We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
“LOST AND SOMEWHERE ELSE” by Jenny
Bornholdt (Victoria University Press, $NZ25); “DEADPAN” by James Norcliffe
(Otago University Press, $NZ27:50); “MOTH HOUR” by Anne Kennedy (Auckland
University Press, $NZ 24:99)
I
am going to approach Jenny Bornholdt’s latest collection of poems Lost and Somewhere Else as if I have
never heard of this prolific and much-honoured poet. I will attempt the radical
technique of reading the poems on the page themselves, and ignoring
biographical details - save to note that (according to the acknowledgements)
the poems were written when the poet and her husband were living for a year
(2018) in an Ernst Plischke-designed house in Central Otago. This may have some
bearing on the poems, which is the only reason I mention it, and it is
specifically referenced in the poem “Crossing”.
This
collection begins in a deceptively simple way. The opening poems concern
standing in the sunlight at the back door and looking at clothes on the line;
the sight of backyard birds and how the disposition of light recalls childhood;
the lino in the kitchen and that part of the lawn that has been mown. But these
are not simply descriptive pieces. Something is moving behind them, and that is
an implied attitude to life itself. When we shift to the poem “Becoming Girl”,
seemingly based on a childhood anecdote, we are wrestling with what the poet
considers the process of becoming a woman, or at least the process of being
seen as one. Later poems like “Geology” and “Blossom” use gardening imagery,
but clearly situate it as a metaphor for life. The same is true of the poem
“Flight”, only ostensibly about aircraft. There are many references to weather
as we clearly move through “Winter” and “Wintersweet”, some elegaic poems
towards the end of the volume and a touch of confessionalism in “Crossing” in
which (possibly) the poet herself is the woman who “nearing sixty… loves her husband ferociously.” Every so often,
Bornholdt gives herself to epigrams and haiku.
But
all this is only to tell you in a po-faced way about the book’s contents, and
not in any way to evaluate them.
I
admit to finding some poems cryptic and hard to understand, as if I am not “in
the know” about personal things that are alluded to. This is especially true of
the poem “Finance”, which still baffles me after repeated readings. Is it
possibly about growing older and separating the adult from the child? This
could be suggested by the lines “Was this
the end / of the world? Of Childhood? / This frozenness trapping us / in our
adult selves.” Or is it about the
constraints of finance, as the last lines imply? Perhaps it simply asks too
much of the reader. Yet immediately following it, there are two perfectly clear
vignettes in “Last Summer”, with its imagery of a beach, death, darkness and the daunting moon; and
even clearer variations on the same theme in “Dark”.
Which
poems in this collection really nourished me?
“Science” is one well worth reading closely.
There is ambiguity in its title, for the Latin
“scientia” is simply knowledge, and this poem considers the knowledge of
the heart – how we read things and react to things. This is not the same as the
common usage of “science” to mean the scientific method. Here an apple tree and
a garden and a child’s essay are “science” inasmuch as the heart responds to
them.
“Cellular”, another of this collection’s very
best, is written in that very dangerous form – a “letter” to a friend. In this
case Bornholdt is responding to the art-works of Liz Thomson. Hence, for the
uninitiated reader, the references are a little opaque. Despite this, though,
“Cellular” becomes a good meditation on the power of art even if (like me) you
don’t know Thomson’s work. There is an image of the visceral appeal of art in
the lines “A bee / landed on a held stem and its vibration / travelled through me
like a current, / which is close to how I feel when I see / your work.”
There is also an aesthetic close to Baudelaire’s “Correspondances” in the suggestion
that one image or sensual stimulant can trigger another: “Remarkable… the way art works. Or poetry. / Like the way a stretch of
sand can summon / a dress my mother wore on a date / with my father…”
Generally,
I am not an admirer of “found” poems, but much to my surprise, I also found
this book’s two “found” poems to be among the very best. The “found” poem
“Hearken” is a reorganised set of statements from a 19th century New
Zealand book of religious instruction. It becomes a forthright statement on
endurance. Even better, “Cultural Studies” begins as instructions drawn from a
children’s book of stickers, relating to historical costumes, but moves off on
its own direction as the poet jumbles up quotations from the “found” text as
wry and subversive comment. This is a very fruitful flight of fancy and Lost and Somewhere Else is a very
fruitful collection. Jenny Bornholdt’s words are tender, observant, sympathetic
and penetrating.
