Linda in her White Nightdress by Anne Noble

Waiting

       (for my sister, Marilyn*)

I wait for your text

in one way it’s no hardship

out here   bush tumbling

into a mirror   autumn sun

so bright my eyes

weep

– or is it not being there

while you wait

alone    across a channel

as wide as the universe when you can’t be

at her side  

                 you wait

for a phone call    an invitation

that announces your new status

and mine    first babies take their time

or maybe the stork can’t navigate

the ash of Icelandic eruptions

I watch a mother gull

wean her offspring     repeatedly

the juvenile pecks the red spot on her yellow bill

but she refuses

flaps her wings   leapfrogs 

while he squeaks pitifully

she doesn’t desert 

hovers    willing him

to fish his breakfast    

his cries stir a primeval response

and I toss soggy crackers   knowing

I’m perverting the course of nature

reflecting

how briefly we have our young  

how keen we are to see them grow

and fly away

               until we are alone

waiting

* Charlotte Victoria Katelijn Timmis, born 22.4.10 in The Netherlands

About Karen Zelas:

Karen Zelas is a Christchurch writer. She is Fiction Editor of Takahē literary magazine; editor of Crest to Crest, Impressions of Canterbury: prose and poetry (Wily Publications, 2009). Her poetry has been published in bravado, Catalyst, Eclecticism, Kokako, Landfall, Pasture, Poetry NZ, Presto, The Press, Snorkel, Takahē, in several anthologies and broadcast on radio; pending in Interlitq. Her short stories have appeared in bravado, Takahē, Southern Ocean Review, The International Literary Quarterly, 3 anthologies and produced by Radio New Zealand. View her first novel, Past Perfect (Wily Publications, 2010) and ‘poem of the month’ at www.KarenZelas.com

About Anne Noble:

Anne Noble is one of New Zealand’s most respected photographers. Her substantial body of work spans landscape, documentary and installations that incorporate both still and moving images. She often works in series enabling her to explore the medium and its possibilities in great depth.

Since 2001, Noble has been researching and photographing Antarctica. She is exploring the cultural construction of place through imagination and depiction. Moving away from the traditional photographer’s role as companion to exploratory and surveying teams, and questioning the tendency to frame the Antarctic landscape as heroic, picturesque or sublime, Noble is searching for appropriate forms of representation in light of our current, rather than historical, relationship to place.

In 1998, Noble embarked on a series of photographs of Ruby’s room (Anne’s daughter), her toys, and spectacular close-ups of her mouth. The works expand Ruby?s mouth in many guises to a scale that is at once scary, comical and heroic. Lush, large, and electric in colour, the photographs are of imaginary disembodied physical and sensory experience.

In 2001 The Dunedin Public Art Gallery curated a major retrospective of her work. The resulting exhibition States of Grace, toured New Zealand 2001 – 2003. In 2005 and 2006 her work has featured in exhibitions at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, in Berlin and the Patio Herreriano in Spain. Noble has just returned from Paris where she has just completed printing her series Ruby’s Room, which will be exhibited at the Musee du quai Branly in 2007 and tour Europe in 2008 – a catalogue will accompany this major exhibition.

In Beattie’s Book Blog today, Peter Robertson, President of Interlitq writes that “It was, of course, disappointing that Arts Council England did not choose to look outwards  but, in any case, we were not defeated, but only strengthened by that apparent setback, and Interlitq has now regrouped successfully in order to engage in its essential undertaking—which is to publish the finest international literature. And, to that end, publication of Interlitq has, for the time being, migrated to www.interlitq.wordpress.com

In a recent interview with Crescent Post, Reza Aslan, an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, whose works include “No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, and who is a Consulting Editor for Interlitq, responds to those who say that Islam and democracy are not compatible in the 20th century by affirming that,  “No one really says that anymore.  Certainly no analyst or sober-minded commentator says it. Of course, there are still those who refuse to acknowledge the empirical evidence: that the three largest Muslim majority states in the world are democracies; that one-third of all Muslims live in democratic states; that without exception every single poll ever taken of people in the Middle East shows overwhelming majorities of Muslims agreeing that Islam and democracy are compatible. What’s funny is that the people in this country who still refuse to acknowledge that Islam and Democracy are compatible are the same people who want to turn America into what they like to call ‘a Christian nation.’”

In a recent interview with Elizabeth Grice of The Telegraph, A.C. Grayling, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, author of many works including “Against All Gods: Six Polemics on Religion and an Essay on Kindness” , “The Choice of Hercules” and “Liberty in the Age of Terror: A Defence of Civil Society and Enlightenment Values”, and who is a Consulting Editor for Interlitq, discusses the private University of which he is first Master and states that what “students need is that one thing that is obsolescent-proof…..The ability to think!”.

Beatriz Hausner, the poet and translator of some twenty-five works of literature, General Editor of Interlitq, a former President of the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada, and who contributed prose-poems to Issue 10 of Interlitq, will be participating (alongside A. F. Moritz) in poetry reading in St Clair, Toronto on February 21st, 2012 at 7pm.

At a recent event in Durham, USA, in which he read from his recent memoir Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of An Unrepentant Exile, Ariel Dorfman, the Chilean novelist, playwright, journalist and human rights activist, Walter Hines Page Chair of Literature and Latin American Studies at Duke University, and a Consulting Editor for Interlitq, stated that “purity…is the Occupy movement’s greatest asset, but its greatest potential problem as well”, adding that “change must happen through the institutions, which inevitably leads to negotiations, and betrayal”.

Interlitq is delighted to announce that its poem in English for 30.01.12 will be “Waiting” by New Zealand author Karen Zelas, a contributor to Issue 11 of Interlitq.

In a recent interview with The Futurist, the Iranian author Azar Nafisi, the Iranian academic, writer, and implacable fighter for women’s rights, here talking about human rights’ abuses in Iran, and who is also a Consulting Editor for Interlitq, states that “the history of the West in Iran is one of cultural and economic exploitation” and later affirms that she wants “people to come to Iran through Firdausi, a poet”.

En un video reciente, Elena Poniatowska, autora de La noche de Tlatelolco,  Nada, nadie: Las voces del temblor y novelas incluyendo La piel del cielo, y una Editora Consultora de Interlitq, habla de la comisión “MORENA Cultura”, formada para promover la cultura nacional en México y sostiene que la educación tiene que ser el baluarte de este emprendimiento.

“Berlioz, Verdi, Wagner, Britten: Great Shakespearians”, a volume focusing on Shakespeare’s reception by the major composer, edited by Daniel Albright, the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard University, editor of “Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources”, author of many works including “Beckett and Aesthetics” , “Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of Modernism” and “Stravinsky: The Music-Box and the Nightingale”, a Consulting Editor for Interlitq and a contributor to Issue 4 of Interlitq, will be published by Continuum in March 2012.