Poetry Shelf Occasional Reviews: James Brown’s The Tip Shop

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The Tip Shop, James Brown, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022

Alex Grace writes on the back of The Tip Shop: “Funny, dark, insightful and nothing close to a chore to read. Poetry, but it doesn’t suck.” Ha! Some poetry must suck, even be a chore to read, like a school assignment! James Brown’s poetry is cool – ok a lazy-tag adjective children are often forbidden to use as what does it actually mean? It means James’s poetry is hip, electric, agile on its poem toes, lithe on its heart beat, and is immensely readable.

The opening poem, ‘A Calm Day with Undulations’, places visual waves on the page and sets you up for all manner of undulations as you read the collection: wit, heart, life. In the poem, James uses an ocean metaphor to write about cycling which is a way of writing about living. Think surf / swell / naval surface / roll up and down / wave length / lull / pool.

It’s a calm day with undulations.
My tyres flow freely
across the naval surface.

The Tip Shop appraises and pays attention to scenes, moments, events, potential memory, language. The detail ranges from measured to madcap. Questions percolate. Poetry rules are invented. Words are played with. Dialogue is found. Poems stretch and poems repeat. Herein lies the pleasure of poetry in general, and a James Brown collection in particular: there is no single restrictive model when it comes to writing a poem. Within the collection as a whole, and within the frame of an individual poem, James resists stasis.

A poem that epitomises intricate delights is ‘Schrödinger’s Wife’. It delivers a miniature story laced with wit and puzzle. Here is the first stanza:

Mary didn’t walk with us Sundays. She ran.
With earbuds, she could keep reading. Her shop,
Schrödinger’s Books, was a tough mistress.
‘Are you working today?’ we’d ask. ‘Yes and no,’
she’d reply. She just needed to ‘finish the books’.
Can the books ever be finished? They wink at us
as though there are uncertain things
they think we ought to know.

I am drawn to repetition, to a concatenation of detail, especially in list poems, overtly so or nuanced. Three examples in The Tip Shop, establish A to Z lists. Another poem juxtaposes ‘I must not’ and ‘I must’. A found poem, like a form of canine play, lists dog owner dialogue. And then the delight in repetition dissolves, and time concentrates on the washing and peeling of fruit. In ‘Lesson’, a single elongated moment becomes luminous when caught in the poem’s frame. We are implicated, and are returned to an (our) apple: “When was the last time you / washed a green apple”.

Three longer poems stretch into telling a yarn, spinning a story, as the repeated indents mark the intake of a storyteller’s breath. Glorious.

‘Waiheke’ pares back to an ocean moment, and I am imagining the scene imbued with love. So much going on beneath, on and above the surface of the poem, whether in the breaststroking, in the prolonged looking.

You yearn so much
you could be a yacht.
Your mind has already
set sail. It takes a few days
to arrive

at island pace,
but soon you are barefoot
on the sand,
the slim waves testing
your feet

The Tip Shop is piquant in its fleet of arrivals and departures. It is poetry as one-hundred-percent pleasure – it makes you laugh and it makes you feel. It encourages sidetracks and lets you rollercoast on language. What a poetry treat.

James Brown’s poems have been widely published in New Zealand and overseas. His Selected Poems were published in 2020. Previous books include The Year of the Bicycle (2006), which was a finalist in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2007, and Go Round Power Please (1996), which won the Best First Book Award for Poetry. His poems are widely anthologised and frequently appear in the annual online anthology Best New Zealand Poems. James has been the recipient of several writing fellowships and residencies, including the 1994 Louis Johnson New Writers Bursary, a share of the 2000 Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship, the Canterbury University Writer in Residence, the Victoria University of Wellington Writer in Residence. James works as an editor and teaches the Poetry Workshop at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington. 

