just a point man in the ocean by Vaughan Gunson

just a point man in the ocean

holding a piece of rope

which starts at one point

on the shore, arcs out towards

the black island rocks, their skirts

of white foam billowing up

like Marilyn Monroe’s dress

long ago, or yesterday

distracted by what’s beneath

the ocean, to go down diving for

                 – screams of children

bring me back, a chorus
rising high with each wave.

I stand with my fellow guardians

staunch against the waves

breaking cold on our backs.

we speak, only about the ocean,

the next wave coming towards us,

reaching its tipping point.

the line holds, the children scream

claiming all the world.

I’m there to see it: a point man

in the ocean, going down.  

From this hill, all it's about is lifting it to a higher level, Steele Roberts Ltd 2012

Posted here with permission from the author.

Vaughan Gunson lives in Hikurangi, north of Whangarei. He is concerned about the ecological, economic and political challenges facing New Zealand and the world, and has been active in a range of organisations and campaigns.

His poetry has been published in Blackmail Press, New Zealand Listener, Poetry New Zealand,
Side Stream, Takahē, the Lumière Reader, UNITY Journal, Workers Charter and 52/250 A Year of Flash. "just a point man in the ocean" is from Vaughan's poetry collection this hill, all it's about is lifting it to a higher level, published last month by Steele Roberts Ltd.

What intrigues me most about this poem is its movement and ambiguity. The poem follows the arc of the rope of the second line, out across the frivolous and nostalgic – "foam billowing up// like Marilyn Monroe’s dress" – and the dangerous “black island rocks." We seem to enter the mind of the "point man" as he contemplates "what's beneath" but are snapped back out, as he is, to the populated world.

There are ideas of protection here, perhaps against the unknown – “just” suggests the solitude of one man holding the fort against nature but “screams of children// bring me back, a chorus/ rising high with each wave.” jolts us into a much livelier situation filled with the rise and fall of voices; the crash of waves. Then “my fellow guardians” again populate the scene and we are witness to an unfolding world or uncoiling, like the rope that leads us. 

My favourite line is "the children scream / claiming all the world" which brings each image back into focus for that moment: the people, the rocks, the foam, the mysteries beneath before that final submergence.

this hill, all it's about is lifting it to a higher level has been described as “Poems about the beauty of the everyday, parenting and childhood, the creative process, death, moments of transcendence, social justice, and hope."

It can be purchased online from Steele Roberts or by sending a cheque for $20 (includes postage) to: Vaughan Gunson, 71A George Street, Hikurangi, Whangarei (with a return address).

You can read more of Vaughan's work at his website,  Falling Away From Blue and "like" his poetry on his facebook page, Vaughan Gunson: Poetry.

Now take a look at the Tuesday Poems in the sidebar here - written or chosen by our 30 Tuesday Poets from around the world. 

This week's editor is Wellington writer, Saradha Koirala. She is the author of the poetry collection Wit of the staircase, and has recently finished a second collection, with the help of some serious time away from teaching. SaradhaKoirala.com

For John Pule by Karlo Mila

the poet told us

there was a beach
but a hurricane came
and swallowed it up

there was also a nation of people
but a New Zealand sponsored
hurricane
just as hungry
swept away people like grains of sand

with the help of
longremembered newfound family
he finds the old foundations
where hibiscus trees grow wild
with memories of his mother

using a new machete
he follows the old tracks
to a not-so-distant past
meeting his ancestors along the way
capturing them on canvas
mapping out their stories
so they will
never be lost

and his own children
will be able to find them

From Dream Fish Floating

Poem shared here with the permission of the author.

‘For John Pule’ was published in Dream Fish Floating, New Zealander Karlo Mila’s first book of poetry. Dream Fish Floating went on to win the NZSA Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry at the 2006 Montana New Zealand Book Awards, the beginning of many accolades for Karlo.

Karlo’s work is courageous and broad. She seamlessly navigates political and personal subjects: from cultural considerations to identity in modern New Zealand society, from her personal development as a woman to pregnancy and motherhood. She is of Tongan, Samoan and Palangi (European) descent, and represented Tonga at the international Poetry Parnassus in London earlier this year. http://soundcloud.com/southbankcentre/sets/poetry-parnassus-2012/

Karlo has had work anthologised in Whetu Moana: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English and Short Fuse: The Global Anthology of New Fusion Poetry. Her latest work, A Well Written Body, was created in collaboration with artist Delicia Sampero. It is a powerful collection of Karlo’s poems and Delicia’s beautiful artwork.

