Something New

 

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

“HOPURANGI – SONGCATCHER, Poems from the Maramataka” by  Robert Sullivan (Auckland University Press, $29.99); “AUP NEW POETS 10”, edited by Anne Kennedy (AUP, $29.99); “TOWN” by  Madeleine Slavick (The Cuba Press, $30); “TIDELINES” by Kiri Piahana-Wong (Anahera Press, $NZ25.)

            It is a formidable task to do justice to Robert Sullivan’s Hopurangi Songcatcher. Much longer than most collections of poetry its 144 pages encompass approximately130 poems. I have read carefully all these poems, but the review you are reading simply cannot examine or consider in detail every poem, so I am reduced to giving you generalities.

Maramatanka means the Maori lunar year and, says Sullivan in his introduction, the poems take place over three months according to that lunar system. Further, his introduction tells us that he was concerned to reconnect with his late father’s iwi, but also to connect with other iwi important in his life. In many of his poems he references whakapapa and the desire to re-connect with family and forebears. The poem “Tamatea Kai-ariki: Tautoko” concerns his academic searches to verify whakapapa. What this may imply is that to some degree he has often been living a way of life that is not fully Maori – and he has Pakeha in his whakapapa (not only his Irish name Sullivan but also reference to a forbear called Paddy). Put it all together and, in what he calls in his introduction “a period of personal change and growth”, his poems aim to bring him back to his Maori side. But there is a flexibility in his points of reference. In New Zealand as it now is, it is impossible for anybody, Maori or Pakeha, to be unaware of mass media, pop and rock tunes etc. Sullivan refers to these things, every so often showing his pleasure in off-shore music. For example in the poem ”Tangaroa-a-mua: Ranginui” Sullivan puts together a revered piece of Maori mythology with a pop song sung by Diana Ross. He also describes, in “Turu: Just last week” a present-day account of a literary gathering, crammed with poets.

The poems begin with “Paua Canticle”, where the poet is walking on the Oamaru beach and trying to connect with sea-food and the tide, seeing all things as connected. In his often quizzical poetry he ties tradition with the present. In “Continuous Positive Airway Pressure Machine” there is the clash between the dead animals of the past and the present museum in which they stand in class cages. In “Pupurangi Shelley” he tells us that the kauri snail in the forest is ultimately linked to supermarkets and then emphasises the millennia in which these islands have existed. He pours on a degree of satire in “The Paper Chase” where he imagines all the different copies of the Treaty of Waitangi being eaten away by giant kauri snails.

But this is simply the overture. The major interest of the volume follows the stages of the moon taking us through the lunar cycle in terms of Medium Energy, Low Energy and High Energy before lapsing into Low Energy and Medium Energy again. The moon influences our moods and the times when we can work or think. In Medium Energy he is concerned with the happiness of relating to his iwi and their customs which he is just learning and feeling the energy of the marae. The first Low Energy appears to deal with his sexuality in the poem “I Went Alone to the Taj Mahal”. In “I Was Wondering Why”, the clouds mute the sun with greyness. Medium Energy counters with the poem “Ouenuku: Mauri Ora” where, despite the rain “the awards are for the young people to give their ha / to the sky, who encourage us to thrive…” Rain can be a blessing. “Anei Ano he Ra” affirms that there is such a thing as love where “Now I know that to believe / in aroha, or love, is honourable and plain, / no similes for it except to say that love / has a purpose.” In fact, as Sullivan suggest, love can be joyful. The poem “Okoro – I had a cat once” appears to suggests that the cat’s animal joy at having a litter is in itself a form of love.

Some of Sullivan’s poems are of moods of despondence – of opportunities lost or unhelpful situations, as in “I opened a box” and also in “Korekore Whakapiri: Recycling” about the difficulty of clipping a hedge – everyday things. But there are also poems of exultation and joy as in “Rakaumatoi: E Hoa” [High Energy] which begins “How do I love you, my friends? / Let me count the mountain’s ways, / the heightened plains that bend / up into snowy reaches, playing / in the mind out of sight, to send / pillars of light, clouds, rain / on a grateful garden bed…” Delight can be sparked by the forces of nature.

It is perhaps inevitable that Sullivan, affirming his Maori self, takes some shots at colonialism, even if this is not his main interest. In “Tangaroa Whariki Kiokio: Another grey day” the “grey” refers to 19^th century George Grey wherein “when you think about / our colonial history, they’re all Grey days”, Grey being the epitome of British rule. Inasmuch as there is activism, Sullivan has a poem celebrating the use of Maori writers texts in schools “You’ll get an e-mail from me”. “Orongonui: The Corrections” has him discussing how over the years he was not encouraged to use the Maori language. And the poem “Rakaunui: He Whenua Manu”, while not chastising James Cook directly, does tell an anecdote about him that puts Cook in a bad light. There is criticism here, but not rage. That is not Sullivan’s style.

One outstanding interest for Sullivan is birds, often seen as omens, messengers or passengers coming seasonally to this country. “Tamatea Kai-ariki: Three birds flew from me” is an admirable lyric, which I quote here in full: “Three birds flew from me: / a sparrow from my chest / a tui out of my throat / a pilwaka from my thigh / they flew to see my father / to let him know I am well / then the monarch butterflies / took their turns to see my / grandmother / once they saw the birds / were safely flown / and then the bees / came back to the field / to help the new manuka / akeake, harakeke, totara, / ti kouka and kowhai / bring back the birds.” More ironical is “Otane: Feeding the Birds of the World” which considers all the birds from other parts of the world that fly in to Christchurch seasonally… right next to a museum filled with stuffed birds in glass cases. More directly, “Tamatea a Ngana: Huia” laments the wilful extinction of the huia.

