to their allocated desks. Just focus on the stillness.
Listen to the many keyboards inside yourself.
You might experience them as a ticking cavern
or a preschool armed with felted mallets.
Notice the shuffle of your thoughts in your internal
stairwells. There may be pigeons scribbling their nests
in your eaves, a fresh pucker in your wiring, burnt toast
on Level 7. Acknowledge these,
and try not to ask yourself
why your pipes
feel so water-logged
these days, or whether
it’s just a clump of thoughts
leaning on a wall.
Let your elevators rise
and let them softly fall.
Natalie Morrison
Natalie Morrison has an MA in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters, where she received the Biggs Family Prize for Poetry in 2016. She lives and works in Wellington. Her debut collection Pins appeared in 2020 (Victoria University Press).
Natalie Morrison reads from Pins, Victoria University Press, 2020
Natalie Morrison has an MA in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters, where she received the Biggs Family Prize for Poetry in 2016. She lives and works in Wellington. Pins is her first book and is on the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards Poetry Category longlist.
CONGRATULATIONS to all the poets. This is the best longlist I have seen in years. I have loved all these books to a sublime degree. I am also delighted to see a mix of university presses and smaller publishers, and those inbetween. I plan to review Hinemoana and Karlo’s books over the coming weeks (Goddess Muscle, Karlo Mila, Huia Press and Funkhaus, Hinemoana Baker, Victoria University Press).
For end-of-year Poetry Shelf wraps, I have usually invited a swag of writers to pick books they have loved. It has always turned into a mammoth reading celebration, mostly of poetry, but with a little of everything else. This year I decided to invite a handful of poets, whose new books I have loved in 2020, to make a few poetry picks.
My review and interview output has been compromised this year. I still have perhaps 20 poetry books published in Aotearoa I have not yet reviewed, and I do hope to write about some of these over summer.
The 8 Poets
Among a number of other terrific poetry reads (Oscar Upperton’s New Transgender Blockbusters for example), here are eight books that struck me deep this year (with my review links). Tusiata Avia’s The Savager Coloniser (VUP) is the kind of book that tears you apart and you feel so utterly glad to have read it. Tusiata has put herself, her rage, experience, memories, loves, prayers, dreads into poems that face racism, terrorism, Covid, inequity, colonialism, being a mother and a daughter, being human. An extraordinary book. Rhian Gallagher’s Far-Flung (AUP) is a sumptuous arrival, a book of exquisite returns that slowly unfold across months. Her poetic craft includes the lyrical, the political, the personal and the contemplative in poems that reflect upon the land, experiences, relationships.
Rata Gordon‘s Second Person (VUP) is fresh, layered and utterly captivating. This is a book of birth, babies, death, the universe, love, motherhood, water, sky, wildlife. It is a book that celebrates the present tense, the way we can inhabit the now of being. Reading Mohamed Hassan’s new collection, National Anthem (Dead Bird Books), opens up what poetry can do. It widens your heart. It makes you feel. It makes you think. It gets you listening. It makes you think about things that matter. Humanity. Family. Soil. Ahh!
Bill Manhire‘s Wow (VUP) will haunt you – so many of these poems have joined my list of memorable poetry encounters. The baby in the title poem says ‘wow’ while the big brother says ‘also’. This new collection sparks both the ‘wow’ moments and the ‘also’ moments. Get lost in its glorious thickets and then find your way out to take stock of the ordinary (and out-of-the-ordinary) world about you. Like Rhian’s collection this is a book of poetry astonishments. Natalie Morrison‘s (VUP) debut collection Pins is exquisite, both melodious and tactile, economical and rich. There is both a quirkiness and a crafted musicality, resonant white space, yet perhaps a key link is that of narrative. I filled with joy as I read this book.
