The Deck, Fiona Farrell, Penguin, 2023

The novelist is about to step out onto the unknown ground that is every new book. She will make up characters and a setting and a plot and walk about in the imaginary land that always lies just offshore, alongside reality. She has no idea if her story will work. It’s always a bit of a gamble. Maybe making things up will feel ridiculous, irrelevant before the online deluge of fact. Maybe she’ll lose her nerve. Maybe her imagination will fail her, her characters will dwindle to dots. Maybe she will be be unable to settle to the daily grind at the computer, distracted by the news reports and their insistence on failure, collapse, shambles.

from ‘The Frame’

Fiona Farrell’s writing has enthralled and inspired me from the moment I fell into the freshness and delight of The Skinny Louise Book in 1992. Since then I have devoured her poetry, her novels and her nonfiction. Her writing prompted by the Christchurch earthquakes was humane, lyrical, layered and so utterly necessary. When I think of Fiona’s writing, I am reminded of the power of books, regardless of style or genre, to move us, nourish us, to challenge without ever losing touch with both heart and mind.

I recently read an essay in The New Yorker by a disgruntled critic who poured a wet blanket over our contemporary enchantment with and cravings for stories and storytelling. We are besotted with story. And yes, a story might not have the power to dismantle global warming or feed the hungry or put an end to violence, yet stories have mattered and continue to matter. It matters that the awkward child picks up the picture book and sees an awkward child dressing in a sparkling dress or singing out of key or kicking a football through a hoop. Or reading a book in a nest for an elephlion. It matters that I read stories that entertain me, lift me out of despair and maybe signal choices for the good of the planet. It matters that I can step into other points of view, close to mine, or at arm’s length. As the film-directors, the Tavianni brothers exclaimed when they first saw themselves and their stories reflected on the Italian cinema screen: ‘Cinema or death!’ We tell stories from the moment we get out of bed; to ourselves, to each other, to our friends, family, doctors, politicians, to strangers. Some of us crave to write. We might be plagued with doubt over sending our books in to the world and what difference that book will make. But stories represent how, where, who and why we are – and how, where, who and why we will or might be.

Fiona Farrell’s new novel, The Deck has made a difference to me.

The Deck steps off from Covid, borrowing the structure and motifs of Boccaccio’s The Decameron from the 14th century to re-present a novel that speaks from and to our contemporary plague. Boccaccio sets his novel, his sequence of stories and homage to the reach of storytelling, in the time of the plague in Florence. He opens with ‘La cornice’ (The frame), an autobiographical and nonfiction introduction to the scene and the situation. Fiona follows suit. I am catapulted body and heart to our time of Covid, to the new language that introduced bubbles and isolation, RAT testing and quarantine hotels, border controls and conspiracy theories, masks and hand sanitisers, the 1pm news gatherings and the daily statistics, teddy bears on fences and deserted city streets, online ordering and the stockpiling of flour and toilet paper.

For me, Fiona nails the uncertainty, the unreality and complexity of the situation, the daily reassessments and difficult choices, the willingness to work together for the good of the whole, the unwillingness by some to relinquish individual freedoms. The reevaluation of what mattered.

The Deck. When it looks like the country is about to collapse under another plague, Philippa makes a beeline for her beach house with her husband Tom and some friends. The retreat feels like a mini intermission, a temporary retreat from living in the thick of the plague, its consequences and the tough decisions. As in The Decameron, the group of friends pass the time drinking, eating, telling stories. So what stories get shared on the brink of catastrophe? In the frame story, Fiona speaks as the novelist, and asks what the point of writing fiction or a novel is, when the world is under multiple threats. She asks: ‘Is fiction no more than a brief solace, a distraction on our the way to our own extinction?’

On the third night, the friends debate China v America, war and famine issues, and then meander through best books, best movies (yes The Bicycle Thief!), places to visit, sports, philosophy. Each person takes a turn at spinning a yarn, drawing upon their own life, hinting at dark undercurrents, turning points, mis-turning points, yearnings. At times the story is a gut a punch to the listener, a secret revealed in public. Each story is headed by the epigraph: ‘A tale of one who, after divers misadventures, at last attains a goal of unexpected felicity.’

