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
Ah. Love is my final theme. My seventeenth gathering. I chose love because love is the ink in my pen, it drives the pencil filling my notebooks. It’s the reason I keep two blogs running when, at times, it seems impossible. There is the love of reading and writing stretching back to childhood. Love poetry can embrace many subjects, moods, objects, experiences, relationships. So many poetry books in Aotearoa are steeped in love. In what is written and, just as importantly, in the infectious love poets feel for the power of words. For the possibility of the line, silence, music, physical detail. As readers, writers, publishers, reviewers, booksellers of poetry, we are connected through a shared and invigorating love of poetry. Ah.
To celebrate the end of my theme season I have ten copies of Wild Honey: Reading New Zealand Women’s Poetry to give away. I will sign one for you or for a friend. You can leave a comment on the blog, on FB or Twitter: Which theme resonated for you? What theme do you suggest if I should ever do this again? Or just email me if you have my address.
Grateful thanks and aroha to all the poets, publishers and readers who have supported my season of themes. I so loved doing this!
The poems
Poem
So far it has worked by imagining you in all the places I would like you to be
*
this is the one I love. he is not here but the air is still warm from where he might have been
*
we have spent hours circling each other with words-thinly vowelled embraces
*
how to translate these words into silences or the silences into words
*
when I cannot fix you behind my eyes I carry your absence like stars on the blue roof
Jenny Bornholdt
from Selected Poems, Victoria University Press, 2016
Catch
Two sitting at a table two at a table sitting two and two a table in the grass in the grass a table and on the table empty almost with a little a little empty almost but with a little water there sits a jar for love on the table a jar for love not a fresh jar every day fresh every day nothing in the jar that lasts always fresh they are sitting sitting at the table looking they are looking at the jar at the table at each other they are sitting looking sitting at the table at the jar looking looking sitting now is nearly the day the day is nearly now now go to sleep go to love go to jar go to look look looking look sit sitting catch that catch two sitting at a table two at table sitting two and two and two a table in the grass
Murray Edmond
from Fool Moon, Auckland University Press, 2004
Because of you
(for Darae)
My Son,
in you I see the shape of the heart all poets try to explain
you, the greatest poem I could never pen
how blessed I am to mother a son to exercise hope and love when everything else is absent
Son, your are a gift to men because of you I pray for men still love men hold hope for me, for you.
Grace Iwashita-Taylor
from Full Broken Bloom, Ala Press, 2017
The wind has shaken everything out of the quince tree. Behold the bony gullets of fledglings as yellow as the towers of rock that arise in Wyoming. ‘Stop blocking the gangway,’ the old woman used to say, cutting away long roils of yellow clay with her spade, hell bent on re-configuring a brand new version of genetically modified melancholy. ‘Never forget how the old ones arrived from Dubh Linn, the Place of the Dark Pool, formed from the union of the River Liffey and the River Poddle. Never forget that we are arisen from a line of proud people.’ And here I am, holding onto my end of the string and I know, my love, that you are holding onto the other.
Bernadette Hall
Aroha Mai
Aroha mai I was trying to get to you but the wind kept changing direction
Aroha atu she hates it when institutions use Te Reo in their signatures she hates it when my wet hair drips all over the bedsheets
Aroha mai I couldn’t see you this time I was down a rabbit hole along the coast beside the point
Aroha atu love given love received there isn’t enough room in this house to house our love the brick square flat beneath a rectangle sky
Aroha mai your baby finally came the angels found your address submerged in yesterday’s current and she’s clapping in every photo
Aroha atu my feet don’t touch the ground these days take the stairs to stay fit I keep my car full of gas it is easy to recycle the past
Aroha mai my ghost is in town and I don’t know if I should email her back
Aroha atu already the skeleton wings of this year are casting long shadows we don’t know what’s for dinner but next door’s Tui keeps singing all the buried bones to life
and you’re opening every can of beans in the cupboard to feed the tired warrior in my arms
Courtney Sina Meredith
from Burnt Kisses on the Actual Wind, Beatnik Publishing, 2021
Helping my father remember
My father is in the business of transmissions. A radio technician, the basic premise being that a message is sent out, then received. Except something’s gone wrong with the wiring, and he didn’t teach me how to fix it. I see him, standing at the kitchen bench, his hand hovering over an orange and paring knife; trying to think what he had planned.
