The Starlings by Tim Upperton

Anger sang in that house until the scrim walls thrummed.
The clamour rang the window panes, dizzying up chimneys.
Get on, get on, the wide rooms cried, until it seemed our unease
as we passed on the stairs or chewed our meals in dimmed

light were all an attending to that voice. And so we got on,
and to muffle that sound we gibbed and plastered, built
shelves for all our good books. What we sometimes felt
is hard to say. We replaced what we thought was rotten.

I remember the starlings, the pair that returned to that gap
above the purple hydrangeas, between weatherboard and eaves.
The same birds, we thought, not knowing how long a starling lives.
For twenty years they came and went, flit and pause and up

into that hidden place. A dry rustle at night, fidgeting, calling,
a murmuration: bird business. The vastness and splendour
of their piecemeal activity, their lives' long labour,
we discovered at last; blinking, in the murk of the ceiling,

at that whole cavernous space filled, stuffed like a haybarn.
It was like gold, except it was more like shit and straw,
jumbled with their own young, dead, desiccated, sinew
and bone, fledgling and newborn. Starlings only learn

a little thing, made big from not knowing when to leave off:
gone past all need except need, enough never enough.


This is a favourite poem of mine by Palmerston North poet, Tim Upperton, who is also at the Tuesday Poem hub this week. It is from his collection A House on Fire. I love the craftedness of it, the sounds of birds and people - soft and maddening at once - evoked with words like 'thrummed' 'chimneys' 'dimmed' and the blissful 'murmuration', the secrets in rooms and eaves and hearts, the gold and the murk, the unwinding emotional centre. Fabulously fairytale and sadly real at once. Thanks Tim for letting me use your poem here.

You can hear it read. 

The Starlings was selected for the Best NZ Poems 2009 and Tim explained it there:"The starlings" was originally an informal epithalamion, a poem to commemorate the wedding of my sister, Katrina, and her husband, Steve. That version was, appropriately enough, a lot more celebratory than the final version you see here. The poem includes details my sister would remember, such as the immense starlings' nest in the ceiling of our family home.

I kept revisiting and revising this poem following its first publication in the NZ Poetry Society's anthology, tiny gaps (2006), and each time it got a little darker than before – notes of elegy seeped in. A last-minute change before my first book of poems, A House on Fire, went to print last year was the addition of the word 'murmuration' – a lovely old collective noun for starlings.'

Now see Tim's poem at the Tuesday Poem hub. 

The Rocky Shore Wins

It's National Poetry Day and I am at Rona Books in Eastbourne selling books. No poetry yet but I live in hope. Someone called Jill just showed interest in Vincent O'Sullivan's Futher Convictions Pending but had to dash off to the doctor.

I have put Jenny Bornholdt's The Rocky Shore at the centre of the poetry display now because I see she's won the Montana NZ Poetry Award this year - it's always announced on Poetry Day. Congratulations Jenny. And to Sam Sampson who won the novice award.

Interestingly, Jill the Customer and I were pouring over The Rocky Shore earlier not knowing Jenny had won. Jill has a copy she got for Christmas and we were talking about the lovely way Jenny Bornholdt writes of gardens and yet - by her own admission - has a garden that languishes. In one poem, a newspaper photographer comes to capture the garden on film for an article, and all he can say is 'Jesus.'

And here's a poem I have to share. Tim Upperton wrote it. Like me, he's a tutor at Massey University, and he launches his first collection of poetry A House on Fire at the Palmerston North City Library at 7 tonight [all welcome]. Tim's poems are tender things - rich in language and finely observed quotidian detail - much like a Jenny Bornholdt. This villanelle is a little different from other poems of Tim's I've read ...

The drill’s bright bit, its tip, its jewel
by Tim Upperton

In a lane as straight as a child’s rule,
as twilight falls, not dark, not quite,
I swim another lap of the pool.

The water encloses me, comfortably cool.
The attendant passes, flicks on a light.
In a lane as straight as a child’s rule

The rest here.

lighter than the medium you walk on - cilla mcqueen is the new poet laureate

It's one of those days when there is poetry in the air. You hear of it being read out loud in broad daylight in a car park in Cuba Street, and later - as night closes in - you hear it aired in the large lit foyer of the National Library. And you find them gathered: poets who walk on water, poets nimble in the littoral, poets who hop with burnt feet on the sand, poets who sit on towels and watch the waves, poets who - I dunno - lick ice-creams?

Outgoing NZ Poet Laureate Michele Leggott is the car park reader it seems [TV3's resident poet Richard Langston caught her at it] - and she might have been standing near a fish shop. I'm not sure about that bit but it fits. She reads now at the National Library, 'Poetry is a crayfish or two packed in wood shavings flying home in a chilly box with my name on it...'

Then it's time for the announcement of the newest laureate, Cilla McQueen from Bluff, whose first meeting with a live poet was at a bus-stop. His name was James K Baxter. When she's called to accept the tokotoko of laureateship, there's a small bashful pause in proceedings. At last she steps from the crowd, quietly in a kilt, and takes the tokotoko and speaks to it: 'Bless you, Hone, I know you're in there somewhere.'

All around me the poets and others make sounds of the sea: yes, yes, Cilla McQueeeeeen. Richard Langston is standing next to me and 'yessing' along with the rest. He says that when he lived down south she was one of the big three of poetry along with Brian Turner and the late Hone Tuwhare, 'the three of them like Easter Island statues.'

McQueen reads a handful of poems then. One of the lines goes: 'poetry takes you apart, puts you back different', and another - about a lake - says, 'it is a matter of ensuring you are lighter than the medium you walk on'. Ah-ha! They do walk on water, then, or aspire to - insects in this case. Poets, too, perhaps - not only Leggott and McQueen and other kiwi lit-luminaries but the likes of Faber & Faber poet and former poetry editor, Christopher Reid. He's standing off to one side watching. We talk for a moment, him and I, about his friend Ted Hughes.

There's more poetry on Friday - stacks of it - everywhere. It's National Poetry Day. You might find Leggott in a car park somewhere down South if you're lucky, and you'll certainly find more poets in Cuba Street - this time in Cuba Mall as part of an all-day poetry marathon. If I had my way, I'd get to Unity's poetry readings at 12.30, Christopher Reid at the IIML in the afternoon and the launch of Tim Upperton's accomplished first collection A House on Fire at Palmerston North City Library at 7.

However, I might just have to stay working at Rona Books in Eastbourne and sell poetry instead. It does happen.

Postscript: It's Cilla - more from the NZ Poet Laureate site.