Category Archives: NZ poetry

Poetry Shelf Lounge: Elizabeth Morton launches This is your real name

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Elizabeth Morton This is your real name (Otago University Press, 2020)

 

Elizabeth Morton’s launch scraped in by the skin of its teeth recently, but I thought it would be lovely to do an online version and get Poetry Shelf Lounge rolling. You can read and listen for morning tea with a short black, afternoon tea with your favourite tea, or a glass of wine or beer this evening.

At the bottom of the post, I have put a selection of good bookshops where you can buy or order the book online (this is a list in progress, please help me fill the gaps).

 

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Tracey Slaughter launched the book.

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Split the pages of Elizabeth Morton’s This is your real name anywhere & you are in the pulsing presence of questions that cut to the very heart of poetry: How much, if anything, can language actually touch? How much of our experience can we ever name? How much can poetry reach past the stars smashed into the emergency-glass of daily-living & offer the kind of voice that leaves more than a bloody trace, that makes a vital difference. ‘Poetry wallows between question marks/police? fire? ambulance?’ says a piece that opens with telephone lines exploding in a gaze pushed to the edge – how much can language ever hope to halt pain, to offer connection, to help in such a crisis? ‘Deep breaths,/say the operator’ within that poem, but ‘inside the communications centre/the desks are inconsolable.’

‘There is no touching the black heat at the centre of things’ another early poem entitled ‘Inside-out’ declares – and yet travel through the bolted internal doors and bleak domestic corridors, the blighted global landscapes and glinting dystopias of Elizabeth’s collection & you know you’re in the hands of a poet who, like Plath or Sexton before her, has all the dazzling surreal command of language to reach to the core of that black heat, to make it speak.

‘Inside-out’ concludes with a widespread vision of ‘a wreckage of stars’ – but the volume goes on in piece after luminous piece to chronicle the work of salvage, of a self bent on using every particle of language to dig through the ruins, rewire the evidence, sustain the spark, relight every shard.

These are poems that speak again and again from both the inside and the outside, from both the blasted solar plexus of private traumas and the slow-mo devastations of the wider planet – over and over the poems flicker from hallways tremoring with personal pain to the ‘casual terrorism’ of history, taking an ‘aerial photograph’ of a suffering earth with the same kind of acute irradiated poetic lens that it turns on the lone & isolated heart. Whether it’s the stranding of a single life caught in the driftnets of personal desolation, or the mass beaching of a populace oblivious to the global damage they’ve done, Elizabeth’s language zeroes in on the waste & makes us see the interconnections: whether it’s steering the reader through burning towerblocks or coldblooded wards, past disinterested drone strikes or through achingly-handled small-scale solo losses, the breathtaking scope of poetic skill with which she charts her urgent scenes makes the reader feel every detail, feel the meds and the headlines catch in our throats, feel the doors locked and the altitude dropping, feel the kiss blown against the quarantine window & the distant ‘circle[s] of blood’ left on political screens.

These are poems that detonate and sing, that ring in the ear and sting in the political consciousness, and linger in the bloodstream long after they’ve stained your eye. They’ll also make you outright belly laugh: ‘I’d marry Finland. I’d blow Nicaragua. I’d shag Australia if she wore a paper bag’ states a slapstick look at politics that plays wicked & sacrilegious footsie with stereotypes. With the same comedic weaponry ‘How I hate Pokemon but I can show restraint and just talk about my adolescence’ gives a gore-soaked rundown of methods to slaughter innocent anime, and ‘In the next life’ tracks Wile E. Coyote speeding to collide with another booby-trapped piano or hurtling freight train. But of course, under the cartoon bloodsport there’s another violence being expressed: ‘I’m from the wrong cartoon she says…There is no/acid in my stomach to digest the sadness’; ‘I spent my teens/hyperventilating in elevators…yanking at emergency cords’ – that’s what lurks beneath the funny foreground of these onscreen critters and their messy calamities.

