Academy of New Zealand Literature

.

.

.

.

The Pistils
by Janet Charman

 

Otago University Press

 

$25.00

 

ISBN: 9781990048333
Published: March 2022
Pages: 84
Format: Paperback

 

————————————

 

House and Contents
by Gregory O’Brien

 

Auckland University Press

 

$29.99

 

ISBN: 9781869409647
Published: March 2022
Pages: 112
Format: Paperback

 

 

Reviewed by Sophie van Waardenberg

 

---

 

Janet Charman’s ninth collection of poetry, The Pistils, is both harsh and soft, generous and sparse. In performance of the book’s title, the poems’ dynamics and tones dilate and contract, reacting innately to nightfall and sunlight. The female body exists here, fortified and violated, alongside ruminations on childhood, cereal, television and the digital world. It’s a collection of delicate balance and clear, unapologetic voice.

In the collection’s smaller poems, many of which appear early, Charman allows large and subtle transformations to occur. ‘Picnic Days’ begins in the casual, habitual care experienced in childhood:

 

from wherever we were

she would get us

in the car

with a picnic

 

and ends in the same scene, but with a new turbulence, a darkening light, a kind of terror:

 

there is the icy current

making out

against our wriggling demurral

what we amount to

if we’re a doable swallow

 

The benign, warm communion of home-baked pies turns into the ominous communion with the waves. From this early poem onwards, water gets in everywhere, flooding so many of the following pages with the Wahine disaster, childhood afternoons spent drenched in the Waikato River, and the ocean between the speaker and a far-off friend reached via mobile phone.

There’s a minimalism to many of these poems that lets air and light and, yes, water in between the lines. But even with such brevity of line and ample punctuation of white space, there is a generosity of sound and colour. The poem ‘saying goodbye to the garden’ begins:

 

Aunt

in curlers

 

takes

the daffodils

 

it caused me hassle

to purchase

 

cuts them loose

in a vase

 

The hushed, bristling sound world created by the sibilance and assonance of Charman’s final words of each line — ‘daffodils’ and ‘hassle’, ‘purchase’ and ‘loose’ and ‘vase’ — textures this poem that seems, to the eye, sparse and thin. It’s a poem, like so many others in the collection, whose pleasure involves surprise: that the poem opens so widely to lines like ‘feel the sun / come down heavily on my skin’, and that these epiphanic moments don’t clunk in clumsily but feel, instead, just right within the poem’s gentle wave, is owed to Charman’s precision of craft.

To offset these more imagistic, clipped pieces are several looser and longer poems whose lines spill over the page and whose tone is a little less reverential, a little more laid-back. For instance, ‘the gold zipper’ and its three-line stanzas regulate phrases that otherwise burst out like soliloquies: ‘O shut up and lie down here in this bed for a change and listen’. The boldness of this poem is not only in these outbursts, but in its blatant repetition, each stanza appearing twice in almost the same order, but zipped up by the placement of the first stanza as the last. It, and several poems that precede and follow, pronounces a lyrical restlessness that is only satisfied by such luxurious enactment on the page, some stretching three or four pages, peppered with cold absolutes like ‘i never want to see them again’, referring to photographs, and blunt questions like ‘am i still missing out?’, referring to gender representation in literary journals.

It’s one thing for a collection of poems to feel conversational, but Charman brings this quality to our attention in poems like ‘when i was young’ by inviting in an italicised conversational partner, unnamed and seemingly imaginary:

 

there’s a bit of a beach

where we’d crawl ashore

and walk home wet

 

in your clothes?

how far was it?

 

Instead of a kind of apology for poetry’s inherent intensity and self-seriousness, the conversational constructions within these poems remind us that the story itself — the memory, the fact — is not what we, or the poet, care about. The poem is made of the telling of the story: how and to whom. Will the reader believe the poet? Can the poet believe herself? These questions are some of the most exciting ones in poetry, and The Pistils is all the more dynamic in these moments of asking.

In The Pistils’ title poem, which comes near the book’s end, I’m satisfied by the knotting of so many of Charman’s poetic obsessions and image worlds. The ocean and the creek are here, garments of clothing, elements of flora, the female body and the fortified ‘body of my city’. The poem brings out all the more clearly the project of the collection and its title, a pistil being the female reproductive organ in a flower, something upright, receptive to pollen, both shielded and advertised by a flower’s garments of petals. It makes sense, then, to have poems like ‘cunt’ and ‘womb’ here, poems that both celebrate and guard the most symbolic, vulnerable, and exploited parts of a female body, and the brittle humour of the poem, ‘rhymes for clitoris’, begging attention for what is later named ‘the organ of exclusive eros’. We are let in for moments at a time to this clothed, open body, then ushered out, always aware of the distance between a body and its speaker, its speaker and the world.

Gregory O’Brien’s House and Contents, a hybrid collection of both painting and poetry, is arresting and refreshing both as a visual artefact and in its pace and structure. Over 20 paintings are interspersed through the written work, which includes both lineated verse and several pieces in prose. The paintings are unfailingly, ungarishly warm, and comprise myriad interconnected elements that encourage the eye to play across the page. That warmth isn’t lost in O’Brien’s written pieces, the order of which, the author writes in a brief note, ‘has less to do with their geographical referents and more to do with colour, tone, phrasing or maybe a faint thematic thread’. House and Contents is vibrant and immediately inviting. What’s inside, it says, is for indulging, and for you.

The collection’s title piece is one of the most conspicuously structural elements of the book. ‘House and contents’, the poem — is it a poem? — takes the form of a day-long log. At first it seems to be a straightforward earthquake diary detailing an aftershock after a 6.6 magnitude quake in Wellington, which transforms in later entries into a more associative chain of thoughts on the subjects of destruction, infrastructure, and the connections between Santiago de Chile, Christchurch, and Wellington in the wake of disaster. Fragments of the log crop up semi-regularly throughout the book, so as a reader navigates the plentiful places and people and questions of House and Contents, she also holds the smaller structure of a day in mind, from the first entry at 9 a.m. to the last at 5 p.m.

One of this collection’s foremost preoccupations is with the fragmentary nature of things. This artist seems to be asking himself almost constantly, ‘How do these pieces make a whole?’ The answer is partly in the care taken to craft those pieces, small as they may be. For instance, O’Brien writes in ‘On drinking water’:

 

What besides

pure water a glass

of water contains:

 

of the sky nothing

necessarily, but always

something

 

Through the poet’s conspicuous enjambment, his short lines become not only fragments of the whole but whole things themselves. Unignorable, too, is the question of the poem, its fixation on ‘What besides’. What else is contained in one thing, even in water, which may seem only made of itself? Other poems in the collection more visually enact this predisposition to the fragmentary, such as ‘Sixteen things’ which is, of course, a poem of sixteen parts not easily held in equivalence to each other. One brief segment is titled ‘i.m. John Ashbery’, another, even briefer, has a title of 16 words (‘Sea kelp observed at Makara Beach, on the day of Samuel Beckett’s death, 22 December 1989’) to preface a poem of a single neologism: ‘murmurabilia’. Some are spaces for wordplay; others, lists of flowers.

What do we do with these fragments? Perhaps these poems do their real work when a reader decides how to put them together. One of the more self-contained pieces in the book, ‘House’, begins:

 

A man or woman

might be remembered

as a house

 

and goes on to detail each part of the body as a room of a family home. It’s dedicated to ‘Frank Jones, architect, and his wife, Pat’, and is one of the many pieces in the collection dedicated, or written in reference, to a specific person or place. The poem suggests we take the parts of ourselves that are separate and distinct, and look for ways to join them together. We can focus on one small part, and also on how that part, as in a house, is wired or nailed to another. The poem continues:

 

A house might also be remembered

for the synchronicity of

its bedrooms, densely wooded eyes

 

or for its wiring – the brilliant circuitry

of a family, for it is the house

illuminates the tree outside

 

‘A dwelling’, O’Brien writes, ‘is scattered / but not divided’. Then, to follow the poem’s metaphor, so is a body as it is remembered. The poems in this collection seem, too, separate and stuck together: fragments in search of connection to people lost and living, the landscape, the past, the materials that make up the built world.

