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.

The Situation: Ruth Arnison

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

Silent lyrics

If I could sing you a love song I’d voice

not one word,

 

but play a tune over your lips with mine,

whisper a chorus of breaths in your ears.

 

If I could sing you a love song you’d hear

every caress in my silence,

 

fingertips outlining your face with a hum,

lips crooning over the creases on your brow.

 

If I could sing you a love song I’d tell you

without sounding a note,

 

toes entwining in a melody of moments,

fingers gentling in harmony with yours.

 

If I could sing you a love song I’d murmur

not one bar,

 

but scale your body with a rhythmic touch

signing these lyrics.

— Ruth Arnison

Driving to Wanaka’s Festival of Colour

Roadside cabbage trees stand like costumed Polynesian performers

while pylons, hands on hips, feet wide apart, await their zumba class.

 

The Manuka Gorge bends and snakes between shadow and light.

When we meet, slippery when frosty, next 5km, we slow down,

nervous skaters new to the rink.

 

A passing truck tattoos the windscreen with gravel, luckily it’s not

a full piercing. Not so lucky is the April-dead hawk, feathers stark

against the tarmac.

 

Approaching Lawrence a relocated house looks dislocated, stranded

mid muddy paddock, base boards torn away exposing beehive piles.

Sheep gather shade from rusted off-road abandoned stock trucks.

 

Sacks of farm gate sales - pinecones, kindling and horse poo – slouch

against disused school bus shelters. I’m given the ‘don’t even ask’ look

as he notes my eyes stalling on the compost possibilities.

 

Nearing Roxburgh, gorse descends on discarded orchards. Fleecy clouds staple

the sky and sheep yards, patiently waiting to go metric, stand empty. The hills

contort and crease with rocks balancing like tipsy macarons.

 

Max’s recomposed Vivaldi’s Four Seasons carries us onward, bypassing

Cromwell where two years of my life lie drowned beneath Lake Dunstan.

 

Now the hills are honey coloured and paddocks shorn of sheep. Fat hay bales,

stacked like ripening cheeses. Wanaka beckons, enticing us onwards

with further performances.

— Ruth Arnison

Ruth Arnison biography

Ruth Arnison is the afternoon Administrator at Knox College — a student residential college in Dunedin. Her poems have been published in literary journals, anthologies, and ezines in NZ, Australia, the UK and US. She has curated five PoARTry exhibitions in Dunedin with the sixth one, Tools of the Trade, taking place at Mercy Hospital, Dunedin, in March. She’s the editor of Poems in the Waiting Room (NZ), the instigator of Lilliput Libraries, and supplies Dunedin cafes/businesses with free Pocket Poetry cards. Her passion is to take poetry out of books and into neighbourhoods, schools and playgrounds.  With her “step sister’ Sheryl she is responsible for the Poems on Steps project around Dunedin. 

Ruth Arnison. Image provided. 

The Situation: Brian Potiki

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

two breasts of wine, both red

 

give boys words,
not guns -
and girls words, not dolls -
to play with

most important,
fill the luxury hotels;
with poets and
give each a key to
the hotel wine cellar

 

 

an exile thinks of Bluff

 

at the north end of town
the footpaths have
twisted out of shape;
Bluff, if you like,
in its singlet

hillsides bare -
the gorse blooms pale there-
and the streets
(oh my dear!)
hang from the sides
like trousers
on the line

the old cemetery
faces Rakiura straight-on,
it’s only a glance away
but a long way in
memory

i’d be there now, really
if i could - 
but i’m stuck here
in the North Island
for good

—Brian Potiki

Brian Potiki biography

Brian Potiki and his partner Jill Walker. Image Bill Dacker.

Brian is a hardcore koro, with mokopuna spread between Hamilton and Blenheim. He fishes on Lake Rotoehu from a kayak. A musician, storyteller and playwright as well as a poet, his books include Aotearoa: Collected Poems and Songs, and Te Wai Pounamu, Your Music Remembers Me: four South Island history plays & their songs.

.

