Tag Archives: Ian Wedde

Poetry Shelf celebrates Broken River Train / Dreams of Travel at the National Library

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Installation shot, Peter Ireland

For the past four years I have been addicted to travel as my ventures into the physical world have been restricted to blood labs and the hospital. I travel every day within and beyond the pathways and tow ropes of a poem, within the joy and nourishment of a secret books I am writing, within the writings and conversations and posts I create and poets contribute to Poetry Shelf. I travel into the past, especially to my long term scholarly relationship with Italy and the incredible experiences I have had there, to New York, London, Scotland, Ireland, Portugal, France, Barcelona, Japan to name a few, and all over Aotearoa with my partner Michael and our girls (as both children and adults).

Travel is a way of widening how we approach beauty, human endeavours, art, music, theatre, literature, sport, physical challenges, cultural relationships, racism, sexism, how we create and dismantle hierarchies, how we feed ourselves and our families, how we can communicate in different languages. How we see things in astonishing lights.

Travel is also a way of widening the markers of home. Of finding and holding beauty, of holding epiphanies close to our hearts, of listening to the stories of the person standing next to us, of taking time out from daily routines to savour and reboot within the rhythms of travel whether by train or bus or car or bicycles, or in hiking books or walking shoes.

Peter Ireland has created a mesmerising exhibition at the National Library, entitled Broken River Train | Dreams of Travel. To celebrate, and with the help of Peter and a group of poets, I offer you a poetry and image travel feast.

Peter has written an introduction to the exhibition and we have included seven photographs, along with a link to the collection of William Williams, one of the photographers.

I went travelling through my poetry shelves to select a dozen poems that offer myriad travel connections.

To travel is to dream. To dream is to travel. To dream and to travel is to connect and to reboot.

Paula Green

H. A. F. Jackson, J. Alexander, and A. G. Jackson with penny-farthing cycles. The three men travelled from Christchurch to the West Coast on the bicycles in January 1887. Photographer unidentified. ATL: PA1-f-010-21

I don’t know exactly why this exhibition came to the fore and into the programme, though to spend time looking at the collections of the Turnbull Library is to travel and to roam. And as someone for whom dreams are almost always about travel, then a sense of why this exhibition begins to emerge. The exhibition originally had the title of Road Trip …  and the wonderful image above was the first added to a file of about 350 images, of which 51 appear in the exhibition. Curiously, and somewhat to my regret, the Penny Farthing cyclists didn’t make the final cut though it’s an image I remain very fond of.

Along the way I came across a Steffano Webb image of Christchurch Railway Station showing a sign for ‘Broken River Train.’ This felt like just the right title.

Central to the exhibition is a selection from the more than 1000 holiday pictures taken by William Williams during the leisurely trip to Europe he made with his wife Lydia between 1925 and 1927. Evocative, dreamlike images of ‘foreign places,’ timeless, austere, sparsely populated stage sets of history, pre-tourist boom and ripe for William Willam’s deliberate and tender record.

A hundred years on these images speak to the opening lines of L. P. Hartley’s novel, ‘The Go-Between,’ that ‘the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.’ Whilst true in one sense, I suggest that we are more than passive onlookers at a remote world, we respond to the pathos and beauty of the images, that in looking at the past we rearticulate it, make it fresh and meaningful, dream it anew.

Other photographers provide key imagery for our dreams of travel, including Leo White, official war photographers Thomas Frederick Scales and George Kaye and the American adventurer Melvin Vaniman. Max Oettli, John Pascoe and Edgar Williams are also among the abiding spirits.

My hope for the exhibition is that visitors will find it evocative and that they take away a favourite image in their mind together with an appetite for exploring the collections for themselves.

Peter Ireland

Installation shot, Peter Ireland

Seven Photographs

Christchurch Railway Station, c. 1906
Photographer Steffano Webb
ATL: 1/2-040999-G

The platform sign for Broken River Train provides a helpful clue for dating this image. The Broken River train serviced a temporary railway terminus on the midland railway line, completed in time to allow travel to the Christchurch exhibition in 1906 – 1907. Thirty-six years in the making, the midland line was finally completed in 1923 with the opening of the 8.5km Ōtira tunnel.

Ice skating in the Otago region, c. 1935
Photographer: Leo White
ATL: WA-25279-F

Street vendor, Barcelona, Spain, c.1926
Photographer: William Williams
ATL: 1/4-100043-F

William Williams (1858 – 1949) was born in Cardiff and emigrated to New Zealand with his family about 1881. He lived in Wellington for a time, recording his experience of life in a bachelor’s flat, the ‘Old Shebang,’ on upper Cuba Street. In 1887 he married Lydia Devereux, the couple living first in Napier, then moving to Dunedin and to an address on Royal Terrace, Kew.

There are a 1000 images recording the leisurely European holiday the Williams took between 1925 and 1927. This selection forms a centrepiece of the intended dreamscape of the exhibition. You can check out the collection here: https://natlib.govt.nz/items?text=William+Williams+1925-1927+Europe&commit=Search

M. Vertelli crossing the Whanganui River on a tightrope, 31 October 1867
Photographer: William Harding
ATL: 1/1-000253-G

M. Vertelli, dubbed the ‘Australasian Blondin,’ caused quite a stir on his tour of New Zealand as these two reports suggest:

‘On Saturday next at 3 o’clock M Vertelli will astound the admiring multitude by accomplishing the most daring act recorded in ancient or modern times, and, regardless of danger, unconscious of fear, he will, by, as it were, a magic chain, connect Campbelltown and Wanganui by bridging the noble river, (900 feet across!) the vast expanse of waters flowing beneath.’

Source: Wanganui Herald, Volume I, Issue 124, 24 October 1867, page 3

Cyclists Pat Driscoll and Bill Mulrooney near the road bridge in Alexandra, c. 1901
Photographer: J.H. Ingley
ATL: MNZ-1740-1/2-F

Bernini Fountain, Rome, Italy, c.1926
Photographer: William Williams
ATL: 1/4-100248-F

Taxi driver’s dinner, Westwind coffee bar, Queen Street, Auckland, 1968
Photographer: Max Oettli
ATL: PADL-000106

a dozen poems

The Armchair Traveller

Excuse me if I laugh.
The roads are dark and large books block our path.
The air we breathe is made of evening air.
The world is longer than the road that brings us here.

The necklace is a carving, not a kiss.
You run towards the one you can’t resist.
At first she edges backwards, then she stalls.
Now every sentence needs another clause.

The road goes off through willows, then it winds.
Is that the famous temple over there?
Why are the people round about so undefined?
Why must they kiss then disappear?

Time now to let the story take its course,
just settle back and let the driver drive.
Bliss is it late at night to be alive,
learning to yield, and not to strive.

Bill Manhire
from Wow, VUP, 2020

xxv. No Response

Noman under a sheep who’s calling?

Why am I calling sheep farmers? Don’t they hear
the call of Cassino? Don’t they know you can see
the whole damned world from the top of Montecassino!
The whole wide world if you stretch your arms out
and fall off the edge and sail like a paratrooper?

Didn’t they remember the names here?

My mind leaves the walls of the abbey and sits
in the train station chapel with the smell
of cigarettes outside.

Robert Sullivan
from Cassino: City of Martyrs / Città Martire, Huia, 2010

In Dublin        
for my father, need it be said

I’ll go to Ireland some day, see those places
you’ve told me about, now that is a promise.
Not before I die, don’t leave me alone, my father
said, contrary as ever, all that bullshit and teardust
I knew so well, and that is how I let the years
slide steadily and quietly away beyond
his last defeated breath. But the day had to come

and I wish there was some way I could tell you
how much I love the broad River Liffey that runs
through the town and the way I’m enchanted
by St Stephen’s the sunlit park in the heart
of the city and the magnificent Corinthian
portico on the Four Courts, and yes the new Spire
of Dublin which of course you wouldn’t have seen
a whip of metal one hundred and twenty metres
high in the sky and the way they joke about the ‘stiffy
by the Liffey’ with that raw sly affection

but really it’s here in this music store in Dublin
these swift easy Irish tears of mine begin falling
between the CD spines lay me down / between
the bars / everybody / I’ll see your heart and I’ll raise
you mine / stay with me till dawn / volcano / no ordinary
love / nothing can
          nothing can
and I remember that you could sing
a sweet tenor all your own

So, yes, here I am, I’ve made it, right to the centre
of it all, it’s a grand street is O’Connell Street
complete with bullet holes and all. I’m watching men
walk past their hard faces taut with strain and the women
with their difficult mouths. I feel perfectly at home,
thank you for asking.

Fiona Kidman
from Where Your Left Hand Rests, Random House, 2010

Tour Bus Minutiae and Commentary:
West Berlin, 1985

I have felt the bite & crunch of winter winds, the sudden
stir of snow hunched around the corner waiting to pounce
on you, I’m envigoured by it. It’s called: Berliner Luft:
Duft, Duft, dufte! Loverly.

Dog-lovers walk their pets home, anxious to complete
the chore quickly, a marvel of detachment & poise as the dog
pisses or shits. When new snow lies white on the ground,
the nature-mess that dogs make is easier to see and avoid.

There are over a hundred thousand dogs registered
in Berlin. The City Authorities are sympathetic.
Two hundred and fifty thousand trees have been planted.

Despite the generosity of statistics, there are canine
territorial disputes over the third tree. Tribal Elders
from my Dog Tribe—Ngati Kuri—will send a mediator
to Geneva, me. It’s not a piddly matter.

Every tree has been given a number which I find phantastisch!
You may rendezvous with the beautiful Dame from East Berlin
unter den Linden tree Nummer 2231 Eisenberger Strasse.
On the Wannsee border-bridge, a Spy Exchange Service—
Spionageastauschdienst—is in place.

