How To Live With Mammals is a new collection of toikupu, mostly about climate change, from Pākehā poet Ash Davida Jane. It’s an all-consuming topic and we need artists as well as scientists to help us get to grips with it.

There are parts of How To Live With Mammals that I found illuminating. The poems largely comprise free verse, mostly without capital letters, and often with ragged margins and caesura (gaps of white space) within the lines. Jane writes with a combination of wonderment and grief that touched a chord with me:

“does the last / of anything know / it’s the last … I want / a name / for the feeling / of never wanting / to see something / but being / glad / it exists”.

She nails that nagging feeling of knowing you have to take action but being unable to figure out how:

“i will / do something momentous and ethically powerful / or at least / i will do a hundred small things / that add up to one slightly / bigger but still quite insignificant thing / i will wonder / how many small things i have to do to add up / to something impactful.”

She also gets right the feeling of generational responsibility:

“if you were dead / and some kids / stood in front of a mirror / with the lights off / and said / your name three times / could you face them”.

I also loved her flashes of acerbity: “you can’t be a good person even if you recycle.” But as I read, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something important was missing. I kept expecting to feel a sense of shared landscapes, of art shaped by and grounded in the specific environment of Aotearoa.

This expectation was partly set up by Jane herself. In her essay on NZ Poetry Shelf, An Ecopoetics of the Future, Jane wrote: “We are not separate from nature, no matter how much it can sometimes seem like it when you live in a city … It’s become clear that sympathy for the planet’s other inhabitants is not enough to inspire change within our (colonial, capitalist) human systems … Tangata whenua are part of the land, and so there can be no ecopoetics without tangata whenua.”

I agree but ultimately I don’t think How To Live With Mammals upholds this kaupapa. It is written in English with – despite toikupu about how the natural world has different names in different languages – no kupu Māori whatsoever.

Unlike Jane’s essay, which references various Māori poets, I couldn’t find any sense that How To Live With Mammals was in conversation with the ecopoetics of tangata whenua. Where Jane does write in response to the mahi of others (Dorothy Wordsworth, David Wallace-Wells, Richard Siken, E.O. Wilson), none have (or had) – as far as I can tell – any particular connection to Aotearoa.

Jane’s apparent dismissal of te ao Māori is especially frustrating because she is clearly willing to think about the limits of her own knowledge and perceptions in some ways:

“i don’t know how i am supposed to go about my day like normal / knowing that i am missing out on the sounds bees make / when they bump into each other … i think about what else we are blind to”.

For me, Jane’s skilful and sincere writing is let down by a focus on the international at the expense of the local. The overall effect is a pukapuka that despite its subject matter feels oddly ungrounded.

Note: Toikupu, poems. Tangata whenua, people of the land. Kaupapa, principle or policy. Kupu Māori, wording. Mahi, work. Te ao Māori, the Māori way. Pukapuka, book.

Reviewed by Elizabeth Heritage