There are no horses in heaven
Frankie McMillan
Canterbury University Press
$25.00
In the cranny between wakefulness and sleep, is
Frankie McMillan’s dreamscape, There are no horses in heaven.
Entering McMillan’s latest collection is like stumbling in on a garden party
where David Lynch, Rene Magritte and Man Ray are guests. The margins between
the real and the fantastical bleed into each other. Within this hypnagogic fuzz
is something stunningly beautiful. This is a world inhabited by artists – glass
blowers and corsetieres, taxidermists and accordion players. But McMillan’s
vision of creativity is not of something premeditated or exclusive to a clique
of practitioners. Existence is inherently creative, if simply because people
‘walk towards deeds / they never knew they had within them’.
There are no horses in heaven is a fleshing out of the ineffable. Emotions
find expression through the symbolic. There is a sense that the characters that
walk the pages are archetypes, embodiments of universal and timeless ideas,
rather than meagre humans. McMillan is a shapeshifter, stepping in
and out of the shoes of each character with dexterity. On one page she even
peers through the cervine eyes of a deer, with ‘360 degree vision’. McMillan’s
narrative is not pegged to any particular time or place. She plays with
omnipresence and, boy, does she do it well.
This is a collection that balances warmth with
wordplay. Language is scrupulously chosen. The trajectory of a clause is often
tenderly rerouted midstream. Nouns perform tasks not usually attributed to them
- a ‘bone corset / begins to sing’, wooden slats issue a ‘faint fury’, and a
deer etched in frosted glass ‘leaps out of the broken glass door’. Miracles
happen to ordinary things.
McMillan is the ringleader of a magnificent circus,
which strings together the bucolic and the steampunk, the suburban and the
mythical. Her vocabulary is extensive, and covers the lexicon of unusual
occupations that feature in these poems - The glass blower’s ‘tungsten pick’,
the field of ‘campanology’ (the study of bells), the oceanographer’s ‘LFA
sonar’. Within are so many nouns to gratify the tongue. But There
are
no horses in heaven is more than a catalogue of words.
This is an extraordinary work, both in terms of
nitty-gritties and brute architecture. It is unsurprising to note that McMillan
has won competitions in poetry and flash fiction. Let me swoon a little. There
are no horses in heaven showcases a voice that is unique and
insightful, and provides caption to an, at once, absurd and beautiful
world.
Whale Years
Gregory O'Brien
Auckland University Press
$27.99
'No man is an island, entire of itself', said Donne. A
person is more a voyage through a flock of islands, perhaps. Perhaps a person
is the cargo they carry. Sometimes, perhaps, a person is a
wreck.
In Whale Years, Gregory O'Brien takes us
on a journey, tracing the migratory routes of seabirds and whales. Islands are
our stepping stones through the South Pacific. In an assemblage of poems and
drawings, Gregory O'Brien charts his travels between 2011 and 2014. We visit
such places as Tonga, Raoul Island, Easter Island, the Chathams, Mayor
Island.
But we are no indifferent tourists. We are surveyors -
witnesses to the buckling of an ecosystem, ushered by 'those politicians / who
would mine the clouds / for minerals'. O’Brien remonstrates ‘free-marketeers’
and ‘cutters of corners’. He surveys the wreckage of the Rena, its
‘350 tonnes of bunk oil / in the ocean’, the ‘300 oiled birds revived
/ or not, each day’.
This is poetry of quiet activism, an artful protest.
But there is more to this collection than political cud-chewing. Whale
Years lends us a periscope to other small worlds. Like flicking
through the slides of a ViewMaster, we find ourselves berthed in one scenario
and then another, often in quickfire. We listen to a guitar in Hanga Roa. We
join the throngs of mourners in Tonga, paying respect to their dead King. We
watch the weather balloon rise above Raoul Island. We meet crowing lizards and
cemetery dogs. There is a 'zoo above our heads', and everywhere
else.
Some of the poems are like postcards, others more like
entries in a logbook. A delightful moment shared with a fellow whale surveyor
is noted:
‘Two poets on a headland, mid-survey
Might pause suddenly and say
will this be your whale, or mine?’
Whale Years is a charming collection. Diversity of poetic form, as well as the
insertion of O'Brien's own drawings, makes this a work to come back to, again
and again. O'Brien is something of a Renaissance Man - writer, teacher,
painter, critic, curator. In this work, each of these qualities is
ostensible.
This collection feels like a survey taken at the
end of the world, a final tallying of magic. As Douglas Adams might say - 'so
long, and thanks for all the fish'.
About the reviewer:
Elizabeth Morton is a poet and sometimes
student. She has a keen interest in neuroscience. In her free time she collects
obscure words in supermarket bags. She is a promiscuous reader, but her chief
love is poetry. Her own poetry has been published in Poetry NZ, Takahe, JAAM, Blackmail
Press, Meniscus and Shot Glass Journal, amongst other
places. In 2013 she was winner of the New Voices, Emerging Poets competition.
She has also been a runner-up twice in the annual Takahe Poetry Competition.
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