We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
“IN THE CRACKS OF LIGHT” by Apirana Taylor (Canterbury University Press, $NZ25); “FOR WHEN WORDS FAIL US [a small book of changes]” by Claire Beynon (The Cuba Press, $NZ30); “BLACK SUGARCANE” by Nafanua Purcell Kersel ( Te Herenga Waka Press, $NZ30); “HALF WAY TO EVERY WHERE” by Vivienne Ullrich (The Cuba Press, $NZ25); “THE RICHARD POEMS” by Simon Sweetman (The Cuba Press, $NZ20).
By long practice, Apirana Taylor knows that you cannot hold an audience or a reader if you write too cryptically or with a vocabulary that baffles your listeners. In In the Cracks of Light, Taylor’s seventh book of poetry, he shows his skill by sticking to this rule. His prosody is simple, his words are straightforward and concise. His verses never go beyond one page. And much of what he presents reads like haiku or brief meditations. To give some examples: the opening poem “note” reads in full “a poem is / born / in the / cracks / of light / in the / dark / wall.” Then, when this concept of inspiration-breaking-through has been given to us, the next poem says where a poem can set to work with “catch the wind” which reads in full “oh poem / raise your sail / catch the / wind”. We are now on our way. I will not labour the brevity of technique that Taylor uses, but two poems catch me that need be said. First the poem “still life” reading in full “an empty bowl / of flowers”. What more can one say? Second “listen” reading in full “the voices of the poets / are written / on the wind”, which is a masterly ambiguous statement when you think of it. Minimism indeed.
What are Apirana Taylor’s preoccupations? What does he most care most? Obviously language itself haunts him, which should be the case with all poets who claim the name. Taylor sometimes combines the Maori te reo with the English language. This is true of his very affirmative poem “ko au te awa” in which he identifies himself with the river, the sky, the sea, the night, the light, the mountains. It could be read [or heard] as a chant or a hymn, with seven couplets in which each is first in Maori and then in English. The poem “lines” [based on a Maori activist who remembered being caned at school for speaking te reo] uses an elimination system to turn English into Maori. However, apart from the names of specific places and some of the old gods, most of this collection is in English.
And there is nostalgia for the marae. And returning home to Paekakariki. And the majesty of the Pohutukawa. And the reality of ancestry.
Some poems do miss the mark (a poem about the wind comes close to bad primer-school level). He can produce vague Utopian wishes (a poem about Hate). There are some vague stabs at loving women. But when he deals with nature, birds, the sea, and other things of nature that should be cherished, he is very much at his best. There is no polemic but a clear descriptive poem in Governors Bay, one of his best. And he is never cryptic, thank goodness.
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When I had read the first third or so of Claire Beynon’s “For when words fail us”, I asked myself whether this was a collection of poetry or a novel. It is at least almost as long as a novel, but then in most parts it is presented in triplets [three lines per stanza] and it certainly has long poetic moments. “For when words fail us” is about a long running relationship of a woman and a man. An afterword tells us that this relationship was at least partly built upon a real relationship Claire Beynon had had, therefore it is to some degree autobiographical.
Its substance is in many respects an analysis of the different ways women think and men think when it comes to love and how different their approaches are. It is not quite Ying and Yang complementing each other, but there are many binaries. For example there is in the text some discussion of the struggle between Apollonian poetry and Dionysian poetry, Apollonian being the orderly, conscious poetry [think Virgil or Shakespeare at their best] and Dionysian, the inspired, not-always-coherent, free-wheeling poetry [think Walt Whitman or Dylan Thomas at their best… and of course I have grossly simplified]. The woman and the man are both intellectuals, which makes them consider these things. There is also a motif that deals with the female and the male. They spend some time looking at, and commenting about, the 19th century French painter Bouguereau’s “Nymphs and Satyr” which depicts a dark Satyr being pulled along by four naked Nymphs. This is very obviously an erotic image, and the four naked females were clearly intended, by Bouguereau, to arouse a largely male audience. For your pleasure the closed back flap of this book gives us a reproduction of the painting, its most highlighted person being a smooth-skinned naked white nymph with a delightfully broad bum, a sturdy spine and a breast peeping beyond her fine shoulders. But as seen in this poetic-novel, Nymph and Satyr suggest the female principle and the male principle. At certain points the woman who tells most of the tale refers to her not-quite-lover as Satyr.
