We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books
“GRAFT” by Helen Heath (Victoria University Press, $NZ28)
“JUST THEN” by Harry Ricketts (Victoria University Press,
$NZ25)
“BIRDS OF CLAY” by Aleksandra Lane (Victoria University
Press, $NZ30)
As
I said in an earlier posting [look up comments on Shift via the index at right], I know it is a very unsophisticated
thing to read poetry in order to dig out details of the poet’s autobiography.
But sometimes it is hard to avoid doing this. Helen Heath’s new collection Graft tells us much about her interests
and her family circumstances. She has some Greek heritage. She is intensely
interested in science and in women’s place in science. And she is a mother.
Divided
into three sections Graft addresses
all these matters, but not necessarily in this order.
The
deconstruction of fairy-tales is often in terms of gender roles, as in the poem
that notes mothers are “defined by…
absence” in stories that deal with wicked stepmothers. Regarding mothers,
the poem “The Whole Woman” recalls a mother who, in what many will see as a
recognisable paradox, was “built like a
bird, with hollow bones, / she relied on her eyes for discipline”. The
strength of the apparently fragile!
The second section, “Ithaca”, recalls a
journey to Greece and consists of two pieces, the fifteen shorts poems labelled
“Postcards” and the title poem “Graft”.
One of the “Postcards” poems is called “Up the hill” and
gives me such delight that I quote it in full:
The truth about
raindrops is
they are not shaped
like tears.
As raindrops fall they
become balls,
burger buns,
parachutes, then doughnuts.
Rain is only sad in
wet places,
others greet it with
euphoria.
Water is containment
and travel,
it worries at earth
and stone.
Things do smell better
after rain, like
wild oregano up the
hill from Vathy.
In
a way, this little poem is emblematic of Heath’s larger technique. There is
that specificity of observation. Each stanza presents a new proposition about
rain in general – a demonstrable and provable statement - with the last one bringing the poem
back to the specific place her sequence is observing.
Much
of the “Postcards” cycle draws on the contradiction of a continuing traditional
peasant culture in an age of high tech – and the fact that the tourists who
come to observe it (including, presumably, the poet) are also destroying it.
One poem is ironically called “Lonely planet”. The cycle ends with a reflection
in a derelict church and the poet wanting to know the material world better.
As
Heath’s notes explain of the title poem “Graft”, the word ‘graft’ has many
meanings, such as fusing two plants or digging (hence “grave”). I wonder how
much Helen Heath was also thinking of “graft” as in the old colloquial “hard
graft” meaning hard work. The poem records digging into the hard earth, in
search of ancestral roots.
More
diverse in subject matter, the third section, “Truth and Fiction”, has poems of
adolescent recall and of domesticity, but gradually moves into dream imagery
and ends with poems about a woman having an abortion. The volume’s one
genuinely funny poem, “Spilt”, conveys what must be a relatively common
domestic scene when a young woman is lactating.
It
occurs to me that I have really botched this review by telling you about the
volume’s contents without analysing any poem in detail, or adding layers of
mystification as reviewers of poetry are wont to do. I’m not really sorry I
haven’t done this, however. What I have tried to convey is my pleasure in poems
that have such a forthright voice, such exact imagery and clear-headedness
allied to a humane sensibility. Science fascinates Helen Heath, but she is
aware that a scientific approach is only one way of encountering reality. If it
was the only way, then there would be no impulse to write poems.
* * * *
* * * *
* * * *
Helen
Heath’s poems are often earnest and serious. By contrast, the dominant tone in
Harry Ricketts’ latest collection, Just
Then, is playfulness.
Sometimes
this entails literal play, with poems that recall boyhood games of
Cowboys-and-Indians and an ongoing interest in cricket. Three poems appear in
the form of numbered lists. Three are blocks of free-rambling prose. Ricketts
includes poems about having the imagination of a child and about his younger
self [sometimes addressed as “you”] in love. Three rhyming ditties apparently
date from the 1970s. There is an affecting piece on the awkwardness of trying
to talk to a father about intimate adolescent matters. There are also poems in
which Ricketts himself is the father, expressing pride in his children or
reconstructing the former child in his grown son, who is now part of a rock
group (“Phoenix Foundation”).
More
than anything, though, his collection relies on literary and cultural
references. They come thick and fast from the opening poem “El Prado” where the
poet, under-whelmed by a gallery of Renaissance religious art, speaks of one
viewer “randy for epiphany”, which
immediately makes us think of Larkin’s Church-Going “ruin-bibber randy for antique”. References in the free-ranging
prose-poem about lost-object-finding St.Anthony suggest it comes from the time
when Ricketts was writing a book about First World War poets.
