Albert Wendt: The Book of the Black Star

By SHONAGH LINDSAY

The act of making a poem can be described as that of making the imaginative visible and heard.

In Albert Wendt's latest work, The Book of the Black Star, this becomes doubly so as the poet combines his usual word-smithing with graphic mark-making to create resonant image texts driven by the central motif of the black star.

A mysterious force conjured up as part-Samoan myth, quasi-scientific interpretation and a good measure of populist culture, the black star is many things: birth and death place; a sucker-in of energy that transforms space and light, and a fertile orifice into which things disappear and reappear.

We first meet its powerful presence through a young street poet, Sam, who tells us, "Yeah, it was like close encounters of the third kind and I opened my window to it ... Yeah and opened my pores to its converting light and deep scent of space-travel, oceans without end, and God."

But the words don't look like type - Times, point size nine - to be read in a neat, tidy line on an otherwise empty page.

These words are written the way a teenager illustrating a page of their poetry exercise book would write them.

God has its "o" as a filled-in dark circle, symbol of eternity; the word "and" is written as a plus sign; the dots above the letter "i" are like small stars.

Grinning down from its Ponsonby appearance is the black star, a cheerfully malevolent presence in the urban night.

This graffiti-style writing is the element that integrates the book's narrative with its densely drawn illustrations, some of which come out of the words themselves, much like calligraphy, and others acting with the words to extend their imaginative constructs.

Rhythm and space, common to both poetry and drawing, seem to work best when they are at their simplest and most subtle such as in: "Stretch so you want to stretch and stretch out like a sail and catch all the people you love?" which snares its words in a fine cross-hatching of lines with positive and negative spaces working beautifully to evoke light and shadow on water and the billowing, eternal nature of what's being desired.

But in others, where the illustrations are heavier, they can feel ponderous, almost too dense to be read and their lightness and appeal, their sense of working with the words gets lost.

Visual and aural colloquialisms and playing with Christian imagery in a colonial setting bring James K. Baxter and Colin McCahon to mind on reading the first few of these poems.

Particularly Easter Sunday, which says of Sam: "And his smile was that of that other holy poet walking out of the tomb", with the "T" of the tomb throwing its dark shadow outwards like the crucifix on Mt Golgotha.

However, although this latter typographic pun appears often, Christian mythology is largely replaced with Polynesian, and a poem such as "Cannibals if in your midnight dreams you are visited by Pe'a, who wants to break your heart, will you let it? Or will you catch it, gut it, roast it and share it with your only true love, the black star?" is more reflective of the book's nature; and the Polynesian arts of siapo (tapa) and tattooing are equally valid resources for its imagery as the Pakeha comic book or tagging.

These are poems I'll go back to many times, forced to read them in every direction just as their lateral, vertical and spiral typography makes one, and to scavenge their poetry as we are told the black star does by Sam watching sparrows on his back lawn.

"Is the black star a scavenger too I asked. Too right, mate, he replied. Like a sparrow it waits for the courage of numbers and then scavenges all the leftover darkness from every orifice in the universe."

* Published by Auckland University Press, $34.95

* Shonagh Lindsay is an Auckland researcher and writer.

* The Book of the Black Star will be launched tonight as part of the Seeing Voices festival of poetry, on at the University of Auckland this weekend. This is an exciting programme of New Zealand poets and one Australian guest, John Tranter, who will read his work and talk with Michele Leggott and Murray Edmond from 2.15pm to 3.45pm today.

Other events include Richard Reeve, Glenn Colquhoun, Sonja Yelich and Anna Jackson reading and talking with Bill Manhire today, 11.45am-1pm; and John Campbell talking with poets laureate Bill Manhire and Elizabeth Smither - and many other names. Think of a local poet, and they're probably in the programme. Saturday and Sunday tickets still available. For programming details, look at nzepc.