Jill Chan: The Smell of Oranges (2003)

Raewyn Alexander, ed.: Magazine 1 [loaded with arts, fire and boodle] (November 2003)

Jill Chan, The Smell of Oranges, Wellington: Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop, 2003. ISBN 1-86942-028-4. 64 pp. RRP $19.95

Jill Chan: The Smell of Oranges (2003)

One of the best things about editing a poetry magazine is the people you meet, albeit (much of the time) vicariously. Jill Chan intrigued me from the first. Her letters were terse and unforthcoming, the poems short and to-the-point, but with an almost disturbing perfection.

That was a few years ago now, and the poems have kept on appearing, growing ever more complex, but without losing that air of uncanny precision, of a carefully husbanded wound. It’s lovely to see them gathered in a book, confirming my original belief that here we have something quite extraordinary: a miniaturist whose art is on a grand scale, “not ever breaking at the pressure.”

(10/03)

Magazine 1 (2003): 76.

[130 wds]


Magazine 1 (2003)


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brief 28: Editorial (2003)

Jack Ross, ed.: brief 28 (October 2003)

Editorial:
In the Spirit of Crazy Horse

i.m. Alan Brunton (14 October 1946 – 27 June 2002)

New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre

Alan Brunton

Drama is two people talking. That’s how Red Mole began. And a few years later we did the desert, a show called The Excursion, shadows and masks on Second Avenue in New York. I took it from Flaubert’s letters from Egypt, and we projected Maxime du Camp’s photos …. And from The Excursion, I went into Moonshine, ‘thinketh she of Egypt, always Egypt’ and so on; the physics of the contraction and expansion of the heart. I guess it’s no wonder nobody got it.

– Alan Brunton, “Questions & Answers,” brief.19 (2001): 52-64 (62).

It seems to complete the circle somehow that we should be able to reproduce the text of The Excursion – albeit in a revised version – in this special issue of brief, twenty years after it was first performed (we’ve also put in some of those photos of Maxime du Camp’s, along with images of the original production from the Red Mole archives). If nobody got Moonshine when it came out, they’ll have less excuse after reading Martin Edmond’s magisterial “Lighting Out for the Territory.” (Richard Taylor also contributes an expansion of his Pander review – the one write-up it received at the time).

“Why do you continue to be involved in a magazine like brief? What do you think it contributes – or should contribute – and to whom?” continues John Geraets in the email interview quoted above. Alan’s reply seems even more pertinent and prescient now:

… maybe you’re asking why keep your magazine going. It’s a witness to faith, faith is a total thing. In the midst of all this sleaziness, corruption, theft, bankruptcy - you have to have that faith, that you’re engaged in something absolutely incorruptible. Because there’s no money in it. Brief opens onto an area that is parasite-free – how’s that? (60).

Keeping the faith – that is what it’s all about. In this case, our faith in the continuing life and value of Alan Brunton’s work.

Leonard Peltier, the Native-American Lakota activist framed by the FBI for murders he didn’t commit in the mid-seventies, used to close his letters with the phrase : “In the spirit of Crazy Horse.” Looking at Peter Matthiessen’s book on the case, I think of Brunton: that same crazed integrity, the almost barbaric sense of cultural richness and excess … I hope this issue will serve to make that spirit more accessible. Now, above all, when we need it most, when our idealists are dying off and a “tawdry cheapness” once more threatens to “outlive our days” (Pound, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”).

I should really move on to my thank-yous, though. Again, to Alan Brunton’s literary executors: Martin Edmond, Michele Leggott, and Sally Rodwell. The first half of this issue is almost entirely their work. Archives were scoured in Wellington, texts collated in Auckland, and a constant stream of helpful comment came from New South Wales. Michele Leggott, in particular, provided the impetus without which this project could never have come into being.

There are other names listed in the acknowledgements section opposite. It would be invidious to try to thank all of them appropriately here, so instead I’ve chosen to provide a brief breakdown of the contents, with comments where they seem required.


We begin with a dossier of works grouped around the The Excursion, a play mixing the iconography of The Egyptian Book of the Dead with details from Flaubert’s 1849-50 tour:

• Michele Leggott introduces and contextualises the play
• Murray Edmond provides an extract from his thesis on NZ alternative theatre
• Sally Rodwell lends illustrations from the original production in New York
• We reprint Brunton’s poem “Their Diet Consists of Carrion,” written to explain to an obtuse local critic exactly what “Flaubert was doing there in the first place”

Moving on to poems, tributes and critical pieces:

• Lesley Kaiser and John Barnett give some background to their projected edition of the Gnostic poem “Know-So” (1994)
• Michael O’Leary, Mark Pirie, & Brunton’s executors provide materials on Bumper Books
• Chris Bourke has allowed us to use a hitherto unpublished interview, compiled at the time of the release of Big Smoke (2000)
• We reprint four early Brunton poems from Raucous, the official journal of Auckland University’s O’Rorke Hall of Residence (“One day, one hopes that people will read Raucous for something more than their own particular quote,” said the 1966 editors. Little did they know!)
• Martin Edmond & Richard Taylor elucidate Moonshine (1998)
• Peter Simpson & I try to do the same for Fq (2002)
• Scott H. & Claudia W. rap about Brunton’s counterculture roots
• Stephen Oliver & Mark Pirie give a context to Bumper’s Brian Bell Reader (2001)
• Steve Dean, Ron Riddell, Mark Young & Michele Leggott all contribute poems

Finally, we present the first fruits of Richard von Sturmer’s two months residency on Great Barrier Island as the holder of the inaugural brief writers award. Enjoy.

(27-28/9/03)

brief 28 (2003): 3-4.
[Available at: nzepc]

[841 wds]

brief 28 (2003)


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F**k you, Faerie Queene (2003)

Jack Ross, ed.: brief 28 (October 2003)

F**k you, Faerie Queene

Alan Brunton, Fq. Wellington: Bumper Books, 2002. ISBN 0-9582225-4-1. 164 pp. RRP $35.

Red Mole: Stairway to the Stars

As I sat down to begin this review, the postman delivered a mail-sack with my long-anticipated copy of Kisari Mohan Ganguli’s 4-volume, 5,000-page, complete translation of the Mahbaharata (“As an epic it is the greatest – seven times as great as the Iliad and the Odyssey combined, and the grandest – animating the heart of India over two thousand years past and destined to lead humanity for thousands of years in future.”) Yeah, that’s the way – keep it subtle, guys: show, don’t tell – show, don’t tell:

The effort to conceive the mind that conceived it is itself a liberal education and a walk through its table of contents is more than a Sabbath day’s Journey.

