Afternoon with Simon by Ashleigh Young

A reflection fills the rain
on the window: it’s Simon, proffering his lunch-taker
filled with gold almonds: almondos he calls them.
His eyes have the shine of all good editors’ eyes:
polished by finding.
I drop my pen, reach over, trailing red
crossed-out fingers:
I have been attacked by a man-eating grammar.
My eyes have been prised from my head
by looking.
Simon studies the lines of rain and eventually
starts talking, beginning each sentence with ‘I suppose’
because he is too hospitable not to leave room
to agree with somebody else
and he also really does suppose:
sometimes assuming that all this is true, sometimes only
imagining it to be so.


We clear a spot amidst the books that nobody
in this country will read. We are the international
editorial team: ours is the great city of color
and Mom and ‘You betcha’
circled by ocean, not sea.
We make our talk up
like newspaper shelters in the street: strange at first
and lifting at the edges, soon becoming part
of the city’s furniture.


Simon, too, has a voice that lacks volume.
When people catch wind of it
they interrupt to save him
the trouble. Well, their cars go faster. But, goddammit,
he has things to say; like
if in doubt, laugh
even if doing so will offend someone
because the odds are you will offend them even more
if they think you are serious –
which in the current climate is the no. 1 risk –
or they will not notice you and will tramp right through your house.
In conversation, a quiet-voiced person
needs plenty of space, needs flags to wave, needs
a moat filled with deep water.


Through our window, a giant Dan Carter
stands there in his undies. Imagine having
that confidence – to wear yourself
like you were an expensive set of clothes.


Simon does lunges
in his homemade trousers.
I ask what he is doing but he doesn’t hear;
he’s partially deaf, sometimes partial to being deaf
and I suppose I would have more friends
like Simon if the other people didn’t catch the half-things I say.
This is a job where so many words go forth heroically
only to fall through a rotten board in the floor.
But it does not matter that crucial parts have been lost.
I used to say nothing and now I am talking;
used to live nowhere and now I am eating
gold almonds in the afternoon, with shelter.




_______
  
                                                            Guest Editor: Tim Upperton

Ashleigh Young is a New Zealand writer currently living in London and blogging at eyelashroaming. She is well-known for her creative nonfiction works (or “pieces”, “sketches”, “things”, as she called them in a Booknotes article): she won the Adam Foundation Prize in 2009 for her essay collection, Can You Tolerate This? (the title essay can be read here), and her essay, “Wolf Man”, won the Landfall Essay Competition the same year. She is perhaps not so well-known for her poems, despite their regular appearance in our off- and on-line literary magazines (Sport, Turbine, Best New Zealand Poems). 

Her poem, “Certain Trees”, is the final poem in The Best of the Best New Zealand Poems, and was singled out by Sam Hunt as the best of them – the best of the best of the best. 

There’s not much I can add to that, except to say that Ashleigh Young’s voice is, I think, unique – in both the essays and the poems, I hear its distinctive, individual tone of engaged enquiry, a curiosity about the world that suspends judgement while still reaching tentative conclusions. It wonders where things are going, and follows them, and the reader can’t help but wonder and follow too.

I’ve chosen “Afternoon with Simon” as it typifies her strengths. The poem appears to meander through a not particularly busy afternoon, and it’s not until the end that we realise how acute the observation is. I find this poem extraordinarily humane, and I feel richer for reading it.

Tim Upperton lives in Palmerston North, New Zealand. His poems have appeared in various places including Agni, Landfall, New Zealand Books, Sport, Turbine, and The Best of Best New Zealand Poems. His collection A House on Fire (Steele Roberts) was published in 2009. 

Thanks Tim! Now do take time to check out the poets in the sidebar including Melissa Green at the bottom of the list because her blog isn't updating on the blog roll. 

Poems for National Poetry Day (NZ)

from The Radio Room by Cilla McQueen (Otago University Press 2010)

About The Fog

Damp sea-fog lay like a sheep on my journal

outside all night on the table,

turned radiant blue ink to turquoise wash

through which the permanent horizons stared

twenty-eight pages empty.

                                                Of vanished thoughts here

and there word-slivers, blots in the gutter, bled edges;

some legible sentences in ballpoint.

