Academy of New Zealand Literature

 

University of Canterbury Press

 

$29.99

 

ISBN: 978-1-98-850333-2
Published: August 2022
Pages: 128
Format: Paperback

 

 

Reviewed by Jack Remiel Cottrell

 

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Frankie McMillan is one of New Zealand’s best flash fiction writers: this is a genre that stretches from traditional short stories, condensed to a few hundred words, all the way to prose poetry. The 57 pieces in McMillan’s fascinating new book — her sixth — are split into five sections organised loosely by theme, forming a genre-bending collection of prose, poetry and essay-ish creative nonfiction.

The Wandering Nature of Us Girls rests at the lyrical, poetic edge of flash, suggested by McMillan’s approach to punctuation. Full stops are in short supply; a dozen stories are told in one long sentence, and others are broken into parts with one full stop per paragraph. It speaks to McMillan’s control of language that this dearth of conventional punctuation isn’t obvious.

McMillan’s 2016 collection My Mother and the Hungarians, longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, was intensely personal; the title of McMillan’s most recent book, The Father of Octopus Wrestling (2019), suggests her trademark wit and imaginative embrace of the surreal. Once again, there’s a delightful streak of surrealism in this collection —Mr Whippy is a recurring character, framed either as an ice-cream salesman or a sentient cartoon mascot. In ‘Chase’, he turns ‘off his ice cream shaped speakers because “Green Sleeves” isn’t what he wants to hear right now’. When his wife, Mrs Whippy, shines a torch down his ear canal, she detects not only slush in his ear but ‘a cul de sac of sprinkles’.

Another McMillan trademark, the thematic link of water, means the book’s settings include lakes, rivers and an inflatable pool, and roles for swans and a taniwha. One piece — ‘Steadfast’s Breath’, a particular standout —introduces the reader to the fairground/travelling circus which provides a setting for several of the other works here.

The three women yell his name, ‘Steadfast! Steadfast!’ I’m thinking Mormons. Serial
wives. Then I’m wondering if there’s something else going on here because this long-
haired fella is a long way from beating any record. You don’t know, none of us knows
what goes on behind closed doors.

McMillan’s publisher calls these ‘small stories’, but The Wandering Nature of Us Girls sits at the lyrical, poetic edge of flash fiction, with a skilfully managed, deceptively loose approach to punctuation. For this reason, the collection is best savoured a bit at a time — read it all at once and the edges of the individual narratives get a little bit blurred in the string of 300-word sentences.

An example of this is final piece of the first section, ‘Explaining the Sputnik dog to my child’. This uses full stops sparingly, its long-running sentences evoking a sense of complicity both from the narrator and in the reader: ‘Whatever else Laika was thinking as they strapped on her harness and whatever else they said except “Please forgive us” and “You have enough oxygen” and “You’re going round nine times, Laika, nine times around the earth,” and whatever else happened’.

As the title suggests, several of the stories are told from the point of view of children or young women. The ‘girls’ of the title crop up at intervals, usually wild, sometimes cruel, and almost always defined by their relationships to one another. The way McMillan uses her child narrators is exceptional — there’s no sentimentality here.

The unthinking cruelty of children is on full display, and their understanding of the adult world shows no irritating precocity. Actually, many of the adults in The Wandering Nature of Us Girls don’t understand children either. ‘The boy who grew antlers’ is a particularly vivid story, told from the point of view of the boy’s parents, who insist that they are ‘fine’ with the occurrence: ‘We raised our hands in the air, it was a stage, we explained, yes, just a stage our son was going through.’

This is a book written in sepia, though without any suggestion of a rose-tinted lens: the lyrical style of McMillan’s writing doesn’t soften the frequently disturbing subject matter. There’s a feeling of age to the entire collection — almost every piece comes across as being set in the past. Contemporary events and hints at modernity are there, but each feels conspicuous. Going backwards to the industrial revolution, or the Edwardian period, feels more natural than coming forward to the 21^st century.

One of the few pieces which truly feels modern — ‘Coming toward her, a thoroughly decent man from Bumble’ — might be narrated by a bird as easily as a woman. (‘She thought if they met something terrible would cross her face, some arctic flare in her eye, some shy marking which would show just what kind of species she was.’) In another, McMillan recalls a real-life stunt from 1901, when one Annie Edson Taylor went over Niagara Falls in a barrel (and survived).

Although the title refers to ‘wandering’, this is a collection where the disparate pieces, and sections, flow from one to the other. McMillan’s exceptional touch with each story means it’s unlikely that a reader will end up lost.

 

 

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Jack Remiel Cottrell is an itinerant flash fiction writer and rugby referee. His first book Ten Acceptable Acts of Arson and other very short stories was published in 2021.

 

Auckland University Press

 

$24.99

 

ISBN: 9781869409609
Published: November 2022
Pages: 88
Format: Paperback

 

 

Reviewed by Anne Kennedy

 

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Reading a new Elizabeth Smither poem might initially seem like setting off on a familiar journey. The language sounds natural, as if the speaker has been encountered in passing and there are updates since last acquaintance — domestic moments, local anecdotes, traveller’s tales. And the form appears recognizable, where Smither’s tidy three- or four-line stanzas maintain a high standard of housework. But then. Then things happen: the end of a line turns a surprising corner, an unexpected twist occurs in a story, a rhyme pounces that was lurking in the language all along, there’s a laugh at something sad, an ache at a joke, a treasury of contrasts. But mostly, it’s the way Smither connects a thing, an image, to an emotion, and how the reader can never unsee that feeling; it’s for always. Smither is primarily an imagist who brings her original eye to uncovering the strangeness of being alive.

Smither’s latest collection My American Chair is her 19^th volume of poetry and is a co-publication between her long-time Aotearoa publisher Auckland University Press and MadHat Press, North Carolina. Chair (yes, it refers to a thing) is quintessential Smither for its beauty, warmth and control, and yet it is full of newness. Up-to-the-minute Smither unpacks the contemporary item by item; where, for instance, the discovery of a new planet can be something close, first ‘ovaloid like a baby’s head’, then later:

 

But how delicious it sounds. The sun

that belongs to this planet (still unnamed,

just a number) as close in its orbit

as a woman is to her handbag (‘A new planet’).

 

These lines epitomise Smither’s often-used technique where quick-fire metaphors widen the view yet bring it so poignantly home: a baby’s head, a handbag.

Smither is, of course, well known for her prodigious output, not just in poetry but in fiction and memoir. She is published internationally and much-lauded: the national poetry prize twice, Poet Laureate, a Prime Minister’s award for poetry and an honorary Doctorate from the University of Auckland.

While she is hugely respected for her work, I have concerns about how closely Smither is read, and these ideas are partly to do with my personal poetry journal but also to do with audience. It’s time for full disclosure: It took me a couple of decades to appreciate Smither’s poetry, which I now find astonishing, but I think there are two reasons. The first is to do with my inability to read Smither’s seamless craft. I did not look deeply into the formal structures (noted at the beginning of this review) and to hear the sway of the conversational voice.

But apart from my own failings as a reader, I also believe there is another reason I did not initially understand Smither’s brilliance. She was not thrust under my nose as an inescapable part of the NZ canon. Much as Smither has been decorated, she has not received the critical investigation that her work demands. I put this down to the glaring fact of womanhood. A thumbnail sample of key Aotearoa poetry anthologies (that proclaim an overview) show Smither less represented than her male counterparts. Her topics are often domestic — notwithstanding that there is art, music, painting, belief; that her tone is talky, her voice deceptively glancing while all the time approaching nothing less than existential; why, how are we here.

