Category Archives: NZ poetry

Poetry Shelf Review: Diane Brown’s Taking My Mother to the Opera – a rollercoasting, thought provoking, detail clinging, self catapulting, beautiful read

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Diane Brown Taking My Mother to the Opera Otago University Press 2015

Otago University Press is producing beautifully designed poetry books with striking covers and internal designs that are both fresh and inviting. Diane Brown’s new book is no exception. The nifty look could be out of the fifties or sixties with its limited palette, the oval shapes and the time-pinning, parental photograph. Gorgeous. Being a child of the sixties, there is a nostalgic hue that draws me in. Plus the book is that rare poetry species – hard cover with a yellow ribbon. The book is about to be reprinted.

Diane’s new work could be flagged as narrative poetry, poetic narrative or as poetry as memoir. The writing is fluid, fluent, daring, exposing, moving. Diane steps back into her earlier self, the daughter-self, as she builds portraits of both her mother and father, and her shifting relations with them. Yet the adult writing self is never far away. The memoir is in debt to hand-me-down anecdotes, photograph albums and the potager plot of memory. We read of memory’s failings and fadings, in the light of mother, father and poet-daughter. Over lifetimes, memory has been weeded and fertilized to suit, unwittingly in the main. The poet is acutely aware of how tough and provisional a recuperation of the past is:

 

Too late to ask permission,

it’s up to me to tease out

some sort of narrative

 

from the missing story,

to add the words

I never thought to ask.

 

 

This memoir is like a poetic version of family archives; the hidden box where a cluster of things unlock family stories. What makes this family box retrieved from the dark so potent is the unsparing eye. Diane delves deep into parental enigmas. How can we ever know the adult? Stepping back into the shoes of the child, Diane steps back into things done and not-done, said and not-said, observed not-observed. Forbidden from the beach on Sundays, her mother is ‘alone in a studio/ in her velvet dress, blue/ possibly, with sunburst// embroidery, wishing/ she wasn’t.’ We get physical details, but then the melancholy arm’s length:

 

She’s maintained this one-way

conversation all her life, keeping

 

her own counsel, allowing

no disclosures, either of anger

or of love to husband and children.

 

Diane’s memoir, then, transcends the photograph album and exposes miniature wounds (the mother not at the school gate, the fact you cannot eat poems), mysteries (mother) and allegiances (with father). The poet has lifted veils and allowed space for rankles, reflections, sympathies. As detail and miniature stories accumulate, the memoir sharpens. It is as though we intrude on a personal endeavor to get to the truth of the past (for each participant). Lots of billowy white space to explore. Admissions. It is hard not to bring your own luggage to the scene.

The memoir is a sharply rendered portrait of time and place — haunting in the detail that drags me back to my childhood and adolescence. I loved that. Yet what makes this memoir stick is the complicated, heart-trembling knot that is on the one hand mother and on the other hand father. It carries you across generations to a time where parental expectations were different (as both mother/father and of daughter). It reminds you of the elusiveness of mother/father. We know what they shown us, less so what they have not. In the final part of the book, the parents age, become frail, face death. This introduces new questions, new writing drives, different parental versions:

 

I want to call him back,

have him describe changes

 

in the town and tell me

all the things I never thought

to ask. But too late,

 

he’s swimming downstream

with flowers in the current

and not looking back.

 

To enter so deeply into behind-the-curtains stories of family life is brave. That the family portrait depends on economy rather than over-statement heightens the emotional kick. You get the arc of the poet’s life where it intersects the parents, but there is so much that flickers in fleeting traces. Absence heightens the focus. As writer, daughter and mother, the book raised many issues for me, issues that I explored in great detail in my doctoral thesis, issues that I want to return to in my new book. For now, Diane’s new book is a beautiful read — a rollercoasting, thought provoking, detail clinging, self catapulting, beautiful read.

 

 

from ‘A Black and White Story’

 

Not the opera, Dad says,

we never went to the opera, but the flowers sound right.

 

I’ve always bought your mother flowers, why wouldn’t I?

Best woman in the world.

 

Mum, who doesn’t believe in poetry

or any other form of declaration, mutters,

Actions not words, behind his back.

 

Not tuned in to cynicism, Dad refuses to hear. It doesn’t occur to him

his memory might be fading.

