Selected Poems

by Bill Manhire

Bill Manhire, by trade a medievalist and by vocation a poet, has - like those writers who invented and developed English poetry - helped to make something charged and original out of his landscapes (including Antarctica) and his language. He was New Zealand's first Poet Laureate and is one of its most popular and entertaining writers. This book traces his evolution over more than four decades, from The Elaboration (1972) through to The Victims of Lightning (2010) and new poems. It is the story of a love affair with the planet: 'The world is a constant amazement, / always on the move'.

Genres: Poetry

187 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2012

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

[Sienna · Rating 2 out of 5]

I should like Bill Manhire's poetry more than I do. He writes of gods and creation, dogs and dark forests, horses and the moon. In fact, "moon" was my first word, and I'm predisposed to soft-focus fondness, if not love, for anything to do with that mottled, reflective orb, with the stars, with the night, when we see so much less, so much more. And yet at times "A Song About the Moon" feels like rubbing a cat the wrong way.

The moon lives by damaging the ocean
The moon lives in its nest of feathers
The moon lives in its nest of clamps
The moon lives by aching for marriage
The moon is dead, it has nothing to live for

The bodies are dangerous, you should not touch them
The bodies resemble our own, they belong together
The bodies are weapons, someone will die of them
The bodies will not lack for wings, someone will find them
The bodies are maimed but you will not remember

Do you still suffer terribly?
Do you always speak French?
Do you stare at the moon for you cannot forget it?
Do you long to be emptied of nothing but feathers?
Do you want to go on like this almost forever?

You must abandon everything after all
You must abandon nothing at least not yet
You must abandon hilarity
You must abandon your flags
You must abandon your pain, it is someone else's

You must abandon poetry for you cannot forget it
You must abandon poetry, it never existed
You must abandon poetry, it has always been fatal
It is like the moon, it is like your body
It is like the ocean, it is like your face

I am that cat, bristling and yowling, and not only because comma splices feel like flea-bites. I want to like this meta-poem about resemblances and relationships, language and identity, but it takes its own absurdity so seriously. "The Selenologist," a longer, more straightforward narrative poem, is more successful in part because it doesn't end with "it is like your face" (I thought we abandoned hilarity?), but also because there we find science and magic coexisting in the moon. It feels right, singing of silence and shortcomings. This is Manhire at his best: "What is memory but all of us listening?"

There are many wonderful little stories and moments and people inhabiting these pieces. Manhire's poets have been struck by lightning. "No one / retains the charge, though some believe they do." His god is "a succession of dreams." His women are... irresistibly twee. "Girl Reading" reads like me — a me I hope makes appearances only rarely. I mean, really:

She overhears the sound of things in hiding.
She bites an apple and imagines orchard starlight.
Each time she licks her thumb, its tip,
she tastes the icy branches,
she hears a sigh migrate from page to page.

He also likes to rhyme. Sometimes he gets it just right. "The Oral Tradition" playfully succeeds on most counts, but as it's long and best read in full I submit this gorgeous sing-song-y sequence from "What to Call Your Child" as evidence:

Oh she is herb,
she is skin, Christ in his skeleton,
the whole of the world he wants,
maybe jasmine. She knows the quietest name
of the wind, and says it but he cannot hear.
He makes a bird of paper (bird of timber,
bird of trees) and throws it to the breeze.

But Manhire's just as apt to deal in awkward wordplay; "The Next Thousand" self-consciously pairs slant words without rhyme in mind, asking us to contemplate the relationship between each couple with a coy smile, hand half-obscuring his expression so that we're left wondering why we're meant to think of the future so cheekily. "Song with a Chorus" forces tragedy's hand into that of sickly sweet sentimentality, all silage-scented sadness, and "The Wrong Crowd" wants us to take note of the letters that "below" and "bellow" share. (All right... so?) I struggled with these and, really, want to emphasize that: these are my failings as reader, and these same poems may sing for you.

Some did for me. "The Song," for one:

My body as an act of derision,
eating up the answers to life.
There is the bird-song, now,
elbowing through berries while
the hairs in my nose catch
at the little bits of existence.

And I know you go on living
because you need to be cared for.
I embrace you, I kiss you,
trusting in an ordered development,
watching the small explosions
under your wrists.

Oh we survive merely by good fortune,
by random appetite: going
outside to lie on our stomachs
as if we meant to swim in the earth,
floating near the dazed horizon,
giving this music into the light.

And "The Trees":

Barques we ride on over the sea:
we like to come in on the tide
alone and when it's morning, first
light shattering the bodies.
We want to go under completely,
a well-heeled relic of devotion.

Shapes in the dusk, the faithful
breathing, happens under leaves;
though what does it matter, let's suppose —
'under the circumstances' is where we are.
The truth is a requisite urge,
nobody's lover. Sweet sweetheart,

I have a good intention to be better.
I mean to be a silence,
a hair on the floor of the forest.
Why, I sometimes hope to be your pleasure,
the raft you swim out to in lake-water,
shaking a little when your body touches.

The best poem of all is a long one, "Brazil," a murky, dreamlike tangle of a narrative that could keep going and I'd be content. It has to end somewhere, somehow, though, and I like the way it does, without struggling to make its conclusion dovetail into something easily describable with this impressive, imperfect, incomplete language of ours. I won't share any of its magic here here — you should seek it out.

This may be a brilliant introduction to Manhire's work, but it's full of thoughts to which I don't relate and only a few that I do. Apparently (and boringly) I like poetry that mirrors back the contents of my head. As with all Victoria University Press publications, it's a beautiful book, adorned with one of Ralph Hotere's distinctive line drawings, and you may have more luck connecting with it. You should try: if you're the right reader, if you're fortunate, it might all feel like this:

When we touch,
forests enter our bodies.

The dark wind shakes the branch.
The dark branch shakes the wind.

("Poem")

[Daniel Klawitter · Rating 3 out of 5]

"The great world makes its changes
And yet remains the same;
And poets' verses will unwind
The tangle in the brain."

While I enjoyed parts of this book, I think I hoped for a bit more consistency from such a prestigious poet (Manhire has won the New Zealand Book Award four times and is also that country's inaugural Poet Laureate.)

I tended to appreciate the later poems the most. However, there is a quite wonderful early poem titled "On Originality" that plays on the old trope that says “good artists borrow, great artists steal.” But the poem stumbles for me toward the end with a weird bit of haphazard syntax where Manhire writes: "Now I slide a gun into the gun/and go out looking." How does one slide a gun into another gun? I'm no firearms expert but I've never seen it happen. The poem also has no other instances of such oddness, so the line is really rather obstrusive.

Other poems in the middle section of the book come across as a bit underwhelming in terms of diction as well. But still a book worth reading and one not without humor, as in the closing poem:

Old Man Puzzled by His New Pyjamas

I am the baby who sleeps in the drawer.
Blue yesterday, blue before -
and suddenly all these stripes.

[John Nash · Rating 3 out of 5]

Took me a long time to warm up to this selection of poems.

Initially I was disappointed and found his work hard to get into. I found the syntax awkward, the rhythm a bit stilted, and the content confusing (How does one put "a gun inside a gun?"

The last 30 page or so were phenomenal, however. Beautiful insight into the mundane. The meter felt more natural and endearing. I felt myself slipping away into another world as I read them. As a result I look forward to reading more Manhire in the future.

[Blair · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm sure Manhire does a wonderful job at mentoring other writers, but I find his own poetry to be mostly uninspired, with some exceptions. The poems (arranged chronologically) get better as the book progresses.

[Ashleigh · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5