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Poetry Shelf Occasional Poems: Dinah Hawken’s Speaking of Trees

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Speaking of Trees

What does it take to break ground?
What does it take to carry yourself
with dignity through mist and rise?

You can see the fragility of trees
and the forbearance of trees.
You can see the agility of trees.

You know where you stand with a tree:
sheltered and strengthened,
beholden to the nature and network

of trees; the assembly of trees,
the farmland haunted by trees  
and the regiment of trees.

You can see the bearing of trees,
the felling and falling of trees,
the shipment of trees, the return on trees.

The return of trees.

What does it take to carry yourself into a forest
one valley over
from the one, right now, on fire?

                                           

Dinah Hawken

Dinah Hawken’s ninth collection of poems, Sea-light, was published by THWUP in 2021. ‘Speaking of Trees’ was written for Gerda Leenard’s exhibition of paintings at Pataka in Porirua : Regeneration – A Story of Trees. 

Poetry Shelf review: Frankie McMillan’s The Wandering Nature of Us Girls

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The Wandering Nature of Us Girls, Frankie McMillan, Canterbury University Press, 2022

The feel of a book in hand matters. Holding Frankie McMillan’s new collection, The Wandering Nature of Us Girls, is immensely satisfying. The size and shape, the paper stock, the pale blue title pages, the choice of font and font size, the breathing space. A perfect alchemy of design and production.

The dedication page: “For Marvin, / who taught me how to wander. / Without you, I would never have gotten lost.” This is the keyhole entry into a book where wandering becomes wondering; we get lost in wonder and wander, whether reader or writer. The collection of small stories performs bridges between both, in so many delicious ways. Even me naming the pieces is a mental excursion through form and label; how we tag what we write from poetry to prose to essay to fiction to short story, and any number of hybrid marriages.

The book is offered as small stories so I am running with that. Think mouthfuls of narrative or let’s say fiction. Think past and present. Think stepping stones from the miniature to wider issues, issues hungry for human attention: love, death, loss, violence, curiosity. Think anchors in the real, and offshoots in the hyperreal, sidelines in the surreal.

Water is the connective tissue, and if you think of the ever-changing appearance and movement of water, it is extremely apt. Frankie often crafts long sentences, sentences an Italian novelist might favour, sentences that showcase the currency of water. Extended tidal rhythms, the water breathing in and out. It makes me think again of wander, and the flâneur comes to mind, the bricoleuer, with both reader and writer meandering, amassing detail, absorbing atmosphere.

Water is the connective tissue and like the ocean it is a meeting ground of dark and light. The grandmother goes swimming, others go swimming, but there are drownings, there are bodies missing at sea. This is a collection of mystery, of gaps in the narrative, of surprising turn of events, of tragedy. Most definitely tragedy, terrible twists in events. The aunt who loves sweeping stays home in the flood, sweeping out the water, until the point she is on the roof, still sweeping, still sweeping, until she and broom and house are swept away.

There is such power in Frankie’s imagination. A beaked mouth, an antlered head. A baby under a tree writing a thesis on “aerial domesticity”. There are the acrobatics of circuses, of putting on a show. There are the subcurrents of our planet under grave threat. The tragedy we must face. Along with violence against women, ‘us girls’, and suddenly, slowly, the meandering takes on a greater insistent force. We are wandering and wondering, and there are consequences, cause and effect.

The mood and ideas a book generates matters. The Wandering Nature of Us Girls is less concerned with geography than with movement, with action, with human connections. It is a handbook of curious and gut smacking things. It is a book you feel as well as a book you think. It is a book of catastrophe and a book of epiphany. Small story brilliance.

Frankie McMillan is the author of five books of poetry and short fiction. Her most recent collection, The Father of Octopus Wrestling, was listed by The Spinoff as one of the 10 best New Zealand fiction books of 2019 and shortlisted for the NZSA Heritage Book Awards, and her 2016 collection, My Mother and the Hungarians, was longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. She has twice won the New Zealand Flash Fiction Day competition and has been the recipient of numerous awards and residencies, including the NZSA Peter and Dianne Beatson Fellowship (2019), the Michael King writing residency at the University of Auckland (2017), and the Ursula Bethell residency in creative writing at the University of Canterbury (2014). McMillan spends her time between Ōtautahi Christchurch and Mohua Golden Bay.

Canterbury University Press page

Girls Raised by Swans on Poetry Shelf (‘Accounts of Girls Raised by Swans’)

Poetry Shelf Occasional Reviews: James Brown’s The Tip Shop

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The Tip Shop, James Brown, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022

Alex Grace writes on the back of The Tip Shop: “Funny, dark, insightful and nothing close to a chore to read. Poetry, but it doesn’t suck.” Ha! Some poetry must suck, even be a chore to read, like a school assignment! James Brown’s poetry is cool – ok a lazy-tag adjective children are often forbidden to use as what does it actually mean? It means James’s poetry is hip, electric, agile on its poem toes, lithe on its heart beat, and is immensely readable.

