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As I’m sure you all know, the modern poetry business is a fast-paced affair, full of people in sharp suits and pencil skirts clustered around laptops discussing third-quarter profit projections (OK, maybe that’s just business meeting stock photography for websites).

And sometimes, that poet life requires you to be in two places at once, a feat not even T.S. Eliot could accomplish without a lot of CGI. Such is the case on Wednesday 23 July, the date of both the Sydney launch of The Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry, and a poetry reading at Circadian Rhythm in Dunedin, MC’d by Shae McMillan, at which Rhian Gallagher and I are the readers.

Since I can’t be in two places at once, and have made a prior commitment to read in Dunedin, I am unable to make the Sydney launch, but my co-editor P.S. Cottier will be in attendance, as will publisher Dr David Reiter, and a number of poets represented in the anthology will also read.

Meanwhile, I’m very much looking forward to reading and hearing other poets read in Dunedin – my home town from 1976-1993, and a place I still have lots of friends.

If you can be in two places at once, or even one place at once, here are the details of those two events:

The Stars Like Sand Sydney Launch, 23 July 2014: Part of Live Poets @ Don Bank, 6 Napier St, North Sydney, 7.30pm. Here’s the Facebook event and the Facebook event description:

IT’S THE NIGHT OF THE MASKED BARDS’ BALL! (Bring one to wear if you want). KYLA LEE WARD will perform her book ‘Land of Bad Dreams’. DAVID REITER will present ‘MY PLANETS’ .There is the Sydney launch of ‘STARS LIKE SAND” Anthology of Australian Speculative Poetry, featuring many of Australia’s best – from Interactive Press. Plus: Open Section – recite, sing, tell a story or play an instrument.There will be dancing in the courtyard. It’s the Warm Winter Words Festival! Doors open at 7.30 pm. $7 admission includes hot supper and drinks. Readers from the anthology come in free. Further info/bookings: Convenor Danny Gardner (02) 9896 6956 Mobile 0422 263 373 or via dannylivepoets (at) yahoo.com.au

Come and commune with our guests in the cosy confines of historic Don Bank. Why not bring a friend?

Circadian Rhythm Reading, 23 July 2014: 8-10pm, Circadian Rhythm Cafe, 72 St Andrew St, Dunedin, with MC Shae McMillan, open mike, and guest poets Rhian Gallagher and Tim Jones. Here’s the Facebook event.

Well, I’m back – back in Wellington from my trip to Melbourne and Canberra, where my co-editor P.S. Cottier and myself launched the anthology we’ve been working on for almost two years, The Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry.

Each of us (Penelope | Tim) has already blogged about the Melbourne launch. The Canberra launch last Thursday, held at historic Manning Clark House, was also a success, with 40-50 people in attendance. The photos below show poets Lizz Murphy and John Jenkins reading their poems from the book, although most of the crowd is out of shot in these photos.

UPDATE: Penelope has now posted another eloquent post about the launches and how she feels at the end of them.

I enjoyed my trip to Australia a lot, thanks in very large part to the hospitality of my co-editor and her lovely family. Now I have a couple of solid weeks ahead of me as the judge of the Open Section of the 2014 New Zealand Poetry Society International Poetry Competition, and then I have some writing to do!

Finally, watch out for some more publicity for Lost in the Museum this coming week – that’s the new fantasy anthology with a touch of horror, set in Te Papa, that includes my story “The Big Baby”.

The first launch of The Stars Like Sand has happened – and very good it was too! As my co-editor reports on her blog, we had a good group of poets from the anthology reading at the Melbourne launch – a double launch with poet Gemma White’ first collection Furniture is Disappearing.

About 70 people attended the launch at Melbourne’s Collected Works bookshop – you can see part of the crowd below, including one of the poets from the anthology, Sean Wright (with hat); publisher’s representative Breanne Rodda (seated on floor) and Collected Works owner Kris Hemensley (at right) (image courtesy Satya Helen Patrice).

Now we’re gearing up for the Canberra launch tomorrow night, and expecting another good crowd and another set of anthology poets to read!

If you’d like a copy of the book, it’s making its way into bookshops such as Melbourne’s Collected Works, and you can also buy it from the publisher and from Amazon.com.

I mentioned in my previous post that I have a story, “The Big Baby”, in the recently published anthology Lost in the Museum, which has just received an excellent review by Lee Murray in the widely-read Beattie’s Book Blog.

Lost in the Museum is now starting to become available in bookshops, including The Children’s Bookstore in Kilbirnie, Unity Books, and Marsden Books in Karori (Wellington) and Retrospace (Auckland). The ISBN is 978-0-473-28320-9, which will help you to order it from other bookshops.

Lost in the Museum is also available from Amazon as a Kindle ebook: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KTV5K0U

While I’m still training a couple of dragons and therefore not quite ready to resume posting regularly, I couldn’t pass up the chance to let you know that The Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry, the anthology that I have co-edited with P.S. Cottier, by has now been officially published, and I have recently received an early copy. (Penelope has lots of info about the book up on her blog – such as who is in it!)