 

 

*

 

 

There may have been a time

when they attended Madame Butterfly,

Mum wearing her good dress,

 

the green tulle with a flared skirt; behind her ears, a dab of Evening in Paris, from the deep blue bottle.

 

Dad in white shirt and striped tie, heart soaring. There are no photos of this so perhaps I am spinning

 

the parent tale we all want to read at bedtime—love uncomplicated and just for you.

 

© Diane Brown 2015

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf, Poets’ Choice: Cilla McQueen and Brian Turner make some picks

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My pick is Emma Neale’s Tender Machines (OUP). Emma’s poetry is resonant on many levels and repays close reading. In her supple, expert language, she takes a loving look at the human condition in a collection which has depth, wisdom and insight.

Cilla McQueen

 

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Mostly I read poetry and non-fiction, and a lot of the latter is to to do with environmental issues in an effort to understand and do something about the disgusting rate at which we’re destroying the place. Recently I read Michael McCarthy‘s The Moth Snowstorm, which Helen Macdonald termed ‘a deeply affecting memoir and a heartbreaking account of ecological impoverishment’. I concur. Much of what McCarthy writes about mirrors what’s happened and continues to here, in NZ, and elsewhere.

Three of the volumes of poetry that I’ve read and liked most in the past year are Robin Robertson‘s The Wrecking Light, Vincent O’Sullivan‘s Being Here, and Emma Neale‘s Tender Machines. Robertson doesn’t pussy-foot around, covers a lot of ground, can be caustic, blunt, wry and shattering. O’Sullivan ranges widely both in tone and content. Apart from the wry and sly ways he approaches things I like the ways in which he highlights human absurdities. As I hear him, it’s not as if we’re too much troubled by human absurdity, it’s that we’re not troubled enough. In Emma Neale’s Tender Machines she grapples with long-standing human predicaments, the difficulties we have personally keeping a lot of the ‘ongoing human symphony’ playing while trying to work out how to silence our dreadful ‘inner racket’.

I’d like to be able to buy and read far more NZ poetry than I do these days. Back in the 1960s, when I began trying to write poems, it was possible to be familiar with nearly all of the volumes of poems by NZ writers. Not now; the result is great gaps in one’s reading. Does it matter? I don’t know.

Brian Turner

Poetry Shelf, Poet’s Choice: Rachel Bush makes her pick

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I was hooked by the couplet that begins the first poem in Ocean and Stone by Dinah Hawken (Victoria University Press 2015).

‘Here I am an old woman, sitting alone / on an outside chair in Maoriland,’ she writes. I am captivated by this concise and evocative sketch of herself. That word ‘Maoriland’ with all its nuances and baggage still turns over and over in my mind.

Dinah  writes beautifully about children, particularly in this book  about her grandchildren. There is none of the cuteness that can mar writing about little children. Hers are tiny in stature, but total and convincingly human beings.

She can be very funny, for instance when she writes about ‘the bloke’ who disrupts the lake and everyone peacefully round it by tuning a loud speed boat for hours on end. We all know him, alas.

She writes particularly well about the natural world. I find it difficult to say without sounding as though I am attributing to her some wise conventional pieties. And the very last thing she does is write things that sound good and ‘nice’. If I had to pick a favourite poem, today  I might choose ‘A screen is a screen’. Partly it’s a poem about climate change, but there is no hefty lecturing about it. The ubiquity of screens in our daily lives is countered with the strength and vitality of one bare tree, and with a the way a sense of community and family can  enrich our lives.

Rachel Bush

Poetry Shelf, Poet’s Choice: Emma Neale’s favourite poetry reads 2015

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My poetry treasures for this year:  Some people say they’ve travelled, or fallen in love, or moved house, as the measure of a year’s alterations: for me, 2015 was the year I read Iain Lonie’s A Place to Go On From: The Collected Poems. The depth and frankness with which this plumbs love, grief and staring into the void is so unstinting that reading it has felt like a life event. As an act of scholarship from the editor David Howard and the author of the introduction Damian Love, it deserves to be celebrated.
I also loved seeing the fresh direction Joan Fleming has gone in with Failed Love Poems and how quickly she takes up new role models (eg Mary Ruefle, erasure poetics) and rearranges and ‘re-aspirates’ these.

