JENNY BORNHOLDT

 

Cross

 

You’ve had a coat 
for weeks now     I mean 
a cold    and that’s why 
you need the coat     but even 
before the cold you needed 
the coat     for 
the cold     or against it     one 
of the two     or is it 
three? 

 

Listen to Jenny Bornholdt read ‘Cross’

 

Winter

 

Snow drifts in 
to rest 
among our short, practical 
sentences. 

There are new kinds of cold 
to learn, new kinds 
of clothes and talk. 

As the bus winds up 
the children practise 
their snow vocabulary: 

Ridge Run 
         The Boulevard 
                  High Traverse 
                           Tom’s Drop 
                                    Wedding Knob 
                           Cross Roads 
                  Easy Off 
         Shirt Front 
                  Escalator 
                           Wind Swept 
                  High Traverse 
         Powder Bank 
                  Sun Run 
                           Lower Sutton 
                  Snow Mat 
                           Platter 
                                    The Chair 

At night, a quiet 
horse, white 
as you-know-what, 
moves out from the trees 
to shadow us 
down the road. 

 

Listen to Jenny Bornholdt read ‘Winter’

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jenny Bornholdt was the Writer in Residence at Victoria University during 2010. During her time there she wrote a book of poems entitled The Hill of Wool, which will be published in 2011 by Victoria University Press. Jenny has written nine books of poetry, including a selected poems: Miss New Zealand. Her last book, The Rocky Shore, was a collection of six long(ish) poems, described as ‘…as much autobiographical essay as long poems’. This book won the Montana Book Award for Poetry in 2009. With her husband, poet and artist Gregory O’Brien, Jenny has co-edited My Heart Goes Swimming: New Zealand Love Poems (Godwit/Random House, 1996) and The Colour of Distance: New Zealand Writers in France/ French Writers in New Zealand (Victoria University Press 2005). With Mark Williams, Bornholdt and O’Brien edited An Anthology of New Zealand Poetry in English (Oxford University Press, 1997), which won the 1997 Montana Book Award for Poetry. Jenny has been an Arts Foundation of New Zealand Laureate, and was the Te Mata Estate New Zealand Poet Laureate 2005-7.

 

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