Category Archives: NZ poems

Poetry Shelf review: Frances Samuel’s Museum

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Museum, Frances Samuel, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022

Up here in the thin green air,
I’m feeling the wind on my face
with the joy of a dog on a family car trip,
head out of the window.

from ‘Exhibition (DNA)’

Frances Samuel worked in a museum writing texts for exhibitions for many years. For me, museums are an endless source of fascination and marvel. I wrote about the intoxicating thrill of museums in New York Pocketbook. Standing, for example, before a pair of child’s boots in Ellis Island’s Immigration Centre or moving with the wonders of the Natural History Museum. Or the roll call of museums that fed my Italian degrees. There are the hungry gaps of the past that you seek to fill by studying scuffed toes, wrinkled leather, the uncanny emptiness, the child that once ran or skipped or hid. In my self-imposed lockdown, picking up Frances’s new collection felt like a trip to a museum and, as happens on the threshold of any museum space, I felt a heady mix of anticipation, joy, curiosity. Where would this book take me?

I pass through the book’s opening poem, ‘Exhibition (Security)’, and then move through three exhibitions: ‘SUPER(NATURAL) WORLD’, ‘(IM)MATERIAL WORLD’ and ‘OBJECT LESSONS’. I am following the poet, the museum maker, but the museum on offer is porous. It reaches out beyond walls and still life into the air we breathe, and with each poem I track twist unfold pursue peruse fold untwist. Just like I do on Ellis Island. Or in Roma. It is discovery and it is magical.

The poem ‘Climate Change’ proposes a change in perspective. Inventive in its start:

Since we are all made up of atoms and vibrations,
let’s rearrange ourselves.
You be a bird and I’ll be a buffalo,
stand on my back and off we go, carefully
stepping over our discard clothes

And utterly moving, when you reach the final stanza. I keep bouncing back to the poem’s title, just as I might switch and flick between museum diorama, museum label and someone else’s shoes:

From above, we watch travellers on the trails
tying and retying their loads to donkeys’ backs.
They take a few steps and the load slips again.
Over and over again, agreement can only come
when the bird in me bleats
to the buffalo in you.

Frances writes lightfootedly. It’s not just a matter of weight but a matter of luminosity. If the poems were written in ink, the ink would be imbued with a wonder that slips in and out of view. You need to read each poem whole to get the effect of fitting together, but certain lines stand out and settle on you, little talismans, little points of fascinations.

‘Rain is hole-punching its way in.’ from ‘Moonhopppers’

‘My friend wears a grass jumpsuit / teeming with ants and worms.’ from ‘Fashion’

‘A poet explodes at a kitchen table / taking everything else with her.’ from ‘Pottery’

‘The words are falling from him like seeds.’ from ‘Fast Forest’

‘If one hundred thousand leaves / can make a clean break every day / then what are you waiting for?’ from ‘Seed/Leaf/Tree’

In the first section/exhibition, you enter forests, mountains, deserts, fields, physical exhibition spaces. In the second section/exhibition space, the immaterial shifts my view on existence. Ghosts and trees jangle eyes. Things leap off the page, the canvas, out of the shadows, or from the anecdote, to gain provisional flesh, and you are back in the invigorating and mysterious air of the world.

And suddenly it’s a good thing
you extinguished your shoes
because now you are walking on air.
And when you are walking on air
you can go anywhere.

from ‘Exhibition (Shoes)

And then poet becomes mother, and the maternal role, reframed time and fatigue, chores and the tendering, are made visible. The mother is still of course poet, and the third section/exhibition refuses to keep the world confined in glass cases. The domestic enters and still the writing mind roves and creates and muses. In such an airy space, the wonder and discovery expands. For both reader and writer. In ‘Coin Rubbings’, the speaker finds buried civilisations and buried self elusive, so she tries this:

(…) So maybe it’s as easy
as placing the paper over your own face
and rubbing to see what impression
you are making on the world.

In each section/exhibition space, you turn upon notions of perspective, ways of absorbing and reacting, seeing and feeling. Your place(s) in the world comes into question, or into view, or dissolves, and you turn the page and keep reading. This sublime stanza appears in ‘The Kindness of Giants’ and appears in other guises or translations throughout the book.

Your feet are shod in cruise ships, and your eyes
look though spectacles made of frozen lakes.
Trapped fish obscure your vision.

When I first visited foreign museums in my twenties, I found them dead. Nothing jumped out and poked me in the eye or heart. Yet all these decades later, both poetry and museums are alive to me. I get to carry bits of humanity, song, epiphany, storytelling, dread, mystery, roadmaps, possibility atlases, the real, the unreal. The power of words, in both locations, along with the power of objects, get to sing in heart and mind. I finished France’s new collection and, how can I explain it, I was bursting with gladness and sadness. Maybe because instead of listening to the 11 am announcement on Covid changes yesterday, I read the book. I reread the collection today, writing this on one breath, on the wire of living, on the lightning rod of uncertain times, and as I put the book on my shelf, I am busting up with joy. That is what poetry can do. Read this book.

