Something New

 

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

    “LIAR, LIAR, LICK, SPIT” by Emma Neale (Otago University Press, $NZ30); “BLUE HOUR” by Jo McNeice (Otago University Press, $NZ30); “HOTEL THERESA” by Doc Drumheller (Cold Hub Press, $NZ28. 

 

The 85 poems of Emma Neale’s 7^th collection Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit has a title, drawn from an ancient chant, focusing us on the human capacity to lie, misinterpret or misunderstand reality, and sometimes suggesting that dreams can both beguile and confuse us.

The opening clutch of poems deals directly with lies. First there is a tragic situation. In  “False Confession”,  a dissenter in a tyrannical country is tortured until he gives a false confession – a case of the lie being forced. Then there are children’s lies. “Porky” has a little girl lying her first lie to mother ; then “The Quiet Type” has a little girl telling a lie to her teacher in primary school. Turning to more mature people, “Spare Change” displays the lie of a con artist. Perhaps God lies to us and is not fair – or at least this is implied in “Like girls were hot soft scones”. “Pandora First Gets Feminism, Age Ten” has the ten-year-old discovering her father’s stash of girly (or soft-porn) magazines – and then her father lies about it. “Threat” has a false bomb threat at a school – a malicious lie that scorches children’s minds for years after. “Androphopia”, a tale of a boy being physically mistreated by teacher, says “It begins when the child finds deceit / turns to truth if certain adults use it. / His tongue still curls at the grit of wrong, / like it did in the crumbs stuck to the sweets / from the man’s jacket pocket.” “Little Fibs” displays the small lies we all tell, as in  “Let us praise / the small evasions: / the missed call / the slight sore throat / the prior engagement…”. “Player” shows the capacity men have to spin untruthful yarns in casual conversations

So we learn of direct lies, forced lies, innocent lies, theological lies, foolish lies, well-intentioned lies – as in “white lies” – and malicious lies. Human beings are flawed, even the best of us. But what of the way we often lie to ourselves? Our false memories are a sort of lying. “Like the albums on rotate in your first year away from home” deals with the bric-a-brac of memories, of things left over and misunderstood.

But it would be quite misleading to suggest that Emma Neale is plucking only one note. There are tragedies, as in “Terribly Involved” wherein a new-born baby is cruelly being neglected in a hospital ward. There are sad let-downs – in “Wanted to believe in the butterfly event” a mother is aware that she wants to save the world… but her sons ask if that’s so, why did she have them? “Night-call” is essentially a lamentation for somebody who has died, but given to us in terms of multiple harsh or lowering images. In fact in this collection there are a number of poems that have the terror of night and dreams. “Sleepless” is literally nightmare-ish in its imagery, while “My Blank Camouflage”, also frightening, may or may not be read as a real event being told, or another nightmare. It appears to be related the fear of rape. In similar territory, “Scapegoat” has a woman who has a birthmark and who knows that her forebears once would have superstitious-ly regarded such a birthmark as the sign of a witch. One could also say “The Night Shift” is a fantasia. One poem, again nearing to dreams, is called in full “Dreams are the dark glasses and heatproof shell the mind wears when the truth is a hot, burning ball of plasma and at least sixty-seven known elements”

Emma Neale gives us a number of poems about 19^th century colonialism : “Tricks of Trade” suggests, in an almost jocular way, that white traders routinely cheated the Maori people; while the long poem “Genealogy” questions in detail how Pakeha genealogies gloss over things, especially forgetting the great help by iwi that had been given to white settlers. And in “Histology Report” there is an ambiguous memory of the poet’s family and its events in the past… perhaps another case of the mind telling untruths.

What is one to make of the poem “#notmetoothanks”? Is this poem based on a real meeting the poet had? At any rate, the first-person narrator refuses to honour a crass poet whom she once admired. There must be many cases like this in the poetry community. And what is one to make of “If you saw a miracle, would you speak of it?” It begins with the delight of seeing an unusual creature – but it turns into a call to leave creatures alone before that become categorised and examined. There is a strong conservationist idea here.

I have, of course, not mentioned every poem in this collection. It would take many pages if I did. Emma Neale has a very robust and sure way of expressing herself. This time, she encourages us to consider our own habitual ways of thinking, especially when we become complacent and assume that our lies and distortions of memory are the truth. Yes, we are flawed. But balancing a very questing collection, there is also Neale’s skill with the nightmare-ish, the dreams, and all the imagery that holds it up.

