FLEUR ADCOCK (2010)
Fleur Adcock was born in New Zealand but has lived in England since 1963. Her previous collections of poetry, now out of print, have been replaced by Poems 1960–2000 (Bloodaxe 2000), and a new collection, Dragon Talk, appeared in May 2010. She has also published translations of Romanian and medieval Latin poetry, and edited several anthologies. In 2006 she was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.
Adcock comments: ‘The following extract is from my journal, 20 November 2009: “I sat up in bed in the early hours of this morning and wrote an instant stream-of-consciousness poem called ‘Having Sex with the Dead’. When I had finished the first 15 lines, I got up and went downstairs for a slice of toast and some hot milk, over which I wrote three lines more. (I was well aware that if I’d interrupted the flow of nocturnal dictation by getting up earlier it would have vanished). And that’s it, more or less: I can’t think of anything apart from the odd word that I want to change. It’s such an odd production in any case that it would be difficult to judge it in the reasonable light of day.” That afternoon I added: “But now, thinking about it, I realise that it has a lot in common with my other middle-of-the-night poem, ‘Over the Edge’, which really was based on a dream, not just surfacing thoughts from the deeps. However, as they were both sent from the subconscious I suppose it’s not surprising that both feature water and dead people. I guess that’s what we have down there.”’
JOHANNA AITCHISON (2007)
Johanna Aitchison was born in the Bay of Islands in 1972. She left to attend Otago University, where she completed a Bachelor of Laws and was admitted to the Bar as a Barrister and Solicitor of the High Court of New Zealand. After graduation she worked as a solicitor at a Dunedin law firm, leaving in 1997 to do an MA in Creative Writing via Bill Manhire’s pilot Master’s programme at Victoria University of Wellington.
‘Miss Red in Japan’ comes from her second volume of poems, a long girl ago (VUP), which was a finalist in the poetry section of the 2008 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. She was the winner of the New Zealand Poetry Society competition in 2010, and her poems can be seen in Big Weather: Poems of Wellington, as well as online in Turbine and Best New Zealand Poems 2008. Johanna’s third volume of poems, Miss Dust Collection, will appear in 2012.
She lives in Palmerston North with her partner and son and teaches creative writing at Massey University.
Aitchison comments: ‘“Miss Red in Japan” was written to express the sharp intensity of experience I encountered living for three years in Hokkaido, Japan. The inhospitable winters of Hokkaido—lasting five months and requiring lashings of snow shovelling—were just the trick for keeping the 122 million people in Honshu and Kyushu from seeping north.
‘Miss Red in the poem created an imaginary family out of Moritz sticks, yellow plastic hard hats, frying pans. She found refuge from the bowing and the fierce buzz of staring eyes in the English films she rented from the local video store. She leached joy from the smallest of things—roadside vending machines filled with HOPE, LARK, Lucky Strike cigarettes, snow flying in sideways, and the crows, crows everywhere.’
MICHELE AMAS (2005)
Michele Amas was born in Dunedin in 1961. She has a degree in Performing Arts from Toi Whakaari New Zealand Drama School and has spent most of her working life acting and directing for stage and television. Her short film ‘Redial’ which she wrote and directed was selected for competition in the 2002 Venice Film Festival. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Victoria University and was the Adam Prize winner in 2005. Her first book of poetry, After the Dance, was published by Victoria University Press in 2006 and was a finalist in the Montana first Book Awards and the Prize in Modern Letters in 2007.
She shifts between acting and writing but maintains that acting and writing poetry employ the same observational skills, in one process you create more layers to flesh out the work and in the other you reduce the layers to an essence, they are both translations of form.
Amas comments: ‘“Daughter” was written out of a desperation to contain a myriad of emotions that living with a teenager forces you to experience daily. In this poem I have attempted to describe the shifting emotional landscape that a mother and child stumble into, quite out of the blue, both unprepared and bewildered—full of blame and guilt, need and love.’
ANGELA ANDREWS (2005)
Angela Andrews was born in 1977, in Rotorua. After graduating from medical school, she spent several years living and working in provincial New Zealand before settling in Wellington where she completed an MA in Creative Writing at Victoria University. She currently lives in Christchurch with her husband and four small chldren. Her collection of poems Echolocation was published by Victoria University Press in 2007.
Andrews comments: ‘It was my first Wellington winter and I was walking with my son, who was several months old at the time. I was cursing the fact I didn’t own gloves when I came across this large group of people gathered outside a house, only a block or so from my own home. The women were wearing beautiful white saris. As I got closer, I realised it was a family funeral, and the poem is pretty much exactly as I experienced it.’
TUSIATA AVIA (2004)
Tusiata Avia was born in 1966 in Christchurch, of Samoan/ Palagi descent. Tusiata is a poet, performer and children’s writer. 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. Her first collection of poetry, also titled Wild Dogs Under My Skirt, was published in 2004 by VUP. Her latest book of poetry, Bloodclot, was published in 2009, also by VUP.
Tusiata completed an MA in Creative Writing at Victoria University in 2002. She held the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies Artist in Residence at Canterbury University in 2005 and the Fulbright Pacific Writer in Residence at the University of Hawai’i the same year. She was the 2010 Ursula Bethell Writer in Residence at the University of Canterbury.
Avia comments: ‘I’ve got to admit, I blanched just a little when I first learned that “Shower” was to appear in this anthology. The subject matter speaks for itself. Putting a poem like this out into the public space (particularly as the only poem representing one’s work) is a little challenging. In 2002 I was reading Sharon Olds—I love the way she writes about the deeply intimate. I find when I really connect with a poet’s work it often gives me access to a “place” I haven’t been to before.’
STU BAGBY (2005)
Stu Bagby was born in Te Kopura 1947. He is semi-retired and lives on a five-acre block of land in Albany, Auckland. Previously published in Auckland University Press’s New Poets 2, his first full collection of poems As it was in the beginning, published by Steele Roberts, included ‘The boys’ and was nominated in the Sunday Star-Times by Kevin Ireland as one of 2005’s best books. Stu is also the editor of A Good Handful: Great New Zealand Poems about Sex (AUP) and Just Another Fantastic Anthology: Auckland in Poetry (Antediluvian Press). His most recent collection of his own poetry, So goes the dance, published by Steele Roberts, was released at the end of 2010.
Bagby comments: ‘A light, fun poem, “The boys” came from borrowing some cattle to bring my overgrown paddocks down after I’d fenced them off. I became quite fond of the boys and spent many hours in their company. I like to end poetry readings with this poem and use the final two words to exit the stage.’
HINEMOANA BAKER (2010)
Hinemoana Baker is a writer, musician, sound enthusiast and creative writing tutor. She hails from Ngäti Raukawa, Ngäti Toa Rangatira, Te Äti Awa and Ngäi Tahu on her father’s side, and her mother’s ancestors are from England and Bavaria. Her first collection of poetry, mätuhi | needle (2004), was released in New Zealand and the United States. Her second, köiwi köiwi | bone bone, was launched in July 2010. She spent three months in Australia as 2009 Arts Queensland Poet in Residence, and the Fall semester of 2010 in the US, as one of 38 Writers in Residence at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Programme.
Baker comments: ‘This poem is a response to the events of 15 October 2007 in Taneatua, Ruatoki and around the country, which have come to be known as the State Terror Raids. As well as being shocked by the methods employed by armed police on that day, which terrorised many innocent people, I found myself questioning the ethical decisions a person would have to make in order to be involved in the 12-month surveillance campaign which led up to the raids. I was moved to write the poem because of these things, and also after watching The Lives of Others, a film whose plot unfolds around the practice of surveillance by agents of the Stasi in East Berlin in 1984.’
DAVID BEACH (2003)
David Beach was born in England in 1959 to New Zealand parents who returned (with him) to New Zealand when he was five. From 1986 to March 2002 he lived in Sydney, since then back in Wellington. His poems have been quite widely published in Australia, without editors overdoing it. Since returning to New Zealand he has had poems published in the New Zealand Listener, Poetry New Zealand, JAAM, and Takahe; published two books with Victoria University Press, Abandoned Novel (2006) and The End of Atlantic City (2008), and won the Prize in Modern Letters in 2008.
Beach comments: ‘From time to time I have flown in a plane, mostly between Wellington and Sydney, but have never jumped out of one. “Parachute” is from a group of “attack sonnets”, where the idea was to write something energy high, sensibility unobtrusive. Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan” was a key poem. Banjo Paterson’s “The Man from Snowy River” also opened the door to possibilities.’
PETER BLAND
Peter Bland was born in Yorkshire in 1934. He emigrated from the UK to New Zealand in 1954 and began work with the NZBC to establish some of New Zealand’s first arts and social commentary programmes. He was a co-founder of Wellington’s Downstage Theatre and its artistic director 1964–68. He was associated with the Wellington group of poets and a close friend of James K. Baxter, Louis Johnson and Alistair Campbell, and his first substantial collection of verse, My Side of the Story, was published in 1964.
From the early 70s, Peter divided his time between England and New Zealand and travelled widely as an international jobbing actor for stage and screen. In the 70s and 80s Peter appeared in numerous West End comedies, as a guest artist on many UK television programmes, and at the Bristol Old Vic, the Chichester Festival Theatre and The Palladium. He settled permanently in Auckland in 2009. A Selected Poems was published by Carcanet in the UK in 1998, and his most recent book is Loss (Steele Roberts 2010).
Bland comments: ‘“X-Ray” was written following a medical check-up, which included a full-body x-ray. Studying the picture of this other person I felt as if I’d been playing host to some secret self who had uncomplainingly supported me for years. I sensed both an intimate relationship and a design-structure that I shared with the whole of humanity. The poem sprang from the ambiguities and insight of these feelings. I was delighted to discover, following publication in the New Zealand Listener, that someone had pinned it to the hospital notice-board. It’s rare for a poem to find such an appropriate place in the “real” world.’
JENNY BORNHOLDT (2008)
Jenny Bornholdt’s most recent collection is The Hill of Wool (Victoria University Press 2011). The Rocky Shore (2008) won the NZ Post Book Award for Poetry. She has written eight other books of poems, including a selected poems: Miss New Zealand (1997). Jenny was the Te Mata Estate New Zealand Poet Laureate in 2005/2006.
