“What's a tesseract?” “Didn't you go to school? A tesseract is a hypercube, a square figure with four dimensions to it, like a cube has three, and a square has two. Here, I'll show you …”
– Robert Heinlein, “– And he Built a Crooked House –.”
Astounding Science Fiction (1941)
Each of us is made up of stories – family stories, work stories, relationship stories – even stories about trying to buy a revolving bookcase in Paeroa … Stories, too, about the country and the world we live in.
If you put them all together, the lines begin to connect up into the shape of a life: not a simple geometric figure, but the outline of a particular location in spacetime – a line, then a square, then a cube, then finally a four-dimensional hypercube, a tesseract.
An earlier version of this, Jack Ross’s latest poetry collection, was longlisted for the Kathleen Grattan award in 2025. He’s happy to present it here with a book design and lively illustrations by 2025 Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi Springboard recipient, Scarlett Robinson-Kean.
'What makes this book resonate so deeply with me is movement. Physical and emotional movement. Not on a grand over-the-top flare of sentimentality but in small measured steps that favour contiguity. I relish the shift between what is easily witnessed in the everyday and what is much harder to fathom, what is retrieved in glimmers and shards across time. it is a collection that warrants a prolonged sojourn. Glorious.'
- Paula Green on Jack’s The Oceanic Feeling (2021)
•
Jack Ross is the author of six poetry collections, four novels, and five books of short fiction, most recently Haunts (2024). He edited Poetry New Zealand / Aotearoa from 2014-2020, along with many other books, anthologies, and literary journals over the years.
He and his wife, crafter and art-writer Bronwyn Lloyd, share their house in Mairangi Bay with a regal three-legged cat named Mila.
Sources & Acknowledgments:
Thanks, above all, to Bronwyn Lloyd for your invaluable advice throughout the process – and also for giving me permission to take your name in vain in so many of the poems.
Thanks, too, to my brilliant illustrator and book designer Scarlett Robinson-Kean. This book would be a very different thing without your vivid sense of colour and form.
Many of the pieces included here have been previously published. Thanks to the editors and publishers of all those anthologies, journals, and websites for permission to reproduce them here. For further details, please visit https://ovidius-naso.blogspot.com/2026/03/notes-to-tesseract.html.
Many of the 72 poems here have been published previously in periodicals or online. A complete list of these is available here. The book also features four artworks by New Zealand graphic novelist and illustrator Scarlett Robinson-Kean, painted specifically for this project.
The poems, too, are grouped into four sections. The first, 'No time but the present', gives an overview of my basic social and family setting.
The second, 'Chocolate Weetbix', goes back further in time. There are stories here about travels abroad and around New Zealand, and the effect they've had on me.
The third, 'Time in Poetry', expands the lens further. There are poems here about geological deep time, as well as other social and political implications of time.
The book concludes with a final section called 'No wars but in words.' Here I think more specifically about the reach of poetry and writing in general: the insights it offers us, and the limitations on its power.
The whole, I hope, adds up to a kind of 'representative life' - told, inevitably, by the person living it, since much of the information included here is privileged. By analogy, though, I hope it invites collaboration and comparison from the people who read it.
Lisa Baudry: Paper Table logo (2017)
Available:
Paper Table
Attn: Bronwyn Lloyd
6 Hastings Rd
Mairangi Bay
Auckland 0630
RRP: $NZ 40.00 (+ $12 postage)
Scarlett Robinson-Kean: They have arrived! (2/6/2026)
I’m writing with thanks for submitting your manuscript for the 2025 Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award. I’m pleased to let you know that your work was longlisted this year – warm congratulations! It’s a wonderful achievement to have your manuscript recognised among such a strong and diverse field of entries.
The winner will be announced later this week, along with details of the forthcoming Landfall Tauraka 250 issue, which will carry the judge’s report.
Thank you again for sharing your work with us and for contributing to this year’s competition. We wish you all the very best for your ongoing writing.
Ngā mihi nui,
Mel Stevens
Landfall Tauraka
Otago University Press
I found myself stepping sideways and picturing Jack’s sublime collection as a tesseract on poetry, on writing poetry, on living breathing sharing poetry. It got me thinking about writing and reading poems, and how my lines of thinking have been prompted by Jack’s lines of writing. I have found myself gathering questions for him on the glorious stretch and tenacity of poetry, whether perceptions, measurements, constructions, experiences, memories, attachments. How poetry can step out of an overcoat of rules into a pair of socks or shoes we pick from the shelves of living. How poetry might ease the aches and pains we bear, shift the lens on the worlds we inhabit.
