Something New

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

“SELECTED POEMS – GEOFF COCHRANE” Selected by Fergus Barrowman (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $NZ40, hardback); “THE GLASS GUITAR” poems by Peter Olds (Cold Hub Press, NZ$26) ; “NIGHT SHIFTS” by Pat White (Cold Hub Press, $NZ28); “REMEMBER ME – Poems to Learn by Heart from Aotearoa New Zealand” edited by Anne Kennedy (Auckland University Press, $NZ45); “RAPTURE – An Anthology of Performance Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand” Edited by Carrie Rudzinski and Grace Iwashita-Taylor (Auckland University Press, $NZ49.99)

 

The poet Geoff Cochrane was born in 1951 and died in 2022, so in a way this selection is his memorial.

After a brief and serviceable foreword by Fergus Barrowman, who selected these poems from the sixteen collections Cochrane produced between 1979 and 2020, there is a 40-page-long interview, first published in Sport twenty years ago in 2003. Damien Wilkins interviews Cochrane. He discusses Cochrane’s long years of alcoholism and the strangeness and disorientation Cochrane felt after giving up the drink, but also how both states – drunkenness and sobriety -  fuelled him with types of poetry. He discusses frankly how little he likes New Zealand and sometimes wishes he was in England or some such environment. Nevertheless he is a Wellingtonian. He makes it clear in one way or another that he prefers shorter and comprehensible poems, and he hints at a disdain for poems that are academic and designed for insiders only. He discusses his Catholic upbringing and how he rebelled from it once he left home, but that he nevertheless has been formed by it. In what I can only regard as his saddest trait, there are his periods of being obsessed with sex. Yet now [at the time of the 2003 interview] he lives singly, unpartnered and alone. After reading this long interview, my first reaction was to think “Poor bastard!” and I already had the image (reinforced by reading this selection of his poems) that his life was spent smoking, taking cheap meals, meeting old mates (some still on the booze), living in a very cramped little flat and writing poetry whenever he could. Cochran had published two novels, which I have not read, and apparently wrote some more which were never published. There was also a collection of short stories called Astonished Dice [reviewed on this blog] published in 2014, which reads more like vignettes and prose poems rather than short stories as such.

So there is the portrait of a bohemian poet, living by choice a fringe life and dealing with an addiction or the aftermath thereof. As I read my way through Selected Poems, I was aware that frequently his earlier poems are series of unconnected images – fragments that do not cohere, like a child’s collage. They are images that may be vivid in themselves, but are isolated. Reading them is like walking on a beach one sunny day, and seeing random flashes of sunlight reflected in random grains of sand. In these earlier poems we get some self-loathing as in “Report on Sobriety” which includes the lines “I am the people I loathe, my past / appals me, me”. At this stage he is appalled by the quantity of alcohol he used to consume. He is still at the stage of being sex-obsessed like a randy teenager, as in “Tinakori Nights” where “Near these hills took place / some wonderful parties, a suicide or two, / a few ardent fuckings. / She was skinny and brown, / a pallid T connecting hips and twat… She liked it sudden; / she liked it from behind. / And to touch herself, impaled, / and get her fingers wet – / to watch it being done and done to her…” etc. etc.  Similarly, “Rads” is a sequence in which a woman is half-sex attraction half-goddess. He says goodbye to religion in “Astronomy” or in “Eucharists” where, remembering school, he recalls that “To breakfast / on Christ’s body / was to eat redemption.” Down to physical fact comes “Pile Diary”, literally about the pain of his piles. And is he dismissive of his parents or is he still in thrall to them? Take the two-line poem “My Elderly Father Watches Television” which reads thus “How can he sit there enjoying the cricket / when there’s death to think about?” Is this a callous statement or a provocation?

