We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
“STILL
IS” by Vincent O’Sullivan (Te Herenga Waka University Press $NZ30); “IN THE
HALF LIGHT OF A DYING DAY” by C. K. Stead (Auckland University Press $NZ29:99);
“MEANTIME” by Majella Cullinane (Otago University Press $NZ30); “TAROT” by Jake
Arthur (Te Herenga Waka University Press $NZ25)
Not by design but by happenstance,
three collections on this posting refer to death – Vincent O’Sullivan’s death; the
death of C.K.Stead’s wife Kay; and Magella Cullinane’s loss of her mother… and
even Jake Arthur’s “Tarot” does sometimes refer to death, albeit cryptically.
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New Zealand was deprived of a great poet when Vincent O’Sullivan died,
aged 86, in April of this year. (My tribute to him, Remembering VincentO’Sullivan, can be found on this blog). O’Sullivan was prolific in
his poetry when he wasn’t writing short-stories, novels and non-fiction
biographies. Fortunately, there was one last collection of poetry to be
released posthumously, Still Is. It contains ninety poems,
perhaps because O’Sullivan aspired to reach that age. As always in his
collections of poetry, O’Sullivan does not organise his poems as a series of
themes. His poems are presented in no particular order, and he often makes the
title of a poem part of the poem itself. Given his age, there are naturally reflections
on ageing, and therefore there are also poems calling back the past, including
childhood and adolescence. The first three poems of Still Is consider
vague remembrances of making love (old age recalled); a blind man who can find
his way around (overcoming infirmity); and a refection on gates as they once
were.
Reading this collection, I can’t
help noticing some predominant themes and ideas.
First there is remembrance itself,
tied to the idea of time and of our tendency to misremember events. The ticking
of time is seen in terms of art in the poem “Randomly so, in a gallery” where “Lightens.
Dark comes in. Their grace we go along with, / clocks edging season to
season. / Painters as ever insisting their one belief: / the leaning of
great slabbed light, dark slanting in.” The poem “Last time” begins “It was so different
last time… / There were thrushes. I remember it rained / in buckets. The
tarseal on the drive / crinkled in the torrent. I remember that…” and there
is the persistent idea of how apparently small and apparently insignificant
things can nevertheless be the most remembered things. In remembrance there is occasionally
a reaching back to how forebears were presented to him when O’Sullivan was young. “Slaint” is one of the few poems that deals
with O’Sullivan’s Irish ancestors while “Uninvited twin” also broods on the
fortunes of the Irish who crossed the Atlantic. Inevitably, too, there are
childhood memories with “Grey Lynn Noir” (just avoiding being beaten up by the
local thug), “Bastards, down from the hills” (a very rough boys’ game), “Seven,
yes” (little boy first understanding that “bum” is a rude word… though
grown-ups use it often) and a poem or two referring to attending convent
school. As for early adulthood (when O’Sullivan would have been in his
twenties), the prose poem “To be fair to the Sixties” is about hippie-ish
druggie-ness in the 1960s and suggesting how it was mainly pointless if not
destructive.
As
for old age, there are inevitably reflections on decay. “He comes to mind” considers meeting a solitary old man
and how his stoicism sustains him. “Any
weekday’s likely” basically tells us that all things decay. And there is a more
ironic take on decay with “Catching Lenin’s ear”, about how the
dictator’s preserved body is falling apart.
Speaking
of extreme states of mind, we are presented in a number of poems with how the
brain works. The poem “extras” is halfway
between theatre and halfway a dream when under dental anaesthetic. “Premonition”
combines mental fantasy with suburban unease [it’s in part about spiders];
while “As
few may tell you” is an ironic account of ghosts and how people do or do not
deal with them. Though O’Sullivan was ambiguous about religion, with regard to
his Catholic upbringing he could be amused. He uses the title “This business of
lost belief” not to tell a tale of losing religion, but to tell of missing his
chances with a girl whom he admired when he was a young teenager.
His sometime quirky-ness is found in
“Either isn’t or is” and “Dreamwork” both of which take cats to be arbiters of
life and death – after all, silent cats do appear to be watching and judging us
don’t they? In contrast “Ciao, Norman” is
a brisk but heartfelt elegy for a dog that had to be put down.
These
are just some of the ideas that O’Sullivan dealt with in his last collection.
