A Clearer View of the Hinterland (2023)

NZ Poetry Shelf

Poetry Shelf Favourite Poems:
A Clearer View of the Hinterland

Jack Ross: Leicester Kyle (2000)

A Clearer View of the Hinterland
Leicester at Millerton


Absence of rapids on Ngakawau stream.
Big Ditch and Little Ditch Creek – impious hand bisects the ‘D.’
Cobweb of raindrops in dragon sun.
“Down, down, down from the high Sierras ...”
Electrical storms: intensity of affect.
Fund-raising at the Fire Depot.
Grey & white kitten, black robin, and black fantail.
Huffing into an Atlas stove.
“If you can see the hills, it’s going to rain.”
Jack said: “A succession of inner landscapes.”
Kiwi peck through sphagnum moss.
Leicester said: “A community devoted to male play.”
Millerton speaks – A Cannabis Landslide.
Nature tips – gorse is choked by bush.
Other landrovers get one wave.
Proud grey donkey; manure in a sack.
Quarrelling over the Fire Service.
“Rain has a persistency of grades, much noted by the locals.”
Siren: “I’m always free on Wednesday nights.”
Twin side-logs set for smoke-alarms.
Utopia St, Calliope Rd.
Village hall stained with camouflage paint.
White-packaged videos, too frank a stare.
X of three rocks marks one rare tussock.
“You have to say: Great! Awesome! Choice!”
668 – Neighbour of the Beast.


[7-10/7/98]

•

As a kid, I spent a good deal of time poring over the works of Edward Lear. I did like the limericks, but it was his illustrated alphabet poems that really tickled my fancy. This was my first – and to date only – attempt to compose one myself.

It records a visit I made in 1998, some 25 years ago now, to my friend the Rev. Leicester Kyle, who was living at the time in Millerton, a small bush-clad town on the West Coast of the South Island. Millerton is quite a mysterious place (or it was then) – very much off the grid. It was, however, the rather deadpan commentary on its inhabitants and traditions delivered by Leicester as we navigated its narrow roads in his bright red Land Rover which was the real prize for me.

I found myself jotting down some of his more quotable comments and thoughts, along with a few of my own observations, and ended up grouping them in this way to reduce the information overload I felt overtaking me at times.

Leicester himself was a fascinating character. He started off as a botanist, was then ordained as an Anglican priest, only to convert in his late fifties to a new faith: poetry. After his death in 2006, my friend David Howard and I collaborated on an online edition of his collected works which can still be consulted here.

The poem first appeared in a small magazine called Spin [#36 (2000): 51], which I was co-editing at the time. It was described in a review of the issue as “languid and oddly themed,” a tag I’ve always relished. I’ve often thought it could stand as an epitaph for most of my work.

Some ten years ago I used it as the title poem for my collection A Clearer View of the Hinterland: Poems & Sequences 1981-2014 (Wellington: HeadworX, 2014). The publisher, Mark Pirie, was kind enough to include it on his website as an incitement to purchase the book.

I still have a soft spot for it, I must admit. It brings back many memories of those times: of Leicester himself, of the wild West Coast, and the kindness of the people I met there. It makes me feel like jumping in the car right now and heading straight down to Buller and Karamea to try to locate some of the overgrown industrial sites and hidden green havens my friend revealed to me then.

I fear that it might have to be a journey through time as well as space, though. Much of the Buller Plateau has been devastated since then by strip mining.

•

Jack Ross’s most recent book is The Oceanic Feeling (2021). Last year he retired from his job teaching creative writing at Massey University to pursue his own writing fulltime. He lives with his wife, crafter and art-writer Bronwyn Lloyd, in sunny Mairangi Bay, and blogs at http://mairangibay.blogspot.com/.

Favourite Poems is a series where a poet picks a poem from their own backlist and writes a short note to accompany it.

Jack Ross: A Clearer View of the Hinterland (2014)

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(13-14/4/23)

'Poetry Shelf Favourite Poems: Jack Ross’s "A Clearer View of the Hinterland".' Ed. Paula Green. NZ Poetry Shelf: a poetry page with reviews, interviews, and other things.
[Available at: https://nzpoetryshelf.com/2023/05/03/poetry-shelf-favourite-poems-jack-rosss-a-clearer-view-of-the-hinterland/ (3/5/23)]

[624 wds]


Poetry Box: Paula Green


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Welcome to Novella (2017)

Leicester Kyle: Letters to a Psychiatrist (2017)

Afterword:
Welcome to Novella

Leicester Kyle: Letters to a Psychiatrist (c.1975)

Novellas … boy, as far as marketability goes, you in a heap o’ trouble.

This quote from Different Seasons (1982), bestselling author Stephen King’s first collection of novellas, gives a pretty accurate picture of the received wisdom about the form: amongst publishers and agents, at any rate – the views of readers tend to be far more positive.

King’s book did, after all, inspire three feature films: Rob Reiner’s Stand by Me (1986), Frank Darabont’s Shawshank Redemption (1994), and Bryan Singer’s Apt Pupil (1998). The first two of these are now regarded as modern classics, and are certainly among the most successful among the many, many screen adaptations of his work.

King has gone on to publish three more such collections: Four Past Midnight (1990), Hearts in Atlantis (1999), and Full Dark, No Stars (2010). Clearly, then, the novella form appeals to him strongly. No fewer than five movies have been made, to date, of the thirteen stories in these three books.

The reasons for this are not too difficult to ascertain. Novellas make good films because they contain the thematic scope and heft of a novel without its immense weight of detail.

Despite the brilliant acting and production which distinguishes both Stand by Me and Shawshank Redemption, their success as films can be laid solidly at the door of story. In each case certain things may have been left out and added to the original novella, but the narrative remains essentially intact.

So, if a good novella can be equated with box-office gold, why do they continue to be regarded as a drug on the market?

First of all, what exactly is a novella? Stephen King’s quick, workmanlike definition in the afterword to Different Seasons specifies any story between 25,000 and 35,000 words, which he refers to as ‘numbers apt to make even the most stout-hearted writer of fiction shake and shiver in his boots.’ He goes on:

There is no hard and fast definition of what either a novel or a short story is – at least not in terms of word-count – nor should there be. But when a writer approaches the 20,000 word mark, he knows he is edging out of the country of the short story. Likewise, when he passes the 40,000 word mark, he is edging into the country of the novel.

Mary Doyle Springer, in Forms of the Modern Novella (1975), is somewhat more liberal in her choice of vital statistics. She defines it as ‘a prose fiction of a certain length (usually 15,000 to 50,000 words).’ She does, however, go on to stress that ‘this is a length equipped to realise certain formal functions better than any other.’

What this appears to mean in practice – to booksellers, at any rate – is a story too short to be marketed successfully by itself. It therefore has to be shoe-horned in somehow with a group of other pieces as part of a larger collection.

This prejudice against the commercial possibilities of the form does not seem to weigh so heavily on publishers in other languages. Novellas continued to be available as single volumes in French, German, Russian and Spanish bookshops, and many of the most celebrated works by authors in those languages have always been issued in this way.

The aversion to the risk of the single-volume novella runs deep in the English-speaking world, however. Even such classics of Modernist fiction as Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and James Joyce’s The Dead, were all first issued as parts of a larger collection: James’s in The Two Magics in 1898; Conrad’s in Youth (1902); and Joyce’s in Dubliners (1914).

And yet, properly packaged, there can be little doubt that readers do respond positively to short focussed pieces in pocket-sized volumes. Certainly that is the philosophy espoused by American publisher Melville House in their new series “The Art of the Novella,” dedicated to celebrating ‘this renegade art form and its practitioners.’

Melville House confines itself, for the most part, to the classics of the genre. Turning to the New Zealand publishing scene, I would note that there’s been considerable success here for works of non-fiction presented in single volumes.

Lloyd Jones’ Four Winds Press essay series (2002-2003) was succeeded (from 2004) by Awa Press’s “How to” series, and (more recently) by Bridget William Books’ BWB texts – accompanied, now, by Martin Conrich’s NZ film studies series. In each case a piece of prose of roughly 25,000 words (give or take 10,000 or so) is presented for purchase at a very reasonable price.

So why has the same not been done here for fiction?

To which, of course, the answer is that it has.

In May 2005, at Diamond Lil’s bar in Auckland, hot on the heels of Peter Simpson’s successful anthologies of classic New Zealand novellas (Seven New Zealand Novellas, 2003, and Nine New Zealand Novellas, 2005), local publisher Brett Cross, of Titus Books, kicked off the Titus Novella series. Distinguished novelist Mike Johnson was on hand to launch the first three volumes: William (Bill) Direen’s Coma, Olwyn Stewart’s Curriculum Vitae, and my own Trouble in Mind.

In her Landfall review of these books, Katherine Liddy remarked that:

the Titus novella series presses ahead of the pack with something new, smart and strange. Kiwi literature just got a whole lot more interesting.

Titus Books soon shifted to publishing full-length novels, as well as short fiction and poetry collections, and their novella series did not continue. The positive response to this initiative – as well as to Peter Simpson’s anthologies – seemed, however, highly suggestive of things to come.

All of which serves as a preamble to the present project: Paper Table Novellas. This is intended as a stand-alone series, with its own aesthetic and mission statement: to publish contemporary novellas in attractive standalone volumes, and – by doing so – to assert their importance not only to modern fiction as a whole, but to New Zealand writing in particular.

•

How many recent novels (both here and overseas) are simply bloated novellas?

