Something New

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

“Touch Screen” by Philip Armstrong (Otago University Press, $NZ30); “Sick Power Trip” by Erik Kennedy (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $30); “In the Hollow of the Wave” by Nina Mingya Powles (Auckland University Press $NZ 24:99)

            Rare it is to have a poet who could be called a true philosopher. The blurb presented with Touch Screen tells me that Philip Armstrong is a lecturer in literature, writing and human-animal studies at the University of Canterbury, but he might as well be called a philosopher as his poetry delves deeply into the problems that go with our species and humanity – where we came from, where we are going, and how we are or are not now being dominated by machines. Sometimes – but not too often – Armstrong uses recherche or specialist words, especially when he is dealing with very small creatures.

            Wisely, Armstrong divides this collection into three separate sections because each deals with different ideas.

First part is called Glass, kicking off with a poem called “The Advancement of Learning”, that being the name of Francis Bacon’s early17^th century speculations about knowledge and how humanity could advance via science. But do scientific advances necessarily make for a better world? Armstrong’s title “Touch Screen” refers to what is now available on computers. He questions how much we now rely upon artificial intelligence to make our decisions. His poems “Jacob’s Ladder” and “Personality Test” suggest a great sense of pessimism. “Uber-Ich” shows an annoyance at the way cars now tell us what to do and how we are supposed to drive.   Then there is a quirky, but intriguing, long poem “Immram”, a version of what navigation was like in ancient times, yet gradually beginning to rush along with great speed; and in a way being a version of the founding in New Zealand. And “at such speed we couldn’t tell what came between. / Skyline after skyline flickered past, / faster and faster and faster, / the way we forgave and still forgive / ourselves, over and over until / out fingers bleed”. In some of his poems, Armstrong feels stifled and makes reference to modern medical treatments. “Foreign Accent Syndrome”  fears the non-human languages that are being created on computers – “It makes you wonder what they might / be saying, smiling as they do with slightly / parted lips. Since meeting them in my dreams and my nightmares are identical. I wake / making confessions in a foreign tongue.”  But like any good poet, Armstrong is not stalled on one theme. Three poems – “My Life in Comics”, “My Own Goals” and “Anastomosis” -  tell us, very ironically, tales of his teenage days.

Excellent though these poems are, they are only the warm-up to Part Two Myth, wherein Armstrong looks at how we human beings began in the first place and whence we had evolved. “Humble Beginnings” gives us a sour version of our distant forebears. “Book of the Dead” is almost a dead-pan description of the ancient Egyptian burial customs, including nearly all the Egyptians  gods. In the end, the poem suggests that death is just the disintegration of particles – that after all we are merely dust. The poems “Drifters” and “Mere” combine ancient sages with modern technology – implying that we in some ways have not changed much. Most impelling of all in this collection, however, is the long sequence called “Life of Clay”, being 13 poems which deal in detail with not only evolution but with the fragility of human beings. Often Armstrong makes reference to Mary Shelley’s “monster”, made by Frankenstein, who was shaped by man, an appropriate metaphor given that, eons ago, our ancestors were more-or-less shaped out of clay. But the poem “Clay on the Rocks” again warns us that non-human forces (machinery, computers, touch screens etc.) are taking us over – “Now warming to the warming world / my pineal gland locates / two hundred and forty years of stalled / operating system updates. / Begins a monster download.” And the poem “A Branding Exercise” says “After two centuries / the power to galvanise dead matter has / been put into the hands of children”, conjuring up images of both technicians and teenagers fiddling with their computers and touch screens. The poem “The New, New Atlantis”, takes Francis Bacon’s “New Atlantis” to show how terrifying applied science has wrought . There follow poems about the ubiquity of [pocket] cameras, unwanted images and the loss of privacy. These are not in any way the ideas of somebody who does not appreciate modern science. They are the words of someone who intelligently critiques the down side of some applied modern scientific trends.

When we finally reach Part Three Dirt, we are in a different type of poetry. Yes, there is some speculation on how species have survived over the eons – for example the poem “Slow Stepper” which is almost a jolly account of what would happen if one were to be reincarnated as a tiny mite of some sort. But most of Dirt is made of descriptive versions of New Zealand ancient and modern. Hence there are poems about the explosion of Lake Taupo two thousand years ago; and about what is left of an abandoned goldrush town. Surprisingly poems like “Estuary Bay”, “Driftwood Sculpture” and “City Under Rain” come close to being a more conventional type of descriptive poetry, though Armstrong does make some biting comments on ecology and how it is often ignored. And, where pollution is concerned, consider the poem “Landfill” with its angry lines about “a rancid pile / of Feltex worn through / to the webbing, rolls / of an underlay stippled with black / mould, a tarp-wrapped trap complete / with decomposing rat, / car batteries, tyres, asbestos tiles: / back then there was nothing you couldn’t / offload: the landfill ‘reclaimed’ / territory from the mangroves…”

We human beings are very good at leaving messes behind us. And perhaps modern technology makes even bigger messes. 

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    Reading Erik Kennedy’s Sick Power Trip, I’m immediately on the side of poets and novelists who can blow their stacks with skill. Juvenal lashing out in all directions at everything that was wrong with ancient Rome. Jonathon Swift thumbing his nose at English politics. Any good satirist. Erik Kennedy -  American born, now New Zealander – is a very good satirist. But, as I suggested in reviewing his two earlier collections There’s No Place Like the Internet in Spring Time  and Another Beautiful Day Indoors, even good satire can sometimes curdle into carping.

