Newborn

His mouth a small red hearth
we huddle around:
forest creatures drawn
to its light and warmth.

When its suck and flicker at the breast stops
we blow cool breath on the soft black coal of his head
to make its wet spark dart again.

A scarlet trapdoor with tiny clapper
that knocks and knocks at our dreams and enters,

his mouth springs open
like the lid of a surprise
to loosen translucent birthday balloons of

Ah, ah.
I, I.

We stand here and watch them rise;
the night crowds at fireworks
make of our own mouths a kind of mirror:

Oh. Oh. You.

Emma Neale
from Spark, Steele Roberts, 2008

Over the coming months, the Monday Poem spot will include poetry that has stuck to me over time, poems that I’ve loved for all kinds of reasons.

I have a poetry room in my house and a poetry room in my head, both excellent places to go travelling. The room in my head stores poems and collections that have stuck with me, whether it is the subject matter, the craft, musicality, an unfolding and enduring sense of awe and wonder. A visiting poet recently admitted (on the radio) they disliked the word ‘inspire’. I dug my heels in, and decided I like a word that evokes an intake of breath, an outtake of creativity. I guess that is what happens when I read poems I love, that delicious intake of breath and that creative trigger. More than anything, heart is always there.

Emma Neale’s poetry collections have struck multiple chords with me – so am delighted her new collection is to be launched on November 14th. A very happy coincidence indeed. So much to admire and celebrate in Emma’s writing. I am drawn into the exquisite craft, poetic rhythms, acute observations, miniature narratives. Her poems are rich in heart, lithe in movement between the domestic and the imagined, the past and the present, personal threads and political challenges. Love is the key.

I picked ‘Newborn’ to go in Dear Heart: 150 New Zealand Love Poems (2012) because the poem catches a maternal moment so perfectly, so surprisingly. The poem exemplifies Emma’s ability to layer a poem like an artichoke, to offer it to the reader to peal back and delight in each petal, and on each reading, take a slightly different route to reach a state of reading wonder. How I love this poem. This heart. Ah.

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.

Emma’s 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 (due out from Otago University Press in November 2024).

Launch details

Emma Neale, University Book Shop Otago and Otago University Press warmly invite you to the launch of Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit, the new poetry collection by Emma Neale. To be launched by Louise Wallace.

5:30pm–7:00pm
Thursday 14 November 2024
University Book Shop Otago
Dunedin
All welcome!
Please RSVP to events@unibooks.co.nz for catering purposes

Fibs, porkies, little white lies, absolute whoppers and criminal evasions: the ways we can deceive each other are legion.

Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit, the new collection by Ōtepoti poet and writer Emma Neale, is fascinated by our doubleness. Prompted by the rich implications in a line from Joseph Brodsky — ‘The real history of consciousness starts with one’s first lie’ — it combines a personal memoir of childhood lies with an exploration of wider social deceptions.

From the unwitting tricks our minds play, to the mischievous pinch of literary pastiche; from the corruptions of imperialism or abuse, to the dreams and stories we weave for our own survival, these poems catalogue scenes that seem to suggest our species could be named for its subterfuge as much as for its wisdom. Yet at the core of the collection are also some tenets to hold to: deep bonds of love; the renewal children offer; a hunger for social justice; and the sharp reality that nature presents us with, if we are willing to look.

Emma Neale is a novelist and poet. Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit is her seventh poetry collection, following To the Occupant (Otago University Press, 2019). Recognition for her work includes the 2008 NZSA Janet Frame Memorial Award for Literature and the 2011 Kathleen Grattan Award for Poetry for The Truth Garden (Otago University Press, 2012). In 2020 Neale was awarded the Lauris Edmond Memorial Prize for a Distinguished Contribution to New Zealand Poetry. A former editor of Landfall, she lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin and works as a freelance editor for publishers in New Zealand and Australia.

Find out more here.

Join us for the launch of Slender Volumes by Richard von Sturmer, Saturday 16 November, 2:30–4pm at Onehunga Community House, 83 Selwyn Street, Onehunga. This is the first release from new independent publisher, Spoor Books.

Slender Volumes locates the cypress trees of Buddhist folklore in Onehunga and the teachings of the Zen tradition along its foreshore. Elaborating on kōans collected by poet-philosopher Eihei Dōgen, each poem fastens centuries and distances together to find insight in everyday things: seagulls on a handrail, insects drinking from a pan of water, sump oil glistening in a white bucket.

Richard von Sturmer is an artist-activist turned Zen teacher, whose lyrics for punk bands formed the soundtrack to the nationwide protests of the ’80s, including Blam Blam Blam’s “There is No Depression in New Zealand.”

Spoor Books is an independent publisher, a community-oriented platform, and a bookshop featuring radical publishers from India and elsewhere. Based in Titirangi, Aotearoa New Zealand, we aim to connect readers with left-field inquiries and non-Western imaginaries. Spoor Books is led by Balamohan Shingade and Erena Shingade.

