The candle lit for peace flickers I can feel rain on my cheeks
Paula Green
How to mark ANZAC Day on Poetry Shelf when I want to stand on the street with a placard saying PEACE in one hand and a placard saying CEASEFIRE in the other. When I want to pause in this sweet haven in which I live, with its abundance of bush and birds, vegetables and water. When each day delivers small miracles of joy and delight.
And yet each day carries me to the inhumanity of Gaza, the infinite despair, brutality and violence of this godforsaken and utterly unnecessary war. Of all wars, past and present. Local and global. Today I am grateful for all the historians and journalists, fiction writers and poets, documentary and film makers who have exposed the travesty and horror of wars.
So today, I return to the haunting and insistent pain of Bill Manhire’s ‘My World War I Poem’, a poem I have returned to often, with its hope and its aching repetitions. I am reminded, with this poem haunting, of incalculable loss and suffering, of terror and agony and heartbreak. On each occasion of reading, a moment to mourn.
Bill directed me to Keith Sinclair’s ‘The Bomb is Made’, and it felt so very fitting, with its ominous over-and-undercurrents of threat, a finger pausing over the weapon, and the sweet startle of the final word with its semantic ripples. The poem is a repository of repetition, on this occasion both form and subject driven, where for me, the past is fingertapping the present. Again the reading triggers the mourning.
I have included the elegiac voice of Robert Sullivan. In his collection Cassino: City of Martys / Cittā Martire, Robert travels to Italy, to the place his grandfather and so many others battled during World War Two. He travels with a knotty braid of war memories, burial caves, cemeteries, family grief, drawing upon Hone Tuwhare, Dante, Ezra Pound, home soil, whānau. Again the poem, and indeed the entire collection, haunts. Again the reading becomes mourning.
Next Sue Wootton’s ‘War baby’. Again it clings to me long after I finish reading. The notion of concertina time squeezing in and out, the ripple implications and effects of war, it is like my heart is squeezing out melancholic music, a prolonged pain.
I finish with a poem I wrote for my dear sister in law, as we struggled to cope with the tragic news flooding in from Gaza, a poem that is still active in its motivation, an inhumane tragedy that I think of every day at dawn.
Let us work and write and record together for peace.
Five poems for ANZAC Day
MY WORLD WAR I POEM
Inside each trench, the sound of prayer. Inside each prayer, the sound of digging.
Bill Manhire, from Some things to Place inside a Coffin, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2017
THE BOMB IS MADE
The bomb is made will drop on Rangitoto. Be kind to one another, kiss a little And let love-making imperceptibly Grow inwards from a kiss. I’ve done with soldiering, Though every day my leave-pass may expire.
The bomb is made will drop on Rangitoto. The cell of death is formed that multiplied Will occupy the lung, exclude the air Be kind to one another, kiss a little– The first goodbye might each day last forever.
The bomb is made will drop on Rangitoto. The hand is born that gropes to press the button. The prodigal grey generals conspire To dissipate the birth-right of the Asians. Be kind to one another, kiss a little.
The bomb is made will drop on Rangitoto. The plane that takes off persons in a hurry Is only metaphorically leaving town, So if we linger we will be on time. Be kind to one another, kiss a little.
The bomb is made will drop on Rangitoto. I do not want to see that sun-burned harbour, Islandless as moon, red-skied again, Its tide unblossomed, sifting wastes of ash. Be kind to one another, kiss a little, Our only weapon is this gentleness.
Keith Sinclair, from Moontalk: Poems New and Selected, Auckland University Press 1993
xxxviii. Songs
Singing through the flashes and tracer fire singing through the bombs and roaring propellers singing for the Shermans crossing the Bailey bridges singing the Māori Battalion song singing of the farms and the whānau singing out praise for their country singing like Orpheus so the rocks and trees followed them from home
Robert Sullivan, from Cassino: City of Martys / Cittā Martire, Huia Publishers, 2010
War baby
War’s rationing and war’s dread live on behind the fruit bowl and the hogget and the bread. Time’s a concertina with doodlebugs and sirens in its pleats, and when it’s squeezed it folds her in too tight: it requisitions happiness; carpet-bombs delights.
Sue Wootton, from By Birdlight, Steele Roberts, 2011
Speak the Mountain
for dear Banu
There is a mountain There is a river There is a lake
Hold the weeping child to heart Hold the thirsty and the wounded to heart Hold the dead and the fearful also to heart Hold the rubble home and the broken bones
We speak the despairing mountain We speak the blood river We speak the grief lake
Marching peace Marching heart Marching out
There is a mountain There is a river There is a lake
Plastic, Stacey Teague, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024
I count every maunga I can see: Mt Albert, Mt Eden, Mt Roskill, One Tree Hill. Growing up, we never learnt their Māori names: Ōwairaka, Maungawhau, Puketāpapa, Maungakiekie. There is erasure in the naming and not- naming.
I catch my foot on the nail on the deck, again. Hop downstairs to see my parents, and slump into their blue and yellow couch. When I left New Zealand in my early twenties, I couldn’t wait to disappear. I didn’t want to see my past in everything. Each time I came home I wanted to escape again.
This time, I have anchors.
from ‘ANCHORS’ in ‘Hoki’
Poetry is sustenance at the moment, for all kinds of reasons. I have been musing on how to review books, and don’t even think ‘review’ is the right word for what I do, unless it is a matter of re-seeing a book in new lights, personal lights, surprising lights.
I think of a poetry collection as a thicket – with clearings and growth, light streaks and shadows, memory provoking, sense activating, offering multiple reading pathways. I don’t want to carry a yardstick with me, or prattle on about what a poetry collection ought to do or does not do. I loathe reviews like that. I want to read a review that shines light on potential tracks of reading, on electric connections, whether leading to economy or rich complexity.
Stacey Teague’s new poetry collection, Plastic, with its beautiful cover by Sarah McNeil, is a compelling thicket to linger in, for so many reasons. It is personal, love-imbued, connecting. The poems have roots in family, place, navigations of home and, as Stacey contemplates who she is, her bones and her ancestors, she reaches out to te ao Māori.
