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

Michele Leggott’s new collection, Face to the Sky (Auckland University Press, 2023) is rich in scope, reference and melody. Michele draws upon a lived world, an imagined world, a remembered world. The book is a deft weave of two women; the poet herself and artist poet Emily Harris. The two women are separated by 100 years, linked by an attachment to Taranaki and the creative process. Michele’s poetry navigates the space between, a space that is transformed through travel, detection work, admission, appearances and disappearances, dialogue. The poems draw upon grief, personal challenge, the past and present, art, literature, historical events, friends and family, love.

To celebrate the arrival of this sumptuous new book, Michele agreed to answer a few questions. You can read my review at Kete Books here. Michele is launching her book with AUP at Devonport Library, Wednesday 19th April. Doors open at 6:30pm and the session will begin at about 7pm.(masks highly recommended!).

The conversation

Face to the Sky is a glorious, multi-layered reading experience. What words epitomise the writing experience for you?

Fluency is everything. Sometimes it is hard to find or I go away from the folders, doing something else, and the fluency goes away too. I’ve learned over the years to monitor the tension between whatever I’m doing poetically and any critical or archival or editing projects I have in hand. Best of all is when I’m working in one mode and feeling an almost physical pull towards the other. Moving between the two produces a kind of highwire happiness for which there is no substitute.   

What drew you to the life, art and writings of Emily Cumming Harris, a woman who is so exquisitely threaded into the collection?

We share a Taranaki background. Emily Harris landed with her emigrant family on the beach at Ngāmotu in 1841 when she was four years old. My brother and sister and I played on the same black sand 120 years later. There are distances and separations of experience, and that is what makes the exploration interesting. But first there is the memory of what every Taranaki child knows, that you can’t run barefoot to the water over hot black sand without a towel to stand on. I started from there and followed Emily into her colonial life as a writer, a poet and later on as an artist.  

Your poetry offers the reader an aural treat because music and sound are such vital elements. How does sound work for you as you write? Is it intuitive, carefully crafted, a mix of both?  I loved the move from English to Latin to Te Reo and the playful treatment of individual words (for example “artemisia”).

Every word has a sound profile and in the same instant a visual profile. For me the trick is to engineer the progress of this double synapsis so that it makes a satisfying whole for ear and eye.  The whole can be as short as one word or a line with spaces in it to indicate moments of stasis and recovery. Or it can be the shape of a prose sentence that lifts and falls over its duration. Then there are paragraphs and beyond them cantos. They all have distinctive motion as sound forms and visual duration. And then there is the referential reach that accompanies the dynamic. Who wouldn’t want to keep all this  in the air?   

Sam Neill has published a memoir that explores the rewards of writing during treatment for a serious blood cancer. You reference the serious health issue that you have navigated over the last few years. Was writing an important aide for you?

I’m listening to Sam’s memoir right now. It’s very good at striking a balance between a dangerous illness and how to live with or outwit it. The lymphoma I contracted in 2020 as Covid arrived put me into the world of cancer treatment and all the side-effects it entails. Chemotherapy and radiation dropped me into an abyss of fatigue and anxiety that stripped away my confidence and the ability to write or think. Very slowly writing and research came back and once they were there I made sure they would stay. Sam wrote a memoir. I found the outlines of a collection of poems in my folders that made sense of my Emily Harris work and suddenly the dual drive, poetry and research, was back in place. Even a failed stem cell transplant was easier to bear because I could think and write. By the time I was offered CAR T-cell therapy on the Malaghan Institute trial at Wellington Hospital I knew there were two books in preparation, one poetry, the other archival. Each was feeding the other. It helps that immunotherapy is a lot kinder on the body than chemotherapy. I have been fortunate: the CAR-T has worked and I can say cautiously that the lymphoma has gone.

Name a few poets who have acted as beacons and anchors for you as both reader and writer.

The list is long. Can I point instead to some of my favourite audiobooks from recent months? George Saunders reading A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, his unpacking of seven classic Russian short stories. Melvin Bragg reading Back in the Day, his memoir of a Cumbrian childhood and adolescence. Michael Crummey galloping across generational crazy paving in his novel Galore. Amor Towles’ charming novel A Gentleman in Moscow. Margaret Atwood’s plunge into a dark family history in The Blind Assassin. Emily St John Mandel’s criss-crossing of space and time in Sea of Tranquility. And so on. What links these disparate reading experiences? Each book is a masterpiece of disclosure and disclosure is all about timing. What better material for a poet to be listening to. Every one of these books I finished and went back to the start to read again and pick up what I had missed.    

Is there a particular poem in the collection that especially resonates with you?

