Black

I'm off for a week, so thought I should post this, inspired to do so by Kmeista.

Stays Black

Kiwi

The sun competes for my soul; the moon betrays my longing.

I stand here in the dark, waiting for my footsteps to begin.

If I lack courage and luck, I will hesitate, and surely miss the call to wander out, surely lose the chance to learn, surely ignore the edict to grow.

But when, as I step out into time and space, time and space envelop me, I can discover all I need to know, all I need to become.

I need to fulfil my destiny.

I know that waiting won’t make me brighter, but dying won’t make me wiser. I know what I know; what I don’t know, I can’t help, but at least I know what I know.

Energy matters, and action spikes my belief. Deep inside, I want that my life will embrace the meaning of an instant. This desire concentrates my ambition. Yet I’m motionless. But don’t confuse my stillness for hesitation. I wouldn’t do this without a reason.

Kiwi Logic

Simple, I stand still for a reason,

I move for a reason, and

I live, and

I breathe, and

I cry

for a reason.

I smell a rat!

I smell a rat before I hear a rat.

I hear a rat before I see a rat.

I tell myself I see a rat, because I smell a rat.

This rat must surely smell me too

Rat v Ratite

The rat reeks of hunger and predation: an odour heralds the advent of a warm-blooded killer, a smell promises violence, a stench proclaims, “Murderer on the loose!”

I don’t acknowledge him.

He doesn’t belong here.

He claims a moral right to be in my world. He will do what he must do to satisfy his need.

But I know what I know.

I see the Hawk’s eyes scanning the ground.

I wait with her.

But the rat doesn’t know waiting. His concern is what he can smell, see, hear, touch, and taste. For him, there are no other senses. He makes meaning of life this way, fresh blood and easy prey. So he moves as quickly as his short legs allow him to move. He races toward me, teeth bared.

I crouch in the darkness, knowing he will soon see me, knowing what he doesn’t know.

He jumps from a distance. He sees me now, lunging toward me. His breath reeks of stale death, his eyes wide, white, and wild. With my heart pulsing red shards of lightning in my arteries, and my eyes burning space into the darkness, all I can do is crouch lower still. Stillness becomes me.

I see his feet in the air, and there they stop, and they drop down for a moment, then they take off from the ground,

and they rise higher and higher.

I hear his cry of shock, disappointment, surprise, understanding; disbelief fading into terror.

Peering out from my hiding place, looking up, I thank Tane Mahuta for the Hawk as she disappears into the tall trees with her new best friend, predator and predator, epicure and entrée.

Now, I must move on. My love waits for me.

On and On

My love waits for me with beauty beyond my expectation.

How could I not fall in love every time we meet?

I need to love, to be loved, to forever be falling in love. We keep our romance aflame without social contracts, or constructions. Simple together, we want only that we carry on into eternity. And, to that end, we copy ourselves onto the fabric of this dimension.

Some parents dread the future and regret the past. We can’t do that; we don’t possess that luxury. Instead, we live inside the instinct of the present. We remain grateful for our offspring, for anyone’s offspring. For what is the future without children? It becomes a pointless discussion, a round of gossip between our hopes, our dreams, and our solid reality.

As we journey along sincerity’s path, humility and gratitude satisfy more than our desire for love, more than our need for companions, more than our instinct for compassion.

Generations of kiwi enter the universe of eternal possibilities. We recognise the responsibility of immortal ambitions. We place our hopes in the hands of what is now forever, and forever now.

Kiwi Creed

Black, black, black

All black is gold.

Black means safety,

Black means victory,

The night pumps black blood through my soul.

But inevitably, the night bleeds into daybreak.

*****************

On and on, the sun competes for my soul. But this lonely sun competes with the universe of time, the universe of space, the universe of no code. Ultimately, the sun must concede defeat to the owner of a higher dimension, the owner of no contests, the owner of no surrender, the owner of no side, the owner of the black.

