The Randell Cottage Writers Trust is marking National Poetry Day (22 August 2014) with our own online poetry festival, a series of poems by Randell Cottage poets (a term encompassing our residents, trustees and committee members).

 

Our 2010 New Zealand resident Pat White is a poet, essayist and artist whose work reflects his passion for the natural environment and an exploration of the way individuals relate to the land. His poetry collections are: Signposts (1977), Bushfall (1978), Cut Across the Grain (1980), Acts of Resistance (1985), Dark Backward (1994), Drought and Other Intimacies (1999), and Planting the Olives (2004). He has also published In Gallipoli: In search of a family story (Red Roofs, 2005). Pat’s Randell project, The Quality of Light: A Writer on the West Coast is a biography of the teacher, writer, bookseller and conservationist Peter Hooper, to be published by Mākaro Press.

 

Not my favourite spa

Who cannot fly
cannot imagine: Michael
Harlow
late summer days
too hot to engage
with what might
once have been
 
from an old letter
knocking dust off
clearing silverfish
from the margins
 
a small poem
that after all
doesn’t particularly
go anywhere
 
but doesn’t hurry
to get there
either, the day
being as it is

 

Pat White
Not my favourite spa is to be included in a forthcoming collection of poems tentatively titled Naturally.