Because as a student I always used to write far too much and get reprimanded for exceeding the word limit, I have to add here Bones in the Octagon by Carolyn McCurdie – see particularly her poem about the Brothers Grimm – and oh please just one more to add – two Hungarian poets have dazzled me this year: Ágnes Nemes Nagy and Ferenc Juhász.

Emma Neale

Bones in the octagon front cover copy

Poetry Shelf, Poet’s Choice: Bill Manhire selects some favourite reads of 2015

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The late R.F. Langley is still one of the secrets of recent poetry in English, though Carcanet’s new Complete Poems (edited by Jeremy Noel-Tod) will be doing something to bring him out of the shadows.  He looks a bit remote and narrow on the page – but in fact the poems are full of hidden rhymes: listen to him hard, sound him on the tongue, and you realise he’s one of the most musical poets going.  And if poems are, as someone said, acts of attention, then he’s also one of the most attentive you’re ever likely to come across.

I like how Commune Editions, the publisher of Juliana Spahr’s That Winter the Wolf Came,  describe themselves: ‘purveyor of poetry & other antagonisms’.  There are plenty of antagonisms in this new book, which builds its effects into something bigger than the simple arithmetic of its individual poems. A poem called ‘Turnt’, online at the Poetry Foundation, gives a reasonable sense of how Spahr goes about things.

Though I’m late to the party, I’ve been reading Dan O’Brien’s 2013 collection, War Reporter (CB editions, 2013), which voices itself through the persona of the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Paul Watson – so that you’re both in the action and out of it at the same time.  As with Wilfred Owen et al, it will never be an easy time to read work like this – but just at the moment it feels especially challenging.

Finally, Zaffar Kunial is a poet I like a lot, though he hasn’t published a full collection yet.  He has the wonderful/weird distinction of once having worked as a writer for Hallmark Cards. Here’s a link to why – or part of why – I like his work. The page also includes a link to his poem ‘The Word’. It’s small and tidy, but is a sort of Tardis poem: bigger on the inside than the outside.

Bill Manhire

Slam, slam … & thank you Mams – Vaughan Rapatahana’s take on Slam Poetry & NZ stalwarts

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Vaughan Rapatahana has just posted a piece on Jacket2 that casts a spotlight on various poetry activities in New Zealand. Great to see. Thanks, too, for the thumbs up Vaughan.

‘In this, my last commentary post of this series — apart from a brief Coda next week — I want to talk about two distinct areas of the Aotearoa-New Zealand poetry scene that I have alluded to previously, but nor really covered copiously as yet.

One is the vital and brimming Poetry Slam situation in this multicultural land — a scene that is really expanding fast, most particularly among younger poets, and certainly among Polynesian poets who tend not to live in stuffy urban areas, but more likely in places like Mangere, where I grew up. I reckon this bodes extremely well for the future of (their) primarily oral-delivery focussed work, for they seem less interested in being seen in print in established/mainstream journals and much more energized by the live performance, the audience, the competition, the sometimes Americano rap/hip-hop, often Pasifika, definite ngā mōteatea rhythms and beats running through their pieces. Mind you, some DO already have print collections out there … Kei te tino pai tēnei (This is very good.)’

 

and part two:

 

‘So I also want to focus on another essential aspect of New Zealand’s poetry scene — the Stalwarts, the people — very often women, thank you Mams, who keep poetry in this country alive and kicking via their commitment to writing about it; reviewing it as in the several online blogs, like The Tuesday Poem as organised by Mary [McCallum] and Claire Beynon, which ‘carries a poem and commentary on the poet’s work every Tuesday’; publicizing it; organising it — often  regionally: mostly unpaid and as dedicated labours of love.’

 

Full blog here

Damien Wilkin’s launch speech for Bill Manhire’s short story collection: ‘I think of these stories as ludic on the outside but ferocious in their hidden centres.’

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Great launch speech!

‘It’s not a bad way to approach this book – to listen for the tune as much anything. Because while it’s true that these beguiling, discomforting stories take many strange and sudden turns, I was struck all over again by how hummable they are, how they stick to the ear and the mind.’

