Reviews by kaemi

Toitu lyricates you into the stream sensorial primally grasping at a before buried in “tangled in barbed rosewire” which overwhelms the ordinated course of things til you find your “feet succumbing / to the crag and slip / in the canopies / the empire of birds / musical”, a freedom in “courseways of leaf”. And it works, of course, as “you crackle over the forest floor” to watch “a brush of sun explodes on a tall bough, brightening and magnifying the hillside”. Who so scullery serious doesn’t enjoy such things? Even just “a huge kowhai tree nearby drips yellowy petals onto the grass” is lovely in the sense that I know now such a thing as a kowhai, this has improved my attachment to this earth, which is all we must ask of a sentence.

Of course, too much color without shape induces vertigo, so we find “you are standing in what looks to be a men’s urinal”. Alas that having something to say. Well very well. We’re now teetertumbling through Dunedin to pit the poets against the bankers, their whole accursed line stretching back to “the first sailor stranded himself on the shores of Murderer’s Beach” who have enslaved the native landscape into “all these things we have he says, opening his arms in a widening circle around himself”, metonymized by the act of diverting the stream to harness “All that power going nowhere, out to sea, wasted… all that water, that precious water…” Through this act of appropriation the magisterial architecture of downtown Dunedin, its banks, its gardens of the queen, full of statues to names immortalized to History by right of being the superintendent who “despatched the first shipment of wool to London”. It is written, what you will remember.

But other stories have tried to be written, to overcome “the teeth like mountains to climb / the tongue like a moving hillock of grit / and everywhere the breath, the breath”. We wander the whorls of half place to seek the “forgotten stream, forgotten poet / the world cannot keep up with the barreling wheels of time” through loose drafts of Janet Frame, a Dunedinite writer rescued from lobotomy by a well timed literary award who, in this telling, has not been so rescued: “they silenced the poet / they will try to silence you, too, if you are not careful / the only way to remember your name is to be heard / the only way to be heard is to remember your name”. The invocation of the name hearkens back before we were tamed to flow through waterwheels, when different forces flowed the river forth on journeys which cannot be mapped by streets. That Dunedin has forgotten that the city is built upon the Toitu is the imperial act of selfgrounding which recognizes that “We had to master the story, to remove the stream not just from the hillside but from people’s minds” in forging a place whose story starts in 1770. In defiance of “these people, the ones who own and control the narratives / they understand the power of a name”, find yourself “fortified against it / because you know the name of the stream / the source of the power” through intuitive construing of alternation progressing beyond where “the lines are joined. Everything is named / how can you possibly live with it? / well, I shall write it upon a piece of paper”.

As the ambition ramps more definitive, the poetry strains to retain semblances of its original charm. Sometimes it’s just hard to lyrically elevate the mundane: “you find a box of coffee grounds with some italian name across the front / add the water / you set the lid of the plunger on top of the glass and watch the water turn a murky black / wait / the coffee and water mixture is strong, the plunger gives slowly, with some satisfaction / you pour the coffee out into a plain white mug / you sip tentaively, blow”. Othertimes the obvious is more pleasant when pleasant: “the skinhead sees you coming, stares you down / there is something malevolent in his way”. Then there’s just the occasional absence of an editor’s pen: “it is so cold and smooth it feels alien, as if made by aliens”. There’s no rule that we can’t enjoy excesses beyond the power of editors, though, so I rather enjoy “a doziness comes over you”.

Shall we find ourselves struggling for purpose the further we stray from which edens introduced us, then we’ll find a companion here, where “the bricks seems to breathe and squeeze you with their breath” as we strive tirelessly “to find a place beside the graves, in the soft grass”. We yearn together for the voice of one whose name was writ in water within these walls where “they are for the cars, the crosses / and the rain is for the people”.