You can buy the book as a paperback or ebook from the publisher or from Amazon.

Here’s the Facebook event for the Melbourne launch on Friday 6 June: https://www.facebook.com/events/1502760696619431/ – all Melbournites and visitors welcome!

(Note to authors: we’ll be posting out author copies after the Melbourne and Canberra launches next month.)

I should also mention a couple of recent short story collections I have stories in:

• Fresh Fear: Contemporary Horror (sales link to Amazon)
• Lost in the Museum (link has info about the launch)

… and I’m pleased to say that I have a story appearing in the next issue of JAAM as well.

Normal hiatus will now be resumed, for another month or so – and then I might get around to put a fresh lick of paint on this dear old blog.

… until someone loses their dragons. I have three fierce dragons to chase at the moment – or are thy chasing me? There’s the finishing stages of proofing for The Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry – that stage when a book seems to be interminably 95% finished, but never quite done. There’s the ever-extending Basin Reserve Flyover Board of Inquiry – as the co-convenor of the Save the Basin Campaign, quite a lot of my energy is going on that. And there’s a major work project which is about half complete.

If they don’t succeed in burning me up or out, all those dragons should be caught and trained by about July, but in the meantime something has to go, and I’ve decided that thing will be blogging. When the Seven Kingdoms are reunited under the flag of peace, freedom and the Westerosi Way – when the sun also rises – when at least two of those three projects are out of the way – I’ll be back. Till then, au revoir!

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Sidelights: Rugby Poems, by Mark Pirie (Wellington: The Night Press, 2013), available via Mark’s website.

Sport, a big area of New Zealand life, has formed a surprisingly small part of New Zealand poetry. Mark Pirie has done a lot to remedy that lately, with his NZ cricket poetry anthology A Tingling Catch receiving a lot of very favourable press, not least from the prestigious Wisden Cricketer.

Mark is currently editing an anthology of New Zealand and international poems about football (that is, the round-ball variety). But when I was growing up, the world game was still called ‘soccer’ in New Zealand, as ‘football’ was reserved for use to describe the sport that all New Zealanders, and in particular all New Zealand males, were supposed to be obsessed by: rugby union.

I grew up in Southland, where rugby’s hold was arguably as complete as anywhere in the country – at Gore High School, it was a source of great embarrassment that those half-despised, half-pitied sooks who played soccer had actually managed to string together a few winning games, while the school’s rugby First XV, supposedly the bastion and exemplar of teenage masculinity, was completely useless.

(If women’s rugby was played anywhere in New Zealand in the 1970s, it most certainly wasn’t played in Gore.)

I only ever played one game of rugby, during which I invented the kicking No. 8 long before Zinzan Brooke had thought of the idea. And, despite my Pommy background and odd haircut, I did eventually get interested in the game and used to watch a lot of it – right up to the point at which the All Blacks won the 2011 Word Cup, at which point, to my surprise, my interest in the game evaporated almost completely. I still watch the occasional All Blacks match on TV, but no longer pay any attention to the domestic or Super 15 competitions.

But I remember those provincial passions, which is why I enjoyed Mark Pirie’s Sidelights, and why my favourite poem from it is The Divided Country, which explores the eternal duality between Hurricanes and Highlanders supporters. “School Days at Wellington College” has a great last line which it sets up perfectly, and I also particularly enjoyed the sequence “Five All Blacks poems”, which ends with a poem celebrating the moment All Blacks’ captain Richie McCaw lifted the Webb Ellis Cup at the end of the 2011 World Cup tournament – that same moment that something in my brain appears to have decided that enough was enough.

Even in 2014, it’s hard to be in New Zealand for long without rugby starting to seep into your life: Sidelights is a good first step towards an understanding; or a valedictory to an era, long lost or recently ended, of liniment, the Sideline Eye, and the crowd rising to “E Ihowā Atua”.

Walking to the dairy
to buy milk is no easy
thing when you’re in Dunedin.
Like this morning, I was
walking down Great King Street
when a car pulls up
and someone screams out the window,
“OTAGOOO!!”
I couldn’t help myself. I yelled
back, “HURRICANES BEAT YOU, MAN!”
The guy was stunned. He hurled his can
at me, beer spraying
across the street. Then, he tore off
and I walked into the dairy. It seems
the Dunedin mornings
are the saddest. “Just wait,” says
the girl at the counter, “for the rain!”

1999

Credit note: “The Divided Country” is published in Mark Pirie’s collection of rugby poems, Sidelights,, which I’ll be reviewing on this blog soon.

Tim says: When I think of a country divided by rugby, the first thing that comes to mind is the 1981 Springbok Tour. But this poem is about a different sort of division: the eternal divide between New Zealand’s five Super 15 franchises. I reckon I’ve walked to that dairy a few time, too.

The Tuesday Poem: Is the 2013 Takahē Poetry Competition winner.