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)


•

Shebang: Collected Poems 1980-2000 (2001)

Helen Rickerby, ed.: JAAM 16 (November 2001)

David Howard, Shebang: Collected Poems 1980-2000, images by Jason Greig (Wellington: Steele Roberts, 2000) 167 pp. RRP $24.95.

David Howard: Shebang (2001)

David told me he designed the cover himself, so it seems permissible to interrogate it as a first way into the book. The basic image shows a man with outstretched arms coming through a door [Jason Greig’s ‘My soul from out that shadow’ (black & white, 1982)]. It’s framed by a bold red line, and further surrounded by a thicket of red lettering. The man’s face is not clearly visible. He has long hair and is wearing a dark jacket, but his head looks more like the muzzle of a lion – the same high cheekbones and angular, black-framed eyes. Interestingly, despite the drawing’s title, the figure is coming in from the light. He casts a long distorted shadow in front of him, and the angled pencil lines shading the room he’s entering all converge on the farthest corner. Our vantage point is low and to one side.

The blurb on the back informs us, along with laudatory quotes from various illustrious contemporaries (Eggleton, Smithyman, Norcliffe, Kassabova) that “David works outside the literary arena as Tour Supervisor (SFX) for international performers such as Metallica and Janet Jackson,” and this might give us another clue how to take this cover. It is, in fact, a rock star image – more Nick Cave than Janet Jackson, admittedly: backlit like Bowie in his “Heroes” video – but still an image of throwing oneself open for scrutiny, accepting this invitation to perform.

The analogy breaks down if we try to read David’s poems as song lyrics. They are far darker and more complex than that. But there’s nothing relaxed about them – never a moment when the writer isn’t alert, ears cocked, at attention. Even the “Snatches of Old Tunes” from his first volume show an intense, almost fanatical control of his effects (FX?):

The silver birch’s delicate
musculature is miraculous:
a soldier’s frame
under the leaves’ fatigues.

Note that inverted consonance in “musculature” and “miraculous” in the second line. There’s potentially too much echo there, if it weren’t for the clean, precise, end-stopped words which make up the rest of the stanza.

What are some other characteristics of this book, In the First Place (1991)? There’s an intense melancholy, a sense almost of the necessity for depression:

I’ve always lived in autumn;
received orders to fall
back to earth after building
castles in the air.

Quite so marked an insistence on disillusionment is something one associates with adolescence, I suppose – but then that’s probably when the lyric impulse is at its strongest, too. “The Last Word” takes an ironic pleasure (I presume) in parodying this excess – “Sludge undertakes [My daughter’s] footsteps / to prove every pleasure illusory”:

I whisper to her:
‘Your mother’s had a stroke. …’

In any case, there’s nothing comforting about this voice. The numerous love affairs all end in disappointment (“You were wonderful / as the novel / I could never be / the hero of”), lovers are fickle, children doomed. Of course, I should add that the young David Howard already displays a considerable talent for ventriloquism. The poem I quote from above, “Saltarello,” is adapted from the Italian of Guido Gozzano, and there are others “after” Vicente Aleixandre, Manuel Bandeira, Jorge de Lima, Stefan George, and Pedro Salinas – not to mention verses inspired by Fernando Pessoa, Erik Satie, Vincent van Gogh (one of a positive raft of painters) and a solitary local (albeit internationalist) poet: Michael Harlow.

I haven’t quite finished with that cover yet, though. Shebang – what sort of a title is that? In one sense it’s obvious enough: “the whole shebang” – the comprehensiveness we have every right to expect of a collected poems (as opposed to any selection, however astute: they’re almost guaranteed to leave out one or two favourites). Even before Ricky Martin’s tunelessly intense “She bangs,” however, we might still have been aware of other levels of meaning: “She” sounds a little like She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, the heroine of Rider Haggard’s archetypal adventure story – even, perhaps, “Sheba”: nigra sed formosa, worthy consort for King Solomon. “Bang” is simpler – a reference to David’s profession as pyrotechnician (I recall going to see a film called Hanabi with him on one occasion simply because the title translates as “Fireworks”). The other, Ricky Martin, meaning seems clearest in the poem “White Boy Meets the Cheetah,” from Holding Company (1995):

… I lie
in the ditch of our wedding vows
beating my meat

That poem concludes: “the cheetah is coming for me / this love is for real / this love is mortal” which perhaps suggests another interpretation for that threatening big-cat face on the cover. Love does seem to be a mortal disease in David Howard’s poetic universe.

