tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16648107006254541202024-03-06T07:53:03.722+13:00Poetry New Zealand ReviewLocal Poetry Books in ReviewDr Jack Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01805945600952222957noreply@blogger.comBlogger61125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1664810700625454120.post-35566452740714552862019-03-30T09:29:00.001+13:002019-04-01T07:32:28.640+13:00Jamie Trower: A Sign of Light (2018)<div align="center">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsh_Dw6JLIk_wDTMJlW44gMMwa6a0Ykn0NvYMNOm7BqCoj8mJSl-U2KoAfWehAHRUNQoxx1qu1LnpVW0UXh_do7MGFeZP0P6WYSL4mVCOju3byNYe-d-5Z_5bNk6y9Nw4bTpvAhkDLq0s/s1600/A-Sign-of-Light-front-cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsh_Dw6JLIk_wDTMJlW44gMMwa6a0Ykn0NvYMNOm7BqCoj8mJSl-U2KoAfWehAHRUNQoxx1qu1LnpVW0UXh_do7MGFeZP0P6WYSL4mVCOju3byNYe-d-5Z_5bNk6y9Nw4bTpvAhkDLq0s/s640/A-Sign-of-Light-front-cover.jpg" width="496" height="640" data-original-width="1240" data-original-height="1600" /></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">Jamie Trower: <a href="https://thecubapress.nz/shop/a-sign-of-light/">A Sign of Light</a> (2018)</span><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: 180%;">Reviews:</span></b></div>
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<blockquote><blockquote>Jamie Trower. <i>A Sign of Light</i>. ISBN 978-0-9951107-3-1. Wellington: The Cuba Press, 2018. RRP $25.00. 70 pp.</blockquote>
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<b>Reviewed by <a href="http://poetrynzreview.blogspot.co.nz/2017/05/about-reviewers.html">Richard Taylor</a></b></div><br />
<br />
It happens that I had heard Trower read his own poetry and went to the launch of this book. Something in his way of reading and phrases at Poetry Live (where I had 'returned') he used made me feel it necessary.<br />
<br />
And I am now sure I was right, and am glad I bought this book.<br />
<br />
<i>A Sign of Light</i>, which deals with psychological issues and mental illness, follows Trower's first book <i>Anatomy</i> which is about disability. I was informed at the launch that Trower had been involved in a severe and life threatening skiing accident. So the trauma of that accident I believe is one cause of the mental issues which are dealt with in <i>A Sign of Light</i>. And the poet seems to have been able to reach towards that light successfully, as the book ends relatively positively.<br />
<br />
Like John Berryman and other significant and major modern-postmodern poets working in a form of confessional mode, Trower uses the device of personae and dreams etc by which he is able to communicate through a kind of grid, or objective correlative (the personae). This moves the focus away from the writer as such and becomes a fascinating drama of consciousness and psychological struggle. In Berryman's <i>Dream Songs</i> he has the personae of Mr Bones, an 'I', Henry and a kind of dream-diary sequence. Trower also uses such a device with his 'speakers' or actors who include Bird, Birdboy, Dog, and a mysterious and seemingly almost ubiquitous orange haired woman who may or may not be the writer or protagonist's mother: these appear similarly in a kind of dream sequence.<br />
<br />
This method is always powerful, like a drama, or the use of masks sometimes by Yeats, and is similar in purpose to Eliot's 'objective correlative', where objects of events channel the inner emotion of the writer or his or her alter ego. Charles Bernstein talked of degrees of absorption of a reader in a text, while Vincent O'Sullivan uses his 'butcher boy' in a series of almost riddling but intriguing poems of that name. So Trower, by adopting this dramatic construct, rather than pure 'confessionalism', is in good company.<br />
<br />
Trower's poetic voice and his subtle use of language reveals him to
be, I feel, already one of New Zealand's most interesting and ingenious
poets. 'When You Became' and other poems in <i>A Sign of Light</i> have a
quality of writing as highly accomplished as many of those poets he lists (in his
acknowledgements) who have helped or influenced his writing. I think also, especially reading 'When you became', as well as Dylan Thomas and possibly G. M. Hopkins, of Geoffrey Hill and his great historical-religious poems that yet achieve both a concentrated language and a beautiful evocation of things and objects:
<blockquote><span style="padding-left: 4em;"><b>When you became</b></span><br />
1.<br />
<br />
When you arose for the first time in baptism.<br />
your head tracked and trod the treasure map to the ocean.<br />
The tranquility of your holy sea had teeth.<br />
<br />
You pulled at the sheet of ferocious waves.<br />
We watched you on the coast of that blessing<br />
with the wreakage of life-rafts built on sacred wood.</blockquote>
With this extraordinarily writing Trower moves through the book as he himself 'grows', reads, encounters Dog, and Bird Boy and observes the phenomenal world. Puns and allusions abound (is that 'the Sea of Tranquility, and is 'sea' a pun on 'see' and 'See', as in the Holy See?) One suspects such bedevilment in good poets.<br />
<br />
But it is not just a linguistic spree: Trower is focused on the complexities of being and perhaps Being, suffering, curiosity in and of life, dreams, and sadness, pain and joy. Of happines he denies he can explicate it in 'A Definition of Happiness':
<blockquote>
<i>On the contrary,</i> you replied<br />
<i>I will never know.<br />
But that is why I spend my days dreaming<br />
of divine birds and carving lucid words to stone,<br />
looking for an answer.</i></blockquote>
In setting the scene or dialogue of his book or struggle into light, Trower's first poem, 'If', is a kind of struggle to <i>be</i>, as a writer and as a sane being:
<blockquote>
You met up with his poetry for coffee and a chat<br />
on the morning you tried to destroy him.<br />
<i>I'm never leaving</i>, it said to you<br />
with its brilliant, insane eyes.</blockquote>
From and through this struggle of self and soul 'he' takes control:
<blockquote>
Quiet. Now, quiet.<br />
Listen to the voices in the summer evenings.<br />
Those cherub sounds moving, drifting into the thirsty trees.</blockquote>
Trower or his poet / alter ego / self, now united with his creative self: moves out, listening to voices outside the body / soul.<br />
<br />
Then, in the poem 'Dog', he meets Dog, and there is a calmer, almost comic and slangy, up-beat, tone:
<blockquote>
Dressed in the same<br />
canary-yellow Y-fronts as last week, old Dog,<br />
you'd estimate 40 or so, bathing in the sun.</blockquote>
Comic but almost sinister, Dog seems to be keeping a watch over the 'you' in these poems. He has 'A silver collar – a crucifix – around his neck.'<br />
<br />
The 'Dog' appears in the next poem 'I dream of ambitious things.' We are on and in an extraordinary psychic or inner journey:
<blockquote>
2.40 pm. This night-time swell prickled with sequence. You are with<br />
me here, 100 feet up, in this dissolving tide. You are floating beside me<br />
now, look.<br />
<br />
A wrung of wings beaten with pewter rain. Wings that fit so comfortably<br />
between this commotion and me. Rain clouds – inquisitions of<br />
bravado in a tender brain.<br />
<br />
I can hear and see thunder and lightening in the distance. I want to<br />
move closer to it. Thin rivers flow into my mouth like milk. I feel so<br />
hot and so cold all at once.<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
I am standing on the mud path ...<br />
... with Dog watching ...</blockquote>
Like Browning's 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came', in inverse, where the inner journey is to a 'dark tower' ... (the entire poem inspired by a man, an actor, pretending to be a madman in a storm in Shakespeare's <i>King Lear</i>) ... but:
<blockquote>... anxiety smothers me for I am now part of this bruised earth too / I am a ghost destined to oblivion and lost things ...<br />
_______________________________________</blockquote>
The third stanza of this is a kind of emergence from the inner hell, or a Waste Land:
<blockquote>I want to visit again the trees. The thirsty skeletons after the flood ...<br />
<br />
The dark towers, their spires pointing upwards like dried, receiving<br />
palms searching for drink.</blockquote>
But to go back to that line:
<blockquote>A <i>wrung</i> of wings beaten with <i>pewter</i> rain. [My italics.]</blockquote>
A wrung of wings?! Pewter rain! It is the sign of an extremely alert, hard-working craftsman – and a greatly talented poet. <i>Pewter</i> and not grey is just right and <i>wrung</i> besides containing rung inside itself or not has a twisting force or torque that intensifies this passage.<br />
<br />
Then the rain clouds become '– inquisitions of bravado in a tender brain.'<br />
<br />
Trower has a sure hand and eye and moves between these torrential nights of the soul to a subtle, short love dialogue in the poem 'Lovers a warning: verdigris on / 100 cm by 100 cm gesso canvas'.<br />
<br />
This poem has to be read, but it reads like one of those neo-pastiches of say John Ashbery who utilizes irony and surrealism as, also, to some extent, Trower does. But he is perhaps more direct, a little more open. But still his poetry is a challenge, as well as great pabulum.<br />
<br />
Something also of Lowell of “Skunk Hour” ('My mind's not right.') comes into 'My feet, stained':
<blockquote>These voices I am hearing in my mind are ever changing, hot and<br />
cold. I imagine them dangling from the sky as long drapes of silk.</blockquote>
Then comes 'The Birdboy manifesto':
<blockquote>You are shotgun shrapnel. A master of disguise, splattered, festooned,<br />
trickled from sunrise. Pointed, dejected down the gullet.</blockquote>
I could go on. Usually in a review I find 'errors' or weak poems best left out combined with some excellent poems.<br />
<br />
There is little like this here. This book of poetry has nothing manifestly 'weak'. <i>A Sign of Light</i> is one of the most original, intense, and deeply significant works. I was going to say 'moving'.<br />
<br />
But here I realise a problem (what I call the 'twee factor' kicks in here); and it is in some ways consonant with my thinking about Thom's book-poem that tries to "save the world", and the mode required.<br />
<br />
In Trower's case the danger for him is that he and his readers will read him as the disabled poet, then as the poet suffering from mental illness. In discussions with my friend Ted Jenner about Berryman the fact of his father's suicide is recurrent, and we are aware that Pound, another great poet was (all but) a fascist; and I like the novels of Céline, at one stage a fanatically enthusiastic Nazi: Rimbaud shot Verlaine, moved around the world, became a gun runner: the poetry of Berryman did him no good, he committed suicide in any case.<br />
<br />
Céline, in a strange creative screw, wrote great serious as well as brilliantly funny works all in one. Did the writing of Celan, a 'survivor of the holocaust' do anything to alter the future of the human species or its past? Like Berryman and another writer survivor Primo Levi, he killed himself in despair. (The question arises, what good then did their work or experience or their confessionalism? I feel the answer is that there is no (necessarily positive) connection. No significance, as in Macbeth, except perhaps as a way of working through certain issues, one of the merits of Wystan Curnow's excellent <i>Cancer Daybook</i>.)<br />
<br />
In a deep sense, then, it is the poetry or the art of these people, whatever their personal dilemmas. actions, associations that what we as writers-readers-critics are concerned with. ('Why' is another question, perhaps left to Montaigne, or a Camus, a Heidegger, or a Sartre).<br />
<br />
Shakespeare of whose life and personal feelings we know almost nothing, seems, if anything, a deep pessimist (witness his 'All the World's A Stage' and that life is '... a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing', and remark that everyone (mostly the 'good') in his greatest tragedies (dies)).<br />
<br />
There is a danger that Trower might be influenced also by a need by those wanting the best for him, to 'write to order', or play the game. Too many New Zealand writers already do this. Others who were writing poetry or words that they deeply felt needed, have caved in to a kind of pressure of conscience: a kind of political correctness, a weakness of compassion misdirected.<br />
<br />
There is no truth (or redemption) in poetry (perhaps in a subtle sense there is as in the phrase of Keats about Beauty and Truth or in his brilliant 'negative capability': yes Auden said that he only had words to [attempt] to 'undo the folded lie'; and wrote <i>more</i> than that <i>poetry doesn't make anything happen</i>, but, (as Jack Ross pointed out in a discussion of Auden), in this great poem about Yeats written as a moving obituary, that '... <i>it survives in the valley of its making</i>'.<br />
<br />
Yes, poetry then adds something, in that valley where it and we via our culture perhaps survive (Auschwitz, war, time, indifference and crassness): even if most of us remember only Auden's phrase <i>poetry makes nothing happen</i>: for indeed Auden doesn't (quite) convince: what is this valley? Auden with all his shifting from his earlier deep, hauntingly beautiful but ambiguous poems, actually remains there: and it remains that Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Artaud, and the NY Poets; and poets such as Alan Brunton and Leigh Davis of NZ, and the Language Poets of the US and many others who dare to take writing away even from even these at one time cutting or edgy 'groupings' into new regions, regardless of what people think or whether the world survives, or the poet overcomes some illness of his soul or not: that – <i>a great intensification and ambiguation of language</i> is the 'mission' of the poet if there is one. The great poet is not so influenced by Opinion in <i>his or her poetic</i>.<a class="style23" href="https://poetrynzreview.blogspot.com/2019/03/jamie-trower-sign-of-light-2018.html#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title="">[1]</a>.<br />
<br />
So Trower's poetry is not found by me to be laudable for the reasons of some terrible struggle in himself, or because it helped him avoid suicide, or he changed things (similar parallel issues are in my <a href="https://poetrynzreview.blogspot.com/2019/03/martin-thom-fair-2018.html">plaint re Thom</a>). No, it is the essence of the writing and or the total work in each case.<br />
<br />
But that rant aside, which is partly to myself as the critic: in this case, in the main, Trower's strength is thus, not only the excellently modulated way he has presented his subject and what is effectively a kind of human and a psychological struggle with his difficulties: it is his great use of language, inventiveness, and his superb craftmanship. It is in the 'poeticalness' of his poetry, his art. Not, as such, what he suffered or didn't, or who he pleased. He has to be true to himself. The artist is a selfish being <i>as an artist</i>.<br />
<br />
I need to emphasize though, that as with Thom the work is a kind of complex of Trower's skills as a writer and a planner joined to the theme he is struggling to turn to a total work, as I feel writing needs to be: that is the combination of the theme and the language operating in high energy mode.<br />
<br />
To wrap things up, now I've got that out: it is seen by the reader that as Trower's book continues he moves to a lighter, almost more playful, ironic tone. And the poem 'A pool of wellness' begins a kind of reconciliation despite the 'black mood', hints of possible tippling, and the often frequently present lighter, as from here on that mood tends to lift:
<blockquote>I read silence like a black mood ring tap tapping the side of a whiskey glass. A<br />
shattered skull. 10,000 pairs of broken teeth chattering at once. Ghosts<br />
of sparrows on a wire.</blockquote>
I am very enthusiastic about Trower's work and his future as a poet / writer. His writing in <i>A Sign of Light</i> is excellent. It is 'endlessly creative' as Don Smith said (rightly I feel) once of Alexander Pope. My comments re the method or aesthetic etc above aside, I conclude with this:<br />
<br />
Struggling for mental health, stability, and a sense of purpose is a good rationale [way of building a structure upon which to <i>build the poem</i>.] These things form strong motifs in the poems and the total work of <i>A Sign of Light</i>. Other 'methods' include his use of personae as I previously bespoke: such as Bird Boy, 'Father', a 'Mother', and a strange orange-haired woman, Dog and other actors in this dream-surreal-trauma book-poem – appear in another poem near the book's end, 'Years after the flood', where he finishes with perhaps the more redemptive:
<blockquote>'... and Bird Boy felt alive once again.'</blockquote>
And yet, just near the end of the book, in the strange almost Strindbergian play (of his <i>Dream Play</i>) within the poem-book, called 'Descent', which is a tour de force that almost adds a <i>mise-en-abime</i> into the total work here: there is a magnification of the previously presented themes, and is eerie, moving, and comes just as the reader is perhaps thinking 'all is well', like a violent shocking and icy wave. So Trower continues to survive throughout <i>A Sign of Light</i>.<br />
<br />
My final conclusion?<br />
<br />
Trower's <i>A Sign of Light</i> is a fascinating book, and he is a poet measurable to the best writing now and sometimes in the past in NZ, and even elsewhere. He is a poet of importance, commitment, and energetic significance. I would urge people to buy the book, or at the least, to find a copy, perhaps in a local library. It is a rare experience to read such high level yet 'edgy' and sometimes humoresque, writing.<br />
<br />
Of this book I further think of this haunting part line: '<i>I'm never leaving</i>, it said to you with its brilliant, insane eyes.' And then, by some complex association of memory, that great miniature by Ungaretti:
<blockquote>
M'illumino<br />
d'immenso</blockquote>
<br />
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<br />
<blockquote>
<b>Notes:</b><br />
<br />
<div id="ftn1">
<a href="https://poetrynzreview.blogspot.com/2019/03/jamie-trower-sign-of-light-2018.html#_ftn1" name="_ftn1" title="">1.</a> I am not taking out compassion from the equation. A poem may or may not move one in this human level, the point is the artfulness of the artist in making these feelings, and or, this language, meaningful in a deep sense. In Trower's case I feel he succeeds. Thom approaches this goal in the totality of what he is attempting to do, and comes close to his goal.</div>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: 85%;"><a href="http://www.poetrynz.net/">Poetry New Zealand</a></span></div><br />
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Dr Jack Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01805945600952222957noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1664810700625454120.post-16826813786724544772019-03-29T17:21:00.000+13:002019-11-09T09:54:44.937+13:00Martin Thom: FAIR (2018)<div align="center">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHSTodaSc3ZuRPXKWN3WbIDW9lKEzD9F_1N1vIssXd1dPtvbt9QamqiFhyphenhyphenJD6H1LgSk5pqcwYY-AuRS9ALOsYeH9Ivn4aQUG5R9mlp2EzdCBJZ2Cy0BkIirSQaqlphnLWkyploJ8TKo5A/s1600/9780905795614.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHSTodaSc3ZuRPXKWN3WbIDW9lKEzD9F_1N1vIssXd1dPtvbt9QamqiFhyphenhyphenJD6H1LgSk5pqcwYY-AuRS9ALOsYeH9Ivn4aQUG5R9mlp2EzdCBJZ2Cy0BkIirSQaqlphnLWkyploJ8TKo5A/s400/9780905795614.jpg" width="248" height="400" data-original-width="248" data-original-height="400" /></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">Martin Thom: <a href="https://www.foyles.co.uk/witem/fiction-poetry/fair,martin-thom-9780905795614">FAIR</a> (2018)</span><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: 180%;">Reviews:</span></b></div>
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<blockquote><blockquote>Martin Thom. <i>F.A.I.R</i>. ISBN 978-090579-561-4. London: infernal methods, 2018. RRP £5.00. 16 pp.</blockquote>
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<br />
<b>Reviewed by <a href="http://poetrynzreview.blogspot.co.nz/2017/05/about-reviewers.html">Richard Taylor</a></b></div><br />
<br />Martin Thom's <i>F.A.I.R.</i> is inspired by and about war and injustice and in particular the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia (and the 'humanitarian catastrophe' of the war between Yemen and Saudi Arabia) which the (then - 2017) British Minister of Defence Sir Michael Fallon and Liam Fox, Secretary of Trade for International Affairs, allegedly support and promote. And we know indeed that whoever we can point to there are many such ministers and others profiting from war and arms sales: and Ministers, British or other, have 'friends' who are all too keen to buy and on-sell or use lethal weaponry. But it is not only 'about' this, it is a poem that piggybacks somewhat on Shelley's 'The Mask of Anarchy', and becomes a book-poem.<br />
<br />
There are many shortcomings to this kind of relatively tendentious writing: poetry that attempts to "change the world" (to echo a <a href="https://webcast.massey.ac.nz/Mediasite/Play/9728302f42f34f84a683eab918f987db1d?catalog=312af55c-e030-42ad-b9a4-801f05a4a2ba&catalog=312af55c-e030-42ad-b9a4-801f05a4a2ba">recent lecture</a> by Jack Ross and some of his colleagues, in which some excellent points were made). And indeed Shelley was invoked there where his relatively abstract and refined Romantic style was contrasted with the more detailed, close to nature and its particularities style that Clough developed (or naturally wrote in).<br />
<br />
These things I think are important in evaluating what this poem is trying to do and does. Firstly, some of the implied criticism of Shelley's style is also relevant here. Shelley's poetry, as his wife Mary Shelley points out re 'The Witch of Atlas', for example, is always somewhat detached from the sensibility of the people. At his best he is an impassioned, deeply concerned, and could be said to be a political poet. In this, if we add other epithets, readers may know of 'Prometheus Unbound' which concerns a kind of reverse of the fall, or the Greek version of a Fall, as Prometheus, contra the original Greek play (thought to be by Aeschylus), is 'unbound': knowledge and the right to self expression are thus espoused against Christian doctrine (Shelley may have thought of Spirit, but he was expelled from University for being an Atheist (whether this makes him one I am not sure, not knowing much of his life)); and even 'The Wild West Wind' (a superb poem in my view) is said to be about or to point to the revolutions in the United States and France.<br />
<br />
Shelley was aware in his own day of various developments in science, politics, art and of course of the US and French revolutions as well as reform and struggle in England and elsewhere. He and Keats and others such as Coleridge attended lectures of the Royal Society. Much of this I read about in Richard Holmes's excellent book <i>The Age of Wonder</i>. That there much that is often downplayed re Shelley's political or moral indignation side is revealed in that book by Holmes.<br />
<br />
But why does Thom use 'The Mask of Anarchy'? This poem was written almost 200 years ago in 1819 in response to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterloo_Massacre">Peterloo Massacre</a>.<br />
<br />
So a reader is made aware of an interesting consonance of history. Here in the Docklands of London the 'fuel' of repression continues via the arms fair which took place when Thom wrote the poem and will happen again later this year.<br />
<br />
A documentary, 'Where is the Love,' on YouTube by children of the London dockland area where the arms sales convention is held by young people who are immigrants and local white British adolescents. They ask officials why this arms convention is held in a place where during the Second WW thousands were killed by Nazi arms? It indeed “asks” why human beings make war for (whatever reasons they go to war). The question of the poem enters this moral issue.<br />
<br />
Some of the local people (and of course many Britons these days) are from ex-colonial territories such as Yemen and Sierra Leone where war is complex, and other documentaries one can easily find also show mercenaries machine gunning "rebels". These men seem convinced they're doing the right thing. But there is plentiful work for mercenaries to work for various “legitimate” states supported by often European nations and companies, and <i>F.A.I.R</i> itself asks (by implication) questions of moral fairness and points to the ongoing money made from or around war.<br />
<br />
The question arises: is the poem as effective as a political and moral "blast", as Shelley's 'Mask of Anarchy' is? I think that Shelley's Mask means Masque here, and Anarchy is the enemy, and not a 'good' peoples' state. Added to that Castlereagh and Sidmouth were two English politicians who imposed severe repressive laws (but didn't necessarily cause the Peterloo Massacre): these two match Fallon and Fox. Today many protestors are anarchists (or of similar 'persuasions'): so here it gets complex, as for example, it could be argued that the State itself is an entity that leads almost inevitably to the world situation of wars and repressions (so many wars and so complex it is not easy to say arms should not be sold and in fact it is considered to be inevitable by some commentators on world affairs that they will continue to be available, potentially, to everyone: and arms are a produce or technology of the very "advance" that has led to “the problem”).<br />
<br />
In other words Thom, and many other political poetical writers, are immediately on a difficult ground. All is never clear. (Most of us will want wars to stop and most feel arms as now made are terrible things regardless of any “complexities” and I share this with Thom and others, as well as sharing his dislike of conservative politicians involved in arms sales or siding with predatory states etc). <br />
<br />
But an aesthetic-moral question remains re <i>F.A.I.R</i>. Tendentious political and often rather hortatory poems and or tracts lead to or via rhetoric and abstractions away from the stark human issues in question. Rhetoric, abstractions, generalisms, etc are always a part of language but we see it more in such as Shelley in 'The Mask' and Thom here etc.<br />
<br />
This is not to say that writers with this intention to move us or persuade or to protest are insincere. They are not.<br />
<br />
But in regard to Thom's book-poem I feel that while it and the accompanying photograph of Fallon in a helicopter manning a machine gun, arouses our interest and pity re war and suffering, some of the possible power of its effect is blunted by density, allusion and complexity. The rather dated style (echoing Shelley's poem) and obscure acronyms, and references make the poem interesting but I am not sure if it focuses attention or distracts. Indeed, some of this obscurity and or reference is a good thing as we are thus reminded or informed of the Peterloo incident and the arms sale, the war in Yemen, and indeed other similar wars. Again, that Thom's poem echoes Shelley's emphasizes that certain troubling political and social issues in England are still important and do reflect a kind of tradition of struggle and protest as described, as well as by such as Shelley, in E. P. Thompson's classic <i>A History of the English Working Class</i>, as well as other books.<br />
<br />
But my review of this poem has to be, I feel, almost an essay, on the complexity of how to convey information, or how to persuade and move readers, rather than how “good” the poem is. So the question circles for me around what is an appropriate way of presenting the issues raised. This is because the fact of war, and the reality of the enormous suffering caused by wars continue to be a tragic reality of vital importance. So <i>F.A.I.R.</i> is, I feel, a book-poem whose potential and which, taken as a total of its poem and the references, images etc, is of great importance. <br />
<br />
The question of how to write positively about the possibility of change for the betterment of all people in the world is difficult. Rhetoric and the 'uplift' of songs and so on are always a part of the narrative of protest. War continues, albeit not on the vast scale of the two big ones in the 20th century, but they are as terrible for the people (mostly not directly involved) as those other large wars. A viable suspicion is that such wars are deemed necessary by the various 'planners' of the major powers of the 'West' and also probably China and such places as Saudi Arabia and many post colonial Governments throughout the world. However war happens, and whatever the causes though it is a constant that overall, for millions of Others, it is an endless nightmare. A horror.<br />
<br />
So for this reason I think this book has the value of alerting readers and browsers to these issues. This is the first good thing about this book. Another is the valiant attempt, and that the writer goes beyond himself. <br />
<br />
Not that 'confessional' poetry has no value, but we must always remember that it is an inevitably self-centred exercise, and thus can be as problematic as the (often) rather abstract didaction of what could be a fatally good poem such as Tennyson's 'Charge of the Light Brigade' or some of Kipling's or Brooke's <i>faux pas</i> (although to be fair to Brooke he never got to see what modern war was like and died, absurdly and tragically, in transit to that war). But like all writers his or their general thematic (Thom's, Tennyson's, Shelley's etc): style and ability are on display – again this is not a bad thing, an artist should in theory be able to integrate some kind of "beef" with what is an artistically effective poem, the problem is how – so he has also to be judged on it merits as a poem – but this interacts with its purpose or <i>raison d'etre</i>. The two need to be coordinated skilfully. <br />
<br />
So for that first reason it affected me. What was this all about? I knew 'The Mask of Anarchy' but nothing of the war in Yemen. But it activated me to be concerned, to investigate. I remembered my "protest days" when in the late 60s I protested the Vietnam war and much else, and even my protest against the 1981 Springbok Tour where I was battened. On a small scale, the protests of 1981 and perhaps the later land protests by Maori made New Zealand of that time into a place in an eerie kind of civil war. I later wrote a poem about the protests and started one (circa 1969) re the Vietnam War. The problem of political poems was perhaps not clear to me but my anger energised some strong rhetoric. My (earlier) Vietnam poem started; 'Bastard country...' (referring to the US). I had been reading Levertov in those popular booklets of poetry with photographs at the time. I stopped writing poetry altogether around then. Political poetry when I wrote it later, I found to be doable but always leading into contradictions. Political involvement seemed to prevent me even from writing anything of creative nature. So, the problem is not only of a kind of poem but of what is the nature and or the need of poetry. And yet no doubt this kind of poetry or writing can be done.<br />
<br />
And Thom's book is good in bringing to our attention a kind of historical continuity in such protests (and the protests are wider than just about arms sales, they are about the terrible nature or war and perhaps they are an attempt to stop them, to change the world, as I once dreamed of doing...). And perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps the style of Thom's poem is right. Perhaps the relatively obscure references, the annoying acronyms etc, the interjection of languages I have no idea of, are challenges; perhaps they are the ticket. But my own feeling is that in both Shelley and Thom's poem we are 'distanced' and 'disassociated' (T.S.Eliot's 'disassociation of sensibility' perhaps), and that something more direct, more vivid is needed. Perhaps, perhaps not. But I should give some examples of the poem-book, and a brief excerpt from Shelley's poem.
