Hailman, Leanne Radojkovich, The Emma Press 2021

Leanne Radojkovich’s short story collection is a satisfying and nuanced mix of redeeming light and dark notes. Scenes are stripped back to the potency of the unsaid, and yet people and place are exquisitely present through the power of detail. A woman talks with “pins her mouth”, while “liquid fabrics, shimmering falls of sequins” are nearby. The scene becomes physically luminous, the undercurrents contextualised.

The collection is invigorated by recurring themes. Grief and loss form a connective tissue. Birds, scents, buildings, the weather and flowers, physically anchor loss, rape, infidelity, inadequate parenting, parental death. Human glow versus human pain and loss. It is the physical world that is fleshed out, not the back stories behind the dark and the painful.

I savour Leanne’s collection as narrative tapestry, with its fine stitching and craft. There is remembering and forgetting, slants and prisms, epiphany and release.

For some reason that burst of yolks disturbed me. I left the café and continued along the road, registering all the changes with the strange double-vision sensation I couldn’t explain. I wasn’t sure if the time zone was affecting me, or whether it was my adult life coming up against my child life. I took note of everything: pigeons, nikau palms, the For Lease signs, an op shop with a naked one-legged mannequin. The fruit shop, grill rooms and womenswear had become a mini-mart, a Korean BBQ and a karaoke with private booths. The knitting shop which had once belonged to Nan now sold bric-a-brac. A taxidermied owl sat on a formica table staring out the window. My legs felt so heavy just then; I saw another time when the shop was lined with honeycomb shelving units stuffed with balls of wool, and knitted ‘garments’ as Nan called them, on satin-covered coat hangers.

from ‘Where the river meets the sea’

 

Perhaps I love this collection so much, because it is a book I feel. I feel what is present and I feel what is absent. I choose the word ‘prism’ to underline how the thematic hues spark and shift. You see life in sensory gleams. You experience life in pieces, yet there are underlying themes that are significant to us. The present forms a bridge to the past, the past forms a bridge to the present. Pockets of emptiness and loss are countered by an expanse of recollection and musings. It is a collection to lose yourself in and then discover multiple rewarding paths to your own bridges and connections. It’s narrative as nourishment.

All the rest home doors have name tags. Mum’s has a typo: Irina. Although Irena isn’t her born name – only she knows what that is, and she’s never told, never discussed the war. Says she was born the day she reached Wellington harbour with papers stating she was a ten-year-old Polish orphan. Dad said not to ask about the European years, and my brother and I never did. Now they’ve both died and there’s just me and Mum, and she’s in a rest home with a mis-spelled name on her door.

 

Leanne Radojkovich’s debut short story collection First fox was published by The Emma Press in 2017. Her work has been anthologised in Bonsai: Best small stories from Aotearoa New Zealand and the forthcoming Best Small Fictions 2021. In 2018 she won the Graeme Lay Short Story Competition and was a finalist in the Anton Chekhov Prize for Very Short Fiction. She was longlisted for the 2020 Short Fiction/University of Essex Prize and shortlisted for the 2020 Sargeson Prize. Leanne holds a Master of Creative Writing (First Class Honours) from AUT Auckland University of Technology. She has Dalmatian heritage and was born in Kirikiriroa Hamilton. She now lives in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, where she works as a librarian.

The Emma Press page

Leanne Radojkovich page

I think I’ll remember where the cleaning eye is but I know I won’t

This is how tired you get, the plumber says,
when you have two seventeen-year-old daughters
you can fall asleep
when one of them is driving.

And he says, I’ve been here before, scrolling his phone
so he can slice again through woven grass
remove a square and place it to the side
like my father burying the family dog.

As a young man he went to Canada, he tells me,
worked the ski fields, some words about how lucky
we are and then – sound of metal, ceramic –
he has found the cleaning eye

go inside and run the tap he tells me
in and out I go proud as a child.
Next, the machine
hosepipe of tightly coiled spring

feeds itself in
he is wearing the special glove
the moral of the story is
always wear the special glove.