The opening poem, ‘A Calm Day with Undulations’, places visual waves on the page and sets you up for all manner of undulations as you read the collection: wit, heart, life. In the poem, James uses an ocean metaphor to write about cycling which is a way of writing about living. Think surf / swell / naval surface / roll up and down / wave length / lull / pool.

It’s a calm day with undulations.
My tyres flow freely
across the naval surface.

The Tip Shop appraises and pays attention to scenes, moments, events, potential memory, language. The detail ranges from measured to madcap. Questions percolate. Poetry rules are invented. Words are played with. Dialogue is found. Poems stretch and poems repeat. Herein lies the pleasure of poetry in general, and a James Brown collection in particular: there is no single restrictive model when it comes to writing a poem. Within the collection as a whole, and within the frame of an individual poem, James resists stasis.

A poem that epitomises intricate delights is ‘Schrödinger’s Wife’. It delivers a miniature story laced with wit and puzzle. Here is the first stanza:

Mary didn’t walk with us Sundays. She ran.
With earbuds, she could keep reading. Her shop,
Schrödinger’s Books, was a tough mistress.
‘Are you working today?’ we’d ask. ‘Yes and no,’
she’d reply. She just needed to ‘finish the books’.
Can the books ever be finished? They wink at us
as though there are uncertain things
they think we ought to know.

I am drawn to repetition, to a concatenation of detail, especially in list poems, overtly so or nuanced. Three examples in The Tip Shop, establish A to Z lists. Another poem juxtaposes ‘I must not’ and ‘I must’. A found poem, like a form of canine play, lists dog owner dialogue. And then the delight in repetition dissolves, and time concentrates on the washing and peeling of fruit. In ‘Lesson’, a single elongated moment becomes luminous when caught in the poem’s frame. We are implicated, and are returned to an (our) apple: “When was the last time you / washed a green apple”.

Three longer poems stretch into telling a yarn, spinning a story, as the repeated indents mark the intake of a storyteller’s breath. Glorious.

‘Waiheke’ pares back to an ocean moment, and I am imagining the scene imbued with love. So much going on beneath, on and above the surface of the poem, whether in the breaststroking, in the prolonged looking.

You yearn so much
you could be a yacht.
Your mind has already
set sail. It takes a few days
to arrive

at island pace,
but soon you are barefoot
on the sand,
the slim waves testing
your feet

The Tip Shop is piquant in its fleet of arrivals and departures. It is poetry as one-hundred-percent pleasure – it makes you laugh and it makes you feel. It encourages sidetracks and lets you rollercoast on language. What a poetry treat.

James Brown’s poems have been widely published in New Zealand and overseas. His Selected Poems were published in 2020. Previous books include The Year of the Bicycle (2006), which was a finalist in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2007, and Go Round Power Please (1996), which won the Best First Book Award for Poetry. His poems are widely anthologised and frequently appear in the annual online anthology Best New Zealand Poems. James has been the recipient of several writing fellowships and residencies, including the 1994 Louis Johnson New Writers Bursary, a share of the 2000 Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship, the Canterbury University Writer in Residence, the Victoria University of Wellington Writer in Residence. James works as an editor and teaches the Poetry Workshop at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington. 

Te Herenga Waka University Press page

Poetry Shelf Occasional Reviews: Sudha Rao’s On elephant’s shoulders

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On elephant’s shoulders, Sudha Rao, The Cuba Press, 2022

Poetry books are so often objects to treasure, physical treats to hold.

Sudha Rao’s On elephant’s shoulders is exactly this, with its exquisite, embroidered cover image (sorry no acknowledgement of source or creator). The interior design is equally appealing; a perfectly sized font with ample space for the poems to breathe and readers to sojourn. The title also captivates, and I especially love the fact there is neither definite nor indefinite article to support ‘elephant’. I am pirouetting on the title, imagining elephant as both anchor and viewing platform. Falling into the title, over and over. I am both grounded and liberated.

The opening poem, ‘Warp and weft’, establishes the collection as a book of arrivals and departures. It sets the scene for recurrent motifs, ideas, words, images – and I love that. The poem is divided into three parts: passages, shadows and braids. The three terms are an excellent guide to the book as a whole. I am particularly captivated by the recurring ‘braids: there are plaits, the father’s hands, the grandmother’s hair, the South Island rivers, a way of writing, a way of living between here and there, this home and that home.