I am mindful that for many of us who write poetry, we don’t write in a vacuum, we write within the captivating threads of the work of others, communities of poetic voices, styles, ideas, forms, choices. Stacey acknowledges this with poems that step off from the work of or are dedicated to: essa may ranapiri, Anahera Gildea, Talia Marshall, Kaveh Akbar, Jack Underwood, Mary Oliver, Sappho.
] ] I read Sappho ]she tells me to become a voice ] ] so I do ]I am
from ‘ode to Sappho’
The poems are prismatic in form – can I say this? You move from prose poem to concrete poem or couplets, from list poem to a poem with right-hand brackets hugging the left-hand margin, from slashes syncopating the flow to sweet stream currents. Six sections, along with an introductory poem, include three spell poem clusters, and an ongoing and deep attachment to women and Goddesses. I am thinking of Papatuanuku, Hine-nui-te-iwaiwa, Kurangaituku, her grandmother (Narn), her aunty, to the women in the photographs on the walls, the poet Sappho.
The poems are exquisitely present. How to be present in the world, intimately, vitally? This is what I feel as I read. How to be present in the poem, step by step, word by lovingly placed word, revelation by revelation? This is also what I feel as I read. When the poet returns home and stays in the spare room, she retrieves things from the memory box to make the space her own, to recognise herself. And yet linked to this, so very linked to this are the conjunctions of disappearance and appearance, whether overseas, in erasure or ‘the sound of nothing’.
The casting of spells, like forms of recipes, perhaps even mantras, heighten the effect of slow meditation. There are 19 spells, including ‘to divert love from one object another’, ‘to heal an unseen wound’, ‘to gain courage’, ‘to erase and replace’, ‘to carve out space’ and a spell ‘for self-compassion’. They establish little epiphanies as I read, as I seek space and courage and my own self-recognition.
I have jotted down so many lines I want to quote to you, in order to share the heart-rich rewards of this glorious book. This is a book to pack an overnight bag for, to sojourn within and beyond, to reflect upon and to re-emerge nourished. I am wondering if poetry can also be an amulet that protects ‘the hearts pulses’. I love it.
spell to gain courage
love wide-open against the natural framework / sinking always across phenomena / shift the form and work the despair until it is hollow / when you can’t see through the fear / you have to reclaim your structure / rearrange the text until / you can see yourself there in it /
Stacey Teague (Ngāti Maniapoto/Ngāpuhi) is a poet, publisher, editor and teacher. She is the author of the poetry collection takahē (Scrambler Books, 2014) and two chapbooks: not a casual solitude (Ghost City Press, 2016) and hoki mai (If a Leaf Falls Press, 2020). She is currently a publisher and editor at Tender Press. She is the former poetry editor for Scum Mag and Awa Wahine. In 2019 she completed an MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters.
Miriam Sharland, Palmerston North City Library, Bruce McKenzie Booksellers and Otago University Press warmly invite you to the launch of Heart Stood Still by Miriam Sharland. To be launched by Ingrid Horrocks.
6:00pm–7:30pm Thursday 9 May 2024 Mezzanine Floor, Palmerston North City Library
All welcome! Please RSVP to publicity@otago.ac.nz for catering purposes
ABOUT THE BOOK: Miriam Sharland’s eco-memoir Heart Stood Still is the latest title in the Ka Haea Te Ata series from Otago University Press, a series dedicated to casting light on issues of importance in Aotearoa today.
In early 2020 Sharland was nearing the end of a 17-year adventure in Aotearoa. A desire to return to family and the familiar was pulling her back to her homeland, England. When Covid put an end to her travel plans, she found herself facing isolation in Manawatū instead.
Despite her initial unhappiness, Sharland came to see this strange and unexpected time as a gift – an opportunity to explore the natural beauty of the home she’d known for many years but had not fully seen or appreciated. Her explorations were grounding, and she began to examine what it means to truly ‘belong.’
Heart Stood Still is a record of Sharland’s journey towards finding healing in the world’s natural beauty, a beauty that we must fight to protect in the current climate crisis. It is both a memoir and a lyrical portrait of Manawatū. Through a series of personal essays that follow the pattern of the seasons, Sharland skilfully weaves reflections on her life and family history with observations on the native and introduced plants and animals about her; all tinged with her experience as ‘an unsettled settler’ in Aotearoa.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Miriam Sharland is a writer and editor focusing on creative non-fiction, travel, biography/memoir and natural history. Based in England and Aotearoa New Zealand, her essays, reviews and features have appeared in numerous books, journals, magazines and newspapers, and online. These include Reader’s Digest, The Dark Mountain Project, The Dominion Post, Headland and Adventure Travel. In 2021 she was awarded a writing grant from the Earle Creativity Trust and in 2022 she was runner-up in the New Zealand Society of Authors Central Districts summer essay competition. Heart Stood Still is her first book.
To celebrate the inclusion of At the Point of Seeing by Megan Kitching (Otago University Press, 2023) on the Ockham NZ Book Award Poetry short list, I am reposting a reading Megan did for Poetry Shelf from her collection and the review I wrote. Megan’s terrific collection is a book to be celebrated indeed. The awards will be announced at an Auckland Writers Festival Event on May 15th.
The reading
‘Headlands’
‘Crematorium’
‘Houseplants’
Megan Kitching, At the Point of Seeing, Otago University Press, 2023
The poem
The Inlet’s Shore flat and prosey — marginalia in a book of poems
Two chevroned feathers from a paradise duck’s breast caught on knitted turf so smooth they wafted into my fingers.
Their carpet was of water pimpernel beside the glasswort groves along the inlet’s shore woven with shells and mellow seagrass.
Flat, it was, manytoned drabs of sand, gleam and sun-shot emerald marching in low drones to the dunes and distant hills.
Under a milky light, pied birds went about stooped, gleaning the speckled field; others hung dark on the band of the sea.
In that wavering horizon, where the merest snag loomed I found a dull, sedate beauty, an abundance of swans.
Yes, despite the red fire flush tipping the succulent wort and a stilt’s elegant flight the marsh was flat, almost poetry.
