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The poems selected are both previously published and unpublished.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.
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.
Out Here: An anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ writers from Aotearoa, eds Emma Barnes and Chris Tse, Auckland University Press, 2021
We chose words that delighted us, surprised us, confronted us and engaged us. We chose political pieces and pieces that dreamed futures as yet only yet imagined. We chose coming out stories and stories of home. We followed our noses. What our reading revealed to us is that our queer writers are writing beyond the expectations of what queer writing can be, and doing it in a way that often pushes against the trends of mainstream literature.
Emma Barnes and Chris Tse
The arrival of Out Here is significant. Editors Emma Barnes and Chris Tse have gathered voices from the wider reach of our rainbow communities. Queer texts, rainbow texts. Fiction, poetry, comic strips. I am delighted to present a selection of audio readings in celebration.
The readings
Stacey Teague
Stacey Teague reads ‘Angelhood’
Jiaqiao Liu
Jiaqiao Liu reads ‘as my friends consider children’
essa may ranapiri
essa may ranapiri reads an extract from ‘knot-boy ii’
Emer Lyons
Emer Lyons reads ‘poppers’
Oscar Upperton
Oscar Upperton reads ‘New transgender blockbusters’
Hannah Mettner
Hannah Mettner reads ‘Obscured by clouds’
Natasha Dennerstein
Natasha Dennerstein reads ‘O, Positive, 1993’
Gus Goldsack
Gus Goldsack reads ‘It’s a body’
Ruby Porter
Ruby Porter reads ‘A list of dreams’
The poets
Natasha Dennerstein was born in Melbourne, Australia. She has an MFA from San Francisco State University. Natasha has had poetry published in many journals internationally. Her collections Anatomize (2015), Triptych Caliform (2016) and her novella-in-verse About a Girl (2017) were published by Norfolk Press in San Francisco. Her trans chapbook Seahorse (2017) was published by Nomadic Press in Oakland. She lives in Oakland, California, where she is an editor at Nomadic Press and works at St James Infirmary, a clinic for sex-workers in San Francisco. She was a 2018 Fellow of the Lambda Literary Writer’s Retreat.
Gus Goldsack is a poet, cat dad and black-sand-beach enthusiast. He grew up in Te Whanganui-a-Tara / Wellington and Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland, and lives in Brooklyn, New York. His work has appeared in The Spinoff and Out Here: An Anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ Writers From Aotearoa (Auckland University Press, 2021).
Jiaqiao Liu is a poet from Shandong, China, who grew up in Tāmaki-makau-rau. They are finishing up their MA in Creative Writing at Vic, working on a collection about love and distance, relationships to the self and the body, and Chinese mythology and robots.
Emer Lyons is a lesbian writer from West Cork living in New Zealand. She has a creative/critical PhD in lesbian poetry and shame from the University of Otago where she is the postdoctoral fellow in Irish Studies at the Centre for Irish and Scotish Studies. Most recently, her writing can be found at The Pantograph Punch, Newsroom, Queer Love: An Anthology of Irish Fiction, Landfall, and The Stinging Fly.
Hannah Mettner (she/her) is a Wellington writer who still calls Tairāwhiti home. Her first collection of poetry, Fully Clothed and So Forgetful, was published by Victoria University Press in 2017, and won the Jessie Mackay Award for best first book of poetry at the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. She is one of the founding editors of the online journal Sweet Mammalian, with Sugar Magnolia Wilson and Morgan Bach.Hannah Mettner
Ruby Porter is a writer, artist and PhD candidate. She tutors creative writing at the University of Auckland, and in high schools. Ruby was the winner of the Wallace Foundation Short Fiction Award in 2017, and the inaugural winner of the Michael Gifkins Prize in 2018, with her debut novel Attraction. Attraction was written during her Masters of Creative Writing at the University of Auckland under supervisor Paula Morris, and published in 2019 by Melbourne-based Text Publishing. It is distributed throughout Australia, New Zealand and North America.
essa may ranapiri (Ngāti Wehi Wehi, Ngāti Raukawa, Na Guinnich, Highgate) is a takatāpui poet living on the lands of Ngāti Wairere. They are super excited about Out Here being in the world even in these weird times. Their first book of poems ransack (VUP) was published 2019. They are currently working on their second book ECHIDNA. They will write until they’re dead.
Stacey Teague (Ngāti Maniapoto/Ngāpuhi) is a queer writer and editor. She is the poetry editor for Awa Wahine, editor for We Are Babies Press, and has her Masters in Creative Writing from the IIML.
Oscar Upperton‘s first poetry collection, New Transgender Blockbusters, was published by Victoria University Press in 2020. His second collection, The Surgeon’s Brain, is scheduled for publication in February 2022. It follows the life of Dr James Barry, nineteenth century surgeon, dueller and reformer whose gender has been the subject of much debate.
So many poets have written walking poems. So many poets have commented on the relationship between walking and a poem gathering momentum in the pedestrian’s head. Just for a start, I am thinking of Jenny Bornholdt’s magnificent poem ‘Confessional’, Michele Leggott’s walking blind, a vital thread, with different insight and senses on alert in her poems, and of course Blanche Baughan’s love of hill walking. A poem itself is a form of walking with its various rhythms and absorptions. The poet becomes walker, bricoleur, observer, mind-drifter.
My most recent collection The Track (Seraph Press) was written as I walked the third day of the Queen Charlotte Track with a broken foot in a wild storm. To keep walking I used the alphabet to compose poems and returned home with a book-length sequence. Whenever I have read from it, I am right back in the storm diverting pain with words. A strange feeling indeed. But I also have the early mornings at Te Henga Bethells. Walking on the near empty beach in the early morning light is an opening for poetry. Glorious.
I am currently reading Foxtrot and Other Collisons, Shari Kocher’s sublime second collection. In her endnote she says the poems were written over a five-year period. She wrote:
No poem in this collection was written before it was walked: arbitrary or otherwise, the rule I applied to the book’s organic growth was that each poem was to be ‘discovered’ on foot, and many continued to be composed peripatetically across many drafts while out walking in ways dedicated to that terrain.
The poems I have selected are not so much about walking but have a walking presence that leads in multiple directions. Many of the poems are longer rather shorter and take you on glorious excursions. Once again I am grateful to publishers and poets who are supporting my season of themes.
