Something New

PLASTIC by Stacey Teague (Te Herenga Waka University Press, NZ$30); DETRITUS OF EMPIRE – feather / grass / rock by Robin Peace (Cuba Press, $NZ25); 100 YEARS OF DARKNESS by Bill Direen (published in a limited edition, Grapefruit  Press NZ$30) ;  FLEUR ADCOCK : COLLECTED POEMS, [Expanded edition], (Te Herenga Waka University Press, NZ$50)

Stacey Teague’s Plastic is a quest for identity. Brought up in an Auckland suburb, her family did not speak Maori and did not participate in Maori life - yet their forbears were Maori. (There seems to have been some Pakeha forebears as well, but this is not spelled out.) Plastic opens with a 12-page-long prose introduction called “Hoki” concerning the poet’s young life in Auckland. She examines the depth of her Maoritanga. Why is she  not more immersed in it? Of one of her aunties she says “ She’s one of the only people in my whanau who knows about our history and whakapapa, so I listen patiently. She always refers to Mum as ‘Ngati Plastic’ and giggles about it. A plastic Maori refers to Maori who do not know te reo, tikanga or their whakapapa.” In contrast her mother says to survive you have to assimilate. Teague later says “It’s easy, when the messages you receive are that it is not a good thing to be Maori. You hide away, you pretend to be something else. It was easy to cosplay as Pakeha. I didn’t have a Maori name; I had red curly hair and freckles; I didn’t know my whakapapa. Somewhere in the back of my mind though, I felt proud to be Maori. I just couldn’t show it.” And “Here are the ancestors, here are the people. But I am both colonised and coloniser.”

So having set up her situation, Teague launches into many and varied free-verse poems under the heading PLASTIC. “Dreamworld” charts childhood nightmares. “Ipu whenua” deals with the essential traditional role rituals in Maoritanga of giving birth.  In “Blue hours” the poet speaks of many things, but in part about maturing where “I felt language rearrange me /  then leave me behind / on the hot driveway of my youth / I saw my own future / and left it behind” - and this probably involves perhaps casting off some Pakeha ways. There is a shape poem called “Beat” in the shape of a paddle. “Ode to Sappho” seems to be identifying her sexuality and “no one taught me a way / in which love was the most possible / I had to learn it in the darkness of rooms”. “Family name” written, a little eccentrically with each line ending with a full stop regardless of grammar. It appears to be about the colour of the skin. Not so cryptic is “Toitu te whenua, toit te tangata” where it is hard to miss the commentary about the loss of Maori land to colonisers. And finally in this section is “Love language” which presents a scene about awaiting a tryst.

Another section headed PARATIKI [meaning plastic] is less diverse in its focus. This time Stacey Teague sets her sight on traditional Maori customs and beliefs and how she is drawn into them. One poem deals with the death of a Maori schoolgirl whom she knew at school – the event staying with her mind. Other poems deal with a goddess who watches over women working at traditional crafts; a still-born child; a traditional violent story in which a male figure finally kills a female figure; and the goddess who rules the heavens but also crushes a man who violates her. These tales are all part of Maoritanga. But most impressive are the two poems that end this section. “Tupuna Wahine” traces the lives and legacy of three Maori women (presumably forebears of the poet) and how they fared between 1830 and 1939 – in effect giving a history of how Maori women both endured but also faced different challenges. And then there is a poem that expresses heartfelt distress at the death of Teague’s much-loved grandmother.

TOKIKAPU, the final section, reverts to prose. It underlines the poet’s determination to identify with Maoritanga. Part of her ancestry is Ngati Maniapoto. With her family – recalling her childhood – she visits the Ngati Maniapoto Marae near Waitomo. She also writes “I grew up in the Pakeha world, nobody taught me how to be Maori. This is not unusual, but no one talks about it. We are all learning. I want to learn. Here I am, in the body of my ancestor, but I feel distracted by my own doubts. I want to be in the present, so I try to imagine that I am a mountain…”.  “It’s not that visiting my marae finally validates me as a Maori person, it’s not some great spiritual experience, it can’t undo a lifetime of disconnection, but it is a step towards understanding, towards becoming….” And that is where she now stands.

Interspersed in this collection are three times shorter sections called SPELLS, free-verse poems encouraging the poet herself in different moods and situations.

