Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Launch of Ash Davida Jane’s How to Live with Mammals
Leave a reply
Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Nina Mingya Powles on the radio and live at Vic Uni
Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Poems by Cleaners event
We’re in the Auckland Writers Festival! The amazing Mele Peaua will lead a team of four writers from Somewhere a cleaner, introduced by co-writer Janice Marriott. If you’re in Auckland, Saturday 15 May 5pm, join us.
You don’t need to go to Auckland! Several writers from the book join cleaner/musician Don Franks for an hour in the Aro Valley Community Centre. Sunday 28 March, 4.00pm.
Also an open mic for poems about cleaning/cleaners. Coffee and cake (bring your own cup), koha.
Poetry Shelf Review: Eamonn Marra’s 2000ft above Worry Level
Eamonn Marra, 2000ft above Worry Level, Victoria University Press, 2020
Have you read Eamonn Marra’s 2000ft Above Worry Level yet? It is so good. It is so real it hurts, because there you are in the edginess of life that is seldom smooth sailing, that offers up edges and grime and spikes and unspeakable challenges and making do and doing the things you need to do to get through the day. I laughed out loud and I winced and I almost cried and then I laughed out loud again and I just didn’t want to put the book down. The sentences are freshly flowing, the dialogue pitch perfect. The voice of the main character feels so real I feel like I am intruding into the story. A gatecrashing eavesdropping reader who wants everything to go ok. The bloke is just out of university and is trying to find a job, trying to hold down a room in a flat, trying to keep his mind in balance with anti-depressants, keeping in touch with his ex-girlfriend who he likes more than any other subsequent date. painting his mother’s fence slower than a snail with the help of top tips from a well-meaning neighbour. He is trying to write fiction in between the daily demands, and when his ex-girlfriend complains his short story is based on her, he claims it as fiction. Who knows whether fiction draws on real life and real life collapses into fiction in this kaleidoscopic rollercoasting 3D realism!
The novel is episodic, collaging pieces of a life, scenes from childhood alongside university days and post university, and it comes together as glorious conjunctions with its adhesive threads. Think persistence, think daily detail, what gets eaten, what gets agonised over, what gets said and what doesn’t get said, think humour and everyday tedium and enduring family attachments. The writing is almost like stream of conscious, yet it is sweetly crafted in its poise, its delicious ease. And if you crash against the dark, especially a psychological dark and the awkwardness of fitting in and making ends meet, if you do feel affected by this, and I sure did, you also absorb hope and light and rejuvenation. I started reading the book when an incomprehensible and insulting tweet about two new zealand poets really pissed me off. Reading 2000ft above Worry Level got me back on track and I just thought yes! This sublime self-transcending reading experience is why books matter.
Eamonn Marra is a writer and comedian. He was born and raised in Christchurch and now lives in Wellington. He has a masters degree from the International Institute of Modern Letters. Eamonn’s shows include Man on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (2014), Respite (2014/2015), I, Will Jones (2016–18), and Dignity (2018). 2000ft Above Worry Level is his first book.
Victoria University Press page
Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: Emma Neale’s ‘Indicator’
Indicator
All through thin winter
a single yellow-lipped flower
hangs like honeydrip
from the tip of a twig
on the kowhai outside our window.
Now and then a wax-eye
or an eerily silent tūī slips by,
suckles there, each visit so swift
we soon guess the teat’s run dry:
no languid glug of nectar
like those summer-dusty kids,
canter-and-cartwheel parched
at the schoolyard drinking fountain,
when their every mouthful sounds
a grateful, gulping hum
like the rev of a warming engine.
Through ice, hail and fog
this blossom that grips the brink
seems bitter, withered emblem
of what is not; of tense lockdown;
of what cost; futures lost,
the tired earth’s toxin-clogged, wild demise
I even cuss some fossicking birds
as if they’re mad deniers —
boom-times are gone.
Can’t you just goddamn leave
that last poor scrap alone?
Then one cold but blueing morning
I lift the kitchen blind
wait for coffee to send its sun
through the hoar-frost of sleep
to see the whole tree
buckets with its own bright rain
a thousand beak-mouthed flowers
sing the aria of themselves
as if that one yellow blossom
in its winter death clench
was the stoic pilot light
that set the whole tree ablaze
a Kali-armed candelabra
peacocking with gold —
yet this silken dart and glitter
of unbidden happiness —
now grown so unfamiliar —
is it dangerous?
What have I turned my back on
for that moment
it takes a small child
to rush before a speeding van,
slip into an unfenced pool,
for some link in the web to fray
by the time night flows over the tree
as dark as the inside of a body?
Emma Neale
Emma Neale is a Dunedin based writer and editor. The author of 6 novels and 6 collections of poetry, Emma is the current editor of Landfall.
Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Semira Davis’s Boosted campaign
Semira Davis is currently running a Boosted campaign and looking to spread the word beyond her own social circle.
The campaign is to publish a narrative sequence of poetry that was Runner-Up in the 2019 Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award.
It’s a story about the grief of losing a sibling to incarceration.
Here is a link to the project.
Poetry Shelf noticeboard: NFFD 2021 is open through 30 April
NFFD 2021 is open through 30 April!
Submit your best 300-word stories!
See an interview with the judges for the 2021 competition: Rachel Smith speaks with Diane Brown and Paula Morris.
Coming soon: an interview with youth judge Kerry Lane.
The youth competition moved in 2020 to an international competition with free entry – curated by the youth journal fingers comma toes. All youth writers welcome!
Note that the youth comp, for ages up to 19, has no competition fee and is international! Please share the news!
Upates have been posted for the international 2021 MICRO MADNESS competition – opening in April! Judges this year are Alison Glennyand Grant Faulkner. Micro information, and last year’s winners, are here.
NFFD events will take place 22 June 2021 in Auckland, Christchurch, Dunedin, Northland, Waikato and Wellingtonwith international online events as well.
Poetry Shelf noticeboard: The launch of ‘Kate Edger: The life of a pioneering feminist’ by Diana Morrow.
Otago University Press warmly invites you to celebrate the launch of Kate Edger: The life of a pioneering feminist by Diana Morrow.
In 1877, Kate Edger became the first woman to graduate from a New Zealand university. She went on to become a pioneer of women’s education in New Zealand and worked tirelessly to mitigate violence against women and children. Diana Morrow tells the story of this remarkable woman’s life and, in the process, provides valuable insights into the role of women social reformers in our history and Edger’s place within a distinctive strand of Christian feminism.
When: 6pm, Wednesday 7 April
Where: The Women’s Bookshop, 105 Ponsonby Road, Auckland
RSVP to publicity@otago.ac.nz by 1 April
*Please note, this event will only take place if Auckland is at Alert Level 1
NZ Poetry Shelf 