Skinny Dip: Poetry, eds Susan Paris & Kate De Goldi, illustrations by Amy van Luijk, Massey University Press (Annual Ink), 2021
Kate De Goldi and Susan Paris, editors of the popular and best-selling Annuals, have edited a lively, much-needed, and altogether stunning anthology of poems for middle and older readers. I review Skinny Dip:Poetry here, plus you can hear Amber Esau and Sam Duckor-Jones read a poem. (Skinny Dippage at Massey University Press)
I was so inspired I invited secondary school students to write a poem that plays with various poetic forms (as well as making it my November challenge on Poetry Box). Thanks for sending in all the terrific mahi! I have picked a few favourites from a bunch Year 9 students at St Andrews College in Ōtautahi Christchurch sent me. I love the wittiness in many of these poems, the acrostic poem where one line spills onto the next, a poem that reminds me of Bill Manhire’s magnificent ‘The 1950s’, an eerie scene, the way sports makes it in, how a handful of words can unfold like origami, how rhyme can be close and not exact, and how ideas are linked to dough. All of this and more! I am sending copies of Skinny Dip to Alisdair McCall and Olivia Glass.
The poems
Rowing (cinquain)
Deep breath STAC on my chest In and out, final beep Digging stroke, trained, built, for right now Deep breath
Thomas White
Look Out the Window (a haiku sequence)
Look out the window While I’m sitting in a chair Ideas many so
Choosing a topic A topic to think about What idea to pick
Shaped like it is dough The thing which has got me here Look out the window
Oliver Murchison
Prestigious schools love exams (acrostic)
Prestigious schools love exams A pain in my back, an Innocent pain that many times I’d love to hit with a bat or run over with a train, though Never shall I forget the pain in my back For cry’s sake, this exam should be hit with rake “Use your time and take a break” but all they really say is your education is at stake Let us take a break we students say or else I might be forced to get out the rake
Jackson Evans
Pig Hunting (free verse)
Peering over the ridgeline Intense work, getting from pig to pig Gapping it to get to the top of the fenceline
Heavy boars on the run from dogs Undertaking the hard task of carrying out the dead pig Not wanting to miss the shot with everyone watching Tactically trying to find pigs Inhaling the fresh air from the highest point Nervously waiting for the sound of a good bail up Gutting out the pigs after a big day
Olley Collet
Cricket (acrostic)
Cracking on in the middle Ready to spend 4 hours of pain Into the action Cooking in the boiling hot sun Kicking of self as we drop a catch Exhaling all voices supporting our teammates Time to eat my sushi tray
LachlanGrant
(cinquain)
Sweaty Hope I’m ready I start with some files Then large boxes, trolleys and more Sweaty
Max Barclay
November (free verse)
November, not December or September. Its the 11th month don’t you remember. It’s like spring and summer put in a blender. In terms of weather it’s the centre.
Jonty Lang
That Kid (haiku sequence)
Watch out for that kid They got the moves got the grooves Got the feet like hooves
Watch him bounce around He likes to move it move it Everywhere he goes
Watch his body go He is the clear champion He loves rock and roll
Kaelan Graham
(rhyme form)
My basketball, my artistic mat, My overalls, my tiny cat, My cosy couch, my sharp stick, My ankle ouch! My sticky ick,
My big oar, my shiny bike, My best score, my huge hike, My book a batch, my crazy catch, My red bump, my huge jump.
My cool wii, My mid-night pee, My bean bag, The huge price tag, My cuddly toys, My aussie ois.
Alisdair McCall
The Old House
Walking round all alone Looking through this empty home Sitting in a creaking chair Broken glass everywhere
Wind blowing with a gust Knocking everything over including us Pushed over towards the ground Shivering with no one else around
Don’t know what else to do Lying here in this cold dark room Eyes open with a gust of fright Someone looking at me
Been a few years since this day Still scared to walk that way Person sitting at the house Someone familiar But can’t quite remember
Mark Pirie has been writing cricket poems for a number of years. He published a booklet of cricket poems in 2008 and has now gathered a whole book together. If you are a cricket fan like me, you will be drawn to a collection that celebrates a game that captivates in both its slowness (the tests) and its speed (the T20s), its intricacies, elegance and skill. The poems consider specific matches, offer odes or tributes to beloved players, sing the praises of a sweep, swinging ball or one-handed boundary catch. There is a reflective gaze back, as memory is trawled for standout moments. Remember when. Remember how. I found myself trawling though my own cricket memories and revisiting Vivian Richards at Lord’s, listening to cricket on the transistor radio as a child, watching Richard Hadlee take one wicket after another, Martin Crowe bat.
But the joy in reading these poems is how life infuses cricket and cricket infuses life. The delight is also in how playing cricket can be aligned to writing a poem. How you might go out for a duck but it is a love of playing/ writing that matters. I read this book for the pleasure of cricket, the pleasure of poetry, and a myriad reactions animating the bridge between the one and the other.
Lost
Driving back from a book fair whites on a green field
remind me of a love now lost. It’s a while since I played.
I long for that Saturday field, can smell the whiff of leather,
the feel of stitch and seam. At the fair I’d looked at old
cricket books. They all knew. And when I arrive home, my bat
lies in the corner propped against the dresser, hidden by shadow.
November 2010
Mark Pirie was born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1974. He is the Managing Editor for HeadworX, a small press publisher of poetry/fiction. His poems have been published in India, New Zealand, Australia, Croatia, the US, Canada, Singapore, Iraq, France, Germany, and the UK. In 1998 University of Otago Press published his anthology of ‘Generation X’ New Zealand writing, The NeXt Wave. He was managing editor of, and co-edited, JAAM literary journal (New Zealand) from 1995-2005, and currently edits broadsheet: new new zealand poetry. In 2003, Salt Publishing, Cambridge, England, published his new and selected poems, Gallery: A Selection. In 2016, a new selection of his poems Rock and Roll appeared from Bareknuckle Books in Australia.
HeadworX page Mark Pirie website Poetry Shelf: Mark Pirie reads from Slip
Robyn Maree Pickens has been announced today as the 2021 winner of the Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems, in an online ceremony.
The annual competition is organised by Auckland based writing group, International Writers Workshop (also known as IWW.)
Robyn Maree Pickens has won the $1,000 prize for her sequence of poems, entitled ‘Juniper.’ Ōtepoti Dunedin poet and art writer, Robyn has been a member of IWW for two years. On receiving her award Robyn said: “As a huge fan of Vana Manasiadis’ poetry, I am incredibly honoured to win the 2021 IWW Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems. I would like to thank Vana for the time and consideration evident in her comments on all finalists’ work, and IWW for organising this prize.”
Vana Manasiadis judged the competition and described Robyn Maree Pickens’ winning entry as: “a supple, intimate, fragile and extremely powerful work. I went to places in each of the poems that I couldn’t have guessed at from the beginning, the work stranges expectation – and this is what the sublime in poetry should do – and in this case, does”.
The Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems competition has been run by IWW for thirteen years and Robyn Maree Pickens joins a list of winners including Siobhan Harvey who won in 2019 and 2020’s winner, Liz Breslin. Both Harvey and Breslin used their victories over the past two years to launch books in 2021 based on their respective winning sequences. (“Ghosts” by Siobhan Harvey and “In Bed with the Feminists” by Liz Breslin).
This year there were two runners-up, and they were announced as Kerrin Sharpe for her sequence titled ‘Te hau o te atua/The breath of heaven, and Marie McGuigan for her hybrid sequence titled: “The Goose Wing.”
Manasiadis described Kerrin Sharpe’s sequence as “an incredible work which has continued to generate multiple layers and emotional landscapes with every read; the sculpting of its physical geography is stunning and palpable”.
Manasiadis described Marie McGuigan’s sequence as “an extremely rich work with breath-taking images that come together to move in all senses – into and out of form, the past, the air, language, and always deep love and leaving.’
Manasiadis considered the task of choosing the winners a gift during this very unsettling time, and said, ‘The winners – and all the entrants – gave something of themselves in the writing of their sequences, and this was evident in the incredible quality of the year’s submissions”.
Due to Covid-19 restrictions the announcement was made via Zoom rather than at the usual in-person presentation in Auckland. IWW has been running all of its fortnightly meetings via Zoom since August so members were prepared for such circumstances. IWW has announced that its annual prizegiving has been postponed to until February 2022 when Robyn will be celebrated in person.
At the February 2022 ceremony, prizes will be given out for haiku, tanka, flash fiction, romance writing and a children’s story all of which demonstrates the breadth of writing that IWW members have learnt about and competed in through the year.
IWW President, Duncan Perkinson said: “We are absolutely thrilled for Robyn. The Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems is a prestigious prize on the New Zealand literary calendar and IWW is proud to organise it. 2021 has emphasised the importance of flexibility and throughout multiple COVID-19 lockdowns the group has still come together on a fortnightly basis to share our writing. We look forward to coming together in person 2022 to congratulate Robyn as well as all of our other winners from our writing competitions through 2021.”
