Garlic-planting time

There has not been much to recommend the future lately,
but still you go outside in gumboots, three layers of wool,
the rhythms of the garden offering solace.

Under dark hills that are not the mountain
you were born under, you prepare the beds
for the shortest day. Preventative medicine.

You stoop, claw at the earth
digging over the dirt, raking in
sheep manure and comfrey tea.

You hope to grow enough for a whole year. It
will hang in plaits around the garage, drying
in the warm summer air, warding off colds and evil spirits.

Have you noticed how there is a lull in the cold,
before it rains? It gets a little warmer. This is
what to look for – small breaks in the weather. Breathers.

When a friend brings you cloves
of new varieties: silverskin, purple stripe –
you cradle them like papery currency, rustling gift.

This is sorting and healing. This is
planning and tending. With muddy fists,
you take possession of the year.

Helen Lehndorf
from The Comforter, Seraph Press, 2011

Over the coming months, Poetry Shelf Monday Poem spot will include poems that have stuck to me over time, poems that I’ve loved for all kinds of reasons. Poems that comfort or delight or challenge. Poems that strike the eye, ear or heart. This sublime poem by Helen Lehndorf chimes so sweetly as I plan the summer garden, ‘this storing and healing’, and I am mindful of how we take possession of each day, how we build and grow and connect. Planting does this. Words do this. Poetry does this. In these turbulent times, in these diabolical and strained times when the future feels so uncertain, I will cherish each new day. I will plant seeds.

Author and teacher Helen Lenhdorf’s latest book A Forager’s Life is a creative nonfiction nature memoir. In 2023 it made the top ten list for NZ nonfiction. Helen has published essays, reviews and poems in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Spin-off, Pantograph Punch and Landfall. She is also the author of the poetry collection The Comforter, which made The Listener’s 100 Best Books list in the year of release, and Write to the Centre, a book about the joy of keeping a journal. 

Emma Neale, University Book Shop Otago and Otago University Press warmly invite you to the launch of Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit, the new poetry collection by Emma Neale. To be launched by Louise Wallace.

5:30pm–7:00pm
Thursday 14 November 2024
University Book Shop Otago
Dunedin
All welcome!
Please RSVP to events@unibooks.co.nz for catering purposes

ABOUT THE BOOK:
Fibs, porkies, little white lies, absolute whoppers and criminal evasions: the ways we can deceive each other are legion.

Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit, the new collection by Ōtepoti poet and writer Emma Neale, is fascinated by our doubleness. Prompted by the rich implications in a line from Joseph Brodsky — ‘The real history of consciousness starts with one’s first lie’ — it combines a personal memoir of childhood lies with an exploration of wider social deceptions.

From the unwitting tricks our minds play, to the mischievous pinch of literary pastiche; from the corruptions of imperialism or abuse, to the dreams and stories we weave for our own survival, these poems catalogue scenes that seem to suggest our species could be named for its subterfuge as much as for its wisdom. Yet at the core of the collection are also some tenets to hold to: deep bonds of love; the renewal children offer; a hunger for social justice; and the sharp reality that nature presents us with, if we are willing to look.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Emma Neale is a novelist and poet. Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit is her seventh poetry collection, following To the Occupant(Otago University Press, 2019). Recognition for her work includes the 2008 NZSA Janet Frame Memorial Award for Literature and the 2011 Kathleen Grattan Award for Poetry for The Truth Garden (Otago University Press, 2012). In 2020 Neale was awarded the Lauris Edmond Memorial Prize for a Distinguished Contribution to New Zealand Poetry. A former editor of Landfall, she lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin and works as a freelance editor for publishers in New Zealand and Australia.

Warm Congratulations to:

First Prize: John Burnside, Ruin Blossom(Jonathan Cape)

Poetry Shelf review of Tung

throwing a shimmer of tongue / this moment now / this pinch / this short gasp / this no escape / this not empty / this sky-wheat / this red earth / this sped through / this gnawing / this harvest / this dissolving shell of sky / this ocean / this not mine

Poetry Shelf review of At the Point of Seeing

In that wavering horizon,
where the merest snap 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.

Liveability, Claire Orchard
Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023

Liveability came out in 2023, and joined a wee pile of poetry collections I read and loved last year, but ran out of energy to review. Claire Orchard’s collection stuck with me, certain poems in particular, and I am posting one of them in my Monday Poem spot on November 4th. I am currently selecting poems that I have especially loved over a period of time, along with occasional new ones.

You can hear Claire read here.

Today, the sun is shining, the wind is on leave, the power is on, and in this rare miracle moment, I am sitting on the side of my recovery mountain at an intersection of equilibrium, beauty and peace. The perfect time to return to a book that resembles an ode to life, to the intricate lacework of being.

Claire writes with sublime fluency: the sweet aural currents carry physical detail, multiple voices, epiphanies, observations, declarations, tenderness and edge. Think of a collection with multiple notes, myriad bridges to the world outside, whether a world experienced or a world imagined, a world read or a world remembered. I find myself crossing footbridges into my own memory, my own ambulations, liveability.

