Beneath the Sea: An Anthology of Poetry

Could it be a reflection of himself? A reflection of the sky? Or the people he cares for? All we know is that as he studies these reflections he experiences a spiritual freedom.

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With this spiritual freedom the speaker of the poem is able to offer spiritual assistance to his fellow man. It is this spirituality that enables him to open many cages and free his fellow human man. I listen and I offer. Sydney is a cornucopia. As I walk in the bright,. I have opened many cages;. It is only when my head is upon my pillow that.

I merge beyond human connection: I am a boat,. I am many lights shining up the waters of self. This prayer makes all of us a part of this great ocean and its unlimited boundaries; and it makes us realize that in the poetry world and the spiritual world there are no strangers.

Dear God of many strange,.

The Search Beneath the Sea : The Story of the Coelacanth

Posted by Chris Rice Cooper at Newer Post Older Post Home. For a long time it was a matter of faith that New Zealand poetry began around with Curnow, although there were minor figures — Ursula Bethell especially — who had prepared the way among the plangencies, bluster, and prettiness of a derivative colonial literature. Not surprisingly, this is a view that has come under sharp scrutiny and attack since the s, not only from younger poets like Ian Wedde influenced by the exuberant forms, demotic rhythms and democratic instincts of American writing but also from succeeding generations of women writers alienated by the hierarchy, masculinity and exclusiveness of the cultural nationalists.

Postmodern critics, meanwhile, have critiqued the assumptions of his realism; postcolonialists have critiqued his nationalism. Curnow, however, stands on both sides of such conflicts: Yet she concentrates on a local and immediate world only to open up universal concerns: Yet she also acknowledges the implication of language in the political terrorism of the late twentieth century.

Even her nonsense verse has a hard practical edge. More to the point, the two modes of apprehending reality — linguistic and political — are interwoven:. Even the admiring sons eventually found it necessary to resist the father, and women poets have staged a long opposition from Robin Hyde in the s to Michele Leggott in the s. The most dramatic refusal of sonship was that of James K.

If facility and easy social satire weakened the verse of his middle years, the later work achieves greatness by the taut lucidity of its compulsive brooding on death, love and meaning and by the tense doubt behind the effort to salvage what might still be used among the icons, myths and gods:. Baxter as a Catholic apologist is at odds with the characteristic scepticism about religious belief and metaphysics that is part of the settler legacy.

There is much fierce demythologising in New Zealand poetry and a deflating irony directed at the idea of an afterlife. Yet one also encounters a kind of secularised worship, not of the gods but of the world. The idea of New Zealand as Eden may have dissipated, but the sheer physical loveliness of so much of the place continually elicits rapt attention and, in fiercely engaged poems by Ian Wedde and Cilla McQueen, a passionate desire to preserve the land from further despoliation.

If New Zealand poets have been conscious of the dislocations of language in a colonial society, they have also been attentive to the world itself — the ubiquitous presence or power of the land, shaping the consciousness of all who write in New Zealand, in ways recognised and subterranean.

By the late nineteenth century, while their fellows were busy felling the last of the great primeval forests and clearing the land for pastoralism, some among the European New Zealanders known as Pakeha were already attending to what was being rudely displaced. Even among the farmers there were early enthusiasts for patiently and minutely recording the effects of the borrowed and introduced on an ecosystem; this concern continues today and is found in the poetry of Hawken, McQueen and others. By the s the energies of the movement had found new modes of expression; Maori cultural and political assertiveness had not lessened in intensity but there was a growing diversity in Maori writing.

Old myths are applied in new ways to familiar details and ordinary pleasures:. From the start, the preoccupying subject of New Zealand poetry has been language and its dislocations from place as much as naming the hills and rivers, celebrations of love, or the registration of new patterns of social and cultural life.

