In Tamaki Makaurau, we recently had several days looking at our world through a ‘smoulder gel’, courtesy of the smoke from the Australian bush fires. It was a disturbing experience of the encroaching realities of climate change. Michael Giacon’s poem title therefore overtly acknowledges the fact that ‘nature’ lyrics – such as this one he has written – have acquired a permanent edge of elegy: Wordsworth’s daffodils, Frost’s snowy woods, Basho’s Road to the Far North, Dallas’s cows at evening milking: all become requiems.

The telling imagery Giacon uses in ‘through a smoulder gel’, realises the natural world with acuity: ‘trees swelling / with the same sound as the sea / in the wind humming a recharge’, but his intermittent typo-graphical word fadeouts simultaneously suggest that the delights of lyric precision will ultimately feature in forensic records. Reading ‘through a smoulder gel’ jolted me to a remembrance of Doris Lessing’s magnificently compassionate post-apocalyptic novel from 1999 Mara and Dan, http://www.dorislessing.org/maraand.html, in which, at one point, a department of archivists find unstoppably rising water swirling around their ankles – this bringing to an abrupt halt their dedicated efforts to digitally preserve the remaining evidence of human civilization.

In these terms the lyric comforts of Giacon’s oceanside meditation are dangerously deceptive. His watcher-on-the-rocks contemplates the clouds of a moonlit night, while hyped for the drama of awakening weather. As observer, he speaks to the reader from a place of personal equilibrium and risk ­­– which he assesses as manageable. He is there to ‘take on fuel for climbing rocks / and singing the sea’. A speaker whose life trajectory is undiminished and whose mood is not chastened with environmental dread even though his ‘Old friends are… / counting costs each cent a remove / from where we were.’ Is his moon-alert cockeyed optimism a kind of gallows humour? Or is it that he simply refuses to go there… yet?

Michael Giacon situates his narrator exactly where most of us are at this moment: Keep Calm and Carry On. His piece’s composure achieved by a sense of the rightness of ‘all the themes / I think I know’. For example, the poem’s unmentioned environmental, political and economic interventions, that we and ‘others’ will make and are making. Efforts, which surely are going to sort out the rumoured messes yet to impact these shores and our lives. This is the don’t panic point of view buttressed by the poet with the ancient verities of Christian communion: ‘The Cloud night held the moon / like a host to a chalice to steal me / away through’.  It’s as if this faith vocabulary is an enduring one for him, that will, whatever happens, be an avenue of escape ­– spiritual release made available to the poet so long as he remains fully attuned to the eternal rhythms of the earth: ‘A slither in the southward cloud sky / becomes more lure than hook’. In this line the poet also expresses his ambivalent awareness that the price of his spiritual consolations will require the anchoring in him of doctrinal barbs. He is prepared to tolerate these. The promise of a transcendent spiritual plane revealingly positioned by him, as accommodating the phallocentric paradigm of male as neutral universal: ‘Tonight is man unmade’.

The poet’s voice is that of an emblematically Kiwi everyman: Someone juxtaposing rueful sorrow; humble resignation; replenishing solitude; dauntless can-do energy; and crazy hope – in a text whose line fade-outs and fade-ins could buck the trend of dissolution, to be read counter-intuitively, in a feminine register, as a word taniko.

It should also be noted that a ‘smoulder gel’ could be that lens, beloved of Hollywood, used for softening a leading lady’s sharp features to a ‘luminosity’ acceptable to the male-gaze. And it’s also a cosmetic – applied to the eye sockets to enhance sexual attractiveness. An effect achieved by masking the wearer’s actual expression in a smudge of dark velvet distraction.