Tuesday Poem: Chrome Yellow Hypothesis, by Iain Britton

the house isn’t what it was

the voice of a radio predicts a storm /

it mimics a politician

commentates on cricket

the radio possesses the eye

of an orchestra

anthems on walls / flags and

coronation stuff / a platoon

route marches to Hill 44 /      

the family has taken furniture

its god particles and disguised itself in bundles

the house isn’t what it seems ...

a square brick object at the mercy of orthodoxies

dousing gentiles in holy water / they

chant / play / sing / love thine enemies

                                                                                                                                   

Te Hahi o te Whakapono

the church (sermon-bloated)

hunches its white skull

beside the lake

passers-by are pulled in to drool

on historical grounds

where prisoners in wood

hug others in wood

where the lake laps music against stained-

glass windows / a flute’s voice

breathes on naked skin

a woman smiles

undoes her soul

for the cost of a camera’s sharp bite

life i observe is a sulphuric cloud

raw and exposed

a matter of confessions

this woman this mother

approaches

                                                                                                                                   

the miracle makers

who each year split atoms

by walking on air

she’s fascinated by silica

its crystals / this geothermal fragility

which  domes the town

she opens herself to parkland

fantasies

any stuntman would exploit

            

beside the lake

birds scrap

over chrome-plated godsends

plucked from moonstones

this mother this woman

goes into the house of

 one room

 one kitchen

 one radio

a solitary figure clothing

                                                                                                                                   

legends in bright garments

                                                                                                                                   

 what if

i place my lips on her lips / would forests

buckle up / would ghosts

return to their shelves to rest

she speaks to each gnome in her garden / paints

their hats gold

handles them carefully

each night they rough and tumble

squabble like her children

where invisibility is an asset

where in her house

love battles

love charges up a hill / e hoa

she calls

and the radio responds

with the news / the weather

a boy scoops up a ball

and runs with it

through a yellow cloud


Credit note: "Chrome Yellow Hypothesis" is from Iain Britton's collection photosynthesis, now available from Kilmog Press. This version is published, and reformatted to work better on a blog, with the permission of the author.

Tim says: After my hiatus, I'm back in the world of the Tuesday Poem, where I will try to get back in the routine of posting a Tuesday Poem every fortnight. It's a pleasure to (re)start with this fine poem by Iain Britton.

The Stars Like Sand - Canberra Launch: Orbital Separation Achieved

Well, I'm back - back in Wellington from my trip to Melbourne and Canberra, where my co-editor P.S. Cottier and myself launched the anthology we've been working on for almost two years, The Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry.

Each of us (Penelope | Tim) has already blogged about the Melbourne launch. The Canberra launch last Thursday, held at historic Manning Clark House, was also a success, with 40-50 people in attendance. The photos below show poets Lizz Murphy and John Jenkins reading their poems from the book, although most of the crowd is out of shot in these photos.

UPDATE: Penelope has now posted another eloquent post about the launches and how she feels at the end of them.

I enjoyed my trip to Australia a lot, thanks in very large part to the hospitality of my co-editor and her lovely family. Now I have a couple of solid weeks ahead of me as the judge of the Open Section of the 2014 New Zealand Poetry Society International Poetry Competition, and then I have some writing to do!

Finally, watch out for some more publicity for Lost in the Museum this coming week - that's the new fantasy anthology with a touch of horror, set in Te Papa, that includes my story "The Big Baby".

The Stars Like Sand: Awaiting Second Stage Ignition

The first launch of The Stars Like Sand has happened - and very good it was too! As my co-editor reports on her blog, we had a good group of poets from the anthology reading at the Melbourne launch - a double launch with poet Gemma White' first collection Furniture is Disappearing.

About 70 people attended the launch at Melbourne's Collected Works bookshop - you can see part of the crowd below, including one of the poets from the anthology, Sean Wright (with hat); publisher's representative Breanne Rodda (seated on floor) and Collected Works owner Kris Hemensley (at right) (image courtesy Satya Helen Patrice).

Now we're gearing up for the Canberra launch tomorrow night, and expecting another good crowd and another set of anthology poets to read!

If you'd like a copy of the book, it's making its way into bookshops such as Melbourne's Collected Works, and you can also buy it from the publisher and from Amazon.com.

"Lost In the Museum" Now Available As Ebook and In Bookshops

I mentioned in my previous post that I have a story, "The Big Baby", in the recently published anthology Lost in the Museum, which has just received an excellent review by Lee Murray in the widely-read Beattie's Book Blog.