After a hundred or so pages of gold – sharp, focussed writing – the narrative meanders off into supernumerary scenes and plotlines, with occasional spasms of dialogue.

Why is this? Could it be that the superior saleability of any work marketable as a novel outweighs the aesthetic advantages of conciseness and relevance?

That’s not to say that there aren’t many excellent novels out there, but invariably these are works which demand that length and weight of considered detail to make their point, whatever that may be.

The temptation must be strong to pretend that you’re writing a novel when actually what you have on your hands is a potentially fine novella. But what shame can there be to add to a form which can boast such masterpieces as Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1911), Stefan Zweig’s The Royal Game (1942), Gabriel García Márquez’s Leaf Storm (1955), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), and Marguerite Duras’ The Lover (1984), as well as such local classics as Katherine Mansfield’s Prelude (1918), Frank Sargeson’s That Summer (1946), and Kirsty Gunn’s Rain (1994)?

•

The first book chosen for the Paper Table Novellas series, Letters to a Psychiatrist, was originally self-published by its author, poet, priest, and ecologist Leicester Kyle (1937-2006), in a small cyclostyled edition in the mid-1970s. It received little attention at the time, and has since become fabulously rare – as have his other three novella-length works, issued at roughly the same time: The Abbot and the Rock; Deosa Bay: A Pastoral; and The Visitation; An Account of the Last Diocesan Visitation of John Mowbray, Bishop of Calcutta.

Though Leicester’s reputation rests mainly on his poetry, written from the early 1990s onwards, there is much of interest in these early prose works. By far the best of them – to my mind, at least – is Letters to a Psychiatrist. Its topographical and botanical exactness about the South Island seashore below Karamea, based on his own intimate knowledge of the West Coast, are combined with a vivid account of a spiritual vastation, drawn again – I suspect – from the deepest roots of the author’s own experience.

I first read this story (along with the others listed above) at Leicester’s house at Millerton, in the hills above Westport, on a visit in the late 1990s. Perhaps one of the reasons it appealed to me more than any of the others was because he had guided me to one of those very beaches – accessible only on foot – only the day before. We had walked together through the dense bush, explored those strange, magical landscapes.

Letters to a Psychiatrist has the specificity characteristic of Leicester’s best poetry, still decades in the future when he wrote these stories in his late thirties. As one of his two literary executors (along with poet David Howard), I was overjoyed to discover a copy of it among Richard Taylor’s wonderful collection of Kyle-iana a few years ago, while working on the comprehensive online index of his surviving work now to be found at the Leicester Kyle website [http://leicesterkyle.blogspot.co.nz/].

Leicester’s story is roughly 23,000 words long, right in the middle of the novella range. It seems to strike an ideal tone for the launch of the Paper Table series. It has enough action and ideas for a full-length novel, but is composed with the concentration and precision of one of its author’s own short stories.

My own pair of twin novellas, The Annotated Tree Worship, completed in 2015 (some forty years after Leicester’s) will be the next in the series. I can see, now, that many of the thematic links between them are not accidental, but were motivated by this early reading of his novella. I wasn’t at all conscious of that at the time I was writing, but it now seems to me another good reason for placing them side by side.

In any event, let’s hope they’ll be the first of many more to come!

•

---

Works cited:

King, Stephen. Different Seasons. 1982. London: Futura, 1984.

Liddy, Katherine Liddy, “Something Strange: Reviews of Coma by William Direen, Trouble in Mind by Jack Ross & Curriculum Vitae by Olwyn Stewart.” Landfall 212 (Spring 2006): 185-88.

Springer, Mary Doyle. Forms of the Modern Novella. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975.

•


(29/4-7/6/17)

“Afterword: Welcome to Novella.” In Leicester Kyle: Letters to a Psychiatrist. ISBN 978-0-473-41327-9. Paper Table Novellas 1. Auckland: Paper Table, 2017. pp 81-87.

[1726 wds]




•

The Zone & the Plateau (2014)

Murray Edmond, ed.: Ka Mate Ka Ora


Paul Celan & Leicester Kyle:
The Zone & the Plateau

Paul Celan (1938)

1 – Airlifting Paul Celan

Perhaps the greatest risk for the reading of Celan in our time is that we have venerated him … crippling exceptionalism has made his work a symbol of his fate rather than an active matrix for an ongoing poetic practice.

– Charles Bernstein (2004)

Charles Bernstein’s remark, above, inspires one to ask precisely how Paul Celan’s work can be made the “active matrix for an ongoing poetic practice” – by which I presume Bernstein means to imply a practice aware of and responsive to contemporary historical and political events and ideologies?

• One such application of his work might be on the biographical or personal level:
  
  In her launch speech for my book Celanie: Poems & Drawings after Paul Celan (2012), New Zealand poet Michele Leggott talked of the idea of “airlifting” material from one cultural matrix into another – in this case, a kind of Berlin airlift of German poems by a Central European writer, attached, with extensive annotations, to the letters he wrote to his Francophone wife, and subsequently transplanted (by me) into Antipodean English.
  
  Leggott justified this procedure in terms of the human identification we can all feel with the tragic love-story of Paul and his wife, artist Gisèle Celan-Lestrange:
  

  Small masterpieces of language hooked up to lives … this is what I’m hearing in Jack's rendition of the poems in the letters written to Gisèle Celan-Lestrange. (Leggott)

  
  This essentially emotional reading of my book of translations from Celan’s German (via French) is strengthened by the presence, in Celanie, of a series of intensely expressive artworks by another artist, Aucklander Emma Smith, each focussing on a different view of a flayed horse’s skull.


• Then, of course, there are the more characteristically technical aspects of Celan’s writing: his idiosyncratic neologisms and deliberately broken syntax:
  
  In a recent review of expatriate Māori poet Vaughan Rapatahana, critic Scott Hamilton cited Celanie as evidence for his contention that these aspects of Celan’s work offer an ideal model for the literary consequences of Rapatahana’s own hostility towards the English language, and his anxiety at retaining it as his principal medium of expression, despite its inevitable colonial overtones:
  

  The famous obscurity of Celan's poems comes partly from his mistrust of the language in which they were written. Celan had a fuming desire to write ... At the same time, he feared that by setting down words and lines and stanzas in a contaminated language he was falsifying or dishonouring his experiences, and the experiences of his people. Celan was like a man lost in a desert who came across a pool of filthy water. He had to drink, but feared that the deep, desperate draughts he took might kill him. To read the poems in Celanie, with their gnomic images, oxymoronic maxims, strange neologisms, and dizzyingly sudden line-breaks, is to see Celan both slaking his thirst and sickening himself. (Hamilton)



• While not wishing to dispute (or supplant) either of these interpretations, I’d like in this essay to suggest a third, environmental or eco-poetic approach to using Celan’s work as the “active matrix for an ongoing poetic practice.”
  
  The key lies in the word “Celanie,” which Emma and I chose for our title after discovering it in the introduction to the French edition of Paul and Gisèle’s collected correspondence. The editor, Bertrand Badiou, explains the term as follows:
  

  Reading these letters doubled with poems is also to delimit the space where Celan habitually deployed his language, and which he referred to – not entirely seriously – as his “Celanie”: the Rue des Ecoles, the Rue de Lota, the Rue de Montevideo, the Rue de Longchamp, the Rue d’Ulm, the Rue Cabanis …, the Rue Tournefort and Avenue Emile Zola. Around this space exists another one, not much larger, which included the towns of Moisville, Epinay-sur-Seine, Le Vésinet, Suresnes and Epinay-sur-Orge. Celan chose to include almost all of these place-names on the manuscripts of his poems, like guarantees on their first dated and “unalterable” versions, as well as on quite a number of his own annotated books, thus – in a sense – annexing them to the world of his writing. (Badiou & Celan, 2:10)[1]

  
  While I was careful to quote this passage in the introduction to our book, I neglected to unpack many of its implications there beyond saying that we liked “to think of these images, accompanied by English versions from his German-French dual-text poems, as a kind of ‘Celanie’ – our own take on that particular region of the imagination which can only be accessed through Celan’s strange, bleak, wintry words.” I concluded by saying that we hoped to inspire others:
  

  to put on record their own “Celanie”: their own individual understandings of the world of one of our age’s most individual and troubling poets. (Ross & Smith, 15)

I’m not sure, now, that that’s an adequate way to characterise Celan’s own usage “non sans humour” [not without humour] of the word “Celanie.” For him, it was clearly more of a place of refuge from the cold inhuman landscapes of his imagination, of the history he had himself experienced, than one of the actual provinces of that poetry.

Perhaps it was not even a place of refuge: an eyrie, rather – a place of power, of sustenance, which he could return to after his excursions, short or long, into that inimical world of the death-camp and the bureaucracies of terror.

Take, for example, the very last poem he sent Gisèle (in a letter dated 18 March 1970, a scant month before his death): “Es wird etwas sein, später”

There

will be something, later,
that fills itself with you
and lifts itself
to a mouth

From my shattered
mind
I stand up
and watch my hand
tracing the one
unique
circle [2]

Is it wrong to see this traced “Kreis” [circle], familiar from magic and necromancy, as somehow related to the “l'espace” [the space] of Parisian streets he frequented, the little quartier that gave him a base, a place to stand, encircled as it was (in its turn) by the little towns he had visited and stayed in so often with Gisèle and their son Eric?