As if by tears

                        lost the death of my mother,

the reunion with my tokotoko at Matahiwi,

Orepuki Hopupu ho nengenenge matangi rau

at hand beside me now, ribboned, knotty, sleek,

Washed away, goes without saying, language

absorbed by a fog to dissolve in the sun.

from The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls by Kate Camp (VUP 2010)

When things get broken we recount their history

On blue and orange lino tiles

triangles of the tulip glass

of the four I bought

from a tent

by the underground city

two with cracks

were nestled in newspaper.

The stallholders

of Turkey

do not love me

after all.

One by one

I am smashing

the knickknacks

of the past.

To smithereens I blow

the family of owls

and tragically the tiny glass

hand-painted flowers

we drank from

through baby teeth.

When the house was burgled

they broke the mirror tile

saw there a picture

of themselves.

There is all the time in the world

to regret

when something is falling

coffee pours up

from the cup

the plate turns

its soft food

towards the floor.

An earthquake

would be

an explosion

of memory

jars

blasting open

peaches

glass

and syrup.

from Mauri Ola – Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English (Whetu Moana II), a poem by Alohi Ae’a (Hawaii), collection edited by Albert Wendt, Reina Whaitiri and Robert Sullivan (AUP 2010)

Hālāwai 

I dream that you stand beneath the night

sky, watching the stars. You track

their movements, as the dome of the earth swings

overhead. The star you seek rises

and there, as it breaks the horizon, you turn. Face

Tahiti. The wind is silent at this moment. I turn

in bed; the air is cool.

Such small things keep us together. I work

the sennit of our love, roll it between

my fingers. Next week, I will help you lash

the masts. In the open ocean, the ropes we pull

will keep this canoe together. It will rise

and fall with wind and wave and storm. You go

with it. I remain here.

You sit at Moa’iki under the full bright

of a distant moon.  At Waikīkī, moonlight

makes little difference – yet here I am at Queen’s,

watching the waves swell dark

against a grey horizon. I catch my breath – see

the shower of light falling, falling. I find the handful

of constellations that I know. Grip them in my mind.

Nine a.m. Sunday morning, Dolphins spin

far offshore. I see their bellies flash silver. You

want to reach out and touch them, strike the sleek pulse

of their sides. What does all that smoothness

remind you of? What are you thinking as the wind

catches in the sails? How is it that I can hear your voice,

echoing across the distant channels?

                                                    

                                                            Editor Renee Liang

This week, we celebrate New Zealand's upcoming National Poetry Day (July 22) with not one, but three poems.  I’ve chosen those which called to me the most, from the pages of the shortlisted books for the poetry section of the 2011 NZ Post National Book Awards. It’s a purely personal pick, and quite possibly I would have picked a different bunch on a different day. Looking at them now I’m amazed at how much they resonate with each other. The books (all remarkable collections) are so varied in mood and theme.

The Radio Room by Cilla McQueen is a work held together by the delicate strands of space and time. Traversing geographical and ideological boundaries, the poems remind me of sketches in a day journal, some quick impressions, others much more detailed, worked and returned to.  Behind it all is Cilla’s forthwright and direct voice, offering personal events as a microcosm of universal experience.

Kate Camp’s The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls is a much more intellectual work, basing itself on a found text (the first Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls, an early 14th century work of Christian mysticism by Marguerite Porete) and extending this as a lens on the present time and place.  She manages to take a medieval European work and make it modern, and in some ways quite “Kiwi”.

Mauri Ola – Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English (Whetu Moana II) edited by Albert Wendt, Reina Whaitiri and Robert Sullivan, is possibly best described as a treasury of the Pacific voice.  The work selected covers poets throughout Polynesia, including many emerging and established voices in Aotearoa. Many of the poems deal with the discovery or claiming of identity, or the facets of daily experience that make up a culture.  There’s a fair amount of anger as well as humour, but overriding it all is a joy in finding expression.

So what have I chosen?  Three poems that all, in the different voices of their writers, deal with the loss of loved ones through the physical remembrance of objects. Cilla’s poem, evoking the loss of a journal, the favourite tool of this writer, but with a wry hope in the closing line that maybe the words will have gone to a better place.

Kate’s poem which weaves objects bought on OE with childhood items and which in its closing stanzas refers to the small but significant losses a natural disaster like an earthquake can bring.  Somehow, I find her simple inventory of objects more poignant than all the news images of broken buildings. And Alohi Ae’a’ (a Hawaiian writer) who so beautifully uses the metaphor of a boat to sail across space and time to join her loved one.

