Me and you with our babies:

 

We walk around the streets

steal fruit and visit your childhood,

hide the spoils in the prams.

Lemons from the school-yard and

crab-apples from your old house.

They aren't even sour.

 

We drive up to the windmills,

they chop through the air,

make a sound like a

heartbeat in utero. There, are

the Manawatu plains, as flat

as you say you feel afterwards.

 

I give you a pretty black dress

to wear to parties and a bunch

of coriander wrapped in a

supermarket bag. One last

cup of tea. You drink it standing up.

We wave you south. No looking back.

 

 

Helen Lehndorf is a writer and writing teacher living in Palmerston North. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies, including Kaupapa (eds Hinemoana Baker and Maria McMillan) and Swings and Roundabouts (ed Emma Neale), where this poem first appeared. She has had work produced on Radio New Zealand National and feature writing published in the Dominion Post. Helen and I have been making art journals together for a couple of years, you can see some scans of the project here.

There is something about that moment in the second stanza, when the blades of the turbines chop through the air. I can hear the whomp-whomp of it, and the connection with a heart beat in utero is genius. I like the way in the poem grows up; child-like and mischievous stealing fruit - to a black party dress and no looking back. In the middle those ominous cutting blades, it's dark but not without hope. Lovely.

For more Tuesday Poems visit the Tuesday Poem Blog.

The second installment in the Quick Ten Interview series.

 

 

Photo credit Rebecca Swan / Doublescoop

 

A rare being - internationally successful, award winning writer and presenter of The Good Word - Emily Perkins answers questions about what happens when acting and writing converge, Books vs Paintings and acting in the movie of the Novel About My Wife.

You can follow Emily on Twitter.

There are affiliate links in this interview. I’ve found The Book Depository to be the cheapest and quickest place to find books and recommend them without hesitation. Free delivery anywhere in the world is an amazing thing.

The first question is from Ashleigh Young who has a curly one for you:

So many people loved "Not her real name" and some writers tried to emulate it. Then you went off and did a completely different thing. Do you think you'll ever write a collection of short stories again? Also, have you ever met Patrick Evans and if so, were things civil between you?

EP: Ha – I haven’t met him. I’m sure he’s a personable guy. He’s been photographed wearing Mickey Mouse ears, which is always a good sign. Looking forward to reading his book.

For sure I’ll keep writing short stories and hopefully publish another collection. One of the books I’ve been working on is a sort of story-novel hybrid. My dream is to sustain the precision and intensity of stories through a longer work.

 

HH: I'm really interested in how having a background in more than one creative discipline effects your work as a writer. Also, having a husband who is a visual artist must have some impact surely? What happens when acting, painting and writing converge?

EP: Hm, I think the main influence from drama is probably in the imaginative act, the focus you bring to visualizing a scene or an interior moment. I say visualizing but really you’re trying to engage all the senses. Similar to acting but in writing you’re on your own and you can redraft.

I’ve learned a lot from artists over the years about just getting on with it – the importance of routine, daily application to the work.

At the moment I’m doing a little collaboration that involves me drawing, which is hilarious and insanely good fun. Awesome to try something new and have the freedom of engaging a different part of the brain and not caring if it looks completely amateur. Maybe that’s the thing with different disciplines: one might be your life’s work but it’s enriching and liberating to be a rank amateur in others. A few years ago I thought Am Dram would be a good form of make-your-own fun but now wonder if I’d have the guts. I might skip straight to the waitressing..

 

HH: You mentioned in an interview a couple of years ago that:

“I'm really interested in how we construct ourselves, the building up of identity and how much we live as a known quantity and how much we're mysteries to ourselves and how much we invent ourselves and live in other people.”

How different is creating a character for stage or screen to creating a character in a novel?

EP: So far, in my writing, it happens differently every time. In one of my current projects the characters emerged clearly after the initial draft, which was very much about sensory experience. I’ve fitted the characters to the story world rather than the other way round. In the other project, there are two female characters and one man who are leading it. They’ve been clearly defined from the start.

