Academy of New Zealand Literature

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How to be a Bad Muslim
by Mohamed Hassan

 

Penguin Books

 

$35.00

 

ISBN: 978-0-14-377621-5
Published: May 2022
Pages: 208
Format: Paperback

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Reviewed by Angelique Kasmara

 

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It’s evident from Mohamed Hassan’s collection of essays How to be a Bad Muslim that he has a keen instinct for a story, a talent that has also served him well in his pressure cooker roles as an award-winning journalist and champion slam poet (and whose debut poetry collection National Anthem was shortlisted for the 2020 Ockham NZ Book Awards). The essays here span from the 15 March 2019 terrorist attack in Christchurch to Middle-Eastern politics, television series Mr Robot, New Zealand’s drinking culture, the Sydney siege, questionable therapists in Istanbul and that time he auditioned for a pirate role. His razor-sharp observations of contemporary life are always illuminating, and by turns melancholic, poetic and often, very funny. I’m going to start a time capsule just so I can add this book to it.

Perhaps I’m stating the obvious, but I would like to point out that this book is not a literal handbook on how to be a ‘bad’ Muslim, or any kind of Muslim. It isn’t a dissection on Islam (although ‘The peace of wild things’ does go into the ritual of regular prayer). What it does explore are some aspects of Egyptian history, Hassan’s own family in ‘The witch of El Agouza’, ‘My country, my country’ and ‘Always watching’, and there is a strong theme throughout of navigating his way as a Muslim millennial through secular spaces. He anchors these to the familiar footholds of schoolyard bust-ups, the pain of not fitting in, the in-between zone of airports in ‘Showdown in the Kōwhai Room’, ‘The last sober driver’ and ‘A stranger in no man’s land’. Just when we’re easing into their rhythm, he draws open the curtains to reveal the observers pressed against the glass, judging the feta sandwiches and basbousa in his school lunchbox, his accent and abstinence from alcohol.

Hassan is adept at building a vivid narrative through a delicate balance between beautifully rendered imagery and terse sentences:

‘As a kid who wore the question of belonging like an ankle monitor wherever I went, airports were a magical realm where no one belonged. Like me, everyone was a stranger on a journey. Everyone was seeking something they were missing, and this was the in-between place. Not heaven nor hell. Neutral. Safe.’

His mother is pulled aside and swabbed for explosives every time they transit through Australia. When Hassan is old enough to travel by himself, he finds himself detained on a regular basis because his name alone triggers security systems at the passport control desk. If you’ve ever come across his fantastic poem, ‘Unlearning My Name’, these passages in ‘A stranger in no man’s’ land lends an extra layer to the unwarranted attention to his name.

‘Subscribe to PewDiePie’ is a clear-eyed view of how the internet enabled a terrorist with his plan to upload a hate-filled manifesto to social media before he turned on his livestream and murdered 51 people in New Zealand on 15 March 2019. Hassan tracks a chilling trajectory of how social media has evolved into the beast that it is today, its platforms building algorithms to keep users feeding the monster. It’s the first essay in the collection and in a poignant piece of set arrangement, ‘Two Funerals’ is its penultimate, covering the sheer enormity of what mourners had to deal with in the aftermath of the terrorist attack. Hassan’s prose is devastating when scaled down to precise, stark detail:

From Tuesday until Friday, for five hours at a time, this is all we did. In the morning we would all stand with the bodies laid out in front of us and pray the funeral prayer. In the evening we would visit the families, Sheikh Rafat out front, telling stories about his memories of each of the departed, and describing in vivid colour the journey they were now on.

On Friday afternoon, as the final body was lowered into the ground, everyone on site broke down together. A week of leveed tears finally allowed to flood.

‘A pirate’s life’ switches tone with its funny and self-deprecating look into the humiliation of the auditioning process, and its kicker of a punchline brought a wry chuckle, despite the deflating outcome; I won’t give it away here.

‘A pirate’s life’ is a deft anecdote for its natural companion piece ‘Ode to Elliot Alderson’, where Hassan elaborates further on ‘an industry that for decades was the only source of information on Islam and Muslims for billions of people and what they saw were monsters marionette on screen to sell cinema tickets’. His argument is a compelling one, in the potted history he presents and the neat evisceration of the role that producers, directors and financiers have played in perpetuating stereotypes. Egyptian-American actor Rami Malek played Elliot Alderson in the gripping and clever television series Mr Robot, the brainchild of fellow Egyptian-American Sam Esmail. Within the complex character of Elliot and the authenticity which layers the entire series, Hassan finally feels himself truly represented on screen. That it took him until his late twenties to have this moment bleakly illustrates how Hollywood’s world dominance of the screen and its cynical paint-by-numbers approach to diversity has squeezed out other voices.

Hassan’s insights into both Hollywood and social media are intimate and meticulously examined, and it’s perhaps because of this that this reader hankered for more on his observations of the role that media have played in perpetuating stereotypes. One of his most powerful essays, ‘How to be a Bad Muslim’, does delve into critique of the fourth estate to some extent, via his experience of walking into TVNZ at the moment when the 2014 Sydney siege flooded every news channel. In a newsroom that he’d worked at for two years, the reaction of his coworkers is telling: ‘One by one, they all looked up from their screens to see me. One by one, their faces went white. First the producers of the evening news desk, then the reporters, then the cameramen, then the shift manager.’

Nobody speaks to him in the lunchroom that day. Later that year, he’s turned down for promotion for the third time because, according to his bosses, ‘I was too quiet, and it was hard to tell whether I was competent at my job.’

It’s a broad clue, as are others scattered throughout the text, such as noting the power of language and how the media deliberately uses menacing words for effect. However, this isn’t the central point of this essay, which leans more towards a sweep of the wider structures at play within not just the media, but our societies and governments, as well as how some politicians such as Winston Peters and Pauline Hanson use their platforms to stir hate. What TVNZ lost out on with Hassan being passed over for promotion, Aotearoa has gained in a fresh and rather brilliant essayist.

 

 

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Angelique Kasmara is a writer, editor, translator and reviewer from Auckland. Some of her fiction has appeared in the New Zealand Listener, Newsroom, and the anthologies Ko Aotearoa Tātou | We Are New Zealand, and A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa. Her first novel Isobar Precinct (The Cuba Press 2021) was the winner of the 2017 Sir James Wallace Prize for Creative Writing, and finalist for the 2019 Michael Gifkins Prize.

 

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So far for now
by Fiona Kidman

 

RHNZ Vintage

 

$38.00

 

ISBN: 9780143775805
Published: March 2022
Pages: 272
Format: Paperback

 

 

Reviewed by Rachel O’Connor

 

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So Far For Now is a meticulously crafted collection, a series of essays that, like skilfully curated artworks in a retrospective exhibition, offer the opportunity to walk slowly and engage deeply with the huge life lived so far by that master of New Zealand literature, Dame Fiona Kidman. Framed by the measured yet moving account of her husband’s fatal fall, and the poignant yet practical contemplation of the widowhood that has followed, the collection pays tribute to a truly great marriage, the celebration and loss of which ripples across every page, but also reveals, both within and beyond that relationship, a woman of many parts.

Kidman emerges life-size from her words: spirited, adventurous, loud and constant in her demands for justice, quietly determined in her quest for truth, honest in her admission of vulnerability and of pain. The prose is similarly open, relaxed and familiar, almost colloquial in its tone and structure. Every essay is a lesson in fine storytelling, alive with incident and anecdote, character and humour, and delivered with crisp, telling detail, deftly placed strokes of colour and texture that combine to convey a deeply felt, and passionately savoured, existence. When I completed my reading of the volume, I felt as if I had just risen from a table in a sunlit kitchen, having reluctantly reached the end of a long conversation with Kidman, during which we had together laughed, argued and cried over life, the universe and everything.