Launch speech here

Poem Friday: Sue Wootton’s ‘Lingua incognita’ –

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Lingua incognita

 

Some words dwell in the bone, as yet

unassembled. Like the word you want

 

for Weary Of The City, for Soul Tired; the word

you seek for Confusion Where Affection Once Existed

 

or the single vowel-filled syllable which would accurately render

Sensation of Freefall Generated by Receipt of Terrifying Information.

 

Down in the bone the word-strands glimmer and ascend

often disordered, often in dreams,

 

bone-knowledge beating a path through the body to the throat

labouring to enter the alphabet.

 

Maybe the bones ache.

Maybe the throat.

 

Your cells your language, occasionally articulate

in a rush of ease, the body clear as wellspring saying this is

 

The Moment of Illumination When One Allows that Water Yields to Rock, and Always Flows

 

and sometimes the only word to assemble in the throat is Yes

and sometimes the only word to assemble in the throat is No.

 

© Sue Wootton 2015

 

Author bio:  Sue Wootton’s poetry and fiction has been widely published, anthologised and translated. Her most recent publication is Out of Shape, a letterpress portfolio of poems hand set and printed by Canberra letterpress artist Caren Florance. She was recently placed second for the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, and longlisted for the 2015 Canberra University Vice Chancellor’s Poetry Prize. A former physiotherapist, Sue has a special interest in the practice of the creative arts in healthcare. She holds a Master of Arts in Creative Writing from Massey University, awarded with distinction, on the subject of creative fiction and the phenomenology of illness. She lives in Dunedin and is the current selecting editor for the Otago Daily Times Monday Poem column. Her novel, Strip, is forthcoming next year from Mākaro Press.

Sue’s website

Paula’s note: I love the way this poem grapples with the elusiveness of words, building in momentum from that point in the bone to that point in the throat. Inventive. Surprising. The elusive moments/notions/images glint as they escape. The ending shifts the pitch of the poem and delivers, for me, a moment of poignancy. I love this.

 

 

Six artists respond to the poetry of Joanna Margaret Paul

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Thursday 26 November, 6.30pm
Six artists respond to the poetry of Joanna Margaret Paul
Light House Cuba

Fresh from the recent screening at Experimenta 2015, the BFI London Film Festival, the programme features short moving image works by Nova Paul, Rachel Shearer, Sonya Lacey, Miranda Parkes, Shannon Te Ao and the collective Popular Productions.

A prolific film-maker, poet, photographer and painter, Joanna Paul (1955-2003) quietly observed the intimate poetics of the domestic and the modest grace of her immediate surroundings. This programme presents an ambitious range of new moving image commissions shot in various spaces, including out of doors and within an artificial building complex made from salt. Each film has been inspired by a selection of Paul’s poetry, proving the resonance of her work in 2015.

According to a recent review in Frieze magazine: “New Zealander Joanna Margaret Paul’s films were made in relative artistic isolation from avant-garde film discourse in the mid-1970s, but are rooted in an acute feminist politics that focuses on concerns of shared female social spaces and everyday domestic situations.”

This screening of Six artists respond to the poetry of Joanna Margaret Paul is presented by CIRCUIT in association with the Adam Art Gallery’s current exhibition Fragments of a World: Artists Working in Film and Photography 1973–1987 (3 October – 18 December 2015) which features moving image and photographic works by Popular Productions, Joanna Paul and a number of her contemporaries.

$10 adults, $8 students/Adam Art Gallery Friends and Supporters
Seating is limited – to book email stephen.cleland@vuw.ac.nz

Poetry Shelf review — Emma Neale’s Tender Machines takes you into a deep private space in her writing; in ways that sing and challenge, that move and muster every poetic muscle and tendon as you read

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Emma Neale Tender Machines Otago University Press 2015

Emma Neale’s new poetry collection features a striking drawing by her son, Abe. Surprising, inventive, poetic even. The poetry is Emma’s best yet, dare I say it. To step off from the title, tenderness meets sharp edges meets exquisite moving parts, small yet perfectly formed. The collection holds you in the intimate embrace of home, yet takes you out into the wider allure of the wider world. Issues, ideas, preoccupations.