Ah. This is a book to read for yourself, to track and trace the impact on your own heart and mind as you are transported back to 2020 and the arrival of Covid, and into your own cache of stories, secrets and intimacies, your misadventures and felicities. I am struck by how we perceive things, how the protests at parliament were a sword in our side, when decades ago, the anti-Apartheid and Vietnam protests attracted so many more protestors. Ah. And how the image of the desecrated children’s slide at Parliament was so unfathomable. What on earth does this rebellious act stand for?

I am at the novel’s ending. I love the novel’s ending. I am transported back to the endings of post-war Italian neorealist films. I am there watching (think The Bicycle Thief and Rome, Open City) as the characters and a group of children walk down the road, down the road to the final frame, to the word HOPE, and even though I am wrung out and smashed to smithereens by planetary greed, I am strengthened by a collective impulse to write – as resistance, as solace, as illumination. There are multiple versions of who we are and there are multiple versions of who we might be. We need novels. We need stories. We need imagination and we need the mirror held up.

Fiona Farrell’s remarkable new novel, The Deck has made a difference to me.

Fiona Farrell, born in Oamaru, was educated at the universities of Otago and Toronto, and has published volumes of poetry, collections of short stories, non-fiction works, and many novels. Her first novel, The Skinny Louie Book, won the 1993 New Zealand Book Award for fiction. Other novels, poetry and non-fiction books have been shortlisted for the Montana and New Zealand Post Book Awards with four novels also nominated for the International Dublin IMPAC Award. In 2007 she received the Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction, and in 2012 was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature. The Broken Book, a book of essays relating to the Christchurch earthquakes, was shortlisted for the non-fiction award in the 2012 Book Awards and critically greeted as the ‘first major artwork’ to emerge from the event. Her work has been published around the world, including in the US, France and the UK.

Penguin page

a – wake – ( e ) nd, Audrey Brown-Pereira, Sau’foi Press, 2023

Audrey Brown-Pereira’s third poetry collection, a – wake – (e) nd, is a moving evocation of being, remembering and retrieving, of acknowledging and connecting. You move between fire and fever, ocean and silence, wind and light. There is breath and there is breathe and there is breathing.

Audrey is writing the girl, the woman, she is writing a constellation of selves, she is writing she and I and me and you and we. She is rendering the voice of the woman audible, the woman visible. She is recognising self within self, writing to remember, writing to ‘forget me (k)not’ as one poem is entitled. It is for daughters. It is for her. It is speaking in poetic form to and with and by and for whanua and family, for poetry lovers.

It is political and it personal. It is raising the red flag on climate change and the effect our choices have had and are having on the Pacific Ocean and its inhabitants.

Audrey resists a seamless word flow for both eye and ear. Open the collection and you will fall upon the spaces along the lines, the gaps, the clearings, the intake of breath. These might be registered as silent beats or as rich gatherings. The space becomes bridge between this word and that word, this feeling and that feeling, this recollection and that idea. It is musical – think syncopation, harmony, melody. It is daydream and it is sidetrack. I am (a)float on these islands of words.

And there we go – carried to the i (s) land. The fractured word re-forms to sing of self and belonging and again, yes, of being. The reverberations are there too in the title poem, ‘a- wake – (e) nd’. Both revitalised and reclaimed words are windows, doorways, exquisite pathways into the collection – this writing and this reading is an awakening. A reforming of self. There is pain and there is a slow vital spacing out of self. Think heart and think body. Think loved and loving and loved ones. The writing is awake to or with or for or by: she and I and me and you.

Find a copy of the book – nestle into the clearings – tune in your ear and your eye. Listen to Audrey read from the collection here. Follow the wind and the light, the ocean and the land, as you are embraced by the rhythm and melody and remembering. This is a glorious book of her, of making woman girl she present. It is voyage and epiphany and talisman. It is to hold close and breathe in. I love it. So very much.

Audrey Teuki Tetupuariki Tuioti Brown-Pereira (1975) is an innovative poet who plays with text on the page and words in the air/ear. Poetry collections include Threads of Tivaevae: Kaleidoskope of Kolours (2002) with Veronica Vaevae, published by Steele Roberts and Passages in Between I(s)lands (2014) with Ala Press. Born in the Cook Islands and raised in New Zealand, Audrey lives in Samoa with her family. She is a graduate of Auckland University and the National University of Samoa.

Saufo’i Press page

Ichthyosaurus

1

It nudges its long snout
through the dappled curtains of time.

