Letters, Conversations

Press, 13 November 1982, Page 16

Letters, Conversations

Letters. Selected Poems by Riemke Ensing. The Lowry Press, 1982. 53.50. The Silences Between (Moeraki Conversations). By Keri Huhne. Auckland University Press 0.U.P., 1982. $6.40. (Reviewed by Peter Simpson) Wordsw’orth. who wandered lonely as a cloud, and wrote his poems out of “the bliss of solitude," also celebrated the poet as a communicator, a "man speaking to men." The pull towards solitude and the contrary pull towards . relationship, especially through their lonely art. are often found together in poets. R. A. K. Mason, for instance, sang of what he called "brotherhood" out of an ecstasy of isolation: “this solitary hard-assaulted spot, fixed at the friendless outer edge of space." ■ The poet may be not only a man speaking to men. but also of course a woman speaking to men, or to women. Different as they are in most respects. Riemke Ensing and Keri Hulme, two strong new women poets (these are both first collections), are alike in that both appear to conceive of poetry as an essential act of communication projected from the solitude at the “outer edge of space," the physical and mental aloneness in which the poet resides. For Ensing poems are letters — both the letters of the alphabet out of which they are pieced together and epistles addressed to distant (or even dead) friends or relatives — designed to keep open the fragile lines of communication: My book fills up with notes the jottings of. letters sent or thought of always in winter it seems when, ttje heavy weave of water hangs from the sky and whole landscape eclipse in clouds silent as movies. For Hulme poems are conservations (the words “verse" and "conversation"

actually have the same semantic origins), ways of bridging the silences between people, between the living and the dead, and between the east coast of Moeraki (from where her family comes) and the west coast of Okarito (where she lives): I am polishing my grand-dad's tohu.

It is a small piece of pounamu. translucent and shaped like an elongated tear. Or a mere. His father was a traveller, a refugee from this coast. I have brought his tohu back home, but I don't know whether I have come home. Ensing’s poems are for the most part sombre, intense, and honest meditations taking their emotional colouration from a succession of vividly realised winter landscapes. The tendency towards melancholia and self-absorption is checked, however, by a determined focusing on the particular recipient imagined for each poem, a way perhaps of consciously avoiding the solipsistic perils of what Keats called "the Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime."

The mood is enlivened, too. by evoking the temperament and environment of the correspondent which often contrasts effectively with the poet's own. In "Conversations for Miro” and "Fires from Chagall" the poems are addressed not to personal acquaintances, but to famous artists whose radiant and ebullient worlds Ensing appears to be drawn to by the attraction of opposites. Her own work is more reminiscent of Colin McCahon (alluded to in one poem): "the colour is personal sombre or black depending on the gesture." Occasionally the verse is uncertain in tone, the informalities of the epistolary medium assorting awkwardly with the level seriousness of her natural manner. Some of the poems hover, too, uncertainly between conventional verse forms and more experimental modes. But this is a solid and impressive first book, superbly printed by the Lowry Press at the University of Auckland, the famed printer Bob Lowry, after whom the press is named, would have approved. Keri Hulme is a vigorous and gutsy poet whose work is marked by immense vitality. Her book is sprawling, untidy, formless, an impression intensified by the bewildering variety of type faces used by the publisher for titles and texts. On one page I counted no fewer than seven different types. Nominally the book is divided into six sections (or “conversations"), each containing a number of shorter poems, though in some places it is hard to tell where one poem ends and another begins. Gradually, however, the chaos begins to subside and one becomes aware of pattern and coherence, of links between the poems in each section, and of lines of continuity between one section and another. The reader is sustained past initial confusion (deepened for a unilingual pakeha reader by the frequent use of Maori words and phrases, especially for ’ titles) by the vividness, humour, passion and abundant humanity of the writing. Her subjects range from whilebaiting in a West Coast river ("Moonbeshotten. the silver sheep/stare and stare and shiver/ while the whitebait with moonlight eyes/ go running up the river") to hard-porn night-club acts in downtown Honolulu. Perhaps her most striking quality is a distinctive combination of force and delicacy,

Kcri Holme's voice (female, Maori, South Island coastal) comes to us from a new direction. It is well worth listening to.