Unseasoned Campaigner, Janet Newman, Otago University Press, 2021
Poet Janet Newman lives at Koputaroa in Horowhenua, where she farms beef. Her debut collection, Unseasoned Campaigner, is nourished beyond description of scenic beauty to a deep love and engagement with the land and farming. Women writing the land is not without precedent. Ruth Dallas comes to mind initially. She spent time as a Herd Recording Officer during WWII and found cities restrictive and dull afterwards. When she was living in Dunedin in later years, writing enabled returns to her beloved rural settings. Janet dedicates several poems to her. The second poet that springs to mind is Marty Smith, whose rural background has featured in her poetry, and who is also unafraid of over and underlaying an idyllic landscape with the grit and reality of farming life.
Janet’s first section, ‘How now?’, places the reader one hundred percent in rural experience: managing livestock, a diarrhea-soaked calf that doesn’t make it, drenching, the slaughter house in graphic detail, blood and sweat. There are water restrictions, water anxiety, drought. A dead river. More dead stock. Horses led to shade and grass. Scenic routes and beauty spots are off the menu.
I applaud this revised view but it is the people who hold my attention to a significant degree. While farmers are currently under scrutiny for diverse reasons, particularly climate change, some are speaking out about how tough it is. Listening to RNZ National’s excellent Country Life, it is clear there is no hold-all definition for the contemporary farmer and their diverse practices. In the book’s middle and final sections, Janet also opens up what “farmer” means, and that adds significant and poignant layers to the first poems.
In the second section, ‘Tender’, Janet draws us to close to a father, and I am assuming her father. He was a complicated, multifaceted human being: a farmer, father, husband, war veteran. He was a man of few words and myriad actions, toil and more toil. He cursed war on television and kept a belt by the door. He is memory, because he has passed, and he fills the speaker with mourning. The poems are vividly detailed with the physicality of daily life, and it is through his presence farming is made prismatic, beyond stereotype. When I pivot on the word “tender”, I see the poems as an offering to both mother and father, to us as readers. I see too the tenderness in the care of animals, and tender as the sore spot that is parental absence, maternal and paternal memory.
His language is electric rhythm of pump and wire, gush of couplets from the artesian bore,
a flighty heifer enjambed with a low rail,
stanza of cloud over the back paddock threatening rain,
the fuck, fuck, fuck of a dead bull in the drain.
from ‘Man of few words’
The mother is an equally haunting presence with her preserves, her baking and her plums. She too is drawn close through a focus on the physical detail of everyday actions. She is mourned and, in dying first, is an unbearable hole in the father’s life. The parental poems scratch the surface of my skin. Preserving, for example, brings back my own pungent memories. And preserving is also the tool of the poet, poems are stored in sweet and salty brine, held out to be savoured by both poet and reader.
Preserving
Red plums give up round plump bodies when I cut out their stones. I hear my mother’s long-ago voice: ‘Don’t overdo it.’ The boiling and much else. In the photograph she is smiling behind glass, my memory of her steeped in absence. Now, even that faithless call sounds sweet as in preserving jars sour plums surrender to sugar syrup.
The third section, “Ruahine”, moves and adjusts to loss. It also finds footing on scenic routes. In the final poems, the poet is out driving and absorbing the birds and trees, mesmerising hills, the land bereft of vegetation. The landscapes have widened further to carry farm practices, daily challenges, connections to the land and to making a living. But of course it is not as though the farmer is blind to beauty. The final cluster of poems become song, act as sweet refrain, where upon in each return to a view, the view shifts in nuance. Just like poetry. Just like the way life is nuanced and resists deadening dichotomies. ‘Beach’ catches the elusiveness of what we sometimes see and feel so exquisitely:
Some days the clouds disappear on the drive to the coast
the way the things you wanted to say evaporate when you get there.
Sentences float to the pencil-line horizon between sky that is nothing but blue
and sea that is as blue as … but words fail you,
smudge like fishing boats in the distance without your binoculars
from ‘Beach’
Janet writes with poise, each line fluent in rhythm and accent, and in doing so achieves a collection that matches heart with sharp and bold eye. Her collection belongs alongside the very best of Marty Smith and Ruth Dallas, a fine addition to how we write the land, whoever and wherever we are.