<blockquote>
What would Shelley find to say<br />
Of Murder met with on his way?<br />
Eldon, Sidmouth, Castlereagh<br />
Are gone into that endless night<br />
Their vice and virtue all forgot<br />
Save in Shelley's Jeremiad<br />
- Which from Jeremy I had<br />
And not from FedEx out of Riyadh -<br />
But Anarchy, the Skeleton<br />
Still works the bellows and the drone<br />
And keys are rattling still<br />
On the instrument of Hell.<br />
Chill music of proxy wars<br />
.........................................<br />
<span style="padding-left: 9em;">... flying notes</span><br />
Are infant heads on Murder's floor.<br />
The Arms Fair prospers yet, and Rudd<br />
Has curtained off a mire of blood<br />
Which the Few, the Good, the Great<br />
In ermine gowns may contemplate.</blockquote>
Later in the poem:
<blockquote>At a margin of collateral<br />
Harm to school or hospital<br />
In a hell-sent British shell.</blockquote>
Hereabouts though the focus shifts to Darien, Panamax (presumably a conflict in Panama) until the lines are:
<blockquote>
With each defended nation state<br />
Despite the UN, Amnesty<br />
And innocents who turn and flee<br />
The raptor or the UAV.<br />
Crestfalls thus from blighted fields...</blockquote>
And here and through the poem I am struggling to decode the many references and and acronyms and the somewhat awkward clutter of writing here. But again there is something good in this evocation of Shelley's poem:
<blockquote>
<span style="padding-left: 2em;">Eldon, Sidmouth, Castlereagh</span><br />
Are in the stocks that Shelley made</blockquote>
And Peterloo is invoked, which is good, but I am not sure of the effectiveness of this mode of writing. It is de facto that the problem here I wrestle with re such political poems, or writing trying to 'change the world' is what mode should or can be adopted to avoid ambiguities or over simplification and the danger of too much rhetoric and abstraction. On the other hand if it is impossible to write without using such 'abstractions' or metaphors, then the 'problem' of this book-poem and the issues it struggles with are problems of language. The way these things are presented effectively or not are philosophical linguistic issues that are complex. The danger is that the very language employed enhances the kind of tub-thumpings that leads us into wars.<br />
<br />
And this applies to Shelley also, no one is immune from this difficulty. Shelley on the Massacre at Peterloo:
<blockquote>
<span style="padding-left: 4em;">XC</span><br />
<br />
'And these words shall then become<br />
Like Oppression's thundered doom<br />
Ringing through each heart and brain,<br />
Heard again – again – again –<br />
<br />
<span style="padding-left: 4em;">XCI</span><br />
<br />
'Rise like Lions after slumber<br />
In unvanquishable number –<br />
Shake your chains to earth like dew<br />
Which in sleep had fallen on you –<br />
Ye are many – they are few.'</blockquote>
Shelley wanted this poem to be published and to energise protests against the restrictive and often unjust laws of the ruling classes of 1819. But his poem was not published until well after the event.Would it have inspired revolt through indignation and the energy of his poem? It is hard to say.<br />
<br />
What other primarily or strongly political poems or poets are there? There have been a lot and if we include those now also concerned with environmental issues it is possibly increasing (as are tendencies toward writers struggling with their own inner issues, fears, psychological pressures and so on (perhaps the starting point of a wider ethical concern?)<br />
<br />
For me the problem of mode has not been solved or it perhaps requires many such modes:<br />
<br />
Rosemary Menzies , whom I knew and who helped my rather 'inward' and somewhat image or language-based poetry, invited myself, with Joy McKenzie, to be the guest readers at one of her Wednesday night poetry events then held at the Masonic. Her own book <i>Poems for Bosnia</i> seem to me to cut closer to many of these issues. She is more direct than Thom.
<blockquote>These are a people<br />
I will not forget.<br />
<br />
In the warmth of the crumbled stones<br />
their soul still lives,<br />
In the sandbags that fill the holes<br />
their courage is piled high.<br />
In the beauty of their bearing<br />
lies the triumph of dignity.</blockquote>
Rosemary made an extensive trip to Yugoslavia at a time that that country was split into a war whose complexity (and savagery) defied analysis. But she was there, she did speak with the people there, she speaks of killing, castration, rape, blood and grief so the rhetoric here is perhaps more convincing. (Not that we expect Thom to travel into Saudi Arabia or Yemen; indeed, perhaps piqued by Thom's poem for example, we ourselves can learn something of the horror and complexity of that war, one of the effects being the starvation of people in Yemen, as well as the destruction and maiming of people by guns).
<blockquote>Everywhere I went<br />
they asked me:<br />
<br />
<i>Tell the world what's happening.<br />
Tell what you have seen.</i> <br />
<br />
Later there is more directness:<br />
<br />
<i>Tell me what else I cannot see.</i><br />
<br />
You cannot see the fires<br />
nor the piles of unburied dead;<br />
too many for even the starving dogs<br />
to finish. </blockquote>
And we are now moving closer to the reality of war. People are named and places. It is not A against B or some politician in particular, it is certain brutal military men: in fact it is humans killing humans, something her whole book-poem cries to be stopped. Her book is powerful. But does it leave us still too much 'in the dark', is it the right way?<br />
<br />
Another way is <i>Shut Up Shut Down</i> by the US 'experimental-realist' poet Mark Nowak which deals with the struggles of miners (and families of those dealing with the death of miners) and people in poverty, unions, unemployment. His method is to mix statements by people interviewed with official statements, excerpts from some political theory and the statements made to him directly by people affected.<br />
<br />
This is a brief attempt at what I think has to go beyond a normative review: these issues we <i>feel</i> are 'too deep for thought', somehow we know the injustice, the greed of oppressors, the folly of politicians, the massacres, the bigotry from all sides, the genuine struggles, the insane killing by drones of the machine guns of mercenaries and so on. We know that it is the people everywhere, of whatever religion of ethnicity, who are chopped up by the machines of death. We feel helpless. These books all offer various modalities or modes of 'attack' to bring to the mind and heart of the reader these things.<br />
<br />
Despite the drawbacks of all methods, and despite the considerable reservations I have about Thom's poem (its failure is linked to its success, the almost Shelleyan rhetoric and the mode by its strangeness of mode for our times); and indeed the most extraordinary example I can think of of a great poem of this generic style that is almost terminally awful is Tennyson's 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' – a poem whose 'story' whose language is powerfully memorable – but how stupid it is! To glorify what was, it seems, a terrible misunderstanding, and the suicidally inane (but heroic) charge straight into the Russian guns. And the worst line ever: 'Theirs is not to reason why, theirs but to do and die.' Amazing! And in a documentary on WWII on YouTube this, quoted by MacArthur in a documentary on the Pacific War: brought waves of approbation from those not even knowing he was quoting!<br />
<br />
This brilliantly written, but inherently stupid poem, is the other end of the scale.<br />
<br />
It is how the very beauty and energy of a poem can lead us towards a naïve war jingoism and away from changing things and sometimes the mode of everyone who attempts these political or world changing works. Pound's <i>Cantos</i>, fundamentally energised by the writer's horror at the effects of that terrible, insane slaughter house, the First World War in which he lost his friend a sculptor, and a poet, and in which he knew so many died, basically for nothing, but which led him, via his thumping towards a solution: that Usury (banks, big finance and hence Jews) was the cause of it all, is another example, in some senses as stupid as Tennyson's effort. Yet it remains a major work.<br />
<br />
But it can, if used well, also lead us toward new ways of seeing literature and a wider understanding of the world and life. And Pound is fundamental in this great, if often flawed, attempt to 'solve' the complex historical and human and cultural equation.<br />
<br />
So Thom's poem is important as something that might energise people to consider the issues he refers to (the arms sales, the iniquitous wars, the oppression etc) and lead them to research the issues, but as a poem <i>per se</i> it is limited, given the task, and given that there are moments of impact and strong writing: the problem turns on that aesthetics are linked to morality. (Shelley's <i>Mask of Anarchy</i> and Tennyson's poem and Pound's <i>Cantos</i> and the others I mentioned above all have similar limitations, I feel. So Thom is in good company). But one is thankful for the passion and the concern that underwrites the work.</blockquote>
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Dr Jack Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01805945600952222957noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1664810700625454120.post-19926422694387321832018-12-05T10:13:00.001+13:002018-12-20T10:27:24.419+13:00Owen Bullock: Work & Play (2017)<div align="center">
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<span style="font-size: 85%;">Owen Bullock: <a href="http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct18/gibbins_rev.htm">Work & Play</a> (2017)</span><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: 180%;">Reviews:</span></b></div>
<br />
<blockquote><blockquote>Owen Bullock. <i>Work & Play</i>. Canberra, Australia: Recent Work Press, 2017. RRP $AU 12.95. 88 pp.</blockquote>
<div align="center">
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<b>Reviewed by <a href="http://poetrynzreview.blogspot.co.nz/2017/05/about-reviewers.html">Richard Taylor</a></b></div><br />
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The difficulty I have in assessing the poems in <i>Work and Play</i> are that these poems seem transitional in style and their mode is such that the prose poems in the first part of the book, which I feel are the best – conflict with a pull toward the more conventionally styled poems in the second part. I feel Bullock could have taken both sections of his book further but some, especially in the second part simply don't work. Nevertheless in mode and style they are more interesting to me than (if we can define them), more 'normative' poems. What was initially a bit disappointing I felt, was that Bullock as I wrote in my notes: ‘...doesn't charge these poems sufficiently.’ Perhaps that is unfair, some are like that and I think there are perhaps too many poems not so good in the second part, but as I read and re-read Work and Play I started seeing more and more of interest (although some criticism of certain weaknesses remain); and it seems (despite some reservations) it is a stimulating book with a lot of energy (given what appear to me to be some misfires and what seem like over-writing). <br />
<br />
However, those who know Bullock's work should add this book to others he has written as it shows I think a struggle to move in new directions (some of this is indicated by the blurb and notes and comments by Bullock himself). This is a difficult thing to get right.<br />
<br />
As a poem gets shorter it seems to me, certain errors or lapses in control or editing of the poem become more significant. However, Bullock has written some very good Haibun's (which is a mix of prose and short, almost Haiku-like poems) and I will start with (a quote from) a very good poem that begins the second part of his book, that is 'Brogo, Bega'
<blockquote>
A dwelling, full of silence. Socked feet find the meditation room.<br />
<br />
<span style="padding-left: 9em;">in the house</span><br />
<span style="padding-left: 9em;">of characterful doors</span><br />
<span style="padding-left: 9em;">a framed photo</span><br />
<span style="padding-left: 9em;">of a characterful door</span><br />
<br />
<span style="padding-left: 9em;">the profile</span><br />
<span style="padding-left: 9em;">of the Rayburn’s flu</span><br />
<span style="padding-left: 9em;">reminds me …</span><br />
<br />
Father’s pot of tea steeping on the shelf above the hob.<br />
<br />
A framed jigsaw ornaments the bathroom; orange & yellow tiles, black & white parrots.<br />
<br />
A fireplace worthy of a great hall, well-prepared, flares swiftly.<br />
<br />
<span style="padding-left: 9em;">perusing someone else’s books</span><br />
<span style="padding-left: 9em;">the cuckoos</span><br />
<span style="padding-left: 9em;">in us</span><br />
<br />
‘My life is a creative act.’ – Ram Dass.<br />
<br />
<br />
Staying in someone else’s house is like looking at a portrait for a long time.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="padding-left: 9em;">the candle’s shadow</span><br />
<span style="padding-left: 9em;">flat</span><br />
<span style="padding-left: 9em;">against the wall</span><br />
<br />
<span style="padding-left: 9em;">view of the bush</span><br />
<span style="padding-left: 9em;">no more</span><br />
<span style="padding-left: 9em;">overlit corridors</span><br />
<br />
<span style="padding-left: 9em;">straight eucalypts</span><br />
<span style="padding-left: 9em;">warm warble</span><br />
<span style="padding-left: 9em;">of kookaburra</span><br />
<br />
<br />
I want to touch the quiet. Sometimes it seems as though everyone’s had a more troubled life than me; nothing attacks me from the past. A bird hovers among ruminations. It’s our nature, too, to look for food, to go where the work is — what we’ve been discussing in our couple of days away from routine.
</blockquote>
This shows part of what is indeed an excellent poem of this kind and in some ways it echoes the 'experimental' use of found fragments etc in the first section of the book. The poems following this poem are mostly less accomplished but are similarly quirky and always interesting. He goes closer to that 'charge' I talked of, in 'Spring', and the lines:
<blockquote>
mullock<br />
semi-hobo<br />
tender bone<br />
<blockquote>
<i>she's been shoulder tapped</i></blockquote>
jaup the propitious light
</blockquote>
Here the intrigue is in what is left out, and these fragments work.<br />
<br />
'guide' is also a very good poem in this section, and 'repechage' which starts hauntingly:
<blockquote>
a dream is a blue estuary<br />
with a long corridor<br />
<br />
people come and go<br />
hidden in mist
</blockquote>
There are some great or almost great poems otherwise in this second half but they may need editing or in some cases leaving out.<br />
<br />
But the most interesting poems perhaps are those prose poems in lower case, with or without found material in the first section of the book. In this section, of these poems there are some great examples, including what is a brilliant micro story 'At the bus stop'; and such as 'Let someone else be crazy' which is perfect of the form here that reminds me of say Ted Berrigan or Frank O'Hara (whereas some of Bullock's other poems in both parts of his book shift modally towards something like Sam Sampson's fascinatingly enigmatic poems, or the writing of some of the Language poets, or the post-Language writers and their theoretical offshoots). In 'Let someone else be crazy' the poet uses humour and discursive techniques. It is just right.<br />
<br />
I also liked 'Bubble' (here the poet definitely veers away from 'confessionalism' and the technique is as if two personas are egging each other on) and 'Layers':
<blockquote>
Bubble<br />
<br />
Why don't you talk about the river you skimmed on....
</blockquote>
Thus he keeps some ironic distance between ‘himself’ and himself.
<blockquote>
Layers<br />
<br />
We peel the town together; I take walls, you rooves.<br />
In one house a woman hasn't spoken to her partner<br />
for four days....
</blockquote>
The man to whom the woman 'hasn't spoken to...for four days' (!) has shaved his beard which gave the woman security. Bullock is hard to pin down and here he uses humour and an imagined 'tour' through a suburb of people to see those people. It is good writing indeed.<br />
<br />
The book is work and play and Bullock plays:
<blockquote>
Num num, birdy num-nums, nom de nom. Creosote,<br />
creoso, welcome, willkommen....
</blockquote>
This is a burst of language play perhaps a little reminiscent of Khlebnikov's 'zaum' works. And it is play.<br />
<br />
But the play is work and thus is creativity so:
<blockquote>
Creativity's a wild pig that comes at you out of the bush<br />
when you're isolated without a gun and uncertain of the<br />
knife in your hand. If someone were to control it, it would<br />
be a tame event, a habit. We die each day because we live.
</blockquote>
And we tend to say ‘true’ (not being really sure what it is that is thus true!): but the truth of a poem's truth is in the poem. Perhaps he is echoing William Carlos Williams:
<blockquote>
<span style="padding-left: 8em;">It is difficult</span><br />
to get the news from poems<br />
<span style="padding-left: 4em;">yet men die miserably every day</span><br />
<span style="padding-left: 8em;">for lack</span><br />
of what is found there.
</blockquote>
We are not sure what this means any more than what Bullock means above but it haunts and challenges us.<br />
<br />
Bullock may have lapses in many poems but his work is always surprising, and sometimes brilliant: and it is full of great activity and a struggle toward ideas of play and work and the process of life lived. </blockquote>
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Dr Jack Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01805945600952222957noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1664810700625454120.post-84576449663873677982018-12-05T09:14:00.000+13:002018-12-08T07:31:31.711+13:00Riemke Ensing: If Only (2017)<div align="center">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyN8IGf3nUcaVDWzuJdF31scunr08i2zopVSzV-ayU43JnhsHBOIFaplhi4FmT7Kuesx_6qZQjuRygc9HQGf3c-lq0hFOyF8rhbXodojpzhGRXdxxcaCn3FC75QZBdC_NE-l3bmXyACZk/s1600/Screen+Shot+2018-12-05+at+08.46.29.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyN8IGf3nUcaVDWzuJdF31scunr08i2zopVSzV-ayU43JnhsHBOIFaplhi4FmT7Kuesx_6qZQjuRygc9HQGf3c-lq0hFOyF8rhbXodojpzhGRXdxxcaCn3FC75QZBdC_NE-l3bmXyACZk/s640/Screen+Shot+2018-12-05+at+08.46.29.png" width="360" height="640" data-original-width="514" data-original-height="914" /></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">Riemke Ensing: <i>If Only</i> (2017)</span><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: 180%;">An experience reading <i>If Only</i> by Riemke Ensing (poet)<br />
and Tara McLeod (graphic designer)</span></b></div>
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<blockquote><blockquote>Riemke Ensing. <i>If Only</i>. Designed by Tara McLeod. Auckland: The Pear Tree Press, 2017. RRP $220. 36 pp.</blockquote>
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<b>by <a href="http://poetrynzreview.blogspot.co.nz/2017/05/about-reviewers.html">Alexandra Balm</a></b></div><br />
<br />
I attended a poetry reading recently. In spite of its timing: early Sunday afternoon, when most shops in Northcote were doing their siesta, it was a scintillating event: a few notable NZ poets gathered to read against the background of local art, an exhibition at the Northart Gallery titled <i>The Poetic Condition</i>. All participating poets – among whom Riemke Ensing, Wystan Curnow, Amanda Eason, Nadine LaHatte, Graham Lindsay, Sen McGlinn, Alistair Paterson and Denys Trussell – were reading from a collective volume published at Donek Press, <i>Poems from the Pantry</i>.<br />
<br />
It was a small, intimate gathering and I felt at ease even if I only knew Riemke Ensing – from a poetry conference in Auckland – and listened to Denys Trussell and Alistair Paterson read at the same conference and Wystan Curnow present a paper at a symposium in Wellington. The other names were vaguely familiar from other poetry readings. <br />
<br />
The poems read were infused with subtle humour and were touching in a joyous way – a paradigmatic image of NZ poetry at its best: deep, anchored in the immediate, unassuming. . In tune with the humility of the collection’s title, <i>Poems from the Pantry</i>, the poets had none of the aura of rock stars, neither were they post-pubescent <i>enfants terribles</i>. However, their words reminded the audience of so many levels of lived experience, from food and meals shared with friends to existential seeking, crises or angst, all dipped in mild self-deprecating irony that seems particular to intelligent New Zealanders. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdrEpDgl2II5XyqeOU7hIFkNem11QQNZnUYn9N8K_YqVIZcigHDLIlhJCgejClgji3-AEjoe0lockHsOHYyxWFeqABYISAENbO7sKxUm091pfECcNcU0YaAIkChsIT6zcvHmAFwIvf7JA/s1600/150106ensing.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdrEpDgl2II5XyqeOU7hIFkNem11QQNZnUYn9N8K_YqVIZcigHDLIlhJCgejClgji3-AEjoe0lockHsOHYyxWFeqABYISAENbO7sKxUm091pfECcNcU0YaAIkChsIT6zcvHmAFwIvf7JA/s640/150106ensing.jpg" width="640" height="427" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1067" /></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><a href="https://www.ensing.co.nz/">Riemke Ensing</a></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 78%;">[photo by James Ensing-Trussell]</span>
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The event reminded me of the first time when I listened to Riemke Ensing read at the 2017 Poetry Conference in Auckland. As she walked on the stage amongst loud applause she waved the admiration of the audience away. She struck me as one to dismiss accolades and formality. When I talked to her later during the day, there was a playful twinkle in her eyes and an aura of kindness, of the sort that fosters consideration for people and their emotions. <br />
<br />
<i>If Only</i>, Riemke Ensing’s latest collection that she read from from at the Auckland Poetry Conference, had gradually developed over five or so years. The poems document the persona’s states after the loss of a loved one, identifiable with the poet’s grappling with the death of her partner, Bill Trussell. The sense of longing and the residual affection invested in poems after their recipient has passed, now presumably transmitted through poems to the loved one’s ineffable spirit, immediately established a connection. A dear friend’s husband had died a few weeks previous and my father a year before, so death was very much on my mind. I decided to buy <i>If Only</i> for my friend, but then I kept it for myself. A mutual friend had already offered her a copy. I wondered at the coincidence.
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<b><span style="font-size: 130%;">•</span></b></div><br />
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<i>If Only</i> is one of those rare books that compel one to share one’s experience reading it. It was written when “conditions for writing couldn’t have been more dangerous,” when
<blockquote>Everything froze over.<br />
Grief was deep and nothing seemed bound to earth.<br />
Whole hillsides came down in a rush. (‘A different kind of Hemingway episode’ <br />
after reading ‘There is never any end to Paris’).
