Please join us for the launch of Still Is, the final poetry collection by Vincent O’Sullivan.

Still Is will be launched by Fergus Barrowman, with readings by Jenny Bornholdt, Diana Bridge, Bill Manhire, Gregory O’Brien, and current New Zealand Poet Laureate Chris Tse.
 
Friday 21 June
5–7pm

Te Ahumairangi Foyer
National Library of New Zealand
Corner Molesworth and Aitken Street
Thorndon, Wellington

All welcome. Please RSVP to: thwup@wgtn.ac.nz

Light refreshments will be provided,
with wine kindly sponsored by Te Mata Estate.
Copies of Still Is will be for sale in Te Āmiki.

With thanks to Helen O’Sullivan and the wider O’Sullivan whānau.

The thrushes are back. The blackbirds too
are back, already worrying the thrushes,
filching their choice worms. The gorse
is running the hills along the Aramoana
Road, spills the slopes yellow; the broom,
so much more politely, you call it
gold. Look again, the gorse walks prickling
against the skyline. This is September.
 

Still Is gathers ninety dazzling new poems by Vincent O’Sullivan. These are poems that call and respond, poems that elaborate and pare down, and poems in which an ending is a beginning.

Born in Auckland in 1937, Vincent O’Sullivan was one of New Zealand’s leading writers, acclaimed for his poetry, plays, short stories, and novels, which include Let the River Stand, Believers to the Bright Coast, and the Ockham-shortlisted All This By Chance. He was joint editor with Margaret Scott of the internationally acclaimed five-volume Letters of Katherine Mansfield, edited a number of major anthologies, and was the author of widely praised biographies of John Mulgan and Ralph Hotere. He taught at Waikato University and Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, and was the New Zealand poet laureate for 2013–2015. In 2000, Vincent was made a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, and in 2021 he was redesignated as a Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit. Vincent died in April 2024.

Welcome to an ongoing series on Poetry Shelf. I have been thinking a lot about the place of poetry in global catastrophe and the incomprehensible leadership in Aotearoa. How do we write? What to read? Do we need comfort or challenge or both? I am inviting various poets to respond to five questions. Today, poet Isla Huia.

1. Has the local and global situation affected what or how or when you write poetry?

Absolutely, totally, overwhelmingly; yes. When reflecting on the poems that made up my book, Talia, I notice now how many of them came from the perspective of a response, a review, or an observation. Writing is the avenue by which I express my reactions to the world around me; it always seems like the most natural way for me to express myself, and to answer back to what I’m seeing in the world. Indigeneity has always been a key theme in my work, and now more than ever, it feels vital to provide a counter-narrative to the one we’re hearing from our so-called leaders, and to openly and courageously (albeit on paper) hit back at it all with some home truths. Obviously, there’s more going on than just the blatant racism in the political sphere – the daily assaults on papatūānuku, the daily assaults on our diverse communities, and of course, the daily atrocities we’re seeing being experienced by our Palestinian brothers and sisters. It’s too much to hold in my body, so really, it feels like I have no other choice but to get it out through my words.

2. Does place matter to you at the moment? An object, an attachment, a loss, an experience? A sense of home?

Place is fundamental for me. In a Māori sense, the most important things in my world are people and places, and everything else comes as a byproduct. Similarly to what I was referring to earlier, I didn’t really realise how much of Talia was focused on places until I looked back on it, but now I see that the book itself is really a map between the locations and the lives of people who are crucial to me. Te Henga, on Auckland’s west coast, featured a lot, as did Whanganui and Motuoapa and the places I whakapapa to. So did Ōtautahi, and Te Kiekie Mount Somers, and so many of the places that I’ve been called to write in, or about. I spend a lot of my time walking, and when I’m not at mahi I’m usually either reading, or tackling my ever-growing list of tracks and places to explore here in Waitaha. And when I’m walking, I’m always writing. It’s places, especially quiet and isolated places, that give my body and my head the kind of clarity they need to work together and produce words that are true, authentic and real. 

3. 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.

