Cover & Book design: Scarlett Robinson-Kean(June 7) Tesseract. Illustrated by Scarlett Robinson-Kean. ISBN 978-0-473-78266-5. Auckland: Paper Table, 2026. 110 pp.
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“What's a tesseract?”
“Didn't you go to school? A tesseract is a hypercube, a square figure with four dimensions to it, like a cube has three, and a square has two. Here, I'll show you …”
– Robert Heinlein, “– And he Built a Crooked House –.” Astounding Science Fiction (1941)
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- No time but the present (24/5-7/10/22)
- Mutual Forgiveness (12/11/22-27/5/23)
- Soft (22/9/22-5/7/23)
- The key (3/12/22-27/5/23)
- My partner (10/9/22-14/3/24)
- Pick-ups (19/10/22-23/2/24)
- The cat’s ritual (5/11/22-9/5/23)
- The Ballad of the Great Storm (23/11/22-5/7/23)
- Heavy Rescue 401 (5/12/22-8/3/24)
- Our backyard (13/9/22-3/2/24)
- Big pink (26/10/22-11/7/2023)
- Rain (30/10/22-27/2/24)
- The Great Impostor (26/9/22-13/2/24)
- Under the knife (10/11/22-3/3/24)
- An evening’s viewing (28/11/22-6/3/24)
- Power cut (27/11/22-27/5/23)
- It was so and not so (19/6/24)
- Spartacus (19/9/22-2/5/23)
- Chocolate Weetbix (6-7/4/22)
- Nice (20/9/22-7/2/24)
- So does this mean World War III? (18/11/22-11/7/2023)
- Insignificance (30/9/22-15/2/24)
- When people are anxious (14/11/22-11/7/2023)
- Gallowglass (6/9/22-28/1/24)
- India twenty years ago (29/9/22-14/2/24)
- The Sixties (23/10/22-24/2/24)
- Get out of the way! (29/10/22-26/2/24)
- Wolf (21/9/22-5/7/23)
- Strangers on a train (12/10/22-20/2/24)
- From Russia with Love (18/10/22-22/2/24)
- The Basketballathon (20/2/22-15/10/23)
- Towards the end (24/10/22-25/2/24)
- I miss it sometimes (15/11/22-11/7/2023)
- The inverse ninja law (17/11/22-11/7/2023)
- Bronwyn (8/12/22-5/7/23)
- My mother’s rose bushes (18/9/22-2/4/23)
- Time in Poetry (27-28/4/22)
- Zealandia (11/9/22-2/2/24)
- Scurvy Grass (6/2-22/7/21)
- Coming in from the cold (25/10/22-11/7/2023)
- All that you love will be carried away (17/9/22-7/2/24)
- Rear Window (8/10/22-17/2/24)
- Kimono (1/10/22-15/2/24)
- Is time travel possible? (25/9/22-12/2/24)
- Pizzagate (14/10/22-20/2/24)
- Coming Forth by Day (15/10/22-21/2/24)
- Déjà vu all over again (3/11/22-28/2/24)
- In my dream last night (21/10/22-5/7/23)
- The House on the Strand (3/10/22-16/2/24)
- Weather (17/10/22-22/2/24)
- Living history (4/12/22-8/3/24)
- Prisoners of K. Rd. (14/9/22-3/2/24)
- Last days (20/11/22-4/3/24)
- Catullus 101 (12/9/22-28/5/23)
- No wars but in words (24-25/5/22)
- Why do you write? (2/11/22-28/2/24)
- Gaslighting (29/11/22-5/7/23)
- Crash (26/11/22-5/3/24)
- You need to get a job (28/10/22-26/2/24)
- The Bard (22/10/22-24/2/24)
- The usual suspects (5/10/22-16/2/24)
- I used to quote (16/11/22-11/7/2023)
- Not everything is an anecdote (20/10/22-23/2/24)
- Mnemonics (31/10/22-8/5/23)
- Houseboat Days (22/11/22-12/7/2023)
- Emotionally labile (13/10/22-4/1/23)
- The Killing Floor (7/12/22-5/7/23)
- Experimental (9/12/22-8/2/24)
- Frack away (4/11/22-29/2/24)
- Bronwyn asked me (25/11/22-5/7/23)
- Catfish or cats? (6/12/22-27/5/23)
- Just Like the Others (27-28/10/20)
For Bronwyn
Blurb:
Each of us is made up of stories – family stories, work stories, relationship stories – even stories about trying to buy a revolving bookcase in Paeroa … Stories, too, about the country and the world we live in.
If you put them all together, the lines begin to connect up into the shape of a life: not a simple geometric figure, but the outline of a particular location in spacetime – a line, then a square, then a cube, then finally a four-dimensional hypercube, a tesseract.
An earlier version of this, Jack Ross’s latest poetry collection, was longlisted for the Kathleen Grattan award in 2025. He’s happy to present it here with a book design and lively illustrations by 2025 Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi Springboard recipient, Scarlett Robinson-Kean.'… What makes this book resonate so deeply with me is movement. Physical and emotional movement. Not on a grand over-the-top flare of sentimentality but in small measured steps that favour contiguity. I relish the shift between what is easily witnessed in the everyday and what is much harder to fathom, what is retrieved in glimmers and shards across time. it is a collection that warrants a prolonged sojourn. Glorious.'- Paula Green on Jack’s The Oceanic Feeling (2021)
No time but the present. That’s not quite it, is it? No time like the present is the usual phrase. Do it now, in other words – don’t put it off. But, as H. G. Wells’s Time Traveller explains so clearly in the story, there’s no such thing as an instantaneous object: it must have duration, as well as height, length and breadth, in order to be perceived (let alone possessed) by us. Now is a moment which is over so quickly that it’s only perceptible in the rearview mirror, as a part of the long spool of experience unwinding behind us. So all we really have is the past – that is to say, the memory of what is already done and dusted. But do we have that, even? It’s no longer with us, so I’d have to say no – all we have, then, is that quavering moment, poised on top of the wave. But since we can’t perceive it till it’s over, you could argue that all we have is anticipation: the prospect of what the next moment will bring. You’d think that might make us a bit less greedy: less determined to collect the leavings of all these moments, past and to come, and more prepared to enjoy them to the uttermost. We’re only conscious for a small part of the time allotted to us: there’ll never be any more of it, so let’s dance.
(24/5-7/10/22)
Publications:
- Poetry Shelf: Occasional Poems. Paula Green, ed.: NZ Poetry Shelf: a poetry page with reviews, interviews, and other things (7/10/22)
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of each vice
These are the gates of paradise
– William Blake
If we had a bigger landing
we could display Steven’s coat
on the stairs
yesterday four packages arrived
from Wellington
the cream
of Bronwyn’s
She Shed
textile show
at the Petone Settlers’ Museum
rugs blankets dolls
and now the house
is full of bubble-wrap
and boxes
and a desperate quest
to find some space
to set up
the Kiwi equivalent
of Antony Gormley’s
Angel of the North
it’d seem a bit crazier
if it weren’t for the fact
that I spent all yesterday
reconfiguring
my Children’s Books
bookcase
in double rows
too many pretty things
in the world
too little restraint
on our part
the cat
sits by and purrs
(12/11/22-27/5/23)
Notes:
"She Shed: Contemporary Wool Craft is a capsule exhibition assembled by Blumhardt curator Dr Bronwyn Lloyd - writer, crafter, and textile collector. She Shed is Lloyd’s dream space of wool craft, featuring the work of seven contemporary makers she most admires: Vita Cochran, Lizzy Leckie, Caroline McQuarrie, Rona Ngahuia Osborne, Steven Park, Daegan Wells, and Georgina May Young, at the Petone Settlers Museum.
This exhibition is presented in conjunction with Threads: Textiles Festival, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington from 16-20 March 2022."
