

Listen here
You can also hear Nina in person at Vic Uni:

Ten things I love
Me in Beijing, taken by my partner.
a dream of foxes
in the dream of foxes
there is a field
and a procession of women
clean as good children
no hollow in the world
surrounded by dogs
no fur clumped bloody
on the ground
only a lovely line
of honest women stepping
without fear or guilt or shame
safe through the generous fields.
Lucille Clifton
Full poem and video at poemhunter
“First Love / Late Spring” by Mitski, from her album bury me at makeout creek.
A song I listened to while beginning to write the book in Shanghai.
A bathful of kawakawa and hot water by Hana Pera Aoake (Compound Press).
Minari
Five Mile Bay, Lake Taupō, my first swim after arriving back in Aotearoa.
Char kuay teow and sweet milk tea.
A window.
Next to the windowsill where I’ve planted daffodils, in the sun, the cat perched next to me.
Night train to Anyang
light changes as we cross into neon clouds
voices flicker through the moving dark
like dream murmurs moving through the body
red and silver 汉字 glow from building tops
floating words I can’t read rising into bluest air
they say there are mountains here but I can’t see them
there are only dream mountains high above the cloudline
I come from a place full of mountains and volcanoes
I often say when people ask about home
when I shut my eyes I see a ring of flames
and volcanoes erupting somewhere far away
when I open my eyes snow is falling like ash
Five questions
Is writing a pain or a joy, a mix of both, or something altogether different for you?
Writing gives me adrenaline, which is sometimes a kind of joy, or at least relief. Writing –when it’s going well – gives me energy in the moment itself, but often leaves me utterly drained.
Name a poet who has particularly influenced your writing or who supports you.
There are so many poets who have supported me and deeply influenced me; it wouldn’t be fair to name just one. I am endlessly grateful to poets Alison Wong, Helen Rickerby, Anna Jackson, Bhanu Kapil, Sarah Howe and Jennifer Wong – I walk in their footsteps.
Was your shortlisted collection shaped by particular experiences or feelings?
The book is so distinctly shaped by a particular period in my life. Some poems feel ancient to me now, distant and far away – but I don’t mind that. I was living in Shanghai, my first time living alone, feeling both brave and terrified at the same time. The poems are shaped by isolation, longing, aloneness (but not always loneliness) and in-betweenness.
Did you make any unexpected discoveries as you wrote?
Always – I think this is how writing works for me. I have a loose outline in my mind of something I want to get down on the page, usually starting with a particular image, and then the writing itself reveals to me the place I want to go. I can’t quite explain how it happens, only that I’m following threads, making connections as I go. When something unexpected happens, I think that’s when I’ve written something good.
Do you like to talk about your poems or would you rather let them speak for themselves? Is there one poem where an introduction (say at a poetry reading) would fascinate the audience/ reader? Offer different pathways through the poem?
I prefer to let the poems do the work, although I enjoy giving some background details about some poems, such as “The First Wave”, which was written while listening to the online livestream of Radio NZ while I was in Shanghai at the time of the Kaikoura earthquake in 2016. Or, “The Great Wall”, which I affectionately call my Matt Damon poem, titled after the 2016 movie of the same name.
Nina Mingya Powles is a poet, zinemaker and non-fiction writer of Malaysian-Chinese and Pākehā heritage, currently living in London. She is the author of a food memoir, Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai (The Emma Press, 2020), poetry box-set Luminescent (Seraph Press, 2017), and several poetry chapbooks and zines, including Girls of the Drift (Seraph Press, 2014). In 2018 she was one of three winners of the inaugural Women Poets’ Prize, and in 2019 won the Nan Shepherd Prize for Nature Writing. Magnolia 木蘭 was shortlisted for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Nina has an MA in creative writing from Victoria University of Wellington and won the 2015 Biggs Family Prize for Poetry. She is the founding editor of Bitter Melon 苦瓜, a risograph press that publishes limited-edition poetry pamphlets by Asian writers. Her collection of essays, Small Bodies of Water, is forthcoming from Canongate Books in 2021.
Nina reads ‘Faraway love’ from MAGNOLIA 木蘭
Review on Poetry Shelf here
Seraph Press page
Nina’s website
MAGNOLIA 木蘭, Nina Mingya Powles, Seraph Press, 2020
The finalists in the 2021 Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry are:
Funkhaus by Hinemoana Baker (Victoria University Press)
Magnolia 木蘭by Nina Mingya Powles (Seraph Press)
National Anthem by Mohamed Hassan (Dead Bird Books)
The Savage Coloniser Book by Tusiata Avia (Victoria University Press)
Full shortlist and judges’ comments here.
“Poetry collections published in Aotearoa in 2020 show a wealth of exceptional and original work. It’s an exciting situation for New Zealand poetry. The four shortlisted collections are striking, all exhibiting an acute global consciousness in difficult times,” says Poetry category convenor of judges Dr Briar Wood.
I was so excited about the poetry longlist, I spent the last few months celebrating each poet on the blog. What sublime books – I knew I would have a flood of sad glad feelings this morning (more than on other occasions) because books that I have adored were always going to miss out. I simply adored the longlist. So I am sending a big poetry toast to the six that didn’t make it – your books will have life beyond awards.
I am also sending a big poetry toast to the four finalists: your books have touched me deeply. Each collection comes from the heart, from your personal experience, from your imaginings and your reckonings, from your musical fluencies. The Poetry Shelf reviews are testimony to my profound engagement with your poems and how they have stuck with me.
Over the next weeks I am posting features on the poets: first up, later this morning, Tusiata Avia.
