How to live by the sea Lynn Davidson  74 pp (VUP, 2009) ISBN 978-0-86473-599-7

Nola Borrell

The voice of lament is Lynn Davidson's strength. You hear it in the comings and goings of  the tide, in left behind rooms and houses, childhood and adulthood. This poet will engage you immediately with her direct address - in the first and third sections of the book in particular.

How to live by the sea is tidily arranged: 3 parts, 43 poems: Intertidal zone, The Middle Ages, Table to table. All discrete sections, each with its own cohesiveness. The front cover has the tattooed shoulder of the author's son; the back cover, the author with distant gaze: Both images neatly link with the title.

This is Lynn Davidson's third book of poetry.  It follows Tender  (Steele Roberts, 2006) and Mary Shelley's Window (Pemmican, 1999) as well as a short novel (Ghost Net, OUP, 2003). Lynn is a graduate of  the 2007 IIML MA poetry class. She received a Louis Johnson Writer's Bursary in 2003, and teaches creative writing, at Whitireia Community Polytechnic. Lynn is also a former editor of the NZPS newsletter.

You won't have any difficulty reading these short poems: Free verse, simply structured, frequently personal and created around one main image. There's a care with words, length of line; at times a lyrical touch. Short they may be, but they're not lightweight.  

Intertidal Zone opens with 'My House', a song of love and a lament. It is  "a house to set your bearings by" ('Visitors'). Indeed, the whole selection, the whole business of living, is to do with bearings. The poet tells us to "settle for disorder" (but) "Keep one craft at hand/ a kayak out back among nasturtiums" ('How to live by the sea')

I liked the conciseness, but at times I wanted more than a single image/ event poem. 'Visitors' is an exception. It develops, stretches way back, undergirds the present, has a reach that the shorter poems lack.

The Middle Ages centres on the powerful 'type' of the Fool: jester, innocent and clown, truth-teller, social critic and insight-bringer. This allows the poet to dip into a medieval world of dark woods and fairy spells, comfrey and pennyroyal, "ice hanging from her wrists like charms" ('Lark Pie'). The device also offers the potential to tell something we'd rather not know about. Another way of seeing impacts on everyday events. I liked this imaginative extension as a contrast to the here-and-now poems of  the rest of the book.

The two final poems in this section appear to depart from the theme - a minor point. 'About Love', a plangent poem with a terse ending, seems to belong to the poet persona, not the Fool. And 'Remains' takes a great sweep to the dawn of time, when "all the animals and trees/ have turned one by one/ back into words". 

Table to table I found the least appealing. Eighteen poems  travel from early childhood to sibling events to motherhood, with a leap to thoughts of death. Many of them do have tables: in cafes, restaurants, kitchens, a school fair, a workbench. They are clear and direct, but again I wanted more. 'This freezing morning'  gives a snatch of conversation, 'Biker girl' a picture with a brief response; 'A spell to tame horses' a short  ritual.

A short prose piece (?prose poem), 'A family feast', provided a  variation in format as well as several agreeably unexpected lines: "The babies wake and cry, wave marshmallow fists at loved ones with knives"... "Parents and grandparents carry children heavy as potting mix".

Many of these poems would read well at a poetry reading. The audience would stay with  the poet's sense of  time passing, appreciate the poignancy, and enjoy the flashes of fantasy too.

The lamenting tone returns in the final three poems: The leaving behind of rooms and gardens, the moving towards old age and death as in 'Conversations':

It will be comforting
on those ringing-cold walks
to see exactly how
the earth
is reaching up towards me

This, indeed, is a voice that Lynn Davidson does well.

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