</blockquote>
Despite the dangerous conditions for writing and indeed for being, <i>If Only</i> stands proof that absences can be filed in time with the wisdom and even joy that experience has engendered, that gaps can be bridged, that the essence of lived experience is not sorrow or futility, but hope:
<blockquote>There was the year you died<br />
and then another and another year. [...]<br />
<br />
And all the time there were birds.<br />
The trees full of them, and the garden.<br />
Musicians in white ties, fiercely fast,<br />
chatting, whistling, making passes at each other<br />
as though it were spring and not this depth of winter<br />
with life almost at standstill.
</blockquote>
There is undeniable joy in the activities and noises of the tui that animate the scene despite the sense that life has frozen over and is in danger of coming to a standstill. The poem bears testimony that the search for answers, and the connections across realms that such searches establish, can eventually yield beauty. <br />
<br />
‘A different kind of Hemingway episode,’ from where the lines above are quoted, won the NZSA Kevin Ireland Poetry Competition in 2012. Kevin Ireland praised the poem and noted that “every word of it is crafted, poignant and precisely right. There is not even the shadow of a comma to spare.” <a class="style23" href="https://poetrynzreview.blogspot.com/2018/12/riemke-ensing-if-only-2017.html#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title="">[1]</a><br />
<br />
Indeed, the whole poem collection <i>If Only</i> is perfect in many ways. It is any poet's or bibliophile reader's dream. It is a thing of beauty, assembled with such consideration for the poems it comprises, and with such love that once opened it becomes a treasured object.<br />
<br />
There are not many handmade books these days, but <i>If Only</i> is exceptional for more than this reason. Exquisitely handmade and handset by Tara McLeod of The Pear Tree Press in Auckland, its pages are individually painted, and hand printed with illustrations that encourage and support the reader’s stepping into the world of the poem. Each page is unique and a pretext for private meditation. The fact that the pages are unnumbered suggests the apparent infinity of grief, the shapelessness that life assumes for a while after a loss, as well as the unhoped-for transformed state of being that the self eventually forges out of existence that had been rendered nondescript by pain. <br />
<br />
Ensing's poems in <i>If Only</i> appeal to me both through recording states that one visits after loss, and through their resemblance to William Blake's illuminations. Graphic designer Tara McLeod has carefully assembled thirty handmade copies of the volume – “handset in 14pt Garamond and printed on a Littlejohn proofing press,” as the note at the end of the book testifies – that seem a minimalist modern gesture in the direction of the Romantic poet’s books. The book ends with McLeod’s autograph and it opens with Ensing’s signature on the title page, both in pencil. As if a pen would be too strong an assertion of presence and authorship. As if both the poet and the artist were just mediums, instruments or vehicles through which the poems could be transmitted to the readers. As if such a valuable book can be approached with only the delicate, erasable, touch of a pencil nib rather than the permanent mark of a pen. A reminder that human presence and work, and indeed existence, even if far from indelible, would be mere traces on water had it not been for poems or stories to record them.<br />
<br />
I leaf through <i>If Only</i> quite often. Each poem makes a strong impression. Each time I turn to ‘The Last Summer of the World’ I gasp as if ambushed by a wave, almost a tsunami, of emotions. The birds printed on the left transport me to my childhood, when I used to watch the swallow prepare their migration against the autumn sky, and I dreamed of other countries. The poem on the right reminds me of loss and its meaninglessness. And yet in the poet’s registering aspects of the world in which she’s left to live, there’s an inkling that she had succeeded in seeing through absence into the ripe meaning of presence and its hypostatisation as small details.<br />
<br />
I was tempted to copy here the whole poem<a class="style23" href="https://poetrynzreview.blogspot.com/2018/12/riemke-ensing-if-only-2017.html#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title="">[2]</a> ‘The Last Summer of the World,’ but after I have seen them together, the poem might appear incomplete without its accompanying illumination. As Ensing acknowledges, “Tara [McLeod] has a wonderful eye for capturing the essence of a poem and he is truly in tune with what happens in the poem,” so much so that without the illumination, the poem might feel bereft of layers of meaning and expressiveness, its impact diminished. The text of the poem and the image to its left – and the texture of the paper (104 gsm Sundance white) – seem inexorably married together, such that separating one from the other would be as insensitive as separating kindred spirits who have grown together, one filling in the gaps and the spaces offered by the other, in a dance of complementarities that speaks of the soul’s longing for wholeness and fulfilment. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3RNJuxETYdn_uaVIeaeP4tT52Ufzg2seizu6dE2BSow15xKdqP2WskHRYb4ubLdmz7hnDFrkTzPrwZFnsAaGrlWZfA5l5jPLhYryYq6TxsNRv-OUa9oEGZewpG8Rw71Nuo7Kbst01HAQ/s1600/Screen+Shot+2018-12-05+at+08.49.03.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3RNJuxETYdn_uaVIeaeP4tT52Ufzg2seizu6dE2BSow15xKdqP2WskHRYb4ubLdmz7hnDFrkTzPrwZFnsAaGrlWZfA5l5jPLhYryYq6TxsNRv-OUa9oEGZewpG8Rw71Nuo7Kbst01HAQ/s640/Screen+Shot+2018-12-05+at+08.49.03.png" width="640" height="360" data-original-width="1206" data-original-height="678" /></a></div>
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Often, when I read a collection of poems, I pick a few favourites, poems that speak to me the most directly. However, it is impossible to have favourites amongst the poems in <i>If Only</i>, so I have picked a few almost at random. ‘The Poet Writes of Death’ is a touching ode to life that reminds me of my friend who can only read one of the <i>If Only</i> poems a day. For – I can only guess – each poem is so rich with emotions, suggestions, memories and presence that one is enough to fill the space of a day.<br />
<br />
An intriguing poem is ‘Flame’ – an elegy of longing and desire as vivid at each re-reading and as present as when initially experienced. Each poem invites repeated readings. Each revisit is different, yet as fresh, as surprising, as the first time round, each time reading is a holistic happening that involves all the senses. The paper feels as the parchment-like skin of a loved one in winter; it smells of a calm woods in summer. Flames rise off the page to hit the retina, words stir and soothe in equal measure in a syncretic experience made even more complete when the poems are read out loud. I almost feel the taste of sadness and the tinge of hope on my tongue when I read the poems in <i>If Only</i>. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimJGeux8IUSavw5pedcFp3WVIgpgUAIK1DRV7HfBc8yuGvLtxFKg0gQju1Po40RqA6_5UYLZh23-vJTMfh6LsBinq3E_qNIVYT6_IdNcvto_UEDfiUhi7WRKl0LLelhCOzYkmQ0IF2muU/s1600/Screen+Shot+2018-12-05+at+08.59.35.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimJGeux8IUSavw5pedcFp3WVIgpgUAIK1DRV7HfBc8yuGvLtxFKg0gQju1Po40RqA6_5UYLZh23-vJTMfh6LsBinq3E_qNIVYT6_IdNcvto_UEDfiUhi7WRKl0LLelhCOzYkmQ0IF2muU/s640/Screen+Shot+2018-12-05+at+08.59.35.png" width="640" height="357" data-original-width="1208" data-original-height="674" /></a></div>
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Ensing's poem talk less of grief as of the experiences that have made loss the more difficult. They are poems of recovering from grief to discover a world replete with beauty even more poignant than before the loss. These poems have sprung from pain to produce mesmerizing sad joy, but joy nonetheless.<br />
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<span style="font-size: 130%;"><b>Notes on rare, handmade books</b></span><br />
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Books like Riemke Ensing’s and Tara McLeod's are symptomatic of a return to valuing the book as an object, of creating books that resist the temptation of convenience and defy the means of mechanical reproduction, which Walter Benjamin deplored during modernism in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935). In face of the de-personalisation and loss of aura that consumerism brings, handmade objects and books mark a return to an age of craftspeople and artisan objects created with calm and devoted effort, with dedication and patient joy that are close to zen-like meditation. If I were to give a name to this age I'd call it metamodern.<br />
<br />
When most books are produced through what Walter Benjamin called “means of mechanical reproduction,” producing a book – indeed anything at all – by any other means is a revolutionary act. More than a century before, William Blake had tried to counteract the depersonalisation of book production by creating unique volumes that he engraved in backward handwriting and that contained illuminations that he would colour in by hand, each copy different to the next one. Following what seems to crystallise as a meta-modern paradigm, Ensing and McLeod cast personal grief into the shape of expressed authentic lived experience and aesthetically pleasing pages. <br />
<br />
In a non-threatening and irenic (non-aggressive), non-competitive way, a few small presses – such as The Pear Tree Press, where <i>If Only</i> was published and, perhaps, Eunoia of <i>Richman Road</i> fame – compete with big publishing houses to produce beautiful objects rather than great numbers of volumes. Such books are called to answer to a multitude of needs. They enchant the eye and satisfy the tactile sense through the texture of the page. Each time I turn a page of <i>If Only</i>, I cannot help running my fingers over the spaces that feel like the familiar skin of someone loved dearly for many decades. Then I touch the slightly indented words that are typset in the porous paper. After that I reach to the illustrations – indeed illuminations in the tradition of medieval manuscripts and Romantic William Blake.<br />
<br />
<i>If Only</i> satisfies the need for a special object – unique even – that can be shared with a friend or a significant other. Its poems express longings and chagrin that everyone would have experienced. They put in words the inexpressible hope that the dear one has not quite gone forever, that their presence survives in memories and in music, in the small accidents of fate that recreate moments reminiscent of the ones shared when alive.<br />
<br />
I tried again and again to pick a favourite poem, but one by one, as I read and re-read them, the one that I read last seems the most evocative. There is insight, quiet beauty, and truth in each of these poems of presence shaped from tormenting absence. As if each poem were a sculpture by Rodin – perfect, exquisite, haunting – in which an angular disciple such as Brancusi is born each time as a presence that’s meaningful, fiercely serious, poignant. Or better, a miraculous <i>Măiastra</i> within a rough stone. A presence within an absence. In <i>If Only</i>, the experience of the poet engenders and names our experiences for us, extracting them from anonymity, validating them, making them bearable. Significant.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpehW6L5s4Wp7tPr4r9_kCmg-UEMfe8NowbuaiWFa03fnOzRwyfiz41BRGCQa3j-tjfg0jAayMublXSEWyyMn0a8K5dJCyIFVD_8IK4HfKCtrvNUYcxD3i2c5bW3_2p7IyRCaryXcmWaM/s1600/Screen+Shot+2018-12-05+at+08.59.12.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpehW6L5s4Wp7tPr4r9_kCmg-UEMfe8NowbuaiWFa03fnOzRwyfiz41BRGCQa3j-tjfg0jAayMublXSEWyyMn0a8K5dJCyIFVD_8IK4HfKCtrvNUYcxD3i2c5bW3_2p7IyRCaryXcmWaM/s640/Screen+Shot+2018-12-05+at+08.59.12.png" width="640" height="354" data-original-width="1216" data-original-height="672" /></a></div>
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I find it hard to understand how, even if born of immense sadness, each poem reveals a sort of ineffable joy. As if the contradictions that inhabit the poems are created by the paradoxical nature of lived experience that we all have had a share in at some time. In the tangled garden untamed after the death there is a blue iris blossoming, in the poem ‘Und ob die Wolke.’<a class="style23" href="https://poetrynzreview.blogspot.com/2018/12/riemke-ensing-if-only-2017.html#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title="">[3]</a> The moment of surprise when the poetic voice is caught unawares is evoked by the image opposite, where the grass is interrupted by a trace of purple. As if to say that death is the negative of life, a negative that reveals its beauty. But life, like memory, can be as treacherous as it is beautiful. For when the clouds are waiting for a sign, for something to happen, there is no sign; the clouds refuse to take shape and encode messages from beyond.<br />
<br />
And yet the subsequent poem, ‘If Only’ talks of a “phoenix moment.” A unique, unrepeatable, epiphany. A "Time to dazzle and be dazzled/ again."<br />
<br />
One of my first creative writing tutors, Renee Liang, talked about the generosity of poets during one of those calm summer afternoons in the oval room at the Pah. I find the poems in <i>If Only</i> generous in their sharing private experiences that require courage to send into the world. And I suspect there might be an intention or hope that these poems would reach others and convey a message that even if unbearable at first, even if it stays fresh for years and years, grief eventually subsides into a state from which joy and beauty could be contemplated.
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<b><span style="font-size: 130%;">•</span></b></div><br />
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After a dinner we had together, my friend for whom my copy of <i>If Only</i> was originally intended noted that over the time we had known one another my poems had become more precise, tauter, better. We were leaving the restaurant when she said this, stepping from a cavernous interior into the low sun of the early evening. I stopped in my tracks and looked at her. It was at the tail end of a difficult period in my life, so I thought ruefully Yes, let circumstances hurt me deep enough and the poems will improve even more. But I only smiled and thanked my friend for the kind words. I remember this episode whenever I read Ensing’s poems. I am still amazed at their perfect balance that, even when tilting towards sadness, records beauty – of nature, of togetherness even if only in memory, of coming back to life after grief. From extreme anguish, they create a bubble of serenity that helps consolidate an acceptance of the inevitable. <br />
<br />
Like a meal shared with a friend, these poems offer a brief stop in remembered stories – some lived, some intertextual – a rest in poetry, reassuring togetherness and shared emotions.<br />
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<b>Footnotes:</b><br />
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<div id="ftn1">
<a href="https://poetrynzreview.blogspot.com/2018/12/riemke-ensing-if-only-2017.html#_ftn1" name="_ftn1" title="">1.</a> Lodge, Thomas. ‘Kevin Ireland Poetry Competition 2012’.
<a href="http://beattiesbookblog.blogspot.com/2012/09/kevin-ireland-poetry-competition-2012.html">http://beattiesbookblog.blogspot.com/2012/09/kevin-ireland-poetry-competition-2012.html</a>.</div>
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<div id="ftn2">
<a href="https://poetrynzreview.blogspot.com/2018/12/riemke-ensing-if-only-2017.html#_ftn2" name="_ftn2" title="">2.</a> In ‘Deformance and Interpretation,’ Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuels talk of the performative understanding of a text as a better way of engaging than a conceptual interpretation. A reading of a text – whether fragmented or in its entirety – is to me a performative act. Probably more so, if a frame – however sketchy – is provided. Hence, reproducing large chunks or whole poems, as opposed to the usual analytical deconstruction, might be a better way of giving the reader a “feel for” the text. See Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuels, ‘Deformance and Interpretation,’ <a href="http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/jjm2f/old/deform.html">http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/jjm2f/old/deform.html</a>.</div>
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<div id="ftn3">
<a href="https://poetrynzreview.blogspot.com/2018/12/riemke-ensing-if-only-2017.html#_ftn3" name="_ftn3" title="">3.</a> ‘Through Clouds Obscure,’ from Act III of the German opera <i>Der Freischütz</i> by Carl Maria von Weber (Libretto: Friedrich Kind), where Agathe prays to heaven for protection from the dream she had in which she turned into a dove and her lover Max shot her.</div>
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<span style="font-size: 85%;"><a href="http://www.poetrynz.net/">Poetry New Zealand</a></span></div><br />
<br />Dr Jack Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01805945600952222957noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1664810700625454120.post-66324537589790842162018-01-01T08:30:00.000+13:002018-12-22T10:33:51.043+13:00Terence O'Neill Joyce: Painting with Words (2017)<div align="center">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjtWb5DcJf1zLV7mqLE185wy2SsB4fKrCIt1-03zMpsEzTcBDqTaL054nPXuFOBvQCbpkEXs5MJfOzX4GlzYzTyVUNT9UKRTsLHZv8h2Kxg90QoqyXeBEnghNDiU_ebGINIJ1byZDh4KY/s1600/5-7-2017-Poeetry-book.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjtWb5DcJf1zLV7mqLE185wy2SsB4fKrCIt1-03zMpsEzTcBDqTaL054nPXuFOBvQCbpkEXs5MJfOzX4GlzYzTyVUNT9UKRTsLHZv8h2Kxg90QoqyXeBEnghNDiU_ebGINIJ1byZDh4KY/s400/5-7-2017-Poeetry-book.jpg" width="400" height="267" data-original-width="685" data-original-height="457" /></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">Terence O'Neill-Joyce: <a href="https://www.localmatters.co.nz/news/14954-nations-flavour-local-poets-work.html">Painting with Words</a> (2017)</span><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: 180%;">Books and Magazines in brief:</span></b></div>
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<blockquote><blockquote>Terence O’Neill-Joyce. <i>Painting with Words: A Collection of Poems</i>. Warkworth: Video Pacific Communications Limited, 2017. RRP $30, 182 pp.</blockquote>
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<b>Reviewed by <a href="http://poetrynzreview.blogspot.co.nz/2017/05/about-reviewers.html">Jack Ross</a></b></div><br />
<br />
Terence O’Neill-Joyce’s book is clearly the work of a lifetime: it contains literally hundreds of poems presented in A4 format with photos and illustrations.<br />
<br />
Virtually all of them are centred in the middle of the page — an easy task in the digital age, but also a measure of a certain lack of attention to differentiating them one from another.<br />
<br />
Some of the poems are clearly meant as song lyrics — a field in which O’Neill-Joyce has had a good deal of success (he won a New Zealand Music Award for ‘outstanding contribution to music’ in 1980, and still owns the company Videopacific Communications Limited).<br />
<br />
For me, the best ones are those which record conversations or incidents of the wayside on the author’s numerous travels over the years: ‘Taxi Fare’ (1999), for instance, or the fascinating evocation of Mexico in ‘Taxco’.<br />
<br />
O’Neill-Joyce dedicates his collection to ‘the Presence that is never absent, call it angelic, spirit, guardian, I am in no doubt that behind the curtain of this supposed world of “reality” there is another place from whence we came and to where we will go’.<br />
<br />
This essentially Platonic view of Nature as (in W. B. Yeats’s words) ‘a spume that plays / Upon a ghostly paradigm of things’ is not one I could really assent to wholeheartedly myself, but I may well be in the minority in that. Nonetheless, I’m glad for Terence O’Neill-Joyce’s sake that he’s been able to put on record his engagement with this world over so many fruitful years.</blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTmcMZMwsLjy4G9QxMlramrXjUACTwFXyyTumtVpbALr2JXPGurP-hrtbR26Vk_pJSxX7-bMG-QMtT4Ohiw7NwZyH-ZPt5pTQZ5ifbwxMWbSTMShdN-_Z1eSnBFK_xVMMDRwhrbKxQW4M/s1600/images.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTmcMZMwsLjy4G9QxMlramrXjUACTwFXyyTumtVpbALr2JXPGurP-hrtbR26Vk_pJSxX7-bMG-QMtT4Ohiw7NwZyH-ZPt5pTQZ5ifbwxMWbSTMShdN-_Z1eSnBFK_xVMMDRwhrbKxQW4M/s400/images.jpg" width="400" height="141" data-original-width="378" data-original-height="133" /></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><a href="http://www.poetrynz.net/">Poetry New Zealand</a></span></div><br />
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Dr Jack Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01805945600952222957noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1664810700625454120.post-84613140666509850752017-07-25T08:32:00.000+12:002017-12-02T09:19:33.785+13:00Diana Brodie: Giotto's Circle (2013)<div style="text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigHgcN_I1inoCxRkwm8VmQ3sehksgh68Cv-nEtHcdoXsYhvIOo2NTMr2GW08p-V1xybh5EpLOKvzD6PwzC4RqCyQ9h9DJEry02lPinndYBUZceF24OI8PXy7dYJuRI3WJnuVLo1cWc05s/s1600/giotto.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigHgcN_I1inoCxRkwm8VmQ3sehksgh68Cv-nEtHcdoXsYhvIOo2NTMr2GW08p-V1xybh5EpLOKvzD6PwzC4RqCyQ9h9DJEry02lPinndYBUZceF24OI8PXy7dYJuRI3WJnuVLo1cWc05s/s400/giotto.jpg" width="283" height="400" data-original-width="800" data-original-height="1132" /></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">Diana Brodie: <a href="http://www.poetrysalzburg.com/giotto.htm">Giotto's Circle</a> (2013)</span>
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<b><span style="font-size: 180%;">Reviews:</span></b></div>
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<blockquote><blockquote>Diana Brodie. <i>Giotto’s Circle</i>. ISBN 978-3-901993-41-1. University of Salzburg: Poetry Salzburg, 2013. RRP £10.50 (+ 2.00 p&p), €13.00 (+ 2.50 p&p), US$ 18.00 (+ 3.00 p&p). 96 pp.</blockquote>
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<b>Reviewed by <a href="http://poetrynzreview.blogspot.co.nz/2017/05/about-reviewers.html">Mary Cresswell</a></b></div><br />
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The book starts out bright and loud:
<blockquote>
An O<br />
drawn freehand, his arm<br />
used as compass, his brush<br />
dipped in blood red,<br />
<span style="padding-left: 4em;">[‘Giotto’s Circle’)
</blockquote>
The first section is full of red, crimson, vermilion, and gold, ekphrastic angels screaming, Dame Edith Sitwell hovering, a locked-up nun collecting cash. But quickly the darkness begins – we hear of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Dachau. The section ends with the ironically named Golden Bay, dull and isolated, soggy under the heavy New Zealandness of the past.<br />
<br />
New Zealand and memory are as entwined as braided rivers. Family, scenery and the past combine in one flow:
<blockquote>
I am the spill<br />
in the estuary<br />
of the Bay of Plenty<br />
I am no river where<br />
the river was<br />
<span style="padding-left: 4em;">[‘The River’]</span>
</blockquote>
The world is one of drudgery, not a place to look back to with affection. ‘Dad’ rode everywhere on his ‘old black Raleigh bike’ …
<blockquote>
41 years in one office.<br />
How many days is that? He said he’d <br />
hated every single one.<br />
<span style="padding-left: 4em;">[‘Take It from Here’]</span>
</blockquote>
Children fare no better:
<blockquote>
Late that night I wrote a poem.<br />
Mum found it, tore it up, <br />
put the pieces in the bin.<br />
<span style="padding-left: 4em;">[‘Dove Cottage’]</span>
</blockquote>
Most of the poems evoke family history, misunderstanding, quarrels and death. It is not until the seventh (and last) section of the book – where we meet the contemporary family, the poet’s granddaughter – that justice is seen to be done:
<blockquote>
Lily, six, lies all afternoon<br />
on a comfy cushion, reading books.<br />
When we’re back home, <br />
we sit at the kitchen table,<br />
and together, we write a poem.<br />
<span style="padding-left: 4em;">[‘Lily Rose’]</span>
</blockquote>
and
<blockquote>
but she kept skipping until afternoon<br />
looked more like evening and every time<br />
she jumped the rope, her voice rang out in rhyme.<br />
<span style="padding-left: 4em;">[‘In the Courtyard’]</span>
</blockquote>
This last section uses more traditional form than the rest of the book does. Little girls are described in several sonnets, and the form works as a control or boundary, holding them safe from the free-wheeling (free-verse) anxiety of the little girl in New Zealand, which was bleak and never-ending.<br />
<br />
Verse structure is nicely varied throughout the text. There is a fine series of broken sonnets (‘Song of the Apprentice Angel’) as well as other uses of sonnet form. The poet has a great affinity with triplets: she plays with them and seems to turn to them as a relaxed setting where she is at ease and enjoying herself. They are sometimes part of a villanelle (‘But Where is He?’); other times they are terza rima:
<blockquote>
I came here to observe the two-toed sloths.<br />
I gave that up. The species is extinct. ...<br />
I should have told you this but never wrote.<br />
I had no stamps. My pen ran out of ink.<br />
<span style="padding-left: 4em;">[‘Gap Year Letter from a Five-Toed Sloth’]</span>
</blockquote>
The collection finishes most elegantly with ‘Arrhythmia’ – triplets using lines of 15 syllables and ending with:
<blockquote>
To lie waiting for the heart to beat can be a lonely art.<br />
In the poem’s unravelling circle, pen follows pulse. It must.<br />
Sometimes I write a poem that takes its rhythm from the heart.<br />
The pen ekes out words and end-stopped lines. The circle falls apart.
</blockquote>
Or, as with the poetic granddaughter, some things can go full circle.
