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Poetry Shelf celebrates Landfall 241

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Landfall 241, edited by Emma Neale, reviews editor Michelle Elvy

Otago University Press, 2021

As Landfall 241 is the final issue edited by Emma Neale, Poetry Shelf takes a moment to toast the stellar work she has done as editor over the past few years. Like the other Landfalls under her watch, the latest issue is a vital compendium of poetry, fiction, reviews, essays and artwork. I am delighted to see a range of familiar and unfamiliar voices, emerging poets and those established, and to traverse wide-ranging subject matter and styles. The winners of the Charles Brasch Young Writers’ Essay Competition are announced and the artwork is sublime, distinctive, eye-catching.

Bridget Reweti’s stereoscopic photographs invert Allen Curnow’s ‘Unknown Seas’ to become ‘Known Seas’. If you hold the double images at the right distance and look though to the horizon you get a sense of spatial depth. It got me considering how I ‘hold’ a poem and experience multiple shifting depths. The way a poem pulls you into space in myriad ways. The way you float through layers, in focus out of focus, absorbing the physical, the intangible, the felt.

I made a long list of poems that held my attention as I read. Alison Glenny’s extract from ‘Small Plates’ haunted me with its off-real tilts:

The poets move together in flocks. One finds a new song and the others take it up. Developers move in and the poets rise together to find a new perch. The night is a forest with missing eaves. So much wood to build boxes for poems to live in. Each leaf a quarrel over the exact placement of the moon.

In the end I assembled a Landfall reading comprising voices I have rarely managed to hear, if ever, at events. It is so very pleasing to curate a reading from my rural kitchen and feel myself drawn to effervescent horizons as I listen. The print copy is equally rewarding!

The poets in Landfall 241: Joanna Aitchison, Philip Armstrong, Rebecca Ball, David Beach, Peter Belton, Diana Bridge, Owen Bullock, Stephanie Burt, Cadence Chung, Ruth Corkill, Mary Cresswell, Alison Denham, Ben Egerton, Alison Glenny, Jordan Hamel, Trisha Hanifin, Michael Harlow, Chris Holdaway, Lily Holloway, Claudia Jardine, Erik Kennedy, Brent Kininmont, Wen-Juenn Lee, Wes Lee, Bill Manhire, Talia Marshall, Ria Masae, James McNaughton, Claire Orchard, Joanna Preston, Chris Price, Tim Saunders, Rowan Taigel, Joy Tong, Tom Weston

Landfall page here

The readings

Talia Marshall reads ‘Learning How to Behave’

Cadence Chung reads ‘that’s why they call me missus fahrenheit’

Claudia Jardine reads ‘Field Notes on Elegy’

Ria Masae reads ‘Papālagi’

Stephanie Burt reads ‘Kite Day, New Brighton’

Tim Saunders reads ‘Devoir’

Jordan Hamel reads ‘Society does a collective impersonation of Robin Williams telling Matt Damon “It’s not your fault” repeatedly in Good Will Hunting‘

Rowan Taigel reads ‘Mothers & Fathers’

Trisha Hanifin reads ‘Without the Scaffold of Words’

The Poets

Stephanie Burt is a professor of English at Harvard and has also taught at the University of Canterbury. Her most recent books include Callimachus (Princeton University Press, 2020) and Don’t Read Poetry: A book about how to read poems (Basic, 2019).

Cadence Chung is a student at Wellington High School. She first started writing poetry during a particularly boring Maths lesson when she was nine, and hasn’t stopped since. She enjoys antique stores, classic literature, and tries her best to be an Edwardian dandy.

Jordan Hamel is a Pōneke-based writer, poet and performer. He was the 2018 New Zealand Poetry Slam champion and represented NZ at the World Poetry Slam Champs in the US in 2019. He is the co-editor of Stasis Journal and co-editor of a forthcoming NZ Climate Change Poetry Anthology from Auckland University Press. He is a 2021 Michael King Writer-in-Residence and has words published in The Spinoff, Newsroom, Poetry New Zealand, Sport, Turbine, Landfall, and elsewhere.

Trisha Hanifin has a MA in Creative Writing from AUT. Her work has been published in various journals and anthologies including Bonsai: Best small stories from Aotearoa New Zealand (Canterbury University Press, 2018). In 2018 she was runner up in the Divine Muses Emerging Poets competition. Her novel, The Time Lizard’s Archeologist, is forthcoming with Cloud Ink Press.

