Review: The Sets

Victor Billot is perhaps best known to the literary community for his weekly satirical poems (written in the tradition of Allen Curnow’s Whim-Wham) commissioned by Steve Braunias for the ReadingRoom website. While those poems are well-made, humorous, politically and socially acute, the poems in his latest collection, The Sets, reveal an alert and mature poetic sensibility at work. This is the work of a poet with a true sweep of feeling for and understanding of the complications and contradictions of our age:

The hive mind of the precariat is munching a Pixie Caramel

halfway up the property ladder to the celestial kingdom

in Dirty Dog wraparounds, toting prepaid unlimited texts,

one week away from the event horizon of financial singularity.

(from The National Conversation)

To anyone who has spent time around surf beaches or has even the most rudimentary knowledge or understanding of surfing culture, will know the word ‘sets’ is a demotic term used to describe groups of waves. New Zealand is a nation of wave watchers. As a people, we are vulnerable to its moods and rhythms. It makes sense, then, that our most powerful and prescient artworks are born of the ocean.

Allen Curnow, arguably our finest poet of waves and shorelines, began the ninth movement of his sequence Trees, Effigies, Moving Objects with the couplet, “Never turn your back on the sea./The mumble of the fall of time is continuous.” It’s an aperçu that could well serve as something of a missing epigraph or unlegislated mission statement for The Sets. Curnow’s lines become the compass point where Billot’s book finds its origin, what it addresses, and ultimately where and what it returns to. Sample this, from the book’s prologue and titular poem:

I wish these demands would forsake me,

my heart and balls and guts tangled hopelessly

in the murky business of the world.

Distant raging darkness beyond the line of the horizon

makes the ocean tremble, and so the sets come on.

Here we find the same austere existential and metaphysical foreshadowing, the same dance between the personal and political, the social and elemental. Across four sections, in short lyrics, dystopian allegories, incantatory chants with binding phrases, Billot has created something of a fragmented mini-epic. The world is in a bad way (as the events of 2020 reaffirmed) and the reader is spared nothing of this realisation:

Instant humans get their kicks, just add water to the mix,

read between the lines to the rhythm of doomsday clock ticks.

Reserve banksters roll the presses, print money they can’t buy,

all typeset by a million philosopher monkeys, channelling dead white guys.

(from The 21st-Century Book of Doom)

However, The Sets is more than a chronicle of doomsday prophecies. If anything, the reader is drawn back to the destabilisng effect of contemporary life but forced also to look for alternatives. We are shown also the watermark of human implication and error but Billot is careful to give balance to the full and complex spectrum of emotion. This book is not all hellfire and brimstone. The necessity of human intimacy is also celebrated:

Unguarded windows reveal set pieces,

quiet kitchens, the flicker of game shows.

Stars assemble in formation.

Outside we listen to the old sounds of night.

Our fingers brush and twine.

(from Stillness on the Bay)

Billot is a technically adroit craftsman and doffs his cap to his sponsors. In reading The Sets one can glean the tutelary assistance of poets such as Les Murray, Pablo Neruda and Derek Walcott, while the spirit of his polemics can at times be comparable to those of the Irish Marxist poet, Tom Paulin. Readers will find he shares the same gift for linguistic dexterity, breakbeat cadences and richly textured sonic patterns as current Poet Laureate and fellow Dunedin poet, David Eggleton.

Lastly, The Sets is a sure example of why our most interesting poetry is made by outliers, who operate away from the hothouse shelter of institutional creative writing programmes. The poems of The Sets are hard won. They are the testament of a man navigating the light and dark of his epoch. Victor Billot has much to say. His is a voice worth listening to.

Reviewed by Michael Steven