Someting New

 

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

“over under fed” by Amy Marguerite (Auckland University Press, $24.99); “Makeshift Seasons” by Kate Camp (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $NZ25); “Clay Eaters” by Gregory Kan (Auckland University Press, $29.99); “The Intimacy Bus” by Janet Charman (Otago University Press, $30)

                     

            There’s a strong possibility that I will be chastised by some if I point out that the feverish, overloaded and yet brilliant imagery and metaphor in Amy Marguerite’s debut collection over under fed is similar to the wildness and fervour of the teenaged genius Rimbaud. Yes, she does use the current affectation of writing “I” as “i”. Yes she does write everything in lower case. Yes she does sometimes run sentences together. But her work is compelling, her images hold attention and in the end we get a whole life’s story. She dedicates her opus “For the quietly immoderate” and much immoderation there is. Amy Marguerite is an adult woman, but her narrative – such as it is – is focused on her adolescence. To put it simply, she was plagued by anorexia nervosa, a condition that is most often connected with teenage girls, and she spent time in hospital wards. Every so often, we are given poems headed “discharge notes”. Over under fed is divided into four sections - “terms and conditions” “love language” “ward 25” and “hollowing full” and in a way they do move us towards a sort of conclusion – apparently a final escape from her anorexia nervosa condition. She is now apparently over being under fed - hence the book’s title. But as the four sections often overlap, I will read the work as one ongoing narrative.

A febrile, fragile psyche is suggested at once in the opening poem “far too blue” which sets the pace with “I have grown appendages of contempt / for many things. I believe in god because people / are too digestible. I am terrible at staying / in touch unless they are exceptionally interesting…/… I give up at once on anything I cannot immediately be / brilliant at…” And the following poem “reuptake inhibitor” declares “it seems / a cliff is only dangerous / after you jump of  / of it and I am so tired / of jumping”. [A statement which she refutes much later in this collection]. This signals deep depression. Sequential poems tell us that love is sadness, that she is out of the beat when it comes to music, and in the “july poem” “I feel like a hairdresser / turning away / the kids with headlice…”.   There is evidence of disorderly eating as a teenager. Much later in the collection there is the poem “when my body was Amorphophallus titanium” again with a lack of confidence as a teenager and listing all the things she was not able to do with ease.

There is also the problem of limerence [a term created by a psychiatrist in the 1960s] which means having obsessive love for somebody else, but without reciprocation [I confess I had to look this up]. Amy Marguerite writes a poem called “limerence” which asks “why do I obsess over people / who understand me?” I take a wild guess here and wonder if this refers to people who have tried to help her… or maybe not. It’s common for teenagers to have crushes on people who do not respond. She writes in the poem “stalling” that “I keep thinking / about apologising / for not holding your left hand / when my right one / was stupidly clammy” There is that sense of being inferior, as if one were bowing down to a goddess. And “I’m too busy wondering what now / we would be in / it I had let my wine- / dry lips scutter / crabwise down your cheek. But wondering is / brutally futile…”. The poem “love language” steps up the limerence with “don’t you / want to waste / your entire lunch / break wondering / how? / without any kissing / at all” There are many connections with women, but mostly they seem girlish dreams. Like most young people who want to have a hidden life [like getting away from parents, for example] she writes in “discharge notes (iii)” that “When diaries get gritty you put them / in a shoe box call them gone. call them / one less segment of yourself to mourn / something like that. i keep so many secrets / from myself.” Growing older, into maturity, she turns to men but in the poem “raisins” she declares she f**king hated men but she f**ked them and she dieted on raisins to remain slim for them and “i kept hating and f**king”. Make of this what you will, but some sort of desperation is signalled.

As for the parts about the anorexia nervosa wards, they can be quite graphic. While “fortisip” recalls her petulant behaviour as a kid when she was being taken to hospital by her parents, “discharge notes (iv)” gives us the buzz on other girls in her ward and learning their tricks on “how to get away with water loading / before my five a.m. weigh-in ha ha. / I was really good at being sick it felt good. / to be good at something. bad to be good.” Despite having grown past her affliction, she still to the very end has a very negative view of the nurses in the hospital.

At which point I could raise some ideas about the poet’s gender or sexual identity. Most of her attraction was to girls but she seems to have settled down with a guy whom she calls “my darling partner Blair”. Not that it matters I suppose and none of my business anyway. I’m also interested by the many passing references to her grandmother throughout this collection. But this is all by the way. What is important is that Amy Marguerite has produced a vital and lively work – angst-fill inevitably, but honest in its confessionalism and filled with energy. As a debut, it’s brilliant.

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By now an accomplished poet with a many collections to her credit, Kate Camp has moved on in her focus. Once, when I reviewed one of her earlier books, I said her work was “usually housebound anecdotes”. While this might have been true for the earlier book, it is certainly not true for her latest collection Makeshift Seasons [the title comes from the last words in the book]. Yes, there are some poems about home and her surroundings, but they are only a small part on her palette. As was the case in her previous work, she tends to write in the first person - in fact in nearly all 36 poems in Makeshift Seasons. So obviously there is a sense of either confessionalism or autobiography. Unlike some of her contemporaries, she does not use free verse [well… she does not usually]. Her prosody is largely traditional, with stanzas neatly separated. Her poem “Entropy” is a sort of sonnet – at least it divides into octave and sestet even if it doesn’t rhyme – and with an analysis of first a consulting a doctor and then having the odd reaction once she was outside. Her “Epiphany” is also a sort of sonnet – in this case first an event [octave] and then an unexpected outcome [sestet].

Yet let me admit that I was intimidated by the opening two poems in the book. “Kryptonite” picks up tropes about Superman and uses it to consider how we are both strong and fragile. “Trajectory” is apparently about the pain and coldness of the seasons, but after reading it many times over I could not decode what it was really saying. Its imagery is so cryptic as to be opaque… but thank goodness she moves on to clarity in all the following poems.

Like most poets, Camp deals with favourite interests. She comes back a number of times to a favoured spot in Wellington, thus the poem “Island Bay” being a neat little vignette of politeness by the water. Later there is “Island Bay again” with darker images on the same shore; and later still there is “Island Bay Beach” about swimming there where “I appreciate the smaller space / at high tide, soft, soaked sand / cleared of footprints…” - though she also paints here images of discomfort. After all, no place is really idyllic. “Freyberg Carpark” is a clear and thoughtful poem, depicting a place and time and a mood struck by two very different women meeting. I found this the most engaging poem in the collection.

Speaking of which, there is a sensibility about places in poems about overseas travelling. “Driving in France” is a straightforward memory of a journey near Mont-Saint Michel . But “Wittenberg” reveals the truth that often, when we tourists go to see something of historical or cultural interest, we find we are more distracted by small and perhaps trivial things that have amused us. There are domestic poems - “Equinox” is about the house they live in and how it was when they first entered it. “Autumn” is a relatively straightforward [and therefor readable]  account of the effect of that season “It’s a beautiful morning. That’s what we call a morning / with a red tugboat at a distance, long white / landscape of fog against the hills, sun gold / on buildings.”… and then she shifts into modish reveries of being in a bar in Berlin.