Oh, always. I find myself reaching more and more often for either works that hit-home so hard that they make me feel seen, or works that are so far outside of my lived experience that I feel distracted from the actual world we’re living in – or at least the one I’m seeing. Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride, and Intimacies by Lucy Caldwell are works of fiction that I’ve totally fallen for this year. Haerenga: Early Māori Journeys Across The Globe by Vincent O’Malley, The Believer by Sarah Krasnostein and So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Mellissa Broder are non-fiction books that have challenged me and helped me in all the same breath. We, The Survivors by Tash Aw, The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi, and A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam have given me insight into lives so painful, and beautiful, and fundamentally unimaginable to my own. Overall, though, the books I’ve read that have come out of Aotearoa are the ones that I’ve clung to, and the one’s I’ll always remember for their familiarity, their relatable ache and the way they remind me of something I can’t name but always need: Tangi and Into The World of Light: An Anthology of Māori Writing by Witi Ihimaera, Loop Tracks by Sue Orr, Bird Child and Other Stories by Patricia Grace, 2000ft Above Worry Level by Eamonn Marra, Plastic by Stacey Teague, Faces in The Water by Janet Frame …. to name but a few.

4. 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?

He pātai pai tēnā. For my own writing, I aim more for heart, mind and wairua than ear or eye. I want my writing to physically move me back to the place, circumstance or perspective I was in when I wrote it. I want it to feel entirely tika, and raw, and I want to understand myself better for having written it. Sometimes, that doesn’t translate onto the page, or feel palatable or decipherable to an outside audience; but it’s always the place I write from, regardless. How my readers interact with my work is secondary to whether or not I feel like I am entirely, uncompromisingly myself, within it. I guess the same applies for me as a reader, when I think about it. I like books of all genres that emote a certain feeling, or provide an atmosphere, or hold an energy; all of those more abstract things that are hard to pinpoint or describe. I look at words far more than I look at plot, or narrative, or structure. I look for the feeling between the lines more than I look for a perfect description, or a clever piece of dialogue. It’s all in the wairua.

5. Is there a word or idea, like a talisman, that you hold close at the moment. For me, it is the word connection.

I’ve always loved the word ‘remember.’ I have it engraved on the inside of a ring that I’ve worn every day for years. Sometimes I worry that I do too much remembering (stewing, over-analysing, regretting…) that I’m stuck in the past, but I also think that my love of remembering is where my poetry comes from. The name ‘Hinewai’ is a bit of a talisman for me too. It was the name of a whole line of my tūpuna wāhine and is definitely the name I’ll give to a pēpi one day. It translates to ‘girl of the water’, which makes sense, being that we hail from the banks of the Whanganui river, and the Manganuioteao tributary. Oh, and my aunty Alice read my tarot cards last week and almost all of the cards were cards of ‘cups’, which she said signified emotion, connection and relationships. So that’s a bit of a tohu, too. And so are aunties – thank god for them. 

korowai 

in the back of aunty’s whip
makawe rewilding in the hau
hands on hot plastic we are 
precious in the cargo trailer
and i think, i want to be telling
my nephew to put down the
fishing rod and mihi atu ki a whaea 
for the rest of always, 

i wanna go out telling him
‘it’s an urupā not a flower farm’ and 
that i have comeback to see the dead 
in my grass rash the gods in my genepool
the fruits in my fat

i want this land to return me dirty
and sodden, to de-extinct me 
from the birdbones out

i want my river to whāngai me 
backwards as in, i wanna come through
this place to find there is no otherside
other than this one.

Isla Huia

Isla Huia (Te Āti Haunui a-Pāpārangi, Uenuku) is a te reo Māori teacher and kaituhi from Ōtautahi. Her work has been published in journals such as Catalyst, Takahē, Pūhia and Awa Wāhine, and she has performed at numerous events, competitions and festivals around Aotearoa. Her debut collection of poetry, Talia, was released in May 2023 by Dead Bird Books, and was shortlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards 2024.

Dead Bird Books page

HECTOR
Written by Cadence Chung

The season is from the 18th-22nd of June, at BATS Theatre in Wellington. Cadence is putting it on with a group of young artists from the Music, Theatre, and English departments of Victoria University.

