"One story and the other" by Sarah Broom, 1972 - 2013

My stomach churns like stormwater
running to the sea

and in the wake of the storm
I am strewn with debris.

*

When you look at me
with that innocent face,
as artless as the full moon,
as simple as the round
of cream at the top
of those old glass bottles –

then I forget
your other side,
the veiled moon,
the averted head,
the shuttered eyes.

*

This afternoon the harbour
was still and sultry

only the white butterflies
carried on their dance,
their frantic, balletic pairings

everything else was overcome

but then when I swam
in the too warm sea
the current was strong –
twenty seconds on my back,
staring at the clouds,
and the jetty was a good
long swim away –

twenty minutes
and I’d have crossed the bar.

*

I could not see the open sea
because two headlands were in the way.
One was near and one was far.

*

And it is true that there is always one story
and the other:

the moon with its two faces;

the lash of the storm and its relenting;

the fever grip of the days that pass
thick and fast among stumbling feet
and soft jammy mouths,
and the slow inner breath,
a room expanding and shrinking
like a paper lantern, its ivory coolness
swinging through the dark;

the harbour with its come-hither looks,
its nests and whispered secrets,
the tug and sigh and doze of tides

and then the open sea –
you knew I would return to it –

the open sea
of which, in fact, we know nothing.

Only that it pitches, rocks and keens

and agitates
in our dreams.
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© Sarah Broom, 2013
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From: Gleam by Sarah Broom, Auckland University Press, 2013
Reproduced on The Tuesday Poem Hub with permission.
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My first encounter with Sarah's poetry was in 2010, when I read and loved her first collection, Tigers at Awhitu (Auckland Universty Press, NZ; Carcanet, UK.) News of her death earlier this year was a great sadness to me, and although I looked forward to the publication of her second collection, Gleam (Auckland Universty Press) in August, I still felt deep regret that the poet would no longer be with us and part of all that release of a book means.

In her obituary for Sarah, written for Carcanet, Sarah’s UK publisher, Selina Guinness wrote:  “Gleam … is a collection written in extremis, and contains some of the most beautiful and startling poems about dying I have ever read.”

I agree that Gleam is very much a testament to Sarah's long illness and dying. I also feel that when you look at a poem like One Story and the other it is a poem that is as much about life as about death, and also about the "being here" that encompasses both. In this sense, I believe the poem offers a key to the collection. The sea is a constant companion throughout Gleam: its myriad voices, its constant change and yet its immutability. I feel it is no accident that the poem both begins and ends with the sea, although there is also a still heart to the poem, contained within the many unfolding boxes of moon, tide, "the fever grip of days":

… the slow inner breath,
a room expanding and shrinking
like a paper lantern, its ivory coolness
swinging through the dark …

Reading Gleam, I was put in mind of the AS Byatt quote:

'Think of this – that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.'

Sarah and I never met in person although we emailed, and talked once on the phone. But when I sat down with Gleam and read poems like One story and the other in particular, in that space I did indeed feel like we were alone together, with a friend speaking to me from every line.
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Sarah Broom’s first poetry collection, Tigers at Awhitu, was published by Auckland University Press (AUP) in 2010, and simultaneously by Carcanet Press in the UK.  She also wrote Contemporary British and Irish Poetry: An Introduction, which was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2006.  Her second collection, Gleam, was published by Auckland University Press in August 2013. To hear Sarah read from and discuss Tigers at Awhitu, click on the following Scottish Poetry Library podcast interview: Sarah Broom.

Sarah died on April 18, 2013, after a five year illness with lung cancer. She is survived by her husband and three children.

Today's editor, Helen Lowe, is a novelist, poet and interviewer whose work has been published, broadcast and anthologized in New Zealand and internationally. Her first novel Thornspell, (Knopf) was published to critical praise in 2008, and in 2012 The Heir Of Night, won the David Gemmell Morningstar Award. Helen posts every day on her Helen Lowe on Anything, Really blog and can also be found on Twitter: @helenl0we
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In addition to One story and the other, be sure to check out the wonderful poems featured by the other Tuesday Poets, using our blog roll to the left of this posting.
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"All my life" by Sarah Broom

So we sat, and the waves
crashed in like gifts, or insults,
and the children played,
digging trenches to defend
against the sea, and then a head
bobbed up and down
in the waves, a bit too far out,
and an arm waved, and again,
and a friend walked the beach,
waving the head in, and we sat
and said to each other
do you know that Stevie Smith
poem, not waving but drowning –
yes, and why is it still so hard to tell,
and then we stood and watched
as the inscrutable head bobbed up
and down and the arm still waved
and the children still dug, bodies
roughcast with sunscreen and sand,
and we thought about getting the
lifeguards, but surely the friend
should know, and we thought
about how there should be a sign,
you know, two punches in the air,
or something like that, yes,
then a surfer came and paddled
him in on his board, and the friend
helped him walk, and yes he was
drowning, not waving, now we know,
and isn’t it hard to tell?