It’s a very long time since I played a character on stage. Of course someone else has given you the words. The last thing I did was probably one of my better efforts because I was really lost about acting and on the verge of giving up, so didn’t try too hard, and the play was a Mamet so the language was all you really needed.

 

HH: You're probably sick of talking about distance, location and exile as themes in your work by now. Do you think these themes will keep coming up in your work or are you done and dusted?

EP: Well, to return to these two projects, which both have a strong sense of place – one isn’t about those things at all and one has a character who is quite defined by being out of her home country.

 

HH: In my last interview Elizabeth Knox said she'd like to answer more really writerly questions about story and syntax, rhetoric and imagery. What do you wish people would ask you? Would you like to tell us about your rhetoric and imagery?

EP: I’d like to read Elizabeth’s answers. I wish there were more of these discussions, the kind of symposium where writers can talk to each other and a readerly audience about technique, craft, art, theory, etc, without it being an academic context or the festival event focus on the story/plot of a single book or the author biography. You know, those events are very much about what happens, not how it happens.

Um, so to take the opportunity briefly – the rhetoric seems to develop over the early stages of a draft and that style is intimately connected to the characters and mood. The organising principle. There's that funny thing with writing where each book has its own flavour but perhaps there is some recognizable author voice behind them all. Being on the inside of the writing is like being inside your own self, where you experience yourself as sort of pH neutral and you forget that it might come across as very positively one thing or another, on the outside.

 

HH: What writing projects have you been working on since Novel about my Wife?

EP: These two novels, for the most part. Some other smaller stuff.

 

HH: How would you describe your creative process? Do you sit down and slog it out everyday? How does it get squeezed in with teaching, parenthood and The Good Word?

EP: I write five days a week, though not always on the project that needs the most attention. My process could broadly be described as alternating between moss-like accumulation in a fairly relaxed manner, and intense slightly nauseous focus. The children are all in school now. Prep for teaching and The Good Word tends to happen at night, I can’t really write fiction after getting the kids to bed. And we do end up sometimes working on the weekends but that’s much more family time.

 

HH: Suspend disbelief for a moment... You're asked to play Ann in a movie version of Novel About my Wife – would you take the job?

EP: Oh no. I would be so wrong for the part it’s unimaginable!

 

HH: Is it Books vs. Paintings in your house when it comes to what takes up space?

EP: It’s Books vs. Everything and the books are winning. I suppose e-readers will change this and maybe one of the unexpected silver linings will be more wall-space for paintings. But right now I love ‘real’ books in shelves and am not ready to give them up.

 

HH: Who are you reading at the moment?

EP: I’m a bit frustrated with my reading at the moment. For work I have an Albanian novel, Ornela Vorspi’s The Country Where No One Ever Dies, and some writing on anarchism (The Coming Insurrection – speaking of rhetoric, that is written/translated in the most exhilarating style). For fun, dipping in and out of Clarice Lispector’s Cronicas (a Fergus Barrowman tip) and the David Lipsky/David Foster Wallace interviews. But I can’t read certain books I’ve been looking forward to – the Robin Black short stories, the new Maile Meloy, other stuff – because I’ve got a feeling they’ll somehow fuck me up at this stage of writing.

So it is very slow passing through fantasy novels I read as a kid: Ursula Le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea.

 

 

And then, there’s nights humid hot

with the breath of frogs, croaking

an urgent desire, anywhere they find

the water’s edge. What if you would

wake in that sort of darkness, filled

primeval, with the amphibious dance,

mating heavy in the air, stultifying

to the point you have to stand, moonlit

looking out into the sound, you naked

by an open window seeking movement

to feel any cool breeze, your body pale

or shapeshifting when cloud crosses

the moon’s path filtered with moments

of unexplained pause in the crescendo

chorus of frogs – somewhere among

neighbours, the distant barking, a dog

disturbed for whatever reason – lying

awake it may be worth asking if just

because there’s a whole lot of words

out there, is no reason to use them

though nature is profligate; breathing

phosphorescence in ripples, caught

shoals lit in the water’s curl, awash

with breath, so much, ah, there’s so much

 

 

Pat White is a writer and artist who lives in the Wairarapa. He was a student in the 2009 MA in Creative Writing at the IIML. Earlier this year he held the Robert Lord Cottage residency in Dunedin, at present he is the 2010 Randell Cottage Writer in Residence and has started blogging. He is working on a biographical work on the life of Peter Hooper, West Coast author and conservationist. His memoir How the Land Lies is due out in November from VUP.

