Calamities! Jane Arthur, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023

Jane Arthur’s second collection, Calamities!, is a glorious translation of being, of existence in an unsettled world. Think comfort and discomfort, the physicality and elusiveness of being, its poetry and its prose. Big questions surface, little questions simmer. Conundrums hover and anxiety lurks. This is poetry of tilt and tremor and one reading wasn’t enough. I dived back in for more.

The opening poem, ‘The Better to See You With My Dear’, is a declaration for the poetry to come. The title draws the ubiquitous and macabre fairy-tale threat of bad things into a present tense, into the tension of apocalyptic views and warnings, into the tug between closing eyes and speaking out, between body worry and body action. And already as reader you are making a stand, ticking the boxes: action and/or speaking out, writing, deferring, addressing, more writing.

Add the imperative of awe, a need to feel the world: ‘I tried / to place myself in the context of the size / and the history of the universe’ (from ‘Meteorite’). Joy is elusive, elation is slippery. I come back to the notion of poetry as being. I have entered a book of ideas and of feelings, experience and thought. This is what Jane’s poetry does: it offers multiple paths, entrances and exits, pulling you into both the unimaginable and the imagined, the concrete and the elusive. It brings the tilt of the world within reach, so as reader, you can feel the heat and hit of anxiety, the unsettled.

A single poem can be so complex, so simple, so piercing, so affecting. Take ‘Dodge’, for example, where ‘each day is each of us / carving through space/ using our bodies’. Then, in the next stanza, we are divided into groups depending on how we answer the listed questions. The last stanza is a throb-of-the-heart moment, a “wow”, a stop-you-in-the-tracks-of-reading:

Do we live only to the limits
of our comprehension?
We will never know
what we don’t. Alack.
Some of us
carry shame and others of us
probably should.

Move from domestic life to philosophy, from dead flies in cups on kitchen shelves, to the prospect of heroism and couch hugging. Climate change is there in ‘Alien’, an ode to once was, to what ‘is kind of like / getting cooked alive but so slowly you’ll / probably barely notice it’. World fret meets individual fret meets world fret. Ah. Such friction. Such knowing that leads to less knowing that leads to knowing hunger in the fabulous poem ‘How, All Right’. And then, in travels though calamity, in the poem ‘Autumn’, the writer speaks of autumn light, where the nag of cheesy thoughts is nothing compared with bigger issues. This is a solace branch, this beauty moment, this invitation to pause and restock:

(….) Not us, not
when there are bigger things to worry about –

and not when it’s still possible to put them aside
to look at the low shadows, the glow

of evening sun across the branches
of trees that refuse to be anything but green.

The core of Calamities! contains a longer sequence, ‘The Bear’, and it’s mesmerising: part fable, part magic, part analogy. The speaker lives in a cave with no heating or sanitation but a hibernating bear for company, yet the visiting sisters don’t see the animal. Ah. The bear begins fierce and blazing, then shrinks and sags, and remains a vital source of heat, for the speaker is cold. So many paths through this sequence.

Jane produces the kind of poetry that haunts, that clings with mystery and mood, with a mise en abyme effect of story and storytelling, personal, global, affecting. How to get warm in the calamity of cold? How to find the bear and the cave and the point of rescue? I am rereading the collection, and writing becomes a key, reading and writing, this twinned joy, this survival.

The book’s final poem, ‘Imaginary Den’, makes a touching bridge back to ‘The Bear’. The poem begins with dogs nestling in close and then ends with an image of comfort and security. Such a perfect note to finish the collection, and indeed my review, a review that barely scratches the surface and depths of the book’s making, with its sweet craft and its intricate layering. Calamities! is a collection to spend extended time with, to nestle in close to the power of poetry to move and to comfort and to speak.

(…) The dogs want to be
near me, seek safety and comfort in numbers,

which is no new concept but one that
gets eroded as the world devises ways

to wring value out of its inhabitants
(and inhabitants wring value out of their world).

Let me dig my little hole. Let me
settle down into it, feigning safety, let me.

You can listen to Jane read ‘The Better to See You With My Dear’ here

Jane Arthur is the author of Craven, which won the Jessie Mackay Prize for Best First Book of Poetry in 2020. She received the Sarah Broom Poetry Prize in 2018 and has a Master of Arts in Creative Writing from the IIML at Victoria University of Wellington. Born in New Plymouth, she manages and co-owns a small independent bookshop in Wellington, where she now lives with her family.

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