New book coming up

Home Base

If you have been visiting this now revamped site in the hope of a new post, then you have struck it lucky. For the last two years or more I have been putting together a new book - Home Base. It is a memoir of the three years I spent as a New Zealand Army Regular Force Cadet, living  in barracks at Waiōuru military camp. The work is a sequel to the highly rated No One Home (Mākaro Press, 2018), which records my early and somewhat chaotic boyhood, and ends at the point I board the Auckland to Wellington overnight express in early January 1964 on the way to my boy-soldier life. I was 15, which at the time, was the youngest age one could join the Army. 140 other recruits of a similar age entered camp at the same time.

The work provides a personal snap-shot of the years 1964 - 1966 and distils the essence of what life was generally like for each annual intake of teenage boys who flowed through the Regular Force Cadet School from 1948 - 1991. Like No One Home, Home Base uses more than text to portray memories of time, people and place. Employing a bricolage approach, the work tells its story through short prose, poems, photos, sketches, maps, diary excerpts, and images of contemporary artefacts, memorabilia, and documents.

Home Base chronologically unfolds my Cadet years, but is more thematically structured than No One Home. Themes include arrival, learning the ropes, kit and caboodle, daily routine, marching and parading, minders and carers, leave and time-out, and aspects of barrack life. Vivid and sometimes humorous vignettes are used to gradually lay bare my army home and its harsh physical and social environment. Ever present are the volcanoes that form Waiōuru’s backyard, with Ruapehu in particular writ large in the lives of the cadets. Also woven through the memoir’s narrative is the story of how my individual post-cadet future came to be shaped and secured through the interest and actions of an Army benefactor.

Home Base will appeal to those who read life-stories to learn about and be reminded of times before and to an audience who enjoys reading about the New Zealand Army's past. It will also interest those who have served (or who are still serving) in the military in some capacity. Rather than being solely an account of one person’s memories of a particular life-period, Home Base will pique the reader’s curiosity and attention through the variety of literary and graphic forms that it employs and by revealing the uniqueness of a place in New Zealand most people only experience while passing through it. 

The book is due for publication by The Cuba Press (Mary McCallum) in October 2021. Before then, I'll advise when and where book launches will be and post some more extracts.

 

Here is a taster from Home Base:

 

Parade states

 

We were marched on and marched off

We were marched in and marched out

We were dressed up and dressed down

We picked up our dressing and lost it again

We marched paces forward or paces back

We stood at ease and stood easy 

We stood to attention and stood around

We braced ourselves and paced ourselves

We numbered from the right but not the left

We were wheeled in and wheeled around

We marched in quick-time

We marched in slow-time

We double-marched

We halted

We formed up in columns of three

We moved to the right or left in threes

We got on parade and got off it

We changed step and marked time

We fell out and fell in

We gave eyes right and eyes left

We advanced in review order

We presented arms

We hurried up and waited

Photo: Aerial view overlooking Waiouru Military Camp and Mount Ruapehu. Burt, Gordon Onslow Hilbury, 1893-1968 : F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington

Tuesday Poem: Stellar Science Fiction

Sometimes when
the paddock gate has closed on day
and dusk’s fence
has culled the colours from the sun

I watch the mother of all musters
graze the night.
My childhood questions long ago
re the stars

and their what and why and when
are answered now
with quasars, crabs, quarks and holes.
But these don’t hold a candle

to the stories told me then
of angels tending flocks
of fireflies
across the fields of heaven.


When the priest who married my wife and me heard I wrote poetry, he asked me for a poem to put in his parish newsletter. I sent him this.

Visit Tuesday Poem for more poems this week.

A different hat

Have just changed my blog title  to 'Some place else', having figured out that blog titles are meant to be not quite as loud as my previous ('Keith Westwater's writing' – still there as a byline and indicator of content).

The new one is more suggestive of major themes in my poetry, which takes you to...???

What do you think?

Tuesday Poem: Misinterpretations of two sessions at Writers and Readers Week, 2008

Bill introduced Paul. He said Paul is possibly the planet’s pre-eminent poet

Princeton poetry professor, a prodigy, prolific.  Paul didn’t demur.

I don’t think Paul is a morning person.  He brought about four of his

published works on stage with him.  He hadn’t used post-its to mark

the poems he was going to read.  Bill said Paul said poets try to re-write

the work of past poets when writing new poetry.  Or something like that.

(Harold once said something similar in a different way – didn’t he?)

Paul thought a nine-thirty in the morning reading was a bit different.

He waffled a bit while trying to find the poems he was going to read.

I don’t think Bill is a morning person either.  He didn’t ask questions

when Paul left him gaps to do so.  So Paul waffled a bit more.  It was

a little disconcerting.  Perhaps there had been a welcome party the night

before.  Paul was disconcerted by the jackhammers behind the stage.

Paul’s poems were good.  Bill thought we should hear some songs written

by Paul and played by the guitar band he’s in.  I’m not sure who was singing.

Some people got up and left then.  Paul finished with a witty comment

about poetry.  I suspect he’s used it at other readings.  Everybody clapped.

Bill said to stay seated while Paul and he exited.  More got up and left then.

Christian said he is a ‘sound’ poet.  He read several poems very loudly.

Some people put their fingers in their ears.  A few got up and left.

Most of the poems he read didn’t have intelligible words in them. Christian won

a very big award and lots of money for writing some long prose poems.

All the words in each poem have only the same one vowel in them.  Christian said

he doesn’t write conventional poetry because he doesn’t want to inflict his ego

on anyone.  ‘Chapter i’ was the single-vowel prose poem he chose to read to us.

He said it was his favourite chapter.  Christian is conducting a GE project

in which he will alter the genetic structure of a microbe by implanting a

mirror cipher on its genome.  The cipher will write a poem.  When the microbe

regenerates, new poems will get written on the genomes of the offspring.

He thinks this will be a nearly foolproof way of communicating the high points of

human culture to ET beings who find our planet.  Christian doesn’t seem to be into

GE ethics, unintended biosphere-experiment consequences, or planetary safety.

I mean, what if all the poems the mutant microbes write are really, really bad?

I went to my first 2012 Wellington Festival Writers and Readers Week event today. It was really good then I remembered the 2008 Festival and a poem I had written after attending a couple of the readings.  Visit Tuesday Poem for more poems this week. 

 

Dance lessons

I didn’t join the blue-dressed, barefoot girl

as she pranced alone upon her toes

at the after-wedding dance last Saturday

her male and female partners coming, going.

Neither did I sidle up beside the five men coalesced

each dancing self-obsessed with Saint Vitus

nor crib some space among the solo swayers

nor nudge aside the twos and threesomes.

But this odd menagerie of motion

led me to a dance floor long ago

where matrons with a record player

showed spotty boys and girls with sweaty palms

where to place their feet and hands

should a waltz be struck up by the band.

Funny how memories are triggered – anyone else experience the dance lessons of a previous age? I seem to remember they were pretty excruciating all round.

Visit Tuesday Poem for more poems.