These are poems chosen in lockdown. Perhaps it shows. They are rooted in one place, with an eye on a flickering, shifting other. Ruth France, who died in 1968, finds herself between ‘headlands we did not know were headlands’ – France mastered the art of dislocation, her experience never quite fitted the map. Bernadette Hall’s twist in the tale, her superb tripwire, gives the land the upper hand, puts us in our place. Simone Kaho’s Blues holds the dream of music success just beyond the horizon of island time and an alcohol-fuelled bender. Rhian Gallagher is in that other place, of foreign sounds and welcome anonymity. Selina Tusitala Marsh’s perfunctory dismissal of ‘Jimmy’ Cook from his step on the podium of our history; Richard Langston’s gentle last rites for a roadkill seabird; the charged adolescent hopes in Airini Beautrais’ The Library – from our masked up, emptied spaces, these are Apirana Taylor’s reasons for writing: the richness of the land given to the poor.
Sally Blundell
The Poems
Near Hurunui
It is surprising, not far from home, to discover An unknown, a shy bay where the water is very blue.
Where the road comes in through the bush Casually, and arrives with no rush
But just comes there, beside the beach. Where the headlands we did not know were headlands reach
Blue-shadowed into the the blue sea, stealing Each from the other as an old remembered song
Of Greek islands lost, a long time ago. There is a a feeling here of sleep, too
Many completed times we did not have part in, And a strangeness as of other gods than our own
Walking among these hills. It is good in some ways To come at evening back over the high ranges
Towards our own land, to leave such shadows behind us, And feel tired, as though we have been a long way.
Ruth France
from No Traveller Returns: The selected poems of Ruth France, ed. Robert McLean, Cold Hub Press, 2020
The River Whau
for Linda
she tells me how her big desire is to capture the River Whau
every day she sends me another photo
here is the river in gold dust here is the river in ice here is the river in mist as it twists the sweet daily bread of language
who can explain the mystery of desire?
now, we’ve both been captured by the River Whau
Bernadette Hall
from The Ponies (Victoria University Press, 2007).
Poem note: The Whau estuary is in Kelston. Auckland. The quotation is from Janet Frame’s poem, ‘I Write Surrounded by Poets’, from The Goose Bath (Random House, 2006)
Blues
Andy Blues, man, soul man let’s jam to the view Do you want a cup of tea brother? How did we get home last night? Nah – good call good call. Things have moved on man it’s another day. I’d give you that cat if it was mine I swear sister. Nah I’m Sāmoan, mainly Sāmoan. My woman – she saved me I like to think of her as an angel I haven’t seen her all weekend she doesn’t like to see me when I am on a bender. Don’t you know who I am? I’m Andy Blues I’m gonna make it big in the UK and come back and buy this street. Yeah that’s what I said on Police Ten 7 haha cos they said You’ve got to turn it down sir but here drink this sis you gotta hydrate all the time on the island. That’s it have a big long drink.
Simone Kaho
from Lucky Punch, Anahera Press, 2016
Abroad
I
Your own voice comes back at you accentuating the rise as if scaling a staircase of sound, and everything here goes the other way round. Everything you say is in question.
II
For the first time in your life you feel free of your story, walking street after street in a city that is layered with history. You are alone; you are in a zone of millions. Anonymity shines down on you from a sky so unclear after years you will still not know its true colour.
III
The islands shimmer against damp red brick, flaunting their best appearances: wild mountains & rivers & sea. A tape in your head plays the earliest memories. That girl, you mother says, where she has gone?
Rhian Gallagher
from Shift, Auckland University Press, 2011
Breaking Up With Captain Cook on Our 250th Anniversary
Dear Jimmy,
It’s not you, it’s me.
Well, maybe it is you.
We’ve both changed.
When I first met you you were my change.
Well, your ride the Endeavour was anyway on my 50-cent coin.
Your handsome face was plastered everywhere.
On money on stamps on all my world maps.
You were so Christian you were second to Jesus and both of you came to save us.
But I’ve changed.
We need to see other people other perspectives other world views.
We’ve grown apart.
I need space.
We’re just at different points in our lives —
compass points
that is.
I need to find myself and I can’t do that with you hanging around all the time.
Posters, book covers, tea cozies every year, every anniversary.
You’re a legend.
I don’t know the real you (your wife did burn all your personal papers but that’s beside the point.)
I don’t think you’ve ever really seen me.
You’re too wrapped up in discovery.
I’m sorry but there just isn’t room in my life for the two of you right now:
you and your drama your possessive colonising Empire.
We’re worlds apart.
I just don’t want to be in a thing right now.
Besides, my friends don’t like you.
And I can’t break up with my them so …
Selina Tusitala Marsh
from Ko Aotearoa Tātou: We Are New Zealand An Anthology, eds Michelle Elvy, Paula Morris & James Norcliffe, Otago University Press, 2020
Seabird
I have not forgotten that seabird, the one I saw with its wings stretched across the hard road.
One eye open, one closed. I wanted to walk past,
but the road is no place for a burial – I picked it up by the wings
took it to the water & floated it out to sea,
which was of no use to the bird. It had ceased. I like to think someone
was coaching me in the small, never futile art, of gentleness.
Richard Langston
from Five O’Clock Shadows, The Cuba Press, 2020
The library
The library is full of people looking for love. At the sound of footsteps approaching, a boy turns around with a meaningful glance, and casually slips a pencil behind his ear. Girls pause on the landings, clutching armfuls of books to their breasts. Sometimes, you feel sorry for these people. You wish this wasn’t happening. All you want is a book, and all the shelves are filled with eyes of longing.
Airini Beautrais
from Secret Heart, Victoria University Press, 2006
To write
to write of the mountains to write of the rivers to write of the lakes to write of the seas to write of the land to write for the poor that is the dream
Apirana Taylor
from Ko Aotearoa Tātou: We Are New Zealand An Anthology, eds Michelle Elvy, Paula Morris & James Norcliffe, Otago University Press, 2020
Sally Blundell is a freelance journalist and writer in Ōtautahi Christchurch. She holds a PhD from the University of Canterbury. She was books and culture editor for the NZ Listener and a judge (fiction) in the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. She was awarded MPA journalist of the year in 2020 and was runner up as reviewer of the year in this year’s Voyager Media Awards.
Airini Beautrais lives in Whanganui and is the author of four poetry collections and a collection of short fiction. Her most recent poetry collection is Flow: Whanganui River Poems (VUP 2017). Bug Week and Other Stories recently won the Ockham NZ Book Fiction Award 2021.
Ruth France (1913–68) published two novels: The Race (1958), which won the New Zealand Literary Fund’s Award for Achievement, and Ice Cold River (1961); and two volumes of poetry: Unwilling Pilgrim (1955) and The Halting Place (1961), under the pseudonym Paul Henderson. Poems from a third collection, which remained in manuscript at the time of her death, are published as No Traveller Returns: The Selected poems of Ruth France (Cold Hub Press, 2020).
Rhian Gallagher’s first poetry collection Salt Water Creek (Enitharmon Press, 2003) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for First Collection. In 2008 she received the Janet Frame Literary Trust Award. Her second poetry collection Shift, (Auckland University Press 2011, Enitharmon Press, UK, 2012) won the 2012 New Zealand Post Book Award for Poetry. A collaborative work, Freda: Freda Du Faur, Southern Alps, 1909-1913, was produced with printer Sarah M. Smith and printmaker Lynn Taylor in 2016 (Otakou Press). Rhian was the Robert Burns Fellow in 2018. Her most recent poetry collection Far-Flung was published by Auckland University Press in 2020.
Bernadette Halllives in the Hurunui, North Canterbury. She retired from high-school teaching in 2005 in order to embrace a writing life. Fancy Dancing is her eleventh collection of poetry (VUP, 2020). In 2015 she was awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for literary achievement in poetry and in 2017 she was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Richard Langston is a poet, television director, and writer. Five O’Clock Shadows is his sixth book of poems. His previous books are Things Lay in Pieces (2012), The Trouble Lamp (2009), The Newspaper Poems (2007), Henry, Come See the Blue (2005), and Boy (2003). He also writes about NZ music and posts interviews with musicians on the Phantom Billstickers website.
Simone Kaho is a digital strategist, author, performance poet and director. Her debut poetry collection Lucky Punch was published in 2016. She has a master’s degree in poetry from Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML). She’s the Director of the E-Tangata web series ‘Conversations’ and a journalist for Tagata Pasifika. In 2021 Simone was awarded the Emerging Pasifika Writer residency at the IIML.
Selina Tusitala Marsh (ONZM, FRSNZ) is the former New Zealand Poet Laureate and has performed poetry for primary schoolers and presidents (Obama), queers and Queens (HRH Elizabeth II). She has published three critically acclaimed collections of poetry, Fast Talking PI (2009), Dark Sparring (2013), Tightrope (2017) and an award-winning graphic memoir, Mophead (Auckland University Press, 2019) followed by Mophead TU (2020), dubbed as ‘colonialism 101 for kids’.
Apirana Taylor, Ngati Porou, Te Whanau a Apanui, Ngati Ruanui, Te Ati Awa, is a nationally and internationally published poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, actor, painter and musician. He has been Writer in Residence at Canterbury and Massey Universities. He frequently tours nationally and internationally visiting schools, tertiary institutions and prisons reading his poetry, storytelling and taking creative writing workshops. He has written six collections of poetry, a book of plays, three collections of short stories, and two novels. His work has been included in many national and international anthologies.
