Bernadette HallThe Darling North, by Anne Kennedy (Auckland University Press, 2012), 87 pp., $24.99.
‘Ah! Those good old times, when I first came to New Zealand, we shall never see their like again. Since then the world seems to have gone wrong somehow. A dull sort of world this now.’ With these words, Frederick Maning opens his 1863 publication, ‘Old New Zealand’. His account of scenes and incidents is given, he claims, ‘exactly as they occurred’. His writings ‘owe nothing to fiction.’ Anne Kennedy on the other hand, who acknowledges Maning as a source for her new work, makes no such disclaimer. She seems delighted to plunge once again into the heart of fiction. Yet, even as she does so, she’s re-presenting ‘facts’, the kind of things we thought we knew as islanders living among other islanders all on our own little islands in the big bath tub of the Pacific.
That’s probably the most original thing that strikes me in this book, the stance that’s taken. It arises from dislocation, the divided life that has Kennedy shifting regularly between New Zealand and Hawai’ii, where she teaches fiction and screenwriting at the University of Mãnoa. But it’s neither the voice of an outsider nor an insider. What we have here feels to me much more integrated, it arises from deeper roots. It has the seriousness and the weird hilarity of fairy tales, you know the kind of thing where you get an ousted youngest brother, a couple of lost children, several betrayed princesses and a prince who’s in the body of a frog, all of them in search of home, in search of themselves. And time after time, the same big questions arise, what is the world like beyond the forest? What is the one small object that might save you? Where does love reside?
This is a beautiful book. It looks and feels beautiful with a beauty that is meaningful. The title is apt and affectionate. Maning was born in the north, in the northern hemisphere, in Ireland. He moved to Tasmania and then to the Hokianga in 1833. He married Moengaroa of Te Hikutu, a hapu of Nga Puhi and they had four children. ‘North’ is also the stark title of one of Seamus Heaney’s collections of poetry and Kennedy quotes lines from him as well. North and south are loaded words in Ireland. Kennedy is of Irish descent. When she reuses the lines ‘ No treaty // I foresee will salve completely your tracked / and stretchmarked body …’, you can feel the vibrations, it’s Aotearoa as much as it’s Derry.
That’s part of what I’d call the expansiveness of ‘The Darling North’. There’s movement north from Wellington, where Kennedy grew up. In ‘My Carbon Gaze’, a prose poem made up of fourteen smallish segments, there’s a lovely evocation of the city, its hills ‘brassy yellow with gorse flowers.’ Incorporated into the sequence is a homework poem made up by Kennedy’s mother, Vivienne, copied down by the daughter in her ‘McCahon handwriting.’ It’s about the gorse: ‘A prickly maze, a funeral pyre / a golden haze, a monstrous fire.’ Should the fire be real, where would everyone go? To the sea because there’s nowhere else. ‘I’m still out there’ writes the poet. ‘I am standing in the cold sea at Island Bay and it is 2011 and it is freezing and I am waiting for the fires on the hills to go out.’
The title poem takes us on a youthful road trip to the Hokianga and the end of a love affair. The lover’s name is Maning, that’s a nice little joke. ‘Maning earthed me, a brown / wire. I became an in-law of the land.’ The land is marvellously described.
‘Periodically the land leaps
up at me, whiteness, and the wide semi-tropical leaves
like emissaries, resined with recent rain, helmeted,
and I snort, my heart relentless like the water cycle.
Northness has overcome me.’
Northness has overcome me.’
Later on there’s the move to Hawai’ii. In fourteen free-range sonnets that make up a sequence called ‘Lostling and Foundling’, so we’ve not left fairy tale territory, Kennedy unwraps the process of change, a change of place, a change of self:
Day and night you are dressed in the heat.
Before this you were naked. All your life, not a stitch
of warmth apart from your clothes.
Before this you were naked. All your life, not a stitch
of warmth apart from your clothes.
