Tuesday Poem: The Landscape

My father serves lunch, lifts 
the salad with servers, offers 
a dish of olives,
the muted light stroking his

hands, head bent as if
in a pew, paler
than I think of him.
On the pergola

above, the leaves of the vines
are ecstatic and lime-bright,
a scribble of veins,
tendrils, shadows – a reminder how light

both clarifies and complicates –
how a simple landscape of skin, let’s say,
can become a whole atlas.
Here the x-ray,

there the scan.
The chickens
pant in the hedge.
He chops bread 

and chunks of cheese, lays 
one on the other
passes it across the table 
to my mother, 

his hand a plate. She’s feeling 
the heat, longs to be cool 
inside with a book, is looking 
up, grateful 

for the vines, for the lean of the tree 
beside us, its pollen rising rapidly like small fish 
in a vertiginous sea. 
The olive dish 

is passed around again. My father 
sweeps crumbs 
onto the grass with his hand. (He asks 
the surgeon now and then, ‘When it comes 

again how will I know?’) All this 
light and still the incomprehensible 
scrabble of things, 
dark scribbles 

that dim 
the bright falling. Above, 
the sky’s open palm, 
supplicating leaves. 


                           By Mary McCallum

Post updated 12:01 pm Tuesday July 24 - more on Mahy.  

This poem is from my small book The Tenderness of Light out earlier in the year which I'll be reading from in the Wairarapa this Friday as part of a poetry roadshow with four other poets for National Poetry Day. Do come if you're in the area! Details here.

by Kirk Hargreaves Fairfax/NZ

The Landscape is written about my parents, but I'll dedicate it here to Margaret Mahy, the astonishing children's writer who died from cancer yesterday in Christchurch. 


Her gift to readers is immeasurable. Her books are a joyful and magical part of so many lives, mine and my children's included. What would we have been without A Lion in the Meadow? And Maddigan's Quest? 

Fairfax/NZ

I met her once, she signed our treasured copy of A Lion in the Meadow. My mother met her too - she had to pick her up from Wellington station over 20 years ago, to take her to a reading at Newtown library where Mum worked. 

Mahy used to wear an orange curly wig to perform for children and you can imagine the writer's delight when she saw Mum's car: a bright orange Fiat Bambina with a sunroof. She leapt in, donned her wig, pulled back the sunroof and sailed through Wellington like that.... my Mum grinning all the way. 

Update: My daughter has just reminded me how, smitten by Maddigan's Quest when she was ten, and keen on writing herself, she sent Margaret Mahy a letter. She received a long handwritten letter in return that amongst other things said that she, Margaret Mahy, liked the same character Issy liked, and encouraging Issy to write down her stories too.  When I told Issy this morning that Mahy had died, she burst into tears. 

The Booksellers NZ blog has posted The Fairy Child today - a perfect choice. It begins: 'The very hour that I was born/I rode upon a unicorn' - yes! she did! God Bless the extraordinary people in our midst who ride unicorns - and ride them to our very door  - and ask us to climb aboard.  

Margaret Mahy, you will be sorely missed. 




Oh and please do visit our magical Tuesday Poem hub today to see poems from each of the NZ Book Awards finalists selected by Andrew Bell. An uplifting way to start the day. 

Tuesday Poem: Translucent

Crossing the Rimutakas, going home,

and the scraped landscape is in the thick

of it – although thick isn’t the word, really

– tender the cloud stroking the cut earth,

tender the light as it feels its way through.

All is gauzy. Filtered. The blue

of the sheep truck we lose on the bends

the only colour. See, Helen, you can

touch clouds. Live in them, even. Tenderly,

we make our way up and over. So

light, so lit, we’re luminous. It’s like flying,

and all we talk about on the way down. 

Mary McCallum

Flax by Mary McCallum

On this, Tuesday Poem's second birthday, here is the final poem in my book The Tenderness of Light which, I am delighted to say, is fast selling out. You can watch me read it in the video at the top of the left sidebar here. It's right at the end...

I like this poem. I wrote it quickly but had been thinking about it for weeks - the best sort, really. They have a lightness of being these heady devil-may-care poems. The others - written slowly after a burst of inspiration - can do your head in. 

The Helen in the poem is mentioned in the first poem in the book, too. She's crazy about clouds, makes them, wants to live in them, and curated the fabulous exhibition Translucent Landscapes of which my poetry was a part. 

What I love in Translucent is the feeling of joy and family and nature and home. 

Now do go to the Tuesday Poem hub to see the excitement of the global birthday poem unfolding over two weeks. The first line is up this morning and others will follow. Very exciting! 


We're two! And it started here! I can't quite believe we've got to this. But we have. I am so grateful to all the Tuesday Poets who join me each week, especially Claire Beynon - artist, writer, angel. 

Finally, Happy Birthday to Melissa Green Tuesday Poet, and to little Carter who is one today and sometimes comes to play. 

The Tenderness of Light, the reading

Posted on Translucent Landscapes this morning:

The reading of my book The Tenderness of Light at the opening of Translucent Landscapes was recorded on video by Mike Ting, and I edited it with images from the book and the place the poems talk about: our property in the Wairarapa over summer. Making the video has felt like an extension of the book-making and the poetry.