The Poems
Travelling light
She is walking at the edge of the sea
on the wet shining sand.
The bright sky is behind her.
She is travelling
on a sheet of grey light.
We pass, and I wave.
She laughs. Of course.
A woman who walks at the edge,
on light, would laugh.
Adrienne Jansen
Madeline McGovern’s ‘Enchanted forest’, source of Rose People’s poem
A path of stars
There are many things
I would like to tell you,
my darling
My darling,
I would like to tell you
in this life
everything will be okay
I would like to tell you
that you will walk upon a path of stars
that you will travel through the forest
and never lose your way
I would like to tell you
to look only at the stars
and not the gaps between them
to look at the sun
and not the clouds.
My darling, I would like to tell you all these things
for the same reason we read fairy stories to children
and weave their years with mythologies
because there is comfort is such lies
because I want the world you live in
to carry more magic
and less sharp edges.
But, on this dark night
I have run out of comforting lies.
My darling,
I cannot promise you a path of stars.
some days you will walk upon
unforgiving concrete or sharp-edged gravel
some days you will wade through quicksand.
Tonight, I cannot conjure stars
without the black between them.
My darling, I can only wish
when you walk through the dark and tangled forest
and lose your way a thousand times
that one day
you come across a clearing
where you can sit
and where the sun will find you
and warm your face
and where you can rest.
My darling
you can rest.
Rose Peoples
My Maunga
we’re monitoring pests at the Maungatautari reserve
gluing bait to ink slick cardboard with peanut butter
extracted from a single hole in the finger of a latex
glove bulging with the breakfast spread
our hands were all sticky fingers and dirt
made it to the first true slope
gorse brushing our knees the angle necessitating
a fuck-this what-are we doing crawl upwards
the trees move back and forth
poles caught in a tide
swinging long ways
between sickly white clouds
and glare-blue sky
a miromiro sitting plump on a ponga
squeaking like a mouse
then fluttering caught blurry on a camera
there are no edgerleyi in sight
Māhinaarangi’s perfume a ghost in the clouds
replaced by sweat-stink
the trip back down is a chorus of snaps
and low groans from wood and soil
giving way under our weight grown careless
with exhaustion
then we’re back through the mechanical gate
one shuts and locks for the other to unlock and open
pull it back on its squealing hinge
to leave the reserve behind
it’s a short trek down the hill back to the car
the air made pungent by cowpats
essa may ranapiri
from Ngā Kupu Waikato: an anthology of Waikato poetry, ed Vaughan Rapatahana, Waikato Press, 2019, selected by Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connor
A Walk with Your Father
Before you do anything else, check your lungs.
Are they the right size for you, are you the right size for them?
Are they nice and snug against your ribs and spine?
Don’t worry if they’re a bit big for you, you’ll grow into them.
They must be full, however; you don’t want them empty.
You have a long way to go.
Put your hand inside your mouth and make sure
everything’s in it’s place, check that all the pipes and hoses
leading from your lungs into your mouth are in position and in good nick.
You don’t want any leaks or sudden explosions
this is your air we’re talking about.
Close your mouth securely around this apparatus.
Next check your weight. If you are too heavy
or too light you won’t get anywhere. By the way
there’s no need to take a whole lot of extras with you.
Some people strap expensive knives to their legs and wear protective gloves.
There’s no real need for any of this – an ordinary old sharp knife
from the kitchen drawer will do. And just your bare hands.
You may need to signal to each other.
Now pay some attention to your skin.
It should feel secure and warm
but also allow plenty of room to move freely.
There are any number of colours available nowadays –
they all do pretty much the same job.
Your feet, are they the right size?
If they’re too large you will tire quickly,
too small and you’ll be left behind.
You’re probably looking at feet
about the same size as his.
Your eyes – spit in them.
It keeps everything clear.
That step you’re about to take
will have to be wider than you’re used to.
Don’t forget to move forwards, not backwards.
Keep your hand on your mouth so everything stays in place
when you break the surface.
Mihi to Tangaroa. Mihi to Hinemoana.
Now get yourself in under there,
immerse yourself.
Do it now, go.
He’ll be right behind you.
Hinemoana Baker
from mātuhi / needle, Victoria University Press, 2004
When I Head Home I Like To Be On The Left Side Of The Road SoAs To Be Closer ToWhere I Am Heading
I walk home with a bouquet of flowers held up
like an explorer holding up a torch,
in the early days of these days.
The flowers do not emanate
light, but they do catch the eyes of the people
I might like. The flowers will sit by my bed
waiting for when I open my nose from sleep.
Maeve Hughes
from horse power, printed by Fernbank Studio, 2019
The verb ‘to be’
It is foggy.
There is a mountain.
I am climbing the mountain.
She is climbing the mountain.
The path is slippery.
She says, ‘It is all right.
It will all be all right.’
She is right.
There are people behind us.
They are climbing the mountain.
They are in the fog.
Their voices are broken.
There is a shout.
There is laughter.
We are all climbing the mountain.
She is climbing ahead of me.
There is fog in her hair.
Her hair is glittering.
The wind is cold.
There is a man with a walking stick.
There are names scratched on the stick.
He carries the names as if they were eggs.
They could fall and smash.
We are carrying names too.
They are carved on bone.
They are scratched on skin.
We are all carrying names up the mountain.
There is a chapel at the top.
It is locked.
Its walls are damp.
There is broken timber.
There are fallen stones.
It is cold here.
Now we are turning.
We are going down.
She is running.
She is sliding down the mountain.
I am following her.
She is running ahead in the fog.
That is how it is now.
That is how it will be.
That is how it will be
till she is and I am not.
She will be.
I will not be.
The verbs slip under our boots,
like small changeable stones.
Fiona Farrell
from The Pop-Up Book of Invasions, Auckland University Press, 2007
A note about ‘The verb ‘to be’’
This poem was written when I had a writing fellowship in Ireland. My younger daughter took leave from her job working with kakapo recovery on Codfish Island and came to stay for a month. We climbed the high hills.
We climbed Croagh Patrick, up the slippery path from the enormous carpark and visitor centre to the crest where the fog was thick and the chapel was closed and a chill wind tore at the flimsy remnants of shelters built to give some protection to the thousands who come here each year. Toward the top we met a man who was climbing using a camán (the stick used in hurling or the women’s version of the game, camogie) as a support on the stony ground. He showed us some names written on the flat head of the camán. ‘You’ll recognise these’ he said. We didn’t, and felt awkward for not knowing. It was an All-Irish champion camogie team he had coached, his daughter’s name among them. Some time after their victory she had become ill and was now in hospital, and he had made a vow to climb Croagh Patrick 30 times, if only she could be made well. He carried the camán each time. This was his 29th pilgrimage.