‘This is not a joke’ warns another poem, parading a cast of backwoods bar-leaners and big boned nobodies, its humour always ready to brim with ‘a metaphor so sad it makes grown men sob and jerk off into the same handkerchief.’ The counterstrike to comedy is always coming, the punchlines always poised ready to gut you. We might snicker when we’re introduced to a blowsy homespun oblivious America, but when she ‘order[s] Big Mac’s and Napalm’, lazily erases continents & watches bodycounts rise from her consumerist couch, the smile is wiped off our faces. And when the pronouns shift in this poem to fold us into complicity, as they do to such clever & ethical effect throughout the collection as a whole, we too are left standing with supermarket bags and shotguns/baffled and alone.’ That moment of aloneness – whether it’s the self turning figure-eights of final need or the last polar bear ‘pacing his cell, as the credits go down’ – is the place which the poems often return us to: ‘I wonder whether you know/you are melting’ this poetry asks with chilling economy. Over and over we find trapped ourselves in that phone booth, as in the masterpiece ‘Aubade’, where the glass is ‘skull-cracked’ and the world seems only to have ‘hold music’ to offer us. But even in this moment of exigency, with our ‘hearts in []our horror mouth’ & all the lines crossed, language is held up as ‘the loneliest miracle’: because we still use it to ‘pray, into the receiver’ hoping for a sign on the other end, some voice to come back from the empty page. ‘Writing is a political act’ the poem insists, even from this place. Even if all it can sometimes do is trace ‘the face of the enemy,’ or chalk round the bodies of selves and lovers we’ve lost; even if all it can sometimes do is echo the bleak dialtone inside our chests, its utterance ‘sets you apart’ the voice of ‘Aubade’ repeats to the sufferer.

Elizabeth had already set herself apart as a poet of breathtaking force, edge, intensity and empathy – This is your real name is another stunning, irrefutable, crucial book, a fearless personal testimony and a blistering political act. It goes to the places we need poetry to go to, places that only a language loaded with heart and shimmering with pressures can name. It smashes the glass.

Tracey Slaughter

 

Listen to Elizabeth read ‘Tropes’:

 

 

 

Stranding

 

We were never alone, pushing up loam on a blackened beach.

We kicked our tails like we were trying to escape
the outline of ourselves. We came ashore, two by two
with our cutlasses and compasses, with our baleen smiles

and bad attitudes, with our dead-end marriages and dreams that choked

in drift nets. We were never lost. We knew the shoreline better
than we knew our own purposes. We were a quarter into lives
that stood us up from the water-break, that left us gasping

by the river mouth, blistering under wet sacking,
our eyeballs fierce with the evening sun.
We wanted the attention. We wanted to arrange ourselves

upside down and scattered like something infinite. Like stars.

We follow each other to the end of the beach
and sing something that reminds us of bone
and the million land-flowers our mothers spoke of,
and the kamikaze heritage, our fathers and their fathers,

who recognised a vague phosphorescence
and shadowed it into the salt marshes, dreaming of air.

 

Elizabeth Morton

 

ELIZABETH MORTON grew up in suburban Auckland. Her first poetry collection, Wolf, was published by Mākaro Press in 2017. She has placed, been shortlisted and highly commended for various prizes, including the 2015 Kathleen Grattan Award, and her poetry and prose have been published in New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States, Ireland, Australia, Canada and online. She has completed an MLitt in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow.

Otago University Press author page

 

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Let’s support our books and authors. Most importantly you can order this book online or visit your local bookshop. Here are a few choices (new books):

Whangārei Piggery Books  Porcine Gallery

Auckland  The Women’s Bookshop,  Time Out Bookstore,  Unity Books, The Book Lover(Milford), Dear Reader

Matakana Matakana Village Books

Hamilton Books for Kids  Poppies Bookshop

Tauranga Books a Plenty

Rotorua McCleods

Palmerston North  Bruce McKenzie Bookseller

Whanganui Paiges Gallery

Gisborne Muirs Bookshop

Napier and Havelock North Wardini Books

New Plymouth Poppies

Featherston Loco Coffee and Books, For the Love of Books

Carterton Almos Books

Masterton Hedkeys Books

Martinborough Martinborough Bookshop

Wellington Marsden Books  Unity Books, Vic Books

Petone   Schrödinger’s Books

Nelson Volume    Page & Blackmore

Christchurch Scorpio Books      University Bookshop

Queenstown BOUND Books & Records

Manapouri The Wee Bookshop (no website?)

Twizel The Twizel Bookshop

Dunedin University Bookshop

 

Poetry Shelf new books: Jeffrey Paparoa Holman celebrates Michael Steven’s The Lifers

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7
Halide compounds hum inside the floodlights

pouring down lumens on the prison yard

across the service lane. Sleep is futile.