So what’s that got to do with writing about this last work (“finalised for publication just before his death in Amsterdam, June 2002”) by Alan Brunton, “life’s supreme uranic poet, Overseer of the Scribes of the Great Records” (9)? I suppose, on the one hand, it seemed like a good omen: a Karmic intervention by the universe outside. On the other hand, it reminded me a bit of the rhetoric surrounding the release of this sequence of poems: “All the big questions are asked and all possible answers interrogated … Fq is funny, bleak, tender, savage, philosophical, prescient and crazy … It confirms his reputation as the most innovative, abundant and far-reaching poet of his time.” (Fq publicity handout, Oct 2002). Vyasa, Homer and Sappho rolled into one would have a hard time living up to that drum-roll!

That’s certainly what Douglas Barbour thought, anyway. In his recent Jacket review he said:

Could any volume by any contemporary poet truly do this? Brunton was clearly an important figure, especially among the fellow writers and performers with whom he did most of his life’s work. … But even within New Zealand, I am sure any number of people might put other names, even from Brunton’s generation or later, forward: say Bill Manhire, or Michele Leggott, for just a couple of examples. It’s an impossible call.

He concludes: “I can only offer my honest response to Fq. An interesting, sometimes delightful, often entertaining, occasionally provocative work, which also has many lacklustre moments, awkward, prosaic lines, confusing twists and turns.” Not, as they say, a rave. (I particularly like that “even within New Zealand” line: even in that distant barbarian province, nestled on the far edge of the Empire of Babel …)

Ian Wedde appears to entertain similar views. When, in his long piece “The poem as stretch limo” (in NZ Books (March 2003) 6-7), he finally gets around to talking about the poem, he summarizes as follows:

It’s been “a trip”: excessively virtuosic, simply moving, brilliantly theatrical, sad and hilarious … Even the title on the cover slips in and out of view – the “memory of an amnesia”. Unforgettable, taunting, addictive, like an image you have to remember, but only can when your mind is at full stretch, thin, almost transparent, just before sleep.

Huh? Wha’? “Thin, almost transparent, just before sleep.” … With praise like that, who needs criticism? Perhaps I shouldn’t have been amused, but I was, to find in that same issue of NZ Books an editorial by the late lamented Bill Sewell, on the subject of the “Clayton’s” poetry review (“The beer you have when you’re not having a beer,” for any of you too young to remember Jack Thompson slumped on a bar stool, salivating over a urinous pint of the unmentionable). The relevant rules, so it appears, are as follows:

• mention famous (preferably famously obscure) contemporary poets, gesturing vaguely towards the poet or poets under review [or, in this case, the “evolutionary psychologists”“ Judith Rich Harris, Steven Pinker and Geoffrey Miller, who have to jostle for space with Jonathan Franzen, John Searle and Plotinus in that long first section – roughly two thirds of Wedde’s review].
• Don’t attempt any sample analysis of the poetry.
• Don’t risk a judgement on the quality of the work [unless that bit I quoted above constitutes such a judgement: “Excessively virtuosic, simply moving …” in short, “a trip”].
• Whatever you do, don’t mention the “T” word; discussion of poetic technique makes everyone uncomfortable.

Bill Sewell’s remedy was to “Be bold in approaching the poems; pussyfooting around is a waste of time.” Barbour, to do him credit, is bold; Wedde clearly wants to be kind to the memory of an old friend, but one can’t help feeling that he could have found more to say about the poetry if he’d felt any particular liking for it.

So, after all that, where do I stand on the matter? Well, I guess my first reaction was a little like Barbour’s. What collection of poems could possibly justify that build-up? After I’d read the first few of them (knowing I would have to review the book), I felt more like Wedde. How do I get out of this one? Can I just bullshit on about the subject of “obscurity” in general, with a few pertinent quotes, and get away with a pose of mandarin aloofness? But then I read more, and more, and then more again …

Barbour comments, towards the end of his piece: “I have to confess that there are many other books I would re-read before I came back to this one.” That’s, I think, where we differ most. I enjoyed the book hugely – once I’d actually sat down and started it. I more than enjoyed it – I loved it. I laughed, I cried. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that sounds like a dumb cliché, but I did. I laughed and cried. There’s a beautiful poem “Precious Stone,” clearly meant for the poet’s daughter Ruby, on p.97. I’d like to quote it in full, but maybe this will give you some idea of it (show, don’t tell):

… yes, arrive daughter somewhere
in sunshine rubio with the rapture of
expectation, live in your immensity
through the longest years – live them as
fired up as I am now, wordless in the
insomniac night of my bio-clock, at this
moment of worldly separation from

you

Sentimental? I think not. Sad, yes. Beautiful and clear, too, I think. Who wouldn’t like to receive a poem like that in the post? But wait, there’s more. Earlier in the same poem we get a similarly passionate recreation of the writer’s own past:

you will live in an era of new
proprioception, quatre étoiles, bright
locofocos over Ocean City, leaving me in
my old age growing up again in the fuzzy
town of my childhood where nothing was
original, not even our peccadillos, where I
promised with my hand stuck to a
tree by a knife I’d eat the wind all my life and
ramble from commune to commune as my blood

wept

onto stones like the ‘unrecapturable
nostalgia for nostalgia’ …

That was what got me, I guess. There was to be no “old age growing up again,” nothing but this moment, this souvenir of a youthful vow to “eat the wind all my life”‘ – a vow he manifestly upheld. And the neologisms – “proprioception,” [self-perception? An Olsonian coinage, Michele Leggott informs me] “locofocos” [foci of place? Loco folk-os?] – seem, in context, less allowable than necessary: the only way of invoking this intangible future. As necessary as those obtrusive letter-spacings, imparting a sense of duration and time to certain talismanic words: wept, you … I don’t know about you, I find that moving.

•

Is that all there is to it, though? A Villon-esque Last Will and Testament addressed to those he left behind? That may be how we (inevitably) read it, but that was not how it was intended. Fq was to be yet another instalment in his life’s work: a weighty one, to be sure, but to be interpreted in its own terms – a long poem with beginning, middle and end.

Perhaps the major problem with the publicity handout (which still seems to me entirely appropriate for its moment – just before the celebratory concerts in Wellington and Auckland – not to mention function – an upbeat overview designed to sell as many copies as possible), was that it encouraged a reading of Fq as an essentially manic and celebratory text: “existential vertigo is coefficient with loopy lyrics in the mind of Shoe …” That moment has passed, and I think it’s time to admit how dark, how difficult, how terrifying a poem this can be.

