Something New

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

“THINGS OKAY WITH YOU?” by Vincent O’Sullivan (Victoria University of Wellington Press, $NZ25); “THE MERMAID’S PURSE” by Fleur Adcock (Victoria University of Wellington Press, $NZ25); “LETTERS TO YOUNG PEOPLE” by Glenn Colquhoun (OldKing Press, $NZ35)

            I am going to avoid a cliché as I consider Vincent O’Sullivan’s latest collection of poetry Things OK with you? I am NOT going to say that this is an “old man’s poetry”. True, O’Sullivan is now in his 84^th year, but unlike some other poets of his vintage, he does not focus on old age, infirmity and impending death to the exclusion of other things. The volume’s title comes from the last line of the last poem in the book – a defiant decision not to dwell on these things. Naturally, among the 75 poems presented here, there are a few that touch on old age, such as “How to shame a family properly…” and “End Game”, which presents an almost cosy image of a contented old woman, undercut with wry wit. When O’Sullivan deals with graves and worms and epitaphs, he does so with detached irony, as in “Poem with five plots” about imagined visits to the tombs of Proust, William Faulkner, Yeats and Harry Lime.

            In Things OK with you? O’Sullivan is still exploring new concepts. This is his first collection since Being Here (in 2015) and And So It Is (2016) [both reviewed on this blog] and he has clearly thought through a number of philosophical ideas which he has not approached so insistently in earlier works.

            Satire there is. The opening poem “After Lucy Tinakori’s famous party” takes a slap at what might be called “coddle culture” where every kiddie at a party is given a prize regardless of merit or lack of it. “Southern pastoral” scorns the pretentious rich, who imagine they are living the simple country life when they move into mansions some way out of town. And “Lines from way back” must surely be about the unnamed Donald Trump when “Pussy and circuses stake out their claim” and “Maggots exult that nature bred them white”. As satire, “Well so I’ve heard” and “Late Night News” could easily be taken the wrong way by those who read things literally… though the latter could be an admission of fierce forbidden feelings.

            O’Sullivan also has some literary amusement commenting on the illustrious. “Late note to Iris Murdoch” suggests elegantly that philosophy is only one mode of thinking and it is devised in the context of other events and contingencies. “For the Time, Being” deals with paradoxes in the life of the philosopher Martin Heidegger (incidentally, this is the only poem in Things OK with you? which is accompanied by an explanatory note – O’Sullivan usually assumes that his readership will understand his allusions without explanations). “Ms Dickinson, Mr Whitman” deals with fastidious Emily and booming Walt in terms of the convergence of two such different people.

            But after the satire and the literary figures, what are these philosophical ideas that I found in this collection?

            More than in earlier collections, O’Sullivan is interested in the whole field of epistemology – how we know (or think we know), understand (or think we understand), perceive and communicate (or try to). In “What to look sets off”, a simple sensual experience (watching fireflies) triggers a whole train of thoughts about perception. “Thinking the shark tank” depicts the human desire to be free of words. “I gotta use words when I talk to you”? Often we wish it wasn’t so.  In “The Scar” we are reminded that one childhood incident can affect the whole way we interpret the world thereafter. For the record, O’Sullivan is honest and unsentimental when he reconstructs childhood – there is no babbling of green fields. ”A story from the Forties” would in no way induce soft nostalgia, but it isn’t dismissive of earlier generations either.

            Some poems are very direct in addressing the problem of how we understand and perceive. In “Epistemology, Standard Five”, the problem of the nature of Being is resolved by experience of the present moment. “Class outing, even now” suggests that certain individual words bend the way we understand the world. “Signify” is certainly a poem about epistemology, asking how “real” the physical world is and banging rationalism against empiricism. It is interesting that some of O’Sullivan’s trains of imagery are at the service of this philosophical exploration. There is the image of the changing and on-flowing river in the Joyceian titled “Riverrun”, and in “Soon enough, then” and “What river means”, in each of which the mutability of a river challenges our understanding of what a river essentially is. Then there are poems when the sensual experience and mentality of dogs lead us to question our human sensual experience and mentality – poems like “If you don’t have a dog yourself well you’d hardly know”, “At the city pound” and “Dogspeed”. As to whether our perception is based on fear or delusion, consider those poems that deal with nightmare (and old age!) “Late shift” and “The story of Born Again Brightly” .

            As I too often do in reviewing collections of poetry, I have here been your friendly neighbourhood bibliographer, tiresomely listing for you some of the contents of the book rather than assessing the quality of the verse. (Jaysus! I’m getting to be Joyce’s Shaun the Postman!). So what can I say about O’Sullivan’s poetry, which is at once sensual and cerebral? I could note that O’Sullivan often makes the title of a poem the poem’s first line, as he has done frequently in the past. I could note that there are outstanding poems that do not conform to the neat thematic lines I have suggested above – such as  “Depression Villa”, which comes very close to being about haunting. I could say that that the imagery is vivd, as with the image of a dying fish “like threshing diamonds” in the poem “Once”. And I could say that the rawest, most desolate and most sad poem in Things OK with you? is “Festival highlight” – the commonplace agony of those who feel but cannot express.

            But there, you see – all I am doing is listing more poems, trying to convince you that Things OK with you? is essential reading.

