Opening of The long waves of our ocean: New responses to Pacific poems

Friday 25 November
5.30pm to 7.30pm

The National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa is delighted to invite you to the opening of our next exhibition The long waves of our ocean: New responses to Pacific poems at 5.30pm on Friday 25 November 2022. 

Please join us in the foyer of Te Ahumairangi Ground Floor at the National Library (entrance via 70 Molesworth St, Thorndon) for refreshments, performance and kōrero.

For this exhibition, early-career artists Sione Faletau, Ayesha Green, Turumeke Harrington, Ana Iti, Sione Tuívailala Monū, Ammon Ngakuru and James Tapsell-Kururangi have created new artworks made in response to a selection of poems by Alistair Campbell, Keri Hulme, J. C. Sturm, Hone Tuwhare and Albert Wendt. These artists and writers address Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa in its varied and shifting roles, engaging with fictions and histories and encouraging us to inhabit new perspectives. 

On Saturday 26 November from 11am to 12pm, join curator Hanahiva Rose and some of the contributing artists for a tour of the exhibition. 

RSVP here

Gorse Poems, Chris Holdaway, Titus Books, 2022

As near to Hart Crane’s open bones as I am spiritually
Capable to experience. Each bridge formed by the Platonic
Form of space between pylons; an allegory
of the cave projected on a stone wall.

from ‘Sea burial’

Chris Holdaway’s debut collection Gorse Poems, is under the influence, and perhaps above the surface of gorse and the American poet Hart Crane. Gorse and poetry as spiky reading tracts. I stall on ‘gorse’ in the book’s title, and think invasive threat, eye-catching bloom, postcolonial and colonial narratives, textured realities.

The poetic fluency is made from cloud soft and mechanical spike. Ambiguity matters. Naming matters. In ‘Cirrus’, the waves are standing, and then they are shifty and hard to pin down. Poetry becomes tidal with personal bearings – and ‘tidal’ resonates as much as you like.

The poetic density resembles thickets on the page, tuned to a frequency of difficulty. If you think this, if you consider the collection as a series or accumulation of poetry thickets, then the reading paths are myriad. You push into light and you propel into dark. Smudging is inevitable. Sidetracks mandatory. Pauses essential.

Chris’s poetry delivers concentrated thickness, a thickness that sways between abstraction and physicality.

          Sit on this mountain of Eden and wonder how
Little sunrise resembles sunset. How clouds are
The ultimate test in geometry—their folding nets
The sun at different angles flat in the distance.
What bottom line for a suburban volcano; a gable
Long before any state bungalow unfurled upon
Blitzed shoulders. Nominal sovereignty—mission
-ary neologism—name badges with translations
The original never found. Crown mantle refusing
The title of extinction in a language whose empire
Makes centuries of millennia—patient castles of
Scoria by and large hillsides turned into the roads
Around hillsides.

from ‘Aucklandii’

At first I found the capital letters running down the left-hand margin resembled a wall, disconcerting, a way of displacing a poem as smooth flowing stream. But then I embraced the judderbar movement. And the capital letters nodded to different poetic traditions.

I am thinking Gorse Poems delivers the music of a present world in strife, of a past world in strife, of a future world in strife. And how we need such avenues of viewing and wondering. Gorse Poems, I am concluding provisionally, is a book of wonder, a collection of wander, a fertile undergrowth.

       I first fell in love with you tearing up
Gorse at a conservation site without permission
—a soldier away at the longest running
World War: deforestation. We’re all illicit
Gardeners I suppose. But rather than extract
This thorn from my hand I’m determined
To let it decompose inside me; choose to fill
My mouth with vinegar then suckle wounds.
Cobwebs form between my hat peak and glasses
—bridge of my nose—like art. How long will
Anatomical features stick in memory when
There’s nothing constant to trust in even
Geology so why the body? No functional diff
-erence between dense bush and landslide,—
Not enough sky to stop me turning to smoke
Alone contributing to the heat death of Earth.

from ‘Bioluminescence’

Titus Book page

Chris Holdaway co-founded both the poetry journal Minarets, and the award-winning publishing outfit Compound Press. He is the author of the chapbook HIGH-TENSION/FASHION (Greying Ghost, 2018) and his poetry has been published in various journals including Brief, Cordite, Cream City Review, Landfall, Oversound, Poetry NZ Yearbook, The Seattle Review and Shearsman Magazine.

