Spain: This Too Shall Pass, by Milena Busquets

The back dust jacket of this slim book carries extracts from eight reviews which claim it to be "luminous and profound", "full of subtle wisdom", "touching and deeply funny" among other words of praise. Hmmm. I found it profoundly annoying. Blanca's mother had just died. She leaves Barcelona and travels to the resort town of Cadaques along with two friends, two ex-husbands and two sons. There is also a married lover tucked away.

Any "subtle wisdom" is tucked away beneath layers of talk about sex, drugs, and detailed adjective-laden descriptions of what everyone is wearing. Blanca seems to live a comfortable life but has no visible means of support: "my psychiatrist wants me to get a job". At one point, one of her friends accuses her of being a spoilt rich girl with a trust fund, and just when I was thinking "that explains it", she denies having a trust fund, but there is no alternative explanation of the source of funds that she lives on.

As for the drugs, the talk of drug use - smoking a joint, for instance, or at another point, being offered a "line" at a party - is treated as quite casual and normal, with little hint that drugs might actually do harm. And there is plenty of the "f" word.

Yes, there is some widsom about the grief process - overwhelmed, as I said, by the other elements. Some beautiful description. Humour? Nothing that I recognised as such, perhaps it is humour that does not translate well internationally.

The book was not so bad that I had trouble finishing it. But neither was it good enough for me to have any desire to seek out more by the same author.

Japan: The Housekeeper and the Professor, by Yoko Ogawa

The professor of the title of this book is the survivor of a car accident which left him with a short term memory loss. His clothes are covered with pinned on notes, one of which reads "My memory only lasts for eighty minutes". The housekeeper is a single mother of a ten year old son, and she and her son gradually develop a relationship with the professor, and a love for the mathematics that is still his passion. And the professor seems to develop a relationship with them, too, even though each morning he has forgotten them and has to refer to the notes and sketch pictures pinned to his clothing that identify her as his housekeeper.

In the first section I began to wonder if I had made a good choice, as there is an extended description of how the professor asks the young boy to come up with a better way of calculating the sum of numbers from one to ten (or one to a hundred, or any other number) without adding them up. This is the sort of maths that is regularly taught to extension programmes of intermediate school age children, and I wondered if the rest of the book would be similarly tedious, but in fact it was a beautiful and tender read.

Baseball comes into it too - the son, nicknamed Root, has a passion for baseball, as does the professor, although he has never seen a game. In his case, the passion comes from numbers and statistics.

I was surprised by one thing - the meals that the housekeeper cooks seemed very Western. It describes her cooking, for instance, a roast dinner. No mention anywhere of noodles, rice, tempura or any other Japanese dish. Since the author is Japanese, I have to assume this is authentic, even though if a Western author had described Japanese meals in the same way I would have thought they had it badly wrong.

Cambodia: In the Shadow of the Banyan, by Vaddey Ratner

The standard disclaimer at the front of this book is rather at odds with the afterword. One states that the book is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to actual people, events or locales, is entirely coincidental. In the other, we read "Raami's story, is in essence, my own". Ratner was five years old when the Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia. Her protagonist, Raami, is seven years old, and the events are told through her eyes, as her comfortable and privileged life in Phnomh Penh, in a family descended from Cambodian royalty, is forever lost. Forced into the countryside by the revolutionary soldiers, constantly moved from place to place, made to labour in the fields and on vast earthworks without the aid of machinery, she loses most of her family and descends into starvation.

However, this is not as depressing as it might be, as the story is told with poetic beauty. The old Cambodian folk legends and the poetry that her father has read to her comfort Raami, and she sees beauty in the world around her.

I did feel that the narrator's view seemed somewhat too sophisticated and abstract for a seven year old. I may be misjudging here, as this may just be the different world view of one brought up in a Buddhist tradition. None of this mattered in the end, however, as events unfolded towards their gripping end. The last couple of years are told in the shortest part of the book, as the days descend into a blurring monotony of sameness, an endless repetition of work, sleep, and very little to eat.

The author escaped with her mother and arrived in the United States at the age of eleven. I would have loved to read a book written by someone still living and writing in Cambodia - however, the vigorous extermination of "intellectuals" - anyone who could read or write - by the Khmer Rouge goes a long way to explain why those books might still be rather hard to find.

Bangladesh: The Bones of Grace, Tahmima Anam

When I borrowed this from the library, I discovered it was the third in a trilogy. I wondered at reading out of order, but it didn't seem to matter to much as the story stands on its own, with a bit of filling in of earlier events in later chapters.

Zubaida Haque is on the eve of leaving the United States for a paleontology dig in Pakistan when she meets and falls in love with Elijah Strong at a concert. After the political situation in Pakistan causes the dig to go disastrously wrong, she returns to her home in Dhaka, Bangladesh where she marries her childhood friend, Rashid.

There are a number of threads to her story - her two relationships with Elijah and Rashid, her search for her origins (she is adopted) and events that take place in the ship breaking yards of Chittagong. Zubaida is there to translate for a Western woman, who is making a documentary about the lives and conditions of the workers. The passenger liner, the "Grace" is being dismantled for salvage. The Bones of Grace of the title refer to both the ship, and to the bones of the walking whale ambulocetus which were the subject of the dig (and which we return to at the end of the book).

I was surprised to find reviews on the library website which thought the book only average, and that the story was "too complex". I felt the several threads worked in well and the storyline was always clear. Besides, I am a sucker for a bit of scientific geekery such as the walking whale. I found it a beautiful, passionate book and will definitely seek out the earlier two later.

Tahmima Anam was born in Bangladesh but left at the age of two as her parents were working overseas. She returned briefly in her teens. She was named a "Granta Best Young British Novelist". However, she was brought up immersed in Bengali culture, and visits Bangladesh frequently, where the rest of her family still live. So, this is Bangladesh not quite through Western eyes, but through the eyes of someone with a thorough knowledge of both cultures.

Italy: The House in Via Manno, by Milena Agus

Wandering around the library shelves looking for authors with foreign sounding names may not be the best way of selecting books to read from around the world. This is a slim book, which attracted me because there are a lot of countries. What's more, the cover proclaims it to be an "international bestseller". It is more popular romantic fiction than literary fiction, however. I found it a pleasant light read, and it does have a bit of a twist at the end.

The narrator explores the life of her Nonna, a Sicilian woman who married in the war, not for love but for convenience. Her husband is a good man, a widower, and they make a life together, with "kindness and good deeds". Nonna meets "the Veteran" when she travels to a spa for treatment for kidney stones. His mysterious figure lurks in the background of the story. What really happened between the two of them? At just over a hundred pages, it doesn't take the reader too long to find out - or does it? The ending is not quite clear (but better for that).

Colombia: The Blue Line, by Ingrid Betancourt

Ingrid Betancourt is a Colombian politician and activist who was held hostage in the jungle for six years by anti-government rebels. Although she has previously written a memoir of this time, and other non-fiction, The Blue Line is her first novel.

