Poetry by Iain Lonie

During the recent Dunedin Writers Festival Otago University Press launched the large and handsome A Place To Go On From: The Collected Poems of Iain Lonie, edited by David Howard. Lonie, who worked in the Classics Department at Otago University, was an internationally respected medical historian, and died in Dunedin in 1988. My cover note for the volume touched briefly on my respect for his work:

I can’t imagine how we could over estimate just how much we owe to David Howard for this superb edition of Iain Lonie’s poems. Just as I, for one, can’t sidestep a certain shame at not realising until now how fine and important a writer Lonie was. He brought to his poetry the precision and clarity and intellectual force of a gifted classical scholar. He was patiently indifferent to passing fashions, with his own more enduring touchstones. And in a remarkable fidelity to the tides of his productive but troubled life, he wrote a body of poems on love and grief and the searing currents of remembrance that, in New Zealand writing, stands alone.

There’s so much more to be said about Lonie, and that is sure to be said now that this edition places him back among us. There’s a particular aptness too in my now being able to put a few of his poems on the National Library website. I began this laureate blog a couple of years ago with a poem of Allen Curnow’s, a tribute to the New Zealand poet who matters most to me. So how fitting that I end with the poet whose A Place To Go On From seems to me as significant as any single volume since Curnow’s own selected poems. As good a page as any to sign off on.

– Vincent O'Sullivan

---

Iain Lonie.

Unattended crossing ahead

Some poems have no plan:
you simply have to be there to catch
the express when it whooshes through
and there’s no timetable.

Oh they’re not at all
like embroidery laid aside
taut in its drumlike frame
and awaiting a meditative hour.

Chance is all against them
they are unlikely as this love—
who knows when we’ll meet again?
And it’s not that we don’t want to—

but then the children, the grave demands
of time and place, our health even—
the years compacting around our roots—
perhaps it’ll always be like this?

Oh no, we say, we simply can’t!
seeing it all so clearly:
and yet we’re left breathless
standing here at the dusty crossing

while the red light bobs away
and the bell’s clang chokes in a country silence
thinking, I might have been on that train
thinking, it could have killed me.

Collection day

I have not had the heart
to throw out these shoes, and so they lie
still mud-caked, at the bottom of a tin trunk.

Shoes should stand in neat pairs, or be walked in.
These lying in their bent shapes are like fragments
a boy breaks out from the context of a cliff

and stores in a box along with other stones
coins, cartridge cases, and other things labelled
with days and places, their native magic forgotten.

Death comes to all of us, watery eyed
trailing his black plastic bag and wanting things:
I’ve seen whole shopsfull of cracked shoes, in their pairs.

But today, woken early, just before dawn
by rain flung hard against the side of the house
I am not thinking of all that: today

we are going to take that famous walk
along the cliffs where the difficult path
lies deep in cowdung between the iron gates

past the cottage abandoned to the sea’s encroachment
down the dene, and over the little bridge
then up again to the cliffs on the other side

where, if we are lucky, we shall just see
parting through the mist, the castle’s twin towers
far to the north, and unattainable.

Crusoe's canoe

for Elizabeth Smither

1

With Everyman his owne Shipwright in one hand
this rusted chisel in the other, I pick up
the principles as I go
                                           (I’m gouging a lot of trees)
We must start with detail
                                           (I’m wasting a lot of time)
A treenail’s made from trees, that’s why
it’s called a treenail. Or because it holds
trees together
                              (I get things half right).
First fashion your treenail: everything
is in the detail: for servants of the Lord
this holds in carnal matters: carpentry
child-begetting, the chapel’s business.
From one treenail another will come
from many treenails a floatable canoe

(I am making a sensible advancement).

2

But first you must
open your tree
up delicately
                          and trees
are close things
                          clinging
like one flesh, like
the firmaments
of earth and water
unwilling to be flayed
into dripping slabs.
                                        Think:
your chisel’s made
a new surface, displayed
its whiteness to the light.

The Lord’s work, that.
Or a butcher’s.

3

Do nothing for a bit: listen to the surf
and think hard about trees: how, left alone
they turn themselves into banana shapes, or how
they hold a man’s curve like a hammock, ride
the big winds without going under.
Think then of canoes, how stem and prow
hold themselves together like hands in prayer:
how they’ll always want to be
splaying themselves back into trees again
lying horizontal under the heavy sands

and sending up the green shoots vertical.

4

I see something of the art, it has more
of woman’s witchcraft than it has of detail
a thinking yourself into things. The art
is to take trees apart in so gentle a way
that they’ll hold themselves together for you
in a different shape, the living vessel
that bounces on the waves. It’s not about detail—
it’s more like prayer. You have to ask for the shape.
It’s more like love. You have to pity the tree.
It’s more like grief. You have to let things die
in their own gentle way

to sail off from the island.

Cover image: The Centurion’s Servant (1914), Stanley Spencer, oil on canvas, © Tate, London. Book designed and typeset by Damian Love.

Voices

Long after the sun had gone
three poets sat on, talking.

The first said:
though not a religious man
I see that wrong we do ourselves
and the earth, sometimes righted by a natural good.
What else is there worth speaking of?

The second said:
though not a religious man
I hear sometimes voices penned in things
claim utterance such as makes the light
ripple out eastward over folded hills.

