Resonance XIV
It was in June 2000 when I was
compiling the CD and searching for links between the text and
the images that I realized that the image of the Macrocarpa
tree kept reoccurring in the text. The trees are on Bedford Parade
and just up from the Baxter house; one had been cut down and only
the large stump remained. Although these images appear dark the
original photographs are rich in detail, Big Rock is visible and
the Otago Peninsular coastline stretches like a distant arm into
the ocean. When I took the image there were hundreds of
pine nuts (Baxter remember floating down the river scattered on
the ground, and while there was no sign of a cigarette buts, there
was an empty beer bottle.
The idea behind the image was
not to make a photograph of the tree but a child's like view from
the tree, a door from the protection of the tree to the world
outside.
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James K Baxter - Poem
references
'Prediction', unpublished
poem, no. 554, Ms 704/9
"the
macrocarpa tree, the child's look-out"
'Poetry and
Education', unpublished talk given at the Winter School of the English
Association, August 1963 (Ms 75/163, Hocken Library), p. 3.
the
first cigarette tasted in the top branches of the macrocarpa tree
The Tree 1962
A tree of vulvas oozing golden resin
Where I and my wire-muscled cousin
Climbed endlessly. Its bird-shit -splattered branches
Invoked the gross maternal mystery that fed his life and mine.
Smoking my father's tobacco in a sly
Tree house, or edging up a shaking mast
to a cradle open to the sky
riding those giant fronded arms,
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