Something New

  We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“A PLACE TO RETURN TO” by John Allison (Cold Hub Press, NZ$30);  “NIGHT AS DAY” by Nikki-Lee Birdsey (Victoria University Press, $NZ30); “LAY STUDIES” by Steven Toussaint (Victoria University Press, $NZ25)

            It was happenstance and the order in which publishers sent review copies to me that brought me to review these three new collections. But as I read them, I thought they could be ranged in an order from most accessible to most mandarin. See what you think.

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John Allison is an experienced poet and A Place to Return To is his fifth published collection. New Zealand–born, longtime resident of Australia, and now once again resident of New Zealand, Allison (born in 1950) is not too much older than I am. This may be the reason that I feel very much at home in his poetry, despite not sharing his “anthroposophist” philosophy. Most of his cultural references are ones with which I can identify and (apparently) most of the books he’s read are ones I’ve read. Many poems in A Place to Return To nod at High Culture. Allison reads the obits. of poets in the Guardian while listening to Mozart; he still has a thing for Ezra Pound and takes in vistas of Provence and gives a dawn poem (“alba”) while quoting the old langue d’oc and examining landscape via mentioning Cezanne and visiting Cezanne’s atelier. There is a somewhat broken-backed poem about Alfred Sisley; and Charles Trenet and Charles Baudelaire both get a look in.

Subtitled “new and uncollected poems”, A Place to Return To comprises 29 new poems and 22 previously uncollected poems. Poems in the “new” section are called “Telling Stories” and were written between 2013 and 2019. Poems in the “uncollected” section are called “Another Way of Looking” and date from between 1998 and 2005.

You get a taste of Allison’s style and typical themes as soon as you read this collection’s opening poems. The poems “you  elsewhere” and the sequence “backing into silence” are composed neatly in couplets. More alluringly, they are written in a very straightforward, declaratory style – being ostensibly about seascape and landscape – but they have the trick of implying much more about human beings. The same is true of the later poem “Native Country”, where the true country becomes the body of the beloved.

There is, then, a double vision – in these cases, human beings are read into the land.

The poem “A question raised by archaeology” is another example of the poet’s double vision. A cursory reading give us a simple story of “backyard archaeology” i.e. something being dug up in the back garden for fun – in this case a fragment of china with part of the “Willow Pattern” on it. The child-observer for the first time understands there is tension between his parents. But read more carefully, the poem really turns on the idea of what is authentic and what is fake (with, I suspect, the poet knowing full-well that the whole “Willow Pattern” legend is not truly Chinese, but is a European example of Chinoiserie, or Chinese-style fakery). In other words, there is a complex philosophical concept presented in the form of a simple story.

Much of what Allison writes is elegaic, as perhaps befits an older man. One of the best poems in this collection is the wistful and beautifully-crafted “Elegy Eutrapelos”. It references especially Paul Valery’s Le Cimitiere Marin as well as other scraps of shared 20^th century culture. Valery’s great poem has inspired other New Zealand poets. (Look up on this blog the review of Robert McLean’s A Graveyard by the Sea.) But in its effect, Allison’s poem has more in common with the tradition of crepuscular 18^th century poems (Gray, Collins, Thompson etc.)

Another of Allison’s very best is “Theatre Piece”, which might quote Oscar Wilde as its epigraph, but which is in a tone more like a painting by Paul Delvaux or like Rene Magritte’s “The Lovers”, sounding the idea of isolated souls never meeting. And when Allison is not being literally elegaic, he is often saying goodbye (“At the departure gate”) or lamenting distances (“As it is”) and very last poem of the “new” poems part of this collection is an “envoi” telling us “living seems more / complicated now than dying” and “poetry is all there is / when nothing else makes sense.”

