Something New

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

“MY BRILLIANT SISTER” by Amy Brown (Scribner, $NZ 37.99); “LAWRENCE OF ARABIA” by Ranulph Fiennes (Michael Joseph, $NZ42 ); “THE VANISHING POINT” by Andrea Hotere (Ultimo Press $NZ38)

            Amy Brown, New Zealander now resident in Melbourne, has published poetry and stories for children over the last decade or so. My Brilliant Sister is her first novel for adults and it is a formidable, complex piece of work. The novel comprises three separate stories about three separate women, but linked with the same themes: how difficult, if not impossible, is it for women to sustain a career, or be creative, if they have to do all the domestic work and raise children? Or conversely, how easily can women sustain friendships (or love) when they are focussed on a career?  This is clearly a feminist novel, often referring to the fact that women usually have to do all the heavy-lifting of cleaning and raising children while their male spouses or partners can simply stand back and pursue their interests. Each of the three women tells her story in the first person.

            Ida (the first third of the novel) is a New Zealander living in Melbourne. She is not married formally, though we are told that she and her man had a jokey “celebration” in Wellington when they decided to live together. They have a four-year-old daughter called Aster. Ida feels thwarted. Her partner is an academic university lecturer who hides himself in his study and absorbs himself in his writing, getting ahead with his career. Ida believes she too could have had an academic career as she did well at university; but she wasn’t awarded scholarships and instead teaches at high-school. Ida has to look after Aster, take her to and from care places, make breakfast, lunch and dinner, do the cleaning… and teach high-school. Like her partner she wants to write, but where is the time? In the background of this story is the Covid pandemic. At high-school Ida gets 17-year-old girls to read the classic Australian novel My Brilliant Career,  published in 1901, written by Stella Miles Franklin [full name Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin, but published under the name Miles Franklin, as in 1901 it was still believed by some publishers that books would sell better if they appeared under masculine-sounding names]. Stella Miles Franklin was a free-wheeling, unconventional woman who turned down a proposal of marriage, never married, and got on with her writing… under many different pseudonyms.  Struck down with pneumonia, Ida, bed-ridden, reads all she can about Stella Miles Franklin, and learns that Stella had a younger sister, Linda, who married when Stella did not, had a baby and died when she was only 25. Linda lived a conventional life, did all the household chores, but also sometimes showed a desire to produce works of her own. She frequently wrote to Stella. This leads Ada to consider what it would be like for women who have literary or other artistic aspirations but are never able to achieve them… which could be her own fate.        

The second section of the novel is therefore told by Linda Franklin, in rural Australia in the 1890s and very early 1900s, round about the time when Australian women won the franchise. In the first person, Linda writes letters to her older sister or addresses Stella directly in a free-flowing monologue. Linda remembers Stella’s boisterous adolescence, her tendency to dominate Linda, and the way she brushed aside both an offer of marriage and the stories Linda tried to tell when Stella was concocting her own plots. Linda marries, is domesticated and has a child, but there is a tension in her thoughts. She likes her husband, she loves her child (who dies young), but she still feels she has not been given the chance to fully express herself in writing, about which she dreams. Stella Miles Franklin becomes famous when she is only 21 and her My Brilliant Career is first published. For Linda, Stella becomes “my brilliant sister”. She envies her sister and she dislikes the way Stella often belittles as trivia things that are important to Linda. And, of course, Linda dies too young to show what she could have achieved.

While this second section reinforces the theme Amy Brown began with, the third section of My Brilliant Sister is more ambiguous. The time is the [almost] present. Another Stella is a very successful rock star in New Zealand, a singer-songwriter and guitarist who attracts large audiences to her gigs. Her stage name is Stella Miles Franklin. Stella sees no point in marriage.  Stella has fallen in lesbian love with another musician, but apparently her love is not returned. She often leans on her mother for conversation but, at the age of 36, she’s beginning to wonder if her musical days are fading away. Has she reached her peak? She talks with Linda, a friend since schooldays, who is married and has three children; but much as she likes her friend, she knows that is not the life she wants. As a celebrity, she is invited to speak at her old high school but, as she narrates it, what she says is barely coherent. She ends up fantasising about having the double or sister she never had – somebody she could relate closely with.

There are many ideas crammed into this section of the novel, but surely one of them is that having a “brilliant career” does not necessarily mean either happiness or fulfilment. There is always competition. There is always the possibility that focusing on achieving something can make it difficult to foster intimate relationships with others. The achiever can morph into a loner and loneliness will reign. Read as I have read it, this third part of the novel is more dour and depressing even than the experiences of Ada and Linda Franklin… or perhaps Amy Brown is signalling that being truly creative is always a hard road.

Taken as a whole, My Brilliant Sister is a complex and thoughtful account of the relationship of the sexes, as well as the difficulty of finding room for creativity. For this reader at any rate, the most persuasive of the novel’s three sections is the opening one, the one that sounds most authentic. Brown charts carefully, moment by moment, the small things that stack up, forcing Ida to see herself as almost trapped and unable to fulfil herself. I can’t help wondering if it is at least in part based on the author’s own experience. [The very unfashionable three-letter name Ida might chime with the author’s three-letter name Amy.] The second section, set in the New South Wales of the 1890s, is almost as persuasive. Brown has certainly done her research. The social classes of the time, the poverty that the Franklin family fall into when they lose their farm, the sharp difference between Linda’s home experience and Stella’s boarding-school experience, the snobbery of some of the horsey-riding clan – it is all readable and all real. I would only fault (me being a nit-picking person) a few moments when narrating Linda, recalling what she said as a ten-year-old, seems to use a vocabulary far beyond her age.

This is an important novel, though I would understand if some readers saw it as very depressing.

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

 

It’s been calculated that about 300 books concerning Thomas Edward Lawrence “of Arabia” have been published, and they keep coming. Readers of this blog may be aware that some time back I wrote a detailed critique of Lawrence’s autobiography of his years in Arabia, Seven Pillars of Wisdom ,highly praised in its day but now subject of much criticism. And I found much in it to criticise. I also reviewed Richard Aldington’s Lawrence ofArabia – A Biographical Enquiry, published in the 1950s and the first detailed attempt to debunk the Lawrence legend. Aldington was shouted down at the time, but later research has proven that much of what he wrote has turned out to be accurate. The problem was that Aldington tended to be dogmatic and refused to see any good in Lawrence. I could see that, even if Lawrence did not achieve as much as he claimed to have done, there was something extraordinary in a short-sized English officer being able to gain the trust of Arabs and become one of their leaders – especially as Lawrence was only in his twenties at the time. So you can see I’m undecided about Lawrence. He was partly charismatic leader of the Arab tribes and partly self-aggrandising charlatan.