Perhaps I will make it all clearer to you if I give you a general synopsis of the story.
She and he meet in up-state New York U.S.A. He’s an intellectual very interested in painting. She is a painter. They talk about poetry and art and discuss books. She is on the verge of falling in love with him but really has to think it over. She flies back to New Zealand and she gets a residency in Queen Charlotte Sound. There she attunes herself to viewing and delighting in nature where “tui send pointed telegraphs out / across Kenepuru Sound…. / a trio / of tree ferns hold private counsel / high above the forest canopy – elegant / cello necks, arched spines and multiple / tuning pegs declared the arrival of spring.” Meanwhile, in America, “Satyr” reads Richard Wilbur and Neruda and he sends massages and letters to her and vice-versa. Claire Beynon says in her endnote that the real he and she had much correspondence with each other.
But there are many moments when Beynon goes into a sort of idyll of a man and a woman in a forest. It is, to me, like a dream or reverie or an example of wish-fulfilment. The woman who is not sure about her love is creating a romantic idealised version of what love is.
He is in Washington and looks at Bouguereau’s painting which he finds “oddly disquieting”. He discusses this in his letters to her. He is trying to write a book about it… meanwhile she drives around much of the South Island and listens to classical music in her car and dreams and “when night falls and the ruru return, / she casts her body on the banks / and with spine to the ground / and eyes wide open wonders / at the tenacity of moss, / the complex miracle of breathing.” There is more dream talk. He appears to have a woman who paints… or is it a fantasy… or is he thinking of her in New Zealand?
At last he comes to New Zealand. They are together but do not have sexual intercourse.. He is referred to as “Satyr”. He is more earthy than she. He brings her down to earthiness: “…what kind of a garden is it / where now dirt gets under the finger / nails and that gardener never smells / of sweat, where there aren’t worms / in the apples and snakes in the trees? / He does not disagree, replies matter-of-factly, that human shit / mixed with sawdust makes / the richest compost for fruit trees.” He begins to feel jealous of other men who probably don’t exist. She begins to be disenchanted. Things now seem un-exciting, mundane, their bond is fading. But he watches her carefully at her craft in her painting and respects that and she thinks. “It’s not that she doesn’t love him. / It’s that she loves him in ways she/he does not understand. / He dreams of the great marriage / bed but for her friendship is / the ground that has yet to be / fully established between them. / there are, of course, passages / of ease, exchanges loving / and generous, days when records / are not being kept nor quantities / of attention measured for deficit.” He has to go back to the U.S.A.
There is a gap of years before they meet again [or do they? ] in the U.S. He painfully seduces her [or does he?] and she is disenchanted…. Or is it simply a sigh of her no longer seeing him as a possible lover? There are disconcerting images in her head where she is “scattering the shadows of dark-bellied fish” but she now has a different perspective of her relationship with “Satyr” as “she wakes, too, to / new understandings / life’s unyielding / ache, the delicate / treacheries of tissue / and bone.” He is thinking of her and there is a suggestion “in Coulomb’s law/ that… the force of repulsion increases / exponentially as two charges draw closer together.” In other words, like two magnets that push each other away, they now understand that they are not fully compatible. So they end as just pals… or rather pen-pals, sending each other books and concluding that “Art had been / the centre and circumference / of their relationship: rather than seeing themselves as Nymph and a Satyr” Fantasy and daydream, dare I say, have landed in reality.
