“Poetry is attendance upon the world.”
Janet Frame

∗ an intro and three poems chosen by Paula Green
∗ a poem written by Bill Manhire for Janet
∗ three poems chosen by Pamela Gordon with comments

 

 

The sweet daily bread of language
Smell it rising in its given warmth
taste it through the stink of tears and yesterday and
eat it anywhere with angel in sight

 

Janet Frame, from ‘I Write Surrounded by Poets’
in The Goose Bath, Random House, 2006

Usually on Poetry Day I organise a suite of audios, bringing together voices that inspire move surprise . . . that fill us with the joy and delight of poetry. On this occasion however, I showcase a poet whose writing has travelled with me for decades. I have been hankering to do this for ages . . . to revisit the work of writers whose work has affected me deeply, in multiple ways, on repeat occasions, offering heart, surprise, daring, comfort, wit. I begin with Janet Frame.

Janet Frame (1924-2004) is one of New Zealand’s most internationally acclaimed authors. She won numerous prizes and accolades for her poetry, fiction and non-fiction, and was awarded Aotearoa’s highest civil honour the Order of New Zealand. In 1990 her bestselling autobiography An Angel at My Table was adapted for cinema by Jane Campion. Janet Frame bequeathed her ongoing royalties to the Janet Frame Literary Trust and directed that the fund be used to support New Zealand authors.

Pamela Gordon, Janet’s literary executor, has kindly picked three favourite poems by Janet and included some comments, and Bill Manhire has contributed a poem he wrote for Janet for An Inward Sun, ed Elizabeth Alley. It was a book of tributes that was published in 1984 to mark Janet Frame’s 70^th birthday. This month we are mindful it is one hundred years since her birth.

The poems Pamela and I have chosen appear in:
The Goose Bath: Poems, Janet Frame, eds Pamela Gordon, Denis Harold and Bill Manhire, Random House, 2006
The Pocket Mirror, George Braziller, New York, 1967

When I was an awkward teenager devouring Hone Tuwhare, Doris Lessing, Richard Brautigan, Joni Mitchell, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, reading Janet Frame was an electric and vital charge.

Now, all these decades later, when I am reflecting on how much I love Janet’s poems, I am curious as to why some critics have sidelined her poetry. Maybe it’s because there is a resistance to writers who cross borders, who write novels and poetry, or writers who resist the constricting paradigm of model novelist or model poet. I am thinking immediately of the astonishing Anne Kennedy whose novels and poetry both inspire and delight me. And of Emma Neale, Anna Smaill, Keri Hulme, Elizabeth Smither, Vincent O’Sullivan, Robin Hyde.

But today I am musing on why I love the poetry of Janet. Let’s start with the idea of alchemy, a practice of transformation, the recasting of base ingredients into something precious, awe-inspiring, succulent. In this case, in the case of poetry, words are the base elements: nouns, verbs, adjectives, ellipses. With Janet there’s a metamorphosis into a poetry of feel, sound, stretch, freshness.

More than anything I feel Janet’s poetry. I feel it on the level of texture, heart, self and joy. The physical detail is a sweet tang on the tongue as I read. Take the opening stanza of ‘Moss’ for example:

The Spring moss
the plush lining of the jewel-box
rediscovered beneath the snow.
Fever-green surfacings.
Ice with its edges smoothing
shaping in the lick-tongue of the sun
transparent white-green sweet

from The Goose Bath

To that I add the sound of poetry, the deft step of words on the line that spring and spin in the ear as I listen, as I read the moss stanza with its aural rewards for example. More than anything, there is a revelation of self across the writing: as a woman, a child, a poet, though living, writing, moving in the world. One of the three poems I picked below, ‘Child’, is a poem I feel on so many levels: the lyrical flow, the physical presence, the portrait of both child and grandmother.

How I love the stretch of Janet’s poetry. There is the eclectic subject matter, the diverse locations; we move from a tourist in Mexico City to Baltimore streets, from layered snow to dandelions in the grass, from not being able to write to the ink flowing. The motifs are equally ranging, with sun and rain, light and sky, wind and poetry making, incandescent gleams as you read. Yet more than anything, there is the sweet prismatic stretch of what poetry can do, how it might describe sing pirouette confess dance mourn ponder reflect light and dark explore . . . multiple fluencies. There is a sense of this stretch when Janet writes of poetry making, as in ‘Some of My Friends Are Excellent Poets’:

Poetry has not room for timidity of tread
tiptoeing in foot prints already made
running afraid of the word-stranger glimpsed out of the corner of the eye
lurking in the wilderness. Poetry is a time for the breaking habits good or bad,
a breaking free of memory and yesterday
to face the haunting that is.

from The Goose Bath

Finally, the words ‘fresh’ ‘original’ ‘invigorating’ come to mind. Janet sometimes speaks of the practice of poetry making. Sometimes she will hold out the most ordinary thing, offer a moment of self doubt, trace multiple dimensions, the flashes and the fancies that arrive as she writes, and as I read, I am transported, inspired, itching to create poems. I am viewing the world, and indeed, poetry afresh.

