Tuesday Poem - Hound by Emma Neale

                  

                 HOUND
  
                 The heart's a bitch. 

                 It's caught the scent of your coat hem,    
                 the tang of leather and metal on your wrists,
                 the soft skin at your neck
                 where the blood's cursor flashes.

                 You've gone
                 leaving no clear sign -
                 but still the heart strains and whines
                 wants off the leash,
                 snout like a cool, black magnet
                 clinched to the invisible print
                 of where you passed

                 as if it would track you
                 bring you to ground
                 stunned but unbloodied
                 the light on your face 
                 the sheen of wet freesias
                 as the warm jaws lie you
                 like long, green stems 
                 at my feet.


                 Emma Neale 
                    (first published in The Red Wheelbarrow - Issue 17 November 2008) 

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Emma Neale is an award-winning Dunedin-based poet, novelist, essayist, teacher, editor of our local newspaper's Monday's Poem, mother of two sons and friend. Emma is this year's Burn's fellow. She and her work will already be known to many of you; her latest novel Fosterling is a must-read and was recently short-listed in the Youth Fiction category of the Sir Julius Vogel Awards for Science Fiction and Fantasy. I urge you to read it - you will find yourselves immediately, deeply engaged and transported by this beautifully honed, transformative story. To listen in to Emma's conversation with Lynn Freeman on NZ's National Radio, scroll down the radio's page till you reach Emma's name.

A paragraph from one of Emma's recent(ish) blog entries, The Press of Language -   

". . . I love the way, with my battered old Shorter Oxford English Dictionary – a gift from my parents when I was a teenager – I can plunge in, riffling through to look for, say, ciborium (which proves my lack of formal religious instruction), and get waylaid by clingstone, clinchpoop, clergess, churr-worm, chumship. By that sweetly circuitous route I taste peach; make company laugh as we toss the insult about; imagine another life as a mediaeval scholar; hear crickets creak, and feel the presence of my paternal grandfather, Hamish, whose nickname was Chum. A printed dictionary brings about happy little shocks of happenstance: words feel like happenings, events. It’s like walking around a corner, to see an empty music stand set in the middle of someone’s front garden, and a tui perched on it, singing, ‘without notes’. Or in the bustle of the marketplace at the end of winter, turning your head to catch sight of a young woman who has cleared a small space to dance, the competition ribbons pinned to her suitcase fluttering as if they’ve barely overcome stage fright themselves; and as you glance away, you see three Buddhist monks walk past, in companionable, silent single file, alms bowls clutched under their arms, so on the page in your mind, you see arms bowls…"

Visit Emma's blog to continue reading The Press of Language.  


Emma's new collection of poems - The Truth Garden - will be launched at Dunedin's University Book Shop this Friday, 27 July. 

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Friday 27th is New Zealand's National Poetry Day. To celebrate, this week's TP editor Andrew M. Bell has selected a poem from each of the three Poetry finalists for this year's NZ Post Book Awards - Anna Jackson (with her collection Thicket, Rhian Gallagher with Shift and Diana Hawken with her latest collection The Leaf-note). To visit the hub, please click on the quill. Poetry events will be held across the country on Friday, several of which will involve Tuesday Poets. Emma Neale's eagerly-awaited new collection The Truth Garden (OUP) will be launched at Dunedin's University Book Shop on Friday. Up on the North Island, curator Mary McCallum will be one of five 'peripatetic poets. . . brandishing poems that are lyrical and liturgical - bucolic & balletic - rhyming & free. . . ' And who said poetry can't be fun?

Tuesday Poem - SPARK by Emma Neale

                  SPARK

                 Our son, nearly one, has one near-word:
                 another determined birth
                 the sound stutters, gutters
                 then rushes and floods

                 “A-la,
                 a-lie,
                 a-lie-uh,
                 a-lie-uh-duh.”

                He points to lamp and torch,
                to LEDs on clock, computer, answer machine,
                to sun-strike – on sash windows, ignited
                from an old ute’s wing mirror, firing
                a red beech leaf as it falls, flares,
                flaught – like torn newsprint in a grate
                as it spasms into flame….

                “That’s right!” we say, “A light, a light.”
                And as he points to hyacinth, door, cat,
                and tries,

                “A-lie?
                A-lie-uh.
                A-lie-uh-duh!”

                say, “No, that’s a flower, a door, a  cat,”
                but he, small and earnest professor,
                cranes forward a little on his rump,
                to repeat slowly and with extra care

                “A-lie.
                A-lie-uh.
                A-lie-uh-duh”

                until we look again.

