Poet Robert Sullivan turns to myth, history and the quotidian in a soaring new collection, and a dystopian debut sees an exiled couple in a quandary. Elsewhere, go inside the weird and wonderful world of essa may ranapiri, and meet the master of romantic witches. Happy reading.
Canvas books wrap: Tūnui by Robert Sullivan, Metronome by Tom Watson, and more
14 mins to read
In his poetry, Robert Sullivan tries to make sense of Captain Cook, from his boyhood apprenticeships to his "big ego". Photo / Getty
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As the title of Tūnui|Comet suggests, Sullivan is still looking to the skies — "Clouds are habits", the first poem begins — and is equally adept with Māori rhetoric and English poetic traditions. The sea and its deep past is still a presence: Māui hauls up land from "a patch of ocean black with fish"; Kupe gives orders.
In a number of poems, Sullivan tries to make sense of Captain Cook, from his boyhood apprenticeships to his "big ego, hunger for fish and chips, plus ignorance/of what it meant setting out without blue blood". In Cooking with Gas, Sullivan employs a playful tone, embracing both pastiche and anachronism: "By George, / I had to go out there again, and a third time too / like a Hollywood mogul."
But here, along with the Endeavour, there are the Interislander ferry, surfboards and Valiants, open-air buses in Waikiki. Tūnui|Comet looks around as well as back, concerned with the many existential crises of modern Māori. This makes the collection feel both current and timely, an insightful read for any New Zealander pondering the issues of nationhood and belonging.
It's also a personal collection, dedicated to Sullivan's mother, Maryann Teaumihi. Some of the poems place him in his old Auckland life, like Hello Great North Road and the poem Kawe Reo/Voices Carry that has long been an engraved installation on the front steps of Auckland Central City Library. (Sullivan himself is a former librarian.)
Some poems are written in and about his new home of Ōamaru, and there's a sense of him finding himself as a Māori writer in Te Wai Pounamu. He mentions a barbecue at Hone Tuwhare's crib at Kaka Point, and visits Moeraki "attempting to see the same / midges and kelp as Keri Hulme", although Covid precautions stop him from attending the first and "the throng of tourists" disrupt the latter.
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The influences on Sullivan's own identity are also multi-layered and faceted, and he explores them with deadpan humour. In poems like Tētahi Waerea (Prayer of Protection) and Decolonisation Wiki Entries, Sullivan considers his whānau history, and its bicultural origins, embracing the intersections between the Pākehā and Māori dimensions of his whakapapa, and "bringing the unseen chains of a grandfather clock / and a Polynesian paddle into the conversation".
Sullivan's identities also include spirit creatures. "The eel in me is a taniwha," he declares in one poem, returning in another to salute the "Ngāpuhi taniwha eel" that is essential to the spiral of iwi narratives.
Sullivan may have moved south, but is not quite in place in Ōamaru, our steampunk capital — "You need great literacy and numeracy / to have a career in Steam subjects", he observes — or even within his heritage of te reo Māori: Sullivan was "brought up speaking English" though his maternal grandparents were both fluent speakers of te reo. "In time I will write in Māori," he promises in He Toa Takitini, aware that this loss of te reo is an issue for many of his generation. Sometimes, he writes, "I am reminded by non-speakers / not to use this language because it cannot be understood by non-speakers / which perpetuates a cycle of disuse. It's quite an interesting problem."
Comet is the last poem in the book and gives the collection the English part of its title. It's an image of light and miracle, of a message from the skies. Tūnui|Comet faces many different directions, encompassing myth, history and the quotidian, drawing on Sullivan's rich, complex inheritance.
Metronome, by Tom Watson (Bloomsbury, $33). Reviewed by Greg Fleming.
In the era of Covid many might deem the prospect of spending 12 years on a remote and inhospitable island with your partner a very particular kind of hell.
Meet Aina and Whitney, an arty, cultured couple - she's a musician, he's a sculptor - who have been sent into said exile as a punishment. At first we have no idea why they're banished like this but slowly we learn of the existence of a son, Maxime, who they had without permission from the authorities.