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

This week's editor Leah McMenamin lives and writes in Wellington, New Zealand. You can read her Tuesday Poem blog here.

'revolver' by Samuel Wagan Watson

From my balcony I can read a strong poem that the moon has

pasted on the river. Everything is quiet. Now and then, a wave

breaks the message, temporarily changing the font from bold to

italics. The moon in its crescent appearance is the precision blade

of a Shaolin warrior. I’m concerned that if I gaze too long, I may

carelessly jag my retinas on its razor points, pierced globes adding

vitreous humor into this serious stretch of river. A mullet leaps

from the water and reconstructs the moon’s message; it is now the

sound of one silver hand clapping. Above, an anonymous comet

breaches the sky a small eternity, but shooting stars don’t have the

recoil of a poem executed in the lull of moon fire.

oval mirror lights

               seduction on night-water

                              flagrant moon kisses

from: Samuel Wagan Watson, Smoke Encrypted Whispers, University of Queensland Press, 2004. Reproduced here with permission from the author.

Smoke Encrypted Whispers is a collection of Samuel Wagan Watson's earlier work with the addition of a number of later prose poems. What I loved about these was the sense of the poet moving from prose poetry to the haiku which complete the almost journal-like entries. The later poems in this collection are available as an audio recording with responses from 22 Brisbane composers. When Samuel sent me the collection, he mentioned 'revolver' was his favourite poem in it and I think I agree. I love the wave changing the font, the mullet leap and - having lived in Brisbane by the Brisbane River, I know and love the landscape.

Samuel Wagan Watson is a poet with five published books and two major awards for his writing, the Queensland Premiers Literary Awards, David Unaipon Prize for Unpublished Indigenous Writers (1999) and the NSW Premiers Literary Award, Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry Book of the Year (2005). You can hear him talking about his poetic influences here.

Catherine Bateson is a poet and writer for children and young adults who lives in Melbourne, Australia. You can read her Tuesday poem blog here.

Hope by Dinah Hawken

It is to do with trees:
being       amongst trees.

It is to do with tree-ferns:
mamaku, ponga, wheki.
Shelter under here
is so easily
understood.

You can see that trees
know how it is
to be bound
into the earth
and how it is to rise defiantly
into the sky.

It is to do with death:
the great slip in the valley:
when there is nothing left
but to postpone all travel
and wait
in the low gut of the gully
for water, wind and seeds.

It is to do with waiting.
Shall we wait with trees,
shall we wait with,
for, and under trees
since of all creatures
they know the most
about waiting, and waiting
and slowly strengthening,
is the great thing
in grief, we can do?

It is always bleak
at the beginning
but trees are calm
about nothing
which they believe
will give rise to something
flickering and swaying
as they are: so lucid
is their knowledge of green.


                                       Editor: Keith Westwater

I first met Dinah when I was accepted for her course 'Writing the Landscape' at the IIML at Victoria University of Wellington in 2003 (Tuesday Poem poet Tim Jones was a fellow classmate). I was immediately struck by Dinah's hugely impressive poetry-writing skills and her ability to create a safe writing-critique class environment, something very important to novice writers.

Dinah read 'Hope' to our class and I chose it for Tuesday Poem because it encapsulates so well the emotion and feeling engendered in its title. I also love the way the poem's pace, theme and language echo and capture this feeling.

Victoria University's web site (http://www.victoria.ac.nz/vup/authorinfo/dhawken.aspx) states that, "She is the author of five books - It Has No Sound and Is Blue, which won the 1987 Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Best First Time Published Poet, Small Stories of Devotion; Water, Leaves, Stones and Oh There You Are Tui (2001) which collects the majority of the poems from her earlier books along with a substantial group of new poems.

One Shapely Thing: Poems and Journals was published in April 2006. It was one of three titles shortlisted for Poetry in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2007, [as was a sixth title, The leaf-ride, in the 2012 New Zealand Post Poetry Awards].

Dinah was named the 2007 winner of the biennial Lauris Edmond Award for Distinguished Contribution to Poetry in New Zealand."

'Hope' is published on Tuesday Poem with permission and was first published in Water, Leaves, Stones, Victoria University Press, 1995.

This week's editor Keith Westwater is a poet from New Zealand and the author of Tongues of Ash, published in 2011. Visit his Tuesday Poems at his blog and the other Tuesday Poets using our blog list.

