Category: Hay, Pete

Small Press Network: 2022 Book of the Year Award—Shortlist

This year’s shortlisted titles for Small Press Network’s Book of the Year Award have been announced. They are:

The BOTY 2022 winner will be presented in partnership with the Wheeler Centre as part of its Next Big Thing series, on 25 November 2022 at 6:30 pm. You can find the event details here.

I mention this in part cos it reminds me of entering Pete’s book in the award a couple of years ago, (and it won). I was asked to write something for use as part of the award presentation. I suggested yes I could (see below) but that I’d feel less comfortable reading it live. That’s okay, we can take care of that, I was told. (In the event, what I wrote was way too long and just a short segment was used)….

As to Pete….

One evening some years ago I was driving a taxi late at night, parked down in the vicinity of Hobart’s waterfront. Two women – tourists from New Zealand, I was to learn — climbed into the cab. They’d attended a literary event an hour or two earlier. They were cheerful and relaxed and happily exchanged literary perceptions of the evening in the comfort of the back seat of the vehicle. Generous and inclusive, they invited me to share their conversation, to which I responded by noting that for many Tasmanian writers —particularly those who wrote of the environment — a closer affinity was felt with the landscape of New Zealand than with the ‘… sunburnt country, A land of sweeping plains’ of Dorothea Mackellar’s Australia.

The pair asked if I could suggest the name of a praiseworthy Tasmanian writer, someone who’d perhaps slipped under their radar back home in New Zealand. I mentioned Pete, describing him as a poet and essayist and one of our country’s most respected environmentalists. Of the many reasons I might have offered in an appreciation of Pete’s work, I settled for just one — the fare was only running Salamanca to New Town, after all — and that was ‘generosity’. And I tried in my own words to recall for them a conversation years past when Pete had suggested ‘I don’t write because I think I’ve profound truths that other people would benefit from having exposure to. I don’t write to provide anyone with answers, I write to provide people with dilemmas. My essays – even my poetry lately – are written to set up tensions that are ultimately not resolved. I explore the tensions, but I don’t conclude.’

For their benefit, I’d have also mentioned — if the words had come to mind — Richard Flanagan’s support for Pete’s previous essay collection, Vandiemonian Essays, wherein Richard wrote, ‘All (these essays) are written with wit and without fear, with an erudition lightly worn, and with a pen dipped in a large love of this world. All can be read with both joy and curiosity… ’

It’s Richard’s allusion to ‘joy and curiosity’, coincidentally, that I’d recommend as an approach to Pete’s current essay collection, ‘Forgotten corners’ — that, along with an openness to being challenged, informed and entertained.

***

As the cab pulled to a stop, one of the women turned to me, remarking ‘I know it’s eleven-thirty in the evening, but I’m about to jump on the internet and learn a little more about Pete Hay — right now!’

The other leaned in towards me. ‘And I guarantee it, she will!’

A reading: Hay, Brinklow, Kessler—The Lark, Hobart

Went along to the Lark on Wednesday to listen to Pete Hay in conversation with Laurie Brinklow and Deirdre Kessler, on the notion (what else?) of islandness.

 

The Lark readings: Pete Hay, Laurie Brinklow and Deirdre Kessler—Wed 27th October

One of the Tasmanian Writers’ Centre’s feature events for 2010 was a reading with local writer and environmentalist Pete Hay speaking with visiting Canadian writers Deirdre Kessler and Laurie Brinklow at the Lark, in Hobart in October. It’s always a pleasure to listen to Pete Hay. ‘Here in Tasmania’ – ‘this is my signature complaint’ he adds with a wry grin – ‘here in Tasmania when you turn on the television news the weather forecaster comes on and says “It’s raining across the state”. Now the state is a constitutional fiction. The state is the police stations, and the public schools and the roads and the government offices and the parliament. So it’s raining on those things, but what about the rest of the island? This to me is the measure of the extent to which we haven’t come to grips with the geographical fact of islandness. When the weather forecasters start to say, “It is raining across the island….”, however …’ ‘On Prince Edward Island,’ Hay continued, ‘there is a very very strong island consciousness. Even when their poets write about oases in the desert, as Deirdre has done for a forthcoming issue of Island magazine, it’s an island trope that’s coming through.’ Is islandness at the forefront of the way Prince Edward Island writers think about themselves, he wondered? ‘Is there an island effect within the literature of Prince Edward Island? To what extent, he asked Deirdre and Laurie, is your own work island informed?’

