On Thursday 7 November, we joyfully launched the award-winning collection, Blue Hour by Jo McNeice, at Schrödinger’s Books. This wonderful new pukapuka was launched by Chris Price. Here's her fantastic launch speech:
Blue Hour is one of the best types of poetry collection: the type that is hard to capture in a blurb or a book review. It’s hard to tell you what it’s about. As Anne Kennedy rightly says in her judge’s report, ‘The central theme of mental health feels strong and immediate, yet the poems dance in different ways’. The poems aren’t about mental health, at least not in a way you’d recognise from memoirs like Mary O’Hagan’s Madness Made Me or non-fiction narratives like Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon, or indeed fictions like Janet Frame’s Faces in the Water. That Blue Hour has a theme of mental health is true, but it might mislead the reader into thinking they are being positioned as something like a voyeur, peeping through the window to get a glimpse inside another mind, in much the way that the upper classes of the 19th century toured the asylums.
But these poems aren’t interested in being your tour guide. They are interested in what all good poems are interested in: creating a unique experience in language. They deploy the full resources of both language and form to usher you in to an image world rich and complete in itself. They don’t tell you what they are about, they usher you inside ‘what it’s like.’
So what are these poems like?
They’re like waking up to find yourself the anti-hero in a movie of your life that is deconstructing itself with every frame.
They’re like waking up in a maze of errors of your own construction.
They’re like a haunted home movie, a fairy tale where the wolf is inside the house and a spell for escape is desperately needed.
They’re like a love story embedded with a massive power imbalance.
They’re like a vivid dream where over and over you keep meeting the same signs, symbols and otherworldly beings trying to tell you something that maybe you still don’t want to know.
They are full of seasons and weather, both inner and outer: sometimes a southerly comes ‘racing in, like a manic episode’, and spring brings with it an X-ray vision of skeletons.
They’re like an underwater garden where the poet appears before you as a mermaid, that hybrid creature who is at home in two elements, who can see the world of air through a fish-eye lens, and dive into the deep to find sharks and sunken treasure and catch tiny fish that deliver their messages through serrated teeth.
Closer to where we stand, they’re like the Aro Valley, in Jo’s vision of it in the opening poem, with its ‘Edwardian houses/running backwards up the hillside’ and its ‘weeds tripping up the fences’, and ‘flowers tripping up the weeds.’
There’s a timeless quality to the time zone of the book: at times we might be in the age of Paracelsus, when medicine and alchemy were often indistinguishable, and mandrake roots shrieked when pulled out of the earth; or with Lear on the blasted heath; or aboard a train in a silent movie; or swimming alongside the twentieth-century poet Stevie Smith, whose poetic hero was famously ‘not waving but drowning’.
That timelessness extends to the form of some of the poems: there’s a villanelle, a medieval French form that most poetry readers have heard of, but there are also no fewer than three examples of a much less well-known 14th-century Spanish form, the glosa, in which the poet inserts themselves and their own words between four consecutive lines from another writer’s poem and pumps them up into new worlds.
When the contemporary world shows through, it can look worn and scarred: in a poem ‘She’s Feeling Old’, emotional life is confined to the brutalist architecture of a 1950s tower block or, as Jo herself puts it — in lines that feel as pertinent to current events as they are to the poem —
At the bay, I’m curled
on the sand. I’m an ampersand
& my heart is a utilitarian
1950s tower block of council flats.
The need to demolish ugliness
lives within most of us,
to rid ourselves & our surroundings
of unpleasantness, or what we think is
ugly. Distasteful. Hideous.
At heart we can all be brutal.
The ‘blue hour’ is that time of day sometimes referred to in English as the witching hour, or even the twilight zone, but which the French call ‘l’heure entre chien et loup’ – the hour between dog and wolf, meaning that indigo zone between day and darkness when it’s impossible to tell which is which.
It’s a time beautifully wrapped up in the book’s cyanotype cover, which also tells you a great deal about what the world of these poems is like. Cyanotype photography goes back to the 1840s, and, the internet tells me, ‘It is a camera-less technique that involves laying an object on paper coated with a solution of iron salts before exposing it to UV light and washing with water to create stunning white and Prussian blue images.’ The process transforms both organic and manmade objects into ghostly outlines and structures, structures like the ‘Ghostheart’ Jo describes in one of her poems, a real world pig’s heart from the medical world that has been washed clean, leaving a white scaffolding that can be injected with a patient’s cells.
But the ghost plants on the cover show us that in the ‘deceiving evening light’ between dog and wolf, the poet has been cultivating her garden. Jo’s garden contains both weeds and flowers, the beautiful and the dangerous hellebore and heliotrope, brought back from that indigo space and pressed between the covers of this book in poems completely in command of their material, and awash with that distinctive voice that Kathleen Grattan Prize judge Anne Kennedy rightly encapsulates as ‘beautiful yet unsettling, aching yet funny, lyric yet gritty.’ This is what it’s like, Jo tells us. And this.
Although a good chunk of Blue Hour started life a decade ago in the MA workshop at the International Institute of Modern Letters where I teach, really it’s a book that’s been a lifetime in the making — and it’s a triumph of poetry over experience. I’m delighted to give Jo a celebratory bouquet, crack an invisible bottle of Veuve Clicquot across its ghostly bows and watch it set sail. Three cheers for Jo and for Blue Hour!