Something New

We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

 

“ENDURING LOVE – Collected Poems” by Robert McLean (Cold Hub Press, $NZ 40); “WALKING HOME” by Michele Amas (Victoria University Press, $NZ25; “TWO OR MORE ISLANDS” by Diana Bridge (Otago University Press,  $NZ27:95); “HERE WE ARE” by Graham Swift (Scribner, $NZ32:99)

Nearly seven years ago in late 2013, I reviewed on this blog under the heading The Poetry of Robert McLean, three collections of the poet’s work, For Renato Curcio ( first published 2010), Goat Songs (2011) and A Graveyard by the Sea (2012). Later, in 2018, I more briefly reviewed McLean’s collection Figure and Ground.

Enduring Love is subtitled “Collected Poems” of Robert McLean, but the word “collected” does not mean complete. Enduring Love gives a selection from McLean’s works, but with the addition of 30 new poems under the heading Postcards from Atlantis. Presumably McLean has gathered here what he now considers the best from his earlier collections. For example Enduring Love includes only 5 of the 17 poems in For Renato Curcio, only 5 of the poems from Goat Songs, and a more generous 19 of the 26 poems in Figure and Ground. If you wish to see my views on these collections, look up my earlier postings.

A Graveyard by the Sea is published in Enduring Love in its entirety, except that McLean has revised the earlier version, rewording some sections and dropping four of the original 62 stanzas. Reading this recension, I am even more impressed than I was in my reading of the first edition, and I herewith withdraw a few slightly carping comments I made in my 2013 review. A tour de force, at once an hommage to Paul Valery’s Le Cimetiere Marin and a very New Zealand poem, written strictly in the same metrical form that Valery used – sestets (six-line stanzas) with a regular a-a-b-c-c-b rhyme scheme – but more discursive than Valery. McLean’s A Graveyard by the Sea is now 58 stanzas compared with Valery’s 24. The sheer compositional skill impresses as much as the sentiments and the wide-ranging imagery.

So in this review, I will look only at those of McLean’s works which I am encountering for the first time in Enduring Love.

To begin with, one very obvious point has to be made, as it is always made when McLean’s poetry is discussed. McLean, running against current fashion, is a Modernist. He may, as I said in an earlier posting, be fully au fait with Postmodernist theory and practice; but he takes it for granted that his readership is literate and will be comfortable with the many cultural references he makes, and with his many allusions to canonical (or non-canonical) writers and their work. There are no end-notes or footnotes to help the reader along. As the back-cover blurb of Enduring Love correctly puts it “Robert McLean is a defiantly modernist poet who often uses traditional metres and rhyme to explore the complexities of history and selfhood.” It is appropriate that David Howard provides a back-cover endorsement to Mclean’s work. Howard (whose The Ones Who Keep Quiet I reviewed on this blog and whose In-Complete Poems I reviewed for Landfall Review Online in August 2012) is one of the few New Zealand poets who writes with the same intellectual intensity as McLean, although their philosophical stances and choice of thematic matter are quite distinct.

So to those sections of Enduring Love which I have not reviewed previously.

For the Coalition Dead was one of McLean’s earliest productions, appearing in 2009, before all the later collections mentioned above. Nine poems from For the Coalition Dead are included in Enduring Love. Some of McLean’s persistent preoccupations are already here – his admiration of another modernist poet (“A Valediction for C.N. Sisson”); love and the course of a relationship read in the sky and harsh weather (“Appassionata”); a very stark and pared-back poem confronting mortality in the carcass of a dead seal (“Inexorable, Thus”); and mental disorientation (“Lunatic”). Written in nine neat quatrains, “The Second Life” is one of McLean’s stateliest poems, distinguished in its brilliant opening:

“Animated by wisps of zephyr,

wind-chimes clatter pentatonic Zen.

My presence is de-emphasised: just

a plastic chair on the veranda

contrived to hold opinions”

Superficially, it is little more than reveries while seated in a backyard (“My universe is shrivelled - / it’s compacted into my backyard”). But the inevitable, slow tread of nature, the flourishing of weeds, entwines the present moment with a vaster time-scheme. It becomes a genuinely philosophical piece. Time and eternity are here together.

It is clear that much of For the Coalition Dead was a response to current events at the time it was written. McLean dwells on war and some of its horrors in a number of poems. For a soldier, killing can become a numbing, boring, perfectly routine job (“A Norse Assassin Struggles with Ennui”). A captive in a torture chamber is mentally as well as physically tormented, in a poem whose hysterical insistence is underlined by its drum-beat rhyming scheme, with just one rhyme for each of its nine-line stanzas. (“The Patriot”).

What war has inspired such poems? The six sections of this collection’s title poem, “For the Coalition Dead”, give us the answer. This is a response to the war in Iraq which the United States was then waging together with some allies. Rather than being a direct critique of the conduct of that war, “For the Coalition Dead” is an analysis of the American psyche, or at least the psyche of American elites that seek self-aggrandizement on the world stage. It is hard to believe that McLean was not at least in part inspired by Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead”, which is similarly written in quatrains and offers a critique of American mores.

And what of the 30 poems collected together for the first time in Enduring Love under the collective title Postcards from Atlantis?

