The Blue Voyage and Other Poems

by Anne French

The Blue Voyage and Other Poems is a new collection by Anne French – elegiac in tone and confident in execution. A more comic initial section (by noted New Zealand regional poet ‘William Butler Smith’) leads into a section of thoughtful but vivid sailing poems and then a number of elegies, laments and funeral songs from French’s ‘black notebook’. The final section voyages to Korea and includes some loose translations of poems by modernist Korean writer Han Yong-un. In their considerations of remembrance and writerly acts, these ‘translations’ aptly pick up themes introduced in the book’s first three parts and round off the book ‘Waiting / for the ringing of the bells announcing daybreak, / I put down my brush.’

68 pages, Paperback

Published March 7, 2016

Reviews

[Frank Lo-Kee]

The cover of New Zealander Anne French's latest volume of poems, 'the Blue Voyage', is a beautiful photo of antique Turkish Iznik ceramic tiling, featuring a stylised ship. The same picture could as well serve as the cover for CS Lewis's 'The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.' One can imagine a hapless Kiwi reader wondering, 'Why has the author not chosen a Maori Waka?' [ An indigenous canoe.] Quite. This volume of poetry has been serendipitously published in 2015, the hundredth anniversary of the Imperial British and French invasion of what was then the Ottoman empire, and is now the Turkish coast under the thumb of the new quasi-sultan of Turkey. Much of the verse deals with the author's recent sailing expeditions off the northern Mediterranean Turkish coastline, and are replete with much Turkic vocabulary. The titles of these evocative poems also refer to Latin poet Catullus, Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, even Chopin's 'Funeral March' sonata. The volume closes with a fascinating but regrettably short section on Korea.

French's global range of poetic references is this volume's particular strength amidst the thematic drabness of most Kiwi literary writing. If a culture's literature in its richness and variety can be compared to cuisine, the banquet of, say, French, Anglo-American and Arabic/Turkic literature stands apart from the peanut-butter-and-jelly-dusted-with-cinnamon gamut of NZ writing. Consider two large slices of white bread ( one imagining it is whole-grain brown ) standing for the demographically predominant white populace, into which is placed the jelly of Maoridom and peanut butter. The peanut butter doesn't signify the other cultures resident in NZ, but postcolonial guilt. And what, one may ask, has cinnamon dusting got to do with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich? Exactly. In this recipe, the cinnamon stands for the add-on tokenism of the Pacific and Asian peoples who comprise the 'multi' aspect of multiculturalism, but basically fall off the sandwich of contemporary NZ literature. The peanut butter of postcolonial guilt, or how to work around it, comprises the dubious flavour which permeates much of contemporary NZ writing. And one knows that peanuts are the agent of the most lethal common food allergy in humans.>

As can be divined from this analogy, the Kiwi literary sensibility is not a particularly sophisticated palate. Kiwis by and large pay lip service, a sort of chop-chop chopstick tolerance to multiculturalism, and this can show in odd ways. A particularly hapless reviewer of this book does not appear to realise that the 'WB Smith' writer mentioned by French on page 2, in a footnote worthy of TS Eliot's in 'the Waste Land', is an authorial heteronym akin to Portuguese poet Pessoa's use of heteronyms, riffing off WB Yeats. ( One poem is an affectionate Antipodean parody of Yeats's 'the Lake Isle of Innisfree'. ) It is clear that WB Yeats and Pessoa are not much read amongst the student body in English or literature courses in NZ educational institutions. One can imagine the poet's publisher, Auckland University Press, spitting out its breakfast of boiled kumara in consternation at the inclusion of so many Korean-themed poems : 'Dear French, your name may stink of European influences, but be that as it may, how can we publish a volume of poetry with so few New Zealand themes and so much Asian and Middle Eastern stuff? Where are the Maori references, the bicultural pabulum that 'Creative New Zealand' require? UNPUBLISHABLE without more random Maori references! Less Asian, Less Johnny Turk, more Treaty of Waitangi-compliant content PLEASE! Push the Korean stuff to the back of the bus and don't include anything more Korean unless it mentions Lydia Ko, like 'Lydia is NZ's best Asian club'. ' Indeed, this reader wonders how this volume got published in NZ at all without more de facto ToW-C RMC [ Treaty of Waitangi-compliant Random Maori Content]. RMC is what Kiwi readers expect, for better or verse.

The historical content of two poems requires explanation. In the long title poem, Taksim refers to the recent demonstrations in a small park, Gezi, off Taksim Square, a transport hub in Istanbul. Real estate magnates associated with the ruling Islamist AKP party were aided by the AKP and municipal government in turning Gezi park into lucrative commercial redevelopment. The protests became a magnet for the disaffected, largely secular opposition ( along with a religious grouping known as the Gulenists ) against Turkey's increasingly authoritarian ruler. Inspired by 'Occupy Wall Street', many protestors formed an 'Occupy Gezi Park'. This movement was easily crushed, yet another manifestation of the pervasive authoritarian stranglehold which grips the wider Middle East. In the Korean section which closes this book, the Gwangu uprising refers to the crushing of student agitation in that city for greater democracy, following the assassination of dictator Park in 1979. As the writer Lucy Wadham observed in 'Prospect' Magazine of the youngsters massacred last month at the Bataclan hall in Paris, 'they're a generation of pragmatic humanists who see the world around them for what it is- multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multifarious'. This is the overriding impression left by reading 'the Blue Voyage', a volume of pragmatic humanism, richer for its literary cosmopolitanism, a welcome tonic to the tedious, reductive faux-biculturalism of much NZ writing in English with its pervasive RMC.