*
There is evidence that sound helps restore memory: the sound of a cricket ball colliding with tin fence; lemonade meeting beer in a shandy; sticks smouldering in the air, when pulled from a camp fire. The doctor says depression, my sister says stress, my father says stop being so bloody dramatic.
*
They say I am the most like you, and that we are like your mother. I am following you through tall grasses, as high as my head. You’re in your angling gear. It’s summer, I can hear the cicadas. There’s a wind up, but its warm. We’re heading to the river. You find Nana, and I’ll find you. We won’t be lost if we’re together.
I haven’t read a single new book since I’ve been with you. I’ve been so busy peering into your eyes where I can see dark passages & feinting canaries & gold & mine mine mine mine
Plus I’ve been preoccupied with the joy of sex the science of living the interpretation of dreams & my undiscovered self.
So today I read a love poem.
But when I looked at it, it just said your name.
It was very repetitive. It just kept skipping over itself. Skipping to the important bits. Slipping into something more comfortable.
I looked away for a second & when I looked back the love poem had filled the whole room. It was thrusting against the ceiling & had burst through the open window pushing the vase of sunflowers right out.
I tried to call to you to come & look but the love poem was so big that it caught in my throat. There were fainting canaries everywhere like the fallen petals of sunflowers gasping yours yours yours yours
Hannah Mettner
from Fully Clothed and So Forgetful, Victoria University Press, 2017
Strummer Summer
All that summer we kissed outside because we had nowhere inside to be alone. We had matching Clash t-shirts and black outlooks. After my shifts at Seafood Sam’s I would pick you up in my Dad’s ute and we’d drive to the river
so I could swim off the chip grease. I’d light a fire while you showed me the riffs you’d learned that day on your unplugged Fender. /I’ve been beat up, I’ve been thrown out,/ /But I’m not down, No I’m not down./ I requested Blondie but you said it was chick-music.
Poking the fire with a stick, the tinny twang of your dead strings. We thought we had it pretty bad. Your Dad didn’t like me because I was “the wrong flavour”. I craved city life. Packed my army bag and left home, but not before I withdrew half my chip money and bought you an amp.
Helen Lehndorf
from The Comforter, Seraph Press, 2011
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
Always on Waking
Always, on waking, I look out into treetops: I lie beside you in the shimmering room Where, whether summer morning, shell of dawn Or dazed moonlight patterns leaves on walls I wake to wide sky and the movement of treetops.
As the leaves flicker (thin scimitars of opaque Dull green the eucalyptus bundles over her bark strips) They become lucent; leaves lined with sunlight With moonlight are no longer drab But seem scimitars shining, are not now opaque.
While you are there I am nested among leaves; As sparrows come each morning for breadcrumbs So I look for your still face beside me; Without your calm in the face of what wild storm I am no longer nested, but desolate among these leaves.
Ruth France
from No Traveller Returns: The poems of Ruth France, Cold Hub Press, 2020
Honey
It was manuka honey, the best kind, in a big, white plastic bucket, given to you by someone with bees, because you’d been helpful, so much honey, it looked like it might last a lifetime and you being you, and maybe why I love you, you spooned it out into carefully washed jars and gave it to your uncle, your mother, your brothers, our friend with the little boy, your mother’s neighbour who had the birthday, so much honey, and after all that you gave away, there was still so much left for us.
Janis Freegard
from Meowing Part 1 (the Meow Gurrrls zine).
Is It Hard to Follow Your Heart When You Have Three?
