Tuesday Poem: Tight by Helen Heath

My mother folded
heavy blankets
into hospital corners
topped with candlewick.
At night I was pinned down
like a butterfly in a case.

Now we are hiding
from each other
but I'm the only one
playing the game.

Inside the wardrobe
I spy old wallpaper
and under the carpet
oiled floorboards.

Who'll find me
now she's gone --
knees by ears tight
breathing all of me.

Poet Harvey Molloy pocketed Graft
at the Unity launch 

Helen Heath launched Graft (VUP) this month at a moving ceremony in Unity Books, Wellington. Moving because it's Helen's first full collection and because these are poems that spring from both heart and brain but come back in the end, each and every one of them, to the death of Helen's mother when Helen was nineteen, over 20 years ago.

In a post on her blog nearly two years ago, Helen wrote about how the death of her mother had defined her and quoted this:

My mother is a poem
I'll never be able to write
though everything I write
is a poem to my mother.
                     Sharon Doubiago

And of course we've just had Mothers Day, and on top of that (bear with me) my middle son turns 21 any day now, and I've been looking through all those old photos and thinking what it means to be a Mum and feeling a bit emotional. Then there we were on Mothers Day morning and middle son wasn't home yet and the others weren't up yet, and my husband was making coffee ... A knock at the door. On the doorstep, forgotten his key as usual: middle son, his cheeks fresh with cold. He'd walked nine kilometres to get home to see me.

I digress. Mothers.

A number of the poems in Graft are directly about Helen's mother like the one above which constricts my throat -- the claustrophobic feel of it -- the heavy blankets pinning the child down -- all that briskness and efficiency -- the tightness in the cupboard, of the air, the child-in-the-woman curled up so tight, foetal, full of missing, glimpses of another time - wallpaper, floorboards - so close.

There are poems which appear to be indirectly about Helen's mother too: inserted throughout the collection are poems about science and scientists - a fascination of Helen's -- and an area, I think I'm right in saying, that her mother was involved in. These scientists in the poems are people like Marie Curie and Beatrice Tinsley who died of terrible diseases, often brought on by the work they did. The work they did unfolds here in precise and majestic detail.

There are fairytale poems too - which so often have absent mothers - and poems about faith and about Helen as mother.  The effect builds powerfully, so powerfully, poem by poem through each of three sections.

In the second of three sections in the book, there are poems are about Helen's journey to her mother's homeland, Ithaca, to find her mother there. Through language and mythology and place she tries to place her feet where her mother trod and perhaps treads still. One part of the long poem Graft feels like the answer to -- the CPR to -- the open door to -- Tight.

I lie under the olive trees
and say to them, to the hill,
to the sea: I am ready.
I press my ear, my cheek,
to the ground. I smell the dry earth.
I say to the island: I am 
ready to hear you now. 
I wait. After a while
I hear it. There is nothing there
but a hum of silence,
the tension vibrating. The hum
touches my cheek, passes through
to my mouth.
I swallow, turn and look up.  


Later in the same poem, she says:

If I dig a hole all the way through
to before, perhaps then I can hold her.

This middle section of the collection especially grabs my heart, for the search Helen's engaged in, and for a different reason too. Like Helen I am part Greek, and know that feeling of going to that country to find what you do and don't know. These poems with their delicious details of language and place ('Everything familiar/yet askew. Apo thalassa sto Vathy.') made me want to go back there very soon.

In the third section, there are more poems on family, a little science, and a series on Justine of the Hutt Valley who wears ugg boots and gets pregnant to the brother of the speaker of the poem and decides -- against the tide of the book -- not to be a mother -- but has an abortion instead. Aaaah - it's like letting the air out ... but no, the final poem is Justine's, and she's rising above it all somehow, floating, like magic, like faith ... The Rapture? Which returns us, perhaps, to the first poem in the collection which talks about Isaac Newton and the Book of Revelations. My only small gripe: I really wanted that final poem to have Helen's mother in it somehow. Justine's interesting, but feels like an interloper...

Such a good book, though! A powerful collection that I read at a sitting and continue to be excited by.

On the Tuesday Poem hub this week, Helen Rickerby who published Helen Heath's earlier chapbook Watching for Smoke, is posting from Graft too. I am looking forward to seeing what she has to say -- go here.

I didn't mean to say quite so much here but am pleased I have. Now I really have to get on with the speech for a certain 21st. Oh, and one more thing about Mothers Day on Sunday... After a time with my children, I went to visit my Mum. Of course I did.


