Jan Kemp: Dancing Heart (2025)

Jan Kemp: Dancing Heart (2025)

Introduction
Jan Kemp: Dancing Heart: New and Selected Poems 1968–2024

Jan Kemp (1949- )

It was always going to be a delicate matter to try to make a balanced selection from the collected poetical works of an old friend.

I’ve known Jan Kemp now for more than 25 years. We worked together on the Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive from 2002-2004, and then again on the three audio / text anthologies of New Zealand Poets in Performance published by Auckland University Press between 2006 and 2008.

I’ve admired her work as a poet for far longer than that, though. As I look at my set of her books to date, including all nine of her poetry collections, published between 1976 and 2020, they seem like a time capsule of New Zealand writing over the past five decades.

Perhaps the easiest thing would simply be to list them here:

1. Against the Softness of Woman. Dunedin: Caveman Press, 1976.

2. Diamonds and Gravel. Wellington: Hampson Hunt, 1979.

3. The Other Hemisphere. Springwood, NSW: Butterfly Books / Auckland: Brick Row Publishing, 1991 / Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1992.

4. The Sky’s Enormous Jug – love poems old and new. Auckland: Puriri Press, 2001.

5. Only One Angel. Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2001.

6. Dante’s Heaven. Auckland: Puriri Press, 2006.

7. Voicetracks: Poems 2002-2012. Auckland: Puriri Press / Kronberg im Taunus: Tranzlit, 2012.

8. Tripstones: A Selection of Poems. Auckland: Puriri Press, 2020.

9. Black Ice & the Love Planet: Poems 2012-2019 / Glatteis & der Planet der Liebe: Gedichte 2012-2019. Trans. Susanne Opfermann & Helmbrecht Breinig. Kronberg im Taunus: Tranzlit, 2020.

Each one of these books is a thing of beauty. They speak to the typefaces and design features of a particular epoch: the ampersands and back-slashes of the 1970s, the florid exuberance of the early 2000s.

I suppose if I had to play favourites, it would have to be for the meticulously designed and produced volumes created by John Denny at the Puriri Press in Auckland. The Sky’s Enormous Jug, with its delicate hand-binding and sumptuous illustrations, is a particular pleasure to leaf through. Dante’s Heaven, too, is a wonderful piece of book-art.

I had to make some hard decisions early in the selection process. The first had to do with foreign languages.

Dante’s Heaven, for instance, exists in several forms. Jan and her husband Dr Dieter Riemenschneider, to whom so many of her books are dedicated, have a particular interest in poetic translation, and this book has now appeared in German and Italian dual-text editions:

• Dante Down Under / Gedichte aus Aotearoa/Neuseeland. 2006. Trans. Dieter Riemenschneider. Kronberg im Taunus: Tranzlit, 2017.

• Dante’s Heaven / Il Cielo di Dante. 2006. Trans. Aldo Magagnino. Poggio Imperiale: Edizioni del Poggio, 2017.

Jan and Dieter also worked together on an important anthology of contemporary New Zealand poetry for German readers:

• Wildes Licht: Poems / Gedichte aus Aotearoa Neuseeland (English-German). Ed. & trans. Dieter Riemenschneider. Kronberg: Tranzlit, 2010.

So it’s no anomaly that Jan’s latest collection, Black Ice & the Love Planet (2020), was actually published in a dual-text English-German edition. Most of the poems there were translated by Susanne Opfermann and Helmbrecht Breinig, but a few of them were originally composed in German.

All of this is clearly an important part of her practice as a writer, and not something that should be overlooked even in a selected poems, but it is a little difficult to do justice to it in so limited a compass. Accordingly, I’ve included only one poem here of the several she’s written in German and subsequently transmuted into English. It is, however, a crucial one: “Stolpersteine / Tripstones,” from the volume Voicetracks.

The second difficult decision I had to make had to do with the overall structure of some of these collections: once again, Dante’s Heaven is the best example.

The book as a whole plays with the notion that Dante’s Mount Purgatory, located at the precise opposite side of the globe from his Inferno, which the poet enters in the Northern Hemisphere, might well be imagined to be in New Zealand.

Doing justice to such an extended metaphor in a book such as this would be difficult. Also, given that Dante’s Heaven itself already expresses it fully, what would be the point?

