broadsheet new new zealand poetry

Issue No. 19, May 2017

Editor: Mark Pirie

THE NIGHT PRESS WELLINGTON

/ 1 Contents copyright 2017, in the names of the individual contributors

Published by The Night Press

Cover image: Peter Bland, photo from Collected Poems (Steele Roberts Ltd); photo by John Schroeder (2013) at www.the digitaldarkroom.co.nz

Etching on p. 16 by Guthrie Smith, 1965

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ISSN 1178-7805 (Print) ISSN 1178-7813 (Online)

Please Note: At this stage no submissions will be read. The poems included are solicited by the editor. All submissions will be returned. Thank you. 2 / Contents

PREFACE / 5

FLEUR ADCOCK / 6

PETER BLAND / 9

GORDON CHALLIS / 17

GLENN COLQUHOUN / 18

MARILYN DUCKWORTH / 20

RIEMKE ENSING / 22

MICHAEL HARLOW / 24

KEVIN IRELAND / 26

LOUIS JOHNSON / 27

KAPKA KASSABOVA / 28

VINCENT O’SULLIVAN / 30

BOB ORR / 32

A G PETTET / 34

GUS SIMONOVIC / 36

ELIZABETH SMITHER / 37

C K STEAD / 38

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS / 40

/ 3 Acknowledgements

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the editors and publishers of the following journals or collections, where the following poems in this issue first appeared:

Peter Bland: ‘Exotic’, ‘This poem starts right now...’ and ‘Evensong’ from A Fugitive Presence (Steele Roberts Ltd, Wellington, 2016).

Gordon Challis: ‘Gifts’ from Luck of the Bounce (Steele Roberts Ltd, Wellington, 2008).

Marilyn Duckworth: ‘Marble Solitaire’ from The Chiming Blue: New and Selected Poems (Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2017).

Kevin Ireland: ‘Exotic’ is from Kevin’s 23rd book of poems Humphrey Bogart’s great sacrifice (Steele Roberts Ltd, Wellington, December 2016).

Louis Johnson: ‘At the Palazzo Pitti’ from Selected Poems ed. Terry Sturm (Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2000). Thanks to Cecilia Johnson.

A G Pettet: All three poems from Improvised Dirges: New & Selected Poems (Bareknuckle Books, Brisbane, Australia, 2015, new ed. 2016).

Gus Simonovic: Poems taken from Allowed and Aloud: Selected Poems, edited by Laurice Gilbert, President, New Zealand Poetry Society (Printable Reality, Auckland, 2014).

4 / Preface

Peter Bland (actor/writer) is one of the major New Zealand poets, and the recipient of the Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry in 2011. I first knew him as an actor in Came a Hot Friday (1985) with comedian Billy T James, which I saw as a teenager. His poetry I discovered later at age 19, when reading an anthology in my father’s library: Recent Poetry in New Zealand (1965). The poets in this selection certainly interested me in writing poetry myself. James K Baxter, Louis Johnson, Fleur Adcock, Peter Bland, Alistair Campbell, Kendrick Smithyman, Gordon Challis and C K Stead were firm favourites. Peter’s lively poems of anger and experience spoke to me, with a suburban and domestic outlook, accessible and well-crafted. Early poems like ‘Death of a Dog’ live with me still. I never expected to be featuring/publishing Peter, 20 something years on from first reading him, let alone some of the poets he has invited to be in this issue with him, who I first read in that above-mentioned anthology. It’s nice to make this issue a tribute to Peter’s poetry and contribution to our literature. Peter has kindly written a brief note as an introduction:

I’ve been writing poetry for over 60 years, so I’ve lived through all sorts of literary fashions and arguments that, at the time, seemed absolutely necessary to encounter, and probably were, particularly in terms of belonging, where the here-and-now of lived experience is the active field for all sorts of poetic possibilities, and is as open to the wayfarer as it is to the tribal chief, though both will inhabit it differently. But literary theories are nothing more than stimuli, and valuable as these are the origins of poetry are more elemental, primal, even sacred, than that. The Argentinian poet Borges admits that there’s a need among poets ‘to be familiar with the renowned uncertainties of metaphysics,’ but only in order to make the best use of staying open to experience, and ‘to help pass on what we don’t know as much as what we do.’ The sources of poetry are as ancient as cave paintings and the modern poet still has to have something of the shaman left in him in order to be able to indulge in a little cave talk and to commune alone with the deeper sources of his imagination.

