Poet
Biography
Jenny Bornholdt - Poet"The freshness of her poetry, along with her lucid explorations of the simple and the familiar, have received much praise. Bill Direen, for example, observes that "many poems . . . ring like the reassuring chime of crystal glass or with the resonance of a perfectly fired bell . . . They reveal the hidden."
(Listener, 17 June 1995, p. 52).
Jenny Bornholdt was born in Wellington in 1960. She is a poet and anthologist. She has published nine books of poems, including: This Big Face (1988), Miss New Zealand: Selected Poems (1997), These Days (2000), Summer (2005), Mrs Winter's Jump (2007) and The Rocky Shore (2008)
Jenny is married to fellow poet Gregory O'Brien. With Greg, she co-edited My Heart Goes Swimming: New Zealand Love Poems (1996), and with Greg and Mark Williams, she edited An Anthology of New Zealand Poetry in English (1997), which won the 1997 Montana Book Award for Poetry.
In 2002 Jenny was awarded the Meridian Energy Katherine Mansfield Fellowship. The poems in her collection, Summer, record the experiences of the poet and her family through the Mediterranean summer of that year.
Jenny was made an Arts Foundation Laureate in 2003.
In 2005 she became the fifth Te Mata Estate Poet Laureate, during which time she wrote Mrs Winter's Jump, a Godwit book for Random House which was launched in June 2007. The Rocky Shore (2008), published by Victoria University Press, is described as a book of "talky poems...ranging over a wide variety of territory - love, death, children, illness, breadmaking and the garden". The Rocky Shore won the 2009 Montana New Zealand Book Award for Poetry.
In 2010, Jenny was the Creative New Zealand Victoria University Writer in Residence. During that year she completed a book of poems, The Hill of Wool, which will be published in 2011 by Victoria University Press.
Photograph
A little to the left
Neil, that's nice, and
John, if you could come in
a bit, good, good,
now Neil, if you can turn
your body, this way,
yep, just a little, yep,
now turn your head
to me, yep, that's
good. Now Humphrey,
chin up a bit, up,
good, John, if you can
come in closer
to Michael, good,
more, yep, Neil back
a bit, one step, turn
just a little, yep,
now Humphrey,
chin up, turn to the side
a bit, bit more, yep
good, Neil, Neil, back
a bit, yep, Humphrey
chin, Neil, closer Michael,
John, in together, turn
and now, yep, good,
chin Humphrey, closer,
turn, closer, Neil
John, Humphrey, chin
Humphrey, John, Neil
closer, closer, turn,
yep, now
Being a Poet
Yesterday I bought
a blender – blue – from
Briscoes, just like
Marion’s. Today
we’re dealing with the big
issues, like: How the World
Began and
Can We Have Fruit Loops
For Breakfast?
Friends ask
what I’m reading.
By the bed is Go, Dog. Go.
We looked at it this morning
just before our fight
over the nature of
Weetbix. But it’s soggy
every morning, I hear myself say,
that’s just what Weetbix does
that’s just its way.
