Paula Green and her anthology of New Zealand women’s poetry, Wild Honey.

BooksSeptember 23, 2019

Come in, come in! The warm, welcoming poetry anthology Wild Honey, reviewed

Guest writer

Paula Green and her anthology of New Zealand women’s poetry, Wild Honey.

Joan Fleming on Wild Honey: Reading New Zealand Women’s Poetry, the humming, house-like opus by poet and champion of poets, Paula Green.

When Miranda July came to Melbourne in 2016, she did something that I have found difficult to forget. She told us that she was going to stage a conversation between ‘all the men in the universe’ and ‘all the women in the universe’. We, the audience, had to help her. First, she readied the men. “You’re going to introduce yourselves,” she said. “I want you to say: Hello, we are all the men in the universe. Ready? two, three, go.” The men in the audience spoke their line. The town hall filled with the irregular sound of their deep, uneasy voices. It was honestly a feeble attempt, but July didn’t ask them to do it again. She moved on to ready the women. She told us our line, counted us down, and then – to our surprise – we spoke in almost perfect harmony: We are all the women in the universe. We tend to be better at collaborating.

The conversation went on, with the men struggling to keep up a strong aural correspondence, and the women speaking their part with, well, perfect togetherness. The claim that women are naturally better at collaborating is, of course, problematic. Is it ‘togetherness’ and mutual encouragement we fall more easily into? Or is it obedience, a socially inscribed and collectively enforced willingness to follow the instructions and do as we’re told?

Whether nature, nurture, or social programming, it’s my experience that women do tend to crave the kinds of gatherings where we listen deeply to one another, and draw each other out. This spirit of a gathering is at the heart of Paula Green’s big book of devotion to New Zealand women poets, Wild Honey: Reading New Zealand Women’s Poetry. Just look at the cover. Sarah Laing’s unabashed illustration shows a recognizable coven of New Zealand women poets, sharing cake, chatting, and daydreaming on a picnic blanket. This book does not perform critique. It is not an academic inquiry. It doesn’t engage in canon building by sorting the major poets from the minor. It is an appreciation. Green writes about the poets and the poetry she loves. Full stop.

Even in those moments where it might not be love at first sight, we see Green working on the page to find the connection. This is the case with Jessie MacKay, a poet who most of us know as the name behind our Best First Book Prize, but whom few of us have ever read. MacKay is named as one of the foundation stone poets, with Eileen Duggan and Blanche Baughan, and this is in part an act of reclamation. Duggan (along with Robin Hyde) was disparaged by Alan Curnow, who said their later work “does not lose that weakness of inviting a special sympathy from the reader”. Is the ability – the skill – to ‘invite a special sympathy from the reader’ really a weakness? Don’t we all want to be moved?

Green’s book re-centers early female poets like MacKay who were sidelined or not taken seriously. It is important to say, though, that this re-centering work is non-hierarchical, like most of the book. MacKay is not a foundation stone because she’s a major poet, or even because Green adores her work. In fact, there are times Green struggles to know how to appreciate it: “Where are you, Jessie MacKay?” she writes. “Your poems move and provoke me, puzzle and divert me. Some poems…do not rise above flatness, even when that flatness is paradoxically ornate. Yet the very best poems reflect an alert mind and an active ear.” To find her way into MacKay, Green invokes Hera Lindsay Bird. It’s an unlikely pairing. Is MacKay’s letter-to-the-editor activism really mirrored by Bird’s wicked, embedded feminism? But Green insists upon these improbable friendships. She draws all who move her into the shared ecosystem of the hive.

Green has imagined her book as a house, and structured it accordingly. We begin with the foundation stones, then move through the house’s rooms and corners, then through the door and out into the garden, then to the city and the sky. The poets in the shoe closet are no less important than those in the study or the music room, although some are given more space – more pages – than others, a fact for which Green very nearly apologises. The house metaphor is self-conscious. It performs a reclamation of the domestic as a worthy subject for literature.

