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reviews of 'koiwi koiwi | bone bone'

poetry collection published18 july 2010

Teresia Teaiwa, speaking at the launch of 'koiwi koiwi'

'Tena koutou, tena koutou, tena koutou katoa. Ko te mea tuatahi, e mihi ana ki te mana whenua. Ko te mea tuarua, e mihi ana ki nga tupuna. Ko te mea tuatoru, e mihi ana ki te reo rangatira.

I don’t know what the Maori word for poetry is. But I believe that the name Hinemoana would be the perfect synonym for it!

We’re here today to celebrate the launch of Hinemoana Baker’s second book 'koiwi, koiwi'. Hinemoana’s asked me not to go over the top with this speech because she says, it’s a second book. Now, many of you will already be familiar with her first book, 'matuhi |needle'. And many of you were probably at the magnificent launch party for 'matuhi |needle' and 'puawai', Hinemoana’s debut cd in Paekakariki back in 2004.

But anything that invokes bones, and ancestors the way a title like this does deserves ceremony. I’m not sure I’m the right person for the job, but I am touched and honoured by Hinemoana’s invitation to launch what I’ve found to be an achingly moving collection.

David Eggleton, in his review of 'matuhi |needle' described how Hinemoana “reconjugates the obvious, making it surprising all over again.” I am confident he’d say the same of 'koiwi, koiwi'. Structured in three parts, 'head bone', 'tail bone' and 'bone bone', the poems combine feather light descriptions of material reality with the mournful gravitas of historical and personal memories; they balance incisive social commentary with a wry, quiet humour; they are anchored by Maoritanga while they are buoyed by international, cross-cultural and humanist engagements.

I have so many favourites from this collection, already, but I think the first poem really does set the tone (and I’d ask you to reflect on that word “tone” and its resonances with the bone imagery that provide the skeletal frame for this collection). In the first poem, 'fossils', Hinemoana begins the poem on a bus, moving through passengers, to the driver, to the bus depot manager, and the shareholders of the bus company…she constructs a whakapapa linking them all, and the kicker is, they are linked by their consumption of fossil fuel. And as the remnants of pre-historic organisms and life forms, the fossil fuels are basically part of that same family tree. Reconjugating the obvious and making it surprising all over again.

To return to tone and its resonance with bone, I’m going to be literal here—it’s a fault that Hinemoana’s tried her best to rid me of, but it has its benefits, especially when you’re a teacher as I am! If 'koiwi koiwi' reminds us of bones and ancestors, it does so, I believe, in the manner of a bone flute or koauau. In fact, right there, as the central icon of this otherwise wonderfully kiwi kitsch-filled book cover, is an intricately carved and organic wooden koauau.

And it’s a koauau’s tones which inevitably seek out and find echoes in cousin cultures and countries of the Pacific. A reference to Rarotonga in 'dismantling the crane', a poem for Tusiata Avia’s daughter, Sepela, 'eel', an extended reflection on my home country, in 'Our Children Have Run Away to Fiji.” The tones of the bones reverberate inside me as I’m reading; I have no doubt you will find your own resonances and echoes with this book.

Hinemoana will be leaving next month to enter the University of Iowa’s prestigious International Writing Programme. In the last two years she has already completed two writers’ residencies—last year she was the Arts Queensland Poet in Residence, and in 2008 she held a residency at the University of the South Pacific. For both of these, Hinemoana was extremely generous in her outreach…and did way more cultivating of other people’s writing skills than most would expect of a writer in residence. Imagine, if Hinemoana could produce 'koiwi koiwi' out of the impetus of the USP residency, and the epic landscape sonic poem 'Gondwanavista' out of the Queensland stint, imagine what she could produce if she didn’t have so many demands on her time and energy! We are all hoping that this Iowa residency will allow Hinemoana to give a tonne more time to herself and her writing.

