Echolocation Angela Andrews (Victoria University Press). RRP $25.00 ISBN 9780864735638
Harvey Molloy
In Echolocation Andrews investigates the life stories of her Dutch grandparents and how, despite many years living in New Zealand, like all immigrants they are never able to leave the old country behind. This investigation dovetails with an account of her pregnancy and the birth of her child.
All of this might seem very familiar, perhaps even too familiar, to readers of New Zealand poetry, as the concern with family histories and family life runs through much contemporary work. On first reading, I felt that the book was too locked into following these set concerns and perhaps too tightly orchestrated. However, Echolocation succeeds by Andrews' almost virtuoso arrangement of sounds. More than any other book I've read over the last year, Echolocation demands to be read aloud so that the subtle alliterations and rhythms can be heard. On first reading, I appreciated the precision of the poems but on second reading, when I read the poems aloud, I was delighted by their craft. It's hard to quote one or two lines as an example of this patterning, but consider the alliteration of the last two lines of ‘Opa':
Wide stars, small shells,
the open span of sand.
The beauty of the lines shows you good poetry at work: in nine words Andrews creates a vast panorama of space.
The careful shaping of sounds also suggests one of Andrews' themes: our lives are in some ways vibrations in time. We speak, we move, we love, we leave resonances. Here's the opening of 'Leaving Glenview Road':
Our lives are left as hollows
in the carpet, and heavy spaces
on the walls. I can name them.
One of the activities of poetry is naming the hollows and spaces of our lives and Andrews so quietly states this that nothing seems affected (and listen to the lovely alliteration of "lives" and "left" and "hollows" and "heavy"!)
Andrews is a doctor who completed her MA in Creative Writing at Victoria University in 2005, and occasionally you can detect what feels like the 'creative writing exercise poem' in the book. Here's 'How to have a baby':
Have an epidural
Have a Caesar
give birth in the Coromandel hills.
Do we need any more 'How to' poems? This one seems to have been cooked in a classroom. But in the main, Echolocation avoids the formulaic. It's a subtle, impressive, tightly controlled book that requires more than one silent reading. Echolocation is Andrews first book and in her next book I'd like Andrews to free herself from the very strict control I think she's imposed on herself in terms of her subject matter and to give herself more room to breathe.