True to the concept of the Maori lunar years, the whole collection ends fittingly with “Turu: Hoki Whenua Mai” with the stars of Matariki rising “knowing Matariki will lift / our sap to the full moon.” But the most pure depiction of the moon as we see it is “Oike: Marama sits up in the west”, much earlier in the whole collection.

            Hopurangi Songcatcher is a thoughtful and detailed collection, often requiring very close reading and touching on many moods in a quest for identity. Are there any flaws? Only two small ones. I cannot see the point of the re-telling of “Jack and the Beanstalk” which comes near the end of the book; and the typeface is rather faint. But those are my only grumbles about an important text.

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            For some years now, Auckland University Press has encouraged younger poets with their New Poets series, each of which contains the work of three poets. Generous space is given and each poet presents what amounts to a full collection.  The tenth in the series introduces three very different poets.

            Tessa Keenan’s Pukapuka mapi / Atlas has a refreshing straightforwardness to it – the candour of an alert and observant young woman, often using prose poems in her accounts of her region, the beach, fields and mountains; but also in the behaviour of people of her own age. The poem “Scurvy Girls” is a witty round-up of the behaviour of young women. She often relates to somebody she loves; and in “Permission to Hate”, she makes it clear that she does not hate the person she loves but does express her hatred of other things (colonisation, money, ownership) beyond her control. And there is much critical satire in “Killing Time in the Canterbury Museum”. “Moonwalk” suggest both present joy and the limitations of a young person with the lament “One day I will run out of new things to do. / I hope there will still be things to look at without distraction.”  Speaking as a Maori, however, one of her greatest concerns is the present and the past of the Maori people. “Tataraimaka Pa” is a lament for the past, as so (obliquely) is “Taranaki”; but the fullest examination of the past is “Some Other Pa” [connected to the collection’s title] where present-day conceptions of space and distance contrast with traditional ways of perceiving. This is a robust and very readable collection.

            romesh dissanayake’s  Favourite Flavour House displays a very different type of poet. His roots were in Sri Lanka and in his adult years he looks quizzically at New Zealand but also refers back to his land of birth. There are opening poems about Asian food outlets in New Zealand, and he appears to himself be part of the culinary profession. A long ten-part sequence called “Six a.m. in Colombo / Cinnamon Gardens” carries him though much of his childhood and youth, learning among other things that “When the going gets tough the educated emigrate / and when the going got rough / we sold wood apple juice / sealed in small plastic tubes / with a comb and a candle / and bought three / wet summers’ worth in airfares.” So to the leaving Sri Lanka and some riotous behaviour in London before he records a more domestic way life… at least this is how it may be if he is a confessional poet. There is much emphasis on food but also on drugs. There is a tension between his culinary skills and his weariness with his work, telling us “the truth is I’m tired / writing cute little poems to please white people…” Hip? Ironic? Or genuinely world-weary? You choose. Of the three poets in this book, romesh dissanayake is apparently the most experienced. His first novel is about to be published.

            Sadie Lawrence‘s  poems were written between the ages of seventeen and nineteen. Her collection is called Like Human Girls / all we have is noise. There are overtones of romanticism in the opening poem  “(one month) Anniversary” with the speaker dizzy in what is apparently first love: “Tonight, the world is a pearl / cradled in adolescent hands. / Tonight, this bridge is a virginal marriage bed; / we were the first to wrap ourselves in it black blanket”. Lawrence’s style is rich with metaphors, one could almost say courtly. It is no criticism to note that these are adolescent poems because Lawrence consciously deal with the adolescent situation. “All Teenagers are Tapestries” deals with the bloodiness of women’s lives – including surgery and menstruation. Some poems touch on the awkwardness of relating to males and there are poems about leaving home. Or wishing to. Melodrama finds its way into the imagery when the poem “Thank God” touches on popular narratives about romantic suicides. The poet makes grandiose claims of how bad she is in the poem “I’m not like other girls (I’m much worse)”, this being the adolescent chastising herself. It all adds up to a heady mix, and an engaging one.

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Cuba Press announces Town as “fifty stories and fifty images by award-winning writer and photographer Madeleine Slavick” and that is a fair summary. Slavick’s book, almost pocket-size, is as much a work of visual art as of a work of poetry. Rather than calling its words “stories” I would call them prose poems. The title poem “Town” declares that “town” can mean a city or country or volcano or landscape, wherever people or animals are. Whether it was Madeleine Slavick’s intention or not, that relates to the now discarded term “townland” [not used in this collection] which used to mean simply a wide piece of land. American born and Hong Kong raised, Slavick see New Zealand in a different light from NZ-born writers.

The opening poem “The Road Where I Live” begins “A straight line fifteen kilometres long. I walk in one direction one day, and in the other on the next. Seventeen cars pass. Almost every driver waves.” And what follows is almost idyllic in its description of the country, the animals and the friendly people… but Slavick is canny enough to also show that there are nearby state highways and railways. The land she describes is almost, but not quite, the Garden of Eden. Thus with many of her poems – there is mention of earthquakes and death at the railway crossing as well as other tragedies. She has some memories of living in Hong Kong; she tries to learn the Maori language; she notes the fate of Kiwi. The Piwakawaka is honoured with this [complete] poem “Stops. Flaps at eyeline, then darts, sideways. / A man called a loved one Fantail. She also left.” There are accounts of people who encourage others to join a book club. She is bemused by where community halls are. And of course there are sometimes annoying intrusions into domestics live. “Landline” reads in full: “Dinnertime, telephone rings, / A computer company makes an offer. / No, thank you, and I put down the receiver. / The woman calls back and asks why I hung up.”

