A Clearer View of the Hinterland

Leicester at Millerton
Absence of rapids on Ngakawau stream.
Big Ditch and Little Ditch Creek – impious hand bisects the ‘D.’
Cobweb of raindrops in dragon sun.
“Down, down, down from the high Sierras …”
Electrical storms: intensity of affect.
Fund-raising at the Fire Depot.
Grey & white kitten, black robin, and black fantail.
Huffing into an Atlas stove.
“If you can see the hills, it’s going to rain.”
Jack said: “A succession of inner landscapes.”
Kiwi peck through sphagnum moss.
Leicester said: “A community devoted to male play.”
Millerton speaks – A Cannabis Landslide.
Nature tips – gorse is choked by bush.
Other landrovers get one wave.
Proud grey donkey; manure in a sack.
Quarrelling over the Fire Service.
“Rain has a persistency of grades, much noted by the locals.”
Siren: “I’m always free on Wednesday nights.”
Twin side-logs set for smoke-alarms.
Utopia St, Calliope Rd.
Village hall stained with camouflage paint.
White-packaged videos, too frank a stare.
X of three rocks marks one rare tussock.
“You have to say: Great! Awesome! Choice!”
668 – Neighbour of the Beast.

Jack Ross (10.7.98)

Note on poem

As a kid, I spent a good deal of time poring over the works of Edward Lear. I did like the limericks, but it was his illustrated alphabet poems that really tickled my fancy. This was my first – and to date only – attempt to compose one myself.

It records a visit I made in 1998, some 25 years ago now, to my friend the Rev. Leicester Kyle, who was living at the time in Millerton, a small bush-clad town on the West Coast of the South Island. Millerton is quite a mysterious place (or it was then) –very much off the grid. It was, however, the rather deadpan commentary on its inhabitants and traditions delivered by Leicester as we navigated its narrow roads in his bright red Land Rover which was the real prize for me.

I found myself jotting down some of his more quotable comments and thoughts, along with a few of my own observations, and ended up grouping them in this way to reduce the information overload I felt overtaking me at times.

Leicester himself was a fascinating character. He started off as a botanist, was then ordained as an Anglican priest, only to convert in his late fifties to a new faith: poetry. After his death in 2006, my friend David Howard and I collaborated on an online edition of his collected works which can still be consulted here.

The poem first appeared in a small magazine called Spin [#36 (2000): 51], which I was co-editing at the time. It was described in a review of the issue as “languid and oddly themed,” a tag I’ve always relished. I’ve often thought it could stand as an epitaph for most of my work.

Some ten years ago I used it as the title poem for my collection A Clearer View of the Hinterland: Poems & Sequences 1981-2014 (Wellington: HeadworX, 2014). The publisher, Mark Pirie, was kind enough to include it on his website as an incitement to purchase the book.

I still have a soft spot for it, I must admit. It brings back many memories of those times: of Leicester himself, of the wild West Coast, and the kindness of the people I met there. It makes me feel like jumping in the car right now and heading straight down to Buller and Karamea to try to locate some of the overgrown industrial sites and hidden green havens my friend revealed to me then.

I fear that it might have to be a journey through time as well as space, though. Much of the Buller Plateau has been devastated since then by strip mining.

Jack Ross (14.4.23)

Jack Ross’s most recent book is The Oceanic Feeling (2021).  Last year he retired from his job teaching creative writing at Massey University to pursue his own writing fulltime. He lives with his wife, crafter and art-writer Bronwyn Lloyd, in sunny Mairangi Bay, and blogs here. 

Favourite Poems is a series where a poet picks a poem from their own backlist and writes a short note to accompany it.

