Tag Archives: lauris edmond

Poetry Shelf connections: Frances Edmond celebrates Lauris Edmond’s birthday by reading a poem

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Frances Edmond reads ‘Late Song’ by her mother Lauris Edmond

Night Burns with a White Fire: The Essential Lauris Edmond (Steel Roberts, 2017)

 

 

 

 

Lauris Edmond, 1924–2000, grew up in Napier, and attended Wellington Teachers’ College, Victoria University College (1942–44) and Canterbury College (1944). She completed an MA in English literature with First Class Honours at Victoria University of Wellington. She wrote poetry, novels, short stories, stage plays, autobiography and edited several books, including a selection of A. R. D. Fairburn’s ltters. She published seventeen volumes of poetry, including several anthologies, and a CD, The Poems of Lauris Edmond, which was released in 2000. Her debut collection, In Middle Air (Pegasus Press, 1975), wri tten in her early fifies, won the PEN NZ Best First Book of the Year (1975) and Selected Poems (Oxford University Press, 1984) won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1985. She received numerous awards, including the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship (1981), an OBE for Services to Poetry and Literature (1986), and an Honorary DLi from Massey University (1988). Edmond was a founder of New Zealand Books. The Lauris Edmond Memorial Award was established in her name. Her daughter, Frances Edmond, and poet Sue Fitchett published Night Burns with a White Fire: The Essential Lauris Edmond (Steele Roberts), a selection of her poems, in 2017.

Today Emma Neale was announced as the 2020 winner of the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for Poetry.

 

Frances Edmond is a writer and reviewer who works across disciplines in film, theatre and literature and is Literary Executor for her mother, poet, Lauris Edmond. Her most recent completed projects include: Night Burns with a White Fire: THE ESSENTIAL LAURIS EDMOND (with co-editor Sue Fitchett and published by Steele Roberts Aotearoa) and she is now working on a companion piece tentatively titled, Burning Substance: a Lauris Edmond Companion, which explores the origins, sources and inspiration of her mother’s writing through a daughter’s eyes. Frances was the 2018 recipient of the Shanghai Writing Residency and spent two months in Shanghai working on a new draft of her screenplay about New Zealand Missionary Nurse, Kathleen Hall, and her experiences in China. With Ken Rea who teaches at the Guildhall in London, and who was the founder of the Living Theatre Troupe (1970-76), Frances is working on a history of the Troupe based on completed oral histories that were funded with a Ministry of Culture and Heritage Oral History Award. She has also written and directed her own short film, The Apple Tree.

 

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Poetry Shelf classic poem: Lynley Edmeades picks Lauris Edmond’s ‘Epiphany’

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Many years ago I was working two jobs to save to go overseas. One of these two jobs was an early morning shift in a coffee cart, just off Courtenay Place in Wellington, outside a building that housed corporates of many kinds. I worked at the coffee at cart with Jenny, who became a good friend.

Jenny was everything I thought going overseas would make me: effortless artistic, politically informed, culturally savvy. Her parents were both artists, and her uncle was once a Labour Prime Minister. Unlike me, she didn’t need to go overseas; she already knew about the world. In fact, when I told her I was saving to go to India, she just shrugged and said, sweet. No bravado, no interest in impressing. The opposite to me.

Jenny knew I was interested in poetry and that I’d been trying to write for a while. She knew I’d been reading people like Simone de Beauviour and Anaïs Nin, and that I carried this deep-seated belief that real life happened beyond these shores. Probably in France in the 1960s, but that didn’t stop me from going in search of it. Instead of challenging me on this warped idea, she simply slipped a beautiful cream paperback into my hands the day before I set sail; a parting gift. The book was 50 Poems: A Celebration, by Lauris Edmond. As if to say, there might just be some life here too.

I took Edmond with me in my rucksack, and together we would travel through India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and later, onto the UK, where I met up with Jenny in Glasgow some years later. I never said anything to Jenny, but even now, twenty or so years later, as I write this from my home in Dunedin, I still think about that parting gift and what it taught me.

There are several poems from this book that I have continued to come back to over the years. Including this one:

 

Epiphany

for Bruce Mason

 

I saw a woman singing in a car

opening her mouth as wide as the sky,

cigarette burning down in her hand

– even the lights didn’t interrupt her

though that’s how I know the car

was high-toned cream, and sleek:

it is harder for a rich woman…

 

Of course the world went on

fucking itself up just the same –

and I hate the very idea of stabbing at

poems as though they are flatfish,

but how can you ignore a perfect lyric

in a navy blue blouse, carolling away

as though it’s got two minutes

out of the whole of eternity, just

to the corner of Wakefield Street –

which after all is a very long life

for pure ecstasy to be given.

 

Lauris Edmond

 

Who was Bruce Mason, and why was Lauris Edmond writing a poem for him? More importantly, who was Lauris Edmond, and how could she write a poem that had the lines “the world went on/fucking itself up just the same,” in such close proximity to “Wakefield Street”? In my extraordinary naïvety, this poem took me by the hand and said: see, there are people here that think. Here was the poet, looking and noticing, thinking carefully, trying to understand, playing, slowing reality down a little … There was a form of existential enquiry happening in New Zealand, right under my nose — I’d just been too ignorant and ill-informed (and religiously adhering to a stereotype) to take notice. Which seems to me the whole point of the poem — there is stuff happening right in front of us all the time, we’re just too egotistic or preoccupied to see or hear it.