Mary and Peter Biggs CNZM are long-time arts advocates and patrons – particularly of literature, theatre and music. They have funded the Biggs Family Prize in Poetry at Victoria University of Wellington’s International Institute of Modern Letters since 2006, along with the Alex Scobie Research Prize in Classical Studies, Latin and Greek. They have been consistent supporters of the International Festival of the Arts, the Auckland Writers Festival, Wellington’s Circa Theatre, the New Zealand Arts Foundation, Featherston Booktown, Read NZ Te Pou Muramura (formerly the New Zealand Book Council), the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, the Featherston Sculpture Trust and the Kokomai Arts Festival in the Wairarapa. Peter was Chair of Creative New Zealand from 1999 to 2006. He led the Cultural Philanthropy Taskforce in 2010 and the New Zealand Professional Orchestra Sector Review in 2012. Peter was appointed a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for arts governance and philanthropy in 2013.
Nina Mingya Powles, MAGNOLIA 木蘭, Seraph Press, 2020
NIna reads ‘Faraway love’ from MAGNOLIA 木蘭
鸣 (míng), the cry of animals and insects, rhymes with tooth, which rhymes with precipice, which rhymes with the first part of my Chinese name.
I am full of nouns and verbs; I don’t know how to live any other way. I am a tooth-like thing. I am half sun half moon, and the scissors used to cut away the steamed lotus leaves. I am honey strokes spreading over the tiles.
Certain languages contain more kinds of rain than others, and I have eaten them all.
from ‘Fieldnotes on a downpour’
Review on Poetry Shelf here
Seraph Press page
Poetry Shelf has reviewed
The Savage Coloniser Book Tuisata Avia, Victoria University Press
Far Flung Rhian Gallagher Auckland University Press
National Anthem National Anthem, Dead Bird Books
Wow Bill Manhire, Victoria University Press
Pins Natalie Morrison, Victoria University Press (an interview)
This is Your Real Name, Elizabeth Morton, Otago University Press
I Am a Human Being Jackson Nieuwland, Compound Press
Magnolia, NIna Mingya Powles, Seraph Press
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).
Ockham New Zealand Book Award page
Nina Mingya Powles, MAGNOLIA 木蘭, Seraph Press, 2020
鸣 (míng), the cry of animals and insects, rhymes with tooth, which rhymes with precipice, which rhymes with the first part of my Chinese name.
I am full of nouns and verbs; I don’t know how to live any other way. I am a tooth-like thing. I am half sun half moon, and the scissors used to cut away the steamed lotus leaves. I am honey strokes spreading over the tiles.
Certain languages contain more kinds of rain than others, and I have eaten them all.
from ‘Fieldnotes on a downpour’
I have been a fan of Nina Mingya Powles’s poetry since her chapbook Girls of the Drift (2014) through to her glorious poetry boxset Luminescent (2017). The poems are probing, lyrical, self-inquisitive, with women placed centre stage. Her new collection Magnolia 木蘭was also published in the UK (Nine Arches Press) and was shortlisted for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best First Collection. In 2018 she was one of three winners of the inaugural Poetry Prize, and won the Nan Shepherd Prize for Nature Writing the following year.
Currently living in London, Nina is a poet, zine-maker and nonfiction writer of Malaysian-Chinese and Pākehā descent. I have long been fascinated with the idea that poetry is way of writing home, whether home is physical, on the move, a state of mind, ancestral connections, familial relations, an anchor, an epiphany. And if poetry is a way of writing home it is also a way of writing to / for / with / by / underneath / inside / from (home). Magnolia is an organic version of this as it shifts languages on the tongue, layers sensual detail, raises identity questions, and moves from London to Shanghai to Aotearoa. Smells and tastes of elsewhere bring elsewhere closer to the point the paper is imbued with scent and living matter, and your reading taste buds pop.
there are only dream mountains high above the cloudline
I come from a place full of mountains and volcanoes
I often say when people ask about home
from ‘Night train to Anyang’
Senses are on alert as you read a Nina Powles poem, and I love the physical sensation as you read:
After Mulan saves China / fireworks rain down in waves of multi-coloured
stars
from ‘Girl warrior, or: watching Mulan (1998) / in Englsih with subtitles
Food is an exquisite presence, often connecting you to place, a particular memory or event, love, home. But sometimes Nina lingers on food for the sheer pleasure of food itself: it’s tofu for the love and sake of tofu, lotus leaves and sticky rice ‘sucked clean’. I have felt a similar addictive tastebud reaction reading the poetry of Ian Wedde, particularly The Commonplace Odes.
for the morning after a downpour
Layers of silken tofu float in the shape of a lotus slowly
opening under swirls of soy sauce. Each mouthful of dòufu
huā, literally tofu flower, slips down in one swallow. The
texture reminds me of last night’s rain: how it came down
fast and washed the city clean.
from ‘Breakfast in Shanghai’
Colour is equally vital, sometimes the hue of the land is evoked but, at other times, the tone of a particular painting is foregrounded. It makes a difference that I have stood in the Tate Gallery in London and felt the astonishing hum of Rothko’s colour palate, and have imbibed the colour in Agnes Martin’s equally heavenly paintings. I am curious that Nina’s poems, so active with colour, affect me as much as the artworks. It is as though the poem and the artwork are placed on my wrist like perfume and I feel the colour-pulse streaming through. Really the whole experience is both words and greater than words. Really it is as though a poem has the ability to hum inside us. Like colour.
