Ghosts by Siobhan Harvey (Otago University Press, $28)
For years, Siobhan Harvey has reviewed and promoted poetry books, compiled anthologies, lectured in creative writing, organised poetry readings, taught and mentored many poets. Every few years she manages to find time to knock out a book of her own powerful and humanepoems.
The cover blurb of Ghosts tells us the book explores "migration, outcasts, the search for home, and the ghosts we live with, including the ones who occupy our memories, ancestries and stories". Across four sections bookended by an Epilogue, Prologue, and Afterword in the form of an essay, Harvey lyrically interrogates the personal, social and global strata for manes, visitants, poltergeists: "All the buildings that never were/All the novels unwritten. All the dead/bodies of portraits never realised."
Harvey, always a compassionate poet, sets out to write a fugue to what is lost and irretrievable. We encounter the author's ancestral ghosts in Britain. Ghosts of families whose Glen Innes state houses were sold off by the Key Government. Ghosts on Manus Island. There are ghost trysts with a first love. Ghost words, writers, poems. Ghosts are talked about, and described, but rarely do we get close enough to see or meet them.
Harvey displays a fine lyric sensibility across this collection. Her gift is for the exalted phrase, where she pushes language into the realm of the ecstatic. The strongest poems in this collection are where Harvey bravely directs her focus and lyric power on to herself, her family members - particularly when she is writing about the strained relationship she has with her mother: "The other life I might have known / with her is filament burned / into my mind. A movie / never released; a book / unpublished: these I inherit / as she ghosts me."
At times Ghosts began to feel like a creative writing thesis; the many footnotes and quotations clutter up the pages and shift focus from the beautiful architecture of the poems themselves. But there are many true poems here and Harvey is to be commended for her experimentation, for employing such a diverse range of verse and poetic forms. She is able to write to a beat and metre; and shows a gift for appropriating non-literary forms too.
One of the mantras of any writing course is, "Show, don't tell." This is something of an oxymoron: you cannot show without telling. But, of course, this pertains to the use of concrete and precise imagery, as opposed to the general and abstract. I mentioned earlier at times feeling as if we do not get close enough to these ghosts. They are often broadly described, leaving the reader with little or no sense of their physical or spectral identities. This is small stuff. By no means does it detract from the beauty and power of this fearless performance.
