Photo Credit: Robert Cross

Hinemoana Baker, waha | mouth, Victoria University Press, 2014

(Thanks to VUP I have a copy of the book for someone who likes or comments on this post)

This is the self-penned blurb on the back of Hinemoana Baker’s new poetry collection and it resonated with me far more than the usual blurb content: ‘I’d like to think that opening this book to read is like standing at the mouth of a cave, or a river, or a grave, with a candle in your hand.’

This window into reading suggests you might enter the mysterious, dark depths of the cave with its labyrinth of passages, or the pull of a river’s current whether quiet or wild, or the private return to those who have left us. I adore the comparison of the act of reading to holding the light of candle to a poem where something will always remain in the dim shadows, barely sighted, inaudible.

In many ways this book is about the power of words to take hold of us, to connect us in myriad relations, to reproduce us. The first poem, with its mysterious ache and force of a single word, is followed by a family poem. In Nanna’s game, the missing words are adjectives that must be randomly supplied by the players to the gut-wrenching hilarity of all. Word in place — words out of place. In another poem, ‘rope,’ Hinemoana has used a clutch of words from the penultimate sentence of a James Welch novel as a prompt for her poem. It is as though her poem becomes a secret hyperlink that expands a word (or two) — like when you click on a word on a poem online and it opens out. In ‘eclipse,’ where she contemplates ‘his warm, dead right hand,’ individual words are intensified, made special by placing italics. They twitch and vibrate on the line as little memory beacons.

Two poems (‘part 1’ and ‘part 2’) are distorted mirror images of each other. in the splintered glass you enter the family occasion, where things shift and change in the way things shift and change over time, in the mind of this person alongside that person, in this mood alongside that mood. You move from ‘The apricot moon, and a statue, for Valour‘ to ‘The mackerel sky and a steam train.’ I love the way the two parts send a translucent bridge (an arc) over the short prose-like poems that they bookend. These latter poems follow the thematic curvature of the book as they slip from what is familiar to what is not, from being grounded at home to being grounded off shore, from anecdote to striking image. Detail matters.

This exquisite collection is not so much a symphony but a set of partitas for solo violin. Individual notes (words) resonate and linger in the ear as if to make aural chords (connections): ‘a parliament of owls, all palms but mine — bone dry, mouth full of sky and counting.’ In this example, the linking consonants, assonance and near rhyme make chords that register in a subterranean way (sky-mine, mouth-owls, owl-full, parliament-palms, but-bone). Hinemoana’s musicianship extends to the composition as a whole with its shifting tones and pitches.

Many poems stood out for me. I loved ‘there are almost no risks associated’ where the lines are borrowed from a fertility document. The poetic riff heightens the emptiness of repeated medical jargon and narratives, and the way they so often eclipse individual situations, fear and longing. I also loved the final longer poem, ‘magnet bay farm,’ which exemplifies the way Hinemoana’s collection brings together story, acute detail, and divine melody. The poem I have printed off to pin to my wall though is ‘manifesto.’ It reminded me a little of Bernadette Hall’s ‘lacework’ in the way poetry has its roots in mud and muck as much as the moon and stars (a bit like Hone Tuwhare writing poetry from and for the pub and the heavens). It is a poem about poetry with wit and humour where cats get fed and Poetry ‘sniffs at the moon/ and urinates on our suburban garden.’ This I love: ‘In public people stop to say how handsome my poem is, how playful and well-behaved./ ‘Hell that poem’s in good nick,’ they say. ‘What do you feed it?’

Hinemoana’s poems are anchored in the real world yet her poetic melodies remind you that there are other layers of reality embedded here, layers that sing and tremble in the candle light — joy, pain, recognition, trust, narratives that we inherit and carry with us. Tremendous.

Airini Beautrais’s debut poetry collection, Sacred Heart was a little beauty and won Best First Poetry Book at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards in 2007. This was followed by the superb, Western Line. Her latest collection, Dear Neil Roberts, explores an inclination to prose-like poetry in a new way. You could say this is a long narrative poem or you could say this is a series of individual poems that contribute to a narrative arc.

Neil Roberts was a real person, an anarchist. In 1982, he blew himself up outside the Whanganui Police Computer Centre in the middle of the night. Airini’s new book has a central thesis at its core: history belongs to the shadows as much as it does to the great men and the great women. In other words, individuals who get misplaced and misremembered in the side lights of the grand historical narratives do have something to contribute to the way we view the past. The poetry is in part surrogate documentary but generic boundaries are blurred as the poet uses tools of invention and imagination as much as she uses tools of research and political inquiry. What gifts the book another fascinating layer is the way the poet steps into the narrative herself. She shows us how time and place and event affect her. This choice is reinforced in the title, ‘Dear Neil Roberts’; this poetry collection is also part epistle. Letter writers leave traces of their own lives as well as addressing the life of the recipient.

The poems draw upon story-telling techniques but these poems are primarily driven by poetic options: white space, building rhythms, terrific line breaks. Together the poem-pieces form a mosaic that you can step back from and view as an intriguing whole (exploring notions of history on one level, and the life of individual on another, along with the effect of an event like a stone rippling through time and place). ‘Time’ sets the scene with keen detail of a historical moment from the Falklands unrest to protests in Poland, from Rocky III to redundant clothing workers. Then, the ironic reference to a newspaper editorial that suggests fireworks will one day be banned.

If this book is a poetic mosaic, it is a mosaic sumptuous in detail and issues raised. Both moving and provocative. In ‘Clean-up’ the body never becomes more than the gory detail to wash away from the street. Or in ‘Monuments,’ testimonies from Pacificism and from war jostle (Norm wrote in jail, ‘What I have done with my spared life/ while better men lie dead?’; or the veteran war pilot, ‘War is useless and achieves nothing.’). Beneath the surface of this poem lies questions on the merits of war, the necessity or war, the cost of the dead. In ‘Investigation’ (this in 1982), the explosives Roberts used dominate the news, while the anarchist, ‘with razor blades in his ears’ and steel-capped boots’ is chiefly missing.

[ .. ] There is a dryness in the news,

like grief has been squeezed out,

As a mosaic, it is a glinting selection of points of view, invented, factual and personal. ‘By way of an explanation,’ for example, is composed of quotes from Senior Sergeant Rob Butler that Airini gleaned from various newspapers of the time. Brought together in the form of a poem they disturb.

He was one of those people whose human frailty

leads them to join a cult or sect like the punk rockers.

They do some very strange and unusual things by our standards.

He did not seem to have any great concern for his own life.

Another example is the poet’s confession to her own line crossing which in turn subtly rubs against the grain of Neil Roberts (in ‘Out the window’):

Here I am, with blond-haired child,

with my rounded belly, in my hand a set of car keys —

the remote-locking kind, which I never would have imagined.

It’s been awhile since I did anything subversive

with a can of spraypaint, with a billboard, with a naked human body,

with anything. But I’ve known Jonah since the days

when I did. I wonder out loud, what it would be like

if you kept living the same life you lived at twenty-one.

Or the way the contemporary writer makes room for different stories from the past in ‘History books’ in a way that recovery is uncertain, dangerous, shadowy, with faulty connections:

Room is made in the present.

The past is just left traces; paper, newsprint, film, tape, silicon.

The old lamp of the past clicks and crackles;

bald wires, an overheated bulb.

Or the way in ‘Waiting for death/ waiting for birth’, as the poet is waiting for the birth of her second child (‘The first time, I thought I was dying’), she retreats momentarily into her history of protest (‘Protests gave me something to exist within’). This complexly moving poem is aching with overlap:

and seeing cyanide pellets, or crossing an overbridge,

hearing trucks roar, thinking, ‘This is my chance.’

I am here because I didn’t take it.

On Pyramid Farm, you found your chance

in the back of a truck: the gelignite

and accessories. To go out with a bang.

Airini’s new book takes risks as it unstitches a sutured wound of the past, of self even, and dares to imagine grey lines, the long reach of historical events, small or otherwise. The poet is boundary crossing as she overlays historical transparencies, blurring this version upon that version upon that version and in that overlay getting deeper into who and how we are (humanity). You can admire the swing and shape of each poem, but the impression that makes the deepest most affecting mark is the book as a whole. Connections and disconnections forge poetic static that makes that lamp crackle, that bald wire hiss. This is narrative poetry at its very best.

Victoria University Press page

Airini’s thoughts On Poetry for Poetry Shelf

Harry Ricketts has written over twenty-five books, and while poetry is a primary love, he also writes in other genres. These include literary biography (The Unforgiving Minute and Strange Meetings:The Poets of the Great War), personal essays (How to Live Elsewhere and How to Catch a Cricket Match), and has co-edited a number of New Zealand poetry anthologies (including Spirit in a Strange Land, The Awa Book of Sports Writing and 99 Ways into NZ Poetry). He teaches English Literature and creative writing at Victoria University of Wellington. Half Dark (Victoria University Press, 2015) is Harry’s tenth collection of poems. To celebrate this new book, he recently answered some questions for Poetry Shelf.