Hector Berlioz, the 19th-century French composer, and Hector Wong, Chinese Wellingtonian, inexplicably find themselves in a room together. What else are they to do but talk to each other?

Hector is a short play written by poet Cadence Chung, co-directed by Hazel Perigo-Blackburn and Lewis Thomson, alongside stage manager Jackson McCarthy.

The play follows just two characters – Hector Berlioz and Hector Wong – and their attempts to find some commonalities despite the centuries between them. Travelling through many scenarios and eras, the two loosely catalogue their lives, in a dialectic style reminiscent of a Platonic dialogue.

Witty, acerbic, hilarious, and deeply poetic, this play explores how we interact with historical canons in the modern era, and shares personal experiences about racism, identity, and gender roles in contemporary Aotearoa.

Cadence Chung, Hazel Perigo-Blackburn, and Lewis Thomson are all university students and young performers, now operating under their newly-formed production company Hebe Productions. They aim to showcase the vibrancy of emerging directors, writers, and performers. Their previous show In Blind Faith debuted to a sold-out season and national news coverage.

CREATIVE TEAM

Director – Hazel Perigo-Blackburn

Hazel Perigo-Blackburn is an actor, director, and scriptwriter. She has been involved in acting clubs and drama classes her whole life and is currently in her third year of a double degree of Film and English Literature at Victoria University. In 2021, her film Marum Chechil made it into the top 5 Secondary Schools in Wellington in the 48 Hour. She was the director for both the Wellington High School and BATS seasons of the musical In Blind Faith.

Founding Member/Actor – Lewis Thomson

Lewis Thomson is an actor and director, currently in studying at Victoria University. He acted in a piece in the SGCNZ Sheila Winn festival nationals which won three awards, and has participated in the Wellington Young Actors’ programme. In March 2022, Lewis entered the Fringe Festival with his emerging theatre group you be good i love you, debuting their show Tigers Can’t Change Their Stripes. He also played Percy/Penny in the Wellington High School production of In Blind Faith. In this production, he will be playing Hector Berlioz, alongside co-star Dennis Eir Lim, who is playing Hector Wong.

Writer – Cadence Chung

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.

Stage Manager/Dramaturg – Jackson McCarthy

Jackson McCarthy is a poet and musician from Auckland currently studying in Wellington. He is of mixed Māori and Lebanese descent. He was a finalist for the Schools Poetry Award 2021, and was recently one of the Starling Micro-Residents at the New Zealand Young Writers Festival 2023.

Iona reads three toikupu from In the shape of his hand lay a river – ‘Morass’, ‘Ara Toi’ and ‘Lodestone’. 

         Let my voice give meaning         to this ending
That I may shatter        and shelter   what lies between
 And in fragmented friction                  remain upright

 

from ‘Voice’

In the shape of his hand lay a river, Iona Winter, Elixir & Star Press, 2024

The section titles of Iona Winter’s new poetry collection underline the tidal wave of grief that drives the poems, the slam of loss, the invisible currents, the arteries of the heart: Torrents, Subterranean, Estuaries, Confluence, Tributaries. Iona draws us into the darkest crevices, into the painful afterslam of her beloved son’s suicide. She is navigating and retrieving, remembering and recording. No rules, no model for the parent savaged with grief. Ah. How to move and speak and scream and rage? How to write? This utterly moving sequence of poems, so brutally honest, so open for viewing.

How to write your darling when ‘in the shape of his hand lay a river, the warmth of his heart a universe’. He is there in the space between and above and within the lines, he is there on the beach, in the doctor’s waiting room awaiting diagnosis or prescription. How to replenish and heal the empty husk of self, the swollen heart, the need to love? Iona is singing her son, as she sings and screeches her grief, moving into incantation, moving between dark and light, mother-earth and infinite sky, between the impossible questions and the difficult answers. And with every step, with every ache, she never loses sight of love.

