Something New

 

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

“SLEEPERS AWAKE” by Oli Hazzard (Carcanet, $28.53); “SPINDRIFT – New and selected poems” by Bob Orr (Steele Roberts, $NZ40); “SOME BIRD” by Gail Ingram (Sudden Valley Press, $NZ30) ; "RESIDUAL GLEAM - Selected Poems & Translations by Roger Hickin (Cold Hub Press, $NZ28); “TIGERS OF THE MIND” by Michael Morrissey (Aries Press, $NZ25)

Bristol-born but now resident of Glasgow and teacher at the University of St Andrews, 38-year-old Oliver (“Oli”) Hazzard made his name as a poet with Between Two Windows (2012) and Blotter (2018). Hazzard is decidedly on the avant-garde side of poetry, his verse often being cryptic or opaque and in many cases requiring great scrutiny of the reader before it is understood. Only rarely does the transparent break through, but when it does it has much to say. Hazzard’s new collection Sleepers Awake is as much concerned with sound as with meaning, with a propensity for alliteration – indeed much of it would play best as live performance rather than as words on the page. Sound is crucial.

 

The first section of Sleepers Awake is the 70-pages-long “Progress Real and Imagined” which is best understood as a quest for personal identity but which is also concerned with the value of poetry itself. There are moments of odd verbal connections, such as “ ‘Morning plaza’ / wet grass / glass / recycling / overflow.” There are retreats into popular infantilism, such as “Reading Peppa Pig / upside down / difficulty bludgeons / me as memorable / my own performance / of exhaustion / memorable”. There are hip sparks of fatalism when  “accidents and poetry / descend directly from the air”. Occasionally, too, there are moments when the poet comes near to being disgusted by his own metier, speaking of  “Poetry without and ideas in it / brimming with a real stupidity”. And is he referring to poetry or philosophy when he speaks of “Something so complicated you’ll never be able to understand even the basic terms involved / Something so simple you understood it a long time ago, without even noticing.”? At times in this 70-page sequence, he appears to give up on his self-analysis as “sometimes I will simply list basic queries / about the nature of my personality / in order to allow for the possibility that it exists”

For much of this section, Hazzard prefers to present his poetry on the page in the form of slim, scattered verses, but as he nears his goal he turns to blocks of prose. He finally embraces a mental coalition with reality, even if reality is both complex and annoying.  

The second section of Sleepers Awake is a collection of individual poems which begin with “Postpositivity in Spring”, again a quest for identity while dealing with mundane physical reality. The poem “Living etc.” is a bravura example of Hazzard’s hard-blocked connection with sound first. Take on the poem’s staccato alliteration thus: “Luke Luck flocks back to the joke tent or perhaps  palace / pacing the loud loneliness, suddenly intimate, / intricate with internal noise… / clerihew cares.” Many of Hazzard’s poems are presented as puzzles, conundrum in the context of clashing sound. Also, Hazzard is not an activist in the current sense of somebody promoting a particular cause.  Far from being an ideological call to arms of some sort, the title poem “Sleepers Awake” (the title taken from a Lutheran hymn) is literally an account of waking up on a snowy winter day in Glasgow and taking in the changing moods as the snow slowly retreats and the sun begins to dominate. Sleepers awake to the day.

In similar style is the poem “May Face”, which certainly depicts a physical scene. I quote it here in full:

This fact of maximum resistance
looking into people’s houses in the evening, early summer
the steeply receding strata of the rooms which have

 factored us in already though unaware, out in the mesh of analytical errata
except as a gnome Q-team listlessly
plugging in and out of public sockets: suck it up
the cold force of certain tags, cabinets, pets, melodies
or suck it up, the Clyde turning turtle
in its inlet, in blue and pink and brown turning
pink and brown and blue.

In this case however, “May Face” is a Clyde-side scene at a certain time of day, but it does become lost in recherche vocabulary (“analytical errata” etc.) and makes allusions difficult for the reader to de-code. Standing as he does on a verbal tight-rope, Hazzard is often weighed down by sound. His “Composed at Erdberg” relates melancholy to moods to music.

The third and final section of Sleepers Awake is a 16-part sequence called “Incunabulum”, printed sideways to accommodate the long lines (I would almost call them Alexandrines ) which is as much concerned with self-analysis as with the fading impact of classical literature.

