Something New

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

 

“EVERY NOW AND THEN I HAVE ANOTHER CHILD” by Diane Brown (Otago University Press,  $NZ29:95); “THE SONG OF GLOBULE” by Stephen Oliver (Greywacke Press, no price given); “NO TRAVELLER RETURNS – the selected poems of RUTH FRANCE”, edited with an introduction by Robert McLean (Cold Hub Press, $NZ27:50)

            As I have done so often before, I begin with an obvious apology. Apart from all being collections of poetry, the three books I am considering on this post have very little in common. Each has a different focus, a different style and a different purpose – and they are gathered together here only because I have recently read them.

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Rimbaud was certainly onto something when he said “Je est un autre”. As soon as pen meets paper or finger reaches keyboard, a poet is creating a fiction even if writing in the first-person. Any sort of autobiography is selective, smooths down (or jazzes up) reality, and ignores things that don’t fit the writer’s design. Yet at the same time, all poets reveal something of themselves in the poems they write.

These are all commonplace truisms. But I am trying to suggest delicately how difficult it is to review poetry written, confessional-style, in the first-person. Back in October 2015, I reviewed on this blog Diane Brown’s Taking My Mother to the Opera, her poetic account of her childhood and her relationship with her parents as they grew old, written in the first-person. Every now and then I have another child is also confessional, first-person and about the narrator’s life. But here is the problem. Ignoring the clearly surreal and dreamlike sections of this collection, much of the narrator’s CV matches publicly-known details of the poet Diane Brown’s life. So are we to read Every now and then I have another child as straight autobiography, and then busy ourselves psychoanalysing it and drawing conclusions about the poet’s state of mind? Or are we to see it more as a kind of fantasia, mixing autobiographical details with what is consciously fiction?

In this review, I’ll take the latter option and refer to the narrator as Joanna, the name she is given in Every now and then I have another child. This collection is the length of a short novel (approximately 150 pages), although its nine long sections do not make a sequential narrative. The tale often curls back upon itself, and there are spaces for rumination and reflection. But the essential situation is clear enough.

Joanna has two adult sons, but “every now and then”, although she is well past menopause, she wonders what it would be like to have a daughter. The poem “After the Facts” (p.95) begins: “In this dream I am plotting a child, planting the seed / in my lover’s mind, then remember I can’t recall the date / I last bled, five years ago at least. My stomach is swollen / but without craving or nausea. Menopause, not pregnancy…” In fact she imagines giving birth to and nursing and carrying a daughter, who invades her dreams. But there are many things in her past that trouble her. Her mother deserted her when she was very young, so she also wonders what it would be like to have a mother. Joanna feels deeply the lack of a mother’s support and approval, noting she is “Secretly praying every book of mine, every child might / flush her out to the surface. Imagining her appearing / at the hospital or my book launch, swanning in, all dolled up, / the same age as when she left, exclaiming, ‘My daughter, / I’m so proud of you.’ ” (“Ways of processing” p.140). And Joanna never had a sister, lamenting in  “Selected Fragments” (p.88): “I wanted a sister, but my mother said / I was her lovely only”. No daughter, no mother, no sister – Joanna, now of mature age, suffers from a lack of female intimacy in her moulding as a person. She has also been through a divorce and there is an ex-lover to think about.

Much of this is in the key of regret, lost opportunities and “if only…” and “it might have been…”. But then there is the surreal element. Early in the piece, a Doppelganger called Anna begins to butt into Joanna’s life. Is she Joanna’s imagined sister? Or (as she sometimes appears) is she a vision of what Joanna’s life would have been had she continued with the apparently disorderly life she led whan she was a young adult? She could be the part of Joanna that wants to shout out tactless things at a funeral or behave like a spoilt child. The Doppelganger Anna is Joanna with the “Jo” removed, as is noted at one point; so Anna takes over parts of the narrative to criticise or ridicule things Joanna says and thinks. Sometimes she is bad conscience, and sometimes she is evil angel. Late in the piece, one of Joanna’s writing students is apparently murdered. Was this done by the evil Anna? (And if so, isn’t she in fact the dark side of Joanna herself?) A genial young cop called Dave comes to quiz Joanna about it.

