We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
“It’s What He Would’ve Wanted” by Nick Ascroft (Te Herenga Waka Press, $NZ25); “No Good” by Sophie van Waatdenberg (Auckland University Press, $NZ24:99); “The Venetian Blind Poems” by Paula Green (Cuba Press, NZ$20)
In this sixth collection, Nick Ascroft continues to write ironically, often tongue-in -cheek, sometimes flippant, but usually making acute observations on the mores and habits of us human beings – as well as sometimes writing autobiographically. He dedicates this collection to “For all the dead”. Ascroft very occasionally writes in traditional forms, such as the poems “Dire Dairy” and “Pig Magnet”, with their neatly blocked stanzas; but his habitual style is a sort of free-poetry in which he sometimes writes either lists or questions. And once or twice he deliberately writes in doggerel.
There are some major things that preoccupy Ascroft – death and sorrow; the awareness that life is short; the gradual decay of the human body; how the human brain works; and the attractions and pitfalls of sex. Only one poem, “Pig Magnet”, could really be called heroic – a long poem about the difficulties of getting his son to school via bus and the different moods that were felt in the ride – but even here there is much irony.
How are the pitfalls of love and sex represented in this collection? The poem “The Centaur for Women” is introduced as “… a 1990s fillum / featuring Al Pacino / as a blind centaur. / Whenever his nostrils / fill with the stench / of Gabrielle he neighs / a wild: Hooh-ah! Hoo-ah…” (the title parodies the Al Pacino’s film “Scent of a Woman”). The idea is that men are predators, easily aroused like centaurs and wildly preying on women…. yet often their conquests leave them. And in the poem “Dire Diary” there is a sense of scepticism about sex and love with lines like “Love is for young people with its / self-deceit and cross purposes. A young man in / love may make us feel a bit sick, but the crush of / a middle-aged man makes us wince.” Yet the same poem gives us a credible analysis of love is seen by somebody who has had troubles with love. And “Which 1990’s Pin-Up Is Our Future Husband?” mocks teenagers [girls] who used to make a cult of apparent heart-throbs.
Death and human decay are addressed in many ways. “It’s What He Would’ve Wanted” where, tired of this common cliché, Ascroft verbally riots with one-liners about the many ways one could be buried or cremated. “Fair-Weather Friend” is a kind of elegy for a dear friend; and “Pastiche for Mum”, which Ascroft says he read at his mother’s funeral, is a fond collection of odd things she used to do, presented jocularly. As for “Poem for Your Funeral 5”, it is more than flippant, and it is deliberately presented as doggerel in full thus: “When this guy lived he was a pain. / But now he’s dead and down the drain. / He used to drone, each story long, / how he was never in the wrong. / But now he’s dead, the bucket kicked, / his eyes look like eggs Benedict. / His lips are still. He can’t be heard. / And so I get the final word.”
And what of the general human condition? We are, suggests a poem, the “Beast That Needs to Be Tamed”. Sometimes we know that our mentality may be confused. The poem “Do You Hear Yourself?” has the line “There is something / you are unaware of your unawareness.” The poem “Another Poem with a Feather” could be despairing; and “Another Poem With a Found Father” concludes with the line “Another poem as useless at music as a penny whistle.” But then the body is as trying as the mind and the body gradually decays as it ages. Remembering this, there is a brief comment called “Old Farts” which is literally about old people farting. “Do You Wish to Continue?”, a poem made up of 12 questions, contains such lines as “Do you wish to continue squirming like a mortal?” And as one would hope, Ascroft has sone straightforward satire, as in “Dress Code” and “Opulence” wherein pretentious people try to keep up with what is fashionable; and “Bad Cookbooks”, a collection of 44 one-liners, laughing at, or being disgusted by, revolting meals.
This is a very varied and very readable collection. And though the poems about death could be seen as disrespectful, they are clearly telling us that death is inevitable no matter how we try to ignore it.
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No Good is Sophie van Waatdenberg’s debut collection of poetry, although many of her poems have featured in AUP’s New Poets in 2019. She lived and wrote for much of her lived in the U.S.A. and I believe [I could be wrong] that her parents came from the Netherlands. Her parents feature often in this collection. Waatdenberg’s style is in part almost classical. She writes in neat stanzas, preferring to produce either couplets or 14-liners which are almost sonnets. Her imagery sometimes borders on the surreal. More than anything, though, her No Good is a self-examination, or if you prefer, a psychological journey. Why did Waatdenberg call her collection No Good ? People who are depressed often feel, irrationally, that they are “no good” and much of this collection is built on that mood. Towards the end of the collection, we are given the poem that gives the title, “The Getting Away”. It reads in part “I’m moving out. Everyone does it. / Everyone turns their dining tables upside down/ to remove the legs. Down the road, far from your life,/ opposite direction: I’m taking the nail scissors / and the best green leaves. I’m ready for nothing, / smallhanded, tricked. I’m rotten and roiled / and no good, truly – truly no good at all.” Yes, there are moments of joy and desire, but the negative mood is always ready to jump out.
