Mainstream media coverage

New Plymouth poet Tony Beyer has been interviewed by Taranaki Daily News about his involvement with number eight wire, and the piece has appeared on the Stuff website today. Read it here.

Sales are going well, and we’re getting some repeat orders. So, if you’d like a copy (or three), please get in touch.

Within NZ: 

Single copy:         $20 +$4 post/packing or +$7.70 to RD addresses

Two copies postage: +$5.50 (or +$8.70 for RD). Three or more copies: +$7 (or +$10.70 for RD).

Please inquire for details for direct credit payments. Make cheques to: ‘Haiku Festival Aotearoa 2012’ and post to PO Box 183, Katikati 3166.

Overseas (in $NZ):

Australia:             $25 + $10 postage (single copy)

UK/Europe/US:    $25 + $18 postage (single copy)

Please inquire for postage for multiple copies and/or to use PayPal.

Please note that all these postage rates apply only until July 1 when they will be increased to match NZ Post’s increased charges.

Testimonials

Aside from the wonderful poetry in the book, the hard copy itself is very nicely done and has a real ‘quality’ feel to it – Sian Williams

Number Eight Wire is a splendid effort … Very thorough in coverage of the last decade and all my favourites are there – Tony Beyer

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Haiku anthology launch

Ordering details are in the post below.

Bouquet: Co-editors Margaret Beverland (left) and Sandra Simpson (right) with haiku supporter Elaine Fisher of Katikati. Photo Keith Frentz

Ladies at lunch: From left, Anne Curran (Hamilton), Jenny Pyatt (Napier) and Moira Cursey (Raglan). Photo: Sandra Simpson

Bearded haiku poets: Andre Surridge (Hamilton, front) and Harry Frentz (Tauranga). Photo: Sandra Simpson

Pals: Cathie Bullock (left, Waihi) and Jenny Fraser (Mt Maunganui). Photo: Anne Curran

Haiku advertisements: Ruby Robertson (left), Dave Robertson (both Tauranga) and Jenny Pyatt (Napier). Photo: Sandra Simpson

Chat time: Shirley May and Eric Dodson, both Tauranga. Photo: Sandra Simpson

Sales table: Harry Frentz (left) and Keith Frentz. Photo: Anne Curran

Official: Margaret Beverland speaks. Photo: Keith Frentz

Poet profiles: From left, Andre Surridge, Margaret Beverland (Katikati) and Elaine Riddell (Hamilton). Photo: Sandra Simpson

Long table lunch: From right, Deryn Pittar (Papamoa), Moira Cursey and her partner Jenny (Raglan) and Bob Orr (Thames coast). Photo: Sandra Simpson

Catching up: Catherine Mair (Katikati) and Andre Surridge. Photo: Sandra Simpson

Car pool buddies: Anne Curran and Elaine Riddell, both from Hamilton. Photo: Sandra Simpson

 

number eight wire

The fourth New Zealand haiku anthology is finally here! The delivery of books took place this week so my co-editor Margaret Beverland and I are very pleased to announce that copies are now on sale.

Many thanks to Michelle Reynolds at Kale Print, Tauranga for her fantastic cover design.

A 150-page perfect-bound volume, number eight wire is a survey of New Zealand haiku from 2008 to 2018 – 330 poems by 70 authors, published at home and around the world with many honoured in international contests.

The book’s title is taken from this haiku

beaded with songbirds number eight wire

Karen Peterson Butterworth

Number eight wire has been used in New Zealand since the 19th century for farm fences and has also come to mean a way of thinking that creates brilliance from the most basic of materials, and far-sighted problem-solving and innovation. The book includes a glossary of New Zealand words and phrases.

Within NZ: 

Single copy:         $20 +$4 post/packing or +$7.70 to RD addresses

Two copies postage: +$5.50 (or +$8.70 for RD). Three or more copies: +$7 (or +$10.70 for RD).

Please inquire for details for direct credit payments. Make cheques to: ‘Haiku Festival Aotearoa 2012’ and post to PO Box 183, Katikati 3166.

Overseas (in $NZ):

Australia:             $25 + $10 postage (single copy)

UK/Europe/US:    $25 + $18 postage (single copy)

Please inquire for postage for multiple copies and/or to use PayPal.

Please note that all these postage rates apply only until July 1 when they will be increased to match NZ Post’s increased charges.

Testimonials

Aside from the wonderful poetry in the book, the hard copy itself is very nicely done and has a real ‘quality’ feel to it – Sian Williams

Number Eight Wire is a splendid effort … Very thorough in coverage of the last decade and all my favourites are there – Tony Beyer

Recent success

It felt like I was starting 2019 on the right foot when an email arrived advising I had won the Iris magazine Little Haiku Contest!

twilight —
humming as i weed
around the hive

Organised by the Three Rivers Haiku Association in Croatia, the contest was judged by haiku maestro Jim Kacian. Among his comments, which I’m guessing will be published in the next issue of Iris, Jim says:

What raises this poem above the other haiku here, however, is something more. I think it important to recognize that the poet is not humming to the bees, or imitating the bees. The poet is humming because she is employed in a fruitful and welcome occupation. Bees, after all, do not hum, but we can hear their wingbeats when they fly, or when they vibrate their wing muscles to shake pollen from a flower. While we interpret it as a kind of music, what we actually hear is exertion.