Claudia Jardine (she/her) is a poet and musician based in Ōtautahi/Christchurch. In 2020 she published her first chapbook, The Temple of Your Girl, with Auckland University Press in AUP New Poets 7 alongside Rhys Feeney and Ria Masae. For the winter of 2021 Jardine will be one of the Arts Four Creative Residents in The Arts Centre Te Matatiki Toi Ora, where she will be working on a collection of poems.

Talia Marshall (Ngāti Kuia, Ngāti Rārua, Rangitāne ō Wairau, Ngāti Takihiku) is currently working on a creative non-fiction book which ranges from Ans Westra, the taniwha Kaikaiawaro to the musket wars. This project is an extension of her 2020 Emerging Māori Writers Residency at the IIML. Her poems from Sport and Landfall can be found on the Best New Zealand Poems website. 

Ria Masae is a writer, spoken word poet, and librarian of Samoan descent, born and raised in Tāmaki Makaurau.  Her work has been published in literary outlets such as, Landfall, takahē, Circulo de Poesia, and Best New Zealand Poems 2017 and 2018.  A collection of her poetry is published in, AUP New Poets 7.

Tim Saunders farms sheep and beef near Palmerston North. He has had poetry and short stories published in Turbine|Kapohau, takahē, Landfall, Poetry NZ Yearbook, Flash Frontier, and won the 2018 Mindfood Magazine Short Story Competition. He placed third in the 2019 and 2020 National Flash Fiction Day Awards, and was shortlisted for the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. His first book, This Farming Life, was published by Allen & Unwin in August, 2020.

Rowan Taigel is a Nelson based poet and teacher. Her poetry has been published in Landfall, Takahe Journal, Shot Glass Journal, Aotearotica, Catalyst, After the Cyclone (NZPS Anthology, 2017), Building a Time Machine (NZPS Anthology, 2012), and she has been a featured poet in A Fine Line, (NZPS). Rowan received a Highly Commended award for the 2020 Caselberg International Poetry Competition with her poem ‘Catch and Kiss’.  She can often be found in local cafes on the weekend reading and writing poetry over a good coffee.

Poetry Shelf review: AUP New Poets 7

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AUP New Poets 7 features the work of Rhys Feeney, Ria Masae and Claudia Jardine. The series is edited by Anna Jackson.

Editor Anna Jackson suggests the collection ‘presents three poets whose work is alert to contemporary anxieties, writing at a time when poetry is taking on an increasingly urgent as well as consolatory role role as it is shared on social media, read to friends and followers, and returned to again in print form’.

I agree. Poetry is an open house for us at the moment, a meeting ground, a comfort, a gift, an embrace. But poetry also holds fast to its ability to challenge, to provoke, to unsettle. In the past months I have read the spikiest of poems and have still found poetry solace.

AUP New Poets 7 came out in lockdown last year and missed out on a physical launch. To make up for that loss I posted a set of readings from the featured poets. One advantage with a virtual celebration is a poetry launch becomes a national gathering. I still find enormous pleasure in online readings – getting to hear terrific new voices along with old favourites.

Herein lies one of the joys of the AUP New Poets series: the discovery of new voices that so often have gone onto poetry brilliance (think Anna Jackson and Chris Tse).

Rhys Feeney is a high school teacher and voluntary health worker in Te Whanganui-a-Tara with a BA (Hons) in English Literature and a MTchLrn (Secondary). Ria Masae is an Auckland-based poet, writer and spoken-word artist. In 2018 she was the Going West Poetry Slam champion. Claudia Jardine is a Pākehā/ Maltese poet and musician with a BA in Classics with First Class Honours. The three poets have work in various print and online journals.

Rhys Feeney

I am thinking poetry is a way of holding the tracks of life as I read Rhys’s sequence of poems, ‘soy boy’. He is writing at the edge of living, of mental well being. There is the punch-gut effect of climate change and capitalism. There are crucial signals on how to keep moving, how to be.