“I am a bracelet of memories bearing the weight of your bones.”

from ‘Threads across waters’

The poetry, in keeping with braid notions, exudes both economy and perfumed richness, an evocative serving of detail. The detail enhances a scene, a series of relationships, poetry as musical score. The detail may be repeated, as in echoey ‘braid’, you might move from the scent of turmeric to a ‘sunflower flowering’.

What renders the collection poignant, especially in its poetic tracing of a migrant’s experience, is the presence/absence braid, whether we are talking geography, kin, food, gestures, memories. Everything feeds into a braided version of home that is near and far, intimate and longed for.

[…] When you crossed

old waters, did you know

how cold new waters would be?

from ‘Cradle’

I talked about stitching when I recently reviewed Elizabeth Morton’s terrific collection Naming the Beasts, and stitching seems appropriate here, especially bearing in mind the sublime cover. Stitching is a way of talking about poetic craft, about the little threads that are both visible and invisible parts of the art and craft of a work, in the edge and the tension. Sudha has stitched her poetry in threads that gleam of the everyday, the detail so alive with living, epiphany, challenge, but that also work behind the scenes as the poems flow like little exhalations. Measured. Mesmerising. Magnificent.

This is a collection to treasure.

“‘There is rhythm in the cabbage tree when it combs clouds.”

from ‘Keeping time’

Originally from South India, Sudha Rao migrated to Dunedin with her parents and trained in classical South Indian dance. She moved to Wellington to establish Dance Aotearoa New Zealand (DANZ). Sudha’s poems have appeared in literary journals and anthologies in New Zealand and overseas, including Ko Aotearoa Tātou | We Are New Zealand and Best New Zealand Poems. Sudha was a participant in the International Bengaluru Poetry Festival 2019 and performs in Wellington with Meow Gurrrls.

The Cuba Press page

Poetry Shelf: Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2022

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Poetry New Zealand Yearbook is now edited by Tracey Slaughter, supported by the University of Waikato and published by Massey University Press. The latest issue continues to showcase poetry, essays, reviews and a feature poet. It also runs an annual poetry competition for secondary students.

Tracey Slaughter’s introduction sidesteps the traditional literary journal’s editorial ‘opening’ and riffs on the theme of breakage. I adore it! The end of a line provides infinite fascinations: either as a rest stop or an open valve, but Tracey draws us to the way the line itself may be punctured with white space. It is not just the visual hit, prolonged breath or a shift in rhythm, it’s ‘Switch your senses on’. Tracey’s editorial is an invigorating piece on reading and writing poetry. It’s a rush to the senses, and inspired me to to create my second Paragraph Room (coming up soon!).

As an electrified proposition on reading poetry, it also applies to our entry into Poetry New Zealand 2022:

‘Bring it all. Waste nothing. Use everything you are to open the poems in this book.’

Celebration time: there is a succulent and diverse wave of young poets in Aotearoa New Zealand. You meet them on Starling, on social media, in the IIML secondary school poetry competition, and through publishers such as We Are Babies. Holding an annual competition for secondary school students in Aotearoa, PNZYB adds to the increased visibility of emerging voices.

The four First Prize winners (from Y11 to Y13) are nestled in the alphabetical order of the contributors. Good to see them sit alongside the selected poets rather than as a competition adjunct. Unlike most writing competitions, there is no judge’s report. Were there common themes, styles? Leanings towards politics or the personal or both? What the four published poems underline is these new writers are an unmissable destination. You get heart, you get garden-fresh, breathtaking music, thunderbolt surprise, word nimbleness. The names to watch: Ocean Jade, Caitlin Jenkins, Sarah-Kate Simons and Jade Wilson. I am lost for words … these poets are so darn good.

get some air. the haze of summer is ripe and all i could ever want
is to rest my head into its shoulder, rendered to its shallow fever
until i can find a warmth to keep safe. for now,
my head is tilted north through your slack-jawed window
with patient wind threading into my skin

Ocean Jade from ‘Route Back Home’

when the world wants our faces to kiss the concrete
we’ll still be safe in the arms of papatūānuku
cause when things go south —
we’ll deal with them like south —
with the love our roots nourish us in …
bronze skin mona lisa

Caitlin Jenkins from ‘South’

Wes Lee is the featured poet. Her most recent collection is By the Lapels (Steele Roberts, 2019). She was a finalist for the Sarah Broom Poetry Prize (2018) and was awarded the Poetry New Zealand Prize the following year. Tracey provides two terrific paragraphs as entry points into both the poems and an interview she has with Wes. Wes’s poems leave her in awe: ‘accosted, exhilarated, struck’. Tracey writes: ‘The scenes glimpsed within a Wes Lee poem are often low-key, incidental, domestic, yet under the surreal pressure of the poet’s eye the ordinary detonates and homely details seethe and seize.’ Indeed. The poems walk on a precarious edge of living. They scratch and lash, they tilt you as read. You body surf on currents of memory, trauma, the personal.

