Margaret Bradstock Reviews Possession by Anna Kerdijk Nicholson

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Possession

by Anna Kerdijk Nicholson

Five Islands Press, 2010

ISBN 978 0 7340 4111 1

http://www.fiveislandspress.com/newbooks.html

Reviewed by MARGARET BRADSTOCK

Following on from her poetic achievements of The Bundanon Cantos (FIP, 2003), and co-editorship of the journal Five Bells from 2000-2003, comes Anna Kerdijk Nicholson’s immaculately presented collection, Possession.

There are as many interpretations of Captain Cook as there are writers about him, each version taking on something of the personality and vision of the individual biographer. A tradition arises. As a Yorkshire-born woman herself, Kerdijk Nicholson is well positioned to grasp the underlying forces that went towards creating James Cook, navigator, and to express them through poetry:

From the first you knew it –

at Aireyholme Farm you knew. Out the door, up the hill,

you weren’t like the other lads…………………………

…………………………..You’d wind your scarf

across your chest and be out, round the curtain, through

the door, off into the wilding wicked stuff

and all the time your eyes were gathered to the coast

for you could smell it, touch it in your mind, that

which would let you leave this filthy soil and muck

behind and take your breath, your muscle, take

your lily-white body and brown arms off-shore

………………………………………………..

So long as you are let to live

you will mimic it: others stream before it,

shelter, or break, or are lifted up and carried away;

but you have let it into your bones so it flutes you.

You are, for this life’s breath, one,

and you take on its traits: you are whimsical,

caressing, cruel, strong, each of these things;

but above all, you are never wrong.                     

                                                                     (16-18)

Three storylines interweave in this book – the literal journey undertaken by Cook; the philosophical or emotional response of protagonists, as represented in poems from the “lost manuscript”; and, finally, the poet/persona’s own voyage of self-discovery.

Like the chronicler Vanessa Collingridge, but at a deeper level of metaphysical apprehension, Kerdijk Nicholson follows Cook on his personal odyssey, experiencing and retrieving each stage of the journey :

Anchored: the time before dark is reflective. Candles

are lit in the Great Cabin, but the great black

is still visible and noises come from without

–        which Banks’ dogs bark at – things

move at the corner of the eye. There’s enough light

inside for your standing apart to be shown

in the glass and for you to see the vastness outside.

You watch for the showing of unfamiliar stars.

The gentlemen work on. With daylight gone,

your time for charting’s done. You make your way

to the quarter-deck and wait for the track of a meteor,

once-only-given, and your unstoppable breath in:                

                                                                                               (28)

A postcolonial slant on events allows us to go beyond recorded history, to subvert the chronological account with contemporary awareness:

You take possession of islands every day: every

thing within range of your eye seems capable of

dissolution and reconstitution at the tip of your pen.

It is ‘all for the Glory of God and for your King’,

they say; but only the sons of bitches could say that:

in this phosphorescent age, you are footprints on the moon.

                                                                                     (37)

The “lost manuscript” provides closer identification with the subject, a rendering of imagined thought processes and philosophical reflection, as in “You, the one who stands for us”:

What you started to measure, we have measured.

We have counted the words

of the world.

We have catalogued ourselves,

the outcomes of your dreams.                                    (20)

or “Ambition is such a small thing”:

It is like the pip in the haw, hard

nor is there much flesh on it.

How is it that such a small thing

once it takes hold, hedges acres in?

If hacked at the base, slit

and laid, it still binds on,

thorny covetous bugger.                                           (36)

“Today the distance between the threads of the net” enters into an imaginative re-creation of Cook’s state of mind after completion of his appointed tasks, the gap between intention and outcome:

Let us imagine it is the width of a chink of light

falling near her foot as she passes her husband’s door;

the worn dip in a butcher’s block on the Mile End Road;

the width of a carriage rut in the mud in York;

the fatness of folded secret orders from the Admiralty;

or perhaps as thin as a quill in an ink pot

on the St. Lawrence River; but how shall it be measured

now, and how will we know when it is done?                                                (51)

The poet/persona’s own voyage of discovery parallels Cook’s, and is seamlessly interwoven into the narrative. Again it is about possession, the desire for appropriation, and the need to come to terms with these ambitions in some cognitive way. Like its namesake, A.S. Byatt’s Possession, the juxtaposed text reveals that research can, in the end, bring to light as much about the persona’s own story as it does about the subject. This progression emerges in the series of poems at Kangaroo Valley, and several in England and Torrox, Andalucia in the early 21^st century, disturbing certainties and rearranging chronological ‘truths’ to create new meaning.

