Tuesday Poem: The Beautiful Morning by Fiona Farrell

The Beautiful Morning

On beautiful mornings,
flowers fling up their
bright skirts, trees wink
and children run from
their parents' hands to
stand in the crack that
has opened overnight
outside the kitchen.
They jump in.
They jump out.
In and out
as if it were a crocodile.
The earth lies still and
lets them jump
in
and out
of its open mouth.

On beautiful mornings
the front of the bagel shop
falls down flat on the street.
The pub slumps in the gutter.
And the church across the
road lays down its heavy
cross. It spreads itself in
tiny pieces, no bigger than
a man's hand
among the daffodils.

- Fiona Farrell

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Fiona Farrell's poem "The Beautiful Morning" was published in Catalyst, volume 9 and also in The Broken Book which was last week shortlisted in the general non-fiction category for the New Zealand Book Awards. The Broken Book is the book that Fiona was writing when the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes struck Christchurch. Originally a book about walking, it has lovely passages which ramble in the way one might do when taking a leisurely walk about the countryside. However the earthquakes changed the nature of the book, and interspersed with the prose are a dozen or so poems which interrupt the text in the same way that the earthquakes have disrupted all our lives.

I loved the way that The Beautiful Morning set beauty alongside destruction in such a matter of fact way. And I found the whole book really absorbing to read, a worthy contender for the book awards. (With the poetry shortlist being restricted to three books, it is nice to see a little extra poetry sneaking in to another category).

It was a good week for Fiona last week - as well as her book being shortlisted, she was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit on the Queens Birthday honours list for her services to writing.

For more Tuesday Poems visit the main hub site.

A Few Extra Bits and Pieces

Here's the link to the Speight's commercial from which I took the refrain for yesterday's poem.
(Quicker to do it this way than to figure out how to embed a Youtube clip).

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I did intend to post an extra poem for the last Readwritepoem NaPoWriMo prompt. However, I did reach thirty poems in thirty days, and I've had a really busy week. Since it's evening here when the prompt goes up, and since it turned out that I needed to wait for members to contribute lines for me to choose from, and since I've been at work all day and then had family here for dinner, I decided that enough was enough.

For those who need a fix of poetry, hop on over to readwritepoem and you will find plenty of links to other blogs. There are some really good ones out there.

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The first time I was invited to a book launch, I felt as if I was really quite cool :). Real writers wanted me at their book launch! Then I realised that this is New Zealand. Everyone knows everyone else, once you are on any sort of mailing list you will get all sorts of invitations - after all, the idea is to sell books, so the more people who come, the better.

I still really enjoy going to book launches though even if I'm more realistic about it. Last night's was the launch of Fiona Farrell's new novel, Limestone. Fiona is both a poet and novelist. She spent six months in Ireland on a writer's residency, and both her book of poems published in 2007, The Pop-Up Book of Invasions, and her new novel, arose out of that experience. At the launch of both of these books, Fiona's readings were interspersed with selections of Irish harp music from Helen Webby. Both the readings and the music made it a highly pleasurable experience. The selections that I heard lead me to believe that reading the book (which I bought) will be an equally pleasurable experience.

Time for Poetry

Autumn in Christchurch is poetry time. Tonight* was the first in the Canterbury Poets’ collective series of Autumn Readings. For the next seven weeks, we can look forward to some excellent poetry from guest readers and BYO poets (“bring your own” for those not familiar with New Zealand vernacular – applied in the past to alcohol, but these days given a wider meaning).

Tonight started off particularly well as just inside the door I had a stack of books thrust at me, with the invitation to “take them, they are free”. I rarely turn down free books. These were from the estate of the late John Summers – here, I have to plead ignorance, but a glance at the books tells me that he was a bookstore owner, poet and fiction writer and also published his autobiography in two volumes. With luck, the fact that he had enough copies of his books sitting around his house for everyone present to be given a free copy of each of his five books doesn’t mean that they are not worth reading. I will find out shortly.

There was a particularly good turnout tonight, around forty to fifty, and latecomers struggled to find seats. No one is turned away, however, and chairs were produced from stacks in corners and passed overhead. The evening started with an excellent crop of open mic readers, and then three guest poets read after the break.

Firstly, Tim Jones, whose blog I enjoy reading, but whose poetry I was not familiar with until now. Tim claimed a sore throat, but it didn’t show. He was an excellent reader (which is a different thing from an excellent poet, although he is that, too). He was easy to here and read with expression and enthusiasm from his two collections, Boat People and All Blacks’ Kitchen Gardens. The latter was named for marketing reasons, he says. And indeed, it is a title that encompasses all the genres which most readily fill our bookstore shelves – sports, cooking and gardening. If the title has truly helped it sell more copies, it is well-deserved. Tim read poems about his father, about returning to his birthplace in Yorkshire (he left at the age of two) and a number of poems that are rather harder to catergorize – and to remember. That's not the fault of the poems - I’m not good at remembering poems after one reading. I enjoy hearing poems read aloud, but for a full appreciation, it’s good to hear them more than once, and to get a chance to read them too.

That wasn’t a problem with the other two readers. Fiona Farrell read from her book “The Pop-Up Book of Invasions”. I had heard her read these poems before, at her book launch, and had also read the book. Rehearing these only added to my appreciation. These poems resulted from a six month stay in Ireland when she was awarded the Rathcoola Poets Residency. She read two longish poems. The Lament of the Nun of Beare was Fiona’s rendition in English of the earliest Irish poem. It was followed by “Genealogy” which is a poem based on some of the descriptions given of Irish immigrants in the 1840s and 1850s – terms like “degradation”, “squalor” and “ape-like”. Two poems, however long, weren’t enough for the audience, and Fiona was persuaded to read a third, The Way of the Dishes which tells of her visit to a place connected with an Irish saint.

The final guest reader was my friend Victoria Broome who is a member of our small poetry group, the Poetry Chooks. Victoria is in her second year at the Hagley Writers Institute where Fiona is her tutor. This course was a new one last year, and caters for those who want to study writing more seriously, without quite the commitment of a degree course . Victoria read from her course portfolio including a number of poems I had heard and enjoyed before. Two of these were based on a class visit to the Antarctic wing of the Canterbury museum. Other poems were less familiar and I look forward to hearing them again.

The evening concluded with the announcement of the winner of the popular vote for the best open mic reader. The readings are held at the Madras Café Bookshop and David, the owner, kindly donates book vouchers as prizes each week. This week’s winner was Joanna Preston, who was coincidentally my own personal choice. Does this prove that I have excellent taste by picking the winner, or does it prove that everyone else has excellent taste by agreeing with my opinion? Joanna’s blog is one of my regular reads, you will find it at A Dark Feathered Art (and Joanna keeps chickens – you can’t go past a person who likes chickens). I’m looking forward to the launch of Joanna’s first published collection on Montana Poetry Day later this year.

*Actually, all references to "tonight" should read "last night" as I had to delay posting this due to internet problems.