REVIEWS
Bruce Bentzman – The Short Stories of Bruce Bentzman. $14.40 (US) 188pp. Xlibric Corp, Available from Barnes and Noble, USA
This book has been long looked forward to and I might say eagerly awaited by many. With good reason, too, I might add. These are elegant stories, delightfully crafted and very perceptively seen. Bentzman is not frightened to tackle the most complex situations. Predictably, human relationships dominate especially where 'man and wife' are concerned. Yet sometimes he can pull something exciting out of even the most ordinary situation, as in the subway on his way to work the nightshift. The drunk but proud black man lying across his feet, in "The Greatest Escape". This sort of thing was the subject matter of the late Charles Bukowski but I can detect a certain tone of greater sensitivity here, in Bentzman's work. It is good to see stories in a collection that differ from one another so greatly. Bentzman doesn't bother us by endlessly repeating himself as many more prolific and more famous writers do. Especially memorable is "Mr Longstreet's Short Excursion to Pittsburgh". Somewhat reminiscent of Miller's "Death of a Salesman', it details the unusual solution Bob Longstreet applied to work stress brought about by underlings bypassing him for seniority. Living in crowded, dense, and gloomy Pensylvania has not destroyed Bentzman's detached perceptive outlook, or his sometimes grim humour, either. The sequel to that story is "Reckless" where our car-loving Bob runs into trouble with a traffic cop and ends up paying into the police widow's fund (oops, have I given the game away!). Nice twists in plot and superb endings are a feature of Bentzman's stories. And some deep research too. Although a professed athiest, Bentzman does, in "The Gospel According to Judas" what many an eminent theological historian with fancy theoties has not done, and that is to explain the death of Christ with such chilling exactitude. There are many other striking stories in this book. The Vietnam deserter who has no family and wanted to die: "The Healing of SK", and who ends up paying his respects and doing the world a favour in the process with his healing remedies. Then there is the man who lost his memory and became a very succcessful executive, in "Portugal", and married to a beautiful 'woman behind the man' type. And the man who tried to shoot an abortion doctor, in "The Cheshire Downs Dialogue". Once more, taking on social issues sees Bentzman coming out with common sense with a total lack of harsh judgement – even if 'luck' ruled the day in this story. It isn't easy running your plots through often hard-learned experiences, with hard won research, having your stories coming out looking as fresh, detached and very entertaining revelations. That is the art of a great story writer. I am sure Bentzman deserves more allocades than he is likely to get.
HATS – Jenny Powell-Chalmers. Published by HeadworX, Wellington, New Zealand.
This is Powell-Chambers second book of poems. Her first, "Sweet Banana Wax Peppers" was a charming book. This one has moved on from that. She plays with death, "Dancing", and this is easily the best poem in the book. Indescribably complicated, we dance always with death: "….without moving". Equally unusual, in "Love in the Early Winter": "The view spreads / up the valley and waits / by the hills". "Fat Ballerinas" shows acute observation, even if slightly judgemental from one who is so young and needs to tighten up her objectivity a bit. Many, like "Blue Pixie Hat" show little image interest. "Talking About Tomahawk" shows better imagery, "the cars join up like a long necklace", finishing in, after doubt at the funeral process, "not one ash / to cradle in my hand". A lot of this work is elaborately personal but not self-piteous. If it misses the bus here and there it is because it has not been properly worked through. "Obligato For Mothers with Religious Accompanment" is a pastiche of motherly things which seeks to identify Christlike things with ordinary human events. Going to God is a special thing. Her title poem, "Hats" is a wonderful affirmation of survival and trust in upcoming generations. We know that hat will last. Even if many of the poems may not. In "The Dreamings", "The Ripper" stands out. Being concerned about the environmental destruction seems worthwhile, even if presenting the destruct as an exhibit only, with no revelationary message. Powell-Chalmers misses many opportunities. In "The Dreamings" ("The Dreamings") about 'pounding the earth', - after stating early in the poem "a sea of dry redness" she ends with "until the bowl / is full / of food". A somewhat powerless ending, I would have thought. "Simone and Her Boys" seemed to be productive to me – an invasion of the male domain was interesting. Feminist defence is still a necessary activity in New Zealand. There is enough here for me to eagerly await Jenny Powell-Chalmers' next book with great anticipation.
CHROME – Paula Green. Poems, Auckland University Press, New Zealand. $22.95.