Jackson Nieuwland‘s I am a Human Being (Compound Press), so long in the making, lovingly crafted with the loving support of friends, with both doubt and with grace (think poise, fluency, adroitness), this book, in its lists and its expansions, moves beyond the need for a single self-defining word. I knew within a page or two, this book was a slow-speed read to savour with joy. Nina Powles‘s Magnolia (Seraph Press) is the book I am currently reading. I have long been a fan, from Girls of the Drift to the glorious Luminscent). Nina’s new book is so immensely satisfying as it navigates home and not-home, identity, history, myth, the lives of women – with characteristic nimbleness, heavenly phrasing, open-heart revelations, the senses on alert, the presence of food, multiple languages. Reading bliss!
The poets and their picks
Tusiata Avia
I’m a terrible book buyer. I tend to read books given to me (because I’m cheap like that) and the shopping-bag full of books my cousin, playwright, Victor Rodger, lends to me on the regular. He has the best taste! I should probably be a better reader of New Zealand poetry in particular, but I reckon I’ve got enough things to feel guilty about.
The top three on my list of books I have read this year and love:
Funkhaus by Hinemoana Baker (Victoria University Press)
I love the way Hinemoana uses language to make the ethereal and the mysterious. I’m happy to not immediately be able to pin down meaning; her language allows me to be suspended between what it does to me and what it means. Poems like the incantatory Aunties and Mother – which I think of as more ‘rooted’ – make me want to sit down immediately and write a poem. In fact that is exactly what I did do when I read this book. I love a book that makes me write.
An American Sunrise Joy Harjo (WW Norton & Co)
An American Sunrise is Joy Harjo’s most recent book of poetry. Joy is Poet Laureate of the United States. I love everything Joy Harjo has written. And I mean everything. She Had Some Horses (from an early book of the same name) is one of favourite poems of all time. Elise Paschen says of her, “ Joy Harjo is visionary and a truth sayer, and her expansive imagination sweeps time, interpolating history into the present.”. I would add to that she is taulaaitu, mouth-piece for the ancestors, gods and spirits. While you’re reading Joy Harjo’s poetry, read Crazy Brave, her wonderful autobiography. It will stay with you forever.
National Anthem by Mohamed Hassan (Dead Bird Books)
When I was looking for favourite lines in this book, I couldn’t decide, sooo many – like small poems in themselves. Mohamed speaks with an iron fist in a velvet glove. His poetry is elegant and beautiful and it tells the damn truth. Someone needs to tell the damn truth – about March 15, about being Muslim in New Zealand (and in the entire western world), about the things that happen so close to us – and inside us – that are easy (and more comfy) to avert our eyes from.
Some favourite lines from White Supremacy is a song we all know the words to but never sing out loud: ‘Please come and talk on our show tomorrow/ no don’t bring that up/…
‘This isn’t about race/ this is a time for mourning/ this is about us/ isn’t she amazing/ aren’t we all’…
‘Let us hold you and cry/ our grief into your hijabs’…
Who can tell these stories in this way but a good poet with fire in his fingers, love and pain in equal measure in his heart and feet on the battleground?
There are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce Morgan Parker (Tin House)
I have to add, There are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce by Morgan Parker to every list I write forever. In my opinion, no reader of poetry should miss this. If it doesn’t grab you by the shoulders, the heart, the brain, the belly – you might be dead. From the epigraph: ‘The president is black/ she black’ (Kendrick Lamar). Morgan Parker is PRESIDENT.
Rhian Gallagher
The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (HarperCollins) edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris features translations of 20th century poets from around the world and is packed with surprises.
Amidst all the books I have enjoyed during 2020, this is the one that I have read and re-read and continue to come back to. It was first published in 2010. I have been slow in coming to the book.
When a poem in another language is re-cast into English, through the empathy and skill of a translator, it seems to unsettle notions of line, rhythmn, word choice and form. Translation pushes and tugs at the boundaries of the ‘rules’ and introduces a kind of strangeness. This strangeness I experience as an opening; a feeling of potential, slippery as a an eel to articulate. It recalibrates predetermined notions and generates excitement about what a poem can do or be.
