Making Faces

I do not
have a face I draw one
in the empty space

the wrinkles written
with good cause are  known
as flaws so I
anoint my pores (this
is one of the local laws)

I paint
my eyelids blue
my lashes too
they make a pretty view

to smile and pout as I
have learned I make a mouth
red
like a burn

I believe, I believe
it is not enough to be clean

I curl my pubic hair
I wear mascara there

Rachel McAlpine

Here is a vintage poem that is even more horribly relevant today. In the early 1970s I wore mascara all my waking hours. Even when swimming and hanging nappies on the line. I was deeply convinced that with mascara I was beautiful and without mascara I was ugly. I kicked the dependence on a trip to Canada where nobody would notice my transformation. Now I am mystified by the grotesque faces of women on “reality” shows like Married at First Sight. And I’m saddened by all women fixated on imaginary flaws in their beautiful faces and bodies. I’ve been there. The juddery line breaks reflect my own distorted perceptions — and a natural rhythm is hiding underneath. Published in Fancy Dress (Cicada Press, 1979). PS I still like red lipstick. Rachel McAlpine

Rachel McAlpine has been writing, publishing and performing poems for nearly 50 years. After many books in other fields and a career as a digital content pioneer, she returned to poetry with How To Be Old (Cuba Press, 2020). Soon she joins a thrilling line of younger performers in the poets’ cabaret, Show Ponies. For VERB, at Meow Cafe, Wellington, 4 November 2022.

Join us to celebrate the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for Poetry for 2022. We are thrilled to announce that the award is going to poet, Robert Sullivan (Ngāpuhi and Kāi Tahu) who has won awards for his poetry, editing, and writing for children. Tunui Comet is his eighth collection of poetry. His book Star Waka has been reprinted many times.Robert’s an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Massey University. He is a great fan of all kinds of decolonisation.

Robert will be joined by guests, Arihia Latham and Ruby Solly.

Supported by The Lauris Edmond Literary Estate and the Friends of the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for Poetry with sponsorship from The NZ Poetry Society, Victoria University Press and the Todd Trust.

Pneumonia/Garden Poems, Sept 2022

 

Photosynthesis

My lung’s struggle roots me in place
offering time to notice new blood

orange leaves delicate and jagged
as neonatal fingernails angle

their waxy crescents
toward the light. I follow

their example, focussing
on the green cells of myself.

 

Unnatural

It’s so bright I can’t focus
he says, trying, staring
at the petals that from here

glow neon red but in natural
light, close up, are dark pink

velvet. He doesn’t talk
about flowers often.
When he does, I soften.

Geranium or pelargonium?
Crane’s bill or stork’s?

I Google “crane” and find
a page of heads vividly
blurring at the edge.

Natural

They are honey-eater
eaters—that’s why they stay
inside. I apologise to their blank
green eyes for keeping
the glass door closed.
One quacks—coos, absurd
bird gurgle where purr should go
and roosts on her haunches
watching the sweet yellow-
striped creature hang
upside-down, stick
his beak into the dark
pink pocket of the swan
river pea and drink.
Not for you, I tell her,
happy to be God of this
situation, until the afternoon
when I find feather confetti
over the rhubarb’s crown.

Viriditas

there is no dishonest flower
unless they all lie
like literature

green and truth
grow together
at a depth

sleeplessly
I see seeds reach weak
white necks through soil

night sweats add a stop-
motion effect to all
I sow    making me turn

over what I know

Amy Brown

Amy Brown is from Hawkes Bay and lives in Melbourne. Her latest collection of poetry, Neon Daze, was named one of the Saturday Paper’s best books of 2019. She has recently finished a novel loosely based on the relationship between Australian novelist Stella Miles Franklin and her lesser known sister, Linda. 

People Person, Joanna Cho, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022

Joanna Cho’s debut poetry collection, People Person, is poetry pleasure. I experience a sequence of poetic delights, poems that offer multiple rewards, poems to read again and again. The presence of Joanna’s mother’s ephemeral paintings is an exquisite addition: fleeting, hinting, translucent palette, subject rich. I adore them.

The poems deliver everything I love about poetry. Descriptive energy that draws people, place, situations closer:

The veins on her hands have shot up overnight, like the backs of cornered
cats. They are rough as the edges of torn paper.

 

from ‘You’ll Thank Me for It Later’

The visual tracks are coupled with attention to audio tracks. The way poems are a gift for the ear. Ideas establish meshed thought, especially ideas connected to home and identity, to name calling and being named.

Our parents bought our names from fortune-tellers,
each of the three syllables laying out our ancestry and personal truths
in the immortal wind

                                 our names are gifts and expectations

but our English names were picked hastily
while flicking through TV channels.

 

from ‘The Gift’

There is the allure of metonymy, where this thought or object placed alongside that thought or object produces electric currents.

