Slow Fires (2025)

Tracey Slaughter, ed.: Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2025: breath (August 2025)

Reviews:

Leonard Lambert

Leonard Lambert. Slow Fires: New Poems. ISBN 978-0-473-71156-6. Lyttelton: Cold Hub Press, 2024. RRP $19.50. 42 pp.

Leonard Lambert: Slow Fires (2024)

It’s nice when you pick up a book of poems and open it to one so good that your first thought is “I wish I’d written that.”

The poem in question was “Remembered Land” – as it turns out, the first in Leaonard Lambert’s new book.

I thought I’d never see my home again
but there it was, on ancient film, the bend
before you come to the straight,
sea on one side, hills inland,
mountains beyond.

It seems so simple: understated, almost. There are no dazzling, transformative words or expressions – nothing but carefully ordered clauses, in straightforward syntax.

But then Lambert picks up again on that crucial word “never”:

Never did I dream
I’d be on this road once more,
rolling home in afternoon light
to a house no longer there, children gone,
loved ones dead, driving now through tears
but seeing no end

Now we begin to see what he’s driving at: the complexity of this emotion of being there and not-there, in a place that once was but is no longer, with people now gone.

This is, of course, a scene we often see in nostalgic feature films, where the protagonist replays old footage of children by the sea, playpool splashings in the front yard, long-dead relatives and pets.

But Lambert gives us more than that. His refusal to particularise invites us in to the poem, gives us the ability to people it with our own dead, our own abandoned spaces. And then there’s his slightly off conclusion:

– how could Hope
ever fade or fail
in such remembered land?

I call it “off” because it sounds so atonally literary – by comparison with the deadpan rest of the poem that is. Hope is (as we all know) “the thing with feathers”, but Lambert’s reasons for capitalising it, marking it off, are deliberately left obscure.

A reviewer of one of Lambert’s earlier books, Park Island (1990) described it as lying “somewhere between nostalgia and bitterness”. That phrase seems to fit “Remembered Land” pretty well, too. The poem has a disconcerting edginess as a result of that barbed conclusion.

Something – or some things – went down there, clearly. While they will remain undiscussed, that past still has teeth to bite us with. It’s not just a golden land of might-have-been.

I certainly have favourites in Lambert’s book, poems which seem to speak to me more personally than others, but it’s hard to detect any which strike a false note, or which seem to have received less than adequate care and attention.

Leonard Lambert, according to the blurb on the backflap, has written seven collections of verse to date. Considering that the first of them, A Washday Romance (1980), appeared some four and a half decades ago, this shows an admirable spirit of commitment – and restraint.

The fact that the blurb also describes him as a “full-time painter” perhaps gives us a further clue to the nature of his poetry. It’s based more on the exploration of warring idioms, competing layers of language, than efforts to achieve visual precision (unlike so many of his contemporaries):

Together we saw the movie,
his legalistic mind decreed
Billy Budd Must Hang. Dad
blamed the weakness
of Captain Vere, entirely
missing the point. I was
Terence Stamp.

There’s a lot going on in these lines from “Toledo Steel”. If you happen not to have seen Peter Ustinov’s 1962 attempt to make a movie out of Herman Melville’s last, posthumously published story Billy Budd, they probably won’t make a great deal of sense to you.

If you have, though, this careful piece of family portrait painting will gradually begin to come into focus. Notably, however, there’s no attempt here to evoke the film visually. Instead, it’s the paradoxical nature of Billy’s death for a mutinous act deliberately provoked by the demonic Master-at-Arms Claggart which is crucial to an understanding of the relationship between the speaker and his older brother.

Lambert himself has described his work as an attempt to “weave a small poetry of quick precision and genuine pathos, returning verse to its natural home in chant and prayer, in psalm and song”. A full-time painter has neither the leisure nor (I’m guessing) the inclination to paint pictures with words: instead, he is free to explore these other, possibly more neglected aspects of poetry.

Whatever the reasons for the way he writes, let’s just be thankful that Leonard Lambert continues to do so.

•

(13-20/9/24)

Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2025: breath. ISBN 978-1-99-101697-3 (March 2025): 274-76.

[754 wds]

Acumen Poetry Prose Reviews: Leonard Lambert


•