A highlight for me is reading the essay of poet and journalist, Maryana Garcia’s ‘A Clearer Dawning”. Maryana writes of being selected for the AUP antholgy A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand, and on standing in the wings about to read at the book launch at the Auckland Writers Festival. The essay is sorting buttons, reciting vowels and diphthongs, a moving ledger of plus and minuses in the family’s move to New Zealand several decades ago (bomb checks v Lola’s cloth cupboard, smog v the best mangoes in the world). It is self doubt as a poet. We should all have a folder marked ‘Dietritus’! It is the way memory is hooked when you least expect it (by the fabric feel of the anthology’s cover). More than anything, it is in keeping with A Clear Dawn‘s stated aim: that Asian poets, like all poets, write about anything in a thousand inspiring ways.

I stared at my poetry folder, asked myself which poems I felt at home with. The answer was: none. Tabs closed. Tabs opened. I blinked again. Then I clicked on a folder I’d called, in a fit of creative frustration, Dietritus.

Maryana Garcia from ‘A Clearer Dawning’

Derek Schulz’s essay steps off from a brilliant Alice Oswald quotation (‘poetry is the great unsettler’) to opening windows on Emily Dickinson’s poetry. I kept arguing and agreeing with the essay which is far more satisfying than skim reading and moving onto the next page.

Sometimes you fall upon a piece of writing at exactly the right time. Sue Wootton’s extraordinary ‘This Damned Helplessness’ chimes so deeply when I am currently equating 2022 to climbing Mt Everest, when I am in training for a high risk adventure and not at all sure what views I will see. Caught in the gap between so many things. Sue considers climbing a first mountain and a second mountain, each with different views, and then perhaps imaginary mountains (Dream, Day, Night, Fact, fiction, Science, Culture, Body, Soul). More importantly, she traverses (connects with) how to exist, survive, flourish in the space between disparate things. Say Science and Culture. The first mountain view and the second mountain view. What is said and what is misheard. She uses her past experience as a physiotherapist to consider storytelling, gap navigation, treating pain, broken self narratives, bridges, patient involvement, re-composition. I am barely scratching the surface of this intricate tapestry of thought. It’s a satisfying neighbourhood of quotations and responses to other writers, physicians, thinkers, patients. Beautifully written, supremely thought provoking, it’s an empathetic plea to speak from both mountains. Yes, extraordinary, humble writing.

My issue of Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2022 is already well thumbed as I lily-pad hop the poems (one poem per poet) along with the continued solid devotion to reviewing poetry books published in Aotearoa. This is a journal I am drawing out over months not days. To savour and sidestoke in. There are unfamiliar names and recognisable favourites. Under Tracey’s inspired editorship, Poetry New Zealand Yearbook is something I look forward to. Rejuvenating. Rejuvenating. Rejuvenating.

take this night
quickly like a pill / the pull
of space cracking / ankle joints
from the stretch up
in its dark belly
gurgling acid starlight

Hebe Kearney from ‘night comes on’

she lay on the pavement
squinting at clouds
and never made out
my father roosting
in cranes and carillons
even her dress    pressed
with paintings of the domes
of Budapest  made
her giddy sun downing
giddy      this way
                               and that

Kerrin P. Sharpe from ‘the scaffolding of wings’

didn’t matter that our Chinese faces
spoke white/all of us knew the routineness
of string/mā má mǎ  mà/knotted our xīn
into snake bites/left our tongues parched/
dead nailed until the bell rang three.

Wen-Juenn Lee from ‘chinese class’

Massey University Press page
10 Questions with Tracey Slaughter

Tracey Slaughter teaches creative writing at the University of Waikato, where she edits the journals Mayhem and Poetry New Zealand Yearbook.

Poetry Shelf review: Janet Charman’s The Pistils

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The Pistils Janet Charman, Otago University Press, 2022

little lapping waves
to inundate
the shoes of makers
whose texts
i’ve addressed
and assessed
in the dark inland towns
of my imagination
the large waves of the fire siren
call me out
in the middle of the night

from ‘welling’

I started reading Janet Charman’s poetry when I emerged from my poetry cocoon with Cookhouse, my debut collection, and she knocked my socks off. First up it was Janet’s musical ear: an elasticity with words, linguistic play, surprising syntax. And then, so essential when my academic research focused on women and writing, her feminist core. Not an adjunct, nor a side track, but an essential feminist core. When I walked across the university threshold onto Simmonds Street, with my PhD and carton of books, I walked out of the academy into life as a poet. And a hunger to immerse myself in an Aotearoa New Zealand context. To discover the women who had written before me, who were writing alongside me, and who would write ahead of me. Janet Charman was busting out of the men’s canon and opening up notions of ‘she’, ‘i’, ‘we’, ‘you’, ‘they’. The ink in her pen and her preferences were placed centre stage, whether in trousers or skirts, folding nappies or building houses.

