About Now (2025)

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

Reviews:

Richard Reeve

Richard Reeve. About Now. ISBN 978-0-473-69577-4. Ōtepoti Dunedin: Maungatua Press, 2024. x + 100 pp. RRP $NZ25. 110 pp.

Richard Reeve: About Now (2024)

This is a lovely book of poems. I realise that that must seem an odd choice of adjectives to anyone familiar with Richard Reeve’s oeuvre to date. And I certainly don’t mean to imply that there’s any diminution of force or intellectual range in the work collected here.

I do, however, feel that there’s a more complete synthesis of matter and manner now. At times, in the past, I felt that the two could be at war – that Reeve’s taste for a somewhat convoluted syntax and his recondite vocabulary concealed more than it revealed of his fiercely held convictions: personal, political, environmental. It was as if one had to fight through a thicket of wordiness to reach the dark matter at the heart of his poems.

Those passions have not died down in this new book – on the contrary, in fact. Nor am I heralding a new simplicity of manner. No, these are recognisably and unmistakably Richard Reeve poems. Rather, it’s as if these two aspects of form and content have grown into each other, can no longer be separated.

Let me give you some examples of what I mean.

Here, from the very first poem in the book, “Recycled Rimu,” is a description of Reeve’s own “Cave of Making,” the study where (presumably) most of these poems were written – or at least worked on:

Recycled rimu, logged from Tautuku or the Longwoods,
on the ceiling of my study flares with enigmatic darkness,
the rage and serenity of the grain hinting at a story

of the first wood, centuries of bird song and weather,
branches rubbing up against each other in a gale,
the company of fungi, the ocean beyond

roaring in lines that emanate from the heartwood.

That’s a beautifully clear description, but it’s also redolent of his larger themes, the oneness of human and nature, the kinship of animate and inanimate. “The company of fungi” is certainly an eloquent phrase, but there’s nothing virtuosic or show-off about it. It’s in a perfectly natural tone of voice.

The poem’s exposition of the onward journey of these planks of wood concludes with its eventual arrival “in an ex-foundry / in Watts Road”:

… the sawn, painted, cracked bones
of old forest gathered in piles on the mezzanine,
1$ per lineal metre, give-or-take. So of course we took,

planed down lengths to uncover the weather front
that now scowls at me from above my writing desk.
Keepsake of so much lost or fallen. A starting point.

As well as being a starting point for this poem, this recycled wood is also a starting point for Reeve’s book as a whole. About Now is also as clear a title as one could desire: a charting of the world he (and, by implication, we) inhabit now. But it also serves as the keepsake “of so much lost or fallen.”

It’s a long book: 100-odd pages – counting prelims, including a resonant epigraph from The Epic of Gilgamesh – of at times quite packed material. I can’t really hope to do it justice here, so I thought I might talk instead about just one of Reeve’s sequences, the one at the end of the collection: “And the Pukeko Shall Rule: Rain Poems.”

It's an account of a drive “back from Invercargill”, then “south again to Gore”, and “then home to Dunedin.” This precision of place-names and road-details is essential to the meditative effect I imagine he’s aiming at – that atmosphere of enforced contemplation inseparable from all long-distance driving.

To live through the poem, be on the other side of it. Coming back
from Invercargill, turning east from Mataura to Clinton, the sky

flood-dark to the north, drove into a first sheet of rain, stopped
at Clinton for a pie as the rain rang down on the asphalt; went on

to Balclutha and the rampant Clutha, tree-tangled, brown,
its effluent-gilded floodwaters underneath the bridge

purging to the coast

To live through the poem. Yes, but how? The narrator attends a funeral en route: I don’t know whose, but it’s clear that to get to the heart of this event he has to see and record it from many angles:

Reaching for writing, I inhabit the sound of the rain,
which is the space of thought, ever almost language

yet defying articulation, something we cannot quite say

This attempt to communicate, somehow, the nature, the wholeness of experience invites this analogy with the “enclave of rain, unattainable though encapsulated / in the universe of my apprehension”.

And then there are those pūkeko!

Where is the pukeko? You know where. Inveterate beak,
incomprehensible to others the runes it scrapes, clacks

against the bitumen, testing this unyielding frontier

Yes, we all know where. Pūkeko lie in little heaps by the side of so many roads, unable to reconcile the careful, marshland groping for solidity of their big hooked feet with the reality of modern traffic.

Pukeko at the verge researching the ambit of operations

knows her field, the fact of high water under the willows,
annihilation to come, delivery on the ransacking tide.

What holds us up, in our monstrous cars and trucks, may be the only thing that can save her.

I hope these quotes, and my attempts to unpack them, make my reasons for loving this new book of Richard’s a little clearer. The careful way he’s woven his two metaphors of rain and pūkeko into the fabric of this sequence is both clever and – crystal clear.

This is a poetry which can be enjoyed on myriad levels: the pleasure of seeing the quidditas of place so lovingly recorded and embraced, the subtlety and interest of a train of thought carried to unexpected ends, and – finally – the sense of a writer inhabiting his here and now with such care and respect.

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(13-21/9/24)

Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2025: breath. ISBN 978-1-99-101697-3 (March 2025): 277-80.

[983 wds]

Academy of New Zealand Literature: Richard Reeve


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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.

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(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


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