candle by Hinemoana Baker

I.

By the time I reach the basket of rose petals

held by the young girl with the green sash

there are none left. Still, she holds

the basket out to me

like an air steward offering sweets

in the last fifteen minutes of the flight.

I breathe in the smoke

of myrrh from the censer

and breathe it out towards your photograph.

If this were a waltz it might go something like:

in space sound don’t travel and everyone floats

won’t somebody light my candles

It would be sung in the voice you sang in

when you sang Johnny Cash

and there would be a visual element, of course

a silent film of a free diver

frogging down from the sparkling surface

to the place where the very water

becomes the sinking anchor tied to your feet.

II.

The stone with a muka rope

tied through a single chiseled hole

the one we’ll give a name to when it washes up

a thousand years later in the shape

of an island white with gulls.

III.

We wrote words on pieces of paper and stuck them to our foreheads.

My mouth was on the plastic tap sticking out of the plastic bag.

Later I used my lips to free the sound of an insect from you.

I miss you (buzz). Pass me your lighter.

When I opened the door there was a cake on the front porch.

Someone had made patterns of waves in the off-white icing.

A single word in capital letters sang itself in chocolate.

Oh where is the cradle and where is the crime

Won’t somebody light my candles

There’s fire in the chapel and ice in the rhyme

Won’t somebody light my candles

IV.

Is it possible to perform this word? To own this word?

To kick this word once in the face and want to do it again?

Is it something one can acquire, like land or collectibles?

Oh yes, yes it is a veritable killer whale of a word

creamy and foamy in its black and white propensities

and its refusal to speak English.

V.

I am trying to leave you behind, my love

I am trying to leave you behind

The boat was a mouth, the word was a whale,

the moon was a flying fish, the swoop of a letter.

I miss you, it’s like a cave in this mouth.

It’s a terrible saxophone solo.

It’s what passes for a lie down.

  

from ‘waha | mouth’, Victoria University Press, 2014, posted here with the permission of the author

editor: Mary McCallum

waha | mouth

Hinemoana Baker's collection, launched last month is already being reprinted. An astonishing fact for a book of poetry in this country. It must surely make her a bestselling poet which is so rare as to be almost an oxymoron. And this wonderful woman who lives on the New Zealand's Kapiti Coast is not just a poet on the page but a poet of the mouth – a wonderful reader of her work, and a singer, too. waha | mouth – perfect. 

'candle' is Hinemoana's favourite in the collection. I asked her to send me her favourite and this is the one that arrived in my inbox not long after midnight. I'd been remiss in not contacting her earlier and in not buying the book – what was I thinking? I waited too long and the first print run simply sold out. An exciting thing to happen, and a tribute to the wonders of this wonder woman. 

In this poem, 'candle', is a mouth: a mouth that is a boat, that hauls in or rides alongside words as big as whales, that has in its recesses a cave of grief for a former lover who's died. A mouth that – with this person still alive and breathing – did it all: breathed, sang, named things, drank wine from a plastic tap, had sex, ate cake, smoked. And now I guess, blows out a candle – or lights one? – and tries to rest. 

It's so hard to write the poem of grief or absence, to make it approachable and fresh, and not to push the reader too hard to feel the deep upwelling ugly thing. 'candle' is powerful for its restraint and its ranging unexpectedness. For its cavernous, versatile waha that does everything except cry. I am hanging out for the whole collection now. Find it here.

Hinemoana Baker
credit: hinemoana.co.nz

Hinemoana – she of the top hat – is the current writer in residence at Victoria University of Wellington's International Institute of Modern Letters. She publishes and performs, has released 5 CDs of her music and poetry,  edited an anthology and teaches creative writing. Hinemoana is descended from Ngāi Tahu in the South Island, and Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Toa and Ngāti Ati Awa in the North. 

Her first book of poetry, mātuhi | needle, was co-published in New Zealand and the US in 2004. Actor, writer and artist Viggo Mortensen's publishing house Perceval Press co-published the book, which features paintings of Ngāi Tahu artist Jenny Rendell. Her second book of poems: kōiwi kōiwi | bone bone was published by VUP in 2010.

Hinemoana's first album, puāwai (Jayrem Records 2004) was a finalist for the NZ Music Awards and the APRA Silver Scrolls Māori Language Award. More on Hinemoana and her music and poetry publications here. And you can hear her singing ...

When you've read 'candle' please head into the sidebar to find a host of other wonderful poems by the thirty poets who are Tuesday Poets. They're poems either selected or written by them.