These examples are all from his earlier years as a poet – very brief statements, sometimes gnomic, sometimes cryptic. Later many of his poems become more coherent and longer, although very so often there are  “Worksheets” which seem to be ideas not yet turned into poems, or which sprout aphorisms such as “Anything can happen, including nothing”. He ventures into writing detailed sequences. The twelve-part sequence “Whispers” is a moving reflection on the death of his father as experienced in his last days and there are further, more terse, poems on the same theme. However he often expresses a nostalgic ache for the alcohol he has given up. “Zigzags” at first seems to glory in bohemian nonchalance, taking in sights and sounds and revelling in it ; but it deliberately collapses into sorrows caused by the use of illicit drugs. In complete form “Under the Volcano” goes thus: “Not a drop of alcohol / in eleven years. / but still I dream / the same old shame, / the same old prideful shame: / I’m living in a single, basic room / with just a one-bar heater, / a mantel radio, a knitted tie of peach, / a stolen copy of Robert Lowell’s Imitations / and a flagon of lunatic soup…/ and one day I’ll be taken out and shot”. Along with the Malcom Lowry reference in title, there is the self-pity of the last line, like a teenager’s death wish, and the bravado of referring to his “prideful” shame.

Cochran allies himself with eccentrics, his best example being “Erik”, a curious sequence about the French musician Erik Satie and his odd life and method of composing. Given that it’s about a man who was frugal and lived on the edge of society, it might almost be an apologia for Geoff Cochrane’s own way of life. At least, Cochran appears to be identifying with Satie. Then there is “Little Bits of Harry”, a kind of epic shaped in 33 “chapters”, being the tale of schoolboy alienated from family, hating school, a loner, and finally becoming a junkie, as if this were nirvana or an achievement. Again, this seems to be a version of the poet himself. A character called Basho stands in for him in some poems – yet another alter ego.

Much of Cochran’s work is drenched in guilt and self-chastisement. “The Poet” has an extended image of being outside an embassy, wherein “His life’s a convalescence - / a slow, elated, awed recovery / from humiliation.” “Loop” says in part “For many years, / I steeped myself in booze. / I steeped myself in booze / till even my marrow drank, / but it’s all behind me now, / sad fuck that I am.” “Negative Buoyancy”, and especially the section headed “Taking Stock”, again deals with the long after-effects of alcohol even when he had been “abstinent for more than fifteen years”. “Daydream” also [presented as a dream] aches and yearns for alcohol. And the late poem “The Rooming-House” presents his boozing years when he was a student. “Mixed Feelings” says: “Sixty today. I’m sixty today. / And though I’ve been sober for more than twenty years, / I still have nightmares about / failing to make provision, / failing to provide myself with booze.” Whether Cochrane disliked his poetry being called “confessional” [in the interview with Damien Wilkins he says he rejects the term], “confessional” is what much of his work is, not only about alcohol but also in poems about his family, father ( “Dreads”) and sister (“Impersonating Bono”). Memories of the past carry him away, and there are echoes of his Catholic upbringing in late poems like “Consecrated Vessels” and “God and Other Worries”

It is in his final poems that we get more of Wellington culture and cafes, and of course thoughts of old age and death. But there is a sense of defeat as he grows older. “Fear of Flying” could be read as another teen death-wish, or just the weariness caused by earlier years of alcoholic abuse. In full it reads “And it dawns on me that I’m fond / of putting things behind me. / This looms, and That is coming up… / and I wish these events were over. / There’s even a sense in which / I’m in a hurry to be through with living – a sense in which I’d like my very life / to be over and done with. Sorted.” “Late in the Day” tells us “my writing life has been / a series of defeat.” Cochrane is exhausted.

Have I belittled Cochrane in this review? I hope not. Cochrane chose a way of life which is largely alien to me. Some of his attempted aphorisms are trite, such as “Sufficient unto the day / are the two-minute noodles thereof,” which some people seem to think is witty. He can ramble and he does repeat himself. Booze. After-effects after giving up the booze etc. Yet the world he creates is a credible one and the precarious life he chronicles is a real one. Of course he was not the first poet to stick with the lower depths (blimey – there have been prominent boozy and druggie poets at least since the 19^th century – right Charlie Baudelaire? right Ernie Dowson?). By fits and starts, the approach can still work.