Dead leaves, which carpet drain and pathway, are cleared away
by City Council workers who come from Italy and Türkei.
Five tons of dog-dung is collected every day.

Bottled bio-gas from such a rich source is exported.
Gas ovens at Dachau & Auschwitz have been made redundant.
A taped recording of mixed doggy-barks is enclosed with each
bottle. I’m not impressed . . . Doggy-bark recording is a dubious
practice.

On the Lietszensee Ufer the trees are stark and still. A ridge
of snow rests along the tops of their nobbly, snaky branches,
their dark winter bareness, fattened and enhanced. On the frozen
lake, voices go up in steam—to the hiss of skates, sluicing . . .

Inside the warm pub on Nachod Strasse a dog comes in wagging
its owner, Sabine, on the end of a leash. Sabine orders a coffee,
unwinds her scarf. The dog sits down by her feet. Helmut, A Berliner,
greets her with tongue-in-cheek: ‘Sabine, kommen Sie hier bei Fuss?’

Dear Brown Bear City, I love you. Ach ja! You’re s bloody wonder-
ful ache.

Hone Tuwhare
from Short Back & Sideways, Godwit, 1992

Ode to the little hotel

Little Hotel
we love you
and in your little
rooftop room we love
each other, even though
we are big
and hardly worthy of such
a little bed.

•

We love the street
you stand on
which is neither long
nor short, but somewhere
in between. And we love
your neighbours
who are our friends—
smaller than us
and so ideally suited
to their address.

•

O Little Hotel we love
your breakfast room
your petit déjeuner
the crypt we reach by
steep narrow stairs
a bob and a curtsy on the last
to miss the bottom
beam—we love
all this.

•

You are our first
and last of Paris, Little
Hotel. We love
your lightning and the
|rinsing rain, the way
your white towels sound
the slap of surf
outside our room.

•

You are the rabbit
of Paris. The duck
with beans and peas.
Little Hotel you are
our herb and cheese,
our soup and sauce,
you are all of these.

•

O Little Hotel
we love your lift
in which we are
always pleased
to know each
other, pressed so close
as we are.
And when we take them
we love your stairs—
wide enough for one
winding up to light.

•

Little Hotel
your windows through which
we duck and climb
to stand on your roof
and look out over
other roofs, we hold these
dear to us.

•

You are paint and wood
and stone and all things made
from the these. Little Hotel
you are a gallery
of leaves.

•

You are our pink suit
of Paris, Little Hotel, our men
in shorts, our jazz band.
Later we will slap our knees
and remember you as four musicians
outside the Sorbonne.

•

O Little Hotel
in whose room
we read and
rest a little
after long days
we revere you.

•

O Little Hotel
we will never
forget you. We will write
and we will return.
O Little Hotel
doorway to our city
of Paris
au revoir.

Jenny Bornholdt
from Summer, VUP, 2003. It was originally published as a limited edition accordion book (or leporello) hand printed by Brendan O’Brien, with drawings by Greg O’Brien.

The laboratory of time passing

The angle of the sun tells us
who we are

or might be. And what time passes
as it passes. How

each afternoon is soothed into
place – the newest tile

in the old town’s expansive roof – and
the ticking of

the unofficial parish clock: its most
senior citizen, his walking stick

ascending the high stone path,
bicycle bell

and water bottle clinging
to its shaft.

Saorge, 13 June 2002

Gregory O’Brien
from afternoon of an evening train, VUP, 2005

Getting to know you, Venice

Pigeons in Venice are born mathematicians. Under their wings,
the flash of fob watch and compass with metal points sharpened.
Kohl-eyed from nights spent marking and route-mapping,
they leave their ledges in the morning, the distance between
dome, cornice and cobbled square plotted for ease

of business. The city’s theirs—a lavish 3D drawing
of scrubbed stone and stolen-gold mosaics, an almost-place
defined by saints and lines, angles and lions and, of course,
the pigeons’ squawk. Raucous at ground level, they are silent
in flight, daring to keep the company of angels, careful

not to graze the pinnacles of temples. Down a side street, away
from the crowds, a gondolier monitors his comrades’ movements
via cell phone. The smells of garlic, myrrh and dead fish mix.
And above it all, the quiet, white whirr of pigeons’ wings.
I believe it might be possible to attempt the impossible

here—wear feathers? Dissolve solid marble
on the tongue? In this city, where rain falls from frescoes
and children fence their shadows in courtyards at dusk,
even the gutters and drainpipes
and dirt bins shimmer.

Claire Beynon
from Open Book: Poems and Images, Steele Roberts, 2007

Spare Change

New to London, maybe I gave off the scent Naïve
to the ragged man who shuffled

along the tube train aisle
where I stood gripping the pole

amid the massed bodies of rush-hour crush;
each face, it seemed, averted in disgust.

Like the small-town citizen I really was
when the man said, ‘Can you help me, love?’

I met his gaze then looked down
to see what he wanted to show me:

his forearm split open, swollen,
infection swarming like red wasps.

‘I need some change to get to hospital.
Spare a couple of quid?’

I didn’t know local custom. How to draw a blank
down over the mind, or how to give a pound

as indifferently as if our hands held slots for cash.
Instead I cried out, ‘What happened to you? Oh my God.’

He stalled, his stare a flame held too close,
then rolled down shirt and jacket sleeves.

‘Never mind.’ He pushed through the throng
as our train hurtled to the next stop.

A second stranger tapped my shoulder.
‘Forget him. He’s a con artist.’

But the fire-swarmed gash.
The pomegranate gasp of it.

The man shrugged. ‘Doesn’t let it heal.
I’ve seen him. Uses pocket knives, tin lids.

‘Grifter. Scabber. Shows wounds for sympathy.
Don’t encourage him with money.’

One man so strung out he’d self-harm for cash.
Another so jaded he’d cauterised compassion.

Decades on, the memory opens
and reopens in the same raw place.

As if I could heal anything
as pernicious as indifference

I am at it again with the sutures and saline
of these ink-black glyphs

needle and stitch
needle and stitch.

Emma Neale
from Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit, Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2024

Remembering America

The question ‘Do you miss it?’ is unanswerable.
It’s obscene to say yes. It’s depressing to others to say no.
It’s inauthentic and invertebrate to say maybe.
I’d rather sing ‘Oh baby, oh baby, oh baby’ in a song
than answer it. I have attempted just to name things
I have liked in my location-limited experience,
like fried clams as big as men’s watch-faces
or a turkey jumping majestically over my father’s bicycle wheel
or suburban snowmen bathing in the cold light of flat-screen TVs,
but that doesn’t answer the question ‘Do you miss it?’
any more than ‘I believe I was a cat in a past life’
answers the question ‘How do you feel?’
Prove to me that the country I thought I grew up in
was real. You can’t unless you beguile me
with your fireworky thinking, your monster-truck cunning,
your whispers of calumny that you cast like the peal of a cracked bell
across the prairies I’ve never been to
and the peninsulas I have been to
and the places I’ve been to and forgotten everywhere.
Missing something is a state of mind,
says the polar bear on her shrinking ice floe.
Knowing not to miss it is a state of grace,
says the hermit crab in her rented carapace.
America, like a lot of people, I’m keeping my distance,
as we do from a super-volcano on public land.
America, a house haunted by itself cannot stand.
America, you are a monument to monumental misrepresentation,
and all your monuments should commemorate this.
America, you’re apostrophised so much
because you’re still not listening.
America, you look even worse from somewhere else
than you do from inside yourself.

Erik Kennedy
from There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime, VUP, 2018

The Catskill Mountains

There is a world of things that bees can see
which we cannot. They sense the earth’s
magnetic field, the electricity
driven by the molten core.

I know that in my heart of hearts
I am not someone who loves the country.
But I do crave the idea of it
to fall upon its soils in relief,

to live in a cabin, in a hollowed out tree
in the Catskill Mountains.
Of course what I really want is America
not the the real one, the wide, wide one

with its purple this and that
and the big gold moon trapped in its branches.

Kate Camp
from How to Be Happy Though Human, VUP, 2020

Travel Bag

The notebook is a surrogate suitcase
in which to pack a road map, a water bottle,
a sharpened pencil, comfortable walking shoes,
a wind breaker, a mood catcher, some folk
music, a violin, cranberry nut mix, seasonal
fruit, a sailing ship, a glimpse of moonlight,
a well-thumbed dictionary, seven memorable novels,
five yoga positions, a braided river,
a tide chart, another violin, a view of clouds,
a pink travel mug, a philosophy of doing,
a philosophy of seeing, a guidebook to verbs,
an old cardigan, stepping stones, changing tides,
a light switch, woollen socks, ginger tea,
a book mark, a mountain to climb.

Paula Green
from Road Trip, a work in progress

Riding the train

As the river consumes its banks
I tell you, yes – as the sky

sucks the sea up into its chalky glare
at noon, as the stars

leak salty dew on the palms and the palm frond’s
jagged shadow disfigures

the stonemason’s perfectly furled siesta –
I’m lost, somehow, at the frontiers

of what’s distinct, of
waking and sleeping, seeing and dreaming.

I’m riding the train.
Don’t know if I’m blind

or in the longest tunnel, now, on the whole
bright coast, or what the difference is.

Ian Wedde
from Arriving blind, in Good Business, AUP, 2009

Poetry Shelf playing favourites: Ian Wedde picks two Palestine poems

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Here are a couple of poems with a location that is important and distressing to me, Palestine, where I had a connection while working in a Palestine refugee camp near Amman in Jordan in 1968/69. The catastrophic situation of Palestinians oppressed by Israel then has become genocidal, and while poems are not going to change that, I have vivid memories of men sitting with coffees in the camp and in the marketplace in Amman, reading aloud to each other from Arabic texts. I assumed these were news updates and in a sense they were, but what I learned from my colleagues and students there was that they were more than likely poems by the likes of Mahmoud Darwish and Fadwa Tuqan. So I share them here in a spirit of empathy and dismay at the plight of the persecuted Palestinian refugees and survivors in their decimated homelands. These are among the different ones in a proposed collection Being Here – Selected Poems 2020 – 2025, currently in a publication queue.

