Recent NZ Poetry Collections Reviewed by Siobhan Harvey

Autobiography of a Marguerite

Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle

Hue & Cry Press

$25

2012 Biggs Poetry Prize winner, Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle offers an innovative, evocative first collection, Autobiography of a Marguerite. For one so young, this author has the range of literary successes and publications that wouldn’t look out of place on the CV of a writer twice her age; at just 24 years old, she’s has been published in Sport, Landfall, Best New Zealand Poems 2011 and 2012, has been Highly Commended in the NZ Post National Schools Poetry Competition and came third in 2007 Sunday Star Times Short Story Competition (secondary schools division). Autobiography of a Marguerite is no less startling.

            “My illness,” Butcher-McGunnigle once said of the rheumatoid arthritis she was diagnosed with in 2004, “has especially affected the way I see the world, the way I write about it. Because of my illness, my poems focus on relationships and people, upon the paradoxical nature of life, the patterns we make and the patterns which make us, as well as the way we choose to live our lives, our memories and our pasts.”

            Part workbook for living with debilitating illness, part guide to familial interaction, dysfunction and love, part insight into the medical profession and part poetic intersection of fact and fiction, Autobiography of a Marguerite is a series of untitled, concise prose-poems, stepping stones into the existence of a young woman who, not too far removed in delineation from the author herself, suffers from physical debility:

            My mother stands in the garden. She says, I can’t hear you.

She says, is this a weed or not. The phone rings and it’s for

my mother, but she won’t come inside, so I stand in for her.

Is this a weed or not, she says, holding up the blistered plant.

We package ourselves to the doctor. I have symptoms, and

what’s more, I have signs. What are your symptoms, the doctor

asks me. Her symptoms are X, Y, Z, my mother answers.

             Poems like this can distance the uninitiated, making them unsure whether they are ‘real’ poems or splices of story. They’re both, a wonderful combination of literary influences and interface which, underpinned by the cadence of poetry and the familiarities of fiction (paragraphs…), offers many deeply tender moments:

            I open a self help book which is about reading self-help

            books. The preface says, If you are reading this, you are

beyond self-help. I think about myself as a child, I see my

face and it doesn’t seem real. The uterus of the forest, the

wind blowing through it, under the pine needles. I think

about myself lying on a bed, covered in needles. I am going

to an acupuncturist once a week. Not because I want my

symptoms reduced, but because I want to be touched.

The first section’s focus on infirmity yields to a second section in which the verse becomes elliptical, fractured slices of narrative accompanied by footnotes:

All the dresses and jumpers in my wardrobe had once

 been my mother’s:

I had to go to the hospital because another student

hurt me,

She started keeping a notebook(93) about her daughter –

Once a therapist asked me if I had ever been abused

and I laughed and said, No, not unless I have

 repressed the memory,

I only ever saw my parents hug and kiss each other

once, when I was six(94)…

93     It’s more necessary than you think.

94     That period of her life became so embellished in memory

that, looking back, it seemed almost a time of happiness.

Meaning here is a connecting and disconnecting device. The lines of poetry offer their distinct topics, inference is the springboard which may or may not join the lines together. Combined with the first section and the last section’s multimedia representations in which imagery, that fundamental of poetry, companions the prose-poems, this is a collection born of an established creative tradition, one so often informed by European writers such as Marguerite Duras and US authors like Thalia Field. In precis, Autobiography of a Marguerite is like nothing being written or published in New Zealand presently, and is the fresher, the more ingenious for that. Publishers, Hue & Cry, guided by a new wave of exciting writers such as Chloe Lane, Sarah Jane Barnett and Amy Brown are to be commended for conducting Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle’s first book into print.

Edwin’s Egg & other poetic novellas

Cilla McQueen

Otago University Press

$39.95

From one ground-breaking poetry book to another with Edwin’s Egg & other poetic novellas by former Poet Laureate, Cilla McQueen. The title intimates the frame, literary and design, for the book arrives in a floral box which contains 8 small booklets, all of which compose the work. Started when McQueen was Poet Laureate, the content examines the space between prose and poetry.

Through waist-high grass cut

through the empty section.

Bend to retrieve the glossy

supplement falling out of the

newspaper. Slip ankle-deep in

muddy water...

begins Edwin’s Egg’s first booklet, ‘1. Higgs’. Like Butcher-McGunnigle, McQueen’s work emphasize its poetic foundations through language, music, rhythms, repetitions and the relationships between words, their sounds and meanings, while simultaneously engaging with other literary forms, most noticeably, fiction:

He saw again the kindly, remote

smile of his father studying rock

samples with a magnifying glass.

