$100 less tax for mince 1 pkt cheese 1 litre of milk 1 loaf of bread 2 rolls of loo paper paid for my poem
fall
gnarled burnt weathered twisted toppled rotting arms raised skyward falling earthbound this tree is dying
Apirana Taylor
Apirana Taylor is a nationally and internationally published poet, playwright, short story writer and novelist. He’s been Writer in Residence at Canterbury and Massey Universities. He tours globally presenting his poetry. He’s written and published poetry, plays, short stories, and novels and is included in many anthologies nationally and internationally.
Acclaimed New Zealand author Tracey Slaughter presents The Longest Drink in Town, debuting at The Meteor Theatre from April 27th – 30th. A dark, lyrical and brooding snapshot of the fallout of a parental affair; The Longest Drink in Town marks the first of Slaughter’s works to be adapted for the stage.
On the inspiration behind The Longest Drink, Slaughter says, “The situation took place on the roadside of my own childhood: I’d been a passenger in my mother’s car to be delivered for ‘visitation,’ and my new stepmother met us at the drop-off point. The detonation was instant. The two women scrapping it out at the T-bone where a servo met a pub met a fleet of display homes – as a child all I could do was freeze in the gravel intersection and witness. That set-up became the nexus for a storm of childhood reactions to the everyday spectacle of a ‘broken home,’ taking me into stories that touched the dark core of what divorce is for the small players who don’t get to choose it. The ‘chick fight’ was more than just late Friday arvo entertainment. The scene transfixed me, and never left. It was inevitable that writing would one day drive me back there.”
Tracey Slaughter is the author of deleted scenes for lovers (2016), Conventional Weapons (2019), and most recently Devil’s Trumpet (2021). She’s received numerous awards, including the international Fish Short Story Prize, the Bridport Prize, the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Award, the Landfall Essay Competition and was the recipient of the Louis Johnson New Writers Bursary.
This exciting project is brought to you by One Question Theatre and Mayhem Literary Journal, who have lifted Slaughter’s prose from the page, without losing an atom of the yearning and the ache of her novella.
Co-directors’ Dave Taylor and Liam Hinton say of the project, “It’s a tremendous privilege to be gifted such a generous text and to have our shared hand in bringing it to life.”
On seeing the story alive on stage, Slaughter says, “Many of their stories were fragments of mine. But they weren’t just vehicles for my catharsis – they had bloodstreams and hair-ties, longings and school-shoes, ugly old dollies and busted hearts. They felt alive to me in the writing, and I loved them. To meet them now, walking round The Meteor, is an experience near indescribable. They’re not just suffering – they’re leaping with wildness, wriggling with mischief, and rocking with anger and lust. They are a joy to behold. I’ll always be intensely grateful to the group of actors who took this journey to bring my characters to life.”
Tracey Slaughter’s The Longest Drink in Town
Where: The Meteor Theatre (1 Victoria Street, Hamilton)
When I receive one of 40 precious copies of Makyla Curtis’ chapbook, Apertures, it comes carefully wrapped in layers: tissue, cellophane, paper. It is the prelude to digging down through the meticulous archeology of Curtis’ poetry.
As she journeys in ever widening circles to find the fragments that will fill in the gaps of who she is, she also finds spaces. From Auckland’s West Coast to Scotland’s North Sea, Curtis finds touchstones in the landscape. A hagstone that allows her to see through time. Greywacke stones that she piles into a cairn. Filmy ferns that she plucks and imprints onto the pages of the book itself.
on the shore I sweep my feet for a hagstone to cast a vision to find a doorway in the rock, in the earth, in time to cast a moment of an ancestor’s eye
Apertures is a work of art: one of several text-and-art pieces that Curtis made in fulfilment of her 2021 Master of Visual Arts project. The other pieces have been displayed in a recent exhibition at the Angela Morton Room at Takapuna Library (https://www.instagram.com/angelamorton.room/), along with videos, photographs and found objects all collected on Curtis’ journey of self discovery. Leanne Radojkovich, the Angela Morton Room’s curator, tells me the response to the exhibition has been warm, searching and curious: much like Curtis’ words on the page.
