To Avis Elaine The flowers you loved strew the shores of my first seven years Sometimes, in flower shops they shout out their names gerbera gladioli iris Sometimes they sing to me from a bouquet only half-made peonies pansies sweet…
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Blog Archives
Thoughts well-wrought, Damian Love
View from the South
Owen Marshall (Grahame Sydney photographer)
Vintage, $40.00, ISBN 9780143771845
It often seems to be the case that novelists, when they turn to verse, move with a more relaxed gait, a less self-conscious regard, than those whose passport to the Republic of Letters declares them to be Poets. I am glad that Owen Marshall is not a Poet. This happy circumstance leaves him free to write poetry. There is no straining for originality in his verse, no exhibitionist sensitivity, just a quiet confidence in the value of well-wrought thought.
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Tagged with: Damian Love, Grahame Sydney, Issue 123, Owen Marshall, Spring 2018, Vintage
Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review
Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review
Back on the rock, Janet Hughes
The Ski Flier
Maria MacMillan
Victoria University Press, $25.00,
ISBN 9781776561131
Vanishing Points
Michele Leggott
Auckland University Press, $28.00,
ISBN 9781869408749
Tightrope
Selina Tusitala Marsh
Auckland University Press, $28.00,
ISBN 9781869408725
Poetry seems to have reclaimed what someone called “the big speech” – eloquence, public speech, heightened language. Poets are reaching to expand their audiences and expressive range. It’s as if the bard has climbed back on the rock, tiring of contemplation and private conversation. These three poets are highly distinctive voices, using varieties of big speech to deserved acclaim in very different ways.
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An account of trauma, Michael Hulse
Allen Curnow: Collected Poems
Elizabeth Caffin and Terry Sturm (eds)
Auckland University Press, $60.00,
ISBN 9781869408510
Allen Curnow’s poetry is a transcript of trauma. “Morning by morning incorruption / Puts on corruption”: this most fundamental of thoughts, borne in upon every one of us as the time of our lives moves from childhood to what we call understanding, and onward, is not Curnow’s alone. The experiences of mutability, transience, and destruction, are universal. “A child returned / Discerns in quicksand his own footprint / Brimming and fading, vanishing.” The evidence that whatever begins in joy, hope and openness is swept away in the indifferent whirlwind lies before us everywhere. Time with a gift of tears.
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Tagged with: Allen Curnow, Auckland University Press, Autumn 2018, Elizabeth Caffin, Issue 121, Michael Hulse, Terry Sturm
Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review
Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review
A swarm of poets, Airini Beautrais
Manifesto Aotearoa: 101 Political Poems
Philip Temple and Emma Neale (eds)
Otago University Press, $35.00,
ISBN 9780947522469
New Zealand poetry in English has a long and complex tradition of politically-charged work: from colonial balladeers, through 20th-century heavyweights like Allen Curnow (as himself and as Whim Wham) and James K Baxter, to more recent poets including Bill Sewell, Robert Sullivan, Dinah Hawken and Hinemoana Baker. Despite this tradition, and perhaps in line with a neo-liberal mood-shift towards individualism and consumerism, an attitude has existed in recent years that there isn’t much political content in our poetry, or that it doesn’t belong there. Sullivan, in his 2010 sequence Cassino: City of Martyrs, bluntly calls such an attitude out in the lines “New Zealand / and its official status quo disdain / for political verse as if it was anything but.” Appearing against this historical and contemporary backdrop, Philip Temple’s and Emma Neale’s Manifesto anthology is a timely and welcome project.
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Tagged with: Airini Beautrais, Emma Neale, Issue 120, Otago University Press, Philip Temple, Summer 2017
Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review
Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review
The wisdom of things, Anna Smaill
The Yield
Sue Wootton
Otago University Press, $25.00,
ISBN 9780947522483
The Internet of Things
Kate Camp
Victoria University Press, $25.00,
ISBN 9781776561063
There is beauty to be had in yielding, Sue Wootton’s collection suggests, both to the natural world and to language. The collection’s title comes from its final poem, a quiet ode to an apple tree. Resurrected from its first life as a “dehydrated sapling”, the tree has thrived against the odds. Evidence of its battle remains in its posture; the sapling has developed
a lean, the whole tree on an angle,
as if surrendering in deference
to persistent pressure, as if leaned
upon,
giving in or giving up to what
prevails
The poem ultimately suggests that, rather than resignation, the tree’s lean is a mode of enabling sacrifice: it “let[s] go” in order to “put out arms, become a fruitful crux”. In conserving its energy the tree enables a different kind of yield – the crop of “yellow apples, blushed, /…Tart and crisp, delicious.”
