O Audacious Book

Tuesday Poem: The Arrival of the Bee Box by Sylvia Plath

2015-01-26T23:49:00.000+13:00

I ordered this, clean wood box
Square as a chair and almost too heavy to lift.
I would say it was the coffin of a midget
Or a square baby
Were there not such a din in it.

The box is locked, it is dangerous.
I have to live with it overnight
And I can't keep away from it.
There are no windows, so I can't see what is in there.
There is only a little grid, no exit.

I put my eye to the grid.
It is dark, dark,
With the swarmy feeling of African hands
Minute and shrunk for export,
Black on black, angrily clambering.

How can I let them out?
It is the noise that appals me most of all,
The unintelligible syllables.
It is like a Roman mob,
Small, taken one by one, but my god, together!

I lay my ear to furious Latin.
I am not a Caesar.
I have simply ordered a box of maniacs.
They can be sent back.
They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner.

I wonder how hungry they are.
I wonder if they would forget me
If I just undid the locks and stood back and turned into a tree.
There is the laburnum, its blond colonnades,
And the petticoats of the cherry.

They might ignore me immediately
In my moon suit and funeral veil.
I am no source of honey
So why should they turn on me?
Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free.

The box is only temporary.

I don't keep bees but I know people who do. They love them, are mesmerised by them. And Sylvia? Bees are a box of 'maniacs' – something to control – like the buzzing in one's brain. A great write up here: http://engzone.weebly.com/the-arrival-of-the-bee-box.html

Afterwards go to the Tuesday Poem hub page: to find another wonderful poem: this one by young Canterbury poet Hamish Petersen, selected by Andrew Bell.

The Art of Fiction and the wonderful James Baldwin

2014-12-07T08:55:00.001+13:00

Herewith, I offer you one of my favourite short stories of all time. Such writing about the human spirit and about music, about families and race in America ... about love. And the ending! Meet the fiction of the fabulous James Baldwin in his story Sonny's Blues. Worth every second of your time.

Read, here.

And here ... an interview with James Baldwin in the Paris Review. He lived in Paris for a number of years and wrote his seminal novel Go Tell it On the Mountain there.

Finally, a blogpost at Off the Shelf explores the 'something' about James Baldwin ...

In 1948, James Baldwin left New York and travelled to Paris. He didn’t speak French and arrived with forty dollars to his name. He was twenty-four years old. But being broke or not speaking the native language was of no consequence. In fact, Baldwin was relieved. He needed to leave America. - more...

Tuesday Poem: Hush

2014-11-18T07:09:00.000+13:00

In the sweet of the morning,

would barely fill a palm
or china cup, is a mouse
curled up asleep in the bread.
Hush, or it will waken and
I'll have to do something.

Mary McCallum

The dilemma of a mouse in the house. Note poem revised since first posted.

And today at the Tuesday Poem hub, you can find more mice in a poem by Lindsay Pope – but his narrator is a little less circumspect in dealing with his mouse problem. Lindsay's book Headwinds I published under our Mākaro Press Submarine imprint. It's a marvellous collection and it's great to see Lindsay on TP, thanks to editor Keith Westwater.

Have a lovely day.

I say to horror, 'What do you look like under your hockey mask, your bloodstained cocktail frock?' Elizabeth Knox

2014-11-16T07:38:00.001+13:00

Elizabeth Knox writes movingly and insightfully on caring for a loved person through a long illness – and how caring for her mother has changed her world view and introduced her to the experience of despair. She talks too of how having a sister who was different from the norm made her write differently: fantasy and horror instead of 'literature'. This from the inaugural Margaret Mahy lecture delivered this year and published by VUP:

For instance, I say to horror, 'What do you look like under your hockey mask, your bloodstained cocktail frock? Show me your body. Your bones.' I walk into the house-of-horror-genre and melt away its grossly figured wallpaper, the shadow on the alcove of its stairs, its dirty glass, its shuttered windows. I melt away the walls themselves until what is left is the frame, a stark figure around an empty volume, and then I call into it my own storms; outer, other darknesses; the real things in life that aren't reconcilable with living rationally, happily and confidently. Such as what illness does to us – to our selves – before we die. And how, even with all the organisation and energy, and goodwill in the world, there is only so much effective help we can offer one another. And in the end how careless a world bursting with causes is with all those devoted to the long cause of care...

.... So why do I write non-realist fiction now that I'm all grown up? Today's answer has to be that I can best make sense of the sadness I feel by acknowledging what catches you when you're in despair – then laughs about it.

Elizabeth Knox read at the wonderful Litcrawl in Wellington last night. People packed into venues around the a small area of the central city and heard poets and storytellers read their work, and then walked to the next event and the next. Yes, packed!

Renée and Anahera: writers must take responsibility!

2014-11-08T09:38:00.002+13:00

Anahera

Renée

Renée is a writer who lives up the Kapiti Coast about an hour and a half from me. She's in her eighties and has been a professional writer for the past 30 years after a lifetime of working in various jobs since leaving school aged 12, the daughter of a solo mother, and always trying to fit in her writing.