Paula Green quotes Smither in Wild Honey: Reading New Zealand Women’s Poetry thus: ‘poetry is saying I don’t know exactly what it is I’m seeing but maybe if I keep looking longer…’ Eventually, thank goodness, I looked longer. I have come to not just admire Smither’s work but to rank her as one of the most striking voices in Aotearoa poetry.

A trawl through Smither’s many previous collections can help navigate the current book: The elegant yet violent The Tudor Style which includes Henry VIII and a Catherine; the hilarious yet poignant Red Shoes in which blistering heels are also about the heart; Night Horse with its trademark locating of generations, mountains, tablecloths; her Parihaka poems that were part of Wellington City Gallery’s Parihaka: The Art of Passive Resistance and proclaim her Taranaki base.

My American Chair, then, doesn’t come out of nowhere with its iconic voice and imagery, its juxtapositions of the everyday and the profound, the funny and the poignant, the personal and the universal, the documentary and the magical. While Smither revisits her favourite topics of thing, family, place, music, art – each poem is a unique in its vision. Elizabeth keeps on making it new.

The book opens with an ode to cranes. The speaker observes a building site with childlike wonder, noticing workmen sitting on planks for lunch, a chain on a boom like a ‘diamante bracelet’. This poem marvels at what human’s make: ‘we live here, thanks to cranes’.

These poems go travelling, but in ways you never thought of before. The distinct differences of the drycleaner in London and in Paris are compared. The title poem of this collection addresses distance, in place and time, as the American chair with its history both political and personal is carried away ‘like a giant crab’.

Funny moments abound in Smither poems. It’s part of the rawness. There are ducks on railway lines and ‘[t]he plastic skeleton I shook hands with when the surgeon left the room’. Funny stories abound. Smither’s narrative skill, so apparent in her droll yet stirring fiction, makes its way into the poems. It’s not often I laugh out loud at a poem, but I did at ‘The joke of the Sapeurs-Pompiers’ in which an English-speaking woman trying to hire a car in France ends up ordering a fire engine because she’s so intent on showing off her terrible French.

There are poems of grandchildren, tender and beautiful, as in ‘Night time words for Ruby’ (which incorporates one of Smither’s lovely tucked-in rhymes):

 

I’m bringing something I do not know

down to you in my embrace. An angel’s

wingtip, the first air movement of

a visitation of becoming and forever grace.

Beautiful girl, beautiful girl.

 

Structurally, My American Chair is a delight to unfold, as it moves through neighbourhoods of topic with two or three poems on each — skeletons, churches, family, gardens, music — which are subtly echoed later on. The arrangements reminded me of a garden planted in a combination of formal and wild, with features and shape, yet drifts come upon as if by accident. In her notes, Smither acknowledges editor Elizabeth Caffin for her vision in creating this structure, and it really does enhance the beauty and impact of the book.

The poems on music, for instance, thread and bounce, with not ten guitars but ten conductors, where a euphonium makes ‘a disgraceful growl // no animal would own, unless a cub / was tuning up to be a bear’.

Hugh Roberts surveying Smither on Poetry Archive notes that in her poetry ‘the simplest details can be trapdoors to eternity’. This seems apt, as Smither documents the moments of a life high and low — the everyday, family, home, aesthetics and belief. Her closing poem demonstrates this very quality with seemingly effortless beauty: ‘Later // after the dishes were cleared and washed / in your lounge’s two matching armchairs / you laid on my lap a large art book’ (‘A wild book’). Notice the armchairs?

In My American Chair, Smither once again delivers a poetry where controlled connections of image, moment, thought, story and emotion speak on our wild existence here.

 

 

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Anne Kennedy is a poet, fiction writer, screenplay editor and teacher of creative writing. Her latest book is Moth Hour, shortlisted in the 2020 Ockham Book Awards. The Ice Shelf , a novel, appeared in 2018. Her awards and residencies include the NZ Post Book Award for Poetry, the Montana Book Award for Poetry, the University of Iowa International Writers’ Program, and the IIML Writers’ Residency. She lives in Auckland.

 

 

 

The Cuba Press

 

$25.00

 

ISBN: 978-1-98-859551-1
Published: March 2022
Pages: 86
Format: Paperback

 

 

Reviewed by Katea Duff

 

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Maggie Rainey-Smith may be best known for her 2015 novel Daughters of Messene, a story set in contemporary New Zealand and decades earlier during the Greek Civil War. Her debut poetry collection, Formica, explores concerns closer to home, from growing up in 1950s and 1960s New Zealand, without television or a car, to life as a woman in her 70s travelling the world or surrounded by ‘tight bright bums’ at a gym class. In ‘That summer’, the poet addresses a long-time friend, remembering their youthful ‘hair rinsed/in beer and ocean/sprayed, teased/thick with possibility’. Now, she reflects, at the end of the poem, ‘we’re grandmothers/with river stones and/gravel in our hearts/our foreheads etched//with the unforeseen’.

It’s unsurprising, perhaps, that twilight and autumn—liminal times, with their shadows and waning light—are referenced more than once in Formica. In ‘Jogging’, the collection’s opening poem, Rainey-Smith frames the importance of time generally: era, generation, impending old age, realising and resisting the way all these things define her:

 

I already know I’m invisible typing

my life into the baby boomer abyss

privileged by association, a post-war

baby whose trajectory is history

that my grandfather was an Irish orphan

migrant here, my father a prisoner of war

my mother a child of the depression

Catholic minority left school aged 12

that I’m the first on both sides to

study tertiary, even if I had to wait

until I was 50 to do that… still

it seems, my voice is now irrelevant

 

Exasperation isn’t the abiding tone of this appealing collection, but ‘Jogging’ introduces subjects that Formica will explore in more detail. As the title suggests, a number of the poems navigate Rainey-Smith’s working-class childhood, blessed by sun and the sea, with fixed roles for men and women. Her family had few ‘appliances’, so her mother ‘used a lemonade bottle/to roll pastry’ and their ‘half-size/apple-green fridge/purred luxury but/ never fully replaced/the meat safe’. The title references a talisman of the era, recalling when ‘the wooden/table was moved/to the washhouse’ to make room for ‘oatmeal Formica/and new linoleum’.

This idyll is threatened by her father’s personal history in the Second World War, one of the ‘Kiwi lads with tins of bully beef’ (‘Seventy years on’) who fought in Crete and was a prisoner of war in Poland where the men could see ‘the smoke/rising from the factory/they called Auschwitz’. It’s inevitable that this experience would cast long shadows when young men like Rainey-Smith’s father, ‘a lad from Kaikōura’, returned home. In the poem ‘Autumn and Anzac’, she dissects the contrast between the ceremonies exalting the returned war veterans and the effects of war on the individual. The shock of the consequences of the ‘forward march’ experienced by her father infects the whole family, not only ‘the drunkenness/of all these old soldiers, their sorrow’ but of unsettling, perpetual ramifications:

 

Anzac Day has turned from shiny
shoes and camaraderie to a darkness

that neither our Dutch neighbour
nor any of us fully understand

 

The clear, unaffected language of Rainey-Smith’s poetry reveals the realities of domesticity and of being female in a language that is without ornamentation or sentimentality. In ‘Jogging’ she describes her first sexual experience and herself as a good Catholic girl who is ‘too afraid to say yes’—it’s ‘technically/rape but consenting all the same’. A young woman in the days before disposable sanitary products, Rainey-Smith recalls ‘the bloody rags/soaking in salt/in the stone tub’, and describes the surreal scene of her own mother faced with ‘a packet of Tampax/that neither of us knew how to use’. Her mother lies on the bedroom floor ‘with her knees up’ trying ‘to instruct me on insertion’. Such topics are not discussed with the men of the family. Here the reader is invited into this intimate history, and the realities of domestic life, and female experience, for many girls of the poet’s generation.