There is in Allison’s work an admirable recognition of “nature red in tooth and claw”, as found in the poem “why we fish” with one “trying anything to coax / a wily, insolent brown trout / to deviate from its lakeshore beat / and suck it up, strike, sink / down to the bottom, doggo as a snag – or else smashed by / the impetuous rush of a rainbow, never / delicate in its fierce arc”. Perhaps in this fine poem we get close to Ted Hughes’ “Pike” territory. But like much of Allison’s work, it segues into an elegy.

I have deliberately lingered more in the “new” poems than I will in the “uncollected” ones of this book, as I think I have already given you the measure of this poet. The “uncollected” one also reference High Culture in the form of Plato, Plotinus, Buddha, Blake, Rilke, Leonardo da Vinci, Gerald Manley Hopkins et al. (I am definitely not denigrating this tendency in Allison’s work – I am simply noting it).

It will suffice to say that there are three stand-out poems in the “uncollected’ section. “The Way Down” is a very vivid and touching recollection of childhood encounters with aviation, warm without being sentimental. “This Side” appears to be an elegy for the poet’s father. And in the cycle “Rilke at Duino”, the finale gives us a persuasive combination of death and love in the lines  “A hunter leans into his shotgun’s stock / as though against the cheek / of his beloved in the village tavern.”

In this whole volume there is only one poem which strikes me as off-key. “Dead Reckoning” concerns an adult man’s remorse for having thoughtlessly shot a bird when he was a child. The poem’s moralising is just a little too pat.

            Allison belongs to the school of well-crafted poems, but he does break out into prose-poems, fragmented poems such as “sounding off” where Nietzsche faces David Bowie, and “found” poems like quotations from the notebooks of da Vinci and the diary of Hopkins.

            This is an agreeable, mature and thoughtful collection.

            Just one curious footnote: One endnote at the back refers to a poem that doesn’t appear to be in the book, “Last Songs of Gustav Mahler”. I assume this is a typo.

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            I spent much of two days reading and pondering over the debut poetry collection of Nikki-Lee Birdsey, Night as Day. At the end of this careful reading, I find myself in a quandary.

The sensibility Nikki-Lee Birdsey expresses is one with which I can easily sympathise. Much of her imagery is impressive and memorable. In many poems, she is open about her perceptions and feelings. But the collection is haunted and, I think, dampened, as many debut volumes are, by being just a little too eager to wear its learning on its sleeve, or to bewilder us with obscure references. Significantly, the poems are followed by fully 20 pages of endnotes (or “Commentary”, as they are designated), either explaining such references or, in some cases, telling us why the poet wrote a given poem. Sometimes this come close to telling us what to think about the poems, which is regrettable.

Why is the collection called Night as Day? So many of these poems refer to the difference between New Zealand and the United States (especially New York and New Jersey) in both of which Birdsey has been a long-term resident. The title has something to do with the fact that it is day in one when it is night in the other, and the poet is often thinking of one while living in the other.

Allow me to do my familiar bibliographic trick of first walking through the book’s contents.

Night as Day is divided into three sections.

Section 1, “Naturalisation”, comprises seven longish poems, all of which are somehow related to the dual identity of the poet as inhabitant of both New Zealand and the USA. (BTW, the endnotes helpfully tell us which location every poem is set in, NZ or NY etc.). In this section, the poem that most clearly expresses this dual identity is the last one, “Foreign & Domestic”. Essentially, it is a poem (within both NY and NZ) of a major sense of dislocation in an alien city – although many very personal references tend to shut the reader out.

Section 2, “Objects” is a sequence of twelve shorter poems, again suggestive of a fragile consciousness wavering between New York and New Zealand, each poem fired by objects or things.

Finally Section 3, “Cartographic Life”, comprises twelve poems, again on the general theme of mixed identity, but now with a tendency to focus on the New Zealand end of things. 