Antarctic breezes rattle loops of barbed wire.

Pairs of men in dark coats milled from rough wool

make laps of the yard’s fenced interior.

I lean out the window, into the brumal air

of tonight’s vision. The lifers carry on.

They walk their fates in thick woollen coats,

addressing each other inaudibly—

confessing and sanctifying their stories

with hand gestures, glowing tips of cigarettes.

You sleep. It is too late to show you them.

Their cold cells are a museum, open at 9 a.m.

 

Michael Steven

This is poem 7 from a sequence called ‘Leviathan’ in The Lifers (Otago University press, 2020).

 

 

 

 

Jeffrey reads ‘7’

 

 

 

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman:

There is a whakapapa of prison poetry that links Michael Steven’s poem on men behind bars in The Lifers, his recent second volume from Otago University Press. The poems in this book have gritty echoes that François Villon would hear and feel; a deep well of humanity also that Oscar Wilde would appreciate, from his cell in Reading Gaol. Whether we are watching users scoring, thieves preparing a raid, a friend mourning the suicide of a kindred lost soul, there opens up before us a vision of brokenness elegised with compassion through an unsparing binocular lens. The poem considered here – Sonnet 7 from a series, Leviathan – captures precisely the cold realities of those sentenced to life for the most serious of crimes. The effect is so visual, it returned to me a memory of Van Gogh’s ‘Prisoners Exercising’, painted in 1890 while he was in the asylum at Saint-Rémy, suffering deep depression. Most Fridays, with two other poets, Bernadette Hall and Jeni Curtis, we take part in a reading group at Christchurch Mens Prison; I recently took copies of this poem and shared it. The silence that greeted its reading attested the truth Michael Steven has captured, from the inside. This poem – and the rest of his fine and developing oeuvre –  invite your close attention.

 

 

 

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman is a Christchurch poet and non-fiction writer. His most recent poetry collection, Blood Ties: selected poems, 1963-2016 was published by Canterbury University Press in 2017. A memoir, Now When It Rains came out from Steele Roberts in 2018. He is currently working on a book chapter for a collection of studies on early 20th century ethnographers. He makes his living as a stay-at-home puppy wrangler for Hari, an eight-month old Jack Russell-Fox Terrier cross. Hari ensures that very little writing happens, but Victoria Park is explored and mapped daily.

 

Michael Steven is the author of the acclaimed Walking to Jutland Street (Otago University Press, 2018). He was recipient of the 2018 Todd New Writer’s Bursary, and his poems were shortlisted for the 2019 Sarah Broom Poetry Prize. He lives and writes in West Auckland. The Lifers (Otago University Press) was recently launched at Timeout Bookshop.

Otago University Press author page

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf noticeboard: I am opening Poetry Shelf Lounge for online NZ book launches

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working from home

 

 

Kia ora readers, writers, publishers and booksellers

 

With book launches already being cancelled, and uncertain months ahead as we work hard to keep our communities well, I am going to open Poetry Shelf Lounge to host online launches of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. I could do children’s books on child-friendly Poetry Box.

I will post Poetry Shelf launches around 5 to 6 pm (wine and nibbles optional!)

I can post launch features with audio and/or texts of a launch speech, an author reading and thank-you speech. Photos. Videos. Whatever works for you and that I can do.

I like the idea of bridging communities and having the launches posted in more than one place if that works.

I am already at capacity with the time I devote to my blog and writing deadlines so this is in your hands. I don’t have time to write material or chase people. And I may have to limit myself to one or two a week! I do have time to assemble posts and spread the word.

Publishers and publicists feel free to get in touch with me – and gather the material for a Poetry Shelf Lounge launch.

 

 

My blog reaches more people than a book launch does but I can link to other significant sites.

This is a time to strengthen our book communities and invent new ways to celebrate our books without putting people at risk.

If you have ideas on how to help or make this idea even better let me know. Goodness knows if it will work but I want to give it a shot! Other ideas are simmering:

 

* host NZ poetry readings online if they are going to be cancelled (is the Pasifika reading in Te Atatu Library to be cancelled or the first Lounge reading?)

* host NZ book discussion podcasts

* host author interviews video or audio

* any other suggestions?

 

 

Maybe there is a better way and place to do this – but this a grassroots project so let’s see what we can do to boost books.

