THE LANDFALL REVIEW ONLINE

APPASSIONATO

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 19:32:00 +0000

HELEN WATSON WHITE

The Violinist: Clare Galambos Winter, Holocaust Survivor, by Sarah Gaitanos (Victoria University Press, 2011) 280 pp., $40.00.

‘On the morning of Sunday 19 March 1944, Klari was at an orchestra rehearsal in the Heavy Metalworkers' Trades Hall when a man burst in with an urgent message for the conductor. Obviously shaken, the conductor informed the players that Germany had occupied Hungary, the army had entered Budapest and its tanks were rolling down the main boulevard. As the extreme left wing Trades Hall would be an early target, they must pack up their instruments and leave immediately, taking different routes. "Go, go, go!" he urged the stunned, mostly Jewish musicians.’
‘Klari’ is longtime Wellington resident Clare Galambos Winter, who, having lost most of her family in the Holocaust, survived to reach New Zealand in 1949 and make a new life in which music figured centrally.
Sarah Gaitanos has read and journeyed widely in order to understand and present a complex historical context for what is also a very personal story. Nolar Millar, her first biography, about legendary Wellington theatre director the late Nola Millar, published in 2006, was similarly thorough, running to 408 packed pages. The Violinist, which like Nola Millar, contains an index, copious notes and a full bibliography, is more rather than less interesting for the many different research tracks she goes down. In addition to book and journal sources, a list of websites — such as www.jewishvirtuallibrary — gives readers an entrée into the extensive Holocaust literature, encompassing official records, photographs and oral history recorded over sixty-five postwar years.
The main difference with The Violinist is that Gaitanos was able to develop a relationship with her living subject, Clare. This allowed the recording of invaluable oral interviews and full access to Clare's own memoirs, letters, as well as a large collection of photographs — not only of her Hungarian relatives, but also of her ‘new family’ of New Zealand friends.
Born in 1923, Clare Galambos Winter was descended from Jewish immigrants who became ‘passionately’ committed to Hungary, after emancipation in 1867, helping form the core of the country's professional elite. Andor Galambos, her father, had also served in Hungary's army on the side of Germany in World War I; like the many German Jews who fought for the Kaiser, he felt betrayed by his country when the Hungarian government brought in anti-Jewish laws.
As Clare was growing up between the wars, it was with her mother's extended family, ‘liberal, well-educated and non-religious’, that she most strongly identified, especially when they gathered for summer holidays. ‘With its parkland and forest,’ writes Gaitanos, ‘the family estate at Nemeskolta belongs to Clare's dreamtime memories of an enchanted childhood’, with ‘a big annual hunt, wonderful harvest festivals, tennis parties, gypsy music, colourful costumes, dances and concerts. Klari's father sang and everyone played the piano.’
Music was at the heart of this pre-war life. Klari's grandmother introduced her to the classics, playing piano music of Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms; her great-aunt was a student of Liszt in Vienna. Klari, who sang regularly in the synagogue choir, learnt to play the piano first, and then — what became a lifelong commitment — the violin. As a teenager, she found ‘a beautiful meshing together of people’ in a local orchestra.
Shocking stories started to reach the fourteen-year-old Klari — of Germany's invasion of Austria, and of ‘people they knew being arrested and not heard of again.’ (Since 1922, the Galambos family had lived in Szombathely, close to the Austrian border.) Hitler — popularly called the ‘mad dog’ — was not, however, considered a threat to ‘civilized’ Hungary. Besides, wrote Clare in her three-part memoir, ‘there seemed to be more important things to think about, such as school, music, violin, boys …’.
Gaitanos makes a very good job of knitting together the parallel rise of fascist powers in Germany and Hungary, with legislation denying Jews' rights to travel, trade or work other than forced labour, and finally to any kind of citizenship at all. She also describes how personal reports of atrocities in Poland were at first thought not to be credible, since they were so extreme. Elie Wiesel himself did not, she discovered, believe the deportations and slaughter described by one witness who had escaped execution in 1942.
In that year Klari was studying violin, music history, theory and orchestral practice in Budapest at the Fodor, a private music academy. Athough the rumours in her girls' hostel were ‘terrifying’, few knew of the Nazis' Wannsee meeting of January 1942, in which agreement was reached on the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question’. In 1943, even when informed of the many death camps in full operation, Hungary's Jewish leaders shut their ears and ignored the implications. The subsequent German occupation of Hungary in March 1944 stunned them, along with the whole country.
Gaitanos could not have invented a more shocking and dramatic turning-point to her story. Klari hurriedly prepares to return home to her family, but at the station — wearing a ‘very smart’ blue coat with yellow fox-fur and carrying violin, handbag and hatbox — she is shoved into a concrete room to stand for three nights, crammed in tightly with thirty other women whose only crime is that they're Jews. In a matter of weeks the recently built ghetto in her town is being emptied out by the first transports of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz, in ‘the largest and fastest deportation operation of the Holocaust’.
Maps, diagrams and photos of the complex and of the inmates at Auschwitz-Birkenau help make real an experience that Clare can only dimly recall: ‘I stepped out of myself and anything that happened there … was so far from what I was. I never even thought of my violin. I never thought of anything.’ The chance of surviving was, however, greater ‘if you had someone’, and for Klari that was her aunt Rozsi, who ‘slept, sat, stood to be counted, queued for food, cared for’ her through five weeks at Birkenau and seven months at Allendorf, where the pair worked at a munitions factory over a winter that was ‘exceptionally harsh’.
After liberation in 1945, aunt and niece returned home, expecting to be re-united with family members — a hope that proved hollow. Only one cousin remained to welcome them; Clare wrote in her memoir: ‘It was beyond ordinary grief. It was utter nihil.’ There was another cousin, though, who had gone to New Zealand before the war, who offered to help them emigrate here. After two years of intense difficulty in an environment ‘morally, socially, politically and economically bankrupt’, Klari and Rozsi left Europe on a steamship from Marseilles.
At this point (Chapter 7), a second biography begins: the life of 25-year-old violinist Clare, living with her Aunt Rosie in a two-storey art-deco house in Lower Hutt, and artistically ‘adopted’ by a Wellington family, the McKenzies. Because the cousin's family who helped their immigration did not want to publish their own Jewishness, Clare was at first cut off from Wellington's Hungarian community, who were mostly Jews. Clare found another community among Wellington's musicians, when she auditioned for an orchestra within weeks of arrival. There were Jews in this community too, among refugee musicians of the pre-war diaspora, and later among the many distinguished musical visitors to the city.
The book's final four chapters, or ‘movements’ – Appassionato, Resoluto, Doloroso, Grazioso – follow Clare's 32-year career with the National Orchestra under different conductors and names, rehearsing, travelling and performing all over the country — and overseas; her ‘joyous and bohemian’ life with Swedish cellist and bandsman Karl Kallhagen, whom she later married; her learning to become a New Zealander, taking citizenship in 1955 and buying a house in Mt Victoria; Rosie's death in 1965 and Karl's in 1977; her close friendship with Carol McKenzie and Carol's illness and death; love and marriage with her doctor, Otto Winter, with whom she returned to the synagogue, and his death in 1990.
Many lives, indeed: not just one, even in two halves.
Music was always important to Clare as representing, beyond language and circumstance, a shared humanity. It was her solace in Allendorf when the officers gave her a violin to play so that they could dance; later, in Wellington, when events like the 1956 Hungarian uprising and the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann ‘stirred the pot’ uncomfortably, she took to the music with a passion that blew away everything but the playing. It may be said that the Holocaust ‘defined her’; then again it was music which both recalled her suffering, says Gaitanos, and transcended it. Clare herself describes the ‘shattering’ music of Shostakovich as ‘like flying into some absolutely rarefied air’.
This, however, is a biography which is essentially down-to-earth and faithful in the telling of a life-story. However, just as the Nola Millar biography gave a detailed sense of Wellington's interconnected theatre life in the 1950s and 1960s, and of the development of Toi Whakaari, the New Zealand Drama School, so The Violinist: Clare Galambos Winter, Holocaust Survivor offers, together with its many other strands, a richly interesting take on the development of classical music performance locally, along with an account of the rise of what has become a world-class musical institution: the National Orchestra — now known as the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.

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HELEN WATSON WHITE has degrees in English and theology from the University of Otago, and for five years was sole editor at University of Otago Press. She is a freelance editor, writer and arts reviewer.

MYTH-EATEN: JKB'S HABITS OF MIND

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 19:31:00 +0000

JOHN DENNISON

The Snake-Haired Muse: James K. Baxter and Classical Myth, by Geoffrey Miles, John Davidson and Paul Millar, (Victoria University Press, 2011), 380 pp., $50.00.

Surely, it is the Orphic quest: three literary scholars descend to the realm of dead reputations, intent on reviving that haunting incommensurability, the sad remains of James K. Baxter’s myth-eaten verse. And we, who once sang with Curnow et al. that Old Romantic NZ was dead and gone, with Jimmy in the grave, might once more find ourselves returning to the Collected Poems with a renewed liveliness of mind—and a Penguin edition of the writings of Carl Jung.

The Snake-Haired Muse is this revisionist descent. The problem of Baxter and myth, as the authors point out, has long occasioned embarrassed side-steps by a roll call of local critics at his anachronistic, even elitist, affectation, thoroughly incongruous with that most pressing of poetics, reality ‘special and local’. These latter-day Orphic critics have now arrived to argue that, ‘Baxter’s use of classical myth […] lies close to the heart of his poetic project; […] the criticisms made of it often rest on assumptions about poetry in New Zealand — what it is and what it should be — that are positively unhelpful in dealing with the kind of poetry that Baxter was trying to write’ (18).

What makes this endeavour so successful is that (unlike Orpheus) it achieves its quiet yet determined revisionism by means of a long, hard scholarly look backwards, back into the turgid yet quite consistent introspection of the adolescent Baxter, and looking back, too, to take in the full scope of his classical baggage in unpublished as well as published works.

Beginning with the modest aspiration of offering a specialist guide to classical myth in Baxter’s poetry, Geoffrey Miles, John Davidson and Paul Millar expected ‘that the substantial strand of early classical myth poems would thin, at times break, and eventually interweave with Christian belief and Maori tikanga to produce a more twentieth-century, New Zealand-sourced kit of mythic themes. […T]his isn’t what we discovered’ (248). In other words, this level-headed, convivial piece of revisionary criticism is no poetry anthology introduction; its case for Baxter as ‘unapologetically mythic, enduringly Romantic, and idiosyncratically religious’ rests on meticulous scholarship, painstakingly re-contextualising the published poetry alongside the swags of unpublished material in the archives. Brief indulgences of literary obsession (Miles’s regret over our not knowing whether Baxter read of Jason or Ulysses first; Davidson delighting in a bit of detective work over Baxter’s knowledge of a painting by Exekias) are guarantees of such.

What the scholarship reveals is not just the scope of Baxter’s engagement with the classics, but also the consistency of his recourse to myth, and the way in which it was impelled by personal exigencies: by a kind of enduring need for existential order that began in his adolescence. It is Millar’s chapter on Baxter’s adolescent use of myth that puts paid to the old charge that Baxter’s mythic material is an elitist affectation, showing how the poet’s idiosyncratic, appropriating mythic method, ‘initiated at sixteen and continuing throughout his remaining lifetime of writing, is a habit of mind essential for an understanding of Baxter’ (54). The mythic matter, then, confronts us with the poet’s habitual method: Baxter’s ‘lifelong habit of plucking from every system of thought he encountered only those that meshed with his personal convictions’ (41).

At best, habits are sustaining, improvisatory patterns; no surprise then that in his last days Baxter wrote some of his finest myth poems — ‘The Tiredness of Me and Herakles’, is a sequence that is emotionally complete, and un-schematic in its idiosyncratic appropriation of the classics. But then, habits of mind are also fickle things, more fickle, perhaps, than those of the absent-minded hand, for they frequently combine instinctive reaction with reasoned justification, the personal urge to scratch a mental itch with a well-plotted, but often specious rationale.

The revelation that Baxter’s regular recourse to the classics is thoroughly habitual not only highlights its importance for understanding his poetics, but also suggests why the results were so uneven. Certainly, as O’Sullivan made clear decades back, Baxter’s mythologizing is more than merely egotistical; still, it seems clear that Baxter’s myth-habit began and ended with personal need, and was finally less about connecting to the collective unconsciousness of mainstream 1950s New Zealand than it was about his long-standing need to get a fix — a psycho-spiritual fix, that is — on himself. When confronted with such heady classical fusions as herring-bone Jimmy’s ‘Snake-Haired Muse’, what strikes one is not only their hyper-schematic nature, but also the way in which such universalised projections of the troubled self leave so little room for the reader. When, as in Baxter’s binary and somewhat infantile preoccupation with rising Venus and the infernal feminine, the exigencies of the personal drama are forced through the Jungian schema (or at least justified by such afterwards), the poetry — and our pleasure — suffer. Viewed one way, then, to take in the scope and character of Baxter’s myth-habit can be to find oneself playing a bit-part in a personal drama that is either overbearing in its impelling neediness, or emotionally truncated by the myth-mapping of late modernity.

In taking such matters personally, the most useful response may well be to pursue the opportunity this book makes possible: to contextualise more thoroughly and then evaluate the late modern religious aspiration of what Millar describes as Baxter’s ‘lifelong production of intricate, relatively consistent structures of meaning’ (61). As Miles suggests, the basic problem that Baxter’s response to the classics presents us with ‘is not “phoniness” or “disingenuousness” so much as a passionate belief in the power of myth to communicate on a deep, unconscious level’ (20). Baxter’s habit of mind has — after Jung — a doctrinaire rationale; myth is the collective repository of humankind across time and space, the point of union of body and mind; in poetic practice, it is the reconciliation and liberation of the authentic self in its conflicted manifestations (Baxter’s preference for Jung has to do with the fact that, as he sees it, the Jungian sponsors a psychological rejoinder to the caricature of Calvinism that Baxter loves to hate: the prospect that ‘my subconscious mind might contain sources of peace and wisdom’).

This use of myth addresses the post-Christian conditions of belief, offering — as a locus of the pre-rational and natural — a way out of the epistemological reductiveness of late Enlightenment rationalism while still aspiring to some total, fundamental schema; it is in other words a systematic method of reconciling the romantic and organic orientation of Baxter’s early formation with the late modern milieu.

‘[P]assionate belief’ has it right, then. And one thinks immediately of the more elaborate and idiosyncratic constructions of Robert Graves and William Butler Yeats — Baxter was mercifully spared their near-fundamentalist mythologies by Jung’s psychological focus, his own temperament, and the Holy Spirit. In this respect it is unfortunate that the identification of that basic ‘problem’ does not lead to fuller consideration of why — as I think it can be — Baxter’s myth-eaten recourse to ‘structures of meaning’ is a problem. More generally, the comprehensive detail of this project — pitched largely as descriptive and contextualising — asks to be followed up by fuller consideration of the relationship of Baxter’s modern catholicising myth-habit, his Catholic faith, and his poetry. If, as Millar suggests, ‘Baxter’s own myth-making […] embodies the Blakean principle, ‘I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s’ (66), then in what ways did such systematics distort his poetry, not least in the conflict it implies between prevenient Grace and the epistemic immanence of constructivism. To put it another way, if the anthropocentric constructs of myth are glossed religiously as ‘the discovery of a sacred pattern in natural events’ (as Baxter seems to do in ‘Notes on the Education of a New Zealand Poet’), where does that leave the sacramental imagination? Recall ‘The Ikons’:

the darkness I call God,

The darkness I call Te Whaea, how can they translate

The blue calm evening sky that a plane tunnels through

Like a little wasp, or the bucket in my hand,

Into something else?

In light of Baxter’s life-long mythic habit of mind, could it be that in this poem Baxter arrives at the nadir T.S. Eliot did in ‘Ash Wednesday’: ‘consequently I rejoice having to construct something / Upon which to rejoice’?

There is, too, the fact that Baxter — wilfully and unconcernedly, or so it seems, at least — syncretised Jungian psychology and Maoritanga with Catholic theology, in keeping with his habitual appropriation of useful existential and metaphysical tropes and tricks. And then, as our authors are keen to point out, the allusions to classical myth do not entirely dry up when Baxter heads north to Hiruharama (although here, too, a more satisfactory explanation than the one given is needed).

Whatever the case, in this accomplished collaboration Miles, Davidson and Millar — all established authorities on Baxter and myth — have pooled their enthusiasm and scholarly exactitude to produce a compelling argument for the centrality of classical myth to Baxter’s development, poetics and poetry, and have laid down a comprehensive foundation for further work.

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JOHN DENNISON is a literary scholar specialising in contemporary poetry and poetics. His PhD, from the University of St Andrews, is a study of the prose poetics of Irish poet Seamus Heaney; he previously studied English and Theology at the University of Otago, and English and Classics at Victoria University. He currently teaches at Victoria University of Wellington.

POSTED BACK INTO THE PAST

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 19:30:00 +0000

SIOBHAN HARVEY

Coming Ashore, Peter Bland (Steele Roberts, 2011), 72 pp., $19.99; This City, Jennifer Compton (Otago University Press, 2011), 64 pp., $30.00.

It’s an exemplar of our age that, as the earth becomes more intimate and accessible so conversely the nature of displacement becomes more extensive, and those experiencing migrant life become more disjointed from the concept of ‘home’. It has long seemed to me that poetry is one of the best platforms to voice the complexities of migration. After all, it is poetry – that most expressive, emotional and lyrical of literary mediums – that in its other guise, the most marginalised, best parallels the immigrant’s lot.

In this, both Coming Ashore, the latest collection by Peter Bland (who has just received the 2011 Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry), and Jennifer Compton’s This City (which won the 2010 Kathleen Grattan Award for Poetry), illustrate the fact that ideas associated with being an emigrant are far more nuanced and diverse than the traditional Western European model of the refugee (in other words: ethnically different; immoral; poverty-stricken). More than this, though, each book reminds us how, in times when, in the teeth of globalisation, we continue to use our literature to determine our national identity, the explorations they offer of the widest remits of what it means to be a contemporary migrant bring us closer – paradoxically – to what it means to be a New Zealander today:

The childhood I couldn’t wait to leave

is the one I keep spotting

from the train or bus…

As always

there’s never time to wave back

before I’m carried swiftly on

to another stopping place up ahead

with so many questions left unasked.

Thus, Bland writing in the poem, ‘Mixed signals’ (1). It’s a verse which, along with others in Coming Ashore, such as ‘The gift’ and the title poem, broadens our insight into émigré existence by tagging its relevance to communal experiences such as the unsettling shift from childhood to adolescence. In ‘The gift’, for instance, Bland explores the enduring relevance of displacement thus:

You love the new land

truly you love it

you pile up year

upon year until

belonging happens

and before you know it

the old land

drifts into myth

which you visit

disguised as a child… (2).

