We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
“Touch Screen” by Philip Armstrong (Otago University Press, $NZ30); “Sick Power Trip” by Erik Kennedy (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $30); “In the Hollow of the Wave” by Nina Mingya Powles (Auckland University Press $NZ 24:99)
Rare it is to have a poet who could be called a true philosopher. The blurb presented with Touch Screen tells me that Philip Armstrong is a lecturer in literature, writing and human-animal studies at the University of Canterbury, but he might as well be called a philosopher as his poetry delves deeply into the problems that go with our species and humanity – where we came from, where we are going, and how we are or are not now being dominated by machines. Sometimes – but not too often – Armstrong uses recherche or specialist words, especially when he is dealing with very small creatures.
Wisely, Armstrong divides this collection into three separate sections because each deals with different ideas.
First part is called Glass, kicking off with a poem called “The Advancement of Learning”, that being the name of Francis Bacon’s early17th century speculations about knowledge and how humanity could advance via science. But do scientific advances necessarily make for a better world? Armstrong’s title “Touch Screen” refers to what is now available on computers. He questions how much we now rely upon artificial intelligence to make our decisions. His poems “Jacob’s Ladder” and “Personality Test” suggest a great sense of pessimism. “Uber-Ich” shows an annoyance at the way cars now tell us what to do and how we are supposed to drive. Then there is a quirky, but intriguing, long poem “Immram”, a version of what navigation was like in ancient times, yet gradually beginning to rush along with great speed; and in a way being a version of the founding in New Zealand. And “at such speed we couldn’t tell what came between. / Skyline after skyline flickered past, / faster and faster and faster, / the way we forgave and still forgive / ourselves, over and over until / out fingers bleed”. In some of his poems, Armstrong feels stifled and makes reference to modern medical treatments. “Foreign Accent Syndrome” fears the non-human languages that are being created on computers – “It makes you wonder what they might / be saying, smiling as they do with slightly / parted lips. Since meeting them in my dreams and my nightmares are identical. I wake / making confessions in a foreign tongue.” But like any good poet, Armstrong is not stalled on one theme. Three poems – “My Life in Comics”, “My Own Goals” and “Anastomosis” - tell us, very ironically, tales of his teenage days.
Excellent though these poems are, they are only the warm-up to Part Two Myth, wherein Armstrong looks at how we human beings began in the first place and whence we had evolved. “Humble Beginnings” gives us a sour version of our distant forebears. “Book of the Dead” is almost a dead-pan description of the ancient Egyptian burial customs, including nearly all the Egyptians gods. In the end, the poem suggests that death is just the disintegration of particles – that after all we are merely dust. The poems “Drifters” and “Mere” combine ancient sages with modern technology – implying that we in some ways have not changed much. Most impelling of all in this collection, however, is the long sequence called “Life of Clay”, being 13 poems which deal in detail with not only evolution but with the fragility of human beings. Often Armstrong makes reference to Mary Shelley’s “monster”, made by Frankenstein, who was shaped by man, an appropriate metaphor given that, eons ago, our ancestors were more-or-less shaped out of clay. But the poem “Clay on the Rocks” again warns us that non-human forces (machinery, computers, touch screens etc.) are taking us over – “Now warming to the warming world / my pineal gland locates / two hundred and forty years of stalled / operating system updates. / Begins a monster download.” And the poem “A Branding Exercise” says “After two centuries / the power to galvanise dead matter has / been put into the hands of children”, conjuring up images of both technicians and teenagers fiddling with their computers and touch screens. The poem “The New, New Atlantis”, takes Francis Bacon’s “New Atlantis” to show how terrifying applied science has wrought . There follow poems about the ubiquity of [pocket] cameras, unwanted images and the loss of privacy. These are not in any way the ideas of somebody who does not appreciate modern science. They are the words of someone who intelligently critiques the down side of some applied modern scientific trends.
