Something Thoughtful

  Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

                         

                                                     REPUBLIC ANYONE?

I am writing this brief think-piece on the weekend that a man of German lineage and of no outstanding skills has been crowned King of England. I have, a number of times on this blog, vented my opinions on British monarchy and its relevance to New Zealand (see, for example, the posting Goodbye Queenie ). I don’t wish once again to rake over in detail my objections – they are based mainly on the lunacy of having as our official head-of-state somebody who lives on the other side of the world and who has no hand in how our laws are framed here. In the UK itself there is a rising percentage of people who lean to republicanism, but for the moment the majority still favour a monarchy and they are welcome to it if that is what they want. As far as I can see, the main functions of royalty in Britain now are (a.) to attract tourists’ money by means of pageantry (Royal coronations and weddings, trooping the colours, changing of the guard etc.) (b) to provide gossip for the tabloids, social media, “women’s” magazines etc. and (c) to make anodyne speeches (written for them, of course) in times of stress, or in opening utilities, schools, hospitals etc. On the whole, monarchy in Britain is harmless, though there is the problem of royal privilege allowing members of “the Firm” to avoid the legal consequences of their actions (Prince Andrew is allowed to pay off a woman whom he had allegedly violated with 20,000,000 pounds taken from public taxation) and there is the reality of royalty still holding, rent free, huge estates for their personal profit.

But what about New Zealand? We still have a Governor-General who supposedly represents the British monarch, though for half-a-century now all Governors-General have been New Zealand-born. The G.-G. more-or-less does some of the things the British monarch and his tribe do in the UK. The G.-G signs off laws that have been passed by our unicameral parliament, but this is a mere formality – a G.-G. has never blocked a law from being passed (there would be a huge uproar if he or she did). The process is merely a matter of giving some formality to what has already been written as law. And the G.-G. does the soothing business of making speeches, opening buildings, and bestowing awards and medals on people who have been nominated by a committee.  

I am not ridiculing this function (somebody has to do it) but it would be easy to replace the G.-G. with a president on the Irish lines – that is, a president who does not have executive power to make or guide policy but who acts as head-of-state for formal ceremonies etc. (It is understood that policy is made by the parliamentary majority). This emphatically does NOT mean a president on American or some other republics’ lines – not somebody whose election is a very expensive and contested matter. More than once, I have heard royalists argue that having a monarch is cheap compared with having an elected president whose election is a very expensive and contested matter. But there are many varieties of republic. I am envisaging for New Zealand a republic in which a president is appointed by a bi-partisan panel [or multi-partisan panel, given that more than two parties are represented in our parliament] and who is clearly not an appointee who has previously been involved in politics. In other words a person as “neutral” on political matters as it is possible to be. Ideally, such an appointee would fulfil the role of president for a limited term and would have to have been endorsed by at least three-quarters of the appointing panel.

By the way, the British monarchy does NOT come cheap. It costs the public purse many millions each year in unpaid taxes and unearned revenue – not to mention over-long lists of members of the extended royal tribe who are paid handsomely by royal pensions, even if they undertake none of the duties that the monarch’s immediate family undertake. Even some royalists are pondering whether the monarchy should be “scaled down”.

The main problem blocking New Zealand’s becoming a republic is, of course, the Treaty of Waitangi and the widespread Maori concept of it – that is, its being seen as a direct contract between the British monarch and the Maori people. As you may have read in my review of Bain Attwood’s A Bloody Difficult Subject, the treaty is best regarded as a “necessary myth”, that is, something that was historically nothing like the way it is now interpreted but which is useful in helping settle and amend Maori grievances. What people mistakenly believe are the rights bestowed by the treaty are in fact rights bestowed by recent legislation made in New Zealand. Even so, this could be a stumbling block on the way to New Zealand’s becoming a republic.

 

Something New

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

 

“RESPIRATOR – A POET LAUREATE COLLECTION, 2019-2022” by David Eggleton (Otago University Press, $NZ35); “SAY I DO THIS – Poems 2018-2022” by C.K.Stead (Auckland University Press, $NZ35); “PAST LIVES” by Leah Dodd (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $NZ25)

 

David Eggleton is a poet wide in his interests, fecund in his output, imaginative in his conceptions, skilled in both lyricism and satire and always ready to find use for canonical quotations which he alters or turns to his own use. His interests in the Pacific, the sea, animal life, the environment, colonialism and the ills of an industrial society are well known. Often his published poems are better read to an audience than read by a solitary reader. They are ripe for performance, joying in the complexity and sheer fun of sounds. The poems that make up Respirator – A Poet Laureate Collection, 2019-2022 were written (mainly) in the four years that Eggleton was New Zealand’s poet laureate – years that saw the pandemic (Covid 19 etc) and other woes.

A respirator is something that helps one to breathe. Why is this collection called Respirator? The answer is found in one section of Eggleton’s “Rahui: Lockdown Journal”. After dealing with the restrictions, denials and fears brought on by the pandemic, the final line is “A poem is a kind of respirator” – something that helps us breathe in difficult times. Poetry revives or energises us.

Respirator – A Poet Laureate Collection, is divided into seven distinct sections. Pardon me if I walk through this collection section by section. It might seem a very pedestrian thing for a critic of poetry to do, but then the seven sections David Eggleton has devised each pick up a different strain, a different set of preoccupations, from the others. This handsome hardback has on its cover a coloured photograph of a decaying coal truck wheel in the bush [the image, with some variations, is repeated in the black-and-white headings of each section].

This icon is most relevant to the first of the seven sections, which is called CIRCLE, in which Eggleton is most concerned with the continuity of life, the circle of life. In the poem “Tomorrow”, anticipated events repeat themselves, like the eternel retour; or in the slow and repeated growth of trees in “Generations” as “the trees  / are our parents’ parents, diving down / a millennium underground, bent round /and curled in a birth dream, till the years / unfold roots that twist out of rock fissures, / and climb as seedlings, tender, growing…”. But this tale of nature’s creativity has a sour conclusion as the great miracle of nature meets today’s pollution. Many poems in this section are built on imagery of darkness; of things growing or dying in the dark; the untamed swell of an Otago beach (“Otago Eight Bells”) and in “Sawmill Empire”, not a lament but a resigned acknowledgement of the fact that noble trees become human houses, buildings, furniture  etc. Fittingly there are poems on the earthquake destruction of Christchurch, and on windswept valleys; leavened by the jocularity of “The Steepest Street in the World”, surely one poem ripe for public performance. Nature and what we do with it is the key to this section.

