Poetry Shelf connections: two poems from Eliana Gray

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Regent’s Canal

 

We push a trolley

Into the canal

Just to watch it sink

Slowly, then all at once

Like they talk about love:

Swallowed, completely

Clear toxic liquid

Opaque

 

Both the nature of desires

And love, yes, love is viscous

Festooned with trash

Bumping up by the locks

In the waterway

Single use plastics

Brushing hands with

Twist ties, bloated crusts and

 

Isn’t it interesting?

How we’ll steal something

Just to break its purpose

Hoarding mentality

But sideways, emotional

 

The thrill of a sharpened crayon

The compulsion for bluntness

For rubbing, hard

On a perfect ending

 

Are we trying to make ourselves soft?

Trying to fit

The world to our curvature?

Action’s nothing more than a

Mechanism of coping

 

And what does that say about Romance, hmmm?

 

Supermarket nightwork:

Pigeons looking fat and sensuous

Moonlit tension

Pilfered fizz and roses

Stolen, from a discarded bench

In Victoria Park

 

Push me dangerously

Close to the water

Make me believe

You’ll tip me in

 

We’ll laugh a little too

Tight, too high, too fast

Like, of course we know

You don’t mean to hurt me

But the back wheel

Has always been faulty

(as stolen trolleys tend to be)

Seems like it’s locking

Skidding, sideways, again

 

What if it flies out of your hands?

What if it just . . .  keeps skidding

And my feet, stuck under

Crossed legs, my scarf, my

Jacket too bulky for sudden moves

 

What if I try to jump

And it just . . . .  tips?

Crack my head against the metal

Concrete, what if the wheels

Are already over the edge?

My centre of gravity not heavy enough

 

What if it teeters, expectantly

On the edge of the canal

And you’ve finally decided

To reach your hand to steady

But your balance is off and

You push

 

How long would you stand?

Watching. My head, my

Hands, beneath the water

Viscous fill my lungs

Swallow me like the trolley

 

 

All I want is to be absolutely perfect forever

 

I want to live like an ornamental apple

Protected from consumption

Slick plastic blush red perfect

Looking so delicious

Resting, in a crystal bowl

 

Beautiful and

An irresponsible use of plastic

Something that could be art but isn’t

And not in the sense that ‘everything is art’

Because it isn’t

 

A perfectly useless representation

of something so cliche

It feels almost overwhelming

 

A stand in for temptation

with no intention or ability

To be so desirous

 

No perfumed smell

no golden hanging from the garden

no pollination no rotting no flies

 

Is it still stasis

if you’ve reached your final destination?

And how long exactly

Is a sense of finality satisfying?

 

Anticipation and anxiety are a Venn diagram

with approximately one circle

The only way to soothe them

is to complete the task

 

I want to live like an ornamental apple

Slick red plastic constant state of blush perfect

The promise of forever

A lifetime sabbatical

Researching absolutely nothing

 

Eliana Gray

 

 

Eliana Gray is a poet from Ōtepoti, Aotearoa. 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 in 2020 they will be both a writer in residence at Villa Sarkia, Finland and Artist in Residence at St Hilda’s Collegiate, Ōtepoti.

 

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf congratulates the Ockham NZ Book Award winners – and showcases the poetry

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Warm congratulations to all winners! This is a year where well-deserving and much-loved books have taken the winning spots – each book is worthy of a place on our book shelves.

I look at this list (and indeed the shortlists) and it reminds me that NZ literature is in good heart. These are heart books. These are books born from love and labour, by both inspired and inspiring authors and publishers.

The Award’s poetry section  was a drawcard for me. I loved each shortlisted finalist so much, but I leapt for joy at the kitchen table to see Jane Arthur win Best First Book and Helen Rickerby win Best Book.

Yes, some extraordinary books did not make the longlists let alone the shortlists – but this is time to celebrate our winners.

I toast you all with bubbles and bouquets and can’t wait to see what you write next.

Right now we need to support our NZ book communities, so I strongly advocate putting an Ockham winner in our pile, the next time we visit our local booksellers.

In these strange Covid times my email box has has never been so full of poems – we’re making sour dough and we’re writing poetry, and it has been such a connecting comfort.

Long may we cherish poetry in Aotearoa.

 

My toast to the Poetry Winners:

 

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Craven, Jane Arthur, Victoria University Press, 2019 Best First Poetry Book

 

 

I have a broth at a simmer on the stove.

Salty water like I’ve scooped up some ocean

and am cooking it in my home. Here,

gulp it back like a whale sieving plankton.

Anything can be a weapon if you

swallow hard enough:

nail scissors, a butter knife, dental floss,

a kindergarten guillotine, hot soup,

waves, whales.

from ‘Circles of Lassitude’

 

 

Jane Arthur’s debut collection Craven inhabits moments until they shine – brilliantly, surprisingly, refractingly, bitingly. Present-tense poetry is somewhat addictive. With her free floating pronouns (I, you, we) poetry becomes a way of being, of inhabiting the moment, as you either reader or poet, from shifting points of view.

It is not surprising it has won Best First Book at 2020 the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

The collection title references lack of courage, but it is as though Jane’s debut collection steps across a line into poetic forms of grit. This is a book of unabashed feeling; of showing the underseam, the awkward stitching, the rips and tears. Of daring to expose. The poems are always travelling and I delight in every surprising step. You move from taxidermy to piano lessons to heart checks and heart beats, but there is always a core of exposed self. And that moves me. You shift from a thing such as a plastic rose to Brad Pitt to parental quarrels. One poem speaks from the point of view of a ship’s figurehead, another from that of Constance. There is anxiety – there are dilemmas and epiphanies. The poetic movement is honeyed, fluid, divinely crafted – no matter where the subject travels, no matter the anxious veins, the tough knots.

An early poem, ‘Idiots’, is like an ode to life, to ways of being. I keep crossing between the title and the poem, the spare arrival of words punctuated by ample white space, elongated silent beats that fill with the links between brokenness, strength and pressing on.