(on the story of the giant octopus from Aelian’s De Natura Animalium)
is it hard to follow your heart when you have three?
one for circulation two for breathing
i am the stone jar of pickled fish you are the giant octopus
i wait in the dark for you you crawl up the sewer for me
we cast our votes two are for breathing
Claudia Jardine
from The Starling 9
Toikupu aroha 1
I waited all night for you to come home to plant kihikihi into your cupped palms
now as you sleep I glide my fingers memorising the tracks that led me here
to this chest – arms – manawa with such vastness and proximity
I lean down taking in the entirety of your pulse and there my hā quickens
above lifelines grooved with spacious and honest certainty.
Iona Winter
from Gaps in the Light, Ad Hoc Fiction, 2021
For Baukis
There are four extant poems written by the ancient Greek poet Erinna. Three of these concern the death of her childhood friend, Baukis.
you lost her, didn’t you? the one that made it worthwhile to be underneath the sun and breathing
you remembered her, didn’t you? the days you played chasing the tortoise topsy turvy, falling from all the white horses
you missed her, didn’t you? when marriage came like a thief and snatched her away the ribbon of your world
you mourned her, didn’t you? when the ribbon was torn the bright eyes empty, the breath stilled
you cried for her, didn’t you? raw, with it heaving out the wet thick language of snot and tears
you loved her, didn’t you? even more than a friend, the closest companion the only one
you wrote for her, didn’t you? wove her memory through hexameters to stave off oblivion
and, now, for her we read.
Hebe Kearney
When the Person You Love Leaves You in the Night
When the person you love leaves you in the night, it is only natural to get out of bed and follow them. It is also only natural for your pyjamas to be all crumpled and your hair sticking up at the back. It is only natural to feel confused, and alone.
Nine times out of ten, a light will be on and you will walk into the living room, squinting. The person you love will probably be making human body parts out of plasticine, or playing video games. They will look up and say ‘Hello’ and smile at you like you’re some kind of lost baby animal. You will feel a little bit found.
If there is no light on in the house, it is important that you check the garden. If there is no garden, check the balcony. The person you love will be out there, staring at the moon and not crying. You are the one who cries. Except that one time… and the other. Don’t ask them if they’re okay because they will just say ‘Yeah’. Besides, you are the one who was left alone in the night.
Just look at them in the moonlight, and let them look at you. Stay very still. Then take their hand in slow motion and walk to the kitchen. The person you love will follow you, and so will the moon. Pour some milk into a pan and simmer gently. You will see a quivering white circle. The moon will be in there somewhere. Slice cheese onto bread and turn on the grill.
When you have two pieces of cheese-on-toast, put them on a plate. Pour half the milk into the mug with Peter Rabbit on it and half into the souvenir mug from Sweden. There will be sugar on the floor and it will stick to your feet. Swing yourself up onto the kitchen bench. You and the person you love will sit with your feet dangling side by side. The sugar will fall without a sound. You will drink your milk. The person you love will eat their grilled cheese, with sips of milk in-between. Peter Rabbit will eat his radishes.
Congratulate yourselves for drinking calcium. Sit at opposite ends of the couch with your legs tossed over their legs. Talk until you wake up the birds.
It is important that at some point during the night the person you love reminds you that you are the person they love. It is also important that they thank you for the grilled cheese. If they don’t, give them a pen and a piece of cardboard. Drop them on the side of the road. Tell them, ‘You can hitchhike from here.’
Joy Holley
from Starling 4
Love Poem with Seagull
I wish I’d seen it from your side of the table when the horrid gull attacked my fish and chips, the springy baton of haddock in my hand a signal for the post-saurian psycho to swoop at my talon-less fingers as they moved toward my mouth in their classically dithering mammalian way, because if I’d had the privilege to see the stress-warped, flexuous face behind my bat-like ultrasonic shrieks of shock as I fought off the bird unsuccessfully then I’d have some idea of what it means for you to love me, the sort of person who manages to always look like this or feel like this regardless of how much easier being normal is.