I’ve therefore, in the present selection, stressed the individual lyric voice over the more extended sequences and technical experiments contained in many of Jan’s earlier collections.

My idea from the beginning was not so much to exhaust the possibilities of the poetry Jan has written and published to date, as to provide a sampler which could do double duty by inspiring readers to go back to the original volumes.

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Your cats are coloured light-marmalade
like your terracotta terrace Buddha bust.

We must get it a plinth, set it
into the reeds to sit, Sphinx-still,

high above the pink & white-walled
garden lotus pond, watching you.

Jan has handled this matter of – at least temporarily – ceding control over her poetic back-catalogue with her usual consummate grace.

The other day she did write to me, though, to say:

Jack dear, might you insert for Werner Jaksch under the title of the Plinth for a Buddha poem – I forgot it! Werner is my German ‘son’, now 62, whom I met in Hong Kong when he was 22 ... He’ll be so pleased you chose it. Happy Sunday to you.
Ngā mihi nui
Jan

Naturally I was happy to oblige. It’s interesting, though. Nothing about the poem demands any knowledge of its dedicatee. As a confirmed ailurophile myself, I was of course happy to see the reference to the “light-marmalade” cats alongside the “terracotta terrace Buddha bust,” but the reason I included it was because it seems to me an almost perfect lyric.

The voice is relaxed, conversational, adroitly concealing the close attention which must have been paid to such felicities of phrasing as “terracotta terrace” and “Buddha bust”. The picture it paints is idyllic, like a Chinese lyric from the T’ang era, but it’s still very much of our own time.

I like the poem a lot, in other words. It doesn’t hurt that one of our own beloved cat companions rests under a similar statue of Buddha under a small home-made mosaic out in our own backyard.

But it is always salutary to be reminded of the backstory and context of the poems which poets send out into the world.

Is it their job there to make new friends for the writer? No doubt. But it’s also, perhaps primarily, to offer new possibilities for perception to the reader. The last poem in the present selection, for instance, “Leftie”, speaks very much to my own feeling of perplexity at the world’s woes and our inability to influence – let alone solve them.

Say not the struggle naught availeth ... We acknowledge our perplexities in order to surmount them. And, if it’s to live, your work does have to end up belonging to others.

Jan has understood this, and her lifetime of poetry writing, reading, performing and teaching has – in my view at least – resulted in a truly wonderful body of work, which I believe richly deserves to catch fire in the minds of new readers as well as the memories of already established fans.

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(23/10-29/11/24)

“Introduction.” In Jan Kemp: Dancing Heart: New and Selected Poems.
Kronberg im Taunus: Tranzlit, 2025. xiii-xvi.

[1203 wds]


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About Now (2025)

Tracey Slaughter, ed.: Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2025: breath (August 2025)

Reviews:

Richard Reeve

Richard Reeve. About Now. ISBN 978-0-473-69577-4. Ōtepoti Dunedin: Maungatua Press, 2024. x + 100 pp. RRP $NZ25. 110 pp.

Richard Reeve: About Now (2024)

This is a lovely book of poems. I realise that that must seem an odd choice of adjectives to anyone familiar with Richard Reeve’s oeuvre to date. And I certainly don’t mean to imply that there’s any diminution of force or intellectual range in the work collected here.

I do, however, feel that there’s a more complete synthesis of matter and manner now. At times, in the past, I felt that the two could be at war – that Reeve’s taste for a somewhat convoluted syntax and his recondite vocabulary concealed more than it revealed of his fiercely held convictions: personal, political, environmental. It was as if one had to fight through a thicket of wordiness to reach the dark matter at the heart of his poems.

Those passions have not died down in this new book – on the contrary, in fact. Nor am I heralding a new simplicity of manner. No, these are recognisably and unmistakably Richard Reeve poems. Rather, it’s as if these two aspects of form and content have grown into each other, can no longer be separated.

Let me give you some examples of what I mean.

Here, from the very first poem in the book, “Recycled Rimu,” is a description of Reeve’s own “Cave of Making,” the study where (presumably) most of these poems were written – or at least worked on:

Recycled rimu, logged from Tautuku or the Longwoods,
on the ceiling of my study flares with enigmatic darkness,
the rage and serenity of the grain hinting at a story

of the first wood, centuries of bird song and weather,
branches rubbing up against each other in a gale,
the company of fungi, the ocean beyond

roaring in lines that emanate from the heartwood.

