{"id":12148,"date":"2012-03-06T07:23:05","date_gmt":"2012-03-05T18:23:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/?p=12148"},"modified":"2012-03-06T07:23:52","modified_gmt":"2012-03-05T18:23:52","slug":"tuesday-poem-finland-by-victoria-broome","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/2012\/03\/06\/tuesday-poem-finland-by-victoria-broome\/","title":{"rendered":"Tuesday Poem: “Finland ” by Victoria Broome"},"content":{"rendered":"

Finland<\/strong><\/p>\n

She returned to Finland with her children
\nwrapped tight against the ice of the night.
\nSo blue their throats ached.
\nIt was a return to the old times, familiar pain,
\nthe first crack of a river in thaw, black haunting
\nof spindly trees, skeletal white morning sky.
\nAir so sharp it sliced their hearts with grief.
\nHer family never sent the gold they had promised,
\nher husband bought book after book
\nthat would not feed them.
\nHer children became jewelled possessions
\nlining her soul with love like the map of Finland.
\nOne night he biked home to an empty house,
\nall doors open, books piled neatly in each room.
\nHe finds a library has no sound and dreams himself lost
\nin the shell pink canals to his children\u2019s hearts.
\nHis love will become a foreign language.
\nShe settles them into the long winter,
\ndark fatherless months waxing over them,
\nstitching bright cloth, sharing words by the fire,
\nshe coaches her children in their mother tongue.<\/p>\n

(c) Victoria Broome<\/p>\n

Reproduced here with permission.<\/p>\n

—<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

About the Poem:<\/strong><\/p>\n

On December 6 last year<\/a> I first mentioned the “Poet’s Corner”, an email series I ran where I invited poets to feature a work and also \u201cspeak\u201d to it\u2014so the reader got to hear the poet\u2019s voice twice: through the poem itself and through the \u201cPoet\u2019s Note\u201d on their own work.<\/p>\n

Victoria Broome’s ‘Finland’<\/em> is another poem from the Poet’s Corner series and one I found powerful and evocative from first reading, but I think the truest evocation of the poem is simply to share Victoria’s own words:<\/p>\n

The Poet’s Note:<\/strong><\/p>\n

“I first wrote this poem about 25 years ago and it was from a strong memory I had of a customer who used to come into a bookshop I worked at. She was from somewhere in Scandinavia and I picked Finland. She was married to a man who rode a bike everywhere and she came into the shop to pick up all the books he ordered; they had young children and she rarely spoke. I remember her as looking resigned most of the time and one day another customer told us that she had left and taken the children with her, back to where she had come from. Literally her husband had come home to an empty house.<\/em><\/p>\n

I have worked on the poem over the years and this is its final incarnation. It is one of my favourites, I think, because it is the first poem I managed to write that stepped outside my own personal experience and told a bigger story; and also was perhaps the first poem that gave me\u00a0a sense of really being a writer. A lot of people respond strongly to it and interestingly an acquaintance who is from Finland felt it was so authentic that I must have been there.”<\/em><\/p>\n

You can also read Victoria’s poem “The Foreign Office”<\/em> here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

.<\/span><\/p>\n

About the Poet:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Christchurch poet, Victoria Broome, has been writing poetry “for as long as she can remember”. She won the CNZ Louis Johnson bursary in 2005 and has had poems published in anthologies and a variety of New Zealand literary magazines and most recently in Flap \u2013 The Chook Book 2<\/em>, which is the second anthology from a group of women writers called the Poetry Chooks. Victoria was an inaugural student at the Hagley Writers Institute and completed a two year course, 2008-09. The manuscript completed over these two years, Big Red Engine<\/strong><\/em>, was runner up for the prestigious Kathleen Grattan Award in 2010.<\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>To read the featured poem on the Tuesday Poem Hub<\/strong> and other great poems from fellow Tuesday poets from around the world, click here<\/strong><\/a> or on the Quill<\/strong> icon<\/strong> in the sidebar.
\n
\n<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Finland She returned to Finland with her children wrapped tight against the ice of the night. So blue their throats ached. It was a return to the old times, familiar pain, the first crack of a river in thaw, black haunting of spindly trees, skeletal white morning sky. Air so sharp it sliced their hearts […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12148"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12148\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12165,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12148\/revisions\/12165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}