Always, although the light pierces the black, the black stays intact, stays black.

“Stays Black” Explanation:

This writing came about after reading the beginning of each of the four novels in the paper. By the time I’d finished it, I’d read all the poetry readings, and finished Within the Kiss, Dirty Work, and gotten most of the way through Relative Strangers.

I couldn’t escape a feeling of “blackness” in the pieces. I don’t mean bleakness. I mean blackness. Blackness for me is an appreciation of the black side of the universe and it can involve humour, wit, sadness, happiness, stupidity, hope, despair, anything the author wants. What separates it from other writing is something that may be peculiar to kiwi writing. It’s a knowledge that there’s always something you can’t see, always darkness.

You can shine a light, and that’s a good thing, but what I enjoy about the NZ writers I’ve read so far is their ability to keep some things in the dark.

I haven’t tried to do that in my piece. Instead, I opted to tell the story from a bird’s perspective. This bird can’t fly, can’t escape predators, and can’t enjoy the light. I feel a kinship with the bird.

I’d like to explore the idea of darkness more, moving it out of a kiwi context into a universal area.

Writer forges creative link with photographer

Tina Shaw

By Gregory Wood

The creative link between photography and writing came under scrutiny at Auckland Art Gallery on Sunday, April 27, when author Tina Shaw was keynote speaker at the Laurence Aberhart photographic exhibition.

Shaw has written five novels and co-edited a book with Dr Jack Ross. For Shaw, every Aberhart print represented a short story, and proceeded to rattle off with ease a handful of plot scenarios with any print she cared to focus on. Shaw added that sometimes the detail in the black and white prints is so fine that gallery staff provide magnifying glasses for visitors to borrow. Better still, take your own to study the work of this reclusive photographer, aged 59, who lives in Russell.

Photography has always been the elusive ‘other’ in the arts because of the difficulty placing it in a niche, as it traverses art, media and documentary. But for one small hour in the centre of Auckland photography and writing melded as one.

Anzac Day upstages Anne Carson

Above: "Because he's our Dad!"

By Gregory Wood

Thoughts of Anne Carson and her classical poetry led me to Auckland War Memorial Museum on Friday, April 25. But those thoughts did not last for long as the museum was putting on Anzac Day. If ‘putting on’ sounds too much like a stage-managed event, you had better get used to it. Anzac Day 2008 in front of the museum’s classical columns was a slick 45-minute show complete with a female announcer, three bands and a speech by the Defence Minister Phil Goff before an audience of about 2,000. And it didn’t rain, for once.

Anzac Day is becoming one of the success stories in New Zealand’s myth making. It is now not just an annual event but a daily encounter with your past. Key into your home computer the name of a relative who went to any war since the New Zealand Wars and the museum’s Anzac Day database will give you a readout of what happened to that person, male or female.

I found a soldier named Edward Albert Wood, a tailor. In 1916 he sailed with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force from Wellington. When he returned he did not run down the gangplank into the arms of his loved one. He was carried off a second gangway for the wounded at the rear of the ship, having lost a leg. However, his loved one stood by him, my grandmother.

Forget any notion of Anzac Day dying away with the old soldiers. Technology is letting it reach out to each new generation. It only gets bigger.

Eyesight is not vision

This picture is my creative response to "a woman, a rose, and what has it to do with her or they with one another". I'll bring it in to class for people to have a closer look.

For me, this poem is about the horror of the descent into blindness. The page is divided into three sections. The top section represents what is being/has been lost: surefootedness (seen in the dancers in the maze), colour (seen in the flowers) and a place in the world – a place of independence, ease of enjoyment and words. For this reason I chose to paste in the line “Do you see me? I am falling out of a blue sky.”