I guess, though, the section of the book we should examine with most attention is the last one, Touch & Go (“light blue touch paper and retire swiftly”). These are the poems we haven’t seen before, and here we begin to see another dimension to this poet of doomed souls set against picture-perfect landscapes, this seeker of the mot juste in the cannon’s mouth. Perhaps it shows up best in the poem “Talking Sideways”:

In the drizzle my boy
cartwheels. With each turn different
droplets reflect the constant
sun. Like him I’m humming
to complete the moment that leaves me …

This is a new voice, I feel – beauty that serves a purpose: love for the moment through the actions of another. It’s focused here on David’s son Luc.

Some times we cuddle in a shop front
sideways so others can
pass by the ones we want to look at
us. Our sentences run together

get messed up but
who cares?

Who cares indeed? The unguardedness of this cuddling in shop doorways seems a million miles from the “poetry as the figurehead on a hulk” of “The Last Word.” Even the poem “For Luc” at the end of In the First Place cast him as the small boy buried in the foundations of a building. “You want to be taken … / seriously? Then write inscriptions on gravestones” is the mature Howard’s response to that (in the dedication to this new section).

Cartwheels are the best
defence against death
reckons my boy: you move
too fast for that drama queen
whose fingers snap at road statistics. …

They’re the best defence, also, against “the boy’s mother,” whose “Holden hung an endless left to my echo” till “I got real / hopeful. So did my boy.”

This new space of love and companionship is the reverse, mind you, of sentimental schmaltz – it’s the place you might arrive at if you go through enough pain and disappointment:

This space has a foreign name
neither my boy nor I can pronounce
on a signpost that points at an empty field.

Are there any other directions on how to find it?

Here we are in so far as we appear
according to my boy, although
neither of us is sure
where that leaves us we just feel

left.

That “left” sounds final, valedictory – but maybe, in the end, not such a bad thing. His poetic journey has left David Howard a long way from where he started: a place where trust can temper virtuosity, where effects don’t always deceive, and love may at last be “for real.”

(8/8/01)

JAAM 16 (2001): 171-75.

[1226 wds]


JAAM 16 (2001)


•

Murray Edmond & Sue Fitchett (2000)

Anna Jackson, ed.: JAAM 14 (November 2000)

Murray Edmond. Laminations. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2000; Sue Fitchett & Jane Zusters. Charts & Soundings: some small navigation aids. New Zealand: Spiral, 1999.

Sue Fitchett & Jane Zusters: Charts & Soundings (1999)

Reading these two books together is fascinating. What the one lacks, the other seems to make up for. That’s more of a paradox than might appear, I hasten to add. Murray Edmond’s Laminations is, after all, a dazzling affair. There’s an immense amount to learn from his use of language, and ideas, and rhythm, and time, and all those other things that poets concern themselves – and us – with. Sue Fitchett’s and Janes Zusters’ Charts & Soundings has simpler virtues. Its virtue is its simplicity, in fact. It’s a poetry of place, and love, and location (and no, I don’t mean the same thing by “place” and “location” …)

So what do the two books lack? I’d like to get any carping out of the way as quickly as possible, so let me illustrate by examining Edmond’s poem “Can That Mango”:

What do you require to renovate such a consummate liar?

A light foot, a stolen line, a competent singer,
and some place to sing withal

What’s that he says?

Kiss and ride, kiss and ride.

Where to?

Man, can that man go!

This is the seventh and final section of a poem which is, to put it mildly, a little difficult to fathom. There appears to be a dialogue going on in the first part:

‘The fall of a sparrow, the flight of a mango, each takes place
beneath the angel wings of our providence –’

‘I prefer the formal approach:
first write your title and your epigraph, then add the poem –’

There are indeed two epigraphs: one about lyre birds (“Not content with his own voice, the lyre bird soon launches into mimicry”), the other about liars (“I am a derivative poet” – Robert Duncan). Turning to the notes at the back for guidance – a fairly necessary procedure in reading Murray Edmond – we find the following deadpan explanation:

Two angels discuss a man and get him confused with a lyre bird.

Clear as mud. Of course, rereading the poem with this information in mind, one understands far better its punning inventiveness: “consummate liar”/ lyre; “can that man go!”/”the flight of a mango”/”Can that Mango”. One also gets some inkling of a possible subject: man’s mimicry – through language/plumage – of meaning, the bright squawk which conceals his lack of substance. “Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel / Ordnungen ?” [Who, if I shouted, would hear me among the angelic orders?]

