Thanks to Seraph Press I have selected a follower of Poetry Shelf (out of the hat) for the giveaway copy.
Maria McMillan’s The Rope Walk goes to Emma Neale.
A Rope Walk for
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Poetry as Social Action: A free symposium at the University of Auckland
POETRY AS SOCIAL ACTION
A Symposium at the University of Auckland, 27 September 2013
How do contemporary poets engage their multiple audiences? What is the function of experiment in writing as a social act? How should we map the cultural dimensions of eco-poetics, identity politics or non-normative behaviours? Seven speakers address these and other questions in a series of interactive panels and a public reading hosted by the NZ Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc) in conjunction with Australian poet Pam Brown’s Distinguished Visitor Award at the University of Auckland.
Our speakers are Adam Aitken (Sydney), Ali Alizadeh (Melbourne), Pam Brown (Sydney), Jen Crawford (Singapore), Ya-Wen Ho (Wellington), David Howard (Dunedin), Susan Schultz (Honolulu) and Ann Vickery (Melbourne).
We welcome students, staff and interested individuals to this free event at the Pat Hanan Room in Arts 2, 9 am-4.30 pm. Then join us at Auckland Central City Library and hear symposium poets read their work at WORD AND WORLD, 5.30-7 pm. .
Programme: http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/features/social-action/index.asp
Information: Michele Leggott (m.leggott@auckland.ac.nz)
‘holding the line’ by Sarah Broom is an entry that unfolds
Having just posted a tribute to Sarah Broom, I now have permission to post one of her poems: ‘holding the line.’ Picking a poem from her new book, Gleam, was no easy task. In the end I picked the poem that opens the book, an entry that unfolds upon the page like an origami bird. It takes flight. It trembles, hovers, and shimmers with meaning and music and tiny little freedoms.
This is a poem of utter economy, every word poised and perfect in its location and resonance. The lines sound out with exquisite music, each musical note, a chime for the ear.
There is the homely gesture — a gesture that signals self care (the full moon placed on the brow). There is the way the moon shining bright and cool in the night sky is an object of beauty in which to restore oneself. There is the quiet hint at the moment of despair (‘my heart/ is clapping out of time’). There is the extraordinary leap of imagination that is a leap of fortitude (‘I take it out/ and throw it among the stars’). There is the depositories of wisdom (‘who know all there is to know’).
But what grips me, what haunts, what unfolds and refolds and unfolds again for me, is the line that both starts and finishes the poem: ‘holding the line.’
Reading this line in the context of the book and the context of Sarah’s life, I see this as holding onto the thread of existence, the ticking heart beat, the line that leads faintly, beautifully to a moon or to the ‘drag of the sea’ or to the arms that embrace her. It is the line that is an anchor, the blood line that is family and loved ones, it is the line that is the line and length of friendship. Above all, and movingly so, it is the line that the poet inscribes in her notebook and then wings through the air to a reader. It is the line that makes poetry — that the poet held close and then let go for all to see.
holding the line
when I feel feverish
I take the full moon
and place it on my brow
like a flannel
it is so cool because it has just
been swimming in the sea
when I feel that my heart
is clapping out of time
I take it out and throw it
up among the stars
who know all there is to know
about holding the line
© Sarah Broom Gleam (Auckland University Press, 2013)
Saradha Koirala’s Tear Water Tea arrives wrapped in blue tissue
Saradha Koirala Tear Water Tea (Steele Roberts, 2013)
Saradha Koirala’s second collection, Tear Water Tea, arrived in my post-box in style this week. It was wrapped in blue tissue, with a tracing-paper tag embossed with with a bee. Imagine if all poetry books were delivered to us like this. The book, itself, is beautiful to both hold and behold. Delicate black & white drawings of flowers scroll about the powder blue — and then you shift from skull to lego block to bee to teapot (or whatever route your eye might take). David Randall Peters, the artist, also did the faint, vein-like, pool-like drawings scattered inside.