Dislocation then is a way in which we tell our stories; in the same way that we recount our growing-up. Ditto death. For, like links to Bland’s previous collection, Loss (3), such poems in Coming Ashore as ‘Absence’, ‘Wilderness moments in Orange County’ and ‘The groves of Isis’ are not just dedicated to the author’s deceased wife, Beryl (who died in 2009) but revivify, poetically, the experience of being with someone now lost, as these lines from the latter poem illustrate:

Two years on, distance creeps

between us. You’re becoming

the essence you came from.

Increasingly, only love can reach you

and when it does you’re a long way off … (4)

Growing-up, dying, displacement, memory, story-telling: time and again, poems in Coming Ashore remind us that these are the things we all carry with us, particularly we New Zealanders for whom these affairs are the stuff of our everyday and/or our ancestry.

In Coming Ashore, Bland is less charting the individual life in small detail than the big idea told in emotive language. Therein, the book is a joyous celebration of the way in which lives can be lived fully, rather than a series of laments to that which has passed us by.

***

Jennifer Compton’s This City is, like its author, a triptych of geographies: Italy, New Zealand and Australia. From the start of the book, geographical schisms equal existential schisms, as the opening-line of the titular, prologue poem demonstrates:

I am travelling from my life, towards my life. (5).

As with Bland, Compton’s primary thesis is that our lives are a series of points – locations – we navigate, in the same way itinerants do. Like Bland too, often such sites are as much thematic as geographic, as in the poem, ‘The Threepenny Kowhai Stamp Brooch’, a meditation on personal and historical misplacement which concludes:

Of course I will be posted back into the past –

back to when kowhai was pronounced kowhai. (6).

History, that which is lost and yet still defines us, reappears and is reconfigured through This City, as in a later poem like ‘Street View’, which employs the subject matter of Google Earth as an exploration of how we are all dislodged by chronology:

…….. People

with cameras are even

now! driving your street

filming your letterbox.

It’s not real time

– the mistake I made –

they are shooting us from

the past into the future. (7).

Where Bland looks at ‘big picture’ stuff, Compton is more concerned with the small, the details, the individual – the specific location rather than the large landmass. Thus, though the collection’s sections are ‘In Italy’, ‘In New Zealand’ and ‘In Australia’, it’s Compton’s more informal environments which construct the true poetic panorama of This City and which have the most forceful impact on the reader. Florence, Genoa, Moxham Avenue, Hataitai, ‘Palmy’ (according to the title of one of the collection’s poems), the Yarra Ranges, Kings Park: in these settings, Compton alights upon small, personal incidents and uses them to speak of things which hold universal relevance, as in the poem ‘Lost Property’:

I had been warned of an imminent loss

the knowledge of loss had thrummed by

so I kept checking I had everything

one hand delving in my shoulderbag.

And more than the knitting is the pillowcase

made by my husband’s mother, now deceased,

she had run it up from a summery cotton frock

with two ties at the top to keep the knitting safe. (8).

As with Coming Ashore, the verses in This City return us to loss, memory and ancestry. Here Compton’s poems are mythologies we read to better understand how we arrived here and now.

***

‘Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted,’ wrote Edward Said (9). To be isolated from one’s birth country can intensify, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, physically and geographically, one’s passage through other lands, their communities and value-systems. In their new collections, Jennifer Compton and Peter Bland write richly and extensively about the impact of topographical and personal distance from the place or places they know as home. By reading these books where we learn about what it is to be a contemporary migrant, we also learn what it is to be ourselves, connected to a land forged by ancestral displacement.

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Notes

1. Peter Bland, ‘Mixed Signals’ in Coming Ashore, Wellington, Steele Roberts, 2011, page 52.

2. Peter Bland, ‘The gift’ in Coming Ashore, Wellington, Steele Roberts, 2011, page 32.

3. Peter Bland, Loss, Wellington, Steele Roberts, 2010.

4. Peter Bland, ‘The groves of Isis’ in Coming Ashore, Wellington, Steele Roberts, 2011, page 55.

5. Jennifer Compton, ‘This City’ in This City, Dunedin, Otago University Press, 2011, page 7.

6. Jennifer Compton, ‘The Threepenny Kowhai Stamp Brooch’ in This City, Dunedin, Otago University Press, 2011, page 24.

7. Jennifer Compton, ‘Street View’ in This City, Dunedin, Otago University Press, 2011, page 39.

8. Jennifer Compton, ‘Lost Property’ in This City, Dunedin, Otago University Press, 2011, page 51.

9. Edward Said, Reflections of Exile and Other Essays, Harvard University Press, 2000, page 173.

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SIOBHAN HARVEY is the author of the poetry collection Lost Relatives (Steele Roberts, 2011). She teaches at the University of Auckland.

A LITERARY JOURNEY IN GERMAN THROUGH NEW ZEALAND

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 19:30:00 +0000

MAX OETTLI

Wildes Licht: Poems / Gedichte aus Aotearoa Neuseeland. Englisch–Deutsch [English–German], edited and translated by Dieter Riemenschneider (Tranzlit Christchurch + Kronberg am Taunus, 2010), 180 pp., $35.00.

The Translator

Shutting out the torment and the fear
deep into the night's cold morning hours
I work on my translation.

Tim Jones, 2010[1]

Dieter Riemschneider’s collection of New Zealand poems translated into German, Wildes Licht, was launched in New Zealand’s four main centres last year in a series of public readings, and then in Germany — thus becoming another important element in establishing the country’s art and literature in the Nordic soul. New Zealand’s status as nation of honour at the upcoming Frankfurt Book Fair (2012) is based on a solid foundation of work of this quality. But Wildes Licht is also clearly a labour of love.

For Germans, distant New Zealand seems to have something of a utopian, epic presence with its spectacular landscapes, its proud indigenous population and its strong assertive home-grown culture. It is not relevant in this kind of Weltanschauung to see this as the whole truth and nothing but, because violence and murder sometimes seem to be weekend pastimes in these green isles; and we have witnessed an erosion of freedom and civil liberties, as well attacks on our ecology and a rise in inequality in the last few years that few other civilised nations have succumbed to. But the carefree ‘Wandervoegel’ with their backpacks, their Lonely Planet guides and lists of Facebook pals on their iPhones can ignore this, as they party with the cheery sexy folks around Courtenay Place or taste the freedom of our beaches, unaware of conflict and simmering resentments airbrushed out of the tourist guidebooks.

Certainly Wild Light is a significant contribution to our literary heritage, both in being a selection by a German academic who has long been impassioned by the poetry of these islands, and as being a careful choice of poems rendered in sensitive translations.

On the question of the choices made, there is not a hell of a lot this humble writer can say. The usual suspects are there, often presented by pieces well known from other anthologies, a few no doubt will smart at being left out, or at being presented by poems they feel are not their strongest. This is inevitably the eternal dilemma of anthologists – we are in the presence of an editor’s privilege at work here. He has chosen to select mainly post-1980s work, but begins with a section that includes work of earlier poets significant for this later generation. Without rattling the boring bones of the mercifully long-buried Mr Leavis, we would, I imagine, agree that there is a great tradition of poetry represented with big names such as Mason, Fairburn, Curnow, Tuwhare and Stead and others whose publications and teaching have left their inevitable imprint. The omission of Glover may be a little surprising, but then how would Quardle oodle wardle ordle doodle[2] translate into German?

Riemenschneider is obviously pitching his collection at a German audience. In his introduction he writes of a ‘Double Structure’ which he says gives equal weightings to the country’s landscape (where some of the work tackles the problematic discourses underlying this) and poetic renderings of everyday life. He essentially takes us on a ‘road trip’. It is apposite in this connection that I googled up a recent reference to him delivering a talk at Munster University described as a ‘Literarische Reise durch Neuseeland’ (a Literary Journey through NZ).

The anthology invites the reader on a literary voyage from pastoral Central Otago to the raw West Coast, from brooding Mount Taranaki and the sunny Bay of Plenty, through to the Hauraki Gulf, and then Hokianga Harbour in the North. On this poetic promenade we are introduced to the people of the land, as well to the economic transformations which this apparently untouched timeless land has not been sheltered.[3] Employing this logic, Riemenschneider presents his poets in five thematic sections, which is a change in approach to other anthologies but suits his underlying strategy well.

So we have:

· ‘Ascriptions’

· ‘A cross-country journey’

· ‘Histories and stories’

· ‘People’

· ‘Environment and change’

The first section concerns the preoccupations of a small and uncertain island state. I would have preferred the German title ‘Signatures’ for this, as it sits better with the work. The other sections give us an elliptical journey through the landscape, offering encounters with the people and then a suggestion of cultural malaise, of islanders facing an uncertain and troubled future. It would be fair to say that the selection and its structure leads to a possible vision, or understanding maybe, of New Zealand, through some of its poets, rather than to an understanding of New Zealand poetry as its own field of discovery.

While Riemenschneider’s translations are entirely convincing to this bilingual reader, the first thing that strikes one when opening Wilde Lichte is that, as in German airliners of yore, the seats are a little wider. German takes more room than English, with a wonderful building up of portmanteau Germanic words, a careful and occasionally ponderous Germanic syntax. Fortunately, then, Riemenschneider sees no need to become obsessed with prosody or rhyme: most German speakers have a good knowledge of English and would probably use this work as a parallel referent, as we might look at a parallel text of Rimbaud or Rilke.

His vocabulary, in keeping with the plain-speaking of most of the poems, is sober and straightforward and there is little need for strategies such as paraphrasing or overwriting to make meaning or context clearer. Riemenschneider is more concerned with rendering the meaning and contents of the original as clearly as possible and the sobriety and neutrality of his German renderings, when seen in parallel with the New Zealand English originals, most of which are not exactly excessively florid either, make for a clear and respectful approach with which we are at ease.

There are however, a few problems inherent with this approach. One, which could only be solved by a ponderous critical apparatus, is the decoding of references which would be amply clear to Kiwi readers and lost in any other context. If we read a poem by Apirana Taylor or Sam Hunt, say, the places, the names are of a huge significance which would be foreign to a reader from Australia or Ireland, even, let alone from Germany. If we read Robert Lowell’s ‘Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’, say, we are informed by Melville, by evocative photographs from the likes of Walker Evans and Robert Frank, and by a whole array of other literary, artistic and cinematic references.[4]

A minor linguistically based hitch arises with grammatical ambiguities around the poetic persona: that is many of the poems use the form, ‘you’ as a general pronoun, which in German can be rendered by an impersonal ‘man’ (compare the use of ‘on’ in French), thus inevitably changing the distance between the persona and the reader, being less intimate. ‘Poetry’, too, has a different meaning in German. Although its etymological origin is apparently from a different branch of the language, it is nevertheless folk knowledge that the German word for poetry, ‘Dichtun’, also means ‘densification’, or ‘making tight’, as in a seal. As explained above, Riemenschneider’s project would not really be what the Germans call ‘Nachdichtung’, which is essentially a literary project of re-creating a literary work in a different register. Classic examples of this abound, from Pope and Dryden to Stead’s versions of Catullus. It is evident that if the author is a literary figure this can have certain implications; for example, unless we are Chinese language-speakers, we are more familiar with Ezra Pound’s re-creations from Chinese verse, surely than we are with the originals. Moreover, both in these works and in Pound’s translations from the Anglo-Saxon sagas we are surely in a strange garden as far as the attempts we might make at everyday understanding goes. Epic deeds do not usually happen before breakfast.

To sum up, Wildes Licht is a fine and scholarly anthology which deserves a decent market in Germany, as well as a presence in German libraries. The book is augmented by a glossary covering some Māori and New Zealand terms and a handful of proper names that appear in various poems. There are also useful biographical notes on the fifty-five poets represented and there is a good bibliography on the sources.

[1] Published in New Zealand Books December 2004, included in Best New Zealand Poems 2004, then in All Blacks' Kitchen Gardens 2005

[2] Quardle oodle wardle ordle Gekritzel (the last word the automatic translator picked up on 'Doodle'. From Wordlingo: http://www.worldlingo.com/en/products_services/worldlingo_translator.html). Babylon http://translation.babylon.com gives a much improved version: oodle doodle ordle Quardle wardle which presumably respects German syntax!

[3] [My Translation] Die vom Tranzlit-Verlag herausgegebene Lyrik-Anthologie lädt seine Leser ein zu einer literarischen Reise von Central Otago bis zur rauen Westküste im Süden Neuseelands, vom Mount Taranaki und der sonnigen Bay of Plenty durch den Hauraki Gulf bis Hokianga Harbour im Norden des Inselstaats. Auf der Wanderung eröffnen die Gedichte den Blick auf die unterschiedlichen Menschen, die dem Reisenden begegnen, und auf den Wandel der Lebenswelt, von dem auch dieses scheinbar unberührte Land nicht verschont geblieben ist. http://www.uni-muenster.de/Rektorat/exec/upm.php?nummer=13784

[4] When a series of James Baxter's poems came out in a Spanish translation in the Bogota based review Palympsetos, translated by Caleb Harris, they were published with photographs by Lloyd Godman and by the writer of this review. This enabled the reader to have a strong visual context for the work. This is not in any way to reduce the value of Riemenschneider’s work, and the book’s cover photo by Jan Kemp has an elemental rocky honesty and remoteness which portrays an authentic New Zealandness well.

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MAX OETTLI was educated at the University of Auckland, and is a former lecturer in photography at Otago Polytechnic. He currently lives in Geneva, Switzerland.

LOST LOVES; LATE STYLES

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 19:30:00 +0000

JEFFREY PAPAROA HOLMAN

Inside Outside, by Brian Turner (Victoria University Press, 2011) 134 pp., $30.00; Chords, by Sam Hunt (Craig Potton Publishing, 2011), 84 pp., $29.99.

On the face of it, there doesn’t appear to be a great deal in common with the two poetry brands this pair of solitary men have come to represent: Hunt the rock-n-roll bard from the 1970s, who survived to open for Leonard Cohen forty years on, living in bays by the sea; Turner, he of a famous Otago sporting nobility, the tussock-and-matagouri-entangled rear-guard sniper, holed up deep in the Maniatoto. Yet considered backed into their respective and preferred hideaways, they share some obvious similarities: Turner will clock seventy in 2014, health permitting and Hunt should be on the pension very soon, if not already.

More than this, they share a generation’s worth of poetic output, a history of punctuated single status, the loner’s persona, a tendency to retreat to and dwell on the margins; and both in their very different ways, are readers worth travelling a country mile to hear. Yet the differences are marked: Hunt is always, somewhere, somehow, chasing the music:

when she turns, she turns

ugly, leaves my ears ringing

when she burns she burns

bright as any star rising,

when she goes silent

I still hear her singing.

(‘Chord 25’)

Those who write off such naked simplicity and apparent artlessness as poetry for the stage, and not the page, miss several points, not least that Hunt’s minimalism comes from years of honing the voice for both mediums, as well as reading and ‘telling’ the poems of others (Baxter is a favourite, but he will ‘tell’ any poem he loves). He uses ‘tell’ for recite — which is revealing in itself: the poem is part of a tale, a story, a conversation the poet is having with the world and the material. In a somewhat ironic state of affairs, through a love of the written word, Sam Hunt keeps burning the flame of a pre-literate orality.

Turner, on the other hand, while very aware of the sonics of language, of what we hear in the ear, always seems to me to be ruminating silently on inward experiences, on the ups and downs of life. Over and over, he works with the majesty and the misery of what happens outside on the road, and beyond in the valleys and ranges; in the urban jungle of postmodernity too, where lurk great dragons of cant. He enjoys the interplay of words and ideas as he slays a few imposters along the way, as in, ‘Advice’:

a man who knows how hard such is

to follow, how easy to dispense.

Make sure you make sense, he said.

Sense makes us, I said.

Reach for the stars, he said.

The stars reach us, I said.

Waste not want not, he said.

We’re all wasting away, I said.

Coming on the back of his recent brush with a potentially fatal illness, there is a little more there of the personal than might appear in the word games and bromide inversions that lead to the poem’s conclusion, that we’re all just “guestimates”. The final section of the book, Post-Operatives, explores at some length Thomas Browne’s pithy assertion: “for the World I count it not an Inn, but an Hospital; and a place not to live but to dye in”.[i] Turner is eyeing an end we mostly prefer to ignore.

Where the spare lineation in this man’s work often sets forth an existential dilemma, an anthropological observation on homo ridiculous, or the stark outlines of rural life à la Ted Hughes, Sam Hunt more often than not circles back to the personal and the private place — that dangerous minefield where the self is mythologised. Surviving youth’s self-indulgence and keeping at his trade, he knows what he is doing. When he digs around inside himself to have — for instance — a dreamtime conversation with his dead mother about the birth of her first great-grandchild, there’s nothing maudlin here.

Now

let’s get this sorted:

I’m currently alive, and you,

if I’m right, currently dead –

said gently, not as if to

put you back in your box –

and I know it cannot be

but, mother, how is it

it was your voice that woke me?

(‘45: The Loki Chords’)

Hunt can skate thin ice like this because, more often than not, he’s enough of a pro to know where the cracks are and when to stop. At times, these spare, cryptic runes seem to come too easily, as if the Sam Hunt Sat-Nav System is easing our passage down unfamiliar roads, but with the comfort of a voice we can recognise and know only too well. Then suddenly, seemingly on cruise control, he can demonstrate once more that he’s a master painter of the margins he inhabits — and very funny, too.

The highway under a fat moon

could be a river

with boats floating on it;

and us, in our own boat,

travelling down river to the

Dargaville wharf.

It’s not a river. Of course.

But it is Dargaville.

(‘Chord 26’)

It hardly matters that it seems he could do it in his sleep, when his sleep can prove so refreshingly deep — and deadpan. There’s a real bite in some of the love poetry, too — the teeth of loss and anger — and here, the short lines and sparseness of the coupled stanzas cut the focus to the bone:

easy to confuse

distraction for destruction,

and love for what a

fuck up it is,

and, now and then, isn’t.

(‘Chord 28.’)

There is plenty of dark here amongst the light, as Hunt gets down and dirty with mortality. I have to confess I was swept along by this vigorous, sometimes marvellous collection — especially the Chord poems — spitting out the inevitable piece of flotsam as the book’s high tide peters out. Some of the new poetry I read these days, though deservedly praised for its intellect and cleverness, leaves my heart cold, but I thoroughly enjoyed the warmth in Hunt’s lines. Next stop perhaps, a live gig in Raglan, or Haast?

Then you’re out of there, amigo,

you’re gone! your car awaits —

angle-parked, full of life’s fumes

(Chord 39.)

Where Hunt goes, Turner is well able to follow — the pair make a rich contrast — but you would never confuse the two voices. Southern-Man-as-misanthrope is a well-affected persona in his previous works, and appears here too — moderated often with a mortal man’s admission of vulnerability and need: ‘And I miss him./Just that, just that’, ends ‘Conversation with my Son’ — and this, after deciding during the phone call he won’t darken the young man’s London day by observing

that little

succeeds as planned,

that the handcarts

to hell are rattling

just around the corner.

