four corners in a room
Lynley Edmeades & Saskia Leek, Bordering on Miraculous (MUP: Auckland, 2022), 95 pages.
Mark Young, Songs to Come for the Salamander: Poems 2013-2021 sel. & intro. by Thomas Fink (Sandy/Meritage Presses: California, 2021), 396 pages.
Anna Jackson, Actions & Travels: How Poetry Works (AUP: Auckland, 2022), 300 pages.
Len Lye, Poems, ed. & intro. by Roger Horrocks (Govett-Brewster Art Gallery: New Plymouth, 2021), 76 pages.
If someone were to suggest to you that you should focus all your attention on only a single corner in a room, you’d be forgiven for asking — why? I’d like to take this image as a handy reference point in order to consider four quite distinct, yet related, poetic texts.
Always we are reminded that things are meaningful in relation with other things. A single corner presupposes the entire room, even when most of it remains out of view. This is how meaning works. Such is my predicament in this brief review, which considers the extent to which the relationship between these individual texts is natural, conjectural, or an artifice?
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Occupying two of the corners in our room are the Edmeades/Leek collaboration Bordering on Miraculous, in which 38 untitled Edmeades poems mesh hand-in-hand with Leek’s soft-coloured illustrations, and the Mark Young selection of some 350 poems in Songs to Come for the Salamander. These two striking NZ-born poets, though contemporaries, are separated by a generation in age, as well as, well prior to the birth of the former, the Tasman Sea.[1] Edmeades has an MA in Creative Writing from Queen’s University Belfast and a PhD focused on the work of experimental composer-poet John Cage — coincidentally, also a figure of importance in poems by Young, who, as a poet, spreads himself lavishly across the canvas of American postmodernity (celebrities artists poets politicians).
Interestingly, the Edmeades-Leek liaison is established in a complementary natural/familial space: the illustrations comprise yellow green pink orange blue shapes that recur and depict natural and domestic objects: hills, a waterline, the sun, sand, a cup, a window. Leek’s images elicit direct responses in the accompanying poems, which explore corresponding intimacies (‘The baby is never paused’ 80). These are not poems that address controversy or public affairs — indeed, the world beyond these delicate woven presences may as well not exist. It is the inner world with the power to create that is their subject:
Yet the way the spreading happens
is something quite accidental
even when it maintains circularity.
Circularity is a gentle kind of repeating
and so is happening in the present (8)
Let go of the yellow
and go towards the gaps,
the stretch and fade
of the white underneath
and ask yourself:
do miracles flow like rivers
or do they circle
like a circle (32)
She looked around the room for language
out of which her feelings could be formed (54)
This sequence of verbally interlaced poems is distinguished by its non-rationality. There’s no argument, no consequential or progressive logic. The poems are like (iterative) moments of embrace, whether it is the tenderness or the occasional feeling of strain (natural, human or language based) that is held close. Their beauty is in their free-floatingness. Their deftness is as light and precise an act as the threading of a needle, without requiring the actual eye of the needle.
Young, on the other hand, spirals in and out of his subject matter, at times dizzyingly, always adroitly, with unremitting wit. He’s Australasia’s foremost poet in the playful vividness (that might read ‘voidness’) of words. Just as one might feel drawn to settle in Edmeades’ domesticated alcove ‘of the white underneath’, that occupied by Young turns out to be at once self-replenishing and empty, extraordinary in its amplitude.
Indeed, it is our a-logical, self-disruptive Western culture that he sinks his syllogistic hooks into. At a time when much libertarian endeavour stays focused on inter-subjective perturbations of psychological experience — our various snapchat worlds — an enigmatic older poet like Young spins the entire mirror-world on its axis (see, for instance: ‘the angle of incidents = the angel of refraction’; ‘A dance in five syllables, of which this is only three’; and ‘conv)ex, conc(ave’), in a prolific cerebral outpouring. In a different way from Edmeades, it is the opulent architectures of civilisation that excites his attention. Take the relatively straightforward ‘A Recipe’:
Start with anything; but
if it seems to be leading to a
dead end, then fence it off with
* * * * * * *
& move on. With another word
or phrase. A sentence even. It
doesn’t need to relate to what’s
gone on before, doesn’t even
need to make sense.
In ‘from:Why I am writing this poem’, Young elaborates in Edmond Hillary fashion: ‘It is something to do’. One moment’s frivolity turns the next into an utter seriousness: poetic care acknowledges no ultimate ground.