Tension Rises by Dmitry Golynko, Translated by Cilla McQueen and Jacob Edmond

high tension
you will contrive to play with us
bends over, to
fix on one point

a pantomime character
got toasted in the sun                
none too soon
intoxication sets in
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
to raise tension
blow the nose, a dried fruit
wrinkled is chewed
and the gruel crawls out

in due course, what in a goddess
doesn’t satisfy a mortal is
a bad smell acquired by her                                                   
through self-contempt
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
tension will rise, should
you get the hots for, try it
those loosened by paradontosis
masticate in the subconscious

impresses an attraction                                                    
not to the usual filth, such as
blah, blah, to the particular
rhythm tapped out
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
envy raises tension
pissing envious
where slops on the sly
stream together

pulverized spanners
in the wrong works, still
in the company the joker
started his own bullshit
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
tension rises when the beam
of the searchlight goes blind, over their faces
the punch spreads
a small haematoma cloud

completely off his head he
got his brains set so straight, turned
all eyes on himself, having butted the punching bag
the fist moved back
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
the tension is increased by the weather,
slushy, a small piebald pooch
whimpers, pink tongue
roughens

in the moment of licking
unknown things, they bought
lots of booze and by agreement
without twisting arms
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
heightened tension threatens
in the anger of a being of the highest ranks
or a wench’s laughter, gathering strength
from its habit of helplessness

to achieve a good chunk
chopped off, enough
to smooth out the place of removal
and level what is unnecessary


12–16 February 2004

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Дмитрий Голынко

Напряжение повышается

напряженье высокое
вы сыграть сумеете с нами
наклоняется над, чтобы
уставиться в одну точку

опереточный персонаж
перегрелся на солнце
чуть позже, чем бы хотелось
опьянение наступает
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
чтоб напряженье повысить
надо высморкаться, сухофрукт
сморщенный разжеван
и кашица выползает

своим чередом, что в богине
не устраивает смертного, это
дурной запах, ею приобретенный
от пренебреженья к себе
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
напряженье повысится, если
втрескаться в, попробуйте
расшатанные пародонтозом
пережевывают, в подсознанку

впечаталось влеченье
не к обычной пакости, типа
тыры-пыры, к особенному
дробь отбарабанили
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
напряжение повышает зависть
писающая кипятком туда
где втихаря помои
сливают в них же самих

перемолотые кости
не в том горле, еще живехонек
в компании приколист
завел свое трали-вали
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
напряженье повысится, когда луч
прожектора слепнет, по мордасам
данный тумак растекается
облачком гематомы

на всю голову трахнутому
так вправили мозги, и весь внимание
обратил на себя, грушу боднув
кулак двинулся в обратную
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
напряженье повысит погода
слякотная, песик с подпалинами
поскуливает, розовый язык
приобретает шероховатость

в момент облизывания
незнакомых вещей, накупили
винища и по согласию
без выкручивания рук
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
повышением напряженья грозит
гнев существа из разряда высших
или бабский смех, набирающий силу
от привычки к беспомощности

чтобы просечь, откуда оттяпан
кусман хороший, достаточно
место отъема подгладить
и ненужное подравнять

12–16 февраля 2004 года

editor: Orchid Tierney

I would like to thank Dmitry Golynko, Cilla McQueen, and Jacob Edmond for allowing me to post this poem and its translation, which first appeared in Landfall 213 (May 2007) and subsequentlly in Ka Mate Ka Ora 11. Click the link to read about how Jacob and Cilla approached the translation process. The poem's new title is "Высокое напряжение" but I have retained the original appellation.

Dmitry Golynko is a poet, literary and art critic whose innovative poetry enshrines a keen examination on the interconnections between post-Soviet language and society. He is the author of Homo Scribens (1994), Directory (2001), and Concrete Doves (2003) and has published critical essays on contemporary art and literature.  His book As It Turned Out is his first English language release and is available from the esteemed publisher Ugly Duckling Press. I recommend visiting Penn Sound to hear some his recordings.

Cilla McQueen is a former Burns Fellow and New Zealand Poet Laureate. She has published ten volumes of poetry and she has won numerous awards, including the Prime Minister's Awards for Literary Achievement (Poetry) in 2010.  In addition, she has scooped up the New Zealand Book award for Poetry three times. 

Jacob Edmond is a senior lecturer at the University of Otago. His book A Common Strangeness has been recently published by Fordham University Press and his articles have appeared in a number of journals including Comparative Literature, Contemporary Literature, Poetics Today, The China Quarterly, and the Slavic and East European Journal.

Please take some time to experience the marvellous selections of poetry from the Tuesday Poem community. You can find these listed along at the sidebar.

Orchid Tierney is a poet and an MA candidate at the University of Otago, New Zealand. 

