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Some Bird
Who am I? Where did I come from? What will I become? Simple questions take on eerie overtones in this, Gail Ingram's second collection.
From a childhood in rural Canterbury through the migratory flight to other lands; falling out of the nest and in and out of love; through all the stages of becoming – a teacher, a wife, a mother, a grown woman wondering how it all happened and where her limits begin and end and who decides these things anyway?
'Some Bird' is a fearless, restless quest for answers, where someone is always ready to throw stones at birds, and where some birds remember their wings – and their talons.
From a childhood in rural Canterbury through the migratory flight to other lands; falling out of the nest and in and out of love; through all the stages of becoming – a teacher, a wife, a mother, a grown woman wondering how it all happened and where her limits begin and end and who decides these things anyway?
'Some Bird' is a fearless, restless quest for answers, where someone is always ready to throw stones at birds, and where some birds remember their wings – and their talons.
108 pages, Paperback
First published September 7, 2023
3 people want to read
About the author
Gail Ingram
3 books7 followersGail Ingram writes and lives on the tussock-clad hills of Christchurch, Aotearoa / New Zealand. Her poetry and fiction is widely published in New Zealand and internationally. She has three collections of poetry – 'anthology (n.) a collection of flowers' (Pūkeko Publications 2024) , which Erik Kennedy described as 'a tour de force'; 'Some Bird' (SVP 2023); and her first poetry collection 'Contents Under Pressure' (Pūkeko Publications 2019), which includes two award-winning poems.
Josiah Morgan (he/him, Kāi Tahu, Ngāti Maniapoto) says: 'Gail is an extraordinary poet, underrated, one of our most accomplished local writers, continually crafting work that is thoughtful, comprehensive, and engaged in its own conceits. Between "Some Bird" last year and "anthology" this year, Ingram has crafted not just one but two essential small-press Aotearoa books, two years in a row. anthology is much more than a "book about flowers," it is also a book of flowering, outward, of everything that flowers and deflowers, what represents and is represented. It traverses brave terrain, tied up in all the complicated messiness of the real, the here and now. It doesn't avoid the politics of the present but dives right in, on the small-scale and the large. Ingram is also a staunch advocate for and lover of the arts, supporter of the works of others.'
Gail is the managing poetry editor for 'a fine line' the flagship magazine for New Zealand Poetry Society Te Rōpū Toikupu o Aotearoa, and formerly poetry editor for takahē magazine (http://www.takahe.org.nz/), and a short fiction editor for international online journal, Flash Frontier: An Adventure in Short Fiction (http://www.flash-frontier.com).
She is a creative writing teacher at the School for Young Writers in Christchurch (https://www.schoolforyoungwriters.org/) and
holds a First Class Masters of Creative Writing from Massey University, and graduated cum laude from Hagley Writers Institute in 2006.
Josiah Morgan (he/him, Kāi Tahu, Ngāti Maniapoto) says: 'Gail is an extraordinary poet, underrated, one of our most accomplished local writers, continually crafting work that is thoughtful, comprehensive, and engaged in its own conceits. Between "Some Bird" last year and "anthology" this year, Ingram has crafted not just one but two essential small-press Aotearoa books, two years in a row. anthology is much more than a "book about flowers," it is also a book of flowering, outward, of everything that flowers and deflowers, what represents and is represented. It traverses brave terrain, tied up in all the complicated messiness of the real, the here and now. It doesn't avoid the politics of the present but dives right in, on the small-scale and the large. Ingram is also a staunch advocate for and lover of the arts, supporter of the works of others.'
Gail is the managing poetry editor for 'a fine line' the flagship magazine for New Zealand Poetry Society Te Rōpū Toikupu o Aotearoa, and formerly poetry editor for takahē magazine (http://www.takahe.org.nz/), and a short fiction editor for international online journal, Flash Frontier: An Adventure in Short Fiction (http://www.flash-frontier.com).
She is a creative writing teacher at the School for Young Writers in Christchurch (https://www.schoolforyoungwriters.org/) and
holds a First Class Masters of Creative Writing from Massey University, and graduated cum laude from Hagley Writers Institute in 2006.
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November 14, 2024
Ingram’s *Some Bird* is the work of a poet operating at the height of their powers. It has the best ‘Me Too’ era poem I’ve ever read right at its beginning and only gets better, traversing complicated topics often approached through cliche with genuine originality. Plus, it has ‘The Kitchen’ in it.
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