It is clear that the title Every now and then I have another child refers to the whole process of writing fiction and imagining characters. The non-existent baby daughter sometimes soliloquises. So does the imagined Anna. So does the picture of a boy whom Joanna sees on a wall – an alternative version of Joanna’s sons, perhaps. So does Detective Dave. Each is the poet’s “child” after all. The narrative arc is not random. There is a sort of cathartic ending and things that allow Joanna’s spirit to settle a bit (or, as the current cliché puts it, “reach closure”) but this ending is for the reader to discover and not for me to reveal.

As you will have noted, Joanna (like Diane Brown) runs a writing class and this brings many comments both on the writing process itself and on her attitudes towards her students – not always complimentary. In fact, she can be quite satirical about writing classes and hip academe and its attitudes. In “Maintaining the Mask”, she recalls being a panelist at a literary event, and describes the other panelists as “Younger, well published with permanent jobs in universities / … I surmise I’m the token speaker outside their circle. / ‘I taught here’, I say to the audience, ‘night school, when anyone / could attend, before creative writing classes became an industry / and kudos for institutions. / A long line of students anxious for a piece of paper to hang / on the wall to prove they can write. And everyone denying / anything therapeutic about it.’ ” (p.16)

Of course it’s hard not to equate these lines with Diane Brown’s own frank views of academic hauteur… but then again, there’s that danger of confusing the narrator with the poet. Maybe Joanna is, in toto, another of the poet’s “children”.

So how do I sum up this very capacious poetic excursion? Parts of it are funny intentionally. Parts are rather raw and unhappy. Despite the final catharsis, there is much unresolved regret here. I did not enjoy all of it, because I felt many of the reflections repeated themselves. But I did keep reading – and that is the effect of a good book, isn’t it?

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A pity the Monty Python people turned the words “and now for something

completely different” into a comic catch-phrase, because I really would like to use those words now. Stephen Oliver’s The Song of Globule is a very different sort of poetry from the colloquial-confessional of Diane Brown. Stephen Oliver is a prolific poet (this is his twenty-first collection) who bills himself as “Australasian” – New Zealand-born, but resident in Australia for twenty years and now back in New Zealand. I first became aware of his work when I reviewed his collection Intercolonial, specifically about “Australasian” connections, in Poetry New Zealand back in 2014. More recently, there was his collection Luxembourg (reviewed on this blog), which I nominated as one of the year’s best collections of poetry in my “Poetry Picks” round-up for 2018 in the now defunct New Zealand Listener. Stephen Oliver can write colloquially, but he brings to his work a wide knowledge of classical and canonical literature and a respect for traditional poetic forms. Let us say that he is sometimes downright erudite.

The Song of Globule comprises 80 sonnets – real sonnets in full 14-line form, all with rhyme-schemes ( well, sort of – the rhyme schemes can be erratic), and nearly all of them following the Shakespearean rather than the Petrarchan structure, and so ending with a rhyming couplet. Mind you, many of the concluding couplets are internal rhymes or para-rhymes, and a few sonnets (Numbers 37 and 47, for example) do not have a concluding rhyme at all, unless you can see a way that “chick” rhymes with “hip”; or “soothsayers” with “bartenders”.

An end-note (also printed in the blurb) tells us that these 80 sonnets “pursue the oneiric preoccupations of a young female protagonist in Sydney who, if not suffering from multiple personality disorder, is certainly a fantasist”. So they present a floating consciousness in a sort of dream state. We soon work out that the young woman in question comes from a comfortable middle-class background (father a chartered accountant on Sydney’s fashionable North Shore), but that she longs for grunge, freedom, in a word, bohemia; and she goes roving in the wilds of Sydney seeking her thrills and kicks. “Her face, friendly as – in the mirror’s clutch, / hungered for a grip on life, love and lies. / Just one more girl in search of some hero.”(Sonnet 6, p.8). But, from the beginning of her ramblings, she knows that there can be huge disappointments. “Life doesn’t give a rat’s arse how we feel. / We nose-balance our hopes much like a seal; / dreams may be free but some turn out crappy. / So Globule learnt that life is a mixed dish.” (Sonnet 2, p.4). This hardens her shell and leads her to a dangerous insouciance: “If life proved to be nothing but a farce, / on balance – she didn’t give a rat’s arse.” (Sonnet 28, p.30).