</blockquote>
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<hr align="left" noshade="noshade" size="1" width="70%" /><br />
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<i>Poetry New Zealand Yearbook</i> 2 [Issue #50]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2015): 224-26.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugSHE40UCJXnLFQYQOlhXzx2vUxzfNOaAO6yMKYDkQeDVtW43fqDavaU3ieqiX_WxhdM3_bDeJRtS7bT_6BoU5NNxs7urhijTMNkDtQM4X8nY-9y14eRfENUBjB68rwkJmT8PZ7u72AE/s1600/pnzy2+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugSHE40UCJXnLFQYQOlhXzx2vUxzfNOaAO6yMKYDkQeDVtW43fqDavaU3ieqiX_WxhdM3_bDeJRtS7bT_6BoU5NNxs7urhijTMNkDtQM4X8nY-9y14eRfENUBjB68rwkJmT8PZ7u72AE/s400/pnzy2+cover.jpg"></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Poetry NZ Yearbook 2</i> (2015)</span></div><br />
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Dr Jack Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01805945600952222957noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1664810700625454120.post-43735258048040662502017-07-24T08:30:00.000+12:002017-12-02T09:24:29.836+13:00Brentley Frazer: Kulturkampf (2015)<div style="text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaUeeTAMCKbsa4LVXNmlPan6_488bOX81oE07vGyzMyiBpTxcZAW1F1nWcadvb-v6Mpzw1MEVKS7WdBxDe2k_xGFLswhl3-SSPFid_f4ip4Fek4uMkBI_Z0g_DFyVn2BrjLuviUk00rjA/s1600/Brentley-Frazer.25x6.87_Front_Cover-629x1024.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaUeeTAMCKbsa4LVXNmlPan6_488bOX81oE07vGyzMyiBpTxcZAW1F1nWcadvb-v6Mpzw1MEVKS7WdBxDe2k_xGFLswhl3-SSPFid_f4ip4Fek4uMkBI_Z0g_DFyVn2BrjLuviUk00rjA/s400/Brentley-Frazer.25x6.87_Front_Cover-629x1024.png" width="246" height="400" data-original-width="629" data-original-height="1024" /></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">Brentley Frazer: <a href="http://brentley.com/store/">Kulturkampf</a> (2015)</span>
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<b><span style="font-size: 180%;">Reviews:</span></b></div>
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<blockquote><blockquote>Brentley Frazer. <i>Kulturkampf: Selected Poems 1995-2015</i>. ISBN 978-0-9941861-1-9. Brisbane: Bareknuckle Books, 2015. RRP AUS$ 15.95 (+ $5 p+p). 114 pp.</blockquote>
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<b>Reviewed by <a href="http://poetrynzreview.blogspot.co.nz/2017/05/about-reviewers.html">Mary Cresswell</a></b></div><br />
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A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, most young poets were constrained to write parodies of <i>The Waste Land</i>. These were all much of a muchness and best forgotten, but Brentley Frazer’s new book presents ‘A Greener Pasture’ – one of the better Eliot parodies I’ve read. It starts out:
<blockquote>
April gets hot here, lizards mate on cracked footpaths, pre-mix aluminum Bacardi cans stir desire for the drought to break; memory of dull roots, thirst for rain. Couldn’t get warm at all last winter, it figuratively snowed.<br />
<span style="padding-left: 4em;">[‘1. She Kissed Your Arse Goodbye’]</span>
</blockquote>
The full poem moves along briskly, making sense in its own world without the painful hiccups that parodies often suffer while proving how witty they are. And how has this wondrous event come about? According to the author’s abstract on www.academia.edu, he has used a combination of two oulipo devices, homophony (imitation of sound) and homosemantic translation (imitation of sense) (more or less!). It isn’t <i>The Waste Land</i> but it feels like <i>The Waste Land</i>, a very good exercise if you can do it, and he has certainly done it.<br />
<br />
A difficulty (or success) in writing with many constraints is that if you are doing it very well indeed, the trick is hard to spot – unless it is a conspicuous one like dropping out a particular vowel or punctuation mark. I suspect that most/all of the poems in this book are done with specific constraints in mind, which means it’s nearly impossible for me to comment on Brentley’s technique. He has elsewhere spoken of his devotion to E-Prime (English Prime, dropping aspects of <i>to be</i>), but I have no idea how to spot the technique in use. The poems are all readable and fluent, even on vastly different topics.<br />
<br />
A second suite of poems is ‘A Factory of Shadows’ – again I can’t guess the constraints, but it feels like a free-for-all version of <i>The Divine Comedy</i> with a mega-cast: Lucifer, Krishna, Jesus, Shiva, and Buddha (for starters) emote back and forth while going in for a good bit of derring-do, ending up sounding like open-mic night complete with fencing foils. But the topics are all tried and true ones, ones for which we have no solution yet. One character begins:
<blockquote>
– I am the Son of a Star.<br />
You won’t find what you’re looking<br />
for here, in The Factory of Shadows.<br />
All of this is an illusion; you have been<br />
institutionalized by language, concluded<br />
values based on an error in your<br />
understanding. You are in a cemetery<br />
disguised as side-show alley,
</blockquote>
and is answered:
<blockquote>
– Ok … wow! I said, gesturing him<br />
to sit. That’s random. How do you fit?
</blockquote>
The debate gets heavier, and answers appear imminent. Then:
<blockquote>
And I, intoxicated with the wine<br />
and the hash Shiva had provided<br />
and the pulse of the music, forgot<br />
my place. <br />
<span style="padding-left: 3em;"><i>Damn you, Dark Lord</i>, I shouted.</span><br />
Now I’m right back where<br />
I started.<br />
<span style="padding-left: 4em;">[all from ‘4. Fornication Boulevard’]</span>
</blockquote>
And that’s it. A virtual person from Porlock (who has already appeared hither and yon as a place-holder for Prufrock) stops the clock again. That’s a major constraint, if you want to look at it that way ... unless, I guess, you’re from Porlock yourself.<br />
<br />
</blockquote>
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<hr align="left" noshade="noshade" size="1" width="70%" /><br />
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<i>Poetry New Zealand Yearbook</i> 2 [Issue #50]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2015): 226-28.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugSHE40UCJXnLFQYQOlhXzx2vUxzfNOaAO6yMKYDkQeDVtW43fqDavaU3ieqiX_WxhdM3_bDeJRtS7bT_6BoU5NNxs7urhijTMNkDtQM4X8nY-9y14eRfENUBjB68rwkJmT8PZ7u72AE/s1600/pnzy2+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugSHE40UCJXnLFQYQOlhXzx2vUxzfNOaAO6yMKYDkQeDVtW43fqDavaU3ieqiX_WxhdM3_bDeJRtS7bT_6BoU5NNxs7urhijTMNkDtQM4X8nY-9y14eRfENUBjB68rwkJmT8PZ7u72AE/s400/pnzy2+cover.jpg"></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Poetry NZ Yearbook 2</i> (2015)</span></div><br />
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Dr Jack Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01805945600952222957noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1664810700625454120.post-42034889080497722662017-07-23T08:25:00.000+12:002017-12-02T09:38:00.025+13:00Vaughan Rapatahana: Atonement (2015)<div style="text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW4Q-9nZTtERTFe-i-j_Qz41yyso_gTdKcTf5kt6lPn-KlVmeiM4Xl1VN1bCgJU_unYRjexl2LGor3B7c6iWFdmZuXk1Sp5uRzMx8-yrv3ShjK79_CPFNSkpLpmOe6UGt1HqyfG222KO8/s1600/index.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW4Q-9nZTtERTFe-i-j_Qz41yyso_gTdKcTf5kt6lPn-KlVmeiM4Xl1VN1bCgJU_unYRjexl2LGor3B7c6iWFdmZuXk1Sp5uRzMx8-yrv3ShjK79_CPFNSkpLpmOe6UGt1HqyfG222KO8/s400/index.jpg" width="285" height="400" data-original-width="158" data-original-height="222" /></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">Vaughan Rapatahana: <a href="http://www.mccmcreations.com/atonement">Atonement</a> (2015)</span>
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<b><span style="font-size: 180%;">Reviews:</span></b></div>
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<blockquote><blockquote>Vaughan Rapatahana. <i>Atonement</i>. Artworks by Pauline Canlas Wu; musical score by Darren Canlas Wu. ISBN 978-988-13115-1-1. Hong Kong: MCCM Creations for ASM/Flying Islands Books, 2015. RRP US$ 11.00. 124 pp.</blockquote>
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<b>Reviewed by <a href="http://poetrynzreview.blogspot.co.nz/2017/05/about-reviewers.html">Mary Cresswell</a></b></div><br />
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This is a small (A6) book with a big geography. The first poem is from Hong Kong (one of the poet’s home territories):
<blockquote>
the day is an elephant<br />
...<br />
an immoveable<br />
mass mastodon<br />
<span style="padding-left: 4em;">[“a hong kong september”]</span>
</blockquote>
Other poems move on to the Philippines, Macau, Mauritius, Tinian, Okinawa, but its heart lies in poems from Aotearoa. The book’s illustrations are all of Aotearoa. Aotearoa – and especially te reo – underlies not just the poet’s personal past but also much of the passions he displays here. He speaks of what might have been between father and son (“a forced reunion”) and, just as painfully, between the land and its people:
<blockquote>
not a city,<br />
neither a town –<br />
<br />
more a sketch <br />
of what could have been<br />
<br />
a draggled clothesline<br />
of had-it houses<br />
<span style="padding-left: 2em;">&</span><br />
not-quite homes<br />
<span style="padding-left: 4em;">[“east coast hamlet”]</span>
</blockquote>
The closer the poet comes to an unsalvageable past, the more often he seems to need te reo – the Māori language. One poem is entirely in te reo and has an English translation, titled in square brackets, so we know it is separate from the poem itself. And elsewhere, seeing a “dead burial ground” conjures up long-gone children’s voices:
<blockquote>
what was a gate<br />
has evolved into<br />
some kids’ swung <br />
plaything<span style="padding-left: 2em;"><i>tātou tātou e</i></span><br />
<br />
no mower<br />
was ever taught<br />
how to dress properly<br />
around these<br />
lumpy mounds<span style="padding-left: 2em;"><i>tūtira mai ngā iwi</i></span><br />
<span style="padding-left: 4em;">[“he urupā mate”]</span>
</blockquote>
The book ends with two blues songs and a score sheet for one of them. Both, as blues songs do, leave us with a picture of intolerable loss, sometimes of our own making, although this isn’t addressed specifically.<br />
<br />
This is in many ways a disconcerting and noisy book. The typography breaks up and comes back in various ways, sometimes making immediate sense, as in “he patai” (‘a question’) in which the entire poem forms a question mark, or as here:
<blockquote>
the deluge<br />
was worse<br />
than any locust plague<br />
<i>s w e e p i n g</i><span style="padding-left: 3em;"><i>d</i></span><br />
from the mainland.<span style="padding-left: 2em;"><i>o</i></span><br />
<span style="padding-left: 11em;"><i>w</i></span><br />
<span style="padding-left: 12em;"><i>n</i></span><br />
<span style="padding-left: 4em;">[“santo tomas deluge, 2012”]</span>
</blockquote>
Other times, the typography seems to be aimed simply at reinforcing the discrepancy between sound and sense, running a stick along a fence to grab our attention.<br />
<br />
The poet also likes alliteration and unexpected words – much of it works with fine effect, grabbing us and moving us along:
<blockquote>
its ramshackle<br />
rattle of<br />
scatterbrain rain<br />
<span style="padding-left: 2em;">&</span><br />
misanthropic<br />
mist<br />
<span style="padding-left: 4em;">[“so winter”]</span>
</blockquote>
or
<blockquote>
the aircraft<br />
silhouettes<br />
sneaking through<br />
the snide skies<br />
<span style="padding-left: 4em;">[“kadoorie beach, tuen mun”]</span>
</blockquote>
But sometimes the unexpected goes too far for usefulness, and we feel as though we were playing oulipo with Edward Lear:
<blockquote>
spy the patulous<br />
tide<br />
frisk<br />
the<br />
leering sand<br />
& forgo<br />
the mnemonic moon <br />
<span style="padding-left: 4em;">[“mauritian time”]</span>
</blockquote>
Last but not least, there is the book’s title, <i>Atonement</i>. Is the poet really trying to ‘atone’ for something? I can’t see it, unless he has kept it well hidden? Or is this the first step in a word game, where he is announcing his intention to write poetry ‘at one’ with a world which is remarkably spread out, both linguistically and geographically? You might read the book to find out.
</blockquote>
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<hr align="left" noshade="noshade" size="1" width="70%" /><br />
<div align="center">
<br />
<i>Poetry New Zealand Yearbook</i> 2 [Issue #50]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2015): 228-30.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugSHE40UCJXnLFQYQOlhXzx2vUxzfNOaAO6yMKYDkQeDVtW43fqDavaU3ieqiX_WxhdM3_bDeJRtS7bT_6BoU5NNxs7urhijTMNkDtQM4X8nY-9y14eRfENUBjB68rwkJmT8PZ7u72AE/s1600/pnzy2+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugSHE40UCJXnLFQYQOlhXzx2vUxzfNOaAO6yMKYDkQeDVtW43fqDavaU3ieqiX_WxhdM3_bDeJRtS7bT_6BoU5NNxs7urhijTMNkDtQM4X8nY-9y14eRfENUBjB68rwkJmT8PZ7u72AE/s400/pnzy2+cover.jpg"></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Poetry NZ Yearbook 2</i> (2015)</span></div><br />
<br />
Dr Jack Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01805945600952222957noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1664810700625454120.post-39443986442083753762017-07-22T08:24:00.000+12:002017-12-02T09:56:35.774+13:00Maureen Sudlow: Antipodes (2014)<div style="text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyrHJGE9XUT4N2YPKvAKnzo79yA1jS6Ccu1-OpiO08oXcmAMLhEG3cTctVknGyqOD7MQYlndl-ezgAAcjigvIeidMJaAug_neNKREJwimYJSNAi2DqTLoD6zJ-WiE_fLTvQ06-M3GX8gw/s1600/antipodes-cover-one.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyrHJGE9XUT4N2YPKvAKnzo79yA1jS6Ccu1-OpiO08oXcmAMLhEG3cTctVknGyqOD7MQYlndl-ezgAAcjigvIeidMJaAug_neNKREJwimYJSNAi2DqTLoD6zJ-WiE_fLTvQ06-M3GX8gw/s400/antipodes-cover-one.jpg" width="400" height="385" data-original-width="1302" data-original-height="1254" /></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">Maureen Sudlow: <a href="https://kiwis-soar.com/antipodes/">Antipodes</a> (2014)</span>
<br />
<br />
<b><span style="font-size: 180%;">Reviews:</span></b></div>
<br />
<blockquote><blockquote>Maureen Sudlow. <i>Antipodes</i>. ISBN 978-1-927242-69-8. Wellington: Steele Roberts Aotearoa, 2014. RRP $19.99. 60 pp.</blockquote>
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<br />
<b>Reviewed by <a href="http://poetrynzreview.blogspot.co.nz/2017/05/about-reviewers.html">Mary Cresswell</a></b></div><br />
<br />
Maureen Sudlow’s new book – her first poetry collection – is a balanced combination of haibun, photos, and a variety of free verse and rhymed styles. Most of the photos were taken by the author and these, along with the use of colour, give the book a relaxed, summery feel, even though the contents tend to be valedictory in many ways.<a class="style23" href="http://poetrynzreview.blogspot.co.nz/2017/07/maureen-sudlow-antipodes-2014.html#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title="">[1]</a><br />
<br />
The haibun make up about a third of the book. I’m new to the form and not a haiku or haibun judge, so I’ve read them only in terms of how they fit in with the full collection. They are first of all a change of pace, visually on the page and in content. Most of them have a pattern in which the prose poem gives specific detail and the accompanying haiku make a comment on a more abstract level. For example, in “Other lives” the poet is watching shooting stars from “… the West Coast of New Zealand”:
<blockquote>
… I go outside and lie on the driveway. I have never seen anything like that wonderful sight – before or since. They say you can only see so many shooting stars before you die. I think I passed my quota.<br />
<span style="padding-left: 3em;"><i>celestial storm</i></span><br />
<span style="padding-left: 3em;"><i>through the aeons of space</i></span><br />
<span style="padding-left: 3em;"><i>coldness of stones</i>
</blockquote>
The haibun all work as illustrations in their own right, where a prose poem is the equivalent of the black-and-white first stage of a woodblock print and accompanying haiku gives us a layer (or layers) of colour overlay for the basic structure.<br />
<br />
There are various stand-alone haiku which reach out to touch passing instants of awareness:
<blockquote>
in the wind<br />
bamboo hedge<br />
break-dancing<br />
<span style="padding-left: 4em;">[“Haiku”]</span>
</blockquote>
Other forms are also included. “Down the pit (Pike River tribute)” moves along in a lively, and traditional antipodean, ballad style reminiscent of Banjo Patterson or Thomas Bracken:
<blockquote>
The West Coast is a wild land leaning to the sea.<br />
Mountains tower o’er foaming rivers, dripping bush and barren scree.<br />
The hills are full of secrets, old pits and dead men’s bones<br />
and many a lost wanderer has never made it home. …<br />
<br />
And now the roll call’s lengthened – Pike River takes its place<br />
in the murderous assemblage where the miners work the face …
</blockquote>
The author does not neglect the domestic, either. She remarks a “lazy day/ sparrows dustbath/ in the ruts of the track” (“Summer dream”) and provides intimate detail such as “… it wasn’t the wind or the driving rain/ ’twas your snoring that kept me awake” (“A wife’s lament on a stormy night”).<br />
<br />
She leaves us on a philosophical note:
<blockquote>
What is it drawing us<br />
to the hills<br />
to the sea<br />
<br />
to the beaten down<br />
remnants of homes and churches<br />
gates loosely swinging<br />
on protesting poles …<br />
<br />
where the ghosts<br />
are all that is left<br />
<br />
to hear the nor’wester<br />
moaning through<br />
the ribs of the past<br />
<br />
what is it that draws us<br />
blood calls to blood
</blockquote>
The collection as a whole offers us a wide range of possible answers to these and other questions, all of them interesting food for thought.
</blockquote>
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<div style="text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: 130%;"><b>•</b></span></div>
<blockquote>
<br />
<b>Notes:</b><br />
<br />
<div id="ftn1">
<a href="http://poetrynzreview.blogspot.co.nz/2017/07/maureen-sudlow-antipodes-2014.html#_ftn1" name="_ftn1" title="">1.</a> Sudlow is Christchurch born and bred but now lives on the Kaipara Harbour. Her website is <a href="http://www.kiwis-soar.com">http://www.kiwis-soar.com</a>.</div>
</blockquote>
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<hr align="left" noshade="noshade" size="1" width="70%" /><br />
<div align="center">
<br />
<i>Poetry New Zealand Yearbook</i> 2 [Issue #50]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2015): 231-32.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugSHE40UCJXnLFQYQOlhXzx2vUxzfNOaAO6yMKYDkQeDVtW43fqDavaU3ieqiX_WxhdM3_bDeJRtS7bT_6BoU5NNxs7urhijTMNkDtQM4X8nY-9y14eRfENUBjB68rwkJmT8PZ7u72AE/s1600/pnzy2+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugSHE40UCJXnLFQYQOlhXzx2vUxzfNOaAO6yMKYDkQeDVtW43fqDavaU3ieqiX_WxhdM3_bDeJRtS7bT_6BoU5NNxs7urhijTMNkDtQM4X8nY-9y14eRfENUBjB68rwkJmT8PZ7u72AE/s400/pnzy2+cover.jpg"></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Poetry NZ Yearbook 2</i> (2015)</span></div><br />
<br />
Dr Jack Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01805945600952222957noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1664810700625454120.post-52712300148688546462017-07-21T08:22:00.000+12:002017-12-01T10:45:52.073+13:00Charles Brasch: Selected Poems (2015)<div style="text-align: center;">
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3f89ByAyMZVbDjvANaluwyyc5wyLEqrw6Rkl0Pmf4AZ4k6B663cOhG1cVbqIVzeJ265z35AHWJ5-b1fHLBJogw7M_tXYkPCruGdbX9jWbZdagpM0QHhbTocIuhp9c2ZntNdgT5GO5u5c/s1600/otago089302.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3f89ByAyMZVbDjvANaluwyyc5wyLEqrw6Rkl0Pmf4AZ4k6B663cOhG1cVbqIVzeJ265z35AHWJ5-b1fHLBJogw7M_tXYkPCruGdbX9jWbZdagpM0QHhbTocIuhp9c2ZntNdgT5GO5u5c/s400/otago089302.jpg" width="267" height="400" data-original-width="226" data-original-height="338" /></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">Charles Brasch: <a href="http://www.otago.ac.nz/press/books/otago088243.html">Selected Poems</a> (2015)</span>
<br />
<br />
<b><span style="font-size: 180%;">Reviews:</span></b></div>
<br />
<blockquote><blockquote>Charles Brasch. <i>Selected Poems</i>. Chosen by Alan Roddick. ISBN 978-1-877578-05-2. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2015. RRP $35. 152 pp.</blockquote>
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<b>Reviewed by <a href="http://poetrynzreview.blogspot.co.nz/2017/05/about-reviewers.html">Hamish Dewe</a></b></div><br />
<br />
Charles Brasch is a poet I’d never really made time for. I’d worked through <i>Indirections</i> and of course came across the usual anthologised poems and common quotations, yet I’d never read him with any real attention. Perhaps I still haven’t, as I cannot help but see him as an interesting failure, a poet who began with so much promise but fell into slack commentary and self-interested discursiveness.<br />
<br />
Thematically, even the technical excellence of his earlier work doesn’t transition well for a modern reader. Poems in which the tangata whenua, never mentioned by any name in this volume at least, recede uncomplainingly in the face of the colonists betray an unforgivable, perhaps even wilful, ignorance of history or even commonsense. Since when did any people willingly cede their homeland?<br />
<br />
This is not to say that Brasch’s work has no value at all. The first two volumes, <i>The Land and the People</i> and <i>Disputed Ground</i> have much to commend them. His strengths are most obvious here where he roots his generalities, which later waft off into unrooted talk, in the specifics of the landscape. See, for example “Pipikariti,” which is for my money the pick of the bunch:
<blockquote>
Stone weapons, flint, obsidian,<br />
Weed and waveworn shell and bone<br />
Lie in mellowing sand with wood<br />
Of wrecked ships and forests dead.<br />
Winds confuse the sand and soil,<br />
Long-rooted grass and sea-fed pool<br />
Content between the cliff and sea<br />
That creep close for fiercer play –<br />
The caress of earth and water<br />
Stretched together till they shatter<br />
Impetuous side against stiff side<br />
One silent and one loud.<br />
The sweet sun and the wind’s light stroke<br />
Charm that fury into smoke<br />
And music, twirling the blue spray <br />
And lighting rage with a fierce joy,<br />
That of the wasting strife appear<br />
Only a lulling ghost of war<br />
Intoning in a measured chant<br />
The history of a continent.
</blockquote>
The predominantly four-stress lines and half-rhyme couplets give the piece a flexibility within the structure that wonderfully plays off the contest between the earth and water, the stiff and the impetuous. There is even here a rare acknowledgement that Maori, who are known only by their material culture, in some way contested the appropriation of their land. The truth of colonial brutality cannot find an outlet in Brasch’s poetical vision and must always be subsumed into the mythology of the compliant Maori nation, where they are allowed to exist at all. “Forerunners” is a particularly notable example:
<blockquote>
Behind our quickness, our shallow occupation of the easier<br />
Landscape, their unprotesting memory <br />
Mildly hovers, surrounding us with perspective,<br />
Offering soil for our rootless behaviour.
</blockquote>
You should hear, of course, the sarcasm of the reviewer’s voice when he repeats a line like ‘their unprotesting memory / mildly hovers’ or when he states, along with Brasch, that yes, of course the noble Maori, who now no longer exist except as memory, had as their only function ‘nam[ing] the bays and mountains’ and that ‘[i]n the face of our different coming they retreated, / But without panic’. Excuse me, I need a drink. Be right back.<br />
<br />
The only thing holding back a wonderful poem like “Waianakarua” from a modern reader’s view is a certain awkwardness of syntax that crops up in several other poems of the period. Lines like:
<blockquote>
but nothing here of you<br />
Speaks the inexpressive face<br />
The rough skin of your country
</blockquote>
or
<blockquote>
Knowledge ends thus with the traveller’s glimpse
</blockquote>
are simply too forced to sit comfortably with the rest of the poem. “Waianakarua,” set at a halt, overlays the landscape with memory and imagination, giving voice to an otherwise mute country. I don’t think I can find anywhere else in this volume anything quite as painterly as:
<blockquote>
Tall where trains draw up to rest, the gum-trees<br />
Sift an off-sea wind, arching<br />
Rippled cornland and the startling far blue waves.<br />
Westward the shapeless low hills are forced <br />
Here by a twisting amber stream,<br />
Still in one pool under the corner willows<br />
And crossed by the stone bridge beside the mill.
