Shadow Friend, Julie Leibrich (Rosetta Press, 2009) ISBN: 978-0-473-16092-0

Liz Breslin

Shadow Friend. The name drew me in, always willing to see what's lurking in the shadows. Julie Leibrich's name also rang bells - this is her third poetry collection, after The Paper Road (1998) and Land Below the Waves (2004). As she's also written children's books, books about criminology and about mental health, there seemed like a lot of potential shadows for poetic exploitation.

About a third of the volume is taken up by her ‘Beach Diary', dedicated to the people of Kapiti. This work covers a month of snippets about the beach each day and is accompanied by pictures from her 2007 exhibition. Each day brings a different observation, of variable lengths, concerning the sea, the sand, the gulls, the:

walkers, talkers, sloggers, joggers
straddling the beach.

There are a few nice soundbites; Leibrich finds fun in the seagulls and our reactions to them. They,

Pick a peck. peck a pock.
Pock a peck o'picnic.
Don't think about The Birds.

And, on Tuesday 16th, "chop stick children on pipi spit sand" provide another memorable image.

There is the man with the white stick who blindly shifts

... the driftwood aside, with his white cane,
as if it did something wrong by coming in.

And the woman who "stalks a shroud". But in spite of these characters, and the pictures accompanying the ‘Beach Diary', I was left wanting more from the month of beach observations. It would be interesting to know if the arrangement of text and pictures is the same as in the exhibition, as I caught myself looking for more of a connection there.

For more colour in the rest of the collection, I was drawn to ‘Throwing a Shiraz', where,

Words had whimpered
and scuttled out of the room.
Reason had crawled,
like a bug, round the floor.
Promises pissed themselves
right out of windows.

Unfortunately, the idea of the shiraz hissy-fit is more alluring than the poem itself, which seems restrained and removed from its "wineshed of emotion".

Chronologically, the next poem is called ‘Your Poems are so Personal'. It's about

...bones laid bare,
faces unwashed, tongues
hanging out to tell tales.

and I can't help but wish for a bit more of just that in this collection.

The back cover blurb says that Leibrich's "poems are personal and profound, which is to say that you need to read not merely the words, but her mind." and I find that's where some frustrations lie, because with lines like, "There is nothing to fear in sadness" (from ‘In the Dark Night'), and poems such as this,

CIRCLE OF LIGHT
Years ago, we sat round the fire.
Moon and stars our measure.
The sun, our god.
We didn't pull words apart
to know we belonged.
We simply longed to be.
Discover those times again.
Uncover the meaning in clouds,
your memory of rain.

I just don't have a hinge on Leibrich's poetic specifics. And maybe the point is that she is content for her writing about ‘time, space, love and mystery" to speak for itself, for us to interpret the universal, or the conceptual, our way. Sometimes, of course, there can be a sort of strength in our recognition of another sort of universal, the mundane. This is true in ‘After the Funeral', when, "...we race home". First one in, first to pee.

Bursting with life, dying to talk
about the service, the people
and when you had tears
and who was the man in the mac?

But I'm lost again on ‘A Woman Doesn't Always Know', firstly because I think it's important never to actually admit that. And also because, at the poem's conclusion, Leibrich reveals something important. She writes,

...there are days like this, when a poem
comes to call, knocking on her heart to let it in.

Her poetry comes from the heart. I'm reading it with my head. And unfortunately, that's where they disconnect.

 

Liz Breslin lives and writes in Hawea Flat and is co-founder of Poetic Justice Wanaka.

 

 

 

 

 


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