Whereas crying gorgeously; 4:37 am makes ample use of typographic symbols and galactic imagery to create a kind of dream haven, Mettle takes the reader from suburban cul-de-sacs to a harbour of estuary mouths in Te Puna o Te Ao Marama [‘the wellspring in the world of light’]. These are place-bound poems that approach the erotic with oceanic language not dissimilar to Marahuyo’s collection, except for their embodiment in the sea and land rather than the stars. There are poems about pashing and being eaten like an oyster, as well as love letters in which “tobacco and whitebait and beer sing” on the speaker’s skin (‘Love Letter to Keri Hume’, 52). Between these more adult concerns, there are also meditations on childhood, in which the interplay of shelter and escapism is ever present: “I wore my rollerskates more than my shoes,” Te Whiu writes in ‘How to solve a Rubik’s Cube’, in which nostalgia is evoked through references to togs, volleys and footy cards, alongside childhood pursuits such as attending Sunday mass, picking mulberries and finding silkworms (22). The steady rhythms of suburbia are countered by claustrophobic childhood anxieties, as the poem flips between halcyon days and domestic calamity: the perils of ballgames played in the middle of the road, swimming in the neighbour’s pool, a mother’s asthma attack – induced, it’s suggested, by the smoking bonnet of the family car broken down during a heatwave. A tacit communication develops between neighbours in the exchange of favours: “They would hear the fighting at night and know that Mum needed a break” (22). This is a world of unspoken interdependencies and help that comes from unreliable places, of banal violence and unexpected kindness, of blistering friction and the soothing balm of understanding between neighbours.
The household is one of Mettle’s chief concerns. Cost of living pressures are reflected in ‘The Politics of Eggs’, a sharp twist of a poem which turns on the (un)affordability of free-range eggs. Unlike Peter Dutton who guessed a wishful $4.20 when asked to estimate the price of eggs in the lead up to the last federal election, Te Whiu’s speaker knows too well how much it costs to feed oneself these days. She speculates, unrealistically, about the possibility of raising chickens in her rental apartment – one possible money-saving endeavour among the many undertaken with clear-eyed resolution within the collection’s pages (27). In ‘Salvation Army: A Shopping Centre Formation’, for example, a $1.50 op shop find is honoured with the promise, “I am going to give this mug / A good life” (31). This is one of the collection’s funniest poems, full of matter-of-fact observations left to speak for themselves. The heart of the narrative is not the discovery of the mug or the transaction that secures it, but an encounter with another, possibly schizophrenic, customer who regales the speaker with a series of unlikely anecdotes (“she married god recently / he was her real husband”), and concludes with the (improbable) claim that her life story has been made into a movie, available to watch on YouTube (not impossible) (32). Told in bullet points, these events subvert the idea of planned shopping trip, aimed at saving time and avoiding unnecessary dawdling in the aisles: a tangential interaction in place of a shopping list leaves the speaker with a character portrait gleaned from the racks at Salvos instead of a mug. It is both a humorous and humanising representation, the woman’s grandiose narratives offering an alleviation of predictability and laying bare the absurdity of life as a stable current. At the same time, Te Whiu does not tokenise her but takes seriously the unknowability of the stranger.
Moments of reprieve in an op shop are contrasted with the private desperation of bruising home lives. ‘Home’ itself becomes a trap for women, children, elderly and working-class people like Nanna and Wayne in ‘(Two of) the Bodies I Have Found’, where Te Whiu lays bare the sociopolitical neglect of vulnerable groups for whom disaster is an everyday attendant (75). In ‘dəˈmɛstɪk’, households become pressure cookers as holidays are peppered with harbingers of catastrophe: police cars stationed along suburban streets where “Christmas induced abuse” drives mothers to leave unquiet homes (15). Christmas, we know, is an especially dangerous time for women in their homes. So too are holidays. Summer. Nights when the footy’s on. Lockdown, as Te Whiu makes clear in ‘Dark as Last Night’, a poem in which the speaker admits that “this roof does not shelter me,” and, through this confession, crystallises the burden of protracted lockdowns on those for whom domesticity isn’t safe, on those who cannot ‘shelter in place’. Violence is just one way of measuring time, one of a number explored in Mettle.
