Something New

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

“WHAT FIRE” by Alice Miller (Pavilion – University of Liverpool Press, $NZ37); “REJOICE INSTEAD – The Collected Poems of Peter Hooper” (Cold Hub Press, $NZ42:50)

 

            If you look up Nowhere Nearer on this blog, you will find reviews of Alice Miller's two earlier collections of poetry, The Limits and Nowhere Nearer. What now interests me about these two collections is how different they are from each other. The poet’s voice and preoccupations had changed. The Limits adopted a style that was almost cryptic, sometimes impenetrable, relying very much on imagery verging on the surreal. One suspected that it encoded many personal things that were not immediately comprehensible to the reader. By contrast, Nowhere Nearer often dealt with public issues, reflecting on the inevitablility of death and the march of time, but also considering the loss of certain cultures and the rootlessness which had become what I described as “the malaise of the modern world”. In this second collection, Alice Miller often referred to what could be called High European Culture as well as Classical mythology. Given the severe and stoical tone of some of her work, I referred to Miller as “a latter-day Schopenhauer”. I am delighted to learn that she was not offended by this sobriquet. Need I add that I found her work enriching and enlightening?

            Alice Miller is an expatriate New Zealander now based in Berlin, some of whose work has been published in German. Her third collection What Fire is a development and extension of many of the themes and ideas she expressed in Nowhere Nearer. 

By and large, it is a very bleak world that is delineated in her verse, but it is not a series of counsels to despair. There are gleams of optimism and hope for human beings, even if they have to be grasped quickly before they vanish. Schopenhauer is modified by good sense and sometimes by love.

In this collection, Miller often situates her poems in specific landscapes. There is occasionally a tendency to Cartesian rationalism as in a poem like “After the Catastrophe”, which raises the possibility that life isn’t real. But most of her landscapes are based on hard empirical observation, even if this is a platform for ideas. One of her most delicately crafted poems “What Becomes Her” has a second-person “you” walking by the Berlin river Spree trying to read the angst in other people and in herself. The cold landscape of fjords is mentioned in a number of poems, while “After the Internet” presents a sort of apocalyptic vision of ruined land and both “The Lighthouse” and “Taillight” suggest a decaying world which one has to endure. A nightmarish fantasia, not exactly a real landscape, dominates the title poem “What Fire”, which appears to have overtones of “night and fog” (Nacht und Nebel) in the most sinister sense that would resonate with one based in Germany. This is the type of densely-considered poem deserving the type of detailed exegesis that cannot be given in a general review of this sort. It is certainly one of the poet’s best.

A strong streak of determinism marks one of Miller’s best river poems “The Fork of Five Rivers”. It pairs Samuel Butler, on his South Island sheep station Mesopotamia, with the river Spree and other rivers. But  “We each have our own    scheduled      future, drowning. / We each have our own paradise inside
 / waiting to drown us       from the inside out.” In similar deterministic tone, “Awake” declares that “the woods are all / 
the same woods, no divergent twig, no path
 / that wasn’t pre-written into existence by a programme
 / you’ve seen so many times before you could recite
 / each oak, each branch.”


Where, ultimately, does determinism take us? To death, obviously, and death is one of Miller’s major concerns. The opening poem “Seams” considers a life’s journey as a planned trip and ends “What song / 
will you sing as the light leaves,  / as the mask’s lowered over your eyes?” Here the dominant image for life is a journey by plane over countries seen only briefly. The same image recurs in “New Wings”, “Orbit” and other poems. “Das Gift” and “Extinction” sound out decay and death. Death is “The Goddess of Death”, referencing Maori mythology respectfully and yet, in its profuse closing detail, also managing to be grotesquely funny. “New Valkyrie” has the female warriors of Norse myth gathering corpses from battlefields. In this collection, it is women who are most frequently related to the concept of death. “Exit” begins with the words “Do we begin in death? What kind of building / is a womb, to live inside, / breach the only way through?”


But then there are poems that relate to women in other ways. “Mutter” tells us that women grow into being their own mothers. “Volumnia”, which derives from Plutarch’s and Shakespeare’s life of Coriolanus,  refers to a mother producing a warlike and destructive son. (Incidentally the epigraph of  What Fire  are words spoken by Volumnia to Coriolanus “I am hush’d until our city be a-fire, And then I’ll speak a little. “) And then there is the obvious fact that women interact with men, not always happily. “Held Under” concerns over-controlling men. Both “What We Find” and “The River” appear, in their allusive way, to be about a marriage or relationship breaking up. Not that misandrony is suggested when “Vanishing Point” declares “I wake up / with you and the world seems new” though the poem does then go on to say how odd this impulse is when the word is doomed. [For the record, I cannot help noting that in the acknowlegements the poet gives thanks to the man she loves.]

Having noted this, however, the dominant note of this collection is fearful, hesitant and uncertain of the future of human beings.“The Miracle” tries to find something unique in human beings as opposed to other animals, but is still waiting for such uniqueness. Most wrenching of all is the confessional poem “Sunday”, where there is a strong, and irrational, sense of guilt as she feels helpless to do anything about her friend’s cancer, and is not sure that poetry will be of any help.

