Beauty of the Badlands Cliff Fell (Victoria University Press, 2008), 110 pp, rrp $25. ISBN 9780864735836

Joanna Preston

These days, ‘ground zero' is the space in New York where the Twin Towers used to be. But go back a generation, and ‘ground zero' refers to the Trinity Site in New Mexico, and the first detonation of a nuclear weapon. And this, not 9/11, is the darkness that lies over the poems in Beauty of the Badlands.

The book begins with an unlisted poem that serves two purposes. Superficially it's a narrative poem about a mule boy and his master, preparing translations of Aristotle and other ancients from the library of an unnamed Moorish Caliph to take north, to Paris and beyond. A variation of the traditional ‘Go, little book', perhaps? More than that. The title - ‘Translatio Imperii' - means ‘the transfer of rule', and is the argument used by Western rulers since Medieval times to justify their rule as a form of inheritance, a natural historical progression of the divine right to power. (Sound familiar?) These ideas - of knowledge being currency, of the West versus the East, of light fading, and decay, and the transfer of authority - are what resonate through the poems that follow. Read the rest at:

The first section of the book - ‘Brightwater Blues' - is centred in/on/around Moutere, near Nelson. The poet's home, and the birthplace of the father of nuclear physics, Ernest Rutherford. So the beautiful ‘On Millennium Creek' ends a description of looking for three missing cows with the image of "the rubble of a fallen city wall". And the final poem of the section - ‘Going Bush Blues' - begins with a kid heading into the hills with a sack of marijuana seed, and segues into the next section with one of the most impressive images in the book:

seeing the crucifix of the second plane
make its endless flights across our TV screen

The second section - ‘Dead Man's Journey' - is the poet in America, his pilgrimage to the Trinity Site, and some of the repercussions of July 16, 1945 - the effect on the scientists, the witnesses, on the landscape, and on the eventual victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It also lingers on the lives of the original inhabitants of the Americas - the Maya, the Pueblo Indians, the Cheyenne.

For the most part, this is a very good collection. Well constructed, well written. There are some lovely lines - "Stars tighten/ in the turning sky" (‘On Millennium Creek'), "The cottonwoods taking root in your chest// And inside your skull, a canyon wren's nest" (‘Song #3'), "then my love-/ the one with trails of morning glory/ caught in her long dark hair" (‘Beauty of the Badlands'), "the farmlands in winter/ pale with the frost, pale with the holding on" (‘Return'). Yes, there are love poems woven through - my favourite, ‘In Mexico City', ends

as the one we'd thought already asleep
came crawling in secret across the deep
canyon between her perfect bed and ours-
hoping to catch us, the lovers she once was.

As you can see, Fell is very good with slant rhyme, and the poems are almost all a pleasure to read aloud. There are quite a few consciously (post)modernist poems, weaving together disparate snippets of information and tone. It's a risky strategy, but does pay off in the book's two key poems: ‘The M at the End of the Earth' and ‘At Bosque del Apache'.

There are problems. For example, ‘At Onetahuti Pool' is a beautiful elegy which is hampered by Fell's casual/offhand (mis)use of punctuation and linebreaks:

And because

you were born under the sign
of the fish
and three little fingerlings

- I don't know their names

You can work out that "and three little fingerlings" (with the digression into not knowing what sort of fish they are) is meant as another clause of "And because", rather than being part of the name of the sign the person was born under, but it does require you to go back and mentally insert commas and/or rebreak lines. At the very least, it destroys the flow of what is otherwise a beautiful and intelligent poem of mourning. And ‘On Millennium Creek' has similar issues:

[...] Stars tighten
in the turning sky-the heavens' engines
moving on their wheels of fire ...

that circle to the place where time is kept

What is that ellipsis doing there? Other than making "circle" read as a verb rather than a noun? On its own, a minor irritation. But once you start seeing this sort of problem, you see it everywhere. And this is only the sixth poem! Then there's the plethora of em dashes ... ok, I use them a lot myself. But in every single poem?!

Irks aside, this is a good book. It's ambitious, musical, and interesting. Force yourself past the garish cover and ignore the back cover blurb. Make it your own journey. He's good company.

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