Hotel Theresa, Doc Drumheller, Cold Hub Press 2024

‘I planted my root in the hills like a hermit’

from ‘The Second Coming’

Doc Drumheller’s latest collection of poems was inspired by a visit to Hotel Theresa in Harlem, New York. An iconic hotel where legends such as Josephine Baker, Duke Ellington, Malcom X and Muhammad Ali stayed. The resulting poetry navigates multiple travels and multiple belongings. A dual citizen of USA and Aotearoa, Doc has also spent time in Asia, Europe and Central America. The poems themselves are seasoned travellers, having appeared in a terrific range of international journals.

What draws me deep into the collection, where home is as vital as a captivating elsewhere, is the way travel is a mesh of experience. Each poem is a set of seven couplets. I felt like I was on board a train with its mesmeric beat on the tracks, a visual beat say, that carries a sequence of fascinations. Every time you look into, and out of the window of the poem, the physical detail and musings resonate. If the poem is an excellent vehicle for travel, and yes it is, it includes foraging, shimmering, transforming, planting. There is suffering and there is singing. There are eulogies and there are odes. There are history markers and childhood memories.

I love the feel of this book in the hand, the paper stock and the internal design, and especially the nostalgic hotel postcard on the cover. I love how I travel from a lollipop man reciting poetry to a two-legged carrot and vegetable waste in the supermarket. You move from traces of the Christchurch earthquake to the legacy of slavery and of war, and to the final resonant poem, where the word you carry away with you is kindness. And that matters, in this collection that draws personal musings and belongings, local whanau and distant family, close.

‘You said to me: “Poetry is the shadow
cast by our streetlight imaginations.”‘

from ‘Via Ferlinghetti’

The readings

‘Via Ferlinghetti’

‘Hotel Theresa’

‘Viva la Vida’

Doc Drumheller is an award-winning poet, musician, dramatist, and has published 11 collections of poetry. His poems are translated into more than 20 languages, and he is the editor and publisher of the New Zealand literary journal Catalyst. He was elected to represent New Zealand on the Executive Board of the World Congress of Poets, and is the editor in chief of the World Congress of Poets literary journal Fuego. He has represented New Zealand at poetry festivals all over the world, and widely throughout NZ. His latest collection is: Hotel Theresa, Cold Hub Press, 2024.