I Am (1)

About this poem

This poem was originally published online as part of a SPL project, supported by Creative New Zealand, which commissioned Scottish writers to introduce a New Zealand poem. The introduction is by Kirsty Gunn, novelist and Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Dundee, who was born and grew up in Wellington, New Zealand.

Reading Anne Kennedy is not like reading at all. It's like watching a life spin and turn, like a washing machine of words, flipping and sorting and humming with the day to day business of families and children and houses and milk bottles and doctor's appointments and scattered conversations…And love. Always love...

Sing-song tips us right from the outset into the midst of Anne's project –

      This afternoon our little daughter
      sang her first small lark's descent…

      She's a latecomer to singing
      and I'll tell you why…

and off we go – on a wild, desperate singing, spinning tale of botched hopes and dark fears, the sickness of a little baby turning into the sickness of a little girl…The parents' anxiety, the child's brave unknowingness, a doctor's mis-diagnosis set against endless prescriptions …A whirl of linked poems knotted and fretted with hope and despair that nevertheless manage to spin their way, over the course of one book, out of trouble towards humour and gentleness and understanding.

It's hard to choose one poem over another in Sing-song because the poet has made her work to be read in sequence, in one sitting – just like singing. Anne Kennedy is special that way – not only in her seizing upon her intensely personal subject, her own particular tune, but also in her creation of a vital narrative imperative. These are page-turning poems! And they follow one after another like verses in the most engaging, idiosyncratic ballad you've ever heard.

So which verse to choose? When I want to open my mouth and sing the whole song? In the end I must settle upon ‘I Am (1)' for the particular print of it, of the poet and her life upon me – the sense of a tiny moment in a child's life representing everything to do with maternal tenderness and inchoate expressions of protection and care and duty, all bound up here in the moment when our child in the middle of the night comes into our bed…

      Every night she wakes and makes
      herself seem big the way she thumps
      across the hall. Those footfalls cast
      a grown-up shadow, minimised
      when she arrives at her parents'
      bed. A night-light, weak-wattaged
      blinks on and chases away the adult
      her. That can wait, she's got all night

      and all the days of her life.

How dense with meaning and emotions are these two short verses - and how beautifully, simply rendered. Hard to believe the complexity of mortality is gathered in to these direct and straightforward sentences. Anne Kennedy's poems are intensely allusive, but allude to their own world. They allude to themselves. So the night light and the shadow on the wall need no explaining…Or the cream, and the guilt and the scratching…We've been living in the midst of the poet's world since we opened the book and read the first poem about eczema and bad choices about everything from houses to doctors…All of the words known to us from the beginning. Anne's world – and not just because I'm a mother too – is… familiar.

In that last verse, ‘Thumps across the hall', ‘grown up shadow', ‘she's got all night and all the days of her life…', all sound like I'm reading in my own voice. This is a poet sharing with us her own life so intensely, so musically that we can't help ourselves, just as with any sing-song, from joining in.

Of course, yes, there's motherhood, too… It's humming away there, all the time, in the pages of Sing- song , at the heart of this poem. Mother love. Mother love. It's the love, in the end, that inspires all these poems. Love that turns itself inside out to become the love that's the very definition of love: that is, with no self at all. This poet is full up with that kind of love, the sort that's as far removed from the traditional love poem with its traditional celebration of one self and its love for another as could be. It spills onto the pages and turns into baptism, epithalamion and elegy all at once. And here it is, all of piece, swaddling clothes and blankets and bandages… A mother with her tiny, hurting child in all its singing, turning wide-awake-in-the-middle-of-the-night entirety…. ‘I am' because ‘You are'.