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            Here’s an interesting point for you to ponder. When publishers’ publicists write blurbs for collections of poetry, they give a general (and of course very positive) account of what the poet is up to – usually in terms of his or her main thematic interests. But for the back-cover blurb of Fleur Adcock’s latest colllection The Mermaid’s Purse, all the Victoria (of Wellington) University Press publicist can do is to list a whole series of diverse things that Adcock deals with, rather than noting anything dominant. In her 87^th year, Fleur Adcock here gathers up and presents new poems on so many different things that it is not easy to categorise her interests and inspirations. In her long and much-applauded career as a poet (look up Fleur Adcock Collected Poems on this blog for a brief account of her writing career) she has written about so many things. And she still does.

            Dutifully, however, I’ll do my boring bibiographical thing and try to corral her poems into thematic types.

            First, though, let me note that it is the first 39 poems in The Mermaid’s Purse that deal with many and varied things. The last 12 poems are designated “Poems for Roy”, and are dedicated to Fleur Adcock’s late friend, the English poet Roy Fisher (1930-2017). These are very personal poems joking with, celebrating with, recalling mutual experiences with the deceased, and I have no intention of intruding on something so personal. So I will pass them by with no further comment.

            Despite the sexy 19^th century painting of a mermaid on the cover, the opening and title poem “The Mermaid’s Purse” reminds us that a real “mermaid’s purse” (actually the protective cover of a tiny baby shark) is no magical thing, and the sea is deep, daunting, dark and dangerous. As opening poem, this seems fair warning that Fleur Adcock is not going to dwell on the fanciful and the pretty. She expands the image of the sea in one of the most skilful poems in this collection, “The Teacher’s Wife”, a kind of bricolage combining couplets with triplets. It draws on a story she pieced together at second hand, but related to a traumatic event in her childhood. It involves attempted suicide by drowning. Of such suicides she notes “Have you noticed they’re all women? / I would cite some men if necessary, / but we are the sea for men to drown in, / the ravening tide. No wonder we scare them.” The deep, daunting, dark and dangerous sea is women, penetrated by, but never fully understood by, men. Thus says a very knowing woman.

            This collection has some expected concerns. There are poems recalling childhood, but not many of them and never maudlin (“Island Bay”; “In the Cupboard”). There is a fond poem addressed to her son (“A Bunch of Names”) and two poems about pet cats (“The Fur Line”, “A Feline Forage in Auckland”), although Adcock sees them for the destructive little beasts they can be. Memories of exotic travel are reconstructed (“Giza” “Siena”) with, apparently at least, memories of a casual affair in one case. Literary figures make their appearance, “Peter’s Hat” (about Peter Bland), “A Small Correction” (about Mike Doyle) and  “Kathi Bowden in Bavaria” (an imagined version of the young Katherine Mansfield in Germany).  But a hard reality is her approach to the literary world. One of her best poems, “The Annual Party”, gives a true, but satirical and very negative, view of the writing life – or at least of the way ageing writers are regarded and treated. Dare I say it is almost as devastating as Vincent O’Sullivan’s poem “Festival highlight” in his most recent collection?  Both are the product of poets who have seen literary gatherings too often to be starry-eyed about them.

            As an expatriate New Zealander who has lived most of her life in England, Fleur Adcock inevitably writes much that has an explicitly British setting. This is particularly true when she deals with birds, animals and nature itself. Thus “Berries”; “This Fountain”, “Magnolia Seed Pods”, “Bats” (about her personal engagement with bats in her English back yard), “Novice Flyer” (concerning a dead robin), “Wood Mice”, “Sparrowhawk” and “The Old Road”. As always with this poet, nothing is approached with a Romantic eye – she sympathises with non-human animals but does not sentimentalise. Her encounters with birds and beasts are matter-of-fact ones.

            Having glibly ranged Adcock’s poems into categories, I admit that in The Mermaid’s Purse there are also poems that are unexpected. Consider the three epigrams “In the Cloud”, “Election 1945” and “To Stephenie at 11 PM”. Enjoy the  bemused and ironical account of a London location “Amazing Grace” or the eccentric poem “Divining” about water-divining (and, I suspect, intentionally ironical). Then there are unexpected excursions like “The Little Theatre Club”, expressing a sort of nostalgia for cheesy English pantomime in the 1940s; or  “The other Christmas Party” about adults stripping off and boogying when the kids are asleep or the poem “Victoria Road”, referring to “Alex and Meg” and working as an elegy for them.

            Of course I have listed for you what is in this volume. In doing so  I have to admit that I found some few poems cryptic and perhaps assuming an intimate knowledge of the poet’s life which most of us do not have  – thus “Berries” and “In the Cloud.” But to conclude, I can only repeat what I said in reviewing Adcock’s Collected Poems. It is a pleasure to read somebody who writes so forthrightly, who has a sense of appropriate form for each poem, who lays her heart on her sleeve without forgetting her functioning, rational brain – in short, somebody who writes like a modernist rather than a post-modernist. Floreat Adcock.

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            A handsome hardback of some 175 pages, Glenn Colquhoun’s Letters to Young People is a book with a mission. Colquhoun is a doctor of medicine by profession.  He currently works as a GP in Levin (Horowhenua). But he is also a poet, with five collections so far to his credit. Two of them – The art of walking upright and Playing God – won prestigious literary prizes. In his introduction to Letters to Young People, Colquhoun explains that all the poems in this collection arise from his work in the Horowhenua Youth Health Service. Most are addressed to young people he has counselled or otherwise helped. As many as possible of the poems have been checked and approved by the indivduals to whom they are addressed.

