Deep Colour, Diana Bridge, Otago University Press, 2023

Diana Bridge’s new collection, Deep Colour, is her eighth, and is a book to savour slowly as you melt into a blissful state of contemplation. You can hear Diana read from the collection here.

The opening poem, ‘Deep colour’, embodies the layered reading experience as you travel through the book. The poem, like the collection as a whole, is a visual and aural delight, nuanced and rich, and unafraid of ideas. You move amidst elusiveness, the kinetic, murkiness, embedded memory, the haunting of words (take haunting as you will). Reading becomes a provisional and satisfying means to catch, reflect, translate, muse. You encounter the unknown, the uninterrogated, truth, fiction.

Deep colour, the words for it are out of range –
that much I can tell you. What I cannot say
is how a life gathers its themes.

How to read? I replay a poem to let its music resonate, and then replay it yet again to let the visual tang and tingle, to let the ideas take root. Take a sample from ‘He has put away pointers’ for example. The poem responds to Camille Pissarro’s painting ‘Le Champ de choux, Pontoise’, 1873; the poem moves amidst shadow and light, vibration and symbol, the unseen and the visible. There is uplift and there is down beat. Diana includes a link to the painting in her notes. Here is the opening stanza:

He says it is morning – but is it? I love best
what I cannot pin down: a direction, a thickness –
greenish-blue ribbons coasting to somewhere outside
my vision but, somehow, contained in the frame.
It comes down to a rectangle holding in balance
its luminous layers, to a field made fast by a foreground
of cabbages, and the way that the cabbages tumble
like hedgehogs under a downpour of light.

The poems include classical references, especially Chinese, a clutch of objects, metaphors, order along with disorder and breakage, the seasons, the seasoned, the soul and the physical. The writing is always measured, steady, sure-footed, musical, alive to what is observed as much as what is thought. Heart is as significant as intellect.

Section II, ‘Utamaro’s Objects’, lingers upon the work of Utamaro, a Japanese artist and designer (1753 – 1806), and the poems stand as little meditations to absorb. Section III comprises the translations of 15 ‘poems on things’ by Chinese poet Xie Tiao (464 – 499). Again there is a marriage of feeling and ideas, heart and intellect, what is not said and what is described or hinted at.

Diana has included comprehensive endnotes that provide a context for some of the poems and a background to her translation work. The notes underline the scope and depth of the poetry. I am particularly drawn to two lines from ‘Compared to silence’, the first poem in the final section (‘The Text, an undertow’ and ‘in a side / chapel of my mind, movements of the rerquiem / glow’). I find myself musing on the way poems take root inside us, how they are undertows and slender ripples, and how they haunt and establish themselves in rooms in your mind and chambers in your heart.

Deep Colour is a satisfying read that lingers, inspires and fills you with the kind of joy that arrives after slow-paced meditation. I adore it.

Deep Colour is the eighth collection by award-winning Wellington-based poet Diana Bridge. It follows Two or More Islands (Otago University Press, 2019). Bridge’s many accolades include the 2010 Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for Poetry, the 2014 Landfall Essay Competition prize and the 2015 Sarah Broom Poetry Prize. The chief judge, Irish poet Vona Groarke, described her work as ‘possibly amongst the best being written anywhere right now’. The same year, Bridge was the first New Zealander since Janet Frame to take up a residency at the Writers’ and Artists’ Colony at Yaddo in upstate New York. In the Supplementary Garden: New and selected poems (Cold Hub Press, 2016) was longlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry in the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Bridge has studied Chinese language, literature and art history and holds a PhD in Chinese poetry from the Australian National University.

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