Take some examples of Kennedy’s really cutting satire. Speaking of complaisance, consider “Individualistic Societies”, which opens the show by suggesting that you might as well give up “If a comet is heading for the earth, we must celebrate the ambition of the comet.” “Loneliness Studies” is a good satire on our human inability to get on intimately with other people “Humans are the only animals / that think they’re not animals. / Chatbot chimps programmed / to miss each other and / to miss missing each other.” There is deep irony indeed in “The Health Benefits of Winter Sea Bathing”. The collection’s title Sick Power Trip comes from the poem “I Like Rich People, but I Couldn’t Eat a Whole One Myself”, strongly mocking the idea that super-rich people are different from the rest of us. “DARVO”, meaning ‘deny, attack, reverse victim and offender’, reminds us that “The most powerful forces in the universe are / the strong nuclear force, the electromagnetic force, / and the need terrible people have to believe / that they are the victims. The sun never sets on / the empire of grievances…”

All of these poems are doing the job they should do – that is, legitimate satire that alerts us to absurdity. BUT some of Kennedy poems turn to snarling at us, where “All Submarine Movies Are Christmas Movies” is angry at the whole idea of Christmas family gatherings. “Pacific Sea  Surface Temperature Anomalies” appears to be telling us that those who like swimming at the beach are “the clammy, suffering, sweltry, cynical , burned-out, / downhearted, vulnerable people go to the sea.”

Satire or snarling apart, Kennedy writes seriously about matters that concern him and should concern us. “Low Carbon Warfare” is a collection of statements that have been made by writers on current ideas related to warfare – mostly the statements are pro-warfare but some are opposed to the military-industrial complex. Putting this together keeps reminding us that some people ignore how existing weapons could nihilate all human beings on our planet. [Four pages at the back of the collection verify who wrote each of the comments that were made.] There are some poems that almost read as despair. “Everyone’s Trying on Their Old Nuclear War Poems” seems to suggest that such protest poems are old hat and “hating the bomb is assumed.” “Someone Put an Ancient Burial Ground Right Where a Hotel Needs to Go” is really a good lecture reminding us of the clash between pragmatism - wanting to go ahead with amenities -  and the value of preserving the ancient… but also noting that “archaeology is a destructive science. / What was excavated today can’t be put back tomorrow”. Some issues are really complex. Sometimes we are given not poetry at all but long prose statements, especially in “Bino” querying the value of heart transplants. Ditto “Soft Power” about the attitudes people have about animals other than us. Ditto “Pet Theories” which considers the relationship of pets and human beings.

Much of Kennedy’s work does have room for ambiguity : poems called “This Usually Represents a Desire to Achieve Greatness in Your Social or Professional Life” and “Enclosure of the Commons II” which suggests that if there were now commons [where people could graze their animals] the land would probably  be toxic and polluted with chemicals and therefore not worth grazing. “An Only Child Poem” suggests that only assertive people who are speaking in a public place are probably the type who were pampered as children. A kind of uncertainly is in the quasi-protest poem “Bystander Poem; or a Gaza Poem”, that is, chastising us for not caring about the situation but not taking sides.

If all this seems that Kennedy is deadly serious about everything, it’s worth noting that he can sometimes be nostalgic or even whimsical. There are a number of poems that are almost nostalgic -  as in seeing hippiedom as harmless nonsense (“Self-Defining Hippiedom Discourse”) ; and something got lost (“Gap in My CV”); and Dad’s interest in cars ( “Classic Cars Magazines”). “Bildungsroman” is concerned with growing up and “I’ve Been Huddling in Doorways” concerns being rootless in earlier years. “The Summer We All Called Cigarettes ‘Snargers’ ” could be read as criticising and poking fun at the way he behaved when he was younger… or nostalgia.

As for whimsy, there is the jump of imagination seeing moths and butterflies as if they were aeroplanes (“Magpie Moth vs Monarch Butterfly”). “Public Coughs” is deliberately doggerel in the Ogden Nash tradition with clunky rhymes. “A Nineteenth-Century Love Song” is also full of bouncily rhymes. “The Human Christmas Tree” is sheer surrealism. “We’ve All Been There” is both serious and witty when “I stored my plan for world peace / safely in my coat pocket, / and then I washed the coat.”

I’m chronicling all this simply as a means of saying that, though Kennedy is not only a skilled satirist, he is capable of writing in different tones. A very engaging collection.

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            Born and raised in New Zealand but well acquainted with China and South-East Asia and now living in London, Nina Mingya Powles is obviously a poet with a very cosmopolitan outlook. In her second collection, she is often inspired by, or quotes, many poets and writers, mainly women, such as Virginia Woolf [from whom comes the phrase ‘in the hollow of the wave’], Sylvia Plath, Sin Chi Yin and others – poets who are very sensitive and who like to look at the small things in nature as well as the motions of the tides, the seasons and the preciseness of art. It’s important to note that this collection is a work of visual art as well as of poetry. The first section “A Woven Sea” could be read as a hybrid – art works [images of quilts etc.] sit next to Powles’ words. In much of her work, Powles is interested in textiles, and memory and the making of waves by the thread or the sea. Much later a section called “Spell of the Red Flowers” is free verse presented in neat square blocks of type, evidence of Powles interest in the visual impact of words.

