Review: Clay Eaters, by Gregory Kan

Across three books of poetry, Gregory Kan has made knitting diverse materials together into a unified whole his speciality. Clay Eaters, his latest, is his most audacious effort so far. Using numerous short, untitled sections, Kan ranges across territory and time, taking us to Singapore as it was in his days doing national service as an intelligence officer in the Singapore Armed Forces, to present-day Wellington, where he and his partner T have recently suffered a bereavement (the death of their cat Gilgamesh), and to present-day Auckland, where Kan’s parents now live, and where his father requires specialised medical care.

The sections about Kan’s time in the army are the most evocative and strange. Conscripts train on the island of Tekong, which has been emptied of its inhabitants by the military, and which therefore is full of empty buildings, ghosts, and echoes. The island is a liminal weirdscape, its geography evolving (with land literally being reclaimed from the sea), barely capturable by maps, the heavy air a soup of paranormal goings-on:

There were stories

About the northern tip of the island

Jeeps that wouldn’t start after sundown

Compasses going haywire

Soldiers getting separated

Abruptly unable to hear or see one another

Going missing and then being found again nearby

Signal sets failing, and so on

Possessed by some desolate desire

I wanted to make it all the way there

As though its remoteness were a comfort

As though the long intestinal road were a runway

As though I might be able to gather enough speed to escape

The clayey earth of the island seems to be a mixture of womb and tomb. ‘At night / We dug / Holes that were the length of our bodies’ in the red clay, and, ‘Spaced out in a perfect grid / Writh[ed] in our separate holes’. This is poetry that taps into the corner of our memories devoted to films of jungle warfare, the humidity and menace and mystery. But Kan also explores other aspects of Tekong’s history—its Taoist temples, its former Malay and Chinese communities, its use as a place for trainee teachers to go on orienteering excursions—and in this way he connects the alien circumstances of military life with the more domestic experiences that occur on the very different islands of Aotearoa New Zealand.

At first glance, successfully incorporating material about the death of a cat into a poem of this kind seems like a tough ask. But Kan makes it work, perhaps because we associate the cat-as-hunter with the soldier-as-hunter, and the result is some of the most interesting writing about grief for an animal that I have read. It is sincere, deep, measured, self-aware, never patronising or cloying, full of interesting links but not over-reliant on anthropomorphic projections: ‘You were always so severely tactical / Computing every line of sight / Every line of flight / . . . / You would have been / A much better Mr LIM [land infiltration management] than I was / So hard to catch you / Radar-eared boy’.

Similarly, the sections about the dissolution of Kan’s family unit might seem incongruous initially. Over a period of years the family has grown apart for good reasons (children pursuing education overseas) and less welcome ones (‘My mother complained to me that he was drinking too much again’, his father’s stroke). Kan offers us a parallel through stories of the dislocation produced by nineteenth- and twentieth-century immigration to Tekong, and he also offers us visions of harmony, of ‘friendly exchange between the communities’ of the island. He strikes a note of optimistic ambivalence that can also be found in passages about his family:

It’s difficult to spend time with my father

In a different way from before

The echoes in the space

In the absence

Of its leviathan

But things are also easier

The rest of us seem so much more ourselves now

Around this old dining table

Which has travelled with us from island to island

Poetry like this could feel like it’s written primarily for the poet—processing-lit—but Kan has an archival researcher’s curiosity, a documentary-maker’s eye for the poignant scene; he contextualises his life material in a way that is both subtle and thorough. And he takes liberties where he needs to. The back matter makes it clear that he adapts and reworks his sources, but he makes sure to stay on the right side of the line between transformation and misrepresentation. Clay Eaters is lissom, precise, and memorable poetry from a writer whose practice keeps getting more refined.

Erik Kennedy is the author of the poetry collections Sick Power Trip (2025), Another Beautiful Day Indoors (2022), and There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime (2018), all with Te Herenga Waka University Press. He lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch.