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.
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