Inside your heart, a museum
and not the free-entry kind,
not the kind with a rollercoaster
and a cafe and a shop.

from ‘Museum Without an End’

Frances Samuel‘s first book was Sleeping on Horseback (VUP, 2014). Her poems have appeared in many print and online publications, including Sport, Best New Zealand Poems, Short Poems of New Zealand, and the National Library exhibition The Next Word: Contemporary New Zealand Poetry.

Te Herenga Waka University Press page

Poetry Shelf review: Rachel O’Neill’s Requiem for a Fruit

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Requiem for a Fruit by Rachel O’Neill, We Are Babies, 2021

Rachel O’Neill’s second collection Requiem for a Fruit continues a preoccupation with prose poetry that resonated in their debut book One Human in Height. The opening poem, ‘It’s an interesting time’, epitomises the delight that poem compression offers. Revelation jostles alongside the unspoken. The image of a ‘rusted coat’ startles, and then pokes and prods as ‘amour’.

In an endnote, Rachel acknowledges readers who are at home in their imaginations. They quote a grandmother’s line from a poem: ‘life is a great mystery, and then that mystery ends’. Mystery, Rachel suggests, is the magnet tug of storytelling. Storytelling reflects and feeds who we are, our origins, where we are going, with an imperative to listen. Listening helps us to ‘reason and act with humanity’, they suggest. This feels overwhelmingly important; this need for us to bend in and listen, to keep recounting who and how and where we are, past present and future, no matter the genre or subject matter.

‘From the homely catacomb in the living room my mother can see the stars.’ from ‘I dream I bury a machine’

And yes, mystery matters in Rachel’s prose poems. The real shimmers then moves to become off-real, startling and strange; and then slips and slides back to the everyday, the usual, the humdrum. I read each poem and see it as a startling painting, or a short film where the mise en scene trembles and quakes and expands the set with mystery connections. There is anecdote, revelation, fantasy, wit, confession. In ‘The commonplace’, a woman is dressed in a ballooning skirt, and she may be part woman and she may be part boulder. The aunt invites the woman/boulder to help herself from ‘the earth in the bowl where the potatoes should be’. What an image! Mystery in the commonplace. It’s also where the seeds are, according to the uncle. The aunt needing to locate the commonplace with its seed bounty: ‘Where’s that?’ What delicious ripples. What a way to be held to a page.

You can move through the book tracking the mystery whiffs, debris, clues. You can also pick up a thread and follow different routes through the narrative maze. Try love for example. Or the mother. Try wit. You can revel in the character festivity. Track and stop awhile with wives husbands love interests mothers fathers a Church of England clergyman children a companion a guest. In fact you are a guest in these poetry alcoves, bringing your own disposition, your own craving to absorb and expand, hum and ah ha.

Put this book in your tote bag or leave it on the kitchen table. You can pick it up and read a single poem, then let that poem drift and settle as you move through the day. It’s magnificent. Electrifying. I recommend it highly as Bernadette Hall does on the back of the book.

‘The relationship is new, yet the love is a stone.’ from ‘The love interest’

Rachel O’Neill is a Pākehā storyteller who was raised in the Waikato and currently lives and works in Te Whanganui-a-Tara/Kāpiti Coast. Rachel enjoys collaborating with writers, artists and filmmakers on publications, exhibitions and works for screen, and they are a founding member of the four-artist collaborative group, All the Cunning Stunts. A graduate of Elam School of Fine Arts (BA/BFA) and the International Institute of Modern Letters (MA), Rachel was selected for the 2017 Aotearoa Short Film Lab, received a 2018 SEED Grant (NZWG/NZFC) for feature film development, and held a 2019 Emerging Writers Residency at the Michael King Writers Centre. Their debut book, One Human in Height (Hue & Cry Press) was published in 2013. As a queer non-binary storyteller Rachel strives to represent the longing for connection and the humour and strangeness that characterise human experience.

A version of ‘Almost exactly the love of my life’ appeared on Poetry Shelf

We Are Babies site

Poetry Shelf review: Brian Flaherty’s Plague Poems

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‘Chewing the nails of just one hand, the right

Silence falling back on us

With all its weight of sky and stars.’

Plague Poems, Brian Flaherty, Little island Press, 2022

10.

