who own the dogs, the horses, the land where the fox
lived its short life. You might be interested to know
that in the UK it is no longer legal to let the dogs
tear the fox to shreds. It must be killed humanely
whereby the hunters dismount, walk towards the fox
in their high brown boots and shoot it in the head.
Meanwhile hunt saboteurs lay citronella to put the dogs
off the scent, and wires to trip the horses (poor horses).
You may end up wanting to tripwire the property
market because you hate the property market.
2.
You end up at an auction where young people bid
astronomical amounts for dumps in outer suburbs
which they could make into a home with a bit of work.
But the investor in the corner walks over in their boots
and bids and bids until they own all the houses. They
can’t live in all the houses, they don’t need all the houses
but they want them, and they can have them because
the policy-makers say that they can. They say, one day
we’ll build more houses, we’ll limit investing, and also
young people like flatting, they like houses the size of
a cupboard. Not us, but then, we’ve always had a house
we’ve always had a house with two bathrooms, a garden
and a garage in a nice street. Oh, and we have another
house, in the country, and the fox is already dead.
Anne Kennedy
Anne Kennedy is a poet, fiction writer and screenplay editor. Her most recent books are Moth Hour (AUP) and The Ice Shelf (VUP). Awards include the NZ Post Book Award for Poetry and the Montana Book Award for Poetry.
You can listen to ‘Letters to Ōtatauhi’, ‘Wild Honey: A Celebration of NZ Women’s Poetry’, ‘Remembering Ralph Hotere’, Landmarks: Sydney, Marshall,Turner,’ ‘Ko Aotearoa Tātou | We Are New Zealand’, ‘Going Viral’, ‘Finding a Place’, Farid Ahmed: Hasna’s Story’, Dear Katherine’, ‘Adventurous Women’, ‘An Hour with Vincent O’Sullivan’, ‘Poet Laureate’s Choice’, ‘An Evening with Witi Ihimaera and Kingsley Spargo’, ‘Pip Adam: Nothing to See’, ‘Bill Manhire Wow’, ‘Elizabeth Knox and The Absolute Book’, ‘Talking Animals: Laura Jean Mckay and Philip Armstrong’ and much more.
1. A photograph: The photo is of Sepela – exactly 10 years ago, a week after the big earthquake when we escaped to Hinemoana’s who lived in Kapiti then.
Is writing a pain or a joy, a mix of both, or something altogether different for you?
A mix, for sure. Often, I don’t feel like writing – unless I have an experience (internal or out in the world) that I feel the need to write about immediately. At times like that, I feel a sense of urgency, sometimes verging on desperation, to stop whatever I’m doing and write. I have pulled the car over on a busy motorway and searched for a piece of paper to scribble it down . I’m not great at the discipline of writing every day.
Name a poet who has particularly influenced your writing or who supports you.
I don’t read her so much these days, but I love Sharon Olds. She helped me to write more openly – to be honest and vulnerable.
Was your shortlisted collection shaped by particular experiences or feelings?
Colonisation, racism, illness, a bit of Covid – all the relaxing stuff.
Did you make any unexpected discoveries as you wrote?
The whole book was unexpected. I was writing another book called Giving Birth To My Father, which took ages. After a while (quite close to my deadline) I realised it wasn’t ready for the outside world. The Savage Coloniser Book had to come together really quickly, if I wanted it published for 2020. I knew I had a few poems that were very ‘2020’ lying about. I wrote to those poems in a short amount of time.
Do you like to talk about your poems or would you rather let them speak for themselves? Is there one poem where an introduction (say at a poetry reading) would fascinate the audience/ reader? Offer different pathways through the poem?
During poetry readings/ performances I used to think the poem should speak for itself but many poems really need an introduction, particularly when people are not experiencing them on the page.
Tusiata Avia, The Savagae Coloniser Book, Victoria University Press, 2020
Tusiata Avia is an acclaimed poet, performer and children’s writer. Her previous poetry collections are Wild Dogs Under My Skirt (2004; also staged as a theatre show, most recently Off-Broadway, winning the 2019 Outstanding Production of the Year), Bloodclot (2009) and the Ockham-shortlisted Fale Aitu | Spirit House (2016). Tusiata has held the Fulbright Pacific Writer’s Fellowship at the University of Hawai‘i in 2005 and the Ursula Bethell Writer in Residence at University of Canterbury in 2010. She was the 2013 recipient of the Janet Frame Literary Trust Award, and in 2020 was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to poetry and the arts.
Nina will read from Magnolia 木蘭 and copies will be for sale.
For every copy of Magnolia 木蘭 you buy at the launch you’ll also receive an extra special gift (while stock lasts): a gorgeous risograph print of ‘Last eclipse’, one of the poems in the collection, which Nina has printed herself.
