Hera Lindsay Bird ( )

Featured in a blog post at https://booksbeyondbinaries.blog/2019/11/11/guest-post-poetry-from-a-former-skep...

I will definitely need to take another pass at her work because it is so packed with metaphors either that they initially have nothing to do with the subject and that you're going absolutely crazy - which, to be honest, I think is the intention.

I really enjoyed 'Having Already Walked Out On Everyone I Ever Said I Loved' for how it made me think back to the slightly scary and quite surprising truth of that every relationship that you get into will either end or last forever - and the fear and delight that that realisation elicits.

Hate was quite a revelatory ode to the emotion. As someone who struggles to feel hate and sometimes wishes that I could just let go in that way it was nice to see how freeing and "human" and flawed Bird seemed to feel when she experienced it.

Also - thanks to the brilliant and celebratory and empowering experience that was Naked Girls Reading another one of my favorites was 'Keats is dead so Fuck me From Behind'. It was an incredibly well chosen poem that offers up the opinion that we have a new generation of romantics and that that they are almost 'anti-romantic' in their approach to the flaunting of prescribed social rules of dating and the way that they reveal in their explicit queerness. ( )

This was absolutely fantastic. The first collection from New Zealand poet Hera Lindsay Bird, it's funny, sexy, wildly imaginative and full of melancholy…it took me completely by surprise. I suppose my expectations when it comes to new young poets are fairly low – too many of them just seem to
consider poetic form
as no more than a literary weaponisation

of line breaks

…and that is true here as well, but she makes up for it by packing every line with more startling imagery and productive disorientation than most poets manage in a whole book. You never find yourself wondering how something should be interpreted, or how to give the author the benefit of the doubt over whether something is trite or profound. Instead it all just washes over you in little bursts of aesthetic pleasure.

Bird's primary tool is the simile, which she wields with disarming flair and confidence. At every turn you find thoughts expressed by means of comparisons that make you laugh, take you by surprise, or give you strange new angles on familiar ideas. She describes the heart, for instance, as being ‘like a cold sleigh drawn / again & again / through the dark avenues of spring’, says that her bisexuality is ‘like turning your back on God...........but in a risqué halter neck’, and writes about

how the past illuminates the present
still swinging from the heart's rafters
like a chandelier in an ambulance

Elsewhere, a sexual partner's O-face puts her in mind of ‘an athlete winning a prestigious sporting tournament at the exact moment he realises his wife has been cheating on him’. Writing about one enthusiastic sexual encounter, she says:

You are a denim tree and I'm the world's fastest autumn.

…which is the kind of line that makes me put a book down and stare around me in delight, at a world newly-changed. I mean, the book's worth the price for that alone. This particular poem, ‘Ways of Making Love’, is one of many in here that are, on a formal level, not much more than lists of similes, strung together in overwhelming profusion and in such a way that the technique is triumphantly justified. It begins:

Like a metal detector detecting another metal detector.
Like two lonely scholars in the dark clefts of the Cyrillic alphabet.
Like an ancient star slowly getting sucked into a black hole.
So hard we break sports, leaving the conveners of the Olympics
with a generous redundancy package.

The images come and go, succeeding each other so rapidly that you're left only with lingering impressions, floundering in some weird subjective space where they all intersect. The same can be said for the litany of rhetorical conditionals in a poem like ‘If You Are An Ancient Egyptian Pharaoh’:

IF YOU ARE AN ANCIENT EGYPTIAN PHARAOH

I am carving dirty hieroglyphics
into the wall of your tomb
If you are a dead French aristocrat
I am the suspicious circumstances
surrounding your death
If you are a shape-shifting wizard
I am the shape you are shifting into
If you are a fast-moving cloud
I am an entire field of deer
looking up

(She goes on in this vein for three more pages.) Bird has a good ear for well-handled swearwords, an affinity for playful titillation, and an engagement with pop culture (one poem is all about Monica from Friends), but she is definitely not a ‘pop poet’ in a dismissive sense. There are serious linguistic tricks going on in here, and surprisingly deep thinking, too. She likes the eye-catching glare of sex as a subject – but it's usually there to smuggle in something much more serious about mortality, loss, the transience of interpersonal relations.

I'll close by leaving you with my favourite from this collection, a poem that somehow manages to live up to its title of ‘Keats Is Dead So Fuck Me From Behind’:

Keats is dead, so fuck me from behind
Slowly and with carnal purpose
Some black midwinter afternoon
While all the children are walking home from school
Peel my stockings down with your teeth
Coleridge is dead, and Auden too
Of laughing in an overcoat
Shelley died at sea and his heart wouldn't burn
And Wordsworth.......
They never found his body
His widow mad with grief, hammering nails into an empty meadow
Byron, Whitman, our dog crushed by a garage door
Finger me slowly
In the snowscape of your childhood
Our dead floating just below the surface of the earth
Bend me over like a substitute teacher
& pump me full of shivering arrows
O emotional vulnerability
Bosnian folk-song, birds in the chimney
Tell me what you love when you think I’m not listening
Wallace Stevens’s mother is calling him in for dinner
But he’s not coming, he’s dead too, he died sixty years ago
And nobody cared at his funeral
Life is real
And the days burn off like leopard print
Nobody, not even the dead can tell me what to do
Eat my pussy from behind
Bill Manhire’s not getting any younger ( )