The book in my hand is small but heavy for its size. Its compact square form, made of heavy paper, are carefully bound and the pages open up to lie flat. The text is the dark blue-green of the ocean. Interspersed, allowing me to breathe between the intense experience of each poem, are pages of impressions: leaves, threads, wood in a delicate pink.
The poems advance and recede across the page, gradually revealing Curtis’ purpose and her journey. From beach to bush to council records, the ephemera are footprints left by migrant ancestors. Some are even physical objects, such as her great great grandmother’s sewing machine which she restores and then brings back into modern-day use. The act of making with a physical object connects her directly with the hand of her ancestors and creates a new history, a continuation of the old:
When you ask me what I am making I twist the threads through the shuttle boat bobbin, we are the colour of rust when the sky leans against us I am threading us through the eye of a 130 year old needle, I cannot see the gap only feel it there.
Curtis’ purposeful journeying is a trail of stones for us to follow, one version of the search for identity that most of us undertake in our lives. In doing so she deals with difficult intersections: how did her ancestors’ path cross with that of Māori? How then does she reconcile their building of their own histories on top of those that were already there? But as with any journey, the spaces and silences are opportunities, too. Sometimes it’s just as satisfying not to know the whole story. To accept you will never know and grow yourself into the silences:
where there is a gap in things there is a threshold
this is where I go in a lacuna – through the gaps in the rain and see across time in the holes in the leaves their multitude is vast in possibilities – across the threshold I am a different kind of whole, a tardigrade in every corner of the earth connected at core essence; no longer isolated on a patch of stolen land.
Apertures, pages 20-21
I sent some questions to Makyla after reading her work and seeing the exhibition.
When you embarked on your Master’s project, what were your initial driving questions? How did that shift over time?
My initial question, or goal, came out of my Master of Arts in English project: I was researching the interpretative possibilities of reading image and text together. I was looking at the work of Cilla McQueen and John Pule and the way their work intertwines image and text as a simultaneity of storytelling.
I wanted to try this theory out in my own artistic practice and chose to do a Master of Visual Arts as the grounding for that experiment. I have been studying te reo mē ngā tikanga Māori for a few years at a few different institutions, and asking a lot of questions about the history of Aotearoa and what it means to be Pākehā.
These two things came together while I was working on my MVA research project. In responding to your question, I’ve returned to the research question I constructed for an assessment early in 2019 and I talk about the ‘(im)possibility of simultaneous presence in Aotearoa and Alba (Scotland),’ and I think that remained a driving force. To be Pākehā is to be fully present in Aotearoa and guided by a Māori worldview, which means knowing where you are from. But in returning to Scotland (I lived there from 2008-2011), despite it being my mother’s birthplace, I was not seen as Scots. And so, there is a contradiction: for me, to be Pākehā is to be Scots, but in Scotland I am not Scots and I am not Pākehā.
The shifts over time were more about how I might explore my complicity in colonisation alongside ideas of identity and belonging here as a settler descendant. I began with wider questions about what a Pākehā identity might be, and then brought it in closer as to what my Pākehā identity might be.
The poems in Apertures have a sense of fluidity – the sense of place and time shifts constantly. What were your poetic influences, and what types of writing techniques did you experiment with?
I’m glad that fluidity comes across. I was looking for that ‘simultaneous presence.’ Cilla McQueen is a huge influence in that regard. Her poems (particularly those in Markings and Soundings) take you to McQueen’s ancestral home in the Western Hebrides of Scotland while keeping you in the South Island of New Zealand in her drawings. The places become kind of overlaid, and that becomes an identity in a way.
Other big influences while I was writing were Ruby Solly, Tōkū Pāpā (Kai Tahu), Roseanne Watt, Moder Dy (Shetlean), Frances Presley, Halse for Hazel (English), Natalie Harkin, Archival Poetics (Narungga). Early drafts of a lot of the poems included a lot more te reo Māori and Scots Gaidhlig, and those languages certainly guided me a lot, but ultimately, I didn’t feel it was quite appropriate for me to keep so much of them in the final poems.
Apertures, pages 24-25
The images in Apertures are contact prints of items you found on your journeys to places of significance to your family. How did you make them, and are they the same in each book?
