Poeta (2020)

Johanna Emeney, ed.: Poetry NZ Yearbook 2020 (March 2020)

Reviews:

Cilla McQueen

Cilla McQueen. Poeta: selected and new poems. ISBN 978-1-98-853128-1. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2018. RRP $39.95. 296 pp.

Cilla McQueen: Poeta (2018)

Like Pat White’s Watching for the Wingbeat, Cilla McQueen’s Poeta is a kind of collected/selected poems, together with some new work. Like White’s book, McQueen’s spans almost 40 years of published poetry, and no doubt some years of practice before that.

She herself is clear on her intentions for the collection, specifying that:

These poems have been grouped . . . in rooms, where they have had a chance to converse, being related in my mind to one or another of my preoccupations as a poet. Arranged as a span rather than as a timeline, the sequence remains roughly chronological, with idiosyncratic exceptions.

One very useful convention she has adopted is the inclusion of ‘the date of first book publication or, where poems have not previously appeared in a book the date of composition’ at the end of each poem.

This is one of those brilliantly simple ideas which are so immensely helpful to scholars and common readers alike — a little like the device of including the date and age of the subject on each page of a biography — that it’s difficult to understand why everyone doesn’t do that.

The point about the rooms seems a useful one, too. When I think of McQueen’s poems, I think first of meeting her at her house in Bluff during a 2006 poetry symposium — mainly because I’d had to send down some books for the occasion and hers was the only fixed postal address the organisers could muster.

I remember the slightly bemused courtesy with which she accepted this commission and greeted this comparative stranger, and the amusement with which she regarded each new invasion of poets on their way up the hill to the marae: rooms, yes — beautifully composed and uncluttered rooms, with their harvest of paintings and books from her many years at the centre of so much of the creative life of the region she lives in.

I have to confess to having had some doubts about McQueen’s last substantive book, her poetic memoir In a Slant Light (2016). Its reticence puzzled me somewhat, as I said at the time. I’m glad to say that this is not the case with this wonderful new collection. There has never been any doubt that McQueen is supremely adept at the complex, many-layered lyric, and this is the best place to find the very best of them.

More to the point, however, the extracts from In a Slant Light included here seem to me to work very well as lyrics — or lyrical narrative excerpts, if you prefer. I guess I was too busy reading it as a memoir, and so failed to see that it was actually just an adjunct to this many-roomed mansion that she has been constructing so carefully over the years.

What are the particular highpoints, for me? Well, I’ll never stop loving ‘Homing in’ and ‘Timepiece,’ but then they can be found in anthologies — and even in the memoir itself. What was most exciting about reading through this new collection (and it really does make a difference that her publishers have given her a wonderfully resilient hardback to hold these nearly 300 pages of poems) were the unexpected gems, which I should have known already, but in many cases didn’t.

Poems such as ‘Kids on the Road’, for instance:

you know, I would like to kick
t.s. eliot in the head
because you shouldn’t have to pass
english exams to love poetry

I like particularly that conspiratorial ‘you know’ at the head of that passage. How many of us have felt similarly oppressed by some such GOM (Grand Old Man) or GOD (Grand Old Dame) of poetry? They may have been wild themselves once — perhaps are wild still — but not in the embalmed form with which we are forced to unwrap them from their mummy bandages in some dreary classroom.

The poem continues:

no more puzzles for clever sleuths
I’d just like to
smile at you broadly
and hand you the whole world
clean on a plate.

You’d have to be pretty jaundiced to resist the charm of that.

I did feel — at the time of reading her memoir — that there was a strong contrast between the seeming simplicity (and actual cunning) of this early lyric voice that might have been vitiated by the many, many poetic experiments — collaborations with artists, captions to photographs, travel poems — she’s conducted over the years.

When one reads such a late poem as ‘Epitaph’, however, such fears dissolve:

Alas shall I in time become
of all no more a part than stone
or blackbird drumming up a worm

And what can worm say in a poem
but dark loam and the sound of rain?

The breathless, run-on diction here puts one a little in mind of Stevie Smith, but a Stevie Smith far less assertive of her own idiosyncrasies. The substance of the poem recalls Wordsworth, I suppose, and (a little) John Clare.