There are well-known names here: Cavafy, Lorca, Akhmatova, Ritsos, Milosz, Symborska among others. There are also many poets previously unknown to me, and many whose work is either out of print or difficult to source. It’s a diverse, inspiring array of poetic voices and, as Kaminsky says in the introduction, puts us ‘in conversation with a global poetic tradition’.
Making discoveries is one of the great pleasures of anthologies. I now have a brand new ‘to read’ list.
Rata Gordon
When I’m reading something that inspires me, I have the urge to inhabit it somehow. I find that entering into a creative process by writing with, and around, another’s words helps me to absorb them into my internal landscape. This poem was created with snippets of some of the poetry I have met recently.
Soon, we are night sailing (Hunter, p. 71)
This is the closest you can get to it:
the void, the nothing,
the black lapping mouth of the sea
and the black arching back of the sky. (Hunter, p. 71)
One still maintains a little glimmer of hope
Deep down inside
A tiny light
About the size of a speck
Like a distant star
Is spotted on the horizon this dark night (Boochani, p. 26)
Swish swish swish
as quiet as a fish. (Ranger, p. 13)
… holy women
await you
on the shore –
long having practiced the art
of replacing hearts
with God
and song (Walker, p. 7)
Today you are tumbling towards her like the ocean.
… you are becoming nearer and nearer to someone other
than yourself. (Hawken, p. 49)
I have … imagined my life ending,
or simply evaporating,
by being subsumed into a tribe of blue people. (Nelson, p. 54)
The End We Start From by Megan Hunter (2017, Picador). (Not strictly poetry, but the book feels so much like a long poem to me). Line breaks added by me.
No Friend but the Mountains by Behrouz Boochani (2020, Picador).
‘Autumn Leaves’ by Laura Ranger. In A Treasury of NZ Poems for Children edited by Paula Green (2014, Random House).
Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning by Alice Walker (1975, The Women’s Press).
Small Stories of Devotion by Dinah Hawken (1991, Victoria University Press).
Bluets by Maggie Nelson (2009, Jonathan Cape). Line breaks added by me.
Mohamed Hassan
Tusiata Avia’s The Savage Coloniser Book (Victoria University Press)
A few weeks ago, I sat in the audience at a WORD Christchurch event and watched our former poet laureate Selina Tusitala Marsh read a poem from Tusiata Avia’s new collection. It began as such:
Hey James,
yeah, you
in the white wig
in that big Endeavour
sailing the blue, blue water
like a big arsehole
FUCK YOU, BITCH.
The hall fell pin silent and a heavy fog of discomfort descended from the ceiling, and I sat in the corner brimming with mischievous glee. It was a perfect moment, watching two of the country’s most celebrated poets jointly trash the country’s so-called ‘founder’ in the most spiteful way imaginable. The audience squirmed and squirmed and I grinned and grinned.
This is how Avia’s book begins, and it never lets up. As the title subtly implies with a hammer, Avia has things she wants to say, and doesn’t care how people feel about them. She delights in the spiteful, burrows down into the uncomfortable and the impolite and pulls out nuggets of painful truths with her bare hands. They are all truths that must be said bluntly and Avia drills them home.
In Massacre, Avia reflects on her youth fighting the demons of Christchurch, and asks us if our ‘this is not us’ mantra is divorced from the history carried in the land, haunted instead by the white spirits that rose to claim lives on March 15.
The book crescendos with How to be in a room full of white people, a dizzying poem that traps us in a single moment in time and forces us to witness and squirm and eventually, hopefully, understand what it is like to be the only brown body in a foreign space, in all its literal and metaphorical significance.
This has been my most cherished book this year, bringing together Tusiata Avia’s firecracker wit and her uncanny gift of conjuring worlds that feel vivid in their weight and poignancy. Abandoning all diplomacies, this is a blazing manifesto for honest and confrontational poetry that speaks with an urgency that puts me as a writer to shame, and demands more of me at once.
