On July 25, former Flash Frontier editor Gail Ingram launched her third poetry collection. We had a long chat with her about the book, and we are pleased to share a couple excerpts and some remarks from Erik Kennedy’s launch speech as well.
Flash Frontier: Your new book takes as a starting point your relationship with our natural world. Can you tell us a bit more about this — your background and interest in flora near your home?
Gail Ingram: My title, anthology (n.) a collection of flowers, plays on the etymology of the word ‘anthology’ from the Greek ‘anthos’ meaning flower and ‘logia’ meaning ‘collection’. My daughter came up with the brilliant idea for the title when I was brainstorming names for the book that had been inspired by the native flowers I’d photographed from the sides of tramping tracks all over the South Island – thank you, Rata! And Rata’s name, of course, comes from the gorgeous South Island Christmas tree ‘Rātā’, Metrosideros umbellata. But my fascination in the delicate understated beauty of our native flora goes beyond naming my daughter. I discovered tramping when I was 14, I met my birth mum Fern in my 20s, did my big OE away from the whenua I loved; I was deciding who I was: short, wild, threatened. Our flowers are tiny in comparison to the often showy non-native flowers, they might only be millimetres wide, some tiny creamy buds among tiny leaves on a tangled bush by an urban river, or hidden in the moss next to a rotting log in the bush, a few centimetres high, the delicate limy petals of one of our 120 odd species of orchid! But really, I don’t know why I love them, this joy. It’s a mystery, like the moment you find meaning in a great poem or story – how everything clicks into place.
FF: The pieces you’ve shared with us (below) are specifically about mikimiki, a coprosma bush, and the rosy sundew. Take us to the moment you engage with these particular plants. What can you recall about the day – and how does that work its way onto the page, even indirectly?
GI: The first one – ‘Dr C Crassifolia’ – I remember vividly. My husband and I were trying to reconnect after several really hard years of raising family and earthquakes. Emily Perkins hits on some of what I was going through in Lioness; there’s this line where the main character suddenly sees the anger that middle-aged women everywhere are carrying. I was one of those women she sees, working through the fury of having played roles society expected of us – mother, wife – and I had done it willingly, but without the knowledge that time unravels, and during those years of child-raising, my husband bore the brunt; we both did. We wanted to reconnect but didn’t know how, beyond doing what we both loved – bush walking, hill walking. On this particular day, walking along the Summit Road above Governor’s Bay, we’d gotten into a vicious argument we didn’t know how to work through, until I spotted this crazy tangled bush, glowing gold-green in the gold grass of the afternoon sun, looking out across the Lyttelton Harbour to the heads. We both stopped in our tracks, pulled up by the view. Somehow the pointless argument dissipated. The bush, being in this stunning place, worked its magic.
In ‘Alien in daylight’ I use the rosy sundew as a metaphor for the ‘corona’ virus, how brutal it is catching little insects to eat alive, as Covid is, sneaking into our bodies, choking its victims. But also, when I saw these little beauties on the side of the track, violent red against the dark peaty swamp, how stunning they were, how clever, how intricately connected to the ecosystem. And you’ll remember perhaps the same response when we first saw pictures of the microscopic Covid virus on our screens, how beautiful, we thought, this tiny thing of wonder and destruction. And how it has changed our world.
FF: The senses are alive in this kind of writing. How important is it for you that you are true to the real world when you use sensory elements in creative nonfiction, or how much is elevated by the ‘creative’ aspects?
GI: The senses are alive, yes, this is everything! I try to be as true to the original moment of inspiration as I can in my writing. I guess this is why you might call a lot of poetry ‘creative nonfiction’ with the emphasis on ‘nonfiction’. I’m trying to recreate that moment in the world where I learned or felt something new. I want to write it down because the writing makes sense of it and is actually where the real learning occurs, bringing what I experience into consciousness. I know I’ve got it right when what I have on the page fits the feeling and imagery of my memory of the experience. I use all the techniques I have to describe this feeling. I try to use specific sensual and vivid language, and metaphor. I’m a kinaesthetic learner so I use a lot of touch words as that is the way I will have encoded that memory I’m describing.
The way then that this ‘nonfiction’ becomes ‘creative’ is through the creative process. I don’t plan my writing but I will give it constraints. Like, this poem will be in the shape of a tree, or this poem will be told from the point of view of the plant. Sometimes the constraint can come from the image that appears in my mind. For example, one of my poems in anthology was of an ecologist I know, looking down on a plant. I thought, okay so this poem is going to be told from the plant looking up at the ecologist and wondering what that man thinks of me! Sometimes, I create a constraint to force myself to use more original language. So, I’ll say ‘I’m not going to use any adjectives in this poem’, or ‘this is a metaphor for Covid so I’ll use the language of illness’.
