Category Archives: NZ poetry

Riddling music of Manhire and Meehan launches Writers on Mondays

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Writers on Mondays 2017, hosted by Victoria University of Wellington’s International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML), brings together a line-up of new and established talent to showcase what’s happening in the world of New Zealand writing and beyond.
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To launch the 2017 programme the IIML is presenting the first free Wellington performance of Tell Me My Name, Bill Manhire’s sequence of thirteen riddle poems set to music by composer Norman Meehan and performed by vocalist Hannah Griffin and Victoria New Zealand School of Music violinist and lecturer Martin Riseley. The concert takes place at 5.30pm, Tuesday 11 July at Meow, 9 Edward Street.

The popular lunchtime series at Te Papa Tongarewa begins on 17 July and the first three weeks feature award-winning authors from America, Australia and New Zealand.

It kicks off with Catherine Chidgey, winner of the $50,000 Acorn Fiction Prize at the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, in conversation about her prize-winning book The Wish Child and her writing career to date.

On 24 July, 2016 Stella Prize winner Charlotte Wood, one of Australia’s “most original and provocative writers” (The Australian) appears with New Zealand novelist and convenor of the IIML Master of Arts fiction stream Emily Perkins.

On 31 July, American poet and essayist Marianne Boruch joins the IIML’s poetry and creative nonfiction convenor Chris Price to explore how her work approaches the big topics of love, death and human knowledge. Marianne Boruch’s restless curiosity ranges across science, music, medicine and art, asking questions such as “why does the self grow smaller as the poem grows enormous?”.

Director of the IIML Professor Damien Wilkins says the combination of new voices and established writers in Writers on Mondays is wonderful.

“This free series is a great way for readers and writers to get together for entertaining, informative, uplifting, even perplexing sessions of talk and performance.”

On 7 August poet and novelist Anna Smaill introduces a quartet of poets with exciting new books. Featuring work from the cutting edge of NZ poetry with Louise Wallace (Bad Things), Hannah Mettner (Fully Clothed and So Forgetful), Maria McMillan (The Ski Flier) and Airini Beautrais (Flow).

In Hopeful Animals, 14 August, Damien Wilkins, Tracey Farr and Pip Adam discuss and read from their recent novels, and consider how fiction continues to provide a vital lens on contemporary life.

Writers on Mondays will acknowledge National Poetry Day with the annual Best New Zealand Poems reading on 21 August. Best New Zealand Poems 2016 editor and Arts Foundation Laureate Jenny Bornholdt introduces this lively session featuring 13 poets at the top of their game.

On 28 August The Fuse Box gathers some of our best writers to shine a light on the creative process. Playwright Gary Henderson, novelists Rajorshi Chakraborti and Elizabeth Knox, and poet James Brown join editors Chris Price and Emily Perkins to take a look at the wiring of creative writers and celebrate the launch of this collection of essays on creativity from Victoria University Press.

Acclaimed playwright Victor Rodger, the Victoria University/Creative New Zealand Writer in Residence for 2017, has assembled a panel of writers to explore how the work of others can inspire and challenge. Mitch Tawhi Thomas, Moana Ete, Jamie McCaskill and Faith Wilson discuss the dynamics of creative communities on 4 September.

The final month of events showcases work from the current cohort of writers in the Masters in Creative Writing Programme at the IIML. It begins with fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction writers in The Next Page, 11 and 18 September, then moves to Circa Theatre for Short Sharp Script, 25 September and 2 October, where actors perform dynamic new work by participants in the Master of Arts scriptwriting workshop.

The Writers on Mondays series runs from 17 July to 2 October, 12.15–1.15pm, Te Marae, Level 4, Te Papa Tongarewa, with the exception of the opening concert at Meow and the two Short Sharp Script events at Circa Theatre. Admission is free and all are welcome.

The full 2017 Writers on Mondays programme is can be viewed and downloaded from the IIML’s website.

Writers on Mondays is presented by Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters with the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, and additional support from Circa Theatre and National Poetry Day.

For more information contact Pip Adam on pip.adam@vuw.ac.nz or modernletters@vuw.ac.nz.

 

 

 

Elizabeth Smither’s Auckland launch

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Auckland University Press and The Women’s Bookshop
warmly invite you to the launch of Night Horse

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Please join us in celebrating the launch of Elizabeth Smither’s new poetry collection, Night Horse.

6.00 pm, Tuesday 20 June 2017
The Women’s Bookshop
105 Ponsonby Road
Auckland

 

Please RSVP by 18 June.
Email books@womensbookshop.co.nz or phone (09) 3764399

Auckland University Press

Johanna Emeney’s Family History: This book is a skin-shaking eye-pricking heart-skipping glorious read

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FAMILY-HISTORY-FRONT

Johanna Emeney, Family History, Mākaro Press, 2017

 

My darling, this afternoon, I found three white parachutes

from a dandelion on my shoulder, seeds stuck in,

wings waiting – little angels of your imprint, your leaving.