I admire the persistence of McLean’s thematic interests – his dedication to a particular vision and a particular version of what poetry is. He will always deal with history, Western culture, and poetry itself in a critical voice redolent of Modernism, even if his techniques sometimes revert to other styles. In a set of “Epigrams” given here, he declares his aesthetic with one called “On Conceptual Art”:

“Its imposition fades on second-thought –

I’ll take the urn: cold, empty and well-wrought”.

Consider the poems here on ancient wars and violence. “Three Views of Agincourt” is a poetic tryptich which gives a very un-Shakespearean view of the late medieval battle, stripped of rhetoric and seen in a wider perspective. “Terror” indicts terror both Biblical and revolutionary. In “Marmont Dying”, one of Napoleon’s marshals takes a pragmatic, resigned look as his own life as a warrior, speaking (as some others of McLean’s personages do) very much like a dramatic monologue of Browning.

Consider other eminent persons from the past. “Machiavelli in Hell” again has a resigned, world-weary tone like a Browning monologue. “Schweitzer’s Progress” uses the term “progress” with a degree of irony, given that motives of the Alsatian philosopher-missionary are held up to severe scrutiny. “Nijinsky’s Last Dance” has the ballet dancer torn between impulse and social constraint. Some eminent – or notorious – figures from the past take some time to declare themselves. Who is the subject of “A walk around the world”? Only an O. Henry-like punchline tells us at the end of a long poem.

Consider poems on art and architecture. “Failure” gives only two cheers for Andrea del Sarto (a reprodction of whose “Head of a Woman” adorns the front cover of Enduring Love). “On Carolingian Sculpture” senses cultural decay in its view of early medieval Europe.

And, of course, consider all the poems about poets. “The Afterlife of Drummond Allison”, about a promising young English poet killed in the Second World War. “Sapience Angelical”, with the Earl of Rochester poised between libertinism and repentance. “Exiles”, which yokes together Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound and Henry James.

“Last Visit to Mallarme” captures perfectly the detached, non-materialist, linguistic idea of that poet in this stanza:

“Flooding back into my mind

came all those precious evenings,

soirees during which I ceased

entirely to believe in things,

even in ideas. Qualm and scruple

were Pentecost to this Priest

of the Absolute.”

In matters of both history and High Culture, however, McLean often digs deepest when he is looking at New Zealand. It is fitting that this volume ends with “At the Sign of the Packhorse I Stand Like a Tree and Sing My Song of Joy”, a discursive poem on the history of Akaroa, its settlement and its French connection. There is a ten-part sequence of poems “The Passion of William Colenso”, viewing from many perspectives the Anglican clergyman, printer, explorer and controversialist, with his initial loyalties, demeanour and faith undermined by the call of the erotic. In a way, I wish this sequence had more to say about Colenso’s ripe crankiness (well documented in his letters to the press – see Give Your Thoughts Life, reviewed on this blog), but at least McLean does give us some disaffected witnesses who describe the older Colenso (in section 9) as “a testy gadfly in minor office” and “tactless, prolix and obscure”.

As for New Zealand poets, “Here and Now” is an elegy for the late Allen Curnow, with a final line that could be a fitting epitaph. Rather more recherche is “The Apotheosis of Charles Spear” with its decorative vocabulary to present a poet whose thoughts were always in Europe. It is in some sense a jeu d’esprit.

Speaking of jeux d’esprit, and wondering if at least some of it is tongue-in-cheek, there is “A Fantasia in the Voice of D’Arcy Cresswell”. Presumably from the grave, Cresswell bemoans his soiled reputation, he being an eogtistical chap who, in the judgement of his poetic New Zealand contemporaries (Curnow, Fairburn et al.), had a much more modest talent than he thought he had. More recently (see the writings of the late Peter Wells) he is the gay poet who is hated by gays because, in the 1920s, he dobbed in the covertly-gay Mayor of Wanganui. McLean’s Cresswell says “my efforts got disparaged as claptrap, / charlatan doggerel” and “my verse earned brickbats from the status quo”. Again, McLean displays a complete mastery of traditional form. “A Fantasia in the Voice of D’Arcy Cresswell” is a sequence of 15 sonnets in the Shakespearean form (i.e. ending in a rhyming couplet), but sometimes borrowing Samuel Daniel’s trick of linking the last line of one sonnet to the first line of the next.

You have by now, I hope, read enough to know that Enduring Love is an outstanding collection, the best single-volume of a poet who runs vigorously against current fashion and scores more hits than misses.

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            You are probably aware that in the midst of the Coronavirus lock-down, the German-based Bauer Media Company decided to pull the plug on those very many New Zealand magazines which it owned. Among other worthwhile publications thus killed was the New Zealand Listener, for which I had been a frequent freelance contributor for well over 15 years. For the last two-and-a-half years, I had added to my other book-reviewing a column called Poetry Picks where, every three or four weeks, I would choose, as worth reading, a new collection of New Zealand poetry. I was allotted only 250 words for each of these columns, so I could do little more than signal my  pleasure for each collection in very general terms. When the Listener ceased to exist, there were two Poetry Picks columns I had submitted that had not yet run. So, in all their brevity and inadequacy, here they are:

           

FIRST, Michel Amas’ Walking Home:

This collection might sadden you, but not because the poems are sad. It’s the circumstances of their publication. Still relatively young, Michele Amas died of cancer in 2016. Her second collection, Walking Home, has been assembled from her papers by her husband, playwright Ken Duncum. In his foreword he suggests that Amas might have edited or altered some poems had she lived to see them published.