#fee10c | saffron: pigment in medieval manuscripts
If I could step inside any Rothko painting it would be Saffron
(1957), which is different from his other yellows because of the thin
bright line that divides the colour fields, not colour shapes or colour
squares or colour blocks, none of which are wide enough to contain
the light. A line dividing two yellow atmospheres glows along the
edges, an electric current. If you stare long enough it seems to get
bigger, slowly opening at one end until it forms a bright gap that
you could just fit through by putting each one of your limbs inside,
one by one, until you are swallowed by light and your skin is the
colour of sunflower petals right before they die and you are either
floating or drowning or both at the same time.
from ‘Colour fragments’
Reading Nina’s collection, I keep fine-tuning what a poem can do. One moment it is the origami bud unfolding in my palm to expose surprising petals of feeling. The next moment she retraces her steps though a city she once lived in; walking and writing through the city and subsequently the miniature poem version. We choose how we move through the poem as miniature city, me on tiptoe, slowly, slowly. This experience is deeply affecting in ‘Falling city’, where the poet lived when young, where she is falling in love, where things have changed and things have remained constant. Nina is seeing and imagining and writing Shanghai by walking; and by reading Shanghai writer Eileen Chang / Zhāng Àilíng, by reading Robin Hyde, by reading maps (‘each person has their own secret map’), visiting ramen bars, musing on ‘New Woman’.
18. What was Chang herself like? I don’t know, but I think she
understood this moment when the dream and the real begin to blur.
She understood how the sky in Shanghai contains many different
colours at once: “At the horizon the morning colours were a layer of
green, a layer of yellow, and a layer of red like a watermelon cut open.”
19. When reading her stories in translation it’s like trying to see
her from a great distance. Or through a thick pane of glass. I am
standing outside, peering into rooms where her ghost has been.
20. As autumn deepened I expected to see your face on the street
or in the subway station. After you left I thought I might feel sad
that this possibility could no longer exist. Instead after a while the
outlines of trees looked sharper, like a fog had lifted.
from ‘Falling city’
The shortish middle sequence, ‘Field notes on a downpour’, is a favourite. There is a hunger for words that fit, for Mandarin fluency, for her mother whose name means rain and language, together meaning ‘cloud tints’. In its intimacy, small details, flâneur pace, mother closeness, disappearances, its repeating motifs, particularly clouds and rain, its naming and its confessions, its love yearnings, this sequence is succulent poetry. And I keep musing on why I am so attracted to the making of poetry, whether writing it reading it, and that it maybe comes down to poems that move into and from the heart of the matter. I don’t mean it has to be full of feeling. I don’t mean it has to fit the facts or perceived realities. I mean it navigates poetic truths: that on certain occasions, in certain places, for a particular person, radiating multiple lights and nuances, this is how it is. In this crumpled and self-challenging world – poetry flicks on the human switch. I am musing this because Nina’s incandescent poetry navigates a bundle of vital questions on who and how and where she is. On what being a particular human in a particular place means to her. On when being asked where you come from digs deep. On needing to eat words. On feeling the rain in all its colours. On being in love.
In order to make learning Mandarin easier, I started to see the
characters as objects I could collect and keep close to me.
魔 (mó), spoken like a murmur, an evil spirit or demon.
One night you said my name in the dark and it came out like a ghost
鬼 from between two trees 林. A ghost that rhymes with a path
between rice fields which rhymes with a piece of steamed bread which
rhymes with paralysis of one side of the body which rhymes with thin
blood vessels.
In June the cicadas were so loud we thought the trees would swallow
us whole.
from ‘Field notes on a downpour’
I turn to the blurb on the back of the book and see so many of the words that have guided my reading: hunger, longing, home, mixed-race, languages, women, colour, rain. Magnolia 木蘭 is origami poetry – it will unfold in your body as you read. It is miniature-city poetry that will reinstate multiple existences of home. It is rain poetry that will fall as gleaming light and stomach nourishment and tattoo your skin. It is love poetry and disappearance poetry. It is heart poetry and human poetry that, in this extraordinary year, will get you contemplating your own downpours and magnolias, and in those musings discover poetry solace. Oh, and it has my favourite cover of the year: an image by Kerry Ann Lee (Allora, 2017), and it is lovingly produced by Helen Rickerby and Seraph Press. Glorious!
I want to know the names of the trees in all other languages too so
that I find out what they taste like to other people. But my mouth
can only hold so much.
from ‘Magnolia, jade orchard, she-wolf’
Nina Mingya Powles is a poet, zinemaker and non-fiction writer of Malaysian-Chinese and Pākehā heritage, currently living in London. She is the author of a food memoir, Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai (The Emma Press, 2020), poetry box-set Luminescent (Seraph Press, 2017), and several poetry chapbooks and zines, including Girls of the Drift (Seraph Press, 2014). In 2018 she was one of three winners of the inaugural Women Poets’ Prize, and in 2019 won the Nan Shepherd Prize for Nature Writing. Magnolia 木蘭 was shortlisted for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Nina has an MA in creative writing from Victoria University of Wellington and won the 2015 Biggs Family Prize for Poetry. She is the founding editor of Bitter Melon 苦瓜, a risograph press that publishes limited-edition poetry pamphlets by Asian writers. Her collection of essays, Small Bodies of Water, is forthcoming from Canongate Books in 2021.
Seraph Press page
Poetry Book Society review
Help us celebrate the launch of Magnolia 木蘭 by Nina Mingya Powles in the time of covid! Nina is stuck in lockdown in London, from where she will do an Instagram Live reading to celebrate the publication of the New Zealand edition of her fabulous new poetry collection.
