Something New

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.