“ELEMENTAL – Central Otago Poems” by Brian Turner (Godwit –
Random House $NZ39:99)
“FROM MANOA TO A PONSONBY GARDEN’ by Albert Wendt (Auckland
University Press, $NZ24:99)
“NOTES ON THE MYSTERIUM TREMENDUM” by Hugh Major (Papawai
Press, $NZ 29:99)
Two books
of poetry and one book of philosophical reflection make up this week’s Something New.
Not all of
Brian Turner’s Elemental is new.
Divided into four sections according to the elements – Earth, Fire, Water, Air
– Elemental comprises about 100 poems
which Turner has selected from his writings over the last forty years. All the
poems concern Central Otago, the poet’s heartland. This handsome hardback book
(complete with ribbon bookmark) presents the poems together with Gilbert van
Reenen’s colour photographs of rivers, tussock, mountains, clouds, snow, sheep,
hawks, huts, country cemeteries and those tawny, tawny Central Otago hills. In
other words, all those things the poems describe – although not the human
animal. Save for one distant shot of a man by a river, the only human being to
appear in any of the photographs is the shot of Brian Turner himself that
follows Turner’s Foreword. In effect, the photographs direct us to the idea
that this is an uninhabited land.
Is it wise
to print descriptive poems alongside photographs like this? I’m not sure. In
one sense, the photographs are so striking that they hog our attention and
detract from the impact of the poems. Part of our imaginative work is done for
us.
But they are beautiful photographs.
I drag
myself away from them and read the text.
Turner’s
Foreword is an affirmation of his identification with the Otago country and an
expression of conservationist concerns.
His poems
are Central Otago. There is concern for the land. The land is compared with
pieces of classical music. Laconic farmers are unsure about this arty writing
stuff, but respect a man who chops his own wood. Sometimes Turner is nostalgic
for childhood in the same country that he now looks at with adult eyes. Signs
of human habitation seem to signal the feebleness and superficiality of the
human grasp on the land. At first I found myself comparing Turner’s poem Abandoned Homestead with James
K.Baxter’s similarly-themed Otago poem The
Fallen House. But whereas Baxter’s poem becomes a reflection on the
implacability of Time, Turner’s is starker with its closing image of dusk and “the mountains turning black”.
Turner is
at his best with the direct, unadorned observation, and with the pithy
aphorism, as in the four lines of his Deserts,
For Instance, which go:
The loveliest places
of all
are those that look as
if
there’s nothing there
to those still
learning to look.
More
awkward (or perhaps less well-digested) are the instances of overt
philosophising, such as the closing lines of West Over the Maniototo. In poetry as in prose it is better to show
than to tell (and it is better to tell than to preach). I do wonder, too, if
the rhyming jingle Matakanui was
written in a spirit of parody (of old newspaper verse?).
I remind
myself, however, that if there are some stumbles, there are plenty of soars.
Take the
gem What the Wind Knows :
I don’t know
what the wind
what the wind
knows of me
but I would
love to know
what the wind
knows
that I don’t
know.
Bravo to
that.
* * *
* * * * *
* * *
* * *
* *
In many
respects Albert Wendt’s From Manoa to a
Ponsonby Garden is very different from Brian Turner’s Elemental. This is not an anthology of forty years. work, but a new
collection divided, logically enough, into two sections. The first, Manoa, is a loose gathering of poems
dealing with Pacific and other locations. The second, A Ponsonby Garden, taking up about two thirds of the volume, is a
sequence of 40 numbered poems tracing the seasons and changes and family life
near and in a Ponsonby garden in Auckland.
Yet Turner
and Wendt have more in common than might at first appear. They are both, after
all, intensely interested in the impact of place and landscape on the human
psyche.
The Manoa section opens with a reflection on
a mountain in Hawaii, wondering about its “incendiary
genealogy” and comparing it with other mountains in the Pacific (including
Taranaki) as they affect human beings.
Wendt hits his stride in the poem Mauli,
which in effect defines the life force as a series of tastes and sense
impressions; and is a copious outpouring of memorable details – a great poem to
rant out loud. Would it be pretentious to call this a distant descendant of
Baudelaire’s Correspondances, with
its system of correlating sense impressions with mental states? Wendt keeps it
up with a poem on the scents and shape of a woman. The style is declarative,
confessional and free-form, with lines spreading prolixly across the page.
This can,
however, clunk into the ethos of a loose blog. The poem With Hone in Las Vegas irritated me. It may end rather piously with
a piece of Pasifika mysticism about the undervalued rights of Nevada’s tangata whenua. But until that point it
is really a piece of rationalised tourism. (So what are Albert and Hone doing
in Las Vegas in the first place if not to be wide-eyed tourists, for all the
predictable criticisms of that eminently avoidable place?).
I like the
evocativeness of the first part of this volume – the sights, sounds and smells
that Wendt gets us to suck up – but I miss the controlling form to go with the
attitudinising.
For this
reason I found the second section A
Ponsonby Garden agreeably astringent. Here Wendt has worked hard at form.
The 40 numbered poems are really sonnet-approximates. At any rate, most of them
have about 14 lines. This forces a certain focus and precision upon the
statements they make as Wendt charts the seasons and changes in this one
Auckland location, beginning with the “summer
Sunday” that “moves in slow motion”.