As well as place, home and season, there is much interest in health; or rather ill health. Kate Camp, now in her 50’s, is aware of the way the body begins to take some knocks.  “Inpatient versus outpatient”, like some others of her poems, indicates going through pain of one sort or another – not fatal or severe but irritating and uncomfortable. “Here is the church” also signals bodily discomfort, considering what it would be like being an old woman: “How will I grieve these hands / when they no longer interlock / the tiny mountain ranges of a zipper / or seal with their perfectly-fitted pads / my nostrils, mouth and chin / as I cover my face with them / in cold, in curiosity, in comfort / or just because I can / because this body / is still mine / and I can hide it / whenever I want to.” The most uncomfortable of poems about ill health must be “summary of our mini-survey on regret” which seems to signal things she does not want to talk about in detail. Something similar is “In the bathroom rubbish bin.” And “Grease”, a kind of fantasia of what adolescence was, also has a sense of awkwardness which is very aligned to pain.

If favoured spots, travel, home and ill health dominate this collection, there are many other interests. “Towards a working definition of global warming is an acute account of the nature of light in the night with “one lightbulb-shaped lightbulb / burning always in the neighbour’s hallway for their children / I suppose, if they were , still. Plus general light reflecting / off clouds but I mean it has to come from somewhere.” “Halley’s Comet” is discursive and a sort of resignation to living within a small area, even after having travelled much of the world – and there is consolation that Halley’s comet may soar through the universe, but it is only a hunk of rock after all. “I think I’ll remember where the cleaning eye is but I know I won’t” is really two poems somehow joined together – the first six stanzas about a plumber coming and fixing a problem ; the last two stanzas addressing different matters in her life. An interesting structure.

            What does all this add up to? A collection of poetry well worth reading, and a work of maturity.

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Gregory Kan is not new to poetry. Far from it. This Singapore-Chinese, with much knowledge of Malaysia, is a New Zealand resident who has twice been reviewed on this blog. When I reviewed his debut collection This Paper Boat  I noted that “I was impressed by Kan’s ability to link past with present in poems that acknowledged the deadness of the past, while at the same time showing the ongoing influence of the past. Kan often referenced, and was in conversation with, earlier authors.” When his second collection came out Under Glass  I said that he “weaves together in this diverse book childhood memories, stories told by his forebears and extended family, stories of his parents’ courtship and early marriage, stories of his own adjustment to New Zealand and memories of his compulsory military service in Singapore.”

The fact is that in his latest collection Clay Eaters, he deals with many of the very same issues – the past, memories, having to do military service, his family, etc . But this is far from just repeating himself.

Certainly a tone of nostalgia, and mixed feelings about it, is in an early part of his latest collection, as in this expanded metaphor where looking back means almost drowning: “Memory will not be / Still / Trying to touch the bottom / Of the deep lake / And return to the surface / Clutching god knows what / Blinking in the sudden light / Lucky to be alive.” And towards that end of this collection there is “To wander / Looking for what we have lost / On that other side of silence / A surface that lets us write so many things into it / Knowing the little that we know / In the few ways we know how”. And there is “It’s not just that I always wanted to forget / Or that I always wanted to remember / It’s just easy to get lost / In that garden / Where the wind doesn’t seem / To move on / To another place…”

Kan happily mixes poetry with prose, including many references to “Uncle Boon’s blog” and to jottings he himself made from his own experience. Timescales jump between memories of an island off Singapore, coming back to it years later, life in New Zealand, the times when his parents worked in Wellington, some of his older siblings who had gone to the U.S.A. and finally references to his partner, a woman he calls T. There are some almost eccentric comments, as in telling us that they once had cat called Gilgamesh “part-god he ruled / From a wooden post of our unfinished deck”.

But the most interesting poems have to do with that island off Singapore, Tekong, which carried a rain-forest and which had a military camp where Singapore men had to do their compulsory military service. [The camp was shut down in 1989.] When Kan re-visits the island, he experiences the muggy rain forest but he also notes “it’s small / I’ve been around it many times” He tells us of its fauna, such as “Belukar” meaning “for secondary jungle or forest that grows on previously cleared or cultivated land”. And he notes he had a role in the army’s Combat Intelligence School but “I was glad not to end up as an infantry officer / I wasn’t good at it / Never liked yelling / And the constant hammering of weapons / At things in the trees we couldn’t see.” Yet he did become expert in teaching camouflage.

More profoundly there are his comments on the nature of a humid island and its foliage: “Look closely at the photograph / Swim a bit further out / Unlock the back gate / Separate the seeds from the flesh / Part the branches / Open the letter / Watch the clearing beside the stream / Play the video / Go deeper into the mangroves / Run your fingers between the threads / pray to a god you do not believe in anymore / Try to remember whether you ever made it to the reservoir.” There is much reference to red clay earth and to “Mangroves on either side as far as I could see / Their pale folded roots / Spidering above the muddy, lapping water / A sea of faces in the furrows / Moths open / Trembling with their own ripeness / Fatal softening of surfaces.”

Although he says he does not believe in God he is aware of religious traditions such as burning offerings in vessels to the gods so that the gods will care for those who go to sea. Inter-tangled are Chinese and Malay religions and there are passages about a wise woman sometimes meeting and confronting trainee soldiers at shrines and others. He makes a form of secular religion among the young soldiers, as in “Whether religious or not / Most of us weren’t ignorant / But we had all become superstitious / Our lives were rituals / In heavy gloves / Steel-soled boots / And thermal imaging devices / Tactics were rites / Strategies were prayers / The ways in which we learnt / To rearrange ourselves / Without words / Between the trees.”

Incidentally, he brings in a very Aotearoa comment with his awareness of the similarities of Malay and Maori languages [he gives a list of 22 essential shared words].

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Janet Charman has always been a feminist as she has shown in her earlier collections such as At the White Coast, Ren / Surrender (reviewed on this blog ) and Pistils (also reviewed on this blog). Charman always writes in free verse and she refuses to write the word “I” as she says it is too phallocentric. Instead she writes it as “i”. When I reviewed The Pistils I noted that her poems are “sometimes a little cryptic in expression [and] laud the female body, its gestation, its resilience”. Such is the case with her tenth collection The Intimacy Bus.

What is “the intimacy bus”? The poem “the gender buffet” begins “knocked about / we alight / female and male / rumpled up / from a nine-month trip / in the intimacy bus”– in other words, we spend nine months in our mother’s womb, whereupon she proceeds to tell us of her views of the sexes and her ambiguities about herself. One has to assume that her poems are based on her personal experiences and are in effect autobiography. In the 38 poems that make up this collection, there are some major themes, viz. Age, discomfort and death; Sex, gender and the behaviour of men; and how she is influenced by television and the media.

Consider first age and death. Born in 1954, Charman is apparently obsessed with now being in her late 60s. There are many references to her cat and how messy her house is. Her two daughters occasionally drop in but it seems she spends much time in bed and/or watching television. The poem “in absentia” is a gruelling tale of loss : the painful lamentations after the death of somebody near – it could be her husband who died some years earlier or it could be an infant, but the tone is ambiguous and the imagery is severe, suggesting an extremeness in feeling as in the metaphor “to keep my guts in lockdown / the surgeon stitched in an internal mesh / she’s seen to it my phantom pain / is wished away…” There is pain as the body ages.

