The Life and the Dark by Richard Reeve. Auckland: Auckland University Press (2004), RRP: $21.99.
Reviewed by TERRY LOCKE
When I reviewed Richard Reeve's first book of poetry, Dialectic of Mud, for English in Aotearoa, I drew attention to the poet's description of the impulse behind his poems as deriving "...from a more complete and even reverential acknowledgement of the encompassing world, which can come only after we have accepted our own finitude." This description, I think, applies to this young writer's second book, The Life and the Dark, the title of which would not be out of place on a religious tract.
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In fact, this book is religious in its own way, though in its own terms which are very much concerned with the elemental nature of the religious impulse. Thus, a poem in the book's fourth and last section, "Te Anau Epiphany" begins:
There might be no setting, no dribble of vines, nor anything
whose voluble exhalations become what we call this lakeon boulders, just a phrase's intimately hollowed-out inside,
a sentence in which the John of him subsists, his senseof some inexhaustible completeness, without poise, perfect,
devoid of purpose, a meaning which is its own, and him.
This is not straightforward verse. For a start, it is not clear who the "John of him" is: a baptiser? a gospel-writer? an out-door privy? I have seen one comment (Robert Sullivan and Anne Kennedy) refer to this poem as having to do with baptism. However, epiphanies (as moments when the divine is revealed) tend to be unnecessarily connected with baptism. And I am inclined to see this poem as about such a moment.
If we attend to the language Reeve has used, and this man is nothing if not deliberate, then we might note the words chosen which in some way connect with vocalisation and language: "dribble" (at a pinch), "voluble", "call", "phrase" and "sentence". We might also note that a "setting" can mean a piece of music composed for particular words, and that the word "become" can mean appropriate to or commensurate with. Whatever the experience of epiphany, the writer here can be thought of as drawing attention to some final inability of language to articulate it.
All he has recourse to (if he must vocalise) are words which in a way defy easy meaning - "a phrase's intimately hollowed-out inside", for example, where the epithet "hollowed-out" is hugely resonant and really uncontainable (hollowed out rocks, self-hollowing as an ultimate sacrifice, loss, hollowed logs as childhood hiding places, etc, etc). By the time one reaches the third couplet, there is something more easy to connect with: "his sense / of some inexhaustible completeness" (appropriate for an epiphany) and its qualifiers "devoid of purpose" and having a meaning that is unique and somehow constitutive of the speaker's own identity.
(To savour "devoid of purpose", imagine an English classroom where the teacher has given herself permission to conduct conversations and silences around texts which have been freed of the necessity of being linked to problem-solving or behavioural learning outcomes - where extrinsic accountability has been superseded by a curriculum which justifies itself by what happens moment by moment in a particular kind of engagement.)
I'm aware that I'm about to stop talking about this poem just six lines into it. There is no one way to do a review, and what I have done so far has been to make a connection with a review of a previous book (that's a fairly standard feature in terms of the genre) and put my own reading (warts of uncertainty and all) in the spotlight (less standard and more honest). As Bill Manhire once suggested in an interview in English in Aotearoa, English teachers need to do more of this risk-taking with their students as a way of strategically undermining their own authority.
If I were to consider using Reeve with an English class, I'm not sure I'd use this poem for starters. If I were, I'd begin with a writing task. I'd get students to research the word "ineffable" and write four lines where they were attempting to find language to express it.
One possible starting point, though I'm not going to develop it here, is to regale them with stories about "Long-drops I Have Known" and ask them to write their own version of "One day in the life of a blowfly at the bottom of a long-drop". I would then risk my male students being swept away by a scatalogical frenzy by introducing them to the poem "Blowflies at the Bottom of a Fiordland Toilet" (yep, "bottom" is a pun I'm afraid). By virtue of this poem alone, Reeve is fated to be mortalised as the New Zealand poet who wrote the words: "O Father forgive us, for we like to eat shit." However, decorum forbids my continuing with this theme. Rather I will conclude this review with some considerations in respect of how I would approach two poems: "Port Terns" and "Thus".
My starting point would be a definition of concrete language from Every Student's English Language Manual as language that presents its subject with striking particularity and sensuous detail, relying on images (qualities received through the senses) of sight (visual), sound (aural), touch (tactile), taste and smell. I would engage students in uses of language that reinforce the distinction between concrete and abstract. Then I would share with them some words from Reeve's poem "Poem Beyond Love": "Your voice is the first plunging of an oar, the vee of a swan / gliding into night." We would note that some sharp images are being used here. We might also comment on the fact that this is a kind of metaphor, but more importantly do some wonderings about how we might make sense of "voice" being described in this way.