Yesterday she walked into a seminar I was attending as a writing mentor. The air changed, there is no doubt. It was something about her bearing, the way she took us all in: fearless, compassionate. She came to speak to us to encourage the writers there: all Māori writers, part of the Te Papa Tupu incubation programme (we writing mentors are there in support but get as much out the sessions). She came to speak to these writers who are trying to live their busy lives while fitting in time to write their novels and poetry and short stories – she was there to tell them it could be done – that there is always a way.

Even as the mother of young children, even as someone holding down a full-time job, even when life becomes overwhelming and pulls you in every direction except towards your desk, there is always a way. And discipline helps (she has it in spades), and humour and compassion and self-belief (those too).

"It's stories that make ideas live. And we're the ones who have to tell the stories."

"Take responsibility for your writing, for telling these stories." She talked about looking writers looking after themselves: their health, their lives, their families so they could write.

Writers are readers first and foremost: "I was a huge reader, I vacuumed up the books in the library. When I stop reading it'll be because I've died … my hands have dropped from the keyboard ..."

How to write: "You've got to find your own way in – writing puts up a bit of a battle at first, but in time it finds you."

Be disciplined. Yes, Renée writes every day to the clock. "I've always used a timer to write. If I hadn't had it I'd have forgotten to do things like check on the children ... when the timer went off I'd go and see what they were up to ... I had to catch the 8 o'clock train today, so I put the timer on. I still have it. "

Finally, she told us that she wrote her famous Depression era play Wednesday to Come in honour of her mother who died aged 42 from a broken heart – she had battled to bring up three children after their father committed suicide. What's more the play was written for a competition, and Renée wrote right up to the deadline. To occupy her children, still young then, she threw coins in the garden and told them to go looking for them and pull out the weeds while they were at it. The garden was weeded (and so were the flowers). The play was writ and continues to be a favourite. It was pivotal for me in the writing of The Blue set in 1938.

Renée finished speaking and then listened with interest to a young upcoming poet and fiction writer Anahera Gildea. Anahera hadn't so much walked into the room as exploded inside it: smiling and hugging everyone like they were old friends. Like Renée, she was a funny and charming speaker, and her insights echoed hers nicely, except that Anahera confessed she'd lacked the older writer's discipline. She said she'd struggled to write a novel until she found her own discipline by discovering how her creativity worked.

Anahera describes her process as working through from the place of te Po and te Ao Marama – a place of stillness and darkness to light. She sits for two hours every morning thinking about her novel, if she writes, fine, if not, that's fine too. This way she progresses by working with herself not against herself, and in three months wrote an astonishing 30,000 words towards the draft of her novel.

Anahera's other tips gleaned from her life so far as a writer, including being part of the MA in creative writing at Victoria University's Institute of Modern Letters:

DRAFT TO CRAFT

DONE IS BETTER THAN GOOD

WORDS WILL COME

In other words (excuse the pun): better to write than not write, to get it down and then craft the thing into something, and yes – make the time and the words will come.

Finally, Anahera echoed Renée: "Being a writer is more than just writing to a word count every day – it involves looking after your health, it involves balance, it involves battling addictions ...' Taking responsibility, in other words, for being a writer and telling the stories that need to be told. Something both these inspirational women do. Thank you for reminding the rest of us.

Renée's blog is at www.wednesdaybusk.com where she is posting a novel-in-progress every Wednesday! And you can find one of Anahera's poems here on Tuesday Poem.

Tuesday Poem: Missing Hat

2014-08-26T00:00:00.000+12:00

for Harriet 26 8 93–7 5 14

Audacious to think I taste that kind of sorrow. My missing

of you is simply on our steps in Ghuznee Street: you in a shiny,

red coat, wanting to know where to go to get a hook-and-eye

fixed on your dress, delighted to be

taken up Cuba to the small shop that’s shut now, the one with

the blackboard and the mysterious seamstress. I'd have done

it for you if I’d had needle and thread, but instead I left you

by the blackboard – and we hugged

and your coat squeaked, your skin up close impossibly creamy.

I think too of watching you talk that day, when you gave time

without weighing it, the tracings your fingers made, mouth

so mobile, your face a place people

lingered. The way you said to a wedge of brownie on a plate:

‘Perfect!’ and regarded it with such plain affection. Small ruins

for me. For the brother they call Gramps, the weeping father,

the stoic mother, Grandma Jo, the rest –

Mac in his kilt, girls in scarlet lippy and pineapple pants, boys

with three-day beards and skinny ties – for them this missing

is a shattered city: lost spires, gutted high-rises, lights stuck

on amber, paper caught in chicken-

wire, the howl as wind claws the perimeter fence.

Mary McCallum

Hat and puppy.
Photo credit: Rebekah Dorman

Harriet Rowland would have been 21 today. The lively, gorgeous Wellington student passed away on 7 March this year.

We at Mākaro Press published the blogs she wrote over the nearly three years she lived with cancer – it's called The Book of Hat and it's been a surprise hit: on bestseller lists, bought by students and grandparents, by bookclubs and classrooms, and runner-up in the Ashton Wylie award between Lloyd Geering and Joy Cowley.