Join us on Wednesday 2 December at 9 pm NZ time on Nina’s Instagram page. (It will also be available to view later, but live is best!) To view the video you’ll need to have an Instagram account.
If Instagram isn’t your thing, or even if it is, you can also look forward to the real-life launch we’re planning with Nina in March!! Details TBC.
You can buy Magnolia 木蘭 from good bookshops, or direct from us. First 100 direct orders will also get a limited edition risograph print made by Nina herself of one of the poems in the collection.
About Magnolia 木蘭
Home is not a place but a string of colours threaded together and knotted at one end.
Shanghai, Aotearoa, Malaysia, London—all are places poet Nina Mingya Powles calls home and not-home; from each she can be homesick for another. A gorgeous bittersweet longing and hunger runs through the poems in this new collection from one of our most exciting poetic voices.
In Magnolia 木蘭 Powles explores her experience of being mixed-race and trying to find her way through multiple languages: English, Mandarin, Hakka, Māori. Powles uses every sense to take us on a journey through cities, food and even time, weaving her story with the stories of women from history, myth and film.
The gorgeous cover features an artwork by Kerry Ann Lee.
The UK edition of Magnolia 木蘭 was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for best first collection.
“This is a book of the body and the senses, whether the million tiny nerve endings of young love; the hunger that turns ‘your bones soft in the heat’; the painterly, edible, physical colour of flowers and the fabric lantern in the pattern of Maggie Cheung’s blue cheongsam; or ‘the soft scratchings of dusk’. These are poems of ‘warm blue longing’ and understated beauty, poems to linger over, taste, and taste again. As Powles searches for home she leaves an ‘imprint of rain’ in your dreams.”
—Alison Wong
About the author
Nina Mingya Powles is a poet, zinemaker and non-fiction writer of Malaysian-Chinese and Pākehā heritage, currently living in London. She is the author of a food memoir, Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai (The Emma Press, 2020), poetry box-set Luminescent (Seraph Press, 2017), and several poetry chapbooks and zines, including Girls of the Drift (Seraph Press, 2014). In 2018 she was one of three winners of the inaugural Women Poets’ Prize, and in 2019 won the Nan Shepherd Prize for Nature Writing. Magnolia 木蘭 was shortlisted for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Nina has an MA in creative writing from Victoria University of Wellington and won the 2015 Biggs Family Prize for Poetry. She is the founding editor of Bitter Melon 苦瓜, a risograph press that publishes limited-edition poetry pamphlets by Asian writers. Her collection of essays, Small Bodies of Water, is forthcoming from Canongate Books in 2021.
Gregory Kan wrote a terrific article for Verb Festival on writing his book-length poem Under Glass (longlisted for 2020 Ockham New Book Awards). It prompted me to choose ‘wonder’ for my February poem festival. I love Under Glass and picked Gregory to read at my Poetry Live Session at the Wellington Writers Festival in March. He talked about writing trauma yet resisting the need to make a spectacle of it. He also spoke of ‘an increasing drive and demand for the narratives of women, Queer and Trans people, people of colour, immigrants, refugees, etc., etc.’ but that we don’t need tokenism. Pronouns and symbols, things, the paths we follow as readers, wonder, love, empathy – these are open, mobile, able to be reformed, replenished in the form of a poem. Alienness and alienated are two different experiences:
I think everyone experiences alienness, i.e. encountering something in the world that one finds alien. To me, alienness is the experience and feeling of one’s internal models of reality being exceeded and/or disrupted. And I don’t think alienness always needs to be framed negatively. It is also a condition of the most beautiful things in the world, such as empathy, love and wonder. All these experiences that begin in the encounter of the unknown. Impossible gaps and impossible bridges. The beauty and terror and noise of being in a jungle.
But not everyone experiences being alienated. Those who are particularly privileged stand at the centre of their respective worlds, and may not often experience what it’s like to be on the other side of those borders. I wanted the text to be able to invoke, at times, the sensation of being outside, even in the places that we find most comfortable and familiar.
Gregory Kan
Poetry is wonder. So is science, dance, music, mathematics, sport, growing things, cooking things, the landscape, sky, crashing ocean, having a family, breathing clean air and watching the sun rise. These things fill me with awe, they challenge, raise questions, leave me lost for words, curious. I witness beauty and I marvel. But I also witness tragedy ignorance violence hatred greed and I wonder. I wonder at humanity. Poetry is a place of retreat when I don’t quite understand, when something puzzles, when something astonishes. Poems set me wandering, with skin pricking, with uplift. Reading and writing poems can be transcendental, like experiencing a rush of utter well being. I completely agree with Reihana Robinson that poetry can fill children with wonder – and that that carries on to adulthood!
A festival of poems: wonder
Their own mind was a kind of wunderkammer, and they kept themselves in the smallest box of all. A parrot with a bird’s keen eye for colour and flash, its memory of jungle and the blue infinite. How eloquently they decorated the tiny space, a slow but relentless process of removal. First one object disappeared and then another. But they were still there, the last to leave, curating their beautiful absence.
*A place where a collection of curiosities or rarities is exhibited
Alison Glenny
I think the beginning of anything
is always a secret.
I love myself when my mind is fucking the hinges of events.
Gregory Kan
The Houses II
On the asphalt a gas light pools: a child looks out
Swinging against the slotted fence and grey,
And eats the three nasturtium seeds: all day
She kept them in her pocket for the doubt
They might be poison, as her sisters say.
But now their delicate, dubious taste can sting
Her tongue curled: snails’ horns curl: they drop and cling
On round nasturtium leaves, green-saucered here.
