Clay Eaters, Gregory Kan
Auckland University Press, 2025

To wander

Looking for what we have lost

On that other side of silence

A surface that lets us write so many things into it

Knowing the little that we know

In the few ways we know how

 

Gregory Kan
from Clay Eaters

I have just finished reading Gregory Kan’s Clay Eaters and I am caught in an eddy of multiple hauntings. How to translate this transcendental state of reading? How to share this poetry nourishment? I will begin with the notion that the collection resembles a landscape of braided rivers: a polyphonic source, the tributaries, the gentle currents and the torrents, the obstacle boulders and the jagged edges, the ripples and the calm. The beauty. The fierceness. The shifting waters. The place to stand and ponder. The place to stand and be. Poetry as braided river. Poetry as wonder.

Poetry that is personal and invented and incredibly moving.

Who were you, really

Outside of us, outside of me

Outside of all my

Useless bargaining

There are autobiographical braids. The family who moves from Singapore to Aotearoa. The poet who returns to Singapore six years later to do compulsory military service on Pulau Tekong. A father who suffers a stroke. A partner and a beloved cat who dies. Siblings and their offspring.

Poetry that is slowly unfolding as we traverse the braided currents. The visual layout offers shifting movement as we move amidst silence, the double spacing, the single spacing, the space to ponder, the spare and the dense, the jungle and the family room, the familiar and the unfamiliar.

Poetry as mapping. Maps are a recurring motif on an island that has a chequered history of cartography and naming, where orienteering is a key lesson for the military trainees. Yet I find myself viewing this as more than jungle mapping, because these poetic braids are a way of mapping self, of heart. There are the slippery currents of losing and finding one’s way in both past and present, the porous areas between here and there. There is no translation for a dish, kueh: ‘Neither cake nor jelly / Neither dumpling nor pudding / But somewhere between them all’. For me that signalled the inhabited space. Nothing set in concrete. Nothing static. The forever changed. Like the braided river flowing, the same but different.

This is poetry that navigates a tough experience, the poet’s military cadet years, those jungle ghosts, where spirits may dwell in trees: ‘The island didn’t seem like a place for people’. Where it’s the ‘Endless trees running deep into the red clay earth’. And it’s the weight of packs and mysterious stories and escape longings. The hammering weapons. Heart wrenching. This ache.

And then.

This is poetry that draws forward the father, there in his invalid wheelchair or his study, notebooks piling, books on shelves. The difficulty and ease of being with him, then and now. And the family, the mother, the siblings and the offspring, coming into view. And a scene, this together family scene, after the ‘archetypal family feast’, that is a catch in my throat, as the dreams accrue and connect:

Piecing our dreams together

In a wild mosaic

A basin

For other dreams

And in this haunting braid of life and death and loss and challenge, the death of a beloved cat, Giilgamesh, much caressed, sorely missed.

I am deeply drawn into this collection, drawn and redrawn, as hold my breath and wait, just for this moment, here with the expanse of autumnal blue sky, the kererū now calm, after weeks of drunken frenzy, this red clay lining the tongue speaking, an aftertaste in my coffee. And yes this collection has stuck to my skin (see below). I loved hearing Gregory read (again see below) – actually I would love to listen to a whole audio book. This gift. This poetry gift. Thank you.

Satellite view of the island

The jungle canopy a green so dark it’s almost black

It looks like a giant black square in the sea

The giant black square is a photo

Of us

Attired strangely

Walking on a soft dirt road at night

We look like we have walked a very long way

We look like we don’t know

where we have come from at all

a reading

Gregory reads from Clay Eaters

a conversation

Were there any highlights, epiphanies, discoveries, challenges as you wrote this collection?

The entire thing was a surprise, really, and a journey of discovery. When I started writing it, I had no idea where it would go.

It all started with the island. That’s where I started digging, again.

It’s humbling to return to the site of such trauma. Often it’s embarrassing to me. But I tried to treat my past selves and memories with as much kindness and acceptance as I could muster, and that in and of itself constituted a large part of the process.

I also learnt lots of things about the island’s history that I hadn’t known when I was there. That was very humbling.

What matters when you are writing a poem? Or to rephrase, what do you want your poetry to do?

That’s a difficult thing for me to generalise. I think each poem has its own tendencies, and my role is to follow them, tease them out. The writing leads me, instead of me leading it, if that makes sense. To me it feels more like a form of stewardship or collaboration, like tending to a garden.

As far as what I want the poems to “do”, I want them to stick to the skin, perhaps without the reader fully realising it. Also, even though my work tends to be very personal, I want readers to see themselves in it too, to catch glimpses of themselves in the gaps.

Are there particular poets that have sustained you, as you navigate poetry as
both reader and writer?

Raul Zurita, Susan Howe, Myung-mi Kim, Tusiata Avia, Hera Lindsay Bird, Anne Carson, just to name a few!

We are living in hazardous and ruinous times. Can you name three things that give you joy and hope?

Love, food, and the idea that change is not just possible but certain.

Gregory Kan is a writer and developer based in Pōneke/Wellington. His first collection of poetry, This Paper Boat, was shortlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for poetry in 2017. Under Glass, his second collection, was longlisted for the award in 2020. He was the 2017 Grimshaw Sargeson Fellow.

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