Something New

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

HUNGUS by Amber Esau [Te Herenga Waka University Press, NZ$30:00] ;  LIFTING THE ISLAND by David Eggleton [published by Red Hen Press, Pasadena, C.A.] $NZ36.79 ; NEW DAYS FOR OLD – Prose Poems by James Brown [Te Herenga Waka University Press, NZ$30:00]

I have to admit that I approached Amber Esau’s Hungus with some trepidation – not because I didn’t like it [it’s great] but because, as well as being a mere palagi, I am woefully ignorant of Samoan mores and traditions and also not young enough to understand all the patois that some younger people now use. Every so often I also had to look at the glossary at  the end, to explain some Samoan words. But having got used to this I was in the swing. Part of the blurb tells me that Amber Esau is  “a SaMoaRish… writer from Tamaki Makaurau” – in other words, she has [I think] some Samoan relatives and some Maori relatives … or have I misinterpreted that? If so, I’d like somebody to correct me.

First question: what is the Hungus which is depicted so vividly on the cover [by Katrina Steak]?   Is it a violent alien creature or an avatar of humanity, part of our own moods? The vocabulary refers to the Hungus as “she”, so maybe Amber Esau is really channelling some extreme thoughts and much youthful angst. Just a thought.  We are told “her Frankenstein tongues are not quite past the bit where the doctor says ‘It’s alive!!!’”  … but despite the early parts of this collection, the Hungus itself soon disappears.

Much of this collection has to do with young people – teenagers and young adults. We are in the area of youngish people jostling in crowds – presumably in Auckland -  and getting foods from MacDonalds and being smothered by television and gossiping or working and hanging out. There are ironic jabs at KFC as seen in the poem @Mantis where a creature is baffled by the way rubbish is thrown about. In this environment,  adolescents are aware of what cliches are. In a brief, sleek poem Amber Esau tells us [recalling her adolescence] “To want or wannabe is the only question Shakespeare / and the Spice Girls were looking to answer. Wanna / say they knew that’s what fia meant, too. / Sometimes, I want and want / and want so succinctly, / I become a cliché .” Esau is clear about the power of dreams, and how different the world looks in the morning. It is made clear in the last of the Hungus: Ulo Bolos poems  “At night, she braids all her heads so they don’t tangle in her sleep and when she wakes up, her heads are wild, scraping with fruit flies.”  A similar idea is given to us in the poem Space Cadet, clearly about a young man, which ends “The man from Mars with lasers in his eyes, glue from his throat. / He’s the threat every parent uses against their kids./ After too much fuel, he’ll blast the doors in, holding all the exit signs, / and slur into the crooks of his sharp corners / wondering where his high score went. / In the morning, the man is just a man, while the space boy is still trying to roll free.” Dreams have to turn into reality.

In this world, there are inevitably the matters of sex and sexuality and gender. On the whole Esau is discreet about these matters, but they are there. And  growing teenagers have their first dealing with drugs in the poem “Quickocrisy”. There are one-off experiences, including the sheer interest in listening to a singer in a pub.

But throughout there is an awareness of Samoan culture and Samoan families.

There are many reflections on the sea and the sky and ships and shores as seen in Samoa. One of the very best is Night at the Neptune which is as much protest and fear as it is about beauty if you can see it. It reads in full “Under a blackboard sky / a plane smears the chalk /and the stars get confused. / Girl, we are trying to accept all / the patterns that we share / but someone keeps shooting / metal from the clouds, / fucking up the water. Isn’t / singing like manu, / chesting like tangata, /  tailing like ika, enough / to remind us we dream / the seams? We massage / the stiches with bone dust, / tuck our feathers behind / out ears, say, ‘E manaia lava ia’ / and we must need it,eh.”  

Dealing with Samoan families in such poems as  Relative Power Cuts, we hear the liveliness and gossip about the things the faifeau’s son [the parson’s son]  has been up to. There are a number of poems about teenagers being mouthy, who would then be told off by nana and other elders, telling them they were “tautala’titi” – basically meaning cheeky. There could be cattiness of teenagers as in the poem Don’t Trust Islanders; not to mention the poem Rainbow’s End, wherein school children are rivals for attention. There are comments about  the Christian faith as in the poem Holding the Hologram Jesus. There are also many references to Manaia – a protector and messenger from the spirit world as in the poem The Uranus Trap.