Did your childhood shape you as a poet? What did you like to read? Did you write as a child? What else did you like to do?

My yo-yoing childhood certainly shaped me as a person. My father was in the British army, and we moved every couple of years. This has made me see everything as temporary, provisional, also to think of the present as the moving edge of the past. I read novels, the longer the better: Rosemary Sutcliff, Arthur Ransome, C S Lewis, Tolkien, Conan Doyle ‒ and endless comics. Not much poetry, though at school we had to learn poems by heart: “The Highwayman”, “Cargoes”, “Gunga Din”. They had good thumping rhythms which, together with the rhyme, made them easy to memorise. We then had to stand up and recite them in class – quite an ordeal. I still remember some of those poems and others that ‘sing in the head’, and I’m sure that contributes to my enjoyment of poets like James Fenton and Derek Mahon who use metre and rhyme much more subtly. I remember once we had to write a poem for homework. The title and subject were up to us. My effort was feeble: rhymed, of course, complete doggerel – in every sense, it was even about our dog. But one of the other boys was asked to read his poem out loud in front of the class – a great mark of favour. All I can remember about his poem is that it contained the phrase “curly kale”. And that alliterative phrase, so simple, visual and exact, has always stayed with me. Also the sudden feeling I had when he read it out: a mixture of excitement and envy. I knew that he had somehow managed to pull off something quite beyond me, but which I now felt might be possible. But mostly from the age of eight I was mad about cricket.

When you started writing poems as a young adult, were there any poets in particular that you were drawn to (poems/poets as surrogate mentors)?

I started writing poems when I was sixteen. I still thought poems had to rhyme and be metrical, and felt very daring when, trying to copy T S Eliot (whom we were studying), I wrote in what I thought was free verse. I did read quite a lot of poetry: poets were we studying like Wordsworth and T S Eliot, but also Ezra Pound, Wilfred Owen, and Holub and Cavafy (in the Penguin translations that were popular at the time). I particularly liked Cavafy and tried to imitate him.

Did university life (as a student) transform your poetry writing? What kind of discoveries did you make?

Personally university wasn’t helpful as far as writing poetry went, though I came out knowing a bit about a lot of English poetry from the Anglo-Saxon “Seafarer” to Spenser to Marvell to Gray to Byron to Browning to W H Auden. Nothing contemporary – in fact, nothing post-WW2. We had to write weekly essays – last week Wordsworth, this week Coleridge, next week Keats. It was like a whistle–stop tour of poetry’s greatest hits – wonderful in a way, but also intimidating. Sometimes I felt I was turning into a dial-a-quote.

I do remember reading some Sylvia Plath which was edgily thrilling and liking Roger McGough and Adrian Mitchell because they were funny and expressed political opinions I agreed with. I bought and read Ted Hughes’s Crow when it came out. I don’t think I ‘got’ the poems at all, but I enjoyed their dark laughter (though I wouldn’t have put it like that). This was the time when Gormenghast and Catch–22 were obligatory reading, and Bergman’s Seventh Seal and Godard obligatory viewing. We all said things like “really weird”, “far out” and “freaky”. We were terrified of being normal or at least being thought normal. It had a lot to do with the music we were obsessively listening to: Dylan, the Doors, the Stones, the Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd, later Steely Dan. Each new album was like a bulletin from another, more exciting world. We wanted our lives to be like those songs – “Strange days have found us”; “Remember what the dormouse said” – and fantasised that they were. It was very heady, and I don’t regret it, but it didn’t lead to me writing any halfway decent poems, though I did eventually write some lyrics for songs.

What about as a lecturer?

I think initially being a university teacher was another inhibiter because I only ever taught poems from earlier centuries ‒ often wonderful but not much help (at least in any direct way) with trying to write my own poems. More helpful was the only poetry writing course I’ve attended. This was a two–day affair in 1979, I think, at the Lancaster Arts Festival, run by a poet called Gavin Ewart. He was a playful-serious poet, who, like Auden, used poetic form as a starter-motor and could do everything from villanelles to clerihews, from prose poems to McGonagallesque doggerel. His poems were (are) clever, also often funny (a rare gift in poetry).

The workshop was memorable. The first day Ewart got us to write haiku and limericks and one–line poems, and one man soon got stroppy and said this wasn’t poetry and that only the rather pretty girl with black hair was producing anything remotely interesting and then he stormed out – never to return. Personally I found trying to do the forms useful and helpful, partly because it got me away from Romantic ideas of the muse having to strike – I was still very hung up on Wordsworth and Keats and notions of the creative mood, sometimes ‘suitably enhanced’. And I do think the class generally encouraged me to be less earnest, that play was okay. The second day we workshopped poems we’d sent in advance and that was helpful. Ewart was very hot on line-endings and about not being lazy with rhyme (if you used it): every word had to pay its way.

I was teaching in Leicester at the time and, partly as a result of the workshop, I joined a small group of local poets. We’d meet and discuss our work, but it all tended to be too polite, and when one member won quite a big national prize, the group combusted from envy. But I do think of that as the time when I slowly started to take writing poems more seriously. This coincided with having children, and I’d blue-tack drafts of my poems to the walls and think about them as I walked around at night, holding wakeful babies. Sometimes the poems were about my children (I had step–children too), and I think becoming a parent not only made a huge difference to me as a person but gradually also to the poems I was beginning to write. It’s not a coincidence that the first poem of mine I think is any good – “Your Secret Life” written in my mid–thirties – is about my (then six-year-old) daughter and imagining her as a teenager.

Some people want to let their poems speak for themselves while others are happy to offer provisional entry points. What do you think your role is when you ‘teach’ poetry?

I think if you’re giving a reading, it’s a good idea to say something between poems, offer an entry point, but not so as to swamp the poem. It is hard to listen to poem after poem without a break, particularly if you haven’t read or heard them before. (I have been to readings like this.) Teaching others to write poems or at least trying to help them is a different matter. It’s not your poem, so your role is more like that of a facilitator or midwife, perhaps. Sometimes your own experience can be helpful, but it’s mostly attention and encouragement. And urging them to read as much poetry as possible.

Another terrific example of poetic entry points that work is your book on the war poets (Strange Meetings: The Poets of the Great War). To me it was scholarly yet satisfyingly fresh in its approach. Your book opens rather than closes the experience of reading these writers. What did you hope to achieve with this book?

That’s very kind of you. I wanted to write a book that demythologised those WWI poets and restored them to a sympathetic human scale, something closer to the people who actually wrote the poems, who together with the horror of the war, had friendships, fallings-out, tried to find a language adequate to their experience.

We wrote 99 Ways into NZ Poetry together a few years ago. Writing the book was a way of viewing the poetry landscape in new lights for me. What discoveries did you make?

New lights for me, too, and many discoveries. You really helped me to read Michele Leggott, a poet I’ve always found very hard.

I love the way your poems reflect shifting forms, pitch, moods, preoccupations and rhythms, yet there is always a clarity of line, a sharpness of detail, the essential moment. What are key things for you when you write a poem?

That’s difficult to answer. Sometimes I’ll deliberately try to write a poem about some event, occasion or person. More usually, I’ll be doing something else altogether ‒ like writing this for you now ‒ and a word or phrase or maybe a memory will suddenly press itself on me, and I’ll find it prompts a line or another phrase and a sense of excitement. Often things just switch off; nothing more happens. But sometimes I have to keep coming back to it (whatever it is) and have to fiddle away, try this, try that. That’s the best part, don’t you think, being inside a new poem? Nothing better. When it’s finished, or as finished as it can be, you’re back in the cold again.

I like that idea — the best bit is when you are inside the poem. Really, your heart starts beating faster. The outside world fades to black (or light). Harry, you have lived both in New Zealand and Britain (like Peter Bland), but I don’t find a relentless niggling tension between here and there in your poems. It is as though a poem steered by you can lay its roots in either place. Are your poems a way of forging home? Laying roots? Being elsewhere?

That’s very perceptive. Temporary roots, anyway. I think the ricocheting childhood thing. I do think that not quite belonging to where you live can be an advantage to a writer.

I agree. Do you think your writing has changed over time?

Yes, I’m not so inhibited, not so hung-up about perfection, more prepared to try things.

Prompted by Eleanor Catton, this question: Do you think we have a history of thinking and writing about the process of writing poetry in New Zealand? Any examples that sparked you? Have you done this?

Well, there are poets who have written about this (Allen Curnow, James K Baxter, Michele Leggott, Bill Manhire among others). But I think there is a fairly general distrust of seeming to proselytise or sound too arty or up-yourself. Some cultures (France, America) seem to be able to talk about the arts (including poetry) more naturally or with less inhibition. But the rise of creative writing schools has definitely increased some writers’/poets’ ability, and desire, to talk about process. It’s a question as to whether this will help to produce better work. Good if it does, but writers sometimes, even often, write best when they break their own precepts.