 

Idiots

I’ve known people who decided

to carry their brokenness like strength

idiots

I’m a tree

I mean I’m tall, I sway

I don’t say, treat me gently

No¾I say, cool cool cool cool

I say, that really sucks but I guess I’ll survive it

or, that wind’s really strong

but so are my roots, so are my thighs

my branches my lungs my leaves my capacity to wait things out

I can get up in the morning

I do things

 

 

I heard Jane read for the first time at the Sarah Broom Poetry Prize session at the Auckland Writers Festival in 2018. Her reading blew my socks off, just as her poems had delighted American judge, Eileen Myles, and it was with great pleasure I announced her as the winner. Eileen described Jane’s poetry: ‘poetry’s a connection to everything which I felt in all these [shortlisted] poets but in this final winning one the most. There’s an unperturbed confident “real” here.’ In her report, Eileen wrote:

The poet shocked me. I was thrust into their work right away and it evoked the very situation of the poem and the cold suddenness of the clinical encounter, the matter of fact weirdness of being female though so many in the world are us. And still we are a ‘peculiarity’ here and this poet manages to instantly say that in poetry. They more than caught me. I like exactly how they do this – shifting from body to macro, celestial, clinical, and maybe even speaking a little out of an official history. She seems to me a poet of scale and embodiment. Her moves are clean and well-choreographed & delivers each poem’s end & abruptly and deeply I think. There’s a from the hip authority that inhabits each and all of these poems.

I am revisiting these words in view of Craven’s multiple poetry thrills. So often we talk about the way a poem steps off from the ordinary and blasts your heart and senses, if not your mind, with such a gust of freshness everything becomes out of the ordinary. This is what happens with Craven. A sense of verve and outspokenness is both intoxicating and necessary:

 

I’m entertaining the idea of never being silent again,

of walking into a room and shouting, You Fuckers Better Toe the Line

like a prophylactic.

from ‘Sit Down’

 

 

A sense of brittleness, vulnerability and self-testing is equally present:

I’ve been preoccupied with what others think again.

I’ve been trying not to let people down.

Nights are not long enough.

Lately there’s been more sun than I would’ve expected.

I keep the weather report open in its own tab and check it often.

 

From ‘Situation’

The movement between edge and smooth sailing, between light and dark, puzzle and resolution, and all shades within any dichotomy you might spot – enhances the reading experience. This is a book to treasure – its complexities and its economies, its confession and its reserve. It never fails to surprise. I am delighted Jane read as part of my Poetry Shelf Live session at Wellington’s Writers Festival in March. It was a divine reading.

 

Victoria University Press page

Poetry Shelf Monday poem: ‘Situation’ by Jane Arthur

Poetry Shelf audio spot: Jane Arthur reads ‘Snowglobe’

Poetry Shelf: Conversation with Sarah Broom Prize finalist, Jane Arthur

 

 

 

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How to Live, Helen Rickerby, Auckland University Press, 2019 Best Poetry Book

 

Helen reads ‘How to live through this’

 

 

When that philosopher said life must be lived forwards

but can only be understood backwards

he was not thinking of me

I have lived all kinds of lives

from ‘A pillow book’

Helen Rickerby’s latest poetry collection How to Live is a joy to read. She brings her title question to the lives of women, in shifting forms and across diverse lengths, with both wit and acumen. Like many contemporary poets she is cracking open poetic forms – widening what a poem can do – as though taking a cue from art and its ability both to make art from anything and in any way imaginable.

Reading this book invigorates me. Two longer poems are particularly magnetic: ‘Notes on the unsilent woman’ and ‘George Eliot: a life’. Both function as fascination assemblages. They allow the reader to absorb lyrical phrases, humour, biography, autobiography, insistent questions. Biography is enlivened by such an approach, as is poetry.

 

6.   It seems to me that poetry usually begins with the self

and works its way outwards; and the essay, perhaps, starts

outwards and works its way in towards the self.

from ‘Notes on the unsilent woman’

 

Thinking of the silent woman I am reminded of Aristotle’s crown of silence that he placed upon she. I then move across centuries to Leilani Tamu’s poem ‘Mouths Wide Shut’ where she sits on a bus with her mouth taped shut silent. The skin-spiking poem (and the protest) considers silence in the face of racism. Even now, even after the women’s movements of the 1970s and the explosion of feminism and feminisms over ensuing decades, men still talk over women, still dismiss the women speaking (take women in power for example, or a young woman at the UN challenging climate-change inertia).

What Helen does is remind us is that silence is like snow – it is multi-hued and deserves multiple names and nuances: ‘Silence isn’t always not speaking. Silence is sometimes / an erasure.’

Ah the stab in my skin when I read these lines. In ‘Notes on the unsilent woman’ Helen draws me in close, closer and then even closer to Hipparchia of Maroneia (c 350 – c 280 BC).

5.    But I do have something to say. I want to say that she

lived. I want to say that she lived, and she spoke and she

was not silent.

 

Helen gathers 58 distinctive points in this poem to shatter the silence. Sometimes we arrive at a list of women who have been both audible and visible in history, but who may have equally  been misheard, misread and dampened down. At other times the poet steps into view so we are aware of her writing presence as she records and edits and makes audible. In one breath the poet is philosopher: ‘Silence might not be speaking. It might be / listening. It can be hard to tell the difference.’ In another breath she apologies for taking so long to bring Hipparchia into the picture.

Elsewhere there is an ancient warning: ‘”If a woman speaks out of turn her teeth will be / smashed with a burnt brick.” Sumerian law, c. 2400 BC.’

A single line resonates with possibilities and the ‘we’ is a fertile gape/gap/breathing space: a collective of women, the poet and her friends, the women from the past, the poet and I: ‘There are things we didn’t think we could tell.’ Yes there are things we didn’t think we could tell but then, but then, we changed the pattern and the how was as important as the what.

Another single line again resonates with possibilities for me; it could be personal, it could equally be found poetry: ‘I would like to be able to say that  it was patriarchy that stopped me talking on social media, but it wasn’t, not / directly.’

I read ‘Notes on the unsilent woman’ as a poem. I read this as an essay. I am tempted to carry on with my own set of bullet points as though Helen has issued an open invitation for the ‘we’ to speak. Me. You. They. She quotes Susan Sontag: ‘The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences.’

 

The other poem I dearly love, ‘George Eliot: a life’, is also long form. Like the previous poem this appears as a sequence of numbered sections that are in turn numbered in smaller pieces. It is like I am reading a poem and then an essay and then a set of footnotes. An assemblage of fascinations. Biography as fascination allows room for anything to arrive, in which gaps are curious hooks, reflective breathing spaces and in which the personal is as compelling as the archives. Helen names her poem ‘A deconstructed biography’ and I am reminded of  fine-dining plates that offer deconstructed classics. You get a platter of tastes that your tongue then collates on the tongue.