Salaam aleikum!

Ian Wedde

From Palestine Poems 

1. The View from Here

Looking west from our second
floor I see foregrounded the
demurely venetianed
ranks of identical white
neighbourly units with here
and there a barbeque on
the first-floor patio or
a sun brolly with folded
chairs and sometimes
a frugal pot-plantation
of aromatic herbs, and
directly opposite some
bamboo stakes holding up an
early assortment of green
tomatoes – sometimes I can
see the busy outline of
a neighbour in their kitchen
window as they prepare an
evening meal (the sun is just
down beyond the western range)
and cars have begun to nudge
into their lit garages
under welcoming kitchens
with sometimes an ‘I’m home’ toot –
what goes on in those private
neighbourly situations
will only be revealed to
eyes that should know better and
go up to their top floor and
look out west past the ranked roofs
of neighbours and their modest
secrets at the distant grey-
green, back-lit skyline of the
sinuous Waitakeres
as far as the eye can see
across the dim horizon
with sudden shards of late light
reflected from the tranquil
estuary where distant
miniature house-clusters
leave just enough space for these
flashes that ambush me with
nauseating memories
of 1969 and
the Israeli rockets I
saw striking refugee camps
near Amman in Jordan – but
Palestine/Lebanon
is where those missiles have been
directed these past months, they
remind me of Mahmoud
Darwish’s great Diary of
a Palestinian Wound –
‘O brave-faced wound
      my homeland isn’t a suitcase
        and I’m not a traveller.
        I am the lover and the land is the beloved.’
– a far cry from ‘the first-floor
patio’ or ‘skyline of
the Waitakere hills’, or
‘sudden shards of late light’ – but
then not far at all, not a
far cry, but a cry to be
heard over and over in
the in-your-face view from here. 

2: Backfire

This morning as I walk our dog Maxi
through streets silenced not by apocalypse
but by the indulgent early hour of
the summer holiday, a car backfires
making her cower, shake, and press against
my sympathetic leg, so that out of
my early Al Jazeera news items
(forty-six thousand Palestinians
killed in Gaza since that October 7, 2023)
I hear myself utter
the words I heard often on any day
back in 1969, in Amman,
Jordan, a greeting but also a kind
wish for peace, As-salamu alaykum,
and as if cued in by that memory,
Mahmoud Darwish’s Diary of a Palestinian Wound,
his Rubaiyat for Fadwa Tuqan, poet
sister of my friend Fawwaz who didn’t
bother to restrain his tears when reading
the Arabic but quenched while translating
its many verses, starting with this one
that I didn’t know I recalled until
keeping sympathetic pace with Maxi:
We’re free not to remember because Carmel’s within us
& on our eyelashes grows the grass of the Province of Galilee.
Don’t say: I wish we were running to it like the river/
Don’t say this.
We exist in the flesh of our country and it in us.

Ian Wedde

Ian Wedde was born in October 1946 (shortly after his twin brother David) in Blenheim, New Zealand. He and Dave spent much of their childhoods in different parts of the world with their peripatetic parents or else in boarding/education institutions without parents, and Ian continued these travelling ways when grown-up, living in several different places including Jordan. He has published quite a lot of books both fiction, essays and poetry, has been New Zealand Poet Laureate, and was awarded an ONZM for services to literature. He now lives in Auckland, a city he’s very fond of, with his wife Donna Malane and beloved dog Maxi. He has a new book of poetry, Being Here, awaiting publication.

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Ian Wedde

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1

McCahon’s Defile
For John Reynolds

And so Colin I cast off in my frail craft of words
my craft of frail words of crafty words
into the defile of Three Lamps where 
struck by sunshine on the florist’s striped awning
and the autumn leaves outside All Saints  
as you did before fully waking in Waitākere
to look at the elegant pole kauri in dewy light
I defile my sight with closed eyes
and so see better when I open them the Sky Tower
pricking a pale blue heaven like Raphael’s
in Madonna of the Meadows or the scumbled sky of
Buttercup fields forever where there is a constant flow of light 
and we are born into a pure land through Ahipara’s blunt gate 
a swift swipe of pale blue paint
on Shadbolt’s battered booze bar where bards 
bullshitted among the kauri.

Gaunt cranes along the city skyline
avert their gazes towards the Gulf 
away from babblers at Bambina
breakfast baskers outside Dizengoff 
some pretty shaky dudes outside White Cross 
beautiful blooms in buckets at Bhana Brothers
(open for eighty years) Karen Walker’s window
looking fresh and skitey across Ponsonby Road
my charming deft dentist at Luminos 
most of South Asia jammed into one floor at the Foodcourt
Western Park where wee Bella bashed her head 
on some half-buried neoclassical nonsense
the great viewshaft to not-faux Maungawhau
and then turn left into the dandy defile of K Road
where you make your presence felt yet again
Colin through the window of Starkwhite
in building 19-G_W-13 where dear John Reynolds
has mapped your sad Sydney derives and defiles 
across the road from Herabridal’s windows all dressed up
in white broderie Anglaise like lovely frothy brushstrokes
or the curdled clouds and words you dragged into the light
fantastic along beaches and the blackness that was all
you saw when you opened your eyes sometimes
like the bleary early morning Thirsty Dogs 
and weary hookers a bit further along my walk.

I love the pink pathway below the K Road overbridge
a liquid dawn rivulet running down towards Waitemata’s riprap
but also the looking a bit smashed washing hung out
on the balcony above Carmen Jones
and over the road from Artspace and Michael Lett etc
there’s El Sizzling Lomito, Moustache, Popped, and Love Bucket
the Little Turkish Café has $5 beers
it’s like a multiverse botanical garden round here
you could lose yourself in the mad babble of it
like the Botanical Gardens at Woolloomooloo
with the clusterfucking rut-season fruit-bats 
screaming blue murder.

But it’s peaceful again down Myers Park
the mind empties and fills like a lung breathing
the happy chatter of kids swinging 
and my memory of you Colin 
sitting alone and forlorn on a bench
must have been about 1966
contemplating the twitchy cigarette between your fingers
as if it divined the buried waters of Waihorotiu
or the thoughts that flow beneath thought
in the mind’s defile at dawn when you open your eyes
and see that constant flow of light among the trees.

Ian Wedde

Note on

Ode to Auckland 1. McCahon’s Defile (For John Reynolds)

This is the first of five ‘Ode to Auckland’ sections/poems, themselves the first twenty-one-page section of a sixty-one-page book BEING HERE: SELECTED POEMS 2020 – 2025 looking to publish in 2026. The poems address a city I’ve loved for the many years I’ve lived in it at various times, including early on when I was a student at Auckland University in the 1960s when I lived in Wood Street, Ponsonby. It was a pretty rough neighbourhood then compared to the Ponsonby of today which is mostly upmarket and chic. Our part of it in Three Lamps is not in the wealthy space, a functionally convenient four-floor unit in a multi-unit apartment complex with office space on the top floor for my wife Donna and myself.  What this elevated space provides is the view out west from my panoramic fourth-floor windows to the Waitākare hills across the luxuriantly tree’d suburbs that stretch across that view. What’s just across the road from our inner-city place is one of my favourite dog-walks, it takes Maxi and me into the steep, sensational viewshaft down to the north-east harbour where we often walk in the morning via one of the little old-tree-planted parks that have survived from the 1960s Ponsonby I remember.  

Living here now in this folding-together of memory and present, I celebrate the huge old Chinaberry tree that stretches up past our office window on Donna’s northern side and is typical of the old plantings I can see stretching out west to the Waitākeres on my side, and I’m glad to have most of what I need within walking distance, but I’m annoyed by the homogenizing impacts of the suburb’s wealth and even find myself grumbling in an old-fuck way about why all the classic villas are getting painted the same white. But the frustration is really with myself. Back in the day when I was flatting in Wood Steet the scungy villas hardly mattered and Ponsonby was just a great place to live. It still is. The title of my prospective book, Being Here, should be where I stop whingeing.

The poems in the ‘Ode to Auckland’ section are mostly written to-and-fro across something like a give-or-take twelve-syllable line which I like because it gets the measuring mind in a focused but not stalled state – like walking with wide-open eyes and a sense of your foot-falls having an organic not regimented pace, mind and breath in synch, the lines reaching ahead but anticipating a transition that keeps the thing moving.

Ian Wedde, 21 October 2025

Poetry Shelf favourite poems: Ian Wedde’s ‘Ballad for Worser Heberley’

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Ballad for Worser Heberley

for the Heberley Family Reunion,
Pipitea marae, Easter 1990

1

I remember the pohutukawa’s summer crimson 
and the smell of two stroke fuel 
and the sandflies above the Waikawa mudflats 
whose bites as a kid I found cruel.

At night and with gunny-sack muffled oars 
when the sandflies were asleep 
with a hissing Tilley lamp we’d go fishing 
above the seagrass deep

—a-netting for the guarfish there 
where the nodding seahorses graze 
and the startled flounders all take fright 
stirring the muddy haze.

And who cared about the hungry sandflies 
when a-codding we would go 
my blue-eyed old man Chick Wedde and me 
where the Whekenui tides do flow.

It’s swift they run by Arapaoa’s flanks, 
and they run strong and deep, 
and the cod-lines that cut the kauri gunwale 
reach down to a whaler’s sleep.

When the tide was right and the sea was clear 
you could see the lines go down 
and each line had a bend in it 
that told how time turns round.

The line of time bends round my friends 
it bends the warp we’re in 
and where the daylight meets the deep 
a whaler’s yarns begin.