I would advise readers that, for all its quirky merits, Sleepers Awake is a very challenging piece of work, not for the faint-hearted or those who do not have the patience to unravel its meaning.

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In terms of prosody and approach, Bob Orr is the antithesis of the avant-garde, cryptic Oli Hazzard. Orr’s poems are lucid, usually straightforward in their presentation and setting no traps for the unwary. They also show a delight in people and clearly-presented urban scenes, landscapes and especially seascapes. Spindrift is subtitled New and Selected Poems for good reason. Spindrift selects from the ten collections that Orr has had published since the 1970s, and ends with 36 poems hitherto unpublished. In effect, it is a summary of all Orr’s best work.

Most of Orr’s poems are brief. Only occasionally does he expand into longer developed poems such as bohemian youth that is recalled in “Fairfield Bridge” and “Roads to Reinga”; or in “River”, one of his longer poems, which combines a grand view if the Earth’s tectonics with the suffering of being inside in a hospital; or in his nod to Shelley’s “Ozymandias” with his discursive poem “Hapuakohe”.

The typical Orr poem sits stark and lean on the page. To take an example from Orr’s early work “The old road” reads in toto “When you wake / in the deadly calm / of somewhere around 3 a.m. / the dreams will quickly leave you. / The street is like a road / across the moon. You hear lions / begin to roar in Auckland Zoo. / Across your bedroom wall / a tropical plant / has cast / the huge shadow of a continent.” Later in his career, he could strip things right down, as in “Orkney poet” which reads in full “Your meagre / hard-won harvest / from stony sea-girt acres / barely put food on the table - / bequeathed a banquet to the world.” And nearer the present time there is this pithy account of a marriage called “Harold and Gladys” thus “He made it / back / from a war / that left no tree unsplintered / to marry / his sweetheart / in Morrinsville / her with / acorn / coloured / hair.”

            Brief, direct statements are Orr’s forte. In this respect he has the skill of an artist who knows how to leave  unnecessary things out. Often his work reads like slightly-expanded haiku, and real haiku turn up in the later sequences “Buddha chopping wood”  and “Buddha burning firewood”. Orr’s sharp eye scans not only the sea but the lives of workers; Auckland in terms of  Freeman’s Bay, Ponsonby, the Chelsea sugar works and the more shady streets; elegies for, or allusions to, poets like Pablo Neruda, Anna Akhmatova, Garcia Lorca, Hart Crane and others. Only occasionally does he go for satire as in “When Muldoon was king” although there are oodles of irony in his poem “Neal Cassady’s car”. Pohutukawa are frequently used as a motif ; there are poems about ancestry and in his more recent poetry more awareness of Maori lore and language. But more than anything there is the sea – inevitable given that for many years Orr was a fisherman and sailor. There are many poems about walking on the shore and imagining sea vistas; much about the fisher folk and their boats; comparisons of the sea around New Zealand with classical voyages in [Greek] mythology and much else.

            Breath in the salty sea breezes! This is a very accessible collection which a wide circle of poetry readers will enjoy.

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Men and boys have often denigrated or belittled women and girls by calling them  insulting names. Often these insults are related to ornithology, as in “bird”, “chick” etc. Gail Ingram’s Some Bird is, among other things, a work of feminism and she is intent on pushing back against such flippant insults. Her work is divided into five sections, each section reflecting an age in a woman’s growing life, with each stage also being labelled with a bird name, thus “shining cuckoo” [childhood], “chicky babe” [puberty], “lovebird” [teenager and early adult], “house sparrow” [married with offspring] and “crow” [maturity and old age]. In her poem “Language lesson for young girls 1979” she presents the way female stereotypes are reinforced by casual language from the classroom onwards : “hey chick / let the little lamb play with the dolly / she’s a tom-boy plays rugby / so butch, a lezo (behind hands) / come on, show us a little skirt, love / but don’t wear that dress – what a floozy / words you know for whore? / slut / tart / hussy / hooker oh-la-la / bit o’ crumpet on the side psst…” and so on with other insults such as “bitch”, “spinster”, “old maid”, “sex-kitten”, “battle axe”, “old biddy”, “bag”, “old hag” etc. etc. Her opening poem “Me Too” makes a similar statement.

Some Bird traces the life of a woman with a very clear narrative.

