We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
“SLEEPERS AWAKE” by Oli Hazzard (Carcanet,
$28.53); “SPINDRIFT – New and selected poems” by Bob Orr (Steele Roberts, $NZ40);
“SOME BIRD” by Gail Ingram (Sudden Valley Press, $NZ30) ; "RESIDUAL GLEAM - Selected Poems & Translations by Roger Hickin (Cold Hub Press, $NZ28); “TIGERS OF THE MIND”
by Michael Morrissey (Aries Press, $NZ25)
Bristol-born but
now resident of Glasgow and teacher at the University of St Andrews,
38-year-old Oliver (“Oli”) Hazzard made his name as a poet with Between Two
Windows (2012) and Blotter (2018). Hazzard is decidedly on the
avant-garde side of poetry, his verse often being cryptic or opaque and in many
cases requiring great scrutiny of the reader before it is understood. Only
rarely does the transparent break through, but when it does it has much to say.
Hazzard’s new collection Sleepers Awake is as much concerned with sound
as with meaning, with a propensity for alliteration – indeed much of it would
play best as live performance rather than as words on the page. Sound is
crucial.
The first section
of Sleepers Awake is the 70-pages-long “Progress Real and Imagined” which
is best understood as a quest for personal identity but which is also concerned
with the value of poetry itself. There are moments of odd verbal connections,
such as “ ‘Morning plaza’ / wet grass / glass / recycling / overflow.” There
are retreats into popular infantilism, such as “Reading Peppa Pig / upside
down / difficulty bludgeons / me as memorable / my own performance / of
exhaustion / memorable”. There are hip sparks of fatalism when “accidents and poetry / descend directly
from the air”. Occasionally, too, there are moments when the poet comes
near to being disgusted by his own metier, speaking of “Poetry without and ideas in it / brimming
with a real stupidity”. And is he referring to poetry or philosophy when he
speaks of “Something so complicated you’ll never be able to understand even
the basic terms involved / Something so simple you understood it a long time
ago, without even noticing.”? At times in this 70-page sequence, he appears
to give up on his self-analysis as “sometimes I will simply list basic
queries / about the nature of my personality / in order to allow for the
possibility that it exists”
For much of this
section, Hazzard prefers to present his poetry on the page in the form of slim,
scattered verses, but as he nears his goal he turns to blocks of prose. He finally
embraces a mental coalition with reality, even if reality is both complex and
annoying.
The second section
of Sleepers Awake is a collection of individual poems which begin with “Postpositivity
in Spring”, again a quest for identity while dealing with mundane physical reality.
The poem “Living etc.” is a bravura example of Hazzard’s hard-blocked connection
with sound first. Take on the poem’s staccato alliteration thus: “Luke Luck
flocks back to the joke tent or perhaps
palace / pacing the loud loneliness, suddenly intimate, / intricate with
internal noise… / clerihew cares.” Many of Hazzard’s poems are presented as
puzzles, conundrum in the context of clashing sound. Also, Hazzard is not an
activist in the current sense of somebody promoting a particular cause. Far from being an ideological call to arms of
some sort, the title poem “Sleepers Awake” (the title taken from a Lutheran
hymn) is literally an account of waking up on a snowy winter day in Glasgow and
taking in the changing moods as the snow slowly retreats and the sun begins to
dominate. Sleepers awake to the day.
In similar style
is the poem “May Face”, which certainly depicts a physical scene. I quote it
here in full:
This fact of maximum resistance
looking into people’s houses in the evening, early summer
the steeply receding strata of the rooms which have
factored us in already though
unaware, out in the mesh of analytical errata
except as a gnome Q-team listlessly
plugging in and out of public sockets: suck it up
the cold force of certain tags, cabinets, pets, melodies
or suck it up, the Clyde turning turtle
in its inlet, in blue and pink and brown turning
pink and brown and blue.
In this case however, “May Face” is a Clyde-side
scene at a certain time of day, but it does become lost in recherche vocabulary
(“analytical errata” etc.) and makes allusions difficult for the reader
to de-code. Standing as he does on a verbal
tight-rope, Hazzard is often weighed down by sound. His “Composed at Erdberg”
relates melancholy to moods to music.
The third
and final section of Sleepers Awake is a 16-part sequence called
“Incunabulum”, printed sideways to accommodate the long lines (I would almost
call them Alexandrines ) which is as much concerned with self-analysis as with
the fading impact of classical literature.
