At first I went hunting for fancy dress poems for my fifth theme, but the more I read, the more the theme widened. I was captivated by the wide array of clothing items that make an appearance in poems, whether fleeting or as a central focus, whether physical or metaphorical. How a jersey might lead to a grandmother’s knitting needles and bedtime stories, or a shirt might lead to a trattoria in Rome, or a pair of tramping socks to a cruel argument, or a warm sweater to the love of your life. Ah.
I love bringing a suite of voices together, singing different notes, in different keys, activating senses, allowing ideas to drift and settle, and drift again. Every time I assemble a theme, I muse on what poetry does, on why I am so drawn to it, on how it is such an open field, so rich in connections and melodies.
Move from the shadows and denim coat worn by the girl in the park moon-gazing (Hone Tuwhare) to a mother’s wedding dress and haunting spaces (Majella Cullinane), to spikes and nibbles, ice and calm (Rachel McAlpine) and Rebecca Hawkes’ mesmerising ‘Technicolour dreamcake’, an ekphrasis poem after a painting by Adrian Cox, “Border Creatures with Secret Life”. I move through the suite wondering if a poem is both a dressing and an undressing, a comfort sweater (like my daughter’s new range featuring her artwork), a swaddling, or a secondhand clothes shop brimming with dust and allure and hand-me-down stories.
One more theme to go . . . but I’m so enjoying this daily poem meandering, I’ve invented a second series! Thanks to all the poets and publishers who gave permission to post today’s poems.
the poems
The Girl in the Park
The girl in the park
saw a nonchalant blue sky
shrug into a blue-dark
denim coat.
The girl in the park
did not reach up to touch
the cold steel buttons.
The girl in the park
saw the moon glide
into a dead tree’s arms
and felt the vast night
pressing.
How huge it seems,
and the trees are big she said.
The stars heard her
and swooped down perching
on tree-top and branch
owl-like and unblinking.
The grave trees,
as muscular as her lover
leaned darkly down to catch
the moonrise and madness
in her eyes :
the moon is big, it is very big
she said with velvet in her throat.
An owl hooted.
The trees scraped and nudged
each other and the stars
carried the helpless
one-ribbed moon away. . . .
The girl in the park
does not care : her body swaying
to the dark-edged chant
of storms.
Hone Tuwhare
from No Ordinary Sun, Blackwood & Janet Paul, 1964
Technicolour dreamcake
well now I must admit to painting you
in an unsayably saturated light
pre-raphaelite nymphknave incendiary
knelt among wildflowers
bulging with significance
souped from the loam
swaddled in kerosene fragrance
I yield to pheromone and accident
between our fluorescent camo and exposed roots
we can only guess what moths might flock to us
Rebecca Hawkes
from AUP New Poets 5, Auckland University Press, 2019
Wedding day
You gaze at your wedding day photograph,
tell me you don’t remember.
Thirty-four years old, you’re standing next to my father,
the two of you smiling. Two years later, I was born.
Your hair turned grey, you lost most of your teeth. I don’t say this.
There are other things I could say, things you wouldn’t like me to mention,
about second choices, other lives left behind. I have no right.
I offer the few details you’ve told me down the years.
The date: April 28th, 1972. I give you a grand, soft day
with a hint of rain. The air warm, the bees buzzing as the photographer
tells you to hold still. I don’t mention your niece, the dark-haired
flower girl in your wedding album at home, how she’s middle-aged
and white-haired now, or the puckered face of your long-dead aunt
in an elegant navy suit and hat, who disapproved of my father.
You wore a size 8 dress. You left the convent skin and bone. All right,
I know I’m teetering; I won’t mention that either, or that your father
didn’t walk you down the aisle. Your eldest sister bought the garish
bridesmaids’ dresses. Another sister sewed
your nightgowns together as a joke. You didn’t marry in your parish church;
it was closed for repairs. When I was a child I asked you why
I wasn’t there. Your attention drifts. Is some part
of you remembering as you stare at that image, or is the chasm
between the things I tell you insurmountable? The shadows
in the cave are quivering, the flames dying down. The story’s
coming to an end. One more thing I’ve only just remembered
the day after, you placed your wedding bouquet on your mother’s grave.