Bill Manhire
Jenny Lewis, Gilgamesh Retold, (Carcanet)
I love the way poetry re-visions the past, especially the deep past. I’m thinking of books like Matthew Francis’s reworking of the Welsh epic The Mabinogi and Alice Oswald’s Memorial, a book that abandons the main storyline of Homer’s Iliad in favour of narrating the death scenes of minor characters, accompanied by extra helpings of extended simile. I’d always known about the Epic of Gilgamesh, which I have owned for about 40 years in a yellow 1960 Penguin paperback. I’ve hardly opened it, but it’s one of some nine translations of the poem that Jenny Lewis has consulted for Gilgamesh Retold, published by Carcanet some four thousand years after the stories first circulated in oral form. (Her publisher at Carcanet, Michael Schmidt, has himself written a much admired book about the poem’s origins and afterlife)
Locally Dinah Hawken has worked with this ancient material, particularly writing about Inanna, the goddess of beauty and fertility and, sometimes, war, who is one of the major figures in the Gilgamesh cycle. Dinah’s feminist sense of the ancient stories accords with Jenny Lewis’s decision, as the blurb says, to relocate the poem “to its earlier oral roots in a Sumerian society where men and women were more equal, … [where] only women were allowed to brew beer and keep taverns, and women had their own language – emesal.”
It’s as well Inanna has such a significant role in Gilgamesh, for otherwise it would be a tale about male adventuring and bonding (Gilgamesh and Enkidu) and the discovery that even the greatest heroes can never overcome death. The world of Gilgamesh also gives us a Flood, which matches and in some ways outdoes the Old Testament. I love the way Jenny Lewis has retold these stories. She doesn’t try to pad them out to produce the sorts of coherence and pacing that contemporary readers and movie-goers find comfortable, while her phrasings have an unreductive clarity and a genuinely lyrical grace. The most audacious thing she has done, and has carried off brilliantly, is to use different metrical forms to reflect the ways in which a range of different custodians/retellers have voiced and revoiced the story. You admire the 21st-century poet’s craft even as she inducts you into a baffling and unfamiliar world. All stories, Gilgamesh Retold tells us, are made by many voices, and the best of them will journey on through many more.
And now I must try and summon up the courage to give the latest version of Beowulf a go!
Natalie Morrison
Gregory Kan, Under Glass(Auckland University Press)
My esteemed colleague, with one hand around his Friday swill-bottle: ‘I hate poetry – no one cares, no one reads it anymore.’
Gregory Kan, with two suns infiltrating the long ride on the train to Paekākāriki, illustrates otherwise: Under Glass lulls like a really disquieting guided meditation.
After lockdown, it is the first book I read outside our ‘bubble’. Threading through an internal landscape, somehow a place I recognise. ‘Here, there are two suns. The ordinary sun is in the sky overhead. The other sun is eating its way out from inside me.’
Certain lines, with their mystical insistence, snag on me and come back again from time to time: ‘Everything that surrounds the second sun is not part of it but nonetheless makes it what it is.’ It’s as if some lines have been dreaming of themselves. The book invites a gentle inspection. A glass bead held right up against the eye. A shutter flipped open over a stark interior.
‘When you move a look moves inside me and eats there what I eat.’
Once, a kind individual in Paekākāriki, their hands busy with a teapot, told me: ‘Those who know what it is, fall on it like starving people.’
When Litcrawl comes, we make our way to some of the events. The room has sucked a crowd in. Spells for 2020, with Rebecca Hawkes, Rata Gordon, Stacey Teague, Arihia Latham, Rachel McAlpine and Miriama Gemmell (thank you for your entrancing words), reminds me of how poetry is still something people might come in search of. Visitations of bees, airline heights and morphing walls. There is a sense of relief.
