The Situation 2021: Peter Olds

The Situation 2021

Tēnā koutou katoa

‘The Situation 2021’ is a continuation of ‘The Situation 2020’. 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

Wild beans & a white butterfly 

In the nun's cottage
we have white rice,
a tin of curry powder

and some watercress
the girls had gathered
from the paddock creek.

Along the fence wire
below the Convent
I picked some green beans

growing wild
on a scrawny vine,
then took them back

to the cottage —
made a feed from boiled rice,
watercress, curry powder

and wild beans
We'd been half-starved
for weeks, feeding

on eel and fried bread . . .
The beans and watercress
went down a treat

something Holy from
fence and creek.
We were the children

of Jerusalem and the Great
Guru was down the river
going round the towns

giving aroha-talks for money
and reciting poetry —
smoking up large, stuffing

himself on pork and Chinese
kai . . . A white butterfly
flies into the cottage.

— Peter Olds

Hail & Water

(Letter to Stephen Oliver),

I've never seen hail & water fall
so much in such a short time. The
roads turned into rivers, gutters
disappeared under six inches of
hail. Cars stopped, jaws dropped . . .
One had pictures of the Flood, &
wondered when the fucking Ark
was going to make an appearance!
The sky turned black as night,
sirens wailed, streetlights blinked
at stalled streets, the air streaked
like some New York modern painting:
Surreal, unreal, leaving high tide
marks of ice in the doorways of
mid-town shops

— Peter Olds

Peter Olds biography

Peter Olds was born in Christchurch in 1944, he left school at sixteen and after meeting James K. Baxter in Dunedin in the 1960s, began writing poetry. He was a Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago in 1978. In 2005 he was an inaugural recipient of the Janet Frame Literary Trust Award for Poetry. He lives in Dunedin. His previously published collections include Lady Moss Revived (1972), Freeway (1974), Beethoven’s Guitar (1980), It Was a Tuesday Morning: Selected Poems 1972-2001 (2004), Poetry Reading at Kaka Point (2006), Under the Dundas Street Bridge (2012), and You fit the description: The Selected Poems of Peter Olds, with an introduction by Ian Wedde, which was published by Cold Hub Press in 2014.

Peter Olds. Image by Anne-Marie Davis.

The Situation 2021: Sue Wootton

The Situation 2021

Tēnā koutou katoa

‘The Situation 2021’ is a continuation of ‘The Situation 2020’. 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

Sapiens

Where goes my body, where goes my mind,
that journey’s dust settles on me, sheet

upon sheet. My winding sheets, my coil,
my solenoid core, my sedimental sentiments,

all I walk through layered on me, pressed,
preserved. I carry my divining and designing

rods across the lodes, sum myself in strings
and Fibonacci spirals. The tempo of spheres

is my comfort and my curiosity. Loom, wheel,
slide rule. Gimbals and ullage and magnificent

desolation. I am galvanised by itch
and mystery, doomed to want

to know. Engine and ingenuity, mitochondrial
machine. This is my tissue-thin life, a matter

of strata and stratagem, microplastics in the carbon
record, a geology of thought and peristalsis,

the chitter-chatter of cell life in its arc. I strew
my trails. Melt reveals my strops and blades, my yarns

and needles. I am an anatomy of pollen and mites, host
to the democratic cacophony, bacteria, parasite,

the viral load. I accrue in layers, though I shed
and shed my soiled skins, although regardless

I forget and forget. In my meteor craters
and my caves snore physicists, poets, healers,

mariners, prophets and gods. I take my pick
to the glittering seams for what clear thread persists,

drawing it through the thick of the tangle.
Word-boned animal with a lace-work mind

blind with gimp and spangle, holed
with loss and limbic-wired for terror,

constantly assailed by vertigo on the lip
of the fathomless fall. Yet the visions pierce.

I swoon, still dizzied in my cities by distant stars,
by the glaze of evening sunlight on a street,

by a certain slant upon a single tree, its portal brilliance,
the excellence and delicacy of a gilt-edged leaf.

— Sue Wootton

 

 

Ōwheo 

How strange it is, a river, made of motion,
made of air, the way it’s every moment

its own catchment and its own release,
full presence, incomplete trajectory,

each rill containing every upstream rill,
each ripple-surge a leading edge that,

in the instant of its observation, dissolves,
pours forward and entirely follows, source

and seeking – both – with all it was
propelling all its going, so that the current

singing to the clock tower from the weirs
is more than it appears, and utters it, karakia

to the summit’s wind, the moon, the stars,
the cap cloud streaming over Cargill,

so that to cross Ōwheo on the footbridge is to cross

dawn chorus, evening roost, the ruru,
frost-beaded moss, five-finger, broadleaf, fern,

whip-tailed kōura in the dappled burn,
deleatidium, smelt, a fuchsia flower afloat,

the ghostly chunk-chunk-chunk
of watermills, and hammer-echo, axe,

the pin-point glow shone in by fungus gnats
from mucus droplets strung on silk,

the footprints of a mayfly strutting
on the pollen-dusted riverskin – is to cross

a long kōrero, whose strands and trails
and traces whisper, babble, surface, disappear,

a telling in the valley of its knowing,
if we would but learn to hear.