We climbed Errigal, a steep-sided hill in Donegal. Irish is still spoken around here and the man who ran the hostel was passionate for the language. It is subtle, he said. There are, for instance, two verbs meaning ‘to be’: one suggests permanence (‘this is the floor’). The other suggests transience and is used, for example, when speaking of the weather (‘it is sunny’).
I walked up the tracks behind my daughter with her strong legs, her dreadlocked hair. Not that long ago, I led her. I can still feel the weight of her in my arms, carrying her when she didn’t want to walk any more between banks of tussocks and flowering hebes on the track at Tongariro, or through the bearded bush at Dawson Falls, or on some sunny Sunday walk near Pohangina. The feel of her little duffel coat and her red tights and her feathery hair, usually chopped into a jagged fringe by herself using the toenail scissors. Now she takes the lead and I’m following, and behind us, there’s that long queue of people, living and dead, stretching back down into the fog.
Fiona Farrell
Pacing Poem
Past the green flowers
past the red stool
past the drying towels
past the letter from school
past the newspapers
past the glass fruit bowl
past the decanter
past the ‘Hoptimist’ doll
and into the kitchen.
Past the oven
past the breadbin
past the broken dishwasher
past the empty tomato tin
and towards the table.
Around the red chair
over the floorboards
past the stairs
and onto the rug.
Past the lamp
past the outside world
past the radio
past the Argentinian print
and around the bassinet.
Past the novels
past the poetry
past the proteas
past the pottery
and into the sun.
Past the breeze
past the ottoman
past the unwrapped cheese
past the pestle
past the wine rack
and nestled
under my armpit:
two deep eyes
still shining wide,
so we keep circling
until sleep arrives.
Amy Brown
from neon daze, Victoria University Press, 2019
Travelling
How normal it feels to get around new places— how basely, physically normal it is for our feet to touch the ground and propel us forward, step after step exactly as they do anywhere.
And if these roads home one day become the rivers they once were— though we might have to pedal the currents or steady our soles on pebbles— we’ll soon get used to it.
A flavour’s only new at first taste; and common sights become invisible; and love dulls into something necessary; and in grief we think this new lack is impossible to live with but we do.
Jane Arthur
from Craven, Victoria University Press, 2019
By the Bosphorous Strait I sat down and wept
Breathe in
when Istanbulites woke to find the water a bright turquois they thought
the worst, a curse had taken over the city or toxins seeped from textile
factories but scientists agreed it was just an explosion of plankton migrating
from the Black Sea, a milky blessing heralding the summer calm, I am told
it’s serene.
breathe out
I did not find out I was colour blind until they tested our class at the library
in Form 2, it explained so much, why I always coloured grass in brown and
tree bark green, why I’d clash my outfits and no one is impolite enough
to tell me, my parents must have thought I was stupid or acting out, the
scientists agreed it was neither
breathe in
my manager told me that things can be difficult here, but when you walk
along the Bosphorous it makes it all worth it, sometimes I think this
city is magical, other times I’m sure it is cursed, a dark pact signed in its
catacombs centuries ago threatening to explode, most of the time it is sad,
mourning a lover lost or a friend it couldn’t save
breathe out
everyday at 12.30pm I walk out of the office and stand at its mouth waiting
for a sign, for the air to return, the explosions in my lungs to subside, the
panic attacks are a daily occurrence, a striking in the middle of a meeting, a
hungry mall, a dolmus packed with strangers and I tense my abdomen and
squeeze my shirt with my hands and try not to remember
for the life of me all I can see is blue, even the scientists are at a loss on this
one, they tell me to relax my shoulders and focus on my breathing, not
worry about time I can’t unwind
it’s amazing how something can be right in front of you and you just can’t see it
Mohamed Hassan
from National Anthem, Dead Bird Books, 2020, selected by Alison Wong
Locus
as you walk you become the vanishing
as you walk you lose the point
as you walk you snow
though autumn
the ranges hold the storm
the ranges bite the neck
and night and day unfix
and night and day turn stone
snow monkeys sit with ice on lashes
coast monkeys pick snails from pools
shop monkeys flip fish in milk and flour
as you walk through autumn, the ranges
unfix snow, and pool you lose
ice-pick, milk-lash, snail-bite—
turn your neck to the day—
Nicola Easthope
from Working the tang (The Cuba Press, 2018).
Duet
I became an old woman
age eleven
Doctor and physio
circling my fingers
around a stick
bone on wood
Swinging my legs
to a new rhythm
wood on bone
bone on wood
Instructing me
in the art
of walking a duet
heel toe
bone wood
stick stick
Trish Harris
published NZ Listener, 1999
Crunch
(i)
She collected broken things: fragments of a delicate speckled eggshell she found on the gravel driveway, a starfish arm from the beach. She kept them in a leadlight box, along with her imaginings.
(ii)
He was the one who knew the way back: just to the left of the forked piece of driftwood standing upright on the shore. Over the bed of African daisies and ice plants. Past the clump of marram and close to the flat patch of sand where they’d lain together that time. That time he hardly thought about any more.
(iii)
She walked briskly, in a way that made you think the act of walking was the purpose of the walk. Not the view of the island, nor the chirrup of pipits camouflaged in the dunes. Not the way a shoe sinks into the sand, nor the sight of a collie hurtling after a stick. No, her walk was for the sake of walking and she’d dressed accordingly: the sneakers, the sun visor, the sensible orange windbreaker.
(iv)
The sheets were so bright against the dull sky, he almost couldn’t bear it. He wanted to take a pot of red paint and throw it against them. He wanted to tell her, you bring out the red in me.
(v)
She lay on top of the duvet being a starfish, each of her hands touching an edge of the bed. She thought how nice it would be, not to have to share.
(vi)
He found himself walking up and down the gravel driveway, just to hear it crunch underfoot as the stones scraped against each other. When he noticed her watching him from the bedroom window, he just kept crunching.