Bornholdt comments: ‘“Fitter Turner” is one of six long poems in The Rocky Shore. The poems all deal with similar themes—death, loss, the garden, poetry—and there’s a kind of conversation going on between them. When I wrote this one I’d been thinking about the words “fitter turner” for a long time. They seemed good words with which to describe a poet.’
AMY BROWN (2008)
Amy Brown’s first collection is The Propaganda Poster Girl (Victoria University Press 2008). She is working on a PhD in creative writing at the University of Melbourne. Her thesis involves writing a modern epic poem—whatever that might be.
Brown comments: ‘“The Propaganda Poster Girl” is quite a literal title for a poem about the figure in a Vietnamese propaganda poster, which hung on the wall above my computer while I wrote the book. After a year of writing mainly from my own point of view and about myself, looking up and seeing this surrogate subject was a relief. I think the poem became so long because I was enjoying writing it.’
JAMES BROWN (2006)
James Brown’s four poetry collections are published by Victoria University Press. ‘University Open Day’ comes from The Year of the Bicycle (2006). James has been a finalist in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards three times. He is the author behind the informative booklet Instructions for Poetry Readings (Braunias University Press), and, in 2005, edited The Nature of Things: Poems from the New Zealand Landscape (Craig Potton Publishing). In 2010, a selection of new poems appeared in Pocket Money / Against Gravity as part of the Duets series—duetsbooks. wordpress.com—which pairs New Zealand and US poets.
Brown comments: ‘I worked particularly hard on three aspects of this poem: the voice, the narrative and the form. The speaker is a school-leaver, so their voice couldn’t quite be that of an adult, but anything too teenage would have been wrong, too. The nature of the voice naturally placed restrictions on the poem’s language, reducing the scope for dazzling linguistic displays and, in so doing, placing extra pressure on the narrative as another way of engaging the reader. Like The Year of the Bicycle as a whole and many of its poems individually, ‘University Open Day’ is a journey. By the poem’s end the speaker knows a little more about the world than they did at the beginning. Four-line stanzas are the form I use most in The Year of the Bicycle—especially in sections one and two where the younger protagonists require more structure. (In section three, lists predominate, and, by section four, stanza-less free verse has really kicked in). In ‘University Open Day’ the form works like a series of rooms, through which the speaker and reader move, pausing just long enough in some to sample the various offerings. The offerings themselves are partly made up and partly based on experience.’
ALAN BRUNTON (2001)
Alan Brunton was born in Christchurch in 1946 and died suddenly in Amsterdam on June 27, 2002. He sent Best New Zealand Poems the following biographical note on March 28 of that year:
‘Alan Brunton has published nine books of poetry including: Ecstasy, as well as compact disk: 33 perfumes of pleasure (Free Word Band 1997). Co-editor with Murray Edmond and Michele Leggott of Big Smoke: New Zealand Poems 1960–1975 (Auckland UP 2000). Co-founder with Sally Rodwell of the experimental theatre troupe Red Mole (ongoing since 1974) based in Wellington since 1988 and previously in New York, New Mexico, London and Amsterdam. Most recent theatre script: Comrade Savage (Bumper 2000); most recent video production: Crazy Voyage (Red Mole 2001). Has recently appeared at international festivals in Colombia (2000), Denmark (2001) and Norway (2002), but not yet in his own country.’
Brunton comments: ‘“Movie” is a death-trip; following the cortege away from his father’s funeral, a man gets lost, the journey fades into an earlier one through the mountains of Portugal. Everything falls apart, the man is left at his table with fragments of poems, talking to someone who is not there. This poem provides part of the text for the poem-video Heaven’s Cloudy Smile and appears also in Ecstasy (both available from Bumper Books, PO Box 7356, Wellington South).’
RACHEL BUSH (2002)
Rachel Bush was born in Christchurch on Boxing Day 1941. She grew up in Hawera on the west coast of the North Island. As a young woman she wrote short stories, but she became increasingly interested in writing poetry. Her two collections of poetry, The Hungry Woman (1997) and The Unfortunate Singer (2002) are both published by Victoria University Press. She has also appeared in Faber’s Introduction 3 as well as in anthologies and journals such as Sport, Landfall, and the Listener. Until 2003 she was a teacher of English at a secondary school in Nelson.
Bush comments: ‘In the summer of 2002 a friend stayed with me. I’d first met her in 1950, but I hadn’t seen her since 1964. We lost touch soon after that and now she lives in St Petersburg. We talked about Hawera, about growing up in this small rural town close to a beautiful mountain, and how desperate we were to move away from it. And we talked about our families, especially our mothers, how we loved them and took them for granted. It was her mother who knew how to make bread brooches and turn old gramophone records into vases.
‘People often say that in New Zealand in the 1950s women were preoccupied with housework and did nothing except care for their families and husbands. If they’d been young today, of course these women would have had longer careers in full time paid work and many of them would have had more formal education. Would they have been wiser or happier if they’d had these opportunities? I’m not sure. I do know they were distinct and strong and creative. When my friend went back to St Petersburg, I went on thinking about the mothers I’d known when I was at school. I don’t think I set out to write a poem to celebrate their individuality, but this is what happened. I hope some of their particular ways of being human are clear in this poem. I like seeing their names in a poem. I miss these women. I’m glad I knew them once.’
KATE CAMP (2010)
Kate Camp is the author of four collections of poetry, all from Victoria University Press: Unfamiliar Legends of the Stars (1998), Realia (2001), Beauty Sleep (2005) and The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls (2010) where ‘Mute song’ first appeared.
Camp comments: ‘This poem was inspired by a news story about a black swan in Germany which appeared to have fallen in love with an enormous plastic paddle boat in the shape of a white swan.
‘I wrote it after hearing the Canadian poet Christian Bök speak in Wellington. Bök’s work, with its crazy ambition and gigantic scope, reminded me that poetry need not be limited to the possible, the real or the confessional; territories in which I had previously spent a lot—maybe too much—time.
‘As well as this poem in the voice of a swan, my 2010 collection The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls includes poems written from the perspective of a donor kidney, a man with a sixty-year-long bout of hiccups, a one-armed Austrian pianist, and the white whale Moby-Dick.
‘I think exposure to Bök’s expansive poetic ego gave me license to explore this wider range of avatars, so I am happy that “Mute song” has now been published in his hometown of Toronto, in the literary journal Brick.’
ALISTAIR TE ARIKI CAMPBELL (2007)
Alistair Te Ariki Campbell (1925–2009) was a Penrhyn Islander who spent most of his life in New Zealand, which made him bi–cultural, existing somewhat uneasily in both the Polynesian and Pakeha worlds. He published drama, four novels, and many collections of verse, including Just Poetry, (HeadworX 2007) in which ‘Tidal’ appeared, and a joint collection of love poems, with his wife Meg Campbell, It’s Love Isn’t It? (HeadworX 2008). He won major poetry awards, including the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry in 2005.
Campbell comments: ‘“Tidal” was written on 1 June 2007 in the sad knowledge that my beloved wife Meg hadn’t long to live. It was my last poem for her, and it is still the last poem I have written. “Alistair and I,” she once wrote, “are both water signs, and come and go with the tide.” Meg died on 17 November 2007.’
GORDON CHALLIS (2003)
Gordon Challis was born in 1932 in a family of Welsh origin who had, by then, moved to southern England. He emigrated to New Zealand in 1954 and trained in psychology and social work, later working in these two occupations—at hospitals and health centres—until retiring in 1988. He and his wife, Penny, now live in Nelson.
Challis comments: ‘The setting for “Walking an imaginary dog” is the north coast of New South Wales where many caravan parks are sited on the wide estuaries. These parks are often run by the local shire councils who generally have a “no cats or dogs” policy. You can, however, have a caged bird.’
GEOFF COCHRANE (2005)
Geoff Cochrane lives in Wellington and sleeps poorly. In 2009 he was awarded the Janet Frame Prize for Poetry. His most recent book of verse is The Worm in the Tequila (Victoria University Press 2010).
Cochrane comments: ‘My younger brother Stephen has for me much of the glamour of an older one. He remains lean and brown and good-looking, and still has a tendency to blush—when asking questions of bus-drivers or waitresses, for instance.’
GLENN COLQUHOUN (2002)
Glenn Colquhoun is a poet and children’s writer. His first collection The art of walking upright won the Jessie Mackay Best First Book of Poetry Award at the 2000 Montana Book Awards. Playing God, his third collection, won the poetry section of the same awards in 2003 as well as the Readers’ Choice Award that year. ‘To a woman who fainted …’ was published as part of that collection. He has also written four children’s books and published an essay with Four Winds Press entitled Jumping Ship. In 2004 he was awarded the Prize in Modern Letters. He recently returned from a Fulbright scholarship to Harvard University where he was working on a collection of medical essays. He works as a GP on the Kapiti Coast.
About his poem, Colquhoun comments: ‘It is based on an experience I had a few years ago at the Dans Palais during a Writers and Readers week in Wellington. An elderly woman fainted at the back of the tent during a poetry reading I had taken part in and I was beckoned from the front of the venue to help her. I found her pale and frail but she soon felt better lying flat and chatting while we waited for an ambulance. The trick, as most doctors will tell you, is to make people think everything is under control. This also seems true of poetry. The poem arose as a sort of quid pro quo for the situation. I guess that is why I adopted the mock serious tone. It was a way of taking any teasing I encountered afterwards seriously and considering the possible links between poetry and fainting as a conceit for a poem.
JENNIFER COMPTON (2009)
Jennifer Compton was born in Wellington in 1949 but now she is based in Melbourne. She is a poet and playwright who also writes prose. Her stage play The Big Picture, published by Currency Press, which premiered in Sydney and was also produced by Circa, was produced last year by the Perth Theatre Company. Her book of poetry, Barefoot, came out with Picaro Press in 2010 and her stage play The Third Age was shortlisted for the Adam New Zealand Play Award in 2011. She was Writer in Residence at the Randell Cottage in 2008, and Visiting Literary Artist at Massey University in 2010. Her poetry manuscript This City won the Kathleen Grattan Award and will be published by Otago University Press in July 2011. ‘The Threepenny Kowhai Stamp Brooch’ was first published in Quadrant.
