Hamesh Wyatt reviews this weeks picks for poetry.
The Radio Room is Cilla McQueen's 11th book of poems. She is our current New Zealand Poet Laureate. Last year, she received the Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement. McQueen said, "I am as happy with The Radio Room as I was with Homing In (1982). Homing In was her debut collection of poems.
In The Radio Room, beauty keeps surfacing. Her distinctive voice shimmers with just the right amount of pathos to induce repeated reads. McQueen's poetry opens the doors and breathes in an endless rainbow of excitement and imagination. There might simply be something in the water in Bluff (where she lives). She relives her "Quark Dance" from Anti Gravity (1984) in "Beacon (Elements 2)":
Discovered in lenses,
bent around stars.
I leap island to island,
altar to altar.
Breathe life into things,
one word to another,
Sweep the night seas
with a quartz shiver.
My feet of quicksilver
dancing on water.
Within 34 poems, she grieves for her mother and yearns for Hone Tuwhare's touch. McQueen talks to her tokotoko, the ceremonial stick she holds when performing as Poet Laureate. She sees things, even if it is just an insect coming out of the ground. "I am too big to be seen, like the weather." She is studious without being stuffy.
McQueen sounds as vibrant and valid as ever. This enormous talent talks about "a state of listening - the mind wide awake that enables a flow between the unconscious and conscious mind". She embraces hard-won lessons of age and experience and also reaches for something in her verse that is striking and beautiful. This is a little book full of simple, spare poems. I love the unexpected tenderness McQueen is able to produce. In The Radio Room, prepare to be wowed.
Time of the Icebergs is a little different. This time around, Eggleton hits the beautiful, mysterious and uplifting button. His poem "Dada Dunedin" was originally commissioned for a project initiated by Roel Wijland, exploring, marketing and "branding" Dunedin. It appears in Landfall 220. He concludes:
For . . . in the New Year you are a ghost ship of a town maintainedby a tatterdemalion skeleton crew in op-shop regalia.
For . . . the sight of you spread out in the skylarking sun revealspostal districts packed with concealed email users.
For . . . yesterday you stretch up, Dunedin, take a breath, and sunk indreamtime vacancy seek to break the trance of a hundredyears, aware in your cobwebbed obstinacy that you'remaking an exhibition of yourself again.
Among these 57 new works are some very short ones. Often, Eggleton delivers spellbinding and mesmerising poems. There are so many clever, deliciously understated poems that add irony to everything he says - whether he means it or not.
There are poems about the cigarette, the loss of the 5c coin in 2006, and a wonderful "Ode to the Beercrate". Many are set in New Zealand, whether looking at "cricketers of the eighties" or being "a jailbird at Momona Airport".
Rest assured, Eggleton has not gone soft, simply deeper. He still writes dark poems like "Christchurch Gothic" that lingers in the "long shadows falling like guillotines", or in "Soundings", the "Nazi bellow at the Nuremberg Rally - a cut-off, chicken-plucking horrid squawk".
Eggleton at times sounds emotionally bruised, but like McQueen he is still watchful and highly observant. Time of the Icebergs is edgy and pretty damned good.
There is a tone of transience and melancholy as T.S.Eliot's "Wasteland" is recalled, but the whole thing does not hold together.
Moisa tries to produce poetry with a power-punch but it doesn't quite come off. I like his quirkiness and energy. The overall result, though, is a little disappointing. The shift in theme being light and then turning very dark is quite disturbing. Just because Moisa is talking loudly, doesn't mean he is saying anything. I am sure he can do better than this.
• Recently, James Flynn released a list of top books to get young people to read quality literature.
He was the foundation professor of political studies when he came to Dunedin from the US in 1967.
In his introduction to O God Who Has a Russian Soul, Flynn comments that in January 2010 he found himself writing about literature. He adds, "I love poets like Yeats who write beautiful prose as verse, and enjoy those who write beautiful poetry as novels (Fitzgerald was really a lyric poet). But, sadly, I can do neither."
Flynn's collection comprises 23 lacklustre poems. They are simply too self-conscious and sound a little dated. Flynn uses a tried-and-true rhythm and metre through his verse, but the tone is way too mellow and repetitious.
• Hamesh Wyatt lives in Bluff. He reads and writes poetry.
