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Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Samoan writer and academic Letuimanu’asina Dr Emma Kruse Va’ai to receive an honorary doctorate from Victoria University of Wellington

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Prominent Samoan writer honoured by Victoria University of Wellington

Samoan writer and academic Letuimanu’asina Dr Emma Kruse Va’ai will receive an honorary doctorate from Victoria University of Wellington at a graduation ceremony this month.

Letuimanu’asina grew up in Samoa and came to study at Victoria University of Wellington on a New Zealand Aid scholarship, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in English Literature and a Diploma in Teaching English as a Second Language. She went on to complete a doctorate in English at the University of New South Wales, after joining the National University of Samoa in 1987 as a lecturer in English, rising to become a professor in English and applied linguistics. Her long service at the National University of Samoa culminated in her appointment as Deputy Vice-Chancellor. Currently she is chief executive of the Samoa Qualifications Authority.

Alongside her academic career, Letuimanu’asina has established herself as one of Samoa’s leading poets and writers of short stories. Her writing is notable for its blending of the Samoan and English languages, which echoes her academic interest in bilingualism in Samoa and the connections between language use and cultural identity.

The University’s Chancellor Neil Paviour-Smith says the honorary degree of Doctor of Literature acknowledges Letuimanu’asina’s commitment to developing a bilingual Samoan–English education system, as well as her impressive body of work as a poet and author.

“Letuimanu’asina is an outstanding example of the type of graduate we aim to produce at Victoria University of Wellington. Both her creative and academic writing are grounded in a deep commitment to her society, and her academic leadership and service has done much to support Samoan students eager to further their education in Samoa and overseas,” Mr Paviour-Smith says.

Letuimanu’asina has served on a number of boards responsible for education and development at the Commonwealth, Pacific, and Samoan levels. She has always been a strong advocate for Pacific women graduates, and is a former president of the Samoa Association of Women Graduates and a founding member of the Pacific Graduate Women’s Network. In 2006, then Prime Minister Helen Clark presented her with a Prime Minister’s Award for Emerging Pacific Leaders in recognition of her commitment to initiating and supporting educational projects to help young women in education. The award enabled her to study at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

“Letuimanu’asina’s leadership and desire to serve others have been an inspiration to many across the Pacific, and make her a fitting recipient of this honorary doctorate,” Mr Paviour-Smith says.

The Victoria University of Wellington Council will confer an honorary doctorate on Letuimanu’asina Dr Emma Kruse Va’ai at a graduation ceremony on Thursday 16 May.

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf Classic Poem: Sarah Jane Barnett picks ‘The Starlings’ by Tim Upperton

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The Starlings

 

Anger sang in that house until the scrim walls thrummed.
The clamour rang the window panes, dizzying up chimneys.
Get on, get on, the wide rooms cried, until it seemed our unease
as we passed on the stairs or chewed our meals in dimmed

light were all an attending to that voice. And so we got on,
and to muffle that sound we gibbed and plastered, built
shelves for all our good books. What we sometimes felt
is hard to say. We replaced what we thought was rotten.

I remember the starlings, the pair that returned to that gap
above the purple hydrangeas, between weatherboard and eaves.
The same birds, we thought, not knowing how long a starling lives.
For twenty years they came and went, flit and pause and up

into that hidden place. A dry rustle at night, fidgeting, calling,
a murmuration: bird business. The vastness and splendour
of their piecemeal activity, their lives’ long labour,
we discovered at last; blinking, in the murk of the ceiling,

at that whole cavernous space filled, stuffed like a haybarn.
It was like gold, except it was more like shit and straw,
jumbled with their own young, dead, desiccated, sinew
and bone, fledgling and newborn. Starlings only learn

a little thing, made big from not knowing when to leave off:
gone past all need except need, enough never enough.