In a green light its teeth shine;
they are sharpened emeralds 

wanting, waiting and momentarily  
there is no longer snatch gob and grab –

there is only the soft rise and fall,  
the even breath of a sleeping ocean.

2

There was a perfect arch 
from hill to shining hill,
the dark water between.

There was the smell of morning
coffee, a warm cup and toast
to ward off the autumn chill.

There is not one centimetre 
of human history in the
kilometres of its eyes.

It would have sensed
your uneven breath as 
you waited, warm and naked,

and as your rainbow body
arched with love, it would
have burst through the surface

of the ocean, its jaws stretched
beyond lex talionis, beyond reason,
streaming with saltwater, with lust.

James Norcliffe
from Shadow Play, Proverse Press, 2011

Note

Over a dozen years ago, Vaughan Rapatahana prodded me to enter a manuscript for the Proverse Prize. Vaughan had entered the competition the previous year and had been a finalist and subsequently published by Proverse Press. His title was Home, Away, Elsewhere and Vaughan, an old friend and colleague from Brunei days, asked me to provide an introduction, which I was very happy to do. Proverse is a Hong Kong publisher run by expatriate New Zealander Gillian Bickley and her husband Verner Bickley. Apart from Vaughan they published the late Laura Solomon, another prize winner.

Accordingly, I submitted my ms Shadow Play which was a finalist and subsequently published by the press in 2011. I am very fond of this book, which, I feel, contains some of my best work. Perhaps, in retrospect, publishing a collection in Hong Kong wasn’t the best strategic move as the book had only minimal distribution in New Zealand and very few if any reviews here. 

I’ve chosen the poem ‘Ichthyosaurus’, originally published in Landfall. According to Richard Peabody of Gargoyle Magazine, who was one of a number who provided an encomium for the book, “(this) great poem exposes the slinky sinister undertow at work”. I imagine that is so. Many of the poems are layered and built on anxiety. We live near the sea, the sea where aeons ago the ichthyosaurus ruled. The imagined creature is pretty scary and not a bad – if over the top – simulacrum of our modern anxieties.

James Norcliffe is an award-winning writer of poetry and fiction and an editor. His eleventh collection of poetry Letter to ‘Oumuamua was published this year by Otago University Press. he has written many novels for young people and his novel for adults The Frog Prince was published last year by Penguin Random House. In 2022 he was awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement for Poetry and this year was awarded the Margaret Mahy Medal.

Favourite poems is a series where poets pick a favourite poem from their own backlist and write a note to go with it.

Photo credit: Claire Lacey

Megan Kitching reads from At the Point of Seeing, Otago University Press, 2023.

‘Headland’

‘Crematorium’

‘Houseplants’

Megan Kitching holds a PhD in English Literature from Queen Mary University of 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 been widely published in Aotearoa New Zealand and international journals. In 2021, she was the inaugural Caselberg Trust Elizabeth Brooke-Carr Emerging Writer Resident. Her debut poetry collection is At the Point of Seeing (Otago University Press, 2023).

Otago University Press page

Into the Light

   for Laura Garavaglia, Como

We walk into the light
inside the poem we have become,
inside the house of poetry.
Your words flying to each other
with astonishing ease,
a constellation in the world-sky,
the moon a perfect accomplice.

Michael Harlow

Michael Harlow has written 14 books of poetry, and was awarded the prestigious Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement for Poetry in 2018. In 2014 he was awarded the Lauris Edmond Memorial Prize for distinguished Contribution to New Zealand Poetry. He was awarded the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship to France in 1987. He lives and works in Central Otago as a writer, editor, and Jungian Therapist.

the days for Frances 

January 2022 

oh Frances 
bright wings 
at the corner of the barrel vault 
against a blue Tuscan sky  

or that big purple octopus 
curving along the underside 
of the pontoon where you wait 
for the ferry that will bring you 
to Devonport 
a big purple octopus 
for the start of rehearsals 
wind and weather 
never looked better 

and then there were the summer lunches 
breezes on the deck 
cuisine straight from the garden 
crisp white wine 
cat monitoring dog 
then into the car 
or the swim at Onetangi 

island life 
its purple octopuses 
and banked tomato plants 
in cans 
clear white wine 
and zucchini fritters surrounded 
by golden flowers 

