Your Phone Was Fully Charged

Erik Kennedy
Mad Diva by Cadence Chung (Otago University Press, 2025), 84pp, $30; Perverse Verse by Michael Gould (Umbrella Books, 2026), 78pp, $30; The Innocent Eye by Brian Gregory (Lyric Press, 2025), 32pp, no RRP; Pill-Rolling Fingers: Poems about early-onset Parkinson’s by Tara Coleman (Atuanui Press, 2025), 144pp, $35

Poetry and performance are often held together in readers’ imaginations these days. Poets are expected to perform their work, and sometimes the work is clearly written with performance in mind. Much of the work in Cadence Chung’s Mad Diva focuses on performance in a different sense: as a subject. It is poetry about performing, specifically about performing in operas as a mezzo-soprano. Chung, in addition to being the author of two books of poems, is a classical singer and composer. It is also about performing various identities. (But we will come to that.)

And what are the great operas of the repertoire usually about? Love. Well, these poems are teeming with love: burgeoning love, ill-advised love, make-believe love, doomed love, hopeful love, queer love, and especially young love. These loves are tangled up with the artistic practices of the speakers of these poems—speakers who sing and write about the heart, who stay out late and party in surprisingly posh hotel rooms, who like well-balanced cocktails and have deep knowledge of perfumes, who consider figs the most erotic of fruits, and say things like ‘They are so red on the inside. / It takes everything in me not to eat them all.’ These are intense, creative speakers living lives of intense creativity. Mad divas, you might say. You have to admire the true-to-life messiness of it. It is a messiness that is itself worthy of an opera.

A number of poems are spoken by someone playing title characters or major characters in operas, characters like Carmen, Lucia (from Lucia di Lammermoor), Musetta (from La Bohème), Salome and Delilah (from Samson et Dalila). I say ‘playing’, but in fact it might be more accurate to say that the speaker is identifying with the character (or trying on the character), because sometimes the action of the poem is onstage, but at other times the setting is more intimate. The action is loaded with an amorous charge. Carmen is accidentally stabbed during a production, and ‘the thud of the knife felt almost like a kiss’. Lucia says: ‘What a slave I am to beauty! That Muse, that ivory-chested girl, she has my heart’, and she also complains that her melodramatic death scene is twenty minutes of ‘weeping and coughing up blood’. Salome gets frisky with the severed head of John the Baptist (which also may not really be a severed head at all, but rather the head of a living lover):

… I put on the YSL, the white one
that smells like psychotic jasmine, clothed in red

like a shepherd calling you, my long-lost lamb.
Jonathan, your shoes were in the bath. Your head

was in my hands. I was steady as I held your soft
dark hair, kissed your clotted lips. The platter shone

silver as the moon. Your phone was fully charged.
It chirped a melody of its fullness. I went in for more.

Delilah likewise mixes pleasure and pain with her Samson: ‘The only time / you let me shave you, I cut your chest.’

In the poem ‘Truths’ Chung writes: ‘I used to not like to write about the truth, / preferring insipid fantasy.’ Where Mad Diva excels—and it excels frequently—is where it presents truth and fantasy as inextricable or indistinguishable. Fantasy is just psychic reality, and as far as I’m concerned that is as real as the reality of trees and parked cars and spreadsheets.

With more space, I would talk about how the second half of Mad Diva nimbly explores metaliterary questions and engages with and remixes authors from the canon, such as Alcaeus, Ovid, Keats, Auden and Frank O’Hara (especially effective). As it is, I can close by saying that this collection does some very good work concerning how poets use and often misuse their imaginations. These lines from the ‘Muse Witch’ section of ‘Three Witches’ capture a truth that no poet likes to admit:

They say all poetry is about Love, Death,
and Time. What a horrible thing a poet is,
writing about these instead of living
them, deep inside a lover thinking about
what a sensual poem it’ll make.

· · ·

Perverse Verse by Michael Gould enacts its ‘perverseness’ through a sort of guerrilla war against the literary establishment. ‘This is poetry from someone outside the mainstream of contemporary poetry’, the cover copy tells us. Gould’s bio informs us that he chose ‘not to pursue the expected career path (academia)’ and instead ‘opted for a life of adventure, travel, and (some very) odd jobs’. And the poem ‘Envoi’ defines a poet as someone whose time is spent ‘playing with words for little reward’. We are meant to regard Gould as independent, ungovernable, iconoclastic—faithful to his artistic principles, perhaps to his detriment.