With regard to sex, gender and the (mis-)behaviour of men and misogyny, the poem “coming out at 68”  says that she is now “heterosexual lesbian” which suggests she is still working out her gender. She notes that her daughters are sceptical about her claim to be lesbian. Regarding men’s rough behaviour in bed and their boorishness, the poem  “consensual” rebukes “and those who / from a reservoir / entitlement / perceive consent as / their having / free access / to her submission” followed by imagery of masculine thuggery. Likewise the poem “all those excuses we make” tells us how crude the earlier generations were in the way they made excuses for men who dealt brutally with women, pregnant or otherwise. “kabedon” is also about male abuse. With regard to the domestic scene, there is “surveillance” about a woman and man ruined by alcohol. Many verses in her poems tell us of physical problems that are more extreme for women than for men, as in “take two Panadol” with its notice “how many women / I wonder / take two Panadol / for front pain / prior to having a breast screen / or sex”

As for how she is influenced by television and the media “my liberation notes” is apparently a reaction to watching violent images… or is it the fear of misogyny? Likewise “bereavement counselling”, about her reaction to Korean soap operas; “eternal summer 1 & 2” is also concerned with movies – how actors age or don’t age on screen; and “for my viewing pleasure”. Are these statements apologising for watching Asian television clichés or is she finding great meaning in them? I’m not sure.   

Charman does tend to ramble in her longer poems. The fact is, I found her most readable works were her collections of either aphorisms or haiku thus “79 Fragments”, being brief statements moving her from childhood to rebellious adolescence to the annoyances of old age, finishing with the killer statement “Unpublished creative writing course graduates / served your sentence / now do the crime”. Wise words. Likewise “18 sex treats” is made of fragments, though in this case focused on male-female sexual relationships, consistently jaded; and “27 episodes from modern life” once again represents discomfort with men. “house lot – everything must go” is again fragments. They can clearly tell uncomfortable truths, viz. “daughters with housekeys / let themselves in / and surprise their mother the old new lesbian / in bed – this rainy afternoon / with her television.” The sequence “your backstory” is the biography of an artist who was mistreated and under-rated at school but managed to get through. “Work in progress” has such brevities as “of that time of childhood / I remember most distinctly / the tedium / the suburban paralysis.”

How can a reviewer pass judgment on somebody else’s life experience? Reading carefully, I get the impression that Janet Charman’s life has been a hard one. Even so, I do wonder why she is so upset by old age. I suggest that some readers will find her work hard reading. But I rejoice that in her “Mother Ship” collection she does tell one truth about the collapse of former New Zealand English Departments “The Humanities / out of Time / work under a flag of convenience / by a skeleton crew.” Quite so.

Something New

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

“NIGHT SCHOOL” by Michael Steven (Otago University Press, $NZ25) ; “THE PISTILS” by Janet Charman (Otago University Press, $NZ25) ; “TUNUI / COMET”  by Robert Sullivan (Auckland University Press, $NZ19:99; "SEASONS" by William Direen (South Indies Press, $NZ22); "ANOMALIA' by Cadence Chung (We Are Babies Press, $NZ25);“EVERYONE IS EVERYONE EXCEPT YOU” by Jordan Hamel (Dead Bird Books, $NZ30)

 

I would not for one moment question Michael Steven’s skill as a poet. He has a strong sense of style and – perhaps unusual for one of his generation -  he is very much committed to more traditional stanzaic forms. His sequence “The Picture of Doctor Freud” consists of six loose sonnets - or at least six 14-line stanzas. “Dropped Pin: Trinity Wharf, Tauranga” takes the same “sonnet” form, as does his concluding sequence “Intercity Bus Elegies”. The sequence “Winter Conditions” comprises five poems in 12-line form. As for all the other of the 33 poems that make up Night School, they are presented in orderly stanzas, sitting like square bricks on the page. Steven composes methodically, corralling all his ideas carefully, even if those ideas are often inconclusive or even despairing.

I admit straight off that up till now I’ve not examined Steven’s work closely enough. When I reviewed on this blog his debut collection Walking to Jutland Street (2018) my comments were regrettably brief, though I was interested in the hard, non-nostalgic view he gave of remembered student digs. I appreciated more his second collection The Lifers (2020), on the whole a chilly and dark view of New Zealand, with much reference to criminality, but redeemed by poems of compassion and showing a broader view of humanity. Now comes Night School, and I’m torn by the thought that we have to take much of it as autobiographical. At least I think we are. How can you critique a man’s confessions? A dilemma for a reviewer.

The title Night School is ironical – there are some poems about attending a literal night school, but the “night” part also suggests the darkness in which criminality happens and young men are “schooled” in the worst habits of society. Night School may very well be called a sequel to The Lifers.  Once again, Steven introduces us to “Dropped pins” meaning always a poem giving close scrutiny to a particular locality with a personal memory. The opening proem “Dropped Pin: Symonds Street, Auckland” puts us in very much the same milieu as did much of The Lifers – gathering of old friends, one clearly living off petty crime and his life going nowhere. There are eleven “dropped pins” in Night School, carrying Steven over much of New Zealand, although Auckland and Christchurch are most often visited.

Two dominant themes run through this collection. One has to do with families and fatherhood and their failures. We have to assume that “The Picture of Doctor Freud” is autobiographical. Steven does insert a little social satire, telling us of his father “He kept us fed in a world of sharks / while suited pig-hunter economists / filleted the country with Bowie knives.” But the sequence becomes a very dark reflection on the sexual life of his grandfather and on his own first adolescent experience of the opposite sex. Also presumably autobiographical, “A Methodist Family Portrait” suggests family violence and the over-disciplined life imposed on his great-grandfather, with a hint that such warped upbringing persisted in the family tree. “The Gold Plains” might begin as a sunset scene, but morphs into a suggestion of an unfulfilled life, especially in terms of fatherhood . Looking back at the sunset, he sees “Somewhere nearby would be the father, / sitting alone in his inherited silence / unable to name the emptiness inside him, / the same emptiness his father endured / before him and was unable to name.” “Dropped Pin: Trinity Wharf, Tauranga” gives a dyspeptic take on Tauranga (the seedy criminal side of it) but segues into memories of a broken home. As for personal background, “Dropped Pin: Addington, Christchurch” is one of his bleakest memories of younger years working in a factory.

The other dominant theme is, of course, drugs. “Strains: White Widow” is a reminiscence of dope-smoking youth. “Papa Jacks” goes into harder drugs. Poems like “Two Wolves” would put you off hard drugs permanently as would “Dropped Pin: Kingsland, Auckland”, but I’m not sure if this was Steven’s intention. There are poems about different strains of weed, the longest being “Strains: Slurricane”; while “The Secret History of Nike Air Max” tells us that wearing this cushioned footwear provided the necessary stealth and silence when pilfering drugs from pharmacies. Steven makes some literary references, though some of them are presented in doped-out form as in the ones on Charles Spear (sort of) and Ronald Hugh Morrieson. There are, it must be added, some poems dedicated to fellow poets, others to people unknown to most.