Majella Cullinane
from Meantime, Otago University Press, 2024
Fancy Dress
I always dressed in style
an apron, lace and
lipstick, a mortar-board and
cassock of wholesome black
but you with your small blunt words
have nibbled it all away
I crouch on the frozen clay
growing my pointed fur
I say lover, lover, lover
we both know that’s a lie
you grow younger and younger
cover me with mirrors
cover me with calm
Rachel McAlpine
from Fancy Dress, Cicada Press, 1979
Have you gone out at night in your favourite dress and then
felt like shit?
got all my delusions
worked up about the party
the shed
the lap dance
the silver bowls
left in the garden the golden frogs on the lawn
someone wants to put fire on my stomach
i push my my mouth onto small things
fingernails you clipped and left on the sill
fake lashes on the kitchen table
got all my delusions thinking that i won’t become a statistic
because this gender is a death trap or something
essa may ranapiri
from ransack, Te Herenga Waka Univeristy Press, 2019
Sa taille svelte de jeune fill
‘You’ve got it back.’ Sa taille svelte de jeune fille
the obstetrician said. The baby in her crib
swathed and hardly figuring.
The dress for leaving had been put on
the belt adjusted, the gloves and hat
(gloves and hat were worn that year).
Underneath the flesh felt soft and pupa-like
inside a chrysalis of stripes
black and white. The belt was red.
How did he know French and why practise it
on that occasion: a young mother leaving
the maternity ward, complete with triumph
and two kinds of flesh: her own
she would never again regard as svelte
and her new jeune fille in her basket.
Elizabeth Smither
(4th Floor Literary Journal, Whitireia NZ Writing Programme, 2011)
When mama made herself a cardboard suit
… and said she was going for a long walk in the forest, and I followed, hiding behind one tree, then another, when I heard her, the cardboard flapping, her muttered breath, when she stopped in a clearing and pulled out a smoke, her arm resting on her stiff cardboard legs, when I wanted to sit beside her, picking at the corrugated folds of her knees, when every anniversary something would happen — when she swam far out to sea and no calling would bring her back, when one Christmas no one could get near her, when she began collecting cardboard boxes from the supermarket, from the backs of refrigerator warehouses , when she began cutting and stapling cardboard until the kitchen was piled high, when she stopped talking, when her voice became papery thin, when she pinned a photo of my dead brother on her cardboard suit, was when she walked out of the door of her house and into the company of trees, that didn’t ask anything of her but just kept giving the way trees do.
Frankie McMillan
She walks
ahead of me to a rhythm set
by the buds in her ears and I follow
the swing of her hips in short shorts
hoping to guess
the tune from her sway.
Her black cheesecloth shirt matches
her black Chuck Taylor shoes and I think
how beautiful,
in this slight rain, the shirt will turn
translucent soon, her legs will sheen
and her hair, already wet, will drip
dark snakes down her back.
Claire Orchard
from Cold Water Cure, THWUP/VUP, 2016
Permission to Hate
I stole your perfect shirt. I hate that it has no holes in it.
Like I hate ownership and I hate money and I hate colonisation.
I used to be afraid to play piano for my family.
But I learnt to deal with it. I learnt
an easy song to fill a room with performative joy and to do what I was asked.
I was awful and I wanted to die when they clapped.
I used to be neat and tidy like I was at a Swiss finishing school
and I hated it.
The silence and order sewed me so tight.
I wore a tie to prove my shirts were in order
when really they were all over my floor.
Now I’m holey and hating everything. See:
colonisation, money, ownership.
I own my own hatred. The fire burns full circles out of your fabric.
