Something New

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

 

“FACE TO THE SKY” by Michele Leggott (Auckland University Press, $NZ35); “BITER” by Claudia Jardine (Auckland University Press, $NZ24:99) ; “POEMS FOR REMEMBERING” by Mike Beveridge (Quentin Wilson publishers, $NZ27:50)

 

Face to the Sky is the eleventh collection of poetry by Michele Leggott, now a very well-established literary figure and loaded with honours and awards, having also been for a season New Zealand’s Poet Laureate.  When I reviewed on this blog her 2014 collection Heartland  I noticed her emphasis on family lore and ancestry. In her 2020 Mezzaluna– Selected Poems  the nine collections she had then so far produced were represented, so we were able to trace how her style had developed. I noted in my review that she had “moved away from often opaque experimentalism and loose strings of imagery to greater accessibility and greater confessionalism.” The personal experience became dominant.

Leggott’s latest collection Face to the Sky is sometimes haunted by ancestry and sometime produces personal memories of the Taranaki she knew as a young woman, as well as giving poetical accounts of journeys she has taken; but it does have some degree of experimentalism and can indeed become very cryptic for the uninitiated. Sometimes Leggott uses a very recherche vocabulary. Each of the six sections, into which this collection is arranged, is named after standard meteorological statements as heard in weather forecasts, viz “Early Morning Cloud” “Light Winds at First” “Scattered Showers” “Gales in Exposed Places” “Isolated Heavy Falls” and “Changes Across the Region”. This must be a nod to the west winds that blow over Taranaki and its great mountain as well as the winds of history, ever mutable.

“Early Morning Cloud” gives us poems of memory and family. “Konene / Wayfarers”, almost prose, looks at a memorial to Peter Buck (Te Rangi Hiroa) as  Leggott remembered it near where she grew up and went to a nearby school; and she wonders, playfully, how Peter Buck would have behaved as a schoolboy. But memory is yoked to the past. “Speaking Distance” is a poem with an ironic title because it is assembled from the fragmentary and  contradictory voices of 19^th century surveyors and soldiers, said during battles in the first Taranaki war. They are literally in speaking distance from the Maori “rebels” they pursue, but what they speak and understand is distant from what their enemy speak and understand – in other words, a distant speaking in lack of real communication. When Leggott was a girl, her family moved to Carrington Street in New Plymouth. “The Wedding Party” has her mind reconstructing a pakeha wedding in the 19^th century as it passes through Carrington Street and taking account of the exotic flora that have been introduced by pakeha where endemic plants still flourish. Leggott is not forcing the issue of colonisation and its negative effects, which is now frequently a theme in New Zealand poetry, but she emphasises that two ethnicities are bound forever by history.

 “Light winds at first” continues the theme of history. The poem “angelic life dialogue wonder” is an excellent exercise in ambiguity. First there is presented the wonder of indigenous flora. Then there is a sort of account of the searching for plants by Daniel Solander and Joseph Banks in one of James Cook’s voyages. “I take my pencil and try the lineaments / keel wing and standard petals.  A thousand drawings / the one as quick as the rest   capsulae a bright yellow green / no name but the heave of surf in our ears tonight”, writes one of the botanists. But Leggott notes the curious fact that the specimens Cook’s botanists took (and are now preserved in a British museum) were wrapped and preserved in proof sheets of John Milton’s Paradise Lost.  Perhaps (and only perhaps) the corruption of the Earth and the introduction of sin, as seen in Milton’s Garden of Eden, is played out again when there is an alien intervention in a far country. More modest in execution and intent is “I have named her Amelia” based on an historical event, the life-long lament of a woman whose infant daughter died en route to New Zealand as, indeed, many children may have died.

The dominant poem in “Scattered Showers” is a very long and discursive piece concerning travel called “A Vida Portuguesa”. It begins somewhat prose-y and pedestrian, like a simple journal of the journey from Paris to Lisbon, and little more than a journal even when the poet walks about Lisbon. Only towards the last two of its ten pages does it take a more reflective tone, pairing Portuguese early navigators with our own conception of the ocean and our awareness of being so far away on the globe.