The next section RAHUI: LOCKDOWN JOURNAL is a twelve-part journal of having to stay in lockdown during the pandemic. The odour and smoke of bush fires in Oz drifts over us; then there are the first whispers of a virus originating in China. The government has to deal with it. “Jacinda arose with the down-home hippy vibe / of a primmers’s teacher, newly promoted to principal, / guiding toddlers on a bush walk during a storm, / which has suddenly grown very dark and bleak”. One is not quite sure how much Eggleton is satirising or endorsing Jacinda’s work, his tone often being jocular in addressing a difficult time. There are descriptions of deserted town centres once most people are confined indoors. … and lockdown is announced… “It’s closing time in the gardens of the West; / lamplights are burning out all over Europe; / and the virus is a riddle wrapped / in a mystery inside an enigma, / but we are assured that its code can be cracked”. (The metaphors are a bit strained here, but the poet has the fun of mixing together oft-quoted phrases, as he often does.) Easter and Anzac Day are more-or-less cancelled as people stay at home. “To venture forth for fresh air, like a witness, / is to see each person englobed in amber, on their own island, / or else in lockstep with a significant other, / or with well-exercised dogs; / and ten closer, half turned away, apprehensive, / to make a wide berth, give you the swerve like a fata morgana…” And it is in this context that Eggleton declares “A poem is a kind of respirator”

Despite being called PANDEMIC, the third section is only in part concerned with the literal pandemic. There is a poem about a rugby match, “Team Spirit,” where Eggleton enjoys playing with copious alliteration (“rains ravish ravines” etc.). The poem called “Pandemic” sees Covid as inciting a change in the country’s mood. It incites “Pandemonium. Pandemonium” and fear and anxiety when “We stay home, we stay quiet in our lanes, / lit by reflections of approaching flames. / Though clouds of uncertainty flocculate, / we know that a needle can inoculate.” “Autumn Almanac” is halfway to being rap – an almost surreal collage of events, personalities and fears; and similar is “The Tongue Trumpet”. A sequence called “A Poem for Waitangi Day” is largely satirical about the way the day is honoured, ending “… let the glacial attitudes of the Pakeha / melt like snow creatures, or ice crystals, / in the eerie green faery mist / of patupaiarehe, amid chants of atua; / then bring out the chart of Te Tiriti o Watangi, / document stained with blood and squid-ink. / A flying canoe ghostly in the sky paddles / over the whole fished up archipelago, / guided by Kupe, whose pointing finger / shines with shark oil as the stars rise.” This satire is followed by others -  on such things as robot-controlled artificial friendships on-line; and radio news with its bogus urgency. The pandemic triggers many uncertainties.

The next section is a thing unto itself, a bull-rush through a number of New Zealand’s literary sacred bulls. The title OLD SCHOOL TIES is deliberately a pun. This is not the old school ties of poncey schools; but the ties the poet has with old school (or at any rate older school) writers. The section begins with great affection, nostalgia and respect for Hone Tuwhare and his habits. But this is followed by a very rude (and very funny) poem “Dear Reader”, which is a blast at C.K.Stead who, for his fastidious way of criticising others and in effect belittling them, is designated as  “The drive-by, take-down guy, with silver hatchets / and bloody scalps stacked in the trophy cabinet”. “Sargeson Towers” is a panorama of Auckland’s North Shore bohemianism in the 1950s, with all the poets and scribblers of the time named, but with A.R.D.Fairburn taking over. In part a work of nostalgia, but perhaps with a mild undertone of mockery at these old school geezers and at the restrictions that were in place in the 1950s. “On First Looking Into James K Baxter’s Collected Letters” reads mainly as contempt for a mood that faded into inanity in the 1960s. The 1960s were Eggleton’s teenage years, so he gives his own loose and engaging memories of being a teenager in Auckland in the 1960s and its now-passe ideas in “Sounds of the Sixties”. “Seven Old Bastards of Auckland” begins like Baudelaire but becomes a right chastising of the old booze-and-chunder culture that was still around in the 1960s. And there are poems about teenage smoking, and war movies they saw as teenagers and memories of Auckland’s west-coast beaches. To conclude this section there is one of Eggleton’s “list” poems and one of his master works, “The Great New Zealand Novel”, a wonderful run through New Zealand novels and types of novels and pretentiousness in novels and yet coming to a positive conclusion about the value of New Zealand novels. Very heartening for avid readers.

A very different world is found in the fifth section THE DEATH OF KAPENE KUKE, where Eggleton moves into the Pacific and its culture. “The Death of Kapene Kuke” is an anti-colonial revisionist account of the death of Captain Cook, as  “Cook brought capitalism and Adam Smith’s saws, / rather than reciprocity and sharing of gifts, / and he was not the great white god Lono, / but one speared through and smoked till flesh seared off, / as the rain dogs ran with the grey rain gods.” When he moves into poems about Honolulu, Waikiki and other locations, the poet poised between lyricism and anger at their degradation. The most poignant poem in this mode is “Lifting the Island” where idealised views and daydreams of the island have been washed away; where “The beachcomber who once sailed the seven seas, / goes from bin to bin with freestyle hands, / grave as a mandarin in abstract thought. / Ripe stink of garbage …/ He wears nothing but faded and ripped shorts….. / The old gods are curios, remade in the bar / as the grinning wooden handles of beer taps.” There is a degree of ambiguity in Eggleton’s approach in some poems in this section. He is lyrical about the waves and mountains of the islands and the ways of life that once were. But he is uneasily aware that he himself is part of the tourist influx and therefore implicit in the degradation of culture he sees. He is angry about colonialism and yet is part of the process. This is he honesty of his presentation.

            Yet the next section, WHALE SONG is far more straightforward and lyrical in describing joyfully the many types of whale that swim and wander in the Pacific– a pure delight in their diversity. Take for one example “Orcas”, which begins “Hail to the Orca, carnivore, apex predator. / We are the killer whales from Antarctica. / We like it cold because then we go fast, / Under the icebergs, beneath polar winds. / Listen to the icepack grind; listen to gales moan. / Hail to the orca, carnivore, apex predator….” and continuing into their habits and lives. There are also poems about the traditional (pre-colonial) connections of whales with human beings as in the poem “Whale Road” where “The Whales are wayfinders for our vaka, / the whales are wayfinders for our life raft, / for our dinghy, for our yacht, for our ferry, for our peace ship, / for our trawler, for our migrant boat, for our cruise ship, / for our container ship, for our oil tanker, for our naval ship - / and underneath them all, the holy holy holy whale swims.” BUT, as the poem “Endangered Ocean Blues” makes clear, all the varieties of whale are now threatened with extinction. And the last whale-poem “Whale Psalm” sees the threatened whale as facing destruction in the same way that human beings are destroying themselves in wars and other human conflicts. The whale is the calm sanity that human beings require for their souls’ salvation. These whale poems are straightforward in their limpid language. Without suggesting they are only for children, I hope that some enterprising teachers introduce these whale poems to their pupils.