            Given the landscape Slavick depicts, there are forthright statements about the ecology. A very robust poem “Declaration” begins “When our forests were forests, people couldn’t hear their own voices for the birdsong. Three, forty, seventy, ninety miles of bush, of song, before trees and their crowns thrown down, mounds fifteen metres high for the burning.”… and goes on to see the casual pollution there is in many forests and waterways. “Animal Stories” charts the hunting done by introduced animals. Not that it is all her prose poems are earnest. The poem “Write, Writer” is an ironic take on the different ways writing is accepted.

            This is an enjoyable collection which can be browsed at leisure, text and images.

A word about the photographs – while there are rural images of the seasons and weather, there are also images that suggest irony or criticism: the amateur sign saying FREE leaning against a tree; the almost brutalist signs saying MEAT and SOCIETY. But countering these are the thoughtful benches with the shadow of a tree falling on them; the beautiful photo of two flowers close up, one wilting… and so forth. Yes, Slavick is a very professional photographer.

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Kiri Piahana-Wong’s Tidelines begins and ends with the story from centuries ago of Hinerangi who, after tragic events including her husband’s drowning, died on the west coast of what is now called Waitakere. The opening poem “Hinerangi” has Hinerangi directly addressing us and the closing poem “In the Beginning” brings us back to Hinerangi speaking. The whole of this slim collection is written in the first person, but in between first and last poems, it is mainly a modern young woman who is speaking. Or is she?  Sometimes she is like an avatar of Hinerangi, observing the lands and beaches that she knew centuries ago, though they are now in a different condition. It is as if she can now see what has become the land she died in. The 8-part sequence “A sequence of birds” begins “Once again I am looking at flowers. / These are hydrangeas, picked / surreptitiously from a hedge outside / a bach at Laingholm Beach.” Staying on Auckland’s west coast, the modern narrator lives for a while  at Piha, where she is moved by the nature and the sea and perhaps especially by the sky and the rain that evoke gods “I feel it / - the sky’s water: all the wondrous light / weeping joyous tears of the sky god, / Ranginui, running down my side and / into the earth, Papatuanuku, and then / settling there.”

But Hinerangi addresses the modern narrator in the poem “So far below”, suggesting that the present-day, modern narrator knows too little about herself. And here the poet becomes confessional, with poems in which she addresses her own moods, apparently often melancholy. “Messenger Bird” wonders if a messenger bird can be more effective than modern communications as she feels cut off from people. The sequence “Happiness” has an ironical title because it is mostly concerned with the fleeting nature of happiness and moods of despondency.  “Falling” suggests uncertainness and a sense of emptiness and “Storytelling” is particularly unhappy, contemplating suicide. It is good that the final poem gives a sense of solidarity with another woman, even if she lived long ago.

Kiri Piahana-Wong writes lucidly – she allows us to understand why she is so related to a long-dead woman and she presents vividly the nature of the coast she scans.

Something New

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

“DEEP COLOUR” by Diana Bridge (Otago University Press, $NZ25); “AS THE TREES HAVE GROWN” by Stephanie de Montalk (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $NZ25); “JAMES K. BAXTER – THE SELECTED POEMS” Edited by John Weir (THWUP $NZ 40)

            Three years ago, I had the pleasure of reading and reviewing Diana Bridge’s seventh collection of poetry Two or More Islands . I at once admired the way she used mythological and literary references which showed real erudition on her part, and how she could make meaningful statements about the present age from them. I concluded my (regrettably brief) review with the statement “I can only give superlatives to this sane and satisfying collection”

 

            Diana Bridge’s latest (eighth) collection Deep Colour opens with the eponymous poem “Deep Colour”. Beginning as a reflection on fish deep down in an aquarium, it morphs into a consideration of time and loss where “Day after day / the past waits for the present to fall / into its hands. One truth will soon displace / another; I am left with this. A life gathers its themes, / some of which it may never weave.” Time and transience are relentless and what is to come is never really fulfilled. And given that these are major themes in this collection, there is much alternation between the present and the past.

 

The first section of this collection focuses on present life, but present life which is often looking back. “In memoriam” is two elegies for a dead friend, “A split sky” and “Moving through leaves”. Two poems recall raising an infant, “Freestanding” being essentially about a child beginning to walk; and “Singapore shapes” depicting an infant becoming used to the shapes in the world. Some poems are written in the third person but (at least to this reader) seem to be close to confessional (“She spends time with objects” and “Her sort of order”). Bridge is very interested in shapes, texture, colours – an aesthetic appreciation of physical reality. It is no surprise, then, that she is very concerned with visual art. “He has put away pointers” is a reflection on a painting by Pissarro but, like “Deep Colour”, is becomes a study in the colours and the moods (or emotions) they incite. In examining another painting, “A butterfly floats in the paint”, there are references to the famous butterfly dream of an ancient Chinese sage. Bridge is, as later poems prove, deeply interested in Asian culture.  Perhaps her most rebellious poem is “Singing robes” where she refuses to tie physical reality to abstract ideas. Giving an almost geometric account of things seen in early spring, the poem concludes “Must you tie it all to something? If I were Wordsworth, / I would think you must, for fear that spring be wasted.” But spring is never wasted if one simply admires and appreciates spring without dissecting or explaining it. Goodbye Wordsworthian cloudy transcendentalism.

