The Heir of Night blog party

Author Helen Lowe who is also one of the Tuesday Poets (see the quill in the sidebar) has a new book out. This hugely successful NZ author has been having a blog party to celebrate. I seem to have missed it, but hey! I checked out her blog and they're still there talking about what went down yesterday. Here's the link to her blog where you'll see a host of guests talking about :  “why books and/or fantasy rock your world”. 

Tuesday Poem: The Bookshop

people come to buy a book

but really they want to say : 

they have two brilliant sons

they have a dying wife

they have a daughter who needs a cake sent in a box

they have a friend who cannot hold a book

they have a grand-daughter so small and sick

they forgot a coat

they have a broken hip

they have an assignment due

they had to fix the leaks

they missed their flight

they will sell their house

that their ex is playing up

that things are tight

that the day is unseasonably bright

that they worry, that they need, 

that they notice, that they're loved

and the book? oh not today

tomorrow, definitely tomorrow, when 

the day's less bright, things are less tight, the ex

is playing less, the house is sold, they get their flight,

the leaks are fixed, the assignment done, the hip 

mended, the coat picked up, the grand-daughter well
(bless her),

the friend better, the cake eaten, 

the wife cured, the sons more ordinary 

then, then

                                                                          

                                                                Mary McCallum 

This is just a bit of fun. I work in a bookshop one day a week. I treasure it - it's a day of communing with books and with the people who walk in off the street. Some of the conversations blow me away. The stories. The power. The suffering. The weight some people bear. The way love seems to slide in somehow whatever we're discussing. We talk about books too, of course. And sometimes I sell a few. 

Vincent O'Sullivan Fiona Kidman Pat White Jean Anderson Mary McCallum Jo Thorpe Maggie Rainey-Smith Beverley Randell read

Tuesday Poem: Rongotai by Jennifer Compton

The salt storm killed everything in my mother's garden.
I hear it late at night against the windowpanes, crash

just like rain in the fist of the wind.
Rain with the secret of salt.

The plane to Sydney would roar and lift above us
at 7 am -- and silence would fall again like fuel

the veil of fuel that smelt of kerosene
that felt like the slow lick of a lazy fire

that fell within its own laws of falling when
I was standing out in my mother's garden.

Another plane and another and another
landing, across the road where the hill

used to be. As the hill and the houses slid
into a chasm of waiting to be something else

I found a stone fish, I imagined it to be a goldfish
left behind to starve and stiffen. I held it in my palm

the puzzling fish, and left it where I found it.
From the sloping garden I could see my roof.

The houses went like snails on the backs of trucks
then the hill, inch by truckload. Dug down to the bone.

My brother came home with the skull of an original.
Which, by a miracle of intervention I never saw until

I was taken to the museum on the hill. Another hill.
And we went on living, under the battering wing.

Dad would rage and shake his fist and shout
that he would mount a machine gun nest

on the roof, next to the chimney. As I flew out
I looked down and saw him, sparing my plane.



This is such a fabulous Wellington poem: the hills, the wind, houses 'like snails on the backs of trucks', Rongotai with its airport. How extraordinary the final two couplets are. The raging father wanting to mount a machine gun nest on his roof to down those bloody planes! And the heartbreaking poignancy of his sparing a daughter flying away over his head to live elsewhere.

I read Rongotai staying with Jen in the flat in Palmerston North where she lived as Massey University's writer in residence this year. We'd been involved with creative writing workshops at the university that day, and after a stroll through humming Palmie, we headed back to the flat. Jen gave me a copy of her latest collection Barefoot (Picaro Press 2010) - with a great photo on the cover of the police helping her down off the roof of the Taj Mahal in Wellington in the 70s - and I took it off to the narrow little bed the poet had filled earlier with two hot water bottles, and read.