In a much earlier poem, “Plage du Toulinguet”, dated Autumn 1954, Celan wrote:

The Beach at Toulinguet

What we saw is coming now
to say goodbye to you and me:
the sea, which tossed our nights on shore
the sand, which kept them by our sides
the rust-red heather above
in which the world happened to us [3]

The equation here between the emotional comfort given by Gisèle (at this early stage in their relationship, at any rate) and an essentially anthropomorphic view of natural phenomena is explicit. Pathetic fallacy or not, Celan’s imagery seemed firmly grounded – at that point – in the romantic sexual iconography of sea and shore.

The tone of these topographical descriptions grows more desperate and frenzied later, culminating in his famous image, in the late sequence “Black Toll” [Schwarzmaut], which Gisele illustrated for him, of “the remnants of hearing and sight / in Dormitory 1001,” where:

daily all night
the bears polka [4]

Is that a better way to think of a “Celanie,” then: as a littoral, a zone, the place where opposites meet? In Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker, when the Writer, the Professor and their guide, Stalker, finally enter the Zona [Zone] which the aliens once visited, then abandoned, leaving behind the remains of their “Roadside Picnic” (the title of the Strugatsky novel the film was based on), the filmstock shifts from black and white to colour.

The emotional truth of the film, one should note, however, lies in the return of these three to their real world of responsibilities: to the crippled child of Stalker, above all, who has been waiting patiently with her mother for the idealist’s return.

There’s an undoubted excitement, momentousness, in the vertiginous dangers of the Zone. In the end, though, none of the three is prepared to enter the final chamber where wishes can (allegedly) come true: Stalker because he sees the truth of his role solely in acting as a guide to others; the Writer because he is, essentially, an observer rather than an actor; the Professor because he has finally rejected his and his colleagues’ plan to destroy this “unscientific” haven of false hopes.

Similarly, for Celan, neither domesticity nor the extremes of memory (not to mention the constant reminders of entrenched Nazism and anti-Semitism in his trips to and fro to his only true “audience” in Germany) could ever finally satisfy him. It was in the alternation between them that he found his semblance of balance, of normality – the balance asserted again and again in the poems he sent back from this “front” in letters to his wife:

The bright

stones go up in the air
clear, white, light-
shards

They don’t want
to fall back, touch,
hit
They go up
blossoming
like wild flowers
then, closing, fall
on you
my light
my truth

I look at you
you take them from my hands
you put them back into
the light, which no-one needs
to own or name
(Ross & Smith, 33)[5]

Those of us to whom history has had somewhat gentler lessons to impart might still be able to benefit in various ways from this poetic enactment of the fort-da game. Perhaps, as Freud conjectured, this childish throwing out and pulling back of a toy does represent an underlying pattern which speaks to other activities: not so much a warding-off as an acknowledgment of our powerlessness before death.

In any case, I think it must be in this sense that we take Celan as our guide into the Zone, avoiding the “crippling exceptionalism” of Holocaust-guilt which renders his experiences in the Second World War and afterwards as literally unimaginable to those of us who come after.

The word Kreis which I quoted above, the magic circle Celan hoped in his very last poems to trace around himself and Gisèle, inevitably recalls Bert Brecht – and his various collaborators’[6] – Kaukasische Kreidekreis [Caucasian chalk circle], In Brecht’s play, however, the chalk circle is a place of judgement, where the true, biological mother proves less devoted to her own child than the servant girl who saved him, and who has raised him as her own. Unconditional love proves stronger than natural maternal instincts, in a direct inversion of the “Judgement of Solomon” motif so familiar from folklore.

Leicester Kyle (2000)

2 – The Poetics of the Denniston Plateau

In May 2013, Nick Smith, the Minister for Conservation, announced his approval of Australian company Bathurst Resources’ bid to strip-mine a large tract of the Buller Plateaux, on the upper West Coast of New Zealand’s South Island, for coal:

He said the area was not a National Park or a Conservation Park and did not have any particular reserve status.
"It is general stewardship land, which is the lowest legal status of protection of land managed by the Department of Conservation.” (Bradley)

A few days later it was revealed that not only had Smith ignored the advice of environmental networks, but also that of the officials in his own Department in making this decision (Lunn). Despite a partially successful appeal to the High Court by environmental group Forest and Bird, the latest news from the Supreme Court (19/9/13) confirms that Smith’s original decision will be upheld.

But what has any of that got to do with poetry, or (for that matter) with Paul Celan, the subject of the first section of this essay?

I suppose that my own involvement with the struggle to preserve the unique eco-system of this region of New Zealand comes courtesy of my friendship with another, somewhat gentler poet, Leicester Kyle (1937-2006), some twenty years younger than Paul Celan (1920-1970) – brought up on the Coast, but born in what seemed (until recently) the much stabler flatland landscape of Christchurch on the Canterbury Plains.

In a reflection piece on the proposed mining of the Denniston Plateau in New Zealand Geographic magazine, Editor-at–large Kennedy Warne remarked:

… for me, standing on the escarpment, it is Kyle who catches the breath of this place and warns of the impending silence – just as he did for Happy Valley, the contentious Solid Energy mining site near Stockton. In his lament for that landscape, he spoke of the birds, writing poignantly: “they have no song for apocalypse”.

He continues:

To what extent, I wonder, did John Hanlon’s song “Damn the Dam”, which topped the singles chart for 1973, help tip the balance against the raising of Lake Manapouri? Did Grahame Sydney’s paintings and Brian Turner’s poems celebrating Central Otago landscapes influence public perception of a wind farm proposal for the Lammermoor Range? [NZ Geographic 122 (July-August, 2013): 114].

He speculates, finally: “Isn’t a listing in Schedule 4 – the statutory register of the country’s most valuable conservation land – the highest protection our environment can have? In one sense, yes. But statutes change, reflecting shifts in social priorities. Perhaps a shared cultural esteem offers a more resilient protection than laws ever can.” This is indeed (as he puts it) “an intriguing thought.”

As one of Leicester Kyle’s two literary executors, and the person mainly responsible for making his collected works – protest poetry and more lyrical works alike – available on the Internet, it’s a thought which has had quite an influence on my actions over the past few years.

Beyond Kennedy Warne’s two articles in NZ Geographic – the one I’ve just quoted from, and a longer piece, “The Black and the Green” [issue 116 (July-August, 2012): 48-79] – is there any evidence that works such as Leicester’s The Great Buller Coal Plateaux (2001) are having any real effect on our attitudes now, seven years after his death from cancer in 2006?

Perhaps that’s the wrong way to consider this issue, though. Perhaps (instead) I should go back a few years and fill in more of the background, explain how Leicester – not yet a familiar name to many poetry readers outside these islands –came to write these works in the first place.

Born in Christchurch in 1937, at the height of the Great Depression, Leicester Kyle grew up in Sumner (among other places), before the family moved into one of the first streets of State Houses built by the Labour government, as he chronicles in his long autobiographical poem State Houses (1997). His father, a journalist with some literary ambitions (he worked with Allen Curnow on the Christchurch Press) came from a well-established Greymouth family, but found it difficult to adjust to life in the city. He committed suicide when Leicester was still in his teens. His wife, Leicester’s mother, killed herself soon afterwards, an experience recorded in his posthumously published collection The God Poems (written c.2005).

Leicester himself started off as an apprentice in the Christchurch Botanical Gardens – as he records in his poem Anogramma (2005) – before joining the Anglican church in 1963, at the age of 26. He worked as a vicar in a number of parishes through New Zealand (and even, for a time, in the North of England), and it was during this period that he first made the acquaintance of a group of painters and writers then living on Banks Peninsula (Jeffrey Harris and Joanna Paul among them), as he explains in his prose memoir “Peninsula Days.”

In a CV written in 2000, he remarks that he “remained in this work until retirement at the age of 60, on the illness of my wife”, then goes on to say that “After the death of my wife I moved from Auckland to Buller, the better to continue my interest in botany, and to write.”

During my life I have written a great deal, though always against the demands of my occupation. I have had articles, short stories, and poems published in many places, including London Magazine, the N.Z. Listener, the Ch.Ch. Press, Poetry NZ., Sport, Takahe, Printout, Pander, and the journal of experimental poetry – A Brief Description of the Whole World ...

I first met Leicester and his wife Miriel Kyle in 1997, at a meeting of the Bookshop poets in Devonport. He became a kind of mentor, in fact, and after Miriel’s death in March 1998, we instituted an informal conversation club at the London Bar on Wellesley Street. We continued to correspond after his departure for the West Coast in mid 1998, and I visited him there three times: in 1998, 2000, and 2002.

The town he was living in, Millerton, in the hills above Granity, up the coast from Westport, was very close to the Stockton mine, and so Solid Energy’s plans to stripmine the plateau above his home hit him hard.

As he himself put it in the late essay “Orchids in a Ghost Town”:

In part, I came here for the botany, and botany has brought me here since I was fourteen. My father started me on this course when I was old enough to go with him. He was a keen naturalist and a conservator and would take me with him on his rambles. Though born on the West Coast, of gold-rush stock, he then lived on the Port Hills above Christchurch, and that was the first environment I came to know. Laing & Blackwell was my manual, and amongst the very first plants which I identified by myself were two orchids—Earina autumnalis and Thelymitra longifolia.

To Leicester, the pakihi, the somewhat unspectacular moorland landscapes of the Buller Plateau region, was a treasure trove of hidden botanical marvels: a series of valleys and ridges untouched since the last Ice Age, unique in the world. The idea of mining it into extinction therefore spurred him into action:

Respect the plants which grow on these cliffs. They mightn’t look much, but they’ve been attracting scientific attention since the 1890’s, when they were noted by Buller’s first resident botanist, W. Townson.
There are two plants here which grow nowhere else in the country: a gentian, and a mountain daisy (celmisia). …
These plants have found a carefully-balanced life in adverse conditions which are often extreme, so take the best care you can not to disturb them.