To jump to assessment, some of these sonnets are gems. See Stephen Oliver’s skill by comparing Sonnets 15 and 16 (pp.17 and 18) where two different moods are evoked by the same stimulae. In Sonnet 15, Globule is bored by the sight of a kiddies’ playground; then in Sonnet 16 we get the joy children feel there: “Each hour is a newly dug treasure hoard / that rolls on like an endless ball of string.” Sonnet 24 (p.26) gives an effectively creepy sense of the young woman’s friendless solitude, while Sonnet 30 (p.32) is a psychologically accurate rendering of the way people often save their public dignity, and sense of self-worth, by pretending that they have not been hurt by others (in this case, the young woman knows she has been discarded by lovers). As for Sonnet 50 (p.52), it shadows perfectly the protagonist’s youthful lack of care: “Globule resided in the here and now, / a handful of dreams, a few basic skills; / she saw herself living inside a cave. / The sun sank on the hillock of her hip.”

There is, however, one major obstacle that might come between the reader and the text. The Song of Globule is so specifically about Sydney, that to appreciate it fully one would have to know Sydney well. Many of the copious end-notes tell us about Sydney, its arcania, the locations which some sonnets describe and (often) the poet’s regret that recent property development has destroyed much of Sydney’s old bohemia. But all this explanation simply reminded me how much I, as a non-Sydney-sider, do not know that metropolis.

Stephen Oliver strains the consciousness of his bohemian wandering young woman by, late in the day, having sonnets about women who represent martyrdom (Sophie Scholl) or who combine fervent religious belief with sensuality (Mary Magdalene, Thecla). Then, for 15 sonnets (Sonnets 64 to 78), he gives his rendering and re-phrasing of Ovid’s Heroides (but in a metre that Ovid would never have known). In these sonnets, women from Greek legend address, and rebuke, men from Greek legend. Penelope regrets how long it is taking Odysseus to get home, and wonders if he has taken up with some floozie; Phaedra still hungers for the erotic love of her stepson Hippolytus; Ariadne rebukes Theseus for abandoning her after she has shown him how to get through the labyrinth; and of course Medea gives a piece of her mind to Jason etc. etc. You get the message here – men can be deceiving bastards who leave women in the lurch.  With one of these vignettes I would, however, take issue. In Sonnet 70 (p.72) “Dido to Aeneas”, the spurned queen of Carthage calls out the self-righteous Trojan wanderer who has sailed away. But her billingsgate is redundant. Read the Aeneid, Book 6, and you discover that the silence of Dido’s ghost, when Aeneas encounters her in the underworld, says more than any rant could. When Dido’s ghost turns wordlessly away from Aeneas, you already have possibly the greatest dismissal of a faithless lover in all literature. Rant is redundant.

I do note that the last two sonnets of The Song of Globule bump us back into the more mundane world of a lost soul in Sydney; and I do understand that these classical tales of abandonment could relate to Globule’s desolation. But I do think the 15 Heroides sonnets are not quite in synch with the rest of the text, and may have been conceived by the poet separately from The Song of Globule.  (Indeed Sonnets 64 to 78 had earlier been published on their own). Even so, I enjoyed Oliver’s concatenation of the demotic, the surreal and the classical, and I enjoyed The Song of Globule for all its skill and the intellectual games it plays.

Personal, petty footnote: The blurb of The Song of Globule features comments from three people endorsing Stephen Oliver’s work. One is a gentleman who now bills himself as “Nicholas Reid of Canberra” to distinguish himself from me. I’ve mentioned this confusion between the two of us before when, seven years ago, I posted on this blog Who is this Ghost who Walks Beside Me? However, I categorically refuse to now start billing myself as “Nicholas Reid of Auckland”. I had the name first, dammit.

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In his introduction to No Traveller Returns – the selected poems of Ruth France, the poet and editor Robert McLean really throws down the gauntlet. He points out that Monte Holcroft once referred to Ruth France (1913-1968) as “among the finest minds of her generation”. But, says McLean, it would be hard to claim that many of our current New Zealand poets have fine minds. Indeed those who “read deeply of contemporary essayists, philosophers, and historians eschew poetry because there seems to them no exercise of intellect in it.” What McLean champions is the type of poetry that he himself and only a handful of his peers now write – poetry which deals directly with philosophical concepts, makes use of traditional forms of structure and metre, draws on a real knowledge of canonical literature and the Classics, assumes that the readership consists of informed adults, and is not merely loose, confessional observations.

