Something New

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

“FLOW – Whanganui River Poems” by Airini Beautrais (Victoria University Press, $NZ30); “ALZHEIMER’S AND A SPOON” by Liz Breslin (Otago University Press, $NZ25); “BAD THINGS” by Louise Wallace (Victoria University Press, $NZ25)

As a reviewer, I pay more attention to New Zealand poetry than do most other reviewing platforms, apart from those that are specifically dedicated to poetry. I always treat new collections of poetry with care and respect, and it is only very occasionally that I feel the need to rebuke a current poet for sloppy writing, cliché-ridden ideas or unthought-through concepts. There is much good new poetry out there. Even so, it is only occasionally that a new volume of poetry has made me sit up with admiration and pure delight. To give a (partial) list of the best volumes of poetry I have had the pleasure of reviewing on this blog, I would name Richard Reeve’s Generation Kitchen, Elizabeth Smither’s Night Horse, Sue Wootton’s TheYield, David Eggleton’s The ConchTrumpet, David Howard’s The OnesWho Keep Quiet, and  Ian Wedde’s The Lifeguard , not to mention an excellent volume selected from a poet’s published works so far,Vincent O’Sullivan’s Being Here.  

Apart from my personal taste, what is it that makes me list these particular collections? I think it is the fact that all these poets have a strong sense of form. They all understand what the shape of a poem should be, and they know how metre and (more occasionally) rhyme can be used to best advantage where needed. In other words, they know about the poet’s craft.

I am very happy to add Airini Beautrais’ Flow – Whanganui River Poems to this list. Flow is Beautrais’ fourth collection of poems, but it is certainly her most ambitious so far. As in her third collection (reviewed on this blog), Dear Neil Roberts, Beautrais displays the welcome gift of accessibility. Some of her allusions may make a few readers scratch their heads, but she is never wilfully obscure and her thematic intentions are always clear. Again as in Dear Neil Roberts, Beautrais’ focus is on the part of New Zealand she inhabits. As she says in her Dedication, she is a Pakeha whose family have for six generations lived near the Whanganui River. Flow, she says, is a “collage” or “polyphony” as the many and diverse stories it tells about the Whanganui region cannot be welded into one single narrative.

This very generous collection (nearly 180 pages of text) is divided into three sections – each almost as long as many complete collections of poetry.

The first section, “Catchment”, covers the whole region and all the tributaries that feed into the Whanganui River as it flows north-west from Tongariro, then turns south at Taumarunui and heads towards the sea. A few of the poems in this section present a modern viewpoint, presumably based on the poet’s own experience. But most convey, in the first-person, the experiences of 19^th and early-to-mid 20^th century Pakeha explorers and settlers – surveyors, tree-fellers and loggers, labourers, farmers, and folkloric figures like the multiple prison-escapee George Wilder.

The second section, “A Body of Water”, deals with the river itself and the settlements upon it. More of the poems in this section are pure “nature” poems, descriptive of the river and its surrounding landscape.  There are fewer poems in the first-person and a clutch of poems about the non-human life in the river (poems about trout, graylings, freshwater crayfish, eels and eel-traps, lampreys etc.). There is an awareness of both the messiness and the otherness of nature, as in one of Beautrais’ best poems “Seed” (pp.82-83), with its catalogue of

“Red grain of wood, wet oozing sap,

domatia where the tiny leaf-mites sleep,

ripe pulpy humus dropped and mashed

by rotting rain, the orange berries flushed

on twigs of foetid plants, the swoop

of water black with tannins in the deep-

cut stream. All live things spill your smell,

all death exudes your taste, and in your fist fits all.”

Even so, the Pakeha pioneers loom large (poems about cartographers and bridge-builders) and there are poems about specific individuals – a long poem called “Fire” about the Anglican missionary and explorer Richard Taylor, and a poem called “Foundlings” about Mother Mary Aubert at the Jerusalem settlement.

As for the third section, “The Moving Sand”, it focuses on the city of Wanganui itself, where the river flows into the sea. Once again, reflections on the current scene mix with 19^th century testimonies from “lieutenant” or “constable” or “Mrs Field” – the voices of early Pakeha settlers adjusting to the fact that the large, unruly, black-sand beach, where winds whip the sand about, is not the same as a polite English beach where one can picnic sedately. There are a couple of poems (“Eunice”, “Stormbird”) about ships that were wrecked on the harbour bar, and there is certainly room for Airini Beautrais to go political or satirical – a poem (“Meat Workers”) about meat workers protesting at a lock-out, and a poem (“Dead Port”) ridiculing repeated attempts to turn Wanganui into a major port. For those who get the allusion, the poem “Glow in the Dark” is a sad reflection on Iris Wilkinson (“Robin Hyde”), who spent a short time as a reporter on a Wanganui newspaper.