After helping to found MAPPS [The Millerton and Plateau Protection Society] in 2000, Leicester, as president of the organization, had a number of meetings with Don Elder, the CEO of Solid Energy, and negotiated the formation of the Millerton Heritage Park, of which Leicester acted as unofficial curator, in 2003.

His greatest coup during this period, however, was the discovery of the giant Millerton snail, Powelliphanta millertonii. Leicester gives a somewhat flippant account of this in his poem “Our New Snail”:

Trish found it,
crossing the road —
the snail, that is.

She was going for a walk
to calm herself,
for there was trouble with the plumbing, again.
It was early,
and had been raining.

I had told her:
‘If you see a snail shell
please bring it to me,’
for I’m interested,
so she brought me the creature,
‘At least you’ll have the shell,’ she said,
but it was too important to keep.

I could see it was an entity
so I rang Kath Walker in town.
‘Measure it,’ she said,
‘and describe it to me,’
but how to do that —

it’s so old
it’s out of my authority;
exactness is absurdity
with a thing like this,
and words are gauche.
It antedates statistics by an aeon.
Chromosomes and categories
slip off down its trail.

‘Look’, I said,
‘It’s uncomfortable.
I’ll ring you back.’

‘Give it a worm,’
she told me.
‘They suck them in
like spaghetti.’

In a 2004 postscript to his 2003 report to MAPPS on the formation of the Millerton Heritage Park, he strikes a more somber tone. I’d like to quote his words in full:

The discovery in 2003 of the Millerton snail—Powelliphanta lignaria ‘Millertonii’—is an illustration of a considerable difficulty we face in our environment.
For over a century this snail had lived in a human community and not been noticed sufficiently to come to the attention of science. It’s a quite large solidly made bush snail that lives in several acres of forest and scrub. A road goes through its territory, two rail tracks have done so, and there’s a house on it. Some fifteen years ago a bush fire narrowly missed the land. In the spring the snail gets restless and goes wandering around the house and across the road; at other times it’s not seen.
During the century of co-habitation with humans it could so easily have been eradicated by such things as fire, industry, or property development—part of its land is designated on the town plan for road and housing. Had any such accident happened, we would never have come to know the animal.
You might well ask whether that would matter, and go on to attend to some other issue more important than a vanished snail, but before you do—stop and think: how different our country would be if the moa, tuatara, takahe, huia, eagle--and the many others of our great army of the disappeared--were still around; how much more lively would be the mountains and the bush. And then there is the colour that has gone—the kaka beak that used to brighten the shores of the Bay of Islands, the scarlet mistletoe that used to make such a brilliant display at Christmas in the Lewis Pass.
These things have gone, and left our island world, our inheritance, so very much the poorer, darker, less interesting. There are few now alive who can remember how rich was the bush before the deer and opossums got into it. This process of impoverishment is continuing, and is of course a global calamity, but here it can be lessened.
One of its causes is ignorance. Our attachment to our natural inheritance is too slender. In all other countries there are poems stories songs and legends about their plants and animals, but here, apart from the Maori, there are virtually none. Our attitudes to our plants and animals is more of sentiment than of experience or knowledge.
We are easily dispossessed of what we value lightly.
We might well be like those who dream on in life, and then awake in a time of need to find they have no friends or family.

Leicester Kyle died of cancer in Christchurch hospital on July 4th, 2006, leaving behind him a considerable legacy of poetic work, published and unpublished. On his deathbed, he asked my friend David Howard and me to act as his literary executors.

As a result of this, in 2011 we began the publication of Leicester’s collected works online, an enterprise which is now substantially complete, and has already inspired two posthumous book publications.

There’s a more ominous side to his legacy, though. You recall his words, quoted above, about the fragility of the giant snail’s tenure of its environment? For a while its mere presence in the hills above Millerton was enough to halt Solid Energy’s plans.

Then, after a couple of years of sparring with various government agencies, they offered to collect the snails by hand, individually, and transport them to an equally hospitable environment further south.

And so they did. We were treated to film, on national TV, of anoraked workers crawling on hands and knees through the sparse undergrowth of the plateau, plucking each of these huge, grotesque snails from their native soil. It was hard to know if this was a triumph or a tragedy for ecologists everywhere.

Until, a few years later (in 2011), we heard that a laboratory worker had accidentally neglected to monitor the temperatures in the storeroom the snails had been stored in temporarily, and that almost a thousand of them had died as a result. The Department of Conservation’s West Coast manager put an upbeat spin on the disaster: “Fortunately we've already managed to relocate more than 60 per cent of the original population into new habitats and we still have more than 800 unaffected snails in the other cool rooms and environmental chambers” (Westport News, 2011).

As Leicester himself put it: “We are easily dispossessed of what we value lightly. We might well be like those who dream on in life, and then awake in a time of need to find they have no friends or family.”

All of which brings me around again to the original question posed by Kennedy Warne in his NZ Geographic editorial: Can “a shared cultural esteem” offer a “more resilient protection” than the law?

Leicester’s initial successes through negotiation with Don Elder: the formation of the Millerton Heritage Park, the (temporary) halt in proceedings caused by the discovery of that rare snail, have now all been negated by the patience and determination of a large energy corporation.

The poetry he wrote about that struggle, The Great Buller Coal Plateaux (2001); not to mention the long sequence “Death of a Landscape” which he published in brief 31 (2004); or “Happy Valley: A Lament for a landscape about to be mined” (2003), which I included in an online feature on NZ poetry on the American poetics site Jacket2 (2011); or his prose notes on the flora and fauna of the Millerton Heritage park (also available online) do, however, continue to exert an influence.

The particular battle he fought may have been lost, but the war to preserve at least a little of our irreplaceable natural heritage goes on. There’s an interesting poem about the nature of his communications with the power company in his 2004 book Living at a Bad Address. He prefaced it with the following note: “Earlier in the year Solid Energy wanted a publicity photo of me with its C.E.O. Don Elder, and I was asked to meet him after a staff meeting. A delay meant that I had to wait outside with his miners and mine-workers, many of whom regard me as a radical greeney trouble-maker.”

Waiting For The C.E.O.

He’s been delayed —
there’s trouble down south;
at Spring Creek there are questions,
so we wait,
I in my truck,
the miners at the car park over the road
where they lounge in their overalls
against the bonnets of their utes,
trying to make point to this pointless time,
talking small to pass it.

They’re here for his presentation:
‘Earning Our Right to Mine’.

‘Mining is a temporary use of the land,
but a permanent use of non-renewable resources’.
they’re to be told,
before they excavate.

I’m here to be photographed with him,
I, who have written to the paper,
the government,
protested in the streets,
who have threatened their jobs,
they say;
I’m to be photographed with their boss.

We’re both uneasy,
I at their resentment,
they at my threat,
but in this we are one:
there’s the road between us
and we long to move on,
each to our work:
theirs at the mine,
mine at the inexpressible.

West Coast Rain (2005)

3 - Conclusion

A few months before his death in 2006, Leicester Kyle wrote a series of poems about rain. The significance of this sequence at first eluded me when I looked through the boxfiles where he’d stacked all the completed poems he wished to preserve. It wasn’t, in fact, until I examined the files stored on his computer hard-disk that I came to understand that they were a sequence, rather than just a series of discrete poems. Rain is, after all, perhaps the dominant fact about life on the Coast.

Night rain
sends a shadow
into late afternoon

the sun doesn’t set

a veil spreads eastwards
white at the edge
but darkening
over a steel sea

lower clouds bank
at the horizon

there’s no wind and
a few drops of rain fall
as darkness sets

we bring in the wood
and pull the blinds
to make refuge

to pretend
at security
[“Night Rain”][7]

“To pretend /at security.” On the one hand, these lines certainly seem to hint at the precariousness of his own tenure of the land. In a few more weeks he would be forced to leave the tiny hamlet of Millerton[8], in the hills above Granity, just north of Westport, to shift into the Christchurch hospital ward where he died.

It is Millerton which we must, I think, regard as Kyle’s own version of Celan’s “Celanie.” He relocated there from Auckland in 1998, shortly after the death of his first wife Miriel from cancer. The house he moved into had been purchased sight unseen, and he devoted the rest of his life to chronicling the old mining village: its landscapes and people.

“To pretend /at security.” These lines also gesture back to the role he’d played in the conservation struggle to preserve this region: books such as his The Great Buller Coal Plateaux, published by MAPPS [the Millerton and Plateau Protection Society], consciously blending poetry with eco-propaganda:

They took the top off Mt. Frederick for reasons they might not
understand
Not just for coal which there’s so much of
The seam is thick for a wide extent
And it might well be that the reasons for decapitation are as
profound as the coal
Such as the cliffs at the west of the hill
For precipices are a downside to a prospector’s on-view
And might remind the managers of limits to a resource
[“For My Father (from the Blackburn Track)”][9]

In these, and many other poems, he was careful to list the long, beautiful botanical names of the species of flora and fauna which would be displaced – in some cases, threatened with extinction. Millerton may act at times in his poems as a magic circle, but more often it’s more like the chalk circle in the Brecht play: a place where we are tried and found wanting.

Leicester was dead by the time Stockton was stripmined, so he never heard of this crowning indignity to all his efforts to preserve this unique environment, unchanged – he told me, as we walked across it one morning – since the last ice age, an irreplaceable repository of knowledge and beauty which could never be regained or reconstituted once lost. But the portion of it we crossed that day has now been lost. What’s left of the plateaux continues to be eroded by successive mining projects.

