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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.
“HOARD” by Fleur Adcock
(Victoria University Press, $NZ 25); “仁 SURRENDER” by Janet Charman (Otago University Press, NZ$27:50); “ORDINARY
TIME” by Anna Livesey (Victoria
University Press, $NZ 25); “FLOODS ANOTHER CHAMBER” by James Brown (Victoria
University Press, $NZ 25)
I
begin this post with an apology.
Recently
I had to suspend producing Reid’s Reader
for some months due to illness (hospitalisation and then weeks of
recuperation). In that time, publishers continued to send me books to review,
so that a formidable pile had accumulated by the time I got back to this work.
The greatest casualty were collections of poetry which, as you know, get very
little notice in the media outside specialist publications and websites.
So
my apology is, that in catching up with four recent collections of poetry in
this one posting, I am going to have to deal with them more briefly and rather
summarily than I would otherwise do. Beg pardon.
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Fleur
Adcock (born 1934) may be our best-known living literary expatriate. England has
been her home since 1963, but she has made a number of return visits here in
recent years. A prolific poet, her last volume The Land Ballot (reviewed on this blog) concerned her family
background in rural New Zealand. The publisher’s blurb for Hoard tells us helpfully that this book is made up of things that
didn’t fit the themes of the poet’s last two collections. I will not call it a
pot-pourri, because its four sections do each have a common theme. But it is
clear that these are things which, on their own, wouldn’t have made a complete
book. Not that it worries me. I find that too many new collections of poetry
tend to be “concept albums”. I prefer the older style of collection where we
read each poem as an individual entity, even if thus we often work out a poet’s
general preoccupations.
So
to Hoard.
The
first section comprises poems about Adcock’s younger life, from schooldays to
young adulthood. Thus to poems about learning Latin declensions at school; the
degeneration of her handwriting since she was a child; her use of typewriters
(which she has now spurned for computers); witnessing a Caesarean delivery when
she was a young woman (at the sight of which a woman called "Mrs Campbell" apparently fainted); three
rather bitter poems about her short marriage to Barry Crump; and poems about
getting used to working and raising a son in England. Adcock’s imagery can be as
sharp as cut metal, as in her very opening poem about coin-collecting as a
child. One ancient worn coin, she writes, has been “sucked in the mouth of history / for so long that its outer edges / are
smoothed away, gone down time’s gullet / with a slow wince of dissolving copper.”
Perfect!
In
the second section, the focus is history before the author’s time. This
includes forebears, as in “Anne Jane’s Husband” (a brutal poem about conjugal
sex, presumably in the 19th century) and two poems on family tales that
were passed on by mothers. But more arresting are two longer poems – or cycles
of shorter poems – about the very left-wing British Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson,
famous in the 1930s and 1940s for being a bit of a firebrand, leading the Jarrow
march against unemployment, organising shelter in London during the Blitz and
later being Minister of Education. Adcock clearly admires her as a feminist
figure from an earlier age, and goes very protective in poems on Wilkinson’s
private life, including one which condemns the rumour that Wilkinson eventually
committed suicide.
Thus
much for the past. The last two sections of Hoard
deal with Adcock’s impressions of England now and of New Zealand now.
Her
poems about English landscape are indeed very English, like the sequence “A
Spinney” about foliage around her English home. Take the section “Horse-Chestnut”
which I quote in full: “The squirrels
want me to grow a forest. / They plant
acorns on my lawn; / I haul them out by the stems, like minims. / / They plant a conker. A green hand shoots
up, / and lo, I’ve stabled it in a pot: / a fistful of sticky buds for next
spring”. It couldn’t be anywhere but England. Nor could the poem about
foxes roving in the suburbs by moonlight. One poem is an extended intellectual
game. This is “Albatross”, ostensibly about Coleridge gaining his inspiration
for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,
but segueing into a lament for birds strangled by plastic out in our modern
oceans.
I
hate using this term, because I have often used it for poems by older people,
but Adcock’s tone is often elegaic. In England bookshops are disappearing as
books get sold on line; people suggest (in the poem poem “Real Estate”) that
she should sell the old-fashioned home she loves and buy a flat (she refuses).
In “Pacifiers” she mocks young people clutching their phones in the way her
generation used to suck on cigarettes. Fings Ain’t Wot They Used Ta Be.