Saradha’s new book flutters between the physical world (a land-locked bird, an escaping dog, a sheetless bed) and a more ephemeral world (blown kisses, things in the air, melting photographs, smoke, ink tears, vapour). What emerges in this poetic movement between what is observed physically, intuitively and at times unfathomably are the strong and lyrical threads of love, home, and place that glue the collection together. It is as though the poet is inviting us into her family album, a poetry diary of sorts, and each poetic entry is lovingly crafted.
While much of the collection adopts a quiet, almost conversational tone (back to Andrew Johnston’s notion that much of New Zealand poetry is talky), the collection as a whole offers the variations of a musical piece. Certain phrases ring deliciously in your ear (‘colourless in corners and stiff’ ‘I pull my temper’). Analogies surprise (‘and yet months pass like clouds’). In some poems, the words accumulate in lush patches of alliteration and assonance (‘Arat’). Then there is the way everything comes together in the one shimmering line (‘no need to read the residue/ of forests strewn like tea-leaves on the lawn’).
The opening (and title) poem is a delight (‘Tear Water Tea’). It lays down three slender strands within its slender form, and you cannot help but swim through the gaps. Poetry so often comes alive out of juxtaposition. Here, storytelling is placed next to grief which is placed next to daily routine. There is accruing mystery about the boy and his imagined wolf, a story that gets repeated in order perhaps to dislodge grief. There is the rip that is also sorrow, that a cup of tea might wash away (there, there). There is the kettle put on — oh, the salty tears that masquerade for water — as you speak and as you listen. There is this strand collapsing into that strand, and so on and so forth. Poetry can take many forms and employ language in a thousand ways, but there is something immeasurably satisfying about small poems that are economical, graceful, mysterious (Bill Manhire is a whizz at this!). Thanks to the publisher and the poet I have reproduced the poem below.
Saradha’s second collection is a larger version of the small poem that introduces it: pleasurable, contoured, refined. A little gift, indeed.
Tear Water Tea
Over and over they told me the story:
a boy, an imagined wolf.
As if sorrow can be likened to mischief.
I hold the teapot in both hands
another satisfying, salty brew.
©Saradha Koirala Tear Water Tea (Steele Roberts, 2013)
Saradha resides in Wellington and has taught English in secondary schools since 2005. She is of Pakeha and Nepali descent, and holds a Masters in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University. Her new book was recently launched at the fabulous Quilters Bookshop in Wellington. Her debut collection was entitled Wit of the Staircase. See below for further links.
Saradha Koirala website
Winged Ink Tuesday Poem
An interview with Tim Jones
New Zealand Poetry Society on Wit of the Staircase
My tribute to Sarah Broom
Sarah Broom (1972-2013) is to be honoured in a new poetry award thanks to her husband Michael Gleissner (Sarah Broom Poetry Prize). The award is a way of acknowledging the strength, imagination, craft, commitment and love that guided Sarah in both living and writing. The prize will enable a New Zealand poet to work towards the completion of a poetry manuscript. The entry will consist of 6-8 poems of which at least 5 must be unpublished. Entries will be accepted from 3 February 2014 and close on 28 March 2014. The winner will be announced May 2014. Sam Hunt is the inaugural judge and I am delighted to be a member of the judging panel. For further details see here.
Sarah undertook academic studies at Leeds and Oxford which resulted in her publication, Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (Macmillan, 2006). She returned to New Zealand where she held a post-doctoral fellowship at Massey University in Albany. An academic life, however, gave way to time dedicated to poetry, motherhood (three young children) and managing lung cancer. These three factors understandably became entwined — and her poetry is testimony to a woman who nourished the word along with her family and her self. Her first collection, the astonishing Tigers at Awhitu (Auckland University Press, 2010), is a book of two parts. The first part was written before her diagnosis, while the second part was written afterwards. Poetry is at work in both. As you move through the poems your ear is lit by the musical notes, you are drawn into the detail that enlivens a view of the physical world, and captivated by miniature renditions of life and experience (‘The beach is heaped and hilled with bleached branches/ as if whole forests have been rolled over the ocean/ and dumped.’) (And: ‘It was as the snow started falling again/ that she blurted it out, so they were all/ just standing there gazing up, knee deep/ in snow’).
