We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
“TUMBLE” by Joanna Preston (Otago University Press, $NZ27:50); “JUST LIKE THAT” by Kevin Ireland (Quentin Wilson Publishing, $NZ25); “MUSEUM” by Frances Samuel (Te Herenga Waka [formerly Victoria] University Press, $NZ25)
This posting I continue with the apologetic tone I took last posting. Again, I apologise for taking so long to review some of these poetic works because of other commitments.
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First apology to Joanna Preston. I have only now found the time to read her very accomplished collection Tumble, which was published in November 2021. Tumble is the second collection by this Australian-bred, and now Canterbury resident, poet.
One train of imagery in Tumble is inspired by a strong sense of European heritage, beliefs and mythology. In Tumble specifically New Zealand imagery is rare. An end-note tells us that Preston’s longer poem “Fare” is set in Christchurch, but “Fare” is a bleak, modernised re-working of John Keats’ “La belle dame sans merci” where a man-woman power relationship is explored in the bewitching of a cab driver by a charismatic woman as he drives her through a modern city. The city could be anywhere; and is Christchurch only because we have been told so.
Other poems also feed on traditional European images. The Biblical Lucifer descends upon Nevada in “Lucifer in Las Vegas” and creates Hell on Earth, with “one-armed bandits – sheer genius, / like teaching cows to milk themselves.” “Census at Bethlehem” re-considers the Nativity as a freezing winter night, emphasising Mary’s physical pain at the approaching childbirth. “Atalanta” references the classic Greek tale of the strong woman who runs a race, but gives it current resonance. She is “running / away from them, businessmen / queued at the traffic lights / thinking of home”.
Exemplary as the recreation of an ancient world is Preston’s very best poem “Chronicle of the Year 793” set in the early medieval monastic community at Lindisfarne. The great skill of this poem is the way Preston climbs into the mindset of the community, who read disasters to come in fabulous portents. We understand that a destructive Viking raid is pending, but at poem’s end we are left in suspense about the outcome, still fearing what the monks feared. In other words, we share the community’s mindset.
Let me not over-emphasise the European mythic strain in Preston’s work, however. If our long European cultural formation is one major interest of Joanna Preston, another is the relationship of woman to man. The proem “Female, nude” and “A bird in the hand” both say something about the sexual power of women and men’s resistance to it; and there are certainly carnal images of women in “Woman in the water”, one of her best poems, and “The dollhouse”, which simply describes a doll’s house, but with such details as to make it a sly critique of the family, something like Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.
Related to this are Preston’s explorations of women-as-objects-of-men’s-desire, that is, of women being turned into objects. Most forceful expression of this is “The disembodied woman” where a woman loses all sense of self as she is ostensibly being admired. An endnote says “The disembodied woman” is related to Marilyn Monroe, who says “A body, blind and deaf to itself, / artifice making up what nature lacks. / I know I belong to the audience. / I’ve never belonged to anything else. They / made me their mirror.” Likewise the poem “In camera”, with an apparently 19th century setting , again considers the idea of a woman turned into a spectacle by a photographer taking her image. Not that Preston is presenting women as either helpless or flawless. As I read it, “Astonishment” represents symbolically a woman’s return to hard reality, which she does not care for, after a moment of pointless passion.
Like all good collections of poetry, Tumble has a wide range of reference. It is not limited only to the historical past and the status of women. Preston is capable of the paysage moralise, with “Wintering over” and “The salmon”, poems about daunting nature with a hint of Ted Hughes in them. “Lares and penates” weaves a traditional [European] scene into mythology and an awareness of the sheer otherness of nature. Despite what I have said above about the paucity of specifically New Zealand imagery, “Fault” and “The Ministry of Sorrow” are poems counting the human cost of the Christchurch earthquakes and very definitely identifying that city. And then there is “Lijessenthoek”, a prose poem about visiting a First World War cemetery in Belgium to find the grave of a soldier, part of the poet’s ancestral family, who died in battle. Self-effacingly, the choice of prose in this case suggests that an unembellished, matter-of-fact prose statement is more appropriate to the memory of massive loss than poetry would be.
How can I sum up this collection? It is polished, it is finished, it is the product of somebody who knows how to weave mythology into the modern scene without being precious about it. It had a satisfying solidity to it. And just in case you were wondering, the title “tumble” appears in the very last poem, “Nightfall”, when we readers are put to bed at night, tucked back into the womb of darkness.
