Natalie Morrison reads from Pins, Victoria University Press, 2020
Natalie Morrison has an MA in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters, where she received the Biggs Family Prize for Poetry in 2016. She lives and works in Wellington. Pins is her first book and is on the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards Poetry Category longlist.
Victoria University Press page
Poetry Shelf launch of Pins
Poetry Shelf interviews Natalie
Hinemoana Baker funkhaus Victoria University Press, 2020
A woman carries in her arms
a heavy rectangle of sky –
roofs and treetops.
She places it in the back seat
of her car to calm down.
You and I sit
like separate circles
of a Venn diagram
unaware of the fabled
tasting zones of the tongue.
from ‘flomarkt’
Hinemoana Baker’s new poetry collection is peppery, salty, sweet. The poems form a bridge between two homes, Aotearoa and Berlin, and the overall effect is a book you want to keep reading. Again and again and again. I have been reading funkhaus since it arrived in my postbox May last year. Some books are like this. The German word ‘funken’, we learn in the blurb, is ‘to send a radio signal’. I love the idea that poetry becomes a form of broadcast. I love being an antenna, picking up the static, the silences, the connections across eight months.
funkhaus is on the Poetry category longlist of the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. The shortlist will be announced on March 3rd.
Hinemoana has always achieved a stop-you-in-your-tracks fluency, maybe because she is a musician and her ear is attentive to the sound of the line, regardless of the subject matter, the personal admissions, the political acumen, the light along with the biting dark. I am listening to funkhaus and admiring the pared back melodies, both the acoustic and the electric.
Pepper blacks the pan so never
Shake it near me, wait
For the flagrant animation
In my bed base
In mountain situations
Sleep swaddled, wake ecstatic
from ‘Narcissist advice column’
What has gripped me more than anything – and maybe this particularly matters in these Covid times – is the way most poems are peopled. Yes there is a mesmerising view out the window where the birds are flying in formation. Yes there is a new vacuum cleaner. Yes there is the question of whether extinct species might be revived. But touch the beating pulse of this collection and you will feel people. Unlike the camera that gravitates towards the people-emptied landscape, Hinemoana draws people in close. Think loved ones, friends, family, passersby. Sometimes a poem is infused in the surreal and you imbibe a scene that tilts and sticks. This is is the start of ‘friday night’, a little beauty of a poem:
Way down south
in the south
of the south island of himself
over greyscale trees.
Eagles and meteorites are not.
On other occasions the poem is grounded in the personal. There is always the gap, the quavery silence, the unnamed pronouns (I, we, you, he, she, they), the spiky detail that fascinates, the heart of experiencing, of imagining, of replaying. I especially love ‘aunties’, a poem Hinemoana read for Poetry Shelf (2019). This glorious tour de force of a poem makes people (aunties) utterly, movingly, wittily, wincingly, gorgeously present.
We had a marching auntie and an eyelash-curler aunty, a
headscarves one, a lavender talcum powder aunty and a satin
running shorts one. We had an aunty who was laid out on the
sheepskin rug by that uncle when she was six, and seven and
eight. These might be the same aunties. We had an aunty who
died on the same day as her own sister and turned into that
white horse on the green hill. A drawn-on-eyebrows aunty who
said I don’t care how good they are at yodelling they’re giving
country music a bad name those girls.
Ah but I also love ‘mother’, ‘waitangi day’, ‘if i had to sing’, waiata tangi’. Find the book. Find your own clearings.
Hinemoana crafts poetry as flourishing movement. In part as melodic flow but also in the way poems come into being in surprising ways. The unexpected paths and sideturns. The underlays and overlays. The semantic chords and the visual alerts. In ‘fox’, an animal is spotted outside in the snow (‘The most powerful things / are the ones we simply come across’). The poem entrances as you move from this sweet epiphany to loss of appetite, your own child dying, to the skin as kidney to:
Climbing into the air outside your door
a tufty plant grows from a cobblestone.
And there –
there is the sandwich board with pictures of fruit
and words you don’t understand
which make nothing happen.
Another sublime example is ‘flohmarkt’, the poem I quoted from at the start of the review. Here we move from the striking opening image of woman and sky to tongue myths to dog and bike owners, and then to chairs. This is how poetry can move. It is gap and it is breathtakingly resonant. Here is the end of the poem:
I live with a surplus
of chairs, mostly empty.
