Mad Diva, Cadence Chung
Otago University Press, 2025

But lo! Here’s my heart in my hands,
clots squished on my sleeve, all sinewy
and stringy in that way organs are. If you
don’t want to take it, well, I wouldn’t blame
you. But it’s the same heart those poets
had once. One with reckless abandon,
always finding love in every little corner
and squashing it flat on the page.

 

from ‘Love Lyrics’

A recurring word that epitomises poetry collections I have read and loved this year is heart. The word is particularly applicable to Cadence Chung’s second collection, Mad Diva. Not only does the poetry offer heart ripples, it is rich in ear and art, and most definitely heat. A symphony of heart. And yes, as the title suggests, we are entering the addictive terrain of opera, a chorus of intensity, an intensity of chorus, with threads of painting and poetry making moving in and out of view.

I once sat in an auditorium listening to Alessandra Marc sing arias and you could hear a pin drop. It was a full scale body reaction. I could scarcely breathe. I get that when I put Maria Callas singing Bellini’s Norma on repeat on the turntable. Listen to ‘Casta Diva’ and let that settle under your skin. I was raised with an opera soundtrack and grew deep into loving it, but I was surprised how my relationship with the music changed when I had finished my PhD in Italian and could understand the words! Suddenly I was catapulted into everyday language delivering scenes of desire and betrayal and amore. I think of this haunting scene of listening because here I am in Mad Diva and it is grit and grandeur and intake of breath . . . and yes, catapulting us into different ways of listening reading understanding. Ancora. Ancora. Ancora.

Mad Diva‘s opening poem ‘Mélodie’ spirals around song, a singing heart, an off-key dream, and stands as a vital entry point into the poems to come, the way poetry is pitched in diverse keys, with harmony and disharmony, solo flights and connecting chords. Or the way languages generate melody with their different pronunciations and accents on vowels and consonants. The musical notes of speech. One of the delights of reading poetry is the surprise arrival – especially individual words on the line. Janet Charman is a whizz at this. As is Cadence. This is poetry to listen to. This is poetry to feel from your seat in the auditorium.

O, the night that stretched before us!
The cool lamplight of it, shining
like cicada-wing.

from ‘VI. O, the night’

Thematic subject matter is a unifying thread in the collection. It is like we venture into an opera house to witness performance, to move in and out of opera scenarios, but these divas are out and about in the world as much as they inhabit the skin of a character. Let’s move in deeper. Let’s listen in wider. These mad divas. Let’s move behind the scenes and the surface brocade. Across two acts, these poetic performances, dig deep into yearning and fancy dress, painted bodies and madness, weapons and treasures. It’s personal. It’s imagined. It’s sung across centuries.

In One Thousand and One Nights, Scheherezade told stories to stay alive, to witness the next dawn, but in the mesmerising poem ‘Scheherezade’, she is Ubering into town with the poet/speaker. The poet/speaker is musing on what it would be like to be locked in a bind of telling, never speaking herself. And herein is a glittering hook of the collection: yes it’s a dazzling navigation of divas in performance, on and of stage, but it’s also the navigation of a poet in the seismic heart of poem making, drawing upon other poets as aids. What to tell? What to speak? How to speak? The voice sometimes appearing in italicised dialogue, sometimes not: ‘How do I write about the Great Themes?’ Or: ‘They say all poetry is about Love, Death, / and Time. What a horrible thing a poet is, / writing about these things instead of living / them, deep inside a lover thinking about / what a sensual poem it will make.’

The poem ‘Scheherezade’, feels like a pulsating core of a collection that portrays a poet as much as it portrays divas. It is personal vulnerable tactile aromatic as it speaks to the way making poetry can never be pinned down to exactitudes. It is gauze for us to peer through:

I try to be like her, swallowing my histories
   in rattles of metal, hide my grandmother’s jade 
in the back of my jewellery box. But my foreignness
   finds me anyway, in mispronounced
names and schoolyard games and men
   leaning in ever closer on the bus. I call to her:
with a clink of long earrings she looks at me.
   Tell me Scheherezade, I try to say.
When does the telling end? Tell me,
When does the silence come? I fill
   every space with poems and only in the dull
hum of the ride home do I realise how stupid,
   how stupid it all sounds.
She can only tell, I can never
   ask. She is as distant to me as a ship
   gauzed by time.