And so to the seventh and final section THE WALL, which is the most consistently  satirical in terms of social issues. “Deepwater Horizon” has a go at offshore oil-drilling. “The End of History” mocks Francis Fukuyama’s thesis that, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and with Communism losing its hold, liberal democracy was the only way forward – but alas, as all historians know, history never ends, and Eggleton concludes his poem with “The blow-up globe was punctured and hissed / with escaping breath as another dream / began to count down to lift-off; / and then we were stuck in the 1990s, / with a long night coming on, / and very few left to sing revolution’s song.”  Do I question some of Eggleton’s prosody? Sometimes. Especially when he is being satirical, his exuberance runs away with him, and the point of a poem gets lost (see “The Wall” and especially Gorgon,  where his rhymes and word-play become the whole course of the poem.) On the other hand there are more focused poems like “My Phone” – an sort of incantation perhaps best read to an audience – which is a witty smack at those little electronic beasts we now all carry with us. And the surprising “Ode to Iggy Pop” does bash out some sort of dignity from the alternative musician, be he “Protested specimen in witness protection, / he’s a smorgasbord, a feast, torso all jelly, / tongue like a gherkin, eyes like pickled onion. / Going to see the man known as Iggy Pop, / in a world where corporates quarry rock, / guitars going for it and drummer’s mighty hammer, / Iggy revs that tongue to slobber and stammer. / He’s the passenger who will ride and ride.” “Homage to Fahrenheit 451” is a blast against the digitisation of books, the removing books from libraries, the philistinism with regard to books and how the ancient of books are no longer nurtured. As I’ve already remarked, Eggleton has a proclivity for producing his own versions of canonical phrases. Thus in “Homage to Fahrenheit 451”, we get “Books are noble animals but have to be put down, / because about suffering they are never wrong”. For the record, the final poem in this collection, “What the Future Holds” is a kind of raising-hands-in-surrender at the future with a que sera sera what-the-hell vibe. There are only so many problems that a poet can address. Or ameliorate.

I know. I know. I’ve tracked my way through Respirator – A Poet Laureate Collection like a bibliographer dutifully classifying and ticketing the contents. Sorry, but I found no better way to express my enjoyment at the variety of tones and issues addressed in David Eggleton’s production. It’s solid, thoughtful, funny, insightful, sombre and very, very readable. Okay, I carp at Eggleton’s occasional letting his verbal exuberance run away with him (also known as losing the plot). But what do you expect? Perfection?

 

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            By pure chance (no kidding) the next collection of poems to come to my attention was C.K.Stead’s latest collection Say I Do This – Poems 2018-2022. Now in his 91st year, Stead has produced 17 collections of poetry in a long career, as well as a having published a “Collected Poems” (not to mention his many novels, short stories, memoirs and essays). In an end-note he says that he was going to call this collection Last Poems, in the knowledge that he will not be with us for much longer; but he changed his mind after recalling a passage from Allen Curnow that “so long as there’s a next, there’s no last.” So Say I Do This it became, dedicated to his wife Kay. Stead has a very simple way of categorising poems in this collection. They are “Home”, poems set in New Zealand; “Away”, poems built on his time overseas or imaginary places overseas; and “Friends’, being concerned with people he knows or has known. It is no irreverence to say these are the poems of a very old man, and his ideas are mainly based on past experience.

In the Home section, the opening poem “To be continued perhaps” is a poem of resignation – enjoying the dying of the light without worrying too much how the world is going on. “Tohunga Crescent” laments the fact that his across-the-road neighbours, Allen Curnow and his wife, are no longer around, and the neighbourhood is degenerating. “Ode to Autumn” tells us that “I lead a life of quiet medication / longing for foreign shores, adventure and death” and “After surgery” tells us that “Death will be not unwelcome though I’d hoped / for a friendlier exit” before he hears the chimes at midnight and babbles o’ green fields as he recalls childhood memories. His address to his wife “Birthday Tercets for Kay” speculates among other things on how they will die. Some neighbourhood poems have a certain degree of soulfulness, such as “To ‘Amnesia, Muse of Deletions’ ” with its closing line “do the dead forget their friends?”; or the long memoir “Mary” where a neighbour’s death ends with speculation on Nature hailing her. “Haiku: Audiology” is about decaying hearing and the sound illusions such as “cicada / tinnitus making each day / ‘one summer’ ”. Yes, these are certainly an old man’s poetry, but they are neither self-pitying nor regretful. Stead shows great interest in, and clearly enjoys, the flora and fauna around him with a number of poems about the birds in his locality and their ways. “Pastoral Kaiwaka, 1941”, one of his retro poems apparently rooted in childhood, is a genuinely witty take on life as was, with a neat dose of anthropomorphism put to good use.

The great farewell to Home is “Poem in October”, borrowing one of Dylan Thomas’s titles and changing Thomas’s opening line “It was my thirtieth year to heaven” to “It was my ninetieth year to heaven” as he farewells the city and flowers and small delights and acknowledges that death is commonplace anyway, concluding that he will say “Kia ora for having me. Stay safe. Go well” as he goes – a purely banal statement but then maybe death itself is banal. (Personally I prefer Henry James’ designation of death as “The Distinguished Thing”.)

In the Away section, the poems about overseas seem more in the nature of distant memories reconstructed rather than more directly recalled – thus his vignettes of Menton. And many poems set elsewhere are historical or legendary places which – presumably – Stead has not stayed in, as in “The Death of Orpheus” about the mythical demi-god,  or “October 16 1817, Angostura 5pm” a tragic anecdote from the era of Simon Bolivar’s wars of liberation. Likewise the poem “Impromptu: Afghanistan”, which chastises the U.S.A. for creating pointless chaos in Asia, ending with the statement “America we love you / (sometimes) but / why so daft, so thick / so unwilling to learn?” Four “Psalms of Judas” and a poem called “The Challenge”, about the recent burning of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, function as proof that Stead is still a convinced atheist, with much contempt for religion, especially Christianity.

Finally the section called Friends, which is as much about acquaintances or in some cases anecdotes about once-met strangers. There are some heartfelt farewells to the dead (“A Sonnet for Peter Wells”). The poem for Kevin Ireland is a blokey thing remembering the ingredients of a dinner as taught them by Frank Sargeson. Another poem to Kevin Ireland gives a more detailed account of their long friendship. The poem to Fleur Adcock hails her for bringing to Stead’s attention poem-worthy things in nature. The poem to John Berryman considers Berryman’s suicide, implying that all things (and people) pass like the animals now becoming extinct. Some poems require more personal knowledge to fully understand what is being said – that is, they rely on things that could be decoded only by an in-group. In “A Sonnet ending on a note of uncertainty”, concerning Seamus Heaney, is Stead implying that he does not approve of Heaney’s winning the Nobel Prize for Literature? It seems so. The poem on Keri Hulme is again very questioning, with Stead (correctly, I think) again raising that matter of violence directed against children in The Bone People. Iris (an anecdote about Iris Murdoch) seems light common-room chatter. But there are more deeply felt poems about the dead or the very old.