I was seriously delighted with Barefoot  and remain so - it's one of my fave collections of the year. Poems about NZ - Otaki, Napier, Rongotai etc - and about Australia (where Jen lives) and places like Italy where she's lived and written and travelled. Poems about family and living on the land and love and anything that grabs her magpie mind. Jen Compton's poetry so often combines the humorous, the quirky, the incisive and the heartfelt without missing a beat.

A playwright and a poet, Jen seems to me to be a fearless writer who flies in any direction she chooses. Appropriate for the daughter of a machine gunner.

Rongotai is used with the permission of Jen Compton. More on Jen here when she was Randell Cottage writer in residence. 

Sarah Laing's Let Me Be Frank

Sarah Laing is one of those super-talented people who writes short stories and designs the book cover to go with them

writes a novel (not sure if she designed this book - my guess is she did)

designs other people's book covers and wins awards for them


illustrates other people's books

writes a blog and illustrates it. 

Sarah's blog is a delight. Called Let Me Be Frank it is about being a writer in residence as Frank Sargeson fellow in Auckland, which sounds very grand when it's not. The blog is also about being a mum and doing all that other stuff one has to do while being a writer in residence. It is wry, funny, bang on. 

One of the recent posts is about going to Wellington with co-Sargeson fellow Sonja Yelich to be feted by the sponsor, Buddle Findlay (solicitors). I was supposed to be there but my husband, a consultant at BF, forgot to remind me about it. No that's not true, he tried to text me but my phone was dead because I couldn't find the charger. (Just like last night when I couldn't remember where we kept the wok to put it away - one of those increasingly common 'slip-of-the-memory' moments). 

Anyway, now I've read Sarah's blog I feel like I was at the BF do (although I have never thought of the BF building in the way Sarah has ever). Now I've read Sarah's blog, I feel like not knowing where the wok goes is reason for celebration of - oh, I don't know, the slippage in life between what we hope for, what we imagine, what we get ... between now and then .... 

If I were her I'd give the wok sturdy legs so it could run off to its own little shelf, and maybe it could gather up the phone charger on the way. The charger of course would have a sleek white horse to ride ...  Ah, I wish I could draw like that.... 

More on Sarah Laing here and at her website (where she does heaps more stuff) here.

Tuesday Poem: Earth

For the people of Canterbury after the September earthquake, 2010

Day 1

it mobs us

leaves us

immobile

we are aghast and naked in the doorway 

clutching each other, where’s the dog? 

we are flying for the children, calling

their names, we are the woman up to her neck 

in it, scrabbling for a handhold, calling --

the child behind her on the path stay there 

the one she’s rushing to collect stay there 

we are the boy running to the grandfather, calling --

we are the family watching the capsizing house 

stay               there

earth in our ears

earth in our eyes

earth in our hair

Day 2

it runs its fingers  

along the fences

and power poles

leaves behind

the sound

anxiety makes

there are

early births

and heart attacks

sleep flies from

windows like

featherless birds

Day 3

the faultline is the

break

in the spine and the

back

and neck

hip

and shoulder bones

adjusting

are the

after

shocks

Day 4

it nudges

like

a dog does

makes

the child vomit

makes

his little brother

shake

and shake and shake

the looters take what they like

the homeless take what they can

the mother says she can’t take anymore

the dairy owner says take what you like pay later

Day 5

it changes

the way we

face the world

that shop we

knew that street

we grew up in

that church

in Little River

we drove past on the way to our holidays

Day 6
the crane             drivers      are having a        field day

   one  saves              a chandelier and        bows      to the applause

one unpicks a      wall brick     by brick      and leaves small

       pyramids ready for       rebuilding    there are too many

toppled chimneys      too many buildings on their     knees

nothing can     be done about         Telegraph Road

Day 7

earth in our hair

earth in our ears

earth in our eyes

we are naked in the doorway

we are shaking like leaves

we are up to our neck in it

scrabbling for a handhold calling -- 

                               

                                        Mary McCallum

And the world comes tumbling down

Moving post on Canterbury after the quake by poet, Harvey McQueen, born and bred in Little River.

