“Poetry collections published in Aotearoa in 2020 show a wealth of exceptional and original work. It’s an exciting situation for New Zealand poetry. The four shortlisted collections are striking, all exhibiting an acute global consciousness in difficult times,” says Poetry category convenor of judges Dr Briar Wood.
I was so excited about the poetry longlist, I spent the last few months celebrating each poet on the blog. What sublime books – I knew I would have a flood of sad glad feelings this morning (more than on other occasions) because books that I have adored were always going to miss out. I simply adored the longlist. So I am sending a big poetry toast to the six that didn’t make it – your books will have life beyond awards.
I am also sending a big poetry toast to the four finalists: your books have touched me deeply. Each collection comes from the heart, from your personal experience, from your imaginings and your reckonings, from your musical fluencies. The Poetry Shelf reviews are testimony to my profound engagement with your poems and how they have stuck with me.
Over the next weeks I am posting features on the poets: first up, later this morning, Tusiata Avia.
Mary and Peter Biggs CNZM are long-time arts advocates and patrons – particularly of literature, theatre and music. They have funded the Biggs Family Prize in Poetry at Victoria University of Wellington’s International Institute of Modern Letters since 2006, along with the Alex Scobie Research Prize in Classical Studies, Latin and Greek. They have been consistent supporters of the International Festival of the Arts, the Auckland Writers Festival, Wellington’s Circa Theatre, the New Zealand Arts Foundation, Featherston Booktown, Read NZ Te Pou Muramura (formerly the New Zealand Book Council), the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, the Featherston Sculpture Trust and the Kokomai Arts Festival in the Wairarapa. Peter was Chair of Creative New Zealand from 1999 to 2006. He led the Cultural Philanthropy Taskforce in 2010 and the New Zealand Professional Orchestra Sector Review in 2012. Peter was appointed a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for arts governance and philanthropy in 2013.
鸣 (míng), the cry of animals and insects, rhymes with tooth, which rhymes with precipice, which rhymes with the first part of my Chinese name.
I am full of nouns and verbs; I don’t know how to live any other way. I am a tooth-like thing. I am half sun half moon, and the scissors used to cut away the steamed lotus leaves. I am honey strokes spreading over the tiles.
Certain languages contain more kinds of rain than others, and I have eaten them all.
Proximity to the library is having one’s hand on the pulse of the universe. It’s turning to see a dear friend in a room absolutely rotten with strangers. It’s looking down on a familiar city from a great height, sweat cooling on your back, and it’s still, so still, that you think you’ve missed the apocalypse. It’s the streetlight blinking when you walk below it, a small owl calling from the bush beyond the fence. It’s that barometric lift of understanding when thoughts move like weather, like an emotion. It’s the feeling of extreme up-closeness that comes from finding out more, and then more again, about the person you love. The secret dimness of the backstage. The treasure at the core of the cave. It’s the feeling I had as a child reading The Borrowers, imagining the whole world in cross-sectioned miniature—that’s how I see the library—like a dollhouse, hinged open at its heart, tiny readers bent over tiny books. Being inside the library is like flying inside a cloud—shut off from the outside, riding out its knocks and bumps. Libraries feel magical, like mushrooms all connected underground, like hibernation, like glimpsing the glittering elbow of a gem poking out of dark rock. Libraries, like icebergs, balancing out the seen with the great unseen—all that knowledge tucked below the surface, keeping us all afloat. Libraries, like icebergs, disappearing.
Karlo Mila reads ‘Letter to JC Sturm’, from Goddess Muscle Huia Publishers, 2020
Dr Karlo Mila is a New Zealand-born poet of Tongan and Pākehā descent with ancestral connections to Samoa. She is currently Programme Director of Mana Moana, Leadership New Zealand. This leadership programme is based on her postdoctoral research on harnessing indigenous language and ancestral knowledge from the Pacific to use in contemporary leadership contexts. Karlo received an MNZM in 2019 for services to the Pacific community and as a poet, received a Creative New Zealand Contemporary Pacific Artist Award in 2016, and was selected for a Creative New Zealand Fulbright Pacific Writer’s Residency in Hawaii in 2015.
Goddess Muscle is Karlo’s third book of poetry. Her first, Dream Fish Floating, won NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book of Poetry Award at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards in 2006. In 2008, Karlo collaborated with German-born artist Delicia Sampero to produce A Well Written Body. Karlo’s poetry has been published in in many anthologies, in a variety of journals and online.