(vii)
She lifted the speckled egg from its cotton wool cradle in the leadlight box and fitted the pieces together to make it whole again. There was one piece missing. She turned the shell so she couldn’t see the gap.
(viii)
Pounding the driveway. Grinding the stones. He supposed he could do it all day. His heavy tread. His trample. He didn’t see her leave the house.
(ix)
The beach was a beacon, making her way clear. She could feel the island’s solid presence, even when she couldn’t quite see it.
(x)
He recognised her footsteps, getting louder. There she was at his shoulder, joining her crunching pace to his. His foot, her foot. Stamping together on a firm earth. Her foot, his foot. Two in step. A two-step. She smelt like biscuits. He reached for her hand.
Janis Freegard
from Kingdom Animalia: the Escapades of Linnaeus Auckland University Press, 2011
Hill walk
We often wonder what moves us in a day – was it words in a sequence that surprised us
or notes played by someone who kept their mouth closed & let the sound leave their broken body
or maybe after years it was the sight of your brother nursing his leg down the hill catching up with you
so you could walk on together to discuss what bird that was in the bush making the sound
neither of you were certain of.
Richard Langston
from Five O’Clock Shadows The Cuba Press, 2020
walking with Dorothy
a dog bothers the scraps
of food around the compost bin
it howls at the murmur of the village stream
ignoring the voice calling from the hill
the trees gleam with overnight rain
each tree, taken singly, was beautiful
the bees emerging
from their wooden house
mistake me for
a flower and for
a moment I am one
hopelessly lacking in pollen
swaying in the breeze
and taking up space
standing still in the mud
unmaking myself amid
leaves I’ve seen a thousand times
and never wondered the names of
some trees putting out red shoots
query: what trees are they?
a fantail flits from branch to branch
something bigger than language
in its movements
which lose
their sheen when captured
and later the sky between
apartments and streetlamps
empties but for the full moon
and Venus striving to be seen
as brightly
all the heavens seemed in one perpetual motion
grit on the footpath like glitter
the roads very dirty
a morepork somewhere in the dark
oblivious to me and better for it
Ash Davida Jane
from How to Live with Mammals, Victoria University Press, 2021
The Poets
Jane Arthur lives in Wellington, where she is the co-owner and manager of a small independent bookshop. Her debut poetry collection, Craven, won the Jessie Mackay Award (Best First Book) at the 2020 Ockham NZ Book Awards.
Hinemoana Baker is a poet, musician and creative writing teacher. She traces her ancestry from Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Toa Rangatira, Te Āti Awa and Ngāi Tahu, as well as from England and Germany (Oberammergau in Bayern). Hinemoana’s latest poetry collection Funkhaus (VUP, 2020), was shortlisted for The Ockham NZ Book Awards 2021. She has edited several online and print anthologies and released several albums of original music and more experimental sound art. She works in English, Māori and more recently German, the latter in collaboration with German poet and sound performer Ulrike Almut Sandig. She is currently living in Berlin, where she was 2016 Creative New Zealand Berlin Writer in Residence, and is completing a PhD at Potsdam University. Hinemoana’s website
Amy Brown is a writer and teacher from Hawkes Bay. She has taught Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne (where she gained her PhD), and Literature and Philosophy at the Mac.Robertson Girls’ High School. She has also published a series of four children’s novels, and three poetry collections. Her latest book, Neon Daze, a verse journal of early motherhood, was included in The Saturday Paper‘s Best Books of 2019. She is currently taking leave from teaching to write a novel.
Nicola Easthope (Pākehā, with roots in Orkney, Scotland, England and Wales) is a high school English and psychology teacher, and mentor of young activists and writers. Her two books of poetry are: leaving my arms free to fly around you (Steele Roberts, 2011) and Working the tang (The Cuba Press, 2018). She has appeared at the Queensland, Tasmanian and Manawatū poetry festivals, as well as LitCrawl in Pōneke. Nicola’s very occasional blog is gannet ink.
Fiona Farrell publishes poetry, fiction, drama and non-fiction. In 2007 she received the Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction, and in 2012 she was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for Services to Literature. Her most recent publication, Nouns, verbs, etc.Selected Poems (OUP 2020) has been warmly reviewed as ‘a Poetry Treasure House…a glorious book’ (Paula Green, Poetry Shelf), and ‘an excellent retrospective… remarkable for drawing small personal realities together with the broad sweep of history.” (Nicholas Reid, The Listener). After many years in remote Otanerito bay on Banks Peninsula, she now lives in Dunedin.
Wellington-based Janis Freegard is the author of several poetry collections, most recently Reading the Signs (The Cuba Press), as well a novel, The Year of Falling (Mākaro Press). She was the inaugural Ema Saikō Poetry Fellow at New Zealand Pacific Studio and has previously won the Katherine Mansfield Short Story Prize and the Geometry/Open Book Poetry Prize. She grew up in the UK, South Africa and Australia before her family settled in Aotearoa when she was twelve. ‘Crunch’ was placed third in the Manawatu Festival of New Arts Poetry for Performance competition and performed in Palmerston North.
Trish Harris has written two books – a poetry collection (My wide white bed) and a memoir (The Walking Stick Tree). She teaches non-fiction on the Whitireia Creative Writing Programme, is co-founder of Crip the Lit and edited their 2019 pocketbook, ‘Here we are, read us: Women, disability and writing’. She says she’s a part-time crane operator…but maybe she’s dreaming?
Mohamed Hassan is an award-winning journalist and writer who has lived in Egypt, Aotearoa and Turkey. 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 collection, National Anthem, was shortlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, poetry category.
Maeve Hughes is a recent graduate of English literature with a minor in creative writing. She lives in Wellington where she loves to walk home.
Ash Davida Jane’s poetry has appeared in Mimicry, Sweet Mammalian, Starling, The Spinoff and elsewhere. Her second book, How to Live with Mammals, was published by Victoria University Press in April 2021. She lives and works in Wellington.
Adrienne Jansen writes fiction and non-fiction for both adults and children, but for her, poetry is where the magic is. Her fourth collection of poetry, All of Us, published in 2018, is a series of poems, with carina gallegos, around the themes of migration and refugees. She is the co-founder of Landing Press, a small Wellington poetry publisher. She lives at Titahi Bay, north of Wellington. Website
Richard Langston is a poet, television director, and writer. Five O’Clock Shadows is his sixth book of poems. His previous books are Things Lay in Pieces (2012), The Trouble Lamp (2009), The Newspaper Poems (2007), Henry, Come See the Blue (2005), and Boy (2003). He also writes about NZ music and posts interviews with musicians on the Phantom Billstickers website.