Erik Kennedy
from There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime, Victoria University Press, 2018
Found Again
our love is a tracking device more sure than any global positioning system
just carve us into wooden tablets then imprint us on opposite corners of a mighty length of siapo and watch tusili’i spring forth
making bridges to connect us over rock-bound starfish scampering centipedes and the footprints of bemused birds
we have many stories of losing and finding each orther
of getting lost and losing others
but today all is well
I lie beneath the old mango tree smothered with coconut oil embellished with wild flowers and droplets of your sweat
your aging shoulders still fling back proud
and I still arch towards you like a young sweetheart
you have whispered in my hair
found again
and we both know this is our final harbour
Serie Barford
from Tapa Talk, Huia Press, 2007
Everything
This morning when I looked out my window they were the first thing I noticed. I saw them flocking outside my house. I like to look at them from my window. I get the sun there. I’ll go out and stroke them. I wonder what they think of me. Some people don’t have anything much but if you put a hen on their knee they start looking. I’m not fast on my feet. I have bother with my eyes. I’ve got friends that can’t get out. Everything goes downhill. I would go back to when I was younger. I love the first things. When you’re young you’ve only a future. I’ve made no plans for dying. I haven’t paid for anything. I’d be terrified if they made a mistake. I do love everything about living though. I love being able to see. I like to look out my windows and see the leaves like a blanket on the ground. I love the autumn. I love the hens in the autumn. They’re beautiful. I couldn’t imagine my life without them. They’re everything to me.
Ashleigh Young
from How I get Ready, Victoria University Press, 2019
The poets
Serie Barford was born in Aotearoa to a German-Samoan mother and a Palagi father. She was the recipient of a 2018 Pasifika Residency at the Michael King Writers’ Centre. Serie promoted her collections Tapa Talk and Entangled Islands at the 2019 International Arsenal Book Festival in Kiev. She collaborated with filmmaker Anna Marbrook to produce a short film, Te Ara Kanohi, for Going West 2021. Her latest poetry collection, Sleeping With Stones, will be launched during Matariki 2021.
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.
Jenny Bornholdt is the author of many celebrated collections of poems, including The Rocky Shore (Montana New Zealand Book Award for Poetry, 2009) and Selected Poems (2016), and editor of several notable anthologies, including Short Poems of New Zealand (2018). In 2005 she became the fifth Te Mata Estate Poet Laureate, during which time she wrote Mrs Winter’s Jump (2007). In 2010 she was the Creative New Zealand Victoria University Writer in Residence. In 2013 she was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature. In 2016 she edited the online anthology Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems. Jenny’s most recent collection is Lost and Somewhere Else (2019).
Murray Edmond, b. Kirikiriroa 1949, lives in Glen Eden. 14 books of poetry (Shaggy Magpie Songs, 2015, and Back Before You Know, 2019 most recent); book of novellas (Strait Men and Other Tales, 2015); Then It Was Now Again: Selected Critical Writing (2014); editor, Ka Mate Ka Ora (http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/kmko/); dramaturge for Indian Ink Theatre. Forthcoming: Time to Make a Song and Dance: Cultural Revolt in Auckland in the 1960s, from Atuanui Press in May, 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).
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. website
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.
Joy Holley lives in Wellington and has recently completed her Masters in fiction at the International Institute of Modern Letters. Her writing has been published in Starling, Sport,Stasis and other journals.
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 AUPNew 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.
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.
