Excerpts from a new collection
Alien in daylight
Wahu, Rosy Sundew, Drosera spatulate an eye-catching rosette of spoon-shape leaves on black peat. photograph: Thousand Acres Plateau, Kahurangi National Park
Corona-like, with their sun-ray leaves, miniature spoons catching droplets – lethal for tiny lives in other worlds. Hot as a fever in summer, like the vermillion flush of your cheeks. Time to slip off the singlet under your shirt, rub glaucous sun-cream along your arms. As you step off the path across the black mud, you must avoid stabbing your thin skin on the twisted branches of small bushes – branches with ill ends, unfailingly sharp, like rotted teeth. Why your interest in these alien creatures beneath you? Your camera will drop from your hand. A soft thud on the cushion uniflorous. You will stop again. Your focus might be better for this one. The light not as bright. Here they are a cluster of red burrs at your feet, crazy-waving arms from spatula-suns on your screen, oozing sweet secretions to choke their victims, slowly. I’ll tell you something: I like their sly beauty, secret viciousness, their ability to hide in full sight.
Dr C Crassifolia, marriage counsellor
Mikimiki, Twiggy Coprosma, Coprosma crassifolia a twiggy character with tiny round leaves and ruby berries. photograph: Heathcote Valley, Ōtautahi
My husband and I would have to work hard at discovering you again. Because, even if we did go back, we wouldn’t be trying to find ways of opening hurt spaces so the other would listen. Our agitation would not be as palpable.
It was your oddity that attracted us, each in our own fug. How you sprang like a hatter from a uniform field, making us pause. Though it wasn’t till later we realized you had a golden aura, same as the grass.
Your back was turned. You didn’t seem to mind that we were there. We closed our mouths, saw how you held yourself like an angel about to lift, and there was an exuberance in the way you wore your knotty hair, swept upwards at the back in the shape of wings.
Your outlook won us over – as it had always done. You pointed out the places we’d been, beyond the end of the peninsula to the Pacific, to the places we would return. You made us notice how spectacular the clouds were, mimicking the long form of the land, and above the patches of blue, the streams of altostratus pouring forth from the sky. You knew the constancy in movement and change. You soaked it up, as we were learning to.
It occurred to us how tough you had to be, out in the open on the tops, bearing the ferocity of southerly blasts, the glare of the sun, the long, long periods of dry.
Author commentary
The title, anthology (n.) a collection of flowers, plays on the etymology of the word ‘anthology’ from the Greek ‘anthos’ meaning flower and ‘logia’ meaning ‘collection’. Our Aotearoa flowers are tiny in comparison to the often showy non-native flowers, they might only be millimetres wide, some tiny creamy buds among tiny leaves on a tangled bush by an urban river, or hidden in the moss next to a rotting log in the bush, a few centimetres high, the delicate limy petals of one of our 120 odd species of orchid! But really, I don’t know why I love them, this joy. It’s a mystery, like the moment you find meaning in a great poem or story – how everything clicks into place.
I try to be as true to the original moment of inspiration as I can in my writing. I guess this is why you might call poetry ‘creative nonfiction’ with the emphasis on ‘nonfiction’. I’m trying to recreate that moment in the world where I learned or felt something new. I want to write it down because the writing makes sense of it and is actually where the real learning occurs, bringing what I experience into consciousness. I know I’ve got it right when what I have on the page fits the feeling and imagery of my memory of the experience. I use all the techniques I have to describe this feeling. I try to use specific sensual and vivid language, and metaphor. I’m a kinaesthetic learner so I use a lot of touch words as that is the way I will have encoded that memory I’m describing.
I’ve discovered over many years the best way for me to tell it fresh is through the structures and play of poetry. Poetry (prose poetry, flash-fiction, flash nonfiction included) focuses on the detail and imagery, the flower of the small moment, which it turns out is the epitome of story. When I focus small – finding those tiny treasures in their smells and subtle colouring that can only belong to that place and that time – then my words can sing.
My new book is a love story for these plants, but it’s also a plea – look at these beauties, go find them, love them, advocate for them, look after them.
About the book
anthology (n.) a collection of flowers is to be launched July 25 at Tūranga 5.30-7pm, hosted by Christchurch City Libraries and Pūkeko Publications
Readings by Erik Kennedy, Joanna Preston and Rata Ingram
Taonga puoro by Geoff Low
Book signings and more
Everyone welcome. For more details and to register:
https://christchurch.bibliocommons.com/events/664a62dbe3e1ee30003f78a3
Gail Ingram writes from the Port Hills of Ōtautahi Christchurch, and is author of three collections of poetry. Her latest collection, anthology (n.) a collection of flowers (Pūkeko Publications 2024) is part poetry, part field-guide and includes over 80 botanical photographs. Her other collections are Some Bird (Sudden Valley Press 2023) and Contents Under Pressure (Pūkeko Publications 2019). Awards include winning the Caselberg (2019) and New Zealand Poetry Society (2016) international poetry prizes. She is managing editor of NZ Poetry Society’s flagship magazine a fine line teaches at Write On School for Young Writers and holds a Master of Creative Writing (Distinction). https://www.theseventhletter.nz/