House and Contents does not only offer a way for visual art and poetry to converse with each other, the writing offering voice and occasion to the paintings, the paintings offering another layer of tone and colour to the poetry. It offers, too, a fresh method of interaction between a reader and the book they hold. O’Brien proposes we take all that is offered of these mosaiced paintings and poems, and discover for ourselves ways to fix them into wholes.

 

                                                 

 

---

 

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.

.

.

.

.

Actions & Travels: How Poetry Works
by Anna Jackson

 

Auckland University Press

 

.

$35.00

 

 

ISBN: 978-1-86940-918-0
Published: March 2022
Pages: 312
Format: Paperback

 

 

Reviewed by Bryan Walpert

 

---

 

Some years back, but still well within recent memory, a minor stoush erupted about the selection of Jenny Bornholdt’s poetry collection The Rocky Shore as the winner of what was then called the Montana New Zealand Book Award for Poetry.

Judges praised the work because it ‘disobeys the rules that poetry should be compressed rather than sprawling, that it should avoid the personal, that it should eschew ‘unpoetic’ elements, that it should not include digressions or speculations about imponderables.’ Another poet argued this was precisely why it shouldn’t have won: ‘Take away the line breaks and the author’s name and you are left with a memoir. Subject manner, treatment, style, use of language … this is memoir. Not poetry.’

Significantly, though they had different views about the award, the judge and this poet agreed on a narrow view of what the ‘rules’ were at the time when it came to poetry. I found this disappointing, having fairly recently come from the U.S., where the so-called rules of poetry were constantly being broken, rewritten, broken again—and where ‘sprawl’ was part of poetry’s history and toolkit.

I was very happy, therefore, to encounter Anna Jackson’s new book  Actions & Travels: How Poetry Works. Her book takes a broad view of poetry, one that welcomes the expansive alongside the compressed—noting the long history for both—and is happy to consider poems along multiple other spectra. She even has a chapter called ‘Sprawl’, which starts appropriately with a quote from a poem in Bornholdt’s book and then takes us from the iconic American poet Walt Whitman in 1856 to the contemporary NZ poet Paula Green.

Neither textbook nor scholarly intervention, Actions & Travels is instead more like a guide to a country whose landscapes, vistas and history await discovery for the curious first-time visitor and further discovery for the returnee. She aptly concludes the book with a set of useful writing prompts for those inspired enough by the journey to want to contribute to the tradition. An associate professor in English literature at Victoria University of Wellington/Te Herenga Waka, Jackson has impeccable credentials as a poet—seven poetry collections with Auckland University Press, including a New & Selected—and is an author of two scholarly books, among others. She makes for a deeply knowledgeable, warm and enthusiastic guide to the territory.

Actions & Travels has any number of strengths. One of these is the diversity of poems across place and time: William Butler Yeats next to Bill Manhire, Catullus beside Janet Charman, John Donne by James K. Baxter. You needn’t love all of the poems on offer, but you will certainly find plenty to enjoy (she notes the reader will encounter 100 poems), as well as much to discover: even if you’re a long-time poetry nerd like me, I suspect you’ll find, as I did, poems you didn’t know and poems you knew but can now read differently.

New Zealand poets have, of course, a strong presence in her book. But it was particularly good to see a solid American representation—including such important contemporary African-American poets as Terrance Hayes and Jericho Brown. This sounds partisan and will possibly generate hate mail (please direct to the Academy of New Zealand Literature, which commissioned this review, as my inbox is full), but the fact is that U.S. poetry has had a strong influence on poetics here.

This was acknowledged by the editors (Bornholdt among them) of An Anthology of New Zealand Poetry in English back in 1996. They wrote, ‘in the last three decades, local poets have turned more and more to American models, enriching and complicating the notion of tradition.’ Such influences tend more recently to be less publicly acknowledged, so it was good to see Jackson affirm, for instance, that it is the ‘contemporary American poets who are the most important influences on [Hera Lindsay] Bird’s work’. It seemed evident to me then, but discussions of Bird’s work, when it burst into public consciousness in 2016, tended to treat it as something completely fresh, as though it appeared ex nihilo.

One of the book’s surprises is its sometimes idiosyncratic groupings. Sometimes Jackson groups poems by craft, e.g. the chapters ‘Concision, composition & the image’ and ‘Form.’ But other chapters are held together very broadly by style, e.g. chapters on ‘Simplicity & resonance’ or ‘The ornate & the sumptuous’ (and the aforementioned ‘Sprawl’), or by subject matter, e.g. political poetry (‘Poetry in a house on fire’), ‘Conversations with the past’ and ‘Poetry & the afterlife.’ There is one chapter called ‘Letters & odes,’ which tends toward what I would call mode.

The advantage of this diverse approach to grouping poems is that it provides for appreciation rather than pedagogy to act as the lens. That is, though this book will teach you plenty, its primary interest is in revealing some of the things one particular reader—Jackson—has over time learned to appreciate about poetry. As she explains in her introduction, ‘I just write about poems I love and what I love about them.’

Such broad groupings also provide a means to see how certain aspects of poetry cut across time and style, taking on local textures. This permits Jackson to suggest in efficient fashion, for instance, how understanding ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ by the modernist William Carlos Williams allows for greater appreciation of Bornholdt’s poem ‘Photograph.’ This is a useful example for any teacher of poetry: one, in fact, of many such instances that suggest the broad audience—from novice to writer to teacher—to which this book will appeal. I was quite taken, for instance, by the link Jackson draws between traditional odes and contemporary poems written as though they were letters, one of those obvious links that are only obvious once someone sufficiently experienced has insightfully pointed it out; I’ll no doubt draw from that in my classes.

There are occasionally, to my mind, downsides to these groupings. On the one hand, the conception of these sections proved at times narrower than I might have preferred. For instance, her chapter on the ode, given the link to letter-writing, tends to narrowly focus on direct address (formally, ‘apostrophe’), when, in fact, odes encompass a far greater territory (just what an ode is has puzzled critics for hundreds of years, hence the diversity). On the other hand, her groupings at times were broad enough to blur the lines between important sub-genres or modes worth more distinct attention, e.g. the traditions of love poetry and the elegy. Elegy is such an important mode in poetry—the elegiac such an often-sounded note—that I was surprised to find little attention to it as a distinct approach, even in her final, beautiful chapter ‘Poetry & the afterlife.’

Another strength is Jackson’s careful readings, which at their best elucidate the complexities of the poem in ways that are accessible and which suggest why we might appreciate it. This comes through, for instance, in her reading of Hone Tuwhare’s poem ‘Hotere,’ as she draws our attention to ‘the perfectly placed colloquialisms’ and the effect of the ‘rising inflection’ of the tone—casual though the language might appear, she clarifies that these are strategic decisions. It comes through, too, when she suggests that the ‘slashes within lines’ of essa may ranapiri’s ‘she cuts herself shaving’ ‘suggest rupture and allow ambiguity.’ In general, I admired how well Jackson balanced a close reading of a poem’s careful use of technique with the need for accessibility to a non-scholarly audience.

Still, though largely guided by the lens of appreciation and a discourse suited to the non-scholar, the approach of the book is just occasionally uneven. For instance, she does lean toward potentially challenging close readings when she gets to Sappho and Catullus in her interesting chapter ‘Conversations with the past,’ when she elucidates the differences between various translations and adaptations to suggest a subtle ‘play of difference and identity.’ For instance, she draws on scholarship and etymological analysis here in far more detail than elsewhere, noting ‘Classics scholar and translator Daniel Mendelsohn observes that the Latin word for ‘‘repeatedly” , identidem, is derived from the repetition of the word idem, or “same,” and in turn gives us the concept of identity.’

