SPECIAL NOTICE TO READERS: CONSTRAINTS ON MY TIME, PLUS MY RECENT VISUAL IMPAIRMENT, MEAN THAT I HAVE DECIDED HENCEFORTH TO PRODUCE THESE BLOG POSTINGS FORTNIGHTLY RATHER THAN WEEKLY.
We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
“FLOW – Whanganui River
Poems” by Airini Beautrais (Victoria University Press, $NZ30); “ALZHEIMER’S AND
A SPOON” by Liz Breslin (Otago University Press, $NZ25); “BAD THINGS” by Louise
Wallace (Victoria University Press, $NZ25)
As
a reviewer, I pay more attention to New Zealand poetry than do most other
reviewing platforms, apart from those that are specifically dedicated to
poetry. I always treat new collections of poetry with care and respect, and it
is only very occasionally that I feel the need to rebuke a current poet for
sloppy writing, cliché-ridden ideas or unthought-through concepts. There is
much good new poetry out there. Even so, it is only occasionally that a new
volume of poetry has made me sit up with admiration and pure delight. To give a
(partial) list of the best volumes of poetry I have had the pleasure of
reviewing on this blog, I would name Richard Reeve’s Generation Kitchen, Elizabeth Smither’s Night Horse, Sue Wootton’s TheYield, David Eggleton’s The ConchTrumpet, David Howard’s The OnesWho Keep Quiet, and Ian Wedde’s The Lifeguard , not to mention an excellent volume selected from a poet’s
published works so far,Vincent O’Sullivan’s Being Here.
Apart
from my personal taste, what is it that makes me list these particular
collections? I think it is the fact that all these poets have a strong sense of
form.
They all understand what the shape of a poem should be, and they know how metre
and (more occasionally) rhyme can be used to best advantage where needed. In
other words, they know about the poet’s craft.
I
am very happy to add Airini Beautrais’ Flow
– Whanganui River Poems to this list. Flow
is Beautrais’ fourth collection of poems, but it is certainly her most
ambitious so far. As in her third collection (reviewed on this blog), Dear Neil Roberts, Beautrais displays
the welcome gift of accessibility. Some of her allusions may make a few readers
scratch their heads, but she is never wilfully obscure and her thematic
intentions are always clear. Again as in Dear
Neil Roberts, Beautrais’ focus is on the part of New Zealand she inhabits.
As she says in her Dedication, she is a Pakeha whose family have for six
generations lived near the Whanganui River. Flow,
she says, is a “collage” or “polyphony” as the many and diverse stories it tells
about the Whanganui region cannot be welded into one single narrative.
This
very generous collection (nearly 180 pages of text) is divided into three
sections – each almost as long as many complete collections of poetry.
The
first section, “Catchment”, covers the whole region and all the tributaries
that feed into the Whanganui River as it flows north-west from Tongariro, then
turns south at Taumarunui and heads towards the sea. A few of the poems in this
section present a modern viewpoint, presumably based on the poet’s own
experience. But most convey, in the first-person, the experiences of 19th
and early-to-mid 20th century Pakeha explorers and settlers – surveyors,
tree-fellers and loggers, labourers, farmers, and folkloric figures like the
multiple prison-escapee George Wilder.
The
second section, “A Body of Water”, deals with the river itself and the
settlements upon it. More of the poems in this section are pure “nature” poems,
descriptive of the river and its surrounding landscape. There are fewer poems in the first-person and
a clutch of poems about the non-human life in the river (poems about trout,
graylings, freshwater crayfish, eels and eel-traps, lampreys etc.). There is an
awareness of both the messiness and the otherness of nature, as in one of
Beautrais’ best poems “Seed” (pp.82-83), with its catalogue of
“Red grain of wood, wet oozing sap,
domatia where the tiny leaf-mites sleep,
ripe pulpy humus dropped and mashed
by rotting rain, the orange berries flushed
on twigs of foetid plants, the swoop
of water black with tannins in the deep-
cut stream. All live things spill your smell,
all death exudes your taste, and in your fist fits all.”
Even
so, the Pakeha pioneers loom large (poems about cartographers and bridge-builders)
and there are poems about specific individuals – a long poem called “Fire”
about the Anglican missionary and explorer Richard Taylor, and a poem called
“Foundlings” about Mother Mary Aubert at the Jerusalem settlement.
As
for the third section, “The Moving Sand”, it focuses on the city of Wanganui
itself, where the river flows into the sea. Once again, reflections on the
current scene mix with 19th century testimonies from “lieutenant” or
“constable” or “Mrs Field” – the voices of early Pakeha settlers adjusting to
the fact that the large, unruly, black-sand beach, where winds whip the sand
about, is not the same as a polite English beach where one can picnic sedately.
