Tidelines
Tidelines by Kiri Piahana-Wong. Anahera Press (2024). RRP: $25. PB, 40pp. ISBN: 9780473710163. Reviewed by Tracey Sharp.
At Te Ahua Point, sitting high above the rugged coastline of Piha in West Auckland, stands the pou of Hinerangi. Hinerangi, a beautiful and chiefly tūpuna of Te Kawerau ā Maki (tangata whenua of the area now known as Waitakere), lost her beloved to the dark waters of this wild coast. Overcome by grief she mourned him from the headland, choosing to die there and set off on Te Rerenga Wairua (the journey of the spirits) herself.
In Tidelines, Kiri Piahana-Wong’s poems of grief, despair and searching sit bookended—contained within—the voice of Hinerangi, creating a call and response that echoes the pull and push of the tides, the rise and ebb of grief, suggested by the title of this collection. The choosing by Hinerangi of her own, dark, destiny has seeped into the very earth to ‘sway / others despairing of life.’ And Piahana-Wong, thus swayed, feels ‘the unremitting pull /of Hinerangi calling / me, urging me to join her.’
This is Piahana-Wong’s second published poetry collection following Night Swimming (2013). Of Māori (Ngāti Ranginui), Chinese and Pākehā (English) descent, Piahana-Wong has performed at numerous literary festivals and her work has appeared in over fifty journals and anthologies. She is a publisher at Anahera Press, and co-editor of Te Awa o Kupu (2023).
Hinerangi’s voice, which begins the collection, expresses a longing to be subsumed by something larger than herself; to become both smaller and greater than her pain.
‘I longed to merge my voice
with the world-song, become
a single drop in the ocean,
be everywhere and nowhere.’
This work reads like a meditation on that longing. In “Falling,” the poet has lost herself: ‘I turn myself inwards, try to find / what is missing’. The collection deftly conveys a sense of being overwhelmed by your own internal workings, and an honesty about attempts to submerge grief and despair beneath a type of nothingness:
‘Lorazepam
unwinds my brain
so that all my thoughts
fall to the ground.
I am unspooled from myself;
I am emptied of worries;
I am floating;
I am that thing they call
stress-free.
I would say it feels good
but I’ve now lost my capacity
to feel my own emptiness’
A pervasive fear of danger, of going under or not, of that seduction of nothingness, threads through the pages of this elegant collection. This brings another dimension to our understanding of tidelines: the places where two currents in the ocean converge, where one body of water is subsumed, absorbed, by another body of water, a phenomenon often found where rivers enter the ocean:
‘On the threshold
the surf surges up
against the river.
Quietly the water
is absorbed.
Even in flood, the
river is never as
strong as the ocean
it returns to.’
The rhythms the poet employs echo the steady rhythm of the everyday, the slow turning of time and tide and of grief. In “A sequence of birds”, ‘I eat my breakfast / surrounded by birds.’ Time slows: ‘Minutes / and hours sink into the bay / like tiny stones.’ The ocean creeps: ‘After the storm, the house / smells like rain. / The sea has crept into the / furniture.’ Nature takes over: ‘Tawhirimatea has taken the / house today. White-capped waves / scud into the bay – .’ And throughout, the poet wondering ‘what it means / to remain, what it means / to leave.’
Written during her time living out west—amongst the rugged, unrelenting Piha, the gothic bleakness of Laingholm—the landscape presses on Piahana-Wong’s poetry in a way that lends her precise, sparse language a deep gravity. And it’s this deft interweaving of the outer of nature and the inner of despair, that is the touchstone of this powerful work. In the wonderful, close to prose, “Storytelling,” the poet expresses the desire to live in ‘Houses [that] do not huddle in the bush and / fall into the sea in storms.’ To live somewhere ‘less full of moods.’ Instead, she longs for the mundane. ‘I needed to be less in awe all day. I wanted to put my / feet up and watch television.’
But despite the harshness of the landscape, there is comfort and hope to be had in Te Taiao, the interconnection of people and nature. The collection speaks to the power of being contained within the natural world of seasons and tides, of sun, stars and moon. In “Arapito” the poet observes the daily withdrawal and return of the sea, only to realise:
‘I am part of this daily journey
This surge and subsidence
This leaving and returning.’
And in “Interlude,” the first swim of summer brings a sense of warmth and peace; of a potential that can be embraced:
‘I float in water as deep as my thighs
As warm as the sun on the grass
The sky above me an open book
As wide as my arms’
—even though the relief might be fleeting, tenuous: ‘After my swim, / I need to swim again.’
And finally, there is protection to be found in the line, the rope if you will, of your ancestry. In “On the day I died,” swayed by the call of Hinerangi, to ‘drown / myself in her distress’, the poet takes ‘the first fork / The one that leads to / the cliff’s edge. Her cliff’—but is rescued, found, by her tūpuna who respond to the call of her pain:
‘And with their coming, a mighty
gust of wind blew me back
from the edge of the cliff
and away, until the forest
swallowed it from sight.’
The final poem, “In the beginning,” belongs to Hinerangi, who goes ‘back to where it / all ended for me, to where it / all began.’ Hinerangi who has received her wish to be both everywhere and nowhere:
‘Sometimes, on the
right day, with the
wind in the west and
the sea gleaming,
I even catch myself
On the edge of song.’
Honest and elegant, raw and hopeful, Piriaha-Wong has crafted a collection of poems that, once spoken, ask the reader to return. There are questions here to be pondered, ‘What is this thing, happiness?’ There are spaces in the simplicity of the prose to consider our own responses, to think of the ways in which we are lost and the ways in which we can be found.
Tracey Sharp is a writer and researcher of Pākehā/Fijian descent based in Tāmaki Makaurau. She holds Master’s degrees (First Class Honours) from the University of Auckland in Sociology (2017) and Creative Writing (2022). As a project manager for the Going West Trust, Tracey is spearheading an initiative to restore and transform Maurice Shadbolt’s former home into a vibrant new writers’ residency in Titirangi. She also facilitates creative writing workshops at the Ōwairaka Community Club and is an active advocate for greater income equality and social justice in Aotearoa New Zealand.