This already risks treading onto abstruse territory for a non-scholarly book seemingly aimed at the non-specialist, even the novice. She then goes on to provide on that page a lengthy scholarly quote from Mendelsohn: ‘In ordering the words out of which he creates his own version of Sappho, he puts the adverb adversus, ‘‘opposite,” immediately next to identidem,’ the effect being, Mendelsohn concludes, ‘to make you hear the words opposite and same after the other: otherness, alterity, and sameness, identity, are exquisitely contraposed.’

Personally, I loved the brief deeper dive into scholarly distinctions and vocabulary (‘alterity’)—I learned something, and it has the advantage both of showcasing Jackson’s passion for these poets (she has two poetry collections that engage with Catullus) and suggesting just how important subtle language choices can be to the complex effects of a poem. But from the broader view of the project, it is distinct from the sort of discussion we find elsewhere in the book.

If, on the one hand, the subtle extended attention to Catullus might go just a bit far for some readers, at other times I wished she had aimed the impressive lens of her experience more fully on some of the other poems. For instance, Jackson is such a keen reader that I’d love to hear her explicate, say, Kay Ryan’s poem ‘Linens,’ which she touches on only briefly in discussing ‘concision.’ She does glide lightly through some poems who could easily withstand greater scrutiny toward useful ends. In discussing form, she might have noted that Elizabeth Bishop’s use of the sestina is apt because it performs the sorts of cycles it describes, which would usefully suggest how form and meaning intertwine. Given her interest in the ways that poems converse with the past, she might have observed in discussing Terrance Hayes’ sonnet, which he calls a ‘prison’ and ‘a box of darkness with a bird in its heart,’ that it recalls the famous poem ‘Sympathy’ (1899) by the African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar: ‘I know why the caged bird beats his wing / till its blood is red on the cruel bars.’

Similarly, she draws on Jericho Brown in her chapter on ‘Form’ to offer a terrific reading of his use of the sonnet to create a new form. But it seems a missed opportunity given the topic of that chapter not to discuss Brown’s amazing facility with the line break. His work, which would work well alongside Jackson’s attention to line break in Marianne Moore’s ‘The fish,’ often suggests how fundamental the line break can be to meaning, the way a line in Brown’s hands so often implies the sentence will conclude one way then, after the break, concludes in a much more surprising one.

Of course, there also are the inevitable might-have-beens with regard to which poets to include. I would have given more attention in ‘Sprawl’ (okay, that subject is close to my heart), for instance, to such poets as Alan Shapiro, Mark Doty or Barbara Hamby (and indeed to Bornholdt) to suggest how sprawl might encompass both the expository and evocative, and might suggest how the reliance on syntax in such poems becomes itself a dazzling art.

It is the job of a reviewer to point out such things. Then again, re-reading my concerns, I keep coming back to this: So what? What of the fact that I might have done things differently, preferred different poets, argued for different distinctions? That’s poetry—a field in which there are no answers, only arguments. That, after all, is what makes poetry a living art form, makes it a community rather than a museum, filled with interest and beauty and surprise. This more or less is the point of Jackson’s useful and approachable book, which generously and successfully characterises poetry as a long, interesting conversation worth entering.

The interesting idiosyncrasies of her choices and structure are in fact part and parcel of Jackson’s implicit argument about the relationship between the reader and the poem. She doesn’t expect a reader to agree with her choices or her opinions. She says so directly, urging the reader to peruse and consider the poems (she provides a web link to them) before reading any given chapter, thus ‘forming their own sense of the poems that can be compared with mine.’

Her argument for the role of the reader is implicit, too, in the epigraph from the poet Anne Carson, who provides the source of the book’s title. The epigraph suggests that the poem is always a dynamic relationship between text and reader: ‘I think a poem, when it works, is an action of the mind captured on the page, and the reader, when he engages it, has to enter into that action. His mind repeats that action and travels again through the action…’

What Jackson wants, as I see it, is not to argue for her readings or her distinctions and groupings as fundamental or unassailable—simply reasonable and appreciative. What I think she wants most is for readers, whatever they decide about a given poem, to be touched by poetry and to engage with it. As the epigraph from Carson concludes: ‘by the time you get to the end you’re different than you were at the beginning and you feel that difference.’

I called Jackson’s a guide to the country that is poetry—it is, though not for the gawking tourist, but rather, one I would happily recommend for the intrepid and curious traveller.

 

 

 

---

 

Bryan Walpert is the author of four poetry collections, most recently  Brass Band to Follow (Otago UP), two scholarly books about poetry and three books of fiction. His novel  Entanglement (Mākaro Press) is shortlisted for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the 2022 Ockham New Zealand national book awards.

.

.

.

.

In Amber’s Wake
by Christine Leunens

 

Bateman Books

 

$34.99

 

 

ISBN: 978-1-77689-033-0
Published: February 2022
Pages: 260
Format: Paperback

 

 

 

Reviewed by Stephanie Johnson

 

 

---

 

Christine Leunens has been living in Nelson since 2006, after an international career as a model and some success as a screenwriter. In Amber’s Wake is her fourth novel; the most famous being Caging Skies, adapted by Taika Waititi for his award-winning film Jojo Rabbit.

This time, Leunens turns her eye on her adopted home, more particularly Auckland, stamping ground of the central protagonist, Ethan Grieg. The first-person narration begins in 1979 at the Nambassa festival, runs until 1991, and then casts off into the future. In a couple of paragraphs Leunens swiftly evokes Nambassa in all its nudie hippy patchouli dope-smoking colour, setting the scene for the first meeting of Ethan and Amber, who will become his great love. They are the same age, almost eighteen. Both are from relatively conservative families, and both are just setting out on adult life.

The novel would end not long after if the course of love ran smooth, but it never does, and Ethan and Amber have some fearsome obstacles. Leunens keeps the pace rolling at a swift clip as Ethan studies film at A.T.I (which she laboriously only ever refers to as Auckland Technical Institute), does a little OE, puts up with his mother on return, lives in scungy flats and pines for Amber, who gets married, but not to him. The limitations of the first-person perspective mean that the reader can only know what he knows about her life, from what she tells him and what he observes. Late in the book Ethan remarks that he is ‘the one who is as much part of the picture but who is somehow always left out of it.’ Leunens wants us to believe that Ethan loves Amber forever and above all others, which a cynic might think is only ever a subject for a woman novelist.

The era is carefully evoked. During Ethan and Amber’s early phone calls in 1979,his little sister picks up the extension and listens in. He remarks that it’s ‘like Watergate’. Santa Claus is still in his finger-crooking glory on the front of Farmers in Hobson Street; in September 1981 the Tour is dividing us more than any mandate, and the U.S. submarine Phoenix is made unwelcome in 1983. In 1987, when the Rainbow Warrior is towed up to Matauri Bay, Leunens’ description of the wounded ship is vivid and emotionally affecting:

. . .  [A]nyone could tell the ship was in a state beyond hope. Too much of her hull was submerged below the waterline, only a small sample of the rainbow painted on the bow still visible, the white dove just making it out of the water like a flying fish. She looked ravaged and old, the wood on the front deck looked rotten, and the holes at the bow were weeping with rust.

As the novel progresses, Ethan’s voice matures. Early on, there is a penchant for exclamation marks and capitals. When Amber accompanies him to Eden Park, he observes: ‘…she went absolutely APE! The moment we got outside the grounds she started siding with the most hardcore protesters, freely throwing ROCKS and FUCK YOUs at the POLICE!’

Leunens has listened to the way we speak, or some of us. Ethan remarks, ‘Man, did she know how to make me feel bad’ and … ‘boy was she quick to find just the right thingamajiggy to fit into another thingamajiggy’

Ten years older, the sadder, wiser man expresses himself more moderately, reflecting on his past from the distance of Antarctica while he makes a documentary.