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Tagged with: Anna Smaill, Issue 120, Kate Camp, Otago University Press, Sue Wootton, Summer 2017, Victoria University Press
Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review
Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review
Jewels and binoculars, Murray Bramwell
Blood Ties: New and Selected Poems 1963–2016
Jeffrey Paparoa Holman
Canterbury University Press, $25.00,
ISBN 9781927145883
Dylan Junkie
Jeffrey Paparoa Holman
Mākaro Press, $25.00,
ISBN 9780994137807
It is a harsh fact that we live in a world where there is far more published poetry than people willing or able to read it. Over the past 50 years, poetry has ceased to be a common currency. It is less often a core component of literary studies in either high-school or university curricula. For most people, poetry has become esoteric and increasingly formidable. Few nowadays have ever read more than a handful of poems, let alone committed lines to memory. There are many reasons for this. A significant one is that since the 1960s some of the best poetry has gone to live in Leonard Cohen’s “Tower of Song”; the canon is now plugged into the body electric. Of course, lyrics still matter for people, but only when encased in melody and beats.
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Tagged with: Canterbury University Press, Issue 120, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, Mākaro Press, Murray Bramwell, Summer 2017
Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review
Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review
Sustained fullness of feeling, Damian Love
Tell Me My Name
Bill Manhire
Victoria University Press, $30.00,
ISBN 9781776561070
Some Things to Place in a Coffin
Bill Manhire
Victoria University Press, $25.00,
ISBN 9781776561056
It is often a revealing act. To translate, to imitate, to inhabit in some way a distant genre, is to offer a unique window. We have a glimpse of what the author is drawn to, but also how he differs from it, what he brings to a tradition and what it brings to him, what he takes from it and what he does not.
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Tagged with: Bill Manhire, Damian Love, Issue 120, Summer 2017, Victoria University Press
Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review
Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review
Young, gifted, female and brown, Elizabeth Crayford
Fale Aitu|Spirit House
Tusiata Avia
Victoria University Press, $25.00,
ISBN 9781776560646
Tail of the Taniwha
Courtney Sina Meredith
Beatnik Publishing, $30.00,
ISBN 9780992264895
Lucky Punch
Simone Kaho
Anahera Press, $25.00,
ISBN 9780473367510
Before Tusiata Avia’s Fale Aitu|Spirit House was published, she made a point of telling her mother what she’d written, to which her mother replied, “It all needs to come out.” Avia tells us this in an endnote, but it could stand as epigraph to all three books. Reading Avia’s work alongside Courtney Sina Meredith’s Tail of the Taniwha and Simone Kaho’s Lucky Punch is to be immersed, sometimes uncomfortably, in contemporary Pasifika culture from a female perspective. Each writer’s voice is distinctive, yet similar themes crop up again and again. Anyone who’s read Albert Wendt’s Leaves of the Banyan Tree, or Sia Figiel’s more recent Where We Once Belonged, both set in Samoa, will not be surprised by the level of violence in these new works. However, the “all” that Avia’s mother implies is alive and kicking in New Zealand in the 21st century.
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Tagged with: Anahera Press, Beatnik Publishing, Courtney Sina Meredith, Elizabeth Crayford, Issue 119, Simone Kaho, Spring 2017, Tusiata Avia, Victoria University Press
Posted in Literature, Plays, Poetry, Review
Posted in Literature, Plays, Poetry, Review
Infectious enjoyment, Fleur Adcock
Night Burns with a White Fire: The Essential Lauris Edmond
Frances Edmond and Sue Fitchett (eds)
Steele Roberts, $35.00,
ISBN 9780947493448
This enjoyable anthology doesn’t pretend to be anything but an act of loving homage; as the editors admit, they did not plan a scholarly book. It consists of poems and a smaller number of extracts from Lauris Edmond’s prose writings, edited by the two people whose names are on the title page, but largely chosen by Lauris’s friends, admirers, and members of her family, who were asked to submit suggestions. The arrangement is thematic, progressing through childbirth, family love, friendship, Wellington, travel and other topics, and ending with a powerfully affecting section about death. It includes a timeline, a bibliography, and an index of contributors; one of the incidental pleasures of reading the collection is to cross-check titles of individual pieces with this index to see who chose what.
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Tagged with: Frances Edmond, Issue 119, Lauris Edmond, Night Burns, Spring 2017, Steele Roberts, Sue Fitchett
Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review
Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review