I think in this review I have given a fair outline of Alice Miller’s preoccupations and philosophical ideas. Decay, determinism, death, the possible mitigation of life by love, and the importance of observation. But this does not really communicate to you the aesthetic quality of her verse. The philosophy is grim, it’s daunting, it’s challenging, sometimes it’s even depressing. But it’s clear, it’s forthright, it’s undisguised, it shows fortitude in the face of inevitable death and decay. It’s a brave voice clearly expressing itself.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

Rejoice Instead – the Collected Poems of Peter Hooper is an exercise in restoring the memory of a poet who was in danger of being completely forgotten. As Pat White, the editor of this collection, tells us in his Introduction, the poetry of Peter Hooper (1919-1991) appeared first in slim volumes that are now hard to find.  Some of his verse appeared in anthologies in the 1970s and 1980s but then he faded from view. Hooper was fastidious in writing and re-writing his poetry, and many poems lay unpublished when he died. Though Hooper was born on the South Island’s West Coast, his mother was English and when he was a child she often read to him the work of English Romantics. Romantic, or more precisely the post-Victorian form of modified Romanticism better known as Georgianism, was the greatest influence on Hooper’s early work.  He was a late starter and did not produce publishable poetry in earnest until the early 1960s, when he was in his forties and after he had spent time in England. Only gradually did he shuck off the English influence and begin to write about specifically New Zealand landscapes. In his case, this meant the landscape of Greymouth and the West Coast where he spent most of his life. Even so, his style remained very much that of early Modernism. He was loyal to simple verse structures and rejected post-modernism. As White notes, he did make friends with some artists and poets and was much admired by Colin McCahon. His poems inspired some of McCahon’s painting. But, though he worked as a school-teacher, his life tended to be solitary. Pat White makes a case for Peter Hooper as an early conservationist, and there certainly is a strong thematic thread in his work of respect for the natural wilderness. However, it is only in a few poems that Hooper becomes polemical. He is mainly concerned with interpeting the quality of landscape rather than preaching about it.

I read my way methodically through the well-presented 220 pages of these collected poems, lamenting only one thing. The table of contents lists Hooper’s poems chonologically, under the titles of the original “slim volumes” in which they appeared. The poems that follow also appear in chronological order of first publication, but for some reason the titles of the original “slim volumes” do not appear in the body of the text.  Even so, I was able to walk through Hooper’s work from early 1960s to early 1990s, seeing how his preoccupations (slowly) changed.

In Hooper’s very first publication “A Map of Morning” (1964) the poem “Walking in Summer Wind” announces very clearly where Hooper was going to go, declaring “And I remember / Whitman would wrestle with brotherly trees / who gave no quarter / answering strength with strength / knowing what the wise and children have always known / earth has no limits to her joy”. There is a rejoicing in nature, Whitmanesque but also Wordsworthian in inspiration but (despite the free forms Hooper often employs) Georgian in effect, with much use of words like “benison”, “woe”, “embrace”, “Songs innumerable” and their ilk. And be it noted that nearly all of the poems in this, his first collection, are set on the other side of the world from New Zealand – Reigate, Anne Hathaway’s Cottage, London, Daffodils and Oak Trees, Perugia, Provence, Japanese prints and poems honouring authors of his era such as “Reading Zhivago” and “For Patrick White”. But even in this, there are stabs at current realities. “Farnborough 1961”, for exmple, set at the show-place for Britain’s military aircraft, sees the planes as merely bearers of death. A pacifist tendency is implied.

Hooper’s second collection “Journey Towards an Elegy” (1969) may include a poem in memoriam of T.S.Eliot, and it may still often use traditional poetic forms – the perfectly rhymed sonnet “The Drudge” or the neatly crossed rhymes of both “Of Love and Time” and “Hoeing Beans”. But, as Pat White’s Introduction has clearly signalled, the scene has changed completely and is now definitely situated on the West Coast of the South Island. References to the West Coast abound – Stockton, Larrikins Flat, Blackball Creek, much wind from the sea, dense bush and trees, coprosma berries, and of course rain, as well as manly pursuits like chopping wood and hoeing beans. The most tragic work is coal-mining where (says the poem “Jimmy”) “the black hills have no cry / for death by stone dust razoring the lung”. Life is pinched and disappointing for some, as in the poem “Retired” about a disappointed retired schoolteacher. The title poem “Journey Towards an Elegy” is one of Hooper’s very best – commemorating his visit to the grave in Italy where lay his brother Tony, killed in the Second World War. The hard message it gives is that graves are not as potent as our memories of the dead; and “Journey Towards an Elegy” also emphasises the sense of distance and separation from home a visit to Europe means for a New Zealander. It is in this collection that Hooper produces a sort of poetic manifesto with “Poetry is for Peasants” claiming “Only when the feet and hands / know the earth / in agony and joy / can the mind be nourished / on beautiful words”. This is a call to life experience rather than intellectual concepts as the force of poetry. The concluding sequence “Notes in the Margin” show a radical change in style, Hooper now being terse, speaking more colloquially and stripping away much of the elevated vocabulary that was seen in his earlier work. The very short collection “The Mind of Bones” (1971) leaps very far indeed from Hooper’s first collection – now all poems are lean and short and referencing the present moment with garden reflections on sparrows and one inspired by reading Baxter’s “Jerusalem Sonnets”.

