The Tuesday Poem: Refeaturing Bernadette Hall and “The Fox”
The Fox
The fox is a single red stroke that cuts across
the clearing. The colour seems to hang like smoke,
you can almost see where she has come from.
Her musk (though you can smell nothing)
is specific like a thumbprint on the air.
It isn’t raining but there’s a kind of wet
on your face, a stickiness of insect juices dropped.
The fox is rusty-dull, discreet, not radiant or hot
or pulsing. Not agitated. Not randy.
She is completely dream and intelligence
sliding through the wet grass, the stinging nettles,
the little brittle helmets of dry seed,
a flower or two, relics of the drizzly, petalled summer.
The lyric fox goes down to the creek
where dark and dankness will mask her scent
and the lovely rosette of her face.
She’ll be able to pause there, for a while, sip water
while the dogs swirl and bell in front of the Big House.
(c) Bernadette Hall
from The Lustre Jug (VUP) 2009
The Fox was a Best New Zealand Poem 2009
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Fine poems should be read and heard more than once, so I’m continuing with my series of relooking at poets who have had multiple poems featured here on “…Anything, Really” since I joined the Tuesday Poem community in June 2010. Bernadette Hall’s “The Fox” was both one of the early poems featured, on 17 August 2010, and has also been one of the most enduringly popular in terms of readers’ visits. I hope you enjoy re-reading it today.
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About Bernadette Hall:
Bernadette Hall is best known for her poetry but also writes short fiction. She has published ten collections of poetry, the most recent being ‘Life & Customs’ (Victoria University Press 2013). Also in 2013, her edition of poems by the Christchurch writer, Lorna Staveley Anker, was published by Canterbury University Press. Titled ‘The Judas Tree’ it reveals Lorna Anker as New Zealand’s first woman war poet with memories of both World Wars. The Dunedin composer Anthony Ritchie used seven of Bernadette’s Stations of the Cross poems in a symphony which premiered in Christchurch on the 22nd of February this year as a memorial to those who died and those who have suffered as a result of the 2011 earthquake.
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A lovely poem …such delicacy of detail.
We’re there in it as readers, aren’t we–in a very sense-ual way.