We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
“BECAUSE A WOMAN’S HEART IS
LIKE A NEEDLE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE OCEAN” by Sugar Magnolia Wilson (Auckland
University Press, $NZ24:99); “THE MOON IN A BOWL OF WATER” by Michael Harlow
(Otago University Press, $27:50) ; “UNDER GLASS” by Gregory Kan) Auckland
University Press, $24:99)
The
title of Sugar Magnolia Wilson’s collection Because
a Woman’s Heart is Like a Needle at the Bottom of the Ocean is, according
to an end-note, a Chinese proverb – or at least it is when you subtract the
word “because”. It is referenced in a poem of the same title. But what does it
mean and how does it announce the focus and intention of this collection? Does
it mean a woman’s heart is like something tiny in something vast – a mere speck
in the universe? Or is it like our term “like finding a needle in a haystack”,
perhaps signalling that a woman’s heart is inscrutable and hard to locate? And
yet a needle can prick and strike, so maybe it’s also suggesting that, small
and inscrutable though it may be, a woman’s heart [= feelings, motives,
emotional thought patterns] is capable of striking out at the world.
My
apologies for making such heavy weather of a title, but I do think these
suggestions take us somewhere near to what the poet is on about. Because a Woman’s Heart is Like a Needle at
the Bottom of the Ocean has poems suggesting women’s isolation, emotional
responses to nature and (perhaps) vulnerability. But it also has more bolshie
poems striking back at men and at any assumptions about women’s weakness. The
prick of the needle.
The
nine-page prose poem “Dear Sister” opens the volume and in some ways is its
manifesto, or at least its announcement of coming attractions. In a country setting, a woman addresses her “sister”,
partly about the nastiness and insensitivity of men (apparently all men are
guilty of destroying the environment) but mainly in myth-related images,
referencing Lilith, of a woman asserting herself in her own way and even in
solitude. Much of its night-time imagery draws upon Romanticism, even if the
vocabulary is contemporary. Much also resembles a dream-state, which recurs
later in the poem “Dear X”.
Indeed
the “Dear Sister” sequence anticipates a number of keys later struck by the
poet. Similar night-time imagery appears in the poems “Moon-baller” and
“Spent”. Similar ideas of a lost Edenic innocence, and of the lost childhood security
of a protective mother, occur in the poem “Home Alone 2 (with you)”, despite
its quite different idiom, which says “for a while you let me be a kid again, / a
kid who got lost and can’t seem to / find her mother anywhere, / no matter how
hard she looks.” In the poem “Final 80s expose” there is desire for a
painting of a mother in which “the wispy
brown / quarter moon of a / child’s head can be / seen to rest against / her
knees”. The collection closes with a 15-part sequence “Pen pal” (apparently
it was published separately as a chapbook five years ago). It is a free-verse
sequence written as if by a child (or young teenager) in a rural area. The girl
plays at being a witch so there are “spells” in it – as well as the assumption
of the female’s special, and possibly magical, powers. Of course “Pen pal”
presents an adult poet’s perceptions and sensibililties, and not those of a
child. But the assumed child’s voice is yet another harking back to innocence.
Oh
to be a protected child again… and yet the adult world doesn’t allow such an
option.
In
fact the world can be a fairly brutal place, and so can much of Sugar Magnolia
Wilson’s imagery. The poem “Anne Boleyn” gives a harsh anatomical vision of a
woman become monster to preserve herself, with the tone struck in the opening
lines “Anne Boleyn had reptilian
creatures / dwelling in her ovaries / eating all her eggs”. Meanwhile “The
Monster”, referencing Frankenstein’s monster, plays on the paradox of the
masculine blending tenderness with brutality. (Obviously there is the added
irony that Frankenstein’s monster was invented by a woman writer, so the
monster is to some extent a woman’s view of the male.) You will also find in
this collection incidental reference to male domestic violence in a poem about
two half-sisters (“Betty as a Boy”) and in an evocation of 1980s Auckland and
children negelected by parents, but again, with a hint of violence (“Newton
Gully mix tape”).
I
could resort to the tired term “surrealist” to describe the imagery in some
poems here (such as “Pup art”). But I am more taken by Wilson’s tendency to
anthropomorphise nature as a way of delineating the human condition. In “Glamour”,
birds building nests are anthropomorphised to suggest women trapped in
domesticity. Something similar happens in “Mother” where birds’ fertility is clearly
linked to the concept of motherhood in general. As for “The lake has a long
memory”, “Muddy heart”, “The Sleep of Trees” and “Town” – all give a sort of
nature description which really comments on human nature, human memory, the
human psyche.
What
I regard as the stand-out poem in this collection steps aside from these preoccupations.