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We’re always on the lookout for book-troughs and bookends for my growing collection this time it was a revolving bookcase one metre high 70 centimetres in diameter I know because the shopkeeper made me measure it with her own tape-measure in the middle she prompted not the side this was to see if it’d fit into the car the consensus was it wouldn’t I wasn’t quite so sure it didn’t after that she got the owner on the phone Are you going up to Auckland anytime soon? Yes he’s already bought it I hadn’t but I wanted to so he needs to have it delivered we settled on next Sunday they think you’re soft confided Bronwyn as we drove away – what do you mean? the way she told you tilt it this way not that way as we tried to wrestle it in the fact she didn’t think you could back into that parking space outside the shop come to think of it I did notice a bit of an village-idiot vibe in the way they spoke to me am I soft? If so it doesn’t worry me more interested in dreaming of all the books I can squeeze into those shelves
(22/9/22-5/7/23)
Publications:
- Live Encounters Poetry & Writing: Free Online Magazine from Planet Earth. Ed. Mark Ulyseas. Vol. 3 (November-December 2024): Aotearoa Poets and Writers. Guest Editor Lincoln Jaques.
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Bronwyn has a habit of walking out of the house leaving the front door open when she thinks she’ll be right back in practice of course she gets distracted till after a while I notice the draft and go over and close it which means that eventually she’ll be pounding on the door to be let back in as she never carries a key it puts me in mind of the Michael Moore documentary where he tested out his theory that Canadians don’t lock their doors by walking straight into a stranger’s front room sure enough it wasn’t locked and the people inside though somewhat bemused seem friendly enough to the shabby shyster the cat too like other cats meows to go out then meows to come in then changes her mind and wants out again seriously though do we live in a world where doors can be left open? I wish we did
(3/12/22-27/5/23)
Notes:
- The reference is to a sequence near the end of Michael Moore's 2002 documentary Bowling for Columbine where he claims Canada is so safe that nobody bothers to lock their doors.
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is a tohunga she told us tohunga are the kind of people you see on K Rd talking to themselves they tell the tales of objects the partner was in the supermarket when she saw an iceberg lettuce that wanted to be hers she bought it and started to eat it as she walked down the street but wouldn’t you know it? people who saw her started to offer her things a builder said he had some sesame seeds she could scatter on it another offered tomatoes another a slice of bread just like stone soup you start off with a stone and water then add the rest as the Queen said after 9-11 grief is the price we pay for love helping each other out is what we do
(10/9/22-14/7/23)
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Every Sunday and every second Wednesday my mother is picked up by a friend from church the friend said she was looking shabby so we bought her new clothes the friend wants her standing outside by a certain time so Bronwyn goes over to dress her and send her down the drive the friend would like money for petrol so we’ve added discreet envelopes but my mum looks so happy as she drives off in the car now the friend would like her to sing solo in the end-of-the-year church concert my mother can’t sing and is intensely shy where does helpfulness end and oppression begin? when your own strongly-held views seem always to accord with the voice of the Lord?
(19/10/22-23/2/24)
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has flexibilities within it for instance having got us up at 6 am she’s then prepared to bed down in the warm spot but only for a while after a snack and possibly a trip outside she sits on the stairs and waits not silently for me to make my way up to the office on gloomy days she beds down in the chair behind my desk on sunny days she marches down the hall pausing to rub certain iconic books with interesting corners and jumps up on the guest room bed by then striped by a sunbeam she may stay there till early afternoon or conversely come down for morning tea it’s hard to say if she sees us as her kittens or her parents certainly our lack of cool embarrasses her profoundly on occasion both I think
(5/11/22-9/5/23)
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Despite the extreme weather events forecast over the last few days the roofing contractors at the supermarket next door neglected to tie down their sheet metal so as the wind rose in febrile gusts it began to roll up and slam against the scaffolding until we began to fear for the lives of those in the carpark not to mention of course our own windows Bronwyn went over to talk to the manager who shrugged and said he’d give the contractors a ring to see if they had anyone willing to go up on the roof in a storm somehow this didn’t reassure us so I got onto the online help desk and asked the bot what to do next it suggested I collect more plastic farm pieces which I felt was a little irrelevant so when it offered to pass me to an actual human being I gladly agreed and started a dialogue with a certain Jenny who got my name phone number address and sundry other details before passing it on to the relevant authorities a couple of hours later we saw a rather disgruntled man wandering around their rooftop with a length of blue tape he seems to have flattened the sheets out again said Bronwyn our last sight of him was gesticulating and yelling on the phone but what he was actually saying we could not hear
(23/11/22-5/7/23)
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My latest reality pash is filmed on ‘the busiest highway in North America’ outside Toronto snaking through the Great Lakes the stoic Canadians who staff the nation’s highways are very family-oriented it’s hard to count the father-and-son teams setting up their rotators and flatbeds beside each crash trucks on their backs on their sides in snow drifts snared in forest glades with cargos of copper wire rolls of paper frozen yeast even once compacted garbage there’s something about it the sense of camaraderie a common purpose which makes them dangle above Lake Erie to haul out a crane I see myself there a mere foot-soldier not yet in the business of calculating vectors walking with a line over my shoulder walking from the shoulder of the road into the trees
(5/12/22-8/3/24)
Publications:
- Titirangi Poets Ezine No.29 (16 October 2024).
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across the creek could certainly be said to be somewhat overgrown my father liked to think of it as the last enclave of native bush in bourgeois Mairangi Bay the birds certainly approve tūī kōtare kererū but crossing the concrete bridge this morning I saw another tree had fallen in last week’s storms blocking the path to the fallen wattle which marks the boundary between us and next door crashing through the vines I thought a machete might be needed in future far off I saw my goal our last big tree a dead dry pine shrouded in old man’s beard it seemed unreachable the only way there by vaulting over slippery snaking boughs like the impenetrable jungles that hid Mayan cities for a thousand years
(13/9/22-3/2/24)
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The lawnmower man came round yesterday to check the ground for bolts left over from the scaffolding ran into one the other day cost me 11,000 dollars very bold he said of the colour whose idea was that? mine said Bronwyn which isn’t entirely true it was a mutual decision based on my hatred for ochre and the obvious need for an Art Deco colour I’m from Napier she went on and this is what houses there look like he wasn’t convinced sooner you than me he muttered John the painter said it’s a homosexual colour Bronwyn but hey whatever floats your boat every day passers-by stop to gawp at an Auckland house which isn’t white or mauve it radiates at night you can see it in the dark at dawn it looks like Petra rose-red city half as old as time we like to call it coral it is a lot of look
(26/10/22-11/7/2023)
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offers the biggest test
so far
of the new order
is the garage leaking
despite its new roof?
alas yes
has the new front garden
washed down the drain?
no
those heavy beach stones
we gathered down the coast
for an art workshop
have done their job
the bark’s still there
is the creek flowing
despite its overgrown banks
the tangle of trash
around the culverts?
I haven’t dared check
is the rusty old water tank
we bought in ‘98
during the drought
overflowing
into the basement
yet?
not sure I’ll drain it
in due course
are the sea levels rising
down by the beach?
of course
this house was built
on a tidal creek
so it is a bit hopeless
futile as King Canute
(30/10/22-27/2/24)
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So when I asked the roofing man Karl a wiry little Australian what to do about the TV aerial he looked at me as if I was mad oh sure we can take that down for you but what I wanted to ask was do we need it to get TV? I had a vague idea It all comes through the internet now being digital so agreed in what I hoped was a knowing way no TV today apparently you do need an aerial to get your free-to-air TV that aerial is lying in a tangled heap on the lawn because I was too scared to reveal my ignorance and wanted to look like a normal human who knows such things I do seem to have managed to reach most of the programmes we watch through the online streaming services of the various channels so all is well but when will I learn to stop trying to act like a solid citizen and admit to being a timorous ignorant clod?
