Category Archives: NZ poems

Poetry Shelf Monday poem: Sudha Rao’s ‘Manuhiri’

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Manuhiri

(Visitor)

1

Her grandmother told her she was a child of Manu,

manushi, daughter of humanity, blessed

to be a visitor when she crossed the sea.

 

The wooden gate is a threshold with arms outstretched

in protection, the slow wash of green waters rhythm.

Rising notes of another tongue is the wailing of her mother tongue.

 

Her back, a billowing canvas is taking shape –

her grandmother’s tapping, tapping the geo-graphy of her

in colours of the monsoon rain.

 

She is dusk, light with all the distance around her.

She crosses the threshold and offers her grandmother’s verses,

a garland of old earth sounds for the new.

 

 

 

 

2

Blissful waters surround pain washed up over and over again.

She sits among silent voices, bodies twitching to utter

shame for carrying skin, coloured by others.

What’s a brown skinned woman to do

at the gates of a marae? The solidarity of colour

bears differentiation.

He opened to a stance defying rule, he said I am

connected to islands by water, I am connected to you

by colonisation.

The gates opened enough for her to raise her head.

 

 

 

3

Nga Mihi

Korihi Te manu, takiri mai i Te ata 

Ka ao, ka ao, ka awatea

Tihei Mauri ora

Kua tau tenei manu hei manu, hei manuhiri, hei manu hari 

Ko te takahanga waewae, ko te rere o te kupu

Ka tangi te ngakau, he roimata aroha

Ki te manawhenua, no koutou tonu te whenua nei.

He awe ko toku mama, he awe ko toku papa 

Ma te huruhuru te manu ka rere 

Ka rere i te ao, ka rere i te po, ka rere ki toku whenua ake 

Ma Te ahi ka te manu ka ora. 

Tena koutou katoa.

 

4

When the kuia holds her hand, a sacred place ignites.

You are a seed of the old banyan tree swept

from your grandmother’s lap.

Transplanted here, I see birds’ nests, singing insects and shoots bearing the weight

of you. I see strong branches making light of your path –

see how they are dropping roots –

she feels the earth quiver under her feet.

 

5

Across the table, she hears raging clouds roving

to make wave upon wave to become sea overhead. White peaks roughed up on waters

below are screeching

gulls. How can she say that she is a visitor

on a  warm beach with sand beads

sketching a canvas stretched in her head?

 

 

 

6

She is a mirror of herself.

She is not a mirror of herself.

She is a scooped grain of memory,

of a love-song for a life lived

between her worlds.

 

 

 

 

 

1  The mihi for Manuhiri was prepared for me by Matt Gifford. It is made of two parts – the first is Māori proverb, the second part of the speech is an introduction of me to the hosts at the marae. The translation is as follows:

 

Nga Mihi (speech)

Part One – Maori proverb

Korihi Te manu, takiri mai i Te ata

Ka ao, Ka ao, ka awatea

Tihei Mauri ora

The bird sings, the morning has dawned

The day has broken

Ah! There is life.

Part Two – my speech introducing myself Matt references me as bird

Kua tau tenei manu hei manu, hei manuhiri, hei manu hari

Ko te takahanga waewae, ko te rere o te kupu

Ka tangi te ngakau, he roimata aroha

Ki te manawhenua, no koutou tonu te whenua nei.

This manu (bird) has descended as a manu (bird), as a visitor, as a dancing visitor

Through its dancing feet and its flowing words

Its heart cries, the tears of love

For you the home people, this is your land.

He awe ko toku mama, He awe ko toku papa

Ma te huruhuru te manu ka rere

Ka rere i te ao, ka rere i te po, Ka rere ki toku whenua ake

Ma Te ahi ka te manu ka ora.

My mother is a feather, my father is a feather

And it’s by their feathers this manu (bird) takes flight

Taking flight to the day, and flight to the night, From its own home land

Where the home fire burns, and gives this manu (bird) life.