 

Tim Upperton
from A House on Fire, Steele Roberts, 2009

 

 

Sarah Jane Barnett:

Since I first read Tim’s poem, it’s been my favourite by an Aotearoa writer. When I was a kid living in Christchurch, a hive of bees lodged themselves in our bathroom’s exterior wall. We could see them go in and out through a tiny hole in the stucco concrete. They’d land, pause for a moment on the hole’s lip, and disappear into the hollow. Eventually my parents had them fumigated.

There is so much to admire in Tim’s poem – the vibrating yet unpretentious language; the gentle comparison he creates between the labour of the family who ‘gibbed and plastered’ and the labour of the starlings’ ‘bird business’; his use of the collective noun, ‘murmuration’. I recommend listening to Tim read the poem to really see how good it is.

For me, the emotion of the poem comes from the family trying to ‘muffle’ the starlings. It makes me think about growing up in a house where ‘anger sang’ but was never acknowledged, and the way a child will push their fear and feelings down by concentrating on something else: starlings for example, or bees.

 

 

Sarah Jane Barnett is a freelance writer and editor. Her poetry, essays, interviews and reviews have been published in numerous journals and anthologies in Aotearoa and internationally. She has two poetry collections: A Man Runs into a Woman (finalist in the 2013 New Zealand Post Book Awards) and WORK (2015). Her poems often inhabit the lives of others, and ask how we find connection and intimacy when affected by trauma. Her essays explore the multifaceted theme of modern womanhood. Find out more here.

Tim Upperton’s second poetry collection, The Night We Ate The Baby, was an Ockham New Zealand Book Awards finalist in 2016. He won the Caselberg International Poetry Competition in 2012 and again in 2013. His poems have been published widely in New Zealand and overseas, and are anthologised in The Best of Best New Zealand Poems (2011), Villanelles (2012), Essential New Zealand Poems (2014), Obsession: Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century (2014), and Bonsai (2018).

 

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Poetry Shelf noticeboard: WriteNow poetry competition open for Dunedin students

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The sixth annual WriteNow poetry competition for Dunedin secondary school students is now open for entries.

This year’s judge is Fiona Farrell.

Entries close at 5pm on Friday 26 July 2019. See how to enter here.

Results will be released on Monday 19 August 2019 (on this website)

All the details, plus previous years’ judges’ reports and winning poems, are available on the WriteNow website

 

2019 Judge

Fiona FarrellThe judge for the 2019 WriteNow poetry competition is Fiona Farrell. Fiona is one of New Zealand’s most acclaimed and versatile writers. She is an award-winning poet, novelist, short story writer and essayist. In 2007 she was awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction, and she held the 2011 Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago. Recently she edited the 2018 edition of Best New Zealand Poems.

You can read more about Fiona Farrell on her website here.

Poetry Shelf interviews the 2019 Sarah Broom Prize finalists: Nina Mingya Powles

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Photo Credit: Sophie Davidson

 

 

If you were to map your poetry reading history, what books would act as key co-ordinates?

My poetry reading history – by which I mean paying attention to poetry and seeking it out on my own terms – begins with Anne Carson, whose long poem “The Glass Essay” was introduced to me by Anna Jackson in my final undergraduate year of uni. Her translations of Sappho in If Not, Winter and her shadowy, hybrid work Nox suddenly split open for me the limits of what poetry could mean. That’s when I began to feel at home in poetry, maybe because I’ve always been drawn to things that can’t be explained.

Very quickly in my literature degree I realised that the ‘Western literary canon’ we studied was the product of a violent colonial legacy. Instead I felt a pull towards the fringes of contemporary poetry, where I found poets doing extraordinary things with poetic form and linguistic boundaries, especially in The Time of the Giants by Anne Kennedy, The Same as Yes by Joan Fleming, and Lost And Gone Away by Lynn Jenner.

