This hand-bound chapbook will feature a poem each by Anahera Gildea, Michelle Ngamoki, Tru Paraha, Kiri Piahana-Wong, Maraea Rakuraku, Dayle Takitimu and Alice Te Punga Somerville, translated into te reo Māori by Hēmi Kelly, Te Ataahia Hurihanganui, Herewini Easton and Jamie Cowell.

It is the fourth book in the Seraph Press Translation Series.

More details coming soon...

The five chapbooks that make up Luminescent are each about a different woman from the past – what drew you to these women?
 
I am obsessed with mysteries and ghosts. Each of these figures felt ghostly to me in some way, in the sense that they were complex and unknown and existing only in traces. It was only after I’d begun writing poems about the other four that I decided to include the school ghost – but they all are in a way.
 
In the case of all of them I think I can pinpoint a tingling moment that made me want to write about them, much like when I peered into the doorway of the ghost tower. With Phyllis Porter, it was when I saw the newspaper clipping in the Opera House (that really happened) and with Katherine Mansfield, a less obscure ghost but a kind of looming figure nonetheless, I think it was when I saw a cross with her brother’s name on it in the grounds of Parliament. These things really happened. So I had to investigate.
 
Did you deliberately choose to write about New Zealand women? If so, why?
 
I think so. When I started my MA at the International Institute of Modern Letters I had read hardly any contemporary NZ poetry and I felt like I didn’t know much about New Zealand history at all, having partly grown up overseas. So I read as much as I could, and found myself searching very close to home for subjects to write about.
 
I’m interested what connects us to people from the past. People pay lots of money for objects once owned by dead famous people because it makes them feel closer to them. People go on pilgrimages and touch trees and doorknobs that legendary figures once touched. As a child I lived down the road from Katherine Mansfield’s birthplace. I wondered what it meant that Mansfield and I grew up beneath the same hills and swam in the same bays and walked on the same bits of footpath – or does it mean nothing at all? I think lots of people have wondered the same thing before about lots of legendary figures from the past. But what about all those people who aren’t legendary, who also inhabited the same space that I do now? I became obsessed with this connection between memory and physical objects and physical spaces. While writing, I was keenly aware that the distinctive New Zealand landscape (and the sea, the harbour, the same moon and sky) is my only physical, tangible connection to the women in Luminescent.
 
The chapbooks are each self-contained and can be read in any order, but there are strong connections and resonances across the sections. Why did you want to present Luminescent in separate chapbooks, rather than as a single collection?
 
At first I thought that whatever I published next after Girls of the Drift should be a full-length collection. I wrote Luminescent with the intention that it would be a normal book. But sometime during my MA year I discovered zines – handmade, DIY books that can be full of art, collage, photography, journaling, poems, anything – which expanded my idea of what a book can be. There are actually no rules. Maybe there doesn’t need to be a beginning poem and an end poem.
 
There are so many small presses creating beautiful chapbooks at the moment and so many excellent DIY poetry zines, so I thought: could this project be more like that? A bit weird and risky and unique? And now I’m so glad we took that risk.
 
Your debut chapbook also contained poems about real and fictional women – in the years since writing that, has your approach to writing about people or characters changed?
 
I started out writing poems only about other people, and now basically I can’t stop writing about myself. I guess for some it’s the other way around, but it took me a while feel like I could let myself in. Luminescent sits somewhere in-between. It started out much more historical and biographical, much more objective and factual (if poetry could ever be called objective), but then I realised I couldn’t keep myself out of the poems. I realised that the act of imagining is itself a signal of the writer’s presence. There was no point in me trying to be invisible anymore; and I think the work is better for it.
 
Biographical poetry is a really interesting area. Do you have some thoughts, both as a reader and a practitioner, of what poetry brings to writing about a life? Do you have any favourite biographical poems by other writers?
 
I love that poetry occupies an uneasy space somewhere between reality and imagination. That’s the work of poetry – weaving between the two, creating a portal from one into the other. I think that’s quite magical. There is so much room for questioning and unknowing, which is a valuable thing. Historical fiction can do similar things but I think in poetry there’s so much more breathing space. You can admit to openly knowing nothing but wondering everything, which is incredibly valuable when you’re facing a biographical subject who no one knows about, who has left behind little material trace of her life.
 
Two examples of auto/biographical poetry (and prose) that actually catalysed the writing of Luminescent are “The Glass Essay” by Anne Carson, which is about the speaker’s connection to Emily Brontë, and “My Emily Dickinson” by Mary Ruefle, which is actually an essay, where she draws a series of connections between Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson and Anne Frank.
 
