Song of Less, Joan Fleming, Cordite Books, 2022

What does it mean to continue? Grandmother says that now is the time to ask ourselves what we are, other than ourselves. A piece. This is a moment mad for understanding. The body is a fence but it is also a wave and a thread in a fabric.

from ‘Yana’

Joan Fleming’s Song of Less is unsettling. It is extraordinary, essential, unlike anything I have read before. It is a poetry collection to feel and not to explain. Wrap yourself in the cave of its making and you will be ripped apart, go into mourning, weep for the planet.

We are not supposed to sing her songs but sometimes I catch them in
the air and put them in my mouth.

from ‘Yana’

Follow the voices. Follow the song. Follow a tiny cluster of characters, that may be a “ritual cluster”, a small nomadic family of cousins adrift, steered by the grandmother across a devastated land to the next camp or cave or hollow river. It may be physical, a way of being, an altered state. The names of the cousins are fable-like: Cousin Groundpigeon, Cousin Twig, Cousin Frogmouth, Cousin Butcher. The story may be apocalyptic-fable, post-contemporary poetry, writing that cuts deep into the tragedy of humanity. The landscape is blistered, people are blistered, language is strange and eccentric, curdled and re-formed.

Nothing is as it used to be. Language fails and falters in the grip of catastrophe. The syntax twists and splits, new words emerge as old words are jammed together. Unexpected. Unsettling. Fragile. Searching in the ruins, the debris.

Their fruitless scrape along the valley’s throat
is companied by doppel-devil fear:
in seeping through the will-dies’ paper skin,
we bring the peril of the mirror near.

from ‘Don’t-berries’

You grapple to understand Radius as you read; the event or circumstances that changed everything, the neither full light nor full dark. Or Gone; the mysterious disappearances. And then you fall upon solidarity and salvage, and above all, the grandmother’s wisdom.

This is a collection of song where you or we or I – whoever is speaking – is song, is story, and this matters. Yet song becomes less, story becomes less, and you or we or I – whoever is speaking – is under threat. Ah, the ability to make, even to hold new songs, is also under threat.

Grandmother says Story is a high and nourishing thing for which to be
scrounging. Story completes us. But what is completion? Permission to
draw a circle around something?

from ‘Yana’

There is a backwards-forwards momentum as though we must look forwards to where/what/how/why we have come from. There is a thin line between Love and Monster; what horrors ferment in the blistered surfaces of skin and earth? There is the disconcerting mind-altering don’t-berries. There is desire that is taboo, that is rape, that is the end of the road.

Ah, how to write poetry in the face and wounds and brutal edges of global loss, climate change, ignorant thinking, untethered greed? Joan has produced a collection of poetry that is the most haunting, body-aching, stomach-churning, self-turning wound. It is extraordinary. It is transformative. It is hallucinogenic. You read with your whole body and it hurts. And yet, and still imperatively yet, I want to do everything in my power to help. To tend this corrugated and corrupted planet on the edge of an abyss. To make choices that help rather than hinder. To speak even if not invited to.

This is what poetry can do. Here I go, tongue-tied, holding this precious book out to you.

Joan Fleming is the author of the books Song of Less (Cordite Books, 2022), Failed Love Poems (THWUP, 2015) and The Same as Yes (THWUP, 2011), and the pamphlets Some People’s Favourites (Desperate Literature, 2019) and Two Dreams in Which Things are Taken (DUETS, 2010). She holds a Masters in Creative Writing from Victoria University’s IIML, a Masters in English from Otago University, and a PhD in ethnopoetics from Monash University. In 2021 her manuscript Dirt was shortlisted for the Helen Anne Bell poetry bequest. Her honours include the Biggs Poetry Prize, a Creative New Zealand writing fellowship, the Verge Prize for Poetry, and the Harri Jones Memorial Prize from the Hunter Writers’ Centre. 

Cordite Books page

Joan Fleming website

A Walk Upstream

Trout and White are walking up a stream. Sounds of rubber boots,
stones, water.

White   You could say it trembles.
Trout    With anticipation?
White    On the brink. Eggshell.
Trout     Of hope? Falling?
White    Grace? Hovering?
Trout    A dragonfly.
White     Exactly.

