Where, by Paula Morris

Where are you from, I ask the waiter.

He is from Brazil, Poland, Florence.

Sometimes he is from Mexico, and I

say: so is my nephew’s fiancée.

In Auckland the taxi driver who lives in

Henderson is from Afghanistan. There are

forty of them there, he says. They love it, but
they have to make their own bread.

In New York the taxi driver is from Pakistan.

He asks me where I’m from, and wants to

talk cricket. His dream, he says, is to live

with his brother in Bradford.

In Auckland the dentist is from Brazil. In

Sheffield the café owner is from Auckland.

In London our waiter is from Glasgow.

In Glasgow our waiter is from Melbourne, like

my doctor in Iowa City, the nose specialist,

who leans over me on the operating table.

Where are you from, he asks me.

I tell him Auckland. Good on ya, he says.

Sometimes in Auckland the taxi driver is

from Auckland. He is not from anywhere

but there. If he’s old enough, I tell him my

dream, bringing back the trams.

Thanks to Paula Morris whose poem 
is posted with her permission

Editor Renee Liang

Paula Morris is a fiction writer of English and Maori descent. Born in Auckland, New Zealand, she's studied and worked in a number of places - York, Manchester, London, New York, Wellington, Iowa City, New Orleans, Glasgow - and is currently Fiction Writer-in-Residence at the University of Sheffield.

Her most recent novel, Rangatira, won the fiction categories of the 2012 New Zealand Post Book Awards and the Nga Kupu Ora Maori Book Awards, and was published in German in 2012 by Walde+Graf. Her short story collection, Forbidden Cities, was a regional finalist in the 2009 Commonwealth Prize. She's also the author of YA mystery novels set in haunted cities around the world (published by Scholastic US) and a forthcoming children's book, Hene and the Burning Harbour. 

Paula is well-known here as a fiction writer, but I’ve also long admired her insightful and intelligent literary interviewing, on show most years at the Auckland Writer’s and Reader’s Festival. It was on her trip home for this that I persuaded her to teach on a writing course for migrant women I run, New Kiwi Women Write Their Stories. This is a four-week ‘fast and furious’ tour through poetry, fiction, editing and performance, and the women are invited to contribute to an anthology at the end, launched (with afternoon tea of course!) as the finale.

A number of well-known writers have been tutors, and they are invited to be in the anthology too. Imagine my pleasure and surprise when Paula sent me the poem above. This poem, which starts with the familiar phrase (to many) “Where are you from,” is packed full of witty detail: the taxi driver who talks about making bread, the nose specialist in Iowa who uses the iconic Australian phrase, “Good on ya.” But the apparently random list is in fact carefully constructed. Everyone, it seems, is from somewhere else. Everyone has multiple allegiances, multiple identities.

In Paula’s poem, the speaker starts by asking the question, but then is in turn asked as she moves around the world. This is a scenario common to us nomadic Kiwis. In fact the answer to that question, “Where are you from,” might well be, “It depends on where I am.” The last verse of Paula’s poem suggests, however, that not all of us are comfortable with the notion of shifting geographies: “He is not from anywhere/but there.”

One of the things I enjoy most about this poem is its cheerful delight, the innocent curiosity with which the question is asked. In the world of the poem, asking where someone is from is a way of connecting. It leads to further opening up and maybe even a exchange: cricket, a dream of trams. I’m going to succumb to temptation and offer a poem I wrote in 2006, ‘From Where’. This is an altogether darker poem, sparked when a camera-toting man stopped me as I was walking in the Auckland Domain (my home turf since student days). To some of us born in NZ, the question “Where are you from,” seems to carry an insinuation of “you don’t belong.” It’s an often daily reminder that we ‘look different’. And yet the way the question is asked (very kindly) means we can’t respond with anything other than polite, as-vague-as-we-can-make-it, murmurings. (Which I did, then went home and wrote this poem.)

I’d love to say that seven years later there is no longer any need to write poems like this; unfortunately I still get asked the same question, and I still feel like I’m being questioned on my right to live at home! My reaction changes, however, as soon as I travel. I find it intriguing that Paula and I responded so differently to the same question. Below, her answers to some questions I sent her; and then, my poem.

