Book review: Wow, by Bill Manhire, a collection of poetry

Wow, by Bill Manhire

Wow
by Bill Manhire
(Victoria University Press, $25)
Reviewed by Anna Jackson

Bill Manhire's latest collection is full of birds and full of song. It opens with a ballad telling the story of the Huia — "I was the first of birds to sing / I sang to signal rain / the one I loved was singing / and singing once again" — and the last section of the collection ends with a poem almost in prose, After Surgery, in which "A small bird flies out of the body, out of a blink perhaps, / maybe out of the lungs."

Throughout the collection, Manhire's 15th, the poetry shifts from conventional, usually iambic rhythms, to the no less lyrical rhythms of ordinary conversation. This is from the wonderfully anti-epic Noah:

"I abandoned the bad band / and joined the good band: I thought / that we would flood the world with music."

Sometimes it seems as if you can hear a poem tuning up, finding its rhythm before it turns itself into song. This is from Isolation Notes, with its unconventional but moving rhythms: "Hospitals and schools, beds and desks / all that courage / all those corridors."

The most substantial poem in the collection is Warm Ocean, a poem that begins with what looks like a typo: "Someone says lonely let's go for a stroll." This voice is joined by another someone and another, all uttering platitudes — "someone says it was never about the money". The only context is this stroll that everyone — now "we" — goes on together.

The stroll takes in a landscape made up of cliffs and ocean, a long stretch of wood, a stream-bed, as well as birds, of course, and books. By the end of the poem, which also seems to be the end of the world, we are left with small fires, shipwrecks, and (unsurprising only because this is a Manhire poem) an orchestra "breaking up the ballroom".

This is a recognisably Manhire landscape, made up of snatches of lyricism, phrases that repeat or rhyme, phrases that have a rhythm to them: "yes all of that and more / all of that and more". It's made up, too, of elemental things: snow, frost, the ocean, brought alive by a detail — "sand that shuffles aside when she whispers". They could have been lifted out of another poem, as if they are echoes, made up of language, as much as they are objects, "something sighing / like the troubled echo of a sigh". The sense that this is a world made up of language takes nothing away from its transcendence.

This has been a year of epic poetry, with Emily Wilson's brilliant new translation of the Odyssey and Maria Dahvana Headley's equally celebrated Beowulf. The lyric, with its lonely interiority, might seem the opposite of the epic. But when a Manhire poem takes flight, the lyric can also show an epic vision — and is all the more resonant for being distilled into song.

Anna Jackson is a poet and academic based in Wellington. A longer version of this review will be published at www.anzliterature.com