Something New

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

“BONFIRES ON THE ICE” by Harry Ricketts ( Te Herenga Waka University Press, $NZ25);  “GIVING BIRTH TO MY FATHER” by Tusiata Avia (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $30.00)“DANCING HEART” by Jan Kemp (published by Tranzlit, Germany); “IF WE KNEW HOW TO WE WOULD” by Emma Barnes (Auckland University Press, $NZ 24.99)  

 

To refer to Harry Ricketts as a seasoned poet is an understatement. So far he has produced eleven collections of poetry plus a book of “Selected Poems”. Regrettably, I have reviewed on this blog-site only a handful of his poetic works, and these reviews were very brief -  his “Just Then”  was, more than anything, jocular and seeded with literary criticism .          “Winter Eyes” , which I saw as showing how older age was coming on but presented by a very urbane wit. And quite apart from his poetry there are the many biographies and other academic works he has published.

Ricketts’s latest work, Bonfires on the Ice, also deals with ageing, with literary references and with wit – very much Ricketts’s style. The title poem “Bonfires on the Ice” is a potpourri of well-known phrases written by earlier poets. The title “Bonfires on the Ice” comes from Rudyard Kipling – not surprising as Ricketts wrote a biography of Kipling.

Unlike many poets, Ricketts presents his poems clearly in different categories. The first section deals with becoming old, loss of friends and dying itself.  Thus he remembers eccentric people in “Aro St. Again”. “Remembering Lauris” appears to be sort of elegy for Lauris Edmond. “Card for Brian” is about an old friend. “He was…” tells us of his great-great uncle who appears to have been a rapscallion. Personally, I am not up enough with 1970s punk music, so I am not sure if Ricketts is for real or has his tongue in cheek when he writes an obituary for “Johnny and the Spasmodics”. “Tangle” moves more soberly into the inevitably of loss. Most important, though, are the last three poems in this section. “Pink Blanket”, ‘Last Day” and “Irregular Villanelle for My Mother”. They are all about the loss of his mother.

The second section, “Down There on a Visit”, is presented in seven pages of couplets. It is a very engaging personal account of visiting the south part of the South Island. I admit to greatly enjoying it, partly because he covers territory which I visited years ago and again more recently. Call it nostalgia on my part. Note too that Ricketts has not given us picture postcards. Admiring the many things he saw, he also suggests the negative things in his journey.

Okay, age, death and travel -  but it is academe that has occupied much of Ricketts’s life. In “The Lecture 3” he says “I’m counting down the lectures / I’ll never give again” and sees how students reacted – sometime negatively. He refers to another poet, Philip Larkin, in “Another Footnote to Larkin” which reads in full “And it’s not just your mum and dad; / lovers, school too, fuck you up. / This is the deal, and Gray might add: / none drinks from Life’s unpoisoned cup. / But if we hand the misery on / from self to others every day, / there’s this to say (Larkin again) we should also be kind while we may.” “Esprit d’escalier” suggests a sort of feud between Ricketts and another academic over how they had interpreted poetry related to the First World War. “The Literary Life 2” examines standard ideas on how to write – or write about poetry and poets. And, again dealing with the type of thing in which an academic would delight, there is “Famous First Words”, where the opening words of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina are called to order [and might I add that I was always sceptical about the truth of Tolstoy’s opening words.] Ricketts does deal with the matter of climate change, but in an almost jocular way in “Villanelle for Gaia”. More forceful is “The Song Sings the News of the World”, written for an event with music and chorus. It ends with the chants “the Song sings of the broken lands / the Song sings of the poisoned  sea /  the Song sings of heads in the sand /  the Song sings  of you and me /  the Song dreams of a world of green /  the Song imagines what still might be.” Rousing stuff if you were there.

“The Stella Poems”  are 15 poems about a fictious character, Stella, daughter of a German father, she living in Wellington. In a note, Ricketts says that in some ways Stella is his alter ego. Stella’s family came from Germany. They were immigrants. In some ways  Ricketts too was an immigrant, still being essentially English. The development  of this sequence shows young Stella moving eventually into middle age and older age. It is something like an elegy.

I wallowed in the fifth section of this collection when I came to “A Weakness for Westerns”. Ricketts, when young, had a love-hate attitude towards Westerns. Exactly how I reacted to Westerns when I was a kid. Ricketts seals his love-hate by then writing “B Movie”, in which he gives us his cowboy version of Robert Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” [Memo to Ricketts: I’ve long believed that Browning’s poem is at least as brilliant as T.S. Eliot’s “Waste Land” so, please, I hope you weren’t knocking the guy.] “The Chemical Life” – apparently referring to the medicine older people have to take – presents an ageing couple who long for the past when it comes to taste. It begins with the words “Each day we practise a kind of magic, / trying to make today resemble / yesterday…” before the speaker sits down and reads a novel by Anthony Trollope – soothing Victorian literature. “Hope” is a little jingle of which Spike Milligan would have been proud. It reads in full thus “Hope is a grey warbler / that whistles down our street, / the tune is thin and sweet, / but always on repeat.”

