Celtic odyssey

Dame Fiona Kidman delves into her family history in her new book of poetry, Where Your Left Hand Rests. Photo / Supplied

It's been 17 years since Dame Fiona Kidman published a book of poetry, but her new collection, Where Your Left Hand Rests (Godwit), is well worth the wait. Not only is Dame Fiona's verse evocative and accessible, but the volume itself, almost pocket-sized and illustrated with photographs of antique fabrics, is exquisitely designed.

"Godwit have done me proud," agrees the Wellington writer, who is looking on the book as a 70th birthday present from her publishers.

"At first I was uncertain about the illustrations as poetry is a plainish form, but then they started sending me the page proofs and I was blown away."

An emotional odyssey to Ireland to search for traces of her late father's family led to the poems that dominate the collection. Although Dame Fiona found the house in Bandon, County Cork, that her paternal grandmother had grown up in, she could not find any other records and she suspects all that remains of these people are the letters and photographs sent to her father after he emigrated to New Zealand.

From these keepsakes, Dame Fiona has created what she calls "found works", a sequence of epistolary verses entitled Last Letters that tell of what she knows of the lives of these strangers from whom she is descended.

She writes of the domestic minutiae, of little things like the weather, as well as greater ones like loss and inheritance.

She admits there was some dilemma at first about whether to use details of these private lives in her work but she now feels it's been a positive thing.

"They no longer exist," she points out. "They've left no trace so far as I'm aware. So they are voiceless. Do I condemn them to be forgotten?"

As an only child, family has always been important to Dame Fiona, and in a way with this volume of poems, she knits herself into place within the generations, creating an unbroken thread between those who have gone and those she will leave behind. There's a sense of continuity and of surrounding herself with family. And there is humour as well as pathos, most especially in a poem called The Ngaio Tree, in which she tells of her grandsons having to study a poem she wrote about their father at school.

"Two or three of them have been through that now," she laughs. "Trying to interpret what a poem means when it's about your father - how embarrassing."

The collection also includes poetry about her home, her husband, her garden and her travels but, although personal in tone, Dame Fiona says none of the work is "wildly confessional".

"You can be intimate without spilling your guts up," she believes. "I did a bit of that in poetry I wrote in the 1970s and think it's a bit embarrassing now."

In the early 90s, Dame Fiona more or less stopped writing poetry.

"I felt dissatisfied with what I was doing and decided that maybe I was a novelist and a fiction writer and shouldn't be doing it," she explains.

"But in all the years that have passed I have read and read poetry. I've got at least 10 books of poems beside my bed. There's a generation of kids that were given poetry to learn or write out for punishment at school and they've been left with the idea that it's worthy or dull. But I love it."

Dame Fiona started writing poetry again in earnest while she was the Katherine Mansfield Fellow in Menton, France. She had returned from Ireland feeling both haunted and exhilarated by the experience of trying to trace her ancestors and found herself writing the draft of a poem every day.

"I thought, maybe I am a poet after all. And I felt much more confident than I had before," she says.

Dame Fiona loves poetry for its intensity, the way words are pared back to the true essence of their meaning.

"You haven't got room to muck around in a poem," she says. Although she has also written eight novels and five collections of short stories, in recent years she has been known for her best-selling memoirs, At The End of Darwin Road and Beside The Dark Pool. By the time she'd finished working on them she was weary and questioning when it might be time to stop writing.

"The memoirs sucked a lot out of me so I've had a deliberate writing rest for the first time in years," she explains. "I haven't written anything except the first drafts of a few poems. But I'm getting itchy, scratchy and unhappy about writing now. So I can't put a time on when I might stop."

She is planning to work on some short stories then another novel, maybe two.

"A novel is like running a race for a year and I think you must run out of energy eventually," she says. "I do feel good but then I wonder if I should go and get everything checked out before I embark on one.

"Still you have to be prepared to take risks as a writer. You take a risk every time you put pen to paper, not knowing what will happen. So I think I'll just have another bite at the cherry. It's irresistible."

Whatever Dame Fiona writes next, it is unlikely to involve looking back.

"I've excavated my life more than most people and I can't live in the past forever," she says.

"I'm ready to move on. I have a very contemporary family, lots of young people who provide me with a contemporary view of the world, for which I'm grateful. I'm not going to flounder about in the past forever."