They all come into focus from time to time and then step back again, which I think is a good thing in a poetry collection. It should keep moving for its readers and listeners. Today’s favourite is a section from ‘Walks and days’ because Richard knocked on the door again this morning:

Richard on the doorstep     we seek out the northerly sun at each turn of the road
wind whips around the corner and batters the sad house
no longer home to the son who cared for his elderly mother
soft voice greeting neighbourhood walkers     and taro in the back yard gone
we agree that Doggerland     is a peak experience among the 900 hours of In Our Time
we note rosellas rattling in the plane trees along the Domain
unlikely to be the red-tailed tropic bird leading up to the pips this morning
I see the bull terrier     a huge piece of driftwood in its jaws
charging the narrow gateway again and again
how many stories can you trust
the reviewer went looking online for the paintings attributed to my mother
they weren’t there because I invented them both
and made my mother an artist of the floating world
would she have liked what I have done     impossible to say
but she would have recognised each detail
because I drew them all from our life together in that house on the hill at Urenui
its view of the river and the sea
the cloud of dust rising as the truck disappears from the frame

Face to the Sky is Michele Leggott’s eleventh poetry collection. 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.

Auckland University Press page

Conversation with Kim Hill RNZ National (8/4 On health issues)

Second conversation with Kim Hill at RNZ National (15/4 On Emily Harris and new book)

10th March

For my family, on the 
third anniversary of my father’s death

The sky is still here
And I no longer have to hold it in place
It’s grey today
A good day for fishing
I remember you always used to fish
in the rain in your worn brown
oilskin coat
Motoring out in the little aluminium
dinghy at dawn to get the best fish
Sometimes with me, or my brother Steve
bundled into the boat
Snapper, gurnard, kahawai
They would rise to the surface in the
early morning,
mouths open to the rain.

Kiri Piahana-Wong

Kiri Piahana-Wong is a poet, editor and the publisher at Anahera Press. She is of Ngāti Ranginui, Chinese and Pākehā (English) ancestry. As a poet, Kiri’s writing has appeared in over forty journals and anthologies, including Essential NZ Poems, Landfall, Tātai Whetū: Seven Māori Women Poets in Translation, Ora Nui, Vā: Stories by Women of the Moana and more. She has one full-length collection, Night Swimming (2013), and a second, Give Me An Ordinary Day, is forthcoming. 

Song of Less, Joan Fleming, Cordite Books, 2022

What does it mean to continue? Grandmother says that now is the time to ask ourselves what we are, other than ourselves. A piece. This is a moment mad for understanding. The body is a fence but it is also a wave and a thread in a fabric.

from ‘Yana’

Joan Fleming’s Song of Less is unsettling. It is extraordinary, essential, unlike anything I have read before. It is a poetry collection to feel and not to explain. Wrap yourself in the cave of its making and you will be ripped apart, go into mourning, weep for the planet.

We are not supposed to sing her songs but sometimes I catch them in
the air and put them in my mouth.

from ‘Yana’

Follow the voices. Follow the song. Follow a tiny cluster of characters, that may be a “ritual cluster”, a small nomadic family of cousins adrift, steered by the grandmother across a devastated land to the next camp or cave or hollow river. It may be physical, a way of being, an altered state. The names of the cousins are fable-like: Cousin Groundpigeon, Cousin Twig, Cousin Frogmouth, Cousin Butcher. The story may be apocalyptic-fable, post-contemporary poetry, writing that cuts deep into the tragedy of humanity. The landscape is blistered, people are blistered, language is strange and eccentric, curdled and re-formed.

Nothing is as it used to be. Language fails and falters in the grip of catastrophe. The syntax twists and splits, new words emerge as old words are jammed together. Unexpected. Unsettling. Fragile. Searching in the ruins, the debris.

Their fruitless scrape along the valley’s throat
is companied by doppel-devil fear:
in seeping through the will-dies’ paper skin,
we bring the peril of the mirror near.

from ‘Don’t-berries’

You grapple to understand Radius as you read; the event or circumstances that changed everything, the neither full light nor full dark. Or Gone; the mysterious disappearances. And then you fall upon solidarity and salvage, and above all, the grandmother’s wisdom.

This is a collection of song where you or we or I – whoever is speaking – is song, is story, and this matters. Yet song becomes less, story becomes less, and you or we or I – whoever is speaking – is under threat. Ah, the ability to make, even to hold new songs, is also under threat.

Grandmother says Story is a high and nourishing thing for which to be
scrounging. Story completes us. But what is completion? Permission to
draw a circle around something?

from ‘Yana’

There is a backwards-forwards momentum as though we must look forwards to where/what/how/why we have come from. There is a thin line between Love and Monster; what horrors ferment in the blistered surfaces of skin and earth? There is the disconcerting mind-altering don’t-berries. There is desire that is taboo, that is rape, that is the end of the road.