Laughing at the Dark, Barbara Else, Penguin, 2023

     It is a rich, special evening, unexpectedly meaningful. We’re a community of six, nested together by the depth of our experiences, the age we are, the years we’ve lived through, and this particular year 2020 that has clarified what’s important to us: optimism, love, the deep meaning behind the apparently mundane. This is what matters. Our families are safe, for now anyway. We’re sitting in a circle of friends with whom we don’t have to explain ourselves. None of us knows what even the next day might bring to any of us. But tonight we’re here.

from Laughing at the Dark

The threshold of Barbara Else’s memoir, Laughing at the Dark, has me pivoting on notions of dark. Great title! I am skating from imagined childhood dread to personal challenges to the beauty of night to incongruity. When I close the book, having read it over the course of a weekend, I am savouring the final page. It describes an intimate poetry reading on National Poetry Day 2020, a time when public events were prohibited. Barbara is in her “community of six”, reading poems, sharing nibbles and drinks. I step from this exquisite moment into the glaring light and dark of my own world. It resembles stepping from cinema dark into the glaze and blare of a city street.

I loved reading this book, I feel completely wrapped in its unfolding disclosures, the fluent writing, the accumulation of personal connections. It is the first time I have read a memoir where I know some of the people, in this case two daughters, having walked along Te Henga’s black sand talking life with Sarah on many occasions, and having sat in cosy Dunedin cafes with Emma, also talking life. I bring to my reading the way Barbara’s imaginatively dexterous Travelling Restaurant series inspired me as a children’s author. The delight I felt when she was awarded the Margaret Mahy Medal for her services to children’s literature (her novels, her numerous anthologies, her agency and assessment work).

I cannot think of another memoir that has formed such poignant bridges between itself and my own life. There I am, back in a London lounge sitting for weeks and weeks, scarcely able to move, knowing I had to become a writer, and there I am, walking out for good into the dark night, parking under a London streetlamp, the street gleaming wet, every physical detail film-noirish, knowing I could not wait until I had had babies and bought a house with my unfaithful partner. This searing recollection makes Barbara’s narrative all the more acute, her writing fluency bringing me deep into the intimacy of her “dark”.

At a young age, Barbara falls in love, gets married, has babies, is a dutiful wife and follows her husband Jim wherever his medical studies, research and work pull him. This is a memoir of “becoming”, of becoming mother, writer, lover, woman. It is written in the present tense, an intricate and satisfying layering that renders each scene so much more powerfully. To say “she is sleeping” has far more semantic possibilities than the done-and-dusted “she slept”. I move between the present tense of the past and the present tense of the woman writing. She is at her keyboard, reflecting back, retrieving and censuring, highlighting and considering, but she is also facing a serious health issue. She is undergoing radical cancer treatment that leaves her fatigued, with scant appetite and joy in food, plagued with despair. She has shelved her next adult novel, picked up the bare bones of the memoir and, as she can, finds energy and focus to write. I am reminded of Michele Leggott and Sam Neill who have also faced tough cancer treatment and found writing solace in the littlest nooks and crannies, in the potent dark and restoring light. As I do too.

More than anything, the memoir affects me along the intricate threads and resonances of women “becoming”. The women’s lib movement in the 1960s and 1970s re-defined how, what and who a woman might be: in the kitchen and out in the world, perhaps as mother, writer, engineer, politician, doctor, rugby player. Barbara acknowledges Fiona Kidman, poet and fiction writer who debuted as a writer in 1975. Many women, like Barbara, were affected by Fiona’s groundbreaking example; women could write their own subject matter, in styles and plot structures of their own choosing, foregrounding the domestic world, an ordinary world if they chose and, above all, representing the lives and desires of women. It become very clear from this time forward that there was no single model or recipe for rebellion, for being a woman. Barbara’s memoir underlines this notion.

I am reading the memoir caught up in the entwined threads, reminded of the organic nature of being, of the way a state of becoming is alive to movement and possibility, as well as to challenge and self-doubt. Along one thread, it’s a handbook on becoming a writer, not dogmatic but provisional, on negotiating rejections and acceptances, on being both visible and invisible (not having ones’ books on a festival stand!), the thrill of speaking at festivals, the nourishment of doing writing courses, being in a writing group, having friends, peers, mentors and family. You get to follow Barbara’s progress through her choices and her experience of writing in a private unpublished testing-of-the-self setting to existing in the public arena, much awarded, widely published and sold, and notably esteemed.