About the Prize
The Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems has been made possible by a bequest from the Jocelyn Grattan Charitable Trust. It was a specific request of the late Jocelyn Grattan that her mother be recognised through an annual competition in recognition of her love for poetry and that the competition be for a sequence or cycle of poems with no limit on the length of the poems.
This is the thirteenth year IWW has had the honour of organising the Prize.
Previous winners are Liz Breslin (2020), Siobhan Harvey (2019) Heather Bauchop (2018), Janet Newman (2017), Michael Giacon (2016) Maris O’Rourke (2015), Julie Ryan (2014), Belinda Diepenheim (2013), James Norcliffe (2012), Jillian Sullivan (2011) Janet Charman and Rosetta Allan (joint winners 2010) and Alice Hooton (2009).
The Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems is sometimes referred to as the ‘Little Grattan’ as the Jocelyn Grattan Charitable Trust also funds the biennialKathleen Grattan Award, run by Landfall / Otago University Press.
About the Judge
Born in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Vana Manasiadis has been moving between Aotearoa New Zealand and Europe for the last 25 years. Her poetry experiments with hybridity and code-switching and has been translated into Greek and Italian, and she has edited and translated from Greek for Shipwrecks/Shelters, a selection of contemporary Greek poetry. In 2018 she co-edited Tātai Whetū: Seven Māori Women Poets in Translation with Maraea Rakuraku.
About IWW and Contact Details
Formed in 1976, International Writers Workshop meets twice a month in Northcote from February through November. The group hosts workshops and holds writing competitions throughout the year covering a range of topics and themes. The group aims to encourage and inspire new writers as well as more experienced writers.
Even though it was dry And cold I, Bold, Ate it After a double fish-0-fillet A passport To every deep wish Packaged in ocean blue Tucked in between The Rangi and Papa Of diet culture
I eat when I’m full Because I’m a perfectionist I’m the best I’m not stressed — I’m free I can eat like the teen I used to be In this perimenopausal body, I’m young Can still afford dumb, delightful decisions Because I have an irrepressible spirit Hedonistic Can still eat whatever, whenever And go the whole way Fuck it I’ve kicked it Says the inner junk food addict While gorging to prove She is loveable, adorable And full of it.
Selina Tusitala Marsh
Selina Tusitala Marsh (ONZM, FRSNZ) is an Auckland-based Pasifika poet of Samoan, Tuvaluan, English, Scottish and French descent. She is a former New Zealand Poet Laureate and has performed poetry for primary schoolers and presidents (Obama), queers and Queens (HRH Elizabeth II). She has published three critically acclaimed collections of poetry, Fast Talking PI (2009), Dark Sparring (2013), Tightrope (2017) and an award-winning graphic memoir, Mophead (Auckland University Press, 2019) followed by Mophead Tu: The Queen’s Poem (2020), dubbed as ‘colonialism 101 for kids’.
Doing my blogs in lockdown is both kite and anchor, a way to push Covid-19 anxiety to one side and focus on the way words sustain, delight, energise. But some days I step into bottomless dark holes and it is much harder to find the ladder leading to the light. Ah! Then like a small miracle, I pick up a new poetry book, jot down entry points, sort a new post, come up with new, challenging ideas. My blogs keep rolling, my secret writing keeps rolling, and each day is a gift.
Everyone copes with lockdown differently, both in terms of calls for caution and calls for freedom. Some writers have stalled, while others find words flowing onto the page. I decided to create a space for writing in lockdown, in Tamaki Mākaurau, Te Tai Tokerau and Kirikiriroa, inviting writers across all genres to contribute a small text. The subject matter and style were open, with a maximum of around 400 words. Rather than a piece of writing from me, I have included photographs I’ve taken since August 17th in my privileged rural lockdown haven (plus a few photos I noted by others).
Thanks to everyone who contributed! Keep safe, stay strong, and tend the connections.
Aroha nui, Paula
Zoom (Sep 18, 2021)
Today every poem that could ever be written is nesting in my body.
Poems in the dipping curve of the black wings I watch in the air as I sip my morning coffee, Spring: green leaved balcony. Elevated.
A cloudless blue sky holds light for me. Open arms. Poems unfold from their resting place where they have been waiting to be written, so soft and patient.
They take flight birds in the sky, whirling dervishes of black divinity. Fluttering heart-beated whirs of feathered feelings, so light – their wide winged dark in clarity blue.
Grace.
There is poetry to be found, even in the single slow-moving plane, lumbering, linear, able to carry its weight in only one direction.
How limited the flight paths are, that we dream of – for ourselves, as human.
And yet, still, this man-made craft has pushed past gravity. Imagined creature. It has made its way out of our minds into the sky.
Flight.
My body too, this morning, holds all of it.
The engineered crafts of man-made dreams swimming in their straight lines in the sky against all the odds.
Small acts of creation.
The swirling freedom of feathered movement miracles of imagination that preceded us – all that we are – dreamed up by a universe intelligent enough to create us.
They still do their thing in the sky. Everyday.
Flight.
My body too, this morning, transcending the limits of three dimensional physics. Arriving in this air, astral, against all forces of gravity.
I sweep across this skyline travelling in a hundred thousand soft particles, moving both in curves and straight lines.
Expanding.
Karlo Mila
Joanna Li
Written/spoken by Simone Kaho, music created/produced by Joanna Ji
A Suburban Miracle
The sun saunters down below the horizon and we’re walking home and it’s springtime. Yesterday was a study in grey. The sky met
with no resistance. Today, is defined lines. Turquoise blue cracking through eggshells, a strike of sun against the wind. We cross above
the southwestern motorway and admire the four-lane traffic, tutting at the revved-up engines as they zip from lane to lane with no flash
of an indicator. And it’s just this—over and over again. The ruby-red stop signs, peeling white paint. The pylon’s standing with their hands
on their hips. Every car radio distorting the breeze. I pull at my jumper, tug the sleeves down over my fists, just to have something to do with
my hands. The air isn’t cold—it feels like summer. And we keep walking, like spring has just begun, like we haven’t really missed it.
There are these little yellow flowers that seem to have just bloomed over the bus stop. They litter the path like lost coins. And up above—
a suburban miracle. Hiding amongst the new leaves, these three sleek parrots. Red-headed beauties, with their lime green bodies, their blue
kite tails. They take my breath away. I mean, the audacity. They shouldn’t be here, perched so casually in a tree, on the side of the main road. But
they are. And it feels like a sign—like I haven’t been paying enough attention. When we reach home, I pause at the letterbox, spin around and
look back at the distance travelled. There isn’t much light left but it’s steady, and there’s a bus coming up over the hill and tomorrow, nothing
will touch me.
Brecon Dobbie
28 Phrases of the Moon: a lockdown almanac
The state of the moon makes itself known every night.
If they can send one man to the moon, why can’t they send them all?
The same force binds the fridge magnet to the fridge that binds the moon to the earth.
The dark side of the fridge where many cockroaches cavort.
Mooning around the fridge, finally you open the door to find someone has already eaten . . .
That someone turns out to be you. You go outside, moonrise behind the roof.
If the cow jumped over it, is that why cows say moo?
What was it Rona said, that landed her on it forever?
Self-improvement: go online, learn how the moon pulls the tides.
Neap and ebb, blood and spring, wax and wane, full and new, gibbous and blue.
Scotty beamed him up and he fell back to earth with moonbeams on his face.
Ko koe he haeata o te marama
And I the moon present
Breakfast in Glen Eden music: ‘There’s such a lot of world to see . . . My huckleberry friend’ sings Louis.
Something fishy about having your moon in Pisces.
Day 17 is the time for planting new ideas in an old notebook.
The moon wags her tail – naughty moon!
Craters full of dark and light and seas full of nothing but names.
Lots of good things come out of idiocies, said Federico Fellini – hurray for lunatics!
Surface, lunar, probe, module, touchdown, the day begins to fill with names.
Dinner Music in Glen Eden: Hirini sings: ‘Whiti te marama i te pō . . . te mata o te pō’
If you believed your senses, you’d think sun and moon the same size.
Better to be an honest liar than a dishonest truthteller.
Everyone begins to look like the moon – I could be anyone.
The new moon’s arms, the cradle in which, old moon, you lie.
The moon has slim ankles, shapely calves and strong thighs
and she dances – at least she did last night.
murray edmond
To the North
Sure, we’re damned to piles and cold showers sometimes, wind rattling the screen netting like it’s some far off island—not just past the bridge. A gust here makes the house flutter
wings and feathers perch a song from the tips of branches. Pulled apart like batting, hung in the trees like ash, the pese ma le aufaipese plays on loop chanting, praying the betrayal
back towards memories and McDonalds ready for the next car load over the bridge. It’s bent until we get on, the rise and fall sloping the city behind us—hard neon lights, chocolate foil
wrappers litter the Waitematā—the mud prints at the bottom already filled with gummy water and loose scales. I’ll never dive in even if I want the vertigo. Seems way easier when the bridge
arcs a horny spine and we brake at the peak only certain of the Vā shifting with us like a me -mbrane. Are we nucleus? Well, we’re family now. The boot door half-closed over our Kmart bookcase
wind rushing in from the back, fingers lemon from gripping the cackling MDF. A car passes us and the old woman up front tracks the sucking wind all up my nape, my
god the eyes are sticky here: pudgy, sour, crusty oyster shells drummed with a knife piled high above the water and sniffing hooked lips at the cars driving back to the other side.