Fingering the page of statistics in your pocket
You are still trying to find the right words
It’s not a matter of painting a black picture
It’s a matter of taking precautions
Even to express such simple emotions
Costs an enormous effort
Most of all you like a certain bell in the neighbourhood
That rings softly around five in the evening.

Rather than knit or bake sourdough, Brian Flaherty wrote a poem a day after Aotearoa went into its first lockdown, just before midnight on 25 March 2020. The next morning, he took Albert Camus’s The Plague (La Peste). He read five pages each day, and ‘used them to sample and shape a poem’ that echoed our pandemic situation, and that he emailed to a friend. Plague Poems represents the fifty poems he wrote. It is a slender, dark-covered book that sings out of dark and life, the unknown and the recognisable.

A reshaping, a sampling, a translation, a poetic transparency laid over our pandemic time. As I read the book in one slow sitting, entranced, captivated, the poetry forms a transparency over my own lockdown experience. Here and then, the empty city, the empty streets, the hijacked and reinvented daily routines, these poems like those days, offer new and surprising sustenance.

Brian slows down in the empty city, in Camus’s novel, and in his slowness of daily pace, observation is heightened. There are posters demanding hygiene, a droning radio, a glass of warm beer, people on balconies and people walking the boulevards. In the ambulation, whether physical, emotional, cerebral, the poet’s mind is adrift, collating and collecting. The poem is thinking with new eyes. It is contemplating the strange and the estranging. I am personally returned to my own drift through the house, up the country road, without anchor and then again with a different anchor. Reading the collection it feels like the objects on the mantelpiece of the mind were taking time to settle. They still are.

14.

To make the trains run again in our imagination
The only way to escape this unbearable holiday
To speak more particularly at last of lovers
Those one sees wandering at any time of the day
Subservient to the sun and the rain
Handed over to the whims of the heavens
To go back through the story
And examine its imperfections
It must be said that people are drinking a lot
You have the impression that cars
Have started to go round in circles.

Time is elongated, meaningless, endless, meaning rich, meaning astray, meaning hungry, questions compounding.

I adored reading this elegant suite of poems, with its silence, its epiphanies, its unexpected resonance, its sweet craft. I am returned to a time that was body-displacing off-real, like a film noir set, a dystopian novel from past or future, as we grappled to reshape our days, our relationship with today. Two years later, it feels altogether noisier, edgier, more divisive, less connected and less connecting. Brian’s poetry takes me back to a time where, against all odds, life felt precious, when we worked together to make it so. We walked through the empty city, observing, collating, harvesting, recognising, celebrating, and being alive to and for what matters. I love this precious book.

33.

After eleven, plunged into darkness
Under a moonlit sky
The town is like a monument
A necropolis in which disease and stone
Have finally silenced every voice
Night crouching in our hearts
The myths that are passed around
Black shape of a tree, the howl of a dog.

Brian Flaherty is a poet librarian. He is co-founder of the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre  with Michele Leggott, and was co-editor of the poetry journal Trout. Poems have appeared in Turbine, Best NZ Poems, Blackmail Press, Ika, Ka Mate Ka Ora, and Trout. Recordings of some of his poetry are at Six Pack Sound.

Little Island Press Plague Poems

Little Island Press Brian Flaherty

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: Stacey Teague’s ‘family name’

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family name

After Kaveh Akbar

1.

find the legitimate.
part of the skin.
claim it or.
don’t claim it my.
bad exchange.
my pale belonging the.
way the word.
identity makes you.
spit.
what’s in there.  
the visible
thing curled.
in the mouth.
exact like biting.
the blood.
speaks the quantum.
splits.
my favourite.
colour is white.
-passing.

2.

my cousins and I don’t.
have any.
brothers we don’t know.
about men don’t.
want to.
we connect at the.
colour of bruises.
open our drinks view.
pain as an ash-like.
diminishing.
we can imagine.
a sudden deep optimism.
in the face of utter.
calamity.
I will devote myself.
to its water.
develop a silken.
empathy.
harm is better.
dismantled.

3.

make me a weaver.
I will wait.
to stop bleeding.
to harvest.
the flax in my.
backyard cut.
away from the. 
heart at an. 
angle scrape off. 
the skin with a. 
shell my ancestors. 
also waited.

4.

to be on an earth.
that turns is to.
exist around crisis.
like looking into.
a non-human eye.
my visions are alive.
with me like an.
empress I.
untouch the insides.
I make something.
fit that does.
not want to.

Stacey Teague

Stacey Teague (Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāpuhi) is a poet, editor, and teacher living in Te Whanganui-a-Tara.

