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Monthly Archives: February 2019
New Books: Celebrating Fleur Adcock’s Collected Poems launch day with Maria McMillan
Launches on Wednesday 13 February, 6pm–7.30pm
at Unity Books, 57 Willis St, Wellington.
Today Fleur Adcock launches her Collected Poems with Victoria University Press at Unity Books in Wellington. This is an occasion to celebrate! I read my way through all Fleur’s books for Wild Honey and I loved the experience and the multiple effects it had upon me.
This week Marty Smith and I (and many more by the looks!) were directed by Maria McMillan’s tweet to her (Maria’s) terrific 2015 blog post on Fleur. Sharing thoughts on what a poetry book means to you on such a personal level is exactly why I am launching my classic (well-loved, enduring) poems/poetry books slot on Wednesdays.
Read Maria’s effervescent blog, pop into the Wellington launch and then tuck up into the glorious richness, kicks, grace, wit, reflective-ness and absolute joy of Fleur’s poetry.
A taste of Maria’s blog post:
Selected Poems, Fleur Adcock. Oxford University Press, 1983.
Being a girl is dangerous. I don’t just mean we are vulnerable to danger, but that we are, ourselves, dangerous, capable of causing great damage to ourselves and others. We, especially in those years we are changing into women, live in danger, where danger is the vibrating state we occupy.
I started thinking tonight about Fleur Adcock’s Selected Poems which I first read at 15. I remembered the dark green cover and how the spine looked on my parents’ bookshelf. The slim sitting room one with the cut out hearts and tidy shelves of Penguins. Have I made up the moment of discovery? Of pulling the book from the shelf, of curling in the large brown chair with the ribbed pattern that would leave its tribal marks on me? The book must have come alive to me then, something that breathed and beat so that next time I came to the shelf I would recognise it. It would hum when I entered the room.
It was my mother’s book but became mine in the way any book is claimed as intimate property by obsessed readers. I wonder if it in turn claimed me, lodging its shards in my ears and brain and heart, because it was the first book of poetry I really read. A book I read for sheer pleasure but also I read and reread wanting to understand how Fleur Adcock had done it. I don’t know if that is peculiarly a budding poet’s reading, or if that is the nature of all close reading of poetry. That the thrill of a good poem is watching it run but also holding it in your lap, seeing the bones and muscles move beneath the pelt, smelling its oily springed wool. Understanding how it all fits together.
Do teenagers, or at least the kind I was, gravitate towards poetry because the best of it is transformative in the same way adolescence is? Good poetry allowing us not just to see the capacity of the poet, but our own capacities. A transformation from passive childlike recipients of the word and the world, to readers active, engaged and creative in our own right. I think about how it’s not just writers who are dangerous, with their strange ability to conjure mountains and moods, but readers too. There is a moment, when we get poems, if we get them, where we are not having something done to us by the poem, but we are doing something to the poem. A good poem, that we have read and understood, can give us a sense of mastery, perhaps what a musician feels when she plays fluently, for the first time, a difficult piece of music.
It is a long time since I have opened Adcock’s book and when I do it is with great affection as phrases I have loved for 30 years float up off the page out to me, triggering the same pings of pure pleasure as they did on my first encounter with them.
Full piece by Maria here
Victoria University Press page
Poetry Shelf 2019
Poetry Shelf 2019 will resume poetry coverage in the next week or so with new features and old.
I will flag the arrival of all new NZ poetry books that are sent to me and review/interview some. Publishers or poets can send books to PO Box 95078 Swanson Waitakere 0653
I will also host a Poetry Shelf NOTICEBOARD – poetry events and poetry news. Send copy to paulajoygreen@gmail.com
I am continuing the Monday Poem slot but I do not accept unsolicited poems at the moment.
On Tuesdays I will pay attention to New Books. And throughout the week!
On Wednesdays I am introducing Poetry Classics where poets and poetry fans get to share NZ poems or poetry books they have loved.
Poetry Audio spot continues on Thursdays.
On Fridays I am hosting Poetry Talk where a poet or poetry fan gets to talk about something that sparks them in the gloriously wide wide fields of poetry.
The blog will continue to have a NZ/Aotearoa focus but will also celebrate international poetry.
Dream pile: to post poetry videos! Let me know if you can do this!
ha p p y p o e t r y d a y s
Paula Green
Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Long Distance Phone Calls
Campfire stories in colossal scale. Intimacy against grand backdrops. Poetry connects us through time, history, scale and location.
Get up close and far with Auckland’s best writers and performers in the one night only show Long Distance Phone Calls. Programmed by Vanessa Crofskey and MC’d by Grace Taylor (Full Broken Bloom, Afakasi Speaks), this unique evening features talent such as Manu Vaea (FAFSWAG), Kyla Dela Cruz (Mouth:Tongue:Teeth), Stevie Davis-Tana (South Auckland Poet’s Collective), Phodiso Dintwe (Rising Voices), the girls of Ngā Hinepūkōrero (Word – The Frontline Interschool Slam Champions 2018) and renowned performance poet Carrie Rudzinski exploring belonging and connection.
Wellington: Fleur Adcock book launch
Victoria University Press warmly invites you to the launch of
Collected Poems
by Fleur Adcock
on Wednesday 13 February, 6pm–7.30pm
at Unity Books, 57 Willis St, Wellington.
Fleur will be there to read from and sign copies of the book.
Fleur Adcock’s Collected Poems is a landmark publication in the career of one of New Zealand’s most significant writers. Published in hardback with ribbon, 558pp. $50
More info here
NZ Poetry Shelf 