Wow by Bill Manhire

Victoria University Press, NZ$25 pb, 88 pp

Bill Manhire is a much-published New Zealand poet and a former poet laureate. His new collection, Wow, pivots on the two great pillars of human experience: pleasure and loss. This tension is evoked in the cover image, an archival tracing of a now-extinct bird whose presence is evoked, even as its absence is acknowledged. The opening poem of the collection, ‘Huia’, signals the beauty of this vanished bird as well as the exploitations that have led to its disappearance:

I was the first of birds to sing
I sang to signal rain…
…
Where are you when you vanish?
Where are you when you’re found?
I’m made of greed and anguish
a feather on the ground.

This inscribing of what was – and the trails and legacies it brings into the future – is emblematic of the overall poetics of Manhire’s work: that the present is a complex tapestry ghosted by what has gone before, and that poetry is one of the strategies by which that past can be re-inscribed, its textures stitched back into what we are seeing and experiencing now.

While there are serious poems and themes in Manhire’s work, there is also a sense of playfulness and humour. The amusing romance of ‘He Loved Her Lemonade Scones’, the ‘Lazy Poet’ who is endlessly distracted by the cricket, even the minimalism of ‘Reverse Ovid’, where a running woman is described as ‘once the last pine tree on Mars’: these indicate the wide emotional palette that Manhire uses as his poems draw us into engagement with the observed world.

As the title poem suggests, this work emphasises the ecstatic ‘wow’ of the baby emerging into life – a sound and an emotion that soon moves into the complexity of what is ‘also’ and finally into an echoing, exhausted sigh. Ultimately, this kind of openness to life, the beginner’s mind embracing both the actual and the possible, is what is celebrated in this book. Even the concluding incantatory lines of ‘Little Prayers, 15 March 2019’, written in the aftermath of the Christchurch attacks, finds hope and compassion among the ‘pain [which must be] felt and … felt again’:

May the rivers and lakes and mountains shine
May every kiss be a coastline
May we sign once again for the first time
May the children be home by dinnertime
May the closing line be an opening line.

Biological Necessity by Jennifer Maiden

Quemar Press, $20 pb, 80 pp)

Jennifer Maiden’s new collection, Biological Necessity, demonstrates the ways in which a prolific and successful poet can develop not only continuity of style and theme, as with a collection of short stories with recurring characters, but also a kind of intra-textuality. This ‘micro-climate’ in Maiden’s work includes a focus on contemporary socio-political experience within neo-liberalism as well as a distinctive poetic voice – a familiar, informed, and insistent voice that enjoins the reader into a series of pressing conversations.

The collection’s title references Aneurin Bevan’s provocation that ‘socialism is a biological necessity’ – thus setting in train the kinds of topics and characters to be encountered: Mrs Macquarie in earnest conversation with Donald Trump’s mother, ‘whose soul is sore / from worry like a salt wound from seawater’; Gore Vidal observing Julian Assange in Belmarsh Prison, his mirth ‘as tempting as a razor’; the sinister dealings of ‘Blackwater’.

In some ways, the collection can read almost like a stream of consciousness or the pent-up urgency of political imperative – run-on lines that suggest a fast-moving form between prose poem and essay. There is no spacing between stanzas/paragraphs. This heightens an impression of intensification, almost a poetics of buttonholing, although this is moderated by some familiar Maiden strategies. The use of the ‘diary poem’, with its reflections and self-deprecations (‘I would tell you I am always a quiet sleeper, but after my / last essay, it could have connotations of spying’), creates irony and breathing space. Similarly, the return of George Jeffreys and Clare Collins, whose complex story has built over several of Maiden’s collections, gives another view of the current moment; we now see them in the ‘second week of their Covid quarantine’ as well as ‘skyping with President Trump / on Election Night, 2020’.

Focused on the current moment with its cross-hatching of issues, Biological Necessity concludes with commentary on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and the shifting of weather patterns. This is a collection immersed in the structures of the world – natural, political, impelled by cruelty and greed as well by generosities. The final poem, ‘La Niña’, concludes, ‘The tempest / outside my house has many mansions, / erratically peaceful in patterns’ – perhaps not such a bad prospect, considering its dark alternatives.

In This Part of the World by Kevin Brophy

Melbourne Poets Union, $25 pb 

Melbourne Poets Union’s new Blue Tongue Poets series aims to produce high production-value chapbooks from established poets. Kevin Brophy’s beautifully curated In This Part of the World is the inaugural title. Again, these poems have the clarity and stylistic confidence characteristic of a senior writer such as Brophy.

The poems are arranged into three seemingly simple delineations: ‘Here’, ‘And There’, ‘And Back’. While the central section moves us in place to the landscapes and history of Italy – Palermo’s ‘rubbed walls / of once-homes bombed seventy-five years ago’ or cycling ‘beneath the pine trees deep / among deer and wolves’ – overall the collection is grounded in the specificity of an Australian home and perspective. Just as the small details of daily event and interaction accrete in ‘Unremarkable Day’, Brophy’s poetic takes the everyday as its point of focus and imaginative departure. In ‘Back Yard Ladders of Surrender’, the trees of a suburban garden ‘reach up and out / their tree-hearts beating / to the small songs seedlings taught them’; the stones of a city path are ‘so blue in the night / listening to the steps we take’. The quiet persistence of birds also features in important ways, literal reminders of unglimpsed worlds: ‘the kitchen window glass [that] stops / a rare azure kingfisher in its flight’; the butcher birds ‘looped … into their other selves / where alpine ash whisper to them in a blue high tone’; the small finch who ‘knows how to live / in joyful fight and fret’.

There are also poems concerning deep connections between men – the complex reaches of friendship, the ways in which a conflicted love for a father might deepen and broaden with time, ‘tempting my lake to stretch itself / … and join up with an ocean’. Things otherwise at the edge of unsayability can find a space here, ‘because [they are] said / in a small poem / placed obscurely / in a prestigious chapbook’ – challenging us to listen closely. These are beautifully crafted and evocative poems, full of compassion, quiet attention, and the insight that marks poetry at its best.