But it wasn’t until I discovered Cup by Alison Wong during my MA year that I recognised something of my own childhood and background in New Zealand poetry. Loop of Jade by Sarah Howe, published in 2016, was the first poetry book I ever read by someone half-Chinese like me. Ever since, I’ve been building my own poetry canon made up of works that negotiate displacement, loss, diaspora, living between cultures, and the ongoing damage caused by European colonisation. Schizophrene by Bhanu Kapil, Citizen by Claudia Rankine, Whereas by Layli Long Soldier, and Poukahangatus by Tayi Tibble are all books that I would like to carry around me at all times like talismans to keep me safe.

 

What do you want your poems to do?

I want a poems that are spells for curing homesickness, I want poems that are notebooks and witness accounts and dream diaries, I want poems that create a noticeable shift in the temperature of the air and transport you to your grandma’s kitchen.

 

 

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Which poem in your selection particularly falls into place. Why?

I knew that when I saw a kōwhai tree in full bloom in a garden in north London, close to where I was working at the time, I would need to write about it because it was the only thing I could do. It was spring and in spring I tend to feel really melodramatic about things. I don’t think the poem is melodramatic, though; I think it ended up somehow capturing what I was feeling, in fragments: both very far away and very close to home at exactly the same moment.

 

There is no blueprint for writing poems. What might act as a poem trigger for you? 

Recent poem triggers: silken tofu, being near the sea, tracking sunlight across my tiny garden in order to figure out where particular plants will grow, a house on fire by the side of the motorway, chocolate ice cream, dreams about whales, Chinese supermarkets, reading, reading.

 

If you were reviewing your entry poems, what three words would characterise their allure?

(This is too difficult and I wish I could ask someone else). Dreamlike, downpour, heatwave.

 

You are going to read together at the Auckland Writers Festival. If you could pick a dream team of poets to read – who would we see?

It would have to be a few American and British poets who I’ve discovered only since moving to London, because I want them and their work to travel as widely as possible. But I wouldn’t want to read alongside them because then I would be too nervous / too in awe / tearful to listen properly. Ocean Vuong – because sometimes at poetry readings he bursts into song. Also Tracy K. Smith, Raymond Antrobus, Bhanu Kapil, and Rachel Long.

 

Nina Mingya Powles is of Pākehā and Malaysian-Chinese heritage and was born in Wellington. She is the author of field notes on a downpour (2018), Luminescent (2017) and Girls of the Drift (2014). She is poetry editor of The Shanghai Literary Review and founding editor of Bitter Melon 苦瓜, a new poetry press. Her prose debut, a food memoir, will be published by The Emma Press in 2019.

 

You can hear Nina read ‘Mid-Autumn Moon Festival 2016’ here

Poetry Shelf review: From Cold Hub Press – Owen Leeming, Ruth Hanover and Victoria Broome

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Owen Leeming, Through Your Eyes: Poems Early and Late Cold Hub Press, 2019

 

Owen Leeming has a fascinating bio on the back of his new poetry collection: he was a radio announcer, briefly studied musical composition in Paris, lived in London, published his poetry in various English magazines, became a UNESCO expert in Africa, settled in Provence, was the first writer to receive the Katherine Mansfield Menton fellowship (1972), joined Club Med in Spain where he met his future wife, worked as a translator for the OECD in Paris. He has remained based in France. His debut poetry collection, Venus is Setting, was published by Caxton Press in 1972.

This new collection is in debt to a trip back to New Zealand with his wife, Mireille but also assembles earlier poems from previous visits home. David Howard endorses the book, likening it to a vessel with two masts (the poems ‘Sirens’ and ‘Khalwat’) that set sail from Owen’s classic poem ‘The Priests of Serrabonne’. That poem was first published in Landfall in 1962.

Owen travels across four decades worth of fascinations, anchors and connections to place, people and ideas. The poems offer deft musical keys, lapping and lilting like little oceans, an undulation of consonants and vowels, assonance and rhyme. The sequence of physical returns form an elastic stretch between homes – France and Aotearoa. The poems often act as surrogate translations as though Own is translating his country of birth for Mirielle but also, and equally importantly, for himself transplanted at a distance.  As he says in the terrific opening poem, ‘Crossing the Tasman’: ‘A sea still flows and Morse / messages stutter from a place you still call home.’