Given this aesthetic attitude to physical reality, the collection’s second section, called “Utamaro’s Objects” comprises poems inspired by the 18^th century Japanese artist Kitagawa Utamaro and his depictions of the natural world. The sequence “Songs of the garden” evokes the artist’s images of flowers and plants, but more often images of small creatures such as insects, butterflies and skinks. We are in a walled Japanese garden, but because we are following Kitagawa Utamaro’s images, we are observing nature at second hand. These poems are delicate, like the small creatures, and inevitably conjure up images of antique Japanese brush-work

Digging into the even deeper past, the third section, “Fifteen Poems on Things: Translations” takes us back to poems by the Chinese poet Xie Tiao (fl.460-494 AD). Bridge’s translations, like any translations, can never replicate exactly the original poems. There is no way that two very different languages can be synchronised, especially when the languages are separated by 1600 years. Even so, Bridge’s translations are a tour de force. Though the inspiration is an ancient one, we are drawn more directly into nature. The opening poem, “the wind” is an exquisite piece of work, characterising the wind in terms of the things it moves “Gently intermittent, it draws the red bud from its case; / Its thick mass spread, green cocklebur is stirred. / Drooping willows bend and then rise up; / young duckweed comes together, to disperse. / In the corridor, long sleeves are blown about…” Thus in the following poems in the sequence “the bamboo” “the rose bush” “the rushes” [which references a song by a Chinese empress], although as the sequence moves on, its observations are more about human reactions to the world of nature, and becomes much more concerned with human behaviour, as in the lament of a courtesan separated from her lover.

The final fifteen poems of this collection revert to the present time and the poet’s own voice, first delving into the impact of Hamlet in “Compared to silence” which wanders along the paths of human perception and asks if it is words or tones of music that create out moods, beliefs, understanding. Sometimes perhaps silence (“the rest is silence”) is better than articulation. Equally concerned with poetry, “The critic at sunset” – inspired by something Clive James wrote - examines inspiration as experienced by the poet. I am interested that two of Bridge’s longer poems are intriguingly ambiguous in their meaning. “Empty your head” views colonialism and the European taking of [in this case] Australia while being in tension with the importance of discovery and advanced science – almost implying that discovery, de-mystifying legends about the Earth, was inevitable. “Irish Girls”, drawing on accounts of immigrant Irish girls incarcerated in Seacliff Hospital in the late 19^th century, presents us with a contest between the hard reality of the girls’ experience and the bush which, as depicted here, seems like a compensating refuge for the girls.

None of this analysis of the collection ignores that fact that Diana Bridge is capable of pure pastoral.  Expression of seasons are dominant in “Canterbury contrapuntal” and “Walking during lockdown”; while “Accommodations” comes close to saying that nature follows art.

Diana Bridge’s poems are not to be read quickly and superficially. They require of the reader concentration and much re-reading. I confess [reluctantly] that I was sometimes daunted by the copious end-notes telling me the inspiration of many poems. But I again see Bridge’s work as  essential reading for anybody who wants to take the pulse of current poetry. A collection to be read and re-read.

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To put it mildly, Stephanie de Montalk’s poetry is radically different from the poetry of Diane Bridge. While Bridge prefers stately, packed stanzas, de Montalk prefers lean, narrow lines (three or four or five words per line). While Bridge is very reflective and very concerned with time and art, de Montalk is more impulsive and brisk and immersed in nature. But don’t assume that her world view is frivolous. Besides, it’s good to remember the dictum that comparisons are odious. Bridge is Bridge; de Montalk is de Montalk.

As the trees have grown is de Montalk’s fifth collection of poetry. The title As the trees have grown comes from a poem buried well into the text called “You will touch down” which declares that “[I] find that as / the trees have grown / so, too, the boxy / twin-engine congregations / of kereru – air ferries / of the species - / and the delicate nests / of titipounamu…” – really a simple declaration that the seasons turn and growth continues… and much honour to de Montalk for singling out the wonderful, bulky kereru as a harbinger of healthy avian existence and the titipounamu [“rifleman”] as the tiny but resilient creature it is.

In the collection’s opening poem “Heartfelt” the human body is compared with landscape. The murmur of the heart is like a waltz or fox-trot in the process of having cardiac problems examined. The six poems that immediately follow “Heartfelt” reference medical situations and hospital procedures, though gradually sliding into images of animals, trees and the farmyard, almost as if these are the disoriented thoughts of the patient, under anaesthetics, either undergoing or awaiting surgery, hallucinatory but vivid, like the best surrealism. Things are vivid and clearly delineated even if the poet [or poet’s narrator] is disoriented. A reader can only assume that these are poems born of the poet’s own experience.

The second section of the collection opens with an outright embrace of the weather and wind with the poem “Allurement” which reads in full “Last weekend the wind / brought cobalt skies, / bright hills and cicadas / louder than you’re likely / to remember them. / The cats slept in fresh grass, / leaves swirled / on the lower lawn, / and all day there was / a deep, white light / and everything / with an edge to it. ” Many different moods are struck in this section. The poem “Papaver somniferum”  wherein, says the narrator “I searched for Aunti Emma”, which makes sense of this only when an end-note advises us that “Aunti Emma” is a street name for opium – and the poem is in part about searching for the stuff in a hostile natural environment. There is a strong strain of fatalism in de Montalk’s world-view. The offbeat “Amor fati” considers the stoic embrace of fate, exampled in the life of a peripatetic trout. “Events” is also fatalist philosophy

De Montalk opens her third section with the Stoa (location in ancient Greece where stoicism was taught) and moves into poems relating what appear to be about a particular location as the weather and winds and seasons work around it, either benignly or intimidatingly. Here de Montalk comes closest to a Romantic concept of a force rolling through all things., while “Park Life” is purely objective observation of birds.

