Just beyond the racers' rise
Posted: 02/12/2025
I haven't driven out around Banks Peninsula since I came back from Wellington, actually. Well I've been up Dyers Pass of course, and to Lyttelton, but I haven't been past Governor's Bay in nearly a month. Perhaps I'm feeling better, or the fuel prices are finally discouraging me for once. In any case I miss driving around the road to Purau but I'm running out of time to do it again. Maybe someone can encourage me...
Anyway, this poem is a little bit of a departure because I wrote it trying to imitate another person's style. I have gone on in the past about how I only write poems about my own feelings, and that remains true. To write in someone else's style is a little more difficult, especially if you want to preserve your originality of feeling, but I think it's more of an exercise in trying to see things through their eyes.
The person in this case is Denis Glover, who wrote the epic Arawata Bill which I used for my Speech and Drama diploma. It is a series of poems, and many of them describe the scenery of Fiordland and Southland in beautiful detail, likening the Southern Alps to "an unmade bed", the gold "hidden in [its] blanketfolds"; while others in the series describe Bill's unending quest for that treasure and his ultimate downfall. I wrote this just now (yet again, no editing) in Tūranga right by where one of the 130 copies of the epic are kept. (It is worth looking for, its woodcut illustrations and the cover are as wonderful as the poetry itself.)
And no I don't think my little attempt comes close to Glover's work, but it's all in the spirit of trying something new; besides I want to write more landscape poetry, at least so I can write about something less abstract than my feelings.
Picture taken 20th October 2025 at Birdlings Flat.