The reader can take it, if not the boy; Turner is determinedly wary of the world. A speaker in another poem — after good sex, it seems — admires his insouciant lover as the kettle blows its top in the kitchen and the toast catches fire, while she robes up post-coitum. Faced with choosing contentment — over omni animal tristis est — the man goes for the anxiety of uncoupling: beware complacency, beware indifference,

like the sun on the fence

or the rowan next door whose leaves

are tremulous in the wind.

‘Imaginary Aftermaths’

Somehow, the voice in this poem just cannot bask in sexual contentment even for a moment, without co-opting the domestic sphere as a site of angst and the world outside the window as metaphoric of our ephemeral state: no relief in sight here, then. If I was her I’d be a little too frightened to ask, ‘so, how was it for you?’ Yet cussedly, this same male lover can elsewhere mourn a departed flame as a world-changing force who left him a nicer giant:

He thinks of down

and sheen and kindness and care.

He thinks of what he would be now

if she hadn’t been there.

(‘If She Hadn’t Been There’)

Turner is too savvy and too large a heart to trap himself for long in the role of mere ingrate, wondering as he journeys on ‘which parts/of the past make up the you of today’ (‘Misunderstandings’). This poem — where the book derives its title from a remark of Goethe’s — namechecks his readings of dead poets and anthropologists, ending with a typically quizzical Turner koan:

Every time you think

you’ve found an answer

you wonder whether you’ve

misunderstood the question.

He’s at his best though when he eschews the philosophical, and goes straight for the graphic: anyone who gets halfway through ‘Rabbits’, a voyeuristic poem where the poet stumbles upon — and minutely depicts — a pair of bonking lovers swapping positions in the great outdoors, will be very glad it wasn’t them Turner spied going at it. It’s a nature poem with a difference: the force of a John Clare, directing a gaze even he could not have maintained.

When he meditates as only he can — as his namesake Turner the painter did with a passionate intensity on canvas — he can be sublime one minute: ‘we are all children/of the swirling cosmos/and the blazing stars’ – and curmudgeonly the next: ‘No one dares insist I “have a good day”.’ Harrumph! The gloom of a wounded stoic at bay overshadows much of Brian Turner’s late style, ‘like Berryman, confessing/his malady, foreseeing his exit, // that life was “mainly wasted time”’ (‘Gravity’). Somehow, I can’t imagine a Sam Hunt poem berating half the country to the tune of pronouncements like this:

Every second New Zealander

has a horse called ‘Indignation’

and they ride it into the ground.

(‘Horses for Courses’)

Well, what if he’s right? Even in his bleakest post-operative moods, having stared down death up close, still wanting to believe ‘There must be/an accounting that makes sense’, his yearning for the solace of human love can resolve itself into the spare monometrics of a poem like ‘Too Slow (for Tulip)’. Tulip – also the subject of ‘If She Hadn’t Been There’, cited earlier – must have been quite a woman.

drive

one

hundred

miles

hoping

see

you.

Why?

Because

walking’s

too slow.

[i] Browne, Thomas, Religio Medici, Section II, 168. (1643)

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JEFFREY PAPAROA HOLMAN has worked as a sheep-shearer, postman, and social worker. He has written several collections of poetry, the latest of which is Fly Boy (2010). He is this year’s Writer in Residence at the University of Waikato. As big as a father (2002), was long-listed for the Poetry Category of the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2003 and the title poem also won the 1997 Whitirea Prize.

LAUGHTER AND THE LIBIDO

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 19:30:00 +0000

CY MATHEWS

Past Present, by Peter Dane (Hudson Cresset Publishing, 2005) 108 pp., $24.99; Sex Poems, by Peter Dane (Words that Work, 2007) 70 pp., $16.00; Undone, by Peter Dane (Words that Work, 2008) 81 pp., $16.50.

In these slim, small press publications, former Bay of Islands orchardist Peter Dane handles the comic more successfully than the profound. Unfortunately, much of his work is weakened through his persistent attempts at the latter. Born in Germany in 1921 to a German father and a Jewish mother, Dane fled to the UK as a political refugee in 1939; he was interned as an enemy alien in Australia in the 1940s, and eventually settled in New Zealand in 1961, where he taught in the English Department at the University of Auckland, retiring as a Professor of English.

He was involved with and influenced by Curnow, Mason and Baxter — in 1981, in fact, Dane generously donated a small collection of Baxter manuscripts and photographs to the Auckland Public Library. Past Present, Sex Poems and Undone all draw upon Dane’s personal history, but each differs in its emphasis. Sex Poems is, without a doubt, the most entertaining of the three. With its luridly blurry cover illustration of three naked people fondling one another in a Edenic environment, the book seems more likely to stimulate laughter than libidos. ‘I love to travel on the porno trail’ is a wonderfully bad first line, as is the description of the inhabitants of Sodom as being ‘dead keen / to gangbang the divine.’ Sometimes the humour avoids absurdity and sounds a wry note, as in the spurned lover’s complaint that begins ‘Eager and Open’: ‘You always do just what you want. / Sadly last night it was not me.’ The remainder of the poem, alas, doesn’t hit quite the same level.

Undone aims for a more serious tone. Here Dane tackles issues of ‘human stupidity and brutality,’ making, as the blurb puts it ‘an impassioned plea for sanity.’ The most readable piece in the collection is the long poem ‘Security,’ which tells the bleak story of a post-apocalyptic future in which a group of wealthy survivors and their servants shelter in a Waipiro Bay gated community, eating each other one by one when their supplies run out. Despite the blood-splattered nature of the story, there is a general lack of descriptive colour and detail: Dane tells his readers what is happening, but he doesn’t make us see it. Most of us are well aware of the stupidity and brutality at large in the world; Undone adds little to this awareness.

Past Present is a more generalised collection. It is here that Dane’s personal life rises to the fore, with poems like ‘1940’ and ‘Interned 1941 Hay, Australia In Camp Near Waggawagga’ firmly grounded in autobiography. As in his other two books, Dane has a fondness here for the sonnet form. The rhymes are sometimes strained — for example ‘quietly’ with ‘fruit for me’ - and rhyming ‘heard’ with ‘unheard’ seems a dubious tactic. Again, most of the poems state their case too bluntly: ‘Begin Again,’ for example, informs us that:

We came so close

that you wanted to marry me,

desperately wanted to marry me.

Initially

we did agree I was not free,

committed to her whom I wed

many years ago.

Interesting, I’m sure, to Dane and the people referenced in the poem; it seems unlikely, however, that anybody else will be drawn in very far. The musical impulse the lines conjure up, as if to suggest some piano-thumping ballad, is unresolved — one senses that as a lyricist Dane has not quite found the tone he is striving for: amid all the rollicking it hovers elusively, like the faintest echo of some Weimar cabaret.

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CY MATHEWS tutors in the English Department at the University of Otago.

PLEASE HOLD

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 19:30:00 +0000

KIRAN DASS

Bird North and Other Stories, by Breton Dukes (Victoria University Press 2011) 191 pp., $35.00.

A quick squizz at a good deal of the latest New Zealand poetry and fiction releases reveals a deeply dismal trend in bland, uninspiring book covers in sedate and muted shades of beige, white or grey. Utterly unappealing, they tragically look like bereavement handbooks.

Northland writer Breton Dukes' debut Birth North and Other Stories however, shakes off this fusty image, opting instead to slyly beckon the reader with a striking cartoony illustration courtesy of Dylan Horrocks. I initially thought the cover was an odd choice — perhaps a touch too lighthearted for what people keep banging on about as being stories which are concerned with pushing a masculine 'Man Alone' angle. But when I say this, I don't mean in the John Mulgan or Bill Pearson tradition. After reading Dukes' stories, the cover makes perfect sense. This book looks and reads like a collection for young adults. These are gateway stories — that is, the characters only just allude to having any shred of insight.

This is a plain, no-frills collection of seventeen stories. Dukes' bongtastic characters drink from beer-filled V bottles, attend dull seminars to apply for call-centre jobs, work in hospitals, spy on their flatmates having sex, and chiefly struggle to relate to the people around them — and themselves.

It's terrific that while these stories are set across recognisable locations across New Zealand such as Te Anau, the Coromandel, Johnsonville, the East Coast and Dunedin, Dukes isn't that fixated on landscape and location. It appears that he is more interested in character. Particularly how men relate to each other and to their environment. I get the impression that Dukes is sticking to the safe confines of writing about what he knows, having worked in Government call-centres and hospitals himself. The only trouble is that his characters aren't strong enough to pull the stories along.

However, Pontoon, a story about an art student who attends a two-day seminar to test his suitability for a position working the phones at the Emergency Services' 111 call-centre is a terrific piece. Dukes dryly captures the pathos of employment workshops. From the man who brings his own pens (and who doubt lines them up in front of him on the desk in an orderly fashion), a woman named Shona (for some reason, there is always a 'Shona' at these things, isn't there?), to the ‘nicotine slaves’ who dash outside for a furtive tea-break puff, and a territorial soldier — the characters here are spot on. However, Pontoon ends on a baffling and woolly note about a pod of dolphins. Here, Dukes should have refrained from trying to be deep.

I know these characters are supposed to be laconic and 'masculine' but I don't think Dukes gives his cast enough credit. I think that in many cases, it is stoic and quiet men who have some of the keenest insights. In these stories, any insight the characters have (whether that be internally or externally demonstrated) is entirely surface level. There's nothing really there. I wanted these people to have a bit more oomph. More bite in the characters could have elevated these stories to a knowing greatness. Instead, the characters mostly come across as mealy-mouthed, shiftless, shaggy-brained slackers. And you just know there must be a lot more going on with them if only we could scratch below that grimy surface. On the whole, these are polite stories.

With its distinct chiaroscuro atmosphere, Racquet is a neat, moody and clear-sighted story. I loved the depressingly helpless, awkward and domestic set up.

Standout stunner for me though, is The Moon, a gentle down-the-line story which shows Dukes is not afraid of the quiet moments. Here, he shows us how the child informs what the adult becomes:

“Peter was five when his father said to him, 'Your mum's gone to the moon. She has some special work to do. I don't know when she'll be back.'”

Which Peter later counters with:

“People can't live on the moon. Mrs Thompson told us.”

The scene is vivid, Dukes sets it up evocatively. There is: ‘a bottle of tomato sauce upside down on the table. A fly was crawling over the dried sauce around its neck.”’

Using minutiae and delicate observation, Dukes creates a story which is at once tender and sweet but also hopeless and melancholy. Don't get me wrong, Dukes doesn't romanticise Peter's situation — Peter turns into a bit of a deadbeat. This is tangible stuff — we all know people like this. Dukes just offers us an insight into or angle on how people turn out the way they do. The scene where Peter sees his father leaning on a fence ‘just before Ashburton’ sent a chill through me.

It is stories like The Moon which hint that Dukes must have some greatness in him. I'd like to see him dig a bit deeper, get stuck into what is beyond the superficial surface, think a bit more about his characterisation and perhaps try his hand at some long form fiction.

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KIRAN DASS is a Wellington-based writer who has written about music, film and books for the NZ Listener, Sunday Star-Times, Metro, Pavement, Real Groove, Rip it Up, New Zealand Musician, NZ Herald, Dominion Post and Staple.

EXUBERANCE

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 19:31:00 +0000

WILLIAM DART

Blue Smoke: The Lost Dawn of New Zealand Popular Music 1918–1964, by Chris Bourke (Auckland University Press, 2010), 392 pp., $59.99.

Charles Brasch, the founding and somewhat patrician editor of Landfall, considered that New Zealand music found its voice in the late 1940s. It was then, he writes in his 1980 memoir Indiscretions that ‘Fred [Page], Dorothy [Davies] and Douglas [Lilburn] all returned to this country and air travel became general, and young people took to music with enthusiasm, so that it ceased to be the preserve of middle-aged and elderly respectability.’ And so, ‘a new period of our history began.’
           Now Chris Bourke’s award-winning survey of the more populist underbelly of our musical culture suggests that, for many New Zealanders, a voice was already well established. ‘We may have followed overseas styles,’ he writes in his Preface to Blue Smoke: The Lost Dawn of New Zealand Popular Music 1918–1964, ‘but we brought our own creativity to the music. New Zealand after-hours was an exciting world; it didn’t close at six o’clock, it opened up.’
            For Bourke, the seed of it all was planted in the wake of World War I; this was a new music fired by examples from across the Pacific rather than on the other side of the globe. He nails its vitality and energy in three words, with the skill of a practised journalist; ‘Exuberance eclipsed politesse.’
            Leading the roll-call of culture heroes is Walter Smith (1883–1960), composer of ‘Beneath the Maori Moon’ and ‘King Tawhiao’. Bourke includes a portrait of the sensitive young Smith plucking at a mandolin, placed opposite an action photograph of Smith’s hot jazz band from a decade or so later; here the men hold their horns and reeds aloft while two women preside over banjo and piano, the latter with proud STEINWAY signage. This was, after all, the era in which the American Paul Whiteman was set on making a lady out of jazz; Kiwi bands were also determined to show their class, spruced up in tuxedos for the lens of the studio camera.
            Roving through the well-illustrated, large-format pages of Blue Smoke, you realise that many of these musicians took their art very seriously. Bourke takes delight in revealing, for example, that Sam Freedman, writer of such classics as ‘When My Wahine Does the Poi’, published a series of practical guidelines for would-be songwriters.
            Blue Smoke charts the many battles pitched in the support of our music. Some outbursts, such as a 1936 letter to Christchurch’s The Press denigrating jazz as ‘ghastly, croon-jazz-blare-baby-doll American rubbish,’ can be dismissed with a smile; other responses involve more complex issues, and Bourke brings careful scholarship and shrewd analysis to tracking the struggle for an independent New Zealand recording industry in the 1950s. Yet you also sense that this writer enjoys recreating the panorama of the fun and frolics of the various musical playgrounds that hosted our popular culture in the last century.
            The dance-hall scene is evoked through images such as that of a truckload of Pierrots travelling down Customs Street en route for the Peter Pan Cabaret. There’s also the cautionary tale of an Australian bandleader promptly dismissed by the same establishment for arriving at work drunk, with pie gravy all over his shirt. The shenanigans surrounding the sabotage and sinking of Showboat, the sailing nightclub at Mechanic’s Bay, pre-empt the similar Rainbow Warrior saga of the 1980s with the zippy energy of a musical farce in double-time.
            Bourke highlights the fact that when times were grim, during the Depression years, the various Community sings allowed a form of communal response, organised through national radio stations. And it’s not the only instance where Bourke, himself a seasoned broadcaster, stresses the crucial role of radio in giving us cultural sustenance.
            The writer’s solid musical credentials enable him to also chime in with the occasional analytical aperçu, noting at one point, for example, how a rhythmic shift in the bridge section of a foxtrot lifts it from languor. Discussing ‘Opo the Crazy Dolphin’, he establishes it is Bill Langford portraying the laughing lagenorhynchus as a cheeky cockney, while Pat McMinn and the Stardusters offer the cheerleading chorus that speaks for the nation. However, while Crombie Murdoch may indeed tickle the ivories, surely it is a baritone saxophone rather than a bassoon that bobs beneath the waves?
            In the late 1980s, when I was providing music research for Jane Campion’s An Angel at My Table, it was a joy to feature Pat McMinn’s vivacious, gender-bending account of ‘Somebody Stole My Gal’ given out in her best Doris Day manner. Bourke’s treatment of McMinn and her many other colleagues whose work graces the splendidly titled TANZA record label (it was an acronym for ‘To Assist New Zealand Artists’) is eminently simpatico, based on his own exhaustive interviewing of both the musicians and Dennis Huggard, a pioneer in the rediscovery of this music.
            And if the book gives the reader a hunger to hear the music that is being talked about, Bourke himself has been playing a lot of it — including rare radio transcriptions — on the eight instalments of his two Radio New Zealand series bearing the title of his book. Inevitably, there is a lot to be covered in a study that introduces itself with the sounds of vaudeville and pianistic rambles in the silent movie houses and closes with a shot of the Beatles, notably ill-at-ease in the company of the beaming Maori Hi-Fives.
            Readers daunted by the navigation of the main highway in Bourke’s narrative, however compulsively readable it might be, can divert to shorter excursions. These are numerous two-three page sections, focusing on one particular aspect or character, and printed against a slightly grey background. One titled Singing! Shooting! Hypnotism! unfolds the saga of Tex Morton, whose ‘Kiwi Blues’ features the killer couplet of : ‘I don’t like you trying to clip my wing because I’m one Kiwi who likes to sing.’ Another, headed Kiwi Vernacular, tracks quirky songsmiths like Ken Avery and Peter Cape, whose satirical ballads were picked up by When the Cat’s Been Spayed in the 1990s.
            On the surface the bibliography looks modest, running to 50 items, a number of them in thesis form; look more closely at the end notes for individual chapters, and you will find Bourke has been scouring a vast range of newspapers and magazines, from the expected NZ Listener and NZ Herald to NZ Radio Record, Ohariu-Johnsonville News and Country & Western Spotlight. A book which so easily could have been reduced to a gibbering carcass by the theoretical lash of Academe, is instead very much the full-bodied story of the people who made the music. There are no vocal-spectrum graphs here of Mavis Rivers’ voice singing “Candy and Cake”, such as the one the academic music historian David Brackett provided when delving into one of Hank Williams’ songs.1 Bourke has not invoked Theodor Adorno, Simon Frith or other theoretical musicologists, or got into a tangle of speculation over issues of social geography.
            Curiously, though, we are not always told the date of some of the musicians’ deaths. Perhaps this was an oversight on Bourke’s part, or information he was unable to obtain, but, then again, perhaps it can be seen as an attestation that these pioneers of our culture are still in a sense with us, forming an integral part of the continuing weave of our country’s songs and music.
__________

1. David Brackett, ‘When you’re lookin’ at Hank (you’re looking at country)’ in Interpreting Popular Music, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles London 1995, pp. 75-107.

_______________________________________________________________________________

WILLIAM DART is an arts journalist, commentator and critic, who regularly contributes music reviews and commentaries to the New Zealand Herald and to Radio New Zealand Concert. He is also the editor of Art New Zealand, and has lectured in music at the University of Waikato.

DECONSTRUCTION

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 19:30:00 +0000

DAVID EGGLETON

Group Architects: Towards a New Zealand Architecture, edited by Julia Gatley (Auckland University Press, 2010) $75.00

What is the great New Zealand building? One answer — or chorus of answers — would be that it is the shed. Thrown up on the landscape like the exact embodiment of the nation’s perceived utilitarian character, ‘this glorious tiny unstable living heap’ — to use a phrase from Murray Edmond’s 1981 poem entitled ‘Shack’ —at once temporary-looking, adaptable, and enduring, has become a kind of bottomless container of local architectural adventure: a form to be revisited, quoted from, argued with, and remade. Rough and ready, it’s a metaphor offering a poetic vernacular to enrich the imported and internationalised language of contemporary architecture.

Our contemporary architects pick up their cues from foundation myths: such as the notion of isolation of place (‘distance looks our way’, as Charles Brasch affirmed in his 1948 poem The Islands) and the notion of early settlement’s straightforward, economical shelters – the shed, the shack, the tent – alone against the vastness of sky and landscape.