            But what is the mission of this book? Colquhoun says he wants to celebrate the honesty of young people and their uninhibited colloquial expression, but also to show their strengths and vulnerabilities and their need for help. Addressed directly to a particular young person, each poem offers advice, but usually in an oblique way, in the form of a story or of a detailed metaphor.  Each poem is, in effect, a part of the healing process.

            So to the text itself.

            With few exceptions, all the poems in Letters to Young People are lean, with short lines sitting like columns on the page. (Written in unabashed prose, the poem  “To a young person finding the journey difficult” is one of the few exceptions.) Erudite language is avoided and Colquhoun sometimes employs forms that will appeal most to a younger readership. Comic book heroes are invoked in “Mud Cake” basically to tell young men to curb their tempers. Comic book heroes mingle with other heroes in a number of poems. One item is written in the form of a text (“IOW”) and another as rap (“Eruptions”). Sometimes (as in a sonnet which is also presented in English) the Maori language is used. If Colquhoun’s preferred vocabulary is usually simple and direct, the trains of imagery are often quite complex. Sometimes they imply details about the addressee to which we readers will not be privy.

            What sorts of advice does Colquhoun offer? To Anna he gives, in a non-coercive way “An attempt to prevent the suicide of a young woman”. In  “Heart murmurs” he lightens  Zoe’s mood by saying her heart “is telling you / there is no one else / exactly like you. ” Addressing Ethan in “Supernova”, he suggests the beauties of a vast universe are like the powerful possibilities that the young man has in him. Kristian is advised that even though his kidneys are not functioning properly, he will find a way to live with this defect. “The far paddock” tells Bree to face the day boldly. Bree (presumably the same person) is also addressed in the 13-part sequence “Via Dolorosa” which presents the travails and wonders of life in terms of a journey – especially mountain climbing. “A song sung sweet to greet the dead” is written as solace for young people grieving the death of their grandmother; and “Madonna and child” basically says fathers can be loving and caring parents too. In all these cases there is an attempt to restore a sense of self-worth and responsibility without guilt.

            Colquhoun is a great believer in the idea that people (his patients) will learn most and heal most if they are presented with stories rather than abstract concepts. He also takes it as an axiom that most of us construct stories about ourselves to explain who we are. The long 12-part sequence “Once upon a time” begins “Sometimes getting / better is about / finding out what’s / wrong with a story”. The sequence proceeds to tell stories from literature and comes up with “You probably think / when I listen / to your chest / with my stethoscope / I am listening / to your heart. / But I’m not. / I am listening / to your stories.” This idea of healing narrative is also in the poem “The three sisters”, where Colquhoun imagines Chekhov (who was doctor as well as playwright) healing people by telling a story. Only a handful of poems are a little difficult to interpret. “To men who steal the bodies of women” is ambiguous. Is it counselling young men not to harrass women? Or is it reminding young men that they owe a debt to women as we all began by living in a woman for nine months?

            Quite distinct from the others, and scattered through the text, are eight poems framed as “Letters to a young nurse”, all addressed to “Jess”. I will brutally summarise what these eight poems are saying thus: (1.) Respect the human body and how it has evolved. (2.) Advice is given mainly in the form of an examination of conscience – the nurse is asked to consider all her faults and then to realise that she, like everybody else, is a flawed human being who can do good to others of her kind. (3.) The Earth itself is the greatest healer and in the right circumstances natural processes heal us. (4.) The quest for medical knowledge is historical and we should respect those who came before us. (5.) You have to respect the stories your patients tell you. (6.) You need to see the world – indeed the cosmos – through more than the lens of your own particular metier. (7.) When things go wrong, accept that your imperfections are shared by all human beings. (8) “This last thing I have to say to you. / At the end of the day the most / powerful medicine I know is love.” Even if you don’t recognize this when you encounter negative things in life, love is still there and is the force that drives the world.

            In dealing fairly with Letters to Young People, I do not want to be accused of being a cynic. I am aware that Colquhoun’s intentions are good. I understand that part of the royalties from sale of this book will go to the Horowhenua Youth Health Service. The poet is obviously on the side of the angels and there is doubtless  therapeutic value in these poems for the people addressed (although I do wonder how helpful the poem “To a young woman raped by a friend” would be.)

            But there are many imperatives, many exhortations and much didacticism in this collection. Though dressed as “stories”, these poems do preach to us. It may be wise not to read Letters to Young People in one long sitting, as a sense of sameness takes over. And though Colquhoun is insistent on the place of nature in our formation, it is odd that his descriptions of nature tend to be generic textbook representations rather than things felt or observed in detail.

            To conclude on two personal observations: (A. ) “Things remembered and dreamed”  - one of Colquhoun’s longest and most discursive poems  - seems to me to come closest to being sheer autobiography. (B.) The one poem I found most impressive is “One that got away” – a sustained image of a tortured deep-sea fish presented as metaphor for the human will to be free. This poem sustains its imagery without being as discursive, and wandering away into other topics, as so many of Colquhoun’s poems do.

Something New

SPECIAL NOTICE TO READERS:  CONSTRAINTS ON MY TIME, PLUS MY RECENT VISUAL IMPAIRMENT, MEAN THAT I HAVE DECIDED HENCEFORTH TO PRODUCE THESE BLOG POSTINGS FORTNIGHTLY RATHER THAN WEEKLY.