The first section, ‘Bad Housekeeping,’ is where poet tends hearth. Mostly, and movingly, Emma navigates her relations with her young son.  She is up against the elbows of insistence, demands, resistance. The mind of the mother is anchoring, roving, admitting. She is in the heart of a toddler tantrum and in the palm of world issues. These poems affect you. You can savour the poetic craft that is honey for the ear. Such musical harmonies and schisms. That is one joy of reading. You can enter the toughness and rewards of motherhood. It is as though maternal experience is the stock pot that is simmered and concentrated to a syrup that is both sweet and tart on the tongue.  The poems become the kind of poems you can hang stories upon; of this child and that child, of this moment of mothering and that. Poetry has the ability to bear story, experience, imaginings, ideas, music — all in its one tender machine (oxymoron and all). These remarkable poems do this. ‘Hard Task, Master’ is a miniature snapshot of the child — its ending breathtaking:

 

as he tries

to build and build

the deck of himself

against the hard, tall wall

of the world.

 

At times it is the concatenation of verb or noun on the line that catches you in a knot of maternal thought — son glued to mother, mother glued to son. As in ‘Towards a Theory of Aggression in Early Childhood Development’:

 

Hit, push, lash, scratch,

these cheeks, this jaw, this shoulder,

are these in truth our edges, outlines, will we cry

as he does, daily, nightly, sky-wrenching as sunrise

yet still hold him in our arms

 

There is poetic braveness here that doesn’t loiter in conventional maternal paradigms. This is a poet opening layers of skin to get to where it hurts, confuses, demands, yet never loses sight of the enduring bond. The love. This is from ‘Domestic’:

 

you’re our darling our treasure.

 

You fling a tea cup at the cat,

plump up her spine like a goose-down pillow,

 

jab your thumbs at your father’s face

as if to pull out its two blue plums

 

but ah, little fisty-kins, honeyghoul, thorny-pie,

grapple hook of your daddy’s flooded eye,

 

stitch by stitch hope’s small black sutures

sew love’s shadow behind you.

 

The rest of the collection represents a mind engaged with the world at large. There is a strong political vein that never relinquishes the notion that the personal is political and that, importantly, the political is personal. Big issues such as consumerism, the compromised state of the planet, greed, waste are there potency ingredient in the ink of the pen, yet Emma’s ideas find poetic life in a variety of ways. Always there is an attentiveness to sound, to the way the poems hit the ear before the eye/mind drifts elsewhere. Assonance is plentiful. Delicious. The musicality is a first port of admiration that sends you back to reread with ears on alert. One poem, overtly and self-reflexively, plays with musical effects, yet delivers a subterranean plea for the earth (‘”Properly Protecting the Most Pure Marine Ecosystem Left on Earth Was Not Consistent with the Government’s Economic Growth Objective”‘. Here is a sample:

 

The spring tries to write

its long lyric poem again:

grass blade rhymes wing tip;

leaf rim, gull keen;

salt foam, thought arc;

surf break, line break;

historical break, heart break;

riven river, toxic stream;

smoked ozone, glacial melt.

 

So many standout poems. I especially loved the way ‘Suburban Story’ moves. It begins with a ‘shopkeeper at my old corner store’ and then travels through a poignant catalogue of losses, minor and major. Again the exquisite ear at work, again the pulsating detail.

This is a collection of reflection, revelation, absorption. Emma wrote many of these poems during her tenure as The NZSA/Beaton Fellow, The Otago Robert Burns Fellow and The University of Otago/ Sir James Wallace Pah Homestead Writer in Residence. Such awards benefit the poet immeasurably with the gift of writing space and time. You can see it in the gold nuggets of this book. In another favourite poem, ‘Sleep-talking,’ the clogged channels of thought become poetry. Emma takes you into a deep private space in her writing; in ways that sing and challenge, that move and muster every poetic muscle and tendon as you read — in this poem and in the book as a whole.

 

Perhaps for the self to hold its own air

it must be played in the key of sleep:

the body an instrument that over time

we must keep pitched, soaked in night like a reed softened in water,

while dreams tune the mind’s strings with a touch that seems

as precise as if the musician’s ear cranes deep

 

 

Otago University Press page

RNZ review

Emma Neale on her title

From the book: ‘Origins‘ posted on Poetry Shelf