The third said:
though not a religious man
I think that if I shouted loud enough
the sound would not travel out forever
but find some foreign shore to break against.

And darkness fell
in its silent wave upon
all choices right and wrong;
upon the cities and the hills
silence upon silence.

The house of childhood

I watched you walk along that mile of beach
to the house at the end of the beach

the home I’d pointed out, the house of childhood.
How well I remembered the garden, its grey stone wall
the stone rest in the garden, overlooking the sea.

And so you set off bravely, to walk that mile
staggering now and then in the sand that ran to you until
the sun blazed overhead, to the right the sea shimmered
I watched you walking that mile, your figure grew smaller and smaller.

Out of the sea’s shimmer came the faint crying
of voices subdued by the sea and the view.
I remembered the stone rest, the thyme scent of the garden
and beyond the stone wall, the sea splashing in the evening.

I pointed all this out to you, this house of my childhood
and watched you set off towards it, staggering slightly
not looking back, growing smaller and smaller
until you passed into the sand, into the stone wall

and under the garden, the earth of the garden, under the sea.

---

The National Library thanks Otago University Press for their assistance in the preparation of this blog post.

Poetry by Rhian Gallagher

When Rhian Gallagher returned from almost two decades out of the country, and won the NZ Post Award in 2011, it seemed to me that there was a perceptible addition to what went on in our poetry. Here was a freshly attentive linguistic edge, a direct sensual intensity, a focus and gutsiness in writing of memory and regret, that seemed just that bit different from what any other writer here was doing. One reviewer called her poems ‘assiduously polished’, another picked up on ‘the visceral strength of her language’. What I admired then I find there again to admire in these unpublished poems. I’m glad my almost last laureate blog becomes the forum to display them.

– Vincent O’Sullivan

Photo courtesy of Rhian Gallagher.

A Haunt that the Thistledown Bore

Seacliff

It was a warm wind day,
no one was at home in the asylum,
the thistledown woke from its dream

shocked by the electric sun
the armour plate of leaves turned gray

out of those ragged grave clothes
the feathery lightness rose,

emerged through broken crowns
like breathless children.

*     *     *     *

A faint depression in the land,
blurred with the years,
where the misery mansion stood –

four and a half million bricks, one hundred and sixty foot tower.

Those who were sent or came
lost their names at the gate.

The voiceless ones among us
as if the earth gave them away
and whatever was left became air.

*     *     *     *

Above the walls and the bars and the slips

all afternoon the thistledown flew
hatching like a thousand butterflies,
each with a small ghost face.

The wings and the seed, how life
makes a start and an end,
how souls depart

some held on to a friend
or huddled in groups on briar,
some floated free alone

above the walls, above the bars and the slips.

Note: Misery Mansion is taken from the book title Misery Mansion: Grim Tales of New Zealand Asylums by Arthur Sainsbury (self published 1946)

An Age of Windows

London

I’d left the clarity behind, the blue,
the startling light exchanged for days
that felt like versions of the night
when autumn blew and winter
drew its blanketing across the rooflines.

First east then west then north again,
a sort of bedsit crawl. The streets to ask
is this home, here or here?
London stretched the other side of any wall,
it was the sea that Shelley heard,
fierce, aquatic London.

Those houses were in disarray, each room
with small repair: the windows gave
damp green, the foxes making fight and play,
the gaps of sky, the chimney stacks.
To learn there was an animal of light
rearranging shadows, a single tree

with all of aching autumn in display.
Gulls gathered on the bricked-in shore
to lift away and leave their flight-lines on the air.
Where dwelling dwelt, inside to out,
I’m numbered by the windows I have known.

Learning to Read

Your friends go forward
writing stories. Sunlight
sails through the chalk dust.
This is your timeless time. The alphabet
lives on the blackboard’s brow
– each letter has a big brother
or a big sister.

Miss Breen can see
there’s some far place in you.
Fantail stutters from the window tree.
You stand beside the island of her desk.
Your friends are busy;
even the tadpoles are working themselves
out and into frogs.

You can’t tell what you see
– the words are shapes
and the schoolroom’s paused.
Bright crayoned houses
pinned to the wall; the piano that waits
to be woken with a touch.
All of the doors that will open.

Her finger steers
crossing the page – you tilt
your voice in reply; through your held back days
you are her echo.
The smell of Miss Breen. The story
is everything.

Small Bird Without a Sky

She flew in through an open door
or some gap that I can’t see
and now a life in danger
– small bird without a sky.

Corralled inside the corridor
she flutters to a pane
that falsifies the world,
                      the tree, the cloud.
The walls she has no map for.

Free her, shoo her...
how she claims me
– bright beaded eye, feather unto skin
creature to creature –
this rapid, rapid beating.

The City

The city had a breath, inlaid a glaze on pavements
deepening the features of old stone. The buildings
recreating from their daylight face
beams and haloes
melded with the currents. A busker
and the bird-like note of flute, a beggar
held a card for you to read;
and from the bridge a scent of distance,
Big Ben tolled, gulls gathered up their shadows
across the shiny plane, each long chime
beat towards a headline.

The hovering of crane shafts, a pleading
outstretched hand, the city with an ache
and moving at a sprawl; that decade that you knew
marchers snaked along the Strand,
a violent blue: Thatcher’s wars,
the bloody Poll Tax, too many bomb scares.
All that news leaching into pores of stone,
became another chapter in the air. The city
peeling and re-peeling like the plane trees
casting skin, hunting with their roots
through layered clay.

