Sometimes I consider the names of places by Kei Miller
PN Review 249, September - October 2019
Sometimes I consider the names of places
Sometimes I consider the names of places:
New York, as if York was not enough;
New Orleans, as if Orleans was not enough;
New England, as if England was not enough;
the New World
as if this world was not enough.
There was once a woman from nowhere
There was once a woman from nowhere. That is how Hanna would begin as if it was a fairy tale she was telling and not the story of her grandmother – a woman who had lived in seven countries without ever having moved. And imagine that – the same house, the same stairs, the same clock upon the wall. But outside things were always changing, the armies invading, the borders shifting. Some mornings, without warning, the radio would just up and start speaking a new language. Babička learned how to be polite in German, and how to be demure in Russian, just so the square jawed men in green uniforms would not rape her. She could describe perfectly the land where she was from. She could not always name the place.
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Sometimes I consider the names of places
Sometimes I consider the names of places. New
Zealand, as if Zeelandia was not enough. And because
the Dutch Explorer, Abel Tasman, had already spent
the bounty of his name on Tasmania. At first he
called it ‘Staten Landt’, believing its mountain ranges
connected to the southern tip of South America.
Argentina, Peru, Chile, New Zealand. Three years later,
it was renamed Nova Zeelandia.
In Nova Zeelandia, on the spot of land whose
coordinates are 45°5'S 170°30'E is a place that was
once called Otepoti, and is still called Otepoti by those
with long memory, and would still be written on the
maps as ‘Otepoti’ if it weren’t for a Scottish churchman
who saw something in the landscape that reminded
him of home.
Place name – Dunedin. Old Gaelic word. ‘Dun’ being
the same word as ‘fort’. Fort being the same word
as ‘burgh’. Dunedin, or Fort Edin, or Edin Fort, or
Edinburgh. And it doesn’t stop there. The town
planner is instructed to ‘emulate’ the Scottish city,
as if to make territories out of maps, as if to tame the
too-wild landscape, as if to baptise and make good
Christians out of trees.
But I love the way that landscapes resist, the poet Bill
Manhire tells me. How they throw up mountains where
there should be valleys, and lakes where there should be
fields, and rivers where there should be sea.
These poems by Kei Miller are taken from PN Review 249, September - October 2019. Further contributions from Miller, including the rest of the poems in this sequence, are available in the archive to paying subscribers, as well as more poetry, features, reviews and reports from across the back catalogue.
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