We then, in the fourth section, move into what is apparently nostalgia, taking us to the northern reaches of the North Island as remembered from childhood. The poem “The far north” begins “Does the sea still sing in summer, / blue between the dusty hills / and northern sky, cloudless / and cicada strong on the gravel / road to Paihia…? ” suggesting that the poet has long since been far from the far north (de Montalk is based in Wellington). “At Waitangi” is about her brother, as a youngster, catching fish. And yet “Tide line” comes back to the subjective views of a patient still in hospital – the “far north” is something being conjured up in a semi-conscious state. “Ground report” watches the demolition of an admired tree, but rather than lamenting, the poem takes the stoical position that things will be as they will be and that a smaller tree nearby may one day be as towering as the demolished giant. Fate rules again.

One of the longest poems in the collection “Time-distant” is an account of pilgrims going to Lourdes, presumably to be healed of afflictions. This bring us back to the matter of affliction and healing as seen in the collection’s earlier poems about hospital existence; but “Time-distant” appears not to be something de Montalk has herself witnessed. The very title “Time-distant” says this is something that happened in the distant past – and indeed an end-note tells us that de Montalk’s poem is drawing on the novel Lourdes by Emile Zola, a sceptical and anti-clerical account of the Lourdes phenomenon. In the circumstances, and given Zola’s fiercely anti-religious attitude, what de Montalk produces is relatively neutral about the phenomenon.

The longest poem, closing the volume, is “Sleave of care”. Its title is drawn from a phrase in Macbeth but, as de Montalk says in her end-notes, the discursive poem has nothing to do with Shakespeare. Instead, it is an elaborate account of a garden and estate in Ukraine which was originally created by Polish nobles. The poem is apparently based on the poet’s visit to this place, and is aware of trees and foliage now changing the face of what was once a place of pleasure in “Polish Ukraine”. Tempus fugit. Time changes all, but the working of nature is still fascinating and beguiling.

I do not find de Montalk’s largely que sera sera fatalist philosophy oppressive. It gives her the freedom to look at past, present and [possible] future impartially and it certainly keeps her in a position to look at things – even unpleasant ones like hospitalisation – with a truthful eye and an acute sense of physical reality, even when the mind is disoriented.

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John Weir is a priest and academic and John Weir is a poet (see a review of his SparksAmong the Stubble on this blog). But John Weir is probably best known for his friendship with James K. Baxter and, over the half-century since Baxter died, for curating and keeping in the public mind the work of Baxter. Weir has edited Baxter’s Collected Poems (1979) and then much later Baxter’s Complete Poems (2022) as well as the four volumes of James K. Baxter : Complete Prose (2015) which is reviewed in detail on this blog. There is no doubt that Baxter was one of New Zealand’s greatest – and most quotable – poets, appealing to many people. I remember as a teenager reading with great pleasure Baxter’s early collection (published in 1953) The Fallen House, the first book of poetry I read by my own choice rather than being told to do so by a teacher. Of course, for many reasons, Baxter was also a controversial person, very questionable in his private life and very performative in his public life (see on this blog The Baxter Problem). 

Now we have James K. Baxter: The Selected Poems edited by John Weir and oddly enough it is very welcome. The Collected and Complete poems of Baxter were very bulky tomes, sometimes difficult to hold or move around. The Selected Poems are of a more reasonable width and bulk. Over its 310 pages of poetry, Weir divides Baxter’s poetry into four sections – “The Early Years: Dunedin and Christchurch 1945-1949” ; “The Wellington Years and a Visit to India 1950-1965” ; “Return to Dunedin 1966-1968” ; and finally “The Jerusalem Years 1969-1972”. This sequence allows us, if we choose to read from beginning to end, to see how Baxter’s poetry shifted in style and content.

In his introduction John Weir remarks that Baxter was “by any standards, a remarkably prolific poet” (p.xv). This is putting it modestly. About 3,000 surviving poems were written by Baxter. Weir gives a concise biography of the man. Baxter had written over 600 poems before he was 18, when his first collection was published. Until he kicked the habit in the late 1950s, when he was about 30, Baxter was a slave to alcoholism. Weir traces handily Baxter’s genesis and evolution as a poet – moving from a leaning on the Romantics and French Decadents to a greater alertness to the New Zealand scene and a more colloquial style until he was “called” to Jerusalem in the late 1960s and died in 1972 aged 46. Weir makes one painful but necessary statement: “[Baxter] was… a willing partner in a number of sexual liaisons. While most of these were consensual, there were at least two which can be classified as rape. While the revelation of this fact has quite properly caused severe damage to his reputation as a man, it should also be said that, despite his preoccupation with sex and despite the serious offences he committed, he also gave direction and compassionate assistance to two hundreds of people, young and old.” (p.xx) I speculate – and with the greatest respect – that Weir would, in his life as a priest, have heard many unpleasant confessions in the confessional, but this particular revelation would probably have been the most upsetting for him. Baxter was a guru with feet of clay.

Weir claims Baxter “bequeathed to New Zealanders a blueprint for social reconstruction based on Christian and Maori cultural values and a body of poetry and prose that was remarkable for its range and for the sense of a life lived here, in Aotearoa New Zealand.” (p.xxi) Well… maybe, though it is hard to see Baxter’s polemics as amounting to a blueprint.

Here, though is the very best thing about James K. Baxter: The Selected Poems. Weir says this selection based on “what I consider to be the best and most recognisable poems Baxter wrote” and hence it is in the tradition of “Best Poems” (p.xxi)

Reader – I will not lie to you. I have not read the Selected Poems from beginning to end, if only because I have already read nearly all Baxter’s verse in other publications. But I did spend a week or so dipping in and out of these selected poems, enjoying old favourites from the first poem, teenager Baxter’s concise “High Country Weather”, to the very last poem, Baxter’s ranting “Ode to Auckland” with its notorious opening line “Auckland, you great arsehole”. Yes, at his worst, Baxter could turn to rant. I revelled again in the early stuff “The Fallen House”, “The Bay” and “Wild Bees”, and that great colloquial elegy “Lament for Barney Flanagan”. I paused at “Howrah Bridge”, which I think was a turning point in Baxter’s work; and I once again felt very ambiguous about “Thoughts of a Remuera Housewife”, which now seems a rather smug and self-satisfied piece of work (Jimmy Baxter showing he’s not one of the bourgeoisie). Then there were the great poems identified with place like “At Brighton Bay”, “Winter River” and the comical protests like “A Small Ode to Mixed Flatting”. And finally the pared-back poems of “Jerusalem Sonnets” and “Autumn Testament”, Baxter controlling himself and getting a focus.