Compton comments: ‘It had been many years since I had spent time in my home town when I set up residence for six months at Randell Cottage in Wellington. And so much had changed. My friend Pam, who lives in Matamata, came to visit me, and gave me a brooch from the Te Papa gift shop which was a threepenny stamp, mounted in a metal frame, from back in the days when it was the usual postage for a letter. At least I think it was. I know I saw so many of them about that I think it must have been. It’s a sprig of kowhai, with its beautiful yellow blossom, on a dark green background. Of course, pounds, shillings and pence have gone the way of so many other things. But there were wonderful new things that I noticed. The waterfront development had encouraged the strollers, the runners, the bikers, the skateboarders. I had recently spent time in Italy and enjoyed their promenade, their ‘passegiata’ and it struck me that Wellington now had one of its own, with a local flavour. And now, of course, unlike back in the old days, everyone pronounced kowhai as it should be pronounced. I doubted that this poem could work on the page, because I couldn’t reproduce the difference in pronounciation of kowhai. But I wrote it anyway, because I wanted to. I thought I might read it a couple of times at gigs. It just goes to show you shouldn’t distrust the intuitive intelligence of the reader. And already I have written more words than the poem contains.’
MARY CRESSWELL (2005)
Mary Cresswell is from Los Angeles. She came to Wellington in 1970. She is co-author (with Mary-Jane Duffy, Mary Macpherson, and Kerry Hines) of Millionaire’s Shortbread, illustrated by Brendan O’Brien and published by University of Otago Press in 2003, and author of Nearest & Dearest (2009) and Trace Fossils (2011), both published by Steele Roberts. She has always worked as a science editor. She also lives next to the sea: this particular closeness and the goofy vocabulary of research science both have had a major influence on her imagination and will doubtless continue to do so.
Cresswell comments: ‘The poem “Golden Weather (Cook Strait)” was first published by Richard Reeve and Nick Ascroft in Glottis magazine. It’s my downstream response to the cryptic priorities of 1970 New Zealand: worship of the outdoors, how to preserve aged relatives/family values, the mysterious hierarchy of ritual foods, the sacred dog … to the language: “packing a sad” “on the day”? … and above all, to the red-blooded Kiwi family, that noble and indissoluble unit, Doing the Right Thing On the Day even if it bloody well kills us—or leaves us up Cook Strait without a paddle.’
ALLEN CURNOW (2001)
Allen Curnow was born in Timaru in 1911 and died in Auckland in September 2001. For more than 60 years, he was at the forefront of New Zealand poetry and literary debate. The anthologies he edited in 1945 and 1960 were seminal in shaping New Zealand’s poetry canon. After training for the Anglican ministry (his father was a clergyman), Curnow turned to journalism instead and later lectured in English at Auckland University. His first collection, Valley of Decision, appeared in 1933. His last, The Bells of Saint Babel’s, won the 2001 Montana New Zealand Book Award for Poetry.
Bill Manhire comments: ‘“When and Where” is a version of an untitled poem of 1829 by the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837). It is one of four translations made by Allen Curnow for Elaine Feinstein’s After Pushkin, a book of translations, versions and responses to Pushkin by a range of contemporary poets, including Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, Carol Ann Duffy and Edwin Morgan. After Pushkin was published first by the Folio Society and then by Carcanet (Allen Curnow’s UK publisher) to mark the 200th anniversary of Pushkin’s birth. In New Zealand “When and Where” appeared in The Bells of Saint Babel’s (Auckland University Press, 2001).
‘The contributors approached by Elaine Feinstein were free to choose their own poems, and to arrive at their English texts as they wished. She did suggest, however, that translators might like to use as their starting point Walter Arndt’s Pushkin Threefold, a compendium of Pushkin’s verse which contained the Russian originals along with linear and metric translations. It is likely that the linear translation which Allen Curnow worked from is the Arndt text which begins, “Whether I wander along noisy streets/ Or step into a temple dense with people,/Or sit among fervescent youth,/I give myself over to my fancies.” Arndt’s metrical version went thus: “As down noisy streets I wander/Or walk into a crowded shrine,/Or sit with madcap youth, I ponder/Bemusing reveries of mine.” The transformations effected by Curnow are dazzling.’
LYNN DAVIDSON (2009)
Lynn Davidson is the author of three collections of poetry, How to live by the sea (Victoria University Press 2009), Tender (Steele Roberts 2006) and Mary Shelley’s Window (Pemmican Press 1999), and a novel, Ghost Net (Otago University Press 2003). Her poetry and short stories have appeared in Sport, Landfall, Turbine and The Red Wheelbarrow. She has a poem in the new edition of the poetry anthology Big Weather: Poems of Wellington, and in Great Sporting Moments: The Best of Sport Magazine. In 2003 she was awarded the Louis Johnson Writer’s Bursary.
Davidson comments: ‘Playing on the monkey bars at school is universal isn’t it? You launch off, hand over hand, all light and rhythmical and fluid, and then the weight of your body slows you down. As a poet I am, of course, interested in rhythm and in risk.
I still look for the rhythm that will get me to the far side of the monkey bars. “He just doesn’t swing” was the strongest criticism I ever heard my father make of a fellow muso. And he looked so sad when he said it, like being able to swing was the most important thing of all.’
FIONA FARRELL (2003)
Fiona Farrell was born in Oamaru, educated in Otago and Toronto, where she wrote her thesis on T.S. Eliot and poetic drama. Publications since include three collections of poetry, (Cutting Out, AUP 1987, The Inhabited Initial, AUP 1999, and The Pop-Up Book of Invasions, AUP 2007), two collections of short stories (The Rock Garden, AUP 1989, and Light Readings, Random 2001), and six novels (The Skinny Louie Book, Penguin 1992—winner of the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction 1993, Six Clever Girls Who Became Famous Women, Penguin 1996, The Hopeful Traveller, Random 2002, Book Book, Random 2004, Mr Allbone’s Ferrets, Random 2007, and Limestone, Random 2009). Her work has appeared in various anthologies and she has been the recipient of several awards, including the 1995 Katherine Mansfield Fellowship to Menton, France. UK students have tangled with one of her poems, ‘Charlotte O’Neil’s Song’, which featured in the GCSE syllabus. Charlotte also appears in Roger McGough’s Wicked Poems.
Farrell comments: ‘I wanted to write something dead plain about a meeting which moved me deeply. It’s an “Our Trip” story, deliberately flat, in the tradition of those narratives we have been writing since primary school.
‘The poem is “true”, in the sense that we did indeed go to Takaka, where we met a young man sleeping on bracken, meditating in a cave. It seemed a noble and desperate thing to be doing: a traditional reaction by the young idealist in this beautiful muddle of a country.’
CLIFF FELL (2003)
Cliff Fell was born in London in 1955, to a New Zealand father and an English mother. In 1997 he moved to New Zealand, to Motueka, where he lives on a small farm and teaches in the School of Arts at NMIT in Nelson.
His poems have been published in New Zealand and the United Kingdom in magazines, chapbooks and anthologies, including The New Exeter Book of Riddles (Enitharmon, London, 1999), and have been broadcast on Saturday Morning with Kim Hill on National Radio.
In 2002 he graduated with an MA in Creative Writing at Victoria University and was the first poet to win the Adam Prize. His first collection, The Adulterer’s Bible, was published in 2003, and his second, Beauty of the Badlands, in 2008, both by Victoria University Press.
Fell comments: ‘“Ophelia” was written in response to an exercise set by Bill Manhire—and as can happen with exercises, it ploughed open an unexpected furrow. The instruction was to write about “My pet”, with the direction that the pet had to be imaginary. In my case, exercises usually stimulate immediate ideas, but this time I was completely stumped. It kept taking me back to Class 1 of Infant School, which wasn’t somewhere I really wanted to go.
‘Two days left until submitting and still not a dickey-bird. That afternoon, a murky April autumn day, we acquired a billy-goat. I watched in awe, and with a certain degree of admiration, as he ferociously served 14 of our 16 doe-goats in about ten minutes. It was then that it occurred to me that sex would be an unusual take on the “my pet” theme. But, goats? … no, somehow I thought not, wonderful companions though they can be.
‘As it happens, I’d started reading Jumping the Train Tracks with Angela by Paul Durcan earlier that day, and later that evening I came across the fine and funny poem, I think it’s called “The Giraffe”, in which the poet ends up in bed with a fellow lover of giraffes. And that was it—it kicked me back to the late 1970s when I lived and travelled in Africa with a friend, the actor Guy Williams, now based in London.
‘Guy had been born and brought up in Kenya, and as I reread the Durcan poem I recalled him telling me that during a particularly wild and lonely period of his teenage years, after he’d been expelled from school, he’d rescued and raised a baby baboon.
‘I also remembered how fascinating it is to watch baboons in the wild—from a respectful distance. Out on the plains of East Africa their troops can number in the hundreds and take an hour or more to pass, during which time they display the full range of primate behaviours, not least the young adults’ uninhibited onanism.
‘But now, as the idea of a poem was beginning to take shape, all I could remember of Guy’s baboon was that he’d called her Ophelia and that she’d once had him mistaken for the devil. I hadn’t seen or spoken to Guy for eight years, but I had a phone number, and he answered. Needless to say, it was as if we’d last spoken two days before—and he was enthusiastic about the poem idea and immediately began to regale me with memories of his Ophelia …
‘So, in some ways, the poem is a kind of found poem—there are lines, from the monkey’s mouth, as it were, that are just as I scribbled them onto a scrap of paper, the phone clamped between my ear and shoulder. And when Guy stopped to comment on their relationship, to try and analyse it for me, and said her jealousy of friends and visitors was almost sexual in its intensity, I saw how easily I could take the poem into a deeper layer of “truth”. I wrote most of the poem the next day, in about 45 minutes.
‘And if my Ophelia has a quality of tenderness and emotion that is “almost human”, as they say, it most likely comes from the nature of the other primates on this planet—and our relationship with them. In a recent copy of New Internationalist I came across this report by Abraham Odeke, of BBC Uganda, which illustrates what I mean:
Baboons protest road killing
A group of baboons by a busy highway in eastern Uganda became furious after a speeding lorry killed a female from their troop.
