Loveday Why
Tung by Robyn Maree Pickens (Otago University Press, 2023), 87pp, $25; Calamities! by Jane Arthur (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023), 72pp, $25; a-wake-(e)nd by Audrey Brown-Pereira (Saufo’i Press, 2023), 74pp, $30
Tung is the first collection from Robyn Maree Pickens, who recently completed a doctorate in ecopoetics at the University of Otago. Taken slowly, her debut reads as a registration of the organic development of a writer’s personal vision and voice. Tung is immensely intricate: it’s at once profoundly tender, disruptive and confronting. It is a hymn to and a grief song for the planet. The language of the poems, with their emphasis on the way words sound, is strange, original, almost mesmeric. It offers language—syllables, words and phrases—that are stretched and stressed. It presents language in odd ways so that the poems deliberately puzzle the reader as if to mirror a collapsing ecology. And then, the poet reaches deep into that ongoing collapse to retrieve something of the less visible or less obvious aspects of nature. Her book explores the question of language as inextricably linked to ecology and evolution and asks: now that we are experiencing a damaged world, one out of equilibrium, do we need to find new ways to express meaning? In short, Tung is wild and rebellious, and it wants to challenge how we understand the world.
In ‘Ontology’, Pickens writes:
I lie lengthwise
on the grass so the earth
may feel its solidity
My relative density
affirms the freedom
of the wind to wrap
its scent around me
The gentle, lulling effect of these lines contrasts with the almost vertiginous disruptions and disjunctions of the poem series ‘Kon Kon’. Erasure poetry and dual language poems, largely untranslated into standard English, defy any assumed centralisation of the English language, while forms of concrete poetry, such as the two poems entitled ‘ki’ offer a ‘magic-eye’ sensation of wave-like symbols set into large letters that serve to reframe and free up our perceptions, as the poet shows us other possibilities of meaning-making through typographical patterns.
Despite the sometimes formalist experiments of a number of these poems, Tung has a profoundly universal and beating heart, at the centre of which is interconnectivity, encapsulated by the chant-like use of the words ‘ki’ and ‘kon’. The notes accompanying these poems explain that Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer proposed using ‘ki’ (singular) and ‘kon’ (plural) when referring to non-human beings as a way to grasp the interconnectivity of human and non-human life.
Although it emerges from an ecopoetic tradition and orients itself around our current state of climate emergency, Tung is not a record of despair. It hums and keens with hope. Through the cracks and ruptures in its language streams a tender, near-exultant insistence on the interconnectivity of all things:
Yes, merging yes liquid yes all alive yes
body pathing being pathing
not calling
hands dripping with honey grateful for thorns honeyed really.
Tung draws us into an understanding of the human as human-and or human-with, that is to say, a sense of fusion, activated by attention so keen that boundaries are crossed and the observer intermingles with the observed. Pickens bypasses the Romantic poetry tradition with a respectful nod and arrives in the realm of the experimental and the shamanic, where union between human consciousness and the world is activated by language, giving tongue to a sense of the vital spirit of the universe. But this mystical intermingling also gives rise to its own difficulties, skirmishes and defeats. The poet connects her interior emotional life with our current universal sense of loss, of becoming extinct, of being forgotten. Consider, for example, these lines within the grid squares of ‘Kilometres’:
we have passed fig season / you absent fleet of soft / I am starting to forget the name of …
Much of the poetry here depicts a trajectory of keen attentiveness to natural phenomena, followed by sorrow or grief at its impending loss. And then this sparks a fiery impulse to save or protect, with an ever-present hope that this is possible. Poems offer a joyful glimpsing, an almost-union, before linguistic breakdowns, partial translations and dissolution into sounds, as if struggling to articulate states of mind. The eroticism of ‘Flaunted temporality’ reminds us we cannot love each other without loving the Earth, indeed the whole cosmos:
the sun magnetised the seed’s first stretch / into light & between the movement of thought& the movement / of growth there was no paralysis until we held all the sun / that had ever shone & uncapped into an orchard of disorder / of tongues …
Tung is not an easy book and requires you to accept it on its own terms as you make your way through it. You need to allow the verbal magic to slowly go to work on you—with its quiet spaciousness, its careful focus on cadence, its studied rhythms that often allow grief and anxiety to modulate through into a kind of blissfulness:
listen rain gather the red
centre the sound in your fall
hold the praise hold the praise
to the skin & seed of the galaxy
sapwood & land poetics
succulent in mouth.
(from ‘Quartz Concentration’)
If we, as readers, accept the ‘creative etymology’ approach of the Chilean poet Cecilia Vicuna, who inspires Pickens, we can see the patterned repetition of ‘ki’ and ‘kon’ throughout this collection as an invitation to join together and go deeper: ‘Kon kon: With with’. Tung encourages us to concentrate and attend more deeply, to acknowledge underlying unities, and to be intensely and vividly one with the world.
Calamities! is Jane Arthur’s second collection of poetry. This book is brave, droll, quiet, keen-eyed, and not soothing, not at all. Its poems are dense with wry and unsettling details, ranging from the minutiae of sleep in Viola’s eyes, to men with offensive baseball caps, to a fly dead in an unwashed glass, to Arthur’s own increasing headaches and irritation at domestic pets, to the rumbling dread of a world addled by sickness and on the brink of ecological collapse. In poems in Calamities! lines quietly and inexorably inflate to near-sublime levels and then pop. An assumed pose of indifference or detachment fails to disguise a gathering sense of imminent personal disaster, which is what makes Calamities! so witty and endearingly self-mocking.
Hear, for instance, the flat cadence in the opening lines:
This apocalypse is more boring / than Hollywood prepared me for …
The calamities are also linguistic. The rug is continually pulled out from under the reader’s feet. The tone sways between vulnerability, rage, and occasional sweetness, deploying a perpetual process of undermining and undercutting.