That’s a beautifully clear description, but it’s also redolent of his larger themes, the oneness of human and nature, the kinship of animate and inanimate. “The company of fungi” is certainly an eloquent phrase, but there’s nothing virtuosic or show-off about it. It’s in a perfectly natural tone of voice.

The poem’s exposition of the onward journey of these planks of wood concludes with its eventual arrival “in an ex-foundry / in Watts Road”:

… the sawn, painted, cracked bones
of old forest gathered in piles on the mezzanine,
1$ per lineal metre, give-or-take. So of course we took,

planed down lengths to uncover the weather front
that now scowls at me from above my writing desk.
Keepsake of so much lost or fallen. A starting point.

As well as being a starting point for this poem, this recycled wood is also a starting point for Reeve’s book as a whole. About Now is also as clear a title as one could desire: a charting of the world he (and, by implication, we) inhabit now. But it also serves as the keepsake “of so much lost or fallen.”

It’s a long book: 100-odd pages – counting prelims, including a resonant epigraph from The Epic of Gilgamesh – of at times quite packed material. I can’t really hope to do it justice here, so I thought I might talk instead about just one of Reeve’s sequences, the one at the end of the collection: “And the Pukeko Shall Rule: Rain Poems.”

It's an account of a drive “back from Invercargill”, then “south again to Gore”, and “then home to Dunedin.” This precision of place-names and road-details is essential to the meditative effect I imagine he’s aiming at – that atmosphere of enforced contemplation inseparable from all long-distance driving.

To live through the poem, be on the other side of it. Coming back
from Invercargill, turning east from Mataura to Clinton, the sky

flood-dark to the north, drove into a first sheet of rain, stopped
at Clinton for a pie as the rain rang down on the asphalt; went on

to Balclutha and the rampant Clutha, tree-tangled, brown,
its effluent-gilded floodwaters underneath the bridge

purging to the coast

To live through the poem. Yes, but how? The narrator attends a funeral en route: I don’t know whose, but it’s clear that to get to the heart of this event he has to see and record it from many angles:

Reaching for writing, I inhabit the sound of the rain,
which is the space of thought, ever almost language

yet defying articulation, something we cannot quite say

This attempt to communicate, somehow, the nature, the wholeness of experience invites this analogy with the “enclave of rain, unattainable though encapsulated / in the universe of my apprehension”.

And then there are those pūkeko!

Where is the pukeko? You know where. Inveterate beak,
incomprehensible to others the runes it scrapes, clacks

against the bitumen, testing this unyielding frontier

Yes, we all know where. Pūkeko lie in little heaps by the side of so many roads, unable to reconcile the careful, marshland groping for solidity of their big hooked feet with the reality of modern traffic.

Pukeko at the verge researching the ambit of operations

knows her field, the fact of high water under the willows,
annihilation to come, delivery on the ransacking tide.

What holds us up, in our monstrous cars and trucks, may be the only thing that can save her.

I hope these quotes, and my attempts to unpack them, make my reasons for loving this new book of Richard’s a little clearer. The careful way he’s woven his two metaphors of rain and pūkeko into the fabric of this sequence is both clever and – crystal clear.

This is a poetry which can be enjoyed on myriad levels: the pleasure of seeing the quidditas of place so lovingly recorded and embraced, the subtlety and interest of a train of thought carried to unexpected ends, and – finally – the sense of a writer inhabiting his here and now with such care and respect.

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(13-21/9/24)

Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2025: breath. ISBN 978-1-99-101697-3 (March 2025): 277-80.

[983 wds]

Academy of New Zealand Literature: Richard Reeve


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Slow Fires (2025)

Tracey Slaughter, ed.: Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2025: breath (August 2025)

Reviews:

Leonard Lambert

Leonard Lambert. Slow Fires: New Poems. ISBN 978-0-473-71156-6. Lyttelton: Cold Hub Press, 2024. RRP $19.50. 42 pp.

Leonard Lambert: Slow Fires (2024)

It’s nice when you pick up a book of poems and open it to one so good that your first thought is “I wish I’d written that.”