 

When the Sister Walks by Sarah Jane Barnett

The trail is damp so she gathers up the hem
of her habit and scolds her own impatience

as she steps over roots as thick as a boy’s wrist. She
is not at her best. When she left he gently pressed

his tattooed palm to the glass barrier. He said,
See ya, Sister. He made a joke – See you tomorrow. 

He watched her face while she recited from her red-
edged bible. Finally, like a child, his head rested down. 

At the lake she makes towards the witness tree,

she holds aside a low-hanging hickory, the seed-nut rattle
exciting a family of yellow-back wasps. They scatter

like bright marbles, afraid or maybe angry
she cries out, Oh – oh – and stumbles

away from their hide. They are sucked into an undulating
bubble of yellow and vibrate up into the trees.

They haven’t hurt her. It is nothing

but on her knees she says, Oh God, I am thankful 
for you. She wipes a dirty finger across her cheek.


Editor: Mary McCallum

“When the Sister Walks” is one of a series of nine poems about death row executions in Texas. It appears in Sarah Jane Barnett's debut collection, A Man Runs into a Woman (Hue & Cry) which was launched on 10 August 2012 at the Michael Hirschfeld Gallery in Wellington.

The poem first appeared in issue four of Hue & Cry Journal and most recently was posted by Sarah on her blog The Red Room which is linked to Tuesday Poem [see sidebar] and can be found here. 

Another poem from the death row series was posted on Tuesday Poem recently via Helen Lowe's blog.  

The series is a fascinating one - the poems are simple and nail sharp and continue to scrape and dig and prod long after you've read them. So back you go, and there they are -- inevitable, disturbing, moving every time.

Sarah says in her own post of 'When the Sister Walks',

 In 2006 I wrote a poem in response to the hanging in the movie Capote, about the power of cinema, illusion, and self delusion. While looking for information about hanging, I found a website that had the last words and criminal reports of death row inmates. It may sound like the death row series is about execution, but that’s only true in passing. 

I wrote the poems as a way to try and understand how something like a murder, and then the subsequent execution of the convicted person, could become a normalised event for the people involved – the police, prison wardens, execution technicians, clergy, the inmates and their family, and the family of the victims. Maybe it can’t.  

I hope the poems try to reconcile, or at least interpret, the different stories told by the inmate’s last words and the police crime report. Maybe my poems are another story about the event. 

A Man Runs into a Woman can be purchased from the Hue & Cry Press store. It's an impressive collection which challenges at every turn.

Poet Paula Green says of Sarah’s work: “As the cartographer of human experience, Sarah Jane Barnett steps boldly into the shoes and lives of others – a cable television engineer, a geographer, a pipeline worker. Her alert mind and canny eye for detail translate and transform what we may have missed in the world into poetic vignettes that are both light-footed and fresh.”

Sarah Jane Barnett is a PHD student and poet and mother of a delightful small boy. She has a Masters in Creative Writing from Wellington's IIML and is currently completing a creative writing PhD after being awarded a Massey Doctoral Scholatship. Her PhD combines both creative writing and research to investigate the difficulties of nature poetry.

Check out other Tuesday Poems here on the Tuesday Poem Hub. Just look to the sidebar on the left - if a post says 'Tuesday Poem' it's worth a read.

This week's editor Mary McCallum is a Tuesday Poem co-curator. She is a Wellington poet and author who teaches creative writing, writes reviews, works in a bookshop and organises book events. Her blog is www.mary-mccallum.blogspot.com.

Piecemeal by Sarah Rice

These things I must steel myself against
Old men packing books into boxes
The empty seat between people at the movies
The smell of armpits on cardigans
Ironing on the dining table with a towel underneath
Friends who no longer talk to each other
Bejewelled butterflies or fairies
And cards with ‘reach for the stars’
Square brittle toe nails
And plastic bags filled with plastic bags
A choc chip muffin to celebrate something
And unplanted punnets with the white roots
straggling from beneath the blue plastic
Board games with missing pieces
And everything with pieces missing
And everything that is in pieces
And everything that is missing.

Posted with the permission of Sarah Rice.  First published in Metabolism, Australian Poetry Limited Members' Anthology.

Sarah Rice

Editor: P.S. Cottier

I love this poem: the way it lists multifarious things that set the teeth on edge, yet also the way that the last three lines recast these sundry offences into a picture of everything that is missing.  A completed jigsaw of missing pieces?  Every one of the senses is touched upon in this short work.