Janet’s new collection The Pistils opens with a terrific sequence, ‘High days and holy days’. Twelve poems that mark holidays or significant occasions (Waitangi Day, Parihaka Day Guy Fawkes Night, Wahine Day, Matariki, Picnic Days). Each poem contributes to a life – within a sequence of panels. Bare bones. Ample white space. A miniature narrative of excavation. Remember when. Remember how. Remember why. The sequence opens scenes, moments, places – and we enter the collection grounded.

winds drain to the horizon
tides
lap below the wrought-iron railing

here
we are sheltered in the hollow of the year
the hollow of the day

blowflies
loll and bang the afternoon to a close
the windows

from ‘1. Northland Panels‘ from ‘high days and holy days’

Move into the heart of the book, and the mind leaps and bounds along the rhythm of the line. Exquisitely crafted. Scored. Composed. In ‘Mrs Valentine’s instructions’, the rhythm of revelation shapes memory. On the next page, in ‘hometime’, attention to the sound of the line is equally arresting. Memory is translated into music and image. It is a portrait of the child but it is also a portrait of the mother. In parings and traces. Surprising arrivals. It is religion and Freud, a mother lost in a novel, it is fingers worn to the bone, the news on the radio, family dinners, walking home. Life and death. It is home.

and the mother weighting at the top of the hill
her red roof tile her front windows
black blank shine
her white two-storeyed weatherboard authority of home time
—untangle the latch race the path
hunt through the house to find her where she sits
adrift in a novel
or conducting her day in some regimen of intellectual longing
with Freud and Jung in the sunroom
—on three sides light pulses in
Father Son and the Holy Ghost
summer on summer through glass the great gum nods

from ‘hometime’

Rhythm is so important. It renders Janet’s poetry fully charged, and accumulates life, detail, confession, insight, opinion, grief, reflection. It feels real, it feels personal, it feels political. The mother is a constant presence, in the shadows and in the light, a vital connection. Rhythm accommodates the feminist spotlight on life. The stamen and the pistil, the difficulty of childbirth and a baby in an incubator, a war memorial, waste management, Pakehā privilege, an aging body image, a breast removed, James K Baxter’s rape boast, literary criticism, sex, grief, having breakfast while watching John Campbell rather than listening to National Radio because your beloved has gone. It is the rhythm of mourning. Ah. So many layers.

i waited into the summer for my diagnosis
saw how a benign White Island
only became Whakaari
for the pakehā
after an eruption with deaths

from ‘bra dollars’

I speak of rhythm in such glowing terms but it is of course part of a sonic festival. Janet’s poetry strikes the ear (as Rebecca Hawke’s debut collection does). This leaning in to listen is rewarding: the leapfrogging alliteration, assonance, short lines, slightly longer lines, punctuating breath, free flowing currents. Again Janet’s agile music enhances my engagement with her roving subject matter. With the sharp edges and the necessary subterranean questions. How to live? How to live and love on planet Earth? How to speak against subjugation based on gender or skin colour? How to see your parents? How to go on when your beloved is no longer there? How to continue probing and resisting? How to be yourself? Ah. Such layerings.

Reading Pistil is exhilarating. I am loving this book because it is vulnerable and open, it is edgy and crafted, and because it shines a light on how it is for women. We still need that persistent light. We still need poetry that misbehaves as much as it makes music on the line. The poems call out and call for, stand out and stand for. It is a stunning collection.

Janet Charman is one of New Zealand’s sharpest and most subversive writers. In 2008 she won the Montana Book Award for Poetry for her sixth collection, Cold Snack. In 2009 she was a Visiting Fellow at the International Writers’ Workshop of Hong Kong Baptist University. In 2014 she appeared as a Guest Reader at the Taipei International Poetry Forum. Her collection 仁 Surrender (2017, OUP) chronicles her writing residencies in Hong Kong and Taiwan. This is her ninth collection of poetry.

Otago University Press page

Interview: Janet Charman on Standing Room Only with Lynn Freeman Listen

Review: Sophie van Waardenberg for Academy of New Zealand Literature Read

Review: Chris Tse for Nine to Noon Listen

Poetry Shelf review: Brian Flaherty’s Plague Poems

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‘Chewing the nails of just one hand, the right

Silence falling back on us

With all its weight of sky and stars.’

Plague Poems, Brian Flaherty, Little island Press, 2022

10.