On NZ Poetry Day, I am offering you three of Janet’s poems I particularly love, that demonstrate so beautifully how her poetry is a poetry of feel, sound, stretch and freshness . . . poems for you to find your own reading trails within.

Child

 

When I was a child I wore a fine tartan coat
that my grandmother, woman of might,
magnificent launcher of love and old clothes, had set afloat
on a heaving relative sea
of aunt and cousin and big enfolding wave of mother
down to small wave of me.

Oh happily I stood that day in the school playground
near the damp stone wall
and the perilous nine o’clock wind
grabbed at my coat-sleeve, waving it in a bright wand
of yellow and green and blue
—all colours, and the other children loved me
and the little girls pleaded to lend
their skipping-rope and the boys their football.

But the spell soon broke in my hand.
Love and sleeve together fell.
The wind blew
more perilous when the world found
my tartan coat was not even new.

 

from The Goose Bath

The Birch Trees

 

Mysterious the writing on the birch-bark
a tune of growth with hyphenated signature,
coded rolls a pianola might play,
a computer accept as mathematical formulae,
surrendering the answer, the question lost.

They tell me the birch tree is delicate
they tell me so often I believe it.
I have seen birches like grey rainbows washed of colour
arched beneath the storm
backbending not breaking,
and the young trees their stick-limbs announcing
all deficiencies beside the one prolonged
nourishment of survival.

Birch trees never ask: Why are we here? They know.
Opportunity trees, their business is the beautiful
disposal or draping of weather
especially of snow distributed across their
grey branches in such a way
their bark becomes a calligraphy of scars and stars.

Reading it suddenly in the woods one is astonished
to find engraved on pages of birch-bark the fiction
and fact of men in their cities.

 

from The Goose Bath

How I Began Writing

 

1
Between myself and the pine trees on the hill
Thoughts passed, like presents. Unwrapping them, I found
words that I, not trees, knew and could afford:
lonely, sigh, night. The pines had given me
my seven-year self, but kept their meaning in the sky.

Now, in exchange of dreams with this remote world
I still unwrap, identify the presents;
and always tired recognition gives way to hope
that soon I may find a new, a birthday shape,
a separate essence yielded without threat or deceit,
a truthful vocabulary of what is and is not.

 

2
Vowels turn like wheels: the chariot is empty.
Tall burning consonants light the deserted street.
Unwrapping the world,
unwrapping the world
where pine trees still say lonely, sigh, night, and refuse,
refuse, and their needles of deceit drop in my eyes.
I began to write.

 

from The Goose Bath

Pamela Gordon’s three poem choices and comments

Here are some thoughts about three of my favourite Janet Frame poems. I love each one for very personal reasons.

When the Sun Shines More Years Than Fear

When the sun shines more years than fear
when birds fly more miles than anger
when sky holds more bird
sails more cloud
shines more sun
than the palm of love carries hate,
even then shall I in this weary
seventy-year banquet say, Sunwaiter,
Birdwaiter, Skywaiter,
I have no hunger,
remove my plate.

from The Pocket Mirror: Poems by Janet Frame

This magical multi layered piece has always been my favourite. I do think this is one of Janet’s best, and she herself counted it among the ones she was most proud of. When she was planning her funeral she chose this to be read aloud and it was her bff Jacquie Baxter (JC Sturm) who did the honours at the service. Jacquie was my friend and mentor and so now the poem carries extra emotional freight for me.

For me the metaphors speak of Janet’s remarkable strength and perseverance in the face of adversity and disappointment. In a literal sense it is amusing because one of our family catchphrases was “Baby Frame is hungry”, from a comment written down by New Zealand’s first female medical graduate, Dr Emily Siedeberg, who delivered Janet at St Helen’s Hospital in Dunedin, 100 years ago this week. Janet had such an enormous appetite for life. As she said once in an interview: “Every thing I do, I want to do to the full.” She was NEVER going to say “remove my plate”, and that is what this poem embodies for me.

Small Farewell

Writing letters of goodbye
we are inclined to say
because we have read
or heard it said
or knew someone who likewise went away
that small details pester the memory.

In the corner closet of your eye
in the back room of seeing
that looks out on the backyard of yesterday
who can pretend to say
what you will muffle in moth balls
or soak with insect spray 
to stop the spread of memory’s decay?
I think all I can say
from hearing a ghost speak in a Shakespeare play
is, if you were Hamlet, and I your father’s ghost,
–Remember me. 

from The Goose Bath

In late 2003, when she was dying, Janet asked Bill Manhire to agree to help me edit a selection of her unpublished poems. And she tasked me with getting them published. It meant a lot to her. Poetry was her first love.

