little paper dragon, poised on the shelf in the room painted green, tucked in its cave below Struwwelpeter and Madeleine, Janosch and Kipling, scuffed satin ballet shoes and chalk portraits of boys long dead hanging on the wall
six neat squares of quilt sewn nearly a century ago, pinned above the cedar chest, keeping leather baby shoes, curled with age, and knitted bicycle sweaters: momentum of childhood a thing you can’t miss in this sunlit room this dragon
made by small nimble hands, the precise folds shaping its wings, lifting, spreading, waiting, its yang energy waking from winter, soaring upwards, inviting change, its heat its power: the fire miraculous, carried so gently in its little paper heart
Air
the scent of blooming things
hyacinth sweet pea peony bursting on a day we crave
good news, wafting from gardens along sunny streets and the sweet
sweet aroma of magnolia their pink hue particularly assertive
in the Smithsonian garden the yin of them needed
outside this window my mother’s creamy camelia bouncing softly
in the breeze fruity fragrance gliding in oh how
a thing unseen hops a gentle ride
rises on glossy air
Water
on the radio, a young harpist, following in the steps of Alice Coltrane and
Margaret Bonds and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor playing muted tones of Troubled Water, sensing a long history
of rivers and swamps, people moving slowly towards a more open world, the harpist growing up
with African American spirituals, desires for liberty hidden behind metaphors, water a symbol of freedom
Earth
cherry trees / spaced / along wide city streets / announcing spring / in this urban metropolis / these trees, gifted in 1912 / a token of friendship from Japan // our friendships delicate these days / taking energy and more / perhaps holding despite / the odds against them // here, look / smaller trees sturdy and familiar / not as showy but fruitful / American holly, redbud, flowering dogwood / native to the eastern seaboard / trees in bloom / roots reaching / sustaining / year after year / softly minding / their own business / flowering and seeding, flowering and seeding / the quiet understory that might endure
I want to lean in to uncynical joy eat fruit when my mouth craves fruit I will let my body sleep for as long as it needs I will have a cry in the back room of Café Laz go out the first warm day after a cold snap and remember what it is to be careless with my body heat to not have to clutch at it
peel off the layers one by one expose the soft hairs at the nape of my neck my mind half an orange every drop of juice squeezed from it the good plant shop down the road closed and another plant shop moved in I walk past it on my way home give a little wave to the driver who lets me cross the street stuff newspaper in the toes of my boots and hope they are dry by morning when I drag myself from sleep to a little cat breathing fish breath on my face she’s checking that I haven’t died in the night if you believe the videos on the internet
the world is my husband and I am a good wife I air out the sheets on bright days drink coffee on an empty stomach until I feel real or at least more real than my baseline think about gone girling myself and my main concern is who will continue to feed the cat I’ve never even seen the movie I just live in the world and now it’s inside me
Ash Davida Jane
Ash Davida Jane is a poet, editor and reviews from Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Their second book How to Live With Mammals (Te Herenga Waka University Press) won second prize in the 2021 Laurel Prize. They are a publisher at Tender Press and reviews co-editor at takahē.
The Open Book is thrilled to welcome back Starling for the Issue 19 Tāmaki launch party at 3pm on Sunday 6 April!
We’ll be celebrating the new issue with readings from several of its authors – come along and join us in hearing new work from young Aotearoa authors, and have a browse of the Open Book shelves while you’re at it.
No ticket or entry fees needed, and we will have drinks and nibbles for you to enjoy. We look forward to seeing you there!
We are driving to North Carolina, my mother and me. We depart early, from our Maryland home; we are on the move after weeks of staying put, a kind of fear and anger deep in our bones, this dangerous energy
driving our sense of survival. I pull my coat close; it is cold. But there are signs of spring everywhere: dots of snowdrops in my mother’s yard, their delicate milk buds resilient, delighting year after year with their knowing, their sense of coming.
For nearly six weeks I could not write a poem, frozen in the atmosphere of this place, my molecules slowing and arranging themselves into fixed positions, my solid state a barricade against encroaching storms. A friend said we write more when we are busy – she is right, I see.