            Powles tells us first that her grandfather used to stich quilts. There was a sewing machine and her grandmother was also into crafts; and “the machine belongs to memory and to a different time. / The machine belongs to the house, which still exits and also doesn’t exist” – introducing us to the persistence of memory, one of her continued themes. Later she tells us “memory is a house with scraped white walls. / I step inside and choose what to take, what to leave behind.” Our memories are always edited ones. She moves on to connect the thread of quilts and texture to the movement of water and the sea, giving examples of the process in making a quilt – cutting, layering, binding, patterning. This interest in craft-work is carried over in her poem “At the Metropolitan Museum, 1990” where she saw “two women strolling through a dark navy blue room filled with Chinese and Japanese silks, jade and red and blue embroidered with birds, leaves and pagodas, everything shimmering in low light. The women reach out to touch the fabrics, forgetting they are behind glass.” Elsewhere she speaks of a gown that can change the colour of a harbour. Again, the fluorescent nature of both water and silk are identified as one. So indeed are what is beautiful in nature.

In other poems, while often referring to South-East Asian crafts [batik etc.], she does occasionally  make nods to the reality of poverty in villages. And yet, what hands have made are also beautiful. In a poem called “A gown is a glacier, receding” she writes “a gown is a rocky slope / a gown is a glacier, receding / a gown is a slow accumulation / a gown is an edifice that forms around an opening / a gown is a fissure where molten rock material emerges” and later “a pleat is a faultline / a pleat is a form of architecture / a pleat is an abrupt geological formation / a pleat must lie outside the borders of gender / a pleat is a sentence written by hand on folded paper.”

The last section of this collection introduces her interest in animals – particularly dogs – and she looks at how preparing food can also be a delicate skill. Her final poems here are about the tides, phases of the moon and the moods they conjure up. 

If I were to categorise the type of poetry Powles writes, I would call it post-modernist romanticism. This is not intended as a slur. Powles writes with delicacy, has an eye for what is beautiful and values the skills of those who can produce tactile art.

 

Something New

 

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

“NEXT: Poems 2016-2021” by Alan Roddick (Otago University Press, $NZ 27:50); “ANOTHER BEAUTIFUL DAY INDOORS” by Erik Kennedy (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $NZ 25); “MEAT LOVERS” by Rebecca Hawkes (Auckland University Press, $NZ 24:99)

 

Alan Roddick is a unique figure in New Zealand literature. Now well into his 80s, he was born in Northern Ireland and has lived in New Zealand for the last 70 years. By profession he was a dentist. Well-known as the literary executor of Charles Brasch (whose Selected Poems he edited), Roddick has produced just three collections of poetry since the 1960s – The Eye Corrects (1969), Getting It Right – Poems 1968-2015 (reviewed on this blog 2016) and now Next – Poems 2016-2021. No irony intended, but I like the speed with which he has written his poetry. All power to the poet who thinks long and carefully about what he publishes instead of churning ‘em out every second year or so. Roddick is thoughtful and witty with a keen eye for the natural scene. This collection’s title Next derives from a quotation by Allen Curnow “…so long as there’s a next there’s no last”. Alan Roddick might be an old man, but he’s not giving up on life. As long as he breathes, he sees and lives and looks forward.

Roddick has organised Next – Poems 2016-2021 into four discrete sections, each of which is dominated by a distinct theme.

Poems recalling childhood and the immaturity of young manhood dominate the first section of eight poems, and naturally most of these poems reconstruct remembered life in Northern Ireland. There is a Belfast childhood memory of Christmas carollers coming to the door in snow (“The Waits”); a sequence of memories involving his father’s disorientation in coming to the other end of the world (“Five Ways to Go”) ; a little boy’s view of his mother buying him new shoes (“Because”); an awkward memory of an American soldier in Belfast during the Second World War (“Captain Conroy’s War”);  and the memory of being a child giving a recitation as part of the entertainment at an adult meeting (“On Mr Sherman’s Agenda). In all these poems there is the inevitable tension between experiencing events as a child would have experienced them and reassessing those same events as a very mature adult.    Greater tension comes in adolescence with “In Memoriam” concerning sexual overtones when watching monkeys behaving as monkeys do in the zoo; and especially “What Happened”, a memory of being a young man shut out of a vital conversation and revealing his more callow state of mind. In this first retrospective section, Roddick’s most perfectly conceived poem is “First Crossing of the Southern Alps” , which yields not only a clear narrative situation (a family awkwardly acclimatising themselves camping in wilder New Zealand terrain) but which gives us a clear understanding of a father’s anxiety - a poem not merely of physical detail but of psychological insight.

