Sugarloaf hill by Bill Sutton

I like to start my morning walks

earlier in late summer

before the Hawke’s Bay heat engine

gets going
          and the flies start up.

There are people already

some with dogs...

we smile and exchange

handfuls of words.

Scratches in the dirt

like some post-modernist

literary text

signify a rabbit

and I see the ragwort

is making a comeback

from spraying and insects...

good.

It’s cool at the top...

I sit for a minute

to look around

grateful for the quiet

a cluster of houses

is colonising

the Hawke’s Bay hills
                    like German wasps

and a small plane zizzes

through the sky

carrying its cargo

back to Wellington.

On my way down

I see the bunny –

a small one,

dead already

engrossed in making

a meal for maggots.

My friend Vicky

would be mortified

but I say... what about the flies?
like developers

          they deserve a chance.


From Bill Sutton's collection Jabberwocky, Steele Roberts, 2014. Reprinted here with the kind permission of the poet.

Tuesday Poem Editor: Tim Jones.

Cover: Rainman, Leonard Lambert, 2013

Bill Sutton says: Since I returned to live in Napier, every week I've climbed at least one of the three hills around Taradale, for exercise and to catch up with the seasonal changes.

Tim Jones says: Hawkes Bay Live Poets were kind enough to invite me to be their guest reader in May 2015 - a trip I greatly enjoyed. Bill was my generous host, and before the reading he tested out my calf muscles with a climb up Sugarloaf Hill so he could show me nearby Taradale, Napier a little further away, and the wide expanse of the Bay.

I had no idea he had written a poem about Sugarloaf Hill, so when I got home and started reading his collection Jabberwocky, I was excited to see such a fine poem about a place I had visited so recently.

I first met Bill when I attended the 2013 National Poetry Conference in Havelock North. This year's conference in in Wellington - I hope you can make it!

Bill Sutton lives in Napier. Previously a DSIR scientist, senior policy analyst and Labour MP, he grew up on a South Canterbury farm and in 2013 organised a national poetry conference in Hawke’s Bay. His poetry collection Jabberwocky (2014) is available from Steele Roberts.


This week's editor is Tim Jones, whose own recent books include poetry collection Men Briefly Explained (IP, 2011) and short story collection Transported (Random House, 2008).

With Mark Pirie, he co-edited Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand (IP, 2009), and with P.S. Cottier, he co-edited The Stars Like Sand: Speculative Australian Poetry (IP, 2014). His poem "Kraken" won second prize in the Interstellar Award for Speculative Poetry 2015.

Oh Dirty River by Helen Lehndorf

The town where I grew up

was small, ugly and smelled
like burning blood.

Most of the dads and 

a lot of the mums and
heaps of the big brothers and sisters 

worked at the Freezing Works.

Thousands of cows and sheep 

and even a few hundred pigs 

would get trucked in, slaughtered,
chopped up and packaged 

in cling film each day.

The burning-blood smell 

came from the incinerator
where they would burn
the bits left over.
Though, some of it got pumped 

right into the river
which ran through the town.

In our town, 

people called the works
‘The University’ 

because it was where most of us
ended up going after we left school.

People also used to
call our town ‘Lavender City’ 

because of the burned-flesh stink.
So you can’t say
we didn’t have a sense of humour.

Yeah. You could make a joke 

about it. But only if you’re
from there, eh?

Otherwise, you’re just

getting smart.

Editor: Tim Jones

Credit note: "Oh Dirty River" was first published in Kaupapa: New Zealand poets, world issues, edited by Hinemoana Baker and Maria McMillan (Te Whanga-nui-a-Tara: Development Resource Centre, 2007), and is included in Helen Lehndorf's poetry collection The Comforter (Wellington: Seraph Press, 2011). "Oh Dirty River" is reproduced by permission of the author, Helen Lehndorf, and the publisher, Seraph Press.

Tim says: I like "Oh Dirty River" for a number of reasons, one of which is autobiographical: I spent part of my childhood in another freezing works town, Mataura. My Dad worked at the New Zealand Paper Mills plant which was directly across the Mataura River from the freezing works, and that smell of burned flesh Helen describes in this poem was all too familiar to me as I walked or biked to visit him.

A few years later, I had a Varsity holiday job that involved measuring the paper mill's effluent stream. That took me down to the riverbank, where, opposite me, I could see the blood-rich, blood-red untreated freezing works effluent that burst from the cliff on which the freezing works stood and plumed into the river, adding a red stain to the multi-coloured stains produced by the paper mill. There were some very large eels in that river.

