Vivienne Plumb: With a New Zealand mother and an Australian father, Vivienne Plumb has one foot on either side of the ditch. One of literature’s all-rounders, as well as six previous collections of poetry, she has written plays, short fiction and a novel. She has been the recipient of several awards, including the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship, the Hubert Church Prose Award, and the Bruce Mason Playwrighting Award.
This poem is from a book I've just published (!!!!) (as
Seraph Press):
The Cheese and Onion Sandwich and other New Zealand Icons: Prose Poems. This book grew out of a series of prose poems that Vivienne was writing, mainly about iconic New Zealand things. Some of these poems made their way to the middle section of
Crumple, which I published last year, but I felt these New Zealand icon poems deserved a book of their own.
In these poems, which are often hilarious and frequently have a tug of fond nostalgia, I find a New Zealand I recognise. One filled with our national cuisine (represented by such things as whitebait, crockpots and muttonbird), with sheds, dogs, tramping, birds, sly-grogging, The Warehouse, inter-island ferries, inter-city buses, motels, gambling and bad weather.
Because summer is on the way (I even got sunburnt yesterday!), I chose this poem from the collection. When I first came across it, I thought it was Bach CDs (as in Johann Sebastian), but very quickly realised my mistake. We never had a family bach, but I've stayed in other peoples, and they are so often filled with the stuff you almost discard, but not quite.
There are a few more sample poems from the book that you can download on the Seraph Press site:
http://www.seraphpress.co.nz/cheese-and-onion.html.
And, for even more poetry, check out the other Tuesday Poems:
http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/
Vivienne Plumb has just been announced as one of the two Randell Cottage fellows for next year (she's the NZ one in the second half of the year, Florence Cadier is the French one in the first half of the year). She plans to use the time to research and write a novel with political themes set in Wellington. I'm very proud to have published her most recent book, The Cheese and Onion Sandwich and other New Zealand Icons: Prose Poems, from which 'Pōhutukawa' comes, in October.