This week's editor Mary McCallum is a publisher with the new Wellington publishing house Mākaro Press which publishes poetry as part of its annual Hoopla series as well as individual titles. Mary is a poet herself, a novelist and children's writer. Her most recent book is 'Dappled Annie and the Tigrish' (Gecko Press 2014). 

Eastbourne by Helen Jacobs

1
It is to the island
and the coastlands
that the shifting light
tethers on a fluid line
weaving water and sand
and rock.

The point of going away
is always to come back –
thrice deny, and you
come back

to the shells of your sandheaps,
allow that there could be
an old spirit or two
or simply an old love affair
with the harbour playing you in.


2

Climbing to the houses
you look down to where
yachts gather, to the path
of the ferries, to all
the usual traffic on the rim,
and you are caught in
the particular pattern
of this moment’s water movement,
this wind flurry, this shadow
darkening green to grey,
and you cannot leave it
because the evening will be
different, and tomorrow will be
different, and the sky has
so many ways of passing before
you, and you cannot gather
all this into imagination so
you must stay.


3

The wide open coast lends itself
to the wind, moods of high spray
over the scrub and frayed flax.
You walk here with your ears wool-
covered, hands in deep pockets,
crouch into a rock or low bush
with your sandwiches.

But on the days of endless blue
there are three white lighthouses
to choose from, the sea a slow swell,
a fishing boat sitting distant,
and you walk to one lighthouse or
the other over sand, clay, rock,
rhythm your steps to a remote clarity
that you can only paint –
or stare at;
in the stillness of the sun
count seven seals, or the houses
on the other shore, and take home one
fingernail-sized shell to code it all,
this question of where the heart lies.

1999
posted with the poet's permission

Editor: Mary McCallum 

Not long before Christmas last year, the people of Eastbourne (NZ) packed out local bookshop Rona Gallery to launch Eastbourne : an anthology (Mākaro Press). The woman launching the book was former mayor  Elaine Jakobsson who writes as poet Helen Jacobs. Her poems 'bookend' the 300 page book, and Elaine had flown north from Christchurch especially to be there. 

After Elaine's launch speech, there were readings from the book, but the last to read was Elaine herself, and Eastbourne is the poem she read. For all who live here it is a taonga — a gift — something to return to as much as the place itself — and the perfect ending to this book of place. 

I speak of Eastbourne with such warmth because I am the publisher at new press, Mākaro, and one of the editors along with Anne Manchester and Maggie Rainey-Smith. Helen Jacobs (now in her 80s) was one of our wonderful finds. The collection of writing — poetry, fiction and creative memoir by 96 different authors — and drawings by local artists, evoke Eastbourne of the imagination, taking readers into the place bay by bay, from Point Howard to Pencarrow. There is classic writing by writers like Katherine Mansfield and Robin Hyde, high profile contemporary writers like Steve Braunias and Lloyd Jones, and fresh new writing from talented locals and visitors like Avi Duckor-Jones and Sarah Laing. 

Elaine Jacobsson was born in Patea in 1929. She came to live in Lowry Bay in 1954, and stayed in  Eastbourne for 36 years. Following an involvement in community activities and environmental issues she was elected Mayor of Eastbourne in 1980, and appointed to the Planning Tribunal in 1986. Since 1984. she has published six collections of poetry, the most recent being DRIED FIGS (2012). 

Elaine/Helen's work has been published in many magazines and anthologies including ‘Yellow Pencils’ 1988, ‘Oxford Anthology of Love Poems’ 2000, ‘Essential NZ Poems’ 2001, ‘My Garden, My Paradise’ 2003, ‘This Earth’s deep Breathing’ 2007, ‘Our Own Kind’ 2009 and in numerous Canterbury anthologies. She retired to Christchurch in 1994 where she has been active in the poetry community and the Canterbury Poets Collective. Visit her at helenjacobspoetry.wordpress.com. 

What a pleasure it was meeting Elaine! And huge thanks to Robyn Cooper who looked after her so wonderfully when she came for the launch. 

One of the joys on working on Eastbourne for us editors was the joy of finding writers from the past life of the community we hadn't expected or known much about, and giving their work more time in the sun. Part of Elaine's speech at the launch of Eastbourne is worth recalling for its acknowledgement of this:

By casting the net generously to gather in retrospective writers as well as current, prose writers of every category as well as poets, this book will have a wide and lasting appeal, and will convey something of the complex nature of writers within the same environment, and something of their attachment to living here, something of the nurse bed of their inspiration. 