In the poem “Standing”, another poet tells her “You can disguise the autobiographical / in the third person”. This is advice that she resolutely ignores.

Her poems are first-person and unashamedly confessional. They read like good spoken monologues, fittingly as Amas was an actor. Some are lightly ironical, like her view of the city where she lived, “Wellington’s Running Late”. Some recall childhood, as when she notes you really can’t go home again in “Home Town”.

            But her main interest is the immediate family. The excellent monologue, “Morning Noon and Night” has an anxious wife telling her husband she’s not perfect. “Oestrogen Makes a Break for it on Thursday” is a wildly comical vignette of a mother running after a daughter who is developing too quickly. The centrepiece is the loose cycle in three parts, “The Tender Years”, which gradually becomes a reflection on Amas’ relationship with her own daughter.

Then comes the sad part – the cycle “Walking Home”, where she confronts her cancer. “I want to read this disease / backwards / to get back to the top” she writes. But there was no going backwards, and going home meant something quite different.

THEN, Diana Bridge’s Two or More Islands:

            When some poets make references to mythology or high culture, I feel they are faking. Their erudition means they’ve looked up a Wikipedia entry or two. Not so with Diana Bridge. In her seventh collection Two or more islands, she shows that she knows intimately Chinese and Indian mythology and culture as well as Classical western mythology. Not only that, but she can make meaning of these things. Two or more islands is not a display of learning, but a book of poems that show us how ancient concepts still have resonance for us.

            Poems take in the I Ching; women from Greek legend like Antigone, Penelope, Ariadne and Demeter; the bloody mess of Shakespeare’s history plays; and, in a closing eight-part sequence The Way a Stone Falls, a long reflection on Angkor Wat and Hindu sites in India. We are enlightened, uplifted and feel solidarity with ancient times.

But there is another side to Bridge’s achievement. In a section of pithier, shorter, specifically New Zealand poems, she gives more colloquial motherly and grandmotherly advice, especially in Pierced Ears and the delicate balance of A pounamu paperweight.

Any future anthologist if this decade’s great New Zealand poems would have to include Among the stacks, about the obsessions of bibliophiles; Light came from the other side, almost a philosophical warning against taking a superficial tourist’s view of things; and Was there ever an Avernus?, which modernises Virgil’s underworld and becomes a lament for the great Seamus Heaney.

I can only give superlatives to this sane and satisfying collection.

There now. That is what I wrote for the Listener. To Diana Bridge and (the estate of) Michele Amas, I can only apologise for the brevity and terseness of these notices. There is much more than could be said about each collection.

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And now for something more bizarre. A couple of months back, a publisher generously sent me a copy of the English novelist Graham Swift’s new novel Here We Are. For a number of reasons I was not able to read it until very recently, which is why I am only now considering it on this blog. I am fully aware that it has already been reviewed by every other reviewer in this country, with particularly perceptive reviews by Siobhan Harvey for the Stuff network and Anna Rogers in the (now gone) Listener. So here I am coming up the rear and I will say only a few things.

Here We Are is about magic, time, getting old and regret.

At the end of the 1950s, Ronnie and Evie, a magician and his “lovely” assistant, are the star attractions on the Brighton pier during the summer season. Ronnie and Evie are engaged to be married. Compere of the show which they headline is Jack, or “Jack Robinson” as he bills himself, with his well-rehearsed cheery patter and singalongs and eye for the girls. More than one reviewer has already noted that he and his style of entertainment are very reminiscent of John Osborne’s Archie Rice in The Entertainer, and that is part of Graham Swift’s design. The tawdry glamour of the Brighton pier and cheekie-chappie comperes were forms of entertainment that were already dying in the late 1950s as television moved in and the little box at home killed variety shows and magic acts.

We’re not far into this short novel (Graham Swift’s novels tend to be lean) when we learn that Ronnie’s and Evie’s engagement goes wrong, and Jack moves in on Evie. Indeed the events of 1958-1959 are only one part of a complex story, for much of it has the aged Evie looking back with regret fifty years later in the 2000s, and much of it concerns Ronnie’s formation as a young magician. As a Cockney kid he was evacuated from the Blitz, taken out of an awful East End home and boarded with a loving middle-class couple in rural Oxfordshire. His life was changed. His loyalties were changed. He discovered the power of magic. Like many evacuees lifted out of the slums, he didn’t want to go back home.

I could dig for all sorts of profundities in this novel, even though I enjoyed it mainly for its power as a story, its ability to make us wonder what will happen next, its clear and clean prose and Graham Swift’s pitch-perfect dialogue, appropriate to the times and places where the story is set. This is a story about retrospection and regret. It is about the social disruption in Britain, and for some, shifts in class-consciousness, brought about by the Second World War. It is about a dead world and about nostalgia and about the delusions of nostalgia that are exposed when the past is truthfully examined. And it is also about love and how it can be derailed. I flinch a little at the denouement, which I think pushes credibility near breaking point and strives to make magic a metaphor for the mystery of life itself, but I’m not the chap to provide spoilers about this.