In the end, what attitude is Steven adopting? Is he presenting illicit drugs as simply a way of life in NZ?  Or is he offering a critique and regretting a drug-messed youth? There are definitely moments where he hints that a less delinquent life might have been desirable. Take “Winter Conditions” which takes a drive through the outer suburbs of Auckland. At first it seems to satirise “square” lives, but then it undercuts itself with the idea that rebellious younger attitudes might have been bogus. Thus: “Most would blindly follow an inherited model:/ careers, mortgages, the trappings of respectability. / That wasn’t for me. I could never roll like that. / What I sought was a kind of psychic repatriation, / some way of harmonising with the ineffable. / Nihilism was chic in the decade we came up in.” Don’t tell me that the underlined part isn’t mocking such perceptions. A similar give-and-take is found in “Animal Kingdom” about being in a prison van and its contents. The title itself subverts the ostensible reportage. “Dropped Pin: Eastern Beach, East Auckland” seems at first to be building up as a schoolboyish ironical critique of a schoolteacher but in the last lines redeems the man. 

Steven’s envoi “Intercity Bus Elegies” is violent and gripping in its profuse imagery, but it comes across as less apocalyptic then disoriented –a generic condemnation of us all. Everything is for the worst and God is either absent or transformed into the rage of a doped-up ranter.

As an Aucklander who also travels much in the Waikato, I read dropped pins about Pigeon Mountain, and Symonds Street and Eastern Beach and East Waikato, but I can only conclude that Steven’s experiences of these places are radically different from my own.

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In terms of style, Janet Charman, in her ninth collection of poetry, makes an extreme contrast with the orderly stanzas of Michael Steven. I remember reading with pleasure Charman’s At the White Coast (2012) and reviewing it for Poetry New Zealand, later designating it as “a loose autobiographical collection written in free verse”. The same could be said of her 2017 collection [Ren] Surrender, reviewed on this blog. Charman apparently always composes in free verse, far from the world of carefully-crafted stanzas. She also follows the now-somewhat-dated preciosity of rarely using capital letters. The first-person-singular “I” always has to be rendered as “i”, because “I” is too phallocentric for this poet, an abominable sign of male dominance and toxic masculinity.

The Pistils is not what I have sometimes called a “concept album” – the type of poetry collection structured around one dominant theme. Rather, as in earlier collections by Charman, it is a collection on very diverse topics and often refreshingly so.

Her opening gambit “high days and holy days” (I’ll stick with lower case for her titles) is a sequence of twelve statements, sometimes a little flippant and/or dismissive about certain public holidays, only occasionally rejoicing. She writes poems about gardens showing that they are hard work and sometimes lamenting the destruction of gardens when new owners take over an old house-and-garden. Perhaps inevitably for somebody in her late sixties, there are poems that recall childhood. “when i was young” makes ironical comment on how differently safety for children is now taken in contrast with the old days. There are reminiscences of the awfulness of schooltime cookery classes and how going to see the panto was like, and was not like, going to church. She lingers on the topic of adults caring for children and the constraints these often impose. Inevitably too, there are poems about ageing, with presumably autobiographical accounts of declining health. “going west” is a generic elegy for the departed. “gracious living” refers to varicose veins, while both “bra dollars” and “clickety-click” introduce a masectomy.

In all this, what we are aware of is Charman’s feminism. Poems, sometimes a little cryptic in expression and larded with mythological references, laud the female body, its gestation and resilience. Read “the gold zipper”  and “because desiring” to see what I mean. The title poem “the pistils” has clearly Sapphic overtones, but is rather muddled as are many of Charman’s statements when she goes grandiose. Pistils are the “female” organs of the flower that produce seeds and fruit and the poem therefore assumes the powerful creativity of women  - hence the cover image of a flower. (A different sort of pistil is encountered in the poem “October garden”). The sequence “thirteen bystanders” speaks of women’s empathy and ability to socialise harmoniously.

However, Charman’s feminism can too easily turn into toxic femininity and snarling misandry as in “My Mister”, though it is hard to make out (so badly is it written) what she is or is not endorsing about the sexes in “womb”. “the holy ghost and the lost boys” is a mash-up of different mythologies again suggesting the redundancy of men. She also takes a pot-shot at James K. Baxter in “The House of the Talking Cat” (note the capital letters for these phallocentric guys) in which he refers to raping his wife. I think we already knew about Jim’s many ethical shortcomings. Oh yeah. There are also the poems where Charman shows how daring she can be. In “selfie” her assessment of her own body includes peeing. “the holy ghost and the lost boys” has “cunts” in it and – gosh, we’re so stunned and impressed -  there’s a poem called “cunt”.

Taken as a whole, The Pistils is an uneven work.“Telethon”, one of her longer poems, regrettably reveals her weaknesses as a poet. With a few decorations, it is essentially a first-person account of the anxiety and eventual relief in having a baby cared-for in hospital… but as poetry it trundles along as a narrative which would better have been presented in pure prose. This is also a case where the absence of conventional punctuation simply creates confusion or at least mystification about something straightforward. Yet by contrast, “classroom” is equally discursive, manages to create a vivid and totally believable scene of primary education as it was. There are lots of ups and downs in this collection.

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Oh for the joy of jumping into something both heartfelt and skilled!! Robert Sullivan’s Tunui / Comet comes with endorsements by David Eggleton and Ruby Solly; and the blurb describes it as” “A marvellous hikoi through Aotearoa today alongside a leading Maori poet”. A bit excessive, maybe, but a reasonable signpost to the contents.

Sullivan, says a publicity handout, is Ngapuhi / Kai Tahu. But genealogically he’s more than that. He also has Pakeha ancestors. This fact he references in a number of his poems. The sequence “Decolonisation Wiki Entries” acknowledge European ancestors and the section of the sequence “Ruapekapeka” mentions a Pakeha ancestor who fought on the British side during the New Zealand Wars.

This is not a trivial point, as he considers much of the history of Aotearoa with an ironical impartiality.

Of course there are stabs at colonialism.

The poem “I wasn’t a poet for writing placenames” purloins the voice of James Cook, who is made to say: “dance’s oil painting stitched me / in a wig with my dress uniform / gold buttoned in some map room / pointing at Australia / yet I could’ve been / dressed for fifty shades of grey / with my fine curls a cut above / bloody run barrels and other / bligh whipping tales about / by severed burial at sea” The “fifty shades of grey” bit sounds like a silly cheap shot, but the poem attacks the pomposity of much imperial historiography. The stupid comments tourists make about Maori sites are chastised in “Rock Art.” Yet when he gets to Parihaka in the brief poem “Feathers”, he quotes both Pakeha and Maori perceptions. The poem “Ah” is slightly ambiguous but is not condemnatory of James Cook’s arrival and what he brought, while “Cooking with gas”, imagines a James Cook who reconsiders his approach to the Pacific and, as well as bringing good things here, wonders if he could have found a more peaceable and conciliatory way of intervening. Sullivan’s sequence “Te Whitianga a Kupe” celebrates both Kupe and Cook. The 8-part sequence “Te Tahuhu Nui” is interesting in that its first section has verses beginning with quotations from Kupe, then examining how his relatives relate to these statements in the way they now recall and discuss things; but later parts of the sequence has him recalling his distant Pakeha ancestors (apparently mainly Scots).