Time out. He opened the

wine and sat on the porch,

leafing through pages. A feature

of the chrysoberyl, he read, is the

occurrence of twinned crystals

in the shape of a heart, giving

the mineral a pseudohexagonal

appearance.

(from ‘5. Pleochroic’).

Pleochroic might send you scurrying for your dictionary (OED def: showing different colours when viewed in different directions), but the range of subjects McQueen examines won’t. Astronomy; Chemistry; matrimony; Mineralogy: through these and other topics, McQueen’s ability to poetically illuminate the invisible life forces which guide our lives is magical and refreshing. Poetry’s version of Brian Cox? Verse’s answer to Stephen Hawkins? You decide:

Edwin gloomily sorted

through the remains of

his marriage.

He took down a new cardboard box

And wrote on the lid “Sporting

Memorabilia”. Then he turned to the

shelves and took down one by one the

tarnished trophies of his wife.

   He wrapped them in newspaper and

packed them in.

(from ‘8. Edwin’s Egg’).

Born to a Red-Headed Woman

Kay McKenzie Cooke

Otago University Press

$25

Over recent years, there have been a number of collections employing poetic sequencing to plot protagonists’ lives. The works of Marty Smith and Anne Kennedy, for instance, spring readily to mind in this regard. If Kay McKenzie Cook’s third book, Born to a Red-Headed Woman, an autobiographical work examined through a sixty-two interconnected verses, is of a similar ilk, it also adds something fresh and imaginative to the ‘narrative poetic cycle’ genre.

                                                                        a country girl again

            The black-and-white photo goes back

to ’67. Taken around Christmas. Perhaps a Sunday

drive out from Gore. A bit of a breeze parts Nana’s perm,

her own steady caution holding down hands

that shine below the folded-back cuffs

of her bri-nylon cardigan.

Grandad’s road-worker’s hands lie relaxed

over the roof of the car, taking ownership

of its dim-blue. Both of them

caught by me at fourteen, when I press

the slow shutter of my Brownie box camera

with a pronounced click. Just a moment ago.

In structure and content, this opening poem exemplifies what follows. Aspects of the author’s life offered chronologically through the medium of poetry, a name of a song or a line of lyric the inspiration, precursor and title for each work.

                                                                        don’t let the moon break your heart

            I was born in winter

to a red-headed woman

who shivered on a hard bed

under one thin blanket

in a hospital by the Waiau Rover

making heavy work

of its final punch through

to the coast,

the thrum of its waters

underscoring our breathing,

the beating of my heart

the size of a walnut.

The use of an intermediary like song, that origin of poetry, is a clever and evocative device. Reading the song title or lyric instantly conjures in the mind the atmosphere of the times, transporting the reader back to a relevant era. By poetic degrees, McKenzie Cooke speaks of herself at 4 years old, 5 years old, 9 years old, a college student and so forth. We, her readers, sit aside her as she reminisces, building a kaleidoscope of her past by using poems as pictures, snapshots in a cadent photograph album, and words to piece together herself, her whanau, her school- and university friends, her beaus and her offspring.

                                                                                    watched you bring my world

            When Mum became a widow

            it seemed a strange word for anyone

to be let alone our own mother

and we were fatherless

as if we’d inadvertently got lost.

We moved to Gore.

But it was okay. There were shops.

And babysitting jobs.

Mum got work

rolling ice creams

at the local picture theatre.

My brothers went to slot cars.

Like the best autobiographies, Born to a Red-Headed Woman manages to use its portrayal of character and personality to suggest the times, their mores and morals, which define, constrain and liberate the people. Nowhere is the book better, more heart-wrenching than when, looking back at the most personal of moments, it touches us with actions, decisions and consequences which reach down the decades to us:

                                                                        rock me on the water

            My mother made me tell Nana too.

            And there we were, all three of us,

            four if you count the baby

            standing in the kitchen

            a generation apart.

           

No-one need know, they both said.

There are places you can go

to have a baby.

This is real flesh and blood,

I thought. This is not a dream.

To paraphrase David Lodge, the best historical literature reflects back at contemporaries an essential truth about ourselves. In the case of Kay McKenzie Cook’s Born to a Red-Headed Woman the realities this collection gives us insight into mightn’t be always pleasant, but they are always accurate, and the book is the more powerful for that.

About the reviewer:

Siobhan Harvey is a poet and nonfiction author. Her latest poetry collection, Cloudboy (OUP, 2014) has been a New Zealand Top 10 bestseller and winner of the 2013 Kathleen Grattan Award for Poetry. While a new book, Essential New Zealand Poems (Penguin Random House NZ) she co-edited with James Norcliffe and Harry Ricketts has just been released. 

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.