Te Herenga Waka University Press page

Poetry Shelf Occasional Poems: Hebe Kearney’s ‘monarch wings’

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monarch wings

risingholme park
ten years before the
/ earth cracked open /

the pine trees were filled with sleeping butterflies

looking up
sails of their orange wings
closed to triangle points
nestled in the needles
childhood haze / gold in memory

and then one night suddenly
/ frost /

looking down
the next day
orange confetti / green grass
disembodied wings
fluttered from death

we gathered their softness / into a basket

went to the dairy on the way home
and when man behind counter saw
eyes went wide / heard him thinking:
butterfly murderers
and i just didn’t know how to
/ explain /

Hebe Kearney

Hebe Kearney (they/them) is a poet who lives in Tāmaki Makaurau. Their work has appeared in publications including: Mantissa Poetry Review, Mayhem, Starling, samfiftyfour, Tarot, takahē, and Poetry New Zealand Yearbooks. You can find them at @he__be on Instagram.

Poetry Shelf Occasional Reviews: No Other Place to Stand

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No Other Place to Stand: An Anthology of Climate Change Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand, Jordan Hamel, Rebecca Hawkes, Erik Kennedy and Essa Ranapiri, Auckland University Press, 2022

Auckland University Press is to be celebrated for its stellar poetry anthologies. No Other Place to Stand: An Anthology of Climate Change Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand offers an eclectic, and indeed electrifying, selection of climate change poetry. The editors, Jordan Hamel, Rebecca Hawkes, Erik Kennedy and Essa Ranapiri, are all frontline poets themselves.

The dedication resonates and stalls your entry into the book because it is so apt: “To those fighting for our future / and those who will live it.”

A terrific foreword by Alice Te Punga Somerville establishes a perfect gateway into the collection. Alice wonders, when climate change is such a mammoth issue, “about the value of the particular, the specific, the local, the here, the now”. What difference will reading and writing make when the world demands action? Alice writes: “Every single poem in this anthology speaks to the relationship between words and worlds.” That in itself is enough of a spur to get a copy of the book, and open up trails of reading, wonder and challenge.

I am spinning on the title. I am turning the word ‘stand’ over and over in my mind like a talisman, a pun, a hook. I am thinking we stand and we speak out, I am thinking we stand because we no longer bear it, and I am thinking we stand together.

The poems selected are both previously published and unpublished. The sources underline the variety and depth of print and online journals currently publishing poetry in Aotearoa: Minarets, Starling, Spin Off, Mayhem, Pantograph Punch, Poetry NZ, Blackmail Press, Overland, Sweet Mammalian, Turbine | Kapohau, Takahē, Stasis, Landfall.

No Other Place to Stand is an essential volume. You can locate its essence, the governing theme, ‘climate change poetry’, yet the writing traverses multiple terrains, with distinctive voices, styles, focal points. I fall into wonder again and again, but there is the music, the political, the personal, the heart stoking, the message sharing. There is the overt and there is the nuanced. There is loud and there is soft. There is clarity and there is enigma. You will encounter a magnificent upsurge of younger emerging voices alongside the presence of our writing elders. This matters. This degree of bridge and connection.

Dinah Hawken has long drawn my eye and heart to the world we inhabit, to the world of sea and bush and mountain, stones, leaves, water, birds. Reading one of her collections is like standing in the heart of the bush or next to the ocean’s ebb and flow. It is message and it is transcendental balm. Her long sublime poem, ‘The uprising’, after presenting gleams and glints of our beloved natural world, responds to the wail that rises in us as we feel so helpless.

6.a.

But all I can do is rise:
both before and after I fall.
All I can do is rally,

all I can do is write
– I can try to see and mark
where and how we are.

