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If Only
If Only, Riemke Ensing’s latest poetry collection, had gradually developed over five or so years. The poems document the persona’s states after the loss of a loved one, identifiable with the poet’s grappling with the death of her partner, Bill Trussell. Each poem is accompanied by an illumination in the tradition of William Blake. As Ensing acknowledges, graphic designer “Tara McLeod has a wonderful eye for capturing the essence of a poem and he is truly in tune with what happens in the poem,” so much so that without the illumination, the poem might feel bereft of layers of meaning and expressiveness, its impact diminished.
22 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 2017
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About the author
Riemke Ensing
10 books1 followerNew Zealand poet. She immigrated to New Zealand in 1951 at age twelve. She studied at Ardmore Teachers' Training College, then taught for two years, returning to the College to lecture in English literature for a year.
Ensing earned a master's degree in 1967, and was appointed to a position in Literature in the English Department at the University of Auckland. There she taught till 1999 when she took early retirement. She has since been appointed an Honorary Research Fellow (Faculty of Arts) and in 2002 was a Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellow.
Ensing earned a master's degree in 1967, and was appointed to a position in Literature in the English Department at the University of Auckland. There she taught till 1999 when she took early retirement. She has since been appointed an Honorary Research Fellow (Faculty of Arts) and in 2002 was a Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellow.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
December 17, 2018
Review published in Poetry New Zealand (Ed Jack Ross)
An experience reading If Only by Riemke Ensing (poet)
and Tara McLeod (graphic designer)
Riemke Ensing. If Only. Designed by Tara McLeod. Auckland: The Pear Tree Press, 2017. RRP $220. 36 pp.
by Alexandra Balm
I attended a poetry reading recently. In spite of its timing: early Sunday afternoon, when most shops in Northcote were doing their siesta, it was a scintillating event: a few notable NZ poets gathered to read against the background of local art, an exhibition at the Northart Gallery titled The Poetic Condition. All participating poets – among whom Riemke Ensing, Wystan Curnow, Amanda Eason, Nadine LaHatte, Graham Lindsay, Sen McGlinn, Alistair Paterson and Denys Trussell – were reading from a collective volume published at Donek Press, Poems from the Pantry.
It was a small, intimate gathering and I felt at ease even if I only knew Riemke Ensing – from a poetry conference in Auckland – and listened to Denys Trussell and Alistair Paterson read at the same conference and Wystan Curnow present a paper at a symposium in Wellington. The other names were vaguely familiar from other poetry readings.
The poems read were infused with subtle humour and were touching in a joyous way – a paradigmatic image of NZ poetry at its best: deep, anchored in the immediate, unassuming. . In tune with the humility of the collection’s title, Poems from the Pantry, the poets had none of the aura of rock stars, neither were they post-pubescent enfants terribles. However, their words reminded the audience of so many levels of lived experience, from food and meals shared with friends to existential seeking, crises or angst, all dipped in mild self-deprecating irony that seems particular to intelligent New Zealanders.
The event reminded me of the first time when I listened to Riemke Ensing read at the 2017 Poetry Conference in Auckland. As she walked on the stage amongst loud applause she waved the admiration of the audience away. She struck me as one to dismiss accolades and formality. When I talked to her later during the day, there was a playful twinkle in her eyes and an aura of kindness, of the sort that fosters consideration for people and their emotions.
If Only, Riemke Ensing’s latest collection that she read from from at the Auckland Poetry Conference, had gradually developed over five or so years. The poems document the persona’s states after the loss of a loved one, identifiable with the poet’s grappling with the death of her partner, Bill Trussell. The sense of longing and the residual affection invested in poems after their recipient has passed, now presumably transmitted through poems to the loved one’s ineffable spirit, immediately established a connection. A dear friend’s husband had died a few weeks previous and my father a year before, so death was very much on my mind. I decided to buy If Only for my friend, but then I kept it for myself. A mutual friend had already offered her a copy. I wondered at the coincidence.
•
If Only is one of those rare books that compel one to share one’s experience reading it. It was written when “conditions for writing couldn’t have been more dangerous,” when
Everything froze over.
Grief was deep and nothing seemed bound to earth.
Whole hillsides came down in a rush. (‘A different kind of Hemingway episode’
after reading ‘There is never any end to Paris’).
Despite the dangerous conditions for writing and indeed for being, If Only stands proof that absences can be filed in time with the wisdom and even joy that experience has engendered, that gaps can be bridged, that the essence of lived experience is not sorrow or futility, but hope:
There was the year you died
and then another and another year. [...]
