Kerrin P Sharpe
Victoria University Press
$25
Most top
graduates of creative writing programs are fortunate enough to find a publisher
for their work-in-progress within a year or two of completing their studies.
Not so, Christchurch poet and student of the forerunner of Wellington’s famous
Institute of Modern Letters Creative Writing course, Kerrin P. Sharpe. Sharpe
finished her studies top of class back in 1976. Recently she saw the release of
her first collection, Three Days in a
Wishing Well by foremost New Zealand poetry publisher, Victoria University
Press, the completion of a publication journey which took her over 3 and a half
decades.
Sometimes, as for the finest viticulturist, time is a
poet’s best friend. In Sharpe’s case, those thirty-six years of poetic genesis,
development and negotiation have created a stunning first release. Structurally
perfect, the collection journeys through three section, each emblematic of the Three Days… poet and reader spend in the book’s fountain
of poetic ideas and imagery, as the titular poem evocatively confirms:
at the bottom
of the well
lined with
porteous
yellow blue art
tiles
ceramic hands
hold
moon drop coins
arranged as
feather
on a hunter’s
shirt
and a city care
man with hose
and
bucket is
separating
wishes with
water
the research is
called
three days in a
wishing
well now the
council knows
the thoughts of
the boy
rowing nowhere
the
woman carrying
shortbread
as live
environments.com
even the washing
instructions for
this poem
The language use is stellar throughout, each poem a
heady mix of finely fermented linguistics and rich symbolism. Collectively the
poems take one from New Zealand’s first woman lighthouse-keeper and a mother’s
passion for sewing to patron saints, monasteries and Captain Scott’s 1910
Antarctic expedition. It is at its most tender, most powerful when resurrecting
the poet’s relationship with her parents, as in perhaps the best poem in the
work, ‘my father always…’ which concludes:
to hug my father
was
to know the sky:
the
voices of
soldiers the
families that
squeezed
him inside the
hot breath
of thatch the
hooks of
his wings even
now i
hear the
surprise of
small birds
As in the best poetry collections, every offering
provides something different – a change of subject, a slight alteration in
word-play, a fresh, delightful image - to comprehend and consider.
Reading this book, it’s hardly surprising to consider
that Sharpe has used the time between
graduation
and publication to build up an incredible list of magazine and anthology
publications for these poems, the kind which rarely grace the Acknowledgements page of a first
publication. Three times published in Best
New Zealand Poems, an entry in Best
of the Best New Zealand Poems, the New Zealand Listener, Turbine, Snorkel…. And shortly, her
work will find a place in the prestigious Oxford
Poets series published by leading UK poetry publisher, Carcanet. On the
strength of Three Days in the Wishing
Well, we’ll be hearing about Sharpe and reading a second collection well
before another 36 years has passed.
Other Animals
Therese Lloyd
Victoria University Press
$25
Sometimes
reading poetry can stir unintended personal responses. Opening another first
collection from a University of Victoria, IIML MA in Creative Writing graduate,
Other Animals by Therese Lloyd and
seeing an introductory snatch of verse from the wondrously concise work of
American poet, W. S. Merwin:
the
stone city in
the
river has changed and of course
the river
returned me to the privilege I felt last year finding
his Poet’s Page on The Poetry Archive UK was launched aside my own. Delving
further into Other Animals, a recent
Number 1 Bestseller on the New Zealand Book sales charts, Merwin’s quote served
another purpose – a linguistic barometer by which to read Lloyd’s own sparse,
but expansive poetry. An early poem like ‘Farmyards of the Mind’ is indicative
of how this poet manages to compress succulent imagery and meaning into a few
lines of verse:
Coming through
fields
wiping dirt from
hands from feet from tracks
the bitterness
still full in my mouth
bits of
forgiveness I seem unable to swallow
I’m bawling for
my lack of difference
and other
awkward characteristics
stacked like
felled timber
in an aching
forest
Awkward, felled, aching: it’s Lloyd’s clever meshing
of adjectives that creates layered meanings; a statement true of many other
poems in the book. This sense of a series of vignettes, beautifully, tightly
composed, plentifully seamed with strong word choice and strong pictures is
present throughout the first section of Other
Animals, particularly in poems such as ‘Scenes from the Motor-camp’, ‘The Eternals’,
‘In Levin’ and ‘Takaka’. But it’s the 2nd section, during which the previously
understated theme of creaturely behaviour tumults, that best showcases the full
range of Lloyd’s poetic talents. In this part, even the opening poem, the
haunting ‘The Hinge Seasons’ begins with lines that seem to perfectly review
the author’s poetic operation:
The talk these
days is of all things known
and the
arrangements we’ve made of them
What follows, in poems such as the titular work,
‘Eel’, ‘The Black Angel’, the epic ‘Compost’, ‘For Sheep’ and ‘Tapu te Ranga
Motu’, is an ongoing, cohesively set down existential questioning, much of it
connected to and dressed by landscape, the animal and the unsettling:
Other Animals
Something
uncanny
about all this –
like the word striation
with its middle
vowel
to vowel roll
You and I
my global
partner in tiny times
trace letters in
the sky
cup our hands to
catch rain
And that wooden
one-eared rhino
knows something
of it all –
his hoof prints
deep drawn
on the underside
of our days –
I gave up
cigarettes to prepare
my body for
whatever
Cars too are
over and done with
as are the flesh
and skin of other animals
It’s funny how
similar a presence
and an absence
can be
We die out of
course, like all the best animals
but us you see,
we choose
to leave nothing
behind
By turns, crisp, clever and wry, Other Animals is a powerful beast of a book.
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