I feel a weight upon my line 
no hapuku is here 
but a weight of history swimming up 
into the summer air.

Oil about the outboard motor 
bedazzles the water’s skin 
and through the surge of the inward tide 
James Heberley’s story does begin.

2

In 1830 with a bad Southerly abaft 
soon after April Fool’s Day 
on big John Guard’s Waterloo schooner 
through Kura-te-au I made my way.

And I was just a sad young bloke 
with a sad history at my back 
when I ran in on the tide with mad John Guard 
to find my life’s deep lack.

Seaspray blew over the seaward bluffs 
the black rocks ate the foam 
my father and my mother were both dead 
and I was looking for home.

But what could I see on those saltburned slopes 
but the ghosts of my career: 
my father a German prisoner from Wittenburg 
my grand-dad a privateer

my mother a Dorset woman from Weymouth, 
I her first-born child, 
and my first master was called Samuel Chilton 
whose hard mouth never smiled.

He gave me such a rope-end thrashing 
that I left him a second time, 
I joined the Montagu brig for Newfoundland, 
though desertion was reckoned a crime —

and me just a kid with my hands made thick 
from the North Sea’s icy net, 
eyes full of freezing fog off the haddock banks 
and the North Sea’s bitter sunset.

And master Chilton that said when your mother dies 
you can’t see her coffin sink 
you can only blink at the salt mist 
about the far land’s brink.

And in the fo’c’sle’s seasick haven 
where a lamp lit the bulkhead’s leak 
you’d share your yarn with the foremast crew 
your haven you would seek.

Where you came from the rich ate kippers 
or if they chose, devilled eggs. 
They didn’t blow on their freezing paws 
they favoured their gouty legs.

And if you pinched an unripe greengage from their tree 
they’d see you in the gallows 
or if you were dead lucky 
wading ashore through Botany Bay shallows.

But I was even luckier, as they say, 
those who tell my tale: 
they tell how my tale was spliced and bent 
about the right whale’s tail.

And how poor young James Heberley 
fresh from South Ocean’s stench 
and the foretop’s winching burden of blubber 
his great good fortune did wrench.

In autumn I came ashore at Te Awaiti 
on Arapaoa Island. 
‘Tangata Whata’ the Maori called me— 
now ‘Worser’ Heberley I stand.

‘Ai! Tangata whata, haeremai, 
haeremai mou te kai!’ 
Food they gave me, and a name, 
in the paataka up high.

My name and my life I owe that place 
which soon I made my home. 
From that time, when Worser Heberley went forth, 
I didn’t go alone.

I raised a considerable family there, 
with Ngarewa I made my pact: 
from him I got my summer place at Anaho, 
my home from the bush I hacked.

I summered there in the mild weather 
and in autumn I went a-whaling 
from the boneyard beach we called Tarwhite 
where Colonel Wakefield’s Tory came sailing.

And I guessed from the moment I saw their rig 
that we had best take care: 
not the Maori, nor Worser Heberley’s mob 
stood to gain from this affair.

With fat Dick Barrett I went as pilot 
on the Tory to Taranaki. 
From Pukerangiora and Te Motu descended 
Te Atiawa’s history —

a history already made bitter once 
in the bloody musket wars, 
that might be made bitter yet again 
for Colonel Wakefield’s cause.

Worser Heberley was never a fool 
else I’d not have lived that long: 
I could see the Colonel meant to do business, 
I could hear the gist of his song.

He was singing about the clever cuckoo 
that lays her egg elsewhere 
and fosters there a monstrous chick 
too big for the nest to bear

so the other chicks must be all cast out 
for the greedy cuckoo’s sake. 
The Colonel sang this song I heard 
as he watched the Tory ‘s wake

tack up the South Taranaki Bight 
with Kapiti falling astern, 
and I, James Heberley, stayed close 
to see what I could learn.

And what I learned has since been written 
in many a history book: 
that you’ll find little enough of our record there 
however hard you look.

3

And now Worser Heberley’s story ceases, 
I hear his voice no more 
though my line still bends by the notched gunwale 
as it had done before

when I was just a kid gone fishing 
in my old man’s clinker boat 
and hadn’t learned that it’s history’s tide 
that keeps our craft afloat.

And now I see as I look about 
in Pipitea marae 
at the multitude here assembled 
that your line didn’t die —

and though old Worser Heberley was right 
to fear Colonel Wakefield’s song, 
he didn’t have to worry about the family 
which multiplies and grows strong.

I thank you for your kind attention 
the while my yarn has run. 
I wish you all prosperity and peace. 
Now my poem is done.

Ian Wedde
from The Drummer (Auckland University Press, 1993) also appears in Ian Wedde: Selected Poems (Auckland University Press, 2017)

In 1986 my novel Symmes Hole was launched at Unity Books in Wellington. An historical character I appropriated for the book is James ‘Worser Heberley’, a whaler who came ashore in Tōtaranui Queen Charlotte Sound in 1829. He married into local iwi and at the book launch tuhanga of James Heberley introduced themselves and suggested it would be appropriate, given my borrowing of their ancestor, if I could donate some copies of the book and also write and share something for their upcoming hui at Pipitea marae in Wellington. This is that poem, a favourite of mine for diverse reasons.

Ian Wedde

Ian Wedde’s latest poetry book was The Little Ache — A German notebook. Victoria University of Wellington Press, 2021. The poems were written while he was in Berlin researching his novel The Reed Warbler.

Poetry Shelf occasional Poems: Ian Wedde’s ‘Six dreams’

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Six dreams

Torn

In last night’s dream I was a gridiron professional in L.A.
and ‘in a relationship’ with no-nonsense Aussie actress Rachel Griffiths

whom I dislike as the gawky Sarah in Brothers and Sisters
but adore as crazy Brenda in Six Feet Under. ‘Brenda’ and I

couldn’t persuade the puppy to romp on the bed
with us. When I tried to crawl home through the wire mesh tunnel

that led from our place to the street torn up for gun emplacements,
I ripped my best suit. The puppy was whining, ‘Brenda’ was in the window,

but I was snagged, there, in full view, the rip in my Boss
making a noise like icebergs breaking loose.

Flowers falling

Tūī grawking and dial-toning in the Green Belt
among the obliging Aussie eucalypts

whose red dirt nectar they relish more
than the pale citrus, herbaceous local drop.

Was this a dream? Who cares. ‘And then I woke up’ is such
a cop-out. Sipped flowers falling before us as we walked.

Wild turkey at the back of the driving range

It sits up nicely for you under unbelievable azure
but keep your head down. Hang on to your turkey sandwich.

After dark they floodlight the range and you see
red eyes down there at the back. Trajectories, they go up

and over, they sky then earth, a line that can’t be straight
because it’s too full of meaning. A thoughtful pause.

I see where you’re coming from, but settle down,
earthed and ready for impact.

Black

Ten minutes in The Warehouse is enough to make me want
to kill myself. It’s the material inertia of New World aisles

that makes me want to end it. You’re doing well
if you can even find the Modern Tretchikov in Moscow. Tusiata and I

walked for hours over a bridge and finally
through a kind of art store.  Our shoes were made of cardboard

and fell apart in the rain. There was a sculpture cemetery, and a tent
for drinking beer and vodka. In the art warehouse

Malevic’s black square was barely displayed at all
but my entire past rushed eagerly into it. In the Palazzo Rosso in Genoa

the opposite thing happened. The darkness at the back
of Caravaggio’s Ecce Homo just kept redeeming it.

Film treatment

The klieg lights, the dark,
dripping forest, the rank flanks

of horses, a sneery hound pissing
on wet tents. The collapse

of public transport, the unhygienic
orphanage, the barracks, the unpredictable

success of tour discounts. A lake
in which a lake

is reflected. A mountain
superimposed on another where

thoughts race along the boardwalk
losing touch with their bodies.

Ian Wedde

Ian Wedde’s latest poetry book was The Little Ache — A German notebook. Victoria University of Wellington Press, 2021. The poems were written while he was in Berlin researching his novel The Reed Warbler.

Poetry Shelf celebrates new books: A poem sampler from Ian Wedde’s The Little Ache — a German Notebook

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The Little Ache — a German Notebook, Ian Wedde, Victoria University Press, 2021

From The Little Ache—a German notebook

2

Im Hochsummer besuchen die Bienen viele unterschiedliche Blüten

‘In high summer the bees seek many different flowers’

caught my eye on the jar of honey

in the organic shop around the corner

in Boxhagenerstrasse

but outside it was already getting dark

at 4.30 in the afternoon

and the warm bars were filling

with a buzz of patrons

dipping their lips

into fragrant brews

jostling each other in a kind of dance

I didn’t join

(I didn’t know how to

couldn’t ‘find my feet’)

but took home my jar of Buckweizenaroma

buckwheat/bookwise aroma

and sampled some on a slice

of Sonnenblumenbrot.

6

Von allem Leid, das diesen Bau erfüllt,

Ist unter Mauerwerk und Eisengittern

Ein hauchlebendig, ein geheimes Zittern.

‘From all the suffering that fills this building

there is under masonry and iron bars

a breath of life a secret tremor.’

In the Moabit Prison memorial

where Albrecht Haushofer’s words

incised in the back wall

already wear the weary patinas of time and weather

or more probably the perfunctory smears

of graffiti cleansing

I’m assailed by a nipping dog

whose owners apologise in terms I don’t quite understand

though the dog does

and retreats ahead of the half-hearted kick

I lack the words to say isn’t called for.

The horizon’s filled with gaunt cranes

resting from the work of tearing down or building up

the forgettable materiality of history

an exercise one might say

in removing that which was draughty

and replacing it with that which can be sealed.

Or as it may be

tearing down the sealed panopticon

but making space to train dogs in.

21

Oberbaumbrücke

is one of those contrapuntal German nouns

that should be simple but isn’t

unless you think

‘upper-tree-bridge’ is simple.

