Somethiing New

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

THE INTERVIEW ROSE by Elizabeth Smither (Auckland University Press, $NZ 24.99); BLUE IS A CRACKED VASE IN MEMORY: POEMS 2000 – 2025 by Riemke Ensing (Cold Hub Press, $NZ33:00); THE GUM TREES OF KERIKERI by Lynn Jenner (Otago University Press, $NZ30); PEACE & QUIET by Dinah Hawken (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $NZ25)

            It is an interesting fact that both Elizabeth Smither and Riemke Ensing, well known poets, are both now in their 80’s. But while their interests are very different,  they are both still producing some of the best poems New Zealand has. I start with Elizabeth Smither.

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To call Elizabeth Smither erudite would be an understatement. As well as writing six novels and six collections of short-stories, she has produced 19 collections of poetry. The Interview Rose is her 20^th collection. Reading widely, Smither’s knowledge of literature is connected to the fact that she has worked as a part-time librarian. The title poem of this collection The Interview Rose has her facing “The week of interviews, twenty minutes each / to face a panel for my disappearing job…” But she is buoyed by the bright rose-coloured hat she is wearing. Next to this poem, there is The Interview Confession, concerning the problems of having to deal with “a difficult borrower” complaining about a book. Six of her poems deal with women in novels by Jane Austen, not always seeing them as honourable people. And then, as often, there comes her interest in Catholicism. Thus there are such poems as The Travelling Reliquary of St. Teresa of Avila , A Room of Madonnas, The Angel of Death, and In the Sacred Heart College Library (where girls are praying). But if this intimidates you, Smither does not at all preach. She is interested in the aesthetic side of religious ceremonies, the colour, the style.

More important than all this, Smither’s poetry is compassionate. There is no anger. There is no asking us to join a cause. Instead there is an acute way of telling us about how important everyday things are. Take the poem De-Stringing Beans, a poem about the homely thing of taking pleasure in stringing and slicing runner beans. Is this a small thing? But surely every-day things can be an achievement.  And in the last poem of these 49 poems, there is Mark Doty: a footnote, about a well-known poet who showed that he could take as much pleasure in football as in poetry. Nothing snobbery there.

Compassion goes to animals and nature itself. Her opening poems in this collection has her considering a frog that is struggling, the death of a fish on the beach, and cows listening to music… and later daisies bearing up in the rain. But all is not tragedy. Elizabeth Smither is obviously an ailurophile as many poets have been [check your Baudelaire, T.S.Eliot etc.]. Thus we have her The Cat and the Wittgenstein Quotes, wherein we are given both an amusing tale and some hardy philosophy. Thus when the cat has “an hour in the sun and then a leap leaving /  some words scrunched. Where of one / cannot speak, there of one must be silent. / Such simplicity to a cat who will not leap / onto a chair and then the carpet until / something better offers…” Ah! the fickleness of cats. And right next to it there is the poem 100 Brushes of a Cat, showing how wonderful and luxuriant the coating of a well-kept cat is. Be it noted too that the poem Degas and the Dancers shows Smither’s interest in movement itself.

But after I have noticed all these fine poems, there is one that stands out for me. This is Love at the Gare de Nord. I mentioned the thread of compassion that runs through Smither’s work, but this poem caps them. The poet sees a messy couple, dirty and shunned, sitting on the steps, annoying… but when she sees them embrace and kiss, she understands  that they have the right to love and live too. Sentimental? Not at all. Read the poem and you will see what I mean.   

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            Riemke Ensing’s collection called Blue is a Cracked Vase in the Memory / Poems 2000 – 2025 is made up of four parts. The first three, called Storm Warning, O Lucky Man and If Only, were published in limited editions by a craft publisher and hence were not widely seen. They make up almost half of  Poems 2000 – 2025. However the fourth part Blue is a Cracked Vase in the Memory takes up more than half of the collection, so we now have all Ensing’s more recent work.

Over the years, whenever I read the poetry of Riemke Ensing, I immediately have in my mind an image of her as a woman walking along a beach – any long beach in New Zealand, like Muriwai – and looking out to sea, enjoying the view but also seeing a sort of magic and reading much in the sea and the sky. Perhaps she is thinking about how far she is from the Netherlands whence she came when she was a girl. There is, in some of her poems, a thread of loss. But note there is also, in the very first poem in this collection, a sense that there is a greater force than nature to guide us. Says her poem Muriwai “Wind brushed / water washed / the sand / grained with signatures of gulls / temporary as moments / flicking their feet into the sky / waiting for gusts/…../ spirits wail and leave in the sand / a watermark. At the water’s edge / gods breath the lifted wave into song.” Naturally, as one who is interested in nature, she also writes about places other than beaches, as in her Waitakere River Valley, or in her poem Lament looking at Lake Kawaupaku. In full it reads “Hills hunker down and slide / into the belly of lake cradling sites / ancient as wings finding no resting / place in the remembered past. / Silver slips into clouds / shivering through water, / stroking out landscapes / buried in sorrow and loss.” And she is also enchanted by trees.  Her Fourteen Ways of Looking at Pohutukawa is following Wallace Stevens’s Thirteen ways of Looking at a Blackbird.

By the way, it is fair to say that some of her shorter poems are as crisp and short as haiku, but they are not haiku. Much later, for example, there is After Loss which reads in full “Storm windows / are put up / for winter. / The light / mourns / then finds itself / in the moon / touching / the lamp.” Or later there is Top of the Morning reading in full “A dress of bright flowers / almost flies across the street. / An instantly uplifting poem / quickly disappearing into the bustle of day. / Carpe diem.”

