Dear Tombs, Dear Horizon, Anna Jackson, Seraph Press, 2017

 

Anna wrote this hand-stitched chapbook in Menton, France when she held the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship in 2016. The long poem savours time to write in the slow stretch of the present participle: walking, dreaming, seeing, reading, writing and more walking. Such leisurely engagement with books read, the world sighted and thoughts that appear like surprising musical notes renders the poem lento, adagio, largo.

For the reader to be caught in such a contemplative beat is immensely satisfying. The physical world simmers on the line while the abstract world, both dreamed and mused, shines below and above.

 

Sun on the coast, sun on my back, but

the mountains dark with cloud,

misty down to the ground, and higher

up, stormy. The shadow of my hand

on the page as I write, writing

inside my own shadow.

 

The poem steps off from graffiti witnessed on rocks: ‘You are my most lovely horizon’. Each experience, thought, recalled page or vista steps off into the mysterious elsewhere of thinking, and from the elsewhere of thinking into the paradoxical here yet elsewhere of writing. The  horizon is the translucent line where Mediterranean sky meets Mediterranean sea, a sensual hook of beauty that stalls the walker, but it is also the indefinable lure that poses a need to write, to think, to experience. It is Katherine Mansfield, the other authors, the conversations that stick, the not-home-ness that becomes a home-ness.

I am thinking of the way the doorstep at Villa Isola Bella leads to the corner of a Vermeer painting and the poem produces a mise en abyme of looking. Stillness matters: the long pleasurable look into the corner of a painting becomes the long pleasurable look into the corner of a poem where detail stockpiles and sparks daydream.

 

At the Villa Isola Bella, my favourite place

is the doorstep, on the corner where a spider

grooms itself on the mottled buttery

yellow stone, beside the eggshell blue

door frame, and the terracotta tiles.

It is like finding myself in a corner

of a Vermeer interior, a detail

closer up than a Vermeer painting

has ever gone, so that with all the stillness

on the canvas, there is this corner

so close up, the spider moves.

 

Therein lies the beauty of this sequence: in stillness you find movement and in movement you find stillness.

I adore this poem because it takes me to an unfamiliar physical place, yet allows me to ride the coat tails of a roving, inquisitive mind. Such curiosity fires the writing process. I am reminded of the way Bill Manhire produced his astonishing collection, Lifted, after his Menton Fellowship with its gift of time. Anna has a new collection in the pipeline but, in the meantime, this is a must-read treasure, also in debt to the gift of time. I don’t want to unpick the curves, arcs and echoes in the poem, the illuminations and the epiphanies, because I want you to read it for yourself. I just love it.

 

 

A ticket simply to go, or to go and to return?

Oh, to return, to return, to return,

to return, to return. I walk once again

méthode flâneusoise around

the coast and the graffiti

reads, “Ma plus belle horizon, c’est toi.”

I wonder how to turn the dream about the

tombs into a poem. I think of

starting the poem “Dear Tombs,” and

wonder whether perhaps I should

try writing the poem

in terza rima. Really I just want

to pile into it everything I have got.

 

 

 

 

Seraph Press page

 

 

 

Dear poetry fans

Thank you so much for your support this year: your contributions, emails, invitations, challenges and poetry conversations!

I still have a sizable tower of New Zealand poetry books I have been sent this year and I am keen to read them over the next few months. Poetry seems to have got a bit more attention in 2017 or am I imagining it? I started Poetry Shelf because it felt like so many local arrivals vanished into the ether and I’d stumble upon them by chance. Reviews were few and far between. However, it feels like we are part of myriad poetry communities that are doing myriad things in diverse ways, with distinctive voices, and these connections matter.

Yesterday I finished a major draft of my book on NZ women’s poetry – and I just don’t have the time to write an end of year set of crackers and tinsel. This year I am not posting the annual monster roundup by local poetry fans of favourite reads from any time and any place. Next year the blog will spark back into renewed action, but I will post little pieces to highlight my summer poetry delights as I can.

Thank you for sending books. I might not write about them all, but I will read them all and definitely showcase some.

I am about to a post a poem from a little book that caught my attention as my Happy Summer time toast to you all.

Meanwhile I am taking a week out to reboot with novels, movies, the garden and early morning runs and swims on the beach – not to mention long periods gazing at the sky.

Warm regards

Paula

 

 

 

 

 

International Writers’ Workshop (IWW) is delighted to announce that Janet Newman is the 2017 winner of The Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems for her sequence, Tender. The $1000 prize was judged by respected Auckland poet Robert Sullivan.

Tender is a seven poem sequence about Janet’s father, Doug Newman (1919-2008). The poems show him as a farmer, a former WWII soldier, and in old age, revealing both his tough exterior and a covert tenderness. By tracing his life from her childhood to his death at 89 years, the sequence explores the ways in which war invades the lives of veterans and their children.

Ms Newman, a member of IWW since 2012 and a runner-up in The Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems in 2014, was born in Levin and raised on a dairy farm at Koputaroa in Horowhenua. She completed a Certificate in Editorial and Publishing at Wellington Polytechnic and worked as a journalist in Lower Hutt, Christchurch and Perth in Western Australia before returning to Koputaroa where she now lives and runs the family farm. She has a Masters of Creative Writing from Massey University and is presently a PhD student at Massey. Her critical and creative thesis looks at New Zealand’s long history of environmentally oriented poetry, and includes a collection of original ecopoems.

Runner-up is Anne Hollier Ruddy of Orewa who began writing poetry in 2006 and has been a member of IWW since 2011. Her poems have appeared in various Australian and New Zealand anthologies, as well as Shotglass Journal, Cordite Poetry Review and Blackmail Press. Her sequence of poems, Ambushed by Gauguin, begins and ends with a reflection of the Mother and Child theme in art with other poems in the sequence exploring it personally in biographical terms.

Mr Sullivan said writing poetry is a journey of discovery and is timeless, whatever the style. He said when writing poetry to think, “Is there an accent on what really matters and not just the right word in the right place?” Of the winning and runner-up sequences he said the poets have submitted their inner hearts. The sequences were new and original, exuded honesty and ‘show, not tell’ while disclosing some aspects of the narrator’s character as well.

About the Prize

The Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems has been made possible by a bequest from the Jocelyn Grattan Charitable Trust. It was a specific request of the late Jocelyn Grattan that her mother be recognised through an annual competition in recognition of her love for poetry and that the competition be for a sequence or cycle of poems with no limit on the length of the poems. It is one of two poetry competitions funded by the Trust, the other being the prestigious Kathleen Grattan Award run by the publishers of Landfall magazine.

Previous Winners

This is the 9^th year the prize has been contested. Previous winners are:

2016: Michael Giacon for Argento in no man land

2015: Maris O’Rourke for Motherings

2014: Julie Ryan for On Visiting Old Ladies.

2013: Belinda Diepenheim for Bittercress and Flax.

2012: James Norcliffe for What do you call your male parent?

2011: Jillian Sullivan for how to live it

2010: Janet Charman for Mother won’t come to us, and Rosetta Allan for Capricious Memory.

2009: Alice Hooton for America.