You walked and walked
inside the never-ending winter¬ – your destination
in delay to ripple with a crowd and then another
as if the night were pushing from below,
with a sequence of small nudges, anticipation gained
and flowered into Soho; pouting boys and boys
in leather, where a hidden river flowed,
below the street, strobes cast a rainbow
on the floor that mixed the beat –
‘Native Love’, ‘It’s a Sin’ and ‘The Hills of Kathmandu’
– you could be a stranger or a friend,
a body making heat till 4am.

Now and then you went to Heaven*;
it was the prelude that you loved
and after love the night bus
staged its crawl across the city;
the Hackney estate you called home,
your keys cocked in your palm.

Note: Heaven is a gay nightclub in London

The Wahine Storm

Let out of school early
we cut through the paddocks for home
and the wind came, it grew
like an animal, our voices drowned in the roar,
clods flew up from their bed,
the little ones got scared.
We tried to keep our heads above the air,
a sheep lorry went past on a lean
then my dad swooped in from nowhere
pulling me out of the wind, ‘thank God’ he said.

*     *     *     *

The wind kept coming for more, the shed roof
sailed over the lawn, everywhere was drag and claw,
it felt like our house might surrender.
Our faces made strange in candlelight,
the transistor voice was our centre, the ferry
was the size of a street. ‘These night prayers,’
mum said, ‘are given up for the rescue’.
But wasn’t God steering the storm?
A horn blew, a judder, behind the window
where I lay, chilled by the air waves.
The sea would never be the same
                                 and the people, the people.

His Parting Gift

I wheel you into the garden and the sunlit air
beyond the glass where day on day your stare is cast.
A gap between the trees, there are the mountains,
the horizon sleeps against your knees.

*     *     *     *

The birds about us jest at spring
but what of it is reaching you? Memory gone,
your talk’s away, amplifies remembering in me
till the garden is the one before
– long rows you stooped and tended.

Your work is done – who loved to dance
and taught us how to make food grow.
In your bent and buckled hands
you show the difference of life.

*     *     *     *

Out to sea in a sea of air –
who’s provider? Am I the elder?
– every breath becomes a flower,
I prattle like a girl beside your chair.

*     *     *     *

A vigil kept across the night, what matters most
we hardly know – oblivion, the outmost zone –
you’re being fetched without a thing in hand.

The ships of all your life are passing
and there are stars to see you out, to toil and dance
upon the decks. You were a child
                                                       though we forget.

Poetry by Peter Belton

W.H. Auden’s ‘Musee des beaux Arts’ is probably the best known poem that takes a painting as its starting point, much as Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’ imagines a painting that sparks a fiction. The Australian poet Peter Steele wrote a fine book that drew on a visual gallery, and of course Peter Porter wrote several splendid poems that come into that category rather forbiddingly described in literary dictionaries as ‘ekphrasis’. As far as I know, such poems are thin on the ground in New Zealand writing, with Hone Tuwhare’s poem about a Ralph Hotere painting certainly the best known. More recently, Anna Jackson has a good one that takes off from Browning’s Duchess. But what a delight then to come across Peter Belton’s ‘Talking with Painters’, an on-going series written by a practising artist and teacher at the Southern Institute of Technology in Invercargill. Some of these will be published later in the year, but in the meantime a coup to offer a number of them here on the Laureate blog, as well as some of Peter’s images. I was struck by the imaginative flair and range of their engaging with artists as well as their works, and by how deftly an informed eye is so at home with the challenges of another craft.

– Vincent O'Sullivan

---

Rembrandt’s Mirror

All said and done, they left the bankrupt with only a
mirror which shattered anyway through his distraction
collapsing hours spent in half-light before a window of white canvas
into a stare. So much time to think.

Thick with the dusty stuff of pigment let him paint
an inch thick; for we must come to this. Saskia with blood in
her mouth. Geertje’s exhausted eyes puzzled with weeping and
Hendrickje lifting her shift; lowering her eyes.

Stand Tapies against the wall and shoot him

Would he be the Master of Analogy through simulation?
Must he, needs be, create yet another allusion without irony
or reflection to the timeless wall?

Blood sticks to walls and bullet strikes suck punches like offended mouths.
Strike me with stuff. Scratch me artfully. Pastry bits onto me.
Beyond reflection? Maybe.

Peter Belton, My Shadow before the Torrent (2013), Mixed oil media on board, 770 x 900mm

De Kooning

The hand slips, mind.
Does glimpsing slip the eye?
Words fail on our lips.
Do we sense the lie?
Do we hear then? Do blind men see?
Or has all meaning passed us by?

The Curator sings his lament

an elegy to holding and keeping

Is a palimpsest a sideways swipe at being again?
An erasure of impression with another, another?

A sideways swipe after the fact when folding follows
collapse into messiness; abjected, altered, muted?

Another footfall becomes a sediment to be peeled, revealed
and, bye and bye, a gouge to bleed by.

Embed the press of palimpsest; straw into lead Mr. Kiefer
and lay your weary impressions edge to edge.