After she died, I ventured alone, grieving, into her study. There was a tidy pile of cardboard folders stacked on the edge of the desk. They were from the stock of poems she had named ‘The Goose Bath’  after a previous storage container. I opened the top folder, and the first poem I saw was this one. A ‘Small Farewell’. Since she had appointed me her literary executor, it was hard not to take that as a message. The study was in a back room looking out over her backyard, and while I read the words “in the back room of seeing / that looks out on the backyard of yesterday”  I felt a shock of the weight of responsibility I now carried.

It can never be predicted what traces of a person and their work will remain, and the poem speaks to me of that letting go of ego and control as one approaches death. You do your best and let the winds blow as they will. You just have to trust that your loved ones will make good decisions, but accept that nobody can determine the outcome. There are so many random factors, accidents as well as felicities. And in the end, it’s all about love.

Before I Get into Sleep with You

Before I get into sleep with you
I want to have been
into wakefulness too.

from The Goose Bath

I love this punchy and wise little piece, and I have enjoyed promoting it vigorously, because it confounds the widespread misconceptions about who Janet Frame was as a person. Janet Frame said of the “myth that some people in New Zealand have created to represent me”: “I resent this myth. I have even contemplated legal action to subdue it.”

As her niece and close friend, I was lucky enough to have been one of Janet’s confidantes from my teenage years onwards, and party to intimate details about the various relationships that she had engaged in over her lifetime. She did make a conscious and difficult decision to sacrifice her personal happiness in order to devote herself to her writing. She deliberately chose not to marry or to have children. That does not mean she was averse to or incapable of human connection and the claim that she was socially inadequate is just another of the injustices that she endured. Some members of the New Zealand chattering classes still perpetrate malicious gossip and this delightful poem, already a classic, is her riposte from beyond the grave.

Pamela Gordon

Pamela Gordon is Janet Frame’s literary executor. She was appointed to this role by the author, who was her aunt, close friend and travelling companion. They lived near each other in several locations around New Zealand. Since 2004 Pamela has co-edited and overseen the posthumous publication of ten new Janet Frame titles: novels, stories, poetry, non-fiction and correspondence. Pamela is also chair of the charitable trust that Frame founded in 1999. The Janet Frame Literary Trust makes financial awards to New Zealand writers from Frame’s ongoing royalty income as funds allow. 

Poetry is Pamela’s first love just as it was Janet Frame’s, and she is the most proud of having been able to fulfill Frame’s dying wish that the collection of poems she had named THE GOOSE BATH should be published. It was also very satisfying to bring two new Frame novels to light and to publish many new stories.

The Open Book is thrilled to welcome back Starling for the Issue 18 Tāmaki launch party at 3pm on Sunday 1 September!

201 Ponsonby Road, Auckland, New Zealand 1011

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. We look forward to seeing you there!

Kia ora e te whānau,

Please join us at Toi MAHARA to celebrate the launch
of Dinah Hawken’s new poetry collection,
Faces and Flowers: Poems to Patricia France
to be launched by Gregory O’Brien,
and the opening of the exhibition featuring Patricia France’s work.

Friday 20 September
5:30pm
Toi MAHARA
20 Mahara Place
Waikanae

🌻  RSVPs essential. Please RSVP to info@toimahara.nz 🌻

Dinah’s new book will be available for sale,
and drinks and nibbles will be on offer.

More Faces and Flowers events at Toi MAHARA

Floor talk by Heritage Curator Vicki Robson
2pm, Sunday 27 October

Poetry reading by Dinah Hawken
Dinah will be reading poems from her new book.
2pm, Sunday 3 November

Please note that seating is limited. Please arrive early to request a seat.

In Faces and Flowers, acclaimed poet Dinah Hawken responds to the works of Dunedin artist Patricia France, who began painting in her fifties while living at Ashburn Hall, a psychiatric institution in Dunedin. Patricia’s psychiatrist encouraged her to ‘paint out the past’ through her art, and she began in watercolour and gouache before moving on to oils. Her early abstracts evolved into vibrant compositions that often feature women, children, landscapes and flowers. Towards the end of her career her eyesight began to deteriorate, but she continued to paint.

Patricia France’s works have now been shown in more than 30 exhibitions throughout New Zealand – including, from 20 September to 8 December 2024, at Toi MAHARA, Waikanae.

In her intimate, unrhymed sonnets, Dinah Hawken addresses a friend she never met, seeking to make a connection across time with the artist and her world.

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.

THE RIBBON-MAKER

Never was there a human hand that resisted the tug of ribbons,
the pastel urge to pull it all apart. The prettiness of a bow
is so much in the unravelling.

Many stitches ago, when I was a small boy,
bound to the chime of church bells, I dreamt of becoming a ribbon maker.
Silks, satins, patterns of organdies, the weave of sweet fibre.
Little else in life is so purely decorative, and even less so full of order.

