48 LISTENER AUGUST 24 2019
BOOKS&CULTURE
“On the surface, they speak different
languages, but when you set up camp in
the poems, they have much in common.”
This is what Green does and what she
invites us to do: wander into the world
of the poem, marvel at language and
rhythm, poke around the corners, peer
under the veiled references, revel in the
breaks, the continuities, the bravery, the
recklessness, “the thrill of travelling with-
out a road map”.
Green’s own path is strewn with books,
art, music. Her poetry-writing mother
grew up in Mapua, where Colin McCahon
worked in the shed at the bottom of the
garden. Toss Woollaston has a perch in the
family tree; her great-uncle encouragedyoung Paula to paint. She still recalls the
sermons of her father, a church minister
before he left to teach music. “The pitch
of the voice, the music, the storytelling –
there’s a persuasive thing happening that
affects you in lots of different ways.”A
s a student at Kamo High School
in Whangārei, she heard James K
Baxter read his poetry. Awestruck,
she rushed home to write her own Baxter-
informed poems. Seven days later, he died.
For years she wrote, amassing a pile of
notebooks. Then, in 1997, came Cook-
house, her first published collection of
poetry drawing on recipe titles and her
earlier doctorate on Italian women writers.
“Through a lucky collision of stars,
everything aligned for me to become a
published poet, and from then my career
took off, but I could have remained a
woman in the shadows with her secret
notebooks. There are so many women like
that. If you take the case of Mary Stanley,
who published one book in the 1950s – it
is the most extraordinary book of the
most extraordinary poems. In a sense, the
book is a puzzle, but it is also illuminating
of a woman trying to find her place in the
world as a mother and a writer.”
Since then, Green has maintained a
prodigious output of adult and children’s“Through a lucky collision
of stars, everythingaligned for me to
become a published
poet, and from thenmy career took off.”
poetry. Some are autobiographical. Slip
Stream charts her experience of breast
cancer. This year’s The Track chronicles her
hike along Queen Charlotte Track in the
Marlborough Sounds with a fractured foot.
It may be a collection of other poets’
work, but there are traces of Green’s own
life in Wild Honey. “The fact I had a child
and had her adopted and she is now part
of my life again. I look back at that young
woman who chose to give birth to her
and give her to parents who couldn’t have
children – I was 19, turning 20, and I can’t
believe how I did that. Then when I read
the poetry of Robin Hyde and what she
had to go through to look after her son –
it affects me so much more because of my
history. And having had breast cancer – it
brings death closer and it is always going
to stay closer, but it made me realise what
is important. So even though it made me
feel quite vulnerable, I like the idea of
saying that in public.”
After a hectic three launches in three
months (as well as The Track and Wild
Honey, she has also released a new collec-
tion of poems for children, called Groovy
Fish and Other Poems), Green is back at
home waiting for the long queue of new
ideas to jostle into some kind of order.
Since her ordeal on Queen Charlotte
Track, she has broken her other foot – she
won’t be going for her morning run on
the beach anytime soon – but she is happy
to clear her desk and open a new page.
“In a sense I have all these rooms in my
head where I have all these ideas germinat-
ing and I never talk about them. It is only
when I start to put them on my laptop or
computer, I might tell someone what I am
working on. So, after the next couple of
months, I will see which things become
most insistent.” l
WILD HONEY: Reading New Zealand
Women’s Poetry (Massey University Press,
$45); THE TRACK (Seraph Press $25); GROOVY
FISH AND OTHER
POEMS (The Cuba
Press, $25)Readings from Wild
Honey feature in a
National Poetry Day
Event at Unity Books,
Wellington, midday,
August 23.From top: Robin Hyde, Hera Lindsay Bird,
Margaret Mahy, Aldous Harding.AT
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