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When you first open Jo McNeice’s debut collection Blue Hour, you might think you are in for a romantic perspective on the world. Blue Hour begins with the poem “Aro Valley”, almost an idyll under the moonlight with delightful romanticism. And so too with the second poem “This Summer” with its “Millions of stars / in the emerald sky.” But this has simply lured us in. With great skill, with detailed images and metaphors, McNeice presents us with a tortured and generally unhappy world. One of the collection’s longer poem “An analysis of us as a film” begins with “Light & dark, / deception & betrayal…” and “Ordinary world, / conflict, / change / failure.” It goes on to tell us that drunkards never really reform and that there are “A swarm of killer bees & / a psychopath waiting in the woods.”… at which point the poem morphs into a movie of a discontented young man and his buddy, apparently having been dominated by his mother.

Many poems are presented in the first-person voice – not that this means the poet is necessarily giving us her autobiography. Some poems draw on images of the more sinister fairy tales, as in the nightmare setting of the poem “Wolf”. The macabre persists in “Not out of the woods yet” which is a distorted version of Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf. Presented more in the present age is “Candles squint into the sun” wherein dead bodies lie on the street and “I walk the narrow road / between them / tiptoeing to avoid / the blood splatter / on the pavement.” Often we are presented with what amount to unhappy and despairing situations. Three “Mermaid singing” poems appear to refer to a young woman medicated and being dealt with by a psychiatrist. There is the image of the tide… and in the third “Mermaid” poem, the mermaids sings “we burn in this dark weather / & we drown in this dead weather”. “Laura” has a young woman with migraine and under a psychiatrist’s care… and yet in this case there is the redeeming factor of a wider perspective on nature in the background. Returning to the despairing, “Schizoaffective in spring” decides “You are just / molecules erasing / themselves, / a collection of / moments & dust, / a melted bullet, / an empty cartridge…”  The poem “Ghost Heart” appears to be dealing with bipolar disorder. “She’s feeling old” is not a poem of despair but of resignation to the fact that things change – in this case in terms of architecture inevitably changing. “Admission” begins “Admit nothing. / Your mind is a blizzard. / All the eyes of the creatures / from the bottom of the ocean / are on you. / You have planted rue & honesty / in a patch of black earth, / ingested doubt, like / a daily dose of arsenic.” And the poem ends “poison is the only cure for madness”. However, “Maybe” has the poet apparently unhappy in love or having lost love, but this time not despairing with the determination “I will wear an armour made / of misery & mania, / delusions & hallucinations, / fight my way out of this.”

I have, as I so often do, essentially given you a sort of synopsis, telling you of the contents of this collection. On the whole, these poems deal with moods; and the moods sometimes verge on the nihilistic – almost suggesting that life is not worth living or that life is only painful. But this does not negate the fact that Jo McNeice writes forcefully, presenting compelling images even in despair, and does, after all, understand what is the fate for many people.

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            The blurb tells us that Doc Drumheller’s Hotel Theresa is named after the New York hotel in Harlem which was frequented often by many famous jazz players and fighters, from Duke Ellington to Malcolm X. Drumheller has dual citizenship as American and New Zealander, and the famous hotel becomes eventually the cornerstone of all the countries he has visited.  He is very disciplined in this collection of 79 poems. All are written in seven couplets [with one exception] and all deal with place and local atmosphere. The poems are divided into nine sections, each having seven poems.

The seven poems of Psalms for a Broken City begin with ancient Maori concepts of how the Earth was formed, and then give us a part jocular and part lament for scenes in New Zealand – the end of a performance poet, the clogged city, a broken rural town and yet happy moments with rough mates.  The Treasured Places again begins with Maori lore but moves into almost idyllic images of New Zealand shores and parks. My Republic is more personal, dealing with how he prefers to raise carrots et al. [none of your chemicals please!], how he regards the Earth, and remembering both his mother and father in their gardening. The Swamp of My Childhood takes him more to his roots in America – the different flora and fauna like snapping turtles in the streams and the different mores with memories of old Dixie and also how his daddy used to speak. Hymns Behind the Iron Curtain do deal in part with his visits to countries that were once Communist, but not exclusively, and there is much irony in the way he deals with the different cultures he meets. And irony looms large in the next section called The Death of Irony, which deals more with sex and disgust at censorship. Learning Mandarin deals respectfully with the Chinese culture Drumheller has experienced, but he also writes ironically about Mao. The Oracles of Delphi moves from Greece and its antiquities to India with its great wealth and immense poverty. Viva La Vida is naturally about Mexico and leans towards its revolutionary side but with some jests as well. And finally the last collection of poems is Hotel Theresa itself. The mean streets looking for the remnants of the long-gone hip and beat days. The wild cactus centre of the U.S.A. A memoir for those killed in the Mosque massacre in Christchurch. And finally a peaceful poem reminding us that most people are our friends.

As I so often do, I have given you an account of this collection without examining the quality of the work. So I will be brief. I enjoyed this collection. I liked the way many of Doc Drumheller’s lines read like epigrams – straight forward, brief, sharp, accessible and very readable. And often enough there are some wild imagery and metaphors. A good sock on the jaw.