Something New

We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“FAR-FLUNG” by Rhian Gallagher (Auckland University Press,  $NZ24:99); “HOW TO BE HAPPY THOUGH HUMAN – New and Selected Poems” by Kate Camp (Victoria University of Wellington Press, $NZ30)

            When I had finished reading Rhian Gallagher’s poetry collection Far-Flung, I realised that I had in fact read two quite distinct books. Many collections of poetry are divided into sections with no clear rationale for the division apart from (as one eminent poet explained to me) providing a break for the reader. But the two parts that make up Far-Flung are quite distinct both stylistically and thematically – so I shall deal with them separately.

The 26 poems that make up the first part, “The Speed of God”, are diverse in content.

A hasty and superficial reader would see many of Gallagher’s poems as straightforward vignettes of nature and the country – the poems on the tiny titipounamu (rifleman) pecking its way up a tree; on moths, a salt marsh and a rivulet [which speaks for itself] inaugurating a river; the riddles about Kotukutuku and Kahu; the poem which aims a subtle protest at human violation of the Mackenzie Country. “Country Hall” recreates the buzz and excitement (and sordor and raw crudity) of the old-style country hall surrounded by darkness on a dance night; and there is a walk through “The Old Cemetery”. But only a superficial reading would take any of these as description alone or mere evocation of place. For always, even in Gallagher’s most descriptive poems, there is a balance between the physical scene and the psychological or spiritual impact it has upon the observer. There is always an awareness of, or a yearning for, something beyond the immediate scene. I am in danger of introducing a superseded vocabulary here, but in Gallagher’s poetry I sense a reaching for transcendence and an awareness that somehow nature is separate from the human mind. I keep thinking of Andrew Young’s famous conclusion to his poem “The Fear” that “even in my land of birth / I trespass on the earth”.

Take, for example, the very first poem in the book “Into the Blue Light”, which records a walk up a hill north of Dunedin. But the walk becomes an ascent beyond what is physically possible – a walk beyond nature and into the blue itself, its dualism reflected in the line “I’m high as a wing tip, where the ache meets the bliss”. Most literally, the ache can be read as the physical strain of climbing a hill and bliss as that sense of achievement on reaching the top and seeing the view. But something else is also implied - Joy in the bliss but still an ache for something more. Similarly, the poem “Home” seems at first to be a nostalgic childhood memory of living in a farm house in the country – but it slides into the territory of the child’s mind first intuiting the dichotomy between the comfortable familiarity of home and the wild world beyond, represented by the fields over the fence. There is a tension between what the child knows and what the child either fears or reaches for.

A duality is present even when Gallagher is being satirical. The title poem of the first section, “The Speed of God” announces itself as a witty feminist response to a patriarchal conception of God; but it manages to conclude with a statement on how the whole human race has degraded the Earth. It is only in part a poem about gender.

This duality – or perhaps ambiguity – is also seen in poems where Gallagher addresses directly the matter of being a poet or writer of any sort. The childhood memory “Learning to Read” introduces us to the theme of literacy, in an almost innocent way. But in “The Illuminated Page” there is the fearful discovery that, while writing and making words can be a joy, it can also be a curse by alienating us further from the physical world we inhabit. Consider the lines “ shapes became a sound I made / to suffer / the illumination / gain set on scales / with loss / the world forever after in translation”. In one sense, to become a writer is to be doomed not to experience the world, but to be always thinking about how one is going to articulate the world verbally. There are echoes of the same theme in the more narrative poem (basically about taking up residence in an isolated place for writing)  “Tears, Trees, Birds & Grass”. Here the poet mocks herself by saying repeatedly that she is only “pretending to be a writer” and the burden of writing is when she wonders “if a bird ever wakes up in the morning / sick with the business of singing”. Her heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains her sense at the thought that human beings have a burdensome consciousness, unlike singing birds.

All this, I hope, conveys to you the reality that Gallagher’s poems always have a depth to them rare in much poetry. I have neglected to add that they are also conceived and structured with great craft. Consider one of her best, “Laced in with the Wind”. Note how the unpredicability and arbitrary motion of the wind is expressed in lively alliteration and internal rhymes. A real poet is at work.

The first section of Far-Flung has only a few discreet references to Gallagher’s Irish background and forebears, but it ends with the Irish-themed “Short Takes on My Father” and “Descent”, leading into the second half of Far-Flung, the 22 poems that make up “Seacliff Epistles”. In “Seacliff Epistles” Irish identity is a major focus, as it was in Gallagher’s 2011 collection Shift (reviewed on this blog).

            “Seacliff Epistles” is a bricolage, based on documents, historical research and letters written by inmates (or prisoners if you prefer) of the Seacliff Lunatic Asylum that once existed north of Dunedin. As Gallagher remarks in her end-notes, in the late 19^th century a disproportionate number of Irish immigants were in Seacliff, many having suffered the long-term effects of famine and an intense sense of dislocation and cultural shock in being transported from their homeland. They were truly “far-flung”.