Poetry Shelf video readings: Iona Winter

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Iona Winter’s hybrid work is widely published internationally, and she holds a Master of Creative Writing. The author of three collections, Gaps in the Light (2021), Te Hau Kāika (2019), and then the wind came (2018), Iona has recently completed her fourth, which addresses the complexities of being suicide bereaved. Iona Winter’s website

Poetry Shelf celebrates new books: Chris Tse reads from Super Model Minority

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Super Model Minority, Chris Tse, Auckland University Press, 2022

Chris reads ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’

Chris reads ‘BOY OH BOY OH BOY OH BOY’

Chris Tse is the author of three poetry collections published by Auckland University Press: How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes (winner of Best First Book of Poetry at the 2016 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards), HE’S SO MASC and Super Model Minority. He and Emma Barnes are the co-editors of Out Here: An anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ writers from Aotearoa.

Poetry Shelf celebrates: Ursula Bethell Collected Poems

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Today is International Women’s Day. At breakfast, I read NZ Supreme Court Judge Susan Glazebrook’s terrific story about her ongoing ZOOM efforts to help get women Judges out of Afghanistan last year (with the help the International Association of Women Judges). The story is in the February issue of North & South and it is unmissable. It feels like we are living and breathing under such a blanket of darkness at the moment. We know the list: the pandemic and its ripple effects, misguided protests, impending war, human suffering under despots across the globe, misguided journalism, mis-and-disinformation, poverty, greed. At times it is too much. I switch off social media, the radio, the papers to avoid toxic voices creeping in with their destructive influences influencing the vulnerable and the disenfranchised. But here I am reading a magazine presenting good journalism under Rachel Morris’s astute editorship. Rachel is stepping back now from the role, but I am grateful for the issues she has presented (not forgetting worthy attention to books in Aotearoa).

It seems an eon since Wild Honey appeared in the world, yet it was only last year I was doing the online Ockham NZ Book Award celebration for it. But it is fitting to remember this project of love – I set out to celebrate and retrieve women poets in Aotearoa. The younger generations of women poets are vibrant, inspiring, active, revealing, political, personal, edgy, lyrical, path-forging and it is a joy to read them. To write about their work on Poetry Shelf. But I don’t write out of a vacuum. I write out of the women poets who preceded me. Who also wrote with vigour, with various connections to the personal and the political. And so to celebrate International Women’s Day, to celebrate women’s poetry in Aotearoa, I draw your attention to Te Herenga Waka University Press’s reissue of Ursula Bethell’s Collected Poems.

I have several copies of Wild Honey to give away. Email or DM or leave a comment if you would like a copy.

Let’s shine lights this week on all the wonderful things women are doing – but hey, not just women, everyone. Let’s shine lights on humanity’s goodness.

Ursula Bethell Collected Poems, ed Vincent O’Sullian, VUP Classic, 2021

Detail

My garage is a structure of excessive plainness.
it springs from a dry bank in the back garden.
It is made of corrugated iron,
And painted all over with brick-red.

But beside it I have planted a green Bay-tree
— A sweet Bay, an Olive and a Turkey Fig,
— A Fig, an Olive, and a Bay.

Ursula Bethell, From a Garden in the Antipodes, 1929

Ursula Bethell is the kind of poet I turn to when I want uplift, when I crave the poetic line as transport beyond ongoing despair at this sad-sack world. Ursula Bethell’s reissued Collective Poems is now a member of the VUP Classic series. Oxford University Press originally published the collection in 1985, and it was reissued in 1997 with corrections and a new introduction by editor Vincent O’Sullivan.

I utterly loved engaging with Ursula’s poetry in Wild Honey. I considered it in three parts:

“I want to approach her poetry as three distinctive garden plots with a memorial garden to the side: From a Garden in the Antipodes (1929), Time and Place (1936) and Day and Night (1939) and ‘Six Memorials’. You could consider the debut collection as poem bouquets for friends, the second as a poetry posy handpicked for Pollen after her death, while the final collection, a late harvest from the same ground, almost like a consolation bouquet for self. The memorial poems were penned annually on the anniversary, or thereabouts, of Pollen’s death.”

I wrote in my Wild Honey notebooks:

Bethell published three collections of poetry in her lifetime, all anonymously, with the poems chiefly drawn from a decade she devoted to writing, gardening and her cherished companion, Effie Pollen. For ten years, the two women lived in Rise Cottage in the Cashmere Hills, until Pollen’s premature death, at which point Bethell’s life was ripped to unbearable shreds.  The more I read Bethell’s poetry and letters, and the more I muse beyond her characteristic reserve, I feel as though this is the woman to whom I would devote an entire book. She is a knotty collision of reticence, acute intellect, acerbic advice, crippling heartbreak and poetic dexterity. Bethell rightly counters the claim that she ‘knows no school mistress but her garden’, with the point that the garden was ‘a brief episode in a life otherwise spent’. Yet her gardening decade was the most joyous of her life, responsible for the bulk of her poetry, and a period she could not relinquish in letters and the grief that endured until her death. She moved back into the city with ‘no cottage, no garden, no car, no cat, no view of mountains’, no dearest companion and an impaired ability or desire to write poetry.

