This past week I have spent creating my poetry room inside the house so our daughter can live in the outside room for awhile. Not quite there yet as it’s a mammoth job! Such a terrific thing to do – discovering old friends, a few books I have yet to read, getting new ideas, and above all, recognising the incredible range of poetry we are publishing in Aotearoa. The university presses are publishing strong lists and must-have anthologies, and the smaller presses excel at bringing an equally inviting range of voices to our attention. I believe our poetry publishers are all producing books with love and heart and it shows. Thank you.
Matariki is a time of connections – connecting with whanau, ancestors, the land, the food we harvest, the food we share, our wellbeing, the stars in the sky. It is a reminder to be kind, to seek unity rather than division, to heal and to nourish. If we as writers and readers can use our words, stories and poems as a vital form of connection and nourishment, then that is a strengthening agent in this challenging world.
This week in my letterbox:
Based on a True Story, David Gregory, Sudden Valley Press, 2024
Please join us for the launch of Bad Archive, the debut book by Flora Feltham. Bad Archive will be launched by Thomasin Sleigh, author of The Words for Her.
From the winner of the Letteri Family Prize for Nonfiction, Bad Archive is a collection of bold, beautiful and constantly surprising essays about life, loss, joy and the fabric of memory.
In this deftly woven work Flora Feltham explores the corners where her memories are stashed: the archive vault, her mother’s house, a marriage counsellor’s office, the tip and New World. She takes us on a frenzied bender in Croatia, learns tapestry and meets romance novelists, all while wondering how families and relationships absorb the past, given everything we don’t say about grief, mental illness or even love. Most importantly, she asks, how do you write about a life honestly – when there are so many flaws in the way we record history and, more confrontingly, in the way we remember?
Please join us for the launch of The Social Space of the Essay: 2003–2023, by Ian Wedde, at Time Out Bookstore. The Social Space of the Essay will be launched by Peter Simpson.
Friday 12 July From 6pm
Time Out Bookstore (upstairs) 432 Mt Eden Road Mt Eden, Auckland
Celebrated poet, novelist and critic Ian Wedde’s third collection of essays follows How to Be Nowhere: Essays and Texts 1971–1994 and Making Ends Meet: Essays & Talks 1992–2004, and ranges widely through Aotearoa New Zealand, the Pacific ocean, and the libraries and museums of the world. Artists considered in depth and often from multiple perspectives include Bill Culbert, Ralph Hotere, Tony Fomison, Judy Millar, Peter Black, Anne Noble, Yuk King Tan, Elizabeth Thomson and Gordon Walters, while writers including Allen Curnow and Russell Haley are remembered.
The Michael King Writers Centre is pleased to announce that next year’s programme of residencies at the historic Signalman’s House on Takarunga Mt Victoria in Devonport, Auckland, is now open for applications. Writers awarded a residency can look forward to peaceful accommodation, the use of a writing studio, a supporting stipend and the opportunity to focus on a specific writing project.
The 2025 programme offers 16 residencies to emerging and established writers for periods of two to four weeks. Awarded residencies will include up to four specifically for Māori or Pasifika writers.
Applications close on Monday 29 July 2024 and the selections are expected to be announced in September.
Matariki, the brightest born star I see you even from afar The keeper of peace and family I say goodbye to you sadly I see your beautiful woven cloak The stars I know about, everyone has spoke Your loving and caring nature Your brave and daring dedication Matariki, my favourite star and born from Tāwhiremātea The sweet and nourishing mother A star brighter than all the others Matariki, the brightest star Rests in the heavens above.
Thomas E, age 9, Richmond Rd School
Dear Grandad (a poem for Matariki)
Dear Grandad,
The bed creaked as you turned your fragile body
You scratched your sandpaper-like skin your joyful smile enlightened the room
while the soft wind kissed your cheek
you got older day by day while telling your priceless stories you loved to tell
you loved eating thick ice cream that made your teeth sting
your memory was like dust easily swept away
I wish I could’ve said goodbye
I love you, Grandad
by Mushal F, Year 8, Te Parito Kōwhai Russley School
Yesterday morning we got up in the pitch dark to go to my appointment. Mars was hovering, the sky miraculously clear of clouds. We stood on the water’s edge watching the sun lift behind Rangitoto. Breathtaking beauty. Utter peace. Perhaps we all tread the arc between uncertainty and joy, as I currently do, finding ways to nurture and nourish not just ourselves but those near us, taking time to absorb the sky, stars, bush, words on a page, the voice on the airwaves.