FOOTNOTE - I rejoice that some months after I posted this review, Joanna Preston's Tumble won the Ockham Book Awards Prize for poetry.
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Second apology is to Kevin Ireland, whose latest collection Just Like That was published in late 2021. Born in 1933, the nearly-nonagenarian poet has been part of New Zealand’s literary scene for over six decades. Just Like That is his 27th collection of poetry. Perhaps to remind us of this poet’s age and status, the front cover sports a photo of the handsome, clean-shaven young poet, taken in 1959, while the back cover shows the poet now, moustached, bespectacled, and with his arms crossed firmly over his paunch.
In terms of current prosody, Kevin Ireland is a heretic. He insists on writing in neat,
orderly stanzas, four or five lines per stanza by preference, instead of letting his words dribble haphazardly down the page. He knows there is a difference between prose and poetry. If he’s polemical he’s polemical discreetly and does not beat a big drum. Worst of all (and this is the man’s greatest sin) he does not write in a cryptic code decipherable only by a small clique. Kevin Ireland makes his meaning clear. Obviously the man has not been to an approved writing school. He should therefore be condemned and burnt at the stake….
Translation – Ireland writes lucidly, clearly and understandably. The nerve of the man!
To begin with the obvious, Ireland is an old man with a very mellowed view of life, but he is not unaware of the world that is still turning and changing. The opening section of this collection is labelled “Poems for Pandemics”, being ten poems that deal with the whole ongoing Covid mess, occasionally preachily but shifting cleverly to comment on the growing number of old people still alive in “The elderly pandemic”. Images of decay and destruction are passed into poems about the pain of ageing such as “The mind and body problem solved” and “Rosy Glory” which begins “It adds a risky feeling to the morning / when you check your latest slide towards collapse, / you’ve been attacked again at night by demolition experts / with a flair for comic artistry. They’ve worked you over / in your sleep – pounding, crumpling parts of you / into a battered wreck.”
Following this opening section, 55 poems are corralled together under the heading “Poems on Inscrutabilities, Irrelevances & Incongruities” which can mean just about anything, after all. A love poem to wife; a lament for the closure of a favourite restaurant; how in old age you tend to turn clumsy and unwittingly perform “slapstick comedy” as you totter or fall. Clear social observation is found in “Where did the paper-boys go?”, recalling not only the disappearance of young boys delivering newspapers and mowing their parents’ lawns; but also noting that it now tends to be women who trudge the streets delivering junk mail. Likewise “Time of the bedsitters” recalls the privacy bedsitters once gave even to the semi-bohemian life; and “The first fiver” recalls when – presumably in the post-Depression years – the poet’s father treated a five pound note as if it were an absolute treasure. “Heading back by tram” thinks of an old mode of transport while confused by new ones. In each case, these poems are not sweet nostalgia but a recognition of change – that is, an alertness to the present.
Flaunting his heresy with regard to current pieties, Ireland writes “Old military families”, which goes against the current grain by telling us that we should judge people of the past in terms of the values of the past “Whatever they got up to / and wherever they went, they were people / of their times. I can’t impose a distant right / or wrong on them, for history does that job / with its sure inconsistencies.”
One of the poet’s main preoccupations is the nature and inspiration of poetry itself. If he sometimes seems a little flippant on this matter, that is merely a façade hiding his real feelings about the genre. “The one good reason for writing” takes a poke at critics and says his only reason for writing poetry is that “it keeps me in at nights, which / means I save a pile of cash for treats to come / when I go out with friends and splash the lot.” More nuanced is “Working things out”, where he asserts poems do not always have to be about “momentous issues”; while “The best we can do” rejoices in not being too solemn in poetry and the value of being a bit of a jester. “Inner meaning” wrestles with the difficulty of putting an image into poetic words; and – though I may be misinterpreting it - “Words out hunting” appears to give a critique of younger poets who are too self-consciously engaged in knocking others down. And yet “Encirclements and arrows” comes close to confessing that he’s through with poetry and tired of it.
Obviously Ireland sometimes addresses the pains of ageing as in “Small catastrophes” concerning a fall; and “At the official dinner” which suggests deafness. Obviously, too, he references or gives tribute to old friends and comrades, living or dead, such as Roderick Finlayson, Duncan McCormack, and Michael Illingworth. “Peter Bland Exposed” jocularly probes his shared and joyful silliness with the poet; and the title poem “Just Like That”, the last poem in book, is addressed to Karl Stead.