Pat is, according to the NZ Book Council: 

a poet whose work often reflects an interest in rural life and the natural environment, with a life lived 'close to the seasons.'

This poem does demonstrate Pat's rural focus, although he is more than a "nature writer". What really strikes me about this piece is the rhythm, it carries you forward to through the poem, it reflects the frogs call and the wash of water and breath itself.

For more Tuesday Poems visit the hub.

She was admiring the view. I saw her jump,

pause first, then jump. She left her purse,

it was black vinyl with a gold buckle.

I didn’t look inside. She wore a hijab, green and blue

and I was thinking how interesting London was

when she climbed over, collapsed like a half-pulled parachute

and hit the water. Her dress billowed like a jellyfish

as she floated away. The Thames was brown and choppy

and she drifted fast, was almost gone –

 

Then I saw you, for the first time, in pyjamas,

in the hostel kitchen, drinking from a milk bottle.

It was dark, the lights were off, it was night,

you didn’t notice me squatting on the windowsill.

 

 

The imagry in this poem is startling in both stanzas. The first stanza hits you with it in the first line and the second tricks you into a false sense of security, then sucker-punches you in the last line with that unusual iamge that reminds me of this painting by Henry Fuseli. I love the way Bill can suprise the reader.

Bill Nelson won the Biggs Poetry prize for best poetry portfolio at the IIML in 2009. He blogs at This is Writing? He writing has appeared in Hue & Cry, The Lumière Reader, Blackmail Press, 4th Floor and Swap Writing and he's also guest edited at Turbine and Blackmail Press. He's also appearing tomorrow at The Sparks Fly Upwards event:

City Gallery Wellington invited eight Wellington-based writers to respond to the work of a particular artist in the Gallery's current exhibition Ready to Roll (29 May-12 September 2010). The writers - Pip Adam, Airini Beautrais, James Brown, Tim Corballis, Chloe Lane, Anna Livesey, Bill Nelson and Lucy Orbell - will read their work at a special evening, entitled The Sparks Fly Upwards, in the Adam Auditorium, at 6pm on Wednesday 18 August.

For more Tuesday Poems go to the hub.

 

 

Russell Sprouts

 

For a long time, I thought that the sprouts

had the name of my father: Russell.

That was the sound of someone

moving in the vegetable garden.

 

Because one night he laid himself down in the dirt

and went to sleep. From the places where his eyes were

and mouth, hands, and feet

pale green plants sprouted, warm and bitter,

bearing his name: Russell.

 

If anyone could lie so still under soil

so as not to upset

the new sprouts from growing,

naturally, it was him – it was only him, the quietest one,

upon whom they felt

at home. When morning came

 

he brushed soil from his hair and swam

a silent length, backstroke,

in the pool: early light

enfolding his skin

in leaves of palest green. Before we woke

he was up and over the window ledge

in a perfect Olympian vault

and through the curtains, with barely a rustle.

 

Ashleigh says:

My first poem ever published was in the School Journal in 1992. I think I was eight? Does that count? It was called "Winter and Spring" and was pretty terrible.

Some how I doubt it Ashleigh!

For more Tuesday Poems go to the Tuesday Poem hub.