The tone is elegaic, as it often is in Swift’s work. Swift is now in his 70s, but this tone cannot solely be a sign of his age. Remember, he was only in his 40s when he wrote his best-known (and Booker Prize-winning) novel Last Orders, which is about old men looking back on their imperfect lives. As for that title Here We Are – as is pointed out a number of times in the novel, it’s a standard English colloquialism, uttered when something is proferred (“Here we are – your tea”, that sort of thing). But as a title, Here We Are points to the human condition. Here we are, here we end up, here we can’t help being, after all our experience of life.

Something New

REMINDER - "REID"S READER" NOW APPEARS FORTNIGHTLY RATHER THAN WEEKLY. 

We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“FIGURE AND GROUND: POEMS 2012-2018” by Robert McLean (Cold Hub Press, $NZ19:95); “LUXEMBOURG” by Stephen Oliver (Greywacke Press, $NZ29:99); “THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE THE INTERNET IN SPRINGTIME” by Erik Kennedy (Victoria University Press, $NZ25);

Five years ago on this blog, I considered three volumes by one of New Zealand’s most underrated poets, Robert McLean (look up the 2013 posting Robert McLean). I find myself quoted on the blurb of McLean’s latest publication Figure and Ground, but I don’t mind in the least. As I’ve said before, McLean is an erudite poet with a wide knowledge of Western culture. He writes on the assumption that his readers share, or are able to access, a similar knowledge. Unlike most other poets who are his contemporaries, he provides no explanatory end-notes or footnotes when he deploys a literary or historical reference. Apparently he is well-versed in postmodernist literary theory, but I would describe his preferred style as High Modernist. He works hard at the form of his poems, often using traditional metres and rhyme, but he is no blind traditionalist. History and received culture are quarried stone to be whacked and shaped into something significant for us here and now.

In Figure and Ground, McLean sometimes makes specifically New Zealand scenes his topic. “The Terminal” is a sad, elegaic poem about flying out from Christchurch; and “Autumn, Island Bay” is a kiwi paysage moralise. But two other poems referencing New Zealanders place them in exotic settings, to wit the two poems about New Zealanders who fought in Europe in the Second World War,  “Indexes and Libations” written in memory of Dan Davin (whose poems, collected as A Field Officer’s Notebook, were edited by McLean) and “John Mulgan in Greece”. 

Most often, however, McLean’s inspiration is far from home. In “Jacopo’s Vision”, Dante’s son explain the origins of his father’s work. “Alberti’s Complaint” has the Renaissance architect Leon Battista Alberti considered the pressures of patronage and hardship of building. “Housekeeping” comments piquantly on the nunnishness of Emily Dickinson. There is a poem on the heterosexual chauffeur and secretary whom Marcel Proust adored.

None of this is mere dabbling in High Culture, however. Where he comments, McLean questions, and at bottom his questions are searching ones about faith or no faith; aesthetics; the making of legends, and the paradox of the simultaneous necessity and mendacity of legends. “Lines on Tarkovsky” references the Russian director’s film Andrei Rublev, about the medieval icon-painter, and exhorts a boy to  “Embrace your absent father / in light of celluloid. / To salve the aching void / embrace your absent father. / You’ve got no other.”  There is a whole tension between types of literature in the poem “Lie Easy, Walter, or Lie All the Same”, concerned with Walter Savage Landor’s place in Italy. It is ostensibly an anti-romantic poem, telling us “Sightseers swarm Barrett - / Browning’s chintzy resting-place, / love’s stronghold. Landor’s grave / sinks deeper: this terminal garret / where the stoic saved face, / whom playful souls never forgave.” And yet it relents to suggest there is a form of idealism that is not to be disparaged. Quite brilliantly, I think, “In Memory of Anne Sexton” manages at once to celebrate the suicidal, confessional poet while undermining any glamourised ideas of Anne Sexton as prophet. Suffering is suffering – it is not pretty or to be emulated. There’s a simlar two-edged swing to “Hell on Earth” in which McLean is emphatically not debunking the legend of Troy (he wouldn’t be involved in such a foolish and obvious game) but is cautioning us about the blood-soaked truth that lies behind the legend.

I will now do the forbidden thing in reviewing a collection of poetry and nominate my favourite. “The Discovery of Pluto” is dedicated to the British poet Geoffrey Hill, who was deeply enmeshed in philosophy and Christian theology. Here the poet stands against the universe, knowing that it can be perceived only through our limited consciousness, and taking as his inspiration the recent “demotion” of Pluto from planet to large asteroid. “It was a planet. Now it’s not. In / our strictly unblinking cosmos, / thick with dark matter, to be forgotten / is never to have been…/”. Given our serial fallibility about the universe, it is fitting that the next poem is about Giordano Bruno.

Challenging but stimulating – a fine collection.

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I admit that I came to Stephen Oliver’s poetry late. I was first aware of him four years ago, when I guest-edited Poetry New Zealand in its old format  (issue #48, March 2014) and enjoyed writing a brief notice on Oliver’s collection, Intercolonial – a kind of loose epic linking Australia and New Zealand, where tales of discovery jostled with vivid childhood remembrance. This is significant because the blurb of his latest [of nineteen!] collections, Luxembourg, describes Oliver as “Australasian”. Born in Wellington, the man has lived twenty years of his life in Oz before a recent return to Newzild, and he is happy to identify with either country. Or both.