I was uplifted by individual poems and by the threads and luminosity as a whole:

“How can poetry ever match the joy and beauty a garden offers? Bethell brings us to the pleasure of words, the way words bloom and bristle. For Ruth Mayhew, a close friend to whom she dedicated a number of poems, Bethell builds her green garden symphony in ‘Verdure’: an abundant foliage of lemon, myrtle, rosemary, mimosa, macrocarpa. Without these variations, Bethell confesses she ‘should have, not a pleasaunce, not a garden/ But a heterogeneous botanical garden display’. The word, ‘pleasaunce’, is the spicy fertiliser waiting to explode the poem into new richness. Bethell favours flowers over produce, a pleasure enticement for the senses over fruit and vegetables for the kitchen (‘I find vegetables fatiguing/ And would rather buy them in a shop’. Her poetry ferments as a form of pleasaunce where the ‘plausible’, easily digested details of domestic routine, the house interior, daily conversations, intimate preferences and relations are sidestepped for words that provoke sensual and intellectual variegation in an outside setting.” from my Wild Honey notebook

To re-enter Ursula’s poetry is an act of restoration, just for a blissful moment, because it’s a way of feeling the warmth of the ground, the warmth of humanity (as opposed to its cruelty and ignorance). It is reminder that our literature offers so many rewards, on so many levels, and it is at times like these, poetry can be such necessary solace, respite, prismatic viewfinders, idea boosters. I am toasting the poetry of Ursula Bethell with thanks to Te Herenga Waka University Press.

Vincent O’Sullivan is the author of the novels Let the River Stand, Believers to the Bright Coast, and most recently All This by Chance. He has written many plays and collections of short stories and poems, was joint editor of the five-volume Letters of Katherine Mansfield, has edited a number of major anthologies, and is the author of acclaimed biographies of John Mulgan and Ralph Hotere.

Ursula (Mary) Bethell (1874-1945) was born in England, raised in New Zealand, educated in England and moved back to Christchurch in the 1920s. Bethell published three poetry collections in her lifetime (From a Garden in the Antipodes, 1929; Time and Place, 1936; Day and Night, 1939). She did not begin writing until she was fifty, and was part of Christchurch’s active art and literary scene in the 1930s. A Collected Poems appeared posthumously (1950). Her productive decade of writing was at Rise Cottage in the Cashmere Hills, but after the death of her companion, Effie Pollen, she wrote very little. Vincent O’Sullivan edited a collection of her poetry in 1977 (1985).   

Te Herenga Waka University Press page

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: Karlo Mila’s ‘Stretch Marks’

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Stretch Marks

(20 Sep 2021)

On looking
at my naked body.
Knowing you will be
Looking. 

My body is ripped 
with silver linings.

Stretch marks. 

A weave of flex.
when my world got too big for me,
bearing babies
or burdens.

Stretch marks.
Invisible inked in skin.
Traces I needed to suddenly hide, 
Dive in, submerge into skin
safer unseen
from predator, prowler,
prey.

Oh luminous seal
with quick thick thighs
you dived underwater
thick-pelted, you hide,
Unseen.
Beached.

The loneliness of mammals. 

Alone in the deep blue deep.
Gestating to a saline rhythm .
All my own. 
All alone.
Skins grown
and shed.

Stretch marks.

A spider webbed weave
of vibrating threads.

Silks spun,
and undone.

The painful crack
of the shell of my understanding
breaking.

Growth.

Shedding full body armour
of weta skin, mine and others –
left behind –
with prayers on parting.

The coconut husk –
wringing cream and water
to try and see my future
in the milk of ancestral fluids.

The cocoon
of caterpillar storybooks
cake and pickle and pie,
so hungry.

The black butterflied chrysalis 
of love poetry written in my 30s.
That well written body indeed.

Here it is. 
Looking for love 
Same songs
different sounds.
Re-makes.
Re-takes.
Re-release. 
Re-mastered. 

I am always entranced 
by the acoustic version,
almost poetry. 

Sound healing.
Sexual healing.

I have been waiting for you so long,
Karakia even.
Hope. 
Asking.
Please.
It’s been too long.
Too alone.
I’m too human.

Across time and space,
He arrives, rain.
softly quoting hurricane.
He comes
in front of me,
sticky embryonic. 

Ultimate tōhu
of fertility. newness. rebirth.
remake. Remaster. 

We cross digital divides,
magic echnologies of presence.
wonder-lust, the marvellous.
the surreal sexuality of screens.

