The Hill of Wool Jenny Bornholdt (VUP, 2011) ISBN 9780864736529 RRP $25
Margaret Vos
It's been a while since I read a poem that made me reach for the dictionary or Google, but I was pleased to learn a few things in Jenny Bornholdt's collection, The Hill of Wool.  Slyly-named overseas locations (real ones) and enigmatic references (the elephant died in 1900) add to the sense of mystery, chance, uncertainty, and something like the possibilities of alternative histories.

The Hill of Wool is more than a book about memories; it opens the doors to revisionist history, the (in)accuracy of memory, what might have been/what is, and an exploration of how family holds together - sometimes because of, sometimes in spite of, its tensions and its bonds.

The un-NZ locations belie the very approachable family and domestic sphere where her best poetry comes from. The sort that makes you read a poem two or three or more times, mining for more meaning each time, because Bornholdt is expert in applying a poetic eye and ear to ordinary life, and death.

My favourite lines are from ‘All Time Moving':

as we unpacked boxes
of my father's impossible handwriting
still unable to figure out
what it was
he was saying.

More wordplay - and I do mean play - is found in ‘Tower of London', which builds upon the ‘be ye friend, or be ye foe' cadence from children's poems and stories. The spell-like imagery evoked by "be ye cradle salt or blood" seems a departure from her usual sphere, but it somehow works.

However I'm mulling over the division of the collection into two ‘books' - there is no clarity to me as to why. Still, I enjoy the poems too much to really care.

Perhaps my biggest criticism of The Hill of Wool is the conscious poetry in some of the poems. I don't enjoy poems that are self-referential, or poems about poetry (except for Yeats). It smacks of navel-gazing to me, and I find it jarring. Unfortunately the collection begins with one such poem, rather blandly - or perhaps grandly? - titled ‘Poetry'. Similarly, I don't like the movement in ‘Pearly Everlasting' from a dreamy image-laden landscape into the self-awareness of "lucky for us/ the tender anchoring/ nouns". 

I'm pleased Bornholdt didn't pursue the couplet as she did in her last collection, The Rocky Shore. In The Hill of Wool, she returned to more focused experimenting with form, like the stitched-together haiku of ‘Blossom', or the haunting first/last stanza echoes in ‘Undone'. That happens to be one of my favourite poems in the collection, as I found it to be an exact characterisation of one's life after another's death:

Nothing, now, is clear. All's become con-
fusion. All falls dark. The house closed fast
to light. We watch as everything becomes undone.
Ordinary things that used to be so full of wonder.

But there is humour too, in ‘Wisdom', and ‘Cookbook' which I quote here in full:

            Oh the horror
            to have a dish
            named after yer.

The Hill of Wool makes me wonder what has triggered Bornholdt's examination of the past and of memory, but in the end her poems can stand on their own without that knowledge. I believe this collection will age well, and will continue to increase in meaning as readers themselves age.
    

If you like Bornholdt's poetry, you'll love this collection; if you didn't like her before, try her now.

 

PS-a "sett" is a den or network of badger tunnels.

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