I’ll declare openly my difficulty with some of this by considering the very first poem of the collection “Cette Terre Homicide” (This Murderous Land). It is a poem in triplets, playing on the clash of identities poised between New Zealand and New York, with “the bright destruction of / my thought process hanging / in the imbalance”. As much as anything, this poem is a lament for a sensibility so overwhelmed by its literary training that it finds it hard to react to the immediate moment. There is much quoting of texts (“intertextuality” is very much the thing now) moving almost into the Stephane Mallarme territory of cryptic, self-referencing incomprehensibility. Hence in reading this poem, I felt joyful release in its clear, colloquial conclusion  “I’m writing this / to say it was / the easiest thing / I have ever done.” One line I thought perfectly summed up an aspect of New Zealand landscape, but then it may in fact be referring to New York, viz. “the shorn / mountains full of nothing dangerous.”

You can see where I am here, can’t you? The ideas are interesting, the images are often arresting, the poet is holding my attention, but there is much confusion.

Thus too with “Augustland”, in essence a simple poem with its reflections on New York, partly viewed through an apartment window, intertwined with memories of a poet and of music, but again so self-referencing as to mystify the  uninitiated; and it walks on the crutches of nearly three closely-printed pages of endnote. With regard to those endnotes, would one easily understand that “The Long Nineteenth Century” is meant to evoke the poet’s ingestion of nineteenth century literature without an endnote to tell us so? Likewise, only the endnote allows us to understand that the poem “Dream Baby Dream” refers to unversity students committing suicide in a time of economic recession. It is a relief to come across the poem “Green Ray”, which has no endnote telling us what to think of it.

But let me not overemphasise this, as I do not wish to pillory a poet who clearly says much that is worth listening to. I delight in the clarity of such poems as 

“Mutuwhenua”, on the fragility of memory as related to childhood events. Or “The Great Western Hotel”, recalling a specific time and place (Auckland’s west coast Piha), but at one remove as it concerns people from before the poet’s time. (There is an odd “distancing” in many poems – consider “The Undergraduate” – a tentative self-portrait but presented in the second person). “Objects 5” makes a lucid statement as the poet views young girls playing in a park… but then there is that long endnote to tell me how thick I am and what literary references I’ve missed. “Objects 7” contains the exquisitely intelligible lines “We never look at just one thing. / I throw my phone in the / bin, too many images -  / it’s just a piece of junk aglint / in the plastic folds of the liner.” Brava! Not that clarity in and of itself is always a virtue. It can lead to the deadpan, and often banal, observationism of Frank O’Hara, who seems to be pushed very much at rookie poets in writing schools. So I shudder a little when “Objects 4” contains the lines “This is another ‘I do this. I do that’ poem / I learnt in New York from O’Hara. / This is a New York poem set in a garden / styled in colonial civics on an island / that is not Manhattan.”

But enough of my dithering over these matters. “War Song” has much hard and memorable imagery creating a mental picture, and such imagery (one of Nikki-Lee Birdsey’s strengths) therefore makes poetic sense even without the endnote giving us a back-story. Similarly, “The Blue Hour”, the most affecting poem in the collection, is, au fond, a statement about loneliness and love, with the pellucid statement “You need a human to love in this awful / human endeavour. You look at all the / sad, dark things I can write long after his death…. You are reading this introduction / to my life now, I wish it were closer / to happiness …”

The front-flap  blurb to this collection describes it as “balancing artistic experimentation with frank expression”. Yes. I agree with that. But if experimentation requires obscure references that have to be explained in overlong notes, then I hope it is reined in a bit in the poet’s next collection.

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This is a rather confronting way to begin my notice on Steven Toussaint’s Lay

Studies, but begin thus I must.