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

“HOARD” by Fleur Adcock (Victoria University Press, $NZ 25); “仁 SURRENDER” by Janet Charman (Otago University Press, NZ$27:50); “ORDINARY TIME” by Anna Livesey (Victoria University Press, $NZ 25); “FLOODS ANOTHER CHAMBER” by James Brown (Victoria University Press, $NZ 25)

I begin this post with an apology.

Recently I had to suspend producing Reid’s Reader for some months due to illness (hospitalisation and then weeks of recuperation). In that time, publishers continued to send me books to review, so that a formidable pile had accumulated by the time I got back to this work. The greatest casualty were collections of poetry which, as you know, get very little notice in the media outside specialist publications and websites.

So my apology is, that in catching up with four recent collections of poetry in this one posting, I am going to have to deal with them more briefly and rather summarily than I would otherwise do. Beg pardon.

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Fleur Adcock (born 1934) may be our best-known living literary expatriate. England has been her home since 1963, but she has made a number of return visits here in recent years. A prolific poet, her last volume The Land Ballot (reviewed on this blog) concerned her family background in rural New Zealand. The publisher’s blurb for Hoard tells us helpfully that this book is made up of things that didn’t fit the themes of the poet’s last two collections. I will not call it a pot-pourri, because its four sections do each have a common theme. But it is clear that these are things which, on their own, wouldn’t have made a complete book. Not that it worries me. I find that too many new collections of poetry tend to be “concept albums”. I prefer the older style of collection where we read each poem as an individual entity, even if thus we often work out a poet’s general preoccupations.

So to Hoard.

The first section comprises poems about Adcock’s younger life, from schooldays to young adulthood. Thus to poems about learning Latin declensions at school; the degeneration of her handwriting since she was a child; her use of typewriters (which she has now spurned for computers); witnessing a Caesarean delivery when she was a young woman (at the sight of which a woman called "Mrs Campbell" apparently fainted); three rather bitter poems about her short marriage to Barry Crump; and poems about getting used to working and raising a son in England. Adcock’s imagery can be as sharp as cut metal, as in her very opening poem about coin-collecting as a child. One ancient worn coin, she writes, has been “sucked in the mouth of history / for so long that its outer edges / are smoothed away, gone down time’s gullet / with a slow wince of dissolving copper.”

Perfect!

In the second section, the focus is history before the author’s time. This includes forebears, as in “Anne Jane’s Husband” (a brutal poem about conjugal sex, presumably in the 19^th century) and two poems on family tales that were passed on by mothers. But more arresting are two longer poems – or cycles of shorter poems – about the very left-wing British Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson, famous in the 1930s and 1940s for being a bit of a firebrand, leading the Jarrow march against unemployment, organising shelter in London during the Blitz and later being Minister of Education. Adcock clearly admires her as a feminist figure from an earlier age, and goes very protective in poems on Wilkinson’s private life, including one which condemns the rumour that Wilkinson eventually committed suicide.

Thus much for the past. The last two sections of Hoard deal with Adcock’s impressions of England now and of New Zealand now.

Her poems about English landscape are indeed very English, like the sequence “A Spinney” about foliage around her English home. Take the section “Horse-Chestnut” which I quote in full: “The squirrels want me to grow a forest. /  They plant acorns on my lawn; / I haul them out by the stems, like minims. /  / They plant a conker. A green hand shoots up, / and lo, I’ve stabled it in a pot: / a fistful of sticky buds for next spring”. It couldn’t be anywhere but England. Nor could the poem about foxes roving in the suburbs by moonlight. One poem is an extended intellectual game. This is “Albatross”, ostensibly about Coleridge gaining his inspiration for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, but segueing into a lament for birds strangled by plastic out in our modern oceans.

I hate using this term, because I have often used it for poems by older people, but Adcock’s tone is often elegaic. In England bookshops are disappearing as books get sold on line; people suggest (in the poem poem “Real Estate”) that she should sell the old-fashioned home she loves and buy a flat (she refuses). In “Pacifiers” she mocks young people clutching their phones in the way her generation used to suck on cigarettes. Fings Ain’t Wot They Used Ta Be.

When, in the last section, she gets to modern New Zealand (observations based on a trip here in 2015), I feared at first that her tone would be dismissive. In “Helensville”, she declares “small-town New Zealand’s doing its thing / of channelling the 1930s.” In a way the funniest poem in the collection is the regretful “Blue Stars” in which Adcock declares “my New Zealand nationality / is a part-time thing – a bit of nostalgia” and goes on to discourse on New Zealand’s lack of indigenous flowers, and hence our need to import exotics which, annoyingly, often run wild. But her general take on modern EnZed is more rueful than dismissive, for in the remaining poems, old age attempts to reconstruct what Mercer and Drury and Thames and Raglan and (especially) Wellington were like when she was young.

It is like a ghost visiting old haunts and wondering at the impertinence that has made them change.

I hope it goes without saying that Adcock’s poems here, even if very retrospective, display the best elements of the modernist tradition in which she developed. The poems are accessible, clear, not given to rhetoric and – dammit – often great fun.

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Now in her mid-60s, Janet Charman (born 1954) isn’t as senior a poet as Fleur Adcock, but she is firmly established with seven well-received collections behind her. I remember reviewing with pleasure her At the White Coast (2012) in Poetry New Zealand #46 (March 2013). It was a loose, autobiographical collection, written in very free verse, of her OE experiences when working in England in the 1980s.