In a book that offers a measured pace, an attentive ear and evocative images, the opening poem is my favourite poem:

 

Bracing yourself against your life, you gaze

across ten years’ chop and swell:

That water widens still from then to now,

from home to now—(but where is home?)—sprays

on bitter wind the rail, your knuckles, eyebrow

and eye, pouring between your past (…)

 

 

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Ruth Hanover, Other  Cold Hub Press, 2019

 

Ruth Hanover, with a degree in English and a background teaching ESOL to refugees in Cairo, Stockholm and New Zealand has published a collection born of this experience, along with the experience of travel and years in therapy.  Her poems have been published in London Grip, a fine line, takahē,  Poetry New Zealand and Manifesto Aotearoa: 101 Political Poems (Otago University Press). Her poem, ‘The Tent’ gained the Takahē Poetry Prize 2017 and a new work was longlisted in the Peter Porter Prize in 2019.

To be reading the collection in the wake of the Christchurch terrorist attacks is to be acutely aware of certain issues. What do we mean when we say ‘we’ or ‘us’ or ‘them’, for example? To what degree should we voice the lives, pains, joys of others? Ruth’s book is dedicated to ‘the seekers of asylum and for those who reach towards them’. It is a timely arrival as we grapple with tragedy and how to reach out and indeed how to speak.

Ruth’s poems are not a matter of speaking on behalf of but a speaking towards, a speaking out of imagining, placing light on dislocations, violences, deprivations, catastrophes, inhumanity. They poems are written along a pared back line, with exquisite economy, as a sequence of voices, other voices – perhaps imagined and perhaps experienced – speaking from real situations.

 

I had gone in for oranges     early persimmon —

the lush fruit     the abundance. Behind me

‘but Europe — the réfugees   did-you-see?

 

‘They       were     everywhere

 

The reply. The tone. I turn     unstable

unable to bear the weight

 

of the oranges     drop them     drop

them in among the persimmon      feel —

complicit as if I had committed

 

some act. (…)

 

from ‘The oranges’

 

We move from Nauru to Syria to Paris to Stockholm. We move with refugees, with the displaced and, as I move as reader, I feel other. Moved yet motionless in my state of privilege.  I feel the helpless slap of what I can do in the face of intolerance.

Poetry can be the occasion of listening; Ruth offers subtle melodies in her finely crafted poems but she also offers other points of view.  Both melody and viewpoint employ gaps on the line, fragments, with punctuation adrift to underline the difficulty of  speaking of catastrophe. With an alluring blend of grace and sharpness, ease and discomfort, I can’t wait to see what else Ruth writes.

 

 

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Victoria Broome, How We Talk to Each Other, Cold Hub Press, 2019

 

 

We are quite separate in this big house. Nana is a

good cook but she doesn’t hug, it’s hard to know

what makes us such companions. I think there are

things we know about each other we don’t know.

A bit like the mysterious chemistry of placing

flour and butter and eggs and sugar into a bowl

and then an oven and then a plate and then a mouth.

 

from ‘Nana  in the Upstairs Bedroom’

 

Victoria Broome has published poems in literary journals and anthologies, was awarded the CNZ Louis Johnson Bursary (2005) and has twice been placed in the Kathleen Grattan Award (2010, 2015). How We Talk to Each Other is her debut collection.

The poems in How We Talk to Each Other arc over ten years, drawing upon familial experience, particularly memories of her parents, hooking the luminous detail that has endured. Poetry becomes a family imprint and like Ruth, Victoria pares back a scene until it shines. Big events are viewed on the fringes; how the young child witness feels, what she does, the glinting physical detail.

Victoria’s collection shows so beautifully the power of domestic poetry – poems that connect at the level of family – to slip under your skin and stay.

