The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature

Jane Stafford, Mark Williams, Jane Stafford, Mark Williams

• Publisher: Auckland University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781869405892
• eBook ISBN: 9781775581666
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

From the earliest records of exploration and encounter to the globalized, multicultural present, this compilation features New Zealand's major writing, from Polynesian mythology to the Yates' Garden Guide, from Allen Curnow to Alice Tawhai, and from Wiremu Te Rangikaheke's letters to Katherine Mansfield's notebooks. Including fiction, nonfiction, letters, speeches, novels, stories, comics, and songs, this imaginative selection provides new paths into New Zealand writing and culture.

Writing Back

Glenn Colquhoun, ‘A Problem While Translating the Treaty of Waitangi’

A pakeha version:	A Maori version:
THE FIRST ARTICLE	THE FIRST ARTICLE
I am the boss.	You are the boss.
THE SECOND ARTICLE	THE SECOND ARTICLE
I am the boss.	You are the boss.
THE THIRD ARTICLE	THE THIRD ARTICLE
Now that’s sorted out put some clothes on, pay your rates, get a job and find a lawyer.	How about those muskets?

(1999)

Bernadette Hall, ‘Poem in the Matukituki Valley’

for my mother d. 1995

I know some things

like you’d rather have seen a rotary

clothesline in my garden than roses

and when I dedicated my book of poems

to you, you hammed it up, mock horror,

with ‘Jesus, what next!’

So coming down from the mountains

when Rae asked me what you would have thought

of it all, the grandeur, the excess,

the jade water, the yellow starred flats,

the black peaks with snow like orca leaping,

I had to say that I didn’t have a clue,

perhaps something like what a fuss about nothing!

and now at night, as the comet works its way

across the greybright sky, I see no sign

that you like Caesar have become a god,

you are far too reliable to be a god,

but rather the gauzy face of a woman,

hair streaming, running with a baby in her arms,

saving me again and again from the burning house.

(1997)

Michele Leggott, from ‘Blue Irises’

1

I wanted to mouth you all over

spring clouds spring rain spring

tenderness of afternoons spent

blazing trails to this

place where breath roars through

the famous architecture of a poet’s ear

Rose and peony buds and tongue

ichthyous tumble honey and pearl—

the runner’s foot has touched and adored

wistaria sprang after you, figs tipped

green air astounded by your passage

to the audient quays of the city

Now it begins, another voyage after nemesis

blue-eyed with the distance of it all

3

From the corner of this mouth take

kisses that begin in moonlight

and pitch slow fire over a history of you

reeling in the universe Rhapsode

you and I have some walking to do, some

stitching together of the story so far, its feat

of silence, of sleeping lightly and listening

for the touch that outstrips all sense

in the hour before dawn Look we have come

to the walled garden See how the roses burn!

The lovers in the fountain spoon each other up

their drenched talk stretches the library resources

and when pubis and jawbone snick into place

you face my delight an uncontrollable smile

4

Honeyed learning! I traced her once

to an island in spring, pointilliste mouse-ear

drifting down the margins Then she was

phlyctena in the eye of the sea-ear reworking

a disturbance in my name I found wild choral

allusions and scents that drew a white bee

to not-madness in the folds of her blue gown

This morning the whole world is wet wistaria

battered gutters running and everything drowning drunk

extends a big hand for the reprise

Which comes Up the road on small trees

is a honey blue inflorescence I can’t name

When the gardeners say cyanotis trust your ears

though rain fall into an open mouth

5

She made him a porpoise gills a-snort

because it was so hard to configure that body

The words weren’t there or they rolled over

and supplied mermaids and mariners For him

the language is a woman’s body and she

will stand out in the rain a hundred years

running it back at him Hast ’ou seen the rose

in the steeldust (or swansdown ever?) Have

you seen a falcon stoop? Hast thou found a nest

softer than cunnus? Can yee see it brusle

like a Swan? O so white! O so soft! O so sweet

is she The sonneteer coughs sneaks

another look at her dolphin scores out

the ellipse after his vibrant tail

17

Suppose, sweet eyes, you went into a distant country

mad with the honey and the noon in your throat

a fiery drizzle of rip and glory asking: Where

are the words that broke the heart with beauty?

Not as plains that spread into us slowly, but as

a wind wet with carillons or winter’s cold isthmus

in the azure year, you will find the frontiered heart

and write a script of stars across its salt and snow

Birds that think in oceans come and go, their chart

behind their eyes that scarcely sleep Your mouth’s adrift

with ghosts of fire the salt has burned to noontide

blue Your sweetness ripples through the rain

of a country to which you may never return You

are the still caesura that breaks a line in two

(1994)

Maladies

Bernadette Hall, ‘Anorexia’

these are the acts of power

to give birth to kill

you have a new notion

*

in a monochrome of beige sheep & paddocks

you try to say your unclear thing

you curl up like a wild rabbit

*

living out now in the open

you are the original food

(1994)

Wystan Curnow, from Cancer Daybook

where’s the

humour

in a

tumour

26.7.82

cut it

out cut

it out

27.7.82

Now that

I

have it

(death)

in my

sentence

I’m the

more

composed.

27.7.82

(1989)

Peter Wells, ‘When My Brother Got Thin’

It was the smell. It wasn’t that it was offensive. It was just an old, rather tired smell—of an exhausted building. It was a shopping centre which had passed its use-by date. Most of the original occupants had shifted out and hollowed out refits, unsubtly gutted, still sprouted signs screaming Cost Cutter and all the other illiterate jumble. Even the lighting seemed peculiar. The wattage was turned down low, so the interior had a sort of seamy, endless day-for-night feeling—as if you were caught inside a building at 4 a.m., and there was no one to let you out.