Yellow & Blue

Night     and I go to frangipani trees
to locate what drifts through our open windows
     to undo the mystery that shakes the membrane
between worlds. Creamy the petals and yellow the heart.

I pick the one flower I can reach and come down off my toes into
a kind of falling through  
hot soles on black grass
and the brute broken notes
of war     

a frightened scudding
fall, the cane toad’s icy stare
I skitter up floating steps and through
the door

morning floods the lowlands and the levels, but not the eucalypts on the rise
           not their soft blue exhalation
            of flammable oils

Lynn Davidson

Lynn Davidson’s latest poetry collection Islander was published by Shearsman Books, Bristol,  and Victoria University Press, Wellington, in 2019. Lynn had a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2013 and a Bothy Project Residency in 2016.  She won the Poetry New Zealand Poetry Award, 2020, and was 2021 Randell Cottage Creative New Zealand Writer in Residence.  

Hailman, Leanne Radojkovich, The Emma Press 2021

Leanne Radojkovich’s short story collection is a satisfying and nuanced mix of redeeming light and dark notes. Scenes are stripped back to the potency of the unsaid, and yet people and place are exquisitely present through the power of detail. A woman talks with “pins her mouth”, while “liquid fabrics, shimmering falls of sequins” are nearby. The scene becomes physically luminous, the undercurrents contextualised.

The collection is invigorated by recurring themes. Grief and loss form a connective tissue. Birds, scents, buildings, the weather and flowers, physically anchor loss, rape, infidelity, inadequate parenting, parental death. Human glow versus human pain and loss. It is the physical world that is fleshed out, not the back stories behind the dark and the painful.

I savour Leanne’s collection as narrative tapestry, with its fine stitching and craft. There is remembering and forgetting, slants and prisms, epiphany and release.

For some reason that burst of yolks disturbed me. I left the café and continued along the road, registering all the changes with the strange double-vision sensation I couldn’t explain. I wasn’t sure if the time zone was affecting me, or whether it was my adult life coming up against my child life. I took note of everything: pigeons, nikau palms, the For Lease signs, an op shop with a naked one-legged mannequin. The fruit shop, grill rooms and womenswear had become a mini-mart, a Korean BBQ and a karaoke with private booths. The knitting shop which had once belonged to Nan now sold bric-a-brac. A taxidermied owl sat on a formica table staring out the window. My legs felt so heavy just then; I saw another time when the shop was lined with honeycomb shelving units stuffed with balls of wool, and knitted ‘garments’ as Nan called them, on satin-covered coat hangers.

from ‘Where the river meets the sea’

Perhaps I love this collection so much, because it is a book I feel. I feel what is present and I feel what is absent. I choose the word ‘prism’ to underline how the thematic hues spark and shift. You see life in sensory gleams. You experience life in pieces, yet there are underlying themes that are significant to us. The present forms a bridge to the past, the past forms a bridge to the present. Pockets of emptiness and loss are countered by an expanse of recollection and musings. It is a collection to lose yourself in and then discover multiple rewarding paths to your own bridges and connections. It’s narrative as nourishment.

All the rest home doors have name tags. Mum’s has a typo: Irina. Although Irena isn’t her born name – only she knows what that is, and she’s never told, never discussed the war. Says she was born the day she reached Wellington harbour with papers stating she was a ten-year-old Polish orphan. Dad said not to ask about the European years, and my brother and I never did. Now they’ve both died and there’s just me and Mum, and she’s in a rest home with a mis-spelled name on her door.