 

 

Sunnyside

 

Grandad went to the Mental Hospital

when we were in Wellington, he made us

sheep’s wool slippers, mine were royal blue

they came in a brown parcel in the post.

Then on a Sunday Mum got a phone call.

I heard her cry, ‘Oh no, oh no.’

At first she said, ‘He had a heart attack.’ The Dad said, ‘No,

he killed himself in the garage, he drank some poison.’

I aw the Irish Peach tree by itself at the back of the long yard.

Mum flew down and cleaned out the house. Nana came to stay.

I wore Mum’s rage, she chased me round and round the house

screaming while Nana stood with her hands up to her face.

Some nights I went riding on the train in the dark lit up by the yellow

light of the carriages, past the harbour to the city and then back again.

I stopped when Dad said I’d be made a ward of the state.

 

This book filled me with a warm glow – yes poetry can do anything and can affect us in so many vital ways, including the discomfort I felt reading Other – but on some occasions the deft translation of life, of everyday goings on, the view out the window, the family behaviours along with the losses, the absences, the deaths – produces poetry that is like a gold nugget. I need this. It restores me, it nourishes me, it reminds me that in poem empathy we witness humanity.

 

 

Owen Leeming  Cold Hub Press author page

Ruth Hanover  Cold Hub Press author page

Victoria Broome  Cold Hub Press author page

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf noticeboard: In Jacket2 Vaughan Rapatahana presents Part 2 Kiwi Asian women poets

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Vaughan Rapatahana presents Part 2 of his feature on New Zealand Asian women poets. He  considers rage and alienation but stresses these women write so much more. The poets: Aiwa Pooamorn, Nina Powles, Vanessa Crofskey, Wen-Juenn Lee, Shasha Ali and Joanna Li .

You can read the full piece with poems here.

On Poetry Shelf:

You can read Vanessa’s poem ‘The Capital of My Mother’  here

You can hear Wen-Juenn read ‘Prologue’  here

You can hear Nina read ‘Mid-Autumn Moon Festival 2016’ here

 

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Poetry Shelf interviews the 2019 Sarah Broom Poetry Prize Judge: Anne Michaels

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between your touch

and my cry

between the sea

and the dream of the sea

 

from ‘Sea of Lanterns’, All We Saw, Bloomsbury, 2017

 

 

Anne Michaels lives in Toronto where she is the city’s Poet Laureate. Her internationally bestselling novel, Fugitive Pieces (1996), was awarded the Orange Prize and the Guardian Fiction Prize among other awards. The Winter Vault (2009), her second novel, was awarded the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and was shortlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. She has written a number of highly acclaimed poetry collections, including the collaborative Correspondences (2013), which was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the selected volume Poems (2000). I read Fugitive Pieces when it first came out and the poetic layerings took my breath away. It moved into the room in my head for books that haunt and stay with me. I have since fallen in love with Anne’s poetry: the melodies, the intensities, the insistent refrain of love.

Anne is appearing at the 2019 Auckland Writers Festival. She is presenting the finalists (and winner) of the Sarah Broom Poetry Prize, appearing in conversation with Michael Williams and on a WWII panel.

Friday 17 May, 10 – 11 am, ASB Theatre, Aotea Centre: A Life’s Work: Anne Michaels

Saturday 18 May, 1 -2 pm, Waitākere Room, Aotea Centre: Sarah Broom Poetry Prize 2019

Sunday 19 May, 11.30 – 12.30 pm, Limelight Room, Aotea Centre: The Aftermath with Vincent O’Sullivan, Maria Tumarkin and Kirsten Warner introduced by Catriona Ferguson.

 

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Anne kindly agreed to an interview for Poetry Shelf.

 

 

Somewhere rain is falling

Somewhere a man is repairing the night, one word at a time

 

 

from ‘Somewhere Night Is Falling’, All We Saw

 

 

Paula: If you were to map your poetry reading history, name 3 or 4 books that would act as key co-ordinates?

Anne:

T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.