But saying that says little about the poem itself. McQueen has learnt from her lifetime’s work to be supremely herself — reminiscent of other poets at times, as all great and consummate writers are — but instantly recognisable as having been inspired by things and experiences, not simple delving in books:

I remember the look
of the unreadable page

the difficult jumble

and then the page
became transparent

and then the page
ceased to exist:

at last I was riding this bicycle
all by myself.

It would be easy to illustrate — for any sceptics still left out there — the complexity and subtlety of McQueen’s thought, as embodied in these many, many glass cages of words — but, like her, I think it’s better to go on ‘stopping for shivers / woggly trees in puddles / . . . a coin on the road / a rusty key’.

This is a beautiful book by a wonderful poet.

Poetry NZ Yearbook 2020 Booklaunch (10 March, 2020)

(30-31/7/19)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2020. ISBN 978-0-9951229-3-2 (March 2020): 300-03.

[997 wds]


Poetry NZ Yearbook 2020


•

In a Slant Light (2017)

Jack Ross, ed.: Poetry NZ Yearbook 2017 (March 2017)

Reviews:

Cilla McQueen. In a Slant Light: A Poet’s Memoir. ISBN 978-1-877578-71-7. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2016. RRP $35. 135 pp.

Cilla McQueen: In a Slant Light (2016)

Which brings us to Cilla McQueen’s In a Slant Light: A Poet’s Memoir. The title is, I take it, a direct doff of the hat to Wordsworth. Both seem agreed on the existence of an entity called ‘a poet’, whose existence must somehow be accounted for, if not necessarily celebrated.

McQueen’s life has certainly been an interesting one. Readers fond of literary gossip might well pick up this book to find out about Ralph Hotere, to whom she was married in the 1970s and 1980s, or Hone Tuwhare, or James K. Baxter, or Ian Wedde, or any of the other poets and artists she’s known and spent time with.

For the most part they’ll be disappointed, though. Just as Wordsworth fails to fill in the salient details about his close friend Coleridge as a modern biographer might have done, while attempting to account for the growth of his own poetic consciousness, so McQueen gives the events of her life almost as notes to self: dated by year, and arranged in end-stopped verse paragraphs. This account of her first experience of love-making, for instance:

Separated from my girlfriend
I go with tall, brown-bearded Ross
To this tobacco picker’s hut:
Surrender at dawn.
We fall in love, both for the first time. (p. 57)

‘Surrender at dawn’: that’s certainly a salutary slap in the face to those expecting prurient details. But I think it’s not so much the sex as the people who intrigue us most. ‘Ross’ never really comes to life as a character, perhaps because he is one — an actual person with an important but mostly off-stage role in McQueen’s life.

From time to time the memoir expands to include one of her early poems. On page 111, for instance:

I write ‘Timepiece’. Mum suggests I send it to the Listener. They publish it; I’m shy to see my poem in print and visible to everyone.

‘Timepiece’ remains a marvellous poem. But I’m not sure I’ve learnt much more about it from re-encountering it here.

To be honest, In a Slant Light puzzles me a little. It seems at the same time so circumstantial and yet so diffuse. The author certainly records feelings of self-doubt, but no significant failures or downfalls are recorded. When poems are entered for competitions, they win; when prizes are awarded at school, they go to her (‘I leave school / elated, with awards: Shakespeare bust, Dux’, p. 57). Is this meant to sound satirical? It seems deadpan. Why, then, the urge to put it all on record?

I can’t help feeling that a prose memoir would have had to go deeper, to have made more of an effort to explore the complex penumbra of motives and feelings underlying these sunny uplands.

I certainly respect McQueen’s decision to skate over things which she wishes to keep for herself: but what is it, exactly, that she means to share with the reader? Any reader of my age will find many chimes and echoes from our own experience of a Kiwi childhood, but I can’t help feeling that isn’t quite what one might have expected from the author of that luminous early book Homing In. The individual lyrics included remain the strong highlights of McQueen’s latest book.

(27/8-5/9/16)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2017. ISBN 978-0-9941363-5-0 (March 2017): 298-99.

