Something New

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

PEPEHA PORTAL by Ariana Tikao (Otago University Press, $NZ30) ; AFTER WAR by Dzenana Vucic (published by University of Queensland…) ; BEYOND THE BORDER and other poems, by Owen Marshall (published by Quentin Wilson, $NZ37.50) ; HERE & HEREAFTER by Alice Miller (published by Liverpool University Press.)

 Pepeha Portal is Ariana Tikao’s first collection of poetry, but she has written poetry for years and has often appeared in various presses. She sojourned at the University of Canterbury after the devastating earthquake and that was where she wrote all the 50 poems that make up this collection. They are divided into two parts. She says “Pepeha” is related more closely to tipuna places and stories; and “Portal” reflects more about her childhood and other memories. In her poem From, she tells us about her childhood, beginning with the stanza “I’m from Redgrave  Street, Hoon Hay. Potiki of seven ‘half-caste’ kids raised in a house built by the state, with purple polyanthus and sweet peas blooming along the driveway…” She gives us two pages explaining her name. She was the youngest of a family of seven. Their parents gave them all European names.  Her parents named her Leanne. But in her adulthood, she legally changed her name to Ariana Tikao, honouring her Maori ancestors and forbears.  And her sees the world from a clear and compelling Maori perspective.

Mihi begins with how the land was formed and reformed by its movements; but this shifting, when it came to Christchurch, meant that many people had to move elsewhere, thus breaking up many communities.  There are poems based in Maori ancient tales such as the making of a Te Taniwha. Again there is an ancient tale Te Tarere a Hikaiti which is about a woman who was mistreated and “juiced and crushed / fermented heart / I leapt to my death / I sang my lament… I fell for you.” It is based on the traditional story of a woman who threw herself to her death after her husband had betrayed her. There are also poems about pre-European Maori customs such as Poua’s Oriori about the right season to plant “You must follow the order of things… /do not come in the time of Maku / when wet cold world / congealer of lung. / No air will enter / No song / No chant… / … We sleep when we’re tired / We eat when we’re hungry / We are born when / whakapapa / & moontide / shine.” But Ariana Tikao is not concerned only with ancient things. There are poems of protest such as “Settling” against Israeli settlers in the West Bank; and “Reclamation” which protests at the way land has been expanded, taking over where there was sea and water.

Moving on to Portal there is Transforming about growing up and seeing the world gradually and taking up radical ideas as in “We will summon those willing to fight for Papatuanuku, those who won’t keep extracting from her – unlike us, who believed the claim of the capitalists. These new fighters will speak our reo and dance with the fluid movement of bull kelp surging around the rocks.”  Intonation celebrates the late Moana Jackson who always advocated for Maori rights. Yet just as often she deals with her family. Cold Feet (Mum) is a sort of elegy for her mother, seeing her when she has died and then “with my sisters and our daughters / I am dressing you / in your swirly bronze and black / coat-dress, and we marvel / at your legs, how / beautiful that are / smooth and straight / like emergency candles / in a box.” There is a sense of close community. There can also be room for the amusing as in  Infight Lovers of Bristol Street where two birds are so involved in mating that they fall off the roof. And there is also the intimate in Surfacing / Diving which is about having her moko “I feel the cut and burn / of my moko’s creation / as when the baby’s / head stretches the puapua / slowly ripping perineal tissue / sweet hot pain / fire breathing her / into tea o marama…” It may be a moment torture, but it takes her to her full Maoritanga.

As is always the case, I have quoted only some of her many poems; but I am certain that this is the best and most polished collection of Maori poetry that I have seen for years.

