From Mary McCallum:


The Jubilant Butter Thief and other poems for a Tuesday

It’s Tuesday. Time for a Poem. This week’s Tuesday Poem is called The Jubilant Butter Thief and it’s been selected for the Tuesday Poem blog by NZ artist, illustrator, writer and poet Fifi Colston,pic right, complete with – as you’d expect – a gorgeous illustration. You’ll find it here www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com . It’s the sixth Tuesday Poem on the snappy new blog, following poems by leading NZ poets Chris Price, Sue Wootton, Tim Jones, Bryan Walpert and Emma Barnes.

But these poems are just the beginning.  Tuesday Poem is a NZ-based community of poets that includes writers from as far afield as the US, Ireland and the UK. Every week, they post a poem – by themselves or another poet - on their blogs and link to the Tuesday Poem blog via its live blog roll. So after you’ve read The Jubilant Butter Thief, you’d be crazy not to click on the other Tuesday Poets for more tasty treats.

This week, you’ll find Tim Jones’ bitter-sweet Family Man which puts the man of adventure up against the one who picks up after children and David Howard’s poignant Late in the Day posted by Claire Beynon which begins: A house is what you pass/ through, using each room as the diver might a wreck. Echoing Howard’s poem, is Janis Freegard’s City Life, and then there’s a paean to reading poetry outdoors by Kay McKenzie Cooke called  ‘lost in…my own green light’, Saradha Koirala’s story of emigration from childhood and the UK called 1987,  Helen Rickerby’s ‘mysterious and haunty’ Two Sisters Whisper After Lights Out, a ‘wee potted story’ by Natasha Dennerstein called Floral Life chosen by Harvey Molloy, the short and not-so-sweet A Poem by Mary McCallum, and from Bernadette Keating an audio poem : Sueyeun Juliette Lee reading The Underground  National didn’t blow up (for want of love).

And that is still just the start… there are another 16 Tuesday Poets rolling out poems today. The Northern Hemisphere poets will starting putting theirs up around lunchtime. And if you’re really keen, there are still some wonderful poems up on the blogroll from last week. Who could resist?