Lyrical Ballads
by Bill Manhire and What to Wear
by Jenny Bornholdt

If we could consider any poets household names in Aotearoa, Bill Manhire and Jenny Bornholdt would certainly be two of them. Both have been Poet Laureate – Manhire inaugurated the role in the late 1990s and Bornholdt held it from 2005 to 2007 – and they’ve published more than a dozen collections of poetry each. Their newest volumes, released on the same day by Te Herenga Waka University Press, sit happily and handsomely alongside one another. Their covers are gestures of welcome: on What to Wear, the arm of a creased silk shirt reaches vaguely outwards; on Lyrical Ballads, a folded piece of paper asks to be smoothed flat. That sense of invitation extends to the poetry of both collections. Each book envelops the reader in its own kind of gentleness. These are quiet poems, more reflective than provocative, and they are alive, bamboozling, surprising and precise.

Insects and animals run through Bornholdt’s latest. What to Wear opens with a bird, bathing itself outside. The reader is encouraged to stop, stand still, so as not to frighten it away. In the poems that follow, Bornholdt allies herself with the animal kingdom, saying ‘sorry, sorry, sorry / to stick insects’, and the behaviour of these creatures often performs the patterns of a mind. Dogs veer ‘like thoughts / into a tiny experimental / forest’. Horses, in particular, have their fair share of appearances, but so do insects, and when Bornholdt zooms in on one of those tiny leggy beasts, we’re encouraged to pay close attention.

At his funeral
a praying mantis scrambled across
the back of the man seated
in front of me. With my heart
I gave thanks, lifted it
from his shoulder
carried it outside
and loosed it
into the day.

In these poems, small moments are placed in the centre of big ones, and major losses sit beside fragile joys. Much of the time, Bornholdt’s job is to pay attention and take care and give thanks, even when grief presses in. Sometimes, though, we have to look right at the colossal grief, as in ‘Mountain’, which describes the passing of a friend.

Since then, silence.
Like at high altitude
on a clear day — nothing,
they say, but you
and the mountain.

These poems never float into abstraction; instead, they’re anchored by concreteness, often by a complete landscape like that one. Here, grief is not a sterile concept but an embodied experience – the terror and bitter cold of a high-up peak.

Most poems in this collection seem to emerge from the centre of distilled moments, perhaps just a second or two caught in the speaker’s thoughts. Like spontaneous cross-sections of a mind at play, they stack memory and present-tense observation with deftness. In ‘Craft’, a kind of ars poetica, the speaker’s head is ‘full of nothing,/then everything’, and she likens the assembly of a life to ‘bad knitting’. There’s a vital looseness and asymmetry to these poems, an echo of that image of bad knitting with its dropped stitches and miscounted rows. Later in the collection, a poem called ‘Poetry’ develops what ‘Craft’ began, describing ‘how poetry happens’ through the unexpected and inexplicable connections between what we see and what we’re reminded of:

Late one night
I watched an interview
with an American poet.
Afterwards I wrote:
I threw away my mother’s
maps.

Throughout What to Wear, Bornholdt usually works in very short lines, often just three or four words in each of them, and she chooses unexpected, playful places to break up her deceptively simple syntax. Though we might think we’re looking at a still image through clear glass, Bornholdt is constantly engineering her lines to refract what we see. Details overlap each other, a verb or adjective from one clause might bump into a noun from the next and pared-back diction is folded over and enriched by off-kilter enjambment.

             cockatoos
in the trees, fairy wrens
at the window, my friend
at the table,
my friend at the table.

While Bornholdt’s skill lies in drawing the reader in to pay close attention to visual detail, the poems made up of carefully chosen images, Manhire’s poems prioritise the rhythm of speech, the real-time milieu of a crowded room or the spontaneity and absurdity of a conversation. There’s almost always whimsy in the poems of Lyrical Ballads – whimsy and melancholy in balance.

roof ripped off but got the tarp
and help is coming it’s mostly a waiting game
as for the health oh much the same

 

yes it’s all a bit of a pain
no, can’t complain

 

anyway, would you like to have this fish

Manhire is attuned to the way people say things, however inane the things they’re saying are. Sometimes, the more inane the better: the mumblings of strangers and friends contain odd delights, particularly when distilled and placed into new contexts. Manhire’s poems contain conversations, but more than that, his chatty geniality allows the poems themselves to be conversations with an imagined listener – when we read them, they become conversations with us. We are invited in. Even when the poems feel a little evasive, in-jokey or ungrounded, they still bear the same kind of charm as the muffled songs that drift outside when you’re taking a breather at a party. You can still hear the music. You’ll go back in soon.

Manhire’s voice is alive and restless and often cheeky. Nothing is ever totally certain or pinned down, and memory is a creation of the present, happening right now as we assemble it.

In Dunedin we lived
between the station and the stars.
Yes I mean the railway station.
The world back then was pure right now,
grey and shining and pretty much improbable.

The five sections of Lyrical Ballads make up a hefty whole. While the earlier sections dabble more in fable, character studies and memories anchored in place and time, the fourth and fifth sections are quieter and more abstract, and somehow all the more potent for it. A two-line poem called ‘Hamlet’ (one of several couplet-length poems in the book) concludes the penultimate section:

The ghost enters, licking its lips.
Yes, that’s it: the show’s over.

After that curtain has fallen, the serenity of the following and final section is a subtle shift from the more jittery, playful earlier sections. But even if the poet would’ve liked to strike a sombre chord to conclude this book with an air of appropriate finality, forces beyond his control won’t allow it. For a book with a title as grandiose as Lyrical Ballads, there isn’t any self-seriousness to be found. A poem called ‘My Final Poem’ isn’t even allowed to be the final poem of this book, and its confounded grumpiness is a relief:

Someone rides a bicycle through a cemetery,
then in and out of my poem.
Why would anyone do that?

 

I was expecting a dark horseman,
not a clown on a bicycle.

One clear way these two collections invite comparison is in the currents of loss and absence that course through them. Neither poet veers into sentimentality in the face of death. Both Bornholdt and Manhire opt for a cooler approach to it. They don’t dwell in the desperate present moment of loss but on the difficulty of nearing death (‘Too exhausted by coughing / to go on coughing’, Manhire writes) or the indescribable and unfillable gaps left behind. In the wake of a suicide, Bornholdt takes stock: ‘There was nothing / to be thankful for.’ But both collections remind us that while death is a sundering, loss is an efficient congregator. When we grieve, we often do it together. These poems are full of other people – groups of people delighting in each other’s company, confusing each other with conversation or standing together without much to say. Both poets use the grammar of the collective, the plural first-person pronoun ‘we’, in healthy doses. And Bornholdt’s ‘Family’ suggests that in the face of great sadness, the language of togetherness is a saviour:

             We long
for the agent emphatic,
for someone to say: māku koe e āwhina
I will help you.