McLean sees these strengths in the poetry of Ruth France who, dead now for over half a century, certainly belongs to Hamlet’s “undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns”.  France wrote two well-received, but now largely forgotten, novels; and she produced two collections of poetry, Unwilling Pilgrim (1955) and The Halting Place (1961), in both cases using the pseudonym “Paul Henderson”. A third collection, No Traveller Returns, was left in manuscript at the time of her death. On the whole, she has been overlooked by anthologists, including what McLean calls “a recent book about New Zealand women poets”.  No Traveller Returns – the selected poems of Ruth France contains selections from all three of her collections, with the poems from the third collection No Traveller Returns being published here for the first time. McLean and Cold Hub Press are making an admirable effort to restore to the canon work by poets that has been neglected or overlooked (including the hitherto uncollected poems of R.A.K.Mason). Thus this welcome selection.

Ruth France’s poetry deals with the physical world, with South Island or Wellington landscapes and seascapes apprehended and described in detail. But the physical details of nature are nearly always the occasion for abstract thought. One of her best poems, “After Flood”, ceases to be about the described flood itself and becomes a reflection on human fallibility and the tendency to take for granted our fragile, constructed circumstances. “The Young Legend” may apparently celebrate early seafarers around our coasts, but really asks how we can attach inherited European images and mythology to New Zealand (or to put it biblically, “how can we sing our songs in a strange land”?). “Mouth of the Waimakariri” does convey awe at the river’s collision with the sea, but the situation is rationalised as philosophy where “Wind / Is cold reason, parting grass, re-sifting sand, / Plunging trees through the sky, breaking the sun / Till light and matter are fragments, and reason / Cries which is the one truth?” In effect, the objective scene before the poet becomes a symbol of the workings of the human mind.

Ruth France looks at floods, clouds, New Year bonfies, or the mouth of a great river, but none of these is a Ding-an-Sich. Each is a cue to some process of thought. Without exception, all of France’s poems require close reading and re-reading.

What I detect in France’s work is a mind not fully at ease with the physical world. She rationally registers nature’s awe and beauty, but she does not submit to it emotionally. All the while, there is the ever-questioning mind of the rationalist (in the Platonic and Cartesian sense), which says that the senses may be cheats and that each emprical observation is subjective and probably unreliable (see the poems “Object Lesson” and “Road Map”).  Empiricist she is not, for all her powers of observation. Yet there are times when the rational mind is not enough, and she aches for a more emotional approach (see especially the poem “How Shall I”). The repeated theme of the toll of time does make much that she writes pessimistic. All must end. Yet in longer, more discursive poems such as “New Year Bonfire”, “Ghost Ships” and “The New Journey”, there are sparks of hope.

Keen eyes might notice that the only poems I have cited so far come from France’s first collection Unwilling Pilgrim. But the traits I detect therein are consistent with her later work. From her second collection The Halting Place comes a strong statement of her philosophical rationalism in “I Think of Those” where “The mind in its lonely prison forfeits today / As well as its yesterdays…” We are all imprisoned in our minds. A halcyon scene of summer collapses into the threat of winter in the collection’s title poem “The Halting Place”. In the hitherto unpublished No Traveller Returns, the title poem tells us that we cannot revisit the past any more than we can step into the same river twice. Even more severely, “The Letter” seems to despair of the possibility of real communication between people. Given that she sees the mind’s interaction with the physical world as the only ontological (and epistemological) reality, Ruth France has great difficulty dealing with death. Her attempts to make something uplifting find her, willy-nilly, stumbling into religious imagery. “When All the Flames” collapses into incoherence when she tries to wed Biblical imagery with a death-ending view of evolution and a critique of masculinity. “On the Death of a Young Girl” denies, but still strains after, an idea of immortality.

