All on the line: A bold debut and new works from seasoned poets

By Ariana Tikao (Otago University Press, $30)

Pepeha Portal is Ariana Tikao’s first collection of poetry, but the musician and author has written poems for years and many have been published separately. In her poem From, she speaks about her childhood, beginning with the stanza, “I’m from Redgrave Street, Hoon Hay. Potiki of seven ‘half-caste’ kids raised in a house built by the state.” She was the youngest child. Their parents gave them all European names and she was called Leanne. But she wanted to honour her Kāi Tahu ancestors and legally changed her name. In the poem Surfacing / Diving she writes of having a child: “I feel the cut and burn / of my moko’s creation / as when the baby’s / head stretches the puapua / slowly ripping perineal tissue / sweet hot pain / fire breathing her / into te o Mārama …” It may be a moment of agony, but it takes her to her full Māoritanga. There are poems based in ancient tales such as Te Tarere a Hikaiti, about a woman who was mistreated: “juiced and crushed / fermented heart / I leapt to my death / I sang my lament … I fell for you.” There are protest poems, others reflecting a strong sense of community, about pre-European customs such as the right season to plant. Intonation celebrates the late Moana Jackson, who always advocated for Māori. Tikao sees the world from a clear and compelling Māori perspective. Pepeha Portal is one of the most polished and forthright poetry collections I have seen for years.

By Alice Miller (Liverpool University Press, $25)

Alice Miller is a New Zealander living in Berlin. In earlier collections of poetry, The Limits and What Fire, she took a rather pessimistic view of the world and our future. But she always has a sharp wit and is careful in the way she examines people’s behaviour. She recalls a Jewish grandmother who had to flee from Nazi Germany. In Future Proof Miller writes: “To apply for a special German passport, I needed / proof my ancestors were persecuted, to show / their vanished business off Unter den Linden; / to listen to the current State’s persecution; and to never / call it that. I smile wide, a man says / I’m allowed here.” One of the most moving poems is Apology in which an older German man awkwardly apologises for the Holocaust. But there is much more to Miller’s poetry. Read deeply those about having a child as in Babies and Birth. She does not deal only with older wars but with some that are still going. And sometimes there is loneliness, as in the poem Real Bird where, “Some days I’m like the gannet / on that island where people left / concrete birds to try to attract a colony. / The poor gannet was the only real bird / left, courting the concrete birds …” Miller is one of the most thoughtful poets we have.

By Owen Marshall (Quentin Wilson, $37.50)

Owen Marshall’s Beyond the Border is his fifth collection of poetry and it is a very generous one, giving us fully 196 poems. While Marshall, probably better known as one of our pre-eminent short story writers, seems content in his age, many of his poems inevitably deal with memory, nostalgia, the past and lost friends. Fittingly, his opening poem Beyond the Border is an elegy for the late Vincent O’Sullivan, saying his friend “wielded the language of academia with the best, but also struck home with the intense simplicity of the butcher and the candlestick maker.” Very true. His poem Disunity gives us a moment of elder life: “My toes are farther from me now and snag / my blue socks when I attempt to dress them. / Other body parts are also distancing themselves / or disputing suzerainty …”. But nowhere is there self pity. There are good poems about the past, as in The Nostalgia Club, The Car Museum and Student Days. But there is also the exuberance of Watching Children Play where: “Everywhere are exhortations concerning remedies for infirmity and the improvement of our well-being, but nothing lifts my spirits more than to watch small children playing. No guise of cynicism, or cloak of subterfuge as they reach for life, just the vulnerability accompanying openness, innocence and trust.” And most brilliant of all is Orca. When Marshall was visiting the Antarctic, orca were near. He describes them as, “Streamlined royalty in black and white rising in gleaming crescent then curving back in such graceful choreography, yet bearing too the insolent demeanour of apex predators. One could aptly be named the name of some lightning-striking Viking god but comes instead from Latin – Kingdom of the Dead.” The best description I have ever read of orca. There are so many poems here that at least some are more mundane, but it is a great collection.

By Dženana Vucic (UQP, $29.99)

Dženana Vucic is a Bosnian-Australian who writes of the horrors of war. The war she deals with is the disintegration of what used to be Yugoslavia, where Serbs, Croats and other ethnicities ripped each other apart, meaning massacres, “ethnic cleansing”, and often rape used as a weapon. She knows about this from her childhood before she and her family migrated from Bosnia to Australia. This is a book about memory, and it can be bitter. In her poem First Year After War, she writes: “How do you fall from a building unshaken by bombs / How do you fall unrunning from gunfire,” – the thoughts of a 6-year-old when she walks in an Australian city. Or later in Fainting Goat she writes, “The first time I hear a car backfire / I throw myself / to the ground, / arms over head as though arms / might make a difference/ (not that they will, they have not)”. But she does not write only about war. There is the problem of why there is hatred between ethnicities, and she notes the massacre of Muslims by an Australian in Christchurch. And there is also the problem of language. Why should migrants have to forget their mother tongue? She speaks English but her parents insisted she also remember the Bosnian language.

Threading Between

By Dorothy Howie (Steele Roberts, $40)