Comedian Michele A'Court at her home in Auckland. Photo / Chris Skelton
Since it's Montana Poetry Day this Friday what better time to revisit a favourite piece of verse. Alternatively, you could read some of the favourite poems of 100 well-known New Zealanders. They've been gathered by pupils at Auckland Girls' Grammar School and published in a book, Dear To
Me (Random House, $36.99), royalties going to Amnesty International.
It's interesting to note that Prime Minister Helen Clark's pick is Kubla Khan by Coleridge, that Sir Bob Jones has chosen Ozymandias by Shelley, and that the Topp Twins and Bernice Mene have provided poems they wrote themselves.
What's special about this book is the wide variety of verse to dip in and out of. And if you're thinking your Sunday might be better spent doing household chores, check out comedian and writer Michele A'Court's choice first:
"I must have read this poem shortly after it was published in 1982 - though I don't remember ever not knowing it. I would have been 21 then and living in a student flat in Christchurch.
"I read it then as a protest poem: a protest against the grinding drudgery of women's lives. I loved its conversational tone - an ordinary voice talking about the ordinary things that drive us mad.
"And I loved the list that had the pleasant and the inane sitting side by side 'I cleaned the bathroom like mad and picked some flowers and wrote some letters and some cheques'.
"And I loved its rhythm, its accelerating pace as it spirals upwards - and the exhilaration you feel as you discover it spirals upwards rather than descends.
"For 25 years, it has continued to play in my head as I do the housework. It's impossible for me to scrub out the shower without thinking of a cat's big green eyes ticking away, and I laugh out loud if I look up at the clock as I vacuum and it says Ten to five. But it's less of a protest poem for me now, more of a celebration - that despite the fact that so much of our lives is inevitably taken up with the tedious and crushingly ordinary, inside our heads we can still fly."
- Detours, HoS