The Situation: Serie Barford

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

If you were a tiputa

 

if you were a tiputa
I’d steal you from the museum

treat and preserve you

lift soil from your shoulders
with low pressure suction

divert the landslide
that swept you away

swab you with blotting paper
parcelled in acid free tissues

bathe you like a delicate artefact

lay you in humidification chambers
rehydrate your brittle parts

tenderly lacquer your frayed edges
patch gaping wounds with kozo

drape you over my shoulders
slumber within your bark cloth folds

press you against my heart

—Serie Barford

 

tiputa poncho-like garment made from barkcloth

The midwife and the cello

I was perched amongst pīngao
contemplating a paragliding instruction

Don’t look at what you want to miss

when a woman sat beside me

pointed at the lagoon’s mouth
breaking into hazardous surf

crooned   I’m a midwife
sing and play cello

I observed her eloquent hands
sand burying sprawling feet
lines networking a benevolent smile
dreads tied with frayed strips of cotton

remembered you returning home
buoyant with the miracle of birth

the baby with omniscient eyes
you eased into this world

how she lay within your arms

didn’t cry

—Serie Barford

Serie Barford biography

Serie Barford. Image selfie by Serie Barford.

Serie 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. In 2019 Serie attended the launch of the Ukrainian version of her Tapa Talkpoetry collection in Kiev. Anahera Press plans to publish her latest poetry manuscript, Sleeping With Stones. Serie is currently writing poems and stories about the Casualisation of Toto/Blood in the Western Medical System.

The Situation: Fiona Farrell

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

Excerpt from: Myth and Legend

The leader

We met them at a corner
on the road. Black tarmac
buckled over rise and dip,
the tap tap of a donkey’s
hooves.The man walked
as in the illustrations, the
woman rode upon the
donkey’s bones, hand
cupping her belly as if
it were a fig, ripe to
bursting. As in the
illustrations. Torn shirt,
faded blue and threadbare,
her skin cracking under
the sun.

They appeared beyond the
mirage, floating towards
us on water, weightless and
unafraid. And then she gave
a mighty groan, slid from
the donkey’s back and
squatted under a barren tree.

And it was as in the illustrations,
the sleek black circle of the
skull between folds of crimson
flesh, then his ferocious face,
his  shoulders slithering into
dry leaf and his fists already
raised. She howled, called us
to come and see. And it was as
in the illustrations, but without
camel, sheep or the flutter of
white wings.

We recognized him.

Here was our bold leader!

Our salvation!

But it was late and the sun
was sliding, the moon its
pale shadow. So we left
them there, trudged on.

We did not have time to
wait, hoping he might grow.

—Fiona Farrell

Fiona Farrell biography

Fiona Farrell. Image Caroline Davies.

Fiona Farrell’s first novel The Skinny Louie Book won the New Zealand Book Award in 1993. Since then three of her five novels have been shortlisted for the award, while four have been longlisted for the International Dublin IMPAC Award. Her poetry and non-fiction have also received recognition and her plays continue to be among the most frequently performed in Playmarket NZ’s catalogue. Her poetry and fiction appear in many anthologies. She has been a guest at festivals throughout New Zealand and overseas. In 2007 she received the Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction and in 2102, the ONZM for Services to Literature.

The Situation: Albert Wendt

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

And so it is

we want so many things and much

What is real and not? What is the plan?

Our garden is an endless performance
of light and shadow  quick bird and insect palaver

The decisive wisdom of cut basil informs everything
teaches even the black rocks of the back fence to breathe

Blessed are the flowers  herbs and vegetables
Reina has planted in their healing loveliness

The hibiscus blooms want a language to describe their colour
I say the red of fresh blood or birth

A lone monarch butterfly flits from flower to flower
How temporary it all is how fleeting the attention

The boundary palm with the gigantic Afro is a fecund nest
for the squabble of birds that wake us in the mornings

In two weeks of succulent rain and heat our lawn
is a wild scramble of green that wants no limits

Into the breathless blue sky the pohutukawa
in the corner of our back yard stretches and stretches

Invisible in its foliage a warbler weaves a delicate song
I want to capture and remember like I try to hold

all the people I’ve loved or love
as they disappear into the space before memory

Yesterday I pulled up the compost lid
to a buffet of delicious decay and fat worms feasting

Soil  earth  is our return  our last need and answer
beyond addictive reason  fear and desire

Despite all else the day will fulfil its cycle of light and dark
and I’ll continue to want much and take my chances

 —Albert Wendt

 

Incantation

 Over the Waitakere the sky darkens and darkens

In its belly the faint blink of lightning
Barely audible thunder a few seconds later
Then thick rivulets of rain weave down
the bare branches of the kowhai beside him

Isabella  Te Wera  Tehaaora  Hohepa  Ashley  Tahu  Sina 
Caleb  Moengaroa  Amelia  Orlando  Maika
His mokopuna’s names slip  sparkle and burn in
the heart of his tongue  an incantation
which lifts him above the storm

He turns his palms upwards
but the storm doesn’t care to read them
Storms happen and the kowhai loses its leaves
according to the pacing and intention of the seasons
What is there at the end of leafing?