Amber Esau
Almost time
After daylight savings starts, the art gallery clock is out of time. At five o’clock, the clock strikes three. At two, it offers nine. At eleven o’clock, it chimes twenty-two times. The clock is not just out of sync, the wrongness of the time is different every hour. It’s only a clock, soothes my boyfriend, but I am irrationally troubled, some inner Hamlet treading the stairs of my mind at all hours, intoning the time is out of joint.
*
We left London in a hurry, because time was, as they say, of the essence. We left a Victorian flat with a clothes moth problem and a path by the river and a thousand trains that came when they said they would. We left very early in the morning with our lives in our suitcases in our hands. The light was half-asleep. We left stopped time for moving time, the pace of Auckland shockingly alive after so many months of nothing. But time is circular. Now, we sit in our front room and look out over the art gallery, where nothing and no one is moving, and watch through the window of our phones a London where the light is completely awake.
*
The first week of September. The magnolias flare white and vanish. In Albert Park, they are planting poppies in the beds, orange and yellow and pink, casting fine, clumsy shadows over each other like thoughts. The first week of October. The trees are greening over the university: Symonds Street growing its fringe out. The cherry trees flicker and fizz. The first week of November. I lie on a picnic mat, buttered by the sun, until I fall asleep and burn. Later, I soothe my shoulders with aloe. They are so bright in the mirror, they look urgent, raw with meaning. The seasons do not care for us — but then, they never did.
Maddie Ballard
77 Days
When I was at high school my Russian teacher, Mr. Meijers, told us a Chekhov story, “The Bet.”
A rich man wagers a poor one he can’t spend five years in solitary confinement without going crazy. He can ask for books, or fancy food, or anything else he wants – but he’s not allowed to talk to anyone, or go outside his room.
I do remember wondering what all the fuss was about. A few years on your own, with books and entertainment of your choice – what could be wrong with that? In fact, after that, every time I bought a book I had that in the back of my mind – being stuck in my own room under house arrest.
As the years roll by, the man in the room studies languages and learns new skills; he leaves little notes asking for more textbooks. What he isn’t told is that his host has lost most of his money, and can no longer afford to settle the bet without going bankrupt.
The rich man lives in fear of his former friend.
The night before the five years are up, the man in the room escapes through a window, leaving no note behind. Perhaps he’s found out about the loss of his friend’s fortune, and decided to let him off out of pity. Perhaps all these years of enforced confinement have finally taken their toll.
Five years is an awfully long time – a scarcely conceivable weight of days. Until now, that is.
Our present lockdown, the fourth for Tāmaki Makaurau, began at midnight on Tuesday, 17th of August. As I write, at the beginning of November, only 77 days have actually gone by. But five years adds up to – give or take a leap year or so – 1824 days!
That’s almost 24 times what we’ve had to put up with so far.
And what have I done with this time?
I boxed up my father’s remaining books and carted them across the road for a church fundraiser.
I edited a webfestchrift for my friend Michele Leggott.
I wrote some posts on my blog.
I went on a diet: I’ve lost 20 kilos so far.
Oh, and I did take the trouble to look up that story. It turns out that it isn’t five years he has to spend in the room, it’s fifteen. Not 1824 days, but 5472. Not 24, but 71 times what we’ve just been through.
No doubt we’ll soon be back to normal. It hasn’t been five years – let alone fifteen – but you can’t really call it nothing, either.
Jack Ross
I’m obsessed with boats, and lockdown proves this
In particular, my lockdown dreams prove this. But I haven’t been dreaming of luxe sailboats with white sails in perfect sea on Insta or the Med, or those little dinghies set against the wall at Herne Bay or pretty much any bay on the Waitematā. I’ve been dreaming of the big tinny past-their-prime rusty, probably oily ferries like the interislander, like the Palace. And I’ve been dreaming of making it to these ferries just in time, or of not making it and watching from the wharf. In one dream, I watched from hill-top Fira in Santorini as the night ferry cut the caldera, in another I kept slipping on the deck because the sea was beam. My mum made it onto that one as well. If I wake up feeling sick I put it down to sea-sickness, if I wake up with one of my migraines, then I must have slipped against the concrete at the port. One time I dreamt of a library instead. There were books in glass cabinets that waiters had to open, and they gave out black coffee too, espresso, and spoke in Italian. I’m not kidding, this library was in Wellington.
Vana Manasiadis
photo: Ian Wedde
The Tree Outside My Window
The old Chinaberry tree outside our bedroom window stretches two stories up across the footpath and the patio at the front of our place and shakes its pink profusions of dainty multi-clustered flower heads against the early morning glassy glint of dawn above the empty barbershop across the road where cheerful morning trims have not been happening these past few months and where the radio has been denied the company of passing cars and the muffled time-warp thud of Kevin Gilbert’s ‘The Tears of Audrey’ or some-such but why do I remember that? But now it’s the birds that wake with dawn and can be heard above the silence of no traffic and no barbershop radio where they gather among the fresh spring leaves and blossoms and big yellow bunches of Chinaberry also known as Bread Tree or Persian Lilac, Pride of India, Cape Lilac or, to be botanical, Melia azedarach — they gather among the tree’s many names that seem to silence the silence of the neglected barbershop and fill it instead with their optimistic singing about what should be happening right now, don’t remember? And when the morning scatter of last night’s leftover rice out there on the roadside has drawn its quick crowd of darty sparrows, plodding pedantic pigeons, strategic down-swooping minah birds and sometimes a gorgeous gaudy couple of rosellas — when they’re all good with cleansing beak-swipes on convenient branches of the Bread Tree, then we brew coffee and speculate on what the Morning Report will have to say while outside among the leafy branches of the Persian Lilac the sparrows that Donna tells me have sophisticated and highly evolved individual recognition capabilities are talking up the day’s chances and setting agendas and trajectories out of the Pride of India towards options elsewhere across the city where under other Cape Lilacs fresh scatters of left- over life-support are not left wanting. Melia azedarach is a Tree of Life as its many names tell us and of worlds and many flocks of sparrows with highly evolved individual recognition capabilities as noted above and so a multiverse of diverse voices and of course of wing- spans and what’s entailed thereby not least near or far horizons and even gaudy strangers whose songs and head-bobs are foreign though the tree in which they show themselves is where the familiar sparrows clean their beaks. But then it’s evening and they’re back, the birds — the sparrows without fail and the boring (sorry) pigeons but now impertinent black-and-white magpies when they so choose and I see them defer or something like nod to the sparrows whose ‘individual recognition capabilities’ are why they know when to wake us at the crack of dawn and as the sun prepares to set, like, how hard is this? Yes, Bread Tree, Persian Lilac, Cape Lilac, Pride of India, Chinaberry, tree of life and dawning, Melia azedarach, we’re open for whatever news comes like it or not.
Ian Wedde
Martian Wedding
Henry says his sister, the Queen of Mars, is getting married. Even though he is eight, he cackles at the news like an old man. His sister Marsha is 18, but teenaged brides are usual on Mars. We are in our silver hatchback crawling over the harbour bridge in the hot sun. Henry is an only child and now siblings punctuate his stories like satellites.
We hold the wedding in our backyard. I bake a chocolate cake with Henry in the afternoon. I buy sprinkles from the supermarket, and Henry decorates the cake with pink love hearts, and tiny, white and peach pearls, because it is a wedding cake. I wonder about gently instilling parental advice, about exploring life before marrying anyone.
We put on our winter jackets and go sit out on camping chairs, on the wooden platform before our small square of lawn in front of the neighbor’s. I light beeswax candles and we take out the cake, and L&P, and jelly dinosaurs that Henry decides he doesn’t like. It is dark. I play Space Oddity on my phone.
Henry is the M.C. and is going to make a welcome speech.
“I’ve never made a speech before,” he says.
“You’ll be great,” I tell him.
When Marsha arrives, she wears a red dress, to symbolize her home planet. She marries a Martian with bright orange skin and gold hair. The Moon rises down the side of the house, full and white. We eat cake. We dance to David Bowie singing, ‘Ís there life on Mars?’.
Even with one thousand Martian guests, I win a prize for being the best dancer.
Henry says, “Are we family?”. He means that his Dad and I are together, but not married. We have lived together for over a year; Henry lives with us every second week.
“Um, I think so”, I say, “I think of you and your Dad as my family.”
That night I dream of my past wedding. Me at 25, wearing a pink dress, with a chocolate wedding cake, and how my Dad was still alive. How certain I was. The pain wakes me, rising from the depths of my psyche.
How love causes us to face painful things, like the shine of impact glass on a red planet.
