Jeffrey Paparoa Holman: Flood Damage (2000)

Jack Ross, ed.: Spin 36 (March 2000)

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman. Flood Damage: Poems. Nga Kupu Press, 4/22 Alexandra Street, Otautahi (Christchurch) 8001, Aotearoa/New Zealand, 1998. ISBN 0-473-05225-3. 36 pp. $10.

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman: Flood Damage (1998)

The cover image on this, Jeffrey Holman’s second book of poems (the first appeared in 1974) emphasises divisions. A group of people are standing on the end of a bridge, looking down at the raging flood waters which have demolished its central span. We are separated from them by time – the overcoats and hats seem to come from the fifties – but also by the camera angle. We stand on the other side of a gap, with the supports beneath our feet obscured.

… this was
once the Blackball Bridge. Was. Once. One full
Westerly too many, the Mother-to-end-all-floods …

The title poem reminds us “… this river’s a socialist: everybody gets / the same treatment. Ask for water, you / get water: death, death.”

Holman’s book, too, seems principally concerned with time, and division, and distance. The poems have been written in a number of different places, with many different personae, and lack any clear sense of unitary design. This is a strength when it results in the surreal, death-camp imagery of “moving house”:

we clung to the walls
of the greasy shaft
until we saw doors

into abandoned offices
where the last of the workers
were burning files

stripping wristwatches
from corpses

However, there are moments when the reader can feel a little bewildered by Holman’s multiplicity of masks (“Ontological Fish,” for example, does little more than reprise Rupert Brooke’s “Fish, fly-replete, in depths of June”; “On Walthamstow Marshes” could be a hundred other grim-faced visions of London; “The Coaster” is a ballad evocation to which we somehow lack a key).

Overall, though, the individual merits of many of the poems outweigh any lack of continuity in the collection. I would single out for special mention the precision of “Nowhere in the year of the Horse,” the floridness of “Rebuilding St George’s,” the solidity of “Inferno (Strongman Mine 1978):”

I was a man, my death not yet.

What links these poems above all is their author’s strong sense of social injustice. Some may fail as verbal artefacts, but they have much to teach us nevertheless.

(4/1999)

Spin 36 (2000): 60-61.

[369 wds]

Spin 36 (2000)


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Leicester Kyle: A Safe House for a Man (2000)

Jack Ross, ed.: Spin 36 (March 2000)

A Safe House for a Man, by Leicester Kyle, Millerton, c/o Postal Agency, Ngakawau, Buller, 88pp, January 2000.

Leicester Kyle: A Safe House for a Man (2000)

The familiar gets
Exceptional when you like it.

It’s difficult to be objective about your friends’ work. Or rather, it’s difficult to say exactly what one thinks about it without either hurting their feelings or being accused of running a mutual admiration society. Leicester Kyle and I are good friends, and I’ve praised his poetry in print in no uncertain terms (most notably, in Pander 6/7 (1999) 21-23).

Having made this preamble, I feel that A Safe House for a Man is his very best work to date. There’s nothing recondite or difficult about the diction of this long semi-narrative piece. The intricate processes of separation, self-analysis, and acknowledgement of loss are sorted through with beauty and precision. Everyday events recur at once casually and hauntingly in the patterning. This is, I feel, a wise poem, which might provide solace – or at least companionship – to many men in similar circumstances. I say “men” because part of the intention of the piece seems to be to providing ideological models for his own sex. This is not really to confine its intended readership, though. We all have certain experiences of loss in common, and how can one achieve empathy without understanding?

The long title poem is accompanied by two others: “The Araneidea” – a rather creepy account of how to “make good-looking, sightly cabinet objects” from live spiders – and “Threnos” – a moving elegy for the poet’s wife Miriel. They are thematically associated with the title piece, and flesh it out into a book which reminds us what this whole poetic enterprise is about – just how much can be achieved, here and now, by dedication and ingenuity.

(2/2000)

Spin 36 (2000): 62.
[Available at: Leicester Kyle: Index (2011)]

[291 wds]

Spin 36 (2000)


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When The Sea Goes Mad at Night (2000)

Jack Ross, ed.: Spin 36 (March 2000)

Theresia Liemlienio Marshall, ed. When The Sea Goes Mad at Night: Poems by Alison Denham, Robin McConnell, Theresia Liemlienio Marshall, Jade Reidy, Jack Ross & Apirana Taylor. Christian Gray New Zealand, PO Box 34293, Birkenhead, Auckland 1310, Aotearoa / New Zealand, 1999-2000. ISBN 0-473-06460-X. 122 pp.

Theresia Liemlienio Marshall, ed.: When The Sea Goes Mad at Night (1999-2000)

This anthology showcases poets who have been published by Theresia Marshall’s Pohutukawa Press, or its offshoot, Christian Gray New Zealand. “TPP,” Theresia explains, “provides space for Maori and South Pacific Islands authors. CGNZ is open to all writers.” In putting together this collection, she goes on to say, “I have had to sequence each cluster of contributions into significance (McConnell’s and Marshall’s); or discern for wider audience accessibility (Ross’s); or leave it in the order the poems first arrived (Denham’s, Reidy’s and Taylor’s).” As this preamble would suggest, there’s not a great deal of consistency in the styles or poetics presented here, but for anyone interested in the work of these individual poets, sufficient space has been given to each to put forward a substantial selection from their recent work. The production standards, as usual, are high.

(2/2000)

Spin 36 (2000): 63.

[183 wds]

Spin 36 (2000)


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