WINNER OF THE 2021/22
JOHN O’CONNOR AWARD
the tide is a thing that moves
from ‘My thoughts are all of swimming’
lean and sometimes hungry
for sand, silt or grit
the foam and the form of it …
My thoughts are all of swimming
by Rose Collins
(2nd edition)
Available March 2024
ISBN: 978-1-7385824-5-7
paperback; 100 p.
rrp $25
Described by Paula Green as “a breathtaking album you want on repeat” (full review here), My Thoughts Are All of Swimming is the award-winning debut poetry collection of Rose Collins.
Rose lost her battle with cancer in early May 2023 – barely nine months after the book’s initial launch. This second edition includes a foreword by her mother, Siobhan Collins.
This highly accomplished, beautifully ordered collection of consistently stunning poems, ranges from the wide-lensed beginning to a focus on the particular, from crater to soup bowl … There is a steadiness of tone, a poise, an assured fully-developed voice, clear-seeing, measuring, at times almost forensic … This contest of two forces is where the pleasure of poetry lies.
My thoughts are all of swimming is a remarkable collection, not just for its range or titles or skill, but for the sense it builds of the poet as a personality … whatever the subject Rose Collins has the enviable ability to be both present and an observer at the same time. My thoughts are all of swimming has the best kind of style, the subsumed kind that accentuates personality rather than diminishes it.
– ELIZABETH SMITHER
Last summer these same girls clutched
from ‘Three visitors’
hands through the dark wood –
looking for a well-spring
in the Green Heart of Germany.
Now they lift the grubbers high
in the glancing sun …
Here is a finely attuned sensibility at work in the house of poetry. Her range of artistic and aesthetic attention is astonishing. As I read and read again and listen to what the intimacy of the eye and the ear create, I know that this is a composer-poet making things happen. That despite all the darkness there is in this staggering world, this is a poetry that is alive with the music of dark hope.
– MICHAEL HARLOW
the body is not a dictatorship
from ‘While the radios are tuned you write letters home’
you and I are free of it
we learnt this when we
began to stretch and spin and twist
coming home is a long gallery
the air spits with static and you may
find the cold moon through the egg-round window
seems to face the wrong way
my friend, write it down for me.
We are taken into the wonder and the menace of myth and fairy tale, with breadcrumb trails, epic journeys, bees that listen, magical swans, children lost in the woods… and of course, as in all good fairy tales, the menace at the edge of everything…. the poems at times look at this danger head-on, and those poems make for uncomfortable reading, but they feel brave and important.
– LYNN DAVIDSON
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Reviews
Rose Collin’s debut collection, My Thoughts Are All of Swimming, was chosen by Elizabeth Smither as the inaugural winner of the John O’Connor Award. In conjunction with the Canterbury Poets’ Collective, the award offers publication to the best first manuscript of a local poet.
Rose’s collection is both elegant and physically present. […]Every word-note is pitch perfect and forms a musical score for the ear. […] There is the space on the page in which a poem nestles, the chance for poems to breathe, for readerly pause and pivot. […] room is left for the reader to navigate ellipses, semantic clearings, things held back. There are poignant references, electric traces that signal illness, challenge, danger, and more illness. […]
There is an inquisitiveness on the part of the poet, as she ranges wide and deep in her curiosity and engagements; touching upon fairy stories, other modes of writing such as William Burroughs cut-up practice, a Kafka aphorism, sculptural installations, a Lydia Davis short story, music, other poets, Robert Falcon Scott’s diary.
[…] in this sumptuous poetry, is intimacy. I am musing on how you are drawn deep into the writing; how it feels exquisitely intimate. It feels compellingly close, as people and places resonate: from son to brother to friends, from Lyttelton to Ireland.
Rose has produced a debut collection to celebrate. It moves you to muse and be nourished, to inhabit and settle in poetry clearings. To dawdle and drift as you read. Close your eyes and absorb the music as though you have put on an album, a breathtaking album you want on repeat. There is darkness and there is light, there is the particular and the intangible. My thoughts are all of swimming is a joy to read.
– PAULA GREEN
full review at NZ Poetry Shelf
My Thoughts Are All of Swimming by Rose Collins won the John O’Connor Award for Poetry in 2022. It was the debut collection of this poet who died in May 2023, after a long illness. A mother as well as a writer, and a sometime human rights lawyer and beekeeper, Rose Collins lived in Te Wakaraupō Lyttelton, having travelled widely. All these elements contribute to a rich collection, to crafted poems able to convey the touch, feel and sensuousness of things, as well as their provisionality. […]
Discovery, exploration of tracings and trails of a terrain’s idiosyncrasies: Collins is able to personify a landscape and also move about it like a surveyor offering metaphorical interpretations of natural forces. […]
In poem after poem, the language, though gentle, is energised to the fullest extent, bringing to mind Emily Dickinson’s statement: When I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.
– DAVID EGGLETON
full review at Landfall Review Online
Sudden Valley Press 