‘We’re breaking with “the tyranny of prose” this week, and turning to you, our readers, to make the most of National Poetry Day by making poems come alive. The focus of this year’s UK-wide celebration of poetry, for which you can find the full programme here, is to get you thinking, dreaming and acting like a poet. Here are some of the video dedications you shared on GuardianWitness – a mix of your own creations and your favourite poems by others.’
see here
I have a little bundle of NZ poetry books to give to someone who within the space of a paragraph or so tells me about a NZ poetry book they have have enjoyed reading this year.
If I get any responses, I will post them on Poetry Shelf, and will randomly pick one poetry fan to receive the books.
send to paulajoygreen@gmail.com by October 11th
Press release:
Published by Bridget Williams Books, The Dreaming Land is a frank and lyrical evocation of a childhood and adolescence spent in rural New Zealand in the 1950s and 60s, richly coloured with details that resonate across generations.
Martin Edmond’s early life was shaped by his schoolteacher father’s developing career and the moves it dictated: from Ohakune, to Greytown, to Huntly, to Heretaunga. The Dreaming Land depicts a slice of New Zealand history from a very personal perspective. Edmond documents the people, places and events that made lasting impressions on him over the course of this peripatetic upbringing. He charts too his mental landscape – a terrain marked by curiosity, empathy and acute observation.
Coming from one of New Zealand’s finest writers, The Dreaming Land makes a significant contribution to the New Zealand literary canon. It adds not only to the extensive body of Edmond’s own work (in art criticism, biography, essays and screenplays) but also to the catalogue of prose writing about people and place in New Zealand.
Martin Edmond’s writing has been recognised by the Michael King Fellowship and the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement (Non-fiction, 2013); other awards include 3rd prize at the 1993 Goodman Fielder Wattie Book Awards for The Autobiography of my Father, and the Biography Award at the 2005 Montana New Zealand Book Awards for Chronicle of the Unsung.
Martin Edmond will be in New Zealand between 14 and 26 October to speak at launch events for The Dreaming Land and to receive the Michael King Fellowship. He is available for interviews throughout this time.
Launch events
WELLINGTON
Thursday 15 October, 6pm
Unity Books
57 Willis Street
AUCKLAND
Tuesday 20 October, 5:30pm
Central City Library
44-46 Lorne Street
Both launch events for The Dreaming Land will feature a reading by Martin Edmond
The inaugural issue is scheduled for January, 2016, and is themed Blue.
see here
‘I like the idea of doing a narrative in poetic form and using dialogue in poetry to create character,’ says Diane Brown. ‘Taking My Mother to the Opera is not a series of individual poems so much as one long poem. It tells a story: the sum is more than the parts.’
Stone
Stony this, stony that. They are cold
today, these stones on the desk.
Stone cold. Stone blind. Stone deaf.
Heart, reception, stare, silence.
They remember the slingshot.
It is said he is a man to reckon with.
He hasn’t spoken to his son for years.
It is said that words will never hurt you.
‘To be hard in hard times,’ he announces,
‘we must build an expressway like an arrow
through the quiet heart
of your coastal town.’ Cold facts
say one thing, cold politics another.
We remember the ballistic missile.
The falling debris and the striking edge.
© Dinah Hawken Ocean and Stone Victoria University Press, 2015
Author bio: Dinah Hawken is one of New Zealand’s most critically acclaimed poets. Born in Hawera in 1943, she trained as a physiotherapist, psychotherapist and social worker in New Zealand and the United States. Most of the poems in her award-winning first collection It Has No Sound and Is Blue (1987) were written in New York in the mid-1980s while she was studying at Brooklyn College and working with the homeless and mentally ill. Her two most recent books, One Shapely Thing: Poems and Journals (2006) and The Leaf-Ride (2011), were both shortlisted for the New Zealand Book Awards. Dinah was named the 2007 winner of the biennial Lauris Edmond Award for Distinguished Contribution to Poetry in New Zealand. She lives in Paekakariki.
Note from Paula: This poem is in Dinah’s new collection just out from Victoria University Press. It is an utterly beautiful book in every detail (the feel of the pages, the choice of font, the simplicity of the cover and of course the billowing beauty of the poems themselves. I have been a Dinah-Hawken fan for a long time. I remember the pleasure of writing a long essay on Small Stories of Devotion as part of my Masters degree. There has been a sustaining chord between Dinah’s work and my writing since those far-off days. In part it is to do with the grace, the elegance, the economy, the lyricism. In part it is to do with the sumptuous view that settles as you open the window of the poem. In part it is the curious self that questions the world and the way we do things.
This poem is a thing of beauty, and it draws upon all the things I have detailed above. There is the lyricism that builds out of stress, meter and repetition (‘Stone cold. Stone blind. Stone deaf.’) There is the way a thing (stone) shakes with life and possibility. There is the way, with that small frame of the window ajar, we fall upon the beauty of an object (a stone) and then fall away to the hurt we inflict upon each other — at the level of the individual, the level of a town, the level of a nation. It really is the kind of poem that needs to speak for itself, to shimmer on the page in its own marvelous way. Its window catches any number of lights.
