Anne Kennedy
Books
Auckland 4, Victoria 3
by Peter Bland
SOMEONE ELSE’S LIFE, by Kapka Kassabova (Auckland University Press, $24); LAZY WIND POEMS, by Graham Lindsay (AUP, $21.99); PEOPLE WITH REAL LIVES DON’T NEED LANDSCAPES, by John Dolan (AUP, $21.99); SING-SONG, by Anne Kennedy (AUP, $24.99); GOOD LUCK, by Anna Livesey (Victoria University Press, $24.99); THE ADULTERER’S BIBLE, by Cliff Fell (VUP, $24.95); NONSENSE, by Nick Ascroft (VUP, $24.95).
Kapka Kassabova’s poems live in “the cherished economy of the moment”. Her life is perpetually on the move. Rootless and dispossessed (her Bulgarian childhood floods through some lovely memory-poems), she refuses to see herself as victim even though “Wherever we went, something else/was on our minds./It was hot, it was cold./We were tired, we were not in the mood./We had been there. It wasn’t what we wanted./We were the constant witnesses of ourselves.”
Her poems read like startlingly good translations, which, in a way, they are, English not being her original tongue. Does she dream in Bulgarian? Do different occasions claim a half-thought in French, a quick response in German? Reading these poems I kept thinking of Ionesco in Paris, Nabokov in New England, even Beckett, split between English and French but doing anything to avoid the stale colloquialisms of an ingrown Irishness.
For Kassabova, rootlessness and dispossession are everyday themes. Her work is edged in absurdity. Her imagination is tenderly surreal. As a permanent stranger (even perhaps to herself), she can take nothing for granted. The more her imagination can reclaim the past the more she feels – if only briefly – at home.
The early poems in this collection are the best, the most driven, the least full of a relaxed and soliloquising self. She either dreams her best poems or shocks herself into an instinctive directness of response. Her imagery – “the cracked cup of memory … the roots of a bridge” – can be wonderfully fresh.
In contrast to Kassabova’s bird-of-passage poetry, Graham Lindsay’s everyday New Zealand vernacular is earthed in recognisably local landscape and domestic routines, where the family car is “our little room on wheels” and “Farm dogs bark/out where the farm’s become a suburb”.
The birth of a new baby inspires him to write some tender, mostly non-whimsical, love poems: “Inside the kitchen, tending the pots in an ad break – newborn in her arms – my sweetheart/knocks on the window to warn me against poetry,/its infidelity.” A lot of poets will recognise that moment – the muse seen as mistress, the dreaded “other woman”. Like the new-born child who “stars” in a number of these new poems, Lindsay “crawls round his world/testing everything”.
Honesty of emotion mostly avoids the doting-Dad scenario. “Now he’s/headed for the pond/in his boy-at-work/blue jump suit,/singing the song/of the titty.” I skipped over a few of the ga-gas and baby songs but, overall, I really fell for the little chap. The poems about him are earthed in a well-loved sense of belonging where “The future, already in place,/is on its way/to meet him.”
Lindsay also writes several dramatic monologues for cab drivers, gardeners, or barely disguised versions of his working self. These use a heightened, often violent vernacular, based on some foul-mouthed male prejudice giving itself away. I should think they’d go down well at a poetry reading. When poets of my generation were first seen to “loosen local speech”, I don’t suppose any of us imagined it would get as loose as this. But it’s okay. It holds.
I enjoyed the obviously self-written blurb on the back of John Dolan’s poems: “Cowardice and vindictive paranoia combine to form Dolan’s crude blood-fingerprint poetic style.” Poets always know best what they’re doing, even if they don’t know how well or badly they’re doing it.
A permanent sense of social injustice gives these gritty intelligent poems their peculiarly footloose and contemporary edge. The man with the “fat sick head” and “the black halo” who shot “the sleek and humble vampire/Poplord Lennon” is ambiguously a victim himself of processes yet to be fully acknowledged or understood. These poems read like some private investigator’s casebook in which it soon becomes apparent that he’s forgotten who’s employing him, why he was employed, and what the hell is going on. All one can do is to continue as witness to events forever out of one’s ultimate control. The tag on the casebook reads, “Error has no rights./Slogan of the Inquisition.”
Dolan’s title-poem is nicely balanced, and sums up a lot of what’s best in this intriguing collection: “You can walk around late/You can stop behind the new 24-hour/You can stare at the lightbar over the door/And try your propositions … “This is actual so I probably love it/This is simply a matter of money/People with real lives don’t need landscapes.” The “probably” is wonderful. The last line could be both ironic and/or true. Dolan is good at presenting us with these edgy enigmas.
When do we know we’re reading real poetry and not nearly poetry? There’s a lot of the latter around. Identifying real poetry has something to do with a sense of inevitability, a feeling that this couldn’t have been done in any other way. Anne Kennedy’s poetry sequence Sing-song doesn’t convince me that it couldn’t have been done equally well as prose, which it often is: as a sequence of letters perhaps, or a long short story, or even as a diary account of her life as “an eczema mother”.
Page 1 2 