What poets have mattered to you over the past year? Some may have mattered as a reader and others may have been crucial as a writer.

The Irish poet Derek Mahon and Auden always matter to me. I constantly read and reread them, and learn from them.

What international poets are you drawn to?

The American poet Mary Ruefle has been a belated discovery.

She is a fabulous discovery for me too! I feel like I want to secretly do some MR poems and see what happens. Particularly the white-out pages. What New Zealand poets are you drawn to now?

In the last year or two? Fleur Adcock’s last two collections ‒ terrific. Ian Wedde’s recent poems.

Ian’s The Commonplace Odes would have to be one of my top NZ picks. Name three NZ poetry books that you have loved.

Jenny Bornholdt’s The Rocky Shore. James Brown’s Lemon. Bill Sewell’s Ballad of Fifty-one.

You write in a variety of genres (poetry, non-fiction, critical writing). Do they seep into each other? Does one have a particular grip on you as a writer?

Yes and no, but poetry is the thing.

What irks you in poetry?

Poems that presuppose a trust they haven’t earned.

What delights you?

Surprises. Also wit.

I was drawn to the title of your new collection (Half Dark) because for me it signals the way poems emerge from and move in and out of the shadows (as opposed to a glass is half full kind of thing). Why this title?

It’s a phrase in one of the poems. As you say, it suggests movement in and out of shadows. It also suggests the mood and tone of many of the poems.

These new poems are like a steaming road with heart, memory, ideas, anecdote, sights rising up and simmering above the surface— poems that steam with life and possibilities. For me this is one of your best books yet. What discoveries did you make about poetry as you wrote? The world? Yourself?

One discovery, as I’ve explained in a note in the collection, was about a form called the triolet. I’d never imagined trying this short form with repeated lines, had shared a fairly common sense of superiority towards the form. But an Australian poet-friend Cath Vidler confessed to having become addicted to the form and suggested I try it. I found she was right; it is addictive. More interestingly, I discovered that though usually used for light verse (which is fine, ‘light’ doesn’t have to mean ‘slight’) in fact you can use the triolet for serious, even heart-breaking, subjects. It’s much more flexible than it looks. And, as poets have done with the sonnet and other rhyming forms, you can empty out the rhyme and just keep the shadowy shape. Discoveries about the world? Well, with the death of friends and family, my world is getting colder, half-dark.

I love your triolets– reading them prompted me to write one myself. I can see why they are addictive. There is a honeyed overlap of repetition and within that echo the subtle nuance of difference. Nuances steered  by shifting juxtapositions. Is there a single poem or two in the collection that particularly resonates with you?

The last poem, “About”, means a lot to me. I started it in 1980 and it’s changed over the years as I have, and I kept losing it and then finding it again. “Noddy” (about a dead university friend) brings him strongly to mind.

I love the blurb on this book. First it references your poem about the phrase ‘Mind the gap’ from the London Underground (that has haunted me too!) and then it introduces the collection as one that ‘addresses the people and places that fill a life and the gaps they leave behind.’ Gaps are so crucial in poems. For me, this entry point heightens my response to your poems. Tell me about the role of gap in this new collection.

It’s all gaps.

Indeed. Is doubt a key part of the writing process along with an elusive horizon of where/when you are satisfied with a poem?

Yes, doubt is key. Also gratitude.

The constant mantra to be a better writer is to write, write, write and read read read. You also need to live! What activities enrich your writing life?

Travel.

Some poets argue that there are no rules in poetry and all rules are to be broken. Do you agree? Do you have cardinal rules?

Rules are to be broken, but it’s worth knowing what they are first. Personally I don’t end lines with words like ‘a’, ‘the’ ‘in’ or ‘of’, unless there is a really good reason.

Do you find social media an entertaining and useful tool or white noise?

A bit of all of these.

Finally if you were to be trapped for hours (in a waiting room, on a mountain, inside on a rainy day) what poetry book would you read?

W H Auden’s Collected Poems.

Thanks Harry!

Victoria University Press author page

NZ Book Council page

The thing is, Neil, you are all of us

You are the old rocker in skinny jeans

who is mumbling in the corner

you are the punk who fixes bicycles

at two o’clock in the morning.

You are the comic book girl in combat boots

whose breasts are drawn too large

you are the feminine librarian

who wants to go on a rampage.

You are the community gardener

with home-cut hair and knee holes

you are the bespectacled chicken rescuer

the guitar player and the police mole.

You are the tofu thief made to work

for the local Salvation Army.

They throw away about half of their clothes:

take as many as you can carry.

©Airini Beautrais Dear Neil Roberts  Victoria University Press 2014

Author Bio: Airini Beautrais lives in Whanganui with her partner and two sons. She is currently working on a PhD in creative writing through the IIML at Victoria University, on the subject of narrativity and verse form in contemporary long poems. Dear Neil Roberts is her third book.

Author note: ‘The thing is, Neil, you are all of us’ is one of the first parts of the book I wrote, back in 2011. I had known Neil Roberts’s story for some time and it had occurred to me it would be interesting to write a long poem about the incident. One of the things that struck me early on in my research, from reading various anarchist/ libertarian communist web entries, was the sense of ownership amongst these radical left communities for the story. It was as though each person who had re-told the story, while not endorsing Neil’s act, could identify with the way he must have felt. In this poem I drew on my own experience within the Wellington anarchist scene – although not every detail is ‘true’, the characters in this poem do approximate real people, myself included.

Within this poem the ghost of an accentual meter can be heard, and the metrical scheme, while loose, is something near the traditional 4, 3, 4, 3 ballad stanza. And it is off-rhymed, xaxa. Perhaps the ballad was lurking behind the scenes all along. It has been mentioned that Dear Neil Roberts is rhythmically close to prose. I think this is true (as it is for a wide range of contemporary free verse), but I also think that writing to a regular stanzaic shape can lead to some interesting effects. For instance, rhymes frequently occur at line-ends. And there are lines in the book that are straight iambic pentameter. It has to be remembered that poetry is a genre, and can be written in verse, prose, or any combination of the two. Writing Dear Neil Roberts as a poem allowed me to present, juxtapose and interpret information in a different manner, than if I had set out to write an extended essay or a work of New Zealand history.

Paula’s note: Not having read Airini’s note before I wrote this, I didn’t have the back history (which is fascinating!). The poem is placed near the end of her collection, Dear Neil Roberts, and traverses Neil’s story with a foot planted in the realm of invention and another within the scope of research. Forming some kind of arc across—or conversely a simmering stream below—these two choices, is the personal. Airini allows herself, her own history and predelictions, to enter the poems.

What struck me about this particular poem is its ability to move, to raise issues and to offer delight at the level of technique. The parade of chalk-and-cheese characters turns the narrative impulse over and positions you as reader squarely within the frame. The poem now addresses ‘you.’ Yes, you might be any one of these characters that, like Neil, might test boundaries or go to extremes, but there are other issues at work here too. We are all destined, in the main, to occupy the shadows of history (as did Neil) as opposed to being a key player. If there is a potential Neil at work in this parade, there is also the way in which the parade is at work in Neil. We occupy many roles, play many parts, with varying degrees of visibility and attachment. These possibilities move me, as they return me to the complicated, contradictory, and at times unfathomable make-up of what it means to be human.

If the poem flips your placement as reader, the final two lines flip your placement within the poem. Again the resonances are multiple.The cheap clothes. The bag to be filled. The societal waste. Yes we have roles but we always have needs. We are linked by common needs whatever complications are steering our lives: warmth, shelter, food.

You can read this poem as prose-like in its poetic intentions yet, as is so often the case with Airini’s poems, there is more at work here. For me, I was hooked by the aural chords that make different semantic connections. For example, I loved pursuing the ripple of ‘m’s’ (mumbling, morning, feminine, community, home, mole, army, many) and the way they are honey for the ear yet forge a buried story. This poem, as does the book, relishes the white space, the gaps, the ambiguity alongside the more prosaic intent of telling a story, bringing someone closer, circulating ideas. It is a poem that haunts me, and in that haunting, I keep returning to the lines to reflect upon ‘why.’ Marvelous.

she gets these letters

one moment there

is vodka at

a forest wedding

the next the last

breath of a gun

she watches defiance

secret army draws

a map of Poland

the sweep of ice

fills her throat

this is the plantation

her father was taken to

perhaps this is the pine

he walked towards

as if he spent

his mornings collecting

alpine specimens

and the snow he fell into

pages of white birds

©Kerrin P. Sharpe There’s a Medical Name for This  Victoria University Press, 2014

Author bio: Kerrin P. Sharpe’s first book three days in a wishing well was published by Victoria University Press in 2012. Her work appeared in Oxford Poets 13 (Carcanet). Another book, there’s a medical name for this was published August 2014 (VUP). A third collection rabbit rabbit is in progress with a grant from Creative New Zealand.

