Something New

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

“The Anatomy of Sand” by Mikaela Nyman (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $NZ25); “The Companion to Volcanology” by Brent Kininmont (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $NZ25); “The Midnight Plane – Selected and new poems” by Fiona Kidman (Otago University Press, $NZ40); “High Wire” by Michael Fitzsimons ( The Cuba Press, $NZ25)

There is an interesting fact that I have come to understand over quite a few years of reviewing poetry. Many poets divide their collections into different sections. This baffled me, as each section seemed simply to continue with the same sort of poetry throughout the book.  So I asked the late Vincent O’Sullivan why this should be so, and he said that it was simply to allow the reader to take a break and have a breather. Fair enough I suppose. But when I read Mikaela Nyman’s The Anatomy of Sand, I discover that the three sections which make up this book are there for a purpose. Each section deals with separate perspectives. It is worth knowing that Mikaela Nyman was born and raised in Finland. She had previously written and published poetry in the Swedish language. She moved to New Zealand and now lives in Taranaki. The Anatomy of Sand is her first collection of poetry written in English. And it is great.

The first section is labelled “Sifting”, made up of 21 poems. The opening poem “Lonely Sailors” sets us at once on the coast of Taranaki: “There’s a huddle of windblown seafarers here, at the edge / of the universe – a black beach of volcanic / sand full of adrift sailors. No one knows where we came from, why / without hesitation we packed our possessions, hoisted / out half-moon sails only to end up on / Back Beach in Taranaki. / A fleet of thousands, free floating, lonely, / man o’ war purple but not as lethal, innocent yet beached on these shores.” This suggests that both human beings and sea creatures are wanderers on the seas… and it implies that all species are part of Earth. The next poem is “Cilia”, in part about how frogs hatch. In “The Hybinette Process” she acknowledges the fact that her great-grandfather was a pioneer in extractive metallurgy – and she goes on to say that such knowledge led to the toxic destruction of many forests, as in New Caledonia where nickel is mined. There are poems about the waste of seeds in Bamiyam in warfare. She is consistently concerned about climate change, but unlike many who write poems about it, she knows in detail scientific facts and is able to make poetry out of them. The only other New Zealand poet I know who can really do this is Helen Heath. Read Mikaela Nyman’s “Devon 1” and you find her unafraid to make use of words that would be alien to many, thus “Mind your step on Seaview Road, where walks carry / a risk of sinking 280 feet through tuffs and layers / of sandstone, silt and baked mudstone until / you arrive at a grey porphyritic sill at 2,861 metres. / Here zeolite sails as fibrous tuffs in pools / of leonhardite lit by a faint glow of clinopyroxene…” Yes, she goes deeply into the underground of Earth, with the many types that make up what is under our feet.

On its own stands “Dunes of methane” in which scientists have suggested that there might on the planet Pluto be sand made of ice and methane, which fires alluring images, but also gives a scientific explanation… “For dunes this size to form / requires generous supply of dry particles, a mechanism / (like wind) to lift and carry matter, an atmosphere / dense enough for wind transport to occur…” She does, however, takes time to recall where she came from in “Whakapapa in a whalebone church” where in the shadow of Mount Taranaki she asserts “… Orrdasklint is / my mountain / the Baltic my sea / (for lack of river) / my waka / a tar-smelling fishing boat. / My ancestors / a comb ceramic / culture / of an obscure ‘ Finno-Ugric / tribe”. And of course there are some poems directly addressing the denegation of land and some natural catastophies. “The Republic New Plymouth – 4” is basically a history of drilling for oil and its consequences. “Date with Sisyphus” is about .about whales beaching. “Iron throne, submerged” is the poem that comes nearest to the title of this collection The Anatomy of Sand.  It is in part a protest against the idea of mining sand .

The second section labelled “Liquefaction”, made of  22 poems, is very different in tone, often ironical and even funny. The poem “Black swan diaries (discont.)” puzzles me. Is Mikaela Nyman making fun of attempts to curb covid in 2020? Or is she genuinely try to reconstruct what it was like in NZ in that year? The poem that is most accessible, and that deserves to be anthologised, is “Purple cone meditation” where a pond becomes our destiny in the degradation of a pool.One poem that is almost despairing, “Suspended”, with “the ultimate deadline” being our destiny in life. Both “Cycle of cicadas” and “Pear lizard plumage” are also accessible, literally about what the titles say, but really also about our human foibles. The ‘found’ poem “How to safely dispose of milk” seems to explain a couple of techniques used by farmers, but seems to be really mocking this. Yet if this section has much irony and some gloom, it finishes with the delightful “Scent sounds” about the joy of breathing in the different odours

As for the third section, “The Markov Chain”, made of 18 poems, they move more into the style of  expressionism. “A pocket full of sand dollars” is inspired by experimental notes taken by the painter Michael Smither when he was surveying sand dunes.“Mudlarking” compares the way the Thames [in London] once had a completely polluted river which has now been cleaned-up… whereas there is a place in New Zealand that is now being polluted. A wonderful example of anthropomorphism is “Spinifex and Velella” where the coastal grass and the sea raft make love as living thing [which of course they are.]. And, in detail there is “Of wombs and eggs (a creation story)” based on the Kalevala, the Finnish saga, and bringing the poet’s distant forebears.