So much to read here. So much to admire. Essential reading for sure. And portable.

 

Something New

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

 

“ENDURING LOVE – Collected Poems” by Robert McLean (Cold Hub Press, $NZ 40); “WALKING HOME” by Michele Amas (Victoria University Press, $NZ25; “TWO OR MORE ISLANDS” by Diana Bridge (Otago University Press,  $NZ27:95); “HERE WE ARE” by Graham Swift (Scribner, $NZ32:99)

Nearly seven years ago in late 2013, I reviewed on this blog under the heading The Poetry of Robert McLean, three collections of the poet’s work, For Renato Curcio ( first published 2010), Goat Songs (2011) and A Graveyard by the Sea (2012). Later, in 2018, I more briefly reviewed McLean’s collection Figure and Ground.

Enduring Love is subtitled “Collected Poems” of Robert McLean, but the word “collected” does not mean complete. Enduring Love gives a selection from McLean’s works, but with the addition of 30 new poems under the heading Postcards from Atlantis. Presumably McLean has gathered here what he now considers the best from his earlier collections. For example Enduring Love includes only 5 of the 17 poems in For Renato Curcio, only 5 of the poems from Goat Songs, and a more generous 19 of the 26 poems in Figure and Ground. If you wish to see my views on these collections, look up my earlier postings.

A Graveyard by the Sea is published in Enduring Love in its entirety, except that McLean has revised the earlier version, rewording some sections and dropping four of the original 62 stanzas. Reading this recension, I am even more impressed than I was in my reading of the first edition, and I herewith withdraw a few slightly carping comments I made in my 2013 review. A tour de force, at once an hommage to Paul Valery’s Le Cimetiere Marin and a very New Zealand poem, written strictly in the same metrical form that Valery used – sestets (six-line stanzas) with a regular a-a-b-c-c-b rhyme scheme – but more discursive than Valery. McLean’s A Graveyard by the Sea is now 58 stanzas compared with Valery’s 24. The sheer compositional skill impresses as much as the sentiments and the wide-ranging imagery.

So in this review, I will look only at those of McLean’s works which I am encountering for the first time in Enduring Love.

To begin with, one very obvious point has to be made, as it is always made when McLean’s poetry is discussed. McLean, running against current fashion, is a Modernist. He may, as I said in an earlier posting, be fully au fait with Postmodernist theory and practice; but he takes it for granted that his readership is literate and will be comfortable with the many cultural references he makes, and with his many allusions to canonical (or non-canonical) writers and their work. There are no end-notes or footnotes to help the reader along. As the back-cover blurb of Enduring Love correctly puts it “Robert McLean is a defiantly modernist poet who often uses traditional metres and rhyme to explore the complexities of history and selfhood.” It is appropriate that David Howard provides a back-cover endorsement to Mclean’s work. Howard (whose The Ones Who Keep Quiet I reviewed on this blog and whose In-Complete Poems I reviewed for Landfall Review Online in August 2012) is one of the few New Zealand poets who writes with the same intellectual intensity as McLean, although their philosophical stances and choice of thematic matter are quite distinct.

So to those sections of Enduring Love which I have not reviewed previously.

For the Coalition Dead was one of McLean’s earliest productions, appearing in 2009, before all the later collections mentioned above. Nine poems from For the Coalition Dead are included in Enduring Love. Some of McLean’s persistent preoccupations are already here – his admiration of another modernist poet (“A Valediction for C.N. Sisson”); love and the course of a relationship read in the sky and harsh weather (“Appassionata”); a very stark and pared-back poem confronting mortality in the carcass of a dead seal (“Inexorable, Thus”); and mental disorientation (“Lunatic”). Written in nine neat quatrains, “The Second Life” is one of McLean’s stateliest poems, distinguished in its brilliant opening:

“Animated by wisps of zephyr,

wind-chimes clatter pentatonic Zen.

My presence is de-emphasised: just

a plastic chair on the veranda

contrived to hold opinions”

Superficially, it is little more than reveries while seated in a backyard (“My universe is shrivelled - / it’s compacted into my backyard”). But the inevitable, slow tread of nature, the flourishing of weeds, entwines the present moment with a vaster time-scheme. It becomes a genuinely philosophical piece. Time and eternity are here together.

It is clear that much of For the Coalition Dead was a response to current events at the time it was written. McLean dwells on war and some of its horrors in a number of poems. For a soldier, killing can become a numbing, boring, perfectly routine job (“A Norse Assassin Struggles with Ennui”). A captive in a torture chamber is mentally as well as physically tormented, in a poem whose hysterical insistence is underlined by its drum-beat rhyming scheme, with just one rhyme for each of its nine-line stanzas. (“The Patriot”).

What war has inspired such poems? The six sections of this collection’s title poem, “For the Coalition Dead”, give us the answer. This is a response to the war in Iraq which the United States was then waging together with some allies. Rather than being a direct critique of the conduct of that war, “For the Coalition Dead” is an analysis of the American psyche, or at least the psyche of American elites that seek self-aggrandizement on the world stage. It is hard to believe that McLean was not at least in part inspired by Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead”, which is similarly written in quatrains and offers a critique of American mores.