(Ōwheo: the Māori name for The Water of Leith.)    

— Sue Wootton

Sue Wootton biography

Sue Wootton’s novel Strip (Mākaro Press) was longlisted for the 2017 Ockham NZ Book Awards, and her most recent poetry collection, The Yield (OUP), was a finalist in these awards in 2018. She was the 2008 Robert Burns Fellow, and held the 2018/19 NZSA Beatson Fellowship. She was awarded the 2020 Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship. Sue lives in Ōtepoti-Dunedin where she is the recently-appointed Publisher at Otago University Press.

Sue Wootton. Image by Oscar Francis. 

The Situation: Carolyn McCurdie

The Situation 2021

Tēnā koutou katoa

‘The Situation 2021’ is a continuation of ‘The Situation 2020’. 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

Along Imaginary Lines of Longitude

At night this city beach disconnects from time

and place. You step from the street to the sand

and the town recedes – flux of tyres on wet roads,

 

wind-swung streetlights creasing the puddles,

laughter cut off by a door slam – all leak away

like the muted nag of old worries.

 

Winter wind licks your neck,

chews and worries your hair, your sleeves,

eyelashes.

 

The tide’s coming in, slow forward, slow back,

and stern with the weight of all the world’s water,

weight of the drowned, and the not-drowned.

They’re out there, heaving, restless, where the dark is neither

sea nor sky, and some of them are yours, your forbears.

 

Family links are thin, but your surname’s a patrilineal thread

from old Gaelic, meaning sea-captain. It’s a slippery fact,

greasy with guesses, assumptions, unlooped from bollards

on other islands, another hemisphere, but reeling you in,

among Donalds, and Dannys, and Marys, and Lizzies,

migrants to tenements, to unskilled work,

and bone-deep torpor of the dispossessed.

 

And further back,

through the wash of submarines, minesweepers, fishing smacks,

to the naval fleet of an Iron Age people who braved the Atlantic.

 

And tonight, you peer out at a blurred Pacific horizon;

you feel them, half-see them, lively, hoary, like spray,

like oar-churn, oar-flick, salt-rotted sails that flare and sink,

decks slick with danger binding the crew in unspoken,

ferocious belonging. Eyebrows low,

hands cracked, and stinging, holding on to come home.

Knowing how.

 

And because of that knowing, you exist.

If they asked: how are you so hollow, unknowing?

How can you live so unmoored? Neither you, the wind

nor the world would have answers.

 

No answers,

but you take off your shoes, step forward. Step again.

In comes the water, pushing, claiming; the cold’s a shock

to the braced touchpoints of your feet.

It’s not much. But it’s something.

A small, blood-felt connection.

— Carolyn McCurdie

Carolyn McCurdie biography

Carolyn McCurdie is a Dunedin writer of poetry and fiction. She won the 1998 Lilian Ida Smith Award for her fiction, and first prize in the  NZ Poetry Society International Poetry Competition in 2013. Her poetry collection, Bones in the Octagon was published by Mākaro Press in 2015.

Carolyn McCurdie. Image by Doug Lilly.

The Situation: Alan Roddick

The Situation 2021

Tēnā koutou katoa

‘The Situation 2021’ is a continuation of ‘The Situation 2020’. 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

The End of a Road

‘Mount Royal Road’ and ‘Pleasant Valley’ were names
that spoke for years of a ‘sweet, especial scene’ –

but something had gone wrong, the road-sign drooping
as if the name were too much for it – and yet 

below Mount Royal that road still strolled away
past grazing cattle under English oaks,

across the Pleasant River, and out of sight.
The map showed where it passed the farmhouse gate

to turn toward the hills – and suddenly,
among shaven slopes, stumps, hillocks of slash,

it was nothing but a pot-holed access road
for the forestry plantations far inland, 

with its maunga, Mount Royal, long out of sight.
When a road loses its name, where does it go?  

I can see it now, as it makes its way back
down to the valley floor to pass that farmhouse,

rumbling over the bridge, under the willows,
through those paddocks, to where, below Mount Royal,

a new signpost announces ‘Stenhouse Road’.
And right there Mount Royal Road ended.