Her new collection 仁 Surrender is also autobiographical and it is mainly composed of free verse; but its final section “101 Snapshots” consists of 101 pithy statements written in (very loose) haiku form – at least each is three lines, even if they do not adhere to traditional haiku syllabics. As she states in her Acknowledgements, this collection sprang from a writing residency in Hong Kong in 2009 and a guest readership at a literary event in Taipei in 2014; therefore much of it is also an outsider’s response to Chinese culture. No wonder the ghost of Robin Hyde makes an appearance. The poem “仁” explains the Chinese character仁  in her title (apparently pronounced “ren”), which once stood for specificially masculine human qualities but which now stands for a general range of human characteristics, including compassion. This seems to connect with the many and diffuse allusions Charman’s poetry makes here to gender and sexual identity.

For much of this collection, we are reading what could be taken for loose diary jottings, or at least poems worked up therefrom. We open with the poet settling into an alien hotel room and adjusting to jet-lag  (“your time 3am. / my time my own”). As the settings are polyglot writers’ gatherings, many poems reference words being translated or mistranslated in literary texts; how sexually-explicit moments of some texts are received; personalities met; questions asked by students; and the otherness of Hong Kong (or Taipei). In a number of poems she mentions taking Panadol for headaches or backaches and this seems to say something about the hectic nature of literary conferences, especially when there are students to lecture or be quizzed by.

 In the long multi-part poem “where people are”  the poet declares “i am actually a left margin justified crazy person / who agitating at her map in a crowded concourse / will talk to herself”. In this poem, there is the sense of disorientation in an alien environment and perhaps the disintegration of the self with a long series of statements beginning “i am”. Breathless, composed in short bursts over 17 pages, “where people are” touches on attraction of woman to woman mixed with cultural clash, much reference to the female body (especially genitalia) and the idea that poetry should undermine and liberate a closed or too-rigid a socety, which in this case is China.

Sometimes a poem is simply about the feeling sparked by something seen. In the poem “Wo de tian a!” a visit to an exhibition of dresses arouses jouissance in the poet. Sometimes a visit to a particular location fires up a series of reflections so diverse that it is hard to grasp a unifying theme, as in the very discursive poem “Nan Lian Garden” about a visit to a public garden. “They say you’re Japanese” agonises about cultural assimilation, while “it’s late” is a very personal memory concerning the father of the poet’s children who was unable to give up smoking before cancer already had him. While there is much effervescence and fizz in these poems, some become sombrely preachy. “The Anthology of Women’s Poetry” reads like a literary polemic that might have worked better as an essay. “on the sliding rack” is a rather flat protest poem about how a contaminated milk scandal was handled.

The publisher’s blurb for this volume speaks of “privileged constraints” upon the participants at the Honk Kong gathering. And certainly, in quite another sense, a mood of privilege inflects some of these poems. You are in a privileged environment if you write a poem about swapping your own books with other participants. Or if you write “Banquet” about how to dress at a literary dinner to make the right impression. Or if you write a ten-page poem “some notes on shopping and present giving” on what a bother it is finding and buying the appropriate things to give as presents to other participants. Yet of course Janet Charman is savvy enough to undercut this with self-deprecation and irony, which tell us that she isn’t that self-obsessed. In the poem “of our lucky eight” she remarks “Hong Kong doesn’t seem that foreign to me / though i know after these cocooned weeks / i might be kidding myself”.  The whole of this particular poem is, in fact, about the embarrassment of having to hold the fort when some members of the performing literary troupe have deserted her.

Janet Charman’s poems here never did less than hold my attention. But after their sometimes rambling discursiveness, I found that I enjoyed most the pithy epigrams of the final (loose) haiku section.

Such gems as “trampoline / the stepchild’s / sitting room”

Or “listen / that’s a hungry cry / turn up the music”

Or “they’ll know / while Earth burned / we fiddled with our nature poems”

Or “leaf raking the trees tell me / everything / about winter”

Or even “those amber those carnelian wrist beads / cheap beyond belief / live ammunition from the faraway market”

As I did when I reviewed At the White Coast, I could at this point rebuke Charman for her rather precious habit of avoiding capital letters, especially in her use of “i” for the first person singular. In the new collection there is a poem “a writing exercise”, about answering students’ questions on her work.  It has a very defensive section on her avoidance of capital letters which equates “I” with male phollocentrality and “i” with the hitherto suppressed female. Ho-de-hum. Interesting, coincidentally, that the poem notes Fleur Adcock is not enthused by Janet Charman’s typographical tic either. But then if I get too reproving about this issue, I will sound like the “teacherly reviewer” Charman rebukes in one of her haiku.

Besides, I don’t want to end on a sour note after enjoying most of this collection.

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Anna Livesey is of a younger generation than either Fleur Adcock or Janet Charman, but the “corporate strategist”, as the blurb describes her, is no newcomer either. Ordinary Time is her third collection.

As there are one or two religious references in this (short) collection of poems, I am sure the poet is aware that “ordinary time” is the term used by the church for those weeks of the year that are not taken up with the big seasons of Lent, Easter, Advent and Christmas – in other words, the times when life chugs on as life, away from the big public events.

