Calypso Bob Orr (AUP, 2008) RRP $24.99 ISBN 186940405X

Majella Cullinane

After reading Orr's fourth collection Calypso (referring to the sea nymph who detained Odysseus on the island of Ogygia for seven years), it came as little surprise to me to discover that Orr works as a boatman on the Waitemata Harbour. This collection, divided into four sections, abounds with the aquatic and marine, and also comprises poems on travel, family and myth.

The first poem, ‘Captain Odysseus', explores myth in a playful, conversational tone:

My skipper an old schemer
by the name of Captain Odysseus
whose ginger beard reminds me
of a map of Greece.
He still harps
on about that hellish voyage
he once made home from Troy.

In ‘Bali', "where fishermen/ at dawn/ on boats that fly like birds/ smiled back in from/ the reef/ through the surf" with its clipped, vibrant lines, suggests movement and a kind of pulling away, reflected in the closing lines:

My flight the silver glint
of Garuda ...
and my heart
in a
thousand pieces

Travel in a new place echoes back to earlier places in the poem ‘San Francisco':

Golden Gate Bridge
a dream of Japan
rock garden and water and red autumn leaf
seen through mist
where the Pacific Ocean
brims like a blue tear.

My favourite poem was the title poem of the first section, Purple Octopus, with its modern references to Euros and weapons of mass destruction, interspersed with Greek myth; a poem which is part dramatic monologue, part narrative and centres around Odysseus and Homer:

I didn't sail away because of Helen
she meant nothing to me in particular -
I had always found her vain
self-centred and shallow.
Certainly she was beautiful
but no more than any other Greek celebrity.
No I didn't sail away because of Helen
as it happened she was just my great escape ...

The 2nd section, Seven Songs and an Anchor,  continues with the travel theme, but also contains ‘My bookshelves', an amusing poem about different writers from the point of view of the poet's bookshelves:

Karl Stead looks askance at Keri Hulme
Janet Frame likes to keep her own company
Homer catches a sign of surf in Conrad's ear
Jack Kerouac is freaking out beside Emily Dickson

‘Samoa' is full of the tastes, colours and sensations of travel:

I wandered aimless about Apia's ramshackle markets
tasted a watermelon sliced open with a warm machete
drank the nectar of a green coconut beneath a pineapple sun.

and also of our natural inclination to compare new experiences with the familiar: 

In the suddenness of evening
the Pacific's Ocean's cool machete split the sun in two
and at the same time just as sharply
divided what I know from what
I thought I knew.

One of the most striking poems in the third section, Red Nebulae, is ‘Ancestors'; with its compound adjectives, intense imagery and rhythm, it evokes a vivid sense of memory; a poem which lingers long after reading it:

Moon valved
sun silvered
clean shadowed
rock jutted
starfish scuttled sea
we pick our way
through your detritus
the length of Piha Beach

and concludes with an echo to ancestors:

Seven hundred years after Kupe
our ancestors came this way
set a course
...

Can you imagine them
blue eyed
with reddish complexion
gazing into the surf's oblivion?

There are also moving poems about family, about a grandmother called Garn who:

once on a frosty night
not far above a macrocarpa
pointed out the Southern Cross.
The cattle lay around us
asleep like ancient boulders.

and a quiet elegy for the poet's mother which ends:

through the chill
of a Waikato evening
watch how
those trees creep closer together
as we move further apart.
So
long
Mum.

The last section, Cicada Summer contains shorter, lyrical poems which I particularly enjoyed, demonstrating the poet's keen observation resulting in memorable, lucid imagery.

Invocation

Turning these pine-cone
pages
we might find
ourselves
among those
who have harvested sea honey.

And ‘Calypso' which is not only poignant but has a lovely, quiet rhythm to it:

On such a night as this
when the moon is a long boat
dancing between the pohutukawa branches
shall we go sailing in it?
Outside our window the tide must now be rising.
It's ours for the asking.
Some stars we'll take for sugar
some we'll take for salt
that way everything should be to our taste.
We could be gone by this morning
to some calypso coast -
an island offshore
where even the waves are dancing
and where the fish most surely will be leaping.
Just say the word
and I'll tell you I'm not dreaming.

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