Author note: This poem began life after I had watched the movies Defiance and Secret Army. I began thinking about the huge significance of locations and how they are changed forever when terrible crimes have been committed there. This poem was published in the NZ Listener in 2014.

Note by Paula: What draws me to this poem is the enigma and the gap. Without the back story the possibilities are myriad whether as reader you step into shoes that are autobiographical, another persona or a mix of both. There is a jostling of meaning and effect between elements; from title to poem, night to day, life to death, vodka to the last breath of the gun. Nouns swell with options: vodka, forest, the map and the plantation are nouns of elsewhere. The understatement is striking. There is the ominous ring of ‘was taken’ that is amplified by the ‘chill of ice.’ The implications of ‘as if specimens’ seems to mask from what really took place. The final image in the last two lines is utterly potent. The white snow might stand in for the clean white page, the insistence of hope, the threat of war and violence and atrocity, and the magnetic pull of the prospect of peace. For me, the word ‘sweep’ leaps out not just for the ear but semantic rewards (a clean sweep, the expanse of the scene, clearing history, fresh beginnings). This is a haunting poem. Yes, it makes a difference when you know the back story but the gaps are still profound.

Victoria University Press page

I can’t wait to read this new offering, a debut poetry collection by Morgan Bach, coming soon from Victoria University Press. What an adorable cover.

Morgan Bach’s author page is here.

Victoria University Press warmly invites you to the launch of

Ocean and Stone   by Dinah Hawken

on Thursday 10 September, 6pm–7.30pm
at Unity Books, 57 Willis St, Wellington.

Ocean and Stone will be launched by Greg O’Brien

$35, paperback, colour drawings by John Edgar

About the book:
Ocean and Stone, Dinah Hawken’s seventh collection of poetry, is a book of many elements.

The central sequence page : stone : leaf, interspersed with the striking drawings of John Edgar, is framed by poems of growing up and growing old. They, in turn, are framed by poems written in the natural world, beside a lake and beside an ocean. At the heart of this book is urgency: the urgency to know the limits of our planet and ourselves, and to live within them.

Ocean and Stone is elemental Dinah Hawken, at once meditative and resolute.

Stone

Stony this, stony that. They are cold

today, these stones on the desk.

Stone cold. Stone blind. Stone deaf.

Heart, reception, stare, silence.

They remember the slingshot.

It is said he is a man to reckon with.

He hasn’t spoken to his son for years.

It is said that words will never hurt you.

‘To be hard in hard times,’ he announces,

‘we must build an expressway like an arrow

through the quiet heart

of your coastal town.’ Cold facts

say one thing, cold politics another.

We remember the ballistic missile.

The falling debris and the striking edge.

© Dinah Hawken Ocean and Stone Victoria University Press, 2015

Author bio: Dinah Hawken is one of New Zealand’s most critically acclaimed poets. Born in Hawera in 1943, she trained as a physiotherapist, psychotherapist and social worker in New Zealand and the United States. Most of the poems in her award-winning first collection It Has No Sound and Is Blue (1987) were written in New York in the mid-1980s while she was studying at Brooklyn College and working with the homeless and mentally ill. Her two most recent books, One Shapely Thing: Poems and Journals (2006) and The Leaf-Ride (2011), were both shortlisted for the New Zealand Book Awards. Dinah was named the 2007 winner of the biennial Lauris Edmond Award for Distinguished Contribution to Poetry in New Zealand. She lives in Paekakariki.

Note from Paula: This poem is in Dinah’s new collection just out from Victoria University Press. It is an utterly beautiful book in every detail (the feel of the pages, the choice of font, the simplicity of the cover and of course the billowing beauty of the poems themselves. I have been a Dinah-Hawken fan for a long time. I remember the pleasure of writing a long essay on Small Stories of Devotion as part of my Masters degree. There has been a sustaining chord between Dinah’s work and my writing since those far-off days. In part it is to do with the grace, the elegance, the economy, the lyricism. In part it is to do with the sumptuous view that settles as you open the window of the poem. In part it is the curious self that questions the world and the way we do things.

This poem is a thing of beauty, and it draws upon all the things I have detailed above. There is the lyricism that builds out of stress, meter and repetition (‘Stone cold. Stone blind. Stone deaf.’) There is the way a thing (stone) shakes with life and possibility. There is the way, with that small frame of the window ajar, we fall upon the beauty of an object (a stone) and then fall away to the hurt we inflict upon each other — at the level of the individual, the level of a town, the level of a nation. It really is the kind of poem that needs to speak for itself, to shimmer on the page in its own marvelous way. Its window catches any number of lights.

Victoria University Press page

NZ Book Council page

You are warmly invited to attend the launch of

The Stories of Bill Manhire

on Thursday 12 November, 6pm–7.30pm
at Unity Books,
57 Willis St, Wellington.

The book will be launched by Damien Wilkins.
Bill will be available to sign copies.

$40, hardback.
cover illustration, ‘Sleeping Baby’ by Peter Campbell

About The Stories of Bill Manhire
Sheep-shearing galas, Antarctic ponies, human clones, the Queen’s visit to Dunedin, a pounamu decoder, a childhood in the pubs of the South Island, the last days of Robert Louis Stevenson—this is Bill Manhire as backyard inventor, devising stories in which the fabulous and the everyday collide.

THE STORIES OF BILL MANHIRE collects the stories from The New Land: A Picture Book (1990) and those added to South Pacific (1994) and Songs of My Life (1996). In addition there are previously uncollected and unpublished stories, the choose-your-own-adventure novella The Brain of Katherine Mansfield (1988), and the memoir Under the Influence (2003).

Dinah Hawken is one of New Zealand’s most critically acclaimed poets. Born in Hawera in 1943, she trained as a physiotherapist, psychotherapist and social worker in New Zealand and the United States. Most of the poems in her award-winning first collection It Has No Sound and Is Blue (1987) were written in New York in the mid-1980s while she was studying at Brooklyn College and working with the homeless and mentally ill. Her two most recent books, One Shapely Thing: Poems and Journals (2006) and The Leaf-Ride (2011), were both shortlisted for the New Zealand Book Awards. Dinah was named the 2007 winner of the biennial Lauris Edmond Award for Distinguished Contribution to Poetry in New Zealand. She lives in Paekakariki. Victoria University Press has just released a new collection of poems, Ocean and Stone.

Did your childhood shape you as a poet?

Yes I’m sure it did. One of my favourite memories as a child is my father reading A.A.Milne – the poems – to me when he came home from the farm. We didn’t have a lot of children’s books in those days (40’s and 50’s) and so he read them over and over again and we knew them by heart. Sometimes my younger brother and I would act a poem out: ‘Sir Hugh was singing hand on hip/when something sudden came along …’. What I loved, looking back, was the way my father and his voice changed when he read these poems. Suddenly he was a changed man, a more mysterious and musical man, and the poems had somehow changed him.

There was one poem that had a profound, perhaps lasting, effect on me psychologically. ‘The Dormouse and the Doctor’ – do you remember it? The dormouse was living happily ‘in a bed of dephiniums (blue) and geraniums (red)’ when the Dr came hurrying around and prescribed instead a bed of chrysanthemums (yellow and white). When ‘they took out their spades and dug up the bed/of delphiniums (blue) and geraniums (red),’ I was devastated at the injustice and imposition of it. They didn’t understand that ‘much the most answering things that he knew/were geraniums (red) and delphiniums (blue)’. I was worried by this story – the powerlessness of the small, the arrogance of grown ups – but at the same time I was impressed with the dormouse’s solution of imagination: ‘I’ll pretend the chrysanthemums turn to a bed/of delphiniums (blue) and geraniums(red).’ It made me determined to fight to remain myself, to hold onto my ideas and attractions even if I was misunderstood. Like the dormouse I was a dreamy child, but also an active one – a tomboy, keen on sports and outside a lot with bare feet. I thought of myself as a reader not a writer.

As a young adult, were there any poets in particular to which you were drawn?

When I went to Dunedin as a school leaver, to study Physiotherapy, James K. Baxter was living there and I went to some of his poetry readings and lectures. He was the first NZ poet I had ever heard or read and The Rock Woman (selected poems) was the first book of poetry (besides A Pageant of English Verse) that I had ever owned. I’ve just taken it off the shelf and it is one of the most worn books in my poetry collection. I felt the emotion and music in those poems, the power of ‘the best words in the best order’, and the sense of being understood as a human being who lives in this place, this landscape. Existential questions were in the air for me at 18 or 19 and one poem, ‘The Cold Hub’ gave me a strong sense of fellow-feeling and therefore consolation. Poetry as consolation became important for me.

The next year in Palmerston North was significant for me in terms of poetry too. I had a boyfriend who not only liked poetry (a rare find) but who really loved Baxter and who introduced me to e.e. cummings and Yevtushenko. Both mind-opening in their own ways. What’s more, in Palmerston North, I also made a close friend, Phillappa, a nurse, who read poetry and wrote it. She showed me it was possible even though I didn’t start writing seriously – though secretly – till I was in my late 30’s. She was the first person I showed my poems to at that time. And a couple of years later I applied for Bill Manhire’s undergraduate creative writing course.