But what of sorrow and loss? She has two poems sitting side-by side called War- Childhood and War-Biography which apparently could have to do with her childhood in the Netherlands… or any other child who had to go through a war. In a different sort of sorrow there is Pretending to be in Paris without You.  And much better there is Birds, rain & plum, which opens with the stanza “ It is winter. Rain insinuates itself / in the damp corners of the house, / tries to get in covers of books / standing a little listless in the depressed grey / the sky has cast into the room” But the real sorrow comes in the next line which is  “It is many years since your death….”

 

Ensing does not usually deal with protesting, but she does record one example of miscarriage of justice, in “Out of Dark” where she recalls the incarceration of Ahmed Zaoui; and in “A Piece of Glass” she joins the protesters against the building of yet another jail.

 Having noted all that, two of Ensing’s greatest interests are painters and other poets. Very carefully, she writes poems about poets, from Baxter to Charles Brasch to Hone Tuwhare to many, many others; and from Tony Fomison and Don Binney and many, many other painters.

In writing all this, I have dealt with only a small part of Riemke Ensing’s Blue is a Cracked Vase in the Memory / Poems 2000 – 2025. I have read every poem, but if I were to examine in detail every poem, I would be filling many more pages.

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            Lynn Jenner lives in the Far North of New Zealand, now an old woman,  and she opens her 56 prose poems with these words: “The land I live on was a kauri forest for centuries; then in the late nineteenth century it was a kauri gumfield, then a mandarin orchard; part of a dairy farm in the 1950s, a tamarillo orchard in the 1970s, and a lavender farm in the 1980s: now it is a home for four people, lots of ornamental trees, a vegetable garden, two old plum trees, travellers from New Zealand and other countries….”  Immediately she is reminding us that land changes and people use and re-use the earth in many ways. She is in no way chastising our ancestors for doing so. At the same time, she is very concerned about nature. In another poem she writes of a farmer who has moved to planting trees. He no longer herds sheep because wool now does not make a profit. In another poem she identifies with the trees where she writes  “In spring the poplar trees in the Ness Road have soft new leaves; I stop walking and listen to them gossiping.” Surely every sensitive reader would respond in the same way. In yet another poem she sees leaves as fabric, thus: “Walking up through the Hongi Hika reserve from Kororipo Pa is peaceful and cool. Red and yellow gum leaves cover the path and I picture them as a fabric…”

            But while her interest in nature is important, she has many other interests as well. In various poems… She takes part in a “Free Palestine” protest. When in a line where the police are doing their breath-tester, she wonders about that blood-red tattoo which one of the police has. She meditates over her great-grandfather who came to New Zealand from Poland in the 19^th century, and as a result his legacy was about 420 descendants. She is clear in her feminism and she pleasures as women do, saying “Standing on the grass in my tee-shirt, I am part of a long chain of women drawn to the moon. I bathe in the cools silver light, my skin pleasure and my night wonder.” Twice she writes poems about paintings by Colin McCahon, in each time given her of interpretations  of his work. In this, one understands that she is an atheist, but she still has her beliefs. And she speaks of climate change when “ People talk about the degradation of the earth, but mostly they do not spell what they see coming so as not to scare the rest of us..” She hopes for peace, and looking at doves she says “And now, with the sun on my face, I think these six doves on the lawn in Kerikeri might be an omen of peace somewhere peace is needed. Sun and doves against monsters and tanks.” One always hopes. The Gum Trees of Kerikeri is a thoughtful collection, touching on many interests.

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Peace & Quiet readily shows us that Dinah Hawken can produce very persuasive images, showing us the glory of sea and general nature while at the same time warning us that evil might come our way. Take for example one of best poems “Trembling” which reads in full “A spring morning and you can see the wind / has no bravado. Over the island / a winged cloud moves towards you / out of a truly sweet blue. / Surrounded by gentleness, the swoop of a tui, / the repressed threat of a warming world. / From the sidelines a leafiness arises / and it trembles. It’s like standing / under the outdoor shower / with the sound of a piano paying upon / your stiff, wingless body.” Notice how we move from “truly sweet blue” to “the repressed threat of a warming world”.

Peace & Quiet is divided into three sections.

Brief Scenes comes first. It presents us with an island [perhaps meaning us] is being overwhelmed  by the tide and the ocean, though it is still majestic. The poem The assessment asks “What if there is nothing wrong? / What if there is nothing wrong with you? / What if there is nothing wrong with me: /  I’m not even too quiet, / too old, too forgetful? / Just old, quiet and forgetful.” Is there a sense of desperation here? Yet there are some things that are positive. The poem Each side says “Care for the children, he said, / care for them with both hands, / one each side of each small head, / their trusting and trustworthy eyes / looking up at you.” Perhaps humanity will continue as suggested. But there is hanging a sense of menace. What is it?

Next comes Speaking of Peace. Dinah Hawken is a pacifist and she writes in detail of a possible war. Part of the poem Solar says “Dark clouds wipe out / the highest peak of the island. / The wings of tyranny and downpour / hover over the global landscape…” Who could she possibly be thinking about?  She quotes from Mozi (c. 470 – 391 BC) who said “To kill one man is to be guilty of a capital crime, to kill ten men is to increase the guilt ten-fold,…  The rulers of the earth all recognise and yet when it comes to the greatest crime – waging war on another state – they praise it.” So in many poems she refers to Te Whiti and Parihaka  and she quotes Simone Weil and Siegfried Sassoon and Archibald Baxter and Gandhi and Rebecca Solnit and other worthies who opposed war.

