We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
HUNGUS by Amber Esau [Te Herenga Waka
University Press, NZ$30:00] ; LIFTING
THE ISLAND by David Eggleton [published by Red Hen Press, Pasadena, C.A.] $NZ36.79 ; NEW
DAYS FOR OLD – Prose Poems by James Brown [Te Herenga Waka University Press,
NZ$30:00]
I have to admit that I approached Amber Esau’s Hungus
with some trepidation – not because I didn’t like it [it’s great] but because,
as well as being a mere palagi, I am woefully ignorant of Samoan mores
and traditions and also not young enough to understand all the patois that some
younger people now use. Every so often I also had to look at the glossary
at the end, to explain some Samoan
words. But having got used to this I was in the swing. Part of the blurb tells
me that Amber Esau is “a SaMoaRish…
writer from Tamaki Makaurau” – in other words, she has [I think] some
Samoan relatives and some Maori relatives … or have I misinterpreted that? If
so, I’d like somebody to correct me.
First question: what is the Hungus which is
depicted so vividly on the cover [by Katrina Steak]? Is it a violent alien creature or an avatar
of humanity, part of our own moods? The vocabulary refers to the Hungus as
“she”, so maybe Amber Esau is really channelling some extreme thoughts and much
youthful angst. Just a thought. We are
told “her Frankenstein tongues are not quite past the bit where the doctor
says ‘It’s alive!!!’” … but despite the early parts of this
collection, the Hungus itself soon disappears.
Much of this collection has to do with young people
– teenagers and young adults. We are in the area of youngish people jostling in
crowds – presumably in Auckland - and getting
foods from MacDonalds and being smothered by television and gossiping or
working and hanging out. There are ironic jabs at KFC as seen in the poem @Mantis
where a creature is baffled by the way rubbish is thrown about. In this
environment, adolescents are aware of
what cliches are. In a brief, sleek poem Amber Esau tells us [recalling her
adolescence] “To want or wannabe is the only question Shakespeare / and the
Spice Girls were looking to answer. Wanna / say they knew that’s what fia
meant, too. / Sometimes, I want and want / and want so succinctly, / I become a
cliché .” Esau is clear about the power of dreams, and how different the
world looks in the morning. It is made clear in the last of the Hungus: Ulo
Bolos poems “At night, she braids all
her heads so they don’t tangle in her sleep and when she wakes up, her heads
are wild, scraping with fruit flies.”
A similar idea is given to us in the poem Space Cadet, clearly
about a young man, which ends “The man from Mars with lasers in his eyes,
glue from his throat. / He’s the threat every parent uses against their kids./
After too much fuel, he’ll blast the doors in, holding all the exit signs, /
and slur into the crooks of his sharp corners / wondering where his high score went. / In the morning, the man is just a man, while the
space boy is still trying to roll free.” Dreams have
to turn into reality.
In this world, there are inevitably the matters of
sex and sexuality and gender. On the whole Esau is discreet about these
matters, but they are there. And growing
teenagers have their first dealing with drugs in the poem “Quickocrisy”.
There are one-off experiences, including the sheer interest in listening to a
singer in a pub.
But throughout there is an awareness of Samoan
culture and Samoan families.
There are many reflections on the sea and the sky and
ships and shores as seen in Samoa. One of the very best is Night at the
Neptune which is as much protest and fear as it is about beauty if you can
see it. It reads in full “Under a blackboard sky / a plane smears the chalk
/and the stars get confused. / Girl, we are trying to accept all / the patterns
that we share / but someone keeps shooting / metal from the clouds, / fucking
up the water. Isn’t / singing like manu, / chesting like tangata, / tailing like ika, enough / to remind us we
dream / the seams? We massage / the stiches with bone dust, / tuck our feathers
behind / out ears, say, ‘E manaia lava ia’ / and we must need it,eh.”
Dealing with Samoan families in such poems as Relative Power Cuts, we hear the liveliness
and gossip about the things the faifeau’s son [the parson’s son] has been up to. There are a number of poems
about teenagers being mouthy, who would then be told off by nana and other
elders, telling them they were “tautala’titi” – basically meaning cheeky.
There could be cattiness of teenagers as in the poem Don’t Trust Islanders;
not to mention the poem Rainbow’s End, wherein school children are
rivals for attention. There are comments about
the Christian faith as in the poem Holding the Hologram Jesus.
There are also many references to Manaia – a protector and messenger from the
spirit world as in the poem The Uranus Trap.
Esau styles can be many. There are some experimental
works. [Is her The Coaxial Triptych really a poem or more of a game?]
