In the Hollow of the Wave by Nina Mingya Powles

Although I read all the time, I’m a very visual person and I love art and images. Poetry is one of the most vivid forms of writing, but imagine my delight when I discovered that this new book of verse contains pictures as well as words. And two sorts of pictures – some providing background for strips of words superimposed over the top, like strips of embossing tape, and the others as actual pictures, often composites of many small squares with multiple variations. Both types of picture bring a different vibe to the collection and help to make it unique.

The words themselves come in a variety of shapes and formats. I always admire creative use of both the blank page and also the white space that remains once you have applied the words. This is a visual feast for the eyes, so many shapes and different uses of the page.

The collection is divided into four very distinct pieces, each with its own unique look and feel. Themes run throughout the book, but these divisions begin with a woven thread which leads to titles such as Slipstitch, patchwork, backstitch, layering and patterning. This is the section that is rich with pictures. We have composite pictures made up of small cut squares of material, the edges a little frayed and strands of cotton weaving out of the square symmetry. Against the poem ‘layering’ the design gets larger, becoming a rectangle of eighteen small squares, all blue but with a variety of patterns.

“I lay strips of pale peach cotton and cloud-printed cloth side by side.

Each becomes a strange, asymmetric quilt block.

Each block like a sentence, each sentence an island, all the islands loosely touching.”

Next to another rectangle is a new form of poem call ‘patterning’ and a new set of pictures, some blue and some sunset-pink. These are pictures rather than pieces of fabric; photos of sky and clouds and ocean. There are blue hills and low clouds in an abstract arrangement, sometimes set on their sides. It is very appropriate to pair this with the poem ‘patterning’. The poet provides us with an explanation:

“A ‘Germination’ is a poetic form invented by Natalie Linh Bolderston, where each stanza can be read from left to right as well as from top to bottom within each triangle.”

There are nine of these triangular stanzas on the page, in rows of three. They all have six words, one on the top line, two in the middle and three at the bottom. Here is an example:

“brittle

                               river seams

                        the waves stitched”

The poem entitled “search?keyword=borneo” is fascinating as an alphabetical listing of words and associations, starting with adze and armband, through charm and chords to hair-pin, hawk-bill and human skeletal remains. I turned the page thinking we might continue on from ‘h’, but that was all. It is rather like a list of images – each word comes with a picture of an object in your mind. Some of the lines pair objects, such as “arrow; dart” or “chord; thread”. Although the keyword search was for Borneo, in reality there are not many items listed that take you specifically to the place. I found myself slipping into my own memories of early-medieval artefacts that I studied many years ago. Apart from the word dart paired with arrow, I could link them all to European archaeology as much as Borneo. Each word a noun, complete with picture in my head. We all bring our own history to a poem.

But I do find a kind of continuation over the page, because the last item “human skeletal remains” is carried over as a reference about a skull from Borneo which is bound by rattan. This reads like a museum index card for an item in their collection, with its size and provenance. Who donated it and where they got it from. The rattan cloth holds the lower jaw in place. The title of the poem “A weaver’s dream seeps into the body of the cloth” then seeps into the next poem, where flowerheads are used to make dye, the memory extracted and used to soak into the cloth. Lovely simple imagery of the spinning of memories, such as this wonderful line:

“Begin to learn the language of knots, which carries the dreams of trees and rivers of the past.”

“A gown is a glacier, receding” is a ten page poem of great simplicity and also complexity. The gown in question is a qipao, which echoes the same two ideas of simplicity and complexity. The gown becomes a glacier, geological formations, a museum exhibition, a flower or a kelp forest. It stands for the exploitation of the young workers in the factory where the dress was made. A poem of contradictions.

“Wearing the qipao is both restrictive and freeing, the hot pink working as a kind of deflective shield.”

In the “Spell of the Red Flowers” there are nine pages of text, each has a block of justified words which form a perfect rectangle on the page. Each block of text is a similar size, varying in length from each other by no more than two or three lines. They are an echo of the block pictures. Familiar themes; earthquakes, flowers, volcanos, race. The Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama dominates with her images of red flowers and pumpkins. We are also with a group of schoolchildren, out collecting words for river poems. There is a lovely narrative flow through the blocks, like the river which I imagine has been constrained into an urban environment.

“How many poems have

been written about this stretch of river? About

the concrete forms built to hold the river’s past

and present shapes, its future rising selves?”

The last section in the book is called “The Heart Works Harder” and is not constrained into a particular form but ranges widely across different styles and techniques, using inspiration from works by Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, or the more everyday use of a recipe from a cooking blog.

“In the Hollow of the Wave” is a brilliant and varied collection, it wins points for range of themes, variation in the way the poems are presented and for leaving you with a sense that you have travelled alongside the poet on a fascinating journey.

Reviewer: Marcus Hobson

Auckland University Press