Showing posts with label Alan Loney. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alan Loney. Show all posts

Saturday, July 10, 2021

A Memorial Brass: i.m. Ted Jenner (1946-2021)



Ted Jenner and friends
[l-to-r: Hamish Dewe, Jack Ross, Ted Jenner, Brett Cross]


Edward [Ted] Jenner (1946-8 July 2021) was a friend of mine. I guess one of the things I appreciated most about Ted was his unfailing cheerfulness and unflappability even when things appeared to be going very, very wrong indeed.

Perhaps it was his long years working as a Classics lecturer in Malawi that accustomed him to sudden emergencies, or perhaps it was the hand-to-mouth nature of his life as a writer and teacher in New Zealand, but I never saw him at a loss for a wise and witty thing to say.

I had heard that he was ill, and even in hospital, but I'm sorry to say that the news of his death from cancer in the early hours of Friday morning still came as a shock. He wore his years lightly. He was one of that group of baby-boomer New Zealand poets, all born in 1946, at the close of World War II – Sam Hunt, Bill Manhire, Ian Wedde prominent among them – who've been so influential on our literature.

Much though I always enjoyed chatting to Ted – he was a marvellously learned man, a trained classicist with an expertise in Ancient Greek – I suppose it would be true to say that my only real intimate knowledge of him came through his books. The below is probably not a complete list, but it includes all the titles I myself own:



Ted Jenner: A Memorial Brass (1980)


  1. A Memorial Brass. Eastbourne, Wellington: Hawk Press, 1980.



  2. Ted Jenner: Dedications (1991)


  3. Dedications. Auckland: Omphalos Press, 1991.



  4. Ted Jenner: Love Songs of Ibykos (1997)


  5. The Love-Songs of Ibykos: 22 Fragments. Images by John Reynolds. Auckland: Holloway Press, 1997.



  6. Ted Jenner: Sappho Triptych (2007)


  7. Sappho Triptych. Auckland: Puriri Press, 2007.



  8. Ted Jenner: Writers in Residence (2009)


  9. Writers in Residence and Other Captive Fauna. Auckland: Titus Books, 2009.



  10. Ted Jenner, ed.: brief the fortieth (2010)


  11. brief 40 (July 2010). Ed. Ted Jenner. Auckland: Titus Books, 2010.



  12. Ted Jenner: The Gold Leaves (2014)


  13. The Gold Leaves (Being an Account and Translation from the Ancient Greek of the 'So-Called' Orphic Tablets). Pokeno: Atuanui Press, 2014.



  14. Bill Direen, ed.: Percutio 10: Ted Jenner Issue (2016)


  15. Complete Gold Leaves: Transcriptions of Sixteen Ancient Greek Gold Lamellae. Compiled with English Translations. Dunedin: Percutio Publications, 2016. [In Bill Direen, ed. Percutio 10: A Special Issue devoted to two projects by Classicist and poet Edward Jenner (2016).]



  16. Ted Jenner: The Arrow That Missed (2017)


  17. The Arrow that Missed. Lyttelton: Cold Hub Press, 2017.



Ted Jenner: Sappho Triptych (1980)


Looking back, I seem to have written quite a lot about Ted's work over the years:
  • There's a brief introduction to it here, on this blog.
  • Then there's my review-essay of his Writers in Residence, on the online poetics journal Ka Mate Ka Ora.
  • And, more recently, there's my review of The Arrow that Missed from Poetry NZ Yearbook 2018.

I'm not sure that there's any need to repeat all that here. Suffice it to say that for me, Ted Jenner combined the twin virtues of precise, scrupulous scholarship with an equally strong taste for experimental fiction and poetry – not that I think he saw much difference between the two genres, and, the way he wrote, there really wasn't.

I borrowed the title for this piece from his earliest book, A Memorial Brass, exquisitely printed by Alan Loney at the Hawk Press in 1980. I'd like to conclude with some more of Ted's own words, taken from the title poem:

My dear, they call us bourgeois
But it was essentially

A bourgeois thing to do –
An image of conjugal

Faith – to cross the hands over chest
And breast and stand on

The goblin pups, a monumental
Brass patent

For the bloodstream-fevers.
I remember it was cold

That May with added expense, upkeep
of allotment, and late

Spring blooms falling fierce as
Snow on the gale-lashed

Oats. Very soon a priest mumbled eight
Sacrificia patriarchae nostri

Above us. Commenting now on the
Canon of his mass, I

Like to think it was
Easy in Abraham's time –

Knowledge and fear were deliberate
Then, total, without cover; but

As for us, we lie awake
Until the sleeping's over.

