The Tuesday Poem: “The House Of Wives” by Jennifer Compton
The House Of Wives
1.
Ah – he said. Camogli. Casa delle mogli. The house of wives.
Because their husbands were fishermen and so always at sea.
Or it can mean houses packed close together. The village
like one house with many wives, calling out to each other
from their windows. Or, further back, after the deity, Camuli.
A sound too much like Ca’mogli to let the happy joke go past.
But – I replied. If they were fishermen then many would
have been drowned dead. The house of widows instead.
That is not the Italian way. We infer, we imply, we don’t say.
But now, of course, it is for the tourists, they sell ice cream.
.
2.
Paddling on the pebble beach – ouch ouch – I come upon
a blue clothes peg, her function intact, at the high tide line.
Back in Australia my pegs had gone missing mysteriously
then the day we found a satin bowerbird’s courtship avenue.
The males adore blue, filch drinking straws and bottle tops
and pegs. What had been vanishing was always and only blue.
They used to make do with berries and flowers, which faded,
but amcoplast solvent drives them on to a fresh excess of art,
brandishing the fetish, strutting and tossing, laying it down pat.
This very peg flies home, a gift from Camogli to our bowerbirds.
.
© Jennifer Compton
from This City, Otago University Press, 2011
Featured on “…Anything, Really” with permission
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I recently purchased a copy of This City , a book of poems by my fellow Tuesday Poet, Jennifer Compton, an expatriate New Zealander who resides in Melbourne. As I said while reading it in July, “it is wonderful, dear readers. I am blown away by the emotional depth, beauty, and integrity of the poems.”
So much so that I am delighted to feature Jennifer’s poems today, both here and as guest editor on the Tuesday Poem Hub. I feel both poems amply illustrate my July observation about This City. Having read the book, I completely see why it won the Kathleen Grattan Award in 2010.
I shall reserve my commentary for the Hub feature, but only say that I was particularly struck by both Jennifer’s poetic insight in The House Of Wives and the way the poem captures the intersection between worlds: past and present, the old world and the new, and the nexus of the cultural and natural worlds in the second stanza.
I hope you will also check out Jennifer’s poem on the Hub:
The Topography Of Wellington
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Jennifer Compton was born in New Zealand in 1949 and now lives in Melbourne. As mentioned above, her book of poems, This City, won the Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award in 2010. Her poem, ‘Now You Shall Know’, won the Newcastle Poetry Prize in 2013, and the collection of the same name was published last year in Australia (Five Islands Press), while her verse novella Mr Clean & The Junkie was published this year in New Zealand as part of the Hoopla series 2015 (Mākaro Press).
To find out more about Jennifer and her work, you can visit her on her blog:
Stillcraic
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Don’t forget to read the featured poem on the Tuesday Poem Hub and other great poems from fellow Tuesday poets from around the world—just click here.