Uncoupling by Jac Jenkins

Ice clasps its thorny cloak with filigreed

brittle lace against my breast

bone. The pin sticks my skin when I inhale.

I stay close to his mouth;

his heat breathes an early thaw

as Winter opens its teeth on my throat.

Spring stitches my scabs to scars, my scars

to silver. I am bare beneath bridal lace

and veil. When I inhale, his hands

clasp me like whalebone; I stay close

to the looking glass so I can see

his beaten knuckles.

Summer loosens my stays. I am

bare and bridled on the burning ground.

My tongue is desert when I inhale. He

is dry bone in the sand, stacked

like pyred sticks. I stay close to his clacking

hands. A loop of gold spins on his ring finger.

Autumn leaves my flesh for the carrion-

eaters. He is dry sand scouring my bones.

I am inhaled by the wind, breathed

out over water, looping and spinning,

close to the opening throat

of the ocean.

Dedicated to Christine de Pizan,

Europe's first feminist

Posted with permission from Jac Jenkins. First published 2013 in Takahē.
TP editor this week: Michelle Elvy

I have known the poet Jac Jenkins since I moved to Northland back in 2009. We've been in poetry groups together and shared flash fiction. Last year we even put our heads together when we judged the 2013 Northland Flash Fiction Competition, hosted by Whangarei Libraries. As a writer of both flash and poetry, Jac knows how to create impact with economy. I admire that most about her writing: nothing ever drags; her poetry catches you from the opening line and takes you by surprise.

And Jac has enjoyed increasing recognition for both poetry and prose in the last couple years, most recently winning the 2013 Takahē Poetry Competition with the poem I posted today. Even better than me writing about Jac's winning poem, 'Uncoupling', I leave it to judge Joanna Preston, who wrote:

 The winning poem, “Uncoupling” by Jac Jenkins, is one I tried to resist, but couldn’t. I was wary of how many of my own personal preferences it seemed to tick – startlingly good images? Check. Vaguely gothic/medieval/fantastical feel to it? Check. As full of song as a Welsh football stadium? Check. (Wish like heck I’d written it myself? Check.) Even now I can’t tell you what it’s about, except by quoting it back verbatim – to paraphrase Wallace Stevens, it ‘resists the intelligence almost successfully’. But I could pull almost any line at random and offer it as an example of lovely workmanship. The way words and images return and modulate – from breast bone to whalebone to dry bones to my bones, from brittle lace to bridal lace to bare and bridled. Intoxicating sounds, and repeated phrases that shift their meaning as they flicker through the poem. A worthy winner, and a poem that still makes me catch my breath. I am envious and in awe. 

You can read all of Joanna Preston's comments in the full 2013 Takahē Poetry Competition Judge's Report here.

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Jac Jenkins is a poet and flash fiction writer from rural Whangarei. She works as a librarian but is looking forward to a three-month writing sabbatical in Australia late in 2014, hopefully in a location that challenges her with new experiences and allows her doctor-partner, Alistair, to practise medicine in a different context. Jac’s writing has found its way into the Northern Advocate, Flash Frontier and Take Flight, and she has recently celebrated winning the 2013 Takahē Poetry Competition and also enjoyed success in the Northwrite Collaboration Competition with Alistair. She was also awarded a NZ Society of Authors poetry mentorship in 2012, during which she worked closely with poet Sue Wootton. 

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Michelle Elvy lives and works as an editor and manuscript assessor based in the Bay of Islands but is travelling this year in Indonesia. She edits at Flash Frontier: An Adventure in Short Fiction and Blue Five Notebook. Her poetry and prose can be found in print and online, most recently or forthcoming in Poets & Artists, Takahē, 2014: A Year in Stories (Pure Slush) and Eastbourne: An Anthology (Makaro Press). A member of the NZ Association of Manuscript Assessors, Michelle can be found at michelleelvy.com, and her Tuesday Poem posts can be found at her blog, Glow Worm. 

* When you've got to grips with Uncoupling, please check out the other Tuesday Poets in the blog sidebar. Riches there. 

Fault by Joanna Preston

A mistake. An error of judgement. A penalty
brought against a quiet city. Stroll
through the park, lunchtime almost over.
A defect, a small disappointment. A summer day
laden with clouds, grey light that softens the walls,
the stone and brick, the glass. Less
than expected. Someone to blame. A sparrow
rests lightly on the hand of a statue. A weakness
in the system, communications break down.
A telephone rings into silence. A refusal. Dispraise, dis-
continuity, lateral displacement. A woman
leaves a cafe, checks both ways, crosses the street.
An unthought response. A vice. Students
repeating the phrases – Good Morning, Good Evening, Good
-bye. It is nine o’clock, it is ten to eleven. The time
is twelve fifty-one.


First published in Landfall. Reprinted with permission of the author.

                                       Editor: Catherine Fitchett

This week sees the second anniversary of the New Zealand earthquake of February 22nd, 2011 which caused so much devastation in Christchurch. It seemed appropriate therefore to post this poem, which I will allow to speak for itself.

