Dougal McNeill

This past week I’ve been in Brisbane, attending the Association for the Study of Australian Literature conference. Academic conferences often leave me feeling dispirited and glum; this one has me elated and full of scholarly pop and crackle. Five splendid days in fine company – learned, friendly, irreverent, open-minded and welcoming. It felt a model of what I’d like to present to people as what academic life should be.

Highlights? Michael Falk and Dylan Chng talking on fictions of and in AI (Michael offered a particularly exhilerating reading of a single word in a Kathryn Gledhill-Tucker story). Anita Heiss’s keynote on Black words and resistance. Sarah Holland-Batt’s the next morning on the histories of poetry and diplomacy, and how they intertwine. Holland-Batt’s collection THE JAGUAR I found in a store the next day; its opening poem will be worrying at me a while still. Dashiell Moore, Kedong Liu, Jiayi Wang and Brenda Machosky spoke on “Narrating Indigenous Pasts and Futures”. Susan Lever was witty and wise launching Julian Croft’s NEW AND SELECTED POEMS (and then Julian was wise and witty launching Susan’s LIFE of A. D. Hope). Graham Ackhurst! He was in conversation with Julieanne Lamond, and then I read his novel BORDERLAND in more-or-less one go in my hotel room that night. Darby Jones, Grace Lucas-Pennington and Rhianna Patrick offered challenging thoughts about First Nations literary criticism. Jeff Sparrow got us excited to read his LIFE of Lesbia Harford. Eugenia Flynn spoke on “Sovereignty in Practice: Indigenous Writing and Literary Culture in the Era of Artificial Intelligence”. Susan Lever was (again) witty and wise on A. D. Hope, this time on his writing to and from Fay Zwicky. Giacomo Bianchino poked and prodded at how poetry might fit in postwar socialist realism (oddly, was his conclusion). Wayne Bradshaw won me over completely to his case for “a vernacular renaissance” in the “Ocker highbrow” (take that Max Harris!). Lachlan Brown and Verity Oswin are new names for me as poets, and ones I’m glad to be following up in the weeks to come. And plenty more: my notebook is full of books and articles I’m now to follow up.

Just down the road was Archive Fine Books, almost as rich and various in its Australiana as Gould’s in Sydney used to be, but somehow a neat and tidy version. I bought a bagful of Thea Astley, Peter Steele, Fay Zwicky.

Brisbane will never be one of my Places: too hot, too sultry, too drawn-out and riverine for a “pallid child” of a “beer-and-whisky / Guilt culture” out of the “Gothic South” like me. But I caught a ferry from one side to the other, saw two pelicans quite self-contented and satisfied in a mangrove shoreline, wondered at a fig tree’s roots and generally managed to marvel at it all.

It’s striking how many of the most exciting younger poets at the moment – Xiaole Zhan, Modi Deng, Cadence Chung, Claudia Jardine – have trained as musicians at the same time as they have developed their writing. Jackson McCarthy is one of this group, too, and I wonder if it’s the discipline of music that has freed them all from the self-defeating New Zealand self-consciousness and awkwardness and inhibition around talent and craft and skill and effort that so often turns a hesitancy to speak into a conscious mangling of what could be beautiful speech. They’re not Fretful Sleepers! And part of what makes McCarthy’s Portrait – a debut collection I’ve just finished reading, and plan to re-read as many times as I can this week – so exciting and so fresh and so alive is its unembarrassed assurance in its own goodness. It swaggers! And it deserves to swagger. Making music is hard work, and the culture of music recognises effort and strain and precision in a way that what passes for reviewing here doesn’t often with literature. All of those competitions, for the players; for us listeners and viewers, less admirably, there’s the wonder of whether it’ll all come together. Watching Yunchan Lim on YouTube is a chance to revel in his brilliance; there’s also a slight thrill in imagining him messing it up. McCarthy doesn’t mess it up, but he’s unruffled either at letting us see the effort involved, the stitching and unstitching that goes into all of this performance of ease and cool. None of the tedium, in this collection, of a poet pretending it’s all just knocked together somehow despite himself. Portrait shimmers:

The yawn I pick up from his

yawn: a memory of a breath

in the surface of the dawn.

