Beloved country
An instant classic offers a compassionate tableau of rural life and undomesticated nature.
Janet Newman’s UNSEASONED CAMPAIGNER (Otago University Press, $27.50) is one of those rare poetry collections that deserves to be an instant classic. A beef farmer in Horowhenua, she writes about farming and rural life in a way that is compassionate without being sentimental, thoughtful without being preachy, and enriched with vivid imagery. She understands that farm animals have their own impulses and feelings, but she also knows where they stand in the food chain. More than anything, it is her eye for detail that sustains this collection. Look at her perfect description of trees in “Drought, Horowhenua”, or of a steer being loaded for the slaughterhouse in “The Rig,” and marvel at her skill with words. A whole section is devoted to memories of her father, also a farmer, in which she creates a rounded, nuanced portrait, not a soft elegy. When she turns to ancient kahikatea forests lost to farming, and the ways of the hawk, her account of wild, undomesticated nature is as skilled as her depiction of cattle and farm dogs.
Tim Grgec’s ALL TITO’S CHILDREN (VUP, $25) is the sober and insightful account of a closed society – a collection of political and social concerns. In the 1950s, Grgec’s grandparents fled to New Zealand from Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslavia. Tito was much admired in the West as the former chief of partisans and the communist leader who stood up to Stalin and went his own way. But he was still a dictator and his secret police were everywhere. In a bricolage of official documents, brief prose statements and short lyrics,
Grgec builds up the image of a watched society where rumour is rife because propaganda is the only “news” available. Tito is either worshipped as a great leader or feared. As Elizabeta the peasant girl says, “We whispered stories … around the village, even though they were forbidden. Tito’s name crossed many lips and, after many years, the pictures of him over every blackboard grew real pairs of eyes.” Yet there is a sense of loss and huge nostalgia for the homeland once freedom is won. Enforced exile is never a happy affair.
SEA-LIGHT (VUP, $25) is Dinah Hawken’s ninth collection of poetry and is consistent with her earlier ones, such as Ocean and Stone. Hawken writes about the human condition, such as a closely observed account of a young woman’s behaviour on a train, or her own advancing age and the death of her sister. But her forte is poems about nature. In “Growth”, a man has an epiphany while observing the beauty of a pōhutukawa. However, it is the sea that takes up most of her attention, especially in its more placid state. In “Leaving Hauparu Bay”, the poet finds solace by observing a calm body of water. Hawken writes mainly short and lean poems and rarely indulges in obscurities. Her ecological concerns are sometimes expressed stridently, but the main effect of Sea-light is lyrical. l