The Little Enemy
\nby Nicholas Reid
\nSteele Roberts Aotearoa
\nISBN 978-1-877577-51-2
\nRRP. $29.95. 94 pp.<\/p>\n
A Man Runs into a Woman
\nby Sarah Jane Barnett
\nHue & Cry Press
\nISBN 978-0-473-21399-2
\n71 pp.<\/p>\n
The Same as Yes
\nby Joan Fleming
\nVictoria University Press
\nISBN 978-0-86473-698-7
\nRRP: $ 28.00. 79 pp.<\/p>\n
Murray Bramwell<\/p>\n
These three collections are all debut publications and each reminds us of the diversity in current writing. They vary greatly in perspective, tone, technique, assumed knowledge and raise again the interesting question of what it means to be a New Zealand writer.<\/p>\n
Nicholas Reid is a lyric and satiric poet. A long career as teacher, historian, theologian, critic and widely published reviewer, spans a reading life which, like mine, encompasses the notion of the literary canon – the best which has been thought and taught – from the standpoint of the latter half of the 20th<\/sup> century. His poems, sometimes with the benefit of endnotes, name-check (as they say) Hazlitt and Cowper, Philip Larkin, Randolph Scott, Alfred Hitchcock, Mayakovsky and Baudelaire – among many more. All dead white males, for sure, but one has a sense that this collection has been a while in the making; that it is both a cultural retrospective and a Proustian reverie about familiar places and the experiences of a younger life.<\/p>\n There is also a tone of mordant acceptance that temps<\/i> is, after all, perdu.<\/i> Reid\u2019s skeptical Catholicism modifies his tone but certainly doesn\u2019t lighten it. Take the curious title poem, The Little Enemy<\/i>, for instance, which is Swiftian, or perhaps Augustinian, in its reminder that we are all bound for decay and oblivion. Reid\u2019s subject, an epicurean, is savouring a dish of fettucine when :<\/p>\n The little enemy, like an army not knowing But life has its epiphanies before it turns to excrement and dust, as the poems in the first two sections, Fly-Over Country<\/i> and The Pool<\/i>, attest. Some are lyrics of familiar places such as Bluff<\/i> Seas<\/i> \u2013 \u201cSkewed on a tip of rock\/ the straps of copper-coloured kelp\/dance in the noon\u2019s sea swell\u201d. Or, in the gentle Romantic paradox of Reserve \u2013 \u201c<\/i>And we <\/i>claimed delight at how\/ distant, soft and hushing the\/rude noise from the main road was.\/Pure Nature. But it was still\/ the concrete beneath our feet\/ that made us most at home.\u201d (p.43)<\/p>\n The absence of cameras is celebrated in Long After it Was Heard No More<\/i>– There are other blue remembered lyrics here, such as the tightly rhymed, gently elegiac Once to the<\/i> Rocks<\/i>, dedicated to his friend, the poet and editor, Bill Sewell :<\/p>\n \u201cOnce to the rocks\u201d said Bill and took a dive So in his element, smooth and alive Elsewhere, we find religious themes questioned with a humanist caution \u2013 as in Holy Sonnets<\/i> and A Donkey Ride<\/i>. And, when you check Reid\u2019s notes and learn that the title refers to an airship\u2019s gondola, Nacelle<\/i> is rewardingly airy. Also notable is the witty and perceptive riposte to Yeats\u2019s poem of the same name – Among School Children, <\/i>which concludes : \u201cWhat of the leaf, the blossom and the bole ?\/ Platonic fizz distracting from the social whole.\u201d The Little Enemy<\/i> has thoughtful, lightly-managed poems that lure you back to be their friends.<\/p>\n Sarah Jane Barnett\u2019s debut collection, A Man Runs into a Woman<\/i> is also a first single author publication for Wellington based art and literary journal, Hue & Cry, and it is well worth the heralding. The collection is in three sections; the first consists of eight pieces \u2013 some like Embossed<\/i> : \u201c \u2018We\u2019re getting on,\u2019 she says.\/ He sings into her hands, his voice\/slipping between her fingers\u201d, and Bees<\/i> : \u201c\u2026One evening there was a fat cloud of bees. They hum into\/ his empty spaces\u201d \u2013 are short dense blocks of unlineated text, like compressed Oxo cubes, perhaps, concentrations of flavour and meaning waiting to be released by the reader.