The Girl and the Poet Read Tea Leaves in Paris-Gore‘

Spilt tea settles between Formica
flicks of colour, flecks of leaves
turn on a red table.

In front of them a collusion of fate,
a collision of cups in a clumsy act,
the leaves of a script set out before them.

Butter sizzled and browned on a black griddle,
hoisted flags of wet washing hung
in a damp wait, a forgotten cigarette smoking
in the ashtray, the teapot cosy
in crocheted stripes.
On the red Formica table,
pikelets dripped the thin juice of melted syrup
down her fingers, onto her dress.

They change their table, order a new
pot of tea and a plate of hot pancakes.
The syrup melts thin and juicy, drips

down her fingers onto her dress. He gives
her a serviette to soak up the mess.
She folds it in half for her own plot.

Jenny Powell

                                                                                                                       

Three Siblings on the End of The World as They Know It

for Lyssa, Ruby & Michelle

Taane

to kick the night
into something
new

it feels good
for light to break in

Taawhirimaatea

someone makes a joke about
the great divorce
the wind doesn’t
find it very funny
doesn’t even crack a smile

they close their eyes and start to blow

Whiro

prefers the dark
and the warmth one day they will be
strong enough to
parent trap the
earth and the sky
back together

essa may ranapiri

essa may ranapiri (Ngaati Raukawa, Te Arawa, Ngaati Pukeko, Clan Gunn) is a person who lives on Ngaati Wairere whenua. Author of ransack and ECHIDNA. PhD student looking at how poetry by taangata takataapui engages with computer technology. Co-editor of Kupu Toi Takataapui | Takataapui Literary Journal with Michelle Rahurahu. They have a great love for language, LAND BACK and hot chips. Thanks as always goes to their ancestors, who are everything. They will write until they’re dead.

Renoir’s Bicycle, Michael Harlow, Cold Hub Press, 2022

Launch Notes

In the past, I’ve edited a couple of Michael Harlow’s poetry titles, but I’ve loved arriving to his new book like a house guest, rather than as one of the electricians or scaffolders tinkering during the final stages of its construction.

Renoir’s Bicycle is a mysterious, atmospheric, idiosyncratic, compelling collection. It seems to me that it’s often a celebration and delicate understanding of the private, interior life; the foundations of identity; the inner-scape of secrets, wishes, dreams, whimsy, reveries, desires, the unspoken, or the unrealised: all the hidden things that can either drive us — or block us; even make us deeply, psychologically unwell, if they’re unacknowledged.

I wanted to use Michael’s line ‘the imagination never lies’ as a mantra, for a while, after reading the collection; and also found myself writing down other phrases to pin to the corkboard in my study: ‘the rondeaux of astonishments’, say, or ‘rondels of light’; or ‘call it love, a lush wilderness in the mind’. Phrases that themselves seem like sun landing on a gem or a silver hook: phrases I wish I could wear, somehow: as earrings or lockets.

Several of the poems ring with authentic, detailed memory and leave a feeling of nostalgia, even when the life in the poem isn’t your own; some trace fleeting states of mind; others work through the comical switches and non-sequiturs of dream language.

They might outline the strange rituals and comforts humans invent for themselves to cope with the dark, with loss, and death:

She took a clean, white bone from her apron pocket,
rubbing it over the warts on both my hands.
     Then she said a prayer in Italian reciting it
backwards. And then she kissed the white bone,
crossing herself three times, and buried it in the earth;
where I could hear Father singing his heart out.
And my Sister too.

from ‘A song in the dark’

On the other hand, these short pieces might evoke a certain disposition, or lean on our responses, the way music does. By this I mean that despite the fact that the front cover of th book calls these prose poems, the music of their syntax, the emotions that the rhythms, hesitations, refrains, and prosody convey, seem to be as much a part of the meaning as any nuggety little quotable, extractable bit of, say, ‘advice’ or ‘belief’. The feeling of spell and flow, sound and song are powerful in Michael’s work.

I’ve talked about the interior life of the mind, and things that might feel a bit nebulous and vague, like music and mood — yet these pieces also call on tangible forms like the fable, or riddle, the tragi-comic skit; or the love song. Several struck me as strange, compressed and compelling psychological or crime case notes. (‘Round the bend’ and  ‘In the mood’, to name just two). All of them, in some way, even the skits or riddles, document and diagnose what it’s like to carry a self through all the puzzles and buffetings of time, and alongside other people with all their own quirks, attractions, and neuroses.