All I can do is plant,
all I can do is vote
for the fish, the canoe, the ocean

to survive the rise and fall.
All I can do is plead,
all I can do is call . . .

from ‘The uprising’

I am reading the rich-veined ancestor currents of Tayi Tibble’s ‘Tohunga’, the luminosity of Chris Tse’s ‘Photogenesis’, the impassioned, connecting cries of Selina Tusitala Marsh’s ‘Unity’ and Karlo Mila’s ‘Poem for the Commonwealth, 2018’. Daily routines alongside a child’s unsettling question catch me in Emma Neale’s ‘Wanting to believe in the butterfly effect’. I am carried in the embrace of Vaughan Rapatahana’s ‘he mōteatea: huringa āhuarangi’ with its vital, plain speaking call in both te reo Māori and English.

Take this heart-charged handbook and read a poem a day over the next ninety days. Be challenged; speak, ask, do. I thank the editors and Auckland University Press for this significant anthology, this gift.

Auckland University press page

Jordan Hamel is a Pōneke-based poet and performer. He was the 2018 New Zealand Poetry Slam champion. He uses poetry and performance to create awareness and discourse about environmental and political issues. He is the co-editor of Stasis Journal and his debut poetry collection Everyone is everyone except you was published by Dead Bird Books in 2022.

Rebecca Hawkes is a poet/painter from Canterbury, living in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Her chapbook ‘Softcore coldsores’ was published in AUP New Poets 5 in 2019. Her first full-length poetry collection, Meat Lovers, was recently unleashed by Auckland University Press. Rebecca edits Sweet Mammalian and is a founding member of popstar poets’ posse Show Ponies.

Erik Kennedy is the author of Another Beautiful Day Indoors (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022) and There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime (Victoria University Press, 2018), which was shortlisted for best book of poems at the 2019 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. He lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch.

Essa Ranapiri (Ngāti Wehi Wehi / Ngāti Takatāpui / Clan Gunn) is a poet from Kirikiriroa. They are part of puku.riri, a local writing group. Their book ransack was published by Victoria University Press in 2019. Give the land back. It’s the only way to fix this mess. They will write until they’re dead. And after that, sing.

Poetry Shelf Occasional Poems: Jenny Powell’s ‘The Girl and the Poet Read Tea Leaves in Paris-Gore’

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The Girl and the Poet Read Tea Leaves in Paris-Gore‘

Spilt tea settles between Formica
flicks of colour, flecks of leaves
turn on a red table.

In front of them a collusion of fate,
a collision of cups in a clumsy act,
the leaves of a script set out before them.

Butter sizzled and browned on a black griddle,
hoisted flags of wet washing hung
in a damp wait, a forgotten cigarette smoking
in the ashtray, the teapot cosy
in crocheted stripes.
On the red Formica table,
pikelets dripped the thin juice of melted syrup
down her fingers, onto her dress.

They change their table, order a new
pot of tea and a plate of hot pancakes.
The syrup melts thin and juicy, drips

down her fingers onto her dress. He gives
her a serviette to soak up the mess.
She folds it in half for her own plot.

Jenny Powell

                                                                                                                       

Poetry Shelf Occasional Poems: essa may ranapiri’s ‘Three Siblings on the End of The World as They Know It’

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Three Siblings on the End of The World as They Know It

for Lyssa, Ruby & Michelle

Taane

to kick the night
into something
new

it feels good
for light to break in

Taawhirimaatea

someone makes a joke about
the great divorce
the wind doesn’t
find it very funny
doesn’t even crack a smile

they close their eyes and start to blow

Whiro

prefers the dark
and the warmth one day they will be
strong enough to
parent trap the
earth and the sky
back together

essa may ranapiri

essa may ranapiri (Ngaati Raukawa, Te Arawa, Ngaati Pukeko, Clan Gunn) is a person who lives on Ngaati Wairere whenua. Author of ransack and ECHIDNA. PhD student looking at how poetry by taangata takataapui engages with computer technology. Co-editor of Kupu Toi Takataapui | Takataapui Literary Journal with Michelle Rahurahu. They have a great love for language, LAND BACK and hot chips. Thanks as always goes to their ancestors, who are everything. They will write until they’re dead.

