All Cretans are Liars and Other Poems

by Anne French

Overview

The poems in All Cretans are Liars are written for friends, lovers, for a small son, for explaining solitude or betrayal – they start out this way but soon take on their own life and walk out to meet us. Anne French sees her poems as small fictions, where intense personal experiences are crafted into elegant and ironic artefacts. This voice is warm, honest and sophisticated. All Cretans are Liars is an accomplished first collection by a poet who became a leading New Zealand voice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781775580126
Publisher:	Auckland University Press
Publication date:	11/01/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	56
File size:	138 KB

About the Author

Anne French is a respected poet, critic and editor. She has published four collections of poetry, which characteristically deal with the issues of identity and definition. She has served as Managing Editor at both Oxford University Press and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

Read an Excerpt

All Cretans are Liars

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By Anne French

Auckland University Press

Copyright © 1987 Anne French
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-86940-513-7

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CHAPTER 1

Disclosures

    The solitary life

    It's simple. You make coffee, decide
    whether to use the white cup
    or the glass one, and sit down with a book
    of poems – for company merely, like
    an animal or a photograph.

    Outside a spring day blazes. The fig tree lifts
    green hands to the sky, 'Come rain, come breeze,
    come sun,' as though winter had lasted years.
    There are flowers on the table.
    Such richness – coffee, flowers, and silence.

    It was not always like this. At seventeen
    I lived in a windy house above the bay and battled.
    Desire and betrayal washed in and out leaving jetsam
    at the high-water mark: jettisoned lovers, old allegiances.
    Junk from a wilful and complicated life.

    I prefer this. Plenty of time later on for passion,
    for the phone-call, the embrace for which nothing
    else will do. All you absurd, urgent particularities:
    wait there. I'll put you on when the season changes
    – next week, perhaps. Or possibly the week after.


    Congratulations

    In the old days of course before the invention
    of the euphemism as an offensive weapon
    death used to be a poet's big opportunity.
    Lately the currency's sunk. Too much of it

    in the newspapers for anything less than a riot
    with children maimed/beaten with whips/set alight
    to rate. So these particular triumphs
    too small to offend too personal to debit much

    from the sum of suffering offered in a single
    week in midwinter cannot be tendered.
    That I am checked and (after all) certified Grade
    II cancer-free as though timor mortis had never

    grabbed me as though the sun's shadow the black
    line around each day's acts had never stared
    stark back at me is of no significance
    beside carnage in full colour. That your fifty-

    third birthday which cannot be multiplied
    by two to get a sensible number shakes a special
    early flowering of Magnolia campbellii
    out of my garden is too trivial even to mention.

    Death by violence a de facto/de jure (choose
    your regime) norm in Managua/Soweto/West
    Beirut makes the act of writing of
    addressing a short message to another survivor

    insignificant in the global scale. The elegy
    is dead the birthday ode out of date. No one
    is listening. Congratulations mon vieux, mon
    brave. We are both still alive.


    Anglican Church, Pakaraka

    It is all emotion and no taste:
    wrought iron bleeds into marble,
    plastic arrangements stiffen in vases,
    white and relentlessly everlasting.
    The ground is lumpy with the sunken dead.

    Tentative, you try the door. It won't
    open, so you stalk instead around the exterior,
    foreign, Catholic, ill at ease.
    It yields easily enough to me: reveals
    inside the usual peace and a certain

    prim austerity, punctuated by the sound
    of traffic on the main road.
    An absence of statues and purple
    agonies. The heaters are concessions
    from the sixties, mounted too high.

    White glass lampshades dangle on strings.
    I am disappointed. These people were
    serious about it: sin, redemption, and the
    price of first-grade lamb at Smithfield.
    There is no great eagle, and no padding.

    Tourists, we take photographs from the road's
    shoulder, three-quarter, to fit in
    the window, and the more picturesque bits
    of graves. Eight years ago, at Otamatea,
    I saw swallows nesting under the porch eaves.

    Today a car slows, stops, and an American
    voice shouts above their music, 'Ask him,
    he's European.' Meaning white. Later, you tell
    me snow stories: driving at night,
    spinning in a whiteout on black ice.


Letter to Kevin Ireland

Dear Kevin,

Here is a letter for you, written in blank verse of a kind on a train in which we are travelling (I in fact, and you inside the baggage of my imagination) across England in the dark. Around us, plain English faces and quiet voices discuss murder and travel with a certain understated humour.

