Review: La rebeldía del sol (Rebellious Sun)

Charles Olsen’s La rebeldía del sol (Rebellious Sun), his third collection, centres around journeys and collaborations. These have been a feature of Olsen’s life, leaving Aotearoa as a teenager to eventually live in Madrid, Spain.

Connections to and memories of Aotearoa are found often in his work. This collection is divided into three sections, with the poetry in both Spanish and English, and explores Olsen’s experiences during the III Antonio Machado Poetry Residence of Segovia and Soria.

These regions are the inspiration for the poetry in the first section. Olsen’s initiative linking poets with Machado’s work in Given Words, a competition for National Poetry Day in New Zealand, forms the second section of the collection, including the winning poems by New Zealand and Spanish authors. The third section returns to Olsen’s poetry, looking to Machado for inspiration, focusing on ‘the sun of childhood.’

As promised by the title, the poetry peers often at sunshine and light and its impact on our memories and experience. The book is accentuated throughout by Olsen’s photography which also focuses on light: the moodiness of the sun’s absence or its reflections off golden rock. Olsen draws parallels to various periods of his life in different countries: in Walks with the Professor, the poem addresses Machado from the perspective of several different cultures and in Return in Five Stops, he visualizes family ‘seeing my grandmother in a Spanish woman… I am that little boy leaning on her knee.’ Above all, Rebellious Sun burns with curiosity and restless energy, a wandering journey of travel, culture and thought.

En Route to Valsaín considers the repeated appearance of a dead woman on the bus, conjured by an elderly passenger:

                EN ROUTE TO VALSAÍN

On the bus to Valsaín, each day he resuscitates the dead woman.

The elderly man whose toes don’t reach the floor

asks if we’ve seen the dead woman.

In the front seats, two ladies chat with the driver.

Snippets of conversation drift up the aisle, ‘… from the

hairdresser we went to the hospital and they cracked up when

they saw us arrive with pallid faces…’

The dead woman is only an excuse as he pulls up early black

and white photos on his mobile, Spanish peasants, his ancestors,

he says.

‘In the Olden Days they wore these clothes for the cold, it was

a hard life out in the fields. See here… in the Olden Days they

cut the wheat with a scythe from dawn to dusk, and here, in the

Olden Days…,’ he says, a fish-like twinkle in his eye.

The bus leans around the roundabout

and the golden glow of the open fields swings into view,

sky reflected in the window,

and the dead woman levitates over the landscape,

her silhouette stretched out in the mountains

before slipping behind the trees.

 Reviewed by Erica Stretton