Now she has evening all her own; the hot
Cream scent of cabbage palms, trying to flood out
Like man’s love, or the Blessed Sacrament:
Sunset peaks over her, a copper net,
Wind like God’s breath goes past her in a shout:
Behind this street shine houses that are not,
Playmates she loves, or loved: but then forgot.
Robin Hyde
from ‘The Houses’ in Houses by the Sea and the Later Poems of Robin Hyde, ed Gloria Rawlinson, Caxton Press 1952
Poem to my nearest galaxy
Yes, I had forsaken curiosity, let it
dull. Now, a most delicate bell,
it chimes as if a monk at meditation’s
end gently tapped the brass, a call
to wake. Stirred. Beguiled.
Not simply interested. Agog. The stars
above (if they’re above) recede
in an ever expanding universe
and here by your side at midnight
I’m startled childish by wonder.
Galaxies? Infinite question, red-shift
reply. But you, you helped me remember.
Sue Wootton
from The Yield (Otago University Press, 2017)
Wonder
Is one
of my core values.
It sits in the twelfth
House of Soul Growth
and the Unconscious.
Wonder might end
the marriage.
Wonder is the Shotover
Moonlight mountain
marathon trail
each step pushed
on by the destiny
toe edging its way
along the barren
ridge line
and what the Bible knows:
That mountains
and marriages
are earthed scaffolding
for Atua
seeded in the lava ash
of Pouliuli
sown in the rays
of Ra
grown under
the cratered cracks
of Mahina
where thigh-splitting
Va lies supine
between us
watching the woman
coming to the end
of herself
at 2000 metres elevation
at the 41st kilometre
after the seventh and final
water station
when each step
is a leap
towards or away from
an infinite love.
Selina Tusitala Marsh
Dance of Sina
You are a tiny flutter, a marigold on water
flung out calling the dead. You are the Tūī
across four winds, an armour of feathers
bone and light soaring over mountains
climbing the day.
You are the core, spilling seeds deepest
blue, head first into soul. You are blood
woven into silk piercing night to sun. You
are a child. A child at sea anchored on your
mother’s lips.
Coral holding the shore, fingers caressing Tāmaki
river. Young girl breaking into woman unfurling
on the Waitematā. You are Sina, sung from
the bones of ancestors, always swimming
towards the sun.
Kim Meredith
What to say and how to be *
Lively eyes lively eyes lively eyes
Square as a box white hair on top
Darrin is thinking HARD about Hiroshima
His teacher has set an
Assignment. It is August 6 three days
until Fat Man dropped on Nagasaki
History is such a funny idea
The fact of men and maybe women men and
maybe women in tiny offices and laboratories
scattered in some other continent
scheme a burning up of people
A burning up of people
And so Darrin writes
All Japan is waiting for
WONDER WOMAN
in your star tights
She is craven she is the last twig
on the cliff-face the last air before
going under that final fast car of rescue
Get away get away sinking wreck
punctured lifeboat wretched sickness
Her grace betraying comic perfection
as if a child could stroke her arm
and be imbued with safety and love
Darrin is wishing for WONDER WOMAN
in her star tights
to catch the falling weapon
in her saving arms like a baby
an infant who is truly a Little Boy
To save all children from
a brief but never-ending childhood
To save schools and satchels and bentos
and laces from ashes more ashes
To save shy smiles and perfectly
folded ‘kerchiefs
Ah! The etching of dark shadows
Shadows fall on Darrin’s classroom
35 small years after Enola Gay rose up
from Tinian amid floodlights and cameras
to fly into history
this funny thing called history
counting a quiet 43 seconds
Tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock tick
* As a teacher of 11 to 13 years olds at one period in my life I loved the way poetry exploded in the hands and hearts of children who otherwise may have been overlooked in classroom chaos.
Reihana Robinson
(First published as ‘After the fall or the power of reading’
in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal Hong Kong)
Fireflies
Last summer I sat amongst a swarm of fireflies while night fell into place around me. I wanted to know if one firefly could ever fly far enough from the rest to see the pulse of their collective light. But there was no one to ask. I raised my arm and held my fingers outstretched towards them but the movement caused them to disappear in a flickering panic—
just as I imagine she might have walked every night to a spot in the bush, not far from the house, where there is a mossy bank riddled with holes and crevices and inside those crevices there are clusters of glow worms, pinpricks of bluegreen light, brightening as her eyes adjust to the dark. She reaches out to touch them and the lights extinguish so suddenly she is not sure they were even there at all.
Nina Mingya Powles
from Whale Fall a chapbook in Luminescent (Seraph Press, 2017). This chapbook focuses on Betty Guard (1814 – 1870) who arrived in Aotearoa as a 15 year-old-bride and was the first Pākehā woman to settle in the South Island.
Cambridge Trilogy
KETTLE’S YARD
The kingdom will have its own colours,
and the unfashioned light will let itself be mastered
in a bottomless, Brancusi pool.
Metal refined by its own thinking force
retains that mercury peril,
continues
to reflect the furious pleasure
of a man being listened to, the one who explains,
art become epiphenomenon of explanation,
a nuclear residue cheaper to tame,
grace nostalgia
strident, even here
where the Gaudier-Brzeska
holds the uncomfortable end of her posture,
sinews bright in the light nursery,
and light in the pits
and mistakes.
JESUS GREEN
The kingdom will have its own spices
whose fore-scent is the privilege of a retriever
lifting her nose at last from the carcass.
When assorted corvids take her place
I will not whisper any of their names
to the tutelar of the college.