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Here
is the first thing that attracts me to Deadpan,
James Norcliffe’s 10th collection of poems – the photo of Buster
Keaton on the cover. I love all three of the great clowns of silent cinema,
Charlie Chaplin’s little tramp; Harold Lloyd’s middle-class eager-beaver; and
Buster Keaton’s adventurer in wild places. But of the three, Keaton is the
greatest. In his silent movies, Chaplin plays too much on pathos (and in his
talkies he goes all preachy). Lloyd sometimes forgets to be the genial optimist
and becomes the nasty practical joker. But Keaton remains the clown staring
blankly at the bewildering world and then ingeniously coping with it. Chaplin
was pitted against society. Lloyd was pitted against other people’s expectations
of him. But Keaton was pitted against life itself and the physical forces of
nature. And he was the greatest tumbler of the lot.
James
Norcliffe begins with a three-page preface in which he explains his own
attitude to poetry. He says that as a youngster “I did not like shouty-poetry, poor-me poetry, poetry that told me stuff
and did not want me to argue.” His poetry developed as something cooler and
more ironical, which he now defines as “deadpan” – as expressionless as Buster
Keaton’s face. (Keaton is referenced in the collection’s title poem.) This
aesthetic means being witty, but being serious at the same time. Letting
tragedies speak for themselves rather than being the occasion for emotional
rant.
Norcliffe
divides them into five sections and in this case (unlike many other collections
of poetry I’ve read) the divisions actually mean something thematically.
Part
One, “Poor Yorick” is a cycle of genuinely deadpan poems where the (deceased)
clown from Hamlet tells us, in blank,
ironical tones, how he sees the world, and life, and the inevitability of
death. And, reversing Shakespeare’s gravedigger scene, Yorick gets to give us
his thoughts on Hamlet’s skull. The whole conceit is at least a distant cousin
to Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern Are Dead, where the
supernumeraries get to redefine the grand tragedy. For Norcliffe’s Yorick, life
is a long grind, not matter for eloquent soliloquies.
Part
Two, “Scan” does take us in various directions. One poem, “The poets at Makara”
is a very cheeky (and funny) piece which comes close to mocking the futility of
poetry as a form of protest. More
prevalent in this section, however, are poems about young human life. The first
poem in this section presents a child in the womb; the next the anxiety of caring
for the small child. “Naughty boys’ island” encodes a whole world of young
boys’ wayward and destructive impulses. As for “Mycroft”, it presents the angst
of a boy who does not have an older brother to guide him.
Part
Three, “Trumpet Vine”, gathers poems which, in the dominant dry, ironical
voice, suggest discomfort, fear or despair, including ageing as in the poem
“There are times I feel like an egg” where “forced
to walk that arthritic dog / I discover there are no shortcuts / through the
suburbs of my malaise.” Here there is marital bickering (“Control tower”),
the horrible jostle of humanity (“Madness of crowds”) and physical nausea about
food and flies (“He had this thing”).
Part
Four, “Telegraph Road” does not directly address the issue of ageing, but it is
implicit in the emphasis on decay and loss. Referencing the Christchurch
earthquake, nothing lasts (“Telegraph Road”). There is loss of identity (“Wallet”),
decay of a building (“scrim”), absence of the familiar (“Site content”), an old
couple no longer communicating (“She moved through the silence”), and fallen,
decaying leaves (“leaves”). And when a plant is described (“Waiting for the
mulberry”) it has the metaphor “dried
berries, like old men / lost among the romantic fiction / have no idea / what’s
going to hit them.” In the midst of this there is, however, the slightly
more lyrical sequence “Geographies”, especially in its descriptive closing
section.
And
so to the closing section, Part Five “Four travellers in a small Ford”,
gathering comments based on visits to Europe, some ironical, some tourist
jottings – except for the deeply weird closing poem “Reforestation in the
living room”.
As
you can see, I have once again pulled my notorious bibliographical trick of
listing and describing the contents of this book, without analysing in detail
the poet’s techniques and ideas. But what do you expect in a notice of this
length? At least it beats the airy, non-analytical generalities which pass for
poetry criticism in some publications.
To
sum up, I’d say that Norcliffe lives up to his promise to be dry, ironical and
deadpan – and the impulse grows stronger as we near the dying of the light.
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I
had a spasm of terror when I read Anne Kennedy’s Foreword to her latest
collection Moth Hour. It tells us
that in 1973, Kennedy’s brother Philip (then aged 22) accidentally fell to his
death. Kennedy herself, the youngest in a family of seven siblings, was 14 at
the time. She says the family had difficulty in finding an appropriate way to
mourn. Apparently Philip was nicknamed “Moth”. Apparently, too, he left behind his
library of favourite books, which Kennedy devoured. And he left behind a packet
of unpublished poems. The first section of Moth
Hour (making up most of this collection) is called “Thirty-Three
Transformations on a Theme of Philip”. It plays variations on one of Philip’s
poems.
