The Ponies Bernadette Hall, Victoria University Press, $25.00, ISBN 0-86473-552-9
Jan FitzGerald
The cover of this collection delighted me, reuniting me with the art of Kathryn Madill, whose work I first saw and loved in the Christchurch home of writer, Anthony Holcroft. It not only works beautifully with the poems as a whole, but is an expression of the two weeks Madill and Hall spent in Antarctica in 2004, under the shared ‘Artists in Antarctica' Award.
To the book now. Thirty-nine poems, many quite lengthy, and eighty-eight pages divided into three sections, is one substantial volume. I like the size of the book (210mmx160mm), too, which is easy to handle and good visually with Hall's use of long lines.
While the notes are interesting background, I preferred to read the poems first without them. After all, these are the creations that must stand or fall on their own.
Antarctica needed this poet. Telling it how it is, is what Hall does best, bringing us the raw, the dangerously beautiful. She captures the essence and bottles it:
Mukluk
What shall we tell them?
That the sea froze under our mukluks
like stretched plastic.
That tiny ice seeds skittered
on the blue pavement, ringing like Inca bells.
But how many ways can you write about ice or snow? Apparently, if you are Bernadette Hall, the ways
are endless...
Sastrugi ii
the ice looks like leaf litter, like roughcast
on the walls of the kauri villa roughly worked
up, the dense blue shadow and white
of pressure ridges that meet like clenched fists
over a card table, clouds that replicate the ice
and vice versa, O constant mirror,
fantastical theatrics, an elegant display
of miniatures, human apparatus in a white cabinet.
In brief Section II comes the magnificently-wrought poem for Hall's niece, Shelley Mather, who died in the Underground Bombing of 2005:
How We All Died With Her in the London Bombing
Passengers are swimming in the exploded dark.
They're like fish gaping open-mouthed towards the camera.
They're trying to say something we cannot hear
and we shudder in case we see her. To see her would be far
more terrible than not to see her, more terrible even
than never to see her again.
Quoting Hall from Wai-te-ata, the next poem: "How it all needs to be marked down." In Section III lies my favourite,
Somewhere Near Kaiapoi:
just a soft ground mist
rising like ghosts
of children running for safety into the swamp
the invaders
chasing them
take them for faerie folk,
the way they run like that,
on the top of the water.
Followed closely by 'The History of Europe' and the fun poem 'An Elegy for a Small Dog'.
Dear Chloe,you've peed on more famous feet
than any other dog I've ever known,
and most of them literary.
My overall impression? Here is a poet at the top of her game. Get this book. It's a serious contender for the Montana.
