Middle Youth, Morgan Bach, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023

Each poetry collection I read at the moment seems to widen the scope of what poems can do. When I read Hannah Mettner’s collection Saga, I began musing on poetry as mesh. Fascinating. Yet poetry can be and do a universe of things, and it is incredibly limiting to anchor a book in one framing device. But here I am captivated by how Morgan Bach’s new collection is, amongst other things, poetry as fire. And there it is in the blurb on the back: ‘The poems of Middle Youth look directly into fire’.

Middle Youth is driven by the searing blaze of a world under threat. Think global warming, war, plague, floods, famine, the rich and the poor, the dispossessed and the the abused. Hierarchies, downright ignorance, racism. Such a global blaze, such sharp edges of catastrophe, but Morgan embeds the flame in hints, sparks, tongues, as well as widening the molten implications of climate change.

I read: ‘a business man’s burning fingers’, ‘peripheral glimpses of fire’, ‘a woman breathes fire’, the ‘extinguished flame’ in a cocktail, ‘our unwanted thoughts / just below combustion point’, ‘California is burning’, ‘In Iceland people have gathered / to watch fire pouring from a fissure’.

The heat creeps up on you. It becomes a shared rage along with a wallop of hopelessness and veins of hope. I am reading the astonishing poem, ‘I could love you for a moment /but there is a democracy / to think of’, and I am in awe at the searing marriage of understatement and knife in the heart, ellipsis and the brutal present, exquisite melody and piercing image.

the dark
is no longer
dark
but spotted
in gold
like the hide
of a cheetah
fast approaching

The ubiquitous presence of fire is traced in motifs and subject matter, but it also becomes a form of tone, the heat of speech, the self under threat, the refusal to look away. And now I am reading poetry as skin, the skin of my reading singed, a barometer, a register of helplessness. The skin of the poem, that scaldable barrier, that fragile layer, sunburnt, allergic. In ‘heat death‘, Morgan writes: ‘Within weeks / my skin is dust on the shelves / of my new room’.

I haven’t had a poetry collection affect me like this for an eon. You could also see this through the lens of mesh. There are layers of connection and connecting. The speaker has her tarot cards read and goes driving in the country to eat sandwiches by a lake with friends. She celebrates a birthday, gets vaccinated, pays her pension, furnishes her living space, loves and is loved. The penultimate poem, ‘to proceed within a trap (v)’, begins with the speaker and three generations of her family watching the Beatles documentary. It ends with an approaching New Year, the conundrum of how to live the weeks leading up to it, and before marking the new year as ‘fresh silence’, we read:

Did the future always gape? An empty
room, requiring a rhythm, a melody

to appear from somewhere, the air to fill
with a scaffolding from out of the minds

of people with enough ego
to give the rest of us something

to look at, to sing along to.

Middle Youth (yes as opposed to middle age) got me musing on whether I can view flame as beauty, comfort, warmth, light or as devastation, discomfort, disintegration, darkness. Or both. Is it possible to look upon the future as the empty room that we will furnish with words and actions, restoration and healing? Ah. What to do when we wake up and step into the vociferous rooms of the day? Middle Youth is poetry at its skin tearing, provoking out of slumber, flame sparking best.

Morgan Bach was the recipient of the 2013 Biggs Family Prize in Poetry, and her first book, Some of Us Eat the Seeds, was published in 2015. Some of her recent work appears in Turbine, The Spinoff and Best New Zealand Poems. In 2014, with Hannah Mettner and Sugar Magnolia Wilson, she co-founded the online poetry journal Sweet Mammalian.

Cover painting: Karla Marchesi, The Sense of an Ending

Te Herenga Waka University Press page

You can hear Morgan read from the collection