Tony Beyer
Standing on my Shadow by Serie Barford (Anahera Press, 2025), 72pp, $30; Between by Sue Fitchett (The Cuba Press, 2025), 102pp, $30; Dracula in the Colonies by Tim Jones (The Cuba Press, 2025), 90pp, $30
If suffering is human, so is the resilience with which it can be withstood and articulated. Often misheard in the urgency of medical procedure or political expediency, the patient’s voice—beyond complaint or minor dissatisfaction—is an important part of the process of keeping us alive. Memoir and poetry have become potent channels for expressing this theme. In effect a book-length sequence written while undergoing cancer diagnosis and treatment, Serie Barford’s Standing on my Shadow adds to and amplifies the possibilities of the genre. Although her title suggests an ominous outcome, the book’s strength is its lively engagement. It’s about living, not dying.
Frequently, an account of this sort can be admirable in intent without being particularly well written. Serie Barford is too tough-minded and skilful for that to happen in this case. Her poetry deploys every available resource in coming to terms with severe reality. The poems in the first section of the text, ‘Exclusion Zone’, establish a powerful parallel between the nuclear pollution of Chornobyl (I follow the author’s use of Ukrainian spelling), where she has visited, and the contamination by cancer of the individual body.
It is significant that the form of the work hovers between prose and free verse, with some sections resembling haibun, using near-prose openings then concluding with shorter, summative lines. This is one of several dichotomies underlying the writing, reinforcing its ambivalent take on its subject matter. Others include the role of radiation as either killer or healer, cultural diversities and outlooks, the ambiguities of appearance, and gender or personal histories (her ‘child-self’ and ‘crone-self’, for example)—all of them part of what it must be to live with uncertainty.
With mature, unblinking honesty, Barford shares large and small observations drawn from the confrontations of diagnosis, chemotherapy, surgery and radiotherapy. Breasts and hair, those iconic manifestations of womanhood, are specifically assaulted by her disease and its treatment. She counters this with both grief and humour:
The Wigs Subsidy for temporary hair loss doesn’t go far.
Affordable wigs barely cover my ears. A credit card top-up
records my fight for life as an electronic transaction.(‘Voucher for a wig’)
Minutiae of the regime can be startling at times for those who haven’t experienced it:
I woke to black crescents sprinkling my pillow.
Tiny sickle moons on white Egyptian linen.Eyelashes.
(‘Sickle moons’)
If there is a complaint at the core of Barford’s reckoning with cancer, it is that Western medical rituals often overrule other cultural traditions rather than acting in tandem with them. She turns for consolation to her mother’s Samoan heritage and to Māori lore, subtly indicating ways palagi might learn from these. The use of Samoan and te reo Māori terms, supported by a glossary, enhances rather than interrupts the fluency of the insights that follow. Shifts of register among these, and between both formal and informal English, amplify the range of viewpoints available to the reader. There is comfort also in the company of fellow travellers encountered on the journey towards precarious equilibrium, as in ‘Coconut earrings’ and ‘The grace of a stranger’.
With Standing on my Shadow, Serie Barford exemplifies a life lived richly in both body and imagination, endorsing the proverbial definition of courage as grace under pressure. To read it is to gain a deeper appreciation of what it is to be human:
Cancer has gobbled anger, hurt, betrayal. Gnawed soft
tissue. Hollowed and split bones. I’ve made peace with
myself, others. Forgiven. Write to express. Connect.(‘Tangerine dreams’)
Certainly, she has achieved that.
· · ·
On the evidence of her third collection of poems, Between, Sue Fitchett is a determined poetic voice, thoroughly engaged with and alert to contemporary reality but also unreservedly steeped in local and international literary culture. Her range of reference in allusions and epigraphs is broad, including—among many others—Shakespeare, Anna Akhmatova, D.H. Lawrence, Robin Hyde, Yevtushenko and Czesław Miłosz. With regard to form and content, she is closer in affinity to Janet Charman than to Michelle Leggott, both also mentioned.