Finally, with much esprit, Ricketts presents his “The Green Christmas Game”, which is his version  of the medieval poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, except that his 19 stanzas are all limericks.

I’ll make something clear – I thoroughly enjoyed this collection, though I am aware that the tone is often donnish i.e. I am the type of reader who enjoys reading classic literature and I can therefore pick up [probably smugly] all the references to specific poems that Ricketts makes. But this will not be to taste for everyone. 

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            Five years ago Tusiata Avia launched her The Savage-Coloniser Book, a very angry collection of poetry about the evils of European colonisation in the Pacific. There are some angry poems in Giving Birth to My Father too, but not many. Her tone is now very different. Almost the length of a novel, it is about personal things, family, community, her connections with Samoa and above all the importance of her deceased father, Namulau’ulu Mikaio Avia. She says she has spent eight years preparing this book.

The first section of this collection is labelled  “This is how it was supposed to go”.  Her father’s funeral should have been performed the traditional Samoan way for a high chief, with an orator speaking, all rites observed, and his body laid out for three days in his house. But, as the second section says, “This is how it went”. It is not the seemly funeral she had hoped for. In her grief, she calls out what she sees as the near-hypocrisy of some of the mourners who claim to have admired her father, but who simply want to show their own importance. Distant cousins smother her. In anger she says “I see myself a raging Jesus / upturning their usury table, / driving them all out of the temple of my father’s body.” As for giving birth to her father, she sees him leaving where “I think about you in labour that night / birthing yourself out of this world / your pains coming faster and faster”.

Is she perhaps really overwhelmed by her sorrow? She spends much time thinking of the positives and the achievements of her father. There is a real sense of the life of her father in the years when he was a young man, living and working in the South Island, carefully learning the English language and fishing “in the cold waters of the Waimakariri”, as well as looking after his family and being a great musician playing many instruments. There were some tragedies like the death of “my baby brother with the big eyes”, yet the family holds together.

But throughout Giving Birth to My Father there is a sense of being caught between two different cultures. There is the tension of living in New Zealand and then meeting relations in Samoa who have mores which are different from hers. At one point she brashly declares  “being in Samoa is much the same as being dead, when you come back from Samoa you are often someone else”. In the poem “Samoan was my father’s mother tongue” she gives a reminder of how she had to learn the Samoan language fully only when she was a mature adult  - and when her own daughter was learning the language.

Apart from the odd jab, there is little rancour in Giving Birth to My Father. There is an affirmation of father and family, pride in being Samoan, awareness of living in two cultures and the inevitable tragedy of death. It is a very rewarding collection in many ways. 

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            Jan Kemp’s Dancing Heart is sub-titled “New & Selected Poems 1968- 2024”. The poems were selected and edited by Jack Ross. Kemp now lives in Germany with her German husband, a professor. Many of her new poems refer to the European scene and to classic situations..

The first 32 pages are new poems called “Dancing Heart.” In these, there is an acute awareness of becoming older, and some of her first poems in this selection say so. Thus the poem “Forest burial” wherein “We’ll sink before AI / is rife, we’ll have / known human lives. / And human love”.   And in the poem “Shedding” she tells us it is  “Time soon to start shedding” and giving things away. The poem “Crater” begins “A Week ago / on the crater’s edge / I looked down & saw / endless nothingness / & death”. But there is some hope in older age with poems about love and friendship and in one of her best poems “Anima mundi” she salutes the glories of nature where “I have my own cathedral here - / the nave-like path / leads through sunlit trees / where light filters / as through green, stained- glass windows.” Kemp often tries to work out some sort of belief. Could it be love itself? Or could she be trying to work out a sort of home-made religion? At any rate she sometimes quotes the Bible and wonders about it, as she did in some of her earlier collections where Dante often turned up. But she stoutly rejects any particular religion.

Those are the new poems. The rest, taking up most of this volume, are the eight collections Kemp wrote earlier, going back to the 1970s as selected by Jack Ross. These are “Against the Softness of Women” (1971 – 1974); “Diamonds and Gravel” (1975 – 1978) ; “The Other Hemisphere” (1980 – 1990”); “The Sky’s Enormous Jug” (1968 – 1998) ; “Only One Angel” (1991 – 2001) ; “Dante’s Heaven” (1999 – 2005) ; “Voice Tracks” (2002 – 20120); and “Black Ice & the Love Planet” (2012 – 2019” ). Of course there is every so often concern for the status of women, but she is more interested with intimacy, love, various countries, religion, beliefs  and nature. Most important, she has the great merit of writing clearly and without the pretentious vocabulary that plagues many academics or younger poets.