Our poet is wholly engaged in her task, and her humming, too, is the by-product of her effort. And if again we hear this effort as music, then our lives are that much richer for it.

It’s always fascinating to see what other people mine from your work. Yesterday I sent my judge’s comments to the organisers of the Martin Lucas Haiku Award so hope contestants and readers of issue 63 of Presence haiku journal will find them interesting.

My haiku is based on experiences around the two beehives we have in our suburban garden. This summer has been exceptionally hot and dry and the bees have been making the most of it. The other evening I could feel the vibration coming from the boxes even standing a few metres away! We harvested from one hive this past week – and the honey is sensational, very sweet and caramel this year.

And I have a haiku in the latest (rolling) edition of Wales Haiku Journal.

too fast
to read the station’s name –
buddleia

Hamilton celebrates KM

Hamilton is on a bit of a Katherine Mansfield binge just now, thanks to the opening of the new Mansfield Garden at Hamilton Gardens. There’s a lovely big parcel of delicious events coming up:

• February 8 – Every Short Story is a Ghost Story: Tracing the Presence of Katherine Mansfield with Tracey Slaughter (a great speaker), 6pm, Waikato Museum, free.
• February 14 – The Garden Party Talk & Concert with Penelope Jackson (another good speaker) and cellist Martin Griffiths, 5.30pm, Waikato Museum, $5.
• February 23-24 – The Case of Katherine Mansfield, 7.30pm, Mansfield Garden, Hamilton Gardens, $25.
• February 28 – Katherine Mansfield with Dr Maebh Long, 1pm, Waikato Museum, free.
• March 2 – Mansfield Garden Party, 10am-3pm, Mansfield Garden, Hamilton Gardens, gold coin.
• Until March 3 – The Garden Party Exhibition, 10am-5pm daily, Waikato Museum, free.

I was given a sneak peek of the Mansfield Garden in 2017, but largely sworn to secrecy, so must get over and revel in the finished garden – Hamilton Gardens has never had so many sponsors for a project – and enjoy some of these associated events.

The Garden-Party by Katherine Mansfield, published in 1922

And after all the weather was ideal. They could not have had a more perfect day for a garden-party if they had ordered it. Windless, warm, the sky without a cloud. Only the blue was veiled with a haze of golden light, as it is sometimes in early summer. The gardener had been up since dawn, mowing the lawns and sweeping them, until the grass and the dark flat rosettes where the daisy plants had been seemed to shine. As for the roses, you could not help feeling they understood that roses are the only flowers that impress people at garden-parties; the only flowers that everybody is certain of knowing. Hundreds, yes, literally hundreds, had come out in a single night; the green bushes bowed down as though they had been visited by archangels.

Read the full text here.

KM was born Kathleen Beauchamp in Wellington in 1888 and died in France in 1923. Read a biography here.

 

NZPS Contest Update

The 2018 NZPS anthology is not only out – it has sold out! But there may be a reprint of The Unnecessary Invention of Punctuation, read more here. So I can now share the haiku that was placed First and won the Jeanette Stace Memorial Award:

cloud lichen …
too late now
to learn the tango

Sandra Simpson

This was written well before I began a six-week course of ballroom dance lessons … turns out it might also be too late to learn how to foxtrot!

roadside blackberries –
the book I wore out reading
to my brother

Sandra Simpson, Commended

by the time he says kingfisher –

Sandra Simpson, Highly Commended

League of Nations

Presence 62 is the final edition for the year and, as usual, is a thoroughly good read featuring voices from around the world. Read more about the journal (including how to subscribe).

an inchworm’s stretch
                  I pull the next leaf
           towards it

Shrikaanth Krishnamurthy (UK)

setting sun –
in the ashtray the butt
still glowing

Minh-Triet Pham (France)

clouding over
the conversation turns
to cancer

Andre Surridge (NZ)

shotgun blast –
so strangely green
these winter fields

David Bingham (UK)

half-open window
the splatter of raindrops
on a child’s palm

Indra Neil Makala (India)

country village
on each house roof a crow
crowing

Anna Maris (Sweden)

heat in the city
a swallow’s repeated dives
to the riverbank

Polona Oblak (Slovenia)

dust storm
the desert bloodwood
holds its ground

Gregory Piko (Australia)

heroine’s grave –
the screech of seabirds
never-ending

Sandra Simpson (New Zealand)