Peter Belton, Sunset: Foveaux Coast (2014), Mixed oil media and Livingstone marl on board, 900 x1100mm

no title and no thing

So everything signifies and Kurt Schwitters lugs his valise
laden to the next trainstop. Ambleside from Hanover.
Handover hands thick with worrying paste and patches.
Tickets from Neverwas to Maybe and Stumbledown
revealed in the small nervousness of torchlight.

On Kitaj’s Suicide

Kitaj hunted by the Jew
within and over his shoulder
watching the crackling air.
Behind.

Kitaj hunted no rest for bodies
over there, beside his shoulder
burdened with pointy fear.
Behind.

Kitaj - just behind us now
slipped his burden from shoulder
to shoulder. Our shoulders
stand. Behind.

Peter Belton, Prospecting (2015), Mixed oil media and Livingstone marl on board, 770 x 900mm

How might it be? (for Johannes Vermeer)

Spinoza, the lens grinder shaved pixels from his looking glass;
bending refractions in order to magnify.
It was, as his friend the painter noted, about selection
so that we might reflect upon our seeing
more clearly: pearls of light to be discovered dancing
in the tapestry of the moment.

A Light Bright Beach

Drawing across my eyes,
dexter and sinister switching
so like a white horse’s tail
to keep the moment away;
and voices rolled
into the wash of stones.

Peter Belton, Flying Man (2010), Oil media with encaustic, 300 x 600mm

1914: An Old Photograph from Berlin

Death Maiden.
I see you wave.
Your hand in his arm
to arm his smile.
Compliant, bemused boy
short stepping not so sure of
the weight of rifle
upon his shoulder.

Tode Madchen.
Your face gripped thin
lipped with resolve your eyes
away out there.
It is an old photograph. Flat toned and
airless he marches a
plucked flower button-
holed to his heart.

Death Maiden.
Your blouse so white.
There are holes; perforations in your
lace like a file of bullet strikes
about to poppy froth.
He marches. He is a frozen moment.
Her white arm upraised;
shot clean with holes.

Call for nominations

Kia hiwa ra!
Kia hiwa ra!

The National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa is seeking nominations for the New Zealand Poet Laureate Award.

Poetry is a quintessential part of New Zealand art and culture, and through the New Zealand Poet Laureate Award the government acknowledges the value that New Zealanders place on poetry as a part of our national identity.

The Chief Librarian of the Alexander Turnbull Library will appoint the New Zealand Poet Laureate after reviewing nominations and seeking advice from the New Zealand Poet Laureate Advisory Group.

Nominees must have made an outstanding contribution to New Zealand poetry, and be an accomplished and highly regarded poet. They must also be a strong advocate for poetry, and be able to fulfil the public role required of a Poet Laureate, which includes engaging with a wide range of people and inspiring New Zealanders to read and write poetry.

• Download the nomination form (docx, 55KB)
• Download the background information (docx, 57KB)

Nominations close on Monday, 6 July.

Candidates must currently reside in New Zealand.

The term of appointment for the next Poet Laureate will run until 30 June 2017.

Please send your nomination to Eva.Weber@dia.govt.nz.

Email is preferred, but you can also mail your nomination to:

Alexander Turnbull Library
Attention New Zealand Poet Laureate Award
PO Box 12349
Wellington

Enquiries about the New Zealand Poet Laureate Award can be sent to Peter.Ireland@dia.govt.nz.

Persecuted poets worldwide

Last week, as we celebrated International Poetry Day, PEN International posted this less celebratory but essential reading.

Commemorating the Armenian Genocide

Among the numerous commemorative events and publications for Gallipoli, it is easy to overlook that other centenary, the genocide of the 'Armenian tragedy'. As well as much else, it was also a 'cultural cleansing', and many writers and artists were among the victims. I'm very grateful to David Howard for putting together this blog, honouring Armenian poetry, and reminding us of what we often don't remember when 'Remembrance' is selective.

– Vincent O'Sullivan

Armenians are marched to a nearby prison in Mezireh by armed Turkish soldiers. April 1915. From the diary of Maria Jacobsen.

It is a century since the governing party of the Ottoman Empire, the Committee of Union and Progress, initiated the Armenian Genocide. Inspired by an ideology, Pan-Turianism, that promoted an exclusively Turkish empire stretching from Anatolia to Central Asia, the ‘Young Turks’ directed the machinery of the state against its Armenian citizens; abductions, murders, and forced marches into exile reduced the Armenian population from 2,133,190 (1914) to around 387,800 (1922). In parts of Western Anatolia Armenians were not allowed to speak their own language except when reciting prayers. It is an exaggeration to claim that the four poems below, in translations by Diana Der-Hovanessian, are akin to prayers, however they may serve a similar purpose: to say, ‘We are still here, waiting to be heard.’

All translations are by Diana Der-Hovanessian and are used by permission

– David Howard

Missak Medzarents (1886-1908)

With an ear trained by the folk poetry of his native Western Armenia, Medzarents is regarded (with Vaclav Derian) as the most musical of Armenian poets. Diana Der-Hovanessian translates his work ‘with trepidation and admiration.’ Like Derian, he died early from tuberculosis.

My death

(the children talk to each other about it)

– Now they pass by the village spring.
– Now they pass by the vineyard.
– Now they’re at the graveyard.
– Now they bury him.
– Now the blessing is read. Does he hear it?
– No. He hears nothing.
– Now he doesn’t see either.
– Now he no longer can swallow his spit.
– Now he can’t shout.
– Now he crumbles to nothing.
– Now they come back.
– Now he’s left alone.
– Now he’ll never come back again.
– Now he’ll never come back again.
– Now he’ll never come back again.

