![]() ![]() She had a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2013 and a Bothy Project Residency at Inshriach Bothy in the Cairngorms in 2016. Lynn Davidson’s latest poetry collection Islander is published by Shearsman Books and Victoria University Press. James Brown’s Selected Poems was published by VUP in 2020. Bug Week and Other Stories recently won the Ockham NZ Book Fiction Award 2021. Her most recent poetry collection is Flow: Whanganui River Poems (VUP 2017). They work in Tech and spend a lot of time picking heavy things up and putting them back down again.Īirini Beautrais lives in Whanganui and is the author of four poetry collections and a collection of short fiction. For the last two years they’ve been working with Chris Tse on an anthology of LGBTQIA+ and Takatāpui writing to be released this year by Auckland University Press. They have just released their first book I Am In Bed With You. To the swell, to the ebb, to the well, to the sea.Īs you would traverse a stream, but ratherĮmma Barnes lives and writes in Pōneke / Wellington. To the roll, to the tug, to the roil, to the shell, To the stick, to the slick, to the sweep, to the twig, To the neap, to the deep, to the drag, to the fog, To the breadth, to the depth, to the tide To the chain, to the town, to the side, to the slide, To the rage, to the rod, to the rood, to the vein, To the surge, to the flood, to the blood, to the urge To the leave, to the oar, to the spring, to the tongue, To the dive, to the shore, to the grave, to the give, To the core, to the gorge, to the grove, to the cave, To the scum, to the moss, to the mist, to the grist, To the roam, to the rend, to the seam, to the foam, ![]() To the bend, to the wend, to the wind, to the run, To the shake, to the lift, to the fall, to the wall, To the rift, to the graft, to the shift, to the break, To the down, to the plain, to the green, to the drift, To the fell, to the wash, to the splash, to the rush, ![]() To the drip, to the weep, to the rock, to the rill, To the stone, to the hill, to the heap, to the seep, Except I’m the lake and I’m water myself. I don’t know how to communicate this with you in a way that you’ll understand. I’ve forgotten I’ve believed I’ve not existed before. I am instead still that teenager on the side of the road with a cello hard case for company. I am never located when I want to be located the most. Your eyes flicker and flutter under your eyelids as you try to find what’s lost, what’s gone forever. You say, as your brain seizes, that you have lost the way. The gravel shifts again with the long-range round echo of stones underwater. I want to know nothing, everything, just tell it all to me. The lake breathes and I breathe and the depth of both of us is able to be felt by finger, by phone, by feeling. I think of all the colours of water that look black, that look wine dark, that look like youth looking back at me. I think of the sound when you’re underwater and the gravel shifts beneath your feet. All lakes exist in the same space of memory. The lake surface is the lake surface is the lake surface. I am grateful to all the poets and publishers who continue to support my season of themes. The poems are not so much about water but have a water presence. And of course the poetry of Dinah Hawken, with her lyrical eye bringing the natural world closer, water a constant companion. Or read your way through Apirana Taylor’s poems and you will find they are water rich – and his poetry flows like water currents. The same can be said of Lynn Davidson’s glorious collections How to Live by the Sea and The Islander. Kiri Piahana-Wong’s sublime collection Night Swimming is like an ode to water. Some poets are particularly drawn to water. I hadn’t factored in leaving poems out when I came up with my theme-season plan. This was an impossible challenge: whittling all the poems I loved down to a handful. Unsurprisingly there is a profusion of water poems in Aotearoa – think the ocean yes, but lakes and rivers and floods and dripping taps. Look through my poetry collections and you will see I can’t keep the ocean out. Over the ensuing weeks in lockdown, I was able to return to that spot, my eyes on the water, my senses feeding on wildness and beauty. ![]() I breathed in and I breathed out, and I saved that sublime moment for later. I stood by the water’s edge as the sun was coming up. Before we went into level-four lockdown last year, I went to Te Henga Bethells Beach near where I live. ![]()
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