Orchid Tierney and David Howard

'Time is worn into beaks': Robyn Maree Pickens

Robyn Maree Pickens is a PhD candidate at the University of Otago, Dunedin, Aotearoa/New Zealand. Her writing has appeared in Art + Australia Online, Turbine|Kapohau, The Pantograph Punch, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Art New Zealand, Art News, The Physics Room Annual, Enjoy Gallery’s Occasional Journal, and exhibition catalogues. Currently she is an art reviewer for the Otago Daily Times, and was Blue Oyster Art Project Space’s 2016 summer writer-in-residence on Quarantine Island Kamau Taurua.

Her output directs an ecocritical gaze, building its power from clausal fragments that frequently feel like complete sentences yet push and pull against settlement. Observations are quickly situated; discomforted by their larger implications, they remain critically thought-through. Her work is sharp yet layered, folding over and inward like an origami sculpture: Donna Haraway (the tension between “affinity” and “identity”), patterning and its relation to access, the nonhuman operation of time and its linguistic mimesis — these all ensure a strong formal architecture despite Pickens’s shifting eye. Her work is an exciting arrival and departure for Aotearoa/New Zealand poetry.

The grass never stops

Lynley Edmeades on Vana Manasiadis

Orchid Tierney and David Howard

Vana Manasiadis’s interest and use of history and mythology — grounded in her own biography — is a welcome strain to New Zealand poetry. Her reference to Greek and classical traditions, and her borrowing of forms from her poetic forebears, lets her cultivate a poetic voice relatively peculiar to these shores.[1] She holds an MA in Creative Writing — the standard currency for emerging poets in the English-speaking world — but her work has a scope much greater than the contemporary institution’s remit.

'Language as a net of reality'

Rob Allan

Orchid Tierney and David Howard

Poetry Reading, Poet of Port Chalmers, 2006.

‘The poetry of tomorrow will be finely articulated fact.’ — W.B. Yeats

Human Language: The Poetry of Michael Steven

Catherine Dale

Orchid Tierney and David Howard

Michael Steven. Photo credit: Greta Anderson.

Unlike many New Zealand poets of his generation, Michael Steven is not part of the literary establishment. Steven has been writing and performing poetry in New Zealand “in fits and starts”[i] for more than twenty-five years, but has not pursued an MA in creative writing or yet published a monograph with a university press.

Messages from the Antipodes

Ted Jenner

Orchid Tierney and David Howard

In New Zealand the poetic generation of 1946 surveyed the boundary fences, then jumped over them. From the late 1960s this generation has set both the poetic and the critical parameters for general and specialist discussion. Career-long attention has been given to Ian Wedde, Bill Manhire, and Sam Hunt, who were all born in a year of notable publications such as The quest: words for a mime play (Charles Brasch), Jack Without Magic (Allen Curnow), The Rakehelly Man & Other Verses (A.R.D.

Cracked mirrors is a series on historical and contemporary New Zealand/Aotearoa poetry and poetics. Neither a corrective nor a supplement to previous conversations, we endeavour to nurture an ongoing exploration of New Zealand’s shifting poetic landscape. To this end, we present commentaries by emergent and established poets and scholars that are committed to interrogating the field of New Zealand literature, its imaginations and fractures, in order to enlarge the zone of its inquiry.

Orchid Tierney's chapbooks include The World in Small Parts (Chicago: Dancing Girl Press, 2012), Brachiation (Dunedin: Gumtree Press, 2012), and Earsay (n.p.: Troll Thread, 2016). She is currently a PhD student in English at the University of Pennsylvania where she works and writes on media, poetry, and poetics.

David Howard spent thirty-five years writing The Incomplete Poems (Cold Hub Press, 2011). He edited A Place To Go On From: the Collected Poems of Iain Lonie (Otago University Press, 2015). David has collaborated with the photographer Fiona Pardington, and with the composers Brina Jez Brezavscek, Marta Jirackova, and Johanna Selleck. He received the Robert Burns Fellowship (2013), the Otago Wallace Residency (2014), a UNESCO City of Literature Residency in Prague (2016), and currently holds the Ursula Bethell Residency at Canterbury University.

Jacket2 Commentaries feature invited posts by poets and scholars who take a close, serial look at poetry scenes, archives, poetic concerns, or theoretical clusters. Commentaries, although curated, are not edited by Jacket2 staff. We welcome your comments. Send queries and notes to Jacket editors here.