(…) And I let my hands tilt and the plastic
bag that you hold rustles and plumps with their
rush, I hold one back and bite into it and its
taste is the taste of the colour exactly, and this
hour precisely, and memory I expect is storing
for an afternoon far removed from here
when the warm furred almost weightlessness
of the fruit I hold might very well be a symbol
of what’s lost and we keep on wanting, which after
all is to crave the real, the branches cutting
across the sun, your standing there while I tell you,
‘Come on, you have to try one!’, and you do,
and the clamour of bees goes on above us, ‘This
will do’, both of us saying, ‘like this, being here!’

 

Vincent O’Sullivan, from ‘Being here’
in Further Convictions Pending, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2009

This week I am reminded of 1968, of anti Vietnam war protests, of calls to ban the bomb, to safeguard the health of the planet, to enable all women to speak, to make choices, to be protected from abuse and subjugation, for equity across race and culture, for civil rights, for food and shelter for everyone. For love.

This week, as the bump in my recovery road feels like a steep hill, I am drawn to notions of care. I heard National Humanities Medal Recipient, Abraham Verghese in conversation with Kathryn Ryan on Radio NZ National. He lives and practices medicine in Stanford, California and is a Professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He will be appearing in three sessions at Auckland Writers Festival. I loved how the word ‘care’ becomes imperative both in his writing and in his care of patients and their complex narratives. His latest novel is The Covenant of Water. I loved this conversation so much I am hoping the festival produces a podcast of his session with Paula Morris. Also keen to hear a podcast of his session with kaupapa Māori academic, Leonie Pihama, co-editor of Ora: Healing Ourselves – Indigenous Knowledge, Healing and Wellbeing. That his RNZ conversation was titled ‘the joys of medicine and writing’ says it all. I am reminded of our local treasure, Eileen Merriman.

I found myself in the day stay ward this week, with the kindest nurse you can imagine, sitting on the bed after doing the routine checks, and I told her about an astonishing young woman musician and writer, Cadence Chung. How her writing is an oasis of care, how she cared so much for her peers, how she has assembled a gorgeous collaborative anthology, bringing together the work of young musicians, poets and artists. How uplifting and inspiring the book is to read and to listen to.

In my postbox this week: Tidelines by Kiri Piahana-Wong, Anahera Press, 2024

This week we are grieving the loss of Vincent O’Sullivan, paying tribute to his life as a writer, a mentor, a friend. I am reminded of the way he supported women writers, bringing women from the shadows into the light. I am especially thinking of the poetry of Ursula Bethell, and of how he supported Reimke Ensing‘s groundbreaking anthology Private Gardens (1977). I picked up this volume, reread Vincent’s ‘Afterword’, and was reminded of how wide and significant his embrace was, and how that nurturing support continued across the decades. The conclusion of his piece still resonates deeply as he addresses potential critics of women’s writing:

But that would not have been so valuable book. it would not have succeeded at what no other New Zealander has done, and that is to take women writers of many kinds, and of several generations, and presented so clearly their response to the  normal realities, the usual evasions and dreams, of living as we do. We are what we are by the way that we say it.

Vincent O’Sullivan, from ‘Afterword’ in Private Gardens: An anthology of New Zealand Women Poets

Links for the daily posts

Monday: Monday Poem – ‘Oh’ by Anna Jackson

Tuesday: Review of Mythos, ed Cadence Chung

Wednesday: Review of Stones & Kisses by Peter Rawnsley

Thursday: Review and readings for Poetry NZ Yearbook 2024
Launch AUP New Poets 10
2024 winner for the John O’Connor Award for Best First Book

Friday: Poetry Shelf readings for Rose Collins

A poem

The Wife Speaks

Being a woman, I am
not more than a man nor less
but answer imperatives
of shape and growth. The bone
attests the girl with dolls,
grown up to know the moon
unwind her tides to chafe
the heart. A house designs
my day an artifact
of care to set the hands
of clocks, and hours are round
with asking eyes. Night puts
on an ear of silence where
a child may cry. I close
my books and know events
are people, and all roads
everywhere walk home
women and men, to take
history under their roofs.
I see Icarus fall
out of the sky, beside
my door, not beautiful,
envy of angels, but feathered
for a bloody death.

Mary Stanley

Starveling Year (Pegasus, 1953)
Also appears in Private Gardens: An anthology of New Zealand Women Poets edited by Reimke Ensing, Afterword by Vincent O’Sullivan (Caveman Press, 1977).

Mary Stanley (1919 – 1980) spent part of her childhood in Thames. Her first husband, Brian Neal, was killed in World War Two. Three of Mary’s early poems were awarded the Jessie Mackay Memorial Award (1945) and she published her work in various journals. Her second husband, poet Kendrick Smithman, wrote an introduction to the posthumous reissue of Starveling Year and Other Poems (Auckland University Press, 1994).

Mary Stanley writes out of the isolating 1950s, out of motherhood and marriage, to produce poetry imbued with love, musicality, a history of reading, personal revelations and searing gender politics. The poem, in her adroit hands, is both a weapon and a point of solace.

A musing

The look and feel of poetry books matters, not just as a marketing choice but in the aesthetic pleasure of a book as an object. Publishers, both mainstream and boutique, are giving much thought and care to the production of their poetry collections. The internal design, the paper stock, the cover, the feel of the book in the hand, these all matter. The look of the poem on the page is an active participant in the overall effect upon ear, eye, heart, mind. My only niggle is when the internal font is so small it makes reading a struggle. I have been admiring all the new books on my desk, delighting in the publishing craft of Katūīvei Contemporary Pasifika Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand (Massey University Press), the visual appeal of all the new Cuba Press poetry titles, the artisan feel of Compound Press’s the prism and the rose and the late poems by schaeffer lemalu. I especially love the fit-in-the-palm-of your-hand Town by Madeleine Slavick (The Cuba Press), the eye-catching cover on Sylvan Spring’s Killer Rack (Te Herenga Waka University Press).

Ah, I have planted a seed in my head.