When,
in the last section, she gets to modern New Zealand (observations based on a
trip here in 2015), I feared at first that her tone would be dismissive. In
“Helensville”, she declares “small-town
New Zealand’s doing its thing / of channelling the 1930s.” In a way the
funniest poem in the collection is the regretful “Blue Stars” in which Adcock
declares “my New Zealand nationality / is
a part-time thing – a bit of nostalgia” and goes on to discourse on New
Zealand’s lack of indigenous flowers, and hence our need to import exotics
which, annoyingly, often run wild. But her general take on modern EnZed is more
rueful than dismissive, for in the remaining poems, old age attempts to
reconstruct what Mercer and Drury and Thames and Raglan and (especially)
Wellington were like when she was young.
It
is like a ghost visiting old haunts and wondering at the impertinence that has
made them change.
I
hope it goes without saying that Adcock’s poems here, even if very
retrospective, display the best elements of the modernist tradition in which
she developed. The poems are accessible, clear, not given to rhetoric and –
dammit – often great fun.
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Now
in her mid-60s, Janet Charman (born 1954) isn’t as senior a poet as Fleur
Adcock, but she is firmly established with seven well-received collections
behind her. I remember reviewing with pleasure her At the White Coast (2012) in Poetry
New Zealand #46 (March 2013). It was a loose, autobiographical collection,
written in very free verse, of her OE experiences when working in England in
the 1980s.
Her
new collection 仁 Surrender is also
autobiographical and it is mainly composed of free verse; but its final section
“101 Snapshots” consists of 101 pithy statements written in (very loose) haiku
form – at least each is three lines, even if they do not adhere to traditional
haiku syllabics. As she states in her Acknowledgements, this collection sprang
from a writing residency in Hong Kong in 2009 and a guest readership at a
literary event in Taipei in 2014; therefore much of it is also an outsider’s
response to Chinese culture. No wonder the ghost of Robin Hyde makes an appearance.
The poem “仁” explains the Chinese character仁 in her title (apparently
pronounced “ren”), which once stood for specificially masculine human qualities
but which now stands for a general range of human characteristics, including
compassion. This seems to connect with the many and diffuse allusions Charman’s
poetry makes here to gender and sexual identity.
For
much of this collection, we are reading what could be taken for loose diary
jottings, or at least poems worked up therefrom. We open with the poet settling
into an alien hotel room and adjusting to jet-lag (“your
time 3am. / my time my own”). As the settings are polyglot writers’
gatherings, many poems reference words being translated or mistranslated in literary
texts; how sexually-explicit moments of some texts are received; personalities
met; questions asked by students; and the otherness of Hong Kong (or Taipei). In
a number of poems she mentions taking Panadol for headaches or backaches and
this seems to say something about the hectic nature of literary conferences,
especially when there are students to lecture or be quizzed by.
In the long multi-part poem “where people
are” the poet declares “i am actually a left margin justified crazy
person / who agitating at her map in a crowded concourse / will talk to herself”.
In this poem, there is the sense of disorientation in an alien environment and
perhaps the disintegration of the self with a long series of statements
beginning “i am”. Breathless, composed in short bursts over 17 pages, “where
people are” touches on attraction of woman to woman mixed with cultural clash,
much reference to the female body (especially genitalia) and the idea that
poetry should undermine and liberate a closed or too-rigid a socety, which in
this case is China.
Sometimes
a poem is simply about the feeling sparked by something seen. In the poem “Wo
de tian a!” a visit to an exhibition of dresses arouses jouissance in the poet. Sometimes a visit to a particular location
fires up a series of reflections so diverse that it is hard to grasp a unifying
theme, as in the very discursive poem “Nan Lian Garden” about a visit to a
public garden. “They say you’re Japanese” agonises about cultural assimilation,
while “it’s late” is a very personal memory concerning the father of the poet’s
children who was unable to give up smoking before cancer already had him. While
there is much effervescence and fizz in these poems, some become sombrely
preachy. “The Anthology of Women’s Poetry” reads like a literary polemic that
might have worked better as an essay. “on the sliding rack” is a rather flat
protest poem about how a contaminated milk scandal was handled.
The
publisher’s blurb for this volume speaks of “privileged constraints” upon the participants at the Honk Kong
gathering. And certainly, in quite another sense, a mood of privilege inflects
some of these poems. You are in a privileged environment if you write a poem
about swapping your own books with other participants. Or if you write “Banquet”
about how to dress at a literary dinner to make the right impression. Or if you
write a ten-page poem “some notes on shopping and present giving” on what a
bother it is finding and buying the appropriate things to give as presents to
other participants. Yet of course Janet Charman is savvy enough to undercut
this with self-deprecation and irony, which tell us that she isn’t that self-obsessed. In the poem
“of our lucky eight” she remarks “Hong
Kong doesn’t seem that foreign to me / though i know after these cocooned weeks
/ i might be kidding myself”. The
whole of this particular poem is, in fact, about the embarrassment of having to
hold the fort when some members of the performing literary troupe have deserted
her.