What sparked this poem? 
I guess the spark for the poem was my incredible nosiness about where people are from; I'm always asking everyone, including shop assistants and receptionists and people I meet on the tram. (They have trams in Sheffield!) I think I can get away with it, because I'm 'foreign' as well - even in New Zealand, because I don't live there. The material seemed to lend itself to a poem because of its compressed form, so I could play with the juxtapositions a bit. Also, the compression of a poem works because often I get little more than a name of a place from someone: these are often announcements rather than discussions, like the one on the operating table in Iowa!

You're more commonly known as a prose writer, but the confidence of this poem suggests you write poetry quite often. Are you a closet poet? 
Yes, I'm a poet on the sly. The very sly, as I don't have much confidence in my poetry. I still sound like a prose writer, I think. Often I write in syllabic meter to try to constrain my lines more, or to demand more of the word choices. I like the playfulness that's possible in a poem, and also the chance to write about things I see/experience directly, which I can't do in my fiction. 'Where' is the first poem I've had published as an adult, you know, apart from a parodic villanelle (called 'Billanelle') written for Bill Manhire's 60th-birthday book. My very first publication as a child was a poem in the primary school magazine. It was about Guy Fawkes. It began 'Guy Fawkes was an Englishman/He though the government was wrong' and ended with 'And they hanged him.' That's all I remember. Clearly I was a prose writer even back then, and obsessed with history ...

How do you choose what to write about? 
I don't think I choose what to write, exactly, whatever I'm doing. Something comes bubbling up, and won't go away. Sometimes it's a case of a connection or intersections, a few things coming together. A while ago I visited the ruins of Pontefract Castle, where Richard II was killed, and I was thinking about it for a while. Then there was a bad car accident nearby that made national news here in the UK, and it seemed as though these two things were related, tangentially. Place is always important in my fiction, and clearly the interest translates.


From where
by Renee Liang

where are you from
she asked
licking fat cream from the tips
of perfect manicures

and I said
actually I live just around the corner.

no really she said
looking in her handbag for lip gloss
where are you from

and I said
from here
as if I didn’t know what she meant
the first time.

From here?
she said
one perfect eyebrow raised
as if she wanted to redo her eyeliner

and I said
quickly
yes

and I knew
the next question.

oh she said
oh where are your parents from then
and I wanted to say
Disneyland

but I knew she wouldn’t believe me
so I said
China

and I could see her summing me up
origami eyelids
golded skin
straight black hair
flat chest

I could see her
breathing in

in relief.

This week's editor Renee Liang, a second-generation Chinese New Zealander, is a poet, playwright, paediatrician, medical researcher and fiction writer. She is involved in organising community arts events such as artistic blind-dating initiative Metonymy and Funky Oriental Beats (FOB), a platform for Kiwi-Asian performing artists. She is a regular contributor to The Big Idea, a website linking NZ's arts community. Renee has been published in a number of journals and anthologies and has produced three chapbooks of poetry: Banana, Chinglish and Cardiac Cycle. She has written, produced and toured three plays: Lantern(2009), The Bone Feeder (2009/2011)and The First Asian AB (2011). She is currently working on Paper Boats, a play about the journeys of Chinese-Kiwi women. Website: www.chinglish-renee.blogspot.com

Remember, there are lots of great poems to check out this Tuesday - look at the sidebar!

ALWAYS ALMOST, NEVER QUITE by David Howard

            at home 
in the interpreted world

            - Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies I

1

The tree on the slope is contingent upon your voice.

I hear nothing so the tree won’t bend –

I need that tree to bend.

The horizon does not want poetry to keep going.

Intention? No star meant to be admired and yet…

Praise is impossible without doubt, ask a teenager.

The beautiful people hear a mirror’s echo;

What they know is special

Pleading. As if poetry needed their vanishing lines!

Always almost, never quite –

Laureates talking up a void rather than a storm.

Whatever, sorrow outlasts wonder.

For most of us it will be winter

Three seasons out of four. Ever had the feeling of feeling

Before?

Parmenides had it too; he knew

Nothing comes from nothing,

The universe is eternal, like first love.

It is hungry work, returning.

2

Because language is the history of being human

A cannibal is somebody who eats his words

As if they were fire.

Embers then ash are what comes of desire.

A food basket made from hope holds the lovers.

Like them, it ignites easily.

Saying is only one way of doing, it is

A narrow cloth for a long table.

However hungry, everyone must leave table

Without much thought for the stained cloth.

3

Anyway, songbirds are followed by birds of prey.