The long trailing tresses of the willows

have turned pale green

and are thrashing in the wind

on the Kreutzberg side

of die Oberbaumbrücke

over the storm-churned Spree.

They are the uneasy ghosts of spring.

Gritty gusts

blow rubbish along the embankment.

In a crappy nook

a graffitied child clenches a raised fist.

Yesterday at the Leipzig Book Fair

I listened to a fierce debate

about the situation in Ukraine

and later visited the Nikolaikirche

where Johann Sebastian Bach had played the organ.

One situation was loud with discord

the other’s efflatus a ghostly counterpoint.

On the train back to Berlin

I received a text from Donna

who’d been rocking our granddaughter Cara to sleep.

My bag from the Book Fair

had a paradoxical misquote from Ezra Pound on it:

‘Literatur ist Neues,

                                       das neu bleibt.’

The train was speeding at 200 kilometres an hour

towards the place I’m calling home

because it’s haunted by ancestors who left slowly

but surely

thereby established the first term

of my contrapuntal neologism:

Endeanfang.

26

The vanity of art

(Milan Kundera) –

In spring

I return to the Moabit Prison Memorial

Haushofer’s words are still there

writ large on the back wall

they seem a little faded

but that could be the effect

of lucid sunshine

which elongates the speeding shadows

of dogs chasing Frisbees

and picks out

the filigreed patterns of trees

beginning to be crowned

with pale baldachins of leaves.

The girl panhandling on the footpath

at Warschauer Strasse station

has scrawled an unambiguous request

on the cardboard placard

her dog’s sleeping head

seems to be dreaming:

‘cash for beer and weed

and food for the dog’.

What the ghosts of Moabit are saying

I find harder to understand.

The memorial park’s stark absences

move me

and the minimal architectural features

seem respectful and not vaunting.

But the silence here

which the happy dogs

vociferous nesting birds

industriously rebuilding cranes

and agitated railway station

do not fill

that silence

crowds into a place in the mind

that scepticism can’t reach

where ghosts gather obliviously

without caring if I sense them

or if any of this exists.

27

Patriotismus, Nationalismus, Kosmopolitismus, Dekadenz

are the words repeated over and over

by the artist Hanne Darboven

whose great work in the Hamburger Bahnhof

museum of contemporary art

like the nearby Moabit Prison Memorial

reduces what she knew

to the minimal utterances

the obsessive reductions

the repetitions

that anticipate the ghosts of themselves

in the silence of the archive.

Ian Wedde

Ian Wedde was born in 1946. He has published sixteen collections of poetry, most recently Selected Poems (2017). He was New Zealand’s Poet Laureate in 2011 and shared the New Zealand Book Award for poetry in 1978. The Little Ache — a German Notebook was begun while he had the Creative New Zealand Berlin Writer’s Residency 2013/2014 and often notes research done during that time, especially into his German great-grandmother Maria Josephine Catharina née Reepen who became the ghost that haunts the story of the character Josephina in Wedde’s novel The Reed Warbler.

Victoria University page

Poetry Shelf Theme Season: Twelve poems about food

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Oven baked salmon

I like my fat cooking pot

I like my fat wild heart

Paula Green, from Cookhouse, Auckland University Press, 1997

My theme-season introductions seem like miniature self confessions on life and poetry. Crikey! I always have much to say about food and poetry because I love cooking and I love writing. My first book Cookhouse got scathing reviews either for being too domestic or for being too experimental. I walked around the supermarket on a Sunday morning reading the first review of my first book saying OMG OMG OMG. It was my first lesson as a writer: leave reviews with the person who wrote them. Just get on with what you love. A few weeks later I opened the Listener and there was a photograph of Cookhouse on the recipe page with a Marcella Hazan cookbook ( I loved her recipes!). Plus one of my poems, sitting on the page like a recipe. That was my second lesson as a writer. Your books and poetry find their way into surprising places and you will never know how your poetry touches people. Although sometimes you get an inkling: a stranger might walk up to you, or send an email or a card, and surprise you (in a good way!).

I can’t keep food out of my poetry and I am equally drawn to writers with similar intent. It is one reason I am such a fan of Nina Mingya Powle’s poetry. Her poems lead in multiple directions but the sensual hooks are often sparked by food. Ian Wedde is the same. I adore The Commonplace Odes. It has always mattered what food I put in my body, and it is a bit the same with with poetry. I want to cook a meal that tastes good and I want poetry that satisfies my reading tastebuds whether I am writing or reviewing. In fact don’t call me a reviewer please. And I am not actually very kind. I simply love reading poetry and sharing my engagements. Just as I love cooking a meal every night for my family.

The poems selected are not so much about food but revel in a presence of food to varying degrees. Grateful thanks to the publishers and poets who continue to support my season of themes.

The Poems

De-stringing beans

A mountain of runner beans

to top and tail and de-string.

She decides to do it for them: her sons

so they will be eaten this evening

sliced into green splinters

with pink seeds showing through.

Easier to sit than stand. Her best profile

towards the door when her son appears.

She wants to disguise how content she is.

The stringy edges, tops and tails, in a dish

the beans growing, like a mountain of shoes

later to be wrapped in tinfoil

roughly divided into two.

No one else in the family will eat them.

In an article it says they are underrated

almost despised as a vegetable

underestimated on two counts

or three: first the vigorous way

they climb, clamber to the sun

second they are rich in iron

and last and best: this contentment

so rarely found, except in

a painting of a woman pouring from a jug

someone bathing someone in a tub

this mountainous-seeming task

calming with each stroke of the knife.

Elizabeth Smither

little walnuts

served from across the seas

in a tin or a jar, fished from suitcases

presented

with grandmotherly dimples

little walnuts – xiao he tao

proudly, good for brain.

except neurons are firing

in staccato, half-

forgotten Mandarin.

they manage xie xie and dutifully

I eat them.

I forget why I ask for these –

the carnage of shells

scraps of brown meat

and a strange invasion staged

on my tongue – slow

and clumsy muscle.

I am quick to rise – you do not get to comment on what’s in my lunch box –

but just as quick to pick

the yolks of my too-dry lotus mooncakes –

discarded suns

of a world in hieroglyphs.

and when I have counted

waves of sleep – yi, er, san –

I don’t dream in the same vowels.

what can I bring back for you?

her smile like furls of steaming jasmine tea

amidst clamouring children

hawking their wants like roadside wares

or suitcase wheels clicking on concrete

destined for smog and skyscrapers.

I always ask for my little walnuts.

*Little walnut or xiao he tao is a particular kind of Chinese walnut with a distinct sweet-salty flavour.

Joy Tong

from A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand, eds Paula Morris and Alison Wong, Auckland University Press, 2021

The proper way to make tea 

It is a cold dry day in late November. 

I take the Jubilee line 

to Bond Street 

change for Mile End 

and wait for the District line

to slowly deposit me at East Ham. 

She peers through the glass door 

small and wrinkled 

like a nut. 

We both smile. 

The worn aluminium pan on the stove is waiting 

thick slices of white bread brown. 

A faint smell of gas 

and toast 

and warm kitchen air. 

A stainless-steel container of yoghurt 

made last night 

sets quietly on the bench. 

Two leftover rotli 

press into each other 

in the tin.

She pours milk, water 

and heaped teaspoons of 

tea leaves and sugar 

into the pan.

Her tiny body

stands watchfully 

as she nudges the heat. 

Reaching for the mugs 

her sari slips off her shoulder. 

She tugs it back and the milk 

erupts

upward and outward

the creamy brown foam 

puffing up 

a breaking wave flecked with dark seaweed. 

Our wooden chairs creak 

muffled voices 

rumble through the wall 

butter soaks the toast. 

We sit together 

mugs of chai between us 

steam mingling like breath. 

Neema Singh

from A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand, eds Paula Morris and Alison Wong, Auckland University Press, 2021

With Nectarines

                                    to Claire Beynon        

A cob loaf rests on a surface,

perhaps a table, an altar, a jetty,

that reaches over a shoreline toward dark water

and the approaching edge of night.

Out there an indigo quiet where the sky lowers to sea,

clouds shouldering weight of storm to come;

a hint of beach, airborne flicks of white,

where seabirds swoop for fish and scraps.

On this side of a sill,

the bread, and a bowl of tawny nectarines

occupy foreground that’s human with light,

with hearth-glow in the corner,

tended against incoming cold.

The bread is warm from the oven,

the fruit ripe, and the room that extends

from the canvas edge into my lived space

where the painting hangs, included as offering

to the sombre air,

to anyone who comes to this threshold, empty.

Carolyn McCurdie

Super Wine

The news is early or his clock is slow,

so he grabs his mug of tea and pops

a biscuit in his pocket,

the top pocket of a faded old coat.

It’s a wreck of a thing, this coat of his.

a shamefully limp and grubby article,

but he wears it through the news and Campbell Live

and on into the night,

and he wears it when he leaves his little flat

and slips up the lane and out into the park

and lights a cigarette

(his skinny nine-o’clocker

and the last of the day).

And he smells the smells of mown grass and woodsmoke,

and he walks across the park towards the lights,

the lights of the houses on the hill,

secular stars of silver and orange,

and he walks beneath the frosty stars themselves,

this unmarried, unmended man,

this unmarried, not-unhappy Earthling,

A Super Wine forgotten in his pocket.

Geoff Cochrane

from Pocket Edition, Victoria University Press, 2009

If you love me you’ll buy Bluff oysters and cook asparagus. Even though I don’t like either.

for Kirsten Holst, for feeding me many good things

and for Alison and Peter, for their Bluff oysters and asparagus

When I am no longer who I was

I can only hope that I will be loved by someone

so much that every day during Bluff oyster season

they will buy me a dozen Bluff oysters.

