Orchid Tierney and David Howard

Note on John Dickson’s poems

Ian Wedde

John and I talk on the phone about every second week. Invariably, he’s got suggestions for what I would enjoy reading and sometimes for what I might like listening to. I’ve benefitted from these amicable suggestions for years and have never repaid the favour. This is because I can’t match John’s capacity to read, let alone his appetite for very long books.

'Strange Self-Congratulations, Flat Whites': Some notes on Bill Manhire

Robert McLean

Orchid Tierney and David Howard

Black painting XV, from ‘Malady,’ a poem by Bill Manhire, 1970, by Ralph Hotere. — Black painting XV, from ‘Malady,’ a poem by Bill Manhire, 1970, Dunedin, by Ralph Hotere. Purchased 1971. ©Te Papa. CC BY-NC-ND licence. Te Papa (1971-0024-2).

By international standards all New Zealand publishing is small press publishing. The country is home to only 4.73 million people. If a significant proportion of the adult population supports the authors of cookery and gardening books, such enthusiasm rarely extends to buying titles by novelists, playwrights, and poets.

'reflecting each other as obliquely as in cracked mirrors'

Lola Ridge and poetry’s refractions in Aotearoa

Orchid Tierney and David Howard

Some time ago I was traversing through Papers Past, an archive of digitised newspapers managed by the National Library of New Zealand, when I fortuitously encountered six poems by Lola Ridge in the New Zealand Illustrated and The New Zealand Tablet.

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.