here 

bells pealing from a dark throat 
in the tītoki  

here 

sticky white flowers 
pelting the deck 

here

a fantail hopping about
in the yellow ginger 

I come down the steps 
counting to fifteen 
and we make a progress around the garden 
arm in arm 
feet cool in the damp grass 
of the oncoming evening 
here is Senhor Palm his thick trunk 
one of two shooting four metres 
into the sky chinks  
below him the heliconia 
almost in flower 
bright red bract about to unfold 
two more palms though one is ragged 
and may have to go 
pink banana flowers 
so beloved of birds
a leaf the length of my arm
torn into soft strips 
then the four beds of provender 
wilding coriander 
basil coming on in ordered rows  
beans out of control on their towers 
bull’s horn peppers curling from stalks 
that can barely hold them 
three tomatoes 
from Taranaki seed 
sweet green shishito peppers 
for pan-frying 
feathery thyme clinging to fingertips 
then the feijoas  
and the disreputable bird of paradise 
whose days are numbered 
but not the cannas 
waving their red flags 
in a bundle of green spears 
the tall ginger plant with ivory flowers 
yellow and orange on the inside 
the boxed fig tree branching out 
tiny fruits on its 
extremities 
and the soft new foliage of the tītoki 
where berries of red and black are forming 
and the tūī comes to dive  
for insects in the evening air  
we circle back across the grass 
to the steps and ascend 
listening
to water pattering below

Michele Leggott

Michele Leggott’s eleventh poetry collection, Face to the Sky, was published recently (Auckland University Press). Her selected poems, Mezzaluna, was co-published in 2020 by Wesleyan and Auckland University Presses. Earlier titles include Vanishing Points (2017) and Heartland (2014), both from Auckland University Press. She is working on a study of archival poetics, provisionally titled ‘Groundwork: The Art and Writing of Emily Cumming Harris’. Michele Leggott co-founded the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc) with fellow poet and librarian Brian Flaherty in 2001. She was the New Zealand Poet Laureate 2007–2009 and received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry in 2013. In 2017 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.

At the Washaway

When you told me your hands
were fish—fuafua or pelepele, to be precise—I was

unmoved. And your neck and shoulders a school of
limu fua or trumpeter, I believed

neither you nor the yellows and pinks, the orange
afterglow. When you said

your heart was a fish
hiding behind a rock, I would have

none of it. Nor that your body was a pool
of hapi, hexagon groper, flutemouth

and cornetfish. I could not so much as
entertain the thought:  your elbows, forearms

and fingers as humu or hafulu
or fine-lined bristletooth. At least

not until Sally Lightfoot led me
      by the mottled hand
down the spiralling staircase of

this, her undersea forest
    her orchestra pit, my washaway.

Avatele, Niue

Gregory O’Brien

Note

‘At the Washaway’ was written on the island of Niue, where I spent a fortnight in November 2022 making etchings with my long-time collaborator and friend John Pule. With another friend, geographer and academic Robin Kearns, we visited the settlement of Avatele–one of very few sandy beaches on the island. Just above high-water mark, the overgrown remnants of a beach-cafe/bar, ‘The Washaway’, is still standing (but, sadly–post-covid–no long operating). The Washaway was once famous for its ‘honesty bar’. Customers were asked to list on a piece of paper any drinks procured from the self-help bar and then pay cash to someone-or-other before sauntering off into the darkness much later in the evening.

Mid-morning, on the reef at Avatele, I stood knee-deep in the crystal clear water and watched tropical fish dart past. I followed the precise manoeuvres of crabs and various kinds of shrimp. It was in the company of these aquatic species that this poem–a love poem to Moana Oceania–began. You might ask who is Sally Lightfoot, at the conclusion of the poem? As marine biologists will tell you, a Sally Lightfoot is a kind of urchin crab common on Pacific Islands. It was one of these exemplary sea-creatures that, Virgil-like, led me in the direction of this reverie, this poem.

Gregory O’Brien

Gregory O’Brien’s monograph on painter Don Binney is published in October this year. He is presently curating (with Jaqui Knowles) an exhibition based upon his book Always song in the water for the New Zealand Maritime Museum Hui Te Ananui a Tangaroa, where it will be on display from August 2023 until February 2024. A new, much enlarged edition of the book, Always song in the water–an ode to Moana Oceania, is being published by the Museum to accompany the exhibition.

Diana Bridge reads from Deep Colour
Otago University Press, 2023

‘Deep colour’, ‘In the New York Public Library’, ‘the candle’ and ‘Accommodations’

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 Press page