There are two wonderful poetry books that I think are key works of New Zealand biographical poetry – How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes by Chris Tse and This Paper Boat by Greg Kan. I discovered these poets during my MA year and I keep returning to their work again and again.
 
More recently I’ve fallen in love with the work of several mind-blowing American poets that all interact with biography and history and autobiography. Here’s a quick reading list: “Salome Dances the Seven Veils” by Nina Li Coomes, “Self-Portrait as Karintha” by Safia Elhillo, and Aubade with Burning City by Ocean Vuong.
 
Some of the poems in Luminescent are erasure poems. What I like particularly about your erasure poems is that, unlike many practitioners, you use a method of erasure that means the words underneath are still visible in a ghostly fashion, so while the poem emerges from the un-erased words, the context you have taken them from is still apparent. Why did you chose that method?
 
I find myself easily seduced by the mystery of erasure poetry. But there’s so much of it around – Instagram poetry, Tumblr poetry, all of that … which is not to say it isn’t any good. I love that it’s a visual kind of poetry, and that in order to create it you need more materials: something to erase with, something to cut with. It turns a poem back into something you’re making with your hands.
 
I decided to try making erasure poems after reading (if reading is the right word) Nox by Anne Carson, which is a monumental, heartbreaking work of poetry and translation and collage and visual excavation all folded inside a box. It’s like a box of evidence. One of her techniques is to paint over old photographs and scribble things on top of the whiteness, so you can’t really see what’s underneath, but you can see that something is there. I wanted to create a similar layering of past / present, document / poem.
What is it about whales?
 
Oh, because they are so enormous and beautiful but we know so little about them! We don’t really know why they strand. We don’t yet know where lots of species go to breed, or how different matrilineal lines communicate, or what they can feel––only that they do feel.
 
You wrote the first draft of this book during your MA year, as your folio. Did you go into the year knowing what you wanted to write?
I thought I did – I’m a very organised person who is good at making plans and lists. From the beginning it was always going to be a five-part collection of poems about women from New Zealand history. We soon realised that we had to be open to change. I may have stuck to the plan but the way I’ve gone about it is very different from how I thought it would be, which is a good thing. I read so much during the year (and not just poetry) that there were so many new things I wanted to try, so many new kinds of poems that I wanted to write.
 
How important to you are literary foremothers? Who are some of yours?
 
Our MA tutor Cliff Fell said to us very early on something along the lines of: being a writer means being a reader. I’ve heard it repeated many times since. So I try to read much more than I actually write. Long before I tried to write anything, my first foremothers were Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath. Then I discovered Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho – two vital foremothers – which made me want to try and write a poem. Non-white writers and poets (especially Asian writers) were largely missing from my university reading lists so there is always, always lots of catching up to do. I’m discovering new foremothers all the time: Maxine Hong Kingston, Claudia Rankine, Alice Oswald, Annie Dillard.
 
Literary foremothers get you started, but real life poetry sisters are just as important. They make sure you keep going.
 
You’ve just spent a year and a half in Shanghai learning Chinese. Has being in a different country and immersed in a different language influenced your poetry? In what ways?
 
It has influenced me immensely in so many ways, but I found it impossible to write poetry for a long time. I discovered recently that Robin Hyde felt the same when she went to China, which makes me feel better: “in travelling, peace isn’t deep enough—if at all—for the writing of real poetry.” I kept a journal and scribbled fragments in it every day and I started writing mini essays about food, which I’m still working on now.
 
Learning Chinese is interesting for me because I’ve always been surrounded by it in small ways but never learned it properly I started at university, which means that so much feels familiar but so much is frustratingly out of reach.
 
Learning Chinese characters by writing them over and over again twenty times each night (it’s the only way to learn them) is slow work. It requires patience and discipline and makes you look at words and letters in a new way. In English, letters represent sounds but in Mandarin, only one portion of the character indicates sound; the other parts visually represent root and meaning. I often felt overwhelmed by so many characters and all their complex components, but also drawn in by their mystery and their beauty. I started experimenting with using Chinese characters in my poems that are otherwise written in English. I’m really excited by poets who do this, like Ae Hee Lee and Ya-Wen Ho and Jen Hyde. I like the idea of a poem containing many languages at once, not just Chinese / English but visual / textual, symbolic / phonetic.
 
The very first Chinese characters were carved into pieces of ox and turtle bone thousands of years ago. They were oracle bones; people would write out their questions on the bone, then the high priestess would hold a flame against it until the bone splintered and began to shatter, then she interpreted the pattern of cracks. I think I’d like to write poems like these – made of words and pictures and tiny cracks in between.