But I also love Helen's poem because it catches both the matter-of-factness of life in a small town that makes its living from the death of thousands of animals, and the half-proud defensiveness of anyone who's grown up in such a town and heard it mocked by the rest of the country. It may be a dump, we think to ourselves - but it's our dump.

After you have read "Oh Dirty River", check out the other Tuesday Poems in the sidebar!

Tim Jones is a Wellington author, poet, editor and anthologist. His most recent book is poetry collection Men Briefly Explained (IP, 2011). He is currently, with P.S. Cottier, co-editing The Stars Like Sand, an anthology of Australian speculative poetry that is due for publication in 2014. You can find out more on Tim's blog Books in the Trees.

Why Don't You Talk To Me? by Alistair Te Ariki Campbell

Why do I post my love letters
in a hollow log?
Why put my lips to a knothole in a tree
and whisper your name?

The spiders spread their nets
and catch the sun,
and by my foot in the dry grass
ants rebuild a broken city.
Butterflies pair in the wind,
and the yellow bee,
his holsters packed with bread,
rides the blue air like a drunken cowboy.

More and more I find myself
talking to the sea.
I am alone with my footsteps.
I watch the tide recede
and I am left with miles of shining sand.

Why don't you talk to me?




                                       Editor: Tim Jones

Alistair Te Ariki Campbell (1925–2009) is my favourite New Zealand poet. While Allen Curnow and James K Baxter were conventionally regarded, during the high nationalist (and masculinist) period of New Zealand poetry, as the twin titans of New Zealand poetry – or perhaps, for aspiring poets, its Scylla and Charybdis – Alistair Campbell's poetry, rooted in observation and experience rather than poetic ideology, speaks more directly to me.

Kapiti: Selected Poems 1947–71 was, if I recall correctly, the first collection of New Zealand poetry I bought. While some of the early poems in this selection, such as "The Return" (1949), are magnificent, it was the increasing simplicity, freshness and directness of address of the later poems in the book that especially impressed and (I hope) influenced me.

"Why Don't You Talk To Me?", written in 1965, has all these qualities, plus a cunning indirection. For much of the poem, the central question is present only by implication: the natural world makes its customary arrangements all around me, yet I am separate; why don't you talk to me? This poem says all that needs to be said, and no more.

For more information about Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, see his Wikipedia and New Zealand Book Council pages and his obituary in The Guardian.

Alistair Te Ariki Campbell

Publication Information

Published in Alistair Campbell, Kapiti: Selected Poems 1947-71, and reprinted in Harvey McQueen, ed., These I Have Loved (Steele Roberts, 2010). Reproduced as a Tuesday Poem by kind permission of Alistair Te Ariki Campbell's literary executor.

Tim Jones is a poet, author, editor and blogger. His latest book is his third poetry collection, Men Briefly Explained. His short story "The New Neighbours" has been included in the recently-published anthology The Apex Book of World SF 2. For more on Tim and his writing, please see his blog Books in the Trees.

Once you have read "Why Don't You Talk To Me?", please take the opportunity to read the poems which the individual Tuesday Poets have posted on their blogs. You'll see them linked from the sidebar at the left of this page.

The Force of Things by Majella Cullinane

 I have tapped the arch of the scapula
     where the skin dips
to the breastbone.


Your breaths
     are the quivering feathers
     of birds
rustling eucalyptus, macrocarpa, pine.


It’s a question of listening:

the guttural call of your dreams
     a kind of offering
I nestle in the cup of my hands.


     I snatch the ghost of things
     you cannot see.

It is this that frightens you.


     The wind holds its blade
against the night’s throat,
but like you, it too will soon forget –

the taste of my lips
     buoyed in a gully of dreams.


"The Force of Things" first appeared in Takake 71, ed. Siobhan Harvey, and was published in Majella Cullinane's collection Guarding the Flame (Salmon Publishing 2011). It is reproduced here by permission of the author.

                                                             Editor: Tim Jones


Majella Cullinane is an Irish poet who has recently emigrated to New Zealand. I heard her read her poetry at September's New Zealand Poetry Society meeting in Wellington, enjoyed hearing her poems very much, bought her debut collection Guarding the Flame, and am very pleased I did.

There are a lot of fine poems in this book, and I had a hard time deciding which of them to ask Majella for permission to publish as a Tuesday Poem, but I kept coming back to "The Force of Things". I like the way it takes the images of the natural world that recur through the collection and makes them both intimate and ominous. Restlessness without and restlessness within...