Finally comes Brief Scenes where the poem October morning tells us “We are a slip of a country in a vast ocean. / The laws of war were a safeguard. / A lighthouse and its light.” How fragile we really are when it comes not only to the polluting of the sea, but also to the fact that New Zealand is a small country and one that cannot really save itself from the aggreson of other greaer nations.

In her final (and longest) poem she says “… there is singing / birds and breeze and laughter: and / even though we have weapons / of mass destruction    even though / we are filling the oceans with poisons and plastic / even though out long-held agreements are breaking up like sae ice / two hands play the cello    and / can you believe it        all is well:       / still we welcome / each newborn child into this rare world…”

            There is much idealism in these poems and much to be admired.    

Something Old

   Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published year or two ago. 

“SOUS LE SOLEIL DE SATAN” by GEORGES BERNANOS (first published 1926). English version first published in 1940 as “STAR OF SATAN”, translated by Pamela Morris.

 

            There is a strong possibility that English-speaking readers have not come across the works of Georges Bernanos, so please forgive me if I give you a basic idea of who he was… and I’m partly writing this because I am determined to read all his novels and I will be reviewing them all on this blog. So watch out for the next four months.

Georges Bernanos (born 1888 – died 1948) was a devout Catholic. As a young man he fought in both Verdun and the Somme in the First World War. He was appalled by the carnage and like many others he knew the evil of war. He was a Royalist, meaning he was one of those extreme conservatives who wanted to restore the King and abolish the French Republic. In the 1920s he joined Charles Maurras’s Action Francaise, but he left it as soon as Pope XI criticised Action Francaise severely for being too extreme, too involved with politics, and ignoring charity. During the Spanish Civil War, Bernanos at first thought Franco was right in staging his coup and uprising. But Bernanos changed his views radically, especially when one of his sons – who was in Majorca – had seen members of the Falange shooting unarmed civilians. Bernanos looked deeply into the matter, read as much as he could, and concluded that Franco was allowing barbarism to take over. So in 1938 he produced a non-fiction book called Les Grands Cimetieres Sous La Lune [meaning something like Thousands are Buried in Cemeteries Under the Moon]. Only later was it published in English under the name A Diary of My Times. He was strictly opposed to both Fascism and  Naziism as well as Communism. Later he was to write essays on the necessity of both freedom and  democracy. But of course he was always a devout Catholic. In the late 1930’s, he was so concerned with the rise of Nazism, that he moved from France to Brazil with his whole family – wife, three daughters and three sons - and he lived there until returning to France in 1946 where he lived until he died in 1948. Two of his sons fought in the Second World War. By then, his novels were regarded by many in France as classics. And so to his first novel…. Sous le Soleil de Satan (Star of Satan… which has also been translated as Under the Sun of Satan). 

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            The novel is divided into three parts, quite distinct in tones.  The first is called The Story of Mouchette.  It is set in the mid-19^th century in Artois, and in a small town. Germaine Malorthy is 16 years old. She seems to be a loner, or at least her parents have not seen her being with other young people. “ Sometimes Madame Malorthy deplored the fact that their daughter had no friends, and seldom went outside the small garden with its dreary, clipped yews.” [Pg. 21] Her father, a brewer, is often an angry man. He discovers that Germaine is pregnant. She refuses to say who had impregnated her but her father guesses it was the wealthy, and raffish, Marquis le Cadignan, and he is right. So he confronts the Marquis saying that he should marry her. The Marquis admits that he had slept with her but it was common knowledge that she had had other bedfellows. The Marquis says he will pay him and surely it would be best for the girl to marry a boy nearer her age – and besides, the Marquis is of a higher class. It was the Marquis who had given Germaine the frivolous nick-name Mouchette. Raging, the father goes home and tells Germaine to stay in her room, for she really is Mouchette, looking for excitement and sex.

            But in the night Mouchette runs away, in her night clothes, and she too confronts the Marquis. They have a very long conversation. She does not ask him for pity and does not beg him to marry her, but she – a wild adolescent - does suggest he should give her enough money to go to Paris and set herself up there. With all manner of suave reasoning, the sophisticated Marquis fends her off, but she is remarkably loquacious. And she has at least a spark of honour and self-respect. There is a long tussle between the two. Finally she picks up one of the Marquis’s firearms and shoots him dead. So she is now a murderer. The narrator [Georges Bernanos] remarks “ He who fancies he can follow the capricious trail of passion – passion mightier and more elusive than lightning – and prides himself on his acute observation, often knows nothing of humankind beyond his own solitary contortions in a mirror.” [ Pg. 39] 

The night is still dark [where all angry ideas bubble up] and the light of the small town’s only doctor is still shining. Dr. Gallet is a sort of charlatan, claims to know more than he does. She wants his help. Where should she go? Who can help her? He is not much help. At one point the matter of abortion [not that that word is used; and besides, then abortion was both difficult and illegal] but it is not possible. The doctor begins to talk about psychology and asks about her moods and feelings. Mouchette says “ Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, all alone in my room, with that fat old fool snoring away a few yards off, and I get out of bed. Everybody condemns me, and I can’t say why, and I don’t care. I get up and listen, and feel strong and slim , and my breasts just fit into the palms of my hands. I go to the open window as if somebody was calling me from outside, I’m waiting and ready. And there isn’t just one there isn’t just one voice calling, you know. There are hundreds, thousands. Men are just babies, really, full of wickedness, but they are only babbies. You see, I feel the thing calling me – only I don’t know where it is  - but somewhere, in the rustling night, there’s another, there’s always another calling me… another enjoying me and feeding his vanity – man or beast. You think I’m mad! I am mad! Is it a man or a beast holding me, holding me tight, you horrible darling?”