So many people have responded to Harriet's vivid, upbeat and compassionate voice. It's been called 'the real The Fault in Our Stars' but it's more than that... there's something singularly Hattie about the book, that spills out in the reading, and doesn't leave you. Peter Jackson's called it, 'truthful, funny and wise'. All of that. Just – Hat.

And now it's going global! The Book of Hat is an ebook -- launched today, something we've achieved working with Rosa Mira Books in Dunedin. And we're also off today on our third roadshow around Wellington secondary schools distributing Hat's book – donations from generous reader Bridget Percy, who reckoned every school should have a copy.

All great ways to celebrate the wonderful woman Harriet Rowland was, on what would have been her 21st birthday. And goodness would she have partied!

Do check out the Tuesday poem for a host of other poems.

Tuesday Poem: It's got a leaf

2014-08-05T08:33:00.000+12:00

It’s

true I

didn’t eat

pears for years

unaware they ripen

from the inside out,

despite Dad who worked

with apples and pears, sold

them in Europe, took us on

holidays to orchards and packing

sheds, ordered them, tissue-cupped,

by the wooden box. Now I try to buy

my pears from Tom or Richard or Sandra:

Winter Nelis – which looks like Nellie but

isn’t – the round hard-looking ones that feel

just picked, and pile them on the spotted plate,

slice them one by one to eat. Winter Nelis – the

one Annie painted for me: a rich red wall behind
the freckled face of it, a goldenish shine to the

skin – the one Tom or Richard or Sandra

rushed over to her from the fruit shop
next door: Look, it’s got a leaf!

Mary McCallum

Such a winter poem! Enjoy (best enjoyed eating a pear). And do check out the Tuesday Poem at the hub – it's by best first book of poetry winner 2014, Marty Smith, and is stunning: Agnus Dei. There are stacks of other Tuesday Poems in the sidebar there too.

The feijoas are falling from the trees by Louise Wallace

2014-07-15T00:00:00.000+12:00

The feijoas are falling from the trees –

a fresh bag-load every day.

Winter is on its way.

I am in the kitchen

shucking feijoas like oysters –

filling ice-cream containers to freeze.

Won't it be nice to eat them in July?

Rory is a good man, who hates feijoas.

I see a strong gust outside

and I imagine the sound of a feijoa falling.

Crashing into branches on its way down,

waiting to be plucked

from the leaves and soil.

Winter is on its way.

I try to think of how I could earn

more money; work harder, get ahead.

There is never enough

and it would be nice to get ahead.

I write a list of all the things

I need to make –

stewed feijoas, feijoa crumble –

another gust; feijoa cake.

_________

Louise says this poem is a clear favourite at readings she's given from her second collection Enough (VUP). It certainly scored high at a reading I was part of at Petone library recently. She was one of three 'young and hungry writers' appearing there – the others were Caolinn Hughes (VUP) and Stefanie Lash (one of my authors at Mākaro Press).

There's something about feijoas. I should know - I once posted a feijoa chutney recipe on this blog and it was a favourite post for months and months. This poem of Louise's nails the business of having a feijoa tree in your life: from the excess to all the recipes ... no chutney, however...

Louise's poems walk with light feet, but carry so much. She thinks they're not all that interesting, but she's wrong. There's something beguiling about them that I can't quite explain. It's the Jenny Bornholdt effect – an honesty and quickness and quirkiness – and always the sideways glance at the place where vulnerability lies.

I'm talking about Louise and Enough on National Radio this afternoon with Simon Mercep - 1.30 pm.

Posted here with the poet's permission. Do check out the Tuesday Poem hub and a wonderful poem by Riemke Ensing about KM. A treat.

Tuesday Poem: Chemotherapy - it's on the hub!

2014-06-24T07:48:00.004+12:00

My poem 'Chemotherapy' - a tribute to the courage and constancy of The Book of Hat author Harriet Rowland's mum Jan Kelly - is on the Tuesday Poem hub this week with a poem by Frankie McMillan. We've both just judged the National Flash Fiction Day NZ competition and so we're paired up here by NFFD powerhouse Michelle Elvy. Very cool. Thanks Michelle!

The Book of Hat is published by my Mākaro Press. It is Harriet's story of living with terminal cancer based on her vivid, upbeat blog posts and has been a hit with young adult and adult readers around the country, and elsewhere. The Auckland Libraries blog reviewer says:

The Book of Hat is the real The Fault in Our Stars

The poem is here.

