Secret Heart, Airini Beautrais. VUP, 75pp RRP $24.95 ISBN 086475413
Johanna Aitchison
Secret Heart is hot young thing Airini Beautrais's first book of poetry. She's taken the daring step of producing 75 pages of poetry in prose form. The idea of prose poems fascinates me; as soon as I hear those two words together I think of Emily Dickinson's 613, "They shut me up in Prose- /As when a little Girl /They put me in the Closet- /Because they liked me "still"'. The question jangling in my mind as I entered the volume was ‘Can she pull if off?'
Beautrais's poems ripple like the Zen verse of Ryokan, Issa, and Buson. There are ample nature images here. Beautrais is camping up Butterfly Creek with a vanload of boys. The images are sparse and unadorned-fish and chips in the park; kids hitting "cricket balls into picture windows of houses" - and, just as you begin to worry that you've entered into a New Zealand Gen Y version of kitsch paradise, she throws in some details that send you sideways,
"It was almost dark in the picnic ground. I had a headlamp but the others didn't. They collected branches by feel."
(What I Remember About Butterfly Creek)
There is a sense of a something to which Beautrais hints but never fully proffers that keeps the reader intrigued. Perhaps the heart of the poems resides just below the surface of ordinary language? Many of her poems are anchored in nature, but Beautrais's best poems have a city/country feel to them. They straddle the territory convincingly. Beans reads like an Aro street parable, with Ratboy's graffiti and the white cross marked with "Here Lies the Ghoul" serving as portents of the by-pass.
Beautrais doesn't just observe the city/country, she inhabits it. There's the sense of the speaker being so immersed in the poems that she is hardly visibl - the Zen thing again. In the hitch-hiking poem, 'Lost Town', Beautrais tries to remember the town: "Somewhere in stone fruit country, somewhere on a back road where the grass verges never got mowed."
Sometimes the objects she inhabits take on a life of their own - the books "which might go off on their own tangents, down the barefoot pavement to the beach", but more often the surrealism is in very light dabs, an image relayed in such an oblique manner that we have to dig for the strangeness ourselves.
Beautrais is obviously a cool chick: she plays with a folk/rock band called the Raskolnikovs - a real-life thing confirmed on the back cover. The band hits the road on page 45 and that's where the book, with its prose poem-only policy, really starts to hum. On the road beautiful and strange images happen: "The morning after ferry" to Picton at the start of the tour "is pink and raw". Her pearls "lose their luster" in Lyttleton. Ah yes, you think! So normal that you wonder why you haven't heard it before; so strange that it has to be accurate.
There are stories of knives being pulled in the bar in which they will be playing (Lyttelton again) and Russian sailors who only drink vodka. Joints are shared, pool is played, a chick flirts with Jelly; the alcoholic host in Port Chalmers talks about eating children. He has been up all night and his face is the colour of red wine. He pours himself another glass and reads the newspaper that is shaking in his hands.
But back to my question of whether she pulls off the prose thing. I'd have to say yes, nearly all the time. Occasionally I'd get the sensation of a poetry volume about to burst into novel, but usually, the prose poem form added to the normal-but-strange-story-but-poem feel to the book.
