The Lakes of Mars  Chris Orsman (Auckland University Press, 2008) ISBN 978 186940 408 6

Jenny Clay

This book is divided into two parts. Many of the poems in the first part were  previously in Pemmican publication White Wind, a hand-bound, letterpress poetry book. (Pemmican Press was founded by Orsman along with Harry Ricketts and Brendan O'Brien in 1998.) The second part of the collection was inspired by Antarctica, where Chris Orsman travelled on an Artists in Antarctica grant in 1998 with Bill Manhire and painter Nigel Brown. Orsman has previously written about the Antarctic in South: An Antarctic Journey, recreating Scott's expedition in a sequence of voices. South was his second poetry book, published in 1996, after Ornamental Gorse (1994) won Best First Book of Poetry at the Montana Book Awards.

The third poem of the second half of The Lakes of Mars takes the title of the collection, where the lake described

neatly simulates: an ice-bound
port to the solar system,
a mirror to the lakes of Mars.
Orsman is concerned about geographies. He talks in the book about landscape, mindscape and perspective. In the first poem of Part 1 he asks,
what do we know
of hidden topographies.

                     (Grass)

He explores the world through the lens of the camera in ‘Instamatic'. It is based around his old plastic Kodak 133, which had two settings that covered all weathers, cloudy and sunny. A "whole century moves until you stop it", the early photos "resisting focus", yet he is charmed by inaccuracy:

the kitchen in a previous incarnation
with its round-shouldered refrigerator.

The images are stalled in time, such as his grandparents "in a plain bungalow" in ‘Blenheim; the first house in the subdivision', "a bottle display", and his brother Derek reading "Tintin on a bed".

There are links to family in several poems. ‘Volunteer' is about his great-grandfather, William Orsman, who at nineteen was one of the men advancing on Parihaka. He previously featured in poems in Ornamental Gorse. ‘Volunteer' starts with the "we" of the men advancing:   

We met no resistance throughout that country,
everything we carried was a dead weight

The poet then changes from "we" to "you", and talks about:

The enemy
lodged within, crouched and defensive
behind the heart's palisades

and challenges the "you", or tries to understand his ancestor's perspective:

Bequeath to me
your clear sight on that morning, whatever
is necessary in your ignorance...

‘Mappa' takes a completely different perspective, the chart "translated from a satellite's bland stare", yet Orsman says,

we have no internal GPS
to navigate the portals of the wind

The wind runs through many of the poems. A "white wind scourges the harbour" as a man "jokes with someone out of view" in the ‘White Wind'. It is the "last year of Victoria's reign", and the couple on the pier:

mouth a dialogue still audible
over ninety years, as distance squints back
from the false horizon.

At the end of the poem we find "the picture frame's a natural division of the wind". We are looking at a picture framed as Orsman carefully frames his poems.

Horizons are also a feature of his poems. In ‘Primer of Ice and Stone':

diagonals, that lunging...
of the linear
...works its way somehow
into each horizon

He wrote this poem for an exhibition of ceramic works by Raewyn Atkinson, Terra Nova, inspired by her 2002 Antarctic experience.

In the second part of The Lakes of Mars Chris Orsman explores the landscape of Antarctica. In ‘Into the Taylor Valley' there are:

walls of rock, jutting outcrops,
a vertical thrust that tilts the mind
off balance
In ‘What the Camera Missed' we are again looking at the perspective of the camera. The camera is:
collecting most of it for you
to scavenge later - bits and pieces
missed ... at the edge of the film.

Yet "the camera misses everything really" - the scent of the released "meltwater stream" buried alive in antiquity, "the taste of a glacier". Smells and sounds are also an aspect of the ‘Book of the Dead', the second sequence of poems in this section, where Orsman shows the relics of previous explorers to Antarctica, particularly of Scott and his men. In ‘Cape Evans' there is within the roofed space of the hut the "smell of a whole century...of blubber, ponies, harness oil...old meals, pungent cigar smoke", and a "book shut tight for eight decades". In ‘The Beach' an Edwardian march, "timing the systole of sea and shore", "grinds out of the brass gorge of a phonograph". 

Orsman uses careful juxtaposition of words to craft his images and evoke the landscape. At times I was challenged to explore the dictionary for meanings, such as the "katabatic", a wind common in Antarctica, and present in several poems. He plays with perspective and horizons, looking through the lens of the camera, through art, maps and assembled objects of the past, knowing that the landscape and mindscape may be glimpsed, but not captured. He provides a frame and yet allows us to see around this frame. He does what he describes in relation to the Terra Nova exhibition in ‘Primer of Ice and Stone':

returns
through conscious art
what has been felt and seen

with layers of found history and his own translation.                    

 

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