In writing this review I have touched on only some of the poems in this collection. In its variety it is absorbing. In its knowledge of the sea and living creatures it is well-informed. And in its irony while being serious it is original.

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            Brent Kininmont, born in New Zealand but now resident in Japan, is very much a poet attuned to the outdoors. His poetry often makes use of images of the sea, mountains and deserts. But he is not a romanticist and – in this collection at least - he only rarely writes about the New Zealand scene. He has travelled widely in many countries and refers to them often. He is also interested in how children are raised or grow up.

The title poem “The Companion to Volcanology” immediately shows his ability to turn land and earth into illusive metaphor. A child is being carried though a forest by a woman on the way to a mountain. There are “soft batons of harmless snakes” in the undergrowth and on the mountains are “crooked fingers of melting snow” On its own, this poem could be analysed in many ways. Is the child [if it is a child] part of a tramping tour? Is the woman maternal? It is interesting that here the woman is the porter… but then it is always women who are the first to carry children. So woman carrying child here is almost iconic. If this is all a little cryptic, the poem that follows, “Twelve Short Talks on Aspects of Origins”. manages to say in almost scientific precision what obsidian is and how it has influenced the Pacific… and sustains itself poetically.

And what of the poems that have to do with children, their raising and their growing up? The sequence “Leaf Boats” manages to move from an image of the sea to the classroom and the playground. In a sort of surrealistic style “Child Carrier” puts child together with imagery of sky-diving. There are four related poems called “Hong Kong 1997” where mother and child are apparently in peril on bouncy castle; a boy then a mother are swimming with strain; a boy and mother are at odds at table; and in the last section one mother not daring to take her child to go far into a pond – this section is called “One Child Policy” which may be a nod to a former Chinese policy.

Of his experience of travel there are examples of his interest in history, as in “Limbs Succumbing” about limbs lost from the Venus de Milo in Greece; or “The Impressionist” where, looking at the Pont du Gard, he considers other bridges of the Roman era and wonders what technology they use to held them together them together. “Near things” is set in the Levant in 1942 (during the Second World War). There are poems, mainly amusing or ironic about is parents and other members of family.

But the most gripping (and straight-forward) poem “New Year Ekiden” - referring to a marathon held in Japan – deals with one athlete “I see in the pained looks that his / lungs are no longer bellows. They are / Aqaba and Eilat, twin border towns / beside the Red Sea. I once sat on their shore / and watched a tea vendor, the slow drizzle / of stubs around his bare feet. While the towns / burned ever dimmer, dawn stretched out for / a moon uncommonly blanched of craters / and pedalled just out of reach.” In a way his most romantic and yet most despairing poem. Brilliant.  A very different poem “Imperial Units “ is also about athletics.

Some readers will discover that Kininmont’s poems often require much thought to understand what he is getting at, but the result is always worth it.

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            Now in her mid-80s, Dame Fiona Kidman is probably most known as a novelist. In her preface to The Midnight Plane she notes, after saying that she had spent most of her time writing novels,  “If all this suggests that the writing of poems has been secondary to my working life, I don’t believe so”. She has previously published six collections of poetry. A large book, The Midnight Plane is almost an anthology of her poetical writings up to now. Of the 140 poems that make up this book, only the last two are new poems.

            Reading most of my way through, I found myself enjoying poems that I had read in her earlier collections. I admired some of my favourites like (from the collection “Honey and Bitters” published in 1975) “The baked bean flutters” about getting comfort food after having a quarrel. Or (from “On the Tightrope” 1978) “Earthquake weather” with its real sense of fear in a New Zealand fault line. Or (from “Going to the Chathams” 1983) “The rooms” with its sense of anonymity in being alone in a hotel room where she sleeps; and from the same collection “Photograph” with its acute sense of ageing. Or (from “Wakeful Nights” 1991) the title poem Wakeful Nights, an evocation of hot summers at night in a rural area. Or (from “Where Your Left Hand Rests” 2010) the long sequence “Speaking of my grandmothers”, pedestrian in its words but interesting in what it says about her female ancestry and her strong feminist affiliation. Or (from “This Change in the Light” 2016) the poem “The town”, which appears to be a mildly ironic account of the town where Fiona Kidman grew up. In the same collection there is her ambitious “How I saw her: Ten sonnets for my mother”, a long sequence of genuine sonnets, tracing her mother’s Scots origin up to her death.                            In her preface Kidman says “I am a plain poet; some critics would describe my early work as ‘confessional’ others as ‘domestic’. Perhaps I was such a poet, and at heart still am, although I am not given much to labels.” Fair enough, though there’s nothing wrong with writing about domestic things or being confessional, so long as it’s done well – and she often did it very well. Note all those poems about forebears, about home, about where she lived etc. But of course just as important to her are her feminist interests. As for calling herself a “plain poet”, she always writes in a straight-forward language. There is nothing cryptic in her work, which is all to the better.