I dedicated my life to the making of ribbons, in the old manner.
I strove beyond what most mortal men do. I made it my business
to tie things up and make them better, to stave off the darkness by means
of material light. How my ribbons shone in shop windows,
or strapped about the ankles of ballerinas!

Crisscrossed on the back of a corset, zigzagged through the eyelet of a boot.
Ribbons black as soot, or pink as a pelican’s beak. In my sleep, even,
I bound things up with a flourish, with relish.
My life as a ribbon-maker meant my life was full of gifts.

Still, there was some pain to it. I mentioned the pulling of all my work,
the fraying. I say this not as a complaint, but as a warning.
The ribbon-maker’s calling, though a wonderful art, is a small torment.

I tied my heart to these things, these angel-strings,
these things which are half made to come apart.

Madeleine Fenn

Madeleine (Maddie) Fenn is originally from Tairāwhiti, now living in Ōtepoti and working as a bookseller. She spent a very happy year in 2023 completing an MA in poetry at the IIML. 

The day I decide the second Poetry Shelf theme will be rain – and I still have Hone Tuwhare singing his sublime rain poem in my head – there is a sudden deluge of rain slam. Again we lose power out west, and I am sitting in the morning gloom with the slanting storm, musing on how much I love rain poems. Whether it is there in the kinetic water dance on the lawn, in the bulging black clouds in the wintry sky, or a spiral of metaphorical possibilities.

The poems

Rainlight

sun bows
mirrored colours
over
to join beneath us
to hold the water
calm in a bowl

such light
our bread
and honey

Cilla McQueen
from Axis: poems and drawings, Otago University Press, 2001

Hoata: ‘Today’s rain is like television static’

(((((((Medium Energy)))))))

Today’s rain is like television static
so hard to believe that pine trees, swishing
traffic, young harakeke, chirruping
blackbird warnings, are real.

The water tank beyond the macrocarpas
is beautifully round, a rondeau?
While there’s a pile of whenua
dug by the farmer next to it
with a yellow digger

that my boy would love to see
when he’s here next except the digger
has gone for now. The radiata
hold out their hands like candle
holders in the rain——new cones.

Robert Sullivan
from Hopurangi: Songcatcher, Auckland University Press, 2024

Two Waters

All winter the rain blubs on the shoulder of Ihumātao.
The main drag splutters under people’s gumboots.

Children squeal and catch raindrops on their tongues
in the place where the cat got the tongue of their ancestors.

Everything is going on. Laugh and cry and yin and yang,
kapu tī and singing in the white plastic whare.

On the perimeter people hold hands in a tukutuku pattern.

The plans of the developers hologram over the lush grass.

Day and night, police cars cluster like Union Jacks –
red white and blue, and oblique, and birds fly up.

A hīkoi carries the wairua across the grey city.
Auckland Council can take a hike. It’s the wettest winter.

The signatures of the petition sprout from the two waters.

The sky falls into the earth, the earth opens its memory.

Anne Kennedy
from The Sea walks into a Wall, Auckland University Press, 2021

On March 15

A man had taken a knife and sliced straight through the
fabric of the sky.

He made it rain buckets of blood and iron, it clung to the
air like thick glue. Its residue coated every road, pavement
and kōwhai tree in the country. It covered the palms of my
hands and the skin of my teeth and when I walked through
the streets of Newtown it felt like treading through layers
of cement. A stranger had stopped me in the street near
my house, where her face was glowing yellow from the
flickering street lamp above her. She clasped two hands on
my shoulders, with despondency filling the whites of her
eyes and threatening to drown my entire existence. I’m so
sorry, she said, over and over again till the words tripped
and tumbled over each other, bleeding into sentences I
could not dissect.

All I could do was nod and say, Thank you,
because I didn’t want her to take me under.

Khadro Mohamed
from We’re All Made of Lightning, We Are Babies Press Tender Press, 2022

Rainy Country

First on concrete, polka dots appear,
in steady tick-tock to pock dry ground.
Rain begins to throw its weight around:
those tiny splashes that mist the air.
Draw it in pencil, with tentative hand,
squint at its fume, its haze of distance.
Farmers, oilskin clad in drab weather,
are squinting upwards for love or aroha.
The raindrop harbour brings a soakage;
water curves to globes flung along a leaf;
let it weep, blub, gurgle what it believes.
A stone church preens in rain’s light sheen.
From blinked smirr to blind cataract,
never disdain to feel and taste fresh rain’s
nebulous champagne from popped corkage,
as streaks of moisture run and sidle in fine,
crooning triumph from a far corner
of the sky, where they first kept hidden,
among hurl and whirl of low-hung clouds.
On tyre skim, a nimbus shine tells
of roads black as submerged mussel shells.
Park up beneath dripping fern fronds
to watch run-off make tar-seal ponds.
Water slides from slate roof eaves,
backyards brim with sopping fennel,
long grass might be wrung like laundry.
In early hours we hear winter rains
gush through the echo-roar of drains.
Rains sound in chorus, sudden and slow,
or high and faint, or deep and low.
Rains will drench, then are hardly there.
Pristine streams go coursing down
to the cadence chant of drunken rivers,
or else pool and darken in a mountain tarn.
Those afternoons of rain being recollected;
when I’m right as rain, rains make strange;
beyond house windows, their ghosts estrange.
For in the drought we pray for rain, then curse
seven days later when it hasn’t stopped.

