In The Poetry

The following poem is dedicated to a whole generation of women – that would have been my grandmother’s generation – who did hand-painting on china and many of us in my generation have their hand-painted china in our china cupboards that we get out on special occasions and so on. And I’ve always been fascinated [...]

Wittgenstein’s Dream

I had taken my boat out on the fiord,
I get so dreadfully morose at five,
I went in and put Nature on my hatstand
And considering the Sinking of the Eveninglands
And laughed at what translation may contrive
And worked at mathematics and was bored.

There was fire above, the sun in its descent,
There were letters there whose words [...]

Songs of a Quiet Woman

lurching delicate as a snow queen down this street of greys
unfocussed exactly enough to miss the businessmen
goggling at my stocking deciding
(as I twitch primly into the tram seat my handbag
nestled on my lap like a puppy) deciding
this will be a day of minor survivals:
etching a bloody mouth in [...]

Pancho Villa

I once shook hands with a pawn-
broker in Chicago who claimed
to have the desert saint’s trigger-

finger cottoned in his fridge, and ever
since, each time I twist a lid of pickled
gherkins, lick the sweet vinegar

lizarding off my thumb, my mind
twitches to Chihuahua, like a tumble-
weed churning in the blue tequilaed

sun, lipping [...]

This poem is called ‘Friends’ Photos’, and it’s about the experience of looking through old photograph albums.

Friends’ Photos

We all looked like goddesses
and gods, glowing and smooth, sheathed
from head to foot by a golden essence
that glistenes and refracted its aura
of power – the wonderful ichor called youth.

We moved as easily as dolphins
surging out of the ocean, [...]

I live down near Hastings, and in Hastings there’s a guy there who’s got a pet iguana and when the weather gets really hot, he takes his iguana on a walk along Hastings beach on a dog lead. Sometimes the iguana sits curled up over his shoulder, they really do look strange, and when [...]

And there is a scene in the Bible where, many centuries later, the Ark is being brought into Jerusalem, and David is dancing as it’s being carried into Jerusalem, and he is described with the phrase “and David danced before the Lord with all his might”. When I read that phrase as a boy, [...]

When I was at school, sometimes the teachers used to point out examples of historical personages that perhaps we should try and emulate in our own lives. Well, one of these examples was David Livingstone, and it was only when, much later in life, I read his biography I discovered, for example, that when he [...]

To reach Dante’s earthly paradise in the Garden of Eden, you must climb the nine circles of Mount Purgatory to the top. I’ve imagined the tor at Torbay, North Shore City, Auckland as representing Mount Purgatory. A local Maori myth has a young woman waiting for the return of her lover as she [...]

‘Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead’ concerns things I found on a local dump – where I shouldn’t have been because one’s not allowed to play on the dump but I’m a grown-up woman and I can go there if I want. I found a lot of personal effects and of course I couldn’t resist [...]