Poetry Shelf Spring Season
Tara Black picks poems Victor Rodger picks poems Peter Ireland picks poems Emma Espiner picks poems Claire Mabey picks poems
the land. the contested land, the stolen land, the cherished land. the land with its regenerating bush. with a view out to the tail end of the Waitākere ranges. the feel the look the idea. the beauty. the unwavering beauty that holds you as you totter. as you stand. the kūmura to be harvested. the lettuces and herbs. the land as essential pulse in your veins. the sublime land. the broken land. the wounded land. the beloved land. we cycle the length and walk the breadth. we climb the heights and we join hands to protect. we will never stop singing the land. in poetry
The poems
Our tūpuna remain
Nothing like a lone-standing nīkau in the middle of some paddock owned by some Pākehā to make you feel mamae
Surrounded by maunga who serve to remind you once that whole paddock had that same sense of tapu
It’s a bit like that urupā in the middle of that reserve which used to be a papakāinga till some Pākehā had it burned
So
consider yourselves warned:
It’ll take more than
a change of name a chopping down of trees a burning down of whare
to make us forget
our tūpuna remain
Jacq Carter
from Puna Wai Kōrero: An Anthology of Māori Poetry in English, Auckland University Press, 2014
Hone Said
chris abani said hone said the only land I am is that between my toes but anne read that hone said the only land I have is that between my toes then michele said selwyn said hone had said
which is why chris had written
it’s the difference between being and owning surging and standing living and landing she said she’d read he said have not am
I keep the am anyway
then ken said ron mason said it first
Selina Tusitala Marsh
from Fast Talkin PI, Auckland University Press, 2009
Parihaka
we never knew about Parihaka it was never taught anywhere except maybe around the fires of Parihaka itself at night when stories are told of the soldiers who came with guns to haul us up by the roots like trees from our land though the prophets called peace peace it was never taught at school it was all hushed up how we listened to the prophets Tohu, Te Whiti who called peace ‘Rire rire Paimarire’ but the only peace the soldiers knew spoke through the barrels of their guns threatening our women children it was never taught or spoken how we were shackled led away to the caves and imprisoned for ploughing our land
Apirana Taylor
from A Canoe in Midstream: Poems new and old, Canterbury University Press, 2009 (2019)
Kauarapaoa
The road climbs up abruptly, here beneath the cliff the water dark blue glass. A peacock dives into the grass – oh where oh where oh where oh where oh where? Wet tang of sheep shit, mass of trees releasing plant-scents in the angled sun, those smells of summers been and gone, bruised sap, ripe humus, rising to the nose. The road bends with the deep-cut stream, leaves fuzz the chasm to its brim, and the stream slinks down towards the river like a lover you’ll never get over.
All over, loose exotic scrub: gum, willow, wattle, elder, poplar, broom stitching the hillside like a seam across the rends of slip-soil dull and drab. A man in white bends to his hives below a face of mānuka sprayed dead. Sheep crawl amongst the sticks to feed on threads of green, wherever greenness lives. Across the road, like greying bones lie slash-piles of cut-over pines. And the naked peaks roll on forever like a lover you’ll never get over.
A falcon calls above the rise: Kek kek kek kek kek kek kek kek kek kek. Far over farmland lies a break of ocean, and the pale of western skies. The white volcano points out north, seeming steadfast, despite its restless sleep. The road skirts, in a gravel loop a drop so steep it catches in the breath. The roadside bluffs divulge their shells, reveal the ocean held these hills. And water is as much a mover as soil in softness is a giver. And what can the land do but take cover? Like a lover you’ll never get over.
Airini Berautrais
from Flow: Whanganui River Poems, Victoria University Press, 2017
Wild
Measure my wild. Down to my last leaf, my furled, my desiccated. This deciduousness, this bloom. Calculate my xylem levels. My spore count, fungal, scarlet in a bluebell glade. Whoosh, where the foliage closes on a great cat. Test me: how many tigers in my jungle, how many lions at roam? Map my rivers, deltas, estuaries. Mollusc, whelk, worm. Monitor my silt. Do I have spoonbills, high-stepping and watchful over the darting fish? Rainfall on pines. Dappled sunlight in my dells. Under moss, the fallen log, under the log the hibernating hedgehog. Late my dates, or soon? Return of the albatross, godwits gathering. What clouds me, shifts, but: indigo thunder-stack, pink wisp. Count the mice. What will survive me, O my cockroaches, O my lice? Scaffold me with metal, cage me in glass, tube me, needle me, fill me, flush me. Saline solution: the ocean. Oxygen therapy: the sky. Mineral deficiency: socks off. Soil. Dark rot, eye-less wriggle, while the roots seek, seek. Un-diagnosable, that ticklish insect. Mountain peak speak only snow, and thus I am diminished; thus I rest in my pulse. Sweet heart. Monitor my yearn, and treat it with trees. Un-pane me. Wilden my outlook. Membrane animal, skin mammal under the osmosis moon. Allow my tides. All this to say, in love we nest, and on Earth.
Sue Wootton
from The Yield, University of Otago Press, 2017
Tidelines
6am—
The sun rising behind me The sea roaring at my feet On the lip of the precipice
Everyone hunched in quiet boxes, houses scattered to the hills, precariously leaning towards the sea, here we are surrounded, ready to surrender the day to the surf, dissolving other imperatives into the dust, into the black iron-laced sand, tracing the time against the rising breeze, the tide ticking in, the river in flood, swollen by rain
And still time passes it washes away my footprints Every day I make new marks imprints on the beach lines on the page
I walk and I string words in long lines in my head I write and I skip words across the page like stones
I let them sink I watch them slowly spiral down through my mind Down and down, until they reach the ocean Deeper, into the abyss of collective dreaming
Until they are no longer my words Just a passing thought you were having
Early one morning, in your bed, in your house, in Piha, waiting for the tide to come in.
Kiri Piahana-Wong
from Night Swimming, Anahera Press, 2013
My Carbon Gaze
1.
Because there were hills to the east and hills to the west, there was a good chance that when you looked at something it would be a hill. Perhaps it would be a hill with a family member or a friend in the foreground. A family member or a friend might be called a loved one for short.
2.
With the hills and the loved ones far apart, your eyes would end up making so many trips back and forth that their orbit solidified into a sort of object. It was a wire model of an atom like they had in the museum. Or perhaps a model of the solar system. In any case, a round thing involving energy and with the potential to explode, but that would be in exceptional circumstances, probably never.
3.
I still have it in my natural history section, although sometimes I wish I didn’t. Sometimes I wish I didn’t have a natural history section. I wish I hadn’t looked up at those hills so often – willy-nilly – between 1960 and 1985, and looked back down at the loved ones, because now I am left with this wire model and it will never go away. In fact it will, because it is organic, but only after a very long time. Perhaps even after I am dead.
4.
Most summers there was a fire on one of the hills, the east or the west, the sun-coming-up hill or the sun-going-down hill. It would seem like the hill was burning, but it was only the gorse. Not so serious. But serious enough to prompt a teacher to set a Poem for homework.
5.
On the way home you could hear the black crackling and it seemed to have a personality, and not a very nice one.
6.
My mother wrote the poem quickly as she peeled the potatoes – in fact she only said it. I wrote it in my McCahon handwriting but much more neatly. Of English descent it crowds the hills, / Originally meant for hedges and sills. / A prickly maze, a funeral pyre, / a golden haze, a monstrous fire.
7.
There was only ever one hill on fire at a time. The problem would be if both hills caught fire at the same time, and the fires might burn down into the valley, and the trees would burn, and the lawns, and all our houses and their contents. And our Prefaces and Introductions. Not to mention the people. But we would run down to the beach. That’s what we would do.
8.
There was an article in the paper about the possibility of a tidal wave sweeping up the bay and taking everything with it, and if you hadn’t gone in the earthquake that preceded the tidal wave, you would now be finished off altogether. This was the opposite of the fire. You would be washed the other way, all the way into town. How extreme the world was. Why not something in the middle?
9.
(Why not fear something in the middle? Earth, wind, a few other things.)
10.
And the hills were mostly benign anyway. They were just there, like your name. You might even get sick of them, of looking up at them and back again. Why don’t people get sick of their name? Maybe they do. Maybe they say, If I hear that name one more time I’ll scream.
11.
Sometimes you might look up at the hills and think, I am looking at the hills, and you might have some sort of reaction, e.g., They are dark against the white sky and are very beautiful. Or, They have a sun like a solitaire nestled into them, but no for long. See look – gone! Divorced. I told you so. These kinds of reactions were the first attempts to connect the hills and the people in the foreground. But it is probably impossible. Well nigh impossible.
12.
In spring they were brassy yellow with gorse flowers. In summer they were ‘tinder dry’ (a cliché) and ‘brown’ (not a cliché because the word brown doesn’t have much to it and people haven’t got sick of it yet). Okay, brown.
13.
When both sides of the hills were brown, to the east and to the west, in the ‘height of summer’, a fire might be lit by a boy letting off fire-crackers saved from Guy Fawkes, or by a girl letting off fire-crackers (svd fr. GF), or by a man going for a walk on the town belt and smoking a cigarette, or by a woman (gng fr wlk on TB w. cig.), and the fire brigade would be called out.
14.
But because there were two fires – one lit by the boy or the man, the other lit by the girl or the women – the fire brigade would have no chance of taking control, and the fire would burn down into the valley. And everyone, family members and friends (loved ones for short as there would not be much time), would run down the Parade to the beach and go and stand in the sea because there would be nowhere else to go. I am still out there. I am standing in the cold sea at Island Bay, and it is 2011, and it is freezing, and I am waiting for the fires on the hills to go out.
Anne Kennedy
from The Darling North, Auckland University Press, 2012
Emotional geography
Look back, and forks and crossroads soon appear. Now you see, or think you do,
how that U-bend, that country lane, which at the time seemed less a turning than the leaning
of the moment, led on to this and later this, as though there really is a road-map of the heart
whose one-way system you have to follow down Ego Street to Guilt Mews, and the various alleys off Vanity Row.