Reviewers are not supposed to say this, but I, theologically-literate, well-attuned to poetry and its conventions even in its most modern guise, read and re-read and attempted to analyse and squeeze meaning from the first four poems in this volume (“The New Laity”, “Acts”, “Pound” [presumably Ezra] and “St. Francis “) and found myself baffled. I paused, had a cup of tea, and tried again – with the same result. Sometimes I wish I was like the type of “critic” who habitually provides blurbs for volumes of poetry, and who speaks in broad generalities without actually elucidating what any given poem is about. You, dear poetry-reader, must know the type of thing I mean: “Poet XYZ cuts deep into the perplexities of life and politics with a sharp and telling wit, erudite and engaging while not neglecting the complexities of inter-personal relationships” etc. etc. etc. One can easily fill pages with such general assertions – none of which ever prove that said critic has read deeply the volume in hand. Thus I struggled with “The New Laity”, “Acts”, “Pound” and “St. Francis”, discovering isolated images that meant something, but never finding them knitting into a coherent whole. I think (perhaps “intuit” would be the better word) that the “St Francis” poem acts as a sort of antidote to the “brother son, sister moon” hippie-ish interpretation of St Francis [of Assisi] by suggesting the less comfortable aspects of nature, but that is the best I can do with it.

American-born (in 1986), but settled in New Zealand for the last decade, Steven Toussaint has studied theology. So I begin on the back foot, genuinely wanting to like a poet who views reality within a philosophical and theological framework and who attempts to interpret things sub specie aeternitatis. But the opening of this collection of poems still daunts me.

Mercifully, I move on and find myself in more limpid space after the baffling quartet. “Yes or No” is not only a parody of simplistic questionnaires, but also a satirical comment on the cheapening of spiritualty in the quick-fire, one-liner, on-line computer age. “Kettle’s Yard” mocks (I think) the pretension that art in itself is a spiritual experience. The long sequence “Aevum Measures” deals with theological matters in terms of music – the dissonant “tritone” becomes the odd measure of the distance between material perception and eternity. The images are piquant, suggesting the degeneration of a physical environment even where angels were once supposed to fly. I let myself ride on the imagery in this one and enjoyed it.

Encountering a poem like “Bubbles”, I wondered if the poet works best in short gnomic statements. I reproduce the first section of “Bubbles” in full:

“At home with contingency

breeze arrives like a first

principle. Autumn.

Red leaves welcomed, one

by one, into the yawning

corridor. A season’s calm

demolitions, diminishing

returns,

imaginary saturations

of foliage on the threshold. ”

The poem’s epigraph refers to Lent, the time of self-denial before Passion Week and Easter, so it is autumnal before the winter of Christ’s passion and death and the spring of his resurrection. If “contingency”  - or flux – is accepted as a “first principle”, then it is an embrace of chaos. But as autumn is part of a cycle, there is the paradox of constancy in change, so the “contingency” really points to what is eternal. At least that is the best reading I can give of it. And it appears to be confirmed by the following stanzas of “Bubbles”, where images of ordinary suburban existence knock against the eternal pattern.

The sequence “Chicago Sketches” is more in the realm of mild social satire of the poet’s hometown, with flashes of annoyance at passing fads. The sequence “Sts Peter and Paul” is the most lucid in the book, once one has grasped the historical events that are involved – and its emotional heart is the section in which St Peter, the denier, questions his own pusillanimity (quo vadis? etc). The poems “Agnus Dei” and “The Nuptial Yes” come closest to articulating a traditional theology.

I end this review profoundly and deeply troubled. What I think Toussaint (“All Saints” – what an apt name) is reaching for is the deepest of profundities, though sometimes with the mildest of ironies (see the poem “St. Mary the Less”). What he is doing is totally out of tune with what is currently fashionable. How could it not be so when it so often references St Thomas Aquinas, St Francis, Neoplatonism, Messiaen’s religious music, Jacques Maritain, Simone Weil, T.S.Eliot? (The roll-call, apart from Eliot, suggests either a Catholic, or at least a man with a Catholic upbringing). I also note that Toussaint has evidently immersed himself in the thoughts and ideas of the canonical thinkers here referenced. He is not wearing their names simply as a badge of his “culture” which is, regrettably, a common feature in many contemporary poets.

I salute Toussaint’s aspiration, but I warn that this is difficult reading.