 

 

Originally from South India, Sudha Rao lives in Wellington and has had a long standing involvement with the arts, primarily as a dancer. In 2017, Sudha graduated with a Masters in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University, Wellington. Since 2012, Sudha’s poems have appeared in various journals and anthologies. These include two editions of Blackmail Press (2012 and 2014); an anthology of New Zealand writing, Sunset at the Estuary (2015) and in the UK anthology Poets’ quest for God (2016);  Landfall, Otago University, Dunedin (2018),and an anthology of migrant voices called More of us published in March 2019. In 2014, one Sudha’s poems was on the Bridport Poetry Competition’s shortlist. Excerpts of her prose work, has appeared in Turbine (2018) which comprised part of her MA thesis Margam and other excerpts were read in two sessions on national radio RNZ (2018). Sudha is part of a collective of Wellington women poets called Meow Gurrrls, who regularly post poems on YouTube

 

 

 

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Poetry Shelf review: Gail Ingram’s Contents Under Pressure

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Gail Ingram, Contents Under Pressure, Pūkeko Publications, 2019

 

Gail Ingram has published poetry and flash fiction both in New Zealand and internationally. She lives in Christchurch where she is part of a writing/ critiquing group of poets. Contents Under Pressure is her debut poetry collection and includes illustrations by her daughter, Rata Ingram.

Contents Under Pressure is in debt to a city; the poems navigate post-earthquake Christchurch. When I first held the book and flicked through the pages, I was reminded of flicking through a book to watch the drawings on the bottom corners move. Flick the pages of this book and it is poetry in disrupted movement: you get spiky angles, walls of text, bold against light, steps against missing bits, changing fonts.

The title is perfect: everything is under pressure – the fractured city and the contents of the book. This is the story of a city filtered through that of a mother / graffiti artist and her son, and both have different ways of coping with a city in pieces.

The opening poem ‘Definition: mother / graffiti / artist’ introduces just that: a mother who goes tagging in the city that continues to break. At times the pages of the book stand in for the tagged walls:

 

she sprays

airport walls in zen

tangles so strangers

trace poke-leaves

in sesquipedalian mazes

 

from ‘From below, the graffiti artist is’

 

I love this book because it shakes up what poetry can do while simultaneously bringing us in close, so searingly close, to human trauma.

An early poem returns us to solid ground: the mother and her sons are looking at a photo of the family tobogganing at Round Hill. It is a white hot shard in the collection that makes the rest of the poetry even more poignant:

 

Mum took the photo. I’ve got this picture of Dad resting his

arm across her shoulders —

Yeah, like a security blanket.

Yeah.

But now when I look at it, I don’t see us. I don’t know who

that family is, but …

I know the mountains —

The mountains are capable of moving.

 

from ‘She overhears the boys talking about the photo in the hall’

 

The portrait of the woman feels like a woman behaving out of character in order to relocate herself (her new character) in the new and shattered terrain. She leaves her familiar/unfamiliar daylight routines. She becomes someone other in the pitch dark night. At times the writing is in shards and spiky while at times it is lyrical:

 

She hasn’t gone out into the ink

of the night street yet. Here,

she exists, safe as a thief

in the stoma of their sheets

before she will slink through the open window,

creep along the dark passages of local streets,

and tap her own tune

on the city’s leaping drum.

 

from ‘The graffiti artist waits for the world to sleep’

 

The graffiti artist shows us the power of art to make both public and personal both ideas and feelings. And we can engage with this. We can be moved and we can be challenged. In ‘The graffiti artist as a teenager’, her art teacher had showed the class the ‘Cubist strokes of “Guernica””. She is learning what art can do:

 

At fourteen she learned the power of dots. That a

cluster could create a river pebble’s shadow, a

crease in a smile or the trail of cupped hooves on

farm soil. Forty pencils pattering in the class, and

the hexagon-window left free, high in the streaked

pupil, made the picture come alive as if it was her

paper skin under the shrapnel of sharp lead. (…)

 

There are many threads to track through the book. Equally captivating is the thread of the son thrown off kilter, with drugs, anxiety, physic textbooks. In ‘Expedition to the New World’ the mother and son are traipsing through the vegetable aisles where the poem’s punning supermarket title confirms everything is made strange and off-centre:

 

(…)  She can’t find what they need. He

brushes past tins of spaghetti. Root-like tendrils on the

labels seem to take an interest in his passing, as though to

grasp for arm or ankle. He half-stumbles into the bags of

stalky cereal and utters a guttural sound, an earthquake

rumble that shudders up through his body to settle there.

