Books
Leggott’s labyrinth
by David Eggleton
From Taranaki to Venice, Rome to Gondwana, with a poet who is at once maze navigator and maze maker.
Mirabile Dictu, Michele Leggott’s eighth collection of poems, was mostly written during the 18 months she was the New Zealand Poet Laureate (a term that finished in June) – thus making the book a kind of odyssey of her laureateship adventures. Mirabile dictu – Latin for “wonderful to tell” – is a phrase found in Virgil’s Roman epic poem The Aeneid, and so we are encouraged from the beginning to read the collection as a work of echoes and correspondences, responsive to remembrance of the past as well as to the euphoria of the present, where “there’s work for the living”.
For poets, words bring the world into being: this is cause for celebration, offering opportunities for spells, riddles, chants, and for language that invokes signs and wonders. Leggott’s poems teem with such things, from the lenticular clouds over the Tararua Ranges that resemble UFOs, to the biblical scenes found on the gilded bronze doors of the Florence Baptistery, to the skull of a circus elephant that died after consuming poisonous tutu berries in Ohakune and that is now installed in the University of Auckland’s School of Biological Sciences Museum.
However, while individual poems offer curiosities and marvels, Mirabile Dictu is emphatically a unity, an assembly of scenes, as one might take “patches of blue in the sky/gather them up and sew them/together”. Motifs leap, flit, dance from poem to poem, offering buoyancy, floating wave-like movement – like the ferries she notices crisscrossing a harbour, with their travelling ripples setting up kinetic patterns. Only connect, sings the poet as she conducts a globe-trotting marathon from Taranaki to Venice, Rome to Gondwana.
Yet if her project is to examine the world and offer a personalised inventory – with poems thronged by relatives, friends, fellow poets, pets, and even passing parrots, and with introductions, common linkages and meeting points established for all kinds of cultural information so as to set up a sense of harmony, of serendipity – any expectations of simplistic resolutions and join-the-dots summaries are constantly thwarted. Instead, Leggott practices an aesthetic of disorientation. If language is perception, can we quite trust the language, or are all those patternings – of imagery, of sounds and syllables – just illusions, mirages, clever puzzles?
Leggott’s language is a labyrinth through which she leads us, at once maze navigator and maze maker, in a sense guided by her ear. The poet writes – in an oblique fashion, all graceful twirls, expecting you to keep up – of the trials of progressively losing her sight, of night blindness, of the comical frustrations of learning to touch-type, of learning how to use a white stick by listening to the echoes it makes as it sweeps the ground, taps objects and ventures towards the trickery of staircases and stairwells. But being Poet Laureate, she has another stick – her badge of office, the matua tokotoko: the speaking stick of the orator. It is a stick that in the hands of this poet is an enchanter’s wand as she resurrects family archives, summons the literary ghosts of her North Shore neighbourhood, and quests wryly after paradises lost and those yet to be discovered. The poet, she shows, speaks the world into being.
It’s a world of whanau and an “angel band” of missionaries, of the funeral wake of Hone Tuwhare and the wedding of a surprise niece, of the “whistle-speaker” Papahurihia in the Hokianga and the ascension of Blanche Baughan over Lyttelton. As visual phenomena become increasingly shrouded, so other senses grow in alertness. Going by an instinct for the right pitch, for the correct touch, she establishes an admirable amplitude, an impressive ability to encompass experience. One time-travelling poem ends up in 1969 affirming “someone is walking on the moon”, having begun with a nod to a Tiepolo ceiling fresco; another poem gently mocks the public relations dimension the contemporary commodification of poetry requires: “why keep a poet and bark yourself”.
At her best, Leggott illuminates, like a lightning flash, the delicacy and fragility of a world made of poetry, as for example when poems chalked by children on pavements are wiped out by a thunderstorm, their blurry shapes running away down gutters amid the sound of trickling water.