And it achieves more. In this age where all is floating in a cloud, dispersed in a sea of twitter, it brings together and gives anchorage to the writers — a tangible centring. 

This is our first post of 2014, at another place where writers and readers can be centred, and find anchorage. Do join us here at Tuesday Poem every Tuesday to meet another poet and poem. In the sidebar, 30 Tuesday Poets post a Tuesday Poem of their own each week — either by themselves or a poet they admire. Check it out.  

Digging in the garden after dark by Pat White

for Seamus Heaney

this morning the blade bites clean
through soil turning up, on the way
worms, spiders and a surfeit of others
at work in the everlasting dark

the news is it is your turn to spend
some time with them, nothing is ended
changing places perhaps, but ritual
recognises impact on those left behind

bespectacled vultures might pick over
the life’s efforts, determine what’s
worth keeping according to the canon,
they lack access to secret conversations

the way your word entered the heart
of the matter, those books taken off
shelves the last few days, good grief
able to remind any of us, how whispering

remnants of your digging for lines, has
somehow entered as a knife would
clean, deep and permanent, parting
resistance between the shoulders

to enter the body somewhere
between truth and aspiration, to say
again with all the precision of hope
that liturgy for the fearful heart

be not afraid, don’t be afraid

_____

posted with permission from the poet 
Editor: Mary McCallum

After Seamus Heaney died last month, after all the quotes from his poems on Facebook - some I'd never read before - others I had, after cradling that last book of his - baby heavy in its cream cover, after thinking of the Beowulf, after listening to my poet friends tell me how much they loved Heaney and realising he was a secret I hadn't shared, after the shock of the thought of a poet gone who one day I thought I'd hear read - talk to perhaps, after all of that, I received an email from my author friend Pat White - whose book on writer Peter Hooper I am to publish soon.

I didn't notice the subject line for Pat's email. Instead, I opened it, and all it said was this:

Pat White

One of my mainstays really

hope the day goes well for you

I glanced down, and there was a poem attached. So I downloaded it, read its quietness and digging and earth and worms, and liked the way it was like Pat talking. He is after all a man of the soil - a farmer once on New Zealand's West Coast who now grows olives in the Wairarapa, has worked in libraries and bookshops, painted pictures and published poems and written an excellent book called How the Land Lies: of longing and belonging (VUP) in 2010. 

The land, you see. Pat knows about that. And we've dug a garden, once, him and I when he was writer in residence at Randell Cottage in Wellington. We planted potatoes (I think) and other useful things. Then, after thinking about Pat and his poetry and the Wairarapa soil and the pleasures of digging in the dark, I read the subject line of the email: 'Seamus Heaney'. Realised then Pat wasn't just writing about himself here, but  about that singular Irish poet, and how that poet had shown him how to dig - not earth, but wormy words.

The digging in Seamus' poems always felt like real digging, a splitting and turning back of the earth in all its damp, wormy shininess, and there was awe for the dark health there and the shine on the spade, and an innocence, too, about what to look for and how long to look at it, and when to start work on the words to tuck it down and make it something. Seamus Heaney worked at poetry for roughly half a century. May he rest in peace, and thanks, Pat, for the poem.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

From Digging by Seamus Heaney

When you've listened to Seamus and read Pat, look to the Tuesday Poem sidebar where 30 poets reside, posting poems by themselves and others they admire every Tuesday.

 This week's editor, Mary McCallum, has published writing which includes poetry, a novel The Blue, and (soon) a children's novel with Gecko Press. She also teaches creative writing and owns a small press called Makaro. She lives in Eastbourne, New Zealand. 

Palmy by Jennifer Compton

Some injudicious thoughts about this city. Nothing else can be written.

I perch in my flat on top of the Square at that dullest hour before dawn,

wreathed in Happy by Clinique For Men from Farmers in the Plaza.

I lurk in the mirrored department of luxury and when the girls go off

to mend their hair and drink tea I spray at random. I love perfume

but don't want to smell the same night after night as the bed warms.

The gay club across the yard has spilled the revellers out into the street.

Their music woke me up, the old tunes I remember like 'Dancing Queen.'

I've had the best time ever! - as the barman dumps bottles in the skip.

So now it is just me and the night, and you, and soon the big old moon

riding the clouds of gathering light behind the glass in my high window. 

This used to be all forest, not so long ago, and I could tell by the sorrow

that haunts the wide, flat roads, that seeps out of the sense of openness,

something is missing, something is wrenched askew, as the river runs.

