Last night Fiona Kidman helped to launch Marilyn Duckworth's new poetry collection The Chiming Blue at Unity Books. She has kindly let us reproduce her speech below.
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"The chiming began for me somewhere
around the early 1960s. I lived in a provincial town, in the suburbs, and the
game of the day was trying to keep the nappies on the line as white as those of
the neighbours. That is unless you wanted to be a writer, and I did. I had a
little clutch of literary heroines, especially those who were New Zealand women
writers. Janet Frame, of course, Jean Watson, Joy Cowley. At the top of the
list was Marilyn Duckworth. I wanted to be like her. I wanted to be her.
The thought of meeting her one day was beyond my wildest dreams – a woman who
was a wife and mother, producing a novel every year, and was little divided
from me in age. Her first novel was A Gap in the Spectrum in 1959, the
next The Matchbox House, and then in 1963, the same year as my first
child was born, came Marilyn’s A Barbarous Tongue. She’d done it all before I even began, or so
it seemed. There would be another ten or so novels to follow and a collection
of poems in 1975. Somewhere along the way, after moving to Wellington in the
early 1970s, Marilyn and I did meet. But it wasn’t until that first collection
of her poems, Other Lovers’ Children, and the same year that my own
first collection appeared, that we started getting to know each other well.
There were readings galore and we
started appearing together. A lot of them were at the Settlement, Harry
Seresin’s establishment – there is no other word for it – and there were some
riotous nights there. It was International Women’s Year and nine books of New
Zealand women’s poetry appeared that year, more possibly than there had been in
the previous 10 years. So there were often half a dozen women reading, drinking
Harry’s red wine, talking, laughing, and
crying too when it all got too much for us, far into the nights. Sobbing too –
we were an emotional lot. There would be Lauris Edmond, Rachel McAlpine, Jan Kemp, Riemke Ensing – a whole collection
of the brave new uprising that we were. Now those were the days, my friends,
they really were. The great cohesive glue for these gatherings was Irene
Adcock, Marilyn’s mother, who hosted gatherings of poets, men and women, at her
house on Mount Victoria. The Campbells, Meg and Alistair, would be there, as
too Sam Hunt, Denis Glover. Irene, to whom The Blue Chiming is
dedicated, as too, Marilyn’s father Cyril, was the founder of what is now the
New Zealand Poetry Society. Marilyn’s sister Fleur – that’s Fleur Adcock, if
you don’t know the literary genealogy of this town, sometimes appeared from
England to read with us. Terrifying!
Well, that first collection was
terrific. We waited for the next one, but the habit of novels had descended on
Marilyn again. We waited. But here we are again, more than 40 years later, and
at last we are rewarded with The Chiming Blue, this new and lovely
collection of Marilyn’s, this long awaited book, published impeccably, as
always, by Fergus and Victoria University Press, with an evocative cover from
one of mother Irene’s paintings.
It’s a rich collection, gathered up
from the years, peopled with the characters and loves of a lifetime, and
reflecting our own beautiful city of Wellington – Karori cemetery, coffee bars
that people of a certain age at a particular time in their lives – like in the 1960s
and 70s used to inhabit, sharply observed, as in ‘Decision in a Coffee Bar’
that begins: ‘Now that we have bitten back the flesh/we see each other in more
livid light/sharp limbs quiver at curious angles/like chicken bones discarded
on a plate.’ Indeed.
There are break ups and reunions,
loss, grief and laughter, there are writers’ festivals and conferences, and figs for Denis – Glover
of course... Above all, perhaps, there are the voices of children, Marilyn’s
four daughters who are here this evening, one of those rare lovely times that
we as parents know as we get older, when all the children are together, and
already the wings of some of them are hovering like moths at evening, ready for
flight again to the other side of the world. So this is a special night for
Marilyn’s friends and family to remember and celebrate, the launching of a new
book The Chiming Blue.
Marilyn, you have had many honours,
not forgetting the Prime Ministers Award for Fiction last year. But I want to
thank you for sharing friendship over the years, for constancy and acceptance.
I’ve made one or two dreadful boo boos on occasion, said quite the wrong thing
about this or that but you have this unfailing grace that smoothes it over and
says, it’s all right Fiona, it really is all right. I love that this is you,
your way of dealing with the world. All those years ago, I couldn’t have
guessed that I’d get up this real and personal, but it happened. Thank you.
Thank you for The Chiming Blue, may the poems sail into the world, sails
unfurled."
The Chiming Blue by Marilyn Duckworth can be purchased at the best bookshops and through our online bookshop. $25, p/b.
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