(1907)

Daniel Varoujan (1884-1915)

In 1914 Varoujan co-founded the literary group Mehian to promote ‘the Armenian spirit’. As a cultural leader he was one of the first to be deported on Red Sunday, 24 April 1915; after a forced march, he was murdered on 26 August 1915.

Coming home

We’re coming home tonight, singing together,
coming home by white moonlight.
Oh village houses, oh you village houses
wake up all the dogs
in all the yards.
wake up all the wells and fountains
and let them bubble up to fill our pitchers.
We’ve brought home flowers,
flowers for the holidays. And we’re singing.
We come singing of love.
We’re coming by the mountain road,
houses, oh, you houses.
Open the gates now as the oxen
horns push them in.
Let the ovens’ smoke rise
to mingle with the blue smoke
of the roofs.
And you young wives of the houses,
you shy “harser” with new baby boys,
bring milk in blue, clay pitchers.
we’re coming home.

(published 1921)

Vahan Derian (1885-1920)

Derian was born in an Armenian village that is now part of Georgia. An early friend of Maxim Gorky, with whom he edited an anthology of Armenian literature, after the Russian revolution he led the Armenian sector. In 1918 he accompanied Trotsky to the conference at Brest-Litovsk. Two years later he died of tuberculosis.

My work was light and full of humor

My work was light and full of humor.
It was my life that was so hard,
unwieldy, silent, helpless,
homeless, wandering and bleak.

My soul in its bright fever reached
out to a boundless world.
My art was bright; my deep faith jovial.
It was my life that was dark.

(1919)

Vahan Tekeyan (1878-1948)

Vahan Tekeyan was travelling abroad when his colleagues were seized. Experiencing survivor guilt, through poetry he tried to make a spiritual home while exiled in Egypt, where he was politically active as a newspaper editor, teacher, and social worker.

‘The evil done to us by man and by you, God, will be forgotten and not mentioned again when we can sing and love, unchained as free men.’

To the Armenian nation

I know it. Only too well. You don’t need this.
But here, again, I give myself to you,
page by page. Forgive this useless gift.
What can you do with poems? They are not food.

Let the adolescent write himself out. That’s allowed.
But what about the grown man who insists
on stringing lines and meters to hang
on them the dark lanterns of his heart?

I know you don’t expect anything, you never have.
Except the unexpressable tribulation
of your children staying yours.

But take these away. To discard. To forget –
these pieces of a heart, worn out
with the burden of burdening you.

(1925)

---

Worldwide reading in commemoration of the 100th anniversary

The international literature festival berlin (ilb) and the Lepsiushaus Potsdam are calling for a worldwide reading on 21 April 2015 – the day that marks 100 years since the beginning of the Armenian Genocide.

Several hundred Armenian intellectuals – poets, musicians, parliamentary representatives and members of the clergy – were arrested in Constantinople (today Istanbul) on 24 April 1915, and deported to the Turkish interior where most of them were murdered. It was the start of a crime against humanity. The extermination of the Armenians during World War One was the first systematically planned and executed genocide of modern times.

A great number of Armenian voices were silenced in 1915 and in the years thereafter. Since then, others have become loud and have spoken out against forgetting, among them an increasing number of voices from the democratic Turkish civil society. In remembrance of the victims and in association with the demand for international recognition of the genocide, we are calling for a worldwide reading on 21 April 2015, with literary texts from Armenian authors, among them Varujan Vosganian, Zabel Yesayan, Siamanto, Daniel Varujan, Krikor Zohrab, Rupen Sevag, Komitas, Yeghishe Charents, William Saroyan, Hovhannes Shiraz, Paruyr Sevak, Hakop Mntsuri, Silva Kaputikian and Hrant Dink.

– Lepsiushaus Potsdam

More information about the venues and times of the worldwide reading (German)

Poetry by John Dennison

This week Auckland University Press publishes Otherwise, a first book of poems from John Dennison, which is also to be launched in the UK by Carcanet Press. For me, Dennison has been among the most challenging figures in our poetry for quite some time. He frankly takes on what most of us shy clear of, as he brings rare attention to what the formal demands of poetry still offer. His work lays claim to the Curnow tradition of ‘ordinary events’ doubling as philosophical occasions, to language experienced as adventure and aesthetic expanse. I’m grateful to AUP for allowing the blog to offer this selection.

– Vincent O’Sullivan

Hear John read "There’s one straight out of the box" at Turbine

Later this year Oxford University Press is bringing out John’s Seamus Heaney and the Adequacy of Poetry.

Hear Seamus Heaney read 11 of his poems

John Dennison. Photo by Robert Cross.

To keep warm inside

Under the bitter yoke
of these red untempered mornings,

steer the car like a life raft
down Cumberland to this

crystal palace, this sometime church.
Tiles, and the wall of light

steaming across the variegated
blues of February.

The liquid aisles, lightly ushering,
rope the depth beneath,

declining order: fast,
medium, slow; aquajoggers

descend and return
shallow from deep. Receive

the goggled epiphany: limbs
flaying out the imagined ellipse, torsos

strapped just buoyant below the surface
striving for peace or perfection;

in Dunedin—steamed open like a cockle
this morning in mid-July.

