Final Whistle
Ōngarue, 1996

Now it’s happened, even the sound is startling
like a braking train, or a morepork hunting.
All of us are here in the bulging cookhouse,
laughing and eating.

When we started here, I was told the men would
need a bit of mothering. Sure, they did, but
it was like a family. Well I don’t know
why I am crying,

thinking of the bush and its eerie sadness,
rain collapsing all of the things we made here.
Still, I know they’ve sawn every dip and ridge, left
nothing of value.

Airini Beautrais
from Flow: Whanganui River Poems, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2017

I have loved all Airini’s poetry collections, numerous poems have travelled with me. I have picked ‘Final Whistle’, from Flow, to share. It’s a haunting poem that folds and unfolds a thousand times as you read. Just as the collection does. In 2017 I wrote of the book: “The sumptuous choral effect produces so many layers, it is a book that demands multiple attentions.” You can see this poetic succulence in ‘Final Whistle’, this ability to produce myriad chords, shadows and light, presence and absence, intricate feeling.

In 2017, to celebrate the arrival of Flow, Airini and I embarked upon an email conversation over the course of a week. Such generosity on her part. Reading the conversation all these years later, it resonates so profoundly. The way we can slow down to a gentle pace and absorb poetry, fiction, music, art. Whether as readers or writers. Feels quite special to have done this leisurely, satisfying thing.

Here is the start of our conversation, words that remind me why I dedicate time and energy to poetry:

“After reading the first few pages of your new collection, Flow: Whanganui River Poems, I felt the kind of spark that travels like electricity through your body as you read: heart, mind, ear, eye, everything on alert. When I was doing my Masters in Italian I read the fragmented fiction of Gianni Gelati. His writing was poetic, strange, addictive. With Narratori delle pianure (Storytellers of the plains), he travelled the length of the River Po, collecting stories from people who lived there. His people, his river, yet while the river dictated the itinerary, it was less of a protagonist. Instead the people he met flourished on the page in their out-of-the-ordinary ordinariness.

I had the idea at page 24 of Flow to have an email conversation with you as I read. I wondered how my relations with the poems might change over the course of reading; the reading would act as my surrogate river with its various currents and tributaries. I wondered how I would shift in view of the poetics, the ideas, stories, characters and the river itself. The book fills me with curiosity and delight at what poems can do.”

You can read the conversation here.

Lizzie De Vegt, a singer / musician, made ‘Final Whistle’ into a song. You can listen here.

Excerpt from The Beautiful Afternoon (THWUP 2024)

Airini Beautrais is a multi-genre writer and educator who lives in Whanganui. Her most recent collection of poetry is Flow: Whanganui River Poems (VUP 2017). Her collection of essays, The Beautiful Afternoon, was published in 2024.