Here in the thought-train I address you, friend and mentor. For gefilte fish, salt-beef sandwiches, pickles, and your grey-green stare – karo on a windy bank above the sea – thank you. Let that stare stand for other things: strong roots twisted into greywacke – your rough Waikato wisdom.

Now St Leonard's beach behind the red-brick grammar school won't seem the same. The older Ireland's tumescent in the bushes, his younger unlicked self a presence in that Soho bar.

I saw him behind your shoulder, haunted, guilty, telling me stories to take his mind off it. Recall Eric McCormick at the under takers, collecting the forgotten ashes of Frances Hodgkins, left for thirty years undisturbed on an upper shelf; Baxter; Schwimmer's famous memory; a bach in Ghuznee Street; or the year you were ten and packed off to your aunts in the Waikato – Te Miro School, by an Act of Parliament let out at half past two to ride your horses home.

The black Waikato night is exiled here, in this one. Shine your light, my friend, for a train in a dirty landscape, down the years to the cold paddock where your aunts walked, and you stood guard outside the dunny door.

    Simultaneous equations

    All day I try out simple sums
    such as in 1967 a year I can almost
    remember as a shareholder with voting
    rights you were only four years older
    than I now am

    or complicated ones, a kind of higher
    mathematics of the heart since you can offer
    her a house with an extra room and a Dishmaster
    will she fulfil her half
    of the bargain?

    But my new differential calculus
    cannot solve pairs of simultaneous

    It is midnight, the storm that blustered all day
    has blown itself into stillness, the fire has died
    to embers, and I am no closer to the answers
    than when I began when did I begin to love you?
    and is it too late now to pull out?


    A kind of love poem

      i
    Today I sat in the pink-ochre-coloured room
    talking to your wife. It hardly seems possible
    that this is how civilized people behave

    – consider this, then, if you doubt it – my
    infant son walking in the garden with your daughter
    who likes babies, while I talk to your wife.

    Two women, talking. Oh we are candid
    about our lives, as women are, and wry
    about the men in them, as women are

    – and at least once both of us were talking
    about you, although she didn't know it. I did.
    I behaved with monstrous duplicity.

    At such dangerous proximity several things
    become clear: that once she loved you
    and no longer does, although she fears

    lovingly for you; and that she wants
    now and forever into the impossible future
    to be alone. Also for you to know this

    though it is the hardest thing. Also
    that you will resist the knowledge
    with all your strength.

      ii

    A week ago in the dark you held
    me and spoke of passion. It was
    not me you meant, though for a moment

    I was baffled. Lust, we agreed, oh lust,
    that's easy – as though it were
    a kind of cocktail you can order

    and pay for. But passion – heaven forfend!
    And then it struck me: you meant
    not after all some failed love affair

    but the woman I avoid naming.
    Go to sleep, you say, go to sleep – forestalling
    kindness, and hold me in a kindly way.

      iii

    It's tenderness of course that I am prey to
    the first innocuous tendril of old man's beard
    wound greenly round an accommodating branch.

    Easier simply to launch myself at you
    the first time we meet, giving way to whatever
    unknown or unacknowledged desires;

    much easier to fall heavily into your hand
    plucked like a ripe wet fig.
    Mysterious, that I should fall upon you,

    that you should calmly register the fact
    as though it were something else, as it seemed
    to be – an interruption and an accurate beginning.

    Now I am prey to it
    a slow killer
    greenly throttling my resolutions.

      iv

    So this is a kind of love poem after all
    if tenderness, passion and solicitude
    in one word lie compounded –

    a three-cornered knot whose untying
    may be done quickly or not at all
    by distance. Choose now, recall

    two women in a room the colour of ochre
    like Monet's house, like the Mediterranean,
    speaking about their lives with a kind of candour.


