Canvas books wrap: Bordering on Miraculous by Lynley Edmeades and Saskia Leek, Nicole Titihuia Hawkins, and more

Nicole Titihuia Hawkins.

Would you read a picture book for grown-ups? A kōrero series hopes you will. Discover the latest new release, plus a poetry collection that counts religion and The Mighty Ducks as its inspiration. Elsewhere, Nicole Titihuia Hawkins, winner of the Jessie Mackay Award for best first book of poetry at the Ockhams, discusses teaching, getting told off, and creating a space for BIPOC writers. Happy reading.

BOOKS IN REVIEW

Bordering on Miraculous by Lynley Edmeades and Saskia Leek (Massey University Press, $45). Reviewed by Ian Wedde, a poet, fiction writer, critic and art curator. A longer version of this review will be published at anzliterature.com

This is the fourth in Massey's Kōrero series, pairing a writer with a visual artist for what the publisher describes as picture books for grown-ups. The series offers thoughtful collaborations, first from Lloyd Jones and artist Euan Macleod, followed by two pairings of writers with photographers — Paula Morris with Haru Sameshima and Chris Price with Bruce Foster.

Bordering on Miraculous combines poems by Lynley Edmeades and paintings by Saskia Leek — both Dunedin-based — that seem to share a tonal delicacy or restraint. The sense of location and identity in Leek's paintings feels secure, with some repeated representational forms (mugs, bananas, flowers, clock-faces and others), as well as the more fluid (suns or fried eggs?), and coloured shapes that may be abstract or may be the sea or the sky.

By contrast, Edmeades' poems may at first seem simply responsive to the paintings. By an image of a yellow sun on a brown scumbled ground, the poem notices "the slow melt of general / warmth and how the sun / often comes to be the centre. / The reaching suggests a casual / spreading with a few / nostalgic licks of brown."

However, any sense of a simply descriptive responsiveness soon breaks down. The same poem leads to the question: "What if it's ok to sleep / with the baby in the bed?" This new baby features in several poems, and in one we encounter the line: "every day: look baby: can you see the birds". On the facing page Leek's image is of folded-back green curtains and a window frame, with an expanse of what must be blue sky with a single black "m"-shaped cipher for bird wings. Is the bird connection between painting and poem coincidental? Surely not — but which came first? And does it matter, except as one of the teasing pleasures of the exchange?

We're unsure, too, of the borders in these exchanges, the places of crossings or relocations or sharing. Perhaps they simply exist wherever we encounter a shared sense of vivid surprise across a border of dialogue: the effort required is the "ordinary" but in its way miraculous one of engagement, of sustaining the empathy of conversation.

Both participants have hinted at something like this in their interview responses to the leading question, "Did this partnership between you present challenges or was it perhaps energising?" Leek said she "realised that I'm not an illustrator, but I do like working alongside words". Edmeades noted she enjoyed "working with visual prompts and with visual artists. I find it really frees me from being too in my head about an idea; having the visual somehow pulls me into the material world, even when that world is somehow concept-driven, like much of Saskia's work." They agreed, Edmeades says, that they "didn't want the pieces to be descriptive of the images; rather, we were more interested in how our practice and conceptual thinking overlapped".

The poet "found this much more exciting and freeing, while it took a little bit of getting used to". It's not a bad way to describe the moment-by-moment pleasure of encountering these vivid exchanges.

JUST OUT

Drawing inspiration from religion, failed relationships and The Mighty Ducks among other diverse sources, Jordan Hamel's debut poetry collection Everyone Is Everyone Except You (Dead Bird Books, $30) is a romp. Excerpt from Tammy the Briscoes lady plans my funeral: "if you buy my coffin / from somewhere that doesn't keep / batteries next to prostate cancer fundraising chocolate / or have a 10-day Christmas Extravaganza / I'll see you in court!"

How to Loiter in a Turf War (Penguin Random House, $28), the first book from multi-talented artist Jessica Hansell (Ngāpuhi, Samoa) – better known as Coco Solid – has landed. She began writing THE coming-of-age novel (with poetry and pictures) while on a Fulbright Creative New Zealand writers' residence at the University of Hawaii in 2018. Set in Tāmaki Makaurau over the course of one day, it tackles themes of gentrification, racism, capitalism, family obligation and identity. The vibrant cover artwork is also by Hansell.

Actress Minnie Driver's essay collection Managing Expectations (Manilla Press, $37) is described as "memoir-ish" and a reflection on the way things not working out for a person can be a way of things working out after all. Comic and tart, she tells of her stint at boarding school, the career slump she experienced after her debut film Circle of Friends and the way her family navigated the sudden death of her mother.

AUTHOR INTERVIEW

Nicole Titihuia Hawkins. By Eleanor Black.

When Nicole Titihuia Hawkins won the Jessie Mackay Award for best first book of poetry at the Ockhams last week with Whai, she was home in Wellington breastfeeding her newborn daughter, wearing her "holey sheepskin slippers" and watching the livestream with friends and whānau.

"We had a Christmas ham and a bucket of KFC and all these beautiful salads, all this incredible food," she remembers. "Everyone went home and I washed my face and got into bed next to my baby and I thought, 'Yeah, I made the right choice' [not to attend the ceremony]."

Hawkins, 34, has always been a writer in her spare time, jotting down lines whenever they come to her, but she is relatively new to the writing community, having formed strong connections through a class at Victoria University's International Institute of Modern Letters and live poetry events in the capital. She even started an event of her own: Poetry With Brownies, co-founded with Alice Te Punga Somerville, to create a space for BIPOC writers.

A teacher of English, social studies and Māori activism at Wainuiomata High School, Hawkins draws much inspiration from her students, who "breathe and walk and talk te ao Māori without having to think about it. The kids are a huge source of joy in my life and they are some of my greatest teachers."

With a Māori father and English immigrant mother, Hawkins lost touch with te ao Māori when her parents separated. "To have students who have grown up with the language and in homes that are run according to tikanga Māori has been fantastic for me," she says. She writes about their gifts to her in Whai, and wryly recounts over the phone how "brutal" teens can be.

"They're not afraid to tell you you've slipped up, and that's not what we do and not how we do it," she says. "I'll never forget the time I went to hand a chair to a visitor to pack away and one of my students really scolded me. She grabbed the chair and she was like, 'What are you doing? We don't get our visitors to pack up.' She really told me off in front of lots of people. It was embarrassing but she was right."

In addition to being Hawkins' first book, Whai is also the first book from publishers We Are Babies, founded by Carolyn DeCarlo, Stacey Teague, Ash Davida Jane and Jackson Nieuwland.

"On social media I had been complaining that my manuscript might never get published," says Hawkins. "I had sent it out to [a number of] publishers and they weren't interested in it in the shape and form it was then. I was like, it might never get published but I really want to finish it. Caro commented and said, 'We're starting publishing.' I have really enjoyed working with all of them – they are so supportive and friendly and warm and they have really allowed me to have tino rangatiratanga over my own work and let me be true to who I am. I have probably had a lot more freedom and control than I would have had if it had been picked up by one of the bigger publishers."

Hawkins is proud to have contributed to the landscape of Māori literature in a way she believes would make her ancestors proud, to be included in a community of writers she admires and to have been recognised in the mainstream literary world. "Hopefully the landscape is broadening," she says.

For now Hawkins is taking a break from writing and teaching to concentrate on her daughter.

"I think I will always write in some way, shape or form but I've never had the notion that I would write full-time. I love teaching and I like having writing as something I do for me. As an English teacher I get to read my students' writing and when you're doing that as your day job it's really easy to remain inspired, because everything is new. It's a bit of an ecosystem."