Exciting news! We've published our first ever ebook!
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With the help of MeBooks, Kaitiaki o te Pō: Essays by John-Paul Powley is now available as an ebook. It's available as both an epub and mobi, so you can read it on your Kindle or Kobo or any other ereader, or on your phone or tablet. Or even your computer, though that sounds a bit awkward.

You can buy and download it: 
from the MeBooks website
​from Kobo
from Amazon.

Thanks to everyone who came to help us celebrate the launch of Kaitiaki o te Pō: Essays, by John-Paul Powley. It was a beautiful thing.

Below are the speeches by launcher Sean Molloy, and by John-Paul himself.

Sean's launch speech
My name is Sean, I’m an old friend of John-Paul’s and I just happen to be the husband of Helen, the publisher. But it’s in my capacity as an old friend with an appreciation of John-Paul’s work that I’m speaking to you this afternoon.

People have been asking me what Kaitiaki o te Pō is about and it’s a very fair question. You should be able to sum up what a book is about, surely? However the question always leaves me flailing, struggling for a simple answer.

On one level the book is a collection of personal essays with a wider eye than the personal, dealing with topics like a school field trip around India; John-Paul’s experiences of being a high-school Dean trying help the ‘difficult’ kids; and his realisation that the heroes of his university days, young men, such as Keats and the lead singers of grunge bands, are perhaps not the best people advise you how to get the most out of life after all.

The essays tend to take at least two apparently different topics and twist them together in artful ways that are surprising and insightful, leaving you wondering: how did he do that? How did he see that?

One essay features John-Paul getting a perm, somehow interweaved with his quasi-friendship with an unpopular boy in class. Out of these two apparently disparate themes, John-Paul weaves multiple reflections on the hidden hierarchies and structures that teenage boys, and by extension all of us, need to accommodate ourselves to and how those hierarchies can turn in unexpected ways.

You may be able to see the problem of summing these essays up by now, I hope. They’re not simple, they are special. There’s a phrase John-Paul uses in the book – “It was like trying to describe feathers with the language of lead”. That is a good articulation of the futility of trying to describe this extraordinary book. 

But, because I am the launcher of the book, I’m going to do my very best to articulate what I think the book is about. Ready? Here goes.

To me, Kaitiaki o te Pō is a book about vulnerability. It’s a book that draws its power from embracing vulnerability.

First, John-Paul the narrator is vulnerable in his life, to time, to memory, to history. There is a consciousness and a theme that loved ones get older, change and are lost to us in multiple ways and that a fearful pain exists in that vulnerability. The first essay in the book expresses all this and is my personal favourite in the collection. It gracefully weaves together reflections on youthful nostalgia, the death of a good friend and Māori views of the world to find a place in the world for historians. Historians, John-Paul suggests, following the thoughts of Justice Joe Williams, are kaitiaki o te pō, caretakers of the night. The theme is one of power and purpose in vulnerability, that we take our dead with us and do our best to love and care for them through our memory.

As well as his own vulnerability, John Paul shows us the vulnerability of others, as people and as part of human systems. These are essays that are focused on people – people are the heart of them and caring for people is the point of them. This is a book that is acutely aware of privilege and the vulnerability that is the flipside from lack of privilege. The privilege and vulnerability of class and ethnicity, gender, income and political power. The systems that people create are more often the problem than a solution. Capitalism is an unescapable trap. The products that people create are after-thoughts and more likely to be rubbish than anything else – an empty chippy packet blowing in the wind, bottle tops washing up on the South Coast. Institutions are usually well-meaning but ineffective. The focus is relentlessly on the people stuck in these systems, and the love John-Paul has for those he writes about.

Third, John-Paul opens himself up to be vulnerable to us the reader, to our judgement. Certainly he doesn’t spare himself from his own judgement. This is not a book written by someone needing to be viewed in a rosy light, who wants to explore the problems of the world without looking at his own place in those problems. These are essays written by someone who has started with examining himself and then looking outwards – true personal essays, but not ending at the personal.

I’m at risk of making the essays sound like a downer. Well, here’s another thing, these essays are funny. Laugh-out-loud funny in places. The humour, though, is another dimension of the exposing nature of the essays that I’ve been talking about. The humour is yet one more way of being honest.

Finally, there is the vulnerability created by these masterful essays in us, the reader. We may not always be comfortable reading these essays. They can be confronting. But they’re so good. They’re remarkably well-written essays written from a high yet intimate viewpoint that refuses to let anyone off the hook but has love for all. There are no villains in these stories, there are people, messy people, trying their best. Vulnerable messy people. People just like us, in other words.

As John-Paul puts it: “An elaborate mess of cogs and springs, prettier than you thought, simpler and more complicated than you thought, Like most people. Like everyone.”

Read the book. Enjoy the book. Savour the book.

And then let me know what you think it’s about.  Thank you.  

John-Paul's launch speech
One of my aunts died last night. Aunty Audrey. She was 71.
 