Thanks to those who contributed to Peter’s issue and shared my feelings for celebrating his impressive oeuvre in New Zealand poetry. A few poets outside the feature are included: A G Pettet from Brisbane, co-editor of the international Bareknuckle Poet series, and Gus Simonovic from Auckland, an innovative entrepreneur, publisher and poet.

Mark Pirie Wellington, May 2017 / 5 Fleur Adcock

T H A M E S

Rather alternative these days, Thames: haunted op-shops full of fancy crockery, tottering canyons of old wardrobes, a sense of goods for sale that aren’t on show. Hippies cruise by like extras in a film, togged up in beards and unlikely knitwear.

Most things that happened here happened a while ago: like the gold rush, with its hundred hotels; like the locomotive industry (watch out or you’ll turn into a museum); like staying with Auntie Lizzie and Alma on our post-war back-from-England tour.

They gave us exotic fruits with real cream and a crate of nasty American sodas to make us feel at home in New Zealand. ‘That’s not fat, it’s muscle’, said Auntie Lizzie when we thwacked her on the bum, enjoying a new great-aunt we could be cheeky with.

From Pollen Street Auckland to Pollen Street Thames Alma had come in her middle-aged bridehood, having married that pillar of rectitude Mr Belcher of Ezywalkin Shoes. (You wouldn’t dare to wallop Mr Belcher; we rather doubted if he had a bum.)

6 / Nearly seventy years on, the former Ezywalkin declines to reveal itself – how to tell one handsome but faded shop-front from another? Even this café has a past. (Whoops! There goes a funeral: a squad of bikers roaring behind a hearse.)

When we’ve finished our toasted sandwiches it’s time for the next touristic indulgence. Andrew offers the bird hide, approached by a boardwalk over a mangrove swamp: not quite as long as he’d remembered but joyously a-flutter with fantails.

By now the chief museum will be open (and don’t worry about that hooter; it’s a call for the Volunteer Fire Brigade – to which no one seems to be responding). I thank my clever son for the fantails. ‘That’s OK – any time’, says the modest.

/ 7 A G A M E O F 5 0 0

The Muse is a seeker after sensation. She wants me to tell you about the time when my second husband offered to play me at cards for my young lover’s life.

Except that it wasn’t quite like that: no death on offer, for example; just a beating-up. And anyway he’d left me first, the bastard; and anyway

But enough of that (although yes, I won). What I’d rather tell you about is how in this hot summer the little girls have been chalking on the pavement:

birthday cakes with coloured candles, and, repeated twice in large letters, ‘Horse Queen of the Year’ – whatever they may have meant by that.

8 / Peter Bland

C O N C E R N I N G O U R O W N B I T O F T I M E yours or mine. Down at the harbour at daybreak a small boat arrives (not the one with black sails). It’s dawn and your life is coming ashore. Of course people are waiting to shame you out of it, talking about a zeitgeist and the proper way to create. That’s OK. Deep down you know that building fences or ticking boxes was never really the name of the game. Sometimes it gets so confusing (this sense of paradise mixed with ancient betrayals) that the dog looks up wondering whether to howl or slyly lie back and wag its tail.

/ 9 T H E S P I R I T H O U S E

Mould in the bread bin, ants in the sugar bowl. There’s the damp smell of earth in every room. We bring it back on wet clothes and soiled shoes. The year’s running low on the warmth it loves most, and the dark is closing in, so it’s time to build a small Spirit House with gifts of mulled wine and an old Chinese poem about a loved one coming home. We’ll place it next to those ants in the sugar bowl and a couple of thin bees blown in from the cold.

10 / E X O T I C

Angela Ackroyd was exotic back in Pommyland in the ’50s. At 15 she painted sexy seams on her drab school stockings. Wonder Woman and Tarzan’s Jane were exotic, and anything that tasted like Turkish Delight and of a paradise where you never got caned or were made to sing GOD SAVE THE KING at the end of the film. Foreign stamps were exotic, especially those with palms and lots of Lawrence of Arabias on camels. Even the poppy Dad wore once a year was exotic. It was like a scarlet butterfly that landed on his lapel and stayed there all day. You couldn’t take your eyes off it!

