Hoof, Kerrin P Sharpe, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023

the blackbird mistakes

the blackbird mistakes
my blank page for snow
his wings shadow my pencil

my hand becomes a beak
my spine hollow bones
and feathers of a blackbird’s hump

he peck-pecks the paper
like rain   sleet   hail

I write tree
                 he’s in the branches
I write house
                 he’s on the roof
I write garden
                 he’s found a worm

now the poem’s
a blackbird’s watch-tower
a waiting room so cold

his gizzard rattles
the oldest song
it should be snowing

when I write sky
as quick as a full-stop
he’s back in the world

his eyes white blades
on the horizon

Kerrin P.Sharpe, from Hoof

Kerrin P. Sharpe’s new collection, Hoof, is “an invitation to travel by train through the poet’s world”. What an appealing idea. There are three sections, like three legs of a journey, with each stage beginning with a dedicated train poem. These poems establish the rhythm of travel, the musicality of movement, the way a poem is a sequence of windows offering shifting views. Rhyme compounds like the sound of wheels on track. We are moving through place, memory, experience, and it is immensely satisfying.

I write the word “original” on my notepad. “Original”, a word that went out of fashion for awhile, a fugitive idea where everything we write resists what precedes, but I am embracing this notion, this sense of “original”. Embracing the multiple possibilities of the word, let’s say the meeting place of not-replica, free spirit, individual, authentic, fresh, origin-al. I am holding Kerrin’s collection of poetry and it is like seeing things for the first time. I was delighted to read the Lynley Edmeades endorsement on the back of the book: “One of the most original and idiosyncratic voices currently writing in New Zealand.”

Take the poem, ‘the blackbird mistakes’, such an original take on writing poetry, it makes my skin prick, my heart beat faster, there on the poetry tracks of travel. I got permission to include the whole poem so you can read it for yourself.

If I muse on the resonance of train journeys, I muse on the connecting beat, the sense of concatenation where an image taps gently against the next image, a rebounding echo that sustains, that might be motif or object or image or sound. In a cluster of poems, my eye moves from branch to forest to trunk to trees. Through the window, through the window, the rhythm pulling me along the poetry tracks.

What we see through Kerrin’s windows of travel is eclectic: Antarctica, the parent’s head stone, hospitals, brides, horses, ice, a penguin, sunlight, Ted Hughes, Rita Angus, Benedict Cumberbatch. Startling images, stillness, activity, presence, absence. What we fall upon, as happens for many travellers, is the fertility of the gap alongside the reward of the connection.

The mesmerising cover, designed by Spencer Levine, comprises photos by Roland Searle that are housed at Te Papa: North Island steam train, 1920s–1930s, North Island lake, 1920s–1930s, Wanganui River, 1920s to 1930s. Another rewarding way to approach the poetry.

Hoof is sublime; it is waking up in the lifting light of poetry, seeing through the windows, enhancing energy, advancing heart. I love this original collection so much.

Kerrin P. Sharpe is the author of four previous poetry collections, most recently Louder. Her poems have appeared in local and international literary journals including Landfall, Turbine | Kapohau, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook, POETRY (US), Blackbox Manifold, PN Review and Stand. Her work has been anthologised in Best New Zealand Poems six times, Best of Best New Zealand Poems, Oxford Poets 2013, 150 Essential New Zealand Poems and A Game of Two Halves: The Best of Sport 2005–2019. In 2021 she held a writing residency at the Michael King Writers Centre. 

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