Poukahangatus

Author(s): Tayi Tibble

Poetry | Aotearoa

'This collection speaks about beauty, activism, power and popular culture with compelling guile, a darkness, a deep understanding and sensuality. It dives through noir, whakamā and kitsch and emerges dripping with colour and liquor. There’s whakapapa, funk (in all its connotations) and fetishisation. The poems map colonisation of many kinds through intergenerational, indigenous domesticity, sex, image and disjunction. They time-travel through the powdery mint-green 1960s and the polaroid sunshine 1970s to the present day. Their language and forms are liquid—sometimes as lush as what they describe, other times deliberately biblical or oblique. It all says: here is a writer who is experiencing herself as powerful, restrained but unafraid, already confident enough to make a phat splash on the page.’ —Hinemoana Baker

Poetry comes in a myriad of forms and each appeals (or not) in its own way. It is sometimes difficult to say why you like a poem - why it appeals or resonates. It's more than the rhythm of the language on the page: sometimes it is the visual appeal of the words or phrases sparsely arranged on a page making talking or thinking space; sometimes it's a turn of phrase which you read aloud just to hear the audacity of the text - of the poet’s thoughts; sometimes it is the quietness of the language that picks at you until it leaves a satisfying scab. Or, in the case of Tayi Tibble’s first collection, a fierce and evocative scar. From the moment I opened Poūkahangatus , on a random page, and started reading the poem 'Shame', I knew this collection of poems would be coming home with me. 



the winz lady who smiles 
has a sign in her office that says
 
he aha te mea nui o te ao 
he tangata, he tangata, he tangata 

but she says the most important thing 
in the world 
Is getting back into the workforce
 

Tayi Tibble writes about being young, about being Maori, about being beautiful and conversely about ‘ugliness’ and difference. She delves deep into our colonial culture and pushes against the edges of our comfort on race and gender without blinking. Her poems are sharp, ironic and tragic, and you will want to keep returning to them to examine your own responses to these concepts as well as to hear her honest and striking voice. To understand, to accept and to hear a voice, a viewpoint that may not be your own cultural experience yet resonates as it is part of the experience of living in a country, in a world, that has a colonial history - a history which impacts the present and needs new voices to ignite us. This is also a collection of poems that explores gender and difference - about what frames our identity and about exploding those concepts of identity into a whirlwind of a storm. It delves back into time: into school days, meeting the mean aunty, about nanny who isn’t a ‘blood relative’, about funerals and births, and the lines that anchor us to our past as well as the things that release us. With a title that is a play on the word Pocahontas and a cover illustration showing a glamorous Tayi in the bath with snakes and vodka, the reader is pitched straight into the audacity of Tibble and the obvious glee that runs parallel to the deeper, more serious, concerns of this collection of poems. 


{STELLA}
 

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Product Information

Winner of The Jessie Mackay Prize for a best first book of Poetry at the 2019 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards Finalist for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry - 2019 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards

General Fields

  • : 9781776561926
  • : Victoria University of Wellington Press
  • : UNKNOWN
  • : 0.131542
  • : October 2023
  • : ---length:- '8.25'width:- '6.25'units:- Inches
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Tayi Tibble
  • : Paperback
  • : English
  • : 821.3
  • : 80