I’m in Christchurch at the moment and walk to work every day past buildings that are broken, that symbolize loss, yet by their loss remind us of the important links to the past.  I think that’s why I like these poems – they rebuild in words the lost objects, acting as both commemoration and reconstruction. Lost things are less lost if they are found again in poetry.

The winner of the NZ Book Award for poetry will be announced on National Poetry Day. After you've read the selected poems here, look into the Tuesday Poets on the live blog roll to the right, many of whom will be celebrating Poetry Day.

This week's Tuesday Poem editor is Renee Liang, an Auckland poet, playwright and paediatrician. Some of her poetry can be found on her blog Chinglish, and her new play FAAB is on in Auckland and Wellington in September and October. 

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. 

Cloud Silence by Graham Lindsay

There has always been
someone

seated
under this tree, looking up

the harbour valley
over rush-studded
paddocks glistening

after rain.
And I’m the first

                           you want to say
you saw the hills

                            it seemed like home
ladders of sunlight leaned
against clouds, then the clouds marched
seawards like ranks of ghost soldiers.
The point is

to stop writing. Stop
using language to protect
yourself from the full

implications of the world – the world says
Look at me, I dare you to
I dare you to see.
                            You tilt your head

back and look up
at the tree.
A ray peers

into the room
of your eye….

          *

Why is our art so introverted?
It doesn’t mean a thing

to the seagull or sun
the clouds don’t understand
a word

their language is silence
and movement and colour.

Here on the face of it – there
behind a mask. This far
above ground

                          in 360^o cinemas
as the present rolls



                                          Guest Editor: David Howard

Graham Lindsay 
Portrait by Keith Nicolson 

‘One of the themes is communication, so there's hope after all.’ – New Zealand poet Graham Lindsay, 27 June 2011

Poets don’t come from nowhere; sometimes they stay there. Whatever critics think, if they think, the best poets wear their origins like hand-me-down clothes, comfortably. Michele Leggott has Susan Howe. Graham Lindsay has George Oppen, who wrote in his notebook: ‘…meaning is the instant of meaning – and this means that we write to find what we believe.’ 

I read to find what (but also who) I believe. My admiring reservations about ‘Cloud silence’ hold me in a vital dialogue with it. I still argue with the predictable if precise ringing of the pastoral Angelus (‘looking up/ the harbour valley/ over rush-studded/ paddocks glistening/ after rain’) and with the stand-up personification of ‘the world [that] says Look at me, I dare you to/ I dare you to see.’ 

I’ve heard these lines out loud. They take a leap of faith off the page. The audience doubles up as Graham foregrounds the implications of what is, after all, a wilful world before enquiring: ‘Why is our art so introverted?’ 

published by AUP

I’m grateful that he is not afraid to move through the register of a preacher – one with that childlike amalgam of curiosity and humour we usually call wonder. I suspect writers are either faint-hearted or excessively ironic, and possibly both, if they believe that readers don’t want to be preached to. Readers demonstrably want to be preached to; they don’t only want to be preached to. 

In an interview with Jack Ross (February 1998), Graham acknowledges: ‘I have this sense of people, and things generally, being manifestations of an eternal upwelling – and of writing as well being a manifestation of it. And I feel that if you are able to be in a place where you can achieve this coincidence between your self and that place, you can almost have something spoken through you. I don’t mean that literally; I mean it figuratively.’ 

When I hear this latter-day Alberto Caiero then I feel that his close reading of the world out there animates the world in here by means of a descriptive language so particular (‘rush-studded’) it seems antipathetic to rhetoric yet audaciously rehabilitates it. Juxtaposed, his fragments of apprehension generate. 

Still glowing twenty years after it was started, The Subject is one of the most charged poetry collections to appear in New Zealand; it holds bright sparks like ‘Context of words’, ‘’Voyeurs’, ‘Wave to the Image’, ‘Picnic on a clifftop’, ‘Backwater’ and ‘Cloud silence’. This far.


More on Graham Lindsay here. 

Born in Christchurch (1959), 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 he retired to Purakanui in order to write. 

David was the inaugural recipient of the New Zealand Society of Authors Mid-Career Writer's Award (2009) for a body of poetry that was subsequently collected in The Incomplete Poems (Cold Hub Press, 2011). His poetry has been translated into Dutch, German, Italian, Slovene and Spanish.