We are driven to put our words on paper; sometimes it’s a small thing, an observation, sometimes a problem to examine or solve. We know, after stasis, the only thing to do is to move ourselves, to thaw, to look for some thing that gives, to find the light.
2.
In Winston-Salem, we sit in a concert hall at my mother’s alma mater, hearing young musicians bringing interpretations of Beethoven and Rocherolle to the stage; we slow down and breathe the southern air, quiet our senses and spend the day listening.
We visit with friends and family, a cousin I seldom see even though we grew up knowing each other and admiring the life the other had; we reminisce: tennis and hot summer days and Steve Martin’s genius.
We go see her dad, my mother’s favourite cousin (you can see why), and when we leave she gives me a cookbook to bring home to New Zealand, recipes from Durham, the town driven mad this time of year with Blue Devil fans (us too, admittedly) and their quest for the winning trophy, also the town where I was born.
3.
I love the trip south but I am stuck some days, still. I cannot ignore the now of these headlines: a Columbian couple who have called California home for 35 years cuffed and deported; new executive orders demanding proof of citizenship and social security eligibility. A Black Sea deal agreed – but peace? No,
peace seems precarious, even implausible. And yesterday war plans texted in a simple chat app, a grand-scale security breach defended (can we really call this ‘national intelligence’ anymore?). Meanwhile, Mahmoud Khalil sits 1000 miles from anyone he knows, and grocery prices are driven up
and up and up, and the man in charge (the man US voters put in charge?) says Europe is freeloading and pathetic, says he’ll bully his way to Greenland and call it friendly, says climate change will actually be beneficial, says – well, you know, so why I am writing this?
4.
Today, I will check on the chairs at Maryland Hall (a small installation started in Dunedin a year ago) – two chairs in a room alone, nothing more, facing each other, awaiting two people who may sit and silently take in a moment together, a moment
of quiet, of reflection, a moment shared, a moment those two strangers did not have the day before. Today, I donate a small sum to Randell Cottage, a trust driving to secure ongoing support for writers – I pause on the word trust, this notion of comfort, this power of believing,
of having faith. Today, I open the pages of Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger (you gotta read it, a trusted friend says). Today, I wonder where my brother could be; I wait for bad news and read good news sent by my daughter.
I pause on the word good and thank goodness for her goodness, her calm, her guarded optimism, her quiet drive. Today, I will breathe through an hour of yoga, stretch beyond my body’s bounds, look for a kind of gentle space for change. I pause on the word
kind. I think of shelter, of lines by Craig Santos Perez, his poem ‘A Sonnet at The Edge of the Reef’, his anguish, his silence, that moment of despair but also perhaps refuge, a gift for his young daughter.
5.
On the trip north, through wide wet highways of Carolina and Virginia, we can’t see two cars in front of us, driving rain obscuring our view. It is cold and I pull my coat close.
After nine hours behind the wheel, we pull up to the house and in my mother’s yard forsythia on the incline has broken out, its colour brilliant like the kōwhai that blooms in my Dunedin garden, both blossoms yellow like fire and igniting
something like hope. I pause on the word hope, something expectant, also related to trust. I think this plant is kind. Forsythia: a protecting species, clever like so many plants, driven by unsaid natural laws to safeguard against everything, knowing how
to look forward, how to plan for eventual disaster, their flowers becoming pendent in inclement weather, guarding their wee capsules inside, tiny winged seeds growing and preparing for what comes next, ready to take flight.
To celebrate the four collections on the Ockham NZ Book Award Poetry Short list I invited the poets to answer a handful of questions.
Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit, Emma Neale, Otago University Press, 2024
I want to hold this morning under an agapanthus sky with a gentle, moth-eyed horse as if the thread of language could ever weave a hide against the hook and ache of loss when we carry it deep as the mare carries the sprint, the vault, in her hocks, her fetlocks.
Emma Neale from ‘The Moth-eyed Steeplechase Horse’
Poetry grows out of both experience and imaginings, with truth and lies active in both realms. Lately, I have been musing upon and indeed bolstered by the way poetry is fed and watered within community gardens. A hub of vital connections. I have read Emma Neale’s Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit three times and it is the kind of book I want to have a long slow cafe conversation with you over coffee and pain au chocolat. This is a book born out of experience, out of truth and lies, out of the personal and the political, a book nurtured by a threads of reading, the stepping stones, poetic pivots and ideas that infuse and influence the making of a poem.
