Something New

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

“THE TIP SHOP” by James Brown (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $NZ24:99) ; “EARTH & ELSEWHERE” by Ian Rockel (Steele Roberts, $NZ30) ; “OUT OF THE WAY WORLD, HERE COMES HUMANITY!” by Keith Hill (Disjunct Books, $NZ25)

            James Brown, teacher of creative writing at Vic, has previously produced six collections of poetry and a “Selected Poems”. I confess that I have read only one if his collections hitherto, Floods Another Chamber (2017 – reviewed on this blog) and my response to it was lukewarm. At least as I interpreted it then, I saw too much of Brown’s work as academic exercises, mildly ironic but often reading like a technician demonstrating that he could write poetry in many and various forms.

To give you a brief verdict first, I’m of the same mind only with regard to a few of Brown’s latest poems in The Tip Shop. So let’s look first at the many good and readable poems there are in this new collection.

The great majority of Brown’s poems are written emphatically in the first person. This can lead to a fruitful examination of self and does help create some of Brown’s best work. Consider “Mr Spencer”, a childhood memory telling us forcefully about growing up a bit and seeing things in a new perspective. Or the very discursive “Resilience on Checkout 7”, the almost steam-of-consciousness monologue of a supermarket employee, catching the employee's personality in actions and attitudes. “Lesson” at first appears to be an academic exercise, being a clear and methodical account of cutting up an apple; but it is redeemed and invigorated by a punchline acknowledging “the sharp fresh taste”. All that labour does lead to something fruitful (bad pun intended). “Insulation” relates to quotidian reality by commenting on the unaffordability of houses in New Zealand. “Cruelty to Animals” has a sharp and appealing wit. It is apparently a monologue spoken to a cat by a man whose wife has walked out on him. The man finally compares himself with the redundant cat, which lazes around all day and achieves little. This has the ring of truth. Even if it fades off a little in the last stanzas, “Space and Time” is nevertheless a convincing re-imagining of a chill night and a lonely universe. Likewise “The Crystal Halo”  has a soupcon of self-pity, but does create a compelling account of a walk in the cold night and the difficulty of connecting with other people or understanding what they are about.

These seven poems are the best things in The Tip Shop, but there are other poems that have a certain appeal  even if their humour is often a little sardonic. I would place them in the “kind of funny” category. Thus “Schrodinger’s Wife”, which at least has a semi-coherent narrative even if the humour is sour. Thus “War and Design” which has an amusing take on the long-ago Profumo affair [to be enlightened about this ancient “scandal”, look up my review on this blog of Richard Davenport-Hines’ An English Affair). “James Brown is LARGE” plays with the fact that the poet has the same name as the deceased American soul singer, hollerer and profuse sweater. “Alleged Female Orgasm” appears [at least as I read it] to be mimicking and mocking the Kinsey school of sexualised theory. “Dog Owners”, though compiled out of standard things said by dog owners, manages to be genuinely satirical at the same time. A similar and effective collection of clichés is found in “An Explosion of Tears and Snot”.

There is also a clutch of effective longer poems. “The Great Employee” is really a prose narrative told by a supermarket employee who eventually gets fired for various reasons, with a side-swipe at a harsh boss. Detailed and almost like a genuine self-revelation it is decidedly readable and convincing, even if it is of the “chopped prose” school of verse. In the same genre is “Oral History”, a student‘s account of hitch-hiking, and travelling on train, getting back from Auckland to Palmerston North, its humour being its deadpan style. “Trigger Warning”, like so many of this poet’s works, is written in a first-person confessional style. An ordinary request immediately conjures up the memory of a traumatic event from earlier years, in which the narrator was summoned by a desperate kid to resuscitate his collapsed mother. There is some trickiness but again a coherent and understandable narrative.

There now. As is too often my wont when I am reviewing poetry, I have bombarded you with a profusion of titles of poems and brief synopses thereof. This has all been in the interest of showing you that I have found much to admire and chew upon in Brown’s work.

Whereupon I have to note that there is still the too-easily-cynical side of Brown’s work. Thus the opening poem “A Calm Day with Undulations” about disappointment (you see, you can’t ride a bicycle in the sea). “Flensing”  may be intended as a protest poem, but is a little too cryptic.  “Collecting” is the epitome of hipster weariness, a dispirited poem about hunting for second-hand stuff, ending  “By the time / you see one, you’re after something else” [Incidentally, this is the poem that uses the eponymous words “the tip shop”.]. “Pure Human Endeavour” tells us that sports are drawn-out and boring. “Their Feeling” basically preaches us that other peoples’ feelings are shallow or performative (unlike our own feelings, of course).

