A brief word with four poets hoping for an Ockham award

Ahead of the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, Kete meets the shortlisted contenders for each of the four categories. This week, Serie Barford, Joanna Preston, Anne Kennedy and Tayi Tibble - in the running for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry - talk about discoveries, books they wish they'd written and what they're reading now.

Sleeping With Stones by Serie Barford

Could you describe your book to us in ten words? A threnody illuminated by delight and love; anchored by stones.

Tell us about a discovery you made in the course of writing this book that surprised you. I realised that I still follow the sun around the house – write from east to west as the day unfolds/folds.

What book do you wish you had written? Faces in the Water by Janet Frame.

What other shortlisted book (in any category) do you most want to read? Kurangaituku by Whiti Hereaka.

What are you reading right now? I always have more than one book on the go. At the moment, it’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami and Tautai: Sāmoa, World History, and the Life of Ta’isi O. F. Nelson by Patricia O-Brien.

The Sea Walks into a Wall by Anne Kennedy

Could you describe your book for us in ten words? We need to clean up our act or it’s curtains.

Tell us about a discovery you made in the course of writing this book that surprised you. That the Island Bay sea wall was built in the mid-1930s. That means my dad, who grew up in Island Bay like me, would’ve known the bay without the wall. That was astonishing to realise because the wall had always seemed like it had been there forever.

What book do you wish that you had written? Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry.

What other shortlisted book (in any category) do you most want to read? I’ve read quite a few already but top of my right now is Patricia Grace’s From the Centre: A Writer’s Life.

Tumble by Joanna Preston

Could you describe your book for us in ten words? Sinners, saints, troublesome gods, girlhood, travails and new fairytales.

Tell us about a discovery you made in the course of writing this book that surprised you. The poems talk to each other much more than I realised.  There are threads connecting pieces that I thought were entirely separate, written in different times and different contexts. But that makes sense; you can’t really keep your obsessions out of your poems. Turns out I’ve been thinking a lot more than I realised about what it is to be female. Not just about gender politics and misogyny (although those things have been on my mind for a long time) but about the experience of being a female human. The joy and the strength of it as well as the frustration. How perilous the journey is, but also how glorious!

What book do you wish that you had written? Two poetry collections I’ve read recently that left me feeling a complex mixture of deflation (because I really wish I could have written them) and pleasure (because they exist,and I can read them again and again whenever I want to) are Paisley Rekdahl’s Nightingale (Copper Canyon, 2018) and Cate Kennedy’s The Taste of River Water (Scribe, 2011).

What other shortlisted book (in any category) do you most want to read? Qiane Matata-Sipu’s Nuku.

What are you reading right now? Ellis Peters’ St Peter’s Fair (number four in the Brother Cadfael series), and Johanna Emeney’s Felt.

 Rangikura by Tayi Tibble

Could you describe your book for us in ten words? Seki, hearty, Naati, hot, elemental, spiritual, cheeky, omniscient, pensive and a flex.

Tell us about a discovery you made in the course of writing this book that surprised you. That I could write a book without nine other people plus Chris Price in an MA classroom telling me how to do it and that I wasn’t condemned to peak with my writing at 21 lol.

What book do you wish that you had written? I wish I had written Kōtuku Titihia Nuttall’s forthcoming pukapuka. Luckily, it’s yet to be published so I still have time to steal it and rush it out under my name. It’s master weaving as well as master writing. It will make natives weep deep from the bruised heart of our history but it will also make us feel connected, celebrated and strong.

What other shortlisted book (in any category) do you most want to read? I want to read Bryan Walpert’s Entanglement because it seems like the most controversial book on the list according to internet commentaries and Entanglement is such a funny word after the Jada Pinkett Smith and August Alsina controversy a few years ago.

What are you reading right now? I’m reading The Bone People by Keri Hulme for the first time.