There are a few different methods of print in the Apertures collection. I printed with found objects including threads, ferns, sliced driftwood, kawakawa leaves, but they’re not all ‘contact’ prints as you describe them, for example some are printed from the remnant ink impression. All, though, are a form of planograph monoprinting (printed from a flat printing plate or surface to create one-of-a-kind single prints that cannot be reproduced in the same method). The prints were photographed and digitised to be included in this book. The originals are in other artworks and single edition books. The images are all the same across the copies because the book was printed using risography (a digital duplicator, it uses screen printing methods but functions more like a photocopier).
When I read your poetry, I feel an urgency – a sense of searching for identity. The Pākehā search for identity in this country now seems to carry with it a sense of shame or shyness – I’ve had friends tell me they have ‘no’ identity. What’s your take on that?
There’s a term I used a lot when teaching at the university that I think was coined by Stephen Turner: ‘productive discomfort.’ This is the active side of the white guilt coin. ‘White guilt’ doesn’t help anyone, least of all Pākehā. The shame, or shyness, makes us inactive, and you can sink into it and drown in it. But productive discomfort allows for the unpleasant feeling of facing our complicity in colonisation of ngā tāngata Māori, but enables us to use it towards action and reparation, even if that reparation is small.
No one has ‘no’ identity. Everybody has culture. If you think you don’t have one, it just means yours is so ubiquitous that you haven’t had to think about it. Something that causes me great concern is that when people think they don’t have a culture or an identity, it can lead them to seek out and steal the culture of others. Cultural appropriation is a further act of colonisation and violence. We need to ward against that by exploring our own culture. I think that we Pākehā have been very lucky to have been given a unique identity that acknowledges that our ancestors are from elsewhere but that we can belong here in Aotearoa. Māori gave us this identity and I think it is an extraordinary gift and privilege. We can be proud to be Pākehā, but it should include that productive discomfort.
Your poems however show that you ultimately uncovered a richness and depth to your past, and a real sense of connection to Aotearoa through the actions of your ancestors. Was this an easy journey for you personally?
Overall, I have found the journey extremely rewarding so far. I been able to spend a lot of time with my Dad because the project was, for the purposes of the thesis, focused on my Dad’s side of the family. I’ve especially enjoyed that aspect. My Dad has come along on the journey with me as an active participant, asking a lot of the same questions as I have.
There have been some very joyful discoveries: learning about the owner of our heirloom sewing machine, Eliza Riley, and repairing the sewing machine to working order; finding an amazing photograph of my great grandparents Florence Annie and Ernest, with Florence’s parents Sarah Ann and Thomas, with Sarah’s sister and her husband and baby. And some very surprising discoveries: I found my great great great grandfather, Thomas Riley, in the Auckland Lunatic Asylum records. We’re still working through what we can find of Thomas Riley’s life; it may well be he was involved in the invasion of the Waikato before he was committed.
It isn’t easy, and I don’t think it should be. If it’s easy, I’m not asking hard enough questions! But it is rewarding, and I recommend anyone who doesn’t know much about their history, to give the search a go. And if you are Pākehā and can’t find your own ancestors, it’s a good idea to learn about our shared settler colonial history and use that to help understand your identity as Pākehā, because the wider history still shaped your identity and our present.
Tell me about how you typeset and printed your book and about your design choices.
I had been writing poetry throughout the project, and snippets of it was finding its way into the single edition books I was making. It wasn’t until February last year (’21) when I attended a workshop introducing the risograph machine at AUT that I thought of compiling the poems into a printed collection. So, the typesetting and design was informed by what I thought I could do using risography, and the fact that I would be handbinding the book (I used the French lace method). You can only print one colour at a time, and because I hadn’t done a lot with riso in the past, I decided on a straightforward split: teal for the text and pink for the images, and then brought them together for the cover. In the rest of the project I was working with Garamond, Bodoni, Univers, and assorted wooden type, because I was working with material type: metal and wooden moveable type, letterpress. But this was a digital design, and so I jumped at the chance to work with two of my favourite typefaces, both from leagueofmoveabletype.com: Fanwood and Raleway. That was, however, occasionally frustrating because Raleway doesn’t have any macrons so I had to add them manually. These two faces weren’t too much of a divergence, though, from the general feel. I think the added typefaces to the project here were enriching rather than distracting. They give the poetry collection its own voice, amid the voices of the other books that worked with text in a different way.