These are very dispiriting pieces. in spite of which The Tip Shop is a varied and interesting collection, well worth reading.

  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *

Ian Rockel’s poetry in Earth & Elsewhere is a very different proposition and with a very different presentation. It begins with an Introduction by the actor Ian Mune, who tells us that Ian Rockel has sent him poetry to read for about 60 years. Obviously the poet is a gentleman of advanced age, and this is his fourth collection of poetry. Mune also outlines the organisation of Earth & Elsewhere, quoting profusely from the text, and contributes four of his own art works, illustrating the moods that Rockel creates.

Earth & Elsewhere is arranged into three distinct sections, and as each section has a different focus I will describe each in turn.

First Section: “Scenes from a world going past”. This section begins with a poem asserting “This verdant world / lost to fire, water, wars / and the manoeuvrings of wealth / to gulp resources / while outside walls / the starved bloat”. It continues that things are “replacing our blue planet”. It sounds very like  a familiar climate-change apocalyptic scenario. But this first section moves on to poems of long-ago times – the Trojan War, medieval Saxons and others, as if implying that human beings have always had a destructive bent. Many poems seem daunted by the state of the universe itself and even speak of the Sun dying or the Earth being destroyed, yet they are set in old times with the first-person voice speaking not only of clinging intimately to love; but also setting itself in a rustic, pre-industrial world in its imagery. Take, for example, the poem “Fissured Ears” which begins “It was out in the fields / and the corn one day / I heard a man, / blind man, / playing a deaf tune / and peasants crowded around.”… whereupon the poem turns to the wickedness of King John. In this first section, there are many, many references to the first-person voice’s attempts to connect satisfactorily with women, erotic yearnings and a frequent line of imagery about women’s breasts as a place of shelter or refuge. Then the historical setting moves on – for this is indeed Scenes from a world going past as the title of this section says. “Glass distances” concerns exploration and colonisation after the medieval era. “Midwinter” reaches up to our own era by its references to receding ice-caps. “Ocean enterprise” tells us of rising seas and polluted waterways. “Gone Boy” suggests that in the present age, a better and simpler world has been lost: “Where shall I find him, / that who was me / a thousand years ago?... Constant gardening / through the ages / has separated us / from our past…” In all this, it has to be noted that as often as a changing or degrading world concerns Ian Rockel, so often does he focus on his unique and personal fate. Old age and approaching death concern him - the destruction of the self as much as the global destruction.

All in all, then, the first section of this collection concerns both the individual observer and the march of history up to the present day.

Second Section “Going” is centred on the present moment. Poems tell us that salmon fisheries are becoming impossible in Canada and locusts plague Africa. This becomes apocalyptic in the poem “A Dark Script” where “A satellite views our neighbours as a furnace, / night skies in Sydney crackle with flames, / so many aircraft turn into fire or water, / over the harbour and going south. / so frequently people turn to dust…”. There is much about impending global catastrophe and, presumably, the end to culture as we know it. Interestingly, however, what Rickel paints is more a natural disaster than anthropogenic climate change. As his imagery often suggests, the great extinction apocalypse is not the fault of human beings, but a vast natural process. The poem “Sucked Dry” says “This sun’s reversed pattern / has taken us with it, / emptying seas and drying ice…/… This planet is plagued / with stench - / a dying animal / or soul perhaps.” Yet there are in the poem “And the Water Laps Over Us…” lines such as “None of us in a state / we were yesterday / when a raised arm / drew birds away / with the scream of gulls -  / tired of plastics, / throats in grotesque shapes / from objects tossed aside…”. It is interesting once again that his presentation here is ambiguous – is he speaking of a real, physical collapse of the Earth; or of a collapse in received culture? Much of it seems a lament for the house and flowers views and the books he likes to read.

Third section “Elsewhere” largely disengages from hard physical reality and becomes fantastical or Utopian. Its “elsewhere” is an unfocused vision of an alternative to Earth, with a number of references to Heaven and to reaching the edge of a new universe. The poem “Elsewhere” reads in full: “Where among atoms / am I now? / In silence I see / the universe about me / world gone / from touch / held to me only / from sense of memory / and belief that others. Like me, / float through space, / glide towards another world, / Elsewhere.” You can’t get more detached from Earth than that, can you? Much of this section reads like reported out-of-body experiences, the ego separated from the Earth and looking down on it, a little wistful, a little detached. And yet there is the possibility that “it was all a dream” and no more than a wishful image of some impossible Eden. The very last poem in this collection, “Of Those in Limbo”, include the statement “In so many of these dreams / I pass people I used to know / but seal lips, in case they are dead.” Having traced a long history of a degrading Earth in the first section; having more-or-less dwelt on the present age in the second section; the third and final section largely detaches itself from the Earth and walks into hopeful dreams.

