Poetry NZ Yearbook 2: Editorial (2015)

Jack Ross, ed.: Poetry NZ Yearbook 2 [Issue #50] (November 2015)

Editorial:
What is New Zealand Poetry?

Image: Karl Chitham

One of the courses I teach – at Massey University’s Auckland campus – is Travel Writing. This year more than half of the students in my class were born and brought up outside New Zealand. I know, because I asked them at our first meeting.

Amongst many other students from many places, there are three young Arabic women in the group. One’s from Egypt, another from Syria, and the third from Saudi Arabia. They couldn’t be more different.

My Egyptian student is a free-thinking thrillseeker, a wild child, capable of jumping in a cab and jetting off anywhere at the drop of a hat. My Syrian student dresses and speaks like a pretty typical teenager. One of the class assignments is to write a piece about travelling on Auckland public transport, and hers was about bussing in to Auckland Uni with a more orthodox friend who nevertheless spends thirty minutes each morning styling her hijab to look as chic as possible.

My Saudi student is married, with two small children. She wears a hijab, and is clearly more conservative in her beliefs and attitudes than the other two. Her local travel adventure was to be handed a mobile phone by the bus-driver and told to explain to the person at the other end (a Chinese woman who thought she’d left something behind when she got off a few stops before) that he couldn’t discuss it with her while he was driving. Perhaps the question above should be, not so much “What is New Zealand Poetry?” as “What is New Zealand?” It’s a pretty diverse place these days: not much like the little seaside suburb I grew up in.

So much the better. It’s one of the perks of my job that I do get to meet and listen to such a cross-section of the young people of Aotearoa New Zealand, be they African, Asian, Arabic, American, European, Māori, Pākehā, Polynesian or any variant on the above.

•

So, after all that preamble, what is New Zealand poetry? It’s probably something that an editor of Poetry NZ needs to have a stated position on, given the journal’s title (in each of its various permutations over the years). And yet it’s surprisingly difficult to answer.

Does it mean poetry written in New Zealand, by no matter who, in whatever language? That would at least have the virtue of simplicity. But then what of poems written by New Zealand nationals (or long-term residents) abroad? Surely that, too, is New Zealand poetry?

In the most comprehensive attempt (to date) to debate the nature of our body poetic, Paula Green and Harry Ricketts’ 99 Ways into New Zealand Poetry (Auckland: Vintage, 2010), the authors say in their preface:

While this book celebrates what poetry can do, we are exploring this idea within the context of New Zealand poems across time, culture, age, gender, style and geographical location … We have only explored poems written in English as neither of us are experts in the other languages of New Zealand (in particular Māori).

That was also the approach taken by the last major attempt to provide a single-volume coverage of the whole canon: Jenny Bornholdt, Gregory O’Brien, and Mark Williams’ Anthology of New Zealand Poetry in English (Auckland: Oxford, 1997).

There’s a certain undeniable convenience to confining oneself solely to the English language. As Governor William L. Harding of Iowa put it, in response to criticism of his WWI regulation banning church services in foreign languages: “There is no use in anyone wasting his time praying in other languages than English. God is listening only to the English tongue.”

I can’t say that I feel particularly comfortable with the idea, though. As I understand it, our nation is based on a partnership between (on the one hand) the tangata whenua, the people of the land, and (on the other) any and all subsequent immigrants to the country. This agreement is embodied in that deceptively simple document known as the Treaty of Waitangi.

It would be nice if one could believe that the Māori and English texts of the Treaty say exactly the same thing. That is far from being the case, however, as William Colenso warned while it was being drafted.

Nor was it signed by everyone. There were significant hold-outs in various parts of the country: the Urewera, for instance, and much of the South Island. They could justly claim that whoever the Treaty covered, it wasn’t them.

Nevertheless, for all its faults and omissions and blind spots, the Treaty remains the foundation of our state, and we can’t ignore the principles of bi-culturalism embodied in it.

So, while I welcome the concept of New Zealand poetries rather than New Zealand poetry: the rich gamut of cultures and languages which now exist in our islands expressing themselves in many languages and forms – in the original and in translation, in dual-text and oral form – I continue to feel that no definition of New Zealand poetry which attempts to sideline or depreciate poetry and song in Te Reo can be taken seriously.

It’s the principal subject of poetic interest for audiences outside New Zealand, and so it should be: we’re fooling ourselves if we think otherwise. I was therefore fascinated to hear what Robert Sullivan, our feature poet, had to say on the subject (in the interview printed on pp. 25-40 of this issue). As a Pākehā New Zealander, I took particular note of his comments about “the need to represent one’s own stories.” He does, however, specify that:

when I was younger I used to think if you’re not Māori you shouldn’t be using Māori terms because you don’t understand the significance, but I’ve changed my mind about that. I think it’s better to promote the use of the language. But bringing it into poetry – well, readers of poetry can be quite pernickety. They’ll look it up, and they’ll actually deepen an understanding of Māori poetics.

•

There were a great many submissions for this issue of Poetry NZ Yearbook. It took us a long time to read and consider them all, and while we included as many as we could of the excellent poems you sent in, there is, inevitably, a limit to this process.

As a result, and to shorten the length of time some contributors have had to wait for a decision, we’ve decided to confine submissions in future to a three-month period: from May 1st to July 31st of each year, in fact: beginning in 2016. This will enable us to have a clearer sense of the dimensions of each issue before making our final choices.

Another reason for this change is because I’m very happy to announce that Poetry NZ will in future be published by Massey University Press. While this will not affect the editorial policy or present direction of the journal, it does have certain implications for our production schedule.

Poetry NZ Yearbook will, in future, appear towards the beginning rather than the end of the year, so the submissions collected in 2016 will actually appear in PNZ Yearbook 3 (February / March 2017). This does mean a longer interval between Yearbook 2 and Yearbook 3 than we would have wished for, but we hope that the establishment of the new Poetry NZ Poetry Prize (details of which will shortly be announced online: on the PNZ website and elsewhere) will provide enough stimulation to bridge the gap.

One of the first submissions I received for the present issue was from veteran actor / poet / Renaissance man Peter Bland, who wrote: “It occurred to me that I hadn’t contributed to Poetry NZ (ex NZ Poetry Yearbook) since 1958!! So I thought it was high time I tried again.” I have to say that it’s remarks like that which really brighten up an editor’s day: the continuous chain of poetry yearbooks and bi-annual issues from 1951 to 2015 (with occasional gaps, admittedly) becomes quite awe-inspiring to contemplate.

It is, however, with equal excitement that I welcome so many new voices, young and old, local and international, to this issue of PNZ.

•

As far as the poetics section goes, the essays and reviews, I thought I should explain here why some books have received full reviews and others only a brief notice. This is principally due to the date the books arrived. Titles which came in after our submissions deadline of 31st July have been “noticed” rather than reviewed simply because of the time required for any reviewer to read and absorb a book.

