Swordfish . . . Far Hotel
That’s me up there cast in plaster
above the wide window
of a coastal pub’s vista bar.
I am the trophy of some forgotten fisherman.
Cigarette smoke fogs my vision
but I still see that day the trophy of my life was taken.
Again I feel. I feel the hook deep within me catch
I feel my anger whip
I feel the tackle tighten
I feel my guts explode
I feel the rainbow strength of colours in me leap
I feel the sky like a mirror smashing
I feel the sun across my dorsal fin get torn
I feel the waves beneath me again and again split open
I feel the blood in the protein church of my heart begin to chant
I feel the hook in my brain burning
I feel the trace against my jawbone cut
I feel time tight as a nylon line almost breaking
I feel the great poem of my life and I know that it is ending.
©Bob Orr Valparaiso Auckland University Press, 2002.
I found myself hesitating between two very different poems I could choose, Janet Charman’s “pin unpin pin unpin pin,” which so vividly recalls the intensity of new motherhood, or Bob Orr’s Hemingwayesque fishing poem, “Swordfish…Far Hotel,” told from the point of view of the fish, now caught and cast in plaster. My reason for choosing the fishing poem is the experience I had of reading it out loud once at a National Poetry Day event at Te Papa, and feeling myself caught on the line of the poem just as it describes the fish caught on the fishing line. It is an extraordinarily taut and powerful poem and reading it was one of the great poetry experiences of my life. It can be found in Bob Orr’s 2002 collection Valparaiso, which is full of favourite poems of mine, including “Eternity” (“Eternity is the traffic lights at Huntly…”), “Remembering Akhmatova,” and “Friday Night…Alhambra Bar,” amongst others.
If we weren’t limited to New Zealand poems, I’d choose “Viewless Wings,” by Mark Ford, the poem which best captures the “lyric strangeness” that Alex Hollis and Simon Gennard have been talking about as what poetry is for, and what poetry needs. It is the poem I would most wish to have written myself, and now am looking for some way to write past.
Anna Jackson
Anna Jackson lives in Island Bay, Wellington, lectures at Victoria University, and has published six collections of poetry, most recently I, Clodia (AUP, 2014). With Helen Rickerby and Angelina Sbroma she quite often runs conferences and other events for talking and thinking about writing, this year a conference on Poetry and the Essay.
Michael Harlow’s Nothing For It But To Sing, the Kathleen Grattan Award for Poetry, was published in 2016 by Otago University Press. He has been awarded the Beatson Prize for poetry, and in 2014 the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for Distinguished Contribution to Poetry in NZ. He has published ten books of poetry, two of which have been short-listed for the National Book Awards. In collaboration with NZ-Suisse composer Kit Powell, he has composed, as a librettist, some thirteen Performance Works, many of which have been performed in Switzerland, Germany, France and New Zealand. He lives in Central Otago (NZ) and works as a writer, editor and Jungian therapist.
Based in Wellington, Fleur Beale has written over twenty novels for teenagers. In 1992, Beale released her first novel Slide the Corner, which subsequently won the Storylines Gaelyn Gordon Award in 2007. She has been short-listed several times in the New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards, and in 2011 her novel Fierce September won the Awards’ Young Adult Fiction section. Fleur Beale won the 2012 Storylines Margaret Mahy Medal. Beale regularly participates in the Writers in Schools programme, and also leads Professional Development sessions for teachers.
Heather McQuillan is a writer, teacher and student. She lives in Christchurch where she is a tutor with the School for Young Writers. She writes books for young people as well as writing short stories, flash fiction and poetry. In 2016 she won the NZ Flash Fiction Day prize and the Micro Madness prize, and she placed third in the Sunday Star Times Short Story Awards.She is currently working on a Masters of Creative Writing Thesis investigating the flash fiction form.
NZ Poetry Shelf 