They surrounded her body in the middle of the road and held a ‘sit-in’, refusing to move for 30 minutes and blocking the highway completely, even when witnesses threw them food.
Last year a similar incident occurred when the baboons hurled sticks and stones at passing cars after a baby baboon was killed on the same road.’
New Internationalist, July 2003
SIA FIGIEL (2003)
Sia Figiel is. A mother. A daughter. A sister. An aunty. A cousin. A teacher. A painter. A novelist. A poet. But in her waking hours she works as the Literature and Language Arts Specialist for the Pacific Islands Centre for Educational Development in Pago Pago, American Samoa.
She won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize Best First Book Award for the South East Asia-South Pacific region with her debut novel where we once belonged—’an extended poem’, she says. She has written two other novels: The Girl in the Moon Circle and They Who Do Not Grieve, a prose poetry collection, To A Young Artist in Contemplation, and a CD recording of performance poems with Teresia Teaiwa—TERENESIA.
Sia Figiel’s work has taken her to Paris, Berlin, Barcelona, New York, Honolulu, South America and she is the first Pacific Islander to read at the Shakespeare Globe Theatre, London. Her novels have been translated into Portugese, Turkish, Catalan, French, Spanish, German and Dutch.
Figiel comments: ‘“Songs of the fat brown woman” was inspired by one of my trips to London. I was in a shoe store, surrounded by all these African, Caribbean women. Of course we were all there because we had size 12 feet and we were looking for shoes. London (and most of the Western AND Eastern world for that matter) can be very unforgiving to women with big feet. Anyways, I spotted a size 13 and was about to dive for it when another brown hand grabbed it right before me. I looked up to confront the hand and she looked at me with a big smile and said: “Malo e lelei, tahine Hamoa.” And that’s how I met my Tongan friend Mavis!
‘I was further inspired to write “Songs” after I met and had lunch with Grace Nichols at my then apartment in Berlin, a decade ago. Nichols is a former winner of the Commonwealth Prize for Poetry and is of course famous for writing the Poems of the Fat Black Woman BUT the difference is, she’s a very skinny woman! I said to myself, someone with authority on fat has to be the one to write the songs of the fat brown woman! And the rest, of course, is history. Thank you.’
JOAN FLEMING (2008)
Joan Fleming’s poetry has appeared in print in Landfall, Sport, the Listener, Hue & Cry and in the Duets chapbook series, which pairs New Zealand and American poets; as well as online in Turbine, Snorkel, Blackmail Press and Lumière Reader. She completed an MA in Creative Writing at Victoria in 2007, and won the Biggs Poetry Prize that year. Joan tutors writing for Massey University, keeps a garden, and practices Nichiren Buddhism. She lives, works, and writes between Wellington and Golden Bay.
Joan comments: ‘“Theory of light” is sort of a farewell poem. I wrote it after walking on the beach near my home in Golden Bay with a good friend. She had come to visit me before going back to America. This beach, I think I will claim it as the most beautiful place in the world. So much washes up and back, and the colours are unreal. On our walk, Andy was telling me about colour theory. She explained about wavelengths of light, and how the colours of objects aren’t independent from the way our eyes perceive them.
‘It made me think about how we only get back what we give out. It made me think about the things we carry with us, and what we leave behind. I don’t fully understand any of this—colour, light, beginings, endings. But I hope this poem enacts a reaching for a way to understand. Re-reading it gives me a pain in my chest, in the best possible way.’
RHIAN GALLAGHER (2003)
Rhian Gallagher’s first collection, Salt Water Creek, was published by Enitharmon Press (London) in 2003 and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for First Collection. Gallagher returned to New Zealand in 2005, having lived in London for eighteen years. She received a Canterbury Community Historian award in 2007. Feeling for Daylight: the Photographs of Jack Adamson was published by the South Canterbury Museum 2010. In 2008 Gallagher received the Janet Frame Literary Trust Award. Auckland University Press is publishing her second collection of poetry, Shift, in 2011.
Gallagher comments: ‘My father was a man of few words. He came out from Ireland in his twenties, worked on building hydro dams down south, then in the freezing works—hard manual labour. The physical act of burying him was my brothers’ and my eulogy to him. There is a nod in the poem to the ritual involved in Catholic ceremony while at the same time wanting to break through the veneer when ritual turns into an empty vehicle. I am no longer a practising Catholic but it is impossible to escape such an inheritance. In Ireland it is often the men of the family who do the burial, my joining in pushed a little at the traditional male-only role. The physicality of the poem is important—I attempted to integrate this physicality into the writing itself.’
JOHN GALLAS (2009)
John Gallas was born in Wellington, brought up in Nelson and St Arnaud, but is at present in Coalville, Leicestershire. Eight collections published by Carcanet Press; the latest, 40 Lies, in 2010. He works for the Leicestershire Behaviour Support Team in county schools. Writing at present a scientific version of The Divine Comedy.
Gallas comments: ‘This tired poem is uncheerful only in the face of sublime beauty: heroic despair at approaching uselessness much occupies Mongolians. The poem was written after being weary, dazzled, transported and looking in the mirror, in that order, in Ulaan Baatar.’
PAULA GREEN (2004)
Paula Green lives in West Auckland with her partner, artist Michael Hight, and their two children. She is the author of five poetry collections published by Auckland University Press: Cookhouse (1997), Chrome (2000), Crosswind (2004), Making Lists for Frances Hodgkins (2007) and Slip Stream (2010). She has a PhD in Italian literature. Paula was Literary Fellow at the University of Auckland in 2005. In February 2005, she curated ‘Poetry on the Pavement’ as part of the Auckland City Council’s ‘Living Room’ project. Paula has published two poetry collections for children, Flamingo Bendalingo (2006) and Macaroni Moon (2009). She is the poetry reviewer for the New Zealand Herald and has written and edited 99 Ways into New Zealand Poetry with Harry Ricketts (Vintage 2010).
Paula comments: ‘I once read a long list of associations that Ernest Hemingway made with rain that haunted me long after I had shut the book. A big fan of rain myself, I am quite happy to venture outside in the wet to walk in the bush, watch my girls ride horses, scramble over rocks, and ramble along the wild beach that is our closest beach.
‘Placed on the first page, “Waitakere Rain” is a gateway into Crosswind, for in writing these poems I settled upon whatever had crossed my path and haunted me. I wrote this poem because as much as I love writing poetry, I love reading the poems of others. I love the way we can write our poetry on the sand (or the pavement, or the blank page) and upon each return find that it feels a little different. Above all, I love the notion that the world is plump with unwritten rain poems.
‘I am also interested in the myriad crossings that make up our lives; the unexpected connections between places, people, memory, art, music. Sometimes, I test out my “crossings” in traditional poetic forms. In this poem, I crossed between my attachment to rain and that of Hemingway, between my poetry and his prose in a sonnet that has a hint of Petrarch, in rhyme more than meter.’
BERNADETTE HALL (2005)
Bernadette Hall’s fifth collection of poems, Settler Dreaming, was shortlisted for the inaugural Tasmania Pacific Poetry Prize in 2003. The Merino Princess: Selected Poems was published by Victoria University Press in 2002. In December 2004, she went to Antarctica on an Arts Fellowship, with her friend and collaborator, the Dunedin artist, Kathryn Madill. Her Antarctic poems appear in The Ponies (VUP 2005). In 2006 she was Writer in Residence at Victoria University of Wellington and in 2007 she held the Rathcoola Residence in County Cork, Ireland. Her Irish poems appear in The Lustre Jug (VUP 2009), which was a finalist in the New Zealand Post Book Awards 2010.
Hall edited like love poems, a major selection of poems by her friend, the poet/painter Joanna Margaret Paul, published by Victoria University Press in 2006. She also completed a commission to write poems based on the Stations of the Cross sculpted by the Christchurch artist, Llew Summers, for the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament, Christchurch. She judged the 2005 Bell Gully National Schools Poetry Award and the 2006 Aoraki Poetry Award. In 2011 she is teaching in the MA programme at the International Institute of Modern Letters.
Hall comments: ‘When I returned from Antarctica, everything seemed to have changed. It was as if I had brought Antarctica home with me to Amberley Beach. My eyes were drawn to patterns of ice and snow on the surface of the sea, in the clouds. As I walked along the track that runs through a pine plantation near our house, near a lagoon, I found myself thinking of the youthful explorers of the heroic age who had suffered in the “white warfare in the south”, as Shackleton put it, only to find themselves embroiled in bloody fighting in Normandy. The immensity of Antarctica, its hazardous beauty, the way you are conscious of being “out of it” down there right at the end of the world, dependent on each other for survival, makes the thought of war, the tragedy and wastefulness of war, seem more terrible than ever.
‘Iraq and Afghanistan were in my mind, the civil war in Ireland, the 19th-century land wars here at home. All wars merging into one. The Israelis, the Palestinians. There has only been one war in Antarctic territory, the Falklands war. Do you remember how belatedly we read of Argentinian boys, not much more than children, underequipped, underclothed, underfed, being stranded there? So much for the modern heroic.
‘Terror is the feeling of the victim, of the trapped animal. “A war on terror” is a term that just doesn’t make sense. There’s enough terror inside me, inside all of us, I suspect, without adding to it. So that’s perhaps where the poem is heading, into the dark plantation of our human fears.’
DINAH HAWKEN (2001)
Dinah Hawken was born in Hawera in 1943. She has lived in or near Wellington for over 40 years. For 20 years she worked as a student counsellor at Victoria University. Her six books of poetry, published by Victoria University Press, are It Has No Sound and Is Blue, which won the 1987 Commonwealth Poetry Prize for “Best First Time Published Poet”, Small Stories of Devotion (1991), Water, Leaves, Stones (1995), Oh There You Are Tui!: New and Selected Poems (2001), One Shapely Thing: Poems and Journals (2006) and The leaf-ride (2011).