“Fragments III: Earth Marriage” (1972)  begins with the prose essay “Earth Light” where Hooper begins by praising the unique quality of light on the West Coast and tells us how he has grown into the landscape. He notes that his poems often present isolated human figures but that does not mean that people on the West Coast are unaware of the greater world. He now does sound a clear conservationist view when he declares his continued loyalty to Thoreau (later in this collections comes the poem “Homage to Thoreau”)  and speaks of “the earth-mother, whom modern man has so tragically rejected”. And finally, after listing his favourite poets, he despairs of the type of academic criticism that over-analyses poems. The sequence “Pencilled by the rain” yields the distressing but truthful lines “Here at the world’s end / we’re not exempt / from the harvest of folly. / At our roots / burn Europe’s poisons. You’ll find / no primal innocence beneath the fern.” Hooper builds beautiful but melancholy images of bird-life on the Coast, but is sure that “I wander the ways of a squandered country” mitigated only by the thought that “there’s not much time for cleverness / but a little maybe for love”. There is a moral robustness to this – a sense that no landscape is fully free of corruption.  But in the same collection, poems like “Three Pines by the Hohomu” lay bare Hooper’s stylistic weaknesses – a tendency to Whitmanesque overstatement and bombast in such lines “I am become a part / of earth, of the river that flows forever, / I share the endurance of her centuries / in the roots of the pines….” Etc. The “Profiles in Monochrome” (1974) are vignettes of people who lived on the Coast either before the poet’s time or when he was a child. Some of the “profiles” are dispiriting, but collectively, they build up a convincing picture of a certain sort of community.       What appeared in “Selected Poems” (1977) is still dominated by landscape but Hooper’s tone is more regretful, melancholy and dwelling on loss. There is a sense that human beings are destructive intruders, as in “Cloudfaring” where “I know without rancour / that the islands of the blest / were always mirage, / that our feet have only / the clay tracks word / in the rough pastures / below our sombre hill.” Certainly two poems about the ill health and death of his mother “Huia Villa” are pained elegy and “Rain Over Westland’emphasises one of the less pleasant features of the region. Naturally there is a strong sense of loss in elegy for Muriel, one of the few poems suggesting the poet’s sexuality

Then there are all the unpublished poems with which Hooper’s writing career ended. With the unpublished “Poems From a Study,” he begins to take up the habit of writing in the third person as “the Old Man”, who takes ovet the unpublished  “Stones of Longacres”. While Hooper’s preoccupations are as they had been for decades, the vocabulary is different. Some locutions still linger from his earlier quasi-Georgian style, but you wouldn’t get words like “sheepshit” and “pisses” in his earlier work.. The language now is more raw and colloquial as in a very short poem like “Thumbs” which begins “He knows it’s winter / cold winds over the paddocks / when his thumbs / split at the corners / a thread of cotton / slices the cut  / to instant torture.” Other poems suggest the roughness of rural life in a style some distance from dithyrambs on birds, winds and trees. “Poets and Paddocks”, one of his longer poems, attempts to fuse his academic past with rural realities. But there is rejoicing in the what is almost an epigram “Old Man in a Garden” which reads in full “Up to my knees / grass in the gully / over my head / a tui scold in the kowhai / I should worry / I rejoice instead” . Not only does this brief poem give this Collected Poems its name, and not only is it quoted in full on the back cover, but it gives a fitting note of serenity and acceptance to one who has so often brooded on the past and isolation and elegies. You accept your lot in the land where you stand, for all its defects, and you rejoice in the beauties nature gives. The closing essay “A Window upon Mountains” reaffirms Hooper’s Thoreauvian view of nature as a window to the soul and resonates most loudly with current conservationist thinking.

How do I assess this resurrected poet from the past? I do not think Peter Hooper will ever be remembered in the same way as Curnow, Baxter and other much-anthologised poets of his era. But I hesitate to use that damning term “minor poet”. Though his canvas is narrow, his interests few and early expressed, and his style often of a past age, he is a thoughtful poet who at his best conveys strongly the sense of a particular time and place. He observes nature carefully and expresses it vividly. Certainly a poet dserving a place in the New Zealand canon.

Something New

REMINDER - "REID"S READER" NOW APPEARS FORTNIGHTLY RATHER THAN WEEKLY. 

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

“NOWHERE NEARER” by Alice Miller (Auckland University Press, $NZ24:99) ; “THE FAREWELL TOURIST” by Alison Glenny (Otago University Press, $NZ27:50); “VIEW FROM THE SOUTH” by Owen Marshall -  photographs by Grahame Sydney (Vintage, $40)

            Nowhere Nearer is the second collection by Alice Miller, a New Zealand poet now living in Berlin. Four years ago on this blog I reviewed her debut volume The Limits, and admitted my bafflement with much of her meaning, finding it sometimes almost wilfully opaque. But I did grasp that much of it implied angst over 20^th century catastrophes.