(26/9/22-13/2/24)
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This morning I go under the knife to excise a boil that’s been itchy and sore on the back of my leg for quite a while but is it malignant? my GP Francesco who claims to be an authority on such matters has pooh-poohed such fears of mine previously this time though he's persuaded me to let him remove it for testing even though he’s ‘almost sure’ it’s benign it reminds me a bit of that H. G. Wells story where the scalpel slips and the patient shoots off into interstellar space faster and faster till the universe starts to coalesce into the gleam of a great jewel on an infinitely large hand always liked that one but would prefer not to reenact it
(10/11/22-3/3/24)
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Serial killers family dysfunction haunted pasts it’s as if the whole world – or the section of it that watches television – is caught in a nightmare from which it cannot awake but is it all bad? the mummy of a lion cub unearthed in Saqqara by adept archaeologists not led by some white saviour from the well-funded west the under-dog digger who unearthed the ship at Sutton Hoo a few small acts of kindness Wednesday Addams befriending a bespectacled nerd a hand reaching out to help you stand up
(28/11/22-6/3/24)
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I guess I would give us about a B+ for our prowess yesterday when the power went off halfway through CSI just as we were about to learn the identity of the strangely branded slave who’d been injected with somebody else’s eyeball we do have a cupboard for candles with lots of matches so that was no problem we improvised some Victorian home entertainment I read out a ghost story and an old poem from the Ingoldsby Legends by now it was pitch dark and we could see all the neighbours prowling around trying hard not to look afraid that things would never go back to normal we didn’t join them but went off to bed instead the cat accepted the situation with her usual calm to be honest I’m not really sure she noticed till the power came back to the accompaniment of loud cheers and crashing machinery the moment we’d settled and taken out our books
(27/11/22-27/5/23)
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for Richard von Sturmer As we approached the square I said to Bronwyn I bet we’ll see Farrell there he always comes to these sorts of things sure enough there he was I didn't go over to say hello we had a nice spot in the shade and he looked okay with his friends it took a long time to get going there were lots of speeches they ranged from impassioned to business-like they taught us some chants which I promptly forgot but once we started they mostly came back we felt very virtuous walking along some ladies with parcels came out of a dress-shop we shouted WHILE YOU'RE SHOPPING BOMBS ARE DROPPING but they didn't look too abashed it was hard to keep pace with the people in front I'd bought a big flag and it flapped in the faces of the people behind unless I held it high which I found very tiring Bronwyn wore her flag draped round her shoulders which was handy when it came on to rain the loudspeakers were a trial a chant would start up next to my head which is bad for my hearing aids they can't handle quick changes in ambient noise we had to stop every time we came to an intersection which caused the procession to contract like a snake most of the chants I agreed with but not all of them I went silent for those eventually we decided to go home when we reached downtown and a new set of speeches began the buses weren't running because of the demonstration so we had to walk quite a way it was coming down pretty hard by then but such a relief to run in the rain
(19/6/24)
Publications:
- "It was so and not so.” John Geraets. broaches (8/9/24)
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‘I’m Spartacus!’ – Dalton Trumbo I guess that’s what this is about facing your fears on paper if you can’t admit them there then where? Spartacus the cat took his last trip to the vet yesterday what words can you find for that? he was 19 but he hung on till his folks went away then even with three aunties there sank into a decline last night I came into the bedroom Bronwyn was packing Are you leaving me? I’ve had enough of your shit she said then seeing my face No of course not just packing away some jewellery she gave me a hug it’s us for life but the fears are always there somehow just under the surface saying them can help send them away
(19/9/22-2/5/23)
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When we were kids, we had a bad habit of leaving the last couple of inches of cereal in the Weetbix package uneaten. No amount of persuasion would convince us that this unwholesome looking mess was as good as the perfectly formed biscuits we’d started off with. That is, until my father came up with the term chocolate weetbix. All of a sudden, we were competing to have a bowl of chocolate weetbix scraps rather than those boringly predictable rectangles. I’m still not sure why those two words made such a great difference to us – the mystique of chocolate transforms all it touches, I suppose. But it was more than that. It was my first experience, not so much of the power of advertising, as of the inherent magic of putting the right words in the right place. My father was a clever and eloquent man, but even he must have felt some slight disquiet at manipulating us with such ease. Since then, as a writer and a teacher, I’ve become increasingly aware of the extent to which one can transform other people’s experience of the world simply by describing it in a particular way. It’s a fearsome responsibility, and not to be taken lightly. This year, as so many of our assumptions about the society we live in crumble around us, I’m more conscious than ever of the power of poetry – ‘language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree’ – and its ability to affect reality. We can, quite literally, change lives with our words: but what is it, exactly, we want to say?
(6-7/4/22)
Publications:
- Poetry Shelf: 25 Poets on Poetry. Paula Green, ed.: NZ Poetry Shelf: a poetry page with reviews, interviews, and other things (14/4/22)
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She was still crying when I walked into the Tourist Information office on the Square in Christchurch what’s wrong? I asked – that man who was in here before he came in and I asked if I could help he didn’t answer just waited for my European colleague to be free – we’re not all like that was all I could find to say to the young Asian woman another colleague hurried in what’s wrong? she outlined again what had happened as the colleague fixed on me a nuclear stare not him he’s nice no another man he’s gone I didn’t know what else to say or do just repeated we’re not all like that
(20/9/22-8/2/24)
Publications:
- Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2024: Revelations [Issue #58]. Ed. Tracey Slaughter. ISBN 978-1-99-101670-6. Auckland: Massey University Press, 2024: 119-20.
Publications:
- Live Encounters Poetry & Writing: Free Online Magazine from Planet Earth. Ed. Mark Ulyseas. Vol. 3 (November-December 2024): Aotearoa Poets and Writers. Guest Editor Lincoln Jaques.
•
asked Bronwyn as the news came in that a Russian missile had fallen on Poland and killed two people thankfully no but the need to deny it took me back half a century to the school library committee of which I was head where the hottest topic was whether anything except nuclear disarmament was worth discussing given the imminent probability of ending up as radioactive dust but then in the 80s the discourse moved on somehow not that anything was resolved but we all just tacitly agreed not to bring it up till the fall of the Berlin wall Ceaușescu and wife slumped in a heap in their back garden the tanks in Prague stopped with flowers the tanks in Moscow halted by an alcoholic with attitude was it all for nothing? Sadly it seems so yes but then as Homer Simpson remarked at the end of a worse than usual set of disasters Marge my friend I haven’t learned a thing
(18/11/22-11/7/2023)
Publications:
- Titirangi Poets Ezine No.24 (11 December 2023).
- Heaven’s Fringe II: Titirangi Poets. Ed. Piers Davies, Ron Riddell, & Gretchen Carroll. Auckland: Printable Reality, 2024. 175.
•
The first time I really felt it was one afternoon in England in the train looking out the window at the chimneys of the nuclear power station that sense of being dwarfed of nothingness we’d been brought up on a diet of ‘every little bit helps’ and ‘one person can make a difference’ and all that but something about those huge blank curves against the landscape gave it the lie so now crouching beside the television as it bleats about the latest Russian plans for Ukraine 500-year floods in Florida (yeah right) I feel it again good-will determination anything you like but sometimes in the path of the glacier all you can do is run
(30/9/22-15/2/24)
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you shouldn’t do something they’re not always wrong my mother’s driving for example the last straw for her was not knocking off someone else’s side mirror driving up our own street nor the fact that not only did she not stop and go back nowhere to park she claimed no what did it was turning out of the garage where they’d patched up her car and realising she didn’t know which way to go next just how do you find home? I suppose she would have braked if you hadn’t shouted stop mused one of my brothers to the other when they returned from a last-minute Christmas shopping run maybe the other opined last night in my dream they were both insisting that I let her drive as we lurched round the streets in an automotive death roll
(14/11/22-11/7/23)
•
My father’s guest brought his son along a boy of about my age maybe seven or eight? we ran around the yard for an hour or two A week or so later a knock at the door he was back and wanted to play again I didn’t want to It was late dinner was over I finally went to the door at my parents’ urging and told him to go away he wouldn’t he stormed and raged I could see how much he’d looked forward to visiting his new friend I had nothing to say knew what I’d done was horrible but there was no other way I couldn’t face running around in the dark with this boy I scarcely knew the pain of such scenes when you see someone you’ve met once or twice but have nothing to say to them if you save some one’s life you’re responsible for them if you speak to them you’re linked forever what does Frankenstein’s monster say? friend good we belong dead
(6/9/22-28/1/24)
Notes:
- The quote "friend good ..." comes from James Whale's Bride of Frankenstein (1935) rather than Mary Shelley's novel.