Life chugs on as (domestic) life in these poems, which are candid, personal and – at first – focus on the poet’s experience as the mother of a newborn baby girl and a two-year-old toddler boy. The big world can chug on outside as Anna Livesey looks clearly at her early motherhood.  The opening (title) poem at once tells us that she just brought her new baby home from hospital. The poem “Eleven Days” says the umbilical cord has gone (“The rotten flesh-stump that joined us / has fallen off”). The most gynaecologically-explicit poem is “Privacy” in which, as she is having a Caesarean section, she thinks of her mother – and wishes to have “the dark privacy of the womb restored”. In the poem “America”, she compares her two children with the remembered skittering of fireflies, seen in America… and then rebukes herself for doing so. She does not wish to surrender to the fey or make her language pretentious and pretty. Some poems compare the newborn with the toddler, and there are great insights into toddler behaviour. Any young parent can relate to the lines in the poem “Winter Gardens”: “I watch my two-year-old and think: / I want to bite my hand in rage when I’m given the wrong cup; / shuffle away from strangers, shaking with disgust / at their forgiveness / their unknowledge of myself.” Yes, toddlers’ tantrums can make us want to throw tantrums too.

The poems are realistic about babies and young children but not hard, not cynical. The closeness, warmth and cuddliness of young motherhood is here too.

There’s a subtle shift in the second section of this collection. Motherhood is still the focus, but it widens to take in the poet’s relationship with her own mother and grandmother, as well as shared experience with other women. The past and the present are united. “Artificial Intelligence” is a poem dense with meaning, connecting mourning for the death of her mother with the child growing in the womb and, later, with post-partum depression – a “cycle of life” poem which manages to be neither sententious nor trite. The prose poem “Drowned Church” (I refuse to synopsise it) is a wonderful essay in literal symbolism. “Bay Leaves” comes closest to being Anna Livesey’s manifesto and explanation of poetic technique when she avers: “In my first book I was desperate not to be confessional. / My poems reached out of myself, pushed myself away. / Now that my mother is dead and my children are born / I seem to have nothing else to speak of.” As for the poem “Reading Books About the War” – it is a really bizarre prose poem, its four sections almost like four separable stand-up-comic gigs.

The third section is more generally reflective, moving from the poet’s immediate family circle to reveries of a friend in rural America and a poem set on a New York fire escape. The final poem in the book (“Trimester One”) seems to be about an abortion, but could equally be about something imagined. It is unusually opaque for this poet, who is on the whole clarity itself.

When poems are as personal and intimate as many of these are, making judgments upon them can seem uncomfortably like making judgments on the poet herself. I hope I am not guilty of that here. As a male, I recognised and understood many of the joys and anxieties of young parenthood that resonate in this collection.

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In its issue of 25 November, the NZ Listener produced a list of ten volumes of New Zealand poetry, published in 2017, that were worth reading. Fully eight of the volumes were by women, one was an anthology edited by a woman and a man, and only one of the ten volumes (David Howard’s The Ones Who Keep Quiet – reviewed on this blog) was by a man. Let me confess that reviewing new volumes of New Zealand poetry sometimes seems like a journey through female confessionalism, so much do women poets now dominate the scene. And note how this posting replicates the process. Having looked at three volumes by women, I now give you the token male. Not that James Brown himself (born 1966) can be regarded as marginalised, given that Floods Another Chamber is his sixth collection and given that he is at the heart of the poetic establishment, now running Vic’s poetry-writing courses, having edited Sport etc.

I won’t waste my or your time by trying to explain why this volume is divided into three sections. The arrangement seems to be purely arbitrary. Also, I remember in a review years ago coming up with an ingenious explanation as to why a certain volume was divided into sections, only to be told later by the poet in question that he had arranged his collection that way simply to “give readers a break”. So maybe that’s all that’s happening with the organisation of Floods Another Chamber.

In Floods Another Chamber, James Brown shows that he can write poems in many different forms. Let me list some of them. There’s the alphabetical poem (“The A to Z of Cycling”) where each of 26 lines begins with a new letter of the alphabet. There’s the mock nursery-rhyme (“Peculiar Julia”, “Shrinking Violet”). There’s that standard of the writing school class, the Wallace Stevens-style “thirteen-ways-of-looking-at” poem (“Eight Angles on the Manawatu River”). There are prose anecdotes lineated (“The Real Humpties”, “How I Met My Wife”). There are modified haiku (“Snogging in Wordsworth’s Bedroom” “Sad Dads” “Tautology Explained”). There are list poems (like the lists of cliché-ic things people say about beds in “Beds R Us”; or like “Agile Workshop”, a collection of clichés spoken in workshops and presentations). There’s the “I-can-write-groovy-sex” poem (“Erotic Snowdome”). And there’s the “found” poem (“Come on Lance”, which Brown would have transcribed only because the cyclist Lance Armstrong proved to be a drug cheat; and “Fine with Afterlife”, reproduced implicitly to mock a poorly-devised theatre poster). Towards the end of the book, there are a clutch of poems built around the repetition of the same grammatical structures.

Far from making me admire the virtuosity of the poet, I find here only a box of tried-and-true tricks, like forms recommended to students in a poetry-writing seminar. There is something airless about most of the collection, as if the poet is not so much connecting with what he is ostensibly writing about as seeing what genre strategies he can devise.

Some poems work as satire, such as the hit at real estate agents in “Attitude”; or what could equally be either social satire on dead-end jobs or an elegy for lost and wasted youth (“The AM Sound” – this being the poem that gives this volume its title with the line “your despair floods another chamber”). Very occasionally, too, there is a poem where the poet seems emotionally invested in his material, like “Piano Tune”, a sad little thing about a bird caught in a piano. In many ways it’s a pity that the very best poem in the volume appears so early. This is “Social Experiment”, a genuinely witty poem about New Zealand’s (dying?) obsession with rugby – yet with the poet self-deprecating enough not to be elevated by his own superiority in not being a fan.