There you once again have from me a description and cataloguing of a collection of poetry rather than a real critique. What can I say? Say I Do This is Stead as we already know him – sometimes combative, often ticking off the foolishness of the world, but in this case being aware that he has already strutted and fretted his hour on the stage. One thing is very certain – save perhaps for the odd in-joke, Stead writes clearly, only rarely dealing in ambiguity and never dabbling in wilful obscurity. From that perspective, this is a very rewarding collection.

 

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            Turning from the work of two very experienced and older poets, I come to the debut collection of a younger poet. Leah Dodd has hitherto appeared only in smaller poetry publications. Her style is very free verse and most of her poems are presented in loose fragments scattered randomly across the page. Sometimes it is hard to see the reason for the separation of words in this way. Most titles are presented in lower case and one of two  poems are unpunctuated stream-of-consciousness, as in the poem “spawning season”. Some poems begin with an idea but then wander off in other directions like a stream getting lost, as in “ilovekeats69”.

And that, I promise, is the end of my dyspeptic grumbles because I quickly discovered that Leah Dodd is a very astute observer of the scene, witty  - sometimes hilarious – and not falling into traps of self-pity. Sure, there are poems about break-ups, but the poem “summer” suggests a kind of taking-it-on-the-chin when a breakup has happened. Other poems imply a desire for a partner, but they are treated with irony and in terms of fantasy, as in  “the only way out of my student loan is to marry ex-FRIENDS star Matthew Perry” where, in her dreams, she is considering dating a Hollywood star after a breakup. Similarly, and equally ironically “marry me (on Runescape)” is also a fantasy about hooking up with someone. Even more irony dominates “Tips for lockdown wellness”, seeking a fantasy protective figure but in this case a tiger! Irony is one of Dodd’s main weapons even outside breakup situations, as when the poem “revolution” proposes that bats should replace people for our own good

Sometimes Dodd, a young woman, easily recalls childhood or teenage situations, as in “Mt Eden 2005”, concerned with painful ways of removing pimples. “When you want to be a mermaid so bad it hurts” perhaps (but only perhaps) suggests that a young girl’s daydreams cannot ever really by fulfilled. And “masterclass” is the mixed memories of learning the piano. (The blurb tells me that Leah Dodd is a classically-trained pianist, though an end-note says that this poem is also inspired by Pink Floyd.) “Memphis Belle” is a memoir of being billeted in a less-then-desirable motel while taking part in a high school Shakespeare fest; and “guided hypnosis” is cooling off after a party.

An almost surreal poem “I am the ghost of the IKEA futon couch” is an anthropomorphic account of furniture becoming a box of memories – probably the most fully imaginative of Dodd’s poems in this collection. Dodd touches on conservation and the environment in “0800 SEE ORCA” lamenting the orca’s death, but conservation is not one of her major concerns. Observing the local scene is. Scattered through this collection there are four “bus poems”, which are literally about riding on the bus in parts of Wellington but which involve daydreams, reveries and memories during the ride

Which brings me to the most poignant of her poems - and the least ironical. The poem “clot” appears to be a poem about an early miscarriage. But one of her best poems, “tether”, about looking after a baby, understands both how difficult it is and yet how compelling: “he’ll cry if I leave.  Little limpet / but oh, I love the closeness.  It slips / so quickly  once we were connected / by a vein and two arteries    ever since / we drift.   I take these gifts with grace”.  “clucky” is also about baby. It is implied in “muscle memory” that she is raising the child alone. And in “gig people” about behaviour of crowd at rock concert “we joke about the baby being home on his own / to three different people”. (I hope she really was joking.) “Last Call Nigel” observes the baby developing into toddler-hood. And in “stone fruit” “he is laid down, tucked in, / his lamp switched off / and curtains drawn to block / morning light / and he sleeps ? little prince, / the one who wasn’t planned / but wasn’t unexpected.”

The nature of society and trends are examined. “Patched gang members in the Maori Affairs Committee Room, 1979” is  really a poem about the disjunction of Maori street culture and highbrow Pakeha culture with lines like “the council blasts Debussy / and Mozart loud / outside the library / where brown kids linger / and drink and fight / like white culture down the throat.” “West Coast School of Rock”, opens “It was a time of Empire Records and The Runaways / black miniskirts and steel-capped boots / gigs at an emptied warehouse / where kids learnt riffs and / soaked their black tees with sweat”. It reads like reportage with punchlines suggesting a self-destructive fad. Is the style intended to be deadpan? I leave you to judge.

            And so to what will be the piece de resistance for many readers. This is the outrageously funny “the things I would do for a Pizza Hut Classic Cheese right now”, with a list of all the most barmy suggestions of what she would do. Food turns up in a number of her poems, “cow fund” being a fantasia about raising a cow to be able to produce expensive cheese. But “the things I would do for a Pizza Hut Classic Cheese right now” tops all the others.

            A short judgement? This is a fully formed collection from a poet who has a keen eye and an engaging style. One of the year’s best.

Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.  

“KRISTIN LAVRANSDATTER” by Sigrid Undset (trilogy first published 1920 – 1922; two different English language translations, the better being the translation by Tina Nunnally) 

            About six months ago I posted on this blog a piece called Book Awards, in which I made comments on how the Nobel Prize for literature was decided. In passing I wrote that in the early years of the awards, there was an over-representation of Scandinavian authors, many of whom are now forgotten. But I mentioned two Scandinavian authors who richly deserved their prizes and who are still read widely, not only in their own countries. They were the prolific Swedish author Selma Lagerlof (1858-1940: Nobel laureate 1909) and the equally prolific Norwegian author Sigrid Undset (1882-1949: Nobel laureate 1928).

            Selma Lagerlof I first met as a child when one of my elder brothers gave me as a Christmas present (an English translation of) Selma Lagerlof’s famous children’s book Nils Holgersson, rendered into English as The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, about a boy shrunk to tiny size by malicious goblins, and then flying all over Sweden on the back of wild geese. I think I was in my twenties when I read Lagerlof’s novel for adults Gosta Berlings Saga (The Story of Gosta Berling), a very rambling and eventful tale of a defrocked clergyman and his romantic attachments. The fact is, I read it only because I was at that time (and still am) fascinated by silent movies, and I’d read that the Swedish director Mauritz Stiller had made a film version of Gosta Berlings Saga in 1924 (it starred Lars Hanson and a pudgy young woman, making her first notable appearance, Greta Garbo). And that, dear readers, has been my complete engagement with the works of Selma Lagerlof.

            More recently, though, I became immersed in the work of Sigrid Undset by reading what is still her most popular work, her trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter. Apparently an English-language translation of Kristin Lavransdatter was published in the late 1920s, but it was universally panned as a botched job. In the 1990s there appeared Tina Nunnally’s new translation, which was highly praised. It was the Tina Nunnally version that I read.