/ 11 T H E D I S T A N C E B E T W E E N U S

Tonight you’ve come close. I can almost see you. In the stillness of my room at dusk you linger in the distance between us, just as we both did when you lived here. After all that was our freedom, leaving ourselves room to move then taking each other outrageously for granted. Linger a little longer. Indulge me. At least I know you’ve not moved on, or not wholly so. I’m led to believe that something of our love still intrigues you. Across the border that now stretches between us the perfume of your presence storms towards me.

12 / R E G R E S S I O N

Looking at photos (fading fast) of our not-so-distant Edwardian past, I can’t help noticing the smooth top-hats, high white collars, cuffs and spats, and how manners so obviously maketh man. There’s one shot of grandad reading Darwin. It must be posed because he’s reading upside down in front of a huge globe coloured red. It seems that Empire Builders are naturally selected and have come a long way since Peking man. How many genes from those ambitious figures (gathered here at a Gentlemens Club) still hang around in my own ageing blood is difficult to tell, but sometimes (and for no good reason) I suddenly feel a deep need to regress, to paint cave walls and smoke some pot and shake the little toy tomahawk my mother gave me before I grew up.

/ 13 T H I S P O E M S T A R T S R I G H T N O W

as they do. This one after weeks of rain is desperate to stay for as long as it can under a blue sky with the sun on its back but it knows it can’t stop moving on because that’s the name of the game. So at this stage all I can safely say is there once was a blue sky rather like this and a sun (which has now gone in) that this poem welcomed a few lines back and tried really hard to hold things up just long enough to say that it did.

14 / D O N ’ T W O R R Y A B O U T T H O S E A N G E L S

Don’t worry about those angels who keep dropping in. Permit yourself to be blessed. Your confusion doesn’t make them any less real, and anyway what a funny word real is when angels are around. Let them stay awhile. Let them rest their wings.

E V E N S O N G

At the end of the garden a soft evening light blooms between two grapefruit trees. Night hasn’t been invented yet but it’s beginning to suggest itself. You can hear earth pausing between breaths. I return here at the close of each day like an animal coming back to drink.

/ 15 E N D S A N D B E G I N N I N G S

After Hafiz

Oceans have shrunk to a childhood pond and the road to Samarkand was never more than a dream. Now ends and beginnings meet under this tree where, as evening comes, I await my love. Speak, old poet, let her know I’m here. Light a lamp to show her the way.

16 / Gordon Challis

G I F T S

For Peter Bland

Sometimes they cannot be crammed into the letter box so are left on display in the space below designed for the use of milkmen or their ghosts.

When I was a postie it was not done that way – we left a note saying where parcels could be claimed.

Our ghosts haunt helplessly – we cannot wake anticipation with a chime of bottles; we swing our satchels driving dogs off howling yet gain no attention.

What gifts we bear come from a more generous age and their recipients still hope for its return.

Meanwhile we bring the fascination of wrappings and our ghosts have become voyeurs observing how gifts are opened – the personal styles and timing – what eagerness, what privacy or what delays.

/ 17 Glenn Colquhoun

A L E T T E R T O I R I S W I L K I N S O N

In Berhampore, among the poor, the little houses stack. In Lyall Bay the seagulls play, what net can hold the catch? In Lyall Bay the seagulls play, what net can hold the catch?

For I am here, and you are there, who knows what lies between? Did we once meet on Bolton Street? For all’s not all it seems. Did we once meet on Bolton Street? For all’s not all it seems.

In Sydneytown, once I went down to hear the Tasman call. The twist, the weave, the heft, the heave, the gods bereaved, the roar. The twist, the weave, the heft, the heave, how unrelieved the roar.

For I am well, the tui swell, the southerly drops in. While we drink tea on Lambton Quay, I sip, you sip, we grin. While we drink tea on Lambton Quay, I sip, you sip, we grin.

In Notting Hill, I sing you still, from sorrow, soil and stone. Inside your eyes, the godwits fly, here, let them rest a while. Inside your eyes, the godwits fly, here, let them rest a while.