Both balance on top of the ballroom

At the end of the harbour pier.

The rowboat waits – that is what it was made to do

So it won’t get impatient, it won’t

Chafe the rope that will soon be thrown

Over. Hear the soulful violin, out of time;

Feel shoes moving in unison

Towards the edge of what was always known.

Why do we hold on

To the belief that infinite growth is possible

In a finite world? (Brian Turner)

At sunset my daughter gets a red cheek.

Her head separates earth from heaven, now from then

With a wall of fire. She will dance

On that wall, calling for the boy

Who tastes of juniper. His juice will keep her

Free from disease…

I smile through three decades

At this innocence. Always almost, never quite

A bullock hauls itself out of estuary mud

To shuffle through the Milky Way.

[published online in On Barcelona]

David Howard, photograph by Alan Thompson

                                                 Editor: Claire Beynon

'We imagine we are observed and are of concern to someone.' (Czeslaw Milosz, 'I Saw') 

Born in Christchurch, David Howard co-founded Takahe magazine (1989) and the Canterbury Poets Collective (1990). He spent his professional life as a pyrotechnics supervisor whose clients included the All Blacks, Janet Jackson and Metallica. In 2003 David retired to Purakaunui in order to write: 'The rural hinter is perfect for this; by getting clear of the social whirl you realise what matters is the dirt under your fingernails. 

In November 2011 Cold Hub Press published David's collected works as The Incomplete Poems. In September 2012 his collaboration with printmaker Peter Ransom, You Look So Pretty When You're Unfaithful To Me, appeared from Holloway Press, the same month Otago University announced his appointment as the Robert Burns Fellow 2013. 'Yes, I feel lucky.' David's poetry has been translated into Dutch, German, Italian, Slovene and Spanish.

*

HAPPY NEW YEAR, Tuesday Poets and loyal readers - and welcome back to the online lap of poetry gods and goddesses. 

You'll see I've taken a slightly different - collaborative - approach to things this week. I invited four members of our collective (names more-or-less pulled from the hat) to read David's poem ahead of time and then to respond to his words with a single question. As the questions came in, I forwarded them on to David who in turn tapped out his reply. The ensuing discussion became not only the body, but the arms, legs, head and heart of this post; each bracketed dialogue, a small-vast world in itself.  

David initially sent me for four poems to choose from. Almost Always, Never Quite was the world that pulled me back, insisting I return - and, again, return. A poem that set me wandering and wondering, I found myself considering the ways in which mathematics, music and metaphysics underpin, shape and inform poetry, whether unconsciously or by intention. I was curious to know, for instance, whether David's poem 'arrived' at fifty-one lines by coincidence or by design, for is there not as inherent and reliable a magic in poetry as there is in prime numbers? Do such matters matter? I believe so. 

In response to my question, 'What prompted this poem and gave rise to its title?', David replied -

'To begin with an aside... Always Almost: Never Quite is the blue-blooded title of the second volume of Outsider by Brian Sewell – a man whose snobbery is so expansive it could fill the Kingdom of Heaven without assistance from any (other) deity. If ‘The beautiful people’ are his, the immediate provocation for the poem was an invitation to the intimate and honest Going West Festival 2012, with its declared theme Almost Always, Never Quite. 

What a shift there is from a colon to a comma! The former is a mark for equals, the latter for what only follows. In the monotonoverse of larger literary festivals, which are peppered with touring almost-celebrities, what most presenters ‘know is special/Pleading.’ Yet the best know more; they know that ‘language is the history of being human'. And that, while the vanity of their colleagues may appear infinite, vanity is one among many finite things: chiefly our species and the planet that we insist on calling, in error, ours. 

The poem goes beyond its occasion because, to be worth reading, a poem has to.'

*

Many thanks to David not only for agreeing to be this week's featured poet but also for investing so fully in this collaborative process. Thanks too, to Marylinn Kelly, Orchid Tierney, Renee Liang and Susan T. Landry for your attentive reading and for contributing so meaningfully to this discussion. (Susan - together with Boston writer and artist, Melissa Shook - recently launched an online journal on memoir you will be pleased to visit - Run to the Roundhouse, Nellie).

*

          For most of us it will be winter

          Three seasons out of four.

Marylinn Kelly: Are you saying that (for most us) time is 3/4 not about producing, growing, flowering, emerging but rather existing in a dormant state? Is that wasteful or desirable? 