The women in Rainey-Smith’s poetry do not dominate, nor are they traumatised by men. Yet they have to navigate the lonely spaces within the family dynamic.  She writes with maturity and awareness, managing to convey nostalgia for childhood—with its milkshakes, matinees and visits to the ‘murder house’ to see the dental nurse—with humour rather than excessive sentimentality. Much of Rainey-Smith’s poetry is distinctly physical and funny. In ‘After the war’, a new husband and wife learn to co-exist: ‘she could/climb through/a broom//he could stand/on his head by/the door’. In ‘And unto ashes’, a loved one’s remains are divided: the poem notes ‘how we split his ashes in half/sealed both boxes and now/he’s in two rooms at one time’.

In Formica, the past is woven together with the present, memories presented alongside strange meetings with unnamed characters—like the woman who catches the poet’s gaze when Rainey-Smith is looking out of a window, after the death of someone in the family. The look they share is framed as one of life’s ‘possibilities’ for connection, one that leaves an indelible mark. She is also unafraid of interrogating her own vulnerability. In two poems, ‘That summer’ and ‘The Coroner’s report’, the poet explores the trauma of her brother who ‘took his own life’. In the sestina ‘Ngawhatu’, an aunt is taken away, to a mysterious and shameful place: ‘half pie inside I laughed, my shame unspoken/the loony bin, we shouted’.

Rainey-Smith writes with such empathy about sexuality, motherhood, madness and suicide that it’s unsurprising she spent almost a decade running a readers’ and writers’ group at in a women’s prison where ‘we were locked in/the library, a small/reading group//mixed age, race and/crimes unknown’. (That poem, ‘How too weird,’ is subtitled ‘reading Mansfield in Arohata Women’s Prison’.) The poet’s keen eye, and the natural and unpretentious flow of her poetry, suggests she would be well-suited to working with other writers, exploring the darkness and light of the past, and considering the potential of every woman’s unknowable future.  In the collection’s final poem, ‘Who am I?’, Rainey-Smith charts her life from coal fires and Khrushchev through all her different jobs, roles and beliefs to a still-fluid present:

 

as the rafters soften
the walls seem closer
the floor keeps shifting
the light’s playing tricks
memories unblunting

 

 

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Katea Duff is a poet, researcher and children’s book author. Katea has a PhD in English with Creative Practice from the University of Auckland. 

 

 

Bateman Books

 

$37.99

 

ISBN: 9781776890439
Published: October 2022
Pages: 304
Format: Paperback

 

Reviewed by Rebecca Hill 

 

 

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The Doctor’s Wife, Fiona Sussman’s fourth novel, is a murder story set on Auckland’s North Shore. Sussman is no stranger to crime writing: her novel The Last Time We Spoke — a gritty exploration of rural violence and prison life — won the 2017 Ngaio Marsh Award.

This new book seems a world away from the farmstead at the heart of The Last Time We Spoke. Stan, Carmen, Austin and Tibbie are middle-aged, middle-class friends whose lives in Browns Bay are fraught with the usual mid-life complications — infidelity, worries about money, jealousy. One couple is wealthy but unable to have children, while the other has teenage sons but far less income. They meet up to eat dinners that feature a ‘pear and blue cheese starter with toasted walnuts on top,’ with ‘the men talking cars, and Carmen commenting like a true journalist on some parliamentary gaffe.’

Austin is a doctor: he and his elegant wife Tibbie have been close with Carmen for over 30 years, since they were teenagers, ‘Friends forever scrawled in their high-school leaving book’. Carmen’s husband, Stan, is ‘a rather late addition to an already tight’ group and regarded for some time as an unwelcome disruption. Austin, in particular, does not like disruptions, in part because he struggles with memories of a traumatic upbringing: ‘Was this going to be his forever school or would his mum and her new squeeze pack up sticks and move town again?’

For the past twenty-four years Stan has remained at Carmen’s side, as a genial and ‘pretty consistent’ presence. Austin sees him as an ‘agreeable coaster. Not easily riled. Not easily enthused.’ Stan seems to be a ‘man without ambition or agenda’— unlike the more tightly wound Austin, who dresses in a uniform of ‘business shirt and chinos’, all prim perfectionism. Stan eats lasagne in front of the TV and wears a T-shirt and jeans to his job teaching art, clothing choices that make Austin ‘feel itchy and unsettled’. Success in life, Austin believes, is ‘about playing the part, about actively shaping each day. Live the life you aspire to achieve.’

Life and death, not simply contrasting ways of living, form the novel’s initial lines of tension. After the ‘abstract diagnosis of brain cancer’, Carmen is very unwell and Stan feels as though their life together is disintegrating. For the first time he sees what judgy Austin sees: a rundown house and chaotic garden. ‘Leggy blades of grass licked mould-blackened bricks. The unravelling went on — a listing letterbox, dead-dry hydrangeas, sagging roof guttering, the cracked porch tiles.’ Their house mirrors Carmen’s physical decline. Reuben, one of their sons, describes his mother’s formerly pixie-ish face as ‘puffy and spongy like bread dough’, and ‘her Halle Berry hair [now] … a crazy paving of pale scalp and prickly brown bristles.’

The changes are not only physical. Tibbie, believing she is ‘going to lose her best friend’, starts to feel ‘strangely alone in the friendship. As if all the little changes that had crept into their relationship over the past months were kept on a running tab, and now, out of the blue, had been tallied.’

But the novel’s domestic drama takes a much more sinister turn when a woman’s body is found at the bottom of a cliff. The dead woman is the doctor’s wife of the book’s title — Tibbie, not Carmen — and the story becomes a police procedural. The novel employs multiple points of view, deftly handled, and the necessary switch halfway through to the perspective of detective Ramesh Bandara will please readers looking for a classic, whodunnit-style mystery. Connections build between the disparate perspectives and our suspicions move from one character to the other.

Sussman was a doctor before she was a novelist and is able to draw on this expertise for the medical aspects of the story: this lends weight to the key story of one character’s cancer diagnosis, which may otherwise have felt gimmicky. However, when faced with the task of sustaining an entire novel based on the central mystery, the author fills chapters with an excess of description rather than deeper character development — so much detail that readers may think they’re vital clues. We know that Austin is meticulous, but this characterisation starts to feel one-note when we’re told he ‘ran the dirty dishes under hot water, then packed the dishwasher — knives on the top shelf, forks facing down in the cutlery basket, big plates at the back, side plates to the front.’ Is this just more dogged showing-not-telling, or a crucial clue to some dishwasher-related element of the murder?

It’s hard to know in a novel that is sometimes over-written — a pōhutukawa is ‘denuded of its crimson blooms’ — and employs similes to excess. Parts of Ramesh’s point-of-view sections are a cliché pile-up: ‘It was easy to get blinkered in the job, especially when on the home straight. And even more so after thinking you’d crossed the finish line.’ This is frustrating in an otherwise readable novel with an intriguing plot.

Eliot, one of Austin’s patients, is a young autistic man who discovers Tibbie — ‘the dead lady with long red hair’— and is traumatised. His point of view is plausible and particular: to Eliot, one of the joggers near the cliff looks ‘quite a lot like Mr Roy, his former woodwork teacher — Golden Retriever eyes and ears like big, kind commas.’ But in common with a number of the characters in the novel, Eliot is a familiar trope: the loner with a heart of gold who doesn’t know his own strength.