To taste ‘George Eliot: a life’ in pieces is to allow room for reading taste buds to pop and salivate and move. This is the kind of poem you linger over because the morsels are as piquant as the breathing spaces. It delivers a prismatic portrait of George Eliot but it also refreshes how we assemble a biography and how we shape a poem. Helen brings her acerbic wit into play.

 

10.7.1.  But the fact is, and I don’t want to give you spoilers, that for such an

extraordinary woman she sure did create some disappointing female

characters. Even the heroines don’t strike out – they give up, they stop,

they enclose themselves in family, they stand behind, they cease, they  die.

They found nothing.

10.7.2.   Did she think she was too exceptional to be used as a model for her

characters? Did she think that while she was good enough to be involved

in intellectual life, and she could probably even be trusted to vote, the same

could not be said for her inferior sisters?

 

A number of smaller poems sit alongside the two longer ones including the moving ‘How to live though this’, a poem that reacts to an unstated ‘this’. ‘This’ could be anything but for me the poem reads like a morning mantra that you might whisper in the thick of tough times or alongside illness or the possibility of death.

‘How to live’ is a question equally open to interpretation as it ripples through the poems; and it makes poetry a significant part of the myriad answers. I haven’t read a book quite like this and I love that. The writing is lucid, uplifting, provocative, revealing, acidic, groundbreaking. The subject matter offers breadth and depth, illuminations, little anchors, liberations, shadows. I am all the better for having read this book. I just love it.

 

I slept my way into silence

through the afternoon, after days

of too many words and not enough words

to make the map she needs

to find her way from here

I wake, too late, with a headache

and she, in the garden wakes up shivering

from ‘Navigating by the stars’

 

 

 

Auckland University Press author page

Helen‘s ‘Mr Anderson, you heartbreaker you’

Helen on Standing Room Only

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf connections: Hana Pera Aoake reads ‘My heart swings like poi’

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This is an audio recording of Hana Pera Aoake reading a poem they wrote called, ‘My heart swings like poi’, which they wrote for Te Rito o te Harakeke, which was a journal they co-edited with essa may ranapiri, Sinead Overbyne and Michelle Rahurahu Scott for Ihumaatao.

They have been very busy with the first issue of Tupuranga which has just launched.

 

 

 

Hana Pera Aoake (Ngaati Raukawa, Ngaati Mahuta, Tainui/Waikato) is an INFP, Gemini heartthrob living on Kai Tahu land in Te wai pounamu. They are a writer, editor and artist in a stupid amount of debt (Liv, Laff, Luv), having completed an MFA in Fine Arts (first class) in 2018 from Massey University. They are a current participant in the Independent study program at the Maumaus des escola artes via a screen and an editor at both Tupuranga journal and Kei te pai press.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf connections: 2 poems by Joan Fleming

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Meditation on relative suffering

            5 April, Madrid

 

Many terrible things in life happen quietly and without spectacle.

The times I am penned inside my own skin are a one that feels like a seven

and it makes me loud.

 

I pull down a book and find a strand of hair that cannot be mine.

I stroke it the wrong way to make it squeak

like an animal.

 

Now the windows are open and I smell a fire I want to be next to.

 

They say that after great pain, you find you can speak well,

but I have been speaking badly and feel about it all

as helpless as childhood.

 

Everything is flowering and the wild boars run in the street,

expecting someone.

 

 

 

Via Negativa

1 April, Madrid

 

In the day book, several nothings have made a space as slow as the city.

I toe the bottle to the table’s far side, this stops me reaching for it.

Mornings are good, don’t you find? And evenings sometimes terrible.

 

We ought to be flooded with green, turned out onto a slope

held down with roots and crowns, zesty with rot, the seasons

breaking into food, the air mad with bees and matter.

 

Instead, there are streaks on the glass

only where the left-side body was responsible.

We meet in bed, stroke each other’s skin as if we possessed it.

 

Joan Fleming

 

 

Joan Fleming is the author of two collections of poetry, The Same as Yes and Failed Love Poems, both from Victoria University Press, and the chapbook Two Dreams in Which Things Are Taken (Duets). Her new collection Dirt is forthcoming with Cordite Books. She holds a PhD in ethnopoetics from Monash University, Melbourne, and is the New Zealand/Aotearoa Commissioning Editor for Cordite Poetry Review. She currently lives in Madrid, and in 2020 she will travel to Honduras for the Our Little Roses Poetry Teaching Fellowship.

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: two poems from Shari Kocher

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from Gathering in the Underworld

 

Monday 13 April (Prompted by Sharon Olds’ ‘Making Love in Winter’, using the nouns: skin, blooms, transom, ovaries, questions; the verbs: is, flying, touch, burns, casts; and the adjectives: loose, dark, motionless – last noun is the title of the response poem)

 

Questions

 

At birth, the bird flew high and white

and motionless, the eye of the storm not yet

arrived but drawing nearer, the bird

loose in its orb of stillness branching

its wings in the hospital hallway between

the lights going out and the generator

roughly clanking the lights back on, in that

moment of cyclonic noise subsiding, the veil

your mother reached down to touch

between the legs they had raised in stirrups

slid warm, unbroken, and when

she, frightened, drew you to her, only a

makeshift curtain pulled partially

around the trolley on which they had

parked her, alone and shaved, one among

many, young, untaught, she felt

before she saw, like glistening gladwrap,

the bag you came in, and she held you in it,

horrified, in awe, believing in that moment before

the light flooded you with ultraviolet,

that you were gone from her, or dead, or worse,

a creature from another universe, which was

partly true and partly all she could feel through

in that overrun, clamorous place, but then you

reached your curled fist palm-upwards,

and kicked to break that sticky breach of trust

and rushed her skin, which bloomed

beneath you, and in that transom,

your tiny ovaries quickened like stardust

and she saw in your unblinking eyes

not the surprise of the unseen bird

like a torn sail above her, but something pass

wingshadowed through your widened

pupils, and she pitied the mewl you made

and brought herself to love you.

 

 

Monday 20 April: Prompt: What repels me? Working from a list of things you dislike intensely – the question of beauty propelled by repulsion inevitably confronts the abject.