Lost in the Museum is now starting to become available in bookshops, including The Children’s Bookstore in Kilbirnie, Unity Books, and Marsden Books in Karori (Wellington) and Retrospace (Auckland). The ISBN is 978-0-473-28320-9, which will help you to order it from other bookshops.

Lost in the Museum is also available from Amazon as a Kindle ebook: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KTV5K0U

We Interrupt This Hiatus For A Publication Announcement

While I'm still training a couple of dragons and therefore not quite ready to resume posting regularly, I couldn't pass up the chance to let you know that The Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry, the anthology that I have co-edited with P.S. Cottier, by has now been officially published, and I have recently received an early copy. (Penelope has lots of info about the book up on her blog - such as who is in it!)

You can buy the book as a paperback or ebook from the publisher or from Amazon.

Here's the Facebook event for the Melbourne launch on Friday 6 June: https://www.facebook.com/events/1502760696619431/ - all Melbournites and visitors welcome!

(Note to authors: we'll be posting out author copies after the Melbourne and Canberra launches next month.)

I should also mention a couple of recent short story collections I have stories in:

• Fresh Fear: Contemporary Horror (sales link to Amazon)
• Lost in the Museum (link has info about the launch)

... and I'm pleased to say that I have a story appearing in the next issue of JAAM as well.

Normal hiatus will now be resumed, for another month or so - and then I might get around to put a fresh lick of paint on this dear old blog.

It's All Fun And Games...

... until someone loses their dragons. I have three fierce dragons to chase at the moment - or are thy chasing me? There's the finishing stages of proofing for The Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry - that stage when a book seems to be interminably 95% finished, but never quite done. There's the ever-extending Basin Reserve Flyover Board of Inquiry - as the co-convenor of the Save the Basin Campaign, quite a lot of my energy is going on that. And there's a major work project which is about half complete.

If they don't succeed in burning me up or out, all those dragons should be caught and trained by about July, but in the meantime something has to go, and I've decided that thing will be blogging. When the Seven Kingdoms are reunited under the flag of peace, freedom and the Westerosi Way - when the sun also rises - when at least two of those three projects are out of the way - I'll be back. Till then, au revoir!

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Book Review: Sidelights, by Mark Pirie

Sidelights: Rugby Poems, by Mark Pirie (Wellington: The Night Press, 2013), available via Mark's website.

Sport, a big area of New Zealand life, has formed a surprisingly small part of New Zealand poetry. Mark Pirie has done a lot to remedy that lately, with his NZ cricket poetry anthology A Tingling Catch receiving a lot of very favourable press, not least from the prestigious Wisden Cricketer.

Mark is currently editing an anthology of New Zealand and international poems about football (that is, the round-ball variety). But when I was growing up, the world game was still called 'soccer' in New Zealand, as 'football' was reserved for use to describe the sport that all New Zealanders, and in particular all New Zealand males, were supposed to be obsessed by: rugby union.

I grew up in Southland, where rugby's hold was arguably as complete as anywhere in the country - at Gore High School, it was a source of great embarrassment that those half-despised, half-pitied sooks who played soccer had actually managed to string together a few winning games, while the school's rugby First XV, supposedly the bastion and exemplar of teenage masculinity, was completely useless.

(If women's rugby was played anywhere in New Zealand in the 1970s, it most certainly wasn't played in Gore.)

I only ever played one game of rugby, during which I invented the kicking No. 8 long before Zinzan Brooke had thought of the idea. And, despite my Pommy background and odd haircut, I did eventually get interested in the game and used to watch a lot of it - right up to the point at which the All Blacks won the 2011 Word Cup, at which point, to my surprise, my interest in the game evaporated almost completely. I still watch the occasional All Blacks match on TV, but no longer pay any attention to the domestic or Super 15 competitions.

But I remember those provincial passions, which is why I enjoyed Mark Pirie's Sidelights, and why my favourite poem from it is The Divided Country, which explores the eternal duality between Hurricanes and Highlanders supporters. "School Days at Wellington College" has a great last line which it sets up perfectly, and I also particularly enjoyed the sequence "Five All Blacks poems", which ends with a poem celebrating the moment All Blacks' captain Richie McCaw lifted the Webb Ellis Cup at the end of the 2011 World Cup tournament - that same moment that something in my brain appears to have decided that enough was enough.

Even in 2014, it's hard to be in New Zealand for long without rugby starting to seep into your life: Sidelights is a good first step towards an understanding; or a valedictory to an era, long lost or recently ended, of liniment, the Sideline Eye, and the crowd rising to "E Ihowā Atua".