Poetry

When I was nineteen and newly married I used to sit in the branches of a willow tree writing poetry. My husband and his friends were building a concrete yacht in the front yard. It was what you did then in the seventies but you didn’t write poetry. At least no one I knew did. The only NZ writer I was vaguely aware of was Katherine Mansfield. No wonder then that I was teased to hell.

Apart from building a yacht and writing poetry I worked in the Post Office. I had left school at 16. I was in the top class but there was no expectation I would go to university. The thought never occurred to me or to my parents.

But somehow the habit of writing poetry stuck, I was I guess a little influenced by my father who read and wrote poetry himself (albeit humorous doggerel). I also had an English teacher who read us Dylan Thomas while sitting on her desk, swinging long legs encased in black lace stockings. She seemed the height of glamour. But even then I wanted to be the one writing not the one reading, I could not however, make myself sound anything like Dylan Thomas. It would have to be a private love affair. And as no one had told me any different I wrote about my life.

I never did much with the poems. I did send some off to what I now know was a vanity press. When I saw the rest of the poems in the anthology that came back after I had paid my sixty dollars, a fortune at the time. I knew instantly it was a con. I could recognise other people’s bad poems, if not my own. I suppose I didn’t really have a lot to say then. What I was doing in sitting in the tree was establishing some psychic space of my own. A place for silence and privacy where no one could see what I was writing before I was ready to show them. It took motherhood and two failed marriages before I was ready to reveal my poems. Poetry was my first love, but it’s not something that can be forced. They come when they are good and ready. Here are a couple.

Follow me if you will

one a.m. in Quay St
a small black balloon
waits unaccompanied
on the footpath, taking
my heart for a minute

away from the language
of the evening
was it significant
his leaning towards me
and do I want it to be so?

no such doubt exists
for the balloon
things are working out
entirely as expected
it’s obvious

by the way it bobs
across the road
jauntily dodging cars
heading straight
for the ferry building

From Best New Zealand Poems 2004

I was living in Auckland and driving home from a dinner party at the writer, Judith White’s house, when I saw a black balloon waiting at the traffic lights. Philip Temple, had also been at the dinner. We had met before and were attracted to each other but, living at opposite ends of the country, didn’t see how we could get together. I wrote the poem and with Judith’s encouragement, sent it to Philip. He sent me back a nice card saying he loved the poem but it was still a long way, even in a following wind, from Anderson’s Bay in Dunedin to Murray’s Bay in Auckland. But it was the start of something. Most of the poems in my collection, Learning to Lie Together, deal with the process of having a long distance relationship and then making the leap to a new city, leaving friends, and family behind.

And here’re a couple of extracts from Taking My Mother To the Opera.

Growing up, I never was
interested in the details
of their lives before me,

being happy enough
with the simple narrative:
A whirlwind romance, met

and married in six weeks,
Dad said. Neither of them
pretended the past

was a place they would
take us to — if only they
could remember the way.

They couldn’t forget it
but they kept it to themselves
while we got on with the moment.

c

The dusty albums stored
in the lounge record trips
taken in retirement

and could belong to any couple.
But not these unlabelled,
undated old photos

thrown into shoe boxes
and stacked on the floor
in my old room.

Too late to ask permission,
it’s up to me to tease out
some sort of narrative

from the missing story,
to add the words
I never thought to ask.