My one, with its smooth
wooden arms and your one
if you were here.
The kind of chair you never want
to get up out of
the kind of chair for which
prepositions were invented.
Maybe this sounds old-fashioned but for me Hinemoana’s poetry gets down to the essence of things. There is an addictive economy that opens out into lush and surprising fields of reading. Like a yin and yang effect. Like poetry as a basket of essential oils that you flick on your wrist and carry all day. That work for each of us differently. That sustain and delight, that get you moving and thinking. That change as you wear them over the course of eight months. Poetry as essential. Poetry as skin tingling essential. It feels essential to Hinemona – to be writing poems, to be travelling across the poetry bridge, that arc of static and connection between Berlin home and Aotearoa home, to be grounded in her friends and whānau, her writing support crew. She acknowledges the vital support of those who have offered aroha and wisdom, publication and recording opportunities, reviews, translations, festival invitations in her endnotes. I offer a small thank you to Hinemoana – each book is a gift and we are all the better for residing within your latest one.
HINEMOANA BAKER is a poet, musician and creative writing teacher. She traces her ancestry from Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Toa Rangatira, Te Āti Awa and Ngāi Tahu, as well as from England and Germany (Oberammergau in Bayern). She is the author of the poetry collections Funkhaus (VUP, 2020), waha | mouth (VUP, 2014), kōiwi kōiwi (VUP, 2010), and mātuhi | needle (co-published in 2004 by Victoria University Press and Perceval Press).
Hinemoana has edited several online and print anthologies and released several albums of original music and more experimental sound art. She works in English, Māori and more recently German, the latter in collaboration with German poet and sound performer Ulrike Almut Sandig. She is currently living in Berlin, where she was 2016 Creative New Zealand Berlin Writer in Residence, and completing a PhD at Potsdam University.
Victoria University Press page
The Spin Off review (Elizabeth Heritage)
Pantograph Punch review (Arihia Latham)
NZLA review (Kiri Piahana-Wong)
Rhian Gallagher reads from Far-Flung (Auckland University Press, 2020)
Rhian Gallagher‘s first poetry book Salt Water Creek (Enitharmon Press, 2003) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for First Collection. In 2007 Gallagher won a Canterbury History Foundation Award, which led to the publication of her book Feeling for Daylight: The Photographs of Jack Adamson (South Canterbury Museum, 2010). She also received the 2008 Janet Frame Literary Trust Award. Gallagher’s Shift (AUP, 2011) won the 2012 New Zealand Post Book Award for Poetry. In 2018, she held the University of Otago Robert Burns Fellowship.
Auckland University Press page
Poetry Shelf review of Far-Flung
Greetings cards for Jackson Nieuwland
I light a candle and vines of blood
Run down in place of wax as if
The experience of transubstantiation
Were being drawn towards the grave
Centre of the earth by the weight of
Your own iron content. Ever found
Yourself on a throne whose arms
And legs are wired to crosses like
A marionette? You’re no puppet and
It’s all the universe in a pocketwatch
I’m afraid. My heart on fire under
A bell jar and that’s just how it’ll stay.
❤
Getting into keeping fish as a hobby
Hoping to use my own body as a tank
Until so filled with water I gain imm-
Unity to drowning and companionship
All at once. The deeper I go the more I
Feel as though falling from great heights.
My open palm broad enough to form
Plains on which tornadoes arise like
Spring clockwork before the lines turn
To river deltas so blue I can’t imagine
Ever having had veins in my hand.
❤
Amongst the sunflowers the scarecrow
Is king. I have the first successful mono
-culture fields of carnivorous plants
That eat every new seed right as you
Sow it. Knock off and pitch a ladder
Against the clouds to paint them like
A weatherboard house or chip away at
An ice sculpture. Lay down on the Gulf
Stream like Michelangelo on scaffolding
Painting the dogmatic ceiling. As if
The compass woven into paper maps
Could spring to life like a computer.
❤
I woke inside a lightbulb holding
A candle slowly consuming all the air
Like the sweetest dream of being a star
Calculating orbits in the different twists
Of screw and bayonet fittings the kind
Of knowledge that can never survive
A trip to the store. An alley so dark I
Instantly become an orphan and have
The shadow of a wolf in passing head
-lights. Fallen leaves and playing cards
And receipts curl into being on the wind
And take a hike into rolling hills.