 

Ngā mihi

Paula Green

 

Poetry Shelf audio spot: Lynn Davidson reads ‘Even though it’s not the beginning’

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Lynn Davidson reads ‘Even though it’s not the beginning’ from Islander (2109, Victoria University Press)

 

 

 

Lynn Davidson is the author of five collections of poetry and a novel, Ghost Net, along with essays and short stories. She grew up in Kāpiti, Wellington and currently lives in Edinburgh.

 

My review of Islander

Victoria University Press author page

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf archives: Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connor celebrates Olivia Macassey’s ‘Outhwaite Park’

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Outhwaite Park         

 

 

and three cheers for the old neighbourhood

clawing its way through the dirt and the

new

houses that squat where the vacant lots reflected us

 

and three shadows

for the people we used to be, for

rice and dope and chilli olives, three shadows

for your silhouette, with its cigarette, for the sound

of a swing at midnight

the sound of a swing when the swinger is crying

 

three sighs for the stubborn authenticity of a face

harsh with streetlights

the horrors of a clarinet

devastating revelations

and for the lies, for the unmoved trees

which made it all seem underwater

for the melancholy see-saws and the warm air, for her dress

in the crooked oblong of doorway, her crooked dress

in the yellow of the door

the stumbling between houses, clutching salads and lovers

the bodies passed out on our floors

 

three tears

for the pale orange poppies

that bloom where you kissed me

bloom where you kissed me

 

and three tears

for the people we used to fuck

for backbones scraped on the washing machine

for the strangers who slept outside your bedroom door

and the schoolgirls and drag queens playing table tennis

and the cockroaches breeding in the microwave;

 

and the four am trains and six am buses,

mint icecreams, roofs of carparks, moulting hedgehogs

lit by the phonebox, the grass overrun by wirewoves

and rotting cardboard, my summer clothes, my love —

 

and tunnels we crept through at dawn, birds which sang blind in the dark

the refrigerator with its empty hum, before we borrowed credibility,

we had the insane faces of barbie dolls, the overpainted walls

and exploding demolition fires

we had stones in our shoes and delinquents in our ceilings

catching our prayers before they got to the sky,

and that bridge most of us

never jumped from, we were saving it for a rainy day,

 

yeah three tears for the old neighbourhood

clawing its way through the dirt

and the park

that I see and can never return to

that stage on which all our memories were undone,

 

and I am again in the wood chips at midnight

with my neck pressed against the silence of your mouth

and I am again on the swing at dawn

watching the policeman make his way across the grass

 

Olivia Macassey

appeared in New New Zealand Poets in Performance, ed. Jack Ross and Jan Kemp (Auckland: AUP, 2008)

 

 

Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connor:

I first heard this poem in Tracey Slaughter’s creative writing class, and I still remember the shiver down my spine. There were those neighbourhoods like mine right there in the lecture hall and this voice that talked a bit like how I talked: yeah. It was one of those poems that you read at the exact right moment, and it was the first that I printed out and carried with me.
It’s beautiful and sort of pining, but all the same gritted and stubborn. It’s got this sort of nostalgia, but with claws. The parties, but also the grubby silences after them, the confetti and the roaches and the cardboard rotting lonely in the corner. The impossibility of going back, but also the impossibility of wholly forgetting: ‘The park that I see and can never return to’. It was the first time I remember seeing repetition in a poem and really loving it. The first poem I read out loud again and again. That rhythm, that imagery, those final lines. The white space after them. Those echoes in the half-dark. I come back to this poem often.

 

 

Olivia Macassey‘s work has appeared in Takahē, Rabbit, Poetry New Zealand, Otoliths, Ngā Kupu Waikato, Landfall and elsewhere. Her books are The Burnt Hotel and Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connor was awarded the 2018 Charles Brasch Young Writers’ Essay Competition, and the 2017 Monash Prize for Emerging Writers. Her poem ‘Instructions’ was named by The Spinoff as the best poem of 2018, and she took up The Spinoff Review of Books Writer-in-Residence Award at the start of 2019. Her work has appeared in Starling, Mayhem, Brief, Poetry New Zealand, Landfall, Turbine, Mimicry, Min-a-rets, Sweet Mammalian, Sport and Verge. She writes thanks to the tireless support of some of the best people on this great watery rock.

Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Nina Mingya Powles in conversation with Jessie Mullingan @RNZ

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This was a great conversation! Listen here.

 

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Poetry Shelf Live and the Wellington Writers Programme

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‘We are making our grandchildren’s world with our words. We

perceive a world in which everyone sits at the table together, with enough for everyone.

We will make this country great again.’

 

Joy Harjo from ‘Advice for Countries, Advanced, Developing and falling’ in An American Sunrise (2019)

 

 

 

A weekend in Wellington is always a treat – especially when there are writers and readers events on. I had a blue-sky, social-charging time and I loved it. Laurie Anderson on the Friday night delivered an improvised platter of musical quotations with a handful of musicians that together created a wow blast of sound and exquisite individual turns on percussion, strings, keyboards. Ah transcendental. Just wonderful. Read Simon Sweetman‘s thoughts on the night – he describes it far better than I can.

One bowl of muesli and fruit, one short black and I was all set for a Saturday of listening to other authors. First up Coming to our Senses with Long Litt Woon (The Way through the Woods) and Laurence Fearnley (Scented). Laurence is on my must-read stack by my reading sofa. Her novel engages with the landscape by way of scent, sparked perhaps by by her long interest in the scent of the outdoors. I loved this from her: ‘Writing about the South Island is a political act – I’m digging my heels in and see myself as a regionalist writer’. I also loved this: ‘I’m not a plot-driven novelist. I tend to like delving into sentences. I like dense descriptions. I imagined the book as dark brown.’

Next went to a warm, thoughtful, insightful conversation: Kiran Dass and Jokha Alharthi (Celestial Bodies). Fabulous!

And of course my poetry highlight: Selina Tusila Marsh in conversation with USA Poet Laureate Joy Harjo. I had been reading Joy in preparation for my Poetry Live session and utterly loved her writing. This is how I introduced her on Sunday:

Joy Harjo is a performer, writer (and sax player!) of the Muscogee Creek Nation. She’s the current US Poet Laureate with many awards and honours and has published nine poetry collections, a memoir, a play, produced music albums. She lives in Tulsa Oklahoma where she is a Tulsa Artist Fellow. Reading Joy’s poems, words are like a blood pulse as they question and move and remember – in place out of place in time out of time. I have just read Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings and An American Sunrise. This was what I was thinking when we have to endure the multiple offensiveness of Trump in our faces even at the bottom of the world to pick up Joy’s poetry is a balm that takes you behind and beyond and above and below into a different USA and it is heartbreaking and wounding and the poems might be like rooms where you mourn but each collection is an opportunity for breathtaking body anchoring travel that allows you to see and feel afresh. Joy’s poetry is so very necessary, If you read one poem this weekended read ‘How to Write a Poem in a Time of War’ from An American Sunrise.

But if you went on Saturday night you got to hear Joy read a good sized selection of poems, including the poem I mention above! Joy’s response to her appointment as the first Native American Poet Laureate in USA: ‘a profound announcement for indigenous people as we’ve been so disappeared. I want to be seen as human beings and this position does that. Human beings write poetry. Even if it’s oral, it’s literature.’

So many things to hold close that Joy offered: ‘No peace in the world until all our stories have a place, until we all have a place of respect.’

She suggested we could think of poems as ‘little houses, little bird houses for time grief joy heartbreak anything history what we cannot hold. Go to poetry for times of transformation, to celebrate and acknowledge birth, to acknowledge death. We need poetry.’

Joy: Indigenous poets are often influenced by oral traditions – a reading voice singing voice flute voice more holistic.

Joy: You start with the breath. Breath is essentially spirit.

Joy: You learn about asking, asking for help.

Joy: Probably the biggest part is to listen. You have to be patient.

Joy: The lessons get more intense.

Joy: If you are going to listen to a stone, what range is that?

 

My energy pot was on empty so was in bed by 8 pm, and so very sadly missed Chris Tse’s The Joy Of Queer Lit Salon. From all accounts it was a breathtaking event that the audience want repeated.

 

Sunday and I hosted Paula Green’s Poetry Shelf Live. Lynn Jenner was unwell (I was so looking forward to hearing her read as her inventive and moving Peat is so good). My dear friend Tusiata Avia was in town coincidentally so she stepped in and read instead along with Karlo Mila, Simon Kaho, Gregory Kan, Jane Arthur, Tayi Tibble and Joy Harjo.