This is also a book nourished by ‘enthusiastic poetry talk’, with dear friends and writing companionship. And that matters. It is heartwarming to read Emma’s notes and acknowledgments. To think of poetry as conversation in myriad directions. One poem is an almost fan letter to Janet Frame, another a subconscious dialogue with poet Poppy Haynes.
As the title suggests, Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit is a book of lies, from little to large, from under the threat of torture or a mother’s stern gaze, from a homeless man scamming sympathy with self-inflicted wounds to lies told to save face or skin.
Emma’s poetry has always been a gift for the ear, and this collection is no exception, the linguistic dexterity, the rich lexicon. With her new collection, there is a terrific density of sound and effect. Every poem an intricate arrival of sonic mesh knit chord soar whisper. How it strikes the heart as you read.
To be reading this book is so very timely, when we are grappling and despairing at inhumane leadership, at planet-and-people-polluting toxic lies, at the self-serving manipulations of self-serving politicians. How to read and write in the age of weasel Trump and weasel Luxon Seymour Peters? What can language do? Ah.
I hold this book close to my heart because it reminds of the reach and possibilities of poetry. We can speak of the child, sons and daughters, mothers and fathers. We can write of loss and love, grief and abuse, epiphany and recognition. Failings and flailings. We can write out of and because of omission, and we can write out of and because of erasure.
There are multiple tracks and clearings as you read. You might feel the sharp blade of reading along with the sweet balm of self care. Take ‘Genealogy’, for example, a poem that steps into a complicated weave of ancestry, where Emma asks, so astutely, ‘is every white genealogy poem an erasure poem / is every postcolonial poem an erasure poem will we ever be fair / and true and clear’.
Or take ‘An Abraham Darby Rose’. Take this poem and sit with under the tree in the shade and embrace its physicality, an attribute that is a gold thread of the collection as whole. Spend time with the rose, honing in on both thorn and petal (‘peach-toned ruffles’), before facing the needle sting of the son’s departure, the self-examination within the greater context of life – and sit there finding ripples of comfort as the speaker gently places plantings in ‘the soil’s quiet crib’. Take this poem and hold it close.
Imagine we are in a cafe. Imagine we are in cafe reminding ourselves that silence is a form of consent. To write is to fertilise our community gardens. To write, as Emma does, and speak of tough stuff is to strengthen who and how we are in the world. To navigate, as Emma does, being mother daughter sister friend. Human and humane being. To gather a box of groceries for the welfare centre: ‘in the hope that kindness migrates invisible currents / to pollinate every tyrant’s heart’ (from ‘Wanting to believe in the butterfly effect’). To gather a folder of poems.
Ah. This precious book with its layers and weave of vulnerability and admission. This book of hauntings. This haunting book. This necessary fertile sequence of plantings. I love this so very much indeed.
The Lake
This child feels it like blue pollen that makes her hive of fingers dance. This one a groove along his spine that must be filled with running. Another as music that only rises here, deep in his mind, never sung. This last, as crystal numbers that link, fold and fall like pleats in time.
We think they all must know the lake’s mother tongue. They are her water cupped in our hands, new skins for the old light we believed in.
Photo credit: Caroline Davies
six questions
Were there any highlights, epiphanies, discoveries, challenges as you wrote this collection?
One of the challenges was in whittling down the original manuscript to give some titles more room to breathe. I had to discard about sixteen poems to streamline things. This meant taking out poems about Putin and Trump; about the Erebus disaster, with Justice Mahon’s infamous phrase ‘a litany of lies’; a playful poem about fake orgasm; darker poems about anorexia; domestic violence; gaslighting; and more besides. I had to think hard about which remaining poems would still carry traces of some of the social and political power dynamics I was preoccupied by.
Is there a particular poem in the collection you have soft spot for?
It’s less a soft spot than a sense of relief that I’ve managed to wrestle the difficult material into a poem with its own shape and forward drive. ‘My Blank Camouflage’ has been more than 30 years in the making, in that it’s taken me that long to find a way to address the topic in a poem.
