Poetry Shelf review: Frankie McMillan’s The Wandering Nature of Us Girls

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The Wandering Nature of Us Girls, Frankie McMillan, Canterbury University Press, 2022

The feel of a book in hand matters. Holding Frankie McMillan’s new collection, The Wandering Nature of Us Girls, is immensely satisfying. The size and shape, the paper stock, the pale blue title pages, the choice of font and font size, the breathing space. A perfect alchemy of design and production.

The dedication page: “For Marvin, / who taught me how to wander. / Without you, I would never have gotten lost.” This is the keyhole entry into a book where wandering becomes wondering; we get lost in wonder and wander, whether reader or writer. The collection of small stories performs bridges between both, in so many delicious ways. Even me naming the pieces is a mental excursion through form and label; how we tag what we write from poetry to prose to essay to fiction to short story, and any number of hybrid marriages.

The book is offered as small stories so I am running with that. Think mouthfuls of narrative or let’s say fiction. Think past and present. Think stepping stones from the miniature to wider issues, issues hungry for human attention: love, death, loss, violence, curiosity. Think anchors in the real, and offshoots in the hyperreal, sidelines in the surreal.

Water is the connective tissue, and if you think of the ever-changing appearance and movement of water, it is extremely apt. Frankie often crafts long sentences, sentences an Italian novelist might favour, sentences that showcase the currency of water. Extended tidal rhythms, the water breathing in and out. It makes me think again of wander, and the flâneur comes to mind, the bricoleuer, with both reader and writer meandering, amassing detail, absorbing atmosphere.

Water is the connective tissue and like the ocean it is a meeting ground of dark and light. The grandmother goes swimming, others go swimming, but there are drownings, there are bodies missing at sea. This is a collection of mystery, of gaps in the narrative, of surprising turn of events, of tragedy. Most definitely tragedy, terrible twists in events. The aunt who loves sweeping stays home in the flood, sweeping out the water, until the point she is on the roof, still sweeping, still sweeping, until she and broom and house are swept away.

There is such power in Frankie’s imagination. A beaked mouth, an antlered head. A baby under a tree writing a thesis on “aerial domesticity”. There are the acrobatics of circuses, of putting on a show. There are the subcurrents of our planet under grave threat. The tragedy we must face. Along with violence against women, ‘us girls’, and suddenly, slowly, the meandering takes on a greater insistent force. We are wandering and wondering, and there are consequences, cause and effect.

The mood and ideas a book generates matters. The Wandering Nature of Us Girls is less concerned with geography than with movement, with action, with human connections. It is a handbook of curious and gut smacking things. It is a book you feel as well as a book you think. It is a book of catastrophe and a book of epiphany. Small story brilliance.

Frankie McMillan is the author of five books of poetry and short fiction. Her most recent collection, The Father of Octopus Wrestling, was listed by The Spinoff as one of the 10 best New Zealand fiction books of 2019 and shortlisted for the NZSA Heritage Book Awards, and her 2016 collection, My Mother and the Hungarians, was longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. She has twice won the New Zealand Flash Fiction Day competition and has been the recipient of numerous awards and residencies, including the NZSA Peter and Dianne Beatson Fellowship (2019), the Michael King writing residency at the University of Auckland (2017), and the Ursula Bethell residency in creative writing at the University of Canterbury (2014). McMillan spends her time between Ōtautahi Christchurch and Mohua Golden Bay.

Canterbury University Press page

Girls Raised by Swans on Poetry Shelf (‘Accounts of Girls Raised by Swans’)

Poetry Shelf Occasional Poems: Courtney Sina Meredith’s ‘Keep the diamonds Keep the pearls’

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Keep the diamonds Keep the pearls 

I want sweet marrow bracelets
I want leathered threaded innards
Womb flowers is what I call them 
Give me ripe tumour florets 
Give me righteous hot growths
I can take it a whole river of it 
I can grow it a whole field of it 
Keep the ease Keep the quiet 
I want childhood dandelion 
And common black-eyed Susan
Found along the roadside 

Courtney Sina Meredith

Courtney Sina Meredith is a distinguished poet, playwright, fiction writer, performer, children’s author and essayist, with her works being translated and published around the world. A leading figure in the New Zealand arts sector, Courtney is the Director of Tautai Contemporary Pacific Arts Trust, an organisation committed to championing Oceanic arts and artists. Courtney’s award-winning works include her play Rushing Dolls, poetry Brown Girls in Bright Red Lipstick, short stories Tail of the Taniwha and children’s book The Adventures of Tupaia. Burst Kisses On The Actual Wind is Courtney’s new collection of poetry, the book was released in 2021 by Beatnik Books. 