Each year when I was growing up I went south from Wellington to see my relatives. Sometimes I flew down to Dunedin to stay with my Gran in Mosgiel, and sometimes my mother and I took the car across on the ferry and we drove south. When we drove south there was a routine. Christchurch meant stopping to see Aunty Helen and Aunty Susan and my cousins. Timaru meant Aunty Linda and Uncle Jack. Waikouaiti meant Great Aunty Helen. Alexandra meant Aunty Audrey and Uncle Neville.
 
I remember their house in Alex. It was actually nearer Clyde, up Springvale Road, a two storey house, and land, in a valley that baked hard and yellow in the summer, and froze hard and grey in the winter. I can remember going to collect the eggs from the coop one morning, and suddenly developing an aversion to soft-boiled eggs when they were presented at the breakfast table 30 minutes later. Being put on a horse and not liking it very much. Going looking for tadpoles with my cousins in the concrete shutes and sluices that ran down from a reservoir. Other things too. Like the terribly unfair way my uncle treated the sons compared to the daughters, and the seeds of resentment that were bedding in for later.  Each time we went to their place the Clyde Dam was progressing. Each time we drove through we wondered if it would be the last time we took the winding, narrow road up the Cromwell Gorge. I remember the Cromwell Gorge as a set of little orchards caught between the road and the steep, rocky ranges; run down old wooden sheds, and tall grass; and on the other side, complicated, jagged rocks, stepping down to the bolting, blue water at the gorge floor.
 
When they moved to a house outside Mosgiel quite a lot about the complicated internal family relationships had begun to unravel, but I discovered jam and cheese sandwiches in their kitchen, and managed to defeat my much younger but highly rated cousin at a game of chess much to my mother’s silent pleasure.
 
My Aunty Audrey was easy going. I remember her as having tired, but friendly eyes, and an appreciation for self-deprecation. But enormously troubling things happened to her a lot, and the eyes must have been tired for a reason. The last time I saw her was also the last time I saw my Gran. Seeing my Gran again had rubbed me raw, and Audrey was talking about one of the children she had raised and how he was going to come home from Australia soon. It seemed obvious that he wouldn’t come back from Australia. He had a job, and a life, and got back some of the self-confidence he had been robbed of growing up. As far as I know he never did come back, although I suppose he is planning a trip now. For the funeral. I dismissed her talk of a homecoming as naive, but it was probably hope. Probably based in some regrets. But I don’t know because I never truly engaged with her life when I grew up. Never sat down and figured it out. Which is lazy and unfair.
 
I try to get it righter in retrospect. That’s some of what I am doing when I write I think. Trying to look back to understand now: understand the students in front of me, the injustices in the world, the causes of the feelings I have about myself and others. One of the things I am worst at is saying how important people are to me in the present. I’ve begun to understand why that is, but it’s still hard.  But this is a time when it is right to do it.
 
I want to acknowledge a few people. And I want to invite three people to the room.
 
When I wrote this originally I wrote: “thank” – I want to thank some people. But it’s not a “thank you” I want to give. It’s to say: “I see you, I see what you have done, I see how you have shaped me, made me better, taught me things, and I acknowledge that and I hope I have been something good for you, at times, in turn.”
 
So I want to acknowledge my family. My mother, Cathy, Eleanor and Rosamund. Remember what I said acknowledge means: I see you, what you have done, how you have shaped me, made me better, taught me things. 
 
I want to acknowledge my friends. My childhood friends, like James, my school friends, like Steve, my uni friends like Danyl, Richard, Adam and others. Their partners. Their children. It turns out we have gotten older together. I’ve not been the best friend to you, really. I’m quite grumpy and sullen. Take this an apology and an acknowledgement then.
 
I want to acknowledge the people I work with and have worked with. The teachers and the students. You need to be thanked for all the laughter, and all the shared effort to be better. I see teachers and students as being in a complicated collaboration: teaching and learning from each other. I have learnt a tremendous amount from you.
 
Especially, in relation to this book, I want to acknowledge Sean and Helen. This book happened because of them. Because they saw I was sad and they took me out and we talked and they put a new path in front of me. A path towards a book.  owe them both a tremendous amount. Especially considering my long history of being a poor correspondent, unreliable dinner guest and ingrate. Thank you.
 
And now I must invite three people to the room who cannot be here.
 
The first is Matt.
 
When my friend – who was a friend to many in this room also – died in 2012, I was devastated. The solitary positive thing that came out of his death was my renewed understanding of the importance of connection. That sharing loss gives us a little power against death. We don’t have to be entirely naked in the face of our mortality. So I invite you here Matt because you always believed in me. You always said I would write a book. You accepted as inevitable that I had talent and that others would appreciate it. And I always thought, but never said: “Why?” I never said it because you were so confident. Because your belief was complete. And so, I need you here so that I can thank you.
 
The second is Gran.
 
