Walls to Kick and Hills to Sing From Murray Edmond (AUP, 2010) ISBN 978 86940 458 1, $24.99

Mary Meyerhoff Cresswell

Dancing with words is a noble art, and Murray Edmond is very very good at it. His newest book gives us lists and prose poems, jacket notes and soliloquies, dialogues and scripts, all in a fullness of fine words. The book is written as theatre - and has been comprehensively reviewed from this angle and in an atmosphere of literary criticism: see NZ Books and the Listener (for print), more on the internet.
Here, I'll just start at the beginning and go on at random: ‘Setting the seal on NZ poetry' recalls RAK Mason's famous dumping of his first book, yet again off the wharf but this time presided over by a seal who quotes the man himself, bringing us a healthy whiff of future fame (or possibly of the Cheshire Cat). Read it, because I can't quote it without ruining the story.
‘Suburban nature morte' is metaphysical, and it's turtles all the way down, as they say in metaphysics: three someones are vividly pictured but too self-involved to notice much, all the way down to the third someone who "performs

his yoga on his patio in tigers
and panthers yoked with flowers
on his Dionysian dressing gown
which is open to interpretation.

‘A translation of one of the sonnets of the importunate' presents a great array of flaunted styles that reads like colonisation on fast forward:

They brought those fêted seals in bells and hats
and leis by fated sails from ocean bowers
with cargo load of sated foals and gold
crew of fetid souls -

‘people are like flowers/they last for hours' sounds so sweet on first reading. ‘Whose say-so says so?' reminds us that a good word-dancer can throw out a hard truth and be safely around the corner before we do a double-take.

‘Of the nature of nature' is the centre of the section called ‘Peripety' (which can mean, in the phrase Edmond uses to end the preceding poem, the" sudden moment of not having"). When you are in the middle of climbing through the looking-glass, which side are you on?

She looks at me and I look back
and she thinks I am not who I am
but I am

and then,

I can't be nobody can I
if I've become someone else so many times
more like a proliferation

We may go back and forth, but things are never again the same after we have crossed the middle once. ‘The last caravanserai' - written in the style of the grand old Duke of York, up and down again, with one word different - points us toward "the feathered camels of poetry", who are on the move. Coming and going with the camels is, I think, a more appealing prospect than lying planked out on some wharf quoting RAK Mason.

And speaking of quoting, these comments gives fewer quotes than considered par for the course. The poems are so well constructed that I found it very difficult to take bits out - far better to just go and read the book. It's worth every word.

 

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