All I’ve done so far is to walk you through the contents of this expansive book. I have not said anything about its quality, and why it is the engaging thing that it is.

Here are some ideas.

In the first place, Beautrais (despite often writing in the voices of others and occasionally sounding like a descendant of Edgar Lee Masters) really does write within her own experience, never pretending to be other than a Pakeha, never claiming to channel the perspective of the region’s indigenous ancestors. She has the wonderful ability to turn very personal experience into something much greater. Take the last two stanzas of the poem “Plotlines” (pp.23-24) where the concept of “story” segues easily from a domestic situation to the longest earthly time-scale:

           

My son always wants a story. Tell me a story about a T-rex

who was far away. Tell me a story about a spider

 who was lonely. And if the plotline doesn’t develop:

‘That wasn’t a story! I want a proper story!’

Obstacle, obstacle, obstacle, solution.

Even a three-year-old knows the basic devices.

Obstacle, obstacle, obstacle, attempted solution, failure.

The greatest stories of all time are geological.

            A truly great poem like “Roads”, dated to a visit made in 2013, works by using a present experience to show the impossibility of re-capturing the past.

            Then you note the care she has taken to shape this whole collection. The first section, for example, both begins and ends at Cherry Grove, Taumarunui. The last poem in the book, “North Mole” drags a modern perspective back to primal origins by presenting Kupe as a surfie.

            Most impressive, though, is Beautrais’ facility with form. In both “Clear Away” (pp.25-26) and “Flood” (pp.126-129) she takes on the type of multi-directional conversation that was a favourite with poets of the Romantic era. Some poems are a celebration of pure sound, as in the title poem “Flow” (p.84), which follows the whole course of the river from the mountain to the sea in insistent anapaests. Formally-structured and rhymed sonnets are within her range (see pp.172-175). Indeed rhyme is a major device in her arsenal. This can lead to some problems. “Into the Ground” (p.35) and “Only Dancing” (pp.43-44) read very much like doggerel, but this is probably intentional – both poems are meant to be rough working-men’s ballads, and doggerel was the norm in such.

            Flow is an ambitious and impressive collection from a poet who is immersed in her chosen subject and knows how to make it sing.

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            No disrespect is meant to two other good collections of poetry if I deal with them more briefly.

            Liz Breslin’s debut volume Alzheimer’s and a Spoon is exuberant, witty, great at wordplay and delightful to read. And this is very odd because the poems (most written in the first person) are about serious matters that could easily have become the occasion for solemnity. The poet’s aged grandmother sinking into Alzheimer’s. The older woman’s distant and garbled memories of surviving Nazi-occupied Poland. The way Alzheimer’s eats away at vocabulary. The crushing banality of the internet and the way nonsense goes “viral”. And yet here these matters are accounted for with a lightness of touch that (not to get too solemn about it myself) suggests a resilient human spirit unwilling to be crushed. Breslin creates collages from found materials – such as her “Lifestyle Creed” - and challenges us with “riddle” poems, using a variety of verbal techniques to draw us into her worldview and empathise even as we laugh. God gets a look-in with a certain wariness, only on the edge of mockery, suggesting the uncertain soul. There is that old paradox that wit can be a serious business, and it certainly is here.

            In her third collection of poetry Bad Things, Louise Wallace (“poet, not celebrity housewife” as the blurb helpfully says) goes for free verse, prose poems, aphorisms, pithy and brief observations and a few truckloads of irony. A clutch of poems reference Meryl Streep, Reese Witherspoon, Robert Redford and other such Hollywood icons, usually in the form of personal encounters which read like the poet’s dream diary. The prose poem “The olives” is a sophisticated take-down of a certain sort of self-indulgent pseudo-art film. The poem “Constellations”, on conceptual art, is as near as well-bred poet can come to saying it’s bollocks, but the statement is carapaced with irony to cushion the blow. And there are poems on food, on middle-class domesticity, and on clothes. The most affecting are the most personal – familiy relationships. As for the poem (well, letter really) about the “other” Louise Wallace, it clearly reflects a great annoyance in the poet’s life and comes out as the letting-off-of-steam.

