Song by Peter Bland

The old Chinese lady
who lives next door
lays out her washing
on a red-tiled roof
as if she were back
in her childhood home.

She sings to herself
a song with long pauses,
a song passed on
full of comings and goings
like the sea on
a calm day when
it drifts in exhausted.

It's a song with no real
end or beginning. One
we still hear
even in the pauses
as she stoops
to water her money-tree
or reaches heavenwards
to collect her washing.


_____________

                                                   Editor Jeffrey Paparoa Holman

Yorkshire Godwit

Peter Bland at the launch of Coming Ashore  August 2011

We don’t have many godwits homing to New Zealand from Yorkshire, except for Peter Bland, a bird of poetic passage and many migrations between here and there since his first long journey south on an immigrant ship in 1954, bearing his precious copy of T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock.

Peter Bland has been fattening himself on these feeding grounds ever since, and enriching us with eleven collections of poetry on the way, as well as co-founding Downstage Theatre and acting in local film. Now 77 years old and a widower mourning his lost love, Beryl, he is back amongst us, living in Auckland and our most recent recipient of the NZ$60,000 Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry.

He deserves it, richly: and to celebrate, we have his latest collection, Coming Ashore, launched last week in Wellington by Steele Roberts. I was asked to speak to the book on the night: a rich collection of elegy and history, and sharply-observed images of the inner and outer life of the poet through his bicultural world views.

This poem, “Song”, is one of my favourites, of many choice pieces here: the viewing persona observes a next door neighbour, a Chinese woman, quite elderly it seems, singing as she hangs out her washing. In 21 carefully crafted and understated lines, Peter Bland brings her to life: the song, the strange quality of otherness and the keening for home its sounds evoke, “full of comings and goings/like the sea on/a calm day when/it drifts in exhausted”.

She sings as she waters her money tree, she sings as she looks up to heaven hanging the washing: here is an immigrant captured in print, somewhere between life and death: “It's a song with no real/end or beginning. One/we still hear/even in the pauses/as she stoops/to water her money-tree/or reaches heavenwards/to collect her washing.”

There is no moral, nor strain: simply the pellucid poise of the best of the ancient Chinese poets he so admires, the emotional ache that we can feel in the final lines of Ezra Pound’s “The River Merchant’s Wife”: “If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,/Please let me know beforehand,/ And I will come out to meet you /As far as Cho-fu-Sa.”

Bland is at one with his subject here because he has stood on similar ground: the immigrant, the man of two worlds with two sets of voices in his head, those from a childhood home, and those from New Zealand streets. This is why he can give her back to us with such simplicity and depth – but only a life of dedication to his craft can help us a little way in explaining the power of his art.

This poem is published with the permission of Steele Roberts and you can find Coming Ashore here. When you've absorbed "Song", take yourself into the right hand sidebar and discover up to 30 poems from the Tuesday Poets linked to this blog.

This week's editor Jeffrey Paparoa Holman is currently on leave from Tuesday Poem while he is writer in residence at Hamilton University in NZ's central North Island. Our thanks to him for his post on Peter Bland. Jeffrey is a poet and academic who normally resides in Christchurch and blogs here. His last post was an earthquake poem. 

Butterfly, by Rhian Gallager

We entered a year of slow burn
I stole a line from her eyes
She wrote by hand return

The body awoke to the act of yearn
Moisture met the heat of July
We entered a year of slow burn

A door ajar, could yield or close firm
From colleague to intimate ally
She wrote by hand, I wrote in return

Disclosure inched by turn
A long striptease of send and reply
We entered a year of slow burn

Shining and wild were in
Our lines, barely disguised
She wrote by hand in return

All grew from a pact of adjourn
Overwintering, waiting a sign in the sky
Fused on a year of slow burn
Word at the start became touch in return.

(c) Rhian Gallagher

.
About the Poem:
"Butterfly", first published in Poetrix, will be included in Rhian Gallagher's second collection of poetry, Shift (forthcoming from Auckland University Press.) "Butterfly" follows the form of the villanelle, although it reflects the contemporary trend of allowing variation in the wording of the refrain.

I believe this poem is representative of Rhian's work in terms of the beauty and delicacy of the writing, a delicacy that nonetheless enhances both the emotional depth of the poem and also the adherence to a demanding form.

I have revisited Rhian's first collection, Salt Water Creek, on several occasions now, enjoying the juxtaposition of intellect, interior reflection, and often profound emotion that characterises her work—and very much look forward to the publication of Shift next month.

"Butterfly" is reproduced here with the permission of Rhian Gallagher.

.
About the Poet:
Rhian Gallagher’s first poetry collection, Salt Water Creek (Enitharmon Press, London, 2003) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for First Collection. Gallagher received the Janet Frame Literary Trust Award in 2008. Auckland University Press is publishing her second collection of poetry, Shift, in September 2011. Gallagher is also the author of a non-fiction book, Feeling for Daylight: The Photographs of Jack Adamson, (South Canterbury Museum, 2010).