Poetry Shelf review Tate Fountain’s Short Films

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Short Films, Tate Fountain, We Are Babies, 2022

and I, well, I have had practice at this; I am far
better attuned to wanting things than I have ever
been to having them, and the day is clear, and the
scent of the kitchen of each nearby restaurant is
carrying. I am alive, and I am settling in, and I have 
in my hand at last something I could not bear to lose, 
some fibrous imperfect gift of a life in the place of
theoretical triumph: blistered heels and my mother’s 
old dress and a self I can face in the mirror; three 
long-stemmed lilies wrapped in cellophane, an 
unripe blushing hydra, five dust-pink tongues 
unfurled to catch the light.

from ‘SUNDAY, 7 NOVEMBER’

Love the idea of a poetry collection called Short Films, especially when it isn’t lifted from a poem title in the book. At the back is the director’s commentary, a HEX index and credits. Rhythm is a vital ingredient in the collection as a whole, the poet’s editing suite has resisted long slow panning camerawork. Instead there are jumpcuts and oblique camera angles, fascinating montage and hypnotic soundtracks. It is an opulent surprising reading experience, that depends upon the visual as much as the aural.

For some reason I made a leap from activated hazelnuts to activated language. Tate’s linguistic agility is spellbinding. Her language is alive, mobile, playful, inventive, active. The word activate is counterbalanced by bracketed space that is rich in possibility. At times it is a blank slate for the reader to scrawl upon, a foyer for musing points, a series of silent beats, a signpost to the unsayable, the unsaid, the gaps in the telling. They strike the eye and they resonate in the ear.

Colour is ubiquitous. Colour pops on the line, sparks across the wider scope of the book. There are individual colour poem clusters. You move from yellow-rayed blossoms to summer to pineapple, and housed in that yellow embrace is ‘a riverside lunch with my mother / We are learning again / / how to be around each other’ (from ‘Yellow’). It is the heightened power of metonymy where you place this shot next to that shot next to this shot. This frame next to that frame next to this frame. Feeling, experience, reaction is heightened.

A stripped back blackout poem uses a prose poem we have just read. I was reminded of how certain words pierced and stuck as I read. And there they were, isolated in the dark black shapes. Tate is taking a form, a convention and then playing with it, pushing it further.

In the inside blurb, the book is aptly compared to ‘a lush bouquet of poems’. I step from the flowers and the fruit, like brocaded still life, like kinetic life, finding mouth and heart, finding float and drift, the light and dark of chiaroscuro. The poetry is bouquet, held out to ignite the senses, but it is also mirror, looking glass for both reader and writer. Love is paramount. YES! These are love poems, heart poems, little outings with glints of self exposure. One poem, ‘LOVE POEM’, plays with ‘I want’, think light and serious, and you move to and fro, between need and desire.

Short films is, as Anna Jackson and Emma Barnes say on the back of the book, wonderful. It is a terrific cinematic experience, Maya Deren flashed in my head, where rhyme feeds motifs and subject matter, and rhythm performs the syncopation of daily life, of love life, of heart life. Utterly wonderful.

stop looking for me in my work /
I am not there /
you are in a hall of funhouse mirrors

from ‘ORANGE’

Tate Fountain is a writer, theatremaker, and DVD Special Features advocate splitting her time between Tāmaki Makaurau and Tauranga. She is a current member of the Starlingeditorial committee, and also works as the coordinator for samesame but different, Aotearoa New Zealand’s LGBTQIA+ Writers and Readers Festival. As an assistant director, actor, and stage manager, she’s worked with Auckland Theatre Company, Binge Culture, and the Pop-up Globe, as well as at Basement Theatre. Her poetry has been published in eel, Aniko Press Magazine, and Min-a-rets (Annexe), among others, and her screenwriting has been recognised by several feature development initiatives. She completed her Master of Arts (First Class Honours) at the University of Auckland, with a thesis on appropriations of the Eurydice myth by H.D., Carol Ann Duffy, and Céline Sciamma. Each month, she releases a new bouquet on Substack. She’s pretty much always thinking about films.

