where you wake is black and very far back behind your eyes
back past your whipping branches and backerfar backer than bone
and blood back past your underlings and their weird offerings
you wake back there in the black among your demigods…
that’s not their real nameit’s just the word you can hear
when they are writhing beside you not in pain
demigods… just a word you can hear when you
sit among themthe ones who
in the first place
told your body push the air outwards
and existand your body did
demigods… that’s not their real name
and they are writhing beside younot in pain
?
here in the black among your demigods
very far backwatching your body’s vision
from a distance with your demigodswatching the faces
arranged at the edge of your vision watching the mouths
in the faces watching the mouths and they’re movingmoving
it reminds you how mouths move what mouths do it reminds you that
mouths say if your thoughts were depraved then we forgive you
if you ruined the day then we forgive you
we forgive you we forgive you
we forgive you we forgive you
here in the blackvery far back behind your eyes
your demigods are doing their job to the sound of the trudge of your blood
they tell your body make your animal movements
make your animals movementsthey tell your body put some pasta in a pot
work in a shop
they tell your body choose to breathechoose to breathe
they tell your body choose to breathe choose to breathe
and your body does and your body does
?
turn aroundof course there is further back than that
far far backin a round room
the black pea to which you are answerable
is whispering:
Behold my astonishing hugeness
The Earth gestures to me
I smile and it changes the air
Time— haha
It wraps around me like a car around a lamppost
and stops there
The Friday Poem is edited by Hera Lindsay Bird. Submissions are now open. Please send up to three poems in a PDF or Word document to info@thespinoff.co.nz
The only published and available best-selling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington.
AUCKLAND
1 Greene Lyon by Alan Goodwin (Quentin Wilson Publishing, $38)
An intriguing new local release. Here’s the publisher’s blurb: “Isaac Newton was a man driven by a passion to unlock the secrets of the universe. But those were God’s secrets, and in the 1660s, England was a dangerous place for a young scholar who dared to challenge God’s supremacy – a world that also believed in the devil and the power of magic. But Isaac’s quest to understand the universe would not be silenced, even when tempted by darker impulses and a passion for Alice Cutler, whose life is threatened by a disciple of the Witchfinder General. A desperate Isaac, a seeker of knowledge but also a young man in love and fearing his life is falling apart, is driven to scientific creation and choices with fatal outcomes. This beautifully imagined novel examines one of our great historical myths and follows Newton’s path to becoming the Greene Lyon, alchemy’s symbolic creature who devours the sun. A compelling story that explores the tensions between the thirst for knowledge and the consequences of desire, Greene Lyon will haunt you long after the apple has fallen from the tree.”
Rather barbed review on Kirkus for this beloved writer and her even more beloved characters (Olive and Lucy): “Strout’s many fans will love this sweet, rambling tale. More critical readers may feel it’s time for her to move on.”
7 Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner (Jonathan Cape, $38)
One of the very hot novels on this year’s Booker Prize shortlist. Kushner is an extraordinarily original writer and this book is her attempt to never, for a moment, have her readers be bored. Highly recommend.
Delighted that this hilarious, brilliant and beautiful novel has also made it onto the Booker shortlist. Love this time of year.
9 Lioness by Emily Perkins (Bloomsbury Circus, $25)
Our own literary star is still hanging onto the top 10! What a run for a brilliantly Wellingtonian novel with the universal theme of rags to riches and the shine wearing right off.
A profoundly moving account of the impacts of rheumatic fever. Here’s the publisher’s blurb: “In the winter of 1969, a 14-year-old Whangārei schoolboy called Keg went to a weekend rugby tournament and came home with a sore throat. Soon he was bedbound with a blazing fever, painful wrists, elbows and knees, and – most worrying of all – damage to his heart. He had been diagnosed with rheumatic fever, and his life was changed forever.
Rheumatic fever is an inflammatory autoimmune disease, usually contracted in childhood. It starts with a sore throat; left untreated it can cause serious, life-long damage to the heart. Despite its status as a developed country, Aotearoa New Zealand has one of the highest rates of rheumatic fever in the world. More than 90 percent of the country’s cases occur in Māori and Pasifika communities.
Author and researcher Jason Gurney knows Keg’s story intimately; he is Keg’s son. In The Twisted Chain, Gurney describes living in the long shadow cast by this disease. He writes of emergency night-time drives to Auckland’s Middlemore Hospital, of panicky hours waiting for medical help. He describes how these frighteningly vulnerable experiences sparked some of the questions that led him to a career in public health. ‘I wanted’, he writes, ‘to research the causes and effects of rheumatic fever. It was my way of fighting back against the illness that had changed the trajectory of my family’s life’.”
A gorgeous hardback containing stories from “Papatuanuku, who sustains and nurtures us; to goddess of peace, Hineputehue, who transformed pain into beauty; and the misunderstood goddess of the underworld, Hinenuitepo, who found purpose and enlightenment through betrayal – this book is a treasure of knowledge and insight.”
