Tackling The Hens
by Mary McCallum (Cuba Press, $25)
Publisher and author Mary McCallum’s third collection is a salute to what is humane. The title poem Tackling the Hens is literally about trying to round up a bunch of squawking birds, but in seeing their behaviour she can see the worst of people – quarrelling, making loud noises, trying to push ahead of others. She prefers to deal with the good in people, so most of her poems are about positive things: the delight of being the mother of an adolescent daughter; the pleasure of seeing a young man making bread; the joy of old women chatting together; showing how important a humble gift is.
None of this is naïve because she balances the positive with the awkward and the unpleasant, like that awful moment when you can’t find a book when you were sure you knew where it was (Hunting for Cavafy). She loves to give us a sense of place and is much very attuned to Wellington and environs, but is saddened by what has become of Day’s Bay in the poem Finding Mansfield. And of course there is deep sorrow in her elegy for her mother, Still Life. McCallum presents a very wide spectrum of human behaviour and has a careful touch in dealing with people.
Terrier, Worrier
by Anna Jackson (Auckland University Press, $24.99)
Anna Jackson is both poet and academic. As well as producing eight collections of poetry, she has also written books about the nature of poetry itself. Terrier, Worrier is presented as prose poetry, in effect speculative statements based on Jackson’s dreams and ideas. The collection’s title comes from the statement, “This summer I kept dreaming about a terrier. It was not a recurring dream but a recurring terrier that appeared in dream after dream, often needing to be released from somewhere it was trapped. It did seem as if my unconscious was hard at work trying to tell me something I was repeatedly failing to grasp.” A terrier is also a worrier, trying to get at the heart of things.
There is much questioning of what consciousness is, how poems are inspired, how trends have changed the way people now think about things and the nature of memory itself. Can it or can it not be regarded as poetry? It’s up to the reader to determine that. What can definitely be said is that Jackson gives us many provocative and stimulating ideas.
e kō, nō hea koe
by Matariki Bennett (Dead Bird Books, $35)
A confession: I took some time warming to Matariki Bennett’s debut collection, but when I caught on to where she was going I understood she was doing something important. Written throughout in the first person, suggesting some autobiography, the first half deals with a young Māori woman lost and idling in Auckland and not understanding where her life is going. She smokes a lot, with her mates she gets “fucked up in myers park sculling wine we can’t pronounce” and she is “scared … / i feel like my silence might be the best part of me”. In other words, she seems to be questioning if she has an identity or future.
But then it dawns on her that “we’ve forgotten the language of the sky under the choke of the cities lights / sometimes we forget where we’re from”. And this is where the second half opens up with her understanding that she will only fulfil herself if she identifies with the Māori community she had left behind. Naturally, there’s more to it than that, but as a story of maturing it is persuasive. The collection includes images of eight paintings by Mahina Bennett and one by Jane Holland.
Ten Thousand Nights
by Yvette Thomas (Castle Street Press)
Yvette Thomas’s poetry has a great virtue – raw honesty. She is not afraid to write about apparently intimate things in her life. Sometimes she has dreams about childhood. The poem Thank You Mary is a childhood memory of nearly drowning. Nearer to the bone she is frank about sex as a teenager, about the men who have been in her life and about how different sex is in middle age. But, like any good poet, she plays with more than one string. She can be lyrical, like her dazzling description of a tūī: “Iridescent orator / your white puffed collar / high in the rewarewa; / a song, a squark, a click, / whirrs to call and chatter.” Sometimes she is pessimistic in poems such as Homo Sapiens in Charge. Sometimes she salutes those who are concerned about the environment. Song of Silent Spring is a tribute to Rachel Carson. And though she’s apparently a confirmed atheist, in Reincarnation at St Pancras Station she yearns for some sort of afterlife, even if it isn’t human. Much thought is packed in here.
