“IN THE TIME OF THE
MANAROANS” by Miro Bilbrough (Victoria University of Wellington Press, $NZ40) “YELLOW MOON – E Marama Rengarenga:
Selected Poems” by Mary Maringikura Campbell (Headworx, $NZ25); “THE LIFERS” by
Michael Steven (Otago University Press, $NZ27.50)
Now in her fifties, Miro Bilbrough is, the blurb tells
me, an expatriate Kiwi settled in Australia, where she is a respected
film-maker and artist. But her adolescence in the 1970s was a New Zealand one.
This memoir replays it vividly.
Her parents had split up. She had been farmed out to a
grandmother who was of the extreme left but who was severely puritanical in her
attitudes. Life with her in Wellington is told with ironic gusto, but as she
reached adolescence, young Miro chose to shift in with her father and her
little sister. They lived in a remote, low-tech shack of a house near the Wakamarina
River in the north of the South Island. Father’s views were anti-materialist,
and “alternative-lifestyle”, but not as alternative as the “Manaroans”. Bilbrough doesn’t like the word “hippy”. It
seems to her a little demeaning and she struggles against it, but eventually she
gives in as she can find no suitable synonym. So hippies the Manaroans were.
They often dropped in on father and daughters to drink, philosophise, smoke pot
and sleep. They lived at the end of a long, winding, unsealed road, at Manaroa
near a remote bay in the Marlborough Sounds. Father joined their commune.
Miro
spent some time boarding in Nelson and attending high-school, but when school was
done with, she joined too. Living in a caravan which she painted herself, she
became a Manaroan. It didn’t last too long. She eventually developed her
artistic talents, did illustrations that were accepted by the government
bulletin for schools, and shifted back to Wellington to study at a visual
design school, having made it out of adolescence and into young adulthood.
As
always, such a bland synopsis does not give you any of the flavour of this
book. Told throughout in the present tense, it is not a linear narrative, but a
set of moments in the author’s younger life. Bilbrough observes people,
observes rituals and mores of “straight”
(i.e. “square”) suburban schoolmates, rebellious and unsettled teenagers like
herself, flatmates, fellow-students and, of course, the hippies. She is alert
to nuances of schoolgirl and hippie-girl behaviour, rivalries, games of teenage
one-up-manship and especially how clothes and words were always for display,
always designed to make a statement of some sort.
Only
a woman writer could or would be able to describe clothes and make-up as
precisely as Bilbrough does, always using these descriptions to socially
“place” people in terms of fashion. Take this example, typical of many, where
she is describing a children’s illustrator “With
a bouffant that adds quarter her diminutive height again, Cleopatra eyeliner,
an amount of facial powder that quotes the Elizabethans, and a waist fiercely
accented by belted full skirts and overhanging stalactites of lace, [she] is an illustration herself. That the
bouffant appears slept in only adds value.” (pp.132-133)
Throughout,
the most attractive feature of this memoir is Bilbrough’s use of language, her
ability to sum up mood and the era in a phrase or a few sentences. I’ve
encountered few expressions of formless teenage angst better than this : “Adolescence had hit my mood centres and
transformed me into an unruly devastation of discontents pining for, I
don’t know.” (p.22) After describing the hair of two young men, she
relates it to youth fashions of the 1970s: “It
is the early seventies; hair is unusually significant and, besides, both
teenagers know that politics are performative. They delight in being
routinely mistaken for girls by adoring old ladies and less adoringly, train
conductors.” (p.36) She produces this killer sentence on the cluelessness of
the commune when, on hearing of the death of somebody they knew, they don’t
know how to respond: “In the absence of
anything to be done, we don’t know how to do it.” (p.229) I won’t call her
prose poetic, but she has a great way with phrasing. Here she is, as a young
teenager, trying to ignore a type of cake-treat she doesn’t like on display in
a shop window: “I never purchase one of these
sugary installations, but I am aware of their presence, like a failure
of desire.” (p.55)
Bilbrough
does account fully for the hippy experience, with its occasional nudism,
seasonal work to keep the commune going, bland vegetarian food, being stoned,
eating (and getting sick on) cannabis cookies, and long periods of boredom.
There were also times of rebelliously wishing for more of the mod cons and junk
food available in town (see, for example, pp.153 ff.) .
