Something New

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 19^th 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 10^th 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.

So to the poems themselves.

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.