Janet Newman was born in Levin. She won the 2015 New Zealand Poetry Society International Competition, the 2017 Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems and was a runner-up in the 2019 Kathleen Grattan Awards. Her essays about the sonnets of Michele Leggott and the ecopoetry of Dinah Hawken won the Journal of New Zealand Literature Prize for New Zealand Literary Studies in 2014 and 2016. She has worked as a journalist in New Zealand and Australia, and a bicycle courier in London. She has three adult children and lives with her partner at Koputaroa in Horowhenua, where she farms beef cattle.
Parted down the middle, his sharpened cuerpo struts out of a waspish cave in the dark
harakeke, strands bowing under a nosey Tūī eyeing the red beaned flower that’s claw-like
in lazy light. We lock eyes in glass. Feathers and flax. He stares from corners acting coy
but this is k’rd, bruh, a Queen will call you out for not looking long enough. I ruffle
the curls searching silences in the glare knowing? Not quite slow moving but watchful
the manu drops a beak at onyx arrowhead eyes forgetting forward. Down the vague grey
he walks the tui across the winking glass into a powdery afternoon, kicking up silent
dust behind them on the street. They swoop to the top of St. Kevin’s perched for a second before flying off
into the blue thin as the moon of pulotu dragging nails across the fog and Paz.
Amber Esau
Amber Esau is a Sā-māo-rish writer (Ngāpuhi / Manase) born and raised in Tāmaki Makaurau. She is a poet, storyteller, and amateur astrologer. Her work has been published both in print and online.
in bed with the feminists, Liz Breslin, Dead Bird Books, 2021
I prefer barefoot I prefer paper maps I prefer flowers in the ground but first, I prefer coffee
I prefer lunch I prefer savoury conversation I prefer to sit at the children’s table I prefer time off without good behaviour
from ‘Possibilities’
Liz Brezlin’s debut poetry collection Alzheimer’s and a Spoonhooked me on so many levels. Her second collection, in bed with the feminists, is politically, poetically and personally active. I love that. The stellar opening poem, ‘the things she carries’ (you can read a version here), is like a mini performance of the book. The things a book carries. The things a poem carries. Everything from lightness to weight. Hidden and on view. The poems carry you along everyday tracks, with myriad opinions and musical riffs, routine and reverie, complaint and consternation. Love.
it’s not just the rain keeping me awake its insistent game of getting in the cracks
it’s the drip drip down of can’t change that
it’s the drip drip down of can’t change that
from ‘out of bed with the feminists’
There is the steady beat of the word feminism, a wide-reaching fuel of a word that refuses to be pinned down to single options or compartments. The speaker is in bed with the feminists, going to museums, on a road trip, stepping off from power-struggle sites, marching. There are maternal poems, colours running in the wash, the negotiation of waste in supermarket aisles. There are sturdy threads leading to a matrix of other women writing: Hélène Cixous, Virginia Woolf, Anne Kennedy. The body, the maternal ink, the writing both inside and outside a room of one’s own, perceptions under question, rampant consumerism. I particularly love a poem that steps off from Anne Kennedy’s ‘I was a feminist in the eighties’, with a nod to Helen Reddy (you can read Anne’s poem and Liz’s appraisal of it here).
I was a feminist, trapped in a lion gutted and ruined, I had a good cry
buttoned my coat way up to my chin wanted the me back who started this game
thought I could escape through the jaws of the beast starved myself pretty, slipped through his teeth
from Liz’s ‘Then a lion came prowling out of the jungle and ate the feminist all up’
Liz’s poetry collection offers a rewarding language experience: lines where words get fractured, dashed apart, piled up one against the other, as though we can’t take meaning and fluency for granted. There are honey currents and there are judder bars in the roads and sidetracks of reading. This is life. This is thinking. This is critiquing. This is poetry.
The book took me back to my doctoral thesis where I spent a number of years considering what drove the ink in the pen of Italian women writing. The ink pot was full and unexpected as it brimmed over with a thousand things, until in the end, I decided the woman writing was opening up and out, and her ink was open, and and was the key word. A hinge, a connection. That’s how I feel about this book. It is alive with hinges and connections. I love the effect of in bed with the feminists, so full of complicated invigorating necessary life.
at the funeral with the feminists
there are times not to think about sex Catholic school will teach you this although if in the middle of life there is death
today is far more than tears and shibboleths desire is pulsing persisting lips there are times it is hard not to think about sex
demure, buttoned, ruffled, pressed lashes to lashes, busting tits middle to middle, in life we are dead
already unless we remember, lest we forget sadness, egg sandwiches, sniffling kids yes, there are times not to think about sex
think sobering snowdrops on unfrozen earth the priest, droning, the week’s shopping list how always, in the middle of life, there is death
we are warm for such a short time at best maybe the true crime is to try to resist there’s no time like all time to think about sex what else is life but sex and death?
