We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books
“THE LIFEGUARD, Poems
2008-2013” by Ian Wedde (Auckland University Press, $NZ27:99). “THE BLUE COAT”
by Elizabeth Smither (Auckland University Press, $NZ24:99)
Yoking two
quite different poets together in one review is a very artificial thing to do.
What do Ian Wedde and Elizabeth Smither have in common, apart from being
well-established New Zealand poets both, this time, published by the same
publisher?
The answer
is – not a great deal. Wedde (current NZ Poet Laureate) prefers to work in
longer, reflective forms. Smither is more the miniaturist. Wedde is
philosophical, and when his humour comes, it tends to be dark irony. Smither
bubbles and stabs with sharp observation and playful wit.
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It would be
a complete misrepresentation to call Ian Wedde’s latest collection of poetry The Lifeguard a death-haunted book. Its
concerns are too broad for that. But there is a distinct concern with
mortality, an awareness of time’s winged chariot and an attempt to reckon up
what this life amounts to in the end. Plus some wistful recalls to a past that
is definitely gone.
Wedde works here in long
sequences – the volume is really made up of five of them – in which he turns
over his themes, looks at them from different angles, and is able to link the
most varied images.
The nine-part title sequence “The
Lifeguard” is sustained by the simplest of conceits. The beaches of the east
are calm and superficial. There people sport and play. The beaches of the west
are wild and tragic. There people drown in the surf. There is a lifeguard on
each beach – he on the east is often forgotten by pleasure-seekers. He on the
west is necessary and stern. But the rising sun of the east is an age-old
symbol of life beginning; and the sun “going west” is an age-old symbol of
death.
It is impossible for an
Aucklander to read this sequence without at once contrasting benign, calm
Milford, or Takapuna or Eastern Beaches, or the inner Waitemata harbour in the
east; with wild black-sanded Piha and Whatipu and Bethell’s and Karekare in the
west (although there is a section of the sequence with clear references to
urban Wellington). But in fact Ian Wedde names no specific names. The sequence
is not primarily geographical description. It is a meditation on life and death
and how they are balanced and how they are approached and the fearful possibility
that there might be nothing beyond them.
Contrasting potentialities of
life are expressed in;
“…days
that smash themselves against
the galloping thigh of lifeguards
on the western flanks of this god-forsaken place”
and
“the dawns that gild the shoulders
of giggling vacationers
up all night celebrating their windfall lives
on the eastern beaches.”
In this contrast, the word
“lifeguard” itself takes on a new meaning. The lifeguard is a life guide,
saving us from succumbing to comforting illusions about what life is, even as
we plod to our inevitable end:
“He’s idling at the tide-mark, the lifeguard,
where early-morning bathers
blink at the sunrise that surprises them
every time they see it –
every time they beach themselves anew,
streaming warm brine
from bodies that feel their mortal weight
press footprints in the sand.
Bewildered by my own dismay,
I join them as we plod
like Galapagos turtles
towards our denouement….”
The imagery may be of New Zealand
(or the Galapagos), but the grasp of the sequence is universal. Classical poets
peep in. In a homage to Theocritus, Cyclops becomes a one-eyed lifeguard
lamenting. Ovid’s Narcissus and Echo are reworked as modern partygoers waking
up to one more hung-over, self-regarding dawn. In a later section Polyphemus
watches the tragic west and Narcissus the trivial east. Fears of mortality lead
to a wish for oblivion and
“…the never-too-late serenades
of cicadas at summer’s end
makes me long for the gritty obscurity
of the west’s waves
or the suave silence of eastern lagoons
through which pouting fish
mutely swim…”
This in turn leads to reflections
on the impossibility of imagining a nullity, a void after death. Yet there is
hope in the final section of the sequence, in memory of a sailor
great-grandfather, with the suggestion that somehow his hopes (for a new land)
might be renewed, even in the way tides wash in and out and cleanse.
My account of this title sequence
is far too schematic as, regrettably, reviews and summaries tend to be.
Throughout these pages of loose couplets, Ian Wedde is in control of something
far more varied, allusive and rich in imagery than I have been able to suggest
here. And repeated references to a clearing in a forest do suggests that there might
be an alternative attitude to life and death than a hard contrast of warm
beginnings and tragic endings.
