First time in my god
damned life I forgot
opening lines to ‘So Buttoned Up’
for the poem go here
A terrific new Emma Neale poem at HeadStuff
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Category Archives: NZ author
Poetry Shelf audio spot: Helen Heath reads two new poems from Are Friends Electric
‘Greg and the bird’
and the bird’
‘A rise of starlings’
Helen Heath’s debut collection, Graft, won the NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book for Poetry Award. It was also shortlisted for the Royal Society of New Zealand Science Book Prize (the first poetry or fiction shortlisted). Helen has a PhD in Creative Writing from Victoria University of Wellington’s IIML. Her new collection, Are Friends Electric, is a poetic smorgasbord that offers diverse and satisfying engagements.
Paula Green and Helen Heath in conversation
Victoria University Press page
In the hammock: reading Mimicry IV
Holly Hunter has edited the latest issue of Mimicry. She has drawn together an eclectic package of art and writing that will place your finger on the pulse of emerging (well mostly!) voices. The magazine is devoted to poetry, fiction, nonfiction, comedy, music, art, photography and design. It is slim but is abundant in reading currents.
You even get a mix tape at bandcamp to listen to as you read.
Often when I pick up a poetry journal I gravitate to the familiar poets whose work I already love – like a music hook. I will share my initial hooks with the rain thundering down outside. In this case Morgan Bach because I haven’t read anything from her for awhile and I just loved her debut book, Some of Us Eat the Seeds. Her two poems here are honed out of cloud and snow and blood because they are light and airy and serious.
Looking for balance to the red interiors
in a calm sea of grasses, the dull love
of dust on a hillside, the caress of each
muscle as it contracts and expands
to pull me to a summit. That place
I would reuse to leave if I could,
but the hours have me by the ankles.
from ‘Terrific’
After hearing Emer Lyons read in Wellington last year, I jump to her poems in an instant. She is nimble on the page and in the ear, and tacks in fresh directions that retune me as poetry reader.
i talk too much at parties
every bee i see is dead or dying
people set fire to the sky
set the dogs howling
record themselves singing the same thing
on repeat
repeating
(and The Fish goes
A A X B B X
1 3 8 1 6 8)
from ‘strays’
Chris Tse’s latest book, HE’S SO MASC, is a sublime read. I love this book because it risks and it opens. The poem here is ultra witty but dead serious.
20. It’s the way we step out of a burning theatre as if nothing’s wrong.
21. As if the smoke in our eyes is a lover’s smile caught in sunlight.
22. An uncontrollable fire is perfectly fine, given the state of the world.
23. Then why do I feel so angry?
24. Are you angry?
25. I’m angry.
from ‘Why Hollywood won’t cast poets in films anymore’
Essa Ranapiri was a highlight for me at Wellington Readers and Writers week this year. Their poem, ‘her*’, catches the way they make words ache and arc and slip between your ribs. You need to read the whole thing. To quote a glimpse is barely fair (two lines out of thirteen).
i left him wrapped in curtains
to stall the acid action of my stomach
from ‘her*’
I have only just discovered Rebecca Hawkes on The Starling. She is so good. The poem here is a linguistic explosion on the page: like an intricate and lush brocade that amasses shuddering detail and smatters expectation. You want to spend the weekend with this poem. (I want to hear her read so will be posting an audio clip of a Starling poem soon)
I ask their name and they make an unpronounceable sound / like the
curdling clink of cooling obsidian / so I call them the ultimate war machine
/ they hurl rocks into my enemies and when they beat the earth with their
fists / I feel the world quake under me / this is how I know I have fallen in
love / but also onto the ground
from ‘Crush’
We are served well with fresh young literary journals at the moment (literary doesn’t seem to catch what they do). They keep you in touch with poets that continue growing on you but also take you into new zones of reading, with unfamiliar voices making themselves felt. Indelibly! I have just read Sophie van Waardenberg’s three poems and they touch me, make me want to write with their viscosity and tang.
my girl becomes a calendar and I curl up inside her
my girl becomes a tongue twister and I curl up inside her
my girl lets the spring in through her hands
she puts her hands over my ears and I remember how it feels
from ‘schön’
Cheers to a well-stocked journal to keep you going through wet wintry days. I am saving the rest of the journal for the next wild weekend. First up Louise Wallace (author of much loved Bad Things), Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connor (the winner of the Landfall Young Writers Competition 2018) and Rachel O’Neill (who was recently awarded a NZ Writers Guild Puni Taatuhi o Aotearoa Seed grant to develop her screenplay).