 

Have you got your Action plan ready?

Mould on the windows, all the cooking books

smoked in grease and arsenic. Spores

on Jamie Oliver. Dust so thick it lives

to garnish spaghetti spliced with stink

bugs suppurating the porous ground.

Where once a kind of onion grew, indelible

Rorschach blots bubble through the possum wee

cooking pot, whole towns drowned in porridge

or was it asparagus, for lack of a word?

Maggots at work among the tulips,

like actors planting light bulbs under

centrelink office desks flashing on and off

up-side-down. Nothing weird

about the underworld in Australia.

Give me a worm with a moustache any day,

or a shrieking bat drunk on Tequila.

Ah, do not go gently, my foul

friend, the good old days when vampires

chilled out with retro cooking shows

and grinned friskily at the rule

against garlic in Hades. Renovations

the Addams family could be proud of.

No queues at Sgninnub in Hades, the

sausage sizzle still available with all

the extras, don’t ask questions,

blinking strictly prohibited though

you can shake whatever comes to hand.

Handles, however, are in short supply.

Tomato sauce, sulphur and sinew completely

out of stock. When registering for real estate

in Hades, have your password ready

and your myVogID portal set up

to activate your deathrate with the

myVogAp to track your whereabouts.

All viral carriers welcome, we want you to

socially include yourselves before we press

Incinerate. No, Ruby Princess, you stay

exactly where you are, you beautiful

infernal dream boat, all your working

slaves captured on camera in their glorious

two-by-two styrofoam cells, no Styx©

necessary, no coin discharged. Here’s a

plastic bag, easy enough, just hyper-

ventilate: we’ll take care of everything

at the Swiss hotel or at the marble gate.

 

Shari Kocher

 

 

 

Dr. Shari Kocher is a poet, creative writer, therapist and independent scholar whose work has been featured in literary journals in Australia and elsewhere spanning twenty-five years. These include Australian Poetry Journal, Best Australian Poems 2013 & 2016, Blue Dog, Cordite, Going Down Swinging, Meanjin, Plumwood Mountain Journal, Southerly, Overland, and Westerly, among others. She is the author of The Non-Sequitur of Snow (Puncher & Wattmann 2015) which was Highly Commended in the 2015 Anne Elder Awards (Australia). Recent awards include The Peter Steele Poetry Prize (2020), The Venie Holmgren Environmental Poetry Award (2018), The University of Canberra Health Poetry Prize (2016) and second, third and shortlisted placements in the prestigious Newcastle Poetry Prize (2017, 2015, 2020). Her forthcoming books Foxstruck and Other Collisions (Puncher & Wattmann 2020) and Sonqoqui: a verse novel in translation (El Taller Blanco Ediciones) are due out soon. Kocher holds MA and Doctorate degrees from Melbourne University, where she sometimes works as a sessional teaching associate and postgraduate supervisor in the School of Culture and Communications.

 

Paula: Shari Kocher and Joan Fleming have occasionally followed daily poetry prompts as part of a Madrid writers’ group that was doing ‘a poem a day’ for Poetry Month. It inspired me to gather together some local poetry prompts that I will post on Wednesday May 13th.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf connections: my Level 3 Mother’s Day poem

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Little thistles

 

The bad thoughts will arrive

little thistles that cling

But I move them on

Yes, I am digging a hole

in the garden

for little thistles

with that stormy wind whining

 

And I am worrying about Level 3

and the people who are hungry

and the people who are sick

and still I can’t sleep

 

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day

and I’m making a daisy chain

of mother daughter memories

 

The time we read books together

or saw the Giant’s Causeway

or ate New York bagels

The times we hugged and

the times we will hug

again soon

 

Today I am lifting

my head above

the Covid clouds like a little

periscope a stretching

swan’s neck

 

to see how the world

will be

 

Paula Green

 

 

Originally published in the Herald‘s Canvas magazine (9.5.20). The last line was left off by mistake which made the future even more uncertain. You get a little jolt at the end of the poem in the paper version and that is quite cool! I am very grateful the paper has published a suite of my lockdown poems over the past four weeks.

Today, I sending Jacinda a virtual bouquet of flowers, because I am so proud and inspired by the way she is reshaping the way nations can be led.

 

 

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Poetry Shelf connections: Michelle Elvy’s ‘Kia ora’

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Kia ora

for my mother

 

I remember the brooch you always wore

I remember it most of all

tiny fragments, blue dust

glinting on your breast

my hand reaching to touch

 

I recall the call of the song sparrow

I recall it most vividly of all

the squeech-squeech-trill

moving through sunlight

stopping on our sill

 

I can see the maple in our yard

I can see it best of all

its smooth  grey skin

planted in thin slanting soil

a young towering thing

 

Or was it a pendant?

A warbler? A white oak?

My memories, round

and flawed, you

across oceans and continents

 

It’s autumn in Dunedin

sunrise, cool and misty

glowing

the brooch            the pendant

the sparrow          the warbler

the maple              the oak

 

Michelle Elvy

 

 

Michelle Elvy is a writer, editor and manuscript assessor. She grew up in the Chesapeake Bay region of the US and now makes her home in Dunedin. She edits at Flash Frontier: An Adventure in Short Fiction and Best Small Fictions, and she chairs National Flash Fiction Day. Recent anthology projects include Bonsai: Best small stories from Aotearoa New Zealand (CUP 2018) and Ko Aotearoa Tātou | We Are New Zealand (OUP 2020). Michelle’s poetry, fiction, travel writing, creative nonfiction and reviews have been widely published. Her book, the everrumble (Ad Hoc Fiction 2019), is a small novel in small forms. michelleelvy.com

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf connections: two poems from Nicola Easthope

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Unessential kiss

 

I thought we’d meet in Island Bay

on a park bench facing the sea.

Well, you two on it, in your safe bubble

with us three standing, two metres away.

 

There’d be coffee poured from the flask

steaming against the strait’s new ice

and muffins with feijoa’s soap-sweet grit.

We’d inhale the aroma, lift our masks.

 

In lock down, I can’t mistakenly slip

on the mussel-kelp-anemone rock

and the soft creased surface of your cheeks

cannot be surprised by my bursting lips.

 

 

Numb and Absurd have morning

love children

and there is small relief.

 

Boris has gone to hospital.

Donald is lost, will lose.