             A few words first about Sigrid Undset. Her parents were Danes but they moved to Norway when Sigrid was 2, where she lived for most of her life in what was then called Kristiania (it reverted to its ancient name Oslo in 1925). She was always interested in Scandinavia’s Middle Ages and as a young woman she wrote a novel with a medieval setting; but it was rejected by publishers. So she set about writing novels with contemporary Norwegian settings. They were severely realist in style and they focused on women, often very frank (for their times) about sexual relationships and adultery, and frequently advocating women’s emancipation. But the idea of the Middle Ages still attracted her. She married a man considerably older than she and raised three children, but the marriage broke up. By the 1920s, having established herself as novelist and earning a reasonable income, she turned at last to writing on medieval themes. The trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter was published between 1920 and 1922 and it was this work that persuaded the Nobel committee to award her the Nobel Prize in 1928. It was also in the 1920s that she made a major decision. Her parents were nominally Lutheran but were in effect atheist. Sigrid turned to Catholicism, disgusted with the formality and tepid faith offered by the Lutheran church of Norway, and perturbed by what she saw as the disintegration of society in the aftermath of the war (what we now call the First World War). At the age of 42 she was received into the Catholic Church, to the consternation of some of her readers, and remained a devotee thereafter. In the 1930s, she wrote frequently against Hitler and his regime, so during the 2^nd World War, with Norway occupied by the Nazis, she took refuge first in neutral Sweden and then in the USA. She returned to Norway in 1945 and died there three years later.

            Set in the 14^th century, Kristin Lavransdatter combines three of Undset’s major preoccupations. First is the status of women, which she’d written about in her contemporary novels. Kristin Lavransdatter [her name could be translated as Christine, Laurence’s daughter] is a very assertive woman, and the trilogy traces her whole life from adolescence to her mature adulthood with her final decision about the way of life that would be most desirable for her. Second, the nature of the Middle Ages in Scandinavia, scrupulously re-created in her prose  - apparently it was her ability to bring to life those ancient times that was most admired by the Nobel committee and won her the prize. And third, religion, with 14^th century Scandinavia having only recently adopted Christianity and still having pockets of the older paganism.

            The first of the three novels The Wreath (Kransen in the original) opens on Kristin’s childhood. Her parents are the formidable Lavrans Bjorgulfson and his wife Ragnfrid Ivasdatter who own the manor at Jorungaard. All Kristin’s brothers died in early childhood and her sister Ulvhild, injured in an accident, later dies. So, ignoring her little sister,  Kristin is the apple of her father’s eye and he hopes to marry her off profitably to a suitable suitor. But the adolescent Kristin is courted by two young men, Arne and the priest’s son Bentein, whose feeling for Kristin are so intense that they kill each other in a brawl. Violent times! Lavrans, to Kristin’s despair, arranges for Kristin to be betrothed to a proper gentleman, Simon Andresson, whom she does not love and says so. To cool her heels, her father sends her as a pensioner to a convent to improve her education and prepare her for marriage. Instead she meets and falls in love with Erlend Nikulausson, very much her elder. Erland has a very bad reputation, having had an adulterous affair with a woman called Eline and having had two children with her. Kristin often rendezvous with Erlend (sometimes in the town brothel!) and in due course is pregnant. The man who is officially betrothed to her, Simon Andresson, confronts her and, in a gentlemanly fashion, breaks off their engagement. Erlend tries to win favour with Kristin’s father Lavrans. In secret Kristin visits Erlend at the home of Erlend’s aunt Lady Aashild. Eline, the woman whom Erlend cast off, visits Kristin and attempts to poison her. In a scuffle, Eline dies. The matter is hushed up by Erlend and his influential relatives. Despite Erlend’s scandalous reputation, Erlend gradually wins the favour of Lavrans, especially when Erlend manfully helps to fight the flames that are devouring a burning church. And so Kristin and Elend are married.

            Are you reeling from all the Scandinavian names I have packed into this synopsis of the first novel of Sigrid Undset’s trilogy? I had to pick my way through them carefully myself. The title of this novel The Wreath refers to the wreath that is placed on the bride’s head when she is married (like the veil in other European countries). This novel represents the first stages of Kristin’s maturation, from childhood and unmarried adolescence to marriage. As my synopsis alone makes clear, Kristin is a very wilful young woman, rejecting her father’s choice of spouse, fornicating with a man with a scandalous reputation and in effect rebelling against the patriarchal norms of her time, when a father virtually owned a daughter. In a way, though the novel is set in a very credibly-presented medieval world, Sigrid Undset is continuing to explore the themes she addressed in her earlier contemporary novels, broaching women’s emancipation. It is possible, too, that in having Kristin marrying an older man, Undset was inspired by her own marriage [which had fallen apart]. Yet the raw violence of the Middle Ages is also there (note the brawls, sudden deaths and fights etc,). It is also made clear, in the last pages of The Wreath, that Kristin’s rebelliousness has something to do with her parents’ relationship. Kristin’s mother Ragnfrid resents Lavrans’ great affection for their daughter. She broods, she has a cold heart and it is made clear that she married Lavrans only when she couldn’t marry another man whom she loved. A thwarted woman of the sort her daughter chooses not to be.

            The second novel of the trilogy The Wife (Husfrue in the original) chronicles Kristin’s life as a married woman. Brought up to finer things in Lavrans’ home, she has to adjust to Erlend’s much rougher and rugged estate Husaby. [The early botched translation titled this novel The Mistress of Husaby.] She has difficulties with disobedient servants who do not respect her but, even as she swells with her first child, she proves to be an efficient mistress of the estate. She gains some spiritual comfort from the priest Gunnilf, Erlend’s civilised brother. She goes through the pains of childbirth when he first child Niculaus (pet name Naakkve) is born. She goes on a pilgrimage to expiate her disobedience to her father and to thank God for her safe birth. She is rewarded with her first visionary experience – she has a vision of the saintly Brother Edvin who had once counselled her. The years pass by at Husaby. Erlend, true to form, is often neglectful and roguish, away for months at a time fighting small wars with encroaching Finns. But nearly every year, Kristin presents him with a child, to the total of seven. Kristin gains the confidence of Erlend’s bastard son Orm, though she has a more difficult time with Erlend’s bastard daughter Margret. When Kristin’s father Lavrans dies, she visits his estate Jorundgaard; and once again she feels the guilt of disobedience to her father while taking stock of her not-very-satisfactory marriage. Lavrans, with his patriarchal righteousness, was a man of firmer morality that her impulsive husband. For example, when Erlend finds a suitor sleeping with his bastard daughter Margret, he chops off the man’s hand and then forces him to marry Margret on pain of death. Lavrans would never have done that. On the whole, this second novel is the book of Kristin’s trial – constantly, she is forced to contrast her household at Husaby with the more orderly values in which she was bred. She feels a pang when her much younger sister Ramborg marries Simon Andresson, the man whom her father had chosen to be her spouse. In political matters Erlend becomes involved in a plot to create a king for Norway separate from the king of Sweden (in the 14^th century the two countries were ruled as one). Erlend is convicted of treason and tortured to extract information on his fellow conspirators; but he steadfastly refuses to name names, displaying a residue of knightly-warrior honour, even though he was trapped because he dallied sexually with a woman (the Lady Suvvina) who reported his plans. It is Simon Andresson, the suitor she rejected, who answers Kristin’s appeal and persuades the king to release Erlend – though Erlend’s penalty is to have all his estates stripped from him.