I could make the obvious point that this poetic novel is in places laboured and repetitive in its ideas. There is an element of blurring reality and falling into vague romantic fugues that ignore the true situation – and after all, the core of the narrative is simply of two friends, female and male, who wake up to understand that their supposed love was just a passing phase… and if it was passing then it wasn’t really love. But then this judgement may just be me being a chastising Apollonian. Mehr Licht Godammit! All of which is, of course, very unfair of me, given that Claire Beynon shines when it comes to her metaphorical way of dealing with nature and who understands that two intellectuals don’t necessarily click. So there is much reality here too. And by the way, I was delighted that “Satyr” likes listening to the music of Chet Baker. Which sane person doesn’t?
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Born in Samoa, raised in Whanganui and now living in Hawkes Bay, Nafanua Purcell Kersel proves herself, in her debut collection, to be one of the rising stars of Polynesian poetry. The blurb that comes with “Black Sugarcane” is correct in saying that she is part of what is now the advancing wave of Selina Tusitala Marsh and Tusiata Avia – although she is more aligned with Marsh’s irony than with Avia’s wild anger about colonialism. In only one poem have I found in “Black Sugarcane” that could be called a protest at palagi attitudes and behaviour. One is “Ponsonby pantoum” about father having to carry a passport in Ponsonby when he was a kid. The other is “Names ‘n shit” about the insensitivity of young palangi who want to have fun by ridiculing Samoan swear-words. Proud of her ethnicity and inherited culture she has much nostalgia for her ancestral motherland and is proud of family. “Black Sugarcane” is divided into five sections headed by the vowels A, E, I, O, U.
A begins with “Moana Poetics” which sees a specific place as the origin of any culture, ending that it is “We, the filaments of a devoted rope. We, / who contain a continuance and / call it poetry”. This is drawn from random quotations from an anthology of Polynesian poems, seeing poetry as the best bond of a society. Then Kersel launches into poems about her childhood, adolescence and the family that surrounds her. Of course there is church. “baby brother / one love” appears to recall reading to a congregation when she was a young girl in a church at what appears to be a funeral. “Butterheart” is a deadpan account of childhood as a little girl and her cousins, apparently now in New Zealand, and the difficulty in learning English language. Perhaps the most happy of the collection must be is “To’ona’i” charting the sheer joy of, as a child, going to a great Sunday feast and the delight of all the Samoan food that they can eat and the games with their cousins, the ending stanza saying “I take a bite of taro, the earthy bulk spreads the salt / across my tongue and I imagine that they must eat / like this every day of the week, back on Samoa.” “Admissions interview” refers having to test that she lives in a school’s zone before getting into a school in Epsom. “But Where Are You From?” may be a rude question that palagi ask Polynesians, being an explanation of all the thinks she did as a teenager… and other adolescent perspectives. There is an interesting poem about the quince; and this section finishes with her relishing being a “bitch” – in other words a teenager going through the phase of being slightly rebellious – but no harm done.
E takes us directly into the wisdom of Samoan elders with “Grandma lessons (garden)” showing how vegies can be raised – and an awareness of sharing with neighbours; and “Grandma lessons (kitchen)” with tips given by grandma in preparing food.
The whole section of I is called “Galulolo / Tsunami”. Endnotes tell us that this tsunami hit American Samoa and Tonga in 2009, with devastation made worse by the fact that there were no warning systems available. Many people died as the wild sea overwhelmed them. “Namu’a Island” depicts people desperately scrambling up to higher ground. “Poutasi” focuses on a woman killed while trying to climb up a tree as the tsunami struck. The sea crushed her against the trunk of the tree. In “Washed up at Falealipo” we are given a vivid catalogue of all the things that were left when the tsunami retired – precious things, rubbish things, things that were dear to people and things to mourn over. Other things of the disaster are accounted for, but in “I dream of palolo” , she tells us “I turn in my cold bed / two thousand miles away” which suggests she knows all this as reported in New Zealand. Two poems about Moana are apparently directly spoken by the sea itself as a force of nature that cannot be tamed.
