photo credit: Claire Lacey

To celebrate the inclusion of At the Point of Seeing by Megan Kitching (Otago University Press, 2023) on the Ockham NZ Book Award Poetry short list, I am reposting a reading Megan did for Poetry Shelf from her collection and the review I wrote. Megan’s terrific collection is a book to be celebrated indeed. The awards will be announced at an Auckland Writers Festival Event on May 15th.

The reading

‘Headlands’

‘Crematorium’

‘Houseplants’

Megan Kitching, At the Point of Seeing, Otago University Press, 2023

The poem

The Inlet’s Shore
flat and prosey
            — marginalia in a book of poems

Two chevroned feathers
from a paradise duck’s breast
caught on knitted turf so smooth
they wafted into my fingers.

Their carpet was of water pimpernel
beside the glasswort groves
along the inlet’s shore woven
with shells and mellow seagrass.

Flat, it was, manytoned drabs
of sand, gleam and sun-shot
emerald marching in low drones
to the dunes and distant hills.

Under a milky light, pied birds
went about stooped, gleaning
the speckled field; others hung
dark on the band of the sea.

In that wavering horizon,
where the merest snag loomed
I found a dull, sedate beauty,
an abundance of swans.

Yes, despite the red fire flush
tipping the succulent wort
and a stilt’s elegant flight
the marsh was flat, almost poetry.

Megan Kitching
from At the Point of Seeing

The review

Once, when I asked a boy from Hong Kong
what new things he’d seen here,

he answered, ‘the moon’.

from ‘Dark Skies’

Megan Kitching’s debut collection, At the Point of Seeing, as the title so aptly suggests, is a book of observation, a handbook on slowing down to see the world. Reading Megan’s poetry splinters immunity to the daily view, the window vista, the routine route. Looking becomes poetry and poetry becomes a source of fascination, nuances, wonder. It might be poetry as contemplation, whether reading or writing, and in that contemplation, in that slow and steady homage to the physical world we inhabit, we are returned to its beauty. In this time of unbearable inhumanity, planet selfishness, personal profit, ugly behaviour, At the Point of Seeing, is a reminder of hope.

In ‘Volcanic Harbour’, the speaker might “sit on a stone and let time work”. I become participant as I too find a “stone” to sit on, and let the poetry work along with time. I move from shells in a museum, to pūhā musings, to a rounded hill, the prevailing wind, horses in a paddock, an albatross curving, muslin rain, macrocarpa that “claw the sky”.

Megan is deft with words. I am trying to think of a poet who achieves such surprise and wonder on the line. Perhaps Emma Neale, perhaps Bill Manhire, Bernadette Hall. So often the next word is not the expected word, it takes me by surprise and that is reading delight. It might be adjective, verb, image evoked, trope. And that is in itself a performance of the awe of seeing through word selections. The way the albatross arc catches our breath, the crawling bee mesmerises.

A morning rain of muslin, hardly there
except in the pinprick flicker, a thickening
of the air.

from ‘Mornington

I also read this sumptuous collection as musical sound track, and again it produces wonder, delight, sonic surprise. It is a sweetly mixed playlist as we move from assonance, to rhyme, near rhyme, alliteration, aural dip and lift and slide. It is writing on the wire. It is scoring the world, it is intricate melody, it is open tuning.

Ah. I am pitching this book to you, when against all odds, poetry is a lifeline, the source of joy, the connecting force, the point of contemplation. We are at the point of seeing, we are at the point of speaking, sharing, hoping, and poetry such as this, poetry as good as this, makes all the difference.

Paula Green, originally posted November 2023

Megan Kitching was born in Tāmaki Makarau Auckland and now lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin. She holds a PhD in English Literature from Queen Mary University, London, looking at the influence of the natural sciences on eighteenth-century poetry. She has taught English and creative writing in the UK and at the University of Otago. Her poetry has appeared in The Frogmore Papers (UK), takahē, Poetry New Zealand, and Landfall. “The horses,” published in takahē 95, was nominated for Best Small Fictions 2020. In 2021, she was the inaugural Caselberg Trust Elizabeth Brooke-Carr Emerging Writer Resident. At the Point of Seeing is her debut collection.

Otago University Press page