This year, The Women’s Bookshop hosted two Ladies Litera-Tea events. I didn’t make the first one, but the one on Sunday was perhaps the best one I have been to. The range of voices was inspired programming. I needed toothpicks to hold my eyes up when I left home, but Dame Fiona Kidman had me sitting up listening to the sonnets she wrote for her mother, Kirsten McDougall mesmerised with an extract from the must-read Tess, Heather Kidd showed the diverse creativity and ambitions of rural women (wow!), Michalia Arathimos spoke of the gut-wrenching origins of her debut also must-read novel Aukati, Fiona Farrell’s extract from Decline & Fall on Savage Street had me sitting on the edge of my seat, the sentences were so good (now have a copy!). Hearing how Eat My Lunch came into being from Lisa King underlined the difference one person can make (with help from friends!).
The first half was a glorious rollercoasting brain-sparking heart-warming delight.
By this stage no vestiges of tiredness. I thought I might flag in the second half but the immune-system boost continued. Wow! Hearing Sue Wootton read poems was a bit like hearing Anne Kennedy read and I just wanted more (please can she come to AWF?), Annaleese Jochems had me gasping every time she read an extract (also now on my table), Diana Wichtel’s account of Driving to Treblinka and her missing Polish Jewish father was so moving I was in awe of her tenacity and ability to bring that story to life on the page, Tina Makereti made abundantly clear why Black Marks on the White Page matters and why this collection is compulsive reading. I actually loved the way – rather than read her own award-winning ‘Black Milk’ – she picked ‘Famished Eels’ by Mary Rokonadravu to read (it had won the 2015 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for the Pacific Region).
We tell stories and we write poems in so many different ways – and that matters.
I came home with four new novels and so much more! Thank you Carole Beu, her team and the authors. I so needed that pick-me-up. Seriously I felt like I had come back from a month at Sandy Bay after reading novels and swimming.
Somewhere in the glorious mix, Courtney Sina Meredith read some new poems – which is no easy thing. I loved hearing her half sing/half speak an early poem, ‘Brown Girls in Bright Red Lipstick’, and I loved hearing the new poems. There is the same musical lift, the same political undercurrents, the same heart that beats along every line – yet there is also a stepping out, a tasking risks, a renewed self exposure with vital attachments to the world. Courtney kindly agreed to let me post two new poems that make a rather good pairing. Just so you can have a taste. I feel rather lucky as I an read them with her performance voice taking over.
I just adore the way these two poems make conversations with each other.
The poems
How about being a woman?
How about being a young woman?
How about being a young brown woman?
How about being a young brown queer woman?
How about being a young brown queer single woman?
How about being a young brown queer single educated woman?
How about being a young brown queer single educated professional woman?
How about being a young brown queer single educated professional creative woman?
How about being a young brown queer single educated professional woman?
How about being a young brown queer single educated woman?
How about being a young brown queer single woman?
How about being a young brown queer woman?
How about being a young brown woman?
How about being a young woman?
How about being a woman?
•
I have stolen away into the secret room
mothers build inside their daughters
I am feeding on a dowry centuries old
the bones sucked dry
a feast of bright quiet.
My mother’s dreams are here
beside the red gold river
born of shame and laughter
the shifting bank won’t hold.
Her mother’s wings are here
wild shimmered iridescent
girl to bird to prophet
an angel killing time.
And there is her mother
at the top of the sky ablaze
lighting the islands below
into a string of tears.
©Courtney Sina Meredith
NZ Poetry Shelf 