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.
Bernadette
Hall
Girl on a Divan
a painting by Berthe Morisot, 1885
I think she’s lovely
with her big pale face,
her short mousey
unsmooth hair,
her red mouth.
In the blue room
on the green divan
she’s taking time out
from the world of men.
I like the way she shines
in her yellow/white
dress. I like the
orange and blue shots
of silk in it. I like
the way she looks,
sleepy, half-laughing,
directly at the painter.
It’s quite something
to make yourself
visible like that,
to let her make you
visible, dear heart.
(c) Bernadette Hall
Siobhan
Harvey:
Friday 30 July is National Poetry Day
and national coordinator, SIOBHAN HARVEY, will be with Women on
Air this Saturday to tell Helen Lowe what National Poetry Day is all about and
discuss some of the events happening around the country, as well as right here
in Christchurch. If you want to find out more or organise an event yourself, go
to the BooksellersNZ website and check out the information there. Siobhan has
selected Renewal by Emma Neale for our website, all part of
celebrating New Zealand poetry for Friday 30.
Renewal
The child wants to know
if birds understand what they are:
does the riroriro know its name
or if it comes from far away
does it speak in French?
Maybe it calls itself in bird words.
A name like Wirrrr!
Or Wheetawheetadrrrr?
A trill climbs the sky in reply.
“Hey!” we say,
“You’re a linguist of the wild.
You spoke its native tongue.”
“Oh, that one?” he replies.
“No, I call that
The Library Bird.”
We stare at the kowhai, birches,
look for finches and fantails
the colour of parchment,
wings and tails that flicker
as if the wind thumbs through
to find its place
in small guides to flight,
the compact biographies
of some elusive aviatrix.
But – “Listen. Be-deep! Be-deep!”
the child mimics.
“It sings the barcode scanner song.”
(c) Emma Neale
Joanna Preston:
Joanna Preston's collection, The Summer King (Otago University Press),
won the inaugural Kathleen Grattan Award, currently NZ’s richest poetry prize,
in 2008 and has just received Australia's prestigious Mary Gilmore Prize, which
is conducted by the Association for the Study of Australian Literature and
presented every second year to a first book of poetry by an Australian writer.
The judges had the following to say about The Summer King:
“Joanna Preston’s title poem, the first in the book, jolts the reader with
its imaginativeness and dramatic power, and these qualities are apparent in all
the poems that follow. A strong grasp of the actual underlies imaginative
representations of both the natural world and the humanly made, generating a
dramatic intensity, even in the quieter poems. This is a book of succinct, taut
writing that displays a depth of imaginative thought.”
This Saturday, Helen Lowe will talk with Joanna about winning the Mary Gilmore
prize and what it means for her career as a poet.
The Summer King
Before the boar stops twitching
Dad and Jeff slash his throat.
Blood on autumn grass –
a torrent of curses
gush from his new-made mouth.
The iron bathtub broods in the flames,
its belly of water ripening.
We slide the boar in,
glide the razor’s bright tongue
across his skin.
He hangs by his heels
from the gambrel, like a pale flag.
Dad slits him open, balls to neck
and omens spill out
in dark coils of gut.
The hand that feeds,
the bullet, the knife –
I am learning their language.
(c) Joanna Preston
Ingrid
Horrocks & Mapping the Distance
Ingrid Horrocks is one of the distinctive new voices in New Zealand writing.
Author of a chapbook of poems, Natsukaashi (1998), and also Travelling
With Augusta (2003)—the latter an innovative blend of research and personal
writing that has also been published in Italian—Mapping the Distance
(Victoria University Press, 2010) is her first full-length collection. She has a
PhD from Princeton University, and lives in Wellington with her partner and twin
daughters. On Saturday will be talking with Helen Lowe about the travel and
other influences on Mapping the Distance.
‘Horrocks writes beautifully and simply. She is not only a keen observer, but
also that most fortunate of travellers – someone that things happen to.’ —
New Zealand Listener
Seeds
She gathering from a bowing tree a ripe Powngarnet,
tooke
Seven kernels out and sucked them.
- Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1567.
On the outside it is a difficult fruit,
pale green, knobbled, awkward to hold.
You are tempted by no promised sweetness,
it is easy to resist.
Let me split it for you.
You see, honeycombed in this bitter green fruit
are cloying pink droplets.
Take a seed, break it open on your tongue.
Now you have eaten
you will stay.
You will leave your mother
in her wooden sea-view house.
I may let you return for some months of light.
But even when the days are windy bright
and your lips taste of salt and oysters,
I will be with you.
(c) Ingrid Horrocks from Mapping the Distance (VUP)
2010
Sarah
Broom & Tigers at Awhitu
Published simultaneously by Auckland University Press and the
prestigious Carcanet in the UK, Sarah Broom is an exciting new voice in New
Zealand poetry. Tigers at Awhitu is her first collection and has already
generated considerable interest for its intelligence, compelling use of language
and precision of poetic form. Sarah Broom's poems have also been widely
published in journals and she authored the non fiction title, Contemporary
British and Irish Poetry (Palgrave, Macmillan 2006). Sarah has a BA from
the University of Canterbury, a MA in English from the University of Leeds and a
DPhil from Oxford and is the mother of three young children. Tigers at Awhitu
was completed while Sarah was undergoing treatment for lung cancer (she has
never smoked), treatment which is still ongoing.
A Terribly Unfair Question
and if we stood right here
while this sun, low and red,
just sank into the cradling sea,
and if we kept on standing
here, as the ragged cliffs
started to darken behind us
and the air grew rough
and unsteady with the edge
of the night, and if the earth,
instead of turning slowly
towards morning, just spun
out of orbit and went crying
into the luminous, star-stabbed
true cold of space, and if
we could still stand here
even then, with the ocean
losing its footing, the gulls
flailing and the stars
unleashed
tell me
what would you
do?
(c) Sarah Broom
Christchurch poet, VICTORIA
BROOME, has been writing poetry "for as long as she can remember", and
this Saturday she will be talking with Helen Lowe about why she loves writing
poetry, her time at the Hagley Writers' Institute, and what winning Creative New
Zealand's Louis Johnson bursary meant for her. Victoria works as a social worker
in Older Persons Health and has had poems published in Takahe, Landfall,
Sport and The Christchurch Press, in anthologies, and in "The
Chook Book", a collection of poems by the Poetry Chooks, of whom she is a
member. The Poetry Chooks will be publishing a second collection of their work
this year.
One Good Frock
There are Cissie and Myra in Cathedral Square.
Cissie thinks they were on their way to work,
they walked in from Lichfield Street, anyway, it was summer.
They are standing in the shade
in black and white, behind the cathedral.
The big English trees reflect in Cissie’s glasses.
Myra has on a white hat and gloves and wears her pearls.
“Oh she liked to be all get up and go out”, says Cissie,
“All I needed was one good frock.”
(c) Victoria Broome
Perhaps
best known for her award-winning novel, The Blue, author and reviewer,
MARY McCALLUM
has recently returned to writing poetry--and initiated the Tuesday Poem
blog. The first Tuesday Poem aired on Mary's O Audacious Book blog on
March 16, 2010 but now has its own blog where contributing editors take turns to
select a Tuesday Poem each week--and with many more poets, both in NZ and
internationally, linking to the Tuesday Poem and featuring Tuesday poems
on their own blogs. To check out the Tuesday Poem blog,
click here:
http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/.To read more about Mary McCallum and her
writing, check out O Audacious Book:
http://mary-mccallum.blogspot.com/
The construction of the nest
By Mary McCallum
There is a touch of sparrowness
about her, about me, a touch
of sparrow's nest.
She is feathers and flight and freckled
eggs, I am a place, well,
I am a place of rest.