The really inescapable calamity of eco-apocalypse, as Arthur presents it, is that we have grown indifferent, or else are numbed and fatigued by media overload:
I was
poised, frozen, between
information and captivation
‘Mesmeriser’ is a stand-out poem in which Arthur speaks as the assistant about to be cut in half by a stage magician, allowing her to expand on this same sense of numbness and detachment:
Maybe all this time
I’ve been walking around
in shock and
sawed.
This sense of freezing in the face of impending doom is entangled with Arthur’s fear that she has already passed through the crisis, having not fully realised it. Reflecting on the impact of the pandemic on the individual body and collective relationships in the poem, ‘When I think of parties I think of disease’, she yearns to embody herself, to feel something, even if that feeling is the sensation of approaching death: ‘I want to get morbid I want to get morbid.’
But surely what disconnects us from the eco-apocalypse is also our collective decision not to empathise with non-human entities and to behave as if we are not one ecosystem. The poet seems to be wrestling with this conundrum in an astonishing sequence of dream poems that reads as a form of myth-making. Arthur writes about encountering a bear in a cave who drinks from the honeypot between them ‘like an offering’. She doesn’t know if the bear is dead, or alive and sleeping. At one point her sisters arrive to express their concern about her living conditions in the cave, with that ‘freeze’ motif occurring again, this time with an almost manic intensity:
I smile at my sisters to show that I am happy. I smile
bigger and bigger and bigger until my cheeks freeze …
This poem, ‘The Bear’, is somehow both heartbreaking and comforting. It soars across planes of emotion and relationship and shows Arthur entering the animal world in order to reflect on the humanity she has retreated from. Unsure of the status of the bear, the implied anxiety is about whether she herself is alive, or awake. Is she feeling enough? Does she care enough?
In another poem Arthur suggests: ‘Give it up Prometheus. Come and have / a snuggle on the sofa, maybe watch a movie …’
Here, once more, the poet flips the script with devastatingly casual understatement. As readers, we are left wondering if we have felt and cared enough, or have we, too, missed something? Have we been standing outside the cave the whole time? Maybe the real calamity is that we are wilfully distracting ourselves from the calamity, passively sitting on the sofa watching the whole boring catastrophe unfold.
The image of embroidery on the front cover of Audrey Brown-Pereira’s third collection gives a clue as to the multi-layered ancestral weaving of the interior. In a-wake-(e)nd the self is self-in-relation. The narrative arc describing the self almost becomes lost in a swirling ocean of impressions, interior dialogue, memories, ancestors, children, loved ones, strangers in the airport. Yet the same poetic force that unravels the self guides us to remember that these interwoven fragments are exactly what make us whole, uniquely shaped and open to being seen, as in the beautiful poem ‘love letters for you’:
when you see
yourself in
the glimpses
of the car window
and other reflections
of hidden and purposeful mirrors
hope you see
what we see
you
all of you
in the imperfect light.
Water floods through these poems, offering the ultimate mirror for reflection, refraction, distortion—linguistically as well as thematically. Lines flow across the page in wave-like structure. The episodes of meeting and departing from family, of remembering loved ones, unsure if they remember us in the same way, add to this perpetual rhythmic perspective shift. But the work is not all dreamy fluidity or ebb and flow. There is precision, fire, boldness, and an exactitude of time and place; a sense of urgency is needed in order to detail the now. Brown-Pereira is at a particularly reflective point in her life, looking back at experiences that have shaped her, and yet still in the thick of it, still searching. The expression ‘1.5’ is one of these particular definition markers.
The notes explain that 1.5 is the temperature limit to which human activity can feasibly impact climate change before disastrous results occur for those in vulnerable habitats, such as the Pacific Islands. The first time 1.5 is introduced into a poem, it occurs in parentheses after the word ‘breathe’, emphasising the entanglement of the human with the ocean and the very real and terrifying consequences of climate change:
she lives where blue and green and grey and dark and light and black and light
surround you give you breath let you sing your story
where you (breathe 1.5) …
Throughout the book, the ocean is more than backdrop or touchstone; it is a living breathing interlocutor and a shaper of identity. As a Pacific woman, Pereira-Brown’s psychological delving and memory work is a process of understanding herself alongside and as part of the ocean ecology of the islands she is from. She gazes into the ocean and remembers her ancestors; she sinks into it to lose and find herself; she travels over it; she questions things, and begins to relocate her sense of belonging and of womanhood, despite those who wish to commodify it, misunderstand it, or thieve it from her:
on the count of 1.5 smile say cheese
they taking pictures of us in the water
like we a mermaid wearing white coral …
—and then there’s:
modern day man want need find
take make break
throw-away and leave behind …
Each poem is interwoven and delicately tied to the others through repeated motifs, phrases and tones, building a collection as reflective and image-bending, as rich with ancestry, as vulnerable, volatile, and pulsing with renewal as the ocean it speaks with and for. There is fierce rightful anger in a-wak-(e)nd and there is deliberate strangeness to the language in poems about politics and new media, a heart-rending sadness in the almost elegiac love song of ‘you and me: me and you’. But triumph courses through the book, too; resilient joy leaps off the page. There is potential for renewal and replenishment located in the ocean, the ancestors and deep within the self:
we leading the charge
for our own self-rescue
without us there is no memory …
LOVEDAY WHY has had poetry and essays published in New Zealand, Australia and the United Kingdom. Her chapbook with Mirrorcity Letter Press came out in 2012, and her collection, Concordance, in 2019. She lives on the banks of Ōtokia Creek in coastal Otago with her family.
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