From 'Postcards' by Helen Heath

iv. Greek for Travellers

How much for this peach?
I would like a room.

What time does the bus go?
I would like a ticket to Stavros.

What a lovely day.
I am in pain.

Where is the police station?
I want to wash clothes.


v. The landing

The truth about stones is some fit in your palm,
some you lay your palms upon.

If you press a stone with your finger
your finger is also pressed by the stone.

If you pull a stone on a rope
the stone pulls you back.

If you carry a stone in your pocket
you can smooth it with your thumb.

I collect pebbles form Ithaca
and intend to bring them home.


vi. Up the hill

The truth about raindrops is
they are not shaped like tears.

As raindrops fall they become balls,
burger buns, parachutes, then doughnuts.

Rain is only sad in wet places,
others greet it with euphoria.

Water is containment and travel,
it worries at earth and stone.

Things do smell better after rain, like
wild oregano up the hill from Vathy.

  

Editor: Helen Rickerby

A week or so ago Helen Heath, local poet, friend and Tuesday-poet-on sabbatical, launched Graft, her debut full-length collection which has been published by Victoria University Press. (I published a wee chapbook of her work, Watching for Smoke, a couple of years ago.) I love Helen’s work, and knew I wanted to feature a poem from Graft, but choosing which was a really hard job. There are so many I like, and I also wanted to try to somehow show the breadth of this collection. But obviously not one single poem can manage to show the variety of a collection, so I hope you’ll follow some of my helpful links below that will take you to some of Helen’s other poems.

It was also hard to choose an individual poem because even though they are self-contained, once you’ve read them in the context of the book, where the poems are finely woven together with connections and resonances within and between, it seems hard to take them out of that environment.

Finally, after reading through the collection a couple of times, I chose these extracts from ‘Postcards’, a long multi-part poem from the centre of the collection. Similarly, I feel funny about removing these from their context as part of a longer piece, but I like them a lot and think they also contain many of the themes and interests of Helen’s poetry, and this collection.

In this sequence the narrator is visiting Greece, seeking something (in the sequence that follows – 'Graft', we learn more about what that is). In ‘iv. Greek for Travellers’ we get phrases as if from a phrase book – and, as humans do, we join things up to make a story. The sharp-eyed humour mixed/contrasting with deep and sometimes painful feeling is a combination you’ll find quite frequently in Helen’s work.

‘v. The landing’ begins with the phrase ‘The truth about…’ which is a recurring phrase in this collection, one I find really appealing. Science and empirical study is a major interest in this collection, especially in the first of the three sections which contains a number of poems about scientists such as Isaac Newton, Marie Curie, Rosalind Franklin and Galileo Galilei. Also the third and final section begins with the poem ‘Making tea in the universe’, which manages to combine the big bang with making a cup of tea. I love the images and observations about the stones – there’s a empirical objective preciseness about them, while also being tactile and emotional. And, of course, metaphorical. And beautiful.

‘vi. Up the hill’ continues the scientific explanations – what you think you see is not what you see. Raindrops are not the shape of tear drops (I learned this recently from some science programme which had ultra-slowed-down footage, so I know it’s true), they are round. But what is scientifically true is also exciting, maybe even more exciting. Explaining something isn’t explaining it away.

I think ‘the truth’ that the poems keep speaking of, though, isn’t just scientific truth. It’s poetic truth and emotional truth and experiential truth, and in this collection you’ll find truths of many kinds. Many of the poems are much more narrative than these ones, and many deal with very real and raw things, such as death, love, family and the experience of being a Hutt girl (as also a former Hutt girl, who did indeed scuff my way around in ugg boots for a while a very long time ago, I was excited to see a clutch of ‘Hutt girl’ poems at the end of Graft). I have so much to say about this book, and I really haven't done it justice, but I think I’ll stop here. For now.

Helen Heath has just started working on a PhD in creative writing at Victoria University of Wellington, where she has previously completed an MA. In her doctorate she is looking at the intersect between people and technology. She won the inaugural ScienceTeller Poetry Award in 2011 for her poem ‘Making Tea in the Universe’. She blogs at helenheath.com.

Here’s some links to more of her poetry:
'Night's magic'
'Making tea in the universe'
'Ripple'
'Plum'
'Truths'
'Tight'
And, a particular favourite of mine, 'Spilt'


And now I hope you'll make some more poetic discoveries by clicking some of the links to other Tuesday Poems in the sidebar.