Can you hear that? Cocks his head like a bird
and I want to say I can but he can, water
running free way along the section
deep underground he hears it.

The grass fitted back in place
grows lusher than before
and now I’m sitting up in bed
balanced on my head

the LED light that changes colour
I’ve set to purple so on the top trapdoor
of my head I feel the weight
of a perfect purple cube

this is the thing I know how to do
right now
to keep that weight centred
above the bony chambers of my skull

and then I am up
and at the mirror
– why?
For human company?

I am wearing every garment I have
woollen boots, pants splashed with bleach,
a long robe like a Biblical prophet and two hoods
as if the monk in me were clothed by the polar explorer in me.

I look across to my only friend, the butternut pumpkin
on his jaunty angle. Dry, dry mouth.
Cars pass as if they were waves.
I am alone.

Kate Camp

Note on the poem

I did a week-long online poetry retreat with Mark Doty and Ellen Bass in late April – because of the time difference I got up each day at 4am to listen to a craft talk from one of them, then we had writing time, and re-grouped at 9am for a three hour workshop, where we shared what we had written in the morning.

I was staying up at our bach so that I could be in “Total Immersion” which was the name of the course. As it happened I got covid at the same time, so my total immersion and legal isolation were combined, quite usefully. This poem originated in that slightly surreal setting.

I think it makes a nod to Jenny Bornholdt’s “Then Murray Came” – the friendly stranger who comes into your home and shares a little – maybe a lot – about their life, then disappears again. Bornholdt’s work has been such an important influence on me as it is on so many New Zealand poets.  

Kate Camp is a Wellington-born poet, author of seven collections from Victoria University Press: Unfamiliar Legends of the Stars (1998), Realia (2001), Beauty Sleep (2005), The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls (2010), Snow White’s Coffin (2013), The internet of things (2017) and How To Be Happy Though Human: New and Selected Poems (2020), co-published by Victoria University Press in New Zealand and House of Anansi Press in Canada. Her memoir, You Probably Think This Song Is About You, was published in 2022 by Te Herenga Waka University Press.

Everyone is Everyone Except You, Jordan Hamel, Dead Bird Books, 2022

In this city you can be whoever you want
and I’m still so much myself it’s disgusting

nothing else fits, nothing is comfortable,
I just want comfort, I want, I want

poorly-aged fish-out-of-water celebrity voyeurism
to remind me living can be so, um, uncomplicated

there’s nothing left for me here except reality
sleep demons waving performance plans

mandatory psychometric pub quizzes
where every answer is a ghost you’ve buried

 

Jordan Hamel, from ‘The Simple Life’

 

Three poets whose writing I admire immensely – Hera Lindsay Bird, Tracey Slaughter and Tayi Tibble – endorse Jordan Hamel’s debut poetry collection on the back of the book. That is enough to make it essential reading. I read their comments once I finish the book and have mused upon its effects. I begin by pirouetting on ‘everybody’ and ‘someone’, pulled between the wide-reaching ALL and the particular ME. The poems deliver ‘I’ and ‘you’, and I am fascinated by the movement these pronouns/entities/gaps generate. You could say there’s a swing bridge between them, an interface, a hammock, and however you visualise the link, it is a link with traffic. And out of that glorious energised traffic, you find poetry.

Jordan’s deft ear and eye, his ability to craft words and lines, underline myriad ways to read and travel in a poem. Writing (reading) becomes a route beneath your own skin, a way of stretching writing to embrace the universal and the personal. This is writing of comfort and discomfort, of need and want. It is vulnerable and it is direct.

Rebecca Hawkes writes very different subject matter, but I absorb a similar verve and vitality, an ability to reveal spikes and judder bars, and to conceal. Jordan’s speaking voice is one of self scrutiny, self doubt, even perhaps self erasure. And then the whole process turns upside down, and the poetry is the act and art of self preservation, self testing, self nourishment. This affects me deeply as reader (and as secret writer).

