2024’s chance to discover three new poets, three very distinct new voices. The way the sampler works is to showcase just enough to get a feel for a voice and a style, but also to present you with a variety, in just over twenty pages for each poet.
Tessa Keenan begins her selection with a poem called “A Room Recording”, seventeen lines without punctuation, except for the final full stop. It is worth reading more than once to fully capture the rhythm and the sense of where to pause and when to plough on. A room that hold both memories and life, clashing the important against the ordinary. “…a room where love was made and wraps were made the night before…”
Of the three poets in the collection, Keenan is the most creative with her white space on the page, being more innovative with the shape of her poems and especially with “Celestra” starting each line one letter space further into the page so the poem sits like a sliding slash across the paper.
I love to hear the quiet voices of the past in poetry, the talking and whispering of the ancestors. Keenan introduces it quite late in her selection. In “Tataraimaka Pā”, on a weather blasted picnic this is what we hear:
“The gravel mutters
Muskets and headless bodies mutter.
Last night the TV muttered ‘southerlies’”
The last three lines then go on to hint at everything deep and felt and too often forgotten or not seen at all.
Five pages later there is another pā poem which also has some great lines. This poem is called “Some Other Pā”.
“I grew up fifteen minutes’ drive from the islands where my ancestors’ children
fished, swam, threw tantrums, cuddled each other, and died. Fifteen minutes’
drive from the urapā with thousands of unmarked graves. My nana us buried
in a marked one, near her nana.
I grew up on land that, based on modern maps, is just outside that which I
have an ancestral connection to. There’s a bit of debated crossover between
the towns where the land belongs to both, says Te Puni Kōkiri. When you step
outside it you’re in the wrong zone.”
The change of style and tempo is very marked as we move into the works by nomesh dissanayake. His collection is called “Favourite Flavour House” and is a very different flavour indeed. The poems are all about the narrative, each one has a story to tell. Often it is about family and food. There is humour too.
Talking about the 1996 Cricket World Cup and the winning Sri Lankan team, dissanayake says:
“They played billy ocean’s when the going gets tough,
The tough get going
Over a montage of the best shots from the final
a victory lap
But when the going gets tough the educated emigrate.”
The poem “Mumma” is all about a crayfish. The crayfish. The one that Aravinda has talked about for years. He brings it into the restaurant still dripping from the sea. They all agree to keep it alive for a week, so when India returns from holiday she too can see the Mumma. But when she does come back, no-one is brave enough to kill the cray and now they all have to lie to Aravinda about how tasty she was.
The title poem, “Favourite Flavour House”, is a snapshot moment in time that describes what the poet sees as he walks into the restaurant kitchen. What each person is doing at that split second, what they are holding, what they are cleaning, what they are reaching for in the cupboard. It is the poetry version of slow motion cinema, panning across the room to see everything at once.
The last of the three poets is Sadie Lawrence with her collection called “Like Human Girls / all we have is noise”. Again the tone and pace change completely, this time to teenage girls and what the collection editor, Anne Kennedy, beautifully describes as a “stark suburban-Gothic tinge”.
In “All Teenagers are Tapestries” Lawrence describes a friend cutting open her palm as they are running from the cops, the mass of blood and the hospital visit:
“…we all shook
like tectonic plates –
like scared teenage girls”
And the last paragraph plays with parenthesis:
“(girlhood is made of blood
and it blooms just the same) (it spills
down your thighs , stems for your nose)
(sharing like teenage girls”
Again we see great inventiveness, as “[NIGHTMARE INTERMISSION]” describes a nightmare that runs like a text message conversation, different narrators on opposite sides of the page and text language; lol, u and ur. In the final poem there is a great line that rang so true:
“>it’s the part of summer where the citronella candle
starts to Almost Work”
Alongside all the youthful angst, the first time experiences and the memories of teenage homes now left behind, there is also a deeper, far more adult side. “All that death, I find it very beautiful” is a startlingly adult poem amongst the juvenilia. I googled juvenilia just to check the age range, because I have poetry books on my shelves with chapters and sections called this. Consensus seems to be that it is work produced when the author or poet is young, and I wonder if this poem is a taste of greater things to come. It begins:
“There is a rich architecture of gory arches, spines and rib cage –
meat so cadmium red it transcends colour and becomes
fact.”
By the end we learn that we are not in some terrible nightmare but simply at the Sunday market.
Reviewed by Marcus Hobson
Auckland University Press