It is not in fact, set in Colombia, but in Argentina, in the years before, during and after its "Dirty War" of 1976 to 1983, with follow up chapters set in the United States. The ruling military junta at the time embarked on a terror campaign in which anyone believed to have socialist tendencies was arrested, tortured and made to disappear. The book is an odd mixture of what seems like factual reportage in tone, sprinkled with doses of magical realism. The heroine, Julia, has spells when she sees future events, and is able to use her knowledge to prepare herself and those close to her for what is to come, and change the outcome.

I wondered if, by setting her novel in Argentina rather than Colombia, and by writing in a rather matter of fact tone, the author was distancing herself from the emotional trauma of writing about horrendous events.

I did find myself feeling more drawn in to the story towards the later part of the book, however earlier on the tone made it seem more like reading a history book - but less believable, as far as the more magical elements were concerned.

Australia: The Night Guest, by Fiona McFarlane

I was back on familiar territory with this book, at least geographically, the setting being a beachside town somewhere in the region of Sydney. Ruth is an elderly widow living on her own. One of her sons is in New Zealand and the other in Hong Kong. One morning Ruth wakes believing a tiger has been prowling through her living room in the night. Later that day a woman called Frida arrives, announcing she has been sent by the government to care for Ruth.

This is a novel that is a convincing and suspenseful portrait of the unraveling of an aging mind. But its portrait of Ruth does not relegate her to senility, giving a fully rounded view of her life and loves. There is plenty of suspense in the book, with new twists just when the reader is convinced of the path the book is taking.

This book was long listed for the Guardian First Book Award and shortlisted for a number of other awards. Fiona McFarlane has also published a book of short stories. I look forward to seeing what she will come up with next.

Estonia: Purge, by Sofi Oksanen

Aliide Truu, an elderly Estonian woman, lives alone on the outskirts of a forest in Western Estonia. One day a dishevelled Russian girl appears in her yard, on the run. Where and who she is running from, and her connection to Aliide, are gradually revealed. Short chapters give shifting viewpoints and build tension as the plot shifts from an independent Estonia in the 1930s, though German and then Soviet occupation, to a free Estonia of the early 1990s. Secret Russian intelligence documents at the end of the book give another viewpoint, casting doubt on some of what has gone before.

Sofi Oksanen is a Finnish writer born to a Finnish father and an Estonian mother. The book makes clear the reasons for the displacement of so many Estonians, forcibly removed to Siberia, others voluntarily to Russia fleeing the Germans, to Germany fleeing the Russians, to Finland and Sweden and further west fleeing both. Besides the devastation caused by war, sexual violence against woman is a strong theme.

The one thing I found annoying about the copy I read was that it is one of those editions designed for book clubs, with a set of "questions for discussion" at the end. I have never belonged to a book club though I might consider it given sufficient spare time - but would run a mile from any book club that felt obliged to follow the sort of inane and prescriptive questions that these books seem to feel are helpful.

Albania: The Fall of the Stone City, by Ismail Kadare

Although Ismail Kadare is an internationally renowned author, I had never read any of his work before and didn't know quite what to expect. At first, this book seemed like just another World War II story, and a rather quiet one at that, lacking in much action. Nazi troops enter the city. Someone fires shots on the advancing tanks and the citizens expect reprisals. Dr Gurameto, who trained in Germany, greets the colonel in charge in the town square and invites him to dinner - they were once old classmates. The next day, the Colonel and his army disappear from the city.

Gradually, however, the story becomes more intriguing. How is the dinner connected with the folk tale of the man who invited a corpse to dinner? I found myself drawn in, and definitely interested in reading more of the author's considerable body of work.

Ismail Kadare was born in 1936 and in 2005 was awarded the Man Booker International Prize for 'a body of work written by an author who has had a truly global impact'.

Pakistan: The Shadow of the Crescent Moon, by Fatima Bhutto

This debut novel relates the events that unfold over the course of one morning in Mir Ali,a Pakistani town in a province near the Afghan border. It is the festival of Eid. Three brothers go their separate ways to pray, as it is not safe in these turbulent times for them all to gather in one mosque.

Aman Erum is a business man recently returned from study in America to be with his dying father. Sikander is a doctor in the vastly under-resourced local hospital. Hayat, the youngest, is an idealist student. Sikander's wife Mina is grieving the death of their son. And then there is the young girl Samarra, formerly expected to marry Anam Erum, but now estranged from him for reasons that gradually become revealed.

This book is well crafted and full of suspense as events unfold towards their conclusion - which is no less powerful for the understated conclusion, which leaves us wondering exactly what happens.

Fatima Bhutto is the daughter of a Pakistani father and Afghan mother. Her father was the brother of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto who was assassinated in 2007. It was politics that kept her father in exile for many years and the reason why she was born in Kabul and grew up in Damascus with her father and his second wife, a Lebanese ballet teacher. She now lives in Karachi.

Austria: A Whole Life, by Robert Seethaler

A Whole Life is the story of Andreas Egger, a man who lives a simple life in the mountains of Europe (exactly where is not quite specified). It is a lyrical and beautiful description of his life and his relationship to the mountains. His relationships are few, and his time away from the village in World War II brief. So, not an action packed book, and it is not a long book either, but it is delightful to read.

A taste - from the quote on the back of the dust jacket - "Sometimes, on mild summer nights, he would spread a blanket somewhere on a freshly mown meadow, like on his back and look up at the starry sky. Then he would think about his future, which extended infinitely before him, precisely because he expected nothing of it. and sometimes, if he lay there long enough, he had the impression that beneath his back the earth was softly rising and falling, and in moments like these he knew that the mountains breathed."

The Irish Times has a longer account of the book here (contains spoilers).

Robert Seethaler was born in Vienna in 1966. The internet tells me he grew up in Berlin, so perhaps I should count this as a German book. The project is proving more difficult than I anticipated... (but I am getting to read some wonderful books, which I might not otherwise have read, which is the main idea after all).

Denmark: The History of Danish Dreams, by Peter Høeg

Peter Høeg's best known novel is Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow. I read this quite a few years back, and then read his next novel, The Woman and the Ape, which met with a rather lukewarm critical reception, and didn't particularly appeal to me.

However last year I came across The Elephant Keeper's Children in the public library and rather enjoyed it, so decided to try another of his novels for my Danish contribution to the around the world project.

I was somewhat misled by the blurb on the back of The History of Danish Dreams. This begins "Denmark is the centre of the world. Or, more precisely, the centre of the world is located on the estate of the Count of Mørkhøj,at a spot on the edge of the coach-house midden. Around his estate the Count has built a wall. He has stopped all the clocks so that time should simply go away and the entire household may live forever - until two hundred years later the twentieth century makes its violent entry." I thought I was in for something with a science fiction flavour to it, but the book turned out to be more of a family saga, albeit with some rather surreal elements and very eccentric characters.

I found it a bit hard to keep track of the story line perhaps because I read it in rather small chunks - twenty minutes or so at bedtime. I think it would repay more concentrated reading. And towards the end I became a bit irritated by the number of authorial insertions, pretending that the book is in fact non-fiction - a "history of Danish dreams" - rather than fiction. For instance "All things considered, we should all be grateful that this is not a novel, since Carsten is far too complex a character to figure in a novel". Nevertheless, it's an intriguing read. While certainly a promising start to the author's writing career, I would have to say I preferred The Elephant Keeper's Children (which I'm not going to review here as it is not fresh enough in my mind, since I read it last year before I decided to start this project). One thing is certain - his books are not predictable, so if I should choose to try any more - maybe later since I still have over 170 countries to go - none of them are likely to be similar to either of these two.

