My call out for poems about New Zealand rivers got an immediate response! Thank you to a certain olive farmer of Awatere Valley, who alerted me to this poem by Eileen Duggan. Certainly one from the “river as a metaphor” file – for love, in this case. The metaphors come thick and fast in this one! Continue reading
Author: envirohistory NZ
Poems about New Zealand rivers
I am on a hunt … for poems about New Zealand rivers.
I have found a few by some of our well-known poets:
“The river in you” by Brian Turner
“Rangitikei River song” by Sam Hunt
“Clutha V” by Denis Glover
And I am sure there are many others, though I am not sure how to find them, apart from searching through endless anthologies, or asking people much more widely read than I am (hint!). Continue reading
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“Birmingham River” – a powerful environmental history in a poem
This section of the Rea is canalised, and has a walkway alongside that nobody uses, people preferring to walk through the park instead.
In my exploration of different ways of writing about our relationship with the environment, I embarked on a search for poems about rivers. First and foremost, my interest was in poems describing New Zealand rivers, but then I stumbled across a poem by English poet Roy Fisher. Entitled “Birmingham River”, it is the story of the rivers (the River Tame and the River Rea) that run through the highly industrialised city of Birmingham.
This poem is an environmental history. Continue reading
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Ikawai: a revelation
I came to the world of Ikawai rather late. I had dipped into the hefty 800 page volume some time back. What I read was very interesting, but thinking that it was basically an encyclopedia about fish, I had not ventured much further than the introductory chapters.
Recently, my interest in the impact of acclimatisation on Maori led me back to the book. What a revelation! Well actually a series of them. Continue reading
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The front lawn – how has this New Zealand institution fared in the Big Dry?
In New Zealand, we have recently experienced one of the most prolonged periods of drought since records began, and a number of regions in New Zealand have now been declared as officially in drought. We live in Kapiti, a coastal area where there is less rain and more sun than many parts of New Zealand. On top of that, we have very sandy, porous soils, which makes growing some things quite challenging. Continue reading
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“Sadness seeping up from the ground” – A personal experience of a book and a landscape
A few days ago I received the following email from Mark Gibson, who had recently finished reading Ravaged Beauty, and wanted to share with me how it had affected him personally. It was such an eloquent email that I thought it would be worth sharing with envirohistory NZ readers:
“My parents (in their late eighties) gave me the book for my birthday late last year. They live in Palmerston North. So does my brother who farms on the Tararua foothills behind Tokomaru. Continue reading
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Wild rivers
I recently had the great pleasure to read John Mackay’s book “Wild rivers”, published in 1978, in which he recounts with remarkable descriptive detail the rafting adventures he and his mates had during the 1970s. He describes adventures on the Upper Buller Gorge, the middle Clarence, the Motu, the Wanganui, and the Karamea – all undertaken on home-made rafts, constructed using inner tyre tubes, timber and ropes, with accessories such as life-jackets either borrowed or improvised. Continue reading
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envirohistory NZ – 2014 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 34,000 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 13 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
Click here to see the complete report.
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Treasure in a charred survivor
On our way back from a recent trip to the Ruapehu Mountain district, we stopped at Bruce Park Reserve, near Hunterville. This was a forest reserve that I had read about in David Young’s conservation history of New Zealand Our Islands, Our Selves, and I had long wanted to visit it. To help entice my husband – an avid geocacher – to stop, I declared “there is sure to be a geocache in there!” Somewhat reluctantly, he relented, but his acquiescence paid off, because this turned out to be his favourite geocache of the trip. Continue reading
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New issue of Environment and Nature in New Zealand now out!
Just released: Environment and Nature in New Zealand Vol 9 No 2
Includes the following articles and book reviews:
Alistair McMechan, “Timber Town: A History of Port Craig”
Simon Canaval, “The Story of the Fallow Deer: An Exotic Aspect of British Globalisation” Continue reading
envirohistory NZ 