Poetry Shelf: Emma Neale’s launch speech for Michael Harlow

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Renoir’s Bicycle, Michael Harlow, Cold Hub Press, 2022

Launch Notes

In the past, I’ve edited a couple of Michael Harlow’s poetry titles, but I’ve loved arriving to his new book like a house guest, rather than as one of the electricians or scaffolders tinkering during the final stages of its construction.

Renoir’s Bicycle is a mysterious, atmospheric, idiosyncratic, compelling collection. It seems to me that it’s often a celebration and delicate understanding of the private, interior life; the foundations of identity; the inner-scape of secrets, wishes, dreams, whimsy, reveries, desires, the unspoken, or the unrealised: all the hidden things that can either drive us — or block us; even make us deeply, psychologically unwell, if they’re unacknowledged.

I wanted to use Michael’s line ‘the imagination never lies’ as a mantra, for a while, after reading the collection; and also found myself writing down other phrases to pin to the corkboard in my study: ‘the rondeaux of astonishments’, say, or ‘rondels of light’; or ‘call it love, a lush wilderness in the mind’. Phrases that themselves seem like sun landing on a gem or a silver hook: phrases I wish I could wear, somehow: as earrings or lockets.

Several of the poems ring with authentic, detailed memory and leave a feeling of nostalgia, even when the life in the poem isn’t your own; some trace fleeting states of mind; others work through the comical switches and non-sequiturs of dream language.

They might outline the strange rituals and comforts humans invent for themselves to cope with the dark, with loss, and death:

She took a clean, white bone from her apron pocket,
rubbing it over the warts on both my hands.
     Then she said a prayer in Italian reciting it
backwards. And then she kissed the white bone,
crossing herself three times, and buried it in the earth;
where I could hear Father singing his heart out.
And my Sister too.

from ‘A song in the dark’

On the other hand, these short pieces might evoke a certain disposition, or lean on our responses, the way music does. By this I mean that despite the fact that the front cover of th book calls these prose poems, the music of their syntax, the emotions that the rhythms, hesitations, refrains, and prosody convey, seem to be as much a part of the meaning as any nuggety little quotable, extractable bit of, say, ‘advice’ or ‘belief’. The feeling of spell and flow, sound and song are powerful in Michael’s work.

I’ve talked about the interior life of the mind, and things that might feel a bit nebulous and vague, like music and mood — yet these pieces also call on tangible forms like the fable, or riddle, the tragi-comic skit; or the love song. Several struck me as strange, compressed and compelling psychological or crime case notes. (‘Round the bend’ and  ‘In the mood’, to name just two). All of them, in some way, even the skits or riddles, document and diagnose what it’s like to carry a self through all the puzzles and buffetings of time, and alongside other people with all their own quirks, attractions, and neuroses.

The collection is given a sense of weave or pattern in its repetitions of light, dark, music, birdsong and other motifs; and by lines that echo each other from poem to poem here (and even from earlier poems from Michael’s other collections). I came to think of those repetitions as perhaps like characteristic gestures by which we might recognise a loved one: the drawn out syllables in their way of sighing; the way they hold their elbows when they slide in their socks across the kitchen floor; that favourite, Fanta-coloured hat. Michael’s refrains are the fingerprints, the laughter lines, by which we know him.

I have at least ten particular favourites in the collection —  but perhaps the top top favourite is the poem ‘Unspeakable’— which is also a perfect and sorrowful micro story, as a character looks back on his life, and struggles with how to articulate his origins, his history, the losses that have, in a sense, brought him to where and who he is now. Poets might be more obsessed with language than the average punter, and the poem could be an analogy for the poet’s role, but in its suggestions of loss of faith, desecration of a trove of myth, separation from personal and cultural heritage, I think what it addresses is far broader and deeper.