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            In some ways, Peter Olds was like Geoff Cochrane. Olds was born in 1944 and died in 2023 aged 79. Like the selection of Cochran’s verse, Olds’ The Glass Guitar is a kind of memorial for a recently-dead poet. But it is not a selection of Olds’ best poems. It is a collection of some of his hitherto unpublished poems, selected by Roger Hickin. While Cochrane was a Wellingtonian, Olds was more of a Dunedin-ite. Olds and Cochrane lived quite frugal lives and both ended up inhabiting limited quarters. But Olds was never a slave to booze in the way that Cochrane had been. John Gibb contributes a detailed Introduction, noting that while James K. Baxter was at first Olds’ mentor, the relationship was not always smooth. He also quotes David Eggleton’s comment that Olds was “the laureate of the marginalised”. Olds did often write about poverty and social inequality. It’s worth noting, too, that most of these poems were written in the last couple of years of Olds’ life. In other words, with a few exceptions, the poems in The Glass Guitar are the poems of an ageing man.

            Reading these selected hitherto-unpublished is to find many and varied moods. Inevitably there are some poems that reflect Olds’ changing attitudes towards James K. Baxter. “Jerusalem Revisited” is a longish dead-pan chronicle account of going to Baxter’s grave years after the man’s death, with undertones suggesting that Jerusalem has become sanitised and cleaned-up – almost like a tourist stop. And “Airmail to Mr. Baxter” might be ironical but only half so, with angry lines such as “I should never have listened to you / you good for nothing prick.”

            Olds loves recalling his adolescence in the 1950s. The sixteen-part sequence “A bucket of fish heads” is a collection of memories of the 1950s as he experienced them – aware of the rugby matches at Carisbrook; programmes listened to on the “wireless”; being a newsboy selling newspapers outside a pub; movies that were then available at the flicks; daydreams – altogether an adolescent fantasia. In the same category of reminiscence, if rather more unnerving, are “Wind murder: Beresford Street, 1956” concerning what terrible things a kid thinks are going on and showing the fearsome side of imagination; and two “Dream” poems earning honestly the designation surreal ; with a similar tone in “Shipwrecked at Tautuku Beach.”

            Devised in couplets, “Grandmother” is a wry confession that when we grow we find ourselves getting to be more like our forebears. Also devised in couplets is “Jack Kerouac at Shag Point” – a lively account of treading up a cliff far above a swirling sea and being pestered by a goat. One can almost hear the wind and the bleating of the goat. More impressive are his poems about specific places. “Leaving Auckland” is a panoramic view of travelling by train from Auckland to the ferries in Wellington that will take his back to his southern home. But on the whole his attitude to Auckland is very negative, reminding me of Baxter’s poem beginning “Auckland you great arsehole”.  Olds’ “Fuck That” appears to be a dyspeptic Jeremiad focused on the sordid side of Auckland; and “Shorty” also gives the sordid tale of Auckland.

The arty side of Dunedin is acknowledged in “Outside Olveston House”, but as old age piles in, the tone becomes more melancholy, with some chastising of himself. There is the sad “Fixing old poems” in which the ageing poet looks back on what could be salvaged or improved of old unfinished poems “waiting for a time when / my eye would be clearer / and less fogged by thoughts / of fame and failure…. The reviews didn’t come. / I don’t blame myself / or the buying public. / The magic stanza was a fizzer.” The sheer loneliness of old runs through “Blue Zopiclone”, where his main friend is a medication for insomnia; and in same poem he pines for the past when “Let’s face it: the Welfare State in our time / was good to us: free milk, apples, health  / camps, music lessons, free scripts. All sorts / of goodies over the counter… The whole / fucking trip, man!”. The implication, redolent of his concern about poverty, is a condemnation of the neo-liberalism that has overtaken us. Very negative moods of old age are highlighted in the poem “Depression”.