Fingering the page of statistics in your pocket
You are still trying to find the right words
It’s not a matter of painting a black picture
It’s a matter of taking precautions
Even to express such simple emotions
Costs an enormous effort
Most of all you like a certain bell in the neighbourhood
That rings softly around five in the evening.

Rather than knit or bake sourdough, Brian Flaherty wrote a poem a day after Aotearoa went into its first lockdown, just before midnight on 25 March 2020. The next morning, he took Albert Camus’s The Plague (La Peste). He read five pages each day, and ‘used them to sample and shape a poem’ that echoed our pandemic situation, and that he emailed to a friend. Plague Poems represents the fifty poems he wrote. It is a slender, dark-covered book that sings out of dark and life, the unknown and the recognisable.

A reshaping, a sampling, a translation, a poetic transparency laid over our pandemic time. As I read the book in one slow sitting, entranced, captivated, the poetry forms a transparency over my own lockdown experience. Here and then, the empty city, the empty streets, the hijacked and reinvented daily routines, these poems like those days, offer new and surprising sustenance.

Brian slows down in the empty city, in Camus’s novel, and in his slowness of daily pace, observation is heightened. There are posters demanding hygiene, a droning radio, a glass of warm beer, people on balconies and people walking the boulevards. In the ambulation, whether physical, emotional, cerebral, the poet’s mind is adrift, collating and collecting. The poem is thinking with new eyes. It is contemplating the strange and the estranging. I am personally returned to my own drift through the house, up the country road, without anchor and then again with a different anchor. Reading the collection it feels like the objects on the mantelpiece of the mind were taking time to settle. They still are.

14.

To make the trains run again in our imagination
The only way to escape this unbearable holiday
To speak more particularly at last of lovers
Those one sees wandering at any time of the day
Subservient to the sun and the rain
Handed over to the whims of the heavens
To go back through the story
And examine its imperfections
It must be said that people are drinking a lot
You have the impression that cars
Have started to go round in circles.

Time is elongated, meaningless, endless, meaning rich, meaning astray, meaning hungry, questions compounding.

I adored reading this elegant suite of poems, with its silence, its epiphanies, its unexpected resonance, its sweet craft. I am returned to a time that was body-displacing off-real, like a film noir set, a dystopian novel from past or future, as we grappled to reshape our days, our relationship with today. Two years later, it feels altogether noisier, edgier, more divisive, less connected and less connecting. Brian’s poetry takes me back to a time where, against all odds, life felt precious, when we worked together to make it so. We walked through the empty city, observing, collating, harvesting, recognising, celebrating, and being alive to and for what matters. I love this precious book.

33.

After eleven, plunged into darkness
Under a moonlit sky
The town is like a monument
A necropolis in which disease and stone
Have finally silenced every voice
Night crouching in our hearts
The myths that are passed around
Black shape of a tree, the howl of a dog.

Brian Flaherty is a poet librarian. He is co-founder of the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre  with Michele Leggott, and was co-editor of the poetry journal Trout. Poems have appeared in Turbine, Best NZ Poems, Blackmail Press, Ika, Ka Mate Ka Ora, and Trout. Recordings of some of his poetry are at Six Pack Sound.

Little Island Press Plague Poems

Little Island Press Brian Flaherty

Poetry Shelf review: Janet Newman’s Unseasoned Campaigner

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Unseasoned Campaigner, Janet Newman, Otago University Press, 2021

Poet Janet Newman lives at Koputaroa in Horowhenua, where she farms beef. Her debut collection, Unseasoned Campaigner, is nourished beyond description of scenic beauty to a deep love and engagement with the land and farming. Women writing the land is not without precedent. Ruth Dallas comes to mind initially. She spent time as a Herd Recording Officer during WWII and found cities restrictive and dull afterwards. When she was living in Dunedin in later years, writing enabled returns to her beloved rural settings. Janet dedicates several poems to her. The second poet that springs to mind is Marty Smith, whose rural background has featured in her poetry, and who is also unafraid of over and underlaying an idyllic landscape with the grit and reality of farming life.

Janet’s first section, ‘How now?’, places the reader one hundred percent in rural experience: managing livestock, a diarrhea-soaked calf that doesn’t make it, drenching, the slaughter house in graphic detail, blood and sweat. There are water restrictions, water anxiety, drought. A dead river. More dead stock. Horses led to shade and grass. Scenic routes and beauty spots are off the menu.

I applaud this revised view but it is the people who hold my attention to a significant degree. While farmers are currently under scrutiny for diverse reasons, particularly climate change, some are speaking out about how tough it is. Listening to RNZ National’s excellent Country Life, it is clear there is no hold-all definition for the contemporary farmer and their diverse practices. In the book’s middle and final sections, Janet also opens up what “farmer” means, and that adds significant and poignant layers to the first poems.