I’d love to know more about your research into letterpress, on this project and others. How did you develop your macron typeset, and what are future projects you’re contemplating?
The first ever language to be printed in Aotearoa was in te reo Māori. The grounding of language and print in this country is te reo Māori, and that is important to remember, especially while English remains dominant.
There have been two letterpress research projects I have conducted, the first was in 2016 and was the creation of a contemporary case for handsetting te reo Māori. The second was in 2019, an experiential research project to handset He Whakaputanga and Te Tiriti o Waitangi.
2016: I found it frustrating to handset metal type in te reo using an English lay out case: there aren’t enough k’s, and what k’s there are, are in a small compartment on the far left. Likewise, the p’s and w’s are relegated to smaller compartments. Meanwhile, the English case has e as the dominant vowel, when in Māori it is the a, and the s, h, d, c, y all take up prime real estate. Add to that the lack of macrons, and it was becoming clear I needed a new case to set from. In 1834 William Colenso was hired by the Church Missionary Society to come to New Zealand and print Te Paipera (the Bible). He made numerous requests to his employers for the tools he would need on arrival, but they missed the memo and when he arrived one of the major things he was missing was type cases, the trays that hold the type. There are loads of different type case layouts, even just in English, but the premise is that the most often used letters are near the centre bar, and the less often used ones are in the outer compartments. Colenso had learned a little bit of te reo on the boat over, so he designed some new cases and had them built by a carpenter in Kororāreka. He filled the cases with the type his employer had ordered from England, but didn’t bother to unpack the English only letters. I used Colenso’s design of his upper and lower cases as the basis for my contemporary job case (upper and lower cases in the same tray) design, and built the case. We purchased some new type in Garamond with macrons from a typecaster in Upper Hutt. The case is now filled with the 14pt Garamond, and I used it to print a poem by Vaughan Rapatahana, and a poem by Cilla McQueen translated into te reo.
2019: In 2019, I commissioned a cabinet-maker in Kaiwaka to build Colenso’s cases based on drawings from 1890s. Then, using these cases I handset He Whakaputanga and Te Tiriti o Waitangi to look as like the original printed versions of these documents as I could (only bigger, I used 18pt). It was an experiential experiment. What was it like to print these documents using these type case layouts as they had been by Colenso in 1835 and 1840. For me, when I handset type, I get very close to the text, I address every letter individually and bring it together. It’s intimate and familiar, and it was an amazing way to get up close to these two documents: documents that are the basis of how I came to be living here in Aotearoa, and are a guide for how to do so.
NB. There’s often confusion with these projects that I designed a typeface for te reo, that is not so. These are all about the tray layout of where the material metal type is stored and where you get it from to handset with it. It would be similar to talking about the qwerty keyboard and alternative keyboard layouts.
Two images from a whole story in the eye of the sea, artist book, 390 x 220mm, silk-cotton pages, 14 leaves, hardcover with stab-binding
This book is one of several that you made, but the rest are much more limited edition, and are experimental in their choice of materials. Can you tell me about these and the process you used to make them?
My MVA project (titled ‘Folding Time’), was made up of a number of fabric printed hangings of collected and pressed ferns (‘Ink Herbarium’, ‘Pteridomania series’); the printing of HW and ToW and an accompanying zine with a collection of poetry, short essays and documentary photographs (Ka mua, ka muri); eight single edition books; the poetry collection Apertures (edition of 40); three essay zines; and two photo zines. Of the eight single edition books, one was digitally printed with a page for each site visit and field trip I conducted for the project between March 2019 – May 2021 (there were 45), and bound as a concertina book so that it can unfold into one very long page. Of the remaining seven, two are printed on rice paper and five are printed on silk-cotton fabric.
By your question I am assuming you are most interested in the five fabric books.