            Ranulph Fiennes’ Lawrence of Arabia is the latest attempt to crack the Lawrence enigma. Fiennes has written many non-fictions, usually polishing up the tales of British heroes like Captain Scott and Shackleton. Fiennes has also done much travelling. The blurb tells me that, according to the Guinness Book of Records, Fiennes is “the world’s greatest living explorer”. Most pertinent, however, is the fact the Fiennes has been a soldier and commander of men in situations of hit-and-run guerrilla warfare. In the 1960s he fought for the Sultan of Omar in putting down the Dhofar Rebellion. This was in a desert country and Fiennes sees himself as having acted very much as Lawrence did in a similar environment.

            In his introduction, Fiennes describes Lawrence’s work in Arabia as “one of the most awe-inspiring stories of all time… a young British officer set the desert on fire and emblazoned his name in the pages of history.” Against this hyperbole, all I can say is “Strewth!” Fiennes identifies himself with Lawrence. Every so often, Fiennes breaks off his narrative of Lawrence of Arabia to interpolate tales of his days in Oman. When he tells the well-known story of Lawrence shooting an Arab to prevent a blood feud, he tells us that he himself knew how unpleasant he felt when he had to shoot a man. When we are told of some successful strategy Lawrence used,  Fiennes tells us of something similar he did. I can see easily how this might annoy some readers.

            Having read other texts about Lawrence, I question at least some of the statements Fiennes makes. He presents the taking of port of Wejh as one of Lawrence’s great triumphs when others have reported that Wejh was taken mainly by the Royal Navy, with Lawrence turning up after most of the action was over. More questionably, Fiennes says that Lawrence knew nothing about the Sykes-Picot agreement – the plan to divide up Arabia between the English and the French - until the very last moment and only then did he become disillusioned with his hope to free the Arabs. The hard fact is that Lawrence was fully aware of this secret pact almost as soon as it was hatched.

            In fairness, though, I have to admit that, despite the interpolations about himself, Fiennes tells a good story and makes the campaigns of Lawrence understandable. As Lawrence told of them in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, they were often confusing and complex. Fiennes turns them into a good yarn. Also, note that he takes on board some of the things that Aldington was abused for noting in the 1950s – among other things that Lawrence was essentially homosexual with a tendency for sadomasochism. Fiennes admits that Lawrence had his flaws, and that his supposed aim to create a unified Arab country never came to fruition. Indeed what Lawrence left behind him was a mess of rival Arab tribes vying for dominance. In the end his achievement was very little. In spite of which, as told by Fiennes, Lawrence of Arabia bounces along with its skirmish scenes, de-railing of trains and other matters of derring-do which will give great pleasure to those who like the genre of outdoor muscular adventure – truthful or otherwise.

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

I have to admit that I took some time getting around to reading Andrea Hotere’s The Vanishing Point, which was published last year. My holidays drew me off to other interests.

 The Vanishing Point is centred on a very famous work of art. Diego Velasquez’s Las Meninas (The Ladies-in-Waiting), painted in Madrid in 1656, has been examined, quarrelled over by experts, admired by art critics, inspired other painters (Picasso et al) and widely loved by the general public more than nearly any other painting except perhaps the Mona Lisa. I admit to standing gazing at it for a long time while visiting the Prado a few years back. It does cast a certain spell. What gets you is the way Velasquez, painting a group of the royal Spanish court, presents them in unexpected places, including himself staring at us from his easel as if he is painting us, the viewers, and not the royal gathering. There is also the unexpected cluster around the little princess, the Infanta Margarita Teresa, with not only two ladies-in-waiting about her, but the two dwarves and the mastiff and more dimly-depicted people behind them. And why are the king (Philip IV) and the queen shown only in a small painting on the far wall… or is it a mirror showing part of what Velasquez is painting? And, at the painting’s vanishing point, who is that man going out the far door?

It is, I believe, the complexity of this work of art and Velasquez’s daring in breaking with tradition that make Las Meninas the masterpiece it is. He defied the standard convention of presenting royalty in stiff, lined-up poses. We admire Las Meninas and ponder over it for purely aesthetic reasons.

            But Andrea Hotere is not really focused on aesthetics. She is focused on a conspiracy. Basic plot: in the late 20^th century two young woman, interested in art, try to unravel the “secret” behind Las Meninas and what is hidden in it.  There is a “curse” hanging over King Philip IV and his offspring, and apparently a scandal involving the king himself … and it transpires that there’s a sinister group, something like the Spanish version of the fabled  “Illuminati”, that tries fanatically to cover things up. Hotere’s narrative moves between 17^th century Spain and late 20^th century London and Spain. And apparently in the 20^th century there are still people trying to eliminate those who get too near to unravelling the hidden codes of Velasquez’s masterwork.

            Let’s make some fair points: Andrea Hotere has done a great deal a research, knows much of the reality of 17^th century Spain, and conveys it to us, usually in the form of conversations between characters to enlighten us... which can sometimes sound artificial. She is also aware that the “curse” that fell upon the whole Hapsburg dynasty was not some supernatural spell or demonic damnation. It was simply genetic. The Hapsburgs were very in-bred, leading among other things to the notorious and unsightly “Hapsburg Jaw”; and the king who followed Philip IV was the pitiful King Carlos who was virtually a drivelling idiot. [Years ago I read on this subject a book called Carlos the Bewitched, which is what the poor fellow was nicknamed at the time.] Yet it is not really this “curse” that is Andrea Hotere’s main interest. She is more concerned with that man going out the door of the “vanishing point” and all he might have done with regard to the scandal involving the king.

            The Vanishing Point is an easy read, though for all the author’s genuine erudition it does seem to be following the likes of The Girl with a Pearl Earing. However, given that Hotere is genuinely very well informed about 17th century Spain, she is miles ahead of the type of unhistorical drivel Dan Brown produced with his The Da Vinci Code.  The Vanishing Point is a great read if you like conspiracy theories. 

 

Something Old

  Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE NOVELS AND STORIES OF NOEL HILLIARD – PART TWO

 

[Last posting I dealt with the first two novels of Noel Hilliard’s tetralogy, Maori Girl and Power of Joy. This posting I deal with the concluding two novels of the tetralogy. ]

Maori Woman (first published in 1974) brings Netta Samuel together with Paul Bennett. Once again, Hilliard presents his novel in four parts. And once again he begins each part with a Biblical quotation.

Part One : Netta Samuel now works as a machinist in a Wellington clothing factory. She was devastated when she had to give up her baby Victoria (“Vicki”) for adoption to a Pakeha couple. She is now living with Jason Pine, a Maori labourer who has spent time in jail for his violent criminal activities including rape. Jason has had a life of dodging or coping with Pakeha prejudices. He also has a strong sexual appetite and (unknown by Netta) he is cheating on Netta with a Pakeha girl. Paul Bennett, as he determined at the end of Power of Joy, has approached Netta and had tea with her after first accosting her at the railway station. He has asked her to phone him - but she will not give him her name. At the clothing factory, Netta’s boss is the Pakeha Henry Rushbury. He has decided views on the disruptive powers of attractive young Maori. They are a distraction for the male workers. He also seems to be bored with his own marriage.  Part One ends with Paul Bennett lifted out of his gloom when Neta does phone him.