His
style is various. He could build vivid,
if daunting, scenes, as in “A good place to buy” viz. “The winds hug at the
house till the ribs crack. / The guttering swings loose as a shot arm. / The
sound of shrieking’s in the splitting wood. / The violence you have to accept
before spring / breaks perfect.” He
could be jocular as in “Easy does it, easy” which I take to be an elderly man
accepting that many things which once seemed precious or important but which
now can now be shucked off. I quote it in full: “Dogs on beaches. / Books on
shelves. / A single mirror / For a dozen shelves. / A toy Ned Kelly / A theorem,s
proof / A spinning dolphin / On a garden’s roof. / A wall of photos / Tell a
hundred years, / A funeral’s laughter / A wedding tears. / A life of veerings /
You make out was straight. / Nicely polished granite / And a final date. / Like
hell, we say, / Let’s start again. / The sermon’s over. / The day shines
through rain.”
Then
of course there is O’Sullivan’s ability as a critic. “Confessional as it gets”
politely answers a reviewer who suggested he was out of steam. He confesses: “At
times – yes, I need to say it - / between the sighs of the living and the
vanished / departed, I’ve written jaunty numbers, / turned the wry erotic
lyric, / half a dozen times I’ve persisted, / tasteless even, after dusk…”
But then aren’t such poems necessary to prevent poets from becoming too solemn
about their work? “A gift for drama” notes how much of human interaction as
play-acting… we are like squealing mice. “No choice much, any longer” suggests
there are so many writers now that the same themes are being overworked (all
too true). “So at least we know” sees the broadcast evening news as usurping
communal prayer as “The News an atheist’s variant / on prayer: for what the
day has achieved, / forgive us; from what tomorrow intends, / preserve us; out
of creation’s wreckage, / rise again.” “Life on air, for example” is a
half-jocular, half-mocking of New Zealand radio.
At
a certain point though, O’Sullivan accepts that though we are a special
species, we are still animals. I quote in full his poem “To accept being human”
thus “I give thanks we were cradled in branches, / that we moved on so
surely to hands daubed in caves. / I give thanks to the dragged knuckles / and
the penetrating gaze. I’d be so proud / were Silverback an ancestral name. / I
watch viewers at the rail of the ape enclosure. / I’m at one with ordure
accurately flung.” And he is clearly jocular about the approach of death in
“Nothing too serious, mind you” and “For the obituarist”. These must surely
have been written when O’Sullivan’s was aware that he was dying.
My
apologies for naming and quoting so many of O’Sullivan’s poems but, believe me,
I have quoted less than a third of the ninety. Certainly a man of many
interests. As for the title “Still Is”, I can only see the defiance of a man
who accepts that the world is as it is. There is often a bluntness in O’Sullivan’s
poetry, but it is refreshing when put up against the preciosity of many poets,
too eager to show off their erudition.
*. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *.
* *. *. *. *. *. *. *
In a preface to In the Half Light of a Dying Day, Karl Stead,
now in his 92nd year, reminds us that he had written poems inspired
by Catullus in earlier collections, one being “The Clodian Songbook”. In the age of Julius Caesar, Catullus wrote many
love poems – or poems of rebuke and annoyance – to a woman whom he called
Lesbia. This woman is now generally understood by Latinists to have been Clodia
Metelli, wife of a powerful general and official. Avoiding the name Lesbia,
Stead uses the name Clodia for the alluring and fickle woman of many moods.
However, in these poems Stead himself takes the role of Catullus. Catullus is a means of
talking about the present as much as the past. In the second part of this
collection, Stead creates a new character
called Kezia, a name used in some of Katherine Mansfield’s stories. If Catullus is Karl Stead, then Kezia is Kay,
Stead’s wife of seventy years, who died in July of last year. While the first
part of In the Half Light of a Dying Day deals with many different
ideas, the second part is focused on the drawn-out illness and final death of
Kay, becoming a long and moving elegy. All these poems were written in 2023.
Part
One is “The Clodian Songbook [Continued]” which begins with a
general invocation, then turns to “History”, an account of the precarious times
in which Catullus lived, invited to a banquet with Julius Caesar when he had
written smutty poems about Caesar’s circle and could have been killed for it.
But while others were killed for mocking, and Caesar himself was killed,
Catullus’s main punishment was to be unknown for centuries. Catullus died when
he was thirty, and only the “silence of the grave / and with the passage of
so many centuries / your words and your wit would / find their way home.”
With “The Farm” Stead injects New Zealand images and “Moreporks”
into a story of Stead /Catullus as a boy. Kevin Ireland is addressed as the
Roman poet Licinius in a “shape poem” that welcomes him as a comrade. But in
another “shape poem” Stead takes a crack at James K. Baxter as “Hemi
/ shaggy and barefoot / he was your Diogenes / full of contempt for your wants
and your wages / and with a wisdom not all his own - / traditional, Catholic /
not entirely to be sneezed at / but for Catullus / retrograde / masculist / at
once flashy and necromantic / belonging to a past / best left behind.” He
concludes “Catullus envied your fluency / Jim / but thought you might have
put it / to better use.” There are poems that seem to be aimed at an
in-crowd which would not be understood by us outsiders. “Creative writing
class?” appears to be about a rupture between poets, but who were they?