There are prose poems such as the young woman’s quest 2 Puna Idol. There
are many neat brevities, such as Silhouettes which reads in full “It’s
possible to see each other’s pain. / Watch the moana pull back / the frothed
shore, revealing / the glass we might’ve made with the sun / is still sand.”
While some poems are almost cryptic and require careful reading, some of Esau’s poems are very clear, especially the
poem Tasi /Gree, dealing with the killing of baby sharks. And there is
almost a surrealist poem which tells us of family waiting for a dinner in the
restaurant.
When I consider the whole of this collection, I have
to point out that this review covers only some of Hungus, even though I have read it all carefully. It
deals with far more things that I could analyse in one review. It is a very
detailed book. What I am sure of is that Amber Esau has made a great piece of
work, and I see her as balancing carefully Samoan experience and Auckland
experience.
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David Eggleton has become one of New Zealand’s major
poets since the 1970’s and there must be only very few readers of poetry in New
Zealand who have not read some of his works. Eggleton has not only produced
many collections of poetry but he is also known for his essays and his role in
editing and writing for literary magazines. For the record, you may find on
this blog my reviews of some of his collections, such as The Conch Trumpet, Edgeland, The Wilder Years
- Selected Poems, and Respirator. Also – given that the publishers are American - there is a glossary at the end
of Lifting the Island explaining words that might be unfamiliar for
Americans.
Born in Auckland, Eggleton is – says Wikipedia – “of
mixed European, Tongan and Rotuman descent”. What is clear in nearly all
his poetry is his interest in both the New Zealand context and the Pasifika contest.
One blurb describes Lifting the Island as “a kind of lyrical world
map of the South Pacific”. This is true in one way as there are many poems that
are almost romantic. But Eggleton is also ready to deal with the negative
things. Lifting the Island runs to
160 pages of poetry. It is divided into six parts – Lifting the Island, The
Shallows, The Great Wave, The Whale Road, The Wall and
Beacon. First point, while the six parts each has its own view of a particular
place or island, nevertheless many poems are not dealing with any particular place.
Secondly, while I read with great interest all of this collection , there is
simply no way that I can analyse everything that Eggleton has written.
So I will deal solely with some favourites. The opening
poem Lifting the Island presents people at the beach on an island. It is
followed by the poem Flying in Southside, which appears to be presenting
the part of Auckland where his father worked and where Eggleton was very young.
In a variety of poems he gives his idea of, after an all-night party, Albert
Park which is “like an old magnolia’s magnificent candelabrum - / flames of
white flowers which gutter and go out - / life goes on without us in particular”. Or again there is the poem Isthmus which
gives a panorama of Auckland, but not entirely a flattering one. I shuddered at
the line “a concrete hypodermic lit by gamble fever” which seems to me
the most correct depiction of the crass Sky Tower. So there is much of Auckland
to begin with. Later the poem Soundings gives us all the noises [some
delightful, many annoying] that one can hear in a city. As for Tomorrow,
Eggleton writes a list of things about what the future could be, but not in a naïve
way – who knows, good or ban, where the future will go?
Turning to nature there are more natural things, such
as Moonshine; or wherein “Rain brings Fred Astaire’s tap-tap across
the roof, / before a razz of jazz is given tumultuous applause, / the ozone in
the air extinguished like snuff / of golden beeswax melted in candles. / Petulant
petals quiver in crimson. / Rain bodies forth a spectacular earthworm welcome /
from hitherto undistinguished lawn.”
Perfect description. As sound are The Shallows, and The Colour.
The long poem Methusalem is a full panorama as seen from one perspective.
When getting further into the section called The Great
Wave, we reach some way into the mores of Pasifika. The moods of the sea
are all around. Belief in the Pacific does not exactly belittle Christianism
and belief on the island, but it does place it against the majesty of the ocean
itself. In the poem Brightness we get pure description of the best sort.
And speaking of the poem The Great Wave itself there is the torch of a
fable that may have been handed down through the ages by the elders. Read it
for how carefully Eggleton slides into images of a forbear titanically fighting
the currents between New Zealand and more northern Pacific islands.
Odes to Weary Dunlop seems to be interesting and surprising memories of
watching movies at the flicks [often movies about war] when he was a kid.
After all these poems I have so far praised, there
is one poem which I think should be plastered on every N.Z. high-school blackboard
– and be read by adults too. This is The Navigators, a long poem about
the migration in ancient times of Pasifika, colonising the South Pacific. It is
an heroic story in itself, but the main point comes at the end, reminding us
that the seas are now rising, climate-change is here, and some islands are in
peril of being drowned. Quite different
is Explorers, which jokingly deals with how different gods quarrel with
one other and how they see human beings. As for the arts, there are poems about
artists, like Hundert Wasser and Len Lyne’s Wind Wand.