© Sarah Broom, 2010

From: Tigers at Awhitu by Sarah Broom, Auckland University Press, 2010
Reproduced on The Tuesday Poem Hub with permission.
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Every year or so I encounter a few "standout" poetry collections, and Tigers at Awhitu was one of my personal favourites of 2010—because of the subtlety and keen-ness of the poetic observation, and the beauty and delight of the language employed, for example in lines like:

"So we sat, and the waves
crashed in like gifts, or insults..."

I found the collection both powerful and moving; it is also one that has "stayed with me" since that first reading.

Emma Neale described the poems as "sophisticated and intelligent … full of bittersweet, piercingly true contradictions" and I feel her words encapsulate today's poem, "All my life". The power of the poem creeps up on you, as the reader, because it is deceptive, disguised in the almost inconsequential conversation of the "we" on the beach, observing the "head//that bobbed up and down//in the waves, a bit too far out." The same "we" that continues to stand and watch and discuss until it becomes clear that the swimmer is in difficulty—and together, we are brought to the final realization:

"…and yes he was
drowning, not waving, now we know,
and isn’t it hard to tell?"

The "voice" remains conversational, but the ending on that final question works at several levels. There is the simple, surface understanding that "we" could have stood watching and speculating until the swimmer drowned.

But I feel the poem also picks up on that uncertainty we feel, an unease even, when something may be a-miss, but because we are unsure we hesitate to take action, to step into what may be deep water. "But surely," we tell ourselves, exactly like the "we" at the heart of the poem, "the friend should know." Someone better fitted than ourselves should know, should act…

Yet I also feel there is another layer again to this poem, one hinted at by the title, "All my life." It points to the poem as an extended metaphor for life itself, in which we are all both the head bobbing up and down in the waves, and the watchers on the shore; always caught up in that duality of drowning and waving, in which often "we know" too late—and isn't it always so hard to tell?

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Sarah Broom’s first poetry collection, Tigers at Awhitu, was published by Auckland University Press (AUP) in 2010, and simultaneously by Carcanet Press in the UK.  She has also written Contemporary British and Irish Poetry: An Introduction, which was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2006. Her second collection, Gleam, will be published by AUP in July next year.  She lives in Auckland with her husband and three children.

To hear Sarah read from and discuss Tigers at Awhitu, click on the following Scottish Poetry Library podcast interview: Sarah Broom
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This week's editor, Helen Lowe is a novelist, poet, interviewer, and a 2012 Ursula Bethell Writer-in-Residence at the University of Canterbury. She emerged onto the NZ poetry scene in 2003 as an inaugural Robbie Burns Award winner and has since had over fifty poems published and anthologized, both in NZ and overseas. The Gathering of the Lost, the second novel in her The Wall of Night series, was published internationally in April, and she recently won the Gemmell Morningstar Award 2012 for the first-in-series, The Heir of Night. Helen posts every day on her Helen Lowe on Anything, Really blog and is a regular Tuesday Poem contributor. You can also follow her on Twitter: @helenl0we

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Enjoy more wonderful poems from our Tuesday Poem contributors by navigating the left side bar.

A message from co-curators Mary McCallum and Claire Beynon: Merry Christmas and a wonderful New Year to everyone who contributes to Tuesday Poem and everyone who supports and comes to visit,  especially our regulars. We are grateful to you all for helping keep this wonderful poetry community vigorous, challenging and satisfying. What treats we've had this year - poems from all over and insightful personal commentaries that have shed new light on them. Based in New Zealand as we are, we are taking a summer holiday break until Tuesday January 22.  See you then!

'Listening to Glenn Gould on Orton Scar' by Kathleen Jones

From Ravenstonedale
driving north on unfenced roads,
moonlight reflects the tarmac’s

frozen wake across the moor —
a snail's trail  in my rear-view mirror.