There are
the hunts and attempted bird-killings of Manoa the pet cat. And watching
football on TV. And jubilation at Obama’s election. And bodily pain, especially
after an operation on the knee. And memories of Hawaii. And laments for people
who have just died (Terry Sturm, Alistair Campbell etc.). And the horror of
hearing about, and trying to memorialise properly, a lethal tsunami in the
Pacific. And the wife’s getting a hip replacement. And awareness of ageing as
young people begin solicitously to call you “dear”. And lots of joys and
celebrations too, in cooking and meals and flowers and watching an adult son
grow.
These poems
certainly have focus and are engaging. The weak side is that the poorer ones
can simply become unpoetic observation or even journalism (the poem on death of
Martyn Sanderson reads like a few sentences from a prose obit.).
There is
still real life here, however, and a vibrancy that is sometimes missing in
Brian Turner’s sparse Otago landscapes.
* * *
* * * * *
* * *
* * *
* * *
Hugh
Major’s Notes on the Mysterium Tremendum
is a book of philosophical and idealistic reflection, illustrated with the
author’s own art works.
It has a
number of essential themes, one of the most important of which is expressed in
the introduction:
“Our knowledge of the world is far exceeded
by our ignorance of it, and this is what creates the very human need to dream,
wonder and speculate. The closer we look at ourselves and our interconnection
with the natural world, the more amazement and joy can be extracted from it.”
(Pg. 3)
Hugh Major
wants to encourage that sense of amazement and joy, but finds some obtuse
enemies standing in his path. Not the least is the stubborn human ego, which
separates itself from the totality of reality and hence reduces everything else
to mere physical objects:
“The ubiquitous mindset…. takes physical
objects as the only permanent reality, nature as a stockpile of resources and
other people as separate entities
further divided by nationality, culture and creed. The individual still reigns
supreme and material acquisitions are still the gauge of value…” (Pg.12)
The
delusions of the ego are encouraged by those secular rationalists who refuse to
see anything beyond the purely material and who do not admit that their
rationality itself depends upon an act of faith:
“Secular rationalists who proclaim that
scientific method relies on facts and not faith need to consider that their
theories are formulated with the faith and confidence that they will eventually
be proved correct. The evidence may not be found in their lifetimes, and in the
case of nuclear physics, may never be observable, so their belief is founded on
faith rather than empirical proof.” (Pg.23)
At one
point, Major asks whether the world is an illusion (the completely solipsistic
view) and suggests that if we had certainty about everything there would be no
fruitful mystery. He posits two contrasting world views – the materialist view,
which leads to a sense of disconnectedness from the universe; and the sense of
oneness with something greater than oneself. Although Plato is not invoked
often, the outlook is essentially Platonic, which is why I began this review by
using the word “idealistic” in its strictly correct sense. What can be seen physically is not the totality of
reality, but the particularity of an underlying structure.
Major’s
approach leads him to attack empirical “naïve reality”, to note that creative
imagination is in fact part of the scientific enterprise, and to suggest that
the observer is always an actor in what is observed. He notes the impact of
quantum mechanics:
“As science is a study focused on the
observable world, a branch of that knowledge which challenges the role of the
observer has been hard to incorporate, shifting the explanatory basis of
science from empirical facts to consciousness. It has been hard to incorporate
a theory that has turned common sense upside down, denying the existence of a
physical world separate from our observation of it.” (Pg.55)
If I were
(rather unfairly) to attempt to put Hugh Major’s thoughts into a nutshell, they
would run thus: We should be more aware that the ego is deceptive; that we are
intrinsically part of something much greater than ourselves; that that
something is both interconnected and infused with consciousness. In other
words, we should be aware that that the universe has mind.
Notes
on the Mysterium Tremendum is not a book of random jottings, but has been
carefully organized into sections reflecting different aspects of Major’s core
ideas. These include sections on the intricacy of animals, on the power of
words and of art and on the mystery of death.
For all its
organization, I found it easier to take in the individual observations rather
than the connecting thesis, or to follow the way one thing leads the author to
another. Consideration of the minute delicacy of organs in the human body leads
him to reflect on bees and then on cats and then on our relationship with other
animals, including the wonderful tale of Kalihari bushmen being able to live in
“truce” with lions so that they did not encroach on each other’s hunting
grounds as they seek the same prey.
When he
considers the great mystery of death, he recounts a near-death experience he
had when he nearly drowned as a boy.
Naturally,
there are dangers in this sort of book – the possibility that it could descend
into flakiness or New Age dottiness. Kind words for Gnostic conceptions (Pg.60)
or for astrology (Pg.62) do worry me. But Major generally keeps an even keel in
his investigations, and shows early on how fully aware he is that some of the
vocabulary he uses can easily be perverted. He says in his introduction:
“In an investigation
of experience, it is unfortunate that adjectives such as authentic, organic and
holistic have become vulnerable to over-use, as buzz-words relating to
lifestyle and the new spirituality.” (Pg.2)
It is a
brave thing to set out a personal philosophy in this way but Major succeeds by
both his clear verbal imagery and the illustrations that form part of his
argument.