Scotland’s chief medical officer,

 

Catherine and our Health Minister, David

have apologised for breaking

their own rules. The Queen, Elizabeth

 

calls for stoicism and self-discipline.

The iwi from Uawa are dancing

on the checkpoint line, in rainbow chiffon

 

wings, totally winning.

Craig from Solly’s lorries says all loos

are closed on his route from Mataura

 

to Ashburton but he makes it in time

yet the journo presses him – just take us

through this – what did this feel like?

 

I am looking in the mirror at the small

purulent pimple on my chin

wondering why on earth at my age?

 

I am thinking of people with nothing

in the fridge and no safe haven.

I am loading the dishwasher too unlovingly

 

and chip the willow-green bowl my mother

made at a pottery nightclass way back

when all we ever caught off each other

 

were colds, mumps, chickenpox, headlice

and it was wickedly easy

to make ourselves burp, or cry.

 

Nicola Easthope

 

 

Nicola Easthope (Pākehā, tangata Tiriti) is a teacher, poet and cheerleader for teen activism, from the Kāpiti Coast. Her two collections are leaving my arms free to fly around you (Steele Roberts, 2011) and Working the tang (The Cuba Press, 2018), and individual poems have been published in Aotearoa, Australia, Scotland and the U.S. She was a guest of the Queensland Poetry Festival in 2012, the Tasmanian Poetry Festival in 2018, and a couple of very cool LitCrawl seasons in Pōneke. You can find more of her work on gannet ink

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf connections: Lynn Davidson reads ‘For My Parents’

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Lynn Davidson is a New Zealand writer living in Edinburgh. Her latest poetry collection Islander is published by Shearsman Books in the UK and Victoria University Press in New Zealand. She had a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2013 and a Bothy Project Residency at Inshriach Bothy in the Cairngorms in 2016. Lynn has a doctorate in creative writing, teaches creative writing, and is a member of 12, an Edinburgh-based feminist poetry collective.  Website

 

 

Poetry Shelf connections: 20 New Zealanders pick a comfort book

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Julia Marshall was on RNZ’s Morning Report this week talking about the Covid impact on our book communities with the closure of bookshops. Book sales of all genres, local and international, unsurprisingly have taken a hit. Some books have been moved to a new publication date, some launches dropped, some launches have gone online.

The best thing New Zealanders can do, Julia recommended, is to keep local bookshops open by buying local.

I started this book-list series because the world was spinning and I couldn’t settle or sleep; books, writing, cooking and gardening gave me the utmost comfort. Not everyone wanted to read or cook or garden, but I wanted Poetry Shelf to be an Open House – a place to make connections for readers and writers. A book list seemed like a good idea. I used the word solace. I used the word comfort. I used the words much loved. So many people have contributed over the past six weeks and for this I am grateful.

We are about to move into Level 2. Bookshops will be open, launches can be held, but things will still be different as we face daily challenges and changes.

Poetry Shelf will continue to be highly active – to offer connections that just might offer diversion, delight, and even at times, comfort.

This week I have been reading a stack of children’s books recently published because I am going to post a Gecko Books reading diary on Poetry Box today (Penguin next week). This was my favourite:

 

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Delphine Perrit’s A Bear Named Bjorn resonated because it is sweetly written. I agree with Bernice Mene that opening sentences can be such a hook. Even this simple: ‘Bjorn lives in a cave. The walls are very smooth. The floor is pretty comfortable.’ Turn over and you discover this bear, who loves mail-order catalogues, has won a red, three-seater sofa. It is the perfect book to read now – as couriers deliver avocados, paper and wine – and as we rediscover what fits in our lives and what doesn’t. Friendship and kindness are highly valued.

I am going to keep the comfort book lists going for a bit longer as way of supporting all aspects of our book industry.

A warm ‘thank you’ to everyone who contributed to this list because I know doing things has been much harder than usual. Kia kaha.

 

The Booklist

 

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Gretchen Albrecht (Artist)

I seem to have had a great surge in reading this year and one standout for me was a novel I started in summer at the beach and finished just on cusp of lock-down: Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. Extraordinarily beautiful evocation of place and a deeply satisfying read. I loved it.

Since then I have ploughed through The Dutch House, Ann Patchett, and a re-read of Hilary Mantel’s trilogy (Wolf Hall, Bring up the Bodies and her latest, The Mirror and the Light. Mantel has a achieved something pretty amazing with these three, they seem to have a painterly eye, a poets ear for phrases and images and an ability to inhabit her characters in 16thC England. Bring up the Bodies remains the most satisfying for me in its completeness and tight focus around Anne Boleyn’s rise and fall.

However, to answer your question re comfort (at any point)…..

Two Books that remain personally comforting whenever I miss my parents – although they died decades ago (!) there are occasions when I wish I was a child again and they were alive and loving me – are:

Patrimony by Philip Roth and Between them by Richard Ford. They speak of the relationship – child and parent(s) – that universal source that sweeps us along, helpless in the its powerful undertow.

 

 

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Mary Biggs (Operations manager, Featherston Booktown Festival)

Over the sometimes anxious lockdown period, I have thoroughly enjoyed reading and been absorbed by The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow. It’s a story about Mary Bennet, the middle sister of the five Bennet sisters in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Often overlooked and mercilessly teased for being plain and serious, Mary comes of age from a gauche, awkward, diligent teenager looking for escape from an unhappy home life (probably through marriage) to a young woman who eventually finds self-love, and then married love by realizing in the words of Mr Collins, ”our happiness depends on ourselves”.

She learnt to choose to be happy after watching and sharing in the contented family life at her uncle’s, Mr Gardiner’s, home in London. The author knows her Austen and there are plenty of references to Jane’s other books as well as a sharp wit and clever story telling.

 

 

 

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Toby Buck (Landfall Essay Prize Joint-Winner 2019, Sales and Marketing Manager at Te Mata Estate Winery)

Always been a fan of a short book and these titles are a bit of chocolate-box collection of sorts. Each one is a treat that I’ve been saving to read or re-read. I’ve also been enjoying the audiobook of George Saunders’ Tenth of December and Flannery O’Connors Everything That Rises Must Converge. Great listening while making bread and cleaning, then re-cleaning until it’s time to make bread again.