The mythic belief in the shed as an ur-building — a regional design from which other regional designs might spring — gained formal endorsement in the 1940s and 1950s through the activities of the Group, that network of vernacular-influenced architects and students in the post-World War Two years, which was associated with the Auckland University School of Architecture. They became a movement for whom later generations of architects have continued to carry the torch.

The Group saw themselves as lifestyle revolutionaries, espousing a relaxed, casual, Kiwi approach. They challenged the old dispensation of British Arts and Crafts-style villas, the more recent California-style brick and tile bungalows, and the Thirties and Forties white stucco houses of suburbia (‘Stucconia’), by promoting buildings that asserted frontier values, and that used simplified shapes and basic materials. Theirs was a purist architecture, crisp, clean, functional; their houses often looked like woolsheds, or small primary school blocks. These were not so much cosy nooks as stark, minimalist houses that encouraged you to be active. They favoured corrugated iron roofs, rough-sawn weatherboard exterior walls, plywood interior walls, and cork or wooden boards for floors. Timber was central: an authentic, indigenous material, warm-toned and intimate, and applied in a straight-forward manner.

The ripple of corrugated iron — shiny-painted, or dull, or rusty — across the farming landscape surfaced in the late nineteenth century. By 1905, the minimalism represented by fluted metal draped over wooden frames in overlapping sheets was everywhere. Maori quickly adopted corrugated iron for their whare as cheap and rainproof; and it figured as the roof material of choice for those numerous bachelor huts of colonial times — the functionalist shelters of axemen, fishermen, gum-diggers, shepherds and other workers on the land. The sine wave of corrugated metal — invented to keep thin, whippy sheets of metal rigid — was a rippling nationalist flag. It stood in the collective mind of the Group for useful architecture.

There may have been some differences in personal design flourishes, but the Group gang — and their mentors, such as the English-born architect and teacher Vernon Brown — may be said to have sanctioned a localised Pacific style that remains in use today: wide roof overhangs, clear-glass doors that open onto veranda decks, and emphatic indoor/outdoor flow: rangy cross-ventilated buildings that shrugged off rain and welcomed sun.

Architecture is a kind of literature. (Think of the fantastic buildings of the Victorians, with their ornamentation, their clutter of detail, that remind you of the era’s more ostentatious novelists and poets, such as Charles Dickens and Robert Browning.) Buildings, after all, are not just about wood and nails and brick, but also about emotion, spirit, memories — they have motifs, they tell stories: they are part of a social narrative. The Group houses, then, suggest mostly a Man Alone architecture — architecture gone bush: woodsy, stark, bare, brawny, masculinist — or perhaps a Frank Sargeson short story: minimal, vernacular, wry, succinct: rus in urbe.

Certainly this is the impression you get from the miscellany of essays in Group Architects: Towards a New Zealand Architecture, where assorted architectural historians deconstruct the mythology that surrounds our first home-grown architectural movement by tackling it from a variety of angles, so as to locate it within the Modernist canon of mid-twentieth century New Zealand culture. Gill Matthewson provides a feminist critique in which she suggests that the Group’s idealism was an imposition on women and children. In the early prototype Group houses, women and children were an afterthought. Rational values, the striving for aesthetic control, took precedence over domestic comfort: ‘openness’ did not always create good ventilation, while ‘light’ — the presence of many windows — meant a lack of warmth in winter.

Edited by Julia Gatley, this profusely illustrated book is a follow-up to another anthology volume, also steered to publication by Gatley, entitled, Long Live the Modern: New Zealand’s New Architecture 1904–1984 (reviewed in Landfall 218) — where one of the 180 buildings selected as an exemplar of architectural Modernism is Frank Sargeson’s 1948 bach, now Frank Sargeson House (and thus also a shrine to literary Modernism). The reason the bach makes it into the architectural canon is that it was originally designed by Vernon Brown — with some of his typical features, such as a shed-style mono-pitched roof — and thus is a precursor to the Group’s slightly later buildings. However, in the end it was adapted to incorporate the cheaper building materials that were all Sargeson could afford.

As essayists Gatley, Bill McKay and Christine McCarthy make clear in Group Architects: Towards a New Zealand Architecture, the Group architects did not just emerge out of a vacuum. A number of New Zealand-born, overseas-trained architects who had experienced International Modernism first-hand in the 1930s began to bring the ideas of Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus back to New Zealand just before World War Two, and thereafter promoted the cause. In particular, Humphrey Hall famously built a coastal house in Timaru, employing Le Corbusier’s ‘shipboard aesthetic’ based on the modern ocean liner: all-white, with a flat roof deck, porthole windows and metal handrails. It still stands, though much modified. And Hall and fellow Modernist architect Paul Pascoe co-authored an essay on ‘The Modern House’ for the second issue of Landfall in 1947.

Post-war, the local architectural scene was also enriched by the presence of half-a-dozen Modernist architects who had arrived as refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe — notably Ernst Plischke, who contributed an article to The Group’s one-off 1946 magazine publication Planning 1. Also post-war, amid the gradual break-up of the British Empire, a new mood of nationalism — a fresh wave of anxiety about cultural identity — began to be asserted, typified by Allen Curnow, who wrote in the Arts Year Book, published in 1946: ‘New Zealand doesn’t exist yet ... It remains to be created ... by writers, musicians, architects, publishers’.

The Forties, then, was an era of clarion calls and manifestos up and down the country, and amongst the most strident — tooting like a truck horn — was the manifesto issued by the Architectural Group — a cluster of first-year architectural students at the Auckland School of Architecture — which declared: ‘ . . . overseas solutions will not do. New Zealand must have its own architecture, its own sense of what is beautiful and appropriate to our climate and conditions’.

The polemicist who penned this manifesto was Bill Wilson (1919–1968). Six or seven years older than the other first-year students, Wilson had been a teacher at a Maori school in Northland, and as a conscientious objector had served in the New Zealand Ambulance Corps during the War, before deciding to study architecture. Convivial, bibulous and also knowledgeable, he emerged as the de facto leader of the architectural avant-garde movement clustered under the umbrella term ‘the Group’. In fact, it was always a loose association of the like-minded, with Wilson as the one constant. First known as the Architectural Group (1946), by 1949 it had become the Group Construction Company, then through the 1950s as Group Architects, before changing into Wilson and Juriss in the early 1960s — named for the two remaining principals, Wilson and Ivan Juriss. Yet the Group’s ideals were sustained by more than one architectural practice. The Group was founded as a co-operative, and as original founding member Bruce Rotherham later expressed it, the Group from its beginnings could be numbered in the dozens, if not the hundreds — from sympathetic fellow students and teachers, to outside architects, and those who supported the movement.

In a way, this was all about the zeitgeist: the cultural turn towards the new, based upon the local. It was also the moment that messianic Modernism made landfall, a utopian moment, when belief in non-profit design for the masses, a concern for the environment, a belief that good design could improve people’s lives, were being agued about and debated — not only at New Zealand universities, but also at pubs and parties: it was a genuinely egalitarian moment.

So the Group were part of a bandwagon, and notable fellow travellers included writers A.R.D. Fairburn (who acted as a journalistic propagandist for the Group), R.A.K. Mason, Maurice Duggan, the printer Bob Lowry, and the nationalist historian Keith Sinclair. Others — potters, weavers, school teachers, academics, business people — sought out the Group and commissioned buildings. The Group architects themselves were a slightly amorphous cluster, with some central figures dropping out early on, and others emerging as promoters of the aesthetic, and then of the mythology.

An essay by Melbourne writers Justine Clark and Paul Walker investigates how the Group arrived at their pre-eminent status in the history of New Zealand architecture, summarising their findings in prim jargon more or less as follows: The Group brand consisted of a set of alliances which created a unique series of provocations whose collectivism served to subvert the conventions of architectural authorship.

In fact, the key players — those closest to Wilson – were dogmatists and proselytisers in the manner of their leader. James Hackshaw, Bill Toomath, and Alan Wild became influential architects and teachers locally, while, later, other tangentially connected architects, from John Scott to Miles Warren, promoted the narrative that ‘the clear sharp minds of that generation of architects saw the house in its simplest terms.’ Later still, the architect and writer David Mitchell built the thesis of his 1984 book and television series The Elegant Shed around the Vernon Brown/Bill Wilson axis of the milking shed-woolshed-whare-farm-hut iconography.

Inevitably, not all were enamoured of the Mitchell thesis. The Sydney-based New Zealand-born architectural writer Elizabeth Farrelly’s response to the nationalist rhetoric implicit in The Elegant Shed was: ‘At last, the great New Zealand hovel.’ Other critics have pointed out that essentially the group practised a sub-tropical regionalism, while the Wellington architectural historian Russell Waldron has termed the group ‘totally overrated’, and Vernon Brown ‘a tin god’.

In challenging the mythology of the Group, such critics are playing out a cultural battle that continues partly as a North–South divide (Otago architect Ted McCoy, who attended the Auckland School of Architecture during that post-war period, has emphasised his rejection of timber in preference to southern stone), partly as a Wellington versus Auckland rivalry, but above all as a rejection of a particular form of regionalism: the rhetoric of a specifically New Zealand architecture, which was in fact matched around the world by what one American critic at the time referred to as ‘an International Cottage Style’. One might call any disparate gathering of architects, then, a quarrel of architects — a matter of taste-making as much as canon formation.

The strength of the Group was their collective anonymity, their neat line in propaganda (1946 was architecture’s year zero), and above all their stance as ‘heroic modernists’, whom otherwise it would have been necessary to invent: they got on with the job, albeit while arguing and debating. Gatley tells us she has uncovered at least 250 Group designs, and guides us to other aspects of their experimentalism: they built octagonal huts, hexagonal houses and circular studios, as well as functional factory buildings. (Many are still in use, though some have been altered by successive owners, most of them sympathetically.)

And Gatley alerts us to one of their most memorable legacies — fittingly, given their didacticism: a series of some six kindergartens, all in Auckland and built in the 1950s. Here, in plain modular design, elegant yet unpretentious, low-cost, with exposed roof rafters, and displaying clerestory lighting, open play areas, concrete floors level with the ground outside, and where possible the height of fittings reduced to a child’s scale, we see the best of the Group: form following function, and bringing good design to the masses.

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DAVID EGGLETON is the Editor of Landfall and Landfall Review Online.

THE SMELL OF SCORCHED CHICKPEAS

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 19:30:00 +0000

ANDREW PAUL WOOD

The Catastrophe, by Ian Wedde, (Victoria University Press, 2011) 191 pp., $35.00.

Ian Wedde’s new novel, The Catastrophe, written during his 2009 Michael King Writer’s Centre Residency, begins with Wedde’s protagonist, the fallen célèbre, middle-aged restaurant critic Christopher Hare — (whose motto, ‘food is love’, is inherited from his Italian grandmother back in Tolaga Bay, Aotearoa; his grandfather being Maori) — eating beneath his accustomed station in an infra-dig eatery. Hare writes under the obscure soubriquet ‘Rosenstein’. My first impression was of something not unlike DBC Pierre in Lights Out in Wonderland mode, taking the piss out of the books of Sarah-Cut Lunch … sorry, Sarah-Kate Lynch … and a global legion of surplus foodie novelists. Everyone, and I mean everyone, has turned a hand at the ‘Oh no, the food is just a metaphor!’ genre over the years, for better or worse, from Emile Zola’s florid Le Ventre de Paris (‘The Gut of Paris’) to Günter — ‘what did you do during the war, daddy?’ — Grass’s chewy Der Butt (‘The Flounder’). Most fail to reach the great heights of either of those novels (Eat, Pray, Love anyone?).
            Hare’s nom-de-plumed muse, the peppery Mary Pepper — (every food writer, bar A.A. Gill, seems to have one; consider Sunday Star Times restaurant reviewer Geraldine Johns’ grandiose ‘the Duke’, implying her status as ‘the Duchess’) — who is also known as Thé Glacé (‘Iced Tea’). Mary, a London photographer specialising in eroticised images of food and a former junkie, has left him. This, in a perfect storm with the economic downturn, is how Hare — an Achilles sulking in his tent — comes to be chasing mediocre rabbit poached in wine (a pun on his name, presumably) around his plate in a less-than-salubrious restaurant in Nice (where else?).
            A mysterious, intriguing woman enters (of course), executes a male diner and his female companion, and calmly departs. For no sane reason, Hare chases after this enigmatic gunwoman and throws himself into the getaway taxi to return the fake Gucci handbag she has left behind in the confusion — a Cinderella assassin with shades of Anna Karenina — as you do. The clichés are knee-deep by the end of the first chapter; but that’s deliberate, I suspect, the presentation of a vaguely noir-ish cinematic vision stirred in with keen observations on the absurd pretensions of foodie culture.
            This isn’t a long book — just shy of 200 pages, all written, apparently, over a couple of months — so it fairly cracks on, with Hare in a precarious position as a somewhat complicit, though inconvenient, hostage of his — as it turns out — Palestinian activist captors. The shooter, Dr Hawwa Habash, is a paediatrician (she suggests en passant that Hare’s alias is a reference to Nils Rosén von Rosenstein, 1706–1773, the Swedish father of the science of modern pediatrics), radicalised by the vile profiteering of Abdul Yassou, her ex-husband, and also the man she has just killed.
            The novel’s title is a nod to the Nakbah, the ‘Catastrophe’, as the 1948 Palestinian exodus during the Arab-Israeli War and preceding civil war is known in Arabic. Much of the story consists of reminiscences: Hare’s of a long ago and far away New Zealand, and of Thé Glacé; and Hawwa’s of her experience of the Palestinian tragedy: death, betrayal, the international trade in human organs, arms dealing, assorted crimes against humanity. Genre-wise, I guess we could call this a political novel as well then. This is the thoughtful Slow Food weave — convoluted politics and characters — that counterpoints the binge-like, Kentucky-Fried-McBurger, ‘pacey thriller’ weft in this story.
            Mary’s ‘catastrophe’ was her marriage to Hare, a self-imposed punishment resulting from the suicide of her Jewish lover from art school. He killed himself in shame over Israel’s complicity in the 1982 massacres of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. (Not terribly likely, I know, but weird Palestinian synchronicities abound, though unexplained, in the novel.) This all comes out after Hare sends a coded email to her from the safe house where he is being kept, (now implicated and compromised by his strange antics), while she, as self-obsessed and about as sympathetic as Hare, is deciding what to do.
            Further Palestiniana includes the fact that Wedde dedicates the novel to the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, whom he became aware of in Jordan in the 1960s, and whose work he has translated in collaboration with the Palestinian scholar Fawwaz Tuqan. Unusually, the novel has a short bibliography, just to remind us of all the research he’s done. Robert Fisk gets big ups, which is suggestive. This isn’t propaganda, but it’s sympathetic and earnest enough to be taking a political risk in some circles: very Victoria University Press, then.
            Reminiscent of the endless lists of exclusive brands in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, Catastrophe is a ragoût (noticeably Martin Amis-ish in its self-conscious prose style), liberally slathered with haute-cuisine metaphors, menu similes, outrageous analogies: Yassou’s blood is described as resembling Tomates aux crevettes (a Belgian dish of tomatoes stuffed with shrimps, ew!). Obviously, Wedde is too good a writer to take that kind of tosh seriously, so it must be sarcasm or parody on his part. (Surely.)
            Even so, the writing’s tight as a drum; even if Hare’s self-abduction seems unlikely and counterintuitive, rash impulsiveness is not unheard of in the real world. Personally, I find the self-inflicting Hare loathsome and gross — preening, solipsistic, vain, nihilistic to the point of sociopathy — his epicurean self-indulgence repeatedly invoked by descriptions of his sensuous lips, smacking and licking (very Swinburnian) in the face of others’ starvation and misery. This is very much the point, if a heavy-handed one. Hare is fun to loathe; however even Nabokov’s self-regarding and noisome paedophile Humbert Humbert has more depth. For Hare the perfect Cappon Magro (a ridiculously elaborate Christmastide seafood salad from Liguria, no doubt included as a result of Wedde’s professed fondness for Lucio Galletto’s 2008 Lucio’s Ligurian Kitchen) is as significant an issue as the precarious predicament in which he finds himself.
            Hawwa is a much more appealing character by far – one of those stylish, polyglot, urbane and intellectual professional Palestinian women in exile – a slightly romanticised cross between Lila Abu Lughod, Nadia Hijab, Ghada Karmi, Huwaida Arraf and maybe a pinch of Edward Said in drag – who very much exist in the real world. I wish she was less of a cipher for the tribulations of the Palestinians than she is. We again experience her memories through food. Early on in the book she bitterly notes that Hare’s book on Middle Eastern cooking was unlikely to contain reference to the UN relief supplies she was forced to live off as a refugee in Lebanon, her otherness (mercifully Wedde avoids the temptation to orientalise too much) signalled by the smell of scorched chickpeas (possibly hummus, that straightforward, unfussy, but delicious staple of Levantine cuisine) pervading the safe house. She is, however, a creation Wedde can be proud of.
            While less obviously literary than Wedde’s other novels, this isn’t an easy read either. There’s no spoon-feeding going on — no narrator is reliable, the author makes no direct stands regarding geopolitical history and the personal moral choices of his characters. Wittgenstein believed that all human behaviour was conscious, and therefore a matter of ethics. Wedde (I suspect him of being a neuro-behaviourist at heart) takes the opposite view that sometimes those ethical choices are not always well-thought-through ones, that human beings lose control of themselves at times of great misery. It’s an incredibly difficult novel to review because it is a novel of human illogicality and impulsiveness, the random pointlessness of life and history; and the possibility that it can also be redeemed, made meaningful, by human actions. Wedde strongly implies that we must take personal responsibility for dealing with the outcomes of those irrational impulses. Everyone in The Catastrophe, through the breakdown of humanity and reason, seems to be thrusting themselves into impossible situations from which they cannot extricate themselves: untenable situations that must nonetheless be endured and survived – an exact parallel with the Israeli-Palestinian situation as it is today; a tense, high pressure, ultimately disintegrating stalemate.
            That’s about as close as he gets to any moral in the novel. There can be no easy resolutions, no straightforward answers for any of the characters. Hawwa survives with the conditional sympathy of the reader. Hare remains more or less an utter turd of the first water that no amount of polishing could make very endearing. Mary is more problematic, a morally ambiguous figure somewhere between the two. What kind of novel is The Catastrophe then? That’s a very difficult thing to say. The passages of hedonistic glamour, and the Middle Eastern exoticism, and the political thriller aspects belie somewhat its status as a philosophical novel of political, social and existential import. At the same time, the narrative is suffused with liberal pot-shots at the overblown, ultraviolet-lit prose of food writing, as well as plenty of the dark humour — both pure schadenfreude and a specific variety of bleak irony that flourishes in Gaza and on the West Bank. It is entirely possible to enjoy the book on both levels. An intellectually hungry reader will find pleasure in the challenge posed by this concoction from the newly appointed New Zealand Poet Laureate. All in all, I pronounce The Catastrophe one of the better home-grown literary meals I’ve enjoyed in a while.