Rose Peoples is from Te Awakairangi/Lower Hutt. She is a student at Victoria University and, having finished her law degree last year, decided that the logical next step was to embark upon a Masters in Literature. She is a bookseller at Good Books. Her work has previously appeared in Cordite, Mimicry and Starling.
essa may ranapiri (Na Guinnich, Ngaati Wehi Wehi, Highgate, Ngaati Raukawa) is a Tainui poet from Kirikiriroa living on Ngaati Wairere land / they want everyone to know that the Echidna they write about isn’t a spikey mammal but a lady with two long snake tails instead of legs / go figure / tino takatāpuitanga 4eva
essa may ranapiri’s work frequently explores the uncomfortable boundaries that exist in binary gender, and uses form and technique to push readers away from conventional approaches to both gender and poetry. Everything in their piece ‘she cut her face shaving’ works to push the reader towards a new space, from the vocabulary and imagery to the way the lines are arranged on the page.
The arrangement of the work on the page exemplifies the subtle ways that ranapiri affects the reader. Rather than proceeding straight down the page, ‘she cut her face shaving’ begins to drift right from the second line. The final shape evokes images that reflect those in the poem – the drip of blood, the curve of a neck- but also reflect a preoccupation with resisting convention. Throughout their collection ransack, words drift and explode across the page in varying arrangements. The visual aspect connects to the subject matter, which centres on ranapiri’s identity as a takatapui and non-binary individual. This poem is a microcosm of an effect found throughout this work- the reader’s eye is physically drawn away from conventional pattern, into a new space and shape that ranapiri has created.
Form and content collide again in the fifth line. Ending this line with the word testosterone is a confirmation of a non-cis experience that is only hinted at the beginning of the poem. Positioned at half-way, this line offers an opportunity to the reader to consider the first section in a new light, and prepares them for the impact of the second section. The deliberate use of pronoun immediately afterwards reinforces this transitionary moment. The pronoun use is sparing throughout this work, but rich with meaning, drawing connection between ownership and the body. The title itself gives context to the poem, ‘her chin’ positions the reader as an outsider in this situation. Garments and body parts that could be ascribed ownership are not, instead they become ‘the pencil skirt’, ‘the hair’, ‘the jaw’. Ownership appears again in this vital fifth line- ‘that testosterone/ bought her’. After this moment, both the Adam’s apple and the ‘lateness’ become hers again. The pronouns here own this experience, and are unafraid to do so.
The slash is a dominant feature of this poem, and serves multiple purposes. One that immediately pushes itself forward is the echo, again, of the ink on the page and the action of the work. Lines that are not broken up by the slash are broken up instead by the line break. Nothing goes on for longer than four words. These short, sharp lines, remind the reader of the pattern of shaving, the short strokes, and in one particularly poignant use – the ‘/cut/’ of hair seems at once to reference the ‘cut’ of the title. Additionally, it breaks the flow of the reader. There appears to be no particular rhythm to the slashes or line breaks, simply a disruption. The disruption to the face by the cut, perhaps, or the disruption to the presumed reader represented by a non-binary figure.
Another strong use of the slash is the way it abstracts the body. Every part of the body, down to the clothes being worn, have their own line. Here the body is represented not as a whole, but as separate pieces. The reader is invited to consider the way we read these pieces as masculine or feminine within the context of the poem and its title. The limited pronoun use works in conjunction with this, separating the pieces not only from each other, but also from a singular ownership of this body. Once this space between body and self is established, ranapiri jams the masculine and feminine together, setting the reader off balance. Gender has remained ambiguous before this moment, and could be intentionally misread to provide a more cis-normative view. ranapiri quashes this in the seventh line, bringing that all important ‘her adam’s apple’ into play. Immediately the subject of the poem comes into view, shedding new light on to the readers experience, and preparing us for the final two lines.
What all of these techniques have in common are the spaces both literal and figurative in the story. ranapiri seems to be again referencing the final part of their work. What is missed out, what we are ‘late’ to, preoccupies this poem, haunting every line and every sparing word. ranapiri creates in this work a space where identity can be celebrated and mourned in the same breath, the past and present as well as hopes for the future tumbled up together.
Rachel Lockwood
Rachel Lockwood is Hawke’s Bay born and bred but now living in Wellington and studying a BA at VUW. She was a 2019 National Schools Poetry Award finalist, and has previously been published in Starling.
You can hear Rachel read her poem in Starling 10 here
essa may ranapiri (Ngāti Raukawa/Tainui/Ngāti Takatāpui/Clan Gunn/Highgate) is a person or some shit / or whatever / they wrote a book of poems called ransack / it’s still in th world / the only time they use they/them pronouns for themselves is in these bios / isn’t that funny / thx goes out to their ancestors / who are as big as everything / just wow / just everything / they will write until they’re dead
Monday Poem: You can read essa’s poem ‘when i was born i didn’t say anything’ here
I knew as much about it as my lungs knew how to breathe.
Like two thumbs cut off and pushed inside a plush toy.
Blackened by the world.
Already.
Marked down in a book.
I had nothing to write with.
essa may ranapiri
essa may ranapiri (Ngāti Raukawa/Tainui/Ngāti Takatāpui/Clan Gunn/Highgate) is a person or some shit / or whatever / they wrote a book of poems called ransack / it’s still in th world / the only time they use they/them pronouns for themselves is in these bios / isn’t that funny / thx goes out to their ancestors / who are as big as everything / just wow / just everything / they will write until they’re dead
Landfall 239 edited by Emma Neale, Otago University Press, 2020
To celebrate the arrival of Landfall 239, edited by Emma Neale, I invited a few poets to read their poems from the issue.
The new issue is an excellent place for small reading retreats. You get fiction, non-fiction, poetry and reviews. It includes heavenly embroidered panels by artist Vita Cochran; they took me back to my primary school days when embroidery was a thing. Surely this will inspire a swag of us to pick up needle and thread, and get creative. I equally adored the paintings – oil on linen or canvas – by Star Gossage. These muted portraits, favouring blue / green palettes, hum with mood and presence. Gosh I love them.
