Writing HomePoetry from New Zealand

Jenny Bornholdt, These Days (Victoria UP, 2000)
Paula Green, Chrome (Auckland UP, 2000)
Anna Jackson, The Long Road to Teatime (Auckland UP, 2000)

—

Of the several New Zealand poetry books which I have looked at recently, the most interesting are those which have set about exploring the spaces that constitute and reconfigure ideas of home. Perhaps it’s not without coincidence that these books are written by women, as women might be more readily inclined to define themselves in relation to family and kin, and through the occupation and management of domestic space. Certainly, for all these poets, family is a central focussing force, and integral to the idea of ‘home’.

Language and the senses are bound up in ways often taken for granted. Both are sources for feelings of belonging. Poetry, through the precision of its enactment and embodiment of what we experience and perceive, is the language that’s most apt for exploring notions of home and belonging, for locating the areas most open to our vulnerabilities and affections.

Part of Jenny Bornholdt’s charm in These Days, is humour and her ability to observe and capture the ordinary details which make up her life. Home is revealed as being constantly ‘in process’, created day-to-day by events that are often peripheral, yet which still impact greatly: the world of appliances, of escaped pet rabbits, of workmen and repairmen, of the round of chores and routines which can sap energies:

You say giddy
giddy giddy giddy
giddy and very soon
you are and you fall
right down.

Bornholdt’s poems are very much concerned with naming, of putting detail into place, of using incident and anecdote to reveal the nature of the everyday. Yet it’s often in what’s implied by her poems that the nature of home is most potently revealed. The demands of family are nowhere better indicated than in ‘A rabbit in danger’, ostensibly about a pet rabbit being bailed up under a car by two dogs:

Your rabbit is under the car, the dogs’ owners explained.

Oh. Jasmine’s mother looked weary. I’ll go and make her
special porridge, she’ll come inside for that.

Shall we stay and make sure she doesn’t go onto the road?

No, replied Jasmine’s mother as she turned and walked
through the gate. I’ve just about had enough of that rabbit.

The last line is wonderful for the way in which the frustration gains in force from those emphatic ‘t’s. Home is predicated by the momentum of the everyday, by the movement of incremental processes that keep us tied to the small, the mundane, despite our lives being carried on by surges over which we have little control: the passing of time, the progress of pregnancy, birth. Bornholdt has a well-tuned ear and eye for the small, revealing incident:

                   Cricket balls release the scent of lavender.
Leaves visit. The kittens Smokey and Molly play on the
footpath. Jasmine the rabbit eats breakfast. An elderly
woman, getting off the bus after a fast ride, says I feel
a bit like Elvis, I’m all shook up.

Though Bornholdt’s uncomplicated sentence structures produce clarity, as a reverse effect they do make for poems which are often technically shallow. Figurative images are not favoured. She prefers her images unmediated, unjuxtaposed – and thus she restricts her tone. If language points to or names, then nouns are the most functional part of language. The noun is the source of the image, and naming confirms the world. In These Days Bornholdt is principally concerned with the process of naming, of fixing tangible points: the poet as nomenclator.

I would have preferred a poetry with a richer, more varied use of other elements of speech: the adjective, for example, is not much employed by Bornholdt in this book. Many poets become afraid of adjectives because they are perhaps the first parts of speech to betray incompetence, and it is preferable to cut them out or to convert them into a noun, or noun-phrase. As Ellen Bryant Voigt says in her essay ‘Rethinking Adjectives’ from her book The Flexible Lyric: ‘Because of its subjective nature its presence in the poem is the hardest to earn; craft does not put it there so much as vision, intuition, temperament, perhaps even character.’ Adjectives are sourced from the senses and thus help to put the poet’s stamp on the poem, they supply tone and feeling and also music.

In her desire to be straightforward, Bornholdt often sacrifices music and the rhythms that would be gained from varying a poem’s grammatical behaviour, though at times, as ‘In waiting’, she does achieve an elegant poise:

Here’s winter coming up
the valley, the last
of the monarchs sailing
past the hillside’s glossy pelt
of flax.
Farewell summer.
Farewell autumn.
We marvel at the seasons
and how persistent, through
all of them, the ivy
is, slowly dragging the washing
line earthwards. And how persistent
this child is, also heading
earthwards, yet turning back
again and again. Your body
too persistent, longing for
memory to kick
into gear and relieve
this ache – dull – like
the soft thud of passionfruit
striking the ground.

However, to my mind the poem should have ended on the word ‘ache’, as it would achieve more resonance, opening its meaning out, rather than closing it off; for me, the sound image (‘soft thud’) doesn’t successfully translate over into touch.

