Blue Hour

The 2023 Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award winner Jo McNeice’s debut collection Blue Hour takes place in the spaces in-between – the flash of a camera, thunder before rain, one heartbeat to the next. McNeice gains inspiration from ‘walking in green spaces. Especially Karori cemetery. It’s sprawling and peaceful, it feels like nature is reclaiming itself. Looking at the plants, insects, graves, statues, birds, there’s an amazing amount of material.’[1] The speaker/poet looks back over her encounters with grief, betrayal, loss and mental health crises but, through the process of reclamation and time’s progression, there is also recovery and healing. The speaker/poet looks back over her encounters with grief, betrayal, loss and mental health crises but, through the process of reclamation and time’s progression, there is also recovery and healing.

Surprisingly, for a collection titled with blue, the colour makes a limited showing – despite the eye-catching cyanotype cover of dandelions and urban flora. There is, however, an abundance of every shade of colour from purples and greens to ‘buttery light’. The opening poem “Aro Valley” begins ‘I want to take / your picture’, announcing a number of different obsessions the book navigates – how to capture a fleeting moment in words, performance, and the role of audience and player. Like the time of day – l’heure bleu / the blue hour – these poems move through twilight at dawn or dusk trying to make connections.

McNeice skilfully connects poems to each other across the collection via repeating words and images, most especially in her use of fairy tales. Each poem connects like a puzzle piece to the next. “Tidal” begins ‘(t)hrough a fisheye lens’ which follows the first of three poems titled “Mermaid singing”, and then the final line of “Kiss”, ‘(w)aiting to lock me in a brand-new dark’, echoes the final couplet of the following poem “Flicker”, ‘beyond the dull light / somewhere’.

McNeice employs three glosa poems in the collection[2] with the first inspired by PK Page, a poet who wrote an entire book of glosa poems. Repetition and revision – also in the form of a villanelle, “Bees haunt the sunflowers” – suggest mental health and the process of recovery.

Negotiating with and learning from the past is a key template for many fairy tales, and McNeice makes abundant use of the allegory. We encounter worlds reminiscent of Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood and The Little Mermaid, and symbols of fairy tales repeat again and again: garden paths and trails, breadcrumbs, forests and hearts. This is evident in lines such as ‘You say it three times, like a spell,’ in “Ghostheart” and ‘the mirror lies then tells the truth’ from “Going where I have to go”. The fauna – wolves, blackbirds – and flora – nettles, mandrake, rue, hellebore, mustard seed, borage flower – intensify this world-building.

The word ‘heart’ appears in a number of different poems, most repeatedly and significantly in one of the central poems “She’s feeling old”:

A tower block heart knows its pain is very ordinary,

very plain, basic, ugly even. Forgettable.

Some types of pain are just more

pleasing to the eye.

(“She’s feeling old”)

In the same poem, there’s a two-line list of abstractions: ‘Disorder. Disintegration. // Disobeying.’ disrupting the narrative in both meaning and sound. McNeice’s poetry disrupts – like any good fairy tale – in its imagery and word choice. In each of the mermaid poems, the singing lines are completely unexpected – ‘I have never taken cocaine.’ In “Compartment C”, there is ‘thunder without rain’ and the speaker’s mind is described as both desert and forest, as if from one extreme to another.

There is a sense of telling a story – whether myth or personal history – and McNeice layers this awareness of audience through a compelling use of ‘you’ throughout. There are instances where the ‘you’ feels intimate and/or known: ‘You tell me it’s because I have bipolar disorder.’

and

You ask me when my birthday is.

(You never asked before now.)

Grow up.

(“Ghostheart”)

Other times the ‘you’ seems almost to speak to another part of the ‘I’ of the speaker.

Admit nothing.

Your mind is a blizzard.

(“Admission”)

This sense of something shared through time and experience culminates in the poem “You & me”, which blurs the line between reader and speaker, a back-and-forth which is porous and malleable, allowing the reader to participate – as audience, co-conspirator, confidante, guilty party.

McNeice also incorporates a more modern sense of telling a story – through the lens of a camera or a film or TV script. “An analysis of us as a film” introduces a ‘hero’ (who also arguably acts as anti-hero) and the poem weaves between different viewpoints and characters to interpret – or perhaps re-interpret – a personal history. The ‘he’ of this poem, as well as the psychiatrist, appear again fleetingly throughout the collection.

I am very careful

to write you in anonymously

like the ghost who lives in the TV.

(“An analysis of us as a film”)

Blue Hour navigates the passage of time through film and photography, as well as the seasons,

I stand on the edge of autumn

on the verge of the afternoon.

(“You & me”)

and the changes that take place in a garden – ‘The sky is an adamant shade of green’ from “Mermaid singing (iii)” and ‘The sky glistens with your / mistakes’ in “Purgatory”.

In “Admission”, McNeice tells us ‘Nature is ill but she won’t admit it’ and this embodiment of the vast natural world around the poet to say the unexpected, the unspoken, the difficult thing connects Blue Hour to other recent Aotearoa poetry collections such as Serie Barford’s Sleeping with Stones which uses the seasons to navigate grief and Robin Maree Pickens’ Tung which meets the vastness of place and language to create an emotional landscape. Whilst reading, I was also put in mind of New Zealandborn Chloe Honum’s frank but tender engagement with mental health in her US publication Then Winter. ‘The fluorescent light in the group therapy room is vetting me for some terrible migration.’ (“Kiwi”).

Claire Orchard calls Blue Hour a ‘shifting kaleidoscope of light and darkness, entrapment and escape’ [3] and indeed McNeice explores and considers what emerges from memory and experience and compellingly offers up her reality to the reader. By utilizing an engagement with nature, McNeice also proposes a pathway to restoration and regeneration.

[1] https://www.otago.ac.nz/news/newsroo m/jo-mcneice-wins-the-2023-kathleen-grattanpoetry-award

[2] A glosa typically consists of four tenline stanzas with a borrowed excerpt from another writer.

[3] https://www.otago.ac.nz/press/books/blue-hour