They are titled: advance / recede; a whole story in the eye of the sea; an aperture shows me an arrival; gaps / thresholds; and little archives. They’re handprinted using relief printing (letterpress – metal and wooden type) and planograph monoprinting (mentioned earlier) with found objects (threads, pressed leaves, sliced driftwood), and some lasercut mdf. When working with fabric, it’s all handprinted, usually on my kitchen table. Occasionally I used a Farley proofing press, but I found it more effective to print with the pressure of my hands. Some prints have the remnants of my finger marks (although those are more evident in the fabric hangings). A lot of the time I will print from the remnants of an impression. By that I mean that I ink up a plate, place a pressed fern, for example, on the plate, print that to produce a negative, or an outline (which I usually throw away) and then remove the fern and place the fabric against the plate. I get the remnant, or the shadow, or an ink impression. It’s a fun and beautiful way to print. Every print is a discovery.
advance / recede, artist book, 150 x 200mm, silk-cotton pages, 21 leaves, hardcover with stab-binding. Courtesy of the Angela Morton Room Collection, Takapuna Library
What new projects have come out of this course of investigation?
The where to from here is that now that I’m not bound by the confines of the thesis, I am exploring my mum’s side of the family. I’ve just moved to West Auckland, and this is where my mum grew up. Earlier this month (March 2022) my mum, Nana and I did a driving tour of West Auckland to look at the houses they lived in, and where they worked and studied, and I’ve begun conducting oral histories with them too. My maternal grandparents and my mum came to NZ in 1957 as ’£10 poms.’ It’s quite a different story to the six ships that brought my paternal family to NZ.
I recorded my journey in a blog (which I’ve been meaning to update) and on my Instagram @makylac
Renee Liang is a poet, playwright, paediatrician, medical researcher and essayist. She is the Asian Theme Lead and a named investigator on landmark longitudinal study Growing Up In NZ. As an established writer, Renee has collaborated on visual arts works, film, opera and music, produced and directed theatre works, worked as a dramaturge, taught creative writing and organized community-based arts initiatives such as New Kiwi Women Write, a writing workshop series for migrant women, and The Kitchen, a new program nurturing stories in local kitchens. Her work The Bone Feeder, originally a play, later adapted into an opera, was one of the first Asian mainstage works to be performed in NZ. Renee has written, produced and toured eight plays. In 2018 she was appointed a Member of the NZ Order of Merit for services to the arts, and won Next Woman of the Year for Arts and Culture.
Makyla Curtis is Scots Pākehā and lives in Tāmaki Makaurau. She is a poet, printer, and artist. Makyla is a volunteer compositor in letterpress at MOTAT, Museum of Transport and Technology. She has a Masters in English from the University of Auckland, and a Masters in Visual arts from Auckland University of Technology.
It’s going to harm animals, this moon rising so full and huge at dusk over this little bald hill at the edge of a field of stubble. Stalks and black earth, already gleaned and dark as the darkest desire which will come on the animals tonight.
And here, in proof, is the ragdoll cat carried draped over a child’s arm or worn around the neck of another, sore and torn, hardly bearing to be held because of the savage bites she bears for venturing, unstoppable, through the cat door and yielding herself, in fealty, to the moon.
Elizabeth Smither
Elizabeth Smither’s most recent publication is a collection of short stories, ‘The Piano Girls’, (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2021). A new collection of poems, ‘My American Chair’ will be published by AUP this year.
Saturday morning and I switch the radio on to hear Kim Hill in scintillating conversation with poet Anna Jackson. The aim was to explore Anna’s new book Actions & Travels: How Poetry Works (AUP). The result is a warm, articulate and joyful celebration of poetry. I loved it so much, I Iistened again this morning.
In the new book, Anna takes around 100 poems and considers what she loves about them, what the poems are doing. Kim Hill was intrigued and delighted by the unexpected inhabitants in each chapter. I saw them as little neighbourhoods with surprising guests that shone renewed light on the chapter theme and upon poetry itself.
A few gold nuggets but you need to hear the whole conversation:
Anna: I was ‘cutting the landscapes of poetry in different directions to see what those combinations would bring out in each poem’.
Anna on younger poets and ‘what it does to poetry to be so current and alive and shared and important’: ‘Poetry is an urgent medium of conversation that takes place not only on the page and between readers and at readings, but on social media as well.’