“Conversation with my boyfriend” is a
tour de force that has to be read stanza by stanza, alternating between two
poems – one expressing a Korean’s thoughts on the same things as the other
speaking an Anglophone’s thoughts. I have often seen this double-poem structure
before, but rarely as well-handled as it is here, with its suggestions of both
understanding and misunderstanding between two cultures. For the record “Bathhouse
night chat” is another exercise in the incomprehension between cultures and there
are other poems which seem to reflect the waxing and waning of an affair with a
Korean.
I
would not describe this collection as wistful, although it has its wistful
moments. More significantly, its imagery and ideas show a collision of tenderness
and hard destructive reality. It has teeth, and they are very sharp. A very
significant debut.
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Individual
poems always have to be read carefully and treated with respect – and this is
the hell of reviewing collections of poetry. Unless I were to give a cogent
analysis of each individual poem, which would make for an incredibly long
review, I have to make generalisations
about a poet’s work. And essentially this means seeing and commenting on
patterns and repeated motifs in poems.
I
am saying all this carefully before I launch into my remarks on what is, I
believe, Michael Harlow’s twelfth collection of poems The Moon in a Bowl of Water. One of the three epigraphs to this
collection is George Serefis’ statement “It
would be very useful if our poets learned to use prose for poetic purposes.”
Picking up on this statement, Harlow has produced a volume of prose poems.
In 2016 I reviewed positively on this blog
Michael Harlow’s Nothing For It But ToSing, noting how often Harlow’s poems read like psychodramas and how he conceives
of joy as a brief consolation for life’s wounds. Born in 1937, Harlow is a
Jungian therapist. He is also, says his on-line bio., of Greek and Ukrainian
heritage. The psychodramas are here in The
Moon in a Bowl of Water with one poem, “On black or white, or both”, specifically
referencing psychotherapy. The ethnic connections are here too, with poems
drawing upon Greek mythology, as in “Odysseus to his son Telemachus”, “Merz
poem, dreaming of Delphi” and those alluding to Persephone. “Artemis for
Alcibiades”, with an Eastern Orthodox setting, suggests the therapeutic power
of some church-related customs. “Weaving,
and the serenity of her laughter” has a Greek setting and is simply an
expression of the serenity that can be found in work, as if it were a sacrament.
As for the title poem “The moon in a bowl of water”, it contrasts the ways of
the “old country” with the ways of the new, particularly in the matter of
having children.
What
is more dominant in this collection, however, is the matter of ageing and death.
Harlow is now in his 82nd year and inevitably many of these poems
are an old man’s reflections. Of course there are poems about death, coffins
and funerals, as in “Contingency plan”, “Undertaking” and “The real estate of
heaven”; but even the poems that do not address death directly tell us
something very sad about facing old age. Perhaps life has not added up to what we
expected. “Ex Libris” says that a life of writing may lead to the realisation
that it is better to be without words. “Telling darkness” and “Our ruby
anniversary” both imply that noise, words, and chatter end in silence anyway.
Harlow’s reference to Saint Augustine, “The Bishop of Hippo and Time” suggests
that the best thing about time is that it moves on and comes to an end. But
something wry can be wrenched from the march of time. One of the collection’s
best, “The weather in Mallorca and Tennessee” concerns aged people trying to
connect with youth and discovering that growing up is not an endless process of
maturing: “And lately he feels the call of philosophy. He thinks hard about walking.
Even if walking forward is always the way of getting somewhere, still, it’s
good to remember that striding out on one foot, the other is always going
backwards.”
The
collection’s poems about unhappy psychological states are as frequent as its
poems about ageing and death. “Cloudy Sunday” is the portrait of a girl damaged
by grief. But what intrigues me is how often psychological stress seems to be
related here to connections not made and relationships that did not work
out. A wedding does not take place because the couple are mismatched even if
they enjoyed flirting (“A matinee special”). A romantic connection may happen,
but probably never will (“Swimming lessons in Spanish”). A woman lives on her own after being thwarted
in love (“The gardeners”). The poem “Short talk on walls” concerns what
literally separates us. Twins are “strangers
of almost a close kind” (“Sister’s keepsake box”). While “Short talk on Cezanne, Switzerland and
lemonade” is mainly about the artist’s special way of seeing, it too segues
into the story of a mismatch and deals with how different his tastes are from
his wife’s. At least in the poem “On never meeting Samuel Beckett”, the idea of
the lost connection is given an ironical and funny twist.
If
death is near, if connections are not made and human beings apparently live as
isolated souls, then (as was apparent in Harlow’s last collection) joy can
never be heartfelt but is always a brief consolation. A clutch of poems say
this directly (“A glancing smile”, “Waiting for the basket-of-gold girl”,
“Three times blessed”). A poem about a photographer (“The eye of the day”) sees
life as, at best, a mixed blessing, or “a way of living… inside the light and dark.”