“Shining cuckoo” A woman goes through the pains of childbirth but her baby is immediately taken from her. This is because she’s unmarried, it’s 1965, unmarried mothers are frowned upon, and her baby is given up for adoption. The biological mother is cut out of the story. The baby is adopted because another [married] woman, who already has children, has just had a miscarriage and the adopted baby is her consolation. Gail Ingram suggests the sorrow involved it this – the little girl growing up and understanding that she is adopted, that she is somehow different from her siblings, that she will never know her biological mother and that she is in effect the “cuckoo” in the nest… and the poet is enraged that it is the [adoptive] father whose family name appears on the girl’s birth certificate.

“Chicky baby” deals with the girl’s experience in puberty and teenagerhood, where, in pairing up, girls have to conform to boy’s expectations – so the years of having to put on makeup, smooching with little real pleasure, being taken on dangerous joy-rides with boys trying to show off in their cars… and when the time comes for her to be sent to a university hall of residence, the only advice her [adopted] father can give her is “Don’t get pregnant.” So to the days when she’s harassed or unwillingly fondled by boys of her age in residence or in public transport.

“Love bird” has her falling in love with a guy, and getting married… though the poem “Love-match”, about the wedding, has a sardonic undertone. And a baby is born, which changes everything.

“House sparrow” is subtitled “in which the sparrow fluffs up and becomes a mother”. Her motherhood has moments of worry and fright, as in the poem “Take care of Stu” where she panics when her child seems to have disappeared. She is always under scrutiny with judgements about how “good” she is as a mother and how well she is bringing up her children. More than anything, though, there is the fact that she has to do all the caring of the children. The two poems “The Provider” and “That thing between us” are most acute about this – the husband takes it for granted that he doesn’t have to do the heavy lifting of child-care. … and the marriage can’t last, even if the breakup is a long time coming. Indeed they are almost up to middle-age. The poem “Family Trust meeting” says a firm goodbye to the way she, in younger years, admired flashy young men playing rock music. She’s her own person…

Not that older age (“Crow”) is necessarily easy. The poem “Menopause XIII” suggests why. She broods on the way older independent women were once tortured or burnt as witches. She’s not entirely happy with the way feminism has gone since the 1970s (see the poem “Your natural mother marched in 1973”). In short, she is aware that nothing can be certain in the interactions of women and men.

I am guessing that some of the narrative presented here is drawn from the poet’s personal experience, but that is only a guess and I have no way of verifying it. Besides, the point of the poetry is what is on the page, not in extraneous guesses. Even more to the point, Gail Ingram is not addressing only the matter of a woman’s life. Some Bird has poems focused elsewhere. “Pakeha parent” is a Maori woman worried by the loss of Maori culture. “The Wading Bird” looks at the degradation of the natural environment. And “I am Pakeha” is half protest against colonisation but also half awareness of being pakeha.

Nevertheless, it is the feminist strain that dominates, presented clearly and forcefully. It’s bracing to read something as clearly articulated.

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            Roger Hickins’s Residual Gleam – Selected poems & Translations gives us first Hickin’s own experiences and observations, and then, in the Translations section, his translations from the Spanish of poems written by nine South American poets.

First, then, there come his poems recalling his childhood (in “Invercargill 1950”) with memories in a “Workshop Song” and the acute lines “The south wind / blew its cold salty breath in my face. / The south wind sings wild hymns / in the macrocarpas”. Then his observation of an ageing bird “Killing the Rooster” where “Once he was the boss, / with jaunty patriarchal strut, / his raucous sickle voice reaped stars at dawn. / Now he’s just the extra rooster / ousted by his son”… and how well Hickin observes the old rooster before he gets the inevitable chop. [Brilliant are those lines that I’ve underlined!] Following are acute poems recalling Hickin’s late-teenager and early-twenties self as he charts the hitchhiking he did, the people he met on the roads, and later the boozing in the pubs and eccentric or colourful boozers. He also has the good taste to salute the Jazz greats Charlie Mingus and Thelonious Monk. Memories can also be for those who are lost. Hickin’s “A beach poem for my mother” does not literally address his mother until the last stanza, which has a particularly haunting effect. It reads “The godwits have left for Alaska / Flax flowers darken beyond the dunes / Boats on the estuary / are pitching in the tidal rip / It’s late – you hear your mother / calling you home.” In a number of poems Hickin addresses Spain, which he has visited, and make references to Russian literature. The most engaging poem here is “After Pushkin” which declares “Happiness of course is / unattainable, but in the search / for peace and freedom you might / just head for somewhere else / a long way from gossip / debt, frivolity / track down / a heavenly shack where you  / can breath and work and slurp / good mussel soup.” Wise words for the thoughtful hermit. And there are further salutes to other literary or artistic people he has known.

