Tuesday Poem

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

History: the Horse, by C. K. Stead

Recall those wartime

draught horses pulling

carts around our suburb -

milk, bread, firewood – like

the record of something

irretrievably

lost, the way for example the

beast would stand, one

rear leg resting

poised on a hoof-point

like a ballerina -

or, square-foot, head-down,

nose in a chaff-bag,

or in the roadside trough

blowing through nostrils

before drinking, as if

to test the ripples

that this really

was water – tail swishing

between shafts; the regretful

blinkered eyes

and lashes; the mane

like human hair but

coarser; the rakish tilt

of the cart, its iron

wheels grinding on the roadway;

the clop-clop

clop-clop and the carter's

cry; and those great dropped

muffins my mother

sent me with spade

to scoop from the street for her

vegetable garden.

It's as if to return

reporting, 'I've seen the past

and it worked.'

Patience, inwardness,

strength, a body warm to touch,

that smelled good, this

was 'horsepower'.

Nothing with an engine

would ever so engage

feeling and thought,

the pleasure and pain of

planetary kinship.

from The Red Tram, Auckland University Press, 2004

Reproduced on The Tuesday Poem with permission

Editor: Jennifer Compton

I came upon Karl's novel Risk in Frankston Library, which was a pleasant surprise. And I enjoyed it so much I went looking for more of his work. And blow me, they had a copy of The Red Tram in their miniscule poetry section. A New Zealand poet in Frankston Library! Words fail me. What can I say about this book? Words fail me yet again. Put to it, to have to write something ( and this is the time to write something if ever it was) the something I would write is that this book reminded me of the time I lucked out, and got the second-to-last ticket in Florence at the Pergola, for the penultimate recital Alfred Brendel gave. This book has that same ease and sense of occasion.

I picked this poem out of all the others that I could have chosen, because I am old enough to remember the milk horse. And its muffins. My brother was given a bucket and a coal shovel one time I recollect, and was sent out to gather the good muck, and he made a song and dance about it. I was too little to be trusted on the road, but by the time my turn had come the horses had gone.

And now Karl has two years breadth to celebrate poetry as our incumbent Poet Laureate. More power to his tokotoko.

- Jennifer Compton

C. K. Stead was born in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1932. From the late 1950s he began to earn an international reputation as a poet and literary critic – his book The New Poetic (1964) has sold over 100,000 copies – and, later, as a novelist. He has published over 40 books and received numerous honours recognising his contribution to literature, including a CBE (1974), an Honorary DLitt from the University of Bristol (2001), the CNZ Michael King Fellowship (2005), the Order of New Zealand (2007) and, in 2009, the $60,000 Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction and the Montana New Zealand Book Award (Reference and Anthology) for his Collected Poems. In 2010 he won the world’s richest short story award, the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award worth £25,000, and his poem ‘Ischaemia’ won the Hippocrates Prize (open section), worth £5000. Just recently he took up the mantle and the tokotoko of New Zealand Poet Laureate.
.
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).

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.

Tuesday, September 8, 2015

The Fox by Bernadette Hall

The fox is a single red stroke that cuts across
the clearing. The colour seems to hang like smoke,
you can almost see where she has come from.
Her musk (though you can smell nothing)
is specific like a thumbprint on the air.
It isn’t raining but there’s a kind of wet
on your face, a stickiness of insect juices dropped.
The fox is rusty-dull, discreet, not radiant or hot
or pulsing. Not agitated. Not randy.
She is completely dream and intelligence
sliding through the wet grass, the stinging nettles,
the little brittle helmets of dry seed,
a flower or two, relics of the drizzly, petalled summer.
The lyric fox goes down to the creek
where dark and dankness will mask her scent
and the lovely rosette of her face.
She’ll be able to pause there, for a while, sip water
while the dogs swirl and bell in front of the Big House.

© Bernadette Hall

from The Lustre Jug, Victoria University Press, 2009

Reproduced on The Tuesday Poem with permission.

Editor: Helen Lowe

This week, I thought I'd do things a little differently and invite Bernadette to speak to her poem The Fox , which in 2009 was recognised as one of the Best New Zealand Poems of 2008, selected by Robyn Marsack, Director of the Scottish Poetry Library.

"The Rathcoola Estate, where I lived for six months in 2007, is situated in Donoughmore, a rural area in Co. Cork, about twenty five minutes drive from Blarney. Among the wonders there were the blue jays that came down to steal apples from the 200 year old apple trees in the orchard. And the foxes. I’ve long been fond of them, from Brer Fox to the silver foxes of the Arctic. I was desperate to see one.

One day when I was standing under huge oak and sycamores trees just beyond the stone walls that enclosed the orchard and not far from the creek, I saw the fox. She was surprisingly close. And I did experience a kind of deepening stillness, the words clearly in my memory from Ted Hughes’ ‘The Thought Fox’ which I had taught to so many classes over the years. Ireland had this way of offering me ‘for real’ many things which literature had already embedded in my imagination.

This fox was completely unfazed by my presence in her space. She had already judged me as being of good will, or at least harmless. I was relieved to see her. That same morning the hunt had gone through the estate, tracking along the creek with a great hullabaloo, the dogs and the men all in a frenzy. I identified with her somehow. I admired the way she kept on calmly going about her own business. I wished her long life, good health and a safe journey.

In his poem ‘On Originality’ (1977) Bill Manhire wrote of poetry ‘This is my nest of weapons./ This is my lyrical foliage.’ In his essay, ‘Catholic with a small c’ published in ‘The Source of the Song’ (VUP, 1995), Andrew Johnston wrote ‘A lyric poem occupies a space that has somehow been charged with meaning (or at least a sense of meaningfulness) as if a vacuum had been crossed by a spark.’ So, a ‘lyric fox’ crosses a glade and it seems that all along she’s been talking to me about poetry."

~ Bernadette Hall

Bernadette Hall is best known for her poetry but also writes short fiction. She is recognised as one of New Zealand’s more distinctive poetic voices and was an an Artists in Antarctica Fellow in 2004, the 2006 Victoria University Writer in Residence and in 2007 held the Rathcoola Residency in Donoughmore, Ireland. Bernadette’s 2009 collection, The Lustre Jug, (Victoria University Press), was a finalist for the 2010 NZ Post Book Award for Poetry.

To date, she has published ten collections of poetry, the most recent being ‘Life & Customs’ (Victoria University Press 2013). Also in 2013, her edition of poems by the Christchurch writer, Lorna Staveley Anker, was published by Canterbury University Press. Titled ‘The Judas Tree’ it reveals Lorna Anker as New Zealand’s first woman war poet with memories of both World Wars. The Dunedin composer Anthony Ritchie used seven of Bernadette’s Stations of the Cross poems in a symphony which premiered in Christchurch on the 22^ndof February 2014 as a memorial to those who died and those who have suffered as a result of the 2011 earthquake.

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 other Tuesday Poets, using our blog roll to the left of this posting.

Tuesday, September 1, 2015

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?

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