One

On the table

is a dancing girl

made of silver, spun by gears

and cogs           she pirouettes

                      she arabesques

and when she begins to slow

I wind the key again

      let her go

 

My father the poet, my mother

the parallelogram

           two lines

           that should never have crossed

Passion and

reason, frenzy and logic

           It’s no wonder

it ended as it did

 

 

Two

She said she was protecting me

from his blood, my blood

and the poison that was waiting there

 

Sitting at my desk

my books open

she wrapped me, laced me

in numbers, equations

like a whale-bone corset

to keep my back

straight, my spine aligned

and threaded through my mind

little lines of logic

a program for equilibrium

 

And so you see

                   it was my mother

who first programmed          me

 

But maybe the software

doesn’t work

I think, in the dark summerhouse

with my tutor

Maybe a line of code

is incorrect

as I feel the lick

of his eyelashes

against my shoulder

 

He is dismissed

I walk five miles

to find him

but he has already gone

 

 

Three

A present from my mother

and today not even

        my birthday

I am twenty years of age

I am safely married

I am waiting

for my own first child

I am no longer an accident

waiting to happen

 

She sends me

something dangerous, something

explosive

Behind my composure

I faint as I tear

the corner of the paper

rip away

the shield, the protection

and there he is

glowing

within the gilt frame

turban knotted around

his noble head

        I see in him

my own eyes, my mouth

the cleft of my chin

 

and I can see

why she kept this

kept him

from me

 

 

Four

I never met him, my father

          but I grew

in his shadow, in his light

What he was with words

I would be

with numbers

An alchemist, an enchantress

          I promised myself

 

I first saw the dancing girl

in Babbage’s studio

A toy, a fancy

My eyes lighted

on a plainer set of

cogs and wheels

engraved with numbers

         The Difference Engine

The other ladies scattered

their tinkling laughter but I

asked, ‘How does it work?’

 

He told me

              and I understood

 

 

Five

The Analytical Engine

was harder, because

      it didn’t exist

except in our minds

  But I    can explain it

share it

It will change

everything

 

I am a prophetess, a seer

 

In me

the twin streams meet

His blood, not drained

but flowing with her reason

I have watched for it

waited, afraid

of the madness, the badness

the danger, but now

I think I may be

the answer to the equation

 

Numbers dance

to the beat of the iamb

trochee, spondee

numbers make music

poetry

if you listen

with the right ear

 

And so you see

                  I am his daughter

after all

 

Helen Rickerby's first collection, Abstract Internal Furniture (HeadworX 2001), was described as 'an avant-garde, indoor garden full of strange images and intriguing ideas where things turn topsy-turvy' (Harvey McQueen, New Zealand Books). She was co-founder, and now co-managing editor, of JAAM magazine, and runs the small publishing company Seraph Press. She lives in Wellington, where she is employed as an editor.

 

Helen says:

The poem is ‘Enchantress of numbers’, which is about Ada Lovelace, who was Byron’s daughter and a bit of a mathematician – enchantress of numbers is what computer pioneer Charles Babbage called her. It’s one of the biographical poems that’s in My Iron Spine. It was published in Poetry NZ 32, but I’ve tinkered with it a teeny bit since it was first published.

Ada Byron (1815–1852)

Daughter of the poet Byron and his wife Annabella Milbanke. Her mother left Byron when Ada was one month old, believing him mad and immoral. He was never allowed to see Ada again. Fond of mathematics herself, Annabella had Ada trained in maths in the hope it would discipline her away from any poetic or deviant nature she may have inherited from her father. Ada is best known for her notes to her translation of a scientific paper explaining Charles Babbage’s design for the Analytical Engine, a precursor to the computer. She has been called the first computer programmer because one of the notes contains what is generally considered to be the first (albeit theoretical) computer program.

I am fascinated with the intersection between art and science. I really like how this poem explores that in two ways - a poem as art discussing science and also played out in the conflict of science and art represented by the men and women in the poem. I also love that the traditional binaries of women being associated with the arts and men with science are transposed in this piece.

 You can see more Tuesday Poems at the Tuesday Poem hub.

Welcome to my new interview series "Quick Ten". Once a month I'll be talking to some of my favourite people about the creative process.

 

  

Photo Credit Bruce Foster

My first victims - best selling author Elizabeth Knox and publisher Fergus Barrowman are New Zealand's hottest literary couple. They answer questions about what makes great fiction, taking risks, what makes publishers keep reading your manuscript and - most importantly - Zombies vs Vampires.

