Instructions for how to get ahead of yourself while the light still shines

About this poem

This poem was first published online as part of a SPL project, supported by Creative New Zealand, which commissioned Scottish writers to introduce a New Zealand poem. This introduction is by Eleanor Livingstone, poet and Director of StAnza, Scotland’s annual poetry festival in St Andrews.

I first came across Jenny Bornholdt when I read her collection Summer and was moved by poems about the death of her father. At the time I was researching New Zealand poets with a view to inviting one or two of them to take part in StAnza 2009 as part of our Homecoming celebrations, to recognise connections stretching back generations which link our two countries.

There is an apparent lack of complication in Bornholdt's poetry, evident in the way she takes hold of language as if it were any practical tool. She prefers to see things as they are. In her long poem 'Confessional', looking at the dark smudges of cancer in her father's X-rays, she wonders if they resemble anything: 'but no, they remained / what they were – dark patches marring a lit screen'.

At the same time she sees the world afresh, perhaps from the viewpoint of the child who in another of her poems 'tries to pick the pattern up off the carpet'. Bornholdt has an amazing eye for the small details and nuances which lift events and moments in her poems out of the everyday, while at the same time anchoring them there. Her poems have been said to 'ring like the reassuring chime of crystal glass or with the resonance of a perfectly fired bell'.

She is especially good at the minutiae of family life and intimate moments, noticing in 'Feel the doughnut'

      the child's morning hair
      which resembles the sea
      skiffled by wind

and, again in 'Confessional', how on the beach ‘the elderly relax and slow,/ sleep settling over them like a thin sheet'. Her poems have a looseness and ease which make them very approachable; there is always a sense of breath and space between the words. If much of her writing seems prompted by the autobiographical, this is only a starting point, her words and lines taking the poems off on a tangent, or down into something deeper, just as on the beach, the elderly go 'down … hand over hand through the bright of their lives'; and the dark patches on the X-ray scans change 'everything'.

This contrasting and balancing of light and dark recurs in Bornholdt's work. She is a poet who understands that the beauty and fragility of our lives go hand in hand, intertwined and inseparable, and that to be true, a poem must acknowledge both. George Szirtes in his 2005 T.S. Eliot Lecture refers to this balancing act, this skating on thin ice producing a 'kind of joy we can justifiably look for in poems'. It's here in Bornholdt's work.

And in her beautiful short poem 'In Memory', light is the resonant theme:

      Something to do with fragrance
      and loss. Also 'Stellata', the way light
      keeps company
      with night.

The long title of her poem 'Instructions for how to get ahead of yourself while the light still shines' brings James Wright to mind. This is Bornholdt in more cheerful if rather didactic mood – which is not unusual for her. Elsewhere she tells us: 'Make sure you fall in love with a man who will survive in the bush', and ‘Try very hard to love your mailman'. The instructions here begin:

      If you have a bike, get on it at night
      and go to the top of the Brooklyn Hill.
      When you reach the top
      start smiling – this is Happy Valley Road.

These references both locate the poem in the poet's home territory, Wellington, and at the same time connect with other Brooklyns, other Happy Valleys, other hills.

At first, despite the night-time setting, there is only the anticipated exhilaration of cycling downhill but as the poem picks up speed it accumulates layers of darkness and light. We let the road take us down into an urban gloom broken only by yellow circles 'lowered' by street lights. No stars here, no suggestion of moon, Happy Valley now seems less so. Bornholdt knows that nothing, not even an occupation as innocent as cycling, is safe. Another poem recalls a grandfather, a cyclist in the Boer war, who 'had his spokes shot out'. But if we heed the poet, stay firm to our purpose, we need not be afraid, not even of our own shadows which like Nemesis creep up from behind, as we cycle on, in and out of brightness and shade.