woa poetry
We have some amazing poets in New Zealand and nothing is more powerful that the written word. Here we offer a chance to read the poems you have heard on woa.
Local poet, Helen Lowe, will be talking to Canterbury poets, on the first Sat in the month.

Anna Livesey
Anna Livesey has twice won the MacMillan Brown Prize and her first collection Good Luck (Victoria University Press), was published to critical acclaim in 2003. Anna was subsequently the 2003  IIML Schaeffer Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. This weekend, Anna Livesey speaks with Helen Lowe about her new collection, The Moonmen, also from Victoria University Press, and themes of the personal in poetry, poetry and real life, and the section of the collection that focuses on her mother's Alzheimer's.


Next Time
The other day my sister was trying to dress you after a spa.
She said you wouldn’t lift your leg.
You had your trousers half on.
You said yes, yes, yes,
but the foot stayed on the ground.

She thought
this is my mother
there is no way
to make her lift her foot.

My sister laughed when she told me.
She said people were looking at you.

I said, ‘Next time make her sit down’.
I said, ‘Next time use the family changing room’.
I said, next time get yourself a better mother,
there’s something wrong with this one, my sister.
Next time be more careful, this mother is broken, I said.

(c) Anna Livesey
from Mapping the Distance, (VUP) 2010