Joanna Preston

Joanna Preston is a 'Tasmanaut' (her word for an Australian who crosses the Tasman Sea to live in NZ). She is also a poet, editor, and freelance creative writing teacher, whose first collection, The Summer King (Otago University Press, 2009), won both the inaugural Kathleen Grattan Award for poetry, and the 2010 Mary Gilmore Poetry Prize. She blogs on A Dark Feathered Art, and lives in Canterbury with an overgrown garden, a flock of chooks, and a Very Understanding Husband.

Once you've read Fault - turn to the left hand sidebar and check out the other Tuesday Poem posts. The poets come from all over: NZ, Australia, the UK and US. 

This week's editor, Catherine Fitchett, also lives in Canterbury where she works with numbers by day and plays with words in the evenings and weekends. She has had work published in various anthologies and journals including Takahe, JAAM and the Christchurch Press and blogs here. She has a keen interest in genealogy and hopes to complete writing a family history or two this year.

"The Artist Knows—" by Helen Bascand

how Leda must sit: how she will pick
feathers from her breast: how
the frame of an hour waits for more –
a soft whistle, chill of shadow, dark kite –
he comes.


Sky wraps itself in the wing-span of storm-
brilliance. And the cold whirr of myth turns her hot.
Smell of grass and mute desire, trap her under
rough wings, grasping for the soft down of his belly.
Even a Sun turns aside.


The artist knows the hard ground they lie on: how
a god wraps lust in beautiful places, how trees bend,
flowers lend fragrance. And how she will fool herself,
whisper phrases for him – he will peck
the words from her throat.
Who can deny a god?


Leda un-twines his neck, her legs, his wings. He sleeps
as she holds him, and she clutches crushed
tenderness in a raw cleft, beneath an arched sky –
She’s a woman –
a sackcloth of afterwards – hanging her
crumpled garments like plucked purple skins, broken
eggshells already spilling.
At the river,
his shadow dips, the bony keel
of disguise shrinks, the bastard wing becomes
a god’s hand, raised to bless the empty
hollow where he took her. Feathers
take a last spiral flight –


and he is gone.
Lust remains.


*


Leda lies
back in the marital bed
under the soiled covers – a haze
of white rain falling, sinking
into soft easy ground.

                                      Editor: Joanna Preston

Helen Bascand is a Christchurch poet, and stalwart of the Canterbury haiku scene. Her first collection, Windows on the Morning Side, was published by Sudden Valley Press in 2001. Her second, Into the Vanishing Point, was published by Steele Roberts in 2007.


Plenty of poets have written about Leda and the swan, with varying levels of success and/or misogyny (surely I’m not the only one who wants to slap Yeats for the “feathered glory” line?). What I love about Helen’s poem is that we see Leda as Leda, not just victim, or vessel, or mother-to-be (of Helen, Clytemnestra, Castor and Pollux). She is a woman and a wife, and someone with thoughts and desires of her very own.

I love the way this poem opens up the question of what Leda did afterwards, how she went back to her husband, literally as well as metaphorically. (Just imagine the conversation – ‘so, my love, what did you do today while I was out Kinging?’) And I love the ambiguity of the first two lines in the last stanza, and the way that last line could be simple factual description, or a hint of how and why the wife of a king might take a little walk on the wild side …


“The Artist Knows—” is published on Tuesday Poem with Helen’s permission.


Joanna Preston is a poet, editor and freelance creative writing tutor from New Zealand. Her first collection, The Summer King, won both the 2009 Kathleen Grattan Award and the 2010 Mary Gilmore Award. Visit her Tuesday Poem at A Dark Feathered Art and the other Tuesday Poets using our blog list.

‘Love at Livebait’ by Gillian Clarke

for lmtiaz and Simon

That time she stepped out of the rain
into the restaurant, and suddenly I knew.
Beautiful in her black coat,
her scarf that shocking pink
of fuchsia, geranium, wild campion,
and he at the table, his eyes her mirror.

She said she didn't know then –
but the light in her knew,
and the diners, the cutlery, the city,
the waiter filling our glasses with a soft
lloc-lloc and an updance of bubbles,
and the fish in their cradles of ice,
oceans in their eyes,

and all the colours of light in a single diamond
sliding down the window to merge with another.
Later, saying goodnight in the street,
they turned together into the city and the rain.
On the pavement one fish scale winked,
like a moon lighting half the planet.


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Gillian Clarke is a Welsh poet, playwright, editor and translator, and one of the most important figures in contemporary Welsh poetry. She was also my tutor on the MPhil at the University of Glamorgan.

She's best known for her poems about the natural world, war, and womanhood. I chose this poem from her most recent collection, A Recipe for Water, to show another side of Gillian's work. A love poem for someone else's love, and set in a city landscape. To me it still speaks unmistakably in her voice: that final image of the fishscale, and that disquieting image of a moon lighting only ‘half the planet’.

A love poem with a twist. And a poet who deserves to be better known.

‘Love at Livebait’ is published on Tuesday Poem with permission of the author, Gillian Clarke.

This week's Tuesday Poem editor, Joanna Preston, is an award-winning Tasmanaut poet who lives in Christchurch. Her collection The Summer King has just won the prestigious Mary Gilmore Prize in Australia (see Tuesday Poem sidebar.) Visit her Tuesday Poem - another poem by Gillian Clarke - and then check out the other Tuesday Poets using our blog list.