Lyttelton Farmer's Market

More photos from the Farmer's Market. It was a challenge trying to keep the rain off the camera, but it did make the vegetables wonderfully shiny.











A close-up of one of a duo performing from under a verandah






I thought this baby looked very warm, dry and contented

A Weekend of Walks

Lyttleton is the harbour town for the city of Christchurch. I don't go there very often as I tend to think of it as "out of town". There is a large hill between the city and the port. In reality though, it is only a ten to fifteen minute drive through the road tunnel from my home, which is about half as long as it takes me to drive across town to work twice a week.

Over the weekend there was a walking festival at Lyttelton, with many interesting choices of walks, so I made the effort to get over there and take part in a couple of events. The first was a photography walk, based around the Farmer's Market and the main street - not much walking, only a few blocks, but plenty of photographs were taken and some useful tips given.



Farmer's Market



I spotted Rose Tremain's Music and Silence at a very reasonable price in this second hand bookstore, and ducked in to buy a copy.



These two young boys couldn't resist posing when they saw a bunch of photographers.

The second event was a visit to Ohinetahi, a historic home with beautiful gardens.



Again, I took many photographs. I'm crazy busy this week, but will try and find time to post more photos from both days.

Coffee with Kooser

I've had Ted Kooser's book Local Wonders on my bookshelf for quite a while - maybe a couple of years - but hadn't got round to reading it all the way through. Recently I took it down and found that it is ideal for taking to work to read on my coffee break. (I'm not being antisocial - we have a very small staff - often just the boss and me if his wife is out!).

It's not a poetry book, but a series of prose observations on people, places and events in the Bohemian Alps area of Nebraska where he lives. It is divided into four sections, one for each season, but each section consists of many short pieces, separated only by a new paragraph and a small leaf motif serving as bullet point, without titles or page breaks.

Kooser is not afraid of using metaphor. In fact at times his prose is overloaded with it, and it can be heavy on sentiment too. But it is saved by the originality of his metaphors, his wonderful observation skills, and his generous good-heartedness. He reminds me to delight in my surroundings, wherever they might be, and not to feel that I have to travel to find anything worth seeing.

If you can awaken
inside the familiar
and discover it new
you need never
leave home.

A couple of his wonderful metaphors:

The sky is like old blue denim just before dawn, with one round hole worn through, exposing the cold bony knee of the moon.

and

A woodpecker taps her automatic pencil on the roof of the house, trying to get the lead to drop down through the tube. She is a certified public accountant, dressed appropriately in black and white, and her task is to keep track of a franchise of ants.

I found myself wondering what Kooser would have noted had he been in my neighbourhood on Thursday. Would it be the scattering of tiny fallen blossoms on the pavement, from a native tree whose name I don't know, looking like small black stars? Or perhaps the three ducks who flew past me like fighter pilots, straight down the road towards the river? I'm sure he would have been amused, as I was, by the nest building antics of the small bird out of sight in the guttering - maybe a sparrow, or a starling. Whatever it was, it was wrestling a cabbage tree leaf - a long, narrow fibrous leaf, at least half a dozen times the length of its small body. As it pivoted on the guttering, the leaf swung back and forth, until eventually it lost its grip, and the leaf joined several others on the roof jutting out below.

And no doubt Kooser would have observed several other things that I missed. With practice, I might see them myself.

But I haven't lost the desire to travel.

Long and Lovely and Lush

Spring always reminds me of Gerard Manley Hopkins -

Nothing is so beautiful as spring –
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush

I have been hitting the garden hard this weekend - or at least, until Sunday when it started to rain.
It's an urge that strikes me every spring, and then I look at the beautiful fresh green of the long grass in all the flower beds, and wonder why I am thinking of pulling it up. Until I remember - "Oh yes, hay fever".



If I was less erratic in my gardening habits, I could plant more actual flowers when the weeding is done, such as these tulips.



I'm gradually picking up photography tips, being very much self-taught. I want to try the tulips again, with the focus set on the left-hand flower, which is in the foreground, since apparently depth of field is greater behind the point of focus than in front. I'd like to try and get all three in sharp focus against the soft background. (I may not get the raindrops though, if the weather clears).

Poetry Pleasure Doubled

It's good to see new poetry events springing up in Christchurch. For National Poetry Day in July one of the local events was "Poetry for Pudding" at Borders Bookstore. This is now being trialled as a regular event on the first Friday of the month. It's an open mic night (without the mic) held in Gloria Jean's, the coffee area at the back of the bookstore - which led to pauses in the readings as we waited for the coffee machine noise to die down a little. The poetry, as is usual at these events, was mixed in style and quality. However, at the end of the readings, an "accidental" audience member stood up and commented that he had never liked poetry, but he thought all the poems read out were great, and he had really enjoyed it.

I suspect the group would have been bigger if it was not for the other poetry event of the evening. At 5.30 we had a poetry reading for New Zealand Book Month with four well-known local poets and one out-of-towner. The readers were Joanna Preston, Tusiata Avia, James Norcliffe, Frankie McMillan and Otago poet Brian Turner. This was very much a time for re-hearing familiar work, as many of the poets were reading from their latest books, several of which are on my bookshelves.

