In my recent Monday updates, I’ve mentioned that the Canterbury Poets’ Collective Spring Season of poetry readings is currently in full swing. One of the guest poets on the first evening was Johanna Aitchison and I am currently reading her collection “A Long Girl Ago” (Victoria University Press, 2007.)

And I have to say that I am enjoying it very much, as I did Johanna’s reading on October 3. She has a distinctive “voice” and also uses alter egos, such as “miss red” in this collection, as a way of experimenting with and extending the narrator’s voice within the poems.

Here’s a few lines to give you the flavour:

‘steel to fm daylight picks
down williams road paihia
middle of summer bro’
— from ‘the smell calls out hot’

and:

” The sun hits the tips of waves in Lyall Bay, the big wing, your
sunglasses as you fly into Wellington again. The blow of water,
the salt, salt water, would taste like lips after fish and chips.”
— from ‘is anybody in there’

also:

”   I make telephone calls
to my bones, eat evenings
full of 12-year-old
video credits.”
— from “miss red in japan”

—

For an indepth review of A Long Girl Ago, you may read Joan Fleming’s review, published in “The Lumiere Reader”, here.

For the full list of the forthcoming spring season lineup of readings, see my post here. (And interestingly, one of next week’s guest poets is Joan Fleming.)