There are a couple of poems (“Eunice”, “Stormbird”) about ships that were
wrecked on the harbour bar, and there is certainly room for Airini Beautrais to
go political or satirical – a poem (“Meat Workers”) about meat workers
protesting at a lock-out, and a poem (“Dead Port”) ridiculing repeated attempts
to turn Wanganui into a major port. For those who get the allusion, the poem
“Glow in the Dark” is a sad reflection on Iris Wilkinson (“Robin Hyde”), who
spent a short time as a reporter on a Wanganui newspaper.
All
I’ve done so far is to walk you through the contents of this expansive book. I
have not said anything about its quality, and why it is the engaging thing that
it is.
Here
are some ideas.
In
the first place, Beautrais (despite often writing in the voices of others and
occasionally sounding like a descendant of Edgar Lee Masters) really does write
within her own experience, never pretending to be other than a Pakeha, never
claiming to channel the perspective of the region’s indigenous ancestors. She
has the wonderful ability to turn very personal experience into something much
greater. Take the last two stanzas of the poem “Plotlines” (pp.23-24) where the
concept of “story” segues easily from a domestic situation to the longest
earthly time-scale:
My son always wants a story. Tell me a story about a
T-rex
who was far away. Tell me a story about a spider
who was lonely.
And if the plotline doesn’t develop:
‘That wasn’t a story! I want a proper story!’
Obstacle, obstacle, obstacle, solution.
Even a three-year-old knows the basic devices.
Obstacle, obstacle, obstacle, attempted solution,
failure.
The greatest stories of all time are geological.
A truly great poem like “Roads”, dated to a visit made in
2013, works by using a present experience to show the impossibility of
re-capturing the past.
Then you note the care she has taken to shape this whole
collection. The first section, for example, both begins and ends at Cherry
Grove, Taumarunui. The last poem in the book, “North Mole” drags a modern
perspective back to primal origins by presenting Kupe as a surfie.
Most impressive, though, is Beautrais’ facility with
form. In both “Clear Away” (pp.25-26) and “Flood” (pp.126-129) she takes on the
type of multi-directional conversation that was a favourite with poets of the
Romantic era. Some poems are a celebration of pure sound, as in the title poem
“Flow” (p.84), which follows the whole course of the river from the mountain to
the sea in insistent anapaests. Formally-structured and rhymed sonnets are within
her range (see pp.172-175). Indeed rhyme is a major device in her arsenal. This
can lead to some problems. “Into the Ground” (p.35) and “Only Dancing”
(pp.43-44) read very much like doggerel, but this is probably intentional – both
poems are meant to be rough working-men’s ballads, and doggerel was the norm in
such.
Flow is an
ambitious and impressive collection from a poet who is immersed in her chosen
subject and knows how to make it sing.
* * *
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No disrespect is meant to two other good collections of
poetry if I deal with them more briefly.
Liz Breslin’s debut volume Alzheimer’s and a Spoon is exuberant, witty, great at wordplay and
delightful to read. And this is very odd because the poems (most written in the
first person) are about serious matters that could easily have become the
occasion for solemnity. The poet’s aged grandmother sinking into Alzheimer’s.
The older woman’s distant and garbled memories of surviving Nazi-occupied
Poland. The way Alzheimer’s eats away at vocabulary. The crushing banality of
the internet and the way nonsense goes “viral”. And yet here these matters are
accounted for with a lightness of touch that (not to get too solemn about it
myself) suggests a resilient human spirit unwilling to be crushed. Breslin
creates collages from found materials – such as her “Lifestyle Creed” - and
challenges us with “riddle” poems, using a variety of verbal techniques to draw
us into her worldview and empathise even as we laugh. God gets a look-in with a
certain wariness, only on the edge of mockery, suggesting the uncertain soul.
There is that old paradox that wit can be a serious business, and it certainly
is here.
In her third collection of poetry Bad Things, Louise Wallace (“poet, not celebrity housewife” as the
blurb helpfully says) goes for free verse, prose poems, aphorisms, pithy and
brief observations and a few truckloads of irony. A clutch of poems reference
Meryl Streep, Reese Witherspoon, Robert Redford and other such Hollywood icons,
usually in the form of personal encounters which read like the poet’s dream
diary. The prose poem “The olives” is a sophisticated take-down of a certain
sort of self-indulgent pseudo-art film. The poem “Constellations”, on
conceptual art, is as near as well-bred poet can come to saying it’s bollocks,
but the statement is carapaced with irony to cushion the blow. And there are
poems on food, on middle-class domesticity, and on clothes. The most affecting
are the most personal – familiy relationships. As for the poem (well, letter
really) about the “other” Louise Wallace, it clearly reflects a great annoyance
in the poet’s life and comes out as the letting-off-of-steam. 
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