To the Occupant

by Emma Neale

Emma Neale creates shape-shifting poems that confound prejudices and subvert expectations. The striking imagery and emotional range of her work challenge the open and latent violence of contemporary life, from refugee crises to rape, poverty, and mental illness to climate change, while revealing the extraordinary in the everyday. Whimiscal typographical experiments and prose poems sit next to reimagined fables, deliciously light-handed satire, and quietly powerful insights into the contemporary political terrain.

80 pages, Paperback

Published August 1, 2019

About the author

New Zealand novelist & poet Emma Neale's first work was published in 1998 and her writing has been featured extensively in magazines, newspapers and journals, and several anthologies.

Daughter of writer Barbara Else.

Abridged from Wikipedia

Reviews

[Kathy · Rating 1 out of 5]

From the look-out point
of sleep's edge
the years spread beak
with all the pinprick fires and dark clutches
of an old,uneasy settlement

I'm not sure how much I agree with the blurb about the 'quietly powerful insights' but maybe the 'light handed satire' is going over my head. There is a lot of striking imagery in here and I think the poems that lean into evocations of nature are strongest even though that's not my cup of tea. But I otherwise found the emotional range to be sort of shallow. Many poems are brief scenes of everyday life, but a certain kind of everyday life--which is fine, stay in your lane and all that jazz, but some poems feel glaringly white, suburban middle class.

There's a poem about giving change to unhoused person, whose cup gets knocked over by "some big old drunk Sally" starting off kind of a mousetrap skit where another man goes chasing after a rolling coin into the street. This slapstick comedy seems intended earnestly, as though some ironic tragedy, the two-dollar coin a patronizing "small miracle of compassion." The characters are drawn thinly, like roles in a PSA beseeching bleeding heart liberals to donate to some cause. There's another poem that has the same vibe--caricaturized images of piteous, thin figures amid scenes of suffering, a patronizing hand, here: "the white hygiene gloves of the soldier."

There's not one but two poems that are basically "Well I have a [insert minority group] friend!" (literally a line: "It is not all Iranians. It's about governments. I had a friend. Her name was Roshi.") that depict racism on the scale of elementary school playgrounds. One child (white, of course, unnamed, default) and "Huiseong Song: Korean for bright star" easy friends, beyond language barriers ("Huiseong knows no English. / Yet--see how he close-reads hands and feet"). Is the simplicity of childhood innocent of prejudice? There's something othering and dehumanizing about this picture of this Korean student, and yet I'm sure this is how well-meaning whites must think. In another poem, we have model brown immigrants ("the gentle Sri Lankan waiter with the garnet ring") juxtaposed with someone on the bus hurling slurs, which somehow reminds the poet to think of her Iranian friend when she was eight?? And finally googles her ("Wait! She's alive."). I ... cannot. Also being the new kid at school is not the same thing as being a minority.

[Caroline Barron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh, I loved this! I'm not a prolific poetry reader, and many volumes I get my hands on I flick through without a heart lurch or a 'yes!' moment. But Emma Neale's work got me, and I got it. All I can say is: buy it for a woman in your life—one in her 30s or 40s or 50s—and make her heart lurch, too.

Favorite poems:
'To The Occupant' (show us again / how lightly to shoulder / these old bone crates, / remind us we are wrong / when we long / to lay them down.)
'Affadavit' (You know, he'd always wondered / once you could buy guns / that fit inside a handbag / why did women still let men / get away with so much violence?)
'The Tasti Guarantee'
'Dear Old Diaries'
'Postcards Just Won't Cut It'

[Anne Herbison · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favourite poem in this collection is "Small Wonder".