Erik Kennedy is the author of There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime (Victoria University Press, 2018), and he is co-editing a book of climate change poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific forthcoming from Auckland University Press later in 2021. His second book of poems is due out in 2022. His poems, stories, and criticism have been published in places like FENCE, Hobart, Maudlin House, Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, the TLS, and Western Humanities Review. Originally from New Jersey, he lives in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Helen Lehndorf’s book, The Comforter, made the New Zealand Listener’s ‘Best 100 Books of 2012′ list. Her second book, Write to the Centre, is a nonfiction book about the practice of keeping a journal. She writes poetry and non-fiction, and has been published in Sport, Landfall, JAAM, and many other publications and anthologies. Recently, she co-created an performance piece The 4410 to the 4412 for the Papaoiea Festival of the Arts with fellow Manawatū writers Maroly Krasner and Charlie Pearson. A conversation between the artists and Pip Adam can be heard on the Better Off Read podcast here
Courtney Sina Meredith is a distinguished poet, playwright, fiction writer, performer, children’s author and essayist, with her works being translated and published around the world. A leading figure in the New Zealand arts sector, Courtney is the Director of Tautai Contemporary Pacific Arts Trust, an organisation committed to championing Oceanic arts and artists. Courtney’s award-winning works include her play Rushing Dolls, poetry Brown Girls in Bright Red Lipstick, short stories Tail of the Taniwha and children’s book The Adventures of Tupaia. Burst Kisses On The Actual Wind is Courtney’s new collection of poetry, the book was released just this month.
Hannah Mettner (she/her) is a Wellington writer who still calls Tairāwhiti home. Her first collection of poetry, Fully Clothed and So Forgetful, was published by Victoria University Press in 2017, and won the Jessie Mackay Award for best first book of poetry at the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. She is one of the founding editors of the online journal Sweet Mammalian, with Sugar Magnolia Wilson and Morgan Bach.
Grace Iwashita-Taylor, breathing bloodlines of Samoa, England and Japan. An artist of upu/words led her to the world of performing arts. Dedicated to carving, elevating and holding spaces for storytellers of Te Moana nui a Kiwa. Recipient of the CNZ Emerging Pacific Artist 2014 and the Auckland Mayoral Writers Grant 2016. Highlights include holding the visiting international writer in residence at the University of Hawaii 2018, Co-Founder of the first youth poetry slam in Aoteroa, Rising Voices (2011 – 2016) and the South Auckland Poets Collective and published collections Afakasi Speaks (2013) & Full Broken Bloom (2017) with ala press. Writer of MY OWN DARLING commissioned by Auckland Theatre Company (2015, 2017, 2019) and Curator of UPU (Auckland Arts Festival 2020 & Kia Mau Festival 2021). Currently working on next body of work WATER MEMORIES.
Louise Wallace is the author of three collections of poetry published by Victoria University Press, most recently Bad Things. She is the founder and editor of Starling, and is currently working on a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of 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.
Ashleigh Young is the author of Magnificent Moon, Can You Tolerate This?, and How I Get Ready (Victoria University Press). She works as an editor at VUP.
No Traveller Returns: the selected poems of Ruth France, Cold Hub Press, 2020
While Trying to Study Phonetics on a Spring Morning
This immense arch of sky
Is a palate, on which ring
Day’s consonantal sounds
Voicing the clarity of bell air
Which breaks about and above us
Like tumbled, exploding plosives
Tripping on the teeth; these
Rear up, far off; sharp sounding-board
Or white, guardian mountains.
Here all is implicit; perhaps we have
No need of such conceits;
Yet without them words remain dumb
Where we, tiny on the tongue
Of the plains, consider how sweet
How sweet is the taste of morning.
Ruth France
Ruth France was one of a number of women poets who didn’t make it into Wild Honey; not because I wasn’t fascinated by her poetry or ideas. I made it clear I was offering a provisional home that needed more rooms, more poets, and more versions written by others writers, especially Māori and Pasifika. When Ruth was writing, most women poets were not lauded to the degree men were, and too often praise was offered on the judgement scale of men. Anthologies only ever included a handful of women and ‘women’s writing’ was often disparaged, undervalued, silenced. I am sitting at the kitchen table where I wrote Wild Honey and I am feeling an overwhelming sadness at the historic invisibility of twentieth-century women poets that is still in effect today. I spent four years writing Wild Honey and didn’t have room for everyone. This has to be an ongoing project.
