Five Poets And A Prize

Five Poets And A Prize involved the reading of five poets’ work plus the presentation of the 2016 winner of the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award. Funded by Victoria University Press and the New Zealand Poetry Society, this award is given to a poet who has contributed greatly to New Zealand poetry.

Frances Edmond, Lauris’ daughter, starts the readings with one of Lauris’ own pieces: a poem titled In Position. She then introduces Dinah Hawken, a past recipient of the prize, as the first reader. Her poems are exact yet grand, and she explains that many of the poems she’s reading are about women and children, since they remind her of Lauris.

It is this threading of Lauris’ memory with each writer that makes the event feel whole. Bob Orr, the next poet, knew Lauris personally and reads samples of his latest book, Odysseus in Woolloomooloo. I loved the way he introduced his poems, sometimes giving an insight into the story and inspiration behind his pieces.

I especially loved listening to Claire Orchard read, since I enjoyed her debut poetry collection, Cold Water Cure, which was inspired by the life of Charles Darwin. Orchard reads snippets from this collection while also expanding the reason for this focus on Darwin: an interest in comparing the similarities between Victorian life and her own.It is this imaginary correspondence between Orchard and Darwin that fuels her pieces.

The fourth poet, Chris Tse, recently had his poetry collection How to be dead in a year of snakes shortlisted for the New Zealand Book Awards. Before the event, I’d never read his work, but such a striking title promises good poetry. Tse definitely delivers; his voice is strong and steady, detailing the metaphor of the snake found in man and humanity.

Next up is Harry Ricketts, and his first poem is a fitting piece that’s both about Lauris and BATS,the theme and venue of the event. In between his readings are small interludes where he talks about his own interactions with Lauris, including a little story about how someone in a café declared that Lauris definitely looked like someone famous… before deciding that she had to be Janet Frame.

The variation between these five poets covered a stunning breadth of place and time from both well-seasoned and newer writers. And when Frances Edmond announces that the 2016 winner of the award is Bob Orr, the audience bursts into applause. Shocked and humbled, Orr gives his thank yous. Like all great writers, he simply loves to write, stating, “I thought I’d just come here to read some poetry”. Overall, the event was a lovely selection of five poets who I will definitely be reading more of, including the worthy winner of a brilliant prize.

Attended and reviewed by Emma Shi

Five Poets and a Prize: Dinah Hawken, Bob Orr, Claire Orchard, Chris Tse and Harry Ricketts
BATS, Saturday 12 March
NZ Festival Writer’s Week

Book Reviews: My New Zealand 123 Book, My New Zealand Colours Book, My New Zealand ABC Book, by Te Papa Press

Available now in bookstores nationwide.

These three board books from Te Papa Press are beautifully presented and published. Each of them use objects from Te Papa Museum’s collection to illustrate the basic alphabet, numbers, and colour concepts.

The text is sparing, simple and playful. It encourages the reader to look more closely at the images shown, giving quips and quirky suggestions that accompany each image perfectly. Each of the key elements are indicated both in English and in Te Reo, an important addition for any kiwi version of these toddler staples – but one that is often overlooked. I, for one, never realised that the Maori word for ‘grey’ was kiwikiwi – what an appropriate word for the bubbling Rotorua mudpools that illustrate the colour grey. Pāua is a unique kiwi addition to the colours also, and a very important one – but it won’t stop kids arguing whether a pāua shell is mostly blue, mostly green, or mostly purple!

The Te reo Māori pronunciation guide at the back of each of the books is important for parents as much as for children, to give the best start possible for learning Te reo at home.

I can’t think of any collection of basic-concept board books that do as well as these at providing children with real-life examples that they can relate to as kiwi children. Equally, they show the unique flavour of life here in New Zealand for those from abroad.

The breadth of art that the images cover is incredible. Modern and classical sculpture, fashion, antique jewellery and artifacts, photography, model airplanes, modern jewellery, puppets, gold nuggets. This alone teaches children how broad and interesting our world is here in the deep south. The images are evocative and have the feel of something ‘found’ rather than something sought. Te Papa’s curators must have enjoyed contributing to these books, and I am certain authors James Brown and Frances Samuel enjoyed coming up with the accompanying words.

My favourite rhyme is from the illustration for ‘C’ – a car made of corrugated iron:
C is for car
all rusty and crinkly.
Too long in the bath
has made it go wrinkly.

I expect these to be available at every bookstore, giftstore and kiosk in New Zealand as fantastic gifts for children, grandchildren and friends. My copies are going straight to my kiwi friend, who lives in Canada, for her baby girl.

Reviewed by Sarah Forster

My New Zealand 123 Book
Text by James Brown and Frances Samuel
Published by Te Papa Press

My New Zealand Colours Book
Text by James Brown and Frances Samuel
Published by Te Papa Press

My New Zealand ABC Book
Text by James Brown and Frances Samuel
Published by Te Papa Press

Book Review: Sleeping on Horseback, by Frances Samuel

Available in bookstores nationwide.