---

Sleepers

Friends decide to separate. After,
we enter the clearing, retrace our steps. A fine
rain settles, and everything is un-
accountably beautiful, unaccountable,
being not promised. Promise—it hung
in the air over the improvised picnic table,
between the opened faces; we nearly sang.
Depressions in the grass, the shape of laughter.
All that time the lines lay, unconverging,
fiercely gauged off each other, overgrown in the dirt—
now ripped out like spade-struck fencing wire,
turf turned and agape the length of the clearing.
We look down. Gutted for you, mate.
And there, unrotted, their pitch glinting, the sleepers.

---

Tawa

Thinly yellow, and fibrous in the heat,
fennel is legion, rank beside the lines,
which shimmer, robing the air in a ferrous stink.
Flowchart rampant! The stalk, and then the branchings,
mnemonic of throughput and outcome, of progress
and its needling filiform leaf, the scent so hard
to shake. Do not consider the flowers, the seed
falling across the sleepers. There, sudden
between the tracks, a penetrative, metro-
nomic knocking from a torso-like box,
locked and knocking in the valley of your childhood.
O dark kernel, o burr of ambition,
remember the boy in his switch-flicking trance
in love not with the light, but with the switching.

---

House concert in the shadowlands

For Will and Alison

All around, his guitar, like a windfall pear
dark-centred and the sweetness giving over,
dark as the bourbon which rises in the jar
the colour of pollo en mole poblano,
dark loamy as the eyes of Eden
your astonishing daughter, friends.
And won’t this come again, won’t
we again pause and lift our heads
to the note rising, and us with it?
O Mary Ursula Bethell, you—
gardening—made poetry on your knees!
How truly found are the lilies
you held out for, how sharp-scented,
how blooming good are they?

---

Lone Kauri (reprise)

So take for starters the surge-black fissure,
the waves which register the lunatic sense
it is all well beyond us. Our flooded nature

rages at the dying light, measures
its measures down some lone goat-track,
works up some incorrigible reprise

on grace, etc., a tuning fork
striking itself out of true on the table
of the elements. But blow, burn, break

and be done with it: baptism will
look like this, the flailing, the flensing of waves
and the breath knocked into you, the haul

that finds you first-footing land, brings
the morning. Forgive my making light of
the glass half-empty and you weighing up the dregs;

but I will get up like a love-cast father
awakening to children’s voices, the night-
time true underfoot, who hears their laughter

and finds, at the unclosed door, the seam of light.

---

As Kingfishers Catch Fire

By Gerard Manley Hopkins

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —
Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.

---

In Memoriam: VII

By Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Dark house, by which once more I stand
      Here in the long unlovely street,
      Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,

A hand that can be clasp'd no more—
      Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
      And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.

He is not here; but far away
      The noise of life begins again,
      And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.

---

Name

By Mary Ursula Bethell

Solitary, after all, were the gardener,
But for the accompaniment of words.

In this my matutinal seclusion
Sights, sounds, and scents, all, all agree to please.
Comely the smile of all well-natured subjects,
Goodly the smell of wholesome, up-turned soil.
Lovely above all is this silence –
But the silence is vibrant with words.

            They murmur in the distance like bees,
            They whisper in the rustle of the trees,
            Then springs one, instant to be heard,
            Sings on my shoulder like a bird.

Poetry by Dunstan Ward

Anyone interested in writing from the First World War, or the towering figure of Robert Graves in twentieth century poetry, is likely to know Dunstan Ward as the editor, with Beryl Graves, of the splendid three volume Carcanet edition of Robert Graves: Complete Poems. He was also the editor of Gravesiana, and the president of the Graves Society.

Dunstan Ward. Photo by Véronique Ward-Viarnes.

Dunstan Ward grew up near Palmerston in Otago, took his degree at Canterbury, taught at Waikato University, and for the last forty years has lived in Paris, where he recently retired as Professor of English at the University of London Institute in Paris. I’ve admired him for decades as a scholar, critic and editor; I can now add as a poet, as a voice that brings fresh inflections to poems that are both commemorative and immediate, ruminative and acerbically direct. Steele Roberts will publish his Beyond Puketapu in May this year, and his work is soon to appear in the PN Review. In the meantime, here are some of his poems.

– Vincent O’Sullivan

---

Snow in Paris

It is snowing minutely,
too light to last
on the muted streets;

it lifts and spins
from grey slopes of roofs
above silent courtyards,

like spray from breakers
or sand that gusts
across windy beaches;

but enough remains
to whiten the narrow
lines of slates,

tracks in frost
on early morning hillsides,
not yet effaced.

---

Drought

His father is shouting.
He can hear him from the back yard
where he has been sent out
to the hard sunlight.

There’s another drought.
It’s worse than the last.

‘A curse on this place.’
‘I’m no more than a rouseabout.’
‘I wish I had never married you.’
‘A man could cut his throat.’

What does his mother reply?
He starts to feel afraid for her,
creeps into the kitchen again.
His father turns, stares. He tries to say
‘I’m sorry, please stop quarrelling.’

Carefully, his father explains
he is too young to understand.
‘Your mother and I are just talking.
Now you stay outside.’
His face is shaking.