In bed with the feminists is Liz Breslin’s second poem collection, part of which won the 2020 Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems. Her first collection, Alzheimer’s and a spoon, was listed as one in the NZ Listener’s Top 100 Books of 2017. Liz was a virtual resident at the National Centre for Writing, UK, in February 2021, where she documented life through the peregrine webcam on Norwich Cathedral in a collection called Nothing to see here. In April 2020 she co-created The Possibilities Project with Dunedin UNESCO City of Literature.
Liz’s website Deadbird Books page Liz reads from in bed with the feminists Landfall Review Online by Jordan Hamel
PS For someone one with minor visual impairment and reading glasses that broke at start of lockdown the font was a struggle, pale and small.
There is the possible world in which, having no safety net to fall into, I killed myself.
There is the world in which acclaim came early with a book called something like Sex Owls of the Sun, and the effects of success jaded me, so I stopped pursuing the art that I loved.
And there is also the world that was a succession of cool, forgettable evenings spent among canapés and loud friends, in which we aged so slowly that we hardly noticed it, until it blurred our vision like damp creeping into a camera.
Erik Kennedy
Erik Kennedy is the author of the poetry collections There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime (2018) and Another Beautiful Day Indoors (2022), both with Victoria University Press, and he has co-edited No Other Place to Stand, a book of climate change poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific forthcoming from Auckland University Press in 2022. His poems, stories, and criticism have been published in places like FENCE, Hobart, Maudlin House, Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, the TLS, and Western Humanities Review. Originally from New Jersey, he lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch.
Mark Pirie has been writing cricket poems for a number of years. He published a booklet of cricket poems in 2008 and has now gathered a whole book together. If you are a cricket fan like me, you will be drawn to a collection that celebrates a game that captivates in both its slowness (the tests) and its speed (the T20s), its intricacies, elegance and skill. The poems consider specific matches, offer odes or tributes to beloved players, sing the praises of a sweep, swinging ball or one-handed boundary catch. There is a reflective gaze back, as memory is trawled for standout moments. Remember when. Remember how. I found myself trawling though my own cricket memories and revisiting Vivian Richards at Lord’s, listening to cricket on the transistor radio as a child, watching Richard Hadlee take one wicket after another, Martin Crowe bat.
But the joy in reading these poems is how life infuses cricket and cricket infuses life. The delight is also in how playing cricket can be aligned to writing a poem. How you might go out for a duck but it is a love of playing/ writing that matters. I read this book for the pleasure of cricket, the pleasure of poetry, and a myriad reactions animating the bridge between the one and the other.
Lost
Driving back from a book fair whites on a green field
remind me of a love now lost. It’s a while since I played.
I long for that Saturday field, can smell the whiff of leather,
the feel of stitch and seam. At the fair I’d looked at old
cricket books. They all knew. And when I arrive home, my bat
lies in the corner propped against the dresser, hidden by shadow.
November 2010
Mark Pirie was born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1974. He is the Managing Editor for HeadworX, a small press publisher of poetry/fiction. His poems have been published in India, New Zealand, Australia, Croatia, the US, Canada, Singapore, Iraq, France, Germany, and the UK. In 1998 University of Otago Press published his anthology of ‘Generation X’ New Zealand writing, The NeXt Wave. He was managing editor of, and co-edited, JAAM literary journal (New Zealand) from 1995-2005, and currently edits broadsheet: new new zealand poetry. In 2003, Salt Publishing, Cambridge, England, published his new and selected poems, Gallery: A Selection. In 2016, a new selection of his poems Rock and Roll appeared from Bareknuckle Books in Australia.
HeadworX page Mark Pirie website Poetry Shelf: Mark Pirie reads from Slip
The Baby Shark Song eats the part of me that cares
for rhythm, for pattern. Time is a parent on leave, retired even.
