Something New

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

FAST by Jorie Graham (first published in 2017) ; BLACK GOLD by Mark Pirie  (published by Earl of Seacliff Ark Workshop, NZ$30)

 

A good friend of mine sent me a copy of Jorie Graham’s Fast. At first I thought it must be a new collection of poetry - but then I looked at the press and I realised that it had been around for quite a while. In my ignorance I knew nothing about the poet, maybe because I have spent most of my recent time reviewing New Zealand, Australian and English poetry.  So I did what most reviewers do. I looked up who Jorie Graham was. Some facts – she is an American, but she grew up in Europe. She is now 77 years old. She has produced 15 collections of poetry. She taught at Harvard for years, and she has won many prizes like the Pulitzer. In her private life she has gone through three husbands and when she was younger she was traumatized by the death of her mother. And having said all this, I am sure that any poetry-reader in America would see me as an ignorant person. Jorie Graham is widely known and read in America.

            The poem Ashes shows how much of her writing is about working out who she herself is  - in other words she is uncertain of her identity “I spend a lifetime entering – the question of place hanging over me year after year…” but at the same time she is intrigued by animals. This idea continues in the following poem Honeycomb where she is examining the nature of human beings. She often writes in brief comments as in the poem Self Portrait at Three Degrees when she tells us “I cannot love any more….. I can’t hold it any more – you don’t want it – I don’t care…” etc. The poem Shroud seems to deal with either her mother or another woman. In The Enmeshments she appears to be having a fleeting moment where she wishes she had some standard to stand on thus “ Spellbound by the history – of god – unknowing – I feel my theory collapsing – I say I – I say too early too soon – the Greeks perhaps they say…” In other contexts she writes about “bots” - how we are being taken over by machines. There is also Reading to My Father, in which she writes something about her relationship with her father when she was a child. While I was confused by most of  the long poem The Medium, I was impressed by the final words “The day is long. It flirts with nothingness. It always does”, a genuine nihilism shown. I am also impressed by the poem Vigil where she gives us a very vivid image of the sun rising where “Daylight shows it. It pierces us with its red spear. It widens… run, it is day, run everywhere.” As for the poems With Mother in the Kitchen and Dementia we get to two images of a family’s tragedy. As for the poem To Tell of Bodies Changed to Different Forms we are told “We will never be happy with the body. Will exchange it for another.” 

            So I could continue with comments and ideas. Jorie Graham has many interesting things to say and she does have moments of earnestness. She is certainly worried about the nature of the current United States. Having said all this though, I find her style very difficult to follow. Too often – she writes – like this – as if – we are meant to – hold on to little statements – that could – have been said – more clearly – or could – have been expanded…

            By which I mean that it is very hard to understand what most of her poems are saying. 

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 Turning to a completely different collection of poems comes Black Gold by Mark Pirie. He is a New Zealander and he dedicated this collection to the long-gone James K. Baxter. Pirie has much wit, knows much about New Zealand history and is concerned with many things. Read the wrong way you might think that he is flippant. Take for example The Great New Zealand Poetry Debate which reads in full “It happened at some point. / It was well organised and well run / with very few attendees, / most choosing to ignore it.” Could it mean that not many people read poetry? Or could it mean that some very good poets are ignored? Or could it mean quite a number of things?

Pirie dedicates many of his poems to poets. The collection’s name Black Gold is dedicated to Clive James. Pirie writes “Black Gold / is the name / of my Notebook. / It’s apt for poetry. / Poets mine / for gold in the hills/rivers / of similes, metaphors, symbols, / onomatopoeia, rhetoric, metonymy… / What does it take / to find that nugget / that will bring riches: / distinction or fame?” In the poem The Song Maker, dedicated to Richard Reeve, he says “ Like Baxter / and Curnow, you seek elaborate but traditional / forms to contain your philosophy, the mind’s / colossus. You are digging into the mud, / into the beach sand, the pumice, driftwood / and sea-bark. You are your own song.” And I must add that he is dead right.

A section of this collection deals with personal memories of family - Grandmother, being taken to the shops when he was a kid, the whole life of his Grandfather, holidays, and an interesting poem about Ghosts, as seen by children.

He moves on to other poets… poems about meeting Hone Tuwhare and a very heartfelt  poem about the death of the Maori Queen. But he is at his best when he writes poems about historical events in New Zealand, such as the Ballantyne fire, the Depression and the work of Edward Tregear…. And there is much more. I greatly enjoyed this collection, open minded, sometimes happy, sometimes angry, but always very readable.