No Good is presented in three sections, and I’ll do my usual system of giving you a sort of synopsis.
First section Sophie van Waatdenberg opens with the “Poem in Which I am Good”, in which she asserts that she can be positive about her life, even if people she loved have died or disappeared and “Everybody I love will live forever”. Following this are poems about adolescent awkwardness; about childhood sharing a bedroom with a young man who “knew a lot / about philosophy, and he knew I thought philosophy was difficult / if not unnecessary…” and had eccentric and annoying attitudes. There is uncertainty about her sexuality in “Hymn to Twee Possibility” as she considers a film about lesbians. She and the people with whom she consorts are involved in raising crops and living simply where [in the poem “Propagate the ZZ Plant”] “you are doing such a good job for me / green monster of staying alive. All my friends / have left me to grow farms of their own…/…The rain is fat / like a grandmother’s kiss and we can’t go out / to be loved by anybody.” As in so many of her poems, one has to ask if this is a metaphor for loneliness rather than a literal account of raising crops. Later she says “How can I spend life with myself…I do not want anyone to love me./ But then they don’t, why don’t they?” She seems to commit herself to being a lesbian, but even here she is ambiguous.
Second Section comprises 16 poems called “Cremation Sonnets” in which “my father was beautiful. His tipped chin / and factual smile, his elbow…”. Her poems are not of rebellion against her parents, but chastises herself, telling us that she “took up swearing, walked home alone at night / with great cowardice” and also “How can it be my fault to get things wrong? / You died and I loved you, my life was over.” In another context she asks “To where is your body going / and in what vessel?” This lament is not only for her father but perhaps also for others [it is not clear], but surely she is referring to her father when she writes “And every night and I mean every night / you’d tuck me in, grip the steel / of my wobbling bed and kiss me / how the Dutch do, thrice.” There is much sense of guilt about family and perhaps of having lost their religion.
Third Section is made of ten poems of different moods. “Love Poem” is about her teenaged intimate love with another girl, presented as a happy memory. But also there are poems about being second best (the poem “Love Practice Weekend Four”); self-consciousness about eating (the poem “Doce”) and other showing how difficult it is to navigate personal relationships.
One can’t help admiring how candid her work is, but it is gruelling.
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Written in two halves, Paula Green explains in her Endnote that the first, “The Venetian Blind Poems” was inspired when she had to be in hospital going through therapy and medicine to right a rare form of blood cancer. The second, “The Open Window”, has to do with how she saw the world when she was once again at home. Each of these many poems is brief, making a statement, falling into revery.
“The Venetian Blind Poems” get their name from being in hospital where “The grey harbour slips through Venetian slats” and “I invent a sweet soundtrack to match / the harbour stripes” and “the world arrives in skinny bands”. There is the pain of her situation; and the drowsiness and lack of focus that comes with infusions she has to have; and some foods she is given are not really palatable. But in all this she gradually comes to appreciate more language and literature and “Living the moment is my way / of inhabiting the serene Lake of Good Thoughts”. Among other things, she appreciates some of the nurses and staff who look after her. She listens to podcasts of children’s stories. She dreams of plants and flowers and other soothing things; but she does have a “morphine nightmare” and “some days the pain is so / intense, like a clinging dressing / gown..” Yet after much trauma, she can face the day and like it.
“The Open Window” is placed in a very different mood. Here we can “Look at the wildflowers in the long grass / Look at the blue umbrella dripping spring / Look at the green hills and the kereru in the cabbage tree.” We see more clearly what is worth looking at, feeling at, liking at things that make life worth living, especially when we were younger… indeed images of childhood…. Or is this mere a fantasy? There are ideas of climbing mountains and “The mountain sleeps / but soon it will whisper / me awake with comfort chants.” Perhaps this section is dealing with recovery and getting used to the normal, although this is as much revelling in small and even mundane things when “We bake bread and we eat / We breathe and we feel” and “I am thinking after a bone marrow transplant. / I measure the world differently / today I watered the garden for the first time.” Often she refers to New Zealand women she knows who are poets, as she is, and lands where there is “…the sweet Lake of Calm…the rock of Contemplation… the river of Self Awareness… the Ocean of Belonging…”
Could all this be called confessional poetry? Not really. Even though much of this collection deals with very personal things, it looks closely at moods and dreams that are universal and it works towards a sense of calmness, even overcoming prolonged trauma.