But Bornholdt, throughout These Days, does give the reader grounded, convincing disclosures. Home is not at all idealised in her work, but attested to with both vulnerability and strength, born from the effort of finding and maintaining an authentic orientation within the broader, illimitable world.

—

Home, for Paula Green in her four-part book Chrome, is more an essence, a tone, a flavour evoked through the touchstone of colour. Yellow, red, green and blue represent respectively her self, her mother, her father, and poetry. Her book is an exploration of mood, memory, past and present, image and abstraction, the boundaries of self, place, and the way in which these can be given resonance. Green’s work is fluid and heavily nuanced. The emphasis is not on incident, or story as it is in Bornholdt, but rather on suggestion, atmosphere. Her lines meld into each other lyrically rather than narratively, meditatively rather than dramatically:

syllable by syllable I decorate myself
rhymed with grapefruit or saffron fuelled

by the clutter of paper honey open wounds
the walls are home to artworks

audible noise the whole year round
routines that dwell in our place

the bare wood the connections
between art and artifact splendid

I carry tokens of my existence
buttery verse culinary herbs cadmium yellow

the lightness of work on a new scale
the lungs or bone or blood or water
(from ‘Yellow’)

The poet in Chrome endeavours to live inside her language, to render her images, at times, with an epiphanic quality. As much as any­thing, the poems seem to be about the nature of poetic reality. Boundaries are difficult to define, and the poetry enacts this, the lines constantly shifting between the tangible and the abstract, constantly playing off nimble conceptuality against gravity and substantiality:

I am at the starting point
home to a precious stone

past and future
basking in a vast present

here, an intimate chair
here, a blue chair

here is the empty bed, ultramarine
here are the flaking chairs, duck-egg blue

here is the winter window sill
here are the straw tables

little wonder at levitation
a possible flight into a huge beautiful leaky realm

disguised as a bird
a heroine in the plumbago air

in the hue of ambiguous depth
in the tint of distant hills

and so, the poet unwinds
unwinding the powder-fine substance of home
(from ‘Blue’)

This produces wonderful results, but at other times it leads to little other than a windy lyricism, too elusive to mean much: ‘I am enclosed within cyanic space/ occupied and occupying/ the absurd truth/ the necessary truth/ setting tasks beyond hope/ about full and dripping breach/ binding the blueness/ conjectural and manifold/ where am I?/ where am I?/ waiting to give speech/ to the ice-bright blue.’

Green is not afraid of adjectives. Indeed, it is her use of these qualifiers that give the book its innovative scope, and which amplifies and unmasks the feeling. In ‘Red’, the section dealing with her mother, so much comes through just in the crucial implications her adjectives are able to supply: ‘the bottled daughter/ the strawberry daughter…my mother in a pinch of light/ grown on placenta and orchard fruit/ in her torn heart/ red wounds and crimson lake…with her longing she fans/ a beetroot flame, the boiling legends’.

Taking her cue from film and painting, Green, with a great deal of subtlety and skill, builds her work less from discursive and expository elements, and more from elements that appeal directly to the senses, those tools for gathering presentational information. Each of the four parts of her book – Yellow, Red, Green, Blue – have their own musical key. Each takes its tone from the visual or presentational use of the specified colour. Yet Green’s lines are often elusive, and remind me very much of French poetry for the way in which the language seems to be one of essences, of nuances, for the way in which an image comes into being, then dissolves. Her lines resist the pull of the tangible, and progress more through innovation and intuition than through the need to be grounded or resolved:

I am a dance without wind
I am a shroud without plangent moon

what I have said so far
dissolves in fierce pigment

a streak of sunlight on a peacock blue floor
makes itself at home with compelling lightness

yet the burden is hidden in unbearable weight
like some heavy thing in deep water
(from ‘Blue’)

At times, the effect is sheer enchantment, at other times I’m not always convinced that the English language can carry such totality over into poetry as French can, ‘where,’ as Octavio Paz wrote, ‘the world becomes writing and language becomes the double of the world.’

However Chrome is the most interesting and original of these three books, and Green’s construction and prefiguring of ideas of home much more complex and elusive. She takes language on board in a way that is essential to any undertanding of a sense of belonging; ‘home’ being made and constructed by language, which is not simply a tool to describe, or locate it. Thus, the last section ‘Blue’, in which Green uses the suggestive possibilities of that particular colour to uncover or filter a sense of poetry, illuminates a space in which writing can find measure and embodiment amongst change and unsubstantiality:

I write this attached to all objects
bedding down in the spree itself

profoundly moved by blue
the colour of the shadow of a southern moon

drawn into the far-off
the bliss of space, a slightly deeper blue

I write to make room for breath
wavelengths of reality and dream

Chrome is a magnificent attempt to explore the material and immaterial dimensions of ‘home’.