An evening of entirely new poetry can be hard on the concentration, and familiar poems often gain on rehearing. I do wish though that New Zealand was a slightly larger country with a slightly greater pool of good poets. I was glad of Brian Turner's presence as he read a number of unfamiliar poems, and I do like at least some new work added to the mix. This is not to detract from any of the readers - the standard of the poetry was high, and all read well. The complimentary glass of wine no doubt added to the good spirits of the audience. At the end of the evening Brian was awarded the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for contribution to poetry, and gave a suitably surprised speech of thanks.

It was a bit of a rush to get from one event to the other, and most didn't attempt it, so perhaps next month there will be a larger number of local poets enjoying "Poetry for Pudding".

Red Door

Red door, Poplar St in the Lichfield Lanes area.

Surfacing Again

For a while, I was struck by spring fever - making the most of the first of the warm weather to get out in the garden, and pursue other projects. I didn't intend to take more than a few days break from blogging. But for many reasons I did take a longer break, and what it comes down to is that I have enough routine obligations in my life, without imposing another one on myself.

Still, I don't want my many loyal readers (two or three, I suspect) to think I've disappeared into a dark hole.

When I started blogging I came across the Daily Photo Blogs from cities around the world. It occurred to me it would be cool to post a daily Christchurch photo, but I resisted the temptation, knowing that it would be hard to keep up the once a day routine. Instead, Michelle took up the challenge, and I have been enjoying her vision of our city here.

I still like to get out from time to time and explore parts of the city I haven't really discovered properly. Last weekend I did just that, taking a stroll through the Lichfield Lanes area. These are supposed to "revitalise the inner city". Which means that there are a lot of bars and restaurants, and that at midday on a Sunday it is very quiet, almost deserted.

There are some rather quirky wall decorations



and I wasn't the only person taking photographs.



More photos to come.

And on a different note, when I arrived home from work today, I found I had won $200.00 worth of book tokens in a prize draw from North and South magazine. That's about six to eight good quality paperbacks worth (books are dear in New Zealand) but still a very nice amount to dream of spending. Doing the happy dance !

Virtual Book Tour: At Night the Dead

Welcome to the sixth stop on Readwritepoem's Virtual Book Tour.
I have to say that I found Lisa Ciccarello's chapbook At Night, the Dead challenging to review. My poetry tastes tend towards what is often described as "accessible" although not too accessible. I found the sections of this book a little more mysterious and confusing than my usual poetic reading matter. If another member of my poetry group had brought them along, I would certainly be asking many questions - what do you mean here? I don't understand this. Why did you use this word?

The work is unusual in that it appears to be intended as a whole, since each section - apparently from the layout, a prose poem - has the same title. This is not the action of a poet who might publish any of them separately. The first starts with an air of menace -
You lock the door. You lock the window. You dream of the dead.

Initially, the sense of the dead being a threat that is somehow not quite defined is what I took from the book. Then I read Jill's review in which she says the dead love us. I went back to re-read and found that there too.

The dead need someone to smile at

Their love is just a little series of letters

The sections are full of very striking images. The moon is a plug to stopper the dark, it is a coin on the eye of the dead, it is an ember. The sky smells like tea.

There is a good deal of repetition. The dead, the moon, salt, coins, the dark. I feel the poems walk a fine line between being darkly obsessive and merely repetitive and boring. Sometimes they wobble a little, but never quite fall off the tightrope. In fact, on each re-reading, I notice details that I missed the first time, and they grow richer. In "accessible" poems, this happens less, because they offer a clear picture which we understand on first reading, and put all the pieces in place. With these poems which I find harder to understand, the mind at first rejects the details that don't fit the initial picture. Words change their meaning - salt appears to be symbolic, but what is it symbolic of? Does salting the sills keep the dead away, or does it feed the dead?

You salt the sills from the inside...
The dead...have no salt. Each one takes a grain of salt

The music of the poems also interested me. The sound does not always appear to flow smoothly. It is sometimes chopped up into many short sentences

A heart is just soil. Ask anyone. A heart is blinks. A long blink is a scream. A longer blink is sleep. All night a scream. There must be someone else

At other times there are long sentences with many clauses in which it is difficult to find a place to take a breath.

Regardless, when certain fish then jumped their eyes were coins made luminous by the luminous coin of the moon which was part of the earth almost recently enough to still remember the heat.

It is not that it is unmusical, but that to me it resembles modern music (modern "classical" music, that is, not "pop") - sometimes fragmented, sometimes discordant, not always easily singable but more exciting and compelling for its surprises.

On Holiday with Laptops

There are two reasons for going on holiday. One is to visit new places, take part in new activities and do all sorts of fun stuff that you wouldn't do at home. The other is to do all the relaxing that you don't have time to do at home. Technically, you could take a holiday at home and do that, but you would see all sorts of things calling at you, like the garden that needs weeding, so it's more relaxing to go somewhere else.

I suspect most people fall on a line somewhere between the two extremes - for me, I'm a little closer to the "doing new things" end of the continuum than the rest of my family. Or at least, so I believe.

I don't own a laptop - my computer is a desktop Mac computer which I like very much. I'm quite happy to leave it home when I go on holiday. Picture this - four people in a hotel room (timeshare, actually), three of them absorbed by the contents of their laptop computers, and me with a book. Only I finished the book, eventually, and anyway, I'm not used to having time to read a whole book uninterrupted, and I get restless.

