I think that the thing I’d like to stress to begin with is that I first knew Tracey as a poet, long before I knew about her short stories. It was, in fact, her feature in Poetry NZ 25 (2002), which really woke me up to her as a writer.
Just reading the titles of those poems now is very evocative, I must say: “Lone Wolf goes to her Reunion”, “Anatomy of dancing with your Future Wife,” as well as the terrifying “Rules for Teachers (1915).”
Nor do you have to hunt out old issues of Poetry NZ to see them, either. These – and many more – were included in her first book, the wonderful – and revelatory – Her body rises: stories & poems (2005).
Over the years I’ve been privileged to see a lot more of Tracey’s poems – as a friend, but particularly as an editor. She’s always been very generous to my requests for more material from her. One of the poems in the present book, Conventional Weapons, first appeared in my guest-issue of brief #50 (2014).
In fact, that whole issue was bookended by two long Tracey Slaughter poems, “31 reasons not to hear a heartbeat” at the beginning, and her fascinatingly disproportionate Victorian monologue “The Box of Phantoms” at the end. That one isn’t in this book, alas, but you can look it up in the issue.
So while it is technically true that this is Tracey’s first stand-alone poetry collection, it’s very misleading to see her as any kind of newcomer to the game. She’s been publishing poetry for more than two decades now, and it’s high time that we started to see her, like Raymond Carver, as someone equally adept at poetry and the short story.
But what kind of a poet is she? Words like ‘bodily,’ ‘visceral’, ‘grimy and dirty’ have frequently been used to characterise her work, and particularly these poems. There is a lot of sex in them. There’s also lot of desperation, pain, and sheer horror of the void. As Hera Lindsay Bird remarked on the dust jacket of another recent VUP book, Therese Lloyd’s The Facts, ‘it won’t make you feel better.’
But all that implies a kind of shock value: a quest for extremity for its own sake. But you have to read deeper and better than that if you want to begin to understand some of the many things Tracey is trying to do in these poems.
As always, she’s extremely, wonderfully literary. Mike Mathers’ Stuff article about this book states that: “If the collection had an overarching theme, it would be one of giving voice to a group of strong female characters of different ages.”
I mentioned before the long Victorian monologue in that old issue of brief magazine. In many ways this collection is a tip of the hat to Robert Browning’s Dramatis Personae (1864): to his idea of embodying complex and subtle character portraits in dramatic monologues – a precedent followed by his disciple Ezra Pound in Personae (1909).
It’s a mistake to think that poets are mostly concerned with self-revelation, leaving fiction writers to concern themselves with the delineation and analysis of character. Perhaps, in fact, it’s Robert’s wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning who’s the stronger influence here: particularly her wonderfully rich and complex verse novel Aurora Leigh (1856).
Tracey understood long since that to be a good writer you also have to be an insightful reader, and I was particularly delighted to hear the echoes of Federico Garcia Lorca’s great ‘Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias,’ with its repeated refrain of ‘a las cinco de la tarde’ [at five in the afternoon] in her own poem ‘breather’ (which came second in the 2018 International Peter Porter Poetry Prize).
Here’s Lorca:A coffin on wheels is his bedHere’s Tracey:
at five in the afternoon.
Bones and flutes resound in his ears
at five in the afternoon.
Now the bull was bellowing through his forehead
at five in the afternoon.
The room was iridescent with agony
at five in the afternoon.
Call your wife, leave a message at the sob. Call your wife, she is learning the hard way. Call your wife, the histology is back. Call your wife, her lipstick is audible. Call your wife, she’s on her third bottle & the kids are starting to look like stars. Call your wife, she remembers the colour of the wallpaper in neonatal. Call your wife, she is talking to you with her head tipped back so you don’t hear the asphyxia. [83]It’s not that Tracey is imitating Lorca’s heart-broken lament for his doomed friend, the dead bullfighter, but she certainly seems to be channelling it somehow. The love trysts in cheap hotels which occur so often in this collection of poems have become a kind of underlying motif or background music, like Lorca’s Andalusian folk traditions and gypsy ballads.
The mention of music brings me to another major theme in Tracey’s work. She is herself an accomplished rock & roll drummer, and has performed for many years as the lead singer in a local covers band. In fact one of the original titles for this book was ‘Covers’ – which does tend to confirm that the complex relations between poetry and music are never very far away for her.
If Lorca, and all he represents, constitutes one pole of her inspiration, then, the sad, frail, whip-thin and radioactively talented Karen Carpenter might be said to embody the other.
Her long sequence ‘it was the seventies when me & Karen Carpenter hung out’, which covers almost twenty pages of the book, underlines this relationship in all its dangerous, flamboyant glamour. KC, or Kace, was a drummer like Tracey. Like Tracey she fought the pressure to come out from behind her drums. Unlike Tracey, she gave in.
