We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
“over under fed” by Amy Marguerite (Auckland University Press, $24.99); “Makeshift Seasons” by Kate Camp (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $NZ25); “Clay Eaters” by Gregory Kan (Auckland University Press, $29.99); “The Intimacy Bus” by Janet Charman (Otago University Press, $30)
There’s a strong possibility that I will be chastised by some if I point out that the feverish, overloaded and yet brilliant imagery and metaphor in Amy Marguerite’s debut collection over under fed is similar to the wildness and fervour of the teenaged genius Rimbaud. Yes, she does use the current affectation of writing “I” as “i”. Yes she does write everything in lower case. Yes she does sometimes run sentences together. But her work is compelling, her images hold attention and in the end we get a whole life’s story. She dedicates her opus “For the quietly immoderate” and much immoderation there is. Amy Marguerite is an adult woman, but her narrative – such as it is – is focused on her adolescence. To put it simply, she was plagued by anorexia nervosa, a condition that is most often connected with teenage girls, and she spent time in hospital wards. Every so often, we are given poems headed “discharge notes”. Over under fed is divided into four sections - “terms and conditions” “love language” “ward 25” and “hollowing full” and in a way they do move us towards a sort of conclusion – apparently a final escape from her anorexia nervosa condition. She is now apparently over being under fed - hence the book’s title. But as the four sections often overlap, I will read the work as one ongoing narrative.
A febrile, fragile psyche is suggested at once in the opening poem “far too blue” which sets the pace with “I have grown appendages of contempt / for many things. I believe in god because people / are too digestible. I am terrible at staying / in touch unless they are exceptionally interesting…/… I give up at once on anything I cannot immediately be / brilliant at…” And the following poem “reuptake inhibitor” declares “it seems / a cliff is only dangerous / after you jump of / of it and I am so tired / of jumping”. [A statement which she refutes much later in this collection]. This signals deep depression. Sequential poems tell us that love is sadness, that she is out of the beat when it comes to music, and in the “july poem” “I feel like a hairdresser / turning away / the kids with headlice…”. There is evidence of disorderly eating as a teenager. Much later in the collection there is the poem “when my body was Amorphophallus titanium” again with a lack of confidence as a teenager and listing all the things she was not able to do with ease.
There is also the problem of limerence [a term created by a psychiatrist in the 1960s] which means having obsessive love for somebody else, but without reciprocation [I confess I had to look this up]. Amy Marguerite writes a poem called “limerence” which asks “why do I obsess over people / who understand me?” I take a wild guess here and wonder if this refers to people who have tried to help her… or maybe not. It’s common for teenagers to have crushes on people who do not respond. She writes in the poem “stalling” that “I keep thinking / about apologising / for not holding your left hand / when my right one / was stupidly clammy” There is that sense of being inferior, as if one were bowing down to a goddess. And “I’m too busy wondering what now / we would be in / it I had let my wine- / dry lips scutter / crabwise down your cheek. But wondering is / brutally futile…”. The poem “love language” steps up the limerence with “don’t you / want to waste / your entire lunch / break wondering / how? / without any kissing / at all” There are many connections with women, but mostly they seem girlish dreams. Like most young people who want to have a hidden life [like getting away from parents, for example] she writes in “discharge notes (iii)” that “When diaries get gritty you put them / in a shoe box call them gone. call them / one less segment of yourself to mourn / something like that. i keep so many secrets / from myself.” Growing older, into maturity, she turns to men but in the poem “raisins” she declares she f**king hated men but she f**ked them and she dieted on raisins to remain slim for them and “i kept hating and f**king”. Make of this what you will, but some sort of desperation is signalled.
As for the parts about the anorexia nervosa wards, they can be quite graphic. While “fortisip” recalls her petulant behaviour as a kid when she was being taken to hospital by her parents, “discharge notes (iv)” gives us the buzz on other girls in her ward and learning their tricks on “how to get away with water loading / before my five a.m. weigh-in ha ha. / I was really good at being sick it felt good. / to be good at something. bad to be good.” Despite having grown past her affliction, she still to the very end has a very negative view of the nurses in the hospital.
