Something New

 We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“AT THE POINT OF SEEING” by Megan Kitching (Otago University Press, $NZ25) ; “SAGA” by Hannah Mettner (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $NZ25) ; “MIDDLE YOUTH” by Morgan Bach ( Te Herenga Waka University Press, $NZ25); "VINES" [a literary journal}

 

 

            Megan Kitching’s debut collection At the Point of Seeing is one of those productions that gives you hope for poetry. The blurb tells us that Megan Kitching gained her PhD in England with a study on how new scientific discoveries in the 18^th century affected poetry. This has apparently had an impact on her own poetry. While she expresses herself from a completely modern perspective, she nevertheless writes with a precision about nature – and especially about flora and fauna - drawn from both personal observation and her learning.

 

One of her opening poems “When Water Was a Galaxy” concerns watching mandarin fish [or gold fish] skimming along under lily pads with “twists of amber flame”, this being in the Wintergarden. The poem has the spontaneity of a child but the acute observation of an adult, and in this poem, as in many others, we stay in an artificial environment. So too in  the closely curated vestiges of nature in encased specimens in “Memorial Museum” where “Each in its niche, tucked, / all in place yet all depending / on the specimens, case by case, / washed up or plundered, prised / apart from their lives, / then husked into drawers you can slide / to hoist the streaming seas / for inspection.” Another artificial environment is found in the domestication and familiarity of plants in the poem “Houseplants.”

 

I am surmising [I could be wrong] that, pulling up weeds on the roadside in ”Botanising” is drawn from a childhood memory, and first awakening to knowledge of the variety of small plants there are. This leads into a five-part sequence labelled [probably ironically] “Weeds”. It gives an account of certain flora, and how they have fared under the impact of human beings, from the consumption of puha to the strangulation of kelp by oil slips. “Verona by the Leith” concerns an outdoor production of Romeo and Juliet, a picnic on the grass in Dunedin, but with the reminder that all is staged “by the weeds, roots and leaves”. Nature endures even in artificial settings.

 

A different sort of nature is addressed in “Cold Fusion” which concerns surfers, but with the clear suggestion that the sea controls the surfers. The surfers do not control the sea.  Nature wins. Even “The Artist’s Site”, wherein a woman creates an image, her image mimics geological nature. Only rarely does Megan Kitching anthropomorphise, as in “Round Hill” where she directly addresses the hill as the moods of the day change its presentation. In “The Beings”, yew trees “speak up dark and choral” and elsewhere “Willows” communicate like people.  There is awareness of the very long geological history of boulders and coast lines (see “Mammoths” and “Headland”). There are many poems involving walking alone and looking at nature, but sometimes suggesting a loneliness of the heart, capped by one of her best, “Between Together and Alone”.

 

Having noted all this, though, it’s important to understand that Kitching is not fixated on the one theme of nature. Not that all her poetry clings to the arms of nature. “Retracing” refers to human relationships as a couple walk on a beach, he walking away from her, she falling behind, and yet he turning and realising that they need each other. Look at one of her overtly urbane poems, “On Hume’s Table”, and you find the 18^th century philosopher wrestling with the problems of empiricism and rationalism… or at least so I read it. “Armrest” refers to the discomfort of rest homes. Then there are everyday human mishaps, as in “Walking is Controlled Falling” addressing the phenomenon of slipping on icy roads or pavements in winter. The nearest Kitching comes to true satire is “Appropriation”, wherein the image of an elephant, cheaply mass-produced, becomes more and more grotesque with each printing until it barely resembles an elephant at all. We often hear the chastising phrase “cultural appropriation”, but here we have animal appropriation. And what comes nearest to a protest poem is “Dark Skies”, lamenting the way night skies are now such that in cities we can no longer see the stars.

 

Creating a different sort of poetry, we have what I would call vignettes – short poems that capture a precise moment, as in “Mornington” a beautiful vignette of rain falling in the suburbs; “Hiatus” the moment the sun rises; and “On Kamau Taurua” a moment of sunset and dusk beautifully captured, with an old-style opening that declares “The sun subsides, the island falls / away beneath the cliff path, twilight / wicking from tidal sands that run / dreaming and vast towards night’s stars.” As for “Crematorium”, it is a grim vignette of a daunting moment.

 

While human interaction does not dominate this collection it can put the soul into a non-human animal. In this respect “A Bee Against a Window” is a poem in a league of its own, with its precise observation and the steady beat of the poem as a bee climbs laboriously  up a window:  “The bee knows no sides / only sunwards until it tires…/…the bee will forget / with what patience it now / gnaws towards a day / upon the rim of summer.”

 

By this collection, we are enlightened and drawn closer to the species who share the Earth with us.

