Recent NZ Poetry reviewed by Elizabeth Morton

Shaggy Magpie Songs

Murray Edmond
Auckland University Press

Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle, sung Glover's magpies.

Murray Edmond's poems are, like the bird, sometimes monochromatic jester, sometimes crooner, sometimes curator of eclectic artefacts. They are your quintessential kiwi icon and your foreign fraudster. Most of all, they are playful and lyrical.

Edmond's latest collection is a quartet, with poems subsumed under the titles 'praise', 'nonsense', 'blues' and 'pop'. Don't expect these poems to conform to their taxonomy. There is plenty of nonsense in 'praise' and profundity in 'nonsense'.

European literati, philosophers, and characters from fiction stumble into New Zealand suburbia. We natter with Sartre in the Waikato. The Ancient Mariner is spotted in Avondale, amongst 'loan-sharks and two-dollar shops'. Nietzsche's 'Eternal Return' plays out in Glen Eden. There are poems for writers too. A poem for Lisa Samuels pays homage to her experimentalist lexicon, with its image of ‘roundabouts of neoliberal multiplicity’, whilst ‘Kiss the Impossible Good Night’ tips its hat to Kendrick Smithyman. There are many references, but this is not esoteric verse. It has too much fun for that.

Murray Edmond is a dramaturge and, in his poetry, characters caper across the stage – an imaginary camera panning from one scene to another. In ‘The Poet Returns to New York’ we are privy to something of a Vaudeville procession of celebrity artists. There’s playwright and poet, Frederico Garcia Lorca, and ‘Leonard Cohen out with his daughter’ and Frank O’Hara who ‘strolls on by in pyjamas’. Edmond transports the reader back to Hairy-Maclary-of-Donaldson’s-Dairy type rhymes of childhood. In moments of hilarity ‘Lorca’ is rhymed with ‘gawker’ is rhymed with ‘daughter’ is rhymed with ‘everyman-and-his-dog New Yorker’.

Edmond is like the class clown of a philosophy tutorial. He is the Goth dressed in fuchsia pink. Cut through the Dadaist gameplay, linguistic cartwheels and downright silliness, and there’s a good deal of existential angst to be found. There are lovers at the end of the world. There is loneliness and there is mortal anxiety. But everywhere is music, and any angst is met with clever quips that register like Smiths lyrics – ‘I used to love you darling / now you’re just my hobby’.

Tender Machines
Emma Neale
Otago University Press

‘Tender Machines’ is not an oxymoron - it is more a love affair between disparities. Emma Neale’s latest collection tugs together the bestial and the mechanical, emotion and its chemical underpinnings, the cyber network and human intimacy. Neale zigzags the dialectic, exploring the seams between terms that are ostensibly irreconcilable. Science and fairytale are married. Love is captured in data. The line between ‘Goodies’ and ‘Baddies’ is muddied. There is something unforced about this collection, and yet it is hefty in its scope. It takes on social injustice, technological anxiety, climate issues, popular culture, but also the nuanced study of humanity at its most solitary and vulnerable.

This is verse with a sense of potency. It reaches beyond its causal nexus, and taps society on the shoulder. It has a message. But this poetry wants to walk the talk, get its hands a little dirty:

‘This poem knows a couple of kids.
It wants to go into their homes
and put in insulation, double-glazed windows,
leave a week’s worth of groceries, exterminate the rats’

Neale writes around our dissociation from ourselves, and our embeddedness within social media platforms, and our fixation with data. Her people ‘Googled ‘how to stay in love’’ or do battle with Siri (‘I am Siri-us’) or update their Facebook statuses and search for ‘likes’. Somewhere within all this, it seems we have lost our humanity - ‘we have steeled ourselves’. Neale asks ‘Can you verify you are a human being, not a robot?’. The question is unsettling. It rattles the Ghost in the Machine.

Neale’s world is at once terrifying and familiar. It is the snug apocalypse we have shuffled into. Perhaps it is not the end of the world – more an end of Self as we know it, but this is equally worrying. All is not lost, however – not just yet. There is tenderness. These are tender, sometimes lonely, and very often baffled, machines:

‘What if the baddies are just scared, hungry,
don’t have a home, they’re cold and lonely’.

I often have good things to say about the poetry I encounter. There are many clever writers, saying many clever things. Emma Neale has rebooted the machine, adjusting the settings. Poetry is often seen as an indulgence. ‘Tender Machines’ is crucial and timely. We may be teetering at the edge of losing our humanity. Neale has a mirror and a fistful of questions.

‘About the reviewer: 

Elizabeth Morton is a poet and sometimes student. She has a keen interest in neuroscience. In her free time she collects obscure words in supermarket bags. She is a promiscuous reader, but her chief love is poetry. Her own poetry has been published in Poetry NZ, Takahe, JAAM, Blackmail Press, Meniscus and Shot Glass Journal, amongst other places. In 2013 she was winner of the New Voices, Emerging Poets competition. She was highly commended in the 2015 Kathleen Grattan Award.