The second half of the book represents poetry trying to absorb a terrific blow to the gut and heart. The titles themselves track the path of searching for a new way to be: ‘NO’ ‘Hospital Property’ ‘Ward’ ‘Three Exercises for Oncologists’ ‘Hold it there’ ‘A Terribly Unfair Question’ ‘Not yet, not now’ ‘because the world can do that to you.’ These poems still have the beauty of musical notes, the attentiveness to the details of the world and the little windows that invite you to stand within the experience of the poem. But these poems now navigate pain and unfathomable questions. Sarah hasn’t poured a deluge of bitterness and despair within the form of the poem, but you can feel the ache along with the determination and ability to take hold of the light. In my review for The New Zealand Herald I wrote:
‘The poems, that may in part be therapeutic, stand as an aid to life. Things outside the clinical procedures and walls wrap about her as windows, anchors and safety nets. Reading these poems, the real world fades to a distance, and beyond the tender craft of each line, the intense luminosity of each word choice is poetry of absolute love.’ For the rest of the review see here.
Sarah’s second poetry collection, Gleam (Auckland University Press, 2013), was launched posthumously. In my review in The New Zealand Herald, I wrote that: ‘Broom uses big things such as the stars (“I am so thin/the stars can see right through me”) and the ocean to navigate lines that shimmer with little explosions of loveliness.’ These poems come from a tremendous love of writing and of family. The poems uphold the musicality and the attentiveness that marked her debut collection (‘So I lay there every night/ and every night the fat white/ moon crept out of the bush/ and came to talk to me’). They are poems that signal the way craft can produce joy, yet upon each occasion there is the fragility of life, the preservation of all that matters, the ability to shine beyond pain and bitterness (‘you are both held/ and not held’). Such poetry becomes a gift to the reader – a place to enter and re-emerge subtly changed. Reading this book strengthened me. Two of the love poems here were published in Dear Heart; love poems that stretch beyond petty squabbles to those bonds that forge immeasurable intimacy. I could never read these out at a reading, but readers have commented on how these poems stick with them.
I love writing about poetry but I want Sarah’s poems to resist my dissection. I want these poems to stand and endure, each and every one, as little homages to love, life, difficulty, family and the insistent desire to write. Each poem holds the world at arm’s length as you read — and then draws it in closer. Perhaps writing and reading under the threat of death does this. Ever since my theoretical explorations for my doctoral thesis I have wondered if writing is a way of postponing death. If you write your way into life. I don’t know. Sarah’s Gleam is a gift for those of us who are well, and those of us who are not; for those of us who write poems and for those of us who love to read them.
Auckland University Press Sarah Broom
Landfall review Tigers at Awhitu
Review of Gleam in ODT
Review of Gleam in Nelson Mail
Michael Gleissner on National Radio
Hamilton goes to town for National Poetry Day
Hamilton Poetry Day Committee came up with all sorts of events to celebrate National Poetry Day. Bookmarks were given out in shopping malls and at Garden Place. There was a roving poet. There was an open-mic night and a Wintec Poetry Competition open to all residents (results on the Wintec and Hamilton Library sites). Carrie Barber came first and second. Hard work for all of those behind the scenes, but great to see a flourish of poetry in a range of ways.
I am full of admiration for Grace Taylor
Grace Taylor is a spoken word poet, teacher and youth development worker. She is a co-founder of the South Auckland Poets Collective and The Rising Voices Youth Poetry Movement. She works tirelessly, creatively, insistently to promote poetry in South Auckland.