Can I say that Sullivan is a realist? Deeply committed to Maori culture and its perpetuation, he is also aware that this country was made as it is by more than one people.

In all this, let me not underestimate Sullivan’s knowledge of Maori lore and foundational stories. “Maui’s Mission”, one of the first and most attractive of his poems, gives a lyrical account of the fabulous raising of the fish and “Homage to Te Whatanui” elaborates on another. Most poems in this collection are in English (as Sullivan says at one point, the language he was raised speaking) but some are bilingual. There are two poems completely in Maori. Please note, too, that Sullivan is also aware of the contemporary urban scene. One of his jauntiest poems “Hello Great North Road” connects central Auckland with  fishing and surfing out on the city’s west coast, and gives the sense of something actually lived.

Some criticisms? As you can see in a quotation above, Sullivan sometimes has the lower-case infection (no capital letters) I’ve noted in another poet in this posting. Sullivan can also sometimes be prosey. “Our Powhiri for the International Students” and “Conservation” are straight prose statements. Even worse “H.G. Wells’” which reads thus “If only I could move forward ten years / in a time machine, bring the family with me / enjoying the government’s successful / reshaping of the education sector / where education is strongly linked / to wellbeing outcomes for all.” It sounds like a-letter-to-the-editor, or a boosting political pamphlet.

But I am nit-picking here. Tunui / Comet is a robust, readable and honest collection and a great pleasure to read.

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    High praise for the smaller presses that produce poetry away from the mainstream of university presses. William (Bill) Direen, resident of Otago, produces Seasons via South Indies Press. I assume that “indies” means independent presses. Seasons presents an almost Thoreauvian statement. But not quite. Direen is not an uncritical observer of nature and into his poetry he inserts the hard shards of reality. Seasons is a poetic diary tracing the turnings of the seasons from autumn to autumn. In a strath an hour’s drive from Dunedin, Direen observes not only the seasons but also the local customs and history. (Yes, not being a Scot I had to look up the word “strath” in the OED and discovered it means a “broad mountain valley”.)

This tracing of a year begins with images of desolation and dereliction:  “Lacking its rear wall, / the house makes an unintended loggia. / Starlings have strawed the attic. / Dust and cack covers the joists.” There is midday fog and the dourness of the season. Ditches flood and the town pump fails. But there are also unexpected pleasures in autumn “Late season plums are ripening at their rate, / willow happy birds are eager and sweetened. / Teeth have torn apricot flesh from stone. / When the work is done / we will know apples’ wholeness.”

Then comes full winter. There is a fire alarm and a house burns down. A blind boy plays the piano. There is a wedding. An “eradicator” comes to get rid of a nest of wasps. The contemplation of the stars fuels strange dreams and some mystic conclusions. But we are not gathered into fantasy. There is also hard reality to contend with:  “a stand of pines, / their creviced bark dark with moisture. They are waiting for the chainsaw, nothing nobler.” And “A willow is a playground, / a home and a roaming ground. / Birds carol from favourite boughs, / they seek sucking mites that turn leaves red. / Rats sneak around its base…”. Late in the collection there is an awareness of the uncertainty of events, the folly of assuming that history is a neat arrow (“it is always time / to prepare for the worst”). Examples are given of local familial disasters.

Direen, then, is not merely rhapsodising on nature,  but giving a sense of community and its mores.

Do I have any criticisms of his work? Just a few. He does have a tendency to make grandiose statements, as in  “We plant seedlings and conserve. / We reduce hard matter and destroy species. / we are lights of simultaneous extinction, / season after season.” Also, I find a forced antiquity in some of his vocabulary, as in lines like “the Southwest is gathering / to benight the sublunary”. Gosh. And, possibly my fault for being a townie who lives far from Otago, I did have to once again resort to the OED to decipher some words. “Summer has ceased its thripping” he writes. How many would know that “thrips” are insects injurious to plants? Or that “myriapods” are centipedes and millipedes, and a “shoat” is a very young pig?

In this I am quibbling. Direen’s descriptions are vivid, if often dour, and Seasons carries the commendable weight of things closely observed. 

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Cadence Chung’s Anomalia comes from another independent press “We Are Babies”, founded by young women and dedicated to publishing the works of women. How ironic the press’s name is meant to be I do not know, but it is focused on youth. The blurb tells me that the poems making up Anomalia were written by Cadence Chung in her last year at high school. Nothing to be sniffy about that. History tells us many great poetic talents flourished first in their adolescent years – Chatterton, Rimbaud, Dylan Thomas, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath – so why not celebrate another teenage poet?

And, in terms of poetic form,  Cadence Chung is an accomplished poet. She tries, successfully, many forms  of poetry – free verse; unpunctuated blocks of prose poems; orderly traditional stanzas; poems with cancelled lines; and list poems. The list poem “table of contents”, corralling diverse old things together, is almost a piece of fond nostalgia.

Like others, Chung also writes without majuscules, which occasionally makes for uncertain punctuation. Interestingly, she does not focus on her Chinese ethnicity – I think there is only one brief reference to ethnicity in this collection. Two strains of imagery dominate Anomalia. One is vivisection and the other is youthful desire. In poem after poem, cold vivisection is pitted against living flesh, be it human or animal, and their conflict is never resolved.

The opening poem “abstract” is somewhat ambiguous in meaning. At first it seems to be protesting against vivisection and cold scientific calculation, but it then adopts a more cynical tone about what human behaviour is anyway. Is this irony… or adolescent bravado? The poem “warning note” again uses the imagery of vivisection, but in this case it is purely metaphoric – it is the verbal and physical “vivisection” that a man practises on a young woman as he tries to seduce her. He is, in effect, mentally trying to strip her apart. This depressing scene contrasts with another image Chung is keen on, the flowers with their sexual organs blatantly on display. Botanical nature does not use devious stratagems to mate. Later, “notes for new recruits” brings in the image of vivisection when two girls sleeping together are – again metaphorically - wrenched apart by cold implements. And thus it continues in “the specimen to the scientist” and “the scientist’s notes” and “the scientist to the specimen". Chung observes closely species that fall apart naturally, as in her frequent references to cicadas losing their exoskeletons. Their living disintegration is nature’s form of vivisection. Elsewhere, with images of  killing spiders, and verdant fields  “damp and mushy… slick with ants”, Chung is never rhapsodising nature.

Yet in the poem “anatomy”, there is featured a “dandelion fluff” which radiates a very human desire for love or at least recognition “trying to find / a home somewhere, a place to seed / and stay, all i want is for someone / to divide me into neat parts and lay / them all out, so i can see / the pesky veins that cause my blood / to swim, the blushing heart that / tries to love more than it can chew through”.

