slow reader
the reports always said
she was conscientious but must learn
to work faster so she outran
the reading laboratory got through
tan to aqua and was safe at last
from the speed tests it was a valuable
lesson the letters dropped softly
into place making voices sing
or whisper there was so much to
keep track of kerning Times Roman
with a sable-haired brush serifs echoing
celestial geometry hours of work
for one or two words about time
she learned space and what lies between
compelling body and soul light and air
song and dance big letters flying
from keyboard to screen at a touch
marvellous sarabande starry gavotte
freehand the camber but understand
weight and measure the way
feet walk in the world and hands
turn pages that take them
out of it again and the copula
its even-handedness its tying
of one thing to another so that both
spin along the causeway expanding
possibilities a non-rival good
an open source a site for sore eyes
quick in its exchange slow to forget
the illuminations psst! pssssssss
sssssssst! pssssssssssssssst! poem
as event tied to the smallest detail
cut from the flying vista Alentejo
Pontchartrain beyond the river
is where we want to go Ponte Littorio
shimmering into della Libertà
that kind of hope that kind of day
that one beside you
offering an arm in the dark
Michele Leggott
Author of eight collections of poetry, Michele Leggott (born in Stratford, Taranaki, in 1956) is a Professor of English at the University of Auckland, from where she co-ordinates the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz). A graduate of the University of British Columbia, Leggott wrote her PhD on the poetry of Louis Zukovsky (her dissertation was subsequently published as Reading Zukofsky’s "80 Flowers" in 1989). Leggott's poetry, since the 1980s, has been shaped by an intense scrutiny of Zukofsky and other recent North American poets, and by her later immersion in the work of pioneering generations of New Zealand woman poets such as Robin Hyde, Mary Stanley and Eileen Duggan. Her writing has retained the kind of taut, allusive musicality which would have appealed to Zukofsky while adopting, increasingly, the personal register and lyricism of Hyde and others. Teeming with incidents and details from the life of the mind, self and family (past and present), Leggott's poems are like preludes and fugues played upon the surfaces of the everyday.
'slow reader' is from her 2009 collection, Mirabile Dictu. Her most recent collection, Heartland, appeared from Auckland University Press this year.
Further information:http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/writers/leggott.html