Tulia Thompson
You might think a children’s book author would find the longest sentence a difficult traverse. Instead, I float languidly, bathing in the still waters of time. Time barely moves – no distraction, no heavy pull of urgent tides to bring me back to shore. I have time to weigh words. Measure the weight – one against the other. Concrete or air. Or a question of syllables that fit to some sound. A sitar that strums in my ear.
Long sips of black coffee. Long walks through shadows of trees. Shoes wet from long grass.
Long nights, the train trudges past, its empty carriages are sighing, what is our purpose now?
The long distance of family and friends, no hugging, no touch makes words more meaningful. The longest conversations with: my son, who is now jobless, plants seeds in his rented backyard; a fellow student from a class I am taking – in one afternoon, I learn more about her than I have all year; my sister has a lung condition, she’s had it for years, she finds breathing difficult, this virus air can kill her, she’s stressed, I give the wrong advice when I say, take a long, deep breath; my mother repeats recipes, cumin, coriander, tumeric; a stranger who by conversation’s end is like a long-time friend. She has read a good book, she tells me the plot. It’s about a found journal, a long-lost lifestory rescued from a dumpster. I may never read the book, the tiny piece of story fills my mind and floats with me.
Vasanti Unka
28th October 2021
11:32 am
Feeling better today, took yesterday off work to let the second vaccine settle. Sore arm, headache and lethargy. My wonky type one diabetic immune system pounced on it. Serves me well for doing right. Back behind the desk today, “Contractor” letters coming in advising my team to be on site, double vaccine and negative PCR test before attending, becoming the norm.
Pen and Dan have popped out. I’ve put Mandolin Orange on the turntable and catching up on yesterday’s emails. This mahi has taken me away from poetry. Paula asked me to write to this kaupapa – so here it is, a break in routine. To sit and reflect, not narcissus I hope, but contemplation, ioe, looking back.
My grandmother Edwina was born during the “Spanish Lady” outbreak in Apia, no Jacinda led government to protect her, our Aiga, our beautiful people. Aotearoa is moving on from elimination, to a risk assessment of a ninety percent vaccinated cohort.
Our son Daniel has been away from his class for too long – we see it in his temperament, his sullen moments, he turned 9 on October 3rd. I was 9 in Tulaele with my Grandmother, translating her world, Dan is in lock down translating the future.
Pen and I are doing our best, she keeps me afloat on the days I want to drag myself ashore and beach. Life in the time of lock down was not the future I saw for us. Pen has made new pathways. She is navigator and artist. Pen is protecting our whanau; her paintbrushes are hammers!
I better get back to it, my manager is calling, breaking my reflection into a million pieces…
2:04 pm
I am waiting in the lobby of a Zoom meeting with a clinical engineering department of a DHB I shall not name. They are late!
Zoom, Teams, Skype – this is the stuff of science fiction from my childhood right, I mean Star Trek
Shit, it’s started…gotta go
2:57 pm
Interruptions and fractures, it is the new normal – “locked down” – stay on your toes, anything can happen!
Writing poetry in lock down is near impossible – I read Nick Cave related nobody wants to expose their families and partners to the horror of an artist at work – I agree!
That reminds me it’s Halloween on Sunday; my son Parone Vincent’s 23rd Birthday!
I’m tired, think I’ll end my working day early – all things going well – who knows if I’ll be interrupted?
Mauri Ola!
Doug Poole
Possession
She sits in front of me Mouth agape, hands splayed Eyes wide and flickering A static zombie
The others are too In our little boxes we choreograph our techno egregores
I study her The other voices float beside me in broken chunks as my binary code usurper pixelates and shifts
Poised now, hands in her lap She nods when I do and plays the part of listening so well
Her smile is made from my teeth My crow’s feet ripple when she pulls my face into her reactions I observe as she takes over She puppeteers me through the screen
She controls my flailing tongue My thick thumbed twitter typos Poses and preens my features in the front camera
I am just source material Her virtual tendrils have captured me and she knows that object permanence is fleeting If we cease to post, we cease to exist
We merge into the imaginary
dislocated and glitchy and sprawling The gaps between my code are widening Porous, endlessly scrolling changing shapes and being sucked in tapping on glass and yelling
Can you hear me?
The ultra-fibre bridge is crumbling My rain fade is swelling
Are you there?
Bianca Rogers-Mott
The Open Sky Is In Your Mouth
exhale inherited in my chest I learn how to untrap it ease it down to my stomach and expand
church is the open sky in your mouth where saliva is warm with mother’s breath where memories are not riddled by illness are always true, in the moment
land as fetus mother that cannot be contained unbinding from inherited trauma releasing generations
may we be like water the flood that cooled the fever that made the world hot and exposed its wounds
Grace Iwashita Taylor
Lockdown delivery
A feral cat ricochets through my house. A marmalade bullet with frantic topaz eyes. Dives between the divan and southwest bedroom wall. She’s queening. Hunkers. Self-soothes with purrs.
Pants.
Organza curtains swell. Lift embroidered leaves into winter’s retreating bluster. Empty and fall. The cat trembles. Raises her swollen belly.
Wails.
Little Cat. Little Cat. Little Cat! I’ll help you. Promise.
Little Cat hisses. Crawls into the shadowy recess between drawers.
Shrieks and shrieks.
I record her travail. Contact the local vet. Press Play.
“Bring her in,” says reception. “Ring the clinic from your car upon arrival. Make a contactless delivery. Lockdown rules. You can’t come in.”
It’s Level Four. I’m self-isolating. Complete questionnaires for Covid-19 contact tracers every morning. Can’t deliver wedged kittens to a vet. Can’t receive visitors.
I’m not accustomed to delivering cats. Lie on the divan. Tentatively lower an arm, an exploratory tentacle, into the hissing void.
… Retrieve what’s left of it.
Retreat.
One more negative swab, Little Cat. That’s all I need for a release call.
Little Cat squeals.
Delivers.
Serie Barford
microclimate
from the inside it doesn’t even seem like a storyline another day’s luck piles up by the front door at least i have a front door lukewarm comfort
brittling bones and news about britney being the awkward dawn chorus guest when i know i’m the species fucking this up and i can’t work out how to stop
in la nina in my neighbourhood the water reaches from dirt into deep space with air you could drink, but never cool off in every green thing on fire with new life
and dark lumps of clouds your mood models tropical lowering a storm that can never get it together enough to happen
the only thing dry is the lightning and your matching set of accusations cat claws from behind the curtains just for hell of it letting the hell spill out a bit on the kitchen floor in fluro pink
and then clean it up and trudge on through this slow-mo crash of a day fever dreams and zoom meeting makeup and waiting to rain
Stephanie Christie
I’m my favourite imaginary friend. I wouldn’t tell everyone especially children – so exacting around grownups. My IF doesn’t have a name. I just call them IF or If for short. I use them/they for If partly because my non-IFs are mostly, she/her/hers/he/his/hims, and I can’t imagine these thems as anything but what they virtually are. One thing I’ll say about If: they’ve dubbed me ‘The I That Can’t Say No’. I can be rather maybe, I’ll get back to you, but before you can muddy me a martini, I’m at the bar or in the cinema, that place we used to go Pre-C, sit in the dark with many other people and escape into imaginary worlds. The real me has always been quite iffy.
I’m my favourite fairy tale. Sometimes I’m the Big Bad Wolf in leathers on my big bad motorbike à la Tom of Finland huffing an’ puffing on a Bourbon Flava-Vape. Sometimes I’m Rapunzel with long blond hair which I won’t let down in case I’m let down when I let up. Cliches are the stuff of fairy telling. I’ve always had a soft spot for that princess with the pea although in the early a.m. this is more Grimm than gorgeous with paracetamol and a hottie for the lower back. I’m quite often Prince Charming. I wear shapely silver tights with crystal slippers and write sonnets on my dark youth. I’ve yet to kiss Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella. Sometimes I’m Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, and Prince Charming (also I) hovering with pink lips puckered for the kiss of life, love, but not happily ever after. That’s one fairy tale too once upon a time far, far away for me.
I’m my favourite porn star.
I’m hardly well known, never had a huge online presence but if I did my porn name would be, apparently, PussPussPuss Westwood Terrace. Not quite West Hollywood, although when there in the mid-80s I do recall a certain popularity. They adored my Down Under accent. I spent a lot of time humming m m MM-mmm – HEY- m m m m-m M mmm. Madonna and I are both from large Italian Catholic families. So candid the Yankees. That time in the hot tub in San Fran when Drew drawled, “Micky, I find you very attractive. I just wanna know what you’re gonna do about it”. Still gives me a giggle.
Michael Giacon
Olivia Macassey ‘Testament‘ 2021.
Large format print, paper, wood (841 x 1200 mm). In A Pandemic Moment in Time, Oct 2021–Jan 2022, Quest Gallery, Whangārei, curated by Filani Macassey.