 

On the back of the book Sue Wootton, Bernadette Hall and Bryan Walpert underline what a gift this book is. I agree. The poetry represents the way the shattering of familiar terrain shakes up everything: family, body, heart, faith, everyday routines, solid attachments. It shakes you as you read. It is intimate and it is wide reaching. It also shows the way art, language and a deep love of family carry you as you discover ways to resettle. A gift of a book.

 

Pūkeko Publications page

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf Classic Poem: Fiona Farrell picks Paula Green’s ‘Glenburn’

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Glenburn

 

Even in the face of an icy wind, the stillness

dazzles us, and we journey south to the dulcet honey.

He falls silent, the din left destitute, far

from the hive. The sound of his laugh, it rises

and becomes music, a vein of sun that is in him

 

like a mountain. Appearances remain objects of barter.

All the calm. All that fury. We cross a threshold

to witness the unbidden cloud. Our chamber of words

sweetened as if made of honey or beeswax,

for we arrive at last, the smell now in him of hive.

 

We will eat bread and cheese, forgetting the northern

city, the pull of the ocean. He moves with his sight

fixed on stillness, finding a fickle appearance

like a star behind slow speech. All that fury. All that calm.

Where will we find the scale of love? The journey south

 

undoes the mountain of cloud. His own incubus

the riddle that is land. We are certain that buildings

will appear in the stillness, kept alive by our eyes.

 

Paula Green

from Crosswind, Auckland University Press, 2004. Also published in Dear Heart: 150 NZ Love Poems, Random House, 2012.

 

Note from Fiona Farrell

My favourite poem? I had enough trouble selecting 25 recently for the IIML annual anthology.

So, a single poem? Should it be one that has repeatedly popped into my head at odd intervals over many years, a single line, a phrase, one of those little handgrips that keeps me from falling? Should it be a poem that belongs so strongly to a time I like going back to in my mind, that it arrives fully packed and tagged to memory? Or the one that touched me so much because it was a gift from a friend and unexpected and it said something I loved hearing? Or the one that was very old and strange? Or the one that made something I knew well gleam with newness so I noticed it again as if it was for the first time? Or the one I read this morning that has left the day feeling just great?

I’ll go with that: Paula Green’s ‘Glenburn’ because it speaks to the strangeness I feel moving to Otago again after many years absence. And to the feeling of discovering it – and it might as well be for the first time – in the company of someone I love who has other eyes to bring to the journey south. And to my knowledge of Michael Hight’s paintings of beehives, so there is an illustration – not any one painting, but many – lurking beside the words.

And it speaks too to a feeling that’s been growing steadily since I came here, that it’s all so fragile, this beautiful golden south. Last night I talked to a woman fighting subdivisions in Arrowtown. ‘It’s going,’ she said. ‘Queenstown, and Wanaka and Arrowtown and the lakes.’ Pockmarked with 400 house subdivisions, an airport proposal which could go anywhere, hotels and resorts and dairy conversions.

This poem of Paula’s makes me think about love: for people and for a landscape.

 

 

Fiona Farrell publishes fiction, non-fiction, poetry and drama. She lived for many years at Otanerito on Banks Peninsula but has moved recently to Dunedin.

Paula Green has just published two new poetry collections (Groovy Fish, The Cuba Press) and (The Track, Seraph Press) with Wild Honey: Reading NZ Women’s Poetry (Massey University Press) out early August.

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf review: Tracey Slaughter’s Conventional Weapons

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Tracey Slaughter, Conventional Weapons, Victoria University Press, 2019

 

Tracey Slaughter came to my attention as a fiction writer; I adored deleted scenes for lovers VUP, 2016) and lauded it in my SST review:

Tracey Slaughter’s daring short fiction deposits you on a rollercoaster, hoists you in the air, puts you in a dank, dark cupboard to eavesdrop, spins you round and round, makes you feel things to the nth degree.

 

Conventional Weapons is Tracey’s first full poetry collection but she has been publishing poetry for over two decades. She was the featured poet in Poetry NZ 25 (2002) and has published Her body rises: stories & poems (2005). She has received multiple awards including the international Bridport Prize in 2014, a 2007 New Zealand Book Month Award, and Katherine Mansfield Awards in 2004 and 2001. She also won the 2015 Landfall Essay Competition, and was the recipient of the 2010 Louis Johnson New Writers Bursary.