The wind blows through, in rolling gusts, baffled, and almost angry.

The wind is searching for the Papaioea Forest. How beautiful it was.  

Tonight, behind the necklace of glittering lights below, is the darkness

which is the hills. Upon them, when it is light, like many crucifixions,

the wind farm. Then the long, ungainly arms swoop and seem to bless.

I will admit, to you, that I have found Palmerston North disconcerting.

It is the only word which fits, and I have rummaged the Thesaurus.

The thing that throws me most onto the wrong foot and unnerves me

is that I think the father of my first grandchild must be Rangitāne.

He is adopted, doesn't know his kin, nobody we know looks like him.

But here I see his way of walking up ahead of me in Rangitikei Street, 

and then the gesture of his hand at the wheel of a car as I cross now,

or he is stooping in a shop door, fitting tiles. His very particular smile.

He has cousins living here. But the link is broken, everything is lost.

We don't know them and  they don't know us. There's no way back.

It's a secret we can't unravel. And soon I will be gone. Meanwhile

the wind searches out the last of the autumn roses and shakes them. 

from THIS CITY by Jennifer Compton (Otago University Press 2011)  

Editor - Mary McCallum

I launched the collection This City in Wellington two years ago. I'd met Jennifer Compton back in 2008 when she was the Randell Cottage writer in residence and been following her career ever since. We claim her as a New Zealand poet and she took the six month stint in the historic Thorndon cottage as a kiwi (the other six months a French writer moves in), but she's lived in Australia since 1972.

When I met Jen she was living in rural Wingello in New South Wales, but she has since moved to Melbourne. She is one of those artists with a foot planted on both sides of the Tasman - publishing poetry, plays and short fiction here from the age of 15 and winning some of our top awards including the Katherine Mansfield Award for short fiction (1997) and the Kathleen Grattan Award (2010); and publishing and performing her poetry and writing plays in Australia, where she's won the Robert Harris Poetry Prize (1995).  A true trans-Tasman writer, then. Or as poet Joanna Preston would say, a Tasmanaut.

The Kathleen Grattan Award was for a whole collection of poems - which led to publication of This City, a book divided into three parts: Italy, New Zealand and Australia. Jen has also been an actively contributing Tuesday Poet ever since she got her blog up and running and continues to support Australian and New Zealand writers through that medium as well as through the many poetry events she takes part in.

Apart from the Randell, Jen has been writer in residence in other exotic distant spots including Rome and Bogliasco ... and Palmerston North (2010). I stayed with her for a night in the breeze-block apartment in Palmy that was her home for three months. She'd embraced the place - a Visiting Artist, no less - with enough time and money to write, and lots to look upon from those high white walls. She also ran to two hot water bottles for a Wellington poet not used to the cool Palmy nights.

In her usual generous fashion, Jen hosted a regular Tuesday poetry evening at a local cafe. She simply announced she'd be hanging out there if poets wanted to turn up, and she'd sit at a table in the corner and knit and do crosswords and write poems until the other poets came along - and if they didn't, she kept knitting, writing poems etc.

One day local writer Johanna Aitchison came to the cafe with a poem called Jun which, with Jennifer's encouragement, went on to beat 621 other entries to win the 2010 NZ Poetry Society Competition. Elsewhere in the city, there was a reading of Jen's play The Third Age by a local theatre troupe.

It wasn't all plain knitting. While in Palmy, Jen missed the birth of her precious first grandchild, which explains why her mind went where it did in Palmy.

I think this poem is an audacious piece of work and a hugely satisfying read for the huge, at times, eccentric swoops it takes - like the Quixotic arms of the wind farm. From a whiff of perfume to the lie of the land - from the past living in the present and, the tentative secret joy of that, or not, and therefore a roaming grief - and some fantastic images that have stayed with me since I first heard Palmy read, especially the absent trees, the baffled winds, the benevolent wind farms ...

Tonight, behind the necklace of glittering lights below, is the darkness
which is the hills. Upon them, when it is light, like many crucifixions,
the wind farm. Then the long, ungainly arms swoop and seem to bless.
I will admit, to you, that I have found Palmerston North disconcerting.

Hah! Don't we all. And yet, in Jennifer Compton's hands, glittering too.

This City is a book to savour. Kathleen Grattan judge, Vincent O'Sullivan says that Jennifer's collection, 'sustains a questing, warmly sceptical mind's engagement with wherever it is, whatever it takes in, and carries the constant drive to say it right.' I like that scepticism and warmth and the way the poet searches and probes... and I very much like the playfulness.

