Poetry from Aotearoa/New Zealand 11 -- Michele Leggott's 'slow reader'

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

slow reader

 

the reports always said

she was conscientious but must learn

to work faster    so she outran

the reading laboratory    got through

tan to aqua and was safe at last

from the speed tests    it was a valuable

lesson    the letters dropped softly

into place making voices sing

or whisper    there was so much to

keep track of    kerning Times Roman

with a sable-haired brush    serifs echoing

celestial geometry    hours of work

for one or two words    about time

she learned space and what lies between

compelling body and soul    light and air

song and dance    big letters flying

from keyboard to screen at a touch

marvellous sarabande    starry gavotte

freehand the camber but understand

weight and measure the way

feet walk in the world and hands

turn pages that take them

 

out of it again    and the copula

its even-handedness    its tying

of one thing to another so that both

spin along the causeway expanding

possibilities    a non-rival good

an open source a site for sore eyes

quick in its exchange    slow to forget

the illuminations    psst! pssssssss

sssssssst! pssssssssssssssst!   poem

as event    tied to the smallest detail

cut from the flying vista    Alentejo

Pontchartrain    beyond the river

is where we want to go    Ponte Littorio

shimmering into della Libertà

that kind of hope    that kind of day

that one beside you

offering an arm in the dark

 

Michele Leggott 

 

 

Author of eight collections of poetry, Michele Leggott (born in Stratford, Taranaki, in 1956) is a Professor of English at the University of Auckland, from where she co-ordinates the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz). A graduate of the University of British Columbia, Leggott wrote her PhD on the poetry of Louis Zukovsky (her dissertation was subsequently published as Reading Zukofsky’s "80 Flowers" in 1989). Leggott's poetry, since the 1980s, has been shaped by an intense scrutiny of Zukofsky and other recent North American poets, and by her later immersion in the work of pioneering generations of New Zealand woman poets such as Robin Hyde, Mary Stanley and Eileen Duggan. Her writing has retained the kind of taut, allusive musicality which would have appealed to Zukofsky while adopting, increasingly, the personal register and lyricism of Hyde and others. Teeming with incidents and details from the life of the mind, self and family (past and present), Leggott's poems are like preludes and fugues played upon the surfaces of the everyday.

'slow reader' is from her 2009 collection, Mirabile Dictu. Her most recent collection, Heartland, appeared from Auckland University Press this year.

Further information:http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/writers/leggott.html

 

 

Comments

[Margie]

There was a wonderful poem by Michelle Leggott billboarded on Shortland Street last week, describing a journey from New Plymouth to Auckland, mentioning Kawhia and Bosco in Taumaranui.

The bill board was removed before I could photograph it to retain a copy.

I wondered if someone could help me by letting me know where this poem is/was published?

Kind regards
Margie