In the poem “The Asylum Keys”, Gallagher identifies herself as the modern visitor coming to the site of the long-demolished asylum and trying to relate to the dead. But “the hearts / I can’t hear in the wind / beating; the asylum / locking me out – a ghost / from the future / come to haunt the past.” She can, however, attempt to reconstruct the voices of the dead. “What You Know About Water”, for example, imagines an Irish peasant’s full familiarity with the water-logged nature of the fields he cultivates; but feeling real terror of water when he crosses the huge oceans between Ireland and New Zealand. Contrasting with this is an extract from an authentic letter “A Great Many Never Seen a Ship Before”, written by a non-Irish passenger and looking down on the uncouth, superstitious Papist Irish emigrants as they pray during a storm at sea.

The letters of two women (one an inmate) suggest the sheer misery of an abandoned, lone and unsupported arrival. And “The Workhouse Girls” mixes reconstruction and documentation to suggest the wildness and independence of Irish girls brought to Dunedin in 1874 from punitive workhouses in Britain; and the horror of settled (non-Irish) Dunedinites that such riff-raff should be released among them. The girls were described as “lazy, unemployed, deviant, drunken, parasitical, worthless”. In Gallagher’s telling, poor Irish immigrants and inmates of Seacliff were the dark shadow that haunted the more respectable citizenry of Dunedin.

“Seacliff Epistles” are indeed such a contrast with the first section of Far-Flung that they constitute a separate book. Gallagher’s versatility is much to be admired.

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How to be Happy Though Human is the “new and selected poems” of Kate Camp drawing on her six previous books of poetry, which were published between 1998 and 2017, and including 16 new poems. The title was originally the title of a self-help book, written by a psychologist in 1931, which promised to “touch helpfully on nearly every important problem in everyday life.” The Canadian Kevin Connolly provides an introduction telling us that Kate Camp (born 1972) was born in the age of the internet and so she has an all-embracing and non-compartmentalised view of things. Connolly also remarks that she can reasonably be compared with a number of eminent women poets writing in North America.

As Kate Camp is an established poet whose earlier work has often been noticed and reviewed, I will concentrate on the 16 previously unpublished poems which open this selection. Kate Camp may quote ironically an ancient book’s blurb, but in her new poems she does indeed touch on “everyday life”. All the new poems are written in first person (as, indeed, a large number of Camp’s poems always have been) and hence they have a sort of confessional style, although it is more the confession of small ironies than the expression of heartfelt emotion. Often the ironical statement is triggered by a small domestic event.

“Hallelujah” has her perceiving a miracle (the term is used ironically) in viewing something in the kitchen bin. In “Panic Button” she references a little button that she fingers when she is worried, and not the device used in emergencies that the poem’s title immediately suggests. “My Father’s Teeth” considers the irony of growing old in the form of decaying teeth. “Here’s the Thing” begins with hanging out the washing and “Organs of Sense and Voice” begins in the shower – perfectly harmless everyday things. For a non-Wellingtonian, “Walking Up the Zig Zag” is a perfect Wellington poem involving “mountains, going by the name of hills” and “ragged and fast-moving clouds”. For an outpouring of domestic detail, the very best of Camp’s new poems is “Baffin Island”, which has an oddly exuberant tone even when dealing with the discomforts and shortcomings of a house. And again it has a mildly ironical ending with an image of something far away and inaccessible, in contrast with the cluttered but livable house.

The tone of Camp’s poems is often playfulness, though it is purely a matter of taste how much soft irony the reader can take.

I will not expand on the generous selection that is given of Camp’s earlier six collections. Instead, I will play the dodgy game of acknowledging which poems I found most appealing as I re-read them, or what seem to have been her dominant preoccupations.

In Unfamiliar Legends of the Stars (published in 1998) Camp seems most interested in absences, a boyfriend and a love of books. In Realia (2001) a real or imagined spinal realignment is referenced a number of times. The poem “A Private Geography” holds up very well for its extended metaphor of love as a map. For this Aucklander, the most relatable poems in  Beauty Sleep (2005) are the uncomfortable (or at least disorienting) ones that record visits to Hamilton and Auckland; and in The Mirror of Simple Annhilated Souls (2010) I would rate “Deep Navigation” as Camp’s best work, with its conceit of (piano) music being akin to a sea voyage. From Snow White’s Coffin (2013) I’d have to mention two poems -  “There’s is no easy way” which I read as a bleak comment on death; and “Double Glazing”, which becomes a reflection on light itself. Finally, from The Internet of Things (2017 – reviewed on this blog) I insist, as I said three years ago, that I can still make little of the poem “Life on Mars” but I now see “Civil Twilight” as a melancholy gem.

I apologise for the fact that a swift round-up of the poet’s work is inevitably both brief and glib.

Footnote: Just one mildly annoying aspect of the production of How to be Happy Though Human: the page numbers given in the end-notes do not correspond to the relevant pages in the text.