Something New

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

“BONFIRES ON THE ICE” by Harry Ricketts ( Te Herenga Waka University Press, $NZ25);  “GIVING BIRTH TO MY FATHER” by Tusiata Avia (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $30.00)“DANCING HEART” by Jan Kemp (published by Tranzlit, Germany); “IF WE KNEW HOW TO WE WOULD” by Emma Barnes (Auckland University Press, $NZ 24.99)  

 

To refer to Harry Ricketts as a seasoned poet is an understatement. So far he has produced eleven collections of poetry plus a book of “Selected Poems”. Regrettably, I have reviewed on this blog-site only a handful of his poetic works, and these reviews were very brief -  his “Just Then”  was, more than anything, jocular and seeded with literary criticism .          “Winter Eyes” , which I saw as showing how older age was coming on but presented by a very urbane wit. And quite apart from his poetry there are the many biographies and other academic works he has published.

Ricketts’s latest work, Bonfires on the Ice, also deals with ageing, with literary references and with wit – very much Ricketts’s style. The title poem “Bonfires on the Ice” is a potpourri of well-known phrases written by earlier poets. The title “Bonfires on the Ice” comes from Rudyard Kipling – not surprising as Ricketts wrote a biography of Kipling.

Unlike many poets, Ricketts presents his poems clearly in different categories. The first section deals with becoming old, loss of friends and dying itself.  Thus he remembers eccentric people in “Aro St. Again”. “Remembering Lauris” appears to be sort of elegy for Lauris Edmond. “Card for Brian” is about an old friend. “He was…” tells us of his great-great uncle who appears to have been a rapscallion. Personally, I am not up enough with 1970s punk music, so I am not sure if Ricketts is for real or has his tongue in cheek when he writes an obituary for “Johnny and the Spasmodics”. “Tangle” moves more soberly into the inevitably of loss. Most important, though, are the last three poems in this section. “Pink Blanket”, ‘Last Day” and “Irregular Villanelle for My Mother”. They are all about the loss of his mother.

The second section, “Down There on a Visit”, is presented in seven pages of couplets. It is a very engaging personal account of visiting the south part of the South Island. I admit to greatly enjoying it, partly because he covers territory which I visited years ago and again more recently. Call it nostalgia on my part. Note too that Ricketts has not given us picture postcards. Admiring the many things he saw, he also suggests the negative things in his journey.

Okay, age, death and travel -  but it is academe that has occupied much of Ricketts’s life. In “The Lecture 3” he says “I’m counting down the lectures / I’ll never give again” and sees how students reacted – sometime negatively. He refers to another poet, Philip Larkin, in “Another Footnote to Larkin” which reads in full “And it’s not just your mum and dad; / lovers, school too, fuck you up. / This is the deal, and Gray might add: / none drinks from Life’s unpoisoned cup. / But if we hand the misery on / from self to others every day, / there’s this to say (Larkin again) we should also be kind while we may.” “Esprit d’escalier” suggests a sort of feud between Ricketts and another academic over how they had interpreted poetry related to the First World War. “The Literary Life 2” examines standard ideas on how to write – or write about poetry and poets. And, again dealing with the type of thing in which an academic would delight, there is “Famous First Words”, where the opening words of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina are called to order [and might I add that I was always sceptical about the truth of Tolstoy’s opening words.] Ricketts does deal with the matter of climate change, but in an almost jocular way in “Villanelle for Gaia”. More forceful is “The Song Sings the News of the World”, written for an event with music and chorus. It ends with the chants “the Song sings of the broken lands / the Song sings of the poisoned  sea /  the Song sings of heads in the sand /  the Song sings  of you and me /  the Song dreams of a world of green /  the Song imagines what still might be.” Rousing stuff if you were there.

“The Stella Poems”  are 15 poems about a fictious character, Stella, daughter of a German father, she living in Wellington. In a note, Ricketts says that in some ways Stella is his alter ego. Stella’s family came from Germany. They were immigrants. In some ways  Ricketts too was an immigrant, still being essentially English. The development  of this sequence shows young Stella moving eventually into middle age and older age. It is something like an elegy.

I wallowed in the fifth section of this collection when I came to “A Weakness for Westerns”. Ricketts, when young, had a love-hate attitude towards Westerns. Exactly how I reacted to Westerns when I was a kid. Ricketts seals his love-hate by then writing “B Movie”, in which he gives us his cowboy version of Robert Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” [Memo to Ricketts: I’ve long believed that Browning’s poem is at least as brilliant as T.S. Eliot’s “Waste Land” so, please, I hope you weren’t knocking the guy.] “The Chemical Life” – apparently referring to the medicine older people have to take – presents an ageing couple who long for the past when it comes to taste. It begins with the words “Each day we practise a kind of magic, / trying to make today resemble / yesterday…” before the speaker sits down and reads a novel by Anthony Trollope – soothing Victorian literature. “Hope” is a little jingle of which Spike Milligan would have been proud. It reads in full thus “Hope is a grey warbler / that whistles down our street, / the tune is thin and sweet, / but always on repeat.”

Finally, with much esprit, Ricketts presents his “The Green Christmas Game”, which is his version  of the medieval poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, except that his 19 stanzas are all limericks.

I’ll make something clear – I thoroughly enjoyed this collection, though I am aware that the tone is often donnish i.e. I am the type of reader who enjoys reading classic literature and I can therefore pick up [probably smugly] all the references to specific poems that Ricketts makes. But this will not be to taste for everyone. 

