The Michael King Writers Centre is pleased to announce that next year’s programme of residencies at the historic Signalman’s House on Takarunga Mt Victoria in Devonport, Auckland, is now open for applications. Writers awarded a residency can look forward to peaceful accommodation, the use of a writing studio, a supporting stipend and the opportunity to focus on a specific writing project.
The 2025 programme offers 16 residencies to emerging and established writers for periods of two to four weeks. Awarded residencies will include up to four specifically for Māori or Pasifika writers.
Applications close on Monday 29 July 2024 and the selections are expected to be announced in September.
Matariki, the brightest born star I see you even from afar The keeper of peace and family I say goodbye to you sadly I see your beautiful woven cloak The stars I know about, everyone has spoke Your loving and caring nature Your brave and daring dedication Matariki, my favourite star and born from Tāwhiremātea The sweet and nourishing mother A star brighter than all the others Matariki, the brightest star Rests in the heavens above.
Thomas E, age 9, Richmond Rd School
Dear Grandad (a poem for Matariki)
Dear Grandad,
The bed creaked as you turned your fragile body
You scratched your sandpaper-like skin your joyful smile enlightened the room
while the soft wind kissed your cheek
you got older day by day while telling your priceless stories you loved to tell
you loved eating thick ice cream that made your teeth sting
your memory was like dust easily swept away
I wish I could’ve said goodbye
I love you, Grandad
by Mushal F, Year 8, Te Parito Kōwhai Russley School
Yesterday morning we got up in the pitch dark to go to my appointment. Mars was hovering, the sky miraculously clear of clouds. We stood on the water’s edge watching the sun lift behind Rangitoto. Breathtaking beauty. Utter peace. Perhaps we all tread the arc between uncertainty and joy, as I currently do, finding ways to nurture and nourish not just ourselves but those near us, taking time to absorb the sky, stars, bush, words on a page, the voice on the airwaves.
Poetry Shelf is my anchor, soaring kite, heart-tingling road trip. I am so grateful for the way you support my ideas, other writers, our books. It feels like our reading and writing communities continue to build and inspire.
This week I relaunched Poetry Box because I love connecting with children, teachers, school librarians, children’s authors. I loved Rachel King’s recent piece on why she writes novels for children rather than adults. I adore doing both but I get this completely. There’s a bit missing when I’m not writing and blogging for children. I believe words have super powers – whether in books or orally, read or written – because they are a vital key to self discovery, self travel, both global and local learning, a way to foster empathy kindness peace. My continued aim is to spark children to fall in love with what words can do, show and create. I want children’s fingers itching to write in myriad ways on myriad subjects and beyond myriad frames. I am so grateful I can once again work online with our precious tamariki across the motu.
This week I invited young poets to celebrate Matariki, and have included a couple for you to read. The Poetry Box festival of Matariki poems is here.
Today, as I sit down to my warm cheese scone and coconut milk coffee, I say thank you; thank you for your kind emails, your incredible support, your sublime poetry and your equally sublime storytelling that lifts and transports us all.
Ngā mihi o Matariki, te tau hou Māori!
Matarikiat Pōhara beach
The skin of the ocean wrinkling the breeze. The eyes of the wind skipping on the sand. I walk into the shallows, Waitā holds me close. Matariki’s breath brings warmth.
Raphe, Y8, age 12, Medbury School
Matariki Riddle
I’m a phantom at day at night I’m shining bright I’m named after a flower blossoming red light. (pōhutukawa)
Liam P, age 10, Richmond Rd School
MatarikiLight
Matariki guides kiwi to their homes in the forest. Matariki guides me to my family. She lights my way I write her this poem.
I have been thinking a lot about the place of poetry in global catastrophe and the incomprehensible leadership in Aotearoa. How do we write? Read? Do we need comfort or challenge or both? This week Rachel McAlpine.
Dear Paula, you ask what the place of poetry is in a global catastrophe. What a question!
I’m above all bewildered. Or shell-shocked, rather. It’s all too much. Recently I read Ellen Hawley’s The Hundred Years War in two thousand words. In a sense, she says, it began in 1066 and it’s still, in a sense, carrying on. Bonkers then. Bonkers now. She accidentally convinced me that it was futile for me to tackle a daily avalanche of questions, all starting with Why? Why? Why? It’s too much for my poor little brain. I’m grateful to journalists and other thinkers who do this work on my behalf.