The poems are written as though on one breath, like a train of thought that picks up a thousand curiosities along the way. As an audio track the poetry is exhilarating in its sheer honeyed fluency. Poems such as ‘the world is at least fifty percent terrible’ pulls in daily routine, chores, political barbs. The combination matters because the state of the world is always implicated in the personal and vice versa. The combination matters in how we choose to live our lives and how we choose to care for ourselves along with our planet.

waking up from a dream abt owning a house

for a moment i think i’m in utopia

      or maybe australia

           but then i see the little patches of mould on the ceiling

i roll over to check my phone

    but i forgot to put it on charge last night bc i was too tired

          why am i am so fucking tired all the time

i should find some better alternative to sugar

i should find some better alternative to lying there in the morning thinking

Artificial Intelligence is a Fundamental Risk to Human Civilisation

      or what i am going to have for breakfast

           how can i reduce my environmental footprint

                but increase the impact of my handshake

 

from ‘the world is at least fifty percent terrible’

I love the way Rhys plays with form, never settling on one shape or layout; the poems are restless, catching the performer’s breath, the daily hiccups, the unexpected syncopation. Words are abbreviated, lines broken, capitals abandoned as though the hegemony of grammar and self and state (power) must be wobbled. Yet I still see this as breath poetry. Survival poetry.

I am especially drawn to ‘overshoot’; a poem that lists things to do that get you through the day, get you living. The list is more than a set of bullet points though because you get poignant flashes into a shadow portrait, whether self or invented or borrowed.

     5) give yourself time to yourself

light fresh linen candles

       & cry in the bath

           call it self-care

6) eat a whole loaf of bread in the dark

7) start working again

           the topsoil of your tolerance is gone

you break in two days

      this is called a feedback loop

your coping strategies don’t work

           in this new atmosphere

Rhys’s affecting gathering of poems matches rawness with humour, anxiety about the world with anxiety about self. Yet in the bleakest moments humour cuts through, gloriously, like sweet respite, and then sweesh we are right back in the thick of global worry. How big is our footprint? What will we choose to put in our toasters? Have we ever truly experienced wilderness other than on a screen? This is an energetic and thought-provoking debut.

Ria Masae

What She Sees from Atop the Mauga opens with a wonderful grandmother poem: ‘Native Rivalry’. The poem exposes the undercurrents of living with two motherlands, Samoa and Aotearoa, of here and there, different roots and stars and languages, a sea that separates and a sea that connects. There is such an intense and intimate connection in this poem that goes beyond difference, and I am wondering if I am imagining this. It feels like I am eavesdropping on something infinitely precious.

i tilted my face up to the stars

that were more familiar to me

than the ones on Samoan thighs.

without turning to her, i answered

‘Leai fa‘afetai, Nana.’

i felt her stare at me for a long pause

before puffing on her rolled tobacco.

we sat there silently looking at the night sky

until we were tired and went to sleep

side by side on a falalili‘i in her fale.

 

from ‘Saipipi, Savai‘i, Samoa’ in ‘Native Rivalry’

Perhaps the lines that really strike are: ‘Mum was fa’a pālagi, out of necessity / i was pālagified by consequence / so, was i much different?’

I am so affected reading these poems on the page but I long to hear them sounding in the air because the harmonics are sweet sweet sweet. ‘Intersection’ is an urban poem and it is tough and cutting and despairing, but it is also stretching out across the Pacific Ocean and it is as though you can hear the lip lip lap of the sea along with the throb throb throb of urban heart.

She sits at her window

staring down at the city lights.

Her scared, her scarred, her marred wrists

hugging her carpet-burnt knees.

The waves in her hair

no longer carry the scent of her Pacific Ocean

but burn with the stink of

roll-your-own cigarettes.

Ah, enter these poems and you are standing alongside the lost, the dispossessed, the in-despair, you are pulled between a so often inhumane, concrete wilderness and the uplift and magnetic pull of a Pacific Island. I find these poems necessary reading because it makes me feel but it also makes me see things afresh. I know from decades with another language (Italian) some things do not have a corresponding word (for all kinds of reasons). ‘There is No Translation for Post-Natal Depression in the Samoan Language’ is illuminating. There is no word because of the Samoan way: ‘be back home that same evening / to multiple outstretched brown hands / welcoming the newborn baby into the extended alofa.‘ How many other English words are redundant in a Samoan setting, where ‘isolation’ and ‘individualism’ are alien concepts?

At this moment, in a time I am so grateful for poetry that changes my relationship with the world, with human experience, on the level of music and connections and heart. This is exactly what Ria’s collection does.

Claudia Jardine

Claudia Jardine’s studies in Ancient Greece and Rome, with a particular interest in women, have influenced her sequence, The Temple of Your Girl. I was reading the first poem, ‘A Gift to Their Daughters: A Poetic Essay on Loom Weights in Ancient Greece’, in a cafe and was so floored by the title I shut the book and wrote a poem.