Tuesday Poem thanks David Howard for his contribution as guest editor. After you've read Cloud Silence, enter the right sidebar for more Tuesday Poems written and selected by poets from NZ, Australia, UK and US. Nau mai haere mai! Welcome!

Lorine Niedecker

                                                                      Editor Susan T. Landry
Lorine Niedecker was an American poet, an avant-garde poet, a poet of nature, a poet of ordinary life, a poet who lived under the roof of the sky and beside a river. She had what people with limited imagination might call a modest life, and yet wrote imagistic, crystalline poems that convey a rich intellect and an ability to see, really see, what was around her.

I first discovered the work of Niedecker after I wrote and submitted a poem to the bi-weekly, short-poem group I belong to, called Brevitas. I was still living in New York City, but I think buried within me, down where the words live that come out when I have a need to conjure up poetry, I had a yearning. The desire to leave, to move somewhere quiet, close to water and the woods was beginning to insist. I can’t remember what I wrote that conveyed this, but one of my fellow poets in the group e-mailed me and said that the poem I sent around made him think of Lorine Niedecker. He said, you will like her work: she has an intimacy with nature that you are seeking.

Niedecker rarely titled her poems. They light on the page like dragonflies or sprawl inside the book like stalks of dried grass, tucked away for later - here are two of them.


My life is hung up
in the flood
    a wave-blurred
                portrait

Don't fall in love
with this face—
     it no longer exists
                in water
                         we cannot fish



***


Spring
  stood there
      all body

Head
  blown off
       (war)

showed up
  downstream

October
  is the head
         of spring

Birch, sumac
  before
        the blast








Jenny Penberthy edited the definitive volume, Lorine Niedecker, Collected Works, published by the University of California Press, in 2002. (It’s the book I bought when I wanted more.) The poems I quote here are from a Web page, also edited by Jenny Penberthy, at http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/niedecker/poems.html. Bob Arnold, literary executor for Lorine Niedecker, was kind enough to give me permission to reprint these poems.

The photograph is mine, of the Maine woods.

For more Tuesday Poems check out the poets in the sidebar - up to 30 of us from all over: the US, the UK, NZ and Australia.

Susan T. Landry is this week’s editor of Tuesday Poem. She lives in Maine, is a medical editor by trade, and also enjoys fine-tuning work for friends, other creative writers and artists. She belongs to Brevitas, an invitation-only short poem e-mail exchange that meets in person only once a year, for a gala evening at the Bowery Poetry Project, in New York City; writes and posts an occasional poem on her blog Twisted Knickers, where she also natters about whatever she fancies, or doesn’t.

Margo, or Margaux by Anna Jackson

I'd drink all night but stop at one glass
of syrah, aromas of pepper, tar,
black plum, and on the tongue
blueberry, licquorice, dark
chocolate, oh it is a dark wine
for us to drink before entering
the night in my cream and silver
car and driving, reeling,
not from the wine but from
the gypsy pirate Mexican music
on the CD (with an after-note, you
suggest, of Ukrainian folk), under
your canopy of silver stars.
Don't tell me their names, tracing
out constellations like
a dot to dot puzzle. Let me
see the sky in the sky, as magisterially
as the sea can be seen in the sea
and the man in the man – speaking
of which let's not meet your mother
with her photos of you as a boy.
Let's just keep driving to
somewhere we haven't looked up
on a map, some town without
any relatives to pin your features
down to theirs, where you can do
that silent thing you do at parties
in a party we'll throw
just for us two.
This cross made up of freckles
under my ribs (two brown, one
red and slightly raised, one beige)
might look like the Southern Cross
still flying like a kite in the chaos
I yearn to see in the sky,
but come closer, inhale,
tell me my after-notes
and under-tones,
and whether you think
I should call my car Margo or
Margaux, I can't decide.

----------
Editor, Helen Rickerby

This poem comes from Anna Jackson's upcoming new poetry collection Thicket. I chose this one because I really like the way the poem twists and turns, or maybe swirls, from wine to music, to the night sky, to mothers, to bodies, to cars, but it's all tied together by the silken sinew of wine. It becomes, almost surprisingly, a love poem, but then twists out of that sensuous seriousness, the way someone might awkwardly twist out of an embrace, to talk about what she should name her car.

I might be being fanciful, but this poem seems to me to have the dark, rich colour of red wine. Swish it around in your mouth. Give it a good taste.

