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Travel and other compulsions

by Heather McPherson

I grew up in the Bay of Plenty and continued the process in different places and more fortunately when the women’s liberation movement broke – among other things – mysteries of subject positioning, compulsory heterosexuality and the (female) antecedents of male deities. I worked with Spiral and Women’s Gallery collectives and other feminist, lesbian feminist and community groups. Older, I see that when trying to insist that a landscape be inclusive, who you travel with is crucial to where you go. And wherever you go the landscape echoes…                                   Heather McPherson

TITLE              Travel and Other Compulsions
AUTHOR         Heather McPherson
PUBLISHED    2004
CATEGORY    Poetry
FORMAT         Paperback
EXTENT           A5, 48 pages
ISBN                1-86942-034-9 
PRICE              NZ  $18

The English poems

            Arriving

We exorcise our jet-lag
ambling Green
Park to Piccadilly and Pall
Mall in the middle
of the road - yelling

kia ora at New Zealand
House and cheering the queens'
stiletto heels and strip-tease
sequins and the boy
bands' tight little briefs

and punch-the-air routines -
grinning at Palace Life
Guards' hup-two-threes
and laughing at Wild
Life swans and squirrels
in St James Park -

hey - it's great to be
in London being proud.

Review by Cilla McQueen in New Zealand Books, October 2004

A friendly woman looks out from the pinhole-camera image on the cover of Travel and other compulsions, standing firm in snow, warmly wrapped and hands in pockets. Or it could be a wrong-end-of-the-telescope image - either way it suggests focus, perception and a steady relationship between observer and observed. Emotional security underpins McPherson's collection, balancing subjective tension with the presence of another. Travelling, she shares experience- the first poem "Snapshots" begins, "Hi, it's me! /here I am in Washington D.C.." Sidetracked from the Women's Art Museum, with a tourist's naive eye she gives a spooky picture of the White House, baulking at "self-guided tours/ like a masturbatory fantasy", wondering whether "the White House isn't immune/... maybe snow slid into the west wing and pipes froze the First Lady swallowed her words/in the chill of its icy heart." Snowflakes that" do not convince as solid... do not convince as living" evoke desiccation and corruption in "January 1995". On a visit to the Holocaust Museum, "this littering, this rash/of ashes" leads the poet ("I think an invisible/chimney is raining fragments of burnt shudders/over the town, over the day") into meditation on Auschwitz and its survivors:

preserved like the Pompeians 
'ordinary lovable and unlovable persons 
who did not die a natural death 
and were always human.'

    Intrigued by historical continuity, feeling as foreign in Britain as French and "yelling/kia ora at New Zealand/ House", the lovers, "wanting the stonemason's brief/that survives love, treason, poverty", "stare at repeating pasts" in church and graveyard. Headstones "cut deep to expose belief" recall the Pompeians again, where "plastic wrappers/ land six-pack rings/itch between green blades/ and sycamore wings."
    The frankly lesbian McPherson pays homage to feminist antecedents in "The forebears", praising those "armsfull of unmastered women - who side-stepped/ 'one-agenda' rules - to choose their own changing the
women we might be." In the "sensuous location" of Waiheke where "the baches hunker/in tangles of honey- suckle over kanuka", she celebrates physical love "in the dark spasms of bamboo/wind chimes", hoping the original owner of the bach wouldn't mind "his bed/being fleet with double-currents - two women/who sleep - and don't sleep - in it." ("Waiheke Island")
    The influence of James K Baxter on a generation of younger poets is producing a number of Baxter poems. In "Poet, once elder...", McPherson recounts his reaction to her question about homosexuality:

    unlike your church- 
    you didn't denounce 
    the sin of loving 
    otherly ... few poets 
    then or now
    might be as brotherly.... 

    I enjoyed the accelerating energy of "The Wellington Party" in the Begonia House as a polite party becomes "a crowd! A pandemonium!" and ends in a frenetic "dance for the dead -/for the living - for us all!"

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