Recent NZ Poetry Volumes reviewed by Elizabeth Morton

Fish Stories - Mary Cresswell
Canterbury University Press
$25.00

I have an almost visceral aversion to those ‘gone fishing’ signs dangling from suburban doorknobs.  With a title like Fish Stories, I was braced for a similar commonplace whimsy. Something Kiwiana and kitsch. Mary Cresswell’s writing is anything but. The poetry in Fish Stories is at once daring and meticulous. Cresswell moves between parameter-heavy forms, and verse that seems to buck any sort of formal convention. We amble from Ghazal to Glosa to Cento to Sonnet. Admittedly, I had to do a little secondary research on the ghazal, which, I found, originated in the Arabic world, and was traditionally a love poem addressed by a man to a younger male. Cresswell takes this form and toys with structure and content, introducing ideas of ecological tension and human fragility.

Fish Stories doesn’t lie on the veranda, telling yarns about the one that got away. Instead, we are beset by a multitude of calamities. Cresswell catalogues ‘typhoon, earthquake, cyclone, hurricane’, along with the odd avalanche, war, hostage situation and flood. People are stripped bare by disaster and the author reminds us that ‘we know that earthquake, / fire or famine can lay bare a state’. Cresswell’s people are undressed in an inhospitable world. We see them standing apart from their possessions, where typically ‘our artifacts preserve a world / in which we conduct affairs of state’. The narrator of the poem Damage Control insists to us:

‘If it’s really Armageddon,
I could give up the garden

and take only pictures with me
when I leave this place for good,
leaving nothing else behind.’

Cresswell has a keen eye for recyclables. There are poems that swell from epigraphs or lines from other poets. There are ‘patchwork’ poems, or centos, wherein lines from various writers are knitted together. Marie Ponsot passes the baton to Elizabeth Bishop, who flings it to Yehuda Amichai. Centos can be clunky but these feel natural. Each dispatch is clean and meaningful.

Fish Stories is clever. Its wordplay and formalism set it apart. It is the nerdy kid who is also beautiful, and you want to dislike, but you can’t because they’re also much too nice.

Cresswell’s poem, Night Playground has images that solidify in the imagination:

‘Swoop over and under the monkey bars,
batter the sodium blare of light.

Round the swings the roundabouts
we flutter we scrabble we love the night’

Crimson - Marino Blank

Anton Blank Ltd
$25.00

Crimson arrived in the post, at the hip of its mother-book, For someone I love. This little book, with infold baby photos, bewildered me. For a start, a book titled Crimson was a Barbie Doll pink. This detail perplexed me to the point of Googling crimson swatches to make a comparison. No matter. An aspect more harrowing was that this little book seemed like it was still nursing on the larger book in the same package. It seemed a pity to separate them. But I decided to review each on separate occasions. A book needs stand on its own two feet.

Crimson does exactly that. This is a poetry bomb. It may have a cutesy cover, but this poetry is prepared to get muck under its fingernails. The poetry within is pared down and personal. It is gutsy. Marino Blank has an enviable economy with words. These poems are no garnished cocktails. They are shooters.

Marino takes us to fit an IUD. In another poem we go with her to a gynaecology exam with ‘a spare of underwear / wrapped up in a plastic bag’. We take a 3am ‘piss’. Other times we are told about ‘the God Particle’ and ‘marble catacombs’, otherworldly dragons and taniwha. Nothing is untouchable. The spectrum of human existence is spread-eagled. And this poetry won’t beat around the bush.

Crimson has some splendid and atmospheric images. From the titular poem:

‘I awoke that morning
to Hindi straining
the transistor,
and smells of the umu
logs burning
close to the
happiness
of children’

There are moments that feel a little contrived, such as when Blank writes of ‘pure cascades of colour’. On the whole, however, the verse here is unique and engaging, and very often witty.

Marino Blank is the daughter of the late Arapera Blank, who was an award winning bilingual poet. But Marino’s work is a stand-alone opus, and for this dithering surgeon, who questioned separating the two books, such unitary strength was a relief. This is very good poetry, and Marino is a name to keep an eye on.

As my mother always said to me: ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’. 

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.