And everything is in this book. Organised into five sections with titles that subtly reflect their contents, the essays deliver reflections on myriad places, people, and preoccupations of the author’s life to date. The first part, entitled Mine Alone, brings into focus the locations and human histories that have shaped Kidman’s own identity. Its first essay, ‘About Grandparents’, touches on the troubling question of home which confronts those New Zealanders, like Kidman, whose European ancestors, displaced by oppression and famine, crossed the world in hope or desperation to start new lives in New Zealand. But of course, as Kidman puts it, ‘one displacement sets the scene for another.’ And for settler descendants like the author, who have learned to acknowledge their scant right to call this land their own, identifying ‘a place to stand’ in Aotearoa becomes something of an obsession. Accordingly, other pieces in the section recall Kidman’s search for the first house of her infancy, found in Hawera, the tragicomic trials and joys of two years during which her parents attempted to farm in Waipu, and the complex relationship that she formed with that place which, along with a house on a hillside in Hataitai, she also calls home.

Other sections of the volume deliver other contemplations, and other facets of Kidman the writer, the woman, the wife. The Outsiders brings together the stories of individuals to whom Kidman has felt some extraordinary degree of commitment. In return, they have offered her excellent reasons to dig deep, and to travel far. Research into the life and death of Albert Black, subject of This Mortal Boy, led her to the streets of Belfast, and less glamorously into ‘the swamps and pines’ of Waikumete Cemetery; her unmitigated passion for Marguerite Duras carried her to Saigon and Hanoi, to the Mekong River and to Montparnasse — and another cemetery. A more local and contemporary campaign for justice is detailed in the Going South section, with a hugely informative account of Kidman’s own involvement in the saga ‘At Pike River’, her part in the battle to halt the sealing of the mine and to continue the process of investigation and accountability, and her sadness when marginalised by a new order in the movement’s leadership. Kidman holds aloft another placard in her interrogation of New Zealand’s questionable record on women’s reproductive rights in ‘Playing with Fire’, an essay in the section entitled The Body’s Sweet Ache. Opening that set is an extraordinarily intimate yet also charmingly pragmatic account of Kidman’s enduring relationship with massage, which commenced in a subterranean room in a Bangkok hotel with an experience that was ‘a kind of rapture, a removal of the self from the body, a kind of surrender.’ Though one has gathered by now that Kidman does not surrender often.

Every section except one closes with an essay, skilfully selected to align in tone and focus with its set, which focuses on a particular element of Kidman’s life as a writer. These experiences, as a teacher of memoir writing, a participant in literary festivals, a writing fellow in Otago, even as an unproductive prisoner of Covid’s great lockdown, add an enriching layer of intertextuality to the volume — Self-portraits of the Artist as Author, if you will. This New Condition, the final section of essays, is the exception to this pattern. It concludes instead with Kidman’s invaluable reflection ‘On Widowhood’, a frank and very personal exploration of the many challenges presented by this unwelcome and under-discussed phase of life, which so many women must navigate. Heart-rending and humorous by turns, Kidman confronts such issues as repelling gold diggers, dining alone, removing the ring, and, eventually, realising that there can still be perfect days. The ache of her loss never lessens, but it appears, in these final pages, alleviated by a reflective calm, perhaps part of what the author describes as ‘one of the gifts of age — a softening round the edges, an acceptance of how things have gone.’

This gentle acceptance, however, is belied by the sustained energy and appetite for life and work that emanates from the writings of this collection. There is grace, certainly, in Kidman’s reconciliation to the conditions in life she cannot change, but in no sense has she surrendered to age. On the contrary, in So far, for now, she has mastered it.

 

 

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Rachel O’Connor is a writer, tutor and researcher, born in Christchurch. She moved to Auckland in 2014 after two decades in Greece. Her first novel, Whispering City, set in Salonika on the eve of World War I, was published in 2020 by Kedros.

 

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Bordering on Miraculous
by Lynley Edmeades and Saskia Leek

 

Massey University Press

 

$45.00

 

 

ISBN: 978-1-99-115113-1
Published: May 2022
Pages: 96
Format:Hardback

 

 

Reviewed by Ian Wedde

 

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At first read/look, the poems by Lynley Edmeades and paintings by Saskia Leek in Bordering 0n Miraculous have much in common. Both have a tonal delicacy or restraint — Saskia in terms of her (for the most part) muted pastel palette and the light touch of her thin brush strokes, Lynley in the economy of her (for the most part) understated content and the elegant deftness of her lines and rhythms. They seem compatible, a good match. Obvious differences in tone and presence might have heightened the drama and contrast of this meeting and its ensuing conversation. As it is, the fascination of the exchange between two women (who an interview reveals were already familiar with each other’s work) owes less to their obvious compatibility and more to the subtle directions of shifting impulses within their exchanges — how the moments in their conversation originate and how responses follow, or, sometimes, seem not to.

The sense of location and identity — of origination — in Saskia’s paintings feels secure, in that they appear to stand alone. There’s an internal consistency, often in terms of iterations and motifs. The negotiations within them and their associated or neighbouring images seem internal to an existing world. In this world there are some repeated representational forms (mugs, bananas, flowers, clock-faces, and others); forms whose exact borders between representation and abstraction are somewhat fluid (suns or fried eggs? Fruits? Window frames? Clouds? Are colour grids abstractions or things?); and coloured fields or shaped areas of colour that are or appear to be abstract, but may be the sea, the sky; or simply the colour field/ground on which objects are placed, in which case the definition ‘abstract’ is a misnomer. These rich interplays both page by page and across successive or neighbouring pages are conversational, or even, at times, narrativistic, suggesting relations, conversations and even stories that have what feels — reads — like a largely self-contained environment.

By contrast, Lynley’s poems often seem responsive in a variety of ways, in that they may depend on their relationships to the paintings for their situations and what they have to say or have been invited to say. For example, on page 27 there is an image of what is surely a yellow sun on a brown scumbled ground with rays reaching out across an area of glow.  The poem notices

 

the slow melt of general

warmth and how the sun

often comes to be the centre.

The reaching suggests a casual

spreading with a few

nostalgic licks of brown.

 

But then:

 

The circle is the centre

is the place of insistence.

It calmly asks: what if

yellow is the thing?

 

And then, an apparent non-sequitur, but, in fact, a deliberate dérive or refocus to one of the poet’s key preoccupations:

 

What if it’s ok to sleep

with the baby in the bed?

 

So, any absolute distinction between the apparently self-contained world of images and the descriptively responsive one of the poems doesn’t really play, and in fact breaks down at certain key points (the baby as ‘centre’ of ‘general warmth’?), as in the second pairing in the book, in which the poem introduces us to the new baby who will feature in several more poems, such as the one quoted above. In the early poem, in which a new mother expresses both parental absorption and pleasure (‘Look at all the little things’) and frustration (‘he wakes: we curse’), we encounter the line, ‘every day: look baby: can you see the birds:’, and on the facing page find an image of folded-back green curtains, the top and bottom sections of window frame, and framed by these an expanse of what must be blue sky with a single black  ‘m’-shaped cipher for bird wings. Is the bird connection between painting and poem coincidental? Surely not; but which came first? And does it matter, except as one of the teasing pleasures of the exchange?

On page 76 are loosely brushed vertical stripes of various colours. The facing poem notices ‘a stripe of miraculous straining/ a stripe of perpendicular straining/ a straining bigger than the stripe’; followed by more variations, ending with ‘a stripe of ordinary miraculous straining’. While this catalogue or list with its accumulation of adjectives is a kind of description of what we see, the adjective ‘miraculous’ and the noun-adverb ‘straining’ are owning or framing the description in ways not apparent in the image itself, except to the extent that ‘straining’ can describe the appearance of a substance strained through a perforated filter such as a sieve or indeed the sieving bristles of a brush. So, what is being sieved and what makes the process miraculous — allowing also for the suggestion of effort implied by ‘straining’; and what kinds of strain-effort are required by miracles? Clearly, the painted stripes are the origin of this exchange; but the result of them getting parsed by the words ‘miraculous’ and ‘straining’ (effort and process) has involved a responsive engagement, a dialogue, even a kind of supplemental ownership.