Paula Green has a warmth and lucidity seldom seen in her contemporary poets. And, certainly an optimism in the value and strength of life that many, concerned at the awful things that beset them, have not. In her opening poem (these poems have no titles as such): "we are stretching the roots of life / loving to the point of dying". The book is in four parts as represented in the colours; yellow (herself), her mother (rose-red), her father (green) and the 'blue' ripeness of poetry. If this all sounds a bit precious, believe me, it isn't. Green makes it all work like a dream. Yellow: "She lays out the history of her mantelpiece" and "with the paint still wet, still fluid", through a great many self-explorations, to "I carry tokens of my existence / buttery verse culinary herbs cadmium yellow". Her mother, "borne aloft my mother / stretching the roots of life" to "working floury fingers to a floury bone". The "the mother suffocating the daughter / is the daughter she suffocates herself" to "recognising the line / between mother and daughter blurs", is a recognition of a special sort of timeless love carried through to her 'green' father: "with a wink of his eye / he harvests sunshine" and "my father, soundless on the stones / hidden by the rage of the rain" Finally, the 'blue' ripeness of poetry is where her poetry triumphs supreme. An impressive achievement of fine unforced imagery which rewards as you re-read and re-read – connecting up the dots, so to speak: "there, where the sway of home / meets the sway of the poem". It is all together for Paula Green – the unity of home, family and her art. Quite inspirational.
ISLANDS OF INTIMACY. Love poems by Denys Trussell. Published by Addenna, Auckland, New Zealand.
Trussell embraces all the arts, poetry, music, (he is a classical pianist) and the visual arts. He is also a noted biographer of the top-rated artist, Alan Pearson. Trussell's talents as a poet, however, are not inconsiderable. I believe they are underrated, when compared to the work of many of his more well known contemporaries. These are love poems written over a period of 30 years from 1970 – 2000. Trussell also takes the opportunity, in an essay entitled "Love Essay Among the Machines, Poetry and the Erotic", to liberally quote his own work in this book - a scholarly and unusual, but not unwelcome intrusion into the poems themselves. But it is to the poems we must turn. Love, to Trussell, is not so much an emotion, but a direction. A path to be taken that has intellectual integrity and lasting warmth. Perhaps, not the love of 'person' concerns Trussell so much, but the love of love. For the 'sea of love' as the book blurb infers. With the long essay at the back of the book, it makes sifting through the poems themselves a daunting task. Would one find oneself short-circuited by an explanation of meaning and context in the essay? I have a suspicion of over-explained poems. But don't let that put you off for what are, in my view, some really classy and memorable poems in this book. Although overloaded at times with some non too subtle imagery, I do like, in "Antipodes of Love", the final lines: "It spins / it spins, this / tidal world of rock / and sea / it spins / and shifts the / islands of intimacy". Truly describing the random aspects of love – the emphasis on hanging on to the idea of love itself in order to overcome fears of its impermanence. There are many rewards for those would persevere with these poems. A really solid achievement.
Laminations, by Murray Edmond, Auckland University Press, 2000, 56pp. Reviewed by Bernard Gadd.
It was a pleasure to come across a collection of New Zealand poetry whose author has learned from the developments of the later 20th century in the Post-Modern, including 'language' poetry yet still writes accessibly and enjoyably. Even readers preferring the more traditional styles will find poems like Step and Wave and A Rant for Mickey Joe to their taste. This is poetry which aims challenge in one way or another many of the contemporary attitudes of mind or common coin of media-fostered language. At its best this poetry employs wit, lightness, allusion, perceptiveness, and layering of potential meanings. The gem of the collection is Can that Mango in which despite the title has as its framework what the end notes describe as, 'Two angels discuss a man and get him confused with a lyre bird': "man you are superb, a god, yet / damned, as only / a dancing lyre bird can be". The targets Edmond takes aim at are often the easy ones of greed, materialism, ignorance, and blunted imagination. But among those are more mind-making issues: "So all information is art of the natural camouflage of the narrator, the multiplicity of stories, the simplicity of plot as it flies" (The Gannets of Pilsen) And in Visiting the Ruins: "The self-congratulations of the past are carried forward to make the present and the future stay the same like cultural histories. In this spirit the dialectical reality is passed off as the material reality and things are declared sufficiently approved to be allowed to endure." The claim on the back cover that the collection 'subverts the self-satisfied platitudes a new century' is somewhat undermined by an over–fondness for the striking line (perhaps in lieu of the striking metaphor of more Romantic and Georgian verse) which can at times read more like striking verbal attitudes than taking on the burden of thrusting satire or subversion of what we have in our minds. Even so it is a book which does not at all share the sycophancy towards power of too much New Zealand poetry, but does indeed challenge the reigning flabbiness of mind and imagination.