Harry Ricketts
from Your Secret Life, HeadworX, 2005
More ancient than any of us
Birds swoop over the whenua. Reminders of you alight upon puku and manawa, and night-time channels thoughts unspoken in daylight. Lit fires smoulder upon open ground more ancient than any of us.
Desire grew in the air between us. Braided awa beneath rākau limbs came crashing earthward, into landscapes of enlivened senses. The gifts inside their ringed stumps spoke of ages and shadow tones, and graced our faces with crossed lattices.
Streams of consciousness — like gaps in the light.
Promises leaked from your eyes. They landed upon my soul etching deep chasms of aroha, before that mamae of yours disrupted the course and an undertow began to tear at the fabric of us, casting me out.
My ringaringa spread wide to expose secrets. And you owned none of the lies that spilled over to lap at my feet, where pūrerehua wings stroked my winnowed heart beating fast to the rhythm of our mother.
Streams of consciousness — like gaps in the light.
Birdsong emerged between pō and rā, to illuminate all the unnoticed seasons. But who can say whether we shifted and morphed with it, or remained stagnant puzzles of links scattered from root to tip, our enacted patterns alive.
Wind blows the tussocks in this unfamiliar place. Yet the longing for you dissipates with each luminous marama cycle, and recounts tidal surges in existence long before you left. And the kakahu always enfolds me, certain I will awake unbroken.
Iona Winter
from gaps in the light, Ad Hoc Fiction, 2021
Heaven
A galaxy of stars on dark water, the breaking of the pack.
Or more like fat congealing on boiled mutton.
When there is only white, when everything is coloured white, the land, the sky the ice and the horizon,
the heroes, as they walk away, you’d say were climbing a white wall to heaven.
Bernadette Hall
from The Ponies, Victoria University Press, 2007
Poem note: This poem arises from the optical illusion in a white-out or almost white-out. As figures move away from you, they appear to be moving upwards. In December 2004 the Dunedin artist, Kathryn Madill and I shared an Artist in Antarctica award. We were stationed at Scott Base. The Antarctic experience was a life-changer for both of us. Lines from this poem have been set in the stone pavement at the foot of Robert Falcon Scott’s statue at the intersection of Oxford Terrace and Worcester St, Christchurch, on the Ōtākaro pathway. The text was carved by Neil Pardington. My grandsons, Leo and Darcy, are having a find old time, deciphering their grandmother’s word-painting.
Bernadette Hall
Harvest
The first whitebait, see-through, rivery lightly-flamed into a wriggle of sweet eyes. Oysters, pink-creamy, frilly, a glug of ocean neck-felt, lemon-spattered, a sea cry.
The first potatoes, knuckle-white, waxy spilling from the earth’s dark hold. Corn, buttoned to the cob, yellow, fleshy, spitting to the bite.
Sunflowers standing on hopeless stems. The first-born, mother-coated, unfolding in the first tears, swimming into the miraculous light.
Richard Langston
from Henry, Come See the Blue, Fitzbeck Publishing, 2005
Jane
Nga Motu beach, New Plymouth1845
When my great-grandmother Jane was a small girl she played with her cousins on the backs of harpooned whales.
From the summit of the biggest creatures on earth they pointed out to sea: Look! Look at the islands!
A single mountain stood behind their backs felt but not seen, inward and silent.
Nonetheless a witness.
Dinah Hawken
in There Is No Harbour, Victoria University Press, 2019
4.9.10 / HOMECOMING
the earth just / empty of it take the shape of a shake / between your teeth. in the cold morning many things falling.
touch the wall as it heaves while translucent alarms vomit into still air / air is still / underneath it the writhing thing turns its dirty head / side to side.
in this movie now / we all should have known better forget to close the door behind you run barefoot onto the silty street see the neighbours in their underpants / this is not a dream /
just a mirror of the noise a tiny pearl lying in your palm sleeping itch it away at your peril.
later you will urinate / in a dark hole next to the rose bushes whose thorns in the dawn spiked your mother in her dressing gown fleeing the house three wide circles / in her face eye eye mouth.
fear lives here in the business part of the throat nestled / between the toes with the simple earth fissured waiting and just
/ not quite what it used to be.
*
I am in the city, and it has been long enough.
It’s a decade on, almost, and the streets’ breathless pant has slowed to a sighing; smooth tufts puffed into icy air.
Rupture has softened, cracked stone padded in limpid moss, splintered beams braced by scaffolding, broken brick tucked up in landfills.
Christchurch remains frozen in its decay, somehow, contractions have distilled entire city blocks to essences: flat ground, empty horizons, a big loud nothing where a city should be.
Its winter sky is unchanged: unshaken, unscarred, tectonically oblivious the low-hung grey cloud a steely blanket locked tight in violent closure.
A blackened scab is being pulled off the knee of Christchurch, and she bleeds brick dust out over the plains, while the Port Hills loom like aristocracy cloaked in a fine-knit sprinkle of snow, sentenced to beheading for the crime of ‘seismic lensing’.
And the Avon River, unfazed, just goes about its watery business the same; an arterial swirl the colour of new-born eyes, unsettled, drawling like a dream past roadwork realms, cone castles, up-and-coming urban developments, and the melancholy ghosts of everything we lost along its banks.
Hebe Kearney
from Starling 10
Land
A child dances alone in the street. A rainbow arcs the sky. A hawk circles, descends. A helicopter appears. Dark suited, new ghosts of developers materialise from the clouds. Here visions – wild places to shelter – are set upon empty land by the writer’s eye.
Once the all-seeing water carried dreams to this safe shore: liquid stars to navigate the ancients; shallows to nurse great-whites; coastline to settle waders’ Arctic flight; sea-views for soldiers arriving home.
Now this land is gifted to the gods of helicopters, SUVs, M6s, sharknosed disruptors who conjure the mantra of mixed model, urban renewal, WOW factor, solar gain, waterfront living. There’s money to summon – ta-da! – from soil. Everything seen or imagined belongs to them. The past – its evicted, protestors and peacemakers – is a trick, an adjunct made to disappear.
As if the scattering of birds into late morning, the shriek of banshees escapes; the helicopter too.
The displaced need this land to live. They want their future to grow here, like trees. They want their children to dance upon it alone, to feel sap pulse through the branch. Rainbow
and hawk to rise from it. This close to regeneration, the evicted lament that which they cannot settle, cannot own. Their wailing is – the rustle of money, whisperings of the past – almost quelled; almost, but not quite.
Siobhan Harvey
from Ghosts, Otago University Press, 2021
Objects 12
The tight-rooted morning coils up but I imagine the buds unfurling in the mess of garden down there; the sharp agapanthus blooms white, the jasmine vine, the flame weeds, the drooping, beaded kowhai. I do not see it happen but I see it happen. That waxy flexibility of plants, I used to call them my guests. There were tea parties with dew. I want you to whisper to me about everglades and prairies, sylvan historians and Dan Bejar, but I’m afraid that you don’t love me anymore. The dark morphing into the unimaginable.
Look, I’ll show you around this condensed symbol of a place. It’s true, it’s everything and nothing specific, and everything to me and always specific. It’s impossible to understand how we got from there to here. One place after another. You come close to a home.
Look, Pip says the days are getting shorter, but I can’t help it anymore I think life is just starting.
Nikki-Lee Birdsey
from Night As Day, Victoria University Press, 2019
Place
Once in a while you may come across a place where everything is as close to perfection as you will ever need. And striving to be faultless the air on its knees holds the trees apart, yet nothing is categorically this, or that, and before the dusk mellows and fails the light is like honey on the stems of tussock grass, and the shadows are mauve birthmarks on the hills.
Brian Turner
from Elemental: Central Otago Poems, Random House, 2012
The poets
Airini Beautrais lives in Whanganui and is the author of four poetry collections and a collection of short fiction. Her most recent poetry collection is Flow: Whanganui River Poems (VUP 2017). Bug Week and Other Stories recently won the Ockham NZ Book Fiction Award 2021.
Nikki-Lee Birdsey was born in Piha. She has a PhD in poetry from the International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML), an MFA from the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop and a BA from New York University. Her first book Night As Day was published by VUP in 2019. She taught poetry at the IIML last summer.
Jacqueline Carter (also Jacq, Jacqs or Jackie), of Ngāti Awa, Waitaha, Ngāi Te Rangi, English, Irish and Scottish descent, is a poet and teacher living in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. She has recently become a member of Te Hā o Ngā Kaituhi Māori (formerly Te Hā) – Contemporary Maori Writers. Her poetry has appeared in several anthologies including Whetū Moana, Mauri Ola, and Puna Wai Kōrero: An Anthology of Māori Poetry in English (Auckland University Press).
Bernadette Hall lives in the Hurunui, North Canterbury. She retired from high-school teaching in 2005 in order to embrace a writing life. Fancy Dancing is her eleventh collection of poetry (VUP, 2020). In 2015 she was awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for literary achievement in poetry and in 2017 she was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Siobhan Harvey’s new book, Ghosts (Otago University Press, 2021) is a collection of poetry and creative nonfiction. She was awarded 2020 New Zealand Society of Authors Peter & Dianne Beatson Fellowship, 2020 Robert Burns Poetry Prize and 2019 Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems.
Dinah Hawken lives and writes in Paekakariki. Her ninth collection of poetry, Sea-light, is published by Victoria University Press, August, 2021.
Hebe Kearney is a queer poet who lives in Tāmaki Makaurau. Their work has appeared in The Three Lamps, Starling, Oscen, Forest and Bird, a fine line, and Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2021.
Anne Kennedy is a poet, fiction writer, screenplay editor and teacher. Recent books are Moth Hour (AUP) and The Ice Shelf (VUP). Awards and fellowships include the NZ Post Book Award for Poetry and the IIML Writers’ Residency. The Sea Walks into a Wall is forthcoming from Auckland University Press in October 2021.