Tusiata Avia reads ‘Massacre’ from The Savage Coloniser Book (Victoria University Press, 2020)
Tusiata Avia is an acclaimed poet, performer and children’s writer. Her previous poetry collections are Wild Dogs Under My Skirt (2004; also staged as a theatre show, most recently Off-Broadway, winning the 2019 Outstanding Production of the Year), Bloodclot (2009) and the Ockham-shortlisted Fale Aitu | Spirit House (2016). Tusiata has held the Fulbright Pacific Writer’s Fellowship at the University of Hawai‘i in 2005 and the Ursula Bethell Writer in Residence at University of Canterbury in 2010. She was the 2013 recipient of the Janet Frame Literary Trust Award, and in 2020 was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to poetry and the arts.
Elizabeth Morton reads two poems from This is your real name (Otago University Press, 2020)
Elizabeth Morton is a poet and teller of yarns. She has two poetry collections – Wolf (Mākaro Press, 2017) and This is your real name (Otago, 2020). She is included in Best Small Fictions 2016, and was feature poet in the Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2017. She has an MLitt in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow, and is currently completing an MSc through King’s College London.
Richard Langston, Five O’Clock Shadows, The Cuba Press, 2020
We often wonder
what moves us in a day –
was it words in a sequence
that surprised us
or notes played by someone
who kept their mouth closed
& let the sound leave
their broken body
from ‘Hill walk’
I am writing this as Tāmaki Makaurau is back in lockdown, wondering if I will pack the car for our first family summer holiday up north in years, worrying how Auckland businesses will cope, how families will cope, and sleeping like a patchwork quilt. Poetry is such a necessary diversion. It even makes up for patchwork sleep. I still have a wee stack of 2020 poetry books and now the 2021 stack is growing. It is like a preserving cupboard of treats along with the canned tomatoes and the black beans.
Richard Langston’s book has been on my mind for months after hearing the reading he did for Poetry Shelf. This week has been the perfect time to return to the poems. I finished the book and the word that came to mind, a word I have never applied to a poetry collection, was precious. This is a precious book – it has poise and it is personal.
The first poems take me to the land. I am musing on how Allen Curnow and the crew of white men writing poetry in the middle of the twentieth century were digging their way into a New Zealand kind of poetry. They were moving away from the early poets that filtered the land and experience through poetry models from Britain. It is a complicated story that has been retold so many times over the decades, in so many different contexts, with so many different biases and erasures. Ah. And then the land barely got a look in in poems. I feel there is a book to be written that traverses the relationship between the land and poetry, that never lets the poem lose contact with the reader, that never lets the poem service the theory and little else, that acknowledges the suffering and heartbreaking losses of the tangata whenua.
The first poems in Five O’Clock Shadows make the land precious. I am reminded of how Sue Wootton, Brian Turner, Airini Beautrais (a river), Hone Tuwhare, Ruth Dallas have done this in distinctive ways. Like these poets, Richard’s poems also travel with myriad subject matter: from the closing of a tavern, to a lost dog, to Dunedin, to refugees, to Sunday in the islands. But it is the land poems that first strike me. I am musing on how earth warmth and leaf light can permeate a whole book. So yes, this is a collection of earth warmth. You get to stand in the land poems and the poem is beauty and anchor and care.
We love the land by eye & feel & sun
& shadow. It grows within us.
This is who we are, this is how we find ourselves.
from ‘Map’
There is a spareness in all the poems, a light rich economy. Goodness knows what it took to write these, but when they reach me there is an exquisite poise. Every word belongs. I also found ‘Bsharri, Lebanon’ – a poem penned for Richard’s sisters who travelled to their ancestral village – precious. This ancestor poem is a poem to hear read aloud:
We have come to hug you,
we have come to kiss you for the life
you made us.
We have come, ancestors, to love
you as you taught us. We have come,
ancestors, & now we are together.
Ancestors, we hug you, we kiss you.
Ancestors, we weep, because
we have come.
The poetry is economical but each poem launches you into multiple musings, feelings, intricacies. I love ‘Please, do not’. The poem begins with infectious word wit and then travels to the punch-gut restorative ending – and the word ‘enough’. I want you to read the whole poem but here is the beginning:
Please do not yell,
such a small shattering word –
YELL – I prefer yell-ow
that might imply surrender
or a field of flowers holding
their faces to the sun,
why not peace, or acceptance,
such lovely hard-earned words.
Perhaps the poems that strike deepest, that are most precious, are the several addressed to mother and father. Eulogies, recollections, re-tracings. I am thinking how Richard’s poems are made of parts and you need to experience the coming together of these parts to get the reading joy in full. If I take a stanza or two to share with you, I am distilling the magic. These poems are magic, moving, must-reads: ‘Plums’, ‘Sons’, ‘Snoring’, Threaded’, ‘There’. In writing the poems both mother and father are held close, like a gift for family, like a gift for us as readers who also live and love and mourn. I especially love ‘There’, a poem that places the mother at the centre. Here are a few stanzas near the end of the poem (again I implore you to read the whole poem):
What we share is our story.
