drives and drops

we were hitting the shuttlecock 

and it started to rain and you 

started singing and all of a sudden 

i knew what i had to do to be good 

at this game and the girl sat 

beside the net complaining about 

her body and the tide came 

closer and sleep seemed further 

away and the book i was supposed 

to have finished was still on the couch 

and i love the way you put your arm 

around me there and i want you 

to do it again and we are so wet now

it is time to get undressed and the 

clothes stay on and the girl puts on 

an accent and the net falls onto 

the grass and this is so convincing 

i might never read again and the boy 

brings us beer and badminton is easier 

when you’re drunk and i am getting 

so good at this and i am never 

good at anything and everything 

smells like the dinner we forgot 

to take out of the oven and the ocean 

that is so close i am already 

swimming and let’s just drop our 

racquets

Amy Marguerite
from over under fed, AUP, 2025

drives and drops

I have been thinking about voice in poetry, and a student, Erina French, pointed me to Alice Notley’s observation that “a good poetic voice must have … something like vividness, actual presence of the live poet in the dead words on the page—the poem is very little without that.”  I don’t know if words on a page are ever dead to me, but I do know that any writing I have ever read by Amy Marguerite is somehow more vividly, urgently alive than almost any other writing I can think of, including even those writers Amy Marguerite loves for their aliveness, Grace Paley and Eileen Myles (I love them too).  “To make that transference is a mysterious thing to do,” Notley says, but this poem, “drives and drops,” being, as it is, about finding a way to live with the vividness and presence of a good poem, tells us something about how this transference might come into being.  It is a poem about playing badminton with such abandon that everything becomes part of the game, and the game becomes part of everything around it – the book left unread is part of the game of badminton, the girl complaining about her body, the dinner forgotten in the oven, the tide coming in… Of course everything and everyone is going to get wet!  In a poem like this, you are already swimming before you have even dropped your racquets.  Are we in love?  The desire coursing through the poem, out of which pours forth the poem’s dizzying trajectory, somehow languorously slow and heart-stoppingly fast at the same time, in a very badminton-like way, cannot possibly not be felt by any reader of the poem who knows how to love.  Who, reading this poem, could help but love the poet, the players, the game itself and everything the game encompasses, which is nothing less than the whole world?

Anna Jackson

Amy Marguerite (she/her) is a poet, essayist, and peer support worker living in Pukekohe. In 2022, she completed an MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters. Amy’s debut collection over under fed was published by Auckland University Press in March 2025. Her essay on the new generation of Aotearoa poets features in Te Whāriki: Reading Ten New Poets from Aotearoa, published by Auckland University Press in October 2025.

Anna Jackson is a poet and Professor of English literature at Te Herenga Waka/Victoria University of Wellington, whose latest book Terrier, Worrier came out with Auckland University Press in 2025.