I hope I am not overstating this case. In emphasising that Ruth France is an epistemological rationalist, that she feels a great barrier between herself and the physical world, and that she is often pessimisitic, I am not saying that these are the only keys in which she plays. Nor am I suggesting that her perspective is one I dismiss. It often makes for exemplary poetry. I note that in her second collection The Halting Place, there is more sense of other people rather than just her isolated ego. In “Always, on Waking”, her boat-building husband is seen as being part of her protection against the outer storm. The hitherto unpublished “While Trying to Study Phonetics on a Spring Morning” crosses into the Baudelairian country of “Correspondances” with its empirical construct that all the senses relate to, and feed upon, one another. And lest any reader imagines that France is a forbidding stylist with contorted ratiocination, I would point out the beautiful, straightforward clarity of “Elegy”, a long, unadorned account of a boy’s death by drowning; and the wonderful “Three Bulls”, noted by McLean in his introduction, where a simple childhood memory moves seamlessly into the idea of the power of mythology.

McLean has not ‘talked up” France’s work in his introduction, however. She really is a poet who deserves to be rediscovered.

Something New

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

 

“TENDER MACHINES” by Emma Neale (Otago University Press, $NZ25); “OCEAN AND STONE” by Dinah Hawken (Victoria University Press, $NZ35); “CARDS ON THE TABLE” by Jeremy Roberts (Interactive Press, $NZ25); “TAKING MY MOTHER TO THE OPERA” by Diane Brown (Otago University Press, $NZ29:95).

This week, I am looking at four completely different volumes of poetry.

They were written by four completely different poets with completely different preoccupations and styles.

Therefore, I am pledged not to make strained comparisons between them. All they have in common is that they write poetry.

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Emma Neale’s Tender Machines takes its title from its two epigraphs – William Carlos Williams’ statement that a poem is “a machine made of words”, and Don Paterson’s definition of a poem as “a little machine for remembering itself”.

The ironically-titled first section, “Bad Housekeeping”, presents a wonderful paradox. There is the clear context of a loving domestic situation – the poet as mother to a young son – and there is the ferocity of the imagery. That poems deal with a domestic scene can often arouse the suspicion that they will be gentle to the point of mental softness. Such is not the case here. Emma Neale begins courageously with a poem (“Origins”) speculating on her own procreation, and on the chaotic way life begins where the human heart could be like “spit rubbed in mud” and the mind “a junk room / of broom handles and wheel-less prams, / must-stink chair nobody will sit in, / little black fly heads / sprinkled in a corner web / ear bones of vanished mice, / single bits of faded jigsaws, / carpet littered with broken envelopes / addressees illegible…”

            One strand of imagery introduced in this poem points to the fragility of life itself. The “ear bones of vanished mice” lead to other poems about these small and vulnerable animals. In the later poem “PokPo”, Neale replays a childhood sense of guilt at almost killing a pet mouse when she played with it too roughly. In the poem “Bad Housekeeping”, she rescues a hunted mouse from the attentions of a cat, overcome with a sense of fellow-feeling when “the glittering of her minikin eyes / says terror plunges through her / in two black pins / and tells me, mute but clear, / that once upon seventy-five million years ago / we sprang (crept and hid) from one lost, common ancestor…”

            Much more than mice, however, it is the child who preoccupies the poet-mother. The first section of Tender Machines dwells most on that tension between strong love and frustration, when the young child also throws tantrums, is too demanding, has an active imagination that won’t be reasoned with – in other words, is an ordinary young child.

The child’s imagination dominates the prose poem “Hunter” (are those waves the growl of a bear coming to get me?) and “Zac and the Beanstalk” (child’s play with implicit magic). The child’s inquisitiveness fills the poem “The Piano’s Appointment”, where the examination of an old piano turns into the child’s questions on how life was in his forbears’ times. The mother is aware that she is bringing up a young male (“Man Up”). But, most poignantly, there is that clash between the mother’s love and the child’s aggression. “Towards a Theory of Aggression in Early Childhood Development” suggests that “Perhaps for the toddler / other people don’t quite exist yet” and asks “This hurled block, this swift kick, this fist swipe, / do they colour us, too, hot and red and beaded with water, / is love the tough, tensile wire desire insists / along all the blood’s jumbled frequencies?” The poem “The Lost Letters” is one that could lead readers to either laughter or tears (like a child’s paddies), with Neale imagining what mothers really want to write to tantrum-throwing children, because “Even love wears thin”. The section ends with the title poem “Tender Machines” where the child himself become as machine as he undergoes and operation and sinks into unconsciousness under an anaesthetist’s needle.