The distinction, I should stress, is never based on any pre-conceived opinion that one book is more important and worthy than another. I did my best to organise reviews of all the books received before that date.

I have, however, not commissioned complete reviews of separate issues of journals: these are clearly important publications in their own right, but it’s doubtful whether they can be said – except in rare instances – to have the unity of purpose of a book of poetry. They do, however, certainly merit as full a notice as we can possibly give them.

(8-12/10/15)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2 [Issue #50]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2014): 7-10.

[1529 wds]


Poetry NZ Yearbook 2 (2015)


•

An Interview with Robert Sullivan (2015)

Jack Ross, ed.: Poetry NZ Yearbook 2 [Issue #50] (November 2015)

An Interview with Robert Sullivan
[audio recording – 6 September, 2015]

Puna Wai Kōrero (2014)

Robert Sullivan

heads the School of Creative Writing at Manukau Institute of Technology. Before that, he was Associate Professor of English at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. He has published seven books of poetry to date, as well as two graphic novels. He also wrote the libretto for the oratorio Orpheus in Rarohenga by composer John Psathas, and has edited and co-edited a number of anthologies and special issues of Academic Journals. He recently completed a Ph.D. at the University of Auckland.

Select Bibliography:

Poetry:


• Jazz Waiata. Auckland: AUP, 1990.
• Piki Ake! Poems 1990-1992. Auckland: AUP, 1993.
• Star Waka. Auckland: AUP, 2000.
• Captain Cook in the Underworld. Auckland: AUP, 2003.
• Voice Carried my Family. Auckland: AUP, 2005.
• Cassino City of Martyrs / Città Martire. Wellington: Huia, 2010.
• Shout Ha! to the Sky. UK: Salt, 2010.

Fiction:


• Maui: Legends of the Outcast. Illustrated by Chris Slane. Godwit Press. Auckland: Random House NZ, 1996.
• Weaving Earth and Sky: Myths and Legends of Aotearoa. Illustrated by Gavin Bishop. Godwit Press. Auckland: Random House NZ, 2002.

Edited:


• [with Brian Flaherty, Tony Murrow and Anne Kennedy]. Trout: Online Journal of Arts & Literature from Aotearoa/New Zealand & the Pacific Islands [http://www.trout.auckland.ac.nz] (1997- ).
• [with Reina Whaitiri]. Homeland: New Writing from America, the Pacific and Asia. Special issue of the journal Manoa, vol. 9, no. 1. Hawai’i: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997.
• Proceedings: International Indigenous Librarians’ Forum. Auckland: Te Ropu Whakahau, 2001.
• [with Albert Wendt and Reina Whaitiri]. Whetu Moana: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2003.
• [with Anne Kennedy]. Best New Zealand Poems 2006. Wellington: IIML, 2006.
• [with Albert Wendt and Reina Whaitiri]. Mauri Ola: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English – Whetu Moana II. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2010.
• [with Reina Whaitiri]. Puna Wai Kōrero: An Anthology of Māori Poetry in English. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2014.

Secondary Sources:


• “Authors: Robert Sullivan.” NZEPC: New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre [http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/authors/sullivan/].
• Marsden, Peter H. From waka to whakapapa, Or: Carving your own canoe. The verse of Robert Sullivan.” NZEPC [http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/authors/sullivan/marsden.asp].
• Marsh, Selina Tusitala. “Pasifika Poetry: Video-Interview with Robert Sullivan.” NZEPC [http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/pasifika/sullivan3.asp].
• Prentice, Chris. “‘A knife through time’: Robert Sullivan’s Star Waka and the Politics and Poetics of Cultural Difference.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 37, no.2-3 (2006): 111-35. [http://ariel.synergiesprairies.ca/ariel/index.php/ariel/article/view/224/221].
• “Robert Sullivan (poet).” Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Sullivan_%28poet%29].
• “Sullivan, Robert.” New Zealand Book Council / Te Kaunihera Pukapuka o Aotearoa [http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/writers/sullivanrobert.html].
• Sullivan, Robert. “Discussion of ‘Varua Tupu’.” In 99 Ways into New Zealand Poetry, by Paula Green and Harry Ricketts. A Vintage Book. Auckland: Random House NZ, 2010. Pp. 462-64.

Robert Sullivan
photograph: Bronwyn Lloyd

• Alistair Paterson told me he awarded you first prize in a nationwide secondary school poetry competition in the 1970s.

Yeah, it was a long time ago, and Alistair’s very fond of saying to me that he discovered me. I think I’d already been accepted by Landfall back then. But those young writer’s prizes, they really encourage the young voice, and I don’t think I would have been as confident about putting my stuff out there if I hadn’t had that boost early on, so thanks Alistair!


• So were you already sending out poems to magazines when you were at school?

No, I just sat on my work. Actually most of my work went into writing letters. I had this penfriend, Dermot Delany, in Dublin, and we’d write all these rather intense things that teenagers talk about. It was good fun. Now I think that constant penmanship did help with my writing, funnily enough. I didn’t really come from a very bookish household.


• When did you start thinking of yourself as a poet, as opposed to just somebody who wrote poems as well as other things?

I was never very confident, except that I had this primary school teacher, Mrs. Ngaea, and she had our class do an exercise about writing what we saw in the sky. So we all sat outside in a group on the grass, and I talked about being a boy hunting an alligator lying in the grass. And she made such a big song and dance about it that I really felt that I was a poet, from the age of ten. I was absolutely certain.

That was really my big Ah-ha moment, but then of course I didn’t have the talent to back that up. It wasn’t until I got to uni, my first year at uni, that it really started happening for me. I just started knocking on people’s doors in the English Department. I was actually only eighteen, but I was quite serious. So I knocked on Albert Wendt’s door, because he had a visiting professorship that year. And Michele Leggott’s, and Alex Calder’s – anyone who’d see me, basically. I knocked on Ranginui Walker’s door in Māori studies.

For quite a shy young man I had a purpose. I wanted to get the best information, I was quite driven. I was obsessed – I like to think it was the way Ezra Pound was obsessed. You can see it in his essays. That’s one of the books that Alex Calder told me to read, the Selected Essays. I still rely on it a lot.


• I’ve been reading some of the new poems that you’ve sent me, and it struck me that those, as well as a lot of your other poems I’ve read, are based on genealogy and whakapapa. Is that a matter of personal choice, or do you see that as an essential part of your job as a poet?

I guess it’s part of the tale of the tribe – coming from a collective background, even though I’m now in a terribly nuclear set-up. I’m a Westerner. I don’t live in my Mum’s village. And yet, that’s where most of my thoughts go to and these ones I’ve just sent you, Jack, they’re my Dad’s side.