Another character who may feel over-familiar to crime readers is Ramesh, the struggling detective, who has just been through a divorce. After anxiety-related sick leave, he is pursuing the case (of course) against the boss’s wishes, desperate to prove himself. At one point, Sussman even seems to be winking at us via the police chief: ‘This is not some cosy murder mystery, Bandara, where the least likely person in the village turns out to be the culprit … You’ve got the quirky young lad with a supposedly superhuman memory. The woman with a brain tumour. Now, her financially strained husband. Soon the whole damned city will be under suspicion. You’re all over the show, man. Give me something concrete.’

By the time the novel reveals its second death, the story feels as though it’s winding down. When the perspective switches to Ramesh — to avoid revelations from our cast of suspects — readers have to wait for the detective to figure out as much as we already know. The pace suffers, and so does the tension.

Still, seasoned crime readers who enjoy distinguishing clue from red herring will consider this a solid attempt at a classic psychological thriller. Despite its clunky moments, The Doctor’s Wife tells a compelling story set in a recognisable Auckland, and Sussman’s twisting-and-turning plot demonstrates her respect for the crime genre.

 

 

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Rebecca Hill is a New Zealand writer and translator living in Berlin.

 

 

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Cold Hub Press

 

$45.00

 

ISBN: 9780473619978
Published: September 2022
Pages: 329
Format: Paperback

 

Reviewed by Ian Wedde

 

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This substantial book (329 pages including notes and indexes) was preceded by the in-complete poems in 2011 (274 pages with notes, etc.). The poems in both volumes are scrupulously dated and, in many cases, accompanied by detailed endnotes, and in these ways as in others, differ from a by-now familiar contemporary style or even culture of poetry-book — which is, if anything, under-presented, intimate and unpretentiously personal. Alex Grace’s review in Goodreads of James Brown’s latest book, The Tip Shop (Te Herenga Waka University Press, June 2022) sets a typical tone: ‘Funny, dark, insightful and nothing close to a chore to read. Poetry, but it doesn’t suck.’  — ‘Poetry sucks’ being an insider poetry-reader quote, of course.

The first poem in each of David Howard’s collected volumes is ‘Judy is a punk’, dated 1976 (an endnote tells us ‘The title echoes The Ramones’ 1976 song’); in the second, recent volume, this title is, in addition, reprised as the last poem in 20.8.2020, but with subtle echoic changes. For example, the last word in the 1976 version, ‘Perfect’, has become ‘abject’ forty-four years later. What’s implied — and encountered by a close reader — is not only overarching control of the whole corpus across a wide span of time and material, including all poems being scrupulously numbered, dated and many annotated, but an implicit subtext that in itself comprises a controlling narrative of order-as-meaning, of a consciousness or character at once fastidious and cartouche-like, detailed and overarching; this implicitly expects a degree of ‘chore’ in the reader’s approach.

In both volumes, this conscientious, engrossing character begins on the book’s cover. The lowercase cover title of the earlier book separates ‘in-complete’ on different lines, forcibly emphasising ‘incomplete’ (my emphasis), but also introducing a sense of paradox, of deliberate, even playful ambiguity. The title of the second book, Rāwaho/The Completed (my emphasis) Poems, gestures at the historically conventional type of title, The Complete Poems, meaning ‘this is a wrap’; but amends the meaning to ‘these are all that were finished’ — while also adding the te reo term rāwaho for unrelated or outsider individuals who could potentially become insider ahi kā with decision-making rights by returning to the appropriate tribal area.

This is a lot of deliberate and deliberated business to encounter before even opening the book, where, on the inside cover-flap, there’s a note by David Howard where he records that ‘many uncollected pieces served as preparatory studies for these 150 titles’, and concludes, ‘This book has thousands of lines but in making it I am drawing one line. Another decade has gone, I’m done. This is the best I can do.’ Further in are two epigraphs, one from Hahi Wilson (2019) that explains the book’s title, Rāwaho: ‘we are not from here’; and a second from Samuel Butler (1872), a gloss on the subtle instability of the word ‘exploring’. The dating on the four-line poem Rāwaho (poem 93, page 148) indicates it was explored in one way or degree over fifteen years, 6.7.2006 — 19.4.2021. Under an epigraph from Albert Camus L’Étranger — ‘Aujourd’hui, maman est morte’ — is the following enigmatic yet precise gloss on ‘not from here’ — snatches of foreign language, solitariness, a sense of being distanced from what defined the location, a sense, even, of ‘appropriate’ tikanga in that alienation:

 

Occasionally there was a sentence

in French. You felt it appropriate

 

to languish on the chaise longue.

You loved the sea from the shore.

 

Also in the book’s foreword material is a dedication to the poet’s father Reginald William Howard, ‘who taught me how to read’ — with very close attention I would add, as a grateful if sometimes exercised reader of the result.

My attention to what comes before the poems themselves might seem pedantic were it not for Howard’s matching detail, precision and critical commitment to the poems themselves which, far from being dry or pedantic are fine-tuned, imaginatively inventive, often elegantly lyrical, and often — opening a random page — witty.  On page 156 we encounter poem 99, ‘Originality’. A sample verse:

 

Freighters destabilised by their cargo,

poets nose into the bar

and take on water.

The resigned smile of a lemon slice;

the parasol that drags like an anchor.

What a to-do

now there’s nothing to be done.

 

And another random pick, using an adroit line-turn, from poem 11, ‘Morning’ (p.18):

 

My candle pales as dawn breaks

down the door. Let’s get up

…

 

The term ‘aphoristic’ can easily be applied to many of the poems in this book, but it misses a range of linguistic and formal complications, including several poems that use a two-column format, for example poem 45, ‘You say it’s your birthday’ / ‘Well it’s my birthday too’ (another pop music reference), four columns across pages 58 and 59, where the reader’s experience is of echoic or overheard voices speaking simultaneously. The critical value of terms such as ‘laconic’ and its natural companion ‘droll’, along with stripped-back lineation, sometimes recall the formal and tonal economies of Robert Creeley. In the opening paragraph of his ten pages of detailed ‘Notes’ in the book’s final sections, Howard references the jazz pianist Paul Bley and quotes from an interview he, Howard, did with Lynley Edmeades and Catherine Dale in 2013: ‘I heard someone who was not afraid to activate silence … I’m amazed by Bley’s ability to let you hear the melody he’s not playing and that’s what I brought over to my poetry … I want that complex song from my poems.’

What ‘complex song’ refers to includes a substantial amount of rhyme- and line-schemes, especially in the latter sections of the book, for example in the ten-page poem ‘The Ghost of James Williamson (1814 – 2014)’, dated 19.11.2014 — 25.1.2015, which is also a voiced set of two dramatic monologues. Among the substantial long works, also dramatic, are libretti such as poem 144, ‘Water Globe: A Libretto for Brina Jeź Brezavšček’, which proceeds over twenty-six pages of  closely rhymed lyrics sung by characters including the teenagers Martina and Martin, Veles (‘the first tormentor of Martin’), Giant Water Snake (‘the second tormentor of Martin’), Dragon (‘the third tormentor of Martin’), Lucifer (‘the fourth …’) and Šembilja (‘a projection of Martina …’). The short note to this work describes it as a ‘libretto for young adults commissioned by the Slovene composer Brina Jeź Brezavšček for performance at Ljubljana town hall in December 2019’. These works enlarge and complicate the scope of what I described earlier as ‘laconic’ and ‘droll’ (‘Water Globe’ is neither of these), and it’s fair to say my enjoyment and appreciation of the book’s idiosyncratic substance as a whole had to take on its ‘chore’ expectations. I’m glad I did.

