Penelope Todd

And here’s the generous interview posted by Tim Jones: Books in the Trees, talking with me last week about Island.

Poet Salman Masalha writes from Jerusalem on the recent exploits of ‘Israel’s pirate army’.

The ‘elusive’ Jellyfish Nebula, 5,000 light years away.

Closer at hand, Claire’s Antarctic Medusa.

I think these were my great aunts’ undergarments, hand-made, of course, with all their intricate, undisplayed detail, which I’ve lugged about for years in an old cotton flour bag, along with a couple of well-cured ferret skins and skeins of old lace. I freshened them up in Nappysan and sunshine, then Alex appropriated them for the delightful blog she shares with her cousin: you could totally be french. If you wear clothes, you’ll want to check it out.

I was moved when my mother wrote after reading Island that a couple of the characters reminded her strongly of my two grandmothers — strong, practical, optimistic (especially after a little time alone with their feelings). And Liesel too could have been Granny Grace carrying on until the tasks were all done during the 1918 influenza epidemic (at Christchurch Hospital where she also met my grandfather recovering from injuries sustained in the Somme).

I’d had neither in mind while writing but accept that it’s likely they would find expression through me. The photo is of ‘Bunny’, my father’s mother, Ellen Preston, in command of the coal range at their station Glen Shee in the Maniototo, probably in the 1930s or 40s.

It’s been the oddest time of late. And yet not entirely unexpectedly odd. Collectively, we on Earth have brought ourselves to a strange and delicate state. I’ve been dealing with upswells of anxiety and I mention this because I suspect I’m not alone in it. While I try to examine myself for local causes, I wonder if I’m not also ‘catching the wave’ of our shared uncertainty: what is dying, and what will be born?

I’ve noticed that this particular malaise responds better to rich interchange than to prolonged introspection. And yesterday, my antidote: these floating vessels, boats beneath the ice. Neither full nor empty, they are held, turned, lifted, lowered, and drifted through veils of light and dark — utterly responsive to the element in which they find themselves.

Claire Beynon and Kate Alterio’s collaborative art and jewelery exhibition, ALCHEMY, runs for another week at The Artist’s Room here in Dunedin. Recalling the excited buzz of opening day, I was grateful to find myself alone this time. Within the work itself, many portals invite entry, as do the tiny painted brooch- and pendant-scapes inside each of which a world awaits. Spokes, shafts or upwellings of light draw the eye to previously unobserved vistas; pairs or collections of figures entice the viewer to join their quiet talks and explorations…

…and the boats: today in silent, calming rise and fall, the boats and I are breathing.

Shot from behind: I found this dress by cacherel in Ushuaia of all places. Elena talked me into it. With the pashmina from Yaks’n’Yetis, I was all set for Sophie and Ryan’s wedding.

For those of us writers slow to take a square look at the need for DIY book promotion — which can feel squeamishly like self-promotion — I reckon we might just have to get over ourselves and learn to play with the new tools. As will publishers. Mixing it up. Blurring the boundaries. Being generous. Author and social media adept Gretchen Rubin outlines tips for authors on the helpful US digitalbookworld site.

No doubt we’ll stumble along the way, get it wrong and embarrass ourselves or offend others now and then. But that’s not usually fatal.

I wished I had the camera last night: just when we think the meal well and truly over, the waiter comes out flourishing a fish to set on the lazy susan — entire, ‘crispy’, teeth bared, fins awry, standing on its plate, to all appearances freshly electrocuted.

I wished I had it this morning at St Clair: a hundred teenaged schoolgirls set off along the promenade, the front-runners prancing, the last four all loosened hair and artful pallor, nonchalantly strolling; in the carpark, a lone boy-surfer strips off, surrounded by another hundred girls; three paces away the Eventide Resthome van with residents in situ, doors hung open, a fish-crate upturned beside it — makeshift table for the preparation of tea: mugs, thermoses, a jar of milk. Raymond and I might have photographed ourselves, too: walking beside blue-jade breakers, 28 years married today.

I wished I had the camera last night to photograph the beloved friends and well-wishers who helped launch Island out into the reading world. And to capture Emma saying very touching things about it, which, I’ve just been alerted, appear on Claire’s blog Icelines here.

Thank you, Emma and Claire!

…organic specks in the same starry broth as this dust pillar of the Carina Nebula. (Astonishing sights are posted each day on the NASA gallery.) What does it imply, that we have seen such things?

Sorry, no Tuesday Poem today but do check out the others.

Elena and I found this in the kitchen on the Atlantic coast. Does anyone know what it is?

Last night a small group of us found ourselves gathered around another mysterious object. Like two large woks meeting at the rims, the burnished metal hang is somewhere between flying saucer and sorcery. Its upper surface is punctuated by seven indentations and a topknot; its underside has a large orifice for the release of sound. The player cradles it on his lap. When struck with the hands around the dents, the hang chimes out its eight notes in the key of D. Those nearby begin to lightly percuss — the giant tambourine whose name I’ll find out for you, the tinker-bells, the rain stick, the gin lid on the the tabletop. And sing, harmonising over a line of nothing: why is there no mud on your boots?