Barbara’s story touches upon the stories of how many women have undone the shackles of thinking and being defined by men. This is her unique story but it will resonate with many readers. It is a story of rebellion and courage, of listening to one’s inner voice and finding ways to make the interior dream a physical and intellectual reality. It is a story of empathy and connection. I close the book, the intimate poetry reading a perfect image to hold as I make lunch, but I know we are not there yet. We are not yet fully liberated from societal behaviour that has represented and limited woman. I am reflecting back on the thought paths Laughing at the Dark has evoked: personal, literary, thought-prompting, heart-tugging. This is a gift of a book, and I am so grateful to have read it.

Barbara Else is an acclaimed writer and editor. She has written plays, short stories, novels for adults, children’s novels and a non-fiction work, and has edited collections of stories for children. She has held a number of fellowships and residencies: the Victoria University of Wellington’s Writer’s Fellowship 1999; the Creative New Zealand Scholarship in Letters 2004 and the University of Otago College of Education/Creative New Zealand Children’s Writer in Residence 2016. She was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2005. As a literary agent and assessor, she has discovered and mentored a number of emerging New Zealand writers, and helped establish the New Zealand Association of Literary Agents and New Zealand Association of Manuscript Assessors. Her awards for her children’s books include Storylines Notable Book Awards, Honour Awards and the Esther Glen Medal, and she has been internationally recognised at Bologna with a White Raven. She received the Storylines Margaret Mahy Medal (2016) for her services to children’s literature.

lucky x radiant x glow

black skirts and shirts x are meant
to be slimming x but the popular x taste
is to show off x your belly x the important
thing x is to go x against comfort x against
well-being x nature x is at capacity
and has been generous xx stop fretting
aka x multi-tasking x to try x is to suffer
and the work x isn’t only in x the evenings
when x you have been blessed x with perfect
reflexes x and expenses x that lend
to bending xx mummy x they’ll call you
which is lucky x when x you have no other
name xx everyone says x it will be hard x to say
goodbye x but you’ll always remember x lying
looking x at the rest x of your body x the electric
sensation pulsing x from x your family x tree

Louise Wallace

Louise Wallace’s fourth poetry collection, This Is A Story About Your Mother, is forthcoming from Te Herenga Waka University Press in May 2023. She is the founder and editor of Starling, an online journal for young New Zealand writers, and the editor of the 2022 issue of Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems. She lives in Ōtepoti | Dunedin with her husband and their young son.

Face to the Sky, Michele Leggott, Auckland University Press, 2023

Launch talk Devonport Library for Michele Leggott’s Face to the Sky, AUP, 2023                                                                                                                                                          

Reading Face to the Sky is like finding oneself
present at a freshly excavated site of human
habitation –not in Pompeii,
but in volcanic Taranaki. These poems address
matters we would have believed permanently
faded, or choked into silence, but here they
are, the tones and colour of past lives,
revealed anew – in ways never imagined.

Long-familiar monumental histories
woven through with intimate scenes
from daily life – the comforts, secrets,
shocks and lies of family drama. And it is
these intricately detailed personal narratives,
which have the cumulative effect, in this
collection, of making all too visible,
the shakiness of the grand colonising myths
in which Pākehā lives are embedded.

My family shifted to Taranaki when I was seven
          – Michele’s family has been resident
for several generations. But even as the poems
in Face to the Sky let the light into long ignored
ocean vistas; forest-clearings; Taranaki dwellings;
and extraordinary events – Michele’s excavations
also point insistently to those yet older stories,
which in this contested terrain, are waiting
to be recovered.

The collection, with its delectable imagery,
thematically echoes the forensic joie de vivre
of Sydney Parkinson’s botanical watercolours.
But equally, Michele stitches her own heretical
impressions into the ‘natural history’ record.
Her poems ‘give a sense of the British explorers’
utter intrusiveness – their presence made
recognisable here – even in their own words–
as evidence from an unfolding crime scene.
One in which intrepid voyagers & travellers are
paradoxically revealed as both victims and
perpetrators. Michele’s reader made vulnerable
in this to experiences formerly airbrushed out
of our histories and herstories.