You can follow Elizabeth and Fergus on Twitter or become a fan of Victoria University Press on Facebook.

There are affiliate links in this interview. I’ve found The Book Depository to be the cheapest and quickest place to find books and recommend them without hesitation. Free delivery anywhere in the world is an amazing thing.

First up – Elizabeth:

HH: The wrong stuff - are accidents and mistakes good material?

EK: So, accidents – I don’t know that I recognise them anymore. I’m working with the silent partner of my subconscious and nothing feels wholly accidental or deliberate. I do plan, but the planning is mostly a way of tricking myself into proceeding with the story. It’s like 1) Imagine the story. 2) Write the story you haven’t imagined.

 

HH: If you could transform into any kind of supernatural being for 24 hours what would you be?

EK: I’m thinking this would work like a fairytale wish and you’d lose any ongoing benefit from the experience, so rather than being someone wise, who could come away from the 24 hours with insights, I would be some creature who could experience pure physical pleasure for that period. Something untroubled, with wings.

 

HH: How many projects do you have on the go at any given time?

EK: I have three things on the go at the moment (though one is illicit). I’m always writing notes up to five possible projects ahead. I have more ideas than time at the moment (and have always had more than I’ve had confidence to get on with some of them!)

 

HH: How is your personal library organised? Is it organised?

EK: Once in a long while Fergus moves books around from room to room. It is like the fall of empires with maps being redrawn. The poetry and essays stay in my office – they are like power points, I need to plug in frequently.

 

HH: How do you feel about taking risks?

EK: I just do it. Deciding not to take risks would be even riskier.

 

HH: Do you ever suffer from fear & anxiety – if so how do you deal with it?

EK: This question caused loud and hysterical laughter in my household where it is understood that I am a racehorse and can often be seen cavorting nervously sideways with my eyes rolling. Is cavorting nervously sideways dealing with it?

 

HH: What do you say to "Genre Critics" who just want you to write straight forward "literary fiction"

EK: I just say, persistently and gently, to those it’ll help as well as those who don’t and won’t get it, that "literary fiction" is a genre – it is literature that matters most to me, and literature can appear in any genre.

 

HH: What do you wish people would ask you in interviews?

EK: I’d love to answer more really writerly questions about story and syntax, rhetoric and imagery, asked by some really noticing critic. David Larsen did a very good job in the forthcoming book of interviews Words Chosen Carefully (I really don’t know about that title ...)

 

HH: Anymore movie deals in the works?

EK: Yes. It could be very exciting if it comes to anything. Dreamhunter and Dreamquake. Twilight producers Temple Hill.

 

HH: Who are you reading at the moment?

EK: Gawd, I read ‘feeding’ and was counting up teenagers… Um. Reading. In the past two weeks I finished The Vagrants by Yuyin Li, and Enchanted Glass, Diana Wynne Jones. On my iphone I read Tim Powers’s Three Days till Never, and listened to an audio book of the brilliant Megan Whelan Turner’s King of Attolia (I wish I’d written those books!). Now I’m starting Jane Smiley’s Private Life. So, for the genre police that’s literary fiction, YA, fantasy, YA, literary fiction. Amen.

 

Now on to Fergus:

HH: What makes you put down a manuscript?

FB: If it sounds like literature.

 

HH: What makes you keep reading?

FB: A tingle of pleasure, or the niggling anxiety that it might be better than it appears to be (which hardly ever comes to anything).

 

HH: What's the most common mistake new writers make?

FB: Thinking they can ask for the reader’s attention; they have to win it.

 

HH: What advice do you have for how to deal with rejection slips? Should writers get thicker skins?

FB: Try to remember that this rejection means only that this editor rejected this work for this publishing list or periodical at this time.

 

HH: If you were a font what would you be?

FB: Baskerville Old Face.

 

HH: How do you feel about being described as a “Gatekeeper”?