The work of an old man, then, and one with a huge merit – namely Olds’ forthrightness. His poems are never clogged by recherche words. He is nor writing for academics. He expresses himself clearly and his verse is very accessible for a wide audience.

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Far more serene in tone, and not clogged with alcohol or the sordid side of life, is Pat White. Now hitting eighty, he too is an old man ruminating, but without malice or much anger. He knows who he is. He knows who and what he loves. He is a poet who has a beautiful grasp of many New Zealand landscapes and dimensions. His new collection Night Shifts is sub-titled “word from the heartland”, and “heart” is much of his poetry even while considering the brevity of life. “After visiting the IC ward” opens the collection with the state of an ageing body as experienced in a hospital bed and being compared with the fading light of day. “When the poem finds you” again dramatizes nature as a means of expressing how fragile a poetic concept is.

Of course, at the poet’s time of life, there are poems of old age. “Toast for absent friends” concerns reunions after many years of absence – and the inevitable reality that people have aged. This is mildly despairing; but there is also “Taking time” about the cheerful capacity old people have for casual chat. If death is to be considered, White’s best is his elegy for the artist Anna Caselberg, remembering her in the home where she lived and painted when she was “Following [her] commitment to the cause / of turning hills into brush strokes /  harbour ripples to pure light / and any other sleight of hand and eye / the briefly beating heart plucks / from morning light / as it slants across the kitchen table.” And inevitably, old age conjures up much nostalgia as in “Lines to a song” and “Heartland, rock and roll”, both recalling the music White enjoyed in the 1950s when he was a teenager.

White often looks directly at nature. “Darkness” is his poem that comes nearest to being documentary or description of place with no theories attached and presenting us with the cold, wet perilous West Coast Grey River mouth and the fishing boats that dare it. In contrast “Desire of water” apparently gives a straightforward view of a river flowing quickly, but with the message “The movement and sound of the creek / takes us one step closer to wisdom / floodwater takes everything / in its way.” Only occasionally does White wrap nature in ancient lore, as when his “Crossing the Alps” weds the South Island’s West Coast with Classical mythology. There are also times when the viewing of nature is not awesome or  idyllic. “Highway One” gives us the horrible heat of summer and roads melting under an uncomfortable poorly-ventilated car.

An almost mystic yearning is evident in some of White’s most complex verse. “Pacific gift and sandals to wear” is almost the epitome of Pat White’s technique and charm with its sense of intense longing – the idea that people are always seeking what will always be beyond their grasp “if you stand on any island beach / West Coast sunsets will suggest tomorrow / always at the edge of things one more mind / lives preparing to fly closer to the sun / intent on finding what lies out there / beyond breakers on the reef / of stories already told.”

White is not the sort of poet to write cryptically, but there are three poems that don’t clearly reveal themselves beyond being vaguely related to old, defunct revolutions. White sits more happily in the observation of animals, of nature and of natural processes. Charmingly fanciful is “A small story” wherein he imagines the lark in Otago rising high in the sky with his song but “I’d like to think that up there / at day’s end when our tiny brown bird / is grounded by the dark / traces of song still trill / where she ascended to sing.” “What if-“ and “Wednesday April the tenth” share annoyance with starlings but use them as a metaphor for more foolish human behaviour. White’s envoi “Sometimes” is a beautiful signing off as old cattle and two geldings stand in a paddock as images of serene age, nearing sunset.

Pat White has no malice, much wisdom and much clarity of line. His work is refreshing to read.