Megan Kitching from At the Point of Seeing
The review
Once, when I asked a boy from Hong Kong what new things he’d seen here,
he answered, ‘the moon’.
from ‘Dark Skies’
Megan Kitching’s debut collection, At the Point of Seeing, as the title so aptly suggests, is a book of observation, a handbook on slowing down to see the world. Reading Megan’s poetry splinters immunity to the daily view, the window vista, the routine route. Looking becomes poetry and poetry becomes a source of fascination, nuances, wonder. It might be poetry as contemplation, whether reading or writing, and in that contemplation, in that slow and steady homage to the physical world we inhabit, we are returned to its beauty. In this time of unbearable inhumanity, planet selfishness, personal profit, ugly behaviour, At the Point of Seeing, is a reminder of hope.
In ‘Volcanic Harbour’, the speaker might “sit on a stone and let time work”. I become participant as I too find a “stone” to sit on, and let the poetry work along with time. I move from shells in a museum, to pūhā musings, to a rounded hill, the prevailing wind, horses in a paddock, an albatross curving, muslin rain, macrocarpa that “claw the sky”.
Megan is deft with words. I am trying to think of a poet who achieves such surprise and wonder on the line. Perhaps Emma Neale, perhaps Bill Manhire, Bernadette Hall. So often the next word is not the expected word, it takes me by surprise and that is reading delight. It might be adjective, verb, image evoked, trope. And that is in itself a performance of the awe of seeing through word selections. The way the albatross arc catches our breath, the crawling bee mesmerises.
A morning rain of muslin, hardly there except in the pinprick flicker, a thickening of the air.
from ‘Mornington
I also read this sumptuous collection as musical sound track, and again it produces wonder, delight, sonic surprise. It is a sweetly mixed playlist as we move from assonance, to rhyme, near rhyme, alliteration, aural dip and lift and slide. It is writing on the wire. It is scoring the world, it is intricate melody, it is open tuning.
Ah. I am pitching this book to you, when against all odds, poetry is a lifeline, the source of joy, the connecting force, the point of contemplation. We are at the point of seeing, we are at the point of speaking, sharing, hoping, and poetry such as this, poetry as good as this, makes all the difference.
Paula Green, originally posted November 2023
Megan Kitching was born in Tāmaki Makarau Auckland and now lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin. She holds a PhD in English Literature from Queen Mary University, London, looking at the influence of the natural sciences on eighteenth-century poetry. She has taught English and creative writing in the UK and at the University of Otago. Her poetry has appeared in The Frogmore Papers (UK), takahē, Poetry New Zealand, and Landfall. “The horses,” published in takahē 95, was nominated for Best Small Fictions 2020. In 2021, she was the inaugural Caselberg Trust Elizabeth Brooke-Carr Emerging Writer Resident. At the Point of Seeing is her debut collection.
His fiction is uncompromisingly experimental his book Ghost Stories
may well be his most accessible I was a bit disconcerted to find that
‘uncompromisingly experimental’ line in my publisher’s write-up on Facebook
tired of airport books? bored by Tom Clancy and Dan Brown? wearied by puerile web sites?
seeking a challenge? try a “novel” by Dr Jack Ross said Michael Morrissey
a few years further back à propos of The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis
it’s hard to remember why I felt it so necessary to print half the pages upside down
it certainly caused pain to the printers who had to redo the whole first run
I suppose it was just that the first time I picked up a book
with half its pages in Farsi hand-drawn dream maps
and diagrams of the compound where the ‘action’ was feigned to take place
it gave me a kick like I just can’t describe after that
texts within texts print windows surrounded by pictures
concrete poems imbedded like plums in Jack Horner’s pie
were all that attracted me but passion dies and the puritan fervour falls away
till you find yourself left-siding everything because you’re so much more interested
in what you’re saying than how to say it and the need for such scaffolding
seems lost like left luggage in an old train station where the ghosts of ambition
have gone to rest
Jack Ross
Jack Ross is the author of six poetry collections, four novels, and four books of short fiction. His latest book of short stories, Haunts, is due out from Lasavia Publishing later this year. He lives with his wife, crafter and art-writer Bronwyn Lloyd, on Auckland’s North Shore, and blogs here. https://mairangibay.blogspot.com/
I am inventing my weekly newsletter as I go. It will include links to the posts from the week, a particular musing (this week the NZ Poet Laureate role), and a poem that has struck me. This week it is a poem by Vaughan Rapatahana that I had missed when I was offline for four months. It haunted me this week, especially as I have been assembling the tribute gathering for John Allison. I am keen to post a poem from a new collection that catches me – but poetry charisma might surprise from anywhere. My recovery road is rocky and challenging at times, and my energy jar miniature, but doing the blog is nourishing. I cannot manage an open submission policy for poems, but I welcome books from publishers.
Tuesday: Ockham NZ Book Award Feature: Bill Nelson
Wednesday: Review of Wok Hei – recipes in the year of the Wood Dragon
Thursday: Thoughts on Ursula Bethell’s ‘October Morning’
Friday: A tribute for John Allison with readings, poems, photographs, homages Launch for Manuali’i by Rex Letoa Paget, Saufo’i Press
A poem
Now that I am dying
now that I am dying it’s probably best you learn from me.
please do not credence gossips, ghouls, gainsayers & their inevitable ostensions about what I was, what I felt.
now that I am dying, it’s waaaay past time to avow my aroha for you.
mahal kita.
please, now let me pass in peace.
[mahal kita – I love you – Tagalog]
Vaughan Rapatahana
Vaughan Rapatahana (Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Te Whiti) is a poet, novelist, writer and anthologist. With David Eggleton, he has co-edited Katūīvei: Contemporary Pasifika poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand (Massey University Press, 2024). With Trevor M Landers and consultant editor, Ngauru Rawiri, Vaughan has co-edited Ngā Pūrehu Kapohau: A literary homage to Pātea, Waverley, and Waitōtara (Lasavia Publishing, 2024).
A weekly musing: The Poet Laureate
Song
For the first time in a long time there is sun making sunshine, the heart sings which was once sighing, for the first time in a long time.