Given its subject-matter and parameters, I think it has to be like that. What, after all, does Fq stand for? On the one hand it is, as we were reminded by Peter Simpson in the NZ Herald (30/11/02, p.G7), a reference to Spenser’s Faerie Queene: another quest poem, originally planned to be complete in 12 books, but actually reaching only six-and-a-bit – one, moreover, whose eponymous heroine never actually appears (I think it’s also important to note Brunton’s awareness of Spenser’s well-documented tenure as a brutal colonialist official in Ireland). Say the two letters out loud, then, and you get “F**k you”: a salutation particularly appropriate to the despoilers he’s so often addressing – Lola InternationalTM: “an Inca death mask / fashioned from pure CaSO42H20 by unexplainable, even anomalous forces: / Goddess of Justice, the Law – cruel, eccentric” (16), most prominent among them.

Shoe writes – The crowd
glowed Undead
on a brick he buries
in the municipal garden
beneath the sterile moon ... (23)

Such echoes of T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land (“unreal city … I had not thought death had undone so many”) must also surely be intentional. For the moment, however, that city (“London Athens Jerusalem”) appears to be called Christchurch. That’s not to imply there’s no humour there – Brunton’s poem is funny in a way Eliot’s “rhythmic grumble against life” could never be – but it’s an exceptionally bleak humour:

Pile-drivers pummel the earth in morning’s acrid
debacle: this is INTERNATIONAL
YEAR OF THE OLDER PERSON!
Why this? Why now? So many live
into the Third Age this is the oldest society
that ever existed.
…
How’s it come to this, that we live
though demented? What does the empty
house of tomorrow signify? The family
at the beach? Or a funeral? Mine?
All this yet to die? I keep
the curtains closed all day. I can’t see.
Too much sun. too much light. (143)

That’s beautifully put, I think – “Too much sun. Too much light.” – albeit, again, not precisely cheerful. It’s more the mood of Milton’s Samson Agonistes (“O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, / Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse ...”) than knockabout farce. Eliot said that the last speech Othello gives before killing himself sounds like a man “trying to cheer himself up.” One gathers, in context, that this is supposed to be a bad thing, but it’s a bit difficult to see why. I certainly read a lot of Fq in this light. It is, after all, a seasonal poem: in 12 parts (144 + 1 poems) approximating to the twelve months (really more like nine) of Brunton’s 1997 writer-in-residence-ship in Christchurch, and reflecting the Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter of our gumshoe poet’s moods. The wintriness of the “Funerary rites” above, then, is counteracted by the opening of section XII:

Green things overflow
with redemption, she opens her legs,
aiee! boat to immortality –
fair Diana in fresh sommer’s day! (147)

That’s the advantage of Brunton’s form, it seems to me. It’s flexible enough to allow him to include almost anything: any mood, any moment, any thought, and yet remain unified by the theme of exile: Bruton’s Tristia, if you like: his Epistulae ex Ponto [“ovilely, like exiled to the Pontus not New Brighton” (7)]. Like Ovid, Brunton wants to philosophize, construe the laws of the universe (one might, in this vein, describe Moonshine as his Metamorphoses, Romaunt of Glossa as his Fasti), but his centre is Amores, love poetry. Polly Pop, BIJOU – even the elusive Nadia Greatorex – enchant, delight, entice our hapless bard: his “system suffers exquisite duress” (22).

It’s tempting to go on quoting, revealing, expounding … Fq, it’s true, divides readers. It makes demands. Your view of poetry, what it’s for, what it can achieve, can never be the same once you’ve taken this book on board. How does Smithyman put it, in “An Ordinary Day Beyond Kaitaia”?

You must change
your life, Rilke’s archaic Apollo urged.

This poem demands no less of you. It’s inclusive, incisive, insightful, informative, infuriating by turns. Barbour and Wedde felt this and rejected it. Been there, done that, they said (in effect, at least) – Just one more hippie poet trying to redefine life, the universe and everything. We’ve heard it all before. And so they had, and so have all of us. George Moore, I’m told, had to draw his own aesthetic line in the sand at Debussy. Up to then he’d managed to keep up with each new artistic movement: Wagnerism, the Celtic revival, Impressionism, everything. But Debussy, Expressionism … no, that was simply too much. One has to draw the line somewhere, after all.

I’ve had to redraw my own line to admit Brunton. His relentlessly jaunty, allusive, pun-packed tone of voice does not automatically appeal, but I’ve found just reading him: not dipping into him here and there: really reading him has convinced me. This poem is the real thing. It needs to be read, enjoyed. I haven’t (I’m sure) worked out half of what half of it’s about, but it continues to fascinate me. So it will you if you give it half a chance.

In a sense I still sympathise with Barbour and Wedde’s reservations, but I think they’re wrong. If something this lively, complex, and precisely constructed isn’t great poetry, I no longer know what is.

•

In the year 1257, [the alchemist Nicholas Flamel] bought by chance an old book for two florins, which soon became his sole study. It was written with a steel instrument upon the bark of trees, and contained twenty-one, or as he himself always expressed it, three times seven leaves. The writing was very elegant and in the Latin language. Each seventh leaf contained a picture and no writing … It was purported to be written by no less a personage than “Abraham, patriarch, Jew, prince, philosopher, priest, Levite and astrologer” …

– Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852)

Whether or not Nicholas Flamel succeeded in finding the Philosopher’s Stone with the help of his mysterious two-florin tome is open to debate. The title of the book I quote the story from gives at least one view on the matter. Personally, I find it harder to reject the fascination of the esoteric text. Alan Brunton has given us just such a book, tailored to the circumstances of immediately pre and post-millennial New Zealand, and for that I’m in his debt.

I’ve said to read it and see, but is that really practical? Do lines like: “The Thing puts down a great concrete foot and catches Shoe’s coat. He cuts himself free with nail scissors. / 3 slaters climb ladders, hired to repair the sky” (152) rule it out of court? The interesting thing with Brunton’s poetry is that, when read aloud, the difficulties mostly evaporate. So for a while that’s how I saw him: a “performance poet.” But now I’m positive those cadences are inherent in his work. You have to give it a chance, but his language, his circumstances, most of his references, are ours:

I thought there’d be fun and games, forests filled with
dames, walks beneath umbrellas of moon-shine,
infatuate elements all around me,
my ear-ring would draw enamelled fingers to my face,
each innocent remark containing a million suggestions,
women would shake out their hair and let defences
drop, saying ‘Your happiness is contagious!’,
others simply ‘Hold me!’ (138)

That was the dream, all right – to throw off the bounds of restraint; crash through the Kiwi norms (conformity, decorum,, compromise: as dominant in our tame literature as in our lives), that suburban dream of perfect amity: bereft of love, enthusiasm, excess; the well-mowed lawns, the rows of square state houses; no tangled, diabolic thickets of bush (except for “Tui Glens” and scenic tourist backdrops); the well-turned lyrics; the plangent vernacular social texts … the boredom of the whole thing demanded such a reaction:

Jesus, will anyone understand this?
there is one story only …
All he is saying is, The time
came and the Man didn’t show (13)

Maybe the time came and the man did show. The man we needed – the rough beast we’d all been waiting for. We didn’t notice, but that man was Alan Brunton.

