book launch

Launching Photos of the Sky

I really love and value the process of launching a book into the world – reading it into life and physically passing the poems into the hands of readers. When I sign a book for someone and hand it back to them, I really do feel that the work belongs to them now.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to write about the week I spent in New Zealand, catching up with friends, family, writers, publishers, booksellers and people I hadn’t seen in years. I enjoyed all of it, and grew more proud of and confident about this collection, which was mostly written in secrecy, bar the few poems blogged here to my loyal audience. I think I’ve said before that it’s a deeply personal collection, something that became particularly apparent as I stood in front of my final crowd in Nelson (my home town) and felt teary farewelling some pretty hard feelings that existed as I wrote this book.

My friend and fellow poet Tim Jones, was kind enough to launch Photos of the Sky at the event at Thistle Inn, Wellington. His endorsement was another lovely and valuable aspect of sending this book into the world.

Tim used the words “confident” and “charismatic” to describe the new collection, and I’m incredibly grateful for his generous comments. Before reading from the book, Tim said:

Tim Jones

There’s so much to identify with in this collection, how could I not love it? Cricket bats, Game of Thrones, Bowie. Slugs sneaking inside to feast on cat food. Love, lust, rueful confessions. Taika Waititi – he gets a whole poem! Midland Park. Melbourne. Preston! The mention of that magical suburb makes me think of Courtney Barnett – and this collection is musical poetry from a musician who writes so well about music and many other things as well.


Photos of the Sky is yours now. I hope you like it!

Available from The Cuba Press and local bookstores, or feel free to contact me here.

Missing my own metaphors

We’ve been studying Sylvia Plath in Year 11 Literature, reading too much into her work, perhaps and trying to avoid linking every poem to the one tragic thing everyone knows about her. The truth is, Sylvia was smart, worked hard, she crafted her poetry carefully, attended creative writing classes. She cared about what was happening in the world around her, she was a mother, she questioned society’s expectations. She wrote poems on good days and she wrote poems on bad days. Her poetry represents all of these things.

I’ll be launching my third collection of poetry in Wellington on Monday. It represents good days and bad days too; tough decisions, optimism and disappointment. It ends just before everything in my life fell astoundingly into place. All my poetry is personal, but in this collection, I feel like I’ve achieved a kind of honesty I’ve avoided all my life.

So, I’ve been nervously wondering if readers will notice.

One of the poems that looks least personal is ‘Building consent’, in the section Shift. I genuinely wrote it because I always had a dream of buying an old house and doing it up, but saw a renovation in progress and decided it looked exhausting, loud and messy. I like the poem. It says what I wanted it to, but as I read through it in the context of this book I realised I’d missed my own metaphor.

The poem represents a shift in my dreams: what once excited me just looked like hard work at that point. I was in the middle of trying to make an unfixable relationship work, a relationship I’d travelled miles to be in. Making it work was my dream, but sometimes you just have to know when to quit.

On one level, the poem’s not a metaphor at all. I looked at the physical labour going into the renovation and had no capacity to embark on such a task myself. I was tired and anxious from my situation. Doing up a house was far from my mind.

On another level, it’s creeping into metaphor – homes represent a kind of stability, a decision couples might make together, a project to establish partnership. My relationship was nowhere near that point of joint purchase and effort.

On yet another level, it’s all metaphor. The house is the relationship. Pure and simple. It was time to give away my desire to fix things that are so obviously a broken mess…

Or am I giving myself too much credit here?

Building consent

The romantic notion of buying a rundown clapboard villa
pouring heart and soul into doing it up by hand
spending all of your time loving it
back to life – gutting out the back half, sourcing
sustainable surfaces for breakfast bars and just the right shade –
is quickly debunked as I walk past a weathered
rusted bungalow, boards rotted through
shirtless men shouting across the trampled front garden
propped with piles of Bunnings purchases
and a ‘dunnys R us’ in pride of place
sounds of dropped steel and hammered edges
everything shifting slightly in the relentless
heat of yet another day on this damned project
too many chiefs, too many cooks and not one chef in the kitchen
that currently looks like a workshop
sawdust lining surfaces and can’t even make a cuppa
with all this mess
all these people coming and going
traipsing through our idealised disaster.

From Photos of the Sky, The Cuba Press available 5th November

The Best of Adam Sharp – by Graeme Simsion

I spent my Saturday finishing reading The Best of Adam Sharp. On Sunday I caught the train to Yarraville to attend the book’s local launch in the chilly-but-welcoming Masonic Hall. Yarraville is adorable, I had no idea. The hall was full of intimidatingly accomplished writers whose first novels have been optioned by Sony or Universal. The launch began with a reading from Jane Rawson, a novelist whose debut is purportedly “Australia’s most underrated book” As I drank my cup of sav, held in still-gloved hands, I wondered if that is in fact the greatest literary accomplishment I’ve ever heard of.

It was wonderful listening to Graeme talk about his writing – the rush to fame The Rosie Project brought him and the philosophical way he’s had to deal with Hollywood and oddly out of touch US publishers.  The descriptions of the writing process for The Best of Adam Sharp made the novel all the more real and I even squirreled away some tips for developing an original plot.

There was an intriguing connection for me here too – Graeme sent me a signed copy of The Best of Adam Sharp after finding my book and recognising the Dylan reference of the title. I liked that link a lot. It’s the kind of thing that musical references should do and is hugely fitting when thinking about The Best of Adam Sharp – a book so imbued with the sentimentality, nostalgia, subtext and at times obsession that songs and their lyrics can be responsible for in our lives.

At one point Adam recalls his dad’s advice after he’s been caught out, “Think about what you sing in the shower” and I’m reminded of my Grandad (who passed away a year ago today) whose mood and thoughts could apparently be traced easily to the tune he was whistling. The songs in our heads are not set to random and they are liable to tell tales on us.

But of course we will cherry-pick the lyrics that have the most significance for us, Adam reminds us. We can connect with a song on even the most tenuous level if we are truly and desperately looking for a connection.

I really enjoyed The Best of Adam Sharp. The soundtrack made me feel like Lonesome When You Go had found its nostalgic and somewhat rueful parent; the scenes in France felt cinematic, making me want to be there, perhaps not for the drama but definitely for the wine; and the themes of second chances, what if, longing for something that never quite was could bring tears to your eyes.

Dylanesque symbolism for this theme crossed my mind briefly as I waited on the Yarraville platform for the train home.