The sequence opens and closes with the poems inspired by Ancient Greece and Rome, with a cluster of contemporary poems in the middle. Yet the contemporary settings and anecdotes, the current concerns, permeate. There is sway and slip between the contemporary and the ancient in the classical poems. History isn’t left jettisoned in the past – there are step bridges so you move to and fro, space for the reader to muse upon the then and the now. The opening poem, ‘A Gift to their Daughters’, focuses on the weaving girls/women of ancient Greece, and the threads (please excuse the delicious pun) carry you with startle and wit and barb. I am musing on the visibility of the work and art women have produced over time, in fact women’s lives, and the troublesome dismissal of craft and the domestic. Here is a sample from the poem which showcases the sublime slippage:

Weaving provided women with a means to socialise and help one

another, strengthening their own emotional associations to the oikos and

to textile manufacturer itself.

The school is filled with Berninas, Singers, Vikings and Behringers.

Our mums are making cat-convict costumes for the school musical,

a mash-up of plagerised Lloyd Webber and local gossip.

I already hate CATS – The Musical.

from ‘The Importance of Textile Manufacture for the relationship of Women’ in ‘A Gift to their Daughters’

These lines reverberate: ‘My dad is furious when I decide to take a textiles class in Year 10. My mother has a needle in her mouth during this conversation.’ The characters may be fictional or the poet’s parents but the contemporary kick hits its mark. How many of us know how to sew? How many of us were frowned upon for selecting domestic subjects at secondary school? So many threads. The speaker / poet muses on ‘all the queens on Drag Race who do not how to sew’.

At times the movement between then and now borders on laugh-out-loud surprise, but then you read the lines again, and absorb the more serious prods. I adore ‘Catullus Drops the Tab’. Here is the first of two verses (sorry to leave you hanging):

there were no bugs

crawling under his skin

where that Clodia

had dug her nails in

rather

The middle section gets personal (or fictional in a personal way) as the poems weave gardening and beaching and family. Having read these, I find they then move between the lines of the classical poems, a contemporary undercurrent that contextualises a contemporary woman scholar and poet with pen in hand. I particularly love ‘My Father Dreams of His Father’ with its various loops and lyricisms.

My father dreams of his father

walking in the garden of the old family homestead at Kawakawa Point

I have not been back since he passed away

 

As decrepit dogs wander off under trees

to sniff out their final resting places,

elderly men wait in the wings

rehearsing exit lines.

 

Claudia’s sequence hit a chord with me, and I am keen to see a whole book of her weavings and weft.

Anna Jackson’s lucid introduction ( I read after I had written down my own thoughts) opens up further pathways through the three sequences. I love the fit of the three poets together. They are distinctive in voice, form and subject matter, but there are vital connections. All three poets navigate light and dark, self exposures, political opinions, personal experience. They write at the edge, taking risks but never losing touch with what matters enormously to them, to humanity. I think that is why I have loved AUP New Poets 7 so much. This is poetry that matters. We are reading three poets who write from their own significant starting points and venture into the unknown, into the joys (and pains) of writing. Glorious.

Poetry Shelf launch feature: Claudia, Rhys and Ria talk and read poetry

Auckland University page

Review at ANZL by Lynley Edmeades

Review at Radio NZ National by Harry Ricketts

A Poetry Shelf gathering: AUP NEW Poets 7 read and talk poetry

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AUP New Poets 7: Rhys Feeney, Ria Masae, Claudia Jardine, ed. Anna Jackson

Auckland University Press, 2020

Anna Jackson, editor of AUP New Poets 7, suggests the collection ‘presents three poets whose work is alert to contemporary anxieties, writing at a time when poetry is taking on an increasingly urgent as well as consolatory role role as it is shared on social media, read to friends and followers, and returned to again in print form’.

I agree. Poetry is an open house for us at the moment, a meeting ground, a comfort, a gift, an embrace. But poetry also holds fast to its ability to challenge, to provoke, to unsettle. In the past months I have read the spikiest of poems and have still found poetry solace.

It feels really important to maintain our poetry hubs – to listen to poets as well spend time with the book in hand. So many new books have missed launches. I haven’t been to a poetry reading since the Wellington Writers and Readers Festival. This is partly why I am compelled to create Friday gatherings so we can connect with poets across Aotearoa.

I am the lucky one. Each of these poets emailed me their readings and I felt I was at an intimate private preview. Just me and the poems, and the heart-moving discussions on poetry, poems and the book itself.

I will review this anthology at a later date, but in the meantime, settle back in a comfy spot and take a listen, and the support the poetry world and buy a copy! I love this gathering so much I am walking on air, boosted out of covid flatness into glorious activity.

