How to be
Dead in a Year of Snakes
Chris Tse
Auckland University
Press
$24.99
Wellington writer, actor and musician, Chris Tse offers an impressive
historical drama in his first full poetry collection, How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes (Auckland University Press). Tse
is an exciting voice, one who has already showcased his talents in such publications
as AUP New Poets 4. For this new
book, Tse takes the 1905 racist-motivated murder of Cantonese migrant Joe Kum
Yung by white supremacist Lionel Terry as the terrain of his work:
(In which the author interviews
a dead man)
No one asked me to speak, nor took the time to fill a
moment with my
presence. We cannot hide from ourselves in the dark. I
crouch down
in the damp void and
listen as they pass words about me between
themselves like borrowed
scandal. The loudest, hungriest voices drown
out all reason…
For years I lit incense
and prayed for my share of good fortune, holding
fast to the belief that
patience brings luck to those who traverse life’s
terrain with humble
expectations. Now such a dispensation numbs me.
I often thought about
the things I left behind, how the distance that once
indulged me slowly
smothered the dreams of those I made promises
to. How my wife waited,
how my bad luck clung to me like a wandering
ghost. We are all losers
in a stoic game. Unkind or unsettled, it made no
difference in the long
run; I took it all like a prize fool…
Journeying in time from 1871 to 1905 and beyond, in landscape between
Canton, the Hokianga, Wellington and a spiritual after-life, this is an
ambitious collection, its poems akin to chapters of an expansive novel. Yet, in
the best traditions of poetry, what it imbues its subject matter with (which
prose never could) is music, language play, heightened (rather than
understated) emotion, theatre and meditation; as the titular poem capably
illustrates:
(How to
be dead in a year of snakes)
There must always be
a first victim.
Maybe not the very
first,
but the one that shocks.
The one that says: hey, look.
The one we can’t let go.
The
theatre in this work is never theatrical. Rather, connected to poetry’s ability
to play out in the mind as a series of images/ mental pictures, performance,
play and tragedy are sustained by Tse’s ability to dress the different stages
his plot unfolds upon with precise details and les mots justes:
1905:
this is the end. The night
opens
to
a scene of death –
gun
blood
peanut
shells
a
knotted walking stick
and
one
quiet body.
Two
guilty feet
head
in an unknown direction
drowned
by the pitter-patter
footsteps
of those running to help.
Another
cold Wellington night
wind
on a sharp loop.
Traces
of cordite
punctuate
the chaos.
His
stiff clothes refuse to move
as
they lift his body
like
a face caught between
photographs
– a sick slur
a
busy thought
-
just enough to make sense
but still framed with questions.
Navigating
both a turbulent and traumatic era in New Zealand’s history, one
which
symbolizes our inharmonious cultural past, and a story which displays a rich,
distinctive New Zealand literary voice, that connected to the heritage and
narratives held by our Asian New Zealand authors, Chris Tse’ How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes is a
welcome and accomplished poetic publication. Another must-read in a year when
the NZ poetry scene has seen a plethora of amazing poetry publications.
the breathing tree
Apirana
Taylor
Canterbury University
Press
$25
From a first-time author to a well-established writer with the release of
Ngati Porou, Te Whanau-a-Apanui and Ngati Ruanui writer Apirana Taylor’s latest
collection, the breathing tree
(Canterbury University Press). Taylor’s last collection was published five
years ago, and the breathing tree, a
body of 40 new works, is well worth the wait, as the first poem in the book
exemplifies:
haere mai spring
early September
the tree buds into song
spring rides the wings of the korimako
and sings in the bellbird’s heart
As with Tse’s work, the
importance, the value of ‘voice’, of a distinctive poetic style is undeniable
and evocative when considering Taylor’s oeuvre. Whereas Tse spoke to
significant historical events and issues, Taylor’s focus is the mythological
and ecological, the subject matter no less culturally important for that:
my waka
my body is a waka
my feet are paddles
my arms are oars
i’m rowing in motion
across the ocean
of tears
I adore Taylor’s
literary compression, his ability to condense emotion and topic down to a form
which comes close, often, to an extended haiku. Even when he writes longer poems in the breathing tree, the use of language
is no less sparse:
whiriwhiri
whiriwhiri whiriwhiri
raranga e
stretched betwixt the weaver’s pegs
whiriwhiri whiriwhiri
raranga e
from flax and feathers
the cloak is woven
whiriwhiri whiriwhiri
raranga e
stories unfold
from the sacred
knowledge
whiriwhiri whiriwhiri
raranga e
from the wairua of those
who know
mauri ora mauri mate
whiriwhiri whiriwhiri
raranga e
how the song sings in
the wind
whiriwhiri whiriwhiri
raranga e
Musically adept, the
poems in the breathing tree intone
their melodies to the reader, enfolding them, 40 times over, with a plentiful harmony
of expression, impression and sensation.
