Photographs

by Albert Wendt

Overview

In Albert Wendt's new poems, his first collection for over a decade, snapshots of the close and familiar contrast with strange and mythical sequences from a vast Pacific epic in progress and a vivid impressionistic montage of global travel in the late twentieth century. The rich diversity and range of Photographs is astonishing, as this complex writer moves with ease and fluency from ancient Polynesia to contemporary China to family celebrations in an Auckland garden, and through a variety of tones and voices. The collection celebrates grandchildren, family, ancestors and a heritage that stretches back to the atua; and shows a profound and compassionate understanding of the ways we now live in these islands.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781775581383
Publisher:	Auckland University Press
Publication date:	11/01/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Maualaivao Albert Wendt CNZM is of the aiga Sa-Maualaivao of Malie, aiga Sa-Su'a of Lefaga, aiga Sa-Patu of Vaiala and aiga Sa-Asi of Moata'a, Samoa. An esteemed poet, novelist, short-story writer, playwright and painter, he is also Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Auckland, specialising in New Zealand and Pacific literatures and creative writing. Wendt has been an influential figure in the developments that have shaped New Zealand and Pacific literature since the 1970s and was made Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2001 for his services to literature. His Adventures of Vela, a novel in verse, was published in 2008; and his co-edited collection Mauri Ola: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English was shortlisted for the 2011 New Zealand Post Book Awards.

Read an Excerpt

Photographs

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By Albert Wendt

Auckland University Press

Copyright © 1995 Albert Wendt
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77558-138-3

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CHAPTER 1

MAUNGAWHAU

    SUMMER WEDDING
    (for Sina & Johnny)

    I sit in our backyard shade drinking
    ice-cold beer and the sun suspended in it
    Every time I put down my glass
    the emperor sun is reborn in the liquid —
    an embryo cauled in fire a Van Gogh
    sunflower the succulent yellow of kina

    Along the backfence a peach tree
    a gum tree creepers and ponga
    six cicadas: two in the peach
    three in the gum tree one in the creepers
    I count them by their different songs

    All week my son and I have weeded
    the flower beds trimmed the hedges
    mowed the lawns raked and swept
    watered the young pohutukawa we planted
    after Christmas in the far corner of the yard

    Last night in my sleep the fullmoon
    wore a necklace of tabua above
    Maungawhau and our city of black glass
    Maungakiekie's face was a moko
    of green fire (The volcanoes died long ago)

    Our home and yard are as neat
    as the cicadas' celebrating chorus
    ready for Sina's wedding tomorrow
    I keep drinking the sun to that
    Sina ia manuia le lua aiga!


    NURSERY LANGUAGE
    (for Tehaaora & Isabella)

    Language is
    blind water poured over the heart
    to find its apt shape
    of sight
      So let's see
    what it finds
    tonight


      1

    In the long eyes
    of the trees the sky is
    full of the winter moon
    and escaping stories
    of rain


      Maungawhau
    surfs night's precarious crest
    The zebra light
    tiptoes along Edenvale Crescent
    oneway into your grandson's
    nursery-rhyme dreams
    Tehaaora the Breath-of-Life
    but everyone
    calls him Tehaa the Czar

      Chagall's white cow
    jumps clean over the moon
    into this poem but Reina's
    fat cat at Orakei
    is too lazy to elope
    with the spoon (How did
    the artful spoon slip —
    slide into this rhyme?)

        The neighbour's
    designer dog doesn't laugh
    to see such fun because
    he got neutered yesterday
    on the level
    playing field of life

    (By the way what happened
    to the fiddle? And what
    about the diddle?)


      2

    Every time you ring
    your granddaughter Isabella
    she insists on your duoing
    Twinkle twinkle little star
    over the phone:

        Twinkle twinkle
    philosophical star do you ever
    wonder who we are?
    Up above the world
    so high like a pizza
    in the sky did Copernicus
    ever figure you right?
    What about Stephen Hawking's
    marvellous insights?
    And why don't you twinkle
    on nuclear nights?

        Twinkle twinkle
    brave little star please protect
    Queen Isabella and the Czar
    from falling
    skies


    IN YOUR ENIGMA
    (for Reina)

    You are dressed in your enigma
    You shift like mist across words
    that describe water
    You plant signs
    You invent yourself in syllables
    of nightlight and winter turning
    to spring on Maungawhau's shoulders

    Every thing is
    Every thing is earth the atua feed on
    Every thing is earth moulded in Ruaumoko's belly
    and thrown up to know
    Tane's kiss of living air

    Your ancestors left their shadows
    for you to grow into
    They fished islands and visions out
    of tides that washed back into the Void
    They dealt in imagery of bone and feather
    They knew the alphabet of omens
    and could cipher the silences
    that once knew the speech of pain
    They planted white pebbles in the mouths
    of their dead and sailed them
    into the eyes of the future

    You are dressed in your enigma
    that finds language in the gift
    that is water
    that is earth
    that is every thing


    A SEQUENCE

Maungawhau

    On the slopes of Maungawhau
    the southerly again petals your house
    with hieroglyphs of her departure

      What is the colour of the future?
      Is it the red of the speared bonito?
      The steely blue of kereru feathers?
      Mele your shaman in her dreams
      always chose the overgrown track
      through the bush

    The tamarillo branches tapping the windows
    are wings of tava'esina —
    messengers of death across a night
    teeming with silence
    In the afternoons when you walk round Maungawhau
    you see her in the shadows that stalk the slopes
    for the sad memories of the Ngati Whatua

      The house is full of her echoes
      She hangs in all the cupboards
      and from all the racks
      What is the cartography of pain?

