Belinda Diepenheim

Belinda Diepenheim grew up in Wellington and worked as a horticulturalist in the Botanic Gardens and Otari Native Plant Museum. She now lives in Ashhurst in the Manawatu. She has published in a variety of New Zealand and international magazines and ezines including Landfall, Poetry NZ, Takahe and Snorkel. Belinda was a graduate from the 2011 Iowa Poetry Workshop at Victoria University.

Diepenheim comments: ‘The poem "Nothing New Under the Sky" is a link between the first nine poems in my book Waybread and Flax, poems that appear in Woden's nine herbs charm, and the next sequence of plants, which were nine chosen to bring to New Zealand by early settlers. There's a third sequence about plants endemic to New Zealand linked in by the voice of Joseph Banks. All of the poems about plants are, in fact, my attempt to speak on behalf of my own ancestors.

‘"Nothing new" is about Captain Cook. He was a man of the Enlightenment, taciturn, reasoned, educated, and his journals reflect that. However, if "Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition" (Montaigne), then Cook was also ordinary and domestic. My poem gets to play with that a little.'

Links

Waybread & Flax at Steele Roberts

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