Sol
By Andrew JohnstonVUP, NZ$25 | Reviewed by Tom Fitzsimons
THERE’S just no doubt that Andrew Johnston can write.
Anyone who tells you that the days you inhabit, which seem so insistent and monotonous, ‘are only trying / to make things clear – / shifting the light around, / summoning rain’, is good.
Anyone who knows that ‘some things that concern us / don’t concern us’ and can tell his young son that ‘soon you will wake / in the present, which is full of consolation’, is worth listening to.
Universally, his poems have a tautness and a sureness of touch that makes them immediately appealing. They are also often short, a boon for fans of the digestible poem.
But my qualm is that they don’t provide enough sustenance. The qualities that Andrew Johnston has been most praised for are the ones that overwhelm many poems in Sol – wit, playfulness and a keen ear for the music in words.
Put another way, there is too much ‘shifting the light around’ and not enough ‘summoning rain’ for my taste. Lots of polish, but not enough kick.
There are some large exceptions to this. ‘The Sunflower’ – recently published in the Listener on a two-page spread – is a long, intricate piece directed towards the poet’s late father. It’s often immensely moving and probably the best poem in the book.
Lines like ‘into the mind of the man we guess our way / blind and deaf, senseless, because he is dead’, have a weight to rival Baxter or any New Zealand poetry.
The last lines of the poem are similarly powerful, concluding with the wonderful, cathartic image of seeds raining from the sunflower.
Throughout, reading the sestina form is like watching a cloth being woven – images of light and sun, dark and death, faith and complicated love, memory and grief repeat and overlap terrifically.
At the other end of Andrew Johnston’s family tree, ‘Les Baillesats’ is dedicated to his son and grows and grows to that ambivalent promise about what the future will hold for the young boy (quoted above).
But apart from these two, which build to something strong, much of Sol feels light to me.
Opening the book at chance, I often find poems that either baffle me or pass me by. In the first section, for example, ‘Arch’, ‘Opinion Page’, ‘The Cyclist’ and ‘Mauve’ are all hugely challenging – too much so for a reader like me. Take ‘Opinion Page’, quoted here in full:
The good news is that
the last time we spoke.
The lessons of the past must be learnt.
But it doesn’t end there.
A new and real danger
could sound the death knell.
Like dinghies pushed
out into a stormy ocean.
They also stand to lose the most.
We must not fail them again.
I have read this poem many times now and I still find it elusive. The unity of the poem, the core of it fails to announce itself to me. But then perhaps that is the point? That there is no consistent thread, just a maelstrom of competing, imperative voices – like we see on an opinion page in a newspaper. But even if this is the case, I don’t feel moved – the poem has the feel of an exercise to prove a point.
Even more commonly, I feel like I understand the words and the connections in the poem, but that it never quite lifts itself off the page. So ‘Heatwave’ reaches the conclusion that ‘even the red plastic lids of the spice jars / keep you up at night,’ which leaves me wanting more.
‘Her eyes’ finishes off with:
he thought (it wasn’t true) –
she’s the one who sees through me
she’s the one who’ll
see me through.
Andrew Johnston loves making words echo and react and spin off each other. Often this is intriguing, but sometimes it results in opening stanzas like this:
You don’t have to go with the flow
but it helps to know
where the flow goes.
I dip into it with my toes–
Which sounds like struggling rap music to my ear. The trouble, I think, is that the desire to make intriguing sounds is subsuming any solid content the poem might hold.
Finally, I think when the poems are clear and direct and big in scope, there are still times when they lack resonance. For example, one unusually direct passage in ‘The Sunflower’ ends up feeling stale to me:
...His earthly power
spent, your god, to us, is dead,
but it was your belief that gave us breath,
the life we take for granted every day.
What sense of your sense will I take with me?
How much of your world will we hand on?
The thoughts are strong ones, but the trouble is that I’ve got to the point where I take it for granted that I take life for granted. Poetry has got to offer me more than a phrase like that – and to be fair, ‘The Sunflower’ holds much more elsewhere.
So Sol is full of innovative word combinations and sparse lines, but not so much of the stuff to take the top of your head off, or saw through your heart. In that, I think it’s like plenty of contemporary poetry – stimulating for those who are very comfortable with ambiguity and big open spaces around words. But, as Mary Oliver says, ‘poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry’. A bit unfashionable, I know, but that’s the stuff I’m searching for.