The shouting gets louder.
He climbs over the Calf Paddock gate,
runs down the hill to the flat
and lies on his back in the dry grass.

All round him there’s nothing else.
He looks up into the endless blue.
Who can he tell?
No one is here but himself, alone
with the dying grass, the empty sky.

He lies and listens to the silence:
only, at times, faintly, the wind,
a sheep calling, a seagull crying...

Far away in the house
his father, he knows, is still shouting.

---

At the Poet's Grave

Deià

Carved on Don Roberto’s grave
by a villager with a simple stick
before the plain cement had set
is no verse, just his name, two dates,
one word to define the endless quest
that led to this height above the sea,
his fate ‘to die and die’ on the way.

Need for entrancement drew him here,
bemused by the shifting shapes of love,
girlish boy, boyish girl, goddess, witch;
nearing mid-point in his writing life
he wrote, ‘My health as a poet lies
in my mistrust of the comfortable
point-of-rest.’ Does he lie there at last?

Three last letters on his grave
wish him (in Spanish, not in Latin)
to rest in peace, but at its head
the cypress that stirs in the sea wind
seems to inscribe unrest, like
those green woods in lines he placed
on the final page of his last book.

Killed in battle at twenty-one,
drowned in nightmare of love’s dissolution,
did the poet then die as he’d foreseen –
muse-maddened, rabbiting on, until
lost in no-man’s-language between
unstoppable volubility
and silence he feared beyond the line?

Did he lose his gift, or give it away?
Between his name and his life’s dates
just one word (Spanish, Latin)
to tell his story (one story only?) –
doomed pursuit of a high calling,
poetic life for love of the mythic
Muse-woman moon-Goddess: ‘Poeta’.

---

Song

A day that alights
     Like a bird on your table,
A bright ladybird
     On the back of your hand:
Stay still
                   but remember
     ‘Nothing stays’ –
Take wing with the day.

---

Expat

‘No, it’s not my country,’
admits the expat
with the panama hat
and disgruntled air
as he knocks back his pastis,
‘but that’s neither here nor there.’

---

What Henry Knew

Henry James knew
every turn of the screw.
Lesser lights might dread to be extinguished:
the Master greeted death as ‘distinguished’.

---

Lower Case

Ezra Pound who shouted ‘MAKE IT NEW’
renewed the same old hatred for ‘the jew’.

---

'Poem'

(creative writing class)

This is the first line of the poem.
It has four stresses, which is less stressful
than five, ‘inviting unfortunate comparisons’
as noted by a friend who’s a famous poet.
That feminine ending might prove problematic
(quite apart from the ‘gender question’),
setting a pattern that has to be broken (or kept).
As for what the poem’s about,
it’s best if the poet discovers this
only when the poem is finished (or stops);
knowing the ending can spoil the story
for the storyteller as well (teleology),
and anyway there should be no story to tell –
stories are written about something, whereas
a poem, ideally, is not about anything,
it unparaphrasably is (or so that story runs).
The poem’s supposed to ‘write itself’; however,
the poet’s more likely to write him/herself instead –
fine for a Byron or Heaney, but few of us are,
and while there may not be many reliable rules
when it comes to writing (or ‘composing’) poems,
this one, I find, almost always applies:
if your poem has the word ‘poem’ or ‘poet’ in it,
bin it.

---

An Academic's Prayer

‘Lord, you are just. For my intellectual pride,
you kept me for decades under the puffy thumb
of a psychopathic mediocrity,
weasel-minded, aesthetically tone deaf,
abusing petty power to lie to committees
and block the lives of those whose talents he lacked.
Now we have both retired I only meet him,
still in the same clothes, still smelling the same,
at colleagues’ funerals, where I have to endure
hearing him praise lost friends that he despised.
In the night I see him stand above my coffin.
Let me not die, dear God, till after his death.
I will light a candle for him at your altar,
and one last time I’ll try to hold my breath.’

Being here, on Tuesday's Poem

It has to be a thin world surely if you ask for
an emblem at every turn...

Read Vincent's 'Being here' on Tuesday's Poem, and his discussion with Helen McKinlay as they cover sincerity, the first person, freedom, and more.

Poetry by Emma Neale

There is something so celebratory about Emma Neale’s poetry, about its eager, informed, needle-eyed engagement with the contemporary world, that it seems the very thing for this final Poet Laureate blog of the year, for what we still, with our perverse and saving optimism, call ‘the festive season’. Thanks to Emma for these unpublished poems, for their kitchen-familiar and cosmic-wide attentions, for running the hot thread of such linguistic flare and precision through whatever occasion she takes up. These seem to me the kind of poems that begin with readers but end with partners, in their take on how things are, and how we talk of them. This is poetry in that ancient tradition of ‘speaking for us all’, of making scenes and events that we find are about ourselves all the time, even when they may at first move so confidently in that Rilkean dimension of ‘beauty and terror’. Good poems to end one year, and to begin another.

Photo by Graham Warman.

---

It Beggars Belief

The small change we slip into the beggar’s hand
press there as if it’s a close cousin of love
is like the coin we would drop into the well
at a garden of remembrance:
may this small kindness be the penance
that takes care of the world’s poundings
an offering to the skittish, feral gods of hope
that still crouch somewhere inside
the electric lights and night store heaters,
the fridge’s motor, the stitches in the children’s blankets,
beside the pantry’s packets of red lentils and raw sugar,
under the thin-worn patch of carpet in the hall,
lares et penates,
please bar the terrorwolf, terrorcrow, terrorsun
terrornomics and terrorment
from our doors.