Chris Holdayway
Chris Holdaway’s Compound Press was established in 2013. It publishes poetry, other writings along with Minarets, a journal of poetry and poetics. The books are printed and bound in their Auckland workshop. Jackson Niuewland’s I am a human being (2020) is longlisted in the Poetry Category of the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Last year they also published A bathful of kawakawa and hot water, a selection of writings by Hana Pera Aoake.
Inside the television the tiny people
are moving and talking. Some of them
are falling in love. Some of them are dying
in exciting ways. The cartoon people
who fall off a cliff or are hit by a train
get up again, scowling but unharmed.
There are also tiny animals.
They live in documentaries.
They hunt and fall in love and die.
They do not get up again.
At night the television is turned off
and all the people and all the animals
lie down and go to sleep.
The people sleep in tiny houses.
The animals sleep in and under tiny trees.
It is crowded inside the television,
but they are all used to it
and they make do, they settle down
under their tiny night sky,
with its tiny stars.
Who would not wish
to join them there?
A young woman with wet hair
climbs out of the television
into a living room,
her long hair and sodden dress
are dripping water on the floor,
and that is a horror movie.
But more and more of us
are going into the television,
and the young woman will soon
be alone in the world.
She wanders from empty house
to empty house, testing the abandoned
appliances. She picks up the remote
and switches the television on,
but then she is bored
and switches it off.
There is nothing to be afraid of
inside the television. It’s quite all right.
Good night, we tiny people
say to each other.
Good night, the tiny animals
growl and squeak and purr.
The television is dark now.
Good night.
Tim Upperton (an earlier version of this poe appeared in takahē 98)
Tim Upperton lives in Palmerston North. His second poetry collection, The Night We Ate The Baby, was an Ockham New Zealand Book Awards finalist in 2016, and he won the Caselberg International Poetry Prize in 2012, 2013 and 2020. His poems have been published in many magazines including Agni, Poetry, Shenandoah, Sport, Landfall and Takahē, and are anthologised in The Best of Best New Zealand Poems (2011), Villanelles (2012), Essential New Zealand Poems (2014), and Obsession: Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century (2014). His poem “The truth about Palmerston North” was recently recorded by Sam Neill here.
Karlo Mila, Goddess Muscle, Huia Publishers, 2020
Paintbrushes in our hands
drafting our dreams,
remembering the chants,
writing the poems,
relearning the language
composing the chants,
cooking the dinners,
carrying the children,
paying the bills,
fighting the fight,
with our tax-paying,
car-driving hands.
A collective of artists
narrating a story
we can bear to live in.
Creating an image
of ourselves
we can love
to look at:
from ‘Our Generation : ‘Āina Aloha’
Karlo Mila’s new poetry book is the most gorgeously produced collection I have held in ages. It feels good. It looks good. It is a pleasing shape. It has abandoned the reigning tradition of black ink upon white page in favour of a wider colour palette for both font and background. Sometimes I have to peer in close to read as though the physical act of reading is as important as cerebral connections and heart boosts. It continues to matter to me as addicted poetry reader at the moment: the effects a poetry collection has upon you as you read and as you move away. How satisfying when poetry uplifts heart and stimulates brain, soothes tired bodies and sets us swaying.
Several artists contributed work for the book and, as the acknowledgement page underlines, these vibrant works are personal: Delicia Samero’s portraits of Karlo, a collaborative mural Aloha ‘Āina and Naomi Maraea’s depiction of Hikule‘o.
I adored the 2021 poetry longlist for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards having been so affected by the eight books I had read and reviewed. And now I can add a ninth sublime read: Karlo’s Goddess Muscle. The collection ignites every reading muscle: from heart to mind to breathing to memory to pulse. Karlo engages with light and dark, fragility and strength, relationships, family, sisterhoods, writing mentors, life mentors, political issues. Her words meet the line, create the lines like a movement of water, lap lapping in your ear, across your skin, with ebb and tide, the words in debt to water fluency as they flow gentle and honeyed, or hit sands, rocks, obstacles. Such sweet flowing lyrical currents. Always audible, always mesmerising. This is poetic craft at its most agile.
Dark, lovely cowrie-shell eyes,
who’d expect the lies,
unless you flipped that fragile shell over
to the serrated crack
of the backside,
where the sea slugs reside,
that weak pink flesh on the inside.