Jack Ross: Tesseract. Illustrated by Scarlett Robinson-Kean (Paper Table, 2026)
We’re only conscious for a small / part of the time allotted to us: there’ll never be any more of it, / so let’s dance.
- Jack Ross, from ‘No time but the present’
I love the title of Jack Ross’s new collection Tesseract. I love how Jack connects the tesseract / hypercube to the idea that we are all made up of stories as Jack says on the blurb:
Each of us is made up of stories – family stories, work stories, relationship stories – even stories about trying to buy a revolving bookcase in Paeroa . . . Stories, too, about the country and the world we live in.
If you put them all together, the lines begin to connect up into the shape of a life: not a simple geometric figure but the outline of a particular location in spacetime – a line, then a square, then a cube, then finally a four dimensional hypercube, a tesseract.
I found myself stepping sideways and picturing Jack’s sublime collection as a tesseract on poetry, on writing poetry, on living breathing sharing poetry. It got me thinking about writing and reading poems, and how my lines of thinking have been prompted by Jack’s lines of writing. I have found myself gathering questions for him on the glorious stretch and tenacity of poetry, whether perceptions, measurements, constructions, experiences, memories, attachments. How poetry can step out of an overcoat of rules into a pair of socks or shoes we pick from the shelves of living. How poetry might ease the aches and pains we bear, shift the lens on the worlds we inhabit.
Scarlett Robinson-Kean’s mesmerising artwork offers the allure of space and presence, a textured divinely smudged colour palette that enhances the various slats of scenes and the people and children that inhabit them. The kind of artwork I want to linger with in a gallery.
Rear Window
A friend of mine
set up a camera
in the back of her car
and drove down hill
to the beach and back
art film
scoffed her boyfriend
and yet
there was something
so strange in the way
it bucked and leapt
as it recorded
the unchanging mountains
behind
with no hint of the wild sea in front
Walter Benjamin’s angel of history
does that
sweeps on
looking back
unable to help
as the rubble and graves pile up
they used to project it at rock concerts
•
A Reading
‘Soft’
‘The Ballad of the Great Storm’
‘Coming in from the Cold’
•
A Conversation
that’s how I used to think of myself
until I switched off the
critic-o-meter
one weekend
when I read
an old collected poems
arranged by date
you just have to give them time
stop looking for obvious beauties
and open your heart instead
- from ‘Bronwyn asked me’
Paula: One poem is titled, ‘Why do you write?’ It references the question a fellow guest once asked you . . . so yes, why do you write?
Jack: I started when I was at school. I’d get a kind of lofty feeling, and found that I needed to express it somehow. Eventually I graduated to having some ideas behind all the turgid words I poured out. Now that feeling comes less often, but I do more thinking about what I’m up to. Any self-importance that attached to it is long gone, though. I do it because it’s makes me feel better – getting painful stuff out on paper makes it easier to bear, and may even be of help to other people in similar situations.
Paula: Can you choose five (or so) words that signal what is important to you when you write a poem?
Jack: I don’t really have preset rules about how to write a poem, but I seem to have developed certain practices over time. I don’t use punctuation, but I allow myself line breaks and gaps for ease of understanding. Actually I don’t really mind if people misread sentences or don’t understand where a phrase fits in – it forces them to slow down and have to go back. I don’t like poeticisms – I try to make everything as vernacular as possible (within my own idiolect). I like poems that tell stories, so I do as much as possible of that – particularly in this book. I find it makes them far easier to read aloud, too.
Paula: Or when you read a poem by someone else? Oh and what poetry books have travelled with you, vitally, essentially?
Jack: I have a pretty high tolerance for artifice in other people’s poetry – though not in my own – but I do like there to be a sense of impetus (narrative or otherwise) behind it. I’m very fond of Robert Lowell’s poetry – Life Studies, For the Union Dead – I love those mid-career books of his. I like bold experimentalists like Anne Carson (NOX), Susan Howe (The Nonconformist’s Memorial), or Peter Reading (Perduta gente). Among local poets I’m a big fan of Fiona Farrell as a poet – Cutting Out is a fine book. Michele Leggott’s Mezzaluna collection is great; so is Albert Wendt’s The Black Star. The Star-Apple Kingdom by Derek Walcott is another book I like a lot. There are so many!