Even though they don’t like Bluff oysters

they will buy them for me

and every day I will exclaim

“I can’t even remember the last time I had Bluff oysters!”;

they will nod at the extreme length of time it has been.

When I am no longer who I was                                                                                      

and when Bluff oyster season is over

I can only hope that I will be loved by someone so much

they will cook me freshly picked asparagus every day.

Even though they don’t like asparagus

they will grow it for me and pick it for me

and lightly steam it

so that I can relish it served with hollandaise sauce

(although some days more lazily served with butter and lemon).

I will eat it with my fingers

and let the sauce (or butter) dribble down my chin;

no one will mind or tell me to be less messy

it will just be moments of edible joy.

In reality I don’t like Bluff oysters (or any oysters)

and I can’t stand asparagus (the taste and texture are disturbing);

I can only hope that maybe someone will love me enough

to buy and cook me the things that I love

even though they hate them, even though I won’t remember.

Paula Harris

the great pumpkin war

standing in the kitchen crying

beaten by a vegetable

thought by now it would be easier

people have suggested this (people i trust)

the myth of progress

you do something every day it gets easier

in reality each day the dirt accrues

it multiplies between cupboard doors

i am running out of resources

i am getting further & further into

the ten-year warranty on the fridge compressor

one day soon i will have to pick up the knife

& address the pumpkin in the room

bought so cheaply from the farmers’ market

now growing larger by the day

taking up all the bench space

i fear for the fruit bowl

my mother says to drop it from a height

she throws hers down the stone garden steps

my previous attempt resulted in

20 minutes lost to searching for an unscathed pumpkin

trying to break open a pumpkin at night

is like starting a winter war in russia

i am letting everything get out of control

i sleep knowing it is getting worse

i do not think i can win at this

i do not think i can carry on in any capacity

Rhys Feeney

from AUP New Poets 7, ed Anna Jackson, Auckland University Press, 2020

The Cheese Scone Recipe as Promised

What’s the secret, people ask,

why do your students return

year after year to your class?

Cheese scones, I say, crisp

on the outside, soft inside

like all good characters. First,

turn up the heat, 200 degrees

should do it. Next, sift two cups

of self-rising flour, holding the sieve

high, letting the flour fall like snow

in the air, then add a heaped half

teaspoon each of salt, mustard powder

and a good pinch of cayenne for a lick

of fire. Stir and rub in 30 grams

of butter. If in a hurry, as I usually am,

you can grate the butter or cheat

with the food processor,

but do not go all the way, stop

at the crumbly stage, add 75 grams

of grated cheese, then beat a large egg,

with about 75 mils of buttermilk,

(if you have none, add lemon juice to milk,

rest it for ten minutes). Breaking

the drought pour into the dry ingredients,

mixing first with a knife, then lightly

with your hands to bring the soft dough

together. If it seems too dry

add more buttermilk, but like

it’s a newborn and precious, go easy

with your handling, remembering

scones and poems need a light touch.

Cool hands, my mother said,

though mine have always been hot.

Roll the dough out in a rough circle,

not too thin, about 2.5 cm thick.

With students due any minute,

I usually take the lazy way, divide

it roughly into 8 triangles but you might

be wanting to impress your mother

or daughter-in-law, and have the time

and the aesthetic sense for fluted cutters.

Appearance improves the taste

so brush the tops with milk, sprinkle

on a little grated cheese, and a dusting

of cayenne. Bake on a high shelf

for about 15 minutes till golden

and irresistible. Making scones

is not dissimilar to crafting a poem,

you need to pay attention to detail,

measuring, mixing, letting in air,

but there the recipe ends.

What I haven’t talked of can not

like metaphor, be quantified, the secret is

to bring to the process, a little of you.

Diane Brown

the children open their

lunch boxes to each other

a ham sandwich

for a Fijian fried egg and three cassava sticks

a mini feta quiche

for a South Indian roti parcel stuffed

with cumin and okra

a tub of yogurt

for a Middle Eastern pouch of semolina

sautéed in ghee and cardomens

a celery stick

for a Tongan plantation ladyfinger banana

a juice box for

fresh Kiribati island toddy

the wooden decks approve

their slats on standby to suck evidence

of sharing and spit them into the crawl space

beneath the salivating joists

it’s the allergies

                            the adults

                                                the food policies

                                                                                  and

the way fear feeds us all

Mere Taito

P r o p e r t i e s


You’ll need oil –
For your forehead on Ash Wednesday, for the insides and outsides
of your palms. For sore inner ears and lifeless hair. For removing
the evil eye – that’s the most important. Though not one in the family
knows the ritual, better to be with, than without.

Grapes and leaves –
For your rice and pinenuts, for your grape jelly.

And ash –
For the grape jelly – vine cinders to be precise. For holy crosses
over the front doors of your houses or workplaces. For the bottoms
of incense holders – hubris to clear it out.

Rose petals –
For gravestones, but mostly for the preserve that fits into a spoon
followed by icy water.

Water –
From the priest, for drinking in the first month of the year
and sprinkling in every room. For keeping in the fridge thereafter.
For putting chamomile into – tea or warm compresses.

Garlic –
For everything. For mashing up and applying with honey to sores.
For rubbing on styes. For wrapping in bread and swallowing whole
when feverish. For shooing away evil by saying the word alone –
along with a spitting sound.

Vana Mansiadis

from Ithaca Island Bay Leaves: A Mythistorima, Seraph Press, 2009

1.2 To the cookbook

Turning east, I drove towards blue grey

Mountains down which cloud crawled

From summits which were already sky. High in it

A glare like grubby porcelain told me that morning

Was advanced. The nibbled winter paddocks were over-

Written in a language no one had ever taught me:

Glottal, almost choking, wet. Lines

Of leafless shelter-belt enwrapped the shorter

Rows of berryfruit trellises in need

Of pruning. My destination: an art gallery.

My mission: to speak about art and poetry.

It was going to be all over before I got there.

Quintus Horatius Flaccus, help me

In my hour of need, help me turn my back

on landscape that wants to be art, on poetry with feet

Of clay. The lovely world has everything I need,

It has my kids, my sweetheart, my friends, it has a new book

With mouth-watering risotto recipes in it,

The kind of plump rice you might have relished,

Horace, in the Sabine noon, yellowed with saffron.

‘The zen poet’ is another of you, he wrote a poem

About making stew in the desert which changed my life.

A good cookbook is as good as a book of poems

Any day, because it can’t be more pretentious

Than the produce you savour with friends as night falls.

Ian Wedde

from The Common Place Odes, Auckland University Press, 2001

Custard

When I was smaller than the family dog,

Dad would tell Mum

that he was taking me to kōhanga.

Then we’d go to the bakery

and get as many custard pies

as we could handle.

Park up by the river,

talk,

eat,

listen to the radio a while.

He’d light one up

as fat as the mighty brown trout,

captured and killed

and lull me to sleep

with a puku full of custard

in his red van

with all his windows up.

Now I am grown

and you ask me to explain something you said.

My eyes glaze

and all I can see is that

red van,

pastry flakes resting

in the corners of my sleeping mouth.

Ruby Solly

from Tōku Pāpā, Victoria University Press, 2021

The Poets

Diane Brown is a novelist, memoirist, and poet who runs Creative Writing Dunedin, teaching fiction, memoir and poetry. She is the Poetry Editor for ‘The Mix’ in the Otago Daily Times. Her latest book is a poetic novella, Every Now and Then I Have Another Child, Otago University Press 2020.

Geoff Cochrane is the author of 19 collections of poetry, mostly recently Chosen (2020), two novels, and Astonished Dice: Collected Short Stories (2014). In 2009 he was awarded the Janet Frame Prize for Poetry, in 2010 the inaugural Nigel Cox Unity Books Award, and in 2014 an Arts Foundation of New Zealand Laureate Award.

Rhys Feeney is a high school teacher in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. You can buy Rhys’ debut collection, “soyboy,” as part of AUP New Poets 7

Paula Harris lives in Palmerston North, where she writes and sleeps in a lot, because that’s what depression makes you do. She won the 2018 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize and the 2017 Lilian Ida Smith Award. Her writing has been published in various journals, including The Sun, Hobart, Passages North, New Ohio Review and Aotearotica. She is extremely fond of dark chocolate, shoes and hoarding fabric. website: www.paulaharris.co.nz | Twitter: @paulaoffkilter | Instagram: @paulaharris_poet | Facebook: @paulaharrispoet]

Vana Manasiadis is Greek-New Zealand poet and translator born in Te Whanganui-a-Tara and based in Tāmaki Makaurau after many years living in Kirihi Greece.  She is 2021 Ursula Bethell Writer-in-Residence at Te Whare Wanaga o Waitaha Canterbury University. Her most recent book was The Grief Almanac: A Sequel.

Carolyn McCurdie is a Dunedin writer, mostly of poetry and fiction. Her poetry collection ‘Bones in the Octagon’ was published by Makaro Press in 2015.

Neema Singh is a poet from Christchurch of Gujarati Indian descent. Her work appears in Ko Aotearoa Tātou: We Are New Zealand(2020) and A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand (2021) and she is currently working on her first collection of poetry, a series of poems unfolding the layers of culture, identity and history contained within ordinary moments. Neema is an experienced secondary school English teacher and holds a Master of Creative Writing from The University of Auckland.

Elizabeth Smither ‘s new collection of stories: ‘The Piano Girls’ will be published in May by Quentin Wilson Publishing.

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, published in Februrary 2021, is her first book.

Mere Taito is a poet living and working in Kirikiriroa.She is interested in the way poetry can be used to revitalise minority Indigenous languages like Fäeag Rotuạm ta.

Joy Tong picks wildflowers from neighbours’ fences, pets strangers’ dogs and chases stories in the streets. She’s a student, musician and writer from Tāmaki Makaurau and her other works can be found in Landfall, Mayhem and Starling, as well as A Clear Dawn, an anthology for NZ-Asian voices.