And all the time there were birds.
The trees full of them, and the garden.
Musicians in white ties, fiercely fast,
chatting, whistling, making passes at each other
as though it were spring and not this depth of winter
with life almost at standstill.
There is undeniable joy in the activities and noises of the tui that animate the scene despite the sense that life has frozen over and is in danger of coming to a standstill. The poem bears testimony that the search for answers, and the connections across realms that such searches establish, can eventually yield beauty.
‘A different kind of Hemingway episode,’ from where the lines above are quoted, won the NZSA Kevin Ireland Poetry Competition in 2012. Kevin Ireland praised the poem and noted that “every word of it is crafted, poignant and precisely right. There is not even the shadow of a comma to spare.” [1]
Indeed, the whole poem collection If Only is perfect in many ways. It is any poet's or bibliophile reader's dream. It is a thing of beauty, assembled with such consideration for the poems it comprises, and with such love that once opened it becomes a treasured object.
There are not many handmade books these days, but If Only is exceptional for more than this reason. Exquisitely handmade and handset by Tara McLeod of The Pear Tree Press in Auckland, its pages are individually painted, and hand printed with illustrations that encourage and support the reader’s stepping into the world of the poem. Each page is unique and a pretext for private meditation. The fact that the pages are unnumbered suggests the apparent infinity of grief, the shapelessness that life assumes for a while after a loss, as well as the unhoped-for transformed state of being that the self eventually forges out of existence that had been rendered nondescript by pain.
Ensing's poems in If Only appeal to me both through recording states that one visits after loss, and through their resemblance to William Blake's illuminations. Graphic designer Tara McLeod has carefully assembled thirty handmade copies of the volume – “handset in 14pt Garamond and printed on a Littlejohn proofing press,” as the note at the end of the book testifies – that seem a minimalist modern gesture in the direction of the Romantic poet’s books. The book ends with McLeod’s autograph and it opens with Ensing’s signature on the title page, both in pencil. As if a pen would be too strong an assertion of presence and authorship. As if both the poet and the artist were just mediums, instruments or vehicles through which the poems could be transmitted to the readers. As if such a valuable book can be approached with only the delicate, erasable, touch of a pencil nib rather than the permanent mark of a pen. A reminder that human presence and work, and indeed existence, even if far from indelible, would be mere traces on water had it not been for poems or stories to record them.
I leaf through If Only quite often. Each poem makes a strong impression. Each time I turn to ‘The Last Summer of the World’ I gasp as if ambushed by a wave, almost a tsunami, of emotions. The birds printed on the left transport me to my childhood, when I used to watch the swallow prepare their migration against the autumn sky, and I dreamed of other countries. The poem on the right reminds me of loss and its meaninglessness. And yet in the poet’s registering aspects of the world in which she’s left to live, there’s an inkling that she had succeeded in seeing through absence into the ripe meaning of presence and its hypostatisation as small details.
Continue reading at:
https://poetrynzreview.blogspot.com/2...
An experience reading If Only by Riemke Ensing (poet)
and Tara McLeod (graphic designer)
Riemke Ensing. If Only. Designed by Tara McLeod. Auckland: The Pear Tree Press, 2017. RRP $220. 36 pp.
by Alexandra Balm
I attended a poetry reading recently. In spite of its timing: early Sunday afternoon, when most shops in Northcote were doing their siesta, it was a scintillating event: a few notable NZ poets gathered to read against the background of local art, an exhibition at the Northart Gallery titled The Poetic Condition. All participating poets – among whom Riemke Ensing, Wystan Curnow, Amanda Eason, Nadine LaHatte, Graham Lindsay, Sen McGlinn, Alistair Paterson and Denys Trussell – were reading from a collective volume published at Donek Press, Poems from the Pantry.
It was a small, intimate gathering and I felt at ease even if I only knew Riemke Ensing – from a poetry conference in Auckland – and listened to Denys Trussell and Alistair Paterson read at the same conference and Wystan Curnow present a paper at a symposium in Wellington. The other names were vaguely familiar from other poetry readings.
The poems read were infused with subtle humour and were touching in a joyous way – a paradigmatic image of NZ poetry at its best: deep, anchored in the immediate, unassuming. . In tune with the humility of the collection’s title, Poems from the Pantry, the poets had none of the aura of rock stars, neither were they post-pubescent enfants terribles. However, their words reminded the audience of so many levels of lived experience, from food and meals shared with friends to existential seeking, crises or angst, all dipped in mild self-deprecating irony that seems particular to intelligent New Zealanders.