What an age to be alive, I sigh to my partner while playing a live
stream of a writer I admire (her face fits my palm). I turn the screen
to show him and imagine my camera has shown him steaming from the shower
where our son hammers the glass with a plastic orca and chants
the words stuck in our shared head. How does the Duchess know
Alice is thinking? he asks. I say I can tell when he’s thinking.
Now? His focus relaxes. Yes.
No! It was a trick. He wasn’t thinking,
just looking. Thoughts are made,
looking is a sort of finding, knitting is done, dreams are suffered,
and listening to your mother read Alice inWonderland
is in between. Is it possible to behead something
bodiless? I ask. Of course not. He’s learning independence.
The balding Sylvanian badger once belonged to me. I’d have it
speak to that same grey rabbit. He’s built them a magnetic castle.
Mine was a red-roofed doll’s house handmade by Grandad (ready to go—
now gone). Badger says to Rabbit, It’s not lockdown here, so come on
inside and have a nice glass of wine. It’s a good game, my son explains
You’d like it because there’s no fighting.
I like watching the show Alone because Vancouver Island
is a limpid coastline of the general wild. Those whining men
living off limpets while yearning for buckets of chicken gradually
know they’ll never be rescued. A boat might deliver them
back to families, places where lost fat is found, but there will always be want.
So, I tell my only child we must learn to play alone—
to shape a shelter from fallen branches, snack on oxalis and set traps to catch fathers.
Amy Brown
Amy Brown was born in Hawkes Bay and now lives in Melbourne. Her latest poetry collection, Neon Daze, a verse journal of the first four months of motherhood, was one of the Saturday Paper‘s 2019 books of the year. She is also the author of The Odour of Sanctity, The Propaganda Poster Girl, and Pony Tales, a series of children’s novels.
The Auckland Writers Festival is a strong supporter of poetry in Aotearoa, hosting a variety of events that feature poets from across generations, locations, styles, genres. You will find poets in conversation, in performance, on mixed panels, in outdoor street settings. Poetry is such a key part of many our literary festivals, I was delighted when Kasandra Hart-Kuamoana and Bridget van de Zijpp from the the Auckland’s literary festival agreed to pick some poems.
Hotel Emergencies, Bill Manhire
I love the way Bill Manhire’s poem, Hotel Emergencies, starts off with a gentle playfulness and a mild sense of internal panic and then spirals out to something much darker and concerned about state of the world. I once saw Bill reading it, saying he was inspired by a notice in a Copenhagen hotel room, and it stuck with me so firmly that forever after whenever I saw a badly translated notice near the door of a hotel room I would think of this poem. (Bridget)
When they ask you where you are really from, Mohamed Hassan
I was overseas when the mosque shootings occurred and from so far away I had only glimpses of how the tragedy was opening up a new dialogue here about racism and belonging. Then, on returning home, I picked up Mohamed Hassan’s collection, National Anthem, and was so moved by the profound intelligence of it, and the way he quietly breaks hearts with his beautiful way of expressing both resistance and recognition, and also tenderness and yearning, warmth and defiance. His reading of ‘When they ask you where you are really from’, which can be found online, is transfixing. (Bridget)
High Country Weather, James K Baxter
Is an Ockham’s razor for lockdown frustration and fatigue. Considered a Kiwi classic by many, and it’s no wonder. Baxter’s call to conquer anger and frustrations, to weather the storm, and to “surrender to the sky / your heart of anger” reads so much like incantation. It takes me down memory lanes of high-country alps, and my home region – through Waitomo Caves, to Rangitoto and Wharepapa South. The speaker recognises the value in never losing sight of the briefest semblance of beauty. The speaker also considers this practice to be an imperative, a survival technique. Where the very act of choosing to “yet see the red-gold cirrus / over snow mountain shine” seems like the utmost act of defiance. I celebrate this and a handful of Baxter’s other early works for their covert rebellion. Their giant phlex of negative capability. (Kasandra)
Eulogy, Ruby Solly
To me, the poem reads like whakatauki on the powerful nature of father and daughter – made even more powerful when explored in this form, and so poignantly. Its voice tends to me. Telling me to walk in both worlds. To grapple with internal conflicts and harness understanding through the wielding of ink and paper, mind and memory – within the external world. It sings of a journey toward catharsis, an accomplishment of the same, and I love that it reminds us how powerful the act and gift of writing is for the pursuit of understanding and reconciliation. (Kasandra)
Ruth Dallas, ‘Pioneer Women with Ferrets’
I use this poem to draw strength from days of old. From three or four, or more, generations ago. See the vignettes of daily life, and the fortitude of pioneers versus now. Be inspired. Let the old photographs that fill your mind with the roads of the road builders, and the hunt and the huntsmen and women, and the strife and the weather worn clothes, trickle into your spirit. Remember that once-upon-a-time tradies never used to have Tough Hands or WorkSafe! This poem stares with stark, steadfast eyes. An urging for my overdue stocktake of my whakahautanga (self-mastery), I use this poem in times of disillusionment to fortify, survive, and soldier on. (Kasandra)
The poems
Pioneer Woman with Ferrets
Preserved in film As under glass, Her waist nipped in, Skirt and sleeves To ankle, wrist, Voluminous In the wind, Hat to protect Her Victorian complexion, Large in the tussock She looms, Startling as a moa. Unfocused, Her children Fasten wire-netting Round close-set warrens, And savage grasses That bristle in a beard From the rabbit-bitten hills. She is monumental In the treeless landscape. Nonchalantly swings In her left hand A rabbit, Bloodynose down. In her right hand a club.