It’s Father’s Day today. My father’s been quite ill. He’s in a rest home. So it’s got me thinking about the Pākehā side of my family a lot more: the Conlons, which is my Dad’s surname. I guess I’ve always drawn on the idea of being Irish. I haven’t actually paid attention to the detail of being Irish in New Zealand.

My wife, Anne Kennedy, she’s always been completely Irish, one hundred percent Irish, and she really draws on that in her work. And I’ve really just made some little gestures, like the odd reference to Yeats and Heaney.


• But you call yourself Irish in your bio-notes.

Yeah, Galway Irish. I think I offended an Irishman, actually, overseas, while I was in the States. I put up a little poster and it said “Galway Irish” and I could have got away with that at home. I didn’t quite understand; I still don’t understand.


• That you were making a claim that he thought you had no right to?

Yeah. I’ve been to Galway Bay, and I’ve been to Roscommon, where my grandfather’s from.


• There are poems about Ireland in Voice Carried My Family, but I guess fewer poems from that side than from the other side. That’s an equally important part of who you are?

I think what it does … it’s a bit like being a poet, you get to carry a licence and wave it around to spout forth on all sorts of topics with no expertise. I’m not into phoney wisdom, but that side of me, it’s still a mystery. It’s not as deep, I guess, because I’m in the homeland of my Mum’s people. I’m not even in my Dad’s Māori homeland, because he’s part Māori. He’s from the South Island. I just don’t know enough about that side of the family, about his Māori roots.


• That diaspora, that feeling of exile you get from Colonialism, is a problem for a lot of writers in the British post-colonial countries: Canada, Australia, New Zealand …

Yes, I read a book called Zong, by Glenys Phillips, and it’s a kind of slave narrative, about a ship full of slave women, on their way to the Caribbean, which I guess was a staging post for the slave trade then. In storms, they’d just toss them overboard, and that book really consists of the sound of them sighing. There’ll be long stretches made up of the letters S O. Sometimes S O S. Sometimes O S. It’s dotted all around the pages, and sometimes that diasporic, that post-colonial experience just isn’t utterable in ordinary language and so the S O or the S O S is perhaps all you can say that’s sensible: sensibly.


• I’ve been looking at the recent anthology of Māori Poetry in English you co-edited with Reina Whaitiri. In the introduction you say “the major criteria for inclusion in Puna Wai Kōrero was declaring tribal affiliation/s.” That seemed a really interesting sentence to me, and I thought you might like to enlarge on what you meant by that.

Now, hearing it read back to me, I think really the main thing is declaring that you’re Māori. If a writer in some way expressed that they were Māori, we would have included them. It does sound as if having a tribal affiliation is another layer, but really we were just looking for a sense of identity as being a Māori writer. I’m aware of other writers who have Māori whakapapa who don’t actually acknowledge it, or who aren’t confident enough to assert that identity. So they don’t. They’re quite prominent writers, so I guess that filter also brings out a sense of being Māori as an identity within the poetry. Whether it’s voiced or unvoiced, it will always be there to some extent. So that is a bias of the collection, I suppose.


• It’s often said that a large number of contemporary Māori no longer have a tribal affiliation, or no longer know their affiliation. So, in effect, they would almost have to research their genealogy in order to qualify?

Yes. Though it never cropped up as an issue so far as I could tell. We put the call out through our networks: like Toi Māori Aotearoa. It’s possible that someone might have missed out on a call because they felt they weren’t affiliated with an iwi, but I don’t think that actually occurred. Theoretically it could have done, I suppose.


• For me that ties in with something I heard you say last year at a conference in Wellington. You gave a keynote speech, and afterwards one of the Australian delegates asked you to explain the “Parihaka story” (for want of a better term), and you replied that it wasn’t your story to tell, because your affiliations are with Northland, and it’s a Taranaki story which you didn’t feel confident to expound. Is that a reasonably accurate account of what you said?

I think so. I’ve always had this funny feeling – it’s a feeling, rather than a theory – about the need to represent one’s own stories. Like I have my own family story, my own ancestors. There’s been a significant book of poetry, Atua Wera, by Kendrick Smithyman. That whole book is about one of my ancestors, and I felt quite perplexed. Because I loved Kendrick, but I also felt quite conflicted, as if someone had reached into my family album and decided to tell that story before I could. So I try to practice what I preach in that regard.


• And yet, if one were to continue that argument, it’s a fact that you contributed a poem to the 2001 exhibition catalogue Parihaka: The Art of Passive Resistance. That’s different from telling the story?

Yeah, there I just relied on public accounts, historical accounts, whereas I felt that, because – as you know, Kendrick was a fantastic researcher. I used to use the university library back in the days when you had cards in the pockets at the backs of books, and you’d see the signature Kendrick Smithyman on almost all of the cards.


• I believe there was once a bet in the Auckland University English Department: to win it you had to go into the library and find a book that Kendrick hadn’t taken out.

But I actually think that he had some archival material too. Some of the things he was saying in that collection were just too mysterious for words. And it’s a great collection, and it did fire me up for some other work, anyway.


• Star Waka was your response to it, to Atua Wera?

Yes, it was.


• Star Waka is a very personal collection. It’s speculative at times, but it’s always based in your life, your connections. So it was the kind of poetry it was that was your response to Atua Wera?

I liked the structure of Atua Wera, the numbering sequence, it got me thinking how to reproduce something like that in Star Waka. You know, the astronomy, the mathematics, the sequencing in that book owes something to Atua Wera, actually: the very clever way Kendrick would dip between different numbered sequences, shift it around temporally. So that’s what I tried to do in Star Waka. I borrowed that technique. That’s the main connection, actually, and then me feeling fired up to tell my story. There are lots of influences on that poetry.


• I share very strongly your sense that certain stories belong to you to tell, and certain others don’t. I’m always quite surprised that some writers don’t feel any embarrassment or difficulty in telling stories which it seems to me aren’t theirs to tell. For instance, if I were to write a poem about a slave ship going from Liverpool to the West Indies, I could couch it as an historical narrative maybe, but I don’t really feel that it’s my story to tell unless I had a relative who was a slave captain. Then it could become my story: my shame to expiate.

Yeah, when I was younger I used to think if you’re not Māori you shouldn’t be using Māori terms because you don’t understand the significance, but I’ve changed my mind about that. I think it’s better to promote the use of the language. But bringing it into poetry – well, readers of poetry can be quite pernickety. They’ll look it up, and they’ll actually deepen an understanding of Māori poetics.

We just had a High School competition, and this wonderful young poet, Emily Fan, she just won first prize, and she’d studied Māori, and she’s not Māori, but she used this term me te wai korari, and I had to look it up, and it’s about the sweetness of the flax flower, the nectar inside it, and I thought “what a strong image”.