I stayed with my Gran in the school holidays a lot in the 1980s and those times are a rock, and an anchor to me in a time that otherwise often felt confusing and lonely. Each day of each visit to my Gran’s had the same rhythm. The same rituals, the same quiet presence of love behind the most prosaic quotidian tasks. I apologise for getting older and thinking too much of myself. For not coming to see you more often in my twenties. I want you to know how much our time sits with me even now. When you died it was time. I was there to take the handle of your casket. But I’m older now and I still want to say, so that you hear, “I love you.”
 
The last is my father.
 
He’s on the cover of the book. Looking away. There, but not knowable. He died when I was five and I remember almost nothing of him, and nothing clear and concrete. When I became a father at 33 I went looking for him. Down south. With the people who had known him. The few who were left. It was illuminating and frustrating. As if I could sharpen the focus on the photo of him on the bridge, but not get him to turn around, and look at me. What my trip down south and my interviews did was change my relationship with him. I stopped ignoring him, downplaying and erasing him, and I let him come back. I accepted the pain of it. The confusion of it. So that I could also hear about his love, and gentleness and compassion. His death was one of the detonating events in my life, and it has only been in the last few years that I have realised that the fact of that makes me who I am.
 
So I ask him here today to say sorry. Sorry I forgot you. I won’t do that anymore.
 
***
 
I like to think that the orchards and the old huts are still there in the Cromwell Gorge. Submerged under the wide, flat reservoir waters that rose above them; that built behind the completed concrete buttresses of the Clyde Dam. I like to think that we can go back. That we can slip off the surface and plunge into the depths and see the past, and learn from it. That the past can be medicine. That it can make me better. More compassionate. More loving. 
 
My Aunty Audrey had dementia. Her memory was unmoored. She is gone now, but I still have a duty to her. To understand her better. To make the time to see my cousins. 
 
I remember Matt, Gran and Dad. And I have a duty to my family, friends and colleagues. 
 
Thank you for being here. It means a lot to me. I’m very lucky to know you and I rarely say it. We’re important to each other, and I look forward to being able to celebrate your achievements with you in the future.
 
Thank you.

We hope you can join us to celebrate the launch of Kaitiaki o te Pō: Essays, the debut book by John-Paul Powley, and Seraph Press's first exciting foray into publishing non-fiction prose.

When: Sunday 2nd December at 4pm
Where: Aro Valley Community Centre, 48 Aro Street, Aro Valley, Wellington

All welcome - bring your kids!

Copies of Kaitiaki o te Pō will be for sale for $35.

About the book: In these brilliant and wide-ranging essays John-Paul Powley harnesses the power of stories to tell us about ourselves and where we come from. Acting as ‘kaitiaki o te pō,’ a caretaker of history and memory, Powley combines memoir with history and cultural criticism to create essays that expand far beyond the simply personal. A powerful debut of an arresting new voice.

About the author: John-Paul Powley lives in Wellington with his wife and two daughters. He has taught English in Japan, and history and social studies in New Zealand.

To find out more about the book, and to buy online (if you can't make it to the launch), visit: http://www.seraphpress.co.nz/kaitiaki.html.

This is quite a new direction for me/Seraph Press. Although, these essays are very poetic, and there are actually three poems included as well. 

These are amazing essays, and I'm really excited to be publishing them. Launch details coming soon.

Read more about the book here. 

This extract from the title essay explains the meaning of the title:

The second day of the history conference started with a speech by Justice Joe Williams. Justice Williams was once a lawyer working on the Waitangi Tribunal helping members of different iwi to present their grievances to the Crown in order to receive redress.

He began by speaking in Māori and then translated. He said that he had begun, as most speakers on marae begin, by paying respects to his ancestors who had passed beyond the horizon and live on in memory. He then used a wonderful phrase which he believes describes the role of the historian. Historians, he said, were ‘kaitiaki o te pō’. This translates to mean the caretakers of the night.

It was a phrase that resonated inside me. Suddenly I felt honoured to be a teacher of history; honoured and charged with a great responsibility.

For a taster of the book, you can download a pdf of the title essay.

Nau mai, haere mai

Please join us to celebrate the launch of Tātai Whetū: Seven Māori Women Poets in Translation, edited by Maraea Rakuraku and Vana Manasiadis.

When: Sunday 11 March, 2 pm
Where: Mākaro room at Te Wharewaka o Pōneke, next to the lagoon on the Wellington waterfront

The launch will feature bilingual readings from the poets and translators, and discussion of the project, followed by afternoon tea (cash bar). Copies of Tātai Whetū will be available for purchase for $20. All welcome.

The poets are Anahera Gildea, Michelle Ngamoki, Tru Paraha, Kiri Piahana-Wong, Maraea Rakuraku, Dayle Takitimu and Alice Te Punga Somerville. Their poems have been translated by Hēmi Kelly, Te Ataahia Hurihanganui, Herewini Easton, Jamie Cowell and Vaughan Rapatahana.

For more information, or to pre-purchase a copy online, visit: http://www.seraphpress.co.nz/tatai-whetu.html

Join the event on Facebook 
Find the event on the Writers & Readers website 

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