So Bronwyn and I had a great time last night at the booklaunch for Liz Morton's new collection Incident Report. Actually, I pretty much had to be there, as Liz had asked me to launch the book for her. This is the speech I gave:
I think I must have first met Liz Morton around 2013. I gather that one of my ex-school teachers had been shown some of her work, and had suggested that she come and see me at Massey Albany, where I was teaching Creative Writing at the time.
I’ve placed that first meeting then because I see that I organised an Open Day Poetry Reading in 2013, which I asked her to take part in: along with more established luminaries such as Richard von Sturmer and Steve Toussaint.
Now if you teach it for a living, you tend to see a lot of people’s poetry. And I did have non-students visit me from time to time to show me their work. I always tried to be encouraging, because I remember how kind writers such as Elizabeth Smither were to me when I first started. I also know how vulnerable you can feel on such occasions.
Some of the poems Liz showed me at that first meeting subsequently appeared in her 2017 book Wolf. They were, quite frankly, amazing. I was used to looking through bundles of poems and seeing a couple that weren’t too bad, and a few that just needed a touch here or there to work much better.
That was the precise opposite of Liz’s work. It was frighteningly good. I say “frighteningly” because there’s a dark side to Liz’s muse: she’s edgy, disturbing – terrifyingly aware of just how hard that rain’s a-gonna fall when it finally hits.
Chapeau bas, messieurs [Hats off, boys]. That’s the fantasy the little clerk in Camus’s book The Plague has about the novel he’s writing. Its first sentence has to be so good that the editor will whip off his hat and stand up in awe when he reads it. I hadn’t ever encountered that feeling before – thought it was a myth, in fact. It’s certainly a pipe-dream for Camus’s character. Not for Liz, though. Her poems were that good.
I don’t know what I said to her at that meeting. The thing I felt like saying was “For God’s sake keep writing! There are lots of us fooling around and doing the best we can, but then there are a few poets we really need – and you’re one of them.” I’m sure I wasn’t dumb enough to say that out loud, though. The last thing a young poet needs is an overdose of performance anxiety.
I’ve managed to calm down a bit since then. Liz has published three collections so far. This is her third from Otago University Press. I guess it’s an open secret now that she’s one of the finest poets of our time. In other words, I think I can now risk saying all this without putting her off her game.
And, after all, she’s wearing a lot of hats at any one time. I understand that she’s just started work on a PhD in Neuropsychology, having completed her Masters in Creative Writing from Glasgow University. Perhaps poetry is a kind of rest cure from all those other impressive accomplishments. But I’m afraid that for me it will remain the most important thing she does, simply because her poems are so insightful and strong.
I could demonstrate that by quoting from the ones in this book – it’s almost irresistible to do so, in fact – but once I started I don’t know where I could stop. Instead, perhaps I can convey a little of what I feel about her work by analogy:
There’s a scene in the 1988 film Camille Claudel – about the French sculptor, played by one of my favourite actors, the incandescent Isabelle Adjani – where Camille asks the Gallerist who’s just mounted yet another unsuccessful show of her work why on earth he bothers. “How do you know I’m any good?” she says. “Nobody else thinks so. Why do you?”
“Parce que ces sculptures m’arrachent le coeur,” he replies.
It’s a bit hard to translate that. “Because your work breaks my heart,” is probably the closest you can get to it in English. Arracher really means something more like “tear out,” though.
Camille Claudel had a pretty tough life. Her brother, the renowned poet Paul Claudel, became a pillar of the Conservative establishment. She, by contrast, went from disaster to disaster. But the little pieces of work she kept on creating – on a deliberately minuscule, anti-heroic scale - are probably more prized now than the massive public statues of her ex-lover Rodin.
Now, I don’t mean to make any direct comparison between Camille and Liz. They’re very different artists, in very different circumstances. But when people ask me why I should get so worked up about this poet’s work when one poem looks much like another to them, seen from the outside – how, in short, I can feel sure that it’s so good – I want to say “parce qu’il m’arrache le coeur.”
A. E. Housman said that he knew a poem was good because it made the hair stand up on his chin while he was shaving. That was his acid test. For me, the test is whether or not it breaks my heart. There’s no time to waste in poetry, just as there’s no time to waste for our planet at present. In Ezra Pound’s famous phrase, Liz Morton’s poetry is news that stays news.
[6-8/10/26]
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Tonight we're off again - to another booklaunch. This time it's for Isabel Haarhaus's new collection Feral and Other Stories. And this time it's Bronwyn who's giving the launch speech - along with her friend Fran (or should I say A/Prof Dr. Francis?) Kelly. It'll also be a nice chance to catch up with OUP publisher Sue Wootton and OUP publicity manager Alice Maxwell - it seems like only last night that we were chatting with them ... Anyway, I'm sure a great time will be had by all!
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