So here's what I did on everyone else's "rest day"

I went for a walk up the hill through beautiful native bush






The view from the top, firstly towards the small town of Russell across the bay ( you can see the ferry heading from Russell towards Paihia)



and secondly towards Waitangi, where the Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840 (Most of the buildings are in fact the Copthorne Hotel, the treaty grounds are behind that)



and later in the day, after school was out, I went over the road and indulged my curiosity about the sculpture in the school grounds









The sculpture by Martha Meyer and the children of Paihia School was inspired by a long list of artists, including Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Antonio Gaudi and Friedrich Hundertwasser. Hundertwasser is the artist responsible for New Zealand's most photographed public toilet which is in Kawakawa, a small town near Paihia where we stayed.

And here it is:

Travels with Tammy

We were accompanied on our travels by a Satnav system with a friendly female voice, who my daughters promptly nicknamed Tammy. Once our destination was entered, the screen showed that we had to turn left in about 200 kilometres, so it was straight up the east coast of the island.

Tammy was all you could want in a best friend and guide. Always calm, she told us "in 200 metres turn left", and then as the turn approached "turn left". But if we made a mistake, she never berated us. Instead, she recalculated, and either told us to "turn when possible" or found a different route for us. Never a regret about past actions - just "how do we get there from here?" Even when we confused her by diverting from our route to find a restroom, or a KFC store.

Once in a while, though, Tammy was wrong, and we had to trust our instincts. According to Tammy, this is not a road (her screen showed us driving across country):



(It was too new to show on her map).

On the other hand, Tammy thinks this is a road:



This is the vehicle ferry across Cook Strait, which shows as a toll road. Just out of curiosity, we asked for an alternative route with no tolls, but she failed to find one. She must have failed to consult these men who sailed their van across, perhaps inspired by Top Gear

Tammy does not think this is a road:



or this:



but in fact both are legal highways. The first photo is of Ninety Mile Beach, which is actually only 55 miles long -still by far New Zealand's longest beach. We drove up it after a careful check of the tides. The Satnav screen showed us surrounded by water, and after a while Tammy stopped saying "turn when possible" and merely showed a dotted red line connecting us across country with the nearest road she could find. Tourist buses take this route every day, but there are signs warning cars they proceed at their own risk. But my husband is a confident driver, and we made it with no problems after a careful check of the tides. In fact, we drove too far up the beach having missed the turn off up the stream, and asked directions from a friendly fisherman. The second photo shows the route off the beach up the Te Paki Stream. You can see the tyre tracks we were following disappearing into the water (shallow, fortunately). It's the only place I've ever seen a road sign which says "Caution Increase Speed". (To avoid getting stuck in the sand). Then, near the top where you emerge onto a properly formed road, there is a sign sticking out of the stream which warns "Caution Oncoming Traffic" which made the girls crack up with laughter.

Thematic Photographic: Shiny

Here's a shiny fellow, and his female friend, that I met on my travels. Sadly, he put his tail down before I could manoeuvre myself to take a front-on shot (I think my daughter has a great one, though, I must check)







for more "shiny" photos head on over to see Carmi.

Home Again

Actually, I've been home for a few days. However, we arrived home on Sunday evening, and I was back to work first thing Monday. And then there was the backlog of mail, and e-mails, and laundry to catch up on. Not to mention a couple of engagements on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings. So I have hardly had a spare moment since I returned.

I'm just beginning to sort, label and edit my photographs.

I intended to do some revision of old poems while I was away, and maybe even write some new ones. I took a fat folder with me. But somehow, once I was there, I didn't want to write. We did a fair bit of sightseeing, and on "relaxation days", I did some reading, and some walking locally. In general, it was a time for what Julia Cameron calls "filling the well".

Now I'm back, and wanting to write, but without the time. Maybe this weekend...

Here's a small taste of where we went. More to come

Spring Break

I'm taking a spring blogging break. Back in a couple of weeks. In the meantime here are two photos from my walk around the block a couple of days ago.

Blossom is bursting out all over.



In recent years more and more of these New Zealand native paradise ducks have joined the brown ducks and mallards on our local river.

Pet Peeve Solved

I was clearing out my e-mail inbox - and wondering why I had a particularly irrelevant looking e-mail from a genealogy list flagged as important
- so I looked and found it was from SKS (some kind soul) who did a couple of lookups, one for me and one for someone else, and put the other one in the subject line
- I had probably opened this e-mail to check why it was flagged about a gazillion times before
- and then I had a brainwave.

I forwarded the e-mail to myself with a new subject line, so I would know exactly what was in it.

Note to self:
When I get about twenty or thirty e-mails from various members of a committee I am on, all with the same very general subject line because no-one every changes it
- and when one or two of them contain important information that I want to be able to find easily later
- I can just do the same thing. E-mail it to myself with a more relevant subject line. Problem solved (as long as I remember to do it).

(Of course it doesn't solve the problem of accidentally ignoring important e-mails in the first place, because of a misleading subject line. Never mind, it's a start).

Readwritepoem #88: Salacious Diodes

I nearly gave up on this week's prompt at readwritepoem. I wrestled with the list of words supplied, and after half an hour or so had a few phrases that didn't quite seem to fit each other, lines where I had written the words over and over again in the hope that a poem would magically write itself, and a great deal of frustration.

Then I took my notebook out again this morning in my coffee break, and somehow it started to come together. I used eleven of the fourteen words supplied (and put another one in the title of this post). I'm not sure that the two stanzas of the poem quite gel together, but I'm more pleased by the poem than I thought I would be.