Which raises the question: where are the borders in these exchanges, the places of crossings or relocations or sharing? Perhaps they simply exist wherever we encounter a shared sense of vivid surprise — astonishment — across a border of dialogue where the effort or straining required is the ‘ordinary’ but in its way miraculous one of engagement, of sustaining the empathy of conversation.

Both participants hint at something like this in their interview responses to the pleasantly leading question, ‘Did this partnership between you present challenges or was it perhaps energising?’ Saskia notes that, ‘I’ve realised that I’m not an illustrator, but I do like working alongside words.’ Linley’s response acknowledges the impacts of ‘visual prompts’: ‘… I really enjoy working with visual prompts and with visual artists. I find it really frees me from being too in my head about an idea; having the visual somehow pulls me into the material world, even when that world is somehow concept-driven, like much of Saskia’s work.’ A little later, she adds, ‘… we quickly decided we didn’t want the pieces to be descriptive of the images; rather, we were more interested in how our practice and conceptual thinking overlapped. I found this much more exciting and freeing, while it took a little bit of getting used to.’

‘A little bit of getting used to’ isn’t a bad way to describe the moment-by-moment pleasure of encountering these vivid exchanges.

 

 

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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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Tumble
by Joanna Preston

 

Otago University Press

 

$27.50

 

ISBN: 9781990048197
Published: November 2021
Pages: 88
Format: Paperback

 

 

Reviewed by Sophie van Waardenberg

 

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Tumble, Canterbury-based Joanna Preston’s second collection, was the poetry winner at last week’s Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Joanna Preston’s poetry is anchored in the plot and texture of ancient and medieval myth and story, and here, these elements weave into the events and language of more recent histories. The collection’s poems navigate the death of Aeschylus, a journey to the underworld and Viking raids, as well as the 2011 Christchurch earthquakes and the public persona of Margaret Thatcher. The collection doesn’t meander as much as it flits, making quick hops between countries and eras, childhood and adulthood, and into and out of voices comedic and tragic, calm and tumultuous.

While Tumble’s many retellings have moments of bite, the poems sometimes fail to measure up to the richness of their primary texts, and a few of them do not quite overcome the staleness of a received story. The sparseness of ‘A bird in the hand’ — ‘She opened for him / the flesh // of a pomegranate, told him to sip, taste, / take.’ — is slackened by the somewhat unsurprising rhythms split between short lines.

Still, there are some moments of ruthlessness and breathlessness that might overshadow those shortcomings. The final strophes of ‘Chronicle of the year 793’, in which the sound of a Viking arrival on Lindisfarne is mistaken for a flock of birds, stand out:

 

                        So many birds! Yet afterwards

                        not one feather was found

                        to name them.

 

                        And now again! Strange,

                        how their wingbeats sound

                        like oars.

 

The echoed exclamations take on the voice of an unknowing listener, a body caught in the trap the reader has already processed. Preston exits the poem with portents unfolding and a great tragedy still to occur, and this moment of pathos is, in consequence, elevated and torqued and immediate despite the story’s long temporal and special distance from its reader.

At many points in this collection, the natural world is given agency; in ‘Classical Gas’, ‘The hydrangeas / reached out and caught me’; in ‘The cold, darkening’, flocks of starlings ‘anchor night / with their feet’. Even the lifeless remains of creatures have power, as in ‘Criccieth’: ‘the bleached hide and scattered bones / of a long-dead sheep / warned against straying’. This poet is not merely fond of nature’s beauty and does not only use it as decoration — these flowers and birds and remains change and order the world around her, and she is in constant conversation with them.

Tumble, unsurprisingly, has movement at its heart. Many of the poems pivot on moments of physical tumult, as in ‘Lost’, in which the speaker’s spouse has gone missing in the mountains:

 

            The stone weight of cold

            punched the windows in

            and swept you off the road –

 

            our life

            streaming past with a roar that I

            was drowning in and nothing any

            where for me to cling

            to

 

Preston’s short line enacts the shock of the ‘sweeping’ and ‘streaming’, and allows this poem to tumble its reader through a real-time near-tragedy. This poet’s craft becomes similarly concentrated and immersive in ‘Atalanta’, a poem tied to the world of ancient mythology, like others here, but building so much strongly verbed momentum that, in its final lines, the titular girl can break out of the already told story:

 

            But for now she is running. The tingle

            of sweat meeting cold air,

            the exhilaration,

 

            as though she could outrun her life.

 

When Preston ends a poem right at the threshold of danger or hope, a reader feels real tremors of energy.

Preston’s strengths in craft and story marry her skill for tonal acrobatics in one of Tumble’s longest poems, a chronicle needing not much more explanation than its title gives: ‘Lucifer in Las Vegas’. The tumble here is, of course, this devil’s fall from heaven, and his time in Las Vegas is punctuated by deft and pleasing one-liners and poetic sleights of hand. And its rhythm punches the dark comedy home:

 

            Once, I lived

            by passion’s flame,

            but I learned

 

            cold blood

            is better.

 

It’s a conceit that could easily be kitsch, hollow, or monotonous — or all three — but Preston avoids that with her five-part structure that winds from Lucifer’s fall to his gambling empire rising from the desert, ending with bitter desperation:

 

                                    At night, look down

            from space and Vegas is

            the brightest thing on this world.

 

            Look down, damn you, and see.

 

Preston wears the voice masterfully; the poem is among her best here, and makes even more sense alongside the book’s epigraph, a quote from Terry Pratchett: ‘All tribal myths are true, for a given value of “true”.’ The bombastic and subversive elements of Pratchett’s Discworld novels and his collaboration with Neil Gaiman on Good Omens can serve as another tonal layer, an additional sounding board for a reader throughout this collection.

Tumble often bears the airiness of a soft-spoken speaker, the dust and familiarity of fable, and the charm of natural beauty. But it’s a collection shot through with fleeting moments of bitterness, fear, irony and anger, and it’s at this intersection of the lovely and the dangerous that Preston’s poetic craft and ambition is at its height.

 

 

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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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Tūnui | Comet
by Robert Sullivan

 

Auckland University Press

 

 

$19.99

 

 

ISBN: 978-1-86940-969-2
Published: April 2022
Pages: 72
Format: Paperback

 

 

 

Reviewed by Anton Blank

 

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It’s 23 years since Robert Sullivan (Ngāpuhi Nui Tonu, Kāi Tahu) published Star Waka, the groundbreaking collection about journeys and navigation that established him as one of our leading Māori poets. Since then, his research and passions as a writer have led him back, many times, into what Epeli Hau’ofa famously called ‘a sea of islands’.

Captain Cook in the Underworld (2002) — commissioned by composer John Psathas as a choral libretto — was a book-length poem exploring both Polynesian and European mythology. The 2005 collection voice carried my family continued Sullivan’s interrogations of the Pacific as a site of exploration and conflicting narratives, including accounts of Tupaia, Mai, Koa, and Te Weherua, all of whom sailed with Cook.

Sullivan’s work as an editor in the past twenty years can also be seen as an uncovering of voices, an attempt to map a new Pacific. Whetu Moana (2002) and Mauri Ola (2010), both edited with Albert Wendt and Reina Whaitiri, were major anthologies of contemporary Polynesian poetry in English. Puna Wai Kōrero, co-edited with Whaitiri, was a landmark anthology of contemporary Māori poetry in English. This body of work, as writer or as editor, suggests Sullivan’s wide interests as a reader, and his broad vision of Indigenous writing in the South Pacific.

In his new collection Tūnui | Comet, Sullivan’s voice is warm and intelligent, and at times detached, the poet as observer. When he explores historical issues that impact contemporary Māori and Aotearoa New Zealand’s natural environment, the voice of the poems is measured and considered. Titles like ‘Decolonisation Wiki Entries’ and ‘Decolonising the Coastline’ suggest the late Moana Jackson’s influential essay ‘Where to Next? Decolonisation and the Stories in the Land’. ‘The Declaration of Independence’ is dedicated to Jackson himself, and reflects that great thinker’s own carefully constructed rhetoric:

 

… Why are we talked to about

the Treaty when it is Te Tiriti that was signed by us

and He Wakaputanga spells it out so very clearly

in black and white with our nose moko

as signatures – can you get any closer?

