Plastic, Stacey Teague, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024

I count every maunga I can see: Mt Albert, Mt Eden,
Mt Roskill, One Tree Hill. Growing up, we never learnt
their Māori names: Ōwairaka, Maungawhau, Puketāpapa,
Maungakiekie. There is erasure in the naming and not-
naming.

I catch my foot on the nail on the deck, again. Hop
downstairs to see my parents, and slump into their blue and
yellow couch. When I left New Zealand in my early twenties,
I couldn’t wait to disappear. I didn’t want to see my past in
everything. Each time I came home I wanted to escape again.

This time, I have anchors.

 

from ‘ANCHORS’ in ‘Hoki’

Poetry is sustenance at the moment, for all kinds of reasons. I have been musing on how to review books, and don’t even think ‘review’ is the right word for what I do, unless it is a matter of re-seeing a book in new lights, personal lights, surprising lights.

I think of a poetry collection as a thicket – with clearings and growth, light streaks and shadows, memory provoking, sense activating, offering multiple reading pathways. I don’t want to carry a yardstick with me, or prattle on about what a poetry collection ought to do or does not do. I loathe reviews like that. I want to read a review that shines light on potential tracks of reading, on electric connections, whether leading to economy or rich complexity.

Stacey Teague’s new poetry collection, Plastic, with its beautiful cover by Sarah McNeil, is a compelling thicket to linger in, for so many reasons. It is personal, love-imbued, connecting. The poems have roots in family, place, navigations of home and, as Stacey contemplates who she is, her bones and her ancestors, she reaches out to te ao Māori.

I am mindful that for many of us who write poetry, we don’t write in a vacuum, we write within the captivating threads of the work of others, communities of poetic voices, styles, ideas, forms, choices. Stacey acknowledges this with poems that step off from the work of or are dedicated to: essa may ranapiri, Anahera Gildea, Talia Marshall, Kaveh Akbar, Jack Underwood, Mary Oliver, Sappho.

]
] I read Sappho
]she tells me to become a voice
]
] so I do
]I am

from ‘ode to Sappho’

The poems are prismatic in form – can I say this? You move from prose poem to concrete poem or couplets, from list poem to a poem with right-hand brackets hugging the left-hand margin, from slashes syncopating the flow to sweet stream currents. Six sections, along with an introductory poem, include three spell poem clusters, and an ongoing and deep attachment to women and Goddesses. I am thinking of Papatuanuku, Hine-nui-te-iwaiwa, Kurangaituku, her grandmother (Narn), her aunty, to the women in the photographs on the walls, the poet Sappho.

The poems are exquisitely present. How to be present in the world, intimately, vitally? This is what I feel as I read. How to be present in the poem, step by step, word by lovingly placed word, revelation by revelation? This is also what I feel as I read. When the poet returns home and stays in the spare room, she retrieves things from the memory box to make the space her own, to recognise herself. And yet linked to this, so very linked to this are the conjunctions of disappearance and appearance, whether overseas, in erasure or ‘the sound of nothing’.

The casting of spells, like forms of recipes, perhaps even mantras, heighten the effect of slow meditation. There are 19 spells, including ‘to divert love from one object another’, ‘to heal an unseen wound’, ‘to gain courage’, ‘to erase and replace’, ‘to carve out space’ and a spell ‘for self-compassion’. They establish little epiphanies as I read, as I seek space and courage and my own self-recognition.

I have jotted down so many lines I want to quote to you, in order to share the heart-rich rewards of this glorious book. This is a book to pack an overnight bag for, to sojourn within and beyond, to reflect upon and to re-emerge nourished. I am wondering if poetry can also be an amulet that protects ‘the hearts pulses’. I love it.

spell to gain courage

love wide-open against the natural framework /  sinking
always across phenomena / shift the form and work the
despair until it is hollow / when you can’t see through the
fear / you have to reclaim your structure / rearrange the text
until / you can see yourself there in it /

Stacey Teague (Ngāti Maniapoto/Ngāpuhi) is a poet, publisher, editor and teacher. She is the author of the poetry collection takahē (Scrambler Books, 2014) and two chapbooks: not a casual solitude (Ghost City Press, 2016) and hoki mai (If a Leaf Falls Press, 2020). She is currently a publisher and editor at Tender Press. She is the former poetry editor for Scum Mag and Awa Wahine. In 2019 she completed an MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters.

Te Herenga Waka University Press page

Listen to Stacey read ‘spell for Hilma af Klimt’