Richard Langston is a poet, television director, and writer. Five O’Clock Shadows is his sixth book of poems. His previous books are Things Lay in Pieces (2012), The Trouble Lamp (2009), The Newspaper Poems (2007), Henry, Come See the Blue (2005), and Boy (2003). He also writes about NZ music and posts interviews with musicians on the Phantom Billstickers website.
Selina Tusitala Marsh (ONZM, FRSNZ) is the former New Zealand Poet Laureate and has performed poetry for primary schoolers and presidents (Obama), queers and Queens (HRH Elizabeth II). She has published three critically acclaimed collections of poetry, Fast Talking PI (2009), Dark Sparring (2013), Tightrope (2017) and an award-winning graphic memoir, Mophead (Auckland University Press, 2019) followed by Mophead TU (2020), dubbed as ‘colonialism 101 for kids’.
Harry Ricketts teaches English literature and creative writing at Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka. His Selected Poems appeared in June, Victoria University Press.
Kiri Piahana-Wong is a poet and editor, and she is the publisher at Anahera Press. She lives in Auckland.
Apirana Taylor, Ngati Porou, Te Whanau a Apanui, Ngati Ruanui, Te Ati Awa, is a nationally and internationally published poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, actor, painter and musician. He has been Writer in Residence at Canterbury and Massey Universities. He frequently tours nationally and internationally visiting schools, tertiary institutions and prisons reading his poetry, storytelling and taking creative writing workshops. He has written six collections of poetry, a book of plays, three collections of short stories, and two novels. His work has been included in many national and international anthologies.
Brian Turner was born in Dunedin in 1944. His debut collection Ladders of Rain (1978) won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. His writing includes biography, poetry, sports writing and journalism and has won many awards. Just This won the NZ Post Book Award for Poetry (2010). He was the Te Mata Poet Laureate (2003-2005) and received the Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry in 2009. He lives in Central Otago.
Iona Winter (Waitaha/Kāi Tahu) lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin. Her hybrid work is widely published and anthologised in literary journals internationally. Iona creates work to be performed, relishing cross-modality collaboration, and holds a Master of Creative Writing. She has authored three collections, Gaps in the Light (2021), Te Hau Kāika (2019), and then the wind came (2018). Skilled at giving voice to difficult topics, she often draws on her deep connection to land, place and whenua.
Sue Wootton lives in Ōtepoti-Dunedin, and works as the publisher at Otago University Press. ‘Wild’ was awarded second place in the 2013 International Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine, and appears in Sue’s Ockham short-listed poetry collection The Yield (Otago University Press, 2017).
Kindness, the word on our tongues, in this upheaval world, in these challenging times, as we navigate conflicting points of view, when our well being is under threat, when the planet is under threat, when some of us are going hungry, cold, without work, distanced from loved ones, suffer cruelty, endure hatred because of difference. Kindness is the word and kindness is the action, and it is the leaning in to understand. I had no idea what I would discover when I checked whether poetry features kindness, and indeed, at times, whether poems are a form of kindness. I think of poetry as a form of song, as excavation, challenge, discovery, tonic, storytelling, connection, as surprise and sustenance for both reader and writer. In the past year, as I face and have faced multiple challenges, poetry has become the ultimate kindness.
The poems I have selected are not necessarily about kindness but have a kindness presence that leads in multiple directions. Warm thanks to the poets and publishers who have supported my season of themes. The season ends mid August.
The poems
Give me an ordinary day
Ordinary days
Where the salt sings in the air
And the tūī rests in the tree outside our kitchen window
And the sun is occluded by cloud, so that the light
does not reach out and hurt our eyes
And we have eaten, and we have drunk
We have slept, and will sleep more
And the child is fed
And the books have been read
And the toys are strewn around the lounge
Give me an ordinary day
Ordinary days
Where I sit at my desk, working for hours
until the light dims
And you are outside in the garden,
clipping back the hedge and trees
And then I am standing at the sink, washing dishes,
And chopping up vegetables for dinner
We sit down together, we eat, our child is laughing
And you play Muddy Waters on the stereo
And later we lie in bed reading until midnight
Give me an ordinary day
Ordinary days
Where no one falls sick, no one is hurt
We have milk, we have bread and coffee and tea
Nothing is pressing, nothing to worry about today
The newspaper is full of entertainment news
The washing is clean, it has been folded and put away
Loss and disappointment pass us by
Outside it is busy, the street hums with sound
The children are trailing up the road to school
And busy commuters rush by talking on cellphones
Give me an ordinary day
And because I’m a dreamer, on my ordinary day
Nobody I loved ever died too young
My father is still right here, sitting in his chair,
where he always sits, looking out at the sea
I never lost anything I truly wanted
And nothing ever hurt me more than I could bear
The rain falls when we need it, the sun shines
People don’t argue, it’s easy to talk to everyone
Everyone is kind, we all put others before ourselves
The world isn’t dying, there is life thriving everywhere
Oh Lord, give me an ordinary day
Kiri Piahana-Wong
The guest house
(for Al Noor and Linwood Mosques)
In this house
we have one rule:
bring only what you want to
leave behind
we open doors
with both hands
passing batons
from death to life
come share with us
this tiny place
we built from broken tongues
and one-way boarding passes
from kauri bark
and scholarships
from kāitiaki
and kin
in this house
we are
all broken
all strange
all guests
we are holding
space for you
stranger
friend
come angry
come dazed
come hand against your frail
come open wounded
come heart between your knees
come sick and sleepless
come seeking shelter
come crawling in your lungs
come teeth inside your grief
come shattered peace
come foreign doubt
come unrequited sun
come shaken soil
come unbearable canyon
come desperately alone
come untuned blossom
come wild and hollow prayer
come celestial martyr
come singing doubt
come swimming to land
come weep
come whisper
come howl into embrace
come find
a new thread
a gentle light
a glass jar to hold
your dust
come closer
come in
you are welcome, brother
Mohamed Hassan
from National Anthem, Dead Bird Books, 2020
Prayer
I pray to you Shoulder Blades
my twelve-year-old daughter’s shining like wings
like frigate birds that can fly out past the sea where my father lives
and back in again.
I pray to you Water,
you tell me which way to go
even though it is so often through the howling.
I pray to you Static –
no, that is the sea.
I pray to you Headache,
you are always here, like a blessing from a heavy-handed priest.
I pray to you Seizure,
you shut my eyes and open them again.
I pray to you Mirror,
I know you are the evil one.
I pray to you Aunties who are cruel.
You are better than university and therapy
you teach me to write books
how to hurt and hurt and forgive,
(eventually to forgive,
one day to forgive,
right before death to forgive).
I pray to you Aunties who are kind.
All of you live in the sky now,
you are better than letters and telephones.
I pray to you Belt,
yours are marks of Easter.
I pray to you Great Rock in my throat,
every now and then I am better than I am now.
I pray to you Easter Sunday.
Nothing is resurrecting but the water from my eyes
it will die and rise up again
the rock is rolled away and no one appears
no shining man with blonde hair and blue eyes.
I pray to you Lungs,
I will keep you clean and the dear lungs around me.
I pray to you Child
for forgiveness, forgiveness, forgiveness.
I will probably wreck you as badly as I have been wrecked
leave the ship of your childhood, with you
handcuffed to the rigging,
me peering in at you through the portholes
both of us weeping for different reasons.
I pray to you Air
you are where all the things that look like you live
all the things I cannot see.
I pray to you Reader.
I pray to you.
Tusiata Avia
from The Savage Coloniser Book, Victoria University Press, 2020
sonnet xix
I’m thinking about it, how we’ll embrace each other
at the airport, then you’ll drive the long way home,
back down the island, sweet dear heart, sweet.
And I’m thinking about the crazy lady, how she strides
down Cuba Mall in full combat gear,
her face streaked with charcoal, how she barges
through the casual crowd, the coffee drinkers,
the eaters of sweet biscuits. ‘All clear,’ she shouts,
‘I’ve got it sorted, you may all stand down.’
What I should do, what I would do if this was a movie,
I’d go right up to her and I’d say, ‘Thank you,
I feel so much safer in this crazy world with you around.’
Geoff would get it, waiting at the corner of Ghuznee Street.
It’s his kind of scene. In fact, he’d probably direct it.
Bernadette Hall
from Fancy Dancing: Selected Poems, Victoria University Press, 2020
Precious to them
You absolutely must be kind to animals
even the wild cats.
Grandad brought me a little tiny baby hare,
Don’t you tell your grandma
I’ve brought it inside and put it in the bed.
He put buttered milk arrowroot biscuits, slipped them
in my pockets to go down for early morning milking
You mustn’t tell your grandma, I’m putting all this butter
in the biscuits.
Marty Smith
from Horse with Hat, Victoria University Press, 2014, suggested by Amy Brown
kia atawhai – te huaketo 2020
kia atawhai ki ā koutou whānau
kia atawhai ki ā koutou whanaunga
kia atawhai ki ā koutou hoa
kia atawhai ki ā koutoukiritata
kia atawhai ki ā koutou hoamahi
kia atawhai ki ngāuakoao
kia atawhai ki ngā tangata o eru ata mātāwaka
kia atawhai ki ā koutou ano.
ka whakamatea i te huaketo
ki te atawhai.
kia atawhai.
be kind – the virus 2020
be kind to your families
be kind to your relatives
be kind to your friends
be kind to your neighbours
be kind to your workmates
be kind to strangers
be kind to people of other ethnicities
be kind to yourselves.
kill the virus
with kindness.
be kind.
