After the Dance, Michelle Amas (VUP, 2006) ISBN 0 86476 5421

Heidi North

After the Dance is an exquisite first collection of poems from Michelle Amas. 26 interwoven poems spun of images and myth, tenderly and wittily dealing with modern life.

There is an inherent elegance to Amas's use of language, a feeling of incantation.

"Everywhere bells
sing, lips unwrap
first kisses
ting.
ting.
ting."

Her style is pared down, slim lines, a modern use of punctuation. While some of the poems take more of a prose poem form, they are still carefully placed. These are almost tactile poems; the images are like reading Braille in the dark. Amas is a dark edged modernist, but the poems are tinged with dreams and transformation. In the poem 'After the Dance', 

"In a box
of milk teeth
she places
a feather."

Amas honestly explores the knotty landscape between mother and daughter.

In 'steeple chase':

"Get off my back
daughter
this is not dancing"

While these poems are at times deeply personal, they never feel invasive. They are honest and quirky. All daughters and mothers will identify with 'Blame':

"It is my fault
her toenails
her thighs
the hideous
hair on her arms."

Loss haunts this collection: loss of childhood, the speaker's own and her daughter's, failed relationships, death. In 'tidy your room':

"She throws out fourteen days of Christmas...
On my knees the way
I delivered her
I scavenge through
baby breath
the childhood
she hands me back."

As Amas explores the results of this loss and the shifting perspective that it brings, everything falls away, to be rediscovered. There is a sense of revelation, something magical with a power to save. In 'Snapshot',

"These are the rules. There is no summer and summer
               And summer
... these are days borrowed and must be returned."

Amas also keeps an excellent balance with dry humour. In 'Disclosure',

"Before we live together I should tell you I have been looking for omens. A boy came off his skateboard. He yelled fuck life to no one in particular, then he looked at me,"

A running thread throughout the collection is 'The Caversham project', a series of poems mixing Amas's childhood memories in Caversham, and Edna and Charlie's lives. They are wonderfully drawn portraits of both people and place, warmly underscored questions of gender and the lives of women in rural New Zealand. In 'Sites of gender',

"While Charlie sleeps, Edna reads historical romances in the bath."

The staggering of this series throughout the book results in our coming to them like an old-fashioned serial, allowing Edna and Charlie to become old friends, and giving shape to the whole collection.

As an actor and director, Amas brings her talent for drawing characters and mood into her poetry. The strength of this collection is in the images; every poem is spot on, yet apparently effortless. It is no surprise to me that after completing her MA in Creative Writing at the IIML in 2005, Amas won the Adam Prize for best folio.

These poems linger long after the book is closed. It is a highly polished first collection, and I recommend it fully.

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