Trout     I debate the advantages of the one over the other, so that
              when I leap –
White    Look out – too bad. Here, give me your hand.
Trout     Thanks. Up to the knee.
White    Occupational hazard.

Crackling branches, sounds of effort.

White    Who’s this on the bank?
Trout     Neck! Well met!
Neck     Trout of Fish and Game, old boy. Good condition!
Trout     White, Egg Board.
White    Pleased to meet you.
Trout     Neck, of the racing fraternity.
Neck     Checking the watercourse.
Trout     Ensuring an even flow.
Neck      Mind if I join you?

Neck climbs down the bank. They continue upstream, occasionally
jumping stones and wading through small rapids.

Trout     Until I was joined by my friend White, who has
              distracted me with semantics.
White    Head of a pin. At a molecular –
Neck     Now you see it, now you don’t?
White    In terms of the benzene molecule for instance –
Trout     There! Over there!

They stop. Water flowing over stones, into pools. Birdsong.

Neck     Ripples? Under the water?
White    Quivering. It trembles.
Neck     Whitebait?
Trout     Give me lampreys. A surfeit. In butter.
Neck      You might find one under these banks.
Trout     Turning to bite its tail in the frying pan. Delicious.
Neck      A coiling, a succulent morsel, head to tail in a golden
               ring.
White     Exactly. Molecular, neither here nor there.
Neck      A delicacy.
White    Ouroboros.
Trout     Certainly. A taste that trembles on the brink of
              roundness.

They continue, with effort.

Neck     Heard of the Crusader, Trout.
White    Ford?
Neck     Rabbit, my friend. Very good to stir-fry. Breed them in
              Oz.
White    Are we going much further?
Trout     Public release at Oreti Beach 1863. Speeches and songs,
              toasts to the ardent new citizens of our verdant land,
              gambolling off into the sandhills.
White    Gathered here together on the occasion of the
              unconditional release of the binary tree –
Neck      Procreation, eh, Fish and Game? No telling how far it’ll go.
Trout     Nature only needs one pair of bunnies.

Fade out sounds of them going on. Somebody slips, is rescued, they
continue. Birdsong and the sound of water take over.

Cilla McQueen
from Firepenny (Otago University Press 2005) and Poeta: selected and new poems (Otago University Press 2018)

Note on ‘A Walk Upstream’

Scooped from the stream of consciousness, in a bush setting, the poem imagined itself as a radio play. The part of my mind which loves to listen to and revel in the resonances of language produced three eccentric characters, complete with names, whose desultory talk as they continue upstream, engaged in ‘checking the watercourse’, ranges from quantum physics to rabbits.

Cilla

Poet, teacher and artist CILLA McQUEEN has published 15 collections, three of which have won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry. Her most recent work is Poeta: selected and new poems (Otago University Press 2018). She has also published a poetic memoir, In a Slant Light (Otago UP, 2016). Other titles from OUP are Markings, Axis, Soundings, Fire-penny, The Radio Room and Edwin’s Egg. In 2008 Cilla received an Hon. Litt.D. from the University of Otago, and was the New Zealand National Library Poet Laureate 2009–11. In 2010 she received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry. Cilla lives and works in the southern port of Motupohue, Bluff.

My Thoughts Are All of Swimming, Rose Collins, Sudden Valley Press, 2022

and after, in the streak-pale sun, the welcome,

liberated hunk of sky – a tangle and comb

of wasted boughs, and still to come

the hum of absence – the loss of blue-glazed cornicing

or the blush of cupped gumnuts icing

outstretched stems – a ghost-shape for the wind to sing

from “Felling the Eucalypt”

Rose Collin’s debut collection, My Thoughts Are All of Swimming, was chosen by Elizabeth Smither as the inaugural winner of the John O’Connor Award. In conjunction with the Canterbury Poets’ Collective, the award offers publication to the best first manuscript of a local poet.