My soul is manic. i rush everywhere with my truth. pleading strangers. to not like me. so that i might feel free.
Place is more precious than ever now that millions are swept from their homes by wars and the impact of climate crisis. Today at Freyberg Beach somebody said to me, “I come here to remember who I am.” It’s a chatty place (place) and again and again I hear myself saying to another swimmer, “Aren’t we lucky?” Not just casual lucky but lotto-lucky, crazy-lucky. Yes, our pipes are busting and our public buildings shut. But we have a place where we belong, set in a swimmable sea. Half of me winces with survival guilt. The other half is enchanted by the sheer luck of it … for now.
But do I write poems about the various global catastrophes? No. I’m focusing on my indie podcast, Learning How To Be Old. I’m on a mission to raise people’s realistic optimism about their own old age. How non-global head-in-the-sand is that? Well, I see the anomaly but I approach the podcast as 50 per cent creative plaything and 50 per cent public health service. Healing me and healing others.
I find comfort where I can, which includes various poets. Today, Tiny Ruins and Janis Freegard come to mind: the gentle touch works best for me. And here’s a few lines from “Tai Qi” by Maytal Noy, written last year when she was 15. I am humbled by such thoughtfulness and compassion.
At a time like this Balance, perfectly centred Instead of swinging from left to right A view of everyone as an equal deserving of life Education on the topic instead of striking out in ignorance Keeping grounded values in the face of extremism At this time There’s a real danger of swinging, of losing your balance That is why it’s so important to fix your eyes on the one spot that keeps you grounded, Put your arms wide out And seek equality
I offer this last poem as a tribute to the very young and the very old. At 84 I can barely remember being one or imagine being the other.
The bravest are millions
Out there living the bravest days are the very old, the frail old using every scrunch of the soul for the next impossible chore. The very old must win and win on multiple fronts day after trembling day.
Out there building the bravest lives are the young knowing what we knew and did not do.
Rachel McAlpine
And Paula, the word that will not go away is “tremble.”
Rachel McAlpine is 84, and all her current work relates in some way to the experience of aging. She hosts New Zealand’s only podcast on the topic: Learning How To Be Old. Her last collection of poems was How To Be Old (Cuba Press, 2020). She was a pioneer in digital content, and for fun she sings, dances, swims, blogs, and scribbles.
Meantime, Majella Cullinane, Otago University Press, 2024
Could I tell you I wish you could see this sky? We could sit on the deck. Ignore the overgrown clematis—I’m not much of a gardener. I wish I could speak to you but I don’t understand the language of the dead.
Stay here and watch with me. Watch the sky shift from flaxen to coral to mauve And, as the minutes pass, to muted grey. Let’s watch with the door open for the light to go.
from ‘Stay here’
Most reviews I write, draw upon the idea that to review a book is to re-see a book, to return and let the multiple lights and darknesses settle upon me. To try and leave my reading baggage and expectations at the backdoor step and enter the myriad delights of discovery. Heaven forbid if I am travelling with notions of what a poem ought to be or not to be, or notions that subject matter can be old hat or redundant. I have read so many extraordinary poetry collections over the past year (perhaps this is an example of post-transplant awe and wonder) and this week, having read, and reread Majella Cullinane’s glorious Meantime, I am taking stock of myself as reader and reviewer. Firstly, I am drawn to the heart of a poem, the heart of a book. I am picturing a core organ that promotes rhythm, energy, reading blood flow, along with ideas, sensations, feelings. I am curious about the alchemy of elements and the effects that set you alight and comfort and delight as you read. A good book of poetry is like an effervescent tablet in the heart.
Majella’s new poetry collection is exactly this, an effervescent tablet in my heart – it is a jolt, a boost, a sparkle. Majella writes out of grief, mourning her mother who died in Ireland when the poet was trapped in Aotearoa due to the Covid lockdown. Writing becomes a form of speaking, poetry a way of talking to and of and for her mother, and it is so very intimate, this maternal portrait, this daughter speaking. Mother missed and missing, perhaps too, daughter missed and missing. Fugitive memory. Necessary memory.