For I am here, and you are there, who knows what lies between? Did we once meet on Bolton Street? For all’s not all it seems. Did we dance in Plimmer park? What’s been, has been, still clings. Did we once meet on Bolton Street? For all’s not all it seems.

18 / Note: Iris Wilkinson was a New Zealand writer who published under the pen name Robin Hyde. She grew up in Wellington and spent her early childhood in Berhampore. Throughout her life she struggled with a number of sorrows including the death of a child and the adoption of another. Despite this she wrote a number of novels, including her best- known work, The Godwits Fly. She also published books of poetry and journalism and many columns for various newspapers. In 1938 she was witness to the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, reporting on this to a newspaper in London. Later she travelled on to England but took her own life the following year at the age of 38. As a young writer I attended a lecture on Iris given by her son, Derek Challis, who had spent many years working on her biography. I remember being moved by her story and by a son’s search for his mother. She seemed a remarkable woman. I also thought Iris was beautiful. Seeing her image projected onto a screen and listening to her words being read, I found myself falling in love with her back across time. This poem is about that experience and about bringing Iris back to a time and place that might have been more accepting. It is also about showing her some gentleness, for all that is worth. / 19 Marilyn Duckworth

M A R B L E S O L I T A I R E

Uneasy sandals, treading the shore at Worthing, squeaky on slipping pebbles sea stones, fathom-worn, sun-glittered, shell litter. The streets behind us purr with mobility cars cute and convenient comic with promise.

While we loiter time is rolling underfoot on treacherous marbles, dropping away, aside. The men are plunging manfully in the tide playing Stevie Smith, while the sea tilts. Too far! Not drowning, not even aging. Or? Pretending is easy, while the sun pours gouts of blood-red gold. Come back!

Old folk and stones. How they collect! Mother collected them – memories to busy the grandkids. Her gem tray’s mine now. My Worthing stone finds company nestled here it handles like a dream. Stones answer a touch.

Grandpa’s Solitaire broods on a higher shelf: the original marble game breadboard, full-moon face, sawn, pitted, pocked with a crafty blade, studded with clay spheres, individual unique as thumb tips.

20 / We learned to play, my sister and I. The end is to isolate the one, the sun. Step over and discard, marble and marble plick, plick. Until the little stony marble – the head-stone alone, and you’ve won. What?

We were only playing.

/ 21 Riemke Ensing

A C H I N A S H O E

[for Peter Bland after reading his later poems]

In your poems absence is presence and distance is near. You keep watch on the way light folds into a bright dress stained with the blackberries straight out of a Monet getting lost in desire.

You keep doors open for the past to walk back through, mesmerized by memory zinging with joy.

Sometimes that vast expanse of unclouded summer sky bluer than Titian’s lapis takes you by the throat and we see that Bellini foot you mentioned in a poem. Matisse might enter here. A woman at a table in a garden dangling her foot. Seductive and inviting. The trees nudging.

Remember that painting by Frances Hodgkins? Flowers and vases and almost hidden a china shoe. A tender keepsake you might put on a shelf. A white shoe with a heart in blue. Who would have thought a foot could be so flirtatious?

22 / D E A T H

[also thinking about Peter Bland writing Loss* ]

In the garden the stalks of the papyrus bend their graceful heads.

Sky is blue impossibly surreal the promise of worlds not yet undone, the wish for a thousand hours.

How far can one travel?

It’s almost beyond remembering when we were young.

I browse through old photos – memories of other eras without the complications of winter.

I would like now the consolation of prayers, but that would be another country.

*Loss, Peter Bland, Steele Roberts, 2010. A sequence of poems written the year following his wife’s death.

/ 23 Michael Harlow

R E A D I N G B E T W E E N - T H E - L I N E S , M I S S F L O R A F L O R E N T I N E

For many years our esteemed librarian, Miss Flora was the keeper of books in our small town library, once an old colonial bank called The Vault. She was widow-thin and quick as a glistening whistle, and had eyes and ears everywhere, Miss Flora Florentine. On occasion, it was she said to herself her duty, spying discreetly on what was going on in the stacks. Such sighing and whispering and rustling of clothes; and once, the rippling riff of a zipper. As our keeper of words, she was especially covetous of the Romance section. The thrill of ‘all that came to pass’, her eyes would shine with excitement. It was reading-between-the-lines that did it. And her desperate imagination she let fly during one particularly dreamy holiday. It came to her just like that presto out of the dark, ‘Some ideas are so crazy that no one has them’, except yourself’, she said to herself from inside the mirror. It was then on the last chapter of the New Year turning, that Miss Flora Florentine disappeared—into the pages of that most mysterious of novels, where she is now, A Spy in the House of Love*.