Marc Smith founded the Poetry Slam movement in The States in 1986 and it has spread like wild fire throughout the world. The movement has created ‘families’ of poets that are drawn together by slam events, new bohemia or hip hop. Spoken-word poetry has taken poems into different corners. It has ignited a love of words with generations of youth. It has energised the way poetry can be delivered, liberated the word from the page and given poets freedom to speak with renewed political bite.
Grace is one of a number of New Zealand poets who are not only producing vital examples of spoken-word poems (along with poets such as Tusiata Avia, Doug Poole, Selina Tusitala Marsh, Serie Barford) but are igniting a love of words in communities such as South Auckland. This is cause for celebration and admiration.
Grace and the team have a fund-raising event coming up for the Rising Voices Youth Poetry Movement.
It is on Saturday September 7th at 15 Bassett Road, Remuera at 2pm. Light supper and refreshments. Tickets $45
Tonight, there is this event at 7pm at the foyer of the Mangere Arts Centre. This year, Stand Up Poetry has been at MIT Creative Arts School, Te Matariki Clendon Community Library, the Cafe at Youthline Manukau. Packed houses for the open mic. Special guest tonight: Jahra Rager.
Listen to Being Afakasi
The Rope Walk: hand stitched with perfect seasoning
Maria McMillan The Rope Walk (Seraph Press, 2013) A limited edition of 150
With a Scottish grandmother, and many occasions cycling through the back roads of Scotland, Maria’s debut collection was always going to strike a chord with me.
This is a slim volume that opens out into so much more. The reason I sent my manuscript of The Baker’s Thumbprint to Seraph Press is because I have loved the way Helen Rickerby produces gorgeous poetry books from Vivienne Plumb’s The Cheese and Onion Sandwich and Other New Zealand Icons to Vana Manasiadis’s Ithaca Island Bay Leaves: A Mythistorima to Helen Lehndorf’s The Comforter.
The Rope Walk is wrapped in brown paper with a peep hole (like a boat’s porthole) revealing a linocut by Joe Buchanan. The book is hand stitched, the paper stock lovely and an inner design that enhances the poetry.
The poems are observant, musical, reflective and measured. The collection signals the craft and joy of small poems, words that are gathered together in a minor key where time stalls and you relish a moment. Maria knows how to write with the perfect degree of emotional seasoning and revelation (I will tell you this, but I will not tell you that). There was a sense of hide and seek for me as I read (and indeed there is a poem called ‘Hide and seek’).
The book is like a fictional family album with members of the family telling their individual stories — from a factory rope worker to a best friend to a mother on an immigrant ship to a brother running (the family has emigrated to New Zealand). Poetry instead of photographs or postcards. The voices shift and change, held together by the blood twines, reflecting love, loss, epiphany.
The rope has various resonant functions and meanings throughout the collection: as an anchor, a lifeline, a binding, a tether. Her poem, ‘Rope,’ is a luminous reading experience. The poem takes as its starting point an aerial performer, but without knowing that fact on my first reading, the poem was a miniature philosophical puzzle. Instead of aligning with the grip of hand on high rope — the tremble and swoop of courage — I found myself in the tremble and swoop of movement, existence, actuality, stillness, thought, stasis.
The collection is enriched immeasurably by the Scottish inflections: the deft detail of place and event, the dialect, the handed-down memory. The last poem, ‘Nothing happened and I wasn’t there’ is a terrific note on which to end the book. This standout poem makes an ordinary scene hum deliciously with its liberal use of Scottish dialect. The words stretch towards nonsense (like a nonsense poem creates its own meaning, you almost know what these words mean, like navigating a foreign language and getting the gist). Yet, for me, it heightened the way the wind and the waves and the land and the sheep and the cows can seem so utterly foreign when you stand elsewhere. The musical notes of the poem getting deep into my memory, the musical notes of the collection haunting and alive.