 

This piece sits almost halfway through Tūnui | Comet, and in many ways it’s the centre of the collection, an anchor for the poetry that precedes and follows it, and a clue to the collection’s main concerns: tino rangatiratanga, and the interconnected issues of colonisation, capitalism and Māori agency.

As the title of Tūnui | Comet suggests, Sullivan is still looking to the skies — ‘Clouds are habits’, the first poem begins — and is equally adept with Māori rhetoric and English poetic traditions. The sea and its deep past is still a presence: Maui hauls up land from ‘a patch of ocean black with fish’; Kupe gives orders. Many of the poems here offer a reinterpretation of our shared history, which begins with sea voyages of different kinds. The poem ‘Ah’ describes the impact of the first Europeans and the ‘new things’ they brought:

 

We learned to see

with spectacles,

and used our own

medicines in vials,

and ointments,

and shared them

with the sailing ships

that came to buy

our medicines,

carvings, cloaks

and food.

 

In a number of poems, Sullivan tries to make sense of Captain Cook, from his boyhood apprenticeships to his ‘big ego, hunger for fish and chips, plus ignorance/of what it meant setting out without blue blood.’ Of course, Sullivan is not the only writer from the South Pacific confronting Cook as harbinger: the recent anniversary spurred Tusiata Avia’s ‘250^th anniversary of James Cook’s arrival’ (Hey James,/yeah, you/in the white wig’), Selina Tusitala Marsh’s ‘Breaking up with Captain Cook on our 250^th Anniversary’ (‘You’re too wrapped up in discovery’), and Alice Te Punga Somerville’s 2020 book Two Hundred and Fifty Ways to Start an Essay about Captain Cook.

Here, rather than address Cook, or rage at him, Sullivan embodies him and permits Cook reflection. In ‘i wasn’t a poet for writing placenames’, he assumes Cook’s persona from birth to ‘severed burial at sea’, diminishing the historical figure’s authority by using lower case:

 

i was a foreman’s son who expanded

the admiral’s imperio cogito

never-setting horizons ergo sum

thanks to sharp clocks

and well-scribed logs

going to australis incognita

tahiti or the antarctic

 

In ‘Cooking with Gas’, Sullivan employs a playful tone, embracing both pastiche and anachronism:

 

I could have dined out with rear admirals
and royals. But it was the press made me do it.
They kept talking me up. By George,
I had to go out there again, and a third time too
like a Hollywood mogul.

 

Cook, speaking from beyond the grave, takes part in an ongoing dialogue with history — ‘what if I stayed in Aotearoa?’ — and debating his own legacy:

 

What if we had gained the friendship,

love and trust of the Natives,
and returned that equally
at the time, not needing
to constantly gaslight
and to make amends?

 

But in Sullivan’s collection, along with the Endeavour — the real thing and its replicas — there are the Interislander Ferry, surfboards and Valiants, open-air buses in Waikiki. Tūnui | Comet looks around as well as back, concerned with the many existential crises of modern Māori. This makes the collection feel both current and timely, an insightful read for any New Zealander pondering the issues of nationhood and belonging.

It’s also a personal collection, dedicated to Sullivan’s mother, Maryann Teaumihi. Some of the poems place him in his old Auckland life, like ‘Hello Great North Road’ and the poem ‘Kawe Reo/Voices Carry’ that is an engraved installation on the front steps of Auckland Central City Library. (Sullivan himself is a former librarian.) Some poems are written in and about his new home of Ōamaru, and there’s a sense of him finding himself as a Māori writer in Te Wai Pounamu. He mentions a barbeque at Hone Tuwhare’s crib at Kaka Point and visits Moeraki ‘attempting to see the same/midges and kelp as Keri Hulme’, although Covid precautions stop him from attending the first, and ‘the throng of tourists’ disrupt the latter.

The influences on Sullivan’s own identity are also multilayered and faceted, and he explores them with deadpan humour. In poems like ‘Tētahi Waerea (Prayer of Protection)’ and ‘Decolonisation Wiki Entries’, Sullivan considers his whānau history, and its bicultural origins, embracing the intersections between the Pākehā and Māori dimensions of his whakapapa, and ‘bringing the unseen chains of a grandfather clock/and a Polynesian paddle into the conversation’. Sullivan’s identities also include spirit creatures. ‘The eel in me is a taniwha’, he declares in ‘Tētahi Waerea’, referring again to this in the poem ‘Comet’, the ‘Ngāpuhi taniwha eel’ that is essential to the spiral of iwi narratives.

Sullivan is not quite in place in Ōamaru, the ‘Steampunk Capital’ — ‘You need great literacy and numeracy/to have a career in Steam subjects’ (‘Steam’) — or even within his heritage of te reo Māori: Sullivan was ‘brought up speaking English’ though his maternal grandparents were both fluent speakers of te reo. ‘In time I will write in Māori,’ he promises in ‘He Toa Takitini’, aware that this loss of te reo is an issue for many of his generation.

 

[…] sometimes I am reminded by non-speakers

not to use the language because it cannot be used by non-speakers

which perpetuates a cycle of disuse. It’s quite an interesting problem.

 

Towards the end of the collection, two long-form pieces, ‘Te Whitianga a Kupe’ and ‘Te Tāhuhu Nui’ return the conversation to the foundational importance of whakapapa. There’s work to be done, he admits in ‘Whakarongo mai’: ‘Printed words tend to stick to the page/and last longer’ than ’knowledgeable kōrero’. But Sullivan is patient rather than anxious, aware of the stretch of history behind and before us.

 

No worries my whanaunga. We’ll be all together after this dust
has died down. We’ll be singing along side by side in our urupa.

‘Comet’ is the last poem in the book and gives the collection the English part of its title.

I’m writing a comet
from my tupuna, Papahurihia,
which from the earth
looks like a long tail

This ancestor whose headstone
turned around overnight

 

So, this too is a whakapapa reference, as well as an image of light and miracle, of a message from the skies. Tūnui | Comet faces many different directions, encompassing myth, history and the quotidian, drawing on Sullivan’s rich, complex inheritance.

 

 

 

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Anton Blank (Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Kahungunu) is an advocate, editor, researcher and publisher based in Auckland, and founder of the Māori literary journal Oranui.

 

 

 

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Massey University Press

 

$35.00

 

 

ISBN: 978-1-991151-14-8
Published: April 2022
Pages: 256
Format: Hardback

 

 

Reviewed by Stephanie Johnson

 

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Prominent New Zealand women writers of very different hues have recently published memoir, including the luminary and much loved Patricia Grace. Wendyl Nissen’s clear-eyed, plainly written and supremely forgiving account of her troubled, unkind mother stands in stark contrast with Charlotte Grimshaw’s literary, dense and alarming account of growing up as C.K. Stead’s daughter. Now, as a kind of pastel middle ground, we have poet Jan Kemp’s Raiment. Kemp does not focus on any wrongs done by her parents — her childhood spent variously in Hamilton, Morrinsville and Howick seems in any case idyllic — or by various men with whom she came into contact during her teenage years and early adulthood.

Raiment begins, as do many conventional biographies and autobiographies, with the subject’s birth. Kemp made her appearance in 1949, second born of what would become a family of three children later, with the birth of her brother Ian. Older brother Peter and Jan dubbed Ian Iwi, because they could not pronounce Ian. Perhaps, at that time in a Pākehā family, it would have been more likely to have been spelt Ewee, or similar, but Kemp spells it the Māori way and reminds us that it means ‘bone, nation, strength.’

Her brothers were kindly and chivalrous, as was her much older father Morice. Her mother Joan was ‘…both my friend and my mother.’ When Kemp was only a few months old, she flew with Joan to Christchurch to have her harelip repaired, a challenge mentioned only once more in the text. Kemp is refreshingly resilient.