Anna after reading Maggie Smith’s much shared ‘Good Bones’ on air: ‘That’s the wish of poetry … What can we salvage? What’s beautiful? What can we will ourselves to see as beautiful without turning away from what’s terrible? What we know is real?’
Kim: ‘Have you read George Saunder’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain? I liked your book in the same way I liked his book.’
Anna: ‘The more poems you read, the more qualities you’ll be likely to recognise.’
Listen to conversation with Kim Hill here, Saturday Morning RNZ National
Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems 2021, edited and introduced by Kate Camp
The trees stand solitary. Clouds wring the odd star out of the dark. We’re walking on nothing. We’re the road, unlined.
Pippi Jean from ‘11.11pm’
This week I spent days reading and replying to all the children who sent me bird poems for Poetry Box’s March challenge. It is a sad glad task as so many children didn’t get picked to be posted, yet there were so many gold nugget poems. My Poetry Box aim is to nourish poetry at the grass roots, to encourage children and teachers to play with poetry. To explore poetry as a way to liberate words, to say what we think and feel, to see and hear with words. To break rules, to create rules. To let imaginations go flying and to draw upon memory. For a start.
I know what is like picking poems for anthologies, for Best NZ Poems, even books for the NZ Book Awards, and it is a painful pleasure, because not everyone gets picked, no matter how many best books and poems there are.
I do squirm and recoil from the word best with its unavoidable hierarchies and exclusions, its biases and neglects – especially how we edited and selected in the past. But still today, these leanings exist.
Despite my aversion to the concept of best, I am also grateful. I pick up poetry anthologies, journals, I scan book award lists, and I delve into Best NZ Poems because there are always rewards. I get to encounter poems/books I have loved, I get to hunt down poems/books I am not familiar with but tempt me, and I sigh over and return to astonishing poems/books that have not made the selector’s cut.
I am a selector every week on Poetry Shelf! And I know from emails how some poets find it tough when I don’t review their books or post their poems. This choosing tug is not easy.
Here I am back at our kitchen table watching the kererū squat greedily in the cabbage tree and I’m musing on the wide fields of poems published in 2021. The luminescent communities of poets writing, exchanging, conversing, publishing. It was a bonanza year on Poetry Shelf as I sought to counter the personal and global challenges of the year with themes and readings, and as many poems, interviews and reviews as I could manage. The poetry luminosity in Aotearoa is to be celebrated. This poem aliveness.
Poetry now is ‘an urgent medium of conversation that takes place’, Anna Jackson said to Kim Hill on the radio this morning. On the page, in performance, in social media. I love this. So many poets are writing with this sense of urgency, a need to half understand why we are writing it, a need to shine lights, and get personal, hold a hand out to the past, and a hand forward to the future. To find stable ground to stop the heart and mind shaking. To shake and tilt and free float.
And so with this peculiar introduction I celebrate the arrival of Best NZ Poems 2021. There are poems from books I have loved and engaged with deeply, there are poems by poets I have not yet read. It is a weekend road trip. A getaway car. A time to linger and imbibe and stall.
You can read editor Kate Camp’s comments on why each poem delighted her.
You can read the poems selected, and treat as a weekend retreat.
House & Contents Gregory O’Brien, Auckland University Press, 2022
What is this particular brightness we expect of poetry? And on what or whose account? If the times are dark, oppressive, tunnel-like – as they seem presently – maybe poetry can be a lantern. Or a firefly, or the glowing bud of a cigarette on a dark night. But for poetry to be these things it can’t simply reflect its times – it has to radiate on its own terms, within and beyond that darkness. It is poetry’s job to flicker and glow and, with luck, emit some mysterious luminescence. At times I feel those are its only real criteria.
Gregory O’Brien ‘Notes to Accompany the Poems and Paintings’
I love coming to a new book with no idea what the book is about. And here am I about to share some responses to Gregory O’Brien’s magnificent collection House & Contents with you. I have had the book sitting on my desk for a month and every time I walk past, I stall on the title and the cover. The skeletal tree, the blocks of cloud, sky, hill and roof. The nod to insurance policies, and an expectation the collection might transform ‘house’ into home, ‘contents’ into Gregory’s ability to amass fascinating detail.