Yet, along with the stylistic games, there’s a deadening sardonic tone to so much of what the poet writes. James Brown is over-eager to tell us that he is too sophisticated to be impressed by things that might impress us lesser mortal. We move into the land of condescension. “Emu” and “Beyond Red Rocks” are presumably memories of tramping and/or cycling trips in the wilderness… but remember, it’s not fashionable to say you admire or are in awe of the scenery on such expeditions, so both poems are hip memoranda about me, me, me. “Janet and John go to the Book Launch” is written with deadpan irony (mimicking the style of old primary school readers), but with an unpleasant undercurrent of contempt for the people who attend such things as book launches. “The Pitfalls of Poetry” and “Unstressed / Stressed” are attacks on older forms of poetry – or are they Larkinian irony? (As in Larkin’s “books are a load of crap.”)

Unless you are cocooned in sterile literary theory, you will be aware that (always and in every form of publication, despite denials) there is a huge element of subjectivity in all reviewing and criticism. Everything I have said about Floods Another Chamber boils down to the fact that I did not enjoy this collection, did not engage with it and found much of it to be predictable game-playing. Others may have a different reaction and they are most welcome to it. We none of us want to discourage people from writing poetry, after all.

Something New

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

“THE LAND BALLOT” by Fleur Adcock (Victoria University Press, $NZ30); “SLEEPING ON HORSEBACK” by Frances Samuel (Victoria University Press, $NZ25)

            To place together these two volumes of poetry is a little unfair. One is written by a well-established, much-anthologised and much-awarded poet, the expatriate New Zealander Fleur Adcock. The other is the debut collection of a young New Zealand poet, Frances Samuel. Their styles and themes are quite different and they have little in common but their publishing house. Yet here I am placing them side-by-side. So that’s that.

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Fleur Adcock’s The Land Ballot sits approximately in the same position relative to her oeuvre as Early Days Yet does to Allen Curnow’s oeuvre. It is an older person’s sequence of poems, going back to the poet’s roots. Just as Curnow set aside some of his typical preoccupations to recall his clergyman father as he remembered him in the 1930s, so does Adcock forsake her usual preoccupations to reconstruct the lives of her grandparents and her father in an earlier rural New Zealand.

Grandfather Sam Adcock and grandmother Eva, from Britain, struggled, from 1919 to the 1930s, to break in and make profitable a most unpromising farm on Mount Pirongia in the King Country. A “land ballot” was the process through which men who wanted to create farms out of wild bushland were allocated property just after the First World War. Grandfather Sam appears to have been a rather half-hearted farmer and when things got tough he found it preferable to earn a living as a barber in Te Awamutu. That meant that often the hard practical farming matters – such as milking the cows – fell to teenaged Cyril, the poet’s father.

The Land Ballot, a collection of generous length (82 pages of poems), traces the lives of these people, and of other members of the family, with a faintly elegiac sense which become quite explicit the nearer we reach the collection’s conclusion. For it is clear that ultimately the Adcocks weren’t able to make a go of the farm and the enterprise gradually fell apart. The last poem in the book, “State Highway 31”, depicts the poet revisiting the land where the farm once was. It opens with the words:

The owners of the land round here

haven’t spent their time preserving

obsolete structures for potential

grandfather-chasers to post on Facebook.

The poet’s memories and recorded family legend and lore and remembered conversations are ultimately all that remain of the life the earlier Adcocks led. As recorded in these poems, that life was pinched and rather austere, but not without its colourful spots. Poems broach such topics as fencing the farm and being an immigrant family far from England and being taught at a tiny primary school and reading the School Journal by the light of a kerosene lamp and the incidence of TB and infant mortality then and the presence of household articles such as “washboard, washing dolly, Reckitt’s bluebag, scrubbing brush, sandstone, bar of Sunlight soap” (as listed in the poem “Settlers’ Museum” at p.46) and family scandals involving the farming out of children and cousins and repercussions of the recent Great War and one historical incident  - not involving one of the poet’s forebears – of sheep-shagging (in the poem “The Kea Gun” pp.73-75). Ragwort takes over the farmland in later poems as the farm falls into decline and as a suitable road is never built in to the small farming community.

There is also an interesting recurring theme of cultural dislocation, most pertinent to a New Zealand poet of English parentage who has spent most of her adult life in England. This is the condition of sometimes realizing that British and storybook cultural markers don’t really fit the New Zealand scene, and yet still having a dual identity as both British and New Zealander. To quote in full one of the best poems in this vein, “Bedtime Story” (p.18), where the child realizes that tales like Little Black Sambo don’t fit our flora and anyway real butter isn’t made in the way the storybook says:

But there are no tigers in this forest

to run round and round a tree until they

turn into butter; this is not jungle

but unbroached New Zealand bush, and it is

the trees themselves – rimu, hinau, tawa,

totara – that because they cannot run

will be turned step by step first into ash

then grass, then milk, then, yes, into butter.

I trust no one has any objections?

(Hang around as the century scrolls by.)