What, in the end, does all the imagery of vivisection and desire amount to? Sorry to play Dr. Freud, but I find it hard not to relate it to the adolescent’s first serious attempts to measure the world; to try to work out his or her place in the world. Fitting together the broken pieces left by vivisection relates to a search for identity; and the desire is, again like most adolescent thoughts on the subject, really a desire that is not yet fulfilled. It is interesting that Chung references the kokako’s mournful cry in the bush and the kakapo’s boom – both of them suggesting a desolate loneliness. Here stands the young person looking somehow for love. “rise”  comes closest to being a love poem, but draws back with a wariness about other people. Similarly in “the anomaly’s love poem” there is a wish for love but a wariness about being diminished by it and categorised by a potential lover. Categorisation is also found in “curio cabinet” while “home” aches with desire for family and friends. Full adulthood is not yet here, and there is intense self-consciousness, especially in the poem “magnus opus” which seems built on acute adolescent fear of how other people are assessing you. I am not being dismissive when I say that many of Chung’s assertions and images suggest an intelligent adolescent trying to define herself, most apparent in the poem “what I want” where each line ends “give me”;  and even more in “boy scout” where “i wanna be told of my merit / to hold it in my hands / i wanna be told i deserve the world / and that everything is out here for me to discover.” And “i want” turns up again and again in the poem “belated wishes”.

I have no intention of being condescending. Cadence Chung has a great talent and skill with words. If she has the outlook of a sophisticated adolescent, she has the perceptive intelligence of an adult. I’d say just the same about Rimbaud, Thomas, Plath and the gang.

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            And a third book from an independent press, Dead Bird Books, Jordan Hamil’s Everyone is Everyone Except You.

I found it very hard to engage with this collection. Okay the author is a relatively young man. But, regardless of what three over-enthusiastic “critics” say on the back cover, Everyone is Everyone Except You is so drenched in self-pity that sounds like a whiney fourteen-year-old’s view of the world.  Crawl your way through it and you find the standard whinges. Decaying masculinity rusts in a shed; families break up but don’t want to talk about it;  influence by, and simultaneous revulsion from,  religious education; a poem “Good kiwi lad” telling us of repressed gayness; “God doesn’t watch you anymore” seems to be essentially about masturbation guilt. Yep, we really are into pubescent angst, folks.

The self-pity ramps up when we have sections headed “Everyone is having sex and meaningful relationships except you” and ”Everyone will succeed in their endeavours except you.” The final poem in the book “Human Resource” gathers together all Hamel’s declared negativities. True, there are attempts to be ironic about it, as in “The Jordan Hamel Committee of Failed Relationships” which basically says I’m a loser and will continue to be so. And of course there’s a lot of specific sex talk, typical of those who have just found out a few things about sex.

The reverse of the self-pity coin is, of course, grandiose day-dreaming. Consider  “I’m falling in and out of love” which includes the lines “I want / strangers who meet me in passing at parties / to decide upon request / that yes they would die / to save me from a minor inconvenience”. Perilously close to death-bed fantasies, this belongs to an age-group even younger than a whiney fourteen-year-old.

I found only a couple of poems in this collection that almost meant something: “We are the happiest couple at the party” at least includes a comical string of improbable situations; and “When you take the Netflix account with you” verges on valid satire.

The blurb tells me that Jordan Hamel was at one time a Poetry Slam champion. It figures. Slam events feature the same barrage of semi-coherent statements which might seem interesting when heard in live performance, but come across as  inane on the printed page.

 

Something New

SPECIAL NOTICE TO READERS:  CONSTRAINTS ON MY TIME, PLUS MY RECENT VISUAL IMPAIRMENT, MEAN THAT I HAVE DECIDED HENCEFORTH TO PRODUCE THESE BLOG POSTINGS FORTNIGHTLY RATHER THAN WEEKLY.

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

“HOARD” by Fleur Adcock (Victoria University Press, $NZ 25); “仁 SURRENDER” by Janet Charman (Otago University Press, NZ$27:50); “ORDINARY TIME” by Anna Livesey (Victoria University Press, $NZ 25); “FLOODS ANOTHER CHAMBER” by James Brown (Victoria University Press, $NZ 25)

I begin this post with an apology.

Recently I had to suspend producing Reid’s Reader for some months due to illness (hospitalisation and then weeks of recuperation). In that time, publishers continued to send me books to review, so that a formidable pile had accumulated by the time I got back to this work. The greatest casualty were collections of poetry which, as you know, get very little notice in the media outside specialist publications and websites.

So my apology is, that in catching up with four recent collections of poetry in this one posting, I am going to have to deal with them more briefly and rather summarily than I would otherwise do. Beg pardon.

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Fleur Adcock (born 1934) may be our best-known living literary expatriate. England has been her home since 1963, but she has made a number of return visits here in recent years. A prolific poet, her last volume The Land Ballot (reviewed on this blog) concerned her family background in rural New Zealand. The publisher’s blurb for Hoard tells us helpfully that this book is made up of things that didn’t fit the themes of the poet’s last two collections. I will not call it a pot-pourri, because its four sections do each have a common theme. But it is clear that these are things which, on their own, wouldn’t have made a complete book. Not that it worries me. I find that too many new collections of poetry tend to be “concept albums”. I prefer the older style of collection where we read each poem as an individual entity, even if thus we often work out a poet’s general preoccupations.

So to Hoard.

The first section comprises poems about Adcock’s younger life, from schooldays to young adulthood. Thus to poems about learning Latin declensions at school; the degeneration of her handwriting since she was a child; her use of typewriters (which she has now spurned for computers); witnessing a Caesarean delivery when she was a young woman (at the sight of which a woman called "Mrs Campbell" apparently fainted); three rather bitter poems about her short marriage to Barry Crump; and poems about getting used to working and raising a son in England. Adcock’s imagery can be as sharp as cut metal, as in her very opening poem about coin-collecting as a child. One ancient worn coin, she writes, has been “sucked in the mouth of history / for so long that its outer edges / are smoothed away, gone down time’s gullet / with a slow wince of dissolving copper.”

Perfect!

In the second section, the focus is history before the author’s time. This includes forebears, as in “Anne Jane’s Husband” (a brutal poem about conjugal sex, presumably in the 19^th century) and two poems on family tales that were passed on by mothers. But more arresting are two longer poems – or cycles of shorter poems – about the very left-wing British Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson, famous in the 1930s and 1940s for being a bit of a firebrand, leading the Jarrow march against unemployment, organising shelter in London during the Blitz and later being Minister of Education. Adcock clearly admires her as a feminist figure from an earlier age, and goes very protective in poems on Wilkinson’s private life, including one which condemns the rumour that Wilkinson eventually committed suicide.

Thus much for the past. The last two sections of Hoard deal with Adcock’s impressions of England now and of New Zealand now.

Her poems about English landscape are indeed very English, like the sequence “A Spinney” about foliage around her English home. Take the section “Horse-Chestnut” which I quote in full: “The squirrels want me to grow a forest. /  They plant acorns on my lawn; / I haul them out by the stems, like minims. /  / They plant a conker. A green hand shoots up, / and lo, I’ve stabled it in a pot: / a fistful of sticky buds for next spring”. It couldn’t be anywhere but England. Nor could the poem about foxes roving in the suburbs by moonlight. One poem is an extended intellectual game. This is “Albatross”, ostensibly about Coleridge gaining his inspiration for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, but segueing into a lament for birds strangled by plastic out in our modern oceans.