•
Our common bond was P. G. Wodehouse I know how that must sound to the class-conscious but Wodehouse’s idle hands and aristos seem more like fictional conceits than actual people when you grow up in the Antipodes Meera my superlatively kind hostess in Bangalore had an abiding love for Wodehouse and wasn’t at all surprised to hear I’d found cheap reprints of some of his almost unobtainable pre-Jeeves pre-Emsworth school novels in Cape Comorin at the tip of India I remember once when she went out she left me sitting in front of the video with instructions to rewatch An Ideal Husband it is not the perfect but rather the imperfect who have need of love as Rupert Everett expressed it an uncanonical addition to Oscar’s text
(29/9/22-14/2/24)
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My brother sent me a card for my upcoming sixtieth birthday it’s printed with ‘Jack’ which led me to imagine a cavernous warehouse of cards each with a different name matched to a particular year in this case 1962 the number of things that were happening then is astonishing the Cuban missile crisis Lawrence of Arabia Marilyn Monroe’s overdose Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich but for me the strangest thing of all is that my sublit vision of the sixties remains intact I remember watching the Vietnam war on our black-and-white TV walking barefoot everywhere to the dairy on the corner long days on the beach and it doesn’t look sepia in my head not distant by a heartbeat but tangible concrete there
(23/10/22-24/2/24)
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he shouted
at the little girl
prattling artlessly
as was her wont
accustomed to obedience
she jumped
as he brought his spade down
on a snake
Sydney 1930s
one of my mother’s stories
that comes up
repeatedly
two or three times in a row
sometimes
why?
she certainly loved her father
treasures his views
on pretty much everything
food no sauces
flowers only roses
about her mother
she’s more equivocal
she often intones
something told her
by one of her aunts
you never knew your mother
a serious illness
maybe a miscarriage?
in Fiji
robbed her
of much of her past
strangely enough
she sees her mother’s memory loss
as far worse than her own
even though
she can’t answer direct questions
it puts it right out of my head!
or remember an outing
half an hour later
her mother stands in
for all that’s lost
a set of vague traumas
we’re glad she’s forgotten
the car accident
where one of them died
(29/10/22-26/2/24)
•
The game was to race around the bach at Bethells Beach but first we had to claim a totem animal I can’t recall why wolf said my brother faster than light so some of us others who’d been thinking wolf as well were shit out of luck I think that I may have compromised on tiger I am after all a Scorpio Tiger something feline anyway then he wanted to pace out the whole course first somewhat un-wolf-like some of us thought and had to be told that that would defeat the purpose of the game but what if I slipped and fell? what if? I think Bronwyn’s brother won
(21/9/22-5/7/23)
•
I remember one Christmas in Britain travelling down to Essex to see my brother working in in the hospital there then back up to Scotland for New Year most of all I remember standing in that long queue snaking right round the platform at King’s Cross as the announcement boomed out if you haven’t reserved a seat then please leave the line this train is fully booked but I had nowhere else to go no money no friends in London so kept on standing there then climbed on the train and wandered up and down it clocking all of the seats in every carriage marked with little cardboard slips until I found one that wasn’t I sat down in it the lady sitting next to me said that the person who’d booked the seat was probably joining the train later on but I was welcome to sit there for the time being until they gazumped me the train left we rolled through the endless back gardens and kitchen windows of London then out into the long green tunnels of sidings station after station we got into conversation she and I she worked as an entertainer on cruise ships singing covers and some of her own songs she lent me a cassette of her music to play on my Walkman easy-listening stuff I praised it I lent her my own cassette of (I imagine) U2 no-one got on no-one displaced me by some strange miracle I managed to stay in that seat all the way to Inverness much to the disbelief of my cousins and everyone who’s heard the story since and the moral? sometimes when you really need them to things don’t go wrong but then on the other hand quite often they do
(12/10/22-20/2/24)
•
Our Russian class went on a school trip to visit a Soviet ship in the harbour the sailors tried to show us around but we stood there dumb till I ventured a few phrases in Russian the captain was much impressed and told me I should come to study in the worker’s republic I lacked the aplomb to answer in kind a year or so later we hosted a visit from the Russian ambassador who offered to answer our questions about the Soviet Union I asked about the case of the poet Boris Pasternak he replied that the reason only some of his work was available there was because his later writings lacked objectivity Solzhenitsyn by contrast an enemy of the people had been justly deported all this was recited with a stone-cold glare our teacher congratulated me later on asking the hard questions in this case the hard questions were the easy ones
(18/10/22-22/2/24)
•
Our Rm 13 form teacher asked us to find ways to raise money for the earthquake victims in Guatemala we brainstormed ideas the one we liked most was a non-stop game of basketball in those days the Telethon was a national obsession – or an excuse for old has-beens to crank out their schtick? – our teacher too was sceptical about the sheer pointlessness of the idea but majority rules and so it was settled we would play in relays one four-hour stint followed by four hours of rest then back on the court for two full days it started on Friday and ran till Sunday – Heaven forbid we should miss any school! we lined up our sponsors and so it began it was pretty difficult to get any sleep a few of us gave up and straggled off home I missed just one stint but they held it against me ever after you wimped out loser I can see their point
(20/2/22-15/10/23)
•
my father’s only tales were of old humiliations the time they asked him to give a talk on some medical subject at the hospital where he worked he offered an eye-witness account of the leper island Molokaʻi which he’d explored and photographed extensively that’s of no interest whatsoever not at all what we’re looking for said the officious organiser or the time he was asked to describe the WWII defence works of the East Coast Bays to a local history group he’d been charting them for decades having watched them built in the first place as a boy on Deep Creek Road the moment he started to speak a man walked in and started to greet everyone and after he’d finished with that asked what was the talk this week? Doctor Ross was just about to begin Oh I don’t have time to stay he said making an equally loquacious exit my father had hardly got going when the chair stood up and said that was all they had time for that week but it’d been a real treat and they hoped to have him back again my father bit back the retort not this side of hell these things went around in his head in those last days no happy memories of the love and respect of his patients who still tell us stories about him as they pass by the front fence but as Julia Roberts puts it in Pretty Woman the bad stuff is easier to believe
(24/10/22-25/2/24)
•
sailing under the bridge In our little kestrel trailer sailor on our way down-harbour to anchor off Chelsea go in for a swim eat our lunch on the deck then the long beat home tacking across to the wharves down into Ngataringa Bay to pick up the mooring sometimes it got quite rough I remember once we ended up missing the buoy and smashed instead into the sea wall my father leapt overboard to hold the boat off the jagged teeth of the planks while the rest of us cowered like deck cargo unable to help years later my cousin bought just the same boat and invited me for a sail we headed for Rangitoto on the way we slipped a stay and I’ll always remember hanging over the side trying to rethread the bolt as we headed for the rocks under North Head I felt as calm as a cucumber my marriage had recently broken up leaving me walking wounded a watery grave seemed the least of my concerns
(15/11/22-11/7/2023)
•
the fewer there are the greater their effectiveness I was walking down the drive outside our house when I saw a woman lying on her back on the asphalt I walked up to her Are you all right? I guessed she must have fallen from her parked car above on the level of the road I’m fine she said I just can’t seem to get up Shall I get a doctor? I asked No I’m fine I just need to rest for a while all my life I’d been hearing not to move accident victims she said she was not in pain and I don’t carry a phone so I went into the house to fetch my father a retired GP he got his bag by now a little group had gathered a loud decisive man was giving orders ringing an ambulance she was moaning in pain no-one paid the slightest attention to my dad as he asked her the usual questions where’s the pain? can you feel your legs? the man with the phone was the man in charge I saw for the first time that my father had shrunk into an old man afterwards he went on about how wisely the loud man had reacted but I knew what he meant how shamed he felt
(17/11/22-11/7/2023)
•
has to go and have tea with someone she knew at school she doesn’t want to they don’t have much in common don’t move in the same circles then or now and there’s no earthly reason why this woman keeps ringing her up to invite herself to lunch except that she nourishes a fantasy of school as the best time of her life has written herself a retrospective dazzling past and Bronwyn is part of that Just tell her that something’s come up I say as I’ve often said before say you’re going to be busy for the next couple of weeks leading up to Christmas I can’t she says it’d be like kicking a puppy I can’t cause anyone pain she blames it on being brought up a good Catholic girl Our Lady is always watching I keep ranting on ignoring the fact that I too have old school chums I need to keep seeing and the few that I’ve actually dumped come thronging back to haunt me in the long watches of the night above all though I thank whatever gods may be that someone indoctrinated Bronwyn with this particular dogma which leads her to forgive my own transgressions again and again world without end amen
(8/12/22-5/7/23)
•
Pruning them back was just the start soil had to be dug out on every side spades placed like levers under the thorns leaned on like Archimedes time and again till with a mandrake groan they gave up the ghost we hustled them onto the lawn but I got scared that they’d somehow re-root themselves so shifted them onto the concrete floor one looked like a lung with arteries attached another like a beating heart all night I could hear them scratching on the windows longing to get in resume their reign punish the usurpers the scaffolders will be here on Wednesday next and after that other plants less inimical ones? will take their place after the last pit was emptied Zero the cat pissed and shat in the empty hole as if to confirm our victory
(18/9/22-2/4/23)
Publications:
- Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2024: Revelations [Issue #58]. Ed. Tracey Slaughter. ISBN 978-1-99-101670-6. Auckland: Massey University Press, 2024: 119-20.