            Perhaps some readers, reading this second novel, might think that Sigrid Undset is reneging on her critique of patriarchal control of women that was expressed in the first novel The Wreath. But this is not the case. Undset is expressing the painful fact that what we most desire when we are young may lead to something more imperfect than we expected; and thus it is in Kristin’s relationship with her husband.

            The third and final part of the trilogy The Cross (Korset in the original) shows Kristin, now in early middle age, seeing her elders dropping away. With both her parents dead, Kristin and Erlend move into Lavrans’ estate Jorundgaard, with their household. They are now in close proximity to Kirstin’s sister Ramborg and her husband Simon Andresson. It is clear that there is now much mutual admiration between Kristin and Simon as when, for example, Kristin saves Ramborg’s ailing child by using folklore medicine. Erlend understands his moral debt to Simon; but he feels it as a burden. Ramborg resents her husband’s admiration of Kristin. But Simon, the gentleman, understands that he can never love Kristin as he did in his youth. Things gradually become even more fractious between Kristin and Erlend. When, for the last of many times, she criticises his selfish and negligent ways, he walks out on her and chooses to live as a semi-hermit in a house that has been deserted by his aunt. When Simon Andresson dies of a fever, Kristin discovers that Simon’s marriage to Ramborg was never harmonious either. Now subject to scorn because her husband has deserted her, Kristin is left to rear her growing children at  Jorundgaard. One spring, she attempts to effect a reconciliation with Erlend, visits his den, and is so strongly still physically attracted to him that she becomes pregnant; but Erlend refuses to return to her household. The child is born. Kristin names the child Erlend (even though it is the custom not to name a child after a living forebear). But the newborn is sickly and soon dies. A fantastic rumour arises that the child was the product of “incest” [meaning in this case having sexual intercourse with a household servant, Kristin’s steward Ulf Haldorsson]. Kristin is even brought before the bishops’ visiting court. Kristin’s sons seek out Erlend who, typically, defends his wife’s honour by getting into a brawl and being killed. But at least Kristin has been exonerated. Now into middle age, Kristin lives with, and for, her sons. Two of her sons train for  the monastery, but she is not sure they are up for it. Her younger sons seek more adventurous lives further afield. Her son Gaute is gradually becoming the master of the estate. By force, Gaute carries off a nobleman’s daughter, Jofrid, has a child by her, and manages to get her family’s consent to marry her. As Kristin judges it, clearly Jorundgaard once again has a capable and determined master and mistress.

            Widowed, single, in her forties, Kristin sets out on another pilgrimage. Again, she encounters the spiritual guidance of Erlend’s brother Gunnulf. Kristin enters a convent and becomes a nun, living a pious and devoted life. The plague known as the Black Dead strikes. In a country which still has a lingering paganism, some people attempt to ward off the plague by long-abandoned remedies, such as child sacrifice. Kristin saves a child from human sacrifice and arranges for the Christian burial of the child’s deceased mother. Then she dies, , realizing the justice and mercy of God in tempering and shaping such an act.

            Summing up this whole trilogy, I would call it a long historical saga, spanning Norwegian life from about 1300 to 1349, but it is a domestic saga, a family story, not a pageant of battles, sieges and what have you. Politics and historical circumstances come to the fore only when Erlend becomes involved in a conspiracy, a very small part of the trilogy. Part of the trilogy’s purpose is to show the pride of the old Norwegian warrior-gentry caste, but also noting its inadequacy as a moral code. Taking more central themes of the novel are the immense importance of marriage settlements and inheritance, and the struggles of Scandinavian Christianity against the real possibility of the survival of paganism. More important than all this, however, is the moral development of Kristin herself. No matter how accurate its historical details are,  Kristin Lavransdatter is centrally a psychological work rather than an historical work, showing a woman’s mental growth from adolescence to her death aged about 50; her responsibilities as mother and lady of the manor; her strong influence by her father; the difficulties of matrimony with a reckless and irresponsible spouse who only late in his life proves his moral worth; and finally discovering a way of finding peace of mind.

Some modern readers might carp at Kristin’s finally becoming a nun. (She does so in her 40s – about the same age as a Sigrid Undset was when she became a Catholic – there is clearly some sort of autobiography in this trilogy). But if you are sceptic, a little research might show you that convent life was one of the few places in medieval life where women could run their own affairs and not always be under the surveillance of men. In their own ways, and in very different eras, both Kristin and Sigrid Undset are expressing a form of women’s emancipation.

Something Thoughtful

  Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

                                                   STUDIES SAY THAT…

Recently, a woman of my ken rejoiced in showing me the results of “studies” which said that boys grew up to be more balanced, more civil and more mature as human beings if they had at least one sister. This greatly amused me, in part because the woman in question herself has sons but no daughters. I also thought with amusement of cases where boys with sisters developed into anything other than civil. Branwell Bronte had three talented scribbling sisters, but that didn’t stop him from becoming a drunken, self-destructive sot.

There is the (probably distant) possibility that the “studies” in question had some merit. Maybe it’s true that boys brought up with sisters get attuned to the opposite sex and learn how to behave themselves in ways they wouldn’t know if they mixed only with the fellers… but most likely that would be true only in some cultures and in some social classes. There are cultures in which young women are regarded by their brothers as slaveys and irritants.

More than anything, though, I was annoyed by that vague and ambiguous term “studies”. Have you not heard it often in advertisements on television, where we are told that “studies” (or sometimes “research”) shows that “our” toothpaste is better than the rest? “Studies prove that Dizzo-Whizzo toothpaste removes all plaque, makes teeth brighter and whiter, heals cavities and brings a true smile on your face!!!”

At which point sentient viewers (if they have not muted the ads, as I usually do) might ask some obvious questions.

What “studies”?

Who sponsored and paid for the research, if indeed there really was any research?

Was the research commissioned by a subsidiary of the toothpaste company, with a foregone outcome expected?

Was the research disinterested? (i.e. impartial).

If scientific matters were involved, was there any double-blind testing?

Who carried out the survey that was needed to verify the conclusion?

How professionally trained were they?

How big was the data base that led to the declared outcome?

If sociological matters were concerned,  how many people were interviewed or observed by those who gathered the data? (In sociological matters, the bigger the database, the more accurate the conclusion is likely to be. Last week I polled people and discovered that the Earth is flat and the Moon is made of green cheese. My interviewees were five inmates of a psychiatric hospital.)