To close this inadequate attempt at ceremony…I offer Hinemoana the only thing I could think of as an appropriate exchange for bones: tapa, or in this case, siapo. It’s from Samoa, not Fiji, because I’m hoping that as surely as the world is going to discover and seek connections with Hinemoana Baker, that she will continue to want to explore her historical and ongoing connections in the Pacific. The design is of ‘ulu’ or breadfruit, one of the most abundant and bounteous food sources of the Pacific. The ‘ulu’ has a reproductive life of over 50 years, so can feed over two generations. With this tapa/siapo, we remember the bones, the fossils that feed our roots, and enrich the ground for fertile lives and imaginings.

Nga mihi nui ki a koe e hine, taku hoa, taciqu, lo’u uo, lo’u uso pele!

Teresia Teaiwa

from 'This is Writing?'

by Bill Nelson

There's Something Compulsory About This
'koiwi koiwi | bone bone' by Hinemoana Baker (VUP 2010)

How long have we been waiting for this book to come out? We've been surviving on scraps of Hinemoana's work in journals for six years and now, finally, her second book has arrived.

It strikes me first of all as completely different in voice and style to her first. Where that was trimmed and clipped, almost to the syllabic level this is more voluptuous and 'talky', there is more in here of what I have come to love of her voice, the raw emotion, the turns of mystery and the self-deprecating humour. This is definitely a solid progression from the first book and also, perhaps this is the benefit of waiting six years, it's super consistent.

I loved 'dismantling the crane', 'fortune cookie' and 'the fossils':

    Outside
    men in orange vests prepare

    to dismantle the crane
    its four ropes of chain rise
    like snakes from the bed

    of a dusty truck, link after link


    Her father visits for her 40th birthday. Don't think of it
    as trying to conceive, he says. Think of it as catching a flight.

- wow, what a way to start a poem...

    Well I
    said the depot manager
    I feel like I've swallowed
    a large white
    brick state house.
    The brick isn't real
    it's a kind of cladding.
    At one corner
    a nest of spiders is building.
   

And then there were some more readily available poems obviously influenced by her own childhood and her parents that were also up there in my list of faves:

From 'the squash club':

    The whole place smelled
    like my father's gearbag

    his headbands left overnight
    in the wash-house.


And then more sonically experimental poems like the astonishingly visceral language sourced from a music theory exam paper in 'homebirth':

    (iii)
    An emerging event two thirds of the way through
    has a rising motion which gives way to
    an exploding attacking sound.

    (iv)
    Covers the full frame from root
    (low thudding event)
    to canopy
    (floating bell echoes)
    with the centre being occupied
    by a wide band of white noise.

- floating bell echoes? Jealous.

Hinemoana also said at the launch that the best gift we can give her is to talk about the book on blogs, twitter, whatever. In this current state of great books passing by unoticed and unreviewed I like this idea of relying less on the print media and just putting the word out there ourselves in our own biased, unprofessional and incoherent way. All of which I am repetitively guilty of.
I was intending to write about this book anyway, but I'm glad I could help her out in some small way because this book put a smile on my face, and not because I was inundated with the funny or the pleasant but because it was better than I expected it to be (on top of quite high expectations), which is the best gift I could have hoped for.

The first two lines in one of the most mysteriously intruiging poems about a kayaking trip called 'observation beach: a farewell' mirror in an opposite, yet reflective way, this book I think:

    Soaked to my socks in spite of my spray skirt.
    There's nothing compulsory about this.

At the end of it I was soaked to my socks in lithe and slippery language, equal measures of mystery and truth and very much pleased that I had decided to leave my spray skirt on the beach.

reviews of 'matuhi | needle'

poetry collection published 31 October, 2004

Bill Manhire, speaking at the launch of 'matuhi | needle'


'Like the poems themselves, the title of the book, 'matuhi |needle', is very sharp and very suggestive. Here's my take on needles.

'Very obviously a needle can be a peaceful or a dangerous thing. It can stitch things together, it can pierce the skin in difficult ways. In the first poem in this book, a small child sitting on her aunty's knee is described as 'a needle of bone'. So this book is very much involved with whatever it is to be human and small, growing into an understanding of the world.

'The needle I find myself thinking of is the kind one might find in a compass. That needle is one which helps you locate your position in the present, but also helps you navigate your way into the future. So if I had to do a summing up, I'd say Hinemoana's book is one that works as a kind of aid to navigation - for her and her readers. A very cheap and handsome Global Positioning System.