(9/03)

brief 28 (2003): 116-22.
[Available at: nzepc]

[2795 wds]

brief 28 (2003)


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brief 27: Editorial (2003)

Jack Ross, ed.: brief 27 (July 2003)

Editorial

I never get used to it – these resurrections
– Solaris, dir/writ. Steven Soderbergh (USA, 2003)

Season of the remakes
Ring
Solaris

The Gulf War
What happened to Gibarian?
Saddam?

Bush II
There’s something happening here
What it is ain’t exactly clear

There are no answers
only choices
I can tell you

what is happening
but I don’t know
if that’ll tell you

what is happening

Solaris (2003)

Dear Jack,
I’ve just beaten my way through the bush to Tryphena. I’m in a valley on the way to Rosalie Bay. Everything’s fine. Establishing a writing, walking and sitting schedule.
Will keep in touch,
Richard

It gave me immense pleasure to select Richard von Sturmer as the inaugural holder of the brief writers’ award. He’s on Great Barrier even now. I’ve admired his work for a long time, so it ‘s extra-nice to be able to contribute some space and time for him to pursue it. That’s on the plus side of the ledger.

On the minus side, we seem to be living in a world where aggressive war has shifted from a war-crime to a duty. It seems particularly curious to divorce “terrorism” from the conditions which give it birth, and treat it instead like some kind of pathological condition …

I suppose I should stop perpetually looking for the beam in my neighbour’s eye, though. Another interesting piece of correspondence in the last couple of months has been a pamphlet by F. W. Nielsen Wright, entitled “A Comparison of JAAM and Brief as the Two Leading Literary Magazines of Aotearoa since 1995.” The implicit compliment in the title is soon undermined by such statements as: “Brief has always been the showcase for what must be the most insignificant group of writers in Aotearoa … wedded to dogmatic theories about writing, in some cases for forty years now.”

Some of us go so far as “espouse dadaism”, or at the very least “a very mechanical concept of intertextuality.” It’s hard to see precisely what point Wright has to make about the two journals, since he’s appeared in both. He is, however, clearly far more sympathetic to JAAM: “the leading Aotearoa literary magazine throughout its time … particularly strong in reviews and interviews.”

The essay was apparently prompted by the 48-page brief index we issued earlier this year (“the smartest looking publication the Writers Group has put out, no doubt in the interests of making a good presentation for their magazine and for themselves”), which perhaps accounts for its concentration on impressive-sounding statistics:

… of the 301 poets who appeared in ten standard anthologies of Aotearoa since 1990, 24 of them also appear in Brief (or just on 8%). That is to say, 25.26% of Brief contributors appear in the 10 anthologies.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, no fewer than 62 (or 20.6%) of those anthologised appeared in JAAM: “(Note the proportionality 8% v 20.6%)”. When it comes to publishing books of poetry – since 1990 – 24 brief-contributors contrast with 73 JAAM-contributors). But then brief 1-26 only printed 95 people, against JAAM 1-19’s 350.

While there’s a certain fascination in all this – mainly in contemplating what a horrendous number of writers there are in NZ (“500 plus poets … have published books of poetry in Aotearoa since 1990”) – one can’t help feeling, at the same time, that it’s a little misguided. Of all the criteria to apply to a literary magazine, how many people it prints is surely the least informative. (Mea culpa, though: I can see how my rather tongue-in-cheek preface to the index could lend itself to this kind of thinking).

Just for the record, though – my criteria for the material I accept or reject for brief are more-or-less as follows:

1. merit as a piece of writing: it must display skill or (at least) serious intentions
2. interest to brief readers (insofar as I can forecast their tastes and proclivities)
3. unlikelihood of appearing in any other NZ literary magazines, either for reasons of taste, or length, or style, or ideology

Number 3 is the most unusual provision, and therefore the one most worth stressing. In general, I feel that unless a piece must appear here, it shouldn’t appear here. Readers will have to judge this issue’s “new faces” for themselves, but you can rest assured that they were included on their own merits, and not in order to up my inclusion statistics in some future index of NZ’s literary gatekeepers.

(12-13/6/03)

brief 27 (2003): 3-4.

[751 wds]

brief 27 (2003)


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Leicester Kyle: Five Anzac Liturgies (2003)

Jack Ross, ed.: brief 27 (July 2003)

Leicester Kyle, Five Anzac Liturgies. Drawings by Philip Trusttum. Auckland: Polygraphia Ltd., 2003. ISBN 1-877332-08-9. 53 pp. RRP $22.50 [+$2 p&p].

Leicester Kyle: Five Anzac Liturgies (2003)

The production of this new book by Leicester Kyle deserves attention, before we get to the poems themselves. It’s A4-sized, with a glossy white stapled cardboard cover, and printed in (I’d guess) ten-point type. The illustrations are of particular interest. They’re photographs of the original Trusttum pieces, incorporating pieces of the wall behind (complete with power-points and skirting boards), often cutting off the head or foot of the panel, and generally not in perfect focus. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this is meant to tell us something.

“El-cheapo,” is one reaction, of course. But, as brief readers, surely we’ve been trained to go deeper than that? The Trusttum drawings are accompanied by small road-maps of each town by Leicester himself, complete with spidery handwriting and carefully ruled lines. There’s something tactile and comfortable about the whole thing, in fact. This is not an art book, though it may be a work of art. It’s not for coffee tables but coffee mornings – to be handed round and read from at the kaffeeklatsch, over buttered scones and Leamingtons.

The subject is, after all, Anzac day – New Zealand’s equivalent to the Mexican Day of the Dead – and Leicester gets his teeth deep into the significance of this iconic event for each of the five small Canterbury plains communities (Hawarden, Waikari, Rotherham, Culverden, Waiau) he memorialises. Each section repeats the same pattern: an initial invocation, more intimate characterisation of one of the inhabitant, a liturgical speech-and-response, a description of their memorial (“The Shrine,” “Lest we Forget” “In Loving Memory Of” …), and finally an address to the townspeople (“To the People of Hawarden say” …)

Does this sound too mechanical? Five parts, each made up of five sections, about five towns? Or is it intended to function like the five taxi-rides in Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth? Repetitiveness can be disarming, enabling one to stop concentrating on it and listen instead …

Your small straight roads …
end where the river flows
and the great wind blows
on the forest rows
when the dust-storms fly.

Then all is quiet as eternity.