Thicket, which will be coming out in July, is Jackson's fifth poetry collection (not counting her inclusion in AUP New Poets 1 and her collaborative collection Locating the Madonna, published by moi). I haven't read the whole thing yet, but I'm looking forward to it. Each of Jackson's previous collections have been a bit different from each other - trying different things or writing in different styles (something I feel I do too - once you finish a book, if you continue writing the same kinds of poetry you could end up becoming a parody of yourself) - and it sounds like Thicket will continue this. It sounds like it will be a bit more free-flowing, covering various styles and topics, compared to, for example, Anna's previous collection, The Gas Leak (also wonderful), which was quite highly structured and conceptual. This is what AUP says about Thicket:

In Anna Jackson’s fifth collection of poetry, a rich and leafy life is closing in on the poet. ‘These are our thicket days’, she writes, ‘and it does seem darker, / though the sun is at its peak / over the crown of leaves.’ But a thicket is also something to walk out of, and Jackson offers us fairytale bread-crumb tracks to follow, through poems that consider badminton at dusk, Virgil at bedtime, theory over wine; shimmering, multi-faceted poems of swans and puppets, sons and brothers, a woman who has become a tree. Thicket is an accomplished book from a poet of unease, who constantly turns her attention to the brambled path, the track-less-followed, the subterranean presences in everyday life.

Anna Jackson lectures in English literature at Victoria University of Wellington. As well as being a poet, she also writes fiction from time to time, and her story 'When we were Bread' was recently highly commended in 'The Long and the Short of it' competition run by Sport and Unity Books, in the long (over 10,000 words) category, and was published in the competition book. You read more about her on the Book Council website: http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/writers/jacksonanna.html.

On my own blog I've posted another poem from Thicket, 'Hansel in the house', a dark, fairytale-ish look at the sometimes difficult relationship between parents and children: http://wingedink.blogspot.com/2011/06/hansel-in-house-by-anna-jackson.html. And if you want still more, also another poem from Thicket, the much lighter and totally charming 'Frank O’Hara for Charles', was published on the Tui Talk blog last week: http://tuitalk.wordpress.com/2011/06/15/tuesday-poem-frank-ohara-for-charles-by-anna-jackson/. And of course check out the other Tuesday poems in the blogs on the sidebar.

This week's editor, Helen Rickerby, is a poet, publisher and public servant. Her most recent book was Heading North, a poetry sequence published last year in a hand-bound edition by Kilmog Press. She’s a co-managing editor of JAAM literary magazine, and runs Seraph Press, a boutique poetry publisher. She hopes she's nearly finished working on what she hopes will be her next poetry collection, but you never can be sure. She blogs, irregularly, at http://wingedink.blogspot.com/.

Zot and the Axolotls by Janis Freegard

          Earlier in the afternoon we had all admired
          the newly constructed axolotl tank, more of
          a complex really, with a glass bridge between
          chambers, a grand axolotl hotel, five stars with
          room service, porters and a parking attendant.
          It was still empty, its soon-to-be residents
          slumming it in temporary accommodation.

like other amphibians, the axolotl has a three-chambered heart
they are perennibranchiate, reaching sexual maturity in the larval stage
axolotls were a staple in the Aztec diet

          I was stoned, I remember that.

the axolotl is neotenous and rarely metamorphoses spontaneously
it can regenerate entire lost appendages in a matter of months
the days of the axolotl surviving in the wild are numbered

         Zot tripped and fell to the floor and lay there,
         unmoving, by the new de luxe tank. I was
         sitting next to him in an armchair thinking:
         Zot’s fallen over. Just that. It was someone
         else – Denise perhaps – who noticed the
         blood. Soon afterwards an ambulance arrived.

Lake Chalco has been drained (but see how they smile their wide amphibian smiles)
Lake Xochimilco is reduced to canals (oh, oh, those beady well-spaced eyes)
roll up, roll up, tasty axolotls

        Oh, see how their pretty gills flutter.


_______
Editor, Saradha Koirala

Axolotls are creepy. They're tricksy shapeshifters able to sneak their way out of the water and walk on land. Something about the tank's "soon-to-be residents /slumming it in temporary accommodation" worries me. Where are they hiding?