The middle section, shaped like an eye, represents the blindness that Michele has. I used white tissue paper to create the feeling of blurry white, at the edges of the top and bottom sections can still be seen. Around this eye I have pasted the lines which I thought were most evocative of the loss of sight to this blindness: “Then a pair of taxis went head to head in a distant country so suddenly I didn’t see the difference but it was a wide white threshold.”

The bottom section is the horror of this blindness. It is hard to imagine what it would be like to lose sight and the ability to easily navigate this world, but the final line of this poem, for me, captured that sheer panic: “She is in the dark, perhaps four years old and the future does not exist, screaming and screaming and screaming.” When I first heard this line read out in class, it sent ice cold chills down my spine. The swirling darkness therefore is not the blindness itself but the panic and terror it evokes.

Within the middle of the eye-shaped whiteness however, is the idea that runs as an undercurrent through this poem: Eyesight is not vision. At first I thought this was a hopeful idea, but within this poem it is a terrible burden. The gift of vision, which must come at the cost of eyesight, is unasked for and feared, but is nevertheless a destiny. The journey towards the destination of this gift is laid out in this picture: the falling and then the panic. But what does this vision see? It lays behind the veil of blindness and it as yet unclear.

Hustlerville

Sir Ed's statue

IN MEMORY OF NIGEL COX AND DIRTY WORK

By Gregory Wood

I

Welcome to Hustlerville, a small seaside town at the end of Auckland’s northern motorway. For over half a century Hustlerville has fought to retain an image as a holiday town. But with the growth of Auckland and the extension of the motorway, Hustlerville is fast becoming just another satellite suburb of the metropolis.

Back in the early days however, the leading figures of Hustlerville must have had noble ambitions for this place. They erected an imposing statue of Sir Edmund Hillary in the future town centre and named it Hillary Square. Today, Sir Ed’s statue is surrounded by a little garden in the midst of a car park. Council workers clear away from the small shrubs a daily build-up of fast-food wrappers blown in by the sea breeze. Sir Ed’s statue faces the beach and the sunrise, and nearby there is a small plaque marking the death of Princess Diana. But any ocean outlook has long gone, blocked by beachfront houses, a block of shops and a Macdonald’s drive-in with its endless queue of cars.

Behind Hillary Square is a short dead-end street called George Lowe Place, which is named after George Lowe, who was a member of that famous 1954 expedition when Sir Ed and a sherpa named Tenzing became the first to climb Mount Everest. George Lowe Place ends at the doors of two panel-beating shops, an auto electrician and a tyre depot. Car wrecks in various stages of restoration line the street, its tar-seal scarred by tyre skid marks.

Leading off George Lowe Place is an alleyway called Tenzing Lane, which is named after the sherpa Tenzing. Here, there is a second-hand shop and a parking lot lined with industrial waste bins at the rear of shops. The names of these two mountaineers, Lowe and Tenzing, are used on street signposts to show the way to a semi-industrial area, a dumping ground for car wrecks and unwanted furniture.

“So what is the problem?” a small voice inside my head asked. “Walk one block back from the main street in any town and you’ll always find industry and ugliness. The tourists only see a façade and come away smiling, while the rest of us get on with making money. That is the way it is.”

II

Seeking some sort of respite, I went to Sir Ed’s statue and paused for a moment to ponder the great man, and Lady Di’s memorial. “Surely they wouldn’t put a statue of Sir Ed in such a prominent position just to attract tourists to be photographed next to?” I thought. “He is not a prop; he stands for something.” Just what I did not know, but had to find out for some peace of mind.

I resumed walking along the road engrossed in my thoughts and found a small path, which led to an estuary, where small wading birds gathered. Approaching female walkers nodded a greeting as if relieved that my walking shoes, drink bottle and cap signified a ‘safe’ man.