A single review mentioning the word ‘plump’ was enough to set off the nightmarish anorexia which eventually took the star’s life – and it’s that aspect that Tracey’s narrator in the poem explores in all its painful detail. Painful, yes, but also funny with a kind of gallows humour:the feetSo, while I do continue to hear Lorca’s immortal elegy when I read Tracey Slaughter, I also hear Karen Carpenter’s late, great song ‘Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft’ – or rather, see the video for that song, with KC’s eyes bugging out of her face, and the jumpsuit emphasising every absent curve.
of me & KC
glue our dreams
like trophies
to the cork-tile
kitchen. When we get
there the cupboards bulge
with Instants
bright in their toxic
brands. Our
tongues are caked
with calories, all for
our mothers’
convenience. You can
just get so lovesick
for puke. [53]
If life wasn’t like that – if young girls didn’t set out to starve themselves to death in the name of a false image of perfection; if desperate souls didn’t get themselves fucked in anonymous hotel rooms in random acts of adultery, then it might not be necessary to write about it.
Tracey has the courage to do so. More importantly, she also has the skill and the depth of poetic knowledge to write it in such a way that we have to go back to her poems again and again to tease out their corners, work out the angles, learn – each time – a little more about the sheer strangeness and beauty of human beings. Buy this book. You won’t regret it.
Tracey Slaughter. deleted scenes for lovers. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2016.
There are many great New Zealand poets, novelists – and creative writers generally, but I still feel confident in claiming that the short story is the genre in which we’ve most distinguished ourselves.
To my mind, these are the four great epochs of the New Zealand short story:
First (of course) the Age of Mansfield: It’s fair to say that the atmospheric intensity of Katherine Mansfield’s fiction was helped by her reading of Chekhov, Flaubert and Maupassant. But I think her work would have developed that way even if she’d never encountered them.
Secondly, the Age of Sargeson: Again, there were outside, mainly American influences on the innovations pioneered here by Frank Sargeson. But his exploration of the literary resources of the New Zealand vernacular – breaking away from dialect as a kind of comic turn – remains revolutionary.
The chronology gets a bit more shaky after that, but the next great age, for me, is the Age of Marshall. Owen Marshall – still with us, fortunately – with his immense body of work exploring the New Zealand experience in all its multifaceted variety, built on the work of previous writers such as Maurice Duggan to present a more consciously symbolic reading of the landscape and mores of the country.
And now we come to the Age of Slaughter. This last category may rouse a bit more controversy. There are, to be sure, many fine practitioners of the art of the short story in New Zealand right now: Breton Dukes, Sue Orr, Alice Tawhai, to name just a few. What is it about Tracey’s work which gives it such extraordinary significance?
It’s not simply a matter of talent – though I would defy anyone to read Tracey’s latest collection, deleted scenes for lovers, which I feel so privileged to be here today to launch, and question the sheer magnitude of her ability as a writer: her ear for language, the mythopoeic intensity of her imagination. No, it’s more of a question, for me, of a paradigm shift.
This is one I’ve been sensing for quite some time, both in the work I receive as an editor, and the kinds of writing I see our students starting to produce – since Tracey and I both work as teachers of Creative Writing.
The Age of Slaughter, for me, has an Apocalyptic air. The authors born into it, or who inhabit it by necessity, feel at home with intense emotion. Unlike the schools of the laconic and the ironic that preceded them, they have no problem with excess, with big themes and extravagant linguistic tropes.
There’s a certain black humour about them, too: like William Faulkner, Tracey writes about situations so devastating that she almost forces us to laugh. Sometimes, as in the passage from a projected memoir with which she won the Landfall essay prize last year, she jets out passages of jewelled prose so intense and dazzling that we hardly notice the banalities of the seventies key party and ranch slider aesthetic that underlies them.
Both Sargeson and Marshall specialised in apparent simplicity: a straightforward surface concealing strange depths. Tracey, by contrast (I would argue), has taken inspiration from Mansfield’s late stories to use the full resources of a poet’s word-palette when painting her complex and devastating scenes. You always have to read a Tracey Slaughter story twice: even then some of its subtleties may lie in wait to ambush you later.
Courage, however, is the word which most frequently comes to my mind when I read Tracey’s work. She goes places others (including myself) are afraid to. The interrogation of the word “consent” in the story of that name, the sheer intensity of the wish for escape and freedom in “How to Leave Your Family,” the dark close of “The Longest Drink in Town” – there’s no holding back in any of these pieces. But neither is there any over-simplification, no failure – above all – to find the “right word, not its second cousin,” which Mark Twain defined as “the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”
If you want to know where New Zealand culture is right now, read Tracey Slaughter. Buy her book; get her to sign it; you won’t regret it. I’ll go further. Even if many of you couldn’t care less about New Zealand writers and their various turf wars and attempts at self-definition (why should you, after all?), if you want to know how it feels to live in this country: to recognise the thousand small details that go to make up a sense of place: the feel of wet flannelette pyjamas on a child who’s wet the bed; how it feels to kiss a smoky mouth you shouldn’t, read Tracey Slaughter.
To say I recommend this book is to put it mildly. I think it’s an indispensable book. This is our Prelude, our That Summer, our The Day Hemingway Died. This is no drawing-room talent we’re talking here: this is Tracey Slaughter. And for better or worse, in all its beauty and complexity, but also its fears and devastations, its intimations of total eclipse, this is the Age of Slaughter.