The early part of the book drags a little now and then, with too much detail about school subjects and teachers. The voice, which matures in the later parts, can sometimes sweeten too much, becoming cloying and cutesy-pie, however this is ameliorated by Kemp’s admirable memory. At nine years of age, she wins the Miss Morrinsville Junior Personality Competition, first prize of which is a bike. Her detailed accounts of the dress she wore, of her momentary fixation on the golden hairs on her arm and the white hanky folded into the poppit bead bracelet she’s borrowed from her mother, of the garb and mannerisms of the town dignitaries, of the company that donated the bike, of the smell and weight of her father’s jacket when he puts it round her after the procession, return the reader vividly to small-town mid-century New Zealand. This is the poet’s gift — the stringing together of images to create an imagined or recalled world.

The memoir’s title is explained while Kemp recalls her teenage years. She attended Pakuranga College, where she did well, winning prizes in speech competitions. But like many teenagers, she was harshly self-critical, believing herself to be fat and ugly. But then one morning, during an out-of-body dream, or what we used to call astral travelling, she remembers looking down at herself in the bed:

…I slip through the back of her neck, putting on her body as if it were a garment-in-one, putting myself into her arms and legs, with me ending up in her head. Gradually I remember her name, Janet Mary Kemp, and what she is like, her personality, what she thinks about the sound of her voice, who her brothers and parents are and what they are like. Then I wake up. I have put on my earthly raiment. I get up.

Among the sexual experimentation and the listening to her mother who tells her to save herself for marriage, there are also the stirrings of love for poetry. A beloved teacher instructs how you must ask yourself:

. . . three questions in this order: What is the poet doing? How does he or she do it? Is the poem successful? You are not supposed to say I like it or I don’t like it straight away for that means you haven’t even given the poet a chance to be heard. It’s a useless and meaningless response.

If only this was still taught, rather than the supremacy of easily affronted feelings.

Pace and interest pick up when young Jan moves from the outskirts of Auckland into Grafton, to attend university. This is also a vanished world — many of the rambling old houses inhabited by students and staff are long demolished for the motorway. It is also a rollcall of many of the most well-known poets, artists and scholars of that generation, featuring, among others, Reimke Ensing, Claudia Pond, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, Robin White, Sam Pillsbury, Tim Shadbolt, Keith Sinclair, Murray Edmond, Mary Paul, Bob Orr, Arthur Baysting, Jean Clarkson, Michael Neill, Dennis McEldowney. Sebastian Black, Judith Binney and Kendrick Smithyman.

She recalls an exchange with Karl Stead:

Karl said to me, And when are we going to have an affair, Jan? I knew he was just being clever, so I managed to be just as clever and answered him, When you take the same emotional risk I would, I will Karl, which shut him up….I learned lots from Karl, though — once I told him I couldn’t possibly attain, sustain and retain the amount of knowledge I really should. Very wisely he said, The things you need to know will come to you and stay with you. The rest, you just let fall away. Those words have come back to me so often – just do your own thing. The rest will take care of itself.’

Here again is Kemp seeing the best in things, even Stead’s lechery. It is an appealing quality, as is her honesty. She doesn’t shy away from intimate details. Her first marriage, at the tender age of twenty, had the reception at Waipuna Lodge, which in 1969 was the height of sophistication. Her husband was an older man who was keen on self-pleasure. Kemp recalls that she asked him to ‘save some of it for me. He laughed and kept on, his face showing all the exhilaration he was feeling. I hated it, but what could I do?’

It was during the ill-fated marriage that Kemp trained as a primary school teacher, not that she practised the profession for long. In the early seventies she travelled to Wellington as one of a group of young New Zealand poets to perform in a late show at Downstage. Wellington poets Ian Wedde and Bill Manhire shared the stage, and Kemp’s devotion to writing and performing poetry was set forever.

The last part of the book is slightly rushed, particularly after the detail afforded the early chapters. It finishes in 1974 with Kemp setting sail from Vanuatu (then still called the New Hebrides) for Fiji. So abrupt is the end, furnished by a poem ‘Quiet in the eye’, which is about the eight-day voyage, that readers will be left wondering if there is another volume to come that covers her later years. I hope there is. I remember meeting Jan in 1979 in Christchurch, when she was touring with Hone Tuwhare, Alistair Campbell and Sam Hunt. I would certainly like to know the inside story there, as I would the story of her eventful life since, in Germany.

 

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Stephanie Johnson’s most recent books are the novel Everything Changes (Penguin Random House 2021) and the biography/social history West Island: Five Twentieth Century New Zealanders in Australia (Otago University Press 2019).

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Te Herenga Waka University Press

 

$35.00

 

 

ISBN: 9781776920006
Published: March 2022
Pages: 240
Format: Paperback

 

 

Reviewed by Sally Blundell

 

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In the final chapter of Mary Shelley’s brilliantly melodramatic fireside yarn, Frankenstein’s creation, wracked with guilt and all-consuming despair, vows to flee to the northernmost extremity of the globe. ‘I shall collect my funeral pile and consume to ashes this miserable frame,’ he tells polar explorer Robert Walton, near swooning with horror. ‘I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames.’

Does he? Vincent O’Sullivan picks up the loose thread and spins out a gripping second yarn as the benighted creature is ‘rescued’ from the ice by Captain Francis Sharpe and the crew of the Dorothea.

We are somewhere in the early 1800s, somewhere near the Arctic circle. Shelley’s book has been published, anonymously; the extraordinary exploits of Captain James Cook have cleared the field of any further maritime advancement. ‘What did the greatest Yorkshireman leave for maritime ambition, on anything but a minor scale, to be fulfilled?’ Sharpe muses. With no scientific goal, no expectation of new discoveries, he decides to travel down the globe from the north pole to the south, ‘for no other purpose than I choose to do it. And no one else has done so. I do it merely to show it might be done.’

Embarking on what he admits is nothing more than a ‘polished folly’, their ‘inexplicable guest’ retrieved from the ice is a subject of distraction and intellectual discussion. For the ship’s carpenter, this new arrival, with his frightening bulk and intimidating countenance, is simply a friend, a quiet but keen learner, courteous to the otherwise-mystified crew. For the older Sharpe, entrenched in an Old Testament Christian ethos, he is a primitive man, ‘or, in a way that bewilders the mind, sui generis?’ For his younger cousin, Lieutenant Richard Jackson, a devotee of Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (hence the name he gives Viktor Frankenstein’s lost and last creation), he is the archetypal ‘untampered natural man’. In the oak-panelled comfort of the captain’s cabin, they talk around their differing beliefs. It occurs to me, Sharpe says, ‘that the reality of sin, which you so dismiss, may cause a man no more stress than your grappling away with the notion of total liberty, of nature in itself the explanation of all things. Your obsession in your way as my own with another. Your Rousseau, my Aquinas.’

Jean-Jacques warms to the camaraderie and civility of this cloistered environment. Over nights of learned conversation or quiet reading, he begins to experience what he has craved for so long — fellow human beings, as Shelley writes, ‘who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of unfolding.’

They travel south, in a cocoon of growing understanding and something akin to friendship, until, following a chance purchase at a port in Australia, their faith in this softly spoken man-of-sorts comes to a crashing end. In a postmodern twist of storytelling, Jackson comes across Shelley’s book. He passes it on to Sharpe who learns, with unquestioning faith in the veracity of the tale, that their guest is a ‘depraved creature’, a murderer, a ‘thing beyond nature’ cobbled together ‘from corpses and the over-reaching of science.’ Sharpe is mortified; Jackson feels the pang ‘of being chastened in his optimism for what humanity might one day be.’ What to do? A plan of sorts is hatched as the Dorothea approaches the rain-battered slopes of Te Waipounamu, where Jackson is hoping to catch another creature of wonderment, the legendary moa. Here, foiling the plans of his so-called rescuers, Jean-Jacques, a creature made from science and nearly destroyed by humanity, flees again, finally succeeding in his lifelong search for love.