Such deceptively simple lyrics alternate with more “daring” passages of internal monologue, echoes of the Anglican prayer-book, of Eliot’s Ash Wednesday and Four Quartets, of botanical and geological manuals (“Eschscholzia on the rocks and apple trees”). This makes it a difficult work to characterise overall. I should perhaps close, then, by acknowledging the ambition inherent in Leicester’s scheme. He wants to reach a “non-poetry-reading” audience, in language they’ll understand and appreciate, without compromising his own standards of precise articulation. This work may offer a way forward for others as well.

(6/03)

brief 27 (2003): 98.
[Available at: Leicester Kyle: Index (2011)]

[459 wds]

brief 27 (2003)


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Sugu Pillay: The Chandrasekhar Limit (2003)

Jack Ross, ed.: brief 27 (July 2003)

Sugu Pillay, The Chandrasekhar Limit and other stories. Auckland: The Writers Group, 2002. ISBN 0-473-08731-6. 151 pp. RRP $29.

Sugu Pillay: The Chandrasekhar Limit (2002)

Like V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Ben Okri and the millionth other, Vasuki Maharaj had come to London to live the writer’s life [“Heretic Loka”]

“That is, the secret writer’s life” (57), the passage continues. It would seem an appropriate beginning for a discussion of Sugu Pillay’s intricately-constructed, intensely self-conscious fables of identity in a post-colonial, post-post-modern world. Does the passage imply that the writer wishes to be seen in the same terms as those icons of Western possession of the Other? Is Vasuki Maharaj a mask for Sugu Pillay, Indian writer in Aotearoa, first-cousin-once-removed to London?

The story immediately belies this notion by the unexpected density of its prose (I first wrote “pose,” and that would seem a point worth making also):

It was obvious that to enter the game of difference and differAnce, one must be released from bondage to the myth of sameness. To risk the caterpillar’s touch and metamorphose into a blue enamel butterfly and in the process the lilac wisteria of memory turns into art? (57)

The invocation of Derridean différance is weighed against the near-Georgian “lilac wisteria of memory.” There’s something odd about the syntax, too. Is “turns” meant to function as a verb or a noun? The punctuation would seem to admit either possibility, thus committing itself to neither. “A postmodernist is an unpalatable writer who eats at the table of another,” grumbles Tom Muribellum, one of Vasuki’s colleagues in the “Physiology department.” “All stories are thieved. Lord Ganesha approves” (63) is her reply.

“The rest was just needlework” (59). This extraordinary complex of conversations, literary investigations, and surgical operations (on sheep, mostly) culminates in the literal arrival of a deus (or should one say diabolus?) ex machina: Ravana, the demon kidnapper from the Ramayana:

Centering Vasuki with his rhynchocephalian eye, Ravana said, ‘He iwi kotahi tatou.’ He then invited Vasuki to enter his left toe. Recognising the pushpavahanam as her rightful turangawaewae, Vasuki gladly jumped thresholds and entered the puzzling space of nga tapuwae. And away they flew to Heretic Loka where only the brave dwell and thrive. Who was afraid of the textual toe? (70)

In his introduction to The Vintage Book of Indian Writing (1947-1997), Salman Rushdie refers to the phenomenon of “Rushdie-itis:’ a dazzling, multi-layered prose which rejects the possibility of simple or understated effects. Even by Rushdie’s standards, though, this passage would seem problematic. Without a knowledge of Maaori, Sanskrit, and modern post-structuralism, the points Pillay is making here are not so much obscure as inaccessible.

Nor is it an isolated example – in this story or any of the eight others. They all hinge on a bewildering multi-cultural barrage of references. Characters from mythology interact with Bollywood lovers, stereotyped politicians and academics, and “realistic” slice-of-life characters. Their language is as complex and typographically bewildering as a Derridean treatise (Glas, for instance), and yet the centre of this web of significations (note the American spelling in the passage quoted above) is always poetry. A Mallarméan poetry of allusion, to be sure, but no less intensely felt for that:

love and its survival
love and survival
love survival
love
lo
(62)

Is that, finally, what saves these stories from themselves? This sense of a reality behind the dazzle, “beyond all this fiddle” (Marianne Moore)?

Sugu Pillay is not anxious to be owned. She doesn’t want to win a Nobel prize for careful adherence to Western ideas of the anti-self, the Other: the familiarised exotic (The Mystic Masseur, The Famished Road – even, dare one admit it? Midnight’s Children). It is true that that is also the subject of these books: how to “succeed” (in the Western literary sense) while rejecting assimilation. Naipaul, Okri, and Rushdie have all faced the same dilemma and tried to write their way out from under it. What degree of success each of them has achieved is (or should be) a daily topic of debate among us. (Perhaps The Satanic Verses is the most magnificently Quixotic of all such attempts to date – no Nobel for Salman, or not as yet …)

Sugu Pillay’s answer is uncompromising in a different way. The “secrecy” mentioned in the first quote above should alert us to the existence of a series of Hermetic barriers within her stories. She invites knee-jerk rejection, derision, incomprehension by the very way she writes. And yet, perhaps hard words are needed when easy answers have failed. Sugu Pillay is not blind to the complexity of her historical and cultural moment. She refuses to let her readers be blind, either. If you listen, there’s much to hear. (There are some rattling good yarns concealed in here, too).

(6/03)

brief 27 (2003): 99-100.

[790 wds]

brief 27 (2003)


•

Smithyman: Imperial Vistas Family Fictions (2003)

Mark Pirie, ed.: JAAM 19 (May 2003)

Kendrick Smithyman, Imperial Vistas Family Fictions. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2002. ISBN 1 86940 274 X. ix + 161 pp. [RRP $24.95].

Kendrick Smithyman: Imperial Vistas Family Fictions (2002)

I cannot be sure
anyone understands this, but I should like to. (59)

In 1983, the same year he began writing Atua Wera, Kendrick Smithyman started work on a companion piece, a kind of family history set against the background of European imperial expansion, the turbulent era of change and folly between the 1880s and the end of the Second World War. Like most of his later poems, the pieces are anecdotal, peopled with drunks and scapegraces and ne’er-do-wells, free of the pieties of the official version:

They did not know how to conduct themselves.
They were unpardonable. They had style. (11)

Even those of us allergic to genealogy can immediately see the point of this sprawling picaresque saga. In structure, it’s like a cross between Masters’ Spoon River Anthology and Melville’s Moby Dick, full of ships, and wars, and sex, and good stories.

More importantly, however, Imperial Vistas Family Fictions provides a necessary counterpoint to the intensities of Papahurihia’s strange vision, and offers vital clues about how to read the longer and more labyrinthine poem. “Poetry is in the pity,” said Wilfred Owen. Kendrick, in Closing the Chocolate Factory, a videotaped reading recorded a few weeks before his death in 1995, disagreed, but went on to say that it might be “in the story.” Reading this book, one begins to realise just how serious and complex was Smithyman’s interest in the science of storytelling: the snatch of anecdote, the snippet of news, the soundbite – essential currency in what Hermann Hesse called “the Age of the Feuilleton.”