Helen Rickerby is a Wellington poet, having escaped many years ago from the Hutt (Upper rather than Lower), though she can still see the Hutt Valley from her lounge window. She publishes books as Seraph Press and is co-managing editor of JAAM magazine. She’s had two collections and a hand-bound chapbook of her own poetry published, including My Iron Spine (Headworx, 2008). She blogs at http://wingedink.blogspot.com/.

Bookcase Full Of Closed Books Wants To Sing by Joan Fleming

The books are all commuters pressed together on a crowded five o’clock train. Every commuter has a bird, trying to beat its wings, inside their chest. No one talks. No one talks about the furled flock of story harboured by the hard spine, the clamouring dusk chorus, suppressed inside the travelling body. Which hardbacks will open up, tonight? Releasing a piteousness of song, a murmuration, an exaltation, a flight.

                                                  Editor: Helen Heath

This poem is from Joan's debut book of poetry, The Same As Yes, which will be launched on November 17. The whole collection is a series of conversations, beautiful and strange. Everyday things take on their own life, if only we can stop and notice them. I love these mysterious and strange little gems.

Joan Fleming won the Biggs Poetry Prize in 2007, and her work has appeared in Landfall, the Listener, Sport, Turbine and The Best of Best New Zealand Poems. She and US poet Emily Toder paired up to produce a chapbook which featured on Tuesday Poem last year. She lives and works between Wellington and Golden Bay.

Joan says:

The poem came about because I have a beautiful, huge, hardback OED thesaurus, and while I hardly ever use it for it's proper purpose (that is, finding better words than the ones I usually choose), I love to read the middle section of the thesaurus which has all kinds of lists: lists of every different sort of hat, lists of the names of diseases, lists of dances, lists of crimes, lists of architectural terms. 

One of the lists is a list of the collective nouns for birds. So, that list, combined with an impulse to imagine the stacked books in a bookshelf as something else entirely, is how this poem was born.

Poem published with permission.

Helen Heath is the editor of this week's Tuesday Poem. Helen's book of poetry, Graft, will be published in May 2012 by VUP. You can read more at her website helenheath.com . Sadly, Helen is leaving Tuesday Poem to go on sabbatical for a little while. She's been an enthusiastic Tuesday Poet since we began in April 2010 - posting all sorts of marvellous poets and poems -- and with Claire Beynon's image, she created our Quill logo. Helen is also so reassuring with her advice on blogging.  We'll miss you, Helen, come back soon. 

Have a look to your right at the sidebar to see all the other wonderful Tuesday Poems this week.

A week of it by Dinah Hawken

It is dark.
Light
and dark again.

It is so.

It is something.
It is really something.

Small, beyond, becalmed
so be-all and end-all.

It is fine.
It is all that blue can be.

So be it.
It is too good to be true.

Are the odds against it?
If only it had another name
like so.

It’s alright. It comes along
in its own time, in the be-all without the end-all.

When it’s miserable
I fancy the o
in so.

So. It is this.
This is it.

Dinah Hawken was born in Hawera in 1943 and now lives in Wellington, New Zealand. She is the author of five books - It Has No Sound and Is Blue, which won the 1987 Commonwealth Poetry Prize for 'Best First Time Published Poet', Small Stories of Devotion; Water, Leaves, Stones and Oh There You Are Tui (2001).

I feel privileged to have had a preview of Dinah’s forthcoming (6^th) book - The leaf-ride. If you want to read more one of her poems "365 x 30" is at Best New Zealand Poems 2001.

Dinah has such a light touch yet her poems are substantial. There is a remarkable range of poems in The leaf-ride as it travels along in its ‘down-welling, up-welling drift’: poems that range from the power of a single word to the horror of violence to the joy of a newborn child.

Helen Heath is this week's Tuesday Poem editor, she blogs at helenheath.com. and lives in the seaside village of Paekākāriki, on New Zealand's Kapiti Coast. She completed an MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University in 2009. Her poetry has been published in many journals in New Zealand and Australia. Most recently she’s had a chap-book of poems published by Seraph Press called Watching for Smoke (2009). Currently she is working on a full-length book of poems.

For more Tuesday Poems, click on the Tuesday Poets in the sidebar.


Curator Note: A week of it, it's been indeed. Tuesday Poem sends its condolences to the people of Japan following the devastating earthquake and tsunami. Tuesday Poet Janis Freegard's post expresses this with a haiku.