Missionary position
is my favourite way
to look at you.
Mirrored
Reflection 
You see
Beauty.
Speak it out loud.

Small scars on my body speak 
to trauma worn, scribbled on skin.
Stretch marks.
Paper thin.
Will you see me? My frailty?
Will you want? 

The small gods of chemistry
are king.

Will you want to
Come in?

Already I imagine you
in my mouth. Salty. Sweet. Big. Deep.

Oceanic. 

De-col. it’s everywhere.
Even in the seabed and foreshore of play… can I play? Can I say? 
Will you stay? 

Trust. in the 21st century 
of unconditional lovers
where it only lasts as long
as the longing.

I want nothing but.
Having settled for less.

I want no settler.
I want native. 
Natural. 
Ease. 

But these stretch marks speak to small anxieties, 
cartography of flesh.
I take a deep breath.
With these silver threads:
Tuia ki roto
Tuia ki waho
Tuia ki raro
Tuia ki runga

I stitch. I sew. I bind. 

Both of us
gasping for breath
in this ocean we have 
Leap of faithed 
into. 

Oh departing place 
of the spirits
watch over us.

Trust. 
Deepak recasts it as moving into the unknown 
beyond the prison of the past.
I listen to his lilting words:
“Today, I will step into the unknown.
I will relinquish the known.
By stepping into the unknown
I will enter in the field of unlimited possibilities.”

This is our place.
The field
beyond write and wrong.
Between hema and mata’u.
The field between other husband and other wife. 

The field between us.

There is no map-making to be had
using the small cursive script of the past. Prisons. 
I cast away my own incarcerated markings,
scribbles, notes, past poems, tiny wounded stories. 

I will give up the need to track-back
the way out
To tightly pencil a safe way in.
To re-make the boundaries.  To fortify.  
To try and control the way home.

I will leave the birds-eye to my ancestors,
keeping an ear open only
to the manu that tangi
keeping our forest alive.
This field.

I step, I step, 
Knowing I will be naked,
humbled, human, 
vulnerable, ashamed, 
afraid, and aroused,
I step, I step
into our field
of infinite possibility.

In this green grass,
I will lie
and meet you there.

Karlo Mila

Karlo Mila (MNZM) is an award winning Pasifika poet of Tongan / Palangi descent.  Her third poetry book “The Goddess Muscle” was released by Huia Publishers in 2020.  Her first book won the first best book award at the New Zealand literary awards in 2005.  She is a Mother, writer, researcher, creative, academic and activist.  Her day job is as the Programme Director of the Mana Moana Experience at Leadership New Zealand.  Karlo is the founder and creator of Mana Moana – aimed at elevating and harnessing indigenous Pacific knowledge for contemporary living and leadership. It is based on five years of postdoctoral research.  Karlo has three sons and lives in Auckland.

Poetry Shelf review: A Game of Two Halves: The Best of Sport 2005 – 2019

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A Game of Two halves: The Best of Sport 2005 – 2019, ed Fergus Barrowman
Victoria University Press, 2021

This book looks back through the fifteen issues of Sport from 2005 to 2019. In 600 pages it presents fiction, poetry, essays and oddities by 100 of our best writers, from leading lights like Bill Manhire, Ashleigh Young and Elizabeth Knox, to emerging glow worms like Tayi Tibble, Ruby Solly and Eamonn Marra. (Blurb)

Reviewing A Game of two Halves is a sad glad day for me. I have loved reading my way through old favourites but I am also sad that this is a farewell. I can remember how excited I was when the first issue of Sport hit the bookstands. It was fresh, exciting, unmissable. I am pretty sure I have every copy stacked on my study shelves. On the blurb, I read that editor Fergus Barrowman’s A Game of two Halves selection is a mix of ‘leading lights and glow worms’, the established and the emerging. Light is such a good analogy because I often find myself using the word ‘incandescent’ to describe writing I love. Writing lights me the reader, the world at large and in miniature, the present, future, past, the miraculous things words can do. Even when the subject matter is dark, shadows and weirdness loom, writing still lifts. Sets me alight. This is what literary journals can do. This is what Sport has done.

All those clothes it turned and churned, the lint
that trapped in its door. I once thought
many things would make my life happier
and now one by one I will let them go.