—

Anna Jackson in The Long Road To Teatime uses a less poetic, yet still intimate voice to convey a sense of belonging. For Jackson, it’s principally family – both immediate and distant – which provides the locus for an understanding of home. The first poem in the volume 16 Pakeha Waka is a potted family history, ranging from 1860 to the present day. I’m doubtful that the first sections hold much interest for the reader because of the content and the reporting style: ‘One of my sixteen waka arrived in Auckland in 1860/ the Ellen Lewis from Nova Scotia, and on board/ my great-great-grandparents, John and Flora McDonald.’ The poem does, however, pick up resonance later, when Jackson locates her own presence and that of her present-day family along the narrative continuum, the idea of waka (Maori for boat) beautifully and poignantly transposed:

Our daughter was born at last, in New Zealand,
at home, in the bath, on the 7th of February

after a Waitangi Day of contractions.
We called her Elvira – a Spanish name

meaning fair one – foreigner – Pakeha.
At sixteen months, she still rows herself
about on the floor, bottom-shuffling.

Not a walker, but a waka –
my waka to the stars.

Important to this book are the concepts of journeying and arrival. The section ‘The Long Road to Teatime’ recounts an imaginary journey the poet makes with Dante as he leads her down into the darkness before she can ‘rekindle [her] affair with the sun’. It’s an intriguing, imaginative poem, full of humour and bound to appeal especially to other poets, as it becomes finally revealed which category of human beings lies at the very base of the inferno, (below even the murderers and child abusers): ‘I open my mouth to ask Dante who they are,/ but no words come./ Then I know these are the traitors to their calling./ Here the artists who gave up painting, the poets/ who were too busy teaching, are sealed/ in their silence.’

What is delightful about this book is Jackson’s ability to be both ‘artless’ and ‘literary’ within the same poem. She writes with appealing clarity, the tone almost naive, yet with loads of stylish humour. The sections ‘Breakfast with Ruffy’ and ‘Mealtimes at the Bookhouse’ are beautifully achieved in their use of voice and form. The poems convey a sense of domestic closeness, of kinship, innocence and rapport. The characters she imagines having tea or coffee with (Katherine Mansfield, Viktor Shklovsky, Marianne Moore, Gudrun and Ursula from D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love) are rendered with empathy and concision. Jackson writes a language which, though often simple and unadorned, is also at times clever, flexible and playful.

There is more versatility of tone and rhythm in Jackson than in Bornholdt, though less linguistic fluidity than in Green. Verbs have a predominance of place in this book, the events presented by way of action rather than description, weight being given to the dynamics of interaction.

There’s a great sense of contentment and reposefulness in Anna Jackson’s concept of home. The poems have the feeling of being written around a large kitchen table, to which many people come and partake of the company and home cooking. Indeed, in ‘Tea with the Timorese’, various people do come – not only the Timorese victims, but also members of the Indonesian military. Again, Jackson uses humour to propel the political import of the poem. The domestic setting takes the concerns out of a broad arena and puts them into the familiar and everyday, humanising and highlighting them. Jackson uses ‘home’ as a venue for the political to be watched, scrutinized, discussed. The speaker appears almost naive, too polite and commodious to confront the General, yet her poems can still be disarming:

Should I have raised the issue of the massacre
in East Timor with the General? I passed
him a bagel and asked Johnny to stop kicking
his chair. The General spread cream cheese
and jam on his bagel and Simon poured him coffee.
But when I introduced him to Simon, Simon’s eyes
narrowed. He asked the General, ‘so how
do you feel about all the kids who died?’

‘They weren’t kids,’ the General replied.
(‘Bagels with General Panjaitan’)

By the end of The Long Road to Teatime home, as much as anything, is tone, texture, courtesy, sociability. It is also the site where identity is most fluid, most protean. In Jackson’s work, home constantly reconfigures life’s processes by laying bare essential roles – parent, spouse, daughter, son etc. Home is made up of the relationships by which we define ourselves and others, and by which others define us.

Each of these three books – These Days, Chrome, and The Long Road to Teatime – while finding their points of belonging within the New Zealand landscape and cultural milieu, also mark out territory that universally crosses into the familiar. Home is not simply the places we inhabit, but also the places and relations that we imagine. The mind and senses meeting together as poetry.