No Good, Sophie van Waardenberg
Auckland University Press, 2025

Cremation Sonnet

When you come back your eyes are huge and bursting.
You come back with clean long hair.
You come back normal but you’re swelling
in the middle like a bird. Your skin luminous.
Or your skin something else. Last night—
did you know—you came back caved in, beaten,
and tomorrow you’ll be perfect, wading nowhere
through a football field of loose complacent light.
You come back: you do not know me. Or if you do,
you do not love me. Or if you do, it’s not enough.
Still you come back, forty-eight and starving,
twenty-two and blushing from a pantomime.
Dead dead traveller, what song is it,
when you come back, that you sing?

Sophie van Waardenberg
from No Good

This is the first of a bunch of ‘Cremation Sonnets’ that make up the middle chunk of No Good. There were a lot more of those sonnets that didn’t make it into the book, and I almost feel like I could write just as many if I tried to again now, but I don’t think I’ll try to again. Grief gets boring. (And I think some of the poems are about that, about how boring it is.)

This one, though, comes from the dreams I had — still have, sometimes — of my dad being alive again. He died when I was thirteen, and for a long while there was nothing I wanted more than to have him back. But it is never comforting to have a dead person come back in a dream, at least not for me, because they are not themselves and have nothing new to say to you. They are what your sleeping brain makes from scraps: some kind of ghoul or stupid caricature. If I wanted to achieve anything in particular with this poem, it was probably to at least gesture at that weird cavernous space between longing and horror. How can you bear that desire for something you can never have again? How can someone be gone? I think grief is more like confusion than sadness.

The thing is, these sonnets weren’t actually horrific to write. They were sometimes quite fun. I remember being in a bit of a frenzy, writing one or two of them a day — most of them unpromising. I had a pretty on-again off-again relationship with metre, obviously, and I made no attempt to rhyme. Still, there are plenty of iambs lolloping around in here. ‘A football field of loose complacent light’ is definitely a result of working in metre; I love how that constraint can force me into a less predictable line. The most fun I have when I’m writing is when I surprise myself, and I did that a lot when I wrote these poems.

Sophie van Waardenberg

Poetry Shelf review extract:

What initially hooks us into a poem? For me, there is no singular response. Indeed if there were, it might limit what poetry can be and do. When I first started reading Sophie van Waardenberg’s new collection, No Good, I jotted down two words in my notebook: rhythm and voice. I was hooked. I was drawn into the musical cadence of a speaker speaking, drawn into the under and over currents of spiky, thistle, bloom. And as I read the collection, on a number of occasions over the past few months, crucial questions arrived. I was especially musing on the way a poem might become both self and other.

The title is the perfect welcome mat into the collection, particularly coupled with the cover illustration, where ‘good’ wavers, and I gaze at the beetle on the apple that is both good and not good. Pausing on the welcome mat, a cascade of (centuries) of good girl propaganda spins in my mind, and I am peering into the no good to see the next apple in the bowl, a portal of good in the pillowcase of no good.

Full review here

Sophie van Waardenberg is a writer from Tāmaki Makaurau. She holds an MFA from Syracuse University where she was editor-in-chief of Salt Hill Journal. Her first chapbook, ‘does a potato have a heart?’, was published in AUP New Poets 5 (2019). Her poems about eating carbohydrates and kissing girls can be found in Cordite, Sweet Mammalian, The Spinoff and Best New Zealand Poems.

Listen to Sophie read two poems on Poetry Shelf: ‘Self-Portrait as Adolescent Covered in Flour’, ‘Hymn to the Insomniac in Fool’s Spring’

Auckland University Press page