This is an appropriate place to revisit the book’s closing poem, ‘Judy is a Punk (Reprise)’ and to check out the substantial note that annotates this small poem — the final note in that section of the book. The note includes the following quote from the Croatian Daš Drndić’s novel Belladonna, as translated by Celia Hawkesworth, which I take the liberty of quoting in full, since I couldn’t have described Howard’s own book better:

 

He has already thought out everything in his life. In little heaps, small piles, he has laid days, years, births and deaths, loves, the few there were, journeys many, acquaintances, many, family dramas, his senseless chases and even more senseless small battles, on the whole lost, languages, foreign and local, landscapes, he has tidily classified it all, and tidied up that baggage, that now unheeded burden, and arranged it in the corners of the spacious rooms as though yet another great removal awaited him.

 

 

 

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Ian Wedde is a poet, fiction writer, critic, and art curator, and the recipient of well over 30 major awards, including New Zealand Poet Laureate and Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit. His latest novel  The Reed Warbler was published in May 2020, through Victoria University Press.

 

 

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Te Herenga Waka University Press

 

$30.00

 

ISBN:  9781776920235
Published: August 2022
Pages: 208
Format: Paperback

 

 

Reviewed by Ruby Porter

 

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Arms & Legs, Chloe Lane’s second novel, is a careful anatomy of a marriage: the minute balances and imbalances, the connections and disconnections, the said and the unsaid.

Lane’s sparse dialogue choreographs these small arguments and even smaller reconciliations, the minor slights and the major fallouts, between the narrator Georgie and her husband Dan. He’s an architect turned furniture builder, ‘six-three and skinny, with a presence that [is] close to apologetic—the result of spending his life trying to fold himself down’. This folding down is also a shutting out, a sealing off. The novel writhes with his silent anger. It reaches its way inside the most mundane and domestic moments—as Georgie watches him separate a precut bagel, she feels as if he is doing this to her, wriggling his fingers into ‘the space between my ribs’, trying to separate them.

Georgie, born and raised in rural New Zealand, whose natural state is one of fear (fear of fires, fear of the sea, fear of the bush around her childhood home) finds herself living in Florida with Dan and their two-year-old Finn. It is a setting in which fears, both natural and unnatural, real and false, take hold. There are conversations of a serial killer who once lived in their town, and a boy from the university where she works has gone missing. Georgie and Dan’s car breaks down, and the man Gray who helps them to fix it is training his pit bull to fight. Meanwhile Finn struggles to speak; the words bubble out from his mouth in unintelligible streams.

There are snakes, bats, egrets, bald eagles, turkey vultures, diseased racoons. All around their neighbourhood, houses are vacuum-sealed and termites fumigated. They go on holiday once, and find toads have taken their place inside; the next time, the remnants of locusts. It is a landscape that makes you question what—and who—you allow in; and what slips by anyway, without your consent.

For Georgie, this is Jason, a librarian who runs Finn’s Music and Movement class—but it is also at times not Jason, not her husband, not us the reader, not anyone.

Georgie is guarded, and can be unreliable. She doesn’t always let us in on what she is about to do. A cop, working the case of the missing boy, tells us, ‘“They can be good liars when they need to be, when the stakes are high enough.”’ Georgie takes ‘they to mean everyone’; we take they to mean Georgie. When Dan thinks she is working late, she is really joining Gray for a prescribed burn in a national park. In her head is the YouTube video she watched before coming along: a man ‘looked offscreen, as if towards his captors, and said, “This place, it’s dying to burn.”’

This is, in some sense, how we must read Georgie. Her life, her husband, her son, she realises, she wanted them all. She has worked towards these things. And yet she risks them anyway. The title comes from a Barry Hannah short story about an old affair: ‘In the shadow of his regret the man described sex with the woman who wasn’t his wife as being just arms and legs, as being not worth a damn.’ This sticks with Georgie—she becomes, as she says, ‘hyper aware’ of arms and legs, their placement on a bench beside her, their exposure in the casual dress of her Florida friends, ‘[a]rms out, legs out.’ It is only near the end of the novel that she confronts this Barry Hannah quote directly again, with all her ambivalence: ‘It was only arms and legs and it wasn’t meant to be worth a damn, which was an argument for not fucking around, though it could be one for fucking around, why not?’ What is not written, but what this book still expresses, is that it is arms and legs, and it is more than that, too.

Sex, here, becomes the perfect metaphor for Lane’s prose—bare, deft, almost transparent on the page; but, at the same time, it is transcendent—the sum of her sentences say so much more than the individual words on the page. A conversation about teeth is just that, and it is also a moment in which Dan, for the first time, feels the full responsibility of parenthood, and where Georgie can relax temporarily because Dan is the fearful one. A scratch on Dan’s eye becomes an emblem of Georgie’s anger, then a symbol of how unobservant she is, how little attention she pays to Dan, then infected. Lane makes us listen to her silences; she makes them as loud as language itself.

This skill, on a line level, renders the instances that are clumsy or awkward more conspicuous than they would otherwise be. There’s the moment where she describes her own expression, almost slipping out of point of view (‘she pulled back to see my reaction, which was one of concern because she was my friend and I didn’t want to see her hurt, but also of poorly masked relief because I hated for her that her and Wren’s lives would forever be tied to that man.’) There are times where the pared back, conversational tone descends into chattiness (a dead squirrel ‘would prove to be a bad omen, though right then we had some fun with it’). There are cliches (the sight of a bird ‘chill[s]’ Georgie ‘to her ‘core’, a question ‘grip[s]’ her ‘like a hand to the throat’, she experiences a ‘rollercoaster of events’). Sometimes, the retrospective narration borders on the trite: ‘I couldn’t yet know the significance of this day’.

These moments jolt us out of what is otherwise exceptional writing. Metaphors are precise and striking. An eagle is described as ‘a high-pitched creature’; Georgie feels like the ‘casing of a snakeskin, shed and twitching in the feeble Florida breeze’; the image of a dead body ‘would clear a space in me with a sudden violence like the punch of an umbrella being opened in my chest. I didn’t want it in there–the umbrella, that feeling.’ These are metaphors that, like the dead body, like the umbrella, like the novel itself, punch you with a sudden violence. They leave you winded.

Arms & Legs, more than anything, gives you the feeling of having witnessed something authentic, something palpable. Though it is fiction, there is an emotional resonance, an emotional truth, to Lane’s words. She captures a sense of reality in an unreal place.

 

 

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Ruby Porter was the inaugural winner of the Michael Gifkins Prize in 2018, with her debut novel Attraction. Attraction was written for her Masters of Creative Writing at the University of Auckland, and published in 2019 by Melbourne-based Text Publishing. Ruby is currently a tutor and PhD student at the University of Auckland.

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Penguin

 

$36.00

 

ISBN: 9780143778561
Published: 31 May
Pages: 304
Format: Paperback

 

 

Reviewed by Sally Blundell

 

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Step out your door after a day’s heavy snow in central Otago and you will be surprised. Surprised by how deep your foot sinks in, surprised by the required recalibration of the ground in front of you, surprised how newly strange the landscape appears. Even if you know the layout of the land, a smooth, white blanket of snow can be disconcerting. In a snowstorm that erases the horizon, obliterates the sun and throws your sense of direction, of course, it is alarming.