And what of the 30 poems collected together for the first time in Enduring Love under the collective title Postcards from Atlantis?

I admire the persistence of McLean’s thematic interests – his dedication to a particular vision and a particular version of what poetry is. He will always deal with history, Western culture, and poetry itself in a critical voice redolent of Modernism, even if his techniques sometimes revert to other styles. In a set of “Epigrams” given here, he declares his aesthetic with one called “On Conceptual Art”:

“Its imposition fades on second-thought –

I’ll take the urn: cold, empty and well-wrought”.

Consider the poems here on ancient wars and violence. “Three Views of Agincourt” is a poetic tryptich which gives a very un-Shakespearean view of the late medieval battle, stripped of rhetoric and seen in a wider perspective. “Terror” indicts terror both Biblical and revolutionary. In “Marmont Dying”, one of Napoleon’s marshals takes a pragmatic, resigned look as his own life as a warrior, speaking (as some others of McLean’s personages do) very much like a dramatic monologue of Browning.

Consider other eminent persons from the past. “Machiavelli in Hell” again has a resigned, world-weary tone like a Browning monologue. “Schweitzer’s Progress” uses the term “progress” with a degree of irony, given that motives of the Alsatian philosopher-missionary are held up to severe scrutiny. “Nijinsky’s Last Dance” has the ballet dancer torn between impulse and social constraint. Some eminent – or notorious – figures from the past take some time to declare themselves. Who is the subject of “A walk around the world”? Only an O. Henry-like punchline tells us at the end of a long poem.

Consider poems on art and architecture. “Failure” gives only two cheers for Andrea del Sarto (a reprodction of whose “Head of a Woman” adorns the front cover of Enduring Love). “On Carolingian Sculpture” senses cultural decay in its view of early medieval Europe.

And, of course, consider all the poems about poets. “The Afterlife of Drummond Allison”, about a promising young English poet killed in the Second World War. “Sapience Angelical”, with the Earl of Rochester poised between libertinism and repentance. “Exiles”, which yokes together Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound and Henry James.

“Last Visit to Mallarme” captures perfectly the detached, non-materialist, linguistic idea of that poet in this stanza:

“Flooding back into my mind

came all those precious evenings,

soirees during which I ceased

entirely to believe in things,

even in ideas. Qualm and scruple

were Pentecost to this Priest

of the Absolute.”

In matters of both history and High Culture, however, McLean often digs deepest when he is looking at New Zealand. It is fitting that this volume ends with “At the Sign of the Packhorse I Stand Like a Tree and Sing My Song of Joy”, a discursive poem on the history of Akaroa, its settlement and its French connection. There is a ten-part sequence of poems “The Passion of William Colenso”, viewing from many perspectives the Anglican clergyman, printer, explorer and controversialist, with his initial loyalties, demeanour and faith undermined by the call of the erotic. In a way, I wish this sequence had more to say about Colenso’s ripe crankiness (well documented in his letters to the press – see Give Your Thoughts Life, reviewed on this blog), but at least McLean does give us some disaffected witnesses who describe the older Colenso (in section 9) as “a testy gadfly in minor office” and “tactless, prolix and obscure”.

As for New Zealand poets, “Here and Now” is an elegy for the late Allen Curnow, with a final line that could be a fitting epitaph. Rather more recherche is “The Apotheosis of Charles Spear” with its decorative vocabulary to present a poet whose thoughts were always in Europe. It is in some sense a jeu d’esprit.

Speaking of jeux d’esprit, and wondering if at least some of it is tongue-in-cheek, there is “A Fantasia in the Voice of D’Arcy Cresswell”. Presumably from the grave, Cresswell bemoans his soiled reputation, he being an eogtistical chap who, in the judgement of his poetic New Zealand contemporaries (Curnow, Fairburn et al.), had a much more modest talent than he thought he had. More recently (see the writings of the late Peter Wells) he is the gay poet who is hated by gays because, in the 1920s, he dobbed in the covertly-gay Mayor of Wanganui. McLean’s Cresswell says “my efforts got disparaged as claptrap, / charlatan doggerel” and “my verse earned brickbats from the status quo”. Again, McLean displays a complete mastery of traditional form. “A Fantasia in the Voice of D’Arcy Cresswell” is a sequence of 15 sonnets in the Shakespearean form (i.e. ending in a rhyming couplet), but sometimes borrowing Samuel Daniel’s trick of linking the last line of one sonnet to the first line of the next.

You have by now, I hope, read enough to know that Enduring Love is an outstanding collection, the best single-volume of a poet who runs vigorously against current fashion and scores more hits than misses.

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            You are probably aware that in the midst of the Coronavirus lock-down, the German-based Bauer Media Company decided to pull the plug on those very many New Zealand magazines which it owned. Among other worthwhile publications thus killed was the New Zealand Listener, for which I had been a frequent freelance contributor for well over 15 years. For the last two-and-a-half years, I had added to my other book-reviewing a column called Poetry Picks where, every three or four weeks, I would choose, as worth reading, a new collection of New Zealand poetry. I was allotted only 250 words for each of these columns, so I could do little more than signal my  pleasure for each collection in very general terms. When the Listener ceased to exist, there were two Poetry Picks columns I had submitted that had not yet run. So, in all their brevity and inadequacy, here they are:

           

FIRST, Michel Amas’ Walking Home:

This collection might sadden you, but not because the poems are sad. It’s the circumstances of their publication. Still relatively young, Michele Amas died of cancer in 2016. Her second collection, Walking Home, has been assembled from her papers by her husband, playwright Ken Duncum. In his foreword he suggests that Amas might have edited or altered some poems had she lived to see them published.