Bach unwinds from the c.d.
a landscape of variations
into this zero night.

The grass is white; trees black.
The walls run off like staves.

The moon fingers each stone
separately, in unexpected harmonies
and structures, endlessly practising —

compelling me to stop.  Listen
to the quiet significance of the moment.

Across the counterpoint
I hear the chill cry of a predatory bird.
Single notes glitter like frost.

©  Kathleen Jones 2011
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From: Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21 by Kathleen Jones, Templar Poetry, 2011.
Reproduced on The Tuesday Poem Hub with permission.

Kathleen Jones is a fellow Tuesday Poet so it was a great thrill when her collection, Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21 won the Straid Collection Award in 2010 and was subsequently published by Templar Poetry in 2011. The collection comprises a number of themes, including family relationship— particularly those between mothers and daughters—both history and natural history, as well as a strong sense of place. Every book of poetry will have some standout poems and usually many more again that I will enjoy reading. But to work as a collection, the sum of the poems must comprise a greater whole, so that when the final line is reached one may say:  yes, this is a book. For me, Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21 met that test.

Nonetheless, in every collection there will still be standout poems, and Listening to Glenn Gould on Orton Scar is one of those poems for me. It is both a poem of nature—the moonlight, the trees, the moor—but also of place. Although I have never been there, as a reader I get so strong a sense of Ravenstonedale and the unfenced roads to the north that I feel I have stood there and seen the "tarmac's frozen wake across the moor." Yet there is more to the poem than this: as a poet I admire both the strength and precision of the language, and the way music itself—as the poet listens to Glenn Gould—is used to encapsulate both the moment and the landscape:

  Bach unwinds from the cd
  a landscape of variations
  into this zero night.

I feel that Listening to Glenn Gould on Orton Scar achieves, in a larger form, exactly what the Japanese haiku form is intended to do:  the poem captures the experience of an "ah-ha" moment in language, lifting the discreet elements of the moment to a sense of something larger. Again as with haiku, I get the sense that no one word has gone unconsidered; every word has earned its place in the poem.

And so we end with:

Across the counterpoint
I hear the shrill cry of a predatory bird.
Single notes glitter like frost.

Chilling. Austere. Perfect.

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Kathleen Jones’ first solo pamphlet of poetry,  Unwritten Lives, won the Redbeck Press pamphlet award and her first full collection,  Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21, was joint winner of the Straid Collection award, and published by Templar Poetry in November 2011. 

Kathleen is also a biographer, author of a life of Christina Rossetti, Learning not to be First [OUP] and A Passionate Sisterhood [Virago], a group biography of the sisters, wives and daughters of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey.  Her most recent biography, Katherine Mansfield: The Story-Teller, was published by Penguin NZ and EUP in 2011. 

Kathleen Jones’ home is in Cumbria, but as her partner is a sculptor working in Italy she lives there some of the time too. She has taught creative writing in a number of universities and is currently a Royal Literary Fund Fellow.  

Website:  www.kathleenjones.co.uk
Blog: www.kathleenjonesauthor.blogspot.com

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This week's editor, Helen Lowe is a novelist, poet, interviewer, and a 2012 Ursula Bethell Writer-in-Residence at the University of Canterbury. She emerged onto the NZ poetry scene in 2003 as an inaugural Robbie Burns Award winner and has since had over fifty poems published and anthologized, both in NZ and overseas. The Gathering of the Lost, the second novel in her The Wall of Night series, was published internationally in April, and she recently won the Gemmell Morningstar Award 2012 for the first-in-series, The Heir of Night. Helen posts every day on her Helen Lowe on Anything, Really blog and is a regular Tuesday Poem contributor. You can also follow her on Twitter: @helenl0we

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Enjoy more wonderful poems from our Tuesday Poem contributors by navigating down the left side bar.

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VA Hospital Confessional by Brian Turner

Each night is different. Each night the same.
Sometimes I pull the trigger. Sometimes I don’t.

When I pull the trigger, he often just stands there,
gesturing, as if saying, Aren’t you ashamed?

When I don’t, he douses himself
in gasoline, drowns himself in fire.

A dog barks in the night’s illuminated green landscape
and the platoon sergeant orders me to shoot it.

Some nights I twitch and jerk in my sleep.
My lover has learned to face away.

She closes her eyes when I fuck her. I imagine
she’s far away and we don’t use the word love.

When she sleeps, helicopters
come in low over the date palms.