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ANDREW PAUL WOOD is a Christchurch-based writer and arts commentator who contributes regularly to a wide range of publications.

HAZING WITH CRICKET BALLS

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 19:30:00 +0000

NICK ASCROFT

‘A Tingling Catch’: A Century of New Zealand Cricket Poems 1864–2009, edited by Mark Pirie (HeadworX, 2010) 189 pp., $34.99; AUP New Poets 4: Harry Jones, Erin Scudder and Chris Tse, (AUP, 2011), 96 pp., $24.99

‘A Tingling Catch’, Mark Pirie’s anthology of New Zealand cricketing poems is unabashedly a pleasure — a pleasure which I mistakenly initially expected to be, if it were so, a guilty one. A skimming, darting and then progressively more engaged reading, however, soon convinced me otherwise, suggesting rather that its subject matter is one of the more worthy nails to fling the horseshoe of poetry at, if I may fail to employ a cricketing metaphor. However, if you don’t like, and in fact hate cricket — all that lilied gentility wrapped around thumping red-ball testosterone — perhaps better just to steer yourself clear.

My initial comcern was that the meeting of minds of cricket-haters and poetry-lovers might make too large an intersection for a book of this sporting nature to be viable. An idiotic thought. There are, let’s face it, more lovers of cricket than (New Zealand) poetry by the hundredfold, and the populism of approaching such a market is not to be pooh-poohed. Poetry should be read by all, and it isn’t pandering to write on subjects that large numbers of people want to read; it is generous, humble and, in the sense that should you fail it will be more apparent, brave. (And on the other hand who can say what wonders of conversion may not be wrought.)

The reason cricket befits poetry goes further than that it rhymes neatly with ‘wicket’ (though this fortuity is pounced upon by nearly all of the rhyme-based poems). Poetry requires lexical beauty, metaphor, drama, politics, all of which are in inherent abundance in the game. Its language is especially evocative, from the ‘ye olde worlde’ fustian of the field positions — the gulley, the long leg, the metonymy of the slips — to the more modern neologisms that stuck, or caught: the ‘googly’, the ‘titanium duck’. Not to mention the historical milieu; the cricketing nations make up a post-colonial legacy of considerable textual heft, providing not only an aspect of the imperial imprint of Britain in the Caribbean, and the Indian subcontinent, and southern Africa and Australasia, but also a latter-day narration for assertion, fight-back and pride of independence. The Commonwealth in a way was — is — held together by the game of cricket. The game lends itself to providing the easy drama, the cliffhangers of conflict and loss and triumph, that the craft of poetry can utilise.

True to form, Pirie is omnivorous in his selections, and while some might prefer less of the rhyming couplet doggerel (not I!) or less of the whacked-out jazz-cigarette poems (no comment!), the largeness (and largesse) is warm and fun. While I find Kendrick Smithyman’s ‘Uncle Arthur’ the most beautiful thing in here — (‘He was so small when he was born,/ the ayah used to say, you could bath him/ in a quart pot.’ And then, ‘he was somehow/ bombed out … when he passed/ … caught and bowled in the mid-century of the/ Common Man.’) — any cricket non-hater will certainly alight on some other particularly suited wonder. I recommend it to the unprejudiced as a present for all occasions, excluding perhaps only weddings.

***

A single sturdy central theme — or thematic motif — also lifts the poetry of Chris Tse from any hint of leaden-footedness. His ‘Sing Joe’ in AUP New Poets 4, while containing some lovely single poems, is made more cohesive through its retelling of the story of Tse’s great-grandparents coming to New Zealand early in the twentieth century. That the ‘Joe’ of the title emigrates first, not to be followed by his wife for some years, and only after he has started a new family, meaning that she must arrive pretending to be an aunt, gives the tale a sense of the operatic — secrets within secrets, doors opening and closing, an ellipsis of telling that’s sometimes comic, sometimes melancholy.

Family history and ethnic identity is something many, if not most of us, cling to in New Zealand, and the story of a Chinese family’s settlement in New Zealand gains in fascination from being the less told: less written about. While elements of the universal experience for those made other in their homeland can be found, Tse’s story remains emphatically personal, emotionally reverberant in its very clipped, tightly-wound expressiveness: ‘This talk of the other that trails/ my every move …/ speaks not of defiance, but of blood clot guilt./ … It mattered back then too,/ possibly even more so –/not knowing which crayons to use at school/ for family portraits …’. His ‘return’ to China at the end of the sequence is poignantly delivered.

Erin Scudder, a name which flung at you might sound like a stage direction, is the second of the three poets in this assemblage of emergent talent, and she too has a gift for elliptical storytelling. Her emphasis though, is more on single poems, which characteristically possess the insouciant knack of achieving a story’s arc in a short space of time, while remaining crisply well told, a quality many New Zealand poems lack, as if their authors associate a more shambolic shaping with a more authentic mode. Scudder reminds me of Jenny Bornholdt in her turn of phrase, which remains conversational yet is delivered with a controlled grace – though she differs, perhaps, in her waspish wit, in her odd perspectives, and in her knowing inclusions of classical references. Here’s an example of all-of-which-in-one in this excerpt from her account of the famous suicide, Lucretia: ‘See Sextus slip/ into Lucretia./ She didn’t want to let him but he told/ her he’d kill her and wreck her repute too. Do/ you see how grittingly, today,/ she wills herself away.’ As with Chris Tse, Scudder’s top-billing as the main character of her poems is justified by her interestingly ready and quick-witted persona. Her effortless-seeming nonchalant stylings are cleverly done, and they suggest that this poet has the potential to become a prominent fixture in the small room with large windows that is the New Zealand poetic scene.

Harry Jones, being the most straight-talking of the three AUP poets here, makes you feel that he could write excellent verse on cricket, if he could ever be pushed in what seems an unlikely direction. They would be bleak and candid affairs however, involving hazing with wicket bails or the long-remembered disappointment from a father at the boundary. Jones is not as ‘new’ as the other poets, his hair a hoary streak on the back-cover photo, and this has clearly given him the confidence of experience. There is nothing in him of the need to impress or, rather, the need to be liked. He tells truths and doesn’t require to shine them up for us. When the candour seemingly emanates from Jones as opposed to a character, he does not always come across as hugely likeable, but the poems, the honesty and the intelligence of his musing are more palpable for it. Like Scudder, Jones takes on the rape of Lucretia, but he is less playful, juxtaposing the Titian painting (‘He has one bare knee already/ Between hers.’) with the real-life rape and savage murder of a Christchurch sex-worker. That he is haunted by both and by other terrors of the world is convincing, and regrounds a reader in the humanity and barbarism of their own world. Undoubtedly, New Poets 4 is another words-worthy triptych in the series from the redoubtable AUP.

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NICK ASCROFT has published two collections of poetry with Victoria University Press, and at present is employed in the academic publishing industry in London. He is the current British Mind Sports Olympiad Scrabble champion.

A TRICKY TONGUE

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 19:30:00 +0000

VAUGHAN RAPATAHANA

Small Holes in the Silence: Collected Works, by Hone Tuwhare (Godwit/Random House 2011) 343 pp. $44.99

Tihei mauriora!

Whakarongo whakarongo whakarongo ki te manu kaka hianga.

Kaore e mate koe e hoa!

Ko tau tinana nui tonu kei konei.

Ko tau wairua tino nui tonu kei konei.

Ko tau kupu tino mohio tonu kei konei hoki.

Katakata koe te taima katoa te manu kaka koe.

Katakata katakata katakata.

Hey – it’s so great to see and hold and read this book, eh. Good photos, well presented packaging and of course the poems eh. Fine selection of your moteatea here, man.

Goodness gracious me.

Hone Tuwhare, you old tuna, you live on and on and just keep getting more lively. Man, there’s a spread of your stuff from waaaaay back before that continual reprint No Ordinary Sun, right through to a few ruri ‘previously uncollected’.

Impressive indeed. Because there’s also lotsa translations into te reo Maori of your poems (na nga tane no tau iwi) — just as you wished, eh. I know you that could write in te reo — and there’s a coupla poems in this collection/anthology/tribute that show this – like ‘Ode to the South Wind’, your waiata for Haki and Hohepa, and your pao for Huaonia – but you grew up in the Ngata days eh, when te reo ‘had’ to take a back seat to the coloniser’s stifling big wet blanket o te reo Ingarahi. Which smothered everything in a coverall, white blizzard, including your own tricky tongue, eh. Man, you even said as much when you spoke of literary ancestors:

… while I have problems still in finding

mine, lost somewhere

in the confusing swirl, now thick, now thin,

Victoriana-Missionary fog hiding legalized land-rape

and gentleman thugs …

(‘Ron Mason’)

and you got real kaka ears and eyes too eh. Magic ears you got, man. I mean you write ‘English’ in a very clever and sui generis way. Got a real talent – he koha no nga atua nei – to turn words into reflections of themselves, to make them doppelgangers all within the same few lines, to interrelate them across the page.

Like this, eh:

……………………………… eyes lefting

like the way they drilled us in the army

to salute bowlegged colonels. Well i prefer

the real kernels…

(‘a Hongi for you too, Spring’)

Paul Millar was right, Hone, when he said you got ‘a fascination with words – how they sounded, what they meant, which tongue they came from.’ Real slippery — bit like you, eh. Heteroglossia rules.

Postmodern well before they even thought up that one. And so bloody bathetic at times too — just when you are about to get too high falutin’, you bring us all back down with a raw guffaw, some naughty bawdy. Knowingly like. I mean, just after you suck up to the south wind in that poem I already mentioned, you code-switch (good on you too – buggers up those academics, eh) with:

…Hello, shithead –

sing us a good one!

I like all these poems — even the really silly ones, though I dunno why they put them in here, actually. Like the one ‘A Know-all Nose’ … bit stupid if you were to ask me … which also makes me want to know why some of your other good ones aren’t here at all …? Like ‘Old Man Chanting in the Dark’, ‘God’s Day to you too, Tree’, ‘My Pork and Puha anthem’ … So a bit eclectic this collect —

As I was saying before you interrupted me, man, I like all of your poems — you’ve KO’ed us with your koha eh. I mean there’s a movement away from those initial icebreaking efforts you unleashed on the unsuspecting Pakeha fleet 60 years ago, which were — all truth being told — rather formal and ‘English’, through to a more casual, self-involved and conversational interpolation in your own verse, travelling then to a much more lonely place in more recent poems, but what’s not to like and admire here?

I also concur with Ken Ardvison that you make an ‘increasing use of specifically Maori material’ as you traveled on tau ara roa (your long pathway), but that does not contravene what Terry Sturm once also wrote about your work: that it ‘resists identification in terms of any separatist notion of ‘Maoriness’, given what you said to Mr. Millar about not trusting nga pakeha: ‘I wasn’t trusting too many Pakehas those days.’

Bit of an Everyman poet you are, actually, smooth with the kaupapa, spread sensually with our patois. Or, as Bernard Gadd once earmarked: your ‘uniquely New Zealand voice’. Too true.

You make us all wake up, too — you’re the bloody modern Maui I reckon, and man, you’re never afraid to put the boot in either, eh:

Warawara, Pureora, Okarito

Guvment Agencies

Have given Private Enterprise

Permission for to strip

And rip-off Kauri, totara,

Kahikatea for to supply

Timber for million-dollar

Yachts and mansions.

Bastards:

Stop your raping of the land.

Fuck off.

No one writes like you — anywhere, given that your word smatterings are far better listened to than read, as all moteatea Maori were anyway. Janet Hunt rightly and tightly grasped about you: ‘being the person [who] moved close to making ‘the connection between traditions.’ Moteatea, modernism, multilingualism mashed into a potent new brew: that’s a bloody big cross to bear, but, hey, I mean it. Ultimately your own words are your living epitaph — a true blue original wordsmith hammering away on that bloody wide anvil of lexis. You got me Hone.

Like, I’m euchered man. I’m eclipsed (‘Hotere’)

So what I’m doing now is to go off on a bit of a tangent to really close-look at one of your pieces, ‘Small Signs & Impressions’, (I like the earlier title, ‘Tangaroa at Te Araroa, 1979’ far better by the way, mate.) Who said I can’t do this? I’m trying to really bring to bear what makes you so worthy of a statue or two more. Bloody icon, indeed.

The piece is a(nother) korero with Tangaroa – the sea, eh. Straight away a cheeky, mouthy metaphor:

Hey, you, Tangaroa, ocean. YOU, with

the blubbery, soft-thwacking gums

working …

Real familiar personification this. On to ‘Whetumatarau’, who ‘scratches a bushy head’, continuing this interwoven ruminative rap in the same vein. (Somehow, this mighty pa has been misspelled in this poem — I should know because Hinehou Collier was my mother-in-law and she wrote the waiata about this impenetrable place. Great song.)

So, those supposedly ‘naked hills’ of Brasch, Chapman, Curnow and company do have voices, feelings, wairua! ‘The mountains are empty,’ Charles Brasch had wailed — bullshit, I say. Hone Tuwhare was up in them, boiling a bloody billy, and listening to them. And talking right back, I bet. And man, he could talk lovely too, yunno — did you ever listen to him read his own stuff?

Which reminds me — where was Hone in Curnow’s 1960 book? Bloody invisible! ‘… it’s hard not to raise an eyebrow at the exclusion of the emergent voice of Hone Tuwhare from [this] collection’ complained Michael Neill, justifiably. How could you ever have been invisible even back then, Hone?

Back to this poem. A jump next into italicised biblical bathos, the ancient and the current all co-existent here, all threatened by the murderous tracts of standardisation, homogeneity, destruction. But you threaten back to them, good on you:

And who impose a common tongue on

the sister and brother voices of Babel, pray?

Then we swing swimmingly back to Tangaroa, still being addressed like one of your own rowdy cuzzies from down the line, albeit with wonderful metaphoric ease:

‘… YOU, out

there, kaumatua, chest heaving, floating on

your back…’

and we wonder if it’s in fact Tangaroa who is the bad guy. Te Waha o Rerekohu – The old, old tree, wide as the world, many-rooted,/ is leaning back, bad thoughts amputated, waiting/ for his own special pataka …’ — of course — also makes an appearance, reflecting on the rugby field of the school, and the storehouse of the same name, spread out beneath his humungous stretch, while the bard – you, eh — then invokes his own clan — Ngapuhi — who had devastatingly raided Ngati Porou and Te Araroa (then the original Kawakawa actually): something which nga tangata o Matakaoa rohe (or district) have never forgotten/forgiven.

Your friend and constant companion – rain – also drops in toward the end, before the final patai ki Tangaroa;

‘And whose is the lasting

victory, Tangaroa?’

The ‘answer’ is a koan (and aren’t you often so Asian-orient-ed in your ruminations and your runes, Hone, I here also reflect):

‘On one side of the tree only, leaves stir to a fickle

wind, passing.’

The small sign is in Te Waha o Rerekohu’s erstwhile glissade of leaves, a nonchalant flutter of his massive pohutukawa mass in a benediction to his cohorts, the sea, the mighty bluff that is Whetumatarau, showers, and the wind. Their hui continues, but – pae kare – they’re always ready to resist any taua or war party, any crusade, any:

‘…threat from the South…

A threat hidden behind the headland

to the North…’ that might ‘pension me off, for crissake!’

Great poem. I’m tempted to say that you really got to be a bit au fait with the East Coast, thus Ngati Porou, as regards the scenario portrayed here, but if you can grasp the indigenous perception that Nature talks and walks and stalks, that all of her elements interrelate, that she precedes us and exceeds us and sees us and waits for our demise back into her, so as to be regenerated again and again and again, into a constant living heterogeneity, untrammeled by systems, decrees, rules on how to live, how to talk, how to write, how to be — you’re well on the way.

Such resistant resilience following its own routine is rather like the poet and his poems in the book I’m holding here right now, actually. Can’t be incinerated, eh Hone.

Small Holes in the Silence indeed. Kaore nga poka iti. Kaore nga kupu kore hoki. Not small holes. Not silence either, eh. If anything, it’s the dirty silence of Bill Manhire. To paraphrase Wallace Stevens, Hone – you make the silence a hell of a lot dirtier. Good on you. Muddy those waters of bourgeoisie conformity, regularity, narrow-mindedness, prejudice, inanity, pedantic cant.

Engari nau te whatu Maori. (But with the eyes of Maori.)

Kia ora e hoa. Kia kaha ki te kaka.

_______________________________________________________________________________

VAUGHAN RAPATAHANA is a New Zealand writer, poet and teacher who currently lives in Hong Kong. His iwi affiliation is to Te Atiawa. He holds a PhD from the University of Auckland.

DANCING FLAMES

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 19:29:00 +0000

AZURE RISSETTO

The Trouble with Fire by Fiona Kidman (Random House, 2011) 302 pp. $36.99.

‘That’s the trouble with fire, you never know which way it will turn.’ So says Alice Scott, a young visitor to the 1860s Canterbury farm of Annie and Frederick Broome in the title story of Fiona Kidman’s latest collection, The Trouble With Fire. The random, haphazard energies of fire noticed by Alice might stand for the nature of storytelling itself, the way stories flicker from person to person.

         In Kidman’s hands fire becomes a potent and magical symbol threading through her narratives as she sets about illuminating the domestic lives of ordinary New Zealanders. Kidman spins skeins that cross from the colonial to the postcolonial, the provincial to the metropolitan, from mother to daughter, and then criss-cross back again. Just as fire sparks, spreads, and simpers, so too she displays an ability to seize on aspects of her scenarios and enlarge upon them to suit her larger purpose again and again in this collection.

         The eleven stories are divided into three sequences. Part I is made up of six distinct episodes, featuring characters we can recognise as present-day city-dwellers, grappling with issues from the past; Part II centres more closely on a single event which may or may not have occurred on a Waikato farm during the Great Depression; and Part III fictionally recreates scenes from the lives of two ‘real-life’ historical figures. The ‘Fire’ of the title moves from the literal to the figurative, offering fires in the bush, and underground, and in the distance; but it also becomes an index of extreme emotion: adolescent lust, homicidal anger, malicious envy.

         The fiery power of ‘storytelling’ is evident everywhere, starting with the opening story, ‘The Italian Boy’. The make-believe gossip that surrounds the Italian boy of the title and Hilary, a young girl in small-town New Zealand in the mid-twentieth century, acts to shroud like smokescreen the real incestuous passion between the brother and sister bullies of her childhood. Only years later, following a visit from her school-friend Meryl, does Hilary confirm that the ‘pregnancy’ which preceded her departure from the town was merely the spiteful fancy of a fifteen-year old girl.

         Storytelling is a hot and molten art form, with the volatile capacity to flare and die away, to generate different intensities of emotion according to ever-shifting contexts. The breakdown in communication between a husband and wife pair is the first sign that all is not right for these New Zealand visitors to Vietnam in ‘Silks’. As soon as the husband is quarantined in a local hospital this absence of understanding transmutes into a nightmare of cross-cultural (mis)translation where, in the absence of a shared oral language, every mute gesture becomes imbued with impossible significance. The land itself tells of other stories.