Some of his mokopuna will grow into prophetic readers
some will stumble early into the irresistible darkness
some will help wash and prepare his body for cremation
Outside his umbrella cover he extends his hands
Icy raindrops tattoo his palms but he can’t read the patterns

The caves along the rugged range of his history
 are stacked with carefully labelled files of loved ones
and the intruders he can’t exile into oblivion:
His father in his khaki work clothes is suddenly beside him 
whispering  ‘the storm has no power and will end shortly’

Fundamentalist faith  eyeless analysis and courage had been
his father’s basis of navigation with an all-knowing God
as central pivot of the Star Map he had made them all live by
until he was in the ultimate court and he couldn’t decipher
in speech his Map’s purpose and the dawn of the second coming

His mother has been a decisive eloquence over the sixty years since
she died of cancer and became his most precious presence
Always he has desired her understanding of the heart’s
whispering darkness and her acceptance of the future
and the unhealable pain of separation

The dark above the Waitakere has melted away
The rain has ceased but his hands are numb with cold
The bare branches of the kowhai are sleekly black with wet
The choice is to be here with his mokopuna and parents
The continuation is that of alofa and forgiveness

Isabella  Te Wera  Tehaaora  Hohepa  Ashley  Tahu  Sina 
Caleb  Moengaroa  Amelia  Orlando  Maika
Luisa  Tuaopepe …. the incantation will continue
to shape  soothe and unread his present

—Albert Wendt

Albert Wendt biography

Albert Wendt. Image Raymond Sagapolutele

Maualaivao Albert Wendt is considered internationally as one of Samoa’s, Aotearoa’s, and the Pacific’s most influential novelists and poets. He has published numerous novels, and collections of poetry and short stories. He has won many honours and awards, including New Zealand’s highest honour, the Order of New Zealand.

The Situation: Riemke Ensing

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

A different country

[Not all wounds are visible]

On the Turiwiri road across the river from Dargaville,
we’re in Dalmatia. Dally Alley, 1955.
The grapes are ready
and the vast wooden vats are halfway filled.
Filomena’s in her element.
In her bare feet she is stamping down her harvest.
Filomena, Anastazija. Such regal names for the young girl
from Vrgorac, here more than half a century later
on her piece of promised ‘golden land’. ‘The new Amerika’.
Her arms are bare. She’s hoisted up her floral dress.
There’s no one there to watch and why should she care.
Seven children and a widow now alone here
on this isolated stretch of river swamp.
In no time at all, her face is puce. The colour of wine.
From the open door of her house
that replicates her husband’s father’s house in Kozica,
Tito looks on from his photograph. A hero here too      [Marshall Josip]
enjoying the spirit of this woman so engrossed in her dance,
tenaciously holding on to what she knew before that ship
took her to this out-cast world’s end.

Far, far off you might hear tamburitza
plucking for a different life.

— Riemke Ensing

If only

 

If only death could be like the movies.

 

A large French window. The grand view. A sky forever open and blue.

A barely discernible breeze gently in the fine summer curtains.

A chair, and silently a man’s arm falling in slow motion

A quiet build up of strings we know too, well.

Everything measured and stately

 

as now on this gleaming gondola I imagine you, gliding

down the ‘most beautiful street in the world’.

A mist has wrapped us round and we are veiled in black

as we watch you leave so effortlessly, it seems. The water

stirring its sensual limbs beneath your prow as you become one

with distance and gold and the ambient reflections

eloquent in their multitudinous caress.

— Riemke Ensing

Riemke Ensing biography

Riemke Ensing. Image James Ensing-Trussell.

Riemke Ensing has had 12-plus books of poetry published, including Talking Pictures – selected poems, published by HeadworX. Her volume Storm Warning – after McCahon was set to music by Alex van den Broek (who has used several of her poems for his compositions) and premiered at the Christchurch Word Festival 2014.

