Something New

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

     “ABOUT NOW”  by Richard Reeve (Maungatua Press, $25);  “DEPARTURES” by Dunstan Ward (Cold Hub Press $NZ30); David Gregory’s "Based on a True Story"; Leonard Lambert’s "Slow Fires – New Poems"; Te Awhina Rangimarie Arahanga’s "Tsunami With Mushrooms"

A personal note. I first encountered the poetry of Richard Reeve with his first two collections Dialectic of Mud (2001) and The Life and the Dark (2004), followed by his long-form poem The Among (2008) and In Continents (2008). Some years passed before his next collection came my way, Generation Kitchen (2015), after which I heard no more. About Now brings us up to date after what had to me seemed like a long silence, apart from the sequence Horse and Sheep (2019). Reeve has always been concerned with ecology and the preservation of indigenous flora and fauna, but [unlike too many New Zealand poets now] he rarely preaches or hectors us. He looks closely at what nature is for good or ill, and frequently presents nature as a metaphor for human behaviour. As he is based in Dunedin, his imagery often refers to the South Island. He can be ironic and/or satirical but not to excess. About Now is dedicated “For departed friends” and opens with a reminder from the ancient epic Gilgamesh that life is fleeting and ultimately we all die. Reeve, now in mature early middle-age, has seen some friends die and writes elegies. I note that this book declares it was “Published without the assistance of Creative New Zealand”.

Reeve has a very distinct style. Some years ago I wrote “Reeve’s own engagement with the raw matter of the world is evident… Another is his awareness of form – not a slavish adherence to traditional poetic forms, but an ability to reference them as he presents his own worldview. In this he is almost unique among his New Zealand contemporaries.” I stand by this statement. Reeve does use orderly stanzas meaningfully and in a standard and traditional form. Sometimes he uses rhyme as in his poem “End of Days”. “Ancestors” is a sonnet in pure form, while “Canto the First” is a long poem heroically written throughout in crossed rhymes [a. b. a. b. / c. d. c. d. etc.]. “Second Thought” makes use of repetition and rhyme in imagining the relentlessness of the rain. This does not mean that Reeve is working only in traditional forms. He also uses blank verse and modernist styles, but he certainly shows prosodic skills that are now alien to too many poets.

About Now is divided into six sections. As they often overlap in their ideas, I’ll simply look at Reeve’s main interests.

There is of course his concern for flora and fauna. He opens with a reflection on “Recycled Rimu” – how this wood has been used, perhaps abused, placed in different environments, admired, carrying a history of its own in Dunedin. He is not a sentimentalist but a realist in regarding a blackbird trapped in a nearby flu, but aware that we human beings often unwittingly torture animals, noting  “There it is, / the coming of death for that poor soul, / hopelessly caught up in a human world / of devices and contraptions, not built for birds.” The same sort of empathy with animals appears in “Dog with its Head out a Window” about the joy a dog feels in a speeding car while watching the scenery rush past. Similarly “Dogs on Beaches” celebrates the anarchic pleasure dogs feel running freely around a beach and barking at one another. The capping salute to animals comes in the final section of this collection  “And the Pukeko Shall Rule”. It is a sequence of eleven poems in which, despite the rain and other obstacles, the resilient bird become almost a symbol of poetry re-encoding itself. Water is another image that interests Reeve. “Judicial Notice” suggests a poetic metaphor wherein the actions of a judge in court are seen as thinking in terms of fly-fishing… perhaps with an ironic tone. Is the judge day-dreaming? “Our Patch” uses the image of water clogged with junk to suggest the endeavours of human attempts at immortality.

Most of the elegies are very personal. “Westies Camp” is an unvarnished eulogy for an old trapper with his flaws and eccentric behaviour. “Last Days” begins “Old friend, my heart breaks. / Witnessing you, shrunken / in a hospital bed, beautiful smile / anticipating an end…” but goes on to suggest that there will be remembrance of him. “Postcard to Mr Clare” salutes mainly forgotten poets whom he remembers. And there is a special elegy for the South Island poet Peter Hooper, who died when Reeve was still a child. [There is a review on this blog of Hooper’s collected works Rejoice Instead] Moving to a wider version of elegy is “Ancestors”, a sonnet dealing with the idea that we carry the marks and ways inherited from our forebears. “Living and Dying in Taranaki” comes close to being an elegy, dealing with an old woman who remembers much of her province, who knows the past well and who eventually, in death, becomes a part of the land. “The Dead” in effect salutes those who fought in wars but admits that most were for pointless causes. In all this, Reeve is drawing on the idea of mortality and how we should approach it.

