Michael Jackson
By Andrew Johnston
Antipodes, by Michael Jackson
(Auckland University Press, 1996)
Reviewed by Andrew Johnston
Landfall 193, Autumn 1997
How many Michael Jacksons are there? In recent years the poet who wrote Antipodes (1996) has also doubled as autobiographer and ethnographer: Pieces of Music (1994), is a series of linked 'autobiographical fictions' and At Home in the World (1995) is based on Jackson's experiences among the Warlpiri of the Tanami Desert in Central Australia.
When someone writes in a number of different genres, it's interesting to look at the uses to which they put each kind of writing. What kinds of things is poetry being used to say and do, in Antipodes? How do the poems resemble or differ from autobiography and ethnography?
In all of his recent work Jackson is preoccupied with issues of self, home, knowledge and language, and the ways these are connected.
Pieces of Music blurs the putative boundaries between autobiography and fiction as it considers the way roads taken and not taken—'penumbral domains, lying outside the settled area of the self'—offer points of departure for understanding others. Jackson has a wealth of experience to call upon here: brought up in New Zealand, he has studied, taught and carried out fieldwork in Africa, Europe, Australia and the US.
At Home in the World moves, in its powerful epilogue, from meditating on the meaning of home to a wider consideration of the nature of knowledge and the way we use language. Jackson uses examples and anecdotes from his three years spent among the Warlpiri to make a case for radical empiricism, an approach to knowledge which revalues experience and phenomena for their own sake, rather than as bases for abstraction.
Antipodes opens strongly with a poem that startles with the violence and clarity of its images. In 'Green Turtle' the relativism of the anthropologist serves the poet well, as any judgment about the killing of a turtle in order to imagine for us the 'long grey rope of its life' emptied onto the sand, its carapace 'a vessel/ filled with a wine lake/ in which clouds/ float, birds fly, leaves fall.'
From a group of opening poems that share similarly vivid images, Jackson moves to autobiographical poems that explore feelings about family, distance, New Zealand, absent friends, life in the US. The quiet confidence of Jackson's earlier poetry is here, the deceptive, musical ease with which lines fall and poems accumulate resonance, which so distinguished Wall (1980).
But I think Antipodes is less successful than Jackson's other recent writing because he is too explanatory; often he fails to trust the images he gathers to do their own work. Some of the poems I wanted to trim back to the nuggety, terse images with which they often begin. Others struck me as too much the kind of poems one might expect from the notebook of an ethnographer 'Snatching at images/ in my last hours here' ('Leaving the Field').
In these poems, such as 'Ancestors', 'Sudan' and 'Poor White', Jackson writes of alienation or misunderstanding, but doesn't enact it in language. Of his recent books, one might expect a book of poems to be the place where language is pushed and stretched, put under pressure, played with, explored for its unexpected betrayals and resistances. But the voice in Antipodes is all too often disappointingly close to the voice of the autobiographer or the ethnographer.
On the first page of Pieces of Music, Jackson writes: 'At home, among familiar things, we become settled in our ways. We think we know who we are. To walk out into the world is to set the mind adrift.' It is true that new situations allow us to discover or develop new parts of our selves. But there is also a process of consolidation of self that takes place when we leave home. It might pay to think of the self as familiar music in a strange place; when we're deprived of other terms of reference, the conversations we have with ourselves become more important. For an anthropologist it might be even more important to hold on to a core of self, at the same time as one is allowing oneself to be changed by the people one lives among.
In Jackson's poetry there are a lot of strange places, and also a lot of familiar music. What I want from poetry, as a reader, is strange music—to hear speech and song mixed up; to hear language as experience, as phenomena.
Of Jackson's recent books, At Home in the World is the one that impressed me most. Jackson seems to have in abundance the anthrolopogist's equivalent of Keats's 'negative capability', 'capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact or reason'. At the beginning of his epilogue—an extremely cogent and powerful piece of writing—Jackson quotes John Berger: 'Authenticity comes from a single faithfulness: that to the ambiguity of experience.' Antipodes is a rewarding book on many levels, but to my mind his poetry needs more faithfulness towards the ambiguity of language—more mystery, more strange music.
'There is no need to leave your room,' Kafka said. 'The world will roll itself at your feet.' Perhaps that's putting it a little strongly, but strange music might flourish in a familiar place. In 1996 Jackson moved from the US to Sydney, closer both to his homeland and to the aborigine people whose stories he is committed to telling. He is one of New Zealand's most original thinkers and most fluent poets; it will be interesting to see what happens to his poetry now that he has returned to this part of the world.
© Andrew Johnston