[539 wds]


Poetry NZ Yearbook 2017


•

Edwin’s Egg & Other Poetic Novellas (2014)

Jack Ross, ed.: Poetry NZ Yearbook 1 [Issue #49] (October 2014)

Books and Magazines in brief:

Cilla McQueen (in association with the Alexander Turnbull Library). Edwin’s Egg & Other Poetic Novellas. ISBN 978-1-877578-13-7. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2014.

Cilla McQueen: Edwin’s Egg & Other Poetic Novellas (2014)

These are some of the fruits of Cilla McQueen’s tenure as New Zealand Poet Laureate, a post she held from 2009-2011: “My two researchers at the National Library sent me ‘clouds’ of images in no particular order, from which it was my job to discover a possible relationship between any image and any part of the text.” The result is certainly a wonderful piece of bookmaking: beautifully presented in a sturdy slipcase, with each of the eight “poetic novellas” as a little A6 booklet. The contents seem rather reminiscent of early surrealist experiments such as Max Ernst’s Une Semaine de Bonté (1934) or some of Man Ray’s photo-collages from the 1920s. McQueen has been experimenting for a long time in the border areas between drawing and poetry, and her latest move into the “space between prose and poetry” seems, in retrospect, to have been only a matter of time. One can’t help feeling that this might herald some further adventures in cyberspace – possibly the incorporation of online animation techniques in future work along these lines?
 

(26-27/9/14)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 1 [Issue #49]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2014): 233.

[197 wds]


Poetry NZ Yearbook 1 (2014)


•

Notes on NZ Poetry: 8 (2012)

[Jacket 2]

State-of-the-Nation poems (3):
Cilla McQueen, “Living Here” (1982)

Cilla McQueen in Auckland (March 29, 2012)

Time for a change of gear, I think. Curnow’s and Baxter’s poems seem designed to wrestle with the big questions, to provoke that “You must change your life” epiphany Rilke got from his Archaic Torso of Apollo. There’s a sense of mission about both of them as writers. They knew that whatever they said would be pored over and attended to, which can lead to a certain attitudinizing – what Chekhov referred to as living “on stilts.”

Not so our next poet. Chekhov said of his new type of theatre: “Let everything on the stage be just as complicated and at the same time just as simple as in life.” Cilla McQueen’s first book Homing In (1982) displayed the new sensibility beginning to appear in New Zealand poetry.

On the one hand, there’s clearly the influence of the women’s movement. Poems such as “Timepiece” show an intense consciousness of the value of the domestic and local, hitherto somewhat repressed in our writing (with the exception of Janet Frame’s fiction and the poems of Mary Stanley and other women poets, or – especially – short story writers).

On the other hand, there’s the fact of distance. Though her family moved to New Zealand when she was four years old, Cilla McQueen was born in Birmingham, which – rather bizarrely – still qualifies her as something of an outsider to local notions of nationality. The fact that she has mostly made her home in Dunedin (and, latterly, Bluff), also gives her a distinctly southern perspective on the idea of what it means to be “living here.” Homing In, then, is anything but a throwaway title:

Well you have to remember this place
is just one big city with 3 million people with
a little flock of sheep each so we’re all sort of
shepherds

How can I convey just how provocative an opening that is to Kiwi sensibilities? Sheep, for God’s sake! If you only knew how sick we are of hearing how many sheep there are in New Zealand, how disproportionate the ratio of sheep to people, etc. Until the Lord of the Rings came along, it was pretty much the only thing anyone could find to say about our strange little country.

That “well”, to start off with, is so deliberately conversational and informal, so clearly not a manifesto designed to be delivered “on stilts”. The use of the second person (“you have to remember”), too, couches all of what’s to come in the form of instructions to an out-of-towner, an outsider. That also qualifies as a direct affront to our taboos. Like most provincial societies, we’re thin-skinned and sensitive to criticism. What we particularly hate, though, is any kind of internal criticism directed towards the outside world – “keep it in the family” is practically our national motto.

we all know we’ll probably
be safe when the Indians finally come
down from the hills(comfortable to live
in the Safest Place in the World)
sheep being
very thick and made of wool and leather
being a very effective shield as ancient
soldiers would agree.