Rilke – Selected Poems (translated by Stephen Mitchell).

And the poetry of Nazim Hikmet (translated by Randy Blasing, Mutlu Konuk), Pablo Neruda (translated by Ben Belitt and Alastair Reid), Osip Mandelstam (various translators), Anna Akhmatova (various translators)

 

Paula: For me your poetry is the kind of poetry that lingers, demanding to be read and then to be read again. The musicality, repetition, the silences and white space, the luminous detail, the layered feeling, the loss, the love – all etch a pattern on the skin. I call it goosebumps. What do you want your poems to do?

Anne: By its very nature, a poem witnesses and, in that witnessing, seeks a kind of justice – not only for the lives or events described by the poem, but witnesses also the reader’s life. Witnesses both what is painful and what is inexpressibly beautiful. I long for a poem to answer an experience, to honour what must be remembered, to honour what cannot be expressed. I long for a poem to name a mystery, to break us open, to wake us. Every poem is part of a greater collaboration, a collaboration of writer to writer, writer and reader, adding its small witnessing to what it means to be alive. To give each other courage. There is no witnessing that does not include the listener. Even if that listener is only the page itself. And I long for the poem to listen to the reader.

 

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Paula: Your collection, All We Saw, carries me deep into humanity, into humanness. The poem, ‘Somewhere Night is Falling’, came at me in waves, prodding me to to feel the wider scope of life and living. I am deeply moved by it and I hope you read this in Auckland. Actually ‘To Write’ hit me in a similar way. What surprised you as you wrote this collection? What questions arose?

 

and where

you are

is where you have

always been,

looking to the edge of paper   that torn edge

of sea

 

from ‘All We Saw’, All We Saw

 

Anne: Within a short span, most of those closest to me died, intimates of 30 years or more, and my parents. I wanted to understand what language there could possibly be for desire so extreme it is rendered chaste. When desire is forced to become grief. No words are restrained or spare enough to express the difference between silence and muteness. All my work is an attempt to render language chaste and these poems especially. I wanted to know how we might find a place in ourselves to assert that “death must give/not only take from us”.

 

Paula: There is no blueprint for writing poems. What might act as a poem trigger for you?

Anne: A poem can emerge from what haunts us, what insists: an event or a life that insists on being spoken, a question that has no answer. A poem should give more than it takes – i.e. open us in such way that we are left asking a deeper question. Language itself is inconsolable – it exists in time and yet longs to express what is beyond our grasp: what is lost, what is incomprehensible, what might be, what is ineffable. I write to hold another human being close.

 

Paula: You are the 2019 Judge of the Sarah Broom Poetry Prize. As a reader what draws you into a poem?

Anne: I am immediately drawn by a disciplined use of language – discipline, rather than manipulation – by a poet who knows a line is not a sentence. A poet who uses language to manipulate will never escape their own certainty; but discipline, however, requires a profound humility – to content, to technique – and an essential respect for and acknowledgement of the inexpressibility of experience. A poet who acknowledges the innate failure of language reaches beyond the self. I am drawn by clarity, not cleverness. I am drawn by a poet unafraid of emotion – the absolute asceticism of emotion – a poet who understands that emotion is somehow irreducible.

 

in that turning of the page

inside out, in the scarf

of shadow, in the message

passing

 

you wanted death to give

not only take from us

 

from ‘Late August’, All We Saw

 

 

Anne Michaels’s website.

Listen to Anne in conversation with Kim Hill on RNZ National

Sarah Broom Prize

 

Sarah Broom Prize finalists: Jessica Le Bas, Nina Mingya Powles, Michael Steven

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: Jessie Mackay’s ‘Scotland Unfree’

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Scotland Unfree

 

Two hundred long winters and thirty forbye

Have narrowed to nought since you first were unqueened, —

When cold, cunning usury made you the teind*

To Empery’s coffer, black treason unweened,

Undreamed of where yonder your mightiest lie,

Scotland unfree.