Your new collection, Ocean and Stone, is one of your best yet. At times, the poems lead me to a place and point of contemplation (outside urban bedlam). The poems remind me of the way I go down to the beach in the morning and all is the same (sand sea sky), yet there is always a pull of shifting nuances. Do you ever see your poems as a way of translating relations with the natural world, both private and nourishing?

Yes I do. Moments and experiences in the natural world give me such pleasure and uplift that I do have an urge to record and share them even though words so often fail the actual experience. But the attempt feels important. And I’m glad you used the word ‘relations’ because any attempt to mirror the natural world is about relationship. I’m a person who wonders a lot and the world around me is one of the most ‘answering things’ that I know.

And wanders in that wondering. That’s what hooks me as a reader. I find your poems are often things of beauty, yet there is a political edge here. It is as though we can no long view the ocean, for example, solely through the exquisite lens of its moods and bounty. Do you see yourself as a political poet? Overtly so or in more subtle ways?

As time has gone on I realize that I am both a nature poet and a political poet though I don’t set out to be. And I hope not exclusively. A poem usually begins with a phrase, a word, an image or a feeling that has a grip on me in some way. It can be a light and friendly grip or an intense, even painful, grip. The poem develops from that and, because of my interests and preoccupations, political concerns or the landscape, often become a part.

In Ocean and stone there is a poem called ‘The uprising’ that was a commission for Lloyd Jones’s issue of the Griffith Review called Pacific Highways. I began the poem thinking about the Pacific, with no conscious intention of writing a political poem. But I’d just read a book about the state of the world’s oceans and the facts in that book, and my feelings in relation to them, naturally flowed into the poem.

But it’s a balancing act to write a political poem and I sense that many poets might disapprove of my attempts – on the grounds of didacticism, emotionality etc. I’m naturally a direct person and I’ve had to learn more indirect and layered ways of expressing myself in poetry. But I’m also willing to be direct about strong personal feelings – a political poem is also a personal poem.

No matter how many times you write a stone poem, Dinah, you have the ability to replenish the subject (I posted one of my favourites from your new collection here). Do you have other motifs to which you are drawn?

Isn’t it amazing how stirring a small stone, like a blank page, can be? I’ve just looked up that famous poem ‘Pebble’ by Zbigniew Herbert where he writes that the pebble ‘is a perfect creature/ equal to itself’ that ‘does not frighten anything away.’ That seems so true to me.

As far as other motifs go, I don’t know. Water, its fluency? Leaf, its green, its growth? ‘The child’? I find myself thinking a lot at the moment about ‘the stranger’.

Yes definitely water! And the child. The grandchildren poems add a different layer to the collection. They remind me of the way women are often keepers of the family archives (scrapbooks, photo albums, treasure boxes). Do  you feel these poems are as much a gift to the family as they are for the reader?

Definitely. I did write them as a kind of scrapbook, a record of my grandchildren’s early development, trying to ‘hold’ some of the delight and moments of discovery that babies and toddlers go through. I started, in my last book, with Elsa from new-born to 16 months and then carried on with Nate from about that age to two and a half. Such an extraordinary time, as a child meets the world. And as a parent you are often too busy to stand back and see it happening.

I’m about to put all the grandchildren poems together in a small volume for the family – and perhaps for other parents of small children as well.

The untitled fragments throughout the book (that ‘stem from the epigraph which is a found poem from The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry’) are so fertile. I particularly loved: ‘a blank page has limits// and no limits.’ What kind of limits do you bump against as a writer?

I no longer have the external limits of time and stress and children and work that many younger writers have – I feel very lucky in that respect. I love writing without pressure – but on the other hand I do have the limits of older age; lack of energy, poorer memory, uncertain health. I find it harder to find words, I seem to have less access to dreams that were a great resource earlier in my life. Many of the poems in the second part of Ocean and Stone are about living with various kinds of decline.

There’s a difference between limits and limitations and so I also have to live within my inherent limitations as a writer. It seems important at this stage to try and see clearly what they are, whether they have any give in them, and to thrive within them. Limits and limitations have a bad name but I see them as the boundaries within which we can have the most ease and can be the most creative.

I love that dichotomy. Is doubt a key part of the writing process along with an elusive horizon of where you are satisfied with a poem?

Another way of considering the contradiction of ‘limits// and no limits’ is to think about faith and doubt in the writing process. They both seem to be essential: faith to believe that something can come from nothing; and doubt to be always willing to question what comes. When I began writing I would lurch, often painfully, between one and the other, now (fingers crossed) it’s more like quietly shifting weight. But you can’t write, can you, without doubt? You can only try to hold confidence and uncertainty in some kind of balance as you go.

I often have an intuitive idea of when a poem is finished in terms of content and length but the editing and re-arrangement inside it can go on for months. Leaving it for a good length of time helps me a lot – to free up and be less attached to what’s there. I don’t have poet friends, or a group, to share this process with at the moment but have in the past found feedback from others invaluable. It was great to have Fergus and Ashleigh at VUP look carefully at my manuscript for Ocean and Stone.

What poets have mattered to you over the last year?

The two most important books for me in the last year or so – both as a reader and a writer – are The Great Enigma by Tomas Transtromer and Faithful and Virtuous Night by Louise Glück. I’ve been attached to Louise Glück’s poetry in the past and was thrilled to discover this one (Carcanet 2014) and find it so impressive. Without your question I mightn’t have noticed that these two books, though different, have the same attraction for me. Both poets use accessible language and strong short sentences developing a narrative that is clear but at the same time mysterious. I love that. They have quite different tones; Glück’s intense, sometimes threatening, Transtromer’s lighter, more surprising. I was strongly aware of Transtromer while writing the first sequence in my book ‘The lake, the bloke and the bike’ but I’m not sure if, or how, his poems might have influenced mine.

What activities enrich your writing life?

Almost everything I do has the potential I expect, but when I think of Ocean and Stone, I see how it reflects a number of my non-writing activities. For example, babysitting grandchildren, gardening, friends, walking on the beach, Tai Chi Chuan. The last sequence in Ocean and Stone , though triggered by the McCahon painting, has a number of the names of Tai Chi postures in it and I wanted the poem to be a kind of Tai Chi sequence even if the reader doesn’t recognize it at all.

There’s no doubt that I’m a poet whose material comes from her own world but in Ocean and Stone I enjoyed very much re-telling the Sumerian myths, forgetting myself, and entering stories from another time and place. Yet stories that have relevance still.

Victoria University Press page

NZ Book Council page

My pick is Emma Neale’s Tender Machines (OUP). Emma’s poetry is resonant on many levels and repays close reading. In her supple, expert language, she takes a loving look at the human condition in a collection which has depth, wisdom and insight.

Cilla McQueen

Mostly I read poetry and non-fiction, and a lot of the latter is to to do with environmental issues in an effort to understand and do something about the disgusting rate at which we’re destroying the place. Recently I read Michael McCarthy‘s The Moth Snowstorm, which Helen Macdonald termed ‘a deeply affecting memoir and a heartbreaking account of ecological impoverishment’. I concur. Much of what McCarthy writes about mirrors what’s happened and continues to here, in NZ, and elsewhere.

Three of the volumes of poetry that I’ve read and liked most in the past year are Robin Robertson‘s The Wrecking Light, Vincent O’Sullivan‘s Being Here, and Emma Neale‘s Tender Machines. Robertson doesn’t pussy-foot around, covers a lot of ground, can be caustic, blunt, wry and shattering. O’Sullivan ranges widely both in tone and content. Apart from the wry and sly ways he approaches things I like the ways in which he highlights human absurdities. As I hear him, it’s not as if we’re too much troubled by human absurdity, it’s that we’re not troubled enough. In Emma Neale’s Tender Machines she grapples with long-standing human predicaments, the difficulties we have personally keeping a lot of the ‘ongoing human symphony’ playing while trying to work out how to silence our dreadful ‘inner racket’.

I’d like to be able to buy and read far more NZ poetry than I do these days. Back in the 1960s, when I began trying to write poems, it was possible to be familiar with nearly all of the volumes of poems by NZ writers. Not now; the result is great gaps in one’s reading. Does it matter? I don’t know.

Brian Turner

Song of the Ghost in the Machine

Roger Horrocks

Victoria University Press

2015

I confessed the day the Ockham NZ Book Award short lists came out I had not read this book as it felt too close to something I had in my head. Truth is I have finished a draft that I am leaving for a decent period of time before lifting it into something that works. The link with my starting point is tenuous. But it loomed large at the time.

Roger’s new collection comes out of walking. Walking in the physical world, walking through books, ideas, memory. Each section is prefaced by the biggest stack of quotations I have seen in ages in a poetry book. If ever! –  when I think further. It means there are two different reading approaches at work here. You can go shopping within the quotes and find the ones that stick.