The collection is given a sense of weave or pattern in its repetitions of light, dark, music, birdsong and other motifs; and by lines that echo each other from poem to poem here (and even from earlier poems from Michael’s other collections). I came to think of those repetitions as perhaps like characteristic gestures by which we might recognise a loved one: the drawn out syllables in their way of sighing; the way they hold their elbows when they slide in their socks across the kitchen floor; that favourite, Fanta-coloured hat. Michael’s refrains are the fingerprints, the laughter lines, by which we know him.

I have at least ten particular favourites in the collection —  but perhaps the top top favourite is the poem ‘Unspeakable’— which is also a perfect and sorrowful micro story, as a character looks back on his life, and struggles with how to articulate his origins, his history, the losses that have, in a sense, brought him to where and who he is now. Poets might be more obsessed with language than the average punter, and the poem could be an analogy for the poet’s role, but in its suggestions of loss of faith, desecration of a trove of myth, separation from personal and cultural heritage, I think what it addresses is far broader and deeper.

I’m reproducing it here, with permission from Michael and his publisher, Roger Hickin of Cold Hub Press:

Unspeakable

Trying to write of the unspeakable.
In the white-washed room with
the broken statues of his ancestors.
At the oval table, the lamplight
drawing a circle. Inside it the cast
shadow of his hand and the stub
of a pencil. Trying to say something
that would take him back to the time
when he had no name in the streets
to call his own. And then he wrote
‘Every word is a crossroads.’

Michael’s work often makes me think about the lies we harbour. Reading it alongside Martin Shaw’s Courting the Wild Twin, Michael’s poetry also seems to be about the shadow selves we try to fling out the window, or run from, but end up having to live and reckon with in some way; the chimaera versions of reality we piece together as young children when we’re only told a portion of the truth going on for the adults in our lives, or when they push down too punitively on the wild in us; how after childhood we can both carry gleams of Eden at the back of our minds and yet be damaged by our parents’ own hidden wounds; how we can both mirror and yet distort those wounds at the same time. And yet, even all of this is paraphrase and abstraction from me, really. What the reader often comes across in Michael’s work are small, dramatic re-enactments of scenes that quietly suggest, rather than announce, this kind of psychic tunnelling. They’re scenes composed with a kind of melodic, sonorous touch, which means somehow we can lift and carry even the most tragic stories without smashing into stone fragments ourselves.

Cold Hub Press page

Emma Neale is the author of six novels,  six collections of poetry, and a collection of short stories. Her novel, Billy Bird (2016) was short-listed for the Acorn Prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and long-listed for the Dublin International Literary Award. Emma has received a number of literary fellowships, residencies and awards, including the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for a Distinguished Contribution to New Zealand Poetry 2020. Her first collection of short stories,  The Pink Jumpsuit (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2021) was long-listed for the Acorn Prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. The mother of two sons, Emma lives in Ōtepoti/Dunedin, where she works as a freelance editor.

Michael Harlow is one of New Zealand’s leading poets. He has published twelve books of poetry, including Cassandra’s Daughter (2005, 2006), The Tram Conductor’s Blue Cap (a finalist in the 2010 New Zealand Book Awards), Sweeping the Courtyard, Selected Poems (2014), Heart Absolutely I Can (2014), Nothing For It But To Sing (2016, winner of the Otago University Press Kathleen Grattan Award) and The Moon in a Bowl of Water (2019). Take a Risk, Trust Your Language, Make a Poem (1986) won the PEN/NZ award for Best First Book of Prose. Residencies he has held include the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship and the Robert Burns Fellowship. In 2014 he was awarded the Lauris Edmond Memorial Prize for Distinguished Contribution to New Zealand Poetry, and in 2018 he received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry.

Time

No time but the present. That’s not quite it, is it? No time like the present is the usual phrase. Do it now, in other words – don’t put it off. But, as H. G. Wells’s Time Traveller explains so clearly in the story, there’s no such thing as an instantaneous object: it must have duration, as well as height, length and breadth, in order to be perceived (let alone possessed) by us. Now is a moment which is over so quickly that it’s only perceptible in the rearview mirror, as a part of the long spool of experience unwinding behind us. So all we really have is the past – that is to say, the memory of what is already done and dusted. But do we have that, even? It’s no longer with us, so I’d have to say no – all we have, then, is that quavering moment, poised on “Time’s toppling wave,” in W. H. Auden’s phrase. But since we can’t perceive it till it’s over, you could argue that all we have is anticipation: the prospect of what the next moment will bring. You’d think that might make us a bit less greedy: less determined to collect the leavings of all these moments, past and to come, and more prepared to enjoy them to the uttermost. We’re only conscious for a small part of the time allotted to us: there’ll never be any more of it, so let’s dance. 