At which point I could raise some ideas about the poet’s gender or sexual identity. Most of her attraction was to girls but she seems to have settled down with a guy whom she calls “my darling partner Blair”. Not that it matters I suppose and none of my business anyway. I’m also interested by the many passing references to her grandmother throughout this collection. But this is all by the way. What is important is that Amy Marguerite has produced a vital and lively work – angst-fill inevitably, but honest in its confessionalism and filled with energy. As a debut, it’s brilliant.
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By now an accomplished poet with a many collections to her credit, Kate Camp has moved on in her focus. Once, when I reviewed one of her earlier books, I said her work was “usually housebound anecdotes”. While this might have been true for the earlier book, it is certainly not true for her latest collection Makeshift Seasons [the title comes from the last words in the book]. Yes, there are some poems about home and her surroundings, but they are only a small part on her palette. As was the case in her previous work, she tends to write in the first person - in fact in nearly all 36 poems in Makeshift Seasons. So obviously there is a sense of either confessionalism or autobiography. Unlike some of her contemporaries, she does not use free verse [well… she does not usually]. Her prosody is largely traditional, with stanzas neatly separated. Her poem “Entropy” is a sort of sonnet – at least it divides into octave and sestet even if it doesn’t rhyme – and with an analysis of first a consulting a doctor and then having the odd reaction once she was outside. Her “Epiphany” is also a sort of sonnet – in this case first an event [octave] and then an unexpected outcome [sestet].
Yet let me admit that I was intimidated by the opening two poems in the book. “Kryptonite” picks up tropes about Superman and uses it to consider how we are both strong and fragile. “Trajectory” is apparently about the pain and coldness of the seasons, but after reading it many times over I could not decode what it was really saying. Its imagery is so cryptic as to be opaque… but thank goodness she moves on to clarity in all the following poems.
Like most poets, Camp deals with favourite interests. She comes back a number of times to a favoured spot in Wellington, thus the poem “Island Bay” being a neat little vignette of politeness by the water. Later there is “Island Bay again” with darker images on the same shore; and later still there is “Island Bay Beach” about swimming there where “I appreciate the smaller space / at high tide, soft, soaked sand / cleared of footprints…” - though she also paints here images of discomfort. After all, no place is really idyllic. “Freyberg Carpark” is a clear and thoughtful poem, depicting a place and time and a mood struck by two very different women meeting. I found this the most engaging poem in the collection.
Speaking of which, there is a sensibility about places in poems about overseas travelling. “Driving in France” is a straightforward memory of a journey near Mont-Saint Michel . But “Wittenberg” reveals the truth that often, when we tourists go to see something of historical or cultural interest, we find we are more distracted by small and perhaps trivial things that have amused us. There are domestic poems - “Equinox” is about the house they live in and how it was when they first entered it. “Autumn” is a relatively straightforward [and therefor readable] account of the effect of that season “It’s a beautiful morning. That’s what we call a morning / with a red tugboat at a distance, long white / landscape of fog against the hills, sun gold / on buildings.”… and then she shifts into modish reveries of being in a bar in Berlin.
As well as place, home and season, there is much interest in health; or rather ill health. Kate Camp, now in her 50’s, is aware of the way the body begins to take some knocks. “Inpatient versus outpatient”, like some others of her poems, indicates going through pain of one sort or another – not fatal or severe but irritating and uncomfortable. “Here is the church” also signals bodily discomfort, considering what it would be like being an old woman: “How will I grieve these hands / when they no longer interlock / the tiny mountain ranges of a zipper / or seal with their perfectly-fitted pads / my nostrils, mouth and chin / as I cover my face with them / in cold, in curiosity, in comfort / or just because I can / because this body / is still mine / and I can hide it / whenever I want to.” The most uncomfortable of poems about ill health must be “summary of our mini-survey on regret” which seems to signal things she does not want to talk about in detail. Something similar is “In the bathroom rubbish bin.” And “Grease”, a kind of fantasia of what adolescence was, also has a sense of awkwardness which is very aligned to pain.
If favoured spots, travel, home and ill health dominate this collection, there are many other interests. “Towards a working definition of global warming is an acute account of the nature of light in the night with “one lightbulb-shaped lightbulb / burning always in the neighbour’s hallway for their children / I suppose, if they were , still. Plus general light reflecting / off clouds but I mean it has to come from somewhere.” “Halley’s Comet” is discursive and a sort of resignation to living within a small area, even after having travelled much of the world – and there is consolation that Halley’s comet may soar through the universe, but it is only a hunk of rock after all. “I think I’ll remember where the cleaning eye is but I know I won’t” is really two poems somehow joined together – the first six stanzas about a plumber coming and fixing a problem ; the last two stanzas addressing different matters in her life. An interesting structure.
