Hamesh Wyatt reviews recent works of poetry.
Michael Steven
Otago University Press
Michael Steven has become a darling in the literary world.
His third collection was the winner of the Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award 2021 and the Auckland-based poet keeps takes a deep look back over his life, always with a keen eye turned forward.
Night School is his best yet.
Steven drops pins in time and space. He is intelligent as he dishes out personal stuff which is pretty disturbing. The Picture of Doctor Freud includes the piece:
… He leant back casually in the guest’s chair
to tell my father about his new wife.
Cigarette smoke curled in the air:
unstable, hostile and pyrophoric.
A river of bad blood, thirty years long,
running between them on that afternoon.
My father and grandfather; the same
wounded human: complicit, bewildered. …
This poetry is for grown-ups and reveals its unconventional dark beauty over repeated reads.
James Brown
Te Herenga Waka University Press
James Brown teaches creative writing at Te Herenga Waka University, Wellington.
Once again he is crazy, entertaining and insightful in this latest effort.
I like his history narrative in War and Design and his own personal tale Oral History.
Lesson:
When was the last time you
washed a green apple - peeling
off the irksome sticker - and
quartered it on a chopping board?
Then sliced the quartered cores out
with two fine v-cuts
and threw them onto the lawn
for the birds? Then cut each quarter
in half and passed the eighths
around, eating two yourself
- the sharp fresh taste sweeter
than you’d expected?
Nick Ascroft
Te Herenga Waka University Press
Originally from Oamaru, Nick Ascroft now lives in Wellington.
The Stupefying is his sixth collection and these are some of his most personal poems.
They contain a sweetness that stings.
Ascroft is insightful and delightful; his main interest to pen poems showing what it means to be human. Over the years he has developed a simple yet effective way of speaking the truth.
Always Saying Sorry (an email from Kate) concludes:
…
I’m exhausted all the time,
and tired of never having money. We
are wasting our potential. Still. So I’m
depressed, stuck here while time just disappears.
I realise it’s been like this for years.
Ascroft strips away the artifice to say what he means.
Stay on to read his funny notes after his comedy-science-fiction poem Pronouncements of the Visiting Entity, from Behind the Pipe.
Elizabeth Morton
Otago University Press
Elizabeth Morton burst on to the poetry scene in 2017 with her little book Wolf.
Naming the Beasts shows Morton still likes to write about broken things and things with teeth.
She takes on many forms. Themes of want, need, despair, love and politics fill up these pages.
Her Breaking news begins:
There is another mass shooting. The pangolin curls into a tenpin ball,
and we are iodine in the veterinarian’s cubby hole. We are swabs and cotton
and all the ways we could have been gentler. The world is a baby. The world
is on fire. The world is a wet market where everybody is smaller than on
the packet.
This books is full of original thought.
Peter Olds
Cold Hub Press
Peter Olds was recently honoured with a plaque in the Dunedin Writers’ Walk.
Sheep Truck: and other poems shows our local scribe has been in reflective mood of late.
Olds’ poems are, as usual, stunning, patient, atmospheric little pieces. It contains many pieces on alienation and disappearance. \
The title poem concludes:
…
They said everything we need for our journey
will be waiting for us when we reach our destination.
We must be getting close, our wheels just touched the runway.
I see trees, shops, traffic lights flash by—
and a sign on a lamppost that says ‘GREAT KING STREET’.
Jan FitzGerald
The Cuba Press
Jan FitzGerald was around on the literary scene in the 1970s. This new effort is a gorgeous, layered little book.
FitzGerald places many of these poems in the past, like growing up in the 1950s and facing demons in her life.
At the same time these pieces are presented as comfort food of the highest order: familiar, warm and instantly satisfying. “Friendly fire”:
…
‘Who drove you to hospital?’ Mother wanted to know.
Father said he asked a boy to fetch the metalwork teacher
while he found a bandage.
And the boy who did it,
the boy who talked to Father when he shouldn’t have,
picked up the fingertip from sawdust on the floor
and, handing it back,
fainted. …
Tim Upperton
Auckland University Press
Tim Upperton, like James Brown, comes from Palmerston North. He is unpredictable with his poems. Three men in a lift have a secret to tell one another when they get stuck.
Sometimes more needs to be said. “The riderless horses”:
One evening that summer a riderless horse galloped along
our road, empty stirrups slapping. We ran up the driveway
screaming to our mother. Quick, inside! she said. She shut and
locked the door, closed the windows. The horse tried the door
handle, its large eye pressed to the keyhole. It prowled around
the house. The fume of its breath misted the windows. It couldn’t
get in! We laughed with relief. …
A Riderless Horse is a bear-hug of book for a bear-market world.
Upperton’s poems have that Christmas-is-here-don’t-cry-feel.
Jordan Hamel
Dead Bird Books
Jordan Hamel’s debut collection is an honest, hilarious, frenzied, fast-moving little book.
Hamel quickly delves into failed relationships, confused intimacy and bad advice.
