John Pule's touchstones of storytelling

John Pule is unusually gifted in balancing words and images.

At the Going West Festival in Titirangi, polymath John Pule, aged 52, read from John Pule, aged 22 or so: "Dolphins, nectarines and turtles,/ and all at once, they jump out from your/ mouth ..."

This is the beginning of The Bond of Time: An Epic Love Poem recently republished with an introduction by Canterbury writer Jeffrey Paparoa Holman. In Titirangi, Holman, acting as Pule's session chair/chief interrupter, said something like: "If you want to go to the Pacific without taking a plane, this book will take you there." But that is misleading: we're already in the Pacific; when Pule wrote the poem he hadn't seen Niue since he first left, aged 2; and katipo, Whatipu beach and moreporks appear in the poem, as do Michelangelo and the Sahara Desert.

The Bond of Time reads like a modern New Zealand-Niuean Song of Songs. Pule says it was a response to a love affair with an older English woman whose ways he found strange, but it became more than that. Like much of Pule's writing, painting and tattoo designs, it is a large maximalist patchwork containing smaller detailed sections. Or to give Pule's verdict on this early piece: it goes "on and on and on and on. Mushy."

That's more amusing than just, but Pule's current muse seems to prefer poems of few words. His latest exhibition, From the Islands: Dreams, Fragrance and Extinction - also out west, close to the Henderson train station at the Corban Estate Art Centre - presents 18 short aphoristic poems calligraphied in blue, each on its own bare, large piece of paper. (Joy, you can also take them away in a small free booklet.)

Pule is unusually gifted in balancing words and images in "illuminated manuscripts", but in From the Islands he offers words on their own, perhaps for the first time, without colour blocks or sketched marginalia of vines and black-cross ambulances drivers in the spare, ethereal and faceless style of Good News Bible illustrations.

These new poems distil Pule's storytelling to his touchstones: here are his familiar shark, revered sexuality, and sickened Christ on a stretcher. The motifs are suspended in language which marries sounds and confounds assumptions.

For example, the whole second poem reads: "The lanugo of my body/ Clung to Liku." I had to decipher this by dictionary (adolescent poetry-reader Pule did the same - although by 18 he was impressing poet cronies at the pub by reciting Keats by heart). "Liku" is the village where Pule was born and I first thought "lanugo" must be a Niuean word also. But no; it is a term in English for the soft downy hair on a newborn's body. Birth, hair and startlingly precise biological words - capillaries, leukocytes, labia majora - all reappear later in the series.

The consonant sounds of "clung" link "lanugo" and "Liku" more tightly, and the image is arresting, linking loss, growth and exile. Thirty years after the 88 pages of The Bond of Time, Pule creates lushness with just eight words.

John Pule will read poetry at the Corban Estate Art Centre on October 11 at 11am, 2pm and 6pm.