Huge in scope and intellectual heft, ‘Mary’s Boy, Jean-Jacques’ is the last and by far the longest of the stories in this book. It is a compelling read, imbuing the breathless revelations of Shelley’s account with a test case of Enlightenment ideals within the fading light of the great age of maritime exploration as the Dorothea continues its steady path to the next unwritten chapter in Jean-Jacques’ unending life.

All but one of the other stories are quieter, more contemporary, domestic, pivoting on the ties of family, loss and betrayal.

In ‘Good Form’, two siblings, successful in their professional lives, broken in their personal lives, are anchored to the old family farm by the inexplicable repercussions of their father’s infidelity, retold through the limited lens of childhood. The writing is spare, the story lingering.

In ‘Splinters’, O’Sullivan sketches out the gentle intimacy of a Friday afternoon tradition shared by a grandmother, Emily, and her grandson Donald — draughts, freshly baked melting moments, a quiet banter at odds with the perfunctory efficiency of her daughter, his mother, with her ‘frantic Friday face’. But buried within the warmth of this domestic scene is the memory of Emily’s own past transgression — undiscussed, unshocking even, but irrevocable in its presence: ‘It was there and you were here. You could look at it as long as you liked and imagine it looked back, but the terms were implacable. You took it for what it was, or not at all.’

The understated tenderness of ‘Splinters’ is even more apparent in ‘The Walkers’, as Tommo prepares his intellectually disabled son for life after his death. The poignancy is underplayed, building slowly beneath Tommo’s cheerfulness and Eric’s limited understanding of why his father is impressing on him a map of the streets of Dunedin.

Betrayal appears again in the superb ‘The Young Girl’s Story’. O’Sullivan is on home turf. Louise lives with her parents in London. Her mother’s research into the works of writer Manson — a nod to the author’s work on Katherine Mansfield — takes her to an academic conference in Nice where she introduces her bright, clever daughter to her colleagues. In staging a suggested tryst with the scholarly Kelvin Stein, Louise executes a punishing betrayal of her mother’s expectations with all the swift and incisive mastery of a Mansfield short story.

O’Sullivan builds his stories slowly. His words are measured, his sentences often truncated, his plot lines as unhurried as a walk on a stony beach. He reveals the weight of his subject with seemingly minimal effort. Only at the end of each story do we recognise his extraordinary grip on our attention. This is most evident when he adopts the dramatic tropes of the historic novel. As in ‘Mary’s Boy, Jean-Jacques’, ‘Ko tēnei, ko tēnā (also published in Te Herenga Waka University Press’ 2021 book Middle Distance: Long Stories of Aotearoa New Zealand) drives a spine-chilling nail of a tale through the mannered formality of a Victorian drama. Residing in the shabby grandeur of the rural estate once belonging to his father, slave trader ‘Mad Sir Jack’, Oliver is clever and reclusive, living in gentlemanly distraction with his enlightened wife and beautiful half-sister. His brother Mason is, it would seem, a chip of the old block, a sharp-eyed amoral adventurer travelling the globe to a remote outpost in Northland, New Zealand, to engage in the horrific purchase of a human artefact. Like the horse he drives in his final race back at his family’s estate, the plot careers towards a final act of revenge breathtaking in its violent execution.

 

 

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

 

 

 

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Breach of All Size: Small stories on Ulysses, love and Venice
edited by Michelle Elvy and Marco Sonzogni

 

 

The Cuba Press

 

 

$30.00

 

 

ISBN: 978-I-98-859553-5
Published: February 2022
Pages: 97
Format: Paperback

 

 

Reviewed by Guy Somerset

 

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Recently, as it is inclined to do every few years, Aotearoa New Zealand’s ‘book world’ has been bemoaning the poor sales of New Zealand fiction. The figures quoted are much as always: 5% of total book sales in New Zealand; each book lucky to sell 2,000 copies. The problem cited is as ever New Zealand fiction’s reputation for being ‘dark, literary and difficult’ (as one novelist put it). The solution? Once again, ramp up the number of commercial fiction titles and afford them more respect, including at book awards.

I think we can safely say Breach of All Size editors Michelle Elvy and Marco Sonzogni didn’t get the memo. Or if they did, they crunched it into a tiny ball and tossed it in the bin with a defiantly muttered ‘Whatever’.

Elvy is a prominent presence in New Zealand flash fiction, including as founder of National Flash Fiction Day; Sonzogni is a cultural dynamo at Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington, who is fast becoming New Zealand’s leading literary conceptualist and trickster. Witness his Dante double last year: More Favourable Waters, in which 33 New Zealand poets reflected on Dante’s Purgatory; but moreover the translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy in which he collaborated with illustrator Ant Sang to replace every instance of ‘ant’ in a word with a drawing of an ant. Who could have anticipated such an antic?

Those books were for the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death. Now it’s James Joyce’s turn — a writer who’d approve of Sonzogni’s tricksterdom, being himself a master of formal tomfoolery and experimentation, puns and pastiche, erudite allusion, and alliteration aplenty.

Breach of All Size marks the centenary of Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses. For good measure, it replaces Joyce’s Dublin setting with Venice, which last year celebrated the 1,600th year of its founding in 421. The 36 contributors were asked to write love stories or poems inspired by Ulysses and set in Venice. The pieces were to be short — mere glimpses — no more than (of course) 421 words. Compared with Ulysses’s 265,222 words. The book’s title is a nod to Joyce’s punning play on Venice’s Bridge of Sighs. A multilayered nod, as we’ve come to expect from Sonzogni. And there are more layers to be uncovered from both him and Elvy in their introductions, as well as from the University of Melbourne’s Catherine Kovesi in her foreword.

Breach of All Size is definitely literary, then. But what about dark and difficult? Not really — although you could be forgiven for thinking it would be.

Ulysses is the 700-page peak of early twentieth-century literary high modernism — a peak many a reader, despite many an attempt, has failed to ascend. It was banned on first publication, accused of obscenity — the ‘obscenity’ of its unglossed depiction of everything from sex to defecation to corpses in a graveyard. And not in such genteel language, either. Joyce wasn’t interested in the decorous deceits of the middle classes and the literary establishment. ‘There’s nobody in any of my books who’s worth more than a hundred pounds,’ he once said. (That’s about NZ$11,500 in today’s money.)

Leaving aside Ulysses’s deep immersion in what we’re now familiar with as the ‘stream of consciousness’ of characters — which in Joyce’s hands is less the gentle streams of our contemporary writers and more like the torrent of a river in flood — the single day (16 June 1904) on which the novel is set is packed with what for many 2022 readers (and a fair few in 1922) will be impossibly recondite references, not least to Homer’s classical Greek epic poem the Odyssey.

You probably ought to have read that, and for the complete experience might also consider Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the 1916 novel in which he introduced and provided much of the background to one of Ulysses’s protagonists, Stephen Dedalus. A working knowledge of the Symbolist movement wouldn’t go amiss, either.

So that’s a significant and challenging chunk of reading to get through before you even reach Breach of All Size. Don’t be deceived by its slimness and low page number. (More Sonzogni tricksterdom?)

Except. In the first story, Diane Brown’s ‘Stately, plump’ (titles have been assigned to contributors from phrases in Ulysses, those words being the novel’s first), a wife admits to her husband she’s never read Ulysses: “I’ve read the beginning and the end, to get the flavour, but there’s always something else demanding my attention.” Is that Brown also speaking? Certainly, although their contributions remain enjoyable and for the most part fertile flights of imagination, she and a number of the other writers give little sign of having read the novel. So readers can afford themselves the same let-out.

