Guarding the Flame Majella Cullinane (Salmon Poetry, 2011) ISBN 978-1-97056-79-6

Vaughan Rapatahana

Let me make this quite clear right from the outset: Majella Cullinane can write; she is a damned good poet.

This is a quite quiet, understated, mellow collection: the whole tone reflects one of the thematic obsessions here: Autumn. Indeed there is a continual reflection on falling leaves, and the soft autumnal tones of this season - as witness titles such as ‘Leaves', ‘Autumn Is Where You Find It', ‘Autumn's End'.

There is no bombast here, no overly academic accent on arcane and archaic allusions, nor is there deliberate obscurity or the pilfering of other languages so as to make the verse ‘politically correct'. This is not an extended exercise in pretentiousness.

Instead we sight some outstanding imagery throughout. Let me quote some examples, albeit shaken by me into isolation from their surrounding boughs:

a wind last seen, sliding its forked tongue
through a net
          windmills dotted for miles,
the quixotic territory of love
only the wooden eye of a table stared back
the hours closing down for the night
Only the sun
being the star she is, and
too quick to ignite,
folds her coppery tongue
in envy and does not speak.
the bones of the house shaken
by winter's Voodoo priest
to startle the fading eyelids of the day
Outside trees take deep breaths,
clothes on a line grieve for bodies
they will never own.

Excellent.

There is also here, even more predominant than the reflections on falling leaves and the daubing of concomitant natural hues flecked with appearances of New Zealand native birds, a steady series of ruminations on what it is like to be a recent immigrant to Aotearoa-New Zealand: for Cullinane is an Irishwoman now faaaaaar from home. Indeed, this book is published by Salmon Poetry, County Clare.

Cullinane misses her turangawaewae (place of origin, genesis) quite badly; she is now ‘the orphan leaf, tossed from a branch'; wonders why she is in a home where there is:

Nothing here of beginnings,
of extraction, or nation; the curled fern frond
on the deck as unconvinced as I...

& pines stringently for her Northern climes, her Northern pines:

           But you wanted to say it straight,
talk your way out of unbelonging, whisper yourself
into the leaves, the branches, the bark of a familiar pine,
to the call of birds flying northward.

Entire poems in this succinct collection cry her earlier home - ‘Not So far Behind' and ‘Rooms', for example, and especially, ‘A Distant Shore' with its pangs and pains of being so far asunder:

           No more fuss from kakas [sic]
parading the trees in crimson collars and dark-edge feathers,
no rain on a corrugated iron roof, tap, tapping into her heart.
an old heart map she clings to,
bays and inlets from another hemisphere impressed there.

A stranger in a strange land indeed. Robert Heinlein would be proud.

There are other reflections here, of course - pregnancy and impending birth; butterflies, butterflies and more butterflies even to the extent of incorporating that mighty lepidopterist, Vladimir Nabokov; Irish mythologies and traditions, but nothing as potent as this wistful alienation. Let me quote one more poem, here in its entirety:

Pohutukawa

Suppose I ask of you
cliff-dweller,
what you make of me
walking this clover grass,
tasting the salty
periwinkles of another
hemisphere
in my mouth?

To borrow from Mike O'Leary, kia ora begorrah Majella. Despite your angst you are well on the way to full integration into the antipodal Aotearoa lifestyle. These are fine poems, real poems, honest poems. Foster the fires and warm yourself in that Kapiti home as Autumn drifts down to see his brother Winter. Keep guarding that flame. For, as you state it so well yourself:

                                                           the interior
of flame is the matador's cloak enticing a charge,
just as in this room now shadows are charged with light,
and the rain that would drench the skin damp,
will later arouse the blood to wamth and glow.

 

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