Mirabile Dictu

Twelve months of a laureate: in 2008 Michele Leggott wrote a poem a week to record her term as the inaugural New Zealand Poet Laureate. In her new collection of poems Mirabile Dictu (‘mi.rah.buh.lay dik.tu’ – Wonderful to relate; amazing to say), she relates the wonders of those 12 months, which took her to Matahiwi Marae in Hawke’s Bay to receive her brilliant sky-blue, specially carved tokotoko, Te Kikorangi; through a time of mourning for and celebration of former poet laureate Hone Tuwhare; to Florence, across a ‘poetic bridge’; and to Wellington ‘hand to hand’ with four other laureates. With her is Te Kikorangi as guide and companion – ‘almost as good as the blue from Kapiti/ we eat when the good times roll’. Leggott also delves back into the past, layering poems of today with poems of then – and finds, among others, Isabella – growing up in a colonial town, ‘named for a grandmother over the sea’. The poems in Mirabile Dictu are gifts; they are lush and supple; they glory in language; they go ‘looking for a good time’ and find rose cuttings, great-aunts, an elephant, several feasts, adorations and assumptions – ’the breathing world’. Through the poems Leggott explores languages within languages, hearing and seeing, coming and going, the porousness of experience and its representations. In this collection she is a daily traveller, crafter of words and maker of fire.