This theme of cultural dislocation is taken up in the poem “A Manchester Child” (pp.24-25) about the teasing the poet’s English father at first got at primary school; and in “The Family Bible” (pp.42-43)

Fleur Adcock adopts many different voices for these poems. Some are “found” poems, quoting from the local newspaper of the 1920s, the Waipa Post, in ways that can’t help but be ironical from the perspective of our changed social attitudes. Sometimes the poet goes first-person and speaks for herself, commenting on her own poetic methods in poems that are printed in italics such as the introductory poem “Where the Farm Was” (p.11), “Settlers’ Museum” (p.46), “The Sensational” (p.72) and “Jubilee Booklet 1989” (p.92). What is noticeable is how dominant the perspective of her father is. There are many poems presented in Cyril’s voice and many which deal with things that would most have affected Cyril, such as his teenage enthusiasm for scientific things and later his training as a teacher and his sense of relief when finally he was posted somewhere far from the farm so that he could no longer reasonably be expected to run it.

I would call Fleur Adcock’s poetic style a rather old-fashioned one. A poem like “Telegraphese” (p.41) – a piece of family history written in the clipped style of a telegram which misses out articles such as “the” and “a” – might have been considered experimental in the 1950s, but now seems a product of the 1950s. This, however, is a pointlessly bitchy thing for me to say, inasmuch as these are, after all, poems of recall written by a woman who is now aged 80. I make it clear that I thoroughly enjoyed this collection and my spirits leapt when I met well-turned phrases, such as the line (in the poem “Armistice Day p.57) about Cyril having seen fireworks “his retina stencilled / with their acidic blaze”.

In terms of both subject matter and style, it is absolutely right that VUP have chosen a 1950 drawing by Eric Lee-Johnson as this book’s cover design.

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I am annoyed by the way in which the term “surreal” is misused. Often it is thrown into articles and conversation as if it is no more than a synonym for “odd” or “freaky” or “arresting”. Properly speaking, if something is surreal it has the solid qualities of a literal, material object, but it has been placed in an unreal or ideal or dreamlike setting. And because of this disjunction of the literal and the dreamlike, it has an inbuilt ironic quality. Think Salvador Dali’s recognizably real watches melting; or the recognizably literal attributes of a redesigned human person being torn apart in his “Premonition of Civil War”.

I’m saying all this because many of the poems in Frances Samuel’s debut collection Sleeping on Horseback are surreal in the most precise way. Take the lovely poem “Light and Shade”, which I quote here in its entirety:

On one side of the tree

Lightning never struck.

Ancient birds sat on the branches

No wind could lift their feathers.

On the other side

Black leaves smoked.

Birds flew close, perched

Then fell to the ground like fruit. 

Now this tree is described precisely, yet obviously there is no such tree, just as there are no such things as “ancient birds” whose feathers cannot be lifted by the wind. So this literally-described tree is a dream tree – a surreal tree – and implicitly it becomes a statement about human perception or the human condition.

            Many of Frances Samuel’s poems work in this way – the externalization of states of consciousness by means of literal and objective things. The poem “Firework Festival”, for example, is explicitly about somebody in an unhappy frame of mind attending a fireworks display, but the fireworks become “angry gods / spitting from the sky”. Or again the long poem “Vending Machine”, which chronicles a series of improbable events and sights before, eventually, literally declaring itself to be a dream. And another long poem “The forest of things”, which pushes surreal images so far that it becomes one long conceit.

None of this is to say that all of Frances Samuel’s poems have a dreamlike or surreal quality, but enough of them do to suggest a poetic technique of finding wildly-imaginative correlatives for mundane states of mind. The colour is in the dreamwork and the dream landscapes.

I am wary of describing collections of poetry in terms of their section headings. I remember once on this blog agonising over why a certain collection of poetry had been divided into four or five sections, and spending much of my review trying to find thematic rationales for this division. My ingenious explanations were deflated by a private missive from the poet in question, who pointed out that he had simply divided his individual poems into sections to provide breaks and breathing spaces for readers.

Bearing this in mind, then, I note tentatively that Frances Samuel’s collection is divided into four sections. The first, “In The Very Earliest Time” seems to comprise poems about perception and representation, and references paintings and drawings. The second, “Traveller’s Luck” is partly about foreign parts, but is more frequently about imaginative states of mind. The third, “The Hundred Year Picnic”, after its genuinely weird title poem, deals mainly with beasts – caterpillars, mountain goats, zoo animals, ducks, penguins. The fourth, “Moon walking” jumps into specifically surreal territory, where a banana becomes a ramp or a slide (in the poems “Bananas”), but finally grounds itself in domestic realities, with a long poem, “The gardeners”, which is apparently an elegy for the poet’s father, and also poems about babies and birth. This, at any rate, is how the collection reads to me – but I could be rationalising what are simply arbitrary breaks.

It is hard to comment at length on the poet’s versification. Most poems are as free form as one now expects of younger poets. But there are odd breaks into stressed alliteration and assonance, as in a stanza of the poem “Qualifying for the ark” where “As

the sun dries up that perilous,/ preposterous puddle, / blink away your bifocal gaze, / safe in the knowledge / you survived the storm alone.”

            I find in this volume one perfect love poem. It’s the one that references penguins. It is called “Stones” and in its entirety goes thus:

            I am selecting stones

To place in front of you

Penguins do this

To express their desire

& since my message

has not reached you

thus far

I drop these smooth weights

warm from discovery

& leave them arranged

like a miniature henge

ready to capture the sun.

This is a very good first collection.