Tell me, for the sake of my own voyeuristic interests.
When I give it back to you, will you ever rip up your shirt and hate?
I don’t care if it will be
for the sake of fashion or for the sake of holes or
for the sake of growth.
You are allowed to hate the way it is.
Tessa Keenan
from AUP New Poets 10, Auckland University Press, 2024
Julia at Tai Tapu
Whenas in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then, methinks how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.
Now when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free;
O how that glittering taketh me!
Robert Herrick
The paddock too is clad in silt.
Fine-grained, it falls as white as milk.
Like rain it shimmers, falling over
ryegrass, cocksfoot, sweet white clover.
Swamp and rivers we’d thought dead
rise, torchlit, clad in glittering thread.
And, sibilant, high fountains play
where Holsteins browse in naked day.
And Julia glides about her park,
a strange vibration in the dark.
Fiona Farrell
from Nouns, verbs, etc. Otago University Press, 2020
Watching
As if they’d done it before, they want
to swim in the sea-shimmer
of fabric, but they watch
the play of her beach-ball
cheeks underneath her skirt
the bounce and rise, and
they nudge each other – those boys
down at the beach, so shy
make her forget for a moment
her red lipstick might be smudged
the force of sand between her toes
her earrings jingle, the feel
of her skirt washing her ankles
while she’s on show
she’s not concerned with hiding
her feelings strengthen, she knows
she’s as coy as an oyster
on the beach at low tide
– those hooded pearl eyes
she stares out from under.
Gail Ingram
from Some Bird, Sudden Valley Press, 2023
Sunday Afternoon
It is the eleventh of February 1973.
Einstein is sitting up the back on a picnic blanket.
He is wearing shorts and jandals as though
he is on holiday from the laws of physics.
Florence Nightingale has sunglasses on
her hair loose and she is reading The Female Eunuch.
There is a bright blue sky over Western Springs
and Mick Jagger is wearing pink lipstick
thick silver armbands and a tight jumpsuit to match
the cloudless day. The silver diamonds could mean
anything as he struts across the stage and
pushes his chest into Sweet Virginia.
I have my eyes shut just for one second.
I think I have the moment in me
that I want to last like the instant the light
catches the hills to make them sharp
or the guitarist picks out that sweet melody.
I think I’m going to drop my plans
and go on down to Texas or New Orleans
but I’m seventeen and I don’t know
what I want and I don’t know
what I need. Mick Jagger struts
across the stage in his jean jacket with his pink scarf
soaring and his midnight ramblings burning
the afternoon crowd.
The world is in razor focus.
‘As long as you’ve got a table and a chair
and a violin and a bowl of fruit you’ll be right,’
Alberts says, ‘that’s all you need.’
He grabs Florence by the hand
and they start to shimmy and sway
to the Jumping-Jack beat.
Mick Jagger eyeballs the Sunday sky with his blue
eyeshadow glowing and his knee kicking high.
Albert pulls me up off the grass and I let myself
fall into the whiff of the blues, country girl at heart.
Paula Green
from The Baker’s Thumbprint, Seraph Press, 2013
The poets
Claire Orchard (she/her) studied English and history at Massey University and completed an MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters. She lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara and is the author of two poetry collections: Cold Water Cure (VUP, 2016) and Liveability (THWUP, 2023).
Elizabeth Smither has written six novels, six collections of short stories and eighteen poetry collections. She has twice won the major award for New Zealand poetry and was the 2001–2003 Te Mata Poet Laureate. In 2004, she was awarded an honorary LittD from the University of Auckland for her contribution to literature and was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit. She received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in 2008. Her most recent book, Night Horse (Auckland University Press, 2017), won the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Award for Poetry.
essa may ranapiri (Ngaati Raukawa, Te Arawa, Ngaati Puukeko, Clan Gunn) is a person who lives on Ngaati Wairere whenua. Author of ransack and ECHIDNA. PhD student looking at how poetry by taangata takataapui engages atuatanga. Co-editor of Kupu Toi Takataapui | Takataapui Literary Journal with Michelle Rahurahu. They have a great love for language, LAND BACK and hot chips. Thanks as always goes to their ancestors, who are everything. They will write until they’re dead.
