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Rose Apple and the Desiccated Lake naush sabah 3 0 P o e m s / S a b a h I Fractals bloom along the horizon inky-black and skeletal reaching upward as if fists have pounded from underground and the earth has shattered the sky. Or I could call them bare trees and tell you to see them as I do in dusk-grey distance, indistinct and fading. Only, there are no horizons where I live and no blue-haze of hills or towns, just the immediacy of walls and amputated limbs on narrowing pavements outside chicken shops. There is no distance in Sparkbrook, only other corners to turn into cul-de-sacs, and here – in the suburb I’ve escaped to – a chill. II Weeks on, snow is still held by the woodland, ground so saturated that each step I take draws its own foot-shaped puddle up to the surface, pool here around me, my weight too much for the land to hold without spilling forth its water; my presence will cause floods and I am staying here to drown the city. Let it never be said I took more than I gave. III I have taken to driving in the night to remind myself I am safe to move, confined in my containers of breath, hurtling through any darkness, as if it is normal to trust, at speed, with abandon. I have perched on a hilltop to overlook the lit city and pretend that elevated distance brings epiphany, that silent staring is contemplation, has meaning. Now, with a view from the promontory I transcend my own estimations, realise I would still rather look through glass than air. IV Memory is thin, membranous. Something wet is slipping down the walls, the earthy dampness of paint and plaster, a smell that witnesses the negligence of disuse. It was a condition of my insurance policy to visit you every seven days and pass a tender look over each threshold, into every crevice, to watch for any drip that might bring rot; destruction is small, slow, then sudden and complete. I did not come for months, trusting that the neighbouring houses would keep you standing, knowing you had a longer lifespan than me and deeper foundations on this land. V Mountain folk do not fear like valley people. I learnt this only when our guide placed the little shell of baby carseat at the very edge of the air and I stood trying not to send my breath plunging down with my baby, made pomegranate-heart grip granite and pull itself back into my chest from the dark of my stomach. He had a sense of perspective I lacked: it wasn’t sheer just because air was all around it or gave the pleasure of distant vision. But I’m of the valley and in the valley the deep rises up to meet our toes before it washes over our rooftops. VI We pray for rainfall then watch the waters surge and rush the land away from us. O Lord, let the rose apple be quenched not ripped by the deluge.
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Bill Manhire in Conversation with John McAuliffe Bill Manhire is New Zealand’s best-known and most celebrated living poet. Since his Collected Poems (2001), he has published four striking, distinctive collections, Lifted (2005), The Victims of Lightning (2010), Some Things to Place in a Coffin (2017) and, last year, Wow. The poems are playful, intent, open to the contemporary moment, steeped in the history of poetics, and, lately, very interested in what it is a poem does, an interest that seems in conversation, often, with questions about song and about sequence, and how poems which begin in one place or moment can make occasions of their own. This interview took place in February 2021. I emailed Bill a question in mid-morning from Manchester and he would respond from the New Zealand evening, the Manchester dawn, timings which set the rhythm of the exchanges, occasionally interrupted as Bill flew south from Wellington to Dunedin (travels which seemed, in every sense, a long way off from here), or university work slowed down the questions here. I began by asking Bill about the title of his new book. John McAuliffe: The title of the new book is really striking, and it catches one of the ways in which we respond to extraordinary experiences, how we register astonishment. It got me thinking about art which has a ‘wow factor’ (and I do think Wow is astonishing). Your title poem situates its astonishment and marvelling praise as baby-ish. I wondered if you could say something about choosing this as the title poem, and about poetry’s affiliation with astonishment? Bill Manhire: Well the word itself has the wow factor. You can read it backwards. You can turn it upside down. It’s also ubiquitous and contemporary yet feels, even if it isn’t, strangely ancient. Someone might well have looked at a sunrise 2,000 years ago and turned to a companion and said ‘Wow!’ At first the poem was called ‘Big Brother’ – so that the title was also the first line. And I considered using ‘Also’ as a title at one point. But ‘Wow’, for the poem and then for the book, seemed better, mainly because less grim. I have some optimistic hunch that it’s our groundnote when we’re born – inside the baby’s wail there’s a wow which never quite gets extinguished – and we hear it in ourselves again when we meet great works of art. I like the shilling-life scope of the poem, the ordinary experience of it, in which the day-to-day world of also relentlessly assaults the wow, but can’t entirely win. The death sigh at the end is its own kind of wow utterance. More generally on the astonishment front, I’d turn to Auden: ‘... there is only one thing that all poetry must do; it must praise all it can for being and for happening’. And then there’s the whole Hopkins notion, which I’m sure I don’t really understand, about the duty of each thing and creature in the world being to utter itself, to sound itself out. Amazement and astonishment and praise and celebration all seem to have some sort of immediacy about them. The trouble is, poems come in lines, and so they can’t help but show you how time passes – it’s hard to get that immediacy into what you actually write. Look how hard Hopkins tried! But maybe melancholy and nostalgia can sometimes present as the wow factor in memory mode. I note by the way that the word ‘wow’ is defined in my dictionary as ‘natural exclamation: first recorded in Scots in the early sixteenth century’. Which seems important, both for the phrase ‘natural exclamation’ and for the Scots bit, given your family background and upbringing in what might be called the Scotch settlements of Invercargill and Dunedin in New Zealand’s South Island… I know your initial research as a graduate student was in Old Norse, and I wondered if you could say something about etymology and the history of words, and how important that is for you? 3 1 F e a t u r e s / M a n h i r e & M c A u l i f f e I’m delighted to learn it’s originally a Scots word! I’d just assumed it was twentieth-century American. Yes, I did study Old Norse, and I ended up admiring the old-fashioned world of textual scholarship, while learning that I wasn’t much good at it. I’m more impressed by Philology than I am by, say, Sociolinguistics. I do still get a strange pleasure from simple things, like knowing that the word gang comes from the Old Norse verb, ganga: to go. And it’s true that I’ve used unlikely words like ‘varmint’ or ‘jalopy’ as triggers for poems. I have a thin vocabulary, and have never wanted to load every rift with ore, but I get a ridiculous amount of pleasure from language that’s a little out of place – in Wow, for instance, using a word like ‘whatnot’ in a poem about Covid; or getting a robot to say ‘Mercy me’. And in my last book, Some Things to Place in a Coffin, there’s a small sequence where I’ve invented a bunch of botanical names – ribslip, chaingrass, thornwing, arawai – with the aim of gently teasing poets who use herb and wildflower names as an easy gateway into ‘nature poetry’. (‘Seed-packet poetry’, a distinguished critic of my acquaintance called it.) Of course, the sequence, Falseweed, eventually turned into a poem about writer’s block and ageing. I’ve become more interested in place names – there are several poems in Wow which get into that territory. We’re in an interesting and important time in New Zealand, in Aotearoa, as the old colonising names – Wellington, Auckland, Hamilton – begin to be challenged and unsettled by the Māori names that often preceded them. It’s good to lift words and names up to the light, and inspect what’s underneath. Place names often seem to function as a kind of dislocation, especially in Wow’s first section, with its town of K— and its Pleasant Valley, one town named for Jingle Bells, and