Janet
Charman’s poems here never did less than hold my attention. But after their
sometimes rambling discursiveness, I found that I enjoyed most the pithy
epigrams of the final (loose) haiku section.
Such
gems as “trampoline / the stepchild’s /
sitting room”
Or
“listen / that’s a hungry cry / turn up
the music”
Or
“they’ll know / while Earth burned / we
fiddled with our nature poems”
Or
“leaf raking the trees tell me /
everything / about winter”
Or
even “those amber those carnelian wrist
beads / cheap beyond belief / live ammunition from the faraway market”
As
I did when I reviewed At the White Coast,
I could at this point rebuke Charman for her rather precious habit of avoiding
capital letters, especially in her use of “i” for the first person singular. In
the new collection there is a poem “a writing exercise”, about answering
students’ questions on her work. It has
a very defensive section on her avoidance of capital letters which equates “I”
with male phollocentrality and “i” with the hitherto suppressed female.
Ho-de-hum. Interesting, coincidentally, that the poem notes Fleur Adcock is not
enthused by Janet Charman’s typographical tic either. But then if I get too
reproving about this issue, I will sound like the “teacherly reviewer” Charman rebukes in one of her haiku.
Besides,
I don’t want to end on a sour note after enjoying most of this collection.
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Anna
Livesey is of a younger generation than either Fleur Adcock or Janet Charman,
but the “corporate strategist”, as
the blurb describes her, is no newcomer either. Ordinary Time is her third collection.
As
there are one or two religious references in this (short) collection of poems,
I am sure the poet is aware that “ordinary time” is the term used by the church
for those weeks of the year that are not taken up with the big seasons of Lent,
Easter, Advent and Christmas – in other words, the times when life chugs on as
life, away from the big public events.
Life
chugs on as (domestic) life in these poems, which are candid, personal and – at
first – focus on the poet’s experience as the mother of a newborn baby girl and
a two-year-old toddler boy. The big world can chug on outside as Anna Livesey
looks clearly at her early motherhood. The opening (title) poem at once tells us that
she just brought her new baby home from hospital. The poem “Eleven Days” says
the umbilical cord has gone (“The rotten
flesh-stump that joined us / has fallen off”). The most gynaecologically-explicit
poem is “Privacy” in which, as she is having a Caesarean section, she thinks of
her mother – and wishes to have “the dark
privacy of the womb restored”. In the poem “America”, she compares her two
children with the remembered skittering of fireflies, seen in America… and then
rebukes herself for doing so. She does not wish to surrender to the fey or make
her language pretentious and pretty. Some poems compare the newborn with the
toddler, and there are great insights into toddler behaviour. Any young parent
can relate to the lines in the poem “Winter Gardens”: “I watch my two-year-old and think: / I want to bite my hand in rage
when I’m given the wrong cup; / shuffle away from strangers, shaking with
disgust / at their forgiveness / their unknowledge of myself.” Yes,
toddlers’ tantrums can make us want to throw tantrums too.
The
poems are realistic about babies and young children but not hard, not cynical.
The closeness, warmth and cuddliness of young motherhood is here too.
There’s
a subtle shift in the second section of this collection. Motherhood is still
the focus, but it widens to take in the poet’s relationship with her own mother
and grandmother, as well as shared experience with other women. The past and
the present are united. “Artificial Intelligence” is a poem dense with meaning,
connecting mourning for the death of her mother with the child growing in the
womb and, later, with post-partum depression – a “cycle of life” poem which
manages to be neither sententious nor trite. The prose poem “Drowned Church” (I
refuse to synopsise it) is a wonderful essay in literal symbolism. “Bay Leaves”
comes closest to being Anna Livesey’s manifesto and explanation of poetic
technique when she avers: “In my first
book I was desperate not to be confessional. / My poems reached out of myself,
pushed myself away. / Now that my mother is dead and my children are born / I
seem to have nothing else to speak of.” As for the poem “Reading Books
About the War” – it is a really bizarre prose poem, its four sections almost like
four separable stand-up-comic gigs.
The
third section is more generally reflective, moving from the poet’s immediate
family circle to reveries of a friend in rural America and a poem set on a New
York fire escape. The final poem in the book (“Trimester One”) seems to be about an abortion,
but could equally be about something imagined. It is unusually opaque for this
poet, who is on the whole clarity itself.
When
poems are as personal and intimate as many of these are, making judgments upon
them can seem uncomfortably like making judgments on the poet herself. I hope I
am not guilty of that here. As a male, I recognised and understood many of the
joys and anxieties of young parenthood that resonate in this collection.
