Dried Figs: Old and Older - Poems from New Zealand

by Helen Jacobs

Dried Figs is a re-release of Helen Jacob’s sixth published collection of poetry. The poems talk of love, joy, loss and lamentation, growing older, past memories and the present. Helen ponders the paradox of old age – a time of terrible losses and unexpected joys. Fellow poet, Sandy Bains, describes the collection as a “pensive contemplation of the nature of humanness and our connection to the planet. These are poems to be read and re-read. She has analysed the nature of memory and our memory of nature wonderfully evocatively”. Emma Neale, Landfall, writes “hers is a poetry of pauses and silences, of an inner contemplation, and the act of trying to absorb the concept of morality …she is less a poet of the small and domestic, than of abiding metaphysical questions”. Patricia Prime, reviewing Dried Figs in Takahē 79, considers it ‘an accomplished, finely wrought gem of a book. It contains poems that pull you into them gently and quickly, and then as you proceed through the book you keep hearing echoes of what has gone before, and echoes of what is to come. Jacobs works with histories that are known and histories that she takes and reshapes. She uses this material – for example, sitting in the garden, in the poem “Garden Seat” where she rests and contemplates the young – in a way that makes you believe a poet can reach into the past and make language and life new again seen through a prism and given new life. This is not easy, but Jacobs does it with lightness of touch. Jacobs’ material is personal, and any information she has included has been well observed so that it arrives in the poem as an essential part of it. This makes her work insightful, emotionally astute, and it allows for a breadth of perception. I love the poem “Interval” which was written after the Christchurch earthquake on February 22nd and encapsulates the need to take every day as it comes and to try and retain a life as ‘normal’ as possible. Helen Jacobs says much in a few lines. Dried Figs does not cower in the face of ageing, pain, loss or difficulties. It is deeply hopeful, and the grit of Jacobs’ love for her city manages to seep through. In the final poem, “Some Other”, she sums up life and its ending in these succinct Does the butterfly in perfection for a day ask more seeking nectar after the end of flight?

70 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 25, 2020