The Ponies
By Bernadette HallVUP, NZ$25 | Reviewed by Amy Brown
WHAT IS IT about Antarctica that makes New Zealand send its artists there? The painters return with snow-blue canvasses, the poets with ten more ways of describing ice. Everyone is left with the impression that Antarctica is a mysterious, tapu land – frighteningly blank and dangerous.
The poems from Bernadette Hall’s fortnight in this isolated environment are haunted by the ghosts of Antarctica’s past; Roald Amunsden, Captain Scott, Herbert Ponting, Frank Hurley and Tom Crean – photographers and adventurers who travelled at the turn of the century with Shackleton. In the title poem of the collection, the activity of building an ice cave as a tourist’s experience transforms into an account of a fatal blizzard. The artists in the ice cave turn into trapped explorers trying to stay calm, trying not to think about their ponies outside, “lying dead in the snow”. Myths and stories often hijack the “reality” of a situation in the last couple of stanzas, a technique used to both humorous and sinister effect throughout the first section of the book, adding to Hall’s evocation of Antarctica’s “hazardous beauty”. While Hall’s talent for precise and surprising description is put to good use in attempting to explain a landscape that many of her readers will never have experienced, I think her use of the adventurers’ voices is much more successful. ‘Fissure’ a sparce, shapely poem, placed early in the book, giving the Antarctic poems a context, is well-formed but familiar. The usual suspects – “frost fish”, “blue ice”, “dark winter” – in describing such a setting flatten the poem out and threaten to distract from the much more interesting:
your own
blood sings
in
your ears
‘O
hazardous
beauty’
This phrase, “hazardous beauty”, is pertinent in describing the aura of not only the Antarctic section of the book, but also sections two and three, in which Hall’s grief at the death of her niece in the 2005 London bombings, and Hall’s own personal history in New Zealand, are examined. The four poems in section two, devoted to articulating grief, are well placed – couched between sections one and three, they are accordingly excused for comparative looseness or hysteria. “We’re all groaning and weeping and holding onto each other/ and laughing and swearing and screaming in this terrible birth”, Hall writes in ‘How We All Died With Her in the London Bombing’, a poem with an unfashionably raw style, evident in the title. Beginning or ending this collection with such candid emotion would undermine it. However, placing a poem of this nature at the centre of the book has the effect of stimulating all the surrounding writing. It invites the reader to interpret the poems that follow in terms of the poet’s grief and even to flick back through the preceding poems and read those in a new light.
Throughout The Ponies, Hall presents ideas of death and beauty, knowledge and fiction. The quotation from Wallace Stevens’ ‘Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction’ in the front of the book satisfyingly distils Hall’s philosophy in this collection.
Morning and afternoon are clasped together
And North and South are an intrinsic couple
And sun and rain a plural, like two lovers
That walk away as one in the greenest body.
Hall might add to this list of binary oppositions, her phrase “hazardous beauty”. Death and beauty is the intrinsic couple of The Ponies. In ‘Buller’s Birds’, a poem from the third section of the book, Hall’s lines, “the terrible beauty of needing to know/ had never been made so clear to me before,” resonate powerfully beyond the context of the poem and reverberate in the baffling intensity of both the Antarctic landscape and the grief of a family tragedy. What do you do when you’re “in a place that is timeless” or confronted with “many months of bewildered grief”? You look to the past – to art and history for answers or consolation (knowledge or beauty). ‘Incredible, the Lightness’, the first poem of third section, demonstrates Hall’s ability to plunder another’s work (Milan Kundera’s, in this case) to good advantage.
As for me,
after the war came to our place,
I had all my hair cut off.
Now I’m going to set up a stall
in Ghuznee Street,
sell carp from it.
The fact that these lines follow the London bombings section of the book allows Hall to describe her process of recovering from grief by slipping into another story and placing herself alongside Sabina and Tomas from The Incredible Lightness of Being.
The last lines of ‘In the Black Harp’, the penultimate poem of the collection, have optimism (and a self-aware aptness in the context of the book) characteristic in Hall’s writing. “Ah, the enchantment of nostalgia/ passed like kisses from mouth to mouth. Next session,/ we’ll lay hands on the future, try to shake it out.” Hall’s joy in using (and participating in) disparate stories in her poetry as a means of understanding the workings of the world, both great and small, and progressing into the future, well-equipped, is condensed in the final poem, a delightful riddle titled, ‘Three Wishes’.
The pleasure I found in reading and rereading The Ponies comes from the coherence of the collection as a whole. Its unforced unity of tone and philosophy is what elevates it, in my mind, from being merely about a place or an event or about the poet. It attacks the big ideas in an unpretentious and convincing manner.
