Anne Kennedy
Anne Kennedy. Nacida en 1959 en Wellington, Nueva Zelanda. Premiada novelista, poeta y filmwriter de Nueva Zelanda.
Formada en Wellington, Kennedy era profesora de piano y bibliotecaria de música en sus primeros años. Se graduó con una Licenciatura en Música y Composición de la Universidad Victoria de Wellington y enseñó en el Trinity College de Londres
Desde 1986, ha sido guionista independiente. Anne Kennedy publicó su primera novela en 1988, y desde entonces ha publicado seis novelas y libros de poesía.
Premios
1985 Bank of New Zealand Katherine Mansfield Short Story Award.
1995 University of Auckland Literary Fellow
2004 Montana New Zealand Book Award for Poetry
2013 New Zealand Post Book Awards - Poetry category winner
2014 Fellowship for University of Auckland Residency at the Michael King Writers' Centre
2014 Nigel Cox Unity Books Award
Obras
Poesía
"What Fell"; "Towards Fourteen Ways of Looking at Pohutukawa"; "Berlin", Poetry New Zealand
"I am", Scottish Poetry Library
Sing song . Auckland University Press. 2003. ISBN 978-1-86940-295-2 .
The Time of the Giants . Auckland University Press. September 28, 2005. ISBN 978-1-86940-342-3 .
Novelas
The Last Days of the National Costume Allen & Unwin 2013
A Boy and His Uncle . Picador. 1998. ISBN 978-0-330-36057-9 .
Musica Ficta . University of Queensland Press. 1993. ISBN 978-0-7022-2457-7 .
100 Traditional Smiles . Victoria University Press. 1988. ISBN 978-0-86473-077-0 .
La escritura de guiones
The Monkey's Mask
Ensayo
The Source of the Song (ed. Mark Williams, 1995)
Antologías
The Picador Book of Contemporary New Zealand Fiction . Trans-Atlantic Pub. November 1996. ISBN 978-0-330-33996-4 .
The Oxford Book of New Zealand Short Stories . Oxford University Press, USA. May 5, 1994. ISBN 978-0-19-558291-8 . 1st edition 1992
Bridget Williams, ed. (April 1, 2009). Some Other Country: New Zealand's Best Short Stories . Victoria University Press. ISBN 978-0-86473-588-1 .
Susan Davis, Russell Haley, eds. (1989). The Penguin Book of Contemporary New Zealand Short Stories . Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-011007-0 .
Goodbye to Romance . Allen and Unwin. 1989. ISBN 978-99901-629-3-6 .
Alistair Paterson , Anne Kennedy, James Norcliffe, Stephen Oliver (2004). Poetry New Zealand . Brick Row.
En el marco de nuestro dossier de poesía actual de Nueva Zelanda, seleccionado y traducido por Andrea Rivas, presentamos la poesía de Anne Kennedy
http://circulodepoesia.com/2016/08/poesia-de-nueva-zelanda-anne-kennedy/
Monólogo de inundación
Nunca discutes con el río
y sin duda el río no quiere
tus discursos (su propio camino feliz)
pero ahora que vives cerca del río
un mosquito llega desde la orilla
y te muerde, y el río
está en tu sangre. Tú pules
el sitio de entrada como un trofeo.
Tu nuevo conocido, riendo,
lleva tus células al mar.
*
Sigue toda la noche, dices a tus amigos
bebiendo vino para calentar la casa
(ya caliente), y ríes, claro
como un desagüe. Más tarde en tu espaciosa
cama escuchas su monólogo―
un avión ascendente que nunca alcanza
altitud. Tus dedos se extienden
de costa a costa para tocar
esta soledad, mientras el agua golpea
su cauce.
*
No estás en ti misma.
Adolescentes van y vienen, el mosquitero
se azota, cardenales atacan el pequeño templo
que cuelga de un árbol. Un vecino con una bolsa
de semillas pregunta si te molestan
las aves. Ahí está el mosquitero, y la gripe,
pero no. En las mañanas, temprano
deslizas los ondulantes árboles a través
(del Bosque Burnham) y miras
seis loros levantarse como la anti-gravedad.