Tight is published with permission.

The Three Helens

Up at the Ballroom Cafe - a place where people danced once upon a sprung floor - it is very hot, and crammed with poets and poetry supporters.  I arrive, and there are only two spare chairs and the poetry's begun. I sit at the back. Behind me, the rumble of pipes, the splosh of water - in front of me, the 'open mic' part of the event, except there is no mic (shame, the water is insistent - I am right at the back.)

It is a fun community entertaining thing - an open mic - but it is hard to thoroughly engage with a poem delivered this way, simply because it's hard to hear all the words. I've, thank goodness, already read Tim Jones' terrific earthquake poem published in the Dompost and on his blog - although his voice carries well so I don't miss much. Robyn Fry gives me a copy of her poem to read later.  I wish I'd asked Maria McMillan for a copy of hers too.

A quick break for a stretch and a refill, and it's time for the music. Blue Vein are a relaxed trio who do some gorgeous (their word is 'cheesy') covers by all sorts of artists e.g. one by Meatloaf and another by Doris Day (love that DD shake of the head Kate does - or is it Liz?)! I've (sneakily) moved my chair to the front for the second half of the show, and realise I'm sitting beside Hinemoana Baker. I can hear her in some of the songs - a sweet barely-there third part to the harmony.

Then it's the Three Helens, or 'Helen Cubed' as the publicity has it. These three women are Tuesday Poets - albeit that Helen L is on sabbatical (come back, Helen!) - so I know their work and admire all three for their poetry and the life they construct around it. Helen L is a tutor of creative writing, Helen H works for the publisher VUP, and Helen Rickerby is a publisher (and civil servant). All the Helens are up to their elbows in poetry and generous in their support of other writers.

They stand up in front of a bay window with the sun streaming in, dressed head-to-foot in Canterbury colours - no, Helen L is wearing bright blue tights.

They tell us they're going to weave their work in front of us. Helen H will lead with a long poem, stop after a bit, then Helen L will read, and Helen R, and then more of Helen H's long poem, and onwards ... Turns out the weaving idea works well because all three are are smart writers with strong personalities, and they clearly have a kind of cross-Helen-poet friendship going on. Helen R has published Helen H, Helen H and Helen L have blogged together... Although Helen R is quick to point out that she is not 'crafty' (in the weaving sense) like the other two.

Helen H's poem is about finding the Greek in herself and herself in Greece. At one point she describes lying with her ear to the earth of Ithaca and being ready to hear what it has to say - but it says nothing. Same thing happened to me in Rethymnon, Crete. I went there because my Yiayia (Grandmother)'s family came from there - like Helen H I didn't have much Greek in my upbringing. Ear to the ground: silence. When I saw Yiayia, I told her what happened, and she laughed, 'Well of course! we came from the village at the top of the hill.'

Helen's poem is an engaging narrative (wonderfully read) - full of a Greece that I recognise.  The style is conversational/epic, often funny, but the simplicity of the language belies the craft that's shapes this yarn. Sadly it's not yet published -I'll have to wait to read the rest.

Helen L's work is more domestic and 'lyrical', with the same humour and smartness of the Greek Helen. Helen L has a keen eye for what ticks in family life - what makes it and breaks it - and has the language to haul the reader in. One of my favourites is about moving house - writing of the anxieties involved and the hope that it will be a place of contentment - she nails it.

Helen R's poetry has found other lives to write about. Writers like the great Emily Dickinson are excellent fodder - and compellingly realised -- combining research/wit/imagination.  Interestingly Helen R brings together the outward looking 'epic' narrative feel of Helen H's long poem with the intimate/domestic stuff of Helen L's shorter works, which has hauled in readers since, well, that first Helen made an appearance in one particular long poem.

And so the weaving continues... next up is Helen H and so on. A lovely lovely evening.

The Poetry at the Ballroom Cafe event is on the third sunday of the month.

Postscript: A young Cantabrian Zeborah has written a simple guide on surviving a disaster which is well worth reading. She talks of the importance of a 'kit to go' in a backpack - my daughter's school is selling these fantastic backpack family kits for $189 each which would be just the trick. I'm getting one, we're right by the sea and need to run uphill as fast as possible after a big quake.

O exquisite quill of granite

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Thanks to Claire Beynon for her lovely graphite quill and Helen Heath for designing the badge.