New Zealand Poetry Society Te Hunga Tito Ruri o Aotearoa
Here Comes Another Vital moment
Here Comes Another Vital Moment: a Writer on the Road Diane Brown (Godwit, 2006). ISBN 1-8692-119-0. 173 pp. RRP $24.99.
Karen Peterson Butterworth
This book is written in Diane Brown's trademark mixture of poetry and prose, and is about the journey she undertook with her partner, Philip Temple, when he was awarded a six-months' writer's residency in Berlin. The title arose, she tells us, from a sign painted in English on an old fruit box outside the Berlin apartment where she and Philip stayed. Brown has doubts about going but Philip is persuasive, and ‘who can resist the I love you madly imperative,' she muses as she packs.
As the story unfolds her doubts seem well-founded. Philip has been to Germany before, speaks the language, and has friends and an ex-lover there. His award gives him an identity and status within the Berlin literary community. Brown has none of these assets, and so exposes herself full-on to a maximum of culture shock and dislocation. She faces her challenges in true writerly spirit - by making a book out of them. The journey places strain on her relationship with Philip and often takes her out of her comfort zone.
"Memoir, poetry and travel intertwine..." begins the blurb on the back cover. There is travel, plenty of it, but it is travel through time, relationships, and feelings as much as through geography. For instance there is an episode about the couple's cleaning lady, aged 79 and from Weimar, where "...after the war the remaining local women were forced to walk through Buchenwald... I could trace no residue of horror on her face." The poem that follows begins, "Of course we see what we expect to see," and plucks an illustration from her New Zealand life.
The book is divided into a Prologue and six Parts, and takes us from Dunedin to England, Germany, the Czech Republic, Rome, and home again. Many of the Part and section headings are like lines from poems - ‘How did I come to be here anyway?' ‘I would tell them how if they asked,' ‘Relationships break up here,' ‘The beast within,' ‘And now for my own ghosts,' ‘The cackle starts.'
Brown employs a poet's prose - condensed, layered and allusive. Readers will get the most out of it by treating the whole of it as they would a poetry book (look for it first in the poetry section of your library). For me that meant reading it in short episodes - Brown's division of it into parts and sections was helpful - and pausing frequently to roll the story past my interior vision.
At first I was slightly embarrassed by Brown's exposure of her relationships with her partner and son. Some of Philip's remarks that she quotes suggest a failure on his part to understand her feelings - yet when re-read, many could equally express a baffled attempt to comprehend. The feelings others invoke in the writer are, of course, legitimate and necessary ingredients of a memoir. I found myself hoping the couple's relationship was ultimately strengthened by her honesty; and felt it most likely, since both are writers.
Apart from her poetic prose there are two main kinds of poetry in the book. Each Part is prefaced with a poem headed ‘Vital ingredients.' These poems are a feast of contrasting images, concrete and abstract, with glimpses of, and ricochets from, the story to come. From three different poems:
An ancestor's breath on your skin.
Gaping holes in the roof of your story.
Parkin cake to sustain your romance on the moors.
A dirty story settling in your water bottle.
Gloves for your children to inherit.
Duckling and rain to save the day.
Pink roses and an all too brief life.
A voice knotted up and matted.
A bathroom flooding with the unsaid.
I love that bathroom, and have one in my own life.
The other kind of poem serves the same purpose as a haiku does within a haibun; it crystallizes the preceding prose episode with clarity and specificity. In Rome, for example, in a prose passage:
"...the suspicious men who inhabit the local bar. Mafia, we're told, and we believe it."
Then in the poem that follows:
...two women
their breasts bouncing
are laughing loudly.
A man is standing feet
apart in front of the woman
who runs the Mafia bar
his fist opening
and closing in her face.
This passage is typical of the liveliness of Brown's sensory images: ‘vital moments' indeed, which constantly punctuate her more thoughtful and somber passages.
Poetry Society members will comprise Brown's most appreciative readers. We are pre-conditioned by poetry to disengage our frontal lobes from ‘What will I cook for dinner?' preoccupations, and take her words into deeper layers of our minds. We can perhaps more easily bridge her frequent lacunae and read the message suspended between them. That is not to say that other discriminating readers won't equally appreciate this book. It is not a facile read, but I found it a rewarding one.