I had in mind Nathan's comment that he always starts writing from words, not ideas. I tried to do the same thing. Given the words supplied, I thought this poem might come out more like a "Nathan" poem and less like a "Catherine"poem, but I can see my own world view sneaking in there, despite the fact that the words weren't ones I'd usually choose. (It doesn't have a title yet).

Magpies rant from the branches
of the macrocarpa, ready
to fling themselves at anyone
who dares to pass bare-headed.
Sunlight coagulates in pools
over the yellow grass, over the froth
of water tumbling over stones
in the creek, over the carcass
of the dead sheep turning rancid
in the paddock.

Memory like a reel of 8-track tape
unspooling backwards. Take it
with a large spoon of salt.
All our lives run in the same direction,
our particles bustling homewards.
We might lay our stories out
as if they were printed
circuit boards, copper etched
on silicon, transistors, diodes
the electrons’ precise elocution.

More salacious diode poems here

What's With All the Knitting?

During the recent Christchurch Arts Festival, random pieces of knitting started to appear on tree trunks and lamp posts:



(Well, yes, actually, this one is not knitting, it's crochet, but I'm pretty sure I saw some knitted pieces too)

and then today I read that the Poetry Society in the UK have a project going on to knit a poem. (It's not too late to take part, apparently).

According to the article at the Guardian newspaper Knitting and poetry are more similar than they might first appear......With poetry and with knitting, you work line by line, and if something goes wrong you have to unravel it

And this poem explains How to Knit a Poem

On Writing Process

I'm a great fan of writing by hand. I very rarely start a poem at the computer, much more often I will scribble out ideas and drafts in a notebook, and then type it up later.

When I want to revise, I print it out so I can read it on paper instead of the screen, and then I scribble revisions on it before amending the computer file.

I didn't think that novelists worked like that any more though - I imagined that the slowness of longhand must mean that they all work at the computer these days. So I was delighted to read Emma Darwin's blog post about her process - she writes long hand in journals, using the right hand pages only, and leaving the left hand page for notes. There's a nice photograph with the post, too. She types it into the computer later. It sounds as if it's a method that would suit me, if I ever write a novel, or am foolish enough to attempt NaNoWriMo.

Emma's is my favourite writer's blog, because it has none of the tedious "my novel is up to page 100" or "got my proofs back from the publisher" sort of posts that seem to fill most writer's blogs. (Or at least, these sorts of things are there, but only in snippets.) Mostly, her blog discusses the art of writing in a really interesting way. It is directed at novelists, but I still find it a great read.

As an aside, I found a mention on Carolee's blog of a book "The Writers Retreat Kit" by Judy Reeves and went to Fishpond to check it out. Fishpond is the New Zealand version of Amazon. Since we are a small country, some strange things happen on Fishpond. For instance the "people who bought this book also bought.." brings up very odd pairings. And today they didn't disappoint me. Apparently I can get a great double deal on "A Writers Book of Days" also by Judy Reeves, if I buy it along with "Making Latex Clothes". To which I can only say "huh?????" (Or as my children would write, WTF?)

Readwritepoem #87

At Readwritepoem this week we were invited to write poems honouring vowels. My first thought was the letter o, which has always seemed the most poetic to me. There are so many "o" words I love, such as ocean, sorrow, willow, follow, not to mention crow.

However, I have put the letter "o" aside for another time, as I wanted to challenge myself by exploring another letter. I started making lists of "i" words and when I thought of "islands" I was hooked.

Homage to the Letter "i"

The least of letters, it is familiar
to the inhabitants of islands
thin thread in the white ocean
of the page, dotted like a rock in the tide
on which sea bird shit,
while their cries of krik krik krik
hang in the air.

We live in the littoral zone,
migrants washed up with the drift
bits and pieces discarded by sailors
ships' rigging, sticks and string.
Twined lines of bull kelp
litter the shore. Spined fragments of kina.
A pied stilt steps over rusting links
of an anchor chain. It stitches the sand
with its beak, in and out, in and out,
probing for pipis. The wind whips our hair.
We eye the horizon, rim of the Pacific,
do not flinch at the sting of salt.


(I think the second half still needs a little work. I found it quite a challenge to use sufficient "i" words and still have it read well. But, it's much improved on where it was a couple of days ago.)

Thematic Photographic: Abandoned

I'm a bit of a sucker for old, rusty bits of metal, or weathered paint on walls - it's the texture that appeals to me. Cobwebs are another thing that appeals to me. So when Carmi announced that his theme for Thematic Photographic this week would be abandoned, I knew exactly where in my files I wanted to look.

This abandoned car is beside a narrow walking track in the Port Hills of Christchurch, between a small stream and a cliff. It amazes me the lengths people will go to, to get an old car into an inaccessible spot, just so it can be left there to rust.

My Dentist Wants Me!

...and this is the reminder card.

(Really? Really, really new?)

I don't actually find it too unpleasant going to the dentist. Managing to fit it in is another matter. They do have one evening clinic for the ten percent or so of the popluation who work during the day (it's more than that? Well, apparently we have to fit in to ten percent of the clinic hours). I'm guessing it will be booked up for the next few weeks, and then I'll be on holiday, so perhaps they'll see me in September.