David Eggleton
from Respirator: A Laureate Collection 2019 -2022, Otago University Press, 2023

Rain

She’s been lying
on the jetty for weeks,
cheek flat on the wet
wood, mouth an inch
from a fishgut stain,
knife at her elbow.

The rain just keeps
coming down.

She’s as naked
as a shucked scallop,
raw and white
on the splintered planks.

Her breath is as slight
as the sea’s sway.

Up there in the bush
all the trees lean down
and inwards, longing
for the creek,
which longs
for the sea.

And the grey ocean
nuzzles the sand,
its waves as gentle
as tiny licks or kisses,
their small collapse
an everytime surrender.

Don’t touch her.
Let it rain.
Let it rain.

Sarah Broom
from Tigers at Awhitu, Auckland University Press, 2010

Avaiki Rain

as the spring rain
caresses my face
on a distant shore

I find myself longing
for Avaiki

the way
she used to rock
me to sleep

cradle me
in her midnight
embrace

take my muted grief
and grant it the right

to echo

among her slender peaks
in the presence of great chiefs
and fallen warriors

the solace she gave me
when all that was left
was the rain

Leilani Tamu
from The Art of Excavation, Anahera Press, 2014

Blackbird

The rain came in waves all night,
washed leaves from the guttering,
turned trees into disciples of tai chi.
Afterwards, in the swollen darkness
before dawn, before cat stalking
or man and woman rising,
a blackbird sits in a bareness of branches,
like a brushstroke in thin bamboo—
and the man and woman
know nothing of this,
tucked in dreams at the edge of morning.

As the sun pours into the land,
the man rises.
the woman pulls back the curtains
and marvels at the bird,
so still after the storm—
in her beak
the first straw of spring.

Jan Fitzgerald
from A question bigger than a hawk, The Cuba Press, 2022

The poets

Recipient of a Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement, Anne Kennedy is the author of four novels, a novella, anthologised short stories and five collections of poetry. She is the two-time winner of the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry, for her poetry collections Sing-Song and The Darling North. Her latest book, The Sea Walks into the Wall, was shortlisted for the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

Poet, teacher and artist CILLA McQUEEN has published 15 collections, three of which have won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry. Her most recent work is a poetic memoir, In a Slant Light (Otago UP, 2016). Other titles from OUP are Markings, Axis, Soundings, Fire-penny, The Radio Room and Edwin’s Egg. In 2008 Cilla received an Hon. Litt.D. from the University of Otago, and was the New Zealand National Library Poet Laureate 2009–11. In 2010 she received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry. Cilla lives and works in the southern port of Motupohue, Bluff.

David Eggleton lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin and was the Aotearoa New Zealand Poet Laureate between August 2019 and August 2022. Respirator: A Laureate Collection 2019 -2022 was published by Otago University Press in 2023. A limited-edition chapbook of political and satirical poems, entitled Mundungus Samizdat, with drawings by Alan Harold, has been published by Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop for National Poetry Day 2024.

Jan FitzGerald is a full-time artist and poet who lives in Napier. She is the author of four previous poetry collections, the most recent being ‘A question bigger than a hawk’ (The Cuba Press, 2022), and she has been shortlisted twice in the Bridport Prize poetry competition.

Khadro Mohamed is a writer and poet residing on the shores of Te Whanganui-a-Tara. She’s originally from Somalia and has a deep connection with her whakapapa, which is often a huge source of inspiration for her poetry. You can find bits of her writing floating around Newtown in Food Court Books and in online magazines such as: Starling, Salient Magazine, Pantograph Punch, The Spinoff, Poetry Shelf and more. Her debut collection, We’re All Made of Lightning, won the 2023 Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry.

Leilani Tamu is a poet, social commentator, Pacific historian and former New Zealand diplomat.

Robert Sullivan (Ngāpuhi, Kāi Tahu) is the author of nine books of poetry as well as a graphic novel and an award-winning book of Māori legends for children. He co-edited, with Albert Wendt and Reina Whaitiri, the anthologies of Polynesian poetry in English, Whetu Moana (2002) and Mauri Ola (2010), and an anthology of Māori poetry with Reina Whaitiri, Puna Wai Kōrero (2014), all published by Auckland University Press. Among many awards, he received the 2022 Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for a distinguished contribution to New Zealand poetry. He is associate professor of creative writing at Massey University and has taught previously at Manukau Institute of Technology and the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. His most recent collection was Tūnui | Comet (Auckland University Press, 2022).