I’m reproducing it here, with permission from Michael and his publisher, Roger Hickin of Cold Hub Press:

Unspeakable

Trying to write of the unspeakable.
In the white-washed room with
the broken statues of his ancestors.
At the oval table, the lamplight
drawing a circle. Inside it the cast
shadow of his hand and the stub
of a pencil. Trying to say something
that would take him back to the time
when he had no name in the streets
to call his own. And then he wrote
‘Every word is a crossroads.’

Michael’s work often makes me think about the lies we harbour. Reading it alongside Martin Shaw’s Courting the Wild Twin, Michael’s poetry also seems to be about the shadow selves we try to fling out the window, or run from, but end up having to live and reckon with in some way; the chimaera versions of reality we piece together as young children when we’re only told a portion of the truth going on for the adults in our lives, or when they push down too punitively on the wild in us; how after childhood we can both carry gleams of Eden at the back of our minds and yet be damaged by our parents’ own hidden wounds; how we can both mirror and yet distort those wounds at the same time. And yet, even all of this is paraphrase and abstraction from me, really. What the reader often comes across in Michael’s work are small, dramatic re-enactments of scenes that quietly suggest, rather than announce, this kind of psychic tunnelling. They’re scenes composed with a kind of melodic, sonorous touch, which means somehow we can lift and carry even the most tragic stories without smashing into stone fragments ourselves.

Cold Hub Press page

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.

Michael Harlow is one of New Zealand’s leading poets. He 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.

Poetry Shelf Occasional Poems: Jack Ross’s ‘Time’

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Time

No time but the present. That’s not quite it, is it? No time like the present is the usual phrase. Do it now, in other words – don’t put it off. But, as H. G. Wells’s Time Traveller explains so clearly in the story, there’s no such thing as an instantaneous object: it must have duration, as well as height, length and breadth, in order to be perceived (let alone possessed) by us. Now is a moment which is over so quickly that it’s only perceptible in the rearview mirror, as a part of the long spool of experience unwinding behind us. So all we really have is the past – that is to say, the memory of what is already done and dusted. But do we have that, even? It’s no longer with us, so I’d have to say no – all we have, then, is that quavering moment, poised on “Time’s toppling wave,” in W. H. Auden’s phrase. But since we can’t perceive it till it’s over, you could argue that all we have is anticipation: the prospect of what the next moment will bring. You’d think that might make us a bit less greedy: less determined to collect the leavings of all these moments, past and to come, and more prepared to enjoy them to the uttermost. We’re only conscious for a small part of the time allotted to us: there’ll never be any more of it, so let’s dance. 

Jack Ross

 

Jack Ross is the author of eight works of fiction and six books of poems, most recently The Oceanic Feeling (2021). He was managing editor of Poetry New Zealand from 2014-2020, and has edited numerous other books, anthologies, and literary journals. He blogs here. 

Poetry Shelf Occasional Poems: Hannah Mettner’s ‘Love poem as women’s work’

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Love poem as women’s work

There are so many tiny hitches, being a woman. I wake up and think, god, I have to wash my hair. And you know how that goes—I block the plughole again. Again, I check my breasts for lumps with conditioner running down my back. Amazing how I am destined always to find what I’m looking for. My horoscope app tells me I can be a world unto myself and I find that I already am.

Stopping in for two-for-one Tuesdays at the video store after doing the grocery shopping. Checking out something black-and-white and something for the kids, because we couldn’t afford the new release rack. What did we do before we binge-watched television? Everything was analogue then, the evenings ticking neatly to their closure. Just getting the children to bed seemed to take all night.

A blackbird flies into the window and lies twitching on the ground outside for several minutes as we watch from behind the glass. Next day it happens again, I sigh and take up the shovel. I try to forget that we live in a country of fitfully dozing volcanoes. Any of them could wake, any minute, and destroy us all. My nails are always catching on something as I stride out into the fault.

Sometimes I find myself looking at my children, nearly taller than me now, and thinking, I will be survived by them. Sometimes I find myself looking at the man I made them with and thinking, will we survive the raising of them.