Luxembourg is a capacious collection [nearly 100 pages] of what Oliver has been writing in the last four years.

Much of it references specific New Zealand landscapes. “Tracking Rupert Brooke” is a fantasia set in an earlier New Zealand, about what the Georgian poet might have written has he not been so coy about expressing passion. The poems “El Nino”, “Dilapidated Dream” and “Green Asterisk” comment on Te Kuiti, the King Country and the central North Island. The sequence “Road Notes” is a long collection of short stanzas following the Waikato. Sometimes the attitude to this country is jaded. “Undercover” tells us “Absent twenty years, I left a country of sheep,  / returned to a country of cattle; rivers / wheeze through an iridescent landscape, / gorged on nutrient-rich run off.” It sees the King Country as “run-down rentals / and mouldering hatreds, hobbled by small / town boredoms”

Oliver also references topical or longstanding political situations, sometimes with the eye of a satirist, as in “The Great Repression” or “Scarecrow”, which is more-or-less an anti-Anzac Day poem. “Streets of Kiev” is specifically an anti-Vladimir Putin poem. (“His favourite cocktail, / Polonium-210, he serves up to those who dare oppose.”). “Impress” concerns refugees, and has the same sort of resigned melancholy tone that Ewin Muir used to strike in the 1950s, with such poems as “The Good Town”

What seems to concern Oliver more often, however, is an apocalyptic collapse of poetry and sense into tribalism  (“The Map”) and an apocalyptic collapse of belief systems into anomie (“Testament”). This sense of desolation is also found in the portrait of a single woman in a tumbledown house (“Lace”). There are in this volume so many poems about mental disintegration, unease, and the inability to articulate something meaningful, as in “Nocturne” where  “There is nothing but grainy silence. / A hissing sound, and the darkened objects of the room / surounding me.” The three prose poems “Dark Matter”, “Domes” and “Choristers” are attempts to fit human beings into the universe, given what we now know of its immeasurable vastness, and attempts to harmonise our moden knowledge with ancient, mythic views of  the universe. While Oliver often tries to consider things on a vast, cosmic scale, this can lead to overblown rhetoric, as in the poem “Titan Love Song”. Could this overstatement indicate real insecurity on the poet’s part? Often Oliver’s uncertainty [about self; about time] is palpable, as in “The World’s Basement”, “What Angels Throw” and “Breaking Straws”. Nadir of not really knowing what he values must be the poem “Worry Beads”, where he wants to pray to something or someone, but in the end affirms only the sound of his own words.

Oliver’s attitude towards women is strangely Romantic. “Sister to the Sphinx” comes across as an overstated tribute to a former model, but then one remembers that even the likes of Yeats could go silly and gaga over a pretty face. The later poem “Stone Lintel” is almost as embarrassing from its opening lines’ assertion that  “The gift of slowing time belongs exclusively to / beautiful women and the space they inhabit…”  For the record, seeing good-looking women as beacons of inspiration seems to be part of this poet’s modus scribendi. As best I can decipher it, the title poem, “Luxembourg”, was inspired by the sight of a model on a billboard. She graces the cover and is obviously deemed important enough to have a German language translation placed next to the English language original in this book. Yet these elements of unlikely romantic worship are atoned for by the hard veracity of “The Lost German Girl”, concerning refugees. It has the same sort of straightforward truthfulness as “The Journey”, about a minor poet’s dedication to his work; or as “Broken”, a factual trbute to a trusty old typewriter the poet once cast away. It is when Oliver is not striving too hard for the Grand Gesture that he is at his best.

If I picked a highlight for this book, it would be the six-page tour de force called “Open-Learning Workshops” in which Oliver lays down ironically “rules” for poets, publishers, novelists, academics, book-festival organisers etc on how they should go about their business – and in the process, deflates their pretensions and displays a great deal of worldly wisdom in these fields. This is satire which, an opening notes tell us, is influenced by Auden and Cyril Connelly, but none the worse for that.

Annoyingly necessary footnote: As I have explained before on this blog [see the posting Who is This Ghost Who WalksBeside Me?) I am not the only person from New Zealand, with some literary connections, who is called Nicholas Reid. There is another Nicholas Reid (no relation), an expert on Coleridge and romantic poetry, who started an academic career in New Zealand and has now relocated to Australia. It is this “other” Nicholas Reid who is referenced in Stephen Oliver’s poem “Building Code” and [at least according to one of the publisher’s websites] it is this “other” Nicholas Reid who had a hand in editing Luxembourg. He appears to be a fine chap of good taste, but then so am I, so doubtless the confusion will continue.

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Is whimsy the thin cloak worn by despair?

I’ll leave that conundrum hanging in the air while I perform yet another manouevre forbidden in academically-respectable (i.e. dishonest) poetry criticism. I am going to divide Erik Kennedy’s debut volume There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime into the good and the bad. And because I want to end on a positive note (there are many, many good things in this collection, after all), I will begin with the bad.

It’s this ironical whimsy stuff.