And his wife, Anne Else, has a useful graph which shows the aftershocks petering out...

Wordnik: Apposite

Occurrences of the word "apposite" per million words

Found this on an amazing site called WORDNIK ... while trying to find out the true pronunciation of 'apposite' (a friend said she's always pronounced it not like 'opposite' - my way - but with 'sight' at the end. Anyway, I fell upon 'wordnik' and found it hard to get away.)

 apposite

from the American Heritage Dictionary 

Pronunciations

/(ăpˈə-zĭt)/

by American Heritage Dictionary

–adjective 
1. Strikingly appropriate and relevant. See Synonyms at relevant.

Century Dictionary (3 definitions)

1. Placed near to; specifically, in botany, lying side by side, in contact, or partly united.
2. Suitable; fit; appropriate; applicable; well adapted: followed by to: as, this argument is very apposite to the case; “ready and apposite answers,” Bacon, Hen. VII., p. 120.
3. Apt; ready in speech or answer: said of persons.

Latin appositus, past participle of appōnere, to put near : ad-, ad- + pōnere,to put; see apo- in Indo-European roots.

I guess there are a lot of word-related sites out there, not least the various online dictionaries. But there's something kind of fun about Wordnik - it has the joys of:  Zeitgeist · Word of the day · Random word  amongst other things. And I love that little graph. 

Tuesday Poem: Victory

Victory

Warm still from hot water and lavender soap, from a clean dry towel,

from a new lace bra, but losing heat fast in a grey room, on a cold slide

with a Velcro tag  for ‘right breast’. The nondescript woman in a denim

skirt slides across the lino to click the button and start the scan. She returns

to turn me over like eggs in a frypan. Firmly, gently, so as not to break the yolks.

She sees my hand go up, flap the air and drop again. It’s a new machine, fewer

handles, she says, you feel like you need something to hang onto. In case I fall, I 

say. But of course I can’t fall, I am clamped like the mouse in the pantry last week

with its nose in the trap,

and in a blue apron, with onions frying, I was the nondescript woman, crossing

the room, calling my son, grabbing the soup ladle, the pestle, the heavy knife,

anything to still the terrible panic, the frantic warm caught body. But nothing

would do. Not squeamishness but violence pushed us back from the pantry door:

pulsing from the concrete floor, ricocheting off the shelves of tinned tomatoes

and packets of flour and nuts, smashing up against our shins. Hot. Angry.

Incandescent. Nothing timorous or cowering about it. No flapping in the air

trying to hang on to something that wasn’t there, no meek waiting while the skin

cooled. We dropped our weapons, quit crying, canned the obscenities, and in the

sanity of silence, simply pressed a heel on the tip of that stupid plastic trap.

And it ran from us. Crookedly, but it ran. 

                                                           Mary McCallum

Thinking of the people in Canterbury in the aftermath of the terrible 7.1 earthquake - not least our southern Tuesday Poets - no poem seemed right for today's Tuesday Poem. But I looked again, and up popped this one. It speaks of that glorious thing they need down south right now.

And from the stories we hear, these Cantabrians certainly have courage in abundance, and are fighting back against this natural disaster, 'nothing timorous or cowering' about them. Victory in sight, although it will be a long haul. 

I love the story of the dairy owner who's opened up his dairy to people saying they can take what they need and come back and pay him when they're able to. My heart goes out, especially, to parents of young children trying to cope in damaged homes with restricted water supplies.

Here's a report from Kathleen Jones - UK poet and Mansfield biographer visiting her daughter in Christchurch; and one from Christchurch author Rachael King who has two small children to care for and, after a few sleepless nights, plans to Keep Calm and Carry On. 

At least everyone is safe. Crooked but safe.

For more Tuesday Poems click on the quill in the sidebar. 