Men are bound on their knees, shivering
in the animal stall, long before dawn.

I whisper into their ears, saying,
Howlwin? Howlwin? Meaning, Mortars? Mortars?

Howl wind, motherfucker? Howl wind?
The milk cow stares with its huge brown eyes.

The milk cow wants to know
how I can do this to another human being.

I check the haystack in the corner
for a weapons cache. I check the sewage sump.

I tell no one, but sometimes late at night
I uncover rifles and bullets within me.

Other nights I drive through Baghdad.
Firebaugh. Bakersfield. Kettleman City.

Some nights I’m up in the hatch, shooting
a controlled pair into someone’s radiator.

Some nights I hear a woman screaming.
Others I shoot the crashing car.

When the boy brings us a platter of fruit,
I mistake cantaloupe for a human skull.

Sometimes the gunman fires into the house.
Sometimes the gunman fires at me.

Every night it’s different.
Every night the same.

Some nights I pull the trigger.
Some nights I burn him alive.


© Brian Turner

From Phantom Noise by Brian Turner (Bloodaxe Books, 2010)
Distributed in Australia & New Zealand by John Reed Book Distribution.

Reproduced on The Tuesday Poem Hub with permission.

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                                                                                   Editor: Helen Lowe

On January 24, I featured US poet Brian Turner's AB Negative (The Surgeon's Poem) as the Tuesday Poem selection on my own blog. 

I had first heard Brian in 2009, as part of a radio documentary on contemporary war poetry. The poem read in that documentary was AB Negative (The Surgeon's Poem), which was why I featured it in January. 

I felt, both on first hearing and subsequent reading, that it had the element I most look for in writing of any kind, which is what I call 'heart." In the poem I heard the note that I believe resonates in all great art and reaches out to the listener, the reader, or the viewer: that depiction of what NZ poet, Dr Glenn Colquhoun, has described as the "ache" of our human condition. 

Part of that depiction may be gritty reality, another part may be compassion—both qualities that I found in Brian Turner's first collection Here, Bullet, a series of poems written during his service with the 3rd Stryker Brigade in Iraq. As I noted on January 24: "...the poems observe, record, note, but make no judgments outside of the personal—leaving the reader to make up his or her own mind on the subject of this war, its brutality and its human cost." In this sense, it's, "...war poetry in the tradition of the First World War poet, Wilfrid Owen, who wrote: 'My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.'"  

Brian Turner's second collection, Phantom Noise, is still war poetry, but this is no longer the poetry of the combat zone but of its aftermath, that return to civilian life where the experiences of war, even when the individual tries to keep them locked down, still bleed into everyday life so that in the poem At Lowe's Home Improvement Center, 

"... standing in aisle 16 ...
 I bust a 50 pound box of double-headed nails  
open ... their oily bright shanks 
and diamond points like firing pins 
from M-4s and M-16s." 

Again, there are many powerful and moving poems in Phantom Noise, but two epitomise the collection for me—perhaps appropriately given they are also its first and last poems: VA Hospital Confessional, which I have featured today, and The One Square Inch Project. 

For me, VA Hospital Confessional is all about the memories bleeding through:

"I tell no one, but sometimes late at night
 I uncover rifles and bullets within me"

and

"Other nights I drive through Baghdad.
 Firebaugh. Bakersfield. Kettleman City." 

The landscapes of war are bleeding into those of home. But this is also a poem about emotional disconnection, perhaps most tellingly encapsulated in the lines:

"She closes her eyes when I fuck her. I imagine
 she's far away and we don't use the word love."

Here the sexual act epitomises a world conceived as "subject" and "object", "self" and "other", one in which "I" fuck "her." Like war and killing, sex is separated out from love, becoming something which is done to the "other."

"Every night," the poem tells us, "it's different." But also: "Every night the same."                       

"Some nights I pull the trigger. 
Some nights I burn him alive."

Raw, brutal, powerful stuff—but also full of Yeats' "terrible beauty." Some of that terrible beauty may lie in "night's illuminated green landscape" of war, but I feel, with Wilfrid Owen, that the poetry is in the pity. 

And that other poem, the The One Square Inch Project? The key to why I feel it rightly completes this collection lies in the final stanza:

............................................." ...When I return to California, 
to my life with its many engines – I find myself changed
 ............ ...when gifted with this silence, motions have more 
of a dance to them, like fish in schools of hunger, once 
flashing in sunlight, now turning in shadow." 