I am reading Iona’s poetic testimony, her aching revelations, her poetry that stitches grief to love, and I recognise this as deeply personal but as more than that. Her personal tributaries signpost imperative questions for us as a nation, as communities, questions that consider how to keep our young people safe, how to nurture and protect our vulnerable youth, how to foster self love and self growth, how to stand up and fight for what is precious. Look around us, look at the stockpiling wounds and losses and dislocations.

Iona has written poetry in the shape of her heart and it sings.

           you have no choice
but to withstand the storm, or break open

like a flooded plain, where green-leaved rākau
       are briefly dazzled by the returning sun

 

from ‘Three years without summer’

Iona Winter (Waitaha/Kāi Tahu) is a poet, essayist, storyteller and editor. She has several published collections of poetry and short fiction; most recently In the shape of his hand lay a river (2024). Her upcoming book A Counter of Moons, creative non-fiction speaking to the aftermath of suicide, is due for publication in 2024. In 2023, Iona founded Elixir & Star Press, as a dedicated space for the expression of grief in Aotearoa New Zealand. The inaugural Elixir & Star Grief Almanac 2023, a liminal gathering, included over 100 multidisciplinary responses to grief. Widely published and internationally anthologised, Iona creates work that spans genre and form, and lives in the Buller region. 

Elixir & Star Press page

Amy Marguerite reads ‘keep this true’

keep this true
       for blair

i jokingly suggest you change
your relationship status to
it’s complicated & i’ll change
mine to engaged we have exactly
six mutual friends on here probably
a matt & you know which freckles
to kiss to keep this true call them
fret markers or like don’t when
bree asks if we’re………Official
is that the rehearsal what steve albini
wrote in his letter to nirvana
the licking pattern of which dog
at the bowl it’s only complicated
if you paraphrase the dream
in which i meet you at the airport
with my girlfriend because i love you
like no amen at all & meaningful clutter
is a brilliant title for a poem
or a song………i won’t call this that you can
have it i’m not even talking about
your house just maybe a busy gap
our bodies on a sunday the novel somebody
else writes on the plane in this
heat anything is nowhere else a thing
i used to have a thing for &
this is new & great & new & pinched
harmonics in my search bar

Amy Marguerite

Amy Marguerite (she/her) is a poet and essayist based in Tāmaki Makaurau. She completed an MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters in 2022. Her poetry has appeared in Spoiled Fruit, the NZ Poetry Society Anthology white-hot heart and various literary journals. Amy is currently working towards the publication of her debut poetry collection. 

Waiting

They spoke animatedly about
capacity and he tangata.
I replaced their water,
tried not to hover.

I imagined making good points
– cake-cutting, smiling –
my words spoken like spells
over a cauldron.

They were the last table to leave.
One woman had a work card,
so the bill was thankfully
simple.

She’d adored the baby pāua
on its bed of lavender foam.

I wiped down, stacked and vacuumed.
Omar was prepping for tomorrow.
He gave me dahl and roasted cauli
to take home.

Time slows when you’re tired.
It took forever to unlock my broomstick
and attach the lights.
Did I have everything?
I rechecked my backpack.

Distance chimed its distant chime.
Every lurch of headlights
brought a brief bow-wave of fear,
but I love the small hours when they open out
under the stars.

A final climb, then the sweep into
the suburb where I roomed … some jumpy clouds
across the moon … the calabash
run away with
the spoon.

James Brown

James Brown lives in Wellington. His Selected Poems was published by Te Herenga Waka University Press in 2020. ‘Waiting’, ‘The Magic Show‘ and ‘Love Poem‘ are from Slim Volume (Te Herenga Waka University Press, forthcoming 2024). 

The Caselberg Trust and UNESCO City of Literature Dunedin, New Zealand are pleased to announce that the Caselberg Trust Margaret Egan Cities of Literature writers resident for 2024 will be poet Alison Glenny. Alison was selected by the judges from a strong field, and will be welcomed to the Caselberg House in Whakaohorahi/Broad Bay from the start of November till mid-December this year.