                It gathers in thick cones,
                rods of bee caves
                dozens of lilac oboe mouths
                peeled back into stars.

                It hovers on one wall
                like a vertical lake
                that rapidly drains
                to miraculous views
                (a dog! a tree! a car!)
                then fills again with itself
                hard, white, stilled.

                It unfurls, blackbird-blue,
                to arc and vault
                from windowsill to garden

                where discs and glints of it
                flock, merge, and wheel apart
                into hedge, clothesline, pegs, water,
                frost on red roof, green blade, yellow grain:

                “A-lie.
                A-lie-uh.
                A-lie-uh-duh.”

                “Ah,” we say, “We see.   There.
                And there.
                Light.   Light.
                All shapes of light.”
   

                Emma Neale

Emma Neale

". . . The first thing we hear is the rhythm of the mother's heartbeat in the womb.

We learn to master language through the principles of corresponding sounds - the world says "da", and "ma": we echo it back, in the long, slow rhyme of learning to talk. A return to childhood certainties is perhaps what many readers are unconsciously seeking when craving the loud, clear bell of end rhyme.

The patterns of rhyme and metre may set up, and fulfil, expectations; it's an enjoyable re-enactment of hopes realised, in artistic form. Yet readers - and writers - over the centuries have not only sought the comfort and security of traditional prosody: they've also sought adventure and novelty, in the form of variation, spontaneity, inventiveness.

Readers might remember that Shakespeare often wrote in blank verse - unrhymed iambic pentameter - and yet he's known as one of our finest literary forefathers.

Poets who are able to use rhyme skillfully, free of cliche and the thump of bathos, might be the Red Checkers of literature: dazzling, dexterous, daring, and yet just as the RNZAF aerobatics team aren't the only kind of pilot, rhymesters aren't the only kind of poet.

Contemporary poetry uses a full, bristling quiver of techniques to add aural music to the literary form: e.g. assonance, sibilance, alliteration, onomatopoeia, consonance, repetition of all kinds - from song-like refrains, to cyclical teuletons (or repeated end words: see the sestina form in today's offering in the Monday Poem slot).

Yet because poetry is often a printed medium, it also uses line ends and white space to articulate all the qualities of silence, and to add narrative or rhythmic suspense and delay. . . "

from the article 'Not All Cats are black, not all poetry rhymes' by Emma Neale. Read the full piece on the Otago Daily Times website.

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Emma Neale is a Dunedin-based poet, novelist, essayist, teacher, editor of our local newspaper's Monday's Poem, mother of two sons and friend; she and her work will already be known to many of you. Emma's latest novel Fosterling is a must-read; you will find yourselves immediately, deeply engaged and transported by this beautifully honed, transformative story. Listen to Emma's conversation with Lynn Freeman on NZ's National Radio (scroll down the radio's page till you reach Emma's name).

Emma has just taken the plunge and joined the blogging community. You can visit her very new blog here. Oh, and how fascinating. . . I have just seen that Penelope Todd featured Emma and her poem Well on The Intertidal Zone a year ago - almost exactly to the day; 20 April 2010! 

Emma has generously donated a copy of her poetry collection Spark to MANY AS ONE - Artwork for Christchurch. 

Thank you, Emma. 

Also new to MaO, 2000 Circles a photographic work by mountaineer, environmental sculptor and photographer, Martin Hill and Philippa Jones. 

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Tim Jones is this week's TP editor, with Pacific Tsunami Found Poems by Teresia Teaiwa. 

Please click on the quill

Breath-taking coastline

I've been away from home since Monday on a graced journey with friends. I hope to find more words than these at a later stage, but for now need to sit quietly with my metaphorical map, water bottle and backpack and to ponder the places we have been and those we have yet to travel.

Being away means I have the delights of a week of your stories and poems to catch up on... I hope you have all been well.

Last night, I hurried my bags along from plane to conveyor belt to trolly to car as efficiently as I could and drove the half hour stretch from Dunedin airport (with its smart new runway, control tower and buildings endearingly flanked by pasture and paddocks) to the University Book Shop in Great King Street. It was important to be there in time to celebrate the launch of Penelope Todd's long-awaited new novel, Island (published by Penguin Group (NZ)).

Fellow writer and friend, Emma Neale, introduced Penelope and Island and has given me permission to print her launch speech here ---

Island launch speech

University Book Shop

Thursday 29 April 2010

I suppose when most of us hear the title of Penelope's latest novel, we might think of our own community – we island dwellers together. Or, embraced by bookshelves as we are right now, we might remember some classical and literary precedents : those ancient forefathers of TV reruns of everything from Gilligan's Island to Survivor Samoa. In Greek myth, for example, the Islands of the Blessed were said to be the final resting place for the souls of heroes and the virtuous. So perhaps we'd expect visions of some far flung paradise in the pages of this Island. At the other extreme, we might recall the bleak marooning of Robinson Crusoe, who fought to survive on what he called the Island of Despair, and who at one point gains religion, thanking God for a fate in which the only thing that is missing for him is society.