Lovely lines in and of themselves, but just as the fish turn—now in sunlight, now in shadow—we are left with a sense that a return to wholeness may be possible. At the very least, amidst the gift of silence, there may be a turning away from that terrible gulf that splits the world into "self" and "other." 
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About the Poet:
Brian Turner served for seven years in the US Army. He was an infantry team leader for a year in Iraq, from November 2003, with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. In 1999-2000 he was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina with the 10th Mountain Division. Born in 1967, he received an MFA from the University of Oregon and lived abroad in South Korea for a year before joining the army. His poetry was included in the Voices in Wartime Anthology published in conjunction with a feature-length documentary film. 

His collection Here, Bullet (Bloodaxe Books, 2007) was first published in the US by Alice James Books in 2005, where it has earned Turner nine major literary awards, including a 2006 Lannan Literary Fellowship and a 2007 NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry. In 2009 he was given an Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship. His second collection, Phantom Noise, is published by Alice James Books in the US and by Bloodaxe Books in the UK. It was shortlisted for the 2010 T S Eliot Prize. 

To read more about the poet and Phantom Noise you may also enjoy the following article that appeared in The Guardian newspaper in October 2010: "Brian Turner, words of war." 
When you've read Brian Turner, check out the other Tuesday Poems in the sidebar.

About the Editor: 
This week's editor, Helen Lowe is a novelist, poet, and interviewer, hosting a regular poetry feature for Women on Air, Plains 96.9 FM. She is the current Ursula Bethell Writer-in-Residence at the University of Canterbury and has recently launched her third novel The Gathering of the Lost, the second novel in the The Wall of Night series. The first-in-series, The Heir of Night is currently shortlisted for the Gemmell Morningstar Award. Helen posts every day on her Helen Lowe on Anything, Really blog and you can also follow her on Twitter: @helenl0we.
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Fey by Helen Lowe

your door
stands open still
at dusk, your light
a moth's antenna
across
shadowed lawn


bare feet rustle
in last year's
leaf drift, a wind
sways
through naked trees


you say
you will hang
a cricket cage
above your lintel,
burn apple wood
in the grate –
dance, the circle
of your skirt
reflecting
the moon's dark face


I ride
a rocking horse
with patchwork eyes,
steal
through your door
to the cold-stone hearth –
dream
of dervish footsteps
hurdy-gurdy trees





© Helen Lowe  Highly Commended, Takahe National Poetry Competition 2008 -  published in Takahe 68, December 2009, and posted with permission here


                                                              Editor, Alicia Ponder

I was first introduced to Helen's work through her novel 'Thornspell', and I remember being particularly impressed by the lyricism of her language, along with her obvious love for romance, myth and fairytale.  A very powerful combination - especially in a poet - so of course when I found she was a member of the Tuesday Poem group I was instantly drawn to her poems.  With pieces ranging from Haiku to works inspired by Homer's Odyssey, each has its own unique voice, its own soul, and its own story to tell.  

I remember seeing Fey when it was blogged in December 2011, and it sent me straight back to my misspent youth - where anything was possible and there were fairies at the end of the garden.  (Not to mention the besom on the front porch that could only confirm that my mother was indeed a witch.)  But Fey is somewhat more sophisticated than a piece of childhood wonder.  It begins with an open door at night - your open door - placing you as the reader open to all the possibilities of an open door - camaraderie and danger - hand in hand.

And then...

                                your light
                                a moth's antenna
                                across
                                shadowed lawn

Helen Lowe

Such a beautiful picture.  Soft. Welcoming.  But more than that.  While being a stunning image of light across grass at first glance -  the moths antenna is also a hint of something slightly alien or "other" that is about to creep into the narrative.  (Not to mention the rather subtle nod to the creatures that belong to the dark - but yet are drawn to the light.) Now I'm sure I could continue to dissecting the rest of the poem - and leave the severed pieces bloody on the page - while undoubtedly proving irrevocably that I've missed the entire point.   I think that would be a bad idea.  So the only other thing I'll note is how I love the picture of "hurdy-gurdy trees" I have in my head, and suggest you check to make sure 

                                your door
                                stands open still
                                at dusk...

Thanks Helen.  Lovely work  I look forward to more. 

