Manuali’i, Rex Letoa Paget, Saufo’i Press, 2024

your skin becomes a dark
damp winter cloak. july dew
necklacing your chest
holding your lungs close.

some weeks it’s like
that. like your mouth is
full of stones. the past a
pebble stuck between teeth.

practice patience.
ride the offbeat tracks
your ancestors lay down.
church organ your ribs.

 

from ‘Donnnie Darko’

Rex Letoa Paget’s debut collection, Manuali’i, was the perfect book to choose from my poetry pile. It is like a heart imprint on the page, and at this current smash of inhumanity, we need heart. I am immediately drawn into the initial acknowledgements, a form of mihi to the poet’s mother and father, to the way each parent shapes the two halves of his ‘good heart’. It feels, at this threshold of reading, I am entering a book of gratitude. Uncharacteristically, I leap to the acknowledgments page at the back of the book, and again the bloodlines of writing and living are underlined. Writing poetry can be so very private; the intimate seams, folds and pockets of living may find their way into a poem’s form. Yet writing poetry, along with its passage into the world, is so often in debt to family, friends, mentors, place, the books we love, the narratives that affect us.

your heart has always been a jukebox
first lit with mum’s acoustic guitar
bellowing to your nightmares
freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose
dad’s empire of dirt you dust off
ask him what his favourite is when
the night is the dark side of the moon.
you gave yourself up.
burned out supernova falling thru gravity.
come with your silence
with your wild
your blackberry thorns
your mother’s music box
your father’s rusted sapelu
your nana-stitched knuckles
your grandfather-clock gold teeth
balance you scaled from the sea
sheep wool you pull and gift to fledglings.

 

from ‘The path doesn’t exist til you carve it’

There is so much to love about this collection, I want it to remain an open field of possibilities for you. It is self portrait and it is family gatherings, it is prayer and testimony, it is grief and it is love. How it is imbued in love. The presence of grandmothers signals the importance of familiar anchors, of nourishment and nurturing, of roots and self growth. There is music on the line, music on the turntable, music recalled. In the opening section, ‘Manuali’i’, the eclectic movement of words and lines on the page offers sweet shifts in visual and aural rhythms, as though there is no one way to pin sky-gazing or family relationships or writing poems to a singular form. The lower case letter at the start of sentences enriches the music.

The second section, ‘Icarus’, initially conjures the Greek myth, and I find myself sidestepping into notions of life as labyrinth, the risk of burning up, of plunging down and of drowning. More than anything I am revelling in Rex’s language, because, in both subject matter and lyricism, this is poetry of becoming. Verbs favour the present tense, writing exists in the moment of living, writing is a vital form of connecting. But the verbs do more than this, these tools of action, whether physical emotional or cerebral, stall delight and surprise me within the wider wordcape of a poetic language that is succulent and sense rich.

At times there is a profound ache, contagious, human, humane, and we are in the ‘Elysian plains’, there with the poet’s grief as he remembers his father. This is writing as inhalation as much as outward breath, not explaining everything, tracing threads to the Gods or ancestors, to the places we become, the connections that matter. And yes, I keep returning to the idea of poems as sustaining breath.

To travel slowly with this sublime collection is to enter poetry as restorative terrain, to encounter notions and parameters of goodness, fragility, recognition, to link the present to both past and future, to question, to suggest, to travel, to connect. Oh! and Manuali’i has the coolest illustrations.

A reading

‘La Douleur Exquise’

‘Shine on you crazy diamond’

‘Darling I’m here for you’

Rex Letoa Paget (Samoan/Danish) is a fa‘afatama crafter of words born in Aotearoa, now living on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people. His poetry and storytelling are his compass through space and time. His works are giftings from his ancestors and have been published in Tupuranga, Te Tangi A Te Ruru, AUNTIES, Overcom, No Other Place to Stand: An Anthology of Climate Change Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand, Rapture: An Anthology of Performance Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand, Spoiled Fruit: Queer Poetry from Aotearoa, and Australian Poetry Anthology Vol 10. His offerings are lessons, learnings, and acknowledgments for the timelines and traditions of yesterday, today and tomorrow.

Saufo’i Press page