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            Emma Barnes’s “ If We Knew How We Would” warns us in a sort of preface that “this book deals with themes of suicide, grief and depression” and also says “particularly avoid the middle section if you aren’t up to this content.” This is almost a provoking “dare”. Even so, Barnes does indeed deal with important things – especially intimate things. The focus is on the human body and the human creatures that we are. The poem “I am a circle” says “You can see I am one thousand years old in a body made of all the decisions of ancestors and the cold crush of time.” Determinism is there. Throughout, this collection is made of prose poetry, presented in solid blocks of print. And nearly all of the poetry is told in the first person. Is this collection near to being confessional? Maybe. At any rate, much of Barnes’s life seems to be made bare. In a long collection Part One, “In Our Hands”, appears to chronical the break-up of a couple who knew each other contentiously. One poem named “Chain of connected resentment” suggests fearsome love-hate. Part Two, “If We Knew How To We Would”, deals with deep depression and thoughts of suicide. And Part Three, “The Truth” analyses the body itself, with the poem “One metre” telling us “I am just cells layered like lacquer, like resin, like subcutaneous fat.” While often coming near to despair, Barnes buoys us up with unexpected imagery and fast moving one-liners – bracing, even if the subject is often sombre.

Something New

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

“A FIELD OFFICER’S NOTEBOOK – Selected Poems” by Dan Davin, edited with an introduction by Robert McLean (Cold Hub Press, $NZ29:95); “THE QUEST” by Yannis Kyrlis (English language translation by Maria Georgala) (Austen Macauley Publishers, no price given); “WALKING TO JUTLAND STREET” by Michael Steven (Otago University Press, $NZ 27:50); “THE FACTS” by Therese Lloyd (Victoria University Press, $NZ25); “ARE FRIENDS ELECTRIC?” by Helen Heath (Victoria University Press, $NZ25); “WINTER EYES” by Harry Ricketts (Victoria University Press, $NZ25); "WHISPER OF A CROW'S WING" by Majella Cullinane (Otago University Press, $NZ27:50)

 

Dan Davin (1913-1990) was best known as a novelist, short-story writer and academic publisher. He had only a few poems published in his lifetime and was not primarily known as a poet. Nevertheless, he did fill notebooks with poems and ideas for poems, none of which have hitherto been made public. Robert McLean has selected, edited and written a very informative introduction to A Field Officer’s Notebook, presenting what he sees as the best of Davin’s published and unpublished poems. The title was one which Davin himself considered for such a collection.

As McLean’s introduction explains, Davin wrote poetry in three periods of his life only, marked in this collection by the headings “Before”, “During” and “After”. The “Before” was in the late 1930s, when Davin was a young man in England, remembering New Zealand and considering a career. The “During” was the Second World War, probably the pivotal period of Davin’s life, when he served with the New Zealand Division in Crete, North Africa and Italy. The “After” was years later, in old age in the 1980s and in retirement from the world of publishing.

McLean speaks of Davin’s “inescapable minor key” in that so many of these poems are wistful, lamenting, accepting of death without eternal rewards and only occasionally finding pleasure in nostalgic, fragmented memories of childhood. In McLean’s view the poems written during the war are Davin’s best.  McLean characterises the poets of the First World War as moving from “idealism to cynicism”, whereas the poets of the Second World War moved from “cynicism to nihilism”. This, he says, was Davin’s course. Though inflected with classical allusions, the poems Davin wrote in North Africa are ironic and raw. They are, says McLean “insistently negative”. He contrasts Davin’s war poems with those of New Zealand’s two best-known servicemen poets of the Second World War, M.K. Joseph and Denis Glover. Davin, he notes, wrote his best wartime poems while the conflict was still in progress. The other two poets wrote in postwar recollection.

This is all the framework of A Field Officer’s Notebook, but what of the poems themselves? We cannot escape the fact that they are poems of their time. Many of the later poems are free-form – perhaps in an “unfinished” state – while the earlier ones tend to be in stricter traditional metres. It is impossible to ignore the dated diction that the younger  man often favours (“ponder” “chide” etc.)

The poems of the “Before” section present a young man’s anxieties, not just in having left comfortable childhood behind, but in the sense of having so far achieved nothing in his life (see especially the poem “In what diversity of sterile tasks”). Perhaps there is a touch of envy at those who got ahead of him academically, as in “Had I constrained my spirit then”,  written in 1937, where Davin claims to spurn Academe in favour of Bohemia. In its entirety, it goes thus:

Had I constrained my spirit then


To put on learning’s gown


I might have scorned the life of men

And walked with the scholar’s frown.

