No Good
by Sophie van Waardenberg
In structure as well as content, this debut poetry collection has fully joined in the game on all sorts of levels. Many of the poems fall naturally into groups, and the various qualities of the groups work and develop together to become a rambunctious whole.
The language is vivid and three-dimensional. We can run from superglue to strawberries while ‘…held inside a duck’s bill, weighed/ against a slice of bread for softness’ (Sticky, p 12)
Or, in the ‘Love Poem’ sequence,
On one side of the highway: sun. The other
is for the deer, their feet glued down by snow.
It’s dusk. (p 41)
We come to life again in one of the ‘The Getting Away’ shorter poems
Sweeping the porch. Beating the rugs free
of skin and hair and scent, and peeling and shrinking
and tripping and laughing at what? (p 61)
The language covers a huge territory with a sense of immediacy and physical reality. And to fill the space even more, many of the poems are presented as groups. A twenty-page series of ‘Cremation Sonnets’ is the centre of the book; there are a half-dozen sonnets labelled ‘Love Poem’ in which even the adjectives (try ‘green’) pop in and out of the text depending on whether they are needed – to give a sense of growth, perhaps, or just to face down a Valentine’s heart.
And the series ‘Getting Away’ is made up of what we could call demi-sonnets, seven to nine lines each, with the tone of a finally judged conclusion after a great deal of experience, most of it not worth worrying too much about any more and therefore dropped out of the present text. They’re an interesting form to experiment with and fit nicely with the full-length sonnets in the book.
Love? Absolutely – but approached in careful increments, in full awareness of how something we are afraid to call ‘love’ can actually hurt. The ‘Love Poem’ sequence (six unnumbered sonnets) gradually introduces the lover’s body, and the expression of love, parallel with increasing the amount of furniture in the room and the number of colours introduced in passing. And I note that the last sonnet in the sequence has only 13 lines…possibly to avoid total commitment?
The third sonnet is here in full, and to my mind is about as ambivalent as you can get without giving up entirely!
I hated her the first time we went away
and we didn’t even go far. Took the only road
to the opposite shore, took a raw cabin
with a no-colour television, phone signal up the gravel path
or none. I almost hated her, but it was terror:
it was the Queen’s birthday, the long weekend,
it was the outdoor shower, the gorge that dropped
straight down, the wet fur of ferns’ curled fronds,
fresh eggs and windows cleaned for us,
and the woman in the big house who called us partners
more easily than we knew how ourselves. It was May.
Never hated her. Afternoon, red car to the sea.
We forded a thick inlet to find the second cover.
She held me by my legs, I held her shoulders, held my shoes.
Most of the poems are in perpetual motion – vivid and vital and in your face, full of enthusiasm for the act of being alive, regardless of whether it feels at any given moment like the good or like the no good. It’s still part of the equation, and well worth having, as of course is this book!
Review by Mary Cresswell
Title: No Good
Author: Sophie van Waardenberg
Publisher: Auckland University Press
ISBN: 9781776711789
RRP: $24.99
Available: bookshops
Author: Sophie van Waardenberg
Publisher: Auckland University Press
ISBN: 9781776711789
RRP: $24.99
Available: bookshops
RSS Feed
