New Anthology Celebrates Diverse Poetic Voices

The fourth book in AUP’s New Poets series, launched in Wellington last night, brings together the work of three distinct new voices: Chris Tse, Erin Scudder and Harry Jones.

The popular series, which has the aim of bringing fresh new poetry to a wider audience, began in 1999 and continued in 2002 and 2008, and has been responsible for launching the writing careers of well-known poets such as Anna Jackson, Sonja Yelich and Stu Bagby, amongst others.

Editor Anna Hodge says: “Auckland University Press is delighted to present a new book in this occasional series. AUP New Poets 4 gives three exciting new voices a substantial platform to display their work.”

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Chris Tse is a Wellington writer whose work draws on his family history and Chinese heritage. His selection, “Sing Joe,” includes narrative poems about his great-grandfather’s emigration to New Zealand from China and about Chris’s own childhood and his research to uncover his Chinese great-grandparents’ story. Though painful truths and difficult choices are revisited, at the heart of these poems is a celebration of family. Chris’s work also provides a timely contemporary perspective of “the Chinese experience in New Zealand” and, by exploring issues of cultural identity through poetry, casts a fresh light on what it means to be a young New Zealander with Chinese ancestry today.

As part of his research Chris spent a month touring China with a group of other young Chinese New Zealanders, and describes the experience as follows:

“The contrast between visiting tiny family villages and the chaos of the major cities was at times overwhelming, but by the end of it I had a stronger sense of who I was and where I’d come from.”

The experiences gathered on this trip make up the final section of “Sing Joe”.

In researching the history of his family, Chris especially wanted to give voice to his great-grandmother, a woman who was left behind in China and is rarely spoken about. In “Sing Joe” he tries to imagine what it would have been like for her. He says that this is the major impetus in all the creative work he produces:

“What drives me is the chance to tell others’ stories and to give them a voice.”

In his poetry Chris Tse creates fascinating stories that are filled with distinctive imagery and musicality.

Erin Scudder writes sophisticated, dark, and flavoursome poetry with close attention to the sound and shape of words. In its treatment of motive and emotion her work feels both personal and universal, specific yet interested in archetypes and the common truths underlying personal experience.

The poems in Erin’s selection “Admission” often take place inside – in the bath, in between library bookshelves, or in the kitchen pantry past midnight – and chart the terrain of that which happens inside of [Kiri – insert all of?] us. Whilst exploring the potential for comfort and revelation in the domestic sphere, these poems also mourn the breach of seemingly safe, ordinary spaces. A native Montrealer who grew up in Ontario and immigrated to New Zealand in 2001, Erin has commented that:

"I belong to two countries, or maybe to neither, and therefore have a mixed-up sense of what or where home is. I think this comes through in my poetry, in the questions it asks about identity and family – I don't tend to take those things for granted, or assume that they can be easily found."

Inquisitive and bold, the poems that venture outside the house enter into a world where the memory of Canada meets the reality of New Zealand.

Harry Jones writes poems in which appearances deceive. On the surface plain, even easy, his poems open on depths of insight and feeling.

Former British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes wrote of Harry’s early poems, “I hear a real voice, a real movement of mind cutting through resistances.”

Of work in this collection, English poet and critic Al Alvarez says, “Harry Jones’s poems are like the world he writes about – unadorned, comfortless and strictly for the grown-ups.”

Harry Jones seeks two conditions in his poetry – clarity and intensity.

“I find the fanciest of words tend to communicate the least, and the plainest the most,” he says.

“Vocabulary is no cover for absence of motive force. So I seek a poetry that is essential, not decorative – a poetry in which hard, clear language says one thing and reveals another. Important too, I seek a poetry that excludes no-one, that is open to all-comers, and is alive and authentic at any level of engagement.

“My work has a tension between the apparent security of external form and the charge within. Form, for me, emerges and takes shape as a result of considerable interior force and pressure. I don’t know that this tension can be achieved in work of loose form.”

In his selection in AUP New Poets 4, “Beyond Hinuera”, Harry writes sharply observed pieces about people and places that have caught his eye, mind or heart, with subjects as varied as “The Maori Chess Champion,” the Canterbury Plains, the legend of Lucretia, a traffic accident, and the landscape after a flood. His poetry combines simplicity, elegance and power.

More About the Authors

Chris Tse is an editor, writer, actor, musician and occasional filmmaker. He studied English literature and film at Victoria University of Wellington where he also completed an MA in Creative Writing. His poetry has appeared in Turbine, Sport, Landfall and Cha, and he has had short stories recorded for Radio New Zealand. He was the winner of the 2009 NZ Chinese Association/Listener short story competition.

Erin Scudder has just earned an MA (with distinction) in literature from Victoria University of Wellington. She works as a librarian and is completing her first book of poetry. Her poetry has appeared in Turbine and Trout, her short fiction in Damki Magazine (Japan) and in Christchurch City Gallery’s Out of Erewhon exhibit catalogue. Erin currently lives in Wellington.

New Zealand born Harry Jones’s first ambition was to be a painter – as a schoolboy, he was given lessons by Colin McCahon. He lived in England from 1974–’94, where he read English at Cambridge and was runner-up in the King’s Lynn Festival Poetry Award. In a brief interlude he was first runner-up in the lyrics section of the UK Songwriting Competition, the largest such event in the world. He now lives in Tauranga, New Zealand, and recently began publishing poems again after a gap of 20 years. Recent poems have appeared widely in New Zealand and UK poetry magazines.

AUP New Poets 4 by Harry Jones, Erin Scudder and Chris Tse
Published by Auckland University Press
17 March 2011 / NZ Book Month
PB; RRP $24.99

ENDS

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