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    Far-Flung
    Far-Flung
    Far-Flung
    Ebook84 pages35 minutes

    Far-Flung

    By Rhian Gallagher

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    About this ebook

    Far-Flung traverses multiple terrains home and upheaval, our connection to the environment and to people, our relation to the past, place and placelessness. From the Kilmog slumping seaward' to the bracts and the berries and the leaves' of the Mackenzie country; the moth (courier of bloom powder'); the wind that grows like an animal and the great loneliness / of grass' Gallagher is in conversation with the natural world. Her lyric poems, marked by attentiveness, have an earthy, intuitive music and a linguistic clarity.Gallagher moves easily from the ecological and personal concerns of contemporary life to the nineteenth-century Irish migrants and the historic legacy of the Seacliff Lunatic Asylum. The multi-voiced, dramatic sequence Seacliff Epistles' draws on a rich variety of poetic forms: from lyric to prose poem, parable to riddle, monologue and letter poem. Bill Manhire called Rhian Gallagher's poetry one of the quiet, astonishing secrets of New Zealand writing'. Far-Flung sees the poet's lyric exploration broaden considerably in an assured new work.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIndependent Publishers Group
    Release dateAug 13, 2020
    ISBN9781776710614
    Far-Flung

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      Book preview

      Far-Flung - Rhian Gallagher

      Acknowledgements

      The Speed of God

      Into the Blue Light

      for Kate Vercoe

      I’m walking above myself in the blue light

      indecently blue above the bay with its walk-on-water skin

      here is the Kilmog slumping seaward

      and the men in their high-vis vests

      pouring tar and metal on gaping wounds

      the last repair broke free; the highway

      doesn’t want to lie still, none of us

      want to be where we are

      exactly but somewhere else

      the track a tree’s ascent, kaikawaka! hold on

      to the growing power, sun igniting little shouts

      against my eyeballs

      and clouds come from Australia

      hunkering over the Tasman with their strange accent

      I’m high as a wing tip

      where the ache meets the bliss

      summit rocks exploding with lichen and moss –

      little soft fellas suckered to a groove

      bloom and bloom – the track isn’t content

      with an end, flax rattling their sabres, tussocks

      drying their hair in the stiff south-easterly;

      the track wants to go on

      forever because it comes to nothing

      but the blue light. I’m going out, out

      out into the blue light, walking above myself.

      The Speed of God

      What if God slowed down after making the grass and the

      stars and the whales and let things settle for a bit so the day

      could practise leaving into the arms of the night and the

      tides tinker their rhythms and the stars

      find their most dramatic positions.

      Or maybe if he’d made man and said, ‘You learn how to

      live with yourself and do housework and then I might think

      about woman.’

      Or instead he’d made woman not out of a rib, which was

      really such a last resort, but rising out of the firmament one

      woman followed by more women and they took journeys

      and learnt how to build boats and bridges which surely they

      would have done without men around pushing and shoving

      and constantly giving orders.

      I just think it was a bit fast – six days to make all of it. How

      could the relationship between things be seen, be felt?

      And as if God’s rush were in us too we go about remodelling

      faster and faster with our burning and breaking and the earth

      reels with our speed and it looks and feels like a disaster.

      Titipounamu Tapping the Beech Forest

      for Laurence Fearnley

      Our smallest bird, a visionary speck

      in the cool, calm, cathedral-quiet of the beech forest;

      the milk-moss, fern-fanned floor

      where I lie down and wait

      hearing a million tiny rhizoid voices, the high-up canopy

      consorting with the sun, light

      falling through a found gap

      makes music with the moist green, gem

      to gem. Above my eye comes titipounamu

      on the trunk that hasn’t opened yet – once more

      she scales the rough-ridged bark

      tap-tap, wing flick, tap-tap-tap she looks up

      to see what’s happened in the last three seconds

      then back to the tree: bow, swivel, tap-tap-tap

      as if she will find the key one day – open

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