Stones and Kisses, Peter Rawnsley, The Cuba Press, 2024

Waiting

Let a room wait
and sing with emptiness.
Let windows look in to touch
the stillness with sky light
and distant sounds of a city.
Let a table wait to be set
and candles to lift their spearheads.
Let a cup wait for wine and
bread wait to be broken, shared.
Let chairs wait for those who wait
and words rise from waiting pages
to speak in the mouths of proclaimers.
Let the air hold its breath and wait
for song and exaltation.

Peter Rawnsley

Picking up a poetry collection by a poet new to me, I always feel like I have an open-ended train ticket, not sure what I am going to view on my travels, where I will travel, what conversations will percolate as I read. Stones & Kisses is Peter Rawnlsey’s second collection, but this is my first sojourn with his work. The writing is melodic, contemplative, detail rich. He can move from a degree of mystery (what is behind the door?) to gentleness (the blessings to loved ones) to eclectic travel at home and abroad. He moves from reverie and contemplation to the rescue of a soldier in the desert to a first date. He can evoke a scene, a state of mind, a situation with deft and melodic use of language.

There are overlapping themes and motifs but the collection as a whole is infused with nature and with love. When I say ‘nature’, I am thinking of flora and fauna, especially birds, godwits, sea eagles, gulls, pied shags, tūī. But I am also thinking of human nature, where the contemplation of the ‘subdued slap and seethe / of a quiet sea’ or how ‘[t]he disturbed flight of gulls / knits together shore, sea and sky’, might also represent, across the collection as a whole, a contemplation of self. There is grief and death, the pain of loss, and there is love, there is ‘I’, ‘you’ and ‘she’. Love is there in the passing of time, as memory, as photograph, as presence. Love in ‘I’ and ‘you’ and ‘she’.

Reading the collection, I am reminded that poetry, like some art, is a form of transcendence. And indeed, there are several poems where the speaker stands absorbed before an artwork:

Scatter on the water’s surface.
Become the canvas’s painted surface.
hide within yourself a secret waviness.
Be filled with an inpouring of light.

from ‘ At the Monet exhibition’

I am particularly drawn to the list poems, to the enchanting and entrancing effect of repetition. One poem begins, ‘The word spoken is tree‘, and then builds a portrait through eclectic and poetic detail. You become embedded in the scene.

Attentiveness to the world versus immunity to the world is infectious. The way, despite its toxic canvas, we can lean into the world sideways, lean slantwise into a poem, into what is there before us and gain nourishment is imperative. Resist immunity. The opening lines of the opening poem of this terrific collection resound until the final page. Stones & Kisses is a delight.

Today I am a different me than I was yesterday.
I can feel it in how I hold myself and look about.
Something has changed, everything leans a little sideways.

from ‘ Leaning sideways’

Peter Rawnsley is a retired public servant living in Porirua, New Zealand. Stones & Kisses is his second collection of poems, following Light Cones (Mākaro Press, 2018).

The Cuba Press page