The poem in question was “Remembered Land” – as it turns out, the first in Leaonard Lambert’s new book.

I thought I’d never see my home again
but there it was, on ancient film, the bend
before you come to the straight,
sea on one side, hills inland,
mountains beyond.

It seems so simple: understated, almost. There are no dazzling, transformative words or expressions – nothing but carefully ordered clauses, in straightforward syntax.

But then Lambert picks up again on that crucial word “never”:

Never did I dream
I’d be on this road once more,
rolling home in afternoon light
to a house no longer there, children gone,
loved ones dead, driving now through tears
but seeing no end

Now we begin to see what he’s driving at: the complexity of this emotion of being there and not-there, in a place that once was but is no longer, with people now gone.

This is, of course, a scene we often see in nostalgic feature films, where the protagonist replays old footage of children by the sea, playpool splashings in the front yard, long-dead relatives and pets.

But Lambert gives us more than that. His refusal to particularise invites us in to the poem, gives us the ability to people it with our own dead, our own abandoned spaces. And then there’s his slightly off conclusion:

– how could Hope
ever fade or fail
in such remembered land?

I call it “off” because it sounds so atonally literary – by comparison with the deadpan rest of the poem that is. Hope is (as we all know) “the thing with feathers”, but Lambert’s reasons for capitalising it, marking it off, are deliberately left obscure.

A reviewer of one of Lambert’s earlier books, Park Island (1990) described it as lying “somewhere between nostalgia and bitterness”. That phrase seems to fit “Remembered Land” pretty well, too. The poem has a disconcerting edginess as a result of that barbed conclusion.

Something – or some things – went down there, clearly. While they will remain undiscussed, that past still has teeth to bite us with. It’s not just a golden land of might-have-been.

I certainly have favourites in Lambert’s book, poems which seem to speak to me more personally than others, but it’s hard to detect any which strike a false note, or which seem to have received less than adequate care and attention.

Leonard Lambert, according to the blurb on the backflap, has written seven collections of verse to date. Considering that the first of them, A Washday Romance (1980), appeared some four and a half decades ago, this shows an admirable spirit of commitment – and restraint.

The fact that the blurb also describes him as a “full-time painter” perhaps gives us a further clue to the nature of his poetry. It’s based more on the exploration of warring idioms, competing layers of language, than efforts to achieve visual precision (unlike so many of his contemporaries):

Together we saw the movie,
his legalistic mind decreed
Billy Budd Must Hang. Dad
blamed the weakness
of Captain Vere, entirely
missing the point. I was
Terence Stamp.

There’s a lot going on in these lines from “Toledo Steel”. If you happen not to have seen Peter Ustinov’s 1962 attempt to make a movie out of Herman Melville’s last, posthumously published story Billy Budd, they probably won’t make a great deal of sense to you.

If you have, though, this careful piece of family portrait painting will gradually begin to come into focus. Notably, however, there’s no attempt here to evoke the film visually. Instead, it’s the paradoxical nature of Billy’s death for a mutinous act deliberately provoked by the demonic Master-at-Arms Claggart which is crucial to an understanding of the relationship between the speaker and his older brother.

Lambert himself has described his work as an attempt to “weave a small poetry of quick precision and genuine pathos, returning verse to its natural home in chant and prayer, in psalm and song”. A full-time painter has neither the leisure nor (I’m guessing) the inclination to paint pictures with words: instead, he is free to explore these other, possibly more neglected aspects of poetry.

Whatever the reasons for the way he writes, let’s just be thankful that Leonard Lambert continues to do so.

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(13-20/9/24)

Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2025: breath. ISBN 978-1-99-101697-3 (March 2025): 274-76.

[754 wds]

Acumen Poetry Prose Reviews: Leonard Lambert


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The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat (2025)

Landfall Review Online

Fitting In

Brannavan Gnanalingam. The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat. ISBN 978-0473725976. Wellington: Lawrence & Gibson Publishing Collective, 2024. 297 pp. RRP: $30.00.

Brannavan Gnanalingam: The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat (2024)

This is certainly a very timely book. At a moment when bizarre political twists and turns come so fast that we can hardly keep up with the craziness, a backwards look at the origin stories of certain such social-media-driven ideologies might well come in handy for all of us.