Esau styles can be many. There are some experimental works. [Is her The Coaxial Triptych really a poem or more of a game?] There are prose poems such as the young woman’s quest 2 Puna Idol. There are many neat brevities, such as Silhouettes which reads in full “It’s possible to see each other’s pain. / Watch the moana pull back / the frothed shore, revealing / the glass we might’ve made with the sun / is still sand.” While some poems are almost cryptic and require careful reading, some of  Esau’s poems are very clear, especially the poem Tasi /Gree, dealing with the killing of baby sharks. And there is almost a surrealist poem which tells us of family waiting for a dinner in the restaurant.

When I consider the whole of this collection, I have to point out that this review covers only some of Hungus, even though I have read it all carefully. It deals with far more things that I could analyse in one review. It is a very detailed book. What I am sure of is that Amber Esau has made a great piece of work, and I see her as balancing carefully Samoan experience and Auckland experience.

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David Eggleton has become one of New Zealand’s major poets since the 1970’s and there must be only very few readers of poetry in New Zealand who have not read some of his works. Eggleton has not only produced many collections of poetry but he is also known for his essays and his role in editing and writing for literary magazines. For the record, you may find on this blog my reviews of some of his collections, such as The Conch Trumpet,   Edgeland,   The Wilder Years  - Selected Poems, and  Respirator. Also – given that the publishers are American - there is a glossary at the end of Lifting the Island explaining words that might be unfamiliar for Americans.

Born in Auckland, Eggleton is – says Wikipedia – “of mixed European, Tongan and Rotuman descent”. What is clear in nearly all his poetry is his interest in both the New Zealand context and the Pasifika contest. One blurb describes Lifting the Island as “a kind of lyrical world map of the South Pacific”. This is true in one way as there are many poems that are almost romantic. But Eggleton is also ready to deal with the negative things.  Lifting the Island runs to 160 pages of poetry. It is divided into six parts – Lifting the Island, The Shallows, The Great Wave, The Whale Road, The Wall and Beacon. First point, while the six parts each has its own view of a particular place or island, nevertheless many poems are not dealing with any particular place. Secondly, while I read with great interest all of this collection , there is simply no way that I can analyse everything that Eggleton has written.

So I will deal solely with some favourites. The opening poem Lifting the Island presents people at the beach on an island. It is followed by the poem Flying in Southside, which appears to be presenting the part of Auckland where his father worked and where Eggleton was very young. In a variety of poems he gives his idea of, after an all-night party, Albert Park which is “like an old magnolia’s magnificent candelabrum - / flames of white flowers which gutter and go out - / life goes on without us in particular”.   Or again there is the poem Isthmus which gives a panorama of Auckland, but not entirely a flattering one. I shuddered at the line “a concrete hypodermic lit by gamble fever” which seems to me the most correct depiction of the crass Sky Tower. So there is much of Auckland to begin with. Later the poem Soundings gives us all the noises [some delightful, many annoying] that one can hear in a city. As for Tomorrow, Eggleton writes a list of things about what the future could be, but not in a naïve way – who knows, good or ban, where the future will go?

Turning to nature there are more natural things, such as Moonshine; or wherein “Rain brings Fred Astaire’s tap-tap across the roof, / before a razz of jazz is given tumultuous applause, / the ozone in the air extinguished like snuff / of golden beeswax melted in candles. / Petulant petals quiver in crimson. / Rain bodies forth a spectacular earthworm welcome / from hitherto undistinguished lawn.”  Perfect description. As sound are The Shallows, and The Colour. The long poem Methusalem is a full panorama as seen from one perspective.

When getting further into the section called The Great Wave, we reach some way into the mores of Pasifika. The moods of the sea are all around. Belief in the Pacific does not exactly belittle Christianism and belief on the island, but it does place it against the majesty of the ocean itself. In the poem Brightness we get pure description of the best sort. And speaking of the poem The Great Wave itself there is the torch of a fable that may have been handed down through the ages by the elders. Read it for how carefully Eggleton slides into images of a forbear titanically fighting the currents between New Zealand and more northern Pacific islands.

Odes to Weary Dunlop seems to be interesting and surprising memories of watching movies at the flicks [often movies about war] when he was a kid.

After all these poems I have so far praised, there is one poem which I think should be plastered on every N.Z. high-school blackboard – and be read by adults too. This is The Navigators, a long poem about the migration in ancient times of Pasifika, colonising the South Pacific. It is an heroic story in itself, but the main point comes at the end, reminding us that the seas are now rising, climate-change is here, and some islands are in peril of being drowned.   Quite different is Explorers, which jokingly deals with how different gods quarrel with one other and how they see human beings. As for the arts, there are poems about artists, like Hundert Wasser and Len Lyne’s Wind Wand.