FB: Patrick White described Beatrice Davis (longterm Angus & Robertson editor) as “the bottleneck in Australian literature”, which I thought was a great accolade.

 

HH: Do you think the old style relationship between editors and writers has gone for good and has anything replaced it?

FB: I’m not sure that that “old style relationship” ever existed in any general sense. Editors have always had an uncomfortably two-faced role, advocating for the writer to publisher, imposing the publisher’s demands on the writer. Close and transforming working relationships between writers and editors have always been rare good luck. They will continue to happen, whether the “editor” is on the publisher’s payroll, or is a freelancer, or is hired by the writer, or is the writer’s agent – or is in “the cloud” in some position that we can’t quite foresee. In the end, the editor works for the reader, and is paid by the reader.

 

HH: Can people learn how to write a prize winning book, or is it natural born talent? In other words -Are writing schools a good thing?

FB: No one can be taught how to write a good book who doesn’t already have it in them, but a good school can help someone find the technique or self-confidence or self-knowledge they need to realise that book. Of course the majority of writing students will not go on to have careers as published writers, but they are as likely as students in any other humanities course to have had experiences or learned things that will benefit them in their future lives. Or not.

 

HH: Who are you reading at the moment?

FB: Not the right thing! Jose Saramago’s Notebook, which has lovely things in it but is too dominated by political certainties (not Antonio Lobo Antunes or Clarice Lispector). Peter Temple’s Truth, which is entertaining but rests too heavily on genre conventions (not Elmore Leonard).

 

HH: Zombie vs Vampire – who would win?

FB: I have consulted widely. Elizabeth says it’s like lions and tigers. One on one the vampire would win. In a group fight the zombies would win because they would cooperate. Jack [their son] says it depends which World you are in.

 

 

                                         seventy - painting by Kirsty Morison

 

Everything is so tender.

Which is kidney, which is steak

or mushroom?

 

It’s the best sleep she’s had in years

this latest hospital stay of his.

She stands in her sunroom

 

practises her choreography

in her blue dressing gown

my mother points to the sky

 

sings I’m goin’ nowhere

somebody help me

somebody help me get there.

 

*

 

On the table

seventy roses in a vase.

Under my feet a mat

 

crocheted from plastic bags.

A silver balloon on a stick

droops in a bunch

 

of dusty plastic hydrangeas.

My clothes are laid out

drying on furniture

 

like shadows of us all.

I think of her

eleven years old

 

how she ran to beat the rain

the road wettening

in lashes behind her.

 

*

 

In the last mouthful of stew

there’s a walnut.

She tells me that Stan

 

makes bacon from stingray wings

how he cures it and you’d never

ever know.

 

Hinemoana Baker is a writer and musician living on Wellington’s Kapiti Coast. Born in Christchurch, she has travelled widely, and was 2009 Arts Queensland Poet in Residence. Her first book, published jointly by VUP and in the US by Perceval Press, was matuhi | needle.

Hinemoana's writing has been published in anthologies and in the online literary journal 'Turbine' (2002, 2003, 2004, 2007). Her popular poem 'A Walk With Your Father' was chosen for 'Best New Zealand Poems 2004', the love poem 'One' for 'Best New Zealand Poems 2006' and 'Last Born' for 'Best New Zealand Poems 2008'.

Her new book 'koiwi koiwi' (bone bone) was launched to much deserved acclaim on Sunday night at the Ballroom cafe in Newtown, Wellington. I might be a little biased. Hinemoana is an old friend and the poem I've chosen began it's life as part of the 'Kissed' collaboration we did together. However, I just love that opening stanza, the leap from tenderness - which in a poem is not usually about steak and kidney. And all the other leaps she takes in the poem that suprise and delight me all the way through.

Hinemoana says:

The poem 'seventy' misquotes The Bee Gees' 'Saturday Night Fever'. It also misquotes my mother. It wasn't Stan, she reminded me. It was John. Sorry John.

For more Tuesday Poems visit the Tuesday Poem blog.

