After the Dance
By Michele AmasVUP, NZ$24.95 | Reviewed by Laura Fergusson
IT IS RARE that one reads a book of poetry at a sitting. Usually the pleasure comes from the potential to dip and savour individual poems, and the satisfaction they give as distinct entities. I’m sure I will return in this manner to After the Dance, but on first encounter it draws the reader sufficiently into its emotional space that it is hard to put down. Without the artificiality of a plot, Amas leaks information gradually through her writing which compels the reader to build a picture and become engaged in her world.
Amas is particularly convincing in the evocations of mother/daughter relationships in the absence of a father. Blame, uprootedness, and teenage crushes are all wryly and lovingly rendered in simple, deftly chosen language. There is also affectionate handling of the no man’s land between childhood and adulthood, as where Alliteration, a depiction of teenage aggression, is juxtaposed with The txt, in which the 14 year-old’s dependence is revealed in the classic medium of the 21st century.
This sense of generational transition is not limited to adolescence, however, as is demonstrated in Orphans, a reflection on the jolting re-assessment necessary when one’s parents’ generation begins to die:
“where are the adults
when you need them.
I’m still standing on the beach
in my togs and Bermuda shorts
waiting for the parents
to find a park.”
The personal poems are interspersed with pieces spanning the genres of poetry and prose, forming a series collectively entitled The Caversham Project. Amas explains: “The Caversham Project is an academic history project which intensively studied the early Dunedin suburb of Caversham. The study spanned thirty years and was directed by Erik Olssen at Otago University. My Caversham Project is a personal history of the place which was home to my grandparents for sixty years.” These pieces combine social history, anecdotal evidence and individual memory in a recreation of Amas’ grandparents’ marriage. In their understated but telling emotive detail they provide an effective counterpoint to the investigation of contemporary womanhood occurring elsewhere in the collection.
Amas’s poetry combines evidence of emotional bruising with a sense of tenacity and the importance of laughter. This is poetry with heart, written with a surety that belies the fact that it is a first collection.