Part Two: Netta’s Pakeha boss Henry Rushbury takes more than a passing interest in Netta… indeed he daydreams about her while at a symphony concert [Hilliard presents classical music as something for snobs who only attend to boost their own prestige.] Netta meanwhile accepts at the factory the friendship of a rather neurotic English girl called Sharon Burt, who claims she’s going to marry a Maori called Richard. Only later do we learn that Sharon is in fact the Pakeha girl with whom Jason Pine is cheating. The friendship of Paul and Netta develops. They meet a number of times and exchange stories of their childhood, but she does not as yet trust him with her address or the details of her life. Finally, balancing up Jason and Paul in her mind, she decides to commit herself to Paul. At about the same time, Jason is gathering together all the rage and resentment he feels about Pakeha society. This culminates when he sexually humiliates Sharon at a Pakeha party they attend. He knows trouble will soon find him and he decides to leave town. This is the same night that Netta and Paul decide to live together.

Part Three : Travelling back to the country, Paul meets Jason, fresh out of prison, who berates him for his Pakeha ignorance of Maori ways. Aggressively he attacks Paul’s patronising attitude. Netta returns to her family, wrenched by the fact that she is not able to tell them about the mokopuna she has given up for adoption. Her father (without speaking out loud) laments the poor living he is able to scratch out of his farm than the Pakeha have taken away the best land. And yet in prayer and celebration, Netta’s is a warm homecoming to a real family. In contrast, Paul’s is a solitary homecoming. Isolated, he wanders among the trees, alienated, looking at the way industry has wrecked the countryside. Visiting the overgrown, run-down marae he wonders how this could be the centre of a social life. As for Jason’s homecoming, he is completely alienated from the old ways… and later he defaces a sign that prohibits the taking of shellfish. He despises his family for clinging to tradition and determines to go back to the city. And back in the Wellington factory, the boss Henry Rushbury is having lustful thoughts about Netta, especially as his wife keeps nagging him about how he should be more assertive with his employees. Netta tells her family that she is going to marry the Pakeha Paul. There is some consternation about this, but her family generally accepts her decision. In contrast, when Paul tells his parents that he's going to marry a Maori woman, there is barely-suppressed racism. Paul’s mother is tight-lipped and his father gives a full-on racist lecture. Paul consults an Anglican vicar about his family’s attitude. The vicar is understanding and says it is Paul’s family that must change; but Paul comes away feeling that he should not have attempted to rely on a church he no longer believes in. He tries, without great success, to make peace with his mother. Netta visits the neighbours of the Matiti area and once again sees how run-down and backward the area is. In a way, she has become more acclimatised to the city than she realises… yet, even though she now finds be inadequate and limited the house she grew up, she is bullied by her father to agree she will stay there. Part Three closes with Paul reading a letter sent by the vicar saying Paul shouldn’t have any fear in marrying with the church’s support.

Part Four : When Netta returns to her factory job, Henry Rushbury plans to seduce her. He has erotic fantasies in which he controls Netta. Meanwhile the unhappy English girl Sharon Burt tells Netta how she has been slapped around by her boyfriend Richard and how she is now pregnant – and Netta knows that she is really talking about Jason Pine. Meanwhile, as Paul sleeps with Netta, he becomes curious and jealous about the man she still lives with; and she explains how this unnamed man is in trouble and needs her. Not too much later however, Netta tells Jason that she is leaving him for a Pakeha man. In return, Jason lectures her on how she will lose all her Maoriness. Finally Paul comes to Netta’s place while Jason is there – and he recognises the man with whom he had an argument in the country some weeks earlier. In a rage, Jason stabs Netta… and the novel ends with Henry Rushbury reading a newspaper report of Netta’s critical condition. He says “Thank God!”, which is presumably his sense of relief that he just missed getting involved with her.

At which point you are very annoyed with me because all I have given you of Maori Woman is an over-long synopsis. So let me give a little critique. This third novel in the tetralogy – the one in which Netta and Paul are brought together – is the most schematic and didactic of the series. Like Power of Joy, it is weighted down with interior monologue – though this time from many different characters – which tends to explain themes rather than dramatizing them. There is often the sense, too, that the thoughts of all the main characters (Netta, Paul, Jason and Henry) are too self-aware and too articulate. For the same reason, much of the dialogue has a stilted theatrical feel. Hilliard is clearly exploring racial attitudes, condemning Pakeha prejudice and (in the character of Jason Pine) showing how resentment at such prejudice can lead some Maori to criminality. Hilliard overtly criticises Pakeha stereotyped ideas of Maori life; but sometimes Hilliard comes close to repeating such stereotypes – Maori with a strong sense of community, spirituality and family in spite of poverty. Meanwhile Pakeha are individualistic, alienated, materialistic and sexually repressed. This is most obvious in the contrast between Netta’s homecoming and Paul’s homecoming when they tell their respective families that they are going to marry. The novel’s admonitory, fable-like quality surfaces again when Jason’s frustration and anger with Netta results in criminal violence… whereas Henry Rushbury’s perverse thoughts die in respectable silence. What other agenda is there here? Hilliard has of course written a socially-aware novel, and in the factory scenes he introduces comments about materials, about piece-work and bonuses and capitalist exploitation. He also arraigns European “high culture” in Henry Rushbury’s thoughts while listening to Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, with Hilliard suggesting that it is not really relevant to New Zealand… a bit like Paul having to cast aside his Wordsworthian-ism in Power of Joy. The church, however, in the figure of the vicar, is presented more-or-less positively.

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

            The last book of the tetralogy The Glory and the Dream was first published in 1978.  Like all books of the tetralogy, The Glory and the Dream is divided into four parts.

Part One opens when Netta and Paul have been married for about a year and they have moved out of the city and into the country. They have a baby daughter called Huia and Paul is working at a paper mill. This first part is framed by a picnic they go on, where Paul thinks back to how his parents ignored them after their registry office wedding, but how Netta’s family welcomed them even though her father still harped on the unfairness of Pakeha taking Maori land. Paul also remembers going on a fishing expedition with Netta’s brother Mutu. Heavy symbolism appears everywhere. In the opening pages Paul and Netta, in their vegetable garden, are deliberately nurturing new plant life… and travelling on a boat to the picnic with Netta and baby Huia, there’s the symbolism of a fragile craft adrift in new waters… like the marriage of Maori and Pakeha. Paul remembers Christmas celebrations and the meal with Netta’s family the previous year, and how he, unused to such food, threw up at the rotten corn. He remembers the New Year’s hangi and the rain… And how Netta showed him her former home and its ways and how he is not fully centred there. Part One ends with him, after the picnic, having sunburn so easily because he has a different sort of skin from his wife… more symbolism and certainly much inner monologue.