Ruth Dallas
from Walking on the Snow, Caxton Press, 1976. Published with kind permission from the Ruth Dallas Estate
High Country Weather
Alone we are born And die alone Yet see the red-gold cirrus Over snow-mountain shine
Upon the upland road Ride easy, stranger: Surrender to the sky Your heart of anger.
James K Baxter
from Blow, Wind of Fruitfulness, Caxton Press,1948. Also appears in numerous Baxter anthologies including Collected Poems, ed JE Weir, Oxford University Press, 1980, 1981, 1988, 1995). Published with kind permission of the James K Baxter Estate.
When they ask you where you are really from
Tell them you are an unrequited pilgrim two parallel lives that never touch a whisper or a window to what your country could be if only it opened its arms and took you whole
Tell them about the moon how she eats at your skin watches you pray and fast and cry while the world sleeps how she gives birth to herself and dies and you wish upon her children
How you wander her night plant cardamom in your friends’ eyes cumin in their teeth zaatar on their brow lick the rest off your fingertips it tastes of visa-on-entry heaven with no random checks
Round the iftar table everyone speaks of politics and God trans rights and colonialism we forget we didn’t speak the empire’s tongue
once
When they ask you why you speak so well for an immigrant:
Tell them about your grandmother’s laugh how you never quite knew whether she was story or myth the upper lip in your conviction or a song ringing in your bones drifting through the kitchen window with the fried shrimp and newspaper voodoo dolls
Tell them how you have always been a voodoo doll your feet licking the flames the stove top eye a television screen a news bulletin an open casket the needle pushing and pulling through your skin every puncture a question played by an accusation every bullet hole an answer you have to fill
with silence with religion with Xanax and daytime television
And when the muazzen calls you to pray on the radio you will wrap your limbs in cotton sheets walk through the crowd with your hands in your mouth waiting for the gun.
Mohamed Hassan
from National Anthem, Dead Bird Books, 2020.You watch Mohamed read the poem here.
Eulogy
As a child Whenever I was angry, Inconsolable, My father would tell me to write a eulogy To the person who had caused me pain. He said that by the end of it I would see That even those who cause us pain Are precious to the world
My father was an exceptional man, He was blessed With a gentle soul. He walking in step With the many animals he adores And he treaded lightly on this earth.
He taught To tread as he did And to leave the world as you found it. Ideally, improve it.
One day I will read this to a room of faces I barely recognize. I will look out on a world No different with him gone As it was With him here.