Marshalling the Facts

(After reading Manjit Kumar’s review of The Reason Why: The Miracle of Life on Earth by John Gribbin)

Once upon five billion years ago
our solar system was being formed
and lo there was a minute part
of the unimaginably colossal universe
that was like existential porridge:
just right. For this zone
held riches of metal elements
which could forge an orb like Earth,
and Jupiter was there: right place, right size,
to hurl water bombs (asteroids and icy comets)
in this direction, pretty early on.
The newborn Earth once hurtled into
another planet, Theia; part of the fallout
was the moon, which really is a kind of mother now:
for it protects us from Jupiter’s gravity
and collisions with cosmic rubble.
After that smash up with Theia,
Earth was thin-skinned, and has been shaky ever since:
which can be terrifying, cataclysmic,
but in turn helps create optimum conditions
for the miracle of liquid water.

Which is as good an explanation as any for questions such as why
the thought of the way you carefully pinched
a sweet square between thumb and index finger
to tap off the extra icing sugar
as you searched perhaps
for the least hurtful words,
or the way you wore your shirts
until the collars had a nibbled look
although your ties still shone with the sleek gloss
that said somebody else, somewhere, loved you;
or the sight of a man pushing a supermarket trolley
filled with budget cans all the way to his damp, dark flat;
or the glimpse of another drinking super-strength beer
on a street bench at sun-up; or the battered plastic
baby gear on sale for next to nothing
at the Salvation Army store;
or the crass trash along the banks of the Leith;
or a son’s small fists pummeling my ribs;
or the fact of foreign superpowers arming factions
that split and re-split along blood, tribe, regional or religious
but note, never gender lines; or the headlines
that say 30% of preventable perinatal maternal deaths
are suicides; or the article that details the rape of a young girl
by god-fearing men that led to their lynching
by other-god-fearing men,
which triggered violence and disorder nationwide;
or the last recorded song of the Dusky Seaside Sparrow;
or the sensation of my hands plunged into soap suds
while outside someone’s voice lifts querulous
at rainy Friday twilight,
time bleeding from us all
like fossil fuels from broken well-heads,
should bring such waves
of strong, dark, pent,
unnamed sorrows
that will not crest,
that rise and rise.

Caller Unknown

He knows she can’t reply.
The cell phone in his hand
fits like an amulet, a locket
that could show a rare old photo
of the dead: delicate gold hinges only
turned open when he’s alone.

He keys in her name, a phrase,
deletes.
He’s under a kowhai whose yellow flowers hang down
as if a woman tents him in her sleepy hair.
Six tui tilt and tip in black arabesques
fold the air with a crêpe paper rustle.

He closes his eyes against vertigo,
presses the bark
that runs rough as unhealed grazes;
imagines a room maple-coloured
like a ship’s cabin and another man
who hears her breath
as if she is a child crouched in a wardrobe
waiting for the dark’s hard sounds
to resolve into words.

He enters her name again.
His thumb tingles as if the keypad
were a cool metal zip
lifted from the hollow in a neck,
wooden toggles slipped from their soft cotton locks.
He imagines the back of her head,
the stitches of her collar,
the fibres that sundust an earlobe.

Ridiculous human thing,
he types in another line of evidence,
again deletes it.
Buttons his coat right up to his throat
as if to head somewhere colder:
the wharf, say; oil-scummed water;
salt-sting squall; a place to gather a fist of gravel
as if everything launched and left to sink
is simple boyish sport.

The tuis’ coal-smoke ballet
ignites to black shimmer:
banks, plummets, surges higher.

He slips the phone back into his pocket
where he holds it
like a smaller hand he must warm,
holds it
fingers tipped on its skin
as if to a mouth:
Let’s not say anything more, now.

Breach

Rain in a fine mist tilted the afternoon
into underwater dark
as the bus pulled up to the lights
in late winter London traffic
where barrier tape, road cones and fluoro safety vests
snagged the eye like candles in the gloam
or delayed, milling carnival floats.

Every passenger turned to look:
books, phones, papers down, even ear-buds out
for the man next to me
whose head had danced hip-hop
every stop since Leicester Square.

A vivid fragment from the street event
had scudded up a high-rise’s face —
a balloon, I thought; or maybe festival celebrants
would dot every tower balcony from here,
waving banners, belting out songs
for a team win, or in the name of International Day
of Something I’d Clean Forgotten.

You’ll have guessed already — being either older,
less naïve, or skintight with optimism
than I was then—
about the man on the window ledge
his face a pale indistinct circle
his thin body in a dark blue suit
and the cop in the yellow emergency vest
trying to coax him gently back
into whatever life had led him there.

The compulsive thing then
in the cold, crushed silence of the bus
was to think and think
what could push a man so far

but understanding a little more, now,
of how many succumb,
how many ways they’re driven there
what I find this poem listens
and listens for over time
is what words came
as if the years were trees,
low, amber sounds in his mouth
welling like sepals or serum,
what did he know, what did he know
to say, that lone officer
beside the agonised man,
his own legs dangled alongside his
into the breach, the cannoning cataracts of air?