On Thursday 20 June we launched Tarot, the new poetry collection by Jake Arthur, at Moon Bar in Newtown, Wellington. Thanks to everyone who came along, and thanks to Moon Bar and to Schrödinger's Books, who kindly sold Jake's book for us on the night.
We also appreciated the use of tarot cards throughout the evening, except for the bit where Jake's editor, Ashleigh Young, unfortunately drew the 5 of Cups.
But on to the speeches! Holly Hunter, friend of Jake's and a publisher at Harper Collins, launched Tarot for us. Her speech follows.
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Hieveryone, my name is Holly. I’m a close friend of Jake’s since university andhonoured to be launching this playful, bewitching, bawdy, brilliant book. Tarot is a trip of the imagination andby god it is so much fun. I adored these poems.
Atthe launch of Jake’s first collection of poetry, which was published only lastyear, one of the speakers talked about how rare it was these days to comeacross an anthology style collection of poetry rather than the more popularconcept album. This book blurs that distinction. As a concept album, the ideabehind Tarot is so simple and yetgenius: each poem inspired by a card or character from the 1909 Rider-Waitetarot deck. But, like an anthology collection, there is no single thematic arcor personal confession of the poet. As Catherine Chidgey says in herendorsem*nt quote, this anthology is an ‘enchanted and enchanting clamour’ ofvoices from the deck.
Inthe early days as Jake wrote the first of these poems, he would email me adraft with an image attached so that I could see the card behind the words. Icame to rely on the visual reference, thinking that it would help me‘understand’ the poem, and if a draft arrived in my inbox without the image Iwould reply and ask to see it. But after reading this book without anyillustrations, I see what a disservice that is, to try an understand the poemand the poet’s intent as if it’s a code to be unlocked or a likeness to befound. What is much more entertaining as a reading experience is what we havehere – an invitation to create our own picture and story. As the opening andframing poem of the book says,
Switchoff that brain of yours.
It’svery loud. It’s like a very white light.
Thisisn’t surgery; this is a reading.’
Thepoems that make up this tarot reading are voices that swim around us, influenceus, affect us, tease and taunt us. They’re not chaotic but considered andself-aware. One of my favourite poems in the book reads,
Allmornings I wake to a despotic myth called me.
[…]
Iam not alone in here.
I’ma person peopled
Bya booming mental population.
Butof them all I’m my secret favourite,
I’min love with my agency the most
Andthat’s the book in a nutshell – each poem rightly in love with its agency themost, its own secret favourite, and at the same time itself a despotic mythdefined by its relationship to the booming population of the other charactersin the collection.
Sowho are the characters? Like a medieval mystery play they dance across thepages. We meet shepherds whose staffs glint in the light as they cross a duskymeadow. We meet peasants, the Devil and the Sun, a lady of the lake, we seeAlexander the Great gift a killing kiss to a fallen soldier. We’re transportedto times of chariots, feasts and battles. But we’re not confined to those times– the book skips back and forth between a present densely textured with thepast and vice versa. As the final framing poem in the book says, ‘You are nowand you are then’. We learn not to blink an eye at a poem titled ‘What hastthou done?’ despite the poem being completely modern in language and style.
Inthe present day we meet a lifeguard quiet-quitting as swimmers sally out intothe riptide; a heterosexual p*rn-star whose muscular shoulders distract themale speaker; an exhausted young mother setting fire to a wood pile with hereyes closed. Fiction writers say that good story starts with good character.Well for any writers in the audience, Tarotcould become your new prompt book, the characters so rich you could shapewhole stories around them.
Anotherprize you’ll take away from this collection is an expanded vocabulary. Wend,louche, moiety, leveret, rabbinical, hebdomadal. Just as the collection playswith characters, Jake plays with his niche and archaic vocabulary, which is theproduct of someone who’s spent years studying early modern literature, speakingSpanish and deciphering Latin, and reading the Bible for academic pleasure. Itall builds towards an askance way of seeing the world that lights up theimagination – in one poem perfectly titled ’Schnozz’, a nose is an upturnedchimney with an antiquarian living inside of it. The antiquarian is played byAcademy Award-winning Spanish actor Javier Bardem. Well of course he is: thisis Jake’s brain and we’re all just living in it.
Youdon’t just write such fantastical poems without there being something you’rerunning away from. At the time that Jake was writing these poems, he was livingin Tūrangi during what he describes in the acknowledgements section as ahorrible year. Jake’s fiancé Todd was recovering from severe long Covid, andJake’s days were lonely and long. I think this book is a beautiful thing tocome from the worst of times: it’s escapism, for writer and reader. If Jake hadwritten this book in the more popular confessional style of the moment he wouldhave written about afternoon naps and getting a pie from the local bakery. Butin Tarot, we are whisked away toother worlds and other minds; we can forget ourselves for a brief moment in thestories of others. Perhaps it is only when life collapses around you that youstart to suspect Fortuna holds all the cards. As the opening poem declares,‘God isn’t physics, it’s Fortune.’
Thefortune teller warns against fixed meaning in life: this eclectic, cosmicpageant of characters is contained within the tarot reading of a single person.Maybe this book – which appears to resist the personal confessional style – isa kind of confession all along. What Jake’s presented across this book is thatwithin each of us is a deck of cards, a mix of voices, whichever we call on ineach moment drawn by fate.
Asthe fortune teller concludes,
Thereis no single voice.
Nofact is binding.
Watchme roll the dice again.
Tarot is a dynamic, unbridled, magicaldelight. My only tip is not to read it all at once. It’s such a treat thatyou’ll want this book to last.
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Tarot (paperback, $25) is out now, from all good bookshops (like Schrodinger's) and here on our website.