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Rose Apple and the Desiccated Lake naush sabah

3 0

P o e m s /

S a b a h

I Fractals bloom along the horizon inky-black and skeletal reaching upward as if fists have pounded from underground and the earth has shattered the sky. Or I could call them bare trees and tell you to see them as I do in dusk-grey distance, indistinct and fading. Only, there are no horizons where I live and no blue-haze of hills or towns, just the immediacy of walls and amputated limbs on narrowing pavements outside chicken shops. There is no distance in Sparkbrook, only other corners to turn into cul-de-sacs, and here – in the suburb I’ve escaped to – a chill.

II Weeks on, snow is still held by the woodland, ground so saturated that each step I take draws its own foot-shaped puddle up to the surface, pool here around me, my weight too much for the land to hold without spilling forth its water; my presence will cause floods and I am staying here to drown the city. Let it never be said I took more than I gave.

III I have taken to driving in the night to remind myself I am safe to move, confined in my containers of breath, hurtling through any darkness, as if it is normal to trust, at speed, with abandon. I have perched on a hilltop to overlook the lit city and pretend that elevated distance brings epiphany, that silent staring is contemplation, has meaning. Now, with a view from the promontory I transcend my own estimations, realise I would still rather look through glass than air.

IV Memory is thin, membranous. Something wet is slipping down the walls, the earthy dampness of paint and plaster, a smell that witnesses the negligence of disuse. It was a condition of my insurance policy to visit you every seven days and pass a tender look over each threshold, into every crevice, to watch for any drip that might bring rot; destruction is small, slow, then sudden and complete. I did not come for months, trusting that the neighbouring houses would keep you standing, knowing you had a longer lifespan than me and deeper foundations on this land.

V Mountain folk do not fear like valley people. I learnt this only when our guide placed the little shell of baby carseat at the very edge of the air and I stood trying not to send my breath plunging down with my baby, made pomegranate-heart grip granite and pull itself back into my chest from the dark of my stomach. He had a sense of perspective I lacked: it wasn’t sheer just because air was all around it or gave the pleasure of distant vision. But I’m of the valley and in the valley the deep rises up to meet our toes before it washes over our rooftops.

VI We pray for rainfall then watch the waters surge and rush the land away from us.

O Lord, let the rose apple be quenched not ripped by the deluge.

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