I love the way this poem plays with diction. The text-book language in italics has its own beauty: "a three-chambered heart" is magical and echoes the design of the "de luxe" accommodation built for this unique creature. On the other hand, the language is frank and immediate: "I was stoned, I remember that." And then of course that last line! Ah!


Janis Freegard is an award-winning Wellington writer whose work has been published in all the literary journals I can name, including Poetry NZ, JAAM, Turbine, Trout and brief. Kingdom Animalia: The Escapades of Linnaeus, is her first solo collection of poetry, published by AUP.




The poems "explore the various interactions between human beings and other animals, but also deals with wider subjects: love and loss, evolution and conservation, sex and death." Freegard has arranged the animal-themed poems according to eighteenth-century naturalist Carl Linnaeus' classification system of the natural world.


You can read more about Kingdom Animalia: The Escapades of Linnaeus at the book's webpage. For more on the poet herself read Janis Freegard's blog. And then check out the sidebar here where 30 Tuesday Poets from four different countries post poems by themselves or others they admire.

This week's editor, Saradha Koirala, teaches English at a Wellington Secondary school. Her first book of poetry Wit of the staircase was published by Steele Roberts in 2009. Her work has also appeared in various literary magazines, including Hue & Cry, broadsheet and The Listener. She is currently working on her second book in every spare moment she can find.

The Book of Equanimity Verses: Richard von Sturmer

Five verses from a hundred verse sequence,
inspired by The Book of Equanimity, a Zen Buddhist
collection of one hundred koans.

30.

The upper hand
lies forgotten
in a bottom drawer.
The lower hand is lost
gathering dust
somewhere in a basement.
Now that all conflict has ended
the roof tiles reflect the moonlight.

31.

It's in the space between
the pillar and the lattice windows.
It's drawn to scale
by a blind person in a dream.
Look — when the kingfisher flies
into a phoenix palm
all the colours of the Nile
carry you across the evening sky.

52.

The donkey looks at the well.
A bank of nasturtiums.
The well looks at the donkey.
A field of violets.
It’s mid-summer
and by the slowly moving river
blackberries are ripening
lobe by lobe.

53.

When the ancient scholar
retires for the night
rats come out
and eat his manuscript.
The most demanding passages—
those he had to write and rewrite
are also the most
difficult to digest.

54.

I divide my time
between High Street
and the Tang Dynasty.
This afternoon
half asleep
from one glass of wine
I allow a red bus to take me
down the road to Changan.

______

                                                Editor Harvey Molloy

Why do I enjoy Richard's poetry so? We have never met yet through his poetry I feel that I know something of him. The poems have an immediacy and energy which I immediately respond to. Nothing is wasted and there is no noise or redundancy. Richard's work fosters an expansion of awareness; the poems call us to pay attention to the sounds and splashes of colour around us. There's also a sense of play or surreal delight in his poems. Like a trapped djinn, Edison's last breath finds release under the stars not yet totally drowned by his lights.

The sparkling intelligence at work in these poems is shaped by Zen poetic forms and Zen practice. Richard's poems acknowledge a greater reality, an awareness of a spiritual power or energy that flashes through the poems and provides both the poet and the reader with a knowledge or insight that can only be expressed within the poem.

When I first started to read Richard's work I saw a certain tension between the poetic forms of the Zen tradition and the very vitality of experience offered by the poems. How much of all this awareness is a trick of language or poetic form? That tension comes from a misunderstanding of awareness: "For those who desire/the pure sky/it's a disappointment." In Richard's poetry, awareness and form are always tied together much in the same way that emptiness and form are tied together in Zen. He's a skilful poet whose crafted work has no bum notes.

Richard von Sturmer is a New Zealand writer and has published four books: We Xerox Your Zebras (Modern House, 1988), A Network of Dissolving Threads (Auckland University Press, 1991), Suchness: Zen Poetry and Prose (HeadworX, 2005) and On the Eve of Never Departing ( Titus Books, 2009).

More selections from Richard's The Book of Equanimity Verses are online at Trout and Interlitq.
His wonderful poem Gathering Clouds is available on Best New Zealand Poems 2003.

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This week's editor, Harvey Molloy has published poems in a number of journals including Enamel, International Literary Quarterly, Landfall, NZ Listener, and Poetry New Zealand. His first book of poems, Moonshot, was published by Steele Roberts in 2008. He is the co-author of the book Asperger Syndrome, Adolescence, and Identity: Looking Beyond the Label. He is now working on his second book of poems.