Everyone’s got a living surprise,
the part that they hide.
from ‘The Tale of Hine and Sinilau’
The book begins with a gathering, a gathering of lineage, ancestors, relations. This becomes place, somewhere to write from and to and because of. The gathering involves balance, re-orientation. The gathering (both noun and verb) becomes writing and this is what writing can do.
It is their
soft singing,
cellular love songs,
the chanting lyric of bloodlines,
accompanying you
all the way
through the lonely.
from ‘Your People Will Gather Around You: Love After Love’
The ocean is paramount, not just in the water fluency of the lines, but in the recurring motifs and the personal attachment. “Oceania’ is an ocean homage, image, self-defining: ‘I call on the memory of water’.
Karlo acknowledges writers and loved ones who have sustained her, who are the essential oils of writing. She lights a candle for Teresia Teaiwa in ‘For Teresia Teaiwa’. I am moved to tears as I read this loving tribute to poet who affected and inspired so many others.
I will light this candle.
The spendy kind,
cradled in glass,
that burns for days
smelling of coconut and vanilla
and I will say prayers for you
even though my prayers
are like bad poems
and are often wordless.
I hope,
at the least,
you will feel the
long-burning
flame of my intent,
warming the space
between us.
The tribute poem to JC Sturm cuts to the bone of reading, sidestepping Baxter and his sickening offences, Karlo taking a road trip to Jerusalem with her own broken heart and her mother, moving under his over-present lines to Jacquie. How I love this poem, this mihi: ‘But moving under all that surface skimming / was you.’ The poem to Hone Tuwhare is pure delight. The sonic torque (can I say that, think sounds spinning on word axes) is sensational.
You boilermaker,
fabricating lyrical weld
from blast furnace
of sun,
slowed,
stopped and
set
on white horizon
of page.
from ‘A Conversation with Hone Tuwhare’
Karlo’s love poems have always gripped me and I favoured them in Wild Honey’s ‘Love’ section. This collection faces broken love, longings, touch, loneliness, attachment with shifting intensities, hues, admissions. There is someone at the end of the poem, an addressee, a beloved, a lover lost, a lover found, and Karlo never forgets that. The poems are layered, intimate, deeply personal. I am still held in their grip.
Goddess Muscle is crafted like a symphony, an experience of shifting life seasons and subject matter, so as you read the effects are wide reaching. Karlo faces significant political issues: climate change, the Commonwealth, colonialism, racism, Ihumātao, ‘the daily politics of being a woman, partner and mother’. She faces these global and individual challenges without flinching. The resulting poems are essential reading, never losing touch with song and heart, always insisting in poetic form how we can do better. How we can be a better world, recharge humanity. I would like to see these poems read in secondary school. You can read ‘Moemoeā: (composed for poets for Ihumātao)’ here.
Goddess Muscle is a gift. I can barely account for how it will stretch your reading muscles, your beating heart, your enquiring mind, your compassion, your music cravings, your empathy. Karlo has extended her own poetic muscle and offered poetry that is wisdom, strength, refreshed humaneness. Thank you. Thank you.
If we were truly to reorient
to life as relatives,
commonwealth
would mean more
than what we might cling to
in the face of a dangerous
and uncertain future.
Let us not
use the word ‘commonwealth’
to try and insulate fate
with the soft fur of fine-feathered friends.
No,
let us spread our wings
to a much wider vision than that.
It may be the end of the world as we know it
but let us not fear
the remaking of another one.
To the young people I say,
there may be no jobs
but there is plenty of work to be done.
So let us harness our collective wisdoms:
divers, different and divergent.
Let us create an atmosphere
of kindness and love
for even the air we breathe,
fresh water, trees, people, ocean.
Let us create a dream house,
a great place to raise a family.
For therein lies the fate
of an extraordinary family of relatives.
Where what we have in common
is all of us.
from ‘Poem for the Commonwealth, 2018’
Dr Karlo Mila is a New Zealand-born poet of Tongan and Pākehā descent with ancestral connections to Samoa. She is currently Programme Director of Mana Moana, Leadership New Zealand. This leadership programme is based on her postdoctoral research on harnessing indigenous language and ancestral knowledge from the Pacific to use in contemporary leadership contexts. Karlo received an MNZM in 2019 for services to the Pacific community and as a poet, received a Creative New Zealand Contemporary Pacific Artist Award in 2016, and was selected for a Creative New Zealand Fulbright Pacific Writer’s Residency in Hawaii in 2015.