You also get the winning essays in the Charles Brasch Young Writers’ Essay Competition 2020. And they cut through any stasis. Especially Grace Lee’s winning essay, ‘Body/Love’.
Small reading excursions are so very satisfying. And with me not going out for the forseeable future, I am very glad to settle back on the couch, and watch / listen to this Landfall reading. And then venture back into the book to read the fiction and reviews. Wonderful.
Thank you Landfall poets for contributing to a Poetry Shelf Lounge event.
Lynley Edmeades reads ‘Notice’
Leonard Lambert reads ‘Nights of Wonder, Days of Splendour’
essa may ranapiri reads ‘echidna goes to see the drone perform in front of a live audience’
Jo-Ella Sarich reads ‘The Jasmine (We need to talk about suicide)’
Tim Saunders reads ‘Demilune’
Nicola Thorstensen reads ‘Legacy’
The Poets
Lynley Edmeades is the author of two books of poetry: As the Verb Tenses (2016) and Listening In (2019), both published with Otago University Press and both longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Best Book Award. Lynley is a lecturer at the University of Otago, and she is currently working on a book of essays.
Leonard Lambert is a long-established NZ poet with a publication history stretching from A Washday Romance (John McIndoe, 1980) to Somewhere in August: SelectedPoems 1969-2016 (Steele Roberts, 2016). His most recent publication is a chapbook, WinterWaves, from Cold Hub Press. Between poems he paints and is a regular exhibitor around his home turf of Hawke’s Bay.
Emer Lyons is a lesbian writer from Cork, currently in the last months of a creative critical PhD at Otago.
Talia Marshall (Ngāti Kuia/Rangitāne ō Wairau/Ngāti Rārua/Ngāti Takihiku) is a poet and essayist with one son and one dog who has a poetry collection forthcoming from Kilmog Press titled Bad Apple. In 2020 she is writing about Ans Westra’s photographs of Māori as part of her Emerging Māori Writer’s Residency at Victoria University. Her essay titled ‘This Is the Way He Walked Into the Darkest, Pinkest Part of the Whale and Cried Don’t Tell the Others’ was quoted on the cover of POETRY magazine’s February 2018 Aotearoa issue.
Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall (Te Āti Awa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Rangatahi, SȾÁ,UTW̱ First Nation) is a creative writing student at Te Pūtahi Tuhi Auaha o Te Ao (IIML). Her work has been published in Landfall, Turbine / Kapohau, Starling, Food Court, and Te Rito o Te Harakeke.
essa may ranapiri (Ngāti Raukawa/Tainui/Ngāti Takatāpui/Clan Gunn/Highgate) is a person or some shit / or whatever / they wrote a book of poems called ransack / it’s still in th world / the only time they use they/them pronouns for themselves is in these bios / isn’t that funny / thx goes out to their ancestors / who are as big as everything / just wow / just everything / they will write until they’re dead
Jo-Ella Sarich is a lawyer, writer, and mother to two young girls living in Te Awa Kairangi. Her poems have appeared in a number of print and online publications, including New Statesman, The Lake, Cleaver Magazine, Barzakh Magazine, Quarterday Review, Shoreline of Infinity, takahē magazine, Shot Glass Journal, the New Zealand Poetry Society’s Anthology for 2017 and the Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2017. Tumblr link, @jsarich_writer.
Tim Saunders farms sheep and beef near Palmerston North. He has had poetry and short stories published in Turbine|Kapohau, takahē, Landfall, Poetry NZ Yearbook and Flash Frontier. He won the 2018 Mindfood Magazine Short Story Competition, and placed third in the 2019 and 2020 National Flash Fiction Day Awards. His book, This Farming Life, was published by Allen & Unwin in August, 2020.
Nicola Thorstensen is a member of Dunedin’s Octagon Poetry Collective, which organises monthly poetry readings. Her work can be found in a number of New Zealand periodicals and journals, including Takahē, Poetry New Zealand and political anthology Manifesto Aotearoa.
Today we have a poetry and music video premier from Ruby Solly with film created by Sebastian Lowe and Viktor Baskin, as well as a wānanga around toi kupu, music, and writing into place between Ruby Solly and essa may ranapiri.
I’ve been reading your poetry forever (since before I even knew you) and have been so privileged to hear you play and sing in public, and these songs on Pōneke are just giving me so much life recently! Just stilling those anxious jitters I’ve been struck with after the end of lockdown. It feels so of the outside as well. To me the songs create this river where you dip in and out of such a strength of emotion, I go from chilling and vibing to crying and humming along; face wet! It feels like something I’ve been needing for a long time. And there also poems that go with each one!
Before I ask you anything about the album could you talk a bit about how you got to where you are, your whakapapa and journey here to this time/place?
Ruby Solly Kia ora Essa!
Kā mihi nui for opening this wānanga space. I was a reader of yours before we met too! I love how we get to be woven together in this way, it’s very special to me. I really like the idea of these pieces forming a river as when I was recording them, I looked at a lot of old river routes from pre-colonial times. I like to think of the water under the concrete and how it can be heard in these pieces. After I finished the album I was actually gifted some of the original river stones from the Te Puni Stream which runs under my street, which joins up to the Waimapihi which features on the album. Was a perfect taonga to be given to mark being able to bring those songs and sounds out into the world again.
I whakapapa to Kai Tahu and Waitaha on my taha Māori, but I also have Jewish, Irish, Scottish and English whakapapa within me. I whakapapa back to Waihao as my tino marae in Te Wai Pounamu, from the Rōpa whānau. I was really lucky to grow up on the foot of Mount Ruapehu where I learnt koauau from my primary school teacher, Maria Kuppa, which was my first time meeting ngā taonga puoro. I started playing cello when I was about seven when we lived in Taupo, which also features on the album. I started playing taonga puoro again at university under the korowai aroha of mentors such as Al Fraser, Ariana Tikao, and Rob Thorne. I’ve lived in Pōneke for seven years and over that time have been lucky to receive teachings on our whakapapa here from Kai Tahu kaumātua, as well as learn from locals and historical records about this place and how my histories are placed within it.
essa Sounds like the album is such a culmination of things for you, everything is of course, but it’s cool to pay attention to the whakapapa of our mahi so thank you for sharing that e hoa.
So the songs are lyricless but you wrote these little pieces of toikupu to go with the waiata (which i love!) it really gives context to the music but they work so well as pieces of music themselves. They are full of stories from around the region, what was something (or some things) you learnt that really stuck out to you and why?