Now the world is the world without trying: the line releases the next line and the next line, the next line — for the first time, for the first time,
Bill Manhire, from What to Call Your Child, Godwit Press, 1999
I have been musing on how vital the NZ Poet Laureate role has been over the past decades, and how with all the current cuts and losses, I hope the role continues.
In June 2007, The National Library of New Zealand took over the administration and funding of the New Zealand Poet Laureate Award from Te Mata Estate Winery, with diligent nurturing from poetry enthusiast Peter Ireland. When I look back over the list of Poets Laureate I am reminded how each person has made the role their own, whether in a Laureate collection they penned, posts they have published on the National Library Laureate blog, events they have hosted, workshops they have run with both children and adults. Selina Tusitala Marsh,a charismatic performer on page and live, particularly inspired young writers across the motu, especially the Pasifika community. David Eggleton, also a charismatic performer, took to the road with infectious poetry energy and published a collected works. that catches his live charisma. Michele Leggott had us drawing poems on pavements, reciting reading and loving poetry in all nooks and corners, and also published a sublime collection (as did many others). Vincent O’Sullivan shared the blog space with other poets, Cilla McQueen used the blog to post Serial, a novella inspired by images in the National Library collection that was then published as a darling boxed set (see image below), Chris Tse, our current Laureate, is hosting events, carrying out workshops, promoting the pleasure of poetry widely. I sang his praises last week.
Each Laureate has received a generous stipend, some Te Mata wine, and a tokotoko especially carved for them by master carver Jacob Scott. The new Laureate is celebrated with the tokotoko, food, warm welcomes, invited friends and family, poetry readings over a weekend at Matahiwi marae near Clive in Hawkes Bay. NZ Poet Laureate blog.
But I turn to the inaugural Poet Laureate, Bill Manhire, who accepted the role and continued his stellar advocacy for poetry written, published and performed in Aotearoa. And of course wrote terrific poems, some of which appeared in the inaugural Laureate collection (What to call Your Child, Godwit, Random House, 1999). I invited Bill to share some thoughts on the Poet Laureate role, and have also included a list of the Poets Laureate to date.
Today I toast our fabulous Poets Laureate.
Te Mata Estate Winery Poets Laureate:
Bill Manhire
Hone Tuwhare
Elizabeth Smither
Brian Turner
Jenny Bornholdt
New Zealand Poets Laureate:
Michele Leggott
Cilla McQueen
Ian Wedde
Vincent O’Sullivan
CK Stead
Selina Tusitala Marsh
David Eggleton
Chris Tse
A Poet Laureate
It must have been some time in 1996 when Brian Phillips got in touch to ask if we could have a drink to discuss a project he had in mind. Brian was a well-known figure in the New Zealand book trade. At the time he was co-owner of Godwit Press, and would soon be managing drector of Random House NZ. Also at the pub, when I got there, was the wine writer Keith Stewart who – at that time, I think – had been advising Te Mata Estate on ways in which they could mark their approaching centenary. Brian and Keith wondered if I could give them some informal feedback on a proposal that Te Mata establish and fund a Poet Laureate position in New Zealand. I don’t recall the details of the discussion, but I know that at that time the plan was for a one-year appointment, and there was a notion that Godwit would publish a collection of the laureate’s work at the end of their term. Te Mata would supply a small honorarium and a crate of wine, a sort of equivalent of the English butt of sack. I was positive about the idea, and no doubt in some respects fairly opinionated. For example, I told them that it would be great to give New Zealand poetry a public dimension of this sort, but the silliest thing about the UK Laureate scheme was the expectation that poems be written to mark the births and deaths of the British Royal Family. I hoped that anything like that would be ruled out. Maybe it was at that point that they interrupted my flow and said that they had got me there under false pretences. The chief thing they wanted to know was whether I would be willing to accept the position if John Buck of Te Mata Estate were to ring me up about it.
I suspect they had had me in mind because I was fairly well known as someone who was good at talking poetry up in various ways. I had started doing regular conversations about poetry with Kim Hill on RNZ’s Nine to Noon show, and was contributing a monthly column to the bookstore magazine Quote Unquote. Among other things, I’d published a prizewinning anthology 100 New Zealand Poems with Godwit in 1993; and had helped bring Laura’s Poems into the world in 1995. There was also the creative writing course at Victoria. So I was a well published poet, but I was also known as a teacher and poetry advocate – and there was an expectation that writing and advocating would both be important elements in the laureate position. The thing was to be a kind of cultural ambassador, finding ways to make the wider public aware of just how good New Zealand poetry was. I don’t think anyone at any point saw the laureateship as a reward for long service.
Anyway – surprise, surprise – I said yes. Before I had even started, the appointment became a two-year one – partly because very few poets could produce a book good enough for publication in the space of twelve months. For me, the tokotoko, carved by Jacob Scott, was the most astonishing and distinctive thing – far more than the honorarium ($2,000?) or even the gift of wine. I took my tokotoko to America a couple of years later and showed it off to the then US laureate, Robert Pinsky. Jacob Scott is still carving them for each new laureate.
If there was a small element of marketing in the creation and publicity that surrounded the announcement of the laureate position, John Buck was much more personally caught up in its life. He developed genuine friendships with all five Te Mata laureates, and worked hard to make sure that laureate readings and events would take place throughout the motu. I even betrayed my own pronouncements and produced a poem for him, an adaptation of one by the Russian writer, Alexander Pushkin. It appeared in the book, What to Call Your Child, published by Godwit in 1999 after my term as laureate ended. In a nice piece of circularity Jacob Scott carved the words of the poem on a tokotoko that was presented to John by Te Mata when he retired last year.
GRAPES after Pushkin, and for John Buck
But who can feel sadness for the roses? The spring goes, and they fade
just as the grapes I love begin to ripen on the vine, climbing across
the slopes above the house, day after day until at last they stand
in all the valleys and the golds of autumn . . . where now they are long and slender
and the light shines through them as through the fingers of a young girl’s hand . . .