In Part Two small matters of adjustment in their marriage are outlined. They collectively become a great matter. She doesn’t see the value of reading books. He does. She has a different attitude to money from his. She goes to church. He doesn’t. She is horrified that he still won’t introduce her to his family, as she believes a marriage should be two families coming together. He criticises her standard of tidiness in housekeeping. There is a grisly incident when he introduces her to a snobbish Pakeha couple who pick apart her name as a problem in linguistics. They go to the funeral of somebody in the same firm as Paul, and she is appalled at how empty of feeling a Pakeha funeral is. They talk about her feelings considering God, and in a long-night conversation she talks about the Maori heritage their children will have. Often he proposes to her the idea that they are a couple above race; but she says such an idea is a delusion. Paul feels how different he is from her relatives when they come to call and he feeds himself while they continue to drink beer until they get some fish and chips. They discuss a pornographic comic Paul brings home from his work, and at her insistence he burns it. They argue about his patronising Pakeha friends trying to change her Maori ways, and about how she doesn’t value money or savings. They have another major disagreement over how Huia is to be brought up – Maori values or Pakeha ones – and she tries to define her morality and concepts of moral good. She tells him about her sense of God – and about something she is missing. She has not told him of the child she adopted out – she claims that her first child died. She is indifferent to politics. He doesn’t believe in in omens. She does.

Part Three: The weather changes. Paul feels sick and irritable being on the night shift at the paper mill. There is a long description here of conditions at the paper mill and the discontent of the workers with the owners. Paul and Netta have long conversations about the merits of classical music and about the pressures placed on him at work. He wonders why she has no ambition and never suggests he should go further than his boring job. He begins to imagine that she is cheating on him because he does the night-shift when anybody could be entering their home… and to escape these negative thoughts, he reverts to adolescence and tries to immerse himself in nature once again. But when he returns home his suspicions are renewed. When Netta is out one morning, he rifles through her belongings looking for evidence of her infidelity. He finds a letter from her adopted-out daughter but does not understand its significance and imagines it’s only from a niece in her extended family. However he finds a paperback that used to belong to a ship’s library. His mind goes back to his days in Wellington and he wonders in raging jealousy if Netta was once a “ship girl”. He suffers what almost amounts to a nervous breakdown, with thoughts of revenge on Netta and her supposed lover… and finally Netta reveals the existence of her adopted-out daughter Vicki… and Paul at last realises what her behaviour has meant over all these years and he is filled with shame. He has simply not understood what a burden she has carried in having to keep some of her past secret.

Part Four. This part opens with two-and-a-half pages of Nature-coming-to-life imagery. Paul has adjusted to his life with Netta – he is resigned to it. Netta gives him as a present The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, with its advice of not becoming obsessed with the foolish and the ignorant… and on the next page Paul’s parents at last visit them. There is mutual awkwardness, but Paul’s father now offers Paul his farm and says it’s what he went to war for… after all, any farmer wants to pass on his farm to his son. After his parents have gone, Paul begins to accept his father’s offer… and the novel ends with life burgeoning as Netta says she is pregnant again.

Okay. Okay. I’m not responsible for the fairy-tale ending and I have delivered you another over-long synopsis. But bear with me in a sort of critique. Hilliard’s fatal weaknesses are at their worst in The Glory and the Dream. Hilliard constantly tells us without showing us. On page after page he rushes in to point a moral rather than dramatising events. Once again, a good deal of the text is taken up with interior monologue and rumination, nearly always Paul’s and very rarely Netta’s. We are, even more than in the preceding three novels, getting the Pakeha male’s view of cultural clash and race relations. This would be unexceptional except that there are long sections where Paul’s conversations with Netta seem to be little more than his asking questions about her values and beliefs – a stark and really undramatised contrast of Maori and Pakeha values. Worse, the symbolic imagery (or pathetic fallacy) gets out of hand, with Nature ready to tell us about life regenerating etc. etc.

Is there a trace in this novel of the Marxism that at one stage Hilliard embraced? In the choice of subject and social attitudes, there may be some moments of socialist inspiration, especially when we have Paul in the paper mill considering the alienation of the workers. Also (in a timber-milling town) there is some imagery about the rape of nature.  But little of this is really seen in a socialist perspective.  Attitudes to work and ideas of alienation are more the sins of Western civilisation than specifically the fault of capitalism. In one sense, then, this novel takes race to be a more determinant factor than class.

To go back to what I said in introducing Hilliard’s work, I believe he wrote with “the best of intentions”. He really did seek a more equitable New Zealand and he certainly wanted greater respect for the Maori people. He did have not only a Maori wife, but also many admiring Maori friends. These are things to be applauded. But, good intentions apart, what he offered sometimes were themselves stereotypes and much of what he wrote now seems oddly patronising. Certainly (and this is not his fault) his depiction of Maori is not as raw and knowing as the work of the many Maori writers who have appeared in the last 40 or 50 years.

And then there are all the problems with his prose style. I was able to access some of the original reviews in “Landfall” of Hilliard’s work, and the reviews were often negative. In “Landfall 57 – March 1961” Paul Day blasted Maori Girl as “not a satisfactory novel because of the thinness of its characters’ emotional life… Mr. Hilliard… has fallen between two stools of reporting and imaginative creation…” In “Landfall 129 March 1979”  Patricia Glensor ripped The Glory and the Dream apart, attacking the whole of Hilliard’s tetralogy as a cliché-ridden unrealistic novel written too often in sub-Wordsworthian prose and perpetuating the very racist concepts Hilliard set out to demolish. She says he creates the “happy-go-lucky Hori and the neurotic, nit-picking Pakeha”. And between these reviews, Dennis McEldowney in 1963 damned one of Hilliard’s short stories as so bad it was “embarrassing”; and R.A. Copland, in 1969, biffed at Hilliard’s A Night at Green River [the novel that interrupted the tetralogy] as sheer didacticism. In “Landfall 113 March 1975”, H.Winston Rhodes praised Hilliard’s social realism in Maori Woman but had to admit the “inadequacy” of Hilliard’s narrative technique.

Not that critics are always right, of course (not even the one you are now reading). But it does seem that Noel Hilliard had a hard ride even in his heyday, and his stock has fallen even further now

 [Two novels by Hilliard, his short stories and one odd book will conclude my examination of Hilliard’s work in my next posting]

Something Thoughtful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.  

                               PRESENT MIRTH HATH PRESENT LAUGHTER

It was almost a ritual in the late 1950s and early 1960s when I was a little kiddie slightly on my way to teenager-dom. Dad would turn on the radio in our living room at the appropriate time and we’d listen to My Word. What a witty BBC programme it was. Two women (most often Nancy Spain and Anne Scott-James) would answer questions about the meaning of obscure words. Then they were asked to say where certain chosen literary quotations came from. After this, the witty script-writers Frank Muir and Denis Norden would take over. (Muir and Norden had become well-known for scripting the 1950s comedy show Take It From Here with “The Glums” and other broad jokery). They would be asked to concoct outlandish stories about how these quotations came about. What they came up with were long, funny anecdotes, always ending with outrageous puns. Muir’s and Norden’s anecdotes were the highlight of the show and the thing most quoted and laughed about when each episode was remembered.