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            I have always believed in learning poems by heart. I still remember all the nursery rhymes I learnt when I was a tot. I made sure we read the same rhymes to our own children. I had the advantage of a mother who frequently read to us, and I still remember and can recite at least the first ten lines of Robert Browning’s long poem “The Pied Piper of Hamlin” (our mother read the whole thing to us often and we regarded it as a treat). Later, at school, memorising poems was one of the disciplines. I can still recite Bill Shakespeare’s Sonnet 60 (beginning “Like as the waves make toward the pebbled shore…”). I’m pretty sure our teacher chose that one – great sonnet that it is – because it was so innocent and didn’t have the sort of sexual undertones found in others of Bill’s sonnets. I went through a later phase of learning by heart sonnets by different poets, from Philip Sidney to Baudelaire (in his own language) to Christina Rossetti to Allen Curnow. And if I’m charged up enough, I can recite dramatically W. H. Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening” and other poems.

            So I like memorising poems and saying them out-loud, got it? (Even if I’ve now forgotten some of the poems I memorised.) But there’s a very important point here. Poems are easier to memorise if they have a steady rhythm and some rhyme. Blank verse is harder to memorise (though the predictable beat of the iambic pentameter helps) and free verse is very hard to memorise. [NB I am NOT suggesting that free verse is not poetry. I’m just saying that it’s hard to memorise.] Which brings me to Remember Me – Poems to Learn by Heart from Aotearoa New Zealand.

            In her introduction to Remember Me – Poems to Learn by Heart from Aotearoa New Zealand, the editor Anne Kennedy (helped by Robert Sullivan) makes clear her criteria for including [New Zealand] poems in this anthology. The poems have to be capable of being read out loud, and they have to be capable of being memorised. It is good to be able to keep poems in your head. The anthology closes with essays on the use of voice and how to learn and perform poetry. Most (but not all) of the 251 poems selected are relatively short and - a great blessing -  Kennedy has thrown her net widely so that this anthology welcomes poetry as old as Eileen Duggan and Allan Curnow and Ursula Bethell, and as new as Tusiata Avia and Airini Beautrais and Lailani Tamu. The seven sections of the anthology are organised alphabetically according to each poet’s surname, which will make it easier for teachers and browsers to find the poems they are looking for. I am assuming, of course, that this anthology is aimed as much at schools as it is aimed at the general reader.

            But here’s the rub. So many of the (mainly short) poems selected are written in free (or fairly random) verse. And while I agree fully that memorising poetry is well worth doing, I also believe that it is very hard to memorise poems that are loose, unrhymed, and lacking a steady rhythm. As I read my way (with great enjoyment) through this anthology, I found myself looking out for the ones that I think really could be memorised, by adult or schoolgirl or -boy. So what follows is basically my list of what I believe really are the poems that can be learnt by heart - that is, memorised. And I reiterate that this is in no way a negative criticism of all the many poems I don’t mention.

First Section “Wisdom”

Presented bilingually, Te Kumeroa Ngoingoi Pewhairangi’s “Do not Turn Away” is an exhortation calling young people to respect their culture and it could very well become a poem recited by a group

Tayi Tibble’s “A Karakia 4 a Humble Skux” has each line presented twice, meaning it could become an out-loud  holler-and-reply (or psalm and response) statement for a large group.

Second Section “Odes”

Ursula Bethell’s “At the Lighting of the Lamps” is very readable – and memorable – for its bold rhymes

Keri Hulme’s “The Bond of Bees” and “Winesong 27” have a definite rhythms which keeps them moving

Bill Manhire’s “Huia”, a rhymed poem lamenting the extinction of the bird, which will certainly go down well with older school-children

Hone Tuwhare’s “Rain” runs at a steady and memorable pace,

Third Section “Earth, Sea, Sky”

Alistair Campbell’s “The Return” which still shakes one’s bones, and could be read at a slow, stately pace, solemn, almost like a dirge.