The poems in Guarding the Flame cover the poet's old life in Ireland, her new life in New Zealand, and the transition between the two. It's well worth reading if you like Irish poetry or New Zealand poetry - or if you just like poetry.

Guarding the Flame is available from the publisher, bookdepository.co.uk, impress.co.uk and fishpond.co.nz. The Salmon Publishing page for Guarding the Flame includes Majella's bio and two sample poems.

Tim Jones is the editor of this week's Tuesday Poem. Tim is a poet, author and editor who lives in Wellington, New Zealand, and won the NZSA Janet Frame Memorial Award for Literature in 2010. He is about to embark on a book tour with Keith Westwater, to launch Tim's new collection Men Briefly Explained and Keith's debut collection Tongues of Ash. This week, one of Tim's poems from Men Briefly Explained is Mary McCallum's Tuesday Poem, and next week Tuesday Poet Helen Lowe will post one on her blog. 


Do check out the other Tuesday Poets in the sidebar.

Miner's Cook by Meliors Simms

Flying in, the sea is dark and demanding.

Our island appears like a jewel and grows

green until we circle to land, 

then I see the red sore gouged at its centre

and my bile rises as the plane drops.

On the ground I am lost in the chaos

of unloading in a sudden dark that hides everything

beyond our beams. I’m looking for the bread,

fresh bread brought to last this first week

but by the time I’ve found it the loaves are gnawed to stale crusts

and I’m in despair with a hungry crew to feed.

I must push my fear and sorrow

out into the dark and be grateful when our neighbours,

the whalers, come over the hill with roast meat.

I stumble asleep among crates of food

and dream of home but when I wake up I’m still here

and a relentless dawn calls me to breakfast for thirty. 

For days of sorting supplies and learning a new kitchen,

fuelling men between their shifts,

all I ever see is the grassy slope sheltering our camp,

a wink of water behind us and a sky full of strange stars.

Finally there is time for a walk, up the hill

I see again the bleeding gash I am feeding,

and vomit into the grass.


Meliors Simms

No Mine is an Island - Meliors Simms 

Blanket-stitched, needle-felted recycled wool blankets 2011

                                                               Editor: Claire Beynon

Meliors Simms (NZ) is a woman of diverse talents; a 'radical crafter'*, environmental custodian, creator of exquisite hand-made and altered books, poet and fine artist of high integrity. 


I first encountered Meliors's books and meticulous needle-felted artworks about two years ago when a friend, knowing my passion for Antarctica, directed to me to Meliors's blog, Bibliophilia; I was awed and delighted by the familiar yet entirely 'other' world I encountered there. Crocheted coral reefs, embossed paper fossils, blanket-stitched oceans contaminated by woollen droplets of rust-coloured oil; a finely-contoured relief of a pristine Ross Island. . . I felt an immediate resonance with Meliors's work and with the ethos underpinning it.

In her artist's statement for You are an agent of change, Meliors explains her process in the following words - "The slow, accretive nature of my artistic practice is an analogy for both the natural world and human society. . . These ‘domestic arts’ also signify apparently unrelated individual human choices regarding food, housing, transport and energy; and their cumulative environmental impact. . ."

I chose Meliors's poem Miner's Cook for this week's Tuesday Poem for the way it exemplifies so much of what I understand her creative process to be about - namely, a call to re-establish the right relationship with our earth; a plea to wake up to the many covert and overt ways in which we cause our planet harm; in this poem and the accompanying artwork, No Mine is an Island, Meliors quite literally stitches into relief our blind disregard and wilful mismanagement of our natural resources. 


Miner's Cook - an image that might or might not have appeared to her in a dream - is a no-holds-barred poem of protest, lament and advocacy. This is work that is at once subtle and provocative, lyrical and confrontational. It serves as archive of our times.

"Look across the surface and down a mine that bleeds toxic tailings into the sea. Look within, beyond the obvious, behind the scenes. There is a complicated story underlying every thing we buy and all that we reject. The consequences of our consumption extend far, and sustain long, beyond our individual use. We cannot fence off ourselves from each other, or from the air, the earth, the waters of our world. Whether careless or deliberate in our choices, whether in denial or awareness, we do not stand alone. Let there be no mistaking: each imperfect stitch of cotton thread was made by hand, every layer slowly needle-felted from recycled blankets and un-spun wool. My materials are plants and animals but my finger tips became calloused from hundreds of hours pushing needles of steel, tempered from iron, mined from an earth left as scarred as my skin. . . " Meliors Simms

*Fellow blogger and Tuesday Poet Tim Jones posted an in-depth interview with Meliors in August. 