Paula: Your collection is steeped in both the personal and the domestic. I can remember when Cookhouse, my first poetry collection came out in 1998, the first reviews attacked it for its domestic bias. It felt sexist. I was walking around a supermarket with the Sunday newspaper in shock! Now all these years later, the domestic in poetry has held firm and necessary ground. I love being welcomed into the domestic and personal spaces of your poems. Tell me about opening up these spaces / places.
Jack: Yes, I remember that criticism of Cookhouse; also of Jenny Bornholdt when she wrote about buying herself a pair of pants in a vintage shop – I think the phrase used on the latter occasion was “exercises in the higher blogging.” As a blogger myself, I thought that was a bit insulting. Sneaking in meanings in disguise, rather than trumpeting them from the rooftops is what modern poetry does best, I think – and Bornholdt had disguised herself so well that her critic didn’t even appear to understand that her poems really were about something. The personal and domestic is where we all live, so (by definition) it’s the best place to reach people. You don’t have to put on stilts to talk about important things, as Chekhov once remarked.
Paula: Oh that image sent me trawling ... stilts, flippers, skateboards, sneakers, hiking boots. Time is an alluring current in the collection, from time travel to memory travel. Two section titles reference time (‘No time but the present’ and ‘Time in poetry’) I love your Proustian reference – when you suggest poetry might be a way of recovering lost time (will quote). Tell me more about this.
Jack: Do you think it might be because I’m getting a bit older? I don’t know – I find myself savouring the sense of distance between the me who is now and that foolish and impulsive younger me who did something-or-other then. I’d like to be able to forgive that person for his flagrant misdeeds and crass stupidity. I can’t always manage it, but that sense of time in the abstract certainly helps. Maybe that’s what Proust was trying to do, too, but he seems to me to be much more comfortable with his earlier self than I am with mine.
Paula: At one point you confess you have a lack of imagination. Does this bother you?
Jack: It did use to bother me. When I started to try to write fiction, it was a shock to me just how hard it is to come up with plots and scenes out of your own head, the way any good storyteller does. But then I realised just how much action and detail careful observation of the reality around you can supply you with, ready-made. So now I’m okay with it. I try to cultivate the camera eye (like Christopher Isherwood) rather than those fanciful vistas I used to think of as being more “creative.”
Paula: Politics is there in the crevices – from seeing the Vietnam war on black & white tv to being out on the streets with a placard with Bronwyn protesting our endangered and war-ravaged world. And there’s the idea that one person can make a difference. What are your thoughts on politics on poetry? Does it make a difference? Such a repeated question in these times.
Jack: I think there’s politics in everything. I have no objections to poems which are political manifestoes, but I do feel that the advantage of writing a poem rather than a manifesto is that you can personalise and humanise and expand your viewpoint till you pull in your reader whether they like it or not. I think of that ragged child in W. H. Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles”:
… That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who’d never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.
That’s certainly where we live today. Those words are as true now as when he wrote them, just after the Second World War.
Paula: More than anything I am reminded that poetry has myriad ways of being and myriad ways of mattering. I am hearing that from you here. We don’t need to be constrained by rules and regulations. I read your collection and touch base with love and grief and fear. Tenderness and philosophy and weirdness.
Choose a poem from the collection for the reader of our conversation to linger on. Why this poem? But first is there a question you would like me to have asked you?
Jack: Your questions are great – “interesting, but tough,” as Huck Finn said of The Pilgrim’s Progress. I guess I might have liked a chance to talk about my collaboration with Scarlett Robinson-Kean, who designed and illustrated the book. I met her because she was working at Objectspace while Bronwyn was there, and we soon discovered a mutual love of comics and graphic novels. I really like it when I get to see my work through somebody else’s eyes – and the ways in which she responded to the poems were very interesting to me. I think she has a great future as an illustrator and a graphic novelist, though at present it’s her zines which have attracted most attention. Thanks for your beautiful pictures, Scarlett!
As for my choice of poem, I suppose one disadvantage of being on social media is that you tend to run into a lot of complaints from other writers. This was what I woke up to one fine morning:
The Killing Floor
A woman was whinging
about how only two people
turned up to her book-signing
though forty said they were coming
on the online invite
this sparked off a chorus of
you think that’s bad?
what about this?
from the likes of Neil Gaiman
Jodi Picoult
Margaret Atwood
and other celebs
Atwood said that not only
did nobody come
but the one person
who did approach her
wanted to buy scotch tape
it got me to thinking
about my own slew
of embarrassing events
readings where the readers
outnumbered the audience
launches where nobody bought the book
and the person giving the launch speech
admitted to not having read it
but still recommended we get it
‘because it’s an important book’
so why do you do it?
asked Bronwyn
- Sigmund Freud had
some useful theories
I said
but at least the writing must be fun?not really I replied
the agony of getting it down
then working through it all
again and again
the fear of falling short
of being laughed at
then why?
to be honest I don’t really know
I’m just glad that some people do
where would I be without the books they write?
