Poetry Shelf noticeboard: call for submissions for climate change anthology
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Poetry Shelf connections: Grace Iwashita-Taylor’s ‘my heart is in my mouth’
my heart is in my mouth
my mama didn’t prepare me for this, but her illness did
a forced pause for the heartburn of a worlds over consumption
isolation, a foreign concept for villages of homes
with more bellies than the home-belly can house
but indeed the sky has stopped bleeding, is now naked and breathing
standing outside under nights blanket I try to sink my breath in tune with it
the mouths of the monsters to our own making are now unveiled, are you listening?
my heart is in my mouth
baited
&
breathing
Grace Iwashita-Taylor
Grace Iwashita-Taylor, breathing bloodlines of Samoa, England and Japan. An artist of upu/words led her to the world of performing arts. Dedicated to carving, elevating and holding spaces for storytellers of Te Moana nui a Kiwa. Recipient of the CNZ Emerging Pacific Artist 2014 and the Auckland Mayoral Writers Grant 2016. Highlights include holding the visiting international writer in residence at the University of Hawaii 2018, Co-Founder of the first youth poetry slam in Aoteroa, Rising Voices (2011 – 2016) and the South Auckland Poets Collective and published collections Afakasi Speaks (2013) & Full Broken Bloom (2017) with ala press. Writer of MY OWN DARLING commissioned by Auckland Theatre Company (2015, 2017, 2019) and Curator of UPU (Auckland Arts Festival 2020).
Poetry Shelf Monday poem: Brian Turner’s ‘Between Shingle Creek and Fruitlands’
Between Shingle Creek and Fruitlands
Cast your mind back to the first time you came this way,
the road windy, corrugated, dusty,
the surface mostly the colour of yellow clay, cuttings
stained with the leer of water seeping.
On the left the ever-ascending slopes,
the Old Man Range, white flecks
in blue gullies near the summit,
and your young old man wondering when
we’d ever get to Alexandra, your mum complaining
about ‘the blessed dust’, both of them
cursing the ‘wash-board surface’ and you thinking
about the number of times she told your father
that ‘it didn’t matter’ when it clearly did. And that
was the way it always was with them,
it is with you, it is, period. Until, you might say,
something happens that’s never happened before.
Like love came back and sent hate packing
never to return, and peace of mind arrived
like a dove from afar, decided to stay, and you
no longer dreamed of what might have been.
Brian Turner
Brian Turner was born in Dunedin in 1944. His debut collection Ladders of Rain (1978) won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. He has published a number of collections including Just This which won the NZ Post Book Award for Poetry in 2010. He has received the Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry (2009) and was NZ Poet Laureate (2003-5). He lives in Central Otago.
In April 2019 Victoria University Press published Brian’s Selected Poems, a hardback treasury of poetry that gains life from southern skies and soil, and so much more. When I am longing to retreat to the beauty of the south, I find refuge in one of Brian’s poems. The economy on the line, the exquisite images, the braided rhythms. Read a poem and your feet are in the current of a gleaming river, your eyes fixed on a purple gold horizon line. His poetry presents his beloved home in shifting lights, but the range of his work offers so much more.
Brian became an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to poetry and literature in the 2020 Queen’s Birthday Honours. He was to be the honoured writer at the Auckland Writers Festival year – he would have been on stage with John Campbell so am very sad to miss this event.
Poetry Shelf Noticeboard: National Flash Fiction Day 2020 online celebration!
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Poetry Shelf reading room: Rebecca Priestley’s Fifteen Million Years in Antarctica
Rebecca Priestley Fifteen Million Years in Antarctica Victoria University Press 22020
During lockdown I would pick up Rebecca Priestley’s Fifteen Million Years in Antarctica, read a few sentences and then carry them with me all day as everything felt awry. Little talismans of comfort yes, but I could never keep reading. I was looking through a tiny pinhole into the blinding white of Antarctica, Bill Manhire’s ‘Erebus Voices’ always coming back to haunt. So adrift. So terribly adrift.
This week the world still wobbles and it is impossible to find words to cover the anxiety and despair. My calendar is clear for the forseeable future, my blogs are back to steady transmission, I have fresh notebooks and anthologies underway, but I am finding it hard to function. There is a strong part of me that wants to sever all ties, to bake the bread and sow the seeds, to switch off social media and watch the wind in the manuka.
I have retreated to Rebecca’s book. It is nothing like I expected – and I now read in glorious stretches – because as much as this is a portrait of the wide white continent, it is a portrait of a woman writing and discovering, and of a planet under threat. How apt to be reading this now, how apt to be reading the words of a woman who exposes layers of anxiety, her multiple roles (academic, teacher, mother, partner, writer, traveller, human being).