In the second section, ‘Tender’, Janet draws us to close to a father, and I am assuming her father. He was a complicated, multifaceted human being: a farmer, father, husband, war veteran. He was a man of few words and myriad actions, toil and more toil. He cursed war on television and kept a belt by the door. He is memory, because he has passed, and he fills the speaker with mourning. The poems are vividly detailed with the physicality of daily life, and it is through his presence farming is made prismatic, beyond stereotype. When I pivot on the word “tender”, I see the poems as an offering to both mother and father, to us as readers. I see too the tenderness in the care of animals, and tender as the sore spot that is parental absence, maternal and paternal memory.

His language is electric rhythm of pump and wire,
gush of couplets from the artesian bore,

a flighty heifer enjambed
with a low rail,

stanza of cloud over the back paddock
threatening rain,

the fuck, fuck, fuck
of a dead bull in the drain.

from ‘Man of few words’

The mother is an equally haunting presence with her preserves, her baking and her plums. She too is drawn close through a focus on the physical detail of everyday actions. She is mourned and, in dying first, is an unbearable hole in the father’s life. The parental poems scratch the surface of my skin. Preserving, for example, brings back my own pungent memories. And preserving is also the tool of the poet, poems are stored in sweet and salty brine, held out to be savoured by both poet and reader.

Preserving

Red plums give up
round plump bodies
when I cut out their stones.
I hear my mother’s long-ago voice:
‘Don’t overdo it.’ The boiling
and much else. In the photograph
she is smiling behind glass, my memory
of her steeped in absence. Now,
even that faithless call sounds sweet
as in preserving jars sour plums
surrender to sugar syrup.

The third section, “Ruahine”, moves and adjusts to loss. It also finds footing on scenic routes. In the final poems, the poet is out driving and absorbing the birds and trees, mesmerising hills, the land bereft of vegetation. The landscapes have widened further to carry farm practices, daily challenges, connections to the land and to making a living. But of course it is not as though the farmer is blind to beauty. The final cluster of poems become song, act as sweet refrain, where upon in each return to a view, the view shifts in nuance. Just like poetry. Just like the way life is nuanced and resists deadening dichotomies. ‘Beach’ catches the elusiveness of what we sometimes see and feel so exquisitely:

Some days the clouds disappear
on the drive to the coast

the way the things you wanted to say
evaporate when you get there.

Sentences float to the pencil-line horizon
between sky that is nothing but blue

and sea that is as blue as …
but words fail you,

smudge like fishing boats
in the distance without your binoculars

from ‘Beach’

Janet writes with poise, each line fluent in rhythm and accent, and in doing so achieves a collection that matches heart with sharp and bold eye. Her collection belongs alongside the very best of Marty Smith and Ruth Dallas, a fine addition to how we write the land, whoever and wherever we are.

Janet Newman was born in Levin. She won the 2015 New Zealand Poetry Society International Competition, the 2017 Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems and was a runner-up in the 2019 Kathleen Grattan Awards. Her essays about the sonnets of Michele Leggott and the ecopoetry of Dinah Hawken won the Journal of New Zealand Literature Prize for New Zealand Literary Studies in 2014 and 2016. She has worked as a journalist in New Zealand and Australia, and a bicycle courier in London. She has three adult children and lives with her partner at Koputaroa in Horowhenua, where she farms beef cattle.

Otago University Press page

Review: Siobhan Harvey for The NZ Herald

Interview: Standing Room Only, RNZ

Feature: Koputaroa farmer and poet Janet Newman writes thesis on ecopoetry

Interview: Janet Newman discusses ecopoetry, RNZ

Interview: The Big Idea

Poetry Shelf review: Serie Barford’s Sleeping with Stones

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Sleeping with Stones, Serie Barford, Anahera Press, 2021

come my love

follow me down the mountain
through the desert
across the ocean to Piula

fish will lomilomi our tears
into crystalline water

I will kiss you better

 

from ‘Piula blue’

 

Serie Barford’s new collection Sleeping with Stones is an exquisite testimony to life and love. The poems are both odes and eulogies, because at the beating heart of the collection is the man to whom the book is dedicated. He was the poet’s beloved. The opening poem shows us a scene of joyful presence alongside a scene of terrible absence. I am inferring, as I read, that the poet’s beloved was pulled over a hard-to fathom edge. The poem suggests to me the collection will weave here and not-here, pain and joy, and that the writing will draw the loved one close. And that is exactly what it does, and it is so very moving.

