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Storms Will Tell, Janet Frame, 2008, Bloodaxe Books. £12  ISBN  978-1-8522478-9-8

 
Frame (1924 – 2004) was a novelist and poet born in New Zealand, who eventually became one of that country’s foremost writers. This collection brings together one published book of poems, The Pocket Mirror, 1967, and one, The Goose Bath, 2006, compiled posthumously by three editors from manuscripts piled up in a capacious container known to family and friends as ‘the goose bath’. 

The poems here are uneven but deeply interesting. Frame’s chequered life is an epitome of how hard it can be for writers (especially for a woman from a working-class family born in the 1920s) to keep going and earn a high reputation. Frame’s ‘eccentricity’ meant that she was forced into the mental health system and was lucky to avoid the most drastic of contemporary treatments, a lobotomy. She wrote an autobiography, made into a film, An Angel at My Table. It helps that the editors here supply information and extensive, sensitive commentary to set her poetry in context. 

Memorably, Frame said about writing in general, ‘the hope is always that the imagination will come to rest in invisible places’. In a poem, Some of My Friends Are Excellent Poets (The Goose Bath), she said, “Poetry has not room for timidity of tread”. In another poem, These Poems, poetry is “Tincture of Light / spooned momently to the eye”. However, she thought her own poetry failed.

Nearly all the poems published here are original, imaginative, ambitious, full of sharp observations and striking phrases. An engaging voice here expresses intense interest and excitement in the physical world, human nature, creativity; also sharp awareness of pain, fear and disappointment. 

Often a poem contains two or three lines which fling a door wide, “Friends far away die / friends measured always in blocks of distance” (Friends Far away Die, The Goose Bath); “I take into my arms more than I can bear to hold / I am toppled by the world” (I Take into My arms More Than I Can Bear to Hold, The Goose Bath); “The tramlines are torn from their sockets. / Things do not suffer as we supposed. / People suffer more than we supposed” (Dunedin Poem, The Pocket Mirror). 

With the exception of two poems in The Pocket Mirror, The Place and Wyndham, Frame condemned her published work. She was right. This selection is a gallant failure, though also a most interesting source book of profound thoughts and exciting approaches. Because Frame is so truthful and imaginative, it’s a rewarding task to ask why so much here fails to ‘shape up’ as a finished poem.  

The effect was more like reading a writer’s notebook than finished work. I felt I was learning what a poem should be and reflecting, in particular, on the need for focus and concentration. Frame herself was the guide. She warned one of her editors, Bill Manhire, that her poems ‘fall away’, comparing this problem with a child, playing a balancing game, who gets distracted and loses her poise. 

Probably novel-writing made great demands. She had not time ‘to live with’ a poem and discover its true form. There are signs, I nearly said, of ‘haste’, but this is not the right word, more of attempted ‘naïve spontaneity’, which is a reasonable aim for a poet but does not often ‘come off’. Another typical problem is a ‘stream of consciousness’ poem with too many changes of direction.

Often, the simplest forms chosen herald the most effective poems. Duties is a poem of six four-line verses, rhymed. It uses the purest language, and short lines, to describe the virtuous tedium of caring for “an old widow-woman / who lies in bed sick / with an aching back”. In the last verse we hear the carer’s one disloyal thought, “why / with her life run dry / she fails to die”. 

The Place has three four-line stanzas only. It has spontaneity and bright images – hens “frying their bacon-coloured combs in the sun”. The last stanza reminds me of Emily Dickinson, as it says something difficult with a sure touch and it takes us by surprise: “I do not remember these things / – they remember me, not as a child or woman but as their last excuse / to stay, not wholly to die”.