NZ Poetry Review - HOOPLA SERIES 2014 - reviewed by Siobhan Harvey

HOOPLA SERIES 2014

Each book is priced at $24.99

Makaro Press, PO Box 41-032, Eastbourne 56047

Suave new kid on the boutique publishing block, Makaro Press breaks fresh territory with their exciting series of poetry collections, HOOPLA 2014 featuring the following works: Wellington poet and publisher, Helen Rickerby’s sumptuous Cinema, first time author Stefanie Lash’s startling Bird murder and treasured poet Michael Harlow’s stylish Heart absolutely I can. The production values of the books are worth their cover prices alone – bright, alluring colours background simple, graceful images, while backs detail the multifarious meanings for the word ‘hoopla’ which, therein, connects to the themes, motifs and plots of each collection in the series.

            At the cinema, we do not think, we are thought

             begins the cornerstone poem, ‘Two or three things I know about them’ in Rickerby’s Cinema. There is something about this effortlessly profound statement which  

symbolizes the entire work. At one level it is a poetic homage to film, to movie devotees, director and actors, past and present. The concluding poem, ‘Nine Lives’ in which the author’s existence is structured around and connected to key movies which have influenced her illustrates how effectively the medium of poetry, one of our least dominant cultural mediums can be used to examine and explore the influence of one of our most dominant cultural mediums, cinema:

4                    American Beauty

Even a plastic bag pulled swirling into the sky

            can be beautiful

Always the strange girl

wearing too much black

wrapping it around myself

like smoke

That time

lying on the deck beside the peace flame

we talked

of the afterlife

‘But what if it’s awful?’ I said

You replied

‘But what if it’s great?’

You are not

the intense boy

You do not swallow

all the light

Somehow

you are lowly making me

an optimist

            It’s language. It’s image. It’s atmosphere. All that which films are best at evoking and revivifying is found also in poetry, especially poetry as good and creative as this. Rickerby’s ability to act as auteur of so many poetic movies in this collection, each poem a filmic medium of music, idiom and illustration reaches its zenith in her connective sequence of works in which her friends’ lives are directed by the famed. ‘Chris’s life, as directed by Ken Russell’; ‘Karen’s life, as directed by Woody Allen’; ‘Sean’s life, as directed by Terrence Malick’ … you get the giste, the clever in-joke:

            Helen’s life,

          as directed by Christine Jeffs

            I spend a lot of time in the bath

            or else

            contemplating water

            Drowning is an ever-present possibility

            As I meander soulfully through the pines

            I am grateful

            for the sunshine

            and the soundtrack

            Author and acquaintances depicted as characters in movies of their lives controlled and scripted by others. Characters thought into being afresh. Cinema is a meeting point of the cultural persuasions of our modern existences: form, exterior, paradox… Reading it is like accompanying Rickerby to a private screening in an art-house movie theatre during which a warm afternoon is busied away with contemplation, reflection, escapism, indulgence and delight.

*

            There’s something of the cinematic about Stefanie Lash’s Bird murder too. Part poetry collection, part fictional narrative, this book is a gothic murder-mystery set to verse. All the atmosphere and eccentricity of the gothic is there from the off:

            A tenant in the attic

            Have you smelled freshly smoked glass,

smoked glass or smoked paper,

the kind that seismographs use?

That was the smell of the place I came to.

The balustrades were carved in white wood:

coniferous trees and extinct animals,

and all the ceilings had masks in  each corner,

the canoes that take people to dead places.

Blue fires burned in every room.

I had the heart of winter when I came there,

grey fingers and hands weighing up each lung.

Every foot I placed left a pool, a print,

not a print of my making. The flagstones

were white too and

wept salt, hardly, and cold fell, every corner.

            The tenant in the attic, as it turns out, is narrator and cast-member, a mysterious occupant in The Good Ship, home to banker, Mr. Cockatrice, his droning wife and their two taxidermic, bell jarred birds. Throw an evening’s preparations for a dinner party and Cockatrice’s scandalous past, and you have a plot rich enough for a novel. Like Rickerby, though, Lash expands the scope and nuances of her topic through those elements of storytelling poetry best enhances – association, imagery, subtext and the rich suggestions of cadent language. In utilizing these poetic resources, Lash stretches her tale back into history and ancestry:

            Deep time

            This bird is scaffolding the genus,

            one foot in Antarctica

            one in India.

Waving to the whale and his brother,

the horse. Sitting in a giant rose.

