Recent New Zealand Poetry Collections Reviewed by Siobhan Harvey

Bullet Hole Riddle

Miriam Barr

Steele Roberts

$19.99

The first collection, Bullet Hole Riddle by Auckland poet and National Poetry Day Coordinator, Miriam Barr is a powerful three-part narrative examining, amongst other things, memory, relationships, violence, secrets and catharsis. The opening poem landscapes the words and themes to come:

            At the time

           

            There was too much to say

            so she said nothing

            The words knotted their arms together

            all octopus and impenetrable ocean

            swam furiously

            but could not find the surface

            Silence; disclosure; Invisibility; exposure: these are the issues which sustain Bullet Hole Riddle. In the first section, ‘Bullet’, poems such as ‘Constructions’, ‘Paradox’, the titular poem and ‘Lesson’ enrich these matters and, in so doing, the overarching narrative of hidden abuse.

            Lesson

            At that age

            all you know

            is that this put stones

            in bellies

            I first learn the words

            at intermediate school

            and realise

            but say nothing

            The body worked

            despite me

            responded

            The legs did not

            run me away

Swallow all my voices

            This is my first lesson

in how secrets

            have teeth

            As in all violent relationships, admission and revelation are indirect acts; the same too in Bullet Hole Riddle. The second section, ‘Hole’ and the third section, ‘Riddle’ progress the story through implicit, impressionistic means:

            Thirst

         

            I am dry

            as a beetle

            clinging

            hook-fingered

            transparent

            unable

            to drink

            the water 

            Verses such as ‘Fox’, ‘Tributaries’, ‘Waves’ and ‘Storytime for Hans Christian Anderson’, tease out the intricate aspects of the plot through sharp, musical language and a sharper eye for imagery.

            Summers

            A sparrow can live for sixty years

            in the right conditions

            at the top of the hierarchy

            in a predator-free place

            A person can live

            for a little over one hundred summers

            the sparrows in the flax

            teaching their young to fly

            low at first

            then higher and higher

            further away

            One hundred summers

            the tall grass in seed

pollen on the water

the little red rowboat

our path across the bay

           

            Barr’s career as a performance poet belonging to the likes of The Literatti is reflected in the crafted nature of her language, and the deep mood and atmosphere which results in her book. If abuse as a subject matter sounds distasteful, reality – as the recent case of The Roast Busters testifies – proves the ongoing need to examine, to voice and to understand topics which, if they go unspoken, continue to cause pain. In this, Bullet Hole Riddle is a brave, necessary, graceful example of which can result when honesty meets exquisite art.    

Jabberwocky 

Bill Sutton

Steele Roberts

$19.99

Hawkes Bay author and literary activist (not to mention former scientist, Labour MP, 1984-1990 and senior policy analyst) Bill Sutton offers a first collection which brims, like its originator, with activity. Science, politics, the family, geography, classical music, astronomy: Jabberwocky covers a lot of territory, personal and public; as the opening poem illustrates.

Territory

            Half way up

   I stop

to listen to the tui

weaving her notes –

each triple makes a stitch.

She twists and turns

to cover the tree

with birdsong

then flies to the next one.

Nobody watches her

marking her borders

but everyone

with feathers hears her.

I resume climbing

my favourite gully

step by

booted

step

and nobody sees me

occupying it

but when I meet a dog

he knows.

            These are poems structured cleverly, dexterously to lead the reader through a journey of the mind and senses. In the collection’s first section, ‘Brillig’ (taken, like the other sections and, indeed, the title of the book from the Lewis Carroll masterpiece), poems like ‘Gods and planets’, ‘The moons of Jupiter’, ‘Unfathomable’ and the titular poem follow suit:

            Jabberwocky

            They pictured me as a monster

            in that children’s story book

            but look at these beautiful toves –

can you honestly call them slithy?      

            Doesn’t a jabberwock have hands,

            eyes, a heart, like other creatures?

            If you cut him, does he not bleed?

