Michele Leggott – författare

In her latest collection, Michele Leggott speaks to the art and writings of nineteenth-century New Zealand painter Emily Cumming Harris. Face to the Sky tells stories of love and loss from two woman in the shadow the same mountain, more than a century apart.‘Voices sing from the archive: a choir of breakers on a North Taranaki beach. Two women born more than a hundred years apart tell stories of love and loss in the shadow of the mountain that is always there. One of them becomes a painter of botanically accurate native flora, and writes all her life. The other, now without sight, lives in a world of sounds caught into expanding webs of memory. She listens for the other, tracing the delicate shapes of what she cannot see, taking her cue from the words of others. She listens and travels, picking up connections over time and place. Mothers and fathers come and go, adding their voices to the tumult on the beach, the shadow of the mountain, the hills above Nelson where the first woman comes to rest. The second, living between two small volcanos in a northern city, waits for a miracle that might cure the lymphoma that has been tracking her days. Through it all, the familiar phrases of the weather forecast sound their ever-hopeful, ever-changing predictions.’— Michele Leggott

In 2008 Michele Leggott wrote a poem a week to record her term as the inaugural New Zealand Poet Laureate. In her collection of poems Mirabile Dictu (amazing to say), she relates the wonders of those 12 months, which took her to Matahiwi Marae in Hawke’s Bay to receive her brilliant sky-blue, specially carved tokotoko, Te Kikorangi; through a time of mourning for and celebration of former poet laureate Hone Tuwhare; to Florence, across a ‘poetic bridge’; and to Wellington ‘hand to hand’ with four other laureates. With her is Te Kikorangi as guide and companion – ‘almost as good as the blue from Kapiti / we eat when the good times roll’. Leggott also delves back into the past, layering poems of today with poems of then – and finds, among others, Isabella – growing up in a colonial town, ‘named for a grandmother over the sea’. The poems in Mirabile Dictu are gifts; they are lush and supple; they glory in language; they go ‘looking for a good time’ and find rose cuttings, great-aunts, an elephant, several feasts, adorations and assumptions – ‘the breathing world’. Through the poems Leggott explores languages within languages, hearing and seeing, coming and going, the porousness of experience and its representations. In this collection she is a daily traveller, crafter of words and maker of fire.

I stood in the dark with many others, some of them close enough to touch, some further away. One by one they turned, light fell on faces that were at once strange and familiar, and they began to speak or sing. Soon the riot of their voices was everywhere, the plane of memory tilted at 36,000 feet, fractals caught in the blink of an eye, the clearing of a throat. Heart us invisibly they said, and I saw the land waiting to invent its people. We walk into the clearing, we wait for light to saturate the eye, we remember. Michele Leggott’s new book of poetry follows on from her 2009 collection, Mirabile Dictu, in its exploration of light and of gathering dark. Leggott is a poet of the lilting, shining moment and the sections here follow some of her own moments and movements, experiments and experiences – to Devonport, to Australia, to the north – as well as reverberating with the stories and histories of others. The book’s final two sections take this exploration of character and narrative further as in one we see off a soldier – shadowed by Leggott – to the First World War; and in the other – set in an earlier, unspecified time charted for us by telegraphic weather reports – a family tragedy unfolds, until a body is finally brought home for burial. With her ‘dear shapes gone to sound’, Leggott’s textured poem-scapes are more aurally charged than ever, like a ‘piano in a dark room that is / quite what it is like and never the same’. A splendid, immersive collection of poetry, Heartland is also, Leggott says, ‘a destination and a song, a shadow and a single word with two chambers’.