Wreck of the Jeanne Gougy, Colin Pink
Illustrated by Daniel Goodwin
Paekakariki Press, 2021 £12.50
The power of poetry
How I love a narrative poem, and ‘Wreck of the Jeanne Gougy’, the title piece, is a great one! Colin Pink dives right in, takes your breath from the start:
The clog of it;
Water a stone in the throat;
The gasp of it — outbursting
Oh God no not again!
The sweep and sway of it; the world tilting
Power of it, turning up to down, down to up.
The childish jostle of it, barging in
Again and again, extinguishing air and light.
Some of the poem’s power comes from the imagery — of the senses, the strong similes and metaphors, and the emphatic repetition (especially the heart-thumping ‘Oh God no not again!’ which comes around over and over). The layout of its fourteen stanzas gives an edge to the tension. Sometimes words run over into lines below, like the waves which keep on rolling, the ‘sweep’ of water through the boat.
'Wreck' reminds me of the power of poetry to grab us, take us somewhere other, pull us into the moment. We’re in the heart of this tragedy. Re-readings don’t dim the impact even though the last stanza explains what's happening. Daniel Goodwin’s woodcut, with its strong modernist feel, graces the front cover: I love it!
‘Breakfast with the Birds 1934’, a very different poem to ‘Wreck’, responds in sonnet form to an artwork (Gabriele Münter’s Das Frühstück der Vögel 1934). Goodwin’s woodcut illustration again keeps drawing the eye. The first part sets the scene. Then there’s a pause in the ‘turn’:
And everything not of this moment evaporates;
you watch and wait; the birds watch and wait;
and the world holds its breath as long as it takes.
It ends with three sensory lines:
The thrum of the real, the hardness of the table,
the transparency of the window glass, and on
your tongue the peculiar flavour of this instant.
There's a stillness, a gentleness here. The last line makes me linger awhile, gazing at the illustration, thinking of painting, poem, woodcut ... and this.
Enid Lee
Death and love
In this slim but rich, letterpress-printed pamphlet, Colin Pink doesn’t shy away from the big themes, notably love and death. Indeed, in ‘Thanatos and Eros’, Death himself knocks on the door and warns about ‘a confidence trickster, known as / Eros’.
At first glance, death would seem to be the stronger force. The title poem describes vividly how a trawler once foundered in a storm with the loss of most of the crew. Death is inflicted violently, and figured as a predator:
The sea is a lion’s paw, playing with its prey
Before gulping it down, crushed between implacable
Jaws that effortlessly chew up metal
And flesh and spits out the bones it can’t digest.
The finality of the disaster is underlined by Daniel Goodwin’s monochrome woodcut of a row of coffins on the quay. (The illustrator deserves to be commended for his work throughout.)
In other poems, death may result from the natural force of the Covid pandemic, or from human agency — for example through the cruelty of Nazi judges and executioners or the cold ingenuity of weapon designers.
Among the disasters and horrors of the world, though, love somehow finds a way through. In the accomplished sonnet ‘Pont des Arts’, the padlocks that lovers traditionally fasten to the bridge in Paris may turn into an symbol of restriction:
How many regret passion’s hasty clasp,
wish they hadn’t thrown away the key?
But a love will survive and grow, if it’s flexible, unlike the hard steel:
Bend with the wind, flex apart and back,
that way the sapling of love won’t snap.
Using the triolet form in his final poems, Pink returns to the fragility (versus the durability) of love. Still, love always has a chance of enduring. ‘Dancers’, addressed to a partner, offers a daringly hopeful view that love may lead to eternity, even in a perilous world:
Hold out your hand and place it in mine
And we shall dance together for all time
Cunningly snatch bliss from the abyss
Dennis Tomlinson