Tuesday Poem: Alienation by Siobhan Harvey

2014-06-11T08:10:00.001+12:00

is the march of students into class,

the closing of space around them

like a retracted wing.

is ornithology for beginners:

Today’s lesson is birds, the teacher says;

and how the children squawk.

is uncertainty:

What birds do we know? the teacher says;

and how words and ideas flock

hungrily into Cloudboy’s mind.

is eagerness to impress:

Geese, Miss, cries Cloudboy;

and how he goes on, In Historia Animalium, Aristotle said

Barnacle Geese emerged from shellfish like phoenixes

from fires.

is the mouth of a river:

No, New Zealand birds! the teacher remonstrates:

and the liquid bubbling cry of it.

the call of a bittern, the cry of a tern …

is the unwillingness to give in:

Moa, miss, Cloudboy perseveres.

is cultural confusion:

What's a Moa? the teacher asks.

is an argument which can't be won:

It lived long ago, Miss, Cloudboy says, like the dinosaurs;

and the teacher's reply, Not dinosaurs! New Zealand birds!

is an arm small as a wing:

how a girl raises her hand;

and how the teacher nods

at the child's answer, Blackbird, Miss.

is an open window:

how Cloudboy turns towards it, the freedom

beyond glass, the knowledge

of air, the gravity birds defy.

___________________

A stunning poem from Siobhan Harvey's powerful new collection Cloudboy about her son who is diagnosed with autism. She writes from the point of view of Cloudmother. I review it on Beattie's bookblog.

Here's a quote from the review:

.... the character of Cloudboy snuck up on me. With him came his abiding curiosity for how things work, his passion for finding out, his genius for understanding (his subjects: Nephology, Astronomy, Ornithology and goodness knows what else at the age many are learning to write their names) and his perceptive mother. And we see this wisp of a boy go to school, and watch aghast at the way school tries to make him more boy than cloud, and in so doing breaks the heart they don’t seem to know is there (‘such softness’) ....

Siobhan's poem posted here with permission.
Do check out Tuesday Poem hub with a wonderful poem by Emma Neale.

Tuesday Poem: Song

2014-04-07T23:50:00.000+12:00

The minim leap of dog

behind, and in front, the hemidemisemiquavers

of rabbit.

Oblivious, both. I think of Mary

Oliver and her unleashed dogs

calling

‘stay’ to Ben

‘run’ to the raccoon.

On Pirinoa Road, we’re still

a strange kind of musical interlude
with me the conductor. Now one – ah there – and now

the other. The grace of both. No need to say a thing.

Bow, my loves.

Mary McCallum

Mary Oliver's lovely book Dog Poems inspired this poem, written at a place of rabbits and one dog.

I am also the editor at the Tuesday Poem hub this week and have posted a wonderful poem by Helen Rickerby who is one of the first poets to be published as part of my new Hoopla series. Her book is Cinema.

Tuesday Poem: Happiness Bowls

2014-04-01T06:18:00.001+13:00

Pink and blue and
lavender, poured glass bowls pinched
to look like small boats brimming with water.
Inside, incised: the letters and lines of a
chemical formula. The white card says
‘Happiness Bowls’.
I wait for the woman
to finish with the customer who’s asked for
a piece of art small enough to carry in a
pocket. As I wait, I decide she doesn’t love
her job. She wears her unhappiness like
a white card. The way
she chinks the keys
for the cupboard that has glass pieces fit
for a pocket, holds the cupboard door as if
she wants to shut it on a hand. The customer
looks and looks and shakes his head. He leaves,
hand in his pocket. Please,
I say, what is this
written in the Happiness Bowls? Seratonin,
she says, but it sounds like Sarah Tone.
She’s back at the table where she can
watch people enter the shop. It’s the
chemical equation, she says.
Oh, I say. I didn’t know
it was like that. I stare at the hexagon, the
pentagon, lines and letters, NH2–HO–HN,
inside the pale, poured bowls. He’s done
more serious work, she says, I’ll get it, and
she walks up the stairs –
brings down a bowl like
the Happiness Bowls but this one needs two
arms to hold it and it’s the colours of fire.
Angular, brimming, but no equation this time.
It looks primordial, like a wedge of something
precious
cut from a rock
and polished. She places it in the natural light
by the window and the colours lighten and
redden, rise and fall, burn like a brazier. I am
enthralled. She says the artist makes a wax
shape and, from that,
a mould, pours molten
glass into it. He fires it, cools it, uses acid
to make the outside opaque. Against artificial
light, the red flares, she says. The word
‘flare’ sounds like it’s flaring in her mouth.
Even the word ‘light’ has lightness.
The ‘t’,
the merest tip of something. I imagine
her upstairs on her own under the lights
watching it flare. Yes, it’s cool to the touch,
she says, but there’s a warm current too like
the sea in summer. Then – No!
she says, fingermarks!
Picks up the bowl and takes it to her table.
I go back to the Happiness Bowls. They are less
serious now: pastel, talky, glib. Something to
carry in a pocket, to bring out when confidence
flags. Why are they here:
to give happiness or to
hold happiness? Or perhaps, and I feel this
might be it: the bowls are happy. And what is
that when it is so small an equation, so easily
etched? I nod goodbye to the woman, behind
her table again. She is
polishing the red bowl
with a soft blue cloth, her whole attention on it.

Mary McCallum

It's the fourth birthday of Tuesday Poem. I can hardly believe it's gone on so long! Inspired by all the fun Michelle Elvy (our precious hub-subbie) has been having with our usual birthday collaboration (okay - fun and HARD work), I decided to write a poem - and then got side-tracked on a old poem which had never felt quite right in language and form. So here it is again, streamlined ... hopefully better. And a HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO US!