                                           Muir and Norden in their prime
 

I remember my father puffing on his pipe and congratulating himself on the number of literary quotations he was able to identify before the panel on the radio had identified them. This seemed to little me the epitome of sophisticated wit. My Word [I have this from Wikipedia] was broadcast from 1956 to 1967, and was then continued in a modified form from 1967 to 1988, but by that time television had invaded New Zealand and we no longer listened regularly to the show or to much spoken radio in general. I treasured my vague memories of My Word (which was followed by the rather more tepid My Music) and continued to think it was sophisticated highbrow entertainment.

Then, beginning last year, disaster struck. The BBC allowed recordings of My Word to be played on line. I sat down at my computer, found the right programme, and waited for a deluge of witticism. Alas, it didn’t happen. I discovered that, as often as not, the show’s moderator Jack Longland had to help out the panel when it came to defining recherche words or identifying literary quotations. They were not so erudite after all. Worse, I found Muir’s and Norden’s anecdotes to be over-long and ending with such contorted puns that they barely made sense, or barely fitted the quotation they were guying [There’s a word you don’t hear often now!]. There was the occasional funny quip, the occasional pun that hit the spot, but it now seemed awfully twee, dated and a little too cosy – middle-class English people patting themselves on the back. I regret to say I had also heard rumours [true or untrue I know not] that in fact Muir’s and Norden’s punning anecdotes were scripted and rehearsed well before the live-show went on air. Perhaps they were not spontaneous.

I feel caddish about writing all this, but it was another proof that certain types of humour don’t fully weather the test of time. I think back to other BBC radio comedies we enjoyed when I was a kid. There was Beyond Our Ken (broadcast from 1958 to 1964) and its successor Round the Horne (1965 to 1968) wherein the unflappable, strait, avuncular and congenial Kenneth Horne dealt with the likes of loud-voiced Betty Marsden and the multi-voiced Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick, who could mimic many characters but who were best known for their camp performance as Julian and Sandy. When I got to university, I often heard fellow-students saying they despised the Julian and Sandy characters, because they were a cruel stereotype of homosexual men at a time when gay guys were often discriminated against. But the reality was that, in real life, both Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick were homosexual, they enjoyed playing their camp roles, and they are now often cited as pioneers in putting gayness to the fore on the media and making the wider public aware of the cant Polare language. Beyond Our Ken and Round the Horne were good fun at the time but, when now heard [also available on line], they are repetitive and very dated.

Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams laugh uproariously, encouraging Kenneth Horne and Betty Marsden in Round the Horne.
 

And the same is true of another 1960s BBC radio comedy I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again, which was slightly more aligned to a younger audience. Its cast mainly came from Cambridge university, including Tim Brooke-Taylor, John Cleese, Graeme Garden, David Hatch, Jo Kendall (the only woman in the show and much under-used) and Bill Oddie. Funny that at the time it seemed a sparkling new sort of comedy with all its university wit – my brother and I listened to it devotedly – and yet now it seems just another collection of funny voices, old-fashioned puns, predictable stereotypes and jokes that came from Joe Miller.

The clever kids from Cambridge, Tim Brooke-Taylor, David Hatch, Jo Kendall, Bill Oddie and the towering John Cleese.
 

Oh dear! What a sour puss I am. But the hard reality is that comedy does date and can date badly.  Some time ago on this blog, I made a similar case in a piece called The Flies Crawled Up the Window. There is much comedy that has survived through long ages. There is some patter that is still funny [check the best of the Marx Brothers – though they too had their duds]. Sometimes I’m inclined to think the most enduring comedy is pure slapstick as practised by silent comics such as Max Linder, Keaton [the very best of them], Chaplin and Lloyd. But the thing is that, on the whole, their comedy wasn’t topical and therefore could remain jocular.

But where old BBC radio comedy shows are involved truly, as Bill Shakespeare said in Twelfth Night present mirth hath present laughter… but only in the present.

 

Something New

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

“SELECTED POEMS – GEOFF COCHRANE” Selected by Fergus Barrowman (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $NZ40, hardback); “THE GLASS GUITAR” poems by Peter Olds (Cold Hub Press, NZ$26) ; “NIGHT SHIFTS” by Pat White (Cold Hub Press, $NZ28); “REMEMBER ME – Poems to Learn by Heart from Aotearoa New Zealand” edited by Anne Kennedy (Auckland University Press, $NZ45); “RAPTURE – An Anthology of Performance Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand” Edited by Carrie Rudzinski and Grace Iwashita-Taylor (Auckland University Press, $NZ49.99)

 

The poet Geoff Cochrane was born in 1951 and died in 2022, so in a way this selection is his memorial.

After a brief and serviceable foreword by Fergus Barrowman, who selected these poems from the sixteen collections Cochrane produced between 1979 and 2020, there is a 40-page-long interview, first published in Sport twenty years ago in 2003. Damien Wilkins interviews Cochrane. He discusses Cochrane’s long years of alcoholism and the strangeness and disorientation Cochrane felt after giving up the drink, but also how both states – drunkenness and sobriety -  fuelled him with types of poetry. He discusses frankly how little he likes New Zealand and sometimes wishes he was in England or some such environment. Nevertheless he is a Wellingtonian. He makes it clear in one way or another that he prefers shorter and comprehensible poems, and he hints at a disdain for poems that are academic and designed for insiders only. He discusses his Catholic upbringing and how he rebelled from it once he left home, but that he nevertheless has been formed by it. In what I can only regard as his saddest trait, there are his periods of being obsessed with sex. Yet now [at the time of the 2003 interview] he lives singly, unpartnered and alone. After reading this long interview, my first reaction was to think “Poor bastard!” and I already had the image (reinforced by reading this selection of his poems) that his life was spent smoking, taking cheap meals, meeting old mates (some still on the booze), living in a very cramped little flat and writing poetry whenever he could. Cochran had published two novels, which I have not read, and apparently wrote some more which were never published. There was also a collection of short stories called Astonished Dice [reviewed on this blog] published in 2014, which reads more like vignettes and prose poems rather than short stories as such.