I think it is fair to say that in the section called The Wall, there is a real tendence to deal with moods and what is more sombre. But in the section called Beacon, poems like Distant Ophir and Sunday Songs are a real recall to childhood. Dealing, too, with the South Island [ Eggleton now lives in Dunedin], there is a detailed and moving poem about the Christchurch earthquake Quake, 22^nd February. And, in another thoughtful poem that amounts to a work of protest, there is The Plastisphere, chastising all the plastic junk that is now polluting the seas.

As always, I have done no more than highlighting a selection of the many poems in this collection. As always, very readable.

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Prose poems are a special art. Baudelaire did it brilliantly when he wanted to. T.S. Eliot did it occasionally. Others did it every so often. In New Days for Old, James Brown gives us 185 prose poems. In this collection,  James Brown is many things. He is a jester, a joker, just a feller looking around, a child remembering things, and sometimes an adult deliberately acting like a child. Yes, there are moments of sheer da-da. Yet often enough it adds up to truly thoughtful ideas. To begin with the obvious, New Days for Old is funny, very readable, often silly, enjoyable if you take it prose poem by prose poem, and opens by quoting the words of another writer “Much of the greatest art, I find, seeks to remind us of the obvious.” Quite so.

Take, for example, the outlook of a child when dealing with a disabled man. Here it is in full. “We take lasagna round to John because ‘He’s fallen through the cracks,’ says my mother. That must be why it’s bad luck to step on them. ‘The  trickle-down theory is a plates of pish-posh, she adds. When we arrive, John is sword fighting in the air with a cake fork.” [p.11] Is this as seen through the naivety of a child? Or has there been irony injected by an adult looking back? The same goes for the passages about school days. And much later an adult voice sees a child cringing at the awful noises adults can make. Thus  “They were a loquacious people. Even their ears could talk. I saw a small boy crouched in a corner covering his, trying to make them stop.”  [p.87] 

            There are moments of almost perfect joy….but only sometimes, as said here  “A man, beached like a seal in foam, spoons his flippers through wet sand. Yoga lady salutes the sun. Bookmark woman prolongs a handstand, her landing strip perfectly balanced. In calm days, you can breaststroke through the rocky channel, following your shadow over sand and seaweed. Yes, it is idyllic, but one must return to one’s towel and uniform.” [p.22]

            There is a both jocular and thoughtful statement which is altogether true, at least as metaphoric, but deeply ironic.  Thus “A soft-voiced man in a brown suit speaks to Jesus’s offer of salvation, his hands proffering pamphlets like doves. A young Greenpeace woman with her clipboard. A man outside KFC claims he was once fried chaffinch. The Earth’s rotation is caused by our footsteps. If enough people walk in one direction, they can turn the Earth toward them.” [p.39].  There are the oddities of people’s behaviour. And there is the loneliness of small towns, as in “The small town was as quiet as its museum. I walked the rows of stuffed birds like a general inspecting his troops, each one fixing me with an angry glass stare….”   [p.51]

There are accounts of trying of find work, which may or may not be true and may or may not be part of his autobiography, such as his work as being a “Visual Display Artist” [i.e. one of those people who dress up mannequins for shop-front display]. There is a prose poem which could be true for many people who have experienced Fiordland [me being one of them]. It reads in full “ The sandflies came from my lost decade. We stood topless in a lonely Fiordland shore seeing who could  withstand them for the longest. Neither of us was going anywhere.” [p.69]

There is the perfectly absurd prose poem which tells what could be the true story of  Hansel and Gretel. And let’s face it, James Brown can play silly games. There is an ongoing joke about babies, made by adding the word “baby” to the titles of movies. But then he hits you with things that are all too true. Take this: “The beach is speckled in summer snow. I walk the tideline pecking at the polystyrene globules. A couple of other broilers strut past clucking and tutting. ‘Rubbish’ we agree. Every high tide, all our little chicken come home to roost.”  [p.67].

Much to think. Much to laugh. Much good reading.

Footnote: On this blog, you may find my reviews of two there earlier collections of James Brown’s work. They are The Tip Shop and his earlier Floods Another Chamber  I have to admit that I was rather too severe in dealing with the latter one.