I have to say I am deeply indebted to the wonderful Michelle Elvy for taking on the job of sub for our Tuesday Poem hub, relieving me of my weekly duties overseeing the posts there. After Michelle finishes her stint, there's another hub-subbie lined up and so it goes. And I will try and write more poems :) with the space these lovely poets have given me. And thanks as always to the wonderful Claire Beynon my co-curator.

So, please check out our hub now -- take a squizz at the fourth birthday poem, and then read some of our poets in the sidebar.

Go HERE to the hub ...

Tuesday Poem: Chemotherapy

2014-02-11T07:40:00.000+13:00

who knew she was there

hidden inside that thing that turns

her girl upside down and inside out

(poison, really, a small inefficient

killing field) let loose in a body still

young enough to smell of milk

in the morning, one the mother must

return to sit beside and stand over

to stroke the soft cheek, catch the soft

vomit, be steel to all that softness — a shield —

and, when called upon, to scream

like a banshee yet, for the most part,

sits beside is all she can do, hands in lap

but running the spellcheck just now

over the girl’s story — all those

words, sharp teeth biting at the last

of life’s full belly — there she is! mother

over and over: the unexpected heart

of the matter, with key on one side,

and happy on the other

Mary McCallum

This poem is for my friend Jan. Do check out other Tuesday Poems - there's the magnificent Bogong Moth on the hub and then in the sidebar you can find 30 poets with poems they've posted especially for today. Enjoy!

Tuesday Poem: Little Dog’s Rhapsody In The Night by Mary Oliver, a reading

2013-11-19T13:40:00.000+13:00

Mary Oliver reads a poem from Dog Songs from The Penguin Press on Vimeo.

Oh this is just perfect. I am working on a poetry book at the moment with dog poems in it (that's as a publisher not a poet), and the poet sent me a link to Mary Oliver's new book called DOG SONGS (The Penguin Press 2013). I love Mary Oliver's work already -- and now I love it doubly. Such perfect lines...

Could there be a sweeter arrangement? Over and overhe gets to ask.I get to tell.

Do go to the Tuesday Poem hub for a fire cracker of a post on Les Murray, by Zireaux, and to see the other TP poets there.

Tuesday Poem: Tangaroa at Days Bay: the fishing man by John Horrocks

2013-10-22T22:25:00.001+13:00

After a print by Michel Tuffery

In this house you can never tell

when it’s raining, for the streams

sound all night outside our windows.

Tangaroa, his black form

ornamented with yellow fish,

stands above our bed, his head

slightly lowered, as though he

can never stop listening

to the running water

or the waves at the beach.

His world is full of bounty.

A blue kahawai swims at his feet.

Beside his dark legs a wash

of gold floods among

eager shapes of fish

hastening to adorn

the fabric of his body.

Poised in the harvest-laden sea

He treads the waves on our wall,

A fastidious and deliberate god,

content merely to demonstrate

how every flowing moment

of every day might be.

____

I love the bountifulness of this poem and the water and the fact of a god. John Horrocks, who was once a farmer in the Wairarapa and wrote wonderful poems about hills called Mount Misery and sheepdogs, lives close to the sea now (and close to where I live) and writes often of water. I remember hearing this poem read the first time and loving the movement of it, and the sounds. I have seen the Tuffery print too - it's fantastic. John's poem is included in Eastbourne (an anthology) which I am co-editing and is out soon.

When you've read this poem do go to the Tuesday Poem hub where a young South African has a wonderful sensual poem posted ...

______________________________________________________________

Alice Munro Nobel Prize in Literature

2013-10-11T07:35:00.001+13:00

Alice Munro wins the Nobel Prize in Literature! Brilliant. The tag line on the Nobel website is 'master of the contemporary short story'. Canadians have been known to call her their Chekhov.

A short article here articulates the beauty of this win - the way we struggle to say exactly what it is that makes Alice Munro so great and how she's credited with doing the 'woman writer thing' exceptionally well: making the small things of life some how big with the attention she pays - but then the article lands on 'some kind of alchemy of form and content' as the only way of understanding Munro's greatness, before throwing up its hands and saying - in effect - just read her! Do please, yes.

I tried to discuss Munro's genius in a blog post five years ago and talked about the time Munro spent looking out of windows. Yes, not looking inside at her own life and her own angst but outside, at people passing by, and what they do. In her words,

I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens', but the way everything happens.

How she wrote short stories because she was a wife and mother and busy thinking always about others needs, so there was time for little recreation except looking through windows, and writing short fiction. Her first collection of stories was published in 1968 when she was 37. I talked in the blog post about reading one of Munro's stories in her collection Runaway while I was working hard on my 2007 novel The Blue - and how it showed me 'suddenly and simply how to write about love in a way that was unsentimental, visceral, raw, astonishing'. And I quoted Munro...

I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens.

... And then I found a perspicacious review in the International Herald Tribune:

The distinctions that Munro has been elaborating on for years along the prairies, small towns, and modest lives of Canada operate upon the heart. They are particle metaphysics, and their collisions release an energy that all but mutates the reader's mental and emotional genes.