I can’t go into academic-speak or tortured aesthetics to explain my reaction to this collection. All I can do is say how much I enjoyed it and relished Ireland’s matter-of-factness. It’s fun, it’s shrewd and it’s relatable.
And if Kevin Ireland’s idea of paradise is a glass of wine at the end of the day, fair enough.
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Museum is Frances Samuel’s second collection of poetry and it’s taken eight years coming. I’m glad she’s back. Her first collection Sleeping on Horseback was reviewed on this blog back in 2014. Then, I noted her precision of observation in what were often dreamlike settings. This I diagnosed as real surrealism, or as I put it “the externalization of states of consciousness by means of literal and objective things”. In Museum, there is much in the same vein, but the poet has moved on in many ways and broadened her perspective. The blurb tells me that Frances Samuel worked for years in a museum and often wrote texts for exhibitions. For most of this collection, a museum is one of her major trains of imagery.
It’s most prevalent in the first of the three sections into which the collection is divided. It is called “Super(natural) World”. Related to museum exhibits, we meet a cactus whose arms have fallen; the microscopic creatures called ‘water bears’; dried moss which recalls tramping in the wild; the wonder of fossils under ice; worms that keep their heads underground when lightning threatens; and the behaviours and strategies of seeds as they wait, often for eons, for the moment when they well germinate and blossom. One of Samuel’s wittiest and most concise poems is “Tornado” which tells us that no matter how much we human beings may empathise with other living creatures, we are still incorrigible carnivores. Then there is a beautifully nuanced poem like “Exhibition (Bees)”, wherein the confident museum guide, showing visitors around, suddenly realises that she is as alien to the exhibits and their story as the visitors are. “The difference between me and a visitor / is that a visitor walks slowly. / Today I’m walking slowly enough… / I look like a person who needs someone / to show them the way out.” Even what has become familiar to the guide can suddenly appear as a revelation.
There is a very interesting train of thought, articulated most fully in the poem “Exhibition (Biomimickry)”, wherein the poet likens dried specimens in a herbarium to herself “There is a word for the fading colour of a leaf as it dies / I am thinking how I am also captive to paper, / stuck on and identified, illustrated / and tied to a rope ladder of classification.” Is there, I ask myself, a word meaning the opposite of anthropomorphism? When we think anthropomorphically, we attribute human characteristics to non-human things and creatures. Here, the poet attributes non-human characteristics to human beings.
The museum environment is still present in the collection’s second section “(Im)material World” but it is not as dominant. Samuel now addresses such general topics as robotics and the scientific nature of colours. That surrealism I noticed in her earlier collection is expanded. “How to Catch and Manufacture Ghosts” could be a painting by Dali with its imagery of sheets being shaped into ghosts and overtones of 30 days in the desert [which reminds me of someone…]. Similar deserts appear in “Pilgims”. In “My Bones”, a man hangs upside-down like a bat. What one imagines comes to life. “Life-drawing class” has a punning title in that real, physical life emerges from art. Works of art that come to life are also found in “Painting”; while “Miniature Sketch” reads in toto “Do the sketch / then make the real thing. / Did you do it? / Did you make the real thing?”. “Exhibition (Colour)” is an almost matter-of-face definition of what colour is and how it blends and un-blends but there is a return to frank surrealism in “Fashion”, which is at the very least ironic in its account of people on a bus clothed in genuinely natural materials – feathers, weeds, earth etc.
That the third section is called “Object Lessons” may signal a coming-down-to-Earth.
True, there is “The Kindness of Giants”, but it is more fairy tale than surreal. Yes, there are poems where plants perceive us such as “Exhibition (Explain Yourself to a Plant)”.
“Whakairo” is a straightforward account of the norms of Maori carving as seen by the carving itself. But most interesting is the way Samuel now addresses domestic matters. There was only one such poem earlier in the collection, it being “Breathing”, which mentions “my baby”. Now we get a number of poems touching on motherhood such as “Recommended Exercise”, “The Passionfruit Vine”, “Red Whistle, Orange Lifejacket” and “Fatigue Font”, the last of which is the most confessional poem in the collection, dealing with sleepless with a wakeful baby.
What is the main effect of Museum? It is the product of an inquisitive mind constantly trying to define humanity in relation to what is not human, fired by those things we have stored and taken to be treasures. It balances the living with the ossified and decides in favour of what it living and breathing. And the tone moves from surreal to whimsical to dead serious. A stimulating collection.
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