On Egretta sacra in descent
On the descent of Pacific reef herons from a magnolia of night along their endless curves of desire, its gossamer threads
The electric ocean charges / discharges as a wild north-eastern sea collides in foam of argument over Mangawhai Heads dune cliff harbour mouth rocky reef tidal current vector confluence
On the sheltered side, young pied shags in pōhutukawa roost drop their bright white splashes onto Pseudopanax below On the open coast side Taranga incises the wind
Te Whara headland lies long brooding distant and the low shoulders of Marotere Islands huddle
these sanctuaries all blazing natural profusions bird song streams off in visible swirls of braided chords
At the kinetic confluence kite surfers dance on pulsing waves of air on lookers in awe of the aerial acrobatics
The fine sands trap easily in our eyes bringing tears so we turn, walk back, heads bowed in the maelstrom Back at the holiday park we arrange a meal in the camp cookhouse, simple pasta and vegetables despite the mid-winter there are people here to chat with locals who home-school their children in lockdown
In the wind there’s blood, it shifts, sorts, sifts, re-sorts the flesh of the world layers of surfaces buried beneath are opened up torn, cut, into skin, in the forest of gone fall flowers of light, ambitious clouds in torment
The peninsula post
For now all is quiet on the Waitangi front. Below Rakaumangamanga cascades of bays melt in the summer sun. From giant fig shade, varieties of human experience and ultra-violet exposure emerge and dissolve into shimmering heat on Oneroa/Long beach.
A trilogy titled Bay Belle, Waitere Blue and Happy Ferry cross and criss from Paihia to here and back and back again here to Kororāreka. The R Tucker Thompson, a gaff rigged schooner under full sail cruises out on another afternoon from the hell hole of the Pacific. Now it’s a goulash of tourist accents and barely gravid honeymooners holding hands, holding conversation, holding berry blossoms of ice creams from the devilishly devilish parlour.
A duo in kayaks paddles over to that quiet beach below those cliffs. Outside the Duke, still refreshing rascals and reprobates since 1827, we toast deliciously (again) on the late afternoon gravel beach splashing into it, in to the pale silvery green, looking across to Waitangi at 2021 (again).
Through spreaders of yacht masts, flag poles, ship yardarms and gull wings our bodies stretch out reptilian under the pōhutukawa grey. On another day (again) luckier than we care to imagine, we watch the water through the trees. The waves carry the full moon through the branches, a tuna glances up
PietNieuwland
No Worries
I’m not really here today – only my worries remain Mum and dad are fighting again hotly contesting the latest news there’s money in anger they say but the worries are yours for free.
They don’t want the old normal gone as if we’d achieved something great the ones at the top always telling us so even though the rest of us know nothing ever really changes cos the worries always remain.
Melinda Szymanik
lockdown
lockdown. he raka iho. hōhā.
how do we circumvent such cloisture?
lockdown. te raka iho. tino hōhā.
when will we slip such smother?
e kāore mātou e pīrangi tēnei aukatinga
more like lock-up.
engari
e kāore hoki mātou e pīrangi te huaketo.
ka mate mātou he aha koa.
locked away forever.
[e kāore mātou e pīrangi tēneiaukatinga – we do not want this restriction]
[engari e kāore hoki mātou e pīrangi te huaketo – but nor do we want the virus]
[ka mate mātou he aha koa – we will die no matter what]
tahi kupu anake
i he ao ki nui ngā kaitōrangapūpōrangi i he ao ki nui ngā tangata rawakore i he ao whakamahana o te ao ko tūmanako te kupu.
i he ao ki nui ngā pakanga i he ao o whakakonuka me apo i he ao ki te mate ā-moa o ngā kararehe ko tūmanako te kupu.
ko tūmanako te kupu anake ko tūmanako te kupu ko tūmanako.
[only one word in a world of many mad politicians in a world of many destitute people in a world of global warming
hope is the word. in a world of many wars in a world of corruption and greed in a world of the extinction of animals
hope is the word. hope is the only word hope is the word hope.]
Vaughan Rapatahana
Out, in
I breathe out, in.
The rose sky bends down to touch the glassy water as I walk my 10,000 steps. The thin fabric of my mask sucks in and out with my breath. In and out with the tide.
In lockdown, I am an astronaut, the term used for migrants who fly to a different country for work while their families stay put. Moving between Level 2 and 3 is an overseas border crossing.
I wear scrubs to look the part of an essential worker. In Wellsford, I use the toilet and the free wifi outside McDonald’s. Then on my passenger seat I line up the items I know I’ll be asked for at the checkpoint: hospital ID, letter from my manager, roster, photo ID, evidence of last Covid test.
When I am overseas, my father rings me: hello? hello? when are you coming back? I need lollies. Urgently.
I breathe out, in.
My father has dementia. The glassy tide, once so full and splashing with life, is receding and layer by layer he is being uncovered. Now parts of his childish self are easily visible: he can’t resist opening packet after packet of his favourite sweets, gorging himself until they’re gone. When that happens, he picks up the phone to order more from his daughters.
We took away his keys so he couldn’t drive. Once, frustrated I was away and wouldn’t be back for two days, he tried walking to the dairy himself for lollies. He was found by a neighbour 100 metres from our house, having tripped and fallen. He spent the day in hospital having a brain scan to make sure there was no bleeding.
An hour is a year for my father. But a minute is too long to remember that he’s already called me.
I breathe out, in.
My father’s tide is still full enough to reflect the life around him. In my kitchen, he stands without needing his stick, closely observing as we bustle through dinner preparations. By close, I mean he gets told off by my mother for getting in the way.
‘I just like to watch you making food,’ he tells her.
Later, after they’ve eaten and collected their hugs from the grandchildren and headed home, I get an email. ‘Hi, Dad here, dinner was very good tonight. I’ll enjoy the leftovers for lunch tomorrow. Thank you.’
The receding tide has uncovered politeness and humility. Now, he always calls or emails to say he appreciates what we did. He does it right away, minutes after we’ve dropped off food or medicines, as if knowing that the minutes will slip away if he doesn’t.
The minutes slip away for all of us: most of us just forget that they do. Breathe out, in.
The daylight is nearly gone as I complete my walk. On the bridge, lights flicker into being, helping walkers see the path.
Breathe out, in.
Renee Liang
Amber Esau is a Sā-māo-rish writer (Ngāpuhi / Manase) born and raised in Tāmaki Makaurau. She is a poet, storyteller, and amateur astrologer. Her work has been published both in print and online.
Bianca Rogers-Mott (she/her) is a pākeha writer based in Kirikiriroa, and though she has a BA in English Lit from the Univesity of Waikato, she finds it increasingly difficult to write bios about herself. She enjoys writing about the monstrous feminine and delights in upsetting the traditional feminine stereotypes written by old white men. You can find more of her work in Starling Mag, if you like.
Brecon Dobbie finds poetry to be her place of solace. She writes to make sense of things, often without meaning to. Some of her work has appeared in Minarets Journal, Starling, Love in the Time of COVID Chronicle and Poetry New Zealand Yearbook.
Doug Poole is of Samoan (Ulberg Aiga of Tula’ele, Apia, Upolo) and European descent and resides in Waitakere City, Auckland, New Zealand. His work has been published in numerous Pacific and international literary journals and anthologies, and he serves as editor and publisher of the online poetry journal blackmail press.
Grace Iwashita-Taylor, breathing bloodlines of Samoa, England and Japan. An artist of upu/words led her to the world of performing arts. Dedicated to carving, elevating and holding spaces for storytellers of Te Moana nui a Kiwa. Recipient of the CNZ Emerging Pacific Artist 2014 and the Auckland Mayoral Writers Grant 2016. Highlights include holding the visiting international writer in residence at the University of Hawaii 2018, Co-Founder of the first youth poetry slam in Aoteroa, Rising Voices (2011 – 2016) and the South Auckland Poets Collective and published collections Afakasi Speaks (2013) & Full Broken Bloom (2017) with ala press. Writer of MY OWN DARLING commissioned by Auckland Theatre Company (2015, 2017, 2019) and Curator of UPU (Auckland Arts Festival 2020 & Kia Mau Festival 2021). Currently working on next body of work WATER MEMORIES.
Ian Wedde lives in Auckland with his wife Donna Malane. His most recent books are a novel The Reed Warbler (VUP 2020) and a book of poems, The Little Ache – a German Notebook (VUP 2021).
Jack Ross’s latest book is The Oceanic Feeling (Salt & Greyboy Press, 2021). He recently retired from Massey University, where he’s been teaching writing for the past 25 years, in the hopes of getting time to do a bit more of it himself.
Joanna Ji, 24-year-old artist and music creator: I’ve found comfort in creating music/sounds that communicate feelings that are hard to put in words, using art/music as a refuge. Simone and I sometimes exchange work, and when she first sent me this beautiful poem my mind was instantly taken to this piano piece I had composed resting in my archives that I wanted to offer as I thought it would canvas perfectly with the mood and rhythm of her healing and comforting words. I immensely enjoy within my friendship with Simone the wonderful feeling when someone manages to put words to that seemingly un-wordable feeling that I typically express in music.