Helen Lowe is an active member of New Zealand's poetry scene.  She is a member of the New Zealand Poetry Society, hosts a monthly poetry feature for Women on Air, Plains 96.9 FM, and of course is a member of the Tuesday Poetry group with her blog. She is also the winner of numerous awards which can be found on her website. Her third novel The Gathering of the Lost , the second novel in The Wall of Night series, is just out. 

When you've read and enjoyed Fey check out the other Tuesday Poets' offerings in the sidebar - the range will astonish you. 

This week's Tuesday Poem editor Alicia Ponder is better known for her children's stories.  She has been published in Australia and New Zealand and her short story "Frankie and the Netball Clone" was recently nominated for Best Short Story in the 2012 Sir Julius Vogel Awards.  Her poetry can be found on her blog An Affliction of Poetry

Butterfly, by Rhian Gallager

We entered a year of slow burn
I stole a line from her eyes
She wrote by hand return

The body awoke to the act of yearn
Moisture met the heat of July
We entered a year of slow burn

A door ajar, could yield or close firm
From colleague to intimate ally
She wrote by hand, I wrote in return

Disclosure inched by turn
A long striptease of send and reply
We entered a year of slow burn

Shining and wild were in
Our lines, barely disguised
She wrote by hand in return

All grew from a pact of adjourn
Overwintering, waiting a sign in the sky
Fused on a year of slow burn
Word at the start became touch in return.

(c) Rhian Gallagher

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About the Poem:
"Butterfly", first published in Poetrix, will be included in Rhian Gallagher's second collection of poetry, Shift (forthcoming from Auckland University Press.) "Butterfly" follows the form of the villanelle, although it reflects the contemporary trend of allowing variation in the wording of the refrain.

I believe this poem is representative of Rhian's work in terms of the beauty and delicacy of the writing, a delicacy that nonetheless enhances both the emotional depth of the poem and also the adherence to a demanding form.

I have revisited Rhian's first collection, Salt Water Creek, on several occasions now, enjoying the juxtaposition of intellect, interior reflection, and often profound emotion that characterises her work—and very much look forward to the publication of Shift next month.

"Butterfly" is reproduced here with the permission of Rhian Gallagher.

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About the Poet:
Rhian Gallagher’s first poetry collection, Salt Water Creek (Enitharmon Press, London, 2003) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for First Collection. Gallagher received the Janet Frame Literary Trust Award in 2008. Auckland University Press is publishing her second collection of poetry, Shift, in September 2011. Gallagher is also the author of a non-fiction book, Feeling for Daylight: The Photographs of Jack Adamson, (South Canterbury Museum, 2010).

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Helen Lowe is this week's Tuesday Poem editor and a regular contributor to the Tuesday Poem community. A novelist as well as a poet, Helen's first novel, Thornspell (Knopf) is published in the US, while her second The Heir of Night, (HarperCollins, US; Little, Brown, UK) is also available internationally and recently debuted in The Netherlands, as Kind van de Nacht. She is currently working on her third novel.
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Once you have enjoyed "Butterfly" do take some time to enjoy the other poems posted by members of the Tuesday Poem community for this week. You will find them all listed in the right-hand sidebar.

Tuesday Poet: Harvey McQueen, 13 September 1934 - 25 December 2010

Te hinganga o te Totara haemata o te waotapunui a Tane — a mighty tree has fallen in the forest of Tane.

One of our Tuesday Poets, Harvey McQueen, died early on Christmas Day and will be greatly missed by us all.

To read 'The Last Post' by Harvey's wife, Anne, please click here.

You will also see commemorative posts by Tuesday Poets on the blogs listed in the side bar (or use our search tool in the sidebar - enter: Harvey McQueen).

The Tuesday Poem Hub curator, Mary McCallum, will be posting a formal tribute for Harvey here next Tuesday January 11.

 Helen Lowe

Compasses: A Triptych by Nancy Mattson

1.

Blake drew Newton naked, every muscle
tense, seated on a rock, hunched over
the paper world unscrolling at his feet,
inscribing limits with his compasses
like God in Milton’s paradise.

2.

Rodchenko photographs his wife,
Stepanova, working at her table,
a pair of compasses in one hand,
thumb and forefinger twirling the pivot,
eyes intent on the interlocking spheres
of her textile design. The universe
is new from skin to sky. Hand-rolled,
a cigarette rests on her bottom lip.
The ash drops, she smiles and blows it away.
Seed fluff, time flake, off to the past.