I would not describe Nowhere Nearer as obscure in its meaning. True, one or two poems do seem to hint, somewhat vaguely, at emotional matters in the poet’s private life. But in the main, Miller’s ideas and references are crystal clear. Nowhere Nearer is dominated by a sense of the ineluctability of time and death; and our inability to escape from the past and the cultures that have shaped us. If I were to choose lines that sum up the volume’s mood, they would be from the poem “How to Forget”, which references Freud  and declares “of all the crowds to listen to / it’s the dead who know most” and later remarks “It is astonishing to be / alive, we say, which means / it is astonishing to be here / among these future dead.”

This collection leans heavily on European High Culture and ancient European mythology. Consider the imagery you find here – many poems are haunted by old Vienna or by palatial ruins, be they Christian or pagan (see the poem “Palace”). Dante enters Hell in one poem, as does Orpheus in another. Yet another (“Boy”) is like a grim retelling of the story of Icarus. The river Lethe and James Joyce’s Buck Mulligan make an appearance and the poem “The Fall” crams in Chekhov’s three sisters longing for Moscow and Flaubert and Tolstoy and others.

For all this cultural richness, though, the tone is generally bleak and grim. The opening poem “Saving” tells us “some of the moments we cling to most / are the futures we never let happen.” This is a formula for life-long regret. The second poem “Out of this World” (whence comes the volume’s title) tells us that beginnings are never endings and we never reach our destinations. “Observatory” suggests time is eternal repetition – the eternel retour in which there is no progress. “How to Remember”, with an odd form of extreme Cartesian rationalism, sees Vienna as an unreal city created by the mind: “We borrowed stage sets we can shift, paint, switch, / but now we will never see the main event. / What we really see will always disappoint us. / Reality does what it likes”. As for the poem “Europe”, it suggests the whole weight of history crushes us even as we are trying to live the moment. “As the Crow Flies the Sun Rips Day Open” tells us “We’ve bought a history we do not want / and we must watch it every day / until the minutes crack.” In “The Hold I Have” death is a certainty. In “Epilogue” love is an illusion

In pointing out the collection’s dark and unrelenting vision, am I being negative about it? Certainly not. I think Alice Miller is doing the bracing work of a latter-day Schopenhauer, telling us that life, as we subjectively experience it, is so grim that we simply have to develop the intellectual resilience to deal with it.

I am wondering to what extent Miller, giving a broad panoramic view of history and concentrating on Europe, has been influenced by the example of Auden?

“Eva Braun in Linz” quotes specifically from Auden’s “September 1, 1939”. It is a hauntingly horrible poem, not just about Hitler’s girlfriend [and, at the last moment, wife], but also about the persistence of sinister memories concerning things that would otherwise be seen as harmless. I believe Auden’s world view invades other poems. In  “St Peter”, Miller suggests resignation before the facts of history and our helplessness to do anything about them. This line of thought puts me in mind of the lines that end Auden’s “Spain, 1937” : “History to the defeated / May say alas but cannot help or pardon.” Even the poem referencing Icarus could take something from Auden’s Musee des Beaux Arts.

There are some puzzles for me in Nowhere Nearer. “Fourteen Mistakes” is partly straightforward mentions of things that highlight the strangeness of attempting to attune to other places; but also partly impenetrable surreal images. It baffles me. “My Girl in California”, however, shows great craftsmanship in its insistent staccato rhythms and its tight focus.

Allow me to finish with a paradox. The poem “The Roof” appears to diagnose the malaise of the modern world as rootlessness; as the lack of a secure sense of home. Yet for me Miller’s most accessible and most accomplished poem in this collection is “The Sound”, in which she fuses together, in description of a real New Zealand place, both Polynesian and European mythology. Despite the volume’s intimations of stasis and ineluctability, this does actually suggest a way ahead in the melding of things that seemed immutable. This is a bit more positive than Schopenhauer ever was.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“There comes Poe with his raven like Barnaby Rudge, / Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge” wrote James Russell Lowell in 1848. It was the perfect response to Edgar Allan Poe, a writer who could hit the poetic and narrative heights but who, regrettably, was also prone to overstatement, bathos and crude melodrama. A real mixture of genius and fudge.

I have never before felt so inclined to invoke Lowell’s jingle as I do after reading Alison Glenny’s debut collection The Farewell Tourist. The best of it is brilliant – evocative of time and place, startling in its imagery, and as very chilly as the poet intends it to be. But the worst of it? Oh dear… let me leave that for later in this notice, so that I can first tell you how accomplished a writer Glenny is capable of being.

