Tarot, Jake Arthur, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024

You see, it is all a matter of making and unmaking.
To stick, even stasis has to change.
We could go mad in an endless night,
And in an endless day drown
as sure as a wine-dark sea.

 

from ‘Penelope or Nine of Wands’

After my first reading of Jake Arthur’s new collection, Tarot, I wondered how much poetry joy we can imbibe, for reading these poems felt like I was travelling through a solar system of poetry joy.

Jake uses a deck of tarot cards to build a sequence of characters, loosely drawing upon the depictions of magicians, occultists, lovers, fools, angels in Rider-Waite’s tarot deck from 1909. Pamela Colman Smith’s cover design is based on the deck. We met the Knight of Swords, the Ace of Cups, the Empress, The Hanged Man, and so on. The King of Cups. The Page of Wands. Reading through the deck is a matter of savouring the episodic, the sensual, the treadmill questions, animated scenes.

The characters, usually speaking in the first-person, make interior fears, uncertainties, epiphanies audible. The episodes are grounded in love or daily routine, sex or stasis, movement or self interrogation. Most importantly, I discover a character deck of myriad readings. The initial poem’s tarot reader invites us (‘you’) to read, and from there we move into the heart and trails of reading: tea leaves, the cards, body language, the world, wreckage, melancholy, the divine, mischief, anxiety, daily omens and signs, yourself . . . ourselves, joy. And what I love about this intricate reading experience is how sensual it is, from the haptic to the sighted to olfactory organs, whether whiffs or woofs or brazier embers.

Another joy is Jake’s agile language, the way the stretching, spinning, surprising syntax adds to the carousel of voices. At times, it might be a slippery movement of nouns and verbs, but other times there is an almost archaic glint, the lexicon carrying traces of an elsewhere time or place. Again sustaining and extending character.

His chest is a golden plate
Where she sees herself back in ridges
As though aged by the prospect of him.

 

from ‘Rest and recreation or The Empress’

Sometimes the sequence has a baroque feel with its drama and heightened movement, or perhaps cubist as the world and the speakers both splinter and cohere, or even impressionist with visible brush strokes and spontaneous vibes. I know zilch about tarot cards but this collection is a reading uplift of signs, signals, sensations. At its core, the universal questions that haunt so many of us. How do we do, how do we go, how do we be, how do we who? Ah, yes, a solar system of poetry joy.

He kept asking:
What do you want to be?
But I wanted to be a who, not a what.

In the future I had different eyes.
I watched my every move.
I stooped to get beers out of the fridge.
I carried suitcases over my head.

 

from ‘Look up or The Hierophant’

Jake Arthur is the author of A Lack of Good Sons, included in the NZ Listener’s Best Poetry of 2023. His poems have appeared in Best New Zealand Poems, Sport, Mimicry, Turbine, and Sweet Mammalian. He has a PhD in Renaissance literature and translation from Oxford University.

Te Herenga Waka University Press page