Goddess Muscle is Karlo’s third book of poetry and has been longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards 2021. Her first, Dream Fish Floating, won NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book of Poetry Award at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards in 2006. In 2008, Karlo collaborated with German-born artist Delicia Sampero to produce A Well Written Body.
Huia Publishers author page
Poetry Shelf – poets on their own poems: Karlo Mila reads ‘For Tamir Rice with Love from Aotearoa’
Poetry Shelf has reviewed
The Savage Coloniser Book Tuisata Avia, Victoria University Press
Far Flung Rhian Gallagher Auckland University Press
National Anthem National Anthem, Dead Bird Books
Wow Bill Manhire, Victoria University Press
Pins Natalie Morrison, Victoria University Press (an interview)
This is Your Real Name, Elizabeth Morton, Otago University Press
I Am a Human Being Jackson Nieuwland, Compound Press
Magnolia, NIna Mingya Powles, Seraph Press
CONGRATULATIONS to all the poets. This is the best longlist I have seen in years. I have loved all these books to a sublime degree. I am also delighted to see a mix of university presses and smaller publishers, and those inbetween. I plan to review Hinemoana and Karlo’s books over the coming weeks (Goddess Muscle, Karlo Mila, Huia Press and Funkhaus, Hinemoana Baker, Victoria University Press).
Ockham New Zealand Book Award page
Nouns, verbs, etc. Fiona Farrell, Otago University Press, 2020
Once upon a time there was
a story.
It lived in the mouth of an
old woman.
It was a bad-tempered story
that kicked the door in and
threw plates. It did not behave
itself.
But she gave it shelter.
She had made it herself.
She had fed it with her own
blood. She had spat her own
stomach into its straining
beak. She knew why it cried.
from ‘The old woman’s story’
Fiona Farrell, much loved poet, novelist and nonfiction author, began writing poems in childhood, at times in ‘wonky capitals’ with the delicious ‘thump’ of end rhyme. She discusses her evolution as poet in the terrific preface to her selected poems published last year. There were comic poems that made her class laugh, the earnest poems of high school with elevated expectations of what a poem ought to be, and the kick in the gut when, at 19, a young man laughed at the poem she showed him. She stopped writing.
It’s so difficult in 2020 to convey just how it felt to be in this world where men, past and present, stood about booming to one another like so many kākāpō on a steep hillside.
from ‘Preface’
So many other women in the 1960s through to the 1970s were writing on scraps of paper in scraps of time getting scraps of attention and rarely making it onto the hallowed ground of men, their journals, their university course material, their poetry gigs.
Today I’ve embroidered relativity
polished the Acropolis
knitted Ulysses
and baked two trayloads of cantatas
for the kindy.
Now, if the baby sleeps another hour
I’ll just about have time
to whip up some of that
Instant Immortality.
from ‘Preface’
Fiona’s ‘Preface’ echoes so many women’s voices I read in my Wild Honey travels. I think of how long it took me, along with other women, to move from hidden notebooks to going public and getting published. For Fiona it was the death of her father, and his complicated presence in her life, that started her poetry pen moving again: ‘The way the simple act of choosing words can give the illusion, however temporary, of control when emotion threatens to overwhelm’ (‘Preface’). She showed the poem to someone she shared a teacher’s college office with and took up the suggestion to get it published.
Fiona’s Nouns, verbs, etc. (selected poems) includes extracts from her four collections: Cutting Out (1987), The Inhabited Initial (1999), The Pop-Up Book of Invasions (2007) and The Broken Book (2011). Interspersed between the extracts are clusters of uncollected poems and, at the end, my favourite endnotes ever, a suite of fascinations that complement the joys of reading the poems, unexpectedly, beautifully. Fiona said she heeded the positive response to the endnotes in The PopUp Book of Invasions.
Nouns, verbs, etc. is a Poetry Treasure House. Across decades of writing, the poems are guided by inquisitiveness, linguistic nimbleness, a freshness of voice that survives over time, an exposed heart, the presence of I and we, political undercurrents. There are human and humane attachments because the recurring revelation is that this poet cares. Poetry stands as a means of care: for self, for loved ones, for the world, for the present and the past, for the stretch and possibilities of languages. In particular Fiona has cared about women; in their daily lives, in a history of writing, in genealogies, in other places and other times, in the need to resist subjugation and erasure.