    This room is a jigsaw of memory and light:
    the Hotere Wall of Moruroa sunrises and sunsets
    of Black Rainbows and the Fourteen Stations
    of Death wearing the feathers of a peacock
    of 60,000 years of Aboriginal birth at Mungo
    POST-BLACK Ralph has redrawn the calligraphy
    of black and Pouliuli lives again
    in all its magic plumage

      The air is seeded with her fingerprints and scent
      In your father's compound
      whenever the Vaipe flooded
      your future smelled of amniotic promise

    The red firetruck she bought Tehaa
    for his first birthday
    lies on its side
    No alarms no fires
    It watches you for omens of that final fire
    and the urned ashes your children will one day scatter
    with the forgiving To'elau
    across the lava fields of Savai'i

      How old is the future?
      How far is it away from Isabella's
      second birthday yesterday?
      (On her fourth blowing we had to help her
      snuff out the two candles
      The chocolate birthday cake was too sweet)

    Scattered round Tehaa's firetruck
    is his broken kingdom of:
    Big Bird and Sesame St.
    Legolimbed creatures jousting for midnight's honours
    the plastic didgeridoo he twirls round and round his head
    to give voice to a world without mana

      Your grandson doesn't yet know winter
      or the swing into spring
      and the other seasons of the blood
      which dictate what we don't mean our lives to be
      and as the song says:
      The fatman and his bald charm
      took her to the Hanson St Motel
      on the river of no return

    Not long after she left
    you dreamt she was standing alone
    in a paddock of burnt grass that stretched forever
    She was gazing down into the wordless abyss
    of her shadow as it stretched out to you

      Tonight you again net Frame's small
      but dangerous words: and if but however ...
      the conjunctions which determine choice
      and the excuses for what our lives are
      She decided there was no return
      despite your ifs buts and pleading
      She told your daughters
      she and the fatman were compatible:
      he isn't sexist
      loves cooking and classical music
      shares domestic chores
      brings her cups of tea in bed
      and she hoped your suffering
      would make you a better person!

    In the Vaipe your arthritic father wakes
    each dawn to the Mulivai Cathedral bell
    and can barely wade through the rooms of his life
    towards God and work
    He is shrinking
    He shuffles forward defiantly
    but one day soon over the phone
    the small words will choose you return
    to the Vaipe and help bury
    a man who weighs what he was at birth

      One morning she too will wake
      to the dawn of the small words
      and the choices that could've been
      and the fatman will look fat and bald
      in the paddock of burnt grass
      which can't contain her shadow

    In the apt connectedness of things
    the objects around you exude
    the shimmering illumination you saw
    in the eyes of the red carp
    in the lake of the Golden Pavilion —
    an uncanny intelligence delighting
    in its wisdom
    The carp wore the face of a gnome

      Since she left
      your dreaming has taught you the nature
      of drowning repeatedly
      You didn't ask for that or deserve
      the bristling aitu which brim up out
      of the floor and engulfing you
      in their arms drag you down
      into the airless pool of your bed

    When you were a boy
    Mele warned you of that recurring death
    storytellers must live out to ensure
    their tales' truths
    (Baxter Tuwhare and others
    have spoken of it too)
    You'd not known such pain before
    All you wanted was to sleep
    and never wake again

      Sometimes when your parents quarrelled
      your mother packed you off
      to Vaiala and Patu Togi
      your favourite grandfather
      He said little as you helped him
      prepare his artful fishtraps
      and watched him paddling out to the reef
      believing he'd topple over the edge
      but he always returned
      with a feast of ula pusi and fe'e
      His was a serene gladness
      moulded by his love of fishing and the sea
      (Asi Tunupopo his father
      had been a notorious war leader)
      Once Patu told you he'd one day
      sail the rainbow's path
      into a horizon as white as bone
      picked clean by the waves
      And he did.

    A stillness crouches
    where the light ends
    and the night begins
    It won't take a shape
    you can tame
    It counts the ticking
    of your veins ...

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Photographs by Albert Wendt. Copyright © 1995 Albert Wendt. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Maungawhau,
Summer Wedding,
Nursery Language,
In Your Enigma,
A Sequence,
from The Adventures of Vela,
The Mountains of Ta'u,
The Contest,
Nei,
Nightflight,
Photographs,
Photographs,
In Reina's Albums,
Te One-Roa-a-Tohe,