Afterward, we glow faintly in the dark.

Heart is a word dangerously subject to sentimental abuse; even worse is heartstrings. Useful, though, in attempting to suggest the nature of Munro's art. She moves on a fine workaday surface; then, unsignaled, reaches deep with delicate and knowing fingers to tug the filament of a brainily targeted emotion. Her unremarkable landscapes are dotted with rabbit holes; falling in, we grow, we shrink, we are at a loss, and then unexpectedly found.

Congratulations Alice Munro. And Canada (love that country and its writers). Thanks Bookman Beattie who shared the news with me first thing this morning.

The Thought-Fox by Ted Hughes

2013-09-10T00:05:00.000+12:00

Ted Hughes reads. And, yes, this is the poem coming - a shadow lagging - a creature about its own business - the widening, deepening greenness - then - yes! - it enters the hole of the head. Printed. Genius.

Please take time to enter the poem at the Tuesday Poem hub this week. It is an anti-war poem by a father to a son written by Jamaican poet Geoffrey Philp, editor Rethabile Masilo in Paris. A marvellous poem an commentary. Here.

And congratulations to New Zealand author Eleanor Catton for being short-listed for the Booker Award with her novel The Luminaries. The third kiwi ever to do it, I believe. Proud.

Tuesday Poem: The Storm

2013-08-12T22:38:00.000+12:00

She dreams of wheelie bins hurled from great heights and wakes to find the street a thicket of meat trays and fruit nets and eggboxes; the asphalt, a jig-saw puzzle. The dog is discovered at the neighbour’s – the fence, worn thin by salt wind, is down. The woman who dreamed of wheelie bins stands by the gap calling the dog and sees the vege garden for the first time. All those trellises, all that lawn, a purpose-built compost. All the way to the shops, she sees how delicate things are: the way asphalt is only a skin and trees are brittle at the tips, and roofs – usually so respectful – can turn and laugh at you. At the café, she shares a table with a woman who forgets how old she is. She needs to text her husband to find out. She’s not old, she’s just in pieces. Together the two women watch a family walk its belongings from a sodden house – cat bed, cushions, crime paperbacks. A truck pulls up with orange cones and men in high-visibility jackets. Someone cheers. Both at the same time, the women lift their bags and go. At home she tries to fix the fence. There’s a blackbird contemplating the lid of her wheelie bin, he’s pinkish in the light. The bin lid is yellow, the sky, yes, at last! a little blue.

Mary McCallum

We've had a big earthquake since but we're still fixing things up from a massive storm that hit us some weeks back. The asphalt is still jig-saw-like in parts and sand is over the footpath and rubbish bins are wrenched from the ground. We were lucky really... just a fence down. That bit of the poem is me. The rest is true of other people I know. How helpless storms make you feel and 'in pieces'. Enjoy Tuesday Poem this week both here and at the hub where Australian poet and author Catherine Bateson unfolds a gem for us... Go here.

Eleanor Catton in Wellington and beyond

2013-07-28T10:46:00.000+12:00

The extraordinary writer Eleanor Catton has done what few (only two?) New Zealanders have done before. At the tender age of 27 she has a novel on the Booker longlist: The Luminaries. And we in Wellington can see and hear this author at her book launch next Saturday 5 pm at Unity Books and at a Modern Letters' Writers on Monday event 5 August 12.15 at Te Papa.

I'm not surprised to hear of Eleanor Catton's success. She is a singular talent. Four years ago I reviewed her first novel The Rehearsal in a blog post entitled Catton among the pigeons and, lost in a strange metaphor of my own making, said:

"This terribly-young author is already a cat-like phenomenon in the Big Book Square of the World with its greening statues of the famous and host of perching pigeons. She's won Best First Novel here and a similar award in the UK, and is lined up for more. The book reviewers and writers' festivals love her. One UK reviewer picked The Rehearsal as the future face of the novel."

There's a great write-up of Eleanor Catton's recent success by Robert Sullivan on the MIT website here where she teaches and a brief TV interview here. I'm looking forward to reading The Luminaries - at 800+ pages I will need to put some significant time aside.

Tuesday Poem: Tassel by Saradha Koirala

2013-07-23T00:10:00.000+12:00

The action of giving turns out

to be a gesture for making a deal
the promise of discount, save or Be Saved.
I gather what I can
listen for insights from passing chatter
squint the world into a spin.

An elderly couple walk side by side
a tassel of her shawl caught in his cufflink
well-dressed for this time of day.
I roll the image between finger and thumb:

the cufflinks, the shawl the slow pace of their walk
spin the world into a gilded string.

This poem is from Saradha's new collection Tear Water Tea out soon. It has the most beautiful cover designed by her partner and is published by Steele Roberts. I love Saradha's images that are both delicate and strong, like this one. Who would have thought a tassel would have had so much life in it! I am caught up in my family history at the moment -- working on my mother's memoir -- and so perfect images like the one above: the tassel caught in his cufflink, resonate. And I always like a fairytale reference.