As well as facing the complexities of modern living, the poems benefit from a clear-eyed and disabused historical perspective. Their wiry meditations are emphasised by the understated, conversational tone many of them adopt. In other words, the impact on the reader arises through carefully manipulated stealth. ‘A home in this world’, for example, succinctly conflates resistance to capitalism, masculine hegemony and reckless environmental destruction, all within the bland setting of a suburban landscape. Sometimes brought about by erasure, sometimes by repetition, a vigorous spontaneity emerges from carefully modulated wording. In ‘Negotiating with the ferryman’, very deep-seated Classical tradition is brought tellingly to life in an intimately present situation. Poets and their poems are vividly alive in ‘Old friends / new connections’. A fellow practitioner is mourned in the elegy ‘For a poet’.
At her very best in what might be called metaphysical poems—those concerning time and its elisions—Fitchett explores the unsettling recurrence or continuity of the human dilemma. She investigates the complex meanings of commonly spoken phrases in ‘Why silence is important’ and ‘The smallness of significant things’. ‘The intimacy of strangers’ moves out of the confines of self into the entirety of existence. One characteristic poem, ‘Journeys with books’, enacts the sequence by which obsessive memory leads to comprehension. It concludes by quoting Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s line on the horrific massacre at Babi Yar, then draws back to:
she lays yevtushenko’s poems open
gull-like on the tableremembers
how when books burnpages flutter
lift in the wind
The date of the publication referred to in the poem is itself testimony to a lifetime of serious reading and thinking. To be haunted by a text like this can be crucial for subsequent invention. Hard-earned and well thought through, these lessons in the nature of human conflict and survival are well worth attention. Elusive at times but consistently challenging, Sue Fitchett’s contribution to the dialogue poetry exists to maintain is valuable and memorable.
· · ·
More at ease with—or perhaps more tolerant of—popular culture, Tim Jones’s poetry book Dracula in the Colonies at least partly locates its preoccupations in the newsworthy realm of politics and social foibles. While the title poem constructs an allegory from historical and fantasy elements and drives a stake sharply into the avaricious heart of colonialism, it is not typical of the collection’s best work. Also a writer of fiction, Jones’s advantage in poetry lies in his confident management of narrative. In formal aspects, this is illustrated by the opening poems regarding his family’s life in England and migration to Aotearoa. Here the tendency of the stanzas veers towards ballad structure, most obvious in the quatrains of ‘Grandad was a romantic’, with its recurrent refrain. By contrast, the prose poem ‘Places not to build’ introduces an opposite trajectory.
Adept, too, at quiet humour, Jones moves on from family anecdote to an occasionally sardonic view of current manners and interactions. He is usually better with longer, more developed pieces than with shorter, more imagistic glimpses. Where he excels is in making the personal universal, as in poems like ‘Thirty years’, which shares common but also unique reflections upon marriage, and ‘Pneumonia’. Once or twice he overplays his hand: ‘Uncles’ is an awkward instance.
The portrait poem ‘The visionary’ focuses on the nub of political conservatism in its modern context. Other poems on politics in the book’s final section adopt a more journalistic flavour. A genuine surprise, however, is ‘What you leave behind’, an elegy in memory of the late figurehead of Green policies, Jeanette Fitzsimons. Beautifully paced, its thoughtful repetitions and diction evoke images of music, personality, self-awareness and ecological responsibility. It is a poem of mourning that looks forward with affection but without unnecessary regret:
All voices end. Yours lives on
in wisdom, friendship, in example.
Be kind. Speak clearly. Be unafraid.
Block the gates of power and greed.
Refreshing in many ways, Jones’s topical and public poems have often struck a chord when appearing individually in journals or online. Seeing them together in a collection confirms their variety and appeal. They provide a reasonable balance to more introspective trends in recent poetry. For the ordinary, non-specialist reader—who does still exist—this can be an attraction towards what might otherwise seem forbidding territory. This is not to say, though, that Jones is a shallower or more meretricious writer than others. He wears his considerable talent with aplomb.
All three poets reviewed here engage with situations that can occur in anyone’s life: sickness, cultural or gender exclusion, belonging and alienation, migration and acclimatisation. For each of them environmental anxiety is a touchstone. Whether handled with acute sensitivity or addressed directly, their concerns are both personal and collective. In an ideal world, their undeniable quality would merit a larger audience; but then, in an ideal world, they might have been able to turn their attention elsewhere.
TONY BEYER is a poet and writer living in Taranaki. His in-print titles include Dream Boat: Selected Poems (HeadworX) and Anchor Stone (Cold Hub Press). The latter was a finalist in the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for Poetry.
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