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We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
“MISBEHAVIOUR & OTHER REVERIES” by John Davidson (Steele Roberts $NZ25); “A LASH OF LAST WORDS” by Ian Rockel (Steele Roberts $NZ25); “ENDINGS – POEMS 1984-2023 by Bruce Bisset (Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop $NZ30) ; “CHEW THE BRIGHT HYSTERIA – Poems & Paintings” by Rhondda Greig (Quentin Wilson Publishing $NZ35 )
John Davidson is an Emeritus Professor of Classics. Many of his interests are related to ancient Greek and Roman tales and literature – but he is definitely not stuck in the past. His poetry often deals with the present moment, embracing ideas about New Zealand’s concern for the environment, about some elements of politics, and sometimes recalling his earlier life in England and travel elsewhere. And there are philosophic moments when he delves into the very nature of humanity. Misbehaviour & Other Reveries is Davidson’s 9th collection of poetry… and here I have to admit that I have not yet read any other of his previous collections. Misbehaviour & Other Reveries is divided into two parts, the first called Diversions and the second called Yearnings. While the Diversions section has more jocularity and the Yearnings section has more philosophical thoughtfulness, the fact is that there is much overlap between the two sections… but I shall doggedly deal with the two sections separately.
Diversions begins with “Misbehaviour”, a poem about a mischievous cat and the chaos it makes, but the cat is named Troy and its upsetting actions are like those of an Hellenic warrior. Yes of course this is a jocular beginning. Then there is “Deliveries”, Davidson’s anecdote of trying to distribute leaflets around London when he was younger. And “Sunday morning”, a rather dismissive account of a protest in the street. “Oxford market” is again anecdotal – simply viewing the place and the type of people in a particular environment. The same goes for “The Wallace Collection” with its images of London bustling about outside the well-known art gallery of classic paintings. From this, one quickly understands that Davidson is a raconteur as well as a landscaper with words, and a genial chap who is trim with the anecdotes. The poem “Betsy” is the quintessence of his enjoyable anecdotes – a poem about an American writer bumping into Davidson at a writers-and-readers gathering, and the kind of awkward conversation that ensues.
Yet along with the anecdotes, there is in this collection a stream of fantasy. The poem “She went to the opera” has a woman raging about how dreadful the performance was and how everything went wrong… but her version of what happened is so over-the-top that it is hard to read it as a truthful account. In other words, it could be a fantasy. Is the poem “Unicorn” a fantasy about a real unicorn? Or is it rather about a toy unicorn left in the rain as seen by adults? Or… is it any number of things? Davidson does call on his classicist past with the poem “Ulysses”, delving into how often and distorted the ancient hero has been re-constructed by later poets and novelists. But then “Protos heuretes” is an amusing anecdote of a tour guide in Greece saying something that would amuse many New Zealanders [ I won’t spoil the joke by repeating what she said].
Davidson has a keen interest in the visual arts, as seen in “Abstract attraction” which praises the use of black-and-white in painting; and he speaks more of more of art in “Style changes” which deals with the little known American artist Harry Lum. And naturally, having been an academic, he can call out charlatans in academe. One wonders whom he was lampooning in the poem “Wordsmith”, which reads in full “He didn’t have anything to say / but he was clever clever clever. / He spun his web like a busy spider / to snare the earnest, the gullible, / the wannabe intellectual / the culture conquistador. / They all came clamouring - / to be webbed by his pretentiousness.”
And having said all this about the first half of Misbehaviour & Other Reveries, PLEASE let some anthologist include Davidson’s excellent, exuberant “Journey” – a brilliant poem filled with images, lauding not only travel and wandering in all their forms, but lapping up what there is to absorb - culture, friendship, beauty and all the time the awareness that there is more to see and hear. A poem both optimistic and encouraging.
Yearnings is on the whole more sombre. The “Visitation” poems examine the same event, perhaps one fanciful and the other matter-of-fact, but both inspired by a painter. This is possibly Davidson’s most experimental poem. “Maria finale” is a fitting poem for an elderly man to write, in effect being an eulogy for a woman he once knew but who has just died. “A wish called Fonda” gives a very ambiguous account of the actress Jane Fonda, and Davidson’s poem about “Ukraine” is also ambiguous.
Then there are the poems ( inevitable these days) that call out the colonialism of New Zealand. “The invaders” seems to imply [though not clearly] that British acquisition of New Zealand was inferior to the earlier Maori possession. This poem was apparently inspired by two famous poems, one by Alistair Campbell and the other by C. P. Cavafy. There are other brief poems about how this country would be like if the birds took over; but the poem “Parihaka” necessarily looks at the injustice of it. On the conservation side of things, “Roots” reminding us that roots of trees and grasses literally examine the Earth more closely than we human beings do.