         If the intense power of storytelling to carry us through hard times is not renewed by a fresh spark of some kind, it must inevitably fail and be extinguished. Trouble brews for the lovers in ‘The History of It’ when they squabble over the number of children they are supposed to have between them, at least as far as they construct their (false) story for others. Eventually, the actual loss of another child signals their passion for one another is over.

         Sometimes trouble arises from what we choose to read into something. For Simon in ‘Heaven Freezes’, a single moment in the car-park of his local supermarket precipitates the end of his second marriage, but it’s also an epiphany — it allows him to finally acknowledge the truth regarding the end of his first marriage.

         At other times, trouble lies in wait when we refuse to acknowledge something that is right in front of us. When the fire-spotter husband in ‘Extremes’ fails to recognise the key signs of his wife’s adultery, the child she unexpectedly delivers registers their different kinds of infidelity — the husband’s failure of observation, the wife’s literal unfaithfulness — in her appearance. The nickname he bestows upon the child, ‘firebug’, registers the threat of illicit sexual combustibility in a long-term, seemingly stable marriage.

         For Rachel, the other expectant mother in ‘Extremes’, the story of the termination of her love child – a ‘lump of tissue’ which has resulted from a quick ‘office shag’ – is marginalised and eclipsed by the birth announcement which declares the safe arrival of a son to her one-time lover and his wife. Just as she imagines her lost child would have carried the revealing fire-orange hair of its father, Mark, so Rachel soon discovers that the stain of illicit passion is impossible to erase from the genealogy of her life story.

         The disfigured appearance of an unwanted child also informs the truncated narrative of a vanished mother in Part II of the collection. When the adoptive parents of an illegitimate newborn return her because of an unsightly birthmark on her face and neck, the act of rejection reverberates through the generations, and for readers as well. As we move from ‘The Man From Tooley Street’ on to ‘Some Other Man’ and finally ‘Under Water’, readers witness family members rhythmically re-write and re-erase the story of the woman’s disappearance, much like the fires which sporadically reignite and recede underneath the farm where the family resides. Yet since a missing body forestalls closure of any kind, the end of the third story in Part II paradoxically directs us back to the beginning.

         The final section, Part III, is the most explicit in acknowledging the self-renewing fire of storytelling as it ‘fictionalises’ episodes from the lives of both Gordon Coates — Prime Minister of New Zealand from 1925–1928 — and Lady Barker, the famous colonial writer. In the last, eponymous, story, Kidman rephrases scenes from Barker’s memoir Station Life in New Zealand (1870). Arguably, the dual third-person/first-person narration here illustrates the impossibility of any final narrative authority when it comes to the telling of New Zealand tales.

         The stories in this collection are written with unrushed clarity, unforced compassion, and unmannered economy. Fiona Kidman is a veteran storyteller whose intuitive brilliance is undeniably in evidence throughout The Trouble With Fire.

________________________________________________________________

AZURE RISSETTO is currently pursuing her PhD in English Literature at the University of Auckland.

ANCESTRAL VESSEL

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 20:00:00 +0000

TOM BROOKING

No Simple Passage: The Journey of the London to New Zealand, 1842 — a Ship of Hope, by Jenny Robin Jones (Random House, 2011) 350 pp., $45.00.

This book is very different from either historical ‘faction’ such as Ray Grover’s excellent Cork of War (on Te Rauparaha and Te Rangihaeata), or Judy Corballis’s Tapu (on Hongi Hika), let alone orthodox history books. The novelty is appealing because it provides a fresh approach on the early settlement of Wellington. Instead of unfolding a chronologically structured narrative of voyage and settlement, Jones sits, Goddess-like, on the shoulder of her ancestors, expanding on the somewhat cryptic and skeletal story told in the diary and letters of her great-great-grandmother Rebecca Remington and others who travelled on the London as it voyaged to Wellington for 124 days between 29 December 1841 and 1 May 1842. The others include Dr William Mackie Turnbull, obsessed with the illnesses of the passengers, especially the many sick children on board, and William Empson, fixated on the weather and the ship’s progress, or lack of it. Jones starts each day’s entry with Dr Turnbull’s notes on ailing and dying children. Then she fasts forwards to develop some comment or theme revealed in the diaries. In this way the story of her family’s experience is told along with that of other passengers and the broader, Wellington community.

            There are advantages in adopting this imaginative approach in that it really brings home the awful problem of high infant mortality aboard ship before the discovery of antibiotics. The heartbreak that will affect any parent or grandparent is deepened by the savage irony that these hopeful immigrants thought they were travelling to a healthier place. Trawling around in contemporary records like newspapers also highlights the sheer physical courage required for such a long and uncomfortable voyage. After reading this account the modern traveller will feel ashamed at complaining about the discomfort of long (twenty-four-hour) flights on cramped jets. It is all too easy to forget just how claustrophobic most below-decks accommodation was and the dreadful smells that had to be endured. The sheer terror of storms at sea also helps explain why many migrants to New Zealand, the world’s ‘farthest promised land’ as Rollo Arnold once put it, including some of my own family, refused to ever again travel on any kind of a boat. Some stayed in New Zealand simply because they could not get back to Britain, especially before the advent of steam ships services in the 1870s.

Jones’s thorough research in manuscripts, letters and newspapers held in the Alexander Turnbull Library, National Archives and Masterton Archives catches much of the texture of life in early Wellington. Once again she reminds us that settlers, despite their high expectations, experienced much more physical discomfort in poorly built housing served by chronically underdeveloped infrastructure. Rudimentary sanitation made the new settlement anything but healthy and parents had to continue coping with the pain of losing more children. As Jones points out, losing children then was no less painful than in other, more secure periods, despite the reality of high infant and maternal mortality persisting into the twentieth century. Certainly infant mortality remained high in Britain as in the rest of the Empire and the USA, but migrants were disappointed that rates took so long to drop in a supposedly ‘better’ environment. On top of the trauma of losing children came the terror of the 1855 earthquake — an 8.2 monster that would have proved catastrophic in a more intensively settled town. Danger also took on less spectacular forms for adults: clearing forests to make way for farms involved the danger of being burned alive or of having heavy trees falling upon the less expert woodsmen. Cuts, easily gained in bush clearance, could trigger fatal blood poisoning. Travel, too, involved dangers, especially drowning in swollen rivers that could only be crossed on foot. Horses, although nowhere near as dangerous as motor cars, sometimes threw their riders and rolled on top of them. The marginalisation of Maori, from the seven mysterious figures on board the London to those encountered at Wellington, is also probably a fairly accurate reflection of both the attitudes and experiences of the majority of British settlers concerning race relations.

Involvement in churches and a host of other social and cultural organisations also rings true, and provides further evidence that contradicts Miles Fairburn’s argument that nineteenth-century New Zealand was made up of atomised, disconnected individuals rather than cohesive communities. As Jones demonstrates, many of the families who came on the London ended up intermarrying and supporting one another in the tough business of building towns and making farms. Jones and Random House must also be praised for the high standard of presentation including the attractive colour reproductions of period paintings. Even if the relevance of one or two seems questionable, they look stunning.

Yet, for all its energy and imaginative evocation, assisted by Jones’s lively prose, there are problems with her novel approach. By hopping around so much and playing fast and loose with time, she produces a work that is very retrospective and over-loaded with hindsight. The people whose lives she hopes to illuminate simply did not experience things this way. Rather they engaged with life and its vicissitudes day by day as history unfolded. They did not know that earthquakes were coming until at least 1844, and could only assume that Maori resistance would eventually be overcome. They anticipated that sheep farming and wool growing would earn the colony a living — but there were no guarantees of success. Leaping around between theme and time also makes the interwoven stories a little hard to follow because the narrative drive is frequently disrupted. For this orthodox historian, at least, the experiment would have worked better if the author had related the voyage first and then unfolded the story of what happened after arrival next. Alternatively, holding an imaginary conversation, or creating a dialogue with her ancestors on the London, would have provided more coherence for this reader, at least, than the approach employed here. Of course, others who find mainstream historical writing to be rather dull and plodding may prefer this rather different and highly playful approach.

It must be conceded, nevertheless, that nineteenth-century New Zealand was an experiment in every sense, whether we are talking about economic development, environmental transformation, social engineering, cultural formation, race relations, or political systems. Wakefield’s theories and schemes added to the sense of trying something different, but the British migrants who became New Zealanders had to start anew and develop their country in their own way, with or without Wakefield.

Adjusting to very different realities involved working through a very organic process, just as eastern Polynesians had become Maori before British settlers arrived by learning to come to terms with the larger land mass and harsher and cooler environment of Aotearoa/Te Wai Pounamu. It is fitting, therefore, that Jones has experimented with the presentation of family and migration history and tried something different. For her imagination, bravery and hard work she deserves plaudits, but like most experiments her approach needs fine-tuning and modification, just as Wakefield’s ideas had to be significantly adjusted in practice to match the difficult realities of a new and very different land.

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

TOM BROOKING is Professor of History at the University of Otago. His books include Seeds of Empire: The Environmental Transformation of New Zealand, (with Eric Pawson), published by I.B.Tauris (London) in 2010, and Lands for the People? The Highland Clearances and the Colonisation of New Zealand: A Biography of John McKenzie (1996). He is currently writing a biography of Richard John Seddon, New Zealand's longest-serving Prime Minister.

GENERATION XPERIMENTAL

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 19:30:00 +0000

JODIE DALGLEISH

Zebulon: A Cautionary Tale, by Richard Meros, (Lawrence and Gibson, 2011) 169 pp. $24.00; Getting under Sail, by Brannavan Gnanalingam, (Lawrence and Gibson, 2011) 236 pp., $24.00; The Constant Losers, by Alex Wild, (Titus Books, 2010), 189 pp., $30.00.

The ridiculous is skilfully made both funny and thought-provoking in Richard Meros’ Zebulon: A Cautionary Tale, recently published by the writers’ co-operative Lawrence and Gibson. Not only does the book present a writer’s hilariously sadomasochistic efforts to dominate a few fledging writers in order to spark his own creativity, but the head of long-dead Che Guevera is made to thaw on a shelf of the FBI and head south, levitating and directing itself with a new-found power. What’s more, these two unlikely threads of storyline are brought together and intertwined to form a novel that playfully and pointedly explores the potential of experimental fiction and the act of writing itself.

            As the book began, I suspected that the writer was going to do little more than indulge in the pursuit of smartass-edly writing about himself. But by the end of the second chapter he had begun to reveal his particular ability to throw reality around since ‘no mere story, especially one posing as auto-biography, can approximate reality’. Meros convinces the reader that the book’s main character is also its author, slyly establishing a chronological link to his previous book, On the Conditions and Possibilities of Helen Clark Taking Me as Her Young Lover. At the same time, he is the book’s main character: a writer typing words that ‘flopped off [his] computer, onto their pages, and onto the floor.’

            At the hands of Sally and Leo the main character and author, Richard, is unexpectedly smeared in a number of condiments and subjected to an erotic encounter with a book on tattooed nudes. Somehow inspired, he devises a plan to dominate would-be writers, and reels in three recruits like trout that each require ‘a different type of tickling.’ In master and servant sessions they are slapped, pinched and caressed into writing, without drifting from their narrative flow. But by the end of the fifth chapter, Richard has inevitably and unsatisfactorily slept with one of his recruits, fired another and been overcome by the normalising demands of Riley, the third.

            In the sixth chapter Meros goes further, throwing the reader into a narrative that is almost surreal. Taking the ridiculous to a new extreme, Che Guevera’s defrosted head is able to move as if controlled by the joystick of his new life force. Levitating without friction, Che traverses America at his own discretion, creating hysterical rumours and headlines along the way. At the end of the chapter, however, the author presents ‘Richard’s comments’ on that chapter’s text, making it that of Riley, his only productive recruit. And so follows a to-ing and fro-ing of chapters that alternate between the story of Richard and Che.

   Over a lengthy nine chapters, Che Guevera achieves a second coming and eventually recognises the impotence, capitalisation and stylisation of his so-called revolution. Co-incidentally, Richard finds a new recruit, Karl, that turns the tables on him, more fully discovers his own impotence as he begins to write again, is suddenly engaged to be married and tries to quit the Lawrence and Gibson Group. This gives substance and movement to Meros’ novel, but if the author did wish to draw parallels between the idea of failed or eventually impotent revolution and writing, he could have made more of the play between these chapters.

            Part way through his novel’s nine chapter interplay, Meros infuriates the reader. He takes the story of Che — which is supposedly that of Riley — into his own clutches, sneaking in bits of language he used in his first few chapters. The reader — who is also likely to be a writer, given the experimental nature of Meros’ novel — is likely to ‘tut tut’ and shake a finger. Fully aware of his flaunting of ‘the rules’, however, Meros deliberately plays a trick on the reader and rescues the reputation of experimental fiction in the last chapters of his book.

            As it turns out, the members of Lawrence and Gibson (which include Riley and Karl) decide to declare their insolvency. But on the insistence of their accountant, the uncooperative cooperative’s James Marr claims the incomplete manuscripts of its last active members and tries to compile a book that will make enough money to cover their debts. He ‘[cobbles] the confiscated texts into something half-coherent, whittling it all down to two plotlines,’ sends it to Richard to both finish and edit, and calls it ‘Zebulon: A Cautionary Tale.’ In one fell swoop Meros finishes by throwing questions about the authorship of his novel up in the air, and causes the reader to rethink his entire novel as those questions fall.

***

Lawrence and Gibson’s other recently released book, Getting Under Sail by Brannavan Gnanalingam, is less successful. Gnanalingam recounts his extraordinary road trip from Morocco to Ghana with two guys previously his high school friends. It is, as advertised, part-travelogue, part-picaresque and part-confessional. This is what makes it interesting and worthy of attention. However, the language, while at times surprisingly refreshing, is often overburdened by grammar and diluted by unnecessary ‘factual’ or autobiographical information. In addition, the dialogue between Gnanalingam and his travel companions is often banal and the laddish dialogue that includes frequent mention of girlfriends as ‘good bitches’ will, I suspect, sound unreal to most readers.

            With some direction and a good edit, Gnanalingam’s book could have been polished into a gem. For the author can conjure a place with a stellar phrase. Of Cairo he writes: ‘the pollution snarled at my eyes, stuck its tongue down my throat like an over-enthusiastic first kiss.’ In the medina of Marrakech: ‘music filled every spare corner ... Moroccans [were] taking on the blues, or waltzes with traditional instruments that convinced the sky dust and night air to dance a dervish around the open space.’ In Mauritania, the aroma of fried fish ‘stood out in the blanket of dust.’ In Senegal, a van ‘was a stutterer under stress’, and ‘a sharp, cool, palliative beer’ washed away heat. ‘Tamale was a city lurking in wait.’ And in Busua, fishing boats ‘flopped onto land like a swimmer too tired to get out of a pool.’

            Perhaps the most interesting, and yet underdeveloped, thing about Gnalanalingam’s account is his exploration of his own identity as a ‘darkie’ from a ‘white’ country travelling as a tourist in Africa. Throughout the book, the author gives little snippets of his Sri-Lankan heritage and muses on the nature of ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’. Poignantly, Gnanalingam calls himself ‘the black man who is white’. On the back of this is a load of guilt, contradiction and conflict that works its way to the book’s end. Gnanalingam does fully understand and explore the strange experience that is travelling, however. He mentions the need to explore the world for the sake of it, the practice of ticking off attractions, the way a traveller remains dislocated from people and their so-called monuments, the fact that ‘tourists’ and ‘locals’ inevitably act out their respective roles, and the supposed superiority of the well-travelled.

***

Like Zebulon, The Constant Losers by Alex Wild is a surprising and successful work of experimental fiction. Written as a series of zines that combine text-speak, doodles and photocopied notes, it offers funny and appealing musings on music, relationships, books and sexuality, among other things. Of particular note is its ability to be fully Generation Y (‘OMGWTF’) while it draws on plenty of music and other stuff dear and recognisable to a Generation Xer, such as the practice of making and exchanging audio cassette tapes.

            It might seem unlikely that any writer could maintain a zine format with its truncated manner of speech and keep the reader engaged, but Wild pulls it off with ease. She lets her zine-like format structure her novel’s text under snappy headings and uses her doodles as visual cues. At the same time, she offers a recognisable narrative flow. She has a deft touch and a way of making her story live through her own kind of content. In particular, the tone of her central characters, Frankie and Amy, skilfully carries the smile, wink and nudge of the author. And the battle-of-the-zines that develops between them and ultimately brings them together is nothing less than a sweet read.

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

JODIE DALGLEISH is a curator, critic and author currently living in Wellington. She is a regular contributor to the online art journal EyeContact, and has a Masters degree in Creative Writing from the Auckland University of Technology.

POETRY'S MANY DIFFERENT VOICES

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 19:30:00 +0000

NICHOLAS REID

The Best of Best New Zealand Poems, edited by Bill Manhire and Damien Wilkins (Victoria University Press, 2010) 224 pp., $35.00; These I Have Loved – My Favourite New Zealand Poems, edited by Harvey McQueen (Steele Roberts, 2010) 192 pp., $34.99.

Because you are reading this, you are part of the electronic revolution. These words exist only in cyber-space. Paper has nothing to do with them. And for the last twenty years or so, clever people have been telling us that this is the way ahead. Websites, blogs, on-line journals etc. are going to take the place of those physical objects, books. Printed books will go the way of the hand-written codex. A few reactionary 'craft' printers might still produce them as a kind of folk-hobby, but the rest of us will be Kindling and reading off screen rather than off page.

            So isn’t it funny that when an on-line journal reaches its tenth year of successful production, it celebrates by producing a real physical book with real physical pages?

            The Best of Best New Zealand Poems gathers together what Bill Manhire and Damien Wilkins consider to be the cream of Victoria University’s online poetry journal Best New Zealand Poems, which began in 2001. The journal has had a different editor each year, from Iain Sharp in 2001 to Chris Price in 2010, so initial selection of contents is not tied to one person’s idiosyncratic taste.

            In his introductory essay, Damien Wilkins’ tone is a little defensive about producing a book to celebrate something online. He is determined to pre-empt this obvious criticism, as well as some others. There is, as he correctly notes, an element of hubris in calling a personal selection of contents ‘the Best’. He points out that of the 65 poets represented, there are 38 women and 27 men, so the two blokes who selected the contents haven’t been sexist or anything. He also writes: 'One final piece of accounting – and this will inflame some readers. By my estimate more than 30 per cent of the poets in this book have connections to either the International Institute of Modern Letters or Bill [Manhire]’s old Original Composition class. What can we say?... these are the poems that most excited us.' I’m not sure that it was prudent to say this. Whatever Wilkins’ intention, it inevitably creates the impression of a clubby in-group.

            And so to the 65 poets, arranged in alphabetical order from Fleur Adcock to Ashleigh Young.

