Singing
With Both Throats
by Maris O’Rourke (David Ling Publishing, 2013)
Vaughan Rapatahana
Maris O’Rourke’s first collection of poems - and this
72 page collection is replete with many poems, some written in formal
stylizations such as sonnets and villanelles - is a strong, mature compilation
which is divided into three reasonably stand-alone sections. By stand-alone I
mean that the thematic coherence remains quite striated within each section.
These three sections are entitled as follows:
Passages - concerning her formative years and
experiences, such as having to deal with a Plathian father, with marriage -
here equated with death, where “Wring her neck” is a powerful concluding line -
separations, as in the fine metaphoric poem sharing the same title, and with
early family situations. Indeed there is an element here of her being quite
mistreated by the masculine gender.
Parallels - whereby she elicits parallels
between societies sharing – often unbeknownst to them - similar tribulations,
such as in the well-wrought ‘In Passing’: near both the Red River in Viet Nam
and the Waikato River in Aotearoa are structures “only the [owners/members] can
enter”. Meanwhile her varied trips through Asia and Europe opened her eyes, and
therefore our own via her lines, with the recollection that “the homeless
cluster against the walls” of Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris; in which cold
stone walls are “holding up the homeless on the other side” - here using
repetition to both open and to snap shut the poem. Then there is her longer
rumination “Three Encounters on Rannoch Moor”, wherein she connects up the
Scottish [Robertson] dots to this reviewer: Rapatahana is after all Robertson
translated ki te reo Māori.
Pathfinder
-
whereby she shares lessons learned and attempts to leaven lessons we should
learn from her; it is only here where on a couple of occasions she comes across
as just a little preachy, in poems such as ‘Lifelines’. The other poems here,
however, do resonate with sensitivity, sense, positivity, patience and of a
journey undertaken and - for O’Rourke - well-accomplished, as in these lines
from ‘Aotearoa: a Sonnet’:
But
it’s here my bone-deep song is sung,
this
sea, this sky, this land - my mother-tongue.
She definitively claims her place as a Kiwi. Yet there
is also sadness, some sorrow, and on occasions still personal hopes and
aspirations in several of these final verses, such as in ‘Petition’:
take
me to the dream makers. Put me
on
the bass guitar at Elvis’ s
‘68
Comeback Special.
- her admonition of the nay-sayers and bores and
advice-givers.
More,
there are some things that struck me straightaway about this overall oeuvre,
and I will outline them straightaway also:
-
O’Rourke has had a massive range of experiences, as regards both life
encounters and abrasions and career highlights, and the concomitant copious
overseas excursions and jaunts. This has all served her poetry very well, for
she has a great deal to write about viz. her subject matter; there is quite a
mass here. This is in itself a refreshing tinge in a Kiwi writer, some of whom
remain somewhat restricted as to where they have been, what they have done, who
they actually are - the latter point here especially pertinent to O’Rourke, who
has found herself as a person and in her own terms established Aotearoa as her
standing ground, her tūrangawaewae (as earlier mentioned and as also affirmed
in other poems within.).
- This latter point leads to my own assignation of
this poet as someone who is very willing to entertain and - more importantly -
to respect Māori concepts, reo, mythologies, worldview to the degree of
utilising Māori language and writing about both Māori personages and Māori
cultural assignations. Well done, I say: we have here a woman who shows no
reluctance to view her adopted country as multicultural, multiethnic,
multilingual and has attained her own particular voice in so doing - thus the
titular singing with both throats. Ka nui te pai tēnei Maris. Indeed in the
poem ‘The Map on Taru’s Wall’ we read:
I step
into a parallel universe,
familiar
shape – New Zealand,
unknown
world – Aotearoa,
complete
discontinuity in specifics:
She sees that there are other worlds within the one
that is Aotearoa-New Zealand per se and indeed she also sees - as we will also soon
also view from a couple of further quotations - that these supposedly separate
ao can and do and should merge on many occasions too.
- None of the above takes anything away from
O’Rourke’s sheer poetic skill; in fact it more obviously augments it, for this
is also a woman who can write well. Some examples of craft follow:
• The clever use of similes, so as to contrast Te
Kuiti with international sites, as in ‘Friday Night in Te Kuiti’.
• The clever use of smacking final lines, such as in
her depiction of a Saracen in Paris, all dressed up in Arab gear, yet also
“pulling his roll-along suitcase”!
• The clever use of (parallel) metaphors in several
poems, as in ‘Water Baby’ where the “Expectant clouds rolled in…” to a scene of
a woman’s waters breaking, and the clever extended metaphor of a true friend as
not a smooth easy-to-clamber-on rock, but more as a bastion of “Not safe
ledges, easy hand-holds, simple steps...” from the poem entitled, of course,
‘Friend’.
• The killers - for me at least - are the following
lines from ‘Back to Back’, which incidentally is ‘all about’ not just Edmund
Hillary, but more, the shared ethnicities and respective stances of Aotearoa
that I mentioned earlier:
A
skewed hatchet of a face
crag-crevassed
hair
over
acute precipices
ravine-gashed
mouth
avalanched
shorn-off ear
gorge-slitted
eye.
Which is almost where I stop, except to remark in
related fashion that O’Rourke is – I think, other than Tuwhare himself - the
only poet I know who rhymes Māori and Pākehā lexis such as ‘kai’ and ‘lie’ i.e.
two reo become one - all of which is something I have alluded to several times
already: her willingness to see beyond a one-dimensional world, to grasp
another world and to be comfortable within it, so much so as to write about her
own tangi. Kia ora ano Maris, is what I say.
For
here we have an honest poet, never afraid to be upfront without enlisting
obfuscating jargons and launching labyrinthine language attacks. Here we have
someone who is OK with writing what she feels and views, as a vital part of her
own endeavours to be herself. So much so that her last line in this book really
demonstrates the poems’ worth:
each one is a gift, no doubt.
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