In the realm of the present age we meet satire and much pessimism. “Unsustainable Preservation” basically damns many categories of people from “derivative poet” to bureaucrat to investor to liberal hypocrite. The collection’s title poem “About Now” does indeed deal with the present moment, part of it hinged on a group discussing (or arguing over) the rights and wrongs of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine… but this is part of a greater question. How right or wrong are our perspectives of our own era when weighted against all of history? “When it is so clear now our times are on the way out, / what to write, what to say, to the civilization in denial? / There are ways yet to live. They are not your ways.” And once again, some of Reeves’ images call into question the nature of poetry and current reasoning. There follows “Be Happy” which ridicules facile optimism about the future; and “End of Days” begins “Counting down the decades, years or days / till everything we know has turned to ash, / we ask ourselves if there are other ways…”

Yet after Reeve’s forays into nature, elegies and satire, we come to the matter of poetry itself, creating some of the most thoughtful work in this book. “Angling” once again uses the imagery of fishing as the poet understands that with age, poetry come harder for him that it did when he was younger, thus “I cast my line for a word. Wonder at my inability / to call up a suitable specimen. / When first I fished from the pool, shoals of phrases / flickered in the depths, every cast was a strike, / I brought home fat bags of ballads, as though the abundance would never end, / which however it did, a few less each time, / or undersize, scrawny things, belly-hooked sprats of verse / as the stock thinned…”.

The sequence “Horse and Sheep” consists of 13 poems, all having seven lines with a rhyme scheme and a final single line which has the effect of closing the case. “Horse and Sheep” is apparently a sort of allegory with the narrator crossing rough country in cold weather. A horse becomes [as I read it] a figure of life and steadiness, while the sheep are more vulnerable and perishable. The narrator’s way is daunting: “Brilliant and daunting and ignorant, / this intellectual shrub that tears my toe / will penetrate the doubt of pig or ant. //  Near everywhere, it does not cease to know / in guts or steeps; it undermines the air, / the gentle gusts that fill the scree below, // the roar of seasons in the pooling year. / On sun-cut rock, or buried under snow, / it gets in everything, lives everywhere, // infesting so that no new life can grow.”           

And then there is the heroic “Canto the First” clearly inspired by Dante Alighieri and once again presenting a perilous journey by a wanderer – but the wanderer is not seeking Paradise. He is seeking justice for his late friend and poet Corin. He addresses Dante thus: “Master poet, harking from other parts, / nine ages dead, you walk our southern rim, / what brings you to this country of false starts?, / is there a wrong that you were sent to fix, / our culture of administrated arts? / Our leaders thrive in pond-life politics. / What other reason could you have for coming? / Is God caught up in tax avoidance tricks?”  Reeve suggests an idea of Hell different from Dante’s – the torture of a poet who did not achieve what he hoped… and in the process he mocks official arbitration of poetry, as in “our culture of administrated arts”.

If you have read this review to the end, you will note that I have produced a catalogue of About Now rather than a real critique. This is the old problem with reviewing a substantial collection of poems. How does the reviewer make it clear what the collection has to offer without mentioning many poems – unless one is to focus in detail only on a very few poems.

I have one confession to make. I do not understand the poem “The Elite” – it appears to be criticising various types of people who regard themselves as superior, but it presents so many examples that we might as well conclude that we all have such an assumption of superiority. That said, I see About Now as wide-ranging, thoughtful and challenging in the real meaning of the word.

Footnote: In 2018 and 2019, Maungatua Press, edited by Richard Reeve and David Karena-Holmes, produced a set of slim collections written by Nick Ascroft, David Karena-Holmes, Cilla McQueen, Michael Steven, Blair Reeve and Richard Reeve, all of them illustrated with woodcuts by Manu Berry and all of them “Published without the assistance of Creative New Zealand”. Maungatua Press appears to be proud of its independence. I was happy to receive them when they were sent along with About Now and I note that the “Horse and Sheep” sequence of About Now was originally on` of these slim collections.

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            Dunstan Ward, now in his eighties, is an academic who has lived in France for longer than he has lived in New Zealand. Among many other things, he co-edited the collected poetry of Robert Graves,  assisted by Graves’ widow. He does have deep New Zealand roots as well as Catholic roots. And he has been careful when it comes to producing collections of poetry. At an advanced age, he has produced only three collections, Departures being the third. The long [8 pages] opening poem called “Departures” gives a full account of  his forebears. In the 19^th century, the Wards settled in New Zealand, more than once clashing with Maori when it came to the ownership of land. The Ward family produced the prime-minister Joseph Ward and many land-owners, as well as being close to the Redwoods from which came a Catholic archbishop. But many in the family tree decided to return to England. What are departures? Literally leaving a country and friends to go elsewhere, but also departing from things and ideas – in other words changing one’s mind over the years. In a way, this very civilised collection could just as well be called Reminiscences as Departures.

