Sophie chooses favourites

From my Poetry Shelf review:

The middle section of the book, ‘Cremation sonnets’ resembles a grief casket, where the poems lead in multiple directions, carrying us between presence and absence, letting go, and unable to let go. This lost love. This elegiac memory.

The final sequence of poems, so utterly moving, are written with the ink of love. The poems are addressed to ‘you’, written across a distance between here and there, between hunger and satisfaction, dream and reality, turning away and moving close. This is love. This loved and loving woman. This is ache and this is a yearning to love and be loved. Such gentleness, such a slow perfect unfolding of what is special, with only so much revealed and gently placed in the pockets of the poems. And if this is a love that is over, such deep sadness, it seems to me, that love finds a way to linger in residues, traces, scents.

The word I write in my notebook in my latest reading is bridge, the way poems become a bridge, establish vital bridges. Think sweet and sour crossings, fluid and awkward, here and there, good and not good. Not as a restrictive dichotomy but as a series of movements, like music, like the way personal experience resists pigeon holes. Traversing the myriad bridges in Sophie’s sublime collection makes me both think and feel the world. Yes I am thinking and feeling a version of her world, but also a version of my world. And this moves me.

Rhythm, voice, bridges. I hold this book out to you so you may find your own self-affecting crossings.

A stagger of lemons and a goneness
I can’t swallow. Hello the same feeling,

didn’t I wash you off,
you get everywhere, sog up my arms

and droop me. It’s something alien
in my gut that knows you so well.

I say it again: I am not a creature of sorrow.
But I could be proper sad if I put my mind to it,

if someone dropped me from a height.

from ‘The Getting Away’

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