Like a little reading map for the reader pedestrian. The sources are eclectic. Surprising.

Then there is the poetry, and this is infused with the way age changes things. For some poets, it prompts a new alertness to the world, to what matters. Roger is absorbing the world as he walks and leaving shiny traces of it in the poems.

‘This is the world I saw.’

For some poets, age is the body changing, under threat, slower. Death seems closer. Death seems to push and nudge the poems and make itself felt. For Roger, it is there in a health scare, in the passing of loved ones.

‘The body supplies the beat’

Mostly the poems are made of long lines in thick stanzas and generate the fluency of walking. One poem, ‘One Hundred Descriptions,’ amasses aphorisms, miniature thoughts, like miniature steps.

‘a square peg in the round hole of the world’

Throughout the book, as you meander and read, sidetrack and read, loiter and read, certain things leap out at you. Just like when you walk in the physical world and see the cat asleep in the flowerpot.

‘Like shoehorn, a mind is meant to ease you/ into the world, but his makes a poor fit.’

‘My cargo is close to bursting – years of sights/ and smells, ideas and anxieties, mistakes and regrets -/ but for the moment I’m still mobile, still fossicking.’

What changes the poetry when death seems that little bit closer? With this collection it invigorates it. The ideas about self and writing and how we fit in the world. How we belong. How we make attachments. How we can use words to make shadows on the page like Plato’s cave.

In his note at the back of the book, Roger talks about poetry. In my view, when I scan the decades of NZ poetry I have read, I believe poetry does anything and everything. It busts out of compartments. Not all poetry is preoccupied with self (Roger proposes much is), yet find me a poem where traces of the poet don’t flourish like tiny signatures (ah begone Barthes!). Tiny alluring signatures that reflect bias. Bias that snags on ideas, physical views, opinions, musicality, experience, poetic choices, subject preferences.

This terrific poetry collection is like walking in the world because as you readwalk you feel invigorated, refreshed, and ready to write.

Congratulations on a well deserved spot on the short list, Roger.

VUP page

I receive this news with great sadness. I met Rachel for the first time when she read in Nelson as part of my Hot Spot Poetry Tour of Nelson last year. But her poetry caught my attention and held it a number of years ago. My thoughts reach out to friends and family.

from ‘Early’

The darkness wears a quiet sound

of fires died down and people who stir

in sleep. Soon they will slip on

their daily selves, button them up.

A rooster knows the time, says

it out loud when day is less

than a light line above the hills

This from VUP:

It is with great sadness we learned that our good friend Rachel Bush died yesterday. Rachel was a wonderful poet, an astute reader and a warm supporter of other writers. She will be greatly missed. Our thoughts are with her family and close friends.

Thought Horses, Rachel’s newest collection of poetry, will be published in April. We are so pleased that Rachel was well enough to work on her book with editor Ashleigh Young, and that she also got to see and hold her book.

We will be holding a reading and celebration of Rachel at Vic Books on Tuesday 19 April.

As part of the Hot Spot Poetry Tour children interviewed authors. Lucy interviewed Rachel:

Cold water cure Claire Orchard  Victoria University Press 2016

Lately I have been thinking about the bridges that occur between poem and reader. Some bridges are so surely established that the ensuing traffic is free flowing. Noisy. Exhilarating. On other occasions, the bridges falter and it is barely possible to cross.The poem remains at arm’s length. Reading can be viewed as a travel card of crossings, but it is also invigorated by countless sidetracks  and multiple rest stops.

Claire Orchard’s debut collection,  Cold water cure, affords rich crossings. It is a book in three parts with the long middle section, a  fitting centrepiece. The first section resembles a picnic spread where everyone brings a plate and it all seems to fit together perfectly. These opening poems bring family close to the surface of reading in ways that move you. Move you to laugh out loud, to wry grins, to feel something. Claire prunes the dross, and peels a poem back to the bare bones of incident. Then she adds a little kick, a curve, a tilt and the bare bones gleam so we take notice. This is the joy of poetry. The way it enables renewed attention to old things.

So many favourites in this first section but here are a few:

Egg

What people often don’t realise, my grandfather said abruptly,

while we were sitting on a bench at the playground,

is that parenting involves taking

a lot of split-second decisions.

This poem is a grandparent anecdote involving an egg. I had no idea where the poem was taking me and it made me laugh out loud, grin wryly and feel something. All in one little poem basket.

Several of the poems suggest that Claire was once a primary-school teacher. Very rarely do I come across poems written from the point-of a-view of a teacher. It sparked a whole train of thought. I taught in primary schools in my twenties (Auckland, Wellington, London), yet I have never written poetry about these experiences as though they are low-status material or too far back in time. Janet Charman wrote some tough poems about being a high-school teacher. Johanna Aitchison has written hilarious poems about teaching English as a second language. Claire’s poems catch a knife-edge delight I recognised.

Here is the ending of, ‘Sharpening,’ one of the teacher poems:

I ask these questions without thinking,

tearing open a band-aid.

He’s six, the number of perfection.

There are a few found poems in the bunch. Found poems work best when the poet considers how best to serve them. Sometimes found poems don’t shift beyond road sign or stolen conversation and the connection is one of indifference. Not here. I especially love the one that kick starts the collection with a recycled quote from Ali Williams during the All Blacks 2011 World Cup Campaign.

Hang on

I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves here.

Last time we got ahead of ourselves,

we shot ourselves in the foot

then we did it again a few years before that –

shot our other foot.

We’re just trying to leave our feet on.

I loved the poem that riffs stream-of-conscious like when the poet spots a young man wearing the exact same T-shirt at the next table (‘Don’t let me be misunderstood’). Equally funny is ‘Poetry master class.’ This is based on sharing a copy of the poems with a late arrival at Bill Manhire’s event at the Embassy Theatre. Just hilarious with an ending that nails it. Here is an early stanza:

She referred to the presiding poet as Bill and,

before he’d begun to address himself to the first poem,

had taken a pen and scored briskly through three of its lines.

Yes there is humour in the opening banquet but there are ample reasons to savour rest stops. The end lines. The shift of the eye. The look of the poem. The sound of the poem. Tropes that renovate things. This from ‘Legendary creature’:

Your many-winged laundry rack

resembles a pale, anorexic albatross

doubled over

in the boot of the car

The middle section constitutes the bulk of the book and sets up bridges like Russian dolls, chiefly between Claire and Darwin. Unlike most poetry collections, Claire has placed her detailed notes at the start of the book. A travel guide, if you like, that signposts the link between poem and original source. Many of the poems juxtapose the words of Darwin or those connected to him with the words of Claire. The poems thus promote conversation between then and now, him and us, this idea and that idea. His experience and her experience. It is quite the thing for poets to step back in time at the moment. To take a historical figure and see what happens when you transplant yourself or your subject or both.

Such transplantation raises questions about how we represent the past. How the past infects us and vice versa. What I loved about the Darwin poems is the way his ideas percolate in the gaps but he is placed in a context of living. The poems are infused with life.

In ‘Voyages,’ Darwin’s voice sits on the left-hand side of the page, Claire on the other. I am itching to put Claire in quotation marks to stress her collision of selves. And then I think Darwin is equally unstable, and want to do the same for him. In the end, I leave them to float at will. A word from Darwin on the left prompts a personal anecdote, a musing, an image from Claire on the right. I keep looking at the page and reading the tiny stanzas and seeing them as two hand-prints. He and she. The connections are electric.

Another poem, ‘Near Lima,’ provides new entries into the Darwin section.

Somewhere I read that, day to day, most of us

rarely raise our eyes more than fifteen degrees

above the horizon.

This is what the Darwin poems do. They lift us beyond the horizon line of fact, beyond the borrowed phrase or lines to reflect on how ideas rub against wife, child, animals, watches, ornaments, fish, ceremonies, death. So innovative. So stimulating.

The final section faltered for me. These poems venture out into the wider world, untethered by theme or style, which felt liberating. I am fascinated that I didn’t make it across the bridge for some of them. I don’t see these poems as failures. I see this as a failure on my part as reader. Sometimes it is like wine affected by mood, circumstances, company or context. One day a vintage hits your palate. The next day it misses. As a persistent reader of New Zealand poetry this interests me. Reading poetry is also susceptible to mood, the weather, what you have just read or done. I haven’t yet got what these poems are doing. I am planning a return visit.

I heard Claire read from ‘Voyages’ at the Lauris Edmond Poetry Prize in Wellington recently. What a treat. It could have been a disaster trying to read these two voices into audible life (do they need to be discrete?), but it was a highlight for me. Hearing the voice of the poet aloud, heightened the effect of her deft hand. I shivered with connections that I hadn’t spotted on the page. Some kind of spooky yet wonderful ventriloquism was taking place.

This book is a gift. It makes you laugh out loud. It rejuvenates. It challenges. I adore it.

Victoria University press page.