I am drawn to the unstable ground of writing, to the section titles that underline a fragility of being: ‘Am I still Here?’, ‘Meantime’ and ‘Nowhere to Be’. Writing becomes a way of retrieving elusive memory but also way of replenishing the gap, between here and there, Aotearoa and Ireland, life and death, mother and daughter, what is said and what is not said, what is safe and not safe and, in the context of a mother who is suffering from a form of dementia, what is delusional and what is real.
The sight of the pīwakawaka in the opening poem, ‘Memory’, is fitting. Its tail flickers like memory, like the unspoken, the subtly referenced: ‘Quiver / of pīwakawaka tail / hide / and seek’. Move to the final lines where the ‘d’ word cannot be spoken, and the poet muses on elusive memory:
one day I might be the old woman who doesn’t remember walking into a room and asking— whose memory is this anyway?
The pīwakawaka sighting is also a vital marker of place, giving shape and physicality to the elsewhere of here. Majella plants physical anchors, from the ‘tūī song’ to the ‘korimako in the neighbour’s oak tree’ as she listens to her mother’s favourite music. Again, a quiver between dream and wake, between here and there, moving among poignant images, the near past, the distant past, the mother ghost haunting rooms, objects, the preparation of food.
From the dark hall I see your ghost standing at the kitchen table. Your hands are dusty with flour, your sleeves rolled up. You ask me how my day has been. What do I say on this first day of winter? I watched two pihipihi fly into a sunlit tree, a tūī sip water from the neighbour’s eave. I walked to the local bay and barely noticed the ocean.
from ‘Winter recipe’
Majella draws her mother into the folds and crevices of her homesickness and heartache, into her daily movements and her recognitions. And it is tribute and testimony and self care.
More than anything, Meantime is poetry at its most intimate, movingly so, and as readers we get to share in that intimacy. We might sidestep to our own trembling ground, our own losses and aches. We might pause to absorb a volley of grief and a shawl of comfort. I love this collection so much. I love its gentleness, its exposures, its pain and its healing. And above all, its love.
A reading
Majella reads ‘Nowhere to be’
Majella reads ‘Meantime’
Three questions
What are three or four key words for you when you write poetry? Listening, quietness, absence/presence
What gave you particular joy when you wrote this new collection? Or challenge? I wrote the collection over a period of multiple Covid-19 lockdowns (2020-2022) in New Zealand. During that time, I was grieving my mother who died during Ireland and New Zealand’s first lockdown in April 2020. Grief affects a person mentally and physically, but writing and reading poetry and essays during this time was a huge salve.
Have you read any poetry books in last year or so that have struck a chord? Seán Hewitt’s poetry collections: Tongues of Fire and Rapture’s Road Iona Winter’s A liminal Gathering – Elixir and Star Grief Almanac 2023 Geraldine Meaney’s Mute/Unmute The late John Burnside’s Selected Poems Kerry Hardie’s We Go On Vincent O’Sullivan’s Selected Poems: Being Here
Majella Cullinane writes poetry, fiction and essays. Her second collection Whisper of a Crow’s Wing (Otago University Press and Salmon Poetry, Ireland) was chosen as The Listener’s Top Ten Poetry Books of 2018. Her writing has been published internationally, and she has held residencies and fellowships in Ireland, Scotland and New Zealand. She was awarded a Copyright Licensing New Zealand Grant (2019) and a Creative New Zealand Arts Grant (2021) to complete Meantime. She graduated with a PhD in Creative Practice from the University of Otago in 2020. She lives in Kōpūtai Port Chalmers with her family.
I’m going counter-clockwise around Rarotonga by bus, looking back to see if I can see Avarua. I’ve glided down over the International Date Line.
I’ve been up in the sky eating a vegan pie. They say judge and jury put a man in clink, but he escaped to ride to glory on a missing Starlink.
And they say Babe Ruth was telling the truth, and they say Albert Henry is living in penury, and they say Tom Davis is with Aunty Mavis.
The waiter’s from the Philippines, he wears ripped jeans. They say the Prime Minister’s out on the lawn, looking for manganese nodules and carrying on.
So get out coconut shell bras for the airport X-ray, as travel-weary strangers flood the runway, while night-time sways like a frangipani lei.
Now I’m chasing a turtle, wearing a snorkel, then I buy at the market a mat to use as a basket, while a whale’s barrel-body rolls over off-shore.