A crowd still feels like a dream, and a dream still feels like the sea. Gregory writes that ‘the sea is a house made of anything. The sea is a story about anything, told by someone unfit for storytelling. More than what I can know, and much more than I can understand.’
Under Glass, which wasn’t exactly written for this year (no ordinary year), seems to slot into it.
My steamed colleague, with one hand steadying the banister: ‘I guess Bob Dylan is okay, though.’
Note: I asked my colleague’s permission for quoting him. He said he was fine with it, as long as a mob of angry poets didn’t come knocking.
Jackson Nieuwland
2020 was the year we finally got a book from Hana Pera Aoake (A bathful of kawakawa and hot water Compound Press). I had been waiting for this for so so long. It’s a taonga that I am incredibly grateful for. Ever since I first read Hana’s work they have been one of my favourite writers. Their writing is both clever and wise, of the moment and timeless, pop culture and fine art, Aotearoa and international.
This is a book I will be returning to over and over again for inspiration, electrification, nourishment, and comfort. I would recommend it to anyone.
Other poetry books I read and loved this year: Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky, The Book of Frank by CA Conrad, hoki mai by Stacey Teague, Hello by Crispin Best, and Head Girl by Freya Daly Sadgrove.
Nina Mingya Powles
For most of this year I could only read things in fragments. I could only hold on to small parts of poems, essays, short stories in my head before they floated away. This year I sought out poetry by Indigenous writers. Of these two books, the first I read slowly, dipping in and out like testing the surface of cool water. The other I read hungrily all at once.
Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz (Graywold Press) reminded me why I write poetry, at a time when writing anything at all felt impossible. Diaz’s heavy, melodic love poems circled around my head for days: “My lover comes to me like darkfall – long, / and through my open window.” But it is her writing about water and the body that changed me. In this book, water is always in motion, a current that passes through time, memory and history. Her long poem “The First Water of the Body” is a history of the Colorado River, a sacred river: “I mean river as a verb. A happening. It is moving with me right now.”
A bathful of kawakawa and hot water by Hana Pera Aoake (Compound Press) came to me when I needed it most, nourishing me and warming me. I haven’t yet held a copy of the book, but I read it on my laptop over two days and have carried parts of it around in my body ever since: “I speak broken French and Português into the broken yellow gloaming.” A bathful of kawakawa and hot water is a searing, lyrical work of poetry, memoir, and political and cultural commentary. Like the title suggests, it was a balm for me, but also a reminder of the ongoing fight for our collective dream of a better world, and most importantly, that “racism is not just a product of psychological malice, but a product of capitalism.”
Natalie Morrison has an MA in Creative Writing from the Institute of Modern Letters, where she received the Biggs Family Prize for Poetry in 2016. She lives and works in Wellington. Victoria University Press recently published Pins, Natalie’s debut collection. The book is most definitely poetry, the kind of poetry that affects your breathing patterns because it is so good, so original, so addictive. But it also resembles a letter, as the speaker addresses her missing sister, and a catalogue of fascinations, as she tracks an obsession with pins. The collective result is book that centres upon family, and then radiates out into pocket-book narratives of loss, curiosity, yearnings, attachment. The title itself ‘pins’ sends me in multiple directions before I even open the book, and then vital movement continues as I read. This is a book to treasure.
I can just about trace the birth of your fascination.
We were cordoned off from the fireplace with a moveable
copper façade. Nana was stitching one of Grandad’s
socks. We didn’t have any clothes on,
were still dripping slightly from the bath.
You picked up a pinch of metal
and in the dim light tried to see what it was
you were holding. I continued reading Beatrix Potter
with a damp index finger. Nana told you to be careful:
What you have in your hand is very sharp.
Caution: where there is a pin
there will be puns.
One must love a sister in the same way one must love
jabbing oneself in the foot halfway up a flight of carpeted stairs.
Our parents told you I would be a nice surprise.
from Pins
Paula What were the first poetry books that mattered to you?