Clear and straightforward in [most of] its meaning, Plastic has one great merit which is too often ignored by many poets – it is accessible for a wide readership.

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            Robin Peace is a retired geographer, teacher and academic with a deep interest in ecology. Detritus of Empire is her second collection of poetry, embracing 55 poems. Her poetic agenda is declared early in the very first poem of this collection called “All flesh is grass”. It reads in full thus: “Why grass, you ask, / why write about grass / as if it were a thing /  to do with feeling, /  with feathered griefs,  / or the suffering wells / where human thinking / flows and ebbs / through the stories / of its empires, / when all it is / is the green beside the patio / or a paddock for cows? / Ah, like stars, grass / holds the secrets / of our selves. It speaks of multitudes / and shines.” We at once are introduced to her view that nature itself is colonised with the different plants, trees and animals that have been introduced. In her poem “Small ecologies”, the loss of a bird’s feather diminishes nature as a rooster gets buried.   In  “We are as grasshoppers” [a quotation from the Bible] the grasshopper eats the world – just as we do. Grass, rooster, grasshopper – like us, they have colonised this part of the world. The title poem of this collection “Detritus of Empire” concerns seeds brought back from India by colonialists and becoming invasive lawn weeds in New Zealand. Likewise “Cinnamon songs” concerns those imported destructive pests, possums.

            Many New Zealand poets are now focussing on the iniquities of colonialism – the confiscation of Maori lands, racial prejudice, former suppression of the Maori language etc. Robin Peace sometimes addresses these matters, but her technique is original. She sees the degradation of this country’s ecology as a major result of colonialism in the form of misused land and forestry. So misused nature is her focus, rather than wars and human conflicts. A clutch of poems deal with rocks, sand and erosion (“Land that falls into the sea is not lost” ; “Hill song” ; “A basement gives no shelter”; “Fourteen quarried away” )

Most of Peace’s poems are lean and brief; but there are also a number of substantial prose poems like “Rocky shores” which directly addresses colonials thus: “We were given no cause to make sense of bigger things to be unpicked and put to rights. Land theft, confiscation, annexation for trade: things that fell to the floor like clods of mud off boots. Empires of satisfaction in the crush of homesickness. Collateral ignorance blooming while domestic life unravelled from back pockets of entitlement and hope.” The following prose  poem “Other rocky shores” appears to be chastising a forebear who was an industrial chemist, and therefore part of the process of degrading nature. The prose poem “Islands” focuses on the unimaginative way British settlers usurped the Maori names of islands with dull English ones. “So decidedly Cookian: North. South. Stewart. Chatham. Poor Knights. Barrier. Mayor. It’s like we were all nonplussed by the simplicity of the steal and scribbled whatever came first to our heads: directions, famous chaps, weak concepts.”

Yet while there is a strong strain of protest in Robin Peace’s poetry, this is not the only string she plucks. Some of her poems are simply detailed observations of how creatures function, as in her eloquent “Grace notes” describing ducks descending; or “American flamingo” about those exotic birds as they behave trapped in a zoo; there are a number of poems about the shades of green – not limited to the green of grass – simply given as clear description; and “Lawn daisy” which is given a precise description of the small flower, but which also anthropomorphises it. “Swamp witness” recalls a child’s wonder and delight in first seeing an estuary and swamp and all their colour and fullness.

Some of Peace’s poems seem double-edged, as in “Stitching it”. It concerns her British forebears. She says she has visited their bleak British places, but while there, she pines for New Zealand birdsongs – after all, is she not a colonial herself? As are most people who will read this review.

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A few years back, I reviewed on this blog Bill Direen’s collection Seasons  which chronicled a year in the Otago where he lives. It was a very vivid version of the seasons, sometimes lyrical about nature but often realistic about the hardships of Otago winters.