 

from ‘Dandelion’

 

What you bring to a book affects the way you read it – as though already established trenches or crevices are more receptive, more alert to shared experiences. Johanna’s new poetry collection is a family history but the mother is placed centre stage; we are brought close to her breast cancer and shocked by her premature and unexpected death. The collection begins with gaps in the family photograph album and ends with blurry photos; it is as though these poems are held up to the gap, where light and dark dazzles and where edges blur. Early on a poem stalls me, as I too watch the ducklings ‘that cats dare not disturb.’  The snapshot tingles because I have never thought of ducklings this way, and it is as though I am seeing the world as something that must not be corrupted or thrown off course. The pathos lies in the way the poet is thrown off kilter; her family not ‘off limits.’

 

Even if one were to straggle,

to drop off the end

like a misplaced preposition,

lost for a moment in the long grass,

no cat would mess with it

because today belongs

to the ducklings

and all the other

spring things

that on some mornings

and some afternoons

are just plain off limits.

 

from ‘Ducklings’

 

You never know how you will react when faced with life-threatening illness, or when someone close to you is; you never know which details will stand out to elbow and nudge and stick. Johanna’s book traverses the sweet and the sour, the coordinates of illness, the pain, the anger and the way things can be luminous, sharp, elusive, blunted.  ‘Undertaking’ is a sestina, the perfect form to catch the undulations of grief that repeat and slap an attack of feeling – a little like the book does as a whole.

Things are palpable: gateways to grief, memories, a relationship presence, a relationship absence. ‘Ham bag’ was a humorous code for handbag between mother and daughter; when the poet (I am boldly granting the first-person pronoun autobiographical status) catches sight of a calico bag, she misses her mother again:

 

Ready to go? Got your hambag, darling?

And I say:

Yes, Mum, all the better to put my ham in,

and we’re beside ourselves again.

 

from ‘Ham bag’

 

I am sitting in a cafe at AWF17, a table of writers next to me, conversations adrift because I am adrift on the currents of this book. The writing stitches me and I feel the needle prick and sew, prick and sew, as I read. There is a fluency of writing, a lightness of line as the shadows swell and the hurt pulses. It is not the first time writing poetry stands as a keepsake, for the sake of mother, family, friends and self. For the sake of a reader who keeps reading the same lines over.

The final poem, ‘Glass bowl with pink swirls,’ is so simple yet so sharp, I think I am going to cry, despite the writers I know laughing and conversing at the next table. This is what writing can do. It can pull you down to the very tiny gestures that mark a day, that mark a life so that everything shifts a little. You can feel those internal trenches and crevices tremble. The glass bowl holds the mother’s hand, a last image, a last desire, as she feels the warm soap suds. The glass bowl, a keepsake; and the poem.

 

 

To perceive you seeing nothing and everything

to watch the loop of your hand in its benediction

or to sit at your feet with my hot cheek tilted

to meet the roll and stroke of soft fingers,

was to be most steady and most moved

by your tender infinitive. That keepsake.

 

from ‘Glass bowl with pink swirls’

 

This book is a breathtaking startling soothing toppling skin-shaking eye-pricking heart-skipping glorious read.

 

Johanna Emeney lives in Auckland where she tutors at Massey University and co-facilitates the Michael King Young Writers Programme. She has been placed third and been commended in the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine and shortlisted for the International Montreal Poetry Prize. Her debut collection was entitled, Apple & Tree (2011).

Mākaro Press  page

The collection is part of the 2017 HoopLa Series that also includes Jeffrey Paparoa Holman’s Dylan Junkie and Elizabeth Morton’s Wolf.

 

 

 

 

Chocolate & Poetry: an invitation

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POETRY | CHOCOLATE

EKOR BOOKSHOP

17 College Street, Te Aro, Wellington

6PM | 19 JUNE | TICKETS $30

details here

The taste of poetry, the sound of chocolate and the sense of books. We’ve matched medieval humours with contemporary New Zealand poets and some of the best chocolate you’ll find, ever.

Join us at Ekor Bookshop for a multi-sensual, medieval-medicine-inspired poetry reading and chocolate tasting.

Featuring: Nick Ascroft, Hannah Mettner, Louise Wallace, and Freya Daly Sadgrove.

Chocolate curated and introduced by Luke Owen Smith (The Chocolate Bar).

Chocolate (and poetry) included in ticket price.

Stephen Burt’s Letter from NZ celebrates local poetry

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Letter from New Zealand

by Stephen Burt
complete piece here at PN Review May-June, 2017
‘To live in Christchurch at the end of 2016 is to encounter, daily and seemingly everywhere, construction: cranes, scaffolds, burly workers in lemon-fluorescent vests, bright orange cones, PVC pipes jutting up from the ground, all of it part of the ongoing, city-wide multi-year recovery after the earthquakes of 2010-11. The fences and pits are a great inconvenience, a melancholy sight for those who grew up in what was (I’m told) the most sedate and stable of NZ cities. For me, on the other hand, the construction is mostly inspiration: I see a city that’s putting itself back together, a nation that has recognised (and chosen to pay for) a shared public good, while my own home country, the United States, is tearing itself apart.’

Paekākāriki Launch: The Ski Flier by Maria McMillan

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You are warmly invited to the launch of

The Ski Flier
by Maria McMillan

4–6pm on Saturday 17 June
at St Peter’s Hall, Beach Road
Paekākāriki

All welcome.
About The Ski Flier

Vimeo page