Dr Sarah Rice is one of the most intellectually energetic people I have met. Stand by her and the ideas swarm out like bees, but multi-coloured bees without stings.

I have had the pleasure of participating in two workshops run by Sarah, here in Canberra.  One was on ecopoetry, and one on ekphrasis, and both times she has presented more material than I have been able to assimilate on the spot, but which I have mulled over for some time afterwards.

Sarah's way into poetry was largely through the visual arts, and she remains vitally interested in the spaces between one art form and another.  She is an art-theory lecturer, visual artist and writer.  She was an award winner in the 2011 Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, commended in the 2011 CJ Dennis Literary Awards and highly commended in the Michael Thwaites Poetry Award.

Her poetry is published in Island, Southerly, Blackmail Press, ACTWrite, fourW twenty-two annual anthology, as well as in the Australian Poetry Members’ Anthology.  Her collaborative work with ceramicist Patsy Hely 'On the Mountain' (poetry on hand-painted porcelain vessels) was exhibited at Craft ACT in 2011.  Her limited-edition art-book of poetry Those Who Travel (prints by Patsy Payne, Ampersand Duck, 2010) is currently on display in the NGA, and her work is included in the current exhibition 'Hand Set - Letterpress poetry broadsides from Ampersand Duck' at the ADFA Academic Library gallery.

Two photographs here capture something of the scope of Sarah's work: one of the collaborative ceramic project mentioned above, and one from Those Who Travel. Thanks to Sarah Rice for letting me reproduce her poem, and for these images of her other projects.  Now I'm just off to ADFA to check out the poetry broadsides!

When you've gobbled up Piecemeal, do check out the poems in the sidebar where 30 Tuesday Poets post poems they've written or admire. It's well worth it. 

This week's Editor P.S. Cottier aka Penelope Susan Cottier is an Australian poet and short story writer who lives in Canberra. Published in anthologies internationally, she has two collections of poetry and one of short stories to her name -- the most recent being The Cancellation of Clouds. She is also a keen blogger and Tuesday Poet, and has worked as a lawyer, university tutor, union organiser and a tea lady. Her next book, one third of Triptych Poets Three, is launched next month.

Hotel Emergencies by Bill Manhire

Hotel Emergencies

Thanks to The Poetry Archive for the recording.

Editor: Mary McCallum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For Patrick Rosal Who Wore A Dress & Said, by Aracelis Girmay

A dude rocks a slick green dress once, for kicks,
& the whole gender paradigm has to shift? Come on.
Haven’t you seen the women glide down streets
with frocks so wide you envied them their summer
shimmy, the loose-loose dazzle of their dresses
above knees? Not just the knees. But the dresses
above the knees. Haven’t you wanted to stand at the mirror
as the sister you never had, so bad, you could almost feel
the bird of her voice start to rise inside your own throat? Nightingale.
Listen. Once, in June, the dress was green,

& I flew into it from the diving board of my sex
& I didn’t care that the trees were watching. & I didn’t care
who saw. In fact, I ran out the door, into the magenta hall
of the Campus Inn hotel where I was visiting, & a poet,
& I laughed & laughed & laughed. I didn’t care
that the rooms were full. I didn’t care
that people might hear. In fact, I wanted them
to catch me in the lit Technicolor of my glee & mistake me for
a flashlight. Or a discotheque. For a bald & handsome lola
parading my two strong legs through the hall, out
onto the street, singing to strangers
something lovely about the breeze, have
mercy. I wore a dress & it made me nice, yes. Once,

I was a man who stood inside of a dress
& loved it with my whole brain. My body did not change
from its line, before or after. My name did not change, but
I moved into that green, & it was easy – to swing
the regions of my body with new grace
as the street sang up to me from below, Go on,
& my hairs stood up like switchgrass
atop the gold fields of my skin, bless
this holy, holy chance to move
above the ground
like this.




Published with permission of the author.
Editor: Janis Freegard

Aracelis Girmay

It was an almost impossible choice, picking a poem from Aracelis Girmay’s excellent collection, Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions, Ltd.).  Finally I chose the poem for Patrick Rosal (himself an American poet) because of the story it told: I could see him parading through the hotel; I could feel him “moving into that green”, moving in a new way.  I love the exuberance, the celebration of this poem.  I love the language and imagery the poet uses (“the loose-loose dazzle of their dresses”, "the bird of her voice").  I love the idea of loving something with your whole brain.

