Matt Blackwood
Archives for September 2016
“My Dearest Lizzie”
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Pamela Wood
I knew he had died. Before reading the letters, I knew the end of his story. Sergeant Charles Leonard (Len) Hooper from Masterton, serving with the New Zealand Machine Gun Battalion on the Western Front, died in November 1918 in France just four days before the Armistice. His letters to his English fiancée, Elizabeth Sibthorp of Hornchurch – his ‘dearest Lizzie’ – are bundled in a grey folder loosely laced with thin white tape, held in the Imperial War Museum archive in London.
Tasty medicinal words! Poems by Alan Roddick
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Sue Wootton
… Now we insert the point
of an elevator in the peridontal space.”– from “A Patient” by Alan Roddick.
There are not many poets who can confidently use the phrase ‘peridontal space’ in a poem. Indeed, I know only one: dentist poet Alan Roddick, whose long awaited second collection, Getting it Right, has just appeared. It follows at a stately remove from its predecessor, The Eye Corrects, which was published in 1967. The poems collected in Getting it Right feel honed, polished, clear. They celebrate the natural world, love and life (there is only the one poem which overtly mentions dentistry, so dentophobics need not fear opening the book), and Roddick brings his steady eye and hand to every line.
Big Minty Nose
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Jenny Bornholdt
“Big Minty Nose” is one of six long poems that made up my book The Rocky Shore. They’re about all kinds of things, mostly illness, death (keeping it cheerful here!), the garden, kids and family. “Big Minty Nose” is the final poem in the book. I was recovering from a year of pain, then hip surgery; our friend Nigel had died of cancer and I was thinking about my father’s death from melanoma some years earlier. Writing about these things helped me find a place for them inside our daily life, which is where they will always be.
When your words and your body language aren’t singing the same song…
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Chris Nichol
… we know you’re lying. I’ve been experiencing an awkward state of unease for close to 50 years now. And I hadn’t been able to put my finger on quite what it was until I heard an interview on Radio NZ National’s Nine to Noon programme. Lynn Freeman was talking with Harvard Business School social psychologist Amy Cuddy about body language, and especially about the significance of dissonance between words and actions.
Donald Trump provided her with a good example. She’s identified that he tries to adapt his body language to match his words. But it doesn’t work and that’s why he seems inauthentic.