  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *

 

            Dzenana Vucic is a Bosnian-Australian and in her After War she writes of the horrors of war. The war she deals with is the disintegration of what used to be Yugoslavia, where Serbs, Croats and other ethnicities ripped each other apart, meaning massacres, “ethnic cleansing”, and often rape, which was used as a weapon. Bosnia was caught up in it. She does not take sides in her poetry. Indeed she dedicates her collection to a retired Croatian army officer, Tomo Buzov, who protected a Bosnian boy. The title of her book reads in full “After War – a memoir in poetry and pieces” for she is concerned with how she remembered things. She was six when her family brought her to Australia and she recalls pieces of trauma that shaped her life, as well as the tails of horror that her family told her. In her poem First Year After War she writes “How do you fall from a building unshaken by bombs / How do you fall unrunning from gunfire”. Or later in the poem Fainting Goat she writes “The first time I hear a car backfire / I throw myself / to the ground, / arms over head as though arms / might make a difference/ (not that they will, they have not)”. Bosnians are [mainly] Muslim, and sometimes she refers to the massacre of Muslims by an Australian in Christchurch. She is also concerned about the matter of language where [in some parts of  what was Yugoslavia] the Bosnian language was banned. But of the whole catastrophe she writes “I want to write a poem that explains a hundred thousand deaths, one point five million unhomed, up to sixty thousand raped and 9 million youtube viewers …”, the latter part showing how un-caring the rest of the world is. There follows a long sequence – covering 20 pages written in fractured words – which makes it clear that the whole country was fractured by war. And in the poem To Learn a M/other Tongue, she tells us how, as she grew up in Australia, she began to speak English.  So she taught herself how to speak the Bosnian language. There is much, much more to this collection, including poems that show she now has a wider perspective. But it all speaks of what should be humane.

  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *  

 

Novelist, short-story writer and poet, Owen Marshall’s Beyond the Border is his fifth collection of poetry and it is a very generous one, giving us fully 196 poems. This collection  begins with Beyond the Border, an elegy for the late Vincent O’Sullivan, saying that O’Sullivan “wielded the language of academia with the best, but also struck home with the intense simplicity of the butcher and the candlestick maker. You couldn’t drive a car, but had complete licence in the use of words”. Very true. [And I remember driving Vincent home once or twice as he had no car.] As you might expect, a collection beginning with an elegy often deals with memories and losses, such as the dead who are “beyond the border”. But Marshall is not sentimental. Far from it. This is a very balanced collection, and it is abundant. As always Marshall does not perplex readers but works in straightforward literal statements, though sometimes with irony. Nothing is written to baffle us. Marshall uses, in these many poems, prose poetry [sometimes], free verse, standard stanzas, and others, but never confusing. And so to the many poems.

Marshall certainly has travelled and there are poems about visiting Saint Agnes, what is left of Troy, going to the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, visiting Menton, and the Antarctic. He also has memories of childhood; and as an old man he sometime writes about his grandchildren. He also writes poems that come close to philosophy. But it is the loss of friends who have died that most hurt him. There are so many poems in this collection that the best I can do is to point out the poems that most interested me.

First the poem Retrospection, which reminds us that we often remember trivial things which we thought were important, and yet they stay with us. My Father Laughing is a happy moment he recalls from his young years. Disunity gives us a moment of old age saying “My toes are farther from me now and snag / my blue socks when I attempt to dress them. / Other body parts are also distancing themselves / or disputing suzerainty….” Oh so true if you are old. And right next to it there is the poem Bipedal Advantage, which wonders how we homo sapiens came to be the leading creatures on Earth when other creatures are in many ways more majestic than we are. Mr. Catarrh is about a man he knew when he was young – a man who would “hock” and spit a lot - but with whom he was able to converse. Among memories of school days there is Ignominy about negative things he did – really small things but he felt bad about it. And as you might expect for children in the 1950s, he has memories about The Bughouse, kids watching movies before television in New Zealand basically took over.