Fifty Years from the Elephant's Head, Broken Hill, to now.

Here they are my parents - Lindsay and Norma McCallum - fifty years married. This picture was taken yesterday.

Married in Ndola, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), in 1960 where I was born, they moved to Bermuda for four sunny years - enter my brother, then to Wellington New Zealand (not so sunny!) where my youngest brother was born, took us to England (where Mum came from) for two years and then back to NZ again. Adventurers both.

Dad - a fun, gregarious fellow and snappy dresser, who likes to be up and doing, loves news (worked as a journalist and in PR for most of his working life) and sport (swims, plays petanque now). Mum - a caring community person, more retiring than Dad, reader and music lover, wrote columns and cookbooks and worked as a librarian. 'Family comes First' is their mantra (eight grandchildren now), and they offer support and encouragement at any time and any place. They have for all of us a fierce pride. Magnificent friends to their friends too. Some might call them bossy (people call me bossy), others would call them  'can do' will-move-mountains sort of people. Good-hearted. Yes.

And always always up and off somewhere. When I was young we never stayed in any house longer than two years (they just shifted again last year! they say it's for the last time, but I never believe them.) Needless to say they travel light and (due to Mum) economically.

Dad was born in Greece to Greek/French/ English parents and was a refugee during the war living in Egypt, Africa and then England, and stayed there until 19 when Africa called (in the form of the colonial police force). Mum was brought up in Seaham in the North of England, but as soon as she could she shot over to Greece to work as an au pair - unheard of in the street where she lived. Back in England, she worked as a librarian and police officer and then.... Africa called.

Remember that movie with Meryl Streep that begins 'I left my heart in Africa'? I think my parents picked up another heart while they were there and brought it away with them. It is in a box in their hot water cupboard beating its own beat. Something more expansive and penetrating and perplexing and profound than any other sort of beat. It is the heart of their household dug from a soil I knew once, briefly, and where their feet stood fifty years ago while they exchanged marriage vows. How young they look! How happy. How sun-kissed.

She was Norma Corrigan, her mother in Seaham baked the wedding cake and sent it by sea. They couldn't afford to travel all that way. Neither could Dad's Mum in Athens. There were lots of friends at the wedding, though, all shiny and elegant. The sun shone. On the way to their honeymoon at the Elephant's Head Hotel, Broken Hill, the car broke down. It was night and an empty stretch of road. All they could hear where the drums. Dad sent Mum off in a passing car and waited for help. He got to the Elephant's Head eventually, but it was a long wait for a new bride.

Fifty years. I am so proud of them. For all the hard work, the strength, the commitment, the optimism, the fun, the sense of adventure, the love.

Alice Munro, Diana Athill, the LIttle Mermaid and the wisdom (or not) of age.

A stunning interview, all too brief. Thanks to Harvey McQueen for pointing it out to me. I must look up Athill's Stet now - what sounds to be a marvellous book about the writers Athill (the publisher) has known and the books she has read.

Now here, a heart-breakingly beautifulinterpretation of Munro's Lives of Girls and Women. Each word is deeply perfect. The music is "comptine d'un autre été", by Yann Tiersen.

Tuesday Poem: The Hospital

sliced fingertip, blood on the Sleeping Beauty dress: they take me for her mother

polite brother, polite sister beside the dying father: they take me for their mother

wild boy at the bedside, humming, painted hair: they take me for his mother

child with child, flat as, thin as, white as a sheet: they take me for her mother

tired boy with whooping cough : they take me for his mother

wired man with harried heart: they take me for his mother

thumb, crushed, a foul mouth: they take me for his mother

numb, glutted  with  pills: they take me for her mother

breath ricochets like spent laughter

death ricochets – a spent balloon

they  take  me  for  its  mother

they know me for its daughter

                                                                   Mary McCallum

For more Tuesday Poems click on the quill in the sidebar. Anna Livesey's the moonmen is at the hub this week, and you'd be crazy not to follow the live blog roll to more treats. 