A scatter of now souvenir cartridge-cases
testifies to the terror of flying bullets;
the death of a negligible newborn is allowed
to be a source of unassuageable grief;
in the name of taxonomy there are casually
merciless depredations of species;
a rat runs across the children’s blanket;
the photographic milestones of a
           beloved family are performed against the
           entropy of a long-vanished living-room wallpaper;
two tall sons, one dark one fair, are caught
in cherished meet-ups with their parents;
tearing news – devastating
to yet other families, unknown – is given to us
of the suicide bomber at Kabul Airport;
and Te Reo – yet to be ghosted – is heard,
everywhere, throughout the land.
While always, nipping at the reader’s heels,
is the sheer inexplicability of an ongoing,
near-death, health crisis.

In a series of micro-pauses centred
on the heartfelt, these poems
imaginatively reconnect a fearless traveller,
abroad in the world, with past traumatic
& jouissant events: inviting us to acknowledge,
with equal fearlessness, our own buried
and denied connections.

I now call on you, in defiance of suffering
and disaster, in celebration of this beautiful
book, to raise your voices
in a toast to a formidable collection:
to Michele Leggott and her
Face to the Sky!

Janet Charman, Avondale, 19. 4. 2023

The presence of M. at a School Reunion

The lies we tell are part of the truth we live. Michael Holroyd.

If, out walking, we caught the scent
of penny royal in the air, or watched a twig
revolving in a circular eddy in the stream,
listened, perhaps, to the  shush shush
shush of the trees in the gum belt,
that is not surprising. We know
how to watch, how to listen. We have always known.

But when we’re dressed for roll call, like girls
aching for a party, M. turns
and says, recant. We shared this past. This
isn’t the first time we’ve set off for school
together.  How was it you came to see things
                               so differently
from me? What was I doing while you suffered
so much? We were both there.
        Think on it.

Fiona Kidman
from Wakeful Nights: poems selected and new, Penguin (Vintage), 1991

This poem, written about thirty-five years ago, still holds true for me. M. has been one of my closest friends for seventy-seven years. Some of the strength of our friendship lies in the fact that we can disagree about some things without altering the arc of this relationship.

When we were in our late forties we went to a school reunion up north, and as the narrative in the poem tells the reader, it was an occasion for exploring differences in our lives. I had just heard Michael Holroyd speaking at a writers’ festival and I was struck by what he said, the way memory is really a tangle of stories that become our truth, whether it’s exact or not. I put these two experiences against each other.

In hindsight, I see that although M. and I shared so much of our daily lives together when we were children, a great deal was going on behind the scenes for both of us that wasn’t stated or understood at the time.  But what M’s question did for me was make me pay closer attention to the way I interpreted the past when I came to write memoir. She has continued to be an influence on the way I approach the genre.

And, at a very simple level, I enjoy the landscape and sensory experiences the poem yields, the onomatopoeia, the scents and sounds, as sharp when I read it as if I was back in that place.

Fiona Kidman

Fiona Kidman has been writing pretty much all her life, across several genre. Over the years she has written about 35 books, including six collections of poetry. Her novel This Mortal Boy won the Ockham New Zealand Book Award for Fiction in 2018. She has several awards for contributions and services to literature, including a Damehood in New Zealand and the French Legion of Honour  (Legion d’honneur) from France.

Favourite poems is an ongoing series where a poet picks a favourite poem from their own backlist and writes a note about it.

Memoir

For W.G. Sebald

The past returns as an iron kettle.
Militant statues stare right back.

If only the leaves could tell the whole story, before
they fall and strip the naked branches speechless.

Europe is a cold cauldron.
Grandfathers laid down their scythes
and shipped their horses to Mesopotamia.

Years passed: all that is left now, a palm
crested buckle, embossed
Baghdad 1919.

There is a fly sidling over
the regimental history, rubbing
its paws.

It knows the truth, it is the truth, but
one good swipe from a whisk
will kill it.

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman
From Blood Ties: New and Selected Poems, 1963-2016 (Canterbury University Press, 2017).