Because of its breadth – the house tries to accommodate everyone – Wild Honey is useful as a guide or a reference book. In the ‘study’ chapter, we find a helpful assemblage of definitions of what poetry can do and be: “it has to fit right in my mouth” (Selina Tusitala Marsh); “I find myself looking for…glorious tension” (Anne Kennedy); “the luminous moment is vital” (Emma Neale); “I like to give myself a bit of a fright” (Bernadette Hall). The ‘kitchen’ chapter is especially occupied with themes of the domestic, and how male critics have loved to trivialise them. We travel the gamut from Blanche Baughan’s basic onomatopoeia (“Hiss! Splut! Splutter!”) to the “incessant hunger” of Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle’s Autobiography of a Margeurite, where food is ever-present but rarely satisfies.

Other preoccupations of Wild Honey include reading through biography to see how women’s historically marginalized experience shapes their writing, and the physical and psychological spaces women have had to carve out in order to write and to keep writing. Green also keeps coming back to the anxiety and crippling self-doubt that so many ambitious female creatives seem to experience as a matter of course.

Carving out a space to write: the laptop and the loo. Credit: NZ writer Angela Cuming

In reading this book, and thinking about the ways that women gather and listen to and ‘read’ one another, I began to wonder about therapy and its usefulness as a metaphor for criticism. Psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips has said that the work of therapy, “at its most useful and interesting,” can function as a kind of translation. People often come to therapy when they have reached “the limits of their language”, and they need someone to translate their painful stories back to them, with a “better vocabulary”. For me, the loveliest prose in this book is something akin to this, when Green penetrates the psychic layers of a poem, and translates its yearnings back to the reader – or, more precisely, back to herself. One example is her description of Tusiata Avia’s poem “Looming”, where the speaker “releases secret little sadnesses that gather in the bedroom and the grey disquiet of dawn”. Another example is her interpretation of Morgan Bach’s poem “What They Made”, where the speaker feels “an internal stranding, a struggle to shift from origin stories to self-autonomy…to move from dark to light, from haven to wider world.” These moments feel like the insights that can arise when women have the time, space, and freedom to go deep diving together. Perhaps she is not offering a ‘better vocabulary’ to the poets she is reading, or diagnosing the poems’ meanings, but rather, articulating the echoes of her own psychic experiences as she encounters them in poems.

Green has often described reviewing culture in New Zealand as replete with bullying and bandwagons. She has said how certain critics demonstrate a “toxic” and “ego-driven need to demolish and show off”, or hierarchize by claiming certain books of poetry “aren’t poetry”. These critics are often male, however, I am cautious of replicating the implication of a toxic male reviewing culture versus a more generous, more encouraging reviewing culture led by women. Our reviewing culture is certainly not as binary as that. Green’s example as a critic is characterized by her necessary website Poetry Shelf. She has chosen to build her place in New Zealand letters based on a spirit of encouragement and kindness, which she articulates as a conscious revolt against cruel and patriarchal tearing-downs. There’s a flip side to this. Some Kiwi writers want a little more severity. New Zealand is a fishing village, and those critics who dare to say unfavorable things might find the writer of the book they’ve found wanting is sitting on the next prize panel or deciding the next round of residencies. I sometimes worry we’re all damning each other with faint praise.

Green’s point, however, is that behind every book is a human being, and behind most poetry books is a skinless human being whose sensitivity to the world is both their best gift and their worst curse.

All this review long I have been speaking of “male critics” and “women poets” as if there were only two genders. New Zealand is still waiting for its big, queer, new-wave poetry anthology, a gathering of work that might better reflect fresh movements beyond binaries. However, Wild Honey is not that. And it doesn’t need to be. This book is an open house with a garden party happening out the back, and you’re invited.

Wild Honey: Reading New Zealand Women’s Poetry by Paula Green (Massey University Press, $45) is available at Unity Books.

Keep going!