The self deprecation is scattered thought out:

and the last old man          I’ll ever disappoint      is me

where I grew up      men don’t get sick     they rust
like grizzled house cats      under the ute      they crawl
with a quiet    they’ve always carried            they don’t die
just become another blunt saw    you never throw away

 

from ‘The worst thing that will ever happen to you
hasn’t happened yet’

The final poem ends on blank space, on pause, reset, refill, silence, breath intake. It is over to us how we respond, engage. We now inhabit “you”, which also becomes a way of reflecting upon “I”, whichever “I” that is, whether anybody everybody somebody. These lines form the final musical notes of a haunting book that is such a rich and open reading experience.

                   the perfect poem is just                                     blank space

 

the perfect you is just

 

 

from ‘Human resource’         

Dead Bird page

Jordan Hamel website

Wellington City Libraries video interview

Jordan Hamel (he/him/his) is a Pōneke-based writer, poet and performer. He was the 2018 New Zealand Poetry Slam champion and represented NZ at the World Poetry Slam Champs in 2019. He is the co-editor of Stasis Journal and co-editor of a forthcoming climate change poetry anthology from Auckland University Press. He is a 2021 Michael King Writer-in-Residence and recently placed third in the 2021 Sargeson Prize judged by Patricia Grace. He has recently had words published in The Spinoff, The Pantograph Punch, Newsroom, NZ Poetry Shelf, Landfall, Turbine | Kapohau and elsewhere.

monarch wings

risingholme park
ten years before the
/ earth cracked open /

the pine trees were filled with sleeping butterflies

looking up
sails of their orange wings
closed to triangle points
nestled in the needles
childhood haze / gold in memory

and then one night suddenly
/ frost /

looking down
the next day
orange confetti / green grass
disembodied wings
fluttered from death

we gathered their softness / into a basket

went to the dairy on the way home
and when man behind counter saw
eyes went wide / heard him thinking:
butterfly murderers
and i just didn’t know how to
/ explain /

Hebe Kearney

Hebe Kearney (they/them) is a poet who lives in Tāmaki Makaurau. Their work has appeared in publications including: Mantissa Poetry Review, Mayhem, Starling, samfiftyfour, Tarot, takahē, and Poetry New Zealand Yearbooks. You can find them at @he__be on Instagram.

The Girl and the Poet Read Tea Leaves in Paris-Gore‘

Spilt tea settles between Formica
flicks of colour, flecks of leaves
turn on a red table.

In front of them a collusion of fate,
a collision of cups in a clumsy act,
the leaves of a script set out before them.

Butter sizzled and browned on a black griddle,
hoisted flags of wet washing hung
in a damp wait, a forgotten cigarette smoking
in the ashtray, the teapot cosy
in crocheted stripes.
On the red Formica table,
pikelets dripped the thin juice of melted syrup
down her fingers, onto her dress.

They change their table, order a new
pot of tea and a plate of hot pancakes.
The syrup melts thin and juicy, drips

down her fingers onto her dress. He gives
her a serviette to soak up the mess.
She folds it in half for her own plot.

Jenny Powell

                                                                                                                       

Three Siblings on the End of The World as They Know It

for Lyssa, Ruby & Michelle

Taane

to kick the night
into something
new

it feels good
for light to break in

Taawhirimaatea

someone makes a joke about
the great divorce
the wind doesn’t
find it very funny
doesn’t even crack a smile

they close their eyes and start to blow

Whiro

prefers the dark
and the warmth one day they will be
strong enough to
parent trap the
earth and the sky
back together

essa may ranapiri

essa may ranapiri (Ngaati Raukawa, Te Arawa, Ngaati Pukeko, Clan Gunn) is a person who lives on Ngaati Wairere whenua. Author of ransack and ECHIDNA. PhD student looking at how poetry by taangata takataapui engages with computer technology. Co-editor of Kupu Toi Takataapui | Takataapui Literary Journal with Michelle Rahurahu. They have a great love for language, LAND BACK and hot chips. Thanks as always goes to their ancestors, who are everything. They will write until they’re dead.