Jack Ross

 

Jack Ross is the author of eight works of fiction and six books of poems, most recently The Oceanic Feeling (2021). He was managing editor of Poetry New Zealand from 2014-2020, and has edited numerous other books, anthologies, and literary journals. He blogs here. 

Love poem as women’s work

There are so many tiny hitches, being a woman. I wake up and think, god, I have to wash my hair. And you know how that goes—I block the plughole again. Again, I check my breasts for lumps with conditioner running down my back. Amazing how I am destined always to find what I’m looking for. My horoscope app tells me I can be a world unto myself and I find that I already am.

Stopping in for two-for-one Tuesdays at the video store after doing the grocery shopping. Checking out something black-and-white and something for the kids, because we couldn’t afford the new release rack. What did we do before we binge-watched television? Everything was analogue then, the evenings ticking neatly to their closure. Just getting the children to bed seemed to take all night.

A blackbird flies into the window and lies twitching on the ground outside for several minutes as we watch from behind the glass. Next day it happens again, I sigh and take up the shovel. I try to forget that we live in a country of fitfully dozing volcanoes. Any of them could wake, any minute, and destroy us all. My nails are always catching on something as I stride out into the fault.

Sometimes I find myself looking at my children, nearly taller than me now, and thinking, I will be survived by them. Sometimes I find myself looking at the man I made them with and thinking, will we survive the raising of them.

Hannah Mettner

Hannah Mettner is a Wellington-based poet from Tūranganui-a-Kiwa. Her first collection, Fully Clothed and so Forgetful (VUP 2017), was longlisted for the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, and won the Jessie Mackay Award for best first book of poetry. With Sugar Magnolia Wilson and Morgan Bach, she is one of the founding editors of Sweet Mammalian. A new collection is forthcoming from THWUP in 2023.

The Etruscans  

In the British Museum
I love the Etruscans best.
I thought I would be simpatico with others

more genteel, less roughly hewed
as if from sandstone, not marble
deep thinkers, at it for years

by frozen water or under chandeliers
but these rough-hewn who loved
the present moment and pleasure

are the best this afternoon
when the darkness comes at three
the hour I imagine they dance.

Elizabeth Smither

Elizabeth Smither’s new collection, ‘My American Chair’ will be published in October/November by AUP and MadHat (USA).

mount st.

I am trying to love it, all of it, including the stomachaches and the scars that pucker on my legs. They say the world is poisoned but I feel like I just have to give it a go first, sample the arsenic-yellow paintbrush just to see if it might stain something bright. “That’ll be us,” my friend says when we pass a group of kids, picnic-lunched, sun-dizzy, at the local graveyard. I can’t tell which part he means: the picnic or the being-six-foot-deep-in-a-grave. He is an actor, not a poet, and doesn’t take kindly to being immortalised in a poem. His art is all glitter and stage lights and sweat. The moment all the sweeter for not being preserved. Verse erodes on the human tongue, and a tongue is nothing but a slab of meat ‒ which is to say, it will rot. But I just can’t help it. I want to taxidermy this crude human heart just so somebody down the line remembers how it felt. Oh, how it felt: too much, too much, always bursting with clotty red blood. There’s nothing in a graveyard that you can’t find somewhere in the gristle of a human. And nothing clawing in my mind that can’t be stopped by the sight of a wild sparrow-chewed blackberry, a window glowing golden at night, two friends trying on a silly hat. I keep them like sweets under my tongue, and when, as all flesh does, it rots ‒ there’ll be sugar spilling out into the grass.

Cadence Chung

Cadence Chung is a poet, student, and musician currently studying at the New Zealand School of Music. Her original musical In Blind Faith premiered at BATS Theatre in August 2022, and her debut poetry book anomalia was published by We Are Babies Press in April 2022. Her poetry takes inspiration from Tumblr text posts, antique stores, and dead poets.

