TAPA TALK
POETRY COLLECTION
SERIE BARFORD
HUIA PUBLISHERS, AOTEAROA: http://www.huia.co.nz
REVIEWED BY CATH KOA DUNSFORD

Serie Barford wrote, in Niu Voices [Huia Publishers] “…truly precious stories, those that hold sacred truths within them, can never be lost. They are kept intact by the universe itself. They exist beyond everything we can touch and name. They are in our blood, and like red hibiscus burnt by frost, recover and reveal themselves again. These stories are so powerful that only the pure of heart can carry them between worlds and survive. They change lives and their coming is signalled by the stars.”

Tapa Talk, her latest poetry collection, holds such sacred truths and is a collection that is truly signalled by the stars, painted on tapa, drawn down from the heavens, into the sea, emerging as starfish and being etched onto the page by her pen. This magic, always holding truths through the experience of sensuality, marks the difference between Barford and poets who are purely ruled by the head and not the heart. Her work connects the worlds through wisdom and sensuality. We feel this on every level from love making and desire through to weaving – literally weaving between the worlds. Serie Barford moves effortlessly between these places, a truly poetic shape shifter, whose words come from a place deep within – herself and the universe, especially the Pacific Islands, where the soul of her work is located.

Serie Barfood is able to span these worlds from her own mixed heritage of Samoan, European and Algonquin Indian ancestry, from her wide travel and work experiences, but she never forgets her roots nor the fact that both she and her parents worked their way through factories to survive. Those of us who have endured this experience know better than to romanticise it. The work is gruelling, hard, monotonous and never- ending. Barford payes homage to this in Culture Shock, which forms the last part of her collection.

The first poem, Threnody, is a beautiful lament or Song of Sorrow, marking the change from ancient voyagers from the Pacific to the often lamented modern realities of life in the new land where Pacific people are alienated from their roots and sometimes endure terrible hardships to survive. Threnody comes from the ancient Samoan practice of spreading a mat on the shore for someone who was lost at sea. Whatever landed on that mat was believed to be the soul of the dead person. Her lamentation allows space, lays a mat for the losses endured in this Pacific migration, knowing that these songs of sorrow can sometimes bridge worlds for those departed, wanting to return to familiar places where loved ones await them. This poem is a symbol for the entire edition of Vaka Moana: Talkstory by Navigation [www.apwn.net] where we cast out our nets to welcome departed souls [those departed from their native lands] and their stories back home to these shores and also took Pacific Talkstory to global shores, especially sharing talkstory with Mohawk, Cree, and many other First Nations people during 2007 [see part two of Vaka Moana]. Mahalo, Serie.

Culture Shock is a sequence in the collection that had me laughing and crying with recognition of the experience of being Pacific within a university experience that is so lacking in awareness to the point that the lecturers of such note are incapable of keeping the rooms at a bearable temperature. This is both a literal and metaphorical experience and the gumbooted lecturer is depicted with fantastic humour with her appalling lack of intelligence or awareness of her role. One of the best poems to depict the utter ridiculousness of the university experience when it cannot take context into its grasp and remains isolated from our lived lives. What point is knowledge devoid of context?

Many readers will have read an excerpt from Connections, a poem in Tapa Talk, in Niu Voices – a terrific collection of Pacific Writing and may here explore the full text. One of the poems that bursts from the pages with powerful imagery is the title poem for this collection, Tapa Talk, where Serie Barford describes the narrator’s journey:

“I’m a shadow catcher
I walk and fly in worlds
Between worlds”

She compares this with the loved one, whose heart “ is a starfish freshly/plucked from heaven”.

This poem captures and celebrates sensous images from the Pacific and her own experiences and is exquisitely crafted.

Tapa Talk, as a poem, recalls Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body where she describes her lover Louise as a scroll waiting to be unravelled, a text waiting to be translated. Here the lover is “the translation/of an ancient text/and the tapa on the wall/is the gallery of motifs/I found in your sleeping form.”

Before this poem, it had not occurred to me to link Barford and Winterson’s work, but once this connection revealed itself, it began to play koauau to my soul and it is a compliment to both writers. Like Winterson, Barford has etched her own unique Pacific vocabulary into a literature of deep sensuality and intelligence. Her work is political but visionary. She plays with words and ideas like Winterson, but in her own Pacific voice. She has broken literary boundaries and carved a place for other Pacific writers to express their voices on their own terms. She has found a way to make siapo through poetry and her poetry sequence Making Siapo brings the ancient process into the modern poetic with skill and heart.

When bringing Pacific Talkstory into Canada on a recent Canadian University Book Tour, I quoted from Niu Voices and from Serie Barford’s work in a lecture at the Ban Righ, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. A Mohawk writer came up to me afterwards with tears in her eyes. She was drawn by stories of the nuclear holocaust in my review of Daughters of the Pacific but she was also entranced by the words of Serie Barford, quoted at the opening of my lecture She wanted to hear more. I will send her a copy of this collection and I know she will share this with her family, colleagues and friends. For her own voyage was not that different from those described by Serie, in words that few of us can match.

Serie Barford is one of the most compelling poets in the Pacific and in Aotearoa-New Zealand at this time. Tapa Talk is a terrific collection of her work and a good introduction to her visionary style. It is poetry that is at once sensual but also intelligent and accessible to anyone willing to share this voyage of Pacific Navigation by Talkstory. If you want to be drenched in words like a lover waiting for her perfect wave, order a copy of this book now: http://www.huia.co.nz