Review: Ghosts

Ghosts is the third full-length collection from poet, editor and teacher Siobhan Harvey. A selection of poems from Ghosts won the 2019 Kathleen Grattan Award for a Sequence of Poems.

This is a book primarily about houses and homes. What makes a home and what makes a house; the physical and emotional structures of houses and homes, and what they harbour. The safety that can be found but also, especially in the searing sequence Building Memories, what happens when a home is not safe. As befits the title, these are haunting, powerful poems that will draw you in and spin you about. They are elegiac poems, dense with meaning, that reward re-reading.

There is a sense of constant movement in the collection: relocation, and dislocation, and the poems possess a quality that allows them to wend their way inside the reader like smoke. If you have been unfortunate enough to personally experience the pain of relocation, housing uncertainty and eviction, the poems contained in Ghosts will particularly speak to you. And if not, you will gain valuable insights from reading this book.

There is a strong sense of loss threaded throughout the book. The losses described are many and they are as varied as loss of one’s past identity, loss of a home, loss of opportunities, loss of one’s childhood, lost possessions. In these lines from the title poem, Ghosts, Harvey writes: ‘All the buildings that never were. / All the novels unwritten.’

I was also struck by the poignancy of this segment from The Ghosts of Aranui:

Everywhere we see the realisation of time

hauling itself back in: daylight retreating

to darkness; abandoned sections recomposing

the rubble of weatherboard and glass […]

My Ghosts Rise Up in Lockdown is another evocative poem dealing with loss: ‘…tortured lovers / who summon the past in fitful bursts, / punches to the gut; the countless dead’. While in Listening to David Sylvia, the Ghostwriter Considers the Past, she writes: ‘we all possess remnants we want erased.’

Social justice is an ongoing theme of the book. In poems such as Haunted House and The Ghosts of Manus Regional Processing Centre, Harvey powerfully references the refugee crisis:

Would our arms stretch across the deep?

Would our courage break down that wall,

Embrace the other life we find there?

Would this humanity set us free?

Would this humanity return our souls?

Ghosts also contains many poems addressing housing shortages, the greed of developers and experience of eviction and homelessness. The New Zealand political situation, with regard to housing, is brought into stark relief in poems like Serving Notice upon the Prime Minister, Erasure and The Poem of the Short Film of the Story of the House.

While many of the poems in Ghosts elucidate issues to do with relocation in general, Harvey particularly examines the stress and sense of dislocation experienced by migrants. In Ulysses poem, she writes:

Beyond the walls

of the life, the home

I’ve rebuilt, some animal

stalks the wilderness

In Someone Other than Myself she imagines a parallel life where she remained in her homeland and in The Ghostwriter’s Life is a Translated Poem she writes about being “transposed” into a new life, with all the losses that entails.

The collection ends with a piece of creative nonfiction, Living in the Haunted House of the Past, that placed third in the 2020 Landfall Essay Competition. This harrowing but ultimately uplifting essay traverses childhood trauma within the framework of the renovation of a new home. The juxtaposition of the two provides insights into recovery, the process of writing and our deep need for shelter.

Ghosts is a superb collection that will further cement Harvey’s reputation as one of our most accomplished poets and creative essayists.

Reviewed by Kiri Piahana-Wong