“Uncertainty” has young Stead/Catullus at a bohemian gathering trying to guess
“who among us is fucking whom”. There is an apocalyptic piece
about the “World’s End”, though without being hysterical and “The good man in
love” wherein Catullus pleads with the gods that he be shorn of any love for
Clodia given that she was untruthful, unfaithful to him… and yet he still can’t
break away from her. Now that is a theme that is brushed earlier in a version
of Catullus’s famous epigram “Odi et Amo” – “I hate and I love” - still attracted to Lesbia [Clodia] but
still appalled by her. [For the record, and standing outside Stead’s poetry,
I note that in full Catullus’s epigram reads “Odi et amo, quare id faciam,
fortasse requires? nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior”. The best
translation I have ever seen is in James Michie’s translation of all Catullus’s
work, thus “I hate and I love. If you ask me to explain / The contradiction,
/ I can’t, but I can feel it, and the pain / Is crucifixion.” ] How
much do Stead’s Catullus poems refer to his love life? I’m in no position to
know.
Part
Two “Catullus and Kezia” is very personal in its presentation and
therefore difficult for an outsider to discuss fairly. Stead opens with “Home”,
in which old man and old woman are no longer travelling “no more travel for
them…/…old age has taught them / to love what they have / this green enclave
where flowers and fruit flourish / where tui and blackbird, / pigeon, sparrow
and thrush / build / and teach their young to fly”. Perhaps this is an
idealised version of the Steads’ Parnell home, but it leads into happy memories
when husband and wife were young. “Language again” gives a [possibly] idealised
version of their first love-making. But the sickness of Kay is looming.
“Modern Miracles” is an ironic title as the poem
concerns the way modern airlines could whisk the Stead’s younger daughter back
from London when Kay’s health was declining. Starting with the poem “Free will”,
the couple do some intense thinking about their lives. Karl’s wife of seventy
years says she chose to stay with him, despite all their ups and downs…
They consider photos of themselves when they were young… and how her absence
from public places is now being noticed by friends… and the importance of her
reading. But the physical decay is relentless. The poem “Pain” considers “the
gods” who are silent while Catullus / Karl tries to ease the pain of Keyzia / Kay by rubbing
her back “she panting, shivering, sweating / seeming so small so shrunken
and depleted / and still so loved.”… And finally in “Sorry”, the tragic
moment comes when Kay dies beside Karl in their bed. “You kissed her cheek / Catullus / and told her
you were sorry / and wept. / She would have wept to see you weeping / but could
not / did not know they were your tears / falling on her face / did not know
anything / anymore / who had known so much.”
There
is the long aftermath. In “The science” he longs for, but cannot embrace, the
idea that there is something after death. Then there are reveries: In “Gallia”
he remembers the pleasure of being together with Kay in southern France; and
Paris. There are briefer poems almost nearing the epigrams of [the real]
Catullus - “The plum tree”, about life still going on when he is still
alive (and now wearing a Medic Alert).
With “A Beginning” he remembers when they had their first child, in the early
1960s. The poem “Now more than ever seems it rich” picks up on John
Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale”. Keats continues “Now more than ever seems it rich to die, / To cease upon the midnight with no
pain, / While thou art pouring forth thy
soul abroad / In such an ecstasy! / Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in
vain— / To thy high requiem become a sod.” Catullus
recalls Kezia calling for this poem and weeping at the beauty of it… but Keats’
harsh word “sod” suggests immediately the finality of death. “The wound”
appears to refer to the poet’s love life and his wife’s reaction to it. Kezia
says that Catullus’s poems about Clodia “had to be written / because of your
deplorable / romantic ego / and the wound it had sustained”. Of course there are other
interests that intrigue – “The Story?” suggests that high culture as we know it
is collapsing ; “The puzzle” has him recalling his childhood and how very
different Auckland then was; “Catullus demonstrates a vulgar taste” when he
watches on his own, and thoroughly enjoys, the old song-and-dance movie “Singing
in the Rain” (and so he should, dammit). And inevitably “After death” is the
closing poem. The final words are “in the half
light of a dying day”.
I have to close with the
most obvious words – the “Catullus and Kezia” sequence of this
collection is by far the more engaging, and I would also suggest the more
heartfelt, of the two sequences. It is a genuine elegy and it would have taken
great devotion to write it.