And what of some even more thoughtful poems? Yet It Will Come asks us to think how the world will end – not in terms of warfare or famine, but the long natural disintegration of the Earth as the Sun expands and the Solar System changes. Who will be the last human beings on Earth before they are wiped out? There is a charming poem called Whatever telling us that anything, seen the right way, is poetry. As for True Mentors, it tells us that “Those writers of the past whom you admire become the family in your head, best friends too. It doesn’t matter that they are dead, for you have met them in the confessional of their works…” And there is much more about poetry this poem says. When he turns to Watching Children Play he sees “Everywhere are exhortations concerning remedies for infirmity and the improvement of our well-being, but nothing lifts my spirits more than to watch small children playing. No guise of cynicism, or cloak of subterfuge as they reach for life, just the vulnerability accompanying openness, innocence and trust.” Oh yes there are also other very good poems of the past, as in The Nostalgia Club and The Car Museum and Student Days.

But the poem which I thought the most brilliant was Orca, which he saw when he was in Antarctic where orca were near, described as “Streamlined royalty in black and white rising in gleaming crescent then curving back in such graceful choreography, yet bearing too the insolent demeanour of apex predators. One could aptly be named the name of some lightning-striking Viking god but comes instead from Latin – Kingdom of the Dead.” The best description I have ever seen of orca.

I have, of cause, noted only a sample of these many poems. I do not think every one of Owen Marshall’s poems is great. Some of his poems are downright mundane. But this is a great collection and, is always with Marshall, it is very readable. 

*.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.   * 

 Over the years I have read all of the collections of Alice Miller, including The Limits in which she said that life is such that we have to simply develop intellectual resilience to deal with the world and its people. In her next collection What Fire she was very concerned about the fearful, hesitant and uncertain-ness of the future of human beings, perhaps mitigated by love. All of which might sound as if I were saying that she is a prophet of doom – which of course is not true. She has a streak of wit and she is very open to considering many ways people live. I would go so far as to say she is almost a philosopher with a heart. Alice Miller was born and bred  in New Zealand, but she now lives in Berlin and obviously she can speak the German language. Her grandmother was Jewish and managed to get out of Germany before Hitler took over. Now her new collection Here & Thereafter takes a broad view not only of the country where she now lives. One of her opening poems Old Romantic says “When we’re young we know poems matter, later we / still know but have to admit there’s only one way they can. / After all, much more than sandcastles are vanishing. / What with those odds, one part must keep singing / and it’s that proof we keep.” Think about this poem carefully. It means so many things. Coming to Germany she writes Future Proof wherein “To apply for a special German passport, I needed / proof my ancestors were persecuted, to show / their vanished business off Unter den Linden; / to listen to the current State’s persecution; and to never / call it that. I smile wide, a man says / I’m allowed here”. One of the most heart-breaking poem is Apology where an old German man awkwardly apologises for the Holocaust. But this is far from all of Miller’s poems. Read deeply of poems about having a child as in the poems Babies and Birth, with all the pains of giving birth. She does not deal only with older wars but with some that are still going. And in the poem The Golden Baugh Hotel there is the possibility of a war to come. And sometimes there is loneliness, as in the poem Real Bird where “Some days I’m like the gannet / on that island where people left / concrete birds to try to attract a colony. / The poor gannet was the only real bird / left, courting the concrete birds…”  I have given you only a very small sample of the many poems in Here & Thereafter but it is clear that Alice Miller is one of the most thoughtful poets we have.

Something New

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ll conclude by noting some personal favourites.

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

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

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

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

Something New

We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
 
“WULF” by Hamish Clayton (Penguin, $30) ISBN 9780143206491

“HOKITIKA TOWN” by Charlotte Randall (Penguin, $24:95) ISBN 9780143565390

“THE LARNACHS” by Owen Marshall (Random House, $39:99) ISBN 9781869794972

Historical novels present grave problems to discerning readers. One day I’ll devote a whole blog to them. Meanwhile, let me note one of the problems.

Novelists are too prone to force the attitudes and values of their own times into the mouths of people who lived in past ages. Add to this the tendency of some historical novelists to judge and condemn values from the past, on the assumption that present values are the standard against which all history must be judged, and you have a recipe for what historians call “present-ism”. Many supposedly historical novels really serve us characters from our own age, superficially dressed in period clothing.