Ruth France (1913 – 1968) was a poet and novelist. She wrote two novels, with her debut The Race (1958) winning NZ Literary Fund’s Award for Achievement. She published two collections of poetry under the name Paul Henderson, a handful of which made it into two anthologies (not all women of her era were selected). Editor Robert McLean (himself a poet with a new collection out) has selected poems from Ruth’s published books (Unwilling Pilgrim 1955 and The HaltingPlace 1961) along with poems from an unpublished manuscript, ‘No Traveller Returns’. To have this lovingly edited collection of her poetry underlines what readers have missed with her work not readily available.
Robert’s introduction considers the poetry and states that as the poems do not offer explicit biographical details neither will his introduction. Yet her biography (not that we have easy access to much) is as intriguing as the poetry. Yes, we can let poems stand on their own feet and we can find our own invigorating pathways through, but autobiography can make poems glint in unexpected ways. In fact, as is my habit, I read the poetry first, wrote most of this, then read Robert’s introduction and hunted out her appearances in New Zealand anthologies. She is largely invisible.
Te Ara / The Encyclopedia of New Zealand has a biographical entry. She was born in Canterbury, her mother wrote poems and short stories and was published in the Christchurch Press while her father was a shopkeeper. Ruth attended secondary school and then worked as a librarian before marriage at 21. For over three years, she and her husband lived on a yacht at Lyttelton; she rowed her husband to work and her son to kindergarten. After the second son was born they settled at Sumner. Her father had been a devout Catholic and was incensed his daughter had married a non-Catholic.
Ruth published her first collection of poetry at the age of 42 as Paul Henderson. According to Te Ara she wrote letters to the press under her own name and had a strong social conscience and her poems were published in various newspapers and journals. Te Ara also suggests her contemporaries claimed she wrote under a male pseudonym as it freed her from ‘poetess mannerisms’. Crikey! I am so infuriated by these two words. Ruth is said to have held herself at arm’s length from the Christchurch writing community as she didn’t like the way women were treated as inferior. I am thinking of the Caxton Press and all the power it exerted but also of the gatekeepers at a national level (there were notable exceptions). This is what it says in Te Ara:
Already well known for her poetry written under her own name, it is unclear why she felt a need for a male pseudonym. Contemporary male critics suggested it freed her from ‘poetess mannerisms’ and contributed to her success. Today, the best features of her poetry are judged to be the plain, serviceable language and syntax in, for instance, ‘After flood’ or ‘New Year bonfire’.
I am so infuriated by this dismissiveness, I want to write another book. Ruth’s poetry is so much more than ‘plain, serviceable language and syntax’. Where do I begin? For a start plain serviceable language can offer a thicket of copious reading delights. Secondly her beautifully crafted lines offer all manner of musical rewards. Economy and richness coexist.
I am sitting at my kitchen table with a thousand questions mounting. Why wasn’t her last ms published? Her poetry had a vital political edge to it yet, for whatever reason, her poems did not raise questions about the status of women, whether as wife, mother, poet or woman. Ruth refers to ‘men’ to denote all people encompassed in her narrating ‘I’: ‘All men I, and I, living, all men’. It was the convention of the time to subsume women within ‘men’, but some women poets were resisting this tradition. I am reminded of Mary Stanley’s ‘I’ in Starveling Year (1953) as she navigated what it was to be a woman writing (see ‘The Wife Speaks’). Yes I am a little disconcerted that women (and ‘she’) do not make an appearance in Ruth’s poems but we see the world through Ruth’s eyes. It in no way detracts from the myriad rewards her work offers. But it makes me curious about her views on the status of women.
As with many women poets, global issues mattered to Ruth – war, the bomb, atomic energy, equality of men, invasions. You will find clear evidence of her political acumen, along with heart-moving love poems and an attraction to the seas, hills, mountains, shifting tides, seasons. Her poetry is a sumptuous feast of ideas and physical layers. I think she needs a book devoted to her writings, her opinions, her life.
