New Zealand Poetry Society Te Hunga Tito Ruri o Aotearoa
Overnight Downpour
Overnight Downpour Andrew Fagan (HeadworX, 2006) RRP $19.99, ISBN 0-473-11302-3
Anne Tucker
The face that looks out from the cover of this fourth collection of poems from Andrew Fagan is intense, serious, even haggard. This is a different persona from the more congenial images on his previous volumes of poetry. I'm not sure whether this signals a change in his view of himself as a poet or person or whether it's something driven by a new publisher, but the poems seem to look back on life and show more awareness of patterning and form than his
previous books.
The prevailing mood of the book is a somewhat rueful look at relationships, friendships, family and domesticity interspersed with light humorous pieces in a way that reminded me of Simon Armitage or James Brown. The overall effect for the reader is that of being in congenial, down-to-earth, and thoughtful company.
With Fagan's profile as a song writer and performer, it's inevitable to think about the difference between a song lyric and a poem. The poet Adrian Mitchell writes in his introduction to Blackbird Singing: Poems and Lyrics 1965-1999, Paul McCartney (Faber and Faber, 2001): "There's often a difference between a poem and a song lyric. Lyrics tend to be less concentrated, partly because a song has to work instantly, and partly because the words must allow room for the music to breath, to allow time for the work of the music. In a good song the words and the music dance together, so they need dancing room."
Music creates a rhythm - imposes a rhythm sometimes - on words in a way that you wouldn't necessarily see on the page. A song has a texture of words and voice laid over and intertwined through instrumental rhythm and melody. But in a poem the texture of words on page must do all the work, and in general I would like to have seen the words on these pages work a bit harder.
The strongest poems use rhythm, repetition, refrains or have a soundscape that matches the content, such as in 'Wind Went Away With the Day', where the rhythms ‘just heaving the lethargic/ leftovers of a long lost/ Ocean swell' match the sea's movement. There is a tendency to use some nice word pairings such as ‘swell and wither', ‘wrong womb . . . wrong room', but many poems are weakened by an adjective or adverb that stalls the momentum of the poem without really adding to the noun or verb they are paired with.
For example 'Overnight Downpour', the title poem, has a soundscape of conflicting rhythms that reflect the sound of water on an iron roof, and it nicely conjures up the introspective or inward looking frame of mind that heavy rain can inspire; but the poem is weakened by the heavy use of adverbs in lines such as ‘Fully justified and/ Overtly obvious/', the words not bearing the emphasis that such short lines gave them. It's worth mentioning that the same poem later has a nice adjective-noun combination of ‘liquid noise'; this working because it is unexpected in a way that the others are not. The same way that the ‘lethargic/leftovers' mentioned above works.
The weaker poems fall into generalisations where Armitage or Brown would use the interesting word, the surprising detail, and grab you by specifics. And there are too many poems with unspecified ‘we's' and ‘you's' that seem to be about a particular person or event but don't give the reader quite enough information, and thus keep them at a distance.
The poetic voice in this book is good company, you're with a sensitive observer of a particular life, a New Zealand Everyman of a particular generation. However, it would be good to see the poems notch up a level, with some of the edginess in the gaze on the book cover transferring to further technical rigour.