We Are Babies page

Poetry Shelf Occasional Poems: Jane Arthur’s ‘Autumn’

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Autumn 

When autumn hits here, 
the leaves tend not to fall. 

They cling and quiver in the wind 
like our disappointment in them  

and the few that fall go slippery and annoy us. 
The light, though, thaws our cold hearts 

and we don’t even care we’re being cheesy 
for a moment or so. Who needs  

a new cliché? Not us, not 
when there are bigger things to worry about – 

and not when it’s still possible to put them aside 
to look at the low shadows, the glow 

of the evening sun across the branches 
of the trees that refuse to be anything but green. 

Jane Arthur

Jane Arthur lives in Pōneke, where she is manager and co-owner of a small bookshop. Her first poetry collection, Craven, was published by Te Herenga Waka University Press (then VUP) in 2019 and won the Jessie Mackay Award for best first book of poetry at the 2020 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. A second collection will be published in 2023.

Poetry Shelf review Fleur Beale’s The Faraway Girl

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The Faraway Girl, Fleur Beale, Penguin, 2022

Without planning it, I have been reading a bunch of Aotearoa children’s and YA ghost novels. And so far they have been excellent! Fleur Beale’s The Faraway Girl is a YA ghost story that works on so many levels. It underlines why I am a devoted book fan. Novels can divert, amuse, entertain. They can challenge you at the level of feeling and of ideas. They might reflect parts of the world back to you – in ways that are refreshing, transformational, revealing. Things you have forgotten, things you never knew.

Fleur’s novel is so very satisfying. It is action plus, heart-in-the-mouth paced, character rich, dialogue smart. I love the ghost story but I also love the way I engage with both our contemporary time and with 1869. The key issue: what is it like to be a girl or a woman in England 1869 and in Aotearoa 2019. I become the eavesdropping ghost amassing rekindled despair at how it was for women in 1869 – how they were owned and shared, were without rights and chattels, were straitjacketed under corsets and awkward clothing, how they could seldom speak their minds as their minds were consistently denigrated, how they were baby factories. Fleur layers such piquant detail the misogynistic world is bitingly real.

But I am also musing on how things are for women and girls now. So much has changed, our lives are so much better and freer, and more independent. Yet no way are we there yet. Look at how our Prime Minister is treated compared with how men Prime Ministers are treated. If the All Blacks had been playing in a World Cup tonight, the Herald would have been full of it – instead it’s half a page for the Black Ferns. Not forgetting the curious and disturbing responses to men treating women badly, in law courts and politics. We still do not have equity.

Today a brilliant ghost novel got me re-viewing women’s issues, issues that I explored at university, in the theses I wrote, and in the anthologies I have edited.

I love Fleur’s book so much. Every teenager should read it. Get thrilled by a ghost story tugging you to the last page, and muse upon how we need to work harder to remove gender bias, privilege, hierarchies, ignorance. We cannot hold white men as the norm, the standard, the voice of authority.

I hold this sublime book to my heart. It is both entertaining and an essential challenge. Novels like this underline the power and value of books. A glorious reading day.


Fleur Beale is the author of many award-winning books for children and young adults — she has published more than 40 books in New Zealand, as well as in the United States and England. A former high school teacher, Fleur was inspired to write her acclaimed novel I Am Not Esther when one of her students was beaten and expelled from his family for going against their religious beliefs. Fleur is a leading advocate for New Zealand authors, and home-grown literature for children and young adults.

Penguin page

Poetry Shelf Occasional Reviews – Alice Te Punga Somerville’s Always Italicise: How to write while colonised

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Always Italicise: how to write while colonised, Alice Te Punga Somerville, Auckland University Press, 2022

And then you skype with me late one afternoon to practise your speech
which begins with your pepeha as if that is the most ordinary way to start
when you’re eleven years old.

How were we to know – even to guess – that this language would be your weapon
Your strategy
Your bullet-proof vest

from ‘Anchor’

Alice Te Punga Somerville’s new collection offers four vital sections: reo / invisible ink / mahi / aroha. Sections in their own right but the discrete boundaries blur as movement and connections abound. The categories strike a chord, deep seated, poignant, as though this exquisitely designed book becomes a register of life – how we speak, how we are unseen and unspoken, how we work, and how we love. Importantly, how we become.