Thank you so much Ria, Rhys and Claudia for the mahi, the poetry love. Thank you.

The Poets

Ria Masae talks poetry and the book:

Ria reads poems:

Claudia Jardine reads and talks poetry:

Rhys Feeney reads two poems and talks about the book:

The Poets

Rhys Feeney is a high school teacher, volunteer peer support worker and fledgeling doomsday prepper who lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. He writes with terrible grammar about things he is scared of. His work can be found in Starling, Sponge, Salty x Foodcourt, and forthcoming in The Spinoff. You can buy his debut chapbook ‘soyboy’ as part of AUP New Poets 7.

Claudia Jardine (she/her) is a poet and musician based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Her most recent publication is AUP New Poets 7 which also contains collections by Ria Masae and Rhys Feeney. In recent months she has completed an MA thesis on intertextuality in Anna Komnene’s Alexiad, and now she is learning to groom dogs. Jardine’s writing can be found in Sport 47, Starling, The Spinoff, Stasis and Landfall 237.

Ria Masae is of Samoan descent, born and raised in Tāmaki Makaurau. She is a writer, poet, and spoken word artist whose work has appeared in various literary publications, as well as a handful of theatre productions. Her family includes an exasperating, but adorable dog who looks like a cow and neighs like a horse. Since her acceptance into the AUP New Poets 7 anthology, Ria has been working on a poetry collection for her first sole anthology.

Auckland University page

Poetry Shelf classic poem: Jordan Hamel picks Ria Masae’s ‘Jack Didn’t Build Here’

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Jack Didn’t Build Here

 

This is the house that Dad built.

Foundation laid with stories

from sitting under the ulu tree

to learnings from palagi scholarship:

for wife, for offspring, for aiga.

Sunday School teachings echo in his mother-tongue

dotted with Oxford Dictionary words.

 

This is the house that Lange built.

Southside Prime Minister. The only home

in the hood with a pool. He invited the locals

– his Mangere locals – over to swim

and understood the pressures of fa’alavelave,

cos he brown on the inside like that.

 

This is the house that Mum built.

Chandelier hangs over the heads of churchy

poker players, cheating and laughing on

the woven fala. Celebration trestle tables

laden with islands of sapasui, oka,

fa’alifu taro, palusami, and umu pork

surrounding a pavlova cheesecake.

 

This is the house that Key built.

Double-glazed windows within a security code gate.

His pool stretches across his Parnell palace

where riff raff are never invited to take a dip,

instead he swims regular laps to drown the reality

of midnight figures huddled inside torn sleeping bags

outside glaring high-fashion mannequin stores.

 

This is the house that I built.

Now in State House central. Wallpaper designed with parents’ language

smudged into Samoglish. One post carved from

the ancient va’a of bloodline ocean wayfarers.

Other post, a mighty kauri etched with Hans fairytales,

and Chinese script I feel but I can’t translate.

 

What house will Jacinda build?

Will her house accommodate the next generation?

Will it enable my daughters to build their own homes

of tangata whenua foundations and fa’a Samoa roofs

in this palagified City of Sales?

 

Ria Masae, originally appeared in Landfall

 

 

poem appeared in latest Landfall 237

 

Note from Jordan:

I was lucky enough to see Ria Masae perform poetry last year and I’ve been a fanboy ever since.  I fell in with love this poem when I read it in Landfall instantly because of how it delineates the relationship between the personal and political. While those with power have the ability to create structures and systems that shield them from one or the other, the two spheres of experience are inherently and inevitably reciprocal.

Ria shows us the house as a place of learning, eating, sharing, a place to nurture Whanaungatanga. But she also shows us the house as something unattainable, surrounded by barriers and surveillance, somewhere that can spread fear, otherness or indifference. We spend our whole lives as house guests: we consciously and subconsciously pick and choose experiences and lessons as we build our own, deciding who to invite in, how we speak inside, what wallpaper to put up. Ria has built a house that is a sum of her, her knowledge, her language, her whakapapa, her space within a nation, where the treatment of its guests fluctuates with the whims of those sitting at the head of the table. Ria ends with a question:

What house will Jacinda build? Will it enable my daughters to build their own houses/of tangata whenua foundations and fa’a Samoa roofs/in the palangified City of Sales?

This ending resonates in a time where Aotearoa is asking more of it’s leaders, asking how they will allow rangatiratanga to flourish, how they will create a sustainable future and undo the harms of colonialism and capitalism, how they will celebrate and protect the unique experiences and histories of all its guests, how they will rectify their positions of power and privilege with the whenua they stand on. Ria will have an answer to her question sooner or later. In the meantime, I’m getting a grappling hook, a balaclava, a bottle of whisky and going for a midnight skinny dip in John Key’s forbidden pool, who’s coming with me?