Take the title poem – the very first in the book -  “There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime”. It could be understood (as I understand it) to mean that springtime is not a place like the internet. Therefore it could be taken as a criticism of the internet. But the poet commits himself to no clear viewpoint – so ambiguous whimsy it becomes. A companion poem “Uninstall Your News App and Join a Hiking Club” could be read as a straightforward exhortation to do just that, but again the tone the poet strikes is laid-back hipster irony. Selecting other poems in this collection, I note that “Mailing in a Form Because There’s No Online Form” sees bureaucracy as the new means to confuse and control people as was once the role of war (getting close to conspiracy theory, folks). “You Can’t Teach Creative Writing” offers its title ironically, but then says nothing to refute the title statement as literal truth. Even a straightforward story about the poet’s great-uncle’s footballing career has to have a title that belittles it -  “The Family Lore Poem” – as if to say the poet is sick of family lore poems. Less evasively, “Poem in Which, in Which, in Which” is a harmless bonbon in which the poet ridicules the pomposity of chapter headings in many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels.

Here’s the whimsy-irony thing in relatively innocuous form, but it skirts close to despair in other poems – hence the question with which I began this critique. “Four Directions at the Beach” uses the imagery of a beach to suggest there is no truth in any direction, and the best one can do is to abandon any search for truth and surrender to idle contemplation of the sky. “I Am an Animal Benefitting from Climate Change” is intended as cool irony, but reads as a surrender to the inevitable. In “I Can’t Even” we are schooled with the idea that human creativity is built on sorrow and disaster and may simply be a survival mechanism. “I Rank All the Beautiful Things There Are” has a bit more heft, saying that any form of categorisation is provisional and our tastes change.

I hear your objection to what I have said so far. I appear to be criticising the poet for the What rather than for the How, and we all know that great poems can be made out of very dodgy philosophical ideas, so the What is often less important than the How. But I am considering the How, namely the tone of irony that so often reads as affectation.

Right. I’m glad to have got all my negative comments done with. As I said, There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime has many very good things in it and I’m happy to note them. Rather than poking the ironical borax, “Your Grandfather’s War Stories” gives a larger and more thoughtful possibility of the repeated cycles of history. “Public Power” is a vignette of the first town in the world (Godalming in Surrey, England, in 1881) to have a public electricity supply; and “The Great Sunspot of 1947” is another vignette, this time about how people once interpreted things.  In these three poems, Kennedy sets aside arch irony and looks at things compassionately.

Quite wonderful in this respect is “An Abandoned Farm Near Lockhart, New South Wales”. Like the world’s best poems, it lets its ideas creep up on you rather than bashing you over the head with them. On a superficial level, it is simply a description as its title declares – but note how the poet lets those matters of time, utility and decay enter into it, unforced and unironically.

I have used the term “irony” in a such a negative sense that you may assume I dislike irony in any circumstance. Not so. When it pairs with real wit, irony can work wonders. Take Kennedy’s witty “Georgics” which are , after all, satirical, as they produce such couplets as “A lambent light it is that fill the pastures, but it’s too dark to read. / The wise farmer rises early  to get the best broadband speed.” And “You can ride a tractor from, as the Italians say, the stable to the stars. / The tractor’s GPS is more powerful than the computer on the ship that, some day, will take men to Mars.” Yet also, in a non-solemn way, this witty sally comments on the hardship of farming in a dying economy, even if the farming is industrialised.

Much of Kennedy’s political satire is transparent, clear and pungent, such as  “The Paris Agreement” concerning prevarications over the climate change accord. Sometimes, though, the targets are unclear and the meaning opaque, as with “Growing Fears That the Leadership Contest Has Been Hijacked by Far-Left Infiltrators”. It might have had some immediate topical application as, according to an end-note, it was first printed in a Poets for Corbyn pamphlet. Without such context, its meaning is very unclear indeed.

And, showing how well irony can be used, may I commend the amiable, easy, ironic canters of “Love Poem With Seagull”, the wired couplets of “Amores” and the particularity of “How a New Zealand Sunrise Is Different from Other Sunrises”. As for complete laid-backness, “The Contentment Poem”, about leaving lawn-mowing incompleted, takes the prize. It’s hard not to notice, too, that Kennedy, an expatriate American, in the poem “Remembering America” is very ambiguous about his country of origin, but comes down on the side of rejection.  

Lawks a mercy, but I’ve been very contradictory about this one, haven’t I? This thought occurs to me – often the best volumes of poetry, and the ones you remember longest, are the most provocative. There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime certainly provoked me and annoyed me at times – and at other times made me admire the poet’s skill and insight. This is a way of saying that it is very uneven and that it will probably affect you differently.

What an interesting collection.

Something New

We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books

THE POETRY OF ROBERT McLEAN

“FOR RENATO CURCIO” (Gumtree Press, Dunedin 2010); “GOAT SONGS” (Kilmog Press, Dunedin, 2011);“A GRAVE YARD BY THE SEA” (Cold Hub Press, Lyttelton, 2012). All volumes of poetry by Robert McLean.

            If one were to trust a recent hefty anthology of New Zealand poetry and prose, virtually the only worthwhile poetry currently being published in New Zealand comes from the major university presses, most notably Auckland University Press and Victoria University Press. In academe, there is some wariness about the poetry published by smaller craft printers. It does not have the proper imprimatur. There may often be good reasons for this wariness. Some small presses are almost in the nature of vanity presses, while others lack the editorial skills to discern what is and what is not worth publishing.