Find out more about Luminescent...

We had a fantastic launch for these two new chapbooks with a French connection up at Vic Books on 26 October. With French cheese, French wine and French poetry read in French (by Luc Arnault, and in English translation by Anna Jackson) we could almost imagine ourselves in France. 

You can catch Anna and Luc reading more French poetry in French and English at LitCrawl in Poetry In and Out of Translation, 6 pm, Hashigo Zake, Saturday 11 November. 

Below is Helen Rickerby’s launch speech.


Kia ora, bonsoir, good evening and welcome to the launch of these two chapbooks with a French connection – Dear Tombs, Dear Horizon, by Anna Jackson, and Last Stop Before Insomnia by Marlène’s Tissot, translated by Anna Jackson and Geneviève Chevallier.
 
I’m Helen Rickerby and as Seraph Press I’m the publisher of these two books.
 
As well as the French connection, the other connection between them of course is Anna Jackson. You will all know her as an amazing poet, and scholar and teacher. I’m also lucky enough to have her as a very dear friend, and so it’s especially delightful to be launching these two books with her.
 
Both of these books came about because Anna was the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellow last year. Not content to just work on her main poetry project, she also worked on various side projects and caught the translation bug after meeting academic and translator Geneviève Chevallier.
 
Last Stop Before Insomnia, a delightful introduction to the poetry of French poet Marlène Tissot, resulted from that connection, and is now number three in the Seraph Press Translation Series, which I started about a year ago with my series co-editor Vana Manasiadis. In November last year we launched the first two books in that series – Shipwrecks/Shelters, a small anthology of six contemporary Greek poets, translated by Vana, and Observations, a selection of poems by Italian poet Claudio Pasi, translated by Tim Smith and Marco Sonzogni.
 
The series was Vana’s idea originally – she had just returned from living in Greece for almost a decade, and was feeling the lack of translated literature here in New Zealand. She got me excited about being able to share different poetic voices and celebrate different poetic languages. Our aim for the series is to bring to a New Zealand audience contemporary poetic voices from languages other than English, and to make connections with literatures and writers from other parts of the world. We want them to be bilingual tasters of something fresh and new. Our next collection, which we are very excited about, is a wee volume of seven Maori women poets, whose poems, which were originally written in English, are being translated into te reo Māori. It’s being edited by Maraea Rakuraku and Vana.
 
Anna is going to talk a bit more about Last Stop Before Insomnia a bit later, and she and French translator Luc Arnault will do a bilingual reading, which is something I’m very much looking forward to. But first I’m going to talk about the other chapbook we’re launching tonight – Dear Tombs, Dear Horizon.
 
This was written while Anna was in Menton, being the Katherine Mansfield Fellow, and began as a sort of poetic travel diary in which she recorded things she did, things she saw, etc. The initial (and longer version) that she sent me just before she came back, very clearly showed how it began more as a diary, and it still contains many of those interesting and delightful in itself observations. I’m very fond of anecdotes such as which of the previous Menton fellows was the favourite of the expats, and observations like how the bats flying past the balcony look like cut-out bats. But the poem quickly became more than simply a recording thing, but a thinking thing – a poem in which you see the thinking and mulling and connecting.
 
I’m really interested in what poetry can do – what can be done in poetry, and many of you will know that in a bit over a month Anna and I, with our friend Angelina, are running a conference about poetry and the essay. And, because it’s my new obsession, I’m thinking about this long poem very much as an essay – not in that it has an argument or a thesis – it doesn’t present the answers – but in that it is enquiring and considering, It is thoughtful and mulling. Some of my favourite sections are ones which take something she is reading, an idea of someone else’s and she turns it over and connects it with other things. Her reading is varied, and includes Robert Dessaix on Turgenev, Martin Heidegger, Catullus, articles about octopuses and her predecessor Katherine Mansfield.
 