But, just as the anthology’s better stories and poems are those that engage with Ulysses more closely, the better reader experience is one that recognises when and how they’re doing so. These pieces include, appropriately, the last story, Selina Tusitala Marsh’s ‘Yes’. Its title is the final word in Ulysses, the end of a long monologue by another protagonist, Molly Bloom. The monologue is as renowned for being a single unpunctuated sentence of nearly 50 pages as it is for its sexual and bodily candour. Marsh distils (perimenopausal) bodily candour and other themes, with Venice and its canals put to metaphorical service, into her own single unpunctuated sentence, over a page-and-a-half that likewise culminates in the word ‘Yes’. With a lot of other yesses along the way, Marsh builds to a glorious crescendo of affirmation.

Two of the anthology’s other poets, Anne Kennedy and Lynley Edmeades, best capture the subtler aspects of Joyce’s style in ‘The nearing tide, that rusty boot’ and ‘The weight of my tongue’. That style amounted to more than abandoning punctuation. (Which he only does in Ulyssses in Molly’s monologue.) There were the missing words to convey the jumpcut fractured continuity of consciousness; the portmanteau words; the neologisms. Edmeades goes one better — and meta — and deconstructs Joyce’s technique before our eyes by crossing out her ‘missing’ words rather than erasing them completely.

If Venice is a city of love (and prescribed to be so in this anthology), Joyce’s Dublin is one of lust, and several of the stories and poems blend the two, such as in the libidinous energy of Lloyd Jones’s ‘Another victory like that and we are done for’; Sudha Rao’s sublimely sensual ‘Diamond and ruby buttons’; the straying eyes of Emma Neale’s honeymooners in ‘Bald, most zealous’; and the bawdy bathos of Trish Gibben’s innuendo-laden ‘To enter or not to enter’.

Sexiest of all is the following from Renée’s ‘Moment more. My heart.’, the story of a woman farewelling her seasonal farmhand lover:

The tree smells of you, of sun, it smells of the end of summer, the end of time, the end of us. My hands smell of you. Six Saturdays, six Sundays. Six Friday nights waiting. Six Monday mornings waking. Two days. Twenty hours working, two hours eating, washing ourselves, our clothes, swimming, the rest of the hours sleeping. Or not sleeping.

While many pieces pay stylistic and formal homage to Joyce — even if the stylistic and formal innovation is sometimes their own and owes only its spirit to him — others tip their hat in other ways: a Molly here, a prostitute or priest there. A newspaper office. The flâneurs.

No matter how closely they’ve engaged with Joyce — or for that matter with Venice (it’s no more than a variety of apple in Renée’s story) — most of the writers have let their imaginations roam productively with the challenge set them. As a result, you’re as likely to encounter the repercussions of institutional abuse (not once, but twice — in Jenna Heller’s ‘The inner organs of beasts and fowls’ and Wes Lee’s ‘A sugarsticky girl’) as you are a piece of historical fiction (Karen Phillips’s ‘Of soldier and sailors’), sibling enmity (SJ Mannion’s ‘Just you try it on’) or a droll non-fiction travelogue (Paula Morris’s ‘Hardly a stonesthrow away’).

There’s a touch of the travelogue about a few fiction pieces too; an inevitable touristy take on the city by writers from the other side of the world. And a touristy take means a certain Venetian milieu is missing. There are few people here worth as little as a hundred pounds.

Although the pre-modernist literary style and framing of one or two stories might make you wonder whether Joyce’s revolution of the word (the title of Colin MacCabe’s landmark 1979 structuralist study of him) has declined into a rebourgeoisification of the word, there are only a couple of actual duds in the book.

Elvy and Sonzogni are to be applauded for the daring of their anthology’s conception and the success of its execution. By turning the virtues of Ulysses’s expansiveness and intense immersiveness on their head, they and their contributors have shown how brevity and a casual dip can be virtues, too. Breach of All Size is unlikely to breach the 2,000 copies sales barrier or enrich the bank balances of anyone involved. But it will provide those who do read it with a more valuable kind of enrichment.

This year is also the centenary of TS Eliot’s poem ‘The Waste Land’, another beacon of literary high modernism. Dare we hope Elvy and Sonzogni have another anthology planned for that?

Sadly, we’re still seventeen years away from the centenary of Finnegans Wake, the 1939 novel in which Joyce substituted Ulysses’s stream of waking consciousness with one of sleeping consciousness, and wrote a book virtually unintelligible to most readers.

What might a febrile mind like Sonzogni’s make of that anniversary?

 

 

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Guy Somerset is a former Books and Culture Editor of the New Zealand Listener and Books Editor of The Dominion Post.

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Super Model Minority
by Chris Tse

 

Auckland University Press

 

 

$24.99

 

 

ISBN: 9781869409616
Published: March 2022
Pages: 104
Format: Paperback

 

 

Reviewed by Sophie van Waardenberg

 

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It’s difficult to read Chris Tse’s third collection of poems, Super Model Minority, silently. Just take his titles as examples: the very first, ‘Utopia? BIG MOOD!’, demands a scream. ‘Karaoke for the end of the world’ instructs towards singing. And though this frenetic volume undulates, it nevertheless joyously persists. Even a few pages before the book’s end, the reader cannot avoid the rapturous wall of text titled ‘BOY OH BOY OH BOY OH BOY’. Tse is, as he always has been, dynamic, luxurious, and fun — yet this collection showcases him as a writer of great tonal range. Beneath the effervescence, a reader finds the heavy, settled anchor of an explorative, calculating and often angry speaker.

Super Model Minority, which has become its own character in my mind, is open-armed, gracious and gregarious, the opposite of any insular and haughty idea of poetry possibly held by people outside the poetry world. Its poems take inspiration and language from Chinese-American poet Chen Chen, Aotearoa artist and poet Sam Duckor-Jones, Carly Rae Jepsen, George Michael, the Cards Against Humanity game and a bounty of other artists and musicians. Amongst the poems’ cultural references are mall cops, Korean soap operas and Girls Aloud. In Tse’s work there is always the feeling of a gesture outwards, and an acknowledgement of the work and people of whom and for whom these poems were made. This ramshackle backing chorus of borrowed voices adds warmth and breadth to the collection, while also pointing the reader towards the cross-section of identity and lyric Tse provides on every page.

The collection’s title is, of course, a clue to that cross-section. There is the excess and shine of the super model, melded to the cultural construction of the ‘model minority’, the homogeneous expectation of Asian immigrants to prove themselves as hard-working and intelligent. In these poems, Tse dissects some of that expectation, alongside the historical and current injustices faced by the queer community. It is not work done quietly; there is nothing hidden about Tse’s preoccupation with these themes. Indeed, as a whole, the collection does not shy away from the transparent expression of thought or feeling. The first sentence of the book’s first poem reads, ‘I will use my tongue for good.’ The reader knows, then, from the very start, that what they are to read has been charged with responsibility and moral motivation. It takes stamina for a poet to keep this kind of declarative work going over the course of nearly 100 pages, but Tse does it elegantly and buoyantly, injecting a lyrical bounce (‘I am not an exorcist—I am a sympathetic / vomiter’) and throwing a handful of stubborn glitter into an explication of racism, as in ‘Wishlist – Permadeath’.

There’s a conspicuous rotation of forms within this collection. A reader finds prose in standard paragraphs and verse in standard couplets and strophes, and then there are page-wide slabs punctuated by slashes or blank space, long-lined verse in islands scattered down several pages, and, in the poem ‘A flag’, two pages of prose segmented to echo the segments of the pride flag. This playful and various formatting isn’t new for Tse — his previous two books play in the same way. Still, it’s a technique that draws attention to itself. The pieces in more structured, paragraphed prose read as lyric essay, as in ‘Super model minority — Flashbacks’, with typographic punctuation to signal new sections. And still here there’s room for poetic play, especially in the gaps between sections: a paragraph about teenagehood is followed by one about generational trauma, and instead of feeling whiplash, a reader can leap with Tse through these discrete yet interconnected explorations of an identity under attack.

There were moments I questioned the form chosen for a particular piece, however. Perhaps ‘Version control’ would’ve found a little more fluency and momentum if it were laid out in prose; and Tse’s use of couplets in several poems — their ability to tense the sentence, leave me hanging — was so delectable I wished he would’ve used them more. Then again, perhaps I only wanted these things because my eyes had been treated so well by all the visual flitting and stretching I’d already been given.

