Red Revisited

Red art on the wall of the entrance to the underground car park at the Christchurch Art Gallery (I haven't checked lately to see if it is still there).
The text comes from members of the public who offered responses to the following questions: What is a political idea or situation you feel passionate about? At what point would you initiate or join a protest about this? What would shift you from though to action?

For more red themed photographs, visit Carmi here.

Thematic Photographic: Red

I haven't joined in the fun at Carmi's Thematic Photographic for a while, so this week I thought I would play along. The theme for the week is "red".



This flower captured at the Lyttelton Farmer's Market is a waratah, which is an Australian flower. I have noticed quite a few around in florist's shops lately.

If you like colour, check back here during the week for more "red" images, and drop in at Carmi's, too.

A Poetic Emporium

"H Pannell's boot emporium" - now a Thai restaurant



Johnson's grocery - a traditional style grocery with a wide range of specialty goods

I seem to have been spotting the word "emporium" everywhere lately ( and it has joined my "favourite words" list). On the inside flap of Michele Leggott's new poetry collection, Mirabile Dictu, she says
If the effect is of a kind of poetic emporium I would be very pleased, having learned that the word reached us through the Greek emporos , traveller or merchant, from poros , a journey, a porosity, passing from one thing to another.

It's not a book that is a quick and easy read. There is a lot crammed onto the shelves of these poems. Leggott does nothing to help the reader by way of footnotes or endnotes (I suspect that if she was inclined to such explanations, they would fill as many pages as the poems, at least). Additionally, there is no punctuation other than slightly larger than usual gaps between some of the words, one assumes to indicate a pause or breathing space.

In one poem for instance, she refers to the "sky-blue stick" which I understand to be the tokotoko or talking stick presented to her as Poet Laureate.

Te Kikorangi we could call it
almost as good as the blue from Kapiti
we eat when the good times roll

I recognise as referring to the Maori word for blue, which is also the name of a blue cheese made by the Kapiti cheese company - but how many more references pass me by unrecognised?

In the next poem, she begins
somewhere in Canada Sharon Thesen
is driving a car

and google tells me that Sharon Thesen is a Canadian poet, who presumably from the context of the poem, appeared at a literary festival in Wellington, which switches abruptly from Vancouver to Oriental Bay, and visits various locations around Wellington - Otaki, Island Bay, Red Rocks - before returning Sharon to Kelowna and Okanagan, while encompassing (among others) Lucy Jordan, Tamara de Lempicka, Eliza Hannay, Frances Boldereff, and Finnegans Wake. (Google them yourself, if you don't recognise them!)

Many of the poems have fragments in italics which I assume to be quotes, but again (without resorting to google), there is nothing to indicate who or what she is quoting. I'm not sure whether or not it detracts from the poems to miss half the references, as I'm sure I do.

These are poems better appreciated detail by detail than in their entirety. The overall effect at times can be a confused jumble, if taken too quickly. The endings are not particularly strong, leading to a "so what?" reaction at times, but as in Johnson's grocery, taken item by item, line by line, there is much to delight. It's a book I'll be trying to absorb for quite a while yet.

Six Things a Day

I was web browsing a week or so ago and came upon this article by Linda Gregg.
Linda says "I have my students keep a journal in which they must write, very briefly, six things they have seen each day - not beautiful or remarkable things, just things." I have seen this exercise referred to a number of times before, and was inspired to have a go - which I kept up for several days, until the long weekend arrived, and with it a three day gardening binge.

Linda asks her students to write without similes. Just to simply see. That is the first step. But then there is the finding of words. I found it harder than I would have imagined to describe something like this:



Raindrops hang on the handle of my recycling bin. I was transfixed by the way they picked up the colour, not of the green directly behind them, but of the yellow lid.

Hawks and Falcons

A couple of years back I lost a fair bit of weight by eating well (lots of salads etc) and walking a lot, especially in the Port Hills not far from my home. And then I went back to work full time, and winter arrived, and gradually I put it all on again.

I decided it was time for action, so I have been back to the salads for the last couple of months, and have been trying to walk to and from work (about half an hour each way) three days a week. I decided it was time to increase the activity level a bit, especially since the walk to work is flat. so at the weekend I headed for the hills.

I didn't get very far up, but will aim for further next time. As I was heading downhill, I saw a large number of black and white feathers clinging to the grass in a roughly circular area about half a metre across. There's only one bird around here with feathers like that - a magpie. (The same as the Australian magpie, which is an entirely different bird from the British magpie). My first thought was that it had been killed and eaten by a hawk. I often see one gliding above the hills, searching for prey. My second thought was that a magpie was surely too big to be taken by a hawk. Magpies are quite fierce birds, especially at this time of year, when they will dive bomb anyone getting too close to their nests, as unwary cyclists and joggers sometimes find to their peril. In fact, in nesting season, even some joggers will wear helmets. And cyclists apparently find that two large eyes painted on the back of their helmets will deter magpies.

I did briefly ponder the possibility of a dog, but it is lambing season, and dogs aren't allowed on the hill tracks where sheep graze.

In one of those intriguing coincidences, there was a programme on birds on TV that evening, and they showed the New Zealand falcon, which is similar to the hawk, but smaller and faster. Among the range of birds they showed that are taken by falcons were magpies. So perhaps my original thought was not wrong after all.

Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry

Friday evening was the Christchurch stop on the country-wide tour that Tim Jones and publisher David Reiter are putting on to promote the new book Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand.

As Tim said, the first question that sprang to mind when he was considering this book was "is there any science fiction poetry in New Zealand?" And the answer turned out to be, quite a lot. Science fiction poetry though seems to be a slightly different beast than science fiction itself. Poets, I think, have the benefit of brevity which means that one poet will in a lifetime write far more poems than one fiction writer will write novels, or even, mostly, short stories. Hence, the poets included in this book may have, on occasion, written science fiction poems, but they are not "science fiction poets" - they are just poets, free to range over a wide range of subject matter as the fancy takes them.

In each venue the readers are mostly local poets who have work featured in the book. Thus, besides Tim reading his own and other's work from the book, and David Reiter reading from the book, we had local poets James Norcliffe and David Gregory reading their work (both in the book, and others). Not having taken notes at the time, I recall in particular David Gregory's "Einstein's Theory Simply Explained" and James Norcliffe's "Alien Vegetable" which despite the title, he claims is not a science fiction poem but a riddle poem. (David Gregory's poem is included on the publisher's website for the book - click the link above). There was also an open mic opportunity for the audience to read their own science fiction poetry. Most memorable from this section was Helen Lowe's wonderful poem "Star Man" about the loneliness of an astronaut . The book has been several years in the making, but I'm sure this poem would have been a worthy candidate for inclusion, if submissions had been open more recently.

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: