Songcatcher Robynanne Milford (Whitestream Press, 2009)
Vaughan Rapatahana
The poet, a South Island, Aotearoa-New Zealand physician, likes to play with words, languages, shapes. Always with an iota of irony; a wistful wisp.
Her collection - her first, as here published by Whitestream Press - is a plenitudinous patchwork of le difference à la Derrida, a mélange of sorties into variegated styles - from the two-legged shape ‘White Hot', to a more austere landscape ruri (short topical poem) ‘Lake Hauroko', skimming over a range of her own Southern alp-and-valley life experiences. Except at the end, a mausoleum of memory for New Zealand war dead, including her own closekin.
Sometimes overwritten, as if she clutched a regurgitant thesaurus as she wrote, ['katabatic' keeps calling, as does 'susurrate']; sometimes using nga kupu Maori (Maori words) as if she has gone direct online to find a straight transliteration (as, for example, in Korowai whakakaingoa for Tohinga [sic] - which for me just doesn't work), rather than meld the two alien languages into a newly holistic code-switched via media -à la Powhiri Rika-Heke (1991) - Milford, when she hits her straps, IS a forceful and fine poet.
Let me return to the abovementioned ‘Lake Hauroko'. I will quote it in full.
in deer blood dawn
stealth
six boots stalk the
roar
rain mutes groin thwack
root trap ankle
in serious mud suck
saves
crazed orange hats
fall
off bluff way down
back body bag
te mauri
te urupa o te tupuna
where water listens to wind
whenua tapu, te taonga o Ngai Tahu
Concise, scalpled imagery with a tangible taste of te reo tuatahi o tenei whenua (the first language of this land), this poem rivets Lake Hauroko deer-hunting terrain into immediate focus, yet at the same time bolts the vista onto the anvil of long-range history once and for all. An efficiently effective poem, methinks.
Another very good poem is the frontispiece verse to the largest division in this collection ‘come white in' (with its especially blanched references) - namely ‘On this train of thoughts'. Some damned good imagery not straining the electric fence that is poetry at its very best. What about "She leans into elbows of the land" and "off the tracks willowrivers braid through her"? These give me a hit or two.
& then there is the excellent and contrapuntal ‘Mourning chorus'. SFA te reo Maori here, but a moteatea (song-poem) nevertheless: repetitive, recurrent imagery structured as a waiata tangi (song of loss) mo nga manu ngaro o tenei whenua o matou (about the lost birds of our land.) What we have all done to extirpate, once and for all - huia, Stephen Is. Wren, Piopio, orange kea and their feathered cousins. Sad, moving, plangent.
There's an intelligence frolicking throughout this spume-ride of verse. Serious mud indeed.
Whakatuhi pumau koe tau moteatea Robin [Robynanne] - kaore he manu ngaro koe.
Always write your poetry Robynanne - you are no lost bird.