Like her fiction Tracey’s poetry is unafraid of dark subject matter: violence lament teenage eating teenage not eating abortion trauma. You will also find sex need desire love. The subject matter is important but it is the poetic effects that first strike me. There is an intensity of rhythm, an insistent beat that holds a poem together like a subterranean heartdrum, a breath metronome. It is no surprise that Tracey was (and is?) a drummer.

 

We deepdish kiss in the purple of your parents’ lounge,

a bunker plump with buttoned vinyl, fringed

 

with cocktail lamps. Your little brother doctors himself

a tower of afterschool toast and shovels into the corduroy

 

beanbag, watching claptrap TV—we’ll lip-sync those jingles

with their punchline chords the rest of our lives;

 

from ‘archaeological’

 

The beat in this two-and-a-bit page poem catches the intensity of after-school kissing, the heightened breath as the poem ‘sucks’ in detail of tongues and pashing, with an eye looking sideways to make the citrine kitchen and the purple lounge pulsatingly real. I am bowled over by the syntax, by the surprising juxtapositions of words, the lithe rhyme. I need to let the sonic impact sink in deep and savour the exquisite word play. Yes the young kissers are ‘archaeological’ but so too is the poet as she digs deep for flakes of the past and reposits them in the present tense.

The poem ‘the bridge’ also employs lithe syntax and rhythms to replay the urgency of kiss and touch:

 

Let feet slip on

sills of shell, a spiral

perimeter of crush.

Currents eel

 the light into

muscled canals we need

to oar & plough, tough-thighed

in the bridge’s underworld.

 

Often the poems are made electric by the present tense. The opening poem ‘she is currently living’ is a startling portrait, written like a mantra, all lower case, even after the full stops, so you are compelled to keep listening to ‘where’ she is currently living:

 

in a dead-end off jellicoe. in the waiting room of blue vinyl fear. she is currently

living in supermarket flowers that whisper buy me in their middle-class plastic.

she is currently living in a red metal playpen riding her stepsister’s rocking horse.

 

 

If Tracey’s aural dexterity keeps you on your reading toes so do her shifting forms. There are long form poems, bite-size pieces, block prose, fractured lines, lists, multiple choice. The poem ‘how to solve and 18-year sadness’ sits on the page like heart break – the heart hinted at, the break holding apart past and present, the sadness hiding in the crevice. Another poem ‘horoscope (the cougar speaks)’ sets word clusters against left and right hand margins. The poem with its film-noir lighting centres desire, attraction, loneliness, suicide drifting song lyrics that are cut off short as the speaker finds her way:

 

there are girls to pick

the wings off

 

but I’m not one of them

 

And now the subject matter. For me Conventional Weapons foregrounds character, women characters, which makes this book dig even deeper under my skin. The experience is often attached to trauma, the settings lit up in neon detail, the emotional core razor sharp. I posted a piece on Poetry Shelf from ‘it was the 70s when me & Karen Carpenter hung out’ and even in that brief extract the effects were incandescent. This is a poem of youth, song lyrics and singing, macramé, neon lights, freezer food, the backseats of cars, orange lounges, soap operas, instant things but it is also a poem of vomit and of bodies eating and starving, of the traumatic smash of eating disorders.

 

me & Karen carpenter

blu-tacked heartthrobs

to the hangout

wall & lay down

under our own gatefold

smiles. The ridges of our mouths

tasted like corduroy & the hangout

door was a polygon of unhinged

ultra-violet. We stole lines from stones

& rolled them like acid

checkers on each

other’s tongues, testing

the discs of our tucked spines as we

swallowed. (…)

 

When I return to the poem ‘horoscope (the cougar speaks)’, I return to the spike in the poem’s flow, the suicide that cuts into you as you trace the portrait of a woman:

 

& that last verse

is chloroform

*

don’t come

back with your bad

translations of love

one writs italicised

with scars

 

 

‘the mine wife’ is another imagined portrait; a long poem that features the wife of a miner lost in the Pike River disaster and the wife’s ‘grief is opencast’. In Wild Honey I write about the way poets might step into the shoes of another’s trauma, tragedy, loss, grievance, dislocation, wrongs, grief in order to make public horrific things both as a distant and/or close witness. Is this trespass? Is this keeping trauma and human wrongs in public view? For centuries writers have imagined beyond their own experience. In this poem I am heart struck by the way a woman continues to live alongside death, in the fist of life once lived, in the daily routines of food and laundry, in the coming up for air from the dark.