Thought Horses Rachel Bush, Victoria University Press, 2016

Rachel Bush was born in Christchurch and lived a number of years in Nelson. That she lived to see a bound copy of her last poetry collection, Thought Horses, was special because this very special collection stopped me in my poetry tracks. I rarely tweet about the books I read but this book was an exception – I urged everyone on Twitter to run down the road, buy a copy of Thought Horses, take time out from routine and noise and beginning reading.

I adore this book. Everything I love about poetry is at work here. The poems reflect my personal biases on what good poetry can do. The bridge between reader and printed word on the page is luminous with activity.

Thought Horses is written out of exquisite poetic fluency; written on the breath, on a long, sweet exhale so that it flows. There is a slowness here as though the poet is observing, absorbing and  reflecting the world through a single, leisurely pan.

The book, like Sarah Broom’s exquisite last collection, is written out of illness. The poems hold onto life, exude life, become life as they embrace sky, elephants, fan palms, birds, Venice, Anne Carson, departed friends, departing things. In the lines between are the fingertips of death. The subject matter is roving but the collection is harmonious with a unity of sound, craft, story. Perhaps it is to do with grace, writing with grace. Individual phrases catch me: ‘the rind of winter’ ‘lost is my quiet’ ‘Truth floats like scum on sea/ water’ ‘The best spring/ is in your own high/ free step’

This is the joy of poetry.

The first poem, ‘Thought Horses’ should be attached to the wall above every restless bed because it is as though the poet was thinking aloud on the line as she lay awake between four and six. Where does the mind wander? The poem provides ‘some things to think of’ and the list resembles a miniature self portrait, an anxiety map, a guide to the following day. I am expert in navigating night waking. I read this book on a plane to Nelson, after little sleep, with the world askew, and this poem nailed it.

You think of the poem you wrote about leaving a house, and how

houses we have owned will come back to us in dreams.

You think about taking your computer into the next room.

You think maybe you ought to try to sleep.

If I were an anthologist, hunting through the collection, I would build a sizable list of contenders for an updated anthology of New Zealand poems. ‘Sing Them’ is one of them. I am hoping someone asks me to edit a new anthology so I can start with this poem. It is light and lovely with little sharp bits and is a hymn to what words can do, and how poems are sung into being, into us. Each verse is a little shift, a tilt of the head to see things a bit differently, with tactile things animating the elusive, unrealness of words.

Because every day the poems

stay folded and pressed flat in

a suitcase of their pages

till the composer unfolds

them in sound lines and when

you sing them, they float.

Another poem to put in my anthology is ‘These Days’ with five little snapshots of the moods of different days that ache in the acuteness of remembering. There is the need to sleep when it is too light, the boy resisting with his string of NOs, ‘days that could make you depressed and flat as a squashed dog,’ the mother’s lesson to the dawdling son, the classroom singing, and the sweet, sugary days:

Long sugary days, you find these words come out

blurty blurty snap snap snap one after the

other and thoughts go off down little paths you

hadn’t noticed, like maybe lunch with a friend

whose round face under a merino beanie

smiles a vegetative smile, showing small teeth.

Then there is the poem I have already anthologised in A Treasury of Poems for Children because it is so vivid and surprising and is perfect to hook young ears and eyes. From ‘Early’:

The darkness wears a quiet sound

of fires died down and people who stir

in sleep. Soon they will slip on

their daily selves, button them up.

I have to point you in the direction of ‘It Ends with Forever’ which leads us back to mother and daughter and the way single words can stick in the head across a lifetime (‘frisky’ ‘forever’). This is a two-toned poem. An utterly poignant poem where death comes a little closer. In the second verse, the mother responds to the idea she will die one day by comparing herself to a kitten. She will live frisky, not forever. And then the maternal image in the first verse that made me well up:

Ah then sometimes, I wanted,

still want, something safe

and kind and firm and tight

as when our mother rolled

us in thin woollen blankets

on cold nights

OH, there are so many poems that lift you out of your skin. Mark Broach asks what is the point of poetry in the Latest Listener (April 23) and then gets a handful of poets to respond. This book is a point of poetry. Its needle pricks you. It makes you feel and be curious and review how your day will unfold. It shows the way poetry opens portals into what matters. For example, at the end of ‘ “All my feelings would have been of common things” ‘:

I once thought

many things would make my life happier

and now one by one I will let them go.

Rachel’s collection sits on my top shelf with a handful of poetry books that rise above the bulk to become something astonishing. Why? Because the heart is engaged. Because the writing is as contoured and as musical as the world no matter which way you look. Because this book was written so close to death, yet it shows the joy of life in little things, in big things, in ideas, relations, places. We all do this. We all write the world. But Rachel has made the word incandescent and in taking us back into the grit and light of living changes us. If you buy one poetry book this year, make it this one.

Victoria University Press page.

My tribute and an interview with Nelson school girl, Lucy  here.

Four poems along with Louise Wrightson’s tribute.

Regrets only

You’ll take your grandfather roller skating,

watch from the edge of the rink.

For dinner you’ll make rabbit stew

and discuss the character of poultry.

Rose petals as a garnish, but also to eat.

Not many people know you can do that.

Sometimes it seems you’re the only two people

in an absorbing, character-based mystery.

You know this is all adding up to something—the roller skating, the rose petals, the rabbits.

©Bill Nelson 2016

from Bill Nelson’s newly released Memorandum of Understanding Victoria University Press 2016. Bill Nelson currently lives in Wellington. He was awarded the Biggs Family Prize in Poetry from International Institute of Modern Letters in 2009. He co-edits Up Country, an online journal devoted to outdoor pursuits. I did read elsewhere that he is a map maker! Lots of poems leapt out at me but I just love the ending of this poem and the electricity between those three things. This debut collection delivers clarity of voice along with tilts, kinks, uplifts and an essential dose of human warmth. Running along the beach yesterday, I was musing on how I am attracted to poems first through the ear, then through the heart, then through the tilting gaps and finally in the light of Ruth Padel’s chewy bits. I think this book delivers on all four in different ways. Worth adding to your shelf!

VUP page

Another poem on The Spin Off

Booksellers review

Invitation to Tusiata Avia’s book launch, Wednesday 11 May, 5.30pm–7.00pm, Tautai, Auckland.

You are warmly invited to the launch of

Fale Aitu | Spirit House

by Tusiata Avia

on Wednesday 11 May, 5.30pm–7.00pm
at
Tautai: Contemporary Pacific Arts Trust
Level 1, 300 Karangahape Road
(Next to Artspace)

Tusiata will read some new poems and sign copies of the book.
Refreshments will be served.

About Fale Aitu | Spirit House
Tusiata Avia is an essential voice in New Zealand and Pasifika literature. In her fearless new collection, she weaves together the voices of the living and dead, the past and the present in poems that are confessional and confrontational, gentle and funny. Speaking from Samoa, Christchurch, Gaza and New York, she combines stories from myth and the everyday, never shying away from pain or wonder.

Fale Aitu / Spirit House Tusiata Avia, Victoria University Press, 2016

Last night I drove into the city into some kind of warm, semi-tropical wetness —like a season that no longer knew what it ought or wanted to be — to go to the launch of Tusiata Avia’s new poetry collection. Tautai, the Pacific Art Gallery, was a perfect space, and filled to the brim with friends, family, writers and strong publisher support. I loved the warmth and writerly connections in the room. I have been reading Tusiata’s book on planes as poetry now seems to be my activity of choice in the air. I adore this book and have so much to say about it but want to save that for another occasion. I was an early reader so have had a long-term relationship with it.

the launch

The room went dark and an MIT student, bedecked in swishes of red, performed a piece from a previous collection, Blood Clot. Mesmerising.

Tusiata’s cousin and current Burns Fellow, Victor Rodger, gave a terrific speech that included a potted biography. I loved the way he applauded Tusiata not just as a tremendous poet, but as a teacher and solo mother. Her names means artist in Samoan and he saw artist in the numerous roles Tusiata embodies. Writing comes out of so much. He identified her new poems as brave, startling, moving and political. Spiky. I totally agree.

Having dedicated her book to her parents, Tusiata said that it was hard to be the parent of a poet who wrote about family. When she told her mother what she was writing, her mother embraced it. She opened her arms wide. She said the skeletons need to come out. The atua. Tusiata’s speech underlined how important this book is. It is not simply an exercise in how you can play with language, it goes to the roots of that it means to be daughter, mother, poet.  It goes further than family into what it means to exist, to co-exist, in a global family. When a poet knows how to write what matters so much to her, when her words bring that alive with a such animation, poise and melody, it matters to you.

Four poems read. Lyrical, song-like, chant-like, that place feet on ground, that open the windows to let atua in and out, that cannot turn a blind eye, that hold tight to the love of a daughter, that come back to the body that is pulsing with life.

Yes I had goose bumps. You could hear a pin drop.

Fergus Barrowman, VUP publisher, made the important point that these poems face the dark but they also face an insistent life force.

Congratulations, this was a goosebump launch for a goosebump book.