The pleasure of good writing journals is that keep you in touch with what you know and catapult you into the unfamiliar where you accumulate new must-reads. Mimicry does exactly that.
See Mimicry on Facebook
Enquiries: mimicryjournal@gmail.com
A chance to hear Sam Duckor-Jones reading poetry @BATS_Theatre
Saturday June 23rd Sam Duckor-Jones and Marolyn Krasner BATS Theatre Wellington
Sam is reading from his debut collection People From The Pit Stand Up (VUP). He is a sculptor and poet who lives in Featherston. In 2017 he won the Biggs Poetry Prize from the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington.
Monday Poem: Ian Wedde’s ‘McCahon’s Defile’
McCahon’s Defile
For John Reynolds
And so Colin I cast off in my frail craft of words
my craft of frail words of crafty words
into the defile of Three Lamps where
struck by sunshine on the florist’s striped awning
and the autumn leaves outside All Saints
as you did before fully waking in Waitakere
to look at the elegant pole kauri in dewy light
I defile my sight with closed eyes
and so see better when I open them the Sky Tower
pricking a pale blue heaven like Raphael’s
in Madonna of the Meadows or the scumbled sky of
Buttercup fields forever where there is a constant flow of light
and we are born into a pure land through Ahipara’s blunt gate
a swift swipe of pale blue paint
on Shadbolt’s battered booze bar where bards
bullshitted among the kauri.
Gaunt cranes along the city skyline
avert their gazes towards the Gulf
away from babblers at Bam Bina
breakfast baskers outside Dizengoff
some pretty shaky dudes outside White Cross
beautiful blooms in buckets at Bhana Brothers
(open for eighty years) Karen Walker’s window
looking fresh and skitey across Ponsonby Road
my charming deft dentist at Luminos
most of South Asia jammed into one floor at the Foodcourt
Western Park where wee Bella bashed her head
on some half-buried neoclassical nonsense
the great viewshaft to not-faux Maungawhau
and then turn left into the dandy defile of K Road
where you make your presence felt yet again
Colin through the window of Starkwhite
in building 19-G_W-13 where dear John Reynolds
has mapped your sad Sydney derives and defiles
across the road from Herabridal’s windows all dressed up
in white broderie Anglaise like lovely frothy brushstrokes
or the curdled clouds and words you dragged into the light
fantastic along beaches and the blackness that was all
you saw when you opened your eyes sometimes
like the bleary early morning Thirsty Dogs
and weary hookers a bit further along my walk.
I love the pink pathway below the K Road overbridge
a liquid dawn rivulet running down towards Waitemata’s riprap
but also the looking a bit smashed washing hung out
on the balcony above Carmen Jones
and over the road from Artspace and Michael Lett etc
there’s El Sizzling Lomito, Moustache, Popped, and Love Bucket
the Little Turkish Café has $5 beers
it’s like a multiverse botanical garden round here
you could lose yourself in the mad babble of it
like the Botanical Gardens at Woolloomooloo
with the clusterfucking rut-season fruit-bats
screaming blue murder.
But it’s peaceful again down Myers Park
the mind empties and fills like a lung breathing
the happy chatter of kids swinging
and my memory of you Colin
sitting alone and forlorn on a bench
must have been about 1966
contemplating the twitchy cigarette between your fingers
as if it divined the buried waters of Waihorotiu
or the thoughts that flow beneath thought
in the mind’s defile at dawn when you open your eyes
and see that constant flow of light among the trees.
©Ian Wedde
Ian Wedde is an Auckland writer and curator with sixteen poetry collections, seven novels, two essay collections, a book of short stories, a memoir, a monograph on Bill Culbert and several art catalogues. His multiple honours include The Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry, admission to The Order of NZ Merit and an Arts Foundation Laureate Award. His most recent poetry book, Selected Poems, appeared in 2017.
Auckland University Press page
Mary McCallum launches her debut poetry collection in July
Poetry Shelf audio spot: Emma Neale reads ‘Man Up’
‘Man Up’ from Tender Machines, Otago University Press, 2015
Emma Neale received the inaugural NZSA/Janet Frame Memorial Award, the Kathleen Grattan Award for an unpublished poetry manuscript (The Truth Garden), the University of Otago Burns Fellowship and the NZSA/Beatson Fellowship. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Sarah Broom Poetry Award and the Bridport Poetry Prize, and her poetry collection, Tender Machines, was long-listed in the 2016 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Her novel, Billy Bird, was short-listed for the Acorn Prize in the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award. She is the current editor of Landfall.
Otago University Press page