<\/p>\n These poems inhabit subjectivities other than that of the poet; they are micro-fictions, tersely fashioned to suggest meaning beyond their margins. Lullaby<\/i> is especially insinuating in its melancholy:<\/p>\n The woman next door sings so slowly someone must have The second section is more particular and, perhaps, problematic. These poems all refer to the documented executions of convicted murderers on death row in Texas between 1999 and 2009. They are named \u2013 Dennis Dowthit, David Long, Johnny Ray Johnson \u2013 and details of their grisly crimes, all against women and children, are interspersed with accounts of their final hours and minutes awaiting lethal injection. The authenticity of the details, I discovered, can be found on the Texas Execution Information Centre website.<\/p>\n Barnett crisply and powerfully captures the events, the frame of mind and actual words of these miscreants. Dowthwitt commits his crimes at a rundown location he knew as a kid \u2013 \u201c While he drags her to the rear of the truck\/ he thinks, I\u2019m fucking sick\/ of selling cars in Humble.\u201d There is sinister irony in For a New<\/i> Technician<\/i>: David Long, the live-in handyman who killed all three women in the house he shared , faces execution :<\/p>\n The chair looks My initial reaction was that these are Google poems, with subject matter drawn a long way from \u201chome\u201d. But the poet has adeptly made this material her own and inhabits the specifics in order to invoke our deeper consternation and bewilderment about the sources of human cruelty.<\/p>\n The final section consists of three extended prose\/poems. The longest, Marathon Men<\/i>, describes the unlikely meeting of two isolated older men \u2013 Stu, a waste collection contractor and Robert Malzack, a reclusive man who paints (and decorates) prosthetic limbs. It is a study in contrasting personalities and unlikely connection and has more than a touch of eccentricity to it. It would make a brilliant short film, but I feel, at fifteen pages, it looms too large, literally, in a slim volume that should be more delicately balanced.<\/p>\n It raises into question the severe economy of other pieces and overshadows the splendid composition, The Geographer,<\/i> which precedes it. <\/i> The Geographer refers to the woman narrator\u2019s father, now a cross-dresser \u2013 \u201cI\u2019m still\/ your dad, just kinder\u201d, he says.\u201d Source for the line \u2013 \u201cIn my dream a man runs into a woman\u201d – it gives the book\u2019s title new implication. The man morphs into a woman, as Sarah Jane Barnett morphs through a variety of guises, many of them male, some of them in extremis. She, like The Geographer, charts new territory and takes imaginative bearings beyond the subjective eye .<\/p>\n The opening poem in Joan Fleming\u2019s collection describes a small girl who- \u201c has some questions: is \u2018hello\u2019 the same as\/ \u2018yes\u2019\u2026\u201d In this imaginative suite of intriguing miniatures, Fleming greets the world from new perspectives and in their playful, often affirmative engagement, hello does indeed seem to be the same as yes.<\/p>\n Like Barnett, Fleming is also a shape-shifter, inhabiting her poems even from inanimate perspectives. An old house says please, a clothes peg talks to the clothesline, chalk talks to the board. In fact, in the first section, Blue as the Eyes of her Mother<\/i>, everyone is talking. An old man is talking to his radio, a young girl talks to a quail chick she is about to love to death, a fifteen year old boy talks in his broken voice, a father does not talk but snoozes through a feminist play, a boy talks to his pockets , a young man who hasn\u2019t swum in fourteen years talks to the ocean.