After five of us – me, Hone Tuwhare, Elizabeth Smither, Brian Turner, Jenny Bornholdt – and with much more substantial funding initiated by the late Michael Cullen, the laureateship passed into the safe and often entrepreneurial hands of the National Library, where it has been very well cared for. As well as an advocacy position, it is now very much a literary fellowship. The connection with Te Mata remains. They manage the creation of each new tokotoko, and also – of course – continue the gift of wine.
Look at the light dancing on the waves I say to Martha. She is five years old. Sunlight is so hard to catch, she says but it catches everything in the whole
wide world. She sings a song. I ask her if she has learned it at kindergarten. I’m making it up just now, she says it’s what the sun is singing to the sea.
And runs off dancing her songlines of sun and sky and wind and sea elated all the way across the sand into the wide open arms of everything.
John Allison from A Long Road Trip Home, Cold Hub Press, 2023
The recent death of John Allison (1950 – 2024), has touched local writing communities. Poet, musician, teacher and mentor, John published seven collections of poetry: from his debut, Dividing the Light in 1997 (Hazard Press), a number with Sudden Valley Press, Balance: New and Selected poems (Five Islands Press, Melbourne, 2006), and several with Cold Hub Press, including final collection, Long Road Trip Home (2023). He taught for several decades at The Rudolf Steiner School in Christchurch, co-founded Sudden Valley Press and was a key member of the Canterbury Poetry Collective. He was the featured poet in Poetry NZ 14.
To celebrate the life and poetry of John, Poetry Shelf has gathered written tributes, some readings of his poems, included some of his own poetry and reviewed his final collection. This is a special gathering, a meeting place with multiple clearings and poetry benches we can return to, to meditate, mourn and above all, celebrate.
Sudden Valley Press, The John O’Connor First Book Award page Cold Hub Press page ‘Corona Contemptible’ on Poetry Shelf ‘Whitianga Testament’ on Poetry Shelf ‘Father’s axe, grandfather’s machete’ ŌrongohauBest NZ Poems 2020
Thank you to the contributors, and special thanks to David Gregory, Roger Hickin and James Norcliffe for helping me choose some of John’s poems and creating a list of people to contribute.
Go well, go gently.
AReview of A Long Trip Home
Of Bread
After all these years I’ve been making bread again, remembering that way your hands worked the lumpen dough (who was it joked, the proles also needed to be pummelled into shape before they would rise?)
We were young, comrade and our politics were too casual. Later we settled for the word companion meaning to share bread together. And now after all these years I’ve learned I cannot live by bread alone.
I become your hands.
John Allison, from A Long Road Trip Home
If you travel through John Allison’s seven published collections, the word ‘travel’ resonates deeply, both in his poetic fluency, the threaded and recurring motifs that range from the colour blue to the travelled road, from beloved artists to a rock pool, from the ever-present light to salty air, from the dead to the living, from listening and looking at the world to the anchor of home. Always ‘the long road home’; each poetry collection establishes sublime contemplation points on the long road home.
John’s final poetry collection, A Long Trip Home (Cold Hub Press, 2023), begins with a poem about baking bread. It’s hands on, evoking images of domesticity, fermentation, dailiness, the drifting thoughts as the dough is kneaded, the surfacing memories of the addressee, his ‘comrade’. The poem’s endnote refers us to Peter Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread (1892) and its vision of a society based on ‘mutual and voluntary cooperation’. The presence of the word, ‘companion‘, draws us deeper into what matters, into thoughts of companionship, and yes this haunting collection is poetry about what matters.
Turn the page and the poem ‘How to go on’ introduces this: ‘The ways back to reality / after the oncologist’s news’. Death is a companion we travel with as we read, whether John’s cancer diagnosis and his view of the world, the flickering arrivals of his horizon line, the planet at risk, recollections of those no longer with him such as in the poem ‘What is lost’, or in the eulogy to a friend, ‘the send-off’. A cancer diagnosis refines what matters and, out of that vital movement, John has written poetry that nestles under the skin.
More than anything, and as this tribute page underlines, people matter. Many poems are dedicated to loved ones, friends, other writers. He draws in his love of art and books; Colin McCahon, Vincent Van Gogh, Joseph Beuys, Roger Hipkin make appearances. He never forsakes his love of music, it is there on the line, sounding in your ear as you read. He is singing to friends, he is singing with the world, and the song invests what matters with finely crafted melody. In one poem, John is in a waiting room with a young girl drawing in blue, ‘in this waiting room where blue means something else’:
The girl glances up at us, and laughs: You and my Daddy should make a song. And she hums and she doesn’t stop the blue yes, she hums and doesn’t stop the blue.
from ‘Singing the blues’
And yes, the blue reverberates with multiple meanings, as do so many of his words and motifs, and it haunts and it hurts and it uplifts, like music, like art, like the power and strength of poetry to nourish, and delight, and travel, and to remind us to open the window, to hold our arms wide, and to breathe in deeply what matters. This book is precious.
Paula Green
Tributesand Poems
For John Allison
The river of voice runs on, even as breath is stilled.
John, John, the muses’ son, breathed his breath
and away has gone.
Jeffrey Paparoa Holman
Jeffrey Paparoa Holman reads his poem ‘For John Allison’
John Allison with David Howard and David Gregory, Banks Peninsula 1996
June 2019, same site on Banks Peninsula
David Howard
In his later years I saw John as a fresco painter on his way to the monastery. I imagined him sizing up a moist plaster wall. He would brush his colourful images into the surface.
As the wall dried, as its plaster set, every pigmented line John put there would join the lime and sand particles, becoming part of the structure rather than a surface decoration. His artistry made things more solid.
Skimming Water
these words are just the sounds of
a smooth white stone skittering
across the surface of a pond
inscribing a brief archipelago
of intersecting lucent rings
arcing over darkness
the stone sinks
inside the final
o
John Allison, from Stone Moon Dark Water, Sudden Valley Press, 1999
Singing the blues
She grips the felt-tip pen with that kind of determination you’d never argue with, hunched over the table and her drawing: I’ve gotta finish the blue before we go!