It was difficult to pick which poem to post, but Helen and Maria have kindly give permission to post ‘Nothing happened and I wasn’t there.’
I love this collection. I love the grace, the phrasings, the syntax — the flecks of life and the speckles of fiction that move you out of routine into the sheer pleasure of poetry.
Helen Rickerby has kindly provided a copy as a giveaway. I will select a random follower of Poetry Shelf on Friday August 30th.
Nothing happened and I wasn’t there
Moon-broch. Morning mun.
Pleeping in the morning blink.
The Catcher’s pleck-pleck.
The moor duck plashes.
Far off the day’s first moo-maein.
One cow then all the cows
moo-maein. The wind
gets cracking. The waves
widenin’ & heightenin’
All day nothing but waves
till evening lay. Lay and lowen.
Then, somewhere the trissle,
thrummle of thistle finch,
a cat’s thrum.
©Maria McMillan The Rope Walk Seraph Press, 2013
On Reviewing Poetry: I decided to go home
Having reviewed fiction and poetry for a number of years for The New Zealand Herald, and as I am about to embark on a new course of reviewing for Poetry Shelf, I have got to thinking about the whole practice. Unlike a number of reviewers in this country, I love reviewing New Zealand books and I actively seek out other reviews of New Zealand books. Why? Partly because I love reading New Zealand books and partly because my academic studies and degrees focused on all things Italian (There are still readers who resist reading and buying NZ books!). Once I walked over the academic threshold with my little box of things and my head full of Italian, I decided to focus on home for a change. I had spent so many years reading Italian from Dante to Calvino to Ramondino and Sereni, from poetry to narrative, and from the Renaissance to contemporary writers, I had missed out on a lot of local books. I decided to go home (in my head, in my reading).
I don’t think I have ever constructed a list of reviewer dos and don’ts to pin to my wall but, after all this time, I realise I have become quite opinionated on reviewing options. So I thought I would share my views and invite comment. This is a somewhat idiosyncratic list, I must confess.
1. I only ever review books that I might be interested in (oh I can’t stand detective novels but let me review this one — really?).
2. I only ever review the book (I can’t stand those reviewers that indulge in personal attack and allow some kind private prejudice against the author to seep into the review. I find this immensely unsatisfying and pointless).
3. My objective when I review a book is to open myself up to the poetry or the narrative and explore what the book is doing. When I did my doctoral thesis I felt slightly allergic to the governing decree that one ought to deconstruct, smash apart. I preferred to build a thesis based upon tenets of construction).
4. When I am reviewing I really don’t want to spend most of the review feeding back the plot (like those film trailers that give you the whole movie in a little pot). Short and sweet I say.
5. Some people have suggested that I am a very kind reviewer. I can see how this opinion might be taken up with poetry. I get to review so few poetry books now that I only pick ones that I have loved (even then I don’t get to review all the books I have loved). So it is not surprising this handful of reviews will be glowing. I write what I experience in the process of reading, and I am not going on the hunt for negative points for the sake of negative points. We produce so many fabulous poetry books here that are cause for celebration as both reader and critic.
6. I am not afraid, however, to make points of criticism when I see the need. I welcome someone who reviews my books in a thoughtful and intelligent way and is unafraid to signal weaknesses (Emma Neale is a case point).
7. We all have different relations to reviews as writers. I can remember my first review of my first book (Cookhouse — and it got some rather nasty reviews!). I was in a supermarket in West Auckland on a Sunday and was walking around going (oh my god! oh my god!) as I read. I was shocked that someone could brutalise my book so badly and get it all so wrong! But by the time I got home I saw this as a valuable lesson. I would never hold a review against someone. I would let my books have their own lives in the world. Years later strangers still come up to me saying they liked Cookhouse. I see the kerfuffle of Book Awards, reviews etc as white noise that can eat away at the process of writing. Unsatisfying and pointless and can only lead to bitterness. Books have lives greater than reviews and awards.