When we awake in the volume’s second section, “Auto Correct” we are in different poetic territory. “Auto Correct” – the punning title suggests the poet is following a course of self-correction, which gradually becomes reason tempering passion. If the poems of the first section deal most with presence – the presence of the child or of the life that is being nurtured – the poems at the beginning of the second section cluster around absence. The poet alone. The poet reflecting on self and on love that has gone, usually in sylvan or “natural” settings. In this, the sense of loss has to be set against responsibility, one’s dignity and the realization that what is lost is usually irrecoverable. A later poem,  “Over” dives into seeing a lost love, and sexual experience, from a male’s point of view.

But this mood is not where the volume’s second section ends. A clutch of poems look (lightly, ironically, playfully, affectionately, with fellow feeling) at the life in the streets – the life beyond the closed self. Thus “Slice of Life”. Thus Queen’s Drive, Town Belt”. Thus the oddly blokey “John Smith, Brother of Tim”. In “Suburban Story”, there is a deeply ironical account of a misunderstanding over what a woman was saying, leading to a consideration of the whole phenomenon of loss, including losing a sense of purpose. But within this is the phrase  “sense of purpose / carries something of the feeling of being part / of the great ongoing human symphony”. And this really defines when this collection of poems is going. Out of the confined self and into wider human interaction. Regrettably, in the age in which we live, some of that interaction is via intrusive technology. So to a clutch of poems about life on-line – “Feeling Only Sort of Sorry for the Robots”, “Cyber Bullying”, “The New Narcissicism” and naturally “Auto Correct” itself.

The self and the community interact. The mother raising the child is part of the community. Her concerns are part of the concerns of the community. Which is where “the personal is political”, and that is the main theme of the final section, “These Poems Want”. The poet has much to say about ecology. The poet has something to say about sexism. The poet has things to say about poetry, too. Putting it this ham-fisted way, I make it sound as if Emma Neale succumbs to sloganeering. Not at all. As in the rest of this collection, the poems of the third section are filled with acute observation, sharp and memorable imagery and various levels of irony. The poem “How to Install a Glass Ceiling” is a whiplash against type of assumptions made about “domestic” poetry to which I referred early in this notice. And the final poem,

“Polemic”, lifts up its hands to everything a poem should, could, hopes to and never will be. The title tells you that some irony lurks here, too.

            You will note that I have said virtually nothing about Emma Neale’s skill with technique, virtuosity in style, creation of prose poems and other matters upon which I should have commented. That’s because I was too busy enjoying the poems, nodding along at what they were saying, occasionally (but only occasionally) feeling rebuked as a male, and being gob-smacked by their imagery.

A very, very powerful collection.

Silly footnote: The poem I felt most keenly was one I couldn’t fit into the “pattern” of this collection – the poem about sleep-deprivation, “Sleep-Talking”. As a chronic and unwilling insomniac, I moaned in recognition at the line “hell, can’t you leave it alone, switch off this inner racket? If only you could bloody sleep.”

            You can say that again.

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If Emma Neale thrives on generous ferocity and close observation, Dinah Hawken is more the calm, rationalist philosopher. In Ocean and Stone her poems are cool, lean, pared-back, sometimes almost gnomic.

The volume’s epigraph reads “We have to live within / our limits: the knowledge / of limits and how to live within them is / the most graceful and comely knowledge / that we have.”

The very first poem sets the mood for much that follows. “The lake, the bloke and the bike” is a first-person confessional in which a woman attempts to reflect on the big things in life – including permanence and impermanence – as she gazes at Lake Rotoiti from the shore. This might sound a peculiarly Wordsworthian set-up…. except that the lake is racked with the sound of a bloke on his noisy hydroplane. Natural perfection is transient. The world changes. Technology intrudes. Reflection has to end up engaging with a flawed world.

And thus it is in many of Dinah Hawken’s poems.