Poetry Shelf is my anchor, soaring kite, heart-tingling road trip. I am so grateful for the way you support my ideas, other writers, our books. It feels like our reading and writing communities continue to build and inspire.
This week I relaunched Poetry Box because I love connecting with children, teachers, school librarians, children’s authors. I loved Rachel King’s recent piece on why she writes novels for children rather than adults. I adore doing both but I get this completely. There’s a bit missing when I’m not writing and blogging for children. I believe words have super powers – whether in books or orally, read or written – because they are a vital key to self discovery, self travel, both global and local learning, a way to foster empathy kindness peace. My continued aim is to spark children to fall in love with what words can do, show and create. I want children’s fingers itching to write in myriad ways on myriad subjects and beyond myriad frames. I am so grateful I can once again work online with our precious tamariki across the motu.
This week I invited young poets to celebrate Matariki, and have included a couple for you to read. The Poetry Box festival of Matariki poems is here.
Today, as I sit down to my warm cheese scone and coconut milk coffee, I say thank you; thank you for your kind emails, your incredible support, your sublime poetry and your equally sublime storytelling that lifts and transports us all.
Ngā mihi o Matariki, te tau hou Māori!
Matarikiat Pōhara beach
The skin of the ocean wrinkling the breeze. The eyes of the wind skipping on the sand. I walk into the shallows, Waitā holds me close. Matariki’s breath brings warmth.
Raphe, Y8, age 12, Medbury School
Matariki Riddle
I’m a phantom at day at night I’m shining bright I’m named after a flower blossoming red light. (pōhutukawa)
Liam P, age 10, Richmond Rd School
MatarikiLight
Matariki guides kiwi to their homes in the forest. Matariki guides me to my family. She lights my way I write her this poem.
I have been thinking a lot about the place of poetry in global catastrophe and the incomprehensible leadership in Aotearoa. How do we write? Read? Do we need comfort or challenge or both? This week Rachel McAlpine.
Dear Paula, you ask what the place of poetry is in a global catastrophe. What a question!
I’m above all bewildered. Or shell-shocked, rather. It’s all too much. Recently I read Ellen Hawley’s The Hundred Years War in two thousand words. In a sense, she says, it began in 1066 and it’s still, in a sense, carrying on. Bonkers then. Bonkers now. She accidentally convinced me that it was futile for me to tackle a daily avalanche of questions, all starting with Why? Why? Why? It’s too much for my poor little brain. I’m grateful to journalists and other thinkers who do this work on my behalf.
My soul is manic. i rush everywhere with my truth. pleading strangers. to not like me. so that i might feel free.
Place is more precious than ever now that millions are swept from their homes by wars and the impact of climate crisis. Today at Freyberg Beach somebody said to me, “I come here to remember who I am.” It’s a chatty place (place) and again and again I hear myself saying to another swimmer, “Aren’t we lucky?” Not just casual lucky but lotto-lucky, crazy-lucky. Yes, our pipes are busting and our public buildings shut. But we have a place where we belong, set in a swimmable sea. Half of me winces with survival guilt. The other half is enchanted by the sheer luck of it … for now.
But do I write poems about the various global catastrophes? No. I’m focusing on my indie podcast, Learning How To Be Old. I’m on a mission to raise people’s realistic optimism about their own old age. How non-global head-in-the-sand is that? Well, I see the anomaly but I approach the podcast as 50 per cent creative plaything and 50 per cent public health service. Healing me and healing others.
I find comfort where I can, which includes various poets. Today, Tiny Ruins and Janis Freegard come to mind: the gentle touch works best for me. And here’s a few lines from “Tai Qi” by Maytal Noy, written last year when she was 15. I am humbled by such thoughtfulness and compassion.