Lynley Edmeades

 

‘Epiphany’ is from 50 Poems: A Celebration (Bridget William Books, 1999) and was originally published in New & Selected Poems (Oxford University Press, 1991) and is posted with kind permission from the Lauris Edmond Estate.

 

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Lauris Edmond (1924-2000) completed an MA in English Literature with First Class Honours at Victoria University. She wrote poetry, novels, short stories, stage plays, autobiography and edited several books, including ARD Fairburn letters. She received multiple awards including the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship (1981), an OBE for Services to Poetry and Literature (1986) and an Honorary DLitt from Massey University (1988). Edmond was a founder of New Zealand Books. The Lauris Edmond Memorial Award was established in her name. Her daughter, Frances Edmond, and poet, Sue Fitchett, published Night Burns with a White Fire: The Essential Lauris Edmond, a selection of her poems, in 2017.

Lynley Edmeades is the author of As the Verb Tenses (Otago University Press, 2016), and her second poetry collection, Listening In, will be published in September this year (with Otago University Press). She is also a scholar and essayist, and currently teaches on the English program at the University of Otago. Her writing has been published widely, in NZ, the US, the UK and Australia.

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf Classic Poem: Kate Camp picks Lauris Edmond’s ‘Camping’

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Camping

 

Do you remember how we woke

to the first bird in that awkward pine

behind the ablution block, and leaned

across the knotted ground to lift

the canvas as though it was

the wall of the world

and ourselves at the heart of it

lying together

with the fresh grass against our faces

and the early air sweet beyond all telling –

 

do you sometimes look still

into that startled darkness

and hear the bird,

as I do?

 

When we drove away I looked back always

to the flattened yellow grass

to see the exact map of our imagining

our built universe

for a week

and saw that it was just earth

and faced the natural sky.

 

We took with us the dark pine

and the blackbird

and dew beside our foreheads

as we woke

 

and now we live apart

and I don’t know where they are.

 

 

Lauris Edmond  (from New & Selected Poems, Oxford University Press, 1991)

Posted with kind permission from the Lauris Edmond Estate.

 

 

From Kate Camp: It feels a bit odd that this is such a favourite poem of mine, because of the pun with my name. But the image of the flattened grass hit me with such power when I first read it, and does every time I revisit it. There is so much to love about the poem – its sensuality, its unashamed romanticism, and of course (being Lauris Edmond) its absolutely killer ending.

I remember Lauris saying to me once that she felt a poem should end like the shutting of a car door, from which I took a sense of satisfying and substantial closure, a rightness. I didn’t know Lauris well but she had a way of talking, and of reading her poems, as if she was slightly surprised by each individual word. I hear that cadence when I read the poem.

But of course the best thing about this poem is the ablution block. It’s such an ugly, unlikely thing to find in a poem, both the thing itself and the awkward “no one has ever said it” tone of the phrase. You know this is a found piece of language off some battered sign of the camp ground, and that lends the whole poem a down home, unpretentious feeling, that lets her get away with the romantic flourish of the “early air sweet beyond all telling.”

The other thing I love about this poem is how, like one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, it’s really a kind of sly testimony to the power of poetry – and of this particular poet – to capture and immortalise. It ends “I don’t know where they are” but of course we do know where they are, the bird and the pine and the dew are here in this poem. Wherever the poem’s protagonists and landscapes are, however lost to time and mortality, the poet has saved them here.

I think that’s why for me this melancholy poem is one that leaves me with a sense of exhilaration, even triumphalism – because when the car door of the poem closes, I sense the power of the poet in the driver’s seat.

 

 

Kate Camp is a Wellington-born essayist and poet, with six collections of poetry published by Victoria University Press. She has also written essays and memoir. Unfamiliar Legends of the Stars won the NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book of Poetry Award (1999), and The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls won the New Zealand Post Book Award for Poetry (2011). Snow White’s Coffin was shortlisted for the award in 2013, and The internet of things was longlisted in 2018. She has received the Creative New Zealand Berlin Writer’s Residency (2011) and the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship (2017). Her essay ‘I wet my pants’ was a finalist in the Landfall essay competition in 2018.

 

Lauris Edmond wrote poetry, novels, short stories, stage plays, autobiography and edited several books, including ARD Fairburn letters. She published over fifteen volumes of poetry, including several anthologies, and a CD, The Poems of Lauris Edmond, was released in 2000. Her debut collection, In Middle Air, written in her early fifties, won the PEN NZ Best First Book of the Year (1975) while Selected Poems won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (1985). She received numerous awards including the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship (1981), an OBE for Services to Poetry and Literature (1986), an Honorary DLitt from Massey University (1988). Edmond was a founder of New Zealand Books. The Lauris Edmond Memorial Award was established in her name. Her daughter, Frances Edmond, and poet, Sue Fitchett, published, Night Burns with a White Fire: The Essential Lauris Edmond, a selection of her poems in 2017.