Vaughan Rapatahana
The Lift
For Anna Jackson
it had been one of those days
that was part of one of those weeks, months
where people seemed angry
& I felt like the last runner in the relay race
taking the blame for not getting the baton
over the finish line fast enough
everyone scolding
I was worn down by it, diminished
& to top it off, the bus sailed past without seeing me
& I was late for the reading, another failure
so when Anna offered me a lift home
I could have cried
because it was the first nice thing
that had happened that day
so much bigger than a ride in a car
it was all about standing alone
in a big grey city
and somebody suddenly
handing you marigolds
Janis Freegard
first appeared on Janis’s blog
Honest Second
The art of advice
is balancing
what you think
is the right thing
with what you think
is the right thing to say,
keeping in mind
the psychological state
of the person whom you are advising,
your own integrity and beliefs,
as well as the repercussions
of your suggestions in the immediate
and distant futures—a complex mix,
especially in light of the fact that friendship
should always be kind first,
and honest second.
Johanna Emeney
from Felt, Massey University Press, 2021
A Radical Act in July
You are always smiling the cheese man says, my default position.
The cheese, locally made, sold in the farmers market,
but still not good enough for my newly converted vegan friend
who preaches of bobby calves, burping methane, accuses me
of not taking the problems of the world seriously enough.
Granted, there is much to be afraid of: unprecedented fires,
glaciers melting, sea lapping into expensive living rooms,
the pandemic threatening to go on the rampage again
and here still, lurking behind supermarket shelves,
or in the shadows outside our houses like a violent ex-husband.
Strongmen, stupid or calculating are in charge of too many countries,
we have the possibility of one ourselves now, a strong woman,
aiming to crush our current leader and her habit of kindness
while she holds back global warming and Covid 19
with a scowl. I can see why friends no longer watch the news,
why my sons say they will have no children,
why pulling the blankets over your head starts to seem
like a reasonable proposition but what good does that do
for my neighbour living alone, who, for the first time
in her long-life, surviving war, depression
and other trauma is afraid to go outside?
Perhaps there is reason enough for me not to smile,
one son lives in China and can’t come back for the lack
of a job. The other lives by the sea, but in a shed with no kitchen.
I hear my stretcher-bearer dad in his later years, talking
of Cassino and how they laughed when they weren’t screaming
how his mates all dreamed of coming home and finding
a girl. Some did and so we are here, and in being here
we have already won the lottery. So, I get up early
for the market, put on my red hat to spite the cold,
and greet the first crocus which has popped up overnight.
I try not to think it’s only July and is this a sign
and should I save the world by bypassing the cheese man
and the milk man who names his cows?
My dad was consumed by nightmares most of his life,
but at my age now, 69, he would leap into the lounge
in a forward roll to shock us into laughing. A gift,
though I didn’t see it at the time. Reason enough to smile,
practise kindness and optimism as a radical act
Diane Brown
Seabird
I have not forgotten that seabird
the one I saw with its wings
stretched across the hard road.
One eye open,
one closed.
I wanted to walk past
But the road is no place
for a burial –
I picked it up by the wings
took it to the
water and floated it
out to sea,
which was of no use
to the bird, it had ceased.
I like to think someone
was coaching me in the small,
never futile art,
of gentleness.
Richard Langston
from Five O’Clock Shadows, The Cuba press, 2020
Four stories about kindness
I had lunch with Y today, and she told me over gnocchi (me) and meatballs (her), about how she joined up with another dating website. She quickly filled in the online forms, all the ones about herself and her interests, until she came to one where she had to choose the five attributes she thought were the most important in a person. She looked at them for a while, and then grabbed a piece of paper and wrote out the thirty possible attributes in a list. She read the list. She put it down and went to bed. The next morning when she woke up she read the list again. She found her scissors and snipped around each word. She laid each rectangle on the table, arranged them in a possible order, shuffled them around, and then arranged them again. She went to work. When she came back in the evening they were still there, glowing slightly in the twilight. She sat down in front of them and made some minor adjustments. She discovered, somewhat to her surprise, that kindness is the most important thing to her. She went back to the web page and finished her application. Very soon she was registered and had been matched with ten men in her area. Soon after she had thirty-five messages. The next morning she had forty more. She deleted the messages and deleted her profile. Then she wrote five words on a piece of paper and pinned it to her wall.
*
I phone A, whose father is dying. Whether fast or slow, no one really knows, and no one wants to say it, but we all know this will probably be his last Christmas. She was, at this very moment, she tells me, writing in our Christmas card. She tells me that she’s been thinking a lot about kindness. About people who are kind even when it’s inconvenient, even when it hurts. I tell her she is a kind person. ‘There are times’, she says, ‘when I could have chosen to be kind, but I didn’t. Wasn’t. I’ve said things. Done things. I don’t want to do that – I don’t want to make people feel small.’ I think of my own list, my own regrets. It’s weeks later before we get our Christmas card. ‘What’s this word here?’ asks S, as he reads it. ‘Before lights.’ ‘Kind’, I say. ‘The word is kind.’
*
J is a scientific sort of person, and she wants to understand relationships, so she does what any good scientist would do and keeps a notebook in which she records her observations. She watches. And listens. And then she writes. She writes about the good ones, and about the bad ones. Her subjects are her friends, her family, her acquaintances and people she meets (or overhears) while travelling. None of them have given ethics approval. (She hasn’t asked.) She considers the characteristics of each relationship, both good and bad, and in-between. It is almost halfway through New Year’s Day and we are still eating breakfast. While her study is not yet finished, and so all results are of course provisional, she tells us one thing is clear to her already: that the characteristic shared by the best relationships is kindness.
*
I am talking to C in the back yard at the party and I tell him that the theme of the moment is kindness. He tells me that while, yes, he thinks kindness is important, he thinks he is sometimes (for which I read ‘often’) too kind. He puts up with things, he says, that he should not. He lets people have their way. He doesn’t want to hurt their feelings, but he doesn’t want to be a doormat anymore. I’m not always the quickest thinker, but I know there is something wrong here; I think I know that there is a difference between kindness and niceness, kindness and martyrdom. I am sure that being kind doesn’t mean giving in, going along with things you don’t like, denying yourself. I’m sure that being kind doesn’t mean you can’t give the hard word, when needed, doesn’t mean condoning bad behaviour. I try to explain this to C, who is kind, and also is a doormat sometimes, but I’m not sure he understands what I’m saying. I’m not sure if he heard me. Probably because we are both too busy giving each other advice.
Helen Rickerby
from How to Live, Auckland University Press, 2019
Letter to Hone
Dear Hone, by your Matua Tokotoko
sacred in my awkward arms,
its cool black mocking
my shallow grasp
I was
utterly blown away.
I am sitting beside you at Kaka Point
in an armchair with chrome arm-rests
very close to the stove.
You smile at me,
look back at the flames,
add a couple of logs,
take my hand in your bronze one,
doze awhile;
Open your bright dark eyes,
give precise instructions as to the location of the whisky bottle
on the kitchen shelf, and of two glasses.
I bring them like a lamb.
You pour a mighty dram.
Cilla McQueen
from The Radio Room, Otago University Press, 2010
The poets
Tusiata Avia is an internationally acclaimed poet, performer and children’s author. She has published 4 collections of poetry, 3 children’s books and her play ‘Wild Dogs Under My Skirt’ had its off-Broadway debut in NYC, where it took out The Fringe Encore Series 2019 Outstanding Production of the Year. Most recently Tusiata was awarded a 2020 Arts Foundation Laureate and a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to poetry and the arts. Tusiata’s most recent collection The Savage ColoniserBook won The Ockham NZ Book Award for Best Poetry Book 2021.
Diane Brown is a novelist, memoirist, and poet who runs Creative Writing Dunedin, teaching fiction, memoir and poetry. She has published eight books: two collections of poetry – Before the Divorce We Go To Disneyland, (Jessie Mackay Award Best First Book of Poetry, 1997) Tandem Press 1997 and Learning to Lie Together, Godwit, 2004; two novels, If The Tongue Fits, Tandem Press, 1999 and Eight Stages of Grace, Vintage, 2002—a verse novel which was a finalist in the Montana Book Awards, 2003. Also, a travel memoir, Liars and Lovers, Vintage, 2004; and a prose/poetic travel memoir; Here Comes Another.
Johanna Emeney is a senior Tutor at Massey University, Auckland. Felt (Massey University Press, 2021) is her third poetry collection, following Apple & Tree (Cape Catley, 2011) and Family History (Mākaro Press, 2017). You can find her interview with Kim Hill about the new collection here and purchase a book directly from MUP or as an eBook from iTunes or Amazon/Kind.
Janis Freegard is the author of several poetry collections, most recently Reading the Signs (The Cuba Press), and a novel, The Year of Falling. She lives in Wellington. http://janisfreegard.com
Bernadette Hall lives in the Hurunui, North Canterbury. She retired from high-school teaching in 2005 in order to embrace a writing life. This sonnet touches on the years 2006 and 2011 when she lived in Wellington, working at the IIML. Her friendship with the Wellington poet, Geoff Cochrane, is referenced in several of her poems. Another significant friendship, begun in 1971, was instrumental in turning her towards poetry. That was with the poet/painter, Joanna Margaret Paul. A major work that she commissioned from Joanna in 1982, will travel the country for the next two years as part of a major exhibition of the artist’s work.
Mohamed Hassan is an award-winning journalist and writer from Auckland and Cairo. He was the winner of the 2015 NZ National Poetry Slam, a TEDx fellow and recipient of the Gold Trophy at the 2017 New York Radio Awards. His poetry has been watched and shared widely online and taught in schools internationally. His 2020 poetry collection National Anthem was shortlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards (2021).
