The Time of the Giants by Anne Kennedy

3.

Moss picked her way

over the mosaic of strange things away from his bed and

buttoned herself out the door

while he was in the bathroom without saying goodbye.

Why? Because

goodbye seemed like an apple i.e. needing a lot of

explaining.

She walked along the street feeling new-born, stretched

to let in light.

The bark on the trees was rougher in the palms of her hands.

She carried

his weight in her backpack, his words as loose change

in her purse

his essence in a thermos for comfort and emergencies.

She noticed

she could see sideways. Cars approaching. The ghost

that she always knew

lived in the passage. I knew it. As a child rasping to bed

she'd open her eyes

as wide as possible to let in all the possible light

and the ghost in

but the moment she felt it passing (not dying, passing

as ghosts do)

she'd blink and the ghost would be gone. The others

(the living, Mum, Dad etc)

in the light of the living room as if etched on a jug

would call out

See? It was nothing, there is no ghost and look back

at the TV.

Now Moss is wide open and the ghost

is physical

you can reach out and touch it like this table this chair.

While she was out

a furniture truck came and moved her into his body.

In her room you can see

the marks on the wall where the furniture stood for so many

years. Years.

I first started reading Anne Kennedy's poetry while researching long narrative poems in New Zealand poetry. “Read Kennedy,” other writers told me so I went to the library and took out The Time of The Giants (2005), Kennedy's second collection of poetry. The Giants is a long narrative poem set over 114 pages and eighteen sections or chapters. Each chapter is itself split into sections and the resulting structure resembles of the fractal growth of a fern frond: the long form is a stem from which branches of poems grow.

The poem follows Moss, a young woman giant, who is trying to hide her substantial size from her lover Paul, a normal sized man. The poem/section above is part of chapter nine and occurs just after Moss and Paul have spent their first night together. Of the book Kennedy has written, “[it] reconfigures myth in a contemporary setting. As the descendent of Irish immigrants to Aotearoa/New Zealand, I am interested in where and how diasporas find us today.” The poem does feel like a modern day myth that is lyrical, funny, and quietly satirical of modern etiquette. It also does an excellent job of balancing the imagery and tone of a myth with a contemporary setting and voice. According to the NZ Book Council, Kennedy was once a piano teacher and a music librarian which explains her attention to sound and the alternating long / short line form that repeats its rhythm and ties the poem together. Another extract from the poem can be found here.

As well as poetry Anne Kennedy also writes fiction, autobiography and screenplays, and is the co-editor for the online journal Trout. She has collected a fair few awards such as the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Short Story Award, the ICI Award and Kennedy was also the Literary Fellow at the University of Auckland. She lives in Honolulu and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Hawai'i.

This week's Tuesday Poem editor is Sarah Jane Barnett, a writer and reviewer living in Wellington. Sarah is currently working on a creative PhD at Massey University that looks at the way the human/nonhuman relationship is portrayed in contemporary poetry. You can check out her blog at http://theredroom.org.

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