Many of the poems in Kingdom Animalia celebrate life and being.  Others commemorate the dead (such as the sad and startling Praise Song for the Donkey, about two girls and a donkey killed in Gaza whihc ends "praise the small/ black luggage of the donkey's eye/ in a field, flung far/ filling the ants & birds/ with what/ it saw.").  Family is an important theme and animals - snails, snakes, ants, parrots - make their way through the pages.  There is also a poem about the ampersand and one about the "r" in Aracelis ("making my name/ a small boat/ that leaves the port/ of old San Juan/ or Ponce/ with my grandfather Miguel").  It’s a collection that’s full of surprises, innovation, craft and beautiful music. I "met" Aracelis online last year, after we'd both published poetry with similar titles on opposite sides of the planet.  I'm so pleased to have found her work.  You can read a review of Kingdom Animalia here.

Bio: Aracelis Girmay is the author of the poetry collections Teeth & Kingdom Animalia for which she was awarded the GLCA New Writers Award & the Isabella Poetry Award respectively. She teaches at Hampshire College & Drew University (low-residency MFA). Among the writers she is reading now are Clarice Lispector, Shane McCrae, & Fanny Howe.

This week's editor is Janis Freegard.  She is is the author of Kingdom Animalia: the Escapades of Linnaeus (Auckland University Press) and co-editor of AUP New Poets 3.  She also writes fiction and is a past winner of the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Award and runner-up in the recent National Flash Fiction Competition.  She blogs at janisfreegard.com .

What We Call Frog Hunting by Jane Springer

This is the last 2 a.m. song fit for poling a johnboat through the swamp
so we may glide, quiet enough, to catch frogs with our hands.

It’s the year Robertlee can’t afford a suit to take me to prom.

Our flashlights tell the difference between alligators & sunken logs
adrift in the dark.

This year Emmyjean’s daddy shows us how he guts a deer.

As for the girls, we’d rather be kissing. We’ve practiced our kissing
on each other—shy as spotted fawns.

We know the boys sometimes meet for a circlejerk in an empty barn.

This is the canvas bag we keep frogs in, once they are caught. It
will hold thirteen by dawn.

It’s the year we learn to sew a pleat & stew a coon in Home Ec.
T.J. Corbett has such long arms—the boat don’t tip when he leans out
over the rim.

This year, we can’t all read well enough to fill in class ring forms.

We’ve never been so aware of skin—the full bag is an organ beating 
on the floor of the boat.
                                        We barely contain our joy.

This is the year the principal measures the acre between our knees
& the hems of our skirts.

We dock the boat & break the backs of frogs against a stone.

We know they are dead when their tongues unfurl. This is the last
newborn light licked between cypress trunks.

Lunch ladies from here serve fried okra & jambalaya.

The round spot behind each animal eye is an ear—here we circle
the head’s globe with a single knifeslice.

Though all year we’ve swerved to miss guineas by the schoolyard.

We push our thumbs under the edge of skin at the throat to loosen
slick bodies from the green.

This is the year: the dark, the boat, the sunken suits & watery forms,

the catch & kiss, damp canvas, split rib, dawn & entrails in the grass—
we cut the feet last—in the pleated heat—

        then wipe our blades across our thighs & call this happiness.


                                                                   Editor: Eileen Moeller

Jane Springer’s new book, Murder Ballads is masterful in its depiction of the sensuality and brutality of the American South. Springer’s long lines, and vivid images of place, place her work in the Southern Gothic tradition, alongside that of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. These are poems that face the darkness that abounds in everyday life, they express a love of the colloquial, and they give us glimpses of humor and irony.


Murder Ballads is deeply original, and full of old rituals, of the rural as it mixes with a more contemporary sense of liberation: trailers, and deep freeze units sitting out on porches,  fields fill with rusty farm equipment, while Marvin Gaye’s Sexual Healing plays on the radio, and teenagers give each other “necklaces of hickeys”.

Titles like “Looks Like The Hound Who Caught the Car”, and “You Can’t Tell Nobody Nothing That Ain’t Never Been Nowhere” bring us into a different time and place, an older sensibility that Springer, as "other", uses to make meaning on her own terms. Lines like “that’s all chigger, / no shade”, or “crazy as a shithouse rat” are pure delight.  But Springer's work is also intensely lyrical, as in “I’ve heard a river waltz through laced hands of the levee toward a grand new / partnering of earth & water –“

In the title poem, “Leave It Lay Where Jesus Flung It”, a mastodon skeleton is being unearthed from the swamp, and like an archaeologist, Springer has been digging into the past, to unearth lost times, lost innocence, lost loves, lost selves, a dangerous, possibly calamitous task. Though she wants to tell them to “Leave her bones”, the final turn in the poem comes to the acceptance that “Each misstep unearths / a miracle”. In the end, the mastodon finds her music, and the book leaves us feeling optimistic that harvesting the past, with all its painful missteps, remaking it from the safe distance of a new time and place, may bring a few miracles into the light. And like the women in the murder ballads, that have lived on beyond them, the stories in these poems will be remembered, the lives they depict affirmed.