 

But they hear, but they heave, blessed mounds on the heath,

That house their true clay for you, mourner and mother,

Mounded for God and for you, not another,

Hear the moor-sloganing, brother to brother,

Hear it from Orkney to Tweed and to Leith,

Scotland unfree!

 

Mother of martyrs, now hear ye the living;

Mother of makers, world-marches away,

Who set your high mark, in their bold hodden gray,

On masterless wild and blue, bounteous bay, —

Palms for your honour, brave air, but, the giving,

Scotland unfree!

 

Hear you the living that fare never forth

From your guerdonless thrift in the halted out-flowing.

Too long your life-river, all-hoping, unknowing,

Gold-ribboned the seas from the dawn to down-going

Of sums that had set for your cradling North.

Scotland unfree.

 

Gold ribbons you gave to the seas of the west.

The world had your best of divine discontent.

Your parasites battened; despoiled and forspent,

‘Twas the babes of your breast, ’twas your children that went;

No steading in life, and no anchor of rest,

Scotland unfree!

 

What now and what more, when the world is at halt? —

When winds of all destinies clash in the blue?

The gadflies of battles are stinging anew,

Meanly to risk, or unhallowedly rue,

The redeless old nations in fear and at fault,

Scotland unfree.

 

Redeless they gather, no nation are you,

Mother of sages, the seal on your lips,

The gyve on your arm, by dead havens of ships,

Silent, interned, and betrayed to eclipse;

Scarce a name, not a nation! Is Caledon through,

Scotland unfree?

 

Lure-word of sophistry, “Britain!” quo’ she,

Weaver of phrases—high word and poor favour!

Your peers they are bidden—jejune and a-waver,—

To brag and to bicker; what salt and what savour?

“Britain?” what Britain that’s wanting of thee,

Scotland unfree!

 

Scotia, North Britain, draw biddably nigh,

Re-born to the day, and for ever re-born,

To the mock of moor-purple and crackle of thorn,

Your hour of re-queening: come, preen and adorn!

For your fairings you have but to dance and to die,

Scotland unfree!

 

Dance featly and fair, for your lords would be pleasured.

Skirl to their fancy, the caber let fly;

There’s gold for the lifting and silver forbye;

But, redeless, quiescent, to-morrow you die,

When for ever of yours shall your glens be untreasured,

Scotalnd unfree.

 

Be done with the talking, let scorning be done.

Bid Britain be Britain; whose vassal be ye,

Druidess, Norna, and chrissom Culdee?

One in a triad blent, one, two, and three;

God’s in His heaven, and Albyn is one,

Scotland the free!

 

Riddle us fairly that triad of yore;—

Sisterly queens that for ever are twain,

Sisterly queens that have done with disdain,

En-sceptred in one at the gates of the main

Live you, so live you, or none shall live more,

Scotland the free!

 

 

* Tribute

Note from Jessie: At the date of writing, May 31st, 1935, no answer has been reported to the recent joint demand of Scotland and Wales to be granted immediate Dominion status. The position has become increasingly impossible under the conditions of this century. For fifty years Scottish Home Rule Bills have been introduced, talked out or thrown out. Now national feeling demands the full and only solution of an impossible situation.

 

Jessie Mackay,  Vigil and Other Poems, Whitcombe & Tombs, 1935

 

 

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‘Scotland Unfree’ is the final poem in Jessie Mackay’s final book, Vigil and Other Poems.

 

Jessie Mackay (1864 – 1938)  We have a poetry prize honouring Jessie Mackay’s legacy: the Jessie Mackay Best First Book Award for Poetry in our national book awards.  Jessie was born in Rakaia, Canterbury and grew up on several remote sheep stations. She trained as a teacher, taught briefly and then devoted her life to politics and poetry. Jessie wrote countless letters to newspapers and articles on issues such as the plight of women, the vote for women, prohibition, ending the war and Scottish Home Rule. The latter affected her deeply as her Scottish parents spoke of their beloved homeland and the cruel land clearances. Perhaps this is why she revealed such a concern for Māori issues in a number of poems: the fact that land, language, stories and culture make a people. To take them away is to dispossess them. Cruelly. Unforgivably. Pākehā might write poems differently now, after decades of interrogating colonialism; perhaps less likely to borrow myth but, like Jessie, many poets are showing history in a new light  (such as Parihaka).  Jessie often drew us to the women’s point of view.