Claire Beynon is this week's TP editor. An artist, writer and novice filmmaker, Claire's blog - www.icelines.blogspot.com - is about to turn three; her first entry was written in October 2008 en-route to a field camp in Antarctica. 


For more Tuesday Poems, please follow the links in the side-bar to the right of this page.

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The 100th person to join our TP community is Salaq. 

 We will be sending Salaq a package of poetry books in celebration. 

Shetland Ponies, Haast Beach by Tim Jones

Forest and sea have had their way

with memory. A few houses — silent,

locked — remain. Between car and beach,

a field of Shetland ponies, already

calling her by name. But I'm

facing inland, bush not far beyond,

mountains piled like thunderheads

across the morning light. Was this

our house, or this, or this now empty field?

For eighteen months, we lived here

while they built the road. I was two, then four.

What I have are barely memories:

my mother at the washing line. My father's

longed-for homeward stride. Grader drivers

lifting me onto their knees to ride.

Work done, we drove away, the new highway

bearing our fortunes south, over spilling streams,

across the Main Divide. Now I'm back, reclaiming

what may be reclaimed. The forest

has no answers. The sea lies past the ponies.

"Look," she says, "they're eating from my hand."

________________________

 Editor: Alicia Ponder

From the soon to be released collection Men Briefly Explained, I found Tim Jones' Shetland Ponies, Haast Beach instantly compelling. It's the first stanza deliberately filled with contemplative pauses - echoing those empty spaces of memories from a long-forgotten past - and the lovely shape in the way the poem moves between the present and the past, with glimpses of these, as if from a car window on a long journey to a pivotal destination. The poem as a whole has a real feeling of reclaimed memories in a solid and imperative now.  

Tim Jones is a poet, author and editor, and Men Briefly Explained will be his third solo collection of poetry, out in October.  I'm looking forward to hearing him read from it at a launch event at Rona Gallery, the bookshop my family owns in Eastbourne (Friday October 28, 6 pm), and at other venues around the country.  


Tim's support of New Zealand poets and poetry has been amazing, he was highly instrumental, along with co-editor Mark Pirie, in creating and keeping alive the dream of "Voyagers" a highly esteemed collection of New Zealand Science Fiction poetry and a real boost for many NZ Poets.  He also recently edited the Australian and New Zealand Speculative Poetry Collection in the second issue of Eye to the Telescope, published online here by the Science Fiction Poetry Association.  

 

Tim is a Tuesday poet who lives in Wellington NZ, and blogs at Tim Jones: Books in the Trees.  Some of his books can be found on his blog, including the short story collection Transported longlisted for the 2008 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.

Alicia Ponder is this week's Tuesday Poem editor.  She lives in Eastbourne, and loves poetry, and writing for children.  She is the co-author of two art books, and is published in New Zealand and Australia .  She blogs here at an Affliction of Poetry.  


After you've read the hub poem, try out some of the Tuesday Poem posts in the sidebar. 

Leaving the Tableland by Kerry Popplewell

Leaving, I stop to look
where once the long hut lay
under an outcrop on a sloping shelf;

then, try to reconstruct
from memory’s ragtag store
its silhouette, woodshed and rusting roof.

Almost, I smell wet smoke
but no one stops now, soaked,
to dry their clothes before a sputtering fire.

Glistening, the land’s pelt shifts.
Clouds break. Chill sunlight lifts
low haze from bush around the clearing’s rim.

I move on down the track.
High up, against white rock,
damp tussock flares on the receding hill.


"Leaving the Tableland" is the title poem of Kerry Popplewell's first poetry collection, published by Steele Roberts (2010) and available from the publisher or in selected bookshops for $19.99 (RRP).

Tim Jones writes: Having enjoyed hearing and reading Kerry's poetry over the years, I was very excited to hear that her first collection was being published. I had a tough time deciding which poem from this collection to run as this week's Tuesday Poem, but I chose "Leaving the Tableland" because it's a fine poem that showcases Kerry's skill at exploring the place where landscape and memory meet.

You can read another poem from this collection, "Portrait: Pahiatua, 1942", which Helen Rickerby recently posted as a Tuesday Poem on her blog.

"Leaving the Tableland" is reproduced as this week's Tuesday Poem by permission of the author, Kerry Popplewell.

Tim Jones is the editor of this week's Tuesday Poem. Tim is a poet, author and editor who lives in Wellington, New Zealand.