'To island', as a verb, of course means to insulate, or to protect. In the nineteenth-century setting of Penelope's novel, ailing immigrants and sailors are sent to a fictional Quarantine Island, to protect mainlanders from the threat of disease. So there's an immediate link to the archetype of the island as a place of bitter isolation and suffering. But what possible version of paradise could there be, in a tiny half-village of hard-worked nurses and pain-wracked patients?

Well, take one part need, add one part gentleness: heat them together, and the cloistered environment becomes a crucible for desire and love.

I think the most extraordinary achievement of this book – even better than its gaspingly beautiful prologue – is its knowing display of the strange compulsions of attraction, the human magnetism that leaps social boundaries like age and health, and historical standards of propriety and decorum. In Penelope's novel the life force surges forward in the shape of desire, insisting on its right to exist even in the most starved of circumstances. Yet in some startling scenes the book also asks – do love and attraction actually become destructive, when they dig in their heels and declare their own primacy? When is a lover wrong to insist on saving the beloved's life? When is a caregiver morally correct to withdraw warmth and nurturing?

I'm phrasing all of this in a slightly abstract way, because I don't want to rob you either of the pleasures of narrative pace, or of the full shock of the ethical dilemma that young nurse Liesel faces in cruel, doubled form. I hope it doesn't siphon off the fizz of discovering the story for yourselves if I do say a couple of specific things about the characters. I loved meeting them on the page. There's Liesel, who talks 119-to-the-dozen, is briskly capable and practical, and is only just growing aware of the effect she has on men. She's a kind of prototype modern woman: the type many of our European great-great grandmothers must have been for any Pakeha to have survived mentally and physically in the new land. There's also a severely injured but deliciously salty sea captain, drawn to Liesel despite himself; there's young, athletic runaway Kahu, who shares Liesel's instinctive gifts for healing, but who's only just on the cusp of manhood, so who can't always challenge her in the ways she needs. There's Martha, the hospital matron, whose indulgences of whisky and keeping pet donkeys give a wonderfully quirky yet grounded sense of personality. I have to say there is also a lovely donkey-father: for me he's changed that saying 'making an ass of himself'. He's quite the tender gentleman.

As with all of Penelope's earlier work, the writing in this book often has a deep, melting poetry – it asks you to slow down, let the images and descriptions send out their full impact in expanding ripples of response. Yet the plot – with all its high drama and its erotic turns – also keeps you scudding swiftly along with its current. It's as if the book has two quite different yet somehow perfectly compatible speeds. I found it compulsive reading to the point where I worked on deceitful strategies to sneak more reading time into each day. Such as pretending to sort clean laundry, with the book concealed under a cloth nappy, so that I'd look boringly occupied to my 7-year-old. He seems to accept that clothes have to get folded, whereas reading a book – well! It's interruptible idleness.

I said at the start that the book touches on several aspects of our understanding of what an 'island' setting might bring. There's the potential paradise of desire; there's the flip-side of exile and desolation brought on by terrible illness, and love tested to its limits. But although the novel is set in the nineteenth century, there is also 'us': we current isle-men and women. For it's not only Liesel who might seem like a prototype modern, in some of the freedoms she claims. Kahu and Martha also at times vividly reflect us back at ourselves in their language and actions. This ensures that we don't treat the historical texture of the novel as 'other' or escapist. The bigger questions the characters face about morality, destiny, love and lust are those that may still trouble our minds, or make our hearts swerve off course, on any otherwise unsuspecting Thursday evening. In this sense, although Penelope's novel touches on all those island associations with a delicate, original hand, the one she examines most attentively is exactly what Robinson Crusoe missed: society; ourselves.

Island did all the things I want a book to do. It took me away to a place that was far from my own circumstances, and yet it also brought me back, better able to reflect on what those circumstances are. I'm so pleased that Penelope asked me to launch it, and I'm honoured to hold the boat steady for a moment while you, its future readers, climb in, and head off for a breath-taking coastline.

Congratulations, Penelope, and thank you for all the solitary, hard graft you've put in to helping us look at both our past and our own world afresh.

Yes, thank you, dear Penelope - and congratulations.

&

Thank you, Emma.

Penelope is one of our Tuesday poets and author of the blog, Life in the Intertidal Zone.