It’s a timely book, but it’s also a book about time. The first chapter is dated 1984, and the last 2024. The first is called “I’ve Been Writing” and the last “I’ve Been Thinking.” For older readers, at least, that triggers a little trip down memory lane to the titles of Richard Prebble’s infamous 1996 and 1999 ACT manifestos.

Brannavan Gnanalingam, too, has been writing. In the fourteen years since the publication of his first novel, called (appropriately) Getting Under Sail (2011) he’s completed another seven: an impressive total by any standards.

Like the protagonist of V. S. Naipaul’s debut novel The Mystic Masseur (1957) – the cautionary tale of a thwarted Trinidadian writer who exploits the gullibility of his celebrity clients to climb the social totem pole – Kartik Popat, Gnanalingam’s own anti-hero, also begins as a “creative” of sorts.

Popat’s thwarted ambitions as a film-maker, centred around his projected feature film And Jack, are gradually eroded away by the ever more effective prostitution of his talents by, first, the New Zealand political establishment; second, the anti-Vaxxer movement. (And, if we hadn’t already suspected the fact, Gnanalingam informs us in his bio-note that And Jack is the title of a real 2004 short film, “written and directed by Brannavan Gnanalingam, Jonny Thompson, and Steve Wakeem”).

This autobiographical note seems inextricable from his writing. Each of his first seven novels appears to have been based on a particular period in the author’s life: Getting Under Sail on a trip from Morocco to Ghana (which included being detained as a murder suspect); You Should Have Come Here When You Were Not Here (2013) on his time in Paris between 2012 and 2013; Credit in the Straight World (2015), the first of his books to be set in New Zealand, on the global financial crisis as seen from down under. And so on.

Again and again I felt these uncomfortable rhymes with experience as Gnanalingam/Popat forced me to relive Helen Clark’s painful last years in the Beehive; the rise of the “smiling assassin”, John Key; and the ghastly death throes of Jacinda Ardern’s coalition of kindness. You can’t take even the most tangential interest in New Zealand politics and not find your worst suspicions about our elected representatives thoroughly vindicated by Popat’s half-hearted Apologia pro Vita Sua.

However, it’s the pitiless grimness of Popat’s early years, bullied and despised at High School without the slightest prospect of reprieve from the dungeon of ethnicity, which really ring true. It was, admittedly, a long time ago. Change is possible. I’m sure there’s even more kneejerk racism on display now than during Popat’s miserable childhood.

Which brings us neatly to the question of what exactly Gnanalingam is seeking to achieve with this novel. He’s explained in some detail in a Spinoff article the moment of inspiration when he watched an Indian American podcast host (and former Republican presidential candidate) interviewing a notoriously racist influencer, a white woman, who began by praising him for being so “articulate”:

“I guess I can call you ‘articulate’ because you’re not an American black.”

After they had a good old yuck at the idea of such an obvious oxymoron, she threw in the kicker: “But I still would not have voted for you, because you’re an Indian.”

As Gnanalingam explains in his article:

you can grease up to racist folks by doing some of the heavy lifting for them, but they’ll still never view you as one of them. You’re just the hired help. And they’ll still view you as a loser. …

I wanted to capture this ugliness in my novel, grift off the grift, and imagine a New Zealand equivalent. Presumably mocking other minorities must be rewarding in its own way (putting aside the societal impacts) – power, money, royalties from tank-top sales, and kudos from the worst people who’d discard you the moment they don’t need you – and all you have to pay is your self-respect.

Perhaps the question Gnanalingam’s novel sets out to answer, then, is: How do you get from here to there? How do you start off as a proud child, shaped by community and family values, and turn into a grovelling toady for the modern day equivalent of slave-owners? It’s certainly a tricky one.

A straightforward first person life-and-times narrative must have seemed the obvious approach. But there are problems as well as advantages with that form. The Mystic Masseur, for instance, is not told in the first person. Its eponymous protagonist is observed from a discreet distance by a very judgmental contemporary (who sounds, strangely enough, a lot like Naipaul himself).

The apparent focus of Kartik’s tale is himself, his struggles, all the appalling people he’s met, virtually all of whom seem to have betrayed him in some way. The real focus is (I presume) supposed to be the morally bankrupt, self-serving nature of his story.