•
Jack Ross is the author of four novels, five books of short fiction, and six previous poetry collections. He was managing editor of Poetry New Zealand (now Poetry Aotearoa) from 2014-2020, and has edited numerous other books, anthologies, and literary journals. He lives with his wife, crafter and art-writer Bronwyn Lloyd, in Mairangi Bay, on Auckland’s North Shore.
Dawn Chorus: A Recycled Poem from the Ancient Greek Tebtunis Papyri. Trans. Salvatore Quasimodo
& Jack Ross. Artwork by Béatrice Carlson. “Where We Meet: Four Artists. Four Poets. Four Collaborations”. Curated by Pippa Mothersole. Angela Morton Room, Aug 23-Sep 27. Auckland: Takapuna Library, 2026. 8 pp.
Jan Kemp. Dancing Heart: New and Selected Poems 1968–2024. Edited by Jack Ross. ISBN 978-3-00-083163-8. Kronberg im Taunus, Germany: Tranzlit, 2025. 172 pp.
Jan Kemp MNZM & Dr Jack Ross first worked together 20 years ago creating the Aotearoa NZ Poetry Sound Archive (2004) [www.aonzpsa.blogspot.com]. Since then Jan has published three poetry collections, Dante’s Heaven (Puriri Press, 2007) which became Dante Down Under (English/German) (2017), and Black Ice & the Love Planet (English/German) (2020), both from Tranzlit [www.tranzlit.de] & Tripstones (Puriri Press, 2020), as well as the two memoirs Raiment (Massey University Press, 2022) and To see a World (Tranzlit, 2023). She lives with her husband Dieter Riemenschneider in Kronberg im Taunus, Germany, where she sings in a choir, presents poetry & music performances and walks in its parks.
Jack, too, has published three poetry collections since 2004: To Terezín (Massey University, 2007); A Clearer View of the Hinterland: Poems & Sequences 1981-2014 (HeadworX, 2014), and The Oceanic Feeling (Salt & Greyboy Press, 2020); as well as Celanie (Pania Press, 2012), a collaboration with artist Emma Smith, which includes a translation of Paul Celan’s poems to his wife Gisèle Celan-Lestrange. He was also managing editor of Poetry NZ (now Poetry Aotearoa) from 2014 to 2020. He lives in Mairangi Bay, on Auckland’s North Shore, with his wife, crafter, curator and art-writer Bronwyn Lloyd.
I’ll never know why the Christmas lily she gave us grew.
After eight years, she severed her friendship
with not even a knife-like you no longer amuse.
It was hot irritation. But how she’d always treasure
the gone good times. Well, you do grow up.
I’d sworn to her everlastingly out of pity at her
biggest loss. Now that’s all so, like anything
that comes to pass.
But how, this late October
does a Christmas lily come to me to pot, re-pot,
put in the light to bring white pods of
pure flower up from the dung? She is now
something, a teaspoon, I could pick up or leave
lying absently near my cup. But a lily is insistent &
shows its love. Is it that she or I may yet forgive?
Taken with kind permission from the newly published (in Berlin) limited edition of 80 copies (156 pages, 230gms in weight) Dancing Heart: Poems 2019–2024 by Jan Kemp, with an Introduction by Jack Ross (Tranzlit, $35), available via the author by emailing her on jantranzlit@gmail.com. The price covers post and packaging from Germany.