Leanne Radojkovich’s debut short story collection First fox was published by The Emma Press in 2017. Her work has been anthologised in Bonsai: Best small stories from Aotearoa New Zealand and the forthcoming Best Small Fictions 2021. In 2018 she won the Graeme Lay Short Story Competition and was a finalist in the Anton Chekhov Prize for Very Short Fiction. She was longlisted for the 2020 Short Fiction/University of Essex Prize and shortlisted for the 2020 Sargeson Prize. Leanne holds a Master of Creative Writing (First Class Honours) from AUT Auckland University of Technology. She has Dalmatian heritage and was born in Kirikiriroa Hamilton. She now lives in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, where she works as a librarian.

The Emma Press page

Leanne Radojkovich page

I think I’ll remember where the cleaning eye is but I know I won’t

This is how tired you get, the plumber says,
when you have two seventeen-year-old daughters
you can fall asleep
when one of them is driving.

And he says, I’ve been here before, scrolling his phone
so he can slice again through woven grass
remove a square and place it to the side
like my father burying the family dog.

As a young man he went to Canada, he tells me,
worked the ski fields, some words about how lucky
we are and then – sound of metal, ceramic –
he has found the cleaning eye

go inside and run the tap he tells me
in and out I go proud as a child.
Next, the machine
hosepipe of tightly coiled spring

feeds itself in
he is wearing the special glove
the moral of the story is
always wear the special glove.

Can you hear that? Cocks his head like a bird
and I want to say I can but he can, water
running free way along the section
deep underground he hears it.

The grass fitted back in place
grows lusher than before
and now I’m sitting up in bed
balanced on my head

the LED light that changes colour
I’ve set to purple so on the top trapdoor
of my head I feel the weight
of a perfect purple cube

this is the thing I know how to do
right now
to keep that weight centred
above the bony chambers of my skull

and then I am up
and at the mirror
– why?
For human company?

I am wearing every garment I have
woollen boots, pants splashed with bleach,
a long robe like a Biblical prophet and two hoods
as if the monk in me were clothed by the polar explorer in me.

I look across to my only friend, the butternut pumpkin
on his jaunty angle. Dry, dry mouth.
Cars pass as if they were waves.
I am alone.

Kate Camp

Note on the poem

I did a week-long online poetry retreat with Mark Doty and Ellen Bass in late April – because of the time difference I got up each day at 4am to listen to a craft talk from one of them, then we had writing time, and re-grouped at 9am for a three hour workshop, where we shared what we had written in the morning.

I was staying up at our bach so that I could be in “Total Immersion” which was the name of the course. As it happened I got covid at the same time, so my total immersion and legal isolation were combined, quite usefully. This poem originated in that slightly surreal setting.

I think it makes a nod to Jenny Bornholdt’s “Then Murray Came” – the friendly stranger who comes into your home and shares a little – maybe a lot – about their life, then disappears again. Bornholdt’s work has been such an important influence on me as it is on so many New Zealand poets.  

Kate Camp is a Wellington-born poet, author of seven collections from Victoria University Press: Unfamiliar Legends of the Stars (1998), Realia (2001), Beauty Sleep (2005), The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls (2010), Snow White’s Coffin (2013), The internet of things (2017) and How To Be Happy Though Human: New and Selected Poems (2020), co-published by Victoria University Press in New Zealand and House of Anansi Press in Canada. Her memoir, You Probably Think This Song Is About You, was published in 2022 by Te Herenga Waka University Press.

Everyone is Everyone Except You, Jordan Hamel, Dead Bird Books, 2022

In this city you can be whoever you want
and I’m still so much myself it’s disgusting

nothing else fits, nothing is comfortable,
I just want comfort, I want, I want

poorly-aged fish-out-of-water celebrity voyeurism
to remind me living can be so, um, uncomplicated

there’s nothing left for me here except reality
sleep demons waving performance plans

mandatory psychometric pub quizzes
where every answer is a ghost you’ve buried

Jordan Hamel, from ‘The Simple Life’

Three poets whose writing I admire immensely – Hera Lindsay Bird, Tracey Slaughter and Tayi Tibble – endorse Jordan Hamel’s debut poetry collection on the back of the book. That is enough to make it essential reading. I read their comments once I finish the book and have mused upon its effects. I begin by pirouetting on ‘everybody’ and ‘someone’, pulled between the wide-reaching ALL and the particular ME. The poems deliver ‘I’ and ‘you’, and I am fascinated by the movement these pronouns/entities/gaps generate. You could say there’s a swing bridge between them, an interface, a hammock, and however you visualise the link, it is a link with traffic. And out of that glorious energised traffic, you find poetry.