In the heat the hotel room’s fan-blades stir, and the gossip you hear here is beyond belief, for they say they wrapped an old-timer in a flag,
and sank his expatriate body beyond the reef. So they hope you’ll make it back next time, to a Trader Jack’s table for marlin caught by line.
When you listen, the sea’s voicing the answer, as the sun blurs behind a sinking beer schooner, while a vaka-team rows out at pace from Avarua,
and going counter-clockwise around Rarotonga.
David Eggleton
David Eggleton, former Aotearoa New Zealand Poet Laureate, lives in Ōtepoti. The Wilder Years: Selected Poems (Otago University Press) was published in 2021, and Respirator: A Laureate Collection 2019-2022 (OUP) in 2023. He is co-editor of Katūīvei: Contemporary Pasifika Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand (Massey University Press, 2024).
A late grasshopper has strayed into another universe, nothing he is programmed for is here, the sun is not where it should be, the cooler air is hard to breathe, his flight is urgent but aimless, he crash-lands everywhere. He finally makes it to the open sky, a swarm of one in search of the lost summer.
Leonard Lambert from Slow Fires: New Poems, Cold Hub Press, 2024
“I’ve begun to think of short poems as being the literary equivalent of the small house movement. Small houses contain the same essential spaces as large houses do. Both have places in which to eat, sleep, bathe and sit; the difference being that small houses are, well, smaller. Like the question of bathrooms- does one need six stanzas or will one do? What short poems might lack in floor space they make up for in nifty storage. You might have to go outside to swing the cat, but you can still have the thought indoors.”
Jenny Bornholdt from ‘Introduction’, Short Poems of New Zealand, Te Waka University Press, 2018
New books in my letterbox
Wild Wild Women, Janis Freegard, At the Bay, 2024 The End of the beginning, Jenna Heller, At the Bay, 2024 anthology (n.) a collection of flowers, Gail Ingram, Pūkeko Publications, 2024 The Mires, Tina Makereti, Ultimo Press, 2024
I have been thinking a lot about the place of poetry in global catastrophe and the incomprehensible leadership in Aotearoa. How do we write? Read? Do we need comfort or challenge or both? In an ongoing series, poets respond to five questions. Today Dani Yourukova.
Has the local and global situation affected what or how or when you write Poetry?
I’ve always thought that writing is as much about paying attention to the world as it is about stringing sense together. Like, sometimes you can write all day but then that work doesn’t matter at all if you haven’t walked to the shops, or reached the end of a thought, or had a biscuit.
So, as well as the regular at-the-desk writing practice, there’s a certain percentage of thought-space that needs to be dedicated to writing for it to work for me, and recently, I’ve found a lot of the thought-space normally labelled POEMS has been recategorised as WORRYING ABOUT EVERYTHING and RAGE. Which means protests instead of writing, and struggling to find employment instead of writing, and it means unspeakable grief, and shame, and petitions to ask our government to please refrain from whacking huge massive mining operations onto conservation land or supporting genocidal atrocities.
Does place matter to you at the moment? An object, an attachment, a loss, an experience? A sense of home?
Oh I’m terrible at locating myself! I’ve always felt more like a brain sloshing around in a jar than a person, which I assume is because my personality is mildly defective. In practice, I think it just means that I have to work a little harder to understand what it means to be in a place, or to be “home”.
I think home is something I experience from being in community. I think it’s both brilliant and bewildering that we can move into and through each other’s lives, and fall into conversation, and take action together and piss each other off. It’s all very moving when you think about it. So I try to make sure I observe people and places sympathetically and honestly, and give parts of myself away sometimes. I listen, and work, and do my best to show up when someone needs me. I am not always good at it, but I do think it might be the most important thing I can do with my time.
Are there books or poems that have struck a chord in the past year? That you turn to for comfort or uplift, challenge or distraction.
I’ve been reading poems by Kapka Kassabova recently and finding a lot of uncertain comfort in them. I have quite an uneasy relationship with my heritage, but I couldn’t really resist reading a New Zealand Bulgarian immigrant poet once I realised we had one of those. Kassabova is about the same age as my mum, from the same end of the country, and they both went to language schools. I think I was curious if there was something, somehow, I’d recognise in her work. And I’m not sure if that happened, but I did find some of her work enormously resonant.