—
Helen Lowe is this week's Tuesday Poem editor and a regular contributor to the Tuesday Poem community. A novelist as well as a poet, Helen's first novel, Thornspell (Knopf) is published in the US, while her second The Heir of Night, (HarperCollins, US; Little, Brown, UK) is also available internationally and recently debuted in The Netherlands, as Kind van de Nacht. She is currently working on her third novel.
—

Once you have enjoyed "Butterfly" do take some time to enjoy the other poems posted by members of the Tuesday Poem community for this week. You will find them all listed in the right-hand sidebar.

Shetland Ponies, Haast Beach by Tim Jones

Forest and sea have had their way

with memory. A few houses — silent,

locked — remain. Between car and beach,

a field of Shetland ponies, already

calling her by name. But I'm

facing inland, bush not far beyond,

mountains piled like thunderheads

across the morning light. Was this

our house, or this, or this now empty field?

For eighteen months, we lived here

while they built the road. I was two, then four.

What I have are barely memories:

my mother at the washing line. My father's

longed-for homeward stride. Grader drivers

lifting me onto their knees to ride.

Work done, we drove away, the new highway

bearing our fortunes south, over spilling streams,

across the Main Divide. Now I'm back, reclaiming

what may be reclaimed. The forest

has no answers. The sea lies past the ponies.

"Look," she says, "they're eating from my hand."

________________________

 Editor: Alicia Ponder

From the soon to be released collection Men Briefly Explained, I found Tim Jones' Shetland Ponies, Haast Beach instantly compelling. It's the first stanza deliberately filled with contemplative pauses - echoing those empty spaces of memories from a long-forgotten past - and the lovely shape in the way the poem moves between the present and the past, with glimpses of these, as if from a car window on a long journey to a pivotal destination. The poem as a whole has a real feeling of reclaimed memories in a solid and imperative now.  

Tim Jones is a poet, author and editor, and Men Briefly Explained will be his third solo collection of poetry, out in October.  I'm looking forward to hearing him read from it at a launch event at Rona Gallery, the bookshop my family owns in Eastbourne (Friday October 28, 6 pm), and at other venues around the country.  


Tim's support of New Zealand poets and poetry has been amazing, he was highly instrumental, along with co-editor Mark Pirie, in creating and keeping alive the dream of "Voyagers" a highly esteemed collection of New Zealand Science Fiction poetry and a real boost for many NZ Poets.  He also recently edited the Australian and New Zealand Speculative Poetry Collection in the second issue of Eye to the Telescope, published online here by the Science Fiction Poetry Association.  

 

Tim is a Tuesday poet who lives in Wellington NZ, and blogs at Tim Jones: Books in the Trees.  Some of his books can be found on his blog, including the short story collection Transported longlisted for the 2008 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.

Alicia Ponder is this week's Tuesday Poem editor.  She lives in Eastbourne, and loves poetry, and writing for children.  She is the co-author of two art books, and is published in New Zealand and Australia .  She blogs here at an Affliction of Poetry.  


After you've read the hub poem, try out some of the Tuesday Poem posts in the sidebar. 

Envelope by Anna Jackson

I stick a stamp on an envelope.
It is a lake, a little glassy, and a mountain, behind the lake.
A little bit of lake is left behind on my tongue.

I would not like to be a fish in that lake.
A little bit of me would always be going missing.
I would always be leaving the lake for the mountain.

And now, it is several days later.
I am waiting for a reply.
Then I see that the stamp is still attached to me.

So that explains my demonic energy lately!
That explains how I rose so high so fast,
what everyone means when they refer to my depth.

But where am I being sent?
And when I arrive, who will open me?
Roughly, with a finger, or gently, with a knife?

__________________
                                                    Editor: Robert Sullivan

I selected this poem because it is from a brilliant new collection, Thicket (AUP). Anna Jackson is influenced by Russian poetic traditions following the Bolshevik revolution (although its declared influence is Virgil), and so she often informs her writing with an edgy danger, in this instance contrasting the roughness of fingers with the genteel ‘knife'.

Without wishing to explain the poem, I admire the several figurative transformations: the narrator into an envelope, the lake into saliva on the narrator’s tongue in which a fish struggles. Later in the collection there is a poem called “The Fish and I” reminding me about its many internal cross-references, as well as to other poetics.

"Envelope" is published on Tuesday Poem with Anna Jackson's permission.

There is another of her Thicket poems and more about her here on  Tuesday Poem. 

To read more Tuesday Poems, look in the sidebar where up to 30 poets from NZ, Australia, the UK, the US and Italy post poems by themselves and others they admire. The poems go up all through a Tuesday - in the southern and northern hemispheres.