Or perhaps that was just how I was feeling.

My mother had been mad, now, for over six months. It had begun with a phone call—the slippage, I guess you would call it. She rang me and said she felt certain the sewer pipe under the house was about to explode.

I chose—perhaps I had no choice, perhaps at that stage I wanted to believe she was sane—to treat her enquiry rationally. My brother and I went to see her. We inspected the evidence. And even when there appeared to be no basis for my mother’s anxiety, still we got a plumber out who looked at the situation and informed us that there was nothing wrong.

But of course there was something wrong.

My brother had recently announced he was HIV-positive. That is, any freedom he had had to announce this had been effectively stripped from him just as his flesh was plucked from his bone when he was returned to us, from a holiday in Thailand, almost a walking skeleton.

It was happening.

The slippage of my mother’s sanity took off. When she rang me one evening, shouting down the phone, that the house was about to slide down the hill—the walls were bulging—the pipe had exploded—I knew I could avoid the issue no longer.

My mother was seriously disturbed.

For me, this was one of the most extraordinary moments in my life. I had been suckled, it seemed, by my mother’s warm practicality. She was a woman who lived for the surface of the sun. If there could have been a cathedral made out of her love for my brother and me, it would have risen up towards the organ pipes of preserved fruits and jams which stood in the top cupboards in our kitchen—each one possessing a glorious intensity of colour, promising us in the winter of our lives a foretaste of the summer to come.

My mother for me was like a summer that had been kept perpetually alive inside the preservative of her skin: she ordained warmth, and the salty taste of her skin as I licked her, or the soft blows and pats we exchanged as we moved past each other, pretending to play like cats and kittens—all of these suggested a mother who was unquestionably sane.

She was like those black and white figures on the wooden walls of church, which indicated the number of the hymns: each card was individual, spatulate, slightly worn, even faintly grubby from repeated use, but everyone within the vessel of the church knew by glancing at these numbers what hymns to turn to and so we would shuffle to our feet and open our mouths and out of our throats would flood elements of song—praise for the Lord.

O Lamb of God who takest away the sins of the world

have mercy upon us

O Lamb of God who takest away the sins of the world

give us peace

Everything had fallen out of sequence as we’d got older.

I’d stopped going to church after my mother tried to drag me physically along the pew, to keep up the illusion that I still received communion. My brother had become more religious, more charismatic—almost to the same degree that he was more furtively homosexual.

Our father, not in heaven, but on earth, had just died. And now, just at this moment when it seemed we had at long last got rid of the one person in our family who despised homosexuality to such an extent that the three of us had to keep our lives a perpetual secret from him—now he had gone, and we could at long last relax—this had happened.

It did not happen, it erupted.

Just like, I guess, that pipe in the garden which my mother saw out her front windows as she stared through the glass, pacing endlessly as she turned and re-turned to an insoluble problem.

Her son was dying of AIDS.

She who had never admitted to her friends that her two sons were gay, could hardly call on them for help.

Of course she went mad.

It was probably impossible not to.

When I think of this period, I don’t see it as a sequence, I see it in the erratic movement, the stop-go, the sudden loss of control, the wild and frightening freefall, the stripping of the gears, the longterm damage to the engine which comprises slippage.

My brother’s state of mind, as could be expected, was fragile—instantly he was having to review his expectations. He was ambitious, successful, on his way to being rich. He had many beautiful possessions. He worked in the public service with the intensity of one who believed he could make a difference. Perhaps he was a priest in another calling? This makes him sound stiff and formal: rather he was impulsive, spontaneous in his acts of generosity and kindness—he wanted to understand, to make a difference. He believed life could improve—after all he, a runt at primary school, had had his life changed by an art teacher who gave him her art room to hide in, to paint in, to escape bullying. He changed himself as he got older into a desirable man, a man other men found handsome. He had only recently come back from Waitangi where he advised a hui which would effectively change the future of his country.

But now he was being written out.

Now, just at this point when he was about to come into his own—before he was even forty—he was having to make a rapid reassessment, the end point of which was frighteningly close.

The thing which frightened him most of all was dementia.

The trajectory of AIDS has moved so swiftly in the past decade that one has to go back to a time when there was no possible alleviation of the disease. And perhaps the worst aspect—worse than the loss of the beautiful body which gay men had made into such a virtue—was the loss of your mind. Everyone—everyone who knew someone gay, that is—had their own humiliating story of how a human being became a kind of Quasimodo of horror.

This now awaited my kind and humane brother.

He began a slippage of his own.

But before this could happen, we had to decide about what to do about my mother.

As I write this, looking back, I can hardly believe the series of decisions we made, just as I can hardly believe that the woman my mother became at this period—frantic, consumed with anxiety, always on the point of hysteria—is embedded in the same woman I know today, who has returned to her native skin, and is warm, sane, salty, wry in her perceptions, and shrewd.

My brother and I agreed to my mother undergoing a series of electric shock treatments.

How did we arrive at this decision? Both of us had been brought up on the horror of Janet Frame’s experience, on the Grand Guignol of the movies. How could we have agreed ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Contact
• Colonial
• Maoriland
• Colonial Gothic
• Between The Wars
• In The Garden
• Cultural Nationalism
• Fretful Sleepers: After The War
• Teachers
• From Kiwi Culture To Counter-Culture
• The Bomb Is Made
• Earthly: The Seventies
• Whaddarya? The Eighties
• Driving Into The Storm
• Cabin Fever: The Nineties
• Writing Back
• Living Here
• Domestic
• Author Biographies
• Select Bibliography and Sources
• Acknowledgements
• Index
• Footnote
• Backcover