Nicholas Reid. "Something New:: “BONFIRES ON THE ICE” by Harry Ricketts ( Te Herenga Waka University Press, $NZ25); “GIVING BIRTH TO MY FATHER” by Tusiata Avia (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $30.00)“DANCING HEART” by Jan Kemp (published by Tranzlit, Germany); “IF WE KNEW HOW TO WE WOULD” by Emma Barnes (Auckland University Press, $NZ 24.99)." Reid's Reader - A Blog of Book Reviews and Comment (17/11/2025):
The first 32 pages are new poems called “Dancing Heart.” In these, there is an acute awareness of becoming older, and some of her first poems in this selection say so. Thus the poem “Forest burial” wherein “We’ll sink before AI / is rife, we’ll have / known human lives. / And human love”. And in the poem “Shedding” she tells us it is “Time soon to start shedding” and giving things away. The poem “Crater” begins “A Week ago / on the crater’s edge / I looked down & saw / endless nothingness / & death”. But there is some hope in older age with poems about love and friendship and in one of her best poems “Anima mundi” she salutes the glories of nature where “I have my own cathedral here - / the nave-like path / leads through sunlit trees / where light filters / as through green, stained- glass windows.” Kemp often tries to work out some sort of belief. Could it be love itself? Or could she be trying to work out a sort of home-made religion? At any rate she sometimes quotes the Bible and wonders about it, as she did in some of her earlier collections where Dante often turned up. But she stoutly rejects any particular religion.
... there is every so often concern for the status of women, but she is more interested with intimacy, love, various countries, religion, beliefs and nature. Most important, she has the great merit of writing clearly and without the pretentious vocabulary that plagues many academics or younger poets.
Denys Trussell, "Thin Sheaves against Virtual Muses: Te Pūrere/The Exodus: The anthology of expatriate New Zealand poets edited by Vaughan Rapatahana and John Gallas (Cold Hub Press, 2025), 205pp, $35; Dancing Heart: New and selected poems 1968–2024 by Jan Kemp (Tranzlit, 2025), 172pp, n.p." The Landfall Tauraka Review: Aotearoa New Zealand Books in Review (March 2, 2026):
Jan Kemp’s collection, Dancing Heart: New and selected poems 1968–2024, edited and introduced by Jack Ross, very much fits the theme of expatriate poetry. A long-time resident of Germany, Kemp has spent much of her life away from the country of her birth, but she has maintained strong contacts, and was instrumental in establishing the Aotearoa NZ Poetry Sound Archive in 2004, an audio collection stored at the National Library.
...
She moves in light, sure curvatures, as if in flight, through the phrasing, the junctures, the visible appearances the words might carry into a reader’s mind. Entering life by means of poetry becomes, for her, something that has created meaning and purpose throughout a life of largely self-exile. Her decision has been to stay in Europe, but to use poems to express a sense of distance and tension, feelings of being torn between places:
I long for the sea,
for islands
even the Kea’s raw call,
but love our Berg & Burg
with its cobble-stoned wall.
Now trim & as neat
As a Hausfrau should be …
•
"A Plinth for Buddha" - Jan Kemp in Werner Jaksch's garden (2026)
Jan Kemp’s collection, Dancing Heart: New and selected poems 1968–2024, edited and introduced by Jack Ross, very much fits the theme of expatriate poetry. A long-time resident of Germany, Kemp has spent much of her life away from the country of her birth, but she has maintained strong contacts, and was instrumental in establishing the Aotearoa NZ Poetry Sound Archive in 2004, an audio collection stored at the National Library. Born in 1949, Kemp was one of the younger poets involved in the years of ‘counter-culture’ here. These were responses to the anomalies of capitalism, conflict and colonialism, made highly visible by the Vietnam War. Radical feminism, ‘open’ poetics, a belief in a sexually liberated society, and in universal and indigenous rights resonate in the title Freed, a sporadic literary publication that became a point of focus among writers — Alan Brunton, Ian Wedde, Russell Haley, Murray Edmond, Stephen Chan, Jan Kemp and others — who were students at Auckland University.
Moving through this turbulence, Kemp developed a lyrical style — concise, sensitive and imagistic; a style that makes visible the space between objects and conveys a visual emphasis in a poem. This does not mean ideas and incident are absent. They are very much there, but they speak rather than declaim. This produces all that needs to be said in a small compass:
We’ll sink before AI
Is rife, we’ll have
known human lives,
And human love.
‘Forest Burial’
She has a self-confessed affinity with Emily Dickinson, expressed in her ‘Self Portrait’:
I remind myself of Emily Dickinson
locked in the attic of my thoughts.
I believe her empathy with Dickinson is based on more than introversion. She has a similar way of sensing a poem. I had already found, in Dickinson’s output (‘Poem 653’), lines that remind me of Kemp’s presence in her own poetry:
Of Being is a Bird
The likest to the Down
An Easy Breeze do put afloat
The general Heavens — upon —
She moves in light, sure curvatures, as if in flight, through the phrasing, the junctures, the visible appearances the words might carry into a reader’s mind. Entering life by means of poetry becomes, for her, something that has created meaning and purpose throughout a life of largely self-exile. Her decision has been to stay in Europe, but to use poems to express a sense of distance and tension, feelings of being torn between places:
I long for the sea,
for islands
even the Kea’s raw call,
but love our Berg & Burg
with its cobble-stoned wall.
