Photo credit: Amber-Jayne Bain

Birdspeak, Arihia Latham, Anahera Press, 2023

The readings

Arihia reads ‘Birdspeak’

Arihia reads ‘Defying death’

Arihia reads ‘Koia’

Arihia reads ‘New island’

Arihia reads ‘Spring passage’

Arihia Latham (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, Waitaha) Is a writer, creative, and rongoā practitioner. Her poetry collection Birdspeak is just out from Anahera Press and her short stories, essays and poetry are published and anthologised widely. She has been an arts columnist for The Post and presents often at arts and writers festivals. She lives with her whānau in Te Whanganui a Tara.

Anahera Press page

THE MOTHER IS SPEAKING TO HER CHAIRS

The mother was born in a large city in 1956
The father was born in a small town in 1957
They met each other in a third place in 1979

They got married in the large city in 1980
They moved together to the small town in 1981
Their first child was born there in 1982

Their second child was born there in 1984
Their third child was born there in 1986
The mother’s uncle died in 1988. He left her six good chairs

Over a period there are approximately
2 cats, 3 mice, 4 rats, 5 fish, 6 birds & 1 dog
By 2003 the mother & father have split up

By 2004 all the animals have died
By 2005 all the children have moved out
& the mother has the six chairs recovered

It was expensive, but, she argues, it has been such a long time
& the first child gets a pet. He phones the mother to tell her
He says how he talks with the pet & how nice it feels

The mother says well I talk to my chairs so I understand yeah I get it
I say hello chairs, I love you chairs, you are so beautiful, chairs
& the first child says, good Ma that’s good, well talk to you soon

Ok bye hon, she says & they hang up

Sam Duckor-Jones

Sam Duckor-Jones is an artist and writer from Te Whanganui-a-Tara now living in Mawhera.

A Garden Is a Long Time, Annemarie Hope-Cross and Jenny Bornholdt
Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023

View

You’re up to your knees
in grass, bent
for scent or form
framed by the window, held—
as a cellist might draw
a note to the end
of sound.

Jenny Bornholdt

A Garden Is a Long Time brings together photographs by Annemarie Hope-Cross (1968 – 2022) and words by Jenny Bornholdt. It is a sublime book. It is a book generating admiration and wonder.

Firstly the title. The title resonates so beautifully, like a tiny poem held in the palm of your hand. I am moving in all directions, along multiple paths, holding the ideas and mood it generates: seasons, attachments, necessity, beauty, growth, the power of the senses.

Secondly the cover that features Annemarie’s photogenic drawing on canvas is placed on natural linen (from ‘Tupare Leaves’, 2016). I run a finger over the smooth surface of the photograph and then delight in the textured surface of the linen. There is no blurb on the back of the book, no sales pitch, just the linen expanse. The book, so lovingly created, is a work of art. I prolong the moment before opening the book.

Thirdly the words, at times biography, at others art appreciation, art ideas and processes, a photography manual, Jenny’s poetry. Annemarie’s father used to develop photographs at the kitchen sink (later had a darkroom) while her mother sang in a choir. Annemarie was driven to create photographs from a young age, resisted digital photography at Art School, studied various photographic techniques at Fox Talbot Museum in the United Kingdom. She went to live in Alexandra, fell in love with Eric Schusser, had an ambulance job, gardened, and kept exploring her favoured medium.

Jenny writes with the deft touch of a poet, her words drawing us into a life and into the photographs. Jenny’s exquisite poems, penned with a handful of elements reverberate so sweetly for ear and eye, holding out a scene or a fleeting moment. I find myself lingering over each one, letting the poem shimmer and grow. Each a touchstone for contemplation. i have included a whole poem with permission for you to absorb. In your own way. In your own time.

And fourthly the photographs. My daughter currently has a fascination with extremely old cameras she finds in junk shops. Her black and white photographs are sublime. I can’t wait to show her the book because Annemarie’s photographs are inspiration staircases. Touchstones. She used old cameras, printed by hand on paper, had a long engagement with the work of Anne Noble, and was inspired by William Fox Henry Talbot, claimed as the British inventor of photography. His aim was ‘to reproduce what he saw’. Perhaps seeing is like a vibration, where what we see is both fleeting and unstable, the oxymoron of looking.

Annemarie’s photographs are a form of bliss, a cousin of contemplation, a grandmother of wonder. Shadows fall. Light catches. We are viewing an object, a leaf, a flower, a bottle, through misted veils. There is an eerie feel, heightened by the shadowy texture, the blurry lines, the smudged solids, the indefinite horizon, the silhouetted forms. The ‘Cloister’ series brings to mind the interior of a chapel, the shape of the nuns. Again the artwork offers multiple tracks to contemplation, as though we are seated beneath the stained glass window. Jenny writes this: Or the shape might suggest nuns holding the peace of a garden within themselves’. And I am caught up in reverie. The Italian painter and printmaker, Giorgio Morandi (1890 – 1964), whose paintings smudged vases, jars, occasionally fruit, comes to mind. Annemarie was also captivated by this artist, dedicating works to him. I am also catapulted back to Jude Rae’s still lifes.

