Cilla McQueen. Poeta: selected and new poems. ISBN 978-1-98-853128-1. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2018. RRP $39.95. 296 pp.
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 kickI 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.
t.s. eliot in the head
because you shouldn’t have to pass
english exams to love poetry
The poem continues:
no more puzzles for clever sleuthsYou’d have to be pretty jaundiced to resist the charm of that.
I’d just like to
smile at you broadly
and hand you the whole world
clean on a plate.
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 becomeThe 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.
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?
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 lookIt 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’.
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.
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
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