I’ve been thinking about how a recurring theme of the poem is the idea of looking back, finding new places to look back from, new things to look back at. Sometimes literally, as Anna writes:
 
I walk up and down
impasses and traverses, looking for new
angles to look back from. I go up
lifts and behind bins, urban hiking
 
Or the time she and her friend Rose go behind the apartment building to see what it looks like from behind:

It’s like not being able to see
the back of your head, she worries,
and I think of the Catullus poem about
the poet who reads his poetry oblivious
to how awful it is. What flaw am I
carrying around like a backpack
I cannot see,
 
But the looking back is often more figurative – such as the tense used by the Roman letter writer – a complicated looking forward to look back into the past of the present:
 
 (“I was writing this in the garden…”) – thinking ahead
to what will be the present moment in which
the recipient reads the letter, already
imagining their present moment of writing as having
taken place in the past,
 
Similarly the poem ends with a looking forward to look back – when Anna herself – as the poet at least – I think we can assume that the narrative voice of the poem is fairly close to actually being Anna, though it always dangerous to assume, I think we can fairly closely map the narrative voice of the poem to the actual Anna – writes a about wondering about writing the poem we have just read:
 
I think of
starting the poem “Dear Tombs,” and
wonder whether perhaps I should
try writing the poem
in terza rima. Really I just want
to pile into it everything I have got.
 
All this looking back isn’t just idle, but a way to get a better perspective – as she says:
​
literature does give us
another place to look back from
 
Having said that this long poem doesn’t really have a thesis, I think I want to revise that statement, because I think this is an understated but really powerful argument for the value of literature to our real world. 

We hope you can join us to celebrate the launch of these two exciting new chapbooks with a French connection, both of which grew out of Anna Jackson's time as Katherine Mansfield Fellow in 2016.

Dear Tombs, Dear Horizon by Anna Jackson is a lively and charming poetic essay/diary poem that weaves her experiences and observations with her engagement with the work of other writers, including her predecessor Katherine Mansfield.

Last Stop Before Insomnia / Dernier Arrêt Avant l’Insomnie, ​by Marlène Tissot, translated by Anna Jackson and Geneviève Chevallier is the third book in the Seraph Press Translation Series. This taster of deliciously playful poetry by French poet Marlène Tissot takes you on a wild ride through the existential, the sensual and the sleep-deprived.

When: Thursday 26 October 2017, 5.30 pm
Where: Vic Books, Easterfield Building, Kelburn Parade, Wellington

All welcome.

Today Paula Green will receive the  2017 Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement – Poetry. Seraph Press is utterly delighted that Paula has been recognised with this award for her contribution to poetry in New Zealand.
 
To date Paula has published seven collections of poetry for adults; her first, Cookhouse, in 1997 and her most recent, New York Pocket Book, we are pleased to have published in 2016. She has also written three collections of poetry for children and children’s picture book. She’s also written considerable critical work about New Zealand poetry, perhaps most notably the book 99 Ways into New Zealand Poetry, co-written with Harry Ricketts, but also many many reviews. Listing all these things makes me feel exhausted already, but Paula is indefatigable! She’s also edited the anthologies Dear Heart: 150 New Zealand Love Poems and A Treasury of NZ Poems for Children, and in the last few years has run two blogs that are major poetry hubs – one for children and one for adults – and has been a frequent visitor to classrooms around the country, getting children all fired up about poetry. And all this while she’s working a non-fiction book about poetry by New Zealand women.
 
Paula has an enormous heart and does all of this out of love, her love of poetry and of people too. So many poets around the country have appreciated her support as well as her own beautiful words. I hope this award goes some way to making her feel how appreciate she is by so many.
 
If you’re in Wellington tomorrow, Thursday 10 August, you could pop down to Unity Books during your lunchtime to hear Paula read and discuss her work with the other prestigious recipients of the Prime Minister’s Awards for Literary Achievement – Witi Ihimaera, who received the fiction award, and Peter Simpson, who received the non-fiction award.
 
Thursday 10th August 12.30–1.15pm
Unity Books Wellington
57 Willis Street
 
All welcome

Join us to celebrate the launch of Luminescent by Nina Powles, an amazing new collection/box set of five chapbooks by one of the most exciting young voices in New Zealand poetry. 

There will be poetry readings by Nina Powles, Sarah Webster and Louise Wrightson, and Luminescent will be launched by Cliff Fell.

Thursday 17 August 2017, 6.00 pm
Ekor Bookshop and Cafe
17B College Street, Wellington

All welcome

For more about the book, or to buy a copy online, visit: http://www.seraphpress.co.nz/luminescent

Is it a book, or is it books? It's a single collection made up of parts that can be read in any order. It is full of fabulous poems which show the growing and significant talents of an exciting poet. And it's also going to be possibly the most beautiful publication I've ever made. 

Find out more about Luminescent by Nina Powles

Launch invitation coming soon!

You studied Spanish at university, and have lived in Spanish-speaking countries? What was it that drew you to the language and the culture?
 