The lightly handled boundaries of the poems cause the material to leap and spark. Each one is jam-packed with fascinating observations. Risks are taken, everything is up for grabs, music and music theory, cocktails, rock bands, a broken violin, a musical laundromat, a thesis on atonality in the bone people, ‘let me have my Irish marae’, says the poet, and when confronted with the question of what to save in the case of a flood, she stops naming and just grabs – ‘this this this …’ repeated fifty four times over the space six lines. The whole sequence is a bravura performance
Early on in the narrative line of the book, somewhere between Wellington and Hawai‘i, there’s a massive change of direction. It comes as a total surprise. Remember the gingerbread man? Well, in a sequence of three case studies (twenty-five pages worth, almost one third of the whole book) that rework fairy tales, we meet up with him again. This time he’s called the Gingerbread Boy and he’s on the run from his Mama, a BIG lady who ‘looms like sunblock’. She was born shortly after him on the very same day from the very same oven ‘which took some getting / your head around / and made you think of /the notion of devolution.’ Her mantra is ‘You can’t you can’t’ – no wonder he starts running. The short lines of the sixteen pages worth catch the velocity and the rhythm of the original children’s story. But you’d never read this one to children. It’s hilarious and disconcerting.
Ruby goes with her mother through the woods to visit her Grandma who’s ‘sick as a dog.’ Mum is worried about the wolf. Ruby has other worries. ‘Mum, it’s not woods and it’s not wolf, / this is the pacific, it’s bush and paedophiles.’ When a wolf does turn up to huff down the house of the three little pigs, he sneers at them like this: ‘Hey ho kunekune puhaface’ and ‘Hey ho pokopoko piggyfritter.’ And it’s the piggy Dad who falls down the chimney. So, what goes into the mix. Psychology, philosophy, literary theory, art history (a Wyeth horizon), religion probably, transactional analysis possibly, high culture, low culture, no culture, a Ted Hughes tuxedo, Helen as in Clark surely, Ellen from TV, and a Red Fox who just happens to be an American and says ‘yes ma’am’ all the time — now you’ll have some small notion of how daring, how bizarre and how meaty this piece of work is. I admire Kennedy for rocking the boat with it. And well done, AUP, for seeing it through.
But let’s go back to Hawai’ii. The final poem in the collection, ‘Hello Kitty, Goodbye Picadilly’, re-establishes us there. Early European explorers must have thought it was paradise. The word paradise comes from the Persian for a small walled garden. Sounds nice, but what would it be like to live there.
Imagine you’d come to Hawai’iki early.
I don’t have Hawai’iki.
I don’t have Hawai’iki.
Imagine you were in Heaven.
I don’t have Heaven.
I don’t have Heaven.
Imagine you were in Paradise
but at first you don’t recognise Paradise,
or smell it or touch it,
because you miss earth too much,
but at first you don’t recognise Paradise,
or smell it or touch it,
because you miss earth too much,
and being earthly.
It might have seemed like this when you first stepped off the boat. There’s a lovely theme of dressing and undressing that marks stages in the journey so far. In the Hokianga there was a nightdress, ‘a south dress / snowy and windy.’ In Wellington there was ‘a coat, olive green, rough, / sea-going you wore / near the sea.’ Now in Hawai’i (or is it Paradise): ‘You wonder in passing / about your body, its whereabouts.’ There are no more disguises. Long leisurely lines, slow held bow strokes in the music, a gathering up of all that you are and all that’s happened to you, a circling like running prayer beads through your fingers – in texture and tone the final poem is like nothing else in the collection. It works through loss towards acceptance.
There is no brother
but a digital camera, no aunt but a pair of shoes,
but a digital camera, no aunt but a pair of shoes,
there are no grandparents but a hair straightener,
but they were always
but they were always
going.
And in its final lines, slowed down by repetition that sounds like a mantra, there’s acknowledgement of the inevitability of change and the hint of a final re-settlement after all the dramatic rehearsals. What is experienced as real now holds all the weight of metaphor. And metaphor is fiction, isn’t it? But perhaps fiction, especially the multi-layered fact/fiction which is the very nature of poetry, is what gets us to the right place after all.
We’ve waited seven years for a new collection of poems from Anne Kennedy. This one arrives like a breath of fresh air. Warm or chill, from the north or the south, it bounces in off the Pacific and I’d say we should feel very grateful.
BERNADETTE HALL lives at Amberley Beach, North Canterbury. Her 9th collection of poetry The Lustre Jug (VUP) was a finalist in the 2010 NZ Post Book Awards. She edited the on-line anthology Best NZ Poems 2011 and she is the editor of The Judas Tree, poems by the late Christchurch writer, Lorna Stavely Anker, which will be published by CUP in 2013.
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