Of ‘365 × 30’, she writes: ‘It amused me to have this dream at the time of our 30th wedding anniversary. As you can see and hear, the poem is a very straightforward description of the dream up to the last two lines. The image in the second-to-last line was in my mind for months after I had had the dream and written the rest of the poem, but for some curious reason, which often happens, I wouldn’t take it seriously. Then I realised, suddenly, that this spontaneous and concrete image was what I’d been looking for all along. Thirty years along.’
SAM HUNT (2008)
Sam Hunt was born in Castor Bay, Auckland, in 1946. He lived for a long time on and about the Cook Strait. He has published roughly fifteen books, including recently: Doubtless: New and Selected Poems (Craig Potton Publishing 2008), Backroads (Craig Potton Publishing 2009), James K. Baxter: Poems Selected and Introduced by Sam Hunt (Auckland University Press 2009) and Chords (Craig Potton Publishing 2011). An album with David Kilgour, Falling Debris, appeared in 2009. He now lives on the Arapaoa River of the Kaipara with his 13-year-old son.
ANNA JACKSON (2010)
Anna Jackson has published four collections with Auckland University Press, most recently The Gas Leak in 2006. Thicket, her fifth collection, comes out in July 2011. Anna lives in Island Bay, Wellington, and teaches in the English department at Victoria University.
Jackson comments: ‘This was a throwaway poem I added at the last minute to a set of poems I was submitting to Turbine. I wrote it one day when fellow poet Erin Scudder and I were both chained to our computers and to make our day more amusing we set instant poetry challenges for each other. We would email each other a set of rules for writing a poem, and see how fast we could fire one back. The poem that became “Spring” just had to include three words Erin gave me. Probably “snow” was one of them, and I think another was “Montreal”. I wrote the poem in less than three minutes and the only revision I made was to change “Montreal Avenue” to “diminishing avenues” which may have been a mistake. I have just found a copy of the original and it reads “you slink off down Quebec avenue / which is somewhere in Montreal”, so the diminishing avenues are more of a revision than I remembered, and possibly even more of a mistake. “Quebec” must have been the other word I had to include to meet my obligations.’
LYNN JENNER (2008)
Until 2003, Lynn Jenner worked as an educational psychologist and counsellor, and read a lot. In 2004 and 2007 Lynn studied writing at Whitireia Polytechnic and in 2008 completed a Masters in Creative Writing at Victoria University. In 2008 her folio Dear Sweet Harry, a mixed genre work of poetry, prose, found text and visual images concerning the life and times of Harry Houdini, won the Adam Prize, and was published by Auckland University Press in 2010. ‘Women’s Business’ appeared in that book without this title, and was known by the poem’s first line.
Jenner comments: ‘“Women’s Business” concerns some of love’s nastier obligations. While researching First World War records for Dear Sweet Harry I became obsessed with why boys volunteered when they must have been afraid, and how their mothers let them go. Not why—how. Lots of people have written about this leaving and this letting go. Ernst Toller, a volunteer in the Kaiser’s army, a leader in the German revolution of 1919, and a playwright, gives a young man’s point of view:
I died
Was reborn
Died
Was reborn
I was my own mother—that’s all that matters.
Once in his life every man must cast adrift from everything, even from his mother; he must become his own mother.1
‘If my poem and his were jigsaw pieces, I think some of the holes and lumps would match.’
ANDREW JOHNSTON (2007)
Andrew Johnston is a New Zealand poet who lives in Paris, where he works as a freelance editor. Until recently he also edited The Page, an online digest of the web’s best writing about poetry. His latest book of poems, Sol, was published in 2007 by Victoria University Press and in the UK by Arc Publications in 2008. In 2007 he spent a year as Victoria University’s J.D. Stout Fellow, working on a book about contemporary New Zealand poetry. He has also edited Moonlight: New Zealand Poems on Death and Dying (Random House New Zealand, 2008).
Johnston comments: ‘“The Sunflower” is woven from many strands. In 1991 I read John Ashbery’s book-length poem “Flow Chart” and was struck by the double sestina embedded in it (pp. 186–193), which borrows its end-words (among them, “sunflower”) from a poem by Swinburne. In January 1997, newly arrived in the depths of a London winter, I was bowled over by an exhibition of Anselm Kiefer’s sunflower paintings. When my father died in 2004, my brother Peter suggested two passages from the King James Bible for the funeral service; their language stayed with me. I spent November 2005 at a writer’s residence in the north of France. On a trip back to Paris one weekend, I had a revelation in the train: I could use the double-sestina structure, and even Ashbery’s (and Swinburne’s) end-words, plus bits of the King James psalms and Kiefer’s sunflower image, to write the poem I needed to write about my father (there are echoes of many other sources in there, too). I went back to the Villa Mont-Noir and wrote “The Sunflower”.’
ANNE KENNEDY (2005)
Anne Kennedy writes fiction and poetry. She has won several awards including the Montana New Zealand Poetry Award and the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Short Story Award. She has worked in film, including adapting Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask for the screen. Anne has taught fiction and screenwriting at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, and is a co-editor of the online literary journal Trout. She lives in Auckland.
Kennedy comments: ‘“Die die, live live” is part of a narrative sequence about a young woman giant called Moss (The Time of the Giants), which is why the poem develops a bit of “story” towards the end.
‘New Zealanders will recognize the title as a loose translation of the haka, “Ka mate, ka mate, ka ora, ka ora” (“I die, I die, I live, I live”) composed by the leader Te Rauparaha in the early 19th century. These words begin the most well-known poem in New Zealand. “Ka mate, ka mate” has long been commandeered by the All Blacks both to inspire themselves and to psychologically trample underfoot their opponents before play.
‘Much of “Die die, live live” could be taken down in note-form in almost any New Zealand living room during a test match. I’d like to thank my husband Robert and his friends for handing me the language of rugby-watching on a plate, year after year.’
MICHELE LEGGOTT (2009)
Michele Leggott’s sixth collection of poems, Mirabile Dictu, was published in 2009 by Auckland University Press, together with an audio CD of selected poems, Michele Leggott / The Laureate Series, from Braeburn and Jayrem. Michele continues to coordinate the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc) at the University of Auckland and was the Inaugural New Zealand Poet Laureate 2008–09.
Leggott comments: ‘“nice feijoas” is a sign that appears each year in the neighbourhood, chalked on a blackboard near a table with bags of fruit and an icecream container for the money. It’s a sign of late summer, as the light begins to change and your old dog reaches a steep patch in her decline, which is not yet a goodbye. In fact, she made it through the Mirabile Dictu poems; her ghost is present in writing that came afterwards and points to the time when a guide dog might enter our lives.’
GRAHAM LINDSAY (2003)
Graham Lindsay was born in Wellington in 1952. He has published seven books of poems, the last being Lazy Wind Poems (Auckland University Press 2003). He edited and produced the literary magazine Morepork (Ridge-Pole 1979–80), and held the Ursula Bethell/Creative New Zealand Residency in Creative Writing at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch in 2004.
Lindsay comments: ‘It’s a lullaby. I found caring for a baby, an infant, required such considerable attentiveness that the attention was rewarded with observations. “Arepa Omeka” is the Maori transliteration of Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.’
ANNA LIVESEY (2003)
Anna Livesey is a poet and policy analyst. Her second book, The Moonmen, was published by Victoria University Press in 2010.
Livesey comments: ‘“Shoeman in Love” is from my first book, Good Luck (Victoria University Press, 2003), written while I was a student at the International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML) in 2002. There is a small shoe-repair shop on the route between my then home in Mt Victoria and the IIML.’
CILLA MCQUEEN (2010)
Cilla McQueen was named New Zealand Poet Laureate in 2009 and in 2010 received a Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement. She has published over ten volumes, won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry three times and received many international fellowships. She lives in Bluff.
McQueen comments: ‘The Māoriname of Bluff, a port in the south of the South Island, is Motupohue. Poets mentioned in “Ripples” are Joanna Paul (1945–2003) and Hone Tuwhare (1922–2008). The poem appears in The Radio Room (Otago University Press 2010), and was first published in the NZSA Bulletin of New Zealand Studies Vol 2.’
SELINA TUSITALA MARSH (2006)
Selina Tusitala Marsh is of Samoan, Tuvaluan, and English descent. She is a poet lecturing in the English Department at the University of Auckland. Her current obsession includes developing Pasifika Poetry Web, a sister site of the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc). It is an archival site filled with poetry, interviews, biographical and critical information on poets of Pacific Island heritage in Aotearoa. Her poetry has appeared in the 2004 Montana New Zealand Book Award-winning anthology Whetu Moana and, most recently, in Niu Voices: Contemporary Pacific Fiction 1; a collection of short stories and poetry by Pacific writers (which she edited) as well as Making Settler Colonial Space (Palgrave Macmillan 2010) and Mauri Ola (Auckland University Press 2010); as well as on her sons’ bedroom walls. Her collection of poetry, Fast Talking PI, was published by Auckland University Press in 2009, and won the Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry in the 2010 NZ Post Book Awards. She is working towards publishing her doctoral research as a book: Ancient Banyans, Flying Foxes and White Ginger, the first critical anthology of the first Pacific women poets to publish in English.
Nafanua: Ancient Samoan goddess of war, commonly mythologised, and renown for her battle prowess. She covered her breasts with coconuts and was believed to be a formidable male warrior until her womanhood was discovered.
Koko alaisa: a dish made from cooked rice, cocoa and sugar.
Faleuila: toilet.
Saka: boiled up dish (saka kalo is boiled taro).
Aiga: extended family.
Makeke fou: market place.
Kupe: money.
Kua back: villages ‘at the back’ or away from the more westernised (hence sophisticated) capital of Apia. Derogative in meaning.
KARLO MILA (2005)
Karlo Mila is a poet, writer, mother, columnist and academic of Tongan and Pakeha descent. She was born in Rotorua, grew up in Palmerston North, lived in Auckland for ten years and currently resides in Wellington. Karlo attended Massey University where she completed a BA in Social Anthropology and Sociology and a Masters in Social Work (Applied). She has recently finished her PhD in Sociology.
Karlo has had poems included in a range of anthologies and journals. Her poetry has been selected for Best New Zealand Poems three times. Karlo’s first poetry collection Dream Fish Floating was published by Huia and won the 2005 Jessie Mackay Best First Book of Poetry at the Montana Book Awards. Her second book A Well Written Body was published by Huia in 2008. For this book, Karlo worked with visual artist Delicia Sampero creating images as well as poetry.