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Back in 2018, I had the great pleasure of reviewing Majella Cullinane’s
debut poetry collection Whisper of a Crow’s Wing (reviewed - all too
briefly – on this blog
). Irish-born and raised but now New Zealander, Cullinane’s style was described
by me thus: “It combines a romantic sensibility with a modernist
sharpness.” Cullinane dealt with Irish old times and emigration and her own
Irishness, all with an excellent sense of time, place and perspective. In
Meantime, she has a much more testing perspective to deal with. I take the collection’s
title to have a double meaning – “meantime” usually means filling in time; but
here the time really is mean. When Covid 19 was shutting New Zealand down, and
travel was restricted, Cullinane’s mother, far away in Ireland, was succumbing
to dementia. Even by long-distance phone calls, Cullinane had great difficulty
talking to her mother who became more incoherent as her dementia increased.
Cullinane charts this trying and
tragic situations in three parts.
Part
One “Am I still here?” begins with the poem “This is not my room” – the
poet’s mother refusing to stay in the hospital that is caring for her and
already confused as to whether she is still at home. The mother is also very
much aware of a world beyond this earthly world – a mixture of Christianity and
folklore. In “The believer” she shows her awareness of the dead [as told by the
daughter]: “They’ve been calling you more of late. They, who can’t be seen
or verified. / For a believer, it’s hard to ignore the dead, or that other
world / most can scarcely reckon with, the one you’re so certain of.” In various poems, the mother imagines noises
in the hospital. She thinks of supernatural beings. She is sure a French angel
is visiting her… and she has forgotten her wedding day. But we are aware that
we are seeing all this through the eyes of the daughter, far away in New
Zealand. It is the daughter [the poet] who has to imagine her mother’s
reactions in “If the walls could speak.” And then we come to the definitive point,
“The long goodbye”: “They call what’s
happening the long goodbye - / the
disease that each day snatches parts of you / and scatters them about, until
you can’t find them, / until you don’t remember losing them.” This is the
painful process which every carer knows – the time when it is clear, in the
patient’s loss of memory and inability to do routine things, that dementia is
irreversible.
Part
Two “Meantime” has the daughter coping with her mother’s death and also
her sense of guilt that she has not been able to attend her mother’s funeral.
When the mother has lost communication, the daughter delves back to childhood
and the family’s rituals. The poem “The wedding ring” reads in full
“My sister removed your grandmother’s wedding ring, gripped / your calloused
palm, took your cold hand in hers, / the same hands that held us, the arthritic
fingers / that once kneaded bread, the long fingers that never glided / across
a piano keyboard, never strummed the strings of a guitar.” “Virtual
funeral” forces the daughter having to guess what her mother’s funeral was
like, as she is torn by her absence on the other side of the world: “On the
morning of your burial, it’s late evening here. / Everyone’s in bed, the house
is quiet. / I’m in the sitting room, lying on the couch / waiting for the call
from my sister. / She tells me she feels better now that you are safe.” In
“Meantime” she still has a sense of guilt for her
absence “I would compress seas and oceans, turn hemispheres upside down / to
believe what has happened has not happened…. /… I try not to think of you in
the spring-churned earth, far away so cold in there so cold.” She creates poetry inspired
by Dante, especially “Make no sound” has her questioning “why are we in
purgatory? Wasn’t her mind purged enough?”. She experiences the huge sense of loss as she sees momentarily a
woman looking like her deceased mother.
Part
Three “Nowhere to be” finally brings some sorts of closure. There is in
this last section, the long-term regret, remembering mother (and father in the
poem “Widower”) and their Irish home… even if the poet is triggered by things
she sees in New Zealand. She has many dreams of her mother, now seen in her
mind as younger than she was in the end. The daughter remembers in detail some
of her mother’s skills, such as making bread. The poem “All Souls” is halfway
to belief in the traditional All Souls (remembrance of the dead); and
“Something to say” has the poet, who rejected her mother’s beliefs and
religion, now understanding their power more. “Stay here” has her calmed by
nature, by walks… and all the time wishing her mother was with her: “Could I
tell you the cat followed me to the shops / but I didn’t notice until I met her
on the train tracks / as I was coming home? You would have laughed. / Could I
tell you I wish you could see this sky? / We could sit on the deck. / Ignore
the overgrown clematis – I’m not much of a gardener. / I wish I could speak to
you / but I don’t understand the language of the dead.” In a sort of coda,
she visits the Old Country and says goodbye to her mother’s grave.