                                                 A Freedom Song

 

Freedom to love       
not to wage war                                                               

                           A tūī still sings
                          The manukā trembles

Freedom to listen
not to mislead

         A kererū glides
         The broad beans ripen

Freedom to feed
not to starve

          It’s heart to heart
          It’s the kumarā roasting

Freedom to heal
not to wound

           It’s lightness at dawn
           It’s the ruru calling

Freedom to care
not to ignore

                   It’s a song and dance
                   because our world is broken

 

Paula Green

 

 

 

 

Tangihanga

at the pā
nō rātou te mana
nō ngā wāhine
e mau panekoti ana

my father
stands to speak

I am a needle of bone
on my aunty’s knee
I have cut my hair

handled gently
I am a thatched weapon
a flake of obsidian

something skirting
the boards of the house
as if it were property

what he says is like
bread or a bruise

there is a rushing to the edges
the scent of kawakawa releases
into the dark-fleshed home

Hinemoana Baker
from mātuhi | needle, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2004

Over the coming months, the Monday Poem spot will include poetry that has stuck to me over time, poems that I’ve loved for all kinds of reasons. Poems that comfort or delight or challenge. Poems that strike the eye, ear, mind or heart.

I have loved this poem for twenty years, the first poem in Hinemoana’s debut collection, mātuhi | needle, a book that sings and weaves with aroha, agility and self navigation. I think of this poem welcoming us to the poetry that follows, and indeed, to the sublime collections that follow. Here, on the first page, whanua. Here in the first lines, wahine. Te reo Māori, the first breath. The healing balm of kawakawa, a wafting scent for speaker and reader. This layered poem is heart, the kind of vital heart that travels with you, as bridge, as anchor, lifeblood. Here the notes of an agile musician poet draw us into the chorded melodies to come, aural economy and aural richness, the sweet and sour intricacies of the world, the magnetic pull of story, memory, ancestors, home. Ah, such joy, returning to this poem and this collection, this poet.

Poet and performer Hinemoana Baker traces her ancestry from Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Toa Rangatira, Te Āti Awa and Ngāi Tahu, as well as from England and Germany. Her four poetry collections, several original music albums and other sonic and written work have seen her on stages and pages in many countries around world for the last 25 years. With Maria McMillan, she co-edited Kaupapa: New Zealand Poets World Issues (2007). Her most recent poetry collection, Funkhaus (THWUP 2021) was shortlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. It was published in German translation (AZUR Voland & Quist) in 2023 and in Polish (Wydawnictwo Ha!art) in July 2024.

Hinemoana was the Arts Queensland Poet in Residence (2009); one of thirty-eight writers in residence at the University of Iowa International Writing Programme (2010); the writer in residence at Victoria University in Wellington (2014); the Creative New Zealand Berlin Writer in Residence (2016). She is currently Randell Cottage Trust’s writer in residence at the historic homestead at the base of Ahumairangi in Te Whanga-nui-a-Tara.

Hinemoana Baker’s website

Poetry Shelf conversation with Hinemoana

Te Herenega Waka University page

Yes – now on November 21st

Faces and Flowers Poems to Patricia France
Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024

I search your paintings of flowers
and see nothing fragile in their colours.

Flowers are delicate by nature, in their opening selves.
But you added to that. You added ferocity

and strength. Orange, blue, yellow, white, rising
from a dark vase and a dark past.

 

Dinah Hawken
from ‘Consider the future and the past with an equal mind’

Dunedin artist, Patricia France (1911 – 1995), was a cousin of poet Dinah Hawken’s father. I have long admired and loved the work of both women, the paintings of one, the poems of the other, so to hold this book is precious.

After self-admission to the psychiatric hospital, Ashburn Hall, Patricia began to paint, and from that point, continued to paint and develop her career as an exhibiting artist. As Dinah’s collection title suggests, Patricia was known for painting women, girls and flowers. A number of artworks are included in the book. The paintings and poems form an exhibition at Waikanae’s gallery, Toi Mahara, from 20 September to 8 December 2024.

I begin with the production of the book – the shape, the layout, the font size, the paper stock, because each choice serves the paintings and poems beautifully. I think of the book’s design as a breathing space, because here the art and poetry have room to breathe, and that makes all the difference for both reader and viewer. Sublime.

Books are often dedicated to loved ones, and there is a long tradition of poems written for named or unnamed recipients. With Faces and Flowers, Dinah underlines that these poems are written to Patricia. Writing in this context is a way of speaking to someone, and out of that speaking, a loving portrait of a woman emerges, the artist, the relation. Dinah assembled her portrait through research and delving. She drew upon Patricia’s letters in the Hocken Library and by viewing her artwork, by listening to T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets as Patricia did when she painted. Contemplation and memory are working in tandem. By placing these paintings and poems together as an exhibition, the fecundity of conversation between poem and painting, past and present, is heightened.

