The Midnight Plane: Selected and new poems, Fiona Kidman
Otago University Press, 2025

It’s the same again this weekend, wild weather,
rain and delays, and a long way south, suspension
on a cloud, books take you everywhere.

 

from ‘On small planes’

Reading your way through the poetry collections by a particular poet can be such a rewarding experience. I recently read Chris Tse’s poetry books and felt utterly moved. I sat at the kitchen table thinking this is why I write my own poems, and read, review and blog all-things poetry. Poetry is the ultimate prismatic experience for heart and mind, eye and ear. It is sustenance, it is challenge, beauty and balm, multiple-toned music. It is deep-rooted aroha.

For a number of years, I read and researched every possible woman poet who had published poetry in Aotearoa. It was illuminating, heartbreaking and felt utterly necessary to shine a light on the women who have written and published poems for over 150 years, to question their scant representation in anthologies, in publishing and award lists, in public appearances. The visibility of and attention paid to women poets has changed to a remarkable degree, but I am always suspicious of any critique or review that promotes a hierarchy of style or subject matter, that dismisses the domestic, the personal, the tricky-and-impossible-to-define feminine.

In the 1970s, women poets were finally catching the attention of readers. In an interview with me in 2016, Fiona mentioned some of the women who were publishing poetry and performing at venues together: Lauris Edmond, Elizabeth Smither, Marilyn Duckworth, Meg Campbell and Rachel McAlpine among others. A handful of women joined the young men countering the poetry traditions that had preceded them with calls for the new, but others, such as Fiona, advanced the rewards of the domestic in poetry. Rachel made it into Big Smoke: NZ Poems 1960 – 1975 (AUP, 2000), while Fiona, with her attention to the domestic, did not. Yet in my view, both women liberated words for women, inspired women to write. Like Fleur Adcock and Rachel, Fiona has favoured the first person pronoun. It is personal and intimate, and I feel like I’m sitting in the same room as the poem, entering the terrain of autobiography. The relationships, the acute observations and anecdotes, carry me within and beyond a domestic setting.

In her preface to The Midnight Plane, Fiona tellingly writes: ‘I am a plain poet; some critics would describe my early work as ‘confessional’, others as ‘domestic’. Perhaps I was such a poet, and at heart still am, although I am not given much to such labels. What I know is poetry still has the power to shake the heart.” And that is exactly what Fiona’s poetry does for me. It shakes my heart.

Let’s listen to Fiona read:

Photo credit: Robert Cross

‘The midnight plane’

‘What I do’

Otago University Press has gathered a selection of poems from Fiona’s books, along with some new ones. The beautiful production, with a hard cover, lovely paper stock, and a gorgeous cover, acknowledges the work as a national taonga.

Fiona’s debut collection, Honey & Bitters (1975), is one of my all-time favourite poetry collections. It is a series of both actual plantings and memory plantings, a matrix of movement and stillness, physical views and revealed feelings, where what is not said rubs alongside what is said. The writing is agile, surprising, holding out the rhythm of slow-paced observation. I read a poem, I stall and have to read it again, and again.

In the field the sheep are scattered like hail,
this pale dun landscape with small
quaint cottages we’ve driven miles to find, for sale,
near trees

whose scribble branches wait for spring,
scratch barren messages across the sky.
But a man, a boy, a girl and I
are here.

from ‘Wairarapa Sunday’

The poem, ‘Kohoutek’ is dedicated to the comet, but draws our attention to the preciousness of each day, to the ‘voyages of discovery’ in a new house, to the trees bursting in green, and the sunlight patches. Fiona writes: ‘These are the miracles of the everyday’, and this for me is a miniature poetry manifesto. It is one I hold close to my heart, sitting at the kitchen table where I have written so many books, celebrated so many books by other poets, shared so many meals.

I like the way you stand, fingers trailing
over the back of a chair before a velvet
curtain looped with braid, your eyes fierce
and direct, a hat like a guardsman’s
helmet tilting on your brow, a telltale
ruffle of lace at the wrists
because you are my grandmother
fluted silver vases stand poised
above my bookshelves
because you are my grandmother
I wear old fine gold and mother-of-pearl
because, because of this,
I wear this hair shirt of guilt
the settlers’ shame

from ‘Speaking with my grandmothers’

In Where Your Left Hand Rests (2010), another collection I adore, there is a poem I would love to post in its entirety on Poetry Shelf. ‘Speaking with my grandmothers’, is a poem that threads past and present, that forms a braid of spike and silk as Fiona reflects upon the grandmother ancestors she never met, and the stolen land she stands upon. Here are the final lines: “Tonight I want to sit quietly by this window. There is so / little silence, so many voices.” Ah, we can take this moment and hold our line of grandmothers close, and for some of us, the stolen land we stand upon.

This Change in the Light (2016) is another go-to collection for me, with its haunting portrait of Fiona’s mother in ten sonnets, its travels from Paris to Provence to Singapore to a cancer ward. The poem, ‘What I do’, is one I could pin to the wall; it navigates mornings devoted to writing books, afternoons to preparing food, suggesting the mornings may not be cut and dried like food, but how love seeps though the whole day. It feels like I see myself in the poem’s mirror, with my endless hoard of cookbooks, my love of cooking and writing every single possible day. And then, and then movingly then, the exquisite final poem, ‘So far, for now’, a loving tribute to her beloved husband Ian. I am holding this poem to my heart. I wanted to share lines but it felt wrong to take a handful out, you need to read it in full, and let it unfold in you over the course of a day.

On the cover of the book, a photograph shows Fiona sitting in her lounge looking out the window at the Wellington sky and harbour. A perfect image for poetry that embraces both lounge and sky, that depends upon slow observation and the dailiness of living, a mind that goes travelling. Sitting at my kitchen window looking out across the ever-changing expanse of bush and sky, as I pick my way along a road thatched with spike and sweetness, I am crying, strangely crying, because somehow, I know that for so many of us, poetry is a gift, a gift we do and a gift we share. Fiona’s poetry winds about me, I gather it in, the shifting lights and the vital substance, knowing in her work there is always heart, her fingers on the pulse of humanity, and that is why the poetry of Fiona Kidman matters so very much.

Dame Fiona Kidman is a poet, fiction writer and memoirist. She has also written for the screen industry. Her internationally published work has won numerous prestigious literary awards, and her honours include a damehood (DCNZM), an OBE and the French Legion of Honour (La Légion d’Honneur). She lives on a cliff top in Wellington.

Otago University Press page