[NOTICE TO READERS: For over four years, Reid's Reader has been presenting an entirely free service to readers with commentary on books new and old. Reid's Reader
receives no grants or subsidies and is produced each week in many hours
of unpaid work. If you wish to contribute, on an entirely voluntary
basis, to the upkeep of this blog, we would be very grateful if you made
a donation via the PayPal "DONATE" button that now appears at the top
of the index at right. Thank you.]
We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
“AND SO IT IS”
by Vincent O’Sullivan (Victoria University Press, $NZ25); “BESIDE HERSELF” by
Chris Price (Auckland University Press, $NZ24:99); “COLD WATER CURE” by Claire
Orchard (Victoria University Press, $NZ25)
I have been
studying how I might compare these three new collections of poetry to musical
instruments, for I must have an image on which to hang them. How else can I
connect a new volume by a major New Zealand literary figure with another by an
established poet in full career and with a third by a newcomer making her
debut?
Musical
instruments it is.
* *
* * *
* * *
* * *
* * *
* * *
* * *
*
Vincent
O’Sullivan’s And so it is is a
‘cello.
It is a mellow
and civilised and well-tuned instrument to be played in the evening, always
thoughtful, often looking back at the past, but neither elegiacally nor
nostalgically. Perhaps indulgently and forgivingly.
I gallop through
the first 38 pages before going back and re-reading them, and I find poems
about older people who have learnt that the small things are the really
important things, as when a woman frees a trapped bee (“Knowing what it’s
about”); memory proves to be slippery (“The recall factor”); life’s cycles move
in slow motion (“Season”); the dead really are dead (“Anzac morning”); some
rubbish needs to be burned (“Despatches from the Dead”); and there are so many
half-remembered things that one cannot quite place (“Enough, surely?”). And
from the perspective of older age, some youthful habits and enthusiasms are no
longer to be countenanced (“Each packet comes with a warning”).
My inadequate “synopses”
might make it appear that we are in grumpy old man territory, but that is far
from the effect of these poems. They celebrate life as it moves from illusions
to wisdom. The quality O’Sullivan appears to admire most is the
clear-sightedness that comes from experience. Things no longer have to be
tarted up. They can be looked at and enjoyed and appreciated for what they are,
in all their mortality and limitation.
It is fitting
that the title poem “And so it is” is sheer description of an Otago morning and
ends thus: “Everything is clear as if
pared on light’s sharpest knife edge, / I don’t want to make too much of this
morning, but there it is.” Reality is not to be rhapsodised and betrayed by
the poet. We shouldn’t “make too much”
of it. But seen as it is, it is still beautiful and “there it is”. Physical reality can be enjoyed and relished, but
without illusions.
The past is not
an obsession with this poet. In a lovely poem about Milton’s daughter taking
her blind father’s dictation, O’Sullivan gently mocks the way past ages
regarded women (“Think of the girl, for once”) and he enjoys snatches of pure
topicality. His quirky poem “Neighbour”, about a guy whose hobby is flags,
takes a swipe at the fact that New Zealand’s flag “may not be our flag for much longer / if the Parnell huckster finds a
new logo / for his golf shirt.”
Yet the past is
not to be ignored. Displaying his habit of letting a title comment ironically
on the poem that follows, the poet gives us “Talk about old hat”, which is
about recognising the truth that is buried in old art. On the other hand, “Life
writing, 4 to 5, in the Leisure Lounge” considers the awkwardness of writing
love poems in old age.
Thus for the
first 38 pages only of this 96 page collection.
I have been
warned against reading too much into the breaks which divide this collection
into three sections. They have no thematic significance. But while the second
section continues with ruminations on the past and some childhood memories (“Mr
Newman’s Tooth”, “Special Delivery”, “Westmere on my mind”), I think I detect
more poems which question the way reality is perceived and interpreted – our
encounters with phenomena rather than noumena – as in the poems “The Reality
Problem” and “I so like the man who wrote”. There are certainly more poems
about how art transforms reality such as “Formal”, “By way of later chapters”
and “One version of the telling which is all we’re allowed”. Photography being
one of the arts, it too transforms reality, as in the poem on a photographic
portrait of Wallace Stevens (“Cigars, pinpricks, beasts of all description”)
and the charming and sad one about a photograph of Mayakovsky and his pet,
“Mayakovsky’s Dog”. I am not a dog-lover, though I can live with the beasts (cats
are more my thing), but I’d almost want to cuddle the dog as Mayakovsky cuddles
him, or at least as described by O’Sullivan:
“He cradles the dog
in the white billow of his sleeve
which may be a schnauzer, which
I didn’t know – how could we? –
was ever a breed favoured in Russia.
