Poetry Shelf Review

By Paula Green | Posted:

Robyn Maree Pickens – Tung

Poetry Shelf Review: Robyn Maree Pickens – Tung | NZ Poetry Shelf

/throwing a shimmer of tongue / this moment now / this pinch / this short gasp / this no escape / this not empty / this sky-wheat / this red earth / this sped through / this gnawing / this harvest / this dissolving shell of sky / this ocean / this not mine

from ‘Pinch’

Robyn Maree Pickens’ debut collection, Tung, draws us into a multifaceted contemplation of the natural world, the peopled world, the longed-for world. She carries us to darkness, she transports us to lightness. We move from the sensual traces of a bat, honeybees, a magnolia tree to myriad global risks. She weaves strands of love and tenderness, she faces the vast and falls upon the miniature.

Robyn is unafraid of words, of the ability of words to flip stutter pulse fizz. She shifts from prose-like paragraphs to musical phrasing to syncopated lines. Words scatter and curve, hug either margin, accumulate fascination for both eye and ear. She omits letters, doubles up, inserts Finnish or Japanese within the English currents, plays with suffixes and prefixes. She embraces concrete poetry, typographical playfulness, agile forms. Her linguistic dexterity replays a world that, whether abstract or physical, is both stuttering and harmonious.

The poetry builds threads to multiple sources: a painting by Joanna Margaret Paul, dwindling butterfly numbers in the USA, a book by Yukio Mishima, a botanist’s use of ‘ki’ and ‘kin’ because ‘Nature needs a new pronoun’. There is the tension between speaking to a lover or loved one and speaking publicly, of contesting and confessing. There are signposts to dark and pathways to light.

‘Tung’ is the flowering Chinese tree that bears oil-producing seeds, but the word also has roots in Old and Middle English – meaning ‘tongue’ and ‘language’. And yes, Robin has created fertile poetry that offers multiple rewards. A kinetic poetryscape for us to navigate. A repository for hope.

Robyn Maree Pickens is a poet and art writer who lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin. Her work has been published in numerous online and print publications in Aotearoa and beyond, including Landfall, Empty Mirror, Into the Void, SAND Berlin, Cordite and the Brotherton Poetry Prize Anthology (Carcanet Press, 2020). In 2018 she won the takahē Monica Taylor Poetry Prize, and was also a finalist in the Sarah Broom Poetry Prize judged by Eileen Myles. In 2020 she was longlisted for two US-based poetry prizes: the Palette Emerging Poet Prize and the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest. That same year she was shortlisted for the Fish Poetry Prize (Ireland). In 2021, Robyn was placed second in the Vallum Poetry Award (Canada), and won the IWW Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems. In early 2020, Robyn was awarded the Saari Residence in Finland. Robyn Maree Pickens has twice – in 2019 and 2021 – been a runner-up for the Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award for a complete manuscript. She holds a master’s degree in art history and a PhD in English (ecopoetics). Tung is her first published collection.