</blockquote>
This brief moment of memory and introspection before the journey, which is a passage of both time and place, resumes. The personal connection, memory, infuses the land with a significance which it could not otherwise express. A similar mode reappears in later poems, where memory, often given some sort of physical form, serves to give depth to the landscape. The most obvious examples working this thematic territory are “The Ruins,” “Letter from Thurlby Domain” and “Autumn, Thurlby Domain,” though none display the same quality of attention as “Waianakarua.” Brasch’s poems often attempt to find some way of naturalising pakeha presence in New Zealand. Most often, it is accomplished by having one’s forebears interred here
<blockquote>
Not the conquest and the taming<br />
Can make this earth ours, and compel<br />
Here our acceptance. Dearest dust and shadow<br />
Must we offer still<br />
<span style="padding-left: 4em;">“The Land and the People (III)”</span><br />
<br />
Dead house and living trees and we that live<br />
To make our peace on earth and become native<br />
<span style="padding-left: 4em;">“Letter from Thurlby Domain”</span>
</blockquote>
It is interesting, but probably not intentional, that Brasch’s mode of belonging, of becoming native, is so different from that of the tangata whenua where the ritual marker of belonging is the burial of the placenta. Brasch, of course, makes death the marker of belonging. It is a death that “Offer[s] soil for our rootless behaviour” (“Forerunners”). Bear in mind though that the context for that last quote is the “unprotesting memory” of the tangata whenua.<br />
<br />
With the last few poems under consideration, we have now reached <i>The Estate and Other Poems</i>. This is the turning point. From here the limpidity and controlled rhythms of Brasch’s landscape poems infused with memory begin to be displaced by a limp conversationalism. A few poems seem leftover from Brasch’s earlier style, like “Blueskin Bay,” but the volume also sees the arrival of dryly introspective pieces like “Self to Self,” whose title tells you all you need to know. From here on, the rewards are so few it seems best to end with a rare moment where the same detailed attention of the earlier work seems to carry through into the more conversational mode:
<blockquote>
He sits to read, smoking and considering.<br />
His hand holding the cigarette is poised<br />
Considering, his head held by its look<br />
Balanced, a little inclined, all suspension,<br />
Directed to the book his left hand holds.<br />
<span style="padding-left: 4em;">“Semblances”</span></blockquote>
</blockquote>
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<hr align="left" noshade="noshade" size="1" width="70%" /><br />
<div align="center">
<br />
<i>Poetry New Zealand Yearbook</i> 2 [Issue #50]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2015): 233-36.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugSHE40UCJXnLFQYQOlhXzx2vUxzfNOaAO6yMKYDkQeDVtW43fqDavaU3ieqiX_WxhdM3_bDeJRtS7bT_6BoU5NNxs7urhijTMNkDtQM4X8nY-9y14eRfENUBjB68rwkJmT8PZ7u72AE/s1600/pnzy2+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugSHE40UCJXnLFQYQOlhXzx2vUxzfNOaAO6yMKYDkQeDVtW43fqDavaU3ieqiX_WxhdM3_bDeJRtS7bT_6BoU5NNxs7urhijTMNkDtQM4X8nY-9y14eRfENUBjB68rwkJmT8PZ7u72AE/s400/pnzy2+cover.jpg"></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Poetry NZ Yearbook 2</i> (2015)</span></div><br />
<br />
Dr Jack Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01805945600952222957noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1664810700625454120.post-11862855286767964652017-07-20T08:21:00.000+12:002017-12-02T09:11:01.889+13:00Miriam Barr: Bullet Hole Riddle (2014)<div style="text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4Arrp4XKpiqt4qSJ5Gq4qih8bRSMHbRw3LAkTL-12MGgKrB4ZnsOMH30Ucw_bq9lMqs8jOf4wh2zay-dWMF1LqKVWkbULvzl6OQeNlXXoguFVjtg_sRoGH4wUOZKnL7gBYRzDqv3Bmdg/s1600/Bullet-hole-riddle-cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4Arrp4XKpiqt4qSJ5Gq4qih8bRSMHbRw3LAkTL-12MGgKrB4ZnsOMH30Ucw_bq9lMqs8jOf4wh2zay-dWMF1LqKVWkbULvzl6OQeNlXXoguFVjtg_sRoGH4wUOZKnL7gBYRzDqv3Bmdg/s400/Bullet-hole-riddle-cover.jpg" width="265" height="400" data-original-width="750" data-original-height="1131" /></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">Miriam Barr: <a href="http://steeleroberts.co.nz/product/bullet-hole-riddle/">Bullet Hole Riddle</a> (2014)</span>
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<b><span style="font-size: 180%;">Reviews:</span></b></div>
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<blockquote><blockquote>Miriam Barr. <i>Bullet Hole Riddle</i>. ISBN 978-1-927242-68-1. Wellington: Steele Roberts Aotearoa, 2014. RRP $19.99. 64 pp.</blockquote>
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<b>Reviewed by <a href="http://poetrynzreview.blogspot.co.nz/2017/05/about-reviewers.html">Rachael Elliott</a></b></div><br />
<br />
The third of Barr’s poetry collections takes the form of a triptych, exploring issues of consent, relationships, trauma and the dichotomy of voice and voicelessness that accompanies it. <i>Bullet hole riddle</i> opens directly into the sexual abuse of the speaker, but this act is not the driving force of the collection. Rather, the spaces left behind and the ways in which the speaker attempts to fill these and heal from their trauma push the poetry through the narrative. Enviably, Barr has caught the soul and flavour of her performance poetry and translated it onto the page in a way that does not cage its energy. These poems, particularly within the first two sections, demand to be read aloud.<br />
<br />
“Bullet”, the first, and in many ways the strongest, slice of the triptych, is immediate in both style and content; the voice plunges the reader into their childhood abuse, the aftermath of which shapes the collection. Like the poetry within it, “Bullet” is clipped, stark and to the point. The first poems fling the reader directly into trauma, yet manage to leave room for memory and sadness. The opening poem “At the Time” begins “There was too much to say/so she said nothing” yet fronts a collection that makes a business of defiantly speaking the unspeakable while “No Craft” peels back the first layer of society’s issue with consent: “No is one of our oldest crafts/ for some of us it is the first word we learn/ for others it is the first word we unlearn”. <i>Bullet hole riddle</i> does not flinch, but wades into the growing debate around consent and culpability with its feminist hat firmly on, and its boots ready for kicking. In many ways the backbone of the collection, the first section is unflinching as it races into its final poem, the title piece ‘Bullet hole riddle’. It rips in with nuance and beautiful refrain, but without apology or equivocation. Hands down a standout piece of the collection, its sharp edges create the space required for the second phase of the work: acknowledgement, survivalism, and restoration.<br />
<br />
Like the seven year creative process that shaped it, the rest of <i>Bullet hole riddle</i> will not be rushed. If voice drives the first section, imagery drives the ones that follow; they slip a little, moving into porous imagery that pulls the speaker through their chaos. Like the speaker’s healing process, “hole” and “riddle” face their past, and with growing self-awareness, evolve into resolution. But while the shift allows the second section to spread and knead its way through its experiences with energetic and unexpected imagery, it leaves the third section becalmed, with much of its power lost. For a collection that opens with such vigour, its conclusion feels weak by comparison. While almost anything could be found within the ‘holes’ of the second section, the third was full of the whimsically inevitable. Compared with the originality and force of the preceding poetry, the ‘happily ever after’ of “riddle” feels hurried, and a little contrived. <br />
<br />
<i>Bullet hole riddle</i> is a captivating and enjoyable collection, with moments of dynamic voice and complex, concrete imagery, and truly standout pieces of poetry. Its depiction of regeneration and moulding of self through trauma, its timely political commentary and its moments of rhythmic brilliance make it a must read.
</blockquote>
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<hr align="left" noshade="noshade" size="1" width="70%" /><br />
<div align="center">
<br />
<i>Poetry New Zealand Yearbook</i> 2 [Issue #50]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2015): 237-38.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugSHE40UCJXnLFQYQOlhXzx2vUxzfNOaAO6yMKYDkQeDVtW43fqDavaU3ieqiX_WxhdM3_bDeJRtS7bT_6BoU5NNxs7urhijTMNkDtQM4X8nY-9y14eRfENUBjB68rwkJmT8PZ7u72AE/s1600/pnzy2+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugSHE40UCJXnLFQYQOlhXzx2vUxzfNOaAO6yMKYDkQeDVtW43fqDavaU3ieqiX_WxhdM3_bDeJRtS7bT_6BoU5NNxs7urhijTMNkDtQM4X8nY-9y14eRfENUBjB68rwkJmT8PZ7u72AE/s400/pnzy2+cover.jpg"></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Poetry NZ Yearbook 2</i> (2015)</span></div><br />
<br />
Dr Jack Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01805945600952222957noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1664810700625454120.post-53608814487030973202017-07-19T08:19:00.000+12:002017-12-02T09:13:38.112+13:00Nina Powles: Girls of the Drift (2014)<div style="text-align: center;">
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5jujg3T-LNi7fOB-8nD3QnJW1ivXGMaVGG-9lFXY5EsPzjhX5hLudfyWUpA2weU3_5rbqBtl0iUpV0PKtj7tYv0eEQgpjggoszCQ8TkOluETUGSCiy0-4J-jN_FE7XTz1gNJya2wpN90/s1600/5092321.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5jujg3T-LNi7fOB-8nD3QnJW1ivXGMaVGG-9lFXY5EsPzjhX5hLudfyWUpA2weU3_5rbqBtl0iUpV0PKtj7tYv0eEQgpjggoszCQ8TkOluETUGSCiy0-4J-jN_FE7XTz1gNJya2wpN90/s400/5092321.jpg" width="282" height="400" data-original-width="250" data-original-height="355" /></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">Nina Powles: <a href="http://www.seraphpress.co.nz/girls-of-the-drift.html">Girls of the Drift</a> (2014)</span>
<br />
<br />
<b><span style="font-size: 180%;">Reviews:</span></b></div>
<br />
<blockquote><blockquote>Nina Powles. <i>Girls of the Drift</i>. 2014. ISBN 978-0-473-30843-8. Wellington: Seraph Press, 2015. RRP $20. 20 pp.</blockquote>
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<b>Reviewed by <a href="http://poetrynzreview.blogspot.co.nz/2017/05/about-reviewers.html">Johanna Emeney</a></b></div><br />
<br />
This chapbook by Victoria University graduate Nina Powles features thirteen pages of poetry about historical women, fictional and real. A school ghost and a whaler’s daughter are imagined, and Katherine Mansfield’s characters from “Her First Ball”, “The Woman at the Store” and “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” are reimagined. In addition, New Zealand’s first female lighthouse keeper, Mary Bennett, watches gulls and watches over her children during a harsh winter, and a dark, prophetic telegram from Blanche Baughan to Jessie Mackay responds to the former’s encouraging and lyrical letter. Ending the small collection is a fragment (in the style of Anne Carson’s Sappho translations) from Katherine Mansfield – a journal entry/letter recollecting life with her brother Leslie, contemplating his death, and presaging her own demise via pulmonary haemorrhage.<br />
<br />
Powles’ characterisations are interesting, but more arresting are her evocations of the environments the characters inhabit, refracted through their own points of view. The strong, cold wind at Pencarrow is described as if in an omniscient voice, but then an instruction follows, as if to one of the gulls:
<blockquote>
The wind spins dead things in circles.<br />
Collect up the wintertime, won’t you,<br />
crack it on a rock,<br />
drop it from a height.<br />
<span style="padding-left: 4em;">[“Pencarrow Lighthouse”]</span>
</blockquote>
Again, in “Volcanology”, Powles begins with a (mis)quotation from “The Woman at the Store”, suggesting that the first person narrator of the poem is eponymous. The monologue is shaped like a volcano, rotated 90 degrees, and the last lines ominously claim, “I know one/hundred and twenty-five ways/to bury a man in earth/that was once/on fire.” <br />
<br />
“Shipwrecker” opens with the daughter of a whaler tending an unusual garden – one “corner plotted out with bones/pulled from the ribcage of a sperm whale.” That detail seems incongruous, macabre, even, but the girl is happy in the garden, and quite at ease with its souvenirs from the sea. The poem is full of such well-researched details which deliver a richness to the images of the dual environment of the whaler’s home and his place of work, both of which the daughter inhabits daily. <br />
<br />
Powles is particularly adept at crafting both a credible environment and an endearing, believable central character, and “Shipwrecker” is the perfect example of her prowess. The narrative, imbued with the daughter’s naïve phrasing, is the more delightful and the more vivid for her innocent tone, discernible under the point-of-view’s purported third person:
<blockquote>
When whales forget their maps they strand. The first time<br />
she thought they were rocks but the funny shapes spat air,<br />
little cloud prints floating just above. By tea-time they had died.<br />
<span style="padding-left: 4em;">[“Shipwrecker”]</span>
</blockquote>
Rock-shaped whales who forget their maps, whose deaths are memorable because they coincide with meal-times, are far more poignant than those described by an adult narrator – for an adult narrator would probably perceive their forms accurately from the first and record their deaths in ‘real time’.<br />
<br />
For this reader, in the chapbook as a whole, the most successful poems are those in which Powles creates the characters afresh, not trying to reimagine characters who have already been depicted elsewhere, or written in their own words. Powles is skilled at breathing life into a well-researched idea, place and time; she is able to develop a narrative voice and furnish a setting which puts flesh on the bones of intriguing research.
</blockquote>
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<i>Poetry New Zealand Yearbook</i> 2 [Issue #50]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2015): 239-40.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugSHE40UCJXnLFQYQOlhXzx2vUxzfNOaAO6yMKYDkQeDVtW43fqDavaU3ieqiX_WxhdM3_bDeJRtS7bT_6BoU5NNxs7urhijTMNkDtQM4X8nY-9y14eRfENUBjB68rwkJmT8PZ7u72AE/s1600/pnzy2+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugSHE40UCJXnLFQYQOlhXzx2vUxzfNOaAO6yMKYDkQeDVtW43fqDavaU3ieqiX_WxhdM3_bDeJRtS7bT_6BoU5NNxs7urhijTMNkDtQM4X8nY-9y14eRfENUBjB68rwkJmT8PZ7u72AE/s400/pnzy2+cover.jpg"></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Poetry NZ Yearbook 2</i> (2015)</span></div><br />
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Dr Jack Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01805945600952222957noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1664810700625454120.post-71994378873850918202017-07-18T08:18:00.000+12:002017-12-02T09:07:05.528+13:00Kerry Hines: Young Country (2014)<div style="text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgG268q1BA3ABw5-QxnhCLnJgzgkFq2L-gPC0qwPZvJAh0uIfEFEx36DHsSNlxj1A22T3y3Yoe8YxBtDjLAeJR2of8XUrG-c65kwbR4HgjbRQw33ZUmC9trncSN4Mji6NrM_s4tPFTrG8E/s1600/1415925058226.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgG268q1BA3ABw5-QxnhCLnJgzgkFq2L-gPC0qwPZvJAh0uIfEFEx36DHsSNlxj1A22T3y3Yoe8YxBtDjLAeJR2of8XUrG-c65kwbR4HgjbRQw33ZUmC9trncSN4Mji6NrM_s4tPFTrG8E/s400/1415925058226.jpg" width="309" height="400" data-original-width="232" data-original-height="300" /></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">Kerry Hines: <a href="http://www.press.auckland.ac.nz/en/browse-books/all-books/books-2014/Young-Country.html">Young Country</a> (2014)</span>
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<b><span style="font-size: 180%;">Reviews:</span></b></div>
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<blockquote><blockquote>Kerry Hines. <i>Young Country</i>. With Photographs by William Williams. ISBN 978-1-86940-823-7. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2014. RRP $34.99. 200 pp.</blockquote>
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<b>Reviewed by <a href="http://poetrynzreview.blogspot.co.nz/2017/05/about-reviewers.html">Johanna Emeney</a></b></div><br />
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This is a beautiful book, which counterpoints nineteenth century photographs of colonial New Zealand by William Williams with poems that play off the images. It is divided into four sections: “The Old Shebang”, which focuses on Williams’ Cuba Street dwelling, “Never Far From Water”, which contains poems about Wellington waterways, “Settlement”, an extended poem which tells of one woman’s life as a settler bride and, lastly, “Whakaki”, which focuses on the eponymous station—the subject of many of Williams’ photographs.<br />
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Snatches of early-settler life provided by the poems are as vivid and credible as the photographs themselves. In “Walking Her Home”, the small-town atmosphere is evoked economically by the twitching curtains, controlled by “the electric impulse of the muscle of the street”, and the gossiping neighbours who later decide on what colour the young lady wore, “if his suit was best or second-best”, and “how much separated them” both in terms of physical distance and class. Throughout the book, other small, vivid details depict life in the young country—many of them humorous: “eel and spinach pie, cooking with gorse” (“Sarah”) and “pigs reeling drunk on peaches” (“Letters Home”).<br />
<br />
Again, true to early-settler life, “British Eden” is a poem that feels as if it has been made entirely of found snippets from archived letters back to England, with blunt statements like, “It has no snakes” and “You are never far from water.” However, Hines ends with the delightfully playful:
<blockquote>
A hungry man may fish himself a feed,<br />
or live on windfall sheep<br />
and apples.
</blockquote>
The characters of <i>Young Country</i> are not limited to Williams and the men with whom he shared his Wellington residence ‘The Old Shebang’. There are all sorts of men and women, real and imagined. This reader found the women characters particularly three-dimensional. One example is the butcher’s-wife-cum-medic who “could darn a man’s hand, slap/something raw on a black eye” (“River Hutt”) as well as lay out a corpse. Gruff, guttural sounds together with occasional half-rhyming assonance in the first two-thirds of the poem give a diurnal ordinariness to her medical duties and a sense that the butcher’s wife had no time for fuss-makers. She fixed all sorts of injuries:
<blockquote>
… A kick, a cut,<br />
a ricocheting saw,<br />
<br />
a spill, a fall, an axe.
</blockquote>
However, the description of how she talked to the dead, “touching them/as if they hurt”, saved for the final lines, adds a tenderness and kindness to her ministrations.<br />
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Hines does not match every poem to every photograph in <i>Young Country</i>, but the words and pictures are always complementary in some way. On occasion, the poem is a direct commentary on the photograph, though, as with the pairing of a picture of young Maori men digging a ditch and “Enclosure”, a poem about what a person might do when it seems that he/she can do nothing:
<blockquote>
<b>Enclosure</b><br />
<br />
What is the healthy response to <br />
an unhealthy environment?<br />
<br />
Some people leave; some people live<br />
in quarantine; the healers<br />
<br />
sicken. Rabbits breed.<br />
The wise speak their mind<br />
<br />
once only. The clouds form<br />
a pattern resistant<br />
<br />
to pattern.<br />
<br />
If you can move, keep moving.<br />
If you’re stuck fast, dig.
</blockquote>
Certainly, Hines’ poems respond to Williams’ photographs which are particular to their nineteenth century context. More impressive still is the fact that they also work on a universal level. “Enclosure” is a good example of this double-work. The poem provides a commentary on the photograph of young Maori men digging a deep ditch. Pakeha men line the banks, watching the workers in a manner reminiscent of plantation overseers, while the muscular Maori dig, spades to the side in unison, like warriors rowing a waka. They are, paradoxically, moving while stuck. Hines sees their dignity. She also perceives the everyday bravery of “dig[ging]” when one is “stuck fast” in any type of situation that seems unassailable, and she communicates this to the reader as a maxim of sorts in the poem’s final two lines.<br />
<br />
<i>Young Country</i> is the book of an accomplished poet who has done her research and worked with another medium in an intuitive and respectful way. Hines has used the photographs as intertexts and as catalysts, and the resultant poetry is a pleasure to read on many levels.
</blockquote>
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<i>Poetry New Zealand Yearbook</i> 2 [Issue #50]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2015): 241-43.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugSHE40UCJXnLFQYQOlhXzx2vUxzfNOaAO6yMKYDkQeDVtW43fqDavaU3ieqiX_WxhdM3_bDeJRtS7bT_6BoU5NNxs7urhijTMNkDtQM4X8nY-9y14eRfENUBjB68rwkJmT8PZ7u72AE/s1600/pnzy2+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugSHE40UCJXnLFQYQOlhXzx2vUxzfNOaAO6yMKYDkQeDVtW43fqDavaU3ieqiX_WxhdM3_bDeJRtS7bT_6BoU5NNxs7urhijTMNkDtQM4X8nY-9y14eRfENUBjB68rwkJmT8PZ7u72AE/s400/pnzy2+cover.jpg"></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Poetry NZ Yearbook 2</i> (2015)</span></div><br />
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Dr Jack Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01805945600952222957noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1664810700625454120.post-33732184008608608192017-07-17T08:17:00.000+12:002017-12-02T09:03:50.548+13:00Jack Ross: A Clearer View of the Hinterland (2014)<div style="text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhn2GL7YEg1cSFPZHHiKUKFHLa-qf9XpFmiY256sOHD1uPg-muKVeNPLUPf1yne_wi9D4BWd-5HBcuOmXd2_1H2Xm4TNaOvFcuYn94QkxImkJ98N9fnddlheznfdCee27QL7UyUy1PCJVY/s1600/A+Clearer+View+of+the+Hinterland.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhn2GL7YEg1cSFPZHHiKUKFHLa-qf9XpFmiY256sOHD1uPg-muKVeNPLUPf1yne_wi9D4BWd-5HBcuOmXd2_1H2Xm4TNaOvFcuYn94QkxImkJ98N9fnddlheznfdCee27QL7UyUy1PCJVY/s400/A+Clearer+View+of+the+Hinterland.jpg" width="267" height="400" data-original-width="1066" data-original-height="1600" /></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">Jack Ross: <a href="http://beattiesbookblog.blogspot.co.nz/2014/09/new-poetry-release-by-jack-ross-auckland.html">A Clearer View of the Hinterland</a> (2014)</span>
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<b><span style="font-size: 180%;">The Places Behind the Place</span></b></div>
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<blockquote><blockquote>Jack Ross. <i>A Clearer View of the Hinterland: Poems & Sequences 1981-2014</i>. ISBN 978-0-473-29640-7. Wellington: HeadworX, 2014. RRP $30. 192 pp.</blockquote>
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<b>Reviewed by <a href="http://poetrynzreview.blogspot.co.nz/2017/05/about-reviewers.html">Matthew Harris</a></b></div><br />
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Walter Benjamin, in his 1936 reflections on Nikolai Leskov, classified two kinds of writers: those who readers imagine as the “trading seaman”, bringing stories from afar, and those “resident tillers” whose craft depends on a thorough knowledge of the local soil. Jack Ross, I think, is first and foremost a writer of the latter tradition. As a writer who has lived most of his life in Mairangi Bay, Auckland, he has done a great deal of graft in promoting writing in the region, from co-editing <i>Golden Weather: North Shore Writers Past and Present</i> in 2004 to initial selection work for what became known as ‘The Trestle Leg Series’ – a sample of North Shore writing which has graced the underside of the Auckland Harbour Bridge since 2012 (not to mention his support of numerous local journals, and nationally significant publications and poetry events). <br />
<br />
For those familiar with Ross’s work, this is probably needless to say, but his resident tilling can also be clearly seen in both the subject matter and the form of the poetry collected here – which, I should note, brings together 33 poems and sequences from a time span of 33 years. The North Shore figures in miniature records of place (I like to see the islands in the gulf, driving / down the long hill, ships floating / down the sky [“Except Once,” p.12]); in humorous tweet-sized lines which sum up the changing nature of Auckland (If you can’t park in Birkenhead / where can you park? [“Birkenhead,” p.112]); and in more atmospheric descriptions:
<blockquote>
That scent of air-conditioned air<br />
as you pass a door,<br />
cave-cold; fur<br />
of condensation<br />
<span style="padding-left: 3em;">on a beer:</span><br />
Auckland midsummer.<br />
[“God’s Spy,” p.18]
</blockquote>
And if the subject matter of the poetry is frequently localised, it could be said that the form is too. To raise something of an old chestnut, fans of the North Shore writing might also see something in the way Ross extends a typically Sargesonian interest in the cadences of everyday speech and pushes it to breaking point, by his inclusions of what appear to be verbatim records of conversations. From a poem set at North Head in Devonport:
<blockquote>
– I’ll scrub them when I get home <br />
– What<i>ev</i>er<br />
– Have you had an inspiration?<br />
– Uh<br />
– Get up and stop being stupid<br />
<span style="padding-left: 4em;">– to a fallen child –</span><br />
[“A Sunday Walk,” p.113]
</blockquote>
While there are plenty of Easter eggs for North Shore readers (one might want to play spot-the-reference-to-Sargeson’s-bach?) I should note that any suggestion Ross’s use of the local might result in a kind of inward-looking parochialism wouldn’t stand up. He is also one of the most well-read poets in the country, conversant in several languages (translations are another feature of the collection), so his body of knowledge means he also writes, in Benjamin’s terms, “from afar” – or, at least, from a perspective which includes – occasionally to a reader’s frustration – reference to diverse and sometimes obscure sources. His allusions to figures such as Celan, Thomas Mann and Britney Spears – not to mention lesser-knowns like Bishop James A. Pike and Alexandra David-Néel – provide a colourful, and occasionally disorienting, juxtaposition to local subjects.