And it’s true that the kind of poetry that Gould makes is not what most other contemporary poets either write or read. (However, it is not really true to say that most contemporary poets are in academia in a meaningful, stable or long-term way. Not in Aotearoa, anyway.) Gould’s preferred mode is formal, laconic, insouciant. Needle-to-a-balloon stuff. Sometimes he does this quite well. On his own terms. You couldn’t say that there are any wasted words in ‘The Devil and the Divine’:

I’ve been with the devil
he lives in hell
the food was divine
the sex, swell.

‘Revenge’ is modern enough in its idiom, but in thought it could be from the seventeenth century (not in a bad way):

Now is the time, after living so long
to think of those who’ve done me wrong.

They say revenge is a dish best served cold
well, my freezer is full and I’m getting old.

Do we still have the critical tools to deal with work like this? With poetry that is epigrammatic at heart? Punchline poetry? Has enough time passed since this was a common style of writing that it feels fresh again, ready to be brought back into circulation? Is this like 2020s kids wearing JNCOs, to the astonishment of anyone who was alive in the 1990s? I genuinely don’t know, but I’m open to poetry like this if it is confident, rigorous, rhetorically shipshape. I think there are always going to be problems with emotional and intellectual range with poetry that is built along these lines, but not all poems have to do everything.

Gould writes in other modes, too. His efforts at earnestness yield mixed payoffs:

I hear I’ve hurt you
even while I heart you
heart you more
and more each day
heart you more
than I can say
I hear you
how I’ve hurt you
hear your heart now, anew
and even more
I heart you.

This poem, ‘I Hurt You’, is half Kay Ryan, half Instapoetry, and Dr Seuss all over. It is not that any of these things is prima facie bad in the right circumstances, but I have questions about the fusion. But ‘Old Age’ sees Gould deploying his bouncy versifying to capture rue: ‘Whatever, when the end arrives / I’ll say, I’ve had a ball and hope / that something of me survives.’ I think this goes beyond being relatable and crosses firmly into the territory of genuine pathos. As a matter of fact, all of Gould’s poems about ageing offer something, even if that something is a fist raised at the world.

· · ·

Brian Gregory’s The Innocent Eye is very short (twenty-five pages of actual poetry), and it feels even shorter, like you could read it while waiting for a kettle to boil. Most of the poems have a single-digit line count. The brevity found in The Innocent Eye is entirely unlike that of Perverse Verse. It is a book full of questions, not assertions. Eleven poems end with question marks—a staggering proportion. And these aren’t rhetorical questions, either. They border on riddles, koans. They quest as much as question. There is quite a lot of built-in cleverness and polysemy. We can look at ‘Early Masters’ for a moment:

Where are they now
those well-intentioned priests

who tried to guide
and teach us?

We were wild boys—
how could we learn?

Had we been born
to crash and burn?

First of all, there is no way to confidently answer the poem’s concluding question; we don’t have enough information, because information has been craftily withheld. Second, ‘early masters’ might suggest headmasters (and thus a school setting) or accomplished artists (and thus a literary setting). (We can assume that ‘priests’ is a metaphor … I think.) Third, this is pretty supple verse. The sounds (two slant rhymes and one true rhyme) help you read it, and they also make you want to read it, but they are not what you remember about reading it—the ideas still predominate. That’s good going, I think.

Poems in The Innocent Eye are concerned with how we think, and whether what we think about is actually real and tangible. Gregory doesn’t use the words ‘epistemology’ or ‘ontology’—he doesn’t have the space to!—but these are his obsessions. I found myself being won over by his casual, almost accidental, method of instructing his readers in his ways of contemplation. ‘Feeding Time’ is another good example of how these poems work:

Unselfconsciously swans
upend themselves

stretching their necks
into the lake’s
cool shadows.

I watch them from behind
not thinking they look foolish
but wondering what pleases them
on the lake’s muddy floor.

Can weeds
nourish swans?