Natalie Not a whole book really, but I remember my mum reading us ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and being really taken with it. Gotta love the drama.
Then in high school ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ by T.S. Eliot really resonated with me for some reason, and I still get parts of it stuck in my head. A few memorable books a bit later on were Kate Camp’s The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls (I always think of the owls on the cover) and a collection of W.S. Merwin’s, both of which I became attached to and didn’t want to return to the library. But don’t worry, I did.
Paula What poetry books are catching your attention now?
Natalie Freya Daly Sadgrove’s Head Girl was super kick-ass. I adored Sugar Magnolia Wilson’s Because a Woman’s Heart if Like a Needle at the Bottom of the Ocean, particularly the epistolary sequence. I’m very in awe of Gregory O’Brien at the moment – something just snaps into place. Also looking forward to reading Second Person by Rata Gordon. I’m a hopeless sucker for a good cover and I had a peep at the first few pages the other day…intrigued!
Drop one pin into a glass of clear
cold water for several minutes.
Then immerse your hand in the language
of the water until you find it.
from Pins
Paula Your debut collection is exquisite, both melodious and tactile, economical and rich. What do you hope from a poem or a book-length sequence such as this?
Natalie Thank you! Mostly I hope it behaves itself. Or that I can keep it in line with the shape of itself, being so long and fragmented. It’s nice when the pieces start interacting with each other and when they move through moods/sounds/scenes.
Paula Does this change for you as reader? What attracts you in poems by others?
Natalie I’m attracted to the usual things; the sounds a poem creates, the voice(s) it uses and the way the words fall together. But I love love love it when the poem is also kinda mischievously fun and cracks that sly-sideways smile at you. Quirky also does it for me, and a bit of classic sass.
Paula Your book does just that! Wit is a vital ingredient. James Brown likened Pins to Anne Kennedy’s 100 Traditional Smiles, and I see the connections. There is both a quirkiness and a crafted musicality, yet perhaps a key link is that of narrative. Narrative is such a fertile option for the poet. What drew you to it?
Natalie I’m not sure exactly. A bit to do with what I was reading at the time? I was also lucky to be surrounded by such beautiful narrative-making from my classmates that year, it was relatively contagious.
Paula Would you ever want to write a novel?
Natalie So tempted to go for the pun… Well, that would be pretty cool. People who are able to sustain a whole novel have my absolute admiration. It would take a gazillion years though; I’m fairly distractable, which is why I think Pins is so bitsy.
Paula I love the degree of white space in the collection – resonant for me on so many levels. It is both a visual and aural pause, a silent beat for eye and ear, a place to savour what you have just read. It also acknowledges the missing sister. Can you comment on the white space?
Natalie That’s a really awesome way of looking at it. For sure, I think the in-between spaces echo the little gaps the missing sister leaves in the narrative.
With poetry in general, I enjoy the blanks that we draw tiny conclusions about. It’s like staring at old floral wallpaper – you start to see all sorts of faces and figures.
But I will always have you in the back of my mind,
unwinding like the coil pin in the body of a bright,
jittery, copper toy.
from Pins
Paula Staring at anything! I also love the way the missing sister is the family hub, but you don’t explain and you don’t resolve. Although I do feel like I am moving through fictions – what is true? – as though I am playing with a set of Russian dolls. If I had written this, I would want to leave it in the hands of the reader. No explanations. Do you agree?
Natalie Sort of? I would say there needed to be just enough to nudge the narrative along, but I’m not into overloading a piece with the whys and wherefores either. Especially this piece; it felt right for there to be spaces left. For me personally, the poem orbits around the longing created by the little absences. Maybe a part of longing is piecing together what we can from hints, and hints of hints? That’s how it is in my mind anyway – but yes, very onboard with leaving some of the work with the reader. Partly because I really enjoy the hugely varying assumptions people make about it, or is that too wicked of me? I’ve confounded at least one uncle….whoops!