*Anaïs Nin 24 / ‘ F O R O N C E , T H E N , S O M E T H I N G ’

More than just a glancing smile. I saw the conducting hand of the wind in the bodies of trees, all that leaf green music. And the voice of your unborn child there. I saw your heartbeat at your wrist, and the planetary single star tattooed there. Despit all the small noises of persuasion, I didn’t look in the direction of your hand, reaching into the falling darkness. Looking the other way back into your eyes and beyond—I saw for once, then, something. I saw a small boy crossing a swing bridge on air, waving in his out-stretched hand, a key made of light.

A M A T I N É E S P E C I A L

In which the wedding cake with the dancing couple on the top layer, never turned up. And neither did the bride and groom. Or the flower girl with her primrose posy, dressed in astonishment. And his maiden aunt, gone missing, with her blackthorn walking stick that could still talk to children, when she shook it to wake it up. Something about the soon-to-be and Her defloration true that undid her. And Himself a cross-dresser who just couldn’t get it up for the occasion. They had gone for an intimate stroll along the boardwalk, to admire the sea and marvel at the dog who kept trying to bite the fleece-topped waves. And they dropped in on a matinée special, the back row. And their favourite dance team: Fred Astaire in his flying liquorice tails, and Ginger Rogers, all legs and a discreet but wicked cleavage—having the time of their, unmarried lives.

/ 25 Kevin Ireland

E X O T I C

For Peter Bland

This morning, over the telephone, Peter Bland read me his poem ‘Exotic’. It has made my day, wiped age from my eyes and lifted my spirits like a raised glass.

His take on it was nine parts memory with a large knob of liberty, a fistful of erotic fantasy and the rest was great and generous and explosive joy. It set me asking

what would I come up with if today that poem had knocked around inside my head? But immediately a complicated list unrolled of what exotic could not mean to me – things like

tropical islands, rare foods, downtown bars, clothes, girls, poems, paintings – and instead I kept on thinking of how my despotic father managed to combine a blind belief in justice,

tyranny, slush, ferocity, hate, altruism, stinginess, kindness and misery. I call that so outrageous that exotic is hardly a word big enough to bag it all up in one bundle – though I can’t

come up with another so it will have to do, Good old Pete. So comic, courageous and good. Three words I wish I could pin to a father too damned wacky, too neurotic.

26 / Louis Johnson

A T T H E P A L A Z Z O P I T T I

Gold trappings on a horse’s arse.

Outside, the beggar’s hands curl like question marks

milking the daylight of necessities.

For them, business as usual. The art is for the tourists.

* This poem by the late Louis Johnson was included in a letter to his friend Peter Bland in September 1975. / 27 Kapka Kassabova

S U M M E R S L I K E T H I S

Summers like this feel like the last of the sap is rising, the last heron grazing the river, the last berry blood on the skin, the last stab of wheat in the harvest that will make you sad.

And now this mud-track further in, further in where you glimpse the stags drinking, where you can’t see the sun and warm rain slaps the forest in ecstasy, where the past

waits for you like a friend with a gun. And when you come near – you can’t help coming near – you remember why summers like this feel like the last.

28 / S O M E W H E R E

We think that all of time is ours here in the secret glen, all the way to the coast, and the seasons with their happy disappointments are ours, the daily berries too, and also the white heron at the gates of water, a guardian to the hererafter, we think that days like this will be repeated like a right, the inherited wealth of lovers, the pulpy fruit of being here lying in the water, faces to the sky bodies full of sap, the summer poised like a glinting dagger of victory the heron now open and soaring, eternity fulfilled, that there is no end to this river that gives itself to the sea twenty miles down, then enters the ocean and has our last words written on it, we think – with moonlight ink – somewhere where no one can touch it.