Calling it a whakapapa poem is perhaps too facile, though that’s certainly how it’s being marketed. I’d prefer to see it as a kind of morphology of the family anecdote (in the tradition of Vladimir Propp). Let’s take one poem as an example, the one I quoted from above, “Nightingales”:

In Wellington he chummed up with a son and heir
of a coastal shipping / freighting company
who was in love with (oh, blueball smitten for)
a politician’s daughter.
They would climb
Tinakori slope at evening, Father with bird whistle,
Jim with horny cornet. They blew into nights
fresh as anything coming up from the south,
the devastatingly pure south, ‘Last Night
the Nightingale Called Me’. (59)

Some things stand out at once: “blueball smitten” undercutting the “devastatingly pure south” the two young swains are blowing into … (Tennyson’s “Dark and true and tender is the North” perhaps needs reversal in the Antipodes); the nice double entendre of the “horny cornet” … but then the stanza concludes: “I cannot be sure / anyone understands this, but I should like to.” If you don’t, how can we expect to? Why are you telling us the story in the first place? Patience, patience, Act Two begins …

In Te Kopuru a C of E lady spiderweb lined
of more than mature years was courted. She gave
her hand to a suitor who carried her off
honeymooning as far as Tangiteroria.
… returned from Tangi ‘a married woman’
to several villagers’ raw delight.
“Floss,” they demanded outside the general store,
“Floss, did he make the nightingale sing?”
“What’s a nightingale?” I asked Mum, “what does …”
who was hauling me away before
I ever
did not understand.

“I’m not sure / that any better now I understand if at all / though I should like to.” We tend to assume we’ll understand the point of stories – especially jokes and anecdotes. Here I was flexing my wordly muscles and cooking up a scenario of “nightingales singing = no sleep” or (alternatively) “ditto = singing out during lovemaking,” until having the rug abruptly jerked form under my feet by this throwaway ending. If Smithyman doesn’t get the (presumably smutty) allusion, how can I hope to? But then of course he does. He understands what the villagers meant, as did his mother. What he doesn’t understand (“though I should like to”) is the larger point of the story – and, by extension, the poem – what can perhaps only be paraphrased (in period style) as “sweet mystery of love.”

Love at its most plaintive and ridiculous has become his subject (as one might have expected from that title): youthful unrequited (blueball’d) yearnings transmuted into song, the elderly spiderweb-lined Miss Havisham swept off her feet “as far as Tangiteroria” (so far!). The adroitness lies in the poem’s sense of context – the quiet way in which it conveys a whole world of Victorian courtship and ritual. How final that “a politician’s daughter” sounds – as distant, unattainable, as any of Propp’s fairytale princesses. Our C of E lady too, “had a nephew getting into politics / who looked like doing all right; she too was / politic” – politic enough to demand marriage before granting her favours, at any rate!

I could go on in this vein for quite some time: the youth / age, (unrequited) passion / (expedient) matrimony dichotomies are perhaps meant to signal a changing of the guard between repressed Victorians and pemissive 1920s, a then vs. now patterning … and yet both appear almost equidistant, equally inexplicable to Smithyman (and thus, by extension, to us). He wants to understand both stories, but cannot be sure of understanding either.

… people are always finding
themselves on the dark edge of the universe,
losing the race, losing out, whose sneakers
make commas all over in dust. (108)

Perhaps these lines (from “Father’s Opium War”) would make the best epigraph for the collection as a whole. These are the people who make bum investments, who go broke in gold rushes, who blow all their winnings. All of them “leave / behind things which they mean to go back for.” Losers, in a word.

It puts one in mind of that Far Side cartoon showing a stream of possessions – carpet, piano, pet dog – being sucked out of a house up into the clouds by some mysterious force. “He’s trying to take it with him,” remarks one woman to another. No, you can’t take it with you. What’s to be done, then? You can live with a touch of style, have an interesting time, leave a graceful memory.

As Smithyman’s father said, when accused by his rebellious son of stealing one of his stories from a book by Shalimar:

He used to write
down things people told him.
He didn’t get that story right, you know. (141)

The point doesn’t always depend on getting it right.

(24-26/1/03)

JAAM 19 (2003): 246-49.

[1092 wds]


JAAM 19 (2003)


•

Smithyman / Quasimodo (2003)

Richard Reeve & Nick Ascroft, ed.: Glottis: New Writing 8 (2003)

Smithyman / Quasimodo

A man cannot say ‘I will translate’, any more than he can say ‘I will compose poetry’.

– Helen Waddell, Mediaeval Latin Lyrics (1929)

Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1968)

The catalyst was a dual-text “Italian issue” of Poetry Australia (22/23) from 1968. When Kendrick Smithyman finally got around to reading it sometime in the early eighties, his response to some rather clumsy literal versions by Mary and Walter de Rachewiltz – Ezra Pound’s daughter and son-in-law – was to growl: “I could do better.”

He proceeded to prove his point using the poems included there, then went on to ransack all the other Italian anthologies and single-author translations he (or, after his retirement from Auckland English Department in 1987, his wife Margaret Edgcumbe) could find on the shelves of the University Library.[1]

The result was a massive collection of 211 poems, translated from 15 different Italian modernists, ranging in time from Dino Campana (1885-1932) to the still active Eglio Pagliarani (1927-?). The scope of this enterprise still seems astonishing, especially when one considers that he spoke little or no Italian, and therefore had to work from the half-truths of “literal” versions – and other translators.

By 1993, he was ready to submit the collection for publication – first to Auckland University Press, then Carcanet in Manchester. Neither proved able to take it. I first found out about these Versions from Italian shortly after his death in 1995, when Professor Don Smith lent me his own copy of the typescript prepared for the two publishers.

•

So what are the poems like? Sheer bulk is no guarantee of success, and the nowadays-not-infrequent practice of translating from languages one doesn’t know could hardly be said to inspire an unquestioned confidence. I don’t think I can really improve here on what I said about them in my essay “Smithyman in Italian,” published in Landfall 197 (1999):

I feel that [these translations] liberated a side of Smithyman which was at times obscured by the conscious artifice, the ironic masks of so much of his poetry. They are, I would suggest, best read thus – as a substantial addition to the canon of his own work, rather than a window on the Italians. (73)

I only had space there to talk about the versions from Montale. I couldn’t do more than touch on his engagement with the poet Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1968), who seems to have appealed to him far more. In fact, he ended up translating more than half of Quasimodo’s collected works: 132 out of 195 poems. The nearest rivals in the collection are Sandro Penna and Eugenio Montale (22 and 26 poems, respectively).

