Q&A: Joanna Preston
Canterbury-based Joanna Preston’s accomplished poetry collection tumble won the big poetry prize this year: the Mary and Peter Biggs Poetry Prize at the 2022 Ockham NZ Book Awards. She’s generously allowed one of her poems to be chopped up and reconfigured for our National Poetry Day “magnetic poetry” competition this year. She answers our quick Q&A.
1. How are you and what have you been up to lately?
I’m … busy! Turns out that winning an award means lots of people want you to do things! Who knew? It’s lovely to be wanted, and the winter has been so wet here that the garden wants nothing to do with me.
2. If you were working in a bookshop, how would you hand-sell your book to customers? What would you say to convince them to buy and read it?
Hmm, tough one. Probably start by suggesting that it’s a Choose-your-own-adventure for the journey from girl to woman, with lots of weirdness and more rhyme than they’ll realise at first, and if they read one poem and don’t like it, try another a couple of pages on. Maybe start them with Lucifer or Fallen Roses, and see how they react – if the mythology doesn’t work, try to get them with sex! (Can you tell I’m really bad at this sort of thing?)
3. What books (or other art/media) influenced you while working on this book, or generally in your life?
Putting the book together, I had Ludovico Einaudi’s Experience playing on a loop – I love the way it builds, and found it really easy to lose myself in the music. Individual poems have their own songs – Great Aunt Lavinia was written to the backing of Del Amitri’s One More Last Hurrah, for example, and Fare to The Alan Parsons Project’s Fall of the House of Usher. Books that influenced me over this period is a bit harder – the poems span a pretty long time, and I’m a bibliovore. Terry Pratchett is definitely an echo in tumble – I love his blend of wit, anger and compassion, and reread my Discworld fairly compulsively. Loads of poets of course – Kimiko Hahn and Paisley Rekdal have been recent(ish) loves, and I’m a huge Louise Glück fan-girl. (I won’t name NZ poets – the list would run to multiple pages, and even then I’d miss someone out, and never be forgiven.)
4. What good books have you read lately?
Jasper Fforde’s The Constant Rabbit was something that I genuinely couldn’t put down. Heartbreaking, enraging, really inventive. Susannah Clarke's Piranesi – how does she manage to so completely create a believable alternate reality?! And I’m re-reading Philip Ball’s H2O: a biography of water, which seems to fit the weather altogether too well …
Buy tumble (Otago University Press), $28