So there is the portrait of a bohemian poet, living by choice a fringe life and dealing with an addiction or the aftermath thereof. As I read my way through Selected Poems, I was aware that frequently his earlier poems are series of unconnected images – fragments that do not cohere, like a child’s collage. They are images that may be vivid in themselves, but are isolated. Reading them is like walking on a beach one sunny day, and seeing random flashes of sunlight reflected in random grains of sand. In these earlier poems we get some self-loathing as in “Report on Sobriety” which includes the lines “I am the people I loathe, my past / appals me, me”. At this stage he is appalled by the quantity of alcohol he used to consume. He is still at the stage of being sex-obsessed like a randy teenager, as in “Tinakori Nights” where “Near these hills took place / some wonderful parties, a suicide or two, / a few ardent fuckings. / She was skinny and brown, / a pallid T connecting hips and twat… She liked it sudden; / she liked it from behind. / And to touch herself, impaled, / and get her fingers wet – / to watch it being done and done to her…” etc. etc.  Similarly, “Rads” is a sequence in which a woman is half-sex attraction half-goddess. He says goodbye to religion in “Astronomy” or in “Eucharists” where, remembering school, he recalls that “To breakfast / on Christ’s body / was to eat redemption.” Down to physical fact comes “Pile Diary”, literally about the pain of his piles. And is he dismissive of his parents or is he still in thrall to them? Take the two-line poem “My Elderly Father Watches Television” which reads thus “How can he sit there enjoying the cricket / when there’s death to think about?” Is this a callous statement or a provocation?

These examples are all from his earlier years as a poet – very brief statements, sometimes gnomic, sometimes cryptic. Later many of his poems become more coherent and longer, although very so often there are  “Worksheets” which seem to be ideas not yet turned into poems, or which sprout aphorisms such as “Anything can happen, including nothing”. He ventures into writing detailed sequences. The twelve-part sequence “Whispers” is a moving reflection on the death of his father as experienced in his last days and there are further, more terse, poems on the same theme. However he often expresses a nostalgic ache for the alcohol he has given up. “Zigzags” at first seems to glory in bohemian nonchalance, taking in sights and sounds and revelling in it ; but it deliberately collapses into sorrows caused by the use of illicit drugs. In complete form “Under the Volcano” goes thus: “Not a drop of alcohol / in eleven years. / but still I dream / the same old shame, / the same old prideful shame: / I’m living in a single, basic room / with just a one-bar heater, / a mantel radio, a knitted tie of peach, / a stolen copy of Robert Lowell’s Imitations / and a flagon of lunatic soup…/ and one day I’ll be taken out and shot”. Along with the Malcom Lowry reference in title, there is the self-pity of the last line, like a teenager’s death wish, and the bravado of referring to his “prideful” shame.

Cochran allies himself with eccentrics, his best example being “Erik”, a curious sequence about the French musician Erik Satie and his odd life and method of composing. Given that it’s about a man who was frugal and lived on the edge of society, it might almost be an apologia for Geoff Cochrane’s own way of life. At least, Cochran appears to be identifying with Satie. Then there is “Little Bits of Harry”, a kind of epic shaped in 33 “chapters”, being the tale of schoolboy alienated from family, hating school, a loner, and finally becoming a junkie, as if this were nirvana or an achievement. Again, this seems to be a version of the poet himself. A character called Basho stands in for him in some poems – yet another alter ego.

Much of Cochran’s work is drenched in guilt and self-chastisement. “The Poet” has an extended image of being outside an embassy, wherein “His life’s a convalescence - / a slow, elated, awed recovery / from humiliation.” “Loop” says in part “For many years, / I steeped myself in booze. / I steeped myself in booze / till even my marrow drank, / but it’s all behind me now, / sad fuck that I am.” “Negative Buoyancy”, and especially the section headed “Taking Stock”, again deals with the long after-effects of alcohol even when he had been “abstinent for more than fifteen years”. “Daydream” also [presented as a dream] aches and yearns for alcohol. And the late poem “The Rooming-House” presents his boozing years when he was a student. “Mixed Feelings” says: “Sixty today. I’m sixty today. / And though I’ve been sober for more than twenty years, / I still have nightmares about / failing to make provision, / failing to provide myself with booze.” Whether Cochrane disliked his poetry being called “confessional” [in the interview with Damien Wilkins he says he rejects the term], “confessional” is what much of his work is, not only about alcohol but also in poems about his family, father ( “Dreads”) and sister (“Impersonating Bono”). Memories of the past carry him away, and there are echoes of his Catholic upbringing in late poems like “Consecrated Vessels” and “God and Other Worries”

It is in his final poems that we get more of Wellington culture and cafes, and of course thoughts of old age and death. But there is a sense of defeat as he grows older. “Fear of Flying” could be read as another teen death-wish, or just the weariness caused by earlier years of alcoholic abuse. In full it reads “And it dawns on me that I’m fond / of putting things behind me. / This looms, and That is coming up… / and I wish these events were over. / There’s even a sense in which / I’m in a hurry to be through with living – a sense in which I’d like my very life / to be over and done with. Sorted.” “Late in the Day” tells us “my writing life has been / a series of defeat.” Cochrane is exhausted.

Have I belittled Cochrane in this review? I hope not. Cochrane chose a way of life which is largely alien to me. Some of his attempted aphorisms are trite, such as “Sufficient unto the day / are the two-minute noodles thereof,” which some people seem to think is witty. He can ramble and he does repeat himself. Booze. After-effects after giving up the booze etc. Yet the world he creates is a credible one and the precarious life he chronicles is a real one. Of course he was not the first poet to stick with the lower depths (blimey – there have been prominent boozy and druggie poets at least since the 19^th century – right Charlie Baudelaire? right Ernie Dowson?). By fits and starts, the approach can still work.

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

 

            In some ways, Peter Olds was like Geoff Cochrane. Olds was born in 1944 and died in 2023 aged 79. Like the selection of Cochran’s verse, Olds’ The Glass Guitar is a kind of memorial for a recently-dead poet. But it is not a selection of Olds’ best poems. It is a collection of some of his hitherto unpublished poems, selected by Roger Hickin. While Cochrane was a Wellingtonian, Olds was more of a Dunedin-ite. Olds and Cochrane lived quite frugal lives and both ended up inhabiting limited quarters. But Olds was never a slave to booze in the way that Cochrane had been. John Gibb contributes a detailed Introduction, noting that while James K. Baxter was at first Olds’ mentor, the relationship was not always smooth. He also quotes David Eggleton’s comment that Olds was “the laureate of the marginalised”. Olds did often write about poverty and social inequality. It’s worth noting, too, that most of these poems were written in the last couple of years of Olds’ life. In other words, with a few exceptions, the poems in The Glass Guitar are the poems of an ageing man.

            Reading these selected hitherto-unpublished is to find many and varied moods. Inevitably there are some poems that reflect Olds’ changing attitudes towards James K. Baxter. “Jerusalem Revisited” is a longish dead-pan chronicle account of going to Baxter’s grave years after the man’s death, with undertones suggesting that Jerusalem has become sanitised and cleaned-up – almost like a tourist stop. And “Airmail to Mr. Baxter” might be ironical but only half so, with angry lines such as “I should never have listened to you / you good for nothing prick.”