It’s the only thing that’s being said here in this waiting room where blue means something else: this feeling you have for instance after getting the results of your latest blood test; of the evident anxiety of the young pregnant mother with colourful headgear and yellow-grey pallor; or the sadness of an older couple bent and folded in towards each other waiting between specialists, weighted by the prospects; or this grizzled old bloke wheezing as he works a finger round his gums, a sound more like a punctured tyre than a tune you’d ever recognise.
But the girl with the blue felt-tip pen colours and hums, and her father hums as she colours, and looks out the window at dark clouds and their promise of rain:
Yep, he says, it’s always a blue sky day even though all of the clouds are grey . . . Yes, I say, we’ve got to finish the blue before we go, out of the blue it comes, then into the bright blue yonder we’ll go.
The girl glances up at us, and laughs: You and my Daddy should make a song. And she hums and she doesn’t stop the blue yes,she hums and doesn’t stop the blue.
John Allison, from A Long Road Trip Home, Cold Hub Press, 2023
extract from Of rocks and other hard places
1.
Rocks are slow stories carefully thought out a friend has told me. Well it could be so . . . Certainly these rocks I’m sitting upon
are quite reliable, content it seems to be right where they are, grounded in that reality we subscribe to, resistant to change
except through aeons and earthquakes. Those are distinct eventualities, but in between we find rocks usually sit tight.
They stay in touch. Gravity burdens them yet they bear it all without complaint. Like the dead they seem to be quite silent
(though like the dead, unless you lean close to listen, you will not ever hear them). Chatter is not their predilection. Ah, but
those opportunities for the big statement . . . Knowing time inevitably is on their side they do not want to waste their breath.
John Allison, from Near Distance, Cold Hub Press, 2020
Passage: a Closer Reading
Your book is in my hands. I carry it around all week, unopened. Proximity, however, makes us intimate; the book begins to change. The binding softens, then the pages wilt. On the third day I feel the words dissolve. I’m not immune; the images absorbed like mercury though fingertips, their syntax aching in my wrists, your poems make their way virulent towards the lexis of the heart.
John Allison, from Dividing the Light, Hazard Press, 1997
A poem based on a painting based on a poem
Two or three years ago John wrote a poem called ‘the door’, the last poem in his final collection, A Long Road Trip Home. It is based on a small painting of mine he’d recently acquired––Devant la porte un homme chante (In front of the door a man is singing)––in which a door in a white wall is evoked by a swipe of black paint. The title is a line from a Pierre Reverdy poem.
John spent the last difficult ten or so years of his life acutely aware of that door that opens to the place that must be entered in order to arrive at what we are not. And he kept singing. To the end. Which might also be a beginning.
As he wrote (sounding just a little Sam Beckettish) in ‘the door’:
‘what is there to do until it opens/ but to sing’ . . .
Roger Hickin
John at the launch of A Long Road Trip Home at Scorpio Books, 14 September 2023
Claire Beynon
During John’s last weeks, it became difficult for him to participate in written exchanges. I took to sending him short voice notes, recordings of nature, for instance (birdsong on a forest walk and the like) and at some point, started reading his poems back to him. These recordings I sent via FB Messenger or direct to his phone via his regular mobile number. I have recorded two favourite poems from his last collection: ‘It can be lost just when you notice it’ and ‘Breathing the Open’.
In August 2022, John sent me a screenshot of an early draft of ‘Breathing the Open’. “My remaking of a Rilke sonnet…”, his accompanying note said. He’d positioned it amongst a series of photographs he’d taken while out walking beside the estuary near his home in Heathcote. He had a special fondness for kōtare/kingfishers and kōtuku/herons. I was in Cape Town at the time. We’d been having a lengthy discussion about Barry Lopez’s last book, Horizons, each of us attempting to articulate the complicated gift of having more than one geographical home, more than one tūrangawaewae.
And here, I quote John, “It is an extraordinary time… I should have added mention of my ongoing reflections on his [Barry Lopez’s] words about imagination as that power through which a boundary is transformed into a horizon: “The boundary says ‘here and no further; the horizon says ‘welcome’”…. To be in our birthplace is to be once more held by that boundary, that holding environment; and simultaneously aware of that first horizon, our facilitating environment…”
A few ‘take-away’ instructions from John—
Every ‘away’ is also a ‘towards’.
Never forget that boundary that is sanctuary.
Answer the call to venture beyond—ever further, knowing you will be welcomed
Live simultaneously in centre and periphery.
Wonder at Mystery
Claire Beynon reads ‘It can be lost just when you notice it’, John Allison, A Long Road Trip Home (Cold Hub Press, 2023)
Claire Beynon reads ‘Breathing the Open’, John Allison, A Long Road Trip Home (Cold Hub Press, 2023)
Jan FitzGerald
John was that rare breed. The real poet. It was in his bones. He had his own voice, found his own way, and even sitting on that edge between life and death, he made us look at things … and then look harder. He showed us how darkness could be light, sunshine could be shadow, that even “the rocks and the dead are good companions.” He worked with meditation, music, woven into the quiet dance of his words as he walked the unseen and physical world with an open heart and ready camera. John left us his final words, and in his words we find much wisdom. And “what it is just to be…”
John Allison with Sandra Arnold and David Howard
Ariana Tikao
I didn’t know John Allison for long. I just moved back to Ōtautahi last June, and started attending a series of poetry events by the Canterbury Poets Collective. John was one of the people who came up to me after I first read, and complimented me on my contribution. He was really thoughtful like that.
Then, I was asked to be a guest reader at Hester Ullyart’s Common Ground Poetry events in Lyttelton late last year. John Allison and Isla Huia were the other two guest poets, and John reached out with a proposal to read some lines in his poem Mountain, River, People which I believe is about all of us sharing this land, and how we can live and work alongside one another. It was a gesture of goodwill for him to share this poem with us, and for us (Isla, me, and my cousin Karuna Thurlow) to read together. Initially when the request came through, I admit it felt ‘slightly’ like an imposition, but I am really glad that I embraced the opportunity as I know that John was sincere and deliberate in his actions, as he was with his words on the page.
