Review: The Uppish Hen & other poems and Iris and Me
Reviewed by David Hill
Author:
Robin Hyde
Editor:
Juanita Deely
Illustrator:
Dine
Publisher:
The Cuba Press
ISBN:
9781988595658
Date Published:
01 March 2023
Pages:
40
Format:
Hardback
RRP:
$25.00
Writing about New Zealand pioneering children's author Esther Glen, Betty Gilderdale noted rather sadly that Glen lived long enough to see her books go out of fashion. It's a fate that lurks in the shadows for every writer.
It never had the chance to afflict Robin Hyde. The poet, novelist, mischievously subversive journalist endured poverty, crushing depression and war. Transiting through China en route to the UK, she took trains to the frontline where Japanese troops were invading, was brutally beaten and limped 80 km along railway lines to escape. She reached London but months of loneliness, plus the threat of war, eroded her. In August 1939, Iris Wilkinson (Robin Hyde was the penname she chose in memory of her first, stillborn child) killed herself in Kensington, by drinking Benzedrine. She was 33.
What might she have written if she'd survived and thrived? It’s a futile question but these two satisfying small books from The Cuba Press acknowledge the potential of her craft and life. When her second son, teacher and biographer Derek Challis, was four, his mother gave him a small, typed manuscript she called Derry's Rhyme Book, with a note that she hoped, ‘to have them printed with FUNNY PICTURES, ONE FINE DAY.’
That day is now here - 93 years later, with The Uppish Hen, edited by Wairarapa writer Juanita Deely and complemented by illustrations from French-born, Wakatipu-based artist Dïne. There are 14 poems: domestic and whimsical, warm and inventive. The titles tell you what they're about: The Purposeful Snail... The Dream Child... The Littlest Moon... Singing.
To 21st century readers, subjects and diction may seem dated: “he's a-weary....he's a-counting”. It's a monocultural, European world of Hansel and Gretel's cake-and-candy house, dandelion clocks, a moon through pines (though a tui gets included), a china shepherd. The works are mostly in short stanzas. They rhyme, neatly and conventionally. They're good. They speak clearly to young readers without speaking down. They startle with their felicity of words and close observation: “booming in the lime boughs cling the bees”; “Nobody ever talks to a snail, when sane”. They read liltingly aloud and this decade's kids should respond happily to them.
Dïne's illustrations match them nicely, with a palette of orange, soft greens and pinks, muted blues. Her images echo moods, reward with details: a hedgehog with a leafy umbrella; a centrifugal swirl of bulbs, lanterns, branches; a glimpse of glowing subterranean houses. They'll delight multiple generations.
The Uppish Hen is a charming tribute. I use the adjective in what I hope is its full sense – warm, alluring, beguiling. We lost a potential meteor with Iris Wilkinson's premature death and this book rediscovers some of her dazzle.
Wellingtonian Philippa Werry is one of Aotearoa New Zealand's most lucid and productive writers for young readers, especially in non-fiction. Now comes her intriguing, adventurous verse biography, Iris and Me, with a target audience that I reckon could range from pre-teen to post-retirement.
As its title implies, this is emphatically the story of Wilkinson the woman and fighter as much as Hyde the author. It's told in the first person plural - “we”. So, who is Iris's companion? Not saying, but it's ingenious and successful. Werry lets the narrator explain: “Who am I? / Well, I have to tell you sometime / Where was I while Iris was growing up? / How did I come into her life?”
It starts in Tsingtao, June 1938; flicks us back to suburban Wellington and the child poet (found curled and scribbling in a boat while frantic parents search). Then come the events of this review's opening paragraphs, though far more vividly told, with endearing glimpses of Iris's “loving, tumultuous household”.
In China, there are graphic renderings of bombings and atrocities, as Wilkinson and her companion head for the front, to report the truths of what is happening. There's daring and endurance. “Some of the Japanese soldiers were kind.” Some were savagely brutal.
We meet a sizeable cast: “The British consul and his wife / Mr and Mrs Handley-Derry – / How strange is that name.” We glimpse Anna Wong of Perfection Lane, Shanghai; a septuagenarian US Sinophile; Rewi Alley; many brave and tormented refugees, citizens, soldiers. Flashbacks to writing and illness (Hanmer was where the words came back), blissful or damaging love affairs, plus letters and newspaper reports intersperse the text. There are loving addresses to young Derek – “Always....try to make a garden”. There's that tragedy in the UK and the elegiac tribute, “She wanted.... / To be loved, to be worth loving.”
It's in clean free verse, with neat use of rhythms and cadences. A few slowly treading sections and the odd whiff of panegyric, but technically accomplished and narratively absorbing. Sections are lit suddenly by imagery: “....collecting impressions / like the seabirds that swooped / to catch food in the air”.
“I hope I'm not another of those poor buggers who get discovered when they're dead,” R H Morrieson (in)famously wrote. That's never been Robin Hyde's lot, and these two pleasing publications help ensure it's not likely to be.
Reviewed by David Hill