This book is extraordinary because I travel to Antarctica to such an intense degree – I have never travelled like this in a book. It is as though I can taste and smell and touch an elsewhere through the sensory palette of the author, through Rebecca’s heart and mind engagements. When I put the book down I am dislocated. It’s like the Antarctica cold clings to me, like the danger and the beauty cuts into my skin. Like I can’t breathe. Like I am weighed down with a million clothes. But then I see the bush and the kereru and I start cooking dinner with the fire blazing and the music sweet in my ear.
Is there a word for this? The way a book can deposit you elsewhere so you are inextricably there?
I am cooking dinner and reflecting back on the self exposure, on the way Rebecca’s doubt and anxiety is not censored. How many books have been written with this erased, in order to be objective, rational, factual? I let a little doubt and personal admissions into Wild Honey but mostly I screened the humps and hurdles. I am thinking of the interwoven and complex narratives that layer up behind everything.
More than anything I am reflecting on the urgent need to care for our planet: on the way research is continuing to underline a need to make choices, both at a personal level and at global and national levels. Again this resonates profoundly at a time we cleared skies with our reduction in travel and consumption.
Having yearned and indeed tried to visit Antarctica from an early age, Rebecca takes three trips to Antarctica. The first with poet Alice Miller and the others with various scientists and students. Neville Peat’s review in Landfall traces the trips – I want you to read the book for yourself because this is a book of multiple discoveries. Self discovery, geological discovery, planet discovery – and the more you read the more you determine choices that need to be made. I am thinking too we can never take for granted what goes on behind the scenes – of writing a book, of travelling to Antarctica, of flying on a plane, of collecting data and examining precious samples, or writing a song, painting a painting, building a house. A home.
Fifteen Million Years in Antarctica is the perfect retreat when you are trying to plot your way forward in these pandemic times. I keep trying to talk about the book and find myself stuttering. I just sit in the chair drifting. Shut your eyes and picture the scene – with your bag packed and sugary snacks ready – and nestle into the exhilarating cold of snow and exhilarating heat of human and humane endeavour. Time to open my notebook. Time to bake the bread, and plant the seeds, and read a children’s book.
Rebecca Priestley is an associate professor at Victoria University of Wellington and director of the university’s Centre for Science in Society. Rebecca was science columnist for the NZ Listener for six years and is the author or editor of five previous books, the most recent of which is Dispatches from Continent Seven: An anthology of Antarctic science (2016). She is a winner of the Royal Society of New Zealand Science Book Prize (2009) and the Prime Minister’s Science Communication Prize (2016). In 2018 she was made a Companion of the Royal Society Te Apārangi. She has an undergraduate degree in geology, a PhD in the history of science and an MA in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters.
Victoria University Press page
Neville Peat’s Landfall review where he outlines the book
Poetry Shelf interview with poems and images: Eliana Gray’s Finland residency
For all of February I was lucky enough to be selected to undertake a month-long residency in a tiny town in the middle of Finland called Sysma. The only outcomes were that I had to write a report of my time at the end for the cultural institute that sponsors the residency. I went to continue working on my second collection but mostly just wanted to see what would happen once I was there. I was given a room in a giant house on the edge of town near Finland’s second largest lake with a piano and a sauna. For the majority of the time I shared it with just one other person, who became my dearest new friend. The incredibly talented poet from Germany: Ricarda Kiel. Below is a small and disjointed account of this time.
Did you have any epiphanies? Life or writing?
Both. Vigorously. The biggest epiphany had to do with my ideas of what ambition is, what constitutes work, how terrible capitalism is (as if we didn’t already know) and how I want to live my life. It sounds lofty, but can be summed up as this: Capitalism has fucked everything and jobs can kiss my ass. I’ve always enjoyed doing things that are valued weirdly by capitalism: youth work, music, poetry, sexual violence survivor support. Nobody wants to pay you to do these things. I used to think that the way to get around this was just to get very famous. You wanna do music Ellie? Well ok! You better be a popstar then. Ohh, you like doing poetry now do you? Well then, you better fucking hustle until you become the one poet that is allowed to make a living from poetry at any one time. I’ve now realised that, not only does doing the level of work required to become these things burn me the fuck out and strip me of my passion for whatever t is I’m doing. But also! I fucking hate attention! And I hate to be the centre of it! Even if by some weird reason I did become famous enough to make a living off my work I’d most likely become deeply unhappy as a result of it. I’d always thought that once I found my ‘area of work’ that working would no longer be a stress and a drain. That once I was employed in my preferred ‘career path’ I’d be happy. Big time lies my friends. Turns out it’s the working that sucks. My plan now is to work for as long as it takes to go bush with a goat and a veggie garden and then never be seen or heard from again.
Is there something you miss?