Karlo is now a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Social Psychiatry and Population Mental Health Research Unit at University of Otago, Wellington. Her postdoctoral research is focusing on what is healing for young Pacific people. She is examining narrative, Polynesian myth, poetry, and metaphor in a therapeutic context. Karlo also writes a regular Op-Ed column in the Dominion Post called ‘Pacific Current’. She lives in Newtown with her two sons.
Mila comments: ‘This poem was inspired by a friend of mine, Teresa Brown and her circle of friends. They break all the “fobby” stereotypes of what Pacific people in this country are supposed to be like. They don’t wear mumus or tupenu to their ankles. They are extremely well educated, ultra-urban, with sophisticated palates, good politics and basically they’re downright fabulous. They’re not afraid of who they are and they’re not having cultural identity crises even though they don’t fit the traditional Pacific “mould” …
‘One of Teresa’s friends, Victor Rodger, is a Pacific writer breaking down the stereotypes of who we Pacific people are supposed to be and what kind of box we are supposed to fit into to. I do have some concern about our art-forms sometimes, in that they (subconsciously or super-consciously) embellish the stereotypes that abound. Such as bunging a tapa pattern on a canvas or making references to hibiscus in a poem and somehow considering that to be “Pacific” …
‘But essentially what this poem is also about—and what concerns me more—is the practice of deciding “what is not Pacific”. I have come across so many cultural gatekeepers who try and control who we collectively are (e.g. Pacific academics, the highly visible community leaders and professionals etc). They often seem to have a very conservative and limited sense of “what” you must be and “how” you must be to be a “real” Tongan or Samoan etc. It is a bit of an “in” and “out” game, as subjective as those “what’s hot” and “what’s not” lists you see in magazines— except these are cultural scripts and tick-boxes.
‘There is often such a disempowering sense of disapproval associated with “changing” and deviating from the imagined and “authentic” pathways of Polynesian identity and representation. Sadly for all us, these ideas of what constitutes authenticity can be far from actual Pacific realities in New Zealand. This poem was written as an in-your-face rant, basically … A bit of a backlash about these mean-spirited things we do to ourselves as a community.’
Fob: Fresh Off the Boat.
STEPHANIE DE MONTALK (2005)
Stephanie de Montalk was born in 1945. She lives in Wellington. A former nurse, documentary film maker, video censor and member of the New Zealand Film and Literature Board of Review, she came to writing late. Her four collections of poetry, published by Victoria University Press, are Animals Indoors, which won the Jessie Mackay Best First Book of Poetry at the 2001 Montana New Zealand Book Awards, The Scientific Evidence of Dr Wang (2003), Cover Stories (2005) and Vivid Familiar (2009).
She is the author of Unquiet World: the Life of Count Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk (2002) which was also published in Polish translation by Jagiellonian University Press (2003), and a novel, The Fountain of Tears (2006), after Alexander Pushkin’s poema ‘The Fountain at Bakhchisaray’. Her personal essay ‘Pain’ appears in Sport 33. She was the 2005 Victoria University Writer in Residence.
De Montalk comments: ‘I wrote this poem from notes scribbled immediately after undergoing a bone scan. I had been somewhat apprehensive about the procedure—performed in a Department of Nuclear Medicine—in the way one often is, surrendering to the mercies of strangers and machines. In the event, I lay quite comfortably, albeit on full alert, in the scanner (“Hawkeye V4”) listening to National Radio—beamed in from the control room— while the apparatus revolved and hummed in response to the radiologist who was entering his instructions into a computer: I lay comfortably, that is, until a preview of the news headlines announced Microsoft’s discovery of a critical flaw in its software.’
EMMA NEALE (2002)
Emma Neale was born in 1969, and has lived in various New Zealand cities, as well as in California and England. She has a PhD from University College, London, and works in Dunedin as a freelance editor and writer. Random House NZ have published her five novels, the most recent of which is Fosterling (2011), and the collections of poems Sleeve Notes (1998) and How to Make a Million (2002). A third collection, Spark, was published by Steele Roberts in 2007. She edited the anthologies Creative Juices: new writing (Flamingo 2002) and Swings and Roundabouts: Poems on Parenthood (Random House 2008). In 2000 she was awarded the Todd/Creative New Zealand New Writer’s Bursary, and in 2008 the NZSA Janet Frame Memorial Award for Literature.
Neale comments: ‘“Brooch”, which is from my second book of poems, is perhaps best illuminated by a quotation from Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, which has always been eerily resonant for me (the memory and body a timpani, Brontë the quiet timpanist):
I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.
‘Of course dreams are notoriously punning phenomena. A brooch is “an ornamental fastening, consisting of a safety pin with the clasping part variously fastened and enriched” (from this the words “safety” and “clasping” leap out at me; the dream in the poem is one about vulnerability and loss). Yet the various meanings of the verb (to broach) are themselves synonymous with the actions of dreams: “to veer suddenly; to pierce or thrust through; to give publicity to, or begin discussion about”. It seems to me that dreams often make us confront territory which the daily bustle diverts us from, or which we might deliberately try to skirt in our conscious lives. Dreams can behave like tough inner mentors that push us to our psychological limits.’
JAMES NORCLIFFE (2009)
James Norcliffe has published six collections of poetry, most recently Rat Tickling (Sudden Valley Press 2003), Along Blueskin Road (Canterbury University Press 2005), and Villon in Millerton (Auckland University Press 2007); and several novels for young people most recently The Assassin of Gleam (Hazard Press 2006) and The Loblolly Boy (Longacre 2009).
He was a longtime editor of Takahe magazine and is the poetry editor for the Press. With Alan Bunn and more recently Tessa Duder, he edits the annual ReDraft anthologies of writing by young people.
He has twice won the New Zealand Poetry Society’s International Poetry competition, and has been shortlisted for the Montana New Zealand Book Award Poetry prize. With Bernadette Hall he was presented with a Press Literary Liaisons Honour Award for lasting contribution to literature in the South Island.
He has been awarded writing fellowships both in New Zealand and overseas, publishes poetry widely internationally and regularly reads at festivals and occasions throughout New Zealand and beyond.
Norcliffe comments: ‘“Yet another poem about a giraffe” is essentially a jeu d’esprit. I rather like the way rhyme can generate feeling, in this case that wobbly territory between pathos and bathos. The poem was prompted by a famous poem by the Russian Acmeist poet Nikolai Gumilev, for a period husband of Anna Akhmatova. Gumilev travelled to Africa a number of times and wrote many poems with African settings and about African creatures. Gumilev’s “The Giraffe”, perhaps written to cheer Akhmatova up, stresses the grace and wonder of the giraffe in its tropical home far from the “heavy mists” of Russia. I thought it would be fun to imagine the giraffe in Russia.’
GREGORY O’BRIEN (2005)
Gregory O’Brien is a Wellington-based writer and painter. Between 1997 and 2009 he was a curator at City Gallery Wellington, where he worked on exhibitions (with accompanying books) by Ralph Hotere, Rosalie Gascoigne, Laurence Aberhart, John Pule, Fiona Hall, Elizabeth Thomson and others. Recent projects include two major monographs, Euan Macleod—the painter in the painting (Piper Press, Sydney, 2010) and A Micronaut in the Wide World; the imaginative life and times of Graham Percy (Auckland University Press 2011). O’Brien’s visual works often incorporate texts—his own poetry and that of others. In recent months, he has made a series of 12 etchings with John Pule (printed by Cicada Press, Sydney). He exhibits his work at Bowen Galleries, Wellington, and Jane Sanders Art Agent, Auckland.
PETER OLDS (2001)
Peter Olds was born in Christchurch in 1944 and now lives in Dunedin. His books include Music Therapy (Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop 2001), It Was a Tuesday Morning: Selected Poems 1972–2001 (Hazard Press 2004) and Poetry Reading at Kaka Point (Steele Roberts 2006). Earlier books include two from Caveman Press—Beethoven’s Guitar (1980) and Lady Moss Revived (1972)—and After Looking for Broadway (1985) from One Eyed Press (Chris Moisa). He was Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago in 1978, and received a Janet Frame Literary Award in 2005. He has travelled widely around New Zealand, hitch-hiking and taking odd jobs. In his younger years, he spent time with James K. Baxter at Jerusalem on the Wanganui River.
‘I made notes for “Disjointed” (in notebooks) during the late 80s,’ he comments, ‘while travelling around the North Island, shifting, broke, looking for something … Wellington Railway station was a favourite place for sleeping/shelter, and a meeting place for the ‘down & out’. I’d been down & out myself on occasion, and sometimes when travelling around, half-broke, my path led back into it: sometimes just waiting for a train, a bus, something to open, to eat, or company … I’ve got notebooks full of this sort of writing. Another poem “Journey to the Far South” published in Glottis 7 also comes from these notebooks.’
BOB ORR (2002)
Bob Orr was born in Hamilton in 1949 and now lives in Auckland. For many years he worked for the Auckland Harbour Board. His collections include Blue Footpaths (1971), Poems for Moira (1979), Cargo (1983), Red Trees (1985), Breeze (1991), Valparaiso (2002) and Calypso (2008). He has never shown much inclination to involve himself in literary journalism—or to write anything other than poems.
Orr comments: ‘“Eternity” is a poem from a section in my last book Valparaiso that deals with my childhood, or my recollection of it, on a Waikato farm during the 1950s and early 1960s. However in spite of its physical detail which could probably be verified by anyone driving that way (Huntly, not Eternity!) to me it works more on an imaginative level than a strictly autobiographical one.’
CHRIS ORSMAN (2002)
Chris Orsman was born in Lower Hutt in 1955 and now lives in Wellington. He has three main collections of poetry published, Ornamental Gorse (Victoria University Press 1994), South (Victoria University Press 1996 and Faber & Faber 1999) and The Lakes of Mars (Auckland University Press 2008), as well as chapbooks published by his own poetry label, Pemmican Press. In 1998, along with Bill Manhire and Nigel Brown, he was one of the inaugural Artists to Antarctica. His poems have been published in Sport, Landfall, Takahe, and Printout, and have been represented in a number of anthologies, including Flora Poetica (Chatto & Windus, London, 2002). He was the 2002 Writer in Residence at Victoria University of Wellington.