When we finally reach Part Three Dirt, we are in a different type of poetry. Yes, there is some speculation on how species have survived over the eons – for example the poem “Slow Stepper” which is almost a jolly account of what would happen if one were to be reincarnated as a tiny mite of some sort. But most of Dirt is made of descriptive versions of New Zealand ancient and modern. Hence there are poems about the explosion of Lake Taupo two thousand years ago; and about what is left of an abandoned goldrush town. Surprisingly poems like “Estuary Bay”, “Driftwood Sculpture” and “City Under Rain” come close to being a more conventional type of descriptive poetry, though Armstrong does make some biting comments on ecology and how it is often ignored. And, where pollution is concerned, consider the poem “Landfill” with its angry lines about “a rancid pile / of Feltex worn through / to the webbing, rolls / of an underlay stippled with black / mould, a tarp-wrapped trap complete / with decomposing rat, / car batteries, tyres, asbestos tiles: / back then there was nothing you couldn’t / offload: the landfill ‘reclaimed’ / territory from the mangroves…”
We human beings are very good at leaving messes behind us. And perhaps modern technology makes even bigger messes.
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Reading Erik Kennedy’s Sick Power Trip, I’m immediately on the side of poets and novelists who can blow their stacks with skill. Juvenal lashing out in all directions at everything that was wrong with ancient Rome. Jonathon Swift thumbing his nose at English politics. Any good satirist. Erik Kennedy - American born, now New Zealander – is a very good satirist. But, as I suggested in reviewing his two earlier collections There’s No Place Like the Internet in Spring Time and Another Beautiful Day Indoors, even good satire can sometimes curdle into carping.
Take some examples of Kennedy’s really cutting satire. Speaking of complaisance, consider “Individualistic Societies”, which opens the show by suggesting that you might as well give up “If a comet is heading for the earth, we must celebrate the ambition of the comet.” “Loneliness Studies” is a good satire on our human inability to get on intimately with other people “Humans are the only animals / that think they’re not animals. / Chatbot chimps programmed / to miss each other and / to miss missing each other.” There is deep irony indeed in “The Health Benefits of Winter Sea Bathing”. The collection’s title Sick Power Trip comes from the poem “I Like Rich People, but I Couldn’t Eat a Whole One Myself”, strongly mocking the idea that super-rich people are different from the rest of us. “DARVO”, meaning ‘deny, attack, reverse victim and offender’, reminds us that “The most powerful forces in the universe are / the strong nuclear force, the electromagnetic force, / and the need terrible people have to believe / that they are the victims. The sun never sets on / the empire of grievances…”
All of these poems are doing the job they should do – that is, legitimate satire that alerts us to absurdity. BUT some of Kennedy poems turn to snarling at us, where “All Submarine Movies Are Christmas Movies” is angry at the whole idea of Christmas family gatherings. “Pacific Sea Surface Temperature Anomalies” appears to be telling us that those who like swimming at the beach are “the clammy, suffering, sweltry, cynical , burned-out, / downhearted, vulnerable people go to the sea.”
Satire or snarling apart, Kennedy writes seriously about matters that concern him and should concern us. “Low Carbon Warfare” is a collection of statements that have been made by writers on current ideas related to warfare – mostly the statements are pro-warfare but some are opposed to the military-industrial complex. Putting this together keeps reminding us that some people ignore how existing weapons could nihilate all human beings on our planet. [Four pages at the back of the collection verify who wrote each of the comments that were made.] There are some poems that almost read as despair. “Everyone’s Trying on Their Old Nuclear War Poems” seems to suggest that such protest poems are old hat and “hating the bomb is assumed.” “Someone Put an Ancient Burial Ground Right Where a Hotel Needs to Go” is really a good lecture reminding us of the clash between pragmatism - wanting to go ahead with amenities - and the value of preserving the ancient… but also noting that “archaeology is a destructive science. / What was excavated today can’t be put back tomorrow”. Some issues are really complex. Sometimes we are given not poetry at all but long prose statements, especially in “Bino” querying the value of heart transplants. Ditto “Soft Power” about the attitudes people have about animals other than us. Ditto “Pet Theories” which considers the relationship of pets and human beings.
Much of Kennedy’s work does have room for ambiguity : poems called “This Usually Represents a Desire to Achieve Greatness in Your Social or Professional Life” and “Enclosure of the Commons II” which suggests that if there were now commons [where people could graze their animals] the land would probably be toxic and polluted with chemicals and therefore not worth grazing. “An Only Child Poem” suggests that only assertive people who are speaking in a public place are probably the type who were pampered as children. A kind of uncertainly is in the quasi-protest poem “Bystander Poem; or a Gaza Poem”, that is, chastising us for not caring about the situation but not taking sides.