Well-informed I should have strode

Lettered and erudite


Subscribing to a college code


And mouthing maxims trite.

I might have lost humanity

And withered to a don


But I preferred profanity

Love and demijohn.

Well, perhaps Davin preferred cussing, shagging and drinking to scholarship, but the preference clearly wasn’t unmixed.

The general tone of the “During” section is less defensive. When Davin writes of the dead under snow, he sees no consolation. His poem “Haunted by mysteries, life, time, and death” does not accept the concept (so much a focus for Wallace Stevens) that living joys and sensuality are made more precious and wonderful by the prospect of annihilation in death. Davin won’t accept even that apologia for death, because death haunts and pollutes the joys of life, as in the lines “Wolves exiled from the light / Their jealousies prowl still / About the brief campfires of our love, / Living a ghoulish life / within the echoes of our laughter”. Davin cannot write a poem about soldiers enjoying an evening boozing and having a knees-up. Instead his poem “Morning Fatigue in the Canteen” depicts the morning-after clean up of cigarette butts and slops.

The most finished poems of Davin’s wartime experience are, it seems to me, three of the most confronting. “Egyptian Madonna” is a poem of disgust as the poet describes in horrible detail the sight of an undernourished child being suckled by an impoverished mother. “Cairo Cleopatra” is just as explicit in its view of a prostitute – or at least of a prostitute’s body being used by many soldiers. As for “Grave near Sirte”, the harshest poem in the book, it concerns the complete anonymity of death and the way we inevitably forget the dead, regardless of what the monuments say.

The imagery of some of the poems in the “After” section clearly sets them in the London of the 1980s. Some, dare I say it, are trite aphorisms. There are memories of Davin’s Irish-New Zealand childhood, and he babbles of the green fields, perhaps covered in gorse, of Gore and Invercargill. Yet he is still frequently referencing and re-imagining the war, with fragments of a poem about El Alamein, and quoted snatches of an ironic song about Ravenstein (the German general who was captured in North Africa by a detachment of New Zealanders). His envoi to the war is “Why not be dead?” which goes thus: “Why not be dead? / 
The old dead soldier said.
/ It’s really far less trouble
 / And there are no orders, no jankers, here, /  To be carried out at the double.”

This is the best epitaph the unhappy ex-soldier poet could write for himself.

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It is flattering when a man on the other side of the world writes and asks me if I could review on my blog his collection of short stories. When the Greek writer Yannis Kyrlis wrote from Athens to ask if I would review The Quest, I readily said I would. This slim volume (138 pages) consists of twelve short stories, many of them very brief. The longest is the title-story “The Quest” at 32 pages, followed by “Just Don’t Forget the Way” at 30 pages.

Most [but not all] of the collection’s shorter stories are written in the detached third-person voice and most take the form of fables, parables or visions – more extended image than sequential narrative. The settings are often unreal – I hesistate to say surreal – being both everywhere and nowhere. In “The Threat” a man defends his house from men who want to destroy it – or do they? “The Sceptre” has lovers quarrelling near a rubbish dump, where a walking cane becomes a symbol for antiquated patriarchal authority. “Some Black Birds” is a simple shocker while “Confessions in a Café” presents a rather convoluted discussion in a café between older and younger people of artistic pretensions, ending with a reconciliation between the generations. Symbolism – or extended metaphor – hangs heavily over some stories. “The Stranger” presents a literal foot race as the epitome of the urban rat race. “The Painter of St George” shows a painter’s confidence ruined by a hostile review. “Before the Dawn” is a soul journey story set among street people. “The Little Girl with Cloth Legs” plays with very heavy symbolism indeed as an alluring childhood memory is exorcised by a Witch (or is that Fate?). “The Course of a Crisis” is most definitely a parable, about our need for enemies in order to sharpen our thoughts.

            Thus I have name-checked my way through nearly all of this volume’s shorter offerings. They sound at least a little like the shorter pieces of Kafka in their arbitrary conclusions and not-quite-diagnosed sense of menace. I would advise that they be read carefully, one at a time, or their simlarity of style could become oppressive.

Far more interesting, I think, are the two longer pieces, both written in the first person and therefore perhaps signalling a greater engagement on the author’s part. Oddly, one is a dreamlike, almost surreal piece, while the other is strictly realistic.

“The Quest” is the surreal one, of the Alice-in-Wonderland variety with its abrupt transitions. The narrator has literally lost his heart and is fishing for it in murky water. People incite him to suicide. He is set before a sort of tribunal, convened in a tavern, which accuses him of wilfully losing his heart. His friend and protector is called “the Illustrator”. At one point his heart is a leaf hanging on a tree. At another he is confronted by a powerful female figure who accuses him of throwing his heart away on her. It is hard to read “The Quest” without plucking out symbols – the dead tree, the tower, and perhaps “the Illustrator”, symbolising conscience or art – something that can put the narrator’s experiences into words and can rationalise them. But as to what it means…. like most surrealism, it simply is not reducable to a formula. Kafka’s K. really would be at home in its atmosphere of meaningless menace – a nightmare in images.