*
Al atardecer un sermón acerca de los platos―
¡tú has trabajado todo el día, a diferencia
de otras personas! Corre agua del grifo. El sol,
cayendo sobre Waikki, dispara a través de
los árboles, dora el río (innecesariamente),
te pasma en la habitación vacía. Cada día
durante diez años (te das cuenta, allí de pie)
has cruzado el puente donde está grabado Río
Mānoa, 1972, de ida y vuelta,
excepto el día en que el río creció.
*
Algunos hechos: las Mangostas (sic) (presentando)
orinan en la corriente, se suman a las ratas y ratones,
el río está enfermo. Todos los ríos.
Los mosquitos ―tu mensajero y aquellos
que muerden a los adolescentes cuya joven sangre
es festiva como el maratón de Honolulu―
podrían cargar el virus del Nilo Occidental. Frecuentemente fatal.
Probablemente no, probablemente estén improvisando
como tú, y tú vivirás toda tu vida
y morirás al final de ella.
*
El río no se ve enfermo. Da
un grácil viraje cerca de tu apartamento.
Los árboles son opulentos y proyectan
la sombra como de una casa a la que una vez entraste
en una galería (medios compuestos). El agua
enmascara su enfermedad como un noble Europeo
con la plaga ―una pátina, y rizos.
Estás harta de los problemas de salud
del río, porque tiene
tu sangre y tú tienes su H2O.
*
¿Crees que es tranquilo cerca del río?
Los patos braman, despertándote 2 am,
o algo así. Las mangostas cazan
los huevos de patos, dice tu hijo. Ah, dices tú.
Los cuacs nocturnos son ruidosos, pero
tú inquiétate en paz. A veces los vagabundos
duermen junto a la orilla del río.
Inofensivos. Una vez uno tenía un cuchillo.
Siguen hablando al respecto y tú lo ves a él
fantasmagórico como una app contra los árboles.
*
Todas tus cosas están cerca del río,
camas, platos, lámparas ―estás acampando
lejos de paredes, grifos y electricidad.
Tu laptop hace un ángulo como de espada,
y terrones ingleses calientan el cuarto
(ya caliente). Calientan tu corazón.
Sobretodo tienes mucho menos, porque
claro ―lo dividiste. Pero eres afortunada
o lo serías si el río rechinara
de limpio, y te hablara.
*
El río ha causado un pequeño problema
en el pasado, p.e., la inundación. No es su culpa.
900,000 personas pavimentaron demasiado, entubaron
demasiado. Luego el diluvio. Desde una distancia
segura (a edad apta) viste
tu pequeño curso de agua inflarse y tronar
hacia el valle llevándose autos, sillas, árboles.
Miraste a una madre y su bebé rescatados
de una van ―un vagón flotante, con cuerdas―
la van trastabilló hacia el mar.
*
Un apartamento en tu complejo
se llenó de agua durante la inundación. Y de lodo. Era
este apartamento. Lo has sabido todo el tiempo,
claro, porque has mirado.
Lo arreglaron. Levantaron las alfombras, usaron
ventiladores durante una semana. Repintaron.
No está mal. La puerta descolocada
aún necesita una mano. Bajo ciertas luces
sin embargo, en la pared, una marca de agua,
el monograma moteado del río.
*
Estás usando clichés ―agua bajo
el puente, cartas de amor de un abogado,
daños graves, hundidos sin ti.
El río ha estado en tu habitación,
y tú en la suya. Recuerda las cañas, el frío,
las tardes de verano. Tú amabas
el río. Sus aguas punzantes envían
un último mensaje en jugo de limón:
Si yo estoy jodido, tú vienes conmigo.
Sinceramente, el río.
Anne Kennedy is the author of three novels, a novella, three books of poetry, and many anthologized short stories. Her most recent book is the novel, The Last Days of the National Costume (Allen and Unwin). The Darling North (Auckland University Press) won the 2013 New Zealand Post Book Award for Poetry. Sing-song (AUP) won the 2004 Montana Award for Poetry and The Time of the Giants was shortlisted for the same award in 2006. Anne has also won the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Short Story Award and has held fellowships at the University of Auckland and at the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa, where she taught Creative Writing for a number of years. She now teaches Creative Writing at Manukau Institute of Technology.
After leaving high school, Anne studied for a Bachelor of Music in Composition at Victoria University of Wellington. She later completed at MA in English at the same institution.