The nine poems that make up the second section of Next – Poems 2016-2021 turn firmly to the New Zealand scene. They are concerned with New Zealand landscapes and seascapes, but to see them as mere pictorial displays is to under-rate them. Roddick feels as well as sees the scene. The section opens with “Under Pahia Hill”, a gem of a poem. In its three stanzas there is a clear evocation of a specific place but also of a mood. Read this first stanza: “Cosy Nook. A sudden whiff of seal / sharpens the wind. / You watch from the crook of the hill / seas upon seas hit / the harbour entrance. / To make a home here takes practice.” Now dare to tell me that you don’t want to read the two stanzas that follow. Another fine poem is “Southerly” with its conceit that a house battered by the wind is really a ship sailing through rough seas. “Anticrepuscular” is a precise reflection on the phenomenon of seeing the sun’s setting reflected in the eastern sky; while “Midnight at Mt John” is more than stargazing, again playing with the idea that the skies are seen differently in the Southern Hemisphere from the way they are seen in the Northern Hemisphere. Roddick dedicates two poems to Karl Stead, who has apparently mentored him in his poetic development. His shift from Belfast childhood to being absorbed in the New Zealand scene is complete. But there is old age to contend with. His wittiest poem – as unnerving as sprightly - is “Further Reflections”, when seeing multiple images of oneself in a lift raises the question of where life is leading.

I confess that I was least engaged in the third section, comprising literary witticisms and comments on the writing scene. Vers de societe, perhaps. Polite amusement made out of some meetings with Charles Brasch, a critique of a poem by Yeats, and Roddick’s own version of two Russian lyrics among other things. Very civilised, very discreet.

I was happier in the fourth and final section where Roddick faces old age full on. There are some valedictory poems for deceased friends. “Our Last Meeting” is perhaps wistful about the withering effect of time. A chance meeting with a woman he has not seen for decades has him reflecting “The lights changed, and yet again we learned / how old age can make us look invisible / to the young who thronged the crossing there / around us, between us, submerging us / in rapid, bright-voiced conversations, themselves tomorrow’s ghosts.”  Three poems reference fishing, with “Catch and Release” likening death to a caught fish being released into the stream of… what? Eternity? Oblivion?.  There is an awareness that time is short time, best expressed in “Lockdown: Hold it!” where taking a family photo is always an attempt to freeze time. But childhood memory persists in old age (“The Bagatelle Board”). Beloved landscapes are spoiled by time (“The End of a Road”). And we dream of people long since dead (“At Bluecliffs”). The relentless passage of time – and its implicit destination – is best expressed in “At Last – Level Two” where the clanking of a passing freight train at night picks off the minutes.  It would again be misrepresentation to see all Roddick’s poems in this section as being haunted by old age and decay. One string of images speaks of the poet’s great admiration for practical skills – the fisherman’s steady hand which is able to cut out a dry fly that has wounded a lip; the plumber who has the skill to install a tap properly; the skill needed to use an axe. To be is to do.

Roddick doesn’t rage about not going gentle into that good night. He accepts age and death, but insists that his perceptions are sharp and his observation still keen. And life lasts as long as these things are so.

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            And so to another poet who was born elsewhere. American by birth but New Zealander by choice and based in Christchurch, Erik Kennedy is of a younger and very different generation from Alan Roddick. Kennedy is deeply concerned about climate change and its dire consequences. He co-edited a book on the subject. Kennedy is a polemicist, provocateur and po-faced wit. When I reviewed on this blog his first poetry collection There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime ( 2018) I couldn’t help dividing it into what worked and what didn’t, or the good and the bad of his verse, noting the way his hard irony sometimes turned into whimsy. But there was much real wit and vigour to his work.

            Does his second collection take us down the same paths? Again, we have an ironical title Another Beautiful Day Indoors, and the poetry is preceded by epigraphs condemning capitalism. He nails his colours to the mast at once. And so to a generous collection of 52 poems – or at least 52 offerings, for the second section of this collection, entitled “notes towards a definition of essential work”, is what a publicity sheet calls “a sequence of magical realist short fictions”.

            Let’s look at the poems first.

Climate, conservation and ecological matters still tend to be major concerns for Kennedy.  “Studying the Myth of the Flood” allows him to compare the Biblical flood of Noah with possible inundations brought about by climate change, and to implicitly rebuke us for our complacency.  “The First Plant Grown on the Moon” chides that “The moon is full of foreigners, / with our stiff flags and our left-behind shit. / Some corner of a foreign field will be forever / Earth. Let us tend to it.” “Phosphate From Western Sahara” chastises New Zealand for still extracting Saharan phosphate with negative effects on the environment. These jeremiads can be bracing to read, but there is a downside to Kennedy’s style. It can easily turn to rant and exhortation, and the sensitive touch flies away. Consider “Microplastics in Antarctica”, which deals with an insidious form of pollution. In one stanza, Kennedy likens this phenomenon to global dandruff, with the lines “Scratch the scalp of civilisation / and bits of it go all over the place.” On its own, this is an arresting statement But Kennedy immediately follows it with “Concerned about those embarrassing flakes? / You should be” and we are brought down to the level of an harangue in a demo.

Allied to the ecological themes, there is Kennedy’s ridiculing of business, of capitalism, of our present social and economic set-up in general. “Satellite Insurance” ridicules insurance policies and false hopes based on them. “Open-Plan Office” is a deadpan critique of such architectural designs and the deadening conformism they impose on employees. Deciphering its somewhat surreal imagery, “An Interesting Redundancy Package” appears to be the revenge of somebody who has been fired by an unjust boss. “The Dead Men of 2012” is open-ended in that it appears to be about homeless men made so by the social system. When Kennedy puts together his “Composite Sketch of My Enemy”, he shovels together a mass of things he doesn’t like, such as arrivistes, wine snobs, and those who suck up to powerful bosses. This has the cumulative effect of telling us that the poet himself is a far more principled person than such as these.