The mood is clearly expressed in the advice given in “One hundred laughters”: “say you are a window-washer rising out of a
dream, wanting to give a small but bright celestial shine to this
umbrous world.”
If
I were to get censorious, I could say that some of Harlow’s poems seem to play
on the stereotype of sad and stuffy single women - “Reading between-the-lines,
Miss Flora Florentine”, “A small magnificence, just buzz me Miss Blue”, “Taking
care of your own” and “Miss A returning”. The last-named concerns a woman
teacher who hits children and asks the poignant question “Why is
it we sometimes end up paying for the
unhappiness of the unhappy one?”). Or perhaps these are like real people
whom the poet has observed in his practice? Some poems seem to force their
conclusion, such as “Counting backwards” where a tale of povertyy-wrenched
misery concludes: “The truth is I was
born with a hole in my heart / In my heart a real hole they said. And it’s
still there.” Humour does not always work. It’s hard to tell whether “His
career, a pilgim’s progress”, about a strict and possibly violent policeman, is
satire or sneer.
On
the other hand “Little song on the Hit parade” is a neat sardonic comment on
rampant egotism. And “His acting career, getting a life”, one of the best in
the collection, is genuinely funny, though in a melancholy way.
You
can see that I have damaged my head trying to corral into neat categories of dominant ideas all the poems in this book.
I am now vexed with the thought that they are probably more various than I have
suggested. Whatever misgivings I might have about some of Harlow’s work here,
however, let me praise the calm reflection of the book’s coda – the perfect six
lines called “Short talk on the ‘far more near’ ”, which concisely conveys both
the transformative power of poetry and its eternal imperfection.
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Go
to this link, Gregory Kan, and you
will find that three years ago, in early 2016, I reviewed the Singapore-Chinese
expatriate poet’s first collection This
Paper Boat. I was impressed by Kan’s ability to link past with present in
poems that acknowledged the deadness of the past, while at the same time
showing the ongoing influence of the past. Kan often referenced, and was in
conversation with, earlier authors.
Gregory
Kan’s new collection Under Glass is
also in conversation with other authors, as a note at the end lists many
(mainly very recent) works which Kan has “sampled”.
Under Glass is all one poem – not a collection of poems – and has to be read
as such. Most of this one poem, printed in sparse and widely-separated lines,
is gnomic – both in the sense of brief and pithy and in the sense of requiring
very close scrutiny to interpret. Call it a soulscape – the cartography of a
lost or bewildered soul. On its opening page (also cited on the back cover) it
declares: “Here, there are two suns. The
ordinary sun is in the sky overhead. The other sun is eating its way out from
inside me.” We at once have an image of the external world (material
reality) and the inner world (mind, thought, feeling), objectivity and
subjectivity, empiricsm and rationality.
Read
literally, Under Glass takes a
journey through a landscape of river and jungle towards the coast and a
lighthouse. Like the sun, a lighthouse is a clear symbol of clarity,
elucidation, an explanation of things. But the explanation of life is not so
straightforward, and the lighthouse proves not to be a place of clarity and
elucidation. It has a trapdoor leading to a labyrinth of caverns in which lies
“a giant, mouldering pile of letters and
notes” (p.55) which may be a judgment on literature. As this poem (book)
progresses, it is the inner sun, the subjective, that burns more brightly. But
“everything that surrounds the second sun
is not part of it but nonetheless makes it what it is.” (p.40) Even the
subjective is driven by material reality. We are in the world of uncertainty
where there are no neat answers to the problem of existing.
Strung
through Under Glass are direct
addresses (“you”) to somebody, so the ontological and epistemological questions
are also wedded to the fragility of relationships and it is easy to infer that this
set of reflections has been provoked by a relationship that has broken down, or
that is at a crisis stage.
There
is in this poem that quest for clarity and simplicity, as in “I wanted what happened to be something / I
could know / and I wanted what I knew to be something / I could describe”
(p.2). The quest is emphasised thus: “I
want fixed terms by which to measure my experience. / I must be either high, or
dying. / I don’t want to know many small things. / I want to know one big
fucking thing / and call it either shame, or home.” (p.12) We also note
that “I thought that the things I loved /
were places I could always go back to / but the spaces between things become
places themselves / and threaten to swallow me whole” (p.6). This concern
with the influence of the past links Under
Glass with Kan’s earlier collection This
Paper Boat.
I
found something very refreshing in Under
Glass. Perhaps it is the forthrightness of its ideas. Parhaps, for all that
I have said about its gnomic quality, it is the poet’s candour in dissecting
very personal thought patterns. But most important, it is a work that gives a
sense of wholeness and completeness. Under
Glass is the expression of one unified inspiration.
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