This is Frances Samuel’s first collection, slightly notable for the fact that Samuel finished the IIML MA programme in 2003. It seems to have been a book a long time coming. The book itself gets a back cover blurb exhorting the richness and strangeness of its poems describing the locales as exotic elsewheres. I don’t agree with this. The theme of exotic elsewheres is definitely strong in the book. But this is a consistent trend in New Zealand and even English language colonialist poetry where other cultures are plundered as scenes, settings and flavour for poems. This isn’t very new or exciting. Samuel continues the trend of quiet poems with a perspective of emotional distance, something I would classify as pretty much de rigueur for poetry being published by many publishers in New Zealand today.

There’s a strong theme of whiteness in the book. White light is mentioned on more than one occasion and there are people wearing white gloves, white bread, white pigeon shit on a white night. And snow, a lot of snow. It’s hard to say whether all this whiteness is just unconscious symbolism or an attempt to address the ubiquity of whiteness and its default position and setting of normality. I am siding on unconscious symbolism because there is very little obvious critique. The poems journey through Latvia and Japan, we have Tolstoy and Po Chu-I, Hebrew words and Pākehā ancestry listed as strings of nationalities. Samuel is a museum exhibitions writer and I suspect this has given me a bias towards wanting the book to be complex and analytical of its own obsessions and stealing.

The poetry itself has a voice that’s a bit different than other writers in New Zealand at present. It’s at times a little sing-song. There’s repetition, though not too much. The poems are overall what I would describe as sweet. One poem talks about Japanese funeral rites and ancestors. It is describing something being looked at rather than experienced, which is a key theme in the book I think. The poem I like the most is titled Duckshooting. It is strange in its own way without really needing to cherry pick strangeness from other cultures. There’s a seventh budgie, which is compelling, and the last line finishes the poem perfectly. A lot of the poems have a certain fairytale feeling to them. Some of them seem to be pitched at children to my eyes and others have elements of a dreaminess that pervades the whole book.

The collection holds together well and progresses through its sections in a way that makes sense and flows. And it is well written. I think I would like a little more strangeness in this collection that’s not about how other cultures are different. It’s a time honoured tradition and one I’m keen to see the back of, especially in a book that is sold on its back cover with promises of its strangeness and richness.

Reviewed by Emma Barnes

Sleeping on Horseback
by Frances Samuel
Published by Victoria University Press
ISBN 9780864739728

Book Review: Sport 42, edited by Fergus Barrowman

Available in selected bookstores now.

Reviewing an issue of a literary journal is a rather curious thing. You’re given the issue—in this case, Sport 42, the latest issue of that well loved landmark of Kiwi lit—and you look inside and see not only a clutch of short stories, but also a hefty double handful of poetry, and a couple of essays, and despite the disparate genres and the disparate levels of experience of the disparate writers (some fresh out of IIML, some already well established), you are told “Go! Go forth and review!” And you look down at this overflowing buffet of words in your right hand and you say, “Um. Ok. Sure. How are you supposed to eat an elephant again?”

Despite my trepidation (Sport 42 boasts a lot of poetry, and I am not a poet), I remembered that I can in fact recognize fine writing when I read it, and Sport 42 has a great deal of fine writing on display in this issue. In particular, the pieces of writing I responded to with the greatest enthusiasm were always the pieces where the style matched, supported and enhanced the content. Hence why Pip Adam’s story “Tragedy of the Commons” continues to ring in my mind; the story is disorienting to read, and there is a stone of despair in its belly, but this is the experience and point of view of Adam’s protagonist too, who looks out at a drenched Christchurch through dead, disoriented eyes.

Lawrence Patchett’s taut writing was wonderful to read too—no fat, all muscle. I also greatly enjoyed the economy on display in both Breton Dukes’ and Uther Dean’s work. Dukes’ very short short stories were each only an A5 page long but nevertheless scooped together sharp characterisation, metaphor, dialogue, depth, plot and a character called Raimundo (and how can you go wrong with a character called that?) Uther Dean’s collection of haiku also managed to say a lot with a little, using the haiku form to perfectly (and often weirdly) present some of the grains of absurdity or sadness scattered through our lives: (“All the sad robots/Pretend to robot smile/At their robot friends.”) I also gravitated towards those pieces that seemed to open a door for us to drift out of real life and into dream or memory, as in Frances Samuel’s “Vending Machine”, and I also enjoyed Bill Manhire’s “Bridle Song”, which was zany as heck right up until it became very troubling (“pyong-yang-a-lang, pyong-yang-a-loo/dear leader says he’s coming soon for you”).

Stephanie de Montalk’s ‘fact-ional’ interview with Alphonse Daudet (who died in 1897) was a highly absorbing piece of writing that also merged reality or fact with pure fiction, but which always felt truthful. de Montalk imagines going back in time to meet Daudet who suffered from the neurodegeneration typical of advanced venereal disease. She gives Daudet a voice, imagines his character based on his writing, imagines how he might sit, speak and act, while still incorporating facts and analysis and moving the interview through meditations on chronic pain and suffering. This was a truly masterful piece of writing, and it exemplifies why literary journals like Sport must continue to exist. I admit to some exasperation at the several pieces of writing made of well turned out words but little real feeling (as far as I could tell), but there was more than enough in this issue to show the importance of having this kind of outlet for creative writing. Long live Sport, and here’s to issue number 43!

Review by Febriani Idrus

Sport 42
Edited by Fergus Barrowman
Victoria University Press