 

Jordan Hamel is a Pōneke-based poet and performer. He was raised in Timaru on a diet of Catholicism and masculine emotional repression. He is the current New Zealand Poetry Slam champion and has words published or forthcoming in Takahē, Poetry NZ, Mimicry, Sweet Mammalian, Glass Poetry, Queen Mob’s Teahouse and elsewhere.

Ria Masae is a writer, poet and a spoken word artist. Her work has appeared in various writing outlets such as, Landfall, Circulo de Poesia / Circle of Poets (Mexico), and Best NZ Poems 2017. She is a member of the South Auckland Poets’ Collective.

This year Ria was accepted for the 2019 New Zealand Society of Authors Mentorship Programme in which she is working on new material for her sole poetry collection. She is also compiling poetry to be published by Auckland University Press, alongside two other emerging poets in a book series, New Poets #6. This is due to be released next year.

 

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Landfall page

Poetry Shelf review: Landfall 237

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Landfall 237 edited by Emma Neale

 

Landfall 237 offers rich pickings for the poetry fans: familiar names (Peter Bland, David Eggleton, Elizabeth Smither, Ria Masae, Lynley Edmeades and Cilla McQueen) to emerging poets (Rebecca Hawkes, Claudia Jardine, essa may ranapiri) and those I am reading for the first time (Robynanne Milford, Jeremy Roberts, Catherine Trundle to name a few). The reading experience is kaleidoscopic, pulling you in different directions, towards both lightness and darkness, risk and comfort. And that is exactly what a literary journal can do. I was tempted to say should, but literary journals can do anything.

Landfall has a history of showcasing quirky artwork – and this issue is no exception. Sharon Singer’s sequence, “Everyday Calamities’ with its potent colour, surreal juxtapositions, strange and estranging narratives, and thematic bridges, is an addictive puzzle for heart and mind. I am circling humanity, the power of connection, the individual both tenacious and frail, the state of the planet. Paintings whirling and tipping you into moments that soothe, bewilder and provoke. I adore these.

I turned from these to Rachel O’Neill’s prose poem ‘The Supernatural Frame’ and get goosebumps:

You may look upon the painting through these special

foiled binoculars. We are at a safe distance. Afterwards you

may feel a chill or a fever linger for two days and a night,

accompanied by an infernal cough.

 

 

On the centennial of the birth of Ruth Dallas in Invercargill, I am also delighted to see John Geraets spotlight her poetry. Certain Dallas poems have always had a place in NZ literary anthologies (think ‘Milking Before Dawn’) but as readers we may less familiar with the wider expanse of her work. Like so many women poets of the twentieth century she is in the shadows. In his intro John suggests it is not clear how to include her ‘within more recent nexus based on gender, ethnicity, ecology, avant-gardism, faith or political affiliation’. He responds by assembling her words – culled from Landfall editor-contributor responses and her autobiography Curved Horizon – on the left-hand pages and his words on the right. He first sees in her poetry – compared with contemporary writing choices – predictability, regularity, un-excitement, regionalism; and then, by paying attention and refreshing his routes, he opens up poems to different movements. He moves in close to the poem. I love that. Much I could say on how we approach the women from the past! Expect 568 pages soon.

 

I absolutely love the poetry in this issue; it is both fresh and vital! I see neither formula nor dominating style but shifting stories, musicality, feeling, political bite, muted shades, bright tones.

 

Here are some highlights:

 

Joanna Preston’s poem ‘Allegrophobia’ carries you from birth to tardiness to spring in a layered on punctuality – a perfect little package.

Jasmine Gallagher’s ‘Be Still’ sent me to her bio because I want to read more by her. She is a doctoral student at the University of Otago and has previously been published in brief. Her poem is poetry as brocade – glinting for the eye and chiming for the ear.

 

Slattern: a

hoar frost:

a rime

Cold seed bed

Rot and slime

 

Another poet, Catherine Trundle, also sent me scavenging for more. She writes poetry, flash fiction and experimental ethnography. Her poem ‘The Caravan behind the Plum Tree’ is also an exquisite brocade.

 

This lush cusp of spring rides

pinkish, amoebic, wilding

the inside, every flesh ’n’ cranny

while the sunlight lunges in

through winter tidelines

of curtain rot

 

Tam Vosper’s ‘Ailurophilia’ was an equal hook for me. He is working on a PhD at Canterbury University that considers Allen Curnow and the poetics of place. Again this is brocade poetry: so rich in effect.

