Poetry Shelf review: Kirsten Warner’s Mitochondrial Eve
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Kirsten Warner, Mitochondrial Eve, Compound Press, 2018
Kirsten’s Warner is a writer, poet, journalist and musician and former chair of the Auckland Society of Authors. She graduated with an MA in Creative Writing with Distinction from AUT and won the Landfall essay competition in 2008. She performs as a musician with partner Bernie Griffen in the folk-blues band Bernie Griffen and The Thin Men. Makāro Press published her debut novel The Sound of Breaking Glass in 2018. Her poetry has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies. Her debut chapbook Mitochondrial Eve also came out in 2018. This slender collection is the kind of book you can spend ages with. I read it on the plane to Wellington and once I got to the end of the book I returned to the beginning and read it again. Goodness knows what the passengers either side of me thought. They wouldn’t have known I was poetry rich with a stack of books waiting to be read in my bag.
The six poem titles resemble a narrative framing device: beginning with heartbreak, then moving through dailiness and despair, to a degree of release:
The Location of Heartbreak
Plant a Red Hibiscus
Channel Surfing
S. O. S.
In a Nutshell
Off the Leash
Each poem is exquisitely layered as things are held at arm’s length, obstacles loom, the real world intrudes bright and harmonic, words are lithe on the line. Here is the first stanza of the first poem that pulls you into threat and challenge through the rhythm of walking with its pauses and asides:
I surface dismantled
heart-sore here in the area of the left breast,
certain the most meaningful part of life
is lived while dreaming
and that to awake is to fail to fall
into an abyss of light.
from ‘The Location of Heartbreak’
The heart-threatened core (of the poem, of self), unsettling and hard to reach, is like an insistent pulse that keeps me reading:
I step over cracks so I won’t marry a Jack
resist walking out into traffic
we don’t have a bath and I’d have to find blades
and it’s an end I want not intensification
someone to find me before I drift away.
The second poem, ‘Plant a Red Hibiscus’, returns to the rhythm of ‘feet on the pavement’, but changes pace as the speaker takes charge of a bulldozer. Always the incandescent core, like a burning wound, enigmatic, exposing; the poet never still. Here is the musing speaker at the bulldozer’s helm; I am holding my breath as I read:
Things that also might be worth living for are
small dark orphan babies who need arms to hold them
I would sit for hours.
Gathering fallen leaves,
we are all compost exchanging molecules and air.
Plant a red hibiscus.
Spread good dark soil, pick up dry leaves, hold a baby.
I don’t make assumptions about the speaker in the six poems. She might be the ‘Egyptian Goddess stalking the town!’ She might be part poet, part invention, part delight in different voices. The poem ‘In a Nutshell’ samples role hopping from Eve with mitochondrial disorder (misbehaving cells that can’t burn food and convert oxygen to energy) to Katherine Mansfield in her German pension, Suzie Wong getting STDs, Carmen Miranda breaking into song, Mata Hari watching time flying over rooftops, until the final glorious, puzzling stanza that hooks the stitches of everyday into the whip and pain of existence:
When I eat nuts
I am Nut
the whole shebang
born of ululation
moisture and fire crackers.
I have no consort
he’s outside
drinking
fagging
shooting up
hocking my starry dress
trying to get back up me.
I bear down
without drugs
swallow the night
virgin again
every morning
to make school lunches
and hold up the sky.
This hallucinogenic, rollercoaster, gut punch of book runs through me like fire. I love it.
Kirsten Warner WordPress page
Selina Tusitala Marsh celebrates her Poet Laureateship tenure with a poem and a power point
Dear Selina
You have given us so much as Poet Laureate – you have sparked poetry and poets all over Aotearoa and beyond its shores – you have shared poems, your own experience and opened up what poetry can do. Poetry matters to so many more people because of you. Thank you three times thank you. I look forward to reading your new books, hearing you perform again and talking poetry. Meanwhile enjoy your time as Poet in Residence at the Queensland Poetry Festival – you deserve this time with a much clearer calendar! I embrace you dear friend, dear poet.
Aroha nui
Paula
Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Hinemoana Baker’s sole NZ performance
Go here for tickets and details
Hinemoana Baker – Live @ Aratoi
Waiata mō Te Wairarapa
An acclaimed performer of text and song, poems and prosody, a writer, sound artist and storyteller, Hinemoana Baker joins us for one night only.
Her only show in New Zealand in 2019, a multilingual selection from her back-catalogue and from her upcoming collection, Funkhaus.
For the last four years, Hinemoana has been living, working and performing in Berlin, where she was Creative New Zealand Berlin Writer in Residence 2016.
She hails from Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Toa Rangatira, Te Āti Awa and Ngāi Tahu on her Dad’s side, and from England & Germany on her late Mum’s side.
Doors open 6.30 with a cash bar.
Door sales: $30 on the night.
Aratoi thanks Grafia Productions and Masterton District Council for their support.
Photo credit: Robert Cross
Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Michael King Writers’ Centre – Writers Residencies 2020 applications open
Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Time Out’s Poetry Day event
Would so love to be there for this!!
Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Greg O’Connell Verse Universe
Date and Time
Fri 27th Sep, 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm
Location
Exchange Christchurch (XCHC)
376 Wilsons Rd, Waltham, Christchurch 8011, New Zealand
Event description
Join one of Christchurch’s wittiest wizards of words for an unforgettable evening of poetry. Performing poems of love and loss, nature and nurture, startling imagery and brilliant satire, our eclectic versifier will explore the spectrum of tall tales, home truths, and what it means to be both a serious poet and to take nothing too seriously.