Shine, there’s shine and starlings 
and I’m starting to wake up 
to a series of occasional 
poems, so far a series 
of one, the first in a procession 
I look forward to as the starlings, 
nesting as usual in the wall 
behind the fridge, start again with  
a new season of fledging  
and flights.  Yesterday  
Susan came over 
from next door with pastry 
that needed baking in our oven 
because hers has broken down and  
Lucinda was soon summoned to check 
on the state of the pastry while  
Robert was left on speaker-phone  
stoking his fire. He had been  
out gathering clay – but was it clay  
or had he been gathering mud, he  
wondered – to make a koauau  
to improve his poetry readings by 
layering in taonga pūoro.  I like 
his poetry readings because 
of the way they sound just like 
him talking and how  
talking to him on the phone is  
like a poetry reading I am invited 
to interrupt when occasionally 
I have something to add, a sudden  
flight, but poetry readings  
have taken on more and more shine  
and dimension these days with  
music and dancing, even in  
my dreams.  Last night, I dreamed   
of Robert’s koauau before waking  
to find a new series of occasional poetry  
launching on Poetry Shelf 
with Robert’s poem 
about gathering clay – but 
was it clay or was it mud, he  
wonders in the poem  
as he wondered on the phone, when 
he must have already been echoing  
the poem I read as an echo of the call, 
the poem he must have written  
before he talked to me about  
the mud, no the clay, and the koauau 
which is not yet made but one 
day will sound its sound  
into the air.  I feel it echo in me 
before its first sounding and  
I want to mark the occasion of the  
dream-sounding of the koauau and to mark 
the occasion too of the occasional  
poetry series launch, and the occasion of  
the clay-gathering and the pastry 
baking and the phone call  
and the reading of Robert’s poem,  
so I am writing an occasional  
poem of my own, this poem, if   
it is a poem, not just a muddy  
stream of words, probably needing  
music backing it, or back-up dancers 
feathered and shining, sounding  
a sound beyond the words, beyond 
the work, beyond the occasion, 
beyond the writing first thing  
in the morning, the new moon  
(Tirea now, we have passed Mutuwhenua) 
still quietly auspicious  
though invisible now as the sun  
rises, rises and turns, has been rising  
for a while now, rising as I write, the birds  
quietening and my shoulders  
stiffening, and I still  
in my pyjamas – I don’t  
even know the time.

Anna Jackson

Anna Jackson’s latest collection of poetry is Pasture and Flock: New and Selected Poems (Auckland University Press, 2018). She also recently released Actions and Travels, a book on poetry (Auckland University Press, 2022). She is based in Wellington.  

 

up the road: the top paddock

Dear Poetry fans

It’s almost a month since I celebrated the arrival of glorious poet, editor and mentor Chris Tse as our National Poet Laureate.

Time then to give a blog update. I feel like, as I just said on Twitter, I have emerged from the stables after the past months, and my mind is like a horse galloping cantering dancing around the paddock before settling in for a long nap. Glorious. A bone marrow transplant is such a refresher for the mind.

I have read so much this year – and in my time back home pretty much a sublime book per day. It got me musing on how I had to hunt hard for good children’s titles as so few of them had been reviewed in New Zealand. I was musing on how I love our local children’s book communities, what they are producing, and how in my experience children still love books: reading and writing, stories and poems! Against my better judgement, with my energy tank far from full, still coping with physical challenges, I decided to transform Poetry Box into a celebration hub for children’s books, for adults and for the young, all book categories. To challenge children to write poems. To challenge adults to share children’s books. To make as many connections as I can.

I am motivated to support our young readers and writers, to support our wonderful local children’s authors, and to showcase our fabulous librarians, booksellers, and publishers.

I am also doing my own secret writing projects because words are what hold me on an even keel at the moment – writing and reading make my heart sing and allow zero room for negativity or ‘if only’ or ‘why me?’ or glumness in my head. No matter what challenges I face.

But crazily madly a part of me also wants to wake up Poetry Shelf. And yes madness as this blog has always taken such a big bite of me. Not just the posts I assemble and write but all the communications and responses to requests – and even at times, aggressive emails. I can’t cope with demands at the moment, or deadlines, or even feeling like I am failing. When I don’t get to celebrate all your magnificent books, even when I have loved reading something, or when I have loved a book a little less, I feel bad. That becomes a form of failing for me. Not good.

So I am trying to make a plan where I can wake up Poetry Shelf just a tiny bit. What I want to do is occasionally review a poetry book I have loved or post a poem I have loved – or even post a notice now and then. Without rigid commitment or tight schedules or comprehensive coverage or worrying about what I don’t do.

So this is what I am thinking. I might never answer your emails or the phone. But slowly, step by step, I will start to shine little lights again on our fabulous poets and what they are doing. To share the way poetry is a source of joy and challenge, is balm and solace, refreshment – is re-engagement with our fickle and vulnerable and beloved world.

Watch this space!

Oh and keep an eye out for Roar Squeak Purr (my big anthology of animal poems by adults and children, out mid October thanks to the wonderful team at Penguin).

Love

Paula

PS I can’t tell you how much your cards and poem choices and the books (and chocolate!) you popped in the post have meant to me. I still have three envelopes to open for days when I feel fatigue and pain and glumness settling in. A thousand times thank you for your support and care and generosity. It has mattered so much.