NZ Poetry reviewed by Siobhan Harvey

Enough

Louise Wallace

Victoria University Press

$25

I feel like I am having the world’s heaviest baby

is what I say to Rory

about the book.

         He agrees.

Every day

it gets larger, and is harder

to carry with me. It seems

it will never be done.

        Rory bears

the weight too….

The motif of writing, of birthing a collection of poems, underpins Louise Wallace’s second book, Enough. Ideas of weight, waiting, origination, labour and creativity run through poems such as ‘This new place’, ‘The happy poem’ and ‘Looking forward’. Each engages with the literary, with the word, its use and meaning, its reach towards the reader, and simultaneously grapples (in dance and rejection) with the cadence words intuitively offer. Reading a poem such as ‘I’m always telling people’, Wallace’s narrative style of poetry underscores and underplays the rhythmic beauty of word and meaning:

I’m always telling people

not to use words

like ‘beauty’ or ‘sad’

because they are too vague,

too much

of an abstraction –

they don’t give us a picture, I say.

But when I say ‘love’ I see

your face, and your full heart

sailing towards me.

The same is true of those poems in Enough which connect to the collection’s secondary theme: habitation. Here topics such as small acts of domesticity, living in an unfamiliar landscape and familial contact intertwine through verse like ‘We need to put new batteries in our smoke alarms’, ‘Back to the long river’ and the final poem, ‘Dear Wellington’ where:

We have taken the time to

            get a tan

and now

            we are coming home.

Playful, inventive and imaginative, in content and form, Enough is a satisfying collection and proves that Wallace has successfully overcome that difficult task of delivering a second book.

  

Life & Customs

Bernadette Hall

Victoria University Press

$25

                       Whereas Louise Wallace’s Enough connects to an upper South Island landscape, Bernadette Hall’s new poetry book Life & Customs traverses the lower South Island, namely Otago, as the opening poem illustrates:

Hedge

through the hedge and way back then

pushing my way out into the Central Otago sun

there was the laughing face of Jean

and someone else whose name I have forgotten

they played with me as if I was a doll

Landscape as a medium for memory and memory lapse continues through poems such as ‘Skeins’, ‘The view from the lookout’ and, extending the geographical theme globally, ‘Just another traveller in Rome’ where:

There’s the knit of tiny bricks in the elegant flooring,

the lovely swell of the big rounded brick ceiling

like the smooth turning of a knitted heel on the needles,

and Hadrian’s little poem about the soul set up there

on the wall, he calls it vagula, his little wanderer

which gives rise to ‘vague’….

Poetically speaking, Hall spreads her thematic net as far as County Cork in Ireland (in poems like ‘The woman on the bridge’, no doubt inspired by her time as 2007 Rathcoola Resident) Nepal, Singapore and Australia. Always, it is Hall’s attention to detail, the way her eye and voice exquisitely capture the scenery which impresses. In ‘A simple imperial measure’, for example:

The sky is all silver and grey,

the sun streams white,

the clouds (the water-bearers)

look like bruises or like gathers

in a hooped organza skirt,

a Quaker dress perhaps,

of stubborn elegance….

Here, and indeed across Life & Customs, Hall takes the topographically everyday and common (the heavens, the sun and clouds….) and transforms them into something rare, unusual and striking. Remarkably she sustains this imaginative originality throughout the book so that the penultimate untitled poem offers us

mataitia

*

how the waves gather at night

under the lights of the Waiheke ferry

*

sea tract         sea tulip           sea angel 

the breath beyond breathing

Life & Customs is an accomplished work by one of New Zealand’s most skilful poets

About the reviewer:

Siobhan Harvey is a poet, non-fiction writer, lecturer and anthologist She is the author of the poetry collection, Lost Relatives (Steele Roberts, 2011), the work of literary criticism, Words Chosen Carefully (Cape Catley, 2010) and the poetry anthology, Our Own Kind (Random House NZ, 2009). Her poetry manuscript, Nephology for Beginners is shortlisted for 2013 Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award. While her creative non-fiction has been published in Landfall, was Highly Commended in 2013 Landfall Essay Prize and runner up in 2011 Landfall Essay Competition. Recently, she was a guest writer at Queensland Poetry Festival.

Siobhan Harvey is a regular poetry reviewer on this blog.