Ah, how to write poetry in the face and wounds and brutal edges of global loss, climate change, ignorant thinking, untethered greed? Joan has produced a collection of poetry that is the most haunting, body-aching, stomach-churning, self-turning wound. It is extraordinary. It is transformative. It is hallucinogenic. You read with your whole body and it hurts. And yet, and still imperatively yet, I want to do everything in my power to help. To tend this corrugated and corrupted planet on the edge of an abyss. To make choices that help rather than hinder. To speak even if not invited to.

This is what poetry can do. Here I go, tongue-tied, holding this precious book out to you.

Joan Fleming is the author of the books Song of Less (Cordite Books, 2022), Failed Love Poems (THWUP, 2015) and The Same as Yes (THWUP, 2011), and the pamphlets Some People’s Favourites (Desperate Literature, 2019) and Two Dreams in Which Things are Taken (DUETS, 2010). She holds a Masters in Creative Writing from Victoria University’s IIML, a Masters in English from Otago University, and a PhD in ethnopoetics from Monash University. In 2021 her manuscript Dirt was shortlisted for the Helen Anne Bell poetry bequest. Her honours include the Biggs Poetry Prize, a Creative New Zealand writing fellowship, the Verge Prize for Poetry, and the Harri Jones Memorial Prize from the Hunter Writers’ Centre. 

Cordite Books page

Joan Fleming website

A Walk Upstream

Trout and White are walking up a stream. Sounds of rubber boots,
stones, water.

White   You could say it trembles.
Trout    With anticipation?
White    On the brink. Eggshell.
Trout     Of hope? Falling?
White    Grace? Hovering?
Trout    A dragonfly.
White     Exactly.

Trout     I debate the advantages of the one over the other, so that
              when I leap –
White    Look out – too bad. Here, give me your hand.
Trout     Thanks. Up to the knee.
White    Occupational hazard.

Crackling branches, sounds of effort.

White    Who’s this on the bank?
Trout     Neck! Well met!
Neck     Trout of Fish and Game, old boy. Good condition!
Trout     White, Egg Board.
White    Pleased to meet you.
Trout     Neck, of the racing fraternity.
Neck     Checking the watercourse.
Trout     Ensuring an even flow.
Neck      Mind if I join you?

Neck climbs down the bank. They continue upstream, occasionally
jumping stones and wading through small rapids.

Trout     Until I was joined by my friend White, who has
              distracted me with semantics.
White    Head of a pin. At a molecular –
Neck     Now you see it, now you don’t?
White    In terms of the benzene molecule for instance –
Trout     There! Over there!

They stop. Water flowing over stones, into pools. Birdsong.

Neck     Ripples? Under the water?
White    Quivering. It trembles.
Neck     Whitebait?
Trout     Give me lampreys. A surfeit. In butter.
Neck      You might find one under these banks.
Trout     Turning to bite its tail in the frying pan. Delicious.
Neck      A coiling, a succulent morsel, head to tail in a golden
               ring.
White     Exactly. Molecular, neither here nor there.
Neck      A delicacy.
White    Ouroboros.
Trout     Certainly. A taste that trembles on the brink of
              roundness.

They continue, with effort.

Neck     Heard of the Crusader, Trout.
White    Ford?
Neck     Rabbit, my friend. Very good to stir-fry. Breed them in
              Oz.
White    Are we going much further?
Trout     Public release at Oreti Beach 1863. Speeches and songs,
              toasts to the ardent new citizens of our verdant land,
              gambolling off into the sandhills.
White    Gathered here together on the occasion of the
              unconditional release of the binary tree –
Neck      Procreation, eh, Fish and Game? No telling how far it’ll go.
Trout     Nature only needs one pair of bunnies.

Fade out sounds of them going on. Somebody slips, is rescued, they
continue. Birdsong and the sound of water take over.

Cilla McQueen
from Firepenny (Otago University Press 2005) and Poeta: selected and new poems (Otago University Press 2018)

Note on ‘A Walk Upstream’

Scooped from the stream of consciousness, in a bush setting, the poem imagined itself as a radio play. The part of my mind which loves to listen to and revel in the resonances of language produced three eccentric characters, complete with names, whose desultory talk as they continue upstream, engaged in ‘checking the watercourse’, ranges from quantum physics to rabbits.

Cilla

Poet, teacher and artist CILLA McQUEEN has published 15 collections, three of which have won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry. Her most recent work is Poeta: selected and new poems (Otago University Press 2018). She has also published a poetic memoir, In a Slant Light (Otago UP, 2016). Other titles from OUP are Markings, Axis, Soundings, Fire-penny, The Radio Room and Edwin’s Egg. In 2008 Cilla received an Hon. Litt.D. from the University of Otago, and was the New Zealand National Library Poet Laureate 2009–11. In 2010 she received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry. Cilla lives and works in the southern port of Motupohue, Bluff.