After the doctor tells her she has a form of insanity “Terrific rage was beating in her breast, but she stifled it. The flames of her thwarted pride were consuming all that was left in her of wild and pitiless adolescence. In that instant she became aware of the indomitable hearts and cold calculating intelligence of a woman, the tragic counterpart of the child she had once been” [Pg.74] The doctor was able to speak with others, made it clear that Mouchette had committed murder, and because she was both a minor and unbalanced she was sent to a “nursing home”… and “A month later she came out completely cured, after  the premature birth of a stillborn child.” [Pg.79]

And that may seem a complete novel… but it’s nothing of the sort and only one third of the novel. The second part is called The Temptation of Despair and we are in a completely different environment. Two aging priests, Father Demange  and Father Menou-Segrais are discussing the problem about a young, fragile and naïve priest Father Donissan. He is just out of the seminary and he is not ready to deal with a small congregation, mainly simple people in a rural eria – in other words peasants. He is to be the Cure of Lumbres. Later, speaking to his superior Father Menou-Segrais, Father Donissan says that he is not cut out for “parochial work” declaring “it is beyond me altogether. My superior thought so, and so do you, I know. In a place like this I would do more harm than good. The lowest peasant in the parish would be ashamed of a priest like me, without experience or knowledge or dignity. However hard I try, how can I hope to make up for it?” [Pg. 97] Father Donissan mortifies himself [punishes himself]. He regularly whips himself, leaving blood all over his back. Father Menou-Segrais is appalled when he learns this, saying it is a barbarous thing to do. Father Donissan is humbled, saying he is not worthy of helping and careing people, but Father Menou-Segrais  says that he has real and worthy work ahead of him, God’s work. So Father Donissan becomes a hard working priest, doing his rounds in a spread-out area, visiting his mainly peasant congregation. Some of what should be his congregation are sceptical, but even they listen to him with respect. He comes to enjoy his work, even if it means trudging long distances. Yet there is an element of pride in his work. Is his pride a sort of sin?  The narrator [Bernanos] notes “Father Donissan  let fall by chance, many years later, which shows a strange light on this obscure period of his life. ‘When I was young’ he admitted, ‘ I did not know evil. I only learned to know it from sinners themselves.” [ Pg.114] At the same time he sees himself as a sinner, enjoying his work. And he thought “This causeless joy can only be illusory. Such a secret hope, suddenly born, in the deepest, most intimate part of his being – an indefinite joy without an object – it is all too like the presumption of pride. No! The stirrings or grace have none of this sensual attraction. This joy must be plucked out by the roots.”  [Pg. 123]. And he falls back to chastising himself. “ His mind , numbed as it were by the intensity of physical pains, had only one vague thought – to reach and destroy the very principle of evil in his own intolerable flesh.”  [Pg. 125]

The great crisis comes when he takes a very long walk, many miles, and then he realises that he will have to walk all the way back and he might be late when he should be saying Mass. He gets lost in the forest and the night is dark. Which road should he take? Suddenly an obliging horse-dealer joins him and tells him which is the right road. At first the  horse-dealer speaks with him in an amicable way, suggesting that he can find him bed and warmth in the dark night. But then the horse-dealer begins to ridicule both the Church and God… and the priest realises that the horse-dealer is in fact Satan…. And, dear reader, at this point you are probably thinking that this is a foolish fable. But there is a twist in it. For in one moment Satan presents himself as the Priest … and then he vanishes. Father Donissan realises that there is evil within us.

[And here I break off my synopsis to give an opinion. Bernanos is making it clear that in all of us there is the potential to do evil. This does not mean that we are all cursed and horrible sinners, but it does mean that we are all capable of hurting others, doing negative things, deluding ourselves about what we have done and frankly anything that can be called evil, from murder, rape, torture and genocide; to lying and cheating and things that might seem trivial but belittle other people. We are all the same species. I add that the works of William Golding [nearly all Golding’s novels I have reviewed on this blog] are essentially saying the same thing. We are all flawed – or what Christians would call Original Sin. But I digress… so back to the novel.]

