HELEN RICKERBY
Coming of age in New Zealand film
Setting the scene
The shot pans over a barren
landscape
townscape
waterscape
a dark shape on the horizon
enlarges and becomes
a girl
Her clothes are daggy
she is not self-conscious
Her family
is small but close
if she has two parents
only
one
really matters
The wolf
She is minding her own business
doing whatever
is it that girls do
even weird girls like her
When the stranger strides in
confident
larger than life
And there they are now
talking to Mum
or Dad
She
hates
the stranger
and finds them
strangerly attractive
both at once
No wonder she is confused
She begins to rebel
There goes innocence
She has reached menarche
she reaches down
and finds her fingertips
are red and sticky
She refuses to accept this
but finds she is uncontrollably drawn to lipstick
and mirrors
and possibly boys
She may see
one or other
of her parents
having sex with the stranger
maybe through a partially opened doorway
She will probably run away
The woman
will scream as she climaxes
Happy endings
Her family pulls together
as they sometimes do
in times of
adversity
The stranger is expelled
flung out
oil and water
chalk and cheese
The girl
who is almost a woman
is embraced like a child
because by the end of the movie
somebody is dead
LISTEN to ‘Coming of age in New Zealand film’ by Helen Rickerby
Helen Rickerby is a poet and publisher from Wellington. She has published four collections of poetry—her most recent, Cinema, was published by Mākaro Press in 2014. She runs Seraph Press, a boutique publishing company with a growing reputation for publishing high-quality poetry books, and she is co-managing editor of JAAM literary journal. She is currently indulging her interest in biographical poetry (about which she recently co-organised a conference at Victoria University of Wellington) by writing prose poetry about George Eliot.
Rickerby comments: ‘“Coming of age in New Zealand film” was published in Cinema, which, as you might expect, contains poems that were inspired by films and film-making; though I actually wrote this poem quite some time before I had the thematic idea for the collection. I’d been thinking about a bunch of New Zealand films I’d seen recently that all told the same archetypal story, a New-Zealand-gothic coming of age, though in different ways and places and times. I guess I’m interested in exploring (though am often frustrated by) the ways we represent ourselves, and create ourselves.’
Links
Helen Rickerby’s blog Winged Ink
Cinema at Mākaro Press
Seraph Press
JAAM