O is very concerned with the spoken and written tongue, especially by Samoans who navigate two languages. The poem “Pi faitau” tells us “A fine / education is a high-sheen knife, honed to / incise tongues / over twenty-six letters. / Underachieving vowels merge close, so / frightened of glottal gaps. The most / generic fear, the most primal fear / lingers in damaged lingo….”. This speculates on the matter of language itself, but especially when Polynesians have to work their way through the common noises of the English language. The title poem “Black sugarcane” is also in part about language itself, her imagery being that language itself is a bitter thing and [I speculate] especially true when the language you most often use is not your ancestral language “I cut my tongue twenty-six ways, / swallow my sugar, and still get strung / on my words / my tongues, tense - / still”.
After which, printed on black pages, there are sixteen pages of erasure, a current craft creating poetry by selecting words and phrases from others’ texts. In this case, the erasure is drawn from a book about old Samoa and Samoa’s origins. As erased, these sixteen pages seem to be trying to delve into their origins and trying to call them back while aware that in present days things are no longer the same. The front flap of the book suggests that this is the most important part of the whole collection. I find it hard to agree.
U finally returns us to the familial and domestic with “Grandma lessons (voice)” and “Grandma lessons (work)”.“Grind / stone / ghost” is a very angry poem, apparently about a violent man, a great-grandfather, who married and viciously abused his wife … and in contrast is “Letolo Plantation House” about a grandfather happily living with his offspring. “Bee Sting” celebrates her father for calming her when she was stung. One of Nafanua Purcell Kersel’s most heroic poems “Double crowns” celebrates a Samoan woman (her mother?) who worked hard studying medicine, was applauded publicly when she had finished her a post-graduate, and travelled much of the world. And in the world of fantasy there is another enjoyable hero story twelve pages long “They Messed with the Wrong Teine”, in which the schoolgirl sleeps and dreams that the sister she loves is caught by a monstrous sea creature, she heroically rescues her. As such tales go, this is a tour de force.
And as an envoi there are short poems on grandmother and great-grandchild, and finally “Koko Samoa” where “We meet again, roots; / cup the smoky black / pods which soul a person / to land at their homefire / altar of scales and shells / from the many coloured reef. / We feather a cloak with spirits / clotted in your soil story, / surviving like rocks; / we mature by the moon / and return to the banyan tree / with our children.” This is an affirmation of the poet’s ethnicity and its deep roots.
… And I’ve done it again, haven’t I? I’ve given you a synopsis rather than analysing style. So what can I say but that “Black Sugarcane” gave me much pleasure and delight, made me think hard about a society I did not know very well, was obviously written by a warm-hearted woman who cares about her society and family, who is intelligently interested in language itself and who can reasonably, but only occasionally, point the finger at sillier palagi. Very well – I didn’t think the erasure sequence wasn’t to my taste, but what more do you want in an outstanding collection?
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[ I apologise in advance to the following two poets for giving only brief comments on their work. Space was too limited to expand my views.]
Vivienne Ullrich’s Half Way to Every Where is an exercise in intellectual wit. Her poems are, in the main, iconoclastic comments on pretty-fied fairy-tales, analyses of paintings, and some moments of personal meditation. The Jack who climbed the beanstalk and stole the giant’s gold turns out to be a capitalist swine. The frog who was kissed by a princess is a sexual opportunist. Goldilocks is either a thief or the child of a deprived family or an independent woman asserting herself [this poem, “Goldilocks was a Victorian”, is my favourite poem in this collection.]. And her “The Last Inlet” gives a haunting version of a decaying wild place. One for thoughtful readers.
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Simon Sweetman tells a sad but true story. His The Richard Poems, is about his teenager years and how he knocked around with his best friend Richard down Gisborne way. They drank booze when they could, revelled in watching violent movies, and bonded with the type of music they liked. But this was many years ago . As they grew a bit older he saw Richard had a violent streak, messed up peoples’ lives, and did things that could be called psychopathic. By then Sweetman had parted from him and avoided him. Ultimately it’s a sad story of having to get rid of a friend.