Reading My Way Around the World

The blog has been languishing since the wind up of the Tuesday Poem community - but now I have a new project that I thought was worthy of being shared. This is not original, I have been inspired by a number of others on the internet. The plan is to try and read a book (mostly fiction) from each of the 196 or thereabouts countries in the world. (Ann Morgan has 196 on her list, my daughter's list is 206 countries, some of which are not yet officially recognised).

I have been compiling lists of potential books to read that are available in our local library, or could be ordered on the internet. For some countries, it's a challenge. And I realise that I haven't quite managed to define for myself what is a book from a particular country. For instance, I have been reading a book by an author born in Kabul, brought up in Damascus, who now lives in Karachi - set in the border provinces of Pakistan, near the Afghan border. So is that a Pakistani book, or an Afghan book? And I am also reading a book by a "Finnish Estonian" author, set in Estonia. After a bit of research however, I found that the author is Finnish, with an Estonian mother. So it is as much an Estonian book as if my mother had written a book set in Scotland - which I would not have considered a Scottish book at all. Still, I haven't located anything else Estonian, so I think this one will probably have to do in the meantime.

Ideally of course each book would be written by an author both born and raised in the relevant country (leaving at the age of two hardly counts), and set in that country. But for many war torn countries, this is a pretty tall order. I am rapidly learning how many people have had to flee their birth countries over the years - something very relevant at the moment to the situation in North Africa, the Middle East and Europe.

I plan to review each book I read here - or describe it at least, I'm not sure what constitutes a "review". I'm close to twenty books already, so I have a bit of catching up to do. Look for the first one soon.

(Any suggestions for books to read, particularly from obscure countries, will be very welcome).

2015 Reading: Fiction

For most of 2015, I kept a list of books that I had read and found that the total was quite considerable. This hasn't always been the case. In some years, I've marvelled over blogs that post their "ten top books" from the previous year, given that if I posted my ten top books, it would be likely to nearly all the books that I'd read.

I'm not going to select my top ten, but I did find that there were almost twenty books on my fiction list for the year, so I am listing some of those that I particularly enjoyed or found notable for various reasons:

The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell

I've been a fan of David Mitchell since reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, a historical novel set in Japan, specifically, on the island of Dejima. I also enjoyed the opportunity to hear him speak when he visited Christchurch. (David Mitchell, that is, not Jacob de Zoet). I love the many layered quality of his work, and the fact that each one is a surprise, and very different from the one before. The Bone Clocks is a sort of supernatural/dystopian/futuristic/realistic novel which spans a period from around the 1980s to several decades in the future. I both started and ended the year with David Mitchell as for Christmas I received a copy of his latest book Slade House. I found it a bit disappointing (even though I enjoyed it very much). I had the feeling that it was written because his publisher was pushing for another book, so that he recycled some of the ideas in The Bone Clocks and used them again, in what is much more a "one idea" book, something that I have not found with Mitchell's books up until now. It's the interweaving of ideas in his work that I find the most rewarding aspect - and the way that minor characters from previous books pop up in new roles in subsequent work is a small treat.

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

An old man and his wife set off on a journey in post-Arthurian Britain. There is something important that they can't quite remember... There is a dreamlike quality to this novel, which is less a reworking of Arthurian legend (despite the setting), than a meditation on the nature of memory, and of how society deals with the aftermath of war, and heals old wounds.

The Marriage of Opposites by Alice Hoffman
This novel imagines a substantial back story for the life of Camille Pizzaro, known as the "father of impressionism". It focuses on his mother, Rachel Monsanto Petit Pizarro, a Jew of French and Portuguese ancestry born on the Caribbean island of St Thomas, at that time a Danish territory. The lush and exotic setting, and the story of a remarkable and unsual woman, made it a rewarding read.

The Chimes by Anna Smaill
Set in a futuristic London, where music is used to communicate in place of words, and memories reside only in physical objects. "The dystopian novel" can easily become cliched, but I found this stunningly original. The slow reveal of how things got to be the way they now are is fascinating. The fact that Smaill is musically trained herself shines through the book (and sent me in search of her 2005 collection of poetry, The Violinist in Spring - poetry, too, shines through the pages of The Chimes).

More in the next post.

Merry Christmas

Strawberry Santas by my husband. While I can imagine a winter Christmas, I find it very hard to imagine a Christmas without strawberries...

Tiny tree with origami books by my daughter. Each book contains a poem. I think she searched my blog to find poems I liked..

Hope you are all having/have had a wonderful Christmas surrounded by family and friends..

Tuesday Poem: Heatwave, by Emma Neale

Heatwave

February 2013: New Zealand’s worst drought in 30 years

It’s a hot, find shade like a dog day,
let the child crawl, mewl and nip,
pant in my belly-shadow, back-shadow;
get up, pace, restless for coolness,
stalk the scent of water, hope,
openness, that icy air
that rides a river’s meniscus
and carries the dark-flow of trees …

Along the scrappy riverbank,
its rough, ugly, unhewn rocks,
the hills rear up like something unclear
in an uneasy dream, while Himalayan fuchsia,
kōwhai and beech gasp through
the chloroform rags of old man’s beard,
passion-vine, woodbine.

It seems in this heat haze
as if some colourist, or abstract expressionist
has tried to paint out some difficult concept
in green and green and green
but can’t unbind
from their own ouroborine obsession:

loving too much, loss of self,
greed, lust, the choking, short-term view,
the slow contraction of our end of days
green eats green eats green.

but a cry splashes on the air;
the child’s seen red rata, wild plums,
their pinot-sweet light quivers, wells
bright as freshet-falls.

We scramble up the banks of parched grass,
use a peaked sun-cap for a pail,
climb, stretch and sweat
to pluck plump palmfuls,
until the hill path
tips the small boy down
like a tumble of milk that weeps for itself.

The weeds snare, they clamber and drag,
seem to say Homo inhumanus, Homo insapiens.

We push back up
through tinder-brittle undergrowth
when with a rush of noise as if to say
its name is Nightmare a giant bird
comes to stake its claim.

‘But they’re our plums!’
the three-year-old cries;
‘They’re wild,’ I say, evenly;
‘and we have to share, share the planet
with all the other animals,’
as if not complicit, ashamed, riven
with dear world, how long …
what if … what have we forsaken?

Yet when the boy bravely holds a plum
balanced on his palm like an apple for a horse
and the bird’s wings laugh closer,
even the low river seems to misremember
its own name; in curved sheets of glass
that still spill and spill, it sings Lethe, Lethe,
and under my stubborn skin
wide-mouthed flowers
pistils sweet with survival’s honey
petals bright as poison
crane towards the drought-taut sky:
common-or-garden now,
common-or-garden joy.

