Fiona Kidman & Sue Wootton
On Thursday 29 May we launched The Midnight Plane: Selected and new poems by Fiona Kidman at Unity Books Wellington. We’d like to thank everyone who came to this special launch. We’d also like to thank Harriet Allan, who gave such an amazing launch speech.
Here is what Harriet had to say on the night:
The Midnight Plane is the name of Fiona Kidman’s latest book, I think the 35th that she has written or edited, this one beautifully published by Otago University Press. The opening poems in this collection are from Fiona’s very first volume, Honey and Bitters, published in 1975, and they take us through the decades right up to now. That’s a spread of 50 years – what a treasure trove, a waka huia.
‘The Midnight Plane’ is also the name of a new poem included in the final section. It is a poem about love, which we learn is written at midnight, in bed, from Fiona’s house perched high above the airport in Te Whanganui-a-Tara.
Love, you will discover, underlies this whole collection, but it isn’t a sloppy emotion, rather a real one with all its difficulties and pain, as she writes in another poem:
‘We
Who have known rage and lust,
Regrets and promises, have come
To understand love.’
The photo on the front cover is taken from inside her house and is a still from Joshua Prendeville’s powerful film on Fiona called The House Within, which is also the name of her 1997 novel.
The House Within could apply to this collection as well, for in her generosity of spirit, Fiona invites us beyond her front door – not just her living room but, as established earlier, even into her sleeplessness – yes, she lets us into her life, her inner feelings. We meet her late husband, her children who we follow growing up and having their own children, who in turn are nesting, but these poems also take us back to Fiona’s parents and ancestors, as well as to friends past and present.
This poetry is personal, potentially exposing, but instead her special skills take an oxymoronic turn so that the intensely personal becomes the intensely universal. We read about her life and read about ours.
Harriet Allan & Fiona Kidman
Fiona homes in on what she calls in one poem ‘the miracles of the everyday’. They are moments that make us nod in recognition. And she will contemplate the deeper implications of that moment and again we might nod in agreement. But then the true poetic alchemy happens because we move beyond to a place we could never have thought of going, or could never have thought of in such terms, with phrases that startle and hit deep.
In one terrific new poem, Fiona writes about Degas’ sculpture of a dancer standing on one leg, which ‘destabilises a person’s centre of gravity’, something she does to her readers with such lines as ‘the way the world couples with itself’ or ‘the wasteland of chance’ or how ‘memory chooses its victims well’. She’ll mention in passing that ‘blood blossoms too’ or the surface of a pond being ‘as still as memory waiting / to be broken’ or ‘so many hotel rooms, so much/ baggage I’ve carried in and out / of them’, I could go on for nearly every page had phrases that demanded I stop and ponder.
And when each poem is complete, it is like – to use a well-worn cliché – the last piece of the jigsaw. Up to then, we have been examining each shape, seeing how it slotted into its neighbouring lines, looking at its notches and nubs, it colours and pattern. But by the end of each poem, we are stepping back and seeing the complete picture on the jigsaw as a whole for the first time, the pieces fitting so perfectly together it’s as though that picture has always been there, always been that way, it makes such sense.
Unity Books, Wellington
But it hasn’t always been that way, and we wouldn’t have seen it ourselves because we don’t have Fiona’s genius. It’s a genius that’s all too easy to take for granted because these poems aren’t grandstanding or showing off at how smart they are, they are far more subtle and act on us as if we’ve been invited not just into Fiona’s inner sanctum but into our own. She helps us locate our own house within.And in the process, she will give us whole stories in a few lines, just as she holds Katherine Mansfield’s shawl and says ‘yet here it is, another short story’, for so too in the silky folds of Fiona’s words are stories of journeys on trains or by plane, visiting the Chathams, Ireland and France, of memories from childhood, of living without electricity, of a grandson arranging stone eggs, or her daughter making a quilt, of leaving home or of planting daffodils, and many activities about which she describes as ‘that place / where we live, the place we call “life”’.
There is also a story about the man who loved flowers in salads and at a dance ‘ate / the fresh violet corsage from a girl’s dress . . . such crunching through a tango.’ Yes, she makes us laugh with her astute descriptions of ‘women / with their difficult mouths’, or ‘the reverential salver / (a Tupperware container)’, or ‘between garlic and dandruff’; with her wry twists to sayings in ‘the lady’s not for burning’ and ‘it’s getting quite / lonely on this high moral ground’; and there’s her funny but dark humour, such as, ‘we agree to share botulism’. Yes, I laughed even though I also cried sudden unexpected tears at her daughter surviving cancer and her adjusting to her new widowed state.
These poems are lyrical but also capture the rhythms of speech. They can be noisy, too, with a ‘jiggery-jig’, a ‘shoo-sh-shoo’, ‘click, tschick, click’ and a morepork crying ‘go now / go now’.
The morepork is among many passing details that ground these poems in New Zealand in its volcanic rock and pleats, its sea and ancient fossils, the trees and ferns, the sky that changes from ‘ancient porcelain’ to ‘delphinium’. There’s the smell of salt, pennyroyal or ripe plums. In one poem, she comments: ‘Up hill / and down dale / well, no, up mountainsides / and down passes’, for these are poems about us and for us, and even those set overseas are viewed with Antipodean eyes.
And we can share a little part of that genius I mentioned earlier by buying a copy of this wonderful book, not just for yourself but also for your loved ones. Because, as I’ve said, this book is about love: for family, for friends, for fellow writers, for partners. Indeed it is a token of love, as epitomised in this final snippet from yet another moving poem:
‘. . . We leave. We hold
each other at the door. We leave. We hold.’
Find out more about The Midnight Plane here.