‘A shared geography’ brings the confession, ‘I am a true / child of the / 20th century’ — and truly, he’s all over it. Yet it’s the 21st one that announces his significant coming out and over which Young casts an assured, if mischievous, spell:
As I approach my seventy-eighth year, I decide it is time I wrote
a really long poem. A meisterarbeit as it were, tying in together
everything I have learnt over my lifetime & distilling it into an
output of such insight & incisiveness that, even if I didn’t finish
it, there would be enough for the most obdurate of critics to
proclaim it the work that showed literature the way forward into
the second half of the twentyfirst century.
(‘Lines writ in the week leading up to my 77th birthday’)
Young realises that ways of seeing are in mimetic relationship with, yet contradistinctive to, encountered objects: life is mentation, down to the level of our regular daily routines (see ‘The Revealing of the Present’):
Grace note
What do we write about
at the beginning, at the end?
Two periods of fifteen years.
Twenty-five years of silence
between. Began by writing
about lizards. Have come
back to them again. Outlived
the earlier ones. The later ones
will probably outlive me. What
is the angle of a turning circle?
Again, the circle. Yet the circle is the place where change and no change co-exist. These two practitioners are top crafters. Edmeades because of her light deftness in threading — and Young because the eye threaded knows no bounds.
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The pertinence of Anna Jackson’s poetic primer Actions & Travels is quickly self-evident. As poet-as-critic she takes 100 poems —predominantly canonical — and in so doing she allows the combined magic of the best to flow over a number of lesser known, local practitioners.[2] Among these are several 1990s-born IIML/VUP associated females/non-binaried: Hera Lindsay Bird (b. 1987), Rebecca Hawkes, Ash Davida Jane, essa may ranapiri (‘Ngāti Raukawa’, takatāpui), Annaleese Jochems, Tayi Tibble (‘Te Whānau-ā-Apanui/Ngāti Porou’), with Nick Ascroft (b. 1973) as a single youngish male.[3] Given the book’s purpose as a reading/teaching instrument for poets/students, it is understandable — if slightly disconcerting —that Te Herenga Waka, where Jackson is Associate Professor in English literature, is centre earth.
The purposive is something I’ll come back to, because I consider that Jackson, at least to some extent, in her inimitable poetic canniness, in part destabilises the same ‘universality of literature’ that is proclaimed as exemplary.
That universality is consummately satisfied in the text’s symmetrical 300-page structure. The 100 poems are neatly categorised into 10 more-or-less equal chapters, with alluring titles such as ‘Simplicity & resonance’ and, endingly, ‘Poetry & the afterlife’. Jackson’s perspective is fresh and insightful, her prose supple and resonant. To take a single instance, the following is written in response to Shakespeare’s quintessential Sonnet 30:
The poem holds open the possibility of finding beauty in sorrow
from the beginning, with the phrase ‘sessions of sweet silent
thought’ beautiful in its alliteration and its syncopated rhythm
slowing down the pentameter line. The beauty of the phrase
suggests the lure of the unhappiness that could be never-ending,
never cancelled out, if it were not for the happiness the thought
of the loved friend brings. (29)
In addition to the 300:100:10 ratio, there is the standard Introduction (‘Reading & writing poetry’), and, from page 210 onward, five supplementary sections, ranging from ‘Writing suggestions’ to the regulation ‘Index’.
Bang in the middle of these is ‘Notes and references’ (33 pages). I find it a marvellous complement (or subtext) to the main body of conventional argument, because it reveals Jackson’s quirkier, no less interesting, poetic side — that of a poet of the standing of an Edmeades or Young. As you will see, relationship abounds:
‘There is plenty of crouching and brooding going on in the work
of New Zealand poet Rebecca Hawkes…’, Rebecca Hawkes,
‘softcore coldsores’, in Anna Jackson (ed.), AUP New Poets 5
(Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2019). (249)
Accordingly, the most informative (and revealing) section in the main body of text is ‘Conversations with the past’, in which Jackson circles around her heartfelt ‘love’ (used along with other words like ‘beautiful’) of translations of classical models including Sappho and, more specifically, Catullus. A gallery of favourites, including epigraph-source Anne Carson, C.K. Stead, and Jackson herself, is drawn into this meme-like refiguration:
These poems are all versions of canonical poem, rewriting – if
not quite translating – them to make them into new works, a
Sappho poem becoming a Catullus poem, a Catullus poem
becoming of poem by Tiffany Atkinson.’ (137)
The same uncanny is reflected in the use of an off piste Carson title and front cover reproduction of Richard McWhannell’s Pig Island Postal Service (2016).[4] The sepia-like weird (another of the more-suggestive critical terms used) pastoral depicts uniformed settler postmen riding on the backs of pigs, with a similarly mounted naked couple of women cavorting in the background (outside the men’s gaze). Held in private collection, it is snapped here by Stephen Goodenough — while the distinguished Actions & Travels’ printer is identified as Chinese company Everbest Printing Investment Ltd (my italics).