The intended readership for the novel is blurred. It would appeal to young adult readers. Sexual content is never explicit. Ethan remembers: ‘…we stared into each other’s eyes for so long and then, still staring like that, came together… It was intense love, right from our hearts. Afterwards she clung to me like she never wanted to let go.’ Adult readers might struggle to take this seriously.

Likely, In Amber’s Wake would make good television. It’s episodic, the characters are kindly if sometimes misled, and the complex plot hinges on tangled relationships, often with a slightly old-fashioned desire to preserve family reputations and standing in the community.  A golden light of nostalgia is cast over all.

 

 

 

---

 

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).

 

.

.

.

.

The Fish
by Lloyd Jones

 

Penguin

 

$36.00

 

ISBN: 978-0-14-377689-5
Published: March 2022
Pages: 228
Format: Paperback

 

 

Reviewed by Cait Kneller

 

 

---

 

In Lloyd Jones’s The Fish, a wayward daughter gives birth in a foetid caravan by the sea. The baby is different—so markedly different that his grandfather refuses to hold him. Our narrator, the child’s young uncle, watches his family shift to accommodate their strange new kin, their Fish.

Jones’s last novel, The Cage, was an unsettling commentary on the murkiest parts of human nature—the way we can acclimate to terrible conditions, and grow indifferent to brutality. A rich allegory, the novel takes place in what Nicholas Reid called ‘the non-specific world of fable’—somewhere faintly recognisable as New Zealand in a dystopian future—and contrasts its detachment against a deeply affecting darkness.

In The Fish, the same allegorical tone pervades (with its accompanying vagueness), only this time it grows frustrating. The novel is described as an exploration of family bonds, yet it treads so lightly over the detail of domestic life, all its charming and bitter idiosyncrasies, that nothing feels sufficiently examined.

You may spend the entire novel wondering what the hell is going on with ‘the Fish’. His ‘fishiness’ is exaggerated in early chapters: a piscine odour overwhelms his mother’s tiny caravan, and on several occasions he is alleged to have gills. Descriptions of the child—alternately referred to as him, our Fish and It—focus on his wide mouth, his loping movements and bulging eyes. Our narrator says, ‘It is a fish, yet we have to pretend it isn’t.’  Given the mystery surrounding the baby’s conception, you could be forgiven for suspecting some deep-water tryst has taken place, à la The Shape of Water.

However, as the Fish grows and his tragic mother fades into the backdrop, so fades our sense of the ethereal. Jones includes occasional detail to help root us in time and place, mainly Wellington in the 60s: Norman Kirk is leader of the opposition; chocolate milk has yet to reach our shores. Perhaps the Fish is meant to illustrate how a family will reckon with their illegitimate, disabled grandchild in an unforgiving era: material lack, intolerance and dysfunction meet at the birth of a unique baby, in the airless confines of an old caravan. The narrator alleges that ‘mostly’ family members ‘dote on the fish because we cannot offer its mother the same.’ This doting is largely mentioned in summary rather than shown in scene. The Fish’s grandmother, we’re told, is one moment ‘all over the Fish. But she can also be awful to the Fish, severe when it misspells a word (“For God’s sakes… you halfwit.”)’

Perhaps this suggests the novel is examining our capacity to love and be ashamed of someone in equal measure, and the way that shame stings in the gut precisely because love is its source. The Fish is not the only source of shame and object of love in the family: his (unnamed) mother and aunt Carla are both, according to the narrator, promiscuous; they both have illegitimate children and no long-term relationships with men. But ultimately, the narrator seems indifferent to the humanity of his nephew, his grief at the various family losses in the novel (‘will I ever see the sun again? Or a flower, a fruit tree in blossom?’) fake or overwrought.

The climax of The Fish borrows its emotional heft from the Wahine disaster, and it is a gripping extended sequence in the final third of the novel. By the final pages, Jones has rinsed three family members from the story—washing them away without giving them real agency. The narrator is a passive observer to a fault. His bereaved mother takes a solo trip to Greece, leaving her teenage son to care for the Fish. The Fish goes walkabout, and teenage son sits at home, inertly wondering if either will come back. Later, he takes his own trip to Australia, to visit Carla, his distant elder sister. When she stands him up, he lingers in doorways for a few days before returning home and never speaking of the trip again. Perhaps Jones is interrogating some retro Pākehā impulse to swallow difficult emotions? A cultural hangover from their stiff-lipped forebears? The novel, too often, is the story of unexamined depths.

One of the most memorable images in the novel arrives when the family has a holiday in California, and spend the night in a hotel across the street from the San Diego city jail. Each night, yearning women line the pavement in front of the prison. All at once, a flurry of love notes erupts from the top-floor windows, swirling confetti to be swept up and redistributed by the waiting molls. The moment swells on the page, only to deflate when the next day the narrator (then a teenager) unfolds one of the remaining notes—revealing a hackneyed promise to reunite in Mexico, implausibly written in English.

This scene, despite its cinematic qualities, does not quite seem to fit in the novel, perhaps because we have no idea why a family trip to Disneyland in the 1960s included several nights in San Diego. I was frequently pulled out of the story by incongruous or anachronistic detail—wondering if this family could really afford to fly their daughter home from Seoul in a pinch, or move a dilapidated caravan via helicopter, and when exactly would pizza delivery have entered a New Zealander’s frame of reference? At one point, the narrator questions why ‘a banknote with the picture of the man who climbed the world’s highest mountain’ is ‘worth more than a banknote with a picture of the national bird whose achievement lies in being?’ This comment was confusing, sending me one hundred years-deep into the Reserve Bank’s currency: I know Hillary appears on the five-dollar note, but the narrator’s big point implies the kiwi appeared on something smaller, a one-dollar bill. This hasn’t been the case since decimal currency was introduced. Is the narrator comparing a ten-shilling note of old with a five-dollar note introduced in the 90s? (Also: there are endangered native birds on all our bills, including the $50 and $100 bills, far out-ranking Sir Ed.) The narrator’s grand statement only works if the comparison holds, and if readers aren’t distracted away from the story because of lack of care with detail.

Jones is an accomplished writer with an international reputation, including a Commonwealth Prize for The Book of Fame and a Booker Prize-shortlisting for Mister Pip. More recently, The Cage was a finalist in the Ockham NZ Book Awards. Perhaps what was seen as imaginative and stylistic strength in that novel—the archetypal characters, the ‘fable-like’ lack of specificity, the focus on allegorical meaning—is less successful in The Fish, with its grounding in a specific place and time. The realism of the novel is inconsistent; its fabulous elements are inconsistent. Like the Fish himself, the book is neither one thing nor the other.

 

 

 

 

---

 

Cait Kneller is a fiction writer and bookseller from Auckland.

 

.

.

.

.

Entanglement
by Bryan Walpert

 

Mākaro Press

 

 

$35.00

 

 

ISBN: 978-0-9951110-8-0
Published: October 2021
Pages: 268
Format: Paperback

 

 

Reviewed by Angelique Kasmara

 

---

 

Bryan Walpert’s latest novel, Entanglement, has already garnered notable attention since its launch in late 2021. It has recently been longlisted for the Ockham Book Awards 2022, and was named as one of the NZ Listener’s best 100 books of 2021. Walpert is the author of the novella Late Sonata (which won the 2020 Seizure Viva La Novella Prize), a short story collection, four books of poetry and two of literary criticism. With Entanglement, he’s built on these previous accomplishments to create a beautiful, stylistically adventurous and deeply philosophical work.

Three intertwined narratives form the structure. A memory-impaired time traveller attempts to correct a tragic mistake he made in 1976, when, as a frightened child, he abandoned his brother Daniel on a frozen lake in Baltimore. A writer-in-residence at the Centre for Time in Sydney in 2011 becomes romantically involved with a philosopher from New Zealand. An author at a lake retreat in New Zealand, 2019, uses workshop prompts to explore the disintegration of his marriage and the tragedies which have marked his life.