The Lonely
Nude
Emily Dobson
Victoria University
Press
$25
The second
collection, The Lonely Nude (Victoria
University Press) by Hawke’s Bay writer, Emily Dobson returns the author to a
moment from her past: her time spent as a life-model. It is this – the concept
of being naked, fully exposed before artists – that inspires and influences the
poems in the book, becoming, indeed, the mantle upon which the collection’s final poem rests:
The lonely
nude, I
Buck
naked
I
am standing
on
the flattening sole
of
one foot.
It’s
nothing
but
blue sky
and
a soft bottom
in
the plain light of day.
I
smile like a madonna.
I
am nothing like a boulder.
Upon this central theme so much
about human interaction is examined by Dobson. So that self restrain becomes
the modus operandi for the poem ‘Life model’; another verse, ‘Nude’ is
predicated upon the notion of being “transfixed,
to see your self: created, drawn, many times over”; and a further poem,
‘Notes: Paradoxical Undressing (hypothermia)’ examines exposure which motivates
such strident authorial counsel as “Declare
yourself, unfold yourself, reveal yourself.”
The politics of the body, its
representation, its interactions and disconnections: these become the topics The Lonely Nude examines, sometimes in
an imaginative, imagistic manner:
Joke: What
can be held without touching?
A
shiny new penny
and
a shiny new dime.
Or
was it the sunlight
on
concrete?
The
whole thing
was
bright with guilt.
We
sat quietly side by side
eating thin slices of rock melon.
Answer: A conversation
And
sometimes in a gendered way:
The woman who used to be an oboe
now didn’t know what she was.
Mason wasps began nesting in her spine.
She defined herself by her regret
for the beautiful sound she had once made.
And
sometimes in an atmospheric, emotional, familial way:
Mapped
(for my mother)
You acquired a heavy collection of maps and sat
there
at rock bottom over your work, saying her name
like a river.
I borrowed your boots to walk to market –
everywhere I went
flocks of small birds were bursting into the sky
above me.
I sent you on your way with instructions, an
untidy map
and some food, but still you got lost on the
return home ….
Most
creative and impressive of all is the structure which sections the book into
seven short parts, a journey through geography as much as through arrangement
for each part tracks the protagonist’s voyage around the globe: Mexico, America,
home… Just as the narrator finds her (poetic) feet in on locale she’s whisked
or whisks herself away to a new terrain; such dislocation a metaphor for the
symbolic and thematic landscape of the book.
Daring in
form and subject matter, The Lonely Nude ably
showcases Dobson’s original voice and poetic approach.
About the reviewer
Siobhan Harvey
is the author of, Cloudboy
(OUP, 2014) and, as co-editor, Essential
New Zealand Poems (Penguin Random House NZ) .Her creative
nonfiction has been selected as highly commended in 2013 Landfall Essay Prize
and runner up in 2011 Landfall Essay Competition, and published in Landfall, Segue (Miami University
Press) and Pilgrimage (Colorado
State University Press).
This year she was runner up in the New Zealand Poetry
Society's International Poetry Competition. Additionally, she was winner of the
2013 Kathleen Grattan Award for Poetry, runner up in 2012 Dorothy Porter
Poetry Prize (Aus) and 2012 Kevin Ireland Poetry Competition. Between 2006 and
2013 she co-ordinated New Zealand's National Poetry Day. She lectures in
Creative Writing at AUT'S Centre for Creative Writing, and has a Poet's
Page on The Poetry Archive (UK), co directed by Sir Andrew Motion.
Siobhan is the regular poetry reviewer on this blog.
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