wit of the staircase, Saradha Koirala. (Steele Roberts, 2009) RRP $19.99 ISBN: 978-1-877448-42-3.

Liz Breslin

How do you approach a book of poetry? Chronologically? Randomly? Back to front? Flicking open Saradha Koirala's first collection, wit of the staircase, you'll be initially delighted - there's a poem printed on the back flyleaf:

Outlook

I pluck out stray hairs
like lost apostrophes
and watch the final comma-curl
of a caterpillar.

Tomorrow: showers
easing towards evening
but today: Six Suites
for Unaccompanied Cello.

Tea steeping at sea level
the harbour as asphalt
and the wind
an ampersand.

So the initial outlook for the book is promising.

The front fly has an equally appealing vignettey work - ‘The season' - and the body of the book is organised into four untitled sections. If there is a criticism of the collection, it is this: finding some sense and order in the flow and segmentation of these sections. But who reads poetry in order?

A constant theme seems to be journeys - journeys of time, journeys of place, snapshots of lives. Her own life has wide ranging roots; she has a Kiwi mother and a Nepali father. She also, for the chronological record, studied English literature at Otago University, trained as a secondary school teacher in Wellington and completed her Masters in Creative Writing at Victoria University in 2007.

Saradha notes in ‘Quakers in Winter',

I think of Friends in vast cities, miles from home.
I hold us all in the light.

So Koirala casts her own light touch over Friends, friends and family from such diverse places as Nepal, where -

I rode an elephant, saw eight rhino
and had Christmas dysentery on a mountain top.

or Amsterdam -

where we rode the cliché
like a bicycle through thick traffic,
behind trams and into fields
where the tulips might have been.

or Rakiura, Queens Road, Courtenay Place.

Her sonnet for the latter won second prize in the Wellington Sonnet Competition 2008. It is obviously caringly crafted but doesn't sound at all forced. A well deserved placing. Some of the other work in this book has appeared in online and print publications including the Lumiere Reader, Turbine and Sport.

The title poem, ‘Wit of the Staircase', tells us,

When the tui called out with the bellbird's song
I should have said
If you take it, make it your own
be known for it.

As I lie in the hut I think of paua
harvested delicacy
captured, expected to come up with pearls.

It's a nice take on the idea of the wit of the staircase, l'esprit d'escalier, that even nature gets to refine its offerings.

But despite the recurring themes of birds, the seasons and the weather, all is not sweetness and light in this collection. In ‘Witness', the repetition of "she said" leaves us in no doubt that there's a great gap between what she said and we know.

In a recent interview for the Arts on Sunday with Lynn Freeman, Koirala said that she struggled with writing poems about memories from her past, finding them obvious, but was encouraged in pursuing this by her classmates. She creates poignancy in supposedly ordinary moments in tree houses, in frames, and on adventures where,

...the beach was a real beach: sweeping, grey,
washing up spume and skeletons onto dunes and tussocks,
not a walk-in-the-city pretend.

In ‘Once a fort knight', she writes

Daddy's a magician; we can never work out his tricks,
even when we check at the back.
His girlfriends give me plastic jewellery
in plastic packets sometimes
and he took us to Rainbow's End.

My brother said it would be different
if we saw him more than once a fortnight.
I liked Fort Knight.
He told me it meant two weeks
but after dinner we leant the dining chairs together
and hid behind them anyway.

This, and others in the collection, show again how the wit of the staircase has magnified Saradha's musings. We cannot, as she says in ‘Nonplussed',

Confine me to a shot glass
And serve me with a tiny spoon.

So a better idea would be to buy this book and dip into it like a tub of that delicious ice-cream with lots of different veins that you can open up and taste again and again.

 

Liz Breslin lives and writes in Hawea Flat and is co-founder of Poetic Justice Wanaka.

 


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