Rachel Bush from ‘All my feelings would have been of common things’

Confession – I haven’t read the whole volume yet but I can’t wait to do that to share. I am so engaged, I want you to place A Game of Two Halves on your summer reading pile as a go-to source of luminous writing. Last ‘light’ analogy I promise. Reading the poetry (I always start with the poetry) is like tuning into a Spotify playlist where individual tracks resonate and then send you back to the albums. Rachel Bush’s sublime ‘Thought Horses’ sent me back to that collection. Michele Amas’ equally sublime ‘Daughter’ sent me back to After the Dance. Herein lies the first joy of Fergus’s playlist. I am reconnected with poems that have registered as all time favourites. Read Angela Andrews’ ‘White Saris’. Bill Manhire’s ‘The Schoolbus’. Read Ruby Solly, Esther Dischereit, Rebecca Hawkes, Ash Davida Jane, essa may ranapiri, Tayi Tibble, Michael Krüger, Jane Arthur, Chris Tse, Freya Daly Sadgrove, Emma Neale. Read Amy Brown’s ‘Jeff Magnum’. Ashleigh Young. Louise Wallace.

This is the place where the schoolbus turns.
The driver backs and snuffles, backs and goes.
It is always winter on these roads: high bridges
and birds in flight above you all the way.
The heart can hardly stay. The heart implodes.

Bill Manhire from ‘The Schoolbus’

Perhaps the biggest gleam is from Tina Makereti’s prose piece, ‘An Englishman, an Irishman and a Welshman walk into a Pā’. I am such a fan of her novels, rereading this reminds me of the power and craft of Tina’s writing.

This is the way of it. Before I have memorised her in a way that will last forever, my mother is gone. If someone asks me to recite my first memory, which consists of chickens in a yard and an old farmhouse and an outside toilet, it will contain this absence. For the rest of my childhood, I don’t think it matters.

Tina Makereti from ‘An Englishman, an Irishman and a Welshman walk into a Pā’

In his introduction, Fergus tracks the development of Sport, the almost demises, and the decision to close (with regrets!). He mentions the vibrancy of the issue Tayi Tibble recently edited (Sport 47, not just the cover but also the contents) and ‘whether it made sense to go on reinventing Sport every year?’ I have appreciated the move to showcase Aotearoa writers beyond the traditional Pākehā set in recent years. To always draw upon the inspired writing of new generations. Fergus closes off his introduction by mentioning a couple of other anthologies VUP / THWUP are doing and then offers this: ‘And after that? You tell us? Send us your ideas. Send us your work.’ Exciting prospect.

I raise my glass to toast what has been an important venue for new and established voices. I will miss Sport. I will really miss Sport. Thank you Fergus and Victoria University Press / Te Herenga Waka University Press for dedicating time and love to a vital space for readers and writers. I look forward to what comes next.

It has been a long time
since I last spoke to you.
When we were children, our fathers
wanted to be mountains
our mothers were the sky.
So here I am, the dry hands,
steady in fog, waiting by the not-there
trees, the holes birds make
in the air.

Jenny Bornholdt from ‘It Has Been a Long Time Since I last Spoke to You, So Here I Am’

the air is thick with depression
even the flies   fly very slowly

Freya Daly Sadgrove from ‘Pool Noodle’

I worry about whakamā and imposter syndrome paralysing our people, making them too afraid or inhibited to really live their best lives or at least the best lives they can under the hellskies of capitalism and party politics. I’m all about people, and I’m all about the best lives.

Tayi Tibble from ‘Diary of a (L)it Girl or, Frankenstein’s Ghost Pig’

 

Fergus Barrowman has been the Publisher of Victoria University of Wellington Press since 1985, and founded Sport along with Nigel Cox, Elizabeth Knox and Damien Wilkins in 1988. He edited the Picador Book of Contemporary New Zealand Fiction in 1996.

Victoria University Press / Te Herenga Waka University Press page

Poetry Shelf review: Out Here: An anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ writers from Aotearoa

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Out Here: An anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ writers from Aotearoa,
eds Chris Tse and Emma Barnes, Auckland University Press, 2021

Gender buttons

An object on a shelf; a self with words inside that never came out.
Your finger down my spine; fine singing in my bones. Umbrella avoiding
the rain: the celebrating hat you wear. Tell me a little more about myself.

The food you forgot; what you got for biting at my breasts. The coloured
loss of uneaten toast on the bench and your tongue of loving pepper.
Hunger heavy in my mouth.

This room we bed down in, be wed down in. White roses growing
on the ceiling.
You want in a variety of colours, but a rose is a rose is a rose
a bunch of them placate the air much better than one.
We couldn’t grow anywhere else.

The teasing is tender and trying and thoughtful. Melting without mending
you undo my gender buttons till all of me is myself.

 

Hannah Mettner

Out Here is a significant arrival in Aotearoa, both for the sake of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ writers and readers, and for the sake of poetry. The sumptuous and wide ranging anthology feeds heart mind skin lungs ears eyes. It is alive with shifting fluencies and frequencies, and I want to sing its praises from the rooftops, from the moon, from street corners.