I miss everything to be honest. I miss waking up at six am and the soft blue light. I miss padding into the quiet kitchen before anyone else is up and staring at the snow with a cup of earl grey tea with oatmilk. I miss everything being made out of oats. I miss the white painted wood floors and the radiators and how the house we always warm even when outside was negative ten degrees. I miss watching the sunrise every morning. I miss noticing the changing trajectories and placings of icicles, ice and snow. I miss waking up to a fresh blanket of flakes and seeing where the birds had been. I miss how quiet and still everything feels underneath snow clouds. I miss how the snow refracts the light and absorbs the sound. I miss walking out onto the frozen lake everyday and dancing by myself. I miss the sense of romance that comes from playing by yourself in the snow. I miss the patterns ice makes from frozen water. I miss the woodpeckers and the hares. I miss seeing the stars from a different angle. I miss Marabou chocolate bars and cheap jars of lemon pesto. I miss the Finnish language and the adventure of a forgien supermarket. I miss Ricarda. I miss our quiet kitchen conversations and how we each needed a similarly small amount of human interaction. I miss walking with her to the abandoned house by the lake and trying to decipher the Finnish graffiti. I miss stargazing and crunching on the frosted moss. I miss the sheets of ice that push up onto the shores of Lake Paijanne and the blankets of pine needles. I miss getting naked and plunging my body beneath the icy water. I miss smiling as the blood rushes to the top of my skin. I miss the intense solitude of being in a place where no one knows you. I miss the comfort of an always warm, well-built house. Of knowing that Ricarda is just upstairs should I need her. That she’ll come knock on my door after nightfall and ask if I’m ok. That if I’m not we can talk about it and she’s so much smarter and calmer than me that it will always be ok. I miss nightly saunas. I miss sitting naked with my new friend in the sauna as we sweat and discuss German history and politics. I miss living in a culture that isn’t terrified of the naked body. I miss my wonderful new friend. I miss the way my body feels so boneless after a sauna that I fall directly asleep. I miss my life in Sysma. I miss Ricarda. I miss not having a job. I miss having my writing be a valued part of my time. I miss being able to live my life in a way that only pleases me. I miss everything.
What books did you take?
Head Girl – Freya Daly-Sadgrove
Mayhem #7- edited by Tracey Slaughter
This gender is a million things that we are more than – edited by essa may ranapiri
Sport 47– edited by Tayi Tibble
I spent a lot of time picking which books I would take with me. It was a balance between bringing necessary inspiration and ensuring that my backpack could be carried by my back.
I took Head Girl because Freya is a beautiful genius but also because I was working on a review of it for the Minarets website. This is how I justified bringing a book by a single author.
The rest of the selection are all tomes filed with a breadth of writers from Aotearoa that I’m obsessed with. It made me feel so grateful for the glut of exciting work in this country. That I could take three volumes and have with me more poetry from my favourite poets than I could get through is such a blessing.
A lovely happening that spun off from my carrying these books is that I was able to lend them to my residency mate and new sweet friend Ricarda, an incredibly talented poet from Germany.
A big big heartfelt thank you to all the beautiful poets in these volumes for inspiring me and keeping me company during this residency.
P o e m s
Pile of bodies like the dead
You look like spilled milk, celestial
Sitting on your bed in the early afternoon
We’ve been fucking for days
I passed out in the shower
Steam heat smothered my brain till it stopped working
slid me down the humid glass
Your hands all over
could have held me up
Against you, been fucking me for days
I wake up on the floor in the hallway and you’re yelling
dragging my hair back to the bedroom
I pretend you’re tender
Pretend I like it
not to notice you’re embarrassed cause
You know lonely men
shouldn’t fuck seventeen year olds
Airways unconstricted by age
we swallow up steam like we’re starving
And yeah I’m ready to try anything
look how hungry they’ve kept me
Like sitting at an empty birthday party
How pathetic to invite people
to enjoy yourself
Spend all your time stringing
balloons on a letterbox
Bag of homemade favours by the door
Everybody gets one
Except for you
new piece
I feel so fucking………mature
Fragrant flesh lobed and so
Ripe, it’s a little embarrassing
But so sweet!
The earnest growth of sugars
Both natural and bred
My body a sum of traits innate
And selected, curation not mine
And still authentic
How I swell
My pith extending
Cell walls expanding
Strain creating bitterness, as a warning
A balance to the sweetness, again
How beautiful I’ll be when I stop
Reach my peak of consumption
Aesthetic requirements fulfilled
Skin appropriately thickened, still porous
Still able to be hooked
Gripped between forefinger and thumb
Penetrated, peeled back
They’ll marvel at my outside
Puckered yes, but how shiny!
