Like Meat Lovers, Claudia Jardine’s Biter is also a first full book of poetry published with Auckland University Press and opens similarly with verse dedicated to the body (or at least part of it). ‘Ode to Mons Pubis’ makes this dedication with reference to English romantic poet Lord Byron. Byron, of course, is a romantic in the true sense, known not only for his sex life, but additionally for writing Don Juan and keeping a tame bear as a pet while a student at Cambridge.

In ‘Ode to Mons Pubis,’ the poet seems to be in competition with themselves as they concoct increasingly complicated and ecstatic synonyms:

hair-covered fat pat, fine hill for roly-polies
the best views, as we know, should be taken in slowly
but not too slowly! Byron did say that
‘high mountains are a feeling’,

(1)

The poem’s voice teems with Jardine’s expertise in classics and romantic elegy, tinted by the present conditions of New Sincerity. She has a Master of Arts in classics from Victoria University, specialising in Byzantine historiography, and also wrote an honours thesis on love bites in Latin elegies. The work is thus a synthesis of her retranslations of epigrams from the Palatine Anthology, originally compiled by Byzantine schoolmaster Constantinus Cephalas in the 10th century, with Jardine’s own original poems.

The Palatine Anthology poems were written by a number of different poets at varying levels of expertise and life experience. While the effect is truly unique, I can’t help but feel that the poet’s “first-book fetish” (as Hawkes puts it) has been exploited, perhaps in part due to the conditions of our digital era where speed is counted as a virtue. Biter is an interesting and ecstatic book of poetry which engages a youthful and contemporary sexuality. But for me, the work reads as two separate and arguably incompatible projects.

This juxtaposition between the ancient and the present makes the translations both too liberal and not liberal enough, giving the poems a sense of headlessness. It feels like the poet is attempting to traverse too much territory at once by publishing both translations and originals in one volume. As a result, these poems are horny like Succession, which is to say they’re horny for the continuation of the Roman empire in a way that might require a little more reflection.

Take ‘Slap-assed,’ for example, translated by Jardine from Palatine Anthology V.55 – Dioscorides, 3rd Century BCE. A 1916 translation by W. R. Paton goes as follows:

Having stretched out Doris the rose-bottomed on top of a bed,
I became immortal in verdant flowers.

(Dioscorides: Epigrams – translation, www.attalus.org/poetry/dioscorides.html, 2018)

In Biter, Jardine translates:

she was bedfast, unfurled, slap-assed,
and in her verdant joinery I was Styxed

(7)

Making sex sound sexy is truly one of the worst tasks of writing, which makes it strange tackle for a first collection of poetry. It’s also a massive risk, because what is sexy isn’t universal, and that’s what we call style. While Jardine, a trained classicist, may be familiar with Styx as goddess and river of the underworld, this poem had me, a recovering philosopher, pondering what the American rock band has to do with immortality. This points back to the problem of the first-book fetish.

If young poets are pressured to publish too quickly, whether for our millennial impatience, academic expectation, or the sheer intoxication of poetry, they risk compromising the effect of their work. Jardine is in an unusual position, and perhaps one many academic poets can relate to… Is it even possible to separate our research from our poetry? In Biter, the translated desires of ancient Greek men are interspersed with Jardine’s originals, which range in subject matter from the family Labrador throwing up raspberry buns, to thinking about the nutritional content of various bodily fluids.

While I love the word ‘slap-assed’ as both a translation and a concept, this and many of the poems in Biter just don’t do it for me. They do it for Paula Green of NZ Poetry Shelf, however, who writes in her review of Biter:

If there is wit in the epigrams, there is acute wit in Claudia’s contemporary poems. There is such wit I am laughing out loud, relishing the humorous twists and turns. Her father, for example, is a professor who has no idea how to open a block of cheese.

At home, only he can claim the title of Professor,
but the way he opens a block of cheese
is akin to unwrapping a bar of chocolate
by putting it in the food processor.

from ‘Thoughts Thought After Surveying the Contents of The Fridge” [Biter 2023; 27]

(2023)

Jardine and Hawkes’ poems are both concerned with the body and lust, or meat and love. These are natural subjects for young poets, moving away from home and finding communities of likeminded artists also discovering themselves anew as sexy and interesting. Byron, for example, who Jardine references in ‘Ode to Mons Pubis,’ was born in London and became a poet while studying at Cambridge. He eventually died from a cold in Greece fighting in the Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire.

Perhaps we poets should take this as a cautionary tale about getting tangled up in other empires’ business. In Aotearoa New Zealand, as in so-called Australia, it’s tempting to pledge allegiance to an elsewhere, given the two nations’ nasty, brutish, and short histories of British colonialism. This trick is perpetuated by C. K. Stead, who, in his poetry, has continued Katherine Mansfield’s legacy of importing a loosely reflexive British modernism to New Zealand’s literary history.

But we are no longer writing in an imagined bicultural past where it is enough to put a macron over a vowel in a city’s name and call it an earnest reflection on place. Pākehā writers in Aotearoa New Zealand suffer the existential ailment of all Antipodean settlers. Given that our inherited western global history is a bastard mish mash of several collapsing empires, the illegitimacy of our comparatively brief occupation of Indigenous lands makes writing a difficult task.

My argument is that we have a duty to buck this trend (perhaps like angry cows?) to move past the postmodern and into a future that reckons more deeply with our complicity in the continuation of empire. Poems about meat, lovers, lust, and bodies should be both embodied and self-aware, and preferably from somewhere other than the objective standpoint of Enlightenment reason. What I like about Hawkes’ poetry is that she transgresses the tradition set for Pākehā poets by Stead and his ilk.

Take, for example the poem ‘Noonday gorsebloom’ from Hawkes’ Meat Lovers:

that invasive stellation annexing the slopes
to wrestle black beech at the bush boundary
the smells of pollinated combat mingling by the water
sultry as marzipan and honeydew casting a heady spell

over the colonised valley the weeds like her very presence here
a legacy of other people’s blood and money
though she has yet to understand this history is her own
still finding a place in her bones let alone the land

(35)

Here Hawkes presents a lively anti-bucolic via a portrait of a skinny-dipper and her working dogs on what is presumably Canterbury farmland in deep summer. Gorse, like Pākehā settlers, is an invasive weed in New Zealand, introduced in the early 1800s as part of the agricultural colonisation of Māori land. But Hawkes’ poem is far from a sanitary idyll. The water is as fecund as the land and its creatures, all clawing at the narrator, “fragranced with sampled sheep shit and carrion” to produce a nuanced reflection on settler belonging (34).

Consider the provocative ending to this poem:

shotgun blasts of life like joyous profanities
or defiant blessings like what is
this world I’m blooming into
and how might I destroy it

(35)

Lines like these prompt readers to consider the worlds we are bringing forth, and indeed what forms their destruction could take. And perhaps Biter is a prime example of this destruction of western poetry as pure synthesis. Ultimately, settler poets writing in both Aotearoa New Zealand and so-called Australia have a duty to create in a way that is both more dangerous and more responsible than those before us, Stead and Mansfield included. Of course, writing poetry that perfectly sanitises these inheritances would be a dishonest poetry. It is this willingness to engage so earnestly with the past which makes poetry in Aotearoa both so hot and so present.