The blue
roman candle advance of liberated students,
crossing the moat, appear from this distance
to embarrass the jogger,
the avenue
of plane trees a parlour
for homeless
who paddle through bugs like playing a harp,
plucking and smoking at once,
labour given lightness by caution.
I follow the sun down the darkening aisles
as if it were criminal.
The wind is animal with cannabis.
ST. MARY THE LESS
The kingdom will have its own currency.
I cannot see any from the pew,
but I know the rivers of this country
sing with cancelled sterling.
Like silver under water
mercy
will flicker through the feeling
of the reader
infinitesimally warming the air
until all of our salvos begin with forgive me.
We pray today
in a national rope
for the brokenness of what we do
here
in memory, pray
the discordances
of an amateur choir perform that brokenness better
than harmony, pray like the nonagenarians
cough
and infants bray
from the back
the Angelus domini.
Steven Toussaint
from Lay Studies Victoria University Press, 2019
The Good Husbandwoman’s Alphabet
When people fall in love with love
they fling themselves in the abyss
– Marina Tsvetaeva (translated by. Elaine Feinstein)
(Animals)
Languages we never learn to speak,
although in books they taught us how to read:
tiger, tapir, timber wolf—T was all of these—
each a name in which I find myself again,
I, who see him coming from the hill.
Now I turn the barbecue to ‘full’.
(Bridle)
These words: throat-lash, brow-band, bit—
how a horse gets broken in.
Each night I am unbridled.
Never try to understand a marriage.
It’s beyond the wonder of all but the finest
gentlemen: how the bridle’s said to fit the bride.
(Cattle)
Heedless ones who never knew
their names, the oxen were unyoked in
Happy Valley, where the years will pass
easy as eels in a creek. I was of the alphabet they made,
slipping across the wet grass at night—
eel among the cattle, gone in a scribble of water.
(Dog)
No one knows but the dog—
dog-sense, dog’s-chance, dog’s life.
So why should I care if he has changed
His name—for if he reads, he must read backwards.
I is what I am. No more or less. So, go on,
say what you will—but go and spread the word.
(Earth)
Consider the earth he works up rich beneath the plough,
or a tilth of crumbly soil—
didn’t Virgil say these were best for corn?
‘Earth yields to us its bread, each cartload
drawn into the barn by slow-
moving oxen.’
(Fires)
Even when the fire was lit, I knew that
sex would never be the thing.
Say that this is true—
an alphabet of husbandry might burn in other ways.
G would be for glimpses of this,
even as he flared beneath my skin.
(Glimpse)
I will make myself absolutely clear—
whatever glimpses you gain of me,
as string of letters, or random word, it was
nothing would ever be easy. Believe me when I say,
to be the good husbandwoman, I tried at every turn
to turn myself into any other thing.
(Husbandry)
Only when he’d love and
care for all the animals on this, my farm;
only when he could name and
number all the cravings of my body—only in such
fidelity would he learn to play their song, though
even then, I’d keep an eye on him.
(Information)
Something’s trying to tell me that
something’s going on. Oh yes.
This morning at sunrise he woke me with his
‘old ways’—then laid them on the floor.
He placed them where the sun’s first beams would alight
on them and opened the blue window.
(Jump-cut)
Whenever he wanted anything,
I recited this, my alphabet to him.
Fevers of words fastened in the needy
evening of his brow, a projection of
letters that flicker in this jump-cut to his eyes,
lifting his eyelids silent as a rose.
(Knowing)
In the first glimmer of knowing that
nothing will come of nothing,
life was all we could make
of those swiftly passing days: I was the golden
violin that he would touch into
echoes, as the echoes gathered us in.
(Lovers)
Whisper it once more in my ear. Oh, that
I would have you hold me still,
tenderly touching me into my skin:
how is it that we render our souls to
love’s fine place, in the rivery light of this:
oh, the pillow and the kiss.
(Money)
Vouchsafe for me these days of
eminence, though in my bag lies nothing but
a worn-out empty purse. Oh,
nothing will come of the nothing that
declines with each transaction. Oh,
I stared back at the checkout girl. And oh I
(Nothing)
waited for the earth to take me in,
as though this were the
nub of it all, the rub of the nothing
that plies between the echo and its
testament to what I pledge to you,
out of the hills, and echoing over again.
(Over)
My name is this: the day that passeth over.
Ancient in the making, now it will be broken over.
Keepsake, my heart, oh will you ever make it over?
Easeful now, I wake when the night is over.
Ashes in the wind: and then its fragrances blew over.
Carry me, sir, carry me on, into the going over.
(Providence)
Apple-blossom drifting down the creek.
Still the rooster wants to crow, though
evening’s almost here.
Forgo these things, though fate or commonplace
ordain us with this dream—our conveyance into
rapture, or the idea that provides.
(Quotidian)
As though this were the remedy for everything—
delight indeed will arise
unto these indigo-tinted skies;
latitude will restore us to the brightness of
the sun, to the spindle of this dreaming
earth that turns for everyone.
(Release)
Release me into the somewhere of the dream—
you will remember where, when you were
brother to me.
Unhook me from the steely world of
tractors, sheep-shit, shearing shed—
I am the one who has already gone into the giddy now.
(Sky)
Cherish the way you held me in your arms—you, he . . .
as usual I confuse the one with the other,
nattering my way through the rain, seeking out
the tarradiddle, the silver-tongue that touched
me once with truth: my good husband was
a pillar whose love could hold earth and sky apart.
(Tarantella)
Knowledge is this, with the heart in mind:
everything you ever did can always be undone.
Absolution never is never quite complete.
Cast yourself in the spider’s web:
a day would come and then the dust would settle.