At a time like this Balance, perfectly centred Instead of swinging from left to right A view of everyone as an equal deserving of life Education on the topic instead of striking out in ignorance Keeping grounded values in the face of extremism At this time There’s a real danger of swinging, of losing your balance That is why it’s so important to fix your eyes on the one spot that keeps you grounded, Put your arms wide out And seek equality
I offer this last poem as a tribute to the very young and the very old. At 84 I can barely remember being one or imagine being the other.
The bravest are millions
Out there living the bravest days are the very old, the frail old using every scrunch of the soul for the next impossible chore. The very old must win and win on multiple fronts day after trembling day.
Out there building the bravest lives are the young knowing what we knew and did not do.
Rachel McAlpine
And Paula, the word that will not go away is “tremble.”
Rachel McAlpine is 84, and all her current work relates in some way to the experience of aging. She hosts New Zealand’s only podcast on the topic: Learning How To Be Old. Her last collection of poems was How To Be Old (Cuba Press, 2020). She was a pioneer in digital content, and for fun she sings, dances, swims, blogs, and scribbles.
Meantime, Majella Cullinane, Otago University Press, 2024
Could I tell you I wish you could see this sky? We could sit on the deck. Ignore the overgrown clematis—I’m not much of a gardener. I wish I could speak to you but I don’t understand the language of the dead.
Stay here and watch with me. Watch the sky shift from flaxen to coral to mauve And, as the minutes pass, to muted grey. Let’s watch with the door open for the light to go.
from ‘Stay here’
Most reviews I write, draw upon the idea that to review a book is to re-see a book, to return and let the multiple lights and darknesses settle upon me. To try and leave my reading baggage and expectations at the backdoor step and enter the myriad delights of discovery. Heaven forbid if I am travelling with notions of what a poem ought to be or not to be, or notions that subject matter can be old hat or redundant. I have read so many extraordinary poetry collections over the past year (perhaps this is an example of post-transplant awe and wonder) and this week, having read, and reread Majella Cullinane’s glorious Meantime, I am taking stock of myself as reader and reviewer. Firstly, I am drawn to the heart of a poem, the heart of a book. I am picturing a core organ that promotes rhythm, energy, reading blood flow, along with ideas, sensations, feelings. I am curious about the alchemy of elements and the effects that set you alight and comfort and delight as you read. A good book of poetry is like an effervescent tablet in the heart.
Majella’s new poetry collection is exactly this, an effervescent tablet in my heart – it is a jolt, a boost, a sparkle. Majella writes out of grief, mourning her mother who died in Ireland when the poet was trapped in Aotearoa due to the Covid lockdown. Writing becomes a form of speaking, poetry a way of talking to and of and for her mother, and it is so very intimate, this maternal portrait, this daughter speaking. Mother missed and missing, perhaps too, daughter missed and missing. Fugitive memory. Necessary memory.
I am drawn to the unstable ground of writing, to the section titles that underline a fragility of being: ‘Am I still Here?’, ‘Meantime’ and ‘Nowhere to Be’. Writing becomes a way of retrieving elusive memory but also way of replenishing the gap, between here and there, Aotearoa and Ireland, life and death, mother and daughter, what is said and what is not said, what is safe and not safe and, in the context of a mother who is suffering from a form of dementia, what is delusional and what is real.
The sight of the pīwakawaka in the opening poem, ‘Memory’, is fitting. Its tail flickers like memory, like the unspoken, the subtly referenced: ‘Quiver / of pīwakawaka tail / hide / and seek’. Move to the final lines where the ‘d’ word cannot be spoken, and the poet muses on elusive memory:
one day I might be the old woman who doesn’t remember walking into a room and asking— whose memory is this anyway?
The pīwakawaka sighting is also a vital marker of place, giving shape and physicality to the elsewhere of here. Majella plants physical anchors, from the ‘tūī song’ to the ‘korimako in the neighbour’s oak tree’ as she listens to her mother’s favourite music. Again, a quiver between dream and wake, between here and there, moving among poignant images, the near past, the distant past, the mother ghost haunting rooms, objects, the preparation of food.