Richard Langston is a poet, television director, and writer. ‘Five O’Clock Shadows’ is his sixth book of poems. His previous books are Things Lay in Pieces (2012), The Trouble Lamp (2009), The Newspaper Poems (2007), Henry, Come See the Blue (2005), and Boy (2003). He also writes about NZ music and posts interviews with musicians on the Phantom Billstickers website.
Poet and artist Cilla McQueen has lived and worked in Murihiku for the last 25 years. Cilla’s most recent works are In a Slant Light; a poet’s memoir (2016) and Poeta: selected and new poems (2018), both from Otago University Press.
Kiri Piahana-Wong is a poet and editor, and she is the publisher at Anahera Press. She lives in Auckland.
Vaughan Rapatahana (Te Ātiawa) commutes between homes in Hong Kong, Philippines, and Aotearoa New Zealand. He is widely published across several genre in both his main languages, te reo Māori and English and his work has been translated into Bahasa Malaysia, Italian, French, Mandarin, Romanian, Spanish. Additionally, he has lived and worked for several years in the Republic of Nauru, PR China, Brunei Darussalam, and the Middle East.
Helen Rickerby lives in a cliff-top tower in Aro Valley. She’s the author of four collections of poetry, most recently How to Live (Auckland University Press, 2019), which won the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the 2020 Ockham Book Awards. Since 2004 she has single-handedly run boutique publishing company Seraph Press, which mostly publishes poetry.
Marty Smith is writing a non-fiction book tracking the daily lives of trainers and track-work riders as they go about their work at the Hastings racecourse. She finds the same kindness and gentleness there among people who primarily work with animals. On the poem: Grandad was very kind and gentle; Grandma had a rep for being ‘a bit ropey’. He was so kind that when my uncle Edward, told not to touch the gun, cocked it and shot the family dog, Grandad never said a thing to my heartbroken little uncle, just put his arm around him and took him home.
So many poets have written walking poems. So many poets have commented on the relationship between walking and a poem gathering momentum in the pedestrian’s head. Just for a start, I am thinking of Jenny Bornholdt’s magnificent poem ‘Confessional’, Michele Leggott’s walking blind, a vital thread, with different insight and senses on alert in her poems, and of course Blanche Baughan’s love of hill walking. A poem itself is a form of walking with its various rhythms and absorptions. The poet becomes walker, bricoleur, observer, mind-drifter.
My most recent collection The Track (Seraph Press) was written as I walked the third day of the Queen Charlotte Track with a broken foot in a wild storm. To keep walking I used the alphabet to compose poems and returned home with a book-length sequence. Whenever I have read from it, I am right back in the storm diverting pain with words. A strange feeling indeed. But I also have the early mornings at Te Henga Bethells. Walking on the near empty beach in the early morning light is an opening for poetry. Glorious.
I am currently reading Foxtrot and Other Collisons, Shari Kocher’s sublime second collection. In her endnote she says the poems were written over a five-year period. She wrote:
No poem in this collection was written before it was walked: arbitrary or otherwise, the rule I applied to the book’s organic growth was that each poem was to be ‘discovered’ on foot, and many continued to be composed peripatetically across many drafts while out walking in ways dedicated to that terrain.
The poems I have selected are not so much about walking but have a walking presence that leads in multiple directions. Many of the poems are longer rather shorter and take you on glorious excursions. Once again I am grateful to publishers and poets who are supporting my season of themes.
The Poems
Travelling light
She is walking at the edge of the sea
on the wet shining sand.
The bright sky is behind her.
She is travelling
on a sheet of grey light.
We pass, and I wave.
She laughs. Of course.
A woman who walks at the edge,
on light, would laugh.
Adrienne Jansen
Madeline McGovern’s ‘Enchanted forest’, source of Rose People’s poem
A path of stars
There are many things
I would like to tell you,
my darling
My darling,
I would like to tell you
in this life
everything will be okay
I would like to tell you
that you will walk upon a path of stars
that you will travel through the forest
and never lose your way
I would like to tell you
to look only at the stars
and not the gaps between them
to look at the sun
and not the clouds.
My darling, I would like to tell you all these things
for the same reason we read fairy stories to children
and weave their years with mythologies
because there is comfort is such lies
because I want the world you live in
to carry more magic
and less sharp edges.
But, on this dark night
I have run out of comforting lies.
My darling,
I cannot promise you a path of stars.
some days you will walk upon
unforgiving concrete or sharp-edged gravel
some days you will wade through quicksand.
Tonight, I cannot conjure stars
without the black between them.
My darling, I can only wish
when you walk through the dark and tangled forest
and lose your way a thousand times
that one day
you come across a clearing
where you can sit
and where the sun will find you
and warm your face
and where you can rest.
My darling
you can rest.
Rose Peoples
My Maunga
we’re monitoring pests at the Maungatautari reserve
gluing bait to ink slick cardboard with peanut butter
extracted from a single hole in the finger of a latex
glove bulging with the breakfast spread
our hands were all sticky fingers and dirt
made it to the first true slope
gorse brushing our knees the angle necessitating
a fuck-this what-are we doing crawl upwards
the trees move back and forth
poles caught in a tide
swinging long ways
between sickly white clouds
and glare-blue sky
a miromiro sitting plump on a ponga
squeaking like a mouse
then fluttering caught blurry on a camera
there are no edgerleyi in sight
Māhinaarangi’s perfume a ghost in the clouds
replaced by sweat-stink
the trip back down is a chorus of snaps
and low groans from wood and soil
giving way under our weight grown careless
with exhaustion
then we’re back through the mechanical gate
one shuts and locks for the other to unlock and open
pull it back on its squealing hinge
to leave the reserve behind
it’s a short trek down the hill back to the car
the air made pungent by cowpats
essa may ranapiri
from Ngā Kupu Waikato: an anthology of Waikato poetry, ed Vaughan Rapatahana, Waikato Press, 2019, selected by Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connor
A Walk with Your Father
Before you do anything else, check your lungs.
Are they the right size for you, are you the right size for them?
Are they nice and snug against your ribs and spine?
Don’t worry if they’re a bit big for you, you’ll grow into them.
They must be full, however; you don’t want them empty.
You have a long way to go.
Put your hand inside your mouth and make sure
everything’s in it’s place, check that all the pipes and hoses
leading from your lungs into your mouth are in position and in good nick.
You don’t want any leaks or sudden explosions
this is your air we’re talking about.
Close your mouth securely around this apparatus.
Next check your weight. If you are too heavy
or too light you won’t get anywhere. By the way
there’s no need to take a whole lot of extras with you.
Some people strap expensive knives to their legs and wear protective gloves.
There’s no real need for any of this – an ordinary old sharp knife
from the kitchen drawer will do. And just your bare hands.
You may need to signal to each other.
Now pay some attention to your skin.
It should feel secure and warm
but also allow plenty of room to move freely.
There are any number of colours available nowadays –
they all do pretty much the same job.
Your feet, are they the right size?
If they’re too large you will tire quickly,
too small and you’ll be left behind.
You’re probably looking at feet
about the same size as his.
Your eyes – spit in them.
It keeps everything clear.
That step you’re about to take
will have to be wider than you’re used to.
Don’t forget to move forwards, not backwards.
Keep your hand on your mouth so everything stays in place
when you break the surface.
Mihi to Tangaroa. Mihi to Hinemoana.
Now get yourself in under there,
immerse yourself.
Do it now, go.
He’ll be right behind you.
Hinemoana Baker
from mātuhi / needle, Victoria University Press, 2004
When I Head Home I Like To Be On The Left Side Of The Road SoAs To Be Closer ToWhere I Am Heading
I walk home with a bouquet of flowers held up
like an explorer holding up a torch,
in the early days of these days.
The flowers do not emanate
light, but they do catch the eyes of the people
I might like. The flowers will sit by my bed
waiting for when I open my nose from sleep.
Maeve Hughes
from horse power, printed by Fernbank Studio, 2019
The verb ‘to be’
It is foggy.
There is a mountain.
I am climbing the mountain.
She is climbing the mountain.
The path is slippery.
She says, ‘It is all right.
It will all be all right.’
She is right.
There are people behind us.
They are climbing the mountain.
They are in the fog.
Their voices are broken.
There is a shout.
There is laughter.
We are all climbing the mountain.
She is climbing ahead of me.
There is fog in her hair.
Her hair is glittering.
The wind is cold.
There is a man with a walking stick.
There are names scratched on the stick.
He carries the names as if they were eggs.
They could fall and smash.
We are carrying names too.
They are carved on bone.
They are scratched on skin.
We are all carrying names up the mountain.
There is a chapel at the top.
It is locked.
Its walls are damp.
There is broken timber.
There are fallen stones.
It is cold here.
Now we are turning.
We are going down.
She is running.
She is sliding down the mountain.
I am following her.
She is running ahead in the fog.
That is how it is now.
That is how it will be.
That is how it will be
till she is and I am not.
She will be.
I will not be.
The verbs slip under our boots,
like small changeable stones.
Fiona Farrell
from The Pop-Up Book of Invasions, Auckland University Press, 2007
A note about ‘The verb ‘to be’’
This poem was written when I had a writing fellowship in Ireland. My younger daughter took leave from her job working with kakapo recovery on Codfish Island and came to stay for a month. We climbed the high hills.
We climbed Croagh Patrick, up the slippery path from the enormous carpark and visitor centre to the crest where the fog was thick and the chapel was closed and a chill wind tore at the flimsy remnants of shelters built to give some protection to the thousands who come here each year. Toward the top we met a man who was climbing using a camán (the stick used in hurling or the women’s version of the game, camogie) as a support on the stony ground. He showed us some names written on the flat head of the camán. ‘You’ll recognise these’ he said. We didn’t, and felt awkward for not knowing. It was an All-Irish champion camogie team he had coached, his daughter’s name among them. Some time after their victory she had become ill and was now in hospital, and he had made a vow to climb Croagh Patrick 30 times, if only she could be made well. He carried the camán each time. This was his 29th pilgrimage.