I
apologise for this half-baked excuse for a review. As you will have noticed,
all I have done is to give you an account of Majella Cullinane’s ordeal, presented in three segments – mother’s
infirmity and mental decline ; mother’s collapse and death ; daughter’s regrets
and conciliation with memories and the present. What I have not dwelt on is the
clarity of Majella Cullinane’s style. Regrettably, clarity is a rare virtue in much
current poetry. Cullinane’s style is
lyrical when it has to be, straightforward when it has to be, and always fully
aware that there are many different but valid ways of embracing this world and
what might be beyond it. Meantime hangs together as one coherent
statement and proves Cullinane’s outstanding skill as a poet.
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Last year (2023) Jake Arthur
produced a brilliant debut with a collection of poetry called A Lack of GoodSons (reviewed on this blog). It dealt with many
psychological states, often referring to chronic mental discomfort. Though
mainly written in the first person, it was not necessarily confessional.
Arthur’s new collection Tarot often deals with some of these same ideas,
but the approach is very different. The opening quotes Hamlet: “What
should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven?” - which is
virtually a cry of despair, a man’s horror at the state of things and the
crushing littleness of the self.
This time, the conceit (presented in
the opening poem “Querent 1”) is that a Tarot reader is reading the cards to a
callow listener who is apparently male. Given the Tarot cards, there is in what
follows much symbolism, the imagery sometimes tending to the medieval. The title
of every poem is connected to a Tarot image - “Knight of Swords”, “Seven of
Cups”, “The Wand” etc. I do not know how seriously Jake Arthur takes the Tarot,
but it is at least a framework in which conditions and states of mind can be examined.
And one idea that is examined frequently is the nature of the sexes, and the
friction between male and female. Male and female both speak through the cards.
“The Spell” appears to be concerned with ambiguity about sex or gender. “His
Mien” begins “No accounting her taste / For hangdog men, weak / of chin and
short of smiles, / Not so much brooding as broken, / And if he’s good in the
bedroom / No one wants to imagine it.” This is at least a sad perspective
on ageing, but it introduces the idea of women as domineering. “Rest and
Recreation” has a dominant woman sexually using a man and having somewhat
patronising ideas about him. In “Play-time” a distraught woman appears to be
planning arson.
Is this misogyny? Probably not, for these poems could also be
read legitimately as a young male groping to understand the nature of women.
And there are some poems, such as “Mater familias”, in which a mother is
celebrated, even if in a wry way. “Her Caller” and “Salt” appear to be
childhood memories.
As for the male, there is much
admiration. “Lost bantam”, the longest poem in the collection, begins as a
story of being shipwrecked and washed ashore on a desert island, but morphs
into a tale of gay desire. “Goose” is the most overtly gay poem in the
collection, while “Tagus”, a poem about Alexander the Great, suggests masculine
comradeship which is much more than just virile.
It’s
important to note that while Jake Arthur is concerned with the sexes, he also
has many other interests. “Life Hack”, pessimistic in the face of ecological collapse, he suggests it might be
best for us to get used to it and again lived simply as our mediaeval peasant
ancestors did. “Re-gifted” is perhaps the most desperate poem, about an
over-intelligent kid who grows up to find his intelligence means nothing. Grown
up, the kid says “I was one of those children / That keeps the word precocious
alive, / Smart but with a maturity disorder. / I was one of those children /
That thinks factoids as good as cash / At the bank of adult approval.”
“Lessons” deals in a jaded way with those awkward evenings where teacher meets
parents – but the scene it paints is very accurate. And then there is his most
self-examining poem “Palanquin” which declares: “I am one unlikely
receptacle / making space for desire… /… All mornings I wake / To the despotic
myth called me… /… I’m my secret favourite, / I am in love with my agency the
most, / My desire the most, my smoke the most, / Most my myth, most my inward
boom.” Is this about a young man growing up or simply narcissistic? Is it a
fantasy? At the very least it is about growing into oneself, even if it often
means “crawling between earth and heaven”.
The closing poem “Querent 2” has the
Tarot card reader saying she has misread her reading. She also says “I’m not
making fun. Read right and / You will kill your mother’s voice. / You will make
love to your father’s / Memory, and so be very happy.” Interpret this as
you will but note that, like the Greek Sibyl, what the card reader says could
be at best ambiguous and at worst false. It appears to be allowing the young
man to reject women and feminine ways. A rather Freudian conclusion.
There is an ongoing puzzle in this
collection. Who exactly is being interrogated or speaking in the cards? One
person or many? I admit that I find some poems in this collection to be cryptic
and often difficult to decode. Not that this deflates Arthur’s achievement.