I have deliberately dwelt on this
title sequence because it is the most impressive thing in The Lifeguard. The four sequences that follow it do, however,
express similar concerns, as when the sequence “Help!” asks:
“What do you want me
to say? That even the albatross,
whose wingspan
measures dawn and dusk,
turns, sooner or
later, and heads for home?”
“Help!”
also has a healthy strain of self-mocking irony with its reference to
“The draughty whine of
my own voice
imploring fate to back
off.”
The sequence “The Look” is a
reworking of the sequence “The Sheen” from Wedde’s 2009 collection Good Business. Again, the dichotomy of
east and west is alluded to, but here there is the theme of whether there is
anything at all behind appearances – as seen by different referenced eyes. In
both “Help!” and “The Look” the lines are longer and more languid than the
couplets of “The Lifeguard”. After “Three Elegies” comes “Shadow Stands Up” a sequence of twenty poems with terser,
shorter lines, with a strong autobiographical undercurrent and with
specifically Auckland references (Victoria Park, Ponsonby, Albert Park etc).
There are recurring images of a Link bus circling the inner city, as if life is
a circle or a return to the beginning time; and there is something like
nostalgia for the poet’s former self as he was in 1969. The shadow that stands
up is the shadow of our former selves.
Fittingly for this whole
collection, the last words of this final sequence are “traffic going west”.
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The 61 short and individual poems
of Elizabeth Smither’s The Blue Coat
do not form a sequence of any sort. Each is a thing in itself. But there are
strings of meaning and shared themes in consecutive poems.
Consider.
Following
on from each other there are poems about lemon tees, about roses, about
daffodils, about grass, about wind in the garden. A poem about having a bra
fitted; is followed by a poem about dressing and seeing a woman across the road
dressing; is followed by a poem about a small child helping his mother to
dress; is followed by poem about a dressing gown worn by a woman who had given
birth - and then we are into poems about birth and parenthood.
Likewise a
poem about the old-fashioned way in which library books were once issued (with
date-stamps) is followed by a poem ticking off a reader for marking a copy of The Great Gatsby with inane comments.
And side-by-side are poems about the poet’s father’s love of Dickens and her
mother clipping her fingernails.
You see,
then, that while each poem is an individual work, the sensibility of the poet
brings her back to the same topics, to similar perceptions, to an insistence on
the small and the local and nature as experienced in a backyard. I do not
believe these poems were written in the order in which they are presented to
us; but that the author has chosen to so arrange them while compiling this
collection is overt acknowledgement of her interests.
There is that matter of
domesticity – the small things of home life and experience which become heroic,
as in the poem “Fountain”, where clipping a tall hedge is “a labour / like painting the tall sides of a green ship.” There is
also the sense that life is often blessed exactly by those things that are not
readily perceived or rationalised. In the poem “Leaf Flurry Tram”, there is
physical and mobile beauty in the leaves kicked up in the tram’s passing, but
“Those inside are
unaware
of what beauty follows
them –
leaves from the track
dancing up
to the passing current
of air
and staying suspended
until the eddy moves
on.”
Indeed there is an insistence
that the small and closely-observed is the most engrossing, as when the poem
“The Underside of the Miniature Plane Tree” tells us that
“Against a sky that
has poured greyness
out for a whole day
I look up into
structures so intricate
and marvellous I think
the Eiffel Tower
is the merest stick
drawing and the stars
(if I could see them)
spaced
for rudimentary
learning for a
mathematical amateur.”
A bumblebee
trapped in a jar is in the same key.
Smither is interested in high art
and music (poems about piano practice; a clarinet in an orchestra; Mozart;
listening to music while gardening). She finds incongruities and ironies in
little things - a chipped plate from a junk-shop is made beautiful by its use;
nurses in a hospital pass by patents’ grief with calm efficiency; young women
tearfully say farewell on a railway platform; babies are introduced to high art
by being trundled through an art gallery. Inevitably there are poems about the
death of friends.
Changed mores are noted. In “The Wedding Lawn”, bride and groom have
already long cohabited and the wedding ceremony is “an old and true passion revived for a day”. But there is a
providential undertone to much of this volume. Far from each other in The Blue Coat are poems about stained
glass and gargoyles, religious imagery by association. The final poem is a
prayer before departing from a house.
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