Karlo Mila is a New Zealand-born poet of Tongan and Pākehā descent with ancestral connections to Samoa. She is currently Programme Director of Mana Moana, Leadership New Zealand. Karlo received an MNZM in 2019 for services to the Pacific community and as a poet, received a Creative New Zealand Contemporary Pacific Artist Award in 2016, and was selected for a Creative New Zealand Fulbright Pacific Writer’s Residency in Hawaii in 2015. Goddess Muscle is Karlo’s third book of poetry. Her first, Dream Fish Floating, won NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book of Poetry Award at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards in 2006.
Maddie Ballard is a writer from Tāmaki Makaurau. By day, she works as the deputy editor of dish magazine, but she is always trying to get more poetry into her life. You can read more of her work at Starling, The Pantograph Punch, The Oxford Review of Books, or on her blog.
Melinda Szymanik is an award-winning writer of picture books, short stories and novels for children and young adults. She was the 2014 University of Otago, College of Education, Creative New Zealand, Children’s Writer in Residence, held the University of Otago Wallace Residency at the Pah Homestead in 2015, and was a judge for the 2016 NZCYA Book Awards.
Michael Giacon During these months of lockdown, poet Michael Giacon has found himself taking flights of the fanciful in a burgeoning series entitled either Playing Favourites or Avoidance Therapy. Plenty of time to decide.
Murray Edmond: b. Kirikiriroa 1949, lives in Glen Eden, Tāmaki-makau-rau. 15 books of poetry (Shaggy Magpie Songs, 2015, Back Before You Know, 2019 and, forthcoming, FARCE); book of novellas (Strait Men and Other Tales, 2015); Then It Was Now Again: Selected Critical Writing (2014); editor, Ka Mate Ka Ora; dramaturge for Indian Ink Theatre. Time to Make a Song and Dance: Cultural Revolt in Auckland in the 1960s was published by Atuanui Press, 2021.
Olivia Macassey’s poems have appeared in Poetry New Zealand, Takahē, Landfall, Brief, Otoliths, Rabbit and other places. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and The Burnt Hotel (Titus). Her website.
Piet Nieuwland is a poet and visual artist who lives near Whangarei on the edge of the Kaipara catchment. His poetry and flash fiction has been published in Aotearoa New Zealand and internationally in numerous print and online journals including Landfall, Atlanta Review, Sky Island Journal, Otoliths and Taj Mahal Review. This year, his book, As light into water was published by Cyberwit and Fast Fibres Poetry 8 has just been launched, co-edited with Olivia Macassey. He appears in Creative Conservation New Holland and Take Flight, a new anthology of Whangarei poets. An exhibition of his drawings, painting and poetry A look back to now was recently held at Hangar Gallery in Whangarei. website
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.
Serie Barford was born in Aotearoa to a German-Samoan mother and a Pālagi father, and grew up in West Auckland. She has published poems online and in journals, along with four previous collections. In 2011 she was awarded the Seresin Landfall Writer’s Residency and in 2018 the Pasifika Residency at the Michael King Writers’ Centre. Serie promoted her collections Tapa Talk and Entangled Islands at the 2019 International Arsenal Book Festival in Kiev. Sleeping With Stones was launched during Matariki, 2021.
Simone Kaho is the author of Lucky Punch, and is the 2021 IIML Emerging Pasifika Writer in Residence.
Stephanie Christie makes poetry in the form of page poems, text art, installations, theatre, video and sound works. She recently shared 3D poems in the Mesoverse and in the Kotahitanga project. She’s obsessed with how it feels to be an animal half-buried in language.
Tulia Thompson is of Fijian, Tongan and Pākehā descent. She has produced poetry, creative non-fiction and the children’s fantasy Josefa And The Vu; and an essay included in Life on Volcanoes – Contemporary Essays. She is working on a collection of personal essays.
Vana Manasiadis is back in Tāmaki Makaurau after her spell in Ōtautahi. She was 2021 Ursula Bethell Writer-in-Residence at Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha Canterbury University. Her most recent book was The Grief Almanac: A Sequel (Seraph Press).
Vasanti Unka is an award winning children’s book writer, designer and illustrator noted for the originality of her storytelling and her riotously colourful and inventive illustrations. In 2021 she won the Arts Foundation Mallinson Rendel Laureate Award for Illustration. Vasanti lives in suburban Auckland.
Vaughan Rapatahana (Te Ātiawa) commutes between homes in Hong Kong, Philippines, and Aotearoa New Zealand. He is widely published across several genres in both his main languages, te reo Māori and English, and his work has been translated into Bahasa Malaysia, Italian, French, Mandarin, Romanian, Spanish. Additionally, he has lived and worked for several years in the Republic of Nauru, PR China, Brunei Darussalam, and the Middle East. He has participated in several international festivals including Colombia’s Medellin Poetry Festival, The Poetry Interntaional Festival at London’s Southbank and World Poetry Recital Night, Kuala Lumper. Vaughan’s new poetry collection is entitled ināianei/now (Cyberwit).
A few weeks ago I invited writers across all genres from Tāmaki Makaurau, Te Tai Tokerau and Waikato to contribute a piece of writing they have written during lockdown 2021. They could write on any subject, in any style, and around 400 words or so. On Friday I am posting my lockdown gathering, but I am launching the project with a longer piece by fiction writer Leanne Radojkovich, on this day Aucklanders can return to bookshops.in person.
Lockdown stone henge
… Infantile Paralysis. Black headlines in the paper, listing the number of cases, the number of deaths…
I re-read Janet Frame’s story soon after lockdown. Rumours circled the burning world. I circled the neighbourhood, circled the neighbourhood, walked until… Everything exhausted us. Cracks appeared in the earth.
I circled the suburb, the mountain, the summit: the view is immense, then down the mountain, the road around the base. Eleven tūī had turned a flowering cherry into an aviary, darting and dive-bombing, bell calls, coos and krrrks, shaking the branches, blossoms shimmering, petals floating.
The daily round, circling the neighbourhood, the phone alarm for the one o’clock news; numbers of community cases, of people in ICU. Lacing up my trainers, putting on my mask, walking the left-hand perimeter of my suburb. A mountain on the left, a lake on the right.
The schools did not reopen. Our lessons came by post, in smudged print on rough white paper; they seemed makeshift and false, they inspired distrust. The story I’d been writing died. Nothing new sparked.
Lacing up my trainers. The mountain. The one o’clock news.
The streets are empty in the mornings. I walk down the middle of the road making no sound. I cover five kilometres in a strange quiet textured with bird calls and breezes.
One o’clock; community cases, ICU, locations of interest.
… the lesson papers sometimes covered with unexplained blots of ink as if the machine which had printed them had broken down or rebelled… The pages of my exercise book fill with squiggles, cross hatches, tiny circles that congregate like a mass of fish eggs.
Two weeks, three.
I start re-reading the last book I’d finished before lockdown, where Derek Jarman recites the names of plants like a rosary: iris, calendula, curry plant, rue. I reach through a scrawny hedge and snap off geranium flowers. Plant succulents plucked from a river stone garden that lines a stranger’s driveway. I take a stone. I take two. Jarman collects stones and makes little henges … the stones a notation for long-forgotten music, an ancestral round to which I add a few new notes each morning. Sometimes I walk with my partner and name the plants we pass: nasturtiums, azaleas, gazanias. I don’t know how I know their names. I’m not a gardener. All I can think is that they were imprinted in childhood, from hearing Mum talk about them. She’s no longer here to check, maybe I’ve misremembered, but the chant continues… lavender, fuschia, lobelia.
If not an ancestral round, then this is a familial one, maternal. I take a river stone for Mum. I’m growing a stone garden.
Five weeks. A woman is murdered on the mountain. She walked regularly; early in the morning, earlier than me. I check security camera footage on the news, she stands on a street on my route, at the base of the mountain, the mountain I circle every day, yet I have not seen her before. A terrible sadness cuts into me. I find the heaviest stone I can in a pile of rocks beside the railway lines and set it down carefully in my henge, shifting the others to keep the shape. Stones of sadness, of remembrance, in a circle on the deck.
On one side the mountain, on the other the lake. I walk down the main road, which I never normally do because of the noise and stink of cars and trucks. But now, stillness, a green spritz of pine scent. I pause in the middle of the overpass and look down at the motorway’s vacant lanes, then a car, then emptiness.
I reach the lake and circle it. Hatchlings stumble and skitter, inky black powderpuffs. Baby pūkeko tumble along. Grey candyfloss cygnets glisten in the sun.
Transplanted tansy and gathered seed. Oh fuck everything! The phone is going again: One o’clock update, community cases rise. The border remains in place… for weeks. For months? When will I see my children again?
A new exercise book, the blank first page. I pick up my pen, then put it down. Everything is shutting down, even the doodling, which sometimes turned into words.