If you want to be cutesy about the sheep, that’s fine. We can probably tolerate that, under the circumstances. That next bit is getting a bit too close to the bone, though. “When the Indians finally come / down from the hills.” What is this, Fort Apache?

No family likes to wash its dirty linen in public, and Cilla McQueen’s poem shows, here, a disposition to do precisely that. The 1970s were a rather bitter time of awakening for New Zealand (as no doubt they were for the rest of the world). The “Angel in the House” was demanding vociferously to be taken seriously outside as well as inside the home – and the myth of New Zealand’s harmonious race relations was finally being laid to rest.

Our particular version of “Indians” – the Maoris – had indeed been dispossessed, and the pretence that sufficient restitution had already been made for the ills of the past, and that “colour-blindness” was the distinguishing characteristic of our society, was an increasingly untenable position. Cilla McQueen’s first husband, Ralph Hotere, probably the most distinguished Maori artist of his generation, collaborated with her on a number of highly politicized works at this stage of her career, so the sting in that crack about “the Safest Place in the World” is certainly intended to draw blood.

so after all we are lucky to have these
sheep in abundancethey might
have been hedgehogs -
Then we’d all be
used to hedgehogs and clothed in prickles
rather than fluff
and the little sheep would
come out sometimes at night under the moon
and we’d leave them saucers of milk
and feel sad
seeing them squashed on the road

There’s a certain air of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle about this part of the poem – so what if all those sheep had been hedgehogs? It’s not really quite as frivolous as it seems, though, when you conflate it with the Indians waiting in the hills. They’ve got to come down sometime, and when they do it won’t be to say hello …

Well anyway here we are with all this
cushioning in the biggest city in the world
its suburbs strung out in a long line
and the civic centre at the bottom of
Cook Straitsome of them Hill Suburbs
and some Flat Suburbs and some more prosperous
than others

That’s pretty much a reprise of Curnow’s critique of our blinkered lack of vision, supplemented by Baxter’s raw indignation at the longer-term effects of “Pig Island” (his name for NZ) complacency.

each in his woolly protection
so sometimes it’s difficult to see out
the eyeslet alone call to each other
which is the reason for the loneliness some
of us feel

More of us than one might expect, perhaps, feel this loneliness; but one does have to acknowledge the inhibition against simply calling out to each other – the fear of being conspicuous, of standing out in any way from the herd. The tall poppy syndrome, we call it – after that Ancient Greek dictator who walked through a field of flowers lopping off all the tallest stems, when asked to give a lesson on statecraft.

McQueen’s poem concludes with some remarks on “our particular relations / with the landscape,” which we:

lovelike an
old familiar lover who fits us
curve to curveand hate because it
knows us and knows our weakness

Hers is a poem which is unafraid to probe those weaknesses, identify those no-go areas. It treads on toes because the atmosphere here, buy the end of the 70s, had got so claustrophobic that one virtually had to provoke in order to be heard.

“Living Here,” then, is a “state-of-the-nation” poem insofar as it very clearly and deliberately sets out to provide a barometer reading on local conditions for an imagined audience of onlookers (“you have to remember”). In tone, it might seem a million miles away from the high vatic of James K. Baxter, or the theophanic of Allen Curnow. It’s nevertheless interesting to see how closely McQueen echoes the endings of both the earlier poems.

Curnow finishes on the image of a “gannet impacting” which explodes “a dozen diverse dullnesses / Like a burst of accurate fire” – a somewhat militaristic analogy for the “psychic cleansing” he requires of us.

Baxter moves away from the violence of that conclusion to the more ecumenical concept of a place, the meeting house, so holy that it can literally bring the dead back to life:

When they brought the dead child into the meeting house

She opened her eyes and smiled.

This rather sentimental notion of the indigenous culture as potential saviour of its own colonisers is not so much contradicted as nuanced by McQueen, whose own poem looks finally for comfort to:

any wrist-brush
cut of mind or touch of music,
lightning in the intimate weather of the soul.

So, while she too ends on an unequivocal “flash, a trumpet-crash” (as G. M. Hopkins put it), this time the image has been scaled down to inner weather – no more firing squads or Pentecostal Raptures.