<blockquote>
Are <i>you</i> thinking<span style="padding-left: 4em;">about them</span><br />
ducking round this<span style="padding-left: 3em;">plinth</span><br />
in Eden Crescent?<br />
[…]<br />
<i>Of course</i> one wears<span style="padding-left: 2em;">a thong</span><br />
to pick up kitty<span style="padding-left: 5em;"><i>Stella Maris</i></span><br />
Lady of the Sea<span style="padding-left: 4.5em;"><i>ora pro nobis</i></span><br />
As in Th. Mann<span style="padding-left: 5em;"><i>Unordnung</i></span><br />
<i>und frühes Leid</i><br />
<span style="padding-left: 11.5em;">cry yourself to sleep</span><br />
[“Disorder and Early Sorrow”, p.53]
</blockquote>
These allusions are more frequent in his earlier work, and over the three-decades of Ross’s writing covered by the collection, it may be possible to detect a drift toward more relational and experiential – rather than pointedly experimental – forms. Certainly, in the latter half of the collection, he isn’t always so determined to complicate his storytelling with external references, and his penchant for literary rarities and the exploration of conceptual archaisms takes up less of the foreground. This, I suppose, will variously please or irk readers who have previously lauded or criticised his leanings toward the avant-garde: Mark Houlahan has called Ross’s writing “slippery” and “quixotic”, Michael Morrissey a “challenge”, Lisa Samuels “uncomfortably interesting, richly literary, and intensely sympathetic”, and Harvey McQueen “a tantalising maze”. But I don’t think one could say Ross’s hyper-connected synapses are any less active in the later poems. The recording of curious text-types, say, in the first half of the collection (the overpass graffiti, bumper sticker, or job recruitment ad) continues to tap into sundry folk-wisdom right until the end of the book (in references to Albert Street signage, t-shirts, and text from a Massey University staff toilet). And the early allusions to Calvin Klein and Miss New Zealand’s head are no more surprising than the later nods to Hosanna Horsfall, Clever Hans, and Slash’s anus. It’s just that the latter are given more context in the poems.
<blockquote>
Hosanna is an idiot<br />
I’m going to New York<br />
I’m going to be a star<br />
If they tell me to eat myself<br />
I’ll do it<br />
[“New Zealand’s Next Top Model Speaks”, p.146]
</blockquote>
Call me a lazy reader, but I tend to most enjoy Ross’s later, more self-contained, narrative poems such as “The Darkness”, “Asbestos hands of Dr. J”, and “Howard”. The first of these, which tells the story of his father’s journey down the Waikato river on an air-mattress, deftly shifts perspective to give the reader a sense of the dread his mother must have felt, and makes the point that being caught up in the main action can sometimes be less memorable than by-standing. The ending of “Asbestos hands of Dr. J” is both touching and funny as it scorches the writer’s devotion to his craft, and sums up his desire to condense words into something combustible – the poem as a coal nugget, perhaps. The last poem of the collection tells the story of a noisy neighbour who grieves his mother’s death by playing Led Zeppelin through the early hours of the morning:
<blockquote>
the fuzz turned up in force<br />
we heard them knocking first<br />
<br />
then going round all the doors<br />
finally they broke in<br />
cuffed him<br />
<br />
and took him off to jail<br />
(“Howard,” p.183)
</blockquote>
It might be said that Ross sacrifices a little attention to form in these more personal narrative poems. For instance, one might query why, in “Howard”, Ross reveals who has called the police so early in the poem, rather than saving that point of tension for the end. Or one might wonder whether the details about his parents’ medical occupation were necessary to the story in “The Darkness”. But these are minor points in otherwise memorable and affecting pieces of verse. If I have any real gripe about the collection, it’s to do with formatting. The Table of Contents is missing page numbers, which makes the book difficult to get around. And the pain of this omission is in no way lightened by the irony of including the poem “Index” which purports to provide contents information on a 1966 edition of <i>The Teachings of Buddha</i>. <br />
<br />
All in all though, this retrospective is well and truly worth the effort spent in navigating it. Thirty years seems a good amount of time to draw on for a clear view of Ross’s personal hinterland – and being his fifth collection, it does a thorough job of covering the many of the most important themes and influences behind his large body of work. I would concur with Graham Beattie, in saying that this is Ross’s “most substantial” collection to date. It’s certainly a book I’d recommend to those who haven’t read Ross before. Many pieces will give pleasure in future re-readings, and there are plenty of fascinating allusions to add to one’s reference-chasing wish-list. For those approaching it for the first time, starting at the end, and reading through backwards might be a good idea though: beginning at the place of arrival before moving back to the places behind the place.
</blockquote>
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<i>Poetry New Zealand Yearbook</i> 2 [Issue #50]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2015): 244-47.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugSHE40UCJXnLFQYQOlhXzx2vUxzfNOaAO6yMKYDkQeDVtW43fqDavaU3ieqiX_WxhdM3_bDeJRtS7bT_6BoU5NNxs7urhijTMNkDtQM4X8nY-9y14eRfENUBjB68rwkJmT8PZ7u72AE/s1600/pnzy2+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugSHE40UCJXnLFQYQOlhXzx2vUxzfNOaAO6yMKYDkQeDVtW43fqDavaU3ieqiX_WxhdM3_bDeJRtS7bT_6BoU5NNxs7urhijTMNkDtQM4X8nY-9y14eRfENUBjB68rwkJmT8PZ7u72AE/s400/pnzy2+cover.jpg"></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Poetry NZ Yearbook 2</i> (2015)</span></div><br />
<br />
Dr Jack Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01805945600952222957noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1664810700625454120.post-21325430583333502112017-07-16T08:15:00.000+12:002017-12-02T08:52:13.650+13:00Frankie McMillan: There are no horses in heaven (2015)<div style="text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOlJr7wp0uBzc_dneelqbnJc7-duz-qG1PZGt72z0752ruqcbFcxDcW7AxMBsOCsbsqVn_BS-zbJjPm4XdZUlI823btSYbXVGsxZOTboV4067lFfPdiPrpK3MAlKP5chTY9vm4azCPHLo/s1600/prt_250x401_1457314521_2x.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOlJr7wp0uBzc_dneelqbnJc7-duz-qG1PZGt72z0752ruqcbFcxDcW7AxMBsOCsbsqVn_BS-zbJjPm4XdZUlI823btSYbXVGsxZOTboV4067lFfPdiPrpK3MAlKP5chTY9vm4azCPHLo/s400/prt_250x401_1457314521_2x.jpg" width="249" height="400" data-original-width="500" data-original-height="802" /></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">Frankie McMillan: <a href="http://ilampress.co.nz/There-Are-No-Horses-in-Heaven-Frankie-McMillan">There are no horses in heaven</a> (2015)</span>
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<b><span style="font-size: 180%;">Lies We Tell Ourselves</span></b></div>
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<blockquote><blockquote>Frankie McMillan. <i>There are no horses in heaven</i>. ISBN 978-1-927145-67-8. Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2015. RRP $25. 102 pp.</blockquote>
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<b>Reviewed by <a href="http://poetrynzreview.blogspot.co.nz/2017/05/about-reviewers.html">Bronwyn Lloyd</a></b></div><br />
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Browsing through the posts on Peter Peryer’s excellent blog, I noticed the way the celebrated photographer describes certain images that “stick to the ribs,” and how this sensation helps him decide which of his photos are “keepers.” I think the same is true of a collection of poetry. Every time I read a book of poems there will always be one or two that stay with me long after I’ve finished the book. Often though, I’m surprised by which poems turn out to be the ones that stick to my ribs.<br />
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There are many memorable poems in Christchurch writer Frankie McMillan’s collection <i>There are no horses in heaven</i> and a slew of redolent images lift from the pages and enter your mind’s eye as you read it: a gorilla dressed in women’s clothes, a whale-bone corset singing when it nears the ocean, a dress of spun glass, a pair of silt-covered shoes, a vine growing through a bedroom wall, and an etched deer breaking free of the glass door that contains it. But the ‘rib-sticker’ for me turned out to be the unassuming short prose poem “Pin-striped jacket” in the middle of the third section of the book.<br />
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The poem is about a Marilyn Sainty jacket found by the narrator in a second-hand shop. It is a “jacket that promises so much” because of the name of the prestigious New Zealand designer on the label and the claim that it is 100% wool. But when she places the jacket on the counter she notices that the fabric is pilled in such a way that suggests that the garment is not entirely wool. The inference is that the label is fraudulent and so too is its maker, and the poem ends with the casual statement by the sales assistant: “These days, … they lie, everyone does.”<br />
<br />
The idea at the centre of “Pin-striped jacket” is that lies, big and small, are the substance of everyday life and a designer jacket that isn’t what it claims to be is one instance of this. What is particularly clever about the poem, though, is that the narrator doesn’t reveal whether she actually bought the jacket. We are left to reflect on what decision we would make in the same situation and whether the label of the maker would override the doubts we might have about the integrity of the garment. <br />
<br />
The real value of a poem that sticks to the ribs, like “Pin-striped jacket” did for me, is that it sets ideas simmering, and I found the concept of everyday lies in this poem extremely compelling, so much so that it informed my second reading of the book in a way that made greater sense of the collection than the five titled section breaks printed on sky-blue paper did. Thinking about those lies that we tell ourselves, those lies that we choose to live with to mitigate the disappointment of the promise of something that doesn’t match the reality, and the consequences of those lies, allowed me to see how McMillan’s book revolved around different kinds of deception. <br />
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The title piece of the collection is a case in point. The blanket assertion that “There are no horses in heaven,” operates as an alleged statement of fact, and yet it contains a double lie. Is the lie that only creatures possessing a soul go to heaven, or is the lie that there is a heaven to go to at all? The notes at the end of the book tell us that the poem was inspired by a conversation with a fellow poet about childhood memories; the formative time in our lives when we accept the truth of things much more readily than we do as adults. This is set against the poem itself, which is about a nun who is increasingly unable to make the distinction between her waking life and her dreaming life, in which she is a horse:
<blockquote>
Sister Teresa wakes to the taste<br />
of an iron bit<br />
<br />
she does not recognise underground water<br />
the wild grasses good to eat<br />
<br />
she stands, shuddering in her skin<br />
the world laid bare before her (p.45)
</blockquote>
The title of the piece complicates the issue, and is another instance of the way McMillan’s poems set ideas simmering. “There are no horses in heaven” begs the question of whether a person of faith who possesses a soul, but believes she is a horse, will still be granted access to heaven? This act of poking holes in alleged ‘truths’ and revealing their complexity is a real strength of McMillan’s collection.<br />
<br />
Another strength of the book is the way that the writer forms links between the poems in which she sets up an idea and follows it through. The final poem of section one, “My father’s balance,” for example, makes the analogy between a tightrope walk and the process of negotiating a new marriage, which involves mastering “the art of equilibrium.” This is followed at the start of section two by a poem “The glass slipper was only half of it,” about an accomplished glass blower who “knew his business” but couldn’t keep his wife, and thus the balance of his life was lost. After she leaves him he fools himself into believing that he can fill the void by making a dress from molten glass, replicating his wife’s proportions. Two poems later, the point of view changes, and the consequences of the lie become apparent. In “The glass blower’s boy,” the man’s son, who has accepted that his mother has gone, observes his father giving shape to the lie as he “spins a glass dress / filling the space with his breath.” <br />
<br />
The continuity of ideas creates a satisfying sense of cohesion to McMillan’s book, but she is careful not to labour the links between poems, and the resulting mix of subtle narrative and thematic connections throughout the book allows for ideas to attach to other ideas, often in surprising ways. I particularly like the less obvious links between poems, such as the poem “Herd” that immediately precedes “Pin-striped jacket.” “Herd” opens with two gorgeous couplets: “when the shadow of a horse / darkens the road / it fools migratory birds / into errors of navigation.” You can see how this idea nicely dovetails into the concept of the next poem about the Marilyn Sainty jacket showing the way that an element of doubt creeps into our judgement about a thing, like the shadow darkening the road and throwing off the flight-path of the birds.<br />
<br />
<i>There are no horses in heaven</i> is an accomplished, original, and thought-provoking book of poems that repays repeat readings. It is a book that is certain to stick to your ribs for a very long time.
</blockquote>
<br />
<hr align="left" noshade="noshade" size="1" width="70%" /><br />
<div align="center">
<br />
<i>Poetry New Zealand Yearbook</i> 2 [Issue #50]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2015): 248-50.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugSHE40UCJXnLFQYQOlhXzx2vUxzfNOaAO6yMKYDkQeDVtW43fqDavaU3ieqiX_WxhdM3_bDeJRtS7bT_6BoU5NNxs7urhijTMNkDtQM4X8nY-9y14eRfENUBjB68rwkJmT8PZ7u72AE/s1600/pnzy2+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugSHE40UCJXnLFQYQOlhXzx2vUxzfNOaAO6yMKYDkQeDVtW43fqDavaU3ieqiX_WxhdM3_bDeJRtS7bT_6BoU5NNxs7urhijTMNkDtQM4X8nY-9y14eRfENUBjB68rwkJmT8PZ7u72AE/s400/pnzy2+cover.jpg"></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Poetry NZ Yearbook 2</i> (2015)</span></div><br />
<br />
Dr Jack Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01805945600952222957noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1664810700625454120.post-62737111229749701252017-07-15T08:14:00.000+12:002017-12-02T08:49:50.210+13:00Stephanie Christie: The Facts of Light (2014)<div style="text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvGnJncOk9BZP6TrItfn0pCDK48NF-U3o6UUmdqY5eewtQMtuyIF3qry8iNqhMAxSg-82MreHJabe5AwPlGKDaDfSeLdx1JGWkFq4d8Zcrgx-EaliDo1092nst8mDRatQ8YMFdwA8hkuQ/s1600/dB_Christie_Cover_Front_1024x1024.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvGnJncOk9BZP6TrItfn0pCDK48NF-U3o6UUmdqY5eewtQMtuyIF3qry8iNqhMAxSg-82MreHJabe5AwPlGKDaDfSeLdx1JGWkFq4d8Zcrgx-EaliDo1092nst8mDRatQ8YMFdwA8hkuQ/s400/dB_Christie_Cover_Front_1024x1024.jpg" width="400" height="400" data-original-width="1024" data-original-height="1024" /></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">Stephanie Christie: <a href="https://vagabondpress.net/products/stephanie-christie-the-facts-of-light">The Facts of Light</a> (2014)</span>
<br />
<br />
<b><span style="font-size: 180%;">Reviews:</span></b></div>
<br />
<blockquote><blockquote>Stephanie Christie. <i>The Facts of Light</i>. deciBel Series 001. Ed. Pam Brown. ISBN 978-1-922181-28-2. Sydney: Vagabond Press, 2014. RRP $AUS 15. 48 pp.</blockquote>
<div align="center">
<br />
<b>Reviewed by <a href="http://poetrynzreview.blogspot.co.nz/2017/05/about-reviewers.html">Elizabeth Morton</a></b></div><br />
<br />
<i>The Facts of Light</i> is a pipsqueak of a collection, comprised of a mere 21 poems. But its scope is lofty and its message is urgent. This is poetry in its last breath, a Swan Song in verse. Christie gives us a sniff of the end times – the “dystopic mess” and “decay of systems”. <br />
<br />
But this collection is not a resignation; this poetry won’t lie back and think of England, nor is it an ostrich with its head beneath the sand. Rather, it greets the new reality in full frontal and intones a call to arms. With poems titled “Revolution”, “Manifest oh” and “Save Today”, we are smuggled into a world that’s turned to custard, and we are urged to act. <br />
<br />
“Passivity of witness” beckons the end of the world as we know it. Sidestepping issues clinches the breakdown of psyche and civilization. Things must change. The hedonistic tendencies of humanity are scrutinised. Christie asks whether “our crude fun (is) what all this / devastation’s worth”. We are chastised for being so “crazy for self-reflection”, for “believing our families / to be the most deserving”, and yet, somehow, this work seems too nuanced to be called didactic. <br />
<br />
Language is as much a pollutant as the “casual wounds, car crashes, alcoholism, genocide and theft”. Christie writes of “a tumbling vicious language” and of a “lingo (which) contaminates the globe”. We need to be gentle, to speak carefully, Christie seems to be saying. We need to be kind. We need to “try learning to love”. <br />
<br />
There is a relentless anxiety, a sense of dislocation. This is a world where fear is recursive. Our narrator says she’s “scared of the discomfort of experiencing fear” and “you keep coming back to find out why you keep coming back”. This is not writing-as-therapy, although the narrator confesses she writes so she “can feel / and let there be feelings”. Her poetry pegs the ineffable to paper. <br />
<br />
<i>The Facts of Light</i> is where the physical and the psychical coalesce. There are unexpected pairings – “the loneliness has cellular depth” and “dislocated thoughts collect / at the bottom of the glass”. <br />
<br />
The poetry is playful and unsettling. It brings to mind the title of an REM song – “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”. The gravity of the “impending crisis” is met by nervous laughter.<br />
<br />
<i>The Facts of Light</i> reads more like Siri than music. This adds to the sense of disjunction. Poems here read as though a science textbook has been mashed with a love poem in a Burroughs cut-up machine.<br />
<br />
Textured wordplay, transmuted cliché and wry humour set the reader on his toes. Christie’s poetry is not warm – It is deliberate and indelicate. This poetry would rather grind axes than administer tranquilisers. This is not palliative care for the end times.<br />
<br />
Welcome to the deep-end.
<blockquote>
When we fall into the sun<br />
finally, there’ll be<br />
no more darkness.</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<br />
<hr align="left" noshade="noshade" size="1" width="70%" /><br />
<div align="center">
<br />
<i>Poetry New Zealand Yearbook</i> 2 [Issue #50]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2015): 251-52.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugSHE40UCJXnLFQYQOlhXzx2vUxzfNOaAO6yMKYDkQeDVtW43fqDavaU3ieqiX_WxhdM3_bDeJRtS7bT_6BoU5NNxs7urhijTMNkDtQM4X8nY-9y14eRfENUBjB68rwkJmT8PZ7u72AE/s1600/pnzy2+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugSHE40UCJXnLFQYQOlhXzx2vUxzfNOaAO6yMKYDkQeDVtW43fqDavaU3ieqiX_WxhdM3_bDeJRtS7bT_6BoU5NNxs7urhijTMNkDtQM4X8nY-9y14eRfENUBjB68rwkJmT8PZ7u72AE/s400/pnzy2+cover.jpg"></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Poetry NZ Yearbook 2</i> (2015)</span></div><br />
<br />
Dr Jack Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01805945600952222957noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1664810700625454120.post-4556275104527843712017-07-14T08:13:00.000+12:002017-12-02T08:46:48.505+13:00Anna Jackson: I, Clodia and Other Portraits (2014)<div style="text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1M5rM3uZA_cKmse3i5J488hG4Jj-aoNPTarWzdbwo3FZw2P-YYoC0Sbdd44Kb_j2_94fMHc1bbYxrTRvA0gwVbjnd0XG_xBnkidFiJvjqUHhADk0aUExvitK0o4lLwskHsXPEJfajxfU/s1600/1415925155755.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1M5rM3uZA_cKmse3i5J488hG4Jj-aoNPTarWzdbwo3FZw2P-YYoC0Sbdd44Kb_j2_94fMHc1bbYxrTRvA0gwVbjnd0XG_xBnkidFiJvjqUHhADk0aUExvitK0o4lLwskHsXPEJfajxfU/s400/1415925155755.jpg" width="257" height="400" data-original-width="193" data-original-height="300" /></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">Anna Jackson: <a href="http://www.press.auckland.ac.nz/en/browse-books/all-books/books-2014/I-Clodia-and-Other-Portraits.html">I, Clodia and Other Portraits</a> (2014)</span>
<br />
<br />
<b><span style="font-size: 180%;">Reviews:</span></b></div>
<br />
<blockquote><blockquote>Anna Jackson. <i>I, Clodia, and Other Portraits</i>. ISBN 978-1-86940-820-6. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2014. RRP $24.99. 76 pp.</blockquote>
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<br />
<b>Reviewed by <a href="http://poetrynzreview.blogspot.co.nz/2017/05/about-reviewers.html">Elizabeth Morton</a></b></div><br />
<br />
<i>Odi et amo</i>, wrote Catullus. I hate and I love.<br />
<br />
Anna Jackson’s portrait of the infamous Clodia Metelli is both love letter and hate-mail. Dancing between tenderness and execration, Jackson summons Clodia from the shadows of History. Clodia is conferred a voice which, hitherto, has been appropriated by men.<br />
<br />
The educated Roman aristocrat leaves a smear of secondary testimonials in her wake, with accusations of incest, promiscuity and allusions to Medea. (Most notably, Clodia appears in the letters of Cicero, and takes the alias ‘Lesbia’ in poems by her lover, Catullus,). But, in Jackson’s sequence of poems, it is Clodia’s turn to take the floor.<br />
<br />
Clodia does not hole up behind Anna Jackson’s verbal frontage. She is not some biographical splinter of the author’s psyche. Unlike the author’s earlier work, <i>Catullus for Children</i>, this volume does not allow anachronism or New Zealand life to seep into its narrative. <br />
<br />
This is clever poetry – It can flitter between free-verse and hendecasyllables and galliambics (which, admittedly, I had to look up). The verses which I find most compelling are the more pared down, such as Clodia’s message to Caelius Rufus:
<blockquote>
So there are verses about me circulating about the city.<br />
At least they keep a pretty metre.<br />
Campaigning against them<br />
would be like campaigning against blossoms falling in Spring –<br />
lean over? Let me brush a petal off your hair.
</blockquote>
It is as though one of antiquity’s more notable love affairs (that between Clodia and Catullus) has been cryogenically set and now thawed. Jackson has given Clodia a new life, and in this incarnation she is poet superior, not merely “a ghost once loved by a poet”.<br />
<br />
The second half of Anna Jackson’s <i>I, Clodia, and other portraits</i> is a wholly different kettle of fish. Here Jackson lets us into the world of “The Pretty Photographer”, whose foray into portraiture is, she tells us, “the worst disaster of her career”.<br />
<br />
The Pretty Photographer captures small absences – the “smile that doesn’t appear on her face”, the subject who says “it was her birthday / when it wasn’t”, the “hallway out of reach”, the “two planes, one / undoing the writing of another”, “the “with” withheld”.<br />
<br />
Here her subjects are arrested, “the stills betraying an extremity of / emotion not apparent / on the move”. We meet a procession of people in their worlds – “Amanda in the mirror”, “Saoirse at the fridge”, “Timothy, after the conference”. These are portraits that are sometimes dramatic and high-contrast, sometimes gentle and soft-lit. We catch subjects in moments where they are vulnerable:
<blockquote>
Saoirse weeps at the fridge door<br />
removing nothing, the cold air<br />
on her tears, her feet in socks<br />
from Singapore Air.
</blockquote>
The Pretty Photographer’s cautioning, her statement that “this creation / of ‘portraits’…. makes her want / to throw up in the sink”, seems off-beam. Portraiture, rather, seems to be a strong suit. <i>I, Clodia, and other portraits</i> is a deft shooting of character, in two parts. Don’t fall for the Pretty Photographer’s self-deprecation. This is poetry with clout.