Through this capable book run variously tinted threads, weaving a kind of whimsied entanglement that inhabits poetry here, there, everywhere.
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The occupant of our fourth corner is the late expatriate ‘drafter’ of unfinished poems, internationally renowned kinetic sculptor and composer of scored-celluloid films, Len Lye (b. 1901, Christchurch). Roger Horrocks, who was Lye’s assistant in the early 1980s, and subsequently his biographer, collates a sixth collection of the artist’s writings comprising 42 short pieces, suggestively grouped in a way that reminds us of Jackson’s poetic taxonomy.
‘The Making of Tusalava’ is a revelation of Lye’s creative approach to film animation[5] and provides a handy bridge between my two favourite sections: the deep mythologies of ‘From “NIGHT TREE”’ —
These are the start of things. These are not things yet, they are
the ideas of things…. They will go into the black honeycombed
rock and stay there for a long time to digest the soil and
become real like rock is real. (‘Prefossils’)
and ‘Moments’ —
Get a brioche in a small white bag and go to a café, and while
waiting to order an espresso, put the brioche in its thin wax
paper on the table, flatten out the bag, find a short 5 inch
pencil (in hip pocket), and write a description of the painting
Land and Sea. (‘How to Write a Poem’).
Reminding us of O’Hara’s offhand artistry (‘Why I Am Not a Painter’ is one of three O’Hara poems referenced in Actions & Travels), the second Lye piece I quote from above would fit well alongside O’Hara’s in the section ‘Concision, composition & the image’: ‘being a poet might not be very different from being a painter because of the way it involves exactly this kind of “painting over”’ (49). More than its accomplishment, Lye’s writing embodies the figural lure that pricks us into pursuing poetry’s inexhaustible promise.
c⌂da
Order may be established but, in the room, it is not guaranteed. Dare one say that it is quite possible to take the order of poems — or the order of lines — or words — or letters — and throw them up in the air allowing them to fall where they will — and the result will still belong to Lye’s ’make new drafts of a text and be unsure’ (21)? The shape that is formed on each occasion is no less amenable to order than the one that gave rise to it. O dear.
These four books give witness, each in their own way, to the room whose corners they occupy. Once ‘spoken’, they revert to the air that contributes to the possibilities of sound or the cipherous characters that enable scripts to be constructed and meanings construed, from corner to corner, room to room.
notes
[1] This is Edmeades third book of poems, his fifty-somethingth. Alongside her ‘not-as-yet’, Songs to Come is Young’s second ‘selected’, quick enough on the heels of his marvelous 412-page Pelican Dreaming, likewise selected and introduced by Fink (Meritage Press, 2008). The to Come leaves the door wide open.
[2] A touch disingenuously, Jackson lauds Robert Sullivan’s Star Waka (1999) as ‘one of the most important poetry collections of twentieth-century New Zealand literature’ (153), immediately rendering him the rightful equal of poets of the calibre of Baxter and Tuwhare, similarly championed in Actions & Travels.
[3] The obvious other name I look for but do not find is that of Chris Tse, another burningly sharp young poet and erstwhile product of Victoria University and IIML.
[4] The title and epigraph derive from Anne Carson, a kind of bright-corollary to Jackson’s own career. Carson is a Canadian professor of classical studies, poet, essayist, classicist and translator (Sappho, Euripides etc.) who ‘often plays with convention and classification’ (227).
[5] In relation to the vaunted aesthetics of circles, it is worth noting from the same poem: ‘The third section… ends with a series of concentric circles welling from one point and another series starting to break into the edge of [the] first and making a scintillating pattern… and the camera dives down into their centre [of one lot of circles] for an underwater take of nebulous dots and flickering light which is the complete circle… the beginning… the end’.
john geraets 