Glenny has visited the Antarctic and done postgratuate Antarctic Studies, and from this develop her major themes and trains of imagery. The wonderful first section of this collection is called “The Magnetic Process”. Its nineteen pages consist of nineteen paragraphs (or prose poems if you prefer) which are like a series of surrealist paintings – Magritte or some such.  A man and a woman are connected with images drawn from the “heroic age” of polar exploration (Amundsen and Scott are referenced in the notes at the back). She appears to be at home, imagining the freezing polar wastes. He appears to be on the ice itself, although their specific locations are sometimes ambiguous. Details can be almost photographic realism – but then surrealism depends on the exact and realistic depiction of impossible things. She loses a notebook he gave her. As a child he played with a telescope.  He loads material for exploration. Explorers eat the emergency stew called hoosh. Fragile photographic plates are smashed accidentally. Yet we also have her dreams and his dreams blurring the edges of reality.  In the first section of this sequence, their fingers touch and produce sparks. He whips up a magnetic storm around her. The music of a piano merges with geology.  She takes a fossilised glossopteris to the doctor’s. She is at home imagining the ice shelves. His sense of perception gets disoriented.

To get the flavour of this, I quote in full the two sections of “The Magnetic Process” to which I kept coming back.

First, Section VII:  “He called it the little observatory. The instrument, he explained, was for measuring the electrical state of the atmosphere. The wooden box, with the latch that was too small to be opened by a mittened hand. Later, the photographer disappeared into a bag with only his arms showing. Darkness was necessary, he explained, if you wanted to capture light.” It is a literal narrative, not a dream, but note how it captures reality from an odd angle. It is not only the paradox in the concluding sentence that does this, but also the phrase about the photographer disappearing into a bag. Of course, with the cumbersome photographic equipment of the early 20^th century, photographers literally went under a hood when they took their pictures. But “disappearing into a bag” slyly suggests the distance between objective detail and its photographic depiction. The photographer disappears into his own representation.

Second, Section XII: “Some afternoons a fog rolled down the hallway. On others, the staircase groaned with moisture. A finger laid carelessly on a bannister dislodged a ledge of rime. She lifted the hem of her dress to avoid the damp in the passageway, wore knitted gloves in the kitchen. She was lying in the bath when the glacier pushed through the wall. She sank deeper into the water to escape the chill that settled on her shoulders Trying to ignore the white haze, to lose herself between the pages of her book.” This is an episode of finely-crafted imagination. In reading it, we at first say that the chilly house triggers in the woman’s mind images of the frozen south. But once the glacier pushes through the wall, our attention turns to the fragility of human habitations themselves. This really is surrealism, like Magritte’s painting “Time Transfixed” (an image of a steam train emerging from a fireplace).

I hope I’ve said enough to show what is really admirable in this collection.

But what about the “two-fifths sheer fudge”? Well, it comes after “The Magnetic Process” is over. The rest of the volume comprises a couple of pages giving modified dictionary definitions of the words “Drift” and “Erasure”, there are “erasure” statements of a gnomic quality, and a long section (fully 21 pages) of “footnotes” to non-existent texts i.e. two thirds of  each page is blank, with only the footnotes on display. Yes, I get the drift of them (Yup! I can make bad puns too), especially as they connect with the line I’ve quoted above about a woman trying to “lose herself between the pages of her book.” Yes, I can see that if you read the “footnotes” in sequence, they do imply a sort of narrative dependent on the grand lacuna that sits above them on the page. Yes, I can see that the almost-blank white pages inevitably resemble snow covered wastes, if you’re cued to see them that way. Yes, I understand Bill Manhire’s comment quoted on the back cover, when he awarded this book the Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award – “the text is not written primarily for the ear… [it] takes full advantage of the white pages on which the words appear.” So it’s an objet d’art as much as a verbal text. But even when I have taken all this on board, the final 46 pages of this production still has the effect of Writing School game-playing. In the short run, footnotes-without-text is an amusing concept. In the long run, it is tiresome preciosity.

“Pushing against the boundaries of what poetry might be” is how the opening words of the blurb describe this book. I would say that after the first twenty pages, it ceases to be poetry at all.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *  

From the much-honoured novelist, short-story writer and poet Owen Marshall comes not a collected poems but a selected poems. In this respect View From the South is kin to Cilla McQueen’s Poeta and Vincent O’Sullivan’s Being Here (both reviewed on this blog). These are poems which the poet himself has selected as being the best from his three collections so far, but with some previously unpublished poems added. As his introductory note makes clear, the accompanying photographs by his friend the painter Grahame Sydney are an essential part of the collection’s effect. Indeed, were I in the business of art criticism, I would comment as much upon the photographs as upon the poems – all those images of lonely South Island roads and hills and snow on trees and an abandoned car and a pier battered by the sea and corrugated iron. They really do complement the poems and I spent much time gazing at them whenever I paused in reading the text.

But the text is the thing, and straightforward in its declarations it can be. As an Aucklander I have to forgive Marshall for his opening “South Island Prayer” where he says he does not want to die “rotting in the heat” of Auckland but wants to die “with the old Southerly Buster” on the larger, less-populated island which he has long regarded as his home (Marshall was born in Te Kuiti). Marshall may not have planned it this way, but he is part of a tradition of South Island poets who rhapsodise over the southern landscape – Mary Ursula Bethell, young Curnow, young Baxter, and (more satirically and critically) David Eggleton and Richard Reeve.

