Mirabile Dictu

Reviewed this marvellous book of poetry this morning on National Radio. Here's the link.

If you don't want to listen, here are my notes tidied up and joined into sensible sentences...

This is Michele Leggott's 7th book. She is the inaugural NZ Poet Laureate [2007-9] and has just finished her term. She is losing her sight to retinitis pigmentosa. She has spoken movingly of this in her previous collection AS FAR AS I CAN SEE: "I give what is left of the light of my eyes, I have fallen out of a clear sky."

Mirabile Dictu is a year in the life of the Laureate. She wrote a poem a week. At 154 pages, her AUP publisher pointed out it is the same length as a novella. Some poems are as long as eight pages. He says that as Poet Laureate she's gained confidence and knows now she has our attention.

BLINDNESS: The poems capture the darkening world of Michele Leggott and show how she copes: learns to touch type, uses a white stick, deals with grief, travels around NZ and to Italy, tracks the history of her family – joins with family and friends in funerals/weddings/feasts. And writes poems.

POETIC EMPORIUM [from the Greek emporos – a journey]: This is how Michele Leggott describes this collection. It starts with a bunch of poets heading to Hone Tuwhare’s funeral and ends with a wedding. A host of other poets are hauled in by name along the way. There are literal journeys and then the poet's interior journey from light to darkness and then back to another kind of vision.

The poems overlap, breathe on each other, are linked by themes and images [the sky, birds, water, singing.] There is a development through the collection from the early despair of the title poem Mirabile Dictu - "only now/has my hand found the stones/I could add to the smooth interior /of my despair" – to the final poems which are lightened/enlightened and show her rediscovery of the miraculous including Wonderful to Relate [Mirabile Dictu translated] which is about a family reunited at the wedding.

In between there is the "breathing world" which is lit by "flashes of brilliance" and the fire/ahi of poetry and inspiration. "Not a white stick but a sky", she says. The sky to Leggott is light and inspiration and beauty and the miraculous and is embodied in the sky-blue tokotoko which she carries as Laureate.

‘here is the light/here is the darkness/look between them and sing/for we are the breathing world’

FINDING POEMS: they are in pockets, tucked inside books, ‘sometimes you meet the title/walking home and the first lines/present themselves at the corner …’ Leggott follows a trail into the university clock tower to track down two elephant skulls and writes a poem about them. There are snatches of language everywhere, and her delight in the history of words : in one poem, people look for vegetables while she looks for the latin word for "really big flower".

TE KIKORANGI: this is the name of Leggott's exquisite sky-blue Tokotoko [here they both are on the left]. An engraved pool cue, its power is an important part of this collection. It features as a CUE to write, an INSPIRATION [its name means the sky] and a PROD: in one wonderfully humorous poem reminiscent of Tuwhare, the stick tells her to write a poem and then goes "back to cooking up/a feed of mussels from Kawhia."

Leggott doesn't use punctuation, instead the lines have gaps which act like the breath in before the rush of words out. These poems have beauty and humour, they sing and rage, they are full of the serendipity and miraculousness of life. Read them and marvel.

G-g-g-glorious

The NZ Poet Laureate website has a great write up on Michele Leggott's addition to the wonderful laureate series and the launch of her collection of poetry Mirabile Dictu which I talked about two posts ago. I am gnashing my teeth even more now having seen how wonderful the launch was because I missed it due to circumstances beyond my control.


Gnash. Gnash. Gnash.


But my good humour [and my teeth] have been restored somewhat by news that my friend Fifi Colston is about to launch her new book for children. It's called Glory, it's published by Scholastic and will be launched at the Storylines Festival.


I know a number of young Fifi fans who'll be rushing to read this book including my daughter Issy who's at the front of the photo with Fifi at the launch of her previous children's novel, Janie Olive, in 2005. Now that was a fabulous event I did make it to - there were young chefs, firefighters and bottles of bubbly...

Stranger than fiction

It's one of those mornings when you wake up and hear something on the radio stranger than fiction. And it makes your brain race - imagining the girl, the falling, the feelings she'll have about being the only one, the reaction of those that waited for her, the sort of life she'll have now ... this girl who lived.


On a more selfish note, I missed the launch of the Poet Laureate Michele Leggott's new book Mirabile Dictu last night [something at my daughter's school I had to sort...] And I am furious about it because Leggott's events are magical word-blown events that should not be missed. Her book is astonishing as always. I review it in a couple of weeks on Radio NZ's Nine to Noon. Here's an extract that [strangely in the way of poetry - which is in itself stranger than fiction] echoes the start of this post:

cyclones have names earthquakes

numbers and in the carnage

of zeros stretching from ocean to sky

one bird falls to earth