Cold Hub Press ~ Jenny Powell

Ticket Home

Jenny Powell

ISBN 978-0-473-20719-9

Softcover chapbook 40pp

Exploring a variety of locations and experiences, the poems in Ticket Home tap into our universal desire to feel ‘at home’. Some have autobiographical starting points, others have a clear base in specific places, while Powell’s careful observations transform ordinary events into the extraordinary. We are compelled by her particular blend of rich imagination and sharpened imagery to journey with her . . . perhaps to seek our own tickets home.

Jenny Powell is an established New Zealand poet with four previous individual and two collaborative collections of poems, most recently Locating the Madonna (with Anna Jackson, Seraph Press, 2004) and Viet Nam: A Poem Journey (HeadworX, 2010). Her work is published in national and international literary magazines. She has been a finalist in the UK 2008 and 2009 Aesthetica Creative Arts Competition, runner up in the 2010 UK Mslexia Poetry Competition and a finalist in the 2011 Wales Poetry Competition. She lives in Dunedin.

out of print

THE HERBERT PLOT

for Donna Demente

As if you were chasing summer

and taking an apartment on the Riviera

or travelling on a tour of galleries

and architectural treasures,

you announce a stopover

at Herbert, ticket purchased,

documentation all in order,

the plot written and waiting

for an opening, there on those

green hills. Not highland hills

or Emerald Isles but Mount Charles

where the heart’s land rises

hill upon hill and in their bones

history rattles. The slow gaze of time

wraps a hundred shades of love

and sorrow in a convergence

of yellow and blue, the last echo

of life tumbling down to the sea,

lifting into the requiem of night,

Donna, Donna, Madonna.

© Jenny Powell 2012