My Thoughts Are All of Swimming, Rose Collins, Sudden Valley Press, 2022

and after, in the streak-pale sun, the welcome,

liberated hunk of sky – a tangle and comb

of wasted boughs, and still to come

the hum of absence – the loss of blue-glazed cornicing

or the blush of cupped gumnuts icing

outstretched stems – a ghost-shape for the wind to sing

from “Felling the Eucalypt”

Rose Collin’s debut collection, My Thoughts Are All of Swimming, was chosen by Elizabeth Smither as the inaugural winner of the John O’Connor Award. In conjunction with the Canterbury Poets’ Collective, the award offers publication to the best first manuscript of a local poet.

Rose’s collection is both elegant and physically present. I jotted down key words as I read, and realised they formed a provisional map of why I love reading and writing poetry. To begin, musicality. Every word-note is pitch perfect and forms a musical score for the ear: “Alan hears the / tide’s shingle-clatter, and closer in, his old dog’s chuffing / sighs” (from “Alan Recuperating on a Bed of Rabbits”). And:

Composing in this crackling southern light –

clinker lines, sail split, the hemp-warp flapping –

while you spun the anchor wider than geography,

a green-oak branch weighted with a stone

from “Returning North”

Secondly, the collection promotes breathing space. There is the space on the page in which a poem nestles, the chance for poems to breathe, for readerly pause and pivot. The internal design heightens this effect, with generous line spacing and a decent sized font.

I can catch a finger-full of salt and rub

it in the cuts: the aim is to avoid stillness.

I move like a blind woman baking sorrow cake

blindfold, following the recipe

spooning in what’s lost.

from “The Kitchen”

Thirdly, and intricately tied to “breathing space”, is the use of understatement, where room is left for the reader to navigate ellipses, semantic clearings, things held back. There are poignant references, electric traces that signal illness, challenge, danger, and more illness.

I am on the trapeze of a new cycle of investigations – I

walked here from the hospital, skirting the rim of a volcano

for my flat white.

from “Lion in Chains Outside Circus Circus Cafe, Mt Eden”

Fourthly, and I am searching for the best word here, there is an inquisitiveness on the part of the poet, as she ranges wide and deep in her curiosity and engagements; touching upon fairy stories, other modes of writing such as William Burroughs cut-up practice, a Kafka aphorism, sculptural installations, a Lydia Davis short story, music, other poets, Robert Falcon Scott’s diary.

My fifth word, and my handful of ideas could extend to become a catalogue, to a more substantial map of possibilities in this sumptuous poetry, is intimacy. I am musing on how you are drawn deep into the writing; how it feels exquisitely intimate. It feels compellingly close, as people and places resonate: from son to brother to friends, from Lyttelton to Ireland.

you are light as steam right now

high frequency, cloud-high

but when you are here, this side

of security, oh the things I have to tell you –

how your letter is the most valuable

thing I carry

how we have built a tower for the chickens

to roost in – kānuka poles frame the ceiling

from “While the radios are tuned you write letters home”

Rose has produced a debut collection to celebrate. It moves you to muse and be nourished, to inhabit and settle in poetry clearings. To dawdle and drift as you read. Close your eyes and absorb the music as though you have put on an album, a breathtaking album you want on repeat. There is darkness and there is light, there is the particular and the intangible. My Thoughts Are All of Swimming is a joy to read.

Rose Collins, born in New Zealand and of Irish descent, is a poet and short fiction writer. She worked as a human rights lawyer before completing the MA in Creative Writing at the IIML in 2010. She won the 2022 John O’Connor Award and the 2020 Micro Madness Competition, and has been shortlisted for the UK Bare Fiction Prize (2016), the Bridport Prize (2020) and the takahē Monica Taylor Poetry Prize (2020). Rose was the 2018 Writer in Residence at Hagley College. She is a some-time litigation lawyer, a beekeeper and a mother of two. She lives in Te Whakaraupō Lyttelton Harbour with her family.

Sudden Valley Press page

7 Mistakes

The salt sting nights we were two cuts       
            in a tongue that licked December.

Not how the falsely boasted flavour hurt ourselves,
           but how it hurt others.

Certain telephone calls that shone with a doggish fidelity
           as if unafraid.

The well-aimed lighting rig we called radical honesty,
            and all the acts we saw there.

Our sweet, multiple forgivings:
           a peace with a torn hem.

Telling him the reason wasn’t
            love running out.

The completion of
            this poem.

Joan Fleming

Joan Fleming’s latest book is Song of Less (Cordite Books, 2022), a verse novel exploring ritual, taboo and the limits of individualism in the ruins of ecological collapse. She is the author of the poetry collections The Same as Yes and Failed Love Poems (Te Herenga Waka Press), and the pamphlets Two Dreams In Which Things Are Taken (Duets) and Some People’s Favourites (Desperate Literature). Joan is a lecturer in creative writing at Massey University, and lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington.