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Poem of the week: Huia by Bill Manhire

<span>Photograph: Nature Picture Library/Alamy</span>
Photograph: Nature Picture Library/Alamy

Huia

I was the first of birds to sing
I sang to signal rain
the one I loved was singing
and singing once again

My wings were made of sunlight
my tail was made of frost
my song was now a warning
and now a song of love

I sang upon a postage stamp
I sang upon your coins
but money courted beauty
you could not see the joins

Where are you when you vanish?
Where are you when you’re found?
I’m made of greed and anguish
a feather on the ground

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I lived among you once
and now I can’t be found
I’m made of things that vanish
a feather on the ground

Huia is the opening poem from Wow, the latest UK publication collection by the New Zealand poet Bill Manhire. I hadn’t expected to be echoing the collection’s title quite so early in my reading, but the poem insisted. It was a “wow” of grief and shock, however, as well as admiration.

The huia was considered a sacred bird in Māori culture. The name means “where are you?” and imitates the bird’s distress call. The last confirmed sighting was in 1907. The creature speaking in the poem is disembodied, perhaps not even the ghost of a ghost. “Where are you when you vanish?” it asks, plaintively and trenchantly. It seems to become an emblem of other disappearances brought about by acts of human encroachment and persecution. But the poem, with its fluid motion of thee and four-beat lines and wonderfully judged shifts between non-rhyme and full rhyme, never loses touch with the songbird.

As the opening line suggests, the huia’s call was the first to be heard each day at dawn. Perhaps it was also “first” in the sense of being among the original species of New Zealand. Sibilance captures a hint of the call and, in the last line of the verse, you can almost hear the pauses as one bird answers the other, “the one I loved was singing / and singing once again”.

Wings and tail, sunlight and frost, love and warning – the second verse captures the bird and its tragedy impressionistically, in a glimmer of shifting antitheses. Later, that stanza seems to take on a larger meaning, and the image of sunlight and frost extends to the turning year, the turning planet, the further human capacity to make living creatures and habitats vanish.

Hunted to extinction, the huia was a victim, finally, of two British Victorian passions – for looting other cultures’ treasures, and for taxidermy. Museums in Britain were, and I’m afraid probably still are, filled with cases full of exotic “stuffed birds”. I remember them from childhood. The air itself seemed murky, the feathers dimmed: there was a smell of damp decay, impossible to describe. The “joins” that the huia-ghost tells us can’t be seen signify not only the contract between “money and beauty” but those seams the taxidermist must effectively close in refashioning the dead, empty bird and faking the semblance of life.

The bird’s questions in the fourth verse are haunting but insistent. In the third line, the striking para-rhyme (vanish/anguish) is almost physically wounding: “Where are you when you vanish? / Where are you when you’re found? / I’m made of greed and anguish / a feather on the ground.” It reminds us those questions can’t be directly answered. All the ghost-bird can summon is a terrible memory and a bleak remnant, “a feather on the ground”.

The fifth and final verse, separated from the others like a little coda, emphasises, before it becomes an echo, the pathos and the warning: “I lived among you once.” It reminds us to look around, see the species that still live among us, and act fast for their protection.

A powerful lyric on the page, Huia has another life, as a song. Bill Manhire was commissioned to write four songs for a cycle, Ornithological Anecdotes. The music is by the composer Gareth Farr. You can listen to all four songs here.

While conservation is a pressing concern in Wow, there are lighter moments, and a frequent fresh sparkle of humour among the warnings and sadness. The voice is terse, direct, sometimes quirky, altogether engaging. And is there a title poem, you may be wondering? Yes, and it’s another of my favourites. Here, for a little of the flavour, is the opening stanza. To read more, you’ll need to get the collection!

Big brother
says also but the baby always says wow
though soon enough she too is saying also
and listening to her father say later
and to the way her mother sighs and says
now would also be a very good time