So why Quasimodo? What was it about him that spoke to Smithyman particularly? If what Helen Waddell says in the quotation above is true, then a poet’s choice of poets to translate ought to say a good deal about both of them.

•

Christ’s lice! What do you expect?
Nothing in the world changes, and Man
proclaiming love and discord still shrugs
his raven wings closer together
against the rain. From the beginning
you’ve never wanted for blood. Only a sheep
with scruffy head and salt-packed eyes
turned round on the way back.
But nothing happens. Moss on its walls
is firstcome chronicle of a city
of some remote farflung archipelago.

– Quasimodo “Altra risposta” (1958)

I’ve been amusing myself by drawing up a table of comparisons between Quasimodo and his counterpart in our “remote farflung archipelago:”

Kendrick Smithyman (1922-1995)

Salvatore Quasimodo / Kendrick Smithyman

Q: Born in Modica (near Ragusa) in 1901, but moves to Sicily at the age of seven. /

S: Born in Te Kopuru (near Dargaville) in 1922,
but moves to Auckland at the age of ten.

Q: After studying in Rome, lives most of his life in Milan, with brief intervals away. /

S: After studying in Auckland,
lives most of his life there, with brief intervals away.

Q: Doesn’t join the Resistance during the Second World War, though he espouses anti-fascist attitudes. /

S: Joins the army during the Second World War,
but is stationed at home and on Norfolk Island.

Q: Early, lyrical love poems give way to tortured asceticism, then a resonant political identification with the Italian people during the war. /

S: Early, self-doubting love poems give way to daunting intellectualism,
then an increasingly relaxed sense of place and people from the sixties onwards.

Some similarities at once stand out. Both came from the backblocks (Sicily; Te Kopuru) to the metropolis, and for both this remained a dominant theme. Both had rather muted war service, apparently preferring the role of spokesperson to Byronic (d’Annunzio-esque) man-of-action. Despite some striking successes in that genre, both found the role of love poet difficult to sustain. The differences, though, are even more striking:

Quasimodo is a poet apotheosised by crisis. His early work, collected in Ed è subito sera [Suddenly, Evening] (1942), was fierce enough. The indignation of these poems at the fact of death: death of love, destruction of the natural world, immediately distinguished him from his more urbane contemporaries. However, it was the Second World War which really defined him. The editor of his complete poems remarks: “While remaining antifascist, he [didn’t] take an active part in the resistance.”[2] All that changed in 1946-47, with the issue of his collection of war poems Giorno dopo giorno [Day after day], welcomed for its assertion of a “reclaimed human dignity.”[3] It won him a Nobel Prize in 1959.

Smithyman, on the other hand, is a poet bound up by landscape (particularly the Northland he grew up in and continually revisited), and language (the convolutions and ambiguities of English syntax) – a writer intensely suspicious of grand attitudes and romantic self-aggrandisement. No Nobel prize for him. No activist posturing during the Vietnam war. And yet, it’s interesting to contrast the Quasimodo poem quoted above with Smithyman’s “Ambush:”

It happens like that, you are not prepared
for
bursts of automatic fire dadadida,
then a single shot da from unseen marksmen
kingfishers, targeting. It happens
like that, as suddenly, a bagatelle and no
one is to blame if fear is all
mixed up with loving.

(Auto/biographies, 24)

“Fear is all / mixed up with loving.” The sheep, the lice, the raven in Quasimodo are props – bits of realia brought in to illustrate a point. The “kingfishers, targetting” in Smithyman seem more tangible than his bullets.

What the two poets have in common is a sense of drama, of intensity. Quasimodo, however, has what Smithyman lacks – a belief in his own historical consequence, which enables him to transform particularities into a larger set of parables about love and death and war. It would be pompous for Smithyman to assert such grandiosity. Ventriloquising Quasimodo, could it perhaps seem legitimate?

That’s how I interpret the late (unpublished) poem “Reading Quasimodo:”

remembering (thinking I remembered?)
(I’d been reading Quasimodo) reading about
night, when bombers came.

Gunfire downriver announced:
noise, in what folk formerly called
“the Heavens”, as though it were all
an oldfashioned playhouse, open to
elements. We waited moonrise, the moon rose
flowering past cross stations, beyond simile.
It was the moon. It did not flower.

The bombers came. They were bombers
not monotone birds. They’d no fine feathers.
They let fall neither eggs nor untimely dung.
They were searching the river, they found
the river. They looked for docks, ware
houses, power plants. In their foreign language
they droned, tediously debating.

We burned angrily. That was the night
the sugar refinery flared, and ran.
Tenders, men with hoses, trapped
in floods of toffee, baked, charred,
glazed, innocent of carnival.

Incendiaries fell in course.
Some wasted among park trees, some in roosts
on storage depots, factories, wharf sheds,
fragmented. Flocks shocked by noise dazed
by lights caught fire, rose and flew.
Sparks did not fly like birds, they were birds.

Truly, we did this, we saw that? Truly, we did.

– Collected Poems IX: 1985-87 (20.7.85)

The poem is a maze of contradictions, of memories cancelling each other out. “the moon rose / flowering past cross stations, beyond simile. / It was the moon. It did not flower.” Did the moon rise flowering? No, of course it didn’t. It was the moon. Moons don’t “flower.” “The bombers came. They were bombers / not monotone birds.” They weren’t birds, they had no feathers, they didn’t lay eggs or “untimely dung” – they were bombers. They dropped bombs.

“Beyond simile” is the key phrase here. When experience becomes ungraspable, unbelievable, it becomes pointless to look for analogies. How can one define the indefinable? How can one believe that such things happened? “Truly, we did this, we saw that?” They did. “Truly, we did.” They do.

The sparks “did not fly like birds,” they were birds.

Kipling once said that when you knew how to do something, it was time to do something you couldn’t. In some ways, late Smithyman was in his most experimental phase, most anxious to attempt the peaks he’d never managed before. Quasimodo, then, can be seen as one of the vehicles he employed to express the hitherto inexpressible: moral indignation, rage against pain and injustice – those things we want so desperately to say but which tend to choke us the moment we begin.

Is it a good translation? Yes, I think it is. But more than that, it’s an essential part in the jigsaw puzzle (Atua Wera, Last Poems, Imperial Vistas Family Fictions) which is gradually revealing to us the work of one of New Zealand’s greatest poets.