 

 *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *

 

 

There are some very great merits to Hannah Mettner’s collection Saga. It is clear in what it is saying, straightforward and candid, with none of the obfuscation and in-speak that plagues so many recent collections of poetry. Mettner says what she means, sometimes in anger and protest, sometimes in regret and very occasionally in nostalgia. The cover design is of an intrauterine contraceptive device and the collection is dedicated “for the hags” so one immediately expects the poems to have a strong feminist strain. Often we have to assume Mettner is being confessional and relating her own life’s story, and this being the case she is bisexual having (in her own account) had both female and male lovers. Much of her poetry is written in prose form (“prose poems” is the old name) and much of it is confronting

 

Mettner’s opening poem “Saga” includes the lines “In the language of this country, I learn to say / that my ancestors came from the fjords. / A place I’ve never visited, but imagine to be / exactly the right temperature for my fickle / body.” And later in the same poem she adds “I learn / too that I belong to the ‘crying side’ of the family / and that the mythos of the non-crying side / circles like wolves round a fire, coming in close / to tear the limb from a sleeping cousin before / loping back into the night. My aunt reports / that we used to be Vikings…”. Clearly this opening poem is a declaration of both her descent and her rejection of much of it, an aloofness about the past. There is also often a certain violence in her imagery as in “Autobiography of a Riot Grrl” where “I walk out, swinging the axe. / I unbutton myself / for bed and find the tough heart of a man clenched / beneath the hot silk / of my skin.” But she goes on to suggest total uncertainty about where she’s going.

Mettner produces some strong satire. The long discursive poem “Birth Control” seems more of a rage than anything against the Vatican and Catholic church. Oddly though, part of  “Praying the gay away” expresses some nostalgia for a church she was part of as a child. Another overt protest is the longish sequence “Beep Test” dealing with the way people are pushed into positions of employment, bullied, categorised and monitored like kids in a school PE lesson.

 

            Many of her poems read like prose arguments with herself or with the world in general, as in “La boheme” about  the most heartfelt misery of living in a non-insulated flat in the winter. Or “Hold-up at the Sleepbank”, a fantasia of unwanted dreams. Other prose poems read as short, thoughtful essays such as “Libraries like icebergs”. Mettner is apparently made uncomfortable by the thought of ageing – odd for somebody who is only 33 – as shown in “Hags”, about no longer having the stamina of a party-girl, and in “Side hustle as an alchemist” about seeking ways of being [or acting] younger. Looking back, however, can also lead to nostalgia for childhood and it is certainly there in “Grandiflora” about visiting grandparents when she was a child.

 

The explicitly lesbian poems include “Love poems with gratuitous sex”,; “Breakup poem at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki” and “The well of loneliness”. Very many poems condemn male behaviour as in “Three times a cat lady” about men in the Middle Ages condemning women as witches; or in “Anita” wherein false versions of women are presented in advertising. And there is the occasional outburst of misandry as in “Bad man kink” which concludes “I imagine holding you down / face-first in the water / between my legs”. Rage indeed.

 

But after the anger, the polemic and the satire, what I find dominant is a constant sense of disappointment in life. “If not nuclear” concerns the difficulties of being a teenager and having a baby. Old lovers are disappointing (“Sea Horses”). Positive forecasts of the future never live up to their hype (”Though experiment in the future”). And there is anger at the world our parents have left (“Who doesn’t love miniature horses”) which comes close the familiar “generational theft” trope. “The world” sums up this orb in largely negative terms

 

Oddly enough, I enjoyed many of these poems no matter how dyspeptic and angry they often are. It’s like listening to a garrulous gate-crasher at a party who bundles you up in a corner and insists on telling you her woes and troubles and hates… and when you leave the party you realise she was the most engaging speaker there.

 

             *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *. 

 

            If Hannah Mettner expresses herself in a loud, confronting way, Morgan Bach works with more subtlety in Middle Youth. Her poems are often lean, are never prose poems, and are frequently allusive. Yet in terms of sexuality, the two poets have much in common. For the record Mettner writes enthusiastically about Bach for the blurb of Bach’s collection; and Bach writes enthusiastically about Mettner for the blurb of Mettner’s collection. A neat arrangement.

Bach herself structures her collection in three phases. First comes “Alone, lonely or single” apparently based on lonely travels. Through many careful stanzas, “the pomegranate” is essentially a imagist poem – a series of images painting a [presumably Hispanic] town… and suggesting the solitude of the tourist. Thus too in “red lake” where “This country’s edge [is] invisible as a trip line / or culture – a snag, a sudden immersion” recognising the alienness of another country and its culture to the traveller or tourist. There is in Bach’s imagery much awareness of clouds, moons, the less tangible parts of nature, the things that are out of reach. There is a  tentativeness of expression and a great sense of loneliness as in the poem “terrific” with its final stanza declaring “What I’m scared of is the pain of absence, / of nothing to fill my lungs. The space / outside that thin layer enclosing life. / T he dark matters, untouchable, / the unknowable life in it. / How it might rise through our bodies / the higher we climb. I keep / waiting for the plague.” This is literally a statement about climbing into the thin air of mountains, but the solitary observer and climber immediately suggests, once again, loneliness. Other people seem hostile as in “because I”, which basically says nobody believes her or can be trusted.  Even the poem “Pluto”, literally about the former “planet” which has now been demoted, denotes isolation, lack of status – in a word, loneliness. Here, then, is a poet and narrator who is somehow isolated from the world and ill at ease with others.