Personal taste leads me to relate much more favourably to “Just Don’t Forget the Way”, a realistic presentation of the childhood memories of a man who lived in an impoverished village – not that the poverty is played up by the narrator, who would have been too young to diagnose such things. Poverty is implied by the fact that the narrator’s father has had to leave for Germany to find work and it is implied by the bitter quarrels housewives have over nothing – that nothing being the meagre rations they have to feed their families. At one point, the narrator’s gang of kids find the corpse of  a man who has committed suicide, presumably from despair. This is a robust and straightforward child’s narrative, and it gives a kid’s eye-view of (Greek) political events that the kid does not understand. Only towards the end do we realise that it is set just after the Colonels have staged their coup.

But there is one snag in this story. It has to do with the uncertain nature of the translation from Greek into English. The matter is not as evident in the volume’s more surreal stories, where unrealistic flourishes of language are part of the territory.  But in a realistic story like “Just Don’t Forget the Way”, it is jarring to find a kid saying “he will bestow me his bicycle” or “a new kid who came lately to our neighbourhood”, or for one quarrelling woman to use the word “foolish” as a form of address, as in “What can you tell me, foolish?” rather than something like “you fool”. To me, this unidiomatic English suggests that English is not the translator’s first language.

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            I have to provide a collective apology to the five poets whose work I cover very briefly in what follows. On this blog, I try to consider collections of poetry in detail, but given that I am now posting only fortnightly, this is becoming harder to do, so – not for the first time – I am here providing “notices” rather full-length critiques. I hope this is satisfactory. 

This may be a brash thing to say, but Michael Steven’s debut volume Walking to Jutland Street fills me with an odd sort of nostalgia. It situations itself in a well-established New Zealand tradition – as the blurb says, it’s partly under the influence of New Zealand poets Olds, Orr, Johnson and (maybe) Baxter. This is the realist poetry of blokes in hard circumstances, in the workshop or in the grotty Dunedin student flat, sometimes among bums, beats, hopheads [cor! listen to my dated slang!] – in a word Bohemians, trying to find some sort of karmic truth. I like the plain statement of all this and I note there’s another layer of nostagia here in that Steven himself is clearly looking back on his life as it was and not as it is. The excellent descriptive title poem “Walking Jutland Street” says as much, especially in its closing line “I am writing these lines from another life.” In saying it’s realist, I’m not dismissing this very arresting collection as a series of literalist snapshots. Steven peppers his verse with unexpected jabs of telling imagery, and he has a wicked ironic wit. Check out one of his best, “Educating SR-3781”, which uses a funny-sad story to point up the difference between machine and human being. In an odd sort of way, Steven moralises, too. The opening poem might be a wild childhood cavort with an excited tone of whoop-de-do, and later ones have rich descriptions of travel in Asia – but as for the Bohemian ones, Steven often admits that there was a destructive side to the Bohemian life.

Therese Lloyd’s The Facts is a book of withdrawal, of unhappiness, of a desperate attempt to find something positive in life. A number of her poems are [to use a word she herself uses in her notes] ekphrastic – that is, they are comments on existing works of art or images, and there is a section which plays variations on the poetry of Mallarme. I think I am justified in saying that some of them are fairly opaque. Central to the collection, however, is the sense of aging and, apparently, an account of a marriage that didn’t work. So the tone is often very confessional. I found myself most absorbed in two poems. The first is the prose poem “On Looking at Photographs in High School Yearbooks”, which negotiates cleverly the task of being at once dismissive of, and nostalgic for, what is now dead and gone. The second is the eponymous nine-page poem “The Facts”, a consciously candid view of a failing marriage written more in lucid dissection than in anger. Its imagery is both complex and engaging, but also often bleak. I have to agree with Hera Lindsay Bird’s comment (quoted in the blurb) that this book “won’t make you feel better”.

