Flap - the chook book 2 (The Poetry Chooks, 2010) ISBN: 978-0-473-17670-9 For sale as a Christchurch earthquake relief fundraiser; see: http://poetrychook.blogspot.com/2011/03/flap-earthquake-fundraiser.html
Barbara Strang
The cheerful cover depicts a bird (representative chook?) with rainbow wings flying above wolf- and crocodile-like monsters. They are rather sketchy and the bird, looking alarmed, has got well clear. Have the poems within the book taken flight also?
The Poetry Chooks are four Christchurch women writers. I took up their second anthology with anticipation. I expected: poems on children, family, relationships, plants, dying etc, and maybe mention of chickens. I certainly found these, and many other topics as well. I wonder if the group had set exercises on ‘blue' or ‘war service' since poems with these themes occur more than once.
Victoria Broome's section is entitled 'the foreign office', after her poem depicting a day in the life of two people who haven't yet met:
He had two great passions and one dream
Mozart, The Great Wall and romance. In soft
morning light he rode out on a rented bicycle
to see the Great Wall. Smoke and steam rising ...
She has a grasp of the short and sharp as well:
Her black
wings
tucked in,
her eye
open
but empty.
(‘Amberley Beach')
Here are accessible, warm, well-crafted poems. However there is a tendency to overstate in some, risking sentimentality. In contrast 'In the Antarctic Room' counterbalances two realities by placing them simply side by side:
Here is the sound of the whales,
next to Disappointment Island, not far
from the Sea of Calamity, keening, haunting
the carpeted booth and the disembodied
voice that describes them.
Come on, the dogs are dead,
look they're stuffed, don't be silly, get up.
I have to go to the toilet.
Don't cry. Be good and we'll go to the café
Barbara McCartney's section is 'the distance from here to there', a line taken from her poem ‘journeys'. This work is a series of crisp little sections:
The distance from here to there
lengthens every bend
so much sky
each hill a backbone
We find an appreciation of places and journeys, ranging from the environs of Christchurch, as in "Boulder Bay bach", to foreign locations such as Venice and Capri.
Barbara is a tight poet, but one or two would be improved by cutting endings which fall into overstatement, as in ‘the men running past'. I find the following work is more to my taste as it works by innuendo, leaving room for the reader to insert his/her meaning:
a man who
following an implausible career
silent as a spy
woke like one cheated of sleep
his mind a haunted house
heard on that lakeside morning
the calm-as-milk lapping of water
re-adjusted his intentions
People are found in her poems as well as places, for instance ‘family at war' is a list of the war experiences of various relation and friends, ending poignantly:
the deserter son
of the widow over our back fence
hid in our garden
form the military police
his terrified boot prints
behind the blackcurrants
Christina Stachurski's section is labelled 'the charm of archaeology', a found phrase of Chinese English, from her poem in three sections ‘Glass Cases'. China has more than one meaning:
China was at the bottom of the hole,
a place beyond the water
that came when you dug quite deep.
Sometimes broken off pieces came through,
blue and white and special ones with gold
edges when you washed them under the tap.
It's hard to resist the charm of this childhood memory and the cute play on words. Many of the poems invoke such scenes, and she also has pieces on present day foreign travel, which, it turns out, is mostly a path to home. These, such as ‘Heaven', build by an accumulation of seemingly casual observations:
In Paris, even the bag ladies are chic.
One we passes buffs an old leather music case
with a chamois. Another tells us off big time
for sitting at the café table next to hers
She meanders on, a tourist in foreign parts, till suddenly we arrive:
God has provided food and they have all the time
in the world to be beautiful in heaven instead.
Catherine Fitchett's section is 'as strong as eggshells'. She opens with a fantastic poem ‘Blue', showing why a settler has lost her taste for cornflowers:
In the last week
they bury her child. The ship is enclosed by sea and sky
the blue of the eggshell she found on the path to the byre.
Catherine's work is innovative. She finds fresh poetry in both well-worn (see the note on her cicada poem) and novel places. She can come up with a striking extended metaphor:
Leaves lie in drifts
the spade-like poplars,
lobed maples, and willow
pointed like diamonds.
(The Poker Players)
It is meticulously crafted, for example ‘Pearl':
This poem references a famous painting
by Vermeer. This poem wakes early in the
morning. It picks roses in the garden where
dew sits like strings of pearls on spider webs ...
which rounds off satisfyingly with:
Each pearl contains a small world
like this poem.
As I expected, this second effort by the Poetry Chooks is an accessible and competent collection, and most poems fly:
There is so much I would still ask you, but
you would not know the answers, even if you could speak.
I am the child who has run ahead on the path.
I glance over my shoulder, you are no longer there.
I am as strong as eggshells, and ready to break open.
(‘Kitchen Sonnets', Catherine Fitchett)