Laurence Fearnley’s new novel Winter Time — her twelfth in just 24 years — is like this in more ways than one.

First, in a very literal sense. We are in Tekapo in the heart of the McKenzie, a small settlement tweaked around the edges to be the fictitious town of Matariki. It is winter; it is bitterly cold. Fearnley paints her mid-winter Otago landscape with extraordinary vividness and veracity (she lives in Dunedin; she did her PhD thesis on the literature of mountaineering; much of her award-winning 2010 novel The Hut Builder is set on the slopes of Aoraki Mt Cook). There is a magic in this wintertime world, in the crunch of snow, the sparkle of a hoar frost, the milky green lake, ‘its surface as still as polished stone’, and the endless depths of the McKenzie Basin’s night sky: ‘In a place like the McKenzie, the stars touched the land, and enfolded the earth. There was a pronounced sense of the circular, spinning world. If you stood outside at night, the stars appeared to move, and cross the sky, never still, always shifting, one following the other in a constant migration.’ But where the mountain landscape of The Hut Builder loomed in dramatic sublimity, here there is a more insinuating, claustrophobic quality in the smudged horizon, the fractured visibility and the swirling snow flurries. Wrapped in winter, life in the small town is marked by the dispiriting recurrence of frozen waterpipes, blocked culverts, the blinded windows of the holiday homes and Airbnbs yawning across former residential streets and new subdivisions.

This sense of creeping unease extends into the chilled air of the former family home of Fearnley’s main character, Roland March.

Roland lives in an upmarket terraced home in Sydney where he and his partner Leon run Kernel, a wholefood café and health store. He has been called back to the place of his childhood following the recent death of his younger and much-loved brother Eddie. Within two pages we realise this is the last of a litany of family tragedies — by page 10 the author has ticked off the death of Roland’s mother (a long illness), father (a short illness), his only sister Casey (melanoma), her twin brother Isaac (presumed drowned), and now Eddie, who appears to have lost control of his ute and plunged into the hydro canal. But suspicion rankles. Eddie was a careful driver, and he knew the road backwards — how did his car end up in the lake? Who is behind the social media comments, posted under Roland’s name, stirring up antipathy between the trophy hunting fraternity and those, like Eddie, contracted by the Department of Conservation to cull the deer population? Who is Holly, the author of a letter found amongst Eddie’s belongings? And why does Bay, one of the few people to offer a hand of friendship to Roland, have no online presence whatsoever?

Like the obfuscating swirls of mist and snow, these questions cloud Roland’s lonely nights and solitary bike rides, triggering uncertainty and understandable fear.

But his return to the family home also brings back memories of his own anxious childhood. These memories are rooted in the alpine environment — the long grip of winter, the build-up of ice on the inside of the bedroom window, school bus trips spent trying to rub some heat into toes frozen under gumboot socks. But hunkering down in the empty house, plagued by the disturbing questions surrounding Eddie’s death and the fake Facebook posts, Roland is also beset by the weight of a more personal history: his father’s disdain, his mother’s illness, the weight of responsibility as the oldest child. Growing up gay in small-town New Zealand, with little interest in sport or hunting, he was alone in his anxiety, daunted by his father’s impatience and his siblings’ daring. He was the quiet child, fearful, ‘whiny’ says acerbic neighbour Mrs Linden. Returning to Matariki to organise Eddie’s funeral and belongings ‘brought back that grief and sense of isolation. Now, though, there was no one to share this moment with, no one to hug him and tell him it would be all right.’

That sense of isolation, not uncommon in Fearnley’s books, shroud the characters of Winter Time as much as the low cloud and blinding snow. Eddie’s death, even Isaac’s death before him; Leon’s impatience; the flippancy of Leon’s friends; the brittle demeanour of Mrs Linden; the sincerity of Bay’s friendship — all become infused with a chilling, shifting uncertainty that demarcates Roland’s aloneness. There are moments of tenderness — Roland’s observations of his older lover’s ageing body is poignant in its attentiveness. There are also moments of awkwardness — a leaking wheatbag in the middle of a café when Roland and Bay first meet hits an odd note. But overall Roland stands alone, as if outlined against the wintry landscape, watchful and unsure.

In her author’s note Fearnley explains that this is the second of her novels based on the senses — after Scented in 2019, this one, she says, is concerned with touch. This sensory theme does not come through strongly, nor are all the questions that plague Roland during his time in Matariki resolved. But Winter Time is nevertheless a strong and compelling yarn from an accomplished writer. Like the precarious promise of that first step into deep snow, Fearnley pulls the reader into her story with a deft and inescapable grip that keeps you peering into the plot, arms out in front to keep your place in the narrative, to the last page.

 

 

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Sally Blundell is a journalist, writer and reviewer based in Ōtautahi Christchurch.

 

 

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Auckland University Press

 

$29.99

 

ISBN: 9781869409555
Published: July 2022
Pages: 220
Format: Paperback

 

 

Reviewed by Sophie van Waardenberg

 

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No Other Place to Stand: An Anthology of Climate Change Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand is a book blessed with editors aware of their project’s limits, yet ambitious enough to present a varied abundance of concerns, forms and poetic voices. Jordan Hamel, Rebecca Hawkes, Erik Kennedy and essa ranapiri are simultaneously resolute and self-aware as they introduce their selection. ‘A poem may not be a binding policy or strategic investment,’ they write, ‘but poems can still raise movements, and be moving in their own right. And there is no movement in our behaviours and politics without a shift in hearts and minds.’ This, then, is what the anthology sets out to do — not to reform climate deniers, nor really to offer a scientific education, but to move. And it succeeds. The work chosen for this book is so abundant, diverse, and urgent, that any reader — however cynical — will be jostled by it somehow.

There’s an untidiness in the editors’ refusal to restrict the anthologised material strictly to concerns or stories from Aotearoa. That’s fitting, partly because there is no experience of climate change that belongs solely to this country — it is, of course, a planet-wide event — and partly because so many of the people of Aotearoa whakapapa to, and are touched by, so many other parts of the world. Australia-centred poems by Laniyuk and Dadon Rowell flow into Victor Billot’s Scott Morrison-dedicated piece, which is followed by Tusiata Avia’s bitter ode to Jacinda Ardern, titled ‘Jacinda Ardern goes to the Pacific Forum in Tuvalu and my family colonises her house’. The melting, burning, crumbling and rage of the Anthropocene cannot be neatly sorted by country any more than it can be sorted into the natural, the political, and the  personal.

In fact, it’s in the clash of the personal with the political, the immediacy of fire and ice with the distant paper forms of bureaucracy, that this collection’s most exciting work comes to life. We may long to be climate warriors, armoured and beweaponed, but as Tim Jones writes, to be in the trenches of our climate battle can mean ‘fighting over inches, kilograms of emissions, / redesigning systems, writing notes for speeches / that no one delivers.’ It isn’t romantic work; it may hardly make a difference. Nina Mingya Powles approaches this balance of disastrous chaos and grounded fact in ‘The Harbour’ with variations on a theme by Lucille Clifton. Where Clifton wrote, ‘the fact is the falling / the dream is the tree’, Powles writes, ‘The fact is the running. The dream is the sea.’ A section of this poem teases out this dichotomy:

 

            the fact is the unseasonable warmth of the sea.

            the dream is bioluminescence.

            the fact is the house overlooking the bay.

            the dream is the white door.

            the fact is nothing grows in such sandy soil.

            the dream is the red aloe.

