landingtree

For Christmas, my grandmother gave me a book of Aotearoa New Zealand poems called Remember Me, chosen to be memorised. Since my Christmas is feeling distributed this year, I opened it early, which is good, because not only have I been really enjoying reading it these last few days, it was in time for me to mention it to a friend who said he'd enjoy getting it for his Christmas gift.

I often come to poetry with partial attention and/or a sense that I don't know enough poetry to think about it well. Ages back, my potter employer was judging a ceramics award. While I took my lunch break, she was ordering photos of wildly diverse art on her floor: smooth and rough, ugly and pretty, functional and abstract, winnowing her short list into being. She is not a potter who's equally good at explaining pottery to non-potters. We had a long talk about her ordering, at the end of which I still had no sense of her aesthetic criteria, only that they were vivid and formed through long experience.

I have felt that way sometimes about poetry, too: looking at a swathe of aesthetic objects I don't understand.

When reading this book, fresh from a masters course in which you write opinions all over everything, I began making little golden dots in the top corner by poems I especially liked, and little exes in pencil next to poems I didn't (because I can always change my mind about not liking a poem, but it seems worth keeping the memory of having once liked a poem). Part of why I seldom go back to poetry collections is the need to sort them anew each time and remember which ones I thought were good, so this helps.

I may make a few posts with poems I did and didn't like in them, but here's one post like that, anyway! Poems above the cut, thoughts under the cut.

High Country Weather
by James K. Baxter

Alone we are born
  And die alone;
Yet see the red-gold cirrus
  Over snow-mountain shine

Upon the upland road
  Ride easy, stranger:
Surrender to the sky
  Your heart of anger.

( thoughts )

Charm for the Winter Solstice
by Airini Beautrais

A feather     a leaf
a stone       a bone
a dead
     town
        road.

Incandescent
snow on the hills.
The forest dark below.

( and thoughts )