Readings from Hoof, Kerrin P Sharpe, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023

‘blue’

‘If you’re looking for Leonard’

‘On a night angry enough’

‘Kalene Hill 1948: the baby won’t turn’

‘In loco parentis’

Kerrin P Sharpe: I have published four previous collections of poetry (all with Te Herenga Waka University Press, Wellington, NZ). My latest collection of poetry, Hoof, published by Te Herenga Waka University Press, October 2023. I have had poems published in a wide range of journals both in NZ and overseas including Oxford Poets 13 (Carcanet Press), Blackbox Manifold, Poetry (USA), PN Review, berlin lit, and Stand. In 2020 I was shortlisted for the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize and in 2021 I was awarded a Michael King Writers Centre Summer Residency. 

Te Herenga Waka University Press page

Saga, Hannah Mettner, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023

[…] My aunt reports
that we used to be Vikings, but it is clear that
that was a very long time ago. For example
all my hobbies are activities that involve sitting
down and not being killed. I only learn these
things as I learn that it is rude to introduce
myself with nothing more to offer than a name.
My history tightens around me like a knot and
there is a wild blackberry growing through it
like everything here.

final stanza in ‘Saga’

The first stanza of ‘Saga’, the opening poem in Hannah Mettner’s new collection, Saga, is utterly intriguing. The kind of experience where if you read it in a bookshop, you know you’d simply have to buy the book, knowing the poem could move in myriad fascinating directions. The speaking ‘I’ draws you into enigma, penetrating questions, revelations, the unexpected.

I have adored spending slow-motion time with Saga, letting its layers and voice, crevices and bloom, take root as I read. I get to the end of the collection and I have written a phrase in my notebook: poetry as mesh. It feels apt.

In the acknowledgement pages, Hannah makes it clear she writes within a nourishing community; think other writers, writing clubs, her Poetry Pals, her friends, editors and journals. This matters. This makes a difference.

Hannah writes within a history of reading and viewing, and this also makes a difference. Some of the poems are written in direct response to the work of others. The brilliant opening poem, ‘Saga’, is a direct response to Mary Ruefle’s ‘Saga’ from her book Trances of the Blast. You can also follow links to bell hooks, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Kristen Ghodsee’s Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, sonnets by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Eavan Boland’s ‘Atlantis–A Lost Sonnet’, Fleur Adcock’s ‘for a Five-Year-Old’. Add in Buffy and the Vampire Slayer, ‘Three times a lady’, Werner Herzog. A cultural and literary mesh that sustains and extends.

The poems also feel embedded within a mesh of personal history. Although I can’t draw a definite line between fiction and autobiography, I found myself viewing the poetry as a vehicle for self conservation, even self recognition. The subject matter roves from sexuality to love, mothering, daughtering, marriage, not marriage, physicality, longing, hunger, friendship.

Relationships are key to poetry as mesh: friends, family, lovers, child.

Unsleeping in the dark, I count my friends
for reassurance, rather than sheep.
I turn to them like the dog-eared pages
of a favourite book. Each with their own
reliquaries of chaos and glory.

from ‘Coven’

Then there is the necessary mesh of a world under threat, disturbing, question raising, action provoking.

If only the world was a brain that could rinse herself as we sleep.
Really, there is no ultimatum we might offer except our own extinction.

from ‘Poem while watching the world burn’

Saga is a magical, thought-provoking, heart-boosting read that sticks to your skin, dances on your eyeballs, trembles in your eardrums, circles in your mind. It is complex and full bodied and haunting. It is mesh. Glorious poetry mesh.

You can hear Hannah read two of the longer poems here

Hannah Mettner is a Wellington-based poet from Gisborne. Her first collection, Fully Clothed and So Forgetful, won the 2018 Jessie Mackay Best First Book Award for Poetry. Her poems have appeared widely in literary journals, including Sport, Turbine and Cordite. In 2014, with Morgan Bach and Sugar Magnolia Wilson, she co-founded the online poetry journal Sweet Mammalian.

Te Herenga Waka University Press page

Goblin Mode

For Scott, after Rosaleen Norton’s drawing of Pan shown at the Dowse ‘Sisterly’ show

Remember when I painted you as Pan? A pair
of twisted horns emerging from your temples, 
unkempt beard curling to the thicket on your chest.

I could still needle-felt a doll from all your fallen hair, 
the coiling brows and pubes that form dark snowdrifts 
in every corner of our apartment. Other men 

sneered openly when I went home to you, said 
do you really want to go on living like an animal? 
Little could they smell that’s all I want, nesting 

in the funk of our den, piling up the floordrobe
and the Sisyphean dishes, the inner damn, bitch
you live like this? only warbling background noise, 

a scold not spoken in our bowerbirds’ burrow, 
lined with my shining stones and your toy soldiers.
Remember when I couldn’t see you were an artist?

But here you are with the tiniest paintbrush
gilding the epaulettes of a barbarian kobold. You daub
dainty eye sockets in the skulls at his belt, delicately

render shadows amid his loincloth rags. I love you
because you are still somehow mysterious to me,
when you clear the dishes away 

to spread out your incomprehensible games
about buying and selling shares in 1800s trains.
Just like I love when we go goblin mode

in the ultimate closeness of mutual delusion,
two animals domesticated but not tamed. Pest-pilled,
you may become a ferret in a wizard’s hat

crawling up my pant leg, and I will be the fingers
buttoning your sequinned cape. Or I’ll be the musky mustelid
pulled from the beanbag, spike-furred and staticy

in a clingy cloak of polystyrene balls, while you are the hand
holding me up by the scruff of my neck. Others have held
my jaw open to check there were good even teeth 

in my mouth. But you behold my ragged fangs, my unkempt fur
and feathers. You kiss my hoof and hold my bloodied talon – 
even when my idea of romance is a purpled fairy ring round your wrist,

a perfect imprint of my teeth. Whomst among us doesn’t 
get rambunctious? Gremlin king, we give each other wildness. 
Bless the strangeness we permit each other, the liberation of this love

in which you never took it upon yourself to make me better – 
adopting a pet mess as a home improvement project,
like all the boys who told themselves I could fix her.

No, you thought when you fell, just as I did, 
for the ultimate promise – 
I’ll make you worse. 

Rebecca Hawkes

Rebecca Hawkes is currently pouring out the dregs of her youth in America and missing you all dearly. She edits the journal Sweet Mammalian and co-curated the Antipodean climate poetry anthology No Other Place to Stand. Her book Meat Lovers won Best First International Collection in the Laurel Prize and was a finalist in the Lambda Literary Awards. She has recently abandoned her garden of carnivorous plants to pursue an MFA in poetry at the University of Michigan as a Fulbright grantee, where so far she is mostly prowling the woods in search of edible fungi.

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