Hannah Mettner

Hannah Mettner is a Wellington-based poet from Tūranganui-a-Kiwa. Her first collection, Fully Clothed and so Forgetful (VUP 2017), was longlisted for the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, and won the Jessie Mackay Award for best first book of poetry. With Sugar Magnolia Wilson and Morgan Bach, she is one of the founding editors of Sweet Mammalian. A new collection is forthcoming from THWUP in 2023.

Poetry Shelf Occasional Reviews: Sudha Rao’s On elephant’s shoulders

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On elephant’s shoulders, Sudha Rao, The Cuba Press, 2022

Poetry books are so often objects to treasure, physical treats to hold.

Sudha Rao’s On elephant’s shoulders is exactly this, with its exquisite, embroidered cover image (sorry no acknowledgement of source or creator). The interior design is equally appealing; a perfectly sized font with ample space for the poems to breathe and readers to sojourn. The title also captivates, and I especially love the fact there is neither definite nor indefinite article to support ‘elephant’. I am pirouetting on the title, imagining elephant as both anchor and viewing platform. Falling into the title, over and over. I am both grounded and liberated.

The opening poem, ‘Warp and weft’, establishes the collection as a book of arrivals and departures. It sets the scene for recurrent motifs, ideas, words, images – and I love that. The poem is divided into three parts: passages, shadows and braids. The three terms are an excellent guide to the book as a whole. I am particularly captivated by the recurring ‘braids: there are plaits, the father’s hands, the grandmother’s hair, the South Island rivers, a way of writing, a way of living between here and there, this home and that home.

“I am a bracelet of memories bearing the weight of your bones.”

from ‘Threads across waters’

The poetry, in keeping with braid notions, exudes both economy and perfumed richness, an evocative serving of detail. The detail enhances a scene, a series of relationships, poetry as musical score. The detail may be repeated, as in echoey ‘braid’, you might move from the scent of turmeric to a ‘sunflower flowering’.

What renders the collection poignant, especially in its poetic tracing of a migrant’s experience, is the presence/absence braid, whether we are talking geography, kin, food, gestures, memories. Everything feeds into a braided version of home that is near and far, intimate and longed for.

[…] When you crossed

old waters, did you know

how cold new waters would be?

from ‘Cradle’

I talked about stitching when I recently reviewed Elizabeth Morton’s terrific collection Naming the Beasts, and stitching seems appropriate here, especially bearing in mind the sublime cover. Stitching is a way of talking about poetic craft, about the little threads that are both visible and invisible parts of the art and craft of a work, in the edge and the tension. Sudha has stitched her poetry in threads that gleam of the everyday, the detail so alive with living, epiphany, challenge, but that also work behind the scenes as the poems flow like little exhalations. Measured. Mesmerising. Magnificent.

This is a collection to treasure.

“‘There is rhythm in the cabbage tree when it combs clouds.”

from ‘Keeping time’

Originally from South India, Sudha Rao migrated to Dunedin with her parents and trained in classical South Indian dance. She moved to Wellington to establish Dance Aotearoa New Zealand (DANZ). Sudha’s poems have appeared in literary journals and anthologies in New Zealand and overseas, including Ko Aotearoa Tātou | We Are New Zealand and Best New Zealand Poems. Sudha was a participant in the International Bengaluru Poetry Festival 2019 and performs in Wellington with Meow Gurrrls.

The Cuba Press page

Poetry Shelf Occasional Poems: Elizabeth Smither’s ‘The Etruscans’

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The Etruscans  

In the British Museum
I love the Etruscans best.
I thought I would be simpatico with others

more genteel, less roughly hewed
as if from sandstone, not marble
deep thinkers, at it for years

by frozen water or under chandeliers
but these rough-hewn who loved
the present moment and pleasure

are the best this afternoon
when the darkness comes at three
the hour I imagine they dance.

Elizabeth Smither

Elizabeth Smither’s new collection, ‘My American Chair’ will be published in October/November by AUP and MadHat (USA).