I’ve known some of these poems for a couple of years now, but reading them in new company and together as a stand-alone book brings them into a different (and flattering, and re-energising) order. Some of this is to do with musicality. The poems sound good together – they chime – and the different echoes (some, as with Auden and Ashbery, acknowledged; some, as with Manhire, unacknowledged) build to something more than their individual moments. There is the stillness, the music of the collection as the ‘space between the notes’ (the ‘small white horror’ of the ‘bones of a bird / in the grass’ my favourite). A funniness comes out, too, a kind of reckless zaniness that threatens all of that lyricism and stillness and almost – but never quite! – upends it into boyish play. I’ve thought of McCarthy from the beginning as a poet of wit. He’s also funny, quite a different thing. Some of that humour, and some of the swagger, is occasionally aloof and sometimes a little cruel. That’s a right of the young and the gifted and those with the nerve, certainly (just like striking the lacrimae rerum note), and it’s part of the pleasure, and of the wit (in “Uniform” especially). It’s also a little chilling, and a little frightening.

Portrait is interesting about men, too; in romantic ways, obviously (and winningly), but in other ways as well. I was about to write in ‘masculinity’, but that sounds too pious and academic and worthy. I just mean in things manly: the hang of t-shirts, certain tones of voice, ways of being social (and anti-social). Lots of women poets write interestingly about how women relate to other women, but it’s a topic men seem to find harder to approach about other men with the honesty of their curiosity intact. Vincent O’Sullivan ruined some of his most moving poems by getting self-conscious half-way through and deliberately hamming things up to avoid a real confrontation with his own intensities. O’Sullivan’s titles sound so often – it frustrates me no end – like a concert pianist banging his fists down on the keys after playing Chopin’s Études just to show he wasn’t taken in by the show. ‘Trakl, old mate’, ‘Nice morning for it, Adam’, ‘The trouble with reading, frankly’, ‘Disciples, frankly’, ‘Blame Vermeer’. It’s so dispiriting. The comparison might seem odd but, reading Portrait, I kept thinking of O’Sullivan in the moments of his I love best. McCarthy and O’Sullivan are both, in their different ways, Catholic Auckland, both prickly, smart, lyrical, writerly, measured, cagey. McCarthy’s ways of watching men, and thinking about men, thinking about the homosocial, track O’Sullivan’s without the latter’s self-sabotage and good-keen-mannerisms. That’s to do with history and generation, surely; but there’s a shared stance. The choice of Max Oettli’s Silver Star as a cover image (an inspired piece of design) suggests something of this roving, energetic, restless observation.

I love also McCarthy’s willingness to think about tradition as something to be evoked and played with and followed – Auden, Glück (ganz glücklich!), Ashbery, all in the universal dance. And I appreciate very much his willingness to think in public and in art being both Māori and Pākehā, and about the intersecting and interlocking lines of art, tradition, story and meaning being inseparable there. It’s a quietly determined stance and one that, without much fanfare, issues some challenges to readers and to critics. As it should.

What next? The (considerable) charm and beauty of this as a debut lies, for me, in its sense of order, of balance, of music. The contrast between a poised form and a disordered content is a constant, and does fine work. What would happen were the poet next to really allow himself ‘down the streets’ of his mind to ‘just look / at the people’s sudden faces’? McCarthy has shown he can write leggierio; can he let in some formal mess and disorder con brio? Is there room for affirmation through doubt? A few of the poems here felt, to me, a little too poised, a little too sure of their performance. ‘The Earth’ comes close to a kind of unpleasant jeering, closing itself and turning away from the sacred (or from me as a reader and my hopes to know the sacred, anyway). What of the encounter with a ‘sacred being’ that Auden puts at the heart of creation in ‘Making, Knowing, Judging’? ‘It may be noble or something unmentionable in a drawing room, it may be anything it likes on condition, but this condition is absolute, that it arouse awe’: there’s plenty of wonder in Portrait but, to my ears, it’s not a collection ready (yet) to let ‘awe’ in fully. That’s for what’s to come, I hope.