Marilyn Monroe, circa 1953. Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

BooksSeptember 22, 2019

Night shift: the true story of a New Zealand nurse and a (very) famous actress

Gregory O'Brien

Guest writer

Marilyn Monroe, circa 1953. Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

New Zealand painter-poet Gregory O’Brien has just published a new collection of essays and art; pitched as a “field notebook … my whale survey”, Always Song in the Water drifts from his own front lawn in Hataitai, up to Northland and way, way across the Pacific. It’s the sort of book that slows you down, reminds you to breathe, and every so often flipper-slaps you with a great little yarn. This extract is called ‘A Kindness’.

Shortly after returning from a trip to England in March 2012, I was talking with my mother over the telephone, describing an in-flight movie I had watched, My Week with Marilyn – the true story of a young film-maker who had been assigned the task of looking after Marilyn Monroe on location in England sometime during the mid-1950s. My mother took a surprising interest in hearing about the film and then told me about two nights of her life in England presumably around the same time.

Signed up with a reputable nursing agency, my mother had found herself eminently employable in post-war London. There was always work – good work – available to New Zealand girls like her, on account of their comprehensive training, work ethic and physical prowess. She had made the most of the twelve months she had already spent in Britain and even managed to get herself invited to a Royal Garden Party – at that time the Holy Grail of stories-to-send-the-family-back-home. From said engagement, a photo survived down the years, in which my dark-skinned, blackhaired mother is standing, best-friend-fashion, with the Queen Mother on the lawn at Windsor Castle, both of them with glasses in hand. On account of what must undoubtedly have been a ‘large’ afternoon, my mother retained a life long enthusiasm for the gin and tonic. No episodes from her charmed nursing life would ever eclipse that story – not even an afternoon spent watching cricket at Lords with Benjamin Britten.

Until I mentioned the Marilyn Monroe movie, my mother had never before spoken of her employment at a central London hospital – ‘the one where all the Royal Babies were born’, by her recollection. As a contract nurse, she was always being bounced around from hospital to hospital, all over the city, with the same frequency, although for a different set of reasons, that Marilyn Monroe bounded in and out of an assortment of hospital rooms throughout her adult life.

On account of a particularly harsh British winter, during which my mother’s health had reached a state of near collapse – her constitution was never strong, on account of a childhood bout of scarlet fever – she spent a week in Dublin with nursing friends. While the rest of the rowdy contingent continued onwards to County Kerry, my mother’s ailing condition necessitated an early return to London, by ferry and then train. Arriving home, she was met by one of her nursing flatmates who, after the briefest of greetings, excitedly informed her that there was a shift available that night, looking after a ‘special’ patient at St Mary’s. It was a wellpaying but undemanding assignment. My mother’s friend was already signed up for a shift elsewhere, otherwise she would have leapt at this one. My mother resolutely pulled herself together, as much as she could. On top of everything else, she told me, she was suffering severe menstrual bleeding. But she needed the money.

Before being admitted to the patient’s room, my mother was taken to an adjacent office, where the nature of the night’s care was outlined. Her employment had not been arranged through the hospital – this was a separate, private contract. My mother was told that the patient was an American actress, who had earlier in the day received surgery to her feet. She was asked to sign a document or two concerning the assignment, specifically regarding the identity of the young woman in the hospital bed, who had been admitted under an assumed name. My mother complied without hesitation. Keeping a secret had never been a problem for her. She reminded me of another of the great virtues of New Zealand nurses: they were always as good as their word.

Painter-poet Gregory O’Brien and his new book, Always Song in the Water.

The nature of the surgery, she was told, meant that a considerable amount of pain relief had been prescribed. (My mother recalled, from her earlier career at New Plymouth Base Hospital, that pain after foot surgery was often excruciating.) With the actress as her sole charge for the night, my mother was to ensure the patient was kept warm and as comfortable as possible. If the pain became too much, a duty doctor was to be summoned. She was to remain awake, bedside, to keep an eye on things generally and also to ensure no unauthorised persons entered the room.

