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About the author: Katherine Mansfield (1888– 1923) is widely considered to be one of the most influential and important authors of the modernist movement. Born and raised in Thorndon, her fiction, poetry and essays have been translated into more than 25 languages. Although renowned for her astute and finely crafted short stories, Mansfield was also a prolific poet. Her earliest forays into the form can be traced back to as early as 1903 when she was teenager. Much of her output in verse was compiled and published posthumously.
Re-verse I N T R O D U C E D BY C H R I S T S E
In brief: This poem takes place in Sanary-sur-mer, a village on the Côte d’Azur in the southeast of France. It’s close to Bandol, which was dear to Mansfield and where she returned to convalesce after her health deteriorated. Mansfield uses a combination of direct language and imagery to describe the mental state of the poem’s speaker, which may have been similar to what she felt in the later years of her life as she tried to balance writing with managing her ill health. Despite its opening with the bright, blissful image of a window overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, a dark undercurrent scores the poem. Here, stillness doesn’t necessarily equate to calm or peace – instead, it stands in for something ominous and apocalyptic (“Nobody walked in the dusty street”).
N E W Z E A L A N D P O E T L A U R E AT E
SA N A RY Her little hot room looked over the bay Through a stiff palisade of glinting palms, And there she would lie in the heat of the day, Her dark head resting upon her arms, So quiet, so still, she did not seem To think, to feel, or even to dream.
Reverse
The shimmering, blinding web of sea Hung from the sky and the spider sun With busy frightening cruelty Crawled over the sky and spun and spun, She could see it still when she shut her eyes, And the little boats caught in the web like flies.
Why I like it: Like many New Zealanders, I was introduced to Mansfield’s fiction at high school. Even though I took a deeper dive into her work at university, I didn’t come across her poetry. This year, which marks the centenary of her death, I’ve decided to invest some time in her poetry. Many of the hallmarks of her fiction are present: her crisp language and masterful control of imagery can be seen in Sanary, which simmers with pent-up energy like the sweltering day it describes. In the poem’s second stanza, Mansfield describes the sun and sky as a spider and its suffocating web, an image and metaphor that wouldn’t feel out of place in one of her stories.
Down below at this idle hour Nobody walked in the dusty street A scent of a dying mimosa flower Lay on the air, but sweet – too sweet. By Katherine Mansfield (1916)
Read more: A number of collections of Mansfield’s poetry were published after her death. The Collected Poems of Katherine Mansfield, edited by Gerri Kimber and Claire Davison (Otago University Press, 2016), is an illuminating survey of her verse and includes previously unseen work from her archives.
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