What would happen if David Trubridge put together a book? A new compilation of essays and photographs from the acclaimed artists, penned as a "love letter to the land and sea", is out now. Elsewhere, a short story collection by Keri Hulme, of The Bone People fame, sets traps for
Canvas books wrap: Spring Clean by Sabreen Islam, Te Kaihau by Keri Hulme and more
11 mins to read
Brannavan Gnanalingham. Photo / Shahir Daud
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Partly, this book is a literary and metaphorical journey through winter and spring, for these two seasons offer the opening section titles of Spring Clean and lend their symbolic meaning to the content therein. So, the poems in the "Winter" segment are generally darker and moodier than those in "Spring" which appear generally more uplifting and brighter. "Winter", for instance, embraces poems that navigate difficult subject matter, as their titles illustrate: "abuse", "the wound is within", "survival" and so forth. Meanwhile "Spring" is composed of poems like "self-love", "full stop on my anger" and "awakening".
But there's more nuance in Spring Clean than a simple, redacted thematic "dark" versus "light". In a poem in the first section, "many wonderful things", for example, the author refines the message with lines like, "to say it was all bad would be a lie …" While in "Spring", praise for the antagonist is found, "so/ in a strange way/ thank you for leaving/ for doing it when i/ couldn't". The result is a layered overarching message, one which faces down the hardships of ill-treatment and mental health with the rockiness of rebuilding one's strength, power and independence.
In this, Spring Clean is also, partly, an offering of poetry in a lyrical and visual style. Artwork by Alice Waldow illustrates most of the verses here. The narratives repeatedly offer pithy, song-like allegories, ergo "bottling up": "who says you can't deal with the hurt/ by pouring it into pretty bottles/ and locking them away?" Their focus on the figurative and concision means these poems prize their metaphors and cadent language above more refined literary elements like enjambment and form. The result won't win over the serious or studious poet or reader, but their accessibility will win over others.
Yes, it takes courage to grow up and be who you really are. Given Spring Clean and the many important songwriting achievements Islam has achieved, it's clear that this isn't just the message of her book, but something her life and accomplishments also endorse.
Te Kaihau: The Windeater and Lost Possessions, by Keri Hulme (Te Herenga Waka Press, $25 each). Reviewed by Paula Morris. A longer version of this review will appear at anzliterature.com
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The late Keri Hulme will always be best known for The Bone People, Booker Prize-winner in 1985, but from the mid-70s she was actively publishing poetry, short stories and novellas. In 1977 she was Otago University's Burns Fellow — sharing the tenure with Roger Hall — and was awarded several writing grants before the novel was published by Spiral Collective and then, in the UK, by Hodder and Stoughton. By then The Bone People had already won at the New Zealand Book Awards and sold out two local print runs.
Her story collection, Te Kaihau: The Windeater, was published in 1985, happily coinciding with the Booker win but overwhelmed by it as well. Now available as a reprint in the THW Classics series, the collection draws together the work of a fertile decade, including the story "Hook and Sinker", winner of the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Award.
Te Kaihau is testimony to Hulme's unique gifts and perspectives as a writer, even if one story here, "Kaitbutsu-San", does not quite stand the test of time. It's a collection that is, by turns, brutal and beautiful, dark and comedic. Some of Hulme's characters are maimed in violent accidents; many drink too much, and struggle with past and present darkness.
Ever the iconoclast, Hulme is playful with form, as we see in the book's foreword, "Tara Diptych", and afterword, "Headnote to a Māui Tale", as well as in the artful, disruptive sidebar notes and script-form scenes of "A Tally of the Souls of Sheep".
"A Tally" is a horror story, and that's another of Hulme's gifts, combining highly stylised imaginative literary writing with genre form, and both subverting and inflecting realism with the fantastic. "The Cicadas of Summer" is another horror tale, set like "A Tally" in a stark, dangerous countryside where isolation can lead to entrapment. Adolescent Gwen is so preoccupied with her ruthless war on the "singers" and "nymphs" of the cicada world — stalking, pulping, dissecting and even eating them, revelling in the "deep and belly-satisfying side to killing" — that she is oblivious to the predator living in the backyard shack.
Many of Hulme's stories explore the unsentimental life-and-death stakes of the natural world, and it's no surprise that some of the most vivid and visceral writing here is about the creatures of rivers and seas, including the title story and "One Whale, Singing". In the glorious "King Bait", a river is transformed into "a viscous moving jelly" of "white slimefroth" by the iconic fish.