So it’s with great respect and pleasure that I recommend three New Zealand novels, all published in the first half of this year, that really do manage to think themselves into a mentality from our past. They might appeal to different audiences, but they all show authors really engaging with times that were radically different from our own.

In some ways the most extraordinary of the three is Hamish Clayton’s “Wulf”, because it is a first novel. It’s narrated by an English sailor on board the brig Elizabeth in the year 1831. This was the ship which, notoriously, transported Te Rauparaha and his iwi down to the South Island where they were able to carry out massacres of other iwi because they had the advantage of being armed with muskets. With great control of the narrative, Clayton manages to avoid the sensational blood-and-guts aspect of this. Instead, he lets us enter the sailor’s mind and see his world in his terms – the strangeness of New Zealand’s landscape and sub-tropical climate, the apparent mystery of new flora and fauna, his distance from the formidable warrior-chief. The sailor’s only frame of reference is English and European mythology, so he thinks in terms of an ancient Saxon epic. Hence the novel’s title. If you have read Thomas Keneally’s 1987 novel The Playmaker (about British convicts on the fringe of Australia, 200 years ago), you will have some idea of the type of atmosphere Clayton creates. A dislocation from everything familiar. But Clayton’s descriptive powers are very much his own.

An attempt to enter a mentality on the other side of the Maori-Pakeha divide is Charlotte Randall’s energetic Hokitika Town. Its first person narrator is a Maori kid who mangles the English language, but in doing so comes up with much creative thinking. He develops a moral conscience a bit in advance of some of the profiteers, prostitutes and miners who fill the pioneer town. Set in the West Coast gold-rushes of the nineteenth century, Hokitika Town has lively plotlines which in themselves manage to suggest something of the sheer messiness of Pakeha life in the days when extractive smash-and-grab industries were the country’s mainstay.

Then there’s Owen Marshall’s The Larnachs, an imaginative development of the famous story of William Larnach, the wealthy Dunedin businessman and MP who built his “castle” on the Otago peninsula, and then committed suicide during a parliamentary session in 1898 . Marshall has two first-person narrators - Larnach’s young wife Conny,  and Dougie, his son from an earlier marriage. In this version it is the adultery of stepmother and stepson that drives Larnach over the edge. The novel is the story of that adultery, developing gradually and in appropriately decorous Victorian language. This is a great departure for one of our best short-story writers and novelists, who has never before written historical fiction.

What these three novels have in common is an original, thoughtful and credible attempt to probe the way people once thought and acted, rather than pretending that ideas and behaviour in the past were no different from what we now take for granted. All three are a rebuke to the type of cut-and-paste historical novel that depends on mugged-up historical detail and stereotypical characters. You can make up your own list of the type of thing I mean.

For other perspectives on the novels discussed here, the Winter 2011 issue of New Zealand Books has Murray Bramwell’s positive review of Wulf which he describes as “powerfully imagined… assured, crisply poetic and spellbinding in its unfurling narrative… Conradian”. In the March 2011 issue of Metro, Pip Adam is a little upset that Hamish Clayton makes some narrative use of cannibalism, but still notes that Wulf gives “the crystal-clear re- imagining of New Zealand as a strange and new place” and concludes that “It’s a fresh and compelling work that plays in the boundaries of story and history and presents a new imagining of the Elizabeth incident to contemporary readers.”

Also in the Winter 2011 issue of New Zealand Books, Ruth Nichol at first expresses some confusion over the language of Hokitika Town, but comes to endorse the novel for its “unusual and engaging” narrator with “an exuberant love of language”. She is particularly impressed by the way Hokitika Town shows the mental growth and development of the main character.

The New Zealand Listener 11 June 2011 contains John McCrystal’s interview with Owen Marshall about The Larnachs [now available at Listener on line]. The novel is reviewed by Elizabeth Alley in the Listener of 25 June. She praises it as “a sensitive, compassionate and discreet recreation of a story that, in less able hands, could well have faltered” and concludes that it is “a moving reflection on the nature of love amid the social constraints of the time.”