I would advise
readers that, for all its quirky merits, Sleepers Awake is a very
challenging piece of work, not for the faint-hearted or those who do not have
the patience to unravel its meaning.
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In terms of
prosody and approach, Bob Orr is the antithesis of the avant-garde, cryptic Oli
Hazzard. Orr’s poems are lucid, usually straightforward in their presentation
and setting no traps for the unwary. They also show a delight in people and
clearly-presented urban scenes, landscapes and especially seascapes. Spindrift
is subtitled New and Selected Poems for good reason. Spindrift selects
from the ten collections that Orr has had published since the 1970s, and ends
with 36 poems hitherto unpublished. In effect, it is a summary of all Orr’s
best work.
Most of Orr’s
poems are brief. Only occasionally does he expand into longer developed poems
such as bohemian youth that is recalled in “Fairfield Bridge” and “Roads to
Reinga”; or in “River”, one of his longer poems, which combines a grand view if
the Earth’s tectonics with the suffering of being inside in a hospital; or in
his nod to Shelley’s “Ozymandias” with his discursive poem “Hapuakohe”.
The typical Orr
poem sits stark and lean on the page. To take an example from Orr’s early work
“The old road” reads in toto “When you wake / in the deadly calm / of
somewhere around 3 a.m. / the dreams will quickly leave you. / The street is
like a road / across the moon. You hear lions / begin to roar in Auckland Zoo.
/ Across your bedroom wall / a tropical plant / has cast / the huge shadow of a
continent.” Later in his career, he could strip things right down, as in
“Orkney poet” which reads in full “Your meagre / hard-won harvest / from
stony sea-girt acres / barely put food on the table - / bequeathed a banquet to
the world.” And nearer the present time there is this pithy account of a
marriage called “Harold and Gladys” thus “He made it / back / from a war /
that left no tree unsplintered / to marry / his sweetheart / in Morrinsville /
her with / acorn / coloured / hair.”
Brief, direct statements are Orr’s
forte. In this respect he has the skill of an artist who knows how to leave unnecessary things out. Often his work reads
like slightly-expanded haiku, and real haiku turn up in the later sequences
“Buddha chopping wood” and “Buddha
burning firewood”. Orr’s sharp eye scans not only the sea but the lives of
workers; Auckland in terms of Freeman’s
Bay, Ponsonby, the Chelsea sugar works and the more shady streets; elegies for,
or allusions to, poets like Pablo Neruda, Anna Akhmatova, Garcia Lorca, Hart
Crane and others. Only occasionally does he go for satire as in “When Muldoon
was king” although there are oodles of irony in his poem “Neal Cassady’s car”.
Pohutukawa are frequently used as a motif ; there are poems about ancestry and in
his more recent poetry more awareness of Maori lore and language. But more than
anything there is the sea – inevitable given that for many years Orr was a
fisherman and sailor. There are many poems about walking on the shore and
imagining sea vistas; much about the fisher folk and their boats; comparisons
of the sea around New Zealand with classical voyages in [Greek] mythology and
much else.
Breath
in the salty sea breezes! This is a very accessible collection which a wide
circle of poetry readers will enjoy.
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Men and boys have
often denigrated or belittled women and girls by calling them insulting names. Often these insults are
related to ornithology, as in “bird”, “chick” etc. Gail Ingram’s Some Bird
is, among other things, a work of feminism and she is intent on pushing back
against such flippant insults. Her work is divided into five sections, each
section reflecting an age in a woman’s growing life, with each stage also being
labelled with a bird name, thus “shining cuckoo” [childhood], “chicky babe” [puberty],
“lovebird” [teenager and early adult], “house sparrow” [married with offspring]
and “crow” [maturity and old age]. In her poem “Language lesson for young girls
1979” she presents the way female stereotypes are reinforced by casual language
from the classroom onwards : “hey chick / let the little lamb
play with the dolly / she’s a tom-boy plays rugby / so butch,
a lezo (behind hands) / come on, show us a little skirt, love /
but don’t wear that dress – what a floozy / words you know for whore?
/ slut / tart / hussy / hooker oh-la-la / bit o’
crumpet on the side psst…” and so on with other insults such as
“bitch”, “spinster”, “old maid”, “sex-kitten”, “battle axe”, “old biddy”,
“bag”, “old hag” etc. etc. Her opening poem “Me Too” makes a similar statement.
Some Bird traces the life of a woman with a very clear
narrative.