“Gales in Exposed Places” presents us with another long and discursive poem in  “Walks and Days”. In sections it is gripping and engaging, including such matters as the tragic death of boys, having to put an injured dog down, the reported horror of the Taliban and eventually preparing [I think] for death or at least a nasty time in a hospital. But, episodic as it is,  does it stand up as an integrated, connected poem? “Haemopoiesis” at first might seem incoherent, but read carefully it is deliberately a work of disorientation. As I read it, it is like the random thoughts of somebody undergoing medical and anesthetised treatment – a free floating mind which runs with such lines as “my march of triumph didn’t get as far as a teapot or an old cat / and in the clouds towards the south I lost my soul like an oar dropped in water…” and hugging images of stars and seas. Am I wrong in speculating that these two long poems were inspired by the poet’s own experience in hospital? Much more straightforward is the trim poem “The Patient Navigator” on the arrival and skill of many skippers over many generations, although this may be a metaphor for a patient patient!  Similarly in style, in “Isolated Heavy Falls” the poem “Neinei in blossom at Mokau” is straightforward in its depiction of a 19^th century woman artist who painted the rich fauna around the rivers of the Taranaki

Changes Across the Region is both prophetic and once again pairing the present with the past. “The Workbook”, apparently first inspired by a book Leggott kept as a child, is a patchwork suggesting the lurking menace of war or the threat of war like “ancestral voices prophesying war”. “Whakaahurangi” interweaves past and present, crossing between a car with current pop music playing and the travails of the 19^th century travel.

Here, then, is a collection of many interests – the wildness and sometimes the beauty of Taranaki; youthful memories; flora; the intimacy of past and present; a soupcon of concern about colonialism; the poet’s states of mind when under stress; and womanhood. The poem “Iridescence” uses quotations from many well-known women poets, presumably suggesting their unique power. I do have difficulty appreciating some of Leggott’s more cryptic pieces, such as “escher x nendo” which may be understood only by those who understand the codes; and “Dark Emily” her most cryptic poem, its meaning revealed only in the last stanza. Embrace the fact, however, that this is a fruitful collection.

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

 

A very different poet is Claudia Jardine. Unlike Michele Leggott, she is a relative newcomer who has previously appeared only in the AUP New Poets 7 anthology. Biter is Jardine’s first full collection and it has quite specific themes. A major one is sex through the ages, but especially sex as revealed now and in the classics of Greece and Rome. Jardine studied (and excelled in) classics at university and, as she says in her preface, she has used the Palatine Anthology – an ancient Greek-language anthology -  and its epigrams to shape many of her own shorter poems. But while interest in sex may be a selling point for Biter (the cover shows the famous statue of Laocoon with his handsome testes dangling down) this collection has many other interests as well.

Jardine’s opening gambit “Ode to Mons Pubis” tells us where we are, being an ode to that “hair-covered fat pad, fine hill for roly-polies / the best views, as we know, should be taken in slowly / but not too slowly.” So we are at once in, or awed by, the pudenda and their erotic use. The poem “Just a thought” has her saying that she has “alternate protein” when “going down on my boyfriend”. (Wonder what the boyfriend thinks of this admission.) “When We Were Courting”, one of her less explicit essays, links the writhing of Canova’s version of Theseus killing the Minotaur – what she calls “the rump of treason topping a zoomorphic calamity” – with desperately wanting her boyfriend to visit her. An ancient legend becomes incitement of a sexual tussle, sweaty and writhing bodies in search of an orgasm. 

Some of her poems relating to sex are rather harsher. “My Iron Cervix” concerns the  difficulty and pain of having an IUD inserted. The title poem “Biter” introduces hard biting as a form of kissing. “Field Notes on Elegy” mixes anticipation of meeting in a karaoke bar with classical tales of lost love, as written by (or for) ancient women poets… and herein she chastises Catullus a little bit. Her “Stay Cruel” is a reasonably close translation of Horace’s Ode 3.7, sometimes known as “Quid fles, Asterie”. I know this because I checked it against my copy of David West’s translation of Horace’s odes and epodes, in the Oxford World’s Classics. Close though it is to old Horace, it does have a rather more assertively feminist tone to it than Horace [or David West] does on the same topic. The forsaken woman is going to “stay cruel” in warding off a notorious seducer who is pestering her.

As for the epigrams that have mainly been culled from the Palatine Anthology, they tell us that “Love… set alight your beacons” or that God alone knows that “I fell in love… I am desired” or that a “slap-assed” woman has “eyelids heavy, breathing heavy,/ parting wet wet leaves heavy” meaning immanent copulation, or that “more than the lyre of Apollo / I wish to hear you whisper in my ear” and the love can be like a rabid dog which can “fix its keen teeth in me /and maraud my soul with mania” and “I am the porch on which love preens” and “love may be labelled a pirate three times”. Collectively, they say that love can be an ecstatic rollercoaster  or a treacherous beast.

And then there are the poems that deal with other things. The very ironical “Rural Activities” seems to be a systematic mockery of some outdoor sports, in the end with sheep trying helplessly to crash a gate just as marksmen, archers, cricketers and others bruise or damage themselves in their over-hearty games. “Tiny Mammal Dream” is inspired by Fleur Adcock’s poem “The Pangolin”, but expanded and turned in a different direction by Jardine. Where Adcock simply wrote of the fragility of small animals, Jardine makes it into a complex dream narrative.