 

 

 

 

 

This Saturday you’re behind the counter
in the work coat you want to shed
like an unwanted skin at the end of your shift.
There’s the 5 o’clock rush to get through
and you don’t want to hear how Michael on bags
got an extra shift at Subway to save for his car.
Your white name tag lets the customers think
they can call you by your name;
the logo on your chest promises a New World
but little was gained from the shelvers’ lockout.
What’s left after the prepaid’s paid for
you’ll put to a silver Playboy necklace
with an imitation diamond eye, or
a pair of Nike trainers, each whoosh
a tick for a Vietnamese child’s
fourteen hour day. Last week Tala
gave you Resurrection and you copied
Tupac Shakur’s name into your senior
social studies notebook in the style
of a typeface owned by the Sony corporation.
You hand back the man’s Flybuy card, try
not to frown as he fumes when the EFTPOS
doesn’t take his PIN. On your inside
left thigh there’s a tattoo of the Vietnamese
character for love you let no-one but Tala
see. You got the idea from Angelina Jolie
now it has become your own and beneath black
polyester pants the sigil warms you;
keeps you real.

 

 

Harvey says:

I wrote this in 2006 feeling frustrated by the dispute between Progressive Enterprises ( a massive company) and supermarket workers. The claims of the workers seemed to me to be so reasonable and yet it resulted in a strike and lock-out. It was published in the USA in Richard Smyth’s journal Albatross. I spent a while on this one—I was aiming for a rough or punky edge to the poem which hopefully adds to the music rather than lessens it. Earlier this year I was using Webcrawler for a week—breaking the Google habit—and being self-engrossed (and wondering which libraries had bought our Asperger book) I ’web-crawled’ myself and found that the poem had been copied and attributed to me on Three Quarks Daily. I was pleased that they had liked the poem enough to copy it but felt that it would have been nice for them to let me know!

Harvey Molloy was born in Oldham, England and emigrated with his family to New Zealand in the 1970s. He studied English at Victoria University, Massey University, and the University of Florida where he completed a doctorate. He worked as a writer/information architect during the ’90s before taking a teaching position at the National University of Singapore. He now lives in Wellington where he teaches English and Drama at Porirua College. Harvey is a rising star in Wellington’s poetry firmament. His poems have appeared in NZ Listener, JAAM and Takahe, and he is a previous winner of the New Zealand Poetry Society’s international poetry award. This poem comes from his first book Moonshot, published by Steele Roberts. 

I love the way Harvey isn't afraid to get a little nasty and downbeat, it shows off his inner punk. The supermarket workers don't get off lightly either, everyone's material obsessions pale against "each whoosh / a tick for a Vietnamese child’s / fourteen hour day".

For more Tuesday Poems visit the Tuesday Poem blog.

 

 

 

Sometimes, in a better place I'm born to a

farmer who recognises my mewling lambness,

who breaks my neck quickly and throws my

body aside, a small gesture of complete

honesty: this one cannot live.

 

Sometimes I see him walking around the

paddocks, knife in his hand, small boy on his

back. He picks up carcasses by hind feet and

flings them. He severs cords, and pulls small

bodies from bigger ones.

 

Sometimes I forget about the boy, and see it

as me, with my brilliant white wool, and

fingerling tail, riding his back, heading to

an oven drawer where I'd be reborn. This

small lamb, this once, this meat.

 

 

Emma Barnes hasn’t long been back from a couple of years in Japan, but she’s been busy – she launched the first issue of her new literary magazine Enamel in early 2009, another issue has just been released. She's had poetry published in JAAM, Landfall, Catalyst and Best New Zealand Poems 2008, among other places. You can check out a recent poem of hers in the latest Landfall 

 

Emma’s poetry often confronts the reader and startles, which I think is an important part of what makes poems great. This poem is no exception, the imagery is at once familiar yet surreal. Emma is definitely an emerging poet to watch.

I strongly urge you to pick up a copy of Enamel 2 hot off the press and Enamel now has a FaceBook group you can join.

For more Tuesday Poems visit the Tuesday Poem Blog.