Bernadette Hall is an award-winning poet and editor who lives at Amberley Beach, North Canterbury. She has published ten collections of poetry, the most recent being Life & Customs (Victoria UP, 2013). In the same year, The Judas Tree, her edition of selected poems by the late Christchurch poet, Lorna Staveley Anker, was published by Canterbury University Press. Poems from her earlier collection The Way of the Cross have been used by the Dunedin composer, Anthony Ritchie, in his Stations Symphony which will be premiered by the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra 22 February 2014. This marks the anniversary of the devastating earthquake which struck Christchurch in 2011.
Bernadette received a Tapa Notebook after her co-presentation with Dinah Hawken at nzepc’s symposium SHORT TAKES ON LONG POEMS in February 2012.
Bernadette writes:
The Tapa Notebook, mine, is weird as regards the dating. I went right through using those lovely fat smooth right hand pages I've always loved since I began scratching big letters on them with a lead pencil when I was 5. But I found I had a whole lot more days left to me and a whole lot more thinking so, like Spike Milligan, I found myself walking backwards for Christmas. Each page is dated or has cont. for a continuation. Just a slight touch of the maze/of amazement in the final product.' Which notion gave me the title 'Tulliver's Maze' for a longish love poem I wrote for my old home town, Dunedin. The uninhibited free flow, the winding in and out of twelve months of tapa notations, has had a liberating effect on me and on my writing. That's what I believe, that's what I'm experiencing. 'Tulliver's Maze' is the final poem, the landing place you might say, in my new collection Life & Customs. Without the Tapa Notebook, I'd never have got there.
Links
Photo:John & Bernadette Hall at Robert Lord cottage
Photo credit: Sandra Winton
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Photo: Bernadette Hall
Photo credit:John R Hall
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