On an even lighter level, “Potholes and k-holes” is about being buzzed out at a festival. “Power Cut at Hotel Coral” is an engaging prose-poem about a complacent dog and a mischievous cat and how they behave in a foreign hotel. “Thoughts Thought After Surveying the Contents of the Fridge” [apparently modelled on a poem by Ogden Nash] is really a youth-versus-age reflection as she wittily discusses how her very educated father is not able to open and reseal a block of cheese without making a mess of it.  “Puttanesca” and “While Cooking Kumara and Onion Fritters” are somewhat more morose in memories of student days, digs, and home-for-the-hols anomie.

Perhaps her most carefully structured, and certainly her wittiest, poem is “Adoration of the Magi, Otakaro” which more-or-less sees the nativity from the surrounding animals’ perspective.

You can see this is a varied collection in terms of subject matter and (dare I say it) in terms of achievement. At worst, there are poems that seem barely coordinated – lines somehow not part of their context. Pairing classical tropes with current modernity does not always work and sometimes seems to belittle the original ancient work. On the positive side there is some real wit here, some acute observation, some real insight into the mechanics of eros. At its very least it is provocative.

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

 

            Mike Beveridge, former rugby player and bookseller, has a mission. He wants to revive poetry that is easily memorable. The blurb for Poems for Remembering says his “poems return us to a time when poems had rhyme and rhythm … while at the same time being wholly modern in their scope and points of reference…”

Now I am more-or-less on board with this aspiration.

From Bill Shakespeare’s sonnets to Baudelaire’s sonnets and spleens; from John Donne and the metaphysicals to Andrew Marvell; from playful to serious Romantics and Victorians, Keats to Tennyson or whoever; from proto-modernists like Apollinaire dancing between rhyme and blank verse in his Zone and Paul Valery strictly staying with rhyme in his Le Cimetiere Marin; and from nostalgic romancers like Yeats to sort-of modernists like Auden using clear rhyme and rhythm when they chose – all these are among my favourite reading, and I know much of my pleasure comes from the rhythm and the rhyme. And – yes indeed – they are memorable, or else fragments of them and full poems would not so often pop into my head. At the same time, my reading experience tells me that much poetry now being published is rather formless, going beyond either blank verse (which of course uses rhythm) and even beyond free verse to a sort of fragmentation, scattered over the page, sometimes hard to decipher and verging (or completely plunged into) incomprehensibility for all but an initiated few. Often general readers, who once read purely for pleasure, are locked out by such productions. The general reader no longer buys collections of poetry, though some might listen to live readings and some poets (like David Eggleton) do still know how to make a poem song-like  … while rhythm-and-rhyme flourish in pop songs, Broadway songs and rap.

So it is understandable that Mike Beveridge wants to revive an older form of poetry. But there is a big problem here. Attempts to revive old time rhythm-and-rhyme often result in doggerel, forced rhymes and an antique vocabulary to suit the rhymes. And (beg pardon Mr Beveridge) I’m afraid that’s what happens in much of  Poems for Remembering.

Poems for Remembering is a capacious collection – 145 large pages of relatively small type, each poem presented in orderly, block-like stanzas as of old. Let me make it clear that Beveridge’s industry is formidable. Every poem sticks to rhymes, rhythm and a clear vocabulary. He is mainly concerned with love, wooing, nature, regret – dare I say, the classic preoccupations. But even if he does crib Larkin’s “This Be the Verse” (in his version beginning “They tuck you up, your dad and mum” – a joke that has been used before), his attempts at the modern scene are a little clumsy. Point in case is his poem “Put Simply”, the first stanza of which reads “Fuck me do. I do love you; / Not much else I’d swear was true. / You’re all woman, I’m all man; / Get us on that master plan.” Gosh, how daring that “fuck” is! Alas, too, there are poems that turn Victorian-esque, with their florid vocabulary. In the poem “Nelson Girl” alone there is “riven”, “ashine”, and “aglow”, not to mention “outstretched arms” and good old “sorrow”. Confession – despite my carping, I did enjoy the old-fashioned rum-te-tum of a number of Beveridge’s works, but I found them more pastiche than poetry. Yet, forsooth, they might attract a large (and maybe nostalgic) readership.

I must add that Beveridge’s publishers generously sent me a CD of 12 of the poems from this collection, as set to music and performed by Jeff Espinoza. In this form they were very palatable, sounding like music I often hear in poetry readings that welcome in musicians. I think audiences to such performances will enjoy them.