Renoir’s Bicycle, Michael Harlow, Cold Hub Press, 2022

Launch Notes

In the past, I’ve edited a couple of Michael Harlow’s poetry titles, but I’ve loved arriving to his new book like a house guest, rather than as one of the electricians or scaffolders tinkering during the final stages of its construction.

Renoir’s Bicycle is a mysterious, atmospheric, idiosyncratic, compelling collection. It seems to me that it’s often a celebration and delicate understanding of the private, interior life; the foundations of identity; the inner-scape of secrets, wishes, dreams, whimsy, reveries, desires, the unspoken, or the unrealised: all the hidden things that can either drive us — or block us; even make us deeply, psychologically unwell, if they’re unacknowledged.

I wanted to use Michael’s line ‘the imagination never lies’ as a mantra, for a while, after reading the collection; and also found myself writing down other phrases to pin to the corkboard in my study: ‘the rondeaux of astonishments’, say, or ‘rondels of light’; or ‘call it love, a lush wilderness in the mind’. Phrases that themselves seem like sun landing on a gem or a silver hook: phrases I wish I could wear, somehow: as earrings or lockets.

Several of the poems ring with authentic, detailed memory and leave a feeling of nostalgia, even when the life in the poem isn’t your own; some trace fleeting states of mind; others work through the comical switches and non-sequiturs of dream language.

They might outline the strange rituals and comforts humans invent for themselves to cope with the dark, with loss, and death:

She took a clean, white bone from her apron pocket,
rubbing it over the warts on both my hands.
     Then she said a prayer in Italian reciting it
backwards. And then she kissed the white bone,
crossing herself three times, and buried it in the earth;
where I could hear Father singing his heart out.
And my Sister too.

from ‘A song in the dark’

On the other hand, these short pieces might evoke a certain disposition, or lean on our responses, the way music does. By this I mean that despite the fact that the front cover of th book calls these prose poems, the music of their syntax, the emotions that the rhythms, hesitations, refrains, and prosody convey, seem to be as much a part of the meaning as any nuggety little quotable, extractable bit of, say, ‘advice’ or ‘belief’. The feeling of spell and flow, sound and song are powerful in Michael’s work.

I’ve talked about the interior life of the mind, and things that might feel a bit nebulous and vague, like music and mood — yet these pieces also call on tangible forms like the fable, or riddle, the tragi-comic skit; or the love song. Several struck me as strange, compressed and compelling psychological or crime case notes. (‘Round the bend’ and  ‘In the mood’, to name just two). All of them, in some way, even the skits or riddles, document and diagnose what it’s like to carry a self through all the puzzles and buffetings of time, and alongside other people with all their own quirks, attractions, and neuroses.

The collection is given a sense of weave or pattern in its repetitions of light, dark, music, birdsong and other motifs; and by lines that echo each other from poem to poem here (and even from earlier poems from Michael’s other collections). I came to think of those repetitions as perhaps like characteristic gestures by which we might recognise a loved one: the drawn out syllables in their way of sighing; the way they hold their elbows when they slide in their socks across the kitchen floor; that favourite, Fanta-coloured hat. Michael’s refrains are the fingerprints, the laughter lines, by which we know him.

I have at least ten particular favourites in the collection —  but perhaps the top top favourite is the poem ‘Unspeakable’— which is also a perfect and sorrowful micro story, as a character looks back on his life, and struggles with how to articulate his origins, his history, the losses that have, in a sense, brought him to where and who he is now. Poets might be more obsessed with language than the average punter, and the poem could be an analogy for the poet’s role, but in its suggestions of loss of faith, desecration of a trove of myth, separation from personal and cultural heritage, I think what it addresses is far broader and deeper.