Yet it remains true that much of our best poetry is being published by smaller presses, rather than by the university presses. (Major commercial publishers bring out very little poetry and it is well understood that – except in very rare instances – poetry does not exactly fly off the shelves.)

I think I’ve cleared my throat enough now to justify devoting this “Something New” to a poet whose work has appeared outside the AUP/VUP axis. And, given the rate at which poetry actually meets its readers, I have no hesitation in calling three volumes published respectively in 2010, 2011 and 2012 “Something New”.

Robert McLean was born in Christchurch in 1974. His academic formation includes degrees in art theory and political science, as well as a Master of Fine Arts. When Alistair Paterson chose McLean as his “featured poet” in issue #40 of Poetry New Zealand, McLean had published only one collection, For the Coalition Dead (Kilmog Press, Dunedin). He introduced himself to Poetry New Zealand in terms of postmodern theory and “the cogency of the ‘linguistic turn’ in thinking about thinking and the world.” He is – theoretically – concerned with poems as linguistic acts in themselves rather than as reflections upon something else. And yet when I read McLean’s work I find myself more often in modernist territory rather than in the realm of postmodern theory. Frequently McLean’s work is difficult – opaque is my default term for some of his poems – but it references the great Western literary and philosophical/theological traditions, often engages directly with the world and has a degree of playfulness even in its more sombre reflections. I also note an ambiguity about God. Especially in the 2010 volume For Renato Curcio, McLean invokes a God (“Him”) Who sometimes appears believed in but is sometimes discarded brusquely; yet there is definitely an ache Thereunto in some poems. I’m not sure if this is God or “the God-sized hole in modern human consciousness”.

I also note and admire McLean’s craftsmanship. When he wishes to use more traditional forms, he works hard on rhyme and metre, but he does not confine himself to these, and he can also call on free form and prose-poetry. His “Discipline” is a villanelle suggesting need for discipline in art, including in its formal elements.

            Craftsmanship is found in a perfectly-wrought poem like “A Postscript to the Death of Virgil” which opens the volume For Renato Curcio. It considers, in four stanzas, the experience of reading Hermann Broch’s novel The Death of Virgil, but turns this occasion into a contemplation of the whole process of reading, of the Logos, of the word as  - perhaps - the creative Word of God. And yet with all this solemnity there is a wry humour as the poet is clearly in two minds about Broch’s modernism and speaks of “the place / where the poet Virgil will die / at the hand of Hermann Broch below / a firmament of / adjectives, quickened by his love / of words, as fleets of thoughts patrol / my mind.” We can lose ourselves in words. The double attraction-repulsion of verbal artifice is one of McLean’s obsessions.

In the same volume, “The Mirror Stage”, written in rhymed (sometimes half-rhymed) couplets, is a complex and in part opaque (that word again!) reflection on the changing self-image one has as one grows, tempered by the jolt of discovering love “Yet with the bloom of womanhood, / an adult’s lot is understood: / Between two poles the world divides. / We gravitate to what we know, / especially when the hormones flow; / like spheres in the Platonic sense, / true love collides with circumstance / and cracks the screen of vanity, / the boy then turns his eye to see / the point of difference ever present, / the source of self he now resents.”

This poem skates close by the risk of doggerel without ever falling in, and ends up on the credit side of traditional self-reflective ironies, its jolting, thorny metres somewhere in the vicinity of Donne’s riper satires.

Such literary comparisons are both right and inevitable with this poet. “Mr McLean and the Spider” is a very personal reflection on the meeting of poetry and mental unbalance (inclusive of depression, psychosis etc.). It holds out at least the minimal consolation that “My hands feel sore / from writing but neat stanzas may restore / my edge.” Craftsmanship keeps at bay a cruel mental universe. The mental unbalance of Christopher Smart, Robert Lowell and Ezra Pound is invoked.

I’m aware that I can overdo the suggestion that McLean is difficult or, for that matter, self-consciously “literary”. True, I did wrestle with the eighteen 14-line stanzas that make up his “Sequence for my Mother”, and wonder if other readers and I are missing highly personal references in the sequence.  But some poems are quite deadpan straightforward accounts, such as “Sapphics for Physics” which, despite its title, applies photographic realism and understated irony to an account of a fair for alternative remedies. Indeed the poem I found the crown and cap of this collection – by which I mean the one I went back to read and re-read – is McLean’s tranparent “Aubade”, a poem about waking up and contemplating unemployment and idleness among much else; a self-deprecating and yet somehow heroic poem in showing the poet’s art chiselled from unpromising life. I see it as distilling the essence of the bohemian condition – hating it, loving it, knowing that any true creation sits uneasily with a 9-to-5 job.

            I am not talking up For Renato Curcio as a flawless collection and I do not swallow the volume whole. I found the protest poems “Accounting (for Kosovo)” and “Dust and Shadow” too close to the damned obvious in their statements. When I first read the volume’s title poem “For Renato Curcio”, I was tempted to rebuke the poet for fashionably eulogising a man of destructive violence (Curcio having been a leading figure in Italy’s “Red Brigades”). Yet on repeated reading, I find the poem is poised, balanced, questioning both the man’s motivation and the processes of mythologisation – and certainly right to question, en route, the smug glibness of Curnow’s “Moro Assassinato” sequence.

