aloe & other poems, Diana Bridge, AUP. RRP $24.99 ISBN 978-1-86940-441-3

Liz Breslin


With four lauded collections - Landscape with Lines, the Girls on the Wall, Porcelain and Red Leaves - under her belt, Diana Bridge's fifth collection of poetry does not disappoint.

aloe & other poems includes 'aloe' and many other poems, arranged into four elusive sections. By this I mean every time you try to define the contents or the themes of each section, they do something slippery, as good poems tend to, and you find more there every time.

On the surface, and certainly according to the page of contents, The Compulsion to Catch It, section one, has more than a whiff of living matter about it. Poems about trees, eucalypts specifically. Magnolias and aloe merge with sculptures and stupa, until, (from ‘Stupa')

you make of ‘nothing's stable'
a virtue - that's it really - the shift of sky for stupa.
the blend of boy with Buddha as he's handing you the statue.
You think you're getting close to it, what is real - the re-
arrangements of your mind like leaves adjusting to the light.

A lot of the work in aloe & other poems is just like this. An observation. An opportunity to go from micro to macro perspectives. The poet observes and we draw our own lines.            

The second section, Into Words, has some interesting commentary on form.  In ‘French doors', we read:

You ask, would I make poems in the way struts shape
a scene, choose some rule-governed form, a sonnet, say,
to limit length and stop the throat of line...

... we won't again


make poems the way that these bars shape a view.

In ‘Notes from the festival: the writers', she beautifully characterises different kinds of writers and processes.

There were some with a commitment so entire I knew
they must live on an island, and alone.
 
A second kind would share a house with someone who'd do the
shopping, make the tea, ignore the urgent rustle of the lawn until the
other came out draft in hand...


Among the vastnesses of particularity in this section, big bangs and afterthoughts, there is still room to ruminate on the ragged skin of a cellist's little finger. As Bridge notes(in ‘Cellist'),  "You stay with the human side somehow apparent".

The third section is entitled Among the Freuds and is more obviously peopled than its predecessors. Along with the call and answer of a warlord, his concubine and the chorus (‘His Last Girl') , there is a 3D scan hidden "somewhere behind the canoes of his lids". Then there's ‘A Mother Like Medea (in which Sylvia Plath talks to Medea and the chorus intervenes)'. Stunning in its sparseness, it ends:

I could see there was nothing left then.
Only one thing I could do.
Just two little pitchers off milk to arrange -
 
I differed in that way from you.

 

She was one who the gods endowed.
And those whom the gods endow are those
whom the gods love least.

And here's ‘One for Freud':

The fear of bleeding
is it a fear of what you will bleed into
 
or what you will bleed out?

           
There is much scope in this section for amusement, as well as historical perspective.
           
The fourth and final section is entitled ‘It's Their Century'. They, we presume from the title poem, are Indians and Chinese.

There they gleam: China, India -
stars  in the broad blue band of the future.

Bridge is well qualified to comment on the history and currency of both cultures, as an expert in early Indian and Chinese art history and Chinese language and literature. She's lived in both countries, as well as other Asian locations and also studied in London at the school of Oriental studies. A Fellow in the Asian Studies Institute in Wellington, she was also one of eight poets representing at the last biennial Conference for the Association of Commonwealth Literatures. All these contribute, no doubt, to her inside-outside view in this collection.  

In this last section, temples, pots and gods are all observed. And again, it's the spaces in which we create meaning that are highlighted. In ‘The Gap Between the Stones', she describes "that vast ball, the Gol Gumbaz". One of the largest domes in the world, this is a mausoleum to Mohammed Adil Shah, and the details noted are made exquisite: " ...the ripples of calligraphy ... he signs his name/ in shields and squares of grass, in half-moon flowerbeds...clouds stained by sunrise...a girl in fluttering orange..."

The final sequence is simply titled Temple and contains more of these beauties, as well as a laugh-out-loud close up on the joys of temple wall couplings. The collection ends with ‘Just Looking':

What, I ask, when we return to the fudged
grey world of stones, most of them broken,
bird droppings, picnickers - what, in the end,
does it mean? You'd think I'd know;...

And I think she does. Know what it means, I mean. Or at least, how to highlight both macro and micro meaning for us. 

As encapsulated in the very last line, what Diana Bridge brings us in this collection is "iconography overridden by delight".

 

NZPS Home