A Question of Gravity by Elizabeth Smither, 80pp, unpriced, Arc
Dog by C.K. Stead, 75pp, unpriced, Arc,
Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road, Todmorden, Lancs, OL14 6DA
I had a flashback this morning while reading Elizabeth Smither’s poetry collection A Question of Gravity: I was 12 years old and sitting in the back row of an English Class curled up with embarrassment as my then teacher, ‘Gabby’ Garwood, read out my essay entitled My Day Out, loudly emphasising my repeated use of the word ‘lovely’. ‘It was a LOVELY day when we set out in the LOVELY car which my father had borrowed and on the way to Laxey we stopped at a LOVELY cafe...’ When he had the whole class reduced to helpless laughter he asked, what I realised much later was a very pertinent question: ‘What does the word “lovely” actually mean?’ And when you think of it, the word can mean anything or nothing. There are many words like ‘lovely’, of which the worst is surely ‘nice’. We can have ‘a nice night out’, ‘a nice meal’, ‘a nice teacher’, we can even have ‘a nice invasion of Iraq’ or ‘a nice bombing raid’... and then there are the lazy words, ‘tiny’, ‘little’, ‘small’ etc. If you can’t think of better adjectives to describe something than these, then perhaps you should forget writing and become a plumber, or a politician, or a police-person. Such words, you see, mean nothing at all; they should be words of which writers are wary, and poets should shun. So it was with rising alarm and trepidation that I began reviewing Elizabeth Smither’s poetry, and in the first handful or so of poems, came across; ‘little polished plaque’, ‘little bay’, ‘little footprints’, ‘tiny bolsters’, ‘tiny lake’...
However I read on, grinding my teeth, even when I came across similes such as ‘...chain saw hanging / alarmingly like a lemur’s tail.’ (just how alarming is a lemur’s tail? And chainsaws, aren’t they heavy and hard, not light and furry?). Still I persevered past ‘little cast iron stove’, ‘a little hill’, ‘small potato’, ‘little town’, ‘little fish’ and (for variety) ‘little shoals of fish’, stopping only to fathom the meaning of such torturous sentences as ‘Have you round / far from Texas now to view.’ (That really is, allegedly, a complete sentence). In desperation, I turned to the rear cover blurb hoping to find something to inspire me, to cause me to search with a new eye amidst this collection, and when I read that these poems ‘inhabit back gardens and vast landscapes, art galleries, restaurants...’, I experienced a road-to-Damascus moment, recognising my own prejudices, realised perhaps the subconscious reason why I find this collection difficult to appreciate – it’s their smug middle class pseudo intellectualism that wears me down. Poems which refer casually to Mozart and Shostakovitch, to obscure painters; Thomas Chambers and Winslow Homer, to Shakespeare... poems with titles like ‘The muse (for women poets)’, ‘The Oxford comma’, ‘Listening to The Goldberg Variations’, ‘Three women sharing a bowl of crème brûlée’ (sic) and even, God forbid: ‘Sitting in Margo’s garden reading Philippe Ariés‚ The Hour of our Death’!
Forgive me, Ms Smither, the poems are probably very well written, the similes intense and vibrant; if they weren’t you wouldn’t be ‘New Zealand’s leading female poet’ (It says that on the back cover too). It’s just that the subject matter concerns aliens inhabiting alien worlds which as yet I have not been privileged to visit. I hope they beam me up soon in order to appreciate what I have been missing.
C.K. Stead writes poetry about great musicians too, and in Dog, he throws in poems about philosophers for good measure: Wagner, Liszt, Nietzche and Wittgenstein to name-drop but a few. But what a difference. No pretensions or obscurity here, no tortured sentences or corrupted similes, instead a humour that has me still smiling long after the pages close. How could it be other with gems such as this:
Vincent
Old girlie Brother Ignas
who liked the swish of cane
on bent-over buttocks
in that long-ago classroom:
‘Boys, please - some flightless birds. Bernard?’
‘The emu, Brother.’
‘The emu, yes. Michael?’
‘Ostrich?’
‘The ostrich. Thank you. What about you John?’
‘The kiwi, Brother.’
‘The kiwi, of course. Vincent, any more?’
And Vincent, pausing, holding his eye:
‘How about a shag, Brother?’
But there is also the touching and unaffected poem ‘His Round’ dedicated to the poet Allen Curnow, ‘an old man / who wouldn’t say his prayers’, and his perceptive long poem ‘Creation etc’, words lulling with images of paradise that suddenly jerk the reader back to harsh reality, like this piece from the section subtitled ‘V dog’:
In the long lovely lonely
heavenly afternoons
(each one lasting forever)
He strolls in the galleries
watching the fall of heavenly rain
on heavenly gardens
but pauses sometimes to listen
for the yells from Hell
Note the subtlety of the repeated (lower case) ‘heavens’ brought to an abrupt ironic climax by the capital ‘H’ of the word ‘Hell’.
And there are smile-inducing visual poems (using both words and numbers), and short poems, witty poems, profound poems, long poems, and he even has the wonderful audacity to re-write the Lords Prayer in ‘Even Newer English Bible’, in a manner that makes the reader smile; if somewhat grimly.
I like Mr Stead. I like his poetry and his style and his knowledge of his art. I do not much like Ms Smither’s poetry, nor do I think I would much like her. So there you go. My reviews are probably prejudiced and therefore unworthy of serious consideration; please do not write to me to tell me the obvious. But if the image of that young lad in the Catholic school asking Brother Ignas, straight-faced, if he’d like a shag, tickles you as it does me; then buy Dog, it won’t disappoint.