More on Jennifer Compton here. And some fabulous notebooks of hers.

And after you've read Palmy, do check out the other poets in the sidebar!

This week's editor, Mary McCallum is the founder and co-curator of Tuesday Poem with Claire Beynon and blogs at O Audacious Book. She has published a novel The Blue, a chapbook The Tenderness of Light and is publishing a children's novel in 2014. Mary has also just started up Makaro Press in Wellington which has a small number of projects on the go including some poetry. 

The Gift by C. K. Stead

Allen Curnow 1911 - 2001

Brasch in his velvet
voice and signature
purple tie

complained to his
journal that you had
'interrupted'.

I wasn't sorry.
That was Somervell's
coffee shop

nineteen fifty-three.
Eighteen months
later you and I

were skidding on the
tide-out inner-
harbour shelvings

below your house
from whose 'small room with
large windows' you saw

that geranium 'wild
on a wet bank'
you suggested

was 'the reality
prior to the
poem'. Son of

Christchurch and the
church you'd come north
to be free perhaps,

to be employed and
in love, and were
making the most

of it in poems that
gave to old 'summer'
new meanings.

Ten years ago
we launched your last
book, The Bells of Saint

Babel's overlooking
the same inner
harbour with

its shallow bays
and touch-and-go
tides. You wrote in

my copy (sure I
wouldn't have
forgotten the source)

'To Karl, always
"somewhere in earshot".'
What you left out

was 'for the story's
end'.  You must have
guessed it was close.

Today no end
to your occupation
of the bland

Waitemata
nor of wild
Karekare where we

shared Lone Kauri
Road. The pipe across
Hobson Bay is

replaced by a
tunnel. Tohunga
Crescent has some

new polish but
nothing you would
deplore. The tuis

still quote you
and even cicadas
manage a phrase

that sounds like yours.
Storms too in wooden
houses sometimes

creak of you. But
this 'blood-noon breathless'
Auckland summer

is the season you
gave us in making
it your own.

                      C.K. Stead


From 'The Yellow Buoy, Poems 2007-2012' [AUP 2013]

Posted with permission 

Editor, Mary McCallum

The Gift by C.K. Stead first appeared in the London Review of Books in 2011 to commemorate the centenary of fellow NZ poet and Queen's Medal winner Allen Curnow's birth, and the ten years since his death.

Karl Stead by Marti Friedlander

Reporting on this, Graham Beattie of Beattie's Bookblog said, 'Stead began writing for the LRB under the editorship of Karl Miller, the paper’s founder. Miller was Professor of English at University College London in 1977 when Stead was there as an honorary fellow and visiting lecturer.

Stead introduced Miller to Curnow’s work and wrote about it for the paper, after which Curnow became a fairly frequent contributor of poems, and this continued after Mary-Kay Wilmers, second in command under Miller, moved into the editorial chair.'

Allen Curnow by Marti Friedlander

The poem begins when the two men met as Auckland University student and lecturer and goes up to the time of the launch of Curnow’s last collection of poetry before his death fifty years later. Curnow and Stead were neighbours in Tohunga Crescent for three decades and in Lone Kauri Road at Karekare on Auckland West Coast, where both had baches.

'The Yellow Buoy' is the 16th poetry collection by Stead out of a total of 44 books of poetry, fiction, criticism, and memoir he's written and edited, and I have had the pleasure of reading it for review on National Radio's Nine to Noon show on Friday. Which means I can't review it here, but I can introduce TP readers to the poem and the man.

While working as an academic in both NZ and the UK, C K Stead became one of our country's most distinguished writers, winning a number of leading literary prizes including the world's largest short fiction prize - the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award, and the open section of the 2010 International Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine.

He's also the winner of a number of national book awards in this country, as well as the Katherine Mansfield short story award and Memorial Fellowship (which took him to Menton), and the Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement in Fiction. More on him here. 

Contrary to the impressive solidity of such achievements, The Gift skips into its subject with its thirteen-syllabled tercets - the delight and sense of mischief, palpable. And it takes them off, the two poets - both geniuses of a kind - to the place of 'touch-and-go tides', in a way that makes me think of the marvellous poem by Bill Manhire, Opoutere, an elegy to friend and fellow writer Michael King who died suddenly, leaving behind another place of tides and fish. These sorts of insights into the lives of prominent NZ writers and their work - our writing history, if you like - I find fascinating. But it's also a lyrical poem about two blokes who hung out in the way blokes in this country do.