I am finding it hard to write this review, when the subject matter depends on such a delicate mesh of dark and light. Yet Serie’s book is a compelling work of beauty that you read in one sitting. I keep imagining the tidal build up of feelings, memories, experience, and here I am holding, let’s say falling, into a book of bittersweet economy. The unsaid is ripe with the spoken, and the spoken is poignant with the unsaid. The beloved comes and goes, and goes. There is the light-rich setting of scenes, of shared places (a fresh water pool on Upolu where they first met), and there is the dark-shadowed pangs of regret. How to hold someone closer to keep them safe? How to be near the grief stricken? How to write grief and how to write love? All these questions and more rise to the surface.

Other things find their way into the weaving. The poet is having mammograms, buys a frock in her beloved’s favourite colour, uses traditional healing foods (turmeric and kawakawa leaves), faces institutional racism, mows the lawn, stands by the pōhutukawa they planted together. All these daily activities and challenges, nestling into the grief and the recollecting, are placed within the four seasons of a year. The seasons indicate the passing of time, the harvest and the plantings, yet also indicate the way life is shaped into so many stages, compartments or loose-bordered arrangements.

The poems sit in generous space on the page, using an open rather tight font. The openness gives the pain and the celebration breathing room. Feeling and thinking room. Which is exactly what I want to do for you. I want to open the book and then let you pick it up and fall into its beauty, its hope, its connections.

your fine voice lies buried
on the other side of the world

how you loved our garden

pese mai
sing to me

from ‘Sing to me’

Serie Barford was born in Aotearoa to a German-Samoan mother and a Pālagi father, and grew up in West Auckland. She has published poems online and in journals, along with four previous collections of poetry. In 2011 she was awarded the Seresin Landfall Writer’s Residency and in 2018 the Pasifika Residency at the Michael King Writers’ Centre. Serie promoted her collections Tapa Talk and Entangled Islands at the 2019 International Arsenal Book Festival in Kiev. Sleeping With Stones was launched during Matariki, 2021.

Anahera page
Poetry Shelf: Serie reads from Sleeping with Stones
Poem on Poetry Shelf: ‘The midwife and the cello’
RNZ Standing Room Only interview
Kete Books: Grace Iwashita-Taylor review

Poetry Shelf Eight Poets, Eight Sentences: Chen Chen’s When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Possibilities

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When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, Chen Chen, Boa Editions, 2017

I am a gay sipper, & my mother has placed what’s left of her hope on my brothers.

She wants them to gulp up the world, spit out solid degrees, responsible
              grandchildren to gobble.

They will be better than mangoes, my brothers.

Though I have trouble imagining what that could be.

Flying mangoes, perhaps. Flying mango-tomato hybrids. beautiful sons.

 

from ‘Self-Portrait As So Much Potential’

Each poem is a list of further possibilities that stretch out with such word beauty to embrace life. Love sadness mother lover constellations emigration wonder kissing winter grandmother song. There is sublime melody in the story and there is sublime story in the song. Picture a footpath incandescent after rainfall and the goosebump tattoo on your skin is what you get as you read. Lists appear; like miniature self portraits, like slow-release puffs of life, suprising, complex, stingingly real. You cannot imbibe Chen’s poems without imbibing word joy. Poetry as a meditation device, contemplation. Luminous.

I want to say, No, it’s completely different, which in many ways it is, but really
I’m remembering what a writer friend once said to me, All you write about
is being gay or Chinese—how I can’t get over that, & wonder if it’s true,

if everything I write is in some way an immigrant narrative or another
coming out story. I recall a recent poem, featuring fishmongers in Seattle,
& that makes me happy—clearly one that isn’t about being gay or Chinese.

But then I remember a significant number of Chinese immigrants
live in Seattle & how I found several of the Pike Place fishmongers
attractive when I visited, so I guess that poem’s about being gay

& Chinese, too. So I say to my friend, I’m not sure, & keep eating
the popcorn. Thank god we chose the “family size” bag. Can’t stop
the greasy handfuls, noisy mouthfuls. Can’t eat popcorn quietly.

 

from ‘Poem in Noisy Mouthfuls’

 

Chen Chen is a poet and essayist interested in Asian American histories and futures, family (bio and found), queer friendship, multilingualism, hybrid texts, humor, and pop culture. His work has appeared in two chapbooks and in such publications as Poetry, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Best of the Net, and The Best American Poetry. He is the recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, the Saltonstall Foundation, and Lambda Literary. He earned his BA at Hampshire College and his MFA at Syracuse University. He lives in Lubbock, Texas, where he is pursuing a PhD in English and Creative Writing at Texas Tech University. His second book of poems, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in Sept. 2022. His first book of essays, In Cahoots with the Rabbit God, is forthcoming from Noemi Press in late 2023.

Chen Chen’s website

Boa editions page

Winner of the A. POULIN, JR. POETRY PRIZE
Winner of the GLCA New Writers Award
Winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry
Longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry
Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry
A Barabara Gittings Literature Award Honor Book