Dog by C.K. Stead, 75pp, unpriced, Arc,
Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road, Todmorden, Lancs, OL14 6DA
I had a flashback this morning while reading Elizabeth Smither’s poetry collection A Question of Gravity: I was 12 years old and sitting in the back row of an English Class curled up with embarrassment as my then teacher, ‘Gabby’ Garwood, read out my essay entitled My Day Out, loudly emphasising my repeated use of the word ‘lovely’. ‘It was a LOVELY day when we set out in the LOVELY car which my father had borrowed and on the way to Laxey we stopped at a LOVELY cafe...’ When he had the whole class reduced to helpless laughter he asked, what I realised much later was a very pertinent question: ‘What does the word “lovely” actually mean?’ And when you think of it, the word can mean anything or nothing. There are many words like ‘lovely’, of which the worst is surely ‘nice’. We can have ‘a nice night out’, ‘a nice meal’, ‘a nice teacher’, we can even have ‘a nice invasion of Iraq’ or ‘a nice bombing raid’... and then there are the lazy words, ‘tiny’, ‘little’, ‘small’ etc. If you can’t think of better adjectives to describe something than these, then perhaps you should forget writing and become a plumber, or a politician, or a police-person. Such words, you see, mean nothing at all; they should be words of which writers are wary, and poets should shun. So it was with rising alarm and trepidation that I began reviewing Elizabeth Smither’s poetry, and in the first handful or so of poems, came across; ‘little polished plaque’, ‘little bay’, ‘little footprints’, ‘tiny bolsters’, ‘tiny lake’...
However I read on, grinding my teeth, even when I came across similes such as ‘...chain saw hanging / alarmingly like a lemur’s tail.’ (just how alarming is a lemur’s tail? And chainsaws, aren’t they heavy and hard, not light and furry?). Still I persevered past ‘little cast iron stove’, ‘a little hill’, ‘small potato’, ‘little town’, ‘little fish’ and (for variety) ‘little shoals of fish’, stopping only to fathom the meaning of such torturous sentences as ‘Have you round / far from Texas now to view.’ (That really is, allegedly, a complete sentence). In desperation, I turned to the rear cover blurb hoping to find something to inspire me, to cause me to search with a new eye amidst this collection, and when I read that these poems ‘inhabit back gardens and vast landscapes, art galleries, restaurants...’, I experienced a road-to-Damascus moment, recognising my own prejudices, realised perhaps the subconscious reason why I find this collection difficult to appreciate – it’s their smug middle class pseudo intellectualism that wears me down. Poems which refer casually to Mozart and Shostakovitch, to obscure painters; Thomas Chambers and Winslow Homer, to Shakespeare... poems with titles like ‘The muse (for women poets)’, ‘The Oxford comma’, ‘Listening to The Goldberg Variations’, ‘Three women sharing a bowl of crème brûlée’ (sic) and even, God forbid: ‘Sitting in Margo’s garden reading Philippe Ariés‚ The Hour of our Death’!
Forgive me, Ms Smither, the poems are probably very well written, the similes intense and vibrant; if they weren’t you wouldn’t be ‘New Zealand’s leading female poet’ (It says that on the back cover too). It’s just that the subject matter concerns aliens inhabiting alien worlds which as yet I have not been privileged to visit. I hope they beam me up soon in order to appreciate what I have been missing.
C.K. Stead writes poetry about great musicians too, and in Dog, he throws in poems about philosophers for good measure: Wagner, Liszt, Nietzche and Wittgenstein to name-drop but a few. But what a difference. No pretensions or obscurity here, no tortured sentences or corrupted similes, instead a humour that has me still smiling long after the pages close. How could it be other with gems such as this:
Vincent
Old girlie Brother Ignas
who liked the swish of cane
on bent-over buttocks
in that long-ago classroom:
‘Boys, please - some flightless birds. Bernard?’
‘The emu, Brother.’
‘The emu, yes. Michael?’
‘Ostrich?’
‘The ostrich. Thank you. What about you John?’
‘The kiwi, Brother.’
‘The kiwi, of course. Vincent, any more?’
And Vincent, pausing, holding his eye:
‘How about a shag, Brother?’
But there is also the touching and unaffected poem ‘His Round’ dedicated to the poet Allen Curnow, ‘an old man / who wouldn’t say his prayers’, and his perceptive long poem ‘Creation etc’, words lulling with images of paradise that suddenly jerk the reader back to harsh reality, like this piece from the section subtitled ‘V dog’:
In the long lovely lonely
heavenly afternoons
(each one lasting forever)
He strolls in the galleries
watching the fall of heavenly rain
on heavenly gardens
but pauses sometimes to listen
for the yells from Hell
Note the subtlety of the repeated (lower case) ‘heavens’ brought to an abrupt ironic climax by the capital ‘H’ of the word ‘Hell’.
And there are smile-inducing visual poems (using both words and numbers), and short poems, witty poems, profound poems, long poems, and he even has the wonderful audacity to re-write the Lords Prayer in ‘Even Newer English Bible’, in a manner that makes the reader smile; if somewhat grimly.
I like Mr Stead. I like his poetry and his style and his knowledge of his art. I do not much like Ms Smither’s poetry, nor do I think I would much like her. So there you go. My reviews are probably prejudiced and therefore unworthy of serious consideration; please do not write to me to tell me the obvious. But if the image of that young lad in the Catholic school asking Brother Ignas, straight-faced, if he’d like a shag, tickles you as it does me; then buy Dog, it won’t disappoint.
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