And what of the poems translated from the Spanish? I do not speak Spanish, so in writing of the 15 poems by 9 South American poets I have to consider them as Hickin’s versions of the original poems and accept them that way. They certainly speak of other countries’ preoccupations  - A hungry pion house. Jesus on the cross and pain. Cockroaches. The confusion of being in distant country and not really understanding the accepted mores there.  A man ineptly trying to woo a woman in a bar. Occasionally back-handed nods to religion. The translations are capped with a long poem by Ernesto Cardenal “Nostalgia for Venice”, which is literally about that as he recalls his visits to Venice as it was decades ago.

This collection is varied, interesting, very readable, and deftly moving among many different moods.

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I tiptoed carefully into Michael Morrissey’s latest collection Tigers of the Mind. Morrissey is now over 80 years old and is well-known to New Zealand readers of poetry. His output is prolific and Tigers of the Mind is his 14^th collection. His poetry is often bizarre, making huge imaginative leaps. Morrissey has told his public that he has periodically suffered from psychiatric disorders. Taming the Tiger, published in 2011, was his very candid autobiographic account of a severe bi-polar condition which led him to spend time in a psychiatric ward. Yet the experience has fuelled some of his best later work.

In Tigers of the Mind, one of the stand-out poems is “Defiant View from the Fifth Level of a Psychiatric Ward”, wherein he presents himself looking out the window at an Auckland vista. The view is “defiant” because the viewer, aware of his disordered condition, nevertheless sees the validity of the images his fevered mind is conjuring up, giving strangely impressive, almost psychedelic, views of “Trees, acacia-like, stripped of lion blood, / incapable of movements as toeless monkeys… Erudite moon, flawlessly memorious, / slings aside a sheeny leopard with pitchy alphabets….” Later, in the poem “Falling in Love, Quite Easily” he remarks “Like the romantics, I fell in love / with melancholia. Depression was / at arm’s length, poetry permitted, / a different way of life, feasible.”

It is hard to avoid such terms as Surrealist or even Dadaist in reading some of Morrissey’s work, conjuring up images that might have been created by Salvador Dali. “Quintessence of Green” gives an apocalyptic view of the Earth ruined while cockroaches prevail. A sequence dedicated to the moon plays with all the power, mystery and fear of the moon. [And was the poet consciously recalling that luna is related to lunatic?]. And then there are poems dedicated to aliens and strange beasts, with the impressive “Poem for a Large Rodent” becoming a conversation between a biologist and a giant rat living in a volcano. But while we sometimes reach into the depths of Dada, we are also sometimes given admissions of cold reality. The poem “Rebirth of Wonder” is the prize of this train of thought. Two guys think that dropping acid will make them enlightened and say something momentous while their girlfriends scribble down their words. Result? Nothing amazing. They haven’t said anything coherent.

Morrissey has his moments of reportage, including his very sad memories of his upbringing in straitened circumstances in Camp Bunn (a shelter for those without adequate housing after the Second World War). He implies that his mother went mad and his father took to drink. And in the gathering labelled “Drunken Impulse”, the whole idea of the uncertainty of life is mooted. There is an oddly deadpan account of the famous painting “Mona Lisa with a Moko”. With the moko added to da Vinci’s work, it is in its own way another modification of the Mona Lisa like the ones the Dadaists and surrealists had fun with.

One wonderfully lucid poem “Making Breakfast” reads in full thus “Through the thin wall I hear my wife chopping fruit / as rhythmically as the piston on the steam ferry. / Each sound has its own precision / delicate but unwavering / surgical as a lobotomist’s knife. / Her kitchen blade slices apple / cuts through pineapple / fillets watermelon / deals painless death to passionfruit. / A banana stands no chance. / It may sound like fruit is being cut / but really it’s the sound of love.” He follows this with a brace of  descriptive poems about Auckland weather, and then deals with  “Coronavirus” and “That Time Again”, both presented in melancholy form as a deserted playground represents the empty streets when the pandemic was doing its worst.

As you can see, it is a very diverse collection of poems, and very engaging to read.