I have to be on time for everything. If I’m invited anywhere, I count backwards to find the latest moment I can leave in order to be at my destination punctually. Occasionally I try to factor in a bit of fashionable lateness, but mostly in vain. Time in poetry, though, is a horse of a different colour. I wrote a poem while travelling in the Lake District with my family in 1981. The first two lines ran:We built a man of slates, and after years, revisited, the rock had grown a face.I liked them, but I wasn’t really sure what they meant. Perhaps for that reason, what came next was less satisfactory – to me, and to others. The poem stayed with me, though, and fifteen or so years later I made a concerted attempt to complete it with some entirely new lines. And in that form it appeared in my first book, City of Strange Brunettes (1998), under the title “First Love.” But I didn’t entirely like that version either, so later on I had a go at changing the second stanza. Just now, in 2022, I had a look at the poem again and decided to change it back to the way it’d been in the book. Even as I read it, though, I can still hear the original 1981 version of the last four lines going round and round in my head. My point is not so much that the poem is still alive for me, after forty-odd years (though it is); rather, the thing that fascinates me is the number of different moments over those four decades that are somehow miraculously preserved in this one six-line poem. Writing a poem is the closest thing I’ve ever experienced to that Proustian idea of recovering lost time – not just as it was, but with the added patina of what has come in between then and now. It’s a snapshot of a buried past, but with the advantage that the people in the picture are still able to live and breathe. Going back to old poems to rewrite and reshape them is not so much about improving them as asserting their ongoing vitality – and, I suppose, my own.
(27-28/4/22)
Publications:
- Poetry Shelf: Paragraph Room 2. Paula Green, ed.: NZ Poetry Shelf: a poetry page with reviews, interviews, and other things (6/5/22)
•
The last country to be settled by humans
with the possible exception of Easter Island
we balance somewhat precariously here
very deep are the depths
but when you dig
you don’t find humans
after the first millennium or so
we do have stars
mind you
and the remains of an very old continent
we like to call Zealandia
Aotearoa
land of the long white cloud
certainly has more glamour
and must sound so fresh and new
to those with pyramids
vitrified forts
and barrow mounds
when I visited Britain
with my parents in ’81
my father saw pa-sites everywhere
his eyes were conditioned to spot
the kūmara patches
and palisade pits
of his native land
(11/9/22-2/2/24)
•
Lepidium Oleraceum (Scurvy Grass)(for Bronwyn)The other place I landed at was the north point of the Bay where I got as much Sellery and Scurvy grass as loaded the Boat – Captain James Cook (27/10/1769)It’s quite a ways from Napier over the worst of roads but a trip to Tolaga Bay must have seemed something for kids who’d never been there on arrival at the campground Dad went out there may not be much but there is a pub hours later he came back with two velvet paintings he’d blued all their money on we stopped there a year or so ago on a road trip around East Cape the immense beach choked with driftwood the epic wooden pier there were organised walks we didn’t join in a lack of seabird habitats is blamed for the decline in this native plant the rich environments they need no longer plentiful enough
(6/2-22/7/21)
Publications:
- Poetry Specials: 2008-2018. Papyri (28/12/2017)
- Scurvy Grass. Poem by Jack Ross. Design by Bronwyn Lloyd. Auckland, 2022.
- Mike Johnson: A Festschrift. Ed. Trevor Landers. Auckland: www.matatuhitaranaki.ac.nz, 2024)
Notes:
- While visiting Tolaga Bay in New Zealand on his first voyage, Cook noted in his journal on 27 October 1769: "the other place I landed at was the north point of the Bay where I got as much Sellery and Scurvy grass as loaded the Boat." - P. J. Lange & D.A. Norton (1996). "To what New Zealand plant does the vernacular 'scurvy grass' refer?". New Zealand Journal of Botany. 34 (3): 417–420.
•
I read an article today which claimed the best way to address the subject of climate change was with humour mock weather reports detailing unsurvivable temperatures best not to venture out midday and nuanced story lines including family values and hope because heaven forbid we should stop insulting people’s intelligence with patronising lies you’ve got to sugar-coat the facts with contexts point out the benefits of a wine industry shifting polewards Siberian muscatels are flooding the market now it’s not that I find the idea laughable or even necessarily wrong and I understand that intense fear is disabling for any who can be made to feel it but don’t panic as a doctrine only really works when there’s nothing to panic about
(25/10/22-11/7/2023)
•
That writhing feeling of extreme embarrassment at contemplation of past errors what if we hadn’t done them? but what if those other worthy things we did as well depended on them? the only question then is the ratio of self-loathing to mild self-toleration in any case I remember advanced thinkers among my set at church when I was a kid explaining how God sees things instantaneously like a wargamer above a sand-table what we see as a set of choices on a forking road He sees all at once so to talk of changing the past is scarcely practical it’s always already happened as I’ve said before
(17/9/22-7/2/24)
Publications:
- Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2025: Breath [Issue #59]. Ed. Tracey Slaughter. ISBN 978-1-99-101697-3. Auckland: Massey University Press, 2025: 132-33.
Notes:
- "All That You Love Will Be Carried Away" is the title of a short story by Stephen King, originally published in the January 29, 2001 issue of The New Yorker. It was also included in King's collection Everything's Eventual (2002).
•
A friend of mine set up a camera in the back of her car and drove down the hill to the beach and back art film scoffed her boyfriend and yet there was something so strange in the way it bucked and leapt as it recorded the unchanging mountains behind with no hint of the wild sea in front Walter Benjamin’s angel of history does that sweeps on looking back unable to help as the rubble and graves pile up they used to project it at rock concerts
(8/10/22-17/2/24)
Publications:
- "Troy Town." The Imaginary Museum (17/2/24).
