Jenny Powell’s collection, Meeting Rita, is inspired by New Zealand artist Rita Angus (1908 – 1970). A decade ago, Dave Armstrong’s play, Rita and Douglas, had a “profound effect” upon Jenny and she began reading and viewing Rita’s life and work to a greater degree. At Dunedin’s ID Fashion Show, Rita Angus: Dress Identity and the Self Portrait (2018), a project idea fell into place.

Hanging around in the gallery

for a ticket-only discussion

of fashion, we were singles

leaning on opposite walls.

Judgement flicked like a whip

and we couldn’t change a thing.

Rita and I

were wearing the same coat.

— from Meeting Rita

Meeting Rita is poetry as sumptuous brocade, rich in detail and shifting views. The writing is measured, finely-crafted, lyrical. Individual words, phrases and the building lines surprise and delight. Endnotes offer background contexts for each poem, fascinating detail acquired from the poet’s research.

In the opening poem, Meeting Rita, the two women wear the same deer-coloured coat and herein lies the pleasure of the collection. Rita and Jenny traverse time to meet in shared spaces. They meet between the past and the present, the imagined and the lived, the making of poetry and the making of art: “We meet between two worlds.” As Jenny states in her preface, “You don’t need to know the art of Rita Angus before you read my poems, where Rita has shifted in time to become my friend.”

Meeting Rita is also poetry as conversation. Jenny is out in our contemporary world talking to Rita. They are facing each other at a poetry reading, Jenny’s stuck in a Wellington hailstorm longing for Rita’s heater at Sydney Street West. The poet is sharing present-day Central Otago with the artist, talking, imagining, rebuilding beloved scenes:

Did you cross the Arrow River Rita

before the sun yawned and the sky woke

and stretched into blue? Icy water shooting

your feet, stones bruising through sneakers.

Did you carry on up the dust-dressed road,

picking at overhangs of berries, leaving

your fingers stained in spots of velvet,

tongue busy with the sharp taste?

— from River arrows in Central Otago

Details of Rita’s life - her loves, shock treatment, miscarriage, overseas travel, the significance of place – are a vital part of the sheeny brocade but so too are specific artworks. Jenny is translating both a life and a series of artworks into poems. She stands in front of a painting and slowly steps off from the artwork to absorb the mysterious effect it has upon her, the unexpected dialogue that arises, the meandering thought, the prompted memory. And that becomes poetry, poetry that borrows from both Rita and Jenny’s stories.

Picture his arrival at Cass.

The solace of flat space,

the potent embrace of guardian peaks.

In the full emptiness of cold shadow

Arthur surveys his prospects.

Thank goodness Rita, you gave us Cass.

You own arrival in the truth of geometry

shaped by fury of downpours and hurl of erosion

mapped on your canvas and paper.

— from Arthur’s Pass

Individual details are a physical presence, an emotional spark plug, a spinning metaphor that shines out. More than anything Finding Rita celebrates poetry as connection, and these connections are infectious. Jenny never settles to one way of viewing. She is testing the seepage, the “fusion” between her life and Rita’s. Recollection meets recognition. The final poem, All Along, Time Has Been Playing with Us, is a letting-go poem, and it is utterly moving, the coat being hung up, a pīwakawaka acting as “a messenger between two worlds.” I so love this book, this original, personal, sweetly-crafted work that makes poetry, art and Rita Angus matter so very much.

Reviewed by Paula Green