This poem surfaces from my background: a child of wartime parents, 1939-45; and my maternal grandmother, 1914-18 and WW2. Growing up in Blackball, a coal mining town where most of the men did not go to war (mining was a protected occupation), my house was an isolated bubble of PTSD. They had no name for it then, except shell shock. My adults were all walking wounded, in their psyches, in their souls. Mesopotamia reaches back into ancient history, but my father’s father fought the Turks there in 1918, and had found his way to Baghdad. My uncle, Dad’s brother, gave me the buckle. I grew up in a household of survivors – it was impossible not to have their war wounds write themselves in my DNA.

This war in Ukraine – Putin’s genocide unleashed – breaks my heart, awakening all this.

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman lives in Christchurch where he walks his Jack Russell terrier, Hari, and works on whatever is current: lately, a memoir on his great aunt Lily Hasenburg, and whatever poetry emerges, over time. He has published in both these forms, and biography.

Poetry Shelf is hosting a series where poets pick a favourite poem from their own backlist.

March 3

my son runs off    while we visit my father
brings me a palmful   of cape gooseberries
tiny globes    suspended  in ghostly lanterns

‘i found them in the bin,’  he says, and i follow
to where a tree staggers  resolutely upright from a wheelie bin

other plants cascade from the garden
my father had to abandon  when steps became treacherous
he still mourns the goldfish that died   when he couldn’t feed them daily

golden in sunlight  the tiny tree  extends its bounty  
still fruiting     despite wizened branches
we collect each sour-sweet morsel – ‘we’ll have to wash them,’ my son says.

the taste of my childhood afternoons  plucked
from a tree carefully planted   nourished
in the home that my immigrant father made for us.

Renee Liang

Renee Liang is a poet, playwright and essayist.  She has toured eight plays and collaborates on visual arts works, dance, film, opera, community events and music. Some poetry and short fiction are anthologised. A memoir of motherhood, When We Remember to Breathe, with Michele Powles, appeared in 2019. In 2018 she was appointed a Member of the NZ Order of Merit for services to the arts. Read NZ page  

How to review a book? I keep returning to this perplexing question, allergic as I am to review models that demand you ought to do this or do that, or to represent the content of a book in such detail there is no point in reading it. I love reading reviews that entice me to read a book, without ruining the potential reading experience, that offer criticism for the sake of creating not breaking, an idea Virginia Woolf played with.

I think I am a gut reviewer who takes eons reading and writing. There are so many doors and windows, walls and sidepaths, stairways and stairwells, to experience along the way. Reviewing is a way of re-presenting a reading experience, of translating the moment where you drift and stall, ponder and puzzle, or the moment where you feel the poem and its ripple effects, or the way a truckload of questions might ferment, pleasingly. It can be so unexpected. Recently reading and reviewing Joan Fleming’s Song is Less and Katherine Rundell’s Why You Should Read Children’s Books: Even Though You Are So Old and Wise epitomised this for me. It also applies to the trove of children’s picture books I am currently reviewing on Poetry Box.

Reading a poem, is a sequence of diversions or hauntings, a soothing balm or disconcerting spike. The thought of holding a yardstick up to a poem with a provisional set of rules or entrenched poetry etiquette makes me feel nauseous. And yes, the book that captivates me, that fills me with reading joy, might infuriate you, leave you unsatisfied. Pick up a book and you activate your own version of it.

If it is a matter of getting a book, I think it is a matter of receiving it. This means opening arms wide to embrace what a poetry book might do. I am also drawn to review fiction and nonfiction on the blog so maybe Book Shelf seems a more apt label – but the blog’s origins are in poetry and it is still my aim to provide space and occasions for poetry in Aotearoa.

Poetry Shelf started out in response to a paucity of poetry reviews in Aotearoa. Today there are so many avenues for celebrating poetry, poetry books, poets and performances, both online and in print media: for example, Landfall-on-Line, Poetry NZ, The Listener, Starling, Kete Books, The Spin Off, the revitalised NZ Review of Books. Poetry makes innovative and crucial appearances at our literary festivals, the small ones and the big ones! Poetry communities get together and perform work, drawing together audiences in ways that are energised and inspiring.