Excavate #2

For Jill and Carolee's Double Dog Dare Mini Poetry Challenge

(These pieces are perhaps not as original as they might seem, being a response to various events in the Christchurch Arts Festival. The phrase "a bed becomes a boat" that Carolee responded to in the comments of the previous piece was a description of a theatre performance "Slava's Snowshow" in the festival programme).

Excavate #2

Beneath the forest
an ancient city
beneath the city
an ancient forest
petrified totara stumps
line an old river bed
in the streets
Herne the Hunter wanders
half-human, half-stag
far from his ancient haunts
searching for the city's
savage edge.

Thematic Photographic: Lines

Every child loves trains. Or at least, every child loves trains in the same way that every child loves dinosaurs - a lot of them love trains, and adults like to push the idea at those who don't.

When my children were small, they did seem to enjoy train rides, and even better than train rides were train rides that went through tunnels. So when we moved here to Christchurch, I planned to take them on the train through the hills to the port of Lyttelton. (Even better than a train ride - a train ride with boats to look at, at the other end). Sadly I discovered that the suburban trains that I remembered from my childhood no longer ran. Perhaps one day as oil prices soar, commuter light rail will come back, but for now, we just don't have the population density to make it economic.

In the meantime these railway lines carry no passengers - only freight, in containers heading for the port on the other side of the hills.



For more photos on the theme "lines" visit Carmi here.

Poetry Mini Challenge

This is for Jill and Carolee's Double Dog Dare Poetry Mini Challenge over at Readwritepoem. (I'm a day or so late, but what the heck)>

Three poems using a synonym for "dig" as the title of the series, and using words culled from one's notebook, or a magazine or similar.

All words and phrases used come from the programme for the Christchurch Arts Festival

Excavate #1

Within the confines of the city
the wayward workings of memory
peepholes to the chaos
in our heads
Winter becomes a wind tunnel
a bed becomes a boat
directions will be given
to layers of history
On treeless plains
skeletons of extinct birds.
What lies beneath is not to be disclosed.

(Check out the new readwritepoem site, it is fantastic!)

Another Poetry Book Launch

On Monday I went straight from work to the launch of local poet Bernadette Hall's latest book, The Lustre Jug. It's her ninth poetry collection and it seems to me they just keep getting better and better.

Bernadette spent six months in Ireland on the Rathcoola Residency and the first half of the book consists of poems from that time. Though born in New Zealand, her father was born in Northern Ireland, and her mother's family came from Southern Ireland. So she had an affinity with the country before visiting there.

There is poetry that is very "accessible" as for instance most of the poems on Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry series. And there are poems that seem to set out deliberately to confuse and mystify. The poems that appeal to me the most lie in the middle - as these do. There are complexities that reward careful re-reading, but they are clear enough to offer some immediate pleasures, too. They are warm, compassionate, intelligent, witty, and fierce, sometimes all at once. Bernadette is also a great tutor. She taught the first poetry course I ever took, and is one of the instigators of the Hagley Writers Institute which is an excellent course here in Christchurch that bridges the gap between hobby classes and university level Creative Writing courses.

Here is a link to one of the poems from the book, Leda at the Billabong, which appeared in Best New Zealand Poems 2008.

The event was held as part of the Christchurch Arts Festival. On the upside, that meant we had a great venue. On the downside, it meant that we were unable to linger and chat after the formal part of the event, as another event was booked in the same venue. However, as I left, another local poet approached me to tell me that she had found her family all listed on my online family tree. A few questions revealed that we are related - approximately fourth cousins. It always excites me to make new family connections - a small unexpected pleasure to top off the evening.

(For photos from the book launch, visit Joanna's blog, A Dark Feathered Art, here). I planned to take my camera but was running late for work in the morning and it wasn't where I thought it was.

More Signs of Spring

Daffodils are coming up in my garden:



and other things:

Laundry Singapore Style

Carmi's Thematic Photographic theme this week is laundry.

So naturally, I remembered this photo that I took when we were in Singapore. Where else would you hang your laundry if you were living in a high-rise building?

More Poetry Events

At Joanna's book launch (see this post) I was offered a free double pass to a poetry event the following night, called Love Letters in the Margins. Not quite poetry, actually, but a fusion of poetry and music involving three bands, each with a poet appearing with the band.

I always accept free tickets! I planned to take my daughter, a contemporary of Marissa's, but she had to work, and the first few friends I tried were unavailable, so I gave up and decided to go alone. Which may have been just as well, because when I reached the ticket office at the Telstraclear Club where my name should have been on a list, they knew nothing about it. Since it was just me, however, they let me in for free anyway.

I thought I was entering what was basically a tent in Cathedral Square, but once inside I was astonished by the opulent surroundings - it was a polygonal space with plush upholstered wooden booths round the outside, and further polished wood chairs and tables on the floor in the middle. There was a bar and restauraunt service. The ceiling was draped red fabric with black scroll-like designs appliqued on - all very attractive.

The poets appearing with the bands were young local poets Marissa Johnpillai, Ciaran Fox and Ben Brown. I don't know their ages apart from Marissa, but their energy and style is what leads me to describe them as "young" as opposed to the more middle-aged and sedate sensibilities of many of the poets who read at the events I usually go to. Marissa read many of the same poems that she read at her book launch earlier in the week. What I like about Marissa's poetry is that it is positive and celebratory with none of the "angst" that often permeates the work of teens and twenty-somethings. There is a lot of food in her poems, and sex. It touches on her life both in Sri Lanka and in New Zealand, so has a touch of the exotic to it - but it also made me a little homesick for the Cuba St fountain in Wellington where I grew up! (Marissa spent a year studying for her Master's in Creative Writing in Wellington).

