On Thursday 19 March, we launched the award-winning collection, The Gum Trees of Kerikeri by Lynn Jenner, at the University Book Shop here in Ōtepoti Dunedin. It was a lovely evening of poetry and celebrations. We’d like to thank UBS Otago for hosting us and David Eggleton for kindly launching this beautiful new collection.
Here is David Eggleton’s speech from the night:
Lynn Jenner
Nau mai, haere mai. Kia ora kotou katoa. It’s my pleasure this evening to launch Lynn Jenner’s award-winning collection The Gum Trees of Kerikeri, chosen by Poet Laureate Chris Tse for the 2025 Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award.
The Russian poet Osip Mandelstam wrote: ‘My desire is not to speak about myself but to track down the age, the noise, the germination of time,’ and we see something of the same impulse in Lynn’s new book. In an on-line interview she’s said the she began writing the sequence of untitled poems here in 2024, inspired partly by the gum trees which she could see from her writing desk at her home in Northland: ‘I had started to think about them as more than just tall and beautiful – I was starting to see the, as symbols, remnants of ideas about landscape that were current in this area in the 1920s and 30s’.
So, gum trees are a recurring motif, along with other motifs and themes that connect up with Lynn’s previous books, such as the essay-memoir Peat, involving poet and philanthropist Charles Brasch.
In Poem 6, she writes: ‘Charles Brasch once saw a steam engine in a dream; she was his mother: she came from nowhere; crossed the road and went back to nowhere; as we walked the trail through the ginger, the jasmine and the gorse, I heard a heavy engine behind me and I turned, half-hoping that I would see a stylish diesel locomotive grinding up the hill. But there was no train.’
Te Tai Tokerau Northland, an area to which Lynn moved from the Kapiti Coast a few years ago is, in The Gums of Kerikeri, a zone of consciousness or associations, as well as a place offering opportunities for psychic excavations of the recent and distant past. Its sets of poems are a carefully crafted recital of histories, legacies and archeologies constituting a collection of guideposts or signposts to the past, but more crucially to the present and the future. Above all, collectively, it seems to me, the book is a wry response to the human condition and its inherent absurdity. Humour or the comic are never far away, although always subtle, understated, concise.
Here’s the beginning of Poem 12:
David Eggleton
‘Standing on the roundabout on Highway 10 on a Saturday morning, waving our “Stop the Genocide” and our “Free Palestine” flags, the 25 of us are a bit of a spectacle … Nearly half the drivers toot their horn and wave; the occasional person gives us the finger, the thumbs down, or a gesture that says we are crazy, but lots of the drivers and passengers and all the dogs just look. They open their eyes wide and stare at us for the whole time it takes to go around the roundabout and pass by…’
A poem is a fabrication, requiring a choice of details, and decisions made about patterns and measures – which these poems deftly provide – but Lynn’s poetic method is also generous enough and skilful enough to admit practically anything for contemplation, from an inherited vacuum cleaner to the way a river can be subversive in its flow. Her poems offer laconic and limpid observations, koans, advice to a younger self, as well as other therapeutic elements, in service of a kind of devotion to the truth of the particular detail. And, as she tells us in Poem 46: ‘attention itself is a form of tenderness.’
The gum trees and their falling leaves, a lone surviving kahikatea tree, kauri dieback, the space station passing overhead, a Tibetan bowl whose clear tone rings out: Lynn’s diaristic poems connect the personal to the political, and the local to the global. She makes a unified collection out of place, events and encounters, taking in the activism of Rebecca Solnit, the war in Ukraine, species extinction, climate change, neo-colonialism and so on: the complications of the contemporary where everything seems in a state of crisis, or permacrisis.
Publisher, Sue Wootton
Poem 25 asks: ‘What use are romance novels, murder mysteries, poetry about trees, short stories about toxic relationships, and eco-projects in welthy neighbourhoods in a situation like this?’
And yet these poems always have hopefulness and optimism to balance against the penumbras and shadings of fate and fatalism they invoke – from the legacy of the World War Two Holocaust to the COVID pandemic to the fate of grandchildren – all carefully rendered so that less is more. This from Poem 18 ‘ A second kōtare flew fast and low through the trees, its wings bright blue; there was a flash of feathers on the branch near us and then they were both gone.’
The Gum Trees of Kerikeri shows landscape as constantly changing, always in transition, never settled but always in in a state of being settled. Landscape is multi-layered, a palimpsest. We are given a sense of absences and of erased narratives. The landscape carries echoes; it resonates with ghosts and phantoms. In Poem 48: ‘Between the Stone Store and the grassy hill of Kororipo Pā I hear footsteps on the old wooden bridge, but when I look there is only a perfect inlet, parked cars and a Heritage New Zealand plaque.’
This is poetry as an apparatus to think with. Its perceptions are philosophical. These poems encourage us to take time, slow down, turn away for a while from our over-active electronic devices. Conjuring up finds, talismans, epiphanies, home truths, Lynn Jenner is a magician of the everyday, the ordinary. A careful recorder, she delivers sagacious vignettes, wise anecdotes. Her characteristic watchfulness is a form of witness, a form of resistance, a form of activism. Going with the flow, she retrieves the preciousness of each moment from the flux of time.
Please join with me in welcoming Lynn Jenner to read from The Gum Trees of Kerikeri.
We will also be launching The Gum Trees of Kerikeri in Kerikeri on March 29. Click here for more details.