Otago University Press

• Celebrates New Zealand’s largest city with an exciting and exuberant issue of art, photography, cultural commentary, essays, stories, reviews and poems.
• Includes work by writers from all over the country.
• Published to coincide with the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival 2013.

The fanfare of Auckland celebration and inspiration includes:

Seresin Estate and Otago University Press are delighted to announce the winner of the 2013 Seresin Landfall Residency.

The fifth recipient of the Seresin Landfall Residency is writer Maxine Alterio, who plans to use the Residency to work on her second collection of short stories Stories Bodies Tell which explores ‘the physical betrayal of bodies, the ramifications of something lost, and the emotional consequences that arise, not just for the protagonists, but also for those connected to them.’ The title story has already anthologised in Best New Zealand Fiction 3 edited by Fiona Kidman (Random House, 2006).

On the death of a daughter

Nowadays often he finds himself down at the river
with fishing rods and home-made lures
that dance as colour-drenched and flamboyant
as an opera diva's earrings
though the gear, and the catch (if any) aren't the point.

He goes because he has to.
Because sometimes a twig floats by,
or a bird jags past,
or a dragonfly balances
on thin air.

And it's ―

    he cannot finish what it is.

Yet in this still room
we feel the river move on and on
as if there were comfort
in something pushing forward from its source,
always forward,
light gleaming on its surface instant after instant,
each sudden vision ― leaf, water-beetle, seed-pod ―
a match that is struck against a deep-running dark.
 

by Emma Neale from The Truth Garden (published July 2012)
Published by Otago University Press.
ISBN 9781877578250

Poem used with the permission of the author.
Find Emma Neale online.

Print this poem for your pocket (opens to PDF)