How distant the man seems, how
could-be-living-this-very-minute
the black dog lying against the famous
chest. Whole towns were named
after the poet. A tyrant wanted
to cry as he read him. The poet
must have loved the dog, you can tell
by the kindness of his wrist, his
spread hand across his friend’s back.”
I am in danger
of swamping comment and criticism with a list of titles. It is not my intention
to name-check every poem in this volume, but I enjoyed the way, in the third
section, that Auden is mildly rebuked, Graham Greene criticised by proxy and
Anna Akhmatova properly lamented.
If I were to
choose one poem that sums up the mood of this collection, it would be “Most
mornings, sort of”, where the hopes of adults are shown to be not as naïve as
the hopes of children, but they are still valid hopes. Essentially, this is
what And so it is is about. Not a
“chimes at midnight” lament for the lost past, but an enjoyment of the present
as marinated in long experience. A cello plays.
* *
* * *
* * *
* * *
* * *
* * *
* *
Chris Price’s Beside Herself is quite a different
musical instrument.
Probably a drum.
Unlike the volume
reviewed above, Beside Herself’s four
sections are quite clearly arranged thematically.
At least in the
first section of this collection, Chris Price prefers the shorter, staccato and
more insistent line, sometimes with wild rhyme that might be kin to rap (see
“Trick or Treat” and “Entangled Epigram”). There is a degree of confessionalism
about the erotic appeal to girls of books about horses (“My Friend Flicka”) or
the unrecoverability of a life not lived (“Tango with Mute Button”). There is
an awareness of the crudity of the fabled past, in poems about Hamlet and the decayed
corpse of Richard III, recovered recently under a car-park. There is also a
sharp awareness of cliché and how it should be avoided, such as the overkill of
music in film or liturgy (“Coda”) or the poetic cliché about silent graceful
dancers being more fulfilled than the poet who contemplates them. “Well fuck it”, says Price with crude but
effective abruptness, “some of us / are
destined to sit on our arses and /
rotate and if the lives we didn’t lead
/ remain more beautiful than those / we
did then we have fulfilled that /
destiny impeccably.” (“Tango with Mute Button” again).
Quite different
in tone and style is the second section, “The Book of Churl” a 23-part sequence
figuring an unlettered and possibly outlaw peasant in a medieval setting. It is
almost like a fairy-tale and yet harder and more brutal, for Churl is
brutalised, scrabbling for life, beastly. Yet Churl survives and Churl looks at
the stars and Churl does sometimes wonder what is beyond his immediate material
circumstances and (in his finale at least) Churl does have a sort of meaningful
encounter with another human being. So Churl is more than a brute-beast if not
quite the polished poet of a troubadour.
Is “The Book of
Churl’ more than a literary exercise – than the impulse that so many poets have
to create a creature of legend? I think so. It is in this section that Chris
Price is most “beside herself”, not with rage but with the capacity to step
inside another character’s skin.
Rage does,
however, open the third section, with two poems whose imagery is extreme.
“Wrecker’s Song” has visions of car crashes, and posits poetry as accident and
chance. “Paternity Test”, apparently echoing some imagined domestic incident,
speaks of violence and murder at the same time as it discusses parenthood. Even
the third poem in the section, “Three Readers in the Jardin du Palais
Luxembourg”, is a very dyspeptic reflection on the relationship of writers and
readers – not so much raging as being sullen and grumpy. Rage abates somewhat
in the nine poems called “Museum Pieces” – reflexions on art found in European
galleries and museums, with the distant enquiring tone that such sequences
often have, and a view of religion balanced between resignation and nihilism.
Rage rises again in the poem “Whip / Lash” - is it about a horse being lashed
or a sadistic jockey doing the lashing? Either way, it is not about a soul at
rest, no more than the sardonic reflexion on canonical poets (“A Pinch of
Salt”) that follows.