The sections set in the Centre for Time present us with aspiring novelist Paul, along with all his preoccupations for the time travel novel he’s writing: discussions chomp through everything from quantum tunnelling to Minkowski diagrams to chronology protection conjecture. This access into his research gives the lay reader a chance to grasp the basics of quantum theory, and the viability of going back and forth in time. This may sound like info dump territory, but it is all skilfully woven into the plot, especially within the passages exploring the connection between Paul and New Zealand philosopher love interest, Anise. Together they deploy nerd-bonding language to navigate their way through the human heart:

More pillow talk, she murmured.
Okay, I said. We are but tachyons…
How did you get past first base in high school?
I was just going to say that perhaps we were made to go faster than light.
How did you even make it through high school?

Their initial spark and the subsequent trajectory of all the highs and lows is believable, nuanced and intricately captured. One passage delivers foreplay in the form of a discussion between relativity versus presentism. I kid you not: it’s a very sexy scene. It also foreshadows the future in a few sentences towards the end of the chapter, adding depth to their (poignant in retrospect) pillow talk about time travel.

She said, pour me another Shiraz. I said, we’ve already made it through the bottle. She said, there’s another in the pantry. Later, when we’d killed the second bottle and were lying in her bed, I said, I told you I could predict the future but she was on her side, reaching into the drawer of the bedside table and said, I don’t suppose you brought one with you.

Walpert has a screenwriter’s eye for foreshadowing and payoff, with the three narrative strands braiding together to form a Möbius strip, seams eventually dissolving. Every word of the novel’s lean 268 pages works hard for its rent, and even its title is evidence of this micro-level thoughtfulness, encompassing as it does the tragic connection between twin brothers, the superposition of subatomic particles, and the intertwining of colliding hearts. Playfulness appears in unexpected places. A discussion on Schrödinger is followed with:

A thin line of light between the door and the frame. In one world, she will be sitting at a table, facing a mirror, putting on earrings. In another, she is buttoning a sweater. In a third, she will be undressed, in the bed, her hair loose over her shoulders. My hand was on the knob. It seemed like anything was possible.

The impact of the narrator’s decision to abandon his brother in Baltimore in 1976 haunts the rest of his life (and the entire book), and also illustrates the necessity of being able to forgive yourself: the ways you can punish yourself otherwise is worse than anything a court of law may sentence you for. When our narrator is given writing prompts at the Lyndon Writers Retreat, the precise and meditative sentences draw slowly towards that fateful day. The memory-impaired time traveller may not even remember his full name, but understands he has a job to do, that if carried out correctly, may atone for all of his regrets.

At its essence, Entanglement is an exploration of how grief alters the shape of your heart. There’s a simple, devastating scene which involves painting a room. Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli is evoked in one passage as Anise explains that holding onto the view that there is no difference between matter and energy gave her comfort after the death of her father. It’s all movement, she says, and each one of us is an event. She concludes with, ‘I was lucky enough to experience the unfolding of part of the event that was my father.’ This deep dive allows the reader to forge their own path as to how they interpret the ambiguous yet perfectly rendered ending.

 

 

---

 

Angelique Kasmara is a writer, editor, translator and reviewer from Auckland. Some of her work appeared in the anthology Ko Aotearoa Tātou | We Are New Zealand. Her first novel Isobar Precinct (The Cuba Press, August 2021) was the winner of the 2017 Sir James Wallace Prize for Creative Writing, and finalist for the 2019 Michael Gifkins Prize.

 

.

.

.

.

The Wilder Years: Selected Poems
by David Eggleton

 

Otago University Press

 

$40.00

 

ISBN: 978-1-98-859261-9
Published: April 2021
Pages: 314
Format: Hardback

.

 

Reviewed by Anne Kennedy

 

---

 

This hefty and handsome gathering of forty years of David Eggleton’s poetry is an opportunity to celebrate his exceptional contribution to literature in Aotearoa and the Pacific, and to survey his evolution as a poet. Currently the national Poet Laureate, and the winner of a raft of accolades including an Ockham for The Conch Trumpet, Eggleton started out as a fringy street poet, the self-described ‘Mad Kiwi Ranter’ delivering linguistic, imagistic, political torrents. (He was voted London’s TimeOut Street Poet of the Year in 1986.) Over the years, he partly migrated to the page, but not from any kind of conforming — no, he brought his audience with him; he educated his audience. By the sheer scope and whammy-power of his voice and intellect, he is iconic on stage and page alike. Very few poets transcend spoken and written; The Wilder Years is glorious testament to a poet who has done just that.

The 300 poems here are selected by the author from his nine collections published between 1986 and 2018, with eight new poems added. It’s always revealing to see how a writer regards their own oeuvre to date. Notably, Eggleton gives his early volumes a severe haircut and favours his later work — perhaps because he tends to write of the moment. There is no foreword; the poet doesn’t blow his own conch trumpet. A thumbnail biography of Eggleton — Fiji-born (of Rotuma, Tonga and Pākehā ancestry), Auckland-raised, and a long-time Dunedin resident — is useful because place looms large in his work, from his early portraits of a fecund, culturally diverse, crazy Auckland, to poems that look at Aotearoa with a cooler authorial distance but still plant their stake in the ground politically. That seemingly effortless yet searing rhetoric is Eggleton’s genius.

To cover a selection as extensive as The Wilder Years in detail in a review is impossible, so I’m going to talk big-picture to show exactly why this survey is important reading, and cherry-pick key moments from the collections.

Eggleton’s customary stance is that of the seemingly innocent observer who reports a tumble of images, metaphors and events of time and place that nevertheless find truths. A poem from his first book, South Pacific Sunrise, epitomises the poet’s love/hate view of a pulsingly capitalist yet desolate Auckland.

 

A bus sways forward concertina-style.

A finance house stacks up its cool vertical lines,

calculator-thin.

This town stands as open as an airport lounge.

Everyone looks like a new arrival.

(‘Big City Rush Hour’)

 

From the same collection, ‘Wings of Ponsonby’ is indicative of the poet’s two-pronged, chuckling lament.

 

… On the chunderous Waitematā

the rusty scows growl, and screw the sea into a batter

of white foam, like pus bubbling in a lung,

or like firemen’s chemical suds, or draught flagons you unbung.

 

Linguistically, Eggleton has always been fearless, using a rich array of features — assonance, alliteration, repetition, rhyme, and puns aplenty. He’s unafraid to be funny or tragic: ‘Auckland Airport Massacre in B minor’, or ‘Titirangi Considered as Wearable Art’.

Hand-in-glove with his semantic MO is Eggleton’s practice of referencing like crazy. His poems are suffused with an encyclopaedic litany of pop culture, history, turns of phrase both old and new, and the all-important news of the day. From the suburban greengrocer’s watermelons in the first poem in this book, to the Zespri in the last, product placement is a Trojan horse subverting the messages of nationalism and corporatisation: ‘Hedgetrimmer, fruit juicer, a shapely finger, / say cheese, think butter, think milk, think bigger’ (‘Pictures of Home’).

While the focus here is mostly of-the-moment, the sorry path of colonisation inevitably receives the Eggleton treatment. The impressive, sustained ‘Waipounamu: The Lakes District’, builds up a language-y, enjambing, history-toting head of steam: ‘Wanaka’s Roman-sandalled summer holiday season / is hot enough to boil the radiator of a slow Tin Lizzie, / steaming like a tea-billy at a saw-mill smoko’.

Eggleton’s concerns are many and varied. As well as being a prolific and acclaimed book reviewer (six-time winner of reviewer of the year), his Ready to Fly: The Story of New Zealand Rock Music is an ebullient trove of information. The ekphrastic seam in his poetry is similarly knowledgeable; in ‘Meditation on Colin McCahon’, he writes about the paint, the ‘hot blacks and ghostly whites’, as well as the land. This teaming array of interests — things, happenings, language — is one with Eggleton’s poetic style.

Eggleton’s pyrotechnics of word and reference uncover complexities lurking in the language and in society. With these assemblages, he invites the reader to join his gaze in a democratic way; we have all somehow found ourselves here.