She has collaborated with several craft printers in the production of her work. These include Beth Serjeant (The Visionary and Black ) Tara McLeod of The Pear Tree Press, John Holmes of The Frayed Frisket Press and Ronald Holloway of the Griffin Press. 'A different country’, by The Pear Tree Press, has been handset and printed for Tara McLeod’s 8 Poems series and is forthcoming as a publication. An earlier version of 'If only’, was hand-set and published by Tara McLeod of The Pear Tree Press in 2017.

In 2012, Riemke Ensing received the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award, a prize given biennially in recognition of a distinguished contribution to New Zealand poetry.

The Situation: James Norcliffe

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

Wolf Light

 

L’heure entre chien et loup

 

1

 

Wolf light: between your

out-breath and your in-breath;

your in-breath and your-out breath,

the stasis mimicking the real thing.

 

2

 

The time of fading

bees and dying ladybirds.

 

When the drone of distant motorways

drowns chittering and buzz:

the grey time where

all noise becomes white.

 

3

 

The little ones bring us stories.

They want us to read to them,

to embroider the bright illustrations

and make them even brighter.

 

How can we resist?

Lying is in our blood.

 

4

 

Buzz, drone, lies

and wolf light and after

wolf light: darkness.

After darkness: darkness

 

— James Norcliffe

 

The man who turned himself into a gun

 

 

At first he thought bullets;

then he expressed them.

 

He became gun-metal grey,

cold to the touch.

 

He wanted to press himself

into evil’s shoulder, be cradled there.

 

He wanted to be trained in evil’s grip,

evil’s telescopic sight in his sight.

 

Above all he wanted evil’s finger feeling for,

feathering, depressing his progressive trigger.

 

He was sleek, he was balanced:

no longer flesh, no longer sentient,

 

weighted,

then weightless

 

mechanically perfect,

perfectly mechanical.

 

— James Norcliffe

James Norcliffe biography

James Norcliffe. Image provided. 

James Norcliffe has published several collections of poetry and many novels for young people. His most recent poetry collection is Deadpan, published last year by Otago University Press. With Michelle Elvy and Frankie McMillan he edited Bonsai;(Canterbury University Press,) New Zealand’s first major collection of flash and short fiction, and this year with Michelle Elvy and Paula Morris, Ko Aotearoa Tātou — We Are New Zealand;(Otago University Press), an anthology celebrating diversity in New Zealand / Aotearoa.

The Situation: Diane Brown

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

Artefact

Joanna Paul's collection waiting, silent
for years in the revolving bookcase in the hall;
always new, apparently more relevant voices
to be reckoned with, but Paula's Wild Honey
draws like love poems back into the room.
It's early morning, I'm sitting on the couch
in the bay window when a small note
slips out from the pages, a love poem perhaps.

Alas, my writing: Please wait/ I am at UBS
getting some books/ can get lift to/work/me/3.05.
A life I don't have any more, but what job did I
ever have that started after three? No waitress
or barmaid. And who am I telling to wait? No
name, no hearts or kisses? My customary plainness,
a please, but is it a polite or a begging please?
My husband, in true biographer style,

interrogates the note. ‘I'm not so sure it's your writing,
or your life, where would you have left such a note?’
And again, ‘What work? It doesn't make sense,
you're not one to write specific times. Maybe the book
was second hand?’ He turns to the first page,
$15 written in pencil. 7/11j below it. Another mystery.
On a mid-week cloudy, spring day, my past, my story,
slipping out of my hands, like love poems.

— Diane Brown

Finding Yourself on the Other Side

— from Every Now and Then I Have Another Child

Haven't you sometimes discovered yourself teetering
on the edge of a lake or skyscraper with no memory
of how you got there? And yet you know it's not dementia,
it’s more like you've slipped into another life, running
            on a parallel track

one layer behind. In that life, I wander the streets
of my newly alienated city looking for the man who offered
to take the baby from the hotel to a place of safety,
even though he was a stranger to me. Perhaps he could see
            I was not up to mothering.

Across the square, their hands twitching on batons, police
stand by watching the homeless rioting. An old-fashioned
fire engine drives onto the footpath heading towards me.
 ‘Out of the fucking way, lady,’ the fireman yells. I jump sideways.
            ‘Watch out for my baby,’ I say,

patting her back, in the timeless way of a mother, although
I've forgotten the details of her birth. But we all feel that, don't we,
when handed a white-wrapped bundle the midwife says belongs
to you now and forever. A lie. There comes a time they must slip
            from your grasp.