I love the poetry of my invited guests and got to sit back and absorb. I laughed and cried and felt the power of poetry to move in multiple directions: soft and loud, fierce and contemplative. Ah if a poem is like a little house as Joy says, it is a house with windows and doors wide open, and we are able to move through and reside there as heart, mind and lungs connect.

A friend of Hinemoana Baker’s from Berlin came to me at the end crying and speaking through tears and heaving breath about how moved she was by the session. I got what she was saying because I felt the same way. I guess for all kinds of reasons we are feeling fragile at the moment – and poetry can be so vital. After four years of Wild Honey reading, writing, conversing and listening I have decided the connective tissue of poetry is love aroha. I felt and said that, ‘We in this room are linked by poetry, by a love of it, and that matters enormously’. I felt that at this session.

 

So thank you Wellington – for all the book fans who supported the events. For the poets who read with me.

I also want to thank Claire Maybe and her festival team. Claire has such a passion for books and such a wide embrace, you just feel the love of books, stories, poetry, ideas, feelings. Yes I would have LOVED to hear Elizabeth Knox, Witi Ihimaera, Lawrence Patchett and Kate Tempest (for starters) on at other weekends but this was a highlight of my year and I am so grateful.

 

‘Come on Poetry,’ I sigh, my breath

whitening the dark. ‘The moon is sick of you.’

We walk the white path made of seashells

back to the orange light of the house.

‘Wait,’ I say at the sliding door. ‘Wait.’

 

Hinemoana Baker from ‘manifesto’ in waha / mouth (2014)

 

 

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Poetry Shelf Monday poem: Johanna Aitchison’s ‘ANNA IS DRIVING HER WHITE CAR & HER CAR IS CRYING’

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ANNA IS DRIVING HER WHITE CAR & HER CAR IS CRYING

 

Home

 

Anna’s white car refuses to leave the driveway without shouting goodbye

to all of the titoki,

the camellias,

the silverbeet,

the letterbox,

the veranda,

the trampoline.

 

Desert

 

“Those flowers remind me of the blues,” says the white car,

“the sky is bruise bruise bruise,

the tussock is hair follicles of a blond boy.”

 

“What’s that couch doing on the roadside?” says Anna.

A battered brown leather three-seater.

Anna would wave out if there were people on the couch,

she would shout out “hey!” as she was driving past,

but there are no people on the couch,

no people with legs spaghettied,

no people with light-washed faces,

no people laughing at the television

or crunching Snax & kicking crumbs behind the cushions.

 

Motel

 

At the reception Anna pays two hundred & sixty dollars for the unit for two nights.

The motel room says, “Do you like my picture?”

“I like it that you’re clean,” says Anna, “I like it that the bed looks new,

there’s Sky TV, a bath, a toaster,

& the owner has given me a little bottle of milk.”

 

Anna sits down on the bed & looks at the acrylic painting:

“I like it that your picture is a beach scene,

but you’re beside a lake.

A beach scene is more impersonal than a lake scene,

because it’s not connected to the place we’re in;

it’s neither beautiful nor repulsive,

which is the perfect way for a motel picture to be.”

 

“But do you like me?” says the motel room.

“I like it that you represent an idea,” says Anna,

“you’re more an idea of a motel than an actual motel.

You’re sufficiently general not to make

any claims on me; I like that.

I like you for what you don’t remind me of,

rather than what you do remind me of,

but I don’t want to get too personal with you.”

 

The motel room does not tell Anna to “turn the fucking TV on”,

because it wants to delay the moment.

 

Pool

 

When Anna was a child she thought a monster lived in the lake

& when she & her sister splashed in the motel pool at night,

she imagined the monster rising & seizing her from the back

dark corner. These were the kinds of things that terrified her.

The motel, however, wouldn’t talk about bland things

to distract her like it does when she’s an adult,

instead it told her to look up from her Weetbix

at snakes corkscrewing around the curtain rails

& that the carpet would display its incisors,

chomp down on her toes & hold her there.

 

Lake

 

After Anna finishes talking to the motel room, she walks to the lake & along the path by the lakefront.

 

There are DANGER stones & stickmen falling off signs at the cliff lip.

Anna notices someone has scraped off some letters:

DANG,           ANGE             —                    DANCE!

 

The red bicycles chained to the fence beside the lake make Anna so sad.