Something New

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

“THE EMBASSY OF CAMBODIA” by Zadie Smith (Hamish Hamilton - Penguin, $NZ17:99); “ENOUGH” by Louise Wallace (Victoria University Press, $NZ25); “LIFE & CUSTOMS” by Bernadette Hall (Victoria University Press, $NZ25)

            Zadie Smith (born 1975) is now a novelist who has considerable clout with publishers. She has written four novels, two of which have been especially praised by reviewers – her first, White Teeth and her fourth N.W. [a review of which you can find on this blog via the index at right]. Still under 40, she often appears on those “best young novelists” lists that some magazines persist in compiling towards the end of the publishing year. Cambridge-educated, the daughter of a Jamaican mother and an English father, she writes with authority and experience about the racially-mixed communities of her original stamping ground, North-West London (although, like so many British literary bright sparks, she now spends half her time in the USA).

            So she has a lot of bargaining power when her stuff gets published.

Now why am I labouring this point?

Because I think not many novelists would be given the privilege of having what is essentially a long short story published by a major publisher as a little hardback book.

To be specific, The Embassy of Cambodia originally appeared in The New Yorker, and is now published in book form. Its 69 small pages are on typical Zadie Smith themes.

            Fatou is a nanny from West Africa, working in Willesden (London) for a mean-spirited Pakistani family who withhold both her passport and her salary, which they say they are spending on her food and board. Fatou does not perform any acts of overt rebellion but, when they are not looking, she does make use of her employers’ membership card to swim at the local health club. She also has earnest conversations with Andrew, an African Christian man who is deeply concerned about the treatment of Africans and matters such as genocide. Zadie Smith has the courtesy to assume that her readers will understand that many of the things Andrew says are inaccurate, but are typical of the way people (of any ethnicity) often discuss world issues. In fact, they suggest one major idea in The Embassy of Cambodia – the idea that most people do not know exactly how the world runs, or what the specifics of other cultures are, even if they can talk reasonably intelligently about them.

The story’s dominant symbol is the walled embassy of Cambodia, which Fatou sees each day when she is waiting at the bus stop. Neither she nor we know what exactly goes on inside the walls of the embassy, and indeed we are never told. But Fatou hears the sounds of badminton being played there, sometimes sees a shuttlecock flying above the high wall, and imagines what the scene is like inside. This, as I read it, is an image of how we use pure imagination to fill in the gaps in our knowledge of other cultures. We do not know all Fatou’s immigrant experience; she does not know all her Pakistani employers’ immigrant experience; neither of us know the immigrant experiences of the embassy’s inhabitants, and so on. Given this, it is a little disconcerting that Zadie Smith sometimes cuts into her third-person narrative with a collective first-person narration (“we”) presuming to speak on behalf of the whole community of Willesden.

Not being a badminton player, I had to have pointed out to me that the short story’s “chapter” headings are in the form of the way a game of badminton is scored, running from 1 to 21. But who are the players of this scored game? Fatou and her employers, I would guess, if I am to judge from the story’s outcome. However, I won’t give that away.

This is an interesting short story, but do remember that it is a short story.

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Why call a collection of poems Enough?

 

For purposes of ambiguity, I would guess. That expressive word “enough” could mean satisfaction as in “I have enough and need no more”.  Or it could mean intense dissatisfaction as in “Enough is enough!” Louise Wallace’s second collection of poetry seems to me to be balanced between these two emotions, even if the title poem “Enough” is about a father irritated by his son’s cough and lacking rest of spirit.

I emphasize that I do not use the word “satisfaction” here to mean complacency, but to mean a situation in which the soul is able to respond to its environment with purpose, clarity of thought and a certain exaltation. These things are very satisfying. This form of “enough” is what I get out of Wallace’s poems in this collection that concern her shift to the South Island, in some of which her husband Rory is mentioned by name and in some of which the poet is “I” while in others she is more objectively “she”.

“I pull the other island towards me, / hand over hand till I jump ship” declares the opening of the poem “This new place”, showing that the personal response to the new setting is paramount. So there are themes about settling in to, and becoming used to, living in a new place; about making food out of feijoas; about worrying over home security (the poem “We need to put new batteries in our smoke alarms”); and about adjusting to a very busy sort of domestic contentment (“The happy poem”)

Wallace is, in my judgement, at her best as a minimalist. For me, the collection’s most perfect poem is the direct statement of  “Getting better”, which I quote in its entirety:

“Today the sun shone

through my cat’s ears.

I could see a web – a map

of tiny veins, red

on his thin pink skin.”

The sun, the cat and a map – that is, a largeness of experience encapsulated in five spare lines.

            Yet there is the other “enough” in this volume – the “Enough!” of dissatisfaction or exasperation with the conditions of life.

Come jolting poems about death (“Jolt”, “Personal poem” “Ghost”) and what appear to be poems about the sickness of elderly relatives (“In the study”; “With her”) or about an elderly relative infantilised (“You wouldn’t cry about that”) and the awkward sense of being a younger person, and therefore risking being thought patronising when you set out to help infirm older people (“A hand”).