Tse uses the ‘we’ and ‘us’ pronouns abundantly throughout this collection, another way of tying his story to those of his ancestors, peers, inspirations, and readers. It serves the poems powerfully, it rallies and includes, and yet I think the strongest poems here are ones where the ‘we’ slips away to make room for the ‘I’. When Tse’s lyricism becomes singular is when it is most electric. This oscillation between first-person plural and singular is clearest in ‘Portrait of a life’, a poem written after a series of participatory artworks by Félix González-Torres. Like González-Torres’s works, this poem is both for the self and for the world:

 

I believe the seasons of love      ….         will give us our direction        even as

they decay    .   one after the other and we slip        …  from our foundations.

I have no name for it             .  but I know it like the gasp      ..in my right knee

after a run     .   I want to prove many small things    . simultaneously

 

There is a community and boldness in the ‘our’ of ‘our direction’, and when it succumbs to the trepidatious, needy ‘I’ wanting ‘to prove’, there is a wave of vulnerability that washes over the reader. We want to give this speaker everything, because we are there with him, alongside, carrying the same flag.

Super Model Minority is a collection about love, brokenness, history and the future, and the celebration and commemoration of all these things at once. These are Tse’s inescapable themes, and the book does not shy away from displaying, dissecting, and playing with them on each page. There is a refreshing clarity in these poems, in their speaker who comforts and calls together its readers, always challenging and not succumbing to patterns of oppression. Tse, always grasping for something open, something bright, marks out the cyclical violence and marginalisation of the groups with which he identifies. In this collection’s opening, he tells his reader that there is room for something else, though it may take ‘reverse engineer[ing] utopia’ to find it — and at the book’s close, that potential is still there: ‘The pattern is whatever you choose to see.’

 

 

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Sophie van Waardenberg is studying towards an MFA in poetry at Syracuse University in upstate New York, where she serves 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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A Good Winter
by Gigi Fenster

 

Text Publishing

 

$38.00

 

ISBN: 9781922458131
Published: September 2021
Pages: 272
Format: Paperback

Reviewed by Rebecca Hill

 

 

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Gigi Fenster’s third book and second novel—one of the finalists for this year’s $60,000 Jann Medlicott Award for Fiction—is a short, powerful portrait of a mind on the edge. The narrator is Olga, a woman in her sixties who is helping out neighbour Lara. ‘Lara needed me that winter,’ she insists, because Lara’s daughter Sophie, a recent widow, has a new baby. Olga is drawn to Lara: ‘We’re both workers. We’re both roll-up-your-sleeves-and-make-a-pot-of-tea kind of people. Bring-in-the-wood-and-set-the-fire kind of people. Get-on-with-it kind of people.’

Olga helps out where she is needed, and perhaps where she is not, judging everyone for their inferior morals, habits and manners. Sophie is ‘a sick, depressed girl,’ she thinks, but without sympathy: ‘Who takes to her bed when she’s got a baby? Who takes more than nine months to mourn a dead husband?’

Olga’s claustrophobic first-person narration is a great way for Fenster to show off her skills: the reactions people have to Olga may be as insignificant as a look or an extended pause in conversation, but Fenster’s description of them means the reader understands immediately how the other characters really feel about her. This is juxtaposed with Olga’s constant misinterpretations of these details to fit the narrative of her own victimhood. Fenster keeps us wondering just how unaware Olga is of the truth and how deep her delusions go.

These interactions with the other characters are the only glimpses we see of the ‘real’ story, happening outside Olga’s mind, but there are enough of them to succeed in building a tense mood right from the beginning of the novel. Fenster does not let us believe Olga’s take on things for very long: it is clear that her protective nature is in fact a much more disturbing need to control. The depth of Olga’s obsession with Lara and her family becomes obvious, and we wait for Olga to snap. Her unstable mind justifies her actions by framing them as a me-against-the-world situation: ‘What those people don’t understand is that it is important to take control of a situation. It was important that I reminded myself that I am not a turn-my-face-to-the-wall kind of person. Important that I read the signs and took action when action was needed.’

Fenster keeps Olga’s true feelings about Lara ambiguous. Perhaps Olga herself doesn’t really understand them—is Lara a mother figure or a love interest? Lara, the main focus of a lot of Olga’s thoughts, is the only person she seems to like. Olga’s brother is ‘a pathetic, tragic little man’. Her fellow Body Corporate board members include that ‘naysayer, Fat Julie from number three’ and ‘that idiotic Mr Stuart’. Sophie’s friend Maxine, Olga says, is a fat and selfish woman ‘who smokes and watches Netflix all day’.

Olga repeatedly makes homophobic slurs about her brother’s ex-wife and her ‘no-tits, no-hair girlfriend … I mean, if you’re going to leave your husband to be a lesbian, do it properly. Don’t go for some boy with a vagina. Go for a real woman … Someone with breasts for crying out loud.’ She is hostile towards anyone who seems to have a greater claim on Lara’s life.

I served myself another piece of cake and I didn’t offer Sally one and I looked at her as I bit into it and I thought, You think you’ve pulled the wool over my eyes. But I know what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to be superior just because you met the dead husband and I didn’t. You want me to think that you know more about the family than I do.

Many of Olga’s criticisms and denunciations are repeated numerous times, and this feels true to someone with her obsessive, judgmental nature. (Sophie is ‘a wallower who liked being depressed’.) In her repetitions, Olga is also constantly trying to convince herself she is not the villain of a situation, and that everyone else is at fault:

Just because I once told her that I thought it was silly to have long, bright red nails made of resin. Maxine has long, bright red nails made of resin. I told Sally about Maxine’s nails and I told her I thought it was ridiculous. You can’t do anything with long, bright red nails made of resin. You can’t work in the garden or change a nappy. All you can do is smoke cigarettes and watch Netflix. And whine in the ear of your friend. That’s all Maxine was good for, with her long, bright red nails made of resin.

Lara is a ‘tired, brave woman’ who, Olga believes, is deeply empathetic: ‘I could see that she understood what it felt like to be trapped, to be waiting for someone to take you away.’

Olga sees parallels with her own long-dead mother, an ‘artist being slowly smothered to death on a sheep-shit farm, and wishes she could explain to Lara, ‘how a family could cause a person to sicken and die. How a family could wear a person down, could sap their strength so that they don’t even have the energy to escape. Or to breathe.’

In early glimpses of Olga’s early life and unhappy childhood, her mother seems unstable, with insinuations about alcohol and ‘sickness’. Details are perhaps too scant, given that backstory dominates the last quarter of the novel. Are we supposed to understand Olga as a profoundly damaged individual or as a psychopath?

The novel’s setting is also vague. Except for references to ‘the snow’ and Christmas in summer, we do not get any information about the location. This may frustrate some readers, but it does add to the mood of stuffy containment that makes A Good Winter such a distinctive novel.

Although Fenster gives us some hints at what Olga is truly capable of, the slow deepening of her delusions may have been more effective if the book had not been marketed as a psychological thriller. We know something dark must be coming, but readers expecting the same level of action as other novels in this category, like Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, will be disappointed.

Some clues are more obvious than they could have been, such as when Olga is taking her anger out on the garden: ‘I was cross and I wasn’t being gentle with the plants. I had to be stopped before I damaged one of them. Sometimes you have to be stopped before you do some damage.’ Fenster’s rendering of the ending is, however, as masterful as it is horrifying, and manages to also make horrifyingly perfect sense. One particularly brilliant moment reveals just how far removed from reality Olga is and to what extent she believes her own lies.

This unsettling portrayal of a disturbed mind could also be seen as a cautionary tale about who our friends really are and who we let into our lives. You will be thinking about it for days after you finish A Good Winter, though you may never want to pick it up again.

 

 

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Rebecca Hill is a New Zealand writer and translator currently living in Berlin. She also reviews books for the Listener.