Books
Islands
by David Eggleton
Moving from south to north in a survey of recent New Zealand poetry.
Poetry aspires to the condition of the aphorism, to charged observations, preferably offered with a musical lilt. As in conversation, tone is everything: it’s all in the way you say it. Eleven collections by 11 New Zealand poets, published during the latter half of 2004, demonstrate this. Self-dramatising, these bards offer us angles, selected excerpts, edited highlights on themselves that help illuminate the world, or possibly interchangeable worlds. These are poets as moral actors voicing concerns and dilemmas; they are conscience-stricken purchasers, harassed homemakers, debonair lovers, anxious motorists and old grumps. And their homing instincts, even as they travel, are trained on New Zealand, which they turn into a source of pure exoticism – its time-worn strictures and disciplines giving rise to paradoxical freedoms that the bard within is ever-ready to exploit.
The Merino Princess, a selection of poems from her five previous collections all published since 1989, is triumphant evidence that Bernadette Hall has arrived on the local version of Mt Parnassus in style. Yet her approach has been quiet, oblique, controlled – and somewhat belated. A poet of the Otago and Canterbury regions, a sometime Latin and classical studies teacher, playwright and editor, Hall writes poems that are rather feathery and fine – ruminations and disquisitions expressed in no more than a handful of images. There are journeys “down the soft underbelly of the island”, and through “the island-shaped-like-a-cello”.
“Golden fur down the black/spine of the headland” catches the poet’s eye and speaks to a fragile emotional state. In “Cairn” a simple image of pioneer settlement is perfectly pitched: “Rusty knuckled iron remains/the paddock cleared of stones.”
The need for compassion, a celebration of ordinariness, the humorous acceptance of life’s disillusionments are the themes of poems that embrace weddings, bereavements, a Catholic upbringing, trips to Iowa and Ireland, and a kind of perpetual quest for a state of grace. Hall’s work succeeds by being ultimately tough-minded and wary, as in the emblematic “Mayday”, which deconstructs the scenic: the “rapturous clapping of rain” is an image put in its place by the succeeding line “[a] stagy day”, then, “the man in the truck/has a rifle across his knees”. The hint of threat, then, can materialise from nowhere. The title poem “The Merino Princess” is both a kind of prayer and an example of grim Southern Gothic: “I recognise her … We don’t speak of the abortion but there is between us/the cautious kindness of the war wounded.” Searching for epiphanies and sometimes finding them, Hall sails up like the Flying Nun, a “persistent levitator” buoyed by her own lightness of being, and her linguistic felicity.
Affirming the value of the provincial is an objective Hall shares with another poet who draws his inspiration from Canterbury and Otago -– Owen Marshall. The much-decorated fiction writer’s first collection of poems, entitled Occasional, is unmistakably elegiac in tone: poetic salutes to events drawn from the relentless flux of time. The preoccupation with mortality becomes overwhelming – not just poems on the deaths of figures such as Janet Frame and Bill Sewell, but also a fond farewell to an old car – “I rubbed/your flanks with turtle wax”; a plea to the Almighty not to let the poet “die in Auckland/Rotting in the heat”; and constant invocations to “life”, that fickle force that seems as eager to abandon us as we are to cling to it. The poem “Advertising life” even proclaims life as subject to market forces, along with everything else.
This obsession with decay and decrepitude, though, is delivered with characteristic good humour. Marshall’s genial persona wins you over to what are after all reasonable sentiments, often thought but rarely so well expressed. Sounding at times like a fount of received wisdom, Marshall weighs his words as if regarding you with a raised ironic eyebrow. The poems employ the same bluff, resilient, yet harmonious language as Marshall’s prose – which makes them less gnomic than, say, Bernadette Hall’s, but also makes them sometimes heavy and ponderous-seeming within contemporary poetry’s fleet-footed and anorexic-form-favouring scene.
Yet, despite the unfashionable, clomping metres, the poems are highly enjoyable – from the remembered climbs with “the fiction writing class” up a particular hill, to acknowledgements of his Welsh heritage, to boyhood in Marlborough, to university days in Christchurch, to the rediscovery of sets of old keys whose purpose is now forgotten, and so on. Above all, the poems are redolent of the South Island – all wild winds and dry hills, sleepy summer afternoons, the shimmer of light on lakes, snow like whitewash on the Alps.
Christchurch poet Jeffrey Paparoa Holman spent his formative years on the other side of the Alps in rough-and-tough Blackball, then left as a teenager with hardly a look back. Decades later he revisits his old stamping ground in The late great Blackball Bridge Sonnets, which is his second book of verse. Within its pages he becomes a kind of soapbox orator, expressing an almost evangelical enthusiasm for the West Coast – its seasons, its myths and its features – above all, the now demolished Blackball Bridge over the Grey River. Blackball is a ghost town, full of memories – memories of “the town’s great footy heroes and plain hardcases”, memories of schooldays in the 50s and early 60s. For Holman, as for Marshall, adolescence is about discovering females as the bewitching other.
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