FF: Your reading of plants takes on a look at the past and a look at the future. Can you comment on this?
GI: If we come back to ‘Dr C Crassifolia’, the piece is ostensibly about nature helping to heal the personal wounds of a marriage, but also the subtext is how we can’t live without nature at all. And to take that a step further and look into the future, the place where I took the photo of C. crassifolia that inspired the poem was decimated by the Christchurch fires in the summer of 2023, the second major Port Hills fire in three years. My book is a love story for these plants, but it’s also a plea – look at these beauties, go find them, love them, advocate for them, look after them.
Hopefully my book works like this on a larger scale too. It’s divided into five sections – ‘roots’, ‘breathing light’, ‘flowering’, ‘going to seed’, ‘regeneration’. In the first section ‘roots’, one of the poems is about how our plants travelled from Gondwanaland to our backyards today, highlighting the long arm of our natural history. One poem tells the immigration of a plant’s story connected to Māori immigration and then colonisation. Other poems explore personal history. The different histories – natural, cultural, social and personal – build to a climax of destruction and depression in the section ‘going to seed’, and culminate in a seductive-rage poem where ‘Mother Nature’ answers back to all we have done with her fires and floods. The last section looks to regeneration, which we as humans can choose to be part of or not. I worried a little in what many are calling the end-times of capitalism that my last section is too hopeful, not representative of the bleakness of our times. When I look at the places of Te Wai Pounamu I love, I see colonialism and capitalism everywhere in the willows that line the high-country rivers, the clear-felling of hedges on dairy farms on the Canterbury Plains, containers stacked five-high blocking the view of the hills on my river walk. But I’ve always believed stories must end with some hope, or what is the point? As I write, there are volunteers out on the Port Hills, dedicated to replanting the burnt area above Governor’s Bay with fire-resistant New Zealand natives.
FF: How does your work as a poet influence the way you write the world? Can you write it any other way, or is poetry the best way to approach with a lens on reality, and a feeling for creativity?
GI: I like to tell stories through the lens of poetry. I love story – the way it moves, builds, resolves – it’s in my DNA. But I find when I write prose, it so easily becomes wooden. I’m pulled back into the old-fashioned me reading Ladybird books and the draw of the traditional narrative.
I’ve discovered over many years the best way for me to tell it fresh is through the structures and play of poetry. Poetry (prose poetry, flash-fiction, flash nonfiction included) focuses on the detail and imagery, the flower of the small moment, which it turns out is the epitome of story. When I focus small – finding those tiny treasures in their smells and subtle colouring that can only belong to that place and that time – then my words can sing. Afterwards, I might use the tricks of narrative to order my poems on the page and I definitely use narrative devices in arranging my collections.
I have to add, going back to that seven-year-old reading those Ladybird books, I was not only captivated by the story, I’d stare for hours at the illustrations – oh that rose-velvet gown of Cinderella’s I longed to touch! So perhaps I was a poet all along.
There she is, doodling flowers down the side of the page again.
Excerpts from a new collection
Wahu, Rosy Sundew, Drosera spatulate, an eye-catching rosette of spoon-shape leaves on black peat.
photograph: Thousand Acres Plateau, Kahurangi National Park
Alien in daylight
Corona-like, with their sun-ray leaves, miniature spoons catching droplets – lethal for tiny lives in other worlds. Hot as a fever in summer, like the vermillion flush of your cheeks. Time to slip off the singlet under your shirt, rub glaucous sun-cream along your arms. As you step off the path across the black mud, you must avoid stabbing your thin skin on the twisted branches of small bushes – branches with ill ends, unfailingly sharp, like rotted teeth. Why your interest in these alien creatures beneath you? Your camera will drop from your hand. A soft thud on the cushion uniflorous. You will stop again. Your focus might be better for this one. The light not as bright. Here they are a cluster of red burrs at your feet, crazy-waving arms from spatula-suns on your screen, oozing sweet secretions to choke their victims, slowly. I’ll tell you something: I like their sly beauty, secret viciousness, their ability to hide in full sight.
Mikimiki, Twiggy Coprosma, Coprosma crassifolia, a twiggy character with tiny round leaves and ruby berries
photograph: Heathcote Valley, Ōtautahi
Dr C Crassifolia, marriage counsellor
My husband and I would have to work hard at discovering you again. Because, even if we did go back, we wouldn’t be trying to find ways of opening hurt spaces so the other would listen. Our agitation would not be as palpable.