8. When I review poetry I want to be open to as wide a field as possible (and not be constrained by some arbitrary notion of what makes a good poem). In poetry all rules are rules to be broken and any poetry dogma ought to be banished to the garbage bin.
9. I welcome a climate of critical exchange on poetry (and in particular New Zealand poetry) but it seems in danger here of prompting toxic, smart-Alec responses. Unsatisfying and pointless.
10. Whatever I do, I do out of joy and love (maybe this is what happens to those who have had a life under threat). This is how I operate as a writer whether on my blog for children, or visiting schools, or writing poems or secret novels, or reviews. This is my impetus for Poetry Shelf. I review out of a joy for poetry. I will be unafraid to criticise books and I will be unafraid to celebrate them.
On Poetry: Elizabeth Smither is the witness of a mystery
Elizabeth Smither has contributed this piece as the first in an occasional series (On Poetry) from New Zealand writers. Elizabeth has written numerous collections of poetry, the most recent of which, The Blue Coat, I have just reviewed in the Herald. This collection shows Elizabeth at her very best — in the way she opens little doors onto tiny corners of the world and in the way she makes those corners hum and shimmer and shine. Elizabeth’s poems reflect craft, attention and an infectious engagement with the world. These skills are also at work in her fiction writing. I was particularly taken with her novel, Lola.
Night horse…. how a poem comes into being
My daughter-in-law, Kate has brought her horse, Alice, from Melbourne. Alice, who in Melbourne was stabled with other horses, made the solo journey with great nonchalance. The sea did not trouble her, the stable where she was quarantined, the new field where she was on her own with a glimpse of cows in the distance. The strangers bringing her carrots.
But one night when I had been visiting and was turning my car to drive home I saw a secret Alice. A mist was rising from the grass and Alice in her crusader’s coat with its hem that flared out like the stiffened band of a dress was moving in it. The car lights lit her for a moment but she did not look up. She was moving to a mysterious purpose, her eyes circled by light like a tournament horse in a mask. She had her secret life and I had the drive home.
I also had the poem which can never be a substitute for something that is seen – Alice goes on – and if she was still at sea she would be the horse breasting the prow of the Titanic on a night with no icebergs. All I had was a glimpse as the car turned and I raised the beam to full for the pitch-black country road – on Alice I had the good sense to have them dipped. I like to think that I was the witness of a mystery.
Night horse
In the field by the driveway
as I turn the car a horse
is stepping in the moonlight.
Its canvas coat shines, incandescent.
Around its eyes a mask
a Sienese horse might wear.
No banners stir the air, but mystery
in the way it is stepping
as if no human should see
the night horse going about its business.
The soft grass bowing to the silent hooves
the head alert, tending where
the moonlight glows and communes
in descending sweeps that fall
through the air like ribbons
as if the horse moves in a trance
so compelling, so other-worldly
it doesn’t see the car lights.
The own life of others, human, animal or plant, how mysterious it is. We go towards it – perhaps if I hadn’t been so astonished I should have parked the car, got out and had the temerity to enter the field (the open field of poetry) and investigate further. The wonderful thing is that this mysterious world which we are hardly capable of penetrating or understanding – but whenever has that stopped a poem from making the attempt? – comes towards us too. The Sienese horses came to me not because Alice is a speedster but because of their daring and the light, falling in sweeping circles put me in mind of a cheering crowd. Ultimately images may be nothing more than an attempt at homage.
I’ve never caught Alice in this mystery again but I still hope to, to see something more unfold. I’ve watched her roll and a friend told me she once fell over a horse sleeping in a field in the dark and they both cried out in shock.
Mysterious Alice: thank you for letting me witness a little of your secret life.
Elizabeth Smither
New Zealand Book Council author page
University of Auckland author file
Auckland University Press author page
NZ Poetry Shelf 