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About the author: Poet and painter Rebecca Hawkes grew up on a sheep and beef farm near Methven and now lives and works in Wellington. She is an editor for literary journal Sweet Mammalian and co-editor of the forthcoming climate change poetry anthology No Other Place to Stand. In 2020, she was the NZ Young Writers’ Festival Writer in Residence and held a NZ Pacific Studios Ema Saikō Fellowship.
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Re-verse I N T R O D U C E D BY C H R I S T S E
In brief: The world famous in New Zealand Peach Teats sign on State Highway 1 serves as the unlikely inspiration for this evocative poem about dairy cattle and modern farming practices. If you’ve ever driven past the sign with its coy illustrated calf, you too may have wondered whether calves do indeed love ’em. According to this poem they sure do because these teats deliver all that they need to quench “their pure thirsty thoughts”. Rebecca Hawkes imbues an otherwise business-as-usual day on the farm with a dash of romanticism, paying tribute to innocent animals who are seen as machines that consume and produce on demand.
P E A C H T E AT S (calves love ’em) so much suckling frothy spittle and grunt a crescent of devotees hunched at the steaming trough barely able to breathe and drink at once in quenched surrender to the rubber teat their pretty eyes their pure thirsty thoughts no useless knowledge no wondering where
Why I like it: New Zealand literature’s troughs are overfilling with poems about farms and the countryside, but Rebecca has truly made the genre her own, eschewing rose-tinted pastoral scenes for vistas that are much more confronting and beautifully grotesque. The bulk of her debut collection Meat Lovers is inspired by her childhood on the farm, and includes poems about the effects of farming on the environment. Beyond its central theme, “Peach Teats” also bears the linguistic hallmarks of Rebecca’s poetry, such as the blending of the visceral lyrical (“suckling frothy spittle and grunt”) and the disarmingly prosaic (note her borrowing of Peach Teats’ own marketing lines in the penultimate couplet). Rebecca’s poems are sometimes much longer and more elaborate, revelling in excess and sprawling imagery. Here, she succinctly captures the contrast between the crushing claustrophobia of the feeding trough with the blissed-out peace of a herd of cattle happily feeding, doing what they’re expected to do.
their mothers are only hot sweet powdered milk and the unique patented internal collapsing flap valve self cleaning leak resistant flow regulating like any perfect body or machine by Rebecca Hawkes From Meat Lovers (Auckland University Press, 2022)
Read more: Rebecca is a prolific poet and has had work published in numerous journals. “Softcore coldsores”, a small selection of her poems, can be found in the joint collection AUP New Poets 5 and is the perfect introduction to her maximalist style and many interests.
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