What matters when you are writing a poem? Or to rephrase, what do you want your poetry to do?
I want to choose the words so that each potential nuance fuels and remains true to the poem’s psychological energy. I want the poem to resonate with sonic qualities so that it shows traces of its musical ancestry. I want the poem to have a hot nucleus of emotional truth.
I would find this impossible to narrow to one example, but is there a poem by a poet in Aotearoa that has stuck with you?
As I get older, answering this kind of question feels less and less possible! So many have stuck with me, that narrowing it to one feels like a falsification. And what sort of world would we be in if only one poet really spoke to us?
Are there particular poets that have sustained you, as you navigate poetry as both reader and writer?
What sustains me is the very fact that there is such a wide range of poets out there, past and present, reminding me that poetry itself is such a capacious, expansive genre. I’ve really enjoyed reading my fellow short-listed poets over the past week: three very different poets, all with resonant voices. I’ll cheat here, and catalogue some of my other recent reading: I’ve lately returned to reread Elizabeth Bishop’s Collected Poems and was struck by poems that hadn’t lingered with me before, although she is someone whose work I’d read and taught over the years. This was a thrilling realisation: to see how age and time uncover fresh potential, fresh insights, in long-term loves.
I recently came across the work of Norman MacCaig, a Scottish poet who was totally new to me, although he lived from 14 November 1910 – 23 January 1996. It was again thrilling to realise that I could still experience that falling-upon-a-poet with the same delight, absorption and a sense of reading as energising that I had as a young hopeful writer. There is something magically transporting when his work is firmly grounded in the sparkling, sensuous natural world.
I also recently came across the work of young UK poet Ella Frears: her work is much grittier and more urban than a poet like MacCaig; it’s sassy, frank, darkly funny sometimes, and vinegarish with satire.
I’ve also recently re-read Heal! by Simone Kaho; the lyricism and honesty in this moved me all over again. As I said elsewhere, when it first appeared, it has a fiery lyricism, even when it’s a sister of narrative prose and it serves a productively discomforting exposure of all kinds of inequality. I loved it in a stirred-up way.
Every now and again, I’ve been dipping back into collections by Ada Limón and feel both recharged and calmed by her ability to compress disparate experiences, contraries, into compact, contained, controlled and intimate lyrics.
And I’m in awe of how Alison Glenny, in her new collection Slanted, turns the page into such a flexible and evocative visual and typographical field. It is like watching a combination of a visual artist carefully etching lines, and a skilled gymnast dance across and transform a tumbling floor.
We are living in hazardous and ruinous times. Can you name three things that give you joy and hope?
The miracle of something as plain and ugly as a tuber containing the diva of a dahlia.
Intelligent, compassionate, excellent communicators, such as, say, the poet and academic Claudia Rankine, or the neuroscientist, literary critic and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, whose work I’ve only just stumbled recently also, via podcasts: I haven’t read his major work, The Master and His Emissary, but now I feel a sense of happy urgency about tracking it down. (Not having read the book, I hasten to add that I can’t yet know if I agree with all his views: and the point of having an open, intellectual society should mean having the freedom to disagree, even with people we admire.) The fact that there are deep, empathetic thinkers out there, capable of linking disparate disciplines and social phenomena together, and conveying their ideas in multiple forms and media: this gives me hope that the best of humanity will persist against the narcissistic, cruel and hateful.
My extended family, and in particular, my own children. One is an independent adult, now; one is still in high school. Despite all I fear for them, and all the things I worried were flaws and inadequacies in myself as a parent, they astonish me with the way they approach the world with entirely their own attitudes and with strengths that I never had. An analogy must be that if their father and I were the tubers, they are the dahlias. Their own extended family would be soil, rain and sun.