Trainers, mask, overpass, lake. I make friends with an eel. It lies in the water as if lounging on a sofa. It has white lips and blue eyes, and stares at me. Its mouth moves as if telling, asking, instructing … but the words remain in the eel’s liquid world, I can’t hear them in my world of air. I pick up a rough stone near the path. Jarman writes that his garden is a memorial, each circular bed and dial a true lover’s knot – planted with lavender, helichrysum and santolina. He has been diagnosed HIV positive and developed his garden until he died years later.
Six weeks, seven. I stop listening to the one o’clock news.
I snap off lavender cuttings on the way to the lake and slip them into my pocket. The cygnets have grown and their short necks lengthened. They wobble along like puppets whose strings are out of alignment. Wet, arrow-shaped pūkeko footprints cross the dry asphalt. I follow them. They turn down a path I haven’t walked before. I continue past a barbecue pit, past a pond with a massive overhanging kōwhai tree whose flowers paint the pond yellow. Then there is a clearing in a kānuka grove – The Circle of Friends, an HIV/AIDS memorial garden, names inscribed in a stone circle.
Week nine. I put away the exercise book.
Today I saw a monarch butterfly land on a cosmos flower. Resting or dying, I couldn’t tell. It had worn-looking wings. They didn’t move. The trees are in bright green leaf; the borage is humming with bees.
Our lessons came by post… they seemed make-shift and false… they could not compete with the lure of the sun still shining, swelling...
I have my own small henge which I’ll circle with terracotta pots of lavender. The cuttings are in a glass of water on the windowsill. Every morning I check – papery bumps are forming. They give the same sense of promise that a new story would. Soon the stems will send out squiggly notes.
#
Leanne Radojkovich
Quotes from: The Reservoir: Stories and Sketches (1963), Janet Frame. Modern Nature (1991), Derek Jarman.
Leanne Radojkovich’s short story collections Hailman and First fox are published by The Emma Press. Her stories have most recently appeared in Best Small Fictions 2021, ReadingRoom and Turbine|Kapohau. Leanne has Dalmatian heritage and was born in Kirikiriroa. She now lives in Tāmaki Makaurau where she works as a librarian. Her website. Twitter @linedealer
The Baby Shark Song eats the part of me that cares
for rhythm, for pattern. Time is a parent on leave, retired even.
What an age to be alive, I sigh to my partner while playing a live
stream of a writer I admire (her face fits my palm). I turn the screen
to show him and imagine my camera has shown him steaming from the shower
where our son hammers the glass with a plastic orca and chants
the words stuck in our shared head. How does the Duchess know
Alice is thinking? he asks. I say I can tell when he’s thinking.
Now? His focus relaxes. Yes.
No! It was a trick. He wasn’t thinking,
just looking. Thoughts are made,
looking is a sort of finding, knitting is done, dreams are suffered,
and listening to your mother read Alice inWonderland
is in between. Is it possible to behead something
bodiless? I ask. Of course not. He’s learning independence.
The balding Sylvanian badger once belonged to me. I’d have it
speak to that same grey rabbit. He’s built them a magnetic castle.
Mine was a red-roofed doll’s house handmade by Grandad (ready to go—
now gone). Badger says to Rabbit, It’s not lockdown here, so come on
inside and have a nice glass of wine. It’s a good game, my son explains
You’d like it because there’s no fighting.
I like watching the show Alone because Vancouver Island
is a limpid coastline of the general wild. Those whining men
living off limpets while yearning for buckets of chicken gradually
know they’ll never be rescued. A boat might deliver them
back to families, places where lost fat is found, but there will always be want.
So, I tell my only child we must learn to play alone—
to shape a shelter from fallen branches, snack on oxalis and set traps to catch fathers.
Amy Brown
Amy Brown was born in Hawkes Bay and now lives in Melbourne. Her latest poetry collection, Neon Daze, a verse journal of the first four months of motherhood, was one of the Saturday Paper‘s 2019 books of the year. She is also the author of The Odour of Sanctity, The Propaganda Poster Girl, and Pony Tales, a series of children’s novels.
The Auckland Writers Festival is a strong supporter of poetry in Aotearoa, hosting a variety of events that feature poets from across generations, locations, styles, genres. You will find poets in conversation, in performance, on mixed panels, in outdoor street settings. Poetry is such a key part of many our literary festivals, I was delighted when Kasandra Hart-Kuamoana and Bridget van de Zijpp from the the Auckland’s literary festival agreed to pick some poems.
Hotel Emergencies, Bill Manhire
I love the way Bill Manhire’s poem, Hotel Emergencies, starts off with a gentle playfulness and a mild sense of internal panic and then spirals out to something much darker and concerned about state of the world. I once saw Bill reading it, saying he was inspired by a notice in a Copenhagen hotel room, and it stuck with me so firmly that forever after whenever I saw a badly translated notice near the door of a hotel room I would think of this poem. (Bridget)
When they ask you where you are really from, Mohamed Hassan
I was overseas when the mosque shootings occurred and from so far away I had only glimpses of how the tragedy was opening up a new dialogue here about racism and belonging. Then, on returning home, I picked up Mohamed Hassan’s collection, National Anthem, and was so moved by the profound intelligence of it, and the way he quietly breaks hearts with his beautiful way of expressing both resistance and recognition, and also tenderness and yearning, warmth and defiance. His reading of ‘When they ask you where you are really from’, which can be found online, is transfixing. (Bridget)
High Country Weather, James K Baxter
Is an Ockham’s razor for lockdown frustration and fatigue. Considered a Kiwi classic by many, and it’s no wonder. Baxter’s call to conquer anger and frustrations, to weather the storm, and to “surrender to the sky / your heart of anger” reads so much like incantation. It takes me down memory lanes of high-country alps, and my home region – through Waitomo Caves, to Rangitoto and Wharepapa South. The speaker recognises the value in never losing sight of the briefest semblance of beauty. The speaker also considers this practice to be an imperative, a survival technique. Where the very act of choosing to “yet see the red-gold cirrus / over snow mountain shine” seems like the utmost act of defiance. I celebrate this and a handful of Baxter’s other early works for their covert rebellion. Their giant phlex of negative capability. (Kasandra)
Eulogy, Ruby Solly
To me, the poem reads like whakatauki on the powerful nature of father and daughter – made even more powerful when explored in this form, and so poignantly. Its voice tends to me. Telling me to walk in both worlds. To grapple with internal conflicts and harness understanding through the wielding of ink and paper, mind and memory – within the external world. It sings of a journey toward catharsis, an accomplishment of the same, and I love that it reminds us how powerful the act and gift of writing is for the pursuit of understanding and reconciliation. (Kasandra)
Ruth Dallas, ‘Pioneer Women with Ferrets’
I use this poem to draw strength from days of old. From three or four, or more, generations ago. See the vignettes of daily life, and the fortitude of pioneers versus now. Be inspired. Let the old photographs that fill your mind with the roads of the road builders, and the hunt and the huntsmen and women, and the strife and the weather worn clothes, trickle into your spirit. Remember that once-upon-a-time tradies never used to have Tough Hands or WorkSafe! This poem stares with stark, steadfast eyes. An urging for my overdue stocktake of my whakahautanga (self-mastery), I use this poem in times of disillusionment to fortify, survive, and soldier on. (Kasandra)
The poems
Pioneer Woman with Ferrets
Preserved in film As under glass, Her waist nipped in, Skirt and sleeves To ankle, wrist, Voluminous In the wind, Hat to protect Her Victorian complexion, Large in the tussock She looms, Startling as a moa. Unfocused, Her children Fasten wire-netting Round close-set warrens, And savage grasses That bristle in a beard From the rabbit-bitten hills. She is monumental In the treeless landscape. Nonchalantly swings In her left hand A rabbit, Bloodynose down. In her right hand a club.
Ruth Dallas
from Walking on the Snow, Caxton Press, 1976. Published with kind permission from the Ruth Dallas Estate
High Country Weather
Alone we are born And die alone Yet see the red-gold cirrus Over snow-mountain shine
Upon the upland road Ride easy, stranger: Surrender to the sky Your heart of anger.
James K Baxter
from Blow, Wind of Fruitfulness, Caxton Press,1948. Also appears in numerous Baxter anthologies including Collected Poems, ed JE Weir, Oxford University Press, 1980, 1981, 1988, 1995). Published with kind permission of the James K Baxter Estate.
When they ask you where you are really from
Tell them you are an unrequited pilgrim two parallel lives that never touch a whisper or a window to what your country could be if only it opened its arms and took you whole
Tell them about the moon how she eats at your skin watches you pray and fast and cry while the world sleeps how she gives birth to herself and dies and you wish upon her children
How you wander her night plant cardamom in your friends’ eyes cumin in their teeth zaatar on their brow lick the rest off your fingertips it tastes of visa-on-entry heaven with no random checks
Round the iftar table everyone speaks of politics and God trans rights and colonialism we forget we didn’t speak the empire’s tongue
once
When they ask you why you speak so well for an immigrant:
Tell them about your grandmother’s laugh how you never quite knew whether she was story or myth the upper lip in your conviction or a song ringing in your bones drifting through the kitchen window with the fried shrimp and newspaper voodoo dolls
Tell them how you have always been a voodoo doll your feet licking the flames the stove top eye a television screen a news bulletin an open casket the needle pushing and pulling through your skin every puncture a question played by an accusation every bullet hole an answer you have to fill
with silence with religion with Xanax and daytime television
And when the muazzen calls you to pray on the radio you will wrap your limbs in cotton sheets walk through the crowd with your hands in your mouth waiting for the gun.
