Books
Higher thought
by Andrew Paul Wood
A superb new essay collection reveals Martin Edmond’s precise powers of observation and eye for poetic detail.
Martin Edmond’s Waimarino County & Other Excursions. In a word. Brilliant.
When Landfall started its prestigious essay competition several years ago, it was with the intention of reviving a literary form seen by many to be in decline in New Zealand, probably due to memories of high-school English assignments (Edmond was joint winner with Tze Ming Mok of the Landfall prize in 2004).
In recent years, the New Zealand essay has come back into its own, especially with the help of dedicated specialist publishers like Lloyd Jones’s Four Winds Press, and Awa Press’s Ginger series. In the hands of Martin Edmond, the essay is a tool of incredible grace, diversity and range, simultaneously incisive like a scalpel and comforting as a hot cocoa with marshmallows, part Francis Bacon’s Essays and St Augustine’s Confessions.
When French aristocrat and armchair philosopher Michel de Montaigne, inspired by his beloved Roman authors, pioneered the genre in 1572, the form was remarkable in many ways: its brevity, versatility, subjectivity and, most important, its intimacy. Montaigne instructed his readers to consider the book and the author as one: “I have no more made my book than my book has made me,” he wrote, “a book consubstantial with its author, concerned with my own self, an integral part of my life.”
That intimacy and candour are evident throughout much of Waimarino County: in the landscapes and portraits of his youth in the rural North Island, gently but bones and all, rich in incident; in philosophical meditations on the human condition and the universe; and even a particularly beautiful recollection of a ’shroom trip in the Australian bush painted in exquisite jewel colours.
The latter, “Gold Tops” is also an excellent example of Edmond’s precise powers of observation of nature and an eye for poetic detail worthy of John Clare, or Wordsworth on a good day, and it would be nice to think that it was genetic, as he is the son of poet Lauris Edmond. There is, perhaps, also a hint of Aldous Huxley, himself an essay machine of the first water not disinclined to drop a tab on occasion, and, indeed, Rimbaud. Actually, the regular references to literary druggies can get a little tiresome.
Edmond’s consistent tone is modest, erudite and down to earth – never pompous or overbearing and he seems to have taken to heart W B Yeats’s dictum that the poet must know about, and write about, everything – in this case art, astronomy, ornithology, brain activity and the various New Jerusalems of sex, drugs, music, politics and philosophy people have tried to construct over the millennia.
The book is broken into four loosely themed sections: Autobiographies, Meditations, Illusions and Voices, each a cache of treasures and discoveries. Other favourites from the collection include the wonderfully rich essay “Waimarino County”; “Rosetta” – a meditation on the links between a space probe to a comet and the original deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphics by Napoleon’s academics; the simply breathtaking “The Abandoned House as a Refuge for the Imagination”; and “Ghost Who Writes” – a smart discourse on the many personae or “heteronyms” adopted by Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (which would just as easily describe artist/s et al), the unreality of homosexual Greco-Egyptian poet Constantin Cavafy, and the near-impossibility of German-Jewish writer Walter Benjamin, which may cause us to wonder at Edmond’s veracity on occasion.
One piece did irk me slightly: “Three” is a short impressionistic prose poem that so blatantly imitates Thomas de Quincey’s (oh look, another junky author) “Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow” as to deserve a light smack on the hand with a moist bus ticket. The play-in-a-play mock biography of the infamous Australian poet-who-never-was Ern Malley, which slightly unfortunately doubles up with Edmond’s descriptions of the Rockwood Necropolis in Sydney (where Edmond lives and drives a taxi), more than makes up for it.
This is an important book by the author of The Autobiography of My Father (1992) and The Resurrection of Philip Clairmont (1999), and the writer of the screenplay for the movie that forever shook up New Zealand’s monolithic binary self-mythology of biculturalism – Illustrious Energy (1987). I feel like I have a New Best Friend. I’m hooked. Fix me up.
WAIMARINO COUNTY & OTHER EXCURSIONS, by Martin Edmond (Auckland University Press, $35).