While you are there I am nested among leaves;
As sparrows come each morning for breadcrumbs
So I look for your still face beside me;
Without your calm in the face of what wild storm
I am no longer nested, but desolate among these leaves.
from ‘Always, on Waking’
No Traveller Returns: The Poetry of Ruth France
‘Living’, an early poem from Unwilling Pilgrim intrigues me. Here is the first verse:
What shall I sing?
It has all been sung before
But time did not begin
Till child my mother bore.
The poem faces the haunting and perhaps persistent nag that however we write our experience it has all been written before. Yet when I read this potent line – ‘Tears bit me in the brief / Salt stream for the first time’ – I am on reading edge. Shortly later I read this: ‘So for each one was new / The shattering love and war’. The poem was written around the year of my birth and I am spinning on its axis. Grief, love, war, pain – poetry has never abandoned these topics, poets have never lost the ability to affect us, to present unique versions of experience that challenge or soothe or inspire.
Ruth concludes the poem with this:
So let me sing for all
And sing old songs again.
I am filled with curiosity about this poem. Ruth is galvanised into song, and I am wondering if the reclaimed subject matter is also a reclaimed how. How we sing matters as much as what we sing. And in this context how we make poems. Is she singing the songs of men? Is she singing her own cerebral activity into poetry?
In ‘Object Lesson’, also from the first collection, the idea that human experience is individually unique is key (although connected by countless universals such as our need to eat and love and grieve). In this poem a hill is a hill but when a particular hill is filtered through a man’s knowing, it is ‘a hill through the eyes of one human’. I see the seeds of subsequent theory here on the role of the reader, the spectator, the creator.
I am finding Ruth’s poetry utterly unique – she is a poet both thinking and feeling, hiding and exposing. Her poems are intricate considerations on what it is to love, write, exist. Never fully in the open. This from ‘How Shall I?’:
Then how shall I do this?
Confine the mind to a reasonable process
Beguiling thought by beguiling thought through a tight
Web to a firm conviction? No moonlight
Must persuade, nor smile chance
To alter the grave march of circumstance.
There is song and there is not song. There is love and there is not love. There is also and always uncertainty, a mind open to movement and a resistance to absolutes. Time and time again I divert the overground ideas to the making of a poem; the way poetry is uncertain, open to multiple interpretations, steered by gut and daring as opposed to rigid maps and regulations. I love the way the landscape is a constant presence – think of it as an anchor, homeplace and a series of travel routes. The poem ‘Road Map’ reiterates the inability of a map to catch everything. The traveller’s aid may guide us across physical terrain, but equally it references the terrain of the mind. It is the blank page of the poet writing.
For all was unexpected that we found;
Rivers were marked, but what map could foretell
The scouring of spring floods, the changed ford,
How the great boulders fell?
There is no absolute of place to be drawn
In neat precision with a mapping pen:
Lakes are hemmed in by thought as well as hills,
That has branched through many men.
Ruth keeps returning to the idea that we are in the land and the land is in us, and how the relationships will be marked by memory, experience, uncertainty, hesitancy, predilection. Here are the final two verses:
Place will be integrate, but not on paper;
The mind’s net flung and hauled, it is a silver catch;
Here was the limestone bluff, the sharp bend,
There was iced snow to watch.
But later, in what deep valley of hesitation
We consider time, and place, and thought
As tiny scratches on what surface, an ultimate
No map, or mind, has caught.
The poetry of Ruth France is a treasure house of gold-nugget poems. Like any good treasury, it reveals its physical and abstract luminosity across the course of many readings. I am utterly fascinated by this writer, by her inquiring mind and her poetic deftness. Go hunt this glorious book down. Bravo Robert McLean and Cold Hub Press.
The island belonged to my father,
Or rather it belonged to nobody.
It wasn’t even real considered against
Men and Material, War and Atomic Energy.
Reality rejected too the hut I built, now ruined,
But then, so did the island. Its own core
Was a reality immune even from wind the eroding stranger.
NZ Poetry Shelf 