If the long exile wasn't punishment enough, they also have to take a pill three times a day - dispensed from a "pill clock" (that ticks like a metronome) - to ward off the effects of the toxic spores from the melting permafrost surrounding them. They survive on oats, what they can grow, and the odd supply drop.
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Aina spends her time doing jigsaws, gardening and silently tracing piano melodies on a sideboard, while Whitney spends much of his time creating large sculptures of himself, which he dots about the landscape.
They're to stay on the island for 12 years - then a warden will come and collect them and, if they pass a test, return them to normal society - although from what we learn of it in flashbacks, (which give the reader a welcome break from the couple's claustrophobic situation) that doesn't seem a much better prospect. Watson keeps the reasons for why the world is the way it is opaque but climate change and an authoritarian government seem to have something to do with it.
Their impending freedom is cast into doubt when instead of the warden arriving to collect them a sheep turns up one morning - which Aina rightly thinks is strange, as sheep can't swim. While Whitney doesn't seem worried about this odd visitor and immediately wants to cook it, Aina - whose eyes the novel is seen through - has begun to doubt some fundamentals both about the relationship and the predicament they're in.
She begins increasing the time between the pills which enables her to spend more time exploring the island before she gets sick. Indeed, she's starting to doubt whether this is an island at all. Yes, we're in the midst of another dystopian debut and while the set-up here is a good one, Metronome is a demanding read.
There are strong points; Watson's an elegant prose writer - this grew out of the University of East Anglia's creative writing programme - and he sets a suitably eerie and unsettling atmosphere, but the central narrative drags for much of the first half of the book and both characters are difficult to warm to. Although this is marketed as a literary thriller, the thriller parts are rather muted. Watson has a film-maker's eye - and this could easily be adapted for streaming - but on the page it is seen at a remove, beautifully articulated but lacking in life.
It doesn't help that Watson's tactic of withholding vital information from the reader results in annoyance rather than fascination. All in all a promising, if flawed, debut.
Dystopian fiction fans might also want to explore two excellent recent local efforts; Clare Moleta's Unsheltered and Kirsten McDougall's She's a Killer - both explore similar territory and, for this reader anyway, yield far richer results.
ESSAY
The weird and wonderful world that essa may ranapiri built. By Eleanor Black.
The poet flew to Australia with 30 copies of their new book tucked away in a bag to sell at the Brisbane Writers Festival.
They felt:
1) excited
2) full of dread
3) both.
"I've never actually left the country, it's quite a big deal in quite a few ways," says essa may ranapiri (Ngāti Wehi Wehi, Ngāti Takatāpui, Clan Gunn) the day before the flight. Brisbane is the largest festival they've attended and performing alongside Chris Tse, Tayi Tibble and others in Show Ponies (billed as "poetry with back-up dancers") is a first too. "It's a lot, in a lot of ways."
Their second book of poetry, Echidna (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $25), a gleeful mash-up of Greek mythology, Christian tradition and Māori legends, is out on May 12. They say it's their best work yet before adding a self-deprecating disclaimer: "Artists always think the last thing they've done is the best thing, which can become quite ridiculous when you've got a band that's been going 20 years and releases an album that no one cares about."
Echidna is a Greek goddess, half-woman and half-serpent. In ranapiri's hands she is a "messy takatāpui wahine" who meets partner Typhon (a monster god with 100 dragon heads) at a bar, where he's "chugging DBs". When they hook up, they "shed skins in the bushes next to the highway".
"There's nothing to say that atua aren't queer, there's nothing to say we haven't always been here," says ranapiri, 28, who is transgender and non-binary. "I wanted to build this world where queerness is almost the norm, and that being comforting. So often our stories are about trauma. I wanted it to be a gift. Here's this weird queer world you can step into for however many hours."
The book is an exercise in community-building; many of the poems speak to the work of other writers and invite reciprocation. "I was frustrated by this idea that writers are these solitary individuals who go around the world to observe and extract their stories from other people," says ranapiri. "Sometimes I think the ghost of Elliott or Byron is stretched into the modern imagination of what a writer is, even when it comes to funding opportunities. You can get funding to write for a month if you're doing it in another country."