-Emma Neale

I recently enjoyed reading Emma Neale's latest book of poems, "Tender Mercies". And the poems in the collection are indeed tender, but also fierce, and beautiful, and harsh, and many other things, all at once. It's not so much that she shows us the beauty in ugliness - a cliched sort of description which doesn't do justice to the poems, for it implies that the beauty and the ugliness, or fierceness, or harshness, are different things, separate from each other. Whereas to me it felt as if the poems showed a wholeness, where the beauty and the tenderness and the fierceness and the harshness were all the same thing, like shot silk where the colours can't be separated from each other.

I'm grateful to Emma for permission to post the above poem from the collection. Tuesday Poem, sadly, is coming to a close, though I may post more poems in the future. Over at the main hub site, there is a celebratory final poem made up of lines from all the participants over the years (including one of mine). The group has taken a lot of work and Mary McCallum and Clare Beynon, along with others, have done a fantastic job coordinating it all over the last five years, but sadly no one has the time now to keep it going. The site will however, stay open, with five years worth of poems to browse at the readers' leisure, along with links to all the participants. It's been a great ride while it lasted.

Now I should post a bio, but it is very late at night, I am in a mad pre-Christmas too many things to do rush, and it has been said better than I can, elsewhere on the internet. So, you will find more about Emma here and here.

Tuesday Poem: On the Need for a New Flag

New Flag

keep
             the old one
seen by Kupe
                        Tasman
Cook

three stripes
          blue
                   green
          blue

sea
            sky
land between

flown to mark
               arrivings,
leavings

copyright Catherine Fitchett

This poem was first published in "The Chookbook: Free Range Organic Poetry" which was a collection put out by the small poetry critique group of which I was a part. It seemed quite topical at the moment so I decided to post it as my Tuesday poem this week. (That reminds me, I need to fill in my flag referendum paper - have you filled out yours yet?)

I had been travelling on the inter-island ferry and had a "visual flash" in which I saw the land and sea laid out before me as if it was a flag flying.

For more Tuesday Poems visit the main hub site.

Tuesday Poem: Memories of Long Grass, by Carolyn McCurdie

Memories of long grass
for Lesley and Steve

We were quick to claim this ground
relinquished by thick-tongued cows
not yet chomped by bulldozers;
on long swooping slopes and gullies
the seeding grasses nodded, waited just for us.

Disdainful, we pushed aside
stalks swaddled by the nursery web spider
ready for her teeming young;
we trampled tracks where no one
walked but skinks, mice, a cat.
Tiger tracks.

The huts we made were dreams of huts, made more
of air than granny-knotted grass that broke
and slipped. Inside the open walls, we sat
and watched the sun stripe our arms and legs.

We rolled the grass flat to make circles
the radius of our bodies. Then our eyes probed eternity
finding it blue, and beyond that, blue
and beyond that…

The grass held us cupped; the sky bent down
and sipped us up.


copyright Carolyn McCurdie
used with permission

I have been enjoying a number of poetry books lately put out by Makaro Press, the imprint started by the indefatigable Mary McCallum, who is also the instigator of Tuesday Poem. Among them was Carolyn McCurdie's first collection, Bones in the Octagon. My first instinct was to ask her if I could post January Begins as my Tuesday Poem (although it is slightly out of season), however I found that it had already been posted online - so I chose this one, especially for its wonderful last stanza, which to me evoked the wonder of childhood, of exploring the outdoors, of summer days that seem to last forever.

Carolyn is a Dunedin writer who has worked as a teacher and librarian. Winner of the New Zealand Poetry Society’s International Poetry Competition and the Lilian Ida Smith Award, she is a long-time contributor to New Zealand’s leading poetry journals, and has published an ebook of short stories and a children’s fantasy novel. Carolyn is a member of the Octagon Poets Collective and helps to organise live poetry events in Dunedin.


For more Tuesday Poems, visit the main hub site. We are a group of New Zealand and international poets who each try to post a poem on our blogs every Tuesday.

So Much Depends On...

I have been flat out lately. I'm hoping to get back to the blog with a Tuesday Poem next week.
In the meantime, I enjoyed Joe Bennett's rewrite of William Carlos William's red wheelbarrow poem in our newspaper, and online here.

Tuesday Poem: Making Starfish, by Serie Barford

Making Starfish

to the untrained eye
starfish have no front or back

but village women know better
these days they cut stencils
from discarded x-ray plates

create whole beds of starfish
on bark cloth and cotton sheets

when you cut x-rays
they utter a peculiar cry

but starfish split silently
make more of themselves
to fill up empty spaces

something the lonely could do

- Serie Barford, published in Tapa Talk (Huia Publishers, 2007)

It is that time of year again when Canterbury poets and poet lovers enjoy the Canterbury Poets' Collective spring reading series, stretching over more than two months. One of this year's guest readers' was Serie Barford, whose work I enjoyed very much.

Serie is a poet and short story writer with a strong interest in performance poetry. She was born in Aotearoa/New Zealand to a German Samoan mother and palagi father. She has published three collections of poetry (with another book forthcoming) and in 2011 was awarded the Seresin Landfall Residency. A much fuller bio is found on the New Zealand Book Council website, which I have linked to above. The collection "Tapa Talk" was inspired by her time on the mainland and various other islands of New Caledonia, along with poems based on her Samoan background. Serie says:

In Samoa the templates cut from x-rays were used for design making on siapo (tapa cloth). They don't do tivaevae but they do make fala su'i, a kind of bedpread that's made by emboidering pandanus mats with wool. My next book (Entangled Islands) is based on this concept and each emboidered panel is metaphorically based on a cluster of poems and short stoies.

Entangled Islands is published by Anahera Press and is due out in December of this year.

For more Tuesday Poems visit the main hub site and check out all the bloggers in the side bar.

Tuesday Poem: The Girl Who Sings Islands

The Girl Who Sings Islands

The girl who sings islands stands
on the branch of an apple tree
grasping the one above.
She sings, and small shoals
of fish swim from her mouth,
slip into the river and head for the sea.
She sings and each syllable
becomes coral, becomes pearl,
becomes a small chain of atolls
strung across the Pacific.

The girl who sings islands
has a white dress, its broderie hem
a froth of white foam washing
around her shores. She sings,
and the apple tree breaks into blooms
of frangipani, tiare, hibiscus.

The girl who sings islands
swings her foot back and forth,
back and forth, dipping into the air
as a paddle dips into the waves.
She propels her waka
on its long ocean journey
sings and paddles, sings and paddles
paddles and sings.


copyright Catherine Fitchett

I have been a bit slow in organising permissions and haven't posted a Tuesday Poem for a few weeks, so thought I would post one of my own this week. This poem was placed third in the 2015 Poems in the Waiting Room competition and appeared in their Winter Poetry Card.

The girl in the poem was a young girl I used to watch on my walks home from work. She was singing and playing much as described,in a language I thought to be one of the Pasifika tongues, although obviously I added an element of fantasy to the poem.

For more Tuesday Poems visit the main hub site.

Tuesday Poem: Sabbath, by Mary Cresswell

Sabbath

not that the dead will visit – they are dead.
But while we living bathe in such mild air,
neither will I rinse them from my mind,
beloved bones dismantled into sand.
Rachel Hadas, “Shells”

I lay the table as I always did:
blue and white dishes, crystal glasses.
The linen cloth is new. Never mind,
when he comes, he will recognise
if not me, at least the meal I serve,
the candles, the wine, the braided bread.
The words come more slowly.
I am out of practice and unused
to visitors. Greeting them is hard –
not that the dead will visit – they are dead.

