Tuesday Poem: A Good Story by Airini Beautrais

My friend likes to find things in skip bins.  I don't have  time

to  list all  the  things  he has found. Put  it  this  way - when

you drive past one, you have to stop.

       The story, as I have  heard  it, is  that he  once found a

 girlfriend in a skip bin. She was  scrabbling  around  looking

for  things,  and  when  he  climbed  in,  they met.  This was

before  she met the  banjo player and the drummer.  But this

is  just  the  story  as  the  drummer  tells  it, and he may not

necessarily be  trusted. He has this way of  smiling when he

talks that suggests he could easily be lying. And he has been

known  to  eat  daffodils. The  truth  doesn't move  people to

do  things  like this.

_____
I was one of the first readers of this poem ever, and for most, if not all, of the poems in the Montana award-winning book Secret Heart from which A Good Story comes. The collection was published in 2006, the year after Airini and I each completed an MA in Creative Writing at Victoria University of Wellington. Secret Heart was Airini's thesis and I was lucky enough to be in her tutor group.


Airini listened interestedly to all our feedback but made very few changes - except to play around a little with form and deciding on the prose poem. Later, her marker commented favourably on 'the casual tossed-offness' of the poems, and that is certainly it. They have a cool, wry, downbeat kind of feel to them, as if someone's just at that moment tossing words over a (leather-jacketed) shoulder or, as in one poem, spitting them like toothpaste out of the car window.

There is enchantment in these poems too - whether it be a guy finding a girlfriend in a skip bin or sisters walking through Cuba Mall with a full-length mirror or trees 'turning folktale' as dusk falls. This is Wellington 'off-centre' (and the South Island, too, in a road trip sequence) and it's a nice place to be. The truth is, as Airini read out her poems in class, we all sat there smiling and then scrabbled round for useful things to say. They are what they are. And we loved them.

[Google books insert with more of Airini's poems removed ]

A science teacher, Airini is currently on maternity leave caring for her new baby and working on her second book of poems.  She's given me permission to run this poem on my blog. 

Do try more Tuesday Poems. Bryan Walpert is the editor this week.