Some of Kennedy’s work has the effect of placing two bob each way, giving with one hand and taking away with the other. “The Please Stop Killing Us and Destroying Everything That Sustains Us Society” is ostensibly what its title says, an oration in which somebody pleas for a better world. But the audience that listens to this oration are depicted as comfortable, self-satisfied dreamers and the implication is that such pleas are merely a form of entertainment for the well-to-do. “The Black Friday Elegy” concerns a man complaining in a shopping centre. He appears to have a real complaint, but the poem ends “at least he died doing what he loved / complaining about capitalism”, again suggesting that activism is just a game, or that it is an amusement for the poet. Such pieces come across as resigned hipster irony, capped by the title poem “Another Beautiful Day Indoors” where staying indoors and doing nothing is not only a display of lethargy but a way of life. Sheer whimsy comes in a poem about couple having a drone to deliver the rings to their wedding. And sheer sour-puss-ery comes in Kennedy’s dyspeptic moods. Read “Lives of the Poets” and you are told that poets are either ruined by success or they become too comfortable and conformist. “All Holidays Are Made-Up Holidays” sneers at holidays, while “Young Adult Success Stories” ridicules the whole idea, telling us all successful kids have rich parents and that’s all there is to it.

What do I miss here? I miss any introspection or self-assessment. For Kennedy, the rest of the world is at fault and he alone is clear-sighted. This sort of bashing-the-world may work wonderfully with a full-on, no-holds-barred satirist like Swift or Juvenal. But Kennedy’s stance is more often peevishness than outrage, not helped by the laid-back hipster tone which suggests none of it matters anyway. The wit and (sometimes) the skill are there, but the reader gets battered something awful. Not always though. “Cemetery-Going” is a poem that rings true for me, maybe because it matches my own graveyard experiences. And I give credit to Kennedy for his very nuanced “We’re Nice to Each Other After the Trauma”, a reflection on how people felt in Christchurch after the 2019 massacre. It’s insightful and better than most editorials on the matter.

And what of those “magical realist short fictions” gathered together under the title “notes towards a definition of essential work”? Some are sardonic tales of break-ups and improbabilities in unreal settings. “The Planned Obsolescence Rhapsody” is as obvious a tale as its title – a long joke about deliberately making things that don’t last. “Official Printer to the Government” tells us that bureaucrats quickly become executioners. In another ecological ram-raid, “Early Evening at the Coal Plant” eventually equates coal with people making biological weapons. The title story of this section “Notes Towards a Definition of Essential Work” suggests burglary is as honourable as barbering or any other sanctioned occupation – which, come to think of it, is more an anarchist concept than a Marxist one. At least some of Kennedy’s prose productions are as enigmatic as a Kafka sketch.

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I’ll begin by admitting a prejudice. I first looked at the cover of Rebecca Hawkes’ Meat Lovers and then flicked through the text, noting two art works. Cover and artworks are by the poet herself – and with their naked human beings and fantastical beasts, I saw them as quasi-Hindu images, especially the cover with its blue goddesses sitting on a holy cow. “Is this going to be a work of belated hippie-ism?” thought my suspicious mind.

Then I started reading the poems and at once realised how wrong I was.

Meat Lovers is not only the fruit of close and critical observation, but is also one of the most forceful and accomplished debuts I’ve ever read. Hawkes is an inspired and skilled poet and Meat Lovers is both intoxicating and challenging. The blurb tells me that Hawkes grew up on a Canterbury sheep and beef farm and the country scene is one of her main preoccupations, but this collection is no pastoral idyll. Having been deeply immersed in farm life, Hawkes often presents it with merciless reality.

The collection is divided into two parts. “Meat” deals mainly with the animals that become meat, and “Lovers” deals mainly with the poet’s emotional and love life, with some lesbian overtones. Put together, the title “Meat Lovers” is ironical as the poet’s ongoing carnivore-ism is paired with her deep knowledge of how messy the production of meat usually is.

In the “Meat” section we encounter, among other things, sanitised and wrapped meat in the supermarket and the lure of nearby sweets; childhood memories of the tar on the road to school; the awful demands made by a pony club; the tailing of lambs ; following her mother through a blizzard for special farm work; coming across a lamed sheep and trying to put it out of its misery by killing it; contemplating killing a kitten from a feral pack; and assisting in the slippery blood-wet birth of a calf. In all these cases, Hawkes presents specific details of discomfort. Her wonderful fecundity of imagery is built on real things, not on abstractions or fancy. The effect is visceral. We are placed so close to the things Hawkes describes that we feel the sweat, smell the smells and hear the baaing and snorting.

There is compassion for the animals, but no sentimentality. In “Flesh tones”, the poem about tailing lambs “The lambs hop back into the flock to greet their mothers. They are the future of meat.” In “The Conservationist”, concerning feral felines, a feral kitten is “this soft furred vermin / flawless awful / psychopath in waiting”. There may be tenderness towards animals, but the slaughterhouse is never far away. The poem “Waif & stray” has her feeding and nurturing lambkins who have been separated from their mothers, and for a moment feeling sentimental “But for now… It is just her & the lambs / while all things birth & butchery happen somewhere else.”