“Shining cuckoo”
A woman goes through the pains of childbirth but her baby is immediately taken
from her. This is because she’s unmarried, it’s 1965, unmarried mothers are
frowned upon, and her baby is given up for adoption. The biological mother is
cut out of the story. The baby is adopted because another [married] woman, who
already has children, has just had a miscarriage and the adopted baby is her
consolation. Gail Ingram suggests the sorrow involved it this – the little girl
growing up and understanding that she is adopted, that she is somehow different
from her siblings, that she will never know her biological mother and that she
is in effect the “cuckoo” in the nest… and the poet is enraged that it is the
[adoptive] father whose family name appears on the girl’s birth certificate.
“Chicky baby”
deals with the girl’s experience in puberty and teenagerhood, where, in pairing
up, girls have to conform to boy’s expectations – so the years of having to put
on makeup, smooching with little real pleasure, being taken on dangerous
joy-rides with boys trying to show off in their cars… and when the time comes
for her to be sent to a university hall of residence, the only advice her
[adopted] father can give her is “Don’t get pregnant.” So to the days when
she’s harassed or unwillingly fondled by boys of her age in residence or in
public transport.
“Love bird”
has her falling in love with a guy, and getting married… though the poem
“Love-match”, about the wedding, has a sardonic undertone. And a baby is born,
which changes everything.
“House sparrow”
is subtitled “in which the sparrow fluffs up and becomes a mother”. Her
motherhood has moments of worry and fright, as in the poem “Take care of Stu”
where she panics when her child seems to have disappeared. She is always under
scrutiny with judgements about how “good” she is as a mother and how well she
is bringing up her children. More than anything, though, there is the fact that
she has to do all the caring of the children. The two poems “The Provider” and
“That thing between us” are most acute about this – the husband takes it for
granted that he doesn’t have to do the heavy lifting of child-care. … and the
marriage can’t last, even if the breakup is a long time coming. Indeed they are
almost up to middle-age. The poem “Family Trust meeting” says a firm goodbye to
the way she, in younger years, admired flashy young men playing rock music.
She’s her own person…
Not that older age
(“Crow”) is necessarily easy. The poem “Menopause XIII” suggests why.
She broods on the way older independent women were once tortured or burnt as
witches. She’s not entirely happy with the way feminism has gone since the
1970s (see the poem “Your natural mother marched in 1973”). In short, she is
aware that nothing can be certain in the interactions of women and men.
I am guessing that
some of the narrative presented here is drawn from the poet’s personal
experience, but that is only a guess and I have no way of verifying it.
Besides, the point of the poetry is what is on the page, not in extraneous
guesses. Even more to the point, Gail Ingram is not addressing only the matter
of a woman’s life. Some Bird has poems focused elsewhere. “Pakeha
parent” is a Maori woman worried by the loss of Maori culture. “The Wading
Bird” looks at the degradation of the natural environment. And “I am Pakeha” is
half protest against colonisation but also half awareness of being pakeha.
Nevertheless, it
is the feminist strain that dominates, presented clearly and forcefully. It’s
bracing to read something as clearly articulated.
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Roger
Hickins’s Residual Gleam – Selected poems & Translations gives us
first Hickin’s own experiences and observations, and then, in the Translations
section, his translations from the Spanish of poems written by nine South American
poets.
First, then, there
come his poems recalling his childhood (in “Invercargill 1950”) with memories in
a “Workshop Song” and the acute lines “The south wind / blew its cold salty
breath in my face. / The south wind sings wild hymns / in the macrocarpas”.
Then his observation of an ageing bird “Killing the Rooster” where “Once he
was the boss, / with jaunty patriarchal strut, / his raucous sickle voice
reaped stars at dawn. / Now he’s just the extra rooster / ousted by his son”…
and how well Hickin observes the old rooster before he gets the inevitable
chop. [Brilliant are those lines that I’ve underlined!] Following are acute
poems recalling Hickin’s late-teenager and early-twenties self as he charts the
hitchhiking he did, the people he met on the roads, and later the boozing in
the pubs and eccentric or colourful boozers. He also has the good taste to
salute the Jazz greats Charlie Mingus and Thelonious Monk. Memories can also be
for those who are lost. Hickin’s “A beach poem for my mother” does not
literally address his mother until the last stanza, which has a particularly
haunting effect. It reads “The godwits have left for Alaska / Flax flowers
darken beyond the dunes / Boats on the estuary / are pitching in the tidal rip
/ It’s late – you hear your mother / calling you home.” In a number of
poems Hickin addresses Spain, which he has visited, and make references to
Russian literature. The most engaging poem here is “After Pushkin” which
declares “Happiness of course is / unattainable, but in the search / for
peace and freedom you might / just head for somewhere else / a long way from
gossip / debt, frivolity / track down / a heavenly shack where you / can breath and work and slurp / good mussel
soup.” Wise words for the thoughtful hermit. And there are further salutes
to other literary or artistic people he has known.