            Olds loves recalling his adolescence in the 1950s. The sixteen-part sequence “A bucket of fish heads” is a collection of memories of the 1950s as he experienced them – aware of the rugby matches at Carisbrook; programmes listened to on the “wireless”; being a newsboy selling newspapers outside a pub; movies that were then available at the flicks; daydreams – altogether an adolescent fantasia. In the same category of reminiscence, if rather more unnerving, are “Wind murder: Beresford Street, 1956” concerning what terrible things a kid thinks are going on and showing the fearsome side of imagination; and two “Dream” poems earning honestly the designation surreal ; with a similar tone in “Shipwrecked at Tautuku Beach.”

            Devised in couplets, “Grandmother” is a wry confession that when we grow we find ourselves getting to be more like our forebears. Also devised in couplets is “Jack Kerouac at Shag Point” – a lively account of treading up a cliff far above a swirling sea and being pestered by a goat. One can almost hear the wind and the bleating of the goat. More impressive are his poems about specific places. “Leaving Auckland” is a panoramic view of travelling by train from Auckland to the ferries in Wellington that will take his back to his southern home. But on the whole his attitude to Auckland is very negative, reminding me of Baxter’s poem beginning “Auckland you great arsehole”.  Olds’ “Fuck That” appears to be a dyspeptic Jeremiad focused on the sordid side of Auckland; and “Shorty” also gives the sordid tale of Auckland.

The arty side of Dunedin is acknowledged in “Outside Olveston House”, but as old age piles in, the tone becomes more melancholy, with some chastising of himself. There is the sad “Fixing old poems” in which the ageing poet looks back on what could be salvaged or improved of old unfinished poems “waiting for a time when / my eye would be clearer / and less fogged by thoughts / of fame and failure…. The reviews didn’t come. / I don’t blame myself / or the buying public. / The magic stanza was a fizzer.” The sheer loneliness of old runs through “Blue Zopiclone”, where his main friend is a medication for insomnia; and in same poem he pines for the past when “Let’s face it: the Welfare State in our time / was good to us: free milk, apples, health  / camps, music lessons, free scripts. All sorts / of goodies over the counter… The whole / fucking trip, man!”. The implication, redolent of his concern about poverty, is a condemnation of the neo-liberalism that has overtaken us. Very negative moods of old age are highlighted in the poem “Depression”.

The work of an old man, then, and one with a huge merit – namely Olds’ forthrightness. His poems are never clogged by recherche words. He is nor writing for academics. He expresses himself clearly and his verse is very accessible for a wide audience.

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

 

Far more serene in tone, and not clogged with alcohol or the sordid side of life, is Pat White. Now hitting eighty, he too is an old man ruminating, but without malice or much anger. He knows who he is. He knows who and what he loves. He is a poet who has a beautiful grasp of many New Zealand landscapes and dimensions. His new collection Night Shifts is sub-titled “word from the heartland”, and “heart” is much of his poetry even while considering the brevity of life. “After visiting the IC ward” opens the collection with the state of an ageing body as experienced in a hospital bed and being compared with the fading light of day. “When the poem finds you” again dramatizes nature as a means of expressing how fragile a poetic concept is.

Of course, at the poet’s time of life, there are poems of old age. “Toast for absent friends” concerns reunions after many years of absence – and the inevitable reality that people have aged. This is mildly despairing; but there is also “Taking time” about the cheerful capacity old people have for casual chat. If death is to be considered, White’s best is his elegy for the artist Anna Caselberg, remembering her in the home where she lived and painted when she was “Following [her] commitment to the cause / of turning hills into brush strokes /  harbour ripples to pure light / and any other sleight of hand and eye / the briefly beating heart plucks / from morning light / as it slants across the kitchen table.” And inevitably, old age conjures up much nostalgia as in “Lines to a song” and “Heartland, rock and roll”, both recalling the music White enjoyed in the 1950s when he was a teenager.

White often looks directly at nature. “Darkness” is his poem that comes nearest to being documentary or description of place with no theories attached and presenting us with the cold, wet perilous West Coast Grey River mouth and the fishing boats that dare it. In contrast “Desire of water” apparently gives a straightforward view of a river flowing quickly, but with the message “The movement and sound of the creek / takes us one step closer to wisdom / floodwater takes everything / in its way.” Only occasionally does White wrap nature in ancient lore, as when his “Crossing the Alps” weds the South Island’s West Coast with Classical mythology. There are also times when the viewing of nature is not awesome or  idyllic. “Highway One” gives us the horrible heat of summer and roads melting under an uncomfortable poorly-ventilated car.

An almost mystic yearning is evident in some of White’s most complex verse. “Pacific gift and sandals to wear” is almost the epitome of Pat White’s technique and charm with its sense of intense longing – the idea that people are always seeking what will always be beyond their grasp “if you stand on any island beach / West Coast sunsets will suggest tomorrow / always at the edge of things one more mind / lives preparing to fly closer to the sun / intent on finding what lies out there / beyond breakers on the reef / of stories already told.”

White is not the sort of poet to write cryptically, but there are three poems that don’t clearly reveal themselves beyond being vaguely related to old, defunct revolutions. White sits more happily in the observation of animals, of nature and of natural processes. Charmingly fanciful is “A small story” wherein he imagines the lark in Otago rising high in the sky with his song but “I’d like to think that up there / at day’s end when our tiny brown bird / is grounded by the dark / traces of song still trill / where she ascended to sing.” “What if-“ and “Wednesday April the tenth” share annoyance with starlings but use them as a metaphor for more foolish human behaviour. White’s envoi “Sometimes” is a beautiful signing off as old cattle and two geldings stand in a paddock as images of serene age, nearing sunset.

Pat White has no malice, much wisdom and much clarity of line. His work is refreshing to read.

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

            I have always believed in learning poems by heart. I still remember all the nursery rhymes I learnt when I was a tot. I made sure we read the same rhymes to our own children. I had the advantage of a mother who frequently read to us, and I still remember and can recite at least the first ten lines of Robert Browning’s long poem “The Pied Piper of Hamlin” (our mother read the whole thing to us often and we regarded it as a treat). Later, at school, memorising poems was one of the disciplines. I can still recite Bill Shakespeare’s Sonnet 60 (beginning “Like as the waves make toward the pebbled shore…”). I’m pretty sure our teacher chose that one – great sonnet that it is – because it was so innocent and didn’t have the sort of sexual undertones found in others of Bill’s sonnets. I went through a later phase of learning by heart sonnets by different poets, from Philip Sidney to Baudelaire (in his own language) to Christina Rossetti to Allen Curnow. And if I’m charged up enough, I can recite dramatically W. H. Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening” and other poems.

            So I like memorising poems and saying them out-loud, got it? (Even if I’ve now forgotten some of the poems I memorised.) But there’s a very important point here. Poems are easier to memorise if they have a steady rhythm and some rhyme. Blank verse is harder to memorise (though the predictable beat of the iambic pentameter helps) and free verse is very hard to memorise. [NB I am NOT suggesting that free verse is not poetry. I’m just saying that it’s hard to memorise.] Which brings me to Remember Me – Poems to Learn by Heart from Aotearoa New Zealand.

