Book Review: A Vase and a Vast Sea

By Carter Imrie-Milne

A Vase and A Vast Sea is a charming anthology of poetry and short prose fished up from the many-fathomed archive of the 4th Floor Journal, the digital platform for students of the beloved Whitireia Creative Writing Programme, which, sadly, had its last year in 2019. The collection as a whole is wonderfully eclectic. Even without referencing the authors biographies, the sheer variety of tone, form, content and style makes it apparent that the Whitireia alumni were a talented and diverse crowd. This is no accident. The Whitireia Creative Writing Programme was founded in 1993 and, in Mandy Hager’s words, quickly established a reputation for "its diversity of students and the nurturing nature of [its] programmes.” At a time when university writing programmes were still much too homogeneous, Whitireia was a space in which anyone who had something to say—regardless of their background—could expect to find the support and guidance they needed. Unfortunately, the progammewas discontinued last year as a result of controversial cuts in funding at the polytechnic after 27 years. It was a living example of how diversity invigorates creative life, with more than 220 publications from graduates as diverse as Alison Wong, Tusiata Avia and Mandy Hager. If A Vase and a Vast Sea is a memorial to the programme, it is also a joyous celebration of what it achieved and a testament to the value of nurturing the talent of a more representative slice of our country, so that their experiences and perspectives can be made known through their own words. The collection places emerging writers alongside respected authors such as Renée, Maggie Rainey-Smith, Anahera Gildea, Barbara Else, Tim Jones and Rata Gordon.

A delightful disregard for continuity in the space-time-and-subject-matter continuum is part of the magic of any anthology. This one is no exception—Jenny Nimon, the collection’s editor, has counterposed the pieces marvelously. Each arrives as a lively surprise, and the shifts in register and changes in focus are continually refreshing. You may find yourself in the company of literal-minded children who’ve packed a lunch and gone looking for Jesus in their neighborhood and then, a couple of pages later, awaken among phosphorescent dust clouds in Central Asia, on the salt-plain remains of what was once the Aral sea. If that sea is no longer so vast as it was, the same cannot be said for that sea of the collections title—the vast sea of human experience—upon which this book sets sail. It’s not a large vessel at 130odd pages but the crew are many, wise, eloquent and companionable.

The poems, otherwise unconnected by theme or circumstance, inevitably share some key preoccupations. The most tangible is an understanding of place and how the environment we identify with shapes our identity, and how we see. Rata Gordon’s ‘I find slaters' foregrounds the connection between her poetry and the natural world: 

I am rifling through this poem

trying to find 

its hidden meaning.

If I rifle through fallen leaves

I find slaters

Her search for meaning in her poetry—and in her life, perhaps—is embedded in an experience of exploring and investigating the natural world. What at first glance seems like bathos: searching for meaning and finding slaters, is, however, redeemed by the realization of a kind of cyclical, self-generating vision of ecology which concludes the poem, which recycles its own metaphor as a conclusion: “The leaves are being digested. / The poem is eating itself." 

At one point, Gordon identifies a tree from which, perhaps, the leaves fell: the Taraire, a common canopy tree endemic to the north island. This is a regular occurrence in the collection— a kind of specificity not of the city/street name variety, but rather of particular places in nature. Trish Harris plays with the dynamics of place and personhood marvelously in “Blackberry-picking heaven”, where her discovery of an especially abundant source of blackberries prompts first possessiveness, resignation to sharing, then a sense of loss when it is converted into “a neat grass verge and a new fence”. Finally, the cycle is completed with the hope that, next summer, “with a little bit of roaming, we’ll find another patch.” The actual part of the country in which this has taken place is never specified, because it is as much a place in Kiwi imagination as in reality: a “heaven” in which a little part of nature which is not ours in accordance with any property law, nevertheless provides a source of joy and sustenance. These pieces, and many others in the collection, are alive to the ways that nature informs our every day experience—as a site for the imagination to take root, for the contemplation and negotiation of self, and the sometimes inconvenient, sometimes joyful reality that we must navigate and negotiate the natural world with other people. 

     Another, somewhat ambient, aspect of the collection is the nostalgic note sounded by lots of writers in different ways. Sometimes the feeling is triggered by cultural detritus from the last 15 years (the duration of 4th Floor Journal’s existence) which has washed up in a poem, such as the catalogue of movies attended by the speaker in Tim Jones ‘Tuesday’ ("Van Helsing. / Hellboy. Harry Potter 3.”) Other times, the origin of the feeling is vaguer. In the elegiac ‘That Summer’ Maggie Rainey-Smith’s rekindles a memory of a summer the reader never had and yet somehow remembers: “our legs stretching / and we are freckled / brown, adjusting our / elegant fingers”. The recurrence of “we” and “our '' throughout gently draws us into a dream of a past which is not our own, and yet, so palpable are our own memories of summer, we are able furnish the dream with details and feelings native to our own experience. Rainey-Smith ushers us into her memory, but it is our nostalgia with which it is imbued—our own sense of longing for those radiant days lost to the ebb of the seasons. Alison Glenny’s poem, 'Notes for a biography', tries to describe the element of which this nostalgia is composed. Biography—that is, the drawing of a life—is a futile exercise, like trying to fill a vase with a vast sea. However unsuccessful our attempts to fit life into prose, poetry, or a decorative container without handles, the inadequacy of the vessel nevertheless stands as a testament: both to the immensity and significance of life, and to our deep-seated desire to try to share it with others. In the terms of Glenny’s poem, nostalgia, longing, and loss all reference an “object” which can only be "evoked by its absence”.

      This collection, which is so full of life and the energy and emotion which life inevitably generates, makes one sad to contemplate the absence of the programme which was the impetus for the collection and which meant so much to the writers in it. That absence and what it means is nevertheless evoked beautifully by quality of the writers and the writing which it produced. Even if we do not have the programme any longer it is a great solace to know that those who were involved with it will continue to write for many decades to come. 

Purchase A Vase and a Vast Sea from Escalator Press online here.