Black Sugarcane
by Nafanua Purcell Kersel
(Te Herenga Waka Press, $30)
In her debut collection, Nafanua Purcell Kersel, born in Samoa and raised in New Zealand, has produced a great piece of work. Black Sugarcane is mainly interested in family, community and traditional Samoan values. But Kersel is ironic and funny, at times sharp, even though very few poems could be called protests. There’s one about how her dad years ago had to carry a passport when he walked around Ponsonby, another about Palagi yobs trying to make fun of Samoan swear words.
“Grandma lessons” are scattered through the collection – an elder passing on common-sense wisdom. The most joyful of the bunch is To’ona’i, celebrating a childhood memory of a great feast where “I take a bite of taro, the earthy bulk spreads the salt / across my tongue and I imagine that they must eat / like this every day of the week, back in Samoa.” But all is not happiness. Galulolo / Tsunami deals with the waves that hit American Samoa and Tonga in 2009 with great loss of life.
Kersel is also concerned with language itself, and how Samoan and English languages sometimes clash. The 16 pages using the “erasure” technique may not be to all tastes, but the collection is a vital, eye-opening and engaging poet’s view of a whole culture.
For When Words Fail Us: A small book of changes
by Claire Beynon
(The Cuba Press, $30)
For When Words Fail Us is not “a small book”. It’s the length of a novel. Heroically, Claire Beynon grapples with the thorny relationship of a woman and a man who may or may not be in love. They first meet in upstate New York. They are both intellectuals. She is a painter. He is an academic who writes about art. He is interested in 19th century French painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s famous Nymphs and Satyr. She interprets the nymph as the female principle and the satyr the male principle. She flies back to New Zealand. They write many letters to each other. Sometimes she calls him “Satyr”. Years go by. They still write to each other. Then he visits New Zealand to meet her again. The situation changes. And so that tale goes on.
It would be a pity to say how it ends, but it does make clear that women often think differently to men. Beyond mundane reality, For When Words Fail Us has passages of romantic reverie, daydream and outright fantasy: “when night falls and the ruru return / she casts her body on the banks / and with spine to the ground / and eyes wide open wonders / at the tenacity of moss / the complex miracle of breathing”.
You could question some of the romantic interludes, but Beynon, who acknowledges in an end note that the tale is partly founded on experience, is spot on in her analysis of the changing moods of two people who are intimate. And her depictions of South Island flora are persuasive.
In The Cracks of Light
by Apirana Taylor
(Canterbury University Press, $27)
In his seventh collection, Apirana Taylor does not waste words. In The Cracks Of Light goes for lean, brief poems, sometimes like aphorisms and sometimes like sheer minimalism.
The opening poem, note, reads in full: “a poem is / born / in the / cracks / of light / in the / dark / wall”. The poem still life says only “an empty bowl / of flowers”. But then what more can one say? The point is made that focusing on one thing can be enlightening.
Like Kersel, Taylor is interested in language itself and the preservation of an indigenous language. Most of his poems are written in English, but some are written in a combination of te reo and English, such as the very affirmative poem ko au te awa in which he identifies himself with the river, the sky, the sea, the night, the light, the mountains. The poem lines is based on an old Māori man who remembers being caned at school for speaking Māori. Using an elimination system, Taylor turns English into Māori. Apart from this, he has nostalgia for the marae, returning home to Paekākāriki, and the majesty of the pōhutukawa. When he deals with nature, birds, the sea and other things of nature that should be cherished, he is very much at his best.
Also well worth reading
Vivienne Ullrich’s Half Way to Every Where (The Cuba Press, $25) is an exercise in intellectual wit. Her poems are, in the main, iconoclastic comments on prettified fairy tales, analyses of paintings and some moments of personal meditation. A world where Jack-in-the-beanstalk is a capitalist swine, the frog who was kissed by a princess is a sexual opportunist, and Goldilocks is either a thief or the child of a deprived family. There are some astute critiques of New Zealand paintings, and a haunting version of a decaying wild place in her poem The Last Inlet.
Simon Sweetman’s The Richard Poems (The Cuba Press, $20) has that rare virtue, honesty. In his teenage years, he knocked around with a friend he calls Richard. They liked violent movies, drinking beer, were awkwardly useless with girls and loved hard rock. He says, “We didn’t have the internet to rot our minds – we had to do it ourselves.” But that was then and this is now. Richard apparently had a violent streak, lied, messed people up and had tics that could be called psychopathic. Finally, Sweetman stopped hanging around with Richard, and Richard sank into booze and squalor. It’s a sad story and a raw one about growing up and having to lose a friend who went wrong.