The Beauty Queen of Leenane and Other Plays by Martin McDonagh
Let The Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead by Milan Kundera
Christmas With Dull People by Saki
A Good Man is Hard To Find by Flannery O’Connor
The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Brain of Katherine Mansfield by Bill Manhire

The Nimrod Flip-Out by Etgar Keret
A Forgotten Kingdom by Mike Nelson
The Art of the Publisher by Roberto Calasso
Transparent Things by Vladimir Nabakov
Seven Days in Mykonos by Anne French

 

 

 

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Chanel Clarke (Curator Māori, Auckland Museum)

Before Level 4 lockdown in New Zealand, I had already been one week into mandatory self-isolation having returned from South Africa on a work trip. Halfway through my isolation, I realised that the whole country was very soon going to join me all working from home. I gleefully began to imagine the half started writing projects that could finally get done and kicked out the door without the constant work interruptions. Alas, this has not been the case and as the business of museums and indeed the entire world transitions to online the pace of work just ramped up tenfold. As an on-again-off-again PhD student, and a historian, I’m a non-fiction reader through and through. On top of that, I’m a slow reader, so the thought of adding fiction to the list while tempting is probably not going to happen.

I could relate to Karyn Hays’ post though on the previous list and must also shamefully admit that my small collection of self-help books have probably all been purchased from airport book shops while waiting for planes. And so it is to the self-help shelf on the bookcase that I have turned at this time. I’ve been reading snippets of Cal Newport’s Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, a book I came across a couple of years ago as a PhD student. A computer science professor at Georgetown University, Cal writes about the intersection of digital technology and culture and in particular our struggle to deploy these tools in ways that support instead of subverting the things we care about in both our personal and professional lives.

Cal has been developing several ideas in his books over the past decade, including his Deep Work Hypothesis, and Digital Minimalism. He has argued that our ability to focus without distraction is becoming increasingly rare (due, primarily, to distracting technology), at the same time that it’s becoming increasingly valuable (as the knowledge economy becomes more cognitively demanding). As a result, those individuals and organisations who cultivate their ability to perform “deep work” will enjoy a major competitive advantage.

Similarly, he has argued that the services delivered through our devices have become so alluring and addictive that they can significantly erode the quality of our lives and our sense of autonomy. He calls for us to embrace digital minimalism by radically reducing the time we spend online, focusing on a small number of activities chosen because they support things we deeply value, and then happily miss out on everything else. Somehow I don’t think my teenage daughter will appreciate this philosophy. During this once in a lifetime experience that is Covid-19, as we take one week, and one day at a time, I have found myself returning to Cal’s rules for deep work. I have tried to choose just one task, finish it well, pat myself on the back, and carry on. When you are wading in the shallows of emails and yet another zoom meeting Cal provides a road map to help you through and to work smarter not harder.

 

 

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Giselle Clarkson (Cartoonist)

 

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John Cranna (Director, Creative Hub)

During the lockdown I have been returning to a beautiful book that I have read several times, Solitude and Loneliness by Alastair Sarvananda Jessiman (Windhorse)

Jessiman is a playwright whose work is regularly broadcast by the BBC. In this book he looks at the tension between these two forces – and how loneliness, if embraced, can ‘season us’, can invite us into the innermost hidden parts of our lives, and allow us to emerge reinvigorated and renewed. The fire to our Phoenix.

With reference to Philip Larkin, Emily Dickinson, Wordsworth and Alan Bennet, he notes that contemporary life is continually drawing us away to superficial stimulation, but that through contemplation of the inner life, with great artists as our guides, we can live much more fully and richly in the present.

Paradoxically, then, the lockdown starts to seem like a gift – an opportunity to go deeper into the places that really matter.

He is particularly good on solitary retreats in the wilderness – where we can also attune ourselves to nature’s rhythm, and revitalise our sense of the miraculous possibilities of language.”

 

 

 

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Barbara Ewing (Actor)

I’m locked down for an extended time in New Zealand, instead of London, a quirk of fate caused by the plans we had made for having my new book published here. I am at the moment without very many things that give me comfort, including my books. But I do have a huge range of NZ books in London that I definitely get pleasure and comfort from all year round – and I am always grabbing people by the lapels and saying: “Do you realise how good New Zealand writing is?” and reading to them!

Three of these books are:

As Much Gold as an Ass Could Carry by Vivienne Plumb that includes the poem “On Using People You Love in Your Poems”” that makes me laugh.

Night Horse by Elizabeth Smither, which includes the poem “The Heart Heals Itself Between Beats,” which makes me cry.

Shame Joy by Julie Hill whose eccentricity I love: a collection of short stories including the truly brilliant New Zealand short story “The Pavlova Debacle.”

 

 

 

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Jordan Hamel (Poet, co- editor Stasis Journal)

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous – Ocean Vuong
The debut novel from one of the best poets alive. The coming-of-age story of the son of Vietnamese immigrant parents in the US, as seen through letters to his mother. Its so easy to get lost in Vuong’s playful and lush lyricism, this book is just great An absolute fucking treat.

Oyster – Michael Pederson
I bought this poetry collection from Vic Books when we moved to level 3, it came with a free bag of coffee beans, both the book and the beans have now been devoured. I love how Michael’s poems know when to string you a long, when to pull the rug from under you, when to hold you and when to let you go. Its bittersweet seeing the late Scott Hutchison’s illustrations alongside Michael’s poems but overall I can still hear Michael’s voice rise from the page as clearly as it did on stage at Verb Festival last year and I get all gross and nostalgic for a time when we could have lit events and listen to live poetry in a bar.

Baby – Annaleese Jochems
I love Annaleese’s writing, I love this weird story so much, isolation dominates the main character’s journey in so many different ways, the claustrophobic, manic, repressed, horny energy of this book is such a vibe for right now. Just buy it, read it and support great local writers like Annaleese please.

 

 

 

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Miranda Harcourt (Actor, coach)

I used to be a fiction reader but for some reason non-fiction really appeals to me now. Maybe because I spend my work-time immersed in making fiction… or maybe because these days fact seems stranger than anything that could occur in a book. Quantum Physics is my favourite. At school I was not at all interested in the sciences so I don’t have the requisite background knowledge but when I read something like Brian Greene’s UNTIL THE END OF TIME I find myself in strange and amazing new worlds.