There are some longer poems in this collection that achieve the level of myth, coming from a larger impulse, more akin to the epic. In fact, Murder Ballads, read as a whole, became, for me, a post-modern version of The Odyssey. It takes us on a perilous journey home, a woman's journey, one filled with monsters, shape shifters, scenes of mythic proportion, and epiphanic transformations for better or worse.

The poet/reader is both Odysseus, bravely facing being wounded at every turn, and Penelope weaving a tapestry of her memories, and then unraveling it to dispel their power over her. In the final poem, “Small Cosmos”, the heart is open. Springer writes: “Love, / come as a cloud & I will stay in the country below you. If you are, by night, / a fire, I will follow your fragrance of ashes into the wilderness. / I will eat your cornbread, pomegranate & fig. I will put away my ghosts & move / into whatever stone house you provide –" It’s a wonderful book, a beautiful book, and fierce.

When you've enjoyed Frog, make your way into the other Tuesday Poet poems in the sidebar. 

Jane Springer’s two books are Dear Blackbird, (Agha Shahid Ali prize, University of Utah Press, 2007) and Murder Ballad (Beatrice Hawley award, Alice James Books, 2012). Her other awards include the Robert Penn Warren Prize for Poetry, an NEA fellowship and a Whiting Award. She currently teaches creative writing at Hamilton College, in upstate, New York where she lives with her husband, son and their two dogs, Woofus and Maple.

 Eileen Moeller lives and writes in Philadelphia PA. Most of her poems can be found in Ars Medica,  The Paterson Literary Review, Paterson: A Poet's City, Umbrella, Melusine, Women,Period, Poems of Awakening, and on the CD Snow White Turns Sixty by composer Dale Trumbore.

The Hammock by Terry Moyle

Editor: Orchid Tierney

Terry Moyle is a vector artist and a top-notch experimental poet. His debut book, Cominghomeland (Auckland: Ducks on the Wall Publishing), was published in 2011. He has an MA Hons (English) from the University of Waikato and currently resides in Kaiwaka, Northland. 

What I particularly enjoy about Terry's work is his diversity.  Ranging from comic strips to 3D milk cartons, his work pushes poetry off the page into real life tangible artefacts. In this way, his experimental works are suggestive of new forms of literacy where text, image and object are inextricably related.  Yet, if I can sum up briefly, I want to suggest that works like Terry's are conversations that challenge binary demarcations of high and low art. Comic strips and milk cartons-throw away items in consumer society-are rendered unique through the interface of poetic language. The resultant work is a new territory between old and new forms of text.

I'd also encourage you to view his challenging Ugly/Beauty poem found here, in which typefaces  exert unusual pressure on the textual meaning.

Want more Terry? Feel free to visit his website here.

Orchid Tierney is an MA student at the University of Otago.  She has numerous publications on and offline.  Her first book, Brachiation, was released from the Gumtree Press in 2012. She edits Rem Magazine, a journal dedicated to New Zealand experimental writing. Wander over to her personal website here.
 

Please take some time to experience the marvellous selections of poetry from the Tuesday Poem community. You can find these listed along at the sidebar.

New Zealand Post Book Awards Poetry Finalists 2012

To celebrate the upcoming National Poetry Day in New Zealand, Tuesday Poem is presenting a poem selected from each of the three Poetry finalists for the New Zealand Post Book Awards - the winner to be announced August 1. National Poetry Day on Friday July 27 has events all over the country and will involve a number of Tuesday Poets.

But first, one of this country's most magical of poets and storytellers Margaret Mahy died in Christchurch yesterday. The Booksellers NZ blog has posted The Fairy Child as a tribute to a remarkable writer who has touched so many around the world. It begins: 'The very hour that I was born/I rode upon a unicorn' - yes, Margaret Mahy, you did. RIP. [More tributes in our sidebar]

Now the poetry finalists ...

Editor: Andrew M. Bell.

