Something New

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

“Tackling the hens” by Mary McCallum (Cuba Press, $25); “Terrier, Worrier” by Anna Jackson (Auckland University Press, $24.99) ; “e  ko, no hea koe” by Matariki Bennett (Dead Bird Books, $35)

It’s ironical that the title poem of Mary McCallum’s “Tackling the hens” is in fact the last poem to be presented in her latest collection, but it could be seen as a summing-up of her view of human foibles. If read literally, the poem  “Tackling the hens” is simply about the ways of unruly hens when you their owners are trying to keep them in order. But, with a little anthropomorphism, it also suggests the eccentric ways human beings often behave. We are not always predicable. Mary McCallum his very interested in the way people act, from joy to uncertainty to sorrow, and her account of our species is a very humane one.

In joy, consider “The love story of the entomologist” a poem delicate and precise as a spider’s web drenched in morning dew. “To find it, you need to feel the trunk / with your fingers. It’s soft, a lump, mossy, / a door that you open with tweezers. / You lean your cheek on the bark, scan / the lump, insert the tweezers. Tug”… the entomologist’s technique when hunting for spiders… but the poem moves carefully to personal relationships and the joy of them.  “Daughter”, written in very free verse, dwells on the delights of being the mother of a growing adolescent daughter. This poem is complemented by “Boy”, wherein a woman is looking at a growing boy. “Bread” deals with the pleasure of seeing a young man making the bread. “Ursula” depicts the joy of ageing women chatting together. “Beloved of bees” centres  on an old woman who cultures very varied flowers… to the bees’ delight. “Just Grand” is a very rare thing – a prose poem about the everyday contentment of a couple who admire each other. Does this sound a little too Pollyanna? I hope not. Mary McCallum deals often with the positive but mundane things, such as “Compost” and the necessary smelly-ness of emptying rotting things. Perhaps the whole collection  could be called ‘the importance of the small and everyday things’ as in “Cauliflower” wherein a humble gift shows how important the simple gift is;  and “Pearls” shows the heroism of ordinary people.

Uncertainty is the tone of some poems. “Hunting for Cavafy” presents us with that awful moment when you can’t find a book when you were sure you knew where it was… but you were wrong. “Weightless” gives a strong sense of how, at a certain point, one understands that even apparently small things which happened in childhood can contribute to the way one thinks as an adult. Similarly “Mouth”, in its own unique way tries to recover in full adulthood the things that excited you when you were a younger person. Another uncertainly is in a clutch of poems about the different moods of Wellington. “Shines” - one of  McCallum’s best takes on life in a city – is about adjusting yourself as “Day calls you to attention, asks / you out the door to the hard jaw / of the city. Most mornings there’s / enough to gentle it: the woman  / in a frilled shirt, the laughing clutch / of builders, Moss making coffee / at the hissing machine – the wide / grin…”. This poem is like bricolage, depicting a city waking up… but also learning something [an end-note tells us that Shines was part of an account of Dante’s ]. There is a similar sense of bricolage in “Penny Lane” where various things are seen as two women walk around their neighbourhood. Nevertheless, Mary McCallum loves to give us a sense of place., as in “Southern Man” in which topography is conjoined with human habitations

And what of the mood of sorrow? Very much attuned to Wellington and environs, McCallum’s “Finding Mansfield” brings on the sorrow of nostalgia which recalls what has been lost. The poem wants to conjure up what exactly Days Bay might have been when Katherine Mansfield was around… but now such traces are lost and “The house where the Beauchamps / spent their summers – that family / waking to the sleepy sound of the sea, / streams falling into ferny basins. / Now it’s road upon road of houses, dogs, / bikes, kayaks. My friend has gone and / Kathleen’s house, so long vacant, has sold…”. Even more sorrowful is “Still Life” and McCallum is grieving the death of her mother “These / are the weeks my mother died and my children / lived all around me, when my father grieved / but my brothers kept him standing, when my hands / held nothing but then took to wearing her ring. / ten times a day, twenty, less and less now, / the hand with the ring reaches for the one without, / and it’s like my mother’s sitting beside me on / the couch and she’s putting down her knitting / to squeeze my hand and sit a while.”

It is a very wide spectrum of human behaviour that is presented in “Tackling the hens” and a careful touch is shown in dealing with people.

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While reviewing on this blog Anna Jackson’s collection Thicket  back in 2012, I noted that she was someone “who can go confessional and who sometimes speaks of personal and intimate matters. But Jackson is more overtly intellectual; more given to literary allusion; as often concerned with  classical ideas as with personal feelings.”

 Terrier, Worrier is certainly the work of an intellectual. Anna Jackson is not only a poet who has written many collections , but she is also the author of books about the nature of poetry and changing styles of poetry. While witty, positive and largely optimistic she always asks us to consider what a poem actually is, even as we are reading the poem. And perhaps it is her academic training that makes her give us seven pages of end-notes verifying her ideas by quoting what scientists, philosophers, novelists, psychologist and others have had their say on the type of  things Jackson discusses.  

 Terrier, Worrier is divided into five sections, Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer again. Throughout her style is prose poetry, presented as brief thoughtful statements. Nearly every statement begins with “I” or “I thought”, implying that she is dreaming, thinking or speculating.