It's been a challenge - watching myself and listening to my own voice reading over and over (!), learning how to delete unwanted sounds/interjections etc and putting the video together with images that are evocative without being dominant -- and by that, I mean evocative of both place and book. I feel I could improve on the reading and hope to do so in the Wairarapa before long.

Meanwhile, Tenderness is selling well to poets, poetry readers, friends and family (thank you!)  ... Here is one happy customer! Copies are going off to San Francisco and Boston and London, to Dunedin and the Wairarapa, and many places in between. Wonderfully, I have gone over the 50 mark in terms of sales, so just under 50 more to go.

You can still buy the books from Translucent Landscapes at 75 Ghuznee St, Wellington until March 22. I am there tomorrow (Sunday) 11 am - 6 pm, if you want to talk about the poems and have me write your name in the book. They are already signed and numbered. Or click the button in the sidebar of this blog. Or email makaropress@gmail.com. Details below.

The Tenderness of Light 

Poetry, signed limited edition of 100 books. Six poems.28 pages. Garamond font on uncoated 100 gsm Munken paper with flax photograph on Gilclear insert, 240 gsm Munken cover, and hand-sewn linen thread binding. $15

Tuesday Poem: Summer

Toenails freshly pink, washing on the line held by the last
of the pegs, apricots the colour that can only be called
apricot (perfect for picking but rotten by noon). Bees sip
the lavender, the dog has – after a small performance –
swallowed her pill, the girls are up at last cracking eggs
for pancakes. Ian’s making coffee. Blitz of the grinder,
chuckle of fledglings on the roof wanting breakfast – one
being taught how to fly – an asterisk of a cloud dissolving
in the time it takes to walk to the compost bin. Summer
here – a held – breath –         Now a thousand trees
exhale – now the deep greening that sussurates, resuscitates
– this! pixilated sunlight – leaves startled into silver.


Mary McCallum

Another one from The Tenderness of Light (see previous post). For more Tuesday Poems go to our excellent hub at www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com. Cheers!

Tuesday Poem: The Tenderness of Light (my new book)

Mary McCallum

1. The Tenderness of Light

poetry, signed limited edition of 100 books. Six poems.28 pages. Garamond font on uncoated 100 gsm Munken paper with flax photograph on Gilclear insert, 240 gsm Munken cover, and hand-sewn linen thread binding. $15 



This is how The Tenderness of Light is written up in the catalogue of the Fringe Festival exhibition Translucent Landscapes which opened on Thursday March 1.  


At 5.30 pm that night, a hundred or so people crowded into the abandoned optometrist's premises on Ghuznee Street to celebrate the work of our 'pop-up' community of nine visual artists, one composer and myself. 







The artists and their work: installation art, photography, oils, drawings, videomedia and more, were there to interact with and enjoy (see end of blog for images), and at the appointed time, I stood in front of the gathering and read The Tenderness of Light in its entirety! After that, Iain Gordon's composition Ice was performed with him on mandolin, my son Paul on guitar and Slava Fainitski on violin. 


Gorgeous. All of it. And not just the art or poems or music that were out there in front of people, but the community we'd formed - the work we'd done together to get the exhibition up and running, and the work we'd done in our own discipline that bounced off everyone else's work, in one way or another, and off the place itself. We are all in awe of curator Helen Reynolds who made it happen. 

 


I sold about 20 copies of my book that night, and each sale was an unexpected and unbelievable gift. In all the writing and designing and printing and handbinding, I hadn't thought what it would be like for someone to open Tenderness and read it and want to keep it, or for someone to hear me read and want to own the poems to read again. Yes, I've sold fiction, but this is different - far more personal, an offering of self. Perhaps, too, because I've waited so long for this. 


Of course my lovely family and friends bought the book without even so much as opening it - and thank God for those people, how could a writer or artist exist without them? - but I was deeply touched when I stopped reading
and a man who owns a barn in the Tararua foothills brought a copy of Tenderness to me to write his name in it (they're already signed). He said my poems about the Wairarapa - just over the hill from him - spoke to him and encouraged him to write. Then there was the elderly woman who squeezed my hand when she took the book from me, and the violinist in the trio who clutched a copy to his chest as he left. The next day a woman with flame red hair bought a copy to send to friends in San Francisco, because she wanted something New Zealand. 

The Translucent Landscapes exhibition is on at 75 Ghuznee Street, Wellington from March 1-22, open daily 11am -6 pm. Free entry. The Tenderness of Light is available there or you can email makaropress@gmail.com to order a copy from me direct. 


















Below are some photos from the exhibition, but first here is my lovely team of bookbinders who worked away like elves into the night. 
That's me, grinning away at the back with dark hair and pale shirt, on my left (going round the table) Alexandra, Carrie, Helen (the host and bookbinder extraordinaire wearing the red shawl), Issy (my daughter), Fifi, Ayliffe, Heather. 

Legs by Poppy Lekner from her Lightness of Being series

Installation by Kath Joyce-Kellaway

Clouds by Helen Reynolds

Video by Mike Ting