•
It’s called the Kimono shop by those of us who frequent it a warehouse-sized emporium in Penrose full of every Japanese garment and trinket imaginable in long serried rows some the wedding kimono for instance are priced steeply others $5 or less I bought some old postcards and a guide to Japan from 1966 the date of some of those old paperback novels I love to read Kōbō Abe Osamu Dazai Shūshako Endō it felt like an out-of-body experience getting there a labyrinth of twists and turns guided by our Aussie-accented cyborg street-guide voice and then the dusty perfumed smell of the kimono where do they come from? hand-sewn each one unique retrieved from dumps and skips apparently exotic ambassadors spreading their own delight
(1/10/22-15/2/24)
Publications:
- Live Encounters Poetry & Writing: Free Online Magazine from Planet Earth. Ed. Mark Ulyseas. Vol. 3 (November-December 2024): Aotearoa Poets and Writers. Guest Editor Lincoln Jaques.
•
No
is the straight answer
but there’re any number of complex
in-and-outs
concerning wormholes
parallel universes
and tachyons
when you talk to physicists
about it
but then there’s the other kind
the inner journey
each of us shuttles up and down
our personal time-stream
moment to moment
so we beat on
boats against the current
borne back ceaselessly
into the past
this morning all the clocks
went back one hour
I hardly noticed
having set my watch back last night
woke at the usual time
around 4.30
only to stare into the dark
pick up a novel
to shut up
that insistent
nagging voice
till morning comes
(25/9/22-12/2/24)
Notes:
- The quote in italics comes from the much-debated last lines of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925):
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further … And one fine morning —
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
•
They’d ordered pizza I recall which took quite some time to arrive all the while I was calculating times so long to walk across campus so long to eat when would we have to start off so as not to miss kick-off? eventually I worked out we’d have to leave just before it arrived it arrived we bolted it down none of the others could not see what the issue was neither can I now but I got my way with a slice or two inside us we started off to hear the nice Irish academic I’d met a few days before give his Bloomsday speech on the meaning of Ulysses in the modern world the moment we got there I thought what an ass to come in the first place let alone hurry our dinner for this it isn’t that it was bad just who the hell cares? what makes it an issue? what is this weird clock which goes off inside me the closer I get to leaving time? which makes me count backwards from every appointment is it madness? conditioning? other people don’t have it can be fashionably late hours late sometimes not me I hope it’s not catching but suspect that it is it saps the enjoyment one might otherwise feel in an evening stroll through a leafy campus perhaps the real answer is never to go out
(14/10/22-20/2/24)
•
When I was a kid at primary school the teacher took us every other week to observe the progress on a house being built nearby foundations first then joists then cladding at last one day the thing was finished ready to receive its freight of folk now as I look out over the bay I’m clocked by a huge crane labelled TEAK as it hoists lackadaisically large pallets of brick from the old parking lot soon to be an apartment block there’ve been months when it hasn’t moved at all one wall went up but then no more what’s gone wrong? is it market volatility or just a shortage of materials? I sit here like a pharaoh watching his tomb inch up in time he hopes for his ascension
(15/10/22-21/2/24)
•
I read a self-righteous piece this morning on why Putin must be stopped otherwise the author opines we’re entering a period where aggressive invasions of other nation’s territory on the flimsiest pretexts can be allowed to succeed I remember twenty years back meeting some Aussies who couldn’t repress their envy of us New Zealanders because our then Prime Minister Helen Clark hadn’t signed up for the invasion of Iraq to root out all those weapons of mass destruction which turned out not to be there or the Gulf of Tonkin the undeclared war on North Vietnam the rollcall began to unspool in my head my ineffectual sentimental radicalism through a lifetime of strife and pain of course I agree about Putin but please just for a moment take a good look at yourself stop editorialising and name-calling on the edge of the pit
(3/11/22-28/2/24)
•
I was stranded
on a half-submerged campus
trying to get back to
the dining hall
diverted endlessly
by sundry obstacles
this morning
the gardeners are coming
with a couple of lemon trees
to top off two months
of frustrating work
on the roof
the scaffolding
the outside paint
the rotten windows
Bronwyn was in a bus
that reversed into a canal
in her dream
the significance of water
in these parts
is not exactly Freudian
the creek at the bottom of our garden
is undercutting its banks
and one day soon will flood
as it did forty years ago
(21/10/22-5/7/23)
•
When we first moved in ten years ago strange things would happen from time to time a handful of change strewn over the floor inside a locked room the persistent sense when down in the basement that the voices and creaks heard overhead don’t sound like subsidence especially when you know that nobody’s home but I did grow up here and eventually it began to tone down again now repainted in art deco colours rose and green and red the house seems to be waking up again after sixty years of white we get cries of approval over the front fence while critics go by with their faces averted the old doc would turn in his grave well take it from me he hasn’t The new doc me feels closer to him than anyone would he approve of the change? not really no would he like to see those peeling window-frames and plaster walls brought back from the brink? undoubtedly yes
(3/10/22-16/2/24)
•
You become a bit of a weather prophet round here whether you like it or not sniffing the air each morning noting the clouds ignoring the complex maps so glibly expounded by perky clothes-horses on the news bearing in mind what a wise old Aucklander said to me once it mostly stays the same for a week one week of rain one week of shine that scent of drizzle is decisive it’ll turn to driving rain is the same true of emotional weather? those complex calculations of tone was that remark really barbed? is the fact that my last email didn’t get a response significant or are things trucking on as ever after twenty-odd years?
(17/10/22-22/2/24)
•
How many Princess Di’s
have died for us
on screen?
Elizabeth Debicki
Kristen Stewart
Naomi Watts
and then there are
the tell-all documentaries
with the survivors
posed against old clips
of their younger
cooler selves
the more you see
the less you feel
you’re hearing the real story
recalling family events
or arguments
one’s forced to acknowledge
how much of it depends
on point-of-view
a certain tone of voice
a contemptuous grunt
how little was ever
actually said
by
or to
the dead
(4/12/22-8/3/24)
•
The last time I read at Poetry Live I was walking away from the venue when one of the others accosted me What makes you famous? I’m just as good as you Why don’t they feature me instead? he’d read out some poems in a faux-Scottish accent I’m not quite sure why but then even R. A. K. Mason was given to ventriloquising in Scots sometimes go figure what do you mean famous? can’t you see I’m a complete nobody? – you’ve published books yeah but nobody reads them or buys them either nobody’s ‘famous’ if you want to be well-known try getting your face on TV poetry’s not about that – why do it then? good question but if you have to ask it you’d probably better give up anyway
(14/9/22-3/2/24)
Notes:
- 10 Oct 2022:
Dear Maddy,
I should probably be honest and admit that I have the fear where Poetry Live is concerned. The last time I read there I was accosted by a strange man with a faux Scottish accent who demanded to know why I thought I was 'so famous' and who pursued me down the street after the reading. The previous time was a bit challenging also. I agreed to the reading this time because I'd told myself I was over all that, but it seems I'm not. So, while there are some family events coming up, the truth of the matter is that my new resolution is to evade known sources of tension rather than the more orthodox 'facing your fears'. I hope that makes sense. So, no, it's probably best to take me off the list of potential readers. I do apologise for wasting your time in this manner, but I was sincere in thinking I could do it this time. I'm sure some more robust reader can easily be found, however.best, jack
•
The last days of twitter the last days of détente like Cai Guo-Qiang’s sky ladder a seven-year-old doco we watched last night as an apocalyptic rainstorm lashed the house that sense of let-down as he achieved his 21-year goal of lifting mankind to the heavens for the benefit of his 100-year-old grannie too ill to be there who died a month later and his dear old dad a calligrapher and book-collector I helped him burn his books during the cultural revolution said Cai it took three days and nights and yet in retrospect a time of hope submerged in our darker out-of-season hundred-year storms the reign of Xi the reign of Putin the reign of Trump trying to pull off that Grover Cleveland trick one more dive at the greasy pig
(20/11/22-4/3/24)
•
atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale Sometimes you wake up with The Fear rain pelting down outside thunderclaps provoking cat shenanigans what Simon called free-floating anxiety does deconstruction help? I’m told that speaking through the words of other people’s poems can help you make your own ten years ago I might have thought the same my remedy now is hanging on all dressed and shod and ready for the day I wait for what will happen anyway
(12/9/22-28/5/23)
Publications:
- "The Zero Suite." Papyri (2/5/23)
Notes:
- C. Valerius Catullus, Carmina 101:
Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus
advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias,
ut te postremo donarem munere mortis
et mutam nequiquam adloquerer cinerem,
quandoquidem fortuna mihi tete abstulit ipsum,
heu miser indigne frater adempte mihi.
nunc tamen interea haec, prisco quae more parentum
tradita sunt tristi munere ad inferias,
accipe fraterno multum manantia fletu
atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.
