Adventures in verse

TAGATA KAPAKILOI RESTLESS PEOPLE

By John Puhiatau Pule

Pohutukawa Press, $21.95


CATULLUS FOR CHILDREN

By Anna Jackson

Auckland University Press, $21.99


EL MILAGRO DE MEDELLIN Y OTROS POEMAS

By Ron Riddell

Casa Nueva, $20


Reviewed by PENELOPE BIEDER

Three elegant volumes with next to nothing in common, except that they are poetry.

Pule's first venture into verse after two novels (the first to be published by a Niuean) is one long, intense and passionate poem called Fenonga Kia Koe - Journey for You. It is a vivid, visceral exclamation mark about love and forgiveness, flying between Pacific Islands - perfumed countries - to places that have "no spine/no head/no eyes/no way in".

While the poem produces unanswered questions about the work's more subtle meanderings, its length and energy portray a fearless poet who has confronted himself head on, who acknowledges his periods of neediness just as he celebrates his personal history: "Take that photo for example,/it had a past that should never have had a future/yet I am still here, sing about that."

Ron Riddell's 13th collection is the first fully bilingual (English/Spanish) book by a New Zealander to be published in Latin America. Written between 1998 and 2002 here and in Colombia, the title poem is a happy homage to the unlikely fact that the Colombian city of Medellin each year hosts the world's largest and most dynamic poetry festival.

Indeed it was this festival that gave the author the inspiration to launch the inaugural Wellington International Poetry Festival last October. Riddell hopes that "the central theme of both festivals is one of peace and reconciliation, through the development of peace-culture initiatives. Poetry is a language of friendship, of bridge-building, of healing and much else."

On his many visits to Colombia Riddell has experienced overwhelming appreciation, finding that in Latin America the health and prosperity of a community is reflected in the health of its poetry. But he is also only too aware of the ongoing violence and civil war that the Colombians endure, and in dedicating his book to the people of Antioquia and Medellin he despairs about whether poems will ever "prevail against the guns".

Anna Jackson finished her third collection in Wellington after she moved there to take up a lectureship at Victoria University. Her affection for the Russian poets is undimmed (her frontispiece reproduces an aptly seasonal line from Osip Mandelstam: "A quotation is like a cicada. Its natural state is that of unceasing sound. Having once seized hold of the air, it will not let go.") But here she adapts some of Catullus' famous verses to her children's playground, and their bittersweet wit notes the passing of time, the tenuous nature of their youth, the oncoming heavy weight of adulthood. In Marriage she wonders: "Your mum and dad/had to marry,/to make you - /but did they at/the threshold/look back do you/ think, did they wish/just a bit not to leave/their childhoods/behind?"

Careful, delicate, glancing, and constantly paying homage to poets that went before her, Jackson's work is wise, meticulous and cool, yet woven through with a fragile emotion.