If all this seems that Kennedy is deadly serious about everything, it’s worth noting that he can sometimes be nostalgic or even whimsical. There are a number of poems that are almost nostalgic - as in seeing hippiedom as harmless nonsense (“Self-Defining Hippiedom Discourse”) ; and something got lost (“Gap in My CV”); and Dad’s interest in cars ( “Classic Cars Magazines”). “Bildungsroman” is concerned with growing up and “I’ve Been Huddling in Doorways” concerns being rootless in earlier years. “The Summer We All Called Cigarettes ‘Snargers’ ” could be read as criticising and poking fun at the way he behaved when he was younger… or nostalgia.
As for whimsy, there is the jump of imagination seeing moths and butterflies as if they were aeroplanes (“Magpie Moth vs Monarch Butterfly”). “Public Coughs” is deliberately doggerel in the Ogden Nash tradition with clunky rhymes. “A Nineteenth-Century Love Song” is also full of bouncily rhymes. “The Human Christmas Tree” is sheer surrealism. “We’ve All Been There” is both serious and witty when “I stored my plan for world peace / safely in my coat pocket, / and then I washed the coat.”
I’m chronicling all this simply as a means of saying that, though Kennedy is not only a skilled satirist, he is capable of writing in different tones. A very engaging collection.
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Born and raised in New Zealand but well acquainted with China and South-East Asia and now living in London, Nina Mingya Powles is obviously a poet with a very cosmopolitan outlook. In her second collection, she is often inspired by, or quotes, many poets and writers, mainly women, such as Virginia Woolf [from whom comes the phrase ‘in the hollow of the wave’], Sylvia Plath, Sin Chi Yin and others – poets who are very sensitive and who like to look at the small things in nature as well as the motions of the tides, the seasons and the preciseness of art. It’s important to note that this collection is a work of visual art as well as of poetry. The first section “A Woven Sea” could be read as a hybrid – art works [images of quilts etc.] sit next to Powles’ words. In much of her work, Powles is interested in textiles, and memory and the making of waves by the thread or the sea. Much later a section called “Spell of the Red Flowers” is free verse presented in neat square blocks of type, evidence of Powles interest in the visual impact of words.
Powles tells us first that her grandfather used to stich quilts. There was a sewing machine and her grandmother was also into crafts; and “the machine belongs to memory and to a different time. / The machine belongs to the house, which still exits and also doesn’t exist” – introducing us to the persistence of memory, one of her continued themes. Later she tells us “memory is a house with scraped white walls. / I step inside and choose what to take, what to leave behind.” Our memories are always edited ones. She moves on to connect the thread of quilts and texture to the movement of water and the sea, giving examples of the process in making a quilt – cutting, layering, binding, patterning. This interest in craft-work is carried over in her poem “At the Metropolitan Museum, 1990” where she saw “two women strolling through a dark navy blue room filled with Chinese and Japanese silks, jade and red and blue embroidered with birds, leaves and pagodas, everything shimmering in low light. The women reach out to touch the fabrics, forgetting they are behind glass.” Elsewhere she speaks of a gown that can change the colour of a harbour. Again, the fluorescent nature of both water and silk are identified as one. So indeed are what is beautiful in nature.
In other poems, while often referring to South-East Asian crafts [batik etc.], she does occasionally make nods to the reality of poverty in villages. And yet, what hands have made are also beautiful. In a poem called “A gown is a glacier, receding” she writes “a gown is a rocky slope / a gown is a glacier, receding / a gown is a slow accumulation / a gown is an edifice that forms around an opening / a gown is a fissure where molten rock material emerges” and later “a pleat is a faultline / a pleat is a form of architecture / a pleat is an abrupt geological formation / a pleat must lie outside the borders of gender / a pleat is a sentence written by hand on folded paper.”
The last section of this collection introduces her interest in animals – particularly dogs – and she looks at how preparing food can also be a delicate skill. Her final poems here are about the tides, phases of the moon and the moods they conjure up.
If I were to categorise the type of poetry Powles writes, I would call it post-modernist romanticism. This is not intended as a slur. Powles writes with delicacy, has an eye for what is beautiful and values the skills of those who can produce tactile art.