Unknown Unknowns 

Maybe one day we will even teach in schools,
along with Homer again, and the Aeneid,
the equally complex songs of the whale,
graduate students composing theories 
about the mysterious bass shift
in song latitude 61˚ longitude 15˚
towards the end of 1971 –
still, we will never know the secret song
the whale sings to himself,
the heretic variations,
the secret pleasure
he allows himself in the silence and the dark;
any more than the poet’s biographer,
revealing everything he’s told,
accounting for contradictions
in accounts, gaps in the paper trail,
can know where the poet goes at night
when even his wife, lying beside him
in the dark, can’t know where he goes
in the privacy of his mind;
any more than we can know
what other worlds God might have dreamed up
too secret, too sentimental,
too erotic to be manifest
in the universe
of dust and light;
any more than we can know
it isn’t this one after all
that is the imaginary world 
too sentimental, too beautiful,
too privately pleasurable
really to be real.

(from Thicket by Anna Jackson, published by Auckland University Press)


More erudite and scholarly readers could tell you more about the literary features of this poem than I can, but I can tell you that it appealed to me because it manages to be playful and profound simultaneously.

I love that it explores magical possibilities, the "what ifs" that are the jumping off point for so much creative endeavour. I admire how Anna Jackson has woven the secret lives of whales, poets and God together so seamlessly.







Blood Work 

Sheep and cattle arrived by lorry,
the lorries were like yards on wheels.
It was a big deal, my father’s work, the smell
was stronger than the brewery.
I took wide paces in my gumboots,
matching his steel-toed stride, I followed him
into the killing room
and spoke my name to the other men.

Nothing stopped, the chain ground on,
sheep hung from hooks, each man with a knife
had his own bit of flesh to deal with.
My lungs ached, my eyes watered
as if there was a fire, the blood everywhere,
red and red over their white cover-alls.

My father handled the aftermath, the sheep
with no head, or feet, or skin, or gut.
Dead cold carcasses coming down a ramp
like fallen angels. He shouldered and stacked.

When the whistle blew
we sat drinking tea from tin mugs.
I was spoken of as his girl,
strong as his strong,
that’s when it started
in the blood: this was his life.
I felt the join no knife could part
and I couldn’t see
how I’d make the journey
going away and away from him.

(from Shift by Rhian Gallagher, published by Auckland University Press)

Regardless of the dynamics, families are a subject everyone can relate to. I love the richness of this poem, the finely wrought nuances and the way the poet strikes a balance between the visceral nature of her father's workplace with the love and tenderness she feels for her father.


The repetition of "the blood everywhere,/red and red" is beautifully echoed in the final line "going away and away from him." This is a poem with a huge, beating heart.

Elsa 
November, 2009 

There is a little girl whose head
fits into my hand and whose spine
you can finger like a row of pearl buttons.

Her breathing is brisk and she startles
—like a skink in a beach garden—
even when she sleeps.

Each hair on her head is fine
and soft and her eyebrows
are two raised dashes on a pale page.

They are dark blue, oval, and new
—her open eyes. Her mother looks into
them and calls her ‘sweet pea’, ‘tree-frog’

or ‘mouth’, which is a lovely one
especially when the bottom lip
comes out from somewhere and quivers.

It is smaller than a wallflower,
a daisy or a miniature rose.
It could be a little walnut
except it is always opening
to fit around a nipple.

Her body is the length
of my forearm and her long
oblong feet are shoving the air.

Everyone asks to see her fingers
and their tiny mirrors but look, the nails
are like pruning saws—they flail
and catch across her face.

You cannot imagine or even dream
what a little face will be
until it is here named Elsa
and the centre of everything.

(from The leaf-ride by Dinah Hawken, published by Victoria University Press)

It is often an extremely difficult thing to write an intimate poem which expresses joy and celebration without tipping over into mawkishness. That Dinah Hawken seems to achieve it so effortlessly speaks volumes for her experience, her precision and her artistry. I presume she is writing about a newborn grandchild and she builds her description of Elsa with such delicate craftsmanship, detail by startling detail, until the scene is intensely vivid in the reader's mind.

The above three poems are reproduced here at Tuesday Poem with the permission of the respective poets and publishers. On a personal note, I would like to thank the poets and the publishers of these three fine collections, each one richly deserving of its place as a finalist.



This week's editor, Andrew M. Bell, writes poetry, short fiction, plays, screenplays and non-fiction. His work has been published and broadcast in New Zealand/Aotearoa, Australia, England, Israel and USA. His most recent publications are Aotearoa Sunrise, a short story collection, and Clawed Rains, a poetry collection. Andrew lives in Christchurch with his family and loves to surf. 

After reading the poem at the hub, try the 30 Tuesday Poets in the sidebar, and the poems they've written or selected - you won't be disappointed!