I am snared on the idea that poems can do this too. A poem might blur or smudge or waver and offer you an uplifiting sense of objects, still life, place, even narrative. I am thinking of the poetry of Dinah Hawken, Sue Wootton, Kiri Piahana Wong, Bill Manhire.

And fifthly, the effect upon me as reader and viewer. The glorious lingering effect that brings together fragility, the uncertain, anchors and stalled time, veils and hints, light and dark, movement and stillness. And yes the sweet peace of viewing and reading, the peace of a long-time garden that is an inner touchstone. This is a breathtaking and precious book.

Annemarie Hope-Cross was born in Upper Hutt in 1968, obtained a Diploma of Photographic Arts from Whitecliffe Art School in 1989, and in 2011 and 2013 studied photogenic drawing, wet and dry plate collodion and the daguerreotype technique at the Fox Talbot Museum in the United Kingdom. Between 2010 and 2021, she held 13 solo exhibitions at public and private galleries in the Otago region, and her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions in New Zealand and internationally. She held an artist’s residency at the Fox Talbot Museum in 2013), and her series of ‘Still’ photographs is in the collection of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. With Eric Schusser, she produced two photo-books, Still Intrusion (2019) and Dissolving Margins (2020).

Jenny Bornholdt has published over a dozen books of poems, most recently Lost and Somewhere Else (2019). She has edited a number of anthologies, including Short Poems of New Zealand (2018), and has worked on numerous book and art projects with artists including Pip Culbert, Mary McFarlane, Noel McKenna, Mari Mahr, Brendan O’Brien and Gregory O’Brien. In 2018 she was the co-recipient, with Gregory O’Brien, of the Henderson Arts Trust Residency and spent 12 months in Alexandra, Central Otago, during which time she met Annemarie Hope-Cross.

Te Herenga Waka University Press page

August 26th, in the Uber ride back home

Early morning, The Economist sends me emails.
I read them on the trip home, lipstick-teethed.

In the backseat crumple the spoils of the evening:
the silver purse, the ruined tissue paper, the poem,

stray sequins, snapped hair, cheap perfume. They
all shine noisily like abandoned confetti. And after all,

what was I to expect on such a night, a night of want?
When we all weren’t looking, the harbour swelled

like a breast, like a corpse. I heard it was from the damp
in the air — I heard that there was a storm and that it was

hot and wet and salty and everything a reckoning should be,
I heard that it raged until the dawn came, nails on windowpanes,

begging to be let in. And in the accusing morning, the
concrete was damp and saline-struck, like clean tears.

Cadence Chung

Cadence Chung is a poet, student, composer, and musician from Te-Whanganui-a-Tara, currently studying at the New Zealand School of Music. Her debut poetry book anomalia was published in April 2022 with Tender Press, and her poetry has been published and commissioned widely by Starling, The Spinoff, Landfall, Turbine, Takahē, and others. She put on her original musical In Blind Faith at BATS Theatre in August 2022, performed her Sapphic lyre compositions at Verb Festival 2022, and composed song cycles to NZ poetry for Cud-Chewing Country, an interdisciplinary concert. She takes her inspiration from dead poets and antique stores.

Lucky Taco Time

A succulent scent drifts up the road
homemade Mexican spicy mix mingles with tomatillo relish
and all the neighbours open windows wide.
Crispy red cabbage and crunchy pink pickle
pops on the tongue like sweet poetry tingles
because it is lucky taco time.
Time to juice limes and roll out the dough
time to mash avocado and pepper the mayo.
Even the birds are singing in spicy keys.

The Lucky Taco Cookbook, Sarah and Otis Frizzell, Penguin, 2023

The Lucky Taco Cookbook is exactly like poetry – you gather some ingredients, and then start cooking, not knowing exactly where you’ll end up, but carrying a sense of flavour on your tastebuds. I have never eaten at Sarah and Otis Frizzell‘s Mexican food truck but it has always been on my to-do list. So to have the cookbook and a daughter who loves cooking and Mexican food as much as me was the perfect excuse to create a feast for three.

The recipes are easy to follow, the ingredients easy to find, and the photographs extremely tempting. We cooked spiced fish tacos with Lucky Taco Pink Pickle, Lucky Taco Salsa Verde, Lucky Taco Chilli salt, some lime mayo, sliced red cabbage and blue flour tortillas. Yum tastebud bridges transport us between piquant and peppery, soft and crunchy, heat and coolness.

