Review: Nouns, verbs, etc. (selected poems)

I am standing in a library. Stacks upon stacks of stories, piled so high they sway like trees or raspberry vines heavy with fruit. I pluck the clustered words and feel the juice, sweet yet tart, squirt between my teeth.

The verbs slip under our boots,

like small changeable stones.

I realise I am not in a library after all but in an open air cathedral. I see a woman walk quickly between the pillars, one hand outstretched. She looks as if she’s leaving a trail of breadcrumbs. I run to catch up but she’s gone. Her trail is not of breadcrumbs but of old slides, the ones you used to carry carefully home from the camera shop and squint as you held them up to the light. Scenes from a middle NZ childhood, lying in long grass under a buzzing sun, watching movies under a fake starry sky whilst dredging in the sweaty smell of a new love.

And then, it’s kind of like

lying on a hillside, sun full

on and a gum tree rattling

away like streamers and

there’s a whole kind of

shining party going on.

And you’re at it.

Without warning, I realise I am crying and laughing. The whiplash of emotions that comes from being dragged down the aisles of someone’s history and tenderly fed with morsels from their kitchen table. The breath of women, scared, resigned, hopeful. Some in crinolines and some in shattered glass. Women, breathing, women, daughters, women, mothers.

Her pink mouth gapes, eyes

lidded, the blinds already

drawn. She breathes. And

breathes. She is a bird in a

dry land. I dab at her lips

with water on a cotton bud.

She is a bird under a brilliant

sun. She tongues the water,

Drop by bitter drop.

The woman reappears but with the sun behind her she looks like a child. And then she is gone again, flown to a strange land from where she is heard singing of saints and sacred cows and nuns in a rhythm strange but still with that unmistakable antipodean twang, and when I blink she is crouched in the cockpit of a war plane raining bombs that explode into flowering angry ashes. There are the faces of children in those ashes, suffering children with large heads, and Indian dairy owners being gunned down for daring to speak, and young women with their heads bowed and their lips pressed together. Suddenly I am in the middle of a crowd, being pushed this way and that, the ground unsteady and the air getting hotter. But then she is there and she takes my hand and I know that she’s telling me to close my eyes and trust my skin.

Nothing exists: no house,

no gentle garden, no

crowd of trees standing

by, heads bowed beneath

the weight of snow. Just

our lights outstretched,

feeling the way through

fistfuls of white flowers.

Fiona Farrell’s selected poems, a personal guided journey through her four collections of poetry, plus many uncollected poems. Not a “best of”, just a place for the author to breathe and take stock, as she reveals at the end by sharing with us a few poems from her new collection in preparation. Don’t miss the Preface, a revealing and quietly angry journey in and of itself, and the extensive Notes at the end.

Reviewed by: Renee Liang