<\/p>\n In the He and She<\/i> section, the focus is interpersonal \u2013 as in He and She Talk a Sweet Violence over Dinner:<\/i><\/p>\n They ate their dinner at the table, which was really a The final group, entitled A Mirror and the First Face,<\/i> explores identity and creativity but these poems are, like the whole collection, Escher-like in their surreal intricacy and Edward Lear-like in their whimsical curiosity. In The Sun Talks about Loneliness and Dying<\/i> : \u201cThe sun talks in plosive vowels. Mostly Os, at noon.\/Because it is tired of living so far away, it tries to take up\/ residence inside our skin.\u201d<\/p>\n The Same As Yes<\/i> is a captivating collection. Joan Fleming\u2019s assured writing, like the other poets discussed here, has a waiting readership who will not be disappointed. But they are not likely to be very young. Most young poets now write songs. Someone should post these poets on Facebook or Twitter or somewhere – to help the hue and cry.<\/p>\n Murray Bramwell lives in Adelaide and is a theatre reviewer for The Australian. <\/i> The Little Enemy by Nicholas Reid Steele Roberts Aotearoa ISBN 978-1-877577-51-2 RRP. $29.95. 94 pp. A Man Runs into a Woman by Sarah Jane Barnett Hue & Cry Press ISBN 978-0-473-21399-2 71 pp. The Same as Yes by Joan Fleming Victoria University Press ISBN 978-0-86473-698-7 RRP: $ 28.00. 79 pp. Murray Bramwell These three collections are all debut publications and each reminds us of the diversity in current writing. They vary greatly in perspective, tone, technique, assumed knowledge and raise […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,5,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-24","category-archive","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2261"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2261\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2262,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2261\/revisions\/2262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nwhether to advance or retreat, stalled in his gut,
\nannounced its presence with an acidic stab, \u2026
\n\u2026
\nIn those moments of hesitancy, the little enemy
\nturned philosopher, declared \u201dYou did know that taste
\nwas brief, didn\u2019t you? That sooner or later
\nI would break down into my constituent chemical bits ?
\nLeave me uneaten, I rot. Process me through your body,
\nI rot faster\u2026
\n\u2026
\n\u201cI am the food you ate , become yourself,\u201d
\nsaid the little enemy, \u201cAnd I am digestion,
\nand I am Time.\u201d He swallowed . The enemy
\nkicked, and fulfilled its destiny.\u201d (pp.30-1)<\/p>\n
\n\u201cThank you for not bringing\/ the camera when I was twelve\/ feet tall. Digging a cavern. \u201c Memory, not memento, is preferred \u2013 \u201cThank you for not saving\/ the moment, for letting it grow malleable and live\/ in this obtuse soft grey organ.\u201d (p.14)<\/p>\n
\nas neat and arc-light as a well-cast line.
\nHe left no ripple. I blundered behind
\nwith belly flop and splashes, awkwardly.<\/p>\n
\nahead, with berried skin and flexing spine
\namphibious kelpie boy, he didn\u2019t mind
\nheadaching sunlight on a morning sea (p.42)<\/p>\n
\ndied. She practises her sorry aria through the walls\u2026
\n\u2026 The radio tells me
\nit snows somewhere south. Drifts fall down for days. The
\npresenter uses the word ghastly far too often. In the ghastly
\nsnow he says, animals dig for their calves. (p.12)<\/p>\n
\nlike a La-Z-boy or the seat an astronaut
\nwould be strapped into, ready for blast off.
\n\u2026
\nThe astronaut mouths , Don\u2019t watch, Mama.
\nI\u2019m sorry I have been such a lazy boy . (p.26)<\/p>\n
\nchild\u2019s school-desk. Darling, <\/i>she said to him. Darling<\/i>, he
\nsaid to her. And they tore up their bread to the sound of
\nthe radio news – snatched children found on rooftops,
\nearthquake weather making the hemisphere smile. She
\nhad a lovely cut on her hand, clean as a cartographer\u2019s
\nborder. And he had splintered fingers from stacking the
\nwood which they were allowing to die, hotly and blackly,
\nin the potbelly stove. (p.37)<\/p>\n
\n <\/i>
\n\u201cMemory and Oxo Cubes\u201d New Zealand Books, Volume 23, Number 1, Issue 101, Autumn, 2013. Pp. 5-6.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"