Ruby Completely, I think with me when I get an idea it’s not necessarily a poetry idea or a music idea or an art idea; it’s just an idea in and of its self and I get to grow it into whatever direction I choose depending on how I treat it and feed it.
I did! It was hilarious because I wrote these very dry factual explanations of each track and then showed one of my cousins who pointed out how academic and dry they were. I’d just finished my masters so I was in this very academic Pākehā writing frame of mind and it reminded me to break out of that. I thought about how so much of our histories have been given to us and passed down through toikupu and song, and that maybe this work is adding to that tradition. I wrote all the poems in one big day during lockdown, but I had all the info in my head from the descriptions I’d written previously which took a lot longer. That’s often how I work as a writer anyway with a research and thinking phase taking up a lot of time and the actual writing just coming in at the end, I call it the internal blackboard a lot to explain it. The original descriptions can still be seen on the bandcamp page though in case that style suits people better.
I think the things that stuck with me the most were the places that I could whakapapa too, which says a lot about representation within arts and the importance of it. Pieces like the two Karaka poems / songs, and the ones with tohu from ōku mātua tūpuna like Koukou are so special to me. Something I love about taonga puoro is the presences that show up for you when you play, and learning to not only read those tohu but play with them.
I thought about you for this wānanga because one, I love your work, and two, because I’ve heard you read some hōhonu, beautiful pieces about place and your connection or disconnection with it. I love the way you unpack these things like taking things out of a messily packed suitcase, then show us everything inside then pack it neatly so we can see the whakapapa behind these feelings. It really inspires me as a writer and an artist. For you personally, how does writing about place affect you as a Māori writer?
essa I just want to speak to something you were saying at the top there before answering your question. It’s so true that the lines between forms are colonial constructions and it makes so much sense for me for this art to take on many forms, I often have paintings and poems and songs that speak to similar things like a little family work. I don’t know I just think that smooshing of form is really cool!
Writing about place is everything really, it hurts a lot, it challenges me, it makes me feel everything I lack, but also it’s everything we are and will be and have been. Because it’s all about place right? The whole state of things is due to where we are placed, where we are displaced. I wrote a poem about my marae, a place I have only passed on the highway or “visited” via the google maps and the work really does summon something, like just putting words into the world establishes some tenuous connection point. Like a little gift from my ancestors. But also I do worry I fetishize that disconnect sometimes, make my life about the things I don’t have rather the opportunities and connections that I can make. It’s also funny as well because growing up I feel like a lot of things teach you that place doesn’t matter like all the names of the streets are some dead colonizers from Britain and the shows on TV are American, none of us present on the box. It has really been a learning experience for me over the last ten or so years finding place or even coming to see it.
And that is another thing about Pōneke that I really love is how it seems to cuts through that noise – that hypermarketed, hyper commercialised, there is always an ad waiting noise, especially with the melodies that keep returning and returning (we see that spiral again) and the all that incidental sound of place itself. And also it’s so layered, taonga puoro, instruments, found sounds, voice, and bird’s song. Would you be able to talk a little bit about the recording process?
Ruby Yes! The idea of art, or just expression in general being placed into different categories is really colonial when you boil it down. Being able to communicate across mediums and languages is a strength we have inherited from our ancestors that we continue to build upon.
I feel that sense of being challenged. Place is so… present in te ao Māori, we’re asked where we’re from before we’re asked who we are which is both a beautiful thing, and a very complicated thing for those of us who have not been privileged to have that relationship with turangawaewae cultivated in the physical sense. Writing into a place is a very Māori way of creating I think, and yes, it hurts to do it and to move through it. But it definitely gave me a deeper sense of understanding and helped me work through the kind of fetishizing that can happen with any diaspora. I’ve heard it referred to as “competitive pain” within our Jewish diaspora, and I really wanted to be able to choose how I presented that pain and how I wove it with all the other emotions that come with it, the full spectrum of it.
Thank you! When I create complete works like a book, or album, or a large piece without a major prompt I like to try and have it so even if no one was ever to see it but me (and my descendants possibly); we would still grow and learn from it. Then I decide whether I want that to be shared wider. I think in many ways that can cut out the subconscious desire to make something to fit the norm or to serve others, which in many ways serves people who don’t always have their needs met in media usually.
For the recording process I recorded taonga puoro within the different environments, responding to them in real time. Then I layered up cello at home afterwards to support the taonga puoro. Some tracks have some extra layers of sounds from the places when I wanted to really tune in to particular sounds like the gulls on Matiu-Somes island for example (they were also dive bombing me so I had to have a few goes). The whole thing was actually recorded on an iPhone four which I haven’t told anyone until now because I was super whakamā about it! But I learnt a lot about recording and took principles from how jazz bands recorded around one singular microphone in the 1920s with things being placed different distances from the mic. The mixing really added to the sound too which was done by Al Fraser.
essa I have listened to a lot of pro stuff recorded on phones there is a lot of life in those kinds of set ups I think! There is even a strange ideology I think behind those pristine soundproofed spaces set aside for recording, it benefits the subject matter so much for the recordings to done in the spaces they’re responding to! The mix is awesome, brings it all together so well, Al did a great job!
Some final questions, what would you want people to take from this record if just one thing?
Also you have a book of poetry coming out next year do you feel there is an overlap between that work and this?
Ruby Completely! It’s given so many people so many more options! I think as well it can be used as a tool to remove the ’sacred room’ element of recording where we try to eliminate all noise in a studio, and through that it can bring the environment back into the music as a contributor. I think acknowledging the space you’re in and all that brings is a big part of te ao Māori and it feels really good to be able to look at recording in that way as a method of decolonizing the recording process. Al is awesome! We both had finishing off the album and all its components as a sort of lockdown project, and it was so good to have someone who really understood the work and how I’ve developed as a player and a person through it.
I think if I could pick one thing for people to take away… it would be an increased ability to listen to and feel histories in places, with more of a sense of presence. To show people that idea that the repercussions of the past are still here, and we kind of get to look back at them in a way where we see the good and the bad all mixing together, and we get to decide where we go with that information. I’ve had lots of conversations with friends and whānau recently about matakite and te ao wairua, and I think my path into that world is being able to hear places and their histories. It’s deep work to be able to share that and I feel grateful to be walking on that path.