Microcosms exist where time passes at different speeds, seared by indelible memories and unmarked occasions punctuated by silence. In ‘Gregorian Time’, time passes in the rhythms of lockdown, marked by a recitation of questions that structure periods of isolation: “have you signed in? […] do you have symptoms?” (66). Elsewhere, time moves at an uneven pace: “It’s New Year’s Eve, fast approaching 2021,” Te Whiu writes in ‘A Countdown’, where a “kitsch watch-clock / ticks when it wants to” (85). A similar image appears in ‘Timeless’, where the narrator hoards stopped watches like a modern-day Ms Haversham: “if I throw them out / I am tossing away time” (10). The speaker looks instead “to sun and stars” for orientation. After all, “clocks know nothing,” as she declares while descending into the abyssal zone in ‘A Chant Guide to One-foot-in-front-of-the-other, or The Five Vertical Zones of the Ocean’s Water Column’ (73). Against the backdrop of the ocean, Te Whiu gestures towards the illusory nature of Western time, flattened by capitalist imperatives and the enforcement of the Gregorian calendar in 1582 which keep our measurements ever at a remove from natural cycles. To counter this, she pulls us back to ourselves and our relation to the world, to, for example, the persistence of seasonality in poems like ‘Land As Body’: “I was already here / following my seasons” (43). Time, Te Whiu knows, is not measured by the ticking of clocks but experienced through land and water.
As Marahuyo does with Tagalog, Te Whiu seeds English with splinters of te reo Māori, and Mettle is laden with phrases that have been threatened with loss, treated as relics of the past rather than part of a living culture that has survived waves of colonisation. In ‘High Tide of Relationality’, the first stanza of eight lines is entirely in language, introducing the mountains, rivers, sea, ancestral home, people and family of the speaker (Te Whiu herself) before giving her name. This mode of writing situates the reader in a relational plane, emphasizing connections that give rise to the work. “Ngaa mihi e hoa for sharing your mahi with me in this way,” she writes to a fellow poet, thanking her for sharing her work (‘Love Letter to Keri Hulme’, 53). In such a way, Te Whiu makes visible the often-hidden process of editing, sharing and seeking out stories in order to make poetry: “tomorrow I will need to scour / suburban streets for more fibres,” she writes in ‘Bibliography of a Weave’, a poem reminiscent of Jazz Money’s collection how to make a basket in how it likens the material form of weaving to the practice of writing in collectivity (57). Like Money’s poems, Te Whiu’s remind readers that writing is a collaborative action, taking place across systems of the body, society and information technology: in ‘Beginnings of the interrogation of the text’ the speaker has her “knees curled close” as she works, committing her mind “to laptop trenches” (59). In this poem, writing is as much a privilege as a labour of love, a mode of expression filtered through platforms, whose costs and conditions are afforded through communality. By its very nature, writing itself takes mettle, the ability to “carry on” in all the different meanings of the phrase: to fool around, to play; to have fortitude through difficult circumstances; to stretch something beyond its limits; and – importantly – to persist in memory or tradition.
Mettle carries the weight of communicating a shared history, one that predates capitalist time. It unravels the illusions of a hyper-individualist system by picking apart the threads that connect people, land and labour, weaving the recent past, present and future through these histories. With vitality and humour, Mettle speaks to the persistence of community, not only in literary endeavours but in the ability of strangers to share far-fetched stories in op shop aisles; for descendants to speak to ancestors through languages ancient and cosmopolitan; for the ocean to speak its journey in waves. In Mettle, time itself is character, alive and dynamic, something that can slip through our fingers like water if we aren’t careful enough to hold it with the attention it deserves.
