Review: Face to the Sky

Michele Leggott’s sumptuous new collection, Face to the Sky, interweaves the lives of two women, the poet herself and painter poet Emily Cumming Harris. They are separated by 100 years but both have ties to Taranaki. The poetry is an act of retrieval, conversation, travel, song. The writing is fluid, nuanced, melodic. The subject matter rich in effect and reach.

Sound is a crucial element for any poet, but for Leggott it is especially so. As a writer, she absorbs and engages with the world by listening, tasting, smelling, touching (‘the words come flying out of the dark’). The word “dark” epitomises the way a single word can refract and reflect in multiple ways – thus it is the dark of the night or the past, remembering and forgetting, the toughness of living, the scene of a poem, her blindness and her witnessing.

The pitch and harmonics of Leggott’s poetry are exquisite: ‘face to the sky on the shoulder of the mountain / between worlds and mirror light”. Yet the primacy of sound also reinvigorates our own engagement with the world, tuning our ears in new directions: ‘a dialogue / and respect for representing imagining.’ Words and phrases like sonic motifs repeat, appearing and reappearing, linking the arrival and departure of people, the locations and the musings: moss, drape, angelic, dialogue, mantel, sleep, music, geography, dark.

Leggott begins the collection in Taranaki, turning her ear to the tangata whenua and to the first Pākehā arrivals, acknowledging that we are often unaware of the history and the voices of the land that have preceded and shaped us, and that are immensely significant to who we are and who we will become.

Leggott has a backstory of bringing women writers out of the shadows, through diligent research and ground-breaking publications (for example, Lola Ridge, Robin Hyde). Harris is her current preoccupation, a figure who moves in and out of our view. Knitting is a recurring motif from socks to lace knitting to a grandmother’s soft white wool knitted into a dress. It is also a useful analogy to bring to the writing – to the way one life is written into the thread and mystery of another. Leggott and Harris, the one knitted into the other, connect threads fragrant with possibility. At times, the threads produce separate poems, at other times the women are knitted within the same poem. Lives might be elusive, deceptive, crumpled, or achingly visible, with family members present, or with feet on the move.

Reading Face to the Sky offers different reading co-ordinates for different readers. I found, more than in any book I have read recently, I am drawn to particular pathways on a deeply personal level. I was drawn to the contextual richness – the art and literature references, the historical events and figures that resonate. Sandro Botticelli, Italo Calvino, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald make an appearance, the suicide bomber at Kabul airport, lockdown, the arrival of navigator Tupaia with Captain Cook. The past along with the present tense is carefully gathered to reflect an experienced and felt version of the world.

Equally resonant is Leggott’s admission of a serious and life-threatening health issue that depends upon radical treatment. Having also undergone radical blood cancer treatment, I am knitted into the text afresh. The uncertainties, the fear, the daily challenges appear in the poems in poignant traces: ‘singers / open the line in my arm and cells begin to flow pristine / undifferentiated into the body wracked by chemical barrages.’

Face to the Sky offers poetry that travels between one woman and another, between ear and eye, across distance and within intimacy, that sings and mourns, discerns and deciphers. It makes me hold life close, and then marvel at the power of poetry to hold life, in an array of manifestations, to the light. Glorious.

 Reviewed by Paula Green