The main difficulty with Marissa's reading was that I felt the band, Le Mot Cafe, were a touch loud in places, making it hard to hear her words. It did help that I had heard the poems and bought her chapbook at her book launch.

The other bands weren't quite so loud. I'm not going to say much about the other poets, although I enjoyed their readings, because I haven't had the benefit of being able to read the poems before or after the event (perhaps I should have bought the CD).

I found the collaboration interesting. At her book launch, Marissa had also performed with backing music - the rather quieter tones of a flute. Some of her poetry, although far from all of it, falls a little flat on the page, and I feel it is definitely conceived as music as well as poetry - the intonation, pacing, and so on is integral to its success. Most of her poetry though is just as successful on the page as in performance. I did feel that in all three cases on Saturday night, the poets had written their work separately from the band, and each piece as performed seemed to be a fusion of first a poem read to music followed by a song which originally had no relation to the poem. Still, it seemed to work.

I've known Marissa for ages since she was a contemporary with my daughters at the Christchurch School for Young Writers, an organisation which runs Saturday morning, after school and correspondence writing classes for primary and high school age students. And this morning I caught up with another their fellow students when I saw her face in the newspaper - Jenna had been blogging as Tatiana Anymodel at Jezebel - here is her "coming out" post - it's a great read! And I have to say that the School for Young Writers was a great place (and still is) for nurturing young talented writers - I expect to hear more of both Marissa and Jenna in the future.

Where's the Pied Piper When You Need Him?

For the last few weeks we have been battling unwanted furry visitors. They consumed a whole bag of blood and bone (garden fertiliser) in the garage, which was bad enough, but they have also managed to get into the house. We had our fruit and vegetables in racks of wire baskets and it has been interesting to find out their preferences - for instance, kumara (sweet potato) are favoured but not regular potatoes, carrots, apples and bananas are all tasty to rodents apparently but the oranges and onions were untouched. They also consumed all the seeds from the middle of the cut pumpkin but not the pumpkin itself. They have the ability to suck out the tasty kernel of the pumpkin seeds but scatter the dried empty husks all over the floor.

And no, I am not talking about mice, the tooth marks are definitely bigger. At first I thought it was mice, but the mouse trap was triggered and flipped over, empty. We put out rat baits and they took all the ones in the garage but haven't touched the inside ones. We have now put all food items inside plastic containers with lids but still haven't managed to get rid of the visitors.

So, this morning I went into the downstairs bathroom to do my teeth and hair before leaving for work, and found big rodent tooth marks in the cake of soap. (Aaagh!!!)

My daughter thinks we need a cat. Given the size of her last vet's bill, I think the electronic rodent scarer advertised for $150 would be cheaper. If it works.

(More on local poetry events coming soon).

Montana Poetry Day

Americans have a National Poetry Month. New Zealand poets, being far less ambitious, have a National Poetry Day. (The title Montana Poetry Day has nothing to do with the state of Montana, but the fact that it is sponsored by Montana wines).

Actually though, there are so many poetry events coming up here in Christchurch that it feels as if we are having National Poetry Month after all.

We kicked off with the launch of Marissa Johnpillai's chapbook on Wednesday, and on Friday - the day itself - Joanna Preston launched her new book, The Summer King. Joanna was lucky - and hardworking - enough to win the inaugural Kathleen Grattan award, which comes with a prize of $16,000 for a book length manuscript, and publication of the book by the Otago University Press. I've had the pleasure of hearing many poems in the book before at local poetry readings, and it was a pleasure to hear some of them again, and to take the book home to enjoy them at leisure later. Joanna's poems are never ordinary - she has a way of picking subjects which are slightly offbeat, and illuminating them with precise and perfect words.

Besides launching the book, she planned a wonderful event by inviting four other poets to share the evening. Each of them spoke about a poem by another poet that was a "touchstone" poem for them, and then read some of their own poems. I'm in awe of the way that each poet was able to speak intelligently and at length about poems and poets that had influenced them. I'm inclined to think that if asked, it would take me a lot of thought to get past "well, umm... because I like it..."

I'm fascinated too, by the range of venues local poets choose for their book launches. This was one of the more congenial - upstairs at local bar, The Twisted Hop, in a space that was just small enough to be friendly and just large enough not to be too crowded.

If you'd like to buy Joanna's book, do visit her blog - click on the link above - I'm sure she'd be delighted to tell you how you can buy a copy.

(Joanna - I thought I would find it on Fishpond, but their website tells me none of their regular distributors have stock available - I'm sure they would be happy to stock it if you let them know how!)

Here comes the Sun

It hasn't been a great winter here so far. Newspaper reports have confirmed what I personally felt, that it has been colder than average with far fewer sunshine hours. Not cold as in heavy snowfalls and sparkling winter white, but cold as in uniformly grey and depressing.

Hence it was a great relief that the sun shone all weekend. I was too congested, and coughing too much, to go anywhere, but I spent my time moving round the house like a cat, curling up in any puddle of sunlight I could find.

I did venture into the garden very briefly on Friday afternoon (having left work early due to my state of health) to photograph the snowdrops which have just emerged. Next it will be dwarf daffodils, and magnolia buds. Spring may be a way off, but it is definitely on the way.