I am going to begin by admitting a prejudice. I am prejudiced in favour of the poetry of Helen Heath. When I reviewed her first collection Graft on this blog in 2012, I praised her for her humane clear-headedness and her engagement with science. I find these same qualities in her new collection Are Friends Electric?, although this is a volume that heads in some new directions. The first section (also called “Are Friends Electric?”) is heavily footnoted as it contains many “found poems” and many allusions to, or quotations from, other people’s texts. Often I find the concept of “found poems” offputting. Too often they become exercises in isolating, and implicitly being ironical or mocking about, what somebody else has written. But this is not Helen Heath’s style. What she finds she transforms. The sequence about “Strandbeests” really does become an engrossing reflection on human-made concepts and imagined evolutionary processes. Even more arresting, the prose poem “The Anthropocene” connects us human beings with bird-calls in a most unexpected and refreshing way. If I do not connect as whole-heartedly with the poems, in this first section, on love and relationships, it may simply be that they reflect the mores of a generation different from my own. The second long section, called “Reprogramming the Heart” is more confessional. Most of its poems are in the first person, dealing with pregnancy, birth, motherhood and (apparently) widowhood among other things. The matter of technology and science is not forgotten, however, for Heath has a consistent train of images linking us [human beings] to the cyber world and to artificial intelligence. Once again, her style is polished and her expression is clear.

I can take Winter Eyes only to mean the eyes of somebody who is heading into winter – that is, getting nearer to old age. In Harry Ricketts’ latest collection, the words come from the last line of the poem “Sansibar oder der letzte Grund”, which asserts “Things look different through winter eyes”. These poems are indeed elegaic and backward looking in the main. Many appear to reach back to mildly-raffish student years (listening to rock music and taking hols on the Continent) and the years of being an aspiring academic. There are a number of anecdotes concerning well-known literary identities either met or talked about, and of course there are references to canonical literature.  Some poems seem to allude to a youthful love (or do they?) and some are certainly about a lost relationship with a stepson. Not that this is maudlin. The tone is more often jocular , knowing and perhaps resigned. I am not sure that Harry Ricketts would necessarily appreciate the comparison, but I read this collection with the same sort of pleasure I get from reading the chattier, more relaxed poems of W.H.Auden’s mellow years. They are urbane and often witty.

Majella Cullinane’s Whisper of a Crow’s Wing is an extraordinary book and unexpected in the sense that it is a type of poetry rarely published in New Zealand now. Suggesting a strong awareness of earlier forms, the collection’s epigraph is, fittingly, a quotation from Walter de la Mare’s “The Listeners”. An Irish expatriate now resident in New Zealand, Majella Cullinane combines a romantic sensibility with a modernist sharpness. Her poetry has much very Irish (Catholic) imagery together with specifically New Zealand imagery. (The blurb tells me it is being published simultaneously in New Zealand and Ireland). There is much reference to a deep past. The whole section “The Hours” links the traditional monastic canonical hours with present day urban life. Much of the final section “Cut Away the Masts” (including the surging and terrifying poem “A Woman Was Seen”) is based on materials drawn from letters written in the nineteenth century. In the poem “Displaced”, it is as if Cullinane has inserted herself into the spirit of an immigrant from earlier centuries. Nature is numinous in the world depicted here.  And it is easily anthropomorphised. There is “a gust throwing the eucalyptus on the hill into a quandary” in the poem “First Light”. Crows are portents of death in the collection’s title poem; or they are linked to the human skill of literacy, as in “the black letters on this page / as they move across the white space, which remind me / of crows stalking frozen trees” (in “Finale to the Season”). I do not wish to be reductive, but the general tone of this collection is a sense of longing. Whisper of a Crow’s Wing is fey in the original and non-pejorative sense of the word – it senses the presence of things not quite seen (see the poem“Seeing Things”). There is much mist, much fog, much sea-coast. Am I resorting to racial stereotypes if I say it is very Celtic? Yet it is also confessional. The whole section “As Good As” appears to refer to a miscarriage in mythological terms and includes the wrenching line “I would fashion the smallest gap you could sneak through” . I’m impressed.

Something New

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

“THE PENGUIN BOOK OF NEW ZEALAND WAR WRITING” Edited by Harry Ricketts and Gavin McLean (Penguin-Random House, $NZ65)

            “Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea,” Samuel Johnson remarked famously about 250 years ago.

            The remark has been rebutted or deplored numerous times by those who wish to emphasise the ways of peace, and those who regard dreams of soldiership as a sign of barbarism. Nevertheless, I think Dr Johnson was onto something. There is, somewhere in the psyche of most males, a respect for warriors and a vague dream of being a soldier, even if it goes no deeper than memories of childhood games about leading the charge or capturing the pillbox single-handedly.

And New Zealand, for all its social liberalism, is one of the countries where the dream most persists, especially as for New Zealanders, wars are adventures that take place overseas. In New Zealand itself there has been no war, in any real sense of the word, for about 150 years. Given that Anzac Day is our most respected holiday, given that the All Blacks are national heroes for playing a game that is ritualised warfare, given that memorials to war-dead appear prominently in every New Zealand town and city, it is harder to get away from martial imagery in New Zealand than it is to get away from the sea.