Alison Glenny was born in Ōtautahi/Christchurch, and lived in the UK and Australia before returning to Aotearoa, where she lives on the Kāpiti Coast. Her Antarctic-themed collection of prose poems and fragments The Farewell Tourist was awarded the Kathleen Grattan prize for a collection of poetry and was published by Otago University Press in 2018. A second collection, Bird Collector, was published by Compound Press in 2021. A third collection is forthcoming in 2024, also with Compound Press, and her work has been widely published in journals and anthologies.

The Caselberg Trust Margaret Egan Cities of Literature Writers Residency is run jointly and collaboratively by the Caselberg Trust and City of Literature Dunedin, New Zealand. Funding from the Caselberg Trust is provided through a generous bequest by the late Margaret Egan.

Website here

We’re so excited to announce the incredible Renee Liang as judge for the Monica Taylor Poetry Prize 2024!

The prize will be opening on 1st June, so start polishing your best unpublished poems!

Dr Renee Liang 梁文蔚 MNZM is a poet, paediatrician, playwright and essayist. After exploring open mics in Broken Hill, Australia, Renee joined the MC team at Poetry Live, becoming known for running slams. Since then Renee has become a jack of literary trades: she wrote, produced and nationally toured eight plays; makes operas, musicals and community arts programmes; and her poems, essays and short stories are widely anthologised. The Bone Feeder, a play adapted into opera for the Auckland Arts Festival in 2017, was one of the first Asian mainstage works in New Zealand and one of the opening works at the Waterfront Theatre in Auckland.

The annual takahē Monica Taylor Poetry Prize honours the memory of poet Monica Taylor, with the generous assistance of her whānau, and with the kaupapa of encouraging new generations of poets.

There’s more information about the Monica Taylor Poetry Prize here

Full details here

Events include

​Thursday 6th June

Poetry event at Gore Library Touring poets Kay McKenzie Cooke and Jenny Powell will read and discuss their writing.
Local poets are invited to read their work in the Open Mic section.
Gor Library 11:30 am

Poetry Reading and Panel Discussion with Sara Hirsch, David Eggleton, Kay McKenzie Cooke and Jenny Powell; Invercargill Library meeting room, 7pm, Koha entry.

Friday 7th June

Conversation on the Couch with Tusiata Avia.
An opportunity to hear from poet, writer and performer Tusiata Avia, about her journey and experiences as a Pacifica writer in Aotearoa.
Repertory House, 7pm. Limited ticket sales, max 2 tickets per person. $30 each.
(Note the bar will not be open). No door sales.

Saturday 8th June

Poetry writing workshop with Sara Hirsch, 9-11am Invercargill Library Meeting Room $20 (or both workshops for $30)
Have you always wanted to learn how to write poetry? Have you been writing for ages and would love the chance to get some tips and tricks? Whatever your background and experience everyone is welcome at this inclusive workshop, from newbies to the poetry obsessed.
The session will introduce you to some fun activities to get you scribbling. We will play with words, sounds and images until we find the poems that need to be written, spoken, shouted at the top of our voices. This workshop is for anyone who has something to say, even if you don’t know what it is yet. Come join in some games, meet some like minded people and explore poetry in ways they don’t teach you in school.

Poetry performance workshop with Sara Hirsch, 12-2pm Invercargill Library Meeting Room $20 (or both workshops for $30)

Taking words from the page to the stage! Whether you are new to the microphone or a seasoned slam poet, this performance workshop is for you. Come and join this inclusive, fun and interactive session centred around poetry in performance with UK Slam Champion Sara Hirsch.
We will explore performance techniques and practice speaking poems in a safe supportive space to help you build confidence and enjoy the power of spoken word.
​
​Poetry Masterclass with Tusiata Avia, 2.30-4.30pm Invercargill Library Meeting Room $30

Ah. What pleasure it was this week assembling a feature to celebrate Katūīvei: Contemporary Pasifika Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand, edited by David Eggleton, Vaughan Rapatahana and Mere Taito (Massey University Press). Listening to the audios, reading the conversation the editors contributed to, it was skin-pricklingly good. Inspiring.