Actually, alongside my dear friend Deb Smith, I love mid-20th-century children’s books, and when I think about it, it is the books that had something to do with time and space that appealed to me even then. CHARLOTTE SOMETIMES by Penelope Farmer, THE CHANGEOVER by Margaret Mahy and A WRINKLE IN TIME by Madeleine L’Engle all grabbed me, as well as the works of Ursula LeGuin.

I am lucky to have had the opportunity to delve more deeply into THE CHANGEOVER than most people as Stuart McKenzie and I made it into a film starring Timothy Spall. It is a magical book, mixing social realism with the supernatural.

So the book I am recommending as one that gives me comfort and solace is the first book I read by Brian Greene, THE HIDDEN REALITY, which appears in THE CHANGEOVER as the book being read by the mysterious Sorensen Carlisle!

 

 

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Sara Hughes (Artist)

Lockdown has been full of reading to and listening to my two sons read. One of my favourite books to read them when they were preschoolers was Margaret Mahy’s Down the Back of the Chair. What joy I got when my 6 year old rediscovered it on the bookshelf and started reading it aloud to himself. He has wanted to read it daily since, the glee of the words rolling off his tongue … humour and rhyme mixed with imaginative narrative … all tangled up with a scarlet sash. Like all the best children’s books it is beautifully illustrated and Polly Dunbar bring the words to life with visuals of a Lion with curls and a Smiling snake … the words and pictures keep giving and it never fails to bring a smile even when read a hundred times.

 

 

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Courtney Johnston (CE Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa)

 

I Capture the Castle Dodie Smith.

My forever and always comfort read.

It’s the early 1930s in rural England. The Mortmain family lives in genteel (verging on desperate) poverty in a mouldering castle. James Mortmain had a major success with an avant-garde book published shortly before Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ – but after a rather strange altercation with a neighbour, is imprisoned for three months and then abruptly moves his family to Suffolk. He hasn’t written since: he spends all day and most of the night in the gatehouse, reading detective novels, avoiding his family and his obligations.

Our narrator is the aspiring writer Cassandra (“I am seventeen, look younger, feel older. I am no beauty but have a neatish face”). The iconic opening line of the book (“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink”) is inscribed in Cassandra’s own sixpenny book, in which she is has just begun recording her family’s life, partly to practice her speedwriting, and partly to teach herself how to write a novel. Poised between startling insight and blithe teenage blindness, Cassandra draws a touching, often acerbic, picture of a family that has been forced into its own kind of self-isolation. When she begins the book, the family has very little to look forward too except, if the hens are willing, an egg to go with their bread for tea. And then, just as with Pride & Prejudice, two eligible brothers appear at the local stately home, and the campaign to marry the eldest Mortmain daughter off to the heir begins.

This risks making the book sound rather twee, and maybe it is a little; it shares the sparkling, knowing, romantic tone of Evelyn Waugh and Stella Gibbons and Nancy Mitford, and if you don’t like that, then you won’t like this. But oh – has anyone ever captured first love like Dodie Smith does here? Cassandra feels everything, and describes everything for us, and with her, we grow up. I re-read this book every few years, and every time I relate to it differently. It is, in my opinion, one of the best coming of age novels ever written.

 

 

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Mary Kisler (Art historian)

There is something rich and immensely satisfying about Ann Patchett’s prose that draws the reader in to each of the character in turn. The Dutch House is tantalisingly written – I got to the end, and felt that I could describe aspects of the house – the tiled fireplace, the Dutch portraits above it, the curtained window alcove in Maeve’s bedroom – yet I still don’t see the house in its external architectural entirety. The driveway, the linden trees that protect the house from the street, these are clear in my mind. But the house is like the people in the novel – her descriptive powers are so evocative that you feel you empathy for each character in turn, even those like Andrea, the ‘second wife’, and all that that might connote – to a husband, his children, and the wife who walked away, yet Patchett turns that trope on its head. The ending, which must not be revealed for those who haven’t read it, is a parable of forgiveness, and where that is not possible, of the need for acceptance. I find my mind going back to the text again and again, as if I can feel it on my skin.

 

 

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Finlay Macdonald  (Journalist, editor)

 

Home is so Sad

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,

Shaped to the comfort of the last to go

As if to win them back. Instead, bereft

Of anyone to please, it withers so,

Having no heart to put aside the theft

And turn again to what it started as,

A joyous shot at how things ought to be,

Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:

Look at the pictures and the cutlery.

The music in the piano stool. That vase.

 

Philip Larkin

 

Clive James turned me on to Philip Larkin. I suppose I might have put Clive’s Unreliable Memoirs series in here too. The first of those brilliant little books got me all the way home from England to Auckland in 1984 in one long read. The others just brightened me up when they intermittently landed. Clive’s love of Larkin seeps through them all, and plenty of his other collections of essays and collections, until it eventually seeped into me.

Then I read Clive’s very last little collection of writings, Latest Readings, published just before he died in which he praised the definitive Philip Larkin: The Complete Poems edited by Archie Burnett. So, perhaps presciently, I asked for it for Christmas. Little did I know it would sit on my bedside table throughout this strange ordeal, unintendedly perfect.

I picked the poem ‘Home is so Sad’, from The Whitsun Weddings, because I’d just re-read it, not because it describes life right now in any literal sense. Home, for the most part, hasn’t been sad at all. But its ten lines are also just right – quiet, reflective, musical, taut, a little ominous, completely real. And yes, oddly comforting.

 

 

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Don McGlashan (Musician)

I’ve been reading a lot. First CivilWarLand In Bad Decline, a set of short stories by George Saunders, where grotesque but vivid characters scratch out lives in the wastelands and theme-parks of a post-apocalyptic America. I love how funny and bleak Saunders can be at the same time, and sometimes he just floors you with a piece of imagining so true and strong you have to put down the book and breathe deeply for a bit. Like that, for me, was a story called “Offloading for Mrs Schwartz”, about a man who is forced to sell memories to get by; first other peoples, then finally his own.