And where do
this rage, dyspepsia and awareness of mortality lead in the drumbeat of this
collection? They lead to the finest thing in Beside Herself, the 12-page self-defining poem “Beside Yourself”,
which talks of the otherness of any persona a writer produces on the page (“Je est un autre” etc.), but in the
context of decay and remembrance. Where is this “me” when my body dies? Can
this “me” be corralled by the grammatical first, second or third person? Do I
exist more clearly in the minds of others than in my own mind? As always,
reducing a complex poem to such questions ignores the nature of the poem
itself, in its verbal dexterity, its images of seasons, its tone of a problem
not quite solved. It is a work of fruitful uncertainty.
And what follows
in the fourth section? A tone of despair or disillusionment or maybe just heavy
irony? Consider a poem called “To the Future” which begins “O future, platform for untethered ego, / favoured holiday destination of dictators….”
and goes on to suggest inevitable disappointment at the envisaged futures that
have passed into imperfect history. Or consider “The New Cuisine”, which spits
at the over-hyped nonsense of haute
cuisine and longs for a simple apple. There’s a sourness, a blasé tone to
these poems, though it would be unfair of me to ignore the purely playful poems
that also make the cut.
Time, I suppose,
to make an inept call on this collection (and I haven’t even mentioned the four
delightful drawings by Leo Bensemann, dating from the 1930s, which separate the
four sections of the text). Chris Price is a skilful and varied poet, who is at
her peak in “Beside Yourself” but whose cracking of the whip at humanity can
alienate. I read. I admired. Sometimes I did not enjoy.
Yet in trying to
sum up this challenging volume, I find I have omitted mention of the poem I
kept coming back to for its comparatively quiet tone. “When I Am Laid in Earth”
is traditionalist in its structure and concept, but distinctly the poet’s own.
Let me quote the first two stanzas to give a taste of its reflective nature:
“When I am laid in earth
this half-life in your mind
is my continuance –
not long, or loud, but
intermittent, like the fault
in the machine that can’t
be diagnosed or fixed
by anything but patience
time, or blind chance; a
break in the static, blip
in the daily traffic that allows
a brief transmission through
from our shared history,
whichever part appealed….”
The drum beats
solemnly here.
Buy the book and
enjoy the rest of this poem.
* *
* * *
* * *
* * *
* * *
* * *
Claire Orchard’s
debut collection Cold water cure is a
flute. It is clear to the ear, like Orchard’s simple and direct vocabulary. It
can trill and be shrill. But it can also be tentative and hesitant in the
quieter moments.
Again, this is a
volume whose sections are clearly thematic.
The first section
has three “found” poems (what a rugby player said; what a computer-game tells
its players; what a train-spotter wrote) but mainly consists of short poems on
the domestic scene, encounters with small children and encounters with pupils
in the classroom. The poem “Settling for Action Man” (about two little girls
playing with Cindy and Barbie dolls) is, like Chris Price’s “My Friend Flicka”,
an adult’s retrospective awareness of the erotic implications – for the
children – of child’s play. “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” is a poem about
hesitation – about wanting to say that somebody much younger than the narrator
is sexually attractive, but realising this could be misconstrued as desire. The
poet is establishing an identity as a mature and observant adult woman who is
nevertheless fully aware that some impulses from childhood and teenage days
still persist.
Thus for the
prologue.
The main course of Cold water cure is the central section,
taking up over half the book and including the title poem. In 27 poems, this
section is a reflexion on, and in a way an annotation of, writings by and about
Charles Darwin and evolution and the relationship of Darwin’s theory to human
happiness.
Among the 27
poems one, “Voyages”, is itself a mini-epic, having 18 short parts, each
beginning with a stanza made out of “found” material from Darwin’s account of
the voyage of the Beagle. Darwin’s
observations in strange lands are counterpointed by the poet’s (i.e. the persona-adopted-by-the-poet’s)
observations of things nearer at hand. Darwin observes a man on horseback
dragging a bull with his lasso; the poet kills a blackbird with her speeding
car. A gaucho knifes an armadillo to death; the poet knifes a spider that has
got into her salad. Darwin notes the violence of South American tribes; the
poet sees violence on television at dinnertime. Darwin says Captain FitzRoy
speculates on the natives’ beliefs about the afterlife; the poet reads
Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Collectively,
the comparisons between Darwin’s voyage and the poet’s [persona’s]
happenstances add up to a vindication of domestic and everyday life as a site
of discovery and enlightening experience. They are not a belittling of Darwin’s
great adventure, but an identification with it.