            A gathering of poems recalls Dunstan Ward’s childhood – images of old Dunedin, dreams and nightmares, father’s farm and the occasional loud arguments of father with mother in the hard times – a very clear and vivid account of time and place. And after the account of childhood, there is the awareness of ageing and knowing time is limited… even if one is old. The poem “Swallows” declares “I part the curtains, watch for the first swallows / today, the day of my birth, and my father’s. / Seventy-eight already I’ve outlived him / by six months, the other half of the year / he must at this date have known would be his last: / disfigured by cancer, he refused treatment, / quoting the sergeant at the Great War front, ‘Come on, you bastards – d’you want to live forever?’ ” His terms of reference show a strong awareness of British and [especially] continental European culture, with one family forebear dead at the battle of the Somme. He loves Paris (it’s basically his home of choice) and its opportunities to enjoy high culture… like listening to Otto Klemperer conducting the orchestra.

            There are very personal poems about the sickness and death of his brother. The familiarity with funerals and their rituals leads to poems about Catholicism and his upbringing in the poem “Education” which reads in full “Not to learn the names of birds and flowers, / cities and rivers, or the constellations, / to parse one’s own body, it’s hidden grammar, / sight-read sheet music, translate Latin unseens, / but to repeat the types of sin and grace, / mortal or venial, sanctifying, actual, / Immaculate Conception, hypostatic union, / transubstantiation, the real presence, / to chant ‘tower of ivory’, ‘house of gold’ / ‘mourning and weeping in this valley of tears’ / ‘the hour of our death’ – the most important in life: / beatific vision or tortures of hell, forever.” He chronicles the deaths of acquaintances and gives virtual elegies for such as Frederick Page, the musicologist.

            Then he takes on the difficulty of writing poetry. He claims (in the poem “Failure”) that he took to poetry only after he had failed at so many other things. “Imitation” suggests that you cannot really translate a poem from another language – a view with which I heartily agree. There follow accounts of many poets he admires, such as “In quest of Fernando Pessoa”, the Portuguese poet. And Elizabeth Bishop ; and Robert Graves of course; and most important of all, two poems about his friend Vincent O’Sullivan, “Friendship” and “Fortitude” – the latter being written after O’Sullivan’s death.

            But ultimately he comes back to Paris and Italy. He witnesses the fire that gutted Notre Dame cathedral. He is inspired by Venetian glasses; he dramatizes Renaissance Italian scandals. In “Infected Spring” he paints a portrait of Paris when plague of Covid 9 hit. And finally he gives us “In My Street”, a kind of paean to the Parisian street when he lives. with all its historical culture.

            I hope I have made it clear that this is an erudite collection of poems coming from a civilised man, touching the major issues of ageing, the importance of culture and the joys of friendship. A solid collection.

 

Added Footnote: After I posted this review of Dunstan Ward's Departures, the poet corrected me noting that his poem 'Fortitude' was not written after Vincent O'Sullivan died, but was read to O'Sullivan by his wife.

 

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            To all writers of poetry I apologise for not being able to give full space to every collection that comes my way. Here, then, is a selection of poetry I have recently read and enjoyed, but have to deal with briefly.

 

            David Gregory’s Based on a True Story (Sudden Valley Press, $25) is a collection of [mainly] lean, short poems, many short enough to be aphorisms. Gregory has much irony and wit.  The ironic title reminds us how dishonest so many movies are that claim to be “based on a true story”. Memory cheats us and perhaps memories of childhood cheat us most of all; but there is some place here for joy and a questioning mind as in the poet’s visit to the Chatham Islands. Robust and very readable work.

            Leonard Lambert’s Slow Fires – New Poems (Cold Hub Press, $19.15) is, understandably, the work of an older man who has much experience behind him. The title poem is a warning against extremism and elsewhere he shows awareness that current ideas always fade and are replaced. But these are not his chief preoccupations. Painter as well as poet, he delights in being retired. He is aware that life is short, accepting its fading joys.          Sometimes he expresses a nostalgia for places he once knew, but he is not naïve about it. And in his most impressive poem, Elements, he weds the joy of flying birds with the working of the human mind. 

 

            Am I allowed to speak of fun when I speak of  Tsunami With Mushrooms by Te Awhina Rangimarie Arahanga (Steele Roberts, $25)? It is a hybrid of poetry and short stories, illustrated by various artists. The poems are mostly (but not exclusively) connected to sea and shore, with mountains. The poet lives in Kaikoura. She can joke, be ironic and be deadly serious. See “A Week of It” for laughter. See “Tsunami Assembly Point” for seriousness. And see a mixture of the two in “Zoom Attenborough”. As for the four short stories, they are closely built on real situations.