By Peter Kenneally
POETRY
Hologrammatical
Philip Salom
Puncher & Wattman, $27
The Empty Grandstand
Lloyd Jones
Upswell, $24.99
Two books of poetry. One from Philip Salom, a poet who in the past few years has concentrated on fiction, publishing four novels in six years, and one from Lloyd Jones, who has produced his first book of poetry after a long career as a novelist. You might think this juxtaposition would provide some insights into the different purposes and natures of the two forms. But the two books weren’t having any of it, and remained resolutely themselves, immune to any schema, except perhaps that of their writers having been alive for a long time, seen a lot, and thought a lot about it.
It’s true that there is sometimes a feeling in Salom’s novels as if a kind of Lovecraftian portal is about to open to some poetic realm: “What’s he building in there?” as Tom Waits might say. But it never does. In Hologrammatical we are in the realm, as if there isn’t another. Subterranean, crepuscular, and yet elegiac and soft, it’s like a kind of grace note to his Alterworld trilogy.
The effect is of someone exploring an archaeological site, ancient or modern or both, and illuminating scenes and texts in passing as their torch beam moves to and fro. Each one, lit briefly, is miraculously intact, sharply rendered, and then fades into shade as we move on. This sense is reinforced by poems at either end of the book that are defined as “time and motion” studies, calculating the efficiencies of grief, of loss, of the death of people, creatures, maybe of everything: “From the window I can almost see the sun / setting into the ocean like a wind blowing / through the coals of a forge. Then out there / is the universe, diminishing.”
And of course, not just the universe. Entropy, falling apart, comes to us all, whether quickly or slowly, and it’s observed throughout, sometimes sardonically, often very tenderly. He captures a feeling that’s universal but perhaps more tellingly felt by those who have moved away, as the people and even the places that were left fade away, becoming somehow more real as they do so.
What does that leave us with? Walking through a cemetery, at dusk, naturally, “as a fine rain tilting downwards grows on our arms like embroidery”, he says, plainly and tenderly, to his companion and to us : “We walk the longer earth together.”
The Empty Grandstand starts from the particular: the opening of a new football stand in the New Zealand suburb where Lloyd Jones grew up. It’s the locus of childhood, adolescence, and of the historical, or mythic, topography he constructs in this book. Jones doesn’t hide his intent. Early on, as the grandstand is opened, young Lloyd experiences a crowd as a young child does, almost suffocated in a dense sea of everyday, detailed humanity, vividly conveyed.
But at the same time the same boy feels he is in “A city of air/ for a bird to fly in and out of / godless / like a crumpled acropolis / shouldering a sun-lit past & / hearsay.” Herodotus is specifically summoned as a hat for the young narrator to wear: am I telling history or lies? A little later, there are first adolescent fumblings in the grandstand, “our broken tongues / set at the edge of a grassy plain, / our warm hug, classically defined, like / the spoils of the Trojan War”.
This notion isn’t overworked, but it’s there from the start, so we know where we are and the kind of mind that’s leading us through. The book ranges across childhood memory, colonial dispossession, and the changes and dissolutions wrought by time, all with a patina of, not decay exactly, but weathering. There’s a sense of abandonment, of a world as lost as the Homeric age: “In my father’s country / a man on a bronze horse waits / for an abandoned century / to catch him up / In my father’s country / no one is at home / to fix the lopsided picture.”
There are intriguing locations such as the “White’s Hotel” he finds himself at, ordinary yet surreal – and funny: “We go about at breakfast in silence – the wall portraits / unsettle. It is like being around English / people, a solitary and profoundly unhappy experience/ of crunched toast, resolute privacy, and a smell of egg.”
The book, however poetic, operates in its unfolding more like a novel: it’s tied together, and the sweep of it fulfils its purpose.
The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.