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).

Mary McCallum is a publisher, poet and author.  Her children’s novel  Dappled Annie and the Tigrish (Gecko) was published in new Zealand in February 2014 and will be released in the United Kingdom and United States in Autumn 2014.  Her first novel, The Blue (Penguin 2007), won two Montana NZ Book Awards (Best First Book of Prose & Readers’ Choice) and she is currently working on a second novel.  Mary has also been a long-serving chair of the Friends of the Randell Cottage.

Four Poets, Randell Cottage, 2009 – Mary McCallum

I walk in on them, four poets eating scones, plates

balanced on their laps, cups in hand, caught like

teapots in a cupboard. That room, once the singing

room, once  a bedroom for spinster sisters,  built

in a time of family bibles and blue-glass bottles.  Now

there’s a bar heater, laptop, plate of softening butter,

and poets of some standing, sitting at odd angles,

protruding an elbow – an ankle – a knee, swallowing

cooling tea, handing out words with silver tongs.

Kirsty and Fiona, Vincent, Christopher Reid – eyes

shifting from the blocked fireplace, to the blank

ceiling, not one letting on that the air is constricted, that

they’re the wrong sized dolls for this doll’s house, that

the chimney creaks. Do they know or do they guess?

In the quiet cavity above, a child’s clothes were found.

Mary McCallum

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 2004 resident Michael Harlow is a poet, publisher and librettist. Born in the United States, with Greek and Ukrainian heritage, he settled in New Zealand in 1968. Michael has been editor of the Caxton Press poetry series and poetry editor of Landfall. He’s also been a recipient of the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship and in March 2014 was presented with the 2014 Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for Distinguished Contribution to Poetry in New Zealand.

Longing for Harmonies,
lettre de Menton

Have you ever noticed?
Always there’s a pair
of them together; ring-collar
doves, even when they’re
flying switchback from tree
to tree, daubs of colour
in a toss of light, you can’t
tell which one is following
the other. Have you listened
to them singing their hearts
out under the parasols of trees?
I swear you never know
when one song begins
and the other one ends.
You might say–they have an
arrangement: one long song
for two voices: they are calling
down the lost noises of the sun
and clearly–this ‘magic study
of happiness that no one eludes’.

Michael Harlow / Clos du Peyronnet
First published in Cassandra’s Daughter (Auckland University Press, 2005, 2006)

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).

Randell Cottage trustee Jo Thorpe is a poet, dancer, and dance historian. Her poems have featured in journals and anthologies. Her first collection of poetry, Len & Other Poems (2003), was written in response to the work of visionary kinetic artist Len Lye.

 
MEDEA READING

The scientists for orbital debris
are tracking some twenty thousand remnants
of hatch covers, launch rockets,
fragments of satellites colliding over Russia,
things which escape or have been dumped.
Another hundred thousand, a centimetre or more
are not yet being monitored.
In the photo they shine like stars – a kind of
prickly swaddle, pinpoints of metal
which because of their velocity
are capable of damaging
space stations, shuttles, any cosmonauts on board.

What this news tells me
is there’s a limit to the number of things which can orbit
other things. Lovers, for example.
The problem lies in deciding how many.
And how remove an object once it’s
reached the end of its mission? – the philanderer, say,
from the subject of his pursuit?
The good news is the debris doesn’t last
forever. There’s something about
the vigour of matter
lessening in the lower orbits
so the body falls back – like a thing exhausted,
like the feeling after sex as described in the books –
back into the ‘ruthless furnace of this world’
where it burns itself out, completely.

How the scientists plan to tidy up space
is by using weak lasers like water cannons
to push the junk closer to turbulent Earth –
where the striving goes on, as effortful
as elephants, a quality admired
provided you’re not versed
in the Japanese notion of the floating world
which has nothing to do with being driven.
Better the idea of launching
swarms of cubes – those foursquare things
nosy as an interested cop – which have
sails that will open, attach themselves to the miscreant mess
(though how they’ll do that, the scientists don’t say)
and spinnaker them
down to where they’ll burn.

What I want to say is,
if you unfurl your sails,
if you hunt for me in glamorous space,
don’t think I’m so small that I can’t
cause damage.

Jo Thorpe
First published Sport 40, 2012.
Translated into German and published in Neue Rundschau, Heft 1/2013

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).

Vincent O’Sullivan is an author, poet, dramatist, and Katherine Mansfield scholar. Emeritus Professor of English at Victoria University of Wellington, he is also a trustee of the Randell Cottage Writers Trust. This poem, The hare he said, will be included in Being Here: Selected Poems to be published by Victoria University Press in 2015. Vincent was appointed New Zealand’s Poet Laureate in 2013.

The hare, he said

‘You can’t imagine what it was like, to see a creature
other than rats,’ to see, he meant, its living pertness,

its ears alert and standing and the sun pink through
them, ‘a kind of warmth we’d as good as forgot.’

Its odd, insistent confidence, its paws casual
even, between coiled snagging wire as if

mere brambles, not a dozen yards to the left
a corpse-infested ditch. He said, ‘We watched

him with childish wonder, as though an angel
had landed at an atheists’ picnic,’ a Methodist

as he’d been then, wryly thinking back. ‘And no one,
none, the hare, the angel, the bleeding enemy,

us, knowing who would disturb it first, who’d
regret forever wrecking its undamaged world.’

Who did? He couldn’t tell you. ‘The one fine thing,’
he said, ‘that was worth remembering. The hare.’

Vincent O’Sullivan

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).

The first comes from novelist, poet, essayist and Friends committee member Maggie Rainey-Smith.

Love in the Fifties

She wore a second-hand,

button-through frock

covered in rosebuds

a belt at her waist

of the same fabric

and black patent shoes

he wore corduroy trousers

a silver cigarette tin in his

back pocket and carpet slippers

they paid half a crown at the

turnstile and Tex Morton sang

‘Old Shep’ on the slow ride

she loved candyfloss and

he lost his front tooth

to a toffee apple

they marvelled together at

the half-man half-woman,

the one white thigh

he proposed on the ghost

train and she screamed

as the skeletons rattled

she wore a hat with

matching gloves and

carried a small bump

they stoked the fire together

and the hot water rumbled

over the red roof tiles

when the ditch was filled

with rainwater and he

was so full that he fell

she dried his clothes on

the rack above the stove

where the roast rested

And there’s more; more

than the rain and the

lost footbridges; barbiturates

This is only the start

but who

has the time nowadays?

Maggie Rainey-Smith
First published in 4th Floor Literary Journal 2010, Whitireia New Zealand Creative Writing Programme