Jordan’s deft ear and eye, his ability to craft words and lines, underline myriad ways to read and travel in a poem. Writing (reading) becomes a route beneath your own skin, a way of stretching writing to embrace the universal and the personal. This is writing of comfort and discomfort, of need and want. It is vulnerable and it is direct.

Rebecca Hawkes writes very different subject matter, but I absorb a similar verve and vitality, an ability to reveal spikes and judder bars, and to conceal. Jordan’s speaking voice is one of self scrutiny, self doubt, even perhaps self erasure. And then the whole process turns upside down, and the poetry is the act and art of self preservation, self testing, self nourishment. This affects me deeply as reader (and as secret writer).

The self deprecation is scattered thought out:

and the last old man          I’ll ever disappoint      is me

where I grew up      men don’t get sick     they rust
like grizzled house cats      under the ute      they crawl
with a quiet    they’ve always carried            they don’t die
just become another blunt saw    you never throw away

from ‘The worst thing that will ever happen to you
hasn’t happened yet’

The final poem ends on blank space, on pause, reset, refill, silence, breath intake. It is over to us how we respond, engage. We now inhabit “you”, which also becomes a way of reflecting upon “I”, whichever “I” that is, whether anybody everybody somebody. These lines form the final musical notes of a haunting book that is such a rich and open reading experience.

                   the perfect poem is just                                     blank space

the perfect you is just

from ‘Human resource’         

Dead Bird page

Jordan Hamel website

Wellington City Libraries video interview

Jordan Hamel (he/him/his) is a Pōneke-based writer, poet and performer. He was the 2018 New Zealand Poetry Slam champion and represented NZ at the World Poetry Slam Champs in 2019. He is the co-editor of Stasis Journal and co-editor of a forthcoming climate change poetry anthology from Auckland University Press. He is a 2021 Michael King Writer-in-Residence and recently placed third in the 2021 Sargeson Prize judged by Patricia Grace. He has recently had words published in The Spinoff, The Pantograph Punch, Newsroom, NZ Poetry Shelf, Landfall, Turbine | Kapohau and elsewhere.

monarch wings

risingholme park
ten years before the
/ earth cracked open /

the pine trees were filled with sleeping butterflies

looking up
sails of their orange wings
closed to triangle points
nestled in the needles
childhood haze / gold in memory

and then one night suddenly
/ frost /

looking down
the next day
orange confetti / green grass
disembodied wings
fluttered from death

we gathered their softness / into a basket

went to the dairy on the way home
and when man behind counter saw
eyes went wide / heard him thinking:
butterfly murderers
and i just didn’t know how to
/ explain /

Hebe Kearney

Hebe Kearney (they/them) is a poet who lives in Tāmaki Makaurau. Their work has appeared in publications including: Mantissa Poetry Review, Mayhem, Starling, samfiftyfour, Tarot, takahē, and Poetry New Zealand Yearbooks. You can find them at @he__be on Instagram.

The Girl and the Poet Read Tea Leaves in Paris-Gore‘

Spilt tea settles between Formica
flicks of colour, flecks of leaves
turn on a red table.

In front of them a collusion of fate,
a collision of cups in a clumsy act,
the leaves of a script set out before them.

Butter sizzled and browned on a black griddle,
hoisted flags of wet washing hung
in a damp wait, a forgotten cigarette smoking
in the ashtray, the teapot cosy
in crocheted stripes.
On the red Formica table,
pikelets dripped the thin juice of melted syrup
down her fingers, onto her dress.

They change their table, order a new
pot of tea and a plate of hot pancakes.
The syrup melts thin and juicy, drips

down her fingers onto her dress. He gives
her a serviette to soak up the mess.
She folds it in half for her own plot.

Jenny Powell