Then I read Sea People – by Christina Thompson, an utterly engrossing investigation into the history of Pacific peoples, and their voyages of discovery. Thompson, a US/Australian who teaches writing at Harvard, examines what we know, through the work of greats like Dame Anne Salmond and Te Rangi Hiroa; what we are only just now learning, like the re-vitalisation of ancient navigational knowledge by such scholar-voyagers as Nainoa Thompson – and what we still don’t know, like what happened to the Lapita and Rapa Nui civilisations who left such striking footprints and little else. “Sea People” uses multiple lenses: Polynesian oral history, linguistics, archeology, anthropology, the uniquely Western knack of suggesting radical (and wrong) theories rather than ask the locals – and Thompson has skin in the game, too: she writes from the heart because she’s married to a Maori man, and their children carry Polynesian DNA. I picked it up because I wanted to understand more about the Pacific and its people, but after a while, I found that the timeless fog already brought on by the lock-down became even more hazy, as I missed appointments, meals and sleep so I could cram in another chapter.

 

 

 

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Thomasin McKenzie (Actor)

Over the past couple of years my love for books has become uncontrollable. Some days all I can think about is what book I’m engrossed in at that moment and what amazing worlds I’ll be able to dive into next. But last week I had to have surgery to get rid of a pesky Pterygium on my eye, and was terrified that I wouldn’t be able to read during my recovery. That was when I discovered audio books. The second I returned from the hospital, still a bit woozy from the general anaesthetic, I collapsed onto the sofa and for the rest of the evening and all the next day listened to Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. I was entranced by Kya’s love for nature and passion for learning.

When I first considered the idea of audiobooks I was adamantly against them, determined that the only way to experience a book was by having a solid copy in my hand. Now my mind is changed and these days my favourite pastime is to turn on an audio book (right now it’s Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng) and colour in while I’m listening. It’s my new approach to mindfulness during these crazy times.

 

 

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Bernice Mene (Former NZ netballer player)

Reading is and has always been an escape for me. The sign of a me unwinding or proper “time out” is a pile of books next to my bed.

I am a big believer in the opening being a good litmus test for the pages to come. Boy Swallow Universe by Trent Dalton starts out, “Your end is a dead blue wren” which piqued my curiosity and reeled me in.

Set in Brisbane, the characters were vivid, entertaining and easy to imagine. Over the course of the book, Dalton evoked a spectrum of emotions. He is a clever storyteller, spinning a unique tale of a brotherly bond, unlikely friendships, love, tough times, and betrayal.

I was gutted when I came to the end of the book however am excited to see Trent has a new book released in 2020.

 

 

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Claire Murdoch (Head of Publishing, Penguin Random House)

Comfort is the diminishing stack of New Yorkers that were still wrapped in their little sleeves and dating deep into the ’19s at the start of lockdown. It doesn’t matter that they’re from the time before we knew.

It’s the slow re-opening of all the little taped-up streetside libraries where you can leave and take books, honestly one of the greatest things about Auckland.

Above all, it’s Helen Garner. This from Helen Garner:

“I am a forty-three year-old woman, a mother, healthy, reasonable-looking. I am in my own city; I am able to make a living; I am sometimes sad or frightened, and recently I have been hurt … the Mighty Force has not come lately to me in the form I was expecting; but it does not abandon people, and it won’t abandon me.”

It comes from The Yellow Notebook, which is the very, very handsome Text edition of Garner’s Monkey Grip-era diaries, Vol I, 1978-1987, not to be confused with the excellent True Stories and Stories in the same beautiful series which it is also very good to own and read and re-read.

Hooray for the Mighty Force.

 

 

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David Parker (Attorney-General, Minster of Environment, Minister Trade & Export Growth)

I’ve been rereading Between Debt and the Devil published in 2016 post the GFC by Lord Adair Turner. As the title suggests, this book critiques quantitative easing (a.k.a. printing money) after the global financial crisis by overseas reserve banks. It considers the effects on the collapse of conventional monetary policy, rising inequality, asset price inflation, and other social ills. It has important lessons for the post Covid-19 economic choices all countries face

My light reading has been one of the Bernie Gunther anti-hero detective tales by Philip Kerr. This one is called A Quiet Flame and is set in post WWII Argentina. Always a good yarn.

Just before Covid I’d started The Anarchy by William Dalrymple, a history of the plundering of India by The East India Company for 250 years from about 1600 to the mid 1800s. Its very well written, but it will take me a while to finish.

 

 

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Gaylene Preston (Filmmaker)

Electric City and other stories by Patricia Grace

I don’t have a favourite Patricia Grace book.  There are too many I like.  I like the characters, I like the settings, I like the authentic strong clear eye that permeates ordinary things – onion grass, the weather, the measured steps of men coming home from war, devastated.  I love her deft portraits of the Maori world.

I wish I could write with such poetic simplicity.  The characters shine.  They dance across the page. There are many humble heroes, but the big hero is the people. Whanau, Hapu and Iwi.  Every kitchen table, every cup of tea is linked to the big struggle of an ancient people disrupted finding their way in an alien age, keeping staunch to their old ways while adapting to the new.

I’d curl up by the fire and read POTIKI any day, and TU and CHAPPY.  I’ve chosen ELECTRIC CITY because it is the first Graceful Patricia book I read and it’s short stories for the lock down when our anxiety levels are up and our concentration is short. Deceptively humble stories about big things.  Land theft, what is now called ‘casual racism,’ written with beautiful simplicity.  Is that a tear she is describing or a raindrop on the window pane?

You can pull out THE KUIA and THE SPIDER with illustrations by Robin Kahukiwa and read it in English or Te Reo to your favourite little people if you have a copy lying around – and most homes do.  Aren’t we lucky to have such writers amongst us.

 

 

 

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Tom Sainsbury (Comedian)

Whenever I need some literary comfort I always turn to the books of Finnish writer, Tove Jansson, and her charming tales of the Moomintrolls. I love them all, but Moominpappa and the Sea would have to be my favourite.

For those that aren’t officiated into the wonderful world of Moomins I want you to picture a bipedal white hippo/troll with lovely eyes and a vibrant spirit. It’s a family of these creatures that the series follows. The books were obviously written for children but there is that extra layer of social commentary and observations of human nature that only adults can pick up on.

The Moomin family is a great inspiration for all. This is mainly because they happily welcome all sorts of critters into their lives and around the dinner table. There is also a constant sense in the books that life is haphazard and chaos reigns, and all you can really do is take the next step forward with warmth and grace. And finally there is that whiff of Scandanavian melancholy. Moominpappa and the Sea is a beautifully melancholy book. That might sound off-putting but when book expresses difficult emotion (such as melancholia) is dealt with beautifully it makes me stop avoiding it and simply embrace it as a part of the human experience.