A boxer and a poem

The creative writing class I teach is compulsory for Communications students at Massey University, so not everyone in the class (read: most of them) want to be there. Many have either never written a poem or written one only once somewhere in the dim past. Somehow their high school teachers managed to skirt poetry and focus on prose because it's 'easier'. There are always one or two self-selected writers per class even if they're not prepared to fess up to it, and there are those who are writers even if they don't know it.

I love seeing a student's face when he or she reads out a poem and the class applauds or I say 'wow' or 'that's a poem!'  or something teacherly like that. There's always a small shift upwards in the bones under the young skin in front of me, the eyes seem wider, the face brighter. Then they look around, concerned that perhaps we're making fun, that it's not good after all.

A young man in that situation will almost always dart a glance sideways concerned he'll be ribbed, and of course he is - his mates' eyebrows will raise, there'll be nudging, a giggle.

There's the young woman who tells me she wrote her poem when she was sitting in front of a movie. She just wrote and wrote whatever came into her head while watching what was in front of her - two pages of 'stuff' - thinks it must be too long for a poem, cuts it down to a page, realises a lot of it makes no sense, is not even sure it is a poem, but hands it in anyway. What 'it' is is an astonishing piece of language poetry. She has never written a poem before.

There's the young boxer who isn't 'getting' poetry, asks his Dad about it, so his Dad gets down his favourite poems, and together they read Rudyard Kipling's If.

Another bloke, the boxer's friend, who still doesn't appear to believe that his fine observations of a house he used to live in once are a poem. The original is restrained and poignant. Every revision is great. He keeps looking down at the ground and shaking his head like I'm a bit cracked.

The mature student, a man, who writes about a miscarriage from his wife's point of view. Astonishing for that reason alone. Another mature student who uses the name of a jazz musician as a verb. Wonders if that's 'ok'.

A woman who describes the heart in such a way that it's never been described before. I cannot remove the image from my mind.

Poet and teacher Mark Doty's latest blog post inspired me to blog on this subject, here's how it begins:

Teachers have no right to pride, really, when it comes to their students' work. All I can claim to have done is ask questions and make some statements about what I saw in the poems before me. I try to be a friendly, interested advocate for what seems most alive in the work at hand. My ideal is for the writer I'm working with to feel thoroughly SEEN -- that someone (me) is looking very closely at what they've made and are trying to make, and attempting to articulate that project with them.

Yes! That absolutely is it! 'Seeing' what's there, and polishing up one's eyes to do the seeing is what takes the time and the energy. Doty goes on to express pride (after all) in three of his students who are having their collections published. I have seen a couple of my students go on to study poetry further and to continue to write it. One has joined Tuesday Poem. Who knows, one day a collection may come from a poet who never dreamed he or she would be a poet. Now that would be something.

Finally, the winners of the NZ Post Book Awards are being announced today - poets, fiction writers, the lot. Good luck to all the finalists. Two years ago, that was me. It was one of the most exciting nights of my life.

Apples and Frost

I have been thinking about Frost's poem After Apple Picking since Tuesday when I read it on Seattle poet T Clear's blog - as part of the Tuesday Poem - and watched Frost read it there (thanks to a crazy digital animator on youtube). It is unbelievably moving and an example of the sort of poetry I am currently smitten with - poetry that appears personal but really is a hand grabbing your throat ...

Such images here, such writing. The extract below, for example, has risen up before me unexpectedly throughout the day today ... that 'shimmer' in the sight ... the 's' and 'm' sounds that hum between lines...the poignancy of 'I am drowsing off' (the whole poem and a lovely photo of picked apples can be found at T Clear's blog).

I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples; I am drowsing off.
I cannot shake the shimmer from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the water-trough,
And held against the world of hoary grass.



Some other wonderful poems that are 'shimmers' of nature can be found on Tuesday Poem this week - HERE and HERE.