I’m reviewing a very good anthology, The Penguin Book of New Zealand War Writing, and I have taken over a month picking my way through it and considering it. That’s because all the time I’m measuring it against my own knowledge of wars in which New Zealanders have been involved, and of people I know who have been to war or have at least been in the forces. I am a most unwarlike person – bespectacled, over-weight, addicted to sedentary pleasures and to reading far too many books. Not soldier material and over-age anyway. The family I come from is not notably martial either. But my father was in uniform in the Second World War, like thousands of other New Zealand conscripts; one of my elder brothers did a 20-year hitch in the RNZAF, and another was a career soldier who became part of the top brass [see the posting Goodbye Soldier]. As I said, it’s hard to get away from this military stuff in New Zealand, even if the only shot I ever fired was when I was a teenager and my soldier brother took it into his head, one afternoon, to teach me to shoot. One fierce recoil of his rifle, bruising my shoulder, was enough to persuade him of my incompetence and to abandon his lesson.

Like most New Zealand males, then, I am no soldier, but I am still very interested in the stuff soldiers do.

The Penguin Book of New Zealand War Writing was edited by Gavin McLean, senior historian at the Ministry of Culture and Heritage, and Harry Ricketts, Professor of English, poet and editor (whose father was, I believe, a career soldier). In his introduction, Harry Ricketts quite rightly points out the persistence of the myth of the New Zealand soldier as a laconic, modest, resourceful, practical joker. Ricketts notes that, before the great OE became possible for most people, being a New Zealand soldier, engaged in foreign wars, always had an element of tourism attached to it. He is sceptical of the “chauvinistic” (p.10) glorification of Kiwi nationalism expressed in Maurice Shadbolt’s play Once on Chunuk Bair. But he does endorse the more temperate version of Kiwi nationalism, which Ormond Burton attached to Gallipoli. In short, Ricketts establishes quickly both his respect for soldiers and his distaste for exaggerated versions of their exploits. Regarding the editorial process, Rickett’s introduction tells us “ ‘Material of sufficient quality’ has throughout been the guiding principle for our selection (though personal taste and ignorance inevitably play their part.” This, he declares, means the book is an anthology of “ ‘war writing’ and the emphasis is quite as much on ‘writing’ as on ‘war’ ”. (p.13) In prose, poetry, playscript and news story, as much space is given to the home-front reflections of non-combatants and to general reactions to war as to combat zone reportage and fictions.

Sensibly, the anthology runs chronologically, not according to when things were written but according to which wars and conflicts the writing references. Contemporary reports rub shoulders with much later fictional or historical accounts of the same events. Doubtless there were many armed conflicts in New Zealand before Pakeha touched the country, but there was nobody to write anything down about them. Therefore, stretching the meaning of “war” somewhat, the first selections in The Penguin Book of New Zealand War Writing are three separate versions of Abel Tasman’s lethal encounter with Maori in 1642 and James Cook’s ditto in 1769. Nearly 500 big pages later, and before a closing section of general “Reflections” on war, the last conflicts referenced are in Iraq and Afghanistan, with a selection from Marianne Elliott’s Zen Under Fire [see posting thereupon]. Between lie sections on nineteenth century wars between Maori and Pakeha; “imperial” wars, meaning the Boer War and the First World War (subdivided into Home Front, Gallipoli and Western Front); the Second World War (subdivided many ways); and “The Cold War and After” – meaning Korea, Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan.

Some of the selections are familiar acquaintances – they are the type of thing that could not decently be left out of an anthology like this. Thus, from the First World War, Archibald Baxter’s wrenching account of “Field Punishment Number One” from his pacifist classic We Will Not Cease, and a generous selection from Robyn Hyde’s first “Starkie” book Passport to Hell and that delightful passage about rats gnawing corpses from John A. Lee’s Civilian Into Soldier. Or from the Second World War, Jim Henderson’s account, from Gunner Inglorious, of being treated surprisingly well by German doctors and medics after he was shot up; and a selection from Dan Davin’s rather chaotic novel For the Rest of Our Lives; and John Mulgan describing German reprisals against Greek partisans in Report on Experience. A generous slice of Vincent O’Sullivan’s Shuriken is reproduced, as well as Rowley Habib’s tough, coarse and effective poem on the Maori Battalion “The Raw Men”, and (pre-Second World War) dispatches from Robin Hyde in war-torn China and Geoffrey Cox at the siege of Madrid in the Spanish Civil War.

There are some selections that might be said to reinforce the received view of the New Zealand soldier, such a Jock Phillips’ account, from A Man’s Country, of Kiwi soldiers in the Boer War building their own legend of hardiness and refusing to be subservient to those snooty Pommy officers. There are others which are purely heroic in tone. In the whole anthology, the selection which reports heroics most admiringly and uncritically must be Alan Mitchell’s (1945) account of 23-year-old James Ward winning his VC by crawling out on the wing of a bomber in flight to put out a dangerous fire.