I hate using this term, because I have often used it for poems by older people, but Adcock’s tone is often elegaic. In England bookshops are disappearing as books get sold on line; people suggest (in the poem poem “Real Estate”) that she should sell the old-fashioned home she loves and buy a flat (she refuses). In “Pacifiers” she mocks young people clutching their phones in the way her generation used to suck on cigarettes. Fings Ain’t Wot They Used Ta Be.

When, in the last section, she gets to modern New Zealand (observations based on a trip here in 2015), I feared at first that her tone would be dismissive. In “Helensville”, she declares “small-town New Zealand’s doing its thing / of channelling the 1930s.” In a way the funniest poem in the collection is the regretful “Blue Stars” in which Adcock declares “my New Zealand nationality / is a part-time thing – a bit of nostalgia” and goes on to discourse on New Zealand’s lack of indigenous flowers, and hence our need to import exotics which, annoyingly, often run wild. But her general take on modern EnZed is more rueful than dismissive, for in the remaining poems, old age attempts to reconstruct what Mercer and Drury and Thames and Raglan and (especially) Wellington were like when she was young.

It is like a ghost visiting old haunts and wondering at the impertinence that has made them change.

I hope it goes without saying that Adcock’s poems here, even if very retrospective, display the best elements of the modernist tradition in which she developed. The poems are accessible, clear, not given to rhetoric and – dammit – often great fun.

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Now in her mid-60s, Janet Charman (born 1954) isn’t as senior a poet as Fleur Adcock, but she is firmly established with seven well-received collections behind her. I remember reviewing with pleasure her At the White Coast (2012) in Poetry New Zealand #46 (March 2013). It was a loose, autobiographical collection, written in very free verse, of her OE experiences when working in England in the 1980s.

Her new collection 仁 Surrender is also autobiographical and it is mainly composed of free verse; but its final section “101 Snapshots” consists of 101 pithy statements written in (very loose) haiku form – at least each is three lines, even if they do not adhere to traditional haiku syllabics. As she states in her Acknowledgements, this collection sprang from a writing residency in Hong Kong in 2009 and a guest readership at a literary event in Taipei in 2014; therefore much of it is also an outsider’s response to Chinese culture. No wonder the ghost of Robin Hyde makes an appearance. The poem “仁” explains the Chinese character仁  in her title (apparently pronounced “ren”), which once stood for specificially masculine human qualities but which now stands for a general range of human characteristics, including compassion. This seems to connect with the many and diffuse allusions Charman’s poetry makes here to gender and sexual identity.

For much of this collection, we are reading what could be taken for loose diary jottings, or at least poems worked up therefrom. We open with the poet settling into an alien hotel room and adjusting to jet-lag  (“your time 3am. / my time my own”). As the settings are polyglot writers’ gatherings, many poems reference words being translated or mistranslated in literary texts; how sexually-explicit moments of some texts are received; personalities met; questions asked by students; and the otherness of Hong Kong (or Taipei). In a number of poems she mentions taking Panadol for headaches or backaches and this seems to say something about the hectic nature of literary conferences, especially when there are students to lecture or be quizzed by.

 In the long multi-part poem “where people are”  the poet declares “i am actually a left margin justified crazy person / who agitating at her map in a crowded concourse / will talk to herself”. In this poem, there is the sense of disorientation in an alien environment and perhaps the disintegration of the self with a long series of statements beginning “i am”. Breathless, composed in short bursts over 17 pages, “where people are” touches on attraction of woman to woman mixed with cultural clash, much reference to the female body (especially genitalia) and the idea that poetry should undermine and liberate a closed or too-rigid a socety, which in this case is China.

Sometimes a poem is simply about the feeling sparked by something seen. In the poem “Wo de tian a!” a visit to an exhibition of dresses arouses jouissance in the poet. Sometimes a visit to a particular location fires up a series of reflections so diverse that it is hard to grasp a unifying theme, as in the very discursive poem “Nan Lian Garden” about a visit to a public garden. “They say you’re Japanese” agonises about cultural assimilation, while “it’s late” is a very personal memory concerning the father of the poet’s children who was unable to give up smoking before cancer already had him. While there is much effervescence and fizz in these poems, some become sombrely preachy. “The Anthology of Women’s Poetry” reads like a literary polemic that might have worked better as an essay. “on the sliding rack” is a rather flat protest poem about how a contaminated milk scandal was handled.

The publisher’s blurb for this volume speaks of “privileged constraints” upon the participants at the Honk Kong gathering. And certainly, in quite another sense, a mood of privilege inflects some of these poems. You are in a privileged environment if you write a poem about swapping your own books with other participants. Or if you write “Banquet” about how to dress at a literary dinner to make the right impression. Or if you write a ten-page poem “some notes on shopping and present giving” on what a bother it is finding and buying the appropriate things to give as presents to other participants. Yet of course Janet Charman is savvy enough to undercut this with self-deprecation and irony, which tell us that she isn’t that self-obsessed. In the poem “of our lucky eight” she remarks “Hong Kong doesn’t seem that foreign to me / though i know after these cocooned weeks / i might be kidding myself”.  The whole of this particular poem is, in fact, about the embarrassment of having to hold the fort when some members of the performing literary troupe have deserted her.

Janet Charman’s poems here never did less than hold my attention. But after their sometimes rambling discursiveness, I found that I enjoyed most the pithy epigrams of the final (loose) haiku section.

Such gems as “trampoline / the stepchild’s / sitting room”

Or “listen / that’s a hungry cry / turn up the music”

Or “they’ll know / while Earth burned / we fiddled with our nature poems”

Or “leaf raking the trees tell me / everything / about winter”

Or even “those amber those carnelian wrist beads / cheap beyond belief / live ammunition from the faraway market”

As I did when I reviewed At the White Coast, I could at this point rebuke Charman for her rather precious habit of avoiding capital letters, especially in her use of “i” for the first person singular. In the new collection there is a poem “a writing exercise”, about answering students’ questions on her work.  It has a very defensive section on her avoidance of capital letters which equates “I” with male phollocentrality and “i” with the hitherto suppressed female. Ho-de-hum. Interesting, coincidentally, that the poem notes Fleur Adcock is not enthused by Janet Charman’s typographical tic either. But then if I get too reproving about this issue, I will sound like the “teacherly reviewer” Charman rebukes in one of her haiku.

Besides, I don’t want to end on a sour note after enjoying most of this collection.

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Anna Livesey is of a younger generation than either Fleur Adcock or Janet Charman, but the “corporate strategist”, as the blurb describes her, is no newcomer either. Ordinary Time is her third collection.

As there are one or two religious references in this (short) collection of poems, I am sure the poet is aware that “ordinary time” is the term used by the church for those weeks of the year that are not taken up with the big seasons of Lent, Easter, Advent and Christmas – in other words, the times when life chugs on as life, away from the big public events.