Tuesday Poem: Try One

Try one on me

see how it sells.

I smile a lot,

I'm a bit gullibell.

I don't make decisions,

I just drift along,

say you like music,

I'll sing you a song,

my dear.

We say that it's love - 

we have no other word - 

this straining and scraping

should be so absurd.

We can't do without,

now we've started so strong,

there's no question now

of the right and the wrong,

my darling.

Is it me that you want, 

or do you want me?

Can we sit without touching

when we watch the TV?

I feel an imposter,

so please make it dark,

it's your night on the roster,

my dear,

my darling,

my heart.

Mary McCallum

Oh this is so old, written so long ago, from the point of view of someone I knew once. Can't tell you much about it really, except that it is stuck word for word inside my head. That's the way with old poems I guess, good or bad. I like the contrasts of tone and subject matter in Try One, the tacked on endearments which are multiplied at the end and slightly off-key (who says 'my dear'?), the word 'gullibell', and the fact that back then people I knew (me too) just drifted along. Otherwise, I find it very hard to approach the poem. It's become ineluctable, an object; it just is.

For more Tuesday Poems go here or click on the quill in the sidebar (more fun). 

Sixty thousand books and more

THIS WEEKEND SAT 9-5 PM, SUN 10-4 PM Wellington Events Centre


This post is partly for fellow Tuesday Poet and KM biographer Kathleen Jones who is visiting New Zealand from the UK, and is interested in Wellington's magnificent annual 60-thousand book book fair. Kathleen called to say she was in Wellington and could we meet up, so I suggested Saturday after a trip to the fair. 


I have never met her but have had the pleasure of getting to know her via the Tuesday Poem blog - a NZ-created hub where poets from all over post poems on a Tuesday. I also have, to my joy, a copy of Kathleen's brand new biography Katherine Mansfield The Storyteller (Penguin). Here she is on how her book updates what we already know about KM. 


“It’s the only biography to be written since all the documents relating to Katherine and her husband John Murry became available in the public domain. Katherine’s letters and notebooks have all been transcribed and printed and the diaries and letters of John Murry are now also in the Alexander Turnbull Library. Additionally I’ve had the help of the family who still have quite a lot of material relating to both Mansfield and Murry. There’s a lot of new information. It’s significant that most of the leading figures in the story are now dead, so information is less likely to be withheld to protect people.” More from the interview by Tim Jones HERE. 





There's more on Kathleen Jones I've gleaned: she lives in the Lake District with her sculptor husband and has written 11 books especially biographies of women writers like Catherine Cookson, appears to translate Spanish, travels a bit (Italy, Cuba, NZ) and writes poems. And here she is promoting her new book. All rather exotic, really. But on the phone she simply sounds nice and Lake District. 


Kathleen spoke in Wellington this evening to, I hope, a good-sized audience, but unfortunately I had another can't-be-missed meeting so wasn't there. Wonderfully, we have organised to meet the day of the Book Fair. She has to visit KM's birthplace first so isn't up for the all-important early fair forage (it's become a ritual), but later, she might. I wonder how much space she's got in her suitcase . . . 

Tuesday Poem: Element

Element

He slipped into it the way a man with ruddy

cheeks and cupped hands can find himself

with an orchard.

Henry Cavendish, whose only extant portrait

is an ink sketch of him hurrying from the room,

who hesitated

in speech, and refused to meet a person’s eye,

or to stand brilliant in the public gaze, made a name

measuring the unseen.

As a man with broad back and steady eye

sizes up a wall, the elusive Cavendish

was in his element

with factitious air. He measured with precision the

constancy of the atmosphere, discovered hydrogen,

put his finger

on the freezing point of quicksilver and felt the pulse

of gravity. He gauged the phenomena of electricity

in a time of candles.

Then, out of thin air, this man who trod so lightly, who

was – even in his own home – barely there, measured

without fanfare

the density  of the Earth. 