The poetry event was very special, and I read some new poems I had written about the genocide that was unfolding in Gaza. John and his partner Annette – the painter referred to in the poem I have recorded of John’s ‘a woman like Syria’- came up to me after my reading, thanking me for talking about the situation in Palestine. We all had a connection over caring deeply about this kaupapa. This is one of the reasons I have chosen this poem to read in my tribute. I honour the poet and the man, John Allison, and send my thoughts of aroha to all his family and friends. E te rakatira o te toikupu, moe mai rā.
Ariana Tikao reads ‘a woman like Syria’, published online in Love in the Time of Covid: A Chronicle of a Pandemic, October 31st 2022
Joanna Preston
Joanna Preston reads ‘Why we fish’, first published in Poetry NZYearbook 2020, and then reprinted in Voiceprints 4 (Sudden Valley Press, 2023)
Jenna Hellar
John Allison was my poetry mentor and a very dear friend. For a while, we would meet every few weeks over coffee or a walk around the Southshore Spit and we’d talk about words, about letting a poem breathe, about what an object is really saying, what you as a poet are really saying, about line breaks and the use of ampersands and slashes, about whether to use commas at the end of a line or not, about the importance of whittling a poem by taking words away until maybe you’ve gone too far and then bringing back only a handful of the ones that are truly necessary so that the poem says something in both the words that are left and the ones that are absent. Every conversation with John was a prose poem. When we weren’t talking about poetry, we would talk about the thrill of foraging, the geology of a landscape, the grace and draw of special places, the love and trouble of humanity, the importance of looking and looking again, and again still, in order to try and understand what exactly the thing you are looking at is saying. I feel so lucky and grateful to have had John in my life and I am thankful that his words and our poetic conversations live on in me, in others, and of course, in and through his poetry.
Jenna Hellar reads ‘Epilogue’ from A Place to Return To (Cold Hub Press,2019)
John with Claire Beynon and Catherine Fitchett, 6 October 2021
Memories of John Allisonby Sandra Arnold
I first came across John in the early 1990s when he sent in a short story to Takahe, a fiction and poetry magazine David Howard and I had started a couple of years earlier. Soon after that we met him at a PEN meeting in Christchurch and he invited us and a group of other writers to his home in Lyttleton. Thus began many Lyttleton gatherings and a friendship that lasted ever since.
My husband Chris and I visited him after he’d moved to Melbourne to live in a beautiful house in the Dandenong Ranges with his wife Bettye. When we saw Bettye there she was very ill with cancer. After Bettye died John returned to Christchurch to live near his family. We saw him frequently at his house and ours as well as at book launches. What I will always remember about John is his passion for poetry, the beauty of the language he used to write it, and the many conversations we had about writing.
The last time we saw John was at his home in Heathcote Valley when he was in the last stages of cancer. He was very thin and pale, but he still had his sense of humour, his acceptance of death and his interest in writing. Just a couple of weeks later we received the phone call to tell us John had died. Even though I had been expecting this, I felt a sense of disbelief.
At his funeral the community centre was packed with John’s many friends from different areas of his art, writing, music and education life. Everyone placed a sprig of rosemary on his coffin and watched the hearse drive him away.
Sandra Arnold
Gail Ingram
Hey John,
I miss your poetry at CPC, the way you read, the space you took. I miss your photos of our shared skyline and the Ōpawāho, the kōtare watching us, the light you captured. I feel your absence, passing your house especially, neighbour, your wild lawn now shaved, and all the flowers gone, and insects too, I miss your bluster, your large view, John, I miss you.
Gail Ingram
John Allison with Fiona Farrell and Jane Simpson, 9 October 2019
Fiona Farrell
What do I remember of John? I remember the man I met many years ago, the very tall man in the very small cottage in Lyttelton and his great kindness when I was lost, new to the city on the university writing fellowship and separating from a long marriage. I remember John talking. He was a great talker. He knew stuff. He was a born teacher. I remember him telling me about Plutonic rock formations on the peninsula. I remember walking with John over Godley Head. He was a great walker. John playing music. John reading poems, his own and others, and his ready response to beauty, and to what was funny or absurd. John telling me about the scientists who visited the volcano that exploded from the sea off Iceland and how they went to see what would be the first life-form on this new earth, not noticing that it was themselves. I remember the grief for his sister that lay at his heart. He was a good man and a deeply serious poet.
John Allison: an appreciation
On entering John’s cottage you were immediately aware that he was a cultured man. His bookshelves were laden with poetry and interesting non-fiction titles. His musical instruments were on display and there were paintings on his walls, many by friends. I always thought John’s cottage was beautiful.
As well as being a fine poet, John was a talented musician: he played the lute and the oud. He loved the New Zealand landscape; he walked in it, photographed it and wrote about it.
John was a big bear of a man. When I visited him I was always met with a hug and a smile. He consciously adopted a positive attitude to life: he was interested in his own life and he tried to live it fully. He was an intelligent, thoughtful, decent man. He was a good man.
Nick Williamson
A poem for John
of a pale white page for John Allison
I already miss John’s familiar tallness, his softly spoken lilt, that warm, glittered gaze.
I will miss his heroic improvised poems, wild – really, dipping into a deep tundra, a vision of fire and beauty that sang to him from somewhere else.
No more coffee collisions on banks peninsula, sharing the mountains, the sun. No more kind words in restaurant doorways.
But I will not miss him. For luckily, he’s still right here conjured in the raising of a pale white page, and the outline of light, or a man, walking a silhouette through the leaves, in the wind the hills, raining, blazing, softly, softly at dawn, in summer, in fall, in the shadow of dusk, and the beauty of it all.
Hester Ullyart
Hester Ullyart reads ‘Ingrid at Tyresö’ from Balance: New and Selected poems, Five Islands Press,Melbourne, 2006
Hester Ullyart reads ‘Entrances’ from Balance: New and Selected poems, Five Islands Press,Melbourne, 2006
Jenny Powell
My memories of John are those of an explorer, open to new possibilities in any dimension of experience, including the spiritual. John’s location of an essence or centre, or shard of it, was often translated and shared through his brimming creativity, but not before the final results were forged, tempered, shaped, smoothed, sung, or said.