Anne
Kennedy dedicates Moth Hour to her
six siblings.
Now
why should all this deal me a spasm of terror?
Because
all this information suggested to me something specific to this family, intensely
personal, tragic and very meaningful for the poet – which leaves the reviewer
in the awkward position of responding to the event rather than to the poems
themselves. What if the poems didn’t appeal to me or if I had reasonable cause
to write negatively about them? What an insensitive person I would seem –
somebody not being moved by a family tragedy of this sort. I would have to
proceed with caution and diplomacy.
So
I do.
Kennedy
prefaces her variations by quoting her brother Philip’s poem in full. It
concerns a moth placed in a jar; and in a Zen sort of way, it reflects on our
human responses.
The
“Thirty-Three Transformations on a Theme of Philip”, being 33 separable poems, sometimes
riff on a single word of the original poem, like “pen” or “paper” or “leaves”
but especially “jar” which seems to image both confinement and orderliness.
Sometimes
[as in poem 4.] there is direct reference to her brother’s death, when “The garden path / leads to the garden / all
roads / to the brother’s death.” There are [as in poem 7.] evocations of her
brother’s bohemian student ways: “At the
top of Patanga Crescent the pared-down villa / trembles with young men
thinking, / pens lost in the wide sleeves of their dead uncles. / They are
ecstatic and do everything extravagantly / in the last light: read, drink, fuck.”
There are also poems that seem to offer advice to the young man who died so
long ago. If I had the space, I would quote in full one of the most cutting
poems, poem 11., which plays variations on, and repeats, the line “You don’t need to be an alcoholic to be a
poet.” There are much lighter moments – the jocular doggerel of poem 16., celebrating
a bolshie letter her brother once wrote; and there is a very different,
discursive tone to poem 19., a kind of free-form meditation on her brother. The
dispirited and rather bitter poem about her brother’s funeral itself (poem 28.)
perhaps suggests a sense of deflation.
Yet
gradually this long set of variations turns into a critique of the youthful
idealism and ideals of her brother’s generation, back in the late 1960s and
early 1970s. Am I wrong to read poem 24. as a severe put-down of On the Road-type Beat dreams, where
hooning around in cars was mistaken for some sort of meaningful rebellion?
Poem 30., the longest single poem in these
variations, is a free-form rant at “the
materialists without materials”, who seems to be generations younger than
the poet’s, Generations X, Y, Z etc., who may be tolerant but who are lacking focus
or opportunites and who are drugged by the media. “And the extremely sad and unfair thing / is that the taking away is
being executed by the generation who invented the counterculture, the former
swingers / who believed in community, authenticity and peace, who believed in
youth culture for fuck’s sake, / but who came swinging back on a pendulum like
a wrecking ball and knocked the next generation / out of the very arena where
they perform their egregious and foul acts of capitalism.” In other words, hippiedom
in the early 1970s led only to self-obsessed middle-aged materialists. The rant
continues in the following poem, 31, where horrible capitalist exploiters shout
“Hell, yes” to materialism and
affluence, presumably reversing the old anti-Vietnam War chant “Hell no, we won’t go.”
Though
the whole sequence ends with a personal affirmation, there is much ambiguity
about the poet’s long-deceased brother and his youthful ideas and enthusiasms.
Is she suggesting that he too would have become a complacent Baby Boomer? Or
that he would have continued seeing the world the way he did, the best part of
fifty years ago, at the time of his death? There may be other possibilities –
that these last poems do not relate to her brother at all; or that the concept
of “youth culture” itself is flawed, as youth do not stay young for long.
After
these variations, there is a quite separate poem “The The” [the latter word has an acute accent – being the French for
tea]. It reads at first as series of separate aphorisms – but some are connected
to youthful rage: “The revolution is
hatched at school”, “The young men
are angry at darkness” etc. And some have biographical connections which
are made clear only in the thirteen-page essay with which Anne Kennedy
concludes this volume. The essay explains the influence of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations upon her when she was a teenager and how they
became the ur-structure for her own variations on her brother’s poem. She also
dissects the whole phenomenon of hippiedom turning into sheer materialism, and
talks in detail (perhaps too much detail) about what influenced and ailed her
brother. I will leave it to others to judge whether she does not over-explain
what her poems here mean.
This
collection was not what I feared it might be. It is not sentimental or morose,
it is sometimes satirical and it certainly suggests a lot of anger.
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