AUP New Poets 11

As always with the Auckland University Press annual collection, there are three new poets to enjoy.

The first is Xiaole Zhan of Chinese New Zealand heritage. They bring a very different approach in Arcadiana. The 22 pages are made up of 77 numbered verses, they could almost be 77 stories, some a short as only two lines, the longest a whole page. All but the last verse is composed of a single unbroken paragraph. What I love is that there are several story strands running through the continuous narrative of the piece; a rolling mash-up of prose poetry and flash fiction.

There is the narrative of Zhan’s parents and grandparents, the colonialism of James Cook, Christianity and Sunday School, and the European musical arcadia, all playing at different speeds and tempos across the entirety of the piece. Alongside their growing up is the difficulty of Zhan having Pākehā grandparents and a Chinese mother, but no father present. The difficulty is highlighted by one verse in particular:

My Pākehā grandfather, like my Pākehā stepfather, had an unforgiving temper. When he stabbed me with his walking stick, I would run to my grandmother in tears. She would hold me in her arms and tell me he once served in a war where he used to have to kill people who looked like me.

And then come the terrors that well meaning presents can create for a child:

My Pākehā stepfather installed a small aquarium in my room one year as a birthday present. I couldn’t stop the fish from dying. My Pākehā grandmother scooped them out for me, one by one. I was terrified of the hovering corpses, the small bodies that would rise to the surface. The childhood fear is still burrowed in my chest, somewhere in the dark cave of my body. The corpses still drift along the canals that wind along my spine.

And then there will be worse indignities:

My Pākehā grandmother greets me at the gate and tells me about an ad she saw between episodes of Border Patrol that will help me get rid of my Chinese eyes. She smiles at me. You are so beautiful she says. You look so different from those other Chinese. You glow. The sculpture of a zodiac snake that I accidentally decapitated as a child nods to me, the tape around its neck rustling.

That last line, a perfectly illustrated memory of childhood, with a layer of sinister on the top.

The second poet is Margo Montes de Oca who brings us a Mexican Pākehā viewpoint. Her poems are some of the most visually different on the page that I have seen in the AUP new poets series. In one called (host) each of the widely spaced lines has some words in bold and some in italic. One version of the poem is in the bold and the other in italics. You cannot read all the words on the same line and get them to make sense, you just pick one option or the other. In the poem call migración there are little pyramids of words; one word on the top line, two in the middle, three on the bottom. There are three of these little pyramids across the page, and then four sets of three. The brilliance of the poem comes in the different ways that you can read it and still find a meaning. Do you read each pyramid as a separate verse or do you just read the tops, middles and bottoms? Both ways give different rewards.

Montes de Oca has a number of other things going on. There are references to various other poets; Louise Glück, Alice Oswald, Natalie Linh Bolderston and HD. But her themes are such more elemental; water, light and colour. The first of her collection, trace fossils, is a good example of these elemental parts. The poet brings us very close to them. Here are six of the eleven lines:

…in the intertidal zone / i cling to a rock / the barnacles

press into my palms / imprint themselves on me / like disappearing stars /

…

…i burrow into the crevices / i cluster with the

snails / they write important messages on my skin / we are waiting for the

water / to sluice away the drying sun / in the intertidal zone / it is always

a matter of time.

In the poem called where will the spirits live there are six numbered verses, with a series of shifting images and colours around a man, a forest of rubber trees and the red of soil, blood and earth. Here is the last of the six:

sleeping at last in the avenues of tears,

in the avenues of crop lines, the forest

curls up around the length of the man, holding

him close. one by one the rubber trees with their red

bark, their tall bodies, their quiet blood

move him into the afterwards, into the past, glowing white-silver.

The final poet is J.A. Vili, who is of Samoan origin and now based in Auckland. His poems are very different, many of them deal with the death and loss of family and friends. Tributes and fragments of memory. The loss of his wife when their children were very young is a haunting presence in some of the poems. They are deeply personal, but retain a sense of life lived in different ways, experiences shared. In Vili’s hands they become very vivid and alive, casual but always layered with meaning.

These lines are taken from Carnival at the Point. The father recounts a visit to the carnival, but tells the son that he was not there. The boy pulls out boxes, and the father thinks it is due to anger:

I can hear boxes falling from my room

I don’t know why he is so angry

then silence, as he returns to the lounge

‘I told you I was there, Dad.’

He shows me an old photograph

I still don’t understand

then he points to your image

& then I see your swollen belly

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry

but I see how much it means to him

I tell him the photo proves he was right

as he buries his taonga into his chest.

The poem call Tobruk Road began by disorienting me about the location – “Between Tripoli and Dunkirk,” and then I remembered our Kiwi love of naming roads after places where the country has fought in battles. This poem is a wonderful memory of childhood battles, when the use of old fruit was about as dangerous as things got:

the corrugated plum tree hid my secrets in her crevices

my father’s taro patch, camouflaged an army of street kids

our shed, my concrete bunker surrounded by onion mine

with old trellis of tamarillos, my wall of defence

from the blitz of money apples and Chilean guavas

followed by a barrage of rotten apples and sibling rivalry

These last poems have a sadness about them, but through that sadness there are always lights to find and lift the spirits.

Reviewer: Marcus Hobson

Auckland University Press