Jenny Bornholdt: Summer

Reviewed by PENNY BIEDER

Summer, the evocative title of this new collection of poems from Wellington-based poet Jenny Bornholdt, means many things.

It is high summer in the author's productive and creative life - she is 41, and busy with her writing and her young family.

Also, travelling with her family to Menton in the south of France, where for six months last year she was the Meridian Energy Katherine Mansfield Fellow, she finds delight in the small, domestic things of a Mediterranean summer, like a haircut across the Italian border on a Saturday afternoon:

At home

we take photos of our new selves and Felix

hangs his medal on our bedhead

and we go to sleep that night in our award-

winning bed and dream Italian dreams and what

our lives in that other country

might have been.

Summer also refers to the summer before, when her much-loved father died too soon. The collection begins with a poignant villanelle - That summer that wouldn't go/ the light was far too bright./ We didn't want to know - followed directly by an even more heart-wrenching poem titled Things We Didn't Do One Summer - A Survey. In Pastoral Bornholdt examines the impact of mortality in her and her family's life, recognising its banality and the way it insists on being fearfully acknowledged, almost courted:

We came and went

from his room - my mother

and sisters and I - making

tea, making small hopeless

noises, making trips across the road

for coffee, where we'd stand in line

behind the surgeon who'd held

our father's head

in his hands.

These first poems are so full of grief and loss, the reader at times feels somewhat of an intruder, as though one has unexpectedly opened a door and found a woman sobbing. The simple beauty of the words overcomes this sense of voyeurism, and anyone who has lost a parent will feel the shock of recognition at Bornholdt's depiction of this most difficult of leavetakings:

Then my father died and the world became a stopped

unsteady place.

The bulk of the collection, however, is set in France, and the poems provide a marvellous, uplifting snapshot of time in a foreign country, where everything is new, where even shopping becomes an excellent adventure:

Past the aubergines and the

beans, the crabs and sardines,

past the pasta, the cheese, past the

pommes de terre and the

fruits de la mer.

This seventh collection celebrates life with a warm intensity born of an awareness and acceptance of its far too seasonal nature.

Victoria University Press, $24.95

* Penny Bieder is a freelance writer.