Helen Heath

Helen Heath’s debut collection of poetry Graft was published in May 2012 by Victoria University Press. Her poetry and essays have also been published in many journals in New Zealand, Australia, the UK and the USA. She completed an MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters in 2009. Helen’s chapbook of poems called Watching for Smoke was also published by Seraph Press in 2009. Helen has been known to blog sporadically. She is currently working towards her PhD in Creative Writing at the IIML. Helen’s PhD research project explores how science is represented in the work of post-war, contemporary poets writing in the 80s and 90s. Helen won the inaugural ScienceTeller Poetry Award in 2011 for her poem ‘Making Tea in the Universe’ and Graft was selected for the NZ Listener’s top books of 2012 as well as winning a Post Graduate Research Excellence Award from Victoria University, Wellington.

Heath comments: ‘This sequence started life as a series of ghazels after Phyllis Webb and Dinah Hawken. Traditionally the ghazel is a love poem but I like to think that this is a love poem to both Greece and science. The poem attempts to bring together scientific facts—Newtonian physics amongst other things (“If you press a stone with your finger your finger is also pressed by the stone…”)—with Greek mythology and magical thinking. I wanted to show that knowledge (or the quest for it) doesn’t detract from the awe you can experience in the world; it only adds.

‘As a child, when my father showed me a butterfly, we didn’t just see its pretty colours and delicate flight. He showed me the beauty in the working of its rolled proboscis, we looked closer at the tiny overlapping wing scales, he told me how there are often ultraviolet patterns in the wings that we cannot see, but which may be seen by other butterflies, I listened to the beauty of Latin names. When I was older we discussed the “butterfly effect” and chaos theory… This is the experience of science I had in my childhood—the curious scientist seeking knowledge in an awe-inspiring world.’ — Booknotes, issue 176 autumn/winter 2012.

Glossary:
Ayia — Saint
Apó thálassa sto Vathy — Over the water to Vathy
Kalimera — Good morning
Ónos — Burden or donkey
Vespula — Wasp
Monastríri Katharon — Monastery Katharon
Támata — Silver votive body parts
Paleochora — Old town

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