What sort of questions were asked of people? Were the questions loaded in any way?

In the case of making comparisons between the sexes, was an equal number of each sex examined or were the interviewees or participants loaded towards one sex or the other?

            And so on.

            The fact is that referring to “studies” as conclusive, without any detailed verification of those studies, is to refer to nothing of value at all. “Studies” often means something as loose as the polling carried out by newspapers and other news services when they want to score a point.

            Of course there are real “studies” that have produced real, verifiable conclusions. But even in the academic sphere, “studies” is often paired with words that imply ideology rather than impartial and empirically provable conclusions.

            Conclusion? Don’t take on faith what is presented to you only as “studies”.

 

Something New

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

“A LACK OF GOOD SONS” by Jake Arthur ( Te Herenga Waka press, $NZ25) ; “LETTER TO ‘OUMUAMUA” by James Norcliffe  (Otago University Press, $NZ25)

Jake Arthur’s A Lack of Good Sons is a very impressive debut, with its fifty poems touching on many psychological states, and its imagery hard and appealing. Arthur can convey solid physical reality with precise observation in poems like “Hockey” where we are presented with the hardness of wood and the sweat as women play; or the note-by-note reportage in “He in the harp” as a harpist plays, each plucking of the strings dramatised. But more often, Arthur’s tone is one of chronic mental discomfort. The dominant persona is somebody uncomfortable in his skin, ill-adjusted to the world,  constantly trying to work out who he is and very aware of the smallness, and perhaps insignificance, of humankind in the vastness of the universe. We cannot assume, however, that this is all, or even mostly, confessional poetry. Jake Arthur writes with many different voices, many different characters, even if most speak in the first-person. For example, it is quite specifically a woman who is speaking in the poem “Eclose.”

Yet it is this tone of discomfort and maladjustment that dominates.

Often Arthur confronts the burdensome weight of childhood and early experience. His opening poem “Jim Nevis” is apparently a disturbing childhood memory – almost, but not quite, traumatic – with the boy disturbed by the sight of a naked man in a neighbouring field, exposing himself and possibly triggering the young boy’s awareness of his own sexuality. “Doze” is also an unnerving child memory, hearing adult things while he is in bed. An adolescent memory in “Young Waverer” has the narrator partially schooled in sex by his older brother. And there is awkward adolescence in “Hair” with its self-conscious: “I was the school pariah and ate my lunch with the weeping willow”. “Lads” deals with a late adolescent-early adulthood experience of having to witness the rough, brawling, pub-going lives of jocks. The very confronting poem “Duelo a garrotazos” begins “I killed my father / in a meadow turned to mud / by our brawl and blood”. Is this the wish-fulfilment fantasy of an unhappy son?

Moving into adulthood come the poems about alienation. “Space”, a sequence of poems ostensibly set in the Christmas season, dwells on the vastness of things, loneliness and the sense of being insignificant. “Damage Limitation” is really a poem about the sense of guilt and how one copes with it while modifying behaviour and keeping a low profile. “The Great H-Goat” is a description of a witches’ sabbath, but as so often in this poet’s work there is the self-consciousness of being watched and judged. It can only be read sanely as metaphor. There is a very strong sense in so many poems of a lack of confidence and self-deprecation, as in “Peregrination” which begins “I cavorted through the Gobi Desert / I fell in love with a camel in Saudi / I poured pints in Karkow. / If anecdotes are life, I have lived. / Otherwise, I’ve urgently wasted my time.” Thus too in “You and the view” where “I ask myself if I am a boring person. / Sometimes I think I may never again / have an interesting thing to say.” Even a poem like “Fatal familial insomnia” – concerning prions (mis-formed proteins that cause some neurological diseases) – ends up with people separated and facing their own existential crises. “Call time” has the speaker’s tastes being broken down as he becomes physically disgusted with coffee. As for “The stones”, it which ends with the words “Beware of the mind, / that it reasons unreasonably, / that the stream may run empty / and flow with rocks and stones”. Human consciousness dissolves into the inanimate.  “Spear” gives us the full disjunction of mind and body… with homoerotic overtones. In so many of these poems there is that sense of not having found an endurable place in the world.

In this vein, Jake Arthur’s master-work is “Bare Choirs”. It takes the image of the mast of a sailing ship and frames it as lonely for the branches and foliage that has been stripped from it… and also upset to be thrust among alien things. Do trees have consciousness? Probably not. But this is still a powerful image of something ripped out of its natural environment. All of which adds up to a metaphor of human alienation.

By this stage in my analysis of A Lack of Good Sons, you may think that I am presenting the poet as a chronic depressive. Not so. His humour (in the modern sense) is also on display. The very best example is “Grizzly, adj.”, a poem about a bear and its natural, impulsive life set against the pedantic cogitations of human beings. There is a kind of melancholy whimsy in “King of collisions”; while “Encounter” is a wry parody of narratives about abduction by extra-terrestrials. Note, too, that there is a strong strain of satire. “Springer Motors, 1976” takes on slick salesmanship, cars, and their inevitable obsolescence. And “So says Ophelia” mixes the language of Shakespeare’s character with modernity, signalling the shift of mores over the centuries.

In Arthur’s poetry there are many mythological and classic tropes. I Congratulate the poet for not cluttering up his collection with explanatory notes. If you read the poem “So says Chiron”, you have to know that Chiron was the centaur who tutored Achilles – Jake Arthur is not going to tell you. Underneath this poem, there is yet again a tone of loneliness, a fear of growing up , a sense of being insignificant in the vastness of things. As Achilles grows, Chiron gives this concluding advice: “There’s going to be a moment when / you remember how we used to play, / and it’ll feel as remote from you as the spheres. / Best stay here with me.” Further interest in Greek mythology (the poet had a doctorate in Renaissance literature and translation) is found in “The Fates” in which he presents the three mythical sisters as straightforwardly as any poet could. And – similar in inspiration, but not ancient mythology – “Bluejackets” sounds like an ancient seafaring tale. Two nightmarish poems are inspired by  paintings of Goya: “Saturn devouring his son” and “Asmodea”.

The mental discontents suggested in this collection come from a whole and well-explored tradition.

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

Back in 2019 I reviewed on this blog the seasoned poet James  Norcliffe’s collection Deadpan . Among many other positive things I said about Deadpan, I noted that unlike some poets, when Norcliffe divides his collection into separate sections, the sections actually mean something. And the same is true of his latest collection – his eleventh – Letter to ‘Oumuamua. Read this work carefully and, with some few exceptions, you will find that each of this collection’s five sections has its own focus, its own tone, even if Norcliffe is consistently humane in his viewpoint and always ready to present humour and levity in the midst of more serious reflections. He is a humanist in the true sense of the word – one who examines human beings without assuming that he himself is exempt from human follies and weaknesses.