Alice was once told foreign words need to be italicised, to be rendered apart from standard English. This alienating process includes te reo Māori. Yet some words are adopted by English and slip off tongues without e-strange-ment: think pizza, pasta, cappuccino. Think haka and marae. Inconsistent. Alice puts the shoe on the other foot and italicises the English language leaving te reo Māori as notforeign. It is poem performance yes, but more importantly it is action.

The overturned italics convention, carried across the length of a book, is an insistence. It is personal, it is political and it is ancestral. We are what and how and why and where and who we speak. The historical and contemporary silencing, the historical and contemporary othering of language is inexcusable.

Alice’s poems are writing on the breath, breathpoetry, utterly fluid; it is writing on the breath of memory, story, change, ideas, feeling. Her poems carry the rhythm of life – of reo, invisible ink, mahi, aroha. There is the rhythm of prayer and the rhythm of waiata. The poetic rhythms and crafted fluencies carry the reader across eclectic subject matter.

Alice is spotlighting indigenous worlds, an indigenous presence, replying to colonised worlds. She is building a poem space and a poetry home. Many poems are dedicated to other people, underlying the idea we write within nourishing communities of readers, writers, thinkers, mentors. And for Alice, this includes the academic, acknowledging her poetry is in debt to her life as an academic. The academy is joy but it is also challenge, with settings that are racist, privileged, biased.

Books reach us at different times and in different ways. As readers we establish myriad travel routes through a book, we bring our own experience close or hold at a vulnerable distance. Books are my life rafts at the moment. With the road ahead still bumpy, still uncertain, I hold language and love close, I work and take little steps each day. I see Alice’s glorious, ground-establishing poetry collection as her mahi, her aroha. It is a book spiked with anger and it is a book stitched with love. It has made me smile and it has gripped my heart. It is the most affecting book I have read this year.

Pick up coffee cup and printed pages, open the screen door, walk back inside.

My eyes take longer to arrive than the rest of me:
they’re still adjusted for the brightness outside;
I bump into things, blind, while I wait for my whole self to arrive,
and realise this is the only worthwhile way to proceed anyway –

All of me, all at once:
anger, frustration, cynicism, hope
and, in the centre as well as the outer reaches, love.

from ‘Too’

Alice Te Punga Somerville, Te Āti Awa, Taranaki, is a scholar, poet and irredentist. She researches and teaches Māori, Pacific and Indigenous texts in order to centre Indigenous expansiveness and de-centre colonialism. Alice is a professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures and the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies at the University of British Columbia. She studied at the University of Auckland, earned a PhD at Cornell University, is a Fulbright scholar and Marsden recipient and has held academic appointments in New Zealand, Canada, Hawai‘i and Australia. Her first book Once Were Pacific: Māori Connections to Oceania (University of Minnesota Press, 2012) won Best First Book from the Native American & Indigenous Studies Association. Her most recent book is Two Hundred and Fifty Ways to Start an Essay about Captain Cook (BWB, 2020).

Auckland University Press page

Poetry Shelf Occasional Poems: Emma Neale’s ‘Little Fibs’

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Little Fibs

Let us praise
the small evasions:
the missed call
the slight sore throat,
the prior engagement;
the short works of fiction
that act like the turn of a key,
the snib of a front door’s fly screen
which mean we can try to forge the silence
that ferries us to the hinterland of the wildest interior.

Emma Neale

Emma Neale is the author of six novels,  six collections of poetry, and a collection of short stories. Her novel, Billy Bird (2016) was short-listed for the Acorn Prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and long-listed for the Dublin International Literary Award. Emma has received a number of literary fellowships, residencies and awards, including the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for a Distinguished Contribution to New Zealand Poetry 2020. Her first collection of short stories,  The Pink Jumpsuit (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2021) was long-listed for the Acorn Prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. The mother of two sons, Emma lives in Ōtepoti/Dunedin, where she works as a freelance editor.