David: While my daily experience is that most of us are dormant most of the time (we often call it ‘being busy’), which I find wasteful rather than desirable, I also own the problem - logical and psychological - of becoming. It’s a contradictory matter; it often seems to me that ‘contradictory’ and ‘matter’ belong in the same sentence. As a child I intuitively subscribed to Parmenides’ notion of block time. Its most prominent adherent is Einstein, who was taken to task by Popper for a view that reduces change to the status of an illusion. While I am intellectually uncertain about essentialism I write from the imaginative position that what is, is; everything already exists, and for always.

                        Nothing comes from nothing,

            The universe is eternal, like first love.

            It is hungry work, returning.

*

Renee Liang: How often does other poets' work kick off your own work, and in what ways? 

David: Not often because I’m wary. Some poets are close friends. Hesiod, Cavafy, Pessoa and Pasolini are the ones I trust most. They have the good manners to stay out of the way when I am beginning a piece; once it is underway they occasionally pop in with advice. Rilke, who orients the opening lines of this poem, is a rare and rather superior visitor to my cinder block tower. I needed to argue through a few of the assertions in the opening of his Duino Elegies, especially: ‘For Beauty’s nothing/but the beginning of Terror we’re still just able to bear’. That's because I view poetry as a way of knowing; it is primarily an attempt to understand rather than an aesthetic endeavour. Incidentally, this means that I treat contemporary notions of hierachy (The Best of the Best of…) and associated technical models as fluorescent red herrings. And a dialogue with the dead, which I welcome, does not presuppose reliance on authority.

            Saying is only one way of doing, it is

            A narrow cloth for a long table.

            However hungry, everyone must leave table

            Without much thought for the stained cloth.

*

Susan T. Landry: Your poem made me think of people who ask why is the sky blue or how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It made me think of an ancient Chinese carving I saw in a museum as a child, the tiniest people and boats and trees carved from a slightly larger but in any language still tiny piece of ivory, and all I could think of even then even as a child, was why?

My question to you is this: is the optimism inherent in the question about blue sky and angels and why enough? Is it always almost, never quite?

David: Your question brings up the ghostly whisper of Montaigne: ‘A straight oar looks bent in water. What matters is not merely that we see things but how we see them.’ He was writing at a time when the intellectual optimism of the Renaissance was being bruised by religious conflict. We read at a time when the economic optimism of the American Dream has visited nightmares upon the have-nots. Always almost, never quite: optimism – whatever its occasion and its object – is not enough. Songbirds are followed by birds of prey. The rowboat waits and, one day, no one will notice how the straight becomes bent yet remains straight. But the optimism of ‘the question about blue sky and angels and why’ is necessary for poetry, which is a kind of analogical thinking. Why? Because it takes faith to leap. The privileged authorities (whether from the state or private sector) use words to circumscribe, to diminish, whereas poets use words to open, to expand. 

*

Orchid Tierney: There are two poetic gestures that really stand out for me in this poem. First is the use of citationality, the borrowing of other voices, or more specifically, the absorption of what-has-already-been-said-and-written, what is historical and passed into public space. Second, section two of poem contains two wonderful clauses:

            Because language is the history of being human
            A cannibal is somebody who eats his words
            As if they were fire.

"Because language is the history of being human" suggests to me that language is an after-effect of experience. In this way, one's gendered, sexual, socio-economic, and ethnic relations to the world not only shape our relations to the structures of language, but in fact, they generate them too. The second line of this stanza: "A cannibal is somebody who eats his words" indicates to me of the pervasive cultural recycling of pre-existent text which leads me back to my first observation of David's use of
citationality. That language is like "fire" would underscore the first line of this stanza: like fire, language is product of human ingenuity; it can nurture us from a distance but once spoken, it cannot be easily reabsorbed back into the human body. At least, to do so would pose a level of danger. But note, language here is spoken by the male subject; he consumes "his words." In this sense, David is referring to a specific gendered experience that produces a language in which its echoes share a male centre (*a* male centre, not *the* male centre).

I'm wondering how David sees his use of citationality as elaborating, expanding, investigating his male-centre relation to the structures of language. 

David: Citationality is a technique for interrogating the self, yet it requires empathy for others and respect for silence (which I regard as generative and therefore feminine). Again, to echo is to enter into relation with the greater-than. When I speak you hear more than me.