All of which at last brings us to the twenty “New poems” that conclude this very large collection. The title poem “The midnight plane” is in its way romantic and delightful – a literal account of the plane that passes over her head each night taking people to the airport in Whanganui, where she once saw a couple happily meeting again, concluding as she lies in bed “thinking that out there in the dark / some people will be coming home.”

It is easy [perhaps too easy] to categorise the types of poetry Fiona Kidman writes in the last twenty poems. There is her interest in nature and flora, such as “Red River Valley” with landscape; and both “The millefiori gardens” and “In the garden” revelling in the many and various flowers and plants. There are poems recalling her childhood. “Cream”, while describing the way cream is made, refers to childhood memories of the farm she grew up on. “Danny Ferry” recalls a man who worked a chain-ferry to cross over a river mouth. There are indeed domestic poems, as in “A Piece of Work”, also a recall of childhood, bringing in her mother and another woman’s skilfulness in picking fruit from a tree. “My daughter makes quilts” and  “The children’s toys” both dealing with things about the house; while “Vol-au-vents” is about regaining skill in the kitchen. The very witty “Pink washbasin” about the item in her bathroom that she most recalls. And perhaps it is right to also refer to the poem “Early morning” as domestic, as it deals with self-awareness where she considers all the different roles she has to take in her life. Of course there is a sort of feminist subtext in some of these poems. There are a very few poems you might call political, viz. “My husband’s war stories” about the 1981 Springbok Tour; and “Sitting bird”, connecting children dying in Gaza to a helpless little bird she sees in tree… but also relating it to maternal necessity. As for what is perhaps the outlier of this collection, there is “Sissinghurst”, a very sophisticated poem of visiting in England well-known country house where literary women lived and segueing into reflections of both death and the Englishness that used to reach New Zealand radio-waves.

I finished reading “The Midnight Plane” happy to connect with somebody who writes clearly, does not attempt to bedazzle readers with recherche and obscure words and tropes, and who says clearly what she means.

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Five years ago, in 2020, Michael Fitzsimons wrote his collection Michael, I Thought You Were Dead [reviewed in this blog] in which he told us that he had been diagnosed with cancer. He thought – and his friends and family thought – that he was soon going to die. But he is still with us, and in his latest collection High Wire he can even be jocular about his situation, seeing the best of life, even if he knows that death will eventually come.

The first section of High Wire is called All This and it takes up about 30 pages. In it Fitzsimons gives us his condition., writing “A dark spot on by hand / a heart twinge in the deep, / galloping blood pressure. / I stand in this majestic world / in my disappointing body, so many faint ripples./ A thrilling high-wire existence.” And “Five years after treatment for metastatic cancer / the doctors don’t want to see me anymore.  / They talk of a cure, as you might to a Lourdes pilgrim” Yet the natural things that surround him are still joyful, such as the dawn chorus of birds… even if he can be ironic about it, such as “Sparrows and silvereyes / announce the day / from their karaka kingdom. / … If I don’t listen to Morning Report / it’s going to be a good day, / full of bounce and soft foliage.” On his way, he questions the value of what he is doing, thus: “My poems seem to appeal / to people who don’t read poetry. / Am I breaking down barriers” / Am I building bridges? / Am I enlarging the world? / Am I cheating? / Am I a poet?” (And doesn’t every poet think this sometimes?). With a hint of his Catholic views, he writes happily  “We drink gold-medals wine from a bar at the back / of what used to be a chapel. The very spot where Brothers / once prayed the Divine office day and night with / great faithfulness. These days it’s used for weddings and / banquets and – latest market opportunity – wakes. / Will I have the reserve syrah or the cabernet blend called / Antoine, named after one of the pioneering French / Brothers? I’ll have both. / Good health and God speed to you all.”

There follow 44 poems, collectively called And More. They speak of the beach, of the sunset, of children growing up, of family, of home, of trees, friends and neighbours, of  travels, of singing, of drinking wine, of (apparently) recalling years in which he considered becoming a priest [in the poem “Dark Whistling” and elsewhere], of reading and finally of accepting his lot. I choose not to analyse all his poems. I enjoyed them. I found Fitzsimons’ style to be easy-going, ironical, happy and enjoyable. No need to say anything else.