 

to stand at the mouth

takes a long journey. It’s like

a cathedral to all

we’ve done wrong. I thought

seeing it would cave me in. But it’s the peace

of the place that doubles me over.

 

The birds go on dialling

God. Even without you, the trees

don’t come to a standstill. Healing is

not clearcut. Air makes the sound of where

you were last seen. I listen

for scraps in the hush.

 

Grief is opencast.

 

Tracey’s poetry reaches me just as her short fiction has: her daring poems deposit you on a rollercoaster, hoist you in the air, put you in a dank, dark cupboard to eavesdrop, spin you round and round, make you feel things to the nth degree. I can think of no other local poet who has this effect on me. The collection will slip under my clothes and travel with me for months. It is a book I feel and it is a book I think and I adore it.

 

Victoria University page

Rae McGregor review at RNZ National

Jack Ross launch speech  (with images)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf Monday poem: Richard Langston’s ‘Sunday in the Islands’

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Sunday in the Islands

 

A rooster crowed – the villagers in their black dresses

and tata, their black suits, white white shirts,

the flower of their devotion. A pig ambled in the rain.

Then they began to open their mouths

to listen and find one another,

they began to fill up the mystery,

to waken our souls.

This blending of human voices,

low and high and humming, and lifting.

They sang themselves out of themselves.

They summoned their dead from under garlanded mounds,

the bright sails of their embroidered names.

They sang them out of the depths of their ocean –

from their watery wrecks.

They sang for our brief moment here,

offered up this,

this shattering blue cathedral of song.

 

Richard Langston

 

Richard Langston is the author of 5  books of poetry: Boy (2003); Henry, Come See the Blue (2005); The Newspaper Poems (2007); The Trouble Lamp (2009); Things Lay in Pieces (2012). All published by FitzBeck. He works as a director for Country Calendar.

Poetry Shelf audio spot: Janis Freegard reads ‘Requiem’

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‘Requiem’ was first published in the Atlanta Review (USA) in 2017. (I wrote the first draft during a Kahini workshop on the Kapiti coast).

 

 

Janis Freegard’s most recent publications are a novel The Year of Falling (Mākaro Press, 2015) and a poetry collection The Glass Rooster (Auckland University Press, 2015). Based in Wellington, she is a member of the Meow Gurrrls poetry group and blogs occasionally.

Poetry Shelf Monday poem: Jeffrey Paparoa Holman’s ‘entrar en el silencio’ (in Spanish/English/German)

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entrar en el silencio

 

entrar en el silencio que no es un silencio

restos de un zapato por boca de un eje

oxidado caldera a un tenedor en el arroyo

estanque de anguilas, donde desmanteló la draga

terminó su canción en un valle de escombreras

entrar en el silencio que no es un silencio

 

entrar en un silencio que nunca fue

las ruedas de un helecho de germinación lokie

una señal de tren vestido de líquenes

el signo de una mina donde los muertos

todavía persisten perdido a los amantes queridas madres

entrar en un silencio que nunca fue

 

introducir entonces el mundo sin llamar

la excavación de perforación sluicing tala

agricultura pesca arando un sueño

acarreando una isla de las constelaciones

en el resplandor de un reinado extranjero

introducir entonces el mundo sin llamar

 

entrar en el silencio entrar entrar la oscuridad

la colmena de la invitación entrar

la majestad Introduce el vino entrar

el desierto mientras que usted puede entrar en

con banderas y entrar con instrumentos

entrar en el silencio  entrar  entrar

 

 

enter the silence

 

entering the silence that is not a silence

remains of a shoe by the mouth of a shaft

rusted boiler at a fork in the creek

pond of eels where the dredge dismantled

ended its song in a valley of tailings

entering the silence that is not a silence

 

enter a silence that never was

the wheels of a lokie sprouting fern

a railway signpost clothed in lichen

the sign to a mine where the dead

still linger lost to lovers dear to mothers

enter a silence that never was

 

enter then the world without knocking

digging drilling sluicing felling

fishing farming ploughing a dream

hauling an island from the constellations

into the glare of an alien reign

enter then the world without knocking

 

enter the silence enter the dark enter

the hive of the invitation  enter

the majesty enter the wine  enter

the wilderness while you may  enter

with flags and enter with instruments

enter the silence  enter  enter

 

