Erik Kennedy
this abattoir is a college by Orchid Tierney (Calamari Archive, 2025), 100pp, US$16; Poems in Retrospect by Stephen Oliver (Greywacke Press, 2025), 380pp, $30; Death Goddess Guide to Self Love by Carin Smeaton (Titus Books, 2025), 90pp, $30
You’d be hard-pressed to find a humanities scholar under 50 who would write about the academy with anything like a spirit of optimism, but in this abattoir is a college Orchid Tierney sets a new standard for bleak scenes from the corridors of Western universities. The clue to the book’s operation lies in the darkly comic logic of the title. If the abattoir is a college (‘a cage for dismembered inquiry’), then possibly the college is also an abattoir—with its institutional regularity, showcasing progress through the ‘uniform condition and appearance of the finished product in place of the variations at present existing in the condition not only of the meat but also of the by-products’.
In fact, each location—slaughterhouse and school—is consistently a mirror-image of the other one, full of offal and fluids and ideas for extracting more of the same. Tierney’s last book, a year of misreading the wildcats, focused on extraction as practised by the fossil fuel industry. This is extraction by the knowledge industry, and (if you can believe it) it’s actually uglier. The word ‘unit’ is vital for Tierney’s work here, as she plays both slyly and roughly with many of its possible senses: an animal, a student, a worker, a section of a course, a machine (there are repeated references to ‘the unit’s’ many ‘attempts to write this novel’). Underpinning all this is a carefully curated bibliography of consulted, quoted and echoed materials, including early twentieth-century writings on abattoir design, Temple Grandin on ‘humane’ animal slaughter, Foucault (obviously), Le Corbusier on architecture (not obviously), Joyelle McSweeney on the necropastoral, and many others on literary theory.
There are two characters whose experiences we track through the book, Limpet and Hog. We follow Limpet more closely as they desperately attempt to keep the killing lines running, the syllabuses on schedule, the students thinking about poetry. ‘Limpet attends a professional development workshop where he knits slogans of wellbeing.’ ‘Limpet eats straw.’ ‘Limpet is knocking a bobby calf.’ ‘Limpet receives an email’ (this poem is a terrifyingly big and random and unpunctuated block of requests, the kind of document that appears in actual inboxes). Hog, more ruthless, has a slightly different career trajectory. ‘Limpet realises he has built a college / and becomes a professor. / Hog becomes a dean.’ Limpet’s fate is almost inevitable: ‘he descends from the trainer with cattle for slaughter. he joins the ramp. he follows the curving line of the corral. he waves to the parents. he waves to the units … the serpentine ramp is calming.’ Limpet has seen how the sausage is made and therefore must become an ingredient.
this abattoir is a college pulses with the frenzied inventiveness of a cornered animal. It fizzes with malice and sorrow and incredulity. It is not ‘easy to read’ emotionally, especially if you have spent any of your adult life working in the tertiary sector. It is soaked in metaphorical and literal death. But it is easy to read as a legible critique of a sector that draws young people in with promises it increasingly has no intention of keeping. And if we take seriously the book’s insistence on its novel-hood, then it is easy to read it as the final, hellish development of the campus novel as refined by writers like David Lodge, Tom Sharpe and Malcolm Bradbury: one long, harrowingly funny joke that gets to the punchline and starts over again, every semester until the end of time.
· · ·
Stephen Oliver, on the other hand, has maintained faith with one of the humanistic institutions of the twentieth century—the sprawling, ambitious modernist poem. The poems that make up the very large selection offered in Poems in Retrospect cover a period of 50 years. Much of Oliver’s work makes use of big canvases: Deadly Pollen (chapbook-length), Islands of Wilderness—A Romance (book-length), Intercolonial (book-length), ‘Occupations’ (almost 500 lines), The Song of Globule: 80 Sonnets. This means that he has set himself the extremely challenging task of having to decide on excerpts from long sequences—which, in the normal course of events, use their own gravity to hang together—and also having to highlight the best of his shorter pieces, their variety and wit and artistry and heart.
Every selection is a compromise, an attempt to rebuild a car with only a quarter of the original parts. Oliver will know this and would probably prefer it if readers went and read the long poems in their full forms. The unmissable one here is ‘Intercolonial’, from 2013, which presents geological, mythical and personal histories of the corner of Australasia that is Te Tai-o-Rēhua (the Tasman Sea). This book was described by Mark Pirie, perhaps slightly effusively, as ‘one of the finest transtasman poems of the new millennium, in line with Walcott’s Omeros’, but the comparison with Walcott/Homer is not a bad one, as this is self-consciously epic work.
Oliver is one of those poets whose careers have been split between New Zealand and Australia and therefore is in danger of falling between two literary communities. As you can tell from my description of ‘Intercolonial’, the metaphysics of the ‘transtasman’ (which Oliver prefers to be stylised in italics, all lowercase) is an important part of his work. But he also ploughs other furrows, furrows that are more commonly worked in poetry, and he does this well. In fact, in my view, there are some advantages to working in this mode. The long poems can be information-dense and seem to have something to prove. It would be simplistic to insist on a binary between poet-as-philosopher and poet-as-singer, but the lyric Oliver is probably more fun to spend time with. I appreciate his surefootedness and prankishness, and I respect that he has a justified-yet-patient frustration with the world that never ventures into misanthropy.