Chris Tse and Emma Barnes have responded to the erasure of queer identities in a national literature that was traditionally dominated and controlled by white heterosexual men. Chris and Emma opted to use ‘Takatāpui’ and ‘LGBTQIA+’ in the title to signal Aotearoa’s rainbow communities within the broadest possible reach. They have used the word queer in their introduction and underline that that must make room for as many ‘labels and identities’ as necessary. I am using the word queer with similar intentions.

Having spent a number of years on a book that responded to the erasure of women in literature across centuries, I understand what a mammoth task it is to shine a light across invisible voices and to reclaim and celebrate. To refresh the reading page in vital ways. Out Here draws together prose and poetry, from a range of voices, across time, but it never claims to cover everything. We are offered a crucial and comprehensive starting point. After finding 110 writers, Emma and Chris sent out an open call, and the response was overwhelming.

We chose words that delighted us, surprised us, confronted us and engaged us. We chose political pieces and pieces that dreamed futures as yet only yet imagined. We chose coming out stories and stories of home. We followed our noses. What our reading revealed to us is that our queer writers are writing beyond the expectations of what queer writing can be, and doing it in a way that often pushes against the trends of mainstream literature.

Emma Barnes and Chris Tse

I am reading the poetry first. I am reading poetry that reactivates what poems can do whether in terms of style, voice, theme, motifs. Some poems are navigating sexuality, gender issues, sex, love, identity. Other poems explore the body, oceans, discomfort, the end of the world, mothers, fathers, violence, tenderness, place, the dirt under fingernails. Expect humour and expect seriousness, the personal and the imagined. Expect to be moved and to be heartened. Some of the poems are familiar to me, others not, and it is as though I have parked up in a cool cafe for a legendary poetry reading (if only!). The physicality is skin-pricking, the aural choices symphonic, the intimate moments divine.

Take the three poems of Ash Davida Jane for example. I am reminded of the feminist catchphrase the personal is political but I am upending it to become the political is personal. ‘Good people’ resembles an ode to the soy milk carton. The poem considers how to be in the world, to make good choices, and be a good person when the world is drowning in plastics. It blows my head off. Ash’s second poem, ‘water levels’, celebrates the tenderness of being in the bath with someone who is shampooing your hair. The poem slows to such an intimate degree I get goosebumps. A poem that looks like a paragraph, ‘In my memory it is always daytime’, pivots on the waywardness of memory, its omission coupled with its power to transmit. I keep stalling on this glorious suite of poems rereading, revelling in the ability of poetry to deepen my engagement with the world, language, my own obsessions, weakenesses.

I stall too on Carolyn DeCarlo’s poems like I have struck a turning bay in the anthology. Rereading revelling. Reading revelling. And then Jackson Nieuwland’s astonishing ‘I am a version of you from the future’ where they stand in the shifting shoes and choices of a past self and it is tender and it is moving and it is tough. Or Ruby Solly’s ‘Lessons I don’t want to teach my daughter’, which is also tender and moving and tough. The ending in both English and Te Teo Māori restorative.

Imagine me standing on my rooftop singing out the names of the poets in the anthology and how they all offer poems as turning bays because you cannot read once and move on, you simply must read again, and it is measured and slow, and the effects upon you gloriously multiple. Chris and Emma have lovingly collated an anthology that plays its part in the final sentence of their introduction:

The final sentence resonates on so many levels. No longer will we tolerate literature that is limited in its reach. Poetry resists paradigms set in concrete, fenced off manifestos, rules and regulations, identity straitjackets. I welcome every journal and event, website and publishing house, that opens its arms wide to who and how we are as writers and readers. Out Here makes it clear: we are many and we track multiple roads, we are familied and we are connected. We are loved and we are at risk. We are floundering and we are anchored. This is a book to toast with a dance on the beach entitled POETRY JOY. I am dancing with joy to have this book in the world. To celebrate its arrival, I invited nine contributors to record a poem or two. Listen here.

Thank you Emma, Chris and Auckland University Press; this book is a gift. 💜 🙏

I would like to gift a copy of this book to one reader. Let me know if you’d like to go in my draw.

The editors

Chris Tse (he/him) was born and raised in Lower Hutt. He studied English literature and film at Victoria University of Wellington, where he also completed an MA in creative writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML). Tse was one of three poets featured in AUP New Poets 4 (2011). His first collection How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes (2014) won the Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry and his second book He’s So MASC was published to critical acclaim in 2018.

Emma Barnes (Ngāti Pākehā, they/them) studied at the University of Canterbury and lives in Aro Valley, Wellington. Their poetry has been widely published for more than a decade in journals including Landfall, Turbine | Kapohau, Cordite and Best New Zealand Poems. They are the author of the poetry collection I Am in Bed with You (2021).

Auckland University Press page