Having crossed a stormy Irish Sea less than twelve hours earlier, a residue of seasickness lingered – on top of whatever else my mother was suffering. (Within a few days, a doctor-friend – also a New Zealander – wrangled a nursing placement for her in Devon, where the fresh air, sunshine and pace of life would be much closer to that of her native Taranaki. The month spent there worked wonders.) Soon enough she was seated in a comfortable chair close by the bed, staring into the blonde hair of her sleeping charge and surveying, in the half-light, the well-appointed room. It was one of the best in the hospital, with large south-facing windows and good furniture.

When I asked my mother if the woman struck her as beautiful, she said that the actress was, at the time, very famous – although not quite as famous as she would be a few years later. Even my mother, not a frequent movie-goer, had recognised her instantly. She added that the actress’s appearance was perhaps a little ‘artificial’ – a word I had never heard her use before, in any context. My mother could not recall in detail any conversation that passed between them, although she could recall the woman’s sleeping head, her deep, narcotic breathing. To which she added, after further thought: ‘Oh, she was striking, yes, you could say that.’ A slight but significant revision of her earlier appraisal.

At a certain point in the night, with her charge drifting in and out of sleep, my mother herself fell into a deep slumber, from which she did not awaken until the following morning. It must have been 6am. The first thing she noticed was that one of the blankets had been removed from the bed and wrapped neatly around her. During the night, the actress had, with some considerable effort – of this my mother was certain – leaned across and, with great care, tucked her in.

The patient was, herself, asleep now. Mortified, my mother could not believe what had happened. How could she – one of an esteemed company of Commonwealth nurses – have slept while on shift? A short while later, a doctor and another nurse entered the room. It was at this point that my mother’s duties came to an abrupt end. She exited the room, distressed, nauseous and certain that her inattention would be reported to the powers that be. Word of such inexcusable, unprofessional behaviour would get back to the nursing agency. She wondered if this was the end of her nursing career in London.

Marilyn Monroe, 1954. Photo by Baron/Getty Images.

Having returned to her flat and crept into bed, she fell into a swirling, convalescent sleep, from which she was roused, late afternoon, by the same nurse-flatmate who had arranged the previous night’s commission. Was my mother available for another shift? her friend asked. The patient from the previous night had placed a personal request that she be tended by the same New Zealand girl as the previous night. My mother was aghast.

About the second night, my mother had less to say. Her apologies would have been profuse but, one suspects, unnecessary. Early in the shift, my mother diligently handed over the painkillers – a formidable array, she observed, silently – and the requisite glass of water. She remained awake throughout the night, staring with girlish fascination at the face of the actress. For the most part, her charge slept comfortably, my mother fine-tuning the blankets and sporadically adjusting the pillows. At one point, she pulled her up in the bed – a manoeuvre my mother performed with great aplomb, as I myself learnt during a long, asthmatic childhood.

Close up, my mother stared at the actress’s face, her downy skin, the slight variations in her complexion, the ordinariness of her nose, her eyelashes – the features which, 60 years later, my mother would remember as ‘artificial’. In the dim light of the nightroom, she listened to the actress’s breathing. An audible twitch. The slightest of moans. The sound that lips make. A light, barely audible snoring which made my mother smile. Occasionally a few words were muttered in the almost-darkness. But, as my mother related, this was probably only the medication speaking. No secrets were forthcoming.

With dawn breaking in the trees outside the brick building, a doctor knocked on the door. He told my mother that later in the day the actress was being transferred, as planned, to a private country house. My mother then related to him, in unnecessary detail, an hour by hour account of the night that had just passed.

A little later, as my mother sidled quietly from the room, the actress was sleeping soundly. Just clear of the crumpled sheet, her shoulder rose and fell in time with each breath. She might have been walking or wading or swimming, my mother recalled – with a steady, deliberate rhythm, as if moving uphill or windward. Her pale neck and shoulder, pursed lips. Accompanied by the faintly oceanic rustle of her sheets. And that was where my mother left that undulating movement – until the morning 60 years later when she related this story to me, at which point the waves resumed their listless motion, a movement which now continues onwards and outwards by way of this further recounting.

Always Song in the Water: an oceanic sketchbook, by Gregory O’Brien (Auckland University Press, $45) is available at Unity Books.