I display my dead on the mantelpiece
arrange them in rows like smoky quartz
picked up on mountain trails
or bivalves washed up on beaches.
Unlike the loud and living, they don’t answer back.
They stand mute and dusty. Always, the dead are
accommodating, part of rituals past
and rituals yet to come. Either way,
it’s OK to leave them there.
But while we living bathe in such mild air,

storms roll in from every compass point;
unrecognisable flotsam and jetsam
pile up in heaps. When high tide relaxes
we are left with an expanse of debris
otherwise known as thoughts.
The dead are more kind.
They rest outside our tumbling chaos
waiting for us to pick through them.
I pause my sorting, grubby and begrimed,
to swear I’ll never rinse them from my mind

so I decide it’s time to build
a place to hold us all, perhaps
a temple – a tumulus – a bower
to safely store the memories
I need to keep with me. Call it what
you like. The dead have all the words to hand.
I mine them all to pick through
and extract my dearest shards. Then I
use them to construct my promised land:
beloved bones dismantled into sand.


© Mary Cresswell

Mary Cresswell is a poet and science editor who lives on the Kapiti Coast. She was born in Los Angeles and moved to New Zealand in 1970. "Sabbath" is taken from her book, Fish Stories, published by Canterbury University Press.

I asked Mary if I could post the poem because I have fallen for a form called the glosa, of which it is a fine example. The glosa is based on a quatrain by another author. Each line of the glosa forms the last line of one of four ten line stanzas. In each stanza, lines six and nine rhyme with line ten.

Mary says:
The poem was written for a Los Angeles friend, a World War II refugee from France (a "displaced person" as they were called then) and later used at her memorial service. It's a twist on the usual Friday night sabbath meal, because it welcomes the sabbath as a bridegroom rather than a bride.

The Tuesday Poem community is a group of poets who each aim to post a poem on their blogs every Tuesday. For more Tuesday Poems, check out the main hub site.

Tuesday Poem: Ozymandias, by Horace Smith

Ozymandias

In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows: -
"I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
"The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
"The wonders of my hand." the City's gone, -
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.

We wonder, - and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chase,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

- Horace Smith(1779-1849)

Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem Ozymandias is well-known. This companion poem by his friend Horace Smith is not so well-known, indeed, I had never heard of it until attending a course on poetic forms with Joanna Preston, where we were introduced to bout-rimé. The idea of bout-rimé is a sort of poetic game whereby the participants are given a set of end rhymes by another participant, and have to come up with a poem using those end rhymes in the given order. Shelley and Smith had read about the discovery of the statue of Ozymandias (the Greek name for Rameses II), and challenged each other to write a sonnet about it, beginning with set end rhymes.

The Tuesday Poets are a group of poets who each aim to post a poem on their blogs on Tuesdays. At the main hub site, one of the members acts as editor and posts a poem for the week, while all the participants are listed in the sidebar. There is lots of poetic inspiration to be found there if you click on through!

(Yes, it's Wednesday. I suddenly found this had not appeared on my blog, and discovered that it was still in "draft". So here it is, a day late).

Tuesday Poem: The Genesis Wafers, by Clive James

Genesis carried wafers in her hold
To catch the particles sent from the sun.
Diamond, sapphire, gold
Were those fine webs, as if by spiders spun
Beside whom specks of dust would weigh a ton.

Continue reading

Years back I used to watch Clive James on TV, and found him an entertaining critic and travel writer - but I was only vaguely aware of his poetry, from the title poem in his collection "The Book of My Enemy has been Remaindered". So I had always thought of him as someone who wrote light satirical poetry. That is, until I took a class with Joanna Preston which looked at a number of his more recent poems, and I found that he was a good deal more serious than that.

Some of his most beautiful poems, such as "Japanese Maple", have been written in the last few years, since his diagnosis with leukaemia in 2010.However, while on holiday last week I read his slightly earlier collection, "Angels Over Elsinore", from which the above poem is taken. It appealed to me for its expression of the beauties of science, as I have been working on a scientific poetry project of my own.

Clive James is generous with his poetry and shares most of it on his website, so I have linked to the rest of the poem there. It is well worth clicking through to read it all, and then exploring further.

For more Tuesday Poems, visit the main hub site. The poem shared there this week is "What Heartbreak Felt Like" by Annabel Hawkins. And you will find links to many other participating blogs in the side bar.

Tuesday Poem: Sunday Lunch, by Paula Green

Sunday Lunch

Everyone turns up for Sunday lunch
even Pythagoras makes an appearance.

I want to discuss the great novels
but conversation favours the harmony of the spheres.

If our ears are deaf to the music
of objects in motion, I hear that
we are immune to the ever-present world.

Simone de Beauvoir passes the kofta.
Everyone agrees the taste of eggplant
and mashed potato is in perfect harmony.

Plato is cutting the bread and
admiring the baker’s thumbprint.

Copernicus dresses the salad
oil lemon mustard honey
on runner beans and radishes.

Simone has laid pomegranate seeds
the length of the table
to track the faultline of human existence.

‘It all comes back to story,’
she says, admiring her handiwork.

- Paula Green
used by permission

I have been reading and enjoying Paula Green's collection The Baker's Thumbprint published in 2013 by Seraph Press. I felt the poem above, Sunday Lunch, best gave the flavour of the first part of the collection, which reminded me of that question beloved of certain interviewers: if you could ask anyone to a dinner party, living or dead, who would you invite? Besides the characters above, Einstein, Florence Nightingale, Jane Austen, Janet Frame and others wander in and out of these playful and yet somehow serious poems. And then, of course, there are the descriptions of food, which make me feel rather hungry!

Paula Green has published seven previous collections of poetry, including two for children, and has written several children's books. With Harry Ricketts, she co-authored 99 Ways into New Zealand Poetry

For more Tuesday Poems, visit the main hub site.

Tuesday Poem: The Soldier Born in 1983, by Jennifer Compton

The Soldier Born in 1983

Before he could walk he crawled
for all the world the way a soldier
slithered through New Guinea
or Vietnam.

I could almost see the rifle
in his crooked arms
as he went elbows and knees
across the kitchen floor.

He searched the house through
but could not find his gun.
Rose up on his hind legs
found the wood basket and

something comfortable like a weapon.
He turned with a happy grin
slew his family with a practised sweep
and exactly the right sound.

- Jennifer Compton
used with permission

When I started high school I dove happily into everything on offer (everything except sports, at least!). This included the public speaking competitions - prepared and impromptu. One year ahead of me, and therefore in the same "junior" competitions, was one Jennifer Compton who impressed me enormously with her facility with words. We each went our separate ways, and it was not until 2004 when I discovered the poem above on the Poetry Daily website, with an attribution to Poetry Wales and wondered if it might possibly be the same Jennifer Compton. (Wales being a long way from New Zealand!)