Ah. So much to say about this sontuosa collection. It is akin to unpacking a heart basket packed with entangled treasures, with flakes of wound, multiple perfumes, pinpricks of discovery tragedy epiphany, the fireworks and nuances of recognition . . . because every time you unpack this precious basket (just liking putting on a much loved album), you hear and discover something anew, behind the scenes, behind the character, that new connection, an idea that trills, an idea -knot to play with, a ‘cicada-wing’ spark of what poetry can light. So it’s a standing ovation: Bravissimo! Bravissima!

a reading

‘Habits’

‘Ulysses’

‘Fire Island’

a conversation

Were there any highlights, epiphanies, discoveries, challenges as you wrote this collection?

I guess in a way, Mad Diva was a whole series of tiny epiphanies. It’s a bit of a culmination of different manuscripts that hadn’t quite worked out. I’d written very glitzy, narrative-based ones, and also very confessional ones, and this manuscript merges the two in a combination of the fantastic and the lyric. Many of the poems are named after and in the voice of famous divas in the canon — Carmen, Delilah, Salomé, Scheherazade — and I discovered how easy it is for me to drive a poem through a character voice. It was what helped me combine the two facets of my writing: a first-person confessional voice combined with a character façade. It’s a bit like a recital, where you’re still yourself, but a heightened, slightly over-the-top version. I think that’s an important balance in poetry, and a tricky one to pull off! Readers often assume the lyric ‘I’ is the poet, and while that is true in a sense, I never want to just be recounting a true experience without transforming it in some way. Especially when some of the poems in the collection deal with topics of madness and mental illness, I wanted to keep some distance, for both myself and the readers, while still staying truthful to the lyric project.

What matters when you are writing a poem? Or to rephrase, what do you want your poetry to do or be?

Really, I hope that a poem is whatever the reader needs it to be! Having your poetry read by different people is such a strange experience, because you get so many different responses and interpretations. When I read a poem that I love, it shocks me, gives me a little jolt that I carry throughout the day. I want to see something in there that I couldn’t have written myself, that makes me see things just a little differently. I’m always going on about transformation, but I think it’s really true. A poem transforms the poet’s experience or thoughts, then the poem transforms the reader, and so on: a chain of tiny differences is created.

Are there particular poets that have sustained you, as you navigate poetry as both reader and writer? 

The poets I’m constantly reading are my contemporaries in this new generation of poets. In particular, my beautiful friends Jackson McCarthy, Amelia Kirkness, Zia Ravenscroft, Maia Armistead, and Joshua Toumu’a. I’m really inspired by the boldness and assuredness of new writers, and the heavy lyric moment we’re returning to. Being self-effacing is out, being insecure is out, cringing at earnestness is out. Love is in! 

We are living in hazardous and ruinous times. Can you name three things that give you joy and hope?

The biggest thing that keeps me going is being part of the strong arts communities I’m in. Being in a bookshop or concert hall or theatre or dive bar and having it full of enthusiastic people is so special. Three specific things that have been giving me joy lately: going to and running literary events, rehearsing for operas with my music friends, and playing with my little cat Hebe. 

Tell us about your tour

As part of Mad Diva’s release, I went on tour to four cities: Te Whanganui-a-Tara | Wellington, Tāmaki Makaurau | Auckland, Ōtepoti | Dunedin, and Ōtautahi | Christchurch. These launch events featured guest poets Jackson McCarthy, Zephyr Zhang 张挚, Rushi Vyas, Claudia Jardine, and Amelia Kirkness, as well as guest singers from the New Zealand School of Music, and Sarah Mileham, Tomairangi Henare, Teddy Finney-Waters, and Emily-Jane Stockman. It was such a fun and chaotic time. It took place over the span of a week, so I tried to cram in as much sightseeing as I could while also performing and connecting with friends around the country! We had a great turnout at all of the events and I was so thrilled to meet new people, as well as people I’d only ever met online. I had no idea what to expect with the tour, so I was really heartened to see people coming out to support new poetry. 

Cadence with Emily-Jane Stockman, at Little Andromeda, Ōtautahi Christchurch

Cadence Chung is a poet, composer, and singer currently in her Honours year at the New Zealand School of Music. Her nationally bestselling chapbook anomalia was released in 2022 with Tender Press, and her anthology of young artists, Mythos, was released in 2024 with Wai-te-ata Press. Her next book, Mad Diva, was released in April 2025 with Otago University Press. She also performs as a classical soloist, presents on RNZ Concert, and co-edits Symposia Magazine, a literary magazine for young New Zealanders.

Otago University Press page