She sits in the dark
on the rough side of
Sunday. The wood is
bare down here, torn
from a tree. She gets
her woolly hat. The
table is saw scrawl
screw and scratch.
She brings a cushion
and some crackers.
The table is a bare
bivvy. Brace and
bruised knuckle.
She flings a sheet
over. She will
live here
for ever.
from ‘The table’ – The Broken Book
The poem Fiona wrote upon the death of her father signalled the way poetry can be a necessary part of our lives as both readers and writers. I know through the extraordinary number of letters and poetry I received during our various lockdowns how vital poems were, whether we were writing or reading.
Each of Fiona’s books, both poetry or prose, has been necessary reading for me, right from the goosebump discovery of The Skinny Louie Book in 1992 to a suite of books responding to the earthquakes in Christchurch. The Broken Book transmuted from a book of walking essays to an earthquake book where the essays were interrupted by poems like quake jolts. It was written because of the Christchurch quake, and it makes the everyday voices away-from-the-cameras visible, the living with damage and daily fear and little blessings palpable. Again poetry becomes necessary.
The PopUp Book of Invasions was prompted by Fiona’s writing residency in Donoughmore, Ireland, the manuscripts her book borrows its title from, and the layering of contemporary invasions along with those in her whakapapa and Aotearoa. She wrote: ‘It was a strange feeling, being there. I wrote to express that’ (from ‘Endnotes’). Again the book becomes necessary reading.
I love the insertion of the unpublished poems in thematic clusters. There are a handful of love poems – so you get to enter a poetry love glade and imbibe the heat and shimmer and connectivity of love. I have no idea when the poems were written, but they feel so vital and fresh. Original. I want to quote from all of them but here is a taster:
They tied the knot.
It was a knot of their
own devising. They
went over and under,
over and under many
times, and it held. So
they could fly, tied
to earth by the knots
around their ties.
So they could always
find their way home.
from ‘Knot-tying for beginners’
Another cluster centres upon travel, upon home and not home, upon hills and mountains, lakes and harbours that anchor you into the guts and grit of the land, and then sets you drifting through place to people and back to the way place shapes and nourishes us. I especially love ‘Our trip to Tākaka’. I want to hear this poem read aloud, to hear the mood ripple through the understated repetitions and motion, the effect travel has upon us, the surprises that become part of our luggage, as we move along, and as we arrive back home.
Some poems carry whiffs of fable – I am picturing the poet blowing on the white page as though it were glass, with a fable presence making its subtle mark. There is always the everyday commonplace experience, relationships or objects in Fiona’s poetry, but there is also the way the poem transcends the realism and makes the ordinary glow.
The fathers swayed beneath us
walking like mountains on
their big legs. We looked
about, seeing the way ahead.
The fathers said hang on!
They held us by the ankles
lest we fall. And sometimes,
they flung us out into empty
air, and we were lost. We
squealed, flailed, knowing
already the pain of solid
ground. But the fathers
caught us on the downward
flight. Gathered us to the
knotting of old jerseys
smelling of fish and vege
gardens and Best Bets and
the whole wide place we’d
glimpsed from their tops.
from ‘The fathers’
Fiona Farrell’s poetry sparks language into dynamic combinations because, as the title of the book suggests, words have mattered to her – from the origins of words, to ancient languages, to codes and punctuation. In The Inhabited Initial endnotes – a collection that celebrates the organic states of words and languages – I discover the origin of the question mark and the punctuation mark. The original exclamation mark was a word that monastic monks inserted to denote moments of joy. I love this! Little glades of joy in the flow of a text. Nowadays the exclamation mark can be a form of shout and exhibitionism. Equally fascinating: Roman scribes used full stops to mark rest bays for breath in the flow of a text. I am thinking poets have a more open relationship with punctuation and how it adds to the reading of poetry.
Nouns, Verbs etc is a reading delight. It offers distinctive travel itineraries that set you drifting in unfamiliar skies, lingering in some poems as though you stall in the familiar rooms of your house, daydreaming between the lines, wondering at the power of nouns and verbs to provoke such intense feelings and connections. Let me raise my poetry glass and toast this glorious book (and loving Otago University Press production). Thank you Fiona, this necessary book is a gift.
