So sang the BeeGees while the remarkable and talented poet Adrienne Rich said, ‘Words are purposes/Words are maps.
I have read some other remarkable and talented poet’s work recently and here’s a taste of three of them.
Rachel Tobin’s collection, Say it Naked … the purpose and power of words… I first met Rachel at a workshop run by Hinemoana Baker, a good workshop too. I wrote a reasonable villanelle for homework at that workshop. In Say it Naked (publisher Submarine), Rachel includes drawings as well as poems and as you turn the pages there’s a lovely feeling of symmetry about the placement of words on some pages and drawings on others. Its like the poems and drawings link to each other like they gain richness from proximity, a sort of nod to each other, another facet, or thought takes place as we turn the pages. And some lovely lines…
I saw her a few weeks back leaning like a sickle (from Riddle)
‘Sometimes Wellington wastes no breath/ on words. On such Gelato afternoons… (Beneath the Feet)
..and the poem to her mother, Last Word Puzzle, with those catch of the heart opening lines…
we sit in your square boxed garden
sipping phlox and February flowers
a framed woman on a white canvas
smokes her way into our last puzzle
Have you met my daughter you ask
Ah you are proud of me…
…and there… that lovely vulnerable catch of the heart happens…Ah you are proud of me…speaks to the uncertainty in all of us. Rachel’s poems lead us into those tricky and subtle highways and byways of love, whether its from a parent, a friend, or a lover.
Nicola Easthope”s Working The Tang (published The Cuba Press), which I launched at Kapiti recently starts basically with a mihi. She’s saying these are my ancestors, this place is where I’m from, these are the people who live in me,
I’m six parts loch ‘n whisky
I’m two parts iron ‘n rose
I’m four parts gorse ‘n’ heather
I’m four parts broch ‘n’ stone…
Nicola and I met when she joined a class I was teaching at Whitireia Polytechnic in 2005. Her poetry is full of movement, Ka mua ka muri …we look back in order to move forward…
These women are wrapped for the weather
The fleece of long–nosed black sheep
so knitted into their skin, wchen their men
undress them there is often a little blood…
Mary McCallum and I met at a hui organised for writers and mentors by Huia Publishers. A fateful meeting because last year Mary’s Makaro Press published my memoir, These Two Hands.
I knew Mary had written a highly acclaimed novel, The Blue. I knew this because I’d read it. but I didn’t know she was a poet until I read XYZ of Happiness. Using the alphabet as a guide she leads us through her collection, one poem to one letter. So many pleasures. One of my favourites right from the start was the poem under V, Vessels, where Mary looks at the vessel of time and how while one mother is watching her adult sons in the kitchen eating bread, laughing, teasing, happy, just a little distance away, a mother is receiving the news that her son has drowned and we rememberall over again that life happens on all sorts of levels at four o’clock in the afternoon..
…In the thickening day in the thickening
water, the young man, really a boy, had
probably already fallen from the kayak,
and was struggling to keep his head up…
while across town the poet’s two sons, young men, are laughing about a TV show and enjoying the happiness of that same moment…while the mother, looking back, knows the fragility of 4pm in the afternoon.
There is a stunning poem Kikoi for Sleeping about a road trip but really about how the bonds of friendship plait and entwine around such a time, become strong and lasting, and here are some lines from another one..
Gardener
Here she comes, my mother. Arms full
of borage, deep blue hydrangeas…
…and the reader can see the woman in the garden, arms full of flowers, full of love.
So three memorable collections…go on, treat yourself, treat another, stick them in someone’s stocking, definitely in yours…go on…celebrate words this Christmas…
Renée
