Saturday, August 24, 2013

Ted Jenner


Ted Jenner is a poet, translator, and classical scholar who was  born and bred in Dunedin, New Zealand. He has spent the last forty years living in Africa, Europe and the northern parts of New Zealand. His books include A Memorial Brass (Hawk Press, 1980), Dedications (Omphalos Press, 1991), The Love-Songs of Ibykos: 22 Fragments (Holloway Press, 1997), Sappho Triptych (Puriri Press, 2007) and Writers in Residence and other captive fauna (Titus Books, 2009).







Genius Loci


JAGGED  FLASHES  OF  LIGHT ABOVE  THE  ROOVES  IN  WAIHI  AZURE PACIFIC A LINE  BREAKING  INTO  LACE  INCESSANTLY  EARS  SO  FULL  OF  CICADAS  THEY SING  IN YOUR  PILLOW  AT  NIGHT  A  RESORT  OUT  OF  SEASON  ITS  STREETS  EMPTY  BALD  AND  LICHENED  ECHOING  THE  BREAKERS  AND  THE  PLUMP  OF  DISTANT  RAINSTORMS  IN  THE  LATE  SUMMER  DUSK  VOICES  GRADUALLY  EFFACED  BY  THE  DARKENING  SILENCE
                                                                                                                        (5.4.07)
.  .  .

At Day’s Bay in profile, the bony angular form of a girl reading, oblivious of the family crossing the sand behind her. The light shimmering, violet. The year, 1899.

: ‘she heard the silence spinning its soft, endless web’ (Katherine Mansfield)

.  .  .

An empty land drained of any significance for the European explorer, Australia seemed to produce nothing but dream-like narratives of repetition, events without closure. Contrast the dreaming of the Aborigine, for whom every corner and cranny in the land was full of significance. See Paul Carter, Living in a New Country (1992): ‘the glint of sunlight on bent grass, turning it into a field of scratched glass or gossamer and revealing someone’s recent passage.’

By 1850, European settlers were already becoming unnerved by the silence of New Zealand bush. Stoats, introduced to reduce the number of rabbits, scurried into the forests and found native birds more interesting prey. Originally introduced for the fur trade, the opossum now stands at an estimated population of 70 million. One hundred years later, some descendants of those first settlers are still spooked by the ‘emptiness’. Others have adopted a more conciliatory attitude: ‘Charles Brasch saying we are alone, existentially full of angst, and Smithyman came out and said, “Hey! If you look at these hills which are crying for meaning, they are covered in pa sites!”’ (Scott Hamilton in Percutio 1 (2007)).

.  .  .

SACRED  HEART:  CONSULT  THE  DRAWINGS  TRACED  IN  THE  CONDENSATION  ON  THE  WINDOWS  IN  ROOM  21  WHERE  PARABOLAS  DESCRIBE  AN  ERECTION  FATHER  CHAMPAGNAT  PURE  WHITE  SHOULDERS  GLISTENING  WITH  DRIZZLE  GAZES  BENIGNLY  AT  THE TONSURED  LAWN  THE  PURSED  LIPS  OF  RANGITOTO’S  VULVA  VISIBLE  ABOVE  THE  ROOVES  OF  GLENDOWIE  PRAY  FOR  US  SINNERS  NOW  AND  AT  THE  HOUR  OF  THE  BREAKING  OF  OUR  VOICES  PRAY  FOR  US  NOW
                                                                                                                        (25.6.07)

.  .  .

Clothesline: Balmoral (29.9.07)

                                                a set of baby’s nappies
                                                flapping against the nor’easter
                                                            small wings     flailing
                                                trapped in lime

.  .  .

Whispering angels trail vapours over Balmoral at sunset; the screams of squabbling archangels fret in the stratosphere as they begin their descent. And down at Earth, a terrestrial representative at St. Lukes stares coyly from her modest frame, as from a fresco by Giotto, a wave of lustrous raven hair falling softly over the left hazel eye, just above a sun-dried wad of chewing gum.  (6.10.07)

.  .  .

THIS  FOSSIL  AMMONITE  FOR  SALE  IN  DOMINION  RD

                                                IS  THE  EYE  OF  A  CYCLONE
                                                PRESSED  INTO  SOFT  STONE
                                                IS  A  FOUR  HUNDRED  MILLION
                                                YEAR  OLD  PERMIAN  RINGWORM

                                                                                                (18.12.07)

.  .  .

A rectilinear grid of streets, essentially boulevards, tree-lined, with tramcars in the shape of the fuselages of the first Continental airliners. The tramcars chime the stops with an ecclesiastical tone as if summoning the communicants to the host. Though dust-laden, the trees sparkle in the early morning sunlight in this most European of Australasian cities, but its outskirts reveal how it sits on its landscape – as an alien. Beyond the city, the grass is light brown fringed with eucalyptus; the red earth is cracked and parched. I could be looking into the heart of Africa.

Suburban gardens in Ashwood display ingenious methods of trapping dew: in one garden, a plastic bottle, with the base removed and the nozzle pointing downwards, was mounted above a slip of nasturtium. I have seen the same method used in the Negev Desert.
                                                                                                            Melbourne, 22.4.08

.  .  .

                                                Teak slats filter
                                                dust and moonlight.

                                                Ashwood’s slatted
                                                shutters wink at
                                                the maid in the moon.