Hail:
walking into a downpour of a thousand brisk pins.
from Pins
Paula I agree – the poetry is a lace-like arrival of longing around the white space – actual and implied. So much to adore about the book – especially the pivotal presence of pins. You catch them in so many surprising ways. I love nana and the sunsets, the barcode pin, acupuncture and voodoo, the downpour. Do you have a few favourites?
Natalie Thanks so much, Paula. Trying to dredge for ‘pins’ around the place morphed into an obsession in itself. I still have pin-themed dreams which is pretty ouch!
As to favourites, hmmm… the futuristic surgical pin for the brain, the bobby pin trail, the pin-filled swimming pool and the pigeons are probably my faves. The pin sonnet was quite satisfying too.
Because of your early attachment with fairy stories,
I wasn’t surprised to pick up your trail of bobby pins
along the footpaths of Wellington’s suburbs. I imagined
finally arriving at your gingerbread destination.
from Pins
Paula I was filled with joy as I read this book, so it felt like you filled with joy as you wrote it. But that might be far from the truth of writing it. Was it joyful? Did you struggle and were plagued with doubt?
Natalie Yay, I love that it’s had that effect on you reading it.
All of the above! Plagued by doubt is definitely my resting state in most of what I do, and I’m probably not alone there? It was certainly joyous at times, especially when something falls into place – that’s quite exhilarating.
If all the pins in the world were gathered together
you would be very much pleased.
But all the pins in the world
cannot be gathered
together.
from Pins
Paula My Wild Honey research exposed a catalogue of doubt – my doubts in my ability to create the book but, more importantly, across a century of woman writing and doubting and finding their way into a public spotlight. Some women were kneecapped and roadblocked by the attitudes of the men in charge to their work.
Has Covid 19 affected you as either reader or writer? Did you write any poems in lockdown?
Natalie I don’t think any of us get away without being affected by Covid 19 and everything that’s happening right now. I imagine it having all sorts of impacts on writing and art-making that we might only notice after the fact maybe? When we were in lockdown, I finished up reading a few of the books I had started and then it was quite nice to return to some old comforting favourites around the flat. I didn’t write as much as I had hoped. It seemed like everyone had lofty goals for their lockdown which didn’t necessarily get realised. My grandma says ‘you can only do what you can do.’
Paula Wise grandmothers! What do you like to do apart from writing?
Natalie Anything to do with making odds and ends. At the moment, I’m knitting like a fiend in a race to finish a sleep sack for my nephew before he gets too big. I have a bad habit of thinking of new projects before the old ones are finished, ah! Overall, it’s a comforting thing to do.
When the stars align, I really love going tramping with friends, usually in the Tararua ranges. It doesn’t happen as often as I’d like, but it’s really special to me.
If all the pins in the world were gathered together you would be very much pleased. But all the pins in the world cannot be gathered together.
Welcome to the Victoria University Press launch of Natalie Morrison’s Pins.
Time to pour that wine and draw in close to celebrate a book-length poem I am ultra excited to read.
First some words from editor Ashleigh Young:
Chris Price launches the book:
Natalie gives us a wee taste of the book:
‘I found Pins extraordinarily witty, perceptive, and moving. The family narrative unspools around two sisters whose pointed obsessions bring us something that echoes Wallace Stevens’ ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ and Anne Kennedy’s 100 Traditional Smiles.’
—James Brown
If you feel like me after these speeches and readings, you will have written down the title as a must-have book. I love the premise. I loved the intimate reading, with glimpses of the kitchen showing in the background. Oh and I love the cover by Todd Atticus.
Sadly you can’t stroll over and tell Natalie how much you loved the reading and get her to sign a copy. But now that we can get books online from our magnificent independent booksellers – I highly recommend you order a copy of this!
PG
Poetry Shelf and Victoria University Press declare this spellbinding poetry book officially launched.
NZ Poetry Shelf 