"A Drift in Dream" is an origin story for Simon, the mute boy in The Bone People: here he's a baby with a vulnerable French mother, a former nun, and an Irish druggie father, whose charm does not mask his dangerous volatility. Parents in these stories are negligent, at best. Gwen's father, consumed by depression, is a "whimpering shade of himself" and unable to protect his daughter. In "Hooks and Feelers", a boy is maimed in an accident caused by his mother, and the story's narrator, the father, weeps in his shed. A fatherless boy named Bird, in "A Nightsong for the Shining Cuckoo", is exiled and summoned back at will by his mother. The girl in the sinister "The Knife and the Stone" is like a fairytale captive of her own parents, condemned to gut fish and a life of scales and slime, and her lurching father "fumbling, delving" when he gets drunk.
Lost Possessions, also first published in 1985, is a scant 50 pages: described now as a novella, it reads like a narrative poem or a dramatic monologue. A male academic "with soft white hands" has been kidnapped and imprisoned by "unknown black" assailants. Like Hulme's castaway tale "Unnamed Islands in the Unknown Sea", the relic of a confused written record forms the story.
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It's possible that Hulme's imaginative starting point here was the sensational 1984 abduction of university lecturer and playwriter Mervyn Thompson, accused of sexual coercion. The lecturer in Lost Possessions has had a relationship with a younger woman from New Guinea, whom he describes as "little, compact, black". Are the "lost possessions" the Pacific islands? Is the empire striking back? As ever, Hulme is provocative as well as lyrical, setting traps for her characters and challenges for readers.
JUST OUT
Historian Jennifer Ashton pieces together the various identities of a notorious early settler to Aotearoa in Thief, Convict, Pirate, Wife: The Many Histories of Charlotte Badger (Auckland University Press, $35). English-born Badger was sent to Australia as a convict after stealing from her employer and was one of the first European women to visit New Zealand.
Celebrated artist David Trubridge explores his connection with nature in The Other Way (David Trubridge, $99), a book of essays and photography spanning the globe. He describes it as a "love letter to the land and sea" in light of climate change and Covid. The book will be officially launched at the Auckland Writers Festival but is already available at davidtrubridge.com/nz
Instagram baker Eloise Head, known as Fitwaffle, shares her most popular recipes in Fitwaffle's Baking It Easy (Ebury Press, $48). Born of lockdown frustration, most recipes feature just three, four or five easily sourced ingredients and require little effort. Especially kid-friendly.
BOOK EXTRACT
July 23, 2022, marks the 70th anniversary of Dame Yvette Williams' becoming the first New Zealand woman to win an Olympic gold medal, in Helsinki. A new biography, Ideals Are Like Stars, by Angela Walker - also an Olympic athlete - features the letter written by Dame Yvette's father, to his daughter after her phenomenal achievement. Read the full letter here..
5 QUICK QUESTIONS WITH BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM
1. You are developing something of a specialty - depicting horror in ordinary places, as produced by ordinary people. Is this intentional?
I hadn't fully realised this but I guess I'm the classic cliche of dark New Zealand writing. I'm unashamedly a political writer and I gaze at contemporary society, so it's hard not to find the horror in it. My books do feature solidarity and care in them, but it's always going to face the challenge of confronting the bigger power structures.
2. What do you most fear?
Eek, even having to work through an answer scares me. And I've been through a fair few dicey situations. It'll be something happening to my children, and me being powerless to stop it.
3. Slow Down, You're Here is a "Covid novel". What was it about the pandemic that appealed as a setting/timeframe/complicating factor?
I think Covid has created a sense of desperation for it all to be over, that we can somehow return back to a past even though, deep down, we know we can't go back there. So we'll pretend that it's not happening. This, to me, made for a fertile backdrop to writing a domestic horror. I guess I was also thinking, if globally we can stuff up a Covid response when people are obviously dying in front of us, how are we going to respond to climate change when that's more slow-moving and the true horror of that is going to affect our children and grandchildren.
4. I noticed that you are doing a session at the New Zealand Society of Authors roadshow. On top of the lawyering and writing and parenting, etc. I have to ask HOW you fit all the stuff into your life that you do? Are you one of those people who only sleeps four hours a night? What do you sacrifice if not sleep?
I sleep a lot! I'm super lucky to have a lot of family support and that's critical. I've also learned to trust my processes. I spent my 20s learning how to teach (I worked at a university), how to write (I wrote literally millions of words as a film, music and book writer), how to read a text (I have a master's in film), and how to be a lawyer (after I finished up at the university). I'm still learning all of those, but I think the time I spent learning the crafts when no one paid any attention has given me confidence to do what I do now.
5. What do you get out of writing that you would miss if you stopped doing it?
I write to figure out the world and writing is my way of making sense of the nuances, the greyness and my confusion of what's happening. I'm still surprised that people read my books and keep mistakenly assuming that I simply have a handful of people reading me. So if that all fell away and no one read me again, I'd keep going. The world's too confusing if I don't keep trying to learn.
Slow Down, You're Here, by Brannavan Gnanalingam (Lawrence and Gibson, $25), is out now.