 

All Gallic pluck

and casual loft

you claim a suntrap,

slump sidewise down,

and unhinge your barbed yawn:

           a shark to shoaling mice.

 

And I want to add Medb Charleton’s ‘I think I Saw You Dreaming’, Rebecca Hawkes’s ‘If I could breed your cultivar / I’d have you in my garden’ and Gail Ingram’s ‘The Kitchen’ to my list of brocade poetry. Glorious.

In contrast you have the spare deliciousness of Ariha Latham’s ‘Waitangi’. Another poet whose work I want to track down.

 

When I read Ria Masae’s “Jack Didn’t Build Here’ I can hear her performing its sharp mix of personal and politics  – and it cuts into my skin. Six houses built. She carries us from the father’s house full of stories to David Lange’s Mangere home open to the locals: he ‘understood the pressures of fa’alavelave,/ cos he brown on the inside like that’. She bears us from the house her mum built with its’ celebration tables’ to the house Key built with its ‘security code gate’. She ends with a question (the house to be built?):

 

What house will Jacinda build?

Will it enable my daughters to build their own homes

of tangata whenua foundations and fa’a Samoa roofs

in this palagified City of Sales?

 

You can move from political bite to the glorious wit you often find in an Erik Kennedy poem. His ‘All Holidays Are Made-Up Holidays’ is no exception. Meet Cabinet Day – ‘we went along/ from house to house hanging little doors / around each other’s necks to hide our secrets’. Or the Feast of Holy Indifference. Genius!

Claire Orchard’s poem, ‘Breakages’, swivels on a set of shelves, on the objects that they hold, and in that satisfying movement speaks of so much more; the poem resembles a shelf of family history with peaks and troughs.

 

I enjoyed the way it had begun to display time

in the style of tottering, elderly people

 

I heard Joan Fleming talk about new poetry she was writing at the Poetry & Essay conference at Victoria University in 2017. The poems came out of her experience of camp life in Nyrripi and surrounding areas in Australia’s Central Desert. I was moved by her discussions of collaboration and consent, her attentiveness to the local. Two poems here – ‘Alterations’ and ‘Papunya is Gorgeous Dirty and I Second-guess my Purposes’ – come out of this experience. I can’t wait to see this in book form.

 

Finally a treat from Cilla McQueen. She has written ‘Poem for my Tokotoko’; it is personal, physical and abundant with the possibilities of poetry. Pure pleasure.

 

Sometimes I see you as an enchanter’s staff,

scattering poems like leaves to the west wind;

at others you’re practical, a trusty pole

by means of which, through quarrelling

undercurrents, I can ford turbulent water.

By means of which I put myself across.

 

This is such good issue – there are reviews and fiction I haven’t read yet, and the announcement of the Charles Brasch Young Writers’ Essay Competition 2019 – but on the poems only, it warrants a subscription. Yep – Landfall has its finger on the pulse of NZ poetry.

 

Landfall 237 page

 

 

White Night event at the Pah Homestead: a collaborative art project with Simone Kaho and Ria Masae

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WHITE NIGHT at the Pah Homestead: ASSEMBLY

March 18 @ 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm

Assembly: Collections and Crafts at the Pah Homestead

Assembly is a White Night celebration like never before. Bringing together collections, treasures, beats, words and craft, this is a gathering of all things creative.

 

Throughout the evening visitors are invited to BRING | MAKE | TAKE as part of our collaborative artwork project and make connections with other local White Night venues.

 

Download a copy of our Neighborhood Map here

 

If you have an interesting item you always wanted to know more about, join expert Yvonne Sanders for our very own Antiques Roadshow.  Pre-register your prized possession and bring it on the night for a short valuation and discussion by Yvonne.

Simply send a short description and a photo to enquiries@wallaceartstrust.org.nz

We will also be joined by local fibre artists from the Handweavers and Spinners Guild, also members of the Auckland branch of Creative Fibre, who will demonstrate their skills in felting and weaving.

Artist Collective Tiger Murdoch (Kelly Pretty and Matt Dowman) will be creating a unique installation in the front entrance to the Arts Centre throughout the evening.

To complete the Assembly of local creative talent at the Pah, Simone Kaho and Ria Masae will craft beats and words into lyrical magic in a live poetry performance.