My profoundest condolences to Ted's wife, Vasalua. If he were here I'm sure he could find the perfect words to thank her for making the last years of his life perhaps the happiest of all.

As for me, I'd like to say once more Ave atque Vale: Hail and farewell, to one of the finest scholars and poets I've ever known. Perhaps we'll meet again some day, when the sleeping's over.



Ted Jenner: Love Songs of Ibykos (1997)






NZ Herald obituaries:
A service to celebrate Ted's life will be held at the All Souls Chapel, Purewa, 100 St Johns Road, Meadowbank on Tuesday 13 July at 1pm. No flowers by request please but donations to Forest and Bird would be welcome.

You can link to some other tributes to Ted here.




Thursday, September 05, 2019

Tara McLeod: 8 Poems by New Zealand Poets (2019)




8 Poems by New Zealand Poets 2019
Designed by Tara McLeod (Auckland: The Pear Tree Press, 2019)

Yesterday I received my two author's copies of Tara McLeod's beautiful new chapbook 8 Poems by New Zealand Poets. It's the fourth in the series, earlier editions having appeared in 2014, 2017 and 2018:







Each book is billed as containing "8 new poems from contemporary NZ poets." It's quite a stellar list. To date the following poets have appeared in the series:

    2014:
  1. Riemke Ensing
  2. Brian Gregory
  3. David Gregory
  4. Judith Haswell
  5. David Howard
  6. Peter Olds
  7. Paul Thompson
  8. Denys Trussell

  9. 2017:
  10. Riemke Ensing
  11. Brian Gregory
  12. Judith Haswell
  13. John Mitchell
  14. Michael O’Leary
  15. Rachel Scott
  16. Paul Thompson
  17. Denys Trussell

  18. 2018:
  19. Glenn Colquhoun
  20. Riemke Ensing
  21. Brian Gregory
  22. Rachel McAlpine
  23. Daryl McLaren
  24. Karl Stead
  25. Paul Thompson
  26. Richard von Sturmer


Here's my own poem, 'The Oceanic Feeling,' from the latest volume:




And here's a list, in order, of all the poets included:

  1. Michele Leggott
  2. Elizabeth Brooke-Carr
  3. Alan Loney
  4. Michael Harlow
  5. Linda Gill
  6. Jack Ross
  7. Gregory O'Brien
  8. Paula Green
  9. Riemke Ensing


Pretty good company to keep, I'm sure you'll agree!




I guess what's most striking about the books is the inventiveness with which Tara has come up with a different design for every poem: with bold colours and variegated font choices to complement the mood of each of them.

I couldn't be happier with the Pasifika look of the title and layout of my own poem, and I'm sure all the other poets feel the same. When Tara showed me a proof of what he had in mind in his studio in Orewa, I was quite blown away. For someone as addicted as I am to handprinting and poetry posters and all those fascinating surrounds to the classic slim volume of verse, it was manna in the wilderness.

I won't disguise the fact: the books are expensive. If you live near a library with a good rare books or special collections section - and which of us doesn't? - you should be able to get your hands on a copy, though (albeit, probably, with white gloves on).

It's always a thrill to collaborate with a real artist, and it's nice to know that Tara is beginning to get the credit he deserves, with a major new book - Tara McLeod: A Typographer's Journey - on his work as a designer, printer and sculptor due out from Lesley Smith's Katsura Press later this year.



Oh, and why are there nine poets rather than eight in this particular volume? Through an act of kindness on the artist's part, actually. Elizabeth Brooke-Carr was going to be included in the 2020 volume, but the state of her health made it seem increasingly likely that she'd never live to see it.

Accordingly, Riemke Ensing offered to bow out to give space for Elizabeth in this book instead. Touched by this gesture, Tara decided to include Riemke's poem anyway - there's a note explaining the circumstances beside it.

Elizabeth Brooke-Carr died in her Dunedin home on the 3rd of September, 2019. I don't know if she was able to see her poem in print before she died, but at least the rest of us can.

Entitled 'All that remains is pressed flat,' it's a very moving account of a funeral. Was it Harold Bloom who remarked that elegy was the mode in which poets almost always succeed?