</blockquote>
<br />
<hr align="left" noshade="noshade" size="1" width="70%" /><br />
<div align="center">
<br />
<i>Poetry New Zealand Yearbook</i> 2 [Issue #50]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2015): 252-54.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugSHE40UCJXnLFQYQOlhXzx2vUxzfNOaAO6yMKYDkQeDVtW43fqDavaU3ieqiX_WxhdM3_bDeJRtS7bT_6BoU5NNxs7urhijTMNkDtQM4X8nY-9y14eRfENUBjB68rwkJmT8PZ7u72AE/s1600/pnzy2+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugSHE40UCJXnLFQYQOlhXzx2vUxzfNOaAO6yMKYDkQeDVtW43fqDavaU3ieqiX_WxhdM3_bDeJRtS7bT_6BoU5NNxs7urhijTMNkDtQM4X8nY-9y14eRfENUBjB68rwkJmT8PZ7u72AE/s400/pnzy2+cover.jpg"></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Poetry NZ Yearbook 2</i> (2015)</span></div><br />
<br />
Dr Jack Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01805945600952222957noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1664810700625454120.post-50655273211928617182017-07-13T11:25:00.000+12:002017-12-01T08:12:53.671+13:00Mary Cresswell: Fish Stories (2015)<div style="text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEW47rD_eHuJWn8HgEHiC1h9qnYQz5whTxKkiGO9os-gUTTQYvTLRhchcZ_22AxOl0TzMrAdbA3WMFV71l4ld4-kAStq6S391FP5JkDlNQhlhC4x1yTSjHhqmA8ZM3yNbm5B_9M4IER_g/s1600/Fish_Stories_Catalogue.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEW47rD_eHuJWn8HgEHiC1h9qnYQz5whTxKkiGO9os-gUTTQYvTLRhchcZ_22AxOl0TzMrAdbA3WMFV71l4ld4-kAStq6S391FP5JkDlNQhlhC4x1yTSjHhqmA8ZM3yNbm5B_9M4IER_g/s400/Fish_Stories_Catalogue.jpg"></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">Mary Cresswell: <a href="http://www.cup.canterbury.ac.nz/catalogue/Fish_stories.shtml">Fish Stories</a> (2015)</span>
<br />
<br />
<b><span style="font-size: 180%;">Reviews:</span></b></div>
<br />
<blockquote><blockquote>Mary Cresswell. <i>Fish Stories</i>. ISBN 978-1-927145-66-1. Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2015. RRP $25. 131 pp.</blockquote>
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<br />
<b>Reviewed by <a href="http://poetrynzreview.blogspot.co.nz/2017/05/about-reviewers.html">Jack Ross</a></b></div><br />
<br />
The ghazal (pronounced, I’m reliably informed, “guzzle”) is certainly trending in contemporary English-language poetry. One can see its advantages in combining close attention to form with a dizzying number of possible variations: a little like the spread of the sonnet form throughout Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth century. <br />
<br />
Mary Cresswell, an American poet who has lived in New Zealand since 1970, says of her collection as a whole: “It is accessible poetry, using rhyme, varying poetic structures and a range of topics,” and goes on to “encourage other poets to use formal verse and rhyme as I think it’s rewarding and fun.”<br />
<br />
Her work, she explains, is “not confessional, not an emotional diary and not an autobiography.” What is it, then, if it’s none of those things?
<blockquote>Yes, I’ve heard about the vacant chambers of my mind.<br />
Are you here because you hope to fill the vacant chambers of my mind?<br />
[“Eine Kleine Kammermusik,” p.23]</blockquote>
This poem, whose title translates as “A Little Chambermusic” (presumably on the analogy of Mozart’s “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik”), rings the changes on the following dismissive remark by linguist Otto Jespersen, referred to by Cresswell in a footnote:
<blockquote>Jespersen describes (<i>Language</i>, 1922) a reading experiment for speed and comprehension in which women overwhelmingly outperformed men. This proves, he says, that women’s minds have ‘vacant chambers’ in which they promptly accommodate new information whereas men’s minds are already full of weighty thoughts that slow down such acquisition.</blockquote>
So far, so shocking (though it does remind one a little of the passage in <i>A Study in Scarlet</i> where Sherlock Holmes disclaims any interest in the fact that the Earth goes around the Sun, rather than vice versa, explaining that such irrelevant information simply takes up much-needed room in his well-organised brain).<br />
<br />
My question is, however, whether the poem itself has much to add to the absurdity of the footnote?
<blockquote>I’ve spoken long with Professor Freud. He knows of course the most<br />
efficient way those pesky little chambers should be mined.</blockquote>
I’m afraid that most readers’ experience of rhyme and strict metrical form is now confined mainly to light verse. The great tradition of such writers as W. S. Gilbert, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll and A. A. Milne has led us to expect witty paradox and ingenuity as inevitable features of such techniques.<br />
<br />
Their successors were the Tinpan Alley lyricists of the Broadway Musical: “We hear he is a whiz of a Wiz, if ever a Wiz there was,” or “Doe, a deer, a female deer,” are probably among the lines that spring to mind when one thinks of the fun (Cresswell’s word) of poetic formalism.<br />
<br />
Cresswell’s satirical intentions may be not dissimilar to, say, W. S. Gilbert’s, but in a poem such as “Eine Kleine Kammermusik,” I think we feel a certain forced quality to the wit. The allusions are there, but – to my ear, at least – the repeated rhyming variations on the word “mind” lack ease. They “smell of the lamp” (to use another nineteenth century phrase).<br />
<br />
Where I think Cresswell is strongest is where she sidesteps the stricter demands of the forms she’s chosen to write in, and allows the language to speak through her with rather more freedom:
<blockquote>Night is cold and coming faster than we’d like.<br />
We sit and shiver under thin and wear-worn shawls,<br />
<br />
I assume I’m exempt because I sit around all day,<br />
reading thrillers, writing predictable ghazals.<br />
[“Waiting Room,” p.91]</blockquote>
We forgive, I suspect, the <i>intentional</i> clumsiness of that “wear-worn shawls” line because of the brooding truth underlying the others: the decision to use the ghazal-form, too, can be seen here in better relief – as, essentially, a refusal simply to add to a monotonous chorus of despair.<br />
<br />
Some of her experiments in cento, too (selecting and recombining lines from other poets), result in a kind of <i>poetry despite itself</i>: a very personal voice asserting itself through a mountain of off-rhymes and naff experiments:
<blockquote>
<i>Where there are two, choose more than one</i><br />
three, possibly, or a handful,<br />
<br />
whatever you need to cross the desert:<br />
dates to tuck in your turban<br />
<br />
silver coins to tip the bearers<br />
Biros for taking notes. You know<br />
<br />
how hard the sun is on diaries<br />
not to mention sharp sand<br />
<br />
between the crumpled pages.<br />
[“The Length of Long Days,” p.45]</blockquote>
The luminosity of such lines goes a long way to make up for a few arid passages here and there.
</blockquote>
<br />
<hr align="left" noshade="noshade" size="1" width="70%" /><br />
<div align="center">
<br />
<i>Poetry New Zealand Yearbook</i> 2 [Issue #50]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2015): 255-57.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugSHE40UCJXnLFQYQOlhXzx2vUxzfNOaAO6yMKYDkQeDVtW43fqDavaU3ieqiX_WxhdM3_bDeJRtS7bT_6BoU5NNxs7urhijTMNkDtQM4X8nY-9y14eRfENUBjB68rwkJmT8PZ7u72AE/s1600/pnzy2+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugSHE40UCJXnLFQYQOlhXzx2vUxzfNOaAO6yMKYDkQeDVtW43fqDavaU3ieqiX_WxhdM3_bDeJRtS7bT_6BoU5NNxs7urhijTMNkDtQM4X8nY-9y14eRfENUBjB68rwkJmT8PZ7u72AE/s400/pnzy2+cover.jpg"></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Poetry NZ Yearbook 2</i> (2015)</span></div><br />
<br />
Dr Jack Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01805945600952222957noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1664810700625454120.post-25070768596065469412017-07-12T11:26:00.000+12:002017-12-01T08:11:49.895+13:00David Eggleton: The Conch Trumpet (2015)<div style="text-align: center;">
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNIXR-rHFv0KI3I6VtkhtCnJnRTmpiXgb2vTGytDz7slbNwEeli7LExHiHRCoZc4KclrcH2AGmN7Ch_owQPyP_jaTSGvbSBzA7L834mcBqhEyKHQsA4rI5zASH5t6wKZ1VxzOZ62fMR94/s1600/otago089185.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNIXR-rHFv0KI3I6VtkhtCnJnRTmpiXgb2vTGytDz7slbNwEeli7LExHiHRCoZc4KclrcH2AGmN7Ch_owQPyP_jaTSGvbSBzA7L834mcBqhEyKHQsA4rI5zASH5t6wKZ1VxzOZ62fMR94/s400/otago089185.jpg"></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">David Eggleton: <a href="http://www.otago.ac.nz/press/books/otago088247.html">The Conch Trumpet</a> (2015)</span>
<br />
<br />
<b><span style="font-size: 180%;">Reviews:</span></b></div>
<br />
<blockquote><blockquote>David Eggleton. <i>The Conch Trumpet</i>. ISBN 978-1-877578-93-9. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2015. RRP $25. 122 pp.</blockquote>
<div align="center">
<br />
<b>Reviewed by <a href="http://poetrynzreview.blogspot.co.nz/2017/05/about-reviewers.html">Jack Ross</a></b></div><br />
<br />
<blockquote>Once in a blue moon,<br />
everyone grows older, if you need something<br />
to cry on, here’s my shoulder.<br />
[“Syzygy,” p.28]</blockquote>
The blurb to his book proclaims David Eggleton’s intention to call to the “scattered tribes of contemporary New Zealand.” Having duly called to them, though, what does he actually have to say? The lines above illustrate his dilemma.<br />
<br />
They exemplify Eggleton’s characteristic serio-comic register: his disconcertingly pat rhymes, offsetting the deep emotionalism of the words itself. What, indeed, is there to say? We do all get older – “if you need something / to cry on, here’s my shoulder.”<br />
<br />
Melancholy and a pervasive sense of loss seem to set the tone here. “On Recrudescence of Waterfalls After All-Night Rain,” for instance, begins:
<blockquote>Before the movies they had waterfalls</blockquote>
and concludes with the less-than-encouraging evocation:
<blockquote>wet with glitter<br />
mined as popcorn additive for Lord of the Rings. [p.36]</blockquote>
What, indeed, can be found which is not fake or (at least) falsely represented in such a landscape?
<blockquote>The early writers echoed one another<br />
to haul narratives of settlement into being,<br />
as if cramming more sail on good ship Rhapsody.<br />
‘Mount Cook, greenstone country, middle island’,<br />
was ‘stupendous’, ‘precipitous’, ‘gigantic’ –<br />
the sublime defined by extremes: peaks, troughs,<br />
breathtaking gulfs, gulps of cold illumination.<br />
[“Wilderness,” p.51]</blockquote>
It was all a device for promoting one’s sense of ownership of all this “nameless nothingness,” Eggleton explains: “a found blank wilderness they would remake.”<br />
<br />
Such denunciations of the “South Island myth” and its landgrabbing corollaries are, mind you, fairly familiar to most of us by now. The poem concludes more teasingly, though – at the end of a list of such landmark namers as Charles Torlesse, Thomas Cass, Charlotte Godley, and Lady Barker – with a reference to the “nowhere of Erewhon.”
<blockquote>Thus Samuel Butler looked up to stony limits,<br />
went searching for paydirt in magnetic ore:<br />
‘At every shingle bed we came to … we lay down<br />
and gazed into the pebbles with all our eyes.’</blockquote>
It’s not that Butler is seen here (by Eggleton, at any rate) as any exception to this rule of plundering a landscape through the language one chooses to describe it. It’s more that these lines point at the larger truth of Erewhon the satire (rather than the placename): one must be somewhere to imagine nowhere – but the point of imagining nowhere is to look back on that somewhere. If you continue to gaze “into the pebbles” with all your eyes, who’s to say what strange visions might result? Mineral wealth of some sort, no doubt, but perhaps not in the usual sense.<br />
<br />
Elsewhere in his book, Eggleton expresses a certain healthy scepticism about any and all attempts to own [= express] truisms about landscape:
<blockquote>Bogans, cashed-up, await gentrification,<br />
seeking a personal tutor in Enzed Lit.<br />
[“Sound and Fury,” p.82]</blockquote>
More to the point, the mediascape he is (we are) forced to inhabit now encompasses a world-wide banality:
<blockquote>Praise be to internet, now my mind is a search engine:<br />
a web-headed weave around humanity<br />
every which way which babbles of conformity,<br />
and of dissenters in each departure lounge.<br />
[“The Age of Terror,” p. 119]</blockquote>
When clicking on a Facebook “like” icon constitutes the extent of your political conformity or dissent, it might be seen to make little difference what else you do or say: “There are unknown knowns, and then there are the drones.”<br />
<br />
It is, to be sure, a chilling vision Eggleton paints, and any attempts to valorise it or make it sound cool seem distinctly beside the point. “Let’s face it,” a young hijab-wearing media commentator said the other day on Al Jazeera, “right now stories about Syrian refugees pouring into Europe are sexy.” There was scorn in her voice, but the language she was forced to use somehow belied it.<br />
<br />
David Eggleton’s latest book reminds us what time of day it is: perhaps as close to midnight as any of us has ever been.
</blockquote>
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<br />
<i>Poetry New Zealand Yearbook</i> 2 [Issue #50]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2015): 257-59.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugSHE40UCJXnLFQYQOlhXzx2vUxzfNOaAO6yMKYDkQeDVtW43fqDavaU3ieqiX_WxhdM3_bDeJRtS7bT_6BoU5NNxs7urhijTMNkDtQM4X8nY-9y14eRfENUBjB68rwkJmT8PZ7u72AE/s1600/pnzy2+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugSHE40UCJXnLFQYQOlhXzx2vUxzfNOaAO6yMKYDkQeDVtW43fqDavaU3ieqiX_WxhdM3_bDeJRtS7bT_6BoU5NNxs7urhijTMNkDtQM4X8nY-9y14eRfENUBjB68rwkJmT8PZ7u72AE/s400/pnzy2+cover.jpg"></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Poetry NZ Yearbook 2</i> (2015)</span></div><br />
<br />
Dr Jack Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01805945600952222957noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1664810700625454120.post-74041396205447705102017-07-11T11:27:00.000+12:002017-12-01T08:11:33.630+13:00A Place To Go On From: The Collected Poems of Iain Lonie (2015)<div style="text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-2Xjxxg6elbb-RJtOjhKyOMcCv4OfHDijo4np9GK3vXdi9IDLM6qXdYtnwqU7YZb0yOoowXvpaa_pC3g_nqTzV9Inoc3WmZxIedNW3NB_yPVE9wcTPoSIE_LUIcedl0bG7PsyZk9v0zY/s1600/otago108004.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-2Xjxxg6elbb-RJtOjhKyOMcCv4OfHDijo4np9GK3vXdi9IDLM6qXdYtnwqU7YZb0yOoowXvpaa_pC3g_nqTzV9Inoc3WmZxIedNW3NB_yPVE9wcTPoSIE_LUIcedl0bG7PsyZk9v0zY/s400/otago108004.jpg"></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">David Howard, ed.: <a href="http://www.otago.ac.nz/press/books/otago106647.html">A Place To Go On From: The Collected Poems of Iain Lonie</a> (2015)</span>
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<br />
<b><span style="font-size: 180%;">Reviews:</span></b></div>
<br />
<blockquote><blockquote><i>A Place To Go On From: The Collected Poems of Iain Lonie</i>. Edited by David Howard. ISBN 978-1-927322-01-7. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2015. RRP $50. 390 pp.</blockquote>
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<b>Reviewed by <a href="http://poetrynzreview.blogspot.co.nz/2017/05/about-reviewers.html">Jack Ross</a></b></div><br />
<br />
First of all, I think it’s important to stress just how carefully and sensitively David Howard has laboured to show off Iain Lonie’s poetry to its best advantage.<br />
<br />
Editorial procedures often constitute the bit at the front of a book which readers skip in order to get to the good stuff inside, but there’s no doubt that appreciation of a poet, in particular, can be greatly helped or hindered by the wrong set of choices.<br />
<br />
Take poor old Philip Larkin, for example. Given the precision and care with which he shaped each of his four published collections, it was quite a shock to his fans to encounter Anthony Thwaite’s boots-and-all gallimaufry of a Collected Poems when it first appeared in 1988. There were poems everywhere! New poems, unfinished poems, juvenilia – in a vaguely chronological order which completely obscured the choices Larkin himself had made about them over the years.<br />
<br />
Initially unresponsive to such criticism, eventually Thwaite was forced to give in. He tried again in 2003. This time he included the four main collections, in full, with a small selection from the other materials included in his 1988 edition. In other words, fewer poems, but with better internal ordering. But which should one rely on? The fuller (but more chaotic) 1988 edition – or the less inclusive 2003 one?<br />
<br />
At the end of a long debate, Archie Burnett’s Complete Poems of 2012 set out to include all the juvenilia, all the unfinished and uncollected material from 1988 (and elsewhere), and all four major books, clearly labelled and separated, with a far more carefully edited text and more copious information on everything. It might be overkill, but it does work.<br />
<br />
Has all this hurt Larkin’s poetic reputation much? It’s hard to say, but it certainly hasn’t helped.<br />
<br />
Howard has learnt from these (and many other) precedents. His Lonie edition includes each of the five collections – including the posthumous Winter Walk at Morning (1991) – clearly demarcated in its own section. Rather than putting in a single section of “unpublished” or “uncollected” work, Howard has intelligently and carefully shaped a series of chronological chapters from the poet’s manuscript and typescript remains. <br />
<br />
It’s hard to see how this arrangement could be bettered, given the complex and debatable state of Lonie’s work, with so many undated poems available in multiple texts. Howard’s decision to include so much information in his endnotes is also a welcome one – as is the inclusion of Bill Sewell’s memoir, Bridie Lonie’s chronology, and Damian Love’s critical essay on the poet.<br />
<br />
It’s doubtful that Lonie will ever require another editor: on this scale, at least. The great thing about David Howard’s book is that it virtually guarantees that he won’t need one.<br />
<br />
But, after all that, what of the poems? Howard quotes a telling remark by Lonie’s eldest son Jonathan, written after reading his first collection <i>Recreations</i> (1967):
<blockquote>I never realised how close to Donovan it is, I suppose I judge all poetry by his, but it is perfect poetry and very musical [p.358]</blockquote>
It’s hard for a subsequent generation to realise how sincerely this could have been meant in 1968: folksinger Donovan Leitch (“Atlantis,” “Hurdy Gurdy Man”) has long ceased to be a name to conjure with. I’m not entirely sure that the comparison is entirely unjustified, though. There’s a great deal of attention paid to being a poet in this early phase of Lonie’s work: far less to what (if anything) he has to write about.<br />
<br />
Certainly it’s odd to hear Lonie invoking Auden and the other thirties poets solely in terms of technique: with an apparent ideology bypass over the motivations behind their demotic techniques and phraseology.<br />
<br />
Montale, too, a deeply personal poet eschewing the public brayings of his fascist contemporaries, is translated by Lonie with sensitivity and care, but with a strange disregard to anything but the immediate personal contexts of his verse.<br />
<br />
Is that the verdict, then: technical brilliance and profound sensitivity foundering in a gulf of lyrical detachment? Not really. Lonie is a poet for particular moods, I would say: for a bitter mood of telling over past follies, past loves. Bitter, or bitter-sweet? Lonie was, after all, a classicist. There’s something Horatian in his attempts to be himself, to live in the world without compromise.<br />
<br />
The more of his work I read, the more I become convinced that that in itself is quite a considerable achievement: to be true to something so evanescent by its very nature, with so little clue as to whether one has succeeded – will ever succeed – or not.<br />
<br />
I suspect, then, that what I’ll be returning to most often in Lonie’s work is those last two collections openly dedicated to grief, <i>The Entrance to Purgatory</i> (1986) and the posthumous <i>Winter Walk At Morning</i>.<br />
<br />
One of the loveliest things about this book is the way in which it represents the meeting of two very different poets – David Howard and Iain Lonie – somewhat alike in temperament, perhaps, in their concern for technical precision and tour-de-force, but very different people, who have been able to meet on these poetic grounds almost like Dante himself, walking with Virgil and Homer into the seven-walled castle of the great pagan poets at the beginning of the Inferno.</blockquote>
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<br />
<i>Poetry New Zealand Yearbook</i> 2 [Issue #50]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2015): 260-62.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugSHE40UCJXnLFQYQOlhXzx2vUxzfNOaAO6yMKYDkQeDVtW43fqDavaU3ieqiX_WxhdM3_bDeJRtS7bT_6BoU5NNxs7urhijTMNkDtQM4X8nY-9y14eRfENUBjB68rwkJmT8PZ7u72AE/s1600/pnzy2+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugSHE40UCJXnLFQYQOlhXzx2vUxzfNOaAO6yMKYDkQeDVtW43fqDavaU3ieqiX_WxhdM3_bDeJRtS7bT_6BoU5NNxs7urhijTMNkDtQM4X8nY-9y14eRfENUBjB68rwkJmT8PZ7u72AE/s400/pnzy2+cover.jpg"></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Poetry NZ Yearbook 2</i> (2015)</span></div><br />
<br />Dr Jack Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01805945600952222957noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1664810700625454120.post-67010075839762598602017-07-10T11:28:00.000+12:002017-12-01T08:05:24.222+13:00Jane Summer: Erebus (2014)<div style="text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6F99ZLFajEz8RL8S5VbgPOYfrKmMZ-75J7tYlTxksmPmW3MtmZN0UuihorID3dgOMiKkIcH954a0BDbYLx4nkU-GrjkyX9BR_iQic8BSLT0my0d3aC4V8bejZjmZZcbSc0lRf_v4-tKo/s1600/Erebus_FRONT.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6F99ZLFajEz8RL8S5VbgPOYfrKmMZ-75J7tYlTxksmPmW3MtmZN0UuihorID3dgOMiKkIcH954a0BDbYLx4nkU-GrjkyX9BR_iQic8BSLT0my0d3aC4V8bejZjmZZcbSc0lRf_v4-tKo/s400/Erebus_FRONT.jpg"></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">Jane Summer: <a href="http://siblingrivalrypress.bigcartel.com/product/erebus-by-jane-summer">Erebus</a> (2014)</span>
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<br />
<b><span style="font-size: 180%;">Reviews:</span></b></div>
<br />
<blockquote><blockquote>Jane Summer. <i>Erebus</i>. ISBN 978-1-937420-90-1. Little Rock, Arkansas: Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014. RRP $US 24.95. 185 pp.</blockquote>
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<b>Reviewed by <a href="http://poetrynzreview.blogspot.co.nz/2017/05/about-reviewers.html">Jack Ross</a></b></div><br />
<br />
I suppose that it’s natural enough that I should have started off by regarding this book with a certain suspicion. Not only do most New Zealanders regard the Erebus tragedy as somehow “ours” – there’s also the fact that it’s already been written about at length in Bill Sewell’s Erebus: A Poem (1999).<br />
<br />
I find myself coming back to that point from Robert Sullivan: “the need to represent one’s own stories” [from the interview on p.27 of this issue].<br />
<br />
I’m glad to say, however, that I now feel that I was completely wrong in this case. Not only is American writer Jane Summer conscious of this need to establish the right to deal with such subject matter, but she handles the whole issue with a deftness and skill one can only envy.