 

There will also be a free shuttle linking the Pah Homestead with Greenwoods Corner – hop on any time between 6pm and 9pm and see what else is happening on and around Pah Road.  Shuttle leaves from the Korma Road entrance to Monte Cecilia Park, there will be guides showing the way from Pah Homestead.

 

Please join us in celebrating the Auckland-wide White Night with our family-friendly evening of MAKING & CREATING at the Pah Homestead!

 

 

About our Collaborators

Yvonne Sanders Antiques is a landmark destination shop located in Epsom, Auckland.  As an International Dealer, Yvonne herself has successfully traded for over 40 years having established the business in 1971.

Creative Fibre is the New Zealand organisation for all fibre crafts. It brings together spinners, weavers, knitters, dyers, flax workers, felters, crocheters, free form fibre artists and all other people involved in the use of fibre. We have over 3000 members throughout New Zealand and around the world who share a passion for fibre.

Whitecliffe lecturers Kelly Pretty and Matt Dowman are working together as artists and grass roots activists, posing confronting questions about social welfare, gentrification, political turmoil and global injustice to the public.  Together they form the collective ‘Tiger Murdoch’ referring to the surname of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and ‘tiger’ referring to an action or cartoon character name.

Simone Kaho joined the Literatti in 2011 as a scholarship-winning graduate of the International Institute of Modern Letters in Wellington, who count Eleanor Catton and Hera Lindsay Bird among their Alumni.  Noted for her lyricism and powerful stage presence, she’s now a performer in demand – at bars like The Thirsty Dog and theatres like Galatos, The Basement and The Mercury.

In 2015, Ria Masae won the ‘New Voices: Emerging Poets Competition’, as well as the ‘2016 Cooney Insurance Short Story Competition’. Also in 2015, Ria was thrilled to see a collection of her text come to life in a brilliant performance called, ‘MAKAI – Black Sand: Ocean Bones’. She was honoured to have her poetry translated into Spanish on the online Mexican literary website, Círculo de Poesía. Her work has been shared in several New Zealand and Australian publications including, Landfall, Blackmail Press, Snorkel, Ika, and Otoliths. Ria is a proud member of the South Auckland Poets Collective (SAPC).

 

 

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Details

Date:
March 18
Time:
6:00 pm – 9:00 pm
Event Category:

Venue

The Pah Homestead, TSB Bank Wallace Arts Centre
72 Hillsborough Road, Hillsborough
Auckland, 1042 New Zealand + Google Map
Phone:
09 639 2010

2015 NEW VOICES – Emerging Poets Competition – the results

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Congratulations!

Ria Masae 1

2015 NEW VOICES – Emerging Poets Competition

The Divine Muses Poetry Reading and Penguin Random House New Zealand are pleased to announce the winner, runner up and highly commended entries in the 2015 NEW VOICES – Emerging Poets Competition.

The winner of the 2015 NEW VOICES – Emerging Poets Competition is Manukau Institute of Technology student Ria Masae for her poem, ‘Native Rivalry’. Writing of the winning entry, our judge commented, “I chose this poem as the winner because it is a beautiful poem, with layers I can ruminate on, and though I read this poem over and over, I never tired of it, in fact I always found a little something more to enjoy each time. It is a sharp observation, yet written with affection, and is very easy to love.”

Our huge congratulations to Ria who holds a BA from the University of Auckland, and is currently studying towards a BCA at MIT.  Her work has been accepted for publication by Blackmail Press, Potroast, Ika,and Otoliths. She is a member of SAPC (South Auckland Poets Collective).

Runner up this year was Auckland University of Technology Masters in Creative Writing graduate, Georgina Monro for her poem, ‘Student Nurse’. This, says Allan, “is a compassionate poem, which utilises figurative language to express modes of communication in unusual forms.”

Monro is a graduate of the Masters in Creative Writing program at Auckland University of Technology. She has been a finalist in the Going West Poetry Slam and the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival Slam.

Additionally there were two Highly-Commended entries are, ‘Murmur’ by Auckland University Philosophy graduate, Sahanika Ratnayake and ‘Colour me true’ by Michelle Chote who is in her 2nd year of study in Italian and French.

Ria Masae and Georgina Monro join our winners and runners up, many of whom have gone onto have work widely published in journals here and overseas, including Elizabeth Welsh, Elizabeth Morton and Rosetta Allan.

There were over 70 entries to this year’s competition. Of those works submitted, Allan said, “The breadth of subject matter was vast, and the forms of poetry went from Rhyming iambic pentameter, right through to freeverse.”

 

 

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