The Companion to Volcanology, Brent Kininmont
Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025

4. Sanbe

For the summit her mother
packs toothpicks for
the peeled slices of nashi.
Half pear, half apple.
Also meaning without.
Plucked from her
grandmother’s altar,
the fruit is still firm after
three days bathing in incense
for the leftover bones
each of us
(even the youngest)
carefully placed in the urn
with chopsticks.

 

Brent Kininmont, from ‘Range of Affection’

Terrific title. Terrific cover. Terrific opening quote:

‘I would not, as my father saw it, exchange our old way of life for the new way but would learn to be part of both . . . ‘ Patricia Grace, Mutuwhenua

This is not, as you might imagine, a book on volcanoes but volcanoes are a shadow effect, a missive, an ongoing motif, a haunting. It is a poetry collection that depends upon mountains, travel, climbing, running, discovering. Various mountains, from Etna to Erebus to Taranaki to the unnamed. Multiple ascents, multiple crossings. Poetry writing as ascent. Poetry writing calling into and from and because of an abyss. A volcanic plume on the horizon. Pyramid ramps.

Some poetry resembles a wide open plain where you get to stand stock-still and absorb the open sky, but some poetry leads us into denser terrain, an undergrowth, the thicket bush. This is sublime poetic intricacy, rich in physical detail. I am finding myself reading and climbing and traversing. And the word archaeology comes to mind. This digging and delving into memory autobiography encylopaedias imaginings.

The collection is in two parts. The first half is rich in the presence of child. In the opening poem, ‘The Companion to Volcanology’, a child is carried up a mountain, the setting a mood vibration of harmless snakes, homeland talk, melting snow, a hissing caldera. Hazy identities. Companionship. Contiguity. Proximity. And it is proximity to the child as much as the mountain in these first poems, whether the poet’s daughter, the poet himself as child, or child imaginings, that intensifies the reading experience. In the thicket of recall, there’s the playground, the drawing, the bouncy castle, the swimming lessons versus Sunday School, the leaf boat. The child, like the mountain, is an ubiquitous presence and I am so utterly moved by this.

The second part shifts to tectonic plates of the adult. Craig Arnold, a hiker poet missing on Kuchinoerabu. Pheidippides and his alleged ‘long dash’ from Marathon. Haruki Murakami running the same ancient route. Ekiden, Japan’s long-distance relay. And then family. The moving father presence. Birth mother. Parents. Illness. Affections. And then place. Poetry as poignant bridge between Japan where Brent now lives and Aotearoa where he once lived. Especially the sequence entitled, ‘Range of Affection’.

Am I easily moved by poetry? Am I easily transported to moments of scale and shiver and leaf shine. Yes I am moved. This sublime collection moves me. This intricate thicket where home is here and there, this mountain and that mountain, this child and that child, this abyss and this footwork. This book that is companion to volcano, to life and to living, to loved ones, here and departed. This book that delivers poetry as companionship. No question. I am moved.

The Readings

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‘The Lift Has Two Decks’

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‘Twelve Short Talks on Aspects of Origins’

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‘Swim!’

Three Questions

The Impressionist

Worn down by the Pont du Gard,
you have earned this breather 

in the river it straddles. 
Still, your friends at home are all 

in school, and you have not
answered yet: What holds

the blocks together? 
No swifts appear to thread

the limestone arches,
like those legions nesting 

in Segovia’s aqueduct.
And doubtless the bond

isn’t chemical, like the one
in Ostia, where ever-stronger 

grow the Roman piers still 
cemented in seawater.

But how can you focus 
on my thoughts 

with your head submerged 
in the Gardon again?

Stop fixating, daughter
please, on that slate behind 

your squeezed eyelids.
All those marvellous arches 

the sunlight, you say,
has outlined there.

Brent Kininmont

Were there any highlights, epiphanies, discoveries, challenges as you wrote this collection?

I began the book with the intention of writing about movement: hiking, running, swimming, and travelling. And there are a lot of references to these in the collection, especially in the second half. I wasn’t expecting a daughter figure to feature quite as prominently as she did. My child was already the focus of the final section of my first book, Thuds Underneath, and I had wanted to move on. However, in the initial poems I was writing about solo trips, it was challenging to raise them above mere tourist observations. I fixed this by injecting the daughter figure into the poems. “The Impressionist”, above, is an example of this. I had hiked around the Pont du Gard aqueduct, and I strug