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            Five years ago Tusiata Avia launched her The Savage-Coloniser Book, a very angry collection of poetry about the evils of European colonisation in the Pacific. There are some angry poems in Giving Birth to My Father too, but not many. Her tone is now very different. Almost the length of a novel, it is about personal things, family, community, her connections with Samoa and above all the importance of her deceased father, Namulau’ulu Mikaio Avia. She says she has spent eight years preparing this book.

The first section of this collection is labelled  “This is how it was supposed to go”.  Her father’s funeral should have been performed the traditional Samoan way for a high chief, with an orator speaking, all rites observed, and his body laid out for three days in his house. But, as the second section says, “This is how it went”. It is not the seemly funeral she had hoped for. In her grief, she calls out what she sees as the near-hypocrisy of some of the mourners who claim to have admired her father, but who simply want to show their own importance. Distant cousins smother her. In anger she says “I see myself a raging Jesus / upturning their usury table, / driving them all out of the temple of my father’s body.” As for giving birth to her father, she sees him leaving where “I think about you in labour that night / birthing yourself out of this world / your pains coming faster and faster”.

Is she perhaps really overwhelmed by her sorrow? She spends much time thinking of the positives and the achievements of her father. There is a real sense of the life of her father in the years when he was a young man, living and working in the South Island, carefully learning the English language and fishing “in the cold waters of the Waimakariri”, as well as looking after his family and being a great musician playing many instruments. There were some tragedies like the death of “my baby brother with the big eyes”, yet the family holds together.

But throughout Giving Birth to My Father there is a sense of being caught between two different cultures. There is the tension of living in New Zealand and then meeting relations in Samoa who have mores which are different from hers. At one point she brashly declares  “being in Samoa is much the same as being dead, when you come back from Samoa you are often someone else”. In the poem “Samoan was my father’s mother tongue” she gives a reminder of how she had to learn the Samoan language fully only when she was a mature adult  - and when her own daughter was learning the language.

Apart from the odd jab, there is little rancour in Giving Birth to My Father. There is an affirmation of father and family, pride in being Samoan, awareness of living in two cultures and the inevitable tragedy of death. It is a very rewarding collection in many ways. 

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            Jan Kemp’s Dancing Heart is sub-titled “New & Selected Poems 1968- 2024”. The poems were selected and edited by Jack Ross. Kemp now lives in Germany with her German husband, a professor. Many of her new poems refer to the European scene and to classic situations..

The first 32 pages are new poems called “Dancing Heart.” In these, there is an acute awareness of becoming older, and some of her first poems in this selection say so. Thus the poem “Forest burial” wherein “We’ll sink before AI / is rife, we’ll have / known human lives. / And human love”.   And in the poem “Shedding” she tells us it is  “Time soon to start shedding” and giving things away. The poem “Crater” begins “A Week ago / on the crater’s edge / I looked down & saw / endless nothingness / & death”. But there is some hope in older age with poems about love and friendship and in one of her best poems “Anima mundi” she salutes the glories of nature where “I have my own cathedral here - / the nave-like path / leads through sunlit trees / where light filters / as through green, stained- glass windows.” Kemp often tries to work out some sort of belief. Could it be love itself? Or could she be trying to work out a sort of home-made religion? At any rate she sometimes quotes the Bible and wonders about it, as she did in some of her earlier collections where Dante often turned up. But she stoutly rejects any particular religion.

Those are the new poems. The rest, taking up most of this volume, are the eight collections Kemp wrote earlier, going back to the 1970s as selected by Jack Ross. These are “Against the Softness of Women” (1971 – 1974); “Diamonds and Gravel” (1975 – 1978) ; “The Other Hemisphere” (1980 – 1990”); “The Sky’s Enormous Jug” (1968 – 1998) ; “Only One Angel” (1991 – 2001) ; “Dante’s Heaven” (1999 – 2005) ; “Voice Tracks” (2002 – 20120); and “Black Ice & the Love Planet” (2012 – 2019” ). Of course there is every so often concern for the status of women, but she is more interested with intimacy, love, various countries, religion, beliefs  and nature. Most important, she has the great merit of writing clearly and without the pretentious vocabulary that plagues many academics or younger poets.

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            Emma Barnes’s “ If We Knew How We Would” warns us in a sort of preface that “this book deals with themes of suicide, grief and depression” and also says “particularly avoid the middle section if you aren’t up to this content.” This is almost a provoking “dare”. Even so, Barnes does indeed deal with important things – especially intimate things. The focus is on the human body and the human creatures that we are. The poem “I am a circle” says “You can see I am one thousand years old in a body made of all the decisions of ancestors and the cold crush of time.” Determinism is there. Throughout, this collection is made of prose poetry, presented in solid blocks of print. And nearly all of the poetry is told in the first person. Is this collection near to being confessional? Maybe. At any rate, much of Barnes’s life seems to be made bare. In a long collection Part One, “In Our Hands”, appears to chronical the break-up of a couple who knew each other contentiously. One poem named “Chain of connected resentment” suggests fearsome love-hate. Part Two, “If We Knew How To We Would”, deals with deep depression and thoughts of suicide. And Part Three, “The Truth” analyses the body itself, with the poem “One metre” telling us “I am just cells layered like lacquer, like resin, like subcutaneous fat.” While often coming near to despair, Barnes buoys us up with unexpected imagery and fast moving one-liners – bracing, even if the subject is often sombre.