Hopurangi - Songcatcher: Poems from the Maramataka
By Robert Sullivan (Auckland University Press, $29.99)
Maramataka is the Māori lunar year and Robert Sullivan says in his introduction to Hopurangi – Songcatcher that his poems are a sequence spanning three months according to the Māori lunar system. He is determined to reconnect with some of the Māori culture he had neglected and the iwi from which he sprang. But he is happy also to connect with some Pākehā culture. In the poem Tangaroa-a-mua: Ranginui, Sullivan puts together a revered piece of Māori mythology with a pop song sung by Diana Ross.
This large and detailed collection deals with “a period of personal change and growth”. Hopurangi – Songcatcher encompasses 130 poems. Sometimes, Sullivan’s poems are despondent, but more often he is positive and joyful, as in Rakaumatoi: E Hoa, which begins “How do I love you, my friends? / Let me count the mountain’s ways, / the heightened plains that bend / up into snowy reaches, playing / in the mind out of sight, to send / pillars of light, clouds, rain / on a grateful garden bed …” Delight can be sparked by the forces of nature. Sullivan sees birds as numinous and sacred in his more idyllic moods. He does occasionally take a shot at colonialism, but this is not his major key. As a detailed work, much of Hopurangi – Songcatcher calls for concentration, but it is rewarding.
AUP New Poets 10
Edited by Anne Kennedy (Auckland University Press, $29.99)
With its New Poets series, Auckland University Press continues encouraging younger writers. The 10th collection features three very different debuts. Tessa Keenan’s Pukapuka mapi / Atlas is refreshingly straightforward – the candour of an alert and observant young writer, often using prose poems as she examines her region, the beach, fields and mountains; but also in the behaviour of people of her own age. One of her greatest concerns is the present and the past of the Māori people, especially in the poems Tataraimaka Pa, Taranaki and Some Other Pa, where present-day conceptions of space and distance contrast with traditional ways of perceiving.
Favourite Flavour House, by romesh dissanayake, showcases a different type of poetry. Sri Lankan by birth and upbringing, he is hip, ironic and candid in reviewing events of his youth: “The truth is I’m tired / writing cute little poems to please white people …”, but his greatest interests are the culinary arts, and with them he’s not ironic. Sadie Lawrence’s collection, Like Human Girls / all we have is noise, is truly remarkable. She wrote her poems between the ages of 17 and 19. There is some romanticism in her accounts of young love, but she deals realistically with the awkward adolescent condition, particularly for young women. Her metaphors flourish and are persuasive.
Tidelines
By Kiri Piahana-Wong (Anahera Press, $25)
Kiri Piahana-Wong’s collection begins and ends with a story from centuries ago of Hinerangi who, after tragic events including her husband’s drowning, died on Tāmaki Makaurau’s west coast. This slim collection is set completely on that coast. The tragic Hinerangi is absorbed by the present-day narrator and as such Piahana-Wong writes in what seems a very confessional style. She examines her own moods.
The sequence Happiness has an ironical title because it is mostly concerned with the fleeting nature of the emotion and moods of despondency. Falling suggests uncertainness and a sense of emptiness and Storytelling is particularly unhappy. Yet the story of Hinerangi buoys her up, like an avatar giving her good advice. Nature is thanked even in a rainstorm where the rain is “the sky’s water: all the wondrous light / weeping joyous tears of the sky god”. Piahana-Wong’s depiction of the wild west coast is vivid and her phrasing is precise.
Town
By Madeleine Slavick (The Cuba Press, $30)
Madeleine Slavick is a poet and a professional photographer. Her Town is as much a work of visual art as of poetry. The blurb announces truthfully that this pocket-sized work offers “fifty stories and fifty images”. American-born, Hong Kong-raised, Slavick has her own perspective on New Zealand landscapes and mores. Her photographs depict Wairarapa, where she now lives, sometimes simply pictorial, sometimes ironic in the way the camera’s angle picks up something ridiculous.
Her written style is often prose poetry. She chronicles some local tragedies, but more often she is interested in everyday, domestic, rural and community events. And there is some deadpan wit. The poem Landline reads in full: “Dinnertime, telephone rings, / A computer company makes an offer. / No, thank you, and I put down the receiver. / The woman calls back and asks why I hung up.” That is everyday life indeed. A good book to browse at your leisure.