As he continues his journey he meets a quarryman coming home from his work. An ordinary man, not pretentious, obviously one who does hard work. He talks with the priest, talks about his family, and guides the priest to the right road. Father Donissan thanks him and thinks for a moment that he has seen a miracle – the goodness of the ordinary man. But his journey is far from over… for at last he meets Germaine Malorthy, that is Mouchette. She is no longer an adolescent but a woman who has been worn out by her own hedonism and no longer has any purpose in life . Remember, the second part of this novel is called  The Temptation of Despair.  Father Donissan has gone through moments of despair but has come through them. Mouchette sees the priest and at once says “I hate you” and the priest  replies “Don’t be ashamed”. But she is always angry about her life, curses him in many ways,  and she says “You’d better pray that you may never have to travel the road I’ve been.” [ Pg. 188]. Mouchette has gone through sanitoriums and has faced doctors who want to analyse her, but she holds her bitter pride. So she passes the priest. She goes back to her parents home. And there she tries to commit suicide by slashing her throat. Complete despair. In a very long conversation, Father Menou-Segrais tries to understand the events that Father Donissan has gone through – his time of despair, his meeting Satan, being shown by the quarryman that there is good in the world, and the despair and pride that sent Mouchette to suicide. When Father Donissan hears of Mouchette’s attempted suicide he at once makes sure that her dying body be taken to the church, where she dies. Had he “saved” her? Maybe not. It is ambiguous. But of course in those days it was common to put those who had committed suicide in an obscure, distant part of a graveyard, ostracized. Mouchette was at least buried ceremoniously; and Father Donissan prays for her. The priest is ordered to enter a monastery for a while to pray and think things over. Five years later, now no longer filled with pride, he becomes the priest in charge of Lumbres.

So to Book Three The Saint of Lumbres. Over many years and up to old age, he has heard thousands of confessions. He knows what evil is. He knows what good is. He knows he is dealing with a mainly peasant congregation, not people who need complex theology. He has heard many voices in his confessional. The congregation regard him as a saint, but he does not see himself that way. Of the priest the narrator says “He knew what man is in reality; a big child full of boredom and violence. Was there anything new the old priest could learn? He who had lived a thousand lives – lives all alike. Nothing would surprise him again. He could die. There were brand new systems of morality, but sin can never be new!” [Pg.235] No. This does not mean despair. It means, once again, that we homo-sapiens-sapiens are flawed… and tragedy is inevitable. With another priest he has a long, complex conversation about the nature of God [very difficult for me to follow]. Sometimes his peasant congregation think he can perform miracles. He knows he cannot do that. Towards the end of his life, a distraught  woman has a very sick boy and sends for the old priest, expecting him to cure the boy with his touch. By the time the priest arrives, the boy is dead. The mother wants him to perform a miracle.  The priest soothe her a little saying “God will only yield to love.”

Father Donissan lives a very, very frugal life as an old man. A sceptic doctor describes the priest as “Hardly enough to eat, no exercise, a mildewed presbytery, a damp church, no light or air in the confessional, the sort of hygiene that was usual in the thirteenth century… apart from angina pectoris, it needs no more than that to finish off an already overworked constitution.”  [Pg. 293] Yet the priest keeps working, and when he is not praying, visiting his flock and hearing confessions, he is meditating in the church. Comes the day when an intellectual atheist comes to see why so many people worship the old man. [Bernanos creates the visitor as somebody like sceptical Emile Zola – an enemy of the Church.] Yet when the visitor enters the church he understands how soothing the quietness is. He also has time to think about the things he has done in his life, and all the wrong things he has done. Somehow it seems good for him, as if he has a sort of interest in evil and good. But he remains an atheist.  He wonders where the priest is. He goes over to the confessional, and discovers that the priest is sitting there, dead. And here the novel ends.

There is much, much more in this novel. As always, I have simplified. There is more of theology that I have not explained.

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Some Notes. (1) In France in 1987 a film of Sous le Soleil de Satan was made. It was directed by Maurice Pialat. Pialat was an atheist. He was asked why he chose to make a film which was so Catholic. He replied “I don’t believe in God but I do believe in Georges Bernanos”. I have not seen the film. It won many prizes in France… but I had misgivings when I saw photos which showed that the timid saintly priest was played by beefy Gerard Depardieu. Bad casting I think… but then I haven’t seen the film.

(2) The title Sous le Soleil de Satan can be interpreted in many ways. Under the Sun  of Satan is one title, and the most correct. Star of Satan is misleading. Of course the Sun is a star looking down on us, but let us remember that, according to the fable, Satan was the bright angel who rebelled against God. Bernanos pits the Goodness of the Sun against the Evil of Satan. Good and Evil are both temptations in us.

(3) Many people have suggested that the saintly priest Father Donissan was based on the life of Jean Vianney.

Something Thoughtful

  

                                             FROM PARADISE TO PAIN

            As some of the readers of this blog probably know, I sometimes guide visitors around the open bird sanctuary Tiritiri Matangi. The week before last I guided. The day was fine, the sea was calm as the ferry took me from Auckland to Gulf Harbour and then across to the island.      How beautiful the day was. Sometimes I have guided, around the island, groups of school children accompanied by teachers and/or parents. Sometimes I have guided people from other countries with foreign languages but at least we could communicate. And sometimes I have guided ordinary Kiwi and Aussie blokes and sheilas. But on this blessed day I was directed to guide only two people. They were newlyweds – a young Aussie and his Sri Lankan bride. They were, in our two-hour walk, excellent company. They were really interested in the trees and the birds and the history of the island and (oh mercy!) they even laughed at my corny jokes. They were such happy people that I asked their permission to take a photo of them and they obliged. As I left them and they had their lunch, I happily whistled as I walked back to the wharf where we wait to board. What a happy day. Perfect. As the ferry took me back to Auckland, I bought a Peroni, happily drank it, and looked forward to a happy evening. This was paradise.