                                                 Mary McCallum

I wrote this after helping my daughter with a science project. I was so fascinated by Cavendish I kept  researching him long after she'd stuck in her last hydrogen atom and gone to bed. For more Tuesday Poems click the quill in the sidebar. The hub poem this week is chosen by Philadelphian poet Eileen Moeller, and there's so much more besides...

Careful or you'll end up in my next novel

Oh, yes, the perfect T-shirt for a writer. If you can't read the writing - it's in the title of the post. 


Not at all what I do of course - I prefer to invent rather than steal people for my novel(s), so much more fun. So much more Godlike. So much safer. Of course I still nick bits and pieces of people - a gesture of joy, a way of acting under stress, a mannerism of age, a nose ... and it's surprising how many people spot a mate or someone they think they know in a novel, even when the author's never met them. 


Anyway, you can buy this T-shirt HERE at the Literary Gift Company. There's a fab little Virginia Woolf pin, too, in the shape of a red typewriter and a perfume that smells like a paperback and a cup that says 'Go Away I'm Writing.' 


Thanks to Christchurch poet Joanna Preston for this link. And do check out her blog - she's just won the prestigious Mary Gilmore Prize for a first book of poetry in Australia, and her blog is insightful and inspiring. It's called the Dark Feathered Art, adapting a line from one of her poems:

Tuesday Poem: Stowage by Chris Price

for Jonathan Besser

The sadness of bells sitting silent
shelved like a library of hearts

old salts in their retirement.
Tap one on the lip and a ship

comes ghosting out of the fog
everything passing and human

held in a resonant vessel.
The submarine cathedral

of its ribs still echoes though the ship
is long since flensed and rendered

down – this spare music
the last thing that lingers

the songs of our youth
always the last to go.

Stowage was written about 22 abandoned ship's bells, as part of an installation at the Wellington Museum of the City and the Sea which combined music and poetry inspired by the bells.

The poem is part of Chris Price's collection The Blind Singer (AUP) and was selected for Best NZ Poems 2009. Chris explains on that website where her mind went as she wrote the poem. This explanation is a real treat. She says she visited the bells 'on the shelf' in a warehouse not far from where she lived, and they appeared to her to be 'a very melancholy thing'. And she goes on:

Somewhere behind the ‘library of hearts’ is a story that had been in the news some time before about a local hospital that had collected and stored the hearts of infants who had died – without the knowledge or consent of the parents. I was also thinking of a photograph I’d seen of poverty-stricken ship-breakers living on a beach in India (I think it was) amongst the rusting hulks of ships that looked like giant carcasses. Then there were the Celtic and Russian folk stories of sunken churches whose bells can sometimes be heard tolling. And lastly there’s the curious aspect of human memory experienced by some Alzheimer’s patients, that while they may be unable to remember what happened yesterday or even minutes ago, music can sometimes unlock the complete recall of the words to tunes they knew when they were young. 

More here.

Chris Price, it seems to me, is a poet's poet, in that she not only writes poetry, but she also leads the way for poets to follow along a certain path: rigorous, eventful, erudite, intersecting wildly with a range of characters and situations - and in her hand a bell. She is a poet who has a deep involvement with music which is why this poem, her recent collection and her magnificent book launch resonate(d) with the sound of music.  

Chris is co-convenor of the MA at the International Institute of Modern Letters in Wellington, co-editor of the online journal Turbine and one-time editor of Landfall. Chris' collection Husk won the NZSA Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poems in 2002, and Brief Lives was short-listed in the biography category of the 2007 Book Awards.  

Stowage is used here with the author's permission. Ask for The Blind Singer at all good independent bookstores who can order it from AUP. 

For more Tuesday Poems click on the quill in the sidebar. Today's Tuesday Poem at the hub is selected by US poet Melissa Shook, but that's just the start. There are thirty other poets to read in the live blog roll.