Cookbooks are always a launchpad into making recipes your own – and the Lucky Taco cookbook is perfect for this. So Georgia added some tuna, some tomatillo salsa verde to the lime juice aioli. One week later and she is doing a marathon kitchen cook with slow cooked pulled pork tacos, a feast of sides, and a stack of homemade tortillas – using the press her friend had picked up in a market for us! I added in the tasty caulifower vegetarian option for me!

Fresh, fragrant, flavoursome Lucky Taco taste bombs. Oh yum! This a cookbook to treasure.

Sarah and Otis Frizzell are the dynamic duo behind The Lucky Taco. The pair fell in love with tacos and the iconic Californian taco trucks while traveling in Mexico and LA. The passionate cooks trained with one of the best chefs in Mexico and returned to establish one of Aotearoa’s very first gourmet food trucks. Since 2013 they have been treating Kiwis to tasty and authentic tacos from their truck, Lucky. Their product range is stocked at food retailers throughout Aotearoa. They have won over 30 awards, including Winner of the Lewisham Most Outstanding Street Food Award (2016, 2018, 2021), Supreme Champion at the Outstanding Food Producers NZ Awards, and World Champion at the World Hot Sauce Awards. Sarah hails from the UK and was an award-winning art director in Aotearoa’s top advertising agencies. Otis is a former hip-hop performer and tattoo artist. He has worked in TV and radio broadcasting, and is a well-known practising artist.

Penguin page

Deep Colour, Diana Bridge, Otago University Press, 2023

Diana Bridge’s new collection, Deep Colour, is her eighth, and is a book to savour slowly as you melt into a blissful state of contemplation. You can hear Diana read from the collection here.

The opening poem, ‘Deep colour’, embodies the layered reading experience as you travel through the book. The poem, like the collection as a whole, is a visual and aural delight, nuanced and rich, and unafraid of ideas. You move amidst elusiveness, the kinetic, murkiness, embedded memory, the haunting of words (take haunting as you will). Reading becomes a provisional and satisfying means to catch, reflect, translate, muse. You encounter the unknown, the uninterrogated, truth, fiction.

Deep colour, the words for it are out of range –
that much I can tell you. What I cannot say
is how a life gathers its themes.

How to read? I replay a poem to let its music resonate, and then replay it yet again to let the visual tang and tingle, to let the ideas take root. Take a sample from ‘He has put away pointers’ for example. The poem responds to Camille Pissarro’s painting ‘Le Champ de choux, Pontoise’, 1873; the poem moves amidst shadow and light, vibration and symbol, the unseen and the visible. There is uplift and there is down beat. Diana includes a link to the painting in her notes. Here is the opening stanza:

He says it is morning – but is it? I love best
what I cannot pin down: a direction, a thickness –
greenish-blue ribbons coasting to somewhere outside
my vision but, somehow, contained in the frame.
It comes down to a rectangle holding in balance
its luminous layers, to a field made fast by a foreground
of cabbages, and the way that the cabbages tumble
like hedgehogs under a downpour of light.

The poems include classical references, especially Chinese, a clutch of objects, metaphors, order along with disorder and breakage, the seasons, the seasoned, the soul and the physical. The writing is always measured, steady, sure-footed, musical, alive to what is observed as much as what is thought. Heart is as significant as intellect.

Section II, ‘Utamaro’s Objects’, lingers upon the work of Utamaro, a Japanese artist and designer (1753 – 1806), and the poems stand as little meditations to absorb. Section III comprises the translations of 15 ‘poems on things’ by Chinese poet Xie Tiao (464 – 499). Again there is a marriage of feeling and ideas, heart and intellect, what is not said and what is described or hinted at.

Diana has included comprehensive endnotes that provide a context for some of the poems and a background to her translation work. The notes underline the scope and depth of the poetry. I am particularly drawn to two lines from ‘Compared to silence’, the first poem in the final section (‘The Text, an undertow’ and ‘in a side / chapel of my mind, movements of the rerquiem / glow’). I find myself musing on the way poems take root inside us, how they are undertows and slender ripples, and how they haunt and establish themselves in rooms in your mind and chambers in your heart.

Deep Colour is a satisfying read that lingers, inspires and fills you with the kind of joy that arrives after slow-paced meditation. I adore it.

Deep Colour is the eighth collection by award-winning Wellington-based poet Diana Bridge. It follows Two or More Islands (Otago University Press, 2019). Bridge’s many accolades include the 2010 Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for Poetry, the 2014 Landfall Essay Competition prize and the 2015 Sarah Broom Poetry Prize. The chief judge, Irish poet Vona Groarke, described her work as ‘possibly amongst the best being written anywhere right now’. The same year, Bridge was the first New Zealander since Janet Frame to take up a residency at the Writers’ and Artists’ Colony at Yaddo in upstate New York. In the Supplementary Garden: New and selected poems (Cold Hub Press, 2016) was longlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry in the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Bridge has studied Chinese language, literature and art history and holds a PhD in Chinese poetry from the Australian National University.