Yes, I lived in Spain for four years and spent six months travelling through South America. After my travels I studied Spanish language and English literature at Victoria University. Funnily enough, it was poetry that drew me into the language. I was obsessed with Pablo Neruda for a long time and went to Chile on a poetry pilgrimage.
 
As well as learning another language, you’ve also taught English as a second language. What have both of those experiences taught you about your own language, and how has that feed into your poetry? I’m thinking particularly of your poem ‘Paroemiology’, which seems especially alive to the tricksyness of language.
 
When I first started teaching English in Spain I had no more than an instinctive knowledge of how English worked. Learning more about the grammar and the structure of language; the whys and hows and whens has been useful, especially during the editing stages.
 
Learning another language expands your world. This is healthy. It can be fun too. Paroemiology plays with international proverbs that are sometimes lost in translation.
 
In New Zealand we tend to not be that familiar with poetry from other languages. Your poem ‘Peruvian Light’ has the subtitle ‘after Vallejo’, referring to Peruvian poet César Vallejo – of whom I must confess I had previously not heard. Do you read much poetry in translation? What do you think the literature from another language has brought to your own work?
 
Yep, one of the main benefits, for me, of learning Spanish is that I can delve into that language’s poetry. I’ve definitely been influenced by Spanish language poetry. I try to read it without translations. Peruvian Light is an ‘interpretation’ of parts of Vallejo’s Trilce, a book that turned Spanish language poetry on its head when it was published in 1922.
 
As I pointed out I was/am a big fan of Pablo Neruda, but when I went to Chile I discovered Nicanor Parra, the great ‘anti-poet’. He was the response to Neruda’s grand romanticism: anti lyrical and colloquial but just as powerful and profound. I think this tension between ‘poetry’ and anti-poetry’ has helped defined what I am doing in my own poetry.
 
You’ve travelled around the world a lot, but now you’re living in a fairly remote part of the West Coast, near Punakaiki. Why did you decide to move there, and what is life like there, especially for a poet? Is it conducive to writing poetry? Do you miss a wider literary community?
 
I have lived in Punakaiki, on and off, for over 25 years. I came here as a teenager and fell in love with the place. It is majestic and wild. There is also a great community who appreciate artistic endeavour and support and encourage me. I don’t really miss a wider literary community as I have internet and am able to keep connected this way. I do miss the poetry events and live action of the city though.
 
When did you begin to write poetry, and why?
 
I had a great English teacher at Wakatipu High School who made poetry fascinating. I don’t think I was writing poetry then but I was writing stories. In my late teens I discovered the beat writers and wanted to be cool like them. I have mixed feelings about The Beats today, but they were exciting and appealed to my young sense of rebellion. To me poetry is rebellion. It is an instinct towards freedom.
 
Are there any poets who have been a particular influence on you?
 
Hone Tuwhare was a big influence and lots of my early poems are fairly good imitations of him. Nowadays I’m influenced by Geoff Cochrane, Tim Uppperton, Gregory O’Brien ... and now Hera Lindsay Bird – she’s brilliant.
 
What inspires you, and what are you aiming to do in your work?
 
Mostly I am inspired by the absurdity of our existence. In my poetry I am trying to make sense of it all while simultaneously trying, as Talking Heads might have it, to  STOP MAKING SENSE. 

Find out more about Two Lagoons...

​We hope you can make it to the launch of Two Lagoons, the debut chapbook by Trevor Hayes, proudly published by Seraph Press.
 
When: Thursday 8 June 2017, 6 pm
Where: Upstairs at Thistle Inn, 3 Mulgrave Street, Thorndon, Wellington (note, not Thistle Hall).
 
Find out more about the book and author

Seraph Press has lots of exciting projects coming up this year, but the first one off the block is this little beauty - Two Lagoons, the debut chapbook of Trevor Hayes.

I've just realised that the first poem in the book, 'Cartography', is the first poem I ever heard Trevor read - at the Poetry Society, at the Thistle Inn, which is kind of perfect because the Thistle Inn is where we're going to be having the launch - more details about that very soon (but save the evening of 8 June)! 

Despite its small size, the poems in this chapbook have a lot of variety - lots of colours, tones, locations. I'm thrilled to find such lyrical gems as:

            ​I’m grasping at straws here. Blind
                        from birth I have never seen
            the grand chandelier, only heard
            comments guests make as they enter
            the ballroom. ('Peruvian Light')
 
alongside the absurd, such as: 'What a pleasure / to sit in the fire with strange trousers on.' ('Paroemiology')
 
I've enjoyed Trevor's work whenever I've come across it, and am delighted to be putting some more of it out into the world.

Read more about Two Lagoons