The Lustre Jug Bernadette Hall (Victoria University Press 2009) RRP $25.00 ISBN 978-0-86473-608-6

Keith Nunes

A New Zealand poet with a deft touch and a subtle sense of humour, Bernadette Hall has produced another fully rounded work with The Lustre Jug. Her stint on the Irish based Rathcoola Fellowship fired her up cracking out half a book of excellent pieces about our northern literary friends. The other half of the book deals with other travels and ruminating on some fascinating subjects.

Hall's six-month writing fellowship based near Blarney follows Kiwi poet Fiona Farrell's identical trip which prompted her to write The Pop-Up Book of Invasions - another lovely collection.

Hall's trip thankfully hasn't prompted a tourist guide to Ireland but rather the series of poems take a clear-headed and profound look at the country - north and south - and the people who deal with the difficulties and joys that come with a country full of history.

The Cantabrian opens the collection with a stunning poem, ‘Rathcoola Rain', that lends the disembodied a face and a personality:

The rain is like mice scrabbling in the ceiling
the first licking of flames in a handful of shavings
the complicit turning of pages in hundreds of Mass books

In ‘The Holy Ground' she paints a picture of where she stood and what she saw on her visit to the Emerald Isle where her father was born:

The walls of the garden are old stone
softened with moss and bracken and dandelion
Monks in black hoods walk the quadrants
Of our minds

I hate to get to it early, but the poem that stands out for me grabs a throat hold on me and never lets go:

The Scar

My pouched cheek
has been sliced open
like a windfall apple

The scar is like a length
Of purple cotton
With knots along it

And should anyone
Have the hide to ask,
I'll tell them straight
That I'm the great-great-
Great-great-granddaughter
Of an Irish pirate queen

And the scar
And a cart and a little donkey
Are all that she left me

But it's not all down hill from here. In the ‘The Naad Bog' she lifts the spirit and raises the senses with lines that explode on you:

The white
Skinned fish people walk
On the surface between the black
Water and the wet trees.

Look up through the eye
Of heaven, see how the circle
Completes itself inside the earth

The ticks I make in the book that acknowledge my favourites keep coming and on page 27 it's ‘St Brigid's Cross', with its vivid images and angst-ridden lines:

To burn reeds was to honour
the dead, a broken reed was the sign
of a family betrayal

In ‘The Mapmaker' we have life on the roll of a head:

For all his artistry and his good company,
they broke his head open with an axe

You barely catch your breath and starting on page 30 we have three pages of powerful and vivid images of life in difficult times, in the ‘The Famine Notebook'. It touches you and caresses you and slaps you in the face, as Hall does with aplomb.

‘Three Sisters Dancing' is inventive with its whacky way of curling a word around the corner while ‘The Fox' and ‘The War is Over' are striking poems, with the latter finishing with a plea: "This is heaven, this has to be heaven".

‘Mrs O'Malley in Paris' is humorous, while ‘Luxury' provides us with lines like:

the Irish bridesmaid's shaky x
on the 19th century wedding certificate

...

to be washed down with a mouthful
or three of Jameson's whiskey

In Book Two, Hall weaves her magic away from the Irish pool of writers and mist and casts her net across the Pacific. This portion of the collection is as mesmerising as the first half and touches on things New Zealand and Australian with a strain of Americana. In ‘ A Girl on a Divan' she reads:

In the blue room
on the green divan
she's taking time out
from the world of men

In ‘The Strenuous Life' she has had enough and she signs off with a flourish, and I think I would like to leave it there with Bernadette Hall telling it like it is in her ninth collection of poetry:

Well, fuck him, that's all I have to say.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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