More
than anything, though, the young Miro yearns for a partner, which translates
into early, fumbling adolescent sexual experience. After some pubescent wanking
(her word), there are the under-age loss of virginity, brief sexual encounters,
dating disasters in her high-school days and being groped in various ways in
the commune. All of this sounds singularly joyless. At one stage she says she
was diagnosed by a doctor as having “vaginismus”, a tension in the muscles
around her vagina which did not allow for easy sexual intercourse. In fact,
nothing in her sexual life sounds particularly happy, but only the unfulfilled
desire of a young woman who is a little lost and doesn’t yet really know how to
negotiate the world. Even when she makes it to Wellington and says she found
her first true love, it ends in two pregnancies and two abortions.
There
is also something particulaly repellent about sex in the hippy context. Of
Sylvie, a more experienced woman in the scene, Bilbrough writes: “She has recognised that the sexual
revolution and its hippy offshoot, the myth of free love without
acknowledgement of emotional need and commitment, serves its male proponents first
and foremost.” (p.72) This idea is enhanced later when she speaks of
socialising “Manaroans” : “Amidst the
swirl of the group, people hold themselves aloof, even when disappearing off
together for the night. Dedicated to keeping the sexual possible alive, this
cagey, obscurely low-commitment style of conducting affairs does not admit of
emotional need.” (p.94) Related to this we later hear of “the relative absence of boys my own age
with whom to negotiate sex in conditions of relative equality; the
opportunism of older hippy men. I wouldn’t know how to begin to describe
these murky transactions.” (pp.160-161)
Apart
from sex, there is also the fact that many people pass through young Miro’s
life without ever staying long enough to become friends. As she says “In this culture of comings and goings, the
sheer number of people I become acquainted with is wildly inverse to the number
I retain. This perpetual gaining and shedding leaves a powerful imprint. I am
situationally agile… My observational eye has been piqued. There is anxiety,
too.” (p.145) She certainly keeps her “observational eye” as her sharp
character-sketches of people show, sometimes proving inadvertently how
judgemental of others the adolescent eye can be. And this may possibly be the
memoir’s greatest weakness. Often it resolves into a series of vignettes or
pen-portraits of people who passed through and who, in the end, blur into one
another.
For
all the alternative lifestyle that she and others embraced at least for a time,
Bilbrough finally finally quits what she calls “the whole malnourished hippy trip” (p.239). In her closing words,
after presenting us with a gallery of old photographs of some of the dramatis personae, Bilbrough gives a
kind of apologia for how she feels now about her youthful experience. It is not
quite a refutation of her younger self and her way of looking at the world.
Indeed it asserts how necessary it all was to her growing up, and she makes a
half-hearted attempt to present the old Manaroan community as pioneers in
Greenness and care for the environment. But underneath it all I sense a certain
defensiveness – as if she wants to admit that maybe the square and settled life
would have been better for her adolescent self, but she can’t quite bring
herself to say so.
Possibly
others will read this conclusion differently.
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Sometimes
I think editors and publishers lay too much of a burden on poets whom they are
promoting. I certainly think this as I look at the foreword and publisher’s
note that precede the poems by Mary Maringikura Campbell Yellow Moon - E Marama Rengarenga. Apirana Taylor’s Foreword says “The blood of poets flows in Maringikura’s
veins”. Mark Pirie’s Note tells us she is “a daughter of two of New Zealand’s most well known poets and writers
Alistair Te Ariki Campbell and Meg Campbell”. Doesn’t this raise unfair expectations,
and imply somehow that the poet has simply inherited her gifts? Surely she
deserves to be be judged on her own terms and by her own skills?
This
objection having been stated, I make it clear that I enjoyed much of Yellow Moon - E Marama Rengarenga. The first
half of this collection consists of new and uncollected poems; the second half
reprints an earlier collection called Maringi,
which was first published in 2015. Mary Maringikura Campbell’s poems are
usually very short, as much statements as poems. Most are written in the
confessional first person and many in direct address. She enjoys creating
simple vignettes, as in the following complete poem, “Small town”:
Bends in the
road
Paekakariki
a small town
north of
Pukerua Bay
A full moon
Bright as a
torch
in your face
My parents
sleep
outside my
window
A giant gull
disappears
mid air
nothing is as
it seems
Similar
charm is presented in “Ra – The Sun”, a childlike snapshot of the sun going to
bed in the sea. Campbell sometimes adopts the tone of a suppliant praying to
traditional gods and sometimes drops down to earth and refers to men who were
unsatisfactory partners. There are moments
of self-affirmation that are a little glib, such as “A Better Fit” which reads in toto :
“I am stronger
sounder
warmer
wiser
I have layers
I am a better
fit
My life is as
it should be
I found my
feet
not far from
my toes
At last
I belong”
More
than anything, however, the poet is concerned with family, ancestry, children
and grandchildren. As far as I can make it out “Teresia” lament for a dead
sister and “Most Revered” endows a coconut tree with the motherly power of
being able to nurture her. “Parents” seems to berate her parents for
underestimating her, although “How We loved” suggests the opposite. There are
invocations of the gods and of visions as in “Signs”, dedicated to a grandchild.
