There’s a complex trough of grief.
There’s a ridge of missing hearts.

 

Paula Green

I love couplets, and love the look of a single couplet on the page, how it catches my attention like a solitary cloud in a bright blue sky. I love how it can unfold in a breath, and you get awe or surprise or sweet wit, with or without rhyme, near rhyme, off rhyme, slant rhyme. Enjambment or a picnic stop. Regular beats or irregular stutters. You might meet the commonplace or the complicated, the uncanny or a confession. Truth or lies. You might veer off to unexpected gulleys and crevices. And of course couplets might gather together in clusters; threading ideas, experience, motifs, mood. My early book, Chrome, was an entire book of couplets on the page. I was drawn to how, on first glance you encounter sameness and routine (one critic loathed this banality), but how the more you look, the more nuances and differences are exposed. A bit like looking at the same view of the Waitākere ranges from our lounge window for the past decades.

For a number of years, I have delighted in Bill Manhire’s flair with couplets, the unsaid, the mysterious, the hinted-at anecdote, humour. His deft touch with rhyme. Here is a favourite:

Talking to the Moon

But the moon has drifted out to sea.
It doesn’t know what will make me happy.

 

Bill Manhire
from Victims of Lightning, THWUP, 2010

James Brown emailed me: “Your request has got me pondering couplets – when is a couplet not a couplet etc. I’ve written poems in rhymed couplets as a challenge to myself and because it’s not the done thing (for good reasons – I’m not advocating for rhymed couplets). Poets can be contrary people and because the prevailing form is free verse, rhymed couplets are a challenging temptation. ‘Peculiar Julia’ and ‘Shrinking Violet’ from Floods Another Chamber were turned into songs on a recent album Please Go Wild, that will be released by Polite Company next week. Another poem I wrote using rhyming couplets is ‘Winston Peters’ (The Tip Shop), whom I’ve no time for, so the poem also disrupts the common perception that a poem always conveys the poet’s truth.”

Ah. I have been musing on couplets a lot lately, on why I love them, and why I keep writing them, especially in the middle of the night, occasionally publishing them on Twitter (X). Writing a couplet in my head can be such a satisfying diversion in the midst of pain or doubt or melancholy or 3 a.m. wakefulness. The other night, when I was listening to a BBC programme on seaweed, I decided to post a suite of couplets on Poetry Shelf, both new and unpublished, by local poets, rhyming or not rhyming. And then I slipped into musing on ‘The troubled crocodile cloud / says peace not war out loud.’

A Suite of Couplets

Marriage

His hands in the sink, he felt his loneliness like a tide pulling him out to sea.
She came back up the stairs, more a cloud than a silver lining.

Anna Jackson

The Joke

Each poem an astonishment that breath
has once more entered and then left —

a sneeze, a hiccup, laughter at the joke. 
Inside each joke the fear of death.

Chris Price

from ‘Stone by Stone’

they saw in the north a glimmer a whisper of light
from the fissure a promise of better

elbowing like atua cramped between their olds
trying to prise the lid off to break the mould

Ariana Tikao

Sediments

sediments in the earth
rock and dirt we are the same

looking back looking forward
time collapsed we are the same

Ariana Tikao

Tell You What

One bird explains the sky to another.
That’s the way they operate.

+

In the 1950s all the boys had big ears.
Those were embarrassing years.

+

Every boy with his book.
Every sheep with its showground.

+

We used to call the stove the range.
I don’t see why that should have had to change.

+

Raewyn keeps in touch.
I never liked her much.

Bill Manhire

Unrushed Light

Something sparks at the end of the wire.
I have a memory like a flour sifter.

Paula Green

How to Age

Don’t panic.
Just keep going.

Cilla McQueen

Mixed Messages

Do you like yourself?
I do. 

James Brown

Entwined

*

We are the perfect couple,
like a headache and Panadol.

*

The real myth of Cinderella is that the order is
first the drudgery, then the prince.

*

When he sees the new baby, the child says to his mother
‘Now you’re not just my mum, you’re my brother-er.’

*

In her room, the child talks on a toy phone
playing the game of not being alone.

Emma Neale

Syrinx

He blew hot stupid breath through me and called it music. My mind watched my body 
from up in the sky, could only think how beautiful the reeds look reflected in the river.

Lily Holloway

Inside

Inside the city of longing is the city of bare feet.
Inside the city of fear is the city of cumin seeds.

Paula Green

Dawn

It’s just shy of dawn.
There’s a pheasant on the lawn.

Paula Green

A Suite of Autumn Couplets

[ . . . ]

Chronic pain
like lemon juice rain.

Alpinecore

A toxic man-thought in the brilliant light:
that I could beat a mountain in a fight.

Four Months in Four Regrets

That paisley shirt. Benching my leading scorer.
Excessive drinking. Missing the aurora.

Mujaddara

I know. I know what’s happening elsewhere.
While I mess around with my kitchenware.

Diary, 2024-05-10

Friday. I wrote another first line of a book.
I’m now at one ten-thousandth of 10,000 books.

Braided Rivers

I also look dried-up if you’re passing by.
I also suddenly flood if you ask why.

Warfare

In short, emotional asymmetry.
I think of you and you don’t think of me.

[ . . . ]

As much charm
as a factory farm.

Processing

Consider the empty networks of grief
working like the veins in a dry leaf.

Erik Kennedy