I’m reproducing it here, with permission from Michael and his publisher, Roger Hickin of Cold Hub Press:

Unspeakable

Trying to write of the unspeakable.
In the white-washed room with
the broken statues of his ancestors.
At the oval table, the lamplight
drawing a circle. Inside it the cast
shadow of his hand and the stub
of a pencil. Trying to say something
that would take him back to the time
when he had no name in the streets
to call his own. And then he wrote
‘Every word is a crossroads.’

Michael’s work often makes me think about the lies we harbour. Reading it alongside Martin Shaw’s Courting the Wild Twin, Michael’s poetry also seems to be about the shadow selves we try to fling out the window, or run from, but end up having to live and reckon with in some way; the chimaera versions of reality we piece together as young children when we’re only told a portion of the truth going on for the adults in our lives, or when they push down too punitively on the wild in us; how after childhood we can both carry gleams of Eden at the back of our minds and yet be damaged by our parents’ own hidden wounds; how we can both mirror and yet distort those wounds at the same time. And yet, even all of this is paraphrase and abstraction from me, really. What the reader often comes across in Michael’s work are small, dramatic re-enactments of scenes that quietly suggest, rather than announce, this kind of psychic tunnelling. They’re scenes composed with a kind of melodic, sonorous touch, which means somehow we can lift and carry even the most tragic stories without smashing into stone fragments ourselves.

Cold Hub Press page

Emma Neale is the author of six novels,  six collections of poetry, and a collection of short stories. Her novel, Billy Bird (2016) was short-listed for the Acorn Prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and long-listed for the Dublin International Literary Award. Emma has received a number of literary fellowships, residencies and awards, including the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for a Distinguished Contribution to New Zealand Poetry 2020. Her first collection of short stories,  The Pink Jumpsuit (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2021) was long-listed for the Acorn Prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. The mother of two sons, Emma lives in Ōtepoti/Dunedin, where she works as a freelance editor.

Michael Harlow is one of New Zealand’s leading poets. He has published twelve books of poetry, including Cassandra’s Daughter (2005, 2006), The Tram Conductor’s Blue Cap (a finalist in the 2010 New Zealand Book Awards), Sweeping the Courtyard, Selected Poems (2014), Heart Absolutely I Can (2014), Nothing For It But To Sing (2016, winner of the Otago University Press Kathleen Grattan Award) and The Moon in a Bowl of Water (2019). Take a Risk, Trust Your Language, Make a Poem (1986) won the PEN/NZ award for Best First Book of Prose. Residencies he has held include the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship and the Robert Burns Fellowship. In 2014 he was awarded the Lauris Edmond Memorial Prize for Distinguished Contribution to New Zealand Poetry, and in 2018 he received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry.

Time

No time but the present. That’s not quite it, is it? No time like the present is the usual phrase. Do it now, in other words – don’t put it off. But, as H. G. Wells’s Time Traveller explains so clearly in the story, there’s no such thing as an instantaneous object: it must have duration, as well as height, length and breadth, in order to be perceived (let alone possessed) by us. Now is a moment which is over so quickly that it’s only perceptible in the rearview mirror, as a part of the long spool of experience unwinding behind us. So all we really have is the past – that is to say, the memory of what is already done and dusted. But do we have that, even? It’s no longer with us, so I’d have to say no – all we have, then, is that quavering moment, poised on “Time’s toppling wave,” in W. H. Auden’s phrase. But since we can’t perceive it till it’s over, you could argue that all we have is anticipation: the prospect of what the next moment will bring. You’d think that might make us a bit less greedy: less determined to collect the leavings of all these moments, past and to come, and more prepared to enjoy them to the uttermost. We’re only conscious for a small part of the time allotted to us: there’ll never be any more of it, so let’s dance. 

Jack Ross

 

Jack Ross is the author of eight works of fiction and six books of poems, most recently The Oceanic Feeling (2021). He was managing editor of Poetry New Zealand from 2014-2020, and has edited numerous other books, anthologies, and literary journals. He blogs here.