This is no lady painter of aquarelles,
she’s a maid’s daughter, Varvara Stepanova,
calls herself ‘Varst’ and she can do anything:
boil pitch or potatoes, build sets for plays,
shoot billiards, dance tangos, make zaum
poems in syllables, grunts and blobs of paint.

Varst is sewing canvas overalls,
her fingertips tough as thimbles. Bites the needle,
spits a smoke ring through its eye, pulls
a thread into a V, cuts and knots it.

Varst sneers at fine art,
slaps the heads off chrysanthemums,
uses her brain like a weapon, wages war
on the object, publishes manifestos, critiques
all ‘isms’ and the artists who deliver them,
writes in her journal with a steel nib,
nails their quirks and egos.

Rodchenko snaps the circle in groups, pairs
and singles, but his wife is his favourite
subject. Never object. She gazes away
from the lens as she points a blade,
arm-length, at six of her collages.

Her self-portrait mocks the easel: forehead
a cross-hatch in blue paint, mouth a scowl
of black X’s. She caricatures herself,
her husband too, as clowns
with elbows and pantaloons.

3.

Never since John Donne has it been so true
as it is with this pair who stride
with equal steps into the Revolution:
If they be two, they are two so
as stiff twin compasses are two.

© Nancy Mattson

First published in Artemis (United Kingdom). Republished on the Tuesday Poem Hub with the permission of the poet.

About the Poem:

"Compasses" is inspired by photographs of Stepanova by her husband, Rodchenko, as well as by her own art and excerpts from her journal – all in Amazons of the Avant-Garde, eds. Bowlt & Drutt, London, Royal Academy of Arts, 1999. I was transfixed by the early 20th century Russian women artists in that exhibition and have nearly completed a book about them and their milieu. To my great surprise, my Finnish great-aunt who emigrated to Soviet Karelia in the 1930s, and was lost in 1939, has now popped up in the poems, insisting that her voice be heard. —Nancy Mattson

About Nancy Mattson:
Nancy Mattson is an ex-patriate Canadian poet, now resident in London. I met Nancy Mattson in 2008, when she and her husband, Mike Bartholomew-Biggs, also a poet, were resident in Christchurch for several months and appeared as guest poets as part of the Canterbury Poets' Collective annual Autumn Season of Poetry Readings at Madras Cafe Bookshop.

At that time, Nancy was already working on her forthcoming collection, working title Finns and Amazons, of which Compasses: A Triptych forms part—and was particularly struck by both the poem's emotional power and also by the strength of the historical narrative, translated into the personal portrait of Varst, Vavara Stepanova, and Rodchenko.

Nancy began writing poetry in 1977 after completing her MA in English Literature at the University of Alberta. Her poetry, non-fiction and reviews have been published in Canada, the US, the UK, Ireland and Finland in magazines, anthologies, the odd scholarly journal, a printed encyclopaedia and a couple of parish newsletters.

In 1982 she edited and co-authored a history book which provided the inspiration for her first collection, Maria Breaks Her Silence (Regina: Coteau, 1989), based on the life of a 19th century Finnish woman who emigrated to Canada. This was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best first book of poetry in Canada. Adapted for the stage as Lye Soap and Dancing Cows, it was also broadcast on CBC Radio.

Her second full collection is Writing with Mercury (Hexham: Flambard, 2006), with cover art by Elaine Kowalsky. Nancy is also one of five poets featured in the anthology, Take Five 06, edited by John Lucas (Nottingham: Shoestring, 2006). The poems in these two volumes are set in contemporary England, Canada, Finland and Italy and use memory, myth, history and family stories to create a rich linguistic and cultural texture.

Nancy is pleased to be one of 20 writers selected by Dr. Beth L. Virtanen to appear in Finnish North American Literature in English: A Concise Anthology (Edwin Mellen Press, 2009) and her work has appeared in many other anthologies.

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This week's Tuesday Poem editor Helen Lowe is a novelist, poet, interviewer and lover of story from Christchurch New Zealand. Her first novel, Thornspell, is published by Knopf, USA and her second The Heir of Night is just out with HarperCollins, USA, and Little, Brown in AU/NZ. Helen has also had both poetry and short fiction published, broadcast and anthologized in New Zealand, Australia and the United States.

For More Tuesday Blog Poems from the rest of the Tuesday Poem community browse our live blog roll in the sidebar – if the header says ‘Tuesday poem’ you know there’s a poem in there somewhere!