Because her poem is about the flattery of a too brief relationship – a suitor was flattering this young woman – her name was Hinemoa, in her poem, and you could see all of that just in that little flax flower image coming from the Māori, and flax is actually a symbol for the family in Māori poetics, and also the song of the bellbird is in a famous proverb to do with flax, so I could see lots and lots of things just in that me te wai korari term in an English-language poem by a non-Māori poet. These things are just beginning.


• And yet, there is a kind of clichéd use of Māori which surely isn’t that, isn’t based on a close study of the language or deep knowledge of Māori tradition.

Yeah, I actually don’t go out of my way to read that material. I don’t really know about that. You mean like in Kowhai Gold, that anthology?


• Yeah, as far back as that, but also as far forward as, say, James K. Baxter, though of course you could argue that he did have quite a strong knowledge of Māori protocol and language. Nevertheless, he did seem to think that it was more or less his job to be the spokesperson.

Yeah, funnily enough. But I was too young when Baxter died. I was a toddler, so I really don’t know enough about his kind of person. He had a Māori family. His wife was a prominent Māori writer, J. C. Sturm. I always wondered about that with Jacquie, though. Perhaps he did get in the way of her writing.


• I guess the reason I’m interested in pursuing this idea is just because I wonder if we’ve reached a point where European, or European-descended poets have to learn to back off certain subjects? perhaps what we need is more Māori writers writing about New Zealand than European writers trying to imagine the Māori experience of New Zealand.

Yes, we’re in an interesting time because Patricia Grace and Witi Ihimaera are still flourishing. And in the States you’ve still got Native American writers like Louise Erdrich and Sherman Alexie, he’s a younger one, and N. Scott Momaday. I don’t want to talk out of turn. But, you know, it’s still very selective in the States. Sherman Alexie would be about it. There’s Joy Harjo, in poetry, as well, so there’s some other voices, but Sherman Alexie seems to have had the consecration. He’s acceptable. Even though he writes about rather crazy things, rather desperately crazy things.


• Yes, and he deliberately writes in a kind of pop culture context and he’s done films as well, very successfully.

Whereas here, Alan Duff’s a bit younger than Witi and Patricia, but we haven’t had … there are a number of novelists, and poets.


• But there are complex figures like Taika Waititi.

Yeah, he’s great.


• He is himself, he does his thing, he can’t really be typed, but nevertheless he’s a strongly Māori artist.

Yes, he’s a storyteller. I should remember that, too, that film is so important now, yeah, and there are some really big films in Māori and Pasifika as well.


• I think you also said at one point that the idea of the Puna Wai Kōrero anthology was so there would cease to be three or four Māori poets that everyone could think of, but a lot more?

Yes, it’s against that kind of consecrating system: it works everywhere in the world, you know, there’s this system of prizes, and publications and publishers and booksellers, and it all wheels in around itself and it’s self-perpetuating. What it means is that it doesn’t allow other voices to come into that wheel. I’m borrowing this idea from Bourdieu: what he calls “the field of cultural production.” I’ve just finished my PhD. It’s all done, and I’m going to graduate at the end of this month!


• I gather it was a fairly long process?

It was very long, surprisingly long. I should get an Academic book out of it, though, hopefully.


• Will that be about Māori poetry?

It’s actually about Māori and Pasifika poetry, because I’m looking at the Moana as a metaphor for reading the poetics, and using a term like “field of cultural production” leads to more of a sense of that production, because, you know, it’s not an Aqua Nullius, it’s actually quite a storied ocean that we come from. The ocean is more like a highway than a barrier to cultures, so I just felt that using the rhythm of the tides to read Moana, Pacific, poets’ work seemed quite apt because it’s our conversational rhythm, it seems to come out of the culture more – at least in the English language poetry. The indigenous language poetry is more formal, quite ritualistic. I had a lot of fun, doing lots of close readings.


• I was going to ask you at some point how you handle the connections between being a teacher, an Academic teacher, and a writer as well. I mean, you must spend an awful lot of time working on other people’s writing as well as working within the Academic system. Is it an uncomfortable fit?

When I was a lot younger. But, you know, I’ve always been a fan of Ezra Pound and I always say “make it new” in every creative writing workshop that I run, every single class: and I also believe in his dictum that “only emotion endures.” And it’s really passion that I’m enabling. The passion should already be there, but you’ve got to make sure that it’s got a life, to know how to grow it. Lots of other role models kick in: it’s a bit like coaching. I really do think that being a teacher is very like being a coach. And if you know that the student’s listening, they’ll go far.

It’s not because of what you say, your own success. I think your students should always be more successful than you if you really want them to flourish. It’s not really about you as a teacher, and your ego, it’s about showing them that the ego isn’t a healthy place to be, about not being too ego-driven. I’m losing myself now in my thread, but I think it’s very important to be a passionate writer, even if you’re being terribly cynical in your poetic or your approach or kaupapa: the themes that you cover. It must fire you up.

As long as you show them that, and they see it, that’s all they need. You don’t need to tell them what to write or even how to write, because they’ve got their passion, they’ve got the rocket fuel.


• In Russia they used to have this phrase: “the cult of personality.” It always seemed to me that there’s a sort of cult-of-personality teaching, where people aspire to be gurus, and to build themselves through the admiration of students. Many people see this as almost the ideal of teaching, whereas I tend to agree with you that it’s really the negation of teaching. Unless you at least hope that your students surpass you, you’re not really teaching at all. You have to try to enable what’s already there, to come out.

Yes, I think that’s why Bill Manhire is so successful, actually. I don’t know Bill very well, but it appears to me that he parks his ego, or he doesn’t appear to have an ego as a teacher. And he brings it out through the workshop process.


• Yes, and I think that while people may imitate Bill Manhire, or try to imitate him, I don’t think that’s ever been his aim.

I don’t know enough about his former students, but I haven’t really detected anyone who actually captures what he does in his own poetry.


• No, I think that in a sense the idea of a Manhire school is not so, because even if you could follow his teaching methods, he doesn’t really have any followers in his poetics.

He’s a unique voice, yes.


• What you were saying before about the field of cultural production, and the star system: the writer as brand, if you like, is also true of Academia. Yet you too could be said to be the beneficiary of that. After all, you are constructing a poetic career.

Yeah, I’ve been a poet since I was quite young – a serious poet since I was 18.


• And you now have a considerable body of work.

Yeah, I’ve slowed down actually, partially because of the PhD, but I used to have this rule of thumb, I’d bring a book out every three years. I thought three years is enough time to let things gel. But just my own books: it’s been five years since my last book. I bought two books out in 2010, so I’m allowing myself something there.


• That career as a whole, obviously you can’t foresee the end of it, but do you feel that you’ve gone places you wouldn’t have foreseen in your early writing?

Oh, God, yeah. When I first started writing poetry, I was just writing in my bedroom. I must say that apart from – well, I had a poster of Brooke Shields, but I’d also made up a poster of one of Bill Manhire’s poems: “An Outline”. I was just obsessed with poetry.

