KEY POINTS:
Jenny Bornholdt's latest collection of poems, The Rocky Shore, is a book to be devoured in one sitting, to be savoured for weeks, and then to be read again with even more pleasure.
The former poet laureate has taken a risk that depends upon the allure of her everyday world but is daring in its resulting self-exposure.
The six long poems can be read as an autobiographical essay and bring to mind Elizabeth Knox's bold journeys into the personal in her recent essay collection, The Love School.
Both writers have refused to cold-shoulder the intimate revelation of the first person and the outcome is a mini triumph.
Bornholdt admits that she has become "a woman who walks" and these poems find life in an ambulatory beat. It's as though we get access to the interior voice of the pedestrian, conversational, confessional, falling upon the smallest detail that catches the poet's eye.
Yet the pedestrian becomes philosopher and we get to meet the big things in life such as love, death, pain, vulnerability, self-doubt, joy.
The poems are long, like an unhurried walk around the harbour side, and this slowing down of focus allows the subtle music of each line to contribute to a greater poetic design.
Bornholdt has invested in a poetry of return, and with her inclination to revisit the same subject matter over a period of time (as did Knox), the poems are like taking hold of a prism.
As a poet, I was drawn to the awkward questions that affect Bornholdt: What is a poem? What is a good poem? How does a poem find life? Bornholdt reminds us that poems are a mix of craft and mystery.
"People often ask about the form of a poem and I usually say something like the poem finds its own form. Which is something I believe. Truly. But sometimes it takes awhile. This poem for instance, was like the shed. I had to make it out of something and move it around the lawn. I didn't want to repeat myself, but then I did. The garden needed revisiting."
Bornholdt's sublime collection makes poetry out of the ebb and flow of being human with tenderness and acute insight. American poet Robert Hass also turns to the mysteries of human existence and produces poems that reverberate.
The Pulitzer Prize winner draws upon the personal in many poems, but is also provoked by global issues to make poetry out of the political. "Poetry should be able to comprehend the earth," he writes. We are taken on a thousand journeys as he uses poetry to contemplate the state of the planet, not just in the light of the "rivers: dammed and fouled" but the need to sustain relations with the worlds of art and books. Words aren't simply there on Hass' page to carry an anecdote, a potted history or a spare image but to establish some kind of verbal radiance.
These poems clearly engage with ideas and confessions, but they also, most importantly of all, offer the reader an exquisitely textured musicality.
Like Bornholdt's poems, this collection offers glimpses into the thinking (doubts and pleasures) behind the scenes of making poetry. I highly recommend both.
The Rocky Shore
By Jenny Bornholdt (Victoria University Press $25)
Time and Materials
By Robert Hass (HarperCollins $24.99)
* Paula Green is an Auckland poet and children's author.