I feel like going on.

And so we did, for long trance-like minutes. It was tonic at the end of our full, busy-brained days, the perfect background murmur for prayers, wishes and thanks, almost a lullaby.

Well

Afterwards, I stood with my child
on the river’s bridge
over the storm swollen rapids.

Make your two wishes, he said,
and into my hands he pressed
shredded petals he’d found, fallen
from the peach-silk hot house flowers
he calls ‘the singing plant’
for their glorious, open mouths.

Their colour flared like tossed coins
towards the river’s turbulent surface:
on contact still they burnt a moment
like soft metal lit by air —
then were pulled beneath the bridge and gone.

What did you wish? he asked, as we walked on —
and I could have confessed each one:
your name, and what I wanted, still want
to have you choose to say: but then as good admit

I wished to be like water:
able to take whatever fractures it —
floodwrack, oar-thrust, fish leap,
the birds’ swift javelin stabs
as they hurtle down and pierce its skin —
and to then as smoothly mend again
unmarred
as if the mind could be its own physician.

Emma Neale

‘Well’ appeared in Takahe Issue 65, winner of the 2008 Takahe Poetry Competition. Emma’s three collections of poetry are: Sleeve Notes, How to Make a Million, and Spark. Her poem ‘Proposal’ appears here in Best New Zealand Poems 2009. Emma is editor of the Otago Daily Times’ Monday’s Poem.

And you can find other Tuesday Poems here.

(Tara-kihi)

Nevertheless, we ate her.

I haven’t heard back from the publisher whose permission I sought for the poem I wanted to share today, so, wary of infringing copyright, I go back a century or so to Rilke’s Poems from the Book of Hours. For some reason, I can’t separate it out into four-line stanzas, or separate off my comments at the end; please DIY as you read.

Now the hour bows down, it touches me, throbs

metallic, lucid and bold:

my senses are trembling. I feel my own power —

on the plastic day I lay hold.

Until I perceived it, no thing was complete,

but waited, hushed, unfulfilled.

My vision is ripe, to each glance like a bride

comes softly the thing that was willed.

There is nothing too small, but my tenderness paints

it large on a background of gold,

and I prize it, not knowing whose soul at the sight,

released, may unfold…

End.

I’m not having that sort of hour, day, or week, but I’m sure glad Rilke did.

Check out the other Tuesday poems here.

I’m going to extort one from someone else next week. Meanwhile …

Dog Attack

The nor-wester howls over, trees have fallen.
Two dogs, silent as stealth,
shadow mine into the bush.

Down in the gully, she screams.
They have her rolled in leaf-litter.
The black brute shakes her like moss.

When I roar so hard I’m shaken,
up comes his head; he recalls the century,
remembers he is now a dog.

I clasp her; frail with fright
she is momentarily lighter,
then back it comes, her full weight,
and the wet-iron smell of blood.

Next week I’ll try to put all the links in but you can find the Tuesday poems via Mary’s site,

Oh, btw, she lived. She’s fine and 13 now.

I was going to say no to this suggestion from Claire, from Mary; I’m not a poet. On the other hand, it looked like more fun to join in, and I’ve written a few poems I’m not entirely unhappy with. Thanks, Mary. Thanks, Claire.

Firewalkers

We say yes to the queue
of people who look like us.

Yes to the woman giving tickets
in exchange for our socks and shoes.

Yes to the wait on winter asphalt,
Yes to the doctor checking soles.

We say yes, I am ready
yes, hold my hand
yes grass, yes fire
But oh!

at the brink

no. No, no. Our feet say no.

And yet the queue, the crowd, the doctor and the drummers;
and over there, our proud shoes wait.

We say, go. Plunge, wade, leap, whimper, hoppit!

Later, we hold our feet. We murmur to our toes.
Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.

Back cover blurb:

‘An island in a bleak harbour; an isolated quarantine station where a group of nurses works tirelessly to care for sailors and immigrants recovering from the effects of the long sea voyage to the new land.

Kahu swims ashore, searching for a woman. Young nurse Liesel, caught in a passionate triangle, is faced with choices both harrowing and intoxicating. Martha, who oversees the hospital and guides the community, is making a kind of experiment with life.

Some on the island are too sick to live. Others flame with life. The island is cradle and crucible.

Penelope Todd’s first novel for adults is full of brilliantly drawn characters and a narrative which sweeps the reader along with its power. This is literary fiction of the highest quality, and an intensely romantic page-turner.’

It’s tiny, the size of half an s, in the middle of my screen. It creeps along the line of print, negotiating ‘trucks and drivers’ with slow aplomb.

Little does the spider know that the creatrice of worlds is about to press the red cross in the corner of the screen. It’s flipped into a new reality: teetering on the rim of my daughter’s funky glasses, staring into the green of her eye. Should I change the screen-saver to a field of grass, or a web? Or tell the spider nothing’s really changed; the merest membrane’s been removed. It’s all in the way it seems.

Why shouldn’t this happen to us?