 

This is what poems are for: holding two things at once, feeling the truth of both. Powles does it here, and so do many others. Dani Yourukova writes, ‘The planet is dying and so is my half-price orchid from Bunnings’, in one of many poems in the anthology which bring care and apathy, playfulness and desperation together. Ash Davida Jane does this too, with a weightily ironic first line: “I don’t ask for much . . . . I just want everything’. (I’m beginning to think the overextended ellipses that feature in quite a chunk of today’s poetry are tiny eco-poems of their own, full of doom and melt, luxuriating, languorous.)

Where another team of editors may have attempted to build an exterior structure into this kind of project, to stack up poems about planes against poems about whales, these editors have chosen to let the work flow more conversationally, encouraging in their order slight overlaps while leaving plenty of room for a reader’s own meandering and connection making. Remarkably, a reader has room to breathe as they make their way from beginning to end, thanks both to the organic flow and the diversity of the poetry chosen. There are poems that ring out as anthems, protest songs, mōteatea and other chants; there are new poets and poets laureate; there is illustrated poetry, Hannah Montana poetry, and poetry that riffs on Wallace Stevens. The success here is due, of course, to the skill and deliberation of the editors, and to the craft and life of the chosen work, but also to the fact that these four editors’ own backgrounds and artistic practices are so diverse. It’s important, I think, that a subject of such breadth and urgency be allowed this kind of abundance and multiplicity of editorial vision, just as in Chris Tse and Emma Barnes’s collaboration on the Out Here anthology, and it’s a trend I hope Auckland University Press continues to promote.

No Other Place to Stand proves that climate change poetry cannot be one-note, and is more than just the word ‘HELP’ written in driftwood on a burning beach. In order for poetry of fossil fuels and carbon emissions to touch us, it must coexist with all the confusion, laziness, consumerism and aesthetic preoccupations we can’t seem to let go of. These editors have not tried to carve out a moral higher ground. There isn’t one left. So, in reading, there’s room for our own anxieties and guilt, acceptance of our shortcomings, and perhaps a small part of each of us that can be moved — yes, even by poetry — into making change.

 

 

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Sophie van Waardenberg is a recent graduate of Syracuse University’s MFA in Creative Writing, during which she served as co-editor-in-chief of Salt Hill Journal. Her first chapbook-length collection of poems was published in AUP New Poets 5.

 

 

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Lawrence & Gibson

 

$25.00

 

ISBN: 978-0-473-61732-5
Published: April 2022
Pages: 206
Format: Paperback

 

 

Reviewed by Todd Barrowclough

 

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Slow Down, You’re Here, the seventh and latest novel by the Wellington writer and lawyer Brannavan Gnanalingam, is packed with the stuff of life. That stuff is mostly work — of parents, of people of colour and of marriage.

The story, set in post-COVID lockdown Auckland, introduces us to Vishal and Kavita, who are barely getting by while raising their two children, four-year-old Aarani and two-year-old Bhavan, in a cramped Onehunga rental. Vishal, who was laid off from his marketing job, drives taxis but is not having much luck with it. If he’s not at the mercy of inebriated Englishmen soiling his car, he’s making honest mistakes and losing coin to passengers who can definitely spare a few extra dollars for fares. Kavita works in accounts and is the family’s main breadwinner, all the while carrying the household with little help from her husband.

While Vishal, tired and dejected, sleeps off his late-night indignities, Kavita is on the go, doing the washing, defrosting chicken for dinner and minding the children. She wants to wake Vishal up so he can help her. ‘One thing at a time,’ she reminds herself, but judging by how difficult it is for either of them to get a full night’s sleep or make a coffee, it’s everything all at once. Their lives are about some things (the same things, day in day out) and not others: the lot of parents.

Needless to say, Vishal and Kavita harbour frustrations with each other — frustrations that, combined with stress, exhaustion and an unequitable division of labour, have bred resentment. Vishal brings the washing in but doesn’t fold it. Kavita seethes. Love is attention, and in this house, attention is divided.

Along comes Ashwin, Kavita’s old flame from university, who invites her to a week away with him on Waiheke Island. Kavita, feeling unloved and unappreciated, accepts.

The novel cycles through the points of view of four characters — Vishal, Kavita, Ashwin and Aarani. We get the meat: feelings, emotions, neuroses, motivations and fears. There is Kavita, guilty at hiding her trip with Ashwin from her husband, who still hopes Vishal will show up for her:

 

Get up Vishal… If you get up early and look after the kids, I won’t leave you… Give me something that shows you’re fighting for this.

 

Vishal doesn’t wake up until late afternoon and an argument ensues. Vishal seeks to defend himself. He takes care of the children during the week while Kavita is at work. To him, it’s unfair that she’s angry at him for sleeping in on the weekend. Easily resolved, we think, by acknowledgment and acceptance from both parties. Vishal, who’s been thinking of looking for a more secure job, seems moved enough by this exchange to tell his wife. Surely this would smooth things over, or at least give Kavita something to chew on. No. Vishal doesn’t say a word because he doesn’t think she’d listen.

Kavita is frustrated and disappointed in Vishal. She believes he gives up on everything, which is her way of saying he is giving her no choice but to leave him. The assumptions we make of others, however reasoned they appear to us because of lived experience. Could things improve if the two of them shared their private gripes with each other? Perhaps, but this is life, and only a chosen few of us have the time, energy and money to cultivate the compassion and patience of the Dalai Lama.

Aside from Kavita and Vishal and their marriage woes, we have Ashwin, a forty-year-old bachelor who pulls long hours at work, hoping for recognition, while his boss favours his hotshot Māori colleague. Ashwin sees the trip away with Kavita as his chance to finally be with her after twenty years of lamenting the missed opportunity. Set up as an alternative to the lazy, adrift Vishal, Ashwin appears to be a solid romantic choice, though he looks down on others, talks at people not with them, and feels things more intensely than everyone else. This characterisation adds an interesting dimension to his and Kavita’s turbocharged tryst on the island.

Not to forget little Aarani, the gentle and caring lover of TV, who has a life-changing journey of her own after the novel’s major climactic event.

For the most part, Gnanalingam juggles the four main characters well, which is a feat considering how the story moves at a rate of knots and tops out at 200 pages. He also manages to delve into issues of race and ethnicity without slowing the pace and sacrificing story.

Minor characters get their time to shine too. Ashwin’s boss is a frightening combination of Hitler haircut and T-shirt with ‘Helvetica’ stamped across the front. There’s Marjorie, the owner of the house where the pair stay on Waiheke: she of the pan-African sculpture-owning, kimono-wearing tribe of Pākeha. There’s also the instructor at a local ashram whose name is Taylor, because, of course it is.

Another standout characterisation is the Englishman in the novel’s opening chapter. Vishal watches a fight between this man (drunk, no less) and a European over who will claim the passenger seat in his taxi. Gnanalingam paints the Englishman as ruddy and red-cheeked with a popped shirt collar, which reads as a deft return jab to colonisers and their flat, dehumanising descriptions of those they colonised.

While Gananlingam generally has a good handle on writing from the perspectives of multiple characters, there are, at times, abrupt shifts between them which is jarring. For example, when Ashwin and Kavita disembark the ferry on Waiheke, the section is in Ashwin’s point of view until we’re dropped into Kavita’s head for a few sentences before returning to Ashwin. Had Gnanalingam been doing this from the jump, I’d be on board, but these quick shifts don’t appear regularly enough to feel intentional. Of course, there are changes in point of view across the novel, but Gnanalingam does them at the chapter-level.