Now trim & as neat
As a Hausfrau should be …
‘The Kiwi in Me’
Dancing Heart begins with her most recent work, written as her husband became ill and then finally died in 2025. This subset contains some of her most accomplished poems — direct in expression, minimal in means. Among them is the six-line piece that titles the whole book:
as your two heart-valves
now don’t quite close,
I’ll slip into that space
& dance with you—
so your heart will beat
steadily & surely on …
This section ends with ‘Body Halo’:
As I sat there
I could feel
his love all around me
a body halo,
warm & sweet
as his skin, hair & breath
when I hold him,
my husband
who found me,
when I wasn’t looking
The collection then swings back to her Poems 1971–1974, beginning with the set’s title piece, ‘Against the Softness of Woman’. Written into a different world more than fifty years ago, it reveals a youth that nonetheless has sufficient judgement and will not indulge the narcissism of a lover:
you were born to fit him
to be his lay, his lie
his way to run his way;
when he has pared down his spare image
don’t try to catch him
you’ll catch yourself —
This ‘collected’ gives the impression that the shorter poem is her home territory, but she does lay out more extended works. There is her quietly satiric account of a literary château and its hostess at Lavigny in Switzerland. Jane Rosenthal Ledig Rowohlt (née Scatcherd) runs a ‘fin de siècle salon’ — the siècle in this case being the twentieth century. The ghosts of Thomas Mann and Marcel Proust hover. Mann’s The Magic Mountain, though, was a sanatorium, and fiction. Kemp’s is a real mountain Shangri-la, inhabited by writers lucky enough to be healthy, but not entirely free of the risks of fade-out in a culture in decline. Kemp’s title is a brilliant alteration of Proust: À la recherche de votre temps perdu — ‘In search of your lost time’. But Proust had no ‘votre’ in the title of his massive novel, making it clear thereby that it involves a universal nostalgia for a vanishing civilisation. However, Jane Rosenthal’s salon is real rather than fiction, and inclusive only of her own milieu. She has her virtues, but these are diminished by flaunted privilege — a fact of which Kemp is subtly aware:
Born in England
grown up in France you thought Switzerland
the perfect place for such homeless people
as yourselves to settle. We do suit you — we whose
home is words.
By contrast, Kemp can turn her home of words to quite different account. Her ‘Street-Sleeper, Hong Kong’ shows life stripped of the slightest privilege or hope:
His limbs are sticks and twigs.
His body is the tree of life.
He is fruit and flower of a hard city.
He did not make the top branches.
In Germany she literally stumbles over its mid-twentieth-century history in the streets. ‘Stolpersteine’, or ‘Tripstones’, a poem she chose to write in English and German, tells of the plaques sunk into pavements naming the vanished of the Holocaust. She trips and learns:
We’re missing
this person. I read:
Here lived
Julius Grünebaum
b. 1892
deported
Auschwitz
Murdered 31.10.1943
Neither the tragedies of history nor nature spare the poet. This one does not flinch at setting down the bones of a human catastrophe. Nor does she withhold pathos, lamenting in ‘Great fish at Muriwai Beach’ the fate of seventy whales that stranded on the New Zealand coastline:
where looters
can’t even give the dignity
of complete burial.
What requiem did you sing,
mighty herd
what whale-talk, what music
sang in your minds
as you followed maps
forged more ancient in you
than the land you struck
instead of water?
In conclusion I would return to ‘Us’, a poem that brings her back to the self, involved in the riddle and enigma of love. We are Us, and so included in the meanings of the words:
These bodies
we lie in
return us
to our simplest selves.
Loving, can you tell
who’s who?
Denys Trussell is a poet, biographer, musician and environmentalist. The author of many books, he won the 1985 PEN Best First Book Award for non-fiction with Fairburn, a book about the life of poet A.R.D. Fairburn. He lives in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.
Lisa Baudry: Paper Table logo (2017)
Scarlett Robinson-Kean: They have arrived! (2/6/2026)
Lisa Baudry: Paper Table logo (2017)
Jack Ross: Tesseract. Illustrated by Scarlett Robinson-Kean (Paper Table, 2026)
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