Ruby Solly
from Tōku Pāpā, Victoria University Press, 2021
Hotel Emergencies
The fire alarm sound: is given as a howling sound. Do not use the lifts. The optimism sound: is given as the sound of a man brushing his teeth. Do not go to bed. The respectability sound: is given as a familiar honking sound. Do not run, do not sing. The dearly-departed sound: is given as a rumble in the bones. Do not enter the coffin. The afterlife sound: is given as the music of the spheres. It will not reconstruct. The bordello sound: is given as a small child screaming. Do not turn on the light. The accident sound: is given as an ambulance sound. You can hear it coming closer, do not crowd the footpaths. The execution sound: is given as the sound of prayer. Oh be cautious, do not stand too near
or you will surely hear: the machinegun sound, the weeping mother sound, the agony sound, the dying child sound: whose voice is already drowned by the approaching helicopter sound: which is given as the dead flower sound, the warlord sound, the hunting and fleeing and clattering sound, the amputation sound, the bloodbath sound, the sound of the President quietly addressing his dinner; now he places his knife and fork together (a polite and tidy sound) before addressing the nation
and making a just and necessary war sound: which is given as a freedom sound (do not cherish memory): which is given as a security sound: which is given as a prisoner sound: which is given again as a war sound: which is a torture sound and a watchtower sound and a firing sound: which is given as a Timor sound: which is given as a decapitation sound (do not think you will not gasp tomorrow): which is given as a Darfur sound: which is given as a Dachau sound: which is given as a dry river-bed sound, as a wind in the poplars sound: which is given again as an angry god sound:
which is here as a Muslim sound: which is here as a Christian sound: which is here as a Jewish sound: which is here as a merciful god sound: which is here as a praying sound; which is here as a kneeling sound: which is here as a scripture sound: which is here as a black-wing sound: as a dark-cloud sound: as a black-ash sound: which is given as a howling sound: which is given as a fire alarm sound:
which is given late at night, calling you from your bed (do not use the lifts): which is given as a burning sound, no, as a human sound, as a heartbeat sound: which is given as a sound beyond sound: which is given as the sound of many weeping: which is given as an entirely familiar sound, a sound like no other, up there high in the smoke above the stars
Bill Manhire
from Lifted, Victoria University Press, 2005. You can hear Bill read the poem at Poetry Archives.
Born and bred in the heart of Te Awamutu-King Country, Kasandra M. Hart-Kaumoana (Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Hikairo) completed her BA at Victoria University as a VUW-Foundation Scholar in Film, English, and Philosophy in 2019 – and Creative Writing at the IIML. She has since published two original pieces in Matatuhi Taranaki: A Bilingual Journal of Literature. Kasandra is kept busy full-time coordinating the Auckland Writers Festival and relishes the bona fide westie lifestyle in her newfound home, Waitakere.
Bridget van der Zijpp is the author of three novels: Misconduct (VUP, 2008), In the Neighbourhood of Fame (VUP, 2015), and the recently released I Laugh Me Broken (VUP, September 2021). Bridget returned to Auckland in March 2020 after living in Berlin for a few years and is now the Programme Manager at the Auckland Writers Festival.
James K Baxter (1926 – 1972), poet, dramatist, literary critic and social commentator, was born in Dunedin. He was Burns Fellow at the University of Otago (1966-7). He published numerous plays and books of poetry and criticism during his life time, while several anthologies have been published posthumously. He lived in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington and Hiruharama Jerusalem. An extensive bio is available at ReadNZ.
Ruth Dallas (Ruth Minnie Mumford) (1919 – 2008) was born in Invercargill and lived in Dunedin from 1954. An award-winning poet and children’s author, she won the Poetry category of the New Zealand Book Awards in 1977 for her fifth collection, Walking on the Snow. She wrote over 20 books. During the 1960s, she assisted Charles Brasch with Landfall. She was awarded a CBE for Services to Literature, was the Burns Fellow at the University of Otago (1968) and received an honorary doctorate from there a decade later.
Mohamed Hassan is an award-winning journalist and writer from Auckland and Cairo. He was the winner of the 2015 NZ National Poetry Slam, a TEDx fellow and recipient of the Gold Trophy at the 2017 New York Radio Awards. His poetry has been watched and shared widely online and taught in schools internationally. His 2020 poetry collection National Anthem was shortlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards (2021).
Bill Manhire founded the creative writing programme at Victoria University of Wellington, which a little over 20 years ago became the International Institute of Modern Letters. His new book Wow is published by Victoria University Press in New Zealand and Carcanet in the UK.
Ruby Solly (Kāi Tahu, Waitaha, Kāti Māmoe) is a writer, musician and taonga pūoro practitioner living in Pōneke. She has been published in journals such as Landfall, Starling and Sport among others. In 2020 she released her debut album, Pōneke, which looks at the soundscapes of Wellington’s past, present and future through the use of taonga pūoro, cello, and environmental sounds. She is currently completing a PhD in public health, focusing on the use of taonga pūoro in hauora Māori. Tōku Pāpā is her first book.