*

Claire: I'd encourage multiple readings of Always Almost, Never Quite. My experience has been that with each reading, the poem's landscape inhabited me more, and I, it. My curiosity was repeatedly piqued as to the relationship between Parmenides (c. 515/540BCE) and his muse - and I found myself wondering about the conversations David might (and surely does?) strike up with Rilke when no one else is around.

I asked David if the three-part form of Always Almost, Never Quite was prompted by Parmenides' poetic and philosophical exposition, On Nature (his response: 'Yes, my poem's echoing structure is intentional. .  .'). In his largely-lost 3000-line poem, Parmenides asserts that 'to be means to be completely, once and for all. What exists can in no way not exist'. I admire - and even envy a little - the language he uses when describing the structure of the cosmos as a fundamental binary principle that governs the manifestations of all the particulars: 'the aether fire of flame', which is gentle, mild, soft, thin and clear, and self-identical, and the other is 'ignorant night', body thick and heavy.

What an exquisite image he paints! 

'The air has been separated off from the earth, vapourized by its more violent condensation, and the sun and the circle of the Milky Way are exhalations of fire. The moon is a mixture of both earth and fire. The aether lies around above all else, and beneath it is ranged that fiery part which we call heaven, beneath which are the regions around the earth. . . '

There's a soft/loud echo of this in David’s two closing lines - 

            A bullock hauls itself out of estuary mud

            To shuffle through the Milky Way.  

*

David takes up his position as Burns Fellow on 1 February. David, we wish you exhalations of fire. 

To read more about David - his pyrotechnics and poetry, collaborative projects and solo publications, awards, service and residencies - please click on the following links:

Under Government and Restraint (David in crackling conversation with TP poet, Tim Jones)
New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre
Trout Press
Cold Hub Press
New Zealand Book Council

Claire Beynon is this week's Tuesday Poem editor. Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, she immigrated to Dunedin, New Zealand in November 1994. Claire is a visual artist, art-science collaborator and writer of poetry and short stories. She blogs (somewhat sporadically these days) at All Finite Things Reveal Infinitude and Waters I Have Known. Her web address is www.clairebeynon.co. nz

After you've enjoyed Always Almost, Never Quite please take time to read the other poems posted this week by members of the Tuesday Poem community. You will find them listed in the sidebar.

Transport, by Riemke Ensing

-->

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

Transport

(photographs from the past)
for James

The edge is important
and the focus. Where
to lead the eye
without blurring
the terror of passing trains,
the ground all wasteland and boots,
fear splintered like glass.

Years fold in
and the track runs on
beyond reason.

In the dark room
wounds are developed.
Chaos is exposed
and fixed. The pictures
are silent and speak of winter.
Shadows
too dark to resolve.

Negatives disintegrate
old and weary
with too much sight.

A shatter of dust.

Ashes.

**

(photo credit: James Ensing-Trussell)

I first met Riemke Ensing, I think, at a poetry reading.  I remember being amazed when she came over to talk to me.  We’d studied her poetry at school, I’d seen her name in anthologies, I knew her as a prominent Kiwi writer. Why would she be interested in a baby poet like me?  

But that was before I knew Riemke as a generous friend and mentor, as she is to many. I’ve been welcomed into her home and had the pleasure of long lunches chatting about writing, poetry and the NZ literary landscape. (Riemke is an excellent cook.) I’ve learnt, too, to be wary of the wicked glint in her eye – she says what she thinks and loves to get a reaction. But the intent is always kind.

‘Transport’ is a visceral poem, touching on the nerve endings many of us have as migrants or the children of migrants. It superimposes the clinical process of taking a photograph (“where/to lead the eye”) over the raw wounds of forced exit from a homeland (“fear splintered like glass.”). Short though the poem is, it spans more than a generation. It says just enough to suggest the hidden pain that survivors of war must live with and try not to pass down to their children.  It also offers commentary on how photographs perpetuate, but inadequately describe, the horrors of conflict (“Shadows/too dark to resolve.”)

I feel Riemke’s poetry has such immediacy. There is the sense of the person behind it. Even where the subject matter is dark, as in this poem, there is also a feeling of life, of the importance of being alive to feel, to sense, to think.  Whether she’s describing the events of history or a morning shower, she has the ability to pull the reader in, to include them in the frame.