— Diane Brown

Diane Brown biography

Diane Brown. Image Philip Temple

Diane Brown is a novelist, memoirist, and poet who runs her own creative writing school, Creative Writing Dunedin. Her publications include two collections of poetry - Before The Divorce We Go To Disneyland, and Learning to Lie Together; a novel, If The Tongue Fits, and verse novel, Eight Stages of Grace, a travel memoir, Liars and Lovers, a prose/poetic memoir, Here Comes Another Vital Moment and a poetic family memoir, Taking My Mother To The Opera. Her latest book is a long poetic narrative, Every Now and Then I Have Another Child, Otago University Press, 2020.

In 2013 she was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to writing and education. She lives in Dunedin with her husband, author Philip Temple.

The Situation: Bernadette Hall

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

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.

The Situation: Mary Macpherson

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

Begin

i never know how to begin without / feeling dread in my heart / never know whether to wish

for wellness / or if i want an answer / well / i want one but not that one / never know what to

hope for / for you / hope is a winking word/ do you trust i have your interests at heart? / what

would be your hope? / freedom from people like me? / how could i know? / i wish i could ask

/ an official before talks begin / wish is the well i fall in

— Mary Macpherson

Need

The yellow leaf staring from our tiny lawn.

Our belief it’s a gift from the cat, and that gifts

exist in cat consciousness. Our need to know.

Our imaginary tree, deep in other trees, its leaves

drifting to inky rot. Our x-ray of night through which

a hunter travels, emitting delicate cries. The leaf we know

as Pseudopanax, its tissue drying under a billowing sky.

Our need to name. Our internet telling us it’s how

mothers teach their young to hunt. How a mother brings

bounty and makes it visible. Certain behaviourists

who say it’s a message to get up and play. Or is it care?

About us? Our need opening curtains

to a horse on the lawn.

— Mary Macpherson

Mary Macpherson biography

Mary Mcpherson. Image Peter Black.

Mary Macpherson is a Wellington poet and photographer. Her first poetry collection ‘Social Media’ was published in 2019 by The Cuba Press.

The Situation: Murray Edmond

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

Back On The Night Shift

while you were away

the gentleman from Hong Kong came by

with the airline pilot’s wife

to enjoy themselves together

in your bed

they said you wouldn’t mind

so I let them in

and the waitress who occupies the lean-to

she was unaccountably seized

by a pain of unlocatable dimension

so they had to cut her open

but inside all looked

normal

and they stitched her up again

meanwhile a poet dressed like a dandy

with a wooden apple box

and a typewriter inside

as well as

a spare pair of knickers

took up residence in the sitting room

now he’s gone

the ambience was not to

his melancholy taste

I left my room untidy

so when you brought your lover there

there was reason for your disappointment

and the vegetable coop

that occupies the garage

is dwindling in its membership

as well as schism-ed in its politics

which has left a lot of leaves

lying on the floor

how beautiful they are

there’s nothing in my head

not even a low-pitched mysterious hum

which would be welcome

the names of things I use

they’ve all been borrowed

from the bank

and tomorrow

I have to give them back

ring me if you must

or better a note left on the kitchen table

the circumstances that we met in

were quite beyond description

I’ve even cause for memory

to raise its gaudy flag

here put your hand upon the mattress

feel the spring

you know how it is

it’s been years since

everything

the helicopter just flew over

I waved but it was too dark to capture

its attention

— Murray Edmond

Foolish Things

like the smell of a horse
or maybe worse

it was fear
I’m afraid to say

made me smell that way
but oh the relief

when the fear galloped away
to god knows where

where does fear
go when it’s gone

it’s gone
but with grief

not the same thing
the ghost of it clings

— Murray Edmond

Murray Edmond biography

Murray Edmond. Image by Joanna Forsberg.

Murray Edmond: lives in Glen Eden, Auckland. Poet (14 books, Shaggy Magpie Songs, 2015 and Back Before You Know, 2019); critic (Then It Was Now Again: Selected Critical Writing, 2014); fiction-writer (Strait Men and Other Tales, 2015); editor, Ka Mate Ka Ora ; dramaturge for Indian Ink Theatre.