Characters’ points of view are filtered unnecessarily throughout the novel. A few examples: ‘He glanced’, ‘He was worried’, ‘Don’t stand up, Ashwin thought.’ If we are deep in a character’s point of view (we should always be), we can recognise thoughts, feelings, and actions without being told what they are. Filtering removes intimacy and plots an inefficient path for the reader to access the emotion and drama of a story.

We get a good look at the developing emergency faced by Aarani and Bhavan throughout the story, but Aarani comes across as unrealistic in parts. Would the average four-year-old have a vocabulary that includes the words ‘co-mingled’, ‘exhortations’, ‘applauded’ and ‘conspiratorially’? A stray word here or there might seem minor, but it only takes a few to yank a reader out of the fantasy.

The same can be said of imprecise and confusing imagery. When Ashwin gets an erection he thinks it’s something that can be dampened. When Kavita warms up on a walk, she somehow knows the sweat on her forehead is a patina without being able to see it.

Elsewhere, there are passages where nearly every sentence begins with ‘She’ or ‘He’. Casting a keener eye over sentences and language would’ve made this book a stronger whole.

Overall, Slow Down, You’re Here is a commendable, action-packed novel that will leave many readers wanting respite. Gnanalingam, refreshingly, does not offer it. Here, life is brutish and short. People looking for a new take on the be-careful-what-you-wish-for trope will find this a welcome read.

 

 

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Todd Barrowclough is a Samoan-Pākehā writer hailing from Aotearoa New Zealand. He currently lives on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung land in Melbourne and works as a librarian and creative writing teacher. He is a graduate of the Master of Creative Writing programme at the University of Auckland and is currently working on a collection of short stories.

 

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Te Kaihau: The Windeater
by Keri Hulme

 

VUP / Te Herenga Waka University Press

 

$30.00

 

ISBN: 9781776920181
Pages: 272
Format: Paperback

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____________________________

 

Lost Possessions
by Keri Hulme

 

VUP / Te Herenga Waka University Press

 

$25.00

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ISBN: 9781776920198
Pages: 50
Format: Paperback

 

 

Reviewed by Paula Morris

 

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The late Keri Hulme will always be best known for the bone people, Booker Prize-winner in 1985, but from the mid-70s she was actively publishing poetry, short stories and novellas. In 1977 she was Otago University’s Burns Fellow—splitting the tenure with Roger Hall—and was awarded several writing grants before the novel was published by the feminist Spiral Collective in 1984. (That decade Spiral also published J.C. Sturm’s story collection, another landmark in Māori short fiction.) By the time Hodder and Stoughton published the novel in the U.K., making it eligible for the Booker, the bone people had already won at the New Zealand Book Awards and sold out two local print runs.

Hulme’s story collection, Te Kaihau: The Windeater, was published in 1986, launched at the first-ever Readers and Writers Week in Wellington four months after the Booker win. In some ways this was felicitous timing, but it could be argued that the novel’s international celebrity meant the stories have been overshadowed. Now available as a reissue in the THW Classics series, the collection draws together the work of a rich, fertile decade, including the story ‘Hook and Sinker’, winner of the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Award.

Te Kaihau is testimony to Hulme’s unique gifts and perspectives as a writer, even if one story here, ‘Kaitbutsu-San’, does not quite stand the test of time. It’s a collection that is, by turns, brutal and beautiful, dark and comedic. Some of Hulme’s characters are maimed in violent accidents; many drink too much, and struggle with past and present darkness, as well as challenges both physical and metaphysical.

Ever the iconoclast, Hulme is playful with form, as we see in the book’s foreword, ‘Tara Diptych’, and afterword, ‘Headnote to a Māui Tale, as well as in the artful, disruptive sidebar notes and script-form scenes of ‘A Tally of the Souls of Sheep’. (The word ‘sheep’, a note tells us, means any ‘member of the ruminant genus Ovus. Or, person displaying the characteristics of the animal’.)

‘A Tally’ is an accomplished horror story, and that’s another of Hulme’s gifts, combining highly stylised imaginative literary writing with genre form, and both subverting and inflecting realism with the fantastic. ‘The Cicadas of Summer’ is another horror tale, set like ‘A Tally’ in a stark, dangerous countryside where isolation can lead to entrapment. Adolescent Gwen is so preoccupied with her ruthless war on the ‘singers’ and ‘nymphs’ of the cicada world—stalking, pulping, dissecting and even eating them, revelling in the ‘deep and belly-satisfying side to killing’—that she is oblivious to the predator living in the backyard shack. The danger to the narrator of the long title story has mythic dimensions: as a baby she is dropped into a ‘great green helix of live water’ lashed by anaconda and is destined, it seems, to death-by-boiling-mud in Rotorua. There ‘are things quite outside humanity,’ the narrator reasons, ‘and we can’t do battle with them.’

Many of Hulme’s stories explore the unsentimental life-and-death stakes of the natural world, and it’s no surprise that some of the most vivid and visceral writing here is about the creatures of rivers and seas, including the title story and ‘One Whale, Singing’. In the glorious ‘King Bait’, a river is transformed into ‘a viscous moving jelly’ of ‘white slimefroth’ by the iconic fish.

‘A Drift in Dream’ is an origin story for Simon, the mute boy in the bone people: here he’s a baby with a vulnerable French mother, a former nun, and an Irish druggie father, whose charm does not mask his dangerous volatility. Parents in these stories are negligent, at best. Gwen’s father, consumed by depression, is a ‘whimpering shade of himself’ and unable to protect his daughter. In ‘Hooks and Feelers’, a boy is maimed in an accident caused by his mother, and the story’s narrator, the father, weeps in his shed. A fatherless boy named Bird, in ‘A Nightsong for the Shining Cuckoo’, is exiled and summoned back at will by his mother. The girl in the sinister ‘The Knife and the Stone’ is like a fairytale captive of her own parents, condemned to gut fish and a life of scales and slime, and her lurching father ‘fumbling, delving’ when he gets drunk.

‘Is there ever a real answer to anything or a true end to any story?’ the narrator of ‘Te Kaihau: the Windeater’ asks, a question pertinent to Lost Possessions, also first published in 1985. A scant 50 pages, the book is described as a novella but reads like a narrative poem or a dramatic monologue. A male academic ‘with soft white hands’ has been kidnapped and imprisoned by ‘unknown black’ assailants:

 

I am very clearheaded and very weak
i am harrod wittie doctor of philosophy
failed lover failed test failure man

 

Like Hulme’s castaway tale ‘Unnamed Islands in the Unknown Sea’, the relic of a confused written record forms the narrative. A ‘Miscellaneous Property Record Card’ at the story’s end tells us 47 handwritten sheets were found in the centre of town, stuffed into a child’s plastic purse. The lecturer, identified in these pages as an English professor, is apparently a teacher of Anthropology. ‘Student prank?’ the card asks. We’re not sure.

Lost Possessions is set in 1983, a year before the sensational 1984 abduction of university lecturer and playwright Mervyn Thompson, who was accused of sexual coercion. The lecturer in Lost Possessions has had a relationship with a younger woman from New Guinea who he describes as ‘little, compact, black’. Are the ‘lost possessions’ these pages or are they the Pacific islands? Is the empire striking back against the colonial academy, with its disrespectful treatment of human remains (‘smokedried’ heads, mummies)? As ever, Hulme is provocative as well as lyrical and allusive, setting traps for her characters and complex challenges for readers.

 

 

       

 

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Paula Morris is a fiction writer and essayist, and co-creator of Wharerangi, the Māori Literature Hub.