Two Sundays ago, on a sweltering winter's morning in Taipei, New Zealand poet and academic Dr Selina Tusitala Marsh crouched by the trunk of an ancient bougainvillea vine in a central-city park, scrabbling through pebbles and dirt, hunting for something.
Specifically, she was looking for the scraps of paper she'd buried under this very tree just eight weeks earlier, when she was in the Taiwanese capital for a history conference. Now she was back, one of many Kiwis in town for the Taipei International Book Exhibition.
When she buried them, each scrap of paper had contained a word from a poem, and the point of this furtive excavation - conducted with one eye out for security guards - was, as Tusitala Marsh put it, to ask, "What is the land saying?"
She planned to reconstruct the recovered words into a new work, an act that would be part conceptual art, part "found" poetry and part investigation of the language and genes linking Taiwan's indigenous hill tribes to Tusitala Marsh's Samoan and Tuvaluan ancestry.
Arguably, though, the earth was saying something like, "Be quiet now, you crazy New Zealand poet." It looked like eight weeks of rain, heat and microbes - perhaps even some of the park's enormous squirrels - had consumed every scrap of language.
But then, after many minutes' fruitless searching: "Oh! There's one!"
A fragile fragment had survived.
"Now, which word is there? If I could just get one letter. Speak to me . . ."
She could just make out half a word: ". . . ing". Tusitala Marsh eventually disinterred another half-dozen fragments, but none were quite readable - a part of an H, the loop of what may have been a Y.
It seemed a little threadbare. She had counted on having a new poem, based on what she found, ready in time to present during her book fair session the next day.
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