School Journal big kahuna, Greg O’Connell has cemented his place as one of Aotearoa’s most loved performance poets, who tonight entertains with sophisticated themes. Sublime and ridiculous, deep and frivolous, like a glass of fine rhyme his verse will transport you.
Venue Exchange Christchurch – XCHC
Date Friday 27 September
Time 7.00pm-8.30pm
Price $20.00
See here
Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Phantom Billstickers celebrates National Poetry Day with posters
Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: Brian Turner – an unpublished poem and a new book
In the Middle of Nowhere
On a late winter morning when driving east towards Ranfurly
pale grey fog’s smothering most of the land from Wedderburn
to Naseby, Kyeburn, Kokonga, Waipiata, Hamilton’s, Patearoa
and beyond. And I’m thinking how often we’re told we live
in the middle of nowhere: that nowadays people everywhere
are categorised, seen as somewheres, anywheres, or nowheres,
and that, in particular, this place is empty, needs more people.
So it goes. In ‘Furl’ I shop at the corner Four Square, pluck
some cash from a money machine, buy a long black and two
thick egg and chive sandwiches at the E-Café, fill up with gas
at the garage and set off homewards. Then, when re-entering
the Ida Valley and emerging into sharp sunlight, and wondering,
yet again, whether what is ever present always feels burdened
by the past, everywhere one looks – north south east and west –
bulky hills and shining mountains glisten with heavy snow.
And, oddly perhaps, so-called nowhere’s nowhere to be found.
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 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.
Once in a while
you may come across a place
where everything
seems as close to perfection
as you will ever need.
from ‘Place’
Yet the joy of reading the Selected Poems is also in the diverse subject matter: the acerbic political bite when he considers a world under threat, the love poems, poems of his mother and his father, the elegies, the humour, the storms, the seasons. In ‘The mixing bowl’ the mother is kneading, she feeds her son cakes and scones, along with ‘a rough and tart / unstinting love’. The final stanzas catch my heart:
But I did not know
it would be so hard
to watch her grow,
enfeebled, toward oblivion,
her hands and face
yellow as floury
butter, her arms
white as gentled flour.
I love ‘In Ladbroke Grove’: a woman in a London cafe is surprised he is writer because she didn’t ‘know there were any in New Zealand.’ When she asked where New Zealand was ‘he refused to answer that because too many know anyway’. Ha!
I emailed Brain earlier in the year to see if had any new poems -and he said he had hundreds. ‘In the middle of nowhere’ is one of them – a Turner taste before you read the glorious Selected Poems. His poetry might carry you to the middle of nowhere (a fiction of course!) but his poems are rich in the sumptuous experience of somewhere. His poetry somewhere is vital, humane, illuminating. His Selected Poems is an essential volume for me and I want to keep quoting poems to you because they are so rewarding. Instead I recommend you pack the book in your bag and take time out for a Turner retreat.
The dead do
sing in us, in
us and through
us, and to themselves
under their mounds of earth
swelling in the sun, or in their
ashes that shine
as they depart on the wind.
from ‘After’ for Grahame
Victoria University Press page
Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Winners of the 2019 WriteNow Dunedin Secondary Schools Poetry Competition
Poems showcase rising stars of poetry
The winners of the 2019 WriteNow Dunedin Secondary Schools Poetry Competition have been chosen from a strong field of entries by judge Fiona Farrell, one of New Zealand’s most acclaimed and versatile writers.
Fiona was particularly impressed by Darcy Monteath (Year 10 Logan Park) who took out first prize in the Junior section for her poem ‘Overcoming grief in the form of birds’.
In her judge’s report Fiona said,
“This is an extraordinary poem, and far and away the best of all the poems, Junior and Senior, entered in this year’s competition.
The poet understands the power of metaphor, not just the birds but the landscapes they inhabit, beginning with the tarmac that is replaced suddenly round a corner by ‘everlasting fields’ and the kotuku with its ‘rounded shoulders’. The poem is a tangible realisation of the journey through grief to the moment where in a transcendent and utterly beautiful image, the poet faces ‘directly into the sun’ where bird that is also the father is ‘rising, singing’. The whole work is superbly structured and delivers real emotional weight.
A second poem submitted by Darcy was equally impressive. ‘Think White’ is superbly crafted. The poet shapes the work around that introductory ‘Think…’ then proceeds to elaborate on three words: ‘candescent’, ‘ailment’ and ‘gleam’. The result is a highly sophisticated work, by a writer blessed with an acute sensitivity to language and an artist’s eye. The three sections are drawn together to form a tantalisingly elusive narrative, through colour and form. This is a young poet to watch.”
First prize in the Senior section was awarded to Caitlin O’Brien (Year 11 Columba College) for her poem ‘Body bags on the beach’. Fiona said,
“The image of bags like ‘huhu grubs’ on the sand is arresting, and the sense of coming awake in the morning round a cold fire is perfectly timed, with that pause before the final word ‘conscious’. It takes a small moment in someone’s life and uses language and poetic form to make it very special.”
Second prize in the Senior section was awarded to Judah Nika (Year 11 Otago Boys) for ‘Life comes life goes’ and third prize to Abi Barton (Year 13 Logan Park) for ‘The Survival’.
Second prize in the Junior section was awarded to Ella McBride (Year 9 Queen’s) for ‘Candy floss skies’ and third prize to Jessie Avison (Year 9 Queen’s) for ‘Book Fish’.
Further details and all the winning poems visit here.
NZ Poetry Shelf 