The poet as portrait artist works on multiple levels. Dinah’s poetic pen is infused with family history but it also includes the ink of contemporary circumstances. She cannot speak to Patricia without signalling a world awry, without acknowledging the tragedy of climate change, the impact of Covid, how the world tetters and topples. Today I could add the war in Gaza and Lebanon.

I am musing on how this book fills me with both wonder and comfort, concern and discomfort. To linger upon the faces and flowers is transfixing: the extraordinary eyes of the women and girls mesmerise as transmitters of emotion and guardians of experience. Dinah considers the enigma, the building questions, in these faces that haunt and endure. She decides, she declares for the first time publicly, that colour has been her ‘silent, / vital, lifelong partner’ (‘Colour’). And yes, Patricia is much admired for her colour palette, the balance, harmony, softness, mood shimmer. When Dinah writes that ‘vowels are my colours’, I want to reach back through her collections and see how her poetry exudes colour as it draws the natural world close. I delight in this colour. This vital bloom. In both the paintings and the poems.

Ah. Comfort and discomfort. Reading Dinah’s collection returns me to an issue that unsettles me every day: how to write, and indeed how to blog, in a world plagued with catastrophe? What to write, what to blog? I hold this book and I savour so deeply the comfort it delivers, the wonder and delight, and then, at the same time, I recognise how important it is to speak up and to speak out, to use our pens and our voices to shine light upon and to help our wounded planet and people. When Jacinda makes an appearance in the poem, ‘The two girls’, I am aching. I am thinking yes, we will lift each other up, yes we have lifted, and yes we will continue to lift. I am thinking how writing poems and making art and maybe even creating blogs is a vital lift, for ourselves and for each other.

Now I think of the prime minister. For me
she is a breakthrough. For her, kindness is not

a sweet, or exhausted, word: it is naturally
entwined with acuity and strength.

Faces and Flowers underlines the necessity of conversation. Of memory. Of creativity. Of connections. Of care. Last week I posted a cluster of harbour poems, much loved by Poetry Shelf readers, and here in Dinah’s new collection is a heart-in-the-mouth, hold-your-breath harbour poem, ‘The still point, there the dance is’. Ah. This poem. It touches so exquisitely on why the harbour is vital as a physical presence, as a metaphor, as an idea. Dinah’s poem is like the heart of the book, in its pulse, its reverberations. As she has done across all her collections, she creates moments of stillness where we might enjoy miniature residencies. She writes with such craft and wisdom, with such nuances, richness, quietude. Every book she writes, reminds me why poetry matters. And this gift of a book is no exception.

The still point, there the dance is

 

Now I’m in the boatshed. On a calm Otago harbour.
Even in winter, even in wind,

the glass walls will protect whoever is here
and still give warmth and light. In time present

the harbour is the source of any creative act.
It’s as if each artist waits like an upturned boat

for their season and their oars. There is nothing other
than waiting. Waiting alone is boat and breath and venture.

An albatross flies overhead on motionless wings.
Bellbirds gather round a feeder and forget to sing.

I sit over a sheet of water and, while in time future
the harbour is quietly, disruptively rising,

in the waiting room, in the meantime,
water itself is the vital and telling element.

 

Dinah Hawken

I would like to gift a copy of this book to a reader – leave your name here, or on my social media feeds with the name of a poetry book you love by Tuesday November 5th. I will draw names out of a hat on Wednesday 6th.

Dinah Hawken is one of New Zealand’s most celebrated poets. She was born in Hāwera in 1943 and trained as a physiotherapist, psychotherapist and social worker in New Zealand and the United States and has worked as a student counsellor and writing teacher at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. Of her ten collections of poetry, four have been finalists for the New Zealand Book Awards. Her first book, It Has No Sound and Is Blue (1987), won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Best First Time Published Poet. Her latest poetry collection is Faces and Flowers: Poems to Patricia France (2024), and other recent collections are Sea-light (2021), longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, There Is No Harbour (2019), and Ocean and Stone (2015). Dinah lives in Paekākāriki.

Te Herenga Waka University Press page

Toi Mahara gallery page

Kindness Collective is a nationwide charity that spreads kindness by connecting children and families with the things they need (from everyday essentials to moments of joy). They support thousands of people living in poverty every year through nationwide programmes. The Collective aims to promote a kinder New Zealand, tackling inequity from the ground up, creating long-term, positive social impacts where everyone has the chance to thrive.Works will be on show at Gow Langsford Onehunga during business hours (Thursday-Friday 10-5pm; Saturday 10-4pm) or by appointment from Thursday 31 October – Thursday 7 November. The auction is now live and biddable online with thanks to Art + Object. Ben Plumbly will conclude the sale with a live auction event on Thursday 7 November at 7pm at Gow Langsford Gallery, Onehunga. RSVP for this special evening to info@gowlangsfordgallery.co.nz.

Bid Online Now