I sit with her
& look out at the weather.
The windows
are full of the day.
She doesn’t know. I do not know.
We have our story,
our fallible memories.
Her mouth
hovers by the spoon,
& we watch the weather.
You can tell this book matters so very much to the poet – and the degree of personal investment is contagious, whether in words gathering the land, family, experience, memory. Think of the poems as personal plantings in the undergrowth of life, with all manner of glorious lights shining through. Like I said, I reread this book in our return to lockdown, and by the time I got to the end I was filled with the joy of living and writing and reading. I am going to leave you with the final poem in the book, that takes us back to the land (crikey we never left it), how the need to be creative is such a necessary thing and how we share so many attachments – ‘together on this whenua’.
Richard Langston is a veteran broadcasting journalist and director, who comes from Dunedin, and was a driving force in the city’s music scene in the 1980s. He lives in Wellington and is a proud member of the three-person South Wellington Poetry Society.
Fanon once wrote that “The Manichaeism of the colonist produces the Manichaeism of the colonised”
It means that we are conditioned to believe in
categories
only ‘two’ genders
capitalism with all the trimmings
that we have the right to speak for us all
We are categorised and branded as one thing
We cannot be another
So we surrender to a position so futile in nature
It cuts like obsidian
It bleeds like the rata tree
While Taawhaki cries out
In seeking vengeance we found only death
Amongst other things we have forgotten
The numbing stench of rain
The chance to listen
The gift of learning
The ability to be humble
The suffering of others
The necessity of place
We don’t know how to be complicated
We don’t know how to be nuanced
We don’t know how to be wrong
We don’t know that to be wrong is to be free
Freedom is conditional
But it grows like Lichen
It dries out in the summer
And regenerates in the winter
We don’t see how we are the ones who perpetuate the violence
We say I am right and you are wrong
It’s like George W Bush all over again
“Your either with us or against us”
I want to be the shoe that hits you in the face
We run a gallery named after a slave ship
But we want to give platforms to grave robbing as art
But we don’t want to be told that we are the ones who need to do the work
But we don’t realise that some of us never forget these things
But we don’t realise memory is a stain that can only be undone through acknowledgement
But we don’t realise we should heal ourselves first
Here we are during this true blue kiwi summer working our tan
burning our skin
not in communion with Tama nui te ra
while the world is dying
while terrorists attempt a pathetic coup
while prisoners drink brown water
while the ice melts as we pillage
Protecting our property we lock our car doors
We accumulate and close ranks
We sell decolonize mugs for $70
We sell decolonize earrings for $70
We sell and sell and sell and sell
We upset ourselves
We upset each other
We doom scroll
We don’t dream
We don’t show tenderness
We don’t take time be present
We don’t take time to be awake
Under sheets of rain we watch the splitting of spaces into the interstices of empire
Afraid of anything but especially ourselves
But what other ways could they have possibly broken in two or is it that we broke into ourselves and revelled in the smell of salt that we can hear
Imagine just saying saying no
I want it all to stop sometimes
I think about the loops that the waves make as they lick the edges of the rocks
I remember that plastic slowly disintegrates as it travels through the ocean’s currents
Remember the Roman tar marking the roads across Europe
Remember the asphalt on Jewish and Romani homes
Remember Govenor Grey in the cape colony, south Australia and New Zealand
Remember the gun holes in the wall on University property
Remember
Remember
Remember
The prisons on my ancestors stolen lands are of course deliberate
The difference between protest and protector
The difference between a riot and a protest
The fall of empire
The decline of the west
The beginning of the end
Our lives are like raranga
Rich fibres knotted together
Through many bodies
For which we must honour them
We honour them through
our complications
our flaws that we work to unlearn
our ability to show love even in the face of the wretched
Hana Pera Aoake
Hana Pera Aoake (Ngaati Mahuta, Ngaati Hinerangi, Tainui/Waikato) is an artist and writer based in Te wai pounamu. Hana recently published their first book of essays and prose, A bathful of kawakawa and hot water with Compound Press. They currently co-organise Kei te pai press with Morgan Godfery.
Jackson Nieuwland, I Am a Human Being, Compound Press, 2020
Jackson reads from I Am a Human Being
Jackson Nieuwland is a human being, duh. They are a genderqueer writer, editor, librarian, and woo-girl, born and based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. They co-founded the reading/zine series Food Court. This isn’t even their final form.