The event reminded me of the first time when I listened to Riemke Ensing read at the 2017 Poetry Conference in Auckland. As she walked on the stage amongst loud applause she waved the admiration of the audience away. She struck me as one to dismiss accolades and formality. When I talked to her later during the day, there was a playful twinkle in her eyes and an aura of kindness, of the sort that fosters consideration for people and their emotions.
If Only, Riemke Ensing’s latest collection that she read from from at the Auckland Poetry Conference, had gradually developed over five or so years. The poems document the persona’s states after the loss of a loved one, identifiable with the poet’s grappling with the death of her partner, Bill Trussell. The sense of longing and the residual affection invested in poems after their recipient has passed, now presumably transmitted through poems to the loved one’s ineffable spirit, immediately established a connection. A dear friend’s husband had died a few weeks previous and my father a year before, so death was very much on my mind. I decided to buy If Only for my friend, but then I kept it for myself. A mutual friend had already offered her a copy. I wondered at the coincidence.
•
If Only is one of those rare books that compel one to share one’s experience reading it. It was written when “conditions for writing couldn’t have been more dangerous,” when
Everything froze over.
Grief was deep and nothing seemed bound to earth.
Whole hillsides came down in a rush. (‘A different kind of Hemingway episode’
after reading ‘There is never any end to Paris’).
Despite the dangerous conditions for writing and indeed for being, If Only stands proof that absences can be filed in time with the wisdom and even joy that experience has engendered, that gaps can be bridged, that the essence of lived experience is not sorrow or futility, but hope:
There was the year you died
and then another and another year. [...]
And all the time there were birds.
The trees full of them, and the garden.
Musicians in white ties, fiercely fast,
chatting, whistling, making passes at each other
as though it were spring and not this depth of winter
with life almost at standstill.
There is undeniable joy in the activities and noises of the tui that animate the scene despite the sense that life has frozen over and is in danger of coming to a standstill. The poem bears testimony that the search for answers, and the connections across realms that such searches establish, can eventually yield beauty.
‘A different kind of Hemingway episode,’ from where the lines above are quoted, won the NZSA Kevin Ireland Poetry Competition in 2012. Kevin Ireland praised the poem and noted that “every word of it is crafted, poignant and precisely right. There is not even the shadow of a comma to spare.” [1]
Indeed, the whole poem collection If Only is perfect in many ways. It is any poet's or bibliophile reader's dream. It is a thing of beauty, assembled with such consideration for the poems it comprises, and with such love that once opened it becomes a treasured object.
There are not many handmade books these days, but If Only is exceptional for more than this reason. Exquisitely handmade and handset by Tara McLeod of The Pear Tree Press in Auckland, its pages are individually painted, and hand printed with illustrations that encourage and support the reader’s stepping into the world of the poem. Each page is unique and a pretext for private meditation. The fact that the pages are unnumbered suggests the apparent infinity of grief, the shapelessness that life assumes for a while after a loss, as well as the unhoped-for transformed state of being that the self eventually forges out of existence that had been rendered nondescript by pain.
Ensing's poems in If Only appeal to me both through recording states that one visits after loss, and through their resemblance to William Blake's illuminations. Graphic designer Tara McLeod has carefully assembled thirty handmade copies of the volume – “handset in 14pt Garamond and printed on a Littlejohn proofing press,” as the note at the end of the book testifies – that seem a minimalist modern gesture in the direction of the Romantic poet’s books. The book ends with McLeod’s autograph and it opens with Ensing’s signature on the title page, both in pencil. As if a pen would be too strong an assertion of presence and authorship. As if both the poet and the artist were just mediums, instruments or vehicles through which the poems could be transmitted to the readers. As if such a valuable book can be approached with only the delicate, erasable, touch of a pencil nib rather than the permanent mark of a pen. A reminder that human presence and work, and indeed existence, even if far from indelible, would be mere traces on water had it not been for poems or stories to record them.
I leaf through If Only quite often. Each poem makes a strong impression. Each time I turn to ‘The Last Summer of the World’ I gasp as if ambushed by a wave, almost a tsunami, of emotions. The birds printed on the left transport me to my childhood, when I used to watch the swallow prepare their migration against the autumn sky, and I dreamed of other countries. The poem on the right reminds me of loss and its meaninglessness. And yet in the poet’s registering aspects of the world in which she’s left to live, there’s an inkling that she had succeeded in seeing through absence into the ripe meaning of presence and its hypostatisation as small details.
Continue reading at:
https://poetrynzreview.blogspot.com/2...
Displaying 1 of 1 review