Some poems I really wanted to like for their sentiment, but found them falling
into bathos. “Imagine” tells us to honour as a goddess an ordinary woman
struggling to bring up her children, a view I would happily endorse. But the language
goes commonplace and editorial: “A mother of five kids / and the rest/ doing
her best to feed and clothe / to love and hold, to protect / what she has.”
Despite
such losses of quality, Mary Maringikura Campbell has the skill to fill “Going
to Town” and “Foxy Boxes” with internal rhymes halfway to being rap. Like many
poems in the book, they might work best declaimed at a live poetry reading.
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A
completely different and far more complex world is presented in Michael
Steven’s The Lifers. This is Steven’s
second collection of poetry (on this blog there is a brief notice of his first
collection Walking to Jutland Street)
and it is impressive.
When
I first grappled with the title of this collection, I thought it would deal
exclusively with criminality, given that “lifers” usually designates people who
are jailed for life. My mistaken interpretation seemed to hold good in the
first few poems.
The collection opens in
Auckland in 1996, with a drug-dealer at a casino snorting cocaine and then selling
bags of crystal meth to construction workers and others coming onto their daily
shift. Next comes the account of an armed robbery - a security van is ambushed
and robbed of its money outside a bank in the Auckland suburb of Penrose,
followed by the robbers’ getaway. Then we cut to an older-style crim with a
vignette of Ron Jorgensen, notorious for the Bassett Road murders in the 1960s,
now semi-retired from the criminal life
and painting to pass the time. And elsewhere there is the violent piece
“Strains: Big Bud” about a skull-cracking mugging in a prison yard. Criminality
and drugs come into a number of other poems, too.
But
it gradually becomes apparent that “lifers” refers to those who live life-long
in New Zealand (like a sentence?), or to those who simply grapple with what
life itself is. Yes, there is “A Brief History of Treason” referencing Cain and
Abel and suggesting inherent violence in human beings. Yes, there is the
brilliantly dark panoramic poem “The Old Town”, long, evocative and in many
parts, being a series of night-time vignettes, set (presumably) in some
European city – perhaps Prague, given that Kafka is referenced. Here night
creatures of the mythical past meld into addicts getting their fixes and others
simply lost in the darkness.
But
there is also “Dropped Pin: Woodhouse Forest, Muriwai”, which is almost the
idyll of a Kiwi hermit. And there is “Dropped Pin: Three Lamps, Ponsonby” on a
disoriented woman finding temporary peace in a chapel. And there is “Yellow
Plums”, recalling a not-entirely-satisfactory visit to the grave of James K.
Baxter. “At Eastern Southland” is another panoramic poem, building a vision of
a of a chill corner of New Zealand. In a couple of poems Steven references the
impact of electronically produced music, and laments a vanished quality of life
in Dunedin. I am not suggesting that these are poems of rejoicing. But I am
suggesting that their survey a quality of life goes far beyond
criminality. The sequence of four poems “Reading to my Son” credibly connects
the raising of a child with the whole of literary history and religion.
As
you will be aware by now, one of my abiding sins is to synopsise a work without
paying sufficient attention to its style. On this, just a few simple
statements: Michael Steven is a master craftsman. In The Lifers he moves from prose poems to the eight loose sonnets
that make up the sequence “Leviathan” to free verse to the disciplined stanzaic
forms of “At Eastern Southland”. His eye for detail is acute and he is fertile
in imagery – so fertile that I will not start quoting him or I might go on a
bit. His view of life in New Zealand and elsewhere might be chilly and dark,
with just a few rays peeping through the storm clouds, but those rays are
there. This is not the work of a pessimist, but of a realist. An arresting
collection.
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