Ah, the cover. I love the marriage between the title of the book and the cover image, a painting by Deb Fuller of three empty chairs, so carefully positioned, so haunting ot the degree of the uncanny. It struck a chord, not just as an entry point into the collection, but in terms of my own writing and what I have been thinking about poetry. Let’s say the making of a poem. Let’s say the poem as empty chair. Let’s say the poem with its physical detail and careful placements, wear and tear, relationships with other chairs, attached and detached memories. This week I was writing poems as empty chairs for the reader to sit in and make their own. An oxymoron because, of course a poem, is never empty.

And yes, Claire’s poetry achieves a satisfying fullness of effect. She might begin with a winged chair or Main Street, an aging mother, a family choosing pizza, feeding the pigeons, entries in a dictionary, the window display in a china shop. It is writing slowing down, a heavenly slowing down to retrieve memory, absorb what is seen through the window, in the street, what is read. Detail and mood are carefully gathered and assembled to the point they become pulse on the page. Throb. Vibration. Movement. That empty chair is rich in layers. In ‘Charms’, I get to drive Main Street in the car of the poet, a nostalgic trigger of past and present. The childhood bedroom in the family flat, in ‘Furnace’, is an equally nostalgic tripwire to a chipped tooth and chipped memories, imbued with the undulations and slippage of recall. Then there is swivel memory in “Xanadu summer album’:

Remember the derelict, one-room schoolhouse,
its empty playground cracking with weeds,
its small playing field unmown. We peered
through the windows at dark-stained wooden chairs
and desks in disarray, textbooks scattered across the floor,
the last lesson still chalked up on the blackboard.
Hmmm, you say. What about the way
the last of the daylight would turn
the iron roof of the long drop into silver?
And I wonder how you even remember things like that.

Ah, perhaps we can might of this as a season album, with its exquisite array of moods, framings, point of views. I am never sure what will be on the next page and I love this. The T-shirt in the poem, ‘If you take one piece of advice this year let it be’, declares ‘Impossible is nothing’, as the grandmother swears by ocean dips, spitting on insect bites and one stair at a time, and the children dash and scratch and tumble. In ‘Shooting rats’, we’re in Uncle Jim’s ute flying through the paddock with sheep scattering, the poem moving to an ending that sticks:

reaching the top felt like flying
and when we looked we saw

through limbs of thinned macrocarpa
the sky, too, was planning something big.

In ‘Herd’, poet becomes reader, and the idea that zebras don’t feel stress arrests us both, reader and writer. Again, Claire delivers a poem ending that prompts pins and needles:

If only the survivors could tell us
how they’re feeling. Recently captured footage
shows them glancing obliquely at one another
before hurriedly looking away again.

Ah, so many poems to share and highlight, from the everyday to the awe-some, from Wilson Alwyn Bentley, a cloud physicist, to family settings, from Ernest Rutherford to a rain precipitation room experience. Perhaps I will leave you with another skin-prickling ending. In ‘Thursday night’, everyone is in the family sitting room (those were the days!) watching Star Trek at 7.30 pm (appointment viewing!). At one point, it feels like Leonard Nimoy is speaking through the screen to the avid viewers. So many bridges and layers and possibilities:

it’s as if he’s speaking directly to us,
as if when he turns his attention to the way
these same features confine and confound us,
he’s seeing through the glass screen into
our sitting room as he laments the bleakness
of such an existence. As if he observes
the widening of our eyes, poor lonely creatures,
perpetually at opposite ends of the couch,
and our mother, in her chair next to the couch.

Pull up a chair, regardless of what the weather is doing, and nestle into the glorious, life-rich experience of reading Liveability. I have barely scratched the surface of what these poems do, with their weave of lightness, fascination, craft, vitality and wonder.

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).

Te Herenga Waka University Press page

Come along to Te Papa this Saturday at 11am for a poetry reading from six great THWUP poets, with publisher Fergus Barrowman as MC.

Victoria University Press, 2019
(resissued Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024)

I put the names in the hat and picked out Ruth Arnison to gift a copy of Fleur Adcock’s Collected Poems.

Ruth included this delightful note:

I first wrote to Fleur in 2006 after coming across her poem, “Flight, with Mountains,” in memory of my uncle Dave Herron.

I thought a portion of Fleur’s response might interest you, –

” It was very significant for me: it was one of the first major, mature poems I ever finished, and it won the Wellington Festival Poetry Prize (£50, a huge amount at the time — I bought a tricycle for my son Andrew and a suit to wear to the prizegiving in Wellington, and still had £25 left over).  More significantly, it restored my faith in the possibility that I might become a real poet, which was pretty shaky at the time (I think it always is).”

You can read the Poetry Shelf tribute here, which includes my slowly unfolding email conversation with Fleur.

There will be an informal reading of Fleur’s poetry at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University on Friday 18th October, with readings from Tru Paraha, Harry Ricketts, Chris Price, more. Details here.