And yes, it turned out to be the same Jennifer Compton, living in Australia, not Wales, and now a fellow Tuesday Poet. And I still admire her facility with words. She has written plays, short stories, and several collections of poems, including This City which won the Kathleen Grattan award and was published by Otago University Press in 2011. Her most recent publications are Mr Clean and the Junkie, a verse novella published by Wellington's Makaro Press, and Now You Shall Know, published in Australia by Five Islands Press. The poem above was included in her 2004 collection Parker and Quink. She blogs at Stillcraic

Tuesday Poem: Landscape with the Fall of John Damian

Landscape with the Fall of John Damian

after Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts”

If the painter had been there, he would have seen
how flat the lands below the castle
dotted with people – the tenant in his fields
making hay, the fisherman in his barge,
the distant drover bringing cattle
from the markets at Crieff. They did not
turn their backs. They glanced up
from time to time, checking for signs
the king was in residence, wondering
when the carts would be sent out
to gather their crops and cattle for a feast.
So it might have been that one of them
would have noted the fall from the cliff –
an indeterminate shape dark against the sky,
not flying too close to the weak Scottish sun
even for a moment, but plummeting –
too distant to make out the detail.
The observer would have shrugged, assumed
a particularly large bundle of rubbish
had followed the piss that the maids
emptied from the chamber pots,
wiped his brow, turned back to his work.

© Catherine Fitchett

Note: Scotland’s first recorded attempt at flight took place at Stirling Castle in September 1507. John Damian, an Italian alchemist at the court of James IV, attempted to fly from the castle’s walls with the aid of feathered wings. He failed completely, landing in a dunghill and breaking his thigh.

After wrestling with a different poem about our 2007 visit to Stirling Castle, I laid it aside. Some years later, inspired by Breughel's painting "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus", and the Auden poem which was inspired by that painting, I wrote the above poem, which was included in the 2014 New Zealand Poetry Society anthology take back our sky.

My ancestors farmed in the very flat lands across the river from Stirling Castle. I was able to visit the farm where my great grandparents were married, and observed the magnificent view of the castle across the river. I like to imagine one of my ancestors working in the fields and looking up to observe John Damian falling from the castle walls, as described in the poem.

I have been a bit slack about posting to Tuesday Poem lately. However, I am having a poetry reading binge lately and am in the process of selecting a number of poems to post over coming weeks, providing that permission is forthcoming. So, to kick it all off, I am posting one of my own this week.

Tuesday Poem: Bright is the Ring of Words, by Robert Louis Stevenson

Bright is the ring of words
When the right man rings them,
Fair the fall of songs
When the singer sings them.
Still they are carolled and said,
On wings they are carried,
After the singer is dead
And the maker buried.

Low as the singer lies
In the field of heather,
Songs of his fashion bring
The swains together.
And when the west is red
With the sunset embers,
The lover lingers and sings
And the maid remembers.

-Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894)

I was tidying up some folders of poetry, and came across the first stanza of the above poem. A google search revealed the second stanza. The poem seems to have no title other than the first line. It has been set to music by Ralph Vaughan Williams, in a song cycle "Songs of Travel".

Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer. He is well known for his novels Kidnapped and Treasure Island, as well as his collection A Child's Garden of Verses.
He came from a family of lighthouse engineers, but although he enjoyed his travels with his father to inspect various lighthouses, he turned away from the family profession to pursue a life of letters.
He died in Samoa, where he had settled, at the age of 44.

For more Tuesday Poems, visit the main hub site.

Old Faithful

Our microwave was starting to make an annoying rattle when in use, so my husband decided to take it in to the repair shop to see if they could do anything with it. He came home and said that when they had finished rolling on the floor laughing, they said they would look at it.

Really, it goes very well and has ever since we bought it - which, by my calculation, was around 36 years ago. I think that the problem is that the wheels that rotate the tray are rather worn down, hence the rattle (when it doesn't stick and refuse to turn at all). Everything else works fine. I really don't want to have to buy a new one, which wouldn't last nearly so long.

It's not even our oldest appliance. Our freezer is around 43 years old, and my Kenwood cake mixer is nearly 45 years old - that has been repaired once or twice, but it still works much better than a modern one.

I often read that old fridges and freezers should be upgraded, because they use much more power than a new one. Which is all very well, but how many years would it take to recoup the cost of the new appliance in lowered electricity bills? And what about the extra resources - metal, power, transport etc - involved in making the new one and disposing of the old one? So for the meantime, I am happy with my old faithful collection of kitchen helpers. And I am sincerely hoping that the microwave comes back to us as good as new. I miss it!

Winter

The poor blog has been rather neglected lately.I have been languishing somewhat heading into winter, not helped by an attack of shingles. A nasty blistering rash, like chicken pox but more localised (and I think, more painful).

I spotted the goat outside The Mohair Store, in a nearby suburb. His warm woolly scarf looked very appealing. Snow is forecast for next weekend.

Tuesday Poem: Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, by W B Yeats

Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Among the many e-mail in my inbox this week, I found one from Tourism Ireland alerting me to the fact that this year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of William Butler Yeats (1865-1939). It seemed appropriate, then to post a Yeats poem as my Tuesday Poem this week. Yeats was the first Irishman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, in 1923. His early work drew heavily on Irish mythology and folklore, while later work was more politically influenced.

For more Tuesday Poems, visit the main hub site.

Tuesday Poem: Wahine Smoking, by Ruth Arnison

Wahine Smoking

My favouritest thing at that Olveston place was
that old guy's painting of the wahine.

Some of the kids didn't think much of it but I
reckon she looked real cool.

The teacher said, look what happens to you girls
if you smoke - that wahine is only 18.

We all laughed, cos he's a right clown our teacher.
Katie May don't always pick up things real quick
and she said,

What school did that kid go to sir? Must've been
a cool one letting her have tats AND jewellery.

We all laughed our socks off and Katie May went,
what, what are you lot laughing at?

The guide just smiled and asked us to follow her.
They must hear a right load of old bosh,
those guides.

In 2014 Ruth Arnison invited artists to create works responding to poems written during her term as poet in residence at Olveston, Dunedin’s historic home. She marked the end of her residency by publishing the artworks and poems in a book, organising an exhibition, a poetry performance and a Questions and Artists session at Olveston. See the blog here.

Other poems in the book respond to works on display at Olveston House. I enjoyed the above poem based on a painting by C F Goldie, with its air of eavesdropping on a tour group of school children, and their reactions to the historic house.

Ruth works part time as the admin person for a research project at Otago University. She is the editor of Poems in the Waiting Room (NZ).

For more Tuesday Poems, visit the main hub site.

Origami Easter Rabbit

We had a family Easter lunch and my daughter brought these cute little origami rabbits just big enough to hold three little eggs each. When I asked her if the instructions were on the internet, she told me "everything's on the internet". So I did a quick google search. Here's a link to a tutorial. There are lots more.

Take a Seat

I took these photos the last time I went into the city. This installation is called The Green Room. The mosaic chair and ottoman took a year to create, using donated china that had been broken in the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes. The garden surrounding the chair was created by Greening the Rubble.

"On the back of the chair are two soldiers. These are from a cup and saucer set given to Pamela McKenzie, when she was 6 years old. She attended... a single teacher school (with) 12 pupils. They all got a cup showing the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, in commemoration of the coronation of King George 6th, in 1936." (Taken from a sign at the site).

