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                                      Portals
                               by
                Robin Fry

TITLE                  Portals
AUTHOR            Robin Fry
PUBLISHED       2011
CATEGORY       Poetry
FORMAT            Paperback
EXTENT             14.8 X 21 cm, 40 pages
ISBN                   978-1-86942-131-1
PRICE                 NZ  $15

PORTALS        ROBIN FRY

I was delighted when Robin asked me to introduce Portals today, because I remember going to the launch of her very first poetry collection, Weather Report, in 2002.  It was held in the City Library, before I really knew Robin.  I’d been living overseas for several years and was unaware that that Robin been an actor, a broadcaster, a journalist and an editor.  I was also unaware that she had only started writing poetry after retiring from her professional jobs at 65.  But on that lovely occasion in 2002, I was struck by her poems and the way in which she read them.

Over the next few years, three more collections were published – Daymoon, Inside it and Time Traveller – so this afternoon, we’re celebrating the launch of her 5^th collection in 9 years – an enviable achievement by anyone’s standards.   

Robin and I have been in the same poetry-writing group for several years now – along with Nola Borrell and Kerry Popplewell, whose first collection was launched last year – and I have seen how central to her life poetry is.  I’d like to quote from an interview published in the Hutt News last week in which Robin says this: 

‘Poetry is in everything I see and touch.  It is a lens through which I experience the world’. 

And having experienced that world, Robin conveys it to her readers in poems which are both accessible and enhancing. Robin is not one of those poets who seeks to be oblique or overly mysterious.  Nor is she one who likes to write a lot of  ‘confessional poetry’.  I tend to agree with the American poet, Jorie Graham, who wrote this: 

‘The poetry that fails … is the poetry of mere self.  It embarrasses all of us.  The voice in it, not large, but inflated’.  

Robin would seem to agree with this, and also with Jorie Graham’s insistence that ‘the poet must move to encounter an other, not more versions of the self’.  

For this is what Robin does.  She consciously encounters an other:  be it God, or nature, a beloved, an Idea, ….’   And she knows how to take us right there, to wherever she is, conveying the tangible through all the senses – warmth, wetness, colour, saltiness …  

Portals – it’s a lovely word.  ‘Doorways … to other worlds’ as the opening poem tells us.  The poems in this collection take us directly into Robin’s world.    To her beloved Petone beach – where she ‘ prayer walks’, writes names in the sand, feels the wind ‘in the small of her back’.    Nature is a constant source of poetry for Robin – be it rain or sea, a plant or an animal – so it’s fitting that the cover image (drawn by her grandson, Micah when he was 18) is a very ‘botanical’ one.  Petals, roots, filaments, cell walls, stamens, pistils… its detail and focus is a clue to what lies inside.    

Robin’s is a world where – as she says in one of the poems Harbour View Rd – ‘small things are noticed’.  Like Pablo Neruda, whom she admires for the way he ‘celebrates the ordinary things’, Robin too, writes of ‘ordinary things’ – a white cat, a dead skink, a trampoline, a spider’s nest  ….. which in poems, can of course become extraordinary.

Robyn also knows – and writes about – the act of writing itself.  And the frustrations of not writing, which she addresses in her poem Writer’s Block.  Someone once said about writing poetry that you have to be ‘alert to the voltage points of the day’.  It seems to me that Robin spends a great deal of time being deliberately and consciously alert, opening herself to the world and whatever she encounters.  

Most poets never know where the next poem’s coming from and Robin alludes to this in The Poem that wasn’t.  She refers to fleeting moments – the effect of a certain light on water, being struck by a little girl’s ‘Shirley Temple curls’, collecting blackberries  – moments which could all have become poems, if only she had developed them at the time.

And that’s the thing.  You have to catch such moments, put them down on paper, and then work and work at them, crafting them till you arrive at the point where you are happy enough to put them ‘out there.’   Most poets will tell you that once the poem is heated up and seems to be going somewhere exciting, there is very little the writer would not do to insure its arrival.  And of course, all that crafting into the carefully wrought forms that are poems, is supposed to appear easy and natural!  

One way to craft a poem is to use the discipline of strict poetic form and Robin seems to enjoy such a challenge.  There is a poem in Portals entitled Wet & Windy which is a double abcderian  – a form I’ve never tried, but one which must be inordinately difficult to execute successfully.  In a double abcderian, the first line must begin with an A, the second with a B and so on till the 26^th line, which must begin with a Z.  But that’s only half of it.  The rest of the challenge is to make the first line end with a Z, the second end with a Y, and so on till the 26^th line, which must end with the letter A!   In a poem such as this, it is form that conjures language.  

Robin also has enormous fun with rhyme and rhythm in This poem is – a long and very entertaining list of everything from a bikie’s chain to a Puccini opera! 

Besides writing about writing, Robin also has a poem about reading. In a lovely poem The Reader, she conveys the excitement some of us feel when we begin to read a new anthology of poems, looking for something which will really strike a chord and resonate. This is how she puts it …..

    ‘And here it comes
    surprising me at last –
    the rare, the numinous one
    like the flick of a silver tongue
    light falling
    from another room.’

Something else I admire about Robin is that she’s not afraid to include big issues in her poems  – religion and violence, corporate greed and global warming, terrorism and nuclear meltdown.  Other sources of inspiration come from her wide-ranging interests – travel (to places like Copacabana), going to plays and movies, attending a performance of Rachmaninov’s music where we are left:

    uncertain as fledglings
    learning to come down
    to earth

Robin also knows that good poems take us on a journey.  Her poem about Mozart starts with the particular – his 5 siblings who didn’t survive childhood, 5 of his own 7 children who suffered the same fate – but the end of the poem opens us out to the universal, to:

    all the lost children
    all the parents
    all down the years

So yes, there is sadness in some of the poems, but also much joy.  We meet some of her grandchildren – the 8-year old Thomas of the title poem (who is now almost 15),  two other grandchildren, Micah and Sydney and their father, Aaron, all of whom live in the US and so can’t be here today.  But Robin’s daughter Susan is here, as is another grandson, Sam.  And it’s a tribute to Robin that so many friends, writers and other poets have also gathered here this evening. 

If, as the American poet A.R. Ammons asserts, ‘value is represented in poems,’ and if poems ‘exemplify ways to behave’, then through the portals of Robin’s work, we see her behaving in ways we can only admire – someone who loves nature and art, who celebrates beauty, is alive to the mystery and humour of life, who is generous of spirit and deeply connected to her family.  In these 24 new poems, Robin achieves what she set out to achieve – she communicates, she entertains, and she also uplifts.  

 

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