Citing Rilke’s Duino Elegies – locus classicus for angel references – sounds warning bells, however. Is Edmond’s poem anything more than clever? I suppose what enables Rilke to get away with it is his compassion for the life and world around him: he invokes the angels; he doesn’t (and can’t) speak for them. Does Murray believe in angels? The colossal naïve effrontery of the question perhaps reveals to us a certain simplicity which has been banished from his poem. I don’t feel edified or harrowed by “Can that Mango,” though I’m certainly impressed by it. It’s a poem of dazzling surfaces, exclusionary angles (pun intended).

The book is, after all, called Laminations, and though it begins and ends with quotations from the Biblical Lamentations, there’s a sense in which it won’t surrender to raw feeling – it is (much of the time) plastic-coated, slick, slippery, hermetic, impenetrable …

What of Charts & Soundings, then? This sumptuously produced book of poems (by Sue Fitchett) and photographs (by Jane Zusters) has a charm which doesn’t have to work so hard to succeed. Zusters’ photographs of rooms, and houses, and faces, and women kissing each other or floating Ophelia-like in pools or rivers don’t need much commentary, and what editorialising there is – faces projected on big soulless buildings, etc. – is largely supererogatory. Similarly, Fitchett’s short poems of place – “Tiritiri Matangi,” for instance – give a precise sense not just of her own island but of the tides of life in general:

each dusk
as we draw curtains
come in cold
unbalanced by
winter’s dark ferry

But – “Everybody’s got a great big but,” as Pee-Wee Herman once observed – just over the page from “Tiritiri” we have the poem, “Mapping the Waitemata …” In the progression of de-Frenchification of island names from Noisettes to Noisies to Noises, Fitchett sees:

MururoaM ruroaMoruroahere’s hoping

Sermonising in verse is generally a mistake, I think, particularly if it concerns someone else’s experience rather than one’s own. Poetically, it tempts one to recycle shop-worn clichés rather than “making it new” (to recycle a shop-worn cliché). I’ve got nothing against engaged poetry as such, but you need at least an admixture of Swiftian passionate indignation to carry it off. “No Ordinary Sun” takes the subject of nuclear devastation seriously enough to succeed, but I don’t believe much is added by this kind of Masonic handshake of a poem (Are you right on? Do you have the right views about …? In other words, are you one of us?). There’s a bit too much of that in here: ritual invocations of Rwanda, Auschwitz … remote sites of suffering which should transcend casual mention.

In short, I’m fascinated by the glimpses of Waiheke island life, by the “queer face[s]” we’re shown, by the loving care that’s gone into making this volume so lively to read and leaf through. It’s a very accessible book, a glittering bauble which demands to be picked up. There is, however, a certain straining for effect at times which seems unnecessary. Fitchett’s poems (“New Angles”, “the thin men”) sprawl across immense white spaces to make very simple points. Zuster’s photographs juxtapose bodies and cityscapes to little discernible effect. Pictures like the cover photo (Amanda Rees – Wellington, 1971), and poems like “The Spirit of the Place” or “1981” make up for a lot, though. It would be pointless to claim it as a flawless book, but it’s undoubtedly a living one. Both artists have an engaging openness about where they’re coming from: psychic space and physical location.

The dominant feeling in Laminations is, by contrast, nostalgia. At its best, in poems like the “Rant for Mickey Joe” which opens the book, or the “Starfish Streets” which closes it, Edmond achieves a remarkable fusion between history, living experience, and its written overlay.

The first pleased me particularly for extra-textual reasons. To parody the wicked excesses of modern poetry, my father once composed a short verse which read:

A seagull
flies over the Savage Memorial.

It was therefore with a certain thrill of recognition that I saw the lines:

an arbitrary seagull dips east
into the bleating wind watched by the eye
of the savage sea …

(Nice pun there on Michael Joseph Savage). The interesting thing is that Edmond’s poem can survive the competition. I can never avoid feeling a certain reverent hush when I stand in front of that strange, truncated obelisk – “There is no fame to rise above the crowning honour of a people’s love” – but at first I felt that “Rant for Mickey Joe” was striving too much first to undercut (“Up here on Boot Hill”) and then to overlay (“as it did when Keir from Grafton laid concrete / blocks by day & ran The Fat Landlady / for those with minds that could not sleep at night / up in Symonds St 25 years ago”) the simplicity of the scene. The more I read it, though, the more of a muchness it seems:

Old mate, the kiss of talk awakes desire.
Supernumerous reasons swarm
to pull it down, stone by stone,
& begin again. Begin. Again.