It was your oddity that attracted us, each in our own fug. How you sprang like a hatter from a uniform field, making us pause. Though it wasn’t till later we realized you had a golden aura, same as the grass.
Your back was turned. You didn’t seem to mind that we were there. We closed our mouths, saw how you held yourself like an angel about to lift, and there was an exuberance in the way you wore your knotty hair, swept upwards at the back in the shape of wings.
Your outlook won us over – as it had always done. You pointed out the places we’d been, beyond the end of the peninsula to the Pacific, to the places we would return. You made us notice how spectacular the clouds were, mimicking the long form of the land, and above the patches of blue, the streams of altostratus pouring forth from the sky. You knew the constancy in movement and change. You soaked it up, as we were learning to.
It occurred to us how tough you had to be, out in the open on the tops, bearing the ferocity of southerly blasts, the glare of the sun, the long, long periods of dry.
From Erik Kennedy’s launch speech
‘Superb in Its Emerald Woolly-Jersey Fronds’
I will start simply and directly by saying that this book is a tour-de-force of poetic ambition, applied botanical knowledge, and imaginative symbology. Gail has combed seemingly every inch of soil in the South Island – every hillside and wetland and verge and underside of a boulder – in her search for plant specimens to press between the waxed paper of her mind. She has thoroughly investigated, taxonomised, and made a poetic whakapapa for every local living thing that eats sunlight and has a root system. There is genuine mastery here.
The etymology of anthology is, indeed, a collection of flowers. But this book is a mere ‘collection of flowers’ in the way that a tragedy is just a ‘goat song’. (Which is the literal etymology of that word.) No, much of the important work that anthology (n.) does is in the realm of storytelling, cultural criticism, and love lyric. The book’s gorgeous layout and profusion of illustrations make you think of herbariums and planting calendars, but the second you start reading you get sucked into Gail’s world of psychodrama and intrigue. anthology (n.) is garden in the front and party in the back. It is more daring than an unwitting reader will expect.
Here, in anthology (n.), we walk through the landscape with a main character called (fittingly) Flora as our guide. We move in physical, temporal, and emotional dimensions.
We travel across the motu from the high country to the estuaries, from ‘our network of roads [that] might trace the tracks of moa’ (‘Awamoa’) to the poet’s own home, which is described room by room in the intimate and revealing poem ‘Flora has a house’. Territory is something to be cherished, guarded, as in ‘Okaoka, protecting the patch’, in which the horrifyingly venomous tree nettle Urtica ferox ‘takes out’ ‘two dogs / a circus elephant / an irate husband’ with its ‘jagged stinging leaves’.
History is freely mined for its mixture of gems and useful ores. ‘Lichen, a successful coloniser in hostile environments’ and ‘A book of beasts for the twentieth century (according to a sheep)’, for example, take us from the beginnings of post-1840 changes in land use to the dominance of industrial agriculture. Personal history, too, is well represented, as a survey of some titles shows: ‘Family holiday in the seventies’, ‘Crowded House play “Everywhere You Go”: The Church, Clapham, 1988’, ‘Unemployed at 50’, ‘From the father who passed the daughter in ICU’. And bear in mind that all along these poems are working flowers into their structures in significant and surprising ways. There is always variety, but there is also reiteration, return. It’s no mean feat.
To have conceived of a book like this is natural enough. All writers, when they’re giddy with thoughts of their own powers, dream up big and exciting projects. It’s like saying you’re going to learn Farsi to read Rumi in the original – it sounds great, but when you sit down to try to do it you realise that, in fact, it’s a hell of a lot of hard work. To actually pull off a book like this is hugely impressive. ‘Project books’ can get bogged down under the weight of their own aspiration. To the reader, it can feel like knowledge is being crammed in, like too many socks in a sock drawer. anthology (n.) never feels like that. Each plant was chosen because it speaks to a poetic idea, and each idea emerges from the mind of a poet who is increasingly writing with urgency and clarity.
Find the book here: http://www.pukeko-pukapuka.com/
Gail Ingram writes from the Port Hills of Ōtautahi Christchurch, and is author of three collections of poetry. Her latest collection, anthology (n.) a collection of flowers (Pūkeko Publications 2024) is part poetry, part field-guide and includes over 80 botanical photographs. Her other collections are Some Bird (Sudden Valley Press 2023) and Contents Under Pressure (Pūkeko Publications 2019). Awards include winning the Caselberg (2019) and New Zealand Poetry Society (2016) international poetry prizes. She is managing editor of NZ Poetry Society’s flagship magazine a fine line teaches at Write On School for Young Writers and holds a Master of Creative Writing (Distinction). https://www.theseventhletter.nz/