And I could never have imagined doing the things I’ve done: travelling, and meeting other poets, and, yeah, it’s been a wild buzz actually. I could never have imagined.

You know, if you’d gone to a career-path High School counsellor and told them that you wanted to be a poet, I don’t think that they would have encouraged that.


• I suspect not! Sorry to keep harping on about the subject, but another thing you say in the introduction to Puna Wai Kōrero is: “In most previous anthologies of NZ poetry, Māori poets, while there, have been given only cursory acknowledgement.” Why is that?

Now another part of my PhD, also borrowed from Bourdieu, is this idea of “habitus” – you know, this idea that a person just focuses on their own world, basically: the world that they come from. So if the editors aren’t Māori they won’t be focusing on Māori poetry, I’m afraid. And if they’re not Pasifika or they’re not Asian New Zealanders, or they’re not women, they’ll tend to see what they want to see. And I think that’s what’s happened in the past with our big anthologies. There hasn’t been a big one very recently: not for poetry. You know Curnow did that 1960 one, the Penguin, there are some Māori poets in there, in Te Reo.


• And in the 1985 Penguin one, more comprehensively.

Yes, that’s better.


• I don’t think there were any poems in Te Reo in the 1997 Oxford one: the title specifies New Zealand Poetry in English.

No, and that was partly the inspiration for this anthology. When Oxford was still here they asked me to put together one, but I sat on it for a long time. And I’m really pleased with the result. We’ve got about sixty Māori poets in this one volume. And actually there are more that I’ve discovered since we published this. I dearly hope that we do get this second chance.

You know, the story of Māori poetry in English and the story of Pasifika poetry in English is, I think, one that still needs to be told. In the Māori case it’s bounded by being within New Zealand. We’ve got an Australian outlier now, and there’s always been a London one. It’s just as small as we want it to be or as big as we want it to be. I just don’t like the historical belittlement of our literature.


• English-speaking people have always been resistant to having to learn another language.

True.


• And continue to be. So can you foresee a renaissance of Māori poetry in Māori as well as in English?

Oh, it’s always been there. You just have to look at the National Kapa Haka competition, Te Matatini, there’s lots of new compositions in that. They might call it dance, but the lyrics are all poetry. And it’s flourishing. It’s got its own spot on Māori television, and the crowds that they draw …

It’s not just haka that are being performed, there are waiata, there are love songs, there are tangi. Although I don’t want to wax too eloquent about the health of it. The health of the language itself is at risk. I’ve enough Māori to know that. What bugs me is, you know, that there isn’t bilingual signage everywhere. Because a Māori speaker like me, if I don’t see bilingual signage I forget, quite rapidly, the few Māori terms I’ve got. So any fluency I’ve got just goes out the window.


• In your anthology you also mention Apirana Ngata’s classic compilation Ngā Mōteatea: the Songs, and while it’s a magnificent book, what fascinates me about it is that while the publication was started in the 1950s, it was only finished ten years ago: with CDs, and complete translations, and all. It’s almost like the national epic of New Zealand. Why did it take so long?

You’re right. It is a cultural treasure, and it should have had some serious funding earlier on to make it happen. Although the expertise was hard won. We’ve had some wonderful editors of those volumes, like Pei Te Hurinui Jones, Hirini Moko Reed, Jane McRae …


• Is that expertise lessening, or is it growing?

I think part of the problem is that I come out of an English Studies context and I’m not really an expert on the Māori studies context in that way. I went to a Māori Studies conference, a national and international conference. I didn’t present a paper, I was just there, and actually there were lots of panels on poetry. There was even a Hawaiian session, for instance.

I think, within that kind of Māori studies context, or Indigenous Studies context, poetry is part of the weave of knowledge. And so that holistic indigenous frame of reference does draw on poetry quite constantly, it’s constantly renewing itself.

And because I just live in a Western, English-language context I know that I don’t know enough about that. But I do like to think that having collections like Puna Wai Kōrero or Ngā Mōteatea does put fruit on that tree called biculturalism.

I’m a Northern Māori, though as you know with a bit of South Island Māori in me too, and our people were the first people in the treaty. We were the first signatories, and I like to think that that contributes to a kind of partnership that should flow into all areas of life, and actually poetics is one of those areas.

It’s a way of thinking that we draw on on the great occasions: life and death and marriage: births, even. And if we don’t, in a few years our poetics, with our tangata whenua kind of conscientising, will be lost, will become a reason to lose our soul. I know that the word “soul” is a dangerous term, but still …


• So is poetry.

Yeah, poetry is a dangerous term. There’s a level of care, not just ideas, but it’s the connection between ideas and the heart which is the poetic space.


• Are there further things you’d like to put on record here?

Oh, Jack, you know you haven’t asked me about my political poetry.


• Do you want to talk about your political poetry?

I don’t know.


• Well, there’s a quote here from Voice Carried My Family: “We see their racism everywhere / It lives on.”

That’s from my poem about the foreshore and seabed controversy, that’s where I got quite political. You know, I was living overseas when that book, Voice Carried My Family, came out, and I was feeling terribly hurt – which is weird, eh – about the foreshore and seabed stuff, and I got very hurt. I think it was because I was reading the Herald Online.


• Never read the NZ Herald!

[Laughs] Well, it just seemed rather one-sided. I was getting quite cross, so I kind of – yeah, I don’t know if my sense of New Zealand and my sense of this place got a bit warped, because I was overseas.


• But to be too nuanced can be a mistake, as well: sometimes you need a bit of a manifesto …

I do think that foreshore and seabed legislation was a big mistake.


• It was a colossal political error. Though it remains mysterious to this day, because no-one can explain clearly what the previous law was and what the new one meant.

Yeah, it was the sense that the rule of law could be changed. That’s why I think we need some kind of supreme court with a bit of teeth. We really thought we had a deal.


• And that was the Labour Party.

And that particular Prime Minister, Helen Clark, which was a real surprise. She was a very good Prime Minister, except in that one area.


• So do you think of a lot of your poetry as being politically motivated?

It’s always conscientised. I’m aware of it. but it popped up then. It was the foreshore and seabed that really hotted things up for me.


• That’s quite Irish, in a sense, because of the strong political tradition there: Yeats’s “1916”. It was always part of his poetry, but especially after the Easter Rising had occurred.

Yeah, that’s right. So I started to look around for other political poetries: there was one about the Peterloo massacre, there was a protest and a massacre in Manchester – was that Shelley?


• "I met Murder on the way – / He had a mask like Castlereagh."

Yes, and of course Swift and Pope. You know I started finding that these people who are quite political; they’re in the canon. Not that I’m into canons, but I started thinking, why can’t I write some political stuff?


• Of course Pound wrote a lot of political poetry.