More pervasively, there are poems of uncertainty about the value of writing poems (“The feathered hat”) or arising from teaching writing courses (“The lonely girls”, “There are people better than you or I”, “What we’ll have to do”) and the difficulty of writing a book of poems (“I feel like I am having the world’s heaviest baby”) and the sickness of desperately wanting to make a literary splash (the poem “The thing” ends with lines about wanting to make “Something that makes normal people / feel worse about their lives”). “At the airport” seems an apologia for the randomness of much verse.

I admit to limited tolerance for too much of this sort of self-consciousness. Reading too many such poems is like hearing a performer cough and clear her throat repeatedly rather than getting on and reading. I am sure that the writing class situations are real but I am not sure that they make real poems. At least, though, there is the admission that literature and good advice can be limiting. I quote in its entirety the bracing poem “I’m always telling people”:

“I’m always telling people

not to use words

like ‘beauty’ or ‘sad’

because they are too vague,

too much

of an abstraction –

they don’t give us a picture, I say.

But when I say ‘love’ I see

your face, and your full heart

sailing towards me.”

Thus far, I have given a personal reaction and spoken about the collection’s ideas. I know this is not very proper of me. I should be weighing the language and the sounds – in other words dealing with the poetry as poetry. Wallace mixes free-form poems and prose poems. Inevitably, the prose poems, by their brevity, have to concentrate on a moment of perception or revelation or epiphany. In this respect they either work or they don’t, and I refrain from making critical comment on them, apart from noting that the one called “the millennium” is a wry comment on the nonsense of first-to-see-the-sun in Gisborne in 2000.

An interesting collection, which works best when the poet looks outwards.

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Comparisons are odious, so I do not compare Bernadette Hall’s latest collection Life & Customs with Louise Wallace’s Enough.

Bernadette Hall can do the minimalist statement. If I quote her poem “How lovely to see you” in full, it goes thus:

“I went happily on the bus to Putney

over the beautiful Putney Bridge

I discovered Bishop’s Park

and a huge stand of oak trees

and an alms-house from the seventeenth century.”

Bernadette Hall also does prose poems, such as “The favour” and “How they ran into each other again at the Old Girls’ reunion”, both in the form of conversational dialogue; and the strange fusion of the Latin language and suicide that is “Millennia of silence and no rain”.

In the main, however, she more often favours the reflective, expansive, and developed poem than many of her contemporaries do.

The first section of this volume offers poems of childhood and recall and foreign journeys  - if they are more than imagined (Rome, Ireland, the Antarctic, Asia). In such poems as “The much vaunted map of holiness and truth”, “The angel of perfection” there is a seeking for the numinous in landscape and memory, even if antique attempts to convey the numinous are rejected.

The volume’s second section, “Sul: a ballet that awaits performance”, is like an eleven-part prose fairy-story, wherein a young woman retreats into a fantasy concerning an Ice King and a chilly winter world of non-growth, before being returned to the world of life and procreation. This story made most sense to me only when I looked at Bernadette Hall’s endnote. She says she was inspired by seeing anorexic young women, who were trying to remain children and not to grow up. In a way, “Sul” works as a critique of all adolescent fantasies of self-dramatization and separation from humanity; those fantasies in which adolescents see themselves as unique and heroic in their withdrawal (why do I immediately think of Romantic self-mythologization like Shelley’s “Alastor” when I note this?). But there is a sting in the tail – for the last suggestion suggests an adult nostalgia for such fantasy, even when the adult mind knows it is destructive.

I do not belittle this interesting work when I say it is like a fairy-tale. Any reader of Hans Andersen knows that fairy-tales often encode profound psychological truth. In its symbolic way, so does this prose poem.

It is the volume’s third section, however, which most justifies the volume’s title “Life & Customs”, it being essentially poems of many lands and cultures – Native American; Aboriginal; Death met on a beach in Maori guise; ancient Rome (the poem “Life & Customs” itself) and Antarctica (“Door”).

“Footnotes to the Oresteia” is a most ambitious cycle, partly modernising Aeschylus, but it does risk banalizing those ancient myths in the modernization (like Cocteau’s “The Infernal Machine”).

I have already admitted that I have difficulty assessing prose poems as works of literature. In spite of this, I see the jewel of this volume as being the generous prose poem “There’s something I want to tell you” which is, as I read it, the sensual stream-of-consciousness of an old woman. It works so well because it flows easily, by association, from thought to thought, and suits Bernadette Hall’s discursive temperament.

Life & Customs is a civilised and agreeable volume.