Cilla McQueen, Axis by Cilla McQueen. Dunedin: University of Otago Press (2001). RRP $34.95

Reviewed by Terry Locke

Axis is serious fun spread over 140 pages of selected poems and drawings. I expected to be delighted and I wasn't disappointed. In a short review, one has to be selective about the points of departure one chooses in directing a potential reader to the kind of experience Axis opens up.

First the big picture. There are 91 poems here. This is not a volume to be skimmed; you're unlikely to crack the meniscus by so doing. More, the publishers have not skimped on page size. These pages are larger than ordinary. The poems have space to wriggle their toes and loll about. And then, there are the drawings. Most are pencil or ink; some use repetitive stencilling; all in their own way complement what's going on in the verse.

A place to start. The publisher's blurb tells us that "Cilla McQueen's poetry is very accessible and wide-ranging – from deft playing with language to taut, formal verses." I wonder who wrote that. I'll go with "deft" and "taut" (and would equally have gone with "heft" and "wrought"). But accessible? What is accessible?

Let's access the book on p.96. The poem is called "Kids on the Road"

Kids on the road
I am the one trailing sideways
in the pink dress
interested in stones
you know, I would like to kick
t.s.eliot in the head
because you shouldn't have to pass
english exams to love poetry
I don't want any more maps
a silk thread would be better

The first four lines are a sharp, childhood vignette. Just enough detail for the imagination to retrieve/compose a picture. "Trailing sideways" is interesting. There's something going on here. An invitation to see the pink dressed one in a certain way: lateral, off-beat, slowcoach, not eyes front. "Then wham bananaskin catapult." Uncapitalised Eliot is in danger of decapitation from poetic foot. Wozzidun to deserve this treatment?

Well, access is suddenly not so easy. Making sense now requires something of leap so that the tone of indignation is justified by identifying the hapless Eliot with a tradition of critical exegesis that generates reading maps for poetic devotees and excludes everyone else. Access is suddenly dependent upon a particular kind of cultural capital. Soooo.the poem is really conditionally accessible.

That's OK. The next few lines get us back on the road with the one in the pink dress directing her attention to particulars in the locale ("a coin on the road/a rusty key") – and then the programmatic resolve:

I'd just like to
smile at you broadly
and hand you the whole world
clean on a plate.

Such a programme connects with, say, the aspirations of Denise Levertov in such volumes as O Taste and See. (Post-structuralists would say it's a programme that simply can't be delivered on.)

Still, it's a pointer to the kind of poetry McQueen is setting out to write and the expectations/demands that might be made on us as readers interested in access. The same might be said for another assertion ("The Disappearance Of A Car"):

poetry's a
voice to talk with
and a language
for the voice to speak
in nearest words to net the dream
and hold it long enough to see.

This is'nt far from Frost's famous definition of poetry as a momentary stay against confusion. Except, I'm not sure that McQueen would altogether buy into the notion of confusion as characterising the state of things out there/inhere. Many of the poems, I'd argue, are celebrations of the process whereby order emerges or is a felt thing to be hallowed in one's transactions with experience. I'm using the word "hallowed" deliberately here because McQueen is not squeamish about giving such celebrations a spiritual tone. Hence poems such as "Vegetable Garden Poem (ii)" with it's celebration of innate design ("The grasses each have their exclusive/seed head design") and "Promises" with its apostrophe to "the huge springs of growing that hold / you up as we are held      like vessels / by the prayers of nuns".

Such poems, with their rich detail and carefully constructed (and notated) cadences, provide an immediate entry for readers. But in general, if I might use the image of "dance" which infuses this collection, readers need to be aware that McQueen's broad smile is also an invitation to dance. Just as the drawings show McQueen in the act of inventing scores/notations for experience, so the poems are themselves notating the potential act of reading – the "voice to speak" is a composer's voice.

This is particularly obvious in what I might term the pace of the dance. Poems like "Poppies" are a slow dance, taking the reader down the page in a slow unravelling of emergent order. Others such as "Fallout" are a fast dance, one perception leading to another, and the reader has to move fast in following the connections.

nuclear war
there go the matchstick house an
children under tricycles, goats paper cutouts
simultaneously the train comes out of the tunne
and the rock hits the coloured container boxes tha
catapult all over the place splitting and disgorgin
plastic spoons tractors hot water bottles TV sets

and so on.

Finally a note on "netting the dream". Besides being notated dances, these poems can also be thought of as dramas of consciousness – of the mind engaging with experience and making sense of it. It's archetypal thematic stuff, of course, but McQueen's approach to it is always fresh. The dream is sometimes easily accessed, sometimes not. It is always provisional and the fact of provisionality is also celebrated (see "Quark Dance"). Stability is balanced by uncertainly, permanence by flux, safely by risk-taking, shape (the meniscus) by the dive that would disturb the surface order, music by noise.

Overall, it's a wonderful array of performances. And it's great to have the drawings.