FIONA FARRELL has published poetry, fiction, drama and non-fiction. Uniquely among New Zealand writers, she has received awards in all genres. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the New Zealand Book Awards and has been widely anthologised. Her first novel, The Skinny Louie Book, won the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction. Three later novels have been shortlisted for that award, and five have been longlisted for the prestigious International Dublin IMPAC Award. In 2013 she received the Michael King Award to write twinned books prompted by the Christchurch earthquakes and the city’s reconstruction. The non-fiction work, The Villa at the Edge of the Empire, was shortlisted for the 2017 Ockham NZ Book Awards. In 2018 she edited Best New Zealand Poems for the International Institute of Modern Letters. Farrell has received numerous awards, including the Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction and the ONZM for Services to Literature. She made Dunedin home in 2018.
Otago University Press page
Kete Books review by Renee Liang
ANZL review by Stephanie Johnson
Fiona Farrell: interview with Robert Kelly, Standing Room Only, Radio NZ
Readings and interview with Morrin Rout, Bookenz, Plains FM
Poetry Shelf interviews Fiona Farrell
Helen Jacobs, A Habit of Writing The Cuba Press, 2020
Flying
I am being ordinary
and flying on a word
as the mist of the morning
unfolds.
I am being ordinary
in a community
where all are old and ordinary
and I am flying on a word
to meet the sun.
Helen Jacobs
Helen Jacobs (the pen name of Elaine Jakobssen) was born in Pātea, Taranaki in 1929. She has published eight poetry collections, and contributed to numerous journals both in Aotearoa and offshore. During her time as Mayor of Eastbourne, Helen advocated for the local environment and local writers and artists. She worked at the Women’s Electoral Body and was appointed to the Planning Tribunal. Since her time in Christchurch she has been a longtime member of the Canterbury Poets Collective. Aged 91, she lives in a retirement village and is still writing.
Helen’s new collection A Habit of Writing is a delight. Here is a poet writing in old age, absorbing things, often small, but sometimes large, always captivating: an object, walking, a flower uncurling, the hills, the wind, a pot of utensils. Each poem slowly and exquisitely unfolds its subject with rivered fluency, with enviable economy.
These are poems to place on your tongue, one at a time, where they will slowly dissolve leaving vibrant aftertastes that last all day. I read the poems before I went to sleep and I got straight back when I woke up. Perhaps I am drawn to the state-of-being of a woman in her nineties, where relations with life and death shift a tad. Where age is a close companion. Words matter a lot. She reaches out for words. She writes. She celebrates.
Fluency
Fluency traipsed off with the years,
shuffled out imagery.
I look at the pots on the balcony
the plants static, consonants and vowels
straight up.
They do not speak in the wind.
Look to the hills. I do,
as the low cloud ends wisp
across the ridges.
This is a collection of miniature pieces that form a larger mosaic, a wider picture that holds up the poet’s lived-in world. I am acutely drawn into an experience of age that makes me see things a little differently. And that is good. When Helen was ‘young’ and in her sixties she would see the ‘oldies’ out on a bus excursion, and now when she is out on the retirement-village bus she sees the young go by on bicycles. Her steps might be slow. She might slowly examine a geranium leaf as she waters her pots. She might repeat her mother’s ritual and drink a glass of port wine at Christmas. A sonnet would never suit ‘the bowls we play’; free verse is the ticket. It is the ‘small things / as my time grows old’ she observes, that ‘remark the larger world.’
Here I am, a young one on Helen’s time scale, but I am drawn to the slow step, to the measured pace, the prolonged look, to the way a single object or activity can be both rich and comforting in reward. The poem ‘Thinking of lemons’ reminds me how we skate over the surface of things, places, people, experiences. How every person we brush against in the street has a story, a sequence of dreams and mishaps. How every view is on the move, and like a good book, or a good poem, reveals further lights and shadows.
Reading A Habit of Writing offers the utmost joy and comfort. This is a book to savour and to give away. Glorious.
Watercolours
You said, ‘Write me sonnets,’
perhaps –
If I squeeze the day,
wring the hours, spin-dry the minutes,
perhaps the drips will swell dry words.
There will be watercolours,
washes of light.
The Cuba Press author page
ODT review
Rachel McAlpine piece
NZ Poetry Shelf 