Ian Wedde was born in Blenheim, New Zealand, in 1946. He lives with his wife Donna Malane in Auckland. ‘To the cookbook’ is from a sequence called The Commonplace Odes, published as a book by Auckland University Press in 2001. He was New Zealand Poet Laureate in 2011.

Ten poems about clouds

Twelve poems about ice

Ten poems about dreaming

Eleven poems about the moon

Twelve poems about knitting

Ten poems about water

Twelve poems about faraway

Fourteen poems about walking

Poetry Shelf poem festival: Trees

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our place, January 2020

 

 

In 2020 Poetry Shelf will host a monthly, theme-based festival of poems.

First up: trees. I chose trees because I live in a clearing in the midst of protected regenerating bush. It is a place of beauty and calm, no matter the wild West Coast weather. We look out onto the tail end of the Waitātakere Ranges knowing we work together as guardians of this land.

I chose trees because like so many other people the need to care for trees is strong – to see the fire-ravaged scenes in Australia is heartbreaking.

I love coming across trees in poems – I love the way they put down roots and anchor a poem in anecdote, life pulse, secrets, the sensual feast of bush and forests, political layers.

I could plot my life through the books I have read and loved, but I could also plot my life through my attachment to trees.

 

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Let me Put in a Word for Trees

 

Let me put in a word for breathing.

Let me put in a word for trees.

Let me put in a word for breathing.

 

Dinah Hawken

from Water, Leaves, Stones (Victoria University Press, 1995)

 

 

 

After a long hard decade, Miranda asks for a poem about feijoas

 

Small hard green breasts budding on a young tree

that doesn’t want them, can’t think how to dance

if it has to put up with these;

 

yet over summer the fruits swell and plump:

frog barrel bodies without the jump or croak

limes in thick velvet opera coats

 

love grenades to throw like flirt bombs

for your crush to catch and softly clutch

before they release their sweet seductions

 

and when the congregation and the choir

in the Tongan church next door exalt in hymns

while their brass band soars and sforzandos in,

 

a fresh feijoa crop tumbles to the grass

as if the tree’s just flung down its bugle mutes

in a mid-life, high-kick, survival hallelujah.

 

Emma Neale

 

 

 

Heavy lifting

Once, I climbed a tree
too tall for climbing
and threw my voice out
into the world. I screamed.
I hollered. I snapped
innocent branches. I took the view
as a vivid but painful truth gifted
to me, but did not think to lay down
my own sight in recompense.
All I wanted was someone to say
they could hear me, but the tree said
that in order to be heard I must
first let silence do the heavy lifting
and clear my mind of any
questions and anxieties
such as contemplating whether
I am the favourite son. If I am not,
I am open to being a favourite uncle
or an ex-lover whose hands still cover
the former half’s eyes. I’ll probably never
have children of my own to disappoint
so I’ll settle for being famous instead
with my mouth forced open on TV like
a Venus fly-trap lip-synching for its life.
The first and the last of everything
are always connected by
the dotted line of choice.
If there is an order to such things,
then surely I should resist it.

Chris Tse

from He’s so MASC (Auckland University Press, 2018)

 

 

 

Reverse Ovid

Woman running across a field
with a baby in her arms . . .
She was once the last pine tree on Mars.

Bill Manhire

 

 

My mother as a tree

I like to think my mother may have been a tree
like Fred’s, the oak whose Elizabethan
damask skirts each year spring-clean
the hillside opposite, in front of the house
where Fred was born. Her royal foliage
clothes a peasant’s weathered fingers,
the same unfussed embrace.
Fred never sees her now,
he’s in a rest-home up the coast
and doesn’t get out much
and so, in lieu, she fosters me
from unconditional dawn
to dusk and through the night,
her feet in earth, her head
in air, water in the veins, and what
transpires between us is the breath
of life. In the morning birds
fly out of her hair, in the evening
they are her singing brain
that sings to me. My mother as a tree:
my house, my spouse, my dress
and nakedness, my birth, my death,
before and afterwards. I like
to think my tears may be her
watershed, not just for me.

 

Chris Price

from Beside Herself  (Auckland University Press, 2016)

 

 

 

Objects 4

 

It’s the close of another year.

Stunned, I walk through the Gardens

feel them draw the numbness out of me.

This is another ‘I do this, I do that’ poem

I learnt in New York from O’Hara.

This is a New York poem set in a garden

styled in colonial civics on an island

that is not Manhattan.

I hurry to the hydrangea garden,

their shaded, moon-coloured faces

so much like my own. As a child I was posed

next to hydrangeas because the ones

next to an unremembered house

were particularly blue—

to match my eyes, presumably.

There are no hydrangeas in New York City.

I rush past the Australia garden but I stop

dead at the old aloes, their heavy leaves

so whale-like, gently swaying flukes

thick and fleshy, closing up the sky.

Some kids have carved their

initials and hearts in the smooth rind,

a hundred years against this forgotten afternoon.

I bend to the ground and sit as if to guard them

in the darkening sun.

The spread of rot constellates out of the kids’ marks

as if to say

look at the consequences,

look at me dying.

 

Nikki-Lee Birdsey

from Night As Day (Victoria University Press, 2019)

 

 

 

I Buried the Blood and Planted a Tree

 

Love is the thing that comes

when we suck on a teat and are fed.

Love is the food we can eat.

 

The food we can’t eat we give

to the ground

to the next day.

We pat the earth

like it is our own abdomen.

 

If I could have drunk a hot enough tea

to boil it out

I might have.

If I could have stood

on a big red button

and jumped once

to tell it to exit

 

like the highest note on the piano.

It was a sound I couldn’t feed.

I gave it to tomorrow.

I buried the blood and planted a tree

so she, unable to be fed, could feed.

 

Maeve Hughes

 

 

The sepia sky is not one for forgetting. Even fragmented, looking up at it from beneath a canopy. The flash of light through leaves more twitch than twinkle. Therapists and yoga teachers say It’s important to let yourself to be held by mother earth, to let yourself be. I used to feel relief in the arms of a tree, but now I feel unease. Is it my own chest trembling or the trees? Oxygen spinning from the leaves, boughs holding birds who were once such a chorus they almost drove Cook’s crew back to sea. Invisible roots bearing the weight of me, through the deep dark, where trees talk in voices I am too brief to hear.

Simone Kaho

 

 

Trees

 

Place is bottled lightning in a shop,

or in a chandelier’s glass tear-drop,

or in a glow-worm’s low watt grot,

or in street neon’s glottal stop —

wow-eh? wow-eh? wow-eh?

 

Place is the moulded face of a hill,

or lichen like beard on a window sill,

or the bare spaces that shadows fill,

or ancestors growing old and ill,

or descendants at the reading of a will,

who frown and examine their fingernails

before plunging off down the paper trails

of diary and letter and overdue bill.

 

Place is the home of family trees —

family trees to wrap round plots of soil,

tree roots to shrivel into umbilical cords,

tree branches to spill bones and skulls;

but even trees are just a spidery scrawl

against the shelf-life of a mountain wall.

 

Place is a brood perched on power-poles:

bellbirds with shadows of gargoyles,

korimako who clutch the power of one,

like an egg, to trill their familiar song.

Place is grandsons who sprawl

in the family tree with laughter;

place is the tree windfall,

gathered up in the lap of a daughter.

 

David Eggleton

from Rhyming Planet (Steele Roberts, 2001)

 

 

13

Te Mahuta Ngahere
the father of the forest
a livid monster among saplings.

A swollen aneurism grips his bole.
Below bearded epiphytes
a suppurating canker swarms with wasps.

Derisively lyrical
the tuis in his crazy, dreadlocked crown
pretend to be bulldozers.

 

Ian Wedde

from ‘Letter to Peter McLeavey – after Basho’, from Three Regrets and a Hymn to Beauty (Auckland University Press, 2005)

 

 

 

Last night I sat outside and looked at the moon. Up there, like it has been since the dawn of time.
Same one the cavemen looked at.
Sickle phase.
I know, scientifically, about the forces that hold it in place.
And suddenly I felt I knew too much.
The grass had been cut, while flowering.
The flowers were still there, they’d either sunk below the blades or reflowered.
I noticed grass flowers look like kowhai post-flowering. When the stamens hang long and white after the flower has fallen away.
The night was still. Cones on the street let me know men would come the next day in matching orange tunics and I should not park there.
The moon was still there.
The stillness and the quiet was misleading.
Everything had a perfect and terrible design that didn’t need me to know it.
I know the trees above the mangroves are called macrocarpas, some bird calls sweetly from the macrocarpa as the sun sets every evening. Orange, purple and pink from the verandah of my flat.
I don’t ever want to know that bird’s name.

 

Simone Kaho

 

 

Song from the fallen tree which served as a twelve year old’s altar to the wild gods

i am a hundred years more girleen since before you were a seed
i fell to mouldering in this darkleaf cathedral where you come

to bury the bones of brief chittering things and burn candles
in roothollows ah you young girleen life all aflickering past short
roots unplanted

i am all your church and ever the altar at which you girleen kneel
i all goldenarched around by sunbeam and sapling green

with my many rings i share with you rootlessness and in winter
you brush away my cloak of snow humming your warmblood
girleen beatsong to soften my ache of frost

while you ask knowing of what time is to the forest and you sing
up your low girleen voice to the horned and feathered kind which
do not walk the rustling hymn of season same as we all

then twice up here you come bringing anothergirl girleen
you open your arms to the sky saying this is your heart and

home yes this the forest that sings you by name and girleen
it is true we the trees know you but you never learned from us

the songs called shyness and slowly and the next time girleen you
bring your brighthaired friend you kiss her in the pricklebelly
shadow of the holly

where i feel you like a seed unhusked shiversway as she
branchsnap slams whipslap runs so when again you dewyoung
girleen come to me you come alone

ungrowing girleen and withering back your shoots as you
bitterbrittle freeze your sapling blood into something thinner
than lancewood leaf

which cracks you through to the heartwood solvent veinsap
dizzily diluting girleen you can barely make your mountainwalk
up to me

until for two snowmelts you do not return but even once your
starved arterial taproot has begun sucking in again greedy sunlight
and sugar to colour your suppling girleen bark back alive

you have disremembered every prayersong taught you by we the
trees and i rot in the forest you called your heart and girleen
you do not visit

 

Rebecca Hawkes

 

 

The Gum-Tree

 

Sitting on the warm steps with you

our legs and backs supported by timber

looking down to the still trunk of the gum-tree

we are neither inside ourselves

as in the dark wing of a house

nor outside ourselves, like sentries

at the iron gates – we are living

on the entire contour of our skins,

on the threshold, willing to settle

or leap into anywhere.