Orsman comments: ‘The poem was commissioned by the Royal Society of New Zealand to commemorate the achievement of Maurice Wilkins, New Zealand-born pioneer of DNA discovery and 1962 Nobel Laureate. It was read at King’s College, London, in December 2002, at a ceremony to mark the unveiling of an official portrait of Wilkins. Emily Perkins, expatriate novelist and short-story writer, read the poem on behalf of the author. The poem itself is an amalgam of biographical and scientific detail, beginning with a contemplation of a vanished birthplace and moving out into specific detail of Maurice Wilkins’ scientific field (x-ray crystallography) and the extraordinary blue-print of the DNA molecule that he discovered. The poem finishes with a play of imagery around the original x-ray plate itself.’
VINCENT O’SULLIVAN (2002)
Vincent O’sullivan was born in Auckland in 1937 and now lives in Wellington, where he is a Professor Emeritus at Victoria University. No New Zealand writer has been more versatile. As well as his poetry, he has produced acclaimed novels, plays, short stories and literary criticism. With Margaret Scott, he has edited five volumes of Katherine Mansfield’s letters. His biography of New Zealand novelist John Mulgan, Long Journey to the Border, was published by Penguin in 2003. Further Convictions Pending: Poems 1998– 2008 was published by Victoria University Press in 2009, and his latest collection, The Movie May Be Slightly Different, in 2011.
O’Sullivan comments: ‘So many poems and stories are about being tossed out of the garden (usually Eden) that I was interested in one where people actually wanted to leave. And instead of it being a good place to be (the beginning of all) it was rather a grim place, a place where things ended. Perhaps the son and the father might be taken in different ways, but I didn’t want them to be at odds as they are in the Eden story, but close and trusting before and after they pass the gates. A dead myth is good to leave behind; and winter of course is where so many myths die—at least for a while.’
VIVIENNE PLUMB (2005)
Vivienne Plumb writes poetry, prose and drama. She was born in the St George V Memorial Hospital for Mothers and Babies in Camperdown, Sydney, Australia (1955) to a New Zealand mother and an Australian father.
Her collection of short fiction, The Wife Who Spoke Japanese In Her Sleep, was awarded the Hubert Church Prose Award. Her first novel, Secret City, was published by Cape Catley Press in 2003.
Her poem ‘The Tank’ won first prize in the 1999 NZ Poetry Society annual competition. The poem ‘Goldfish’ appears in Scarab, a chapbook of twelve linked poems that are about the death of her son.
Vivienne has also been a recipient of the Bruce Mason Playwriting Award (NZ), the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship (NZ), a University of Iowa International Writing Residency (USA), and a Varuna Retreat Fellowship (Australia).
Plumb comments: ‘I wrote this poem one night when I couldn’t sleep. It’s about the big ones: birth and death. It was written about my only son, Willie, who had Hodgkins disease (cancer of the lymph glands) and died at age 27 after a ten-year struggle against the disease. This poem was written at the beginning of his illness, when he was seventeen and undergoing his first course of chemotherapy.
‘There is some interesting rhyming going on in “Goldfish”. For me, the poem has a particular rhythm when I read it—a rhythm that changes three times. The dream in the poem was a dream my son really had, right down to the medical dictionary he was reading in the dream when he woke up.
‘For some reason goldfish often appear in my writing—I did own two quite beautiful goldfish in a tank when I was a child, they often won prizes in the local pet competitions.’
CHRIS PRICE (2001)
Chris Price was awarded the 2002 NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book of Poetry Prize for Husk, in which the poem ‘Rose and fell’ appeared. In 2006 she contributed a verse essay, ‘Are Angels OK?’, to the science-art collaboration of the same name published by Victoria University Press. (An excerpt was subsequently selected for inclusion in Best New Zealand Poems 06.) She also published her second book, Brief Lives, a genre-defying work in the form of an eccentric biographical dictionary that was shortlisted for the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2007 and chosen as one of Best Books of 2006 by the NZ Listener, Radio New Zealand National and LeafSalon. In 2008 she was Auckland University Writer in Residence at the Michael King Writers’ Centre. The Blind Singer, a poetry collection exploring themes of music and perception, appeared in 2009.
Chris has worked as a book editor (for Century Hutchinson and Reed Publishing), and edited the literary journal Landfall for much of the 1990s. From 1992 to 2004 she was coordinator of New Zealand Post Writers and Readers Week for the New Zealand International Arts Festival. In 2004 she joined the staff of the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University, and now co-convenes the Institute’s MA in Creative Writing, as well as managing its outreach programmes. She is the 2011 New Zealand Post Mansfield Prize winner in Menton, France, and is published by Auckland University Press.
‘While working on the final group of poems for my first book, I stumbled on the strategy of holding single words or phrases up to my ear like shells, and listening for the whisper of stories they might contain. “Rose and fell” was the title of a dance work by New Zealand choreographer Douglas Wright that I’d seen four years earlier. I don’t recall what brought the title to mind again in 2001, but its two contrasting and perfectly balanced terms began to hint at a kind of fairy-tale narrative of good and evil. Some time in the preceding year, I’d listened to Seamus Heaney reading his translation of Beowulf, and elements of that epic (such as the figure of Grendel) also surface in the poem. The plant mentioned is rose-root, a herb which grows in rocky districts or on cliffs. Its root, when crushed or dried, gives off the scent of roses.’
KERRIN P. SHARPE (2008)
Kerrin P. Sharpe is a teacher of creative writing. She completed Bill Manhire’s Original Composition class at Victoria University of Wellington in 1976. Over the last three years she has been published widely, including in Best New Zealand Poems 08, 09 and 10, Turbine 07, 09 and 10, Snorkel, Bravado, Takahe, NZ Listener, Poetry NZ, Junctures, Sport and the Press. In 2008 she was awarded the New Zealand Post Creative Writing Teacher’s Award by the International Institute of Modern Letters. She was featured poet in Takahe 69.
Sharpe comments: ‘A friend told me that when her mother died she heard her voice in a clock. I was fascinated by this and when I began writing the poem, I found myself back in St Mary of The Angels in Wellington. I could even hear the late Maxwell Fernie at the organ. It was very windy and I thought of the bell at St Gerard’s Monastery (above Oriental Bay in Wellington). The St Gerard’s bell became the prayer in the poem. Genya, the woman in the poem, was dying and held an apple, her link with creation and her Church. As she calls her children for the last time, their names become a glimpse into their lives without her.’
MARTY SMITH (2009)
Marty Smith was born in the 1950s. She grew up on a remote and wild hill country farm in north Wairarapa, cleared from the native bush by her great-grandfather in the 1800s.
She teaches at Taradale High School in Hawkes Bay. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Victoria University and is working on a series of poems which move sometimes in the racing world and sometimes in the war between her father and almost everything.
Smith comments: ‘My father didn’t speak to my grandmother for eighteen years, then he died first.’
ELIZABETH SMITHER (2006)
Elizabeth Smither was New Zealand’s first woman Te Mata Estate Poet Laureate (2001–3), and received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry in 2008. She has published numerous collections of poetry as well as novels and short stories. Her latest book is The Commonplace Book: A Writer’s Journey Through Quotations (Auckland University Press 2011).
Smither comments: ‘At the end of each day’s work at Puke Ariki two librarians in their black uniforms plus two guards (armed with torches and walkie-talkies) would carry the day’s takings from the adult and children’s libraries, the reference room, to be deposited in the safe on the top floor. I always used to enjoy this moment: our heels ringing on the board floor, the two guards following behind, the little bags and the cash tin (with about enough takings inside to get us to Eketahuna). The safe (a small squat affair with a golden design on the door and formidable teeth which you had to make sure meshed) was in a room housing old uniforms and spare furniture. The guards waited while the bags and floats and cash box were stowed and the long thin safe key turned and left in its lock. (Someone could open the safe if they were locked in the room and count the takings).
‘The night of the poem I was eavesdropping on the guards talking about Jupiter and noting the differences between male and female conversations—the male concentration on facts—the facts of Jupiter and the Earth were offered in the manner we had offered money to the safe. As we walked back, glimpsing the starry evening sky through the long windows, Jupiter seemed the perfect and hopeful end to the day.’
C.K. STEAD (2004)
C.K. Stead ONZ CBE FRSL is a leading figure in Commonwealth literature—novelist, poet, critic, teacher, and the author of many books. Christian Karlson (Karl) Stead was born in New Zealand in 1932. He lives in Auckland but spends a part of each year living and writing overseas. He is married with three children, one of whom, Charlotte Grimshaw, is also a writer. C.K. Stead received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in 2009.
His Collected Poems, 1951–2006 was published in 2008, and South-West of Eden: A Memoir, 1932–1956 in 2010, both by Auckland University Press.
Stead comments: ‘This is one of my 13-syllable triplet poems—a number I’ve written in recent years have found their way into that casual and yet quite demanding form. The poem comes from a story about Allen Curnow, on his way home after completing his training for the Anglican priesthood, finding he had lost his faith. I have fictionalised it, so he isn’t named.’
RICHARD VON STURMER (2008)
Richard von Sturmer is a New Zealand writer and filmmaker. His books are: We Xerox Your Zebras (Modern House 1988), A Network of Dissolving Threads (Auckland University Press 1991), Suchness: Zen Poetry and Prose (HeadworX 2005), and On the Eve of Never Departing (Titus Books 2009).