In the opening section (“Nature and Place”) of the four sections into which Marshall divides his selection, the images are South Island ones of wind and clouds at dusk and mallards and paradise ducks and stone walls and above all vast uninhabited space. There are brief references to overseas excursions and to the poet’s Welsh forebears, but the big island is his heartland. Quite a bit of admiration and nostalgia for (Pakeha) pioneers is packed into this. Consider the last lines of the poem “Clyde”, where “For me the pleasure is to find / an old schist wall behind the shops, rusty / iron links to which the horses were / tethered a hundred years before. I see / them standing patiently behind stone / buildings while their owners show gold / at the bank, then settle at the boozer / with greater satisfaction than any of us / gathered in the chill of this modern day.”

On the whole, Marshall is comfortable in his chosen island environment. He is at home. As far as I can see there is little – if any - anxiety about colonialism or postcolonialism in Marshall’s world and I think I am right in saying that there is no reference whatsoever to Maori culture. “Storm Over Mount Peel” may take place in South Canterbury, but its images are of raiding Vikings and Valkyrie riding the wind. Perhaps this is a South Island thing – again speaking as an Aucklander, I am aware of how less Maori presence there is in the South Island than in the North, and how easier it is for Pakeha of Canterbury or Otago to ignore such of it as there is. In surveying “History and Arts” (third section), Marshall deals with Norsemen, Greeks, Romans, the dogs sensibly eaten by Roald Amundsen’s Antarctic expedition and the original elephant known as Jumbo. New Zealand itself is not a place to reflect on historical tragedy.

When Marshall moves into his second section (“Family and Friends”) he reflects on old loves from adolescence and regrets from that time of life (later in the collection there’s a poem about listening nostalgically to Roy Orbison) ; taking a daily walk; attending funerals; being a grandfather; observing a grandchild’s first artless reactions to a movie and other things that suggest a mature, well-balanced mind enjoying the simple things in life. The words “subvert” and “subversive” are used far too often and too easily in current criticism, but I happily declare that Marshall’s “In Praise of Oddity” is a genuinely subversive poem, celebrating the eccentricity and non-conformity of ordinary people. One of the highlights of this collection.

So to the last section, “Heart and Mind”, where the poems are largely metaphysical. Marshall clearly has some nostalgia for the certainties and simplicity of his childhood Christianity (see the poem “Eary Christianity”), but he is unsure about God, dethroning him in one poem for the concept of Time itself. He aches a little for something definitive, feeling “The scratching behind an opaque, sightless / sky, like a dog left desolate” (opening lines of “Something More”). Seeing man as the centre of things is no substitute for the dethroned God: “Dismiss the arrogant assumption that everything / is fashioned for our benefit and understanding. / The incongruities, random beauty and horror / of existence have purposes beyond ourselves” (opening lines of “The World is not Made for Us”). So the vague ache is still there, partly compensated for by absorption in nature itself. But only partly compensated.

Marshall’s diction is sometimes mildly forced and slightly old-fashioned, as if from mid-20^th century poetry. He likes (good for him!) to write in neat verse paragraphs. When he chooses to be, he is adept at rhyming couplets (in poems like “Paddock Nights” and “Simple Rhyme Chimes”) and he does an extensive Haiku sequence. He is most gifted, however, in the simple, straightforward literal statement which proves to have great resonance beyond itself. It is refreshing to read poetry that does not read like a test in acrostics, and I enjoyed greatly reading my way through this collection.

I’ll conclude by noting some personal favourites.

A moment in the book that makes me say “Snap!” is when Marshall’s observation of aggressive and pesky birds matches my own. This is from the poem “Birdstrike”: “Civic entitlement / is mine, but magpies enforce / archaic rules of trespass and I / don’t linger to debate with such / steely black-and-white resolve.”

“Book Launch” is a poem that will chill the heart of anyone who has had a book launched, because of the dead cold accuracy of its observations.

And finally, bravo for “The Slam-Dunk Poet” which, from a sensibly conservative perspective, takes down that awful competitiveness that plagues younger practitioners of verse.

Irrelevant and silly footnote: I know it’s aesthetically interesting, but I’m not sure why the dust jacket of View from the South covers only two-thirds of the hard cover beneath it.

Something New

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

 

“HEARTLAND” by Michele Leggott (Auckland University Press, $NZ27:99); “THE LIMITS” by Alice Miller (Auckland University Press, $NZ24:99 ); “BULLET HOLE RIDDLE” by Miriam Barr (Steele Roberts $NZ19:99); “HALCYON GHOSTS” by Sam Sampson (Auckland University Press, $NZ24:99)

Four recent volumes of poetry, two by established poets and two by poets who have just produced their first collections.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

            Michele Leggott of the University of Auckland is a very-well established poet and was in 2013 the recipient of the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry. Her latest volume Heartland was a finalist in this year’s New Zealand Post Book Awards. I have only recently got around to reading it.

In her end-note, Leggott tells us: “A family is a series of intersecting arcs, some boat-shaped, others vaults or canopies, still others vapour trails behind a mountain or light refracted through water. None is enclosed, all are in motion, springing away from one another or folding themselves around some spectral inverse of the shape they make against sea or sky.” I take this to mean that Michele Leggott’s thematic agenda is to memorialise and mythologise her family and forebears. The “heartland” is the extended and ancestral family and all its inherited codes and legends.