Let’s not go there. He’s a worry!


• He’s certainly scared a lot of people off politics!

That’s true. I’ve tended to find it mostly in poets before the war, except for the Russians. So, yeah, I think we need to reserve that powerful voice – we’ve let it go for this quieter, more social, polite discourse we tend to have these days. In New Zealand poetry we risk losing that voice.


• And even in an alleged classless society the poetic voice becomes very middle-class, complacent and privileged: the voice of economic advantage. And while we may have our right to speak, we don’t have the right to be the only ones speaking.

No, and there’s a reactionary politics tucked in there.

I think I’d go further and say that the political dimension also brings in an emotional claim – it constitutes a holistic claim on our attention. I think that’s why people are drawn to biographies even though we know we should be reading the text, that they’re not really about the writer.


• I used to apologise for reading biographies, but not any more.

I read some of Andrew Motion’s poetry and it helped to have read his memoir: quite a lot actually. It really opened an emotional door for me into his poetry, which I don’t think I would have quite got otherwise.

And when Hone Tuwhare died, and I put together this “in memoriam” special issue of Ka Mate Ka Ora, Michelle Keown’s piece talked about Christopher Caudwell, and how Hone had read Illusion and Reality and that kind of blew my mind. I realised that he’d been reading very high theory quite early on in his poetic career, and he knew Marxist Modernist theory. In there, Caudwell talks about “affective significance”. The idea that folks – just like with Bourdieu’s “habitus” – attach emotions to the objects of everyday reality. And that’s what writers do, they imbue objects with emotion.

(6/9/15)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2 [Issue #50]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2014): 11-12, 23-38.

[5353 wds]


Poetry NZ Yearbook 2 (2015)


•

Fish Stories (2015)

Jack Ross, ed.: Poetry NZ Yearbook 2 [Issue #50] (November 2015)

Reviews:

Mary Cresswell. Fish Stories. ISBN 978-1-927145-66-1. Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2015. RRP $25. 131 pp.

Mary Cresswell: Fish Stories (2015)

The ghazal (pronounced, I’m reliably informed, “guzzle”) is certainly trending in contemporary English-language poetry. One can see its advantages in combining close attention to form with a dizzying number of possible variations: a little like the spread of the sonnet form throughout Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth century.

Mary Cresswell, an American poet who has lived in New Zealand since 1970, says of her collection as a whole: “It is accessible poetry, using rhyme, varying poetic structures and a range of topics,” and goes on to “encourage other poets to use formal verse and rhyme as I think it’s rewarding and fun.”

Her work, she explains, is “not confessional, not an emotional diary and not an autobiography.” What is it, then, if it’s none of those things?

Yes, I’ve heard about the vacant chambers of my mind.
Are you here because you hope to fill the vacant chambers of my mind?
[“Eine Kleine Kammermusik,” p.23]

This poem, whose title translates as “A Little Chambermusic” (presumably on the analogy of Mozart’s “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik”), rings the changes on the following dismissive remark by linguist Otto Jespersen, referred to by Cresswell in a footnote:

Jespersen describes (Language, 1922) a reading experiment for speed and comprehension in which women overwhelmingly outperformed men. This proves, he says, that women’s minds have ‘vacant chambers’ in which they promptly accommodate new information whereas men’s minds are already full of weighty thoughts that slow down such acquisition.

So far, so shocking (though it does remind one a little of the passage in A Study in Scarlet where Sherlock Holmes disclaims any interest in the fact that the Earth goes around the Sun, rather than vice versa, explaining that such irrelevant information simply takes up much-needed room in his well-organised brain).

My question is, however, whether the poem itself has much to add to the absurdity of the footnote?

I’ve spoken long with Professor Freud. He knows of course the most
efficient way those pesky little chambers should be mined.

I’m afraid that most readers’ experience of rhyme and strict metrical form is now confined mainly to light verse. The great tradition of such writers as W. S. Gilbert, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll and A. A. Milne has led us to expect witty paradox and ingenuity as inevitable features of such techniques.

Their successors were the Tinpan Alley lyricists of the Broadway Musical: “We hear he is a whiz of a Wiz, if ever a Wiz there was,” or “Doe, a deer, a female deer,” are probably among the lines that spring to mind when one thinks of the fun (Cresswell’s word) of poetic formalism.

Cresswell’s satirical intentions may be not dissimilar to, say, W. S. Gilbert’s, but in a poem such as “Eine Kleine Kammermusik,” I think we feel a certain forced quality to the wit. The allusions are there, but – to my ear, at least – the repeated rhyming variations on the word “mind” lack ease. They “smell of the lamp” (to use another nineteenth century phrase).

Where I think Cresswell is strongest is where she sidesteps the stricter demands of the forms she’s chosen to write in, and allows the language to speak through her with rather more freedom:

Night is cold and coming faster than we’d like.
We sit and shiver under thin and wear-worn shawls,

I assume I’m exempt because I sit around all day,
reading thrillers, writing predictable ghazals.
[“Waiting Room,” p.91]

We forgive, I suspect, the intentional clumsiness of that “wear-worn shawls” line because of the brooding truth underlying the others: the decision to use the ghazal-form, too, can be seen here in better relief – as, essentially, a refusal simply to add to a monotonous chorus of despair.

Some of her experiments in cento, too (selecting and recombining lines from other poets), result in a kind of poetry despite itself: a very personal voice asserting itself through a mountain of off-rhymes and naff experiments:

Where there are two, choose more than one
three, possibly, or a handful,

whatever you need to cross the desert:
dates to tuck in your turban

silver coins to tip the bearers
Biros for taking notes. You know

how hard the sun is on diaries
not to mention sharp sand

between the crumpled pages.
[“The Length of Long Days,” p.45]

The luminosity of such lines goes a long way to make up for a few arid passages here and there.

(26-30/10/15)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2 [Issue #50]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2014): 255-57.

[748 wds]


Poetry NZ Yearbook 2 (2015)


•

The Conch Trumpet (2015)

Jack Ross, ed.: Poetry NZ Yearbook 2 [Issue #50] (November 2015)

Reviews:

David Eggleton. The Conch Trumpet. ISBN 978-1-877578-93-9. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2015. RRP $25. 122 pp.

David Eggleton: The Conch Trumpet (2015)

Once in a blue moon,
everyone grows older, if you need something
to cry on, here’s my shoulder.
[“Syzygy,” p.28]

The blurb to his book proclaims David Eggleton’s intention to call to the “scattered tribes of contemporary New Zealand.” Having duly called to them, though, what does he actually have to say? The lines above illustrate his dilemma.

They exemplify Eggleton’s characteristic serio-comic register: his disconcertingly pat rhymes, offsetting the deep emotionalism of the words itself. What, indeed, is there to say? We do all get older – “if you need something / to cry on, here’s my shoulder.”

