In the beautiful collection of poems that opens the volume, Tessa Keenan writes lyrically of a world of perpetual longing – the title of her first poem – in which clouds curtain a mountain the way you might hold a towel in front of a friend when they are changing; she writes of the weight of trying to remember – and of mapping the self in relation to tupuna and place. Places in her poetry are always intimately inhabited and themselves intimate inhabitants of the world, the wind tucking its fingers into the space between an ocean and a home in the poem "Oākura Beach" the way Rona’s white shirt is tucked under a black corset in the poem “Scurvy Girls.” Rona is going to a glow-in-the-dark party, so with the black corset over the white shirt she will look like she doesn’t have a heart – this is all we are told about her but it is enough for us to feel her heart beating. “Scurvy Girls” is one of my favourite poems, like a party itself, the brief introduction to each of the girls of the title adding up to a kind of contemporary War and Peace or Middlemarch, all the more expansive in feeling for being so distilled into a succession of perfect details. It is a good example of how inventively Tessa works with form, coming up with patternings that light up the world, whether working with an abecedarian structure, the outline of a room, the mapping of the self, using line breaks, paragraphs, italics, spaces and slashes to bring glow-in-the-dark and dark-in-the-glow music to everything she writes about.
A formal inventiveness is a characteristic of all three poets in the collection, and Romesh dissanayake has an exuberant playfulness in the way he works with lists and anaphora, making punctuation do what he decides it should do, bringing the acrostic poem to a new level – his poem B.A.D.D.I.E.S beginning with the line “boldly going where no sea slug has gone before.” These are bold poems full of textures and tastes – as you might expect from a chef and the author of the award-winning novel When I Open the Shop. I want to say the poetry is very like the fiction but I also want to say it is very different – both are true! The gift for scene setting, for comedy and for abundant and telling detail is all here in the poetry – and it is true too that the poetic ear for rhythm, for swerve, for repetition and for a conversational musicality are all there in the novel too – but there’s a way that the brevity of a poem allows for a real intensity and resonance that really lifts these works from the page, and there is something also in the movement that a poem allows as well as the movement between poems in the selection – all very artfully controlled, even if the velocity of some of the poems might suggest a hurtling very excitingly close to an edge – as when the poet describes “holding back vomit on the school van / because the HEAT / because the coconut oil in the boy’s hair next to me has gone rancid” – later, in the poem, the driver speeding off, panicked, after running him over. There are a lot of characters in these poems, and I like all of them – “how is this still my favourite flavour house” is the question that ends the poem “Favourite Flavour House,” a cinematic list of all the unsavoury actions of one character after another – no question mark of course because it isn’t really a question – it is any reader’s favourite flavour house, this poem, this poetry!
Sadie Lawrence unfolds dawns for us, she hisses the river and hushes the night, she presents us the little sonic forest of the gurgling gut, shaved eyebrows, dead moths, the earth purring like a cat. This is the most romantic of poetry, funny and tender and glossy and ghostly. These are poems about how being a creature can be really very like being a human girl, when you hold a joint like a tea-cup, pinky finger out. Childhood is not very distant – empathy for the tiny pillars of sweat and tears screaming in the next door kindergarten comes from a place of understanding – we too sing with terror and howl with grief – such is poetry, such is life! If the daylit world of these poems is supersaturated and somewhat terrifying with teeth buried in the gardens and spiders in the cellars, the night time dreams are more terrifying still – teeth are kicked out in dreams, guts are strung up like streamers. “Thank you dreamland!” to quote from Nightmare Intermissions. I do feel very grateful to whatever dark realms of the unconscious produced these poems! For all the darkness these are poems full of life, and alert to the pleasures of friendship and family, porchlight and wet laundry, the sudden painful freedom, the ache and tenderness, that comes with the removal of an orthodontic retainer, how good and golden the weather can be.
A formal inventiveness is a characteristic of all three poets in the collection, and Romesh dissanayake has an exuberant playfulness in the way he works with lists and anaphora, making punctuation do what he decides it should do, bringing the acrostic poem to a new level – his poem B.A.D.D.I.E.S beginning with the line “boldly going where no sea slug has gone before.” These are bold poems full of textures and tastes – as you might expect from a chef and the author of the award-winning novel When I Open the Shop. I want to say the poetry is very like the fiction but I also want to say it is very different – both are true! The gift for scene setting, for comedy and for abundant and telling detail is all here in the poetry – and it is true too that the poetic ear for rhythm, for swerve, for repetition and for a conversational musicality are all there in the novel too – but there’s a way that the brevity of a poem allows for a real intensity and resonance that really lifts these works from the page, and there is something also in the movement that a poem allows as well as the movement between poems in the selection – all very artfully controlled, even if the velocity of some of the poems might suggest a hurtling very excitingly close to an edge – as when the poet describes “holding back vomit on the school van / because the HEAT / because the coconut oil in the boy’s hair next to me has gone rancid” – later, in the poem, the driver speeding off, panicked, after running him over. There are a lot of characters in these poems, and I like all of them – “how is this still my favourite flavour house” is the question that ends the poem “Favourite Flavour House,” a cinematic list of all the unsavoury actions of one character after another – no question mark of course because it isn’t really a question – it is any reader’s favourite flavour house, this poem, this poetry!
Sadie Lawrence unfolds dawns for us, she hisses the river and hushes the night, she presents us the little sonic forest of the gurgling gut, shaved eyebrows, dead moths, the earth purring like a cat. This is the most romantic of poetry, funny and tender and glossy and ghostly. These are poems about how being a creature can be really very like being a human girl, when you hold a joint like a tea-cup, pinky finger out. Childhood is not very distant – empathy for the tiny pillars of sweat and tears screaming in the next door kindergarten comes from a place of understanding – we too sing with terror and howl with grief – such is poetry, such is life! If the daylit world of these poems is supersaturated and somewhat terrifying with teeth buried in the gardens and spiders in the cellars, the night time dreams are more terrifying still – teeth are kicked out in dreams, guts are strung up like streamers. “Thank you dreamland!” to quote from Nightmare Intermissions. I do feel very grateful to whatever dark realms of the unconscious produced these poems! For all the darkness these are poems full of life, and alert to the pleasures of friendship and family, porchlight and wet laundry, the sudden painful freedom, the ache and tenderness, that comes with the removal of an orthodontic retainer, how good and golden the weather can be.