<blockquote>
A yankee, I’ve been<br />
<br />
so out of it for so many years<br />
I’m not even sure <br />
<br />
if I lost Kay in that<br />
crash or she lost me [p.19]</blockquote>
Her poem is, in essence, a love letter to a lost friend, a friend (and, as we gradually intuit, lover) killed in the Erebus disaster.<br />
<br />
She ties together the various knots of her narrative with intricate precision: a “three-month junket / to Australia and New Zealand – / bush vigor, tainted colonialism” [p.23] (I love that description of us: is it the Australians who have the vigour, and we the taint? Or do both pertain to both?) in 1990 fails to spark any memories of Kay’s death in 1979, and even an “Awful dream: X dies in Alps crash / + I say maybe they’ll find her / preserved by the cold but everyone / says I’m fooling myself + my loss / feels inconsolable” [p.30] does not remind her of it.<br />
<br />
Why not? Well, there’s the rub. I could tell you, but you’d miss the best part of her story, her gradually unfolding life-lies and comforting delusions. For once, I think I won’t issue a spoiler alert, but simply recommend you to the book itself. <br />
<br />
Allen Ginsberg’s great poem <i>Kaddish</i> (1961), a howl of grief for his dead mother Naomi, or Paul Muldoon’s “Incantata,” (from his 1994 book <i>The Annals of Chile</i>) for his ex-lover, the artist Mary Farl Powers, are the kind of company Erebus keeps. Nor does Summer have anything to fear from the comparison.<br />
<br />
Both Ginsberg and Muldoon innovate technically with a kind of desperate, heart-felt intensity, transcending any suspicion of too much interest in the machinery of their poems.<br />
<br />
So, too, in Summer’s book, the collaging of log books, the interspersed witness testimonies, the long passages of straightforward verse narrative, never strain our compassion or test our patience.<br />
<br />
It’s hard to imagine a reader who couldn’t empathise with the sheer power of Summer’s bereavement: the life that she could have had, the wound so deep it’s taken this long even to begin to deal with it.<br />
<br />
I feel this is a book I’ll keep going back to, and recommend to many friends. It’s true; it’s unpretentious; it’s written with a casual precision that belies the skill behind it. It is, in short, I firmly believe, something of a wonder.</blockquote>
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<hr align="left" noshade="noshade" size="1" width="70%" /><br />
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<br />
<i>Poetry New Zealand Yearbook</i> 2 [Issue #50]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2015): 262-63.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugSHE40UCJXnLFQYQOlhXzx2vUxzfNOaAO6yMKYDkQeDVtW43fqDavaU3ieqiX_WxhdM3_bDeJRtS7bT_6BoU5NNxs7urhijTMNkDtQM4X8nY-9y14eRfENUBjB68rwkJmT8PZ7u72AE/s1600/pnzy2+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugSHE40UCJXnLFQYQOlhXzx2vUxzfNOaAO6yMKYDkQeDVtW43fqDavaU3ieqiX_WxhdM3_bDeJRtS7bT_6BoU5NNxs7urhijTMNkDtQM4X8nY-9y14eRfENUBjB68rwkJmT8PZ7u72AE/s400/pnzy2+cover.jpg"></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Poetry NZ Yearbook 2</i> (2015)</span></div><br />
<br />
Dr Jack Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01805945600952222957noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1664810700625454120.post-11297134890355480522017-07-09T08:05:00.000+12:002017-12-02T08:40:05.666+13:00Edward Jenner: The Gold Leaves (2014)<div style="text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsY_mKi0l9bpUUloWrDUnqipt8fbie15QACgVOtOksH2LtxHa9jUWWXWH8NWWR-FVYzo4M_yPRibrTiwbDcBTkIcwkp0yLfkNs99ZnEAhGclpl0cvlxqbMh5VnbKEEi463fI84vnsjdHg/s1600/acoverfront.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsY_mKi0l9bpUUloWrDUnqipt8fbie15QACgVOtOksH2LtxHa9jUWWXWH8NWWR-FVYzo4M_yPRibrTiwbDcBTkIcwkp0yLfkNs99ZnEAhGclpl0cvlxqbMh5VnbKEEi463fI84vnsjdHg/s400/acoverfront.jpg" width="320" height="400" data-original-width="820" data-original-height="1024" /></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">Edward Jenner: <a href="http://www.atuanuipress.co.nz/authors/edward-jenner/">The Gold Leaves</a> (2014)</span>
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<br />
<b><span style="font-size: 180%;">The Gold Leaves</span></b></div>
<br />
<blockquote><blockquote>Edward Jenner. <i>The Gold Leaves (being an account and translation from the Ancient Greek of the so-called ‘Orphic’ Gold Tablets)</i>. ISBN 978-0-9922453-7-5. Pokeno: Atuanui Press, 2014. RRP $35. 161 pp.</blockquote>
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<b>Reviewed by <a href="http://poetrynzreview.blogspot.co.nz/2017/05/about-reviewers.html">Richard Taylor</a></b></div><br />
<br />
Edward (Ted) Jenner’s <i>The Gold Leaves</i> follows three other poetry books (1980 to 2009) and a translation of the poems of Ibykos from the Greek. Jenner is a classics scholar, a retired teacher of classics and languages, an expert in Pound and the modernists, and moves between the ancient and the new. His innovative poems were published in Michael Morrissey’s <i>The New Fiction</i>, which came out in 1984. It was a book I was waiting for and reading Ted Jenner and other significant writers (one, Keri Hulme, would later get the Booker Prize) was a stimulating and enlightening experience of NZ literature. Morrissey’s book is, in my view, like Stead’s <i>The New Poetic</i>, one of NZ’s critical and literary classics. Jenner’s poem or ‘creative text’ in <i>The New Fiction</i> utilizes the visual and the poetical. His poetry and innovative approach needs to be more widely known.<br />
<br />
So Jenner, less known than many other writers, is a significant writer as well as a classical scholar.<br />
<br />
<i>The Gold Leaves</i> is not a poetic work but involves poetry or poetic writing, for the gold leaves that the book is about, translated from ancient Greek by Jenner have a poetic and a mysterious beauty. Here is an example from the back of this quite beautiful book:
<blockquote>
You will find a spring and on your left in Hades’ halls<br />
and by it the cypress with its luminous sheen.<br />
Do not go near this spring, or drink this water.<br />
You will find another, cold water flowing from <br />
Memory’s lake; its guardians stand before it.<br />
<span style="padding-left: 4em;">from ‘Petelia’ (4th c. B.C.)</span>
</blockquote>
What adds to this beauty is the gold leaf in question with the original Greek on it, pictured above this excerpt. And the book is beautiful in all senses of the term: it is wonderfully written, excellently designed in terms cover, and of layout.<br />
<br />
<i>The Gold Leaves</i> is not only ‘poetic’ or even only a classic scholarly work (it is that) or an excellent translation. It is all this, but it also involves deep questions not only about the leaves themselves, and the various questions of how the Greeks and indeed other cultures view death, and thus life; but, through Jenner’s commentary and those he quotes, invokes deeper questions of the way humans of any time viewed death, the stark strangeness and seeming finality of death, and the way these questions link to various views of the Greeks themselves. Thus there are insights into Greek culture which always remind us by reflection of our own. The book is written for the scholar and anyone else who has an interest or might take an interest in these fascinating human issues, and this aspect of human history. And we are looking at the culture that, in the 5th and 4th Centuries and others, was to have an immense influence on the Western, and indeed, the whole world. These, not because western culture is primary, but because indeed, from deep time, Greece itself was influenced by many cultures and ethnicities.<br />
<br />
But no one should think that this subject is too difficult for them. It is sometimes complex, but mostly Jenner presents each aspect of his research and commentary very clearly with references to other scholars. It is like a literary and historical journey.<br />
<br />
But what are the gold leaves? Here is the commentary on the back by Murray Edmond:
<blockquote>
<i>The Gold Leaves</i> is a study of ancient (c.400 BC-300 AD) verses, often fragmentary, incised on fragile gold leaves that have been found (and continue to be found) buried in graves and tombs in the culturally Greek parts of the Mediterranean world. These leaves have placed carefully, perhaps on the chest, or in the mouth, or in the hand, of the body. The leaves are messages designed to guide the souls of the dead on their journey [in the after life].<br />
<br />
Jenner has provided his own translation of a selected number of the texts of the gold leaves. He brings his skill as a poet to these translations. [ … ] For me the book is finally a book about poetry, about its potential and its limits, about its “charm” (in the sense of magic).
</blockquote>
This is a typically percipient summation by Murray Edmond, who is an extensively published poet and dramatist who knows well of the “magic”, and sometimes the ambiguity, and the mystery of language. And as well as being a scholarly (but very readable) exegesis of the historical and other implications of the lamellae, or gold leaves, <i>The Gold Leaves</i> is indeed about or is itself inherently on at least one level or way of seeing: a work of poetic magic.<br />
<br />
And magic, or the magic and mystery of language, is what has fascinated me for many years. Among poets I am probably not alone in this. As a teenager I used to read and re-read Huxley’s <i>Texts and Pretexts</i> (an anthology of poetry with a commentary) and the chapter on Magic includes some haunting lines, and this line, which is subtitled ‘Orphic Formula’ which has the Greek above it and Huxley’s translation:
<blockquote>
A kid, I fell into milk.
</blockquote>
Jenner’s translation of the same line is ‘I am the kid that rushed to milk.’ The mystery of that line, regardless of what is the ‘correct’ translation, is in many of the writings of the gold leaves. Jenner discusses the meaning of this and many of the texts (for example in Thurii 1). In both cases ‘kid’ is assumed to be a goat. There is a sense that there may be a sacrifice. But I think that Huxley’s comment (and I don’t think he knew anything of the gold leaves) is cogent: “Poetry justifies belief in magic...” He explains this and gives examples of the mix of magic and ‘logic’ in all great poetry and art. It is as if art and science wrestle with each other, particularly in poetry that is innovative or outré.<br />
<br />
And magic is tied to the rituals and mystery of death: which those who had the gold leaves with their incantatory instructions when they were buried, had possibly hoped to avoid in an absolute sense. And this may lead us, although Jenner’s book is also a good and well organized discussion of the reality (location, date found, the meaning via historical events or writings of the times, research by archaeologists); it is also a discussion of the human situation, or dilemma. And death and life is the interlinked subject. And in one sense at least, poetry and philosophy, indeed all disciplines, and all human activity is linked. Life, the converse has lead most human cultures to some concept of a continuation after death. Funerals, wills, and even writing are ways to offset death: it is a way of somehow continuing. It may be the origin of religion or some belief system, and for many it either gives comfort or adds something to life itself.<br />
<br />
But Jenner doesn’t philosophize heavily in these matters, but he does show potential connections to various ancient religions such as that of the Egyptians and the cult of Orphism and the ideas of Pythagoras and the ‘wheel of life’. Orphism is via the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. This myth involved the descent of Eurydice into the underground for part of the year. Orpheus himself is music and art, Eurydice and her mother become the life bringing spring or the season of cold when Hades presides. The Greeks, as Jenner discusses carefully, had complex mythologies and rituals of death. But the Dionysian cults celebrated an almost atavistic joy in sensual life as lived. And the gold leaves reflect these mysteries, rites and practices as well as questions raised about the significance of the wordings of the different texts found on the dead. We are talking nearly one thousand years or more in the past, yet it still speaks to us, or should.<br />
<br />
These questions, and the various textual poems (or fragments of poems or invocations), are examined methodically and subtly by Jenner. But not dryly: the reader is in an exciting field.<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br />
<b><span style="font-size: 130%;">•</span></b></div><br />
<br />
I said that the book is beautiful. It is. It is beautiful to read, to hold, and it has been wonderfully designed in terms of layout, accessibility and information. <br />
<br />
The various gold leaves are named by their place of discovery. These places are shown clearly on a map of Ancient Greece. From this map and by references to the wording on the sequent lamella the reader is able to locate where each translated text came from, and where it is in the book. Each relevant inscription translated has been numbered clearly and these can be read at the back of the book. In some cases the original Greek is presented. Following this there are further notes on the texts in a parallel numbered section. To assist the reader further, there is a page showing the gold leaves by their outline and comparative and actual shapes and sizes. These are each named. In addition there are two indexes, and a bibliography. It is detailed, planned, interesting, and well thought out.<br />
<br />
Jenner’s text is a lively and excellently written as well as a scholarly work. Connections are suggested between various religious practices and ancient mythologies. But it is not too definitive, and where scholars are not sure, Jenner might speculate but he always allows room for considered doubt. The texts are, of course, very ancient, and their meanings are still not completely clear. <br />
<br />
One example is his evocation of the writings of Hesiod, Homer, as well as Pindar’s and the Homeric Odes and the works of famous Greek philosophers (pre-Socratic, Plato, and others). Pythagoras’s beliefs on transmigration and Plato’s views on reality mix or interact with Orphic views and the Eleusinian mysteries, as well as the Dyionisian (Bacchic) beliefs.<br />
<br />
In T. S. Eliot’s <i>The Waste Land</i> Tiresias becomes a symbol of great significance. Tiresias becomes a force in that poem due to this blind prophet’s place in the <i>Odyssey</i> and later the <i>Aeneid</i>. Odysseus contacts the dead at Cumae. Here Tiresias assists to raise them if these ‘souls’ are able to drink the blood of sacrificed animals. The Greeks at one stage believed that the souls wandered rather dimly in Hades (Hell, perhaps), except those of more august stature, such as Odysseus and other heroes of the Greek world. This aspect of the difference of Christian belief in say a soul reaching some higher heaven (as in Dante’s <i>Divine Comedy</i>) is discussed, as well as the problematic of remembrance. In the leaves the dead have to drink, it seems in many cases, at a lake or pool of memory. This seems to be a way that the physical being or mind or even the brain-mind-soul, can awake, not into a perfect heaven perhaps, but in actuality. A desire for continuation after death we seem to see that the Egyptian kings desired and hoped for. <br />
<br />
This, however is my reaction and speculation (generated by the ‘discussion’ that occurs in <i>The Golden Leaves</i>). But, in this book, we sense the universality of the human concern both for life and some force or spell against total annihilation. It seems that this shows that religion in some form, like Art (poetry, music and all crafts etc.), is a universal concern for human beings. And through all time, it has been the concern of poets and artists of every kind.<br />
<br />
These issues, however, are carefully discussed by Jenner in a book that is completely engrossing.<br />
<br />
The force of this (detailed and informative) book is toward experience: an experience of time, of human hopes and fears, of poetic incantations, of mystery, art, and of yearning and of the now – for we, are as baffled by the terror and mystery of death and the paradoxically the strange resultant joy that this shock of being generates in our ‘material’ life as were the ancient Greeks.<br />
<br />
We recognize these people and their concerns, for they are us. Us now.
</blockquote>
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<hr align="left" noshade="noshade" size="1" width="70%" /><br />
<div align="center">
<br />
<i>Poetry New Zealand Yearbook</i> 2 [Issue #50]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2015): 264-68.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugSHE40UCJXnLFQYQOlhXzx2vUxzfNOaAO6yMKYDkQeDVtW43fqDavaU3ieqiX_WxhdM3_bDeJRtS7bT_6BoU5NNxs7urhijTMNkDtQM4X8nY-9y14eRfENUBjB68rwkJmT8PZ7u72AE/s1600/pnzy2+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugSHE40UCJXnLFQYQOlhXzx2vUxzfNOaAO6yMKYDkQeDVtW43fqDavaU3ieqiX_WxhdM3_bDeJRtS7bT_6BoU5NNxs7urhijTMNkDtQM4X8nY-9y14eRfENUBjB68rwkJmT8PZ7u72AE/s400/pnzy2+cover.jpg"></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Poetry NZ Yearbook 2</i> (2015)</span></div><br />
<br />
Dr Jack Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01805945600952222957noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1664810700625454120.post-26350866592809421742017-07-08T11:29:00.000+12:002017-12-02T10:33:35.420+13:00Diane Brown: Taking My Mother to the Opera (2015)<div style="text-align: center;">
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijEZdKeYwC-vn0hSPH4Fh91HgiNdmTi1Icj8fZ-ukfd1BecQ2i-0AhlHT3DLP91Tdb0RlAV1yTqhqN6W3t6BNokEar1LItb9Oqh0mY-4vgPZIYed_u12YjTByMgi0o_HEmVRCB_aNIKM8/s1600/otago115898.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijEZdKeYwC-vn0hSPH4Fh91HgiNdmTi1Icj8fZ-ukfd1BecQ2i-0AhlHT3DLP91Tdb0RlAV1yTqhqN6W3t6BNokEar1LItb9Oqh0mY-4vgPZIYed_u12YjTByMgi0o_HEmVRCB_aNIKM8/s400/otago115898.jpg"></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">Diane Brown: <a href="http://www.otago.ac.nz/press/books/otago134801.html">Taking My Mother to the Opera</a> (2015)</span>
<br />
<br />
<b><span style="font-size: 180%;">Books and Magazines in brief:</span></b></div>
<br />
<blockquote><blockquote>Diane Brown. <i>Taking My Mother to the Opera</i>. ISBN 978-1-927322-15-4. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2015. RRP $29.95. 116 pp.</blockquote>
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<br />
<b>Reviewed by <a href="http://poetrynzreview.blogspot.co.nz/2017/05/about-reviewers.html">Jack Ross</a></b></div><br />
<br />
It’s nice to see another hardback poetry book from Otago University Press. Slim paperbacks are all very well, but there’s a certain heft and authority in a hardback: especially one as bright and cheerful-looking as this. Diane Brown continues to mine life writing and family history for her subject matter in this, her third collection of poems, full of pictures which will strike a chord with many readers:
<blockquote>
My favourite photo of Mum,<br />
snapped at the beach,<br />
her sensible wedding day suit<br />
<br />
ditched for saggy togs.<br />
Here she is, laughing at Dad,<br />
as if nothing had ever hurt her. [p.11]</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<br />
<hr align="left" noshade="noshade" size="1" width="70%" /><br />
<div align="center">
<br />
<i>Poetry New Zealand Yearbook</i> 2 [Issue #50]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2015): 270.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugSHE40UCJXnLFQYQOlhXzx2vUxzfNOaAO6yMKYDkQeDVtW43fqDavaU3ieqiX_WxhdM3_bDeJRtS7bT_6BoU5NNxs7urhijTMNkDtQM4X8nY-9y14eRfENUBjB68rwkJmT8PZ7u72AE/s1600/pnzy2+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugSHE40UCJXnLFQYQOlhXzx2vUxzfNOaAO6yMKYDkQeDVtW43fqDavaU3ieqiX_WxhdM3_bDeJRtS7bT_6BoU5NNxs7urhijTMNkDtQM4X8nY-9y14eRfENUBjB68rwkJmT8PZ7u72AE/s400/pnzy2+cover.jpg"></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Poetry NZ Yearbook 2</i> (2015)</span></div><br />
<br />
Dr Jack Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01805945600952222957noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1664810700625454120.post-8014421457349747592017-07-07T11:30:00.000+12:002017-11-18T07:39:20.733+13:00Catalyst 11 (2014)<div style="text-align: center;">
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjx4H7PToJlRGHTlv0vTUHkjj6FcCcqOuw4ecJQb2HLEguumQu878aYNymMEFiWjeWgOG0Epuxa7dib792yhRT7hoBE-9UkrvDog_IysqdfzDmCQTW3RTHzJsIYcW0HwY8hSSporCrqWQs/s1600/Andy%252C%252BDoc%252C%252BBen%252B1.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjx4H7PToJlRGHTlv0vTUHkjj6FcCcqOuw4ecJQb2HLEguumQu878aYNymMEFiWjeWgOG0Epuxa7dib792yhRT7hoBE-9UkrvDog_IysqdfzDmCQTW3RTHzJsIYcW0HwY8hSSporCrqWQs/s400/Andy%252C%252BDoc%252C%252BBen%252B1.JPG"></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><a href="http://catalystnz.blogspot.co.nz/2014/06/republic-of-poets-volume-one.html">Andy Coyle, Doc Drumheller & Ben Brown</a> (2014)</span>
<br />
<br />
<b><span style="font-size: 180%;">Books and Magazines in brief:</span></b></div>
<br />
<blockquote><blockquote><i>Catalyst</i> 11: <i>My Republic</i>. Ed. Doc Drumheller. ISSN 1179-4003. Christchurch: The Republic of Oma Rāpeti Press, 2014. RRP $25. 112 pp.</blockquote>
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<b>Reviewed by <a href="http://poetrynzreview.blogspot.co.nz/2017/05/about-reviewers.html">Jack Ross</a></b></div><br />
<br />
“In 2014 The Republic of Oma Rāpeti Press launched a new republic, complete with a flag, and national anthem. To celebrate this event, we have dedicated a special edition of Catalyst to invite writers to share their vision of their own republic” – so begins Doc Drumheller’s preface to the 11th edition of <i>Catalyst</i>. It’s a pretty cool idea, I think, and the issue is worth it for the illustrations of urban art (what we used to call graffiti) alone. It is, I suppose, invidious to single out particular poems from a fascinating bunch, but I have to say that I was particularly intrigued and moved by Abby Friesen-Johnson’s prose-poem “Man Cave”:
<blockquote>
Last week a little girl I was babysitting led me by the hand through her house … <br />
“Wow, I’ve never seen a real man-cave before,” I told her, and it’s true. I’ve only ever seen them on TV shows with laugh tracks … she said “This is where daddy comes when he’s tired of me,” her pride not sagging an inch, and suddenly it made sense why we were still standing at the door. [p.25]</blockquote>
</blockquote>
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<hr align="left" noshade="noshade" size="1" width="70%" /><br />
<div align="center">
<br />
<i>Poetry New Zealand Yearbook</i> 2 [Issue #50]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2015): 270.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugSHE40UCJXnLFQYQOlhXzx2vUxzfNOaAO6yMKYDkQeDVtW43fqDavaU3ieqiX_WxhdM3_bDeJRtS7bT_6BoU5NNxs7urhijTMNkDtQM4X8nY-9y14eRfENUBjB68rwkJmT8PZ7u72AE/s1600/pnzy2+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugSHE40UCJXnLFQYQOlhXzx2vUxzfNOaAO6yMKYDkQeDVtW43fqDavaU3ieqiX_WxhdM3_bDeJRtS7bT_6BoU5NNxs7urhijTMNkDtQM4X8nY-9y14eRfENUBjB68rwkJmT8PZ7u72AE/s400/pnzy2+cover.jpg"></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Poetry NZ Yearbook 2</i> (2015)</span></div><br />
<br />
Dr Jack Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01805945600952222957noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1664810700625454120.post-11040403933953828502017-07-06T11:30:00.000+12:002017-11-18T07:39:58.680+13:00Martin Edmond & Maggie Hall: Histories of the Future (2015)<div style="text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEia9tzONua2mNjCqHRvBh7SvShjPF9rJJSGYio3-Kdz8cwAxVA9Tj3FXIuSzzqZtnRYMJbJY48Eld3EmcrsuoAbia40A4qdEQSWQqfMg9g4Ne1ZYL86sKPtEC-_Y4-L7MnlKcM0seN7acs/s1600/front-cov-edmond.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEia9tzONua2mNjCqHRvBh7SvShjPF9rJJSGYio3-Kdz8cwAxVA9Tj3FXIuSzzqZtnRYMJbJY48Eld3EmcrsuoAbia40A4qdEQSWQqfMg9g4Ne1ZYL86sKPtEC-_Y4-L7MnlKcM0seN7acs/s400/front-cov-edmond.jpg"></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><a href="http://store.walleahpress.com.au/MARTIN-EDMOND-and-MAGGIE-HALL-Histories-of-the-Future_p_69.html">Histories of the Future</a> (2015)</span>
<br />
<br />
<b><span style="font-size: 180%;">Books and Magazines in brief:</span></b></div>
<br />
<blockquote><blockquote>Martin Edmond & Maggie Hall. <i>Histories of the Future</i>. ISBN 978-1-877010-67-5. North Hobart, Tasmania: Walleah Press, 2015. RRP $AUS 20. iv + 100 pp.</blockquote>
<div align="center">
<br />
<b>Reviewed by <a href="http://poetrynzreview.blogspot.co.nz/2017/05/about-reviewers.html">Jack Ross</a></b></div><br />
<br />
I guess the fact that there’s a blurb quote from me on the back cover gives a clue that I’ve already had a certain amount to say about this book. There are some wonderful essays / prose poems in here. The opening piece, “Second Hand Life” with its evocation that older Auckland Martin Edmond calls “Rain City” will stay in my mind forever, I think: especially the parenthetical account of Charles Frances, long-forgotten 1960s New Zealand novelist, author of <i>Johnny Rapana</i>, <i>Ask the River</i> and other books – who but Martin would know about him, or his apparent foreseeing of the Crewe murders? “What Instruments We Have Agree,” about the death of his mother Lauris Edmond (never named, but clearly evoked), is almost unbearably moving. And Maggie Hall’s photographs are far more than illustrations: they have their own narratives and intertwinings, the purity of image surviving even grainy newsprint reproduction: benefitting from it, in fact, perhaps.</blockquote>
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<hr align="left" noshade="noshade" size="1" width="70%" /><br />
<div align="center">
<br />
<i>Poetry New Zealand Yearbook</i> 2 [Issue #50]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2015): 271.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugSHE40UCJXnLFQYQOlhXzx2vUxzfNOaAO6yMKYDkQeDVtW43fqDavaU3ieqiX_WxhdM3_bDeJRtS7bT_6BoU5NNxs7urhijTMNkDtQM4X8nY-9y14eRfENUBjB68rwkJmT8PZ7u72AE/s1600/pnzy2+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugSHE40UCJXnLFQYQOlhXzx2vUxzfNOaAO6yMKYDkQeDVtW43fqDavaU3ieqiX_WxhdM3_bDeJRtS7bT_6BoU5NNxs7urhijTMNkDtQM4X8nY-9y14eRfENUBjB68rwkJmT8PZ7u72AE/s400/pnzy2+cover.jpg"></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Poetry NZ Yearbook 2</i> (2015)</span></div><br />
<br />
Dr Jack Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01805945600952222957noreply@blogger.com0