While such scenes dominate the collection’s “Meat” section, Hawkes does play some different tunes. The sequence called “Hardcore pastorals” romanticises a little as Hawkes wittily deifies a cow and reveals her sapphic longings. “Petri dish of lab-grown meat” gives us a possible meat utopia, but implies a complex and justified irony by measuring the natural against the synthetic. And “Noonday gorsebloom” is, quite simply, a masterpiece of identity, shape, imagery and history – the type of poem that should appear in all future New Zealand anthologies of poetry.

By now you will have noticed how enthused I am by Meat Lovers – but here I have to put the brake on a little. For whatever reason, I did not find the “Lovers” section as engaging or skilful as the “Meat” section. This is not a prejudice against the subject matter. Hawkes does not stick completely with the vagaries of her love life, although she does chronicle, in “I can be your angle or yuor devil” [misspellings intentional], what appears to be an affair that went badly wrong; and she does reveal some of her interests in “Lesbian vampire film theory”. She also, in “Denying that it was a phase”, gives us some social satire. It is essentially about growing up a bit, when she went to “a dismal fetish ball” and “it turned out celebrating hedonism was / quite boring actually. The display / of everyone’s subversiveness / in uniform corsetry.” How conformist the non-conformists often turn out to be.

None of this rattles me, but the poetry in “Lovers” is limper, less forceful and lacking the energy and dense imagery of “Meat”. It’s almost as if it were written by a younger and more callow poet.

Having said this, half a book of brilliance is still a work of brilliance. Vivat Hawkes!

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.

“FIGURE AND GROUND: POEMS 2012-2018” by Robert McLean (Cold Hub Press, $NZ19:95); “LUXEMBOURG” by Stephen Oliver (Greywacke Press, $NZ29:99); “THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE THE INTERNET IN SPRINGTIME” by Erik Kennedy (Victoria University Press, $NZ25);

Five years ago on this blog, I considered three volumes by one of New Zealand’s most underrated poets, Robert McLean (look up the 2013 posting Robert McLean). I find myself quoted on the blurb of McLean’s latest publication Figure and Ground, but I don’t mind in the least. As I’ve said before, McLean is an erudite poet with a wide knowledge of Western culture. He writes on the assumption that his readers share, or are able to access, a similar knowledge. Unlike most other poets who are his contemporaries, he provides no explanatory end-notes or footnotes when he deploys a literary or historical reference. Apparently he is well-versed in postmodernist literary theory, but I would describe his preferred style as High Modernist. He works hard at the form of his poems, often using traditional metres and rhyme, but he is no blind traditionalist. History and received culture are quarried stone to be whacked and shaped into something significant for us here and now.

In Figure and Ground, McLean sometimes makes specifically New Zealand scenes his topic. “The Terminal” is a sad, elegaic poem about flying out from Christchurch; and “Autumn, Island Bay” is a kiwi paysage moralise. But two other poems referencing New Zealanders place them in exotic settings, to wit the two poems about New Zealanders who fought in Europe in the Second World War,  “Indexes and Libations” written in memory of Dan Davin (whose poems, collected as A Field Officer’s Notebook, were edited by McLean) and “John Mulgan in Greece”. 

Most often, however, McLean’s inspiration is far from home. In “Jacopo’s Vision”, Dante’s son explain the origins of his father’s work. “Alberti’s Complaint” has the Renaissance architect Leon Battista Alberti considered the pressures of patronage and hardship of building. “Housekeeping” comments piquantly on the nunnishness of Emily Dickinson. There is a poem on the heterosexual chauffeur and secretary whom Marcel Proust adored.

None of this is mere dabbling in High Culture, however. Where he comments, McLean questions, and at bottom his questions are searching ones about faith or no faith; aesthetics; the making of legends, and the paradox of the simultaneous necessity and mendacity of legends. “Lines on Tarkovsky” references the Russian director’s film Andrei Rublev, about the medieval icon-painter, and exhorts a boy to  “Embrace your absent father / in light of celluloid. / To salve the aching void / embrace your absent father. / You’ve got no other.”  There is a whole tension between types of literature in the poem “Lie Easy, Walter, or Lie All the Same”, concerned with Walter Savage Landor’s place in Italy. It is ostensibly an anti-romantic poem, telling us “Sightseers swarm Barrett - / Browning’s chintzy resting-place, / love’s stronghold. Landor’s grave / sinks deeper: this terminal garret / where the stoic saved face, / whom playful souls never forgave.” And yet it relents to suggest there is a form of idealism that is not to be disparaged. Quite brilliantly, I think, “In Memory of Anne Sexton” manages at once to celebrate the suicidal, confessional poet while undermining any glamourised ideas of Anne Sexton as prophet. Suffering is suffering – it is not pretty or to be emulated. There’s a simlar two-edged swing to “Hell on Earth” in which McLean is emphatically not debunking the legend of Troy (he wouldn’t be involved in such a foolish and obvious game) but is cautioning us about the blood-soaked truth that lies behind the legend.

I will now do the forbidden thing in reviewing a collection of poetry and nominate my favourite. “The Discovery of Pluto” is dedicated to the British poet Geoffrey Hill, who was deeply enmeshed in philosophy and Christian theology. Here the poet stands against the universe, knowing that it can be perceived only through our limited consciousness, and taking as his inspiration the recent “demotion” of Pluto from planet to large asteroid. “It was a planet. Now it’s not. In / our strictly unblinking cosmos, / thick with dark matter, to be forgotten / is never to have been…/”. Given our serial fallibility about the universe, it is fitting that the next poem is about Giordano Bruno.

