We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
“MEZZALUNA – Selected Poems”
by Michele Leggott (Auckland University Press, $NZ 35)
Reviewing
Michele Leggott’s Mezzaluna – Selected
Poems is not like reviewing the 86-year-old Fleur Adcock’s Collected Poems which were presented to
us in 2019. Adcock will probably write more poems before the final bell rings,
but her Collected Poems are still the
summation of a whole career. The same is, of course, true of collections (or
selections) of the works of deceased poets, which have also been presented to
us in the last few years – KatherineMansfield, Allen Curnow, AlistairCampbell, Charles Brasch etc. But
Michele Leggott’s Mezzaluna – Selected
Poems is clearly a different beast from all these. Not only is Mezzaluna “selected” poems, but Leggott
is only in her mid-60s and still very active as academic, writer, editor and public
reader of her own works.
She
is, in effect, in mid-career as a poet.
So
Mezzaluna – Selected Poems is a
provisional survey of her work so far. Together with a new “Coda”, this
selection represents all nine collections that Leggott has produced over 32
years, from Like This? in 1988 to Vanishing Points in 2017. When I
reviewed the Collected Poems of Alistair
Te Ariki Campbell on this blog, I regretted that the poems were presented
thematically, rather than in chronological order of their production, thus
denying readers the opportunity to see how the poet developed over the years.
I’m happy to report that the poems in Mezzaluna
– Selected Poems are presented in chronological order of first publcation,
and that is the way I have read them.
As
a generalisation, after reading Mezzaluna
– Selected Poems, I see Leggott’s work as developing from – often opaque –
experimentalism and loose strings of imagery to greater accessibility and
greater confessionalism. Personal experience, the past, ancestors and other
writers become thematically more dominant as the years pass.
In
selections from her first collection Like
This? (1988), the shorter poems read like frozen, single images, which
might have captured a mood for the poet, if not for readers. The long,
disjunctive poem “An Island” could be read simply as a concatenation of ocean-related
images, but its totality suggests an odd sort of guilt – here we are enjoying
these oceanic and littoral things, but also perhaps despising those other Pakeha
who have come before us; indeed perhaps even seeing ourselves as superior to
them. The younger poet has not inserted herself into the situation. Much better
is the poem “Road Music”, which appears to relate more recent journeys with road
trips which the poet experienced as a child. It is filled with recognisable
images of childhood as experienced by many of us in the late 1950s and early
1960s: “the barley broth is in its third
day / boiled clean of its bones thick /
with orthodoxy the spoons dredge up and convey / to mouths that have learned a
rich language / of gristle and fat.”
Leggott’s
second collection Swimmers, Dancers
(1991) has as one of its key poems “Dear Heart”, far more directly confessional
about both nostalgia and the poet’s mother. On the other hand “Oldest and Most
Loyal American Friend” presents both an aesthetic and an ethical problem. It
appears to entertain, but resist, the temptation to run away from poetry into
idle hedonism. It is in this phase of Leggott’s work, however, that her poems
become most obscure to the uninitiated. Her “Reading Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers”
would make most sense to those (presumably not many in number) who had read the
poetry of Zukofsky, the subject of Leggott’s doctoral thesis. Likwise the poem “Merylyn
or Tile Slide or Melete” was, according to an endnote, triggered by a work of
visual art; but it is most expressive of the frustrations of somebody trying to
write while looking after a baby… or is it? Here is my problem with much of
Leggott’s earlier work. It is not just that many poems resist interpretation,
but that one is not sure of what there is to interpret. In this phase, too,
Leggott experiments with “shape” poems and typographical patterns wherein words
may be meant to appeal to the eye as much as to the ear.
This
interest in “shape” poems is carried over into her third collection DIA (1994). But, interestingly, from
this point on, Leggott adopts more traditional forms. “Blue Irises”, for
example, is a sequence of 21 unrhymed sonnets [or at least 14-line poems]
which, as an endnote tells us, borrow liberally lines from eight or nine other
women poets. It begins as a kind of vague sensual rhapsody as the poet revels
in images of a bright, Grecian sort; a sense of joie de vivre about the physical world and sensual experience. But
it blends gradually into a more sober – almost melancholic – tone where rougher,
more modernistic, imagery takes over. This is by no means the end of the poet’s
capacity to rhapsodise, though it does modify the impulse, and “Blue Irises” is
one of Leggott’s greatest achivements.
From
“Blue Irises” onwards, I found myself reading Leggott’s work with more respect
and attention, understanding that the ostentatiously experimental stage was now
past. Immediately following “Blue Irises” is “Keeping Warm”, a very good poem
in terse three-line stanzas, which suggests the difficulty – but not
impossibility – of maintaining love and affection when the world of work
intrudes.
It
is hard to refer to Leggott’s next collection, As Far As I Can See (1999) without referring to the biographical
fact that, from the mid-1980s onwards, Leggott was losing her sight. As its
title suggests, at least a part of her fourth collection was a reaction to
impending blindness. This is represented in the imagery of the opening poem of
this selection: “swimming in the black
river a tale emerges / twists and turns about her sometimes urgent / sometimes
mirror blank” .This is part of the five-sonnet sequence “dove”. It is by no
means dominated by the idea of blindness, but it does elsewhere contain such
images as “I was asleep dreaming in a
dark place it pressed / on me and I
was afraid”. Blindness is certainly not the preoccupation on the following
sequences “Torches” and “Hesperides”, which are also loose sonnets. After this
point, the selection shifts to prose poems, apparently plucked from a longer
sequence called “a woman, a rose, and
what has it to do with her or they or with one another?” It is really in this
prose-poem sequence that blindness is the theme, and a sense of anguish is
expressed: “When I couldn’t thread a
needle, when I could no longer see the faces of my children or trim their
nails, when the colour of money disappeared (and I bareheaded in the midday
sun) then falling began and I cried out against it… what is the sight of my
eyes to the great oratory of the labyrinth?”