Poetry Shelf Occasional poems: Khadro Mohamed’s ‘saffron’

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saffron 

//

there is a fire
cloud in the air
crawling up the 
side of her 
forearms & mixing 
with the smell of 
onion & olive oil 
that makes the 
entire house sweat
like it’s the 
middle of a
hot african summer

i’m never sure 
what she’s making
it always feels 
like a secret.
but i trust 
that it will 
somehow remind me 
of something i 
thought i have 
forgotten & tucked 
away 

she’ll say: 
the most important 
ingredient in somali 
cuisine is deep 
set curiosity & 
a sharp tongue 
she’ll say:
you have to 
get used to 
the zest of 
a lemon chopping
through the centre
of your lips 
& the deep 
orange stain of 
saffron that lingers
on the tips 
of your fingers 
like a light 
henna stain 
pressed delicately
on the night 
before eid 

& i smile 

& i believe her

because it’s easier 
that way 

Khadro Mohamed

Khadro Mohamed is a writer based in Wellington. Her work has appeared in various online magazines and websites including: Starling Magazine, Sweet Mammalian, Pantograph Punch, The Spinoff and more. Her newest body of work We’re All Made of Lightning published by Poneke based press We Are Babies, can be found in all good bookstores across the motu. 

Poetry Shelf Occasional Reviews: Michael Harlow’s Renoir’s Bicycle

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Renoir’s Bicycle: a collection of prose poems, Michael Harlow, Cold Hub Press, 2022

Michael Harlow’s new collection delivers a poem grove of contemplation. I keep sinking into individual poems and taking up residency. There is sweet alchemy between the visual and the aural. Repeating motifs form threads that offer connections, enhance a rich gathering. I am thinking of light dark love death life song. The notion that poetry becomes song, and stands in as musical score is important. You could say the poetry becomes love light dark death life. There is an insistence of song, the audibility of music, the stretchiness of chords.

The collection gets me thinking about poetry as both maker and made, as dreamer and dreamed: ‘Poems live / beyond where dreams were born’ (from ‘the living girl’). It’s poetry as protagonist. How poems live on the page – in the ear, in the mind, in the pen – promotes endless speculation.

Michael has created a poem grove where the abstract dwells alongside the tangible. Hands, names and water are as important as the unspeakable, the knowing, the speakable. The ideas are philosophical rather than political, although I say that hesitantly, knowing there is a political edge to everything. But I am jamming on a notion; unknowing becomes not knowing and then I opt for beknowing. Playfully. I am investing the poem grove in variations of becoming: beseeing, be-ending, bebeginning, bespeakable.

This is the joy of poetry. Who knows how it becomes you?

We enter a peopled grove: Dante Alighieri, Jean Renoir, Mary Oliver, Sappho, Gertrude Stein, President Lincoln. Such arrivals suggest the collection can also be experienced as narrative with beginnings, middles, endings, scenes and settings, incident and epiphany, turning points and story arcs.

Renoir’s Bicycle is a satisfying read on so many levels. One niggle: I do advocate for larger fonts (there is a trend at the moment to go tiny) because those of us with impaired vision find small fonts difficult to read. That said, I loved spending prolonged time within the rich rewards of Michael’s poem grove.

      Out of the rondeaux of astonishments the dark
sea and the green sea, starfish blooming at your wrist;
on the dark road under star-fall pools of far light
more near, out of the loneliness the cold touch of
loneliness; alone and not alone in the known world.
      The descending dark with its haunting shadows,
how death makes living, makes loving more loveable;
out of the canticles of the poetry of song, and the song
of poetry everywhere in the natural world, the swell
of joy and laughter, cloud cast moments that make light
and dark a wonder.

from ‘Mary Oliver, Poet’

Michael Harlow has published twelve books of poetry, including Cassandra’s Daughter (2005, 2006), The Tram Conductor’s Blue Cap (a finalist in the 2010 New Zealand Book Awards), Sweeping the Courtyard, Selected Poems (2014), Heart Absolutely I Can (2014), Nothing For It But To Sing (2016, winner of the Otago University Press Kathleen Grattan Award) and The Moon in a Bowl of Water (2019). Take a Risk, Trust Your Language, Make a Poem (1986) won the PEN/NZ award for Best First Book of Prose. Residencies he has held include the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship and the Robert Burns Fellowship. In 2014 he was awarded the Lauris Edmond Memorial Prize for Distinguished Contribution to New Zealand Poetry, and in 2018 he received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry.

Cold Hub Press page