Raised by their maternal grandmother, ranapiri grew up in Tauranga, where their talent for visual art was recognised early. Their paintings grace the cover of both their books. They wrote as a kid, the beginnings of novels that ended abruptly with the main character's death as soon as ranapiri lost interest in the story. "I remember in one story the character was travelling down the Nile and it was geographically improbable, he was passing all these Greek cities, and then I made a crocodile eat him."
They started writing poetry around the time they discovered angsty music, at 14, and for a time had a discipline of writing two poems a day. They moved to Kirikiriroa Hamilton in 2012 to do a degree in English and History. The original plan was to "teach high school, which might still happen, but my partner currently teaches high school and her stories of it … So much of the public service stuff is underfunded and overworked, it's not really a new story."
They did a creative writing course taught by Tracey Slaughter, who encouraged them to submit their work to journals, which they have done steadily for years. Their first book, ransack, emerged from ranapiri's experience of 2017, the year they did the MA in Creative Writing at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University's International Institute of Modern Letters, and produced not one but three manuscripts in their cold Wellington bedroom.
"I was being told by multiple people that my work was not publishable, which I was fine with. I thought what I was writing was too weird," says ranapiri, who staves off boredom by juggling multiple projects at once. Some of that work – "all the angry, obviously political poetry" – made its way into a self-published zine, Polemic.
"I didn't think ransack was going to see the light of the world. I still stand behind it but I also feel like there are a lot of things I wouldn't have written if I thought it was going to be in the public space, whereas Echidna was very much written with that in mind. I wanted to write a book that I could invite my parents to the book launch without feeling like I betrayed them."
The next big project for ranapiri is a PhD through Otago University, looking at poetry by takatāpui writers, how they engage with technology and what that contributes to an understanding of mana takatāpui. Now in the literature review phase, ranapiri is studying examples of work in which the English language has been decolonised, such as Cassandra Barnett's Pitter patter, Papatūānuku, which only uses sounds in English that are also used in te reo – so no "s" sounds, for example.
Last year ranapiri did a te reo course and they try to "stay close to the language", bringing it into all spheres of their life. They even switched their computer windows messaging over to te reo, which has been a mixed blessing. "Oftentimes I am confused by the messages popping up and hope they don't mean anything fatal for my computer."
5 QUICK QUESTIONS WITH INDIA HOLTON
You are a bestselling author in the United States, although not well known in NZ. What is your writing background?
The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels was my debut novel, although I wrote poetry and short stories for some years before that.
Writing is a solitary pursuit, but then you have to emerge from the office and sell the book. How do you find that process?
Self-promotion is certainly the most difficult part of being an author. I'm generally shy, which doesn't help. Because my first two books came out during the pandemic, all my promotional work for them has been done online, which has made it less daunting.
Your romance novels are praised for their humour, which is not easy to write convincingly. Do you have your own guidelines for "writing funny"?
When I first began writing comedy, I really just did what I myself found funny. Further down the track, I read about the principles of humour writing, and discovered I'd been instinctively using most of them. There's a fair bit of structure involved in comedy, and once you understand that structure, the humour tends to flow quite easily.
You have tapped into the "romantic witches" genre, which is apparently having a resurgence. You have also written about romantic pirates. Did you set out to meet the market, or are those happy accidents?
I actually was inspired to write about lady pirates when I saw someone declaring that the concept of them would never sell. I guess that's an appropriately rebellious start to a book about pirates. As for witches, my editor suggested adding them to the Wisteria universe and, as I had several "witchy" ideas at the back of my mind already, I was excited to do so. I never pay attention to trends, because it takes so long to get a book through the writing and publishing process - once you spot that something's popular, you're often too late to join in on it.
The book you are currently working on features neurodivergent characters. Tell us more.
Actually, all my books do, but I've deliberately not made it a point of focus up until now, because I wanted to present fun adventure romances that just happened to involve characters with neurodivergent traits, as well as issues like anxiety. In my next book, the characters' way of being in the world is a more significant part of the story, so I'm discussing it more overtly. My neurodivergent protagonists in this book are actually the straight guys in comparison to the madcap Wisteria Society pirates.
The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels and The League of Gentlewomen Witches (both Jove, $24) by India Holton are out now.