There is something grand – and silly – and important about Bastion Point, and Edmond lends it the resonance of Yeats’s “Easter 1916.”

Other poems clamour to be discussed: the delightfully teasing “Curiosity of the First Water” (“You don’t call them shags. I do. You call them / cormorants”) – the double meaning of the word “shag” exploited here perhaps definitively; “Home Coming” – his elegy/tribute to the late great Kendrick Smithyman; the tender “Small Fry” or “Step and Wave”; but “Starfish Streets,” that extraordinary end-piece, must occupy most of my remaining space.

Here poem and notes complement each other perfectly. The latter tell us of a condition called “‘dissociative fugue’ in which the afflicted person will walk and talk in a state of amnesia,” but we have already guessed as much from the former: its weird dissolves from Rimbaud to Roebling to Artaud to Desnos are a thumbnail sketch of our poetic century:

death of the father by poisoned foot
death of the modernist by stepping into space

from Symbolism to Naturalism to Surrealism to … Totalitarianism. Here history is a nightmare from which we are very far from awaking. This is poetry on the grand scale, a poetry worthy of those bleak litanies, “Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Flossenburg / … after the film crew had left in August, the transports began again.”

To sum up, then. The sheer intelligence and skill of Murray Edmond’s book is beyond question, but its cleverness seems, at times, a little overdone. I don’t mean that in the usual way of defeating lazy readers – who cares about them – but more in the sense of a deliberate policy of exclusion. It is as if the writer were himself in some Steiner-esque crisis of language and silence. In “Starfish Streets,” this condition is dramatised and made alive, but it’s a dizzying altitude to inhabit.

One dreams of a book that could be as homely and sweet as Fitchett and Zusters’ and as grand as Murray Edmond’s at the same time. For the moment, I’ll settle for both.

Murray Edmond: Laminations (2000)

(28/5/2000)

JAAM 14 (2000): 99-103.

[1613 wds]


JAAM 14 (2000)


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Michele Leggott: As far as I can see (2000)

Mark Pirie, ed.: JAAM 13 (March 2000)

Michele Leggott. as far as I can see. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1999.

Michele Leggott: As far as I can see (1999)

It’s always difficult to review books whose authors have undergone extraordinary or painful personal experiences. Wystan Curnow’s Cancer Diary springs to mind – or, going to a further extreme, the work of Paul Celan. I suppose, in the final analysis, it really highlights the dilemma of writing a review in the first place: the (inevitable) aching, raw, exposed nerves that characterise almost anyone who’s gone to that much trouble to communicate; the blasé indifference of the average reader. But a review is a reaction, really – description of a work, a reading in progress. The more magisterial it tries to sound, the less it does justice to the shifting moods and sensibilities which inform any reading of any book.

Michele Leggott is losing her “eyesight to the condition called retinitis pigmentosa,” she tells us on the back of this, her fourth book of poems, fourth in that stellar sequence running from Like This? (1988), through Swimmers, Dancers (1991), to DIA (1994). “Standard print is impossible, and I have found other ways to read.” On the personal level, the only possible reaction to this is sympathy: horror, too, at the prospect of losing one’s own access to the visual world. On the intellectual level, one wonders how the poet can deal with this in her work. Will her imagery shift from predominantly visual to tactile? Will memory take over where bibliography has left off?

The questions seem almost frivolous, but they have to be asked. I love Paul Celan, but the Nobel-Prize-winning Nellie Sachs, another concentration camp survivor, leaves me comparatively cold. Homer, Milton, Borges … and John Heath-Stubbs: there seem to be almost as many precedents for the sightless poet as there are ways of invoking the muse.

Do you see me? I am falling out of a blue sky where my days were as dancers in a maze, sure-footed and smiling. I stood in my garden pulling loquats off the tree and eating them to be full of spring.

These lines, from the sequence of prose-poems “A woman, a rose, and what has it do with her or they with one another?” are perhaps as good a place as any to start trying to read her new book. I say trying to read because I’m still not entirely sure how to read a Michele Leggott poem. To read these poems, at any rate. Nor have I found the other reviewers much help. Comments abut “exquisite sureness of touch” and “virtuoso command of language” may well be true, but they’re not really concrete enough to be useful.