Truths by Helen Heath

Let’s not talk about
the whole truth.
Better to let small parts
speak for the whole –
a look, a hand
in the small of my back.
Better to find that
the truth lies
in the smallest things we do.

I chose this poem by Helen Heath because it is the first poem posted by a Tuesday Poet  that grabbed me - with its simple elegance. On the surface it is straighforward, but underneath it has an elegance and grace that is quite breathtaking.  I could wax lyrical, but that is hardly necessary as the poem speaks for itself. It stands alone, a beautiful truth, as rare as any jewel, although perhaps a few words about the author will not be remiss ...


Helen has been one of the true champions of the Tuesday Poem blog, generous not only with her own work, but also showcasing other up-and-coming poets, interviewing authors, and generally being a stellar member of the local writing community. 


Helen blogs at helenheath.com.


She lives in the seaside village of Paekākāriki, on New Zealand's  Kapiti Coast. She completed an MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University in 2009. Her poetry has been published in many journals in New Zealand and Australia. Most recently she’s had a chap-book of poems published by Seraph Press called Watching for Smoke (2009). Currently she is working on a full-length book of poems.




Alicia Ponder is this week's Tuesday Poem editor.  She lives in Eastbourne, is the co-author of two art books, and several New Zealand School Journal plays and stories.  She blogs here at an Affliction of Poetry.  


For more Tuesday Poems, click on the Tuesday Poets in the sidebar.

'Sab' (excerpt) by Maria McMillan

The last run

Up the hill behind our house.
He’d hardly been talking,
too polite and quiet,
like he had to conserve energy,
take short shallow breaths –
like he was old.

Then he woke me one morning
threw my running shoes on to the bed,
stood shining
in the doorway,
dressed already
brother again.

He was faster.
In the wind ahead of me
his white t-shirt billowed
round like a lantern.
The street lights flicked off
as we passed them.
The sound of our shoes
like a song.

I could almost smell jasmine.
I could almost smell snow.

He reached the top,
where you could see clear over the other side,
and turned to me smiling

Meggie, run faster, I was heaving,
heavy as a horse. Quick, he said
as if it were a gift he was giving me –
quick, before the city disappears.


Ann

Loss is a white bound package
so tightly wound, there can be no
leaks, nothing seeping through,
like the Egyptians, only no writing,
no pictures, no gold paint.
Loss is what slips into the sea,
like a silky silver fish sent home.

There were three that day,
only one of them mine.
Each time there was no resistance.
Each time the water closed over at once
like a wound’s uncanny healing.

On land there would have been ropes
at least, a gradual lowering,
the throwing of earth.
A stone to mark the spot.


The Adamant

The sea is a bilious field,
the wind a horse.
We lurch on.

***

I heard Maria McMillan read part of her 'Sab' series when she was a guest reader at the Palmerston North City Library Stand Up Poetry series in 2008. The piece was breathtaking live and the audience were visibly moved, particularly by the 'Ann' poem.

I find it hard to imagine the pain of not only losing a child, but then being forced to bury it at sea, to let the body go in the middle of the ocean with no hope of returning to the spot where they were lost. 'The Adamant' is the name of the ship the family is emigrating on. I love the way Maria's poems skip around in time examining the lives of multiple generations of one family – the threads that join them and the unique pressures of the different times they live in. Her work presents a facet of New Zealand history in an original, visceral way.

Maria says about the poem:

“This excerpt is from Sab, a series of persona poems spanning many generations of a fictional Pakeha family. I'm interested in how people explain huge things to themselves in not many words - like leaving your home country and never seeing your family again, or war, or the spirit-stripping recession of the 1980s. I wonder if grief that's never dealt with is passed on like eye-colour or strange shaped thumbs.”

Maria McMillan lives, writes and works from, the fish's mouth – Wellington. She has poems published in The Listener, and the Lumiere Reader and was long-listed for the Bridport International Poetry Prize. Maria also has two splendid daughters who teach her every day about keeping language crisp, flexible and to the point.

'Sab' (excerpt) is published by Tuesday Poem with permission. This week's editor Helen Lehndorf is a widely-published New Zealand writer and writing teacher. She shares a blog with poet Helen Heath at http://helensquared.wordpress.com/ Please visit the other Tuesday Poets using our blog list.