That, I think, is a fair summary of what this collection is “about”. But it says little on the style and quality of the poetry. Rockel’s vocabulary is sometimes olde worlde, as if he is longing for a past age. He has a predilection for lean poems, with very short lines making each poem stand like a column on the page.  There is much genuine lyricism here, but his terms of reference are often so vague and abstract that it is like reading something out of focus. What exactly is he saying? Some lines are impenetrable. This is an old man’s dream, but a palatable one.

  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *

 

Keith Hill’s Out of the Way World, Here Comes Humanity begins with an opening shot called “A Word to the Young” which basically preaches that young people cannot trust older people because they are treacherous, government research is deceptive and designed to mislead you, and watch out or you too will become the dull conformist people your elders are. At once we know where we stand. Keith Hill is a strong, angry, dyspeptic satirist very much in the tradition of Juvenal, the greatest of true satirists, who flung his angry barbs in all directions and didn’t care where they hit. Thus too Keith Hill.

Walking in my pedestrian way through the text, I note how this lively collection is divvied up.

First section is called “Meet the Neighbours”. It proceeds to be a collection of 14-line stereotypes of people whom Keith Hill either despises or pities – thus “The politician”, “The Millennial”, “The Voter, “The Patriot” etc. . Most are condemned for their rapacity or their gullibility. Some (such as “The Patriot”) reference the USA, but most have  New Zealand foundations.

Next section is “This is the News” which happens to be one single work, viz. the 20-page long “Supercut: A season of Covid -19”. It has been compiled out of real news reports, research papers, editorials etc. whereby it traces the progress of the pandemic and how it affected and still affects us… ending with over 7 pages acknowledging all the sources that are quoted or reproduced. My first thought on reading it was – this is fascinating, it’s enlightening, it’s very readable, it’s the sort of thing you want to share with other people. My second thought was – “But is this collage really poetry?”   At which point I remember that Keith Hill gives a subtitle to his collection. It is “Poems / Antipoems” and this could be one of the antipoems. It says something very arresting, even if it is mainly prose.

Let it be noted that most of Keith Hill’s poems are very long, very discursive, and running to many pages. But I dare to repeat that this is very much in the mode of Juvenal too. After all, a satirist taking on big and complex matters has to be precise and detailed about his targets.

Third section “Boogying with the virus” gets more and more deeply ironic. Most of these satirical poems begin with something reported by the media  “A modest proposal” obviously takes its name from Swift (a disciple of Juvenal, folks). “A modest proposal” has its germ in the true story of a German zoo which, during the Covid lockdown, when the zoo was shut and no money was coming in, was seriously considering feeding some of the animals to others. Keith Hill turns this into a riotous, anarchic consideration of which animals we could eliminate. “We Need to Stop Dithering” has similar raw irony – a proposition to put animals out of their misery as their habitats degrade by killing and eating them and storing examples of their DNA for future use. “Hooray for the workers” says you’re all being screwed by super-rich capitalists and corporations and you’ve really been turned into complacent serfs. “Psalm for the End Times” suggests, tongue deeply stuck in cheek, you can hope in God if you wish but actually we’re going to deal with this climate-change disaster ourselves. “Let’s Give it Another Go” is ironic (well let’s be straight about this one – it’s really sarcastic) basically mocking what stands for democracy but offering no solutions apart from ridicule

So,  our souls battered and our consciences pricked, to the last section “The world needs therapy”. Here be a long lament called “The individual’s soliloquy” which sounds like self-pity on steroids, the unhappy first-person account of a man whose life is so conformist that it goes nowhere. Thereafter “America” (which is “after Allen Ginsberg”) - a veritable and probably justifiable diatribe about how a country we admired so much and in so many ways, and how it has lately turned its back on the world or been dismissive of other nations. “Looky Yonder” is a direct denunciation of Donald Trump, set to early jazz music. “How to found a nation” yields a nine-page historical summary of the colonisation of New Zealand presented as European fraud, theft and dishonesty. And at last the final poem “Request” being a list of things Keith Hill sees as desirable, but which are in fact unattainable s. (Satirists will always be dissatisfied, but then they bloody well should be or they wouldn’t be satirists.)

            What did I eventually feel after reading this melange of anger, irony, accusation and  Juvenalian satire? Frankly elated. Keith Hill says what he says forcefully. No, I don’t agree with everything he says, but this man is looking clearly at the world and writing clearly. Reading Out of the Way World, Here Comes Humanity is like sucking in pure fresh air after choking on the obscurity of too much academic poetry. Keep punching mate!