Melancholy and a pervasive sense of loss seem to set the tone here. “On Recrudescence of Waterfalls After All-Night Rain,” for instance, begins:

Before the movies they had waterfalls

and concludes with the less-than-encouraging evocation:

wet with glitter
mined as popcorn additive for Lord of the Rings. [p.36]

What, indeed, can be found which is not fake or (at least) falsely represented in such a landscape?

The early writers echoed one another
to haul narratives of settlement into being,
as if cramming more sail on good ship Rhapsody.
‘Mount Cook, greenstone country, middle island’,
was ‘stupendous’, ‘precipitous’, ‘gigantic’ –
the sublime defined by extremes: peaks, troughs,
breathtaking gulfs, gulps of cold illumination.
[“Wilderness,” p.51]

It was all a device for promoting one’s sense of ownership of all this “nameless nothingness,” Eggleton explains: “a found blank wilderness they would remake.”

Such denunciations of the “South Island myth” and its landgrabbing corollaries are, mind you, fairly familiar to most of us by now. The poem concludes more teasingly, though – at the end of a list of such landmark namers as Charles Torlesse, Thomas Cass, Charlotte Godley, and Lady Barker – with a reference to the “nowhere of Erewhon.”

Thus Samuel Butler looked up to stony limits,
went searching for paydirt in magnetic ore:
‘At every shingle bed we came to … we lay down
and gazed into the pebbles with all our eyes.’

It’s not that Butler is seen here (by Eggleton, at any rate) as any exception to this rule of plundering a landscape through the language one chooses to describe it. It’s more that these lines point at the larger truth of Erewhon the satire (rather than the placename): one must be somewhere to imagine nowhere – but the point of imagining nowhere is to look back on that somewhere. If you continue to gaze “into the pebbles” with all your eyes, who’s to say what strange visions might result? Mineral wealth of some sort, no doubt, but perhaps not in the usual sense.

Elsewhere in his book, Eggleton expresses a certain healthy scepticism about any and all attempts to own [= express] truisms about landscape:

Bogans, cashed-up, await gentrification,
seeking a personal tutor in Enzed Lit.
[“Sound and Fury,” p.82]

More to the point, the mediascape he is (we are) forced to inhabit now encompasses a world-wide banality:

Praise be to internet, now my mind is a search engine:
a web-headed weave around humanity
every which way which babbles of conformity,
and of dissenters in each departure lounge.
[“The Age of Terror,” p. 119]

When clicking on a Facebook “like” icon constitutes the extent of your political conformity or dissent, it might be seen to make little difference what else you do or say: “There are unknown knowns, and then there are the drones.”

It is, to be sure, a chilling vision Eggleton paints, and any attempts to valorise it or make it sound cool seem distinctly beside the point. “Let’s face it,” a young hijab-wearing media commentator said the other day on Al Jazeera, “right now stories about Syrian refugees pouring into Europe are sexy.” There was scorn in her voice, but the language she was forced to use somehow belied it.

David Eggleton’s latest book reminds us what time of day it is: perhaps as close to midnight as any of us has ever been.

(26-30/10/15)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2 [Issue #50]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2014): 257-59.

[669 wds]


Poetry NZ Yearbook 2 (2015)


•

A Place To Go On From (2015)

Jack Ross, ed.: Poetry NZ Yearbook 2 [Issue #50] (November 2015)

Reviews:

A Place To Go On From: The Collected Poems of Iain Lonie. Edited by David Howard. ISBN 978-1-927322-01-7. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2015. RRP $50. 390 pp.

David Howard, ed.: A Place To Go On From: The Collected Poems of Iain Lonie (2015)

First of all, I think it’s important to stress just how carefully and sensitively David Howard has laboured to show off Iain Lonie’s poetry to its best advantage.

Editorial procedures often constitute the bit at the front of a book which readers skip in order to get to the good stuff inside, but there’s no doubt that appreciation of a poet, in particular, can be greatly helped or hindered by the wrong set of choices.

Take poor old Philip Larkin, for example. Given the precision and care with which he shaped each of his four published collections, it was quite a shock to his fans to encounter Anthony Thwaite’s boots-and-all gallimaufry of a Collected Poems when it first appeared in 1988. There were poems everywhere! New poems, unfinished poems, juvenilia – in a vaguely chronological order which completely obscured the choices Larkin himself had made about them over the years.

Initially unresponsive to such criticism, eventually Thwaite was forced to give in. He tried again in 2003. This time he included the four main collections, in full, with a small selection from the other materials included in his 1988 edition. In other words, fewer poems, but with better internal ordering. But which should one rely on? The fuller (but more chaotic) 1988 edition – or the less inclusive 2003 one?

At the end of a long debate, Archie Burnett’s Complete Poems of 2012 set out to include all the juvenilia, all the unfinished and uncollected material from 1988 (and elsewhere), and all four major books, clearly labelled and separated, with a far more carefully edited text and more copious information on everything. It might be overkill, but it does work.

Has all this hurt Larkin’s poetic reputation much? It’s hard to say, but it certainly hasn’t helped.

Howard has learnt from these (and many other) precedents. His Lonie edition includes each of the five collections – including the posthumous Winter Walk at Morning (1991) – clearly demarcated in its own section. Rather than putting in a single section of “unpublished” or “uncollected” work, Howard has intelligently and carefully shaped a series of chronological chapters from the poet’s manuscript and typescript remains.

It’s hard to see how this arrangement could be bettered, given the complex and debatable state of Lonie’s work, with so many undated poems available in multiple texts. Howard’s decision to include so much information in his endnotes is also a welcome one – as is the inclusion of Bill Sewell’s memoir, Bridie Lonie’s chronology, and Damian Love’s critical essay on the poet.

It’s doubtful that Lonie will ever require another editor: on this scale, at least. The great thing about David Howard’s book is that it virtually guarantees that he won’t need one.

But, after all that, what of the poems? Howard quotes a telling remark by Lonie’s eldest son Jonathan, written after reading his first collection Recreations (1967):

I never realised how close to Donovan it is, I suppose I judge all poetry by his, but it is perfect poetry and very musical [p.358]

It’s hard for a subsequent generation to realise how sincerely this could have been meant in 1968: folksinger Donovan Leitch (“Atlantis,” “Hurdy Gurdy Man”) has long ceased to be a name to conjure with. I’m not entirely sure that the comparison is entirely unjustified, though. There’s a great deal of attention paid to being a poet in this early phase of Lonie’s work: far less to what (if anything) he has to write about.

Certainly it’s odd to hear Lonie invoking Auden and the other thirties poets solely in terms of technique: with an apparent ideology bypass over the motivations behind their demotic techniques and phraseology.

Montale, too, a deeply personal poet eschewing the public brayings of his fascist contemporaries, is translated by Lonie with sensitivity and care, but with a strange disregard to anything but the immediate personal contexts of his verse.