I am the Universe anthology by The Poetry Society - Issuu

At the same time, the unfolding of New Zealand poetry has recorded a growing relaxation in the use of a demotic and the steady formation of a local way of saying. Mansfield was keen to put a little symbolist smoke between the artist and the actual. Curnow, in reaction against the colonial homesickness for England, sternly enjoined New Zealand writers to attend to the world to hand. In much of the best New Zealand poetry, modern or postmodern, one finds sudden switches in register, often from formal kinds of writing to energetic colloquialisms, and an alertness to those minute shifts of tone that signal a local inflection working in language that is not at all local.

Often the poetry is deliberately unpoetic, invoking the New Zealand suspicion of overly elaborate speech to make something slyly aware of itself as poetry. Denis Glover and Bill Manhire are especially adept at this. Isolation and marginality are, after all, comfortingly universal conditions after the lapse of so many empires:. The struggle, then, has not simply been to come to terms with a new place, but to knit thought to it by a process of attending to all that was here, that which was brought, and to the complicated, finicky, often unexpected results of their interrelations.

Sometimes the introduced species of animals and plants got away from their well-intentioned donors, becoming pests. Rabbits, gorse, ferrets — the list is long. Yet even the pests became part of the landscape, earning their place by sheer resilience. So also did the words and phrases that were brought with the settlers get away from their utilitarian owners; they hybridised with the words they found and appropriated, with those they coined and those they borrowed — little by little making a place in language.

New Zealand poetry in the colonial period seemed to Australian critics — captivated by a stronger literary nationalism and by a firmly established local demotic tradition in that country — to be excessively English, formal and genteel. That is perhaps simply to observe that even in the earliest phase New Zealand writing had its own perverse character.

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Somewhere in that seeming paradox lies the large story of New Zealand poetry, as well as all the small ones it has engendered. Click here to see the table of contents. An Anthology of New Zealand Poetry. Translated by Arkadii Dragomoschenko. Edited by Evgeny Pavlov and Mark Williams.

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And what was time, anyway? Somebody give me a drink: But I am not naked here. I am not skinless nor browned by sun. In this version of the present I am simply sitting. The water still falls while bodies continue to edge beneath the mouth, their arms raised in invitation — for this present rolls, all-encompassing, consuming every version of the world. The water falls interminably.

It bubbles, calls — and yet. Some tourists pick themselves out of surf Their bodies pale like blindness under the sun. They will never be any younger than this, clambering over rocks into colder versions of themselves, starved for joy they slip through, for time, for this water they were never given to keep. Helen Mort was born in Sheffield. For updates, like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter youngpoetsnet youngpoetsnetwork.

Each year winners 85 Commendations and 15 Overall Winners are selected by high-profile judges to win publication, tuition, and poetry goodies. The Award closes 31 July every year, and is open to poems on all themes. SLAMbassadors is the national youth slam championship, open to young people aged The slam is open every year to any young person in the country, and aims to uncover the next generation of MCs, rappers, performance poets and spoken word artists.

To enter the slam simply film yourself performing your piece and submit it online. Six acts will be chosen from across the UK to take part in an intensive, two-day masterclass with the spoken word artist Joelle Taylor. SLAMbassadors workshops are also available for schools and youth groups. Schools and The Poetry Society Teaching resources, including free lesson plans, are available from resources.

There are also ideas and writing prompts to inspire new writing. School members receive books, resources, posters, free access to our Poets in Schools service, and more. I am the Universe is an anthology of winning poems written in response to climate change. Helen Mort asked writers on Young Poets Network to I am the Universe Writing environmental catastrophe I am the Universe: I looked for a language I could know like braille 7 and my fingers froze against each sign I touched.

I wonder if when I think back 9 to the sound of rain on hoods I will only picture my childhood Or you in your yellow fisherman coat, dancing with no music. Some tourists pick themselves out of surf 20 to cross other rocks, warm slap of sunscreen beside the aged hint or embrace of sea.

Christa Holka for The Poetry Society. Hayley Madden for The Poetry Society. Published on Sep 26, I am the Universe anthology.