            In her introduction to Remember Me – Poems to Learn by Heart from Aotearoa New Zealand, the editor Anne Kennedy (helped by Robert Sullivan) makes clear her criteria for including [New Zealand] poems in this anthology. The poems have to be capable of being read out loud, and they have to be capable of being memorised. It is good to be able to keep poems in your head. The anthology closes with essays on the use of voice and how to learn and perform poetry. Most (but not all) of the 251 poems selected are relatively short and - a great blessing -  Kennedy has thrown her net widely so that this anthology welcomes poetry as old as Eileen Duggan and Allan Curnow and Ursula Bethell, and as new as Tusiata Avia and Airini Beautrais and Lailani Tamu. The seven sections of the anthology are organised alphabetically according to each poet’s surname, which will make it easier for teachers and browsers to find the poems they are looking for. I am assuming, of course, that this anthology is aimed as much at schools as it is aimed at the general reader.

            But here’s the rub. So many of the (mainly short) poems selected are written in free (or fairly random) verse. And while I agree fully that memorising poetry is well worth doing, I also believe that it is very hard to memorise poems that are loose, unrhymed, and lacking a steady rhythm. As I read my way (with great enjoyment) through this anthology, I found myself looking out for the ones that I think really could be memorised, by adult or schoolgirl or -boy. So what follows is basically my list of what I believe really are the poems that can be learnt by heart - that is, memorised. And I reiterate that this is in no way a negative criticism of all the many poems I don’t mention.

First Section “Wisdom”

Presented bilingually, Te Kumeroa Ngoingoi Pewhairangi’s “Do not Turn Away” is an exhortation calling young people to respect their culture and it could very well become a poem recited by a group

Tayi Tibble’s “A Karakia 4 a Humble Skux” has each line presented twice, meaning it could become an out-loud  holler-and-reply (or psalm and response) statement for a large group.

Second Section “Odes”

Ursula Bethell’s “At the Lighting of the Lamps” is very readable – and memorable – for its bold rhymes

Keri Hulme’s “The Bond of Bees” and “Winesong 27” have a definite rhythms which keeps them moving

Bill Manhire’s “Huia”, a rhymed poem lamenting the extinction of the bird, which will certainly go down well with older school-children

Hone Tuwhare’s “Rain” runs at a steady and memorable pace,

Third Section “Earth, Sea, Sky”

Alistair Campbell’s “The Return” which still shakes one’s bones, and could be read at a slow, stately pace, solemn, almost like a dirge.

Fourth Section “Love Songs”

Nick Ascroft’s “Corpse Seeks Similar”, which makes itself memorable by its in-built shock

Glenn Colquhoun’s “A spell refusing to consider the mending of a broken heart”, which is perfect for memorising. So too is Ruth Dallas’s “A Girl’s Song”

Joanna Margaret Paul’s “the dilettante” makes itself memorable by counting out the days of the week

Robert Sullivan’s “Arohanui” because it is structured as one statement repeated but steadily expanded

Paraire Henare Tomoana’s “The Waters of Waiapu” with its repeated chorus

Sue Wooton’s “Magnetic South” for its very brevity

Fifth Section “Whanau”

Tusiata Avia’s “Helicopter” with its list of family members to help us along

James K. Baxter’s almost tongue-in-cheek “Charm for Hilary” with its old time rhyming couplets

Cilla McQueen’s ten sleek lines of “Joanna”

Sixth Section “Histories, Stories”

Despite its length, Ben Brown’s “The Brother come home”. Its repeated refrain will carry it through.

Allen Curnow’s sonnet (i.e. 14 lines) scrupulously rhymed “The Skelton of the Great Moa in the Canterbury Museum, Christchurch”

Fiona Farrell’s “Charlotte O’Neil’s Song” with its delayed rhymes.

Seventh Section “Politics”

David Eggleton’s “Prime Time” which is ironic and satirical and has rhyming couplets

Anne Kennedy’s “I was a feminist in the eighties” which is built on accumulated statements repeated and added-to… through it may be a little too long for memorising.

            At the risk of being tedious, I repeat that in choosing these poems I am simply suggesting what could plausibly be memorised. I am not belittling all the other fine poems I haven’t mentioned. I should also note that reading poetry aloud [while following a text] is also an art. I believe Baxter’s “Lament for Barney Flanagan” is a great poem and memorable, but is probably too long to be memorised by most readers. So too with Jenny Bornholdt’s exquisite “Wedding Song.”

            I admit to being bemused by the inclusion of Robbie Burns’ “To Mary in Heaven” just because Reweti Kohere wrote a Maori translation of it. As for the ancient bush ballad “Shearing’s Coming” by David M’Kee Wright, I wonder how many people would now respond to it. Anyway, nit-picking as usual, I’ve said my lot about an interesting anthology.

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

 

            Time was, I used to go regularly to public poetry evenings in such places as The Thirsty Dog on Auckland’s Karangahape Road and other such dens. Usually they were enlivening, sometimes provocative and sometimes sadly dull. That’s the fate of poetry performances – some people are good at it, some not so much. Often the poets’ performances sounded good to the ear. But if a poem made its way into print, what excited in live performance could often read as trite on the page. Listeners were beguiled by a poem – or declaration – which, when analysed,  didn’t mean very much.

            In Rapture – An Anthology of Performance Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand, Carrie Rudzinski and Grace Iwashita-Taylor have had the temerity to put on the page much of what, in some cases, might better have been received in live performance. After all, their Introduction and Chris Tse’s Foreword both emphasise that poetry grew out of the spoken or declaimed word, not out of printed texts. But here they are – fully 94 poems of them – canonised in print. At the same time, it’s fair to note that at least some of the chosen poems were written by established poets and originally appeared in print. The spoken word could also first have been written. Worth noting too, many poems are presented on the page according to the author’s typographical organisation – meaning that these poems have impact as much by being seen as by being heard.

            I will not home in on particular poems. I will just make some generalisations. The text is presented in three parts. The first, called “Burn It Down”, is the most provocative section, with men and women protesting about colonialism, disrespect for their bodies, disrespect for their sexuality, disrespect for their ethnicity (there are many selections here from Maori and Pasifika writers). The second section seems to have acquired the name “Float” because it is a more general selection which deals with many and various things. And the third section “Re-earth your roots” tends to be more in the categories of ideas, nostalgia, family the past. And I emphasise that these are big generalisations.

One Media Release says that Rapture is a “snapshot” of performance poetry now in New Zealand . Dare I say that this means much is very topical, often focused on what is now important but which might, in not too many years, be outmoded. In large-page format, with photographic illustrations and a soft cover, Rapture is a handsome piece of work. I hope the price ($50) does not deter too many from buying it.