The ever more degrading compromises he makes in the desperate quest to be accepted by the complacent reactionary racist society around him – which lead him eventually to posting off packages of multi-vitamins as Covid remedies at the height of the Pandemic, and even renting an (admittedly unoccupied) tent in the anti-vax encampment in Wellington – are chronicled by Popat / Gnalalingam in grim detail.

“There need never, at the worst, be any difficulty about the things advantageously chuckable for art,” said Henry James. Gnalalingam has, understandably, chucked out little – certainly none of the rage and disgust he still feels at the self-satisfied complacency of Pākehā society. This is something (I would guess) that he experienced continuously as a child, and no doubt still experiences to this day.

It's not that this is bad material, by any means. On the contrary, the trouble is that it’s too interesting. My fascination with Popat’s early life and humiliations far outweighed any indignation I felt down the track at his anti-vaxxer shenanigans.

And given how little of the book is actually devoted to his final incarnation as an online stirrer and random conduit of contradictory misinformation, it’s not surprising that it’s the vomiting subhuman MPs he was forced to serve as a parliamentary staffer who remain the truly unforgettable parts of his story. Popat himself begins to fade to a mere reporter on their infamy.

Satire is a particularly demanding form in this respect. It’s not by accident that its most effective examples exhibit a kind of meme-like intensity: Jonathan Swift’s cartoonish Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians, for instance; or Evelyn Waugh’s battling war correspondents in Scoop. These are not subtle narratives, by any means, but they’re effective because of the burning indignation which compels each brutal line.

Swift, Waugh, Orwell had something vital to say, and they said it in the shortest, most telling way possible. Is the same true of Gnanalingam? His own political satire seems to me to lack the necessary counterbalance of a moral centre. Unlike Swift – or, for that matter, Laurence Sterne, whose Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy presumably inspired his title – he leaves us with nothing to believe in.

So, in the absence of anything to hold to in the amoral vacuum that is the world of Kartik Popat (or, if you prefer, of contemporary New Zealand), we’re left only with the narrator himself. It’s not that it’s possible to love – let alone respect – Kartik Popat (or “Pooh-pat” or “Tikka”, as he’s variously nicknamed), but it’s easy enough to understand and even (at times) empathise with him.

His own analysis of his surroundings is, always, fatally flawed by the basic futility of his desire to fit in: “fit in” with a bunch of subhuman cretins, limned with all the bitterness of experience. But then that, too, is a profoundly human trait. Nor is his inconclusive ending – a new job as an insurance adjustor with instructions to deny as many storm-claims as possible – exactly calculated to enlighten us. It’s always someone else’s agenda he’s following.

Popat may well be a figure for our times – I fear that he is – but unfortunately that doesn’t make the novel he stars in as coherent as it could have been. For all its many undoubted merits, it’s too inclusive: too detailed in some places, too summary in others.

However, even if it’s not be quite the taut, targeted satire it set out to be, The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat is still an invaluable chronicle of “the time of our time” (to borrow a phrase from that great Satan, Norman Mailer). There are some scenes here I doubt I’ll ever be able to scrub out of my memory no matter how hard I try.

(13-22/2/25)

Landfall Review Online (2025).
[Available at: https://landfallreview.com/fitting-in/]

[1506 wds]


Landfall 1 (1947)


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Relics of John Perry (2025)

Emily Cumming Harris: In New Zealand and Australia

Catherine Field-Dodgson & Michele Leggott:
New Zealand Liliaceae, 1906

In January we received an intriguing email from archivist Katherine Pawley at the University of Auckland. ‘It just leapt out at me,’ she told us, indicating a link to a tall skinny painting by an unknown artist at Webb’s auction house in Auckland. As soon as we clicked on the link we knew what we were looking at. Katherine’s instincts were spot-on: this was another of Emily’s large 1906 oil paintings, and it hasn’t been seen in over twenty years.

Emily Cumming Harris, New Zealand Liliaceae, oil on board, 1170 x 410 mm.