One of the advantages of having these poems under one roof is being able to see how Eggleton’s work has developed over time. (I hope this book will spark a torrent of close readings and criticism of Eggleton’s work because, despite his appeal, he has been relatively overlooked among commentators. Toward this, and as an aid to the general reader, an index of poem titles would have been helpful.) Overall, it seems the confident soap-box poet of the early years has become not so much ‘wilder’ as more controlled, more sustained, and therefore more daring.

In the second book, People of the Land (1988), it’s exciting to see the emergence of inventive rhyme and scheme used satirically, as in the Eliot-ish, ‘Whatever next, whatever next, as the wind flicks over the text’.

By the third book Rhyming Planet (2001), Eggleton has emerged as nothing short of a virtuoso, high-wiring his trademark voice to magnificent intent:

 

standing bush went up in smoke,

burnt to a frazzle, cleared like throats

hurrumphing catarrh-rah-rah- boom-de-ay,

with a rumpty-tumpty rhythm track

of a colonial militia, in full fig, marching past

the rotunda built on Rūaumoko’s roly-poly belly

as possums acted the giddy goat.

(‘Farms: A Sequence’)

 

Rhyming Planet ends with the profound, gritty ‘Republic of Fiji’: ‘rain white as mosquito net, white as grated coconut / white as the helmets of ex-Governor-Generals’.

In such an overview, patterns and practices become evident. For instance, Eggleton shuns the much-exercised lyric ‘I’, yet ‘I’ and ‘we’ stalk the text, especially in the early work. But this is the poet in their external world, detached but full of feeling: ‘I came out of the Manukau City shopping centre / doing the Manukau Mall Walk – / the shoeshine shuffle, the hotfoot floogie, the baby elephant…’ (from Rhyming Planet). This ‘I’ could be you or me.

Over time, form becomes slightly but noticeably more measured. The eponymous ‘The Wilder Years’, from the 2018 Edgeland, assembles the iconic vocalization of agony and ecstasy: ‘A clinking canticle of glasses is poured / as all Kiwiland gets on board– / in sheep’s clothing looking wolfish, a teeth-gnashing nation’. But here, the orderly, waste-not-want-not stanzas perhaps reflect a late-style solemnity.

That the book finished with eight new poems including the poignant ‘Two Mosques, Christchurch’ is a good move, as Eggleton is mostly topical, always imperative.

This beautiful hardback edition is a long-awaited polymath Eggleton’s dazzling, momentous, glee-filled, horror-filled highlights-plus-more. The Wilder Years, the first forty years, is a book to own and treasure.

 

 

 

 

---

 

Anne Kennedy is a poet, fiction writer, screenplay editor and teacher of creative writing. Her latest book is  Moth Hour (AUP), shortlisted in the 2020 Ockham Book Awards. The Ice Shelf (VUP), 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 Frog Prince
by James Norcliffe

 

RHNZ Vintage

 

$36.00

 

ISBN: 978-0-14-377549-2
Published: February 2022
Pages: 302
Format: Paperback

 

 

Reviewed by Josie Shapiro

 

---

 

Before they were fodder for children’s books and movies, fairy tales were women’s stories. Tales told by grandmothers, mothers, aunts, sisters, daughters, shaken down through generations, details shifting with each retelling. Spoken to one another over repetitive work, like mending clothes, preparing meals, and spinning wool, these narratives were filled with the things women desired — a prince, a safe home in a castle, a happy ending; and also full of the things they feared most — the loss of their children, violence from men. When the Grimm brothers Jacob and Wilhelm first published their collected stories Nursery and Household Tales in 1815, the book was aimed at an adult audience, and found few readers. Further editions of the tales were heavily edited, to market the book as children’s stories, cutting out all the sexual references. Rapunzel’s pregnancy from her prince’s visits was erased, and the story of Hans Dumm, who could impregnate women simply by wishing for it, was taken out of the book altogether. These changes saw the book’s popularity skyrocket. But they weren’t the only changes. The changes increased the violence, particularly in retribution for terrible behaviour, and shifted language around women, creating a series of stories that saw well-behaved, god-fearing women rewarded, and badly behaved women punished.

It’s interesting to keep all this in mind when you read James Norcliffe’s first novel for adults, The Frog Prince. A charming novel that explores the possible origins of the fairy tale ‘The Frog Prince or Iron Heinrich’, Norcliffe employs a neat dual narrative structure to understand how stories change when ‘context changes’. In one thread, we’re in contemporary Europe, where David has been travelling with his colleague and girlfriend Cara during their term break. They both teach at Huntingdon, an exclusive boarding school in France. David is an old-fashioned New Zealander who wears ‘disreputable tweed’ with a ‘mismatched tie’ and ‘frivolous socks’; Cara is a sexy American full of contradictions: ‘open but private, light-hearted but serious, enchanting but infuriating’. Despite their contrasting personalities, they’ve fallen into a relationship.

David is certain he’s in love, and on their holiday he proposes marriage. Cara refuses with good grace, though not long after, she vanishes. David is distraught — where has she gone?

In the second narrative, a manuscript written by Cara, we skip back to 1810, and follow the Heller sisters Mathilde and Helga as they record their oma’s stories to take to the Grimm brothers. On their first trip, Mathilde develops a crush on Jacob, the elder Grimm brother, an infatuation that’s implied to be inappropriate. Desperate to have him notice her, Mathilde and her sister take more stories, and their circumstances force them to invent more than excuses to remain in his presence.

The two stories are linked through their common themes: unrequited love and the undercurrent of the Frog Prince story. In Cara’s manuscript, the Heller sisters write the Frog Prince story; in the modern world, we must follow meaning in the tale to understand Cara’s motives.

Norcliffe’s writing is jovial and sweet, and the gorgeous cover rightly indicates the light-hearted fiction within. Though some of the passages are dialogue heavy, there’s a wonderful warmth in the style and tone. The scenes set at Huntingdon toy cleverly with the dynamic between headmaster, his wife and the school staff. A highlight of this section is Angus, Huntingdon’s prickly art teacher. This jollier part of the novel is countered by a fascination with the ‘Forest’, the dark forest where Mathilde’s oma insists not only are all fairy tales set, but is also the place ‘where we all live.’ Dream sequences add a sense of foreboding to the narrative, and alongside Cara’s disappearance, the novel seems set for a climax of fantastical proportions.

We’re given hints of dark outcomes: Cara’s father Martin warns the school headmaster that his daughters will one day stab him in the back — ‘They’re probably sharpening the knives right now’, and one of the endings for the ‘Frog Prince or Iron Heinrich’ that is mentioned is one where the princess, instead of kissing the frog, ‘actually hurls it against a wall.’

The work doesn’t quite build to those promises, and instead of leaning into the magical elements of a fairy tale retelling, David’s story is tied to reality through tours of World War II memorials and a reconnection with his family in New Zealand. A health scare for David at the top of a belfry tower at the Hôtel de Ville is the closest we get to any true disaster, and through his journey the connections between the modern story and the fairytale seem less clear: who is the frog? Who is the princess? And who, of all the characters, is Iron Heinrich?

The novel is about lust and infatuation and love — David loves Cara and others lust for her; Mathilde loves Jacob — yet there’s no visceral sense of it: there’s no recollection of the physical intimacy that must have existed between David and Cara, and his love seems to be based on a very one-sided friendship. There’s the hint of sex, the shadow of it; however, much like the neutered fairytale written by the Heller sisters in Cara’s story, it’s reduced to allusion.

By telling the main narrative through David’s point of view, Cara is diminished to a mystery, a memory. David is angry at her for disappearing, which is understandable, but there’s also a sense he’s angry because she refuses to behave in the way he wants. There’s an echo of the fairytales that Wihelm Grimm edits, making the women more domestic and subordinate. David sends Cara countless emails, demands to know where she is, and he’s full of presumption about how he fits into her life. By largely witholding Cara’s perspective from the story, and revealing it mostly through inferred metaphor in her manuscript, Norcliffe takes the fairy tale from women and attempts to discover male desires and male fears, reversing the original meaning. The subversion isn’t without pleasure, yet the novel’s conclusion is slightly underwhelming.