Bill Manhire occupies a significant position in our literary landscape — as both a poet and as founder of the International Institute of Modern Letters. As poet he is lauded on an international stage and at home was recognised  as our inaugural Te Mata Poet Laureate. As teacher and mentor at Victoria University, his outstanding contribution to our writing communities was honoured by the naming of the Bill Manhire House at IIML (April 2016). I have read Bill when he is not writing poems and have admired his clarity and elasticity of thought, but I had not read the early fiction in his recently released The Stories of Bill Manhire (VUP). Things escape us for all kinds of reason. In the 1990s, I focused on all things Italian as I wrote my doctoral thesis and missed too many local things. What a loss!

Amongst so many books I have loved, three books have really got under my reading skin in the last month: Cilla McQueen’s memoir, In Slanted Light, Tusiata Avia’s Fale Aitu, and Bill’s short stories.

Each of these books took me by surprise. Like little thunderbolts where you can feel your heart rate pick up as you read. Bill’s book didn’t cleave me apart like Kafka’s axe to the head or heart (he says the frozen sea within) but felt like the utterly satisfying thirst-quenching intake of sparkling water.  Writing that is effervescent, clear, restorative. I guess that is doing something miraculous to your parched state (a different kind of frozen sea). This is what words can do.

To celebrate this book – a short review from me and an interview with Bill.

A wee review:

The stories in this collection are gathered from The New Land: A Picture Book, South Pacific and Songs of My Life. There are previously unpublished stories, The Brain of Katherine Mansfield where you choose your own adventure, and the memoir, Under the Influence.

The writing is inventive, refreshing, surprising, on its feet skipping kicking doing little jumps.

How can I underline how good it is? As I read my way into days of reading pleasure, I squirmed cringed gasped laughed out loud sighed did wry grins wriggled on the spot leapt over the gaps laughed out loud again and felt little stabs that moved.

The stories highlight place and character, become nostalgic with detail that glints of when we were young (well for me anyway). You might move from the Queen’s visit and telling jokes to a dog named Fairburn, to a sci-fi keepsake on the tongue, to questions and answers on writing, to a dead-end job. Yes, the subjects are captivating but it is not so much what the stories pick as a starting point but how they travel. Take any story and it is a rejuvenating read. ‘Nonchalance’ for example, is like a series of postcards, travel or writing tips; or arrival tips with love and broken heart, soldiers, soldiers’ wives and the locals. You enter a realm of first things and floating elements. The readerly effects are kaleidoscopic.

To give you a taste of the book (I hope this doesn’t ruin things for you), here are some of the first and last lines. So important in a short story – these just nail it.

First lines:

Some critics write me off as just another ghost character activist, whereas I think I add up to a lot more than that.

The bishops come ashore.

Through here?

You are just an ordinary New Zealander.

The poet looks at the poet’s wife and says: You are my best poem.

He says: ‘Give me something significant.’

A slight scraggy moustache.

There are many tricks I have used repeatedly throughout my career to date, and others that I have done only really as one-offs.

Last lines:

Like a gasping in the chest.

The paddocks are left grey, stretching out to the edge of the frame.

Clouds pour across the sky and my lungs fill with air as though they might be sails.

No.

But jokes are too difficult: I’m getting someone else for that.

God bless him, and all the other poets.

That is how it is, adventure and regret, there is no getting away from it, we live in the broad Pacific, meeting and parting shake us, meeting and parting shake us, it is always touch and go.

The ‘Ghost Who talks’ made me laugh out loud with all its literary references alongside or inside the tricky business of getting ‘you’ and ‘I’ active in a story. Ha! It felt like the pronoun ghost out stalking. Then again the playful absurdities in ‘Kuki the Krazy Kea’ made me squirm with its dry wryness. Or the magician’s performance tips. Head back to the stories at the start of the book and the bits that taste a little different:  details of a nuclear winter, Ghandi’s funeral pyre, the melancholy of an empty pool, a mother colour-tinting photographs at the kitchen table. Bill enters the story to give writing tips here and there, to tilt the world a touch so you have to steady your reading feet (where next! What next!), to frame a judicious amount of missing bits, to be a little bit cheeky, to catch something provocative or lovely or poignant. This is a book I will recommend to friends.

A wee interview:

What satisfies you about writing a story?   

Pretty much what satisfies me about writing a fully-functioning poem.  There’s pleasure in the mix of surprise and inevitability, which needn’t be plot and character based. Sometimes it can just be a sense of musical completion.

I also like it if readers are given room to move and even a little work to do, and they end up feeling pleased about this, rather than grumpy. Maybe that’s explicit in The Brain of Katherine Mansfield, which is my shot at a choose-your-own-adventure story. But the best writing always invites readers to make choices as they go along. I’ve always liked Whitman’s take on the text-reader relationship: “I seek less to state or display any theme or thought, and more to bring you, reader, into the atmosphere of the theme or thought—there to pursue your own flight.”

Were there any rules you wanted your stories to obey? Or disregard? I love the way some of the stories sneak in instructions for start-out writers.

I think that by and large I’ve written against rules and tried to avoid what’s sometimes called the beige short story, of which the great exemplar is probably Joyce’s ‘The Dead’.  Glorious stuff, but . . . well, Joyce didn’t want to go on doing it, did he? Mark Haddon was writing about beige stories in the Guardian recently: ‘modest, melancholic stories, not arcs with beginnings, middles and ends, so much as moments and turning points.’  I’m a big fan of melancholy, but you read too many stories like that in a row, quiet epiphany after quiet epiphany, and the whole world starts to feel a bit insipid.

I suppose those instructions for beginning writers represent a complaint against the formulaic. What I mean is this sort of advice, which comes from a New Zealand book called How to Write and Sell Short Stories published back in the 1958:

PLOTS TO AVOID

(a)  Plots with a sex motif.

(b)  Where religion plays a dominating role.

(c)  Plots where sadism or brutality appear.

(d)  Plots with a basis of divorce.

(e)  Plots where illness or disease must be emphasised.

(f)  Plots dealing with harrowing experiences of children.

(g)  Plots dealing with politics.

And so on. Remove plots like those, and it’s hard to see what’s left.  I’m generally quite troubled by short story writing manuals, and by creative writing workshops that behave like short story manuals.

I also love the detail that catapults the reader to specific times and places  — how much did that sort of thing matter to you?

Getting the voice right in each case felt like the most important thing, and of course details are a crucial part of that.  Quite a few of the stories are really dramatic monologues, opportunities to try out some other voice or personality. That’s most obvious when they’re written in first person, but also in a strange way it’s also there in close third person.  The story called “Highlights” is third-person but it comes across in a flat, somewhat affectless voice – because it’s about a rather passive person. Anyway, the voice thing mattered to me, and I found myself trying on a range of idioms. I don’t think in general it’s a good idea to read a lot of short stories in a row, especially if they’re by the same writer, but I hope there’s quite a variety of narrating voices in the book.

Can you recommend some short-story writers?

There’s so much I haven’t read, but I’d go for Grace Paley every time.  Also Donald Barthelme and Lydia Davis. Gogol is my greatest favourite, especially “The Nose”, which I was once able to read in Russian. Early Sargeson.  Some of Ashleigh Young’s personal essays feel to me like beautifully told short stories – they just happen to be true, or true-ish. And the best of Barbara Anderson’s stories go on being brilliant – full of such sudden things. William Brandt’s collection, Alpha Male, has rather dropped out of sight, but it’s pretty fantastic – he does these wonderfully indignant, damaged narrators.

Do you have a favourite in the collection?

Probably “The Days of Sail”, though that may be because I know the back-story – it’s prompted by a covered-up assassination attempt on the Queen in Dunedin during the 1981 Royal tour.  A 17-year-old took a potshot at her from the top of a Med School building in Great King Street. Imagine if it had been successful! Dunedin would be totally on the map! Anyway, I built a rather cranky story around that fact.  There’s a nice radio adaptation that used be in the RNZ archive that I’d quite like to hear again.  It ends with a children’s choir singing “God Defend New Zealand”.

Do you find endings difficult (I have to say I loved the endings!)?    

Yes, they’re the hardest things.  I think I manage to get them right most of the time – except maybe for “The Death of Robert Louis Stevenson”, which of course is obliged to end with his death.  Not exactly a twist in the tail. Maybe the best ending is in “The Brain of Katherine Mansfield”.  Or, I should say, endings. I’ve met people who feel quite put out by the apparently brutal instruction, “Close the Book”, which comes at the close of several of the plot strands.

But “The Brain” is also about white middle-class complacency and its right-wing tendencies – so there is a “real” ending, too.  I won’t quote it, but anyone who wants to see what I mean can try to get to section 50 online, courtesy of Richard Easther and Jolisa Gracewood:   I’d also advise readers to pause on Greg O’Brien’s illustrated section headings.  There are lots of good visual arts jokes, along with a couple of depictions of C K Stead as a mad Nazi brain surgeon.

Victoria University Press page