My Sunshine

by Bill Manhire

Genres: Poetry

71 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1996

About the author

Bill Manhire was born in Invercargill in 1946. He was his country's inaugural Poet Laureate and has won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry four times. He holds a personal chair at the Victoria University of Wellington, where he directs the celebrated creative writing programme and the International Institute of Modern Letters. His volume of short fiction, South Pacific, was published by Carcanet in 1994.

Reviews

[Courtney Johnston · Rating 3 out of 5]

So, I am a terrible New Zealander. And this is the first full book of poems by a New Zealand writer I have read since my second year at university. I promise to do better.

Bill Manhire is, of course, an eminently sensible place to start, our Billy Collins - approachably familiar but irreproachably poetical. 'My Sunshine' is a mixture of one-off poems, sequences ('Hoosh', 'Isabella Notes', 'An Amazing Week in New Zealand') and two poems that are small and heavy - fat flat raindrops of heavy water:

Opoutere Nest Song

Sky and water, quiet
sand. Little whistle
that gets up and goes.

Prairie Poet

All day shovelling small snow,
and look, western light
at my window.

Musicality - lilting words, rilling patterns - is the driving force of the collection. (A number of Manhire's poems have themselves been set to music, a neat closing of the circle.) It's most noticeable in the onomatopoeia that bursts through 'An Amazing Week in New Zealand'

the pangka-bongka of the bango
the zhing-sching of the cymbals
the plim-blim of the harp

the steady beat of the heart

Or the Jew's harp:whanga-
whonga whee-whaw
whoodle-onga eedle-ongle

whow-zeedle oodle-ee whay-
whonga whaw; almost impossible
to do, like the roar

of an excited crowd, the sound
of winter skaters, a choir singing

but it lurks throughout, as does that borrowing (hard to be a Kiwi kid and not hear quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle in there). The title poem of the collection - and an exceptionally lovely bit of humour and sweetness and poignancy - brings these two things together, weaving unfamiliar magic from familiar phrases:

My Sunshine

He sings you are my sunshine
and the skies are grey, she tries
to make him happy, things
just turn out that way.

She'll never know
how much he loves her
and yet he loves her so much
he might lay down his old guitar
and walk her home, musician
singing with the voice alone.

Oh love is sweet and love is all, it's
evening and the purple shadows fall
about the baby and the toddler
on the bed. It's true he loves her
but he should have told her,
he should have, should have said.

Foolish evening, boy with a foolish head.
He sighs like a flower above his instrument
and his sticky fingers stick. He fumbles
a simple chord progression,
then stares at the neck.
He never seems to learn his lesson.

Here comes the rain. Oh if she were only
sweet sixteen and running from the room again,
and if he were a blackbird
he would whistle and sing
and he'd something
something something something.

As I read the collection for the second and third time, I found myself wondering if Manhire has found poetry too easy at times. On rare, blessed occasions, I've found my own writing coming so easily that the gap between facility and the facile seems to become dangerously narrow: it's the sense I get from Collins, and it's something I sniffed in here. I mean, here are the lyrics pulled almost at random from a run-of-the-mill-ish indie folk pop band I've been listening to lately

Oh well in five years time we could be walking round a zoo
With the sun shining down over me and you
And there'll be love in the bodies of the elephants too
And I'll put my hands over your eyes, but you'll peep through

And there'll be sun sun sun
All over our bodies
And sun sun sun
All down our necks
And sun sun sun
All over our faces
And sun sun sun

So what the heck

'Cause I'll be laughing at all your silly little jokes
And we'll be laughing about how we used to smoke
All those stupid little cigarettes
And drink stupid wine
'Cause it's what we needed to have a good time

And it was fun fun fun
When we were drinking
It was fun fun fun
When we were drunk
And it was fun fun fun
When we were laughing
It was fun fun fun
Oh it was fun

Oh well I look at you and say
It's the happiest that I've ever been
And I'll say I no longer feel I have to be James Dean
And she'll say
Yah well I feel all pretty happy too
And I'm always pretty happy when I'm just kicking back with you

And it'll be
Love love love
All through our bodies
And love love love
All through our minds
And it be love love love
All over her face
And love love love
All over mine

Oh, happy wistful heart-twistful, right? It's a sing-along feel-good bonanza. It's almost too easy (only you know that of course, it's not - have you ever written anything people want to whistle along to? Me neither.) At the same time, many of Manhire's poems also have a blind spot for me, an opacity, a point at which I feel like he not so much dodges the neat ending but lets it trail off, so things aren't all cleanly wrapped up and tidied away. My favourite poem in the collection - aside from 'My Sunshine', which let's be honest, is the mega-hit here - has this; the wordplay again, the nods to music, but a little more gravity, mysteriousness, a resistance to easy likability ...

An American Marriage

He forced her into the forced
which is the forest on America.
How dark it was there - and disappointing
under the branches, though no relief,
given he only wanted to talk to her.

Sing something, he said. He sat and waited,
and she bit her wrist till the blood came.
Nothing doing, no song in the darkness:
she watched him, approaching, love
in his pocket. But sky? But sky up there?

Sing something, she said, and he made these
bubbles of sound. In another life he had been
a king or a conjuror, just going around
and around in these circles: court circle,
magic circle, the ring he would slip on her finger.