 

geben Sie die Stille

 

Eingabe der Stille, die keine Ruhe

bleibt eines Schuhs durch den Mund einer Welle

verrosteten Kessel mit einer Gabel in den Bach

Teich von Aalen, wo der Bagger abgebaut

beendete seine Songs in einem Tal der Tailings

Eingabe der Stille, die keine Ruhe

 

geben Sie eine Stille, die niemals war

die Räder eines Lokie Sprießen fern

ein Eisenbahn Wegweiser in Flechten bekleideten

das Zeichen, um eine Mine, wo die Toten

noch verweilen, um die Liebhaber lieb Mütter verloren

geben Sie eine Stille, die niemals war

 

Geben Sie dann die Welt, ohne anzuklopfen

Graben Bohrungen Schleuseneinschlag

Fischerei Landwirtschaft Pflügen einen Traum

Schleppen eine Insel von den Sternbildern

in die Blendung einer fremden Herrschaft

Geben Sie dann die Welt, ohne anzuklopfen

 

geben Sie die Stille einzugehen die dunkle eingeben

der Bienenstock der Einladung geben

die Majestät geben Sie den Wein geben

die Wüste, während Sie können eingeben

mit Fahnen und mit Instrumenten geben

geben Sie die Stille geben geben

 

from an unpublished series called ‘Wild Iron’

 

 

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman is a Christchurch poet and a writer of non-fiction, and senior adjunct fellow in the School of Humanities and Creative Arts at the University of Canterbury. Born in London, Jeffrey immigrated to New Zealand in 1950, growing up in the Devonport naval base in Auckland, then the coal mining town of Blackball on the West Coast of the South Island. He has worked as a sheep-shearer, postman, psychiatric social worker and bookseller.

Jeffrey’s poetry collection As Big as a Father was longlisted for the Montana New Zealand Book Awards (2003). In 2007, Jeffrey and Martin Edmond won the Copyright Licensing Limited Award giving them $35,000 each towards a non-fiction project. Best of Both Worlds: The Story of Elsdon Best and Tutakangahau, was published by Penguin in 2010. Jeffrey was the 2011 Waikato University Writer-in-Residence and in the same year shortlisted for the Ernest-Scott History prize, Australia. In 2012, he was awarded the Creative New Zealand University of Iowa Residency. The resulting book, The Lost Pilot: A Memoir was published by Penguin NZ (2013). In 2014, Jeffrey travelled to Berlin on a Goethe-Institute scholarship, pursuing research for his current project, a family history based on links with his German relations.

Jeffrey’s SHAKEN DOWN 6.3: Poems from the Second Christchurch Earthquake was published by Canterbury University Press in 2012. His most recent collection, Blood Ties: New and Selected Poems was published by Canterbury University Press in 2017.

Poetry Shelf review: Bob Orr’s One Hundred Poems and a Year

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Bob Orr, One Hundred Poems and a Year Steele Roberts, 2018

 

 

Consider this book of mine

as if it were a rucksack

 

containing what you might need

if you were to step outside your door.

 

There are poems heavily knitted

as fisherman’s jerseys

 

in case you should find yourself

all at sea.  (…)

 

from ‘Rucksack

 

Bob Orr was born in the Waikato. He worked as a seafarer on Waitematā Harbour for 38 years and now lives in a cottage on the Thames Coast. In 2016 he received the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for Poetry and in 2017 was the Writer in Residence at the University of Waikato where he wrote most of One Hundred Poems and a Year, his ninth collection.

The book looks gorgeous – beautiful cover design with an oxygenated font and layout inside. Everything has room to breathe. Barry Lett’s exquisite drawing of ‘Blue Flowers’ on the cover is revisited in a poem.