The quote Curnow inscribes to his friend Karl Stead is by Yeats, by the way, underlining perhaps the mentor relationship here, and I'm guessing there are a number of references between the lines to poems by Curnow himself apart from the obvious ones. 'Storms too in wooden/ houses sometimes// creak of you', for example, seems like a firm nod to Curnow's Wild Iron which I posted on my own blog just last week on a particularly windy night. Lovely stuff, that 'blood-noon breathless' Auckland summer - especially given the weather we've been having (apart from that windy night, and that was Wellington). 

The whole collection, written as Stead neared his 80th birthday, is anchored by poems about the poet's friendship with and appreciation of writers alive and dead, and the places they inhabited. People such as Frank Sargeson and Robin Dudding and Kevin Ireland and Katherine Mansfield and Eugenio Montale. The poems evoke both a sense of loss and an appreciation of gifts received, and they talk to another batch of poems which deal playfully, curiously, stoically with the fact of being old and what it will, in time, bring.

Strangely, I was at a Katherine Mansfield event yesterday in Wellington, and who was there but Kevin Ireland whom I'd never met before. 'I've just read a poem about your wedding!' I blurted, and turning to the woman beside him, 'This must be your wife, Janet Wilson.' (She's named in the poem.)

It's not all weddings and funerals and walks on the beach. C K Stead is no stranger to literary controversy and his latest collection doesn't completely step away from that. Near the end, there's a poem that's a succinct nine-line retort to a Vincent O'Sullivan poem that once criticised Stead - if you're interested in that kind of literary spat, you can start following the trail in the notes at the back. It's another part of the conversation at the heart of the book.

When you've read The Gift, please take time to look in the sidebar which links to poets from around the world who choose a poem written by themselves or others every Tuesday.

This week's editor Mary McCallum is a novelist and poet who lives by the sea in Wellington, New Zealand, and blogs at O Audacious Book. She is co-curator of Tuesday Poem and this year's coordinator of the NZ Post Children's Book Awards Festival. 

Hotel Emergencies by Bill Manhire

Hotel Emergencies

Thanks to The Poetry Archive for the recording.

Editor: Mary McCallum

The fire alarm sound: is given as a howling sound do not use the lifts ....

Thus the poem by Bill Manhire begins. And what a howl it is - the reading, one of the best I've ever heard: the way it builds and builds, the word 'sound' repeating and repeating like a siren - and with it all the other 'alarms' sounding from the intimate to the global. When I heard Bill read it the first time here in Wellington, I had goosebumps on my skin and a sense of anxiety that didn't shift for a while afterwards.

Every time since, I feel that way when I hear it. If you haven't already done so, hit play. Every time since, I feel that way when I hear it. If you haven't already done so, hit play.  The full text of the poem is available to read on The Poetry Archive site too.

There are more recorded poems by Bill at The Poetry Archive and a CD to buy.  Hotel Emergencies can be found in Lifted (VUP 2005, Carcanet 2007) - one of my favourite collections in the world.

Bill Manhire lives in Wellington, New Zealand. A much-awarded, much-loved poet and poetry Professor - despite people not always 'getting' his post-modern, enigmatic take on poetry - Bill was our first Te Mata Poet Laureate in 1997/8 and won the 2007 Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement. Until next January, he is the director of the International Institute Modern Letters, where I did my MA, and also has a position there as a 'Personal Chair'.

Bill's poem Nuptials  was posted by me on Tuesday Poem two years ago with a commentary that explored his self-confessed 'lyrical foliage', and here's a poem I wrote about Bill based on a talk he gave to my MA class once about how he went about writing poetry.

Bill's  NZ Book Council bio says: Manhire has a postmodern, or perhaps simply an alert poet’s, consciousness of the strangeness of language, the apparent arbitrariness with which meanings accrue to signs. 

Which is where Hotel Emergencies began. In Copenhagen, in a hotel, a sign....

Now take a look in the sidebar for a host of Tuesday Poets with a host of poems they've written or chosen to share this week. Especially exciting: the poetry train in Australia which sets off on September 7 from Canberra to Sydney with poets all aboard, and a poem from the new collection by Hue & Cry's (and Tuesday Poem's)  Sarah Jane Barnett. 

This week's editor Mary McCallum is co-curator of Tuesday Poem with Claire Beynon. She's a Wellington poet and novelist and creative writing tutor at Massey University, as well as a book reviewer and bookseller. She blogs at O Audacious Book.