For more interesting chairs, please visit Carmi's blog, where his theme for the week is Please Be Seated.

Canterbury Plains from Kennedy's Bush Track

It's been far too long since I got much exercise. So I took a walk up to the Summit Road by way of Kennedy's Bush track. this is one of the longer routes up - I may have overdone it a little, I was quite stiff the day after. But the view was great.

Tuesday Poem: Hinemoana Baker in Victoria Street

Towards the end of last year I became aware of this public poem in Victoria Street. Hinemoana Baker was a guest at the Canterbury Poets' Collective readings, and this was one of the poems that she read. I love her interpretation of what the river (Otakaro - the Maori name for the Avon River) might say to the street. The reference to the hand of the clock refers to the clock tower in Victoria Street which stopped at the time of the 2011 February 22nd earthquake.

Himemoana Baker is a poet, musician and playwright. She has published three books of poetry, most recently waha/mouth.She was born in Christchurch, brought up in Whakatane and Nelson and now lives in Wellington where in 2014 she was Writer in Residence at the International Institute of Modern Letters.

For more Tuesday Poems visit the main hub site.

Radishes

We have a large hillside garden here, mostly laid out in trees, shrubs and lawns which I try to keep in check, not always successfully. And then at the top of the slope are three raised beds which are the Mister's department, he takes care of the vegetables while I take care of the rest. We have a great crop of tomatoes, the rest of his efforts are somewhat experimental, especially since the vegetable beds don't really receive the desired amount of full sun.

He has been trying to grow radishes. None of them have yet produced enough of a root to make anything worth eating. On the other hand, it turns out that they produce edible pods which you can see in the photo here.

And here they are in a stir fry. Delicious.

Lake Tekapo Again

Another shot of Lake Tekapo in winter - May last year, to be precise. It was a gloriously still, clear sky day. I came across this one last week when I was looking for photos with roads in them. You can't see the road in this shot, but it fits Carmi's theme for this week - Bodies of Water.

On the Road

The South Island of New Zealand is spectacular. It is very popular with tourists who often travel in hired vehicles. Lately, however, there have been a number of serious, sometimes fatal, accidents involving foreign drivers, which has prompted a good deal of controversy about how easy it is to drive here on an international drivers licence, and whether it should be allowed.

I wonder how many of those who think it should be a lot more difficult have ever travelled overseas and hired a rental vehicle on their own travels.

The problem is, though, that New Zealand roads are not always what our visitors are used to. The first of these photos is a narrow side road up Mt John near Lake Tekapo, which leads nowhere but the observatory up there (which is nevertheless, an increasingly popular tourist spot). The second photo, however, is a State Highway. It is the route through the Haast Pass from the south end of the West Coast of the South Island, through the mountains to Wanaka and Queenstown, an extremely popular tourist area. It can be a very dangerous road in bad weather. Even in good weather, good driving habits are essential. It is very easy for those used to driving on the right hand side of the road to cross the centre line, and meet oncoming traffic with little warning round a blind bend.

On the particular trip when I took this photo, we met a Canadian couple at Lake Wanaka, who declared that New Zealand was the "twisty road capital of the world". They might well be right! Twisty, narrow, sometimes dangerous but very beautiful.

For more road themed photos visit Carmi here.

A Drink of Water

I was at a party last weekend, and one of the guests was holding forth on his trip to Palestine, along with his wife. He described day to day conditions in the refugee camps, and stated that we couldn't imagine what it was like to live without running water, sewage and so forth. I really wanted to ask him if he had been walking round Christchurch with his eyes shut for the last few years. It wouldn't have needed a trip to the other side of the world, just to the other side of the city, to find out what it was like for the residents most badly affected by the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes, who most certainly did have to do without running water, sewage and electricity, in some cases for considerable periods of time. (In one case I heard of, two years using a Portaloo because of a lack of working sewage). In our own case, it was a couple of days for electricity, a couple of weeks for running water, and two or three months before our sewage was really functioning properly, although it was semi-usable - and we thought ourselves lucky compared to some. I still recall that it was the most joyous moment I have ever experienced when someone called out "the water's back on!"

In the aftermath of the quakes, many formerly capped springs and wells burst open. The photo above shows one. This is outside a beautiful function centre and Thai health spa, where they have piped the water so that anyone may freely fill up water bottles. There were big queues of people here after the quakes, and I still spot a few people making use of it whenever I go past, as some believe the fresh spring water tastes better than treated tap water. Also, it is convenient for joggers to fill water bottles, and I have seen dog walkers put down a small bowl and fill it for their dog to have a drink. So - a fresh tasting treat now, but in 2011, an essential supply for many.

Visit Carmi's Thematic Photographic for more contributions on the theme Drink.

The First Post in a While

I have had a very laid back summer,which has meant both lack of impetus to write blog posts, and lack of anything really compelling to write about. Life has been quite domestic, involving reading, sewing, gardening, and general lazing around, with a few weeks off work over Christmas and then back to the four days a week work routine.

Last weekend my daughter brought peaches from her tree for preserving in jars, which reminded me of this post. We are just past the four year anniversary of the February 2011 earthquake, and peach bottling always reminds me, for reasons that you will see if you click on the link.

Recently, in Auckland, (well north of here thankfully), a number of Queensland fruit flies have been discovered. An intensive campaign of surveillance and eradication is taking place. Visitors to New Zealand sometimes think it is quaint that our immigration controls are more interested in contraband fruit (an orange, say, forgotten in one's luggage) than in undeclared valuables. This pest is why. If it becomes established, it could wreck our horticultural industry. I have read that it could devastate crops so much that home gardeners would just stop bothering to try and grow fruit, as it is rendered inedible without intensive toxic sprays to keep the pest at bay.

The shops in the exclusion zone are suffering too, as fruit can come in but not leave the zone - so their potential customers are greatly reduced. The peaches on D's tree are beautiful and juicy, it would be a shame not to be able to enjoy fresh fruit like this.

Tuesday Poem: Shooting Star, by Greg O'Connell

Shooting Star

It starts with the ocean in the sky, that sea
in outer space, dense shoals of debris

comet-fragments, asteroid-remnants, swimming
blindly into the Earth’s gaseous net. Each meteor

is finned flesh: silver scales, a gaping mouth,
a luminous flash. And we are the night anglers

who would hook each blazing fish. All our lives
we’ve known how to wish.

© Greg O'Connell

It has been a privilege over the past year to take part in a small poetry workshop group in which Greg O'Connell is one of the members. Greg has a background of writing children's poetry. From there he has expanded into writing poetry for adults also. His sense of word play and musicality extends into his adult poems, making them a joy to listen to. He is also a supportive and perceptive commenter on other people's poems, and his suggestions are always pertinent.

I am grateful to Greg for permission to republish this poem, which originally appeared in the Christchurch Press, as my Tuesday Poem this week.

Greg was born in Oamaru and has lived in Christchurch and the West Coast. A number of his poems have been published in the School Journal, and also in A Treasury of New Zealand Poems for Children, edited by Paula Green. He also travels to schools to present interactive performance poetry shows and workshops. There is a very full and interesting biography on Greg's website.

For more Tuesday Poems, visit the main hub site.