What does all this add up to? A collection of poetry well worth reading, and a work of maturity.
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Gregory Kan is not new to poetry. Far from it. This Singapore-Chinese, with much knowledge of Malaysia, is a New Zealand resident who has twice been reviewed on this blog. When I reviewed his debut collection This Paper Boat [ Feb. 9 2016 ] I noted that “I was impressed by Kan’s ability to link past with present in poems that acknowledged the deadness of the past, while at the same time showing the ongoing influence of the past. Kan often referenced, and was in conversation with, earlier authors.” When his second collection came out Under Glass [March 11 2019 ] I said that he “weaves together in this diverse book childhood memories, stories told by his forebears and extended family, stories of his parents’ courtship and early marriage, stories of his own adjustment to New Zealand and memories of his compulsory military service in Singapore.”
The fact is that in his latest collection Clay Eaters, he deals with many of the very same issues – the past, memories, having to do military service, his family, etc . But this is far from just repeating himself.
Certainly a tone of nostalgia, and mixed feelings about it, is in an early part of his latest collection, as in this expanded metaphor where looking back means almost drowning: “Memory will not be / Still / Trying to touch the bottom / Of the deep lake / And return to the surface / Clutching god knows what / Blinking in the sudden light / Lucky to be alive.” And towards that end of this collection there is “To wander / Looking for what we have lost / On that other side of silence / A surface that lets us write so many things into it / Knowing the little that we know / In the few ways we know how”. And there is “It’s not just that I always wanted to forget / Or that I always wanted to remember / It’s just easy to get lost / In that garden / Where the wind doesn’t seem / To move on / To another place…”
Kan happily mixes poetry with prose, including many references to “Uncle Boon’s blog” and to jottings he himself made from his own experience. Timescales jump between memories of an island off Singapore, coming back to it years later, life in New Zealand, the times when his parents worked in Wellington, some of his older siblings who had gone to the U.S.A. and finally references to his partner, a woman he calls T. There are some almost eccentric comments, as in telling us that they once had cat called Gilgamesh “part-god he ruled / From a wooden post of our unfinished deck”.
But the most interesting poems have to do with that island off Singapore, Tekong, which carried a rain-forest and which had a military camp where Singapore men had to do their compulsory military service. [The camp was shut down in 1989.] When Kan re-visits the island, he experiences the muggy rain forest but he also notes “it’s small / I’ve been around it many times” He tells us of its fauna, such as “Belukar” meaning “for secondary jungle or forest that grows on previously cleared or cultivated land”. And he notes he had a role in the army’s Combat Intelligence School but “I was glad not to end up as an infantry officer / I wasn’t good at it / Never liked yelling / And the constant hammering of weapons / At things in the trees we couldn’t see.” Yet he did become expert in teaching camouflage.
More profoundly there are his comments on the nature of a humid island and its foliage: “Look closely at the photograph / Swim a bit further out / Unlock the back gate / Separate the seeds from the flesh / Part the branches / Open the letter / Watch the clearing beside the stream / Play the video / Go deeper into the mangroves / Run your fingers between the threads / pray to a god you do not believe in anymore / Try to remember whether you ever made it to the reservoir.” There is much reference to red clay earth and to “Mangroves on either side as far as I could see / Their pale folded roots / Spidering above the muddy, lapping water / A sea of faces in the furrows / Moths open / Trembling with their own ripeness / Fatal softening of surfaces.”
Although he says he does not believe in God he is aware of religious traditions such as burning offerings in vessels to the gods so that the gods will care for those who go to sea. Inter-tangled are Chinese and Malay religions and there are passages about a wise woman sometimes meeting and confronting trainee soldiers at shrines and others. He makes a form of secular religion among the young soldiers, as in “Whether religious or not / Most of us weren’t ignorant / But we had all become superstitious / Our lives were rituals / In heavy gloves / Steel-soled boots / And thermal imaging devices / Tactics were rites / Strategies were prayers / The ways in which we learnt / To rearrange ourselves / Without words / Between the trees.”
Incidentally, he brings in a very Aotearoa comment with his awareness of the similarities of Malay and Maori languages [he gives a list of 22 essential shared words].