Sarah Broom (1972 – 2013) was born and educated in New Zealand before moving to the England for post-graduate study at Leeds and Oxford. She lectured at Somerville College before returning home in 2000. She has held a post-doctoral fellowship at Massey (Albany) and lectured in English at Otago University. Broom published her first book of poetry, Tigers at Awhitu, with Auckland University Press in 2010 and is also the author of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

Tarot, Jake Arthur, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024

You see, it is all a matter of making and unmaking.
To stick, even stasis has to change.
We could go mad in an endless night,
And in an endless day drown
as sure as a wine-dark sea.

 

from ‘Penelope or Nine of Wands’

After my first reading of Jake Arthur’s new collection, Tarot, I wondered how much poetry joy we can imbibe, for reading these poems felt like I was travelling through a solar system of poetry joy.

Jake uses a deck of tarot cards to build a sequence of characters, loosely drawing upon the depictions of magicians, occultists, lovers, fools, angels in Rider-Waite’s tarot deck from 1909. Pamela Colman Smith’s cover design is based on the deck. We met the Knight of Swords, the Ace of Cups, the Empress, The Hanged Man, and so on. The King of Cups. The Page of Wands. Reading through the deck is a matter of savouring the episodic, the sensual, the treadmill questions, animated scenes.

The characters, usually speaking in the first-person, make interior fears, uncertainties, epiphanies audible. The episodes are grounded in love or daily routine, sex or stasis, movement or self interrogation. Most importantly, I discover a character deck of myriad readings. The initial poem’s tarot reader invites us (‘you’) to read, and from there we move into the heart and trails of reading: tea leaves, the cards, body language, the world, wreckage, melancholy, the divine, mischief, anxiety, daily omens and signs, yourself . . . ourselves, joy. And what I love about this intricate reading experience is how sensual it is, from the haptic to the sighted to olfactory organs, whether whiffs or woofs or brazier embers.

Another joy is Jake’s agile language, the way the stretching, spinning, surprising syntax adds to the carousel of voices. At times, it might be a slippery movement of nouns and verbs, but other times there is an almost archaic glint, the lexicon carrying traces of an elsewhere time or place. Again sustaining and extending character.

His chest is a golden plate
Where she sees herself back in ridges
As though aged by the prospect of him.

 

from ‘Rest and recreation or The Empress’

Sometimes the sequence has a baroque feel with its drama and heightened movement, or perhaps cubist as the world and the speakers both splinter and cohere, or even impressionist with visible brush strokes and spontaneous vibes. I know zilch about tarot cards but this collection is a reading uplift of signs, signals, sensations. At its core, the universal questions that haunt so many of us. How do we do, how do we go, how do we be, how do we who? Ah, yes, a solar system of poetry joy.

He kept asking:
What do you want to be?
But I wanted to be a who, not a what.

In the future I had different eyes.
I watched my every move.
I stooped to get beers out of the fridge.
I carried suitcases over my head.

 

from ‘Look up or The Hierophant’

Jake Arthur is the author of A Lack of Good Sons, included in the NZ Listener’s Best Poetry of 2023. His poems have appeared in Best New Zealand Poems, Sport, Mimicry, Turbine, and Sweet Mammalian. He has a PhD in Renaissance literature and translation from Oxford University.

Te Herenga Waka University Press page

You can purchase tickets and see programme details here

Delighted to see Isla Huia will be appearing – here is my review of her fabulous collection,Talia, and you can also hear her read a couple of poems.

Isla Huia (Te Āti Haunui a-Pāpārangi, Uenuku) is a te reo Māori teacher and writer. Her work has been published in journals such as Catalyst, Takahē and Awa Wāhine, and her debut collection of poetry, Talia, was released in May 2023 by Dead Bird Books. She has performed at the national finals of Rising Voices Youth Poetry Slam and the National Poetry Slam, as well as at writers festivals and events throughout Aotearoa. Isla can most often be found writing in Ōtautahi with FIKA Collective, and Ōtautahi Kaituhi Māori.

There are few books I am going to be ordering online! This will be a terrific celebration of books published in Aotearoa.

‘Indigo’, graphite on paper, 2017

Indigo
for Catherine Salmon

It was dusk when I swam with the dead whale,
but I did not know it was there.

On the shore a group of people began to gather,
I joined them, I saw it – open and rotten.
The flesh hung like icicles,
stalactites tapering from the roof.

Catherine I want to draw it

Three metres; graphite; erasable;
I trace the edges before I begin.

Name it indigo she says, for the colour
of the place we don’t know –
deep in the sea,
deep in the sky.

When my shoulder aches and my palm
is stained silver she says come back
with fresh eyes: which is to walk away
(blind) and come back seeing again.

I never noticed the onset of her dementia,
perhaps it too had a colour.

Lou Annabell

Lou Annabell is a Manawatū born poet based in Te-Tara-O-Te-Ika-a-Maui / The Coromandel Peninsula. In 2023 she completed her MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters.

