Something New

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

PORTRAIT by Jackson McCarthy (Auckland University Press, $NZ30) ;  SALT QUILT  by Airini Beautrais  (Te Herenga Waka University Press $NZ30:00 ); WATCHING TELEVISION IN A LOVE MOTEL by Haro Lee (Te Herenga Waka University Press $NZ30:00 )

 

In his debut collection, Jackson McCarthy deals with loneliness, love, memory and the city. Being part Lebanese, Maori and Pakeha, he has a unique view of New Zealand. It could almost be called romantic in places with many references to the night moon; but he is also a realist and there is a strong thread of gayness in his work. His poem Adam begins “ I met my first man on a bleak street. / Chaos like night surrounded us, dark / but possible, semipermeable. I had been / walking a long while…” Some of his poems are about being rejected, but some are about idolising men as in the poem Love your messy hair spell when he is seeing a man who is “Like a dumber blonder Saint Sebastian / but less tortured and really happy / to see me. O swallow me whole / like Time goes, then conquer Time / with your classical beauty!” But then there are poems about tragedy as in the poem The Lake where a young man commits suicide. As for the poem Uniform, he is warned that he is vulnerable. Gathered together are four poems called The Father which looks carefully at how a father might think. Death, nostalgia and the human body are examined often, but the finale called Song speaks of distant sorrow. Its last stanza says “My cousins in Beirut can feel / the terror in the air, I go on / with so little left to speak; listen / to my heart, these songs / of loss I write while I / cannot hear the bombs”.  The delicate language McCarthy can use, the careful use of structure in his prosody and the earnestness of his ideas makes Portrait one of the year’s best.

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Salt Quilt is a very full collection. But what is a Salt Quilt, the title of Airini Beautrais latest collection? It is all the things that we remember and how we change over the years. Memory is a major part of Beautrais’ interests. Cancer Moon : Poet Life, all nearly 23 pages of neat four-line stanzas, goes through her whole life as a poet from childhood to high school to university to being a teacher to performing in festivals and other gatherings and getting published. And all the while she finds it hard to explain what poetry really is. She ends by saying “I have tutu’d with its conceits. / I have been through its bookshelves. I have slept beside it / I still don’t know what it really is.” Poetry can be many things. Sometimes she is chastising. A poem like “Mantoum” suggests that when she was young she had a devil-may-care attitude and at the same time telling us that she was angry when she is criticised. The poem “ Doll Girl” gives a caution to young girls who over-do their make-up and grow out of it. “Pretty” says “It’s hard for pretty girls when they get old / Plain girls are used to standing in the cold/ Are used to entering a room unseen/ And keeping notebooks filled with silent spleen  / Hands warming all the lonely drinks we hold”. The poem “Swingball” in a way suggests that she makes her way towards a family. Her most thoughtful poem is “An Analysis of Power” where she looks at how the country has changed and where she asks “What will be the artefacts of our age? / Of systems gambled beyond means? The abandoned page.  / Vouchers that couldn’t be spent. Inexplicable machines.  / The city that glowed by night. All the messages sent from satellite  /and cell-phone tower  / but everything’s just a whiteout /  without an analysis of power.” Yes, there is some irony. Look at the poem “What was left in my house”. Many readers could agree that junk accumulates too much. And “Sisters” gives a very wry account of how people behave at or after a funeral . Capping all this there is a pacifist poem, “Ending Song” which advises “We who are weary, spent, in doubt, / we who have hoped the world could be better, /we who have opened the dreaded letter, /whose brightest stars have been put out, / pause at the news an end has come.”  Truly a remarkable collection.

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            Haro Lee is of a South Korean family and often remembers her parents and the country they came from. She was born and raised in Tamaki, Auckland, and has been a teacher. She divides the first collection as Day Time Television, Primetime Television and Late Night Television, and her opening poem “Theme Song from the Living Room” has a girl watching television with a grandmother, soap operas, cartoons, sitcoms, “the terrible laughter rattling within its tin cans” and other inane things. She moves on to telling us about her teenage years, kids misbehaving, maybe drugs. She visits America. In Colorado [if it is indeed her] she seems to be in love. It gives us one of her best tropes “The mechanical valve turning so beautifully its gears, / and clockwork drumming a song  / from its throat. How wonderful / from its throat. How wonderful / is the warmth of your hand in mine. Proof / of blood delivering its oxygen./   The bird in your chest is working so hard. of blood delivering its oxygen.” Her narrative moves through many parts of the United States - Colorado, Seattle etc. and at the “Happy Meal Thoughts past the Drive-Thru” there is a moment when she is dealing with her lover but “grief of work when I am tired  / because I made a mistake /  and if it were anyone else, I’d just  / tell them, it’s okay, it’s okay, /  and how I break my own heart when I  / talk to someone /  and I’d talk to them again  / but they can walk away /  and how I remember you hesitating /  /  to hear my wicked past / and to speak yours too. Though / now I need permission to continue / and trust in time it will get better. / Forget you. Love you / but leave you behind. And all this sorrow / swells in me like euphoria.”  There follow poems where things do not go well and romance seems a fraud. Yet in all this, we are not sure whether poet is writing about herself. In her poem “Needing Religion at Nineteen” we wonder if she has tongue-in-cheek when she writes “That through all the / grief and heartache and many mistakes, / there was a little bit of sweetness. / So maybe water never turned into wine. / Jesus would still love a whore like me.” Finally we are given “Graveyard Slot” in which, over 40 pages, we hear not only parts of her own biography, but even more about the lives of her forebears and parents. For some time they lived in a poor neighbourhood in Noryangjin, Seoul. This is mainly a prose narrative and it reads clearly as a sort of documentary. It reveals a lot.