 

Here’s to this tree we are standing in.

Here’s to its blue-green shelter,

its soft bark,

the handy horizontal branch

we have our feet on

and the one supporting our shoulders.

 

Dinah Hawken

from Water, Leaves, Stones (Victoria University Press, 1995)

 

 

 

 

Nikki-Lee Birdsey was born in Piha. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a BA from New York University. She has been published widely in the US, UK, Canada, and New Zealand, and she is currently a PhD candidate at the International Institute of Modern Letters. Her first book Night as Day was published by VUP in 2019.

David Eggleton’s most recent poetry publication, Edgeland and other poems, was published by Otago University Press in 2018. He is the New Zealand Poet Laureate 2019 – 2021.

Dinah Hawken was born in Hawera in 1943 and now lives in Paekakariki. Her eighth collection of poetry, There is no harbour, was published by Victoria University Press in 2019.

Rebecca Hawkes is an erstwhile painter-poet and accidental corporate-ladder-ascender. Her chapbook Softcore coldsores was launched in AUP New Poets 5 in 2019 and she performs with the poetry troupe Show Ponies. She wrote this tree poem in her previous occupation as a teen and hopes it will survive repotting after all these years.

Maeve Hughes lives in a tall house in Wellington. She has studied Fine Arts and Creative Writing. Her first publication Horsepower won the 2018 Story Inc Prize for poetry and was launched in October last year.

Simone Kaho is a New Zealand / Tongan poet and a graduate of the International Institute of Modern Letters. She published her debut poetry collection, Lucky Punch, in 2016. Simone is noted for her poetry performance and writes for E-Tangata.co.nz.

Bill Manhire’s new book of poems will be published later this year. It might well be called Wow because he is so surprised by it.

Emma Neale is the author of 6 novels and 6 collections of poetry. She is the current editor of Landfall.

Chris Price is the author of three books of poetry and the hybrid ‘biographical dictionary’ Brief Lives. She convenes the poetry and creative nonfiction MA workshop at the International Institute of Modern Letters in Wellington. In May 2019 she and her guitarist partner Robbie Duncan will be among the guests at Featherston Booktown.

Chris Tse is the author of How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes and HE’S SO MASC. He is a regular contributor to Capital Magazine’s Re-Verse column and a book reviewer on Radio New Zealand. Chris is currently co-editing an anthology of LGBTQIA+ Aotearoa New Zealand writers.

Ian Wedde’s Selected Poems were published in 2017 – Te Mahuta Ngahere can be found there and we hope will survive in the bush. Wedde’s historical novel, The Reed Warbler, will be published by Victoria University Press in May, and a collection of essays 2014-2019 is in development.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Monday Poem: Ian Wedde’s ‘McCahon’s Defile’

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McCahon’s Defile

For John Reynolds

 

And so Colin I cast off in my frail craft of words

my craft of frail words of crafty words

into the defile of Three Lamps where

struck by sunshine on the florist’s striped awning

and the autumn leaves outside All Saints

as you did before fully waking in Waitakere

to look at the elegant pole kauri in dewy light

I defile my sight with closed eyes

and so see better when I open them the Sky Tower

pricking a pale blue heaven like Raphael’s

in Madonna of the Meadows or the scumbled sky of

Buttercup fields forever where there is a constant flow of light

and we are born into a pure land through Ahipara’s blunt gate

a swift swipe of pale blue paint

on Shadbolt’s battered booze bar where bards

bullshitted among the kauri.

 

Gaunt cranes along the city skyline

avert their gazes towards the Gulf

away from babblers at Bam Bina

breakfast baskers outside Dizengoff

some pretty shaky dudes outside White Cross

beautiful blooms in buckets at Bhana Brothers

(open for eighty years) Karen Walker’s window

looking fresh and skitey across Ponsonby Road

my charming deft dentist at Luminos

most of South Asia jammed into one floor at the Foodcourt

Western Park where wee Bella bashed her head

on some half-buried neoclassical nonsense

the great viewshaft to not-faux Maungawhau

and then turn left into the dandy defile of K Road

where you make your presence felt yet again

Colin through the window of Starkwhite

in building 19-G_W-13 where dear John Reynolds

has mapped your sad Sydney derives and defiles

across the road from Herabridal’s windows all dressed up

in white broderie Anglaise like lovely frothy brushstrokes

or the curdled clouds and words you dragged into the light

fantastic along beaches and the blackness that was all

you saw when you opened your eyes sometimes

like the bleary early morning Thirsty Dogs

and weary hookers a bit further along my walk.

 

I love the pink pathway below the K Road overbridge

a liquid dawn rivulet running down towards Waitemata’s riprap

but also the looking a bit smashed washing hung out

on the balcony above Carmen Jones

and over the road from Artspace and Michael Lett etc

there’s El Sizzling Lomito, Moustache, Popped, and Love Bucket

the Little Turkish Café has $5 beers

it’s like a multiverse botanical garden round here

you could lose yourself in the mad babble of it

like the Botanical Gardens at Woolloomooloo

with the clusterfucking rut-season fruit-bats

screaming blue murder.

 

But it’s peaceful again down Myers Park

the mind empties and fills like a lung breathing

the happy chatter of kids swinging

and my memory of you Colin

sitting alone and forlorn on a bench

must have been about 1966

contemplating the twitchy cigarette between your fingers

as if it divined the buried waters of Waihorotiu

or the thoughts that flow beneath thought

in the mind’s defile at dawn when you open your eyes

and see that constant flow of light among the trees.

 

©Ian Wedde

 

 

 

 

Ian Wedde is an Auckland writer and curator with sixteen poetry collections, seven novels, two essay collections, a book of short stories, a memoir, a monograph on Bill Culbert and several art catalogues. His multiple honours include The Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry, admission to The Order of NZ Merit and an Arts Foundation Laureate Award. His most recent poetry book, Selected Poems, appeared in 2017.

Auckland University Press page

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf Winter Season: Ian Wedde off-piste

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From ‘A hymn to beauty: days of a year’

 

Beauty

you’re the trouble I’m in

because there’s a lot of sweetness in my life

with that rude kind of magnificence

as when they hung Le Bateau upside down,

unusually animated and sparking.

Happy Birthday Montgomery Clift:

Where did I see this guy—in Red River

or in From Here to Eternity?

Accept and you become whole

bend and you straighten.

 

 

I hung around a little too long

I was good but now I’m gone,

I may find myself in a tight spot

but forge ahead

where satellite images show Yongbyon

and a mariner in the distance appears cordial.

Happy Birthday Betty Hutton

who is to be found in the lines and gradations

of unsullied snow

for your heart will always be

where your riches are.

 

 

They’re Justified and they’re Ancient

and they drive an ice-cream van

so do what will help

and don’t worry what others think

if King Kong premieres in New York.

In his eyes, beauty may be seen.

Happy Birthday Lou Reed,

as fast as a musician scatters sounds

out of an instrument.

One thing only do I want

to marvel there.

 

©Ian Wedde Three Regrets and a Hymn to Beauty (Auckland University Press, 2005)

 

 

Note for poetry shelf

In ‘Enjoyment’, the preface to Selected Poems (2017), I ‘confess to restlessness and the enjoyment of subverting my own practice’, which is one way of saying I got bored with myself and switched tracks regularly over the years. In a selection covering fourteen collections these swerves look more abrupt than they were. One place where they converge is in ‘A hymn to beauty: days of a year’, a sequence of fifty-seven sections that sampled lines from songs, the day’s horoscope advice to Librans, a ‘today in history’ clip from the Evening Post, the birthday of someone famous, a quote from the shambolic literature of the Sublime, and a religious homily. It took up 22 pages in its original covers (Three Regrets and a Hymn to Beauty, AUP 2005) and I only stopped when a sensible little voice told me to—I was having too much fun. It took me out of an autoethnography groove, it allowed me to mess around with a complex word, beauty, without being trapped by aestheticising lyric conventions, and it construed narrative meanings that had nothing to do with my intentions. Fergus Barrowman first published the whole thing in Sport 32 (Summer 2004) for which I thank him. Here are three sections, the opening one and two more picked at random with my eyes shut.

 

Ian Wedde’s first (very small) book was published by Amphedesma Press in 1971 and in May this year his (fairly chunky) Selected Poems was published by Auckland University Press, with artwork by John Reynolds. A small book about the art of Judy Millar, Refer Judy Millar, is just out from Wunderblock in Berlin. His essay ‘How Not To Be At Home’ is in the anthology Home: New Writing just out from Massey University Press.

 

From Paula: For Poetry Shelf’s Winter Season, I invited 12 poets to pick one of their own poems that marks a shift in direction, that is outside the usual tracks of their poetry, that moves out of character, that nudges comfort zones of writing. It might be subject matter, style, form, approach, tone, effect, motivation, borrowings, revelation, invention, experimentation, exclusions, inclusions, melody …. anything!