            The hell of reviewing an anthology is that one is implicitly required to pick trends or make some sententious statement about the state of modern poetry. I am completely unable to do this. Walking from poet to poet, I encountered many different voices using radically different techniques:

            I’m interested that it is women rather than men who tend to dwell on the rough stuff (Michele Amas’ raw sexual concern for her daughter; Tusiata Avia’s celebration of a wild and crazy sexual encounter; Bernadette Hall worrying about war; Anne Kennedy watching the All Blacks’ vigorous tribal battle on the telly).

            Men and women are equally satirical (Hinemoana Baker’s surrealist protest poem; Gordon Challis defying regulations; Karlo Mila angry at fake stereotypes of Pasifika; Robert Sullivan doing his block about the government’s overriding of Maori customary right).

            Men and women are equally prone to strong feelings about parents and family (Rachel Bush in praise of old-time at-home Mums; Geoff Cochrane writing tenderly about his brother; Rhian Gallagher burying her father; Andrew Johnston’s long stately elegy for his father; Vivienne Plumb reflecting on her very sick son; Sonja Yelich worrying about the kind of education her kids are getting).

            Some poems are written loose blog-style (Jenny Bornholdt seeing a poet as a fitter turner; Stephanie de Montalk facing a bone-scan).

            By contrast, a few brave spirits go for more traditional structures and metres (the eight rhyming lines of Alistair Campbell; that radical young poet Allen Curnow translating Pushkin; John Gallas breaking into rhyme; Paula Green almost writing a Petrarchan sonnet; C.K. Stead replaying Allen Curnow’s loss of Christian faith).

            I could pick out those poets whose selection is dream-like or surrealist (Fleur Adcock), and those who are more social-realist (Peter Olds). But it is really impossible to make generalisations beyond the ones I’ve already made.

            And this one. New Zealand poetry is in good health. It produces a lot of interesting stuff.

            One quibble. At the back of the book are biographical notes on each contributor, and a statement from each poet on what the poem means or what inspired it. Some of these statements ramble on for longer than the poem being explained. The rebellious part of me kept wondering why the poems needed such crutches to lean on. Were they not capable of communicating what they had to say by their own text?

            High praise, then, to Sam Hunt and Gregory O’Brien for not playing the game and for providing no such explanation of their contributions.

•••

Harvey McQueen died late last year, at the age of seventy-six. He was a considerate teacher and anthologist, as well as a good poet in his own right. I had the pleasure of reviewing his last collection, Goya Rules, for Poetry New Zealand. I judged it sane, civilised and capable of making big statements about history without either embarrassment or mawkishness.

            The same statement can be made of the anthology These I Have Loved, the last thing McQueen produced before his death. As the title (per Rupert Brooke) makes clear, in choosing his one hundred favourite New Zealand poems, McQueen was guided first by his heart, not by current critical fashion or consensus taste. He explains in his introduction that he was not deterred, either, by complaints that some of his choices might be considered hackneyed. So he includes Ruth Dallas’s 'Milking at Dawn', Denis Glover’s 'The Magpies', James K. Baxter’s 'Lament for Barney Flanagan', Allen Curnow’s 'House and Land' and Mary Stanley’s 'The Wife Speaks'. And why not? They deserve to be on anybody’s list of the twenty best New Zealand poems ever, let along the hundred best. It doesn’t matter that they have been anthologised often before.

            From somebody who died at a reasonable old age, much of McQueen’s selection consists inevitably of earlier generations of poets. Mason, Baughan, Bethell, Glover, Curnow, Fairburn and Tuwhare are generously represented, and a whole section is devoted to Baxter, whom McQueen describes as: ‘bestriding my poetry life like a colossus’. But McQueen kept reading new poetry to the end, and These I Have Loved also comes up with goodly selections from newer breeds (Kate Camp, Jenny Bornholdt, Mark Pirie, Janet Charman) as well as a few surprising choices from poets who have published little.

            How do you judge somebody else’s selection of favourites? You don’t really. You sit back and take in the anthologist’s comment that: ‘to a considerable extent [the selected poems] represent who I am, or maybe the person I would hope to be.’ The anthology is organised thematically. Each section is introduced by a brief essay. Often the tone is autobiographical, as McQueen explains why and how he first encountered the selected poems.

            He knew his end was approaching as he anthologised. He writes: ‘I’ve been diagnosed as having a rare muscular degenerative disease with no known cure.’ This is a browsable and school-friendly anthology. Also a heck of an epitaph.

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NICHOLAS REID is an Auckland-based historian, poet and reviewer. He blogs about books online at Reid’s Reader.

MODUS OPERANDI

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 19:30:00 +0000

LYDIA WEVERS

The Frame Function: An Inside-Out Guide to the Novels of Janet Frame, by Jan Cronin, (Auckland University Press, 2011), 222 pp., $49.99.

Janet Frame’s 1979 Living in the Maniototo is her penultimate novel and one generally regarded, as Jan Cronin says in her book, as some kind of creative manifesto. The headings of the different parts of the novel are a set of instructions to the reader, predominantly about ‘paying attention’. If these instructions reflect Frame’s sense of her reader, or rather, to adapt Cronin’s title, the ‘reader function’, then paying attention might be something she thinks the reader already does (but not well) or does too much, or does not do enough, and there won’t, of course, be anything simple about what Frame might or might not be saying, but if it is possible to have a reader who pays enough of the right kind of attention, then that person is Jan Cronin.

   The Frame Function picks up from a phrase coined by Patrick Evans in an obituary in 2004, the ‘Frame effect’, which described the way he thought that ‘as readers, each of us is … under her control whenever we read her and required to perform – to solve’. Frame referred to her fictions as ‘explorations’ rather than novels and the questions that have absorbed, intrigued and teased scholars over the duration of her work relate to the ways in which they do not conform to habitual reader expectations. The narrative will never arrive a point where all becomes clear and you are offered ‘closure’. And the reason her novels never reach a reassuring destination is because the author (or rather her many stand-ins because you are never allowed to rest in the comfortable arms of a reliable narrator) is always at your elbow troubling the waters of comprehension.

    Cronin, adapting the ‘Frame function’ from Foucault’s famous term for the author, bases her ‘guide’ to Frame on the ‘authorial presence’ in Frame’s novels and how that presence impacts on the reader. Cronin opens with a wonderful example of Frame playing with her reader’s attention in The Adaptable Man. Over breakfast Russell Maude, the village dentist, his wife Greta and their son Alwyn are being treated to a reading of Anglo-Saxon poetry from Russell’s brother, Aisley, a clergyman who is convalescing with them. Misquotations and mistranslations are exchanged across the table cloth, Frame setting traps for an unwary reader who has done Medieval English 1 and thinks they know some Anglo-Saxon verse. Cronin notes that there is no question of Frame simply having made a mistake about which translation matches which Anglo-Saxon poem. Later in the text translated lines from ‘The Wanderer’ are repeated and matched with the correct Anglo-Saxon original. There are other ‘mistakes’ too, which are harder to classify, and like the good scholar she is, Cronin checked Frame’s ms and various editions of the novel and concluded, to her relief, that the reader ‘could not rely on the empirical author to clarify the text’. But at the same time the ‘wilful authorial presence in the text was such that it wouldn’t allow the reader to disregard it’.

   Of course this is not a new insight in Frame studies. No one can read Frame and not become aware of the author playing cat and mouse with the reader, but what Cronin offers in The Frame Function is a detailed, erudite, clear and illuminating account of Frame’s novels and what she calls Frame’s ‘MO’ — how they work. Cronin acknowledges that her own MO, the ‘inside-out guide’, might be seen as ‘making an implicit claim to know the text better than Frame, to have access to a textual endgame of authorial interests and choices’, but she is always at pains to disavow the potential hierarchies of this position. Instead, she asserts that the ‘Frame function’ and the inside-out guide are two sides of the same interpretative coin. So does it help?

   The answer is unequivocally that yes it does. Cronin delivers a very lucid and highly informed guided journey through corpus of Frame’s fiction, discussing the novels in roughly chronological order, and using each chapter to open out a more complex examination of the ‘prescriptive authorial presence’ and how the novels work. As she repeatedly notes, her interpretive labours are more focused on the how and not the what of Frame’s fiction, reflecting Frame’s own focus, as expressed in an interview with Elizabeth Alley, on the ‘pattern of things’. Towards the end of this comprehensive and learned book, the person she refers to as the ‘empirical author’ appears in her ‘own voice’ (the trouble with reading Frame is one’s heightened apprehensions of the chasms buried in that taken-for-granted, everyday kind of phrase) in quoted interviews and letters. These notes from the deep don’t really say anything that authors through the ages haven’t always said. For example she commented to Susan Chenery that ‘when you are writing you think you know what you are going to do but it gets organised for you’. This is not really any different from the old chestnut of characters taking over the narrative, but where Frame is unlike other people, the source of her great difficulty and treasure is how she changes her reader’s alertness to, and awareness of, the otherworld of the text. Where does the text stop and the world begin? Cronin shows, with expertly heightened attention, how shifty and cunning Frame and her texts are, and how complex and unfinished the reader’s experience will always be.

   This is not a book for a casual reader. Cronin declares at the outset it is for those who have ‘acquired a taste’ for the novels of Janet Frame, and the book is primarily geared to a scholarly audience. Undergraduates looking for an easy fix to an essay won’t find their answers here. It is a guide more in the sense that Virgil is Dante’s guide through the Inferno — there are still complex mysteries. Cronin deploys the metaphor of the guide in her own syntax, which is the only thing about her book that I found irritating — the reader is always part of an armlocked ‘we’. But Cronin’s image for Frame’s novels suggests, I think, the expansions offered by her own text. Cronin says the image that sticks with her is the blue police box — yes the TARDIS, in which Doctor Who travels to new worlds — bigger on the inside than on the outside. This is true of both authors and their texts. The Frame Function won't be the last word on its subject, but it will be a must-read for anyone trying to write about or get to grips with the work of our most extraordinary, gifted and elusive author.

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LYDIA WEVERS is the director of the Stout Research Centre at Victoria University. Her most recent book is Reading on the Farm: Victorian Fiction and the Colonial World (VUP).

YOURSELF WHO ARE THOUSANDS

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 19:30:00 +0000

NICKY CHAPMAN

Dear Charles Dear Janet: Frame and Brasch in Correspondence, selected and edited by Pamela Gordon and Denis Harold (The Holloway Press, 2010), 61 pp., $250 (edition of 150).

Frame would have grinned and Brasch more likely grimaced, but both would have noted the gentle ironies surrounding this small book of short but often intensely interesting writings. Their letters, including email-sized notes on book loans and afternoon teas, have been preserved in beautiful font on thick cream paper, at a price no pauper writer could afford.

The letters, from 1949 to 1978, are torch-beams only. Readers need to go elsewhere for full biographical details. The book begins with Frame’s note sent to ‘Mr Editor’ from Oamaru (1949, between hospital stays). ‘A story. Crumbly and of poor grade. You probably won’t want it. In that case please burn it quickly – quickly – or crush into tinier pieces for Rat Darkness to sneak in and snaffle.’ Charles did not crush the story for Rat Darkness, nor did he reply to her, but he did tell Denis Glover to save it with her other submissions. In 1954 he asks to print one of her poems, and for more of her work, and their correspondence begins. Frame is outwardly diffident at first: ‘I fight off writing, but it has an overtaking habit, like sleep’.

Other writers and places are also briefly, evocatively, lit up. Frame finds England peaceful compared to the United States during the Vietnam era, and then remembers Dunedin in July: ‘... soon, the hills will be shadowed gold with the budding broom and gorse; it rains now, I suppose, and you light fires.’ Brash’s reply describes 1969 Dunedin with a Piggy Muldoon in the Capping Parade, and Hone Tuwhare, Warren Dibble and Ralph Hotere composing ‘a sort of humming top which now seems the centre of the town’s life’. The letters mention many other writers and artists, such as Ruth Dallas, the Baxters (Jacquie getting the children to work to pay off debts, while ‘Jim was up the Wanganui’), Frank Sargeson, Ted Middleton, Bill Manhire as an Icelandic scholar (‘rather sullen and silent’ but whom Frame liked), and even Grace Paley.

However, it is the writers themselves that fascinate most. Frame and Brasch were united in their passion for writing, respect for each other’s work, and affection, which overcame their differences in age, gender, personality and background. Brasch notes in his diary in 1965, ‘Janet shares my interest in moulding language to greater intensity and richness ... She is so quick, receptive, all her antennae alive, aware.’

What differentiates them most is that Frame writes, in general, to explore and to reveal, while Brasch conceals his inwardness behind polite warmth and kind practicalities. Even having taken such care, he still fears posterity’s intrusions: ‘I am appalled at the way people fall like wolves on the letters of writers who are still alive or are barely in their graves; it’s a kind of cannibalism, it’s certainly very indecent.’

If personal exposure upsets Brasch, criticism of her work inspires Frame to passionate analysis. When a Landfall reviewer disparages her ‘weakness for metaphor’, she writes ‘... isn’t the need to compare, to perceive relationships the source of all art? ... images ... are the basis of my life and my need to write, and they all have meaning. The fact that they impede the path of narrative makes me a bad novelist, but, except in some of my stories, I’m not taking the narrative path.’

The editors have filled out the spaces between the letters with much more of Frame’s other writings than Brasch’s, but these give insights into both. Frame describes Brasch to her beloved friend, the American painter, Bill Brown, as a ‘pure earnest bachelor’ who had led a ‘shatteringly lonely life’ until his mid-fifties. When sitting next to Brasch on a plane, ‘I warned him that I would be likely to grab his arm if the plane were being buffeted and he whom I’m sure has remained ungrabbed all his life, suppressed a slight alarm and gallantly said he did not mind.’

The book has faults. Its price and print-run make it inaccessible to most. The printing is not clear on every page, at least on my copy. A little more contextual information would help many readers, for example, being told early on that ‘Ruth’ was Brasch’s secretary for Landfall. I would also have liked to have read all the letters in their entirety.

Despite such criticism, this book is a valuable addition to our understanding of both writers. Its revelations – of Frame’s witty warm compassion and Brasch’s intense privacy and extreme generosity – entice us back to their more formal work. The man who wrote ‘Separation’ (Home Ground 1974) was not ‘ungrabbed’. He also knew that all people are multiple and intertwined, and to create one voice is piercingly difficult:

12

To speak in your own words in your own voice –

How easy it sounds and how hard it is

When nothing that is yours is yours alone

To walk singly yourself who are thousands

Through all that made and makes you day by day

To be and to be nothing, not to own

Not owned, but lightly on the sword edge keep

A dancer’s figure – that is the wind’s art

With you who are blood and water, wind and stone.

‘Shoriken’ (Home Ground 1974)

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NICKY CHAPMAN is a writer, editor and tutor, who shares Brasch's and Frame's strong connections to Otago. She lives in Port Chalmers, near Dunedin.

A FATHER'S RIGHTS

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 19:30:00 +0000

BRETT LUPTON

Settlers’ Creek, by Carl Nixon  (Random House, 2010), 330 pp. $29.99.

I have been an admirer of Carl Nixon ever since, some years ago, I read his short story 'My Father Running with a Dead Boy'. Settler’s Creek is Nixon’s second novel and, having read this, I want very much to seek out his first, Rocking Horse Road, written in 2007.

The story in Settler’s Creek is told through the third-person perspective of Box Saxton, a man devastated by the sudden death of his stepson. Worse, the boy’s biological father, a Maori elder, takes the body without consent to be buried in ancestral land. Through his shock and grief, and memories of his own unfortunate family life, Box is compelled to set out to recover the son he has lost.

Nixon obviously recognises that much of the emotional power is already in the material and through tasteful changes of tense, from past to present, he adds additional focus as needed. All of which culminates in a simple but evocative style of prose that subtly reinforces themes and provides insight into the lives of the characters and how they may later react.

Box looked at the tools left hanging on the walls of the shed. A lot of them were missing now .... When he was very young Box hadn’t understood that his grandfather had drawn around each tool in here with a heavy marker and then painted in the outline in black on the wall. Back then, Box, the boy, had believed ... that the tool had left behind its shadow ... He looked at the black marks now, faded but still visible. Surrounded by the smells of linseed and earth, he stood for a long time and stared at the wall of lost shadows.

Yet despite the relative simplicity of plot and style, the issues Settler’s Creek addresses are certainly not so simple. In fact its cluster of thematic concerns are so snarly and gnarly, it took some thought to decide what this novel is really about. An ambivalent book for an ambivalent time: because it hugs the centre of a road that traces the nation’s bicultural faultline, as if testing territoriality, I am sure this book will mean different things to different people.

Initially the main concern appears to be the obvious clash of opposing world-views. And Nixon devotes much of the novel to developing this dynamic: the European equivalent of tangata whenua symbolised by a family bible; the dual cultural background of his stepson Stephen/Tipene; several examples of the inability of both sides to communicate effectively. He clearly wants a balanced view of both cultures.

But this is also where the novel occasionally wavers. Exactly because both sides of the argument have validity, and there are no readily apparent solutions, Nixon must act as a kind of facilitator — an explainer and ameliorator. As a result, there is sometimes the palpable sense of being led by a firm and insistent (‘fatherly’) hand through the issues. I feel the intentions of the story, and the storyteller, would be better served by allowing the reader the same space to think about the events as that which they’re allowed for emotional reaction — otherwise, paradoxically, the novel, wanting to maintain an even keel (overly concerned with everyone getting ‘a fair hearing’), is in danger of tipping into melodrama, bathos, or worse.

Balancing the cultural issues also distracts from what I feel is the novel’s true thematic focus: not the larger issue of social politics, but the ostensibly smaller – but no less important – question of what constitutes true fatherhood? This is where the novel derives its true power and purpose, and this is primarily why, I think, the author elects to tell the story through the suddenly bereft protagonist. Nixon is at his best when writing directly about Box and his experiences.

And when at his best, all concerns for the political issues that tend to divide us as a nation are swept away by what really matters, the immediacy of personal experience:

Now, looking at the damage, Box couldn’t help imagining latex hands cracking open his son’s chest. He felt a surge of anger. What the hell were they looking for anyway? Wasn’t it obvious that it was hanging from his neck that had killed the kid? Box imagined them reaching into the excavated chest and lifting out the boy’s heart. They would have held it up, turned it towards the light and slowly rolled it over for closer inspection. How much had it weighed? he wondered.

Notwithstanding the odd stumble, Settler’s Creek, with its exploration of contemporary moral complexities, and with its evocation of a particular time and place, lingers in the mind as a fine novel. And, despite my not having read his Rocking Horse Road (a situation soon to be rectified), this novel, in my estimation, is a necessary and successful step forward for this award-winning short-story exponent in getting to grips with the technical complexities of the larger form. It seems obvious to me that, from the luminous and careful crafting of this novel, and his dedication to building on that craft, Carl Nixon is destined to become one of New Zealand’s leading writers.

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BRETT LUPTON is a writer and musician who lives in Dunedin. He is currently completing a PG (dip) Arts in English at the University of Otago.