Please go to the Tuesday Poem hub to read another excellent Saradha poem posted by Harvey Molloy which touches me, a one-time immigrant, in different ways. His write-up is a thousand times more interesting and insightful than mine and worth every second of the time you spend on it.

Happy reading!

Tassel is published with permission.

Tuesday Poem: Alice the Camel

2013-07-16T13:44:00.001+12:00

Alice wakes up one morning. Her lover sings to her: Alice the
Camel has two humps. It's an action song.

Short and sweet today - one of the gems from The Continuing Adventures of Alice Spider by Janis Freegard, another Tuesday Poet. The chapbook is published by Anomalous Press in the US, and I have one, and I treasure it. It's the size of a hand and the prose poems are long and short and will make you smile and nod and shake your head a lot. Janis is launching it in NZ soon. Watch this space. Do head over to the TP hub where there's a wonderful wonderful poem A GARAGE by an Australian poet called Robert Gray.

Tuesday Poem: Flash Fiction Dead Space

2013-06-25T23:42:00.002+12:00

Dead Space

Catch the boy out there standing like a bird with one foot tucked behind a calf looking at the sea. He isn’t at soccer practice. He isn’t on the scout tramp to Chatham Creek. He isn’t playing Dead Space 2 while Bridgie practices her scales. Up and down, up and down. The boy, Jesse, is allergic to scales and allergic to Bridgie who squeaks like a bird when he interrupts her. Dead Space 2. Necromorphs for god’s sake. I need to concentrate.

But she just squeaks and then she squeals and then Mum comes wiping her hands on a tea-towel, and she wants to know where he got the damn game from. Then it’s all over red rover, as his dad says, and he’s outside, like his dad usually is, smoking, except Jesse’s not smoking because he’s run out of smokes.

Catch the boy before he leaves. Not the boy leaving. The father leaving. Country Road bag in hand – Bridgie’s bag for sleepovers. He says to the boy, ‘Bye, Jess’, and he says to the boy, ‘Be good for your Mum.’

And his dad puts down the stupid bag, and the look on his face is that sort of look he gets when he comes home and it’s his birthday and Mum’s made a special dinner. Hopeful. Or something. He blinks too much, thinks Jesse, his breath smells like shit. When his dad hugs him, Jesse puts his foot down so he won’t topple. The scales have stopped. Jesse thinks of Necromorphs. He smells sweat and smokes. That’s how Necromorphs would smell, he thinks. And they’d blink too fast. His father used to play the piano. He bought the piano for Jesse to play but Jesse didn’t want to play. He just didn’t.

Mary McCallum

Dead Space isn't a poem, not really, but as Flash Fiction, it's a comely blend of poetry and short fiction. Three hundred words only and a lot of fun to write. More fun to discover my story was placed third in the National Flash Fiction Day Competition, June 22. It came in after the winning story by Frankie McMillan In the nick of time, a deer, and Rebecca Styles' second placed story Parade, and was read at a NZ Society of Authors open mic evening in Wellington last night.

Congratulations to Frankie and Rebecca and all those short and long-listed. Thanks to Tuesday Poet Michelle Elvy for encouraging me to enter with her fabulous flash fiction facebooking. And thanks to the kind donor who has given some money so the winners get a cash prize - how good is that?

I decided to enter the competition the evening of the deadline, and had a sentence in my head and went from there. As happens with this sort of approach, I didn't know where I was headed or where the Necromorphs came from (they do exist, in a game called Dead Space - but what are they doing here? and they are so right.) The point of view veers back and forth a bit from the boy to the dad. If I'd had time I would have worked at making it more consistent, but in fact I like the inconsistency and uncertainty now, and it works better with paragraphing, which wasn't in the original - becoming more like a play.

Tuesday Poem: Palmy by Jennifer Compton

2013-06-18T08:19:00.000+12:00

Here's a taster of Jennifer Compton's poem Palmy - yes, about Palmerston North - the rest is on the Tuesday Poem hub where I am privileged to be the editor this week.

This used to be all forest, not so long ago, and I could tell by the sorrow

that haunts the wide, flat roads, that seeps out of the sense of openness,

something is missing, something is wrenched askew, as the river runs.

The wind blows through, in rolling gusts, baffled, and almost angry.

The wind is searching for the Papaioea Forest. How beautiful it was.

Tonight, behind the necklace of glittering lights below, is the darkness

which is the hills. Upon them, when it is light, like many crucifixions,

the wind farm. Then the long, ungainly arms swoop and seem to bless.

I will admit, to you, that I have found Palmerston North disconcerting.

More here at the Tuesday Poem hub.

Tuesday Poem: Ruby

2013-06-04T00:26:00.000+12:00

It’s Ed and me today at the end of the seawall

on the way to Lion Rock. We lean on it, feel

the crust of lichen beneath our elbows, watch

the dogs

running on the shingle beach. Billy’s a softie

for a staffie-cross but he’s pulled Ed’s arm

from the socket too many times to count. Ruby’s

not a softie, she has eyes like coins, a seal’s coat.