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Janet Charman has always been a feminist as she has shown in her earlier collections such as At the White Coast, Ren / Surrender (reviewed on this blog ) and Pistils (also reviewed on this blog). Charman always writes in free verse and she refuses to write the word “I” as she says it is too phallocentric. Instead she writes it as “i”. When I reviewed The Pistils I noted that her poems are “sometimes a little cryptic in expression [and] laud the female body, its gestation, its resilience”. Such is the case with her tenth collection The Intimacy Bus.
What is “the intimacy bus”? The poem “the gender buffet” begins “knocked about / we alight / female and male / rumpled up / from a nine-month trip / in the intimacy bus”– in other words, we spend nine months in our mother’s womb, whereupon she proceeds to tell us of her views of the sexes and her ambiguities about herself. One has to assume that her poems are based on her personal experiences and are in effect autobiography. In the 38 poems that make up this collection, there are some major themes, viz. Age, discomfort and death; Sex, gender and the behaviour of men; and how she is influenced by television and the media.
Consider first age and death. Born in 1954, Charman is apparently obsessed with now being in her late 60s. There are many references to her cat and how messy her house is. Her two daughters occasionally drop in but it seems she spends much time in bed and/or watching television. The poem “in absentia” is a gruelling tale of loss : the painful lamentations after the death of somebody near – it could be her husband who died some years earlier or it could be an infant, but the tone is ambiguous and the imagery is severe, suggesting an extremeness in feeling as in the metaphor “to keep my guts in lockdown / the surgeon stitched in an internal mesh / she’s seen to it my phantom pain / is wished away…” There is pain as the body ages.
With regard to sex, gender and the (mis-)behaviour of men and misogyny, the poem “coming out at 68” says that she is now “heterosexual lesbian” which suggests she is still working out her gender. She notes that her daughters are sceptical about her claim to be lesbian. Regarding men’s rough behaviour in bed and their boorishness, the poem “consensual” rebukes “and those who / from a reservoir / entitlement / perceive consent as / their having / free access / to her submission” followed by imagery of masculine thuggery. Likewise the poem “all those excuses we make” tells us how crude the earlier generations were in the way they made excuses for men who dealt brutally with women, pregnant or otherwise. “kabedon” is also about male abuse. With regard to the domestic scene, there is “surveillance” about a woman and man ruined by alcohol. Many verses in her poems tell us of physical problems that are more extreme for women than for men, as in “take two Panadol” with its notice “how many women / I wonder / take two Panadol / for front pain / prior to having a breast screen / or sex”
As for how she is influenced by television and the media “my liberation notes” is apparently a reaction to watching violent images… or is it the fear of misogyny? Likewise “bereavement counselling”, about her reaction to Korean soap operas; “eternal summer 1 & 2” is also concerned with movies – how actors age or don’t age on screen; and “for my viewing pleasure”. Are these statements apologising for watching Asian television clichés or is she finding great meaning in them? I’m not sure.
Charman does tend to ramble in her longer poems. The fact is, I found her most readable works were her collections of either aphorisms or haiku thus “79 Fragments”, being brief statements moving her from childhood to rebellious adolescence to the annoyances of old age, finishing with the killer statement “Unpublished creative writing course graduates / served your sentence / now do the crime”. Wise words. Likewise “18 sex treats” is made of fragments, though in this case focused on male-female sexual relationships, consistently jaded; and “27 episodes from modern life” once again represents discomfort with men. “house lot – everything must go” is again fragments. They can clearly tell uncomfortable truths, viz. “daughters with housekeys / let themselves in / and surprise their mother the old new lesbian / in bed – this rainy afternoon / with her television.” The sequence “your backstory” is the biography of an artist who was mistreated and under-rated at school but managed to get through. “Work in progress” has such brevities as “of that time of childhood / I remember most distinctly / the tedium / the suburban paralysis.”
How can a reviewer pass judgment on somebody else’s life experience? Reading carefully, I get the impression that Janet Charman’s life has been a hard one. Even so, I do wonder why she is so upset by old age. I suggest that some readers will find her work hard reading. But I rejoice that in her “Mother Ship” collection she does tell one truth about the collapse of former New Zealand English Departments “The Humanities / out of Time / work under a flag of convenience / by a skeleton crew.” Quite so.