John’s deep understanding of poetry and music allowed him entry into multiple worlds. He was fascinated by intersections and overlaps of experiences, by external and internal states of being, and by underlying poems where the sung and unsung converge. John and I collaboratively explored interpretations of music and poetry in ‘Double Jointed’ (2003).The three poems written with John are reinterpretations of music. I continue to marvel at his willingness to investigate and push beyond the usual. ‘Symphonie Fantastique’ by Berlioz, Mozart’s ‘Sonata No. 6’ and a new composition, ‘High Country Raga’, were starting points for our combined efforts. In the last stanza of ‘Playing Mozart 1’ John wrote:
He is in the room, dancing in the centre of his melody, pirouetting allegretto for a moment just before the final coda then that silence afterwards, refracting …
Jenny Powell
Erik Kennedy – A poem for John and a reading
The Foraging Poem For John Allison
John showed me one of his private coastal foraging spots. I felt like he should have blindfolded me and taken me there in the back of a van at three in the morning. I am so bad at keeping secrets.
But he was trusting like that, knowing that, because he asked it, I wouldn’t tell anyone— not one of you— where it was, because some little pleasures are infinite but far more are finite.
Erik Kennedy
I hope it’s okay if the words I contribute to the John Allison memorial post are a poem. I’ve wrestled with what to say—vacillating to and fro between personal memories and little appreciative close readings and reflections on his empathy and impact in the community—and nothing I wrote really hung together. Instead I’m turning to a different kind of language. I wrote a poem on the day of his funeral. I’m not sure it’s profound or powerful, but it does do something important, to me at least: it tries to show the way John could make you feel, the loyalty and goodwill he could conjure up. Anyway, maybe this is the place for it?
Erik Kennedy reads ‘the send-off’ from A Long Road Trip Home, Cold Hub Press, 2023
envoi
living seems more complicated now than dying
taken off death row and given life and then parole
some day to be called back in to face the fact
for it’s a sentence with a determined predicate
however I will live as though indeed I were living
laughing it off like anyone else with a conviction
still there are times when it becomes quite shaky
now for instance wanting to say the unsayable
my house of words is creaking in the wind tonight
yet poetry is all there is when nothing else makes sense
John Allison, from A Place To Return To, Cold Hub Press, 2019
You’re all warmly welcomed to join us for this special celebration to launch Rex Letoa Paget’s debut poetry collection, Manuali’i. In this dreamy debut, Rex Paget will have you reminiscing on past loves; dancing in the rain; and appreciating the depth and range of human emotion and connection.
Rex will be signing books on the night! All welcome.
‘All clear, all clear, all clear!’ after the storm in the morning. The birds sing; all clear after the rain-scoured firmament, All clear the still blue horizontal sea; And what, all white again? all white the long line of the mountains And clear on sky’s sheer blue intensity.
Gale raved night-long, but all clear, now, in the sunlight And sharp, earth-scented air, a fair new day. The jade and emerald squares of far-spread cultivated All clear, and powdered foot-hills, snow-fed waterway, And every black pattern of plantation made near; All clear, the city set, but oh for taught interpreter, To translate the quality, the excellence, for initiate seer To tell the essence of this hallowed clarity, Reveal the secret meaning of the symbol: ‘clear’.
Ursula Bethell
from Day and Night, Poems 1924 – 1935 (Caxton Press, 1939). However, this version appears in Vincent O’Sullivan’s Ursula Bethell: Collected Poems (Victoria University Press, 1997, reissued 2011, 2021). Vincent explains in his endnote why the 1997 anthology includes corrections. The poem also appeared in Ursula’s Collected Poems (The Caxton Press, 1950).
Someone recently told me a garden poem might be just the medicine I need for the day, especially when steamrollered. So I picked up my Ursula Bethell books and fell into the delight of her poetry. She writes of seasons, weather, mountain ranges, the sky. She writes of gardening, and she writes of love, and then in the last years, after losing her beloved partner, Effie Pollen, writes of death. She also writes of the darker depths of humanity.
Like so many other people, the weight of the world rests upon my shoulders, the hunger, the poverty, the violence, the racism, the gender phobia, the injustice, the foolish decisions our Government and other world leaders are making, the utter inhumanity. It is unbearable. Yet it is a time, as it has been at other crucial moments in the past, when we need to voice our concerns, to register our protest, to speak together.
How does poetry fit with global and local catastrophe? What good is a poem? It can be a form of protest and it can be balm, and everything in between for both reader and writer.
And so I turn to Ursula Bethell, a poet who listened. She listened to the world and transcribed it into the word on the line, to a rendition of place, beauty scenes that were dear to her, from the distant horizon line to the garden she lovingly tended. I wrote about her aural attentiveness in Wild Honey, her ability to transport us through the arrival of both the musical and the physical.
In ‘October Morning’, I am reminded how I become embedded in her scenes, whether garden or wider view from a backdoor step. How I can smell, hear and feel place to the point reading the poem is a form of meditation, stillness, awe. And yes, this happens as I read ‘October Morning’, the words connecting musical notes and traces of intense beauty. Yet the poem also, fittingly, moves into the unease I feel as I write. How we move between storm and calm. How we translate versions of the world, whether it’s the ‘sky’s sheer blue intensity’ or the ‘powdered foot-hills’ or the resonant and slippery notion ‘clear’?
Ursula offers poetry, rich and resonant, for us to find our own routes through, our own clearings to linger within and beyond, our own ways of holding a poem as talisman, as poetry of darkness and poetry of light.
Paula Green
Ursula (Mary) Bethell (1874-1945) was born in England, raised in New Zealand, educated in England and moved back to Christchurch in the 1920s. Bethell published three poetry collections in her lifetime (From a Garden in the Antipodes, 1929; Time and Place, 1936; Day and Night, 1939). A Collected Poems appeared posthumously (Caxton Press, 1950). She did not begin writing until she was fifty, and was part of Christchurch’s active art and literary scene in the 1930s. Her productive decade of writing was at Rise Cottage in the Cashmere Hills, but after the death of her companion, Effie Pollen, she wrote very little. Vincent O’Sullivan edited a collection of her poetry in 1977 (Collected Poems, Oxford University Press,1985).
NZ Poetry Shelf 