            Alas, along came pain. I had to catch two buses to get back home. I caught one bus. No problem. But I had to run when I tried to catch the second bus – and running was a big mistake. I tripped over and fell straight onto the hard concrete. Bang! My left knee was grazed. My left eye just missed being damaged, but I was bruised near my left eye.  My glasses almost broke apart. One lens popped out. Two men, waiting for another bus, helped me to get up as I scrabble to get my broken glasses. I thanked them, put the glasses in my deep pocket and just made the bus. But all the way home I was holding my handkerchief against the bleeding near my left eye. The handkerchief became redder and redder. I groaned a little and walked home slowly. Here’s the pain after the paradise. I don’t imagine this unpleasant episode was a great disaster. The bruises became darker near the left eye and the knee was still stinging for a while. But after a few days there was no pain at all. When I look in the mirror now I see a mildly grumpy face annoyed that the bruises are taking some time to clear up, but no real damage. Within a few days my glasses were fixed for a small price. People have suffered much, much more pain than I have ever known.

            But I still can’t help thinking that some devil had deliberately sabotaged my perfect day.

 

Something Old

                               IN DEFENSE OF LEWIS CARROLL

Now why am I writing about the man who wrote Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, not to mention Jabberwocky and The Hunting of the Snark? Because he deserves to be defended, that is why. And in due course you will soon see why. But let me first say who he was..

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (born 1832 – died 1898) was the son of an Anglican parson of conservative views. Young Dodgson held the same views and was quite devout. He went to Oxford where he excelled in mathematics and he became such a great mathematician that for many years he lectured in Maths at Oxford. He wrote many books about mathematics, some of which broke new ground. Dodgson was known to be shy in the way he talked and his lectures were rather dry. He became a deacon, but he never took Holy Orders. But there was another side of him. He got on well with many writers of his day, took poetry and the arts seriously, and he attempted to become an artist. But he decided he was not up to it; so instead he learnt the new art of photography and became a very capable photographer. He had inherited his father’s habit of writing in a whimsical way when dealing with friends and family and also creating puzzles. And when Dodgson decided to write stories intended for children, he wrote under the name Lewis Carroll – a name put together by Latin and other obscure ideas related to his family. But when it came to his books about mathematics he still called himself Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. There is an often-told story – untrue and now long debunked – that Queen Victoria so liked the Alice stories that she asked “Lewis Carroll” to send him another book… and he sent her a mathematical treatise.

Children and young people have different ways of reading the Alice stories. When we were children, my sister hated the Alice books. She said they were just silly and they didn’t make any sense. I had a different view. I liked Alice in Wonderland, [first published in 1865] but some things frighted me. I was particularly worried by the sequence where the horrible Duchess thrusts a baby into Alice’s arms… and after Alice walks for a while the baby turns into a pig and runs away. This shocked me. Could such things happen? [Of course more recent clever-dick reviewers see this as proof that Lewis Carroll liked little girls but hated little boys, saw them as nasty pigs, and the angry Duchess sings “Speak roughly to your little boy, / And beat him when he sneezes, / He only does it to annoy, / Because he knows it teases.”] Later I was almost frightened by the angry queen who kept shouting “Off with her head!” or “Off with his head!”... but by that stage I was used to the rhythm of the story and knew it couldn’t hurt me. And I liked the crazy-ness of it all. Going down the rabbit hole chasing the rabbit. Drinking the potions that expands or diminish Alice. The pool of tears and the ridiculous caucas-race where we meet many birds and beasts including the [extinct] Dodo… who might be there because Lewis Carroll sometimes had a stutter when he addressed himself as Do… Do… Dodgson [although once again this theory has been disputed]. Alice reciting You Are Old, Father William [one of the many poems where Lewis Carroll made satire of “improving” poems for children]. The wonderful Mad Hatter’s Tea Party even if it has the nastiness of the poor Dormouse being stuffed into the teapot… and I particularly liked the appearance of the Cheshire Cat who came and mysteriously disappeared. I have always liked cats and I delighted  in him, setting up enigmas and being as careful as any good cat. [ By the way, the phrase “Cheshire Cat” was not invented by Lewis Carroll. It was a traditional phrase and is quoted in William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel The Newcomes, decades before  Lewis Carroll was using the phase.]

Now I hate to say this, but as a child  I moved on and found myself enjoying Through The Looking-Glass [first published in 1871] even more than Alice in Wonderland. Why? Because it had the best [nonsense] poems that Lewis Carroll ever produced: the magnificent Jabberwocky; The Walrus and the Carpenter as performed by Tweedledum and Tweedledee;  Humpty Dumpty’s attempt to recite a poem about the seasons; the White Knight’s long tale of The Aged, Aged Man… and as for events, well, the flowers and their thoughts, and the rivalry of the White Queen and the Red Queen… and their less aggressive spouses. Might I also note that while children don’t go running down rabbit holes, most children at some point will look at a mirror and wonder why we see things backward – which is the opening of Through The Looking-Glass. We note, too, that both books are built around thoughtful games. Alice in Wonderland has playing cards – and you might remember that that it ends with Alice saying “You’re nothing but a pack of cards”. And Through The Looking-Glass is built around chess, where Alice finally wins the game . Finally, if you read both books you will soon understand that Alice is the most intelligent character, asking questions even if her questions are those of a child. She is dealing with grown-ups who usually say foolish things or whimsical things or confusing things. Unlike most books written for children in the Victorian era, which were meant to be “approving”, Lewis Carroll was deliberately giving children a fantasy in which the adults were the silly and pompous ones. And please note that some of the wonder of the Alice books was gained by the illustrations drawn by Sir John Tenniel. Nobody has ever drawn the Alice books better. 