Challenging but stimulating – a fine collection.

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I admit that I came to Stephen Oliver’s poetry late. I was first aware of him four years ago, when I guest-edited Poetry New Zealand in its old format  (issue #48, March 2014) and enjoyed writing a brief notice on Oliver’s collection, Intercolonial – a kind of loose epic linking Australia and New Zealand, where tales of discovery jostled with vivid childhood remembrance. This is significant because the blurb of his latest [of nineteen!] collections, Luxembourg, describes Oliver as “Australasian”. Born in Wellington, the man has lived twenty years of his life in Oz before a recent return to Newzild, and he is happy to identify with either country. Or both.

Luxembourg is a capacious collection [nearly 100 pages] of what Oliver has been writing in the last four years.

Much of it references specific New Zealand landscapes. “Tracking Rupert Brooke” is a fantasia set in an earlier New Zealand, about what the Georgian poet might have written has he not been so coy about expressing passion. The poems “El Nino”, “Dilapidated Dream” and “Green Asterisk” comment on Te Kuiti, the King Country and the central North Island. The sequence “Road Notes” is a long collection of short stanzas following the Waikato. Sometimes the attitude to this country is jaded. “Undercover” tells us “Absent twenty years, I left a country of sheep,  / returned to a country of cattle; rivers / wheeze through an iridescent landscape, / gorged on nutrient-rich run off.” It sees the King Country as “run-down rentals / and mouldering hatreds, hobbled by small / town boredoms”

Oliver also references topical or longstanding political situations, sometimes with the eye of a satirist, as in “The Great Repression” or “Scarecrow”, which is more-or-less an anti-Anzac Day poem. “Streets of Kiev” is specifically an anti-Vladimir Putin poem. (“His favourite cocktail, / Polonium-210, he serves up to those who dare oppose.”). “Impress” concerns refugees, and has the same sort of resigned melancholy tone that Ewin Muir used to strike in the 1950s, with such poems as “The Good Town”

What seems to concern Oliver more often, however, is an apocalyptic collapse of poetry and sense into tribalism  (“The Map”) and an apocalyptic collapse of belief systems into anomie (“Testament”). This sense of desolation is also found in the portrait of a single woman in a tumbledown house (“Lace”). There are in this volume so many poems about mental disintegration, unease, and the inability to articulate something meaningful, as in “Nocturne” where  “There is nothing but grainy silence. / A hissing sound, and the darkened objects of the room / surounding me.” The three prose poems “Dark Matter”, “Domes” and “Choristers” are attempts to fit human beings into the universe, given what we now know of its immeasurable vastness, and attempts to harmonise our moden knowledge with ancient, mythic views of  the universe. While Oliver often tries to consider things on a vast, cosmic scale, this can lead to overblown rhetoric, as in the poem “Titan Love Song”. Could this overstatement indicate real insecurity on the poet’s part? Often Oliver’s uncertainty [about self; about time] is palpable, as in “The World’s Basement”, “What Angels Throw” and “Breaking Straws”. Nadir of not really knowing what he values must be the poem “Worry Beads”, where he wants to pray to something or someone, but in the end affirms only the sound of his own words.

Oliver’s attitude towards women is strangely Romantic. “Sister to the Sphinx” comes across as an overstated tribute to a former model, but then one remembers that even the likes of Yeats could go silly and gaga over a pretty face. The later poem “Stone Lintel” is almost as embarrassing from its opening lines’ assertion that  “The gift of slowing time belongs exclusively to / beautiful women and the space they inhabit…”  For the record, seeing good-looking women as beacons of inspiration seems to be part of this poet’s modus scribendi. As best I can decipher it, the title poem, “Luxembourg”, was inspired by the sight of a model on a billboard. She graces the cover and is obviously deemed important enough to have a German language translation placed next to the English language original in this book. Yet these elements of unlikely romantic worship are atoned for by the hard veracity of “The Lost German Girl”, concerning refugees. It has the same sort of straightforward truthfulness as “The Journey”, about a minor poet’s dedication to his work; or as “Broken”, a factual trbute to a trusty old typewriter the poet once cast away. It is when Oliver is not striving too hard for the Grand Gesture that he is at his best.

If I picked a highlight for this book, it would be the six-page tour de force called “Open-Learning Workshops” in which Oliver lays down ironically “rules” for poets, publishers, novelists, academics, book-festival organisers etc on how they should go about their business – and in the process, deflates their pretensions and displays a great deal of worldly wisdom in these fields. This is satire which, an opening notes tell us, is influenced by Auden and Cyril Connelly, but none the worse for that.

Annoyingly necessary footnote: As I have explained before on this blog [see the posting Who is This Ghost Who WalksBeside Me?) I am not the only person from New Zealand, with some literary connections, who is called Nicholas Reid. There is another Nicholas Reid (no relation), an expert on Coleridge and romantic poetry, who started an academic career in New Zealand and has now relocated to Australia. It is this “other” Nicholas Reid who is referenced in Stephen Oliver’s poem “Building Code” and [at least according to one of the publisher’s websites] it is this “other” Nicholas Reid who had a hand in editing Luxembourg. He appears to be a fine chap of good taste, but then so am I, so doubtless the confusion will continue.