Preparation for the big emptiness
Smudges of moon in the morning — fingerprints of the moon-eaters
A new core gathers for the evening to be plucked and crumbled by other hands
Sometimes, there is blue in between Sometimes, there is no one
You must prepare for the big emptiness to come
It has come
When it comes you must spread yourself thinly, transparently, to fill what can’t be filled
It has come
Unlike the moon you must do it without breaking
Kapka Kassabova in Someone else’s life, Auckland University Press, 2003
Also, I found it sweet that we have the same publisher. (Thanks AUP, you have this very specific niche totally covered)
What particularly matters to you in your poetry and in the poetry of others, whether using ear, eye, heart, mind – and/or anything ranging from the abstract and the absent to the physical and the present?
There’s that Audre Lord essay about poetry not being a luxury, and I’m sure everyone already knows the gist and follows the instagram account etc etc. But when I’m feeling a bit hopeless about writing, I come back to the metaphor that opens the essay:
The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination.
I sometimes think that, if I must write a poem instead of throwing bricks at politicians, well then that poem had better be beautiful and glorious and profound and timely and serious, and I’m not convinced I’m up to that almost-impossible task. But the other thought, and the thought which is more true I think, is that maybe it’s less about any individual thing we produce, and more about slowly changing the quality of the light.
I wrote a very silly little poem for an exhibit a few months ago, and it’s really just a love poem to poetry and frivolity and shared jokes:
For Anaktoria After Sappho, fragment 16
I am ordering bread for the table at a mid range chain restaurant winking over broccoli soup
my heart a pepper grinder my tongue a mistake
I want to take you to the waterfront market and purchase seasonal produce
string bags bursting with blackpurple eggplant silverbeet spinach fat sheaves of kale bruise-coloured beetroots
tomato skins splitting with sweetness
and next thing you know we will be dressed as fatted calves burning ourselves alive at the registry office
oh Anaktoria
have you never lied with violets in your lap?
the fiction too sweet to surrender easily
Dani Yourukova
Is there a word or idea, like a talisman, that you hold close at the moment. For me, it is the word connection.
“community”
Dani Yourukova is a poet, researcher, and amateur occultist. Their poetry and essays have been published in places like Sweet Mammalian, The Spinoff, Bad Apple, and Turbine Kapohau. Their debut poetry collection Transposium was published by Auckland University Press late last year.
Ash, Louise Wallace, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024
I have to learn
to live there. But first I must dig
myself out.
Louise Wallace, Ash
How to begin? How to share thoughts on Louise Wallace’s extraordinary novel without diluting the reading experience for you, without smashing the slowly accruing mood, the enigmatic mountain, and the maternal throb.
A woman lives in the shadow of a rural mountain, with her husband and two children. Mother wife vet woman body. Body belonging to child and child and husband, and even the stranger seated next to her in the dental surgery. I am reading this heartblasting evocation of woman on the coat tails of reading Lee Murray’s poetry-prose collection, Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud. With the help of a nine-tailed fox spirit, Lee depicts nine Chinese women in the land of cloud. Upended, anchorless, despairing. A book that also moved me to the hilt.
How to be mother wife woman, working woman, dreamer, dreamcatcher, survivor – against and within a spectrum of visible and invisible degrees of subjugation? How to write a story driven by these vital questions? Begin with voice. Begin with a voice so real you are walking up the gravel hill alongside the woman as she heaves and grunts and pushes the pram. You are awake in the night with her as she searches for answers to her personal universe of questions.
Build a narrative and make it real familiar everyday, and then insert pieces that both enhance and disrupt the steady flow of the quotidian. Reclaim the art of storytelling, the practice of living, and make them your own. For example, Louise includes a sequence of ‘figures’ throughout the novel, as though we are holding a scientific treatise, but the word ‘figure’ rebounds as it signals body, proportions, considerations, adjuncts. For example, ‘Figure1. (The Figure)’ jam-repeats the phrase, ‘nothingissacrednothingissacred’ to form a hemmed-in box of text. Later ‘Figure 15 (The Figure)’ jams the phase ‘iamshellturningintoashelliamshellturningintoashell’ into a block text within the frame.
Keep the story moving moving and repeating. Now the woman is screaming at Nick and feeding the children and struggling to heal the limping bull. And it is real, devastatingly real, and it is splintering the mountain, and the story becomes myth and metaphor and fable. And it makes me ache and think hard. And it never stops being body-stomping real.