And yet — The Frog Prince is a delightful novel about the power of love and the stories that shape our lives. Entertaining and engaging, Norcliffe’s gentle style will appeal to many readers.

 

 

 

---

 

Josie Shapiro is a writer from Auckland. Her short fiction has been published in takahē, Newsroom, The Three Lamps and Ko Aotearoa Tātou / We Are New Zealand (OUP, 2020).

 

.

.

.

.

She’s a Killer
by Kirsten McDougall

 

Te Herenga Waka University Press / Victoria University Press

 

$30.00

 

ISBN: 9781776564309
Published: October 2021
Pages: 400
Format: Paperback and ebook

 

 

Reviewed by Philip Matthews 

 

---

 

Let’s start with some scene-setting.

Rioting continued in Palmerston North over water and rates costs being driven up by the arrival of one thousand new wealthugee settlers; one protester had been shot and was in a critical condition in hospital. A non-violent protest was being held by iwi in the Wairarapa over former DOC land being sold by the government to overseas investors. A spokesperson called it third-wave colonisation and theft. A hīkoi was being planned from Cape Rēinga to parliament to remind government of its Te Tiriti obligations. The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico had increased by 6,000 square kilometres. MPI was predicting food shortages this summer due to extended droughts across the North Island, and as a result more Specials were being trained to deal with potential rioting.

I read that paragraph from Kirsten McDougall’s lively, engaging and often hilarious satirical novel She’s a Killer on the very day that a convoy of cars and trucks descended on Wellington and offloaded its anti-vaccine, anti-science and anti-government passengers, who then set up a ‘freedom camp’ on the lawn of Parliament. At the time of writing, they are still there, sinking into the mud and distrusting official narratives, while the rest of us observe pandemic restrictions. Speculative fiction suddenly didn’t seem quite so speculative. Instead, it was almost torn from the headlines.

McDougall has created a world that slips easily between the entirely recognisable and the slightly strange. Water is rationed in this vision of the near future. Inflation is through the roof. The gap between rich and poor has turned into a chasm, and security guards are stationed outside posh supermarkets. Yet ordinary life goes on: people still work, take the bus, pay their bills. The novel is set sometime after ‘the last pandemic’, which is presumably the one we are now in. The government’s pandemic response put the country so deeply in debt that wealthy climate refugees were welcomed: imagine a flood of the American mega-rich sheltering in their lifestyle bunkers, as anticipated in journalist Mark O’Connell’s apocalypse-preparation reporting. I’m pretty sure McDougall has coined the word ‘wealthugee’. It may become useful in the real world.

McDougall doesn’t waste time on world-building; this picture of New Zealand is really just the present with a gentle nudge forward, and it seems entirely plausible. Her vision is very funny and down to earth, too, as this quick description of Wellington shows:

This city was windy and grey. Its buildings were ugly and boring. Sure, we had trees and the harbour. But the harbour had poo leaking into it and you couldn’t swim there even on the days when it was warm enough.

Is that the capital in the near future or in the year 2022?

McDougall’s greatest creation is her narrator, who is apparently named Alice, although the name appears nowhere in the text. Troubled, brutally honest, unstable, and again, very funny, Alice is in her late thirties, single, living in a flat below her monstrous mother (with whom she communicates in Morse code) and stuck in a dull job at the university. She has an IQ just one point below genius level, and she has the bitter superiority of those with wasted potential. She is sassy, antagonistic and self-destructive, or just plain destructive. The reappearance of her childhood imaginary friend, Simp, suggests that things are about to take a disastrous turn. Simp is a nagging voice in her head that she talks to and argues with out loud (‘I knew that I was screaming and that people were taking a wide berth, staring at me as they passed’).

In her job at the university, Alice meets Pablo, a wealthugee who hopes to study Russian literature, which the university no longer offers. Gradually, she is drawn into a convoluted plot that generates some real suspense in the last 100 pages of the novel. But as good as that suspense is, I think that this highly entertaining novel is at its best when McDougall is satirising the minutiae of Wellington life through the exaggerated perspective of Alice, a sharp, amoral and prickly character that gives her permission to say almost anything (the C-word is deployed no fewer than nine times in this novel — is that a record for this publisher?). There are some very funny riffs about workplace culture, advertising agencies, craft beer wankery and drama schools, and scepticism about the kinds of activists who would oppose an influx of wealthugees, along with an equal level of scepticism about the wealthugees themselves. McDougall and Alice both seem to be opposed to earnestness.

‘I’m a fan of unhappy endings,’ Alice quips early on. ‘They’re more honest.’ After McDougall’s darker but shorter debut novel, Tess, which had a different kind of troubled or gifted narrator, this novel surprises us with its immediacy and broad appeal. Yes, it is a black comedy about the end of the world (someone wonders if ‘the time of the human has ended’), but it is also a direct, uncomplicated, energetic and well-told story. It’s both topical and highly accessible, and it’s good to see that it has been finding the wider audience that McDougall deserves.

 

 

---

Philip Matthews is a Christchurch journalist. He co-wrote Funny As: The Story of New Zealand Comedy (Auckland University Press, 2019), which was longlisted in the 2020 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

.

.

.

.

The Sea Walks into a Wall
by Anne Kennedy

 

Auckland University Press

 

$24.99

 

ISBN: 978-1-86940-958-6
Published: October 2021
Pages: 96
Format: Paperback

 

Reviewed by Sophie van Waardenberg

 

---

 

It’s obvious from The Sea Walks into a Wall that Anne Kennedy is a writer for whom form ignites language. Some poems in this collection are built of couplets, some are slabs of unending anaphora, some use lines of conspicuously alternating lengths, and some, like the title poem, are elastic and elongated, a blend of the syntax and logic of essay and the enjambment and crunch of verse. I can imagine Kennedy stretching and condensing each piece here until it relaxed perfectly into its final shape, and that satisfaction is one of the collection’s many joys.

But what astounds me here, beyond technical experiment, is the overwhelming breadth of what is seen, encompassed, pressed into words. This is a collection of perpetual opening, so overwhelming in some poems that I can’t catch my breath. ‘The Arrivals’ is one of these.

 

if on arrival there is wringing of hands
we will shake hands
and in the eye of a storm we will make tea
with our brilliant
fading bodies we will do a variety of things
while we can
we will bed down on the steps of the assembly
if we have to
we will bed down in a court of law
and all beds
anyway are temporary and when we see
that
and realise we have travelled through the night
we have travelled
and are not turning back     that
will be the point
at which we arrive

 

As with much of Kennedy’s work, this poem is not tricky, but it is sly, always folding back on itself before propelling forward. We are bounced from the monumental, the storm, to the tiny domestic act of tea-making, then launched into matters of the spirit, the ‘fading bodies’. The tonal retreat into the bureaucratic language of ‘a variety of things’ comes just before we lurch into references to protest, which themselves fade into the poem’s hugeness, its journey, and its generosity of pronoun, the ‘we’ by which every reader is included. Each object of attention is magnified just for a second before it slips out of view, as if Kennedy has the world in a prism, trapped and turning, refracting perfectly.

It’s wrong, though, to so quickly pass by that reference to political protest. The collection’s title is only the first sign that, within these poems, all is not well. The sea hates the wall. The stream is sick. And — over and over again, in the list poem ‘An Hour’, ‘The person of the hour just earned the minimum wage less tax.’ This collection deals with unease — in and with nature, and between each other on personal and governmental levels — to the point of necessary exhaustion. Yet Kennedy captures and notates voice with precision, so the more obviously political passages and poems read not as cold castigation or censure, but as wholehearted woe, frustration, stubbornness, and apathy, and though anger is here, as it should be, it isn’t overly justified as to become self-righteous.

