The Topography Of Wellington, by Jennifer Compton

There is a darkness here: and also an itinerant rainbow

strolling like a twister with one lazy finger dipped in water.

There is a harbour: because of the rainbow there may be

a glory, like a saint's halo, which is an optical effect. Glory.

There are six kererū  in Orangi-Kaupapa Rd feeding on miro:

or pūriru, tawa, tairare. These birds are almost too indolent

to fly, the telephone wires zig-zag under their exiguous feet.

As they pause - in their top heavy survey of topography, let

us consider our understanding of living above. Above contains

below. Look up to the hills and sky, look down the way a river

runs. You are having it both ways now. The sun seeks you out.

In the deep of night before dawn the wind and the rain blow in.

Look down into this glittering city, high on your slippery hill and

shrug. Would they have called it View Rd if it didn't have a view?

© Jennifer Compton 

from This City, Otago University Press, 2011

Reproduced on The Tuesday Poem with permission

Editor: Helen Lowe

Last Friday, August 28, was New Zealand's National Poetry Day for 2015. So what better to feature, I thought, than a poem about New Zealand by an expatriate New Zealander who is also one of our own — the indefatigable Jennifer Compton.

In 2008, Jennifer was Writer In Residence at Wellington's Randall Cottage — and from first reading I was captivated by the accuracy with which she captures the interwoven physical and emotional landscape of Wellington:

"There is a darkness here" she tells us, accurately I feel, but:

"...also an itinerant rainbow"

Also accurate. The poem that unfolds from these lines plumbs the emotional depths of physical environment, and in so doing, Jennifer Compton joins the masters who have caught a cultural sense of the city in literature. The Topography Of Wellington is part of a lineage that includes Lawrence Durrel's Alexndria Quartet and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities:

"...Above contains
below. Look up to the hills and sky, look down the way a river
runs..."

Yet the topography of this Wellington remains as instantly recognisable as Dickens' London, portrayed in the opening paragraphs of Bleak House, would have been to his contemporaries. We encounter Jennifer Compton's six kererū with the same delighted shock of the familiar, the sense of yes, this is not only real, but true:

"There are six kererū in Orangi-Kaupapa Rd feeding on miro:
or pūriru, tawa, tairare. These birds are almost too indolent
to fly ..."

The Topography Of Wellington, as is only right and proper for both poetry and literature, provides a nexus where the local encounters the universal, to the extent I feel confident a reader anywhere in the world could read of looking down:

"...into this glittering city, high on your slippery hill"

and have a sense of what the poet saw. 

Reading The Topography of Wellington I was also able to concur with Kathleen Grattan Award judge, Vincent O'Sullivan comment about This City as a collection: 

'It is a volume that sustains a questing, warmly sceptical mind's engagement with wherever it is, whatever it takes in, and carries the constant drive to say it right. This is a complete book of poetry, coherent, gathering its parts to arrive at a cast of mind, a distinctive voice, far more than simply adding one good poem to another.'

I hope reading The Topography of Wellington today will encourage you to seek out both This City and more poetry by Jennifer Compton.

-- Helen Lowe

Jennifer Compton was born in New Zealand in 1949 and now lives in Melbourne. She has won several Australian awards for poetry and This City won New Zealand's Kathleen Grattan Award in 2010. Her poem, Now You Shall Know, won the Newcastle Poetry Prize in 2013, and the collection of the same name was published last year in Australia (Five Islands Press), while her verse novella Mr Clean & The Junkie was published this year in New Zealand as part of the Hoopla series 2015 (Mākaro Press). 

To discover more about  Jennifer and her work, visit her on her blog: 

Stillcraic

.

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, was published to critical praise in 2008, and her second, The Heir of Night (The Wall Of Night Series, Book One) won the Gemmell Morningstar Award 2012. The sequel, The Gathering Of The Lost, was shortlisted for the Gemmell Legend Award in 2013. Helen's fourth novel, Daughter Of Blood, (The Wall Of Night Series, Book Three) is forthcoming in January 2016. She posts regularly on her Helen Lowe on Anything, Really blog and is also active on Twitter: @helenl0we

In addition to today's feature be sure to check out the wonderful poems featured by the other Tuesday Poets, using our blog roll to the left of this posting. 

Palmy by Jennifer Compton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Editor - Mary McCallum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Erstwhile by Chris Wallace-Crabbe

Your girlfriend rang me up today,
your former girlfriend,
no, that isn't right
the present friend of all that once was you;
your fetch or
what remains in the little photographs:
a boy in black-and-white
riding a horse into the scrub
or, freckled, reading out of doors,
both times T-shirted,
your hair a thick, dark bowl-cut,
my erstwhile son.

Oh yes, she rang today,
had taken somebody out to see your grave
by the forked white trunk,
and we were sad together
on the phone, for a hard while
thinking of you, long gone now. Hence.
Where? Where are you?
In poor fact I can never come to grasp
the meaning of it all, supposing
that to be what religion's all about.
The loss remains behind
like never being well.

Chris Wallace-Crabbe

__________
                                                    Editor: Jennifer Compton

I find I don’t need to see anything much about this poem by esteemed elder of the Australian poetry scene, Chris Wallace-Crabbe. It is elegantly explicit all on its own account. It has charm, it is triste, and it is tough. It is as honest a poem as a poem can be, I think. I do appreciate honesty, in poetry.






Chris Wallace-Crabbe is an Emeritus Professor at the Australian Centre, University of Melbourne and chair of the newly-formed Australian Poetry Ltd.  More on Chris here at the Poetry Archive which says of his poetry:


Frequently set in Melbourne, the poems explore the dissolution of modern life and an ongoing search for joy that he believes all humans experience.


And another of his poems is here. 

Jennifer Compton is Tuesday Poem editor this week. Born in Wellington and living in Melbourne, Jennifer recently won NZ's prestigious Kathleen Grattan Award with her manuscript 'This City', which will published by Otago University Press next week and launched in Wellington on Monday July 18 by Tuesday Poem curator Mary McCallum. On her own blog, Jen has posted one of the poems from 'This City.'


After reading Erstwhile, check out more Tuesday Poems in the right sidebar. Next week, Tuesday Poem celebrates National Poetry Day with poems from all three poetry finalists in the NZ Book Awards.