Hence, I suppose, my continuing interest in the implications of that last sequence of poems by Leicester – “Flood”[10], for instance:

A gull is beaten to the road
where it cowers until
the hail’s overwhelmed by rain
a downpour at first
then a torrent a burst
still mounting to
a river on the path
a flood on the lawn
to the creek raging
down the hill to the road
flooding through the houses
out to a muddied sea

Hence, too, my belief that the “crippling exceptionalism” which Bernstein detects in previous readings of Celan must now begin to take into account the ways in which his work might speak to the distortions of language used to justify environmental devastation – not just the continuing culture-erasing and ethnic-cleansing policies of repressive governments everywhere.

By reading Leicester Kyle and Paul Celan together, I would contend, we can learn as much about our present crises as about their own historical circumstances, their respective choices of a place to stand. Bernstein goes on, in the quotation I began this essay with, to point out that the consequence of this ongoing “process of removing [Celan] … from his own time and place” is to take him “also from our own poetic horizon.”

Though it might sound somewhat utalitarian, the enduring value of such poets as Celan and Kyle must be their example, not simply the specific experiences they have given such eloquent witness to. Using Paul Celan as the “active matrix for an ongoing poetic practice” (as Bernstein tells us we must) involves setting him to work against the network news, reading him in a thousand alien contexts, relocating him in the stunted dwarf forests of the Buller pakihi as well as the crowded streets of the metropolis.

---

Works cited:

• 3 News online staff. “Supreme Court quashes Denniston mine appeal.” 3 News Online (19/9/13). [Available at: http://www.3news.co.nz/Supreme-Court-quashes-Denniston-mine-appeal/tabid/423/articleID/313915/Default.aspx]
• Badiou, Bertrand, & Eric Celan, eds. Paul Celan & Gisèle Celan-Lestrange. Correspondance (1951-1970), avec un choix de letters de Paul Celan à son fils Eric. 2 vols. La Librairie du XXIe siècle. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001.
• Bernstein, Charles. “Celan's Folds and Veils.” Textual Practice 18, 2 (Summer 2004): 200-01 [Quoted in Marjorie Perloff, “«Sound Scraps, Vision Scraps»: Paul Celan's Poetic Practice.” From Reading for Form, ed. Susan J. Wolfson and Marshall Brown (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 2006), 177-202. Available at: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/perloff/articles/Perloff_Celan-Poetry.pdf].
• Bradley, Grant. “Denniston Plateau coal mining approved.” NZ Herald (23/5/13). [Available at: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=10885661].
• Brecht, Bertolt. Parables for the Theatre. Two Plays: The Good Woman of Setzuan / The Caucasian Chalk Circle. 1949 & 1953. Trans. Eric Bentley. 1948. Penguin Plays. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.
• Celan, Paul. Die Gedichte: Kommentierte Gesamtausgabe in einem Band. Ed. Barbara Weidemann. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003.
• Fuegi, John. The Life and Lies of Bertolt Brecht. [as ‘Brecht and Co.: Sex, Politics, and the Making of the Modern Drama’ (1994)]. Flamingo. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995.
• Hamilton, Scott. “From Masada to Matakaoa: three notes on Paul Celan and Vaughan Rapatahana.” [Available at: Reading the Maps (18/12/12): http://readingthemaps.blogspot.co.nz/2012/12/from-masada-to-matakaoa-three-notes-on.html].
• Kyle, Leicester. State Houses. Mt Eden: Heteropholis Press, June 1997. [Available at: Leicester Kyle Texts (2012): http://leicesterkyle1.blogspot.co.nz/2011/02/state-houses-1997.html].
• Kyle, Leicester. The Great Buller Coal Plateaux: A Sequence of Poems. ISBN 0-473-07746-9. P.O. Box 367, Westport: MAPPS [The Millerton and Plateaux Protection Society], July 2001. [Available at: Leicester Kyle Texts (2012): http://leicesterkyle1.blogspot.co.nz/2011/02/great-buller-coal-plateaux-2001.html].
• Kyle, Leicester. "Death of a Landscape." brief 31 (2004): 83-92. [Available at: Leicester Kyle Texts (2012): http://leicesterkyle1.blogspot.co.nz/2012/01/five-millerton-sequences.html#_ftn26].
• Kyle, Leicester. Living at a Bad Address. Millerton, December 2004. [Available at: Leicester Kyle Texts (2012): http://leicesterkyle1.blogspot.co.nz/2011/03/living-at-bad-address-2004.html].
• Kyle, Leicester. "Peninsula Days: A Memoir of Joanna Paul." brief 32 (2005): 61-64. [Available at: Leicester Kyle Texts (2012): http://leicesterkyle1.blogspot.co.nz/2012/01/miscellaneous-prose.html#_ftn4].
• Kyle, Leicester. Anogramma. ISBN 0-476-01604-5. Millerton: Heteropholis Press, August 2005. [Available at: Leicester Kyle Texts (2012): ://leicesterkyle1.blogspot.co.nz/2011/03/anogramma-2005.html].
• Kyle, Leicester. God Poems (Unpublished: c. 2005). [Available at: Leicester Kyle Texts (2012): http://leicesterkyle1.blogspot.co.nz/2012/01/god-poems.html].
• Kyle, Leicester. "Happy Valley: A Lament for a landscape about to be mined." Jacket2 [http://jacket2.org/poems/poems-leicester-kyle] (2011). [Available at: Leicester Kyle Texts (2012): http://leicesterkyle1.blogspot.co.nz/2012/01/selected-shorter-poems-6-1999-2004.html#_ftn29].
• Kyle, Leicester. “Respect the Plants ...” (2003) [Available at: Leicester Kyle Texts (2012): http://leicesterkyle1.blogspot.co.nz/2012/01/miscellaneous-prose.html#_ftn16].
• Kyle, Leicester. “Millerton Park” (2003) [Available at: Leicester Kyle Texts (2012): http://leicesterkyle1.blogspot.co.nz/2012/01/miscellaneous-prose.html#_ftn22].
• Kyle, Leicester. “Postscript” (2004) [Available at: Leicester Kyle Texts (2012): http://leicesterkyle1.blogspot.co.nz/2012/01/miscellaneous-prose.html#_ftn23].
• Kyle, Leicester. “MAPPS AGM: President's report” (2004) [Available at: Leicester Kyle Texts (2012): http://leicesterkyle1.blogspot.co.nz/2012/01/miscellaneous-prose.html#_ftn25].
• Kyle, Leicester. “Orchids in a Ghost Town” (2005) [Available at: Leicester Kyle Texts (2012): http://leicesterkyle1.blogspot.co.nz/2012/01/miscellaneous-prose.html#_ftn20].
• Kyle, Leicester. “Rain Poems”
  1. Quiet Rain [19/1/06]
  2. The Southerly [19/1/06]
  3. Welcome [2/2/06]
  4. Yesterday [2/2/06]
  5. Flood [2/2/06]
  6. From the East [2/2/06]
  7. Night Rain [2/2/06]
  8. With Ice [2/2/06]
  9. Of Earth and Sky [2/2/06]
  [Available at: Leicester Kyle Texts (2013): http://leicesterkyle1.blogspot.co.nz/2012/01/selected-shorter-poems-7-2004-2006.html].
• Leggott, Michele. “Launch Speech for Celanie.” [Available at: http://hesiodic.blogspot.co.nz/2012/09/celanie-2012.html].
• Lunn, Annette. “Nick Smith ignored department's advice over Denniston.” Newstalk ZB (27/5/13). [Available at: http://nz.news.yahoo.com/a/-/top-stories/17336917/nick-smith-ignored-departments-advice-over-denniston/].
• Mead, Thomas. “Denniston Plateau decision could take days.” 3 News Online (12/6/13). [Available at: http://www.3news.co.nz/Denniston-Plateau-decision-could-take-days/tabid/423/articleID/301198/Default.aspx].
• Ross, Jack, & Emma Smith. Celanie: Poems & Drawings after Paul Celan. Introduction by Jack Ross. Afterword by Bronwyn Lloyd. ISBN: 978-0-473-22484-4. Pania Samplers, 3. Auckland: Pania Press, 2012.
• Strugatsky, Arkady & Boris. Roadside Picnic. Trans. Antonina W. Bouis. Introduction by Theodore Sturgeon. 1977. Penguin Science Fiction. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.
• Tarkovsky, Andrei. Collected Screenplays. Trans. William Powell & Natasha Synessios. London: Faber, 1999.
• Tarkovsky, Andrei. Stalker [Сталкер], writ. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky – starring Alisa Freindlich, Alexander Kaidanovsky, Anatoli Solonitsyn, Nikolai Grinko – (USSR, 1979). In Director’s Collection: The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky. Distinction Series. Complete 9-DVD set.
• Warne, Kennedy. " The Black and the Green." New Zealand Geographic 116 (July-August, 2012): 48-79.
• Warne, Kennedy. "On Reflection: The birds have no song for apocalypse." New Zealand Geographic 122 (July-August, 2013): 114.
• Westport News. “DoC staff 'upset' mishap killed rare snails.” Greymouth Star (10/11/11). [Available at: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10765048].