            Summer is “Terrier, Worrier”. There is first person confessional speech. She speaks of dreams and dreamt conversation or “perhaps it is more like  reading a poem, where the words, or the movement of the thought, the song of the thought, is given to you rather than coming from you, but still moves through you.” Does this mean inspiration? This leads into querying how poetry is created – automatically, writing things after you have consciously thought of things to write, or following given ideas? But there comes what could be called the protagonist in the important statement “This summer I kept dreaming about a terrier. It was not a recurring dream but a recurring terrier that appeared in dream after dream, often needing to be released from somewhere it was trapped. It did seem as if my unconscious was hard at work trying to tell me something I was repeatedly failing to grasp. I thought, a terrier is a good symbol for the work of digging up something underground but still alive.” But terriers are also worriers and Jackson also takes the opportunity to wonder how animals think and how they dream.

            Autumn is “Lounge scale” and considers how trends have changed the way people now understand things - e.g. few people now read blogs; people now listen to podcasts ; fewer people keep diaries;  photography takes the place of holding memories or writing them up… and this suggests that the way we think has radically changed… so where is poetry?          

Winter is “Hilbert spaces”. Hilbert spaces [as in mathematics] deals with “the mathematical study of infinite dimensions within finite spaces”. She thinks about whether she had existed before she was conceived and whether “bears hibernating through the winter probably aren’t processing more knowledge than they had access to when the days were longer, or managing particularly troubled or repressed emotions that they had failed to process all summer.” How long is there consciousness in the body even when it has officially died? Then there is the old question - can one think without speaking? … and what of people who take drugs? How different are their dreams or are they just dreaming the drug? The problems of the brain and understanding are examined. And what is really the nature of language?

Spring is “Matchbox beetle” where we go into speculating how sounds and music are created and affect us… and quotes much Wittgenstein.

Summer is “Memory palace” which certainly touches on memory, but also brushes on issues related to how men can underrate women, proven by a number of statements about how early ornithologists – all men – thought that female birds couldn’t sing, until female ornithologists proved otherwise. Jackson notes “I remember a bird I sang a duet with a bird when I was a child, the two of us taking turns to sing the song I thought I had taught it. Years later, in another city, I heard it again, sung by a grey warbler.” Memory is prime in this last section of the book and “every body is a memory palace”. Hence there are short anecdotes of childhood memories.

As I often do, I have given you a very simplified account of Terrier, Worrier, for, as is always the case, when one is dealing with many poems one cannot examine all of them. As for the nature of this book, I will leave it to you to determine if it is poetry as it is generally understood to be; or if it is a series of interesting statements and speculation, perhaps more like a thesis. Either way, it has many provocative and interesting things to say.

     

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            I have to admit that I took a long time warming to what  Matariki Bennett was up to in “e  ko, no hea koe”. It is throughout written in the first person, which means that it is confessional and presumably based on the poet’s own experience. The early sections are focused on her life in Auckland, and her voice is that of a teenager’s patois. The poem “baked by denny’s” suggests the uncertainty of an adolescent “dreaming of a sun glowing out of my skin… I am sixteen blazing in god’s light” but with all this she is scared: “i’m scared too / i feel like my silence might be the best part of me” which becomes almost a catch phrase for much of the early part of the collection. In the poem “after siegfried, for manaia” she is driving through West Auckland, vaping, telling a girl of her headache and being soothed by her songs.  In the midst of this, one can’t help seeing much of what is said is drug-fuelled with admiration for hard rock performances. After a night and a lot of smoking there is an event where “after photosynthesis / we give him the aux / he plays me and your mama / and it becomes a feeling / space junk / red eyed in the stratosphere / we wait for the sun.” There is much about aching while coming up after a hard night. And “We’re too young to worry about forgetting / but forgetting seems to be the only thing we’re good at… it’s time to f… up”. And “we’re f…ed up in myers park sculling wine we can’t pronounce”.

Yet the same poem claims it is “an ode to the panthers to nga tamatoa to the land march to bastion point”. This is a turning point after the nihilistic ideas and pointless games for teenagers on the loose in a big city. For the first time, it’s made clear what is bugging her. She has not yet connected with the protests and the movements that should have enhanced the status of the Maori people. She says “we’ve forgotten the language of the sky under the choke of the cities lights  /  sometimes we forget where we’re from”. Yes, there are other moments when she depicts herself hanging about Queen Street at night and living in Avondale. But she finally remembers her grandmother and the lore she taught. At last in the poem “Bootleg Euphoria” she decides to leave Auckland and lists all the things she knew there that almost destroyed her. She wants dearly to re-connect with Maori culture and the Maori language. “koro” is one of the clearest poems, lamenting the loss of the Maori language by her parents’ generation. Finally one of her longest poems “Kareao” curses colonists at length. She has found a positive cause. It is only towards the end of the collection in standard speech and with some Maori proverbs and statements. She now knows who she fully is.

I am not suggesting that this is great poetry, but it is firm in its production and shows a real fervour for a worthwhile cause. That has to be admired. For the record, this collection includes images of eight paintings by Mahina Bennett and one by Jane Holland.