/ 29 Bob Orr

S H O R E L E A V E

I’m reading Homer’s great manual –

how not to make it safely home from sea.

My hat sits upside down on the table –

its rim the same circumference as my head and in its odour the mystery of yesterday’s sweat.

On a paving stone where a cat lay asleep in the sun a cicada begins to dictate its epic poem.

When I see her on Quay Street texting a sailor

I’ll raise my cap to grey eyed Athena.

30 / L O V E P O E M

That you stand amid leaves not so long ago green

( a Chinese tree’s golden foliage at your feet ) is to me as if you’d let loose a kimono and waited like an empress in a yellow room.

/ 31 Vincent O’Sullivan

T H I S W A S W A Y B A C K , M I N D

I once had a big row with a friend about Shirley Temple. A really disagreeable contretemps. I played an old 78, we were shooting arrows at a target on a eucalypt on a farm near Hautapu turn-off. My friend was English and touchy and thought I condescended because of his age, a bald man as I then tried to joke, jealous of that moppet!

He married a Greek woman who took him back to her island, after several weeks of his being enraged that she danced most evenings, a cousin, so she told me, asked as they walked where they had always walked as children, past a working monastery and a modern fishery, ‘Would you like me to kill him?’

Almost everyone in this story is now dead. The Greek woman I admired greatly is dead, I remember her clapping her hands as she quoted Nikos Ritsos. The man who did not hate Shirley Temple but hated my playing her twice, equally dead, and the cousin I expect who offered a good turn.

The arrows weren’t correctly fletched and flew a touch off-line. The 78 scritched at some of what may have been the nicest notes. The magpies in the gums on the Cambridge Road hated us destroying their afternoon. When people mention the farm, that’s what I think of. Thwock was the sound of missing the target and embedding the scented wood.

32 / O N E G I R L T H I N K I N G N I A G A R A

A skinny river on a page in a fat atlas pushes towards the whitest, the widest moustache in the world, and to every side small rivers, each stream to each river, as centipede legs so gifting its glinty glide, the current’s pace, the percussion’s spray, its roiling mists exciting as if now she were standing on the famous platform, shouting the words too loud to hear themselves shouting – all this on one page’s exuberant thunders, such racketing pelt, the river’s folding in half, the fall’s leap and the always falling, the momentary walls!

She fingers the wire-thin line on its silent page, the whisperingest telling of the wettest rage. Close the book then shall we, close the door, shut the world as we step back from it, God’s epaulette as the child draws it on the shoulder of time, what the morning means and forever and still when we’re dead.

‘So I’ve told you exactly,’ the song of all she imagines, the giantest she can think of steaming fact: imagine, true as the creek speaking her own backyard.

/ 33 A G Pettet

R E D

I believe in a night of all blue languidity freedom and flight, sex and meditation, poetry and bliss.

I felt the final inklings of your lost lucidity and stood laughing at your grotesque display I fancy I saw you smiling from the filth on the floor. My perverse Venus, my purple and battered midnight.

A W A I T I N G B A C C H U S

She folds in upon herself skin, into skin, a night of forgotten wealth seeps through the firmament. She weeps in a broken music box the tinkling springs make a melancholy song, a funeral march for the forgotten. She plays her harp among the stars of Osiris and begs to be reformed once again. She tears her flesh upon an olive branch and whimpers in the vineyard awaiting Bacchus.

34 / W A L P U R G I S N A C H T

She smiles, pale as the moon. Hands warm cradle my heart. Secret fingers grasp me inescapable as the grave. And she is pale, pale, the moon.

/ 35 Gus Simonovic

I S L A N D A N D T H E S E A

look from the cloud, how waves weave an infinite white ring, enclosing the island

you can see their connection, hot and cold day and night, year on year, in and out

yesterday we held hands on that beach today you ask me to be your friend

last week we splashed in a labour of love now, you expect me to labour your point

my words will promise anything, as I am rational man my heart will continue to sing, as I am poet

you can turn my words into rocks and sand to protect yourself from the song of the waves

for what can the sea and the island be – other than lovers or friends?

A N O T H E R M E S S E N G E R

I bring you: one cubic metre of thoughts and a gram of love.

OK, bring them to the kitchen please I am cooking.