 Much imagery in the first section of this collection is drawn from childhood experiences and old photographs, but also from knowledge of the Hauraki Gulf and the islands in it. This much is clear, but lines (often with loose caesura) in loose unrhymed form often seem random and unfocused and the consciousness is one that drifts and wanders.

The poem “tiger moth” opens thus: “poetry is a crayfish   or two / packed in wood shavings   flying / home in a chillibox with my name on it / dear family it’s been a long time / let’s go hunting the past   in order / to find the future   you ask me / what poetry is   and I tell you about / the whale and her calf tracking in the gulf / the coastguard has been alerted / because boaties might collide with them / the Rimutaka Hill Road is closed / …”[there follow various other events and observations] “… this is poetry   you make it happen / wherever there are ears eyes / and mouths…”

If this is an answer to the question “What is poetry?” then I do not find it a satisfactory one, as it appears to say that poetry is simply random sensual experience (what one sees, smells, hears etc.). Isn’t this really the occasion for poetry rather than poetry itself?

The collection’s first section (called “a little ahead, my shadow”) ends with poem told by a female English ancestor. The second section (called “unwinding the bird”) begins with a poem set in Spirits Bay, gateway of the dead, where spirits jump off on their journey back to the ancestral homeland – so we have a bridge to New Zealand and later poems have visions of angels who have Victorian names and therefore might be the spirits of ancestors. There is a very personal poem about going for a walk with a dog-for-the-blind. The title poem “heartland” appears to be memories of childhood picnicking, and it is chiefly in childhood that ancestral and familial legends are absorbed.

Of course in this collection the Pakeha condition has to be considered – that is, the realization that we are separated by half a globe from ancestral experience, and that we are essentially living in somebody else’s legendary space. I find this most clearly addressed in two poems about the stars, which reference Lawrence Durrell and John Donne…. and David Eggleton. “Land sea and sky” is a clever poem about the upside-down-ness of constellations, especially the Pleiades. “The longest night” concerns Matariki.

The collection’s third section, called “many hands”, is divided into seven days. Apparently it celebrates a road trip in Australia and is a very good fragmented travelogue best relished for its specific images of place; but it also probes the hurtful decaying tooth of memory with its references to Charles Darwin and Henry Lawson. The fourth section “the mezzaluna rocking” comprises poems about ancestors and relatives often in the first person and again referencing Australian imagery. The tightest and (as I read it) the most carefully crafted section is the one called “Some Day” which brackets the experiences of a First World War New Zealand soldier in poems of home, going earth to earth.

To have imagery based on one’s personal memory and family lore is fine, but there are times when the specificity of this family’s references and memories exclude the reader. The specific does not become universal. Let me candidly say that, despite the poet’s endnote, and some of the stories of her forebears in New Zealand, I still did not understand what all the poems were pointing at and I am sure I still do not know. It may be the poet’s Heartland, but it does not always become the reader’s.

*   *    *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

 

Alice Miller’s debut volume The Limits is very different, being more personal, visceral and immediate. Poems are arranged in four sections titled “Skin”, “Steps”, “Earth” and “Body”, though for some reason the contents pages don’t display these sectional titles. These are poems that have the texture of dreams, or perhaps nightmares. They float in a world that us half mythic, half everyday, an always nowhere. I would use the term “surreal” except that that is now something of a cliché. What appear to be strong feelings are converted from the abstract to the concrete. To illustrate the technique, I quote in full the (double-spaced) poem “Air”:

You wake on the plane and mistakes ooze out of you

Mistakes ooze out of you like pus squeezed from skin

Look out the window and all’s yellow

Every minute’s infected

And it’s your last chance to choke the ocean

for the plane to crash like a dancer

for you to smell the earth

We live in a staggering time signature

What can I make of this? Yes, it signals the poet’s musical interests (“time signature”), which are referenced a number of times in this collection – later poems refer to Brahms and Clara Schumann. Yes, the “pus” is a simile for “mistakes”. (But what sort of mistakes? Mistakes about what?) The “yellow” is related to the colour of pus and maybe to sunset or sunrise or just sunshine over the sea as seen from a plane. But then maybe the plane is metaphorical too, in which case the poem is an attempt to concretize something abstract…. But what? You see, I find myself going around and around in circles with these poems, trapped on a verbal carousel, not knowing really what is being said. Perhaps this is about something so personal that it is incapable of being conveyed to a wider audience.

Again, quoting in full the poem “Recon”, I see the fantasy/mythic element dominating, but I’m not sure how literally I’m meant to take it. Here goes:

When we go to the field

to recover our weapons

all our axehandles

have grown back to trees

and although we are ready

to bury our dead,

there’s too much room in the ground

so, this is where we kneel again

                                    O Muse, let us.

            The final invocation to the Muse suggests that this has something to do with the process of creation (in poetry or music?). Gathering weapons from a field of battle, and axe handles which reconstitute themselves as trees, are things from fantasy or myth, therefore metaphorical surely. But metaphors of what? Kneeling on earth and burying the dead might be saying something about tradition as it relates to creation. Or am I meant to float with it and not interpret it?