Time for a Poem

I haven't been writing new poems for the Readwritepoem prompts in the last few weeks - mostly because I have been sorting and revising poems for my poetry group's forthcoming book.

We will have about fifteen pages or so each to fill and I thought over the last few years I had easily written enough good poems to fill the pages. It turns out that is partly true, but choosing poems that are not only good poems but that fit well together is harder than I thought. When we did our first book I didn't have too much of a problem arranging my poems in a sequence that made sense. I think I left out one poem that didn't seem to fit with the others. This time, I have more of a range. Partly, this is because of prompts from sites like Readwritepoem. Though I enjoy writing to prompts as they make me expand my range and stop me from boring myself, I am left wondering how important it is to have a sort of "narrative arc" in a poetry book. After all, I find that I often dip in and out of poetry books and don't necessarily read the contents in order. I still have a couple of months to sort things out, so no doubt I will resolve it in time.

In the meantime, here is a poem that I haven't shared on this blog before. A slightly different version is found online here, along with a couple more of my poems.

This poem arose after I read the introduction to Best American Poems 2006, in which Billy Collins claimed that he couldn't bear to read a poem that contained the word "cicada" - it stopped him in his tracks. About the same time, I saw a nature documentary on TV which included the amazing phenomenon of the periodic cicada which emerges en masse every 17 years. Of course, then I just had to write a cicada poem. I assumed - but may be wrong - that Collins's objection was to the sentimental way in which cicadas are often used in poems, so I tried to write a non-sentimental cicada poem.

North American Periodic Cicada

It will happen like this:
after the struggle, he will leave in haste,
return with a spade and dig
a shallow grave in the quiet woods.
The victim, who lived alone,
will not be missed until the neighbour
sees the overflowing mailbox,
knocks on the door a week later.
The assailant is long gone.

Or, it will happen like this:
he will dig a shallow grave.
Too shallow. A boy will walk with his dog
through these woods. The dog will sniff
the freshly dug earth, paw at it,
uncover what has been done.
The assailant, blood on his shirt,
will be stopped at a police roadblock
crossing into the next state.

No, this is what will happen.
There is a struggle in the woods.
Later that night a phenomenon that comes round
once every seventeen years -
a horde of insects crawl from the ground,
make their way around the corpse, through
the soft earth, up the trunks of trees. They split
their shells, emerge soft bodied.
Billions of creatures harden on branches
until by daytime they take to the air.
Before the boy comes by with his curious dog,
empty shells will rain honey-coloured,
covering the ground for miles.
The woods crunch underfoot. The boy
will not venture far in, the dog
will not spot the soft earth.
There will be no manhunt until
the assailant is several states away,
living a new life. And if he keeps his secret
the cicadas, deep in the earth for another seventeen years,
will not reveal it for him.

*********************************

More fresh poetry this week at Readwritepoem here.

Thematic Photographic: Distant

Jenny Diski, in her book On Trying to Keep Still describes among other things a visit to New Zealand to appear at a book festival. She says that people kept saying to her that in New Zealand we are such a long way away, to which her reaction was that as far as she could tell, we are right here. Well, she has a point. But still, I think that most New Zealanders do tend to feel we are rather distant from anywhere that matters.

I do tend to envy British friends who have such a range of countries that they can visit quite cheaply. In an article on British immigrants to New Zealand, one of the couples interviewed mentioned that they found it hard that they couldn't afford their customary two overseas holidays a year, "not even in the Pacific". Well, no. Even the South Pacific, after all, would swallow up Europe many times over. Apparently their usual European holidays cost them about 20 pounds each in airfares. In New Zealand, that amount would purchase a fare from Christchurch to Wellington, and that's about it. (Here's a hint: come to New Zealand to see New Zealand, not to see Europe!)

Perhaps our distance is why we seem to be rather fond of putting up signposts like this:



This example comes from a park overlooking the Pacific Ocean in the small coastal town of Oamaru. No doubt they are also found in other countries, particularly at the coastal extremities, but I suspect New Zealand is particularly rich in them.

For more distant themed photos, visit Thematic Photographic here

Thematic Photographic: Aviation

Here's another photo that I didn't get round to posting for Carmi's previous theme "cloudy". This week his theme is Aviation and I realised that I could sneak it in here instead.

One of the totally unexpected things that struck me when we visited the UK was that wherever we went, there were jet trails all over the sky. Here, at the edge of the world, we see occasional jet trails, but most of the time the sky is free of them. There, on blue sky days, whenever we looked up, there they were.



This photo was taken in a small town in Derbyshire called Matlock. While my husband visited the local records office in a search for his ancestors, I took a walk round the town and added to my holiday photo collection. It almost looks as if the jet trails are stitching the clouds together.

Kay Ryan on AWP

I have several huge piles of poems and articles about poetry printed from various websites. In the interests of clearing office space, I've been going through them and throwing most of them out , keeping only my favourites.

I enjoyed this one - Kay Ryan on her view of AWP which I found both entertaining and thought provoking. (Now that the link is recorded here, I'll throw out the printed pages).

She describes the "contemporary sestina" as like the "contemporary minuet" - both hopeful and sweet. This put me in mind of my third grade piano exam when one of my set pieces was "Minuet for a Modern Grandmother". As I recall, it was dissonant, syncopated and unlike my elderly music teacher, I rather liked it. So perhaps there is hope for the contemporary sestina despite Kay's views (though I have yet to write one myself).

