The Interview Rose by Elizabeth Smither

This is the twentieth collection of poetry from the celebrated New Zealand poet Elizabeth Smither. She also has six novels and six short story collections to her name.

These poems have a lovely selection of scenarios and locations. We travel the globe as far as the Gare du Nord in Paris and the British Museum in London.

We meet cows swimming, fish, garden frogs, a robot vacuum cleaner and have to brush the cat a hundred times. While one poem is about buying peonies, another one, entitled simply ‘Daisies’, does not take us in the direction we might have been expecting:

The lawn is gulping down the rain.

Drops, showers, downpours, and the daisies

respond in kind: one, a cluster, hundreds.

I think they do not fear the mower,

but like Marie Antoinette who said,

‘Excuse me, I didn’t mean to step on your foot,’

before she faced the guillotine

wearing a pure white dress

in the Place de la Révolution.

Another location which I really enjoyed was the sense that some New Zealand cities give when they have steeply rising hills on which the houses clutter the upper reaches. This poem is called ‘Houses on the Hill’:

I envy the houses on the hill

and their bold seizure of sky

and sun and stars and moon.

Most have shady trees for company

a canopy, a hedge of fur.

These hill houses have bare necks

and long windows whose light

and timing is out of reach. We

below switch on the prescribed lamps

but they are flooded, dawn to dark

by bands of light like premonitions

great swathes of war and peace.

The novels of Jane Austin feature heavily in this collection, with mentions of events or characters from ‘Emma’, ‘Sense and Sensibility’, and ‘Persuasion’. Emma and her relationship with Mr Knightley are the favourite, with her character described as ‘an analyst before Freud’.

The title poem was one of my absolute favourites. At first it seems very simple, an interview, a fabric rose worn on the interview suit. But there are so many more layers. The disappearing jobs, the Liverpool football shirt and keeper, the anxious wait, all perfectly rendered:

The week of interviews twenty minutes each

to face a panel for my disappearing job.

I went into a shop called Accessory House

and bought a flamboyant fabric rose

of the most arresting red, as arresting as

Liverpool F.C.’s elite Garibaldi red

and pinned it to my black linen jacket.

I sat on a chair in the corridor waiting

wondering what I should say. I had

prepared nothing, it would have to be

spontaneous, from the heart, like the rose

or the Garibaldi goalkeeper with his gloves

straining for the crossbar of the goal or diving

like a salmon in its death throes.

Protect me, rose, I said, as the bell sounded

and I walked in, stiff-backed, and sat.

Good morning, good morning. We like your rose.

Was that a point on the score sheet?

I’m sure I said something foolish. The rose

was causing me to relax. I told it

to keep it together. Remember the worm

that flies in the night. It settled back

on my lapel and nestled against my cheek.

In the corridor again I unpinned it

and held it to my nose. A little perfume

from my wrist had climbed inside it.

The final poem in the collection is also one rich in observation and surprise. It shows us Smither’s keen eye for observation and calm, a sensation that ripples under the surface of many of these poems. The poem is called, with wry irony, ‘Mark Doty: a footnote’:

Walking between venues in Aldeburgh

to attend the next reading or panel

a boy kicks a football in Mark Doty’s path.

Just a poet walking, one of those

removed from the world, a floater,

but look he has scooped up the ball

on the curve of his foot, cradles it

like a bird fallen from a tree,

rolls it up to chest height

then over his shoulder, his other foot

hooks to kick it back to

two astonished boys. A poet

who could play of Chelsea or Real Madrid,

earn a fee greater than any poet,

but greatest of all the way

he goes on chatting to the other poets,

his head lowered, as modestly

he sets the world back in place.

Reviewer: Marcus Hobson

Auckland University Press