National Poetry Day—& “The Curve of the World”
Today, Friday 22 is National Poetry Day here in NZ and events poetic are happening right now—and will be happening all day—all over the country.
To look for an event near you, you can check out the National Poetry Day website, here.
On the Tuesday Poem Blog Hub, guest editor Renee Liang has featured poems from the three finalists for this year’s 2011 NZ Post National Book Award for Poetry, which will be announced at an awards ceremony to be held in Wellington on 27 July 2011. Renee’s guest editorial includes a brief introduction to each of the shortlisted collections, but you can also see each of the featured books here.
Last year, I posted “Ti” for National Poetry Day, and this year I have chosen another poem that I feel has a distinctively New Zealand flavour in terms of landscape/seascape—I hope you enjoy.
The Curve of the World
Summer breathes
through marram grass, salt-tough
where the southerly whips in
off the Pacific, light &
shadow all the way out
to the distant smudge
of albatross feeding—at night
you see lights dance,
squid boats fishing
the same spot.
The larger ships, too,
follow the albatross road,
tall towers disappearing
beneath the curve
of the world …
The wind sweeps in, recounts
tales of ships, albatross,
men with eyes bleached
to seams … tells
it all to the salt grass
and driftwood piled
into a beach fire—
smoke wavers upward
in a thin stream, dissipates
into the gulf
of sky.
.
(c) Helen Lowe
.
Published in JAAM 27: Wanderings, ed. Ingrid Horrocks, 2009
Very cool… 🙂
I love your poetry, Helen. When is a full collection coming out? Or did one come out already that I missed? I wants more, my precious.
Mary, thank you! As yet there is no collection—but perhaps, one day, you never know …
One copy sold right here! 🙂
Thank you, ma’am!
I agree with Mary. I love your poetry and think there should be a collection. I also took the liberty of posting a few excerpts from your recent earthquake poems onto the library’s blog yesterday. They were doing a feature of excerpts from earthquake poems and i thought yours needed to be there. I hope you agree that it counts as “fair use” since they are all small excerpts of the larger poem. But I was a little ticked off because most of the poets they featured were from everywhere but Christchurch or Canterbury and here you are writing these great poems and not even getting a mention.
Craig–thank you for your enthusiasm for my poetry. It is hard not to be pleased when someone shows such support for your work—and I think the excerpts you have posted probably do count as fair use. In general though, I do think that it is good to ask the writer as well, eg by emailing me through my webmail for example, just as a courtesy, but also in case they have some other reason for not wanting their work featured at a particular time, eg it might be just about to be featured somewhere else. This is not the case this time–and I am still very pleased that you liked my earthquake poems enough to feature them in your comment.
I did think about the asking bit (*grins sheepishly*) after I had posted my comment on the Library’s blog. Duh! It’s a fair point though and i can only cite enthusiasm for the poetry by way of extenuating circumstance.
I think “enthusiasm for the poetry” counts for a lot of “extenuation.” 😉 So no worries, it’s all good!