Thematic Photographic: Cloudy

There are plenty of photos that fit the "cloudy" theme in my travel files. Even at the end of summer, there is no shortage of clouds in Scotland. (And of course we had more time to take photos when we were on holiday).

Before I drag out the travel photos though, I thought I would post a couple taken closer to home. I believe good photography is mostly about having a good eye, and lots of time and patience. Since I lack the last two, I have to hope I have at least some of the first, and rely mostly on luck, and on taking a lot of photos so I can choose the best.

The first two photos are taken in places I'd love to have time to go back to, and sit and wait for those perfect light conditions.

The first is at Godley Head near Christchurch, looking out over the Pacific Ocean, early to mid morning.



The second is taken outside the Christchurch Art Gallery. The kinetic sculpture is called "Reasons for Voyaging". I have other shots of it taken against a brilliant blue sky. About once a week, when the phase of the moon changes, the rotation of the crescent shapes is also changed.



This last shot is taken near my work, late afternoon, near Christchurch Airport.



For more cloudy photographs visit Carmi here.

Readwritepoem #80

Belief

My belief has worn thin. All those years
I sat in church, watched you in your Sunday hat
sitting at the old harmonium, your feet pumping life
into the hymns. Some days now the existence of God
seems ridiculous. Almost as impossible as the idea
that there is nothing pumping the machinery
of this beautiful marvellous world. Do you know
that I am telling you this? It is hard to imagine you
somewhere above, ominiscient.
Or is this one of time's many rooms
that you cannot enter?

After you were gone, I wore your nightgown
until it was so thin it was almost transparent.
I didn't want to let it go.
How long until belief tears apart?


*******

The prompt at Readwritepoem this week was "What I could never tell my mother".
I could always tell my mother pretty much anything, and the things I wouldn't tell her mostly fall into the category of "too much information" and are certainly not material for poems, especially not poems posted in a public forum. I realised though that I could read the prompt differently. My mother died when I was quite young, expecting my first child. There have been many things I would have liked to tell her, or ask her, and she wasn't there. I started brainstorming a list of ordinary everyday things, intending to use them in a list poem, but somewhere along the line it took a slightly different turn.

As always it is a very rough draft.

For more poems about mothers, secrets, or other things, visit readwritepoem here.

Thematic Photographic: Green

Plenty of green photos in my files, so it was hard to know what to choose for this prompt (perhaps I will post some more over the coming week). However for me, this photo from the Singapore Botanic Gardens is the essence of greenness:



For more green photos, visit Carmi here

Readwritepoem #79

Winter Landscape

Farmer in a field digging onions,
their skins the colour of old vellum.
dried stalks in convoluted curlicues
like capitals on an illuminated manuscript.
He stamps his feet on the frosty ground,
blows on his hands to warm them.
Pan the scene outwards, the plains
stretch and stretch, the last tendrils
of morning mist lifting, the row of distant poplars
which his grandfather planted
to tether the sky lest he go mad
from so much blue.

******

I had hoped to use all the words from the readwriteword prompt in one poem, but they were so disparate that the goal eluded me. I managed to use six of them: onions, vellum, convoluted,hand, mist, tether.

For more readwriteword poems, go here

For more of my poetry on line (see my previous post), go to Blackmail Press here

My Poems on the Internet

Just up today, the latest edition of New Zealand Poets Online at Blackmail Press.

It is a themed edition - the theme is "secrets"

And for those of you who don't know my last name, here is the direct link to my page of three poems.

Thematic Photographic: Road

I tend not to take photographs of roads - I don't find them very interesting. When we were in the UK, however, we spent a fair bit of time driving around, and found that often we couldn't stop to take photos. In New Zealand there is usually room to pull over by the side of the road for a scenic shot, but the English roads are narrow, with hedges or stone walls at the roadside, and there just isn't anywhere. Then, if you come to a parking area, there might be a charge of several pounds to park there, which is fine for day walkers, but not if you want to explore an area for ten minutes or so and then move on half a dozen times or more in the day.

Consequently we got quite practised at taking photos from the moving car. And I thought I would find quite a few "road" photos among the seven thousand or so I took over the month, but in fact there are far more photos of what we could see from the road than of the road itself.

I did find a couple of interesting ones, and another from a road trip in New Zealand. Incidentally, I tend to distinguish between roads and streets - the essential difference being that roads are in the countryside, and streets are urban. Where there are streets named something or other road in a city, you will usually find that they started off in the countryside, and the city expanded around them.

This view was taken on Otago Peninsula near Dunedin in the south of New Zealand



This one is at the top of a pass in Scotland aptly named "Rest and be Thankful", at the top of Glen Croe on the route between Loch Lomond and the West Coast.



And this one is in the Lake District, next to a historic slate mine, the Honister slate mine. As New Zealanders, we weren't very impressed with the "mountains" in Britain. We would be driving along and find a sign that warned of a steep descent. After a while we would find the road levelling out and say "oh, was that it?" But the Lake District was one area where we felt the hills made up in steepness for what they lacked in height (Britain's highest mountain, Ben Nevis, is about a third the height of New Zealand's highest mountain, and we have plenty more).



For more road imagery, visit Thematic Photographic here