Books
Big pictures
by David Eggleton
Poems, as the zen koan has it, can communicate before they are understood. Michele Leggott’s poems in her latest collection Milk & Honey at first – and even second – glance seem mysterious and wilfully obscure, yet also somehow rapturous, extravagant and playful. You want to keep reading. Just the cadences of Leggott’s poems can commune with you and uplift you, carrying you over the secret knowledge, the things not spelt out.
Teasingly hermetic, liltingly musical, these are not so much poems to decode or pull apart in search of a precept or motto, as poems to sink into or wander through, enjoying a cavalcade of sensory impressions. Leggott doesn’t want her poetry to necessarily describe or explain the world; she wants her poetry to embody the world. Ecstatic, her poems seek to enact the evanescence of beauty, the sensation of transience, the feel of fragility. Poems become a kind of sympathetic magic, eliciting waves of emotion out of that intract-able stuff known as language by exploring its sensuous properties.
Milk & Honey is Leggott’s fifth collection and consolidates the promise and accomplishment of the previous volumes (Dia won the 1995 New Zealand Book Award for Poetry) in that it confirms she is a maximalist, an omnivore, a world-eater, cramming it in with “a mouth mapping/amplitude”. She is a linguistic mixmaster – “blow me a particle moving/through my languages” – who “bungies from the centre span”, so to speak, intent on the experience.
An Associate Professor of English at Auckland University, Leggott has established her intellectual credentials over the past decade or so with various scholarly works, notably two meticulously edited collections of poetry by Robin Hyde, and a critical study of the American kabbalistic poet Louis Zukovsky, a knotty, and sometimes nutty, contemporary and colleague of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. The title of her last collection As Far as I Can See (1999) was an acknowledgement of her increasingly severe eyesight loss (the result of macular degeneration).
Milk & Honey, though, doesn’t make mention of any of this. Rather, this is a book about Paradise, or “the book/called Paradise”. Using an iconography of exploration, astrology, divination (“teach me the stars in your sky”), fertility symbols and other esoteric material, Leggott conjures up -Paradise, Eden, Nir-vana, Enlightenment: they are all states of mind awaiting discovery. Milk & Honey shows us that the ordinary is full of marvels. It is a text at once utopian, cinematic, symphonic, oceanic; it offers the big picture – “a dialogue with the world” – into which linked elements or motifs fit.
So, for example, these are poems made of “exquisite silk scraps”, which, stitched, flow together, into sequences and episodes that in turn form an ongoing serial, or bricolage: a single poem, then, rejecting exactness, literalism, naturalism in favour of resonance, currents, patterns of ebb and flow. Her litany of the sensuous incorporates fragments of Latin, Maori, Italian, French and other languages, and takes the poet globe-trotting: the title of one section is “fado”, which is Portuguese both for “fate” and for “a sad folk song”; in another bit, the Brisbane River ties “loops and bows/to a bamboo mast on the blue/mountain of heaven”.
Sound and word associations begin to proliferate until, in an act of synaesthesia, “every word/is a kiss”; there’s “the sound of hair/falling on bare shoulders”; and a harlequin (stock prop, perhaps) is wheeled on “playing his fiddle to the waves”. And of course there’s the flow of milk and honey: sticky secretions that hold memories and traces of old desires and sensations (as well as being a metonym for New Zealand itself, land of milk and honey). There’s the “milk of almonds”; and “swanky girls”, both “lacy white and honey black”. There are “dreams of raw honey and smoke”; and “fireworks fading out like blue honey”; and on and on, a slinky catalogue hymned beneath the “wheel of the sun” going round.
Elsewhere, the poet mentions a painting that is a Christmas Day gift. It, too, is a “big” picture of Paradise, containing “islands waterfalls maps and genetic scribble/but most of all fractals of love”. You can feel the heat coming off such writing, confirmation that at her best Michele Leggott is arguably our finest living female rhapsodist.
MILK & HONEY, by Michele Leggott (AUP, $27.99).