About the book:
Shanghai, Aotearoa, Malaysia, London—all are places poet Nina Mingya Powles calls home and not-home; from each she can be homesick for another. A gorgeous bittersweet longing and hunger runs through the poems in this new collection from one of our most exciting poetic voices.
In Magnolia 木蘭 Powles explores her experience of being mixed-race and trying to find her way through multiple languages: English, Mandarin, Hakka, Māori. Powles uses every sense to take us on a journey through cities, food and even time, weaving her story with the stories of women from history, myth and film.
The gorgeous cover features an artwork by Kerry Ann Lee.
Magnolia 木蘭 is longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry, and the UK edition was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for best first collection.
About the author:
Nina Mingya Powles is a poet, zinemaker and non-fiction writer of Malaysian-Chinese and Pākehā heritage, currently living in London. She is the author of a food memoir, Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai (The Emma Press, 2020), poetry box-set Luminescent (Seraph Press, 2017), and several poetry chapbooks and zines, including Girls of the Drift (Seraph Press, 2014). In 2018 she was one of three winners of the inaugural Women Poets’ Prize, and in 2019 won the Nan Shepherd Prize for Nature Writing. Nina has an MA in creative writing from Victoria University of Wellington and won the 2015 Biggs Family Prize for Poetry. She is the founding editor of Bitter Melon 苦瓜, a risograph press that publishes limited-edition poetry pamphlets by Asian writers. Her collection of essays, Small Bodies of Water, is forthcoming from Canongate Books in 2021.
Titus Books is pre-selling three new poetry collections, by Richard von Sturmer, Chris Holdaway and Scott Hamilton, to help cover the costs involved in producing them.
This is in a sense a traditional subscription style of publishing, advance selling the books, and also a new crowdfunding style, we will send out to contributors copies of the books when they are published and thank people inside the books by printing their names (if they would like that). We will also include a gift publication made especially to accompany this series.
If you would like to be involved – all contributions gratefully received – please follow this link
There is more information about the books on the page, including the book titles (as of yet without covers), and some options to get involved.
Echoes of ‘The Long Trail’: The John McGivering Poetry Prize
The Kipling Society is hosting a competition for poems inspired by Rudyard Kipling’s writings, on the theme of travel. The judge is Harry Ricketts, poet, critic, anthologist and biographer of Kipling.
Kipling was a magical phrase maker, who has contributed more expressions to our language than anyone since Shakespeare. He wrote in many voices, which remain a pleasure to read aloud, as the Kipling Society has found in our world-wide Zoom members’ readings during the pandemic, with readers from Britain, Europe, America, India, and New Zealand. The bard of the ‘Seven Seas’, whose finest poems voice the desire for ‘the long trail – the trail that is always new’ was all his life in love with global travel: ‘What should they know of England who only England know?’ He wrote of the delights of Australia, where ‘Through the great South Otway gums sings the great South Main’ (‘The Flowers’), of the dangerous ‘Rio run’, skirting icebergs that groan and shift, ‘Whaur, grindin’ like the Mills o’ God, goes by the big South Drift’ (‘McAndrew’s Hymn’) – and of course his beloved North India:
Parrots very busy in the trellised paper-vine,
And a high sun over Asia shouting “Rise and shine!” (“Jobson’s Amen”)
In this prize competition, enabled by the generosity of the late John McGivering, whose love and knowledge of Kipling have enriched our online New Reader’s Guide, we ask poets to draw inspiration from Kipling, not necessarily in imitation, but with something of his colour and rhythm and his fascination with people and places, as we travel this great and wonderful world.
First Prize £350, Second Prize £100, Third Prize £50. Entry fee £5. For the competition rules or enquiries, email KSwritingprize@gmail.com or visit here
customer asks where you’re from. you reply, auckland, and somehow he hears, start guessing, instead. he talks over you, japanese? you look japanese. are you japanese? you move over to the grill and turn all the knobs up to high heat. the flames reach out to you, tiger orange and desperate. bacon rinds curl up into carbon crisps. your three fried eggs are smouldering, but you leave them there, yolks beaming. until soot falls from your eyelashes, blushing your cheeks. until the sun turns away, saying that she’s seen enough.
Emma Shi, from ‘THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT’
Fabulous cover art by Nirvana Haldar, excellent interview with Shu-Ling Chua (a Melbourne-based essayist, critic and poet) and stellar writing from young New Zealanders.
Check out the contents page and go exploring. Starling has its finger on the pulse of new writing – as it says in their aims for the journal:
‘The young writers featured here will shape and drive what New Zealand writing is to become. Starling is a chance to get a glimpse of where they might take us.’
NZ Poetry Shelf 