McLean’s 2011 volume Goat Songs has aesthetics in its sights, but also more of tragedy (“goat song” being a literal translation of “tragedy”). Of aesthetics, both opening poems “Elias et Elias” and “Conversazione – ‘On Life and Letters’ ” consider sensibility and seeing – the subjective-objective and its connections. “McCahon” [an unfortunate literal renders the title as “MCACHON”] is a dissection of Colin McCahon’s Red and Black T-cross. “Triptych – After Grunewald” considers the persistence of Christian imagery in a postmodern age and “Memoirs of a Pig Hunting Man” is a prose poem on common images of masculinity and violence. “The Lay of Bellerephon” is a threnody on Greek mythic themes. In all of them, raw reality is seen through the web of art, mythology, preconceptions, received images – in other words aesthetic experience and its subsequent reproductions. This works strongly in favour of one of the volume’s hardiest pieces, “Boadicea’s Death Song”, a carefully-constructed death song panting with both ancient and modern imagery. Boadicea, the woman warrior, is also the woman scorned and the woman guarding ancient gods from the imposition of more facile ones. She ends “Pathetic and alone, / I die by candlelight - / its flame flags; querulous, / its oozing tallow scolds. / I am become a stranger. / After my day of death / I’ll be determined. It is / a fearful thing to fall / into these hands tonight -  / the hands of dead and dying Gods.”

Aesthetic experience – or the formal interpretation of aesthetic experience – has its limits and can be exhausted. This concept underpins “Rimbaud at the Empty Inn”, a sequence of eight linked sonnets, perceiving Arthur Rimbaud in his African exile as having travelled through poetry and come out the other side both purified and emptied. [Other poets have imagined Rimbaud differently. Look up the posting “Arthur Rimbaud Twice Over” via the index at right.]

Once again, I note that in this later volume, McLean can also speak with a voice close to colloquial utterance. The language is direct in the elegy “Betelgeuse and Back Again”. While “Voyager” ponders a variation of the saw “Ars Longa, Vita Brevis” in terms of music and its limitations against the great cosmic noise, it never becomes so opaque (third use in one review!) as to lose sight of the little eponymous machine chugging across infinity.

Like “Aubade” in For Renato Curcio, “Rex Nunquam Moritur” is the surprise hit of Goat Songs because of its combination of accessible colloquialism with real erudition. It has a free-running metre controlled principally by breath-pauses. It considers the relationship of torture with religious ritual  - and perhaps our incorrigible tendency to prettify the former, where “our senses are annoyed / with stench, our sorrow consisting solely / in smelling the ordure and filth / of the Paschal lamb on a spit, / the spit submerged beneath the cross, / a gibbet of execution, the ‘ne plus ultra’ / of human suffering.”

Amen.

In some respects, McLean’s short 2012 volume A Grave Yard by the Sea is his most ambitious work to date. It is a single poem of 62 six-lined stanzas, nearly all with an a-a-b-c-c-b rhyme scheme. From its title onwards it references specifically Paul Valery’s 1920 masterpiece Le Cimetiere Marin. Hence its long reflection on the cemetery at Rapaki on Lyttelton Harbour (enfolded by Banks Peninsula) sometimes comments on the disjunction between New Zealand landscape and received European images and mythologies.

Naturally a poem about a graveyard is also a reflection on the dead, and after long descriptions of place, it mixes concepts of subjectivity and selfhood with attempts to account for and to the dead, rejecting a future paradise in favour of present memory. Dare I say that its conclusion (“Life’s sole end is sailing onwards”) is a little bathetic? To me it smacks too much of George Bernard Shaw’s twittish formula “It is enough that there is a beyond” at the end of Back to Methuselah; or H.G.Wells’ hero “striving upon a hidden mission, out to the open sea” at the end of Tono-Bungay. What is your destination, poet? The line evades that existential necessity of choice; and blind sailing onwards could be sailing to a whirlpool. Do not lecture me on “negative capability”. I know theological ducking and weaving when I see it.

Having begun with this negative comment, however, I still judge A Grave Yard by the Sea an admirable and formidable piece of work. Given its strict form, maintaining the appropriate tone is a challenge for the poet. What is witty can, with this structure, too readily become merely whimsical or even facetious, as in  “The beauty of this coastal shelf / is such that it describes itself. / Resistant to my paraphrase,  / its limits and extent are such / that I could hardly hope to touch / what hemmed-in knowledge it displays.”

Yet, in its development of a this-worldly eschatology, I found many quotable stanzas, and that is the only unimpeachable criterion for judging poetry.

            Thus:

“As eminence grise Hart Crane said / (of Eliot) it’s so damned dead! / This is no Wasteland. Apropos, / the dead who’ve such vitality / they’d bilk at our attempts to see / them otherwise than here-below.”

And:

“Pitched in the face of our absurd / betrayal, the power of the word / is able to wrench back the dead / from sheer indifference of the grave. / The rhythm of the barking wave / keep murmuring what we’d left unsaid.”

            You will note that I have come to no general conclusions about Robert McLean’s poetry in this notice. I will leave it to some future PhD student to write an impenetrable thesis on his hermeneutics and poetic theory. I simply bracket McLean with the very different Richard Reeve as, according to my own reading, the two best New Zealand poets under the age of 40 who are currently working.

But I reserve my curmudgeonly right to quarrel with the ideas of both of them.