Features Overview
Naming the beast - Otago University Press
Naming the Beasts is a menagerie of poems about the gnarlier aspects of being a creature of this world. Within these pages wilderness and suburbia collide. The ‘I’ in these poems takes many forms: a wolf, a waterbuck, a bird ‘stuck circling the carnage’. Whether soaring above or prowling through the neighbourhood, Morton’s beasts bear witness to an unremitting vision of pain and ecological damage.
As the flames climb higher, the beasts in this collection are left to wander and live out their lives. There is love and loneliness, passivity and rage. Yet there is always hope. Hoof and hide, fang and gut, these images and insights are those of an artist in a war zone intent on chronicling beauty in a world that’s falling apart. Morton’s poems take a bite out of the world around us, as they explore reality through the vitality and immersiveness of their imaginative powers.
interview
This is your real name - Otago University Press 2020
Longlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry in the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards
Elizabeth Morton’s poems look unflinchingly at a raw and unstable world – the crash, the aftermath, the comeback, ‘the black heat at the centre of things’.The poems in Morton’s second collection are charged with a visceral energy. This is poetry as incantation: an intense, larger-than-life, tactile experience.Underneath the surface of the contemporary world of Pokémon, The Cosby Show and hospital cubicles, the reader is drawn into a dreamscape of creeks and bogs, a fiery meadow and the guts of the sea. A blindman circles a Minotaur; a black horse rides through the pages.
As the reader finds handholds within Morton’s poems, they may trace a dislocation between the voices here and the worlds into which they’re thrown – a strangely askew New Zealand, a mythological America, in liminal spaces where identity and meaning become blurred and uncertain. Jammed full of want, need, despair, love and politics, these are poems of archaeology and identity – where will we dig for our selves? By what names are we called? By whom are we known? This is darkly funny, unsettling writing that strips all the meat from the bones, ‘always writing the same story’.
Wolf - Mākaro Press (HOOPLA series) 2017
Wolf is the critter of humanity. The one who has known loneliness and love and yet is still alone. An exile. An outlaw. And the noise in Wolf’s head is not somebody he recognises.
In her first collection of poetry, Elizabeth Morton writes of what it is to be on humanity’s outer rim writing the noise in her head. She writes as Wolf: barking consonants, mouthing a rubbish bag, in love; and is lupine in her everyday life too, running away under the broken yolk of moon, burying bones (her own).
On the rim of things Elizabeth writes with disturbing clarity of a renewed world where a matador weeps in the bullring and blackberries burst like bloodclots. These are poems that crawl into your lap and howl.