---

Notes:

1. Lire ces lettres doublées de poèmes, c'est aussi mesurer l'espace où Celan pratique habituellement sa langue et qu'il appelait parfois, non sans humour, sa «Celanie»: la rue des Ecoles, la rue de Lota, la rue de Montevideo, la rue de Longchamp, la rue d’Ulm, la rue Cabanis …, la rue Tournefort et l’avenue Emile Zola. Autour de cet espace en existe un autre, à peine plus vaste, incluant Moisville, Epinay-sur-Seine, Le Vésinet, Suresnes et Epinay-sur-Orge. Celan a choisi de faire figurer presque tous ces noms de lieu sur les manuscrits de ses poèmes, comme des prolongements de leur premières version datée et «inaltérée», ainsi que sur nombre de ses livres annotés, les annexant de la sorte a son écriture. [Unless otherwise specified, all translations in this essay are by the author].

2. Es wird etwas sein, später,
das füllt sich mit dir
und hebt sich
an einen Mund

Aus dem zerscherbten
Wahn
steh ich auf
und seh meiner Hand zu,
wie sie den einen
einzigen
Kreis zieht

13.XII.69
Avenue Emile Zola
(Celan, 363-64).

3. Versammelt ist, was wir sahen,
zum Abschied von dir und von mir:
das Meer, das uns Nächte an Land warf,
der Sand, der sie mit uns durchflogen,
das rostrote Heideikraut droben,
darin die Welt uns geschah.

[automne 1954]
(Celan, 69).

4. HÖRRESTE, SEHRESTE im
Schlafsaaal eintausendund eins,

tagnächtlich
die Bären-Polka
...
[Paris, 9. 6. 1967]
(Celan, 275).

5. Die hellen
Steine gehn durch der Luft, die hell-
weißen, die Licht-
bringer.

Sie wollen
nicht niedergehen, nicht stürzen,
nicht treffen. Sie gehen
auf,
wie die geringen
Heckenrosen, so tun sie sich auf,
sie schweben
dir zu, du meine Leise,
du meine Wahre –:

ich seh dich, du pflückst sie mit meinen
neuen, meinen
Jedermannshänden, du tust sie
ins Helle, das niemand
zu weinen braucht noch zu nennen.

10.7.1961.
Trébabu
23 Uhr.
(Celan, 147).

6. For further details on the complicated genesis of this play, adapted from Klabund’s 1925 Der Kreidekreis in 1941 principally by Margarete Steffin, then worked on again in 1944 by Brecht and Ruth Berlau, see Fuegi, 445-46.

7. http://leicesterkyle1.blogspot.co.nz/2012/01/selected-shorter-poems-7-2004-2006.html#_ftn37.

8. Google address: http://maps.google.co.nz/?ll=-41.632663,171.870534&spn=0.001201,0.001832&t=h&z=19&layer=c&cbll=-41.632663,171.870534&panoid=AENfcfOWV62VV2F4uvkULg&cbp=12,218.43,,0,0.

9. http://leicesterkyle1.blogspot.co.nz/2011/02/great-buller-coal-plateaux-2001.html#_ftn3.

10. http://leicesterkyle1.blogspot.co.nz/2012/01/selected-shorter-poems-7-2004-2006.html#_ftn35.

(14-17/6; 9/9-2/10-13/11/13)

Ka Mate Ka Ora 13 (2014): 54-71.
[Available at: http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/kmko/13/ka_mate13_ross.asp]

[6003 wds]


Ka Mate Ka Ora 13 (2014)


•

Introducing Leicester Kyle (2014)

Leicester Kyle: The Millerton Sequences (2014)

Introduction:
Introducing Leicester Kyle

Philip Trusttum: Cover image
[Leicester Kyle: Five Anzac Liturgies (2003)]

1. Friends

I spent Labour Weekend in Ch.Ch. with my oldest daughter, who wanted to revisit family sites of the past. I was able to catch up with a few of the poets, and in particular with David Howard, who was as pleasant as ever, though I fear I may have irritated him by declining an invitation to record some poems for some sort of posterity; it seemed a poor way to spend a precious evening. I went to Antigone instead, which turned out to be almost as poor – a student production given to portentous trivialities.

– Leicester Kyle: unpublished letter to Jack Ross (22.11.02)

In retrospect, it seems a shame that Leicester didn't go into the studio that day with David Howard to “record some poems for some sort of posterity.” This was part of the nationwide recording effort which led to the creation of the 171-poet-strong Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive [http://aonzpsa.blogspot.co.nz/], eventually collected on a set of 42 CDs, and now housed in Auckland University Library's Special Collections (with a backup copy in the Alexander Turnbull library in Wellington). David Howard and I were both involved in the project: he as collector, I as editor. Characteristically, though, Leicester saw it simply as a waste of time, a “poor way to spend a precious evening.”

I'd like very much to put on one of those CDs now and listen to some of his poems again, in that dry, clipped, educated-Antipodean voice of his.

Mind you, I'm sure it wasn't because Leicester was ashamed of his own work, or doubtful of its value (though he was certainly a severe critic of the merits of particular pieces). On the contrary, he'd had a mid-life conversion to Poetry, a kind of St. Paul-like vision on the road to Damascus which had come, by the mid-nineties, to challenge his earlier allegiance to the Anglican church.

Perhaps not “challenge” so much as “supplement.” Leicester began as a scientist: a botanist, in fact. As a teenage school-leaver he'd worked as an apprentice in the Christchurch Botanical Gardens. He left there to train as a priest, then to dabble in writing (short stories, mainly) in his forties. Some of the latter got published in the Listener and the London Magazine, so he was certainly successful at it, but they still weren't quite right – not quite what he was looking for.

Then (as he told me the story, at any rate) one day in 1994 he was asked to write something for a parish newsletter up north, and decided to versify the story of a local shipwreck he'd heard about. The result was “The Voyage of the Venus.” It's not a particularly good poem, but he said that it was while writing it that he suddenly understood that this was what he wanted to do.

We first met a couple of years after that, in 1996, at a Christmas party in Devonport held by the “Bookshop Poets,” a small group of writers who used to gather at Lee Dowrick's house in St Leonards Road. Leicester was there with his wife Miriel, Stu Bagby with his wife Sheila. For me, at any rate, this was a very significant meeting – with poets who were publishing regularly in a number of magazines, active on the scene (Leicester was at that point a regular at Poetry Live on K. Road).

I wouldn't say that we formed any kind of Three Musketeers alliance, but it's true that Stu's skill at editing a poem down and down and down to its essence, together with Leicester's lively and well-informed intelligence were instrumental in getting me out of the solipsistic poetry ghetto I'd been living in up till then. Through them I met other poets, too: Raewyn Alexander, Olwyn Stewart, Alice Hooton, Jackie Ottaway, Wensley Willcox – eventually even Alistair Paterson and David Howard.

I knew Leicester well enough to witness his pain as he was forced to watch Miriel's slow death from melanoma: an event which overshadowed his last months in Auckland, and which surfaces again and again in his writing from that period (and later).

And while I was sorry to see him leave – I knew we'd all miss him – I could understand why he felt the need to put Auckland and its malign associations behind him. It did seem odd to me when he told me he'd bought his house in Millerton sight unseen, would in fact be seeing it for the first time as he was moving in. But of course I could understand the attractions of an unpeopled verdant wilderness. Who wouldn't? It nagged at me a little, though.

Millerton is a small town in the hills above Granity, on the West Coast of the South Island, a few miles up from Westport. It's an old mining village which has been almost swallowed up by second-growth bush (when you see old photographs of it, the landscape around it looks like a blasted heath: duckboards laid over fields of mud). Now, however, it looks more like the forest primeval.

I went down to visit Leicester there shortly after he'd moved in. I had been worried about him, about his state of mind, until I heard that he'd got himself a kitten (called “Cursor” because of his habit of following Leicester's finger along the lines in the book he was reading). That sounded distinctly reassuring. I did still want to check up on him, though, so invited myself for a week-long stay.

He acquiesced with this plan (in retrospect, I don't know how enthusiastically), so I flew down to Greymouth and was picked up in his newly bought Land Rover, a huge red beast of a thing which was quite necessary for the wilderness roads in that part of the world. And so began my acquaintance with the bizarre world of Millerton.

I can’t go into any detail about that now, except to say that I visited him there on three separate occasions, and each time learnt more about the curious history and contemporary mores of this strangely self-sufficient green enclave of environmentalists and alternative-lifestyle enthusiasts.

Perhaps this passage from that same 2002 letter I quoted above will give you some sense of his slightly detached view of the local community:

On Sunday I have a small book-launch: Things to do with Kerosene has been printed, and turns out well. I'll send you a copy in December. The launch is here in my new garage, and is also a garage­wetting to declare the garage a garage, and is also a belated acknowledgement of my sixty-fifth birthday. It will be a typical Millerton piss-up, with some invited not coming and some not-invited turning up anyway, and going on and on and on until it runs out of basic supplies. Some of the Buller Community Arts Council are coming, and some of the Buller Conservation Society, which is action-packed radical greenie. The two groups crossover, which is odd, and the members tend to look as if they live in Millerton, especially the Arts ones, who also have dangerous houses.

He was both an insider and an outsider there: an insider because of his family associations with the Coast, and his long history of botanical exploration of the region; an outsider because he wasn’t dependent on any of the local cash crops for basic subsistence.


2. Dilemmas of a Literary Executor [1]

When Leicester fell terminally ill with cancer in 2006, he asked, from his death-bed, for David Howard and me to act as his literary executors. It's not easy to refuse such an arrangement for an old friend, especially when you're not really anticipating having to do all that much work.