When I was an awkward misfit teenager, I discovered Hone Tuwhare in our secondary-school library and his words spun gold and silver and sweet rivers inside me. This is what words can do. How I loved ‘Rain’ and ‘No ordinary sun’. Words have continued to ignite my heart, my senses, the possibilities of the world, transforming pathways to past present future.

Early one morning we were driving to the blood lab, listening to Kamala Harris on the radio, talking to a gathering of people and it it filled me with both joy and hope. The almost-full moon hung in the sky, a bright beauty patch in a sky of pink grey blue, with a collage of clouds, cut-out shapes like a child’s painting. But my eyes kept returning to the moon, musing on the moon, on its enduring magnificence.

When I read a poem and the moon makes an appearance, it’s like a little patch of shine, a beauty prompt, a reading pause of wonder. When I decided to assemble clusters of poems around themes and motifs, especially themes and motifs that have been used for centuries, my first thought was to start with the moon. No matter how many moon poems have been written, whether the moon is the main focus or a sideline glint, it’s appearance can still enhance the reading experience.

So I begin my theme clusters with the moon, and over the coming months will assemble others such as sun, stars, harbour, rain, fancy dress.

The poems

See What a Little Moonlight Can Do to You?

The moon is a gondola.
It has stopped rocking.
Yes. It’s stopped now.

And to this high plateau
its stunning influence
on surge and loll of tides
within us should

somehow not go
unremarked
for want of breath
or oxygen.

And if I
to that magic micro-second
instant
involuntary arms reach out
to touch detain

then surely
it is because you
are so good:
so very good to me.

Hone Tuwhare
from Mihi: Collected Poems, Penguin Books, 1987

VII.

The moon is sometimes just the moon
no one cares about shimmering
no one asked it to glow
did we request this luminosity?

There it is! Just there
still bleached and airborne even
in the cold tick of morning
on my way to teach the poets.

Rose Collins
from ‘Teaching the Poets’, in My Thoughts Are All of Swimming, Sudden Valley Press, 2024

Song with a Chorus

The child stands
in the moonlight on the moon
and bounces slowly.
His mother tucks him in.
The light tickles his chin a little.
Dear one, dear one.

Illness is here with its puzzling song.
It muddles your mind
yet tells the truth. For a while
the doctor remembers his own youth
when he, too, was cute.
My lovely one.

The moon lists to port
then to starboard. It is
somehow charming, the way
a mother weeps.
The tears repeat slowly.
My dear, my sweet.

A tear hits the forehead:
a piece of that great sea
we witness and respect.
A doctor would once have said hectic
but what now to say?
Dear one, my dear.

Meantime the moon is always travelling.
Stones live on its surface.
You throw them and they take an hour to land.
Give me your hand. Hold me.
It goes around the planet.
Oh my dear one.

Bill Manhire
from Victims of Lightning, Te Herenga Waka University Prtess (VUP),

The dark side of the moon

grief is a fist of whirling mussel shells
slicing
scraping
shredding what remains

a white pigeon heard you’d flown the coop
took me gently under his wing

Filemu Filemu Filemu I crooned
offered water
seeds
leftovers

he ate everything except cooked carrots

was a peaceful presence in my dismantled world

one morning Filemu was gone
waning Masina rested instead
on the guano-splattered roof

I ached to patch her incomplete beauty

I am fully present Masina chided. Heal yourself
instead of tinkering with my perfection.

I closed my eyes

saw the dark side of the moon

white feathers falling in the rain

Serie Barford
from Sleeping with Stones, Anahera Press, 2021

Ulysses

-and O yes that night the
moon was like a wet jockstrap
and the poets were all right
after all. He — our hero —

waded into the winedark water
down from the rusty ladder
where orange bloomed on his
palms and — O — he said, like

a man in a newspaper clipping,
mouth like the wide wet clink of
a stray fin — O how heroically
he shivered. No passerbys no nothing,

white endless streams of light on
his fingers turning white with wind.
Endless reams of stars. Sewn brocade.
Everything like everything else except

the crumbling of towers in his brasscoin
face. History involved itself upon him.
He found himself compelled, com-
pelled and con-vinced to stop struggling

against what was always surely coming,
what had slated against his better
judgement, like a shield. And all of Rome
fell in his sandy shoes.

Cadence Chung

How it all began

Such pitiful pleas — her thirsty brats.

Husbandless, she bends her will, grabs
a calabash, heads off through the ngaio trees and mamaku ferns.

Such pitiful pleas — her thirsty brats.

She stumbles. Her curses echo through forest and starlight.

Stuff you, moon,
boil your pea brain with pūhā.
Put your flat head into the cooking pot.

The one time I need you, you hide.
Coward, cheat.

I am the sleeping moon.
An ashen cloud conceals my beams.

I am aroused, enchanted. This is the wife I dream of.