Joanna’s poetry relishes narrative, whether fractured, curtailed, elongated. The power of story, invented or recalled, attracts me as reader. Think fable or anecdote or ranging subject matter. I savour this collection on so many levels, on its ability to startle and sidetrack, on its use of loops, repetition, echoes.

I tried to be chill, for you and for me.
I tried to be chill,
but at the gig I scoped out the exit, just in case,
and you sculled your beer and turned
cos there was nothing left to say.

The next day we walked around town
and noticed the loop pedal at the busker’s feet.

We got hungry.
We got food.

I knew these would be our last fish and chips.

 

from ‘Pull Over, I’ll Drive’

More than anything I am pulled into the pleats and folds of Joanna’s writing because it is personal. It is humorous and witty and revealing. It is confessional and withholding, gifting and gifted. Each time you read from cover to cover, you will discover new reading tracks, fresh possibilities for what we want and need from poetry. Each poem a provisional portrait, a self excursion, a self reckoning.

These are the narratives we tell over and over again; they keep us
connected through all the distance we have created and maintained.
Our relationships shrink and expand and shrink again like a jellyfish
opening and closing its bell. Blood tethers, clots.

Our true reactions and preferences are inconsistent, but we smooth these
out by reframing our experiences in a consistent narrative.

We are good at keeping secrets from each other, our bodies an advent
calendar—occasionally one of the little flaps opens and a piece of
chocolate falls out.

Each version of the family stories forms an overlapping polyphony.
These are our heirlooms and we are the school choir.

 

from ‘The White Swans Are Dancing / With Their Eyes Closed, in the Flurry’

 

People Person is a triumph – I have quoted more excepts than I would normally do because it is the poetry that matters here, poetry that delivers myriad reading tracks that are so utterly satisfying. Glorious.

Te Herenga Waka University Press page

Joanna Cho was born in South Korea and currently lives in Wellington. She completed an MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters in 2020 and received the Biggs Family Prize in Poetry.

trickster

Just little things, like endless rain,
the spilt milk, parcels
left behind, newly-bought necessities
disappearing, a waiter forgetting an order
and not being able to find our way
out of Blenheim.

Was it coyote, Bugs Bunny, Loki,
Maui, a leprechaun, a fox, a crow,
Pippi Longstocking, Puck,
or Anansi? Might the trickster have been
my father being a monkey
(his animal sign in the Chinese zodiac)

making me leave my handbag behind
on the top of the hill at the war memorial
in Seddon? A town I will forever associate
with Fay & Peter’s tin sleep-out,
a passionfruit vine, the cabbage train, yellow shoes
and three men: Joe the sullen, Paul the optimistic

and born-again Max. Perhaps the last hand
played was the missed call from Liz in Ashburton
just as we were leaving that dusty town.
But the pick of them all, the high winds
thrashing trees near Hinds, the hint of home
still just a trick of light on the road ahead.

Kay McKenzie Cooke

Kay McKenzie Cooke (Kai Tahu, Kati Mamoe) lives in Otepoti and is slowly working towards a fifth poetry collection, as yet un-named. 

 

Opening of The long waves of our ocean: New responses to Pacific poems

Friday 25 November
5.30pm to 7.30pm

The National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa is delighted to invite you to the opening of our next exhibition The long waves of our ocean: New responses to Pacific poems at 5.30pm on Friday 25 November 2022. 

Please join us in the foyer of Te Ahumairangi Ground Floor at the National Library (entrance via 70 Molesworth St, Thorndon) for refreshments, performance and kōrero.

For this exhibition, early-career artists Sione Faletau, Ayesha Green, Turumeke Harrington, Ana Iti, Sione Tuívailala Monū, Ammon Ngakuru and James Tapsell-Kururangi have created new artworks made in response to a selection of poems by Alistair Campbell, Keri Hulme, J. C. Sturm, Hone Tuwhare and Albert Wendt. These artists and writers address Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa in its varied and shifting roles, engaging with fictions and histories and encouraging us to inhabit new perspectives. 

On Saturday 26 November from 11am to 12pm, join curator Hanahiva Rose and some of the contributing artists for a tour of the exhibition. 

RSVP here

Gorse Poems, Chris Holdaway, Titus Books, 2022

As near to Hart Crane’s open bones as I am spiritually
Capable to experience. Each bridge formed by the Platonic
Form of space between pylons; an allegory
of the cave projected on a stone wall.

from ‘Sea burial’

Chris Holdaway’s debut collection Gorse Poems, is under the influence, and perhaps above the surface of gorse and the American poet Hart Crane. Gorse and poetry as spiky reading tracts. I stall on ‘gorse’ in the book’s title, and think invasive threat, eye-catching bloom, postcolonial and colonial narratives, textured realities.