Along the bottom of the page we can follow a footnote thread of sentences, a footer fable, an underlay carpet that augments and stretches and weeps, as it traces other women wives mothers repetitions: ‘The wife had spilled the soup in bringing it to the table. Or had not put the butter out beside the bread.’
And I am sitting on the edge of the bed saying YES YES YES! We are following in the wordprints of all the writers who preceded us, all the mothers and sisters who wrote and lived, found voice, fierce or soft, groundbreaking or seed planting. Pioneers and Goddesses. In her ‘Acknowledgements’, Louise lists some of her sources of inspiration: Jenny Bornholdt’s The Rocky Shore, Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle’s Autobiography of a Marguerite, Arthur W. Frank’s The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness and Ethics, the ‘fables’ section of The Pedestrians by Rachel Zucker, Sara McIntyre’s Observations of a Rural Nurse, Danielle Hawkins’ Two Shakes of a Lamb’s Tail: The Diary of a Country Vet, and Anna Perry’s art.
Louise wrote and researched the book within the PhD programme at Ōtakou Whakaihu Waka University of Otago, with the support of numerous writing friends. I can hold this novel out to you like a prism and it will keep shifting in effect. In one light, the catastrophic ash, like Covid, is contaminating lives and places, rations are stockpiled, wellbeing is under threat. In another light, catastrophe becomes rage and is the unbearable weight of helpless and expectation, of the unsaid but the insistently thought. Hold the novel closer and you will spot the tipping point, the edge of eruption.
This is a novel to feel as much as it is a novel to think. It is a seething simmering boiling novel, every word pitch perfect, and I am holding it close because, yes, we need to keep writing from under and over and for the mountain, to step out of helplessness and expectation, role models and body paradigms, writing templates and restrictive definitions and hierarchical canons. Extraordinary.
I would like to gift a copy of this book to someone. Write a comment on my social media page or here and I will select one reader.
Louise Wallace is the author of four collections of poems, the latest of which is This Is a Story About Your Mother (2023). She is the founder and editor of Starling, an online journal publishing the work of young writers from Aotearoa, and the editor of Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems2022. She is a recipient of the Biggs Prize for Poetry and a Robert Burns fellow. She grew up in Gisborne and lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin. Ash is her first novel.
Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud, Lee Murray, The Cuba Press, 2024
Begin with a fox girl. Begin with nine dutiful wives. Begin with a departure from the land of jade to the land of cloud. Move to you and you and you, the nine-tailed fox spirit, the húli jīng. Continue with the new arrival woman, the new arrival adrift. And it is she and she and she. And it is the fox choosing, and it is the woman speaking.
And here we are in an evocation of Chinese women, women of the Chinese diaspora, women who are owned displaced muted with neither familiar ground nor kinship. Lee has used the figure of the nine-tailed fox to narrate nine women who are framed by the appearances of the fox. We listen to the mothers and daughters, girls and women, listen to them speaking out of struggle and despair, the hope flickering, the different versions piercingly similar. Listening, so very important, that we are listening.
This is the mother working her fingers to the bone: “only you will see the silent click of her tongue and the bitter taste of her unquiet”. And it is the wife coiled in drudgery, the relentless routine, deferred and elusive dreamings, the social hubs existing elsewhere. And it is sadness and subjugation and shapeshifting fox.
What a heart embracing collection this is. Such writing poise. Every line sings out with linguistic freshness, a feast of visual and aural conjunctions: “your heart shrivels to a rotting black walnut, the sweet sonata halts”. Every musical phrase leading to the jagged edge of living: “apples and flutes will always be parallel lines”. Every lyrical cadence twisting the blade: “the girl is a typhoon of want, a perfect symphony of longing”.
Lee draws upon: “the invisible Chinese fox women who came to make there home here in Aotearoa, who trod this cloud-land before me and who lived and died and suffered in these pages, though you are many and nameless, I want to thank you for allowing me to slip on your skulls, share in your lives and give voice to your stories.” from ‘Acknowledgements’
In her ‘Author note’, Lee admits the “poetry-prose work has been one of the most difficult pieces of writing I have ever completed, possibly because I was writing it during the global pandemic and was plagued with interruptions and anxiety, but also because as a New Zealand-born Chinese Pākehā, the tragedy of these narratives filled me with sadness and anger.”