[Through many nations and through many seas borne, I come, brother, for these sad funeral rites, that I may give the last gifts to the dead, and may vainly speak to your silent ashes, since fortune has taken yourself away from me. Ah, poor brother, undeservedly snatched from me. But now receive these gifts, which have been handed down in the ancient manner of ancestors, the sad gifts to the grave, drenched with a brother's tears, and for ever, brother, hail and farewell.]
- Leonard C. Smithers, trans. The Carmina of Gaius Valerius Catullus (London: Smithers, 1894): 285.
When I was at school, my friends and I used to have long philosophical arguments about whether or not it was possible to have a thought which wasn’t initially in words. I was a strong believer in the contention that a thought could precede the words which expressed it: that it often had to be translated – imperfectly – into words, after being conceived in musical or architectural or simply relational terms. Of course I couldn’t prove it, as our discussions were conducted entirely in words. We were also very concerned about the status of mathematics. Was it really a language? Did its axioms constitute words, or were they somehow superior to those slippery entities (as the budding scientists among us tended to argue)? Now that I’m older, my trust in words has not grown greater – but I think I love them more. In fact, “words are windows” was the first phrase that came to mind for this paragraph, until I realised it lacked a “no” and a “but”. Words are windows. They show us things. But they don’t do so clearly. And when you read – as I did in the online news today – that in Russia now you can “speculate freely and quite calmly on the prospects of nuclear war,” I’m again terrified at what treacherous little disease-laden free radicals words can be. I’d like to set against that a quote from Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms: “I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain … There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity.” That is to say, choose your words wisely, or they may blow up in your face.
(24-25/5/22)
Publications:
- Poetry Shelf: 'No ideas but in …’ . Paula Green, ed.: NZ Poetry Shelf: a poetry page with reviews, interviews, and other things (3/6/22)
•
asked a fellow-guest at my colleague’s flat all those years ago no doubt meant as a polite (albeit perfunctory) question but I was rather sick of that routine have you published anything? yes would you like a list? would I have heard of you? well that depends just how familiar are you with the alt-poetry scene? this time I chose to take it seriously trying to come up with reasons for staying alive in my defence I was in a pretty dark place at the time but even so I knew how pompous it sounded the fact that it happened to be true is neither here nor there and the bad manners inherent in my answer more apparent than in the facile and probably not ill-meant question don’t ask if you don’t want to know is still a good maxim though so it’s hard to regret it Why do I write now? I guess it’s a habit it makes me feel better and sometimes I permit myself to hope it might do someone else some good as well
(2/11/22-28/2/24)
•
so we’re told is the word of the year when it comes to online searches next comes oligarch omicron cancel culture and rather oddly sentient no doubt inspired by the software engineer who claimed his AI system had developed independent thought if only! it’s hard to imagine it doing a worse job than we do with our god-given intellect a little lower than the angels but then my own choices of word furry or Bronwyn were never likely to go global but for emotion and intelligence they beat the others flat
(29/11/22-5/7/23)
•
Usually when I’m in a bookshop
I can reach up and ease out books
from even the highest shelve
after all I’m six feet tall
in Hard-to-Find though
the shelves reach up to heaven
ecclesiastical ceilings
so I couldn’t quite manage
the B’s in Biography
there was some kind of step ladder
over in the corner
but the small wooden stool was nearer
so I moved it into place
and reached up to the Brontës
then the stool shifted
two of its three legs
were somewhat misaligned
and threatened to topple
I managed to readjust
– no twisted ankle
or embarrassing fall backwards
into the graphic novels –
and it did have the side effect
of showing me a biography
of J. G. Ballard
I hadn’t known existed
after I’d climbed down
and bought my books
and left the shop
I started to wonder
what chain reaction I’d begun
would others climb up
on that temptingly placed stool?
would they have the same luck
in correcting its wobble?
might not some sprain
or broken bone ensue?
and if so would it be my fault
or that of the stool’s creator
or the shop owner’s for leaving it there
or for piling their stock so high
or Juliet Barker’s for writing such a big fat book
on the Brontës
or J. G. Ballard’s for his explorations
of the fetishistic significance
of any crash?
(26/11/22-5/3/24)
•
in a charity shop preferably one that doesn’t sell books so David Howard when he heard I’d finished all 66 novels by Stephen King like so many authors he underestimates the need for actual readers to validate your product as the discussion proceeded he revealed that he seldom read fiction (except Joseph Conrad) because of his inability to identify let alone empathise with imaginary people biographies and histories were more his bag which makes sense unless you acknowledge a biography is just a version of a life I’ve read three biographies of Thomas De Quincey two were entitled ‘the opium eater’ I’d swear they concerned quite different people as for Dickens don’t get me started Forster Johnson Ackroyd Tomalin Slater Oh sure they overlap but only in the sense that novels with similar plots and characters overlap David Copperfield and Great Expectations Bag of Bones and Duma Key the hazy reality we’re forced to live in dissolves into endless jumpcuts do you have to film everything? asked Warren Beatty as he realised belatedly that going out with Madonna meant guest-starring in In Bed with Madonna
(28/10/22-26/2/24)
•
Someone said studying Shakespeare was a relic of the colonial past in a Creative New Zealand report on funding a new employee for a Shakespeare-in-schools project the world erupted in scorn columnists fulminated cancel culture blackwashing the bard and so on meanwhile in the eye of the storm the CNZ communications team were kept up till midnight explaining the simple facts of the case to outlets who love to say CNZ refused comment or we hadn’t heard back before going to press eventually the PM decided just to give them the cash surely it is rather odd that in New Zealand half a world away the works of this playwright should be seen to outweigh all other cultural input no Dante no Genji no Homer can compare but then as he (whoever he was) once said (or rather as one of his characters said) it is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing
(22/10/22-24/2/24)
•
Were all in evidence this afternoon as I spoke to my friend’s class about my lack of imagination how I envy those people who can make stuff up and make it sound convincing not me events from my life rearranged slightly is the best that I can do which came in quite handy when it turned out that – as well as my images – my PowerPoint notes had been visible to the online audience all along they included some quotes from emails I’d been sent about the students the news reached my friend as she was about to back out from a tight parking place which made her pause just long enough to crash into me as I drove past no damage to either of us luckily since cars are basically plastic shells and they were only going 3 km per hour but a nasty shock nevertheless which took us a few rounds of tapas to drown as we looked out over the Waikato in flood past a bearded portrait of someone who may well have been Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Tūruki
(5/10/22-16/2/24)
•
that thing from Chekhov about how the pistol in a story must be fired in my first-year writing lectures – by which he meant that anything you single out for mention must have some function in the plot what can a gun do but shoot? until one student hearing this saw red and stormed up to the secretary’s office to beard me in my den unfortunately I wasn’t there probably having lunch so he had to content himself with ranting about what a lie it was how many things could be done with a pistol and how I should be shot after that strangely we made friends or sort of he was a fan of Lord Byron and used to drop by my office for a loud harangue leaning in from the corridor which irritated my colleagues especially as he used to shout you can’t really tell me you mark them the same as us them meaning Asian students I just don’t believe it in what passed for a confiding tone it was in vain to protest how excellent was the grammar of language-school trained students how divergent and fascinating the ideas of students from different cultural backgrounds eventually he changed his name and left town for undisclosed reasons only to emerge a few years later as one of our Masters students until he flamed out the pistol in a story must be fired
(16/11/22-11/7/2023)
•
Don’t share your thoughts or stories about your own experience said the self-help guru about listening not talking at your friends guilty! and yet I’d say I was acting on an earlier theory that discourse hereabouts was based exclusively on anecdote in Kendrick Smithyman’s poetry for instance stories are told whose meaning is obscure and yet when broken down turns out to bear rich fruit a culture of laconic non-feeling-sharing men when I lamented the loss of some of his weirder tales to his wife Margaret look through the poems they’re all there was her reply not everything is an anecdote Steve Martin shouts at John Candy in Planes Trains and Automobiles mind you when you can see your interlocutor reading the sickbag it should give you a hint that something’s wrong
(20/10/22-23/2/24)
•
Yesterday I left the hot tap running on the cat’s plate and the light on in the storeroom before going up for my nap I’ve got too many dementia sufferers in my life already said Bronwyn better get it together or I’m putting you out to grass fair enough it’s not that I haven’t noticed in my last semester teaching I found I couldn’t improvise so readily the names and quotes wouldn’t come the way they used to and now half the people I meet disappear from my mind the moment they turn around their names especially but I do have my methods reciting the Kings and Queens of England first off then the American presidents in order any gaps can be filled in next day so far anyway
(31/10/22-8/5/23)
•
In my dream I was talking to a group of students about the genesis of Poetry NZ back in the day in Palmerston North I asked them to write me a haiku – making sure that they knew what that was – then collected all their emails for next time so loud was the din of the next class invading I could hardly hear myself think let alone make out the crabbed scrawl on the notes they gave me I suppose it’s a reaction to hearing of Bronwyn’s workmate who when told we were going to see Emily asked who’s Emily Brontë? have I started teaching again in my dreams? a relief then to be woken by clattering dishes this morning the old life done
(22/11/22-12/7/2023)
Publications:
- "PhD Days." The Imaginary Museum (12/9/23).