This week's Tuesday Poem editor is poet Robert Sullivan of Maori (Ngā Puhi, Kai Tahu) and Galway Irish descent. He has won awards for his poetry, children's writing and editing. His most recent poetry collections:  Cassino City of Martyrs (Huia) and Shout Ha! to the Sky (Salt Publishing, UK). 

Robert co-edited NZ Book Award finalist Whetu Moana: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English with Albert Wendt and Reina Whaitiri. He heads Creative Writing at the Manukau Institute of Technology in Auckland, and  blogs here. 

The Wild Bees by John Griffin

A death wind swished across your open book
and dusted from its dusty leaves and colophon
the spores that gather in spines and gutters,
that swarm when agitated like motes in sunlight
like mites metamorphosing into seething bees
that set the silence humming, throbbing.

What comes alive in the shimmering shafts,
dancing and lemniscating, constructs infinity
inside a geometry of longing and there too
within its tessellations order hypnotises
disorder and draws out the unctuous drones
till they abandon their myrmidonian binging.

Veined wings made of water lift water’s weight
and flap water’s freight improbably into flight
where it hovers now before the portals of pollen
and fans antigens, powder-down and dander
with such a busy buzz the glassine scales intensify
the air, evaporate the dew and vaporize your tears.

The hive in the eaves was built out of absence,
or rather vacancy was its invitation — the colony knew
and soon occupied the silence with circadian rhythms
and you let them even welcoming the palpitations
they brought to things as a sign of life's affirmation,
and risk should their styli be more apt to sting you.

These insects could raise you out of yourself
and air-condition that claustrophobic infirmary
where sickness had you jailed — Delphic bees
pollinating your mind’s imponderables
with thoughts of correlatives beyond itself —
they could even alchemise your tears to gold:

Each swag has a scarab that the bees bear back
to their Omphalos — the Greeks already knew
and named your girls and the Egyptians before them
put onyx amulets in the woven skeps of dreams
so that the soul might harvest its cosmic course
towards that place where Ra drops honey from the sun.


Published with the permission of John Griffin

__________
This week's editor: Zireaux

Poets are not people. And a good poem abandons all biography. I know almost nothing about John Griffin, whether he's attended schools, programs, workshops, written chapbooks or crap-books, published in lit-mags or shit-rags, or whether he's won any awards (I do hope he hasn't; my estimation of him might diminish).

But I know this poem. I know its instrument, its styli, if you will. I know that what we have here is a genuine work of art -- heroic, honey-tender, precisely beautiful -- created by a genuine poet.

We can talk about the remarkable combination of form and flow in "The Wild Bees," the six stanzas, six sentences, the six-sided honeycomb cell; the fluid phrasing -- "draw out the unctuous drones," "powder-down and dander," "pollinate...the imponderables.'

We can talk about the images, the conceit, the subject matter; how the bees, after all, as teardrops-come-to-life, flapping "water's freight improbably into flight" (lovely stuff, so very bee-like and palpable), are but messengers, workers, drones in the creation of Griffin's poetic unguent. Or how "The Wild Bees" is really a kind of love poem, an offering of soma or salve, a nectar meant to soothe the pain of a writer (a writer-goddess in this case) to whom, or perhaps with whom, the poet is responding.

Rather, what we must talk about -- even more than the sweet affection -- is what the poem demands of us: Not the meaning so much, but the language. Now let me speak softly here, a whisper, lest our real poets, quietly toiling away at beauties in the background, be distracted from their craft:

The poet must have faith in the design of language. In the structure, the honeycomb, the tessellation. "The geometry of longing." In vocabulary. Yes, vocabulary.

From spores to motes, mites, bees, scarabs, from death to golden tears and honey sun (bees were once thought to spring, like maggots, from the dead), from colophon to "seething bees" and "shimmering shafts" -- beauty is in the careful, coordinated, construction of words out of the swarm. And sure, it can be dangerous to "lemniscate" without a permit -- Griffin is no novice (he's waggle-dancing with his bees!) -- but don't be afraid to mingle with myrmidons, or let the bees sting your lips.

And you (exclamatory whisper!), O peddlers of minimalism, hucksters of haiku, I request you keep your smokey spiritualism away from the hive. Can you not hear the growing clamor of the i-Clones, the Fad-Pads, the X-Cubes and MeTubes, the Factor Xs, the Super 3-D Cinema-Plexes? Why should we submit to the blog-fog, the vapors of vacancy (stay calm, my voice!), when language can reach -- or better, ride, fly, however improbably, like Dante's Beatrice (Dante being the CGI animator of his day), to the place where Ra drops honey from the sun, on the powerful, jewel-encrusted Griffin-wings of language?

-- Zireaux

______________

For more information about former Tuesday Poet John Griffin (who lives in Ireland, by the way), visit his website.

You'll find information about Zireaux, as well as his latest verse and commentary, at www.ImmortalMuse.com.

We do hope you'll take some time to enjoy the other Tuesday Poem posts this week, listed in the right-hand sidebar.

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!