---

Notes:

1. Among others: Contemporary Italian Poetry: An Anthology, ed. Carlo L. Golino (Berkeley: U of California P, 1962); Eugenio Montale, It Depends: A Poet’s Notebook, trans. G. Singh (New York: New Directions, 1980); The Selected Writings of Salvatore Quasimodo, ed. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1960); This Strange Joy: Selected Poems of Sandro Penna, trans. W. S. Di Piero (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1982).

2. Salvatore Quasimodo, Tutte le poesie, ed. Gilberto Finzi (Milano: Mondadori, 1995) xxii: “Pur essendo antifascista, non prende parte attiva alla Resistenza. Tuttavia, nel ‘44, viene denunciato da una nota spia fascista.”

3. “ritrovata dignità umana” – Tutte le poesie, xxii.

Works Cited:

• Quasimodo, Salvatore. Tutte le Poesie. A cura di Gilberto Finzi. 1995. Milano: Mondadori, 1998.
• Ross, Jack. “Smithyman in Italian.” Landfall 197 (1999): 70-73.
• Smithyman, Kendrick. Auto/Biographies. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1992.
• Smithyman, Kendrick. [Unpublished]. Collected Poems IX: 1985-87.
• Smithyman, Kendrick. [Unpublished]. Versions from Italian (Quasimodo; Campana to Montale). (134 & 83 poems, respectively).

(25-26/9/02)

Glottis: New Writing 8 (2003): 91-96.

[1558 wds]


Glottis 8 (2003)


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Spin 45: Editorial (2003)

Jack Ross, ed.: Spin 45 (March 2003)

Editorial

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)

Over the past five years I’ve edited five issues of Spin, each one marking the New Year in a manner memorable to me, at least. This, however, will be the last (for the foreseeable future, at any rate).

It’s been a pure pleasure to do it, and I’m certainly not stepping down from the editorship of the March issue because I’m bored with the magazine. On the contrary, I’m more convinced than ever that it serves a real function in New Zealand poetry, allowing newcomers to appear side-by-side with established names, and offering a forum to both the experimental and the traditional.

Ever since Tony Chad announced his retirement as managing editor, however, it’s been increasingly apparent that we can’t continue on the present basis – more for practical and financial reasons than any others.

Owen Bullock, a consistent contributor over a long period, also active in the Poetry Society, has agreed to become our new managing editor. He’ll be editing one of the two yearly issues which will make up the enlarged, new look Spin. Kokako (formerly known as WinterSpin), the haiku / short poems issue, will continue to be edited by Bernard Gadd and Patricia Prime.


So much for business. Strange days we live in, strange days. I considered for a while calling this issue Welcome to the War. It seems to be on everyone’s mind at the moment. It’s curious to look at Alison Colling’s poem “He loves America,” and contributions from American friends such as Virgil Suárez and Philip Waterhouse, and to match them against Jessica Le Bas’s strange, haunting “Osama Bin Laden sleeps.”

While the storm rages and the state is threatened by shipwreck, let us lower the anchor of our peaceful studies into the ground of eternity.

So wrote the Astronomer Kepler in 1629, halfway through the Thirty Years War. Is that the point I wish to make? Is our art, the art of poetry, a quietist one: reminding people to take time out to smell the flowers while cordite fills the air? Or is it our job to get them to wake up and smell the coffee?

Ideology always lags behind practice, thank God. I don’t know if it’s better to be a propagandist or a “pure poet,” but it’s an interesting question to raise. I think it’s precisely the question that Jessica Le Bas’s poem is asking. It’s also the question posed by Bill Sewell’s last book, The Ballad of Fifty-One (reviewed in this issue). Ave atque vale – hail and farewell.

(Monday, 17th March 2003)

Spin 45 (2003): 3.

[426 wds]

Spin 45 (2003)


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dreu harrison: dreaming of flight (2003)

Jack Ross, ed.: Spin 45 (March 2003)

dreu harrison, dreaming of flight. Birkenhead, Auckland: Pohutukawa Press, 2002. 48pp. ISBN 0-473-09051-1.

Theresia Marshall of Pohutukawa Press

i remember the taste of peaches
but circles elude me [41]

I’m quoting from ‘flourish,’ a poem where Dreu Harrison speculates about Plato’s taste in breakfast utensils. There’s a point, then, to the contrast between the sensuous taste of peaches (“Do I dare to eat a peach?” [T. S. Eliot]) and the perfect Platonic circle, but it’s not an immediately obvious one. One gathers, too, that it’s to do with the love affair(s?) which preoccupy him through much of the book (“i want you here / for purely selfish reasons”). The direct flashes of experience one gets out of this emotional turmoil provide the strongest moments in the book: “tomorrow there will be / silence / minor apologies and / catholic guilt” (‘judgement day’ [14]). Too often, though, a taste for abstraction and offbeat endings throw away the advantages of this simplicity, this appeal to Harrison’s own feelings and sensations rather than a battery of references to Kepler, Aquinas, Laodicea, and other cosmo/theological footnotes. In its own right, Harrison’s verse is pared down and powerful. If he can only bring himself to abandon the crutch of allusiveness, his could be a talent to watch. The book has been beautifully designed by Theresia Marshall and her team at the Pohutukawa Press.

(18-20/3/03)

Spin 45 (2003): 58.

[224 wds]

Spin 45 (2003)


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Michal Ma’u: Taste of Fiji (2003)

Jack Ross, ed.: Spin 45 (March 2003)

Michal Ma’u, Taste of Fiji. New Zealand: Steele Roberts, 2002. 54pp. ISBN 1-877228-82-6.

Michal Ma’u: Taste of Fiji (2002)

… bottled squid
vibrations make them wriggle
Mr Choo adamant
as he rotates
definitely dead under lid [20]

This piece from ‘Shop shop at Mr Choo’s’ seems a fitting epigraph for Michal Ma’u’s collection of poems from Fiji. “Definitely dead under lid” – lists of fruits, of flowers – poems about gawping into the shops, the markets, the bures – look like a conventional travelogue, an outsider’s vision. But then one begins to look more carefully. Are these bones really dead, or are they moving? There are poems about marital infidelity (‘The Heat’ [35]), separation [8], suspicion (‘Frantic’ [16]); sixties key parties, drunken scenes, storms – even cannibals! The book’s sly, insinuating manner is best encapsulated by the glossary at the back. Running through the bland entries, one comes across “ceke = penis.” Where on earth did that come up? Leafing back through, one discovers, in the market scene on p.34: “prodded by large ceke / ignore with disdain” … I should hope so, too! Michal Ma’u has a definite gift for the arresting image, the offbeat anecdote. This sumptuously-produced book, lovingly illustrated with pen and ink sketches by Lynnette te Hira, is replete with hidden depths and subtleties.

(18-20/3/03)

Spin 45 (2003): 58-59.

[209 wds]

Spin 45 (2003)


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