Congratulations, Michele Leggott!

Michele Leggott has been named Poet Laureate of New Zealand. I congratulate her, and I congratulate New Zealand on its great taste in literature!

Here is the Wikipedia entry on Ms. Leggott...it's rather sketchy as the poet has published several wonderful books (both poetry and literary criticism) since then, and one(I read online) about the tragic experience of losing her eyesight.

I have been trying to acquire her book on Zukofksy's Flowers for several years to no avail. It's VERY scarce and coveted by those who possess it! I saw Salt reissued one of the earlier volumes which can now be had easily and at a great price. They've done that a number of times for seminal experimental poetry volumes that have vanished. Thank you, Salt Press!

from WIKI...

"Michele Leggott, poet and literary scholar, was born in Stratford, New Zealand, in 1956. She received her secondary education at New Plymouth Girls High School, before attending the University of Canterbury where she completed an MA in English in 1979. She then moved to Canada to do a PhD at the University of British Columbia. Her dissertation was on the American poet Louis Zukofsky and was published in America as Reading Zukovsky’s “80 Flowers” (1989).

Leggott began publishing her poetry around 1980. She published Sound Pitch Considered Forms with two Canadian poets in 1984. In 1985 she returned to New Zealand and took up a lectureship at the University of Auckland. She produced her first book of poems, Like This?, in 1988, winning the International PEN First Book of Poetry award. In 1991 she published Swimmers, Dancers, with a domestic focus, and in 1995 she won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry with DIA. On December 4th, 2007, she was named New Zealand Poet Laureate for 2007/2008.

Her work has appeared in the Best New Zealand Poems series in 2002 and 2005."

Here's a poem by Michele I found online...the only American poet she reminds me of (a little) is Sheila Murphy...who is my favorite "quick fix" when I'm down on poetry...I find a new Shemur poem online and the feeling instantly turns around...here's Leggott...okay the third stanza does go a little Barbara Guest or is that Kathleen Fraser? It is luscious...this is a an amazing poem...she does synaesthetic child sense memory better than Dylan Thomas ever did! And I don't think that's something I would say of any other living poet...


    hello and goodbye


there is a path that climbs
out of sleep with clear notes
on five fingers
blown across sweet grassy
plains there is no holding
them they move like the wind
over your sleeping face
which knows where it has been
and why it must remember
the path that climbs
out of sleep and into the green
heartstring morning


vibrato the bell in the throat
the ball in the whistle when it’s low
and your breath is the slow bounce
of ropes that braid and twist
and hold up the floating planet
as if by magic
tremolo a fibrillation of the air
and its concertos better even
than a neighbour deciding between
harpsichord and salt fish
running through his fingers
and over the dark garden to where
we’re walking along
looking for the sound
of a word so deep in theft
its adventures have hardly begun


delirium lady
in Illyria with a lily he calls
Elysium the newly alighted angel’s
lineal poise lirio what would you
on her silver tomb lirica
the white notebook up against
the red wall the black words
going on into the light
lady I am negative wingspan
in Illyria and he is
Elysium a lily a lyric
a white delirium


I saw you, you were
a minim wraith of silver light
the day moon a figure
on the road the blue moon
resurrected sister lucy gone
to heaven in her silver boat
grass ghosts beginning to sing
and you on the spiral road


when I walk sea waves
as I turn glass mallets
and turn again wind chimes
sleeping with the last track
climbing the stairs in the dark


I wait and wait
and the weight of waiting
is impossible cicadas shrill
above the cricket boys
over the daughter chorus
that pearly necklace
I’m looking for in all the stations
on the way to Ocean City
Go with Eros it’s plain as day
a mob of arboreal lorikeets
another kind of whistle
for the chorus
chiasmos comes and goes
thiasos is my east
my new looking my ghost
along the spiral road


looking up
from the dark garden
I see the vision of the boat
sailing in the sky
Fra Angelico’s room and nobody
left behind no one missing
out on its mother of pearl ceilings
I cannot bear the pain
liths of orange what does it mean?
liths of orange roughy on
a big white plate
life and limb kith and kin
lift us into heaven tonight


forgetting remembering
Konai’s grandiflora words
a bowl of cool air anticipating
the sun in its pisces pool climbing
the walls and the towers
waiting for the words
the silver mirror spirals
here now always
the lovers in the fountain
oblivious beginning
their two fish kiss
and sister lucy in her boat
skimming up the hill





First published in The Capillano Review 2.46 (Feb 2006).