Lyric Road, Helen Jacobs (Steele Roberts, 2006.)
Jan FitzGerald
Firstly, I love the cover - wavy blues and surreal seabird! - though I am somewhat disappointed that Lyric Road is not the title of the poem from which it comes, rather than ‘Sing me a chocolate box lid...'
After a fourth reading of the book, I have settled on ‘Early' as the poem that works best in its simplicity and on the ear (though the last line, perhaps, would be better broken up after ‘open,' into two lines and the semi-colons seem unnecessary when the pause is established by spacing):
Early
Talking to you early
as the lid of the sun
the lid of the eye rises;
talking to you early
as the sun limbers,
licks the long wharf;
and the sky stretches wide
cat-flexes
before the cloud crouches;
the sharp cool south wind
springs the sun
springs the mind
open talking to you early.
The poems are predominantly visual and I feel it's not until the poet uses her other senses that the poems start to boogie:
The sound of the train
in the night
is a map of locations,
a line trading life points. (Night Train)
A slow unseasonable rain that smells
of books and fires and fantasy. (Books and Fires)
Some words do nothing for the poetry - peripatetic, ensconced, iterates, translucence, quintessence - and an overuse of adjectives and adverbs weakens some poems that start out well, as in ‘Evening hills':
The hills
that were crouched green dark
and feline late this afternoon
now in the damp spring evening
earth heavy and still
are slumbrously velvet,
coined with amber and silver
silken-sheened in water
diadem-crowned
Reading aloud each poem soon reveals the un-musical, and consequently the first stanza of ‘Song' to grown children felt more like an exercise for the lips:
Now that there is nothing to be gathered
I will thread through, spool silk
wind out and among, spin drift
not binding, barning.
The music and imagery of Christmas Eve, on the other hand, is captivating:
Sarah and Annika and Karin and Kristin
danced the long dance under the skies.
Sarah gave out the Christmas presents,
Sarah with candles in her eyes.
There is a tendency to stay with the comfortable ‘I'. How much more mysterious these lines would be if changed to the third person, ‘she'...
I lean through the softness to rub
my face in the folds of the evening
(Evening hills)
Many good poems in the book suffer from the poet's inclination to tell all, or to lead the reader in a certain direction, when it would have been more intriguing to have stopped earlier. The poem ‘Coast', for example, could lose the last two lines:
Tomorrow
it could be a place
without man or dog,
or baches, the pingao
floating somewhere else;
it could be
desolation, or pristine.
However, these are things for the author to pick up on, for working the next manuscript. For the reader, Lyric Road still stands as a book of pleasant poems on flowers, children, cats and hills, in most instances well crafted and brought together.
To anyone published by Steele Roberts and receiving a grant from Creative New Zealand in these hard times, I say, Well done!
My personal favourite from this book? ‘Hard edge' - without the "impeded step" or "implacable":
Hard edge