Riemke has been very busy in the past few years, writing and keeping up a busy timetable of poetry readings and writer’s talks. She was recently honoured for her lifelong work as a writer, editor and mentor by being given the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for Poetry.  This year she also won the NZ Society of Authors Kevin Ireland Poetry Competition, coming top of the field over more than a hundred entries.  Her work has been included in the UK-based Poetry Archive, a repository of some of the most significant works in poetry. In between running around fulfilling all her obligations Riemke also found the time to answer some questions from me for this week’s post.

When did you first realise you were a poet?

I always feel reluctant and even somewhat embarrassed to think of myself as a 'poet'. I write, and some of my output is poetry, but if I compare myself to Yeats or Eliot , Wallace Stevens, Lorca -  in fact any of the myriad of wonderful poets all over the world over the many centuries, my attempts are pretty minimal and insignificant.

I started writing 'poetry' when I first came to NZ at the age of about twelve. I had no models at that stage, other than church hymns, so you can imagine the rather dismal attempts to improve on Wesley and Co. 

All rhyme, of course, and written in red ink. 

Our Presbyterian minister wouldn't have a bar of them and declined my suggestion he put them to music and have them sung in church. I couldn't see why he was so unsupportive, but it took the gloss off it for a while and I concentrated on painting instead. 

I started writing again at Ardmore Teachers' Training College  and continued through 'varsity  as a student. By then I suppose it had become a 'habit'. I had a few poems published now and then but was never very avid about sending things away. 

Ian Wedde used a couple in the New Zealand Universities Arts Festival Yearbook 1968  and that was a thrill, and Karl Stead sent me a congratulatory 'cheering on' note when I had some poems published in Arena, which was then a handset and printed labour of love and dedication by Noel Hoggard at The Handcraft Press. When I think of all the work and time that went into that publication it was astonishing, really. 

What is your favourite place and time of day for writing?

I am not at all systematic or organized or 'timetabled'. I note things down and keep a notebook handy. Sometimes the scraps become poems. It depends. If I feel a particular idea or concept is worth pursuing, I keep at it, but I'm just as likely to leave it as a note to myself.  Sometimes I write for particular occasions or people, and that is usually an impetus to put something together and mostly works quite well for me. 

People have written of the visual, focussed nature of your poems. For you, is writing a poem like taking a photograph?

For me, a poem is not at all like taking a photograph. Not 'taking a photograph' as I know it, which is taking a sight and clicking a button. The writing of a poem for me is very exacting and exhausting. That's probably why I don't write a lot. 

When I finish a poem, I'm usually 'washed out'. I don't know why that should be. Some poets speak of the thrill, the excitement and joy of writing, but for me it is mostly the opposite. I do at times have a sense of achievement or accomplishment, but it seems to come at a price.

‘Transport’ reads like a very intimate, personal poem, and you dedicate it to your son James. Did you ever experience the displacement voiced in the poem?

I dedicated 'Transport' to James because he was (if I remember correctly) just starting his career as a photographer, having been a teacher of the violin for many years. He of course, thinks the poem is 'very dark'. 

In fact, like my mother, who would have preferred poems about flowers and the more lighthearted aspects of life, he think most of my poems are rather too sombre.  And I suppose it has to do with the age. I was born just before the war in Europe began.

My parents had experienced the First World War and the Depression of the thirties. My first years were war and all the anxieties afterwards. Then there was the migration to NZ and the subsequent sense of being other and different - but no, the 'displacement' I write of in the poem is not something I personally experienced other than through other people's stories, books, films, etc. One lives in the imagination and in that sense the 'experience' can be as 'real' as the actual.  

What are you working on at the moment?

Presently I am still trying to come to terms with ongoing 'presence' of death. Bill died 3 and a half years ago and although he was considerably older than myself, I still can't quite reconcile myself to the idea of his no longer being here. 

My brother died a short while ago, as did a cousin of my age, and there seem to be constant, almost daily reminders, of mortality. So my present work concerns itself primarily with loss. Perhaps that's somewhat depressing, but I think it has produced some good poems - one of which won the recent 2012 NZSA Kevin Ireland Poetry Competition. 

**
This week's editor is Renee Liang,usually from Auckland, NZ, although this week she is posting from Kalgoorlie, Western Australia where she is doing a paediatric locum. Renee writes poetry, plays, fiction and non-fiction, blogs for The Big Idea, and organises community arts initiatives.  In her spare time she works as a doctor and is mum to Sofia (nearly 4 months.)