In Levin

Needlepoint rain
is static against the pines
running alongside
this endless beach
that stretches further to my left
and then to my right
With no way to turn
I must stand very still

There is detritus all around:
a motorbike’s green rusted petrol tank,
a bright pink single mattress
half buried in the sand
blue and white
ice-cream containers
scattered like impossible stepping stones

There is theme music too:
fantails’ song and the whoops and cries
of men playing cricket
A fallen pine gathers seaweed
and plastic bags in its rib-cage
A man riding a horse talks on a cell phone

The rate of teenage suicide
is at its highest ever
The local kids drag race
their souped-up Ford Escorts
leaving thick black stripes
that come to abrupt endings

Therese Lloyd
from Other Animals, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2013

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It’s a strange experience to live with a poem for almost two decades. I must have read this one first in 2007 or so. It came in as a submission for an issue of Landfall I’d been asked to edit, and I could see at once that it had to go in.

Why? Because it stopped me dead in my tracks.

With no way to turn
I must stand very still

And why must this speaker stand so very still? Because they have nowhere to turn to, that’s why. There’s so much activity going on all around – cricket, cell phones, motorbikes – and yet they’re stopped still by something, something unnamed: just the sheer extent of the vista, perhaps; or by something else, off the edge of the screen.

A bit later on, I needed some poems for a class anthology I was editing. It was for Stage One Creative Writing students at Massey University, and I’d broken down the “poetry” section into a series of weekly themes. Therese Lloyd’s poem came in under “Figures of Speech.”

That may sound a bit reductionist, but I was very struck by the way she’d folded so many strategic metaphors and similes into this otherwise seemingly photo-realist description of a local scene:

• “Needlepoint rain” – with the implication of embroidery (of course), but also of a certain stabbiness in the narrator.
• “ice-cream containers / scattered like impossible stepping stones” – it’s that extra word “impossible” which (I feel) conveys the sense of futility, tragic waste which pervades the poem.
• “A fallen pine gathers seaweed / and plastic bags in its rib-cage” – that’s a personification, rather than a metaphor, if you want to be pedantic (and I usually do). It projects the fallen pine as an animate being with a ribcage – which, after all, is what it is. The poem as a whole is full of a sense of animism: of things which seem at least as alive as people.

I don’t recall any Levin patriots protesting at the picture Lloyd painted of the place. I think it had just come top of some nationwide poll of youth suicide rates at the time, but it’s really the coast to the west of town which is the setting – a postcard-perfect Kiwi beach setting.

I called the picture it paints “photo-realist” above, but perhaps a better term would be “hyperreal.” It has the air of a place that you see with exceptional vividness because you’ve just had a terrible shock of some kind. I don’t know what that shock could be, but those last lines about the “souped-up Ford Escorts”

leaving thick black stripes
that come to abrupt endings

might give us some sort of clue.

This is a poem to read when you need to be reminded of the intensity, the momentousness of the things all around you. Fantails, logs, raindrops all live side by side with more human relics in Lloyd’s vision: the mattresses, ice-cream containers, petrol-tanks we leave behind us.

You can ride on by on your horse if you need to, wheeling and dealing on your phone, but if you’re prepared to invest in the world of “In Levin”, you have to stop, look around, and try and see all there is to see.

Jack Ross

– “In Levin” © Therese Lloyd, Other Animals (Wellington: VUP, 2013): 23 (reprinted by permission)

Jack Ross is the author of six poetry collections, four novels, and four books of short fiction. His latest book of short stories, Haunts, is due out from Lasavia Publishing later this year. He lives with his wife, crafter and art-writer Bronwyn Lloyd, on Auckland’s North Shore, and blogs here.

Therese Lloyd lives in Wellington and grew up in Christchurch and Napier. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Other Animals (VUP 2013), and The Facts (VUP 2018) which was shortlisted for the Ockham Book Awards in 2019.