And you said how easy it was
from ‘The cuckoo brings benefits to the nest’
not having a human mirror –
not like your natural-born children turned
out to be, reflecting your everyday
faults back at you.
Some Bird
Gail Ingram
Published August 2023
ISBN: 978-1-7385824-2-6
paperback; 108 p.
rrp $25
Who am I? Where did I come from? What will I become?
Simple questions take on eerie overtones in this, Gail Ingram’s second collection.
From a childhood in rural Canterbury through the migratory flight to other lands; falling out of the nest and in and out of love; through all the stages of becoming – a teacher, a wife, a mother, a grown woman wondering how on earth it all happened and where her limits really begin and end, and who decides these things anyway? Some Bird is funny, sexy, complicated and fearless. A restless quest for answers, where someone is always ready to throw stones at birds, and where some birds remember their wings – and their talons.
The man who makes music
from ‘Dancing in the Dark’
with a smile like light
across his shining face
follows my fingertips
the rise and soar
catching the glitter of the Pacific
Gail’s poems remind me why I read books that give voice to experiences of girlhood and womanhood. I found myself in the elation, grief, rage and sensuality of these poems. It’s a bird’s-eye view of her life in poetic form, and I couldn’t put it down.
– Sarah Jane Barnett
my son hugs me too close to his chest
from ‘Five mistakes’
swaggers when he walks away
the days react with my daughter’s skin
as if the lie of a billion trees would help
that I bear my children
like a weapon
From aching, broken-form narratives of adoption and separation, to tart and spiky wordplay; from the bittersweet afterglow of some memories, to the frightening haunt and threat of disintegration in others, these poems circle and swoop through the stages of a woman’s life with alternating honest, quiet directness, and then whimsy: if whimsy can be wry, and grounded in thick-soled boots: if it’s a whimsy grown out of the need to feel the cool and giddy relief, sometimes, of playfulness after the sting of experience, or after grief and stoic forbearance. These poems can use sensory detail that acts like map pins, locating us precisely, vividly in an era and a place; or they can launch us, as if we’re riding paper darts, off into flights of surreal, room-tilting imagination. This is a collection I wanted to read in one gulp — but then I immediately wanted to trace back through more slowly to make sure I’d really taken in the texture, the electric jolts of story, the salt and tang of love, loss, and the changing landscape of long companionship.
– Emma NEale
Lord, give me a traffic jam
from ‘Teacher prays for a traffic jam”
that leads me into detours
of confusing road cones.
Blessed be the stop-go men
and forgive me my reflection
in rear-view mirrors.
In this superb collection, Gail Ingram takes up the terms of denigration used of women –chicks, birds – and makes them defiantly, exquisitely, her own.
With wit and insight, linguistic flare and total technical control, she creates, poem by poem, an intricate account of a woman’s life as it has been lived in Aotearoa New Zealand over the past half century.
Autobiographical but never self-indulgent, profoundly moving but never sentimental, playful but deeply serious, personal yet resolutely political, this is a collection to respect, admire and savour.
– Fiona Farrell
at the Chinese restaurant that winter night
from ‘B movie’
in Soho on the way back to the train station
she told her flatmates ‘I’m gonna
mountain that man’ […]
Sudden Valley Press 