(17/5/12)

Jacket2: Commentaries: 8 - State-of-the-Nation poems (3): Cilla McQueen
[Available at: https://jacket2.org/commentary/state-nation-poems-3]

[1373 wds]


[Jack Ross: Notes on NZ Poetry (2012)]


•

Questions of Structure (2011)

Landfall 221 (2011)


Questions of Structure

David Eggleton, Time of the Icebergs. ISBN 978-1-877578-02-1. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2010. 88 pp. RRP $NZ25.

McQueen, Cilla. The Radio Room. ISBN 978-1-877578-03-8. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2010. 77 pp. RRP $NZ30.

Newton, John. Lives of the Poets. ISBN 978-0-864736-28-4. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2010. 86 pp. RRP $NZ25.

John Newton: Lives of the Poets (2010)

You could hardly find three more different poets – or three more diverse books of poems. As I kept on reading them, though, I started to wonder about the construction of each book. They are so very distinct, and yet you can see in each case how much time and thought has gone into questions of structure, the ones that tend to be ignored when a reviewer just pulls out individual pieces for discussion.

Take John Newton’s Lives of the Poets. We begin with the nostalgic – and, presumably, semi-autobiographical – verse narrative which gives its name to the book as a whole. Then there’s a section of longish lyrics which seem to constitute a bridge between his first book, Tales from the Angler’s Eldorado (1985), and this one (“Trout-fishing and Sport in Maoriland”, “Gothic, “Black Stump” are a few of the giveaway titles here). Then there’s a section of more recent poems (exactly six of them, matching the six in section two). Then there’s a final section of unrhymed sonnets, “Stations”, hymning various culture heroes of the not-too-distant past (Anna Akhmatova, Malcolm Lowry, Sylvia Plath) in a manner reminiscent of Robert Lowell’s later, post-Notebook poems. There are, predictably, fourteen of these fourteen-line poems, echoing the fourteen Stations of the Cross.

It’s hard to say how tongue-in-cheek this somewhat excessive scaffolding is. Clearly Newton has been inspired by Lowell in more than just the form of his sonnets. The last poem here references “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow” from Life Studies (1959). Is it a coincidence that Lowell’s book – similarly self-conscious in structure – predates Newton’s by almost exactly fifty years? If the latter’s great poetic dilemma (as he remarks in the blurb) is the fact that “the Romantic inheritance may be poison, but it’s all we have”, then what better guide to “fossicking beyond the high-tide mark of expressivism” than Lowell and his friends, the somewhat motley crew assembled along Newton’s own Via Dolorosa?

I guess it’s obvious how pleasing I find this kind of thing: the twenty poems in Newton’s verse novella echo the 14 + 6 + 6 poems of the rest of the book, adding up to 46 (4 + 6 = 10 / 1 + 0 = 1), each of the four parts a skewed reflection of one of the others. The arrangement of Cilla McQueen’s new book could hardly resemble it less. The Radio Room includes 35 poems and 11 drawings and designs. There are some recurrent patterns within it: 4 “Elements” poems, various reminiscences for the poet’s friends Joanna Paul and Hone Tuwhare. There are also a number of blank pages which serve to punctuate the book. I count seven of these, but I’m not really certain how they operate as divisions, if they are divisions at all: more like pauses, perhaps.

Cilla McQueen: The Radio Room (2010)

If Newton’s book aspires to the solidity of monumental architecture, McQueen’s might be seen as a verbal labyrinth. We begin with her evocation of a vanished journal:

Damp sea-fog lay like a sheep on my journal
outside all night on the table,
turned radiant blue ink to turquoise wash
through which the permanent horizons stared

(“About the Fog”)

This is also what we return to at the end of the book:

The pen was missing too –
they’ll be together somewhere in the house or outside
on the table, last night stargazing, too cold, morning fog, O my
dear written pages washed-out turquoise mush –

Peel apart damp translucent skins fragile very old person
…
vanished intimacies

(“Wash”)

It’s clear enough that this image of the washed-out pages, “Of vanished thoughts here / and there word-slivers, blots in the gutter, bled edges; / some legible sentences in ballpoint”, is a way of seeing her own book, woven as it is out of landscape notes, stray memories, laments for the fallen:

I wanted to write about the Kotuku,
lost in the strait four years ago.
Every year at mutton-bird time
I remember the texture of my friend’s long hair.