Often he looks at the big picture like in “Society does a collective impersonation of Robin Williams Telling Matt Damon ‘It’s not your fault’ repeatedly in Good Will Hunting”.
Funny moments are whisked into serious situations. Hamel combines religious undertones too.
Mermaids:
When you lose grip and start to drift
the first thing you’re supposed to do is
steer into it or steer away? …
Hamel knows the world’s problems have got a little more urgent, and he is wrapped up in the world.
John Gibb
Cold Hub Press
John Gibb recently retired after more than 30 years as a science and university reporter at the Otago Daily Times.
Surprised By Hope is his third book of poetry.
Gibb writes weird and wonderful poems.
He muses over Looking Back from the Future, how a 40-year-old German text book imagined the world in the year 2000.
I do like his short poems, like Green:
Like a green tree
the conversation grows.
A tree in which
birds might light,
before night, a place
where wing-shaped
shadows might grow.
Green, greenness
is in the eyes of birds
like a conversation
green words gathering
before the dark.
Occasionally he reworks his old stuff like the third section of Signalling North.
This is potent, polished stuff from one of our locals.
Gibb delivers in equal measures smooth and mellow, dark and heavy. Not everyone can write poems about socks.
Ian Rockel
Steele Roberts
Ian Rockel has lots of friends, one of whom (Ian Mune) writes a lovely introduction to this collection.
Mune also contributes four art works illustrating the poetry within moods.
Rockel is a Devonport poet and has done much in life. Many of these poems deal with death, ghosts, memories and how to live when feeling a little old.
Many read like alluring riddles that simmer along.
The whole thing may seem at times like a grim journey, but Rockel offers hope and a few laughs along the way.
Distance concludes:
…
He gurgled:
‘No, I don’t really want to do that.’
‘But why?’
‘I don’t really want to talk
about it.’
‘Do you think you might,
one day,
want to talk about it?’
But his mind was gathered
by passing cleavages.
Sudha Rao
The Cuba Press
Sudha Rao was originally from South India and now lives in Wellington, after spending time in Dunedin.
Being both a poet and a dancer, Rao expresses both loves in her work.
She doles out many thoughts on family and connection.
Birds “take wing” and other dreamy, thoughtful bits include Up:
Woke
with brittle hands,
cold feet.
Spring
flakes into summer
sunning.
Heart warms,
stand up, hands up
for a shake up.
I like the sense of yearning and joyous outpouring Rao brings to this one.
Tom Weston
Steele Roberts
Tom Weston works language and form into something meaningful. His verse does not skate the surface of emotional intimacy.
Little moments are given deep insight like in his diptych “In which the rain replies”.
Weston divides this slim volume into five parts.
I enjoyed his dialogues where “Kafka does his tax return”:
Today. A man
awoke to discover the zeros in his statements had come to pass.
Had passed. Whatever number once had circumscribed their
infinitude now subscribed to an equal emptiness. …
Expectation contains killer poems that nail the hurt. Weston might paint with narrow parameters but the reader gathers a new understanding.
Doc Drumheller
Cold Hub Press
There is something cool about a little red book containing haiku from China and India.
Doc Drumheller is a native of South Carolina but has lived longer here in New Zealand.
Liang Yujing helps with his Chinese translations.
Drinking With Li Bai may be a little too scattershot to connect with the average reader, but on a second reading some of these short pieces stick:
view from the turret
All Along the Watchtower
playing in my mind
Drumheller’s work may seem to lean sad, but there is no cheap gloom or easy mess.
ed Jordan Hamel, Rebecca Hawkes, Erik Kennedy & Essa May Ranapiri
Auckland University Press
No Other Place to Stand is a big anthology of climate-change poetry from Aotearoa.
Ninety-one writers with connections to these islands grapple with the biggest issue facing us as people and the planet.
Jessica Hinerangi, David Eggleton, Victor Billot, Emma Neale, James Norcliffe and Tara Black all make contributions.
Some of the titles grab you like Dani Yourukova’s All my plants are dead and I’m pretty sure it’s your fault.
Nick Ascroft adds They’re Playing the ‘You’ve Gone on Too Long’ Music, but the Essential Struggle Is to Think Yourself More Important Than the Schedules of Plebeians.
Philip Armstrong expresses his hurt in Best Before:
…
And then I knew this for the place
I’d met the ice-bound ship, the explorer Walton
and the brilliant stranger whose dead face
was more familiar than my own.
I’d fled them, lighting bonfires in my brain.
Somewhere in darkness and in distance lost
a deep crevasse took me and tucked me in
the so-called permafrost
until the seasons sickened and the summer
like a sunstruck scientist on burning feet
came slouching north with blackened hands
to peel back the sheets.
Poetry speaks loudly and softly, sincerely and ironically, confrontationally and compassionately. There are some old pieces included. But this is okay. The situation is not new. Everyone should have a copy of No Other Place to Stand.
Hamesh Wyatt lives in Bluff. He reads and writes poetry.