Further up the path a woman walking a beautifully kept longhaired spaniel pulled off the walkway a long time before I was even near her to let me pass. She was of average height, reasonably attractive, but gave me only a furtive glance. I saw anguished eyes on a drawn face. About fifty metres behind her walked a tall man of solid build and a shaved head. A pair of wraparound sunglasses hid any touch of emotion on the face. He did not acknowledge our passing but stared impassively ahead, not taking his eyes off the woman with the dog, keeping pace with her as if he held on to her with an invisible leash. He seemed to be walking the woman just like she was walking her beloved pet. After reaching a safe distance I turned to watch them disappearing around a small headland. For a sad and fleeting moment the path had become a stage, and two actors were playing out the final scenes in a tragedy play called End of an Affair. My heart went out to the woman; the man looked incapable of changing. He also looked threatening.

Finally, the walkway led to the beach and that first initial blast of salt air. Just beyond the water’s edge, kite surfers skimmed across small waves attached by lines to kite-like sails hovering high above them. At times, they would rise into the air with the force of the wind against their sails. Black-backed gulls reeled overhead, dropping shells onto the sand until they split open, even if it took half a dozen attempts before revealing that treat of fresh shellfish.

The wind strength was perfect for these large seabirds. Once aloft, they can swoop and dive as easily as the tiny common gulls, and turn in huge arcs, their bodies freed by an invisible velocity. When that happens, a walk along the water’s edge is like taking part in an aerial ballet. Look up, and a moving tapestry of sailcloth mingles with the outstretched wings of the black-backed gulls, which seem to revel in the company of an even bigger ‘bird’. One’s senses are overwhelmed with the roar of the wind and surf, and a screeching as the gulls commence diving runs in mock air battles before arcing back around for another game.

III

As the sun went down and cars again lined up outside McDonald’s, I found myself back at Sir Ed’s statue. During that time, someone had placed a red posy of young pohutukawa stems at Ed’s feet. It seemed that the statue was being used as a site of solace, a place to remember and dwell on a distant past with a different set of values.

The wind had died now. Tomorrow, I must bring some flowers for Lady Di. Now, that is progress. And while I’m there, perhaps that first faint touch of a sea breeze will again caress my skin as if being touched by a phantom lover. When that happens, it will be time to heed her siren’s call and leave this modern world for those soft sensuous sands. There, we will hold each other close, her silken hair swirling in the wind as the tempest encircles us and takes us up, soaring and sharing in that incredible celebration of life between Nature and the human spirit.

Poetry Session 2: Carson / Harlow

Orpheus

"Classics" is the theme of the session, and what I principally mean by that is the Greek and Latin classics -- particularly the former. Anne Carson is a professor of Classics, and has written some prodigiously learned books on the subject. Michael Harlow is part-Greek, and lived in the country for a while in the 1970s.

So much for the superficial connections, at any rate. Does this tell us anything useful about the two poets, or is it just an arbitrary juxtaposition? Watch this space -- this is where we'll be starting off at our session next Monday.

I hope you've all been listening to the cassettes I made you and getting more familiar with our poets in that medium as well as on the page ...

*

Some excellent backwards readings of Harlow were made at this session (Kath, take a bow). In general, the Jungian nature of his inspiration came up for a good deal of attention.

For further thoughts on ways into the classical epics, see the latest post on my own blog, The Imaginary Museum.

Reviews: Fiona Farrell

One or two of you have been asking me to put up the texts of some of my reviews of authors included in the poetry section of our course. So here they are, without significant revisions or afterthoughts, as they appeared in (respectively) Landfall, brief and JAAM:

The Need to Gather Stones

Geoff Cochrane, 84-484. Wellington: VUP, 2007. ISBN 9780 86473 5584, 87 pages, RRP $25.
Fiona Farrell, The Pop-Up Book of Invasions. Auckland: AUP, 2007. ISBN 978 1 86940 388 1, 104 pages, RRP $25.

‘Four things are required by every work of art: a Place, and a Time, an Author, and a Cause of Invention.’ – The Speckled Book

And he’s feeling teetery and predisposed, and he feels it in the air like a fuzzy pastel buzz: the need to gather tools and summon energies, the need to try to start a new book. The need to gather stones and start again.