Is that the verdict, then: technical brilliance and profound sensitivity foundering in a gulf of lyrical detachment? Not really. Lonie is a poet for particular moods, I would say: for a bitter mood of telling over past follies, past loves. Bitter, or bitter-sweet? Lonie was, after all, a classicist. There’s something Horatian in his attempts to be himself, to live in the world without compromise.

The more of his work I read, the more I become convinced that that in itself is quite a considerable achievement: to be true to something so evanescent by its very nature, with so little clue as to whether one has succeeded – will ever succeed – or not.

I suspect, then, that what I’ll be returning to most often in Lonie’s work is those last two collections openly dedicated to grief, The Entrance to Purgatory (1986) and the posthumous Winter Walk At Morning.

One of the loveliest things about this book is the way in which it represents the meeting of two very different poets – David Howard and Iain Lonie – somewhat alike in temperament, perhaps, in their concern for technical precision and tour-de-force, but very different people, who have been able to meet on these poetic grounds almost like Dante himself, walking with Virgil and Homer into the seven-walled castle of the great pagan poets at the beginning of the Inferno.

(26-30/10/15)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2 [Issue #50]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2014): 260-62.

[897 wds]


Poetry NZ Yearbook 2 (2015)


•

Erebus (2015)

Jack Ross, ed.: Poetry NZ Yearbook 2 [Issue #50] (November 2015)

Reviews:

Jane Summer. Erebus. ISBN 978-1-937420-90-1. Little Rock, Arkansas: Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014. RRP $US 24.95. 185 pp.

Jane Summer: Erebus (2014)

I suppose that it’s natural enough that I should have started off by regarding this book with a certain suspicion. Not only do most New Zealanders regard the Erebus tragedy as somehow “ours” – there’s also the fact that it’s already been written about at length in Bill Sewell’s Erebus: A Poem (1999).

I find myself coming back to that point from Robert Sullivan: “the need to represent one’s own stories” [from the interview on p.27 of this issue].

I’m glad to say, however, that I now feel that I was completely wrong in this case. Not only is American writer Jane Summer conscious of this need to establish the right to deal with such subject matter, but she handles the whole issue with a deftness and skill one can only envy.

A yankee, I’ve been

so out of it for so many years
I’m not even sure

if I lost Kay in that
crash or she lost me [p.19]

Her poem is, in essence, a love letter to a lost friend, a friend (and, as we gradually intuit, lover) killed in the Erebus disaster.

She ties together the various knots of her narrative with intricate precision: a “three-month junket / to Australia and New Zealand – / bush vigor, tainted colonialism” [p.23] (I love that description of us: is it the Australians who have the vigour, and we the taint? Or do both pertain to both?) in 1990 fails to spark any memories of Kay’s death in 1979, and even an “Awful dream: X dies in Alps crash / + I say maybe they’ll find her / preserved by the cold but everyone / says I’m fooling myself + my loss / feels inconsolable” [p.30] does not remind her of it.

Why not? Well, there’s the rub. I could tell you, but you’d miss the best part of her story, her gradually unfolding life-lies and comforting delusions. For once, I think I won’t issue a spoiler alert, but simply recommend you to the book itself.

Allen Ginsberg’s great poem Kaddish (1961), a howl of grief for his dead mother Naomi, or Paul Muldoon’s “Incantata,” (from his 1994 book The Annals of Chile) for his ex-lover, the artist Mary Farl Powers, are the kind of company Erebus keeps. Nor does Summer have anything to fear from the comparison.

Both Ginsberg and Muldoon innovate technically with a kind of desperate, heart-felt intensity, transcending any suspicion of too much interest in the machinery of their poems.

So, too, in Summer’s book, the collaging of log books, the interspersed witness testimonies, the long passages of straightforward verse narrative, never strain our compassion or test our patience.

It’s hard to imagine a reader who couldn’t empathise with the sheer power of Summer’s bereavement: the life that she could have had, the wound so deep it’s taken this long even to begin to deal with it.

I feel this is a book I’ll keep going back to, and recommend to many friends. It’s true; it’s unpretentious; it’s written with a casual precision that belies the skill behind it. It is, in short, I firmly believe, something of a wonder.

(26-30/10/15)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2 [Issue #50]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2014): 262-63.

[539 wds]


Poetry NZ Yearbook 2 (2015)


•

Taking My Mother to the Opera (2015)

Jack Ross, ed.: Poetry NZ Yearbook 2 [Issue #50] (November 2015)

Books and Magazines in brief:

Diane Brown. Taking My Mother to the Opera. ISBN 978-1-927322-15-4. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2015. RRP $29.95. 116 pp.

Diane Brown: Taking My Mother to the Opera (2015)

It’s nice to see another hardback poetry book from Otago University Press. Slim paperbacks are all very well, but there’s a certain heft and authority in a hardback: especially one as bright and cheerful-looking as this. Diane Brown continues to mine life writing and famly history for her subject matter in this, her third collection of poems, full of pictures which will strike a chord with many readers:

My favourite photo of Mum,
snapped at the beach,
her sensible wedding day suit

ditched for saggy togs.
Here she is, laughing at Dad,
as if nothing had ever hurt her. [p.11]

(26-30/10/15)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2 [Issue #50]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2014): 270.

[119 wds]


Poetry NZ Yearbook 2 (2015)


•

Catalyst 11: My Republic (2015)

Jack Ross, ed.: Poetry NZ Yearbook 2 [Issue #50] (November 2015)

Books and Magazines in brief:

Catalyst 11: My Republic. Ed. Doc Drumheller. ISSN 1179-4003. Christchurch: The Republic of Oma Rāpeti Press, 2014. RRP $25. 112 pp.

Andy Coyle, Doc Drumheller & Ben Brown (2014)

“In 2014 The Republic of Oma Rāpeti Press launched a new republic, complete with a flag, and national anthem. To celebrate this event, we have dedicated a special edition of Catalyst to invite writers to share their vision of their own republic” – so begins Doc Drumheller’s preface to the 11th edition of Catalyst. It’s a pretty cool idea, I think, and the issue is worth it for the illustrations of urban art (what we used to call graffiti) alone. It is, I suppose, invidious to single out particular poems from a fascinating bunch, but I have to say that I was particularly intrigued and moved by Abby Friesen-Johnson’s prose-poem “Man Cave”:

Last week a little girl I was babysitting led me by the hand through her house …
“Wow, I’ve never seen a real man-cave before,” I told her, and it’s true. I’ve only ever seen them on TV shows with laugh tracks … she said “This is where daddy comes when he’s tired of me,” her pride not sagging an inch, and suddenly it made sense why we were still standing at the door. [p.25]

(26-30/10/15)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2 [Issue #50]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2014): 270.

[204 wds]


Poetry NZ Yearbook 2 (2015)


•