B Y
T H E
About the poet: Louise Wallace is the author of three poetry collections published by Victoria University Press, including Since June and Enough. She is the founder and editor of Starling, a literary journal showcasing young New Zealand writers. Originally from Gisborne, she now lives in Dunedin where she is a PhD candidate at the University of Otago.
B O O K
Re-verse I N T R O D U C E D BY C H R I S T S E
In brief: It’s a common sight every summer: Kiwis flock to coastal towns to escape city crowds, only to find that everyone else had the same idea. This poem considers the traditional Kiwi summer holiday from a different point of view, eschewing rose-tinted nostalgia for something a little more prosaic and cynical.
S U M M E R H O L I DAY
Why I like it: This poem is an excellent example of the competing tensions throughout most of Wallace’s work, which has a sly observational quality about it. Many of her poems take familiar social experiences and zero in on the things many of us think but don’t say. While it’s not explicitly a concrete poem, the shape created by the line breaks suggests an ebb and flow, which could refer to the waves at the beach or the arrival and departure of local tourists.
It's not just us: Everyone is on their summer holiday. We have flocked to the coast like gulls, to get ourselves back to nature, irritating the steady local population. This is the red zone for tsunami. Salt dries stiff in our hair, and as we walk back from the beach, there are the jet skis, the barbecues, the cars with silver jaguars launching from their bonnets, the kids’ bikes, kids’ friends’ bikes, a litany of stuff and the pressure to have it, and it joins to form a mountainous wave that's high enough to dwarf even the most assured among us.
Why read it: Everybody looks forward to a summer beach getaway, but there’s a special type of stress that comes with it. All that relaxation is going to take a lot of planning and packing. Wallace captures this pressure with surgical precision, skewering the exodus of city folk escaping to golden beach towns with their “litany of stuff ” which is displayed as symbols of wealth and privilege, emphasising the chaos that these holidaymakers bring with them. This poem feels even more apt in a year when we’ve been told to stay away from popular holiday hot spots to protect vulnerable communities from Covid-19.
By Louise Wallace From Bad Things (Victoria University Press, 2017)
Read more: In addition to her own collections, Wallace’s work has been widely published in journals and anthologies, including the recent A Game of Two Halves: The Best of Sport 2005–2019. Her collection Bad Things also contains a great poem addressed to her namesake, the actress and reality TV star Louise Wallace.
117
