The Companion to Volcanology, Brent Kininmont
Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025
4. Sanbe
For the summit her mother
packs toothpicks for
the peeled slices of nashi.
Half pear, half apple.
Also meaning without.
Plucked from her
grandmother’s altar,
the fruit is still firm after
three days bathing in incense
for the leftover bones
each of us
(even the youngest)
carefully placed in the urn
with chopsticks.
Brent Kininmont, from ‘Range of Affection’
Terrific title. Terrific cover. Terrific opening quote:
‘I would not, as my father saw it, exchange our old way of life for the new way but would learn to be part of both . . . ‘ Patricia Grace, Mutuwhenua
This is not, as you might imagine, a book on volcanoes but volcanoes are a shadow effect, a missive, an ongoing motif, a haunting. It is a poetry collection that depends upon mountains, travel, climbing, running, discovering. Various mountains, from Etna to Erebus to Taranaki to the unnamed. Multiple ascents, multiple crossings. Poetry writing as ascent. Poetry writing calling into and from and because of an abyss. A volcanic plume on the horizon. Pyramid ramps.
Some poetry resembles a wide open plain where you get to stand stock-still and absorb the open sky, but some poetry leads us into denser terrain, an undergrowth, the thicket bush. This is sublime poetic intricacy, rich in physical detail. I am finding myself reading and climbing and traversing. And the word archaeology comes to mind. This digging and delving into memory autobiography encylopaedias imaginings.
The collection is in two parts. The first half is rich in the presence of child. In the opening poem, ‘The Companion to Volcanology’, a child is carried up a mountain, the setting a mood vibration of harmless snakes, homeland talk, melting snow, a hissing caldera. Hazy identities. Companionship. Contiguity. Proximity. And it is proximity to the child as much as the mountain in these first poems, whether the poet’s daughter, the poet himself as child, or child imaginings, that intensifies the reading experience. In the thicket of recall, there’s the playground, the drawing, the bouncy castle, the swimming lessons versus Sunday School, the leaf boat. The child, like the mountain, is an ubiquitous presence and I am so utterly moved by this.
The second part shifts to tectonic plates of the adult. Craig Arnold, a hiker poet missing on Kuchinoerabu. Pheidippides and his alleged ‘long dash’ from Marathon. Haruki Murakami running the same ancient route. Ekiden, Japan’s long-distance relay. And then family. The moving father presence. Birth mother. Parents. Illness. Affections. And then place. Poetry as poignant bridge between Japan where Brent now lives and Aotearoa where he once lived. Especially the sequence entitled, ‘Range of Affection’.
Am I easily moved by poetry? Am I easily transported to moments of scale and shiver and leaf shine. Yes I am moved. This sublime collection moves me. This intricate thicket where home is here and there, this mountain and that mountain, this child and that child, this abyss and this footwork. This book that is companion to volcano, to life and to living, to loved ones, here and departed. This book that delivers poetry as companionship. No question. I am moved.
The Readings
‘The Lift Has Two Decks’
‘Twelve Short Talks on Aspects of Origins’
‘Swim!’
Three Questions
The Impressionist
Worn down by the Pont du Gard,
you have earned this breather
in the river it straddles.
Still, your friends at home are all
in school, and you have not
answered yet: What holds
the blocks together?
No swifts appear to thread
the limestone arches,
like those legions nesting
in Segovia’s aqueduct.
And doubtless the bond
isn’t chemical, like the one
in Ostia, where ever-stronger
grow the Roman piers still
cemented in seawater.
But how can you focus
on my thoughts
with your head submerged
in the Gardon again?
Stop fixating, daughter
please, on that slate behind
your squeezed eyelids.
All those marvellous arches
the sunlight, you say,
has outlined there.
Brent Kininmont
Were there any highlights, epiphanies, discoveries, challenges as you wrote this collection?
I began the book with the intention of writing about movement: hiking, running, swimming, and travelling. And there are a lot of references to these in the collection, especially in the second half. I wasn’t expecting a daughter figure to feature quite as prominently as she did. My child was already the focus of the final section of my first book, Thuds Underneath, and I had wanted to move on. However, in the initial poems I was writing about solo trips, it was challenging to raise them above mere tourist observations. I fixed this by injecting the daughter figure into the poems. “The Impressionist”, above, is an example of this. I had hiked around the Pont du Gard aqueduct, and I struggled to give the resulting lines the necessary heft to justify their existence, for a public readership that is. But once I plonked the daughter in the scene, and started engaging with her on paper, the poem found a satisfying form. In the end, a daughter featured throughout the first half of the book. Sometimes the poems are drawn from true encounters and observations of my own child, and sometimes they are not. She is one of several meanings of “companion” in the book’s title.
Volcanology is also a “companion” of sorts to my first collection. I’ve been based in Japan for a long time, and both volumes include poems that comment on living outside of a homeland while also engaging with it. I resisted the temptation to order Volcanology into sections based on physical location, like I did with Thuds Underneath. Instead, Volcanology is ordered in a way that echoes a mind divided between two cultures. A poem clearly taking place in Aotearoa, for example, might sit beside another located in Japan or elsewhere. Such a juxtaposition can bolster both poems on facing pages.
Another challenge, one which I failed to overcome, was the pace of my output. It took a decade to bring this second collection together. And I cannot adequately explain why that is, except for a sense that time was on my side and that the creative impulse wouldn’t easily diminish. So naïve! I’m determined the next book will be wrapped up far sooner.
What matters when you are writing a poem? Or to rephrase, what do you want your poetry to do?
I like poems that teach me something new. And I like poems that connect disparate ideas or facts in an unexpected, but logical, fashion. A poem needn’t display a sense of humor, but I respond very favourably to a collection of poems that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Touches of irony and absurdity are also very welcome.
Although I try to achieve the above in my own work, the tone of my poems is often a kind of reporting. Quotes from people and written signs appear throughout Volcanology, sometimes as leaping off points, and sometimes as a way of wrapping up. I only noticed this tendency when I was honing the collection’s order and was trying to ensure poems didn’t repeat or overlap unnecessarily.
Are there particular poets that have sustained you, as you navigate poetry as both reader and writer?
Erik Kennedy is among the local standouts for me. His work frequently fulfils the requirements that I mention above. His poems are often places where humour and insight and poignancy intersect. And he does this with deceptively clean sentences. (He seems to be running with a baton that poet James Brown could have passed to him.) Here’s a superb example.
I also keep returning to volumes by Lavinia Greenlaw, Ilyse Kusnetz, and Jack Gilbert. Greenlaw injects such superb creativity and intelligence into her work. She’s a writing allrounder, and she tells stories in poems that could have been developed into novellas instead. Night Photograph is my go-to collection. Kusnetz, meanwhile, is an American poet I hadn’t heard of when I came across her marvellous first collection, Small Hours, in a used bookshop in Tokyo. She died relatively young but had landed fully formed with that book. Finally, Gilbert, another American, was married to a Japanese and spent much of his life away from his homeland. His poems invite the reader deep inside his life story in a way that I couldn’t pull off comfortably. He manages to do so with ordinary sentences that look easy to make, but weren’t. I admire his dedication to quality – he wrote just five books across five decades.
Brent Kininmont is from Ōtautahi Christchurch and lives in Tokyo, where he leads seminars in intercultural communication for Japan-based companies and organisations. His poems have appeared widely in Aotearoa, including in Best New Zealand Poems. He has written two books of poetry, a decade apart: The Companion to Volcanology (2025) and Thuds Underneath (2015), both published by Te Herenga Waka University Press.
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