 

Because sometimes you

remind me of a Catalan fisherman

these are the blue flowers of the Mediterranean

 

***

 

With a felt-tip pen

bought in a supermarket

one day you created myriad blue stems

 

from ‘A vase of blue flowers’ for Barry Lett

 

The poems are equally full of air and verve. The opening poem, ‘Rucksack’, is a perfect entry point as it likens the collection to a rucksack you might take with you for the day. We can expect poems we might shower with; that favour the casualness of jandals, the toughness of tramping boots, bare feet. The poem’s final image flipped me. Bob’s poetry moves through the air, out in the complicated, beautiful world and then underlines human vulnerability with the final line’s ‘bare feet’:

I wrote them while walking down a road with bare feet.

The collection is steeped in the sea: you will find boats, sea birds, ocean harvests and harbours as Bob travels by land and by ocean. He travels in the present time and he travels back through the past, gathering in friends and places, other poets, beginnings and endings. Poetry, the writing and reading of it, is ever present as the world becomes a page, a script to be read, a poem to be crafted.

 

I mention the containers

of the Maersk Hamburg Sud or P&O Line

 

if only because my autobiography

 or even this poem

 

and the cargo it must carry

would be incomplete without them.

 

from ‘Autobiographic’

 

There is death and endings; there is marriage and beginnings.

 

This evening I fly back

a delta-winged moth

 

my sadness like moondust

my night vision glowing like an infra-red camera

 

a stranger to these parts

gliding between the bittersweet shadows of apartments

 

to enter again if only I could find them

the strawberry fields that were said to be forever.

 

How many times and for what purpose

did we have to break

each other’s

hearts?

 

from ‘A woman in red slacks’

 

I missed this book when it came out last year – and it is such a treasure. The fluid lines at times feel like the arc of a bird drifting across the sky and at other times draw upon the ebb and flow of the sea – always beautifully measured. Poetry has so many effects upon us – reading this book the effects are both multiple and satisfying. It comes down to music, intimacy and exquisite reflection, and an engagement with the world that matters. I love this book.

 

Steele Roberts author page

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf audio spot: Victoria Broome reads ‘The Heart of My Father’

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cover 2.jpg

 

 

 

Victoria Broome, ‘The Heart of My Father’ from How We Talk to Each Other, Cold Hub Press, 2019

 

 

 

Victoria Broome has published poems in literary journals and anthologies, was awarded the CNZ Louis Johnson Bursary (2005) and has twice been placed in the Kathleen Grattan Award (2010, 2015). How We Talk to Each Other is her debut collection.

 

Cold Hub Press author page

Poetry Shelf review of How We Talk to Each Other

 

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: Elizabeth Morton’s ‘You can’t, always’

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You can’t, always

 

I’m not going to cry. All winter the television

sulks in the corner of our love. You put the lentils

in a colander to flush the ugly bits. You peel oranges

to their pith and talk about your past like it was mine too.

You say it was sunnier in Queens than it could ever be in

an unhappy kitchen with a lover made of feathers.

I want to tell you about the way a man can look down

a corridor, the way a hunter visits his scope. There are things

too big to ever fold into your hands. A barbule is enough

to demonstrate how even soft things fall down,

like small people from towers that trade in shadows.

When I say I need you, it clambers up a stairwell in my throat

like you were the only window left in 110 levels of pain.

I’m not going to say I get it. You toss the lentils

in a brine pot and power-up the television.

You say we spend too much of life watching

the kind of comedies that make you sad. Like Home Improvement

and The Cosby Show that make you think of time

and the way we were happy in Queens

before small people sat on window ledges, before

the hunter’s scope settled on an ordinary bird.

I’m not going to cry. All morning chopping onions,

watching Bill Cosby hug his wife in Brooklyn Heights

before he was a rapist, and before you first registered

towers on the skyline by their absence.

When I say I need you I am a soft thing falling

on something familiar, and it is violence

in the way dispassionate surgery is violence

or the way The Cosby Show is what you get

before you get what you never wanted.

 

I’ll take what I can.

 

 

Elizabeth Morton

 

 

 

Auckland writer, Elizabeth Morton, is published in New Zealand, Australia, Ireland, the UK, Canada and the USA. She was feature poet in the Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2017, and is included in Best Small Fictions 2016. Her first poetry collection, Wolf, was published with Mākaro Press in 2017. She is completing a MLitt at the University of Glasgow, usually in her pyjamas.