The Tuesday Poem Blog Celebrates New Zealand's National Poetry Day

Friday 30 July is New Zealand's National Poetry Day and to celebrate both the day, New Zealanders writing poetry, and poetry in New Zealand, the Tuesday Poem blog is featuring a poem by each of the 3 finalists in the Poetry Category of the NZ Post Book Awards.

A brief bio of each of the three poets is presented below their featured poem. (Please note: the 3 finalists are listed in alphabetical order.)

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Bernadette Hall: The Lustre Jug









The Lustre Jug

in praise of poetry


there is a question that the sky
asks daily of the sea, something about faith
and unfaith, maybe,
a shirring of the lovely surface,
the silver slip, the embossed artwork

name for me, love, the parts of the flower
and I will tell you how beautiful
the women were when they were young
how they shone in the presence
of God immanent stirring within them, stirring
within everything, how their eyes shone

and then there was always the question
of sex, the joy of it, and death and the poem,
how all three needed, how they still need nothing
more or less than abandonment,
the strewing of roses

name for me, love, the parts of the flower :
anther, aril, axil, bract, calyx, carpel, corolla,
glume, keel, ligule, ovary, pedicel, petal,
petiole, sepal, sinus, sheath, spikelet, sporangium,
stamen, stigma, stipule, tomentum, whorl

the wild geese call as they fly over the estuary,
long strings of them and paradise ducks
and two black swans, the one following the other,
creak creak the sound like a child’s swing

the arguments, the proofs twist down
but they don’t persuade, they never will,
unlike the axle creaking within the turning wheel

Note: This poem also insists on being a gift for Michele Leggott, NZ Poet Laureate 2008 -2009

(c) Bernadette Hall

Bernadette Hall is recognised as one of New Zealand's more distinctive poetic voices. She was the 1996 Burns Fellow at Otago University and an Artists in Antarctica Fellow in 2004. The author of nine poetry collections, her work has been published in a range of national and international anthologies. Hall was the 2006 Victoria University Writer in Residence and in 2007 held the Rathcoola Residency in Donoughmore, Ireland.



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Michael Harlow: The Tram Conductor's Blue Cap

‘Bride with beautiful feet’

Under a sudden sunfall of bright

that strikes the dark in waiting,

we look to sing one pleasure or

another--trying to understand

the way we come to each other,

to let loose words in their looking,

whose language is telling what story,

ours; the right kind of adventure,

waiting for some goddess or other,

dear Sappho to arrive on a rill

of wind; to take your ease, to lean

back, to shout the world the right place

for love to come calling on the ‘wings

of pretty sparrows’. In all the right

places, the right touch to take with great

style the pleasures of your company

Water in one hand fire in the other,

we sing you to make the far, more

near, and the more love’s longing--

some die without it--but look: you

are as sunlight among flowÉers, such

a ‘bride with pretty feet’, we make

the air be music with your name.

(c) Michael Harlow

Michael Harlow was born in the United States but arrived in New Zealand in 1968. In the 1980s, Harlow was an editor of the Caxton Press poetry series and poetry editor of Landfall. His poetry is distinctly European with a whimsical, questioning sensibility. His collaboration as librettist with the New Zealand composer Kit Powell is extensive. A practising Jungian psychotherapist, Harlow was awarded the 1986 Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship and was the 2009 Burns Fellow at the University of Otago.

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Brian Turner: Just This









High Windows

If you want to compliment someone call him grounded.
If you want to do him a favour
pray that there’s more order than chaos, more love

than hatred and resentment in his life, that
transfiguration and redemption are acquaintances,
at least, and possibly friends. Let him be

wistful rather than woeful when looking out of high windows.
Allow him to prance, say he knew wonder and joy
and turned his back on the place called Last Resort.

Let him believe he told the truth, most of the time.

(c) Brian Turner

Brian Turner is a poet, essayist, biographer and editor and brings a fresh perspective to nature poetry, aiming to be at once personal but unsentimental in his approach. In 2009 Brian Turner received both the Lauris Edmond Award for Distinguished Contribution to Poetry and the Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry in recognition of significant contribution to New Zealand literature. He has published numerous collections of poetry, as well as works of non-fiction.

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In addition to our three featured poets, Tuesday Poem Blog poets are also posting a poem with "New Zealand" as a theme, or—for poets not from NZ—a poem on the joys of poetry and the making of poems. Please do check them out and enjoy Naional Poetry Day with us!

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