My skin: a good thickness
My pith present, inoffensive
But providing some necessary ‘grit’
I am beautiful
They tell me I’m beautiful
They hold me in their hands
They press me to their mouths
I am waiting for them to bite down
‘The Top Ten Types Of Boys You’ll Date In College’
Shoes scraping the carpet thread
Bare. Your eyes, heavy-lidded
Rounded, like the cushions
Your skate shoes are dirty
Caked with dirt
You talk to me about Heidegger and
I couldn’t give less of a shit
Temporality temporalizes as a future
which makes present in the process of having been
You say, passing the bong as if its
The idea itself. As if we
Heavy-lidded, were so present
as to be dust. Settled
On everything without notice
Run our fingers through the air
And come up coated
You’re still looking at me
You’re still looking at me and
I can feel it
Like how you say you can feel it
When I roll my eyes behind your
Back but I know you’re lying because
I only ever roll my eyes
When you leave
The room
You’re cool
You’re dust
You’re reclusive
But you have so many FRIENDS
At least a thousand by my last count
Everyone is one of your boys
Understanding of being is itself a determination of being
You say
passing the bong
As if this isn’t
a worse version
Of the same joke ten minutes before
We still laugh, of course
We wouldn’t want you to be
Uncomfortable
Above your head there’s a poster
Tits out. BIG tits. Red bikini
Hair flying! Straddling
A motorcycling! She’s
Tougher than you, she’s
Seen some shit, man
I smile at her, but keep my lids low
So it still looks
Like I’m smiling
At you
Eliana Gray is a poet from Ōtepoti. They like queer subtext in teen comedies and not much else. They have had words in: SPORT, Mimicry, Minarets, Mayhem and others. Their debut collection, Eager to Break, was published by Girls On Key Press (2019) and they are the 2020 writer in residence at both Villa Sarkia, Finland and St Hilda’s Collegiate, Ōtepoti.
Poetry Shelf noticeboard: online launch of Kevin Ireland’s new collection tonight at 6 pm
Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize 2020
Poetry Shelf connections: Two poems from Kerrin Sharpe
maple moon
you text us photos garden to plate
baby beetroot out of isolation
tides of beetroot where the moon fed
turned them red clusters of beetroot
in scarlet jackets like foxy
waiting waiting at our window
we text you photos
of the maple planted at your birth
text haiku autumn breeze/flames of leaves/
warm an empty sky/ and misty morning/
her leaves light/the whole house/ and pray
when the world repairs its lungs
with the business of breathing
the rising sea between us
becomes a red bridge
on a night angry enough
the shadows of Hokitika
tussle with the sea
they fall rise s l i d e to shore
drift like wood
whistle like bone
whir like green
dance like stone
some limp to the memorial
clock tower and find their names
some escape the wind’s lasso
and rattle the smoko window
of the old milk factory
others their backs bent
like harakeke wrestle rain
to reach the Hokitika River
and prise open muddy seams
of consecrated water
to release those miners
long drowned on boats
in the terrible rush
long drowned with dreams of gold
in the rage of a bridgeless river
now their faces are rock
now their faces are ice
the shadows weave a northern path
of rough layered schist
opening the mouth of the river
returning their breath to the sea
Kerrin Sharpe
Note from Kerrin:
The first, maple moon, was inspired by the lockdown and the practice around my neighbourhood (and elsewhere around the world of course) of people putting their soft toys in the window for children (and others like me!) to get pleasure from as we went on our daily walks. I put a large fox standing straight and tall in my window and watched as children walking by pointed up at it! It was wonderful.
The second, on a night angry enough, was written awhile back when I was staying on holiday in Hokitika on the West Coast. It was an angry, stormy night and from our hotel window I thought I saw figures rising out of the stormy sea outside. It still makes me shiver at the memory!
Kerrin has published four collections of poetry (all with Victoria University Press). She has also appeared in Best New Zealand Poems and in Oxford Poets 13 (Carcanet Press UK) and POETRY (USA) 2018. She is currently working on a collection of poems around the theme of snow, ice and the environment.
Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Take time out with poets honoured today
Queen’s Birthday Honours
Warm congratulations to three poets receiving honours today: Tusiata Avia, Cilla McQueen and Brian Turner. A reflection of the extraordinary work they have gifted Aotearoa.
You can hear Karyn Hay in conversation with Cilla McQueen today at 9.15 on RNZ National.
Tusiata Avia reads ‘Massacre’
I review Cilla McQueen’s sumptuous Poeta: selected and new poems Otago University Press 2018
Two bird poems from Brian Turner
Two other writers have been honoured, with both Elizabeth Knox and Tessa Duder becoming Companions of the New Zealand Order of Merit. Two women whose work has also gifted much on so many levels.
Congratulations to Naomi McCleary who has done much to make Going West Literary Festival such a success.
A toast to you all!
Full honours list here
NZ Poetry Shelf 