Some days we would dance the wildest dance.
(Underworld)
Easier by far to see where the stars let out.
Friday. And then he said he really came from
Orion’s belt, the buckle star: Epsilon Orionis.
Riding in the hills that afternoon, he declared another name—
Alnilam . . . O you of the three Maries, I said. And then,
declare that name again . . .
(Vespers)
Usually at around this time it comes to this:
leaves in the poplars start to rustle,
the Empyrean gives forth its heron to the roost.
Except for this, the evenings are ordinary.
Round here they say the poplars are a kind of a people, too.
You’ll believe it when you hear the heron speak.
(Whisper)
It was thus that I came to quietude.
Came into the silence
and the redress of the mind. For
no one thinks to ask
of me what the horses say,
nor guide them on the way, although . . .
(Exhale)
Let me take you back to when
you first could take this in, this breath that is
my husbandman and this my
alphabet—and I, oh I whose breathing
knew of each his suck and sigh of life, each eddy in the
ebb and flow, wherein I now exhale.
(Yet)
a day would come when he would be gone.
Commend to me to these last things: a rustic table,
a bowl of fruit, the music-box that sang
‘Sally is my sweetest heart’. As though the mountains might
exalt his name, even as he flees through
falling shadows and the warbler’s plaintive voice.
(Zero)
Oh and only when the last of words is
ruled and underlined, only when you see the
love that learns itself again,
only when you find the text that declines into the
vertical, will you read in its acrostic that
everything is this: the sweetest of the nothings that are love.
Cliff Fell (Last Leaf Press, 2014)
The contributors
Cliff Fell is the author of three books of poetry. The Good Husbandwoman’s Alphabet came out in 2014, published as a chapbook by Last Leaf Press, with illustrations by Fiona Johnstone and photographs by Ivan Rogers.
Alison Glenny‘s Antarctic-themed collection of prose poems and fragments, The Farewell Tourist, was published by Otago University Press in 2018. In 2019 she was, with Lawrence Patchett, a recipient of an Ursula Bethell writing residency at the University of Canterbury. She currently lives in Kāpiti.
Robin Hyde (Iris Guiver Wilkinson) (1906–1939) was born in Cape Town, South Africa, and moved to Wellington with her family in 1907. She was a poet, novelist and journalist. She worked for the Dominion before becoming Lady Editor at the Wanganui Chronicle, and subsequently the New Zealand Observer. She published three poetry collections (and one posthumously), along with two anthologies of her work (edited by Lydia Wevers and subsequently Michele Leggott).
Gregory Kan’s latest collection Under Glass was longlisted for the Ockham NZ Book Awards 2020.
Selina Tusitala Marsh (ONZM, FNZRS), former NZ Poet Laureate, is a Pasifika Poet-Scholar and graphic mini-memoirist. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Auckland and lives on Waiheke Island.
Kim Meredith (Samoan, Tokelauan, and Portuguese descent). Her poetry and short stories are founded on reclaiming space for the female narrative and have been published in Aotearoa, Hawaii and Mexico. She has collaborated extensively with partner Kingsley Spargo performing to audiences in New Zealand and China. She is co-producing an upcoming album on spoken word and soundscapes ‘Swimming Toward the Sun’ due for release later this year.
‘Dance of Sina’ was written for her daughter Courtney Sina. Courtney was named after her maternal grandmother Rita Sina. Rita Sina was named after her paternal grandmother Sina le pua (Sina the flower). There was a sense of awe and wonder about Sina, continuing her journey down the family line. This beautiful and incredible creature daring to push boundaries and seeking out her own path.
Reihana Robinson: 2019 highlights included poetry readings for Mākaro Press with Jo Thorpe and Elizabeth Welsh (including Poetry Live in Auckland and the Fringe in Wellington), as well as reading at Lounge Poetry at Auckland University and with the remarkable Bob Orr at Carson’s in Thames. Reihana is working on her next collection tentatively titled ‘Grassfire’ but may end up with the title ‘NO’.
Steven Toussaint is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the IIML and is currently studying philosophical theology at Cambridge. He has been a Grimshaw Sargeson Fellow and is the author of poetry collection The Bellfounder and the chapbook Fiddlehead. His new collection, Lay Studies, is longlisted for the 2020 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
Sue Wootton lives in Dunedin. Her most recent publications are her novel, Strip, which was longlisted in the 2017 Ockham NZ Book Awards, and her poetry collection, The Yield, which was a finalist in these awards in 2018. She will travel to Menton, France, later this year as the 2020 Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellow.
Rarotonga-based poet Jessica Le Bas is the winner of the Sarah Broom Poetry Prize 2019.
Sarah Broom website here with poems by the finalists and winner
On Saturday I had the honour of mc-ing the Sarah Broom Prize session, having acted as Prize Director for the past year. I welcomed international judge, Anne Michaels, the finalists, Michael Steven, Jessica Le Bas and poet Vana Manasiadis standing in for London-based Nina Mingya Powles, the Prize founder and Sarah Broom’s husband, Michael Gleissner, and their family, and a room packed to the rafters with poetry fans.
In 2014 when Michael established the award he told me he had created a financial prize to support writing time for a poet, as his wife Sarah had enjoyed. But the Sarah Broom Prize is more than this. It allows us to shine increased light on NZ poetry, local poets get to be read by an international judge and the finalists get to read at Auckland Writers Festival. This is a gift for our poetry communities and we are immensely grateful to you, and to the hardworking Sarah Ross and Greg Fahey. The Sarah Broom Trust has launched a new website and new plans for the future. This year there were over 320 entries. For the past six years The Sarah Broom Trust has worked in partnership with the Auckland Writers Festival.
