Anne Kennedy: Sing-Song; Kapka Kassabova: Someone Else's Life

Reviewed by KEN LARSEN*

In 1594 Edmund Spenser, already an established English poet, married Elizabeth Boyle. He chose as his wedding date June 11 - according to the old calendar, the summer solstice and longest day. For the occasion he composed an epithalamium, a hymn celebrating the introduction of the bride to the bridal chamber. His was the first in English and set the precedents for all subsequent epithalamia.

Spenser's Epithalamium records that he "chose the longest day in all the yeare". It follows the sun's movement through the day and ends with a prayer that "timely seed" would inform his wife's womb. Anne Kennedy in Sing-Song alludes to similar features in her Epithalamium, beginning, "A house orbiting the sun," and concluding: "babies, house, nuptial / feast. On midsummer night / the datura gave out its semen scent."

The features, although put to different purpose, remain clear and place the 21st-century epithalamium within the tradition set by the 16th.

Such allusion can also be found in Kapka Kassabova's Still Life:

"On this April day, the trees shed themselves. / The cruelty of seasons / is the only cruelty today", which obviously draws on Eliot's opening line to The Waste Land, "April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs ... " Here, though, the allusion works by contrast. Eliot's northern April is the harbinger of a desolate spring. Kassabova's is an antipodean autumn where leaves are "shed".

Such allusions distance the poems from the purely personal by widening the context in which they can be read. They take poetry beyond the individual, allusion becoming an integral part of poetry.

Both Kennedy and Kassabova write poems verging on the highly personal. Kennedy's volume treats at length her daughter's eczema - to the extent that she adopts the mask of "eczema-mother". Kassabova writes of forlornness - being on one side of the world where typically, "The street was deserted and dim. / Shrapnel wounds blossomed in stone walls". With this she contrasts the innocence of another world, "so far / from the sun, so far." It is the poetry of a person dislocated, of someone for whom the ground of being is elusive.

Take the first few lines from the volume's title poem, "Someone else's life".

It was a day of slow fever

and roses in the doorway, wrapped

in yesterday's news of death.

Snow fell like angels' feathers

from a dark new sky, softly announcing

that some things would never be the same.

I listened carefully to doubts and revisions

of someone else's life, safe in my room of tomorrow,

a passing witness to sorrow and wonder.

The opening line conveys the torpor that characterises the poem. It is a slow line that runs on to "roses" (colour against the dull black and white of the newspaper); "wrapped" sits conveniently at the end of the line to be wrapped around to "yesterday's news of death" - old, hackneyed, forgotten, but for the rose of memory. Kassabova often uses a line that runs into the next which itself stops in mid-line, a mechanism that keeps the reading voice continually moving forward.

The next image of snow "like angels' feathers" is an elegant one and cleverly ties in with "announcing" - traditionally poets have connected the two, since angel comes from the Greek word for announcing. One concludes, finally, on second or third reading, that the "I" who listens in the third verse is the same and not the same as the "someone else". Two persons in one body, as it were, one of whom has witnessed "sorrow and wonder," the other of whom will return to a room elsewhere and safety. Kassabova, born in Bulgaria but resident here, is torn between the old and the new, the north and the south.

Kennedy's Sing-Song charts the pain and familial pressure that a child with eczema can cause. She uncovers the difficulties and irritations that lie behind ordinary facades. She advises, "Remember this: / The skin is the first port of call for a reaction to the world". Eczema-mother, she tells of "aqueous cream", "another naturopath", "Oatmeal baths, Pinetarsol baths," "not just itchy, more itchy". Her lamentations, however, are only made tolerable by her whimsy and the spry quality that has touched her prose. Her throw-away lines get her by:

"There she learnt off pat all the euphemisms:

itchy skin condition, skin complaint,

topical problem, a toddling thesaurus."

"Toddling thesaurus?" Her wryness, her distance from things when part of them, her drollery, the last resort, "Here, the parents will wipe it all away / with a kiss," all mask her pain.

Yet Kennedy remains a story-teller at heart and the volume closes with the "Sing-Song" poet ceding place to the "sing-song girl". The place of narrative in her poetry is finally disclosed.

Kennedy and Kassabova have both written poetry and prose. Kennedy's novels Musica Ficta and A Boy and his Uncle as well as the screenplay The Monkey's Mask established her reputation, but this is her first sustained venture into verse. Kassabova began with poetry: All Roads Lead to the Sea won a Montana Book Award in 1998 and was followed by Dismemberment. She has subsequently written two novels. Each of these volumes enhances the author's reputation and shows the depth and healthiness of New Zealand poetry.

Sing-Song

Auckland University Press, $29.99

Someone Else's Life

Auckland University Press, $24.99

* Ken Larsen is the head of English at Auckland University.