Horse with
Hat
Marty Smith
Victoria University
Press
$30
Taradale writer
and high school teacher, Marty Smith combines poetry and memoir in an exquisite,
powerful first collection, Horse with Hat.
The collection’s core premise - childhood remembrances, particularly the unexplained,
desperate, years’ long silence between her father and grandmother despite the
pair living on the same farm - frames the inquisitive, personal, often
heart-wrenching landscape of the poems here, as the first poem exemplifies:
Hat
Dad wouldn’t be seen dead
without a hat.
Farm hat, summer hat, town hat
even when he had hair.
Hat on angle, hat on horse,
hat in the truck with dogs.
We fished by stealth
stalked trout
with a spear and a light.
He wore his hat in the dark.
A mile away by metal road
my grandmother lived
on her half of the farm.
No chance meetings, not even
a skyline sighting.
She lay in wait in town
watched
from the haberdashery
as he walked up the street.
She came out as if by accident.
Hand frail, and clasping
the front of her coat,
she gave a coy look
from the bags of her bloodhound
eyes –
the whole air stopped
he raised his hat, went past.
If these two interestingly
fraught figures in Smith’s life compose a dramatic cast for her work, they are
joined by others – equally interesting, equally fraught, including Uncle
Charlie and Aunty Gwen, both of whom appear in a parable to the delights and
dangers of cigarettes:
Emphysema For Aunty Gwen
Gwen wasn’t one of those glam smokers
who swirled smoke back up her nose
and tapped ash with varnished nails
no, she smoked fast and hard.
Miff, she used to call Dad.
By hell, he could smoke –
he could light a cigarette on his horse
one-handed, in the wind.
It looked like Holy Communion
the way they smoked.
At 17 I lit up in the lounge.
He said it’s no good for you
snapped the lighter like a gentleman...
People;
smoking: history, its characters, its peculiarities smolder throughout Horse with Hat. Old fashioned parenting;
the legacy of fighting in the Second World War; the power and place of the horse
in countryside culture: all these issues – and more - intersect in Smith’s
work.
Set against
Brendan O’Brien’s sumptuous, surreal collages, Marty Smith’s first book offers
a distinctive, rich exposition of New Zealand’s rural past and its peoples, the
author’s family rendered with unstinting honesty.
The White
Clock
Otago University
Press
$25
Marshall is, of
course, best known as our master of the short story. But he’s also an adept and
sophisticated poet with a sharp lyricism to his work, as his third collection The White Clock proves. Take a poem like
‘Spirit Image’ and you see how Marshall transfers the heightened skills of the
short story writer (structure, concision, denouement…) to his verse:
When all is silent on the hill
and you stand absolutely still
to match a frozen world, some
times your spirit leaves your
body, rises through air cold
as spring water to a far surface,
looks down on you, diminished,
motionless, but not unhappy
much as you will be in death.
Like Marshall’s
previous collections Occasional 50 Poems
and Sleepwalking in Antarctica, The White Clock also displays the
writer’s magpie-like interest, his drawing towards the dazzle of foreign shores
and quirky characters. There’s also his fascination for everyday occurrences
and reminiscences, as the poem ‘Death of a Finch’ evidences:
Cleanliness proves fatal as a green bird
smacks the broad glass, falls into crocuses.
Softly warm, bowed, passed into death, it
had seen nothing between itself and a
future of everlasting sky and flowers
so felt no fear, or pain, before eclipse.
An instant in full flight, then to strike and
fall into nothingness. Not a bad way to go.
Perhaps the
most captivating poems are those which perpetuate the interest in celebrity Marshall
displayed in his short story collection, Living
as a Moon, and those works about being a writer and the art of writing/
teaching writing. Uber-condensed as the poetry form can be, and in the case of
Marshall’s work often is, there’s something about both subject matters which
seems to find the author boldly, tantalizingly holding a mirror up to himself,
his life, his own quirkiness:
Second Thoughts
I told the writing class that
lascivious is a pleasing word
with intrinsic musicality that
has possibilities in verse.
But now, alone, I wonder if
it is merely that the word is
robed in rich associations of
sexual abandonment. I will
resile I think, with dignified
explanation when next we meet.
If you like Marshall’s
short stories and novels, you’ll be fan of his poetry too; and if you haven’t
read much or anything by this author, The
White Clock is a good place to start.
The Limits
Alice Miller
Auckland University
Press
$24.99
In spite of
being a first time author, Alice Miller has already accrued numerous
prestigious awards, including BNZ Katherine Mansfield Premier Award for
Fiction, Landfall Essay Competition
and CNZ Louis Johnson Bursary. No surprise then that this initial collection of
poetry has not only secured a New Zealand publisher in Auckland University
Press but also a prominent UK independent publisher in Shearsman, a rare feat
for a first poetry collection. The opening poem, ‘Body’ ably showcases Miller’s
inventive word and image play:
It’s strange to want to give someone the earth
again. It’s strange to be the same planet
but split to forge a new, raw globe,
past plundered by lovers and strangers. Forgot
the way my own earth cracks, and tries to make
its half an other’s, forgot old stories re-made
to fable, to a minor bible for a plastic land.
We walk our planet and the print of our feet
scrawls
onto our bodies. Each morning we walk to unearth
more mountains. Each day I sing the valleys
alive. Each night you find a dark pool,
and when you test it with your toe, a green
river ruptures. A quiet mirror opens.
That final
sentence, A quiet mirror opens might
well be the bi-line for this collection, for there’s something gently
understated and reflective about the manner in which Miller knits words and
rhythms together, whether it’s the opening lines of the second poem, ‘Apple’:
The night the earth’s crust cracked
under us, great
hands reaching
to brush the earth’s skin….
Or the last
lines of the concluding verse, ‘Orbit’:
I fear our brains’ geology: their strike-slip
faults;
their symmetry. But when driving
an island to see you, the roads open
the earth. And I want to know no other.
In between
these two fixed points of the book,
there’s a consistently high level of concept, application and suggestion as the
book’s central topic, the body is extended into emotional, psychological,
topographical and historical spheres.
Antarctica I
Pulled into one human shadow, a single outlined
form, pulled into, struggling
as a canal that presses its walls
until a body’s squeezed out
It’s only when the engine
comes up behind you that you live.
How clean to see the imprint
of the bootsole on ice.
About the reviewer:
Siobhan
Harvey is a poet, non-fiction writer, lecturer and anthologist .Her new poetry
collection, Cloudboy,
which won the 2013 Kathleen Grattan Award for Poetry, will be published in
May.by Otago University Press .
Additionally, she's the author of the
poetry collection, Lost
Relatives (Steele Roberts, 2011), the work of literary criticism, Words Chosen Carefully (Cape
Catley, 2010) and the poetry anthology, Our
Own Kind (Random House NZ, 2009). While her creative
non-fiction has been published in Landfall, was Highly Commended in 2013
Landfall Essay Prize and runner up in 2011 Landfall Essay Competition.
She
lectures Creative Writing and mentors MCW students at the Centre for Creative
Writing, AUT.
No comments:
Post a Comment