In the endnote, Gregory talks about how in the past he has used paintings to shed light on the poetry, and poetry to converse with the artwork. In this collection however, where there is a substantial presence of both image and word, he wanted the artwork and the poem to have a ‘co-equal’ relationship.
One poem, ‘House & contents’, acts as a fractured faultline of the collection. It records experiencing an earthquake in Wellington Te Whanganui-a-Tara – a poem in pieces over the course of a day, over the course of the book, little interruptions. It lays a thread of uncertainty, a stave of different sounds, and shifts how I view the title and cover.
The artwork, with motifs repeating like embers on the canvas, like lamplight, like mysterious tugs and echos, is magnetic. No question. You bend in and become hooked on the light and dark. Full of questions. Breathing in the mysterious because there is anchor but there is also instability. Hill might be corrugated boat might be corrugated house might be hill. The echo of chimney smoke might be that from a volcano. I think of the cigarette butt glowing in the dark. Bend down into these paintings and you are wrapped in mystery – the bed outside might be resting on the hills or in the sky or driving a dreamscape. Words loom small not large, and might be bookshelf or textured wall or miniature poem. There is a brick red burnt umber hue signalling earth, and there are the infinite possibilities of blue.
The poetry is an equal compendium of fascinations, an accumulation of rich motifs and hues, knots and splices. The wading birds by a Canterbury river are the poet’s acupuncture. The world is an open book, where streets and mountains, sky and weather, are busy reading each other. Nothing exists in isolation. A library floor might catch a waterfall or flood of books. The poet tracks an interior world and then stitches it to a physical realm, whether present or mourned. The intensely real might collide with the surreal – ‘coins dance / in an upturned hat’. At times I am reading like a chant – both hidden and out-in-the-open lists that make music, that beckon heart and drifting mind. You can’t skim read, you need to enter the alleyways with a flask of tea, and set up camp for ages.
A poem that particularly stuck with my heart is ‘For Jen at Three O’Clock’, the final poem in the collection, a love poem, a luminous list, an ember glow upon the stretching canvas of life. Here are the opening lines:
With us, ice melt and low land fog, creaking thornbush,
sandarac and walnut lawn. With us towers and minarets
of the asparagus field, each blink and muffled cough, each
recitation and resuscitation, mountain
torrent and gasping stream.
Glorious. That is the word for House & Contents. No question. The light will flicker and gleam in artworks and poetry. Reading this collection is retreat and vacation and epiphany.
Gregory O’Brien is an independent writer, painter and art curator. He has written many books of poetry, fiction, essays and commentary. His books include A Micronaut in the Wide World: The Imaginative Life and Times of Graham Percy (Auckland University Press, 2011) and the multi-award-winning introductions to art for the young and curious: Welcome to the South Seas (Auckland University Press, 2004) and Back and Beyond (Auckland University Press, 2008), which both won the Non-Fiction Prize at the New Zealand Post Book Awards for Children and Young Adults. His book Always Song in the Water: An Oceanic Sketchbook was published in 2019, and a major work on the artist Don Binney will appear in 2023. Gregory O’Brien became an Arts Foundation Laureate and won the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in 2012, and in 2017 became a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit and received an honorary doctorate from Victoria University of Wellington.
I am always mid-gulp of fresh air and love poems and so I understand that in any other story the hothouse hike I take at the birth of November would be leading me to you—and perhaps it still is, and neither of us know yet; in which case, what oncoming rapture—but: for the moment, in this story, there is glorious living light dispersed rich and heavy through the trees and my hair and these flowers, the ones I spent $9.99 on after seeing them in a box outside one of arguably-too-many corner-shops on the same straight-down road. And they’re hard to carry, just slightly, a bit awkward to hold, but a sweet joy nonetheless bracketed in the crook of my arm— 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. And 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.
Tate Fountain
Tate Fountain is a writer, director, and rule-of-threes captive published in Aniko Press Magazine, The Agenda, and Min–a–rets (Annexe), among others. She is currently a member of the Starling editorial committee, and is probably being loud about it on Instagram.
NZ Poetry Shelf 