Later poems reference St Sebastian, St George, Penelope weaving to ward off suitors and hoping Ulysses will return, and the wooden horse of Troy. In the poem concerning Troy, my heart leapt at the remarkable lines “But when they haul me out, we’ll all see / a girl pretending to be a goddess: / I cannot make an army. / I cannot change shape.” This appeared to be a call back to solid, concrete, quotidian reality, and a move away from psycho-mythologising. Yet, while never going for the external, concrete document, The Limits does also touch on communal mythologising, especially in the poem “Below the Senate” where Adam (the natural man, as I read it) and Caesar (public pomp and power and role-playing, as I read it) meet and struggle.

            I am torn in my appreciation of this collection. Alice Miller does produce bracing and sometimes resonant images and phrases. I loved her mixed critique of literary responses to the world in the poem “Burn”, where she asserts: “When we put down / our books, spine-spread, we’re left / with our own life’s sentences / sweeping over our faces like waves / endlessly cresting / endlessly breaching…”. I enjoyed her escape from misty and Freud-haunted mythological forests, when she glances at an earthquake–damaged nuclear reactor in Japan. Reading these poems out loud, I found that some of them sing. But I was often stumped by their hermetic opacity. To what are they referring? What are they dissecting? Am I really the dumbest boy in the class not to get it?

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   * 

If I invoke the opaque in discussing Alice Miller’s debut volume, I must do it once again in dealing with Miriam Barr’s debut volume. The poems of Bullet Hole Riddle are mainly written in the first person and are intensely confessional – the great majority in the first section relate to the young woman’s sexual life, but the opacity is in trying to decode the nature of this life. To this reader at any rate, there seems to be something traumatic to which these poems are a long-term response. For example, the title poem “Bullet hole riddle” appears to equate a penis with a gun, orgasm with the firing of a bullet and the result as a wound in the gut. At the very least, this is a very unhappy and negative account of sexual experience for a young woman.

This is not the only note that Miriam Barr strikes, however. The collection is often more wistful than accusatory – love is thwarted or love escapes before it is recognised. A riff on Thumbelina (“Storytime with Hans Christian Andersen”) ends with the chant “We want love in our blood too” – a hope unfulfilled. The poem “The gist of it” suggests that love is really shared pain for “It’s tough out there / to keep the blood in our veins / we are wired to feel / each other’s pains / yet still we gather / form these groups / these functional little tribes / try to warm ourselves / to be warmed.” To the very last poem in the book (“Exchange”) there is wariness, for “Bartering our existence / we exchange small pieces of ourselves / until the lines blur. / We are not stand-alone objects / We are looking at ourselves / through each other’s eyes / Two people in the dark / showing each other where the edges are.”

There is, then, in Bullet Hole Riddle, a sense that love is both necessary and dangerous; fulfilling and wounding. We need to be part of the loving group, but we render ourselves vulnerable in loving at all. Given that these are the poems of a young woman growing in an assertive post-feminist generation, I was taken aback by how often the poems assume the passivity of a woman’s body in the act of love.

The most optimistic poem in the book, and one of the best, is “Love and gardening” which is a vision of love as shared activity in constructing a garden  - but this poem is so idyllic in conception that it could be read as fantasy – and so the note of wistfulness comes in again.

I should note that there is a subsumed and muted strain of specifically Maori imagery in this collection. I should further note that I had the pleasure of attending the Auckland launch of this volume, and greatly enjoyed hearing both the poet and a fellow performance artist reading from the collection. Many of the poems appear to be specifically written for performance, one of them (“Somehow in Relation”) requiring the dual performance of two voices.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

 

And Sam Sampson’s Halcyon Ghosts. One tries to read poetry. One tries. One tries the poetry. One puts the poetry on trial. One knows one reads more poetry than most people read. One knows. One knows one is trying to read poetry without putting poetry on trial. But one puts poetry on trial try as one might. One does a trial reading of poetry. One wonders if one should try. Sometimes one does not want to try. One asks if one should be judged for trying. One tries without scoring. It’s a try.  One takes a bunch of sticks. One breaks them. The breaks are random. The broken pieces are random. The lines of poetry are random and broken. Do they breathe? Do they speak? They are random. They are broken. One tries the breaks. The breaks are judged. The judgement is broken. The random is tried. One knows one reads more poetry than most people read. One knows why most people don’t read poetry. The broken lines are random sticks. The guests fly and the birds are skeins. Repeat twice. The poems are shaped. They are shaped after photos of birds in flight in skeins and broken lines. Later they are shaped after patterns of significance to the poet. To the poet’s mind they are shaped. They are Auckland poems. Oddly they are nostalgic poems. They are the broken bits of nostalgia, place and coherence. They are unplaced. They do not cohere. They are a pile of rubble and broken bits. They are the broken bits of Auckland and coherence. Sticks and skeins will break my mind but lines will never hurt me. Do they fly? The broken bits do not fly nor the falling feather from the photographed skein.