Fourth Section “Love Songs”

Nick Ascroft’s “Corpse Seeks Similar”, which makes itself memorable by its in-built shock

Glenn Colquhoun’s “A spell refusing to consider the mending of a broken heart”, which is perfect for memorising. So too is Ruth Dallas’s “A Girl’s Song”

Joanna Margaret Paul’s “the dilettante” makes itself memorable by counting out the days of the week

Robert Sullivan’s “Arohanui” because it is structured as one statement repeated but steadily expanded

Paraire Henare Tomoana’s “The Waters of Waiapu” with its repeated chorus

Sue Wooton’s “Magnetic South” for its very brevity

Fifth Section “Whanau”

Tusiata Avia’s “Helicopter” with its list of family members to help us along

James K. Baxter’s almost tongue-in-cheek “Charm for Hilary” with its old time rhyming couplets

Cilla McQueen’s ten sleek lines of “Joanna”

Sixth Section “Histories, Stories”

Despite its length, Ben Brown’s “The Brother come home”. Its repeated refrain will carry it through.

Allen Curnow’s sonnet (i.e. 14 lines) scrupulously rhymed “The Skelton of the Great Moa in the Canterbury Museum, Christchurch”

Fiona Farrell’s “Charlotte O’Neil’s Song” with its delayed rhymes.

Seventh Section “Politics”

David Eggleton’s “Prime Time” which is ironic and satirical and has rhyming couplets

Anne Kennedy’s “I was a feminist in the eighties” which is built on accumulated statements repeated and added-to… through it may be a little too long for memorising.

            At the risk of being tedious, I repeat that in choosing these poems I am simply suggesting what could plausibly be memorised. I am not belittling all the other fine poems I haven’t mentioned. I should also note that reading poetry aloud [while following a text] is also an art. I believe Baxter’s “Lament for Barney Flanagan” is a great poem and memorable, but is probably too long to be memorised by most readers. So too with Jenny Bornholdt’s exquisite “Wedding Song.”

            I admit to being bemused by the inclusion of Robbie Burns’ “To Mary in Heaven” just because Reweti Kohere wrote a Maori translation of it. As for the ancient bush ballad “Shearing’s Coming” by David M’Kee Wright, I wonder how many people would now respond to it. Anyway, nit-picking as usual, I’ve said my lot about an interesting anthology.

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            Time was, I used to go regularly to public poetry evenings in such places as The Thirsty Dog on Auckland’s Karangahape Road and other such dens. Usually they were enlivening, sometimes provocative and sometimes sadly dull. That’s the fate of poetry performances – some people are good at it, some not so much. Often the poets’ performances sounded good to the ear. But if a poem made its way into print, what excited in live performance could often read as trite on the page. Listeners were beguiled by a poem – or declaration – which, when analysed,  didn’t mean very much.

            In Rapture – An Anthology of Performance Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand, Carrie Rudzinski and Grace Iwashita-Taylor have had the temerity to put on the page much of what, in some cases, might better have been received in live performance. After all, their Introduction and Chris Tse’s Foreword both emphasise that poetry grew out of the spoken or declaimed word, not out of printed texts. But here they are – fully 94 poems of them – canonised in print. At the same time, it’s fair to note that at least some of the chosen poems were written by established poets and originally appeared in print. The spoken word could also first have been written. Worth noting too, many poems are presented on the page according to the author’s typographical organisation – meaning that these poems have impact as much by being seen as by being heard.

            I will not home in on particular poems. I will just make some generalisations. The text is presented in three parts. The first, called “Burn It Down”, is the most provocative section, with men and women protesting about colonialism, disrespect for their bodies, disrespect for their sexuality, disrespect for their ethnicity (there are many selections here from Maori and Pasifika writers). The second section seems to have acquired the name “Float” because it is a more general selection which deals with many and various things. And the third section “Re-earth your roots” tends to be more in the categories of ideas, nostalgia, family the past. And I emphasise that these are big generalisations.

One Media Release says that Rapture is a “snapshot” of performance poetry now in New Zealand . Dare I say that this means much is very topical, often focused on what is now important but which might, in not too many years, be outmoded. In large-page format, with photographic illustrations and a soft cover, Rapture is a handsome piece of work. I hope the price ($50) does not deter too many from buying it.