I could go on about Lewis Carroll’s other works, such as The Hunting of the Snark, which is good fun; and his last two long books for children Sylvie and Bruno, which were an awful flop and did exactly what he had avoided in his earlier books for children - he lectured children about how to be good. I also have on my shelves one of his very last books for children A Tangled Tale… which is really a set of mathematical exercises disguised as stories. No wonder it is now forgotten.

But at last I have to go into the problem of defending Lewis Carroll. For some people he is controversial.

First there is the lesser problem. In 1967, when hippies were around and smoking pot and other drugs, there was a song called White Rabbit sung by a now-forgotten singer calling herself Grace Slick. Alice goes down the rabbit hole and she drinks the potions and she becomes tall and she becomes small and she changes… so it’s obviously about drugs, right? Now it is true that in the 19^th century laudanum [derived from opium] was used commonly for everyday things such as head-aches and some people became addicted to it. Could Lewis Carroll have become an addict? Not likely. The expanding-and-diminishing of Alice in Alice in Wonderland has nothing to do with drugs. It was more likely that Lewis Carroll was playing with ideas about size as would be seen by a child – a very mathematical idea.

The greater problem is the belief that Lewis Carroll was somehow a paedophile. There is no evidence of this, but it has been built up by those who think there was something suspicious about his interest in little girls. As a photographer Carroll took many photos of  men and women, but he particularly enjoyed taking photos of girls, child or young adolescent. Indeed he made hundreds of such photos. The Liddell family were happy to have Carroll photograph their young daughters Lorina, Edith and Alice – who became his favourite. It was for these three that Carroll made up stories while taking them in an outing, rowing up the river. But as they grew older, the girls grew out of hearing stories, and the Liddells told Carroll that he could no longer visit them. Was there a scandal? Not at all. What has tarnished Carroll’s memory? Partly the work of psychologists seeing all manner of symbols in his works, and Freudians looking for his weaknesses. Not to mention the sensationalism of rumour. Item – some decades ago there was revealed a naked photo of a young girl purported to be taken by Lewis Carroll. Big sensation for a while … but it turned out to be a fraud.

            There are some scholars who are better than I when it comes to Lewis Carroll.

ITEM: I have on my shelves The Annotated Alice edited by Martin Gardner, published in 1960, which gives the whole texts of the two Alice books, and it scrupulously presents notes on all the jokes that were fully understood in the Victorian era, all the mathematical puzzles that are hidden, all the poems of other poets that Lewis Carroll parodied… and inevitably he does have to deal with Carroll’s relationship with young girls. He does say that Carroll “was a fussy, prim, fastidious, cranky, kind, gentle bachelor whose life was sexless, uneventful and happy”. He also says “books of nonsense fantasy for children are not such fruitful sources of psychoanalytic insight as one might suppose them to be. The symbols have too many explanations.” But his most important statement is this: “There is no indication that Carroll was conscious of anything but the purest innocence in his relations with little girls, nor is there a hint of impropriety in any of the fond recollections that dozens of them later wrote about him. There was a tendency in Victorian England, reflected in the literature of the time, to idealize the beauty and virginal purity of little girls. There is no doubt this made it easier for Carroll to suppose that his fondness for them was on a high spiritual level, though of course this hardly is a sufficient explanation for that fondness. Of late Carroll has been compared with Humbert Humbert, the narrator of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita. It is true that both had a passion for little girls, but their goals were the exactly opposite. Humbert Humbert’s ‘nymphets’ were creatures to be used carnally. Carroll’s little girls appealed to him precisely because he felt sexually safe with them…”

 

                 Photo of Alice Liddell as taken by Lewis Carroll.

One must also add that Carroll’s younger sisters removed some pages of his journals after he died, not because he had written something about little girls, but because he had flirted with women in their 20’s. This, they thought, was indiscreet. 

ITEM: For the record, I also consulted a pamphlet written by Derek Hudson on Lewis Carroll in the Writers and Their Work series published 1958. He more quaintly said of  Lewis Carroll “From his early youth… he had sought the society of little girls, thus compensating himself, in part, for his inability to form friendships with women of his own age. Children were an escape from sex rather than any sort of conscious satisfaction of it, but they gave him the affection he needed and helped him to fulfil the Platonic and protective love which was characteristic of his nature.” This seems to be the truth.

Really I think that is where the case should end. When he was in his early twenties Lewis Carroll wrote a poem saying “I’d give all wealth that years have piled, / The slow result of Life’s decay, / To be once more a little child / For one bright summer-day.”  In other words, he pined for his own childhood... but he did no harm.

Something Thoughful

   Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.  

                                                            IT KEEPS HITTING US

 A fortnight ago I wrote a column on this blog about the rain called Weather Makes for Moods, wherein I bemoaned the way that lots of rain makes me housebound. Back in July 2025 I wrote a column called Indubitably Pluvial, which stated that New Zealand is a very rainy country in Autumn and Winter. And of course I often think about the great Cyclone Gabrielle in 2023.  Tiresome person that I am, I am now once again writing about the weather. Why so? Because once again the rain has injured us.

This time we were given clear warning. We knew that another cyclone was coming and it was a big one so we were well prepared. We put our rubbish-bins into the garage so that they would not slide away in the wind as they did back in 2023. We made sure the trampoline was firmly pegged down. We brought inside loose pot-plants and doubly checked the windows. So we waited and waited. Along came a day of rain, annoying all day long and continuing into some of the night, but not being a deluge, just the ordinary Autumn downpour. The road did not overflow. And the following day, Auckland had a bright sunny day. But we knew this was only a prelude, for on the third day it really and relentlessly bucketed down, with the road almost – but not quite - overflowing. But once again there was no real damage.