We climbed Errigal, a steep-sided hill in Donegal. Irish is still spoken around here and the man who ran the hostel was passionate for the language. It is subtle, he said. There are, for instance, two verbs meaning ‘to be’: one suggests permanence (‘this is the floor’). The other suggests transience and is used, for example, when speaking of the weather (‘it is sunny’).
I walked up the tracks behind my daughter with her strong legs, her dreadlocked hair. Not that long ago, I led her. I can still feel the weight of her in my arms, carrying her when she didn’t want to walk any more between banks of tussocks and flowering hebes on the track at Tongariro, or through the bearded bush at Dawson Falls, or on some sunny Sunday walk near Pohangina. The feel of her little duffel coat and her red tights and her feathery hair, usually chopped into a jagged fringe by herself using the toenail scissors. Now she takes the lead and I’m following, and behind us, there’s that long queue of people, living and dead, stretching back down into the fog.
Fiona Farrell
Pacing Poem
Past the green flowers
past the red stool
past the drying towels
past the letter from school
past the newspapers
past the glass fruit bowl
past the decanter
past the ‘Hoptimist’ doll
and into the kitchen.
Past the oven
past the breadbin
past the broken dishwasher
past the empty tomato tin
and towards the table.
Around the red chair
over the floorboards
past the stairs
and onto the rug.
Past the lamp
past the outside world
past the radio
past the Argentinian print
and around the bassinet.
Past the novels
past the poetry
past the proteas
past the pottery
and into the sun.
Past the breeze
past the ottoman
past the unwrapped cheese
past the pestle
past the wine rack
and nestled
under my armpit:
two deep eyes
still shining wide,
so we keep circling
until sleep arrives.
Amy Brown
from neon daze, Victoria University Press, 2019
Travelling
How normal it feels to get around new places— how basely, physically normal it is for our feet to touch the ground and propel us forward, step after step exactly as they do anywhere.
And if these roads home one day become the rivers they once were— though we might have to pedal the currents or steady our soles on pebbles— we’ll soon get used to it.
A flavour’s only new at first taste; and common sights become invisible; and love dulls into something necessary; and in grief we think this new lack is impossible to live with but we do.
Jane Arthur
from Craven, Victoria University Press, 2019
By the Bosphorous Strait I sat down and wept
Breathe in
when Istanbulites woke to find the water a bright turquois they thought
the worst, a curse had taken over the city or toxins seeped from textile
factories but scientists agreed it was just an explosion of plankton migrating
from the Black Sea, a milky blessing heralding the summer calm, I am told
it’s serene.
breathe out
I did not find out I was colour blind until they tested our class at the library
in Form 2, it explained so much, why I always coloured grass in brown and
tree bark green, why I’d clash my outfits and no one is impolite enough
to tell me, my parents must have thought I was stupid or acting out, the
scientists agreed it was neither
breathe in
my manager told me that things can be difficult here, but when you walk
along the Bosphorous it makes it all worth it, sometimes I think this
city is magical, other times I’m sure it is cursed, a dark pact signed in its
catacombs centuries ago threatening to explode, most of the time it is sad,
mourning a lover lost or a friend it couldn’t save
breathe out
everyday at 12.30pm I walk out of the office and stand at its mouth waiting
for a sign, for the air to return, the explosions in my lungs to subside, the
panic attacks are a daily occurrence, a striking in the middle of a meeting, a
hungry mall, a dolmus packed with strangers and I tense my abdomen and
squeeze my shirt with my hands and try not to remember
for the life of me all I can see is blue, even the scientists are at a loss on this
one, they tell me to relax my shoulders and focus on my breathing, not
worry about time I can’t unwind
it’s amazing how something can be right in front of you and you just can’t see it
Mohamed Hassan
from National Anthem, Dead Bird Books, 2020, selected by Alison Wong
Locus
as you walk you become the vanishing
as you walk you lose the point
as you walk you snow
though autumn
the ranges hold the storm
the ranges bite the neck
and night and day unfix
and night and day turn stone
snow monkeys sit with ice on lashes
coast monkeys pick snails from pools
shop monkeys flip fish in milk and flour
as you walk through autumn, the ranges
unfix snow, and pool you lose
ice-pick, milk-lash, snail-bite—
turn your neck to the day—
Nicola Easthope
from Working the tang (The Cuba Press, 2018).
Duet
I became an old woman
age eleven
Doctor and physio
circling my fingers
around a stick
bone on wood
Swinging my legs
to a new rhythm
wood on bone
bone on wood
Instructing me
in the art
of walking a duet
heel toe
bone wood
stick stick
Trish Harris
published NZ Listener, 1999
Crunch
(i)
She collected broken things: fragments of a delicate speckled eggshell she found on the gravel driveway, a starfish arm from the beach. She kept them in a leadlight box, along with her imaginings.
(ii)
He was the one who knew the way back: just to the left of the forked piece of driftwood standing upright on the shore. Over the bed of African daisies and ice plants. Past the clump of marram and close to the flat patch of sand where they’d lain together that time. That time he hardly thought about any more.
(iii)
She walked briskly, in a way that made you think the act of walking was the purpose of the walk. Not the view of the island, nor the chirrup of pipits camouflaged in the dunes. Not the way a shoe sinks into the sand, nor the sight of a collie hurtling after a stick. No, her walk was for the sake of walking and she’d dressed accordingly: the sneakers, the sun visor, the sensible orange windbreaker.
(iv)
The sheets were so bright against the dull sky, he almost couldn’t bear it. He wanted to take a pot of red paint and throw it against them. He wanted to tell her, you bring out the red in me.
(v)
She lay on top of the duvet being a starfish, each of her hands touching an edge of the bed. She thought how nice it would be, not to have to share.
(vi)
He found himself walking up and down the gravel driveway, just to hear it crunch underfoot as the stones scraped against each other. When he noticed her watching him from the bedroom window, he just kept crunching.
(vii)
She lifted the speckled egg from its cotton wool cradle in the leadlight box and fitted the pieces together to make it whole again. There was one piece missing. She turned the shell so she couldn’t see the gap.
(viii)
Pounding the driveway. Grinding the stones. He supposed he could do it all day. His heavy tread. His trample. He didn’t see her leave the house.
(ix)
The beach was a beacon, making her way clear. She could feel the island’s solid presence, even when she couldn’t quite see it.
(x)
He recognised her footsteps, getting louder. There she was at his shoulder, joining her crunching pace to his. His foot, her foot. Stamping together on a firm earth. Her foot, his foot. Two in step. A two-step. She smelt like biscuits. He reached for her hand.
Janis Freegard
from Kingdom Animalia: the Escapades of Linnaeus Auckland University Press, 2011
Hill walk
We often wonder what moves us in a day – was it words in a sequence that surprised us
or notes played by someone who kept their mouth closed & let the sound leave their broken body
or maybe after years it was the sight of your brother nursing his leg down the hill catching up with you
so you could walk on together to discuss what bird that was in the bush making the sound
neither of you were certain of.
Richard Langston
from Five O’Clock Shadows The Cuba Press, 2020
walking with Dorothy
a dog bothers the scraps
of food around the compost bin
it howls at the murmur of the village stream
ignoring the voice calling from the hill
the trees gleam with overnight rain
each tree, taken singly, was beautiful
the bees emerging
from their wooden house
mistake me for
a flower and for
a moment I am one
hopelessly lacking in pollen
swaying in the breeze
and taking up space
standing still in the mud
unmaking myself amid
leaves I’ve seen a thousand times
and never wondered the names of
some trees putting out red shoots
query: what trees are they?
a fantail flits from branch to branch
something bigger than language
in its movements
which lose
their sheen when captured
and later the sky between
apartments and streetlamps
empties but for the full moon
and Venus striving to be seen
as brightly
all the heavens seemed in one perpetual motion
grit on the footpath like glitter
the roads very dirty
a morepork somewhere in the dark
oblivious to me and better for it
Ash Davida Jane
from How to Live with Mammals, Victoria University Press, 2021
The Poets
Jane Arthur lives in Wellington, where she is the co-owner and manager of a small independent bookshop. Her debut poetry collection, Craven, won the Jessie Mackay Award (Best First Book) at the 2020 Ockham NZ Book Awards.
Hinemoana Baker is a poet, musician and creative writing teacher. She traces her ancestry from Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Toa Rangatira, Te Āti Awa and Ngāi Tahu, as well as from England and Germany (Oberammergau in Bayern). Hinemoana’s latest poetry collection Funkhaus (VUP, 2020), was shortlisted for The Ockham NZ Book Awards 2021. She has edited several online and print anthologies and released several albums of original music and more experimental sound art. She works in English, Māori and more recently German, the latter in collaboration with German poet and sound performer Ulrike Almut Sandig. She is currently living in Berlin, where she was 2016 Creative New Zealand Berlin Writer in Residence, and is completing a PhD at Potsdam University. Hinemoana’s website
Amy Brown is a writer and teacher from Hawkes Bay. She has taught Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne (where she gained her PhD), and Literature and Philosophy at the Mac.Robertson Girls’ High School. She has also published a series of four children’s novels, and three poetry collections. Her latest book, Neon Daze, a verse journal of early motherhood, was included in The Saturday Paper‘s Best Books of 2019. She is currently taking leave from teaching to write a novel.
Nicola Easthope (Pākehā, with roots in Orkney, Scotland, England and Wales) is a high school English and psychology teacher, and mentor of young activists and writers. Her two books of poetry are: leaving my arms free to fly around you (Steele Roberts, 2011) and Working the tang (The Cuba Press, 2018). She has appeared at the Queensland, Tasmanian and Manawatū poetry festivals, as well as LitCrawl in Pōneke. Nicola’s very occasional blog is gannet ink.
