Tigers at Awhitu Sarah Broom (Auckland University Press, 2010) 80 pp; RRP $29.99

Joanna Preston

It's always a little uncomfortable sitting down to read a book that someone has praised highly. How often can books live up to hype? In the case of Sarah Broom's Tigers at Awhitu, I sat down to read with a considerable amount of trepidation - which was gone by the end of the opening poem's first stanza.

Now based in Auckland, Sarah Broom lived for many years in the UK. Her work is fluent and assured in a way that is uncommon in much New Zealand poetry. This is poetry steeped in craft as well as art. Normally I'd quote impressive lines to emphasise my point, but this is poetry of the poem entire, rather than of the singing line. Each poem built up out of unfolding image, the way a good film begins, or a piece of classical music.

Broom's motifs are fundamental things - water, rock, journeys, peril, and above all else, children. Many of the poems are almost dystopian in feel - there is a threat, often unspecified, and you watch it approach (or unfold) in a myriad of different contexts. You have to keep adjusting your sense of who it is that is speaking, and to whom. ‘Red Sail', for example, is in the voice of a mother speaking to her child, and follows ‘The First Gesture', which is a mother talking to us, and about a child. The shifting perspectives could become confusing in less sure hands, but Broom manages the voices like a choir master. And she doesn't limit herself to any one mode - some poems are definitely lyric, slightly more are narrative (hooray!), and many have strong elements of both.

Unusually, the collection was not completed when it was accepted for publication by prestigious UK publisher Carcanet Press (who also publish poets such as Gillian Clarke, Les Murray and Eavan Boland), so the second section (sixteen out of the of fifty-six poems) was written with the certainty of publication. Unsurprisingly, (and especially as she underwent a major personal crisis in the interim) there is a definite change in these later poems - almost all in the poet's own voice, and with a gaze turned inward much more. Peril is still a theme, but the children who populated the book in such numbers earlier (in twenty-three of the forty previous poems) only reappear in one. For the most part I prefer the work in the earlier parts of the book - the weakest poems of the collection are in this latter section. Having said that, even though I didn't like poems like ‘Three Exercises for Oncologists' and ‘Panther', they aren't badly written. Just not up to the same standard as the rest.

This is an impressive book. The opening poem (‘Snow') is as finely wrought a piece of theatre as a Hitchcock classic, with just as masterful a use of the unsaid. And poems like ‘Displacement', ‘Twins', ‘Muriwai' and ‘Rain' are breathtaking. It's not just the crafting of the pieces, but the unexpectedness of them. Like listening to Beethoven or Mozart - until you hear it, you would never have guessed the way the piece would play out. But once heard, once read ... of course! How could the universe have possibly been otherwise?

Recommended with thoroughly immoderate enthusiasm.

 


NZPS Home