Poetry Shelf Spring Season
Tara Black picks poems Victor Rodger picks poems Peter Ireland picks poems Emma Espiner picks poems Claire Mabey (VERB) picks poems Sally Blundell picks poems Frances Cooke picks poems We Are Babies pick poems
Sleeping with Stones, Serie Barford, Anahera Press, 2021
come my love
follow me down the mountain through the desert across the ocean to Piula
fish will lomilomi our tears into crystalline water
I will kiss you better
from ‘Piula blue’
Serie Barford’s new collection Sleeping with Stones is an exquisite testimony to life and love. The poems are both odes and eulogies, because at the beating heart of the collection is the man to whom the book is dedicated. He was the poet’s beloved. The opening poem shows us a scene of joyful presence alongside a scene of terrible absence. I am inferring, as I read, that the poet’s beloved was pulled over a hard-to fathom edge. The poem suggests to me the collection will weave here and not-here, pain and joy, and that the writing will draw the loved one close. And that is exactly what it does, and it is so very moving.
I am finding it hard to write this review, when the subject matter depends on such a delicate mesh of dark and light. Yet Serie’s book is a compelling work of beauty that you read in one sitting. I keep imagining the tidal build up of feelings, memories, experience, and here I am holding, let’s say falling, into a book of bittersweet economy. The unsaid is ripe with the spoken, and the spoken is poignant with the unsaid. The beloved comes and goes, and goes. There is the light-rich setting of scenes, of shared places (a fresh water pool on Upolu where they first met), and there is the dark-shadowed pangs of regret. How to hold someone closer to keep them safe? How to be near the grief stricken? How to write grief and how to write love? All these questions and more rise to the surface.
Other things find their way into the weaving. The poet is having mammograms, buys a frock in her beloved’s favourite colour, uses traditional healing foods (turmeric and kawakawa leaves), faces institutional racism, mows the lawn, stands by the pōhutukawa they planted together. All these daily activities and challenges, nestling into the grief and the recollecting, are placed within the four seasons of a year. The seasons indicate the passing of time, the harvest and the plantings, yet also indicate the way life is shaped into so many stages, compartments or loose-bordered arrangements.
The poems sit in generous space on the page, using an open rather tight font. The openness gives the pain and the celebration breathing room. Feeling and thinking room. Which is exactly what I want to do for you. I want to open the book and then let you pick it up and fall into its beauty, its hope, its connections.
your fine voice lies buried on the other side of the world
how you loved our garden
pese mai sing to me
from ‘Sing to me’
Serie Barford was born in Aotearoa to a German-Samoan mother and a Pālagi father, and grew up in West Auckland. She has published poems online and in journals, along with four previous collections of poetry. In 2011 she was awarded the Seresin Landfall Writer’s Residency and in 2018 the Pasifika Residency at the Michael King Writers’ Centre. Serie promoted her collections Tapa Talk and Entangled Islands at the 2019 International Arsenal Book Festival in Kiev. Sleeping With Stones was launched during Matariki, 2021.
Anahera page Poetry Shelf: Serie reads from Sleeping with Stones Poem on Poetry Shelf: ‘The midwife and the cello’ RNZ Standing Room Only interview Kete Books: Grace Iwashita-Taylor review
Skinny Dip: Poems, eds Susan Paris & Kate De Goldi, illustrations by Amy van Luijk, Massey University Press (Annual Ink), 2021
Kate De Goldi and Susan Paris, editors of the popular and best-selling Annuals, have edited a lively, much-needed, and altogether stunning anthology of poems for middle and older readers. Kate and Susan commissioned ‘original, and sometimes rowdy poetry’ from a selection of well-known Aotearoa poets. The poems are pitched at Y7 to Y10 readers, but will catch the attention of a range of readers. The collection is shaped like a school year, with four terms, and with the poets both recalling and imagining school days. The subjects shift and spark. The moods and tones never stay still. Some of the poems are free verse (no rules) and some are written according to the rules of specific poetic forms. There is a useful glossary detailing some of the forms at the back of the book (rondel, tanka, haiku, ode, cinquain, rondel, sestina, villanelle, acrostic, pantoum). There are also found, prose, strike-out and dialogue poems. A genius idea for a book that shows how you can follow poetry rules, break poetry rules, play with poetry rules.