For many years Anne worked in the film industry as a screenwriter and script consultant. Her screen credits include Crush, with director Alison Maclean, which was shortlisted for an Australian Film Critics Award and an Australian Film Institute Award, and The Monkey’s Mask (directed by Samantha Lang), an adaptation of the verse novel by Dorothy Porter.
Anne is the 2014 Michael King Writer’s Fellows at the University of Auckland.
The Darling North
I have now all New Zealand before me to caper about in; so I shall do as I like, and please myself. I shall keep to neither rule, rhyme, nor reason, but just write what comes uppermost to my recollectionof the good old days. – F. E. Maning, Old New Zealand
A Land Court
I woke in the morning when the clock dusted its hands
after an untidy night-time. Lips fluttered
travel plans into my back. My ribcage reverberated
like a cello. He had land so I called him Maning.
We were going up north, the thing to do
down here in the hemisphere.
I’d never looked at landscapes, only heard them,
which was safer, the ear a sieve for
devastation. I liked hubbub, how our apartment
undid the city like a corkscrew. A globe
webbed with lat. and long. and the tracks of former lovers
quivered in one corner. Every so often Maning or I
gave the Tropic of Capricorn a flick, exposing
the soft underside of the other, and the South Seas.
It was a disused schoolhouse in the Hokianga, a hang-out.
I’d been nearby, remembered mudflats, flatness,
nothing much, soundtracks mostly.
I had a compass. I’d had a friend (she moved to England)
who said you should always sleep pointing due north.
It sounded feasible. Finding her waterbed too big to shift
she slept crosswise, fitfully, due to the uncomfortable overhang
of her ankles. Maning and I favoured a clock tower.
All through the night bells rang changes. Half-waking,
I felt them in my heart and in my lungs. In sunlight
I lay close to the coiled hairs on his legs, degrees
Celsius, a cast in my eye, and I lived there
small, below decks. I liked the hardness
of his thighs compared with my own. They were landowners,
his people, crops, sheep, but what I discovered was
if there were no women in the world
he would starve to death. That’s how the line
would die out. He was an artist: ideas, paint.
I once toppled through a sliding door he’d just cracked
a nut in. It jumped off its hinges. We lay on the bed,
rolls of dust under it: a childhood
belief that was where souls went and where they’d
come from. Air-born. Some afternoons
I mopped there and shook out the dead souls
into the wind above the clock tower. Evenings
I worked in a cardboard room, rather crowded, finding
mistakes in the newspaper. It was jovial – the proofreaders’
jokes, their anecdotes, although night was day
and up down. When the phone rang a subeditor’s voice
was drenched in sunshine. After midnight
I’d find Maning with his pen dipped in a pool of rainwater
turned black by the action of many nights upon it,
drawing figures, scarved friends who bopped their heads
to the blues, to vinyl, vodka, moonlight. It got later
despite the clocks, which ticked towards the shores
of the Hokianga, and the weekend.
The friends said oh you’ll love the north,
and not just north, Far North. The tip. Maning agreed:
Everyone goes north. I had listened to northness,
a hiss, a crackle, a buckle of air.
Auckland howled. A clock gonged at night, and at dawn
a bulldozer sorted the chunks
of a dream. I’d bought the alarm clock
so I could wake up in the morning. Maning took it,
set it every night for an obscure hour. At 8.23 a.m.
I blinked at his inventiveness, the way his hand
extended from his sleeve. I’d run my fingers
over my face to be sure of it. When we got to the land,
the disused schoolhouse on the shores of the Hokianga,
I would mop its floors. The night before
he is moving inside my body when the telephone rings.
At first I think it’s the clock tower.
It rings and rings. By thirty rings he has shrunk away,
gone naked to answer the greater urge.
I lie on the bed watching him, my body like strewn hay
(I imagine). He replies yes to a question and laughs
into the receiver. A love-nest is disturbed.
Back in bed he says his friend from France (from the long.)
flies in and out dans le weekend. We’ll be up north,
he says, so I’ll miss her. He’ll miss her
in the Hokianga. No no, I say, we don’t have to go.
Oh we do, he says. We don’t. (The deliberations.)
Shall we go north? No. Shall we go north? No!
We would stay in the south.
Stretch of Hokianga
His name by some stretch of the imagination is Stretch
and he lives with his parents in a little house
on the southern reaches of the Hokianga.