I also listened to a terrific conversation that originally aired on RNZ National in 2010 as part of the ‘Books that Built New Zealand’ series. Justin Gregory asked academic Dr Alice Te Punga-Somerville: how can a book that was never published, and never read, tell us about who we are? In my research for Wild Honey, I had come across the author of the missing novel, Evelyn Patuawa-Nathan. She had published a collection of poetry, Opening Doors. I went back to my copy of Wild Honey and reread what I had written. I would love to give a few signed copies away (message me or email paulajoygreen@gmail.com), but here is an extract:

Patuawa-Nathan grew up in Maropiu, Northland. When she was twelve, she left home and worked in hospitals, hotels and factories. Twenty years before her debut and, to my knowledge, only poetry collection, she wrote a novel that Collins in London was keen to publish, but the edited manuscript got lost in the post and she abandoned it. With poet Hone Tuwhare and author Harry Dansey, she tried unsuccessfully to establish a society for Māori writers. After periods abroad, she moved to Sydney permanently, where she taught in a private school and worked with women prisoners, and apparently wrote under another name. I find scant mention of her in New Zealand archives, have a single book of her poetry, and her poetic melodies cling to me. Like so many other women writers, she is a puzzling gap.

Patuawa-Nathan’s poetry, moving with grace and exquisite economy, reveals a formidable attachment to home. Like Vernice Wineera, her poetic return to origins, throughout the collection, resembles a tidal movement that both reveals and conceals: a return to her village and valley, with its summer hues, ‘holds aloft scarlet-tipped fingers/ halting the hours/ so I may know again/ this hesitant valley of my birth’.[i] In ‘Distant Village’, separation is an ache-channel across the Tasman Sea that poetry fertilises with poignant detail, with little repetitions like the breath of the wind returning: ‘Distant village/ your essence reaches me/ from the broad hill sounds/ hung over northern valleys.’[ii] But the detail carried on the breath of the wind, like the detail carried on the force of the line, is surrogate, a pale substitute where words grapple to hold the physical anchors of home. As readers we are left with a melancholic trace: ‘You reach me/ touch me/ find I am of stone.’[iii]

Many of Patuawa-Nathan’s poems are evocative postcards on the surface, but as you delve deeper, and like the kumara she references, tendrils of ideas stretch and search: this is who am I, this is where I am from. In ‘Waikato Lament’, the poet calls upon repressed stories that need to be told, in melodious lines that counterpoint the ghostly violence, the damaged people, the smothered and unjust events: ‘Green wandering fingers/ of kikuyu/ prying into an old kumara pit/ playing over limestone belly/ and naked rock/ have not quite covered,/ cannot hide,/ the faded emblems/ of a land lost people.’[iv] The poet stitches the essential heart-hit of narrative into her poem, and the legacy of oppression that she carries along her ancestral bloodline, as she sings:

Blood soaked, in time’s
memory,
spirits of Taupiri
raise keening voices
anthem of injustice
echoing down
through the night.[v]

On other occasions, the injustice is made bitingly, and sometimes sardonically, clear. In ‘Aboriginal on the Last Train Home’, a tiny anecdote harbours the greater, national injustice. The Government pays for an Aborigine’s train ticket back home to the mission. Patuawa-Nathan turns it into wry and caustic joke: ‘Another ten such years of travel/ and they would have paid him a fair price/ for New South Wales.’[vi] In ‘Education Week’, a group of students are taken to visit the local jail, and in that moment of checking, a prescient mirror glass suggests social injustice infects both education and crime statistics: ‘In a small concrete cell/ bare/ but for the humour/ of wall graffiti,/ they reach among comments/ for names of cousins/ and brothers/ and fathers.’[vii]

The blurb of Opening Doors, suggested Patuawa-Nathan had a new collection for publication in Sydney, but sadly, I can find no trace of it; sadly, because her slender debut of 24 poems signalled a poet to savour and invite more from. Her succulent detail coupled with crafted melodies forms a way of anchoring home, and in that anchorage, the poems shelter strong opinions, reclaimed history and familial connections. In the final poem, ‘Taraire Berries’, with te reo words italicised, the words form a skinny spine on the page, akin to a family back bone.[viii] The music resonates on the tongue, sibilant sounds brush against sharper consonants, single-syllable words are adjacent to longer word-notes. Visually the effect is equally sumptuous:

Blue-black
taraire berries
tart on the tongue.
Bush tracks
sun-dried and hoof-worn
to powdery earth
by grazing cattle.[ix]

 The poet’s harmonies echo the way home dreams down through her writing pen, just as she passes memory and dream to her son: ‘Memory/ dreams down/ through a son/ seeking his mother’s country./ Seeking the taraire,/ the titoki and karaka.’