Emma Neale is the author of six novels, seven collections of poetry, and a collection of short stories. Her sixth novel, Billy Bird (2016) was short-listed for the Acorn Prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and long-listed for the Dublin International Literary Award. Emma has a PhD in English Literature from University College, London and has received numerous literary fellowships, residencies and awards, including the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for a Distinguished Contribution to New Zealand Poetry 2020. Her novel Fosterling (Penguin Random House, 2011) is currently in script development with Sandy Lane Productions, under the title Skin. Her first collection of short stories, The Pink Jumpsuit (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2021) was long-listed for the Acorn Prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Her short story, ‘Hitch’, was one of the top ten winners in the Fish International Short Story Prize 2023 and her poem ‘A David Austin Rose’ won the Burns Poetry Competition 2023-4. Her flash fiction ‘Drunks’ was shortlisted in the Cambridge Short Story Prize 2024. The mother of two children, Emma lives in Ōtepoti/Dunedin, Aotearoa/New Zealand, where she works as an editor. Her most recent book of poems is Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit (Otago University Press, 2024).
“I cannot pick material that does not relate to survival and resistance.” Tongo Eisen-Martin, poet
The Windham Campbell Prize is an extremely generous literary award from Yale University USA which supports 8 exceptional writers from across the globe: two writers from fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama categories.
How good to celebrate happy news in these tough times.
I am already a big fan of the fiction winners, Anne Enright (Ireland) and Sigred Nunez (United States), but have now listened to the two poets, Anthony V. Capildeo (Scotland/Trinidad and Tobago) and Tongo Eisen-Martin (United States) on the Award website (links below for you).
This is unmissable skin-prickling listening. Two poets sharing thoughts on writing poetry. I am now ordering some of their books.
“Each year, the Windham-Campbell Prizes celebrates eight exceptional writers for their literary achievement. Each awardee receives US$175,000 each, a gift that we hope allows for the space and time to support their boldest, most vital work.”
The 2025 cohort includes Sigrid Nunez (United States) and Anne Enright(Ireland) in fiction; Rana Dasgupta (United Kingdom) and Patricia J. Williams (United States) in nonfiction; Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini (United Kingdom) and Roy Williams (United Kingdom) in drama; and Anthony V. Capildeo (Scotland/Trinidad and Tobago) and Tongo Eisen-Martin (United States) in poetry.
To learn more about each writer, head over to windhamcampbell.org where you can watch mini-documentaries on their lives and creative inspiration.
Thank you for this extraordinary gift, which in these smashed times feels even more extraordinary.
I was listening to a news bulletin, hearing soundbites from world and local leaders hellbent on dismantling the world, and instead of feeling a dark weight descend upon my shoulders like I usually do, I began building my own essential word list.
So many of us are at breaking point. I have never been at such a jagged breaking blistering point. Trying to muster the strength and energy each day to take small steps, to bake the bread and plant the seeds, to write to the child and create the blog, to read the book and cook the meal. To tread water as I do a slow taper off a toxic drug with scant understanding of my current health challenges, let alone the road ahead. To struggle with the compounding questions. To sleep.
And yes, so many of us feel helpless as war criminals keep murdering innocent families in Gaza, as leaders dismantle services and practices that care for people at global and local levels and that improve the wellbeing of our planet. We witness the most vile forms of racism, sexism, homophobia. Our Government has scant understanding of what we need to do to nurture happy, healthy, multi-literate well-fed children (yes reading writing maths, but also emotional and creative literacy). Our health system is smashed and our incredible doctors and nurses are working in the rubble.
I am crisis point. Earth is at crisis point.
For the past two years I have been writing A Book of Care, a book of aids that help keep my feet on the ground, that help me weather the darkest corners and sharp skids down the mountain scree. I hold onto light and mountain beauty, and I hold onto joy, but sometimes it is so incredibly tough.
The tūī are our daily soundtrack. The dancing pīwakawaka dancing delight.
I embrace the notion that things can make a difference. Small steps. My blogs make a difference to me. Writing my secret things makes a difference. Reading your poetry makes a difference. Reading children’s books published in Aotearoa. Hearing people protest and speak out across the world makes a difference. I love tuning into the BBC podcast of People Fixing the World, or their Food Chain podcast, or their Happy Stories from around the World podcasts.
Creating my own word list made a difference this morning. Let us flood the world with word lists and gestures and actions that connect and rebuild and care.
NZ Poetry Shelf 