I think it is fair to say that in the section called
The Wall, there is a real tendence to deal with moods and what is more
sombre. But in the section called Beacon, poems like Distant Ophir
and Sunday Songs are a real recall to childhood. Dealing, too, with the
South Island [ Eggleton now lives in Dunedin], there is a detailed and moving poem
about the Christchurch earthquake Quake, 22nd February. And,
in another thoughtful poem that amounts to a work of protest, there is The
Plastisphere, chastising all the plastic junk that is now polluting the seas.
As always, I have done no more than highlighting a
selection of the many poems in this collection. As always, very readable.
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Prose poems are a special art. Baudelaire did it
brilliantly when he wanted to. T.S. Eliot did it occasionally. Others did it
every so often. In New Days for Old, James Brown gives us 185 prose
poems. In this collection, James Brown
is many things. He is a jester, a joker, just a feller looking around, a child
remembering things, and sometimes an adult deliberately acting like a child.
Yes, there are moments of sheer da-da. Yet often enough it adds up to truly
thoughtful ideas. To begin with the obvious, New Days for Old is funny,
very readable, often silly, enjoyable if you take it prose poem by prose poem,
and opens by quoting the words of another writer “Much of the greatest art,
I find, seeks to remind us of the obvious.” Quite so.
Take, for example, the outlook of a child when
dealing with a disabled man. Here it is in full. “We take lasagna round to
John because ‘He’s fallen through the cracks,’ says my mother. That must be why
it’s bad luck to step on them. ‘The
trickle-down theory is a plates of pish-posh, she adds. When we arrive,
John is sword fighting in the air with a cake fork.” [p.11] Is this as seen
through the naivety of a child? Or has there been irony injected by an adult
looking back? The same goes for the passages about school days. And much later
an adult voice sees a child cringing at the awful noises adults can make.
Thus “They were a loquacious people.
Even their ears could talk. I saw a small boy crouched in a corner covering
his, trying to make them stop.”
[p.87]
There are moments of almost perfect joy….but only sometimes, as said here
“A man, beached like a seal in foam,
spoons his flippers through wet sand. Yoga lady salutes the sun. Bookmark woman
prolongs a handstand, her landing strip perfectly balanced. In calm days, you
can breaststroke through the rocky channel, following your shadow over sand and
seaweed. Yes, it is idyllic, but one must return to one’s towel and uniform.”
[p.22]
There
is a both jocular and thoughtful statement which is altogether true, at least
as metaphoric, but deeply ironic. Thus “A
soft-voiced man in a brown suit speaks to Jesus’s offer of salvation, his hands
proffering pamphlets like doves. A young Greenpeace woman with her clipboard. A
man outside KFC claims he was once fried chaffinch. The Earth’s rotation is
caused by our footsteps. If enough people walk in one direction, they can turn
the Earth toward them.” [p.39]. There
are the oddities of people’s behaviour. And there is the loneliness of small
towns, as in “The small town was as quiet as its museum. I walked the rows
of stuffed birds like a general inspecting his troops, each one fixing me with
an angry glass stare….” [p.51]
There are accounts of trying of find work, which may
or may not be true and may or may not be part of his autobiography, such as his
work as being a “Visual Display Artist” [i.e. one of those people who dress up
mannequins for shop-front display]. There is a prose poem which could be true
for many people who have experienced Fiordland [me being one of them]. It reads
in full “ The sandflies came from my lost decade. We stood topless in a
lonely Fiordland shore seeing who could withstand them for the longest. Neither of us
was going anywhere.” [p.69]
There is the perfectly absurd prose poem which tells
what could be the true story of Hansel
and Gretel. And let’s face it, James Brown can play silly games. There is an ongoing joke about babies,
made by adding the word “baby” to the titles of movies. But then he hits you
with things that are all too true. Take this: “The beach is speckled in
summer snow. I walk the tideline pecking at the polystyrene globules. A couple
of other broilers strut past clucking and tutting. ‘Rubbish’ we agree. Every
high tide, all our little chicken come home to roost.” [p.67].
Much to think. Much to laugh. Much good reading.
Footnote: On this blog, you may find my reviews of two there earlier collections
of James Brown’s work. They are The Tip Shop and his earlier Floods
Another Chamber I have to admit that I was
rather too severe in dealing with the latter one.