            When the wolves and bears are gone

the great forests flattened

even the foxes hunted down

do you think I’ll be spared?...

I never expected justice.

My hope is someone survives

to see these man-things finally turn

their technology on themselves

cutting back the population

and giving the animals a chance.

That’d be my idea of a frabjous day.

‘Callooh! Callay!’ would be ringing out

from every unpolluted wabe

and the mome raths outgrabe.

Where the structure is tight and well-crafted, the layers seamed into each poem, and the collection as a whole, are deceptively immense. As the above poem symbolizes, this is a book built upon alternate worlds: literary, figurative, topographic, administrative, domestic. And yet, each poem being its own self-contained environ, they revivify, individually and collectively, the work of mirror-writing they homage. If, in Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (Carroll, 1871) mysterious verse is given meaning and voice by holding it up to its own reflection, there is an ongoing sense in Sutton’s Jabberwocky of the poet holding a mirror up to subject and reader to disclose sense and truth. At times, such disclosure is deeply personal:

An inharmonious season

Vietnam pitched me into politics –

I listened to Holyoake and Marshall

argue for sending New Zealand troops

and promised to oppose it.

Next day a typed notice went up

on the student union noticeboard

We the undersigned support sending troops …

I spent the week fuming

until a second notice appeared

We the undersigned do NOT support …

signed by me and my friends –

a surprisingly large cohort.

Students were as divided on war

as the rest of the Western world

but for the next two elections

most New Zealanders voted National.

When I came back from Scotland in ‘72

the tide had finally turned

Labour was elected in a landslide

and our troops were brought home

no special welcomes for them

only looks that said ‘loser’

when they applied for jobs

or bought a beer at the local RSA.

Today on broadband I watched a woman

younger than me apologise

on behalf of all our people

for the treatment of those men

and later I went for a walk alone

in the cold autumn sunshine

telling myself the world has changed

there are new issues to fight over

and the yellow, red and brown leaves

from an inharmonious season

trampled into the mud together

will at least make a fertile tilth.

Such a confessional tone also frames poems like ‘Letter to a friend’, ‘Uncle Sid’ and ‘Wheelchairing’. Elsewhere, however, the expose offered by the poet is far more stridently global, as in poem such as ‘Coming to a theatre near you’.

            For this reviewer, though, the most luscious moments in Sutton’s Jabberwocky occur when the poet retreats into memory and confesses – some might say wistfully – a sense of place and time lost or imagined as idyllic in remembrance:

            The gliders

            One year we all made gliders

            I said to my friends from Queensland

and launched them from the playground

down that rolling grassy slope

to the bottom of the gully.

As we stood there looking

I felt again the trepidation

of that far-off ten-year-old boy

holding his fragile construction

of balsa wood and glue

and then the exhilaration

as it soared out of his hand

down through the shimmering air

weaving and bobbing like a dragonfly

all the way to the rushes.

Then as one the other boys

launched their own gliders

but like the volley of javelins

thrown by Penelope’s suitors

all of them fell short –

none of them found their mark

and there was no need for Telemachus

to bring swords or shields –

a few quick smiles from the girls

standing watching our contest

were the final seal of my joy.

The Night We Ate the Baby

Tim Upperton

HauNui Press

$20

As his first poetry collection, A House on Fire (Steele Roberts, 2009) proved, Manawatu poet Tim Upperton is a rare writer, ably to evoke deep impressions and experiences in a few, cadent words. His track-record in recent years has only enriched his growing literary stature with wins in the 2011 Bronwyn Tate Memorial International Poetry Competition and 2012 and 2013 Caselberg Trust International poetry Competitions.

The Night We Ate the Baby adds to Upperton’s standing as an exceptionally gifted poet. The book is part of a triumvirate of works by Manawatu poets (companioned by Leonel Alvarado’s Driving with Neruda to the Fish ‘n’ Chips and Joy Green’s Surface Tension, printed collectively under the ‘Kete Series’ banner).