As well as being a lyricist for several New Zealand bands, including Blam Blam Blam, he and his partner, Amala Wrightson, toured the country in the 1980s as the performing duo, The Humanimals. From 1993 to 2003 he lived and worked at the Rochester Zen Center, a Buddhist community in upstate New York. During that time his work appeared regularly in literary journals and anthologies.
von Sturmer comments: ‘In the 1990s, living in upstate New York, I was separated from my library. A modest library in many respects, but one which I had created, willy-nilly, since my teenage years. One of the joys of relocating back to Auckland in 2004 was to be reunited with my collection of books. Since then many have remained unopened on their shelves, but once and a while I like to take down an old favourite and open its pages. One such volume is The Collected French Writings of Jean Arp, edited by Marcel Jean and translated by Joachim Neugroschel. Although Arp is better known for his sculpture and painting, he produced wonderfully imaginative poetry all his life. His surrealistic poems have a very pure quality, and when I happened to read through them once again last year, they triggered atavistic surrealist tendencies in my own writing. The result was “After Arp”, which I produced in two quick bursts. Arp stated that “It was in dreams that I learned how to write, and it was only much later that I laboriously learned how to read.” So it happened that “Mushrooms”, the poem that launches the series, came from a dream I had about black mushrooms with long green hair. According to the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem, “A dream can only be where there is a reality to return to.” In this spirit the series closes with “Captain Cook’s Hat”, which is a small outcrop of rock, visible from the shore of Vanuatu’s volcanic island of Tanna. And yes, there is one small tree growing on the top and one on the side.’
ROBERT SULLIVAN (2007)
Robert Sullivan is of Maori (Ngā Puhi/Kai Tahu/Ngāti Raukawa) and Galway Irish descent. His poetry collections include Voice Carried My Family (AUP), Shout Ha! to the Sky (Salt, UK, 2010), Cassino City of Martyrs / Città Martire (Huia 2010). He co-edited Whetu Moana: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English with Albert Wendt and Reina Whaitiri, while the follow-up volume Mauri Ola was published in 2010. He has recently read and lectured in New Delhi at the Chotro Indigenous Peoples Conference, UC Berkeley, UCLA, University of Hong Kong, Goethe University in Frankfurt, Universitats de les Illes Balears in Spain and the European Commonwealth Languages and Literatures Association triennial conference in Istanbul. He is Head of Creative Writing at Manukau Institute of Technology, having recently returned from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa where for a time he was Director of Creative Writing.
Sullivan comments: ‘This poem comes from a section of my next book devoted to the recent controversy surrounding Maori customary use and local Maori ownership of the foreshore and seabed. A simple majority in Parliament removed these property rights built up by Maori tribes with coastal access over 800–1000 years. The main right removed was the one to advocate in Court for these ownership interests (where advocacy is the right to speak effectively, to argue within and not outside the acknowledged conventions of the legal system). The poem refers to Caedmon, English history, and European literature, in an attempt to draw Pakeha readers’ attention to their own literary and customary heritage. One should not explain poetry though.
‘In New Zealand currently there are few checks and balances on its one–house legislature since a simple majority, with the signature of the Governor General, might suspend or remove many privileges and rights of citizens without independent binding review. Luckily there was one extra check that the government could not suspend, via a United Nations Special Rapporteur who briefly embarrassed the current government by issuing a critical report in support of Maori.’
Hupe: mucous.
Wahangu: mute, quiet.
BRIAN TURNER (2009)
Brian Turner is one of New Zealand’s more versatile writers whose work includes best-selling biographies of sporting ‘greats’ and numerous collections of poetry.
Turner won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for his first volume Ladders of Rain and the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry for his collection Beyond. In 1994–5 he held the Arts Council Scholarship in Letters. He was Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago in 1984, Writer in Residence at the University of Canterbury in 1997, and in 2003–5 he was the Te Mata Estate New Zealand Poet Laureate.
His most recent books are the best-selling Into the Wider World (shortlisted for the 2009 Montana Book Awards), essays and poems which focus on his love of and concerns for the future of this country’s natural environment, and the poetry collections Just This, which contains a substantial number of new poems set in Central Otago, and Inside Outside.
In 2009 he received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry. Also in 2009, he was awarded the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for his ‘distinguished contribution to New Zealand Poetry’. In 2010 Just This won the New Zealand Post Book Award for Poetry.
Turner comments: ‘When I think of my more dominant personal characteristics, the one that springs immediately to mind is fearfulness. I was, my parents often said, a “nervy kid”. I still am nervy, lack confidence, don’t have enough faith in my own abilities, and tend to fret about and dwell on my mistakes. I’m poor at what is frequently termed—and how I dislike the phrase—“moving on”. I’ve never forgotten the first time I felt extremely fearful. As I say in the poem, it was when my father, jocularly, as I came to see later, threatened to report me to the local cop. At the time, I wouldn’t have been more than four years of age. And for decades after I was inclined to be fearful of anyone in authority. I hated that because such fear drives deference, and don’t the worst sods take advantage of that.
‘The poem also alludes to another trait of mine that I dislike, self–flagellation, or an inclination to blame myself when things go awry. I’ve often been told I’ve been “too hard” on myself, and some have said that I’m a masochist. I disagree, nonetheless it’s irksome to hear it.
‘But there’s more to the poem than that. In the end it works up to referring to something that was common to both my parents, and to me, and that is the extent to which our experiences swung back and forth from anguish to joy, and how difficult it is to banish the former and stay on a fairly even keel. As for the reference to “peace”, I have this nagging feeling that it’s something many people, and most poets, long for but seldom, if ever, find. Or if so, not for long.’
TIM UPPERTON (2009)
Tim Upperton’s poetry and fiction are published or forthcoming in AGNI (US), Bravado, Dreamcatcher (UK), Landfall, New Zealand Books, New Zealand Listener, North & South, Reconfigurations (US), Sport, Takahe, Turbine and Best New Zealand Poems. He is a former poetry editor for Bravado, and tutors creative writing, travel writing and New Zealand literature at Massey University. His first poetry collection, A House On Fire, was published by Steele Roberts in 2009.
Tim Upperton comments: ‘“The starlings” was originally an informal epithalamion, a poem to commemorate the wedding of my sister, Katrina, and her husband, Steve. That version was, appropriately enough, a lot more celebratory than the final version you see here. The poem includes details my sister would remember, such as the immense starlings’ nest in the ceiling of our family home. I kept revisiting and revising this poem following its first publication in the NZ Poetry Society’s anthology tiny gaps (2006), and each time it got a little darker than before—notes of elegy seeped in. A last-minute change before my first book of poems, A House on Fire, went to print was the addition of the word “murmuration”—a lovely old collective noun for starlings.’
LOUISE WALLACE (2009)
Louise Wallace’s first collection of poetry, Since June, was released in December 2009 through Victoria University Press. Louise completed an MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters in 2008, and her poems have previously appeared in a variety of literary journals including Meanjin, Turbine and Sport.
Wallace comments: ‘“The Poi Girls” is one of those rare poems that came to me almost fully-formed in the middle of the night. The rhythm was a big part of that. I scribbled it down then and there, and I wish this happened more often! I grew up in Gisborne, a place I love, and the essence of this poem comes from there. The poem is about childhood, curiosity and the nature of difference, but contains a certain menace too. I hoped to convey the weight and seriousness that events so often have when you experience them as a child.’
IAN WEDDE (2001)
Ian Wedde was born in Blenheim in 1946. He spent part of his childhood in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and England before returning to New Zealand at age 15. One of the most admired poets of his generation, he has also written novels, short stories and art criticism. In the mid-1980s he co-edited the ground-breaking Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse with Harvey McQueen. From 1994 to 2004, he was curator of art and visual culture at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. The Commonplace Odes (2001) marked his return to poetry after a hiatus of nearly a decade.
Wedde comments: ‘Death is one of the themes in The Commonplace Odes which winds right through the book and is the main business of the final poem, “Carmen Saeculare”. It is there (the theme) in formal ways, as a kind of address—the gravity of the funerary ode, sombre, and respectful of grief; and it is there (the theme of death) as a flipside of anarchic appetite, disrespectful of ordinariness which is not lived as though this life were your last. “To Death” has borrowed a number of personifications of death from the odes of Horace (Chloe, Quintillius, Lydia, Archytas, etc) and has threaded them on an idea carried over from the previous ode (mine not Horace’s) which derives from my own long-dead father’s lifelong habit of taking photographs. Because he took them, he was never in them. We don’t see death, because he takes the pictures. Death pictures something, he frames it up, it’s going to die. So get a life.’
SONJA YELICH (2002)
Sonja Yelich was born in Auckland in 1965. She is a first-generation New Zealander and lives with her partner and four children in Devonport, Auckland. Her work was published in 2002 by Auckland University Press in the AUP New Poets series which includes the writing of three emerging NZ poets. Clung (AUP 2004) won the 2005 NZSA Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry, and was followed by get some (AUP 2008).
Yelich comments: ‘While the ideas in “and-yellow” are true, well sort of, they didn’t actually happen in that order. In fact, they are bits of ideas taken from different days and put together to give a kind of “one take” sort of impression. I like doing that type of writing probably because I do that sort of thinking—here and here and then there. And that’s probably got something to do with the fact that I’ve got four small kids who get around like loose bees— and into the poems.’
ASHLEIGH YOUNG (2009)
Ashleigh Young grew up in Te Kuiti and Wellington. Her poems and essays have appeared in Booknotes, Turbine, Sport, Landfall, and the School Journal. Ashleigh was the winner of the 2009 Landfall Essay Competition and the recipient of the 2009 Adam Prize in Creative Writing. She has worked as an editor at Learning Media and is currently an editor at the Aga Khan University in London.
Young comments: ‘I wrote this poem when I was living on my own and listening to a lot of The Smiths—never a very healthy combination. Maybe Morrissey got into my bones and I got a bit miserable. I had the sense that I was shrinking and the world outside was growing and becoming more animated—especially the trees, these prickly, wonky, very anti-picture-book trees. The more time I spent alone in my little flat, the more perspective I lost, and those trees began to seem quite powerful. I suppose it was a bit like when you’re a kid and convinced that aliens are hiding under your bed or behind the curtains. It makes no sense now, but it made perfect sense at the time. The line “Why you on your own tonight?” is from a Smiths song.’
All poems from Best New Zealand Poems over the last decade, plus individual editors’ introductions and many useful links, can be accessed at
http://www.victoria.ac.nz/bestnzpoems
You can also find most of the poems in this book read by their authors at the same web address.
1 Ernst Toller, I Was a German; The Autobiography of a Revolutionary, translated by Edward Crankshaw, Paragon House, New York, 1991. First published Querido Verlag, Amsterdam, 1934.