If there are many things that are familiar here, there are also more obscure things that the anthologists have done well to resurrect – among the best, Donald Lea’s First World War squib “Gold Stripe”, which as poetry might be dated barrack-room stuff, but which is much more honest about the nagging pettiness of a soldier’s life than later and more stridently “anti-war” poetry ever was. Another “find” is Alice Webb’s short-story “The Patriot” (written in 1925), with its vivid account of a young man setting off for war with naïve enthusiasm.

As a general comment, it has to be said that the selected writers’ attitudes towards war become darker and more critical the nearer the anthology approaches our own times. The selections referencing the Korean War, for example, begin with three anti-war poems: Hone Tuwhare’s “No Ordinary Sun” and Keith Sinclair’s “The Bomb is Made”, both protesting against nuclear weapons, and James K. Baxter’s rude (but bloody funny) “Harry Fat and Uncle Sam”, protesting New Zealand’s being embraced by the United States. Nobody is gung-ho writing about the Vietnam War, and many of the passages about the Home Front in the Second World War are dispiriting and drab – Frank Sargeson’s typically misogynistic story “The Hole That Jack Dug”, Greville Texidor’s sad tale “Anyone Home?” about the impossibility of a returned serviceman easily resuming domestic life, and the memories of a conscientious objector Walter Lawry.  (On the other hand, Kevin Ireland’s Home Front piece is a boisterous and comic childhood memory of adult lunacy in Devonport.)

The best feature of the anthology’s arrangement is the way it lets us compare different versions of the same events, by looking at passages that sit side by side. This often leads to side-thoughts on the way history judges events that once seemed above reproach. For example, I find James Cowan’s (1911) account of the death of Von Tempsky in the New Zealand Wars to be a far from vivid piece of writing than Maurice Shadbolt’s fictionalised version of the same event written nearly eighty years later. And, coming back to what is referenced pointedly in the Introduction, Shadbolt’s romanticised version of Gallipoli in Once on Chunuk Bair sits beside Ormond Burton’s sober account of the campaign in The Silent Division. The anthologists say that Shadbolt “perfectly met the nation-building needs of the 1980s [but his] mythologising patently required a considerable amount of historical distortion, omission, and plain wish fulfilment…[which]… has recently started to come under sharper scrutiny.” (p.147)

By contrast, Ormond’s account gives us [in Ormond’s words] “Scorching heat, swarms of venomous flies, hosts of never-ending lice, thirst, the pervading stench of the unburied dead, and then a new experience – the frightful monotony of war. A dangerous life is not necessarily an exciting one.” An unheroic, matter-of-fact endurance rather than a nationalistic hurrah.

I assume this is enough to convince you that this is a capacious and worthwhile anthology.

Now for a few niggles – and they are only niggles. Why is R. A. K. Mason’s “Sonnet to MacArthur’s Eyes” slotted into the Second World War Home Front section? I can only assume that this was some sort of mistake, as the poem is a protest poem about the Korean War. I am further surprised that the “musket wars” of the 1810s and 1820s are hardly represented. Granted that there may not be much contemporaneous writing about them, they have nevertheless been raked over by many historians and I believe they produced at least some quotable passages. I am aware that Guthrie Wilson is no longer highly regarded, but I still find it odd that his Second World War novel Brave Company (concerning New Zealanders fighting in Italy) goes unrepresented. In its day (the early 1950s) it was very highly regarded – I pull my battered old Corgi paperback copy off the shelf and find the blurb has novelist Eric Linklater declaring it  superior to All Quiet on the Western Front, forsooth. I am pleased to see the selection from Jack Elworthy’s book Greece Crete Stalag Dachau [see post thereupon], but think it a pity that it is not one of his very unheroic passages about the retreat through Greece. Finally, I believe M.K.Joseph’s I’ll Soldier No More [unrepresented] says more about military life than his admittedly intriguing A Soldier’s Tale, and I wonder if the latter was chosen to justify reproducing “Dichtung und Wahrheit”, Allen Curnow’s petulant and vindictive poem about it. [My own view on this matter – if Curnow didn’t like Joseph’s novel, he could have trotted the few paces down to his colleague’s office and had a friendly chat about it, rather than spilling his guts in print – Mike Joseph wasn’t the sort of guy who would have belted him one.]

But you see what I am doing, don’t you? I’m now telling what I would have chosen if I had been the anthologist. Not a very nice game. A few years back, when a large but very imperfect anthology of New Zealand writing was produced, many reviewers chipped in to point out all the writers who should have been included. One of the anthologists retorted that they were producing an anthology, not a telephone directory. A fair enough retort I suppose, even if defensive. So I will desist with my niggles at this point and reaffirm that The Penguin Book of New Zealand War Writing delivers the promised goods.