Of all the other
poems in this central section of the book, I am puzzled why it is the poem “Dr
Gully’s Cold Water Cure” (a description of a quack “cure” which Darwin undertook)
which gives this volume its title. Surely the volume itself isn’t throwing cold
water on Charles Darwin? Collectively, the poems give a very nuanced impression
of the man.
As conveyed by
Claire Orchard, Darwin’s encounters with butterflies and birds are
straightforward, but his relationships with his fellow human beings are fraught
with problems. One poem (“Viewing such men”) demonstrates that he shared the
racial prejudices of his age. The poem “The unravelling” reflects on the cruel
side of investigative science – in this case, Darwin’s killing of a bird to
examine its skeleton. But it is in his relationship with his wife and children
that this woman poet sees much for (implicitly) negative comment. “Upon this
matter of the heart”, drawing on notes Darwin made to himself about whether he
should marry or not, presents a plethora of Victorian attitudes towards the
sexes which (I assume) the poet would find either quaintly funny or horrifying
(“A wife is a better companion than a
dog…. A wife will be a vast help in organising notes” etc.). “Darwin’s
first reader” dramatizes the anguish of Darwin’s wife as she considers that her
husband’s theory could rob her of the hope of heaven, and the possibility of
meeting their dead children there. The Victorian battle of science and religion
has its domestic consequences. “Battle of the vegetables” shows Darwin finding
his children and their noise a nuisance when he wants to get on with his work
in silence. The contrast of mother and father here – the woman has to work at
parenthood while the man can get on with his intellectual pursuits – is a
familiar feminine complaint. [In a perverse way, “Battle of the vegetables” reminds
me of Hugh MacDiarmid’s poem “The Two Parents”, which is in part a male
apologia for male grumpiness when children have to be looked after.] Knowingly,
“Battle of the vegetables” is followed by an elaborate poem about Darwin’s
billiard table. And ironically, the cover of this book is a drawing by one of
Darwin’s children. Who said that those noisy children weren’t productive?
And yet if all
this is taken to be deconstructive of Darwin, it is only half the picture
presented by the poet. “My dearest Emma” consists of “found” material from
Darwin’s letters about the illness and death of their young daughter Annie,
showing his anguish. Is it insensitive of Darwin to note that nature is
prodigal and the death of the young (and much-loved) common? Probably not. He
is seeking to place his child’s death in a wider context, just as religious
people do. There are other poems about the child’s death. “Early morning on the
Sand-walk”, by making a chaplet out of phrases from On the Origin of Species, conveys Darwin’s delight in the natural
world, and the grandeur of his vision. And so do the poems “Observations on
their habits” and “Bee”, even if one of them shows Darwin’s methods of
investigation to have occasionally been dotty. If the negatives of Darwin are
suggested in this collection, the image of a great scientist is still
maintained and enhanced. The single poem in Cold
water cure in which I took most delight, “Condor”, draws heavily on Darwin’s
own words to suggest his wonder and awe at nature. I quote it in full:
“A cleric’s collar of feathers at his neck,
black wings
fully extended,
surely they span eight feet from tip to tip,
held in perfect stillness,
thermal currents powering his sweep,
he descends, glides down, until
he’s so close I imagine I feel his pulse
throbbing in the displacement of the air.
Holding on to my hat, I tip my head back
and see how his head, neck and tail move much more
than I expected, how his wings seem to act
as a fulcrum. For nearly half an hour
I watch him hunt over mountain and river,
the outlines of his terminal feathers dark
against the sky, until with a single flap,
he ascends too his for my eyes to follow.”
The last section
of Cold water cure returns to the
modern domestic scene, but the tone is often harsher and more confrontational
than it is in the volume’s opening section. There are poems about the Holocaust
(“This way for the gas”), about human beings seen as machines (“First time on
the disassembly line”), about the possibility of terrorism (“Bombing the
National Gallery of Australia”), about the pains of childbirth (“Delivery
Suite”) and two sceptical poems about religion (“Vatican shockwaves”, “Easter
2014”). Is this pure chance or is the poet, like Darwin’s wife, now fearing the
nihilism of a world without a rational plan?
My last comment
on Cold water cure: What a fine flute
this book is, and how well it is played. The flute’s note is always clear, and
Claire Orchard’s voice is clarity itself. A very impressive debut.