    A visit to Isola Bella

      i

    That year you were in France
    I used to write to you here
    at this address – Villa Isola Bella
    Chemin Fleuri, Garavan. ... Staring
    at it now, the gravelled garden,
    the railway station tout près, I
    can scarcely recall how then
    I imagined it to be. Now in the
    Chemin Fleuri it is another
    address that returns to haunt
    the imagination.

      ii

    You descend the streets of the vieille ville
    through a stink of dog piss. The fastidious
    sprinkle sulphur along the front of their houses
    and around gratings. It is all cobbled
    and crazily cracked, and the tall ochre-
    coloured houses lurch towards each other
    like drunks. There is no straight way
    now you turn and descend a stair
    that leads through a house – like the way
    to Mark's studio in Oriental Bay – at the bottom
    another turning out into the light. I have picked
    a leaf of the sweet bay tree, Laurus nobilis,
    that grows at the top of the hill, and crush
    it in my fingers against the smell of dog.

      iii

    This was all there was
    sixty-five years ago – the old town
    and twenty villas at Garavan
    rich enough to require their own station.
    She wouldn't recognize
    the big main road around the bay
    with its hotels and awnings, nor
    the autoroute high above on the cliff
    bored through the mountain
    where Grimaldi Man was found, to Italy.
    Nor the tourists – people like me
    who drop in for the day and fly on
    in the evening to England.

      iv

    The terraced hillside
    the ochre-pink shuttered villas
    the cypresses
    speak of Wellington
    the palms
    the olive groves
    the sea
    all speak of Wellington.

      v

    The cemeteries here I am told
    are full of consumptives
    who made the mistake of staying on
    for the summer. Spring, early April,
    the mimose – which turns out to be
    a kind of acacia – is almost over
    and the pine pollen blows yellow.
    There are people, probably Swedes, bathing
    in the bay, down there – see?
    It's time to go.

      vi

    The villa is empty, and the room
    unlived in – the new fellow has left
    his name on the letter-box, but he
    doesn't write here, and the shutters
    are closed. Nothing to do but take
    photographs. I pose in front of
    the locked gate. Turn the car and drive
    off down the Bd Katherine Mansfield
    which is – after all – a small
    and rather narrow street.


    All Cretans are liars

    Consider the lie as self-reflexive, leading
    to an infinite regress. 'Do you do this often?'
    sincerely asked is easy to deny
    ease being all or most of it, and I
    compliant and complicit most easily. One lie
    laid to rest then facts resemble bait
    and thus were readily taken – picture it,
    they say, the Backs, those green lawns, rowing
    for your college, the sonorous echo of boys' voices
    i.e. a fly or finger to land a small fish
    out of a backwater. That lapse or fault
    was simply a failure of imagination. After all
    a little water clears us of this act
    and the truth is just a small and wrinkled thing.


    Collisions

    'Of course she's still intransigent,' you said
    between bites as though it isn't someone's marriage.
    So I took a good thirty seconds to digest it.
    'Intransigent nothing.' Sounds as though I was
    their counsellor from Marriage Guidance and not
    – well, something similar, if less honourable. More
    involved. His consolation, her confidante.
    A reflex triangle, you might call it, kinked
    briefly backwards against gravity.
    How much of that you know I daren't assess,
    but note the stillness of your eyes, your voice
    as we defend them to each other. It's the boys'
    team against the girls'. Result: a draw.
    We call it off with a point each on the board.

    So do you know it all then, or just what he
    told you – not quite the same thing – the plot
    and some of the dialogue, with a critical commentary
    throughout? Not, presumably, how it happened:
    the usual collisions of people from a small
    country living in a provincial town.
    The predictable, in other words, just waiting
    for its chance. I was the meat, that's all – he'll
    have told you gristle. Or how it ended: dinners
    together, celebrations, people left on planes,
    assorted fictions stayed intact. Now silence.
    It's relief. But forget his elegant phrases, grand
    evoked emotion. Let me risk the awkward
    truth – it seems (improbably) I loved them both.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from All Cretans are Liars by Anne French. Copyright © 1987 Anne French. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Title Page,
Epigraph,
1: Disclosures,
The solitary life,
Congratulations,
Anglican Church, Pakaraka,
Letter to Kevin Ireland,
Simultaneous equations,
A kind of love poem,
A visit to Isola Bella,
All Cretans are liars,
Collisions,
Night flying,
Cricket,
A summer storm,
Satyric,
Disclosures,
'This could have been another poem',
O quam gloriosum,
Writing,
Learning to pee standing up,
2: Photographs for Daddy,
Eucalypts Greenlane,
'it, then',
Confessional – five sonnets,
'A year/ago',
Several ways of looking at it,
An evening in November,
Photographs for Daddy,
3: New Zealand Day,
It's,
Kite,
Advice to a prospective lover,
All you may depend on,
Parts of speech,
Ichthus,
Literary congress,
Notes on the third time,
New Zealand Day,
Copyright,