A posey of quotations shows the best of the Oliver manner. Consider his description of the night sky over a city in ‘This Way’:
If you could see them, you’d know
that those boot scuffed clouds are the
dirty bits left over from the day;
a star holds to the sky’s rounded toe,
more stars and it’s steel capped.
And the Herbert-esque un-prayer in ‘Worry Beads’:
If there were no God, I would pray for the things
I have ceased to believe in; I would pray against fear
of losing faith in the things that I do believe in
And the valid question, prompted by the theft of The Scream, in ‘Munch Museum, Oslo’:
… Who in their right
mind would live with such a painting, let
alone steal it; such despair is commonplace.
And the vivid tableau of post-industrial hopelessness meeting post-imperial aimlessness in ‘Factory Town’:
The suburb goes one way,
chimney smoke the other. One plane tree; its bole wide as
a well, lava flow of roots massing at the base,
next to the rusty rail line. A derelict munitions factory,
wall graffiti that reads, ‘No certainties in this life’.
· · ·
Carin Smeaton’s previous book, Hibiscus Tart (2024), reclaimed the word ‘tart’, transforming it semantically from a tired slur into an affirmation of ‘wāhine toa who [a]re confident, outspoken, and Indigenous’. Only a year later, Smeaton (Muaupoko/Ngāti Hamoa) is back with a collection of poems that feature women inhabiting new but ancient roles on opposite sides of an archetypal dualism, producers of life and devouring orifices: ‘U give cool liƒe u take it away’.
Death Goddess Guide to Self Love is a book of blood that is ‘sweet fucken cherrybomb red’, especially in the central section, ‘Book oƒ ♰he ∂e∂’. It tells several stories about trauma from nature, from men, from the medical system, and from the cosmos: ‘U will be introduced to Death in phases of lunar positions of planets / U will taste her regrets & smell her secre♰s // Inhale her rocket fuel’. It is work that is possibly in dialogue with a poem by Stevie Davis-Tana called ‘Awa Atua’, ‘a poem’, according to Davis-Tana, ‘about restoring the mana and breaking down the stereotypes around menstruation’.
In Smeaton’s treatment of the subject the starting point is one of degradation, abjection almost: ‘We blee∂ers are dealt a hand of shame A house full of red // given only a toilet brush and janola for redemption’. Then confidence is learned and developed:
Bleeders
Bleed on
repeat after me:
I am the moon and the moon is me
Say it Chant it Believe it
And in the final section, ‘♰♰♰♰♰♰♰♰♰♰ ♰♰♰♰♰♰♰♰♰’, the body part that was once a source of fear has finally become a ‘gift’ that produces everything we see and know:
U bleed heavy a summer storm
U bend ur womb to make ur rain
Ur bending bk 2 survive
As U do
(staying alive)
Some days reigning
(other days chilling)
Ur red hot hand over time
(the other over ur secrets)
Remember her name
(Hine-nui-te-po)
Whisper it 2 us
(we r ∂a wahs)
Wen we forget
show us ur womb
(ur bloo∂y ♰omb)
In this vortex
It’s not an appendix
(btw)
It’ll never burst
(It’ll only grow us
a uni√erse)
In fact, I am flattening things out a bit and giving short shrift to the colonialism narrative that is a feature of ‘Book oƒ ♰he ∂e∂’—‘too much shell shock not enough support’, ‘He even got given a block of land’, ‘An app3asement from one pākehā to another’. The Death Goddess Guide is that kind of book: multilayered, challenging, and full of deep memory. Complex problems often have complex causes.
I haven’t even touched on Smeaton’s unique and visually striking orthography, which is a mixture of old school textspeak, meme lingo, filter evasion spelling, repurposed mathematical symbols, and perhaps other tricks that eluded me. I haven’t had a chance to discuss the work done in the book’s other two sections, ‘Book oƒ Alice’ and ‘Book oƒ Sina’. There are poems about the so-called job market (‘Ki∂s 1n 5upermarke♰ j0bs’, ‘Cxn♰, ur ƒir3d’), people moving to Aussie (‘River spiri♰ nigh♰’), racist and ableist institutional failures (‘SAƒ3 SpAc3’, ‘T4R0 B4By’), elegies (‘who do u ♰hink u r’), and a ‘Zi0n15♰ Pr4y3r’, which is as lacerating as you would expect it to be.
Death Goddess Guide to Self Love traffics in blood and blame, violence and vulvas, ovaries and overtime. Smeaton, in her ngā whakawhetai (acknowledgements), thanks her ‘punk ass publishers who don’t sell out to the middle class festival-going commercial market’. This is poetry that knows who its ideal readers are, and it is not afraid to say that some people are not its ideal readers. And this determination is one of many reasons why it really should be read.
ERIK KENNEDY is the author of the poetry collections Sick Power Trip (2025), Another Beautiful Day Indoors (2022) and There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime (2018), all published by Te Herenga Waka University Press. Originally from New Jersey, he lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch.
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