The Situation 2020
Tēnā koutou katoa
‘The Situation 2020’ is a kind of Poet Laureate's Choice of work from Aotearoa New Zealand poets for the Poet Laureate blog. Essentially, it will be a portfolio of poetry, posted over the next while, from a range of poets whose work I have enjoyed reading recently: interesting poems for interesting times.
— David Eggleton
from Fancy Dancing
1. in conversation with the little cherry tree
So, there’s Duke Street and Castle Street and Great King Street
and Cumberland Street where the sign’s been wrenched off
(it’s such bad history ) and Malvern Street and Hunt Street
and Dundas Street where the big boys once threw Iti’s schoolbag
into the river. And there’s North East Valley right
at the edge of the compass where each of the wooden houses
has a carved architrave. There’s all the clamour
of the Santa Santa Parade, and Willowbank with the Compte de Paris
climbing all over the workmen’s cottages which brings us,
quite naturally, to the triplication of the Pacific heart
and the House of the Silver Triniti. And what about the music,
what about the groundlessness of the Lydian mode,
free of burden? To have flowered once is that reason enough,
my dear yedoensis, so heavy I’ve had to tie up your white aerials.
2.he kōrero pukapuka
Soft rain all night and the gravel paths fill up
with water. There are holes in the plumey grass,
that’s where the sheep are. A child rattles
silver bells in a yellow frame. Waves bunch up
like Christmas. I left four of my rings in the green
tray when I passed through the Guardhouse.
Susan rang security from the library and I collected
them on my way out. Such is my tiredness.
He’s learning things the hard way, the man
in the ugly prison track-pants. Every day he’s faking it
like the dream of big, easy chairs along a sun-washed
verandah. But there’s no sunlight here, just a 22 hour
lockdown. ‘I wonder if I’ll see you round the traps,’
he says, ‘that’s if you ever manage to dig yourself out.
3.
A white sun held on a stem in the courtyard,
a rough paddock of barley grass and barbed wire.
The way the house is inhabited, starlings
in the water-trap, bumblebees under the shed.
The gauzy nets they’ve hung up in the old woman’s
room. ‘Did somebody die here once?’ ‘Yes.’
You want to meet the poet? Well, you’ll have
to take the inner city link bus and get off
at Three Lamps. He’ll tell you about the hemisphere,
the complex relationship between two parts
and a whole, where time is collapsed horizontally
and vertically. As for your lover, sliding a fingernail
along your arm, well, that’s another story,
the way you mirror each other, Spiegel en Spiegel.
— Bernadette Hall
Bernadette Hall biography
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| Artwork:FLIGHT by Robyn Webster. Image by Julie Williams. |
Bernadette Hall lives at Amberley Beach in the Hurunui, North Canterbury. A new collection of her work, ‘Fancy Dancing, new and selected poems 2007–2020’ will be published by Victoria University Press (VUP) in October this year. It includes a series of artworks by the Christchurch artist, Robyn Webster. ‘Flight’ is one of these.
Bernadette has a history of collaboration with the Dunedin artist, Kathryn Madill. For example in ‘The Merino Princess, selected poems 1989- 2001’ published by VUP in 2004. In September, their YA novella, ‘SUL, an Antarctic fable’ is due out from Scythe Press. It features 22 new paintings by Kathryn. The two had shared an Artists in Antarctica Award in December 2004.
In 2015 Bernadette received the Prime Minister’s Award for literary achievement in poetry and for her contribution to New Zealand literature. In 2016 she was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit.