An affectionate cycle of poems about a young grandchild moves into a couple of poems about young people on the cusp of adulthood. The poem “Another, older boy called Jack” has a young man leaving a farm and “the head of the boy is down / in its workings. He has heard no birds. / He has seen no trees. All he hears / is unsteady talk, bleak bravado.” The transition into adulthood is neither smooth nor necessarily a maturing process. Following this, the poet slips into Sumerian mythology with a pair of poems presenting, in magical form, the power that is given to young women as they enter into life, and how it is challenged. Late in the volume, there are poems of old age and glimpses of a hospital for the elderly, in the poem “If you want me I’ll be down below”, the recognition that “I am at the mercy of salt, drought, / snails, leaf-curl and wind. I am at the mercy / of ignorance, sloth, limited years, / an aging body and hope beyond belief.”

From babyhood to boy- and girl-hood to adolescence to old age, the poems so far point in the direction of a linear sense of life and time.

Counterpointing this, however, is the mythic sense of an “eternal return”, of time as circular and endlessly repeating the same pattern. And this was, after all, how time was understood in much of the ancient world (including the Sumerian bit of it), where the gods played endlessly the same games.

Hawken’s cycle of poems “The Uprising” deals with the vast ocean that surrounds New Zealand, rising menacingly. Beginning lyrically, the poems in this cycle then hit readers with a daunting contrast. First “With no motive and no name, the whole / indivisible ocean fits over the earth like a blessing: / it slips around, between and over / the territories we have made….” But then “It’s hard to have a mind for its envelopment / and treachery. Its weight, sheen, depth. / And its frank, cold-blooded flow.” The sea is becoming a menace – and it is hard not to think that Dinah Hawken is referencing one of the threats posed by global warming. Later in the volume, the concept of a global inundation is echoed in a poetic version of the Sumerian legend of the universal flood (the non-Jewish precursor to the story of Noah’s flood). The sense of “eternal return” appears.

The sequence “page.stone.leaf” is often minimalist in style (complementing the drawings by John Edgar that go with it), spare and unadorned by adjectives, some poems being presented as lists. They put together brief observations on stones and leaves as items connecting us with nature but used by us in papermaking over the centuries – a repeated, cyclical process.

And finally, rounding off this theme, there is the long poem “Tidal” (originally written as a response to artworks by Colin McCahon), where all the songs sung by the sea turn out to be one breathing since the world began.

Where do we end in the tension of linear and cyclical views of time? Knowing, I suppose, that while the individual life moves on, it is within the context of the greater pattern. (And why, in my head, do I hear an echo of Longfellow’s “the tide rises; the tide falls”?)

I have dealt with this volume in terms of cold rationality. That was how I read it. For all the warmth of the grandmotherly poems, that was the way I was invited to read it.

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I cannot pretend to be coldly intellectual about Jeremy Roberts’ collection Cards on the Table, because I have to make a confession – some years younger than me, Roberts is a personal friend. I’ve long admired the way he organises pub poetry readings in Auckland’s Ponsonby, and helps to promote even poets who do not see things the way he does.

Roberts is an adept performance poet. He is happiest with poems that can be declaimed publicly. After reading this collection in page-proof, the poet Siobhan Harvey and I each (separately) agreed to contribute blurbs to appear on the back cover of this ample (145-page) collection.

Below is what I had to say:

“Jeremy Roberts is a performance poet, a quick-change artist with words, a confessionalist not afraid to let it be personal, a guy who grabs the present moment and makes it sing. In the words of one of his best, he’s ‘permanently temporary’. He knows ‘the Zen of the immediate moment’. Are you tempted to think he’s just a freak and a letter-day Beat? Wrong! The surface is the surface, cosmopolitan, infused with Asian experience and Rimbaud and American pop culture and echoes of mean urban streets. But scratch into these free-form effusions and you find and strong and fine outrage, a protest against a world in which ‘the celebration of the buck is alive everywhere’. Roberts is accessible. He’s a rebuke to academic poetry which turns in on itself and never looks outside its window. He’s fun and he’s a damned good read.”

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Diane Brown’s Taking My Mother to the Opera is autobiography conceived as poetry.