It’s worth stopping and considering carefully the four poems that open Norcliffe’s eleventh collection. Corralled together under the title “Four Letters”, each of these four opening poems is framed as a direct address. The title poem is addressed to ‘Oumuamua, an object that passed over Earth and that some astronomers think could have been an extra-terrestrial vehicle checking Earth out. Norcliffe’s response to this possible interstellar visitor is to describe human beings in benign terms even if we sometimes go wrong. The poem ends “I’m not saying come back, dear ‘Oumuamua, we know what / we’re doing. We’re not all bad. We just can’t help ourselves.” And that sets the tone for Norcliffe’s whole outlook. Human beings are not all bad, but can’t help doing bad or foolish things. So we are flawed. Following comes “Dear Valued Customer” which is essentially satire, with the request for a wonderful morning being replied to in formal business language. The same goes for “Dear Contributor” which is a most eloquent rejection slip sent by a publisher to an inept aspiring contributor. Again, humanity is gently chastised. And for relief, and reminding us that we are not the only creatures who inhabit this planet, there is “Dear Kereru”, which is sheer fun in its description of the elegant bird, while at the same time putting us human creatures into perspective.

From this we know that Norcliffe is immersed in how we human beings think and perceive, how we react to the other creatures on Earth, how we often go wrong, how we age and decay and - as a corollary – how our flaws are often embedded in our past and our memories of the past.

The second section “The Museum of Unnatural History” takes on the more serious problem of human perception. After a poem about mishearing or misinterpreting events in a train, there is the psychological reflection “Art and Confusion” in which a visitor is both alienated and confused in what is apparently the lobby of a picture theatre. Is the visitor taking in what is really there or is he only misled by fiction? Says the text “You are in, you suddenly realise, a scene from a movie, a scene that must feature in a poster somewhere and you look around the walls again.” This can be read a number of ways. Is it simply the feeling of awkwardness one gets when one is on display in a public place, making sure to put on politeness and manners which are, in effect, putting on a performance? Or is it a genuine crisis of mind? The fruitful conundrum makes this one of Northcliff’s best poems.

Not surprisingly, given the fragility of human thought and body, there follow a clutch of poems with intimations of mortality and the misuse of the body. “Pink Aspirin for the Heart” makes black comedy when old age thickens arteries. “Then Dr Salk”, on the polio vaccines of the 1950s, slyly satirises the anti-vaxxers of our own times. “Rage” is a coded account of death and the end of rage. “#A.M.” and “Insomnia” are both about sleeplessness and all the thoughts that beset you in old age, often filling you with regret. And spilling out from reflections on human mortality where follow poems with bleak imagery in presenting the physical world. ‘The Museum of Unnatural History” gives a bleak and wintry image of a decaying urban scene, urban scenes always being unnatural. “Looking for Novels set in Vienna” and “Scandinavian Noir” and “We Come Easily to the Language of Horror” are like imagined nightmares. In a way, so is “The Search Party”, where one searcher gets lost in the mountains and finds himself unsure about the aim of the search party is anyway. This image of being lost and directionless chimes with the psychological state presented in “Art and Confusion”.

Although this second section closes with a jeu d’esprit, “Hoopsa Boyaboy Hoopsa” - a light and witty poem written to celebrate Venice, Vivaldi and the four seasons – Norcliffe’s mood is summed up in another of his very best poems “Penguin Modern Classics”, winding together age, solitariness, the meaning of literature and the possibility of misunderstanding. A single or solitary person observes and reads; there is here a subtle critique of the art of reading. When texts talk back to the solitary reader, they say, in the closing words “You must forgive us for reminding you / of this. We cannot help being dog-eared, / fly-spotted and ever so lightly foxed / as you are, dear reader, as you are, even as / the fire goes out and the coffee grows cold.” Chimes at midnight for the bibliophile.

How different Norcliffe’s preoccupations are in the third section “Really Hot Soup”! Having already noted the fact that we share the Earth with other creatures, Northcliffe looks at the state of the planet we inhabit. “Living in the Entropics”, “Lambton Quay” and “Ocean View”, even if partially jocular, all refer to rising tides and climate change. “Really Hot Soup” discusses directly human impact on climate and the earth warming, as does “Living in the Goldilocks Zone”, serious even despite its semi-ironical tone. As for “Kotuku” , the poet voice feels “swirling like guilt” as he reflects on the human degradation of nature while contemplating the innocent purity of a white heron.

It's odd to point out that “The Coal Range” – another of Northcliffe’s very best – is at once about memory and a sort of nostalgia, but also, given its coal-mining setting, an example of environmental degradation. It has a (presumably West Coast) New Zealand setting but its family are Scots immigrants. In describing a miner’s home of perhaps a century ago and its routines (starting the fire; getting breakfast) it is at once a severely realist poem relaying family memories while at the same time avoiding sentimentality for “Sentiment sweetens distance, as drop scones, ANZAC / biscuits and peanut brownies sweeten the sour / pervading presence of damp coal, smoke and tea-tree.”

The fourth section “The Unnatural World” ramps up concern for the creatures that share our world, with poems (some written in jolly rhymes) of a one-legged blackbird and another about an arrogant brawling cat. “Duck Mousse for Breakfast” allows an apparently idyllic morning breakfast scene to fade into a sharp reflection on humanity’s cruelty to animals. But “The Goldfish” and “Rabbits” and “Mr Fizz” have a more ironical approach to animals.

            The final Section “The Granity Museum” draws Northcliffe into his childhood roots. “The Granity Museum” itself is a wistful recall to his childhood in the West Coast mining town, always vulnerable to the sea and land slips in the rain-battered region. “While the rain fell / and the surf roared / my childhood / swept away.” It is as hard and bitter environment, as the one depicted in “The Coal Range”. Hardness of the West Coast is also found in “Deacon Brodie” where the poet reveals the precarious lives of his mining uncles, their lungs permanently contaminated with coal dust. “Vertigo” is a very effective poem, poised between nostalgia for the coast and resignation to its loss.

            Ah yes. We close with old age knocking. “Reflux” is… a poem about mountaineers caught out by burpy belching reflux. Old age? Certainly. “The Body in the Bed” – one of Norcliffe’s most cleverly devised and thought-out poems – conveys the sense of how two people – presumably old people -  when they interact in effect make up a third entity… in this case a couple in bed.  “Life After the Diamond Harbour Ferry” is this collection’s fitting envoi or farewell – life nearing its end in the image of a ferry crossing water. Charon will take them soon.

            James Norcliffe can write in formal stanzas, but often prefers free verse or prose poems. Letter to ‘Oumuamua is a formidable piece of work. If I were an anthologist, I would consider earnestly putting in an anthology Norcliffe’s “Art and Confusion”, “Penguin Modern Classics”,  “The Coal Range”,  “The Granity Museum” and “The Body in the Bed”, all displaying the skills of a very perceptive poet.