That’s not all there is to this journal, though. “About the Fog” is not the first poem in the book, nor is “Wash” the last. In the former, the fog is described as lying “like a sheep on my journal”. The book actually begins with a poem called “A Ghostly Beast” (“We scared ourselves white in the bothy”), then moves on to a short piece called “Our Cow”. “Like a sheep” therefore means quite a bit more than it might seem to, in this larger context.

The image might also lead us outside the compass of the book itself, to her celebrated poem “Living Here” (from Homing In, 1982):

Well you have to remember this place
is just one big city with 3 million people with
a little flock of sheep each so we’re all sort of
shepherds

This, I think, shows us just how she intends to gesture to the whole body of her past work, with its constant themes of ecology, indigeneity (variously defined), the interface between human and environment. Cilla McQueen, like John Newton, has large issues to address, and they’re addressed as much by the studiedly-casual, allusive form of her book as by the individual poems and sketches it contains.

David Eggleton: Time of the Icebergs (2010)

What about David Eggleton? Well, at first sight one might be forgiven for thinking that Time of the Icebergs had no clear structure at all. It functions as a series of discrete lyrical pieces, from varying standpoints and geographical locations (Devonport and Dunedin are two he mentions specifically in his notes – Sydney and Suva figure also, though). It is, after all, as a coiner of strange metaphors and arresting phrases that Eggleton is most famed. Who else could have come up with “Glossolalia of the Undie 500 clown cars” or “solitude of rain gangs up on all / gathered at Queen Tuatara’s funeral”?

This automatically classic quality of so many of his lines can have the effect of masking the larger concerns within his work. Just as in performance it takes Eggleton some time to warm up into that high-pitched neighing note which only he can reach, so his book revs faster and faster as it goes along. That apocalyptic sci-fi title, Time of the Icebergs, seems the clearest clue to what he has in mind. Eggleton’s book may be, indeed, be the most didactic and message-driven of the three. Make no mistake, Eggleton is no gentle celebrant of Kiwiana, no bland bush-ballad bard from beyond the black stump. These are lines meant to lash and hurt:

homeless in a Middle Earth
being prepared for strip-mines by Orcs.

His true Penelope is more Swift than Flaubert – savage indignation at the state of the planet lacerating his breast as he’s forced to watch “fascist playthings / sculpt muscles at Les Mills to a triumph / of the will”.

Reading these three books in terms of their interior architecture has been extremely revealing to me. What these poets have in common turns out to be more striking than what divides them: a careful sense of craft, honed over years and through constant practice; a fierce determination to have their say, to ram home their message subliminally as well as directly. What each of them has to say to us (these books imply) does matter, it really is important. We may not have any more time to waste.

(20-21/2/11)

Landfall 221 - Outside In (2011): 184-87.

[1287 wds]


Landfall 221 (2011)


•

Hotere: Out the Black Window (1998)

Pander 5 (Spring 1998)

Hotere: Out the Black Window. Ralph Hotere’s Work with New Zealand Poets, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki – a City Gallery, Wellington Touring Exhibition (July 4th to September 6th, 1998).

Greogry O'Brien: Hotere: Out the Black Window (1998)

Rise up my love, my fair one, and come away.
For, lo, the winter is past,
The rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth;
The time of the singing of birds is come,
And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land

The Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s. This passage (chapter 2, verses 10-12) is one of the most beautiful aubades, dawn-songs, ever written – who knows when, or by whom? Ralph Hotere has included some of the words on a vast dark canvas in one of the far rooms of his travelling exhibition Out the Black Window. It seems as good a test case as any.

Test case for what? Well, at the poetry reading held at the Auckland Art Gallery on Saturday, August 1st, there seemed to be a consensus that we – audience and poets – liked the paintings, but didn’t have much to say beyond that bare fact. Ian Wedde read out his superb “Pathway to the Sea,” and talked about cooking feeds of mussels on the beach. Hotere has a dark sense of humour, he told us, and a way with silence.