The first poem in Upperton’s collection, a caution to the poet’s daughter, sets the tone:

            Avoid

            For Ruth

           

Life is not a dream. Careful! Careful! Careful!

-          ‘The city does not sleep’

New Age mystics. Wave-particle physics.

Federico Garcia Lorca, that all-night talker.

The law. The rot inside the apple core.

All dawdlers. Power walkers. Tattoo

parlours. Death metal concerts.

Poetry readings that go on for hours.

Cigarettes. White-singleted men in bedsits.

Responsibilities. Provincial cities.

Representation on committees.

Bad sex. Rainforest decks. Sunday best.

Other people’s crises. Lychees. Waste

of breath. At all costs, avoid death.

Too much sun. Too much of one things.

Wagner’s Ring. Paintings of cows at eventide.

Cows in formaldehyde. Sentimentality

and cynicism. Literary criticism. Impartiality.

Anyone with a knife. The good life.

            Impressively, the power of the lyric drives the power of the message, a potent symphony. The same is true of other poems in The Night We Ate the Baby such as ‘Valediction’, ‘You Want the Truth?’ and the Caselberg competition winning, ‘Everything is possible’.

Form is also offered in multifarious, harmonious ways. There’s a sonnet, a ‘fonnet’, multiple prose-poems of various lengths, list poems and even this clever ghazal (definition from The Poetry Archive: http://www.poetryarchive.org/poem/ghazal):

Obituary ghazal

I want to die like Vallejo, in Paris or New York or

Tokyo in the rain. but first I want a poem in The New Yorker.

We scan the menu. Beef, pork or chicken on rye.

We’ve become a bad cartoon in The New Yorker.

I consume films like wine. Cork or screwtop?

I sound like Anthony Lane in The New Yorker.

We don’t go to work. Or get out of bed. Instead,

we re-read ‘Shouts & Murmurs’ in The New Yorker.

Jane’s afraid of online stalkers. Me too, I say.

Jane’s not from around here. She’s a born New Yorker.

I call and call. I talk or leave my name on answerphones.

It’s Upperton, after Updike in the index of The New Yorker.

If death is an ongoing refrain in the poems in this collection (‘Small coffins’, ‘At the cemetery’, ‘Hey! Schapelle Corby attempts suicide’ …), it is balanced, indeed conquered by the exuberant life – of words, of experience, of advice – in the book. When the author dedicates the first poem to his daughter, what he’s really doing is laying the foundations for a rule book on survival, on poems that come thereafter which show us how to live gloriously, dangerously, uncompromisingly:

Valediction

Goodbye, bagel, table for one.

Coffee, cigarette. Warmth of the sun.

Goodbye, sparrow. Goodbye, speckled hen.

Goodbye, tomorrow. Goodbye, remember when.

Goodbye pepper, goodbye, salt.

Goodbye, sour and bitter things. And honey. Malt.

Goodbye whiskey, cabernet, beer.

Goodbye, Christmas. Goodbye, New Year.

Goodbye mortgage, taxes, and bills,

renovator’s makeover, rotten windowsills,

lovers, hatreds, kid pen-pal from Mumbai.

Old body that I’ve come to know. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

Siobhan Harvey is the author of 2013 Kathleen Grattan Award winning poetry collection, Cloudboy (Otago University Press, 2014) and, as co-editor, Essential New Zealand Poems (Penguin Random House, 2014). 

She is a lecturer at The Centre for Creative Writing, Auckland University of Technology. Recently, her work has been published in Landfall, Pilgrimage (US), Stand (UK) and Segue (US). She was shortlisted for the 2015 Janet Frame Memorial Award and was runner-up in 2014 New Zealand Poetry Society International Poetry Competition, 2012 Dorothy Porter Poetry Prize (Aus), 2012 Kevin Ireland Poetry Competition and 2011 Landfall Essay Prize, as well as being nominated for the Pushcart Prize (US). 

The Poetry Archive (UK) holds a ‘Poet’s Page’ devoted to her work.