I wait, all attentiveness,
for the thrum of those wings
that wormish breath,
to hold those noisy bones,
while mine rasp and scrape
like an old man’s chest.
Here I am, unheld, unmet -
and yet,
I know this now as I know the wind:
I, once shabby sticks and grass,
needed her to alight here,
her to gather me in.
The air is bitter, prinked
with rain,
when will I see you, sweet, again?
(c) Mary McCallum
Tusiata
Avia
Tusiata Avia is the 2010 Ursula Bethell Writer in
Residence at the University of Canterbury and this Saturday she will be talking
with Helen Lowe about her plans for the residency, including new work. Tusiata
is one of New Zealand's most celebrated performance poets and her work has also
received international recognition. Her solo stage show, Wild Dogs Under My
Skirt, premiered in New Zealand in 2002 and has since toured in Austria,
Germany, Hawai’i, Australia, Bali and Russia, and Tusiata was the Fulbright
Pacific Writer in Residence at the University of Hawaii in 2005. Wild Dogs
Under My Skirt (2004) was also the title of Tusiata's first collection of
poetry; her second, Bloodclot, was published by Victoria University press
in 2009.
Nafanua goes to Russia and meets some friends from back home
Maui is outside the government gift shop on Nevsky
looking just like she expects
full face moko whites of his eyes
Never give an even number of flowers
to a living person he lisps
or count your money in the dark.
Hinenuitepo is kissing a soldier underground
in the Cherneshevsky metro
in a Soviet style jacket and sharp stiletto shoes.
Her teeth are obsidian
and she is composing a waiata
that goes va-gi-na-den-ta-ta or something like that.
Rangi works in a petshop
next to a gunshop where the sun never sets
he sells diamond yellow snakes
and oiled scorpions he hopes no one will buy.
Poor people with hypoallergenic
cats stand outside and offer
them to passersby
Kats they say in English
Kats.
Tangaroa’s converted to Russian Orthodox
she finds him at the Church on Spilled Blood
mouthing the words in Slavonic
For yours is the kingdom
the power
the glory
whatever
whatever
amen.
(c) Tusiata Avia 2009
Robynanne
Milford & Songcatcher
Robynanne Milford is a Christchurch GP and mother of three adult
children who has read as a guest poet for the Canterbury Poets' Collective
Madras Cafe Bookshop Autumn Season of Poetry Reading, been anthologised in
Crest to Crest: Impressions of Canterbury Poetry & Prose and been published
in a number of New Zealand literary journals. Songcatcher (Whitestream
Press, 2009) is Robynanne's first collection and she talks with Helen about her
love of poetry and the passions and interests behind the collection.
The Conductor’s cardinal cap
for Michael Harlow
When the conductor moved next door
he swallowed the house in music
and silence left home.
At dawn he opened with a chorus
except on days of reveille
‘lest we forget to remember’
water music flowed
breakfast eaten on the edge
when it rained acid jazz teased the air
all day he composed himself
at times percussive thumps
percolated. Passers stopped cocked
Outside the music conductor always wore
his cardinal’s cap carried his bone baton
for missa cantata, de profundus and
Deo Deo Deogratitias gra tit iaaaaas
One day he made overtures to Carmine
but when she harped on he cut her strings
Soon he was seduced by the flautist, Isabelle
on her magic flute. Ah grand opi
appassionanato all night long
in no time there were pizzicata
baby grande, twin glorias and
a boy who grew into a double base
often of an evening the 1840 was heard
complete with cannonfire.
In order for his quartet to tune up
He was forbidden to play his organ at night
so he planted by lunar cycles
to strains of moonlight sonata
When his wife sang of butterflies
the pearl fishers took her away in a net
the house mourned in adagio for strings
the e minors tucked a requiem over the whole section
and flew windward.
Soon he too was consumed, ascended a stairway to heaven
silence moved home
found a cardinal’s cap a bone baton
conducting bluebells blood trumpets bellbirds Gloria in excelsis
(c) Robynanne Milford, 2009