But please note, I am an Aucklander and there is an odd geographical thing about Auckland. It is built on an isthmus and rain can move across it more quickly over the isthmus than over wider parts of New Zealand. Yes, in the West part of Auckland, there was much damage in the Cyclone Gabrielle in 2023, with some houses having to be demolished. But that was an anomaly. Meanwhile, both in the  Cyclone Gabrielle in 2023 and in the cyclone that has just passed us, Northland, the Coromandel Peninsula and further South were bashed cruelly by the storm – not as destructive as Cyclone Gabrielle but still causing much damage, making some people homeless and roads flooded.

What is the best that can be said about this? We should be grateful that there were clearly repeated warnings put out by the government and on radio and television. We should be grateful for the meteorologists who explained the situation. We should be grateful for the men and women who had helped people out when roads had been blocked or bridges had become impassable. We should be grateful that there were people who looked after others who had lost their homes. But most of all, we should never be smug because our part the New Zealand missed the deluge. We are always in it.

 

Something New

  

“A FAR-FLUNG LIFE” by  M.L STEDMAN (Penguin, $NZ38:00)

M. L. Stedman  [Margo Stedman] is an Australian born and raised in West Australia, but has also spent much of her life in England. Apparently, according to one source, she is “totally reticent sharing personal information”. She made a hit with her first novel The Light Between Oceans, which I have not read. Now comes A Far-Flung Life, the title referring to both the distance between farms in the arid part of West Australia and the fact that many people in the story come from different parts of Australia… and some Pommies. Before I get into giving you some sort of synopsis of the tale, I have to make it clear that I am not in any way a snob. I can enjoy a good yarn as much as any reader. I say this because Stedman’s novel is in no way a “masterpiece” [a term constantly abused by promoters of bad movies and novels], but it is very readable and is bound to win a large readership, flaws and all. So here we go.

The MacBride family have lived on a remote sheep station for years – a million acres of dry, harsh ground, average rain per year eight inches.  In January 1958 there is a disaster. Dad [Phil] and sons Warren and Matthew are in a car crash. Dad and Warren die. Matthew [usually called Matt] survives, but he is so badly injured that he has to stay in hospital for months and he has lost much of his ability to remember things. So mother Lorna is left to look after the station, sometimes helped by “Peachey” Pete and Maudy and other friends. Matt returns to the station and being ready to help. Lorna has one daughter, Rose. She is a bit of a tearaway but she straightens-up and helps her mother. And then along comes a dashing English man from a wealthy aristocratic family, Miles Beaumont. Of course Rose falls in love with him, but her romance doesn’t get anywhere. So Rose leaves the station and gets work in Perth. She becomes pregnant. Who was the father? We are not told. She goes back to mother and Matt; and she has her baby. Old Pete Peachy, a dinkum Aussie bloke, helps her to look after the baby. Rose and Lorna think of adopting the baby out, but they change their mind. Alas, Rose becomes depressed. With her infant child , she walks down into a mining pit, fall over, smashes her head and dies. The infant survives. Was it an accident or did she intend suicide? Who knows. The child is called Andy. So we now have a family of Lorna, damaged Matt, and little Andy…

The years go by. We are now well into the 1960’s. There are two big problems. First there is the fact that Australia now needs minerals more than it needs sheep. With the approval of the government, companies are allowed to dig into pits on land that was once used by the pastoralists [i. e. farmers]. Wool is no longer king and for some farmers it is hard times. The MacBride family struggle, even if Matt is now mainly in good health. Second, there is the problem of young Andy. He is an alert kid, and he is interested in family trees… and although he has been told that his mother [Rose] has died, he wants to know who his father was. Matt and ageing Lorna try to dodge the issue.  And it is at this point that we are introduced to Bonny Edquist. She is an alert young woman, with university training, who is a   geologist and has come to find valuable minerals. At first there is animosity between Matt and Bonny, but they gradually get to like each other. And Bonny really likes young Andy and more-or-less becomes his best friend.

And, dear reader, you may think that I have given away the whole plot of this novel. Not true, because [as I have often said] I never give away the endings of new novels. I have given you only the first half of the story. A Far-Flung Life is fully 436 pages long and it moves the characters through to the point where Andy is an adult and more characters are introduced, with the likes of the thoughtful police officer, and the band of local thugs who beat up a queer man, and the women who tut-tut about women who get pregnant outside marriage and many others. And yes, eventually we do learn who impregnated Rose.

At the very least, I can say that much of A Far-Flung Life is credible. M. L. Stedman is at her very best in telling us about how farming stations worked and how things changed in Australia once minerals became more important. She has obviously done a great deal of research. The family’s troubles are also credible, including the way the adults try to shield little Andy from knowing what happened to Rose. On the other hand, the character of Bonny Edquist is too good to be true, almost saintly in the way she deals with young Andy. Sorry to say this, but much of this sounds too neat, too sweet, and not like reality… though in fairness the novel ends with an unexpected twist. I enjoyed some of this novel but gradually tired of it as it moved along There seemed to be too much padding. But who am I to give you this negative verdict? A large audience will enjoy it and doubtless it will become a best-seller. Good luck to them.

Something New

  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, 22^nd 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.