[i] Evelyn Patuawa-Nathan, ‘Summer in the Kaihu Valley’, Opening Doors, 1.
[ii] Evelyn Patuawa-Nathan, ‘Distant Village’, Opening Doors, 2.
[iii] ‘Distant Village’, Opening Doors, 2.
[iv] Evelyn Patuawa-Nathan, ‘Waikato Lament’, Opening Doors, 8.
[v] ‘Waikato Lament’, Opening Doors, 8.
[vi] Evelyn Patuawa-Nathan, ‘Aboriginal on the Last Train Home’, Opening Doors, 19.
[vii] Evelyn Patuawa-Nathan, ‘Education Week’, Opening Doors, 23.
[viii]Evelyn Patuawa-Nathan, ‘Taraire Berries’, Opening Doors, 27.
[ix] Taraire Berries’, Opening Doors, 27.

New books in the post this week: Landfall 247, edited by Lynley Edmeades. Slow Fires: New Poems by Leonard Lambert, Cold Hub Press.

Weekly links

Monday Poem: Elizabeth Morton’s ‘Maybes‘

Tuesday: Jenny Powell reads two poems
An Auckland Writers Festival collage

Wednesday: 5 Questions Rhys Feeney

Thursday: Jack Ross on ‘In Levin’ by Therese LLoyd

Friday: Katūīvei – Contemporary Pasifika Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand
a review, readings, a conversation

A poem

This week I have devoted large chunks of time to reading the poetry collections by Vincent O’Sullivan on my shelves in preparation for next Friday’s tribute. I also found a few more in second-hand bookshops. I think I might do more of this second-hand book shop trawling for poetry! I spotted Twenty-Five Poems of Protest by Rewi Alley (Caxton Press, 1968) in Jason’s Books and nabbed the copy. Such a spiky book to read now, when all these decades later, there is still so much to protest about. Rewi protested the inhumanity of the war in Vietnam. You can feel his rage, his helplessness and his need to speak out. In his introduction, Gordon McArthur writes: “One of the poems is about love, a love that goes deep and selfless and does not slam the gate on outsiders, or forget the loved flesh littering Vietnam fields. Hard to take, rough, brutal and honest. You may not like the bitter medicine; but for some of us, these poems of protest are an alarm that rings in the sleeping conscience. This is the time to be awake.”

Rewi writes in his preface: “If these lines that have been written can do a ploughing job so that the seeds of understanding can be sown, if they can stir some hearts and minds to see reality as it is, and too, if they can help some hands to action, they will have been worthwhile.”

ON LOVE . . .

Love makes a man dare to fight—
Love for the many looted of so much love.
Yet love can grip a man
so that he turns deaf ears
to the cries of Vietnam children burnt,
while thinking only of his own,
his precious ones, slamming the gate
on all outsiders.
A queer thing, this love!
Love for the good woman who is
all good things brought together.
Love for a whole world of lovely things:
white seagulls over blue seas, children
under apple trees, or swimming
in the river.
The love of the close-knit family living as part of one another—
the perfect mother, the understanding friend.
All these are loved as part of living.
But what of the world of the denied,
where anxious children watch each morsel others eat?
The two thirds of the world where sickness
strikes the helpless—where practical and down to earth love
is the crying need?
All must join together in their basic cause
and fight, or be enslaved for long to come.
So easy to prate of love, the magic of her touch—
life taking on new meaning, and all the happy things of love!
But remember too
that loved flesh littering Vietnam fields,
scattered there by
enemies of all good men.

 

Rewi Alley, Peking, June 24th 1967