Indeed. And out of this difficulty, out of this complicated and resonant stretch into the personal and the imagined, Lee has produced an extraordinary collection, a chorus of voices that will unsettle and unnerve and are utterly necessary to be heard. This is a book to be shared.
A reading
Photo credit: Maree Wilkinson
Lee reads from Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud
A conversation
What are three or four key words for you when you write poetry?
Thank you for this illuminating question, which has had me thinking on process and purpose and the philosophy of poetry for a couple of hours now. For me, whether a poem focuses on a brief reflection or complex narrative, whether it is contemporary, historical or even speculative, formal or free, a single line or a novel-length epic, poems that resonate do so because they incite some feeling or deep emotion in the reader. There is an element of recognition and understanding, some shared insight into the human condition that is apparent even if the subject matter is foreign to us. So my four key words might be:
Truth. Heart. Connection. Solace.
What gave you particular joy when you wrote this new collection? Or challenge?
The joy has been in the kind reaction from readers and reviewers. As writers, we’re rarely satisfied with our work, typically full of angst about its not-enoughness, and Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud is such a strange little collection, one that is very hard to categorise, so I have been especially antsy! Is it fiction or non-fiction? Poetry or prose? As for the challenges (other than settling on a suitable classification for booksellers), Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud has been the hardest thing I have ever written, which I admit in my author’s note:
While it seemed a simple enough objective when conceived, this prose-poetry work has been one of the most difficult pieces of writing I have ever completed, possibly because I was writing it during the global pandemic and was plagued with interruptions and anxiety, but also because as a New Zealand-born Pākehā-Chinese, the tragedy of these narratives filled me with sadness and anger. At times, I was stricken with writer’s block, something which has never happened to me before. My words were clumsy and insufficient, and I was overwhelmed with a strange responsibility for the women whose lives inspired these narratives. It struck me that it was only through a twist of time and fortune that I was not one of them. More than once, I was reminded to be grateful for the gifts of my grandmother, Wai-Fong, a Shanghai-born refugee, and my mother Pauline, a New Zealand-born Chinese—two incredible women who stepped carefully and also boldly, creating a path for me, so that I might thrive.
Have you read any poetry books in last year or so that have struck a chord? Or books that nourished you as you wrote the collection?
I read a lot of poetry books, so this is hard! However, two poetry books which spoke to me deeply while I was writing Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud include Anxiety of Words: Contemporary Poetry by Korean Women (2006) by Ch’oe Sŭng-ja, Kim Hyesoon, and Yi Yŏn-ju (translated by Don Mee Choi), a groundbreaking collection of poems by three Korean poets who tell of lives shaped by tradition and expectation. Intimate and insightful. I also loved the truths, domestic and universal, revealed in Marge Piercy’s collection On the Way Out, Turn Off the Light (Alfred A. Knopf, 2020). Another book which nourished me that is not classified as poetry by its author, but which comprises prose so gorgeously lyrical that it may as well be, was L.E. Daniels’ novel Serpent’s Wake: A Tale for the Bitten (2018). It’s a kind of metaphorical fairytale for adults written as a means of processing trauma, a work that encapsulates that list of four words that epitomise poetry for me—truth, heart, connection, and solace—and which has become one of my favourite books of all time. Poetry books released in the last year which have struck a chord include Grace Yee’s powerful Ockham Award-winning collection Chinese Fish and Madeleine Slavick’s fabulous homage to small-town Aotearoa, Town. And for emerging writers looking for a way into poetry or established poets in need of a refresh, I highly recommend Writing Poetry in the Dark (2022), a collection of essays on writing into the wound edited by Bram Stoker Award-winning poet Stephanie M. Wytovich.
Lee Murray is a third-generation Chinese New Zealander and multi-award-winning author, poet and anthology editor. She has been awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement for Fiction 2023 and been made an NZSA Honorary Literary Fellow. The manuscript of Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud won Lee the Grimshaw–Sargeson Fellowship at the development stage and the NZSA Laura Solomon Cuba Press Prize when it was complete. She’s won five Bram Stoker Awards, awarded by the international Horror Writers Association. Lee lives in the Bay of Plenty with her husband and son.
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