And what of Davidson’s interrogations of the human condition? “Lament of the soul” and “Companion” both seem to deal with the idea of the soul or, if you prefer, attempting to understand the purpose of life. “Wiring” implies that intelligence might be handed over to other than us. And “You need help” suggests the eternal malaise of the human condition. As for the shortness of a human life, “Shades” deals swiftly with the ceremonies surrounding death. It reads in full “Shades of white / roses sinking silently / into the depths / of the crematorium. / The casket has disappeared / the last glimpse / of what had once been a life / the austere purity of roses. Shades of white.”
As you can see from this brief analysis of , Misbehaviour & Other Reveries is a very varied collection. One final comment – there are long explanatory notes at end of book.
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Ian Rockel is a poet who goes his own way. On this blog I have previously reviewed two of his six collections of poetry, “What Know You, Stars?” [2018 ] and “Earth and Elsewhere” [2022], both of which were prefaced by the actor Ian Mune. Both were concerned with what I can only refer to as cosmic – Ian Rockel is interested in the nature of the universe itself, the stars and the durability of our little planet. This time, there is a preface by the publisher Roger Steele.
While he can be apocalyptic, Rockel can also be happy… but happy in the sense of deep irony. Take the twelve poems, under the heading “Twelve Favourite or Nearly Cheerful Poems”, that begin “A lash of last words”. All of them say something positive – a beautiful statue of a woman, beautiful old houses near a beach, little children playing with insects, the light of Heaven… but [with the exception of the poem “Arrival”] all these twelve opening poems curdle into sorrow or disappointment. This opening sequence concludes with “Trump”, the poet having a nightmare about the man who is now POTUS. (The poem was certainly written before Trump won the election.) Next section is labelled “World Still There, But Suffers Shift.” Again it is the poetry of irony, but this time harnessed to the possibility of the Earth dying, or at least being somehow degraded. Thus the poem “Storm” concludes “We thank God / for our wisdom / in having constructed / a wood-shed for storms / such as this, / yet, as black smoke / rolls to Heaven, / we sense displeasure / at our smudging / the atmosphere.” One hand gives and the other takes away.
The section called “The Day of the Grey Man” begins with a poem of the same name. It works as a protest against conformity. Later there are more tender vistas. God is often evoked [ambiguously] and there is a very comfy poem called “Love by the Hearth” which I produce here in full: “I have not much else to do / in this last edge of life - / yet your smile / holds me together, / though clouds roll. / What tell the seasons? / You smile them away, / and through the chill, / heat the cottage / with what fell / from an old tree. / Our old cat / purrs in the heat / and shifts / from lap to lap. / We have the children / coming back tomorrow - / what crowded joy.” This not only suggests the poet’s age, but it also suggests stability – as does the later poem “Punchbowl Dreams”, in part about “another day / of being / with a continued joy, / friends and love / and the beauty of life.”
In this collection of poetry, there is much imagery of the night, of birds heard therein, of the wind, of the sun, of the most basic elements of our existence. And sometimes there is the macabre, especially in the poem “Peace”, thus “Last year / the cemetery cracked open / spilling garments and bodies / which rolled down the hill / and rested against our house / which cracked but with glue / stretched to its capability - / and in the softest breeze, / twanging. / But by sundown, the old / ones had been put back / but it is not all as quiet / as we might expect.” But there are also intimations of death (see poem “Going”) and images of the end of the world in various ways.
As I said, Ian Rockel goes his own way – a sort of dialogue with God, with the universe, with the reality of death, with the comforting moments in between… and all in brief, pared-back, lean and short poems.
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I’ve been to enough pub readings and/or stage performances of poetry to know that often what seems great when spoken can look thin and banal on the printed page. Bruce Bisset may be the exception to this general rule. Endings – Poems 1984-2023 is a collection of Bisset’s work selected by David Eggleton, who also contributes a Foreword. Eggleton recalls that years ago Bisset was “a beret-wearing barfly bard” having a “gruff and bluff, growly and resonant” voice, and whose poems were made for performance. Bisset was a poet of hard knocks . But as Bisset says in his Endword, he himself hasn’t performed for years, but he has kept writing… and nearly all the poems of this volume were written after his performance years. Bisset also insists that poetry must be spoken, and not be obscure. So Endings – Poems 1984-2023 is very accessible.
Bisset writes in free form. His lines are presented the way a speaker would breathe. But occasionally he bursts into rhyme, especially when writing for children with “the strangest cat (a children’s rhyme)” and in an almost jolly poem “shells”. There is rhyming in the protest poem “one line from rob”, while “hey mister” is pure doggerel cursing Death itself. And at the end of this collection we are presented with the lyrics of songs Bisset has written… and of course they rhyme.