            One Hundred Years of Darkness has a very different focus. The “darkness” is the darkness of sitting in cinemas watching movies. Three tightly-printed pages at the end of this collection list all the films (about a hundred of them) that are referenced in these poems. The great majority of these films are not in the English language or are what might be classed as “art” films, with only a few mainstream films being involved. Having been a long-term film-reviewer and cineaste, I have to admit that I have seen only about half of the films Direen references. Further, many of these poems do not refer directly to what “happens” in the selected films. They do not offer synopsises. Rather they reflect moods or trains of thought that are triggered by a film. Some of the poems are easy to decode. Others remain somewhat cryptic. For example, the opening poem “Zero for Conduct” is a very straightforward reaction to Jean Vigo’s film of that title, about schoolboys reacting anarchically to their teachers. But reading about the [East European] film “Jabberwocky” [it originally had a different title], one either knows what the contents of the film are or they remain a puzzle.

            I cannot comment on all hundred-odd films that are treated here, but I will pick out a few that caught my interest. “The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser” poem, without giving a synopsis of the oft-told tale of the mysterious inarticulate boy, does catch its essential theme about communication and speech. Kenneth Anger’s notorious “Scorpio Rising” is represented by a visual puzzle – a shape poem; but the words used could suggest a sense of disgust at Anger’s perverse preoccupations… or maybe not. Jules Dassin’s “The Naked City” (Phew! A mainstream movie) gives us a good lesson in looking at the engaging incidental things in a movie – the small things in the background that give a film authenticity. The Italian Rosi’s “Illustrious Corpses” [here rendered as “Exquisite Corpses”], about political chicanery, presents clearly what the film’s theme was – corruption and misuse of power. Fritz Lang’s early silent movie “Der Mude Tod” [ “Tired Death”, but presented in English as “Destiny”] deals with the mental growth of Fritz Lang himself and his growth into a certain mood of detachment in his films. Kirsten Johnson’s experimental “Cameraperson” is treated as the film itself was presented – as a bricolage of disparate images.

            And so I could go on, but I will not. One Hundred Years of Darkness is an esoteric collection – you are either tuned into high cinema culture or you are not. This could be a barrier for many poetry-readers, but for the initiated it is a feast.

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In 2019, what was then called Victoria University Press published Fleur Adcock :

Collected Poems, gathering together all the poet’s work from the 1960s to 2019, with the exception of some early poems that Adcock had discarded. It was a bulky hardback, with 534 large pages of poetry before the index pages. Now, in 2024, Fleur Adcock is 90 years old. To celebrate this milestone the same publishers, now called Te Herenga Waka University Press, have produced an updated edition of Fleur Adcock: Collected Poems [Expanded Edition]. Paperback but otherwise same format, same cover image, catching up with Adcock’s output since 2019. The new Collected Poems adds 61 more pages of poetry.  Most of the addition is taken up with Adcock’s 2021 collection The Mermaid’s Purse, but there are also twenty never-before-published “New Poems 2024”.

            On this blog you can find my review of the original Fleur Adcock: CollectedPoems (2019) as well as my review of The Mermaid’s Purse (2021). For the record you can also find here reviews of two earlier collections by Adcock Hoard and The Land Ballot (2014.

The Mermaid’s Purse included “Poems for Roy” about the late English poet Roy Fisher, and Adcock was also interested in the daunting sea, literary people, travel and children. Many of her poems had explicitly English settings. As I said after my first reading of The Mermaid’s Purse “It is a pleasure to read somebody who writes so forthrightly, who has a sense of appropriate form for each poem, who lays her heart on her sleeve without forgetting her functioning, rational brain – in short, somebody who writes like a modernist rather than a post-modernist.” As for my reading of the first version of Fleur Adcock: Collected Poems, I noticed how Adcock’s preoccupations changed gradually from the 1960s to the 2010s, but with her always showing a poet who was “observant, unsentimental, witty, well-read, a little acidic and presenting her own view of the world.”

All of which leaves me with those twenty, never-before-published “New Poems 2024”. Of course they are filled with old age. These last poems begin with “Stint”, about the thousand-year-old sybil who wants to die. They end with the almost-jaunty poem “Being Ninety” which counts off three other literary figures of her age with death drawing nearer. And in between? Well, aged infirmity comes into “Optimistic Poem”, but there is also a poem about chasing destructive foxes away (Adcock’s English side); and “Goliath” which becomes a lesson in aestheticism; and a wry anecdote called “The Lift Shaft”; and “In the Desert” about sorrow surrounding a young man killed in war… and other poems. 90-years-old or not, Fleur Adcock is still an acute observer of human foibles and at once wry and serious. Still excellent to read.