The poetic fluency is made from cloud soft and mechanical spike. Ambiguity matters. Naming matters. In ‘Cirrus’, the waves are standing, and then they are shifty and hard to pin down. Poetry becomes tidal with personal bearings – and ‘tidal’ resonates as much as you like.

The poetic density resembles thickets on the page, tuned to a frequency of difficulty. If you think this, if you consider the collection as a series or accumulation of poetry thickets, then the reading paths are myriad. You push into light and you propel into dark. Smudging is inevitable. Sidetracks mandatory. Pauses essential.

Chris’s poetry delivers concentrated thickness, a thickness that sways between abstraction and physicality.

          Sit on this mountain of Eden and wonder how
Little sunrise resembles sunset. How clouds are
The ultimate test in geometry—their folding nets
The sun at different angles flat in the distance.
What bottom line for a suburban volcano; a gable
Long before any state bungalow unfurled upon
Blitzed shoulders. Nominal sovereignty—mission
-ary neologism—name badges with translations
The original never found. Crown mantle refusing
The title of extinction in a language whose empire
Makes centuries of millennia—patient castles of
Scoria by and large hillsides turned into the roads
Around hillsides.

from ‘Aucklandii’

At first I found the capital letters running down the left-hand margin resembled a wall, disconcerting, a way of displacing a poem as smooth flowing stream. But then I embraced the judderbar movement. And the capital letters nodded to different poetic traditions.

I am thinking Gorse Poems delivers the music of a present world in strife, of a past world in strife, of a future world in strife. And how we need such avenues of viewing and wondering. Gorse Poems, I am concluding provisionally, is a book of wonder, a collection of wander, a fertile undergrowth.

       I first fell in love with you tearing up
Gorse at a conservation site without permission
—a soldier away at the longest running
World War: deforestation. We’re all illicit
Gardeners I suppose. But rather than extract
This thorn from my hand I’m determined
To let it decompose inside me; choose to fill
My mouth with vinegar then suckle wounds.
Cobwebs form between my hat peak and glasses
—bridge of my nose—like art. How long will
Anatomical features stick in memory when
There’s nothing constant to trust in even
Geology so why the body? No functional diff
-erence between dense bush and landslide,—
Not enough sky to stop me turning to smoke
Alone contributing to the heat death of Earth.

from ‘Bioluminescence’

Titus Book page

Chris Holdaway co-founded both the poetry journal Minarets, and the award-winning publishing outfit Compound Press. He is the author of the chapbook HIGH-TENSION/FASHION (Greying Ghost, 2018) and his poetry has been published in various journals including Brief, Cordite, Cream City Review, Landfall, Oversound, Poetry NZ Yearbook, The Seattle Review and Shearsman Magazine.

Yellow & Blue

 

Night     and I go to frangipani trees
to locate what drifts through our open windows
     to undo the mystery that shakes the membrane
between worlds. Creamy the petals and yellow the heart.

I pick the one flower I can reach and come down off my toes into
a kind of falling through  
hot soles on black grass
and the brute broken notes
of war     

a frightened scudding
fall, the cane toad’s icy stare
I skitter up floating steps and through
the door

morning floods the lowlands and the levels, but not the eucalypts on the rise
           not their soft blue exhalation
            of flammable oils

 

Lynn Davidson

 

Lynn Davidson’s latest poetry collection Islander was published by Shearsman Books, Bristol,  and Victoria University Press, Wellington, in 2019. Lynn had a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2013 and a Bothy Project Residency in 2016.  She won the Poetry New Zealand Poetry Award, 2020, and was 2021 Randell Cottage Creative New Zealand Writer in Residence.  

Hailman, Leanne Radojkovich, The Emma Press 2021

Leanne Radojkovich’s short story collection is a satisfying and nuanced mix of redeeming light and dark notes. Scenes are stripped back to the potency of the unsaid, and yet people and place are exquisitely present through the power of detail. A woman talks with “pins her mouth”, while “liquid fabrics, shimmering falls of sequins” are nearby. The scene becomes physically luminous, the undercurrents contextualised.

The collection is invigorated by recurring themes. Grief and loss form a connective tissue. Birds, scents, buildings, the weather and flowers, physically anchor loss, rape, infidelity, inadequate parenting, parental death. Human glow versus human pain and loss. It is the physical world that is fleshed out, not the back stories behind the dark and the painful.

I savour Leanne’s collection as narrative tapestry, with its fine stitching and craft. There is remembering and forgetting, slants and prisms, epiphany and release.