Mohamed Hassan
from National Anthem, Dead Bird Books, 2020.You watch Mohamed read the poem here.
Eulogy
As a child Whenever I was angry, Inconsolable, My father would tell me to write a eulogy To the person who had caused me pain. He said that by the end of it I would see That even those who cause us pain Are precious to the world
My father was an exceptional man, He was blessed With a gentle soul. He walking in step With the many animals he adores And he treaded lightly on this earth.
He taught To tread as he did And to leave the world as you found it. Ideally, improve it.
One day I will read this to a room of faces I barely recognize. I will look out on a world No different with him gone As it was With him here.
Ruby Solly
from Tōku Pāpā, Victoria University Press, 2021
Hotel Emergencies
The fire alarm sound: is given as a howling sound. Do not use the lifts. The optimism sound: is given as the sound of a man brushing his teeth. Do not go to bed. The respectability sound: is given as a familiar honking sound. Do not run, do not sing. The dearly-departed sound: is given as a rumble in the bones. Do not enter the coffin. The afterlife sound: is given as the music of the spheres. It will not reconstruct. The bordello sound: is given as a small child screaming. Do not turn on the light. The accident sound: is given as an ambulance sound. You can hear it coming closer, do not crowd the footpaths. The execution sound: is given as the sound of prayer. Oh be cautious, do not stand too near
or you will surely hear: the machinegun sound, the weeping mother sound, the agony sound, the dying child sound: whose voice is already drowned by the approaching helicopter sound: which is given as the dead flower sound, the warlord sound, the hunting and fleeing and clattering sound, the amputation sound, the bloodbath sound, the sound of the President quietly addressing his dinner; now he places his knife and fork together (a polite and tidy sound) before addressing the nation
and making a just and necessary war sound: which is given as a freedom sound (do not cherish memory): which is given as a security sound: which is given as a prisoner sound: which is given again as a war sound: which is a torture sound and a watchtower sound and a firing sound: which is given as a Timor sound: which is given as a decapitation sound (do not think you will not gasp tomorrow): which is given as a Darfur sound: which is given as a Dachau sound: which is given as a dry river-bed sound, as a wind in the poplars sound: which is given again as an angry god sound:
which is here as a Muslim sound: which is here as a Christian sound: which is here as a Jewish sound: which is here as a merciful god sound: which is here as a praying sound; which is here as a kneeling sound: which is here as a scripture sound: which is here as a black-wing sound: as a dark-cloud sound: as a black-ash sound: which is given as a howling sound: which is given as a fire alarm sound:
which is given late at night, calling you from your bed (do not use the lifts): which is given as a burning sound, no, as a human sound, as a heartbeat sound: which is given as a sound beyond sound: which is given as the sound of many weeping: which is given as an entirely familiar sound, a sound like no other, up there high in the smoke above the stars
Bill Manhire
from Lifted, Victoria University Press, 2005. You can hear Bill read the poem at Poetry Archives.
Born and bred in the heart of Te Awamutu-King Country, Kasandra M. Hart-Kaumoana (Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Hikairo) completed her BA at Victoria University as a VUW-Foundation Scholar in Film, English, and Philosophy in 2019 – and Creative Writing at the IIML. She has since published two original pieces in Matatuhi Taranaki: A Bilingual Journal of Literature. Kasandra is kept busy full-time coordinating the Auckland Writers Festival and relishes the bona fide westie lifestyle in her newfound home, Waitakere.
Bridget van der Zijpp is the author of three novels: Misconduct (VUP, 2008), In the Neighbourhood of Fame (VUP, 2015), and the recently released I Laugh Me Broken (VUP, September 2021). Bridget returned to Auckland in March 2020 after living in Berlin for a few years and is now the Programme Manager at the Auckland Writers Festival.
James K Baxter (1926 – 1972), poet, dramatist, literary critic and social commentator, was born in Dunedin. He was Burns Fellow at the University of Otago (1966-7). He published numerous plays and books of poetry and criticism during his life time, while several anthologies have been published posthumously. He lived in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington and Hiruharama Jerusalem. An extensive bio is available at ReadNZ.
Ruth Dallas (Ruth Minnie Mumford) (1919 – 2008) was born in Invercargill and lived in Dunedin from 1954. An award-winning poet and children’s author, she won the Poetry category of the New Zealand Book Awards in 1977 for her fifth collection, Walking on the Snow. She wrote over 20 books. During the 1960s, she assisted Charles Brasch with Landfall. She was awarded a CBE for Services to Literature, was the Burns Fellow at the University of Otago (1968) and received an honorary doctorate from there a decade later.
Mohamed Hassan is an award-winning journalist and writer from Auckland and Cairo. He was the winner of the 2015 NZ National Poetry Slam, a TEDx fellow and recipient of the Gold Trophy at the 2017 New York Radio Awards. His poetry has been watched and shared widely online and taught in schools internationally. His 2020 poetry collection National Anthem was shortlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards (2021).
Bill Manhire founded the creative writing programme at Victoria University of Wellington, which a little over 20 years ago became the International Institute of Modern Letters. His new book Wow is published by Victoria University Press in New Zealand and Carcanet in the UK.
Ruby Solly (Kāi Tahu, Waitaha, Kāti Māmoe) is a writer, musician and taonga pūoro practitioner living in Pōneke. She has been published in journals such as Landfall, Starling and Sport among others. In 2020 she released her debut album, Pōneke, which looks at the soundscapes of Wellington’s past, present and future through the use of taonga pūoro, cello, and environmental sounds. She is currently completing a PhD in public health, focusing on the use of taonga pūoro in hauora Māori. Tōku Pāpā is her first book.
Poetry Shelf Spring Season
Tara Black picks poems Victor Rodger picks poems Peter Ireland picks poems Emma Espiner picks poems Claire Mabey (VERB) picks poems Sally Blundell picks poems Frances Cooke picks poems We Are Babies pick poems
Poetry Shelf offers warm congratulations to Anne Kennedy whose poetry has continued to delight and inspire writers across generations. Wonderful news.
A prolific writer for young adults, an award-winning poet and one of New Zealand’s most distinguished historians are being honoured in the 2021 Prime Minister’s Awards for Literary Achievement.
With interests spanning ecology, resilience and resourcefulness, and the Treaty of Waitangi – Creative New Zealand is pleased to announce this year’s recipients:
Poetry: Anne Kennedy – an award-winning poet, fiction writer, screenplay editor and teacher.
Non-fiction: Dame Claudia Josepha Orange PhD OBE DNZM – one of New Zealand’s most distinguished historians and an award-winning author best known for her 1987 book The Treaty of Waitangi.
Fiction: David Hill MNZM – an award-winning writer and teacher, renowned for his young adult fiction.
The Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern, Prime Minister and Associate Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage, says, “I’m thrilled to offer my congratulations to Anne Kennedy, David Hill, and Dame Claudia Orange – each renowned for work across multiple areas. Supporting these awards is an honour and they truly are an annual highlight for me.”
Due to COVID-19 complexities, the usual Unity Books lunchtime in-store event will once again move to an online panel so that these outstanding writers can be acknowledged for their contributions to New Zealand literature.
The recipient of the 2021 Creative New Zealand Michael King Writer’s Fellowship, Dr. Monty Soutar, ONZM (Ngati Porou, Ngati Awa, Ngai Tai ki Tamaki, Ngati Kahungunu) will also take part in the online panel, hosted by writer, historian and former journalist Paul Diamond.
The awards were established in 2003. Every year New Zealanders are invited to nominate their choice of a New Zealand writer who has made a significant contribution to New Zealand literature in the genres of non-fiction, poetry and fiction. Writers are also able to nominate themselves for these awards. Nominations are assessed by an external expert panel and recommendations are forwarded to the Arts Council of New Zealand Toi Aotearoa for approval. This year’s selection panel was David Eggleton, Anne de Lautour, Darryn Joseph, and Paddy Richardson.
Creative New Zealand, in partnership with Auckland Live and The Big Idea, invites New Zealanders from across the motu to come together for a live, online panel discussion with the 2021 recipients of the Prime Minister’s Awards for Literary Achievement.
Tune in on Tuesday 16 November, 6.30-8pm to watch David Hill, Anne Kennedy, Dame Claudia Orange and Dr Monty Soutar read and discuss their work with New Zealand writer, broadcast journalist and historian, Paul Diamond. During the live stream, viewers can submit questions to the writers via the comment threads on Facebook and on YouTube. The live stream will be recorded and made available for those that are unable to join.
This event is made possible with the support of Auckland Live. Presented in partnership with The Big Idea and supported by Unity Books.
NZ Poetry Shelf 