The first quote is from Fiona Farrell’s new book The Pop-Up Book of Invasions, written while she held the inaugural Rathcoola Writers’ Residency in County Cork, Ireland, in 2006. The second comes from Geoff Cochrane’s new poetry collection, 84-484, written (to all appearances) as he wandered around his old haunts in Wellington and, especially, Island Bay.

The two books are very different. So different, in fact, that it’s staggering that two writers of roughly the same generation could have such diverse outlooks and personae. “Pain distilled” was the description applied to Cochrane’s work in the Oxford Companion to NZ Literature. Farrell, on the other hand, paints herself here as a relaxed, somewhat garrulous travel companion, effortlessly at home with the craic, the pleasant meanderings of Irish life and culture.

Home & Abroad, then – pain / pleasure – male / female. A set of facile dichotomies could easily be established between these two poets’ latest projects, but I’m not sure that they would get us much nearer to understanding the essence of either book. It would be easy to argue that they were mutually exclusive. I prefer to see them as complementary: each supplying something the other lacks.

Let’s begin with Fiona Farrell. The most immediately striking thing about her book is the extensive body of notes included at the back. Farrell comments engagingly (and a little disingenuously?):

Poems should stand for themselves – and I hope these do – but when I go to readings I like the asides, just as I like the footnotes in books and the marginal scribblings of an irritable scribe.

Most of the time, I’d have to say that I couldn’t agree less. When I go to readings I like people to get to the point, read out the poem straight away, leave out all the lengthy explications altogether. So, as you can imagine, I came to these notes full of incipient disapproval. Only to be won over totally. The little comment about the “marginal scribblings of an irritable scribe” is a case in point.

In her introduction Farrell expounds on her choice of title, talking of the original Book of Invasions, “a compilation of eleven manuscripts describing the discovery of Ireland following the Creation and the Flood.”

The book is written in vellum by several hands, notably by a scribe called Muirges MacPaidin who grumbles in the margins that the light he is working in is bad or that he has lost the piece of pumice he uses to smooth the vellum or that the ruler he has been given to line the page is too thin. He died, probably of irritation, in 1543.

A more determined and driven author might have had no space for Muirges MacPaidin. But he would be quite a loss, I’d have to say. Especially as he’s clearly a model for Farrell herself in her marginal musings on so many evocatively (and somewhat absurdly) named texts: The Book of the Dun Cow, The Speckled Book, The Battler, The Yellow Book, The Black Book, even the Book of Kells …

But do the poems suffer from our growing need to turn to the back, check out the commentary before one can come to terms with the text itself? In some cases, I’d have to say, the back of the book does begin to overshadow the front. “The Way of the Dishes,” for instance, meant little to me until I’d read the notes. After which it fell perfectly into place.

And yet so many of the poems do stand so perfectly, so definitively, “for themselves,” that I’d prefer to see this as an outline rather than a critique of her method. The idea of a book which combines to form a complex whole, like a tessellated pavement or Byzantine mosaic, surely deserves ungrudging admiration.

Which poems would I single out as freestanding compositions? Well, somewhat surprisingly, given the author’s own reservations (mainly over her lack of Irish), I think her translation of “The Lament of the Nun of Beare” an absolute delight:

Bony my hands now
that once touched
splendid men.
Too bony to rise over
sweet boys again!

There’s a strange, syncopated energy in these irregular stanzas:

I was wanton in youth
and I’m glad I was bold!
If I’d been more cautious
I’d still sit here: old

in my ancient cloak –
when the bare hills’ covering
is the fine icy cloak
flung down by the King.