The past year has been a tough road for me, as I recover from my bone marrow transplant and boulders surface along the way – but reading, writing and blogging have been such a crucial anchor. I am currently running on 8 tablespoons of energy a day which means I choose carefully what I do. I am no longer prompt at answering emails, and I only post one review a week tops. Ah, I have so many blog ideas that sit in the waiting room and I still have to get the series of place poems online.

Sometimes I fill with despair and raging self doubt, maybe at a review I have just written or the enticing stack of books on my desk. Yet books, writing and blogging are a vital way of connecting with the world, with ideas, feelings, startle moments. A poem can pull you in so closely, so intimately, to inhabit a time or a place, it is transcendental. You rise above daily routines and you experience an uplift of body and spirit. Like an essential oil. This also works for me with reviews. I have read a few “lazy” reviews lately that have irritated me so much; badly written, as far from the book I have read as you can imagine, cribbing from publicity material, a seemingly scant history of reading widely, criticism for the sake of criticism rather than enhancing what fiction, poetry, writing can do within a vibrant range of styles, forms, subject matter, points-of-view.

I may not answer your emails – I am not yet using Poetry Shelf as a regular noticeboard – but slowly, step by step, small review by small review, featured poem by featured poem, I aim to furnish a space that demonstrates the width and breadth, the heart and lungs, the vital pulse of reading and writing poetry in Aotearoa. My blog is nothing without you, the reader, the writer, the fans of poetry, books, conversation. Thank you to everyone who helps make Poetry Shelf work as a community of voices.

Time’s Raven, Eileen Merriman, Penguin, 2023

Time’s Raven, Eileen Merriman’s second book in her Eternity Loop series, is a terrific sequel to Indigo Moon. The dystopian novels introduce a new generation of virally optimised young adults, offspring of the protagonists in the Black Spiral trilogy (my review of Book 3). You don’t need to have read the first series before embarking on the second.

In Indigo Moon, Indigo Hoffman breaks the rules of time travel knowing there will be consequences. She is the child of virally optimised parents, as is her friend, Rigel (Hunter Blue). She is driven by questions of what is right in a society under threat. In Raven’s Time she must appear before Black Spiral Intelligence to face their decision.

Reading Time’s Raven is an exhilarating, thought-provoking form of armchair travel through time and place. Heart in the mouth reading. Heart racing faster reading! The loops and twists and surprises are deliciously unexpected. What exactly is the Eternity Loop? Who can be trusted? Who can be loved? Who will be loved? There is no way I want to endanger such perfectly crafted narrative tension by giving you a plot summary or a a bouquet of spoilers (I read a review today of this book that gave things away! Why would you do that?).

This is dystopian fiction at its lucidly written best. That the characters matter is enhanced by Eileen’s skill with dialogue. The gripping plot is elevated by its layered context. Place comes alive but so too do the issues and vital questions, and that keeps you on your reading toes. I love that! What happens, for example, if fertility rates drop? What measures are taken if the world is besieged or under threat of plagues? Personal relationships are not only key, they are a reading hook. Love goes hand in hand with jealousy, loyalty goes hand in hand with love. It is edge of the seat reading on so many levels.

Lately I have been musing on how books can have terrific power and reach, especially when our planet is beset with climate change, war, hunger, conspiracy arguments, pandemics, floods. Yes, a book like Raven’s Time has the ability to divert you, to offer a satisfying form of entertainment, to represent complex human relationships – I loved it for that – but it also challenges you to consider challenging issues, from the progression of science to the vulnerability of Earth. Raven’s Time is essential reading, glorious reading. Highly recommended.

Eileen Merriman’s first young adult novel, Pieces of You, was published in 2017, and was a finalist in the NZ Book Awards for Children and Young Adults and a Storylines Notable Book. In addition to being a regular finalist in the NZ Book Awards for Children and Young Adults, Merriman was a finalist in the 2021 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel and Moonlight Sonata was longlisted for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction 2020. Three of her young adult novels have been optioned for film or TV, including the Black Spiral Trilogy. She works as a consultant haematologist at North Shore Hospital.

Penguin page