Wordplay: Capturing the intricate traits of Maori culture
Anne-Marie Te Whiu’s debut collection of poetry explores Maori culture and the joys and sorrows of everyday life.
Maori Australian poet Anne-Marie Te Whiu’s debut collection deftly weaves themes of Maori culture and language, home and family, identity and displacement. I read this collection straight through, deeply drawn to these poems of trauma and resilience explored through fresh, eye-opening experimental poetics.
The titles of the six sections of the book are adjectives that describe different aspects of the poet’s life/self/experience – Platinum, Fractured, Malleable, Lustrous, Mercurial and Reflective. The collection is dedicated, “For my younger self” — always the poet is looking back at her experience and everything she, her family and her whakapapa (Maori lineage) have survived.
In the poem Reading Waves, the poet begins by asking:
is white water foaming?
swirling at your feet and ankles?
are clear shallows drawing you in?
did you check the tide times before leaving home?
and later
the politics of these waters is rough apex
creatures thrive hunt in packs time to say goodbye to all you
once knew enter the impact zone with aroha and grace you
will find out who you really are and who they are not ….
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… finally ready to face your old fears
The opening epigraph from American sociologist Eve L. Ewing reads “those who move with courage make the path for those who live in fear” – and there are many poems in this collection that celebrate fortitude and resilience, the titular mettle.
I was drawn in by these poems’ contemporary grittiness. In Blood Brothers, for instance, the poet sandwiches Maori culture and spirituality with domestic existence to convey a pull between connection and disconnection with her beloved siblings:
i recite a karakia for my brothers
they would prefer I bring kebabs …
i explain tangeta whenua
they turn up the tv
i dream of Tane Mahuta
they roll a cigarette …
i miss our marae
they put out the bins
While in poems such as Land as Body, a physical self-awareness doubles as a metaphor for colonisation:
you and your rudder
did not discover me
I know my winds
I know my true north
I know these waters
your anchor is not
welcome here
and in Smells like Colonial Spirit:
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always a man next door
clearing his throat
stripping the land
tightening his belt …
marking his territory
making his man shed
I will burn it down
before first light
and spread the ashes
in the car park
I admire the way the ancestral and the personal are fused together in so many poems. In these powerful poems, Te Whiu showcases the beauty of the language.
Some wry or humorous poems take the reader to the places of the poet’s daily experience – Mistaken Identity in the Pie Shop and a cinematic poem about a post-COVID visit to the Salvation Army shop that the poet says “is the one shop in the world that I truly love being inside / Generally, I find that shops suck”. This poem develops into the unfolding of an encounter with “a person mostly wearing purple” that meanders into curious lists completely in keeping with the shop itself.
a remarkable confessional collection of poems where the poet draws us into her most personal joys and sorrows
Te Whiu explores many different forms so despite the haunting sadness, strain and fear in the work, there is also a playfulness. In Love Letter to Keri Hulme, dated 30 March, 1984, the poet shares a letter from her younger self written to the Booker Prize-winning author:
I read the part of The Bone People draft manuscript you shared with me, on the bus.
I had to stop about halfway through because of motion sickness.
I’ll devour the other half tonight in bed …
Your words clip my ears and run their hands through my hair.
While this is Te Whiu’s first poetry collection, she has previously edited works including Solid Air: Australia and New Zealand Spoken Word (UQP, 2019) and Woven (Magabala, 2024), a collection of leading First Nations poetry. She is well known as an editor and cultural producer, deeply committed to profiling the creative output of Indigenous peoples and is a former co-director of the Queensland Poetry Festival.
This is a remarkable confessional collection of poems where the poet draws us into her most personal joys and sorrows, looking back through the lens of her poems to how resilient her experiences of self, family and ancestry have made her. I recommend it to you.
Mettle by Anne-Marie Te Whiu, UQP, $24.99.
Dr Jane Frank is a Brisbane poet, editor and academic. Her most recent collection is Ghosts Struggle to Swim, Calanthe Press, 2023.