In her own voice, too, there are some triumphant pieces here: “Genealogy,” for example, which cries out to be quoted in full, flowing as it does from the two dismissive quotes about the Irish at the poem’s head: “a ready-made nucleus of degradation and disorder’ (Carlyle); “ a tribe of squalid apes” (Froude):

Vermin begat Squalor
who married the fourth son of
Hunger who fathered the Pig-
child and the Rat-daughter who
mothered Filth who bore
Raggy Mary who wed an
Empty Glass who was the
son of not-enough-land whose
wife was Dull Superstition …

There’s a certain kind of verse which arises from one more residency in one more evocative spot. This is not it. Farrell’s immigration has clearly been pricked and energised by her six months away from Otanerito, where the previous owners “spelled out ‘Long Bay’ in daffodils across the steep hillside. The flowers come up every spring, growing more blurred and chaotic by the year as the plants multiply.”

What more perfect image for this whole iconography of assimilation and invasion? Like the daffodils, when one closes Farrell’s book one’s abiding impression is of a whole rather than a collection of disparate pieces: “It’s hard to make out the individual letters now.”

Geoff Cochrane’s 84-484, one has to say, lacks the unity and focus of The Pop-Up Book of Invasions. It also lacks Farrell’s light tone and engaging delivery. Cochrane’s is a grimmer, more existential enterprise – part of an ongoing project running through his last few books of poems from VUP.

In fact, if one wanted an international analogue for the demands Cochrane makes of his reader, one would have to look to a poet like grim old Peter Reading: the sudden shifts of register, the refusal to explicate a pattern once it’s been formed.

I have been to Wellington, and to Island Bay (to Ireland, for that matter – even to County Cork); reading Geoff Cochrane, though, I begin to wonder if I’ve ever been to me … The central title piece of the book, “84-484,” begins in an offhand manner by recalling that “84-484 was my grandparents’ telephone number in the 1950s. Absent from my head for donkey’s years, it made its return last night as I was watching Antiques Roadshow.”

My parents and myself
lived with my father’s parents.

Oh, no, I thought – not another genealogy poem ...

I remember Eileen’s sewing patterns,
Percy’s pink Free Lances,
the marzipan mice and Napoleon cake
of my fifth or sixth birthday.

Wait a minute, though – as the finely judged details of a Lowell-esque life-study begin to appear:

If and when it suits me,
I can also recall breaking a window,
poohing wickedly on the wicker chair in the shed,
slicing my finger open with a razor blade.
(The neat white tick of the scar
is still quite visible.)

Now the true form of the poem comes into focus, the inimitable lines of a Cochrane original – “poohing wickedly on the wicker chair …” – the almost compulsive honesty of shameful recollections most of us would be happy to suppress.

And so it goes on. Because, like Farrell, Cochrane too is a novelist. In a very different vein, admittedly, but with the same finely-honed skills of pacing and cumulative detail. We learn more about his grandparents; then, as his grandfather Percy drops out of the picture, more and more about the “troubled and troubling and troublesome” Eileen: “An ageing Ophelia determined to remain dismayed by sex.”

Percy had been dead for seven or eight years, but he woke me up one night by trying to strangle me …

Eileen had ceased to sleep,. but we rubbed along together like a couple of shrewd old crooks. I’d come home boozed in the wee hours and she’d let me in without protest. …

Odours of dripping and gas. A stove of Transylvanian blackness. Stubby flames of turquoise and cerise.

“In the end, of course, the cops took an interest.” But even that wasn’t quite the end, one more scene remains, from journey’s end, the old people’s home Day Room:

Eileen waits until her daughter is talking to a nurse, then turns to me and winks. “The next time you visit, bring a little car and I’ll come away with you!”

But I have no home to take her to. No car, no flat, no money. “I’ll see what I can do,” I say. While smiling a bum’s ambiguous, impotent smile.

It’s a lacerating journey, this one, through distant hells of memory. Cochrane spares himself nothing – one reason why we forgive him such harsh, accurate judgements on others. But how is this different from any other slice-of-life realistic short story? Cochrane’s unerring sense of language illuminates the whole with strange flashes of manic, electric brilliance: that “bum’s ambiguous, impotent smile,” the white-haired heads that “tip and loll.”

