AUP New Poets 10
by Tessa Keenan, romesh dissanayake, Sadie Lawrence; Anne Kennedy (ed)
AUP (here aka Anne Kennedy) has again given us three new voices with an interesting and entertaining spread: one tending towards immersion in the present and blame of the past, one with a multifaceted awareness of language and geographical differences, and one of almost physical revulsion towards a world which gives young people no reassuring ideas about what is coming next.
Tessa Keenan lives in a two-piece world, one in which the past is as significant as the present. She looks from one side to the other – perhaps for patterns? The poem ‘Celesta’ is a universal pattern, an alphabetic poem, which brings us up short at the end with an ending which is not definite at all, forcing us to look to the future. And in ‘Some Other Pā’ we hear:
I map myself.
Even when I’m my stillest, I’m always running between two towns, two maps.
We are people in motion now. We go towards and away from every home. (p 19)
Her poems seem to compare two different stories, both plausible. She tends to speak from one place at a time, but from that perspective, she is looking for alternatives, different levels of meaning, some of them foisted on us by time itself and some of them gratuitously added by ourselves.
romesh dissanayake, however, is a world traveller both geographically and linguistically. While he easily recognises the chaos this entails, he doesn’t seem to find it disconcerting. In ‘Natasha says we shouldn’t heat our curries too high in the microwave’ (p 45), he ends:
we can do what we damn please
because this is our poem
about being on holiday
just try and catch us and
like free roaming stray dogs
we’ll duck out stage right
whenever we like
But not disconcerting is not the same as understandable. The vase-shaped concrete poem ‘Two gentle strangers’ uses four different writing systems – read the book! (p 34) – to describe the existential impact of not only travelling from A to B but also of arriving, possibly unbroken. The fact that the poet is not thrashing around in misery does not mean that that his worlds are either comprehensible or easy. The geographic spread symbolises the vast cultural differences he is up against.
Sadie Lawrence speaks from the middle of a group. Her titles, such as ‘All Teenagers are Tapestries’ (quoted below) or ‘Girls Against Minimalism >:-)’, focus on the blood and chaos that comes with being a female and teenaged:
(girlhood is made of blood
and it blooms just the same) (it spills
down your thighs, stems from your nose)
(sharing like teenage girls (p 60)
It’s a very physical world she lives in, full of blood blood blood and all girls together (no ‘young women’ here), and she runs her hands through the physical world as though it were her lovers’ hair. She sometimes leaves aside her revulsion towards her body but not for long. Of the three poets in this collection, Lawrence seems to be most consistent in her views, though the views are all consistent with a horrible scary world – a world seen from an age when the future is totally invisible (but inescapably in front of you, like it or not). She seems to sum it up here, in a very universal ‘heartbreak (living next to the kindergarten)’ (p 70):
the anger at being perceived as small
at odds with the knowledge that we are/
we sing with terror and howl with grief/
all we have is noise/
by Tessa Keenan, romesh dissanayake, Sadie Lawrence; Anne Kennedy (ed)
AUP (here aka Anne Kennedy) has again given us three new voices with an interesting and entertaining spread: one tending towards immersion in the present and blame of the past, one with a multifaceted awareness of language and geographical differences, and one of almost physical revulsion towards a world which gives young people no reassuring ideas about what is coming next.
Tessa Keenan lives in a two-piece world, one in which the past is as significant as the present. She looks from one side to the other – perhaps for patterns? The poem ‘Celesta’ is a universal pattern, an alphabetic poem, which brings us up short at the end with an ending which is not definite at all, forcing us to look to the future. And in ‘Some Other Pā’ we hear:
I map myself.
Even when I’m my stillest, I’m always running between two towns, two maps.
We are people in motion now. We go towards and away from every home. (p 19)
Her poems seem to compare two different stories, both plausible. She tends to speak from one place at a time, but from that perspective, she is looking for alternatives, different levels of meaning, some of them foisted on us by time itself and some of them gratuitously added by ourselves.
romesh dissanayake, however, is a world traveller both geographically and linguistically. While he easily recognises the chaos this entails, he doesn’t seem to find it disconcerting. In ‘Natasha says we shouldn’t heat our curries too high in the microwave’ (p 45), he ends:
we can do what we damn please
because this is our poem
about being on holiday
just try and catch us and
like free roaming stray dogs
we’ll duck out stage right
whenever we like
But not disconcerting is not the same as understandable. The vase-shaped concrete poem ‘Two gentle strangers’ uses four different writing systems – read the book! (p 34) – to describe the existential impact of not only travelling from A to B but also of arriving, possibly unbroken. The fact that the poet is not thrashing around in misery does not mean that that his worlds are either comprehensible or easy. The geographic spread symbolises the vast cultural differences he is up against.
Sadie Lawrence speaks from the middle of a group. Her titles, such as ‘All Teenagers are Tapestries’ (quoted below) or ‘Girls Against Minimalism >:-)’, focus on the blood and chaos that comes with being a female and teenaged:
(girlhood is made of blood
and it blooms just the same) (it spills
down your thighs, stems from your nose)
(sharing like teenage girls (p 60)
It’s a very physical world she lives in, full of blood blood blood and all girls together (no ‘young women’ here), and she runs her hands through the physical world as though it were her lovers’ hair. She sometimes leaves aside her revulsion towards her body but not for long. Of the three poets in this collection, Lawrence seems to be most consistent in her views, though the views are all consistent with a horrible scary world – a world seen from an age when the future is totally invisible (but inescapably in front of you, like it or not). She seems to sum it up here, in a very universal ‘heartbreak (living next to the kindergarten)’ (p 70):
the anger at being perceived as small
at odds with the knowledge that we are/
we sing with terror and howl with grief/
all we have is noise/
Review by Mary Cresswell
Title: AUP New Poets 10
Author: Tessa Keenan, romesh dissanayake, Sadie Lawrence
Publisher: Auckland University Press
ISBN: 9781776711239
RRP: $29.99
Available: bookshops
Author: Tessa Keenan, romesh dissanayake, Sadie Lawrence
Publisher: Auckland University Press
ISBN: 9781776711239
RRP: $29.99
Available: bookshops
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