Thematic Photographic: Animal Planet

My favourite road trip stop is just north of Kaikoura, where you can stand on the road verge - State Highway 1, the main route from the bottom of the South Island to the top of the North Island - and look down on the beach just a few feet below, at the seal colony where these cute pups were lounging. It is the most accessible mainland seal colony in New Zealand, and perhaps in the world. You can also walk up a short track on the other side of the road to a waterfall, where the pups play while their mums are at sea. They swim up the creek to the pool below the waterfall.

Unfortunately for the seals, some people will try and spoil things. We observed one foolhardy pair walking between the seals and the water, flapping their arms and rushing them in an attempt to get a more lively looking photo. It's a pity they didn't get more than they bargained for. These are wild animals after all, and can definitely injure if they decide to attack. Looking down from the top of the low cliff is plenty close enough for good photos.

Thematic Photographic this week is celebrating animal planet. For more creatures, head over here.

Thematic Photographic: Rows and Columns

Carmi's theme this week for Thematic Photographic is rows and columns - so I went back through a year's worth of photos to see what I could find. First there was my quilt in progress, but I've posted that before..

so instead, I got my "ducks in a row"

and then there was the wonderful Pegasus bookstore in Wellington with its rows and rows of second hand books, with other quirky odds and ends scattered around..

a garden theme crept in - plants at the local garden centre

and colourful pots waiting to be reused at the nearby community gardens

and rural letterboxes are always good for a "row" photo.

For more rows and columns, visit Carmi here.

On Revision

I used to think I was a fast writer, but I've realised that only applies to a small percentage of my poetry, and I have a large collection of failed attempts. A good deal of the writing I have been doing lately involves going back to my files and revising the old poems, the ones where I feel there is a spark that I really want to turn into a successful poem, even if the first attempt was pretty dire.

The worst advice I ever read was not to revise. Granted, this was in a book which was more about writing poetry as self expression/therapy than about writing as literature. Even so, I can't agree. The author seemed to think that to revise was to deny the initial emotion that led to the poem. In my experience, the opposite is true. I remember an occasion when I took a poem to my small workshop group and was met with somewhat blank looks. "What are you trying to say?" one group member asked. I launched into an impassioned defence/explanation of the poem, and she replied "well, why didn't you say so?" And so, I revised the poem so that it did say what I intended to say in the first place.

And that, in my view, is what revision is all about. To make the poem more of what it set out to be.

Changing City

Sometimes it feels as if we haven't just moved house, but moved to an entirely new city. I spotted this building while out to a poetry reading the other night.

I thought it was an old building that I hadn't noticed before, newly refurbished, although I was a bit surprised at its unfamiliarity. It turns out that it is a brand new building, a refreshing change from all the steel and glass going up around the city. It is an Indian restaurant, with a lovely wide open verandah in front, with murals at either end.

And then on the other side of the road I spotted this:

Somewhere to sit and watch the changing panorama of the sky?

Getting round the city can be challenging with constant road works. My daughter tells me that her bus route changes almost daily. I took her home last night after a family dinner. Towards the end of our route, we had to detour as the road I wanted to take (Ensors Road) was blocked by police cars with flashing lights after an incident of "car versus tree". It was quite a long detour, which would have been much shorter if I had known a block earlier that I needed to take a different route. I thought of a different route to take home, along Ferry Road, but heading back from the detour towards my daughter's house, there was a big sign up saying "Moorhouse - Ferry closed, take "Ensors-Brougham". Fortunately it turned out one lane was still open westbound, back past the accident scene.

I need to remember to leave for work early tomorrow, as there is a new road closure which will spill a lot of traffic into one particular intersection on my route. According to the SCIRT website 437,353 km of road has been repaired or replaced. This is 33% of the total that needs to be done. So we will be going for quite a while yet.

Thematic Photographic: Vehicular, Etc

I took a lot of photos in October, when I was attempting to post a photo a day, so I hunted through them for "extras" for this week's theme. The vintage Harley Davidson was on display in New Regent Street, a Spanish Mission style street of shops in the centre of Christchurch, during Heritage Week.

The tram does a regular tourist circuit around the centre of Christchurch. Seen here in front of the Old Government Buildings, now converted into the Heritage Hotel. Ironically, this wing, the old wing of the hotel, survived the earthquakes due to strengthening work in the 1990s, but the new wing is still closed due to earthquake damaged, and I believe is likely to be demolished.

Finally, this shot because in Christchurch you are never very far from heavy earth moving machinery. (One day, all the road and sewer repairs will be finished, but not just yet...)

For more vehicular photos, visit Carmi's blog here.

Tuesday Poem: The Will

The Will

My father left me a boat:
The old red dinghy, slab-sided,
paint peeling, barely afloat.

Summers in the harbour
we sat, three small children
across the stern, one in the bow.
Older, we swam from bay to bay
in deep water, knowing
ourselves to be safe, my father
alongside in the dinghy, rowing.

My father left me a boat.
Sometimes when I falter,
reach for solid ground,
I think I hear his voice -
"Nearly there. Keep going!"
My father nearby
in his coffin boat, rowing,
rowing.

- Catherine Fitchett

In the early twentieth century, and before that, it was common in wills for specific objects to be listed and bequeathed - a famous example being Shakespeare's second best bed which he left to his wife, Anne Hathaway. This poem was written prompted by an exercise in which we were to imagine something that might have been left to us. In fact, the family dinghy had rotted away and been dumped long before my father died, but the prompt allowed me another (much more concise) way to explore material that I had long ago attempted, and failed, to explore poetically.

"The Will" is included in the 2014 New Zealand Poetry Society Anthology "Take Back Our Sky" which launched recently.

For more Tuesday Poems, visit the main hub site

Tuesday Poem: Birds' Nests, by John Clare

Birds' Nests

How fresh the air the birds how busy now
In every walk if I but peep I find
Nests newly made or finished all and lined
With hair and thistle down and in the bough
Of little awthorn huddled up in green
The leaves still thickening as the spring gets age
The Pinks quite round and snug and closely laid
And linnets of materials loose and rough
And still hedge sparrow moping in the shade
Near the hedge bottom weaves of homely stuff
Dead grass and mosses green an hermitage
For secresy and shelter rightly made
And beautiful it is to walk beside
The lanes and hedges where their homes abide.

John Clare (1793-1864)

I've been intrigued with John Clare since reading Adam Foulds' Booker nominated novel, The Quickening Maze which includes Clare, along with Alfred, Lord Tennyson, among its protagonists. John Clare was born in Northamptonshire and was an agricultural labourer, but also a very prolific nature poet. I have taken the above poem from a recently acquired volume, "The Poetry of Birds" edited by Simon Armitage and Tim Dee. They note in the foreword that Clare wrote about 147 different species of birds. Quite an accomplishment. Sadly, he ended his days in a lunatic asylum.

I copied the poem quite carefully, so the odd spellings "awthorn" and "secresy" as far as I can tell are the original spellings used by the poet.

I took the photo at the head of the post a month or two back, I loved the way that the elongated leaf hangs delicately by a thread from this nest that I found in our yard. So I decided that this poem was a great excuse to use the photo.

For more Tuesday Poems visit the main hub site