In one sense, then, Cochrane’s poetic has got looser, more inclusive over the years. His sense of form has enlarged to include short stories, “Worksheet” poems, haiku-like images in the same kaleidoscopic mix. His sense of style has got ever more acute and deadly, though. He’s a risk-taker, noting anything and everything which might contribute to a poem, then leaving us questioning what the poem actually was.

The ambiguous hero of “How it Begins:” Ray Green, 48, “the unembarrassed author of four rectangular novels of modest thickness,” is a little younger than his creator, the – hopefully proud, rather than simply “unembarrassed” – author of two novels, two books of short stories and ten poetry collections , but he appears to have a similar philosophy of life: “All you can do is tend your own patch, order and illuminate your own little corner of the world.”

We used to use amphetamines ourselves, back in the seventies, but with this difference: we didn’t know we were meant to get tooled-up and riot, raid banks and slay pizza-delivery boys.

Cochrane’s is a poetry of survival – a report on the human condition from one of its furthest outposts, bulletins from the barricades of the inner-city.

It is, admittedly, a far harsher voice than Farrell’s, with fewer solutions and more hard questions. And yet what I admire about both is the ability to include the violence and disorder of our past and present without being choked into silence.

Farrell talks of the potato famine and its aftermath, the Irish hegira, with the grace of a distant descendant. Yet she’s well aware of the dangers of pure evocation:

Then the poet comes and / sees in the flop of failure / the outlines of some old / hero whom another poet / made from grunt and stab / on some muddy hill.

Cochrane puts it more simply: “The need to gather stones and start again.”

- Jack Ross, Landfall 214 (2007): 175-79.

Reviews: Michael Harlow

Michael Harlow. Cassandra’s Daughter. ISBN 1-86940-332-0. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2005. RRP $21.99.

The things that are good here are the things that are always good in Michael Harlow’s poetry: the intricately hypnotic diction, the elegant evasions of what anyone else would think to say about some particular theme or character. The title-poem seems particularly strong in this respect. Who else would have thought to make Cassandra’s daughter, (“Cassy for short”): “in love with how / one word wants another / with astonishing ease” (p.2). The rest of us, I fear, would have concentrated (like W. B. Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan”) on “how last night / in her dreamtime a wooden horse / appeared.”

Perhaps that’s what the book as a whole is about, also. At first sight it seems more of an instalment and less a finished thing than, say, Giotto’s Elephant (1991), his previous collection – despite having had (presumably) such a long gestation. Even the blurb seems to convey this uncertainty. “A series of lyric poems and prose-poems in which the ‘persistent imaginal’ goes in search of a language to articulate something of the curious and surreal strangeness of the everyday,” is hardly the most specific of formulae.

“A sudden blow: the great wings beating still / Above the staggering girl …” I wouldn’t trade that Yeats poem for anything. “A shudder in the loins engenders there / The broken wall, the burning roof and tower / And Agamemnon dead.” And yet, and yet, Harlow’s Cassy actually sounds like a small girl chatting to an elderly stranger: “Would you like to / hear me sing? I can almost dance, / too.” Yeats’s heroine, by contrast, seems a mere foil, a mask he uses to interrogate his own fantasies of power and sexual fulfilment.

It’s nice to have both, I guess. Perhaps the most encouraging thing about the lack of a clearly-focussed theme in Cassandra’s Daughter is that it implies that the persistent imaginal in still in quest of that elusive language of expression, which might lead us to hope for another instalment in the very near future. In the meantime, a lot of the poems here will shortly be as dog-eared as their counterparts in my battered old copy of Yeats’s Collected Poems.

- Jack Ross, brief 32 (2005): 105.

Reviews: Michele Leggott

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That poem concludes:

yes wake

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

- Jack Ross, JAAM 13 (2000): 158-60.