Sarah Broom (1972 -2013)
The prize also enables an annual return to Sarah’s poetry and this is a joy. Sarah’s debut, Tigers at Awhitu, appeared post her Cambridge doctorate, at a time she dedicated her life to motherhood, poetry and managing lung cancer. Her second collection, Gleam, was published posthumously. I have found her poems shine with cadence and craft, exquisite wisdom and subtle movements. She wrote poetry for the well and for the dying; the world is to be cherished. Love is always intensely present. I carry her poetry next to my heart.
I read two of her poems: ‘anchor’ and ‘river come gently’ from Gleam Auckland University Press, 2013.
The finalists
Nina Mingya Powles, of Pākehā and Malaysian-Chinese heritage is the author of field notes on a downpour (2018), two from Seraph Press Luminescent and Girls of the Drift She is the poetry editor of The Shanghai Literary Review and founding editor of Bitter Melon 苦瓜, a new poetry press. Her prose debut, a food memoir, will be published by The Emma Press in 2019. Poetry Shelf interview
Jessica Le Bas has published two collections of poetry with AUP, incognito and Walking to Africa and with Penguin, a novel for children, Staying Home. She currently lives in Rarotonga, working in schools throughout the Cook Islands to promote and support writing. Poetry Shelf interview here
Michael Steven is the author of four chapbooks and Walking to Jutland Street, a collection published by OUP, longlisted for the 2019 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. He was recipient of the 2018 Todd New Writer’s Bursary. He lives in West Auckland. Poetry Shelf interview
The Judge, Anne Michaels
Anne Michaels, poet and fiction writer, Toronto Poet Laureate, author of the beloved Fugitive Pieces among other splendid things, has produced breath-taking poetry. Poems that take up residency in your body, that savour silence alongside revelation, that tend to musical pitch and luminosity, that take you deep into human experience, both physical and imagined. These are some of her poetry treasures. [I held up All We Saw, Poems (her first three collections) and her magnificent children’s book, The Adventures of Miss Petitfour that I urged Kate De Goldi to read if she hasn’t already]. When I was in A & E on Sunday my daughter brought me Anne’s Infinite Gradations to reread. It transported me beyond injury, beyond hospital walls to the most glorious writing on poetry and art I know, on what it feels or means to write poetry or make art. So many lines felt utterly relevant in the wake of the Christchurch mosque attacks when we collectively asked and keep asking ‘what good poetry’ and collectively seek kindness, empathy and connection.
Let me share a few favourites.
We write and we read in order to hold another person close.
Sometimes language is the rescuer.
Poetry is the lonely radical precious expression of a single life.
Poetry suspends time. Poetry is time. Poetry gives us time.
We belong where love finds us.
Poetry Shelf interview with Anne Michaels
Anne Michaels spoke on poetry and the finalists entries – she has also selected two highly recommended poets – Jess Fiebig and Wen-Juenn Lee.
Anne told the audience it it was an honour to judge the prize – and that she paid absolute attention to every entry. She said the poems provided a glimpse of New Zealand one could never have in any other way, and that questions arose on home, exile, language, belonging. She saw the poems as kinds of ‘seeking voices’, and that poets are a tribe with a shared love of the word, a compulsion to write, solidarity – and that we are all in it for the enterprise of it.
Anne wanted everyone who entered a poem to understand and feel to their very soul that they are part of this enterprise. She then introduced each of the finalists (I have included her comments on highly recommended):
Jessica Le Bas (winner)
Jessica Le Bas’s poems are alive with detail acutely observed. In the poet’s disciplined language and perception is a kind of tenderness – for the natural world, and for human frailty. It is a poetic vision that understands how inextricable hope and despair, beauty and loss: of a cracked mango, Le Bas wisely advises, “eat it now”. In these poems, the world is passionately perceived.
Nina Mingya Powles (finalist)
These poems express both the power of memory and the grace of a present moment. They are a deeply felt exploration of language – how it separates us and holds us close; how it can become, sometimes, the only home we have. The best compassion is born of clear seeing, and this is the compassion that imbues Nina Mingya Powles’s poems – expressed with a generous, gentle, authority. These are poems of beautiful depth.
Michael Steven (finalist)
These poems speak of intimate encounters, often wordless, and of communions – through music, plums shared along a path, a circling hawk, a gravestone. There is a quietude in these poems that reminds us just how loud the world has become, and how valuable those moments, the “tiny benefactions” that gently restore our attention to what’s important.
Jess Fiebig (highly commended)
By not turning away from a moment, these poems insist on understanding, finding meaning where it hurts. These poems are full of compassionate detail, direct and wondering, and “finding treasures” in plain sight.
Wen-Juenn Lee (highly commended)
These are poems of witness – vivid and fierce, seeking a kind of justice. In their passion to name what it means to live in exile – from a place, from a language – these deeply felt poems assert the right to be seen and known, not forgotten. Their seeking is a kind of restoration. Wen-Juenn reads ‘Prologue’ for Poetry Shelf
In announcing the winner Anne underlined how she loved all three poets, and she urged the audience to follow their careers, to buy their books and to spread the word.
At the beginning I asked, what good poetry? I took up from Anne’s point and finished by saying, as this session so beautifully demonstrated, that we read and write to hold things close: life, love, loss, people, experience, knowledge, connections. Friends and strangers come up to me afterwards and said that this session was full of heart and soul. I agreed.
Grateful thanks to the Sarah Broom Trust and to the Auckland Writers Festival.
I wish you all the best for future years.