Tuesday Poem: “Indigo” by Barbara Strang
Indigo
To achieve the
desired blue
the cloth had to
be lifted in
and out of the vats
in the heat
of India, Nigeria
or Thailand.
Indigo – you used
to wear that deep-dyed hue,
it suited you.
The name for the
spectral blue-violet.
Indigo
a blue as
deep as your eyes,
the lashes a flight of geese
on the last stripe of blue as the
sky plunges towards night.
.
(c) Barbara Strang
from The Corrosion Zone, HeadworX, 2011
Indigo is reproduced here with the permission of Barbara Strang.
—
Opening up The Corrosion Zone for the first time was one of those moments of mixed hesitation and anticipation—because although the collection, Barbara’s second, is new, I knew that I had already encountered several of the poems as works-in-progress when we were both part of the Friday Group (aka “the Boiler House.”) I had also heard others read as part of the Canterbury Poets’ Collective’s regular autumn season. So the hesitation was because I feared over-familiarity, the anticipation because I know just how good a poet Barbara is.
Well, that hesitation was gone as soon as I immersed myself in the poems. Yes, several are familiar, but Barbara (not surprisingly!) has revised and polished them since I first encountered them, lifting the poems to the higher level I expect in a HeadworX publication. And there is a great deal in The Corrosion Zone that was completely new to me, including a fine sequence of poems around Barbara’s brother, Andrew, who committed suicide several years ago. Other poems centre around the break up of Barbara’s marriage and the major transition that involved, both physically, with the loss of one home and move to another, and also emotionally. Yet despite these profound emotional shifts the collection is not indulgent, but spare, wry, and poignant in its understated reserve.
The Corrosion Zone also includes some very fine poetic turns of phrase, such as the culminating stanza of Indigo:
” …
the lashes a flight of geese
on the last stripe of blue as the
sky plunges towards night.”
.
Oh, yes: thank you, Barbara.
—
About the Poet:
Barbara Strang’s first poetry collection Duck Weather (Poets Group) was published in 2005, when John O’Connor described Barbara as “a significant new voice in New Zealand poetry.”
Barbara won the Aoraki Festival Contest in 1998, the NZ Poetry Society’s International Haiku Competition in both 2003 and 1997, and the Takahe Cultural Studies Competition 2002 for her essay on James K Baxter. She is currently editor for Sudden Valley Press and was guest editor for the NZ Poetry Society’s 2009 and 2010 anthologies. Barbara has an MA in Creative Writing from the Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University of Wellington (1998) and lives at McCormack’s Bay in Christchurch, New Zealand.
It’s good to see another poem from “The Corrosion Zone” published as a Tuesday Poem, and you are right:about how good that concluding stanza is!
And I like it when you struggle to even decide which poem you are going to ask if you can feature …
A love affair with a colour, and drawn in to the all important seeing eye as darkness falls in the final stanza. It’s a poem you can read much and more into – lovely choice, it makes me want to read more of her work.
The intensity around the colour certainly attracted me, possibly because I am very much a “blue” person, but the closing stanza was definitely the “clincher.” And “The Corrosion Zone” is definitely worth a good long look, in my view.