Like nearly all poets, Bisset has his preoccupations. He is very earnest about the suppression of Parihaka with the poem “a Taranaki poem”, its sad and best statement being “Te Whiti you were forged too pure to learn / that peaceful protest only succeeds / when you are the same race / when it is backed up by power that can threaten the state / when the world can hear your words.”. He is angry about the removal of a certain railway line and he comments on the war in Gaza in “a familiar tune”, making ironical use of a well-known song. His poem “there’s only one forge left in the country” is ironical, setting out as a Utopia and then undercutting it, perhaps chastising those who think Utopia can be possible.
But surprisingly, most of what he writes is more personal and intimate. He writes much about family, children, the bringing up of babies... who in other poems grow up to be teenagers and adults. There are poems about his now-grown-up kids sending him birthday messages. But in “feedback” he says “the young are savage in / their condemnation / as if experience counts for nothing / as if wisdom is not earned / they bay and bite at the least / provocation / imagining they are the champions / of the world, and none / before them has eyes to see / or mouth to speak.” This develops as a condemnation of know-it-all kids, but understanding that he himself he was once young.
Then there is love, and the difficulty of staying in love [in a poem with no title]. Its first stanza says “last night I tried to write / a love poem for you / but the lines refused to flow / and all I got was a headache. It’s / been with me all day.” And its last stanza says “I’m trying to write a love poem for you / but the love won’t come / and I’ll cry myself to sleep tonight / and you won’t care. / perhaps you don’t deserve it.” The poem “linda” is addressed to his wife, in which he considers her compassion but laments that the world will never be the perfect place she always hopes for.
Overlapping these ideas, there is what may be Bisset’s dominant idea now. It is his awareness of his old age. In “thoughts while she’s away” has him realising he’s getting older than other performers and the much younger audiences there now are. He’s aware that he’s lost his audience. The poem “come back” says wistfully “There are a time when I / could get equal billing with Sam Hunt / my name on posters at festivals / appear with any of the country’s / top band, and be / well paid for it”. An untitled poem says of old age “I am at best a pallid shadow / a waning moon-faced effigy of / the burning flame of my creation that / I brought so readily to life / when I was… I begin to appreciate / how a zombie must feel; / the flesh moves, shakily, but the spirit / is fled.” . The poem “nirvana” speaks of his growing forgetfulness; while “visiting” deals with ageing and his deceased parents. And “sorting” seems to be an older man’s regret of some of his earlier work. So Bisset is not now the wild, rebellious young public performer he once was, but an ageing man with an ageing man’s perspective. And he’s kept his promise. He writes clearly and colloquially, not baffling us. To repeat myself, it is very accessible.
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Rhondda Greig, a New Zealander who has lived and worked in both Scotland and Japan, is poet and painter; and her collection Chew the Bright Hysteria is garnished with images of her paintings, all with bright and brash colours, partly representative, partly abstract, but consistently engaging.
Her poems sit lean on the page, lines being brief, including her “The passionate anagram” [more a word game than a poem]. Rhondda Greig is a poet who is very interested in nature but who – on the whole – does not beat the big drum for conservation. Thus in her “Spring Wairarapa”, “ July Wairarapa”, and two Autumn poems, including one of her very best which says in full “Autumn has sought / asylum from colour festivals / seceded right / after summer’s / too much sun / Spires of fires / are burning down / the valley / cadging charity / for a new season / beyond the outstretched / drought.” She returns to her immediate environment towards the end of this collection with “Living in a landscape” in which she depicts herself as being more at home in the natural environment that surrounds her than in her house. Not that she ignores the hard realities for some people. Her “Supermarket floor cleaner” is a longish poem which is more-or-less in the tone of social reality – it deals with how tedious and difficult such work sometimes is. And naturally there are some unpleasant things in rural areas. There is a poem about catching and killing a magpie.
Far from all this, there are accounts of her travels overseas. “Epithalamium for William and Sarah” is a poem celebrating their wedding but written in terms of skiing and perhaps with tongue in cheek. In Scotland in “Footdee, Aberdeen” she sees dolphins and swans; in “Cromarty” there is an awareness of the golden harvests and the black cattle. One of her best is “Letter from Scotland” where she looks in nearly all directions seeing grey and granite housing. She presents a prose poems chronicling a “Blizzard in Aberdeen”. “Unst” proves to be a daunting, freezing little place in the Shetland Islands. Then there is the poet-as-tourist. She visits France, having to deal with uncouth people on a bus. She visits a French beach which Katherine Mansfield might have visited. In Spain she sees a woman putting up a memoriam for the dead who were killed by terrorists. Her reaction to visiting the Sistine Chapel is ambiguous.
Her very best satirical poem is “Blue jeans”, which sees American clothes as having conquered the world more than wars and bombs have done. She writes “Forget about bombs, missiles, drones, / sabotage and food sanctions. / Threads have done it / Jacob Davis and Levi Strauss / are the new world presidents in absentia. / We have a concord of bottoms. / A tower of Babel that will / shear at the seams one day / consuming all.” And nearby there is the prose poem “The swearing poem”, which is literally about that.
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