In the poem “Standing”, another poet tells her “You can disguise the autobiographical / in the third person”. This is advice that she resolutely ignores.

Her poems are first-person and unashamedly confessional. They read like good spoken monologues, fittingly as Amas was an actor. Some are lightly ironical, like her view of the city where she lived, “Wellington’s Running Late”. Some recall childhood, as when she notes you really can’t go home again in “Home Town”.

            But her main interest is the immediate family. The excellent monologue, “Morning Noon and Night” has an anxious wife telling her husband she’s not perfect. “Oestrogen Makes a Break for it on Thursday” is a wildly comical vignette of a mother running after a daughter who is developing too quickly. The centrepiece is the loose cycle in three parts, “The Tender Years”, which gradually becomes a reflection on Amas’ relationship with her own daughter.

Then comes the sad part – the cycle “Walking Home”, where she confronts her cancer. “I want to read this disease / backwards / to get back to the top” she writes. But there was no going backwards, and going home meant something quite different.

THEN, Diana Bridge’s Two or More Islands:

            When some poets make references to mythology or high culture, I feel they are faking. Their erudition means they’ve looked up a Wikipedia entry or two. Not so with Diana Bridge. In her seventh collection Two or more islands, she shows that she knows intimately Chinese and Indian mythology and culture as well as Classical western mythology. Not only that, but she can make meaning of these things. Two or more islands is not a display of learning, but a book of poems that show us how ancient concepts still have resonance for us.

            Poems take in the I Ching; women from Greek legend like Antigone, Penelope, Ariadne and Demeter; the bloody mess of Shakespeare’s history plays; and, in a closing eight-part sequence The Way a Stone Falls, a long reflection on Angkor Wat and Hindu sites in India. We are enlightened, uplifted and feel solidarity with ancient times.

But there is another side to Bridge’s achievement. In a section of pithier, shorter, specifically New Zealand poems, she gives more colloquial motherly and grandmotherly advice, especially in Pierced Ears and the delicate balance of A pounamu paperweight.

Any future anthologist if this decade’s great New Zealand poems would have to include Among the stacks, about the obsessions of bibliophiles; Light came from the other side, almost a philosophical warning against taking a superficial tourist’s view of things; and Was there ever an Avernus?, which modernises Virgil’s underworld and becomes a lament for the great Seamus Heaney.

I can only give superlatives to this sane and satisfying collection.

There now. That is what I wrote for the Listener. To Diana Bridge and (the estate of) Michele Amas, I can only apologise for the brevity and terseness of these notices. There is much more than could be said about each collection.

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And now for something more bizarre. A couple of months back, a publisher generously sent me a copy of the English novelist Graham Swift’s new novel Here We Are. For a number of reasons I was not able to read it until very recently, which is why I am only now considering it on this blog. I am fully aware that it has already been reviewed by every other reviewer in this country, with particularly perceptive reviews by Siobhan Harvey for the Stuff network and Anna Rogers in the (now gone) Listener. So here I am coming up the rear and I will say only a few things.

Here We Are is about magic, time, getting old and regret.

At the end of the 1950s, Ronnie and Evie, a magician and his “lovely” assistant, are the star attractions on the Brighton pier during the summer season. Ronnie and Evie are engaged to be married. Compere of the show which they headline is Jack, or “Jack Robinson” as he bills himself, with his well-rehearsed cheery patter and singalongs and eye for the girls. More than one reviewer has already noted that he and his style of entertainment are very reminiscent of John Osborne’s Archie Rice in The Entertainer, and that is part of Graham Swift’s design. The tawdry glamour of the Brighton pier and cheekie-chappie comperes were forms of entertainment that were already dying in the late 1950s as television moved in and the little box at home killed variety shows and magic acts.

We’re not far into this short novel (Graham Swift’s novels tend to be lean) when we learn that Ronnie’s and Evie’s engagement goes wrong, and Jack moves in on Evie. Indeed the events of 1958-1959 are only one part of a complex story, for much of it has the aged Evie looking back with regret fifty years later in the 2000s, and much of it concerns Ronnie’s formation as a young magician. As a Cockney kid he was evacuated from the Blitz, taken out of an awful East End home and boarded with a loving middle-class couple in rural Oxfordshire. His life was changed. His loyalties were changed. He discovered the power of magic. Like many evacuees lifted out of the slums, he didn’t want to go back home.

I could dig for all sorts of profundities in this novel, even though I enjoyed it mainly for its power as a story, its ability to make us wonder what will happen next, its clear and clean prose and Graham Swift’s pitch-perfect dialogue, appropriate to the times and places where the story is set. This is a story about retrospection and regret. It is about the social disruption in Britain, and for some, shifts in class-consciousness, brought about by the Second World War. It is about a dead world and about nostalgia and about the delusions of nostalgia that are exposed when the past is truthfully examined. And it is also about love and how it can be derailed. I flinch a little at the denouement, which I think pushes credibility near breaking point and strives to make magic a metaphor for the mystery of life itself, but I’m not the chap to provide spoilers about this.

The tone is elegaic, as it often is in Swift’s work. Swift is now in his 70s, but this tone cannot solely be a sign of his age. Remember, he was only in his 40s when he wrote his best-known (and Booker Prize-winning) novel Last Orders, which is about old men looking back on their imperfect lives. As for that title Here We Are – as is pointed out a number of times in the novel, it’s a standard English colloquialism, uttered when something is proferred (“Here we are – your tea”, that sort of thing). But as a title, Here We Are points to the human condition. Here we are, here we end up, here we can’t help being, after all our experience of life.