For some reason that burst of yolks disturbed me. I left the café and continued along the road, registering all the changes with the strange double-vision sensation I couldn’t explain. I wasn’t sure if the time zone was affecting me, or whether it was my adult life coming up against my child life. I took note of everything: pigeons, nikau palms, the For Lease signs, an op shop with a naked one-legged mannequin. The fruit shop, grill rooms and womenswear had become a mini-mart, a Korean BBQ and a karaoke with private booths. The knitting shop which had once belonged to Nan now sold bric-a-brac. A taxidermied owl sat on a formica table staring out the window. My legs felt so heavy just then; I saw another time when the shop was lined with honeycomb shelving units stuffed with balls of wool, and knitted ‘garments’ as Nan called them, on satin-covered coat hangers.

from ‘Where the river meets the sea’

 

Perhaps I love this collection so much, because it is a book I feel. I feel what is present and I feel what is absent. I choose the word ‘prism’ to underline how the thematic hues spark and shift. You see life in sensory gleams. You experience life in pieces, yet there are underlying themes that are significant to us. The present forms a bridge to the past, the past forms a bridge to the present. Pockets of emptiness and loss are countered by an expanse of recollection and musings. It is a collection to lose yourself in and then discover multiple rewarding paths to your own bridges and connections. It’s narrative as nourishment.

All the rest home doors have name tags. Mum’s has a typo: Irina. Although Irena isn’t her born name – only she knows what that is, and she’s never told, never discussed the war. Says she was born the day she reached Wellington harbour with papers stating she was a ten-year-old Polish orphan. Dad said not to ask about the European years, and my brother and I never did. Now they’ve both died and there’s just me and Mum, and she’s in a rest home with a mis-spelled name on her door.

 

Leanne Radojkovich’s debut short story collection First fox was published by The Emma Press in 2017. Her work has been anthologised in Bonsai: Best small stories from Aotearoa New Zealand and the forthcoming Best Small Fictions 2021. In 2018 she won the Graeme Lay Short Story Competition and was a finalist in the Anton Chekhov Prize for Very Short Fiction. She was longlisted for the 2020 Short Fiction/University of Essex Prize and shortlisted for the 2020 Sargeson Prize. Leanne holds a Master of Creative Writing (First Class Honours) from AUT Auckland University of Technology. She has Dalmatian heritage and was born in Kirikiriroa Hamilton. She now lives in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, where she works as a librarian.

The Emma Press page

Leanne Radojkovich page

I think I’ll remember where the cleaning eye is but I know I won’t

This is how tired you get, the plumber says,
when you have two seventeen-year-old daughters
you can fall asleep
when one of them is driving.

And he says, I’ve been here before, scrolling his phone
so he can slice again through woven grass
remove a square and place it to the side
like my father burying the family dog.

As a young man he went to Canada, he tells me,
worked the ski fields, some words about how lucky
we are and then – sound of metal, ceramic –
he has found the cleaning eye

go inside and run the tap he tells me
in and out I go proud as a child.
Next, the machine
hosepipe of tightly coiled spring

feeds itself in
he is wearing the special glove
the moral of the story is
always wear the special glove.

Can you hear that? Cocks his head like a bird
and I want to say I can but he can, water
running free way along the section
deep underground he hears it.

The grass fitted back in place
grows lusher than before
and now I’m sitting up in bed
balanced on my head

the LED light that changes colour
I’ve set to purple so on the top trapdoor
of my head I feel the weight
of a perfect purple cube

this is the thing I know how to do
right now
to keep that weight centred
above the bony chambers of my skull

and then I am up
and at the mirror
– why?
For human company?

I am wearing every garment I have
woollen boots, pants splashed with bleach,
a long robe like a Biblical prophet and two hoods
as if the monk in me were clothed by the polar explorer in me.

I look across to my only friend, the butternut pumpkin
on his jaunty angle. Dry, dry mouth.
Cars pass as if they were waves.
I am alone.

Kate Camp

Note on the poem

I did a week-long online poetry retreat with Mark Doty and Ellen Bass in late April – because of the time difference I got up each day at 4am to listen to a craft talk from one of them, then we had writing time, and re-grouped at 9am for a three hour workshop, where we shared what we had written in the morning.

I was staying up at our bach so that I could be in “Total Immersion” which was the name of the course. As it happened I got covid at the same time, so my total immersion and legal isolation were combined, quite usefully. This poem originated in that slightly surreal setting.

I think it makes a nod to Jenny Bornholdt’s “Then Murray Came” – the friendly stranger who comes into your home and shares a little – maybe a lot – about their life, then disappears again. Bornholdt’s work has been such an important influence on me as it is on so many New Zealand poets.  

Kate Camp is a Wellington-born poet, author of seven collections from Victoria University Press: Unfamiliar Legends of the Stars (1998), Realia (2001), Beauty Sleep (2005), The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls (2010), Snow White’s Coffin (2013), The internet of things (2017) and How To Be Happy Though Human: New and Selected Poems (2020), co-published by Victoria University Press in New Zealand and House of Anansi Press in Canada. Her memoir, You Probably Think This Song Is About You, was published in 2022 by Te Herenga Waka University Press.