And what of the
poems translated from the Spanish? I do not speak Spanish, so in writing of the
15 poems by 9 South American poets I have to consider them as Hickin’s versions
of the original poems and accept them that way. They certainly speak of other
countries’ preoccupations - A hungry pion
house. Jesus on the cross and pain. Cockroaches. The confusion of being in distant
country and not really understanding the accepted mores there. A man ineptly trying to woo a woman in a bar. Occasionally
back-handed nods to religion. The translations are capped with a long poem by
Ernesto Cardenal “Nostalgia for Venice”, which is literally about that as he
recalls his visits to Venice as it was decades ago.
This collection is
varied, interesting, very readable, and deftly moving among many different
moods.
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I tiptoed
carefully into Michael Morrissey’s latest collection Tigers of the Mind.
Morrissey is now over 80 years old and is well-known to New Zealand readers of
poetry. His output is prolific and Tigers of the Mind is his 14th
collection. His poetry is often bizarre, making huge imaginative leaps.
Morrissey has told his public that he has periodically suffered from
psychiatric disorders. Taming the Tiger, published in 2011, was his very
candid autobiographic account of a severe bi-polar condition which led him to spend
time in a psychiatric ward. Yet the experience has fuelled some of his best later
work.
In Tigers of
the Mind, one of the stand-out poems is “Defiant View from the Fifth Level
of a Psychiatric Ward”, wherein he presents himself looking out the window at
an Auckland vista. The view is “defiant” because the viewer, aware of his
disordered condition, nevertheless sees the validity of the images his fevered
mind is conjuring up, giving strangely impressive, almost psychedelic, views of
“Trees, acacia-like, stripped of lion blood, / incapable of movements as
toeless monkeys… Erudite moon, flawlessly memorious, / slings aside a sheeny
leopard with pitchy alphabets….” Later, in the poem “Falling in Love, Quite
Easily” he remarks “Like the romantics, I fell in love / with melancholia.
Depression was / at arm’s length, poetry permitted, / a different way of life,
feasible.”
It is hard to
avoid such terms as Surrealist or even Dadaist in reading some of Morrissey’s
work, conjuring up images that might have been created by Salvador Dali. “Quintessence
of Green” gives an apocalyptic view of the Earth ruined while cockroaches
prevail. A sequence dedicated to the moon plays with all the power, mystery and
fear of the moon. [And was the poet consciously recalling that luna is
related to lunatic?]. And then there are poems dedicated to aliens and
strange beasts, with the impressive “Poem for a Large Rodent” becoming a
conversation between a biologist and a giant rat living in a volcano. But while
we sometimes reach into the depths of Dada, we are also sometimes given
admissions of cold reality. The poem “Rebirth of Wonder” is the prize of this
train of thought. Two guys think that dropping acid will make them enlightened
and say something momentous while their girlfriends scribble down their words.
Result? Nothing amazing. They haven’t said anything coherent.
Morrissey has his
moments of reportage, including his very sad memories of his upbringing in
straitened circumstances in Camp Bunn (a shelter for those without adequate housing
after the Second World War). He implies that his mother went mad and his father
took to drink. And in the gathering labelled “Drunken Impulse”, the whole idea
of the uncertainty of life is mooted. There is an oddly deadpan account of the
famous painting “Mona Lisa with a Moko”. With the moko added to da Vinci’s
work, it is in its own way another modification of the Mona Lisa like the ones
the Dadaists and surrealists had fun with.
One wonderfully
lucid poem “Making Breakfast” reads in full thus “Through the thin wall I
hear my wife chopping fruit / as rhythmically as the piston on the steam ferry.
/ Each sound has its own precision / delicate but unwavering / surgical as a
lobotomist’s knife. / Her kitchen blade slices apple / cuts through pineapple /
fillets watermelon / deals painless death to passionfruit. / A banana stands no
chance. / It may sound like fruit is being cut / but really it’s the sound of
love.” He follows this with a brace of descriptive poems about Auckland weather, and
then deals with “Coronavirus” and “That
Time Again”, both presented in melancholy form as a deserted playground represents
the empty streets when the pandemic was doing its worst.
As you can see, it
is a very diverse collection of poems, and very engaging to read.
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