METAMORPHOSIS

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 02:03:00 +0000

ROGER BLACKLEY

Fiona Pardington: The Pressure of Sunlight Falling, edited by Kriselle Baker and Elizabeth Rankin, (Otago University Press, 2011) 160 pp., $120.

A ‘museological’ orientation distinguishes a range of photography that engages in fresh ways with historical spaces and artefacts. Thomas Struth’s long-term project ‘Museum Photographs’ observed the observers — the audiences that are such an essential component of displays in museums — while the uncanniness of Candida Höfer’s 2006 photographs of the Louvre’s galleries depended in part on the absence of any human users. In New Zealand, museums sit alongside other memorial sites in Laurence Aberhart’s oeuvre, while Neil Pardington’s recent series explored the aesthetics of museum storage. Occasionally, such projects succeed in completely redefining a historical topic. One example is Rauru: Tene Waitere, Maori Carving, Colonial History, edited by Nicholas Thomas and published by Otago University Press in 2009, which showcased Mark Adams’ photographs of Waitere’s innovative carvings and the international contexts they inhabit. Rauru also featured historical images, an essay by Thomas and insightful perspectives from James Schuster, a great-grandson of Waitere’s, and Lyonel Grant, a leading contemporary carver.

   Otago University Press now gives us Fiona Pardington: The Pressure of Sunlight Falling, an even more spectacular exploration of this fascinating interface of art and ethnography. Full-page plates reproduce Pardington’s sombre, almost monochrome photographs of casts made from living models by Pierre-Marie Dumoutier, the phrenologist serving on the last great scientific voyage by the French into the Pacific. The photographs are accompanied by an impressive array of images and essays that explore the significance of Dumoutier’s work and its relationship to nineteenth-century anthropology. The elegant design is the responsibility of Neil Pardington, the photographer’s brother.

            Usually termed a ‘pseudo-science’, phrenology was a popular pastime of the early nineteenth century that purported to reveal inner truths — much like psychoanalysis in our time. Naval commander Dumont d’Urville was flattered by a favourable reading of his cranial bumps received from a London phrenologist; when this was repeated in Paris he became a convert and secured Dumoutier’s services for the expedition to the South Seas. Charged with forming a collection of skulls and head-casts to support d’Urville’s racial mapping of the Pacific, the phrenologist produced the moulds for some fifty life-cast busts that — back in Paris — were photographed using the novel technique of daguerreotypy and published as lithographs in an atlas documenting the expedition’s anthropological discoveries.

Pardington’s connection with the casts, which are now held by the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, originated with Ngāi Tahu’s knowledge of the portraits made at Otago in 1840. Takatahara (known to Dumoutier as Taha Tahala) was a Banks Peninsula chief who played a leading role in the wars of the 1820s and 1830s between Ngāi Tahu and Ngāti Toa and is related to the photographer. The other Ngāi Tahu male portrait depicts Piuraki or John Love Tikao (Poukalem), who was taken prisoner by Ngāti Toa in 1831 and later travelled the world, living in Bordeaux and London. Fluent in French and English, Piuraki was also at Otago at the time of the French expedition’s visit in March 1840. Together with the portrait of a female subject, Heroua, these South Island casts represent the ancestral connection and catalyst for the project.

The subject of a life cast is effectively a co-author of the resulting artefact and, given the deployment of a negative mould to produce a positive image, Pardington recognises an affinity between life casts and photographs. While this series represents her first foray into digital photography, which transcends the negative-positive dialectic, the works are nevertheless imbued with an antiquarian aura. Apart from the impressive scale and immaculate surface of the exhibition prints, and the wilful manipulation of colour, it is noteworthy that Pardington consistently rejects the three-quarter orientation of European portraiture (which is how the busts were documented in the photographically derived lithographs of d’Urville’s atlas) in favour of a more severe pairing of frontal and profile views, and even some views of the backs of the busts. These formats are intriguingly reminiscent both of the racial profiling of nineteenth-century ethnography, and of the criminal profiling system developed for the Parisian police by Alphonse Bertillon.

Scholarly essays are interspersed with the plates, some of which fold out. The artist’s gradual discovery of and interaction with the life casts is discussed by the book’s editors, Kriselle Baker and Elizabeth Rankin, while David Elliott — artistic director of the 2010 Sydney Biennale where the photographs debuted — profiles the trajectory of Pardington’s career. Kriselle Baker’s essay, ‘The Truth of Lineage: Time and Tā Moko’, focuses on the significance of Māori tattoo and its representations, while anthropologist and Pacific historian Nicholas Thomas sketches the broader story of the voyage and the ‘archival turn’ exemplified by contemporary artists who engage with the legacy of colonialism. French curator Yves Le Fur, in ‘Dumoutier’s Artifacts’, and Elizabeth Rankin, in ‘Facing Difference: Casts as Documents and Display’, furnish interesting contextual information regarding the history and status of Dumoutier’s work. Further essays come from Stacy L. Kamehiro, whose ‘Documents, Specimens, Portraits: Dumoutier’s Pacific Casts’ offers a nuanced reading of the quest for races and types, and Ross Calman, who gives a Ngāi Tahu perspective. The final contribution is by anthropologist and Pacific historian Anne Salmond, who muses on the mechanics of casting a head in plaster and finds it difficult to believe that Māori chiefs would allow such a treatment of their heads.

Fiona Pardington has formerly engaged with museums and their collections, photographing birds’ nests and feathers at the Otago Museum, huia specimens from the Canterbury Museum, and hei-tiki from the Okains Bay Māori and Colonial Museum. I was reminded of the hei-tiki photographs recently, when reading David Eggleton’s critique of Damian Skinner’s interpretation of the artefact photography of Brian Brake. Skinner argued that, by suppressing ethnographic clarity in his dramatically decontextualised images, Brake had ‘aestheticised’ the taonga of Te Maori. A similar play of dark and light — together with an equivalent decontextualisation — characterises Pardington’s approach to artefact-imaging. Far from the dispassionate objectivity of Mark Adams’ Rauru photographs, Pardington’s images of the plaster artefacts partake of a moody neoclassicism.

Elizabeth Rankin concludes her essay by discussing the renunciation of colour in Pardington’s photographs and claims that they will ‘write another chapter in the history of Dumoutier’s heads’. Since this book will now be the essential reference for Dumoutier’s Pacific work, Pardington’s draining of colour from her prints does present a slight problem. Dumont d’Urville claimed credit for mapping the racial divisions of the Pacific and named the darker-skinned islanders Melanesians, in distinction to the copper-coloured Polynesians. Yet this crucial distinction — signalled in part by Dumoutier’s careful painted calibration of skin tone — is precisely what Pardington has collapsed by filtering the colour and thereby blurring the full story of the busts’ contribution to an important episode of racial profiling. One remedy might have seen the book’s historical images supplemented with standard (‘non-aestheticised’) photographic documentation of selected busts.

Dumoutier’s life casts proved insufficient for their intended anthropometric purpose: the characterisation of separate Pacific races as determined by head formations. But with the passage of time they have become precious, almost magical documents that collapse time and distance: indexical imprints made through the collaboration of a French phrenologist and the Pacific peoples themselves. That is why the casts have had a busy exhibition itinerary in recent times, in which the Māori ‘specimens’ have played a prominent role. All four Māori busts returned to New Zealand in 1991 for a National Library exhibition of early French artists’ work in the country. A selection of the Pacific busts travelled to Sydney in 2002 for a Dumont d’Urville exhibition, at the same time as the elaborately tattooed Matoua Tawai (a portrait cast in the Bay of Islands in the month following the Otago portraits) was starring in exhibitions of life-casting staged in Paris and Leeds. The Musée du quai Branly, marking its 2006 opening with a vast exhibition of European depictions of the ‘other’, placed one of Dumoutier’s Māori busts into a compelling line-up of casts. Now, in the form of Pardington’s sumptuous digital photographs, these ethnographic artefacts have completed their metamorphosis into spell-binding works of art.

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ROGER BLACKLEY teaches art history at Victoria University of Wellington. He was formerly curator of historical New Zealand art at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.

DOMINION OF SIGNS: THREE PHOTO-BOOKS

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 02:01:00 +0000

DAVID EGGLETON

Bold Centuries: A Photographic History Album, by Haruhiko Sameshima (Rim Books, Auckland, 2009, $60.00); Alan Miller — New Zealand Photographs, by Alan Miller (Anglesea house, 2009, $70.00); A Man Walks Out of a Bar: New Zealand Photographs 1979—1982, by Lucien Rizos (Rim Books, Auckland, 2011).

‘The camera sits alongside the axe, the gun, the Bible and the specimen jar as colonial tools of preservation’ suggests Aaron Lister in his essay included in Haruhiko Sameshima’s kaleidoscopic Bold Centuries: A Photographic History Album. Sameshima’s Album is an ambitious project, almost a history of New Zealand photography, but presented in a non-chronological and thematic way. Enlisting a number of commentators to provide short texts, he’s gathered together a number of his photographic preoccupations from the past two decades or so, mingling his own photographs (colour, and black and white) with historical photographs, and assembled it all into meticulous arrangements according to subject matter.

            The result is an idiosyncratic enquiry into ‘New Zealandness’, with the unit of the photograph as an identifier, a form of measurement, a way of mapping — and perhaps claiming. Sameshima tells us he emigrated from Japan with his family in 1973 when he was fourteen: ‘Why exactly my father made the decision to leave Japan and settle his family in New Zealand remains a mystery to me, but the project seemed like an exciting adventure . . .’. In a way, Bold Centuries reflects that sense of excitement and wide-eyed wonder: he lays out his images as a seductive mosaic of pictorial souvenirs — as a scrapbook, reminiscent of the kind that many of us, as Kyla McFarlane points out in her essay, may have assembled as children.
            Except that Sameshima is also, by his juxtapositions, implicitly subjecting what he shows us to quizzical examination, rather than merely positioning them as objects of reminiscence. Making historical comparisons — placing found postcards and found cigarette cards alongside photographs by mid-twentieth century National Publicity Studio photographers, and late nineteenth-century scenic photography firms such as Muir and Moodie, and the Burton Brothers, as well as beside topographic photographs by expeditionary colonial photographers — Sameshima highlights the utopian quest behind New Zealand’s settlement.
            Sameshima’s ‘album’, with its consideration of the epic, with its taxonomies that group various photographs by subject, from ‘beautiful’ waterfalls to beautiful photographs of the ‘visual pollution’ of twenty-first-century wind farms, Sameshima challenges us to look again at how we arrive at our visual conventions — how we ‘see’.
             Bold Centuries — journeying from close-ups of the antique wallpaper in the Kerikeri Mission House, to dioramas in the Auckland war Memorial Museum, to the Cook Strait Ferry Terminal to ‘picturesque Lake Manapouri’ — is imbued with a doubting sceptical quality about touristic ‘image factories’ of all kinds. Is the photographer essentially an unreliable witness? Do cameras make good liars? On the cover of the book, a wide river swirls and foams and then cascades as a cataract into a cauldron of froth. This might stand for today’s image torrent, at once powerful, threatening, evanescent and disorientating, which we must navigate.
            Active in many areas of New Zealand photography, Sameshima reveals himself here as a broad-spectrum searcher of our accumulated nationalist photographic depictions — from the clichéd iconic tropes of the lone kowhai flower or crowded sheep run, to the repackaged eco-friendly landscape-as-theme-park experience — for what they might reveal, playing different photographic traditions off against one another.
            Sameshima shows how that the mysterious and rarefied Sublime of landscape art rhetoric has become the ‘sublime’ of galloping consumption, to be ordered from a catalogue. But if capitalist advertising now ‘owns’ much of this imagery, making it contentious, even untrustworthy, adept use of photographic technologies also allows that ownership to be contested, critiqued and even subverted.
            Sameshima’s witty archives of imagery relish the paradoxes and complexities of the photograph. A photograph can be at once realistic and illusionistic, superficial and profound — a veneer, or surface, invested with emotional depth. The photographer as collector, he employs repetition and monotony to tease us with the scrapbook as scrapheap — photographs of obsolescent industrial objects gathering dust — and destroys the notion of uniqueness by producing, in his ‘typologies’, images interchangeable with those of Wayne Barrar, David Cook and Mark Adams by way of ‘quotation’. Yet, examined carefully, Sameshima retains his own signature touches, and perhaps most characteristically a certain complex mood: gentle longing undercut by wry self-awareness; a delicate, even sweet, hovering melancholy.

If Sameshima’s methodology resembles that of scientific enquiry, Allan Miller’s photographic stance in Allan Miller — New Zealand Photographs is that of a nature mystic. As Martin Edmond puts it in a short accompanying essay, Miller’s photographs of the landscape ‘seem to raise the quotidian to another power’ . . . his photographs ‘marvel’ at the world and its numinous mysteries, its ‘true face’.
            Technically, Miller is old school: for these images he’s used a classic Leica camera and Kodak black-and-white film. So, in a way, he is a magician of the darkroom, emphasising the alchemical, his camera’s black vault a progenitor of dreamy musings. The prints have a granular quality, at times a sticky-as-tar quality. They are, design-wise, painterly; in an interview in the book with Kriselle Baker Miller invokes Colin McCahon as a force for revelation of what landscape might be — an exemplary visionary.
            Miller works then with the primal, with shadows and radiance. His is the rhapsody of things as they are, but his wish is to push on past that recognition, seeking the mystery at the heart of rhapsody. Put simply, his subjects are the seasons, as in the shrouded, autumnal aura of ‘Full moon, Bay of Islands, April 2002’, and the organic, as in the close-up of a seed-pod in ‘Nikau, Punakaiki, 2004’.
            We think of photography as a fast medium. Miller’s self-appointed task is to slow it down, and then examine the edges of perception thereby made visible. His weighty images offer a sense of estrangement from the everyday; his skewed shadowplay seeks evocations of spookiness and spirit-beings, traces of the Gothic sublime, the consideration of a Romantic poet’s eye-view, where everything is a metaphor for time and decay, collapse and entropy, transcendence and eternity.
            Light, here, is a material substance: smearing and streaking, glistening on the sea, muffled by mist, veiled by condensation, twinkling through rain from a sunshower that steams off a corrugated iron roof in the backcountry. A charred-looking tree set starkly against the winter snows of Mount Ngauruhoe and slithery surfaces of a Rotorua mudpool forming ominous whorls suggest a world of portents and messages.
   Broody and moody, but also exhilarating, Miller is the photographer as believer. Showing us ragged plumes of toe-toe blending harmoniously with travelling clouds, or taking us deeper into the mottled chiaroscuro of a chrysalis, or tree bole, and promising resurrection of a kind, or at least regeneration, he makes you a believer too.

In French critic Roland Barthes’ book Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Barthes describes early cameras with their wooden cabinets as ‘clocks for seeing’. You could apply the same metaphor to the retro-vision offered by Lucien Rizos’s photo-book A Man Walks Out of a Bar: New Zealand Photographs, 1979—1982. Its sixty-six black-and-white photographs, selected from an accumulation of thousands made while Rizos was a violinist on tour with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, offer the sensation of time travel, and also something of the sensation of their instantaneous making. Essays by Damian Skinner and Ian Wedde ruminate on lost time recovered in these photographs. What once was urgent has been locked into the permanent Now of yesterday.
            This book, a homage of sorts, as Ian Wedde points out, to Robert Frank’s famous 1959 road trip selection of photographs The Americans, and steeped philosophically in the climate of post-World War Two existentialism, has transferred its analogue images into the digital age by smoothing them seamlessly into grey-on-grey. Thus Rizos’s New Zealand is rendered in an atmospheric Parisian grisaille. But in this artful rendering of time lost, arranged loosely into a narrative of riffs and sequences and ‘movements’ that imply the flicker of moving film, of a road movie, what we miss, or what our attention is drawn to, is the absent soundtrack, and how it is signified visually.
            The title offers the first droll signpost. It implies, perhaps, the beginning of a shaggy dog story, to be followed by appreciative chuckles, as well as being a literal description of the cover photograph, but a second look at that photograph suggests that the missing noise is not bar chatter, but some interior music, to the beat of which the man in question is skipping along, with a sway in his step, his pace quickening, his tempo accelerando, in keeping with the images inside the book. The photograph also implies the snatched glimpse of the passer-by, a consequence of the good hand-eye coordination and reflex actions of the alert snapper.
            It signals, too, the scope of the project. Rizos is photographing the rhythms of daily existence in the form of chance encounters. He photographs people caught unaware, or barely aware, or else surprised and curious. Moments of exposure made on the fly taken together constitute a sustained momentum, a series of punctuation points, the sensation of movement confirmed, for example, by the way the man walking out of a bar meets the photographer’s sideways glance, his gaze, as if to mirror his curiosity.
            Rizos, meanwhile, hurries on in search of more arrested moments, in search of the spirit of New Zealand, hoping to make something of consequence from the inconsequential. If Haruhiko Sameshima is interested in examining what varnished photography might consist of, Rizos aims to be the unvarnished photographer, reacting to strangers.
            A study of the lull before the watershed, the last of the Muldoon Years, AMWOOAB forms an interesting counterpoint to Ans Westra’s photo-book of a decade earlier, Notes on the Country I Live In (1972), which presents us as New Zealanders as static, hieratic, often heroic figures. By comparison, Rizos has photographed people who look boxed-in, squeezed into their small British cars, or peering out of a tea-room window disconsolately; they are the grey ghosts and pale doubles of Westra’s people — the same people, perhaps, at the fag-end of a decade of euphoria. In these studies of small-town settings, even the outdoors seems claustrophobic; the skies are permanently overcast — this is Fortress New Zealand.
            Editorial choices are made so that Rizos avoids flashpoints such as political protest rallies, instead his wanderings and his body language diagnoses imply a country locked in space and time, whose scruffy and scrubby surroundings convey a sense of imprisonment, with the Great Escape taking the form of mass exodus to Australia.
            Improvising like a jazz musician, Rizos plays an air upon the theme of emotional repression. It’s as if he’s gone looking for crowds, for camaraderie, and found mostly solitaries wrapped in gloom, like a nation of professional mourners. He’s trying to make a sense of isolation palpable, trying to make anxiety palpable, scenting it in petrol fumes and scorched rubber, in beery but mostly deserted lounge bars, and in smoky tea-rooms, where over the formica table-tops, with their freight of metal ashtrays, individuals are engaged in sour tea-swilling and irritable newspaper-rustling interludes. This is period-era comedy or drama which could have found its inspiration in the writings of Samuel Beckett.
            Pedestrians trot or shuffle, pushchairs squeak. All is locomotion. The mutton-chopped long-hair in his white woolly cardigan drives by, glowering, his elbow plonked on the sill of the open car window. Everyone is preoccupied, solipsistic, oblivious. This is a corpus of imagery with a single-minded conviction.
   Then Rizos, too, moves on — down a state highway, photographing through the car window a house almost by accident. He snatches the moment and renders it as sensation. The subject is the sandblasted leaping gazelles on the glass front doors. Clouds lour and the hills are bare and stark. The doors are caught centre-frame, but they are emphatically shut.

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DAVID EGGLETON is the editor of Landfall and The Landfall Review Online.