The phrase ‘feeding time’ of course means a time to eat. It also suggests a more active process: the process of giving food to Time, shovelling one’s life into Time’s greedy maw. As we live, we ‘unselfconsciously’ ‘upend’ ourselves and descend into the depths. The brevity that I spoke of earlier is, in some respects, an illusion, because this is writing that asks to be read carefully. Its initial approachability is a trap.

This is a book of mysteries. It’s an attractive little hand-sewn object with no RRP and no ISBN. It’s not even clear to me how you would buy it if you wanted to. I don’t think it’s a zine or a chapbook, but it acts awfully humble for a proper book. Gregory asks us to consider enigmas like these via the shrewd stratagem of writing a poem called ‘Enigmas’:

Are things ever
as we think they are

or are our wires
crossed from the start?

What force can lift the heart—
what star or seed?

Why do we bleed?

· · ·

Pill-Rolling Fingers, Tara Coleman’s collection exploring the experiences of early-onset Parkinson’s patients, sits on the border between found and self-generated writing. The book is the creative component of a Marsden-funded study of this ‘often-misrepresented progressive illness’. Pill-Rolling Fingers bundles the stories of forty-eight participants in Coleman’s research into ten groups of poems all called ‘Story One’, ‘Story Two’, and so on. Coleman, an independent scholar, calls these ‘research poems’ and considers them distinct from her own ‘personal poems’, which are present in smaller numbers. She tells us in her introduction: ‘The stories I wrote synthesised the voices of all 48 participants. I read each of these collective stories many times over and when I knew them inside-out I rewrote them as poems.’ I haven’t seen this particular approach to testimony used in poetry before. I like the effect.

It is striking that the research poems read as very vulnerable, intimate, unfiltered. In my view, they are more ‘personal’ than the personal poems. They are confessions, indictments. There is something almost emo about them. (Maybe being churned through the healthcare system has a way of exhausting one’s patience, of compelling one to say things bluntly.) They are understandable, even to a reader with no experience of Parkinson’s, because they dramatise familiar interpersonal dynamics and feelings—work that lyric poetry has always excelled at. The illness is only half of the story. (‘People who experience illness are always more than their illness.’) Consider how avoidant behaviour is depicted in ‘Story Three’ in section 2:

There are people who will leave you
just quietly
the friend who can’t talk about it
who sighs, or leaves the table
whenever it comes up

Think about how anxiety about being left behind, falling out of orbit, is illustrated in ‘Story Two’ in section 8, which I quote here in its entirety:

I don’t see it
but people say
you’re not multi-tasking
your sense of direction
isn’t what it used to be

I don’t contemplate
I push on
keep going, keep doing
don’t look back
or forward

touch only fleetingly
the present moment

The plainness of the language matches the ambition of these poems; their ambition, as I read it, is to show how universal emotional states still obtain in extreme circumstances. (Although if we think about it, are the circumstances that extreme? Most of us, if we live long enough, become disabled to varying degrees.) The anonymised but still distinctive speakers of the research poems are ‘everypeople’. Their words are the correct ones for the job at hand. These poems need neither ornaments nor clichés, so they pour a cleansing acid over them both, leaving only the most durable materials.

By contrast, the personal poems can come across as self-consciously ‘poetic’. They are startlingly different kinds of works. This is the opening of ‘Neurology Day Stay’:

What if sunrise and sunset
no longer defined
your earthly days and nights

what if you were a fox, or a moonflower?

there is a left-sided lack
cogwheeling, nerves wailing
bradykinetic wall of face
shaken, bloated hunger

what if I’m a garden snail?

O Night,
you offer dreamscapes
then run my blood
across your dark stage

A poem like this changes the reading tempo, the processing speed. The book probably needs this variety, and I respect that Coleman trusts her readers to deal with complexity. The likely readership of this book includes many people who may not be frequent readers of poetry but instead are drawn to the subject matter. These readers will find much to savour here, especially in the chorus of ‘synthesised voices’, and regular poetry readers will too. As the final poem of the book puts it: ‘I want to keep bringing it / ruthlessly being honest / about myself, my body, my mind // be real, this is a battle’.

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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. Sick Power Trip is shortlisted in the 2026 New Zealand Ockham Book Awards.