Damien Wilkins' speech at the launch of Ithaca Island Bay Leaves at the Adam Art Gallery, 2nd December 2009


I’m really thrilled to be standing here with Vana, and Vana’s beautiful book and congratulations Helen, it's a beautiful production.

As Helen said, I read a lot of those poems in 2005 just down the lane there at the Institute of Modern Letters when Vana was in the workshop there. They feel like old friends, but they’ve kind of changed in some way, and I've experienced them as more daring and sprightly and vigorous and exciting than I remembered them. I thought they’ve got younger when I'd got older, and I've experienced Vana’s book as almost pure adrenalin.  I think it’s a work which gives you a sense of replenishment, so the poems, without being dopey or gushy in any way, hit these notes of human resistance and resourcefulness again and again and it’s uplifting.

And I should add just quickly – and Helen’s kind of sketched this a little bit – for those of you who don’t know the work, or haven’t come across it yet, that Vana’s key method is to conflate the lives of normal folk with the lives of ancient Greek heroes and gods. So you have this dizzying motion in the poems between high and low as the heroic becomes ordinary and the ordinary starts looking heroic, and it’s a lovely strange movement in the book.

The people, the characters I want to call them – and I want to read this book as kind of like short stories and encourage people who don’t like poetry to read them in that way – live these lives of foolish hope and grandiose ambition and doomed dreams - afterall they’re Greeks who’ve washed up here for God’s sake - but Vana’s method is not satirical and it’s not cool. It’s very warm and intimate and close and affectionate. There’s a lovely intimate tone throughout the book - she dismisses no one and everyone has the best lines, which makes it my favourite kind of writing.

I just want to read you a short one. This is called 'King of Mycenae'


Menelaus was known as a bit of an eccentric.
Over a pint at The Arms, he’d boast about this
and that: his kidnapped wives, his wagered wars,
his days as a people smuggler. He’d sailed on
the Queen Mary, ridden on the Orient Express,
eaten quince. He was the talk of Greymouth.


Menelaus spins yarns, and remembers, and we measure how far he’s fallen – you know, Greymouth – but as I said, that seems to make Greymouth kind of mythic, the potential home of these great figures, or great talkers at least. And, this is a night of reunions, so we can see how far we’ve all fallen, or risen. In Vana’s book, Hector the greatest Trojan warrior, now drives a Honda Chariot. There are lots of good Greek jokes here.

Anyway, I’m seeing members of the 2005 class here for the first time in a while, and Vana is obviously seeing lots of family and friends here, so it’s completely appropriate and metaphorically apt that we’re welcoming a collection of poems that’s very heart is of home-coming and tricky return voyages and community.

To be honest, as a teacher in the masters class, when someone approaches me and says at the beginning of the year they want to write a book about ancestry, their family, identity, their grandmother, my heart sinks a little bit - and I really apologize to all the grandmothers here, it’s not your fault. That thing kicks in where you fear it’s going to be polite and deferential and you know kindness and love and respect will kill the art. But actually, I’m really pleased and quite amazed that this book has not got a touch of piety in it, has in fact got this really pungent wit and kind of a sharp tongue which I love. It saves the whole enterprise and makes it.

Really, Vana’s achievement is to have written poetry which seems both intimately attached to the specifics of time and place, the Wellington Greek community here and now, but also, connects with the wide world in which we all move in. So Nestor, who considers himself in one of the poems to be the true record keeper, the only true pure Greek, has his wheelbarrow from Mitre 10, and Theseus the founder of Athens, son of Poseidon, works for the Department of Conservation, and so on - these lovely jokes again.

There’s an intensely democratic spirit in the book - another great Greek invention - and beneath all the fun – and this is a fun book for non-poetry readers - under the jokes, there’s something really urgent and important. I don’t want to say it’s a message, but I’ll say it’s an idea. I think it’s the idea that questions of identity and ancestry don’t settle anywhere. The answer to the question 'who am I?', which is a question which runs through the book, is neither simple nor the end of anything, and in Vana’s book, marvelously, there’s always another question following that one.

And I just want to read the last few lines of one of her interview poems, (there are lots of dialogue poems in this book, which make it kind of like a play or drama). This is a fellow called Sophocles Manasiadis, who might have been Manasseh or Manasis back in the old country, (the names shift over time), and he’s telling the interviewer how he paid a visit to his daughter’s house forty days after he died. And the questioner says: did you say something? The spirit is being asked 'did you say something to your daughter when you visited?' And he says......'I left the door wide open to prove my visit’.

And I thought when I read that, there’s an image of what a good book does – it leaves the door wide open to prove it’s visit – and I think this book does that perfectly. So I’d like to congratulate Vana on the book and here she is.