Sexual encounters are sometimes noted discreetly as in “blood moon” and examined more explicitly in “oracle” where “my sexuality / is that I would have made / a good oracle / I would take / or leave you after / cryptic truth…”. In other words, like the oracle at Delphi she could be ambiguous about her sexuality. Even more explicit are “moderate fantasy threat” and “magpies” where “I like my lovers to tell me facts, / science, history, things I don’t yet know, / so that when I’m alone listening to podcasts / in the bath has the same effect as company”. People become data - experiences to be filed away in the mind. Yet, for all the suggestions about sexual encounters , she comes back to isolation, loneliness, a difficulty in connecting seriously with others, as in  “date line” where “You walk through churches you don’t believe in / with your body / you don’t believe in. / You come back because / you had been exquisitely lonely / here, once before / and unresolved / loneliness is an unresolved / triumph and failure”.

 

The second section is called “middle youth” and in the title poem “middle youth”, the poet declares herself to be 40. I think in this context “middle youth” means something like the early part of middle-age… and perhaps hoping that one will not yet be seen as middle-aged. There seem, in this longish poem, to be many regrets, one being seeing other people with children and “the gallery / is dimming the lights / for closing / the paintings getting harder / to see – no children”. Later we have “If you have children, you are expecting / someone to outlive you. / I can’t quite look at this even as the minutes / call its past tense into existence.” There are more expectations of loneliness in “carousel” where “orange blossom, an olfactory / loneliness on the brittle street”.

In “after Sissinghurst” (the home of bisexual Vita Sackville-West and her bisexual husband Harold Nicolson) Bach praises “the perfect English garden” as “a camouflage, an expression of those who would be / ostracised.” And “pasture” begins as anthropomorphising the landscape as seen from a train where “the hills, folded tight as bundled cloth, / appear lit from within when the sun breaks / over the eastern range. /… / So bare, like the intimate places of other bodies.” But when she moves to the “scrubby bush” she likens it to “a woman just past ‘her peak’, / feeling the prickly freedom of not giving a fuck, / glows with that new power – of those who have been put / out to pasture in the minds of men, who in all our lifetimes / have been the one to decide” and so to a closing stanza condemning men.

In the poem “blood and sand” she declares “I’ve tried to love in the way / we are conditioned to believe / essential to human experience - / a measure of fulness, inherent goodness, / marking a person of sufficient quality. / But what are human qualities anyway? And where / should I find them in myself? The top shelf / of my personality, the shaker that / no longer quite seals.” No lover quite measures her.

Her sexuality, then, is expressed as a certain coldness which finds it hard to cope with sustained intimacy. And this coldness, this loneliness, is echoed when she takes on the universe in “cosmos”, a five-part sequence giving a particular view of the universe collapsing, when there looms the coldness of nothingness.

 

Finally comes To proceed within a trap. The sequence of poems that bears this name deploys many images of the cosmos, most often tending to see people as isolated or overborne by the vastness of it, or overborne by men as in the poem which begins “The world is full of great men / making it completely unliveable for the rest of us” and, according to the poet, it is men who make the economic system and destroy the earth. The unlive-ability is summed up in “health and safety”, which suggests massive degradation of the earth.

Only in one poem does Bach have a severe attack of nostalgia with “sweet spot”, wherein she remembers the naivete of childhood happily unaware of the real world around them.

Middle Youth is more a collection of sorrow and hesitation than of exuberance and joy, but it is carefully crafted and does open up to us a certain perspective that is rarely revealed. An interesting collection.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

For most New Zealand readers, poetry and short stories are presented to us by university presses and other established publishers. But it is a pleasure to know that there are independent publications far from the major cities. So I am delighted to note here the existence of Vines,  which announces itself as "the Hawke's Bay literary and arts journal". Vines was inaugurated by Erice Fairbrother with Jeremy Roberts as poetry editor (you may find on this blog a review of his book about travelling in Indnesia The Dark Cracks of Kemang). Vines is now into its fifth number, 40 pages long, the length of an average collection of poetry - but it carries poetry, short stories, reportage and reprodutions of art works. Mary-Anne Scott's foreword quite understandably references the huge damage done to the Hawke's Bay region by Cyclone Gabrielle as do some of the poetry contributions. Erice Fairbrother sums up impressively the effects of the cyclone.Tim Saunders (author of Under a Big Sky) gives us an intriguing take on the way some farmers think in his story The Hare and the Hawk. Some poems and art-works are contributed by pupils at a primary school and at a secondary school. There is a book review and a somewhat surreal multilingual story about a personal crack-up. A heady mixture.