Her phrasing fills me with questions. Why are dancers in a maze especially “sure-footed and smiling”? I suppose because they can see where they’re going (“Can you see me?”), so the cramped hedges don’t impede them. I don’t, myself, eat loquats to be “full of spring” – scrubby little yellow things. That reads like a cliché to me: imprecise and Tennysonian. I have to say, though , that those are the kinds of phrases the book is full of. They tumble out of the “book of tears”:

“the grasses of summer … together we make morning” (p.56)

“In their faces were our faces all dewy at the centre of the world.” (p.53)

“An afternoon flight. Hot rain. I spent months getting that right.” (p.54)

“All dewy”? It’s not so much Biblical – “the sons of the morning shouted together for joy” – as pseudo-Biblical: reminiscent of Thus Spake Zarathustra, or (more to the point) Robin Hyde’s pseudo-Nietzschean Book of Nadath. Why is “I spent months getting that right” in italics? Is it a quote (or “sampling”) from the Iris Wilkinson [Robin Hyde] papers at the University of Auckland (a procedure foreshadowed on her acknowledgements page)? DIA, too, was full of quotes, but more integrated into the texture of the poems. I take it, actually, that “I spent months getting it right” is a stepping outside the frame by the author, a way of getting us to look more closely at “An afternoon flight. Hot rain.” But it’s difficult to know.

So what? Do we have to know? This book of tears is undoubtedly full of things that are easy to understand (even in discussing it it’s notable how one’s critical vocabulary gravitates towards metaphors of sight: “vivid flashes” – “precise imagery” – “exact vision”):

At the ticket office my documentation was examined. Are you blind? The fuller’s boy asked. He was in charge of the fare. Yes I said I am. In the change was a small silver leaf.

This comes at the end of a long list of little-known constellations (Tucana, Vela, Volans) addressed to a “second person so recently singular”. Is this someone else who is bereaved, separated? Or is the poet simply speaking to herself? I worry, too, about that “fuller’s boy”. No doubt he was rude, insensitive, but he was hardly to know that he’d got it so terribly wrong. I feel a little sorry for him, despite the pain he undoubtedly caused. A terrible scene, but it’s described with such serenity, such poise. The silver leaf seems more personified, really.

Perhaps I’m making difficulties for myself where there are none, but I find myself curiously uninvolved in Leggott’s world of apples, beautiful children, boats, stars and sea. It seems, yes, imprecise and over-poetic. “The poet,” Hermann Broch tells us in The Death of Virgil, “is heeded only if he extols the world, never if he portrays it as it is.” I don’t really feel I meet many other people in there. The other characters are mostly reflections of some mood of the author’s (“second person so recently singular”). Sometimes there are word invocations which I recognise: “take me to the river” from a Talking Heads song, or “dance me to the end of love” from Leonard Cohen, but even then the point isn’t obvious to me.

“Much of what I have written here is an effort to remember seeing, something to put against the dark while I searched for other ways of understanding where it has put me,” she tells us, but the anguish of this experience seems masked, distant. That Fuller’s story has more the tone of anecdote than parable. Leggott, then, is no Borges the memorious, deep in the library of Babel, no Homer losing himself in gods and bright-greaved heroes, no Milton waiting in his armchair to be milked. Does she have to be? Of course not. She’s chosen to write this way for a reason – perhaps in order to sidestep the long twentieth century Modernist reaction to Romanticism. I can’t say for sure, but I think that Leggott is a natural Modernist (all those years spent poring over Zukofsky?) trying to construct a Romantic from within herself. Which is presumably where Ursula Bethell, Robin Hyde, and Mary Stanley come in – as important precedents.

Undoubtedly that’s an interesting project. But I’ll not resort to describing these as women’s poems, though they are obviously the poems of a woman. This heightened diction, combined with her usual formal complexity and inventiveness don’t really fit into any clear category of classification. She is aiming, I suspect, at no less than a new voice of feeling accessible to all.

I am a dream best left to the ache
and space of letters virtual
upon a screen

is how the first poem in the book begins. “Letters virtual” to me is like fingernails on a blackboard – that unidiomatic inversion of noun and adjective (“No poetic inversions!” thundered Ezra Pound in his famous letter to Harriet Monroe). What’s the point of a book, though, if it only tells you what you already know? Michele Leggott’s book challenges my notion of poetry to the limits – not by being hard but soft, not by being anguished but decorous.

That poem concludes:

yes wake

Perhaps this is our long-promised awakening. I would like to end more confidently, but questions remain. I feel a little distanced still, kept at arms-length; and yet there is so much here – sharpnesses of phrase, ingenuities of texture – that compels admiration. I’m afraid the reading has only begun.

(12/99)

JAAM 13 (2000): 158-60.

[1358 wds]


JAAM 13 (2000)


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