Towards the end of her life over 300 admirers presented Jessie with a testimonial letter that praised her outstanding humanitarian work and contributions to New Zealand literature. On her death the media sung her praises yet you are hard pressed to find her work in anthologies and we have no Jessie Mackay in print. When I first started reading her work it felt like a foreign country but the more time I spent in the archives, and the more time I spent with her writing, the more she moved me.

The first chapter in my forthcoming book, Wild Honey: Reading New Zealand Women’s Poetry, seeks to draw Jessie’s poetry closer. I am moved by her political stamina and by her battle to be heard as a woman writing. I have picked one of her Scottish poems to post as it feels very timely. What would she think? What would she think about Brexit and our own local tragedies? She would be weeping with her feet in the southern stream, and she would be speaking out. She would be writing poetry.

My book is out in August with Massey University Press.

This year’s poetry finalists in the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards will be appearing at the Auckland Writers Festival Award event: Tuesday 14 May, 7 pm- 8.30 pm, ASB Theatre, Aotea Centre.

The finalists: Helen Heath, Therese Lloyd, Erik Kennedy, Tay Tibble

 

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Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Time to create our National Poetry Day

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Acclaimed poet and poetry champion Paula Green is a big fan of the day. ‘Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day is an inventive, invigorating, heart-warming showcase of the width and depth of our poetry communities,’ she says. ‘From beloved poetry elders to emerging poets, words open and spark in every nook and cranny, on airwaves, social media and street corners. This nationwide festival connects us through the power and joy of words.’

The feast of poetry around the country – from installations to open mike performances and competitions – includes appearances from Poet Laureates, spoken-word stars, and award-winning younger writers like Hera Lindsay Bird and Courtney Sina Meredith. Venues range from theatres, cafes, bars, libraries, schools, museums, marae, community centres and bookshops to pavements, parks and public transport.

The deadline for event organisers to register and apply for seed-funding is Wednesday 22 May 2019 at 5:00pm. Events can be registered online via this link

Held every year on the fourth Friday of August, National Poetry Day is a popular fixture on the nation’s cultural calendar. Phantom Billstickers have sponsored National Poetry Day for the past four years and support the celebrations with a nationwide poetry street poster campaign.

The Poetry winner at this year’s Ockham New Zealand Book Awards – announced on Tuesday 14 May 2019 at the Auckland Writers Festival – will star in event(s) on Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day. The shortlisted writers for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry are: Helen Heath (Wellington), Erik Kennedy (Christchurch), Therese Lloyd (Wellington) and Tayi Tibble (Wellington).

Find Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day on social media

 

National Poetry Day has been running continuously since 1997 and since 2014, has been administered by the New Zealand Book Awards Trust. It has a mandate to celebrate discovery, diversity, community and pushing boundaries, and to ensure their longevity and credibility. The Trust also governs and manages the country’s two major literary awards – The Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and the New Zealand Book Awards for Children & Young Adults. New Zealand Book Awards Trust.

Phantom Billstickers is a street poster company which has consistently helped New Zealanders express themselves since 1982. Recognising and supporting home-grown talent has always sat comfortably alongside its commercial campaign work. Phantom actively promotes New Zealand music, art, poetry and culture around in public spaces here and overseas. Phantom Billstickers.

 

 

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Poetry Shelf notice board: NZ Poet Laureate to compose poem with students during Saint Clair Vineyard Half Marathon

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Look forward to seeing the poetry that comes out of this Selina!

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