Don’t you know I am no ordinary moon? Did I set the clouds to stall?
There’s no light for Rona.

I slither around her, buffed and highly sexed. She succumbs.

Wrapped in my sensations, my reflected-light limbs — we become lovers.

The story is that she pines for her lost infants. That’s a lie.

We fuse all night long when you are staring up at us. But you can’t see that far.
Just ask her —

Rona, are you happy?

Oh yes, my love
Oh yes
Come lie with me Take off your slippers.

Her brats grow, invent haka.
You know where that got them —

no land, no language.
Free entertainment every rugby match.

Reihana Robinson
from Auē Rona, Steele Roberts, 2012

Moon

Soft. Softer.

I walk across a small carless island when the moon is
at its widest, and once, on a country road, I turn off the
headlights to know the amount of light.

I have also loved the foghorn.

Madeleine Slavick
from Town, The Cuba Press, 2024

The poets

Bill Manhire’s most recent books, all published by Te Herenga Waka University Press / Victoria Press, include Wow (2020), Some Things to Place in a Coffin (2017), Tell Me My Name (with Hannah Griffin and Norman Meehan, 2017) and The Stories of Bill Manhire (2015). He was New Zealand’s inaugural poet laureate, and founded and until recently directed the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington. He has edited major anthologies, including, with Marion McLeod, the now classic Some Other Country: New Zealand’s Best Short Stories (1984).

Cadence Chung is a poet, mezzo-soprano, and composer, currently studying at the New Zealand School of Music. Her nationally-bestselling chapbook anomalia was released in April 2022 with Tender Press. She also performs as a classical soloist, presents on RNZ Concert, and co-edits Symposia Magazine, a literary journal for emerging New Zealand writers. In 2023, she was named an Emerging Practioner by the Fund for Acting and Musical Endeavours. She likes to sing Strauss, write art songs, and buy overpriced perfume.

Hone Tuwhare(1922 — 2008) was of Ngāpuhi descent, with connections to Ngāti Korokoro, Ngāti Tautahi, Te Uri-o-Hau, Te Popoto, Ngāti Hine and Ngāti Kurī hapū. He was born in Kaikohe and grew up near Auckland. He was the author of No Ordinary Sun (1964), Come Rain Hail (1970), Sap-wood & Milk (1970), Shape-Shifter (1997), and Piggy-Back Moon (2001), among other books. Hone organized the first Māori Writers and Artists Conference in 1973. He received multiple awards and honours including a Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago, a Montana New Zealand Book Award, was our second Poet Laureate of New Zealand from 1999 to 2001 and received the inaugural Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in 2003. That year, The Arts Foundation named him one of 10 living icons of the New Zealand arts.

Madeleine Slavick writes and photographs. Her books of photography, poetry, and non-fictioninclude Town, My Body My Business – New Zealand sex workers in an era of change (as photographer), Fifty Stories Fifty Images, Something Beautiful Might Happen, My Favourite Thing, delicate access, and Round – Poems and Photographs of Asia. Awards include the RAK Mason Fellowship. Madeleine has initiated and coordinated many community arts programmes – in Hong Kong and Aotearoa New Zealand.

Reihana Robinson (he tamaiti whāngai) is a writer, artist, and environmental activist. Her first poetry collection is part of AUP New Poets 3.  Auē Rona (Steele Roberts) and Her Limitless Her (Makāro Press) are her first two poetry collections. She received the inaugural Te Atairangikaahu Poetry Award. She lives some of the year in Montague MA and the rest, near Moehau in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Currently working on two collections of poetry and one novel.

Rose Collins (1977 -2023), born in New Zealand and of Irish descent, was a poet and short fiction writer. She worked as a human rights lawyer before completing the MA in Creative Writing at the IIML in 2010. She won the 2022 John O’Connor Award and the 2020 Micro Madness Competition, and has been shortlisted for the UK Bare Fiction Prize (2016), the Bridport Prize (2020) and the takahē Monica Taylor Poetry Prize (2020). Rose was the 2018 Writer in Residence at Hagley College. She was a some-time litigation lawyer, a beekeeper and a mother of two. She lived in Te Whakaraupō Lyttelton Harbour with her family.

Serie Barford was born in Aotearoa to a German-Samoan mother (Lotofaga) and a Pālagi father. She was the recipient of a 2018 Pasifika Residency at the Michael King Writers’ Centre. Serie performed from her collections at the 2019 Arsenal Book Festival in Kyiv, where the Ukrainian translation of Tapa Talk was launched.  In 2021 Serie collaborated with film-maker Anna Marbrook for the ‘Different Out Loud Poetry Project. Her most recent collection, Sleeping With Stones, was shortlisted for the 2022 Ockham NZ Book Awards. In 2022 she collaborated with Dutch artist Dorine Van Meel, whose video and performance piece, ‘Silent Echoes’, was exhibited in various European cities to address colonial practices and climate crisis through poetic contributions.