Michele Leggott. Milk & Honey. ISBN 1-86940-334-7. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2005. RRP $27.99.

My first impression of this book (once I’d got past James Fryer’s very cool cover: stark colours, hieratic tarot imagery, ceremonial theatrical profusion) was that it was nice to see so many old friends gathered together. A great deal of this work, including some pretty major pieces, has appeared in brief over the last few years. I was, however, a little disappointed that the “Cairo vessel” illustration we included in #29 (2004): p.6, had not been included. Turning to the elegy “I dreamed your book was written …” (included in brief 28 (2003): 103-4) I also missed the context given by our Brunton memorial issue: the Egyptian paraphernalia of his previously-unpublished short play “The Excursion:” Book of the Dead rhetoric and imagery.

That, then, was the second impression: maybe some of the pieces needed more back-up and explanation, of the type that their brief printings had been able to supply.

After that, I turned to and read the book through again: carefully, from beginning to end, instead of simply picking out the plums one by one, and began to see Michele’s design more clearly. The poems here are conceived on a large scale, and they’re very “poetic” poems indeed – Michele allows herself an enthusiastic rapturous diction which would be anathema to any card-carrying Modernist. Her interest, clearly, is in a poetry of transcendence, heady invocations of sex and romance, sun and sea and sand. Taken as a whole, I was astonished to find even cynical old me surrendering to it. The “I dreamed your book was written …” poem takes clearer shape as a joint Robin Hyde / Alan Brunton piece (the title, after all, comes from one of the poems included in Michele’s edition of Hyde’s Collected Poems), but also as a more general point of celebration on a kind of graph of the emotions charted by her book’s entire trajectory.

Longer than any of her previous collections, this one also strikes me as the most assured and relaxed. It’s hard to imagine her writing a better book than this, which might tempt us to hail it as a swansong. Actually, though, it leaves me keener than ever to see just what this poet will do next.

- Jack Ross, brief 32 (2005): 103-7.

Reviews: Graham Lindsay

Graham Lindsay, Lazy Wind Poems. Auckland: AUP, 2003. ISBN 1-86940-285-5. 72 pp. RRP $21.99.

All of the books in this issue of brief deserve far more space than I can give them, but that goes particularly for Graham Lindsay’s latest. It’s nice to see the old master at work again, and to see assembled the inspired domesticity poems which have been appearing here and there over the last few years. I actually wrote Graham a fan letter when I read the painfully brilliant “ballad of Fanny Grace” in brief 16, but seeing it in context now makes me think even more of it: “Love your mother-in-law / when her daughter / (finally coming to bed) / tells you how she was / just tucking her mother / in for the night” [56-7] – it’s tempting just to go on reciting from this succession of mad, pointed anecdotes about senile dementia and the love and good humour that make it possible to endure it.

The book’s divided into four parts: “making love,” which takes us from an ultrasound scan of the new baby, through childbirth, birthdays, first words: “ ‘Bye bye dart’ [17]. There’s a lot of babytalk in there, and a lot of household detail of the kind which I’d normally skip, but Graham makes it work in two ways: firstly through the sheer fervour of his surrender to parental love: “Close the little papa’s eyes / close’m eyes, close’m eyes” [11], and secondly by his skill in ambushing us with the disconcerting detail:

He’s the only

person in the world
I’d let use my handkerchief
then put it back in my pocket. [19]

The second section, “you are here,” begins with “cab dub,” a brilliant and disconcerting series of discourses from the backseat of a taxi-cab, then moves through rugby to a strangely dislocated local version of Peter Rabbit. “Big feet,” the third section, consists largely of family poems (including the mother-in-law one quoted above), and finally “swingdoor” takes us back around into the poet’s more conventionally introspective territory: “All this beauty fading away.” [72] This really is a book to die for.

- Jack Ross, brief 29 (2004): 82.