Rose’s collection is both elegant and physically present. I jotted down key words as I read, and realised they formed a provisional map of why I love reading and writing poetry. To begin, musicality. Every word-note is pitch perfect and forms a musical score for the ear: “Alan hears the / tide’s shingle-clatter, and closer in, his old dog’s chuffing / sighs” (from “Alan Recuperating on a Bed of Rabbits”). And:

Composing in this crackling southern light –

clinker lines, sail split, the hemp-warp flapping –

while you spun the anchor wider than geography,

a green-oak branch weighted with a stone

from “Returning North”

Secondly, the collection promotes breathing space. There is the space on the page in which a poem nestles, the chance for poems to breathe, for readerly pause and pivot. The internal design heightens this effect, with generous line spacing and a decent sized font.

I can catch a finger-full of salt and rub

it in the cuts: the aim is to avoid stillness.

I move like a blind woman baking sorrow cake

blindfold, following the recipe

spooning in what’s lost.

from “The Kitchen”

Thirdly, and intricately tied to “breathing space”, is the use of understatement, where room is left for the reader to navigate ellipses, semantic clearings, things held back. There are poignant references, electric traces that signal illness, challenge, danger, and more illness.

I am on the trapeze of a new cycle of investigations – I

walked here from the hospital, skirting the rim of a volcano

for my flat white.

from “Lion in Chains Outside Circus Circus Cafe, Mt Eden”

Fourthly, and I am searching for the best word here, there is an inquisitiveness on the part of the poet, as she ranges wide and deep in her curiosity and engagements; touching upon fairy stories, other modes of writing such as William Burroughs cut-up practice, a Kafka aphorism, sculptural installations, a Lydia Davis short story, music, other poets, Robert Falcon Scott’s diary.

My fifth word, and my handful of ideas could extend to become a catalogue, to a more substantial map of possibilities in this sumptuous poetry, is intimacy. I am musing on how you are drawn deep into the writing; how it feels exquisitely intimate. It feels compellingly close, as people and places resonate: from son to brother to friends, from Lyttelton to Ireland.

you are light as steam right now

high frequency, cloud-high

but when you are here, this side

of security, oh the things I have to tell you –

how your letter is the most valuable

thing I carry

how we have built a tower for the chickens

to roost in – kānuka poles frame the ceiling

from “While the radios are tuned you write letters home”

Rose has produced a debut collection to celebrate. It moves you to muse and be nourished, to inhabit and settle in poetry clearings. To dawdle and drift as you read. Close your eyes and absorb the music as though you have put on an album, a breathtaking album you want on repeat. There is darkness and there is light, there is the particular and the intangible. My Thoughts Are All of Swimming is a joy to read.

Rose Collins, born in New Zealand and of Irish descent, is a poet and short fiction writer. She worked as a human rights lawyer before completing the MA in Creative Writing at the IIML in 2010. She won the 2022 John O’Connor Award and the 2020 Micro Madness Competition, and has been shortlisted for the UK Bare Fiction Prize (2016), the Bridport Prize (2020) and the takahē Monica Taylor Poetry Prize (2020). Rose was the 2018 Writer in Residence at Hagley College. She is a some-time litigation lawyer, a beekeeper and a mother of two. She lives in Te Whakaraupō Lyttelton Harbour with her family.

Sudden Valley Press page

7 Mistakes

The salt sting nights we were two cuts       
            in a tongue that licked December.

Not how the falsely boasted flavour hurt ourselves,
           but how it hurt others.

Certain telephone calls that shone with a doggish fidelity
           as if unafraid.

The well-aimed lighting rig we called radical honesty,
            and all the acts we saw there.

Our sweet, multiple forgivings:
           a peace with a torn hem.

Telling him the reason wasn’t
            love running out.

The completion of
            this poem.

Joan Fleming

Joan Fleming’s latest book is Song of Less (Cordite Books, 2022), a verse novel exploring ritual, taboo and the limits of individualism in the ruins of ecological collapse. She is the author of the poetry collections The Same as Yes and Failed Love Poems (Te Herenga Waka Press), and the pamphlets Two Dreams In Which Things Are Taken (Duets) and Some People’s Favourites (Desperate Literature). Joan is a lecturer in creative writing at Massey University, and lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington.