We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
PEPEHA PORTAL by Ariana Tikao (Otago University Press, $NZ30) ; AFTER WAR by Dzenana Vucic (published by University of Queensland…) ; BEYOND THE BORDER and other poems, by Owen Marshall (published by Quentin Wilson, $NZ37.50) ; HERE & HEREAFTER by Alice Miller (published by Liverpool University Press.)
Pepeha Portal is Ariana Tikao’s first collection of poetry, but she has written poetry for years and has often appeared in various presses. She sojourned at the University of Canterbury after the devastating earthquake and that was where she wrote all the 50 poems that make up this collection. They are divided into two parts. She says “Pepeha” is related more closely to tipuna places and stories; and “Portal” reflects more about her childhood and other memories. In her poem From, she tells us about her childhood, beginning with the stanza “I’m from Redgrave Street, Hoon Hay. Potiki of seven ‘half-caste’ kids raised in a house built by the state, with purple polyanthus and sweet peas blooming along the driveway…” She gives us two pages explaining her name. She was the youngest of a family of seven. Their parents gave them all European names. Her parents named her Leanne. But in her adulthood, she legally changed her name to Ariana Tikao, honouring her Maori ancestors and forbears. And her sees the world from a clear and compelling Maori perspective.
Mihi begins with how the land was formed and reformed by its movements; but this shifting, when it came to Christchurch, meant that many people had to move elsewhere, thus breaking up many communities. There are poems based in Maori ancient tales such as the making of a Te Taniwha. Again there is an ancient tale Te Tarere a Hikaiti which is about a woman who was mistreated and “juiced and crushed / fermented heart / I leapt to my death / I sang my lament… I fell for you.” It is based on the traditional story of a woman who threw herself to her death after her husband had betrayed her. There are also poems about pre-European Maori customs such as Poua’s Oriori about the right season to plant “You must follow the order of things… /do not come in the time of Maku / when wet cold world / congealer of lung. / No air will enter / No song / No chant… / … We sleep when we’re tired / We eat when we’re hungry / We are born when / whakapapa / & moontide / shine.” But Ariana Tikao is not concerned only with ancient things. There are poems of protest such as “Settling” against Israeli settlers in the West Bank; and “Reclamation” which protests at the way land has been expanded, taking over where there was sea and water.
Moving on to Portal there is Transforming about growing up and seeing the world gradually and taking up radical ideas as in “We will summon those willing to fight for Papatuanuku, those who won’t keep extracting from her – unlike us, who believed the claim of the capitalists. These new fighters will speak our reo and dance with the fluid movement of bull kelp surging around the rocks.” Intonation celebrates the late Moana Jackson who always advocated for Maori rights. Yet just as often she deals with her family. Cold Feet (Mum) is a sort of elegy for her mother, seeing her when she has died and then “with my sisters and our daughters / I am dressing you / in your swirly bronze and black / coat-dress, and we marvel / at your legs, how / beautiful that are / smooth and straight / like emergency candles / in a box.” There is a sense of close community. There can also be room for the amusing as in Infight Lovers of Bristol Street where two birds are so involved in mating that they fall off the roof. And there is also the intimate in Surfacing / Diving which is about having her moko “I feel the cut and burn / of my moko’s creation / as when the baby’s / head stretches the puapua / slowly ripping perineal tissue / sweet hot pain / fire breathing her / into tea o marama…” It may be a moment torture, but it takes her to her full Maoritanga.
As is always the case, I have quoted only some of her many poems; but I am certain that this is the best and most polished collection of Maori poetry that I have seen for years.
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Dzenana Vucic is a Bosnian-Australian and in her After War she writes of the horrors of war. The war she deals with is the disintegration of what used to be Yugoslavia, where Serbs, Croats and other ethnicities ripped each other apart, meaning massacres, “ethnic cleansing”, and often rape, which was used as a weapon. Bosnia was caught up in it. She does not take sides in her poetry. Indeed she dedicates her collection to a retired Croatian army officer, Tomo Buzov, who protected a Bosnian boy. The title of her book reads in full “After War – a memoir in poetry and pieces” for she is concerned with how she remembered things. She was six when her family brought her to Australia and she recalls pieces of trauma that shaped her life, as well as the tails of horror that her family told her. In her poem First Year After War she writes “How do you fall from a building unshaken by bombs / How do you fall unrunning from gunfire”. Or later in the poem Fainting Goat she writes “The first time I hear a car backfire / I throw myself / to the ground, / arms over head as though arms / might make a difference/ (not that they will, they have not)”. Bosnians are [mainly] Muslim, and sometimes she refers to the massacre of Muslims by an Australian in Christchurch. She is also concerned about the matter of language where [in some parts of what was Yugoslavia] the Bosnian language was banned. But of the whole catastrophe she writes “I want to write a poem that explains a hundred thousand deaths, one point five million unhomed, up to sixty thousand raped and 9 million youtube viewers …”, the latter part showing how un-caring the rest of the world is. There follows a long sequence – covering 20 pages written in fractured words – which makes it clear that the whole country was fractured by war. And in the poem To Learn a M/other Tongue, she tells us how, as she grew up in Australia, she began to speak English. So she taught herself how to speak the Bosnian language. There is much, much more to this collection, including poems that show she now has a wider perspective. But it all speaks of what should be humane.
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Novelist, short-story writer and poet, Owen Marshall’s Beyond the Border is his fifth collection of poetry and it is a very generous one, giving us fully 196 poems. This collection begins with Beyond the Border, an elegy for the late Vincent O’Sullivan, saying that O’Sullivan “wielded the language of academia with the best, but also struck home with the intense simplicity of the butcher and the candlestick maker. You couldn’t drive a car, but had complete licence in the use of words”. Very true. [And I remember driving Vincent home once or twice as he had no car.] As you might expect, a collection beginning with an elegy often deals with memories and losses, such as the dead who are “beyond the border”. But Marshall is not sentimental. Far from it. This is a very balanced collection, and it is abundant. As always Marshall does not perplex readers but works in straightforward literal statements, though sometimes with irony. Nothing is written to baffle us. Marshall uses, in these many poems, prose poetry [sometimes], free verse, standard stanzas, and others, but never confusing. And so to the many poems.
Marshall certainly has travelled and there are poems about visiting Saint Agnes, what is left of Troy, going to the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, visiting Menton, and the Antarctic. He also has memories of childhood; and as an old man he sometime writes about his grandchildren. He also writes poems that come close to philosophy. But it is the loss of friends who have died that most hurt him. There are so many poems in this collection that the best I can do is to point out the poems that most interested me.
First the poem Retrospection, which reminds us that we often remember trivial things which we thought were important, and yet they stay with us. My Father Laughing is a happy moment he recalls from his young years. Disunity gives us a moment of old age saying “My toes are farther from me now and snag / my blue socks when I attempt to dress them. / Other body parts are also distancing themselves / or disputing suzerainty….” Oh so true if you are old. And right next to it there is the poem Bipedal Advantage, which wonders how we homo sapiens came to be the leading creatures on Earth when other creatures are in many ways more majestic than we are. Mr. Catarrh is about a man he knew when he was young – a man who would “hock” and spit a lot - but with whom he was able to converse. Among memories of school days there is Ignominy about negative things he did – really small things but he felt bad about it. And as you might expect for children in the 1950s, he has memories about The Bughouse, kids watching movies before television in New Zealand basically took over.
And what of some even more thoughtful poems? Yet It Will Come asks us to think how the world will end – not in terms of warfare or famine, but the long natural disintegration of the Earth as the Sun expands and the Solar System changes. Who will be the last human beings on Earth before they are wiped out? There is a charming poem called Whatever telling us that anything, seen the right way, is poetry. As for True Mentors, it tells us that “Those writers of the past whom you admire become the family in your head, best friends too. It doesn’t matter that they are dead, for you have met them in the confessional of their works…” And there is much more about poetry this poem says. When he turns to Watching Children Play he sees “Everywhere are exhortations concerning remedies for infirmity and the improvement of our well-being, but nothing lifts my spirits more than to watch small children playing. No guise of cynicism, or cloak of subterfuge as they reach for life, just the vulnerability accompanying openness, innocence and trust.” Oh yes there are also other very good poems of the past, as in The Nostalgia Club and The Car Museum and Student Days.
But the poem which I thought the most brilliant was Orca, which he saw when he was in Antarctic where orca were near, described as “Streamlined royalty in black and white rising in gleaming crescent then curving back in such graceful choreography, yet bearing too the insolent demeanour of apex predators. One could aptly be named the name of some lightning-striking Viking god but comes instead from Latin – Kingdom of the Dead.” The best description I have ever seen of orca.
I have, of cause, noted only a sample of these many poems. I do not think every one of Owen Marshall’s poems is great. Some of his poems are downright mundane. But this is a great collection and, is always with Marshall, it is very readable.
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Over the years I have read all of the collections of Alice Miller, including The Limits in which she said that life is such that we have to simply develop intellectual resilience to deal with the world and its people. In her next collection What Fire she was very concerned about the fearful, hesitant and uncertain-ness of the future of human beings, perhaps mitigated by love. All of which might sound as if I were saying that she is a prophet of doom – which of course is not true. She has a streak of wit and she is very open to considering many ways people live. I would go so far as to say she is almost a philosopher with a heart. Alice Miller was born and bred in New Zealand, but she now lives in Berlin and obviously she can speak the German language. Her grandmother was Jewish and managed to get out of Germany before Hitler took over. Now her new collection Here & Thereafter takes a broad view not only of the country where she now lives. One of her opening poems Old Romantic says “When we’re young we know poems matter, later we / still know but have to admit there’s only one way they can. / After all, much more than sandcastles are vanishing. / What with those odds, one part must keep singing / and it’s that proof we keep.” Think about this poem carefully. It means so many things. Coming to Germany she writes Future Proof wherein “To apply for a special German passport, I needed / proof my ancestors were persecuted, to show / their vanished business off Unter den Linden; / to listen to the current State’s persecution; and to never / call it that. I smile wide, a man says / I’m allowed here”. One of the most heart-breaking poem is Apology where an old German man awkwardly apologises for the Holocaust. But this is far from all of Miller’s poems. Read deeply of poems about having a child as in the poems Babies and Birth, with all the pains of giving birth. She does not deal only with older wars but with some that are still going. And in the poem The Golden Baugh Hotel there is the possibility of a war to come. And sometimes there is loneliness, as in the poem Real Bird where “Some days I’m like the gannet / on that island where people left / concrete birds to try to attract a colony. / The poor gannet was the only real bird / left, courting the concrete birds…” I have given you only a very small sample of the many poems in Here & Thereafter but it is clear that Alice Miller is one of the most thoughtful poets we have.
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