Together they’re the tigers in that story

running till they’re butter. Ed’s talking

about the dances in Limerick and

gets onto how he trod the boards with Harold

Pinter. Ed’s a painter now, or was – his duff

shoulder tells that story. Some days we fall in

with Charlie the blue heeler and his owner

whose name I always forget. Both of them have

a touch of wilderness about them. Charlie’s

owner’s parents ran the Oasis Motel

in Palmerston North. Colin lived in Palmy, too,

before he moved to Rome to sculpt; his peke
Andrew is pissing on the wall now and Colin’s

following in his shark tooth hat. He tells a story
about living on Long Island and how, walking
with his bulldog, he was sometimes mistaken

for Truman Capote. Justine is blonde and pregnant

and makes me think of vanilla icecream.

When she hoves into view with slobbering

Aaron and Beagle-eyed Georgie, the men

hold themselves tighter. She’s pretty,

Justine. Her husband’s a musician and

at weekends you see them out and

about. One day

Ed, Charlie’s owner, Justine, Colin and I are

up by the Rec’ in the pingao grass,

and we’re talking baby names while the dogs

churn. Her face is plump and tired, and Justine

says, 'Ruby, I think,' then louder, 'Ruby’ –

and we stop talking a moment and breathe

in the sea and the sharp grass and the frangipane

scent Justine wears and the must of Colin’s

sheepskin coat and whatever it was Billy rolled

in, and then we laugh, and I mean laugh. The

belly kind that makes it hard to breathe anything

at all. We laugh, Ed, Charlie’s owner, Justine, Colin

and me

because there’s Ruby - over there – sniffing

Charlie’s arse, sleek and black, eyes a-gleam,

nothing vanilla about her, nothing like

ice-cream. Weeks later, by Lion Rock,

Colin catches me up. He’s got some results back.

His blood is revolting, turning on his heart.

I squeeze his hand. He squeezes back, eyes

on the oily sea, the other hand holding a bouquet

of the stiff pale seaweed that washes up

in storms. Some days it’s so luminous here,

it’s like standing inside a shell.

Next time we see Ed, he’s at the corner

of Nikau and the Promenade waving

and waving with his good arm. ‘Justine had

her baby! I’ve seen the little mite.’ We
stop and wait. The wind

getting up. Ed has Billy’s lead tight around

his wrist and pants when he reaches us. He mimes
lifting a pram cover and peering in. ‘Now ask me,’

he says, ‘ask me her name.’ We say all together,

a straggly chorus, ‘What’s her name, Ed?’ What’s

her name, Ed? says the sea, and Ruby circles
Billy like a tiger, and the gulls ratchet it down to a mew

and everything is one big smile, everything on this

beach, one big ear. ‘Sure as I’m standing

here,’ says Ed, ‘You’ll never guess.’ He heaves Billy

along the path now, a grin like shark’s teeth,

then Charlie shows up, and his owner –

Garwain? – and they want to know too,

and Ed’s having a ball. We’re all having a ball.

Mary McCallum

This poem was written very long time ago. Nine years. But I've been redrafting it over the past two months.

Ed doesn't walk Billy now because he isn't well enough so his wife Patricia does it instead. We always stop and chat when we see them, but Billy and Ruby are older and greyer and only sniff each other now - no churning. Colin passed away five years ago and his beloved Andrew followed. Garwain, if that was his name, moved away with Charlie. So, I think, did Justine and her dogs and her Ruby - but I'm not sure about that. I just haven't seen them in a while. I still enjoy my daily walks with my Ruby but it's been a while since it was quite so social and quite so much fun.

Do get along to the Tuesday Poem hub to read a delightful fragment of Robin Hyde's, editor Janis Freegard.

Tuesday Poem: Ferry Road, Tuesday

2013-05-21T09:02:00.003+12:00

Back from a walk to the ridge

and all the way up we'd watched

the weather coming in across the harbour

and by weather, I mean

a breath like a peppermint-eating cyclist,

nothing, and then suddenly something

fresh and light at your shoulder, and all

the way up we'd turned

and turned again to see it coming

its line drawn and redrawn in the water

closer each time

and how fast we walked

to be ahead -- to the top of Ferry Road

and onto the track through the new

growing spindly things and the crocheted

spider webs and the splash of rata

and push of green and the confetti

of beech leaves on the rise and

fall --

up and

up --

'There,' I said at last, as we stood
looking back at the weather again, half
the water crinkled now -- an old man

smiling, 'is where the pa of Te Hiha stood
he could see anything coming --
the whole

of the harbour.'

We'd left the beach in stillness, and
returned to a stiff breeze.

Mary McCallum

Poem revised May 22

Tuesdays are my poem days and my bush-walking days, but not today (sadly) for the walking - I have a meeting to get to. Poems, yes. Tuesday is always Tuesday Poem day for me and has been for three years. After you've read 'me' - do go to the Tuesday Poem hub to read a wonderful poem by a poet who is UK born to Guyanese parents - Fred D'Aguiar. I read his poem before I started on my poem again last night (written a couple of weeks ago and left to brew) - I think my poem is talking to D'Aguiar's don't you? The title especially.