Across 110 pages of blank verse, organised throughout in three-line stanzas, Diane Brown tells the story of her relationship with her parents. This narrative is divided into 18 sections, which I find it hard not to call chapters.  The first six chapters deal with the poet’s childhood, early upbringing and adolescence, up to the point where she first married, young and apparently against her parents’ wishes. The last twelve chapters leap a number of decades (one section is headed “Leaping into the Twenty-First Century”) and tell of her relationship with her parents when they are old and infirm and succumbing to dementia or debilitating physical ailments. Both parents lived into their 90s. The collection ends with memorial rites. By design, then, this is very selective autobiography, deleting material about the poet’s own adult life and relationships so that she can concentrate on her chosen theme of how her parents shaped her and how, bit by bit, she came to judge them differently and even, perhaps, to forgive them.

Recently I had the great pleasure of reading Martin Edmond’s (prose) autobiography of his youth The Dreaming Land, and one of the things I found most attractive about it was the way Edmond’s sharp eye for specific detail conjured up the New Zealand that I remembered from being a small child in the 1950s and an adolescent in the 1960s. There are passages of Diane Brown’s Taking My Mother to the Opera that offer me the same pleasure, especially as Brown’s childhood was spent, as mine was, in Auckland.

Some of the childhood experiences she reconstructs are universal ones, like the time when she was a little girl and her mother failed to keep a rendezvous, sending her into a panic of thinking “Maybe I dreamed her up, / will have to live alone now / in the darkening woods  / like all bad children” (from the section “Then We Came Along”). What small child doesn’t experience this sort of separation anxiety at some time? There is also life in state-house suburbia out in the West of Auckland and a memory of being allowed to walk across the Auckland Harbour Bridge on the day it opened and such iconic (and period) versions of a father’s indulgence as the following: “He takes Clive and me up the road / for the 8 O’Clock paper and our Saturday / treat, a box of Black Knight liquorice” (from the section “Big Talk”).

Every child has a memory of weird or horrific things intruding, even into the safest and most orderly lives. In Brown’s case, there was the woman’s body found in a nearby creek, and a near-brush with a teacher who may have been a paedophile. There are also adult reflections on what the domestic norm of the country must have been in the 1950s. Brown thinks of her ex-serviceman father and her mother, and she thinks of all the wives who must have had to show considerable forbearance with husbands who had somehow been marked by the war: “All around the country, wives holding / their tongues, soft hands and voices / maintaining a fragile layer of peace.” (from the section “You Can’t Eat Poems”)

What the whole collection suggests is that the poet felt closer to her father than to her mother – he being more flamboyant and perhaps more permissive and something of a frustrated poet in his own right. Her mother comes across as too possessive; a bit puritanical; disliking and refusing to read the type of things the poet writes and gets published; and (in old age) resentful of change and modern cookery. Yet there is the gradual discovery that the mother was shaped by her own very hard childhood. The clearest shock of forgiveness happens when the poet visits her ailing mother in hospital and at first walks right past her, not recognising “an old woman, / her head pressed into the pillow, / silvery-grey curls grown limp.”(from the section “On the Lookout”). There will always come a time when adult children realise how fragile and small their parents have become. If there is a particularly vivid image in this collection, it’s the one Brown deploys to convey her sense of shock and sadness when he father lost the ability to speak clearly. He babbled incoherently, with only one or two recognisable words  “like coming across / New Zealand mentioned in a foreign / newspaper when you’re homesick.” (from the section “Dad’s New Home”)

I hope I’ve made it clear that I enjoyed much of Taking My Mother to the Opera as recall to a past age, reconstruction of a domestic situation and personal confession. There is an aspect that sometimes niggled with me, however. Sometimes the blank verse gets all too blank. For example, in the following two extracts (out of many I could quote) I have removed the dividers that would tell you where the lines begin and end. We are clearly left with prose.

Thus: “Back home, as a family man, he struggled to be easy with workmates who wanted to talk rugby and racing over smoko, not art or poetry or anything that might unleash the demons he carried.” (from the section “Leaping into the Twenty-First Century”)

And thus: “We are all in the room with Dad as the doctor shows us two large white spots on the scan: bleeding on opposite sides of his brain.” (from the section “Listening to My Father Read”)

What I am saying is that, expansive though it is, and much as it often hits apt imagery, much of this volume is very prose-y. Or Prosaic. It tells us things as straightforwardly, sans imagery or distinctive rhythm, as a prose confession would.

Otago University Press have awarded Taking My Mother to the Opera a very handsome piece of book production. It is a generous and study hardback with an inbuilt ribbon bookmark. Feels classy.