Fiona Farrell has published poetry, fiction, drama and non-fiction. Uniquely among New Zealand writers, she has received awards in all genres. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the New Zealand Book Awards and has been widely anthologised. Her first novel, The Skinny Louie Book, won the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction. Three later novels have been shortlisted for that award, and five have been longlisted for the prestigious International Dublin IMPAC Award. In 2013 she received the Michael King Award to write twinned books prompted by the Christchurch earthquakes and the city’s reconstruction. The non-fiction work, The Villa at the Edge of the Empire, was shortlisted for the 2017 Ockham NZ Book Awards. In 2018 she edited Best New Zealand Poems for the International Institute of Modern Letters. Farrell has received numerous awards, including the Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction and the ONZM for Services to Literature. She made Dunedin home in 2018.
Frankie McMillan is a poet and short fiction writer. In 2016 her collection, My Mother and the Hungarians and other small fictions(Canterbury University Press) was long-listed for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. In 2019 The Father of Octopus Wrestling and other small fictions ( CUP) was listed by Spinoff as one of the ten best New Zealand fiction books of 2019, and was shortlisted for the NZSA Heritage awards. In 2013 and 2015 she was the winner of the New Zealand Flash Fiction Day competition. She has won numerous awards and creative writing residencies including the Ursula Bethell residency in Creative Writing at the University of Canterbury (2014) the Michael King writing residency at the University of Auckland ( 2017) and the NZSA Peter and Dianne Beatson Fellowship (2019). Her latest book, The Wandering Nature of Us Girls ( CUP) was published in 2022.
Gail Ingram is an award-winning writer from Ōtautahi, author of anthology (n.) a collection of flowers (Pūkeko Publications 2024), Some Bird (SVP 2023) and Contents Under Pressure (Pūkeko Publications 2019). Winner of both Caselberg and NZPS International Poetry Competitions, her work has appeared widely across Aotearoa and internationally. She is a creative-writing teacher at Write On and managing editor for a fine line. Website
Hone Tuwhare(1922 — 2008) was of Ngāpuhi descent, with connections to Ngāti Korokoro, Ngāti Tautahi, Te Uri-o-Hau, Te Popoto, Ngāti Hine and Ngāti Kurī hapū. He was born in Kaikohe and grew up near Auckland. He was the author of No Ordinary Sun (1964), Come Rain Hail (1970), Sap-wood & Milk (1970), Shape-Shifter (1997), and Piggy-Back Moon (2001), among other books. Hone organized the first Māori Writers and Artists Conference in 1973. He received multiple awards and honours including a Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago, a Montana New Zealand Book Award, was our second Poet Laureate of New Zealand from 1999 to 2001 and received the inaugural Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in 2003. That year, The Arts Foundation named him one of 10 living icons of the New Zealand arts.
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.
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.
Rebecca Hawkes, poet and painter, debuted in AUP New Poets 5. Her collection Meat Lovers won Best First International Collection in the Laurel Prize and was a finalist in the Lambda Literary Awards. She edits the journal Sweet Mammalian and co-curated the Antipodean climate poetry anthology No Other Place to Stand. She is a founding member of popstar poets’ performance posse Show Ponies. She is currently doing an MFA in poetry at the University of Michigan as a Fulbright grantee.
Tessa Keenan (Te Ātiawa) is from Taranaki and is now based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Her debut chapbook ‘Pukapuka mapi / Atlas’ was published earlier this year as part of AUP New Poets 10. You can also find her writing in various Aotearoa publications including Starling, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook and The Spinoff.
NZ Poetry Shelf 