Chris Holdaway



What Blooms Beneath a Blood-Red Sky: A Year in Aotearoa Poetry

Poetry is booming in Aotearoa, and nobody can quite say why. What’s stirring our blood in the plague years / this sixth mass extinction / our deteriorating climate of political and literal atmospheres?

Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Erasure Poetry As Outsourcing the Lexicon with Reference to Srikanth Reddy’s Voyager and M NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!

Certainly one of the most radical works of erasure poetry is Zong! (Wesleyan, 2008) by M NourbeSe Philip. Where many other examples choose an ample text to move through in linear fashion, producing enough material in the process to constitute the project in its entirety, Philip instead reacts to an extreme paucity of information.

Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Dark Crystals

“Fighting a fire that cannot be seen.” Louis MacNiece Rural news Begin a new life with the pledge never To fly again. Knee-deep in the debts Of heavy machinery—reign of irrigation —the only choice left to tour the velvet Leaf’s …

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Floating point

The first transgressions have always occurred In vehicles. Voyages emit new laws of the wind Clothed in stolen gold—the hero beyond tragedy Stands on the shore having discovered nothing. Shield islands—plumes of headland nodding nearer Farther off breaking coastline vanishing …

Posted in 93: PEACH | Tagged

ICE SHELF (02- Flying in cloud theory)

Any altitude not found in the set Of altitudes of the world. A gap in the mountain as cloud As mirage in the cold desert glittering Pages of travel magazines. Peacetime sweep. To input correct Errors into a twelve-&-a-half-thousand foot …

Posted in 72: THE END | Tagged

Sidereal Time

I get onboard folded land in reference to nowhere Towns down down to the bottom of all places. The interglacial period finally terminates; the news comes Over. Ice ripples like slowmotion—oars carving water— until the Marlborough Sounds freeze over: Wet …

Posted in 72: THE END | Tagged