In Leicester's case, a great deal of his later writing had already appeared in the form of self-printed and photocopied pamphlets and booklets, so I suppose I was anticipating that some small sum of money would come to us with which we could finance the printing of a posthumous selection of poems, somewhat like his friend Joanna Margaret Paul's Like Love Poems, which had recently been published by Victoria University Press (edited by one of her two literary executors, Bernadette Hall).

That's not quite what happened, though. As it turned out, none of the estate had been set aside specifically to pay for future literary projects. Leicester had a large family, and had recently remarried, so a complicated set of arrangements had had to be devised to provide for each of them.

David, who was on the spot in the South Island, retrieved a large cache of papers from Leicester’s house – including the two large boxfiles marked “Collected Poems” 1 & 2, which Leicester had used as a chronologically ordered archive for any poems he thought worth preserving. He also, crucially, managed to download the contents of Leicester's hard-drive onto two CDs.

Next time he was in Auckland, David passed the two boxfiles on to me, as well as the two computer discs (he'd already emailed me a large number of computer files of various ages and provenances). This was to be the starting-point of our discussion on “what to do about Leicester.”

The difficulties were obvious from the beginning. Leicester had little visibility in New Zealand poetry (though we were already, at the time of his death, seeing the beginnings of a fertile sub-genre called “Visits to Millerton,” examples of which might include Jim Norcliffe's Villon in Millerton (2007), some of my own pieces from Chantal's Book (2002), poems by Tony Chad, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, David Howard ... the list goes on).

We didn't have any money to pay for the reprinting of any of his longer works, which were (in my opinion) by far the most interesting. Nobody came forward with any intriguing Leicester-related projects. The few approaches I made to publishers, large or small, drained off into the sand. All in all, the whole question of his literary legacy ended up in the too-hard basket.

And yet, those two big boxfiles continued to sit in my study, glaring at me, somehow daring me to ignore the challenge they presented. They remain there to this day, though their contents have now been carefully indexed and sorted.

The years flew by. Leicester was almost five years dead. On Tuesday, 15 February, 2011, David Howard emailed me to the following effect:

To:Jack Ross
Subject:Leicester's work

Dear Jack,

So, with Leicester well buried, we need to honour our responsibilities to his work and his memory. I spent four months examining and cross-checking his papers. You have the two box files that I extracted from the four large cartons I packed then freighted down from the Christchurch flat that was his final domestic address. Clearly, nothing outside of these two box files has Leicester's blessing to be republished. But no one is likely to want the lot. It seems to me that we have these options:

1. Use your blog and library website skills to put the lot on-line (Peter Simpson's Smithyman is a glorious model).
2. Use the approach of (1) but jointly select from the two box files so that 100 odd pages are available to all and sundry.
3. Approach Titus Books as Leicester's executors with the proposal of a Selected Poems.

Let's get one of the above underway.

love, David

To which I replied the next day:

Well, I agree, David - it's just a question of when and who.

Perhaps the best thing would be to set up a website initially with scans of some of his work up on it, and then consider whether a selected poems is really needed. How much of an audience is there for his work?

I have the two boxfiles at present, but am quite happy to surrender them to you if you want to get underway with the project.

I guess what occurs to me is to annex some free space online at blogspot or some such address, and put up some jpg. scans of the individual pages of (say) Heteropholis together with transcripts of the text. If we were both joint site editors, we could both work on building up the site gradually. Do you have a scanner? Maybe we don't need scans of all the pages, but just the ones with illustrations?

It'd take quite some while to do, though, and I fear I'm a little snowed-under at present at work - not to mention aspiring to get some of my own work done at some stage ...

best, jack

David replied enthusiastically, and so I set to work.

I do have some experience building such sites - ever since mid-2006, in fact, when I first got the bug, I've been running a series of experiments in just how many permutations you can run on the free web-space of a standardised blogging site.

I've used them to index literary magazines (a brief index) and poetry archives (The Aotearoa NZ Poetry Sound Archive); I've used them to put up entire novels (Nights with Giordano Bruno) and poetry collections (Papyri); I maintain one for each of the courses I teach; I have one for my Masters thesis and one for my Doctoral dissertation. Let's say that they hold few fears for me.

But I think if I'd known just how complicated and time-consuming it would be to put up an entire critical edition of a fairly prolific poet's collected works online, I might have hesitated before agreeing to David's proposition.

Let's start with a few statistics. In his lifetime, Leicester self-published 19 poetry books or pamphlets, with lengths varying from 117 pages to 10 pages (12 in A4 format and 7 as A5-sized chapbooks). This was in addition to two commercially produced books, A Safe House for a Man (2000) and Five Anzac Liturgies (2003), both published by Polygraphia Ltd. If you add together the contents of those 19 books, that makes 913 pages of material to scan and transcribe.

Besides that, one of the more exciting parts of our whole Leicester project has been the discovery, among his papers, of four hitherto-unpublished works: Koroneho, the God Poems, the Galapagos Tracts, and Message from a Lightboard. Extracts from the first and third of these appeared in brief magazine during his lifetime, but the God Poems – a long, tragic family saga – was entirely unknown to me. So was Message from a Lightboard, a selection of his short poems to date compiled and submitted to publishers in 1996. Together they come to another 303 pages.

As well as these longer works, there are 746 shorter poems and sequences included in the two boxfiles marked (by Leicester) “Collected Poems.” On top of those, I've discovered another 36 uncollected poems among the computer files left on his hard disc (Leicester had a curious habit of saving each individual poem, and every page of a longer work, as a separate word file: this means that there are literally thousands of files to trawl through before one can hope to reach the end of his oeuvre. I don't think that I've missed anything, but – to be honest – you can never really be sure).

So let's say well over 2,000 pages of poetry, with a few little additions here and there in the form of Christmas letters and miscellaneous pamphlets.

I think it's fairly obvious that, while all that work needs to be indexed and recorded, not all of it actually needs to go up online. What I've done, then, is to put up in full, with facsimiles of each page and transcriptions of the text, the contents of each of the 19 books. Because of their – in my own critical opinion – exceptional literary quality and personal interest, I've done the same with the four posthumous works, though there I've had to be more daring in my editorial choices, given the lack of a single indisputable authorised text for each of them (some are more complex than others in this respect).

By contrast, I’ve put up only what seems to me a representative selection from the rest of the “Collected Poems.”[2] Not all of them (I feel) merit reproduction, and deliberately publishing sub-standard material can hardly be seen to be in the best interests of a writer who's no longer here to edit and select from his own work.

Those 746 poems and sequences comprise 957 pages of text. Of those, I’ve chosen 193 (253 pages) to go online – roughly a quarter of the whole archive. I’ve also put up 24 of the 36 uncollected poems I found among his files. It’s perhaps worth noting here that quite a large number (59, to be exact) of the remaining poems are included in one or other of the books issued during Leicester’s lifetime – not to mention the seven included in this book. This brings up the total online to well over a third, 258, of the total 746.

All of this manuscript material, without exception, will eventually be donated to a permanent library collection, but in the meantime you can rest assured that the website provides a complete online list of everything included in his files.

Which brings me to the precise nature of this once-and-for-all, as-critically-rigorous-as-I-can-reasonably-make-it, online edition of Leicester's works. I decided at any early stage that, while it would be perfectly feasible to reprint each book as a single lengthy computer page, that that would result in a rather unwieldy artefact. I therefore determined to set up two parallel sites:

1. Leicester Kyle [http://leicesterkyle.blogspot.com], for indexing, critical apparatus and secondary materials: chronology, bibliography, galleries of images;
2. Leicester Kyle Texts [http://leicesterkyle1.blogspot.com], for accurate, readable texts of each work.

That seems to have worked quite well. The distinction between primary and secondary materials – works by and about an author – is a familiar one, and given the hyperlinks which connect every part of each site to every other part, a reader can easily use both sites at the same time without even noticing the different headings.

The two sites went live on July 4th, 2011, the fifth anniversary of Leicester's death. My work on them will remain ongoing, but I'm hoping to have them reasonably complete by the date this book is issued, in early 2014.

As well as that, the Leicester Kyle Literary Estate has so far published one volume of literary remains, an edition of Koroneho, his epic poem about William Colenso, in partnership with Ian St. George of the Colenso Society. Ian has since issued another book of reprints of some of Leicester’s early botanical essays (The Orchids of New Zealand. 1956-1957. Historical Series 19. Wellington: New Zealand Native Orchid Group, 2012).

Mind you, I don't think that I would have bothered with any of this if it hadn't been for my firm conviction that Leicester's work as a poet and crusading ecologist is still timely, and merits a far wider audience than it's hitherto had.

Whether I'm correct about that is, I suppose, for posterity to say.


3. The Millerton Sequences

Turning to the contents of the book you now hold in your hand, I should explain that I believe these six poetry sequences, previously uncollected, represent some of the very best work from the second half of Leicester Kyle’s writing career: the Millerton period, dating roughly from his departure from Auckland in April 1998, after the death of his first wife Miriel, to his own death in Christchurch Hospital in July 2006.

Winnowing them out from the numerous short poems written over the same time-span also seemed the best way to do justice to his wide range of interests and subject-matter. We begin here with a short sequence grounded in Leicester’s expert professional knowledge of Botany (“Five Flowers at Millerton Mine”); move on to “Picnic In The Mangatini,” which is probably as close as Leicester ever got to a straightforward set of “nature” poems; thence to a meditative evocation of place (“Rain”); then to a work of ecological protest against the proposed strip-mining of the Millerton plateau (“Death of a Landscape”); then a searching personal confession, written towards the very end of his life (“The Catheter Club”); and lastly to “Rain Poems,” which, in aggregate, sound like a bittersweet farewell to the West Coast and its weather.