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In
its issue of 25 November, the NZ Listener
produced a list of ten volumes of New Zealand poetry, published in 2017,
that were worth reading. Fully eight of the volumes were by women, one was an
anthology edited by a woman and a man, and only one of the ten volumes (David
Howard’s The Ones Who Keep Quiet –
reviewed on this blog) was by a man. Let me confess that reviewing new volumes
of New Zealand poetry sometimes seems like a journey through female
confessionalism, so much do women poets now dominate the scene. And note how
this posting replicates the process. Having looked at three volumes by women, I
now give you the token male. Not that James Brown himself (born 1966) can be
regarded as marginalised, given that Floods
Another Chamber is his sixth collection and given that he is at the heart
of the poetic establishment, now running Vic’s poetry-writing courses, having
edited Sport etc.
I
won’t waste my or your time by trying to explain why this volume is divided
into three sections. The arrangement seems to be purely arbitrary. Also, I
remember in a review years ago coming up with an ingenious explanation as to
why a certain volume was divided into sections, only to be told later by the
poet in question that he had arranged his collection that way simply to “give
readers a break”. So maybe that’s all that’s happening with the organisation of
Floods Another Chamber.
In
Floods Another Chamber, James Brown
shows that he can write poems in many different forms. Let me list some of
them. There’s the alphabetical poem (“The A to Z of Cycling”) where each of 26
lines begins with a new letter of the alphabet. There’s the mock nursery-rhyme
(“Peculiar Julia”, “Shrinking Violet”). There’s that standard of the writing
school class, the Wallace Stevens-style “thirteen-ways-of-looking-at” poem
(“Eight Angles on the Manawatu River”). There are prose anecdotes lineated
(“The Real Humpties”, “How I Met My Wife”). There are modified haiku (“Snogging
in Wordsworth’s Bedroom” “Sad Dads” “Tautology Explained”). There are list poems
(like the lists of cliché-ic things people say about beds in “Beds R Us”; or
like “Agile Workshop”, a collection of clichés spoken in workshops and
presentations). There’s the “I-can-write-groovy-sex” poem (“Erotic Snowdome”).
And there’s the “found” poem (“Come on Lance”, which Brown would have
transcribed only because the cyclist Lance Armstrong proved to be a drug cheat;
and “Fine with Afterlife”, reproduced implicitly to mock a poorly-devised
theatre poster). Towards the end of the book, there are a clutch of poems built
around the repetition of the same grammatical structures.
Far
from making me admire the virtuosity of the poet, I find here only a box of
tried-and-true tricks, like forms recommended to students in a poetry-writing
seminar. There is something airless about most of the collection, as if the
poet is not so much connecting with what he is ostensibly writing about as
seeing what genre strategies he can devise.
Some
poems work as satire, such as the hit at real estate agents in “Attitude”; or
what could equally be either social satire on dead-end jobs or an
elegy for lost and wasted youth (“The AM Sound” – this being the poem that
gives this volume its title with the line “your
despair floods another chamber”). Very occasionally, too, there is a poem
where the poet seems emotionally invested in his material, like “Piano Tune”, a
sad little thing about a bird caught in a piano. In many ways it’s a pity that
the very best poem in the volume appears so early. This is “Social Experiment”,
a genuinely witty poem about New Zealand’s (dying?) obsession with rugby – yet
with the poet self-deprecating enough not to be elevated by his own superiority
in not being a fan.
Yet,
along with the stylistic games, there’s a deadening sardonic tone to so much of
what the poet writes. James Brown is over-eager to tell us that he is too
sophisticated to be impressed by things that might impress us lesser mortal. We
move into the land of condescension. “Emu” and “Beyond Red Rocks” are
presumably memories of tramping and/or cycling trips in the wilderness… but
remember, it’s not fashionable to say you admire or are in awe of the scenery
on such expeditions, so both poems are hip memoranda about me, me, me. “Janet and
John go to the Book Launch” is written with deadpan irony (mimicking the style
of old primary school readers), but with an unpleasant undercurrent of contempt
for the people who attend such things as book launches. “The Pitfalls of
Poetry” and “Unstressed / Stressed” are attacks on older forms of poetry – or
are they Larkinian irony? (As in Larkin’s “books
are a load of crap.”)
Unless
you are cocooned in sterile literary theory, you will be aware that (always and
in every form of publication, despite denials) there is a huge element of
subjectivity in all reviewing and criticism. Everything I have said about Floods Another Chamber boils down to the
fact that I did not enjoy this collection, did not engage with it and found
much of it to be predictable game-playing. Others may have a different reaction
and they are most welcome to it. We none of us want to discourage people from
writing poetry, after all.
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