‘Light On in the Garden’, one of the longer, more essayistic poems of the collection, is also one of the angriest. It’s a narrative of many layers of inequality, ignorance and the tension between money and art:

 

The guys on the exec team hate art.
They watch a movie sometimes, hum along to a tune in the car,
buy jewellery for their wives,
but the guys on the polytech executive team really hate art.
Surely they visit the Met when
in New York, used to moondance in their twenties,
and they all wear clothes,
but sadly the members of the polytechnic executive committee
hate art.

 

It’s a seething, sarcastic poem, and Kennedy is not trying to hide those colours; yet there’s still space in this poem, as with any good poem, any Kennedy poem, for warmth to build. The space is created, first only a little, in the humming, the moondancing, and the tongue-in-cheek ‘they all wear clothes’. In the following sections, the poem grows in both whimsy and incision, stretches into absurd prose in a style similar to that of Joe Wenderoth or Lydia Davis, and ends in a pantomimic exclamation of ‘Noooooooo!’ — the voice of a member of the exec team who, having discovered the dangerous ecstasy of art, has blamed the art school for his newly opened world, and has shut it down and driven away.

All this is a lot for one poem of a few pages. But the poem is successful, like so many in this collection, because Kennedy has created space where space is needed, and has taken the opportunity for didacticism, because she can. Kennedy is a poet who knows just how far to stretch tone and form in each extended piece to concoct a balance of richness, excitement and patience that delivers these poems to, instead of hiding them from, the reader.

The Sea Walks into a Wall is impressive not simply because of its range of tone and voice or its display of the depth of Kennedy’s craft. In fact, ‘impressive’ isn’t the word I want to use anyway. What I want to say is, I’m moved by this collection’s insistence on abundance, humour, and delight in a world of tension and lack. That even within the restrictions of a pandemic, ‘I’ll meet you in paradise in my mask’. There’s a constant tussle between fear and bliss: ‘We were shit-scared and so happy’, Kennedy writes from the chaos of a storm. And everything returns to the sea, its giving and taking, its coming and leaving:

 

and the animals on the land
and the fish in the sea
and the thoughts in our heads
and the living and the dead
rising and falling.

 

 

.

---

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.

 

 

 

.

.

.

.

Nine Lives: New Zealand Writers on Notable New Zealanders
by Catherine Robertson, Lloyd Jones, Selina Tusitala Marsh, Pala Molisa, Paul Thomas, Elspeth Sandys, Stephanie Johnson, Malcolm Mulholland, Paula Morris and Greg McGee.

 

Upstart Press

 

$39.99

 

ISBN: 978-199-0003370
Publisher: Upstart Press
Published: November 2021
Pages: 224
Format: Paperback

 

 

Reviewed by Sally Blundell

 

---

 

Curious.

The editor/s for this collection of essays remain unnamed. All we read is, ‘We asked our authors to provide an essay on a notable New Zealander of their choice… Enjoy. Upstart Press.’

Curiouser.

There are no stated criteria for notability. My dictionary defines notability as, ‘Worthy of note, striking, remarkable, eminent’ but eminent to whom, or to what? New Zealand history? Current politics? Business? Personal family or whanau?

For a reviewer this is unnerving. What is this book trying to do? For readers, it is more than offset by some great writing.

Left, presumably, to their own devices, the essayists cover a range of New Zealand writers, leaders, politicians and sportspeople — all personally influential, all grazing the lives of the writers in some way.

In the most engaging of these, this proximity is close — the subject has been a touchstone, a mentor, a mirror even for their own lives. In the first essay (the order, we are told, was determined by drawing lots), Catherine Robertson presents a compelling portrait of doctor and trailblazing abortion advocate Margaret Sparrow. She begins with her own abortion at 21 — ‘I was given a local anaesthetic and a foetus was aspirated from my womb’ — then moves quickly to that of Sparrow, her abortionist, at the same age, ‘This woman had fought fiercely for longer than I’d been alive to give women more autonomy over their bodies, more choices about their reproductive future.’ The account deftly weaves these stories around a brief history of abortion in this country, circling back to alight again and again on the personal experience of courage and sadness.

This proximity is evident, although not so overtly, in Stephanie Johnson’s important portrait of Carole Beu, unlikely businesswoman (and only businessperson to feature in this book) and founder of Auckland’s Women’s Bookshop. Opened in 1989, the bookshop became a social hub, a place of warmth, conviviality, vitality and much-admired guacamole, championing a new wave of feminist literature and inspiring a new generation of young women writers — including Johnson.

Surprisingly — disappointingly — these are the only two essays that focus on women, but that sense of personal engagement is threaded though these stories.

In her spare yet intimate portrait of Matiu Rata, Paula Morris tracks the life of the Māori leader and politician from ‘the end of our world, the flickering tail of Te Ika a Māui, Te Hāpua’ to Auckland then, at the age of 29, to Parliament where he becomes the first Māori Minister of Māori Affairs, instigator of the New Zealand Day Act (calling it ‘Waitangi Day’, he feared, could spark a ‘Pākehā backlash’) and progenitor of the Waitangi Tribunal and the Mana Motuhake movement.

Morris first meets him as a child in Auckland’s Vulcan Lane, where her grandmother is raising money for the Māori Women’s Welfare League. He is ‘smiling and warm; we are all in awe of him.’ He follows Morris’ progress through school and university. He is distant, but he is there.

First encounters are threaded through this book. Greg McKee’s finely crafted portrait of legendary All Black Ken Gray begins in Circa Theatre, McGee sitting nervously behind Gray and his wife Joy at the opening of his play, Foreskin’s Lament. Gray’s astonishing departure from rugby was prompted by the 1968 All Blacks tour of apartheid South Africa — an ‘immoral regime’, he concluded. It was a tough stance, writes McGee, pitching him from the epicentre of Wellington rugby to being, ‘well, back on the farm at Plimmerton.’

Selina Tusitala Marsh is a young university student when she first encounters Albert Wendt ­— ‘the godfather of Pacific literature’. He is austere, distant, ‘plain ole grumpy’, but he becomes a mentor, a role model, a relentlessly inquiring and incisive writer. For Pala Molisa (Marsh and Molisa co-author the essay on Wendt, so bringing the number of writers to ten), Wendt is the teacher, activist, a ‘warrior’ within the revolutionary politics of Pacific independence.

Lloyd Jones similarly deliberates on which version of his subject to focus on. Slowly, skilfully, he weaves together his portrayal of Paul Melser the local potter, Paul Melser the activist and Paul Melser the cricketer. The essay is full of patience — the patience required in building a home and pottery from an old pig farm near the foot of the Tararua Ranges, of growing a forest, a community tradition of cricket, a pot — ‘A pot or bowl cannot be hurried into completion. It is an exercise that requires a degree of humility.’

The essays move towards and away from their subjects like a tide. For Elspeth Sandys, Rewi Alley — ‘Uncle Rewi’, her mother’s cousin — is a distant, controversial figure in remote China (she was once given a bloodied nose because her uncle was ‘a commie’), but also an ally, a guide. Most importantly, she writes, he is ‘the living proof that art is as necessary to survival as bread and water.’

Malcolm Mulholland’s description of Ranginui Walker — academic, teacher, writer, Māori rights and social justice campaigner — is relayed through the impact of Walker’s 1990 book, Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou: Struggle Without End, a history of Aotearoa from a Māori perspective that launches Mulholland on his own search for identity.

Paul Thomas’ account of cricketer John Wright is that of an experienced journalist, sportswriter and commentator, teasing apart Wright’s ‘ambivalent, perhaps even-love hate relationship’ with cricket.

The design of this book feels perfunctory, the essayists’ bio photos unnecessary, but Nine Lives provides a heart-warming insight not just into nine noteworthy Kiwis, but also on the attributes some of our best writers consider ‘notable’.

 

.

---

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