‘Some of my poetry is island informed: very much so, the particular flora and fauna matter to me,’ insisted Deirdre Kessler. ‘But when I was living in that oasis in the desert in a two acre place called China Ranch, that was my island, and I learned all the flora and fauna, and the coyotes. I knew that place. My island poems are very much informed by the colour, by what’s living, by the historical past – but not other poems. I’ve written a poem set in Mexico, another set in the Red Centre of Australia, and both share a similar close identification with place. So I can’t help you here by making it all fit into a theory of islands.’

‘What does make it fit though is the fact that islanders are very cosmopolitan,’ added Laurie, ‘islanders have always been coming and going. It’s part of who we are as islands and islanders because otherwise we’d just die, we would stagnate if we didn’t have routes across the ocean or the strait, or roots dug deep into our island soil’. Laurie Brinklow says that as she’s become more alive to the realisation of Prince Edward Island as a wonderful place to write from, it’s infused her writing – even to getting the vernacular language down. ‘After twenty-seven years of living there, capturing the voices and the stories of the people there is coming into more and more my poetry.’ ‘This is how presumptuous I am,’ admitted Hay, on another tack. ‘I went to Prince Edward Island and gathered together a pile of locals and took them on a field trip of their own island. And I was confronting. I went into a forest and I said, I want everyone to stay together because there are black bear and elk and big cats, there are all sorts of dangerous critters in these woods, I don’t want to lose anyone. People looked at me and said, there are none of these animals here. And I said, Ah ha! Well there used to be. So now I want you to go into these woods and look for the absences.

‘They don’t, by and large, do that in Prince Edward Island.

‘Deirdre and Laurie know me well enough not to take umbrage here – and they were both on this field trip – but it seems to me in this important respect we are more mature here in Tasmania. We have looked the awfulness of the destruction of indigenous society much more squarely in the eye than they have on Prince Edward Island. We have thought more deeply about what it means to have destroyed the largest endemic form of animal life on this island. They haven’t done that – it seems to me – on Prince Edward Island. They have this dramatic past. We myth our own past, of course ? and we myth it wrongly. They myth their past ? I’m not lisping here ? they myth their past, and they also myth it wrongly. But we’re doing more about rectifying this, it seems to me, than Prince Edward Island is. Is that fair comment?’ ‘Yes I think so,’ Deirde replied. ‘Perhaps this is a good time to read the poem that’s dedicated to you. Pete took us on that field trip, Laurie and I and about nine others all crammed in a van. This poem was written the day after the field trip.’

Come from away: 40° South looks at 46° North

                                                for Pete Hay

This clear-blue-eyed, unfeathered one
from 40 degrees south latitude
takes us into our own woods,
passes along a question from Barry Lopez:

How does birdsong ramify?

And then he dares to ask us
to see not only what is present,
but also what is missing.

In the matchstick forest,
kinglets flit among the spruce,
give us high descending notes
a handful at a time,
the sound as delicate
as their wren-sized bodies.

Chickadees up the ante, and a red squirrel,
whittling a spruce cone,
considers hitting the chatter alarm,
but lets bluejays trump the soundscape.
Distant crow, distant baseline
of the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

One of our troupe stoops to pet the furry hide
of spaghnum moss, spring green no matter the season.
On a windfall, a gob of witch’s butter, dayglo yellow.
Here and there, red-capped Russula emetica,
baby-girl pink, and clown-ears of wood fungus
lurk knee-high up trunks.
Grey-green spanish moss, drips from conifers,
feather-touch on shoulder, back of head.
Hair on hair.