Elsewhere,
there’s a poem about reading detective novels; an appropriately sardonic poem about
poetry slams; a poem called “NZ Lit XI” which forms NZ Lit names into a cricket
team and provokes hyper-critical old me to remark that NZ Lit doesn’t really
have enough major achievers to form a First XI; and poems about Louis Johnson,
half-forgotten novelist John Wain and old Beat faker Allen Ginsberg.
As
I’m already revealing by my editorial comments here, one of the problems I have
with reading poems about literature is that I am always measuring the poet’s
opinions on the said literature against my own; rather than considering the
poems as poems. In both “Arty Bees” and “Wendy Cope in Newtown, Sydney”,
Ricketts reacts to second-hand books, and I find myself saying “Yes, I’ve done exactly that sort of musing
about the previous owners of books I have bought second-hand”. When I read
Ricketts’ poem “How the 2008
modern poetry class cast its vote” I find myself saying that I can’t agree with
the verdict of his 2008 class.
With
the deepest of respect, and having amused myself greatly by reading it, Just Then often reminds me of the title
of W.H.Auden’s volume of cultured clerihews - Academic Graffiti. It is a fun intellectual game.
* * * *
* * * *
* * * *
Of
the three volumes of poetry under review, the most formidable and the one with
the most challenging texture is Alexsandra Lane’s Birds of Clay. A Serb by birth and a New Zealander by choice since
1996, Lane has previously published two volumes of poetry in her mother tongue.
Birds of Clay is her first collection
in English.
Naturally
she is preoccupied with identities, old and new. The volume’s first five poems
[presented without a general title] combine dream imagery with peasant concerns
about Easter and cooking and possible political upheavals; but their setting is
deliberately vague and dream-like. There follows the experimental cycle “War
Interrupted”, which appears to be memories of civil war, presumably in former
Yugoslavia, and of neighbours and families drawn apart in their use of language
and attitudes. The cycle yields what I consider this volume’s most striking
pair of lines, describing the parents of affected children: “under the canopy of scars/ we stepped on our
children’s language.”
The
sequence of fifteen prose poems that bear the volume’s title, “Birds of Clay”,
reflect on Serbian village life. I wonder about their title, which is in no
apparent way connected with the sequence. Does it imply that birds of clay
can’t fly away, but they can be shot at (as in clay pigeons)? Is there another
war tremor about to rumble over these inconsequential observations on family
and mating and village rambles?
With
the sequence “Another Legendary Sky”, the collection moves away from the
village and becomes global, ultimately connecting the old country with New
Zealand. Its words are set out on the page like the patterns of constellations.
Ursus the Bear is dwelt upon, not visible in the southern hemisphere any more
than real European bears are. Last in this sequence is “Crux” (i.e. the
Southern Cross) which is “hiding behind/
the round/ curve of the earth,/ trapped in another hemisphere, another
legendary sky.” To change countries is to change the legendary background
noise.
The
“Bullet Time” sequence is, as I read it, about the conflict between pragmatism
[or Realpolitik] and love. In it, the collection’s most overtly polemical poem
“The Economist” posits the type of limited rationalised thinking, typical of
neo-liberals, in which human needs count for less than the economic
balance-sheet. Some of the poems in the next sequence “A Little Too Rare”
explicitly compare Serbia and New Zealand. They also highlight the imagery of
eggs that is found throughout the collection – as I read it, an image of life
existing in potential and potential allowing for change.
It
is not surprising that somebody concerned with other languages should produce a
sequence called “Affairs of Grammar and Style”. The last sequence in the collection “There Are No Ghosts in
America” is a cycle of “found” poems based on the words of Serbian scientist
Nikola Tesla. Each poem is headed up with a Serbian proverb (e.g. “A man wants to be better than everyone but
worse than his son.”). The whole cycle gives evidence of a man with wild
inspiration, a wild imagination and a rough childhood. Given Tesla’s current
reputation ad status, they might also be expressive of Serbian national pride.
I
had to work hard at reading many of these poems. The typographical mannerisms
(especially in the sequences “War Interrupted” and “Another Legendary Sky”) ask
for concentration but do not necessarily reward it. The prose poems are not
noticeably rhythmical. While images are clear, meaning is sometimes opaque,
even after repeated readings. I find something unfinished and un-worked in this
collection. To some readers that will be a recommendation.