Many grandbirds later,

making the big fly over

from Tasmania –

we didn’t call it that then, though –

landfall on beeches.

Ladies and gentlemen

that was my ancestor

sleeping in the drowning valleys.

Watching the alpine fault form.

Meeting today’s dirt, then.

 Elsewhere there are poetic treatments of taxonomy, taxidermy, suffocation and disembowelment.

Murder Weapon

Cyanocitta stelleri

was born on the Capricorn Plate.

Steller’s Jay to you and me.

This one and its mate

came from Nicaragua.

Just near the volcano that,

as Jorge Espinosa

told, a Christ-aged fossil track

of human feet and walking sticks

were perfectly enstoned.

These two would put their little beaks

through Homero Alonso’s window

and pick up crumbs. So sweet.

Carefully trapped, no pellet holes remain,

the taxidermist’s job so neat.

Which, not wanting to give the remainder of the plot of a poetic whodunit away, is the best place to leave this haunting, fascinating collection.

*

            Poet, publisher, editor, librettist, Michael Harlow is certainly a productive man. HOOPLA 2014’s Heart absolutely I can is his ninth collection, a body of work stretching back over 4 decades. All that fine sweat and craft is on show in this book which contains 5 new poems accompanied by some familiar offerings from previous collections. Love, passion and the human psyche have long been Harlow’s literary trademarks, and he returns to them here in poems such as ‘Always you are there’:

            Always you are there - standing

outside the door when someone

shakes the house down, packs

the children away. You appear

at the bedsides of friends who

are leaving town, and finally

shadows grow out of your hands;

you bring hills into a room.

There is no question of regret,

you are busy with the secret

joy of one who is inconsolable.

Tomorrow, we may sing on the

bell of the sun, hang by a song;

we may sing. Oh, there is some

small promise when you say I do

not believe, I know. When I

touch your body there is light

buried in my hands; there is the

distinct possibility of romance.

The visual aesthetic of this poem, no line too long or too short vis-à-vis its neighbours is a key to how syntactically pitch-perfect, how musical this poem is.  The taut harmonic vibrancy of Harlow’s pen is present in other poems in Heart absolutely I can, including ‘Billet-doux’, ‘And, yes’ and ‘Now the birds are singing’:

Now the birds are singing

In this bright coin of noon

wine-songs in waiting, when

the olive drops, young girls

lick the tips of light that flood

their arms. The black fruit falls

in praise of skirts raised round

these ancient trees, which act

to draw us in we sit inside

the circle we have become

and fold around us what

we are: daughters of Minoa

we bear these sheaves of song,

the laurel, and the love

learned at your hand.

If there is song to these poems there is also, as the reference to ‘daughters of Minoa’ in the above poem indicates, a sense of learnedness. This is not academia for the sake of effect and exclusion (of the reader), but – like the deeply layered melodies, nods to the poet’s origin as vocalist – an illustration of the depths of Harlow’s poetic knowledge and skill. It is present in verses such as ‘Bride with beautiful feet’ and ‘Short talk on getting back together with yourself’, both of which engage with the work of Canadian poet and professor of Classics, Anne Carson; while other poems reference famed writers like Pascal and Rimbaud.

Melodious, suggestive, structurally-tight and soulful, Heart absolutely I can is a powerful addition to the rich body of Harlow’s work. 

Available from selected booksellers or order on-line from: 

makaropress.wordpress.com

           Or email : makaropress@gmail.com

About the reviewer:

Siobhan Harvey is a poet and nonfiction author. Her new poetry collection, Cloudboy (OUP, 2014) will be launched at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival on Friday 16th May and is the winner of the 2013 Kathleen Grattan Award for Poetry. Her other works include Lost Relatives (Steele Roberts, 2011), Words Chosen Carefully: New Zealand Writers In Conversation (Cape Catley, 2010) and Our Own Kind: 100 New Zealand Poems about Animals (Random House NZ, 2009). 

Additionally, she was runner up in 2012 Dorothy Porter Poetry Prize (Aus) and 2012 Kevin Ireland Poetry Competition, and, for her creative non-fiction, Highly Commended in 2013 Landfall Essay Prize and runner up in 2011 Landfall Essay Competition. Between 2006 and 2013 she co-ordinated New Zealand's National Poetry Day. She has been a guest writer at literary festivals in Australia, Indonesia, the UK and New Zealand. 

She has a Poet's Page on The Poetry Archive (UK), co directed by Sir Andrew Motion.