Water in a sudden spring
bubbles up from an aquifer
through the fine silt of story,
layers going clear down to Glooscap,
Abenaki and Mi’kmaq, the People.

Beaver have intentions–this is real estate
in their purview, adjoining barachois pond
already too crowded. Earlier this year,
on a winter walk, we heard insistent mewing
of the kits under the dome of lodge;
now the young ones help gnaw two fine white birches,
soon to lie across the bubbling spring,
another layer, another story.

The Taswegian moves us along to an Acadian fishing village,
his radar sharp: something’s happening.
On the wharf, a crowd has gathered; television camera
turning three bluefin tuna into news.

Inside a boat sling-shed, a man, surname Gallant
or Richard or Arsenault, hands and knife
of his great-grandfather, guts one bluefin.
Already in a plastic bin, her opalescent head
kisses her tailfin; entrails a delicate pink
that should never be seen, and, fresh
the blood, the seawater-blood perfume,
then from a fat hose well water gushing
from wrong openings in her body,
blood and sea washed away from the hollowed-out being.
Bloodsmell in my nose and brain,
my own fluids returning the call, kin to kin,
and indelible, now, the curve of fin, structure
of gills, smooth, black perfection of skin.
The forklift operator clenches, and the second
northern bluefin, weighed, ready for gutting,
slips from the sling. She was never meant for air.
“That one goes 650 pound.” A bystander knows–he’s
fished since before metrification. See the weather
in his face, in his sea-water-thickened fingers.
The come-from-away guide moves us on
to an almost hidden graveyard farther along
the north shore of Abegweit, Minagoo, Île St Jean,
St. John’s Island, Prince Edward Island.
A nor’easter, perfect storm, early October 1851,
The Yankee Gale. Sailors’ bodies layered
on the cold bones of first landowners;
shipwreck story nearly lost, almost
as lost as clacking antlers of moose and caribou,
growl of black bear-what is missing
from this island in a gulf in the North Atlantic Sea.
In the scrub spruce and bayberry,
marram and goldenrod, up comes the song of birds,
bank swallow, song sparrow, signifying,
ramifying upwards and horizontally–
song over the shore field, in and around,
twining, weaving, connecting, then gone.
And, oh, how we must claw back, break
tooth and nail, or sink sadly under.

‘That was inspired by Pete Hay, taking us into our own woods,’ Deirdre concluded.

‘That’s right, what gall,’ Hay responded. ‘But I love that island. It has the same dark dramatic history that we have. I love it.’

North to Garradunga: An afternoon at the Republic

Various things draw me to Hobart’s Republic Hotel this afternoon, not least the fact that Pete Hay is reading today. Compere Liz Winfield opens proceedings with work by Barney Roberts and Magenta Bliss (Jenny Boult), a recital that both renews our appreciation of their respective talents and accentuates our  loss. Some of us are making the trip to Launceston for Bliss’ funeral next Thursday.  Continuing on a happier note, Liz announces the results of this year’s Bruce Dawe Poetry Prize. ‘Last year as you’ll remember, it was won by Louise Oxley, this year it’s the turn of Jane Williams.’ Both women are among the audience for the afternoon’s readings.

First to the microphone is visitor Shaun Levin – originally South African but now a resident of London – and Hobart City Council’s International Writer in residency. ‘Much of my work is about love, and sex,’ he says, ‘which I’m missing cos I haven’t been home for three weeks…’

‘But you’re open to offers, right?’ calls some wit from the audience.

Levin grins without missing a beat. He’s the editor of Chroma, a queer literary journal publishing work from writers and visual artists based in the UK. This afternoon he reads from his recent novella, Seven Sweet Things – his writing is funny, droll, in-your-face.