From the dark hall I see your ghost standing at the kitchen table. Your hands are dusty with flour, your sleeves rolled up. You ask me how my day has been. What do I say on this first day of winter? I watched two pihipihi fly into a sunlit tree, a tūī sip water from the neighbour’s eave. I walked to the local bay and barely noticed the ocean.
from ‘Winter recipe’
Majella draws her mother into the folds and crevices of her homesickness and heartache, into her daily movements and her recognitions. And it is tribute and testimony and self care.
More than anything, Meantime is poetry at its most intimate, movingly so, and as readers we get to share in that intimacy. We might sidestep to our own trembling ground, our own losses and aches. We might pause to absorb a volley of grief and a shawl of comfort. I love this collection so much. I love its gentleness, its exposures, its pain and its healing. And above all, its love.
A reading
Majella reads ‘Nowhere to be’
Majella reads ‘Meantime’
Three questions
What are three or four key words for you when you write poetry? Listening, quietness, absence/presence
What gave you particular joy when you wrote this new collection? Or challenge? I wrote the collection over a period of multiple Covid-19 lockdowns (2020-2022) in New Zealand. During that time, I was grieving my mother who died during Ireland and New Zealand’s first lockdown in April 2020. Grief affects a person mentally and physically, but writing and reading poetry and essays during this time was a huge salve.
Have you read any poetry books in last year or so that have struck a chord? Seán Hewitt’s poetry collections: Tongues of Fire and Rapture’s Road Iona Winter’s A liminal Gathering – Elixir and Star Grief Almanac 2023 Geraldine Meaney’s Mute/Unmute The late John Burnside’s Selected Poems Kerry Hardie’s We Go On Vincent O’Sullivan’s Selected Poems: Being Here
Majella Cullinane writes poetry, fiction and essays. Her second collection Whisper of a Crow’s Wing (Otago University Press and Salmon Poetry, Ireland) was chosen as The Listener’s Top Ten Poetry Books of 2018. Her writing has been published internationally, and she has held residencies and fellowships in Ireland, Scotland and New Zealand. She was awarded a Copyright Licensing New Zealand Grant (2019) and a Creative New Zealand Arts Grant (2021) to complete Meantime. She graduated with a PhD in Creative Practice from the University of Otago in 2020. She lives in Kōpūtai Port Chalmers with her family.
I’m going counter-clockwise around Rarotonga by bus, looking back to see if I can see Avarua. I’ve glided down over the International Date Line.
I’ve been up in the sky eating a vegan pie. They say judge and jury put a man in clink, but he escaped to ride to glory on a missing Starlink.
And they say Babe Ruth was telling the truth, and they say Albert Henry is living in penury, and they say Tom Davis is with Aunty Mavis.
The waiter’s from the Philippines, he wears ripped jeans. They say the Prime Minister’s out on the lawn, looking for manganese nodules and carrying on.
So get out coconut shell bras for the airport X-ray, as travel-weary strangers flood the runway, while night-time sways like a frangipani lei.
Now I’m chasing a turtle, wearing a snorkel, then I buy at the market a mat to use as a basket, while a whale’s barrel-body rolls over off-shore.
In the heat the hotel room’s fan-blades stir, and the gossip you hear here is beyond belief, for they say they wrapped an old-timer in a flag,
and sank his expatriate body beyond the reef. So they hope you’ll make it back next time, to a Trader Jack’s table for marlin caught by line.
When you listen, the sea’s voicing the answer, as the sun blurs behind a sinking beer schooner, while a vaka-team rows out at pace from Avarua,
and going counter-clockwise around Rarotonga.
David Eggleton
David Eggleton, former Aotearoa New Zealand Poet Laureate, lives in Ōtepoti. The Wilder Years: Selected Poems (Otago University Press) was published in 2021, and Respirator: A Laureate Collection 2019-2022 (OUP) in 2023. He is co-editor of Katūīvei: Contemporary Pasifika Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand (Massey University Press, 2024).
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