•
that was the phrase they used for my father after his stroke he’d tear up at the slightest mention of wartime sacrifice or heroic deeds it improved him said my mother he’d been too buttoned up stiff upper lip as he counselled patients in their darkest hour but now it’s me I just have to hear Churchill’s gravelly voice or a burst of patriotic music and I’m awash embarrassing yes but if you can’t cry sometimes what good are you?
(13/10/22-4/1/23)
Publications:
- Stormy Weather. Live Encounters Aotearoa New Zealand Poets & Writers Special Edition. Guest Ed. Lincoln Jaques. Live Encounters: Free Online Magazine from Planet Earth. Ed. Mark Ulyseas (April 2023).
•
A woman was whinging about how only two people turned up to her book-signing though forty said they were coming on the online invite this sparked off a chorus of you think that’s bad? what about this? from the likes of Neil Gaiman Jodi Picoult Margaret Atwood and other celebs Atwood said that not only did nobody come but the one person who did approach her wanted to buy scotch tape it got me to thinking about my own slew of embarrassing events readings where the readers outnumbered the audience launches where nobody bought the book and the person giving the launch speech admitted to not having read it but still recommended we get it ‘because it’s an important book’ so why do you do it? asked Bronwyn – Sigmund Freud had some useful theories I said but at least the writing must be fun? not really I replied the agony of getting it down then working through it all again and again the fear of falling short of being laughed at then why? to be honest I don’t really know I’m just glad that some people do where would I be without the books they write?
(7/12/22-5/7/23)
•
His fiction is uncompromisingly experimental his book Ghost Stories may well be his most accessible I was a bit disconcerted to find that ‘uncompromisingly experimental’ line in my publisher’s write-up on Facebook tired of airport books? bored by Tom Clancy and Dan Brown? wearied by puerile web sites? seeking a challenge? try a “novel” by Dr Jack Ross said Michael Morrissey a few years further back à propos of The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis it’s hard to remember why I felt it so necessary to print half the pages upside down it certainly caused pain to the printers who had to redo the whole first run I suppose it was just that the first time I picked up a book with half its pages in Farsi hand-drawn dream maps and diagrams of the compound where the ‘action’ was feigned to take place it gave me a kick like I just can’t describe after that texts within texts print windows surrounded by pictures concrete poems imbedded like plums in Jack Horner’s pie were all that attracted me but passion dies and the puritan fervour falls away till you find yourself left-siding everything because you’re so much more interested in what you’re saying than how to say it and the need for such scaffolding seems lost like left luggage in an old train station where the ghosts of ambition have gone to rest
(9/12/22-8/2/24)
Publications:
- "Poetry Shelf Monday Poem.” Paula Green. NZ Poetry Shelf: a poetry page with reviews, interviews, and other things (22/4/24))
•
I really don’t care
do u?
the horrible thing is
when I hear such heresies
I can understand why
somebody said it
so much futile energy
applied to quite possibly
insoluble problems
does get wearing
hence
at that drunken dinner-party
where our hostess revealed
she supported Kim Dotcom’s
internet party
because he had a big pool
and she hoped to be invited
to swim in it
I could see the pointlessness
of argument
still every time
I turn on the tele
to see some monstrous gas-guzzler
busting its way
through fragile streams
up sand-dunes
frangible gullies
join the ranger lifestyle
live life large
that sick feeling of indignation
at pricks who smash shit
for the sake of it
comes back to the surface again
so yes I’ll sign your petition
but unless you grew up loving trees
poking through rockpools
(now picked clean)
trying not to step into
other poor creatures’ business
it’s hard to feel much hope
(4/11/22-29/2/24)
•
to read her a poem last thing last night it’s our new thing ghost stories or poems rather than stupefying ourselves with one more sit-com it was a bit of a risk but I tried her on Wordsworth’s ‘We are Seven’ The little Maid would have her will and said “Nay, we are seven!” after a bit of discussion about the poet’s somewhat peremptory manner in quizzing the girl and the general sentimentality her verdict was what a ponce I have to admit she has a point there is something repellent there beneath the saccharine and yet that’s how I used to think myself until I switched off the critic-o-meter one weekend when I read an old collected poems arranged by date you just have to give them time stop looking for obvious beauties and open your heart instead
(25/11/22-5/7/23)
•
Seeing Zero by her plate today sitting as close as she physically could her head flung up appealingly was of course irresistible but reminded me sharply of another cat in the same kitchen twenty-five years ago Poupousse named for yet another cat who knocked over a vase deliberately to spite an intruder (my mother-in-law) while her human was out of the room our Poupousse was a greedy cat or rather she took a simple joy in a plate of food that look of sublime satisfaction as she tucked in was really something to see and the constant peevish attempts to interrupt her by head boy cat Ilya were impatiently swatted away her earlier identity had been as Mitzi living over the fence with a young family of importunate children so she peddled her papers elsewhere we knocked on doors up and down the street to find out where she came from but it never occurred to us to try one street over till one of the family walking by years later spotted her lying in our front yard double identities pulling up stakes and shifting to richer ground are second nature to our furry friends we call such people grifters tricksters identity thieves perhaps we should just call them cats?
(6/12/22-27/5/23)
Publications:
- "Poetry Shelf Monday Poem.” Paula Green. NZ Poetry Shelf: a poetry page with reviews, interviews, and other things (23/6/25))
•
All you have to learn is how to be alone my Dad wrote Admit nothing in his diary in the rest home I used to duck inside the library at school to foil the wolfpacks go undercover if your earbuds secretly connect to nothing broadcasting silence smile disguise it with a whistle eventually you’ll find the one who shows the sign you need received and understood
(27-28/10/20)
Publications:
- Singlets, Briefs & Shorts: An Anthology of Poems from the Show Me Shorts! New Zealand Short Film Festival 2020. Ed. Trevor M. Landers. PMT Press in association with 99% Press. Auckland: Lasavia Publishing Ltd., 2021. 88-89.
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