The different strands are interlinked by recurrent themes, motifs and references, which reverberate throughout the collection as a whole – preoccupations such as codes, maps, recording, measurement, even the reassuring barking of dogs. Pre-eminent is the cultural significance of naming, as though the act of naming might pin down an object/concept, allow ownership and prevent loss. This is exemplified in the poem “How strange to have a name, any name…”:

These huge blank territories are down to you to name.

Will those going where you have come before

touch the maps, lick their fingers and know you –

or just your salty aftertaste?                                                                         (39)  

Words themselves are signifiers, value laden, time and culture-specific, as in “Their words what the beads say”:

Do words have a price? Do they change

              in value according to place or day? What does

with the Consent of the Natives mean?

              Beads meaning ‘friendship’ or perhaps ‘no war’ are not

‘take our beads and you give informed consent’.

              As language has no plumage or scent, how do you

reach the code-breaker for intent?                                                                   (41)

This is one of the very few poems to register an Indigenous perspective, indirectly, via situational irony. The poem on p.42 is another. The overall lack of such representation is perhaps intentional, given that the collection is directed through the subjectivity of Cook.

Words can be obfuscating, hiding meaning, as in “Each word is a failure”:

                     Spills of madeira and wax

record events; words let you down.

You make a fair copy. Nor it nor your journal

get you where you were; not how you are,

or where you’d like to be…………………….

You are sick, of obfuscating lexicology.                                                        (46)

Naming is seen as no protection against loss:

When you’d got to the Cape, de Bougainville’s name

everywhere: how he gave Tahiti the Name

Cypre. Naming issued no protection.

Baptism didn’t stop your two being taken –

fragile life, one jolt and the future’s out,

bleeding at its parents’ feet. You press your eyes,

succumb to leaden Yorkshire skies.

She says, What’s the name of the place

We’ve just been through? You say you can’t recall

but does she think perhaps it will rain?

                                                                              (48)

The ephemerality of words and their link to meaning, yet the need to pin down the unnameable, is encapsulated in the poem “It is difficult to live so long without words”:   

There is a space on the table for a bowl

but that is all. The air is thick with words

breathed in, breathed out, read, some uttered;

some of them hooked up with meaning, carrying it

like a rosella’s tail; others still in their state of code,

…………………………………………………….

There are books in the cabin with lists of meanings and uses:

attempts, laughable, made by one or a committee:

what do we know of words’ origins and where they might go?                          (49)

As a paradox to this questioning, Kerdijk Nicholson’s own linguistic pyrotechnics control the voyage of discovery and its meditations:

a celestial map, up is the flat black, fat black

glittering, not the stuff for feet and dirt.

……………………………………………..

then there’s trees and clouds and neighbours’ lights:

I’m not getting it at all, I’d lose myself if I had to navigate

back to the front door. Would I keep my eyes on

one constellation or its feature, follow it for all

I’m worth – but what about its pace, if I’m a liner or a dhow,

does it make a difference how I keep a grip on the pin pricks?

I start to muse on the same old stuff – we’re made from

the dust of stars, every bit of me’s recycled, I’m drinking

water which passed through other beings

many times before. What profound need or compulsion

would get me out there spotting Magellanic clouds?

                                                                                (32)

Both narrative lines end with a sense of dubiety and loss, the ongoing futility and importance of human endeavour. In the wake of such iconic texts as James McAuley’s Captain Quiros and Kenneth Slessor’s Five Visions of Captain Cook, Kerdijk Nicholson’s Possession is an impressive contribution to the poetic reinterpretation of history.        

WORKS CITED