I do! I think for me there again is that creative process where there is a seed of an idea or an experience, and I get to choose what I feed it with and how I grow it. With the book, I started writing it long before I realised. So many of my pieces were about growing up on mount Ruapehu and Turangi, or my family histories and relationships, and then I just saw this thread with my connections to Kai Tahu and all these other people and places through my Dad and that was what was growing as the book. I’m excited for people to read the book because it does that same thing I think, it acknowledges that there is the good and the bad and all of it is our history and has lead to us. There’s a real narrative of me starting to see and hear that through my childhood and figuring out how I choose to live with it. I’m super fascinated too with the parts of our culture we don’t always acknowledge. Things like how we raise children, or the things we value, or the way we structure our speech. I think those things are often the parts that colonisation struggled to remove, and through them that’s often how we find and reclaim our ways of being and so much of our matauranga. Dad used to get me to swim down this river every summer, while everyone else had boats and life jackets, because he wanted me to be a strong swimmer because it was a survival skill for us and our environment. Little pieces like that are often misunderstood, but can be great gifts. I’ve saved myself from drowning many times.
essa told me they would like this poem to be the start of a conversation among Maaori and Pasifika writers. ‘Poetry can bring us together,’ they hope.
I am happy to offer a connecting space ‘for Maaori and Pasifika writers to deal with and or celebrate whatever during this time’.
paulajoygreen@gmail.com If I don’t answer your email within three or four days nudge me please.
essa may ranapiri, Ngāti Raukawa, is a poet from Kirikiriroa, Aotearoa. They graduated with an MA in Creative Writing from Victoria University of Wellington (2018) and their work has appeared in many local journals. They are the featured poet in Poetry Yearbook 2020 (Massey University Press). ransack has been longlisted for the Ockham NZ Book Awards 2020.
ransack, essa may ranapiri, Victoria University, 2019
‘he is like a bumblebee stinger on my tongue when I say it’
from ‘Dear Orlando’
essa may ranapiri begins their debut poetry collection ransack with a quote from Virginia Woolf’s gender-switching Orlando: ‘Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue.’
When I was doing my doctoral thesis (Italian) I carried a Virginia Woolf quote from A Room of One’s Own with me and I still do: ‘Mary is tampering with the expected sequence. First she broke the sentence; now she has broken the sequence. Very well, she has every right to do both these things if she does them not for the sake of breaking, but for the sake of creating.’
Sometimes we need to break language, to smash how we do things in order to begin again, in order to find form and fluidity for our voices. Sometime language fails us. Sometimes we have to smash muteness and test our way into a new musicality, a new sequence of connections. We may be fierce and we may be vulnerable.
I dipped in and out of ransack last year, and loved every snatched moment, but a few weekends ago I sat down in the cool shade and read the book slowly, cover to cover, and felt myself upturn, overturn, inturn and sideturn as the poetry pulsed through my being (I am thinking of that as a verb). This is what a book can do.
essa’s book is a glorious sequence of creating – of ransacking what has been, in order to refresh what will be. Letters written to Orlando make an appearance – like a epistle spine for the collection or a poetry pivot for both reader and writer.
The opening poem ‘my tongue as rope’ lays down a thicket image – the kind of image that hooks you, especially when you think of writing, speaking and even self as braid. The braided rope is the anchor, the preserver, the tough knot, ‘the single knot’, the finder.
essa writes: to pull in sound / draw in lists / the endeavour hits the land’. Can the poems be a form of rope? ‘my tongue-rope wraps itself until it is a single knot.’
A single poem breaks apart in my mouth and heart. The break in the flow creates a new current.
fetal
a mothe
r returnin
g to the grown ground like a gow
n of weeds got a stretching motion
n to stil
l body corps
e the wood in the wax in the flowe
r chains a bab
y stil
l bor
n rattling i
n the mutton skie
s chubby in the loa
m to no mor
e
Reading ransack allows me to absorb the nonbinary experience afresh. Unsettling the line on the page unsettles the line of thought, the entrenched dichotomies of either / or / male / female / she / he / soft / hard / weak / strong
A long poem ‘Con-ception’ is dedicated to essa’s mother and is a reading explosion of arrival, pregnancy, forming embryo, forming mother. I have never read a piece that breaks into and out of the maternal that has affected me so much. I am going to give you a quote that is also right-hand margin justified, but not all the book is (the forms are dancing on their toes in an exuberant display of variousness:
in the world and into the world of tubes
ride the machine
incubate in plastic
and drench in yellow light
the air is whole new in-the-world
and out of the old world
recognise voices
am i
an i?
put in
alove?
When she finally has a shower afterwards she is crying.
Reading the ransack sequences and I am feeling poetry. essa tells Orlando ‘You never had to discover yourself in a book. You never questioned your gendered nature – you moved from one perfect set of genitalia to another according to Aristophanes and the great round people of concave and convex, of female and male.’
essa places body and experience at its white hot core – a gift in its sharpness, its broken cutting lines and its sweet fluencies as the writer navigates how to be, how to be body, how to be bodymindheart in the world. Part of the writing of experience, with that backstory sting of ‘he’, is claiming name, celebrating a pronoun:
u said you liked the ‘th’ sound in they and them the softening of it
and how it fitted around my rage
made it/for it
to be okay to touch
i talk you through other constructions
ones that subverted phonetics
me as a slice of not that
when expecting this
the xe sound like zay
from ‘a phone call about the nature of pronouns gendered and otherwise’
ransack is a skin-prickling, heart-blasting, mind-opening glorious feast of a book that in the spirit of Virginia breaks up language in order to create something breathtakingly new.
essa may ranapiri, Ngāti Raukawa, is a poet from Kirikiriroa, Aotearoa. They graduated with an MA in Creative Writing from Victoria University of Wellington (2018) and their work has appeared in many local journals. They are the featured poet in Poetry Yearbook 2020 (Massey University Press). ransack has been longlisted for the Ockham NZ Book Awards 2020.
essa may ranapiri reads ‘Glass Breaking’ from ransack VUP 2019
essa may ranapiri is a river full of run-off and a mountain that is money-gated, tangata takatāpui trapped in a colonised world. Their first book ransack is out from VUP now., please buy it they’re so poor. They write these poems to honour their tūpuna, they will write until they’re dead.
NZ Poetry Shelf 