In a hundred years there’s been small change
in the land,
the silver-dollar harvest of the Moreton Bay figs,
in the movements of the family
apart from the sandspit spend by the sea, a brother dipped
over the hill, they are keeping everything
just as it was. But lately, to make ends meet,
Stretch has taken weekend tenants. Friday evenings
are hilarious with car horns.
An uncle owned it. It stood on his ripped-off bit
of the family plot, biggest house on the Hokianga Harbour,
eighteen rooms at low tide. Being a bachelor, childless,
as is the wont of uncles, he left
the house to Stretch, younger brother, because the elder
had gone marae. Married. There were so many.
It’s two-storeyed, wide-pillared, veranda attended by
Norfolk pines, a cypress thinner and more brooding,
wine bottles crooked in its arms,
banana palms shredded like important documents.
From the road at night, the house lit up,
a hundred diners rattle their knives and forks
and shake their frilly sleeves. In the house it’s just Stretch
operating a circular saw. Weeknights he renovates.
On Fridays he bumps home to his parents’ bungalow
across the valley, leaves the tenants
lugging their coffee-maker, their water-purifier. The tide
is stirred as it changes. They’re professional girls
in the book trade, perhaps jilted. Stretch watches
in the rearview mirror as they drape the veranda
with ragged wedding dresses.
Once he told the lessee, a nice woman called Barbara,
he would like to live in the eighteen-roomed house with his wife,
whom he has not had the good fortune to meet yet.
(He is tall of course.) There are no eligible women
in the district. They all go to Auckland. His eyes
reflect all the blueness in the sky leaving the Hokianga
to silver. Later lights sit
in the cypresses, ghosts stalk the halls. He doesn’t like
to think. He knows his history,
the way the north pulled his forebears (the Fortunes)
south with the moon, and on a neap tide
they entered the mouth. Coughed up
diddly-squat (said Barbara
later) through the Land Court. Clutching a document
and a cattle station, they called it Oke Hanga,
built a veranda’d house in the vicinity of a church, a pa,
flour-mill, fish-canning factory, a sprinkling
of cottages and a schoolhouse
for their many children, little north in the south
but better, better. They’d been peasants
in the true north, in the lemon-coloured last night,
and now they were squires. (Maning by the way
thinks the treaty should be ratified. His family land sits
on the land.) I’d never lived with strangers
but after six months cohabitating with the ghost of a man
who had left taking everything with him apart from
his presence which still hung in the wardrobe,
lay folded in drawers and beside me at night
making me gasp,
I also packed up and departed, moved in with
two women in the book trade. Monday to Friday,
dressing-gowns, wings, on the way to the bathroom.
In the weekend I met them: Barbara, Issy,
told me they hawked advance copies in the south.
Nice to meet you, they said, let’s go north. Remember
The Navigator, when the boy shuts his eyes in order to see?
I soon found myself on the shores of the Hokianga
on the edge of a weekend
in the house next door to the disused schoolhouse,
Maning’s (my Maning), that we planned to stay in
but we never did. Now I go north with
Barbara and Issy because you go north.
In my black car I buzz the coast like an insect. I watch
the mudflats hold the tide, quivering, indecisive,
until finally as if going back
for its dove jacket, the water floods in . . . and so,
putting on the most unconcerned countenance possible,
The Time of the Giants
3.
Moss picked her way
over the mosaic of strange things away from his bed and
buttoned herself out the door
while he was in the bathroom without saying goodbye.
Why? Because
goodbye seemed like an apple i.e. needing a lot of
explaining.
She walked along the street feeling new-born, stretched
to let in light.
The bark on the trees was rougher in the palms of her hands.
She carried
his weight in her backpack, his words as loose change
in her purse
his essence in a thermos for comfort and emergencies.
She noticed
she could see sideways. Cars approaching. The ghost
that she always knew
lived in the passage. I knew it. As a child rasping to bed
she'd open her eyes
as wide as possible to let in all the possible light
and the ghost in
but the moment she felt it passing (not dying, passing
as ghosts do)
she'd blink and the ghost would be gone. The others
(the living, Mum, Dad etc)
in the light of the living room as if etched on a jug
would call out
See? It was nothing, there is no ghost and look back
at the TV.
Now Moss is wide open and the ghost
is physical
you can reach out and touch it like this table this chair.
While she was out
a furniture truck came and moved her into his body.
In her room you can see
the marks on the wall where the furniture stood for so many
years. Years.
.