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Is whimsy the thin cloak worn by despair?

I’ll leave that conundrum hanging in the air while I perform yet another manouevre forbidden in academically-respectable (i.e. dishonest) poetry criticism. I am going to divide Erik Kennedy’s debut volume There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime into the good and the bad. And because I want to end on a positive note (there are many, many good things in this collection, after all), I will begin with the bad.

It’s this ironical whimsy stuff.

Take the title poem – the very first in the book -  “There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime”. It could be understood (as I understand it) to mean that springtime is not a place like the internet. Therefore it could be taken as a criticism of the internet. But the poet commits himself to no clear viewpoint – so ambiguous whimsy it becomes. A companion poem “Uninstall Your News App and Join a Hiking Club” could be read as a straightforward exhortation to do just that, but again the tone the poet strikes is laid-back hipster irony. Selecting other poems in this collection, I note that “Mailing in a Form Because There’s No Online Form” sees bureaucracy as the new means to confuse and control people as was once the role of war (getting close to conspiracy theory, folks). “You Can’t Teach Creative Writing” offers its title ironically, but then says nothing to refute the title statement as literal truth. Even a straightforward story about the poet’s great-uncle’s footballing career has to have a title that belittles it -  “The Family Lore Poem” – as if to say the poet is sick of family lore poems. Less evasively, “Poem in Which, in Which, in Which” is a harmless bonbon in which the poet ridicules the pomposity of chapter headings in many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels.

Here’s the whimsy-irony thing in relatively innocuous form, but it skirts close to despair in other poems – hence the question with which I began this critique. “Four Directions at the Beach” uses the imagery of a beach to suggest there is no truth in any direction, and the best one can do is to abandon any search for truth and surrender to idle contemplation of the sky. “I Am an Animal Benefitting from Climate Change” is intended as cool irony, but reads as a surrender to the inevitable. In “I Can’t Even” we are schooled with the idea that human creativity is built on sorrow and disaster and may simply be a survival mechanism. “I Rank All the Beautiful Things There Are” has a bit more heft, saying that any form of categorisation is provisional and our tastes change.

I hear your objection to what I have said so far. I appear to be criticising the poet for the What rather than for the How, and we all know that great poems can be made out of very dodgy philosophical ideas, so the What is often less important than the How. But I am considering the How, namely the tone of irony that so often reads as affectation.

Right. I’m glad to have got all my negative comments done with. As I said, There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime has many very good things in it and I’m happy to note them. Rather than poking the ironical borax, “Your Grandfather’s War Stories” gives a larger and more thoughtful possibility of the repeated cycles of history. “Public Power” is a vignette of the first town in the world (Godalming in Surrey, England, in 1881) to have a public electricity supply; and “The Great Sunspot of 1947” is another vignette, this time about how people once interpreted things.  In these three poems, Kennedy sets aside arch irony and looks at things compassionately.

Quite wonderful in this respect is “An Abandoned Farm Near Lockhart, New South Wales”. Like the world’s best poems, it lets its ideas creep up on you rather than bashing you over the head with them. On a superficial level, it is simply a description as its title declares – but note how the poet lets those matters of time, utility and decay enter into it, unforced and unironically.

I have used the term “irony” in a such a negative sense that you may assume I dislike irony in any circumstance. Not so. When it pairs with real wit, irony can work wonders. Take Kennedy’s witty “Georgics” which are , after all, satirical, as they produce such couplets as “A lambent light it is that fill the pastures, but it’s too dark to read. / The wise farmer rises early  to get the best broadband speed.” And “You can ride a tractor from, as the Italians say, the stable to the stars. / The tractor’s GPS is more powerful than the computer on the ship that, some day, will take men to Mars.” Yet also, in a non-solemn way, this witty sally comments on the hardship of farming in a dying economy, even if the farming is industrialised.

Much of Kennedy’s political satire is transparent, clear and pungent, such as  “The Paris Agreement” concerning prevarications over the climate change accord. Sometimes, though, the targets are unclear and the meaning opaque, as with “Growing Fears That the Leadership Contest Has Been Hijacked by Far-Left Infiltrators”. It might have had some immediate topical application as, according to an end-note, it was first printed in a Poets for Corbyn pamphlet. Without such context, its meaning is very unclear indeed.

And, showing how well irony can be used, may I commend the amiable, easy, ironic canters of “Love Poem With Seagull”, the wired couplets of “Amores” and the particularity of “How a New Zealand Sunrise Is Different from Other Sunrises”. As for complete laid-backness, “The Contentment Poem”, about leaving lawn-mowing incompleted, takes the prize. It’s hard not to notice, too, that Kennedy, an expatriate American, in the poem “Remembering America” is very ambiguous about his country of origin, but comes down on the side of rejection.  

Lawks a mercy, but I’ve been very contradictory about this one, haven’t I? This thought occurs to me – often the best volumes of poetry, and the ones you remember longest, are the most provocative. There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime certainly provoked me and annoyed me at times – and at other times made me admire the poet’s skill and insight. This is a way of saying that it is very uneven and that it will probably affect you differently.

What an interesting collection.