Life chugs on as (domestic) life in these poems, which are candid, personal and – at first – focus on the poet’s experience as the mother of a newborn baby girl and a two-year-old toddler boy. The big world can chug on outside as Anna Livesey looks clearly at her early motherhood.  The opening (title) poem at once tells us that she just brought her new baby home from hospital. The poem “Eleven Days” says the umbilical cord has gone (“The rotten flesh-stump that joined us / has fallen off”). The most gynaecologically-explicit poem is “Privacy” in which, as she is having a Caesarean section, she thinks of her mother – and wishes to have “the dark privacy of the womb restored”. In the poem “America”, she compares her two children with the remembered skittering of fireflies, seen in America… and then rebukes herself for doing so. She does not wish to surrender to the fey or make her language pretentious and pretty. Some poems compare the newborn with the toddler, and there are great insights into toddler behaviour. Any young parent can relate to the lines in the poem “Winter Gardens”: “I watch my two-year-old and think: / I want to bite my hand in rage when I’m given the wrong cup; / shuffle away from strangers, shaking with disgust / at their forgiveness / their unknowledge of myself.” Yes, toddlers’ tantrums can make us want to throw tantrums too.

The poems are realistic about babies and young children but not hard, not cynical. The closeness, warmth and cuddliness of young motherhood is here too.

There’s a subtle shift in the second section of this collection. Motherhood is still the focus, but it widens to take in the poet’s relationship with her own mother and grandmother, as well as shared experience with other women. The past and the present are united. “Artificial Intelligence” is a poem dense with meaning, connecting mourning for the death of her mother with the child growing in the womb and, later, with post-partum depression – a “cycle of life” poem which manages to be neither sententious nor trite. The prose poem “Drowned Church” (I refuse to synopsise it) is a wonderful essay in literal symbolism. “Bay Leaves” comes closest to being Anna Livesey’s manifesto and explanation of poetic technique when she avers: “In my first book I was desperate not to be confessional. / My poems reached out of myself, pushed myself away. / Now that my mother is dead and my children are born / I seem to have nothing else to speak of.” As for the poem “Reading Books About the War” – it is a really bizarre prose poem, its four sections almost like four separable stand-up-comic gigs.

The third section is more generally reflective, moving from the poet’s immediate family circle to reveries of a friend in rural America and a poem set on a New York fire escape. The final poem in the book (“Trimester One”) seems to be about an abortion, but could equally be about something imagined. It is unusually opaque for this poet, who is on the whole clarity itself.

When poems are as personal and intimate as many of these are, making judgments upon them can seem uncomfortably like making judgments on the poet herself. I hope I am not guilty of that here. As a male, I recognised and understood many of the joys and anxieties of young parenthood that resonate in this collection.

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In its issue of 25 November, the NZ Listener produced a list of ten volumes of New Zealand poetry, published in 2017, that were worth reading. Fully eight of the volumes were by women, one was an anthology edited by a woman and a man, and only one of the ten volumes (David Howard’s The Ones Who Keep Quiet – reviewed on this blog) was by a man. Let me confess that reviewing new volumes of New Zealand poetry sometimes seems like a journey through female confessionalism, so much do women poets now dominate the scene. And note how this posting replicates the process. Having looked at three volumes by women, I now give you the token male. Not that James Brown himself (born 1966) can be regarded as marginalised, given that Floods Another Chamber is his sixth collection and given that he is at the heart of the poetic establishment, now running Vic’s poetry-writing courses, having edited Sport etc.

I won’t waste my or your time by trying to explain why this volume is divided into three sections. The arrangement seems to be purely arbitrary. Also, I remember in a review years ago coming up with an ingenious explanation as to why a certain volume was divided into sections, only to be told later by the poet in question that he had arranged his collection that way simply to “give readers a break”. So maybe that’s all that’s happening with the organisation of Floods Another Chamber.

In Floods Another Chamber, James Brown shows that he can write poems in many different forms. Let me list some of them. There’s the alphabetical poem (“The A to Z of Cycling”) where each of 26 lines begins with a new letter of the alphabet. There’s the mock nursery-rhyme (“Peculiar Julia”, “Shrinking Violet”). There’s that standard of the writing school class, the Wallace Stevens-style “thirteen-ways-of-looking-at” poem (“Eight Angles on the Manawatu River”). There are prose anecdotes lineated (“The Real Humpties”, “How I Met My Wife”). There are modified haiku (“Snogging in Wordsworth’s Bedroom” “Sad Dads” “Tautology Explained”). There are list poems (like the lists of cliché-ic things people say about beds in “Beds R Us”; or like “Agile Workshop”, a collection of clichés spoken in workshops and presentations). There’s the “I-can-write-groovy-sex” poem (“Erotic Snowdome”). And there’s the “found” poem (“Come on Lance”, which Brown would have transcribed only because the cyclist Lance Armstrong proved to be a drug cheat; and “Fine with Afterlife”, reproduced implicitly to mock a poorly-devised theatre poster). Towards the end of the book, there are a clutch of poems built around the repetition of the same grammatical structures.

Far from making me admire the virtuosity of the poet, I find here only a box of tried-and-true tricks, like forms recommended to students in a poetry-writing seminar. There is something airless about most of the collection, as if the poet is not so much connecting with what he is ostensibly writing about as seeing what genre strategies he can devise.

Some poems work as satire, such as the hit at real estate agents in “Attitude”; or what could equally be either social satire on dead-end jobs or an elegy for lost and wasted youth (“The AM Sound” – this being the poem that gives this volume its title with the line “your despair floods another chamber”). Very occasionally, too, there is a poem where the poet seems emotionally invested in his material, like “Piano Tune”, a sad little thing about a bird caught in a piano. In many ways it’s a pity that the very best poem in the volume appears so early. This is “Social Experiment”, a genuinely witty poem about New Zealand’s (dying?) obsession with rugby – yet with the poet self-deprecating enough not to be elevated by his own superiority in not being a fan.

Yet, along with the stylistic games, there’s a deadening sardonic tone to so much of what the poet writes. James Brown is over-eager to tell us that he is too sophisticated to be impressed by things that might impress us lesser mortal. We move into the land of condescension. “Emu” and “Beyond Red Rocks” are presumably memories of tramping and/or cycling trips in the wilderness… but remember, it’s not fashionable to say you admire or are in awe of the scenery on such expeditions, so both poems are hip memoranda about me, me, me. “Janet and John go to the Book Launch” is written with deadpan irony (mimicking the style of old primary school readers), but with an unpleasant undercurrent of contempt for the people who attend such things as book launches. “The Pitfalls of Poetry” and “Unstressed / Stressed” are attacks on older forms of poetry – or are they Larkinian irony? (As in Larkin’s “books are a load of crap.”)

Unless you are cocooned in sterile literary theory, you will be aware that (always and in every form of publication, despite denials) there is a huge element of subjectivity in all reviewing and criticism. Everything I have said about Floods Another Chamber boils down to the fact that I did not enjoy this collection, did not engage with it and found much of it to be predictable game-playing. Others may have a different reaction and they are most welcome to it. We none of us want to discourage people from writing poetry, after all.