'It's a fantastic book as an object. There's wonderful art work in it by Jenny Rendall, there's a CD in the back of it with Hinemoana reading some of the poems and one of the songs from her album. I don't think there'll be a better book in terms of physical beauty or value for money published in New Zealand this year. But I don't think there'll be a better book of individual poems adding up to something more than themselves either.

'If I were to describe the way in which her best poems work, I'd want to quote the end of the poem called 'Talk', which she reads on the CD at the back of the book:

          a stream disappears 
          underground
          then hatches 

          from the trunks of trees
          the yellow quivers
          of the kowhai

'It's that sense of meanings which are mysterious, obscure and submerged and then rise as beauty and wisdom to the surface of our lives.

'I think one of the great dangers for poets is the temptation to explain things to you, to treat the reader as the target of wisdom and advice. And, of course, there's big pressure on  poets to be wise, as there's pressure on anyone who has any kind of public place in the world to have wisdom and understanding. But this is a book of explorations rather than a book of explanations. The poems never condescend to or patronise the reader. It puts me in mind of what Walt Whitman said,when his poems were published:

          'The reader will always have his or her part to do, just as much as I have had mine.
          I seek less to state or display any theme or thought, and more to bring you, Reader,
          into the atmosphere of the theme or thought, there to pursue your own flight.'

         

 

from the Dominion Post
November 2004 
by Mark Houlahan

'...'matuhi | needle' is physically the most sumputous book of poems published here this year, beautifully produced and at an astonishingly reasonable price. The poems are interspersed with handsome paintings by Jenny Rendall, and the book comes with a CD of Baker reciting and singing the poems. The poems are anchored firmly in a modern world and yet range freely over Baker's past, lyrically examining a bi-cultural life.'                   

 

 

Islands

by David Eggleton

New Zealand Listener

19-25 February, 2005 (Arts and Books)

 

Excerpt from: 'Moving from south to north in a survey of recent New Zealand poetry'

'Hinemoana Baker, too, in her debut collection 'matuhi | needle' plucks at the plangent chords of biculturalism and its discontents. Based on the Kapiti Coast, Baker is something of a global nomad – she's been around – who is now digging deep into a bedrock of Maori fundamentalism. 'matuhi | needle' is a joint publication with actor-poet Viggo Mortensen's California-based Perceval Press, and is impressively outfitted with a set of reddish-toned paintings by Ngai Tahu artist Jenny Rendall.

'Baker, it transpires, came to Mortensen's attention at a Wellington poetry reading, and a CD recording of Baker reading a few of her poems is pocketed in the back of the book. It reveals that she has a remarkable voice, velvety and musical, cool and laconic all at once. This sensuousness is reflected in the verse, but in a more conflicted way – undercut by a sense of smouldering emotion (resentment perhaps), as though an earlier vulnerability has left the poet bruised by experience. There's a jabbing, needling quality, too, as if responding to the ripeness of things has left the poet feeling tainted rather than wholesome, thus the pregnant imagery in 'Fruitpicker':

          fat strawberries...

          at night

          we pick them by touch

          listen to the flesh

          release the stem.

'The lines, often constricted as if in corsets, offer nuanced, enigmatic snatches of autobiography: the lines tease you and then distance themselves, as if waiting to see what the effect will be. Baker is attuned to the arch, knowing humour currently fashionable, but she's inventive enough to add her own spin and keep you amused by the way she reconjugates the obvious, making it surprising all over again.'

 

 

 

from gaynz.com
28 December, 2004

'Another stylish new publication comes from Hinemoana Baker - a writer, musician and broadcaster who is very much part of Wellington’s queer community. 'matuhi|needle', Baker’s first collection of writing, has been co-published by Victoria University Press and Lord of the Rings star Viggo Mortensen’s Perceval Press. It features impressive, insightful poems with a strong Maori focus, is beautifully illustrated by Ngai Tahu artist Jenny Rendall and comes with a CD on which Baker reads several poems and sings a song she’s written.'