Anguish
receives its fullest expression in Leggott’s fifth collection Milk & Honey (2005), in the sequence
“Faith and Rage”, which is divided into sections pointedly called “chaosmos”
and “tourbillon”, suggesting a fractured view of the hostile world. Related in
the first person, the sequence is essentially a despairing journey, where both
tangible reality and certainty are stripped away. It is also in this collection
that Leggott takes a literary turn, more frequently finding inspiration in
existing texts. In a completely different mood from “Faith and Rage”, “Cairo
vessel” is a two-part poem where first a Girl, then a Boy, speak. We are told
that it is a free adaptation of (a reconstruction of) an ancient Egyptian text.
(Free indeed - it filches three lines
from Cole Porter in its opening and doubtless has other such borrowings). I
salute the pure game-playing fun of the thing.
As
for Journey to Portugal (2007),
Leggott’s sixth collection, I make the personal comment that I found it very relatable
as I matched it with my own warm memories of that country. By this stage in her
development as a poet, it is interesting to note that Leggott sometimes adopts
an orderly, almost documentary, style of expression in assessing a foreign
environment. Take the opening of the poem “verde, verde, verde” which goes thus:
“we walk in a jardim botanico first / to
a fountain with four gates / and cardinals in procession doves roll / over the white paths and
water splashes / in the centre of the mata / then we ascend to the terrace and
read / under a tree so big it could be / the carousel of the world going round…”
There is no forced syntax nor visual games with typography. This is not a
simple accounting of the literal, however, for it moves in its four long
stanzas to a meditation on the power of words to evoke both the distant past,
as well as a sense of delight. Really the same technique – beginning with the
literal and the documentary, but moving on to the symbolic and evocative – is
how the other three poems presented from this collection move: “she counts ten
angels” “domingo” and “house of the fountains”. Again [says an endnote] there
are interpolated quotations from another poet, but they are not disruptive in
terms of the poet’s meaning.
The
poems of Leggott’s seventh collection, Mirabile
Dictu (2009) are sometimes, in a very general sense, more “public” poems, being
written during Leggott’s laureateship (2008-2009). They are not, however, rhetorically
declarative in the way Laureates of old would have been. The poem “work for the
living”, in honour of Hone Tuwhare who had just died, is impressionistic,
working through anecdotes and references to other poets to express a sense of
great loss. The poem “mirabile dictu” may be one of Leggot’s reflections on her
blindness but, wonderful to relate, the body still feels and perceives and the
voice is still able to tell. It is not a lament but an affirmation of the
poet’s ability still to relate meaningfully to the world. “Tell your mama” is really
an elegy for the poet’s mother. “Primavera” begins as a mash-up of Dante first
meeting Beatrice, by way of another poet’s take on it; but it turns into general
delight in the city of Florence – and like the poems of Journey to Portugal, it is in part as documentary, as in: “behind the wall of an Oltrano garden / we
find magnolias with slender leaves / and jasmine climbing over porticos / above
the eschatological roar / of vespas in formation turning into / Via Maggio…” “Peri poietikes” is a poem
again beginning with blindness but working through a relationship with nature
that may involve a redefinition of poetry.
I
freely admit that reviewing on this blog Leggott’s eighth collection Heartland (2016), when it was first
published, I questioned the poet’s definiton of what poetry is (in the poem
“tiger moth”), and also found some of the familial references oblique and hard
for the general reader to grasp. Re-reading the nine poems from this collection
which are now included in Mezzaluna –
Selected Poems, I do not resile from that view – but I’m interested to find
that “tiger moth” isn’t in this selection and neither are most of the oblique
poems about ancestry.
The
most obvious stylistic development in Leggott’s ninth collection Vanishing Points (2017) is her shift to
prose poems . “The Fascicles”, however, does continue a theme that was one of
the keys to the full text of Heartland
– a desire to link with ancestors. In this long poem, the poet identifies
herself with a great-great-great aunt who witnessed parts of the New Zealand
Wars of the 1860s, in the same geographical spaces that the poet knew in
childhood. “Emily and her sisters” again delves into the (imagined) past,
although in this case it tends to emphasise the matter of artistic creation.
And as for that literary turn I noted in some of her earlier work, we have here “Figures
in the Distance”, in which borrowings from nearly 30 poets are credited.
The
“Coda” to Mezzaluna – Selected Poems is “The Wedding Party”, again a delving
into the past with a nineteenth century scene, set in Auckland, mixing two
languages (Latin and English) and implying a new sort of imperial Roman attitude
in the Pakeha (English) overclass that is prepared to look down on other
inhabitants of these islands.
There
now. I have given Michele Leggott’s works the old bibliographical treatment for
which I am so notorious – that is, telling you, in sequence, about the contents
of this volume. This is very plodding and cloth-eared of me, but I still
consider my approach preferable to the vague, undocumented rhapsodising that so
often passes as poetry criticism, where critics give subjective, emotional
reactions without analysing anything specific. Their’s is the type of thing
that often ends up quoted in blurbs. At least you will know from my survey what
Mezzaluna – Selected Poems contains
and what Michele Leggott’s preoccupations are. And I hope that I have conveyed
clearly that I like her poems more as she moves away from early experimentalism
and into a more mature, accessible view of life.
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