Victoria University Press page
NZ Book Council page
‘The approach taken by Bill, Norman, Hannah and Colin has been one that seeks to marry the words and music as seamlessly as possible. Performances include readings of the poems by Bill, sometimes accompanied by an anecdote or brief explanation to illuminate the poem’s genesis followed by performances of the poems as songs. Hannah’s nuanced interpretation of these words is complemented by Colin’s obligatos and solos and as a trio (with Norman at the piano) the three make delicate music that draws from European jazz, from the folk traditions of Great Britain and New Zealand, and from popular song.’
Johanna is a poet who was living in Palmerston North (quite a hub of poetry activity!) but currently in Iowa. I haven’t read her debut chapbook from Pemmican Press, Oh My God I’m Flying (1991), but I really loved her second collection, Long Girl Ago (Victoria Press, 2007). The poems felt fresh, playful, finely crafted, and surprising in the little revelations, particularly in the poems that placed little frames on Japan. The book was shortlisted for best book of poetry the following year. Johanna’s new collection, Miss Dust, was recently released by Seraph Press. It is a collection in two parts with many bridges between, and the freshness, the economy and the diligent craft remain a vital feature.
What catches me with these new poems is the heightened degree of surprise. This is poetry tilted on its axis. The first section is devoted to a sequence that gives life to Miss Dust. When read together, the section forms a long narrative poem, or perhaps you could say, a long character poem in pieces. In trying to liken the startling effect of reading this life, I came up with a hybrid analogy: it is like an Eleanor Rigby portrait meets a Salvador Dali painting meets a dislocating dream state meets a short film by Alison Maclean meets Edward Lear meets a veiled memoir.
The idea of dust is ephemeral — it leaves traces and smears, it veils and it clouds. Perfect word for a character that hides behind tropes, white space and poetic jump cuts. The tropes are borderline surreal (‘The curtains of her house are ash’). At dinner with her online date, he ‘ordered for her the dark.’ Yet even though things are strange, it is the effect of the bridges and the gaps that augment the mood, the portrait, the arc of a life. Take ‘Miss Dust and the Affair.’ The little leaps from one thing to the next, from one action to the next, miss the gritty details that might pepper confession, exchanged story. The poem is mysterious and haunting, but if you lift out the stepping stones (that occur on other occasions throughout the book) you get a terrific story of love lost: affair kiss lips lines waves rocks cheeks. That story is the undercurrent of the poem, hiding in the dust. Miss Dust, herself, would sum up the undercurrent with two words (‘black heart’), words that crop up in a number of the poems.
The movement between things is also surprising or disconcerting in the poems and feeds into the crucial threads of loss and love and life. In ‘Miss Dust makes a promise to her black heart,’ every line seems to offer a new twist — the way the dreaming mind takes the ordinary and then skews it to show a deep-seated feeling pulsing through.
Here is the cure: sitting
on someone else’s carpet,
she makes herself a promise,
with the help of a chisel
and a block of A4 refill.
She chips out a beach scene
three streets away, hammers in
stones that warm or cool
You can’t just read this poem and walk away. It holds you tight as Miss Dust walks into the beach scene and ‘lowers the plunger/ onto one more set of grounds.’ There is that jarring kink between the scene carved (hope, therapy, cure) that catapults the black heart to elsewhere and the chore of making coffee. For me, the word ‘grounds’ flicks and shifts. Yes, the coffee is ground (the daily chore/grind) but also, like the beach scene, ground is another place to lay down roots. To tend damaged roots. Soil, black like the black heart. A single word, and you can set up camp for hours.
I don’t know of a sequence in New Zealand poetry quite like this (maybe I got whiffs of the early surrealness of Gregory O’Brien). Reading and lingering in the half light of Miss Dust, is utterly moving as you fall between the gaps of her life.
The second half of the book is not Miss Dust but there is a similar degree of surprise, little echoes that seem familiar (the half house), the dislocating and then relocating pieces, the way nouns and verbs startle (‘I’m starting to skin your loneliness Miss Shoulder’). There is a stunning Japanese poem, ‘Jun,’ that pulls you back to the previous collection with its final, breathtaking stanza.
one of the saddest things i did in japan was to teach to jun’s photo
on his empty desk i asked the students to count the students
in the class the students said do we count jun
Johanna has delivered a new collection that never lets the dust settle (excuse the pun). Each poem reproduces a glorious jittery, shimmery movement between things, between actions and between things and actions. At the core of that movement: feeling. Yes, you enter a world that is, at times, a little like the bewildering jumps and turns of a dreamscape, but just as with the dream, you fall upon cores of truth. Simple, everyday cores of truth that have as much to do with how you feel the world as how you see the world. I loved this collection.
Seraph Press page
a regular feature at The Spin Off … Friday is Poetry Day!
Ashleigh’s poem here
NZ Poetry Shelf 