Paula Green
PAULA GREEN lives in West Auckland with her partner, artist Michael Hight, and their two children. She is the author of four poetry collections published by Auckland University Press: Cookhouse (1997), Chrome (2000), Crosswind (2004) and a collection for children entitled Flamingo Bendalingo (2006). Making Lists For Frances Hodgkins is forthcoming from Auckland University Press. Paula was the 2005 Literary Fellow at the University of Auckland. During that year, she curated ‘Poetry on the Pavement’ as part of the Auckland City Council’s ‘Living Room’ project. Paula is writing a new collection of poems for children, radically redrafting a novel, and has a new children’s story, Aunt Concertina and Her Niece Evalina, in the wings.
Green comments: ‘Towards the end of 2005 I became very ill and, for the first time in my life, found myself unable to eat or undertake my usual array of daily tasks. From my “sick bed” I agreed to do a poetic response to the Frances Hodgkins exhibition at the Auckland City Art Gallery knowing I would have a few months up my sleeve. My recovery was slow but sure as I lived off homemade juices, the reproductions of Frances, and all the latest New Zealand poetry books (2005). While I couldn’t sustain the attention a novel demanded poems became an electric release from my physical fragility.
‘In my head I slowly assembled the seeds of a new collection that emerged from my love of New Zealand poetry, a new relationship with the work of Frances (whose work I had always whizzed past in galleries without a second glance), and this unexpected illness. I found myself playing around with lists to such an extent I decided to call the accumulating poems Making Lists For Frances Hodgkins.
‘This is the first poem that I wrote that engaged with some of the poetry books on my bed. During this time I had felt quite isolated and wrote letters in the form of poems that were in part speaking to someone who had affected me as a writer but in other ways were letters to myself. I wanted to reassure myself that I was capable of conversation.
‘This poem is also an unashamed celebration of the New Zealand landscape. It is the first poem that I wrote in our new home in Bethell’s valley where the sky and bush and native birdlife are supreme.’