We have been searching for this panel since first reading about it in a 1906 newspaper article. New Zealand Liliaceae featured prominently in the Nelson Evening Mail’s list of the paintings that Emily was sending to the International Exhibition in Christchurch that year:

By to-day’s steamer Miss Harris, of Nile-street, forwarded 12 oil paintings to the Christchurch Exhibition. The collection has been made at the request of the West Coast Executive, and will be displayed in the West Coast Court. The paintings reflect great credit on the artist, who is already widely known in connection with her productions of New Zealand flowers and birds. The collection includes three panels, — clematis indivisa, New Zealand mountain flowers, and New Zealand liliaceae — and also paintings of yellow kowhai and bell birds, Whau, entelea arborescens, gentians, kiekie, nikau, red neinei, turutu, senecios, pohutukawa, manuka, tainui, everlastings, honeysuckle flowers, rata (scarlet). Miss Harris will also have two panels of Antarctic flowers in the Nelson portion of the art gallery. (Nelson Evening Mail 9 Oct 1906: 2)

Then we found the panel mentioned in a contemporary auction record. New Zealand Liliaceae sold in 2002 for $358 at Dunbar Sloane in Wellington. Quite a story emerged when we realised that well-known art and ephemera collector John Perry must have purchased the painting in 2002, bundled it into his van and driven it back to ‘Global Village Antiques’, which he housed in the old Regent Theatre in Helensville. Perry died in 2021 and his vast collection – the equivalent of four tennis courts – is now being catalogued and slowly brought to auction by Webbs. Emily’s panel was being advertised for sale at Webb’s as part of Perry’s estate, alongside other fascinating artifacts that included road signs, shells and folk art cat sculptures.

...

When it was at Webbs in January, New Zealand Liliaceae had only John Perry’s business details and a catalogue number on the reverse, and the lower part of the frame appeared to be damaged.

‘Global Village Antiques and Collectables’ label on the back of the panel

Catalogue number on the back of the panel

We are delighted to report that Emily’s Liliaceae painting is now safely in the collection of a museum, where it will undergo some much-needed restoration work and we hope to visit it soon along with Harris descendants. Meanwhile we remain ever curious and watchful to see what other treasures might come to light from the John Perry estate.

Not for the first time we wish that a rediscovered work could tell us more about where it has been. In this instance, we are lucky to have insights from a range of art professionals and collectors who knew John Perry and wrote memorials after his death in 2021, commemorating an extraordinary passion for many different kinds of art and object.

Briar Williams:

If you’ve been anywhere in the art world in New Zealand in the past 50 years, you will have come across John F. Perry. New Zealand’s artistic and cultural landscape was greatly diminished, when John Perry the artist, obsessive collector, ex museum curator, arts writer for AASD and other publications but most importantly friend / mentor to many, passed away at home above his shop Global Village Antiques in the old Regent Cinema in Helensville, West Auckland on 6 June 2021.

Jack Ross:

It was a real shock to hear, earlier this week, that art historian, curator and antique dealer John Perry had died. It seems like forever that I’ve been driving up to Helensville periodically to check out his immense horde of vintage treasure: books, ceramics, furniture, pictures, prints, and everything in between.

In the early days, it was still possible to enter the body of the auditorium, and to get some sense of the sheer size of his collection. For many years now that part of the building has been closed off to the public, however, with only the front rooms accessible even to the most agile visitors.

The second-to-last time we saw him, he invited me upstairs into his apartment, and I got some sense of how he lived there, surrounded by pictures and curios, with his rooftop garden out the front, there on the outskirts of the ancient Kauri kingdom of Helensville.

Mind you, it didn’t seem too bad a place to live out your days – his apartment had a slightly Latin American air, as if he were one of those retired Colonels in a García Márquez novel, watching the rains come and go across the sinuous flatlands of the Kaipara.

Given John Perry’s extensive knowledge of colonial art, we can be certain he recognised Emily’s New Zealand Liliaceae when it came to auction in Wellington in 2002. Did he wonder about its size and medium in relation to Emily’s better-known watercolurs? Did he realise the panel was part of a larger exhibit from 1906? We don’t know. But we can be grateful for his custodianship of the panel in Helensville and imagine with Jack Ross the painting’s secluded life on the edge of the Kaipara Harbour.

(6-9/6/21)

'New Zealand Liliaceae, 1906.'
Ed. Catherine Field-Dodgson & Michele Leggott.
Emily Cumming Harris. [Available at: https://emilycummingharris.blogs.auckland.ac.nz/2025/03/24/new-zealand-liliaceae-1906/ (24/3/25)]

[202 wds]




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