The editors invited poems from a glorious group of Aotearoa poets: Sam Duckor-Jones, essa may ranapiri, Bill Manhire, Anahera Gildea, Amy McDaid, Kōtuku Nuttall, Ben Brown, Ashleigh Young, Rata Gordon, Dinah Hawken, Oscar Upperton, James Brown, Victor Rodger, Tim Upperton, Lynley Edmeades, Freya Daly Sadgrove, Nina Mingya Powles, Renee Liang and Nick Ascroft.
Through doing my poetry blogs, schools visits and author tours over decades, I have witnessed poetry simmering and bubbling, somersaulting and sizzling, the length and breadth of Aotearoa. Poetry in my experience can excite the reluctant writer, advance the sophisticated wordsmith, and captivate all those writers in between, both in primary and secondary schools. Poetic forms are fun, and can stretch the imagination, electrify moods and music. Send your writing pen in refreshing and surprising directions.
Poem anthologies for younger and middle readers are as rare as hen’s teeth in Aotearoa, so it is a special day when a new one hits our library and bookshop shelves. Kate and Susan have curated a selection of poems that will fit ranging moods, and perhaps inspire you to write a poem of your own, however old you are!
I have celebrated Skinny Dip on Poetry Box with four readings (Ben Brown, James Brown, Lynley Edmeades and Ashleigh Young). My November challenge on Poetry Box is inspired by Skinny Dip (for Y1 – Y8), so do invite keen young poetry fans to give it a go. For Poetry Shelf, I am featuring two glorious readings by Amber Asau and Sam Duckor-Jones, and including a challenge for secondary students.
I decided Skinny Dip is so good it deserves a feast of celebrations! Let me raise my glass to a fabulous project.
A popUP poetry challenge for secondary school students in Year 9 and 10:
Choose one of the poetry forms mentioned above and write a poem. You can stick to the rules or you can play with the rules. Send to paulajoygreen@gmail.com by November 14th. Include your name, age, year and name of school. Deadline: November 11th. I will post some on Poetry Shelf on November 16th. Write Skinny Dip in subject line so I don’t miss your email. I will have a copy of the book to give away.
two readings
Amber Esau reads ‘Street Fighter’
Sam Duckor-Jones reads ‘Please excuse my strange behaviour’
Amber Esau is a Sā-māo-rish writer (Ngāpuhi / Manase) born and raised in Tāmaki Makaurau. She is a poet, storyteller, and amateur astrologer. Her work has been published both in print and online.
Sam Duckor-Jones lives in Wellington. He has published two collections of poems: People from the Pit Stand Up and Party Legend (VUP).
Massey University Press (Annual Ink) page Kate De Goldi & Susan Paris talk to Kim Hill Read an extract at the The Spinoff ReadNZ Q & A with Kate & Susan
I need to write to this guy Jeremy, a poet who I met in New York. Every six months or so Jeremy writes to say hello and provide an update on his latest book which, to be honest, I don’t want to hear about but that’s beside the point; I liked Jeremy and I will get a copy.
I need to write to my other friend, my old friend, who I have not written or spoken to for a long time.
Whenever I hear from Jeremy I think about this poetry reading we both did in Brooklyn, October 2017. At the reading, a mania seized me and I went on for too long. Maybe I wouldn’t remember this now if it weren’t for the fact that the great American poet Eileen Myles was waiting for me to finish reading so that they could read, and when I finally finished and sat down, they stood up and cleared their throat and set a timer on their phone.
Whenever I hear from Jeremy I think of that reading and my arms and legs spasm in shame, as if I’ve been hit by an arrow. It was an outdoor event with rows of those white marquees that undulate violently when the wind blows. People were walking, walking, all through the afternoon, in that miraculous way that people just walk around on the other side of the planet.
Why did I read so long? Why didn’t Jeremy stop me?
If I had stopped reading sooner, there would be more time in the world.
Those three to four minutes would be snowballing off in some other direction accumulating whole hours, days. Maybe my friend and I would still be talking.
The days might be growing longer, not shorter. And all of a sudden we’ve made it through winter together. From the apartment we look down onto the street and decide there is enough light left to go out walking.
Ashleigh Young
Ashleigh Young’s most recent book is How I Get Ready (Victoria University Press, 2019).
NZ Poetry Shelf 