And that’s an early judgement from an early setting of readings; already I’m doubting myself. And the poems ask to be read again. They’re at work in the memory and in the ear.

An editorial gripe. Reality must be local and special at the point where we pick up the traces. That includes our bottoms. Someone at Auckland University Press ought to have insisted that the ‘ass’ in ‘dress pants’, the curving ‘ass’ in ‘the night / full of stars’ and the ‘beautiful white ass’ in ‘Santa Monica’ be corrected to arses. All of my Orsmans are at work and so I’m having to rely on Deverson and Kennedy’s much less charming New Zealand Oxford Dictionary, but even they are clear on the matter. Some editor couldn’t be arsed. They should of.

James Norcliffe, in his Landfall review, calls Manhire’s title “at once disingenuous and somewhat mischievous”. Maybe. I’ve started to suspect, re-reading the collection this weekend gone, that it’s best, sometimes at least, to take these poems, and this poet, as straight as you can. So much of the best of this book is “a homage paid to the native and naked dignity of man, to the grand elementary principle of pleasure”. It’s written using “the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation”. It is the “honourable characteristic” of this poetry that “its materials are to be found in every subject which can interest the human mind”, especially, in this case, Dunedin: its Botanic Gardens (“Our History lecturer”), its mysteries (“Explaining Dunedin”), its surroundings (“Outram”). There’s a hint at balladry in more than a few places - snatches of stories, at the least - and what I hear as an insistent kind of lyricism, a hovering around almost and not-quite-rhyme. Anne Kennedy writes somewhere (where?) about Manhire’s “distillations”. Lovely word! They’re on display here, too. And childhood, plenty of it. And melancholy. Manhire is “stepping westward” now, just like he always was.

The sound of the lyrical O!, bound to child and man by ‘natural piety’, is all through this collection, as is its terser counter-sound of “oh.” O is the signature Manhire vowel (“eventually we all shall go / into the dark furniture of the radio”), and the way O can sound elation, exhalation, deflated recognition and dismissal - from O! to ohhh to oh - is as good a guide as any to what I love about what’s at work here:

The world begins to drone.

You’re on your own.

Something was stopping my parents' garage door closing, so I had a poke about to find out why. This is what came down and, as it did, my mind went to the “bereft elaboration” of the poem in Vincent O’Sullivan’s Seeing You Asked (1998). “It is one thing”, the poem says, to tell a child that birds “have their reasons”. It’s quite another, seeing the “cracked spilled work of instinct” to know that this is all, for them and for us, a mystery, the nest a message “franked / from places we do not understand, but fear.” “The child”, the poem ends, “consoles the cup of woven air.”

Reece King’s exhibition The Ogee & Manaia, at the Hocken Library until 1st August, is big and busy and bustling and painterly. It’s a lot of fun. The works all gesture invitingly towards representation, but never quite get there. They invite interpretation. There’s a lot of everything: colour, shape, canvas, line. Some of the paintings look as if they might just have been pieces of graffiti on a stretch of city concrete, and then another look cancels the thought and they seem elegant, poised, ready. It’s exhuberant. It’s so much.

And what a title! A manaia, in Tina Makereti’s words, is a human form but one “going between the earthly and the spirit forms”. It’s a “figure of transformation and communication”. And as for the ogee . . . Chambers glosses it as “an S-shaped curve or line”. The OED has it as “an arch whose curve is formed by two S-shaped or double curves meeting at its apex” (it’s a word more than 700 years old). __Ogee __was the name of the doomed style magazine Nick Guest and Wani Ouradi worked on in Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. Nick felt that it was time for a new Analysis of Beauty as he traced the bend along his lover’s back. Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty mentions the ogee as “entirely composed of waving lines”. Oh Gee! OMG. Is King the O.G.?

Zealandia by night! Last night, in fact. Not more than five minutes' walk from the entrance, we saw a kiwi pukupuku nosing it about in a ditch. Stopped by a bit of fencing and saw a wētā punga (Cook Strait giant weta). Wandered for a while and were shown, peeking out from a wee bit hole in a tree, the eye of a moko kakariki / green gecko. All in walking distance of the Parliament buildings in a capital city. Glorious.