Cilla McQueen, who was married to the painter for twelve years (until 1986), read a number of poems, including the text she compiled from Gulf War commentaries in Time and Newsweek for use in his Song of Solomon (1991):

sharpbreak revenge warpath gas bodybag bodybag loopgas blitz pin
cluster destroy tactical moth atomicflame mother of germbattles shift

the flowers appear on the earth

There are fourteen couplets, for the fourteen stations of the cross, each followed by a fragment from the original Song. What McQueen referred to as this “conscious un-language” of war was, she said, designed to contrast with its lyric beauty.

I wondered how much of the conception of the painting was hers, and how much his. The answer was almost entirely his – “cross-pollination, not collaboration.” She could not tell me where the Arabic text just visible at the bottom of the picture came from. (My Arabic teacher, Mr. Alan Dabaliz, tells me that it translates roughly as “Libyans Unite!” Copied, perhaps, from some news bulletin?)

Gregory O’Brien’s exhibition catalogue claims that the “oily black inks” of the painting “evoke the oil slicks” of burning Kuwait, the “trails of dots … become tracer fire in the night sky,” and the “horizontal panels of white and black denote the desert landscape.” Perhaps so.

My problem is with this easy sense of an equation. Song of Solomon = beauty; Time Magazine = warspeak. The black is the oil; the fourteen numbers Christ’s passion; the white is the desert. I have no objections to didacticism in itself, but I want to know if what I’m looking at is an anti-war poster, or a work of lasting complexity. It’s a question of genre. The Gulf War’s been over for seven years now. Is Hotere’s work, then, so time-bound?

The poets are little help here. They (naturally enough) trust Hotere to handle the visual side, while he trusts them to handle the verbal. Does the juxtaposition of these two media: an already-written poem by Bill Manhire, or Cilla McQueen, or Hone Tuwhare, or Ian Wedde, with the unpainterly surfaces of Hotere’s scraps of metal, or canvas, or paper, work as the catalyst for an artistic fusion reaction? Or are we being sentimental to think so?

Nigra sum, sed formosa, filiae Ierusalem
I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem …
Look not upon me, because I am black,
Because the sun hath looked upon me:

The original Song of Solomon is not really so simple a work as analyses of the painting would make it appear. It is, it’s true, a marriage song, conveyed through a series of voices: The “dark but comely” Shulamite, her Beloved, the Choruses of her brothers and the daughters of Jerusalem. It’s a love poem, but it’s also about pain and misunderstanding. The Shulamite wanders through the city at night till “The watchmen … found me, they smote me, they wounded me; the keepers of the walls took away my veil from me.”

I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem,
If ye find my beloved, that ye tell him,
That I am sick of love …

The second time I visited the exhibition there were groups of sixth and seventh form girls seated in front of the paintings, scribbling industriously in their bursary notebooks – a frame, a few lines, some words of text: “O Africa,” “Rain,” “Wulf.”

What do the words mean to them? Anything? Or do they take them on trust, like the rest of our incomprehensible charades of endlessly-deferred meaning? I fear I may be looking for a sense of closure unattainable in art or life, but I find it hard to assent to smug readings of these paintings of Hotere’s as mere proof of his being on the “right” side in a series of recent controversies. Song of Solomon may have been inspired by the Gulf War, but it seems to me as much about the complexities of love between two people as the jagged confrontation of two cultures: “Jealousy is as cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame.”

The last part of this strangest, most modern of poems assures us that:

Many waters cannot quench love,
Neither can the floods drown it

But what does it mean by that bitter coda: “If a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned”? That there are limits even to love?

If the poem matches the painting in complexity of levels, does that justify both? Is the fact that both are about light and dark, love and betrayal some kind of criterion of merit? – Libyans Unite! – Perhaps so. Perhaps that’s as close as I’ll get to an answer. It is, as I say, a kind of test case.

I’m going to be taking a lot more things on trust from now on.

(7/98)

Pander 5 (1998): 32-33.

[1037 wds]


Pander 5 (1998)


•