As an entry-point to the collection, I’ve included the poem “One Hundred Steps to Millerton Mine,” written shortly after his return to the Coast. The “Hundred Steps” are a crucial part of the Millerton landscape, leading to the bathhouse used by the Miners after their long shifts underground. There’s also an official list there of those who lost their lives in this endeavour, commemorated by Leicester in another of these early poems from his new home, “An Incomplete List” (dated 3/6/98).

Finally, as a coda, I’ve put in the text of the last of his annual Christmas books, the delightful story of the dog Red, and how he managed to find acceptance in the local community.

The texts have been copied from Leicester’s original computer files, with minimal adjustment and alteration. The fonts, sizing and accidentals are all his. The one exception to this is “Death of a Landscape.” In this case I’ve chosen to present the original handwritten manuscript (dated February 2004) in facsimile form, with the – presumably later – print version (dated March 2004) immediately afterwards. It seemed dangerous to assume that either of these texts was intended to supersede the other entirely, so this seemed the most convenient way for the reader to sample their continuities and divergences.[3]

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Thanks to my fellow-executor David Howard, for prompting this project in the first place, and for contributing the beautiful sequence of poems, “Instead Of, In Memory: Reverend Leicester Kyle (1937-2006)” to the book; thanks, too, to my wife Bronwyn Lloyd for her encouragement and advice at all stages of the process – and the Design team at Titus Books, Brett Cross and Ellen Portch, without whom none of this would have been possible.

Chronology

• 1937 – (30 October) Leicester Hugo Kyle is born in Christchurch.


• 1956 – (August-February 1957) Leicester contributes seven articles on “The Orchids of New Zealand” to the New Zealand Gardener.


• c. 1975 – Leicester self-publishes The Abbot and the Rock, a set of short stories (32 pp.); I Got Me Flowers: Letters to a Psychiatrist, a novella (54 pp.); Deosa Bay: A Pastoral, another novella (47 pp.); and The Visitation: An Account of the Last Diocesan Visitation of John Mowbray, Bishop of Calcutta; Largely Compiled from His Journal and His Letters, the last in this series of early novellas (68 pp.)


• 1995 – Leicester takes early retirement from the Anglican church, and moves with his wife Miriel into Flat 8/1 Ruapehu St., Mt. Eden.


• 1997 – (July) Koroneho, Leicester's long Zukofskyan poem about William Colenso, begins to appear in Alan Loney's journal A Brief Description of the Whole World.


• 1997 – (November) Leicester edits Spin 29.


• 1998 – (29 March) Death of Miriel Kyle from melanoma.


• 1998 – (June) Leicester, now managing editor of Spin, leaves Auckland for the upper West Coast of the South Island, having bought a house (sight unseen) at No. 404 Calliope Rd., Millerton – in the hills above Granity.


• 2000 – (21 July) Jack Ross launches A Safe House for a Man, published by Calum Gilmour of Polygraphia Press (which includes the poetic sequence “Threnos”, a moving account of Miriel's last days), at Takapuna Public Library.


• 2000 – (November) Leicester resigns as managing editor of Spin, after editing issue 38.


• 2001 – (July) The Millerton and Plateaux Protection Society [MAPPS] publishes The Great Buller Coal Plateaux: A Sequence of Poems – an ecological manifesto in poetic form.


• 2003 – Calum Gilmour of Polygraphia Press publishes Five Anzac Liturgies, with drawings by Philip Trusttum.


• 2004 – Leicester finalises the text of Miller Creek, with coloured sketches by Joel Bolton.


• 2005 – (May) Leicester publishes "Peninsula Days: A Memoir of Joanna Paul," in brief 32 (2005): 61-64 (edited by Jack Ross).


• 2005 – (23 October) Leicester marries his second wife Carol at their home in Millerton.


• 2006 – (March) Leicester publishes "A Letter from Buller," in brief 33 (2006): 44-45 (edited by Scott Hamilton).


• 2006 – (4 July) Leicester dies of cancer in Christchurch hospital.


• 2011 – (4 July) Launch of Leicester Kyle website.


• 2011 – (3 November) First posthumous book publication: Koroneho: Joyful News Out Of The New Found World, edited with a Introduction by Jack Ross and a preface by Ian St George.


• 2012 – (12 December) Second posthumous book publication: The Orchids of New Zealand, compiled by Ian St George, with a chronology by Jack Ross.

 

Select Bibliography

Poetry Books & Pamphlets:

1. Koroneho: Joyful News out of the New Found World (1996-2001). In A Brief Description of the Whole World 6 (July 1997): 10-19 / 7 (September 1997): 35-40 / 8 (December 1997): 62-67 / 9 (April 1998): 49-54.
   • Koroneho. 1st book publication. ISBN 978-0-9876604-0-4. Auckland: The Leicester Kyle Literary Estate / Wellington: The Colenso Society, November 2011.
2. Options. Drawings by Jeffrey Harris. ISBN 0-473-04111-1. Mt Eden: Heteropholis Press, November 1996 / July 1997.
3. State Houses. Mt Eden: Heteropholis Press, June 1997.
4. A Voyge to New Zealand: the Log of Joseph Sowry, Translated and Made Better. Mt Eden: Heteropholis Press, 1997.
5. Heteropholis. Mt Eden: Heteropholis Press, 1998.
6. A Machinery for Pain. ISBN 0-473-05734-4. Millerton: Heteropholis Press, January 1999.
7. A Safe House for a Man. Millerton: Heteropholis Press, 2000.
   • A Safe House for a Man. 2nd ed. ISBN 0-9582121-5-5. Auckland: Polygraphia Press, July 2000.
8. Five Anzac Liturgies. Millerton, Buller, 2000.
   • Five Anzac Liturgies. 2nd ed. Drawings by Philip Trusttum. ISBN 1-877332-08-9. Auckland: Polygraphia Press, 2003.
9. A Christmas Book. Millerton, Buller, December 2000.
10. The Great Buller Coal Plateaux: A Sequence of Poems. ISBN 0-473-07746-9. P.O. Box 367, Westport: MAPPS [The Millerton and Plateaux Protection Society], July 2001.
11. King of Bliss. Millerton, Buller, May 2002.
12. A Wedding in Tintown. Millerton, Buller, July 2002.
13. Things to Do with Kerosene. ISBN 0-473-08963-7. Westport: Heteropholis Press, October 2002.
14. Dun Huang Aesthetic Dance. Millerton, Buller, November 2002.
15. 8 Great O’s. Millerton, Buller, 2003.
16. Panic Poems. ISBN 0-476-00084-X. Westport: Heteropholis Press, December 2003.
17. Living at a Bad Address. Millerton, December 2004.
18. Miller Creek. Sketches by Joel Bolton. Westport: Heteropholis Press, 2004.
19. Anogramma. ISBN 0-476-01604-5. Millerton: Heteropholis Press, August 2005.
20. Breaker: A Progress of the Sea. Illustrations by John Crawford. ISBN 0-473-10237-4. Westport: Heteropholis Press, September 2005.
21. Red Dog / Brown. Cover Illustrations by Jim Conolly & Jocelyn Maughan. Millerton, Buller, Christmas 2005.

Prose Books & Pamphlets:

1. The Orchids of New Zealand. 1956-1957. Compiled by Ian St George. ISSN 0114-5568. Historical Series, No. 19. Wellington: New Zealand Native Orchid Group, 2012.
2. The Abbot and the Rock (c.1975)
3. I Got Me Flowers: Letters to a Psychiatrist (c. 1975)
4. Deosa Bay: A Pastoral (c.1975)
5. The Visitation: An Account of the Last Diocesan Visitation of John Mowbray, Bishop of Calcutta; Largely Compiled from His Journal and His Letters (c.1975)

Edited:

1. Spin 29 (Summer 1997), ed. Leicester Kyle (Auckland).
2. Spin 32 (November 1998), ed. Leicester Kyle (Millerton, Buller).
3. Spin 35 (November 1999), ed. Leicester Kyle (Millerton, Buller).
4. Spin 38 (November 2000), ed. Leicester Kyle (Millerton, Buller).

Online:

1. Leicester Kyle:
   An Index to the Collected Poetry Books of Leicester Hugo Kyle (1937-2006)
   [http://leicesterkyle.blogspot.com/]
2. Leicester Kyle Texts:
   The Collected Poetry Books of Leicester Hugo Kyle (1937-2006)
   [http://leicesterkyle1.blogspot.com/]

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Notes:

1. The substance of this introduction was given as a paper “Digitising Leicester Kyle: the Dilemmas of a Literary Executor” at Short Takes on Long Poems: A Trans Tasman Symposium at the University of Auckland (29-30 March 2012). The original text can be read at: http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/features/short-takes/symposium-ross.asp.

2. For a comprehensive list, go to http://mairangibay.blogspot.co.nz/2013/01/leicester-kyle-selected-shorter-poems.html.

3. A complete transcript of the handwritten version of the poem is available on the Leicester Kyle Texts website at: http://leicesterkyle1.blogspot.co.nz/2012/01/five-millerton-sequences.html.

(13/3/12-23/11/13)

Leicester Kyle. The Millerton Sequences. Ed. Jack Ross. Poem by David Howard. ISBN 978-0-473-18880-1. 140 pp. (Pokeno, Auckland: Atuanui Press, 2014): 8-29.
[Available at: Atuanui Press (30/4/15)].

[4557 wds]


The Millerton Sequences (2014)


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