Poet Cilla McQueen and her musical landscape

By GILBERT WONG

Synaesthesia is tricky to define and even harder to diagnose, but if anyone experiences it, that person would be poet and artist Cilla McQueen.

The Oxford Shorter gives the dry explanation: "A sensation in one part of the body produced by stimulus applied to another part."

For McQueen the experience is much richer: the ability to hear what she can see. For her the landscape of Otago and Southland sings an ancient song which she feels to her very bones.

"For me Otago is definitely a synaesthetic landscape. It's like a connection between hearing and seeing. When I walk in that landscape I can hear the visual aspects of the land as colours and music."

She pauses a moment, aware of the risk of sounding loopy, especially in the Auckland cafe in which we are discussing her work. She grins, half apologetic, "I have no idea if I have synaesthesia, but I feel it must be what's happening."

In her latest book of poetry Axis: Poems and Drawings, OUP $34.95, the poem Words Fail Me explains her condition.

"It's a good restful song today, fluent and blurred by travelling clouds; occasionally the tones deepen and the air is colder.

"The sun is behind a cloud and the sharp edge of Mopanui razors the blue and white."

McQueen takes graph paper, pencils and depicts the coordinates she hears to produce a score for the landscape. No notation, but an impressionistic tangle of lines that resemble the hills. To these lines she can put a song of tones and exclamations to sing the hills.

Axis includes the prosaically named 2 Hums varying in intensity with irregular background percussion.

For many years McQueen was in a relationship with the artist Ralph Hotere. That has now ended, though the two remain firm friends. For the past five years she has made her home in Bluff. From her house she can walk up a hill and look across to Stewart Island. Past that land mass there lies only the sprinkle of the Auckland Islands before the end of the world.

"You might see a lonely fishing boat coming across to Bluff, but that's it for the human presence. I do get that feeling that the Pakeha layer is very thin and the old Maori ways are still there and pre-dating everything."

The ancient and invisible world that existed before the Pakeha and that continues to underlie society is one she has become part of.

Her move to Bluff coincided with marriage to a fisherman Stewart Whaitiri. Around her neck she wears a gift from him, a fossilised seal tooth from Rakiura or Stewart Island. When she touches it, it is like a talisman, resonating with a prehistory that can seem almost mythical.

McQueen is not prolific. For 10 years until last year's collection Markings and Axis this year she has not published, hating, she says, the pressure publication deadlines bring.

"I find it hard to write to order. I just wanted time out. It's not good to put too much weight on your writing. I was writing but for my own pleasure, not for publication. I tend to just bubble up. I have the greatest admiration for those who can do a full day's work, but for me poetry is such a reductive process. I'm always generating material and whittling it down."

In Axis she devotes several poems to the St Kilda archipelago 175km off the coast of Scotland, that was home to her paternal grandfather. The McQueen house still stands on Hirta and is now a conservation park administered by the British National Trust. The last inhabitants left the islands in 1930, when the population grew too few to sustain a life.

McQueen has never visited the islands, but they remain vivid in her mind's eye. "Twenty-two little stone houses with turf roofs and 150 people living there for a couple of thousand years." Her own forebears were ancient pagans, which might go some way to explaining the affinity she feels for her adopted whanau in Bluff.

So it is no surprise that while Auckland is a good place to visit, she could never live here. "Civilisation," she says, "it takes away marrow."