I don’t think that love will fit through your door.

That’s what happens when you think too much.

36 / Elizabeth Smither

D R Y C L E A N E R S : L O N D O N A N D P A R I S

A little girl like a shepherdess receives my knit top with a tomato stain and returns the docket. Tuesday.

On Tuesday it’s hanging on a hanger the spot shrunk but still visible. I can’t complain to a shepherdess who has lost one stain but carries its ghost in her demeanour like a lost lamb. I take it to another drycleaner.

In Paris the spot is onion soup. Briskly it is frowned over: one week to remove it, Madame. Not sooner.

It will take a special discovery of benzene an accident like Tarte Tatin and rows of girls in chemises sweating over garments in poor ventilation. No wonder we should sniff at improvements in Paris and failure in London.

/ 37 C K Stead

F I V E S H O R T S F O R P E T E R B L A N D

Köanga

Kowhai knows and tells by tolling yellow bells.

Witchy Wellington

A summer southerly sky grey the sea a beat-up and passing Grass Street I thought of impossible Lauris.

Down from Auckland in a lassitude of reluctance but now here it was that same old pricking of the thumbs.

Oriental Bay, 6 a.m.

Wellington windless lacking the whip and the lash can be lovely.

Back to the wall feet in the flood asleep on its elbows it waits to be woken.

38 / Vulpi

Through iron bars of this locked London park three fleet shadows are scholars of silence mariners of midnight under an icy moon.

The laureate’s last

His last was not least nor yet his best but shaped for a shoe his size and like his sighs not to last.

/ 39 Notes on Contributors

FLEUR ADCOCK was born in New Zealand but has lived in London since 1963. Her poetry is published by Bloodaxe Books (UK) and Victoria University Press (NZ); the most recent was The Land Ballot (2014/15), and a new collection, Hoard, will be published in 2017. PETER BLAND is the featured poet in this issue (see Preface, p. 5). GORDON CHALLIS is a Nelson-based poet, and widely anthologised in major anthologies of New Zealand poetry. Latest book: Selected Poems (2016). GLENN COLQUHOUN is a poet/doctor, who has currently been writing a collection of oral poems for recording and performance. MARILYN DUCKWORTH is a Wellington novelist/poet. Recipient of the Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction in 2016. The Chiming Blue (poetry) just published. RIEMKE ENSING is an Auckland poet, who has recently published in Landfall, Australian Poetry Journal, The Journal of Post Colonial Writing, Mahurangi Cruising Club Yearbook, Eight Poems 2017 (hand-printed, Pear Tree Press), the 2017 Poetry New Zealand Yearbook, the unexpected greenness of trees (Caselberg Poetry Competition anthology) and Takahe 89. MICHAEL HARLOW’s Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award for 2015, Nothing For It But To Sing, was recently published by Otago University Press. He lives and works in Central Otago as a writer, editor, and Jungian therapist. KEVIN IRELAND lives in Devonport, Auckland. His new book is Humphrey Bogart’s great sacrifice (Steele Roberts, Wellington, 2016). LOUIS JOHNSON (1924-1988) was a major New Zealand poet and influential poetry editor and a long-term friend of Peter Bland’s. Peter co-edited Louis’s Last Poems with the late Auckland academic/editor Terry Sturm. KAPKA KASSABOVA lives in the Scottish Highlands. Author of several poetry books and three books of narrative non-fiction, the latest of which is Border. VINCENT O’SULLIVAN is a poet, novelist, short story writer, and dramatist, who lives in Dunedin. His last collection of poems was And so it is, 2016. BOB ORR, an Auckland poet, is the recent recipient of the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for Poetry 2016. A G PETTET is an internationally published Queensland poet. His second collection Improvised Dirges: New & Selected Poems was published in 2015. Pettet is co-editor, with Brentley Frazer, of the international Bareknuckle Poet anthologies. GUS SIMONOVIC is Auckland based creative entrepreneur and arts administrator, cultural catalyst and community animator, poet and educator, publisher, producer and promoter, yoga teacher and retreat co-ordinator, communicator and connector. ELIZABETH SMITHER is a celebrated New Plymouth writer. C K STEAD is the current New Zealand poet laureate. His new novel, The Necessary Angel, will be published in November.

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