Next to read is local writer Kathryn Lomer. She’d missed the last reading at the Republic, she explained, having been hospitalised for a few days with a life-threatening illness. Kathryn mentioned the name of the illness, ‘something to do with the colon’ she said, adding that investigation had led her to realise the poet A.D Hope had suffered from the same affliction. ‘We both underwent life-saving operations … saved his life, saved mine. Hope went on to write about his. “I’ve always been partial to a colon; but a semi-colon is better than a full stop.”

Lomer reads from old and new work, including ‘Heart to heart’ published in the most recent issue of Island (no. 102), and displaying her effortless capacity to write of the trials of the heart – ‘… parts of our hearts already comatose/ from long-ago mishaps in love’. As she offers words to the microphone I wonder again at the sheer quality of her first collection An Extraction of Arrows (UQP), the winner of the Anne Elder Award and short-listed for the 2004 Adelaide Writers’ Festival. (How difficult is that, faced with competition from every decent poetry collection published in the country over the preceding two years?)

The experience of motherhood is never far from Kathryn’s consciousness, it comes out in her writing, in her conversation. ‘I think we could learn from a survey of four-year-olds on their recollections of the experience of birth,’ she says in response to something raised by Shaun Levin, the previous reader. “I asked my son what he remembered about his birth. His immediate response was, “It was too dark, then I slid down a slide and Mummy bit me” ’. (Do our children ever forgive their writer parents for any of this, Kathryn wonders?).

Another poem is dedicated to Anne Morgan, ‘who put me on to kayaking’. It’s a poem from what she hopes will be her second collection ‘by a publisher who’s intimated they may be able to publish it …  in 2007’. It’s funny, Lomer adds, ‘people always tell me this is a great poem about relationships but it’s really just a poem about kayaking’.

I can’t help thinking how good an experience it’d be to publish Lomer myself, if only I had the resources. The things that matter most in the relationship between a press and the work it publishes – the things that make a book effortless and natural to promote – is always apparent to me when listening to Kathryn read her work, it’s in her earthiness, in the lack of self-consciousness about her writing, in her lively imagination.

Pete Hay introduces a sombre note to proceedings. Remarking on the passing of Magenta Bliss (Jenny Boult) this week, he mentioned how he’d had the privilege of delivering the eulogy at the funeral of Barney Roberts a little time ago. “Scott, Roberts, Bliss in the past three months … we’re losing too many fine poets, too fast’, he laments.

Hay reads from his recent collection Silently on the Tide, the poetry spilling out from this much loved man of letters. Of the thylacine, he reads:

The tiger is an absence, and here’s a marvel.
In the common soul wells a mourning,
a sense of an essence lost from the land
and we have made it so.
We have rendered the land incomplete
and it is not to be redeemed.
It is the very land that grieves, perhaps,
gathering us up.

Hay – generous as ever – makes mention of the presence of Cameron Hindrum in the audience. Cameron, the Director of the annual Tasmanian Poetry Festival,  is in Hobart to present Jenny Barnard with the Poetry Cup she’d won at the festival. ‘Cameron’s an extremely good link-man’, Hay says, adding that like a good many other people ‘I got my ass kicked by Jenny in the Cup’. He finishes his set with a wry smile and some welcome new work. ‘The book goes on, becomes part of history … and the poet moves on, to the next.’

Hindrum is welcomed to the microphone. ‘The Launceston Poetry Cup has escaped Launceston,’ he says mournfully, ‘has come to Hobart for the first time since Tony Rayner lifted it in 1997’. The Cup is duly presented – ‘it’s yours for a year Jenny, no wild parties with it’ – and there’s opportunity for Jenny to read her prize-winning piece.

Liz Winfield takes a few moments to launch the latest issue of Poets Republic, the bi-monthly A3 poetry broadsheet she’s faithfully produced for the past two years. It’s a freebie, five hundred copies of it are distributed by literary organisations and bookshops throughout Tasmania. ‘This issue marks its second anniversary,’ she says, ‘the next one will appear early in the new year”.

It’s been a good afternoon.