One day we’re complacently decoding the same old same old, then zip, that background’s whipped away, and everything looks strange — we’re flipped into one of our other realitites: an imagining, a work of ‘fiction’, the dream behind the substance.

(In which case, don’t panic: keep your feet on the screen and make for the titanium rim at the edge of the world.)

What’s to be said about moths? Quiet night messengers, moon-wed, subtly toned and always rewarding inspection. I can’t recall photographing this one although I did so recently. (Correction: I didn’t. It’s Jonathan’s handiwork. What a memory. Thanks, J.) Moths make themselves forgettable, seeking light but never lime-light. Earlier this week, another came in through the kitchen window, aiming for the light above the bench. I turned that off. It made for the one above the table and flattened itself against a high wall. I flicked it into a cup and took it back outside to go and hunt the moon.

According to the OED, moths have two sets of broad wings covered in microscopic scales, and lack the clubbed antennae of butterflies.

Penguin Dictionary of Symbols : said to shrivel the leaf on which it settles, the ‘night butterfly’ is the symbol of the soul seeking the godhead and consumed by a mystical love.

 

It was a gorgeous day, the best of the summer, blessed by sun, friends and family, tears, delight, good food and finery, heartfelt speeches, and the dazzlingly happy couple, Sophie and Ryan, married 6th February.

The photographers have hived off to the Himalayas: photos when they’re back.

I wrote to a friend the other day that I didn’t think music crucial for my survival. I might have to revise the comment. A couple of times this week music has moved me to awe and tears. I think those are necessary elements in a life…

The first was after a workshop with Stephen Taberner when twenty of us practised ‘sobbing manfully’ as a prelude to grasping the rudiments of Georgian singing in three deep and soulful parts. The following night we heard his trio ‘The Secret Lunch’ in Chicks Hotel at Port Chalmers and were wooed into putty by their skin-stirring harmonies, eccentrically wondrous lyrics and musicianship.

Then I found Stephen combining music with a spot of social activism, stirring up shoppers in the most decent way possible: with one song, many singers. Coincidentally a friend alerted me to Il Travatore bursting forth in a Spanish marketplace which led me along the youtube path to the Antwerp railway station. This is where the tears spilled. Such delight and vigour penetrating the mundane, transforming the moment, the day, binding the crowd into one appreciative whole … Who knows where that will end and what further creative acts have already been engendered by such generous outpouring of talent and joy.

This small cry of pleasure, for one.

I’ve started setting up Skybooks, where dynamic, literary, heartening writing will be solicited, selected, edited and turned into stunning ebooks. My confidence waxes and wanes — not in the work itself or in its writers, and not in my ability to recognise that work and present it in its finest light — but in my capacity to approach and interact with the mysterious entity called ‘business’. When I sidle up to business-savvy souls, who have something I need, I’m often so daunted by the coded (and ugly) language of that other reality, that I simply sidle away again. Seth Godin’s daily blog-bridge helps coax me across when I’d rather rather stay on the dreamy, creative side of the river. Today he offers no false reassurances — every outcome is necessarily mixed; nothing is ever entirely okay — but he underscores my conviction, too, that Skybooks is more than a good idea; it’s important and worth seeing through. In fact, it amounts to a kind of glad duty: finding and launching ‘work that matters’.

When something touches us all (a wondrous feat or a dire tragedy) we remember that we’re all of one tribe: the tribe of those living on tiny, fragile Earth early in the 21st century.

These members of the 2007 Iowa International Writers family hail from Turkey/Bulgaria, Egypt, Malta, Hungary, and B from Haiti. Two years ago our Burmese sister’s province was ravaged; now it’s Haiti’s turn. Another day, another year, it might well be ours.

Claire’s provided a beautiful dedicated moment/space on her site, with possible ways to act.

(I’m pleased to learn that B is in the US with her children but she awaits news of her wider family and friends.)

The real index of civilisation is when people are kinder than they need to be.

Louis de Berniere, novelist.

Saying goodbye to the old year seems an apt time to ponder this quote (from Word a Day). I’ve foregone opportunities this week, this day, to be kinder than necessary (to others, to the earth, to myself); I’d like to take up more of them in the coming year and if you do, too, well, how civilised we might become.

My family said goodbye yesterday to perhaps its most civilised member, Uncle Frank Davie, with tears, and coral-coloured roses laid on coffin and violin. We remembered his gentleness, wit, compassion, mischief, vegetarianism, intelligence, laughter, and those piercing blue eyes which told you he knew something of the law of the stars. Here is a tribute from one who loved him well.

Frank was kinder than he needed to be. It’s a fine thing to have his footsteps up ahead.

…could prove beautiful. Okay, perhaps I haven’t picked the most elegant image but prepare to be awed by the others at this BBC site — with thanks to Grace at Rata Weekly for pointing me in that direction.

Via vast new telescopes and exploratory eyes-in-the sky, we’re seeing planets, stars and galaxies in scope and detail unimaginable mere decades ago. If the inner world is ‘intensified sky’ as Rilke has it, what does this expansive new vision say about our capacity as humans? It might say that willing or not, ready or not, we are opening, being opened, to new possibilities — which are ours to embrace or to refuse.