She doesn’t know if it’s the paint

or the child’s bike lying on its chain

or the horror of discovering, when she steps closer,

the missing pedals, seats, handlebars,

which look samesame from far away, but become uncomfortably individual

as she zooms in.

 

Anna finds a spot by the lake edge to eat her kebab.

She concludes she will never find the perfect spot,

but the spot she finds is good enough,

against the trunk of a pohutukawa,

she sits & bites through her food.

As Anna eats the chicken, the beef, the hummus, the yoghurt, the lettuce, the chili sauce,

she watches a couple drop their clothes, watches the man run-hop that run-hop you do when the water’s cool. The woman’s wearing a black bikini, & after she stops shrieking, the man pulls her in close for warmth.

Anna takes a photo & posts it to Instagram. If you look carefully, you can spot the entwined couple carved into the cold water. Anna calls her husband. “Did you hear about Christchurch?” he asks.

 

Johanna Aitchison

 

 

Johanna Aitchison is a PhD candidate at Massey University, examining how contemporary innovative poets create cohesion in experimental verse. She was the 2019 Mark Strand Scholar at Sewanee Writers’ Conference in Tennessee, and her poetry has appeared, most recently, in Best Small Fictions 2019 and Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2020.

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf Friday talk spot: On being reviewed by Emer Lyons

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Whenever someone reviews a book, and they have spent time reading, contemplating and questioning, I am happy. Reviews connect me with books I might want to read. Poet Emer Lyons recently reviewed my mammoth, maze-like book Wild Honey: Reading NZ Women’s Poetry (MUP, 2019) for Landfall Online.

I loved Emer’s review; it confirmed there is no single way to write one. Reacting to a book that celebrates 201 poets, Emer highlights those she made strong connections with (Heather McPherson, Hinemoana Baker, Tusiata Avia, Rhian Gallagher). I love that. Part of my aim was to write a book that sparked poetry interests in the reader – to encourage them to track down particular poets and find out more. Her review invites you into the experience of a particular reader, a little like a reading diary. Yes, give me a personal review over a detached, jargon-driven piece any day. Emer makes it clear that a personal approach can also be a critical approach (she is currently doing a PhD at Otago University). Both the personal and the critical can feed off thought and feeling.

The second thing I loved about Emer’s review is that it got me musing. I said in Wild Honey I would like to see a non-Pākehā woman write a book about Māori and/or Pasifika women poets. This is not apologetic nor guilt ridden but me believing I am not the best person for the job. I can’t, for example, wait to see Selina Tusitala Marsh’s volume on Pasifika women poets. Yet it was essential that my poetry house welcomed widely: across cultures, time and place, and writing preferences. I entered the poetry of others, regardless of difference, and listened. Slowly, slowly, slowly. I can never take my reading travels for granted. I hate the idea of being an authority.

Emer rightly suggested I didn’t make similar points about lesbian poetry. I didn’t state, for example, that I would like to see a not-heterosexual woman write a volume that presented lesbian poetry in new and significant lights – because I wasn’t the best person for the job. And I did not write about lesbian poetry (or sexuality or gender) as a particular focus. It is easy to claim this as one of the many things I did not do in the book but Emer’s argument really got me thinking and I loved that. This is what the very best reviews can do.

I felt invigorated by this review and for that I am grateful.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf audio poem: Bill Nelson reads ‘Red shift / blue shift’

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Bill Nelson reads ‘Red shift / blue shift’.

 

 

 

I wrote this poem after reading a popular science book about the fringes of scientific knowledge. One of those fringes is the size and trajectory of the universe. In the early 20th Century, scientists measured the way light shifts red, or blue, from distant stars. And with this, they discovered that the universe we can see is expanding, that it is big, damn big, and that it probably started with something like the Big Bang. They also discovered that because of the speed of light, we can never know beyond what we can see, and that the universe is ultimately unknowable. All really interesting stuff, but mainly I just liked how the colours were like codes for something else, codes that we just had to observe to unlock their meaning.

Bill Nelson

 

 

Bill Nelson has just returned to Wellington from Scotland and France, where he was on the run from authority. His first book of poetry, Memorandum of Understanding, was published by VUP. He is a co-editor at Up Country: A Journal for the NZ Outdoors and his work has appeared in journals, dance performances and on billboards. You can find more about him here.

 

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