Otago University page

The reading

Some Bird, Gail Ingram, Sudden Valley Press, 2023

‘The provider’

‘How I witch 1692’

‘We are wanting’

Gail Ingram is an award-winning writer from Ōtautahi Aotearoa and author of Some Bird (Sudden Valley Press, 2023) and Contents Under Pressure (Pūkeko Publications, 2019). Her work has appeared in Landfall, takahē, Turbine/Kapohau, The Spinoff, The Poetry Shelf, Poetry New Zealand, Cordite Poetry Review, Blue Nib, Barren Magazine and others. She has an MCW (with distinction) from Massey University, and to earn her living in the arts, she is a teacher at the School for Young Writers and managing editor for a fine line and short fiction editor for Flash Frontier. Her blood runs with words continually rearranging themselves. Website

Sudden Valley Press page

Too Many Lasagnas in the Freezer

There are too many lasagnas in the freezer. Dad and I don’t know what to do. Sure, we try to eat our way through them as the weeks go on, but too many kind people are stopping by unannounced. Dad had to buy a chest freezer to keep up. Just as we finish one, another three show up at the door. It’s not only lasagna being left behind either. There’s casseroles and curries, pies and soups—every meal you can think of that freezes well. How they keep piling up for us we don’t know, but they do. You can’t blame people for being thoughtful, I guess. And Mum would’ve done the same if another family was in our position, so we don’t mind too much. It’s just getting out of hand. Most evenings Dad stands there explaining that we really are fine on food. But family friends can be quite insistent about this kind of thing, especially when they don’t know what to say. We’re at the point where we can’t tell what’s in them anymore. Most aren’t labeled and have frosted over, so they’re just a series of browny-red blocks. You never know what you’re going to get when you put one in the microwave. ‘We’ve got no choice but to turn people away,’ Dad says. ‘Good idea,’ I say. ‘Or we could pretend we’re not home. Make it look like we’ve skipped town.’ ‘Also a good option,’ Dad says. ‘Better yet, we could fake our own deaths. Disappear for good. Then they’d leave us alone.’ We think about this for some time. Then I say, ‘But imagine all the lasagnas Petar would be bombarded with at his university flat? Losing a mother is bad enough, but a dad and brother too? The whole community would be involved. He’d be crushed by the weight of frozen food.’ ‘You’re right, imagine,’ Dad says, shaking his head before muttering something to himself. We consider the pros and cons of selling the house and moving cities entirely, or turning off the power, but can’t bring ourselves to do either. Instead, we decide on a plan. We’ll pass on our frozen meals to unsuspecting neighbors. ‘We could blend in with one of the kids on their paper round,’ Dad says. He explains it would be like an added extra, one brochure and one frozen dinner left in every letterbox. ‘But what if people think we’re trying to poison them?’ I ask. ‘How will we get random people to trust us?’ ‘Don’t forget I was once a door-to-door salesman,’ Dad says. ‘I’ll wear a suit and provide practical demonstrations. Matua is full of elderly people who shouldn’t be using their ovens anyway.’ Luckily Dad and I are of a similar build, so I can wear one of his suits as well. In fact, I’m the spitting image of him in my matching shoes and tie. ‘Even with two of us, it’ll still take a while to get rid of them,’ I say. ‘Oh yes, I suspect it’ll take days, weeks even’ he says, ‘but we have to take it seriously. We’re the only ones who can stop this taking over the whole house.’ Dad fills as many containers as he can into a sack. Then he briefs me on the strategy (which streets are mine, which are his, how to not take rejections personally and all that). It’s the most he’s spoken to me in a while. I’d prefer to be doing something else with my evenings, but at least the tupperware invasion has brought us closer together. Until now, we’ve been lost in our private worlds, eating in silence every night at the dinner table. Now we have something to do as we set off down the street. So similar together in our suits, we might be mistaken as the same person.

Tim Gregc

Tim Grgec is a writer and public servant based in Te Whanganui-a-tara | Wellington. His first book, All Tito’s Children, was published by Te Herenga Waka Press in 2021.

A Summer’s Day, December

In the poetry section of Unity Books,
I collided with you. I was in a hurry
to buy some sadness or a patch of earth,
freshly dug, in rain,
some beauty easily missed.

This, you suggested, perhaps noticing
how all the metal in me was being pulled
by the day’s arbitrary offerings, drawing me
to a room of words in a glass city,
where people leafed through, sighing on waterways.

I stepped out into the High Street sunshine
with a tome of humanity in a bag
and there we parted ways – I confess, god,
I let you down again there at the junction
where I turned towards the gulf.

Medb Charleton

Medb Charleton is originally from Sligo, Ireland. Her poetry has been published in Landfall, Sport, Poetry New Zealand and Turbine | Kapohau.