— Alan Roddick

  

The Mystery 

To put together two metal components
made for each other, one of them being ‘male’
that must be ‘offered’ properly to the ‘female’: 

a wealth of metaphor in those terms, and yet 
the simple task is to screw them together
with maybe six turns, to make a garden tap.  

My first attempt puts the spout at nine o’clock,  
the tap-handle at three (one more metaphor).
Dismantling it for a second try, this time

perhaps I should start them off the wrong way up,
hoping they’re right-way-up some six turns later?
But no, the spout’s at one, the handle hiding;

upside-down at seven. Too many failures,
and that’s why I’m waiting here, expectantly,
to watch as a real plumber wraps his hemp 

clockwise round the thread, then fits them together
to tighten, maybe five or six rotations,
seating the spout at twelve! The handle at six! 

Unconcerned, he applies his wrench to the thing
with careful force to urge it one more half-turn
and give us a garden tap, the right way up.

As he turns on our toby to check for leaks
I wonder how to make use of what I’ve learned –
that it’s not where to start, but how to finish?

 — Alan Roddick

Alan Roddick biography

Alan Roddick has published two collections of poems and is working on a third. As Charles Brasch’s literary executor for nearly fifty years, he has edited three collections of Brasch’s poems. He has also published a monograph and articles on the poetry of Allen Curnow. A retired public health dentist, he lives in Dunedin.

Alan Roddick. Image by Jill Milne.

The Situation: Richard Reeve

The Situation 2021

Tēnā koutou katoa

‘The Situation 2021’ is a continuation of ‘The Situation 2020’. 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

The Knack

At Hank’s, Quentin just then at the table, gruff as ever

in his woollen hat, his heavy, tar-stained fingers

cradling a bag. Mushrooms, collected by him,

 

he tells us, from somewhere in Warrington’s schnitzel

of hedge and lawn. We don’t press the issue where,

gratefully receive, and later feast

 

drunk on the haul, delighting in the terroir of it all.

For Quentin has the knack, knowledge of locale,

seasoned we say from decades loitering,

 

lingering along Coast Road with the bay in tow,

cockles, mushrooms, apples seeded from the defecations

of former Seacliff interns visiting our groves,

 

Quentin attends the gullies, fringes; worries,

claims at the roadside nabbing the best of it,

while we others, holding down respectable jobs,

 

labour away beyond the mountain until evening,

retreat in late afternoon to decode our day

and drink his tales of sly grubbing before night.

— Richard Reeve

from And the Pukeko Shall Rule – Rain Poems

 

*

 

To live through the poem, be on the other side of it. Coming back

from Invercargill, turning east from Mataura to Clinton, the sky

 

flood-dark to the north, drove into a first sheet of rain, stopped

at Clinton for a pie as the rain rang down on the asphalt; went on

 

to Balclutha and the rampant Clutha, tree-tangled, brown,

its effluent-gilded floodwaters underneath the bridge

 

purging to the coast; to Milton, where by State Highway 1

pukeko on berms scratched for worms teased out by the rain,

 

behind them, a dirty inland sea slurping at the roadside;

to Henley, brown; across the Taieri, enormous, brown,

 

plastic silage bales bobbing about like ice cubes in soup;

Allanton, Mornington, Warrington; the end of the poem

 

still far off, though I believed it imminent on my arrival,

readying myself, stepped from the wheel into the rain.

*

 

A visit to your frail house. Then apart, following weather

north to its Waihola digs, rain like a boozer entrenched

 

in the lowlands before Maungatua. I consider your advice,

hover between being and being, the poem correcting itself

 

in squalls of creation,  as though a moment might echo

in preemption the pelting of words, glimmer of recognition

 

through the grey, something we labour to get back to,

the syntax at its root, prefigured in a vanishing scene.

 

I simply do not know where to go. Ever looking back,

strain forward, a knowing verb. For you, the way is ethical,

 

political, resigned, cavities everywhere having opened

in the cultivated surfaces that clothe the soaked earth.

I am inclined to agree. And remain subordinate no less

to the highway, its self-important lines, insisting north.

— Richard Reeve

Richard Reeve biography

Richard Reeve lives in Warrington, a coastal satellite township to the north of Dunedin. He has published six collections of poetry, most recently the poetry-sequence, Horse and Sheep (2019), which features as one of a bundle of six chapbooks by various poets published by Maungatua Press. Now a barrister, Reeve holds a Ph.D. from the University of Otago on “New Zealand poetic reality”, and has in the past worked as a literary and humanities editor for Otago University Press.

'The Knack' was previously published in the community newsletter Blueskin News.

Richard Reeve. Image by Marchell Linzey.