Fiona Farrell publishes poetry, fiction, drama and non-fiction. In 2007 she received the Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction, and in 2012 she was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for Services to Literature. Her most recent publication, Nouns, verbs, etc.Selected Poems (OUP 2020) has been warmly reviewed as ‘a Poetry Treasure House…a glorious book’ (Paula Green, Poetry Shelf), and ‘an excellent retrospective… remarkable for drawing small personal realities together with the broad sweep of history.” (Nicholas Reid, The Listener). After many years in remote Otanerito bay on Banks Peninsula, she now lives in Dunedin.
Wellington-based Janis Freegard is the author of several poetry collections, most recently Reading the Signs (The Cuba Press), as well a novel, The Year of Falling (Mākaro Press). She was the inaugural Ema Saikō Poetry Fellow at New Zealand Pacific Studio and has previously won the Katherine Mansfield Short Story Prize and the Geometry/Open Book Poetry Prize. She grew up in the UK, South Africa and Australia before her family settled in Aotearoa when she was twelve. ‘Crunch’ was placed third in the Manawatu Festival of New Arts Poetry for Performance competition and performed in Palmerston North.
Trish Harris has written two books – a poetry collection (My wide white bed) and a memoir (The Walking Stick Tree). She teaches non-fiction on the Whitireia Creative Writing Programme, is co-founder of Crip the Lit and edited their 2019 pocketbook, ‘Here we are, read us: Women, disability and writing’. She says she’s a part-time crane operator…but maybe she’s dreaming?
Mohamed Hassan is an award-winning journalist and writer who has lived in Egypt, Aotearoa and Turkey. He was the winner of the 2015 NZ National Poetry Slam, a TEDx fellow and recipient of the Gold Trophy at the 2017 New York Radio Awards. His poetry has been watched and shared widely online and taught in schools internationally. His collection, National Anthem, was shortlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, poetry category.
Maeve Hughes is a recent graduate of English literature with a minor in creative writing. She lives in Wellington where she loves to walk home.
Ash Davida Jane’s poetry has appeared in Mimicry, Sweet Mammalian, Starling, The Spinoff and elsewhere. Her second book, How to Live with Mammals, was published by Victoria University Press in April 2021. She lives and works in Wellington.
Adrienne Jansen writes fiction and non-fiction for both adults and children, but for her, poetry is where the magic is. Her fourth collection of poetry, All of Us, published in 2018, is a series of poems, with carina gallegos, around the themes of migration and refugees. She is the co-founder of Landing Press, a small Wellington poetry publisher. She lives at Titahi Bay, north of Wellington. Website
Richard Langston is a poet, television director, and writer. Five O’Clock Shadows is his sixth book of poems. His previous books are Things Lay in Pieces (2012), The Trouble Lamp (2009), The Newspaper Poems (2007), Henry, Come See the Blue (2005), and Boy (2003). He also writes about NZ music and posts interviews with musicians on the Phantom Billstickers website.
Rose Peoples is from Te Awakairangi/Lower Hutt. She is a student at Victoria University and, having finished her law degree last year, decided that the logical next step was to embark upon a Masters in Literature. She is a bookseller at Good Books. Her work has previously appeared in Cordite, Mimicry and Starling.
essa may ranapiri (Na Guinnich, Ngaati Wehi Wehi, Highgate, Ngaati Raukawa) is a Tainui poet from Kirikiriroa living on Ngaati Wairere land / they want everyone to know that the Echidna they write about isn’t a spikey mammal but a lady with two long snake tails instead of legs / go figure / tino takatāpuitanga 4eva
Richard Langston, Five O’Clock Shadows, The Cuba Press, 2020
We often wonder
what moves us in a day –
was it words in a sequence
that surprised us
or notes played by someone
who kept their mouth closed
& let the sound leave
their broken body
from ‘Hill walk’
I am writing this as Tāmaki Makaurau is back in lockdown, wondering if I will pack the car for our first family summer holiday up north in years, worrying how Auckland businesses will cope, how families will cope, and sleeping like a patchwork quilt. Poetry is such a necessary diversion. It even makes up for patchwork sleep. I still have a wee stack of 2020 poetry books and now the 2021 stack is growing. It is like a preserving cupboard of treats along with the canned tomatoes and the black beans.
Richard Langston’s book has been on my mind for months after hearing the reading he did for Poetry Shelf. This week has been the perfect time to return to the poems. I finished the book and the word that came to mind, a word I have never applied to a poetry collection, was precious. This is a precious book – it has poise and it is personal.
The first poems take me to the land. I am musing on how Allen Curnow and the crew of white men writing poetry in the middle of the twentieth century were digging their way into a New Zealand kind of poetry. They were moving away from the early poets that filtered the land and experience through poetry models from Britain. It is a complicated story that has been retold so many times over the decades, in so many different contexts, with so many different biases and erasures. Ah. And then the land barely got a look in in poems. I feel there is a book to be written that traverses the relationship between the land and poetry, that never lets the poem lose contact with the reader, that never lets the poem service the theory and little else, that acknowledges the suffering and heartbreaking losses of the tangata whenua.
The first poems in Five O’Clock Shadows make the land precious. I am reminded of how Sue Wootton, Brian Turner, Airini Beautrais (a river), Hone Tuwhare, Ruth Dallas have done this in distinctive ways. Like these poets, Richard’s poems also travel with myriad subject matter: from the closing of a tavern, to a lost dog, to Dunedin, to refugees, to Sunday in the islands. But it is the land poems that first strike me. I am musing on how earth warmth and leaf light can permeate a whole book. So yes, this is a collection of earth warmth. You get to stand in the land poems and the poem is beauty and anchor and care.
We love the land by eye & feel & sun
& shadow. It grows within us.
This is who we are, this is how we find ourselves.
from ‘Map’
There is a spareness in all the poems, a light rich economy. Goodness knows what it took to write these, but when they reach me there is an exquisite poise. Every word belongs. I also found ‘Bsharri, Lebanon’ – a poem penned for Richard’s sisters who travelled to their ancestral village – precious. This ancestor poem is a poem to hear read aloud:
We have come to hug you,
we have come to kiss you for the life
you made us.
We have come, ancestors, to love
you as you taught us. We have come,
ancestors, & now we are together.
Ancestors, we hug you, we kiss you.
Ancestors, we weep, because
we have come.
The poetry is economical but each poem launches you into multiple musings, feelings, intricacies. I love ‘Please, do not’. The poem begins with infectious word wit and then travels to the punch-gut restorative ending – and the word ‘enough’. I want you to read the whole poem but here is the beginning:
Please do not yell,
such a small shattering word –
YELL – I prefer yell-ow
that might imply surrender
or a field of flowers holding
their faces to the sun,
why not peace, or acceptance,
such lovely hard-earned words.
Perhaps the poems that strike deepest, that are most precious, are the several addressed to mother and father. Eulogies, recollections, re-tracings. I am thinking how Richard’s poems are made of parts and you need to experience the coming together of these parts to get the reading joy in full. If I take a stanza or two to share with you, I am distilling the magic. These poems are magic, moving, must-reads: ‘Plums’, ‘Sons’, ‘Snoring’, Threaded’, ‘There’. In writing the poems both mother and father are held close, like a gift for family, like a gift for us as readers who also live and love and mourn. I especially love ‘There’, a poem that places the mother at the centre. Here are a few stanzas near the end of the poem (again I implore you to read the whole poem):
What we share is our story.
I sit with her
& look out at the weather.
The windows
are full of the day.
She doesn’t know. I do not know.
We have our story,
our fallible memories.
Her mouth
hovers by the spoon,
& we watch the weather.
You can tell this book matters so very much to the poet – and the degree of personal investment is contagious, whether in words gathering the land, family, experience, memory. Think of the poems as personal plantings in the undergrowth of life, with all manner of glorious lights shining through. Like I said, I reread this book in our return to lockdown, and by the time I got to the end I was filled with the joy of living and writing and reading. I am going to leave you with the final poem in the book, that takes us back to the land (crikey we never left it), how the need to be creative is such a necessary thing and how we share so many attachments – ‘together on this whenua’.
Richard Langston is a veteran broadcasting journalist and director, who comes from Dunedin, and was a driving force in the city’s music scene in the 1980s. He lives in Wellington and is a proud member of the three-person South Wellington Poetry Society.
Richard Langston reads three poems from his new collection, Five O’Clock Shadows (The Cuba Press, 2020)
Richard Langston is a poet, television director, and writer. Five O’Clock Shadows is his sixth book of poems. His previous books are Things Lay in Pieces (2012), The Trouble Lamp (2009), The Newspaper Poems (2007), Henry, Come See the Blue (2005), and Boy (2003). He also writes about NZ music and posts interviews with musicians on the Phantom Billstickers website.
A rooster crowed – the villagers in their black dresses
and tata, their black suits, white white shirts,
the flower of their devotion. A pig ambled in the rain.
Then they began to open their mouths
to listen and find one another,
they began to fill up the mystery,
to waken our souls.
This blending of human voices,
low and high and humming, and lifting.
They sang themselves out of themselves.
They summoned their dead from under garlanded mounds,
the bright sails of their embroidered names.
They sang them out of the depths of their ocean –
from their watery wrecks.
They sang for our brief moment here,
offered up this,
this shattering blue cathedral of song.
Richard Langston
Richard Langston is the author of 5 books of poetry: Boy (2003); Henry, Come See the Blue (2005); The Newspaper Poems (2007); The Trouble Lamp (2009); Things Lay in Pieces (2012). All published by FitzBeck. He works as a director for Country Calendar.
NZ Poetry Shelf 