Contemporary New Zealand Poets in Performance, edited by Jack Ross and Jan Kemp. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2007. RRP: $45.00

REVIEWED BY Terry Locke

This collection follows fast on the heels of the 2006 collection of Classic New Zealand Poets. So let me begin by congratulating Auckland University Press and the editors for their enterprise. And special thanks to Jan Kemp, who figures in the Waiata Sound Archive of 1974 and whose vision led to the establishment of the Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive of 2004. This book and its two CDs, and with Richard Killeen's striking cover, bespeaks a number of narratives including Kemp's. Implicated in it are poetic lives, with their victories and defeats; the ebbs and flows of cultural history, with its gaps and continuities; and above all, the survival and burgeoning of poetry as an art and craft in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

In this brief review, I will take the value of this collection to be self-evident. I will therefore be exploring the nature of its interest to readers - general, academic, literary, student - by considering what it isn't and what it is.

In their preface, Ross and Kemp remind readers of their main selection criteria, i.e. "literary merit...a strong body of published work...[and] a commitment to performance and the living voice as an integral part of the work" (p. x). However, while the editors have selected for inclusion poets born during the fifteen years from 1944 to 1958, they can only in a limited sense be described as having selected the poems themselves. While the editors have contributed to a winnowing of the corpus of verse claimants, this collection primarily reflects a series of self-selections on the part of the poets themselves.

For each of the poets, then, sequenced chronologically by date of birth, we have a relatively tiny group of poems drawn from a somewhat larger group deemed by them as suited for oral performance. So what are the points of interest when we focus on the mostly bimodal nature of the reading/hearing experience? (I say mostly, because two of Apirana Taylor's readings have Maaori flute accompaniment.)

The first, I think, relates to what the editors refer to as the "living voice" itself. What does "living" mean? In one sense, these are not "living" voices at all, in the sense of a "live" performance. These are technologically mediated voices, and it's clear that there are differences in mediation between the 1974 Waiata recordings and the latter 2004 Sound Archive ones, with the former having more echo. Certainly, the 27 poets included are ample testimony to the fact that all human voices are unique. Voices change, also, over time.   Compare Bob Orr reading of "The X" (1974) with his reading of   "Eternity" (2004, from his wonderful Valparaiso collection), and you will know that the voice itself has a story to tell.

Here's another point of interest. Suppose we were to rank these poets from most theatrical in their delivery to most casual. I'm not using either of these terms in a pejorative sense. By theatrical, I'm thinking of poems as performed as opposed to shared, declaimed rather than uttered, and intoned rhetorically for a kind of predetermined effect. A number of the poems in this collection take us directly to the underbelly of New Zealand society (Peter Olds' "Waking up in Phillip Street" and Cilla McQueen's "Fuse", for example). What's stunning about Alan Brunton's poem, "The Man on Crazies Hill", is not just the "content". What's stunning is the fact that Brunton's performance of it is so beautifully tailored to the heteroglossic mélange of "voices" within the text itself. You might say that the rendition gains its effect by virtue of the fact that Brunton the poet comes across as possessed by multiple voices that managed to find their way into his poem in his act of composing it. You get a similar sense listening to Api Taylor's hair-raising performance the classic, "Sad Joke on a Marae", or David Eggleton (in "Teen Angel" doing a Robin Williams Vachel Lindsay imitation).

At another extreme, you get readings which might be described as conversational and intimate. I'm thinking "intimate" in two senses here. The first applies to a sense of easy connection with an audience. An example of this is Keri Hulme's reading of an extract from "Fisher in an Autumn Tide" (which in fact does have an audience and comes from the Going West Books & Writers Festival Recordings Archive) and Cilla McQueen's laconic reading of "Living Here". A second kind of intimacy occurs in poems which dramatise a situation where the speaker is addressing some "other". I can't decide on the sexiest voice in the collection. I'm torn between Paula Green's breathy reading of "Two Minutes Westward" (a great counterpoint to Fairburn's "The Cave" from the Classic collection) and Michele Leggott's sensuous reading of "cairo vessel", a kind of reworking of the Song of Solomon for male and female voices.

If you're watching the texts of these poems as "spatial things" while you are hearing them in relentless time, some other points of interest emerge. You find yourself thinking about text selection and issues of immediate as opposed to delayed impact. Some texts manage to canter alongside their oral renditions quite comfortably. Others cry out to the voice to slow down. Such poems need to be absorbed in a quiet moment, perhaps, and have the voice-over added at a later time (Ian Wedde's "Sonnets for Carlos", for example).

I also found myself interested in the fit between the poem-text as encoding reading directions through its notational devices (spacing, line-breaks and so on) and their actual delivery. (I'm thinking of American poet Denise Levertov's describing a line-break as a non-syntactical pause having meaning in a poet's thinking-feeling process.) I'm really pleased to see Graham Lindsay's work here (no relation to Vachel, I suspect). Still, if you look at the text while he reads "Cloud silence", you'll see that there is a disconnect between the notation (especially the line-breaks) and the reading. It's not a criticism. It's just curious. (I have an old recording of William Carlos Williams reading "Burning the Christmas Greens". Hearing it, you get the sense of his being possessed by some kind of "energy in the moment", which has scant regard for his own notation.) By contrast, there is Geoff Cochrane's reading of "Zigzags", which is measured to his own notation.

To conclude, what poem continues some kind of sway with me as I write? Right now, it is Sam Hunt's aching reading of "Bottle to Battle to Death", where something awful about the New Zealand man's refuge in silence stands naked. It guess it's appropriate to end this review with Hunt, since he, more than anyone else, has taken the voice of poetry to the heartland.