by Megan Kitching
(Otago University Press, 2023)
At the Point of Seeing is the debut collection from Megan Kitching, who was the inaugural recipient of the Elizabeth Brooke-Carr Emerging Writer Residency in Ōtepoti Dunedin. Megan holds a PhD in English Literature from London’s Queens Mary University, where she has said her interest was piqued by the crossover between the natural sciences and poetry in the 18th century.
Here, Megan presents the natural world in both wide angle (“Macrocarpas claw the sky, / they hiss and whip, splintered green explosions.” – ‘Shelter’) and microscopically close (“There’s a drift here I can follow. / Into the corolla of a flower.” – ‘Botanising’). In both cases it tells us things, about the realities of time, in the case of ‘Shelter’, and about the realities of gender, in ‘Botanising’, which is written from the point of view of a girl waiting for a ride outside a paddock gate. “I said I’m waiting to be picked up. / If you stay there you will be, he told me. But I am distinct / from that flower and from him, as I had noticed.”
The collection references flora and fauna throughout – there are penguins, ferns, albatross, sea lions, a paradise duck and a colony of bees. But these nature poems feel like they’ve been written not only physically at the end of the earth, but world-historically too: “The toll of knock-on consequences / like a ship’s wake razing shore upon shore / is a line too often sung.” – ‘An Environmental History’. A precisely-written, and precisely-felt collection that is both rooted in the past, yet made for our times.
LAURA WILLIAMSON
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