                                                                        Melbourne, 23.4

.  .  .

[A man or maid in the moon in the West; in Malawi, a rooster; in China, a hare and a toad and a cassia tree. The moon of course ‘es una / misma / en New York / y en Bogotá’ (‘the same thing in NY and in Bogota’ – Mexican poet, José Juan Tablada). And yet the moon is the West’s notorious image of mutability. In China, on the other hand, it represents permanence. The West sees appearance where the East sees essence.]

.  .  .

Anuta is an isolated Pacific atoll of only three hundred inhabitants where children are shared with the childless, a mirror is considered a luxury, and aropa (cf. aroha) is almost a palpable entity.

As this information came to me on the BBC World Service as background to whatever I was doing at the time, I am not sure that aropa is as close to the Maori as I remember it; was it a mirror or was it a looking glass that was considered a luxury? I am not sure that all – as opposed to a number of – children are shared with the childless; was the population 30 or was it 300? And was the name of the atoll really Anuta? And now I feel guilty about reducing an earthly paradise to a game of Chinese whispers.
                                                                                                                        (19.8.08)

.  .  .

Shivering after dawn, Balmoral 6.32 a.m.

                                                And still watching this herring-bone cloud
                                                Dissolve into patterns I might have
                                                smudged with a finger     or are they tyre
                                                tracks     pissed he failed to take the corner?

                                                                                                            (7.7.08)

.  .  .

                                                The sheen of river silt on your body
                                                the smell of river stones on your skin

                                                and Sappho’s melilot     vipers bugloss     violet
                                                hue     mica schist     and the aroma of the thyme
                                                you have just crushed on your shoe…

                                                                                    Clutha District, 14.1.10

.  .  .

                                                Pink salt pans
                                                hills without
                                                sheep / the winds
                                                stream up through
                                                tufts of grass
                                                f i n g e r i n g
                                                m u l t i t u d e s
                                                of tousled hair

                                                Blind River
                                                dry as a
                                                bone / drier
                                                even than
                                                the dry grass
                                                our hands
                                                run through
                                                rasping
                                                the tips of
                                                our fingers

                                                            Grassmere, 17.1.10

.  .  .

NIGHT’S  SHADES  DRAW  CURTAINS  DRAW  SHADES
NIGHT’S  CURTAINS  HER  CURTAINS  DRAW  NIGHT’S  SHADES

IN  A  SILENT  WAY  SHHHH  IT’S  ABOUT  THAT  TIME
SOMEONES’S  HAND  FITS  MINE  LIKE  A  GLOVE  SHADE

THE  DELTA  OF  LIFE-LINES  NO-ONE  CAN  READ  IN  HER
CLASPED  PALM  IS  DESTINY     THOSE  LINES  ARE  BRAILLE

                                                                                    Meadowbank, 31.10.10

.  .  .

                                                Harvesters  :  all these
                                                                        dusty     grimy     chimney sweeps
                                                                        in the hall     their flues
                                                                                    ballooning in the draft

.  .  .

What song the wind-chimes sing in Meadowbank
this evening – perhaps not ‘entirely unknowable’.

.  .  .

Playing against the northern façade of the War Memorial Museum in Parnell, the horses at Anzac Cove are swishing their tails under the olive trees, oblivious to the slaughter around them.   (24.4.10)

.  .  .

                                                clipped hedges
                                                            throbbing and shimmering
                                                in the wind

                                                                                    Remuera, 31.12.10

.  .  .

                                                A ceremony of innocence


                                                At its head
                                                there’s a dry bed
                                                of the River Avon
                                                where no bird sings

                                                not even a cricket
                                                chirps for the one
                                                hundred and eighty-
                                                five monarchs

                                                released in a
                                                fading nimbus
                                                to ghost our
                                                lost souls.

                                                                        Christchurch, 22.2.12

.  .  .

Q.:  WHAT  CAST  A  BRIEF  AND  BARELY  NOTICED  SHADOW  OVER  128  STUDENTS  THEIR  KNITTED  BROWS  THAT  BORE  THE  SIGN  OF  THE  CROSS ON  ASH  WEDNESDAY  THEIR  NCEA  LEVEL 1  MATHS  EXAM   AND  THE  SERRIED  ROWS  OF  FADING  FIRST  XV  FIRST  XI  AND  ROWING  EIGHT  TEAM  PHOTOS  IN  THE  SCHOOL  HALL  AT  SACRED  HEART  THIS  MORNING  (10.28 A.M.)?   A:  A  PARTIAL  SOLAR  ECLIPSE
                                                                                                                        (14.11.12)
.  .  .

                                                First flush this summer
                                                fuchsia red in Kohimarama
                                                and slender palms by the tennis
                                                courts off Neligan Avenue
                                                are charming the breeze that
                                                runs along these spindles.

                                                As if your warm breath is blowing
                                                through the teeth of a giant’s comb
                                                a colonnade of tall sentinels
                                                sways towards Melanesia –
                                                Avenue first then the islands.

                                                                                    (10.12.12.)

.  .  .

Opo

                                                out of the corner of the eye
                                                in the trough of a wave
                                                the flash of a fin is
                                                eager still to greet us
                                                a lost guardian spirit
                                                aching to find her own kind

                                                                        Opononi, 24.1.13


                                                                                               
                                                                                                (to be continued)






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