Vivid Familiar  Stephanie de Montalk  (Victoria University Press, 2009) 78pp RRP $25 ISBN 9780864735980

Jenny Clay

Stephanie de Montalk has written non-fiction: Unquiet World: The Life of Count Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk, published in 2001, and a historical novel, The Fountain of Tears. Vivid Familiar is her fourth book of poetry. On the cover is a detail of a painting by Rita Angus called ‘Storm', with bare trees and gathering clouds. A poem in the third part of four of Vivid Familiar takes the title of the collection, and describes the painting, where the ghost gums'  "rippled arms/ gleam in the rain".

The storm surfaces through the book. In ‘Lepidoptera' it is asked whether Darwin foresees the butterflies "demise in a thunderstorm" or fantasises that they reach the rim of the Pacific, as he leans against the "mast of the Beagle" watching them,

streaming far out to sea
from South America        

Vivid Familiar begins with ‘Fourteen Thousand Miles' where the drowned sleep "with their eyes open" and eat "with their ears",

simultaneously cleaving
and folding

and caught with

the ocean's halters and ropes
on their long pale bones.

Other poems in the first part relate to the life of settlers after their arrival in New Zealand. ‘By the Hour' is a story of colonialism, where the gumdiggers "hardset in mud,/ cleared stratified forests of resin", and prospectors "levelled outcrops" and "washed rivers for gold". Land was surveyed, the boundaries mapped

hidden and visible,     
on condition that transit angles
were back-sighted and doubled for accuracy.

At the end of this section is a poem with a disconcerting juxtaposition, called ‘Skin and Gristle'. Among the familiar food "fat of lamb" and "pork newly killed" is casually placed "human flesh, well baked," "as tender as paper", and then the list continues with oranges and lemons, "French plums arranged on small plates decorated with lacy papers" and

snippets of chicken,
finely-chopped bone, skin and gristle
seasoned and simmered down for stock

‘Eruption, 10 June 1886' circles around the Tarawera eruption and destruction of the terraces; "pink and white parasols were the order of the day". Travellers admired "Lake Rotomahana's tattooed rock and fountain of the clouded sky", and a "morning sighting of an evanescent canoe" was debated, a warning both seen and unseen, perhaps a "trick of the light", "a seed pod" or "an eel pot".

Ideas of presence and invisibility are also in the poem ‘Never Entirely' where a missing limb has "nerves without purpose". This is in Part IV, which also contains ‘Myth' where "halcyons float/ on the fish bones" during midwinter, and has realms of longing and separation, as in ‘The Wishing Tree'.

Physical travels abroad occupy Part III of the book: ‘The Road to Everest' under "a zigzag sky", and in ‘Way Station':

we take a stony road
to the Balkans.

‘Quilted Walls' opens "to the luminance/ of a sultan's tent" and in ‘Simply Paris' you can feast and savour and "See how happy you are/ stirred/ with a long spoon."

A long whimsical poem, ‘Feathers and Wax', forms the second part of the book and feels central to Vivid Familiar. It is a poem that deserves more than one reading. The opening comes from Ovid's telling of the myth of Daedalus and Icarus: "the imagined arts....set his mind and altered natural laws". There are references through the poem to the myth of Icarus:  

No one expects you to drop
from the sky without a safety harness

and

unlike Daedalus, afraid of damp wax,
the ship sailed close to the water.

The poet boards an airship that arrives at her kitchen window, ascending "the mooring tower" she slips "through an opening/ in the nose of the ship. De Montalk treats ideas playfully in this poem. The companions she had chosen for the journey were a radiologist, a tea taster, and a colour consultant rather than an aeronautical engineer. The colour consultant, she tells the sensitiva, in the "heart of a storm" will help to distinguish between "a hundred shades of blue". Is the storm on the cover carried through into this poem, where the wind strengthens and the sky is

wild with twigs
gum bark scooped from the lawn

as it intensifies into weeks of  rain? In the airship the poet becomes lighter than her surroundings, and is asked to "submit to uncertainty".

The book is divided into journeys through the four parts: the settlers, the fantastical, travels abroad, and longing and recall. De Montalk uses evocative imagery in the poems with glimpses of the real and unreal, the invisible world a step away in the imagination. 

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