Before turning our attention to the longish poem "Port Terns", I would set a writing task which asks students to describe a place and what's happening therein such a way that the place is there in the language they use. In other words, I want the thinginess of the place to be reflected in the thinginess of the language they use. We'd discuss the challenge of doing this. Then we'd move from our own paltry efforts to "Port Terns" and I'd draw their attention to a succession of words on the first page of the poem: "greasy", "slapping", "crashed", "puncturing", "screams", "crumpling", "shivered", "puddled", "pulsing", "ruddered", "pooped", at so on (you get the idea). You could say that such words are being used to describe something, but it's more than that. Quite a number of these words evoke tactile qualities (touch) and body sensation. It's as if Reeve is wanting to find a language to em body the physical sense of being somewhere.
The somewhere in this poem is clearly a harbourside, probably Dunedin, on a particular night. On the face of it, not a lot happens. The speaker begins the poem at the end of a wharf and two-and-a-half pages later has left the wharf, walking up a sloping street "towards a cube of warmth / out of the night, tasting failure, / blank, drenched, and in awe of the world." The drama is in the language, which is always under pressure in Reeve's poetry. What is the nature of the failure the speaker is tasting? One clue might be found in the lines beginning:
Staring into the swell, I looked for
words: the moment hoisted
into its state of grace, untangled from the mesh
that clung stupidly to the pegged logs
of the wharf...
Whatever it means to "hoist" a moment into its state of grace, it would appear that the search for words is unsuccessful. Indeed, the natural elements of their very essence ("illiterate") seem antagonistic to the "world-occluding self-importance" of language (as per the reduction of the sign "Private" to a mere "P...at."). Why would someone describe language as "world-occluding" and "self-important", especially someone who writes poetry? Now there's a question that might prompt some interesting answers.
Before looking at "Thus", I'd introduce them to the idea of a motif and I'd explain to them that many poets tend to have favourite words and concepts that recur throughout their poetry. Two of Reeve's favourites are "filament" and "incident/incidence/incidental". Dictionary definitions for these are as follows:
filament: 1. a slender thread-like object, 2. a metal wire in an electric light bulb, which glows white-hot when an electric current is passed through it.
incident: 1. affair, circumstance, episode, event, fact, happening, occasion, occurrence, proceeding 2. accident, confrontation, disturbance, flight, scene, upset.
incidental: accidental, adventitious, attendant, casual chance, fortuitous, inessential, minor, odd, random, secondary, serendipitous, subordinate, subsidiary, unplanned.
I'd explain that "Thus" contains both of these words, but before we look at it (its' only sixteen lines long), we're going to do an experiment around motif. Remember, these are Year 13 students and we've forgotten for a moment about the NCEA. We do a quick revision on haiku and I ask each class member to write one short poem which uses the word "filament" as a metaphor or simile (and yes, I write one or two myself). When we've done our class anthology we investigate the associations of the word "filament" that have been utilised metaphorically. Filament as a slender thread, e.g. as symbolising the fragility of a connection one might have with something? Filament as associated with a particular kind of responsiveness (as in "My heart was a filament which glowed when you glanced up at me."). The general point is that a motif is a recurrent image or concept with a regular cluster of associations. Here is the beginning of "Thus":
This eye, alive behind
Summer's filaments, the straw
That trembles in the wind
On the edge of the blueWide expanse of ocean -
Constrains within its core
The broken horizon,
The graveyards of the shore.
We are now in a position to make sense of the phrase "Summer's filaments". In a poem that would appear to be about the eye, the phrase seems to be suggesting something about the way the eye connects the viewer with the wider environment. (You'll notice the second stanza suggests physical width, fragmentation and history; that's quite an expanse.) Haiku-like, the images move from the close-up ("eye" and "straw") to the panoramic. Interestingly, in the phrase "the straw / That trembles in the wind" (another metaphor for the eye), the second cluster of meanings for "filament" is brought in - that associated with a particular form of responsiveness. The "eye" here is a responder in a particular way, and also a "constrainer".
The second half of the poem also uses the word "alive", and attributes it to the word "pupil" (eye and learner). I have my own view about what is happening here in the second half of the poem. (I'd want to tease out with students the meaning of the expression "Has turned in on itself". What happens when an eye does that? And what is the connection between this and "tear"?)
As for "incidental" - and to conclude - some of the key associations of the word are "accidental", "adventitious", "attendant", "serendipitous" and "unplanned". Reeve, I think, is one of the brightest poetic prospects we have produced in New Zealand for a long time. He's frighteningly young. And he walks a tightrope, writing poems driven by a determination to be faithful to the serendipitous, the accidental, the attendant and the unplanned while at the same time fashioning his work to the constraints of time-honoured forms such as villanelles and sonnets. It really is quite wonderful stuff.