Rhian Gallagher still remembers the day she learned to read. Perhaps that is why words have such an extraordinary importance for the Dunedin-based poet whose book Shift is one of three collections of poetry shortlisted for the New Zealand Post Book Awards this year.
"I was standing next to the teacher and she would be putting her finger under the words and I remember having the experience of understanding for the first time that what was coming out of my mouth was what was shaped on the page. Words have had a slightly magical quality because of that," she says.
Growing up near Timaru as a Catholic, she was also intrigued by hearing adults reciting prayers.
"I was always fascinated that their demeanour, their voice, everything changed and individual words became important. It seemed to me there was something very special about prayer words even though I wasn't sure about all this God stuff. Also, it's very rhythmic. It's an aural form."
At primary school, she loved listening to the teacher reading ballads such as The Man from Snowy River and she was always making up songs.
It was the aural aspect of language that got her into poetry, and it is still important.
Even now, she says she hears a poem before she sees it. As she writes, she speaks phrases or the beginnings of stanzas aloud and hopes the reader will hear them in their head.
She works to get the sound, the language and the emotion she is expressing to come together to create the right tone for the piece, she says.
"Something clicks into place and you have this rush of confidence about the form and the voice and the tone of the poem. You get a sense of it. Once you have that strong feeling for it, moving on is more about shaping and working and the craft."
When she was a teenager, a young priest introduced her to James K. Baxter and her parents bought her his collected works.
"Baxter was a bit of a revelation. It was very much New Zealand," she says, explaining that she found foreign poets such as Seamus Heaney, John Donne, William Butler Yeats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Elizabeth Bishop and T.S. Eliot inspirational.
"I think when it gets into your bloodstream you don't have a choice about writing poetry. This is the strange thing about poetry.
"Trying to make a life as a poet is very difficult. I'm reminded Margaret Atwood says 'stop complaining - you chose this!' It's a great pleasure when you are immersed in a piece of work and you forget yourself when something's happening on the page," she says.
"It's very rare for a poem to come fully formed and organised. I may be struggling with a piece and it's only when you give up the struggle that something else happens. But then you know that if you didn't put in that concentrated effort somewhere it wouldn't stir up something else."
However, at some stage you have to let a poem go, she says.
"It doesn't necessarily mean you won't go back to something about it and approach it from a different angle sometime later. I think it's good to have aspirations for the work itself, but you have to be able to release work because you write yourself to the next poem."
Gallagher organises her life so she has time to work on her poetry, and keeps a notebook of ideas, words and phrases.
Usually there are three or four things simmering in the background, but actually realising a piece of work can take a while.
"It's a passion - it's something I love doing. Lots of people never find something they really love doing, but of course the world couldn't give a toss whether poets write poems or not." Gallagher grew up in Normanby near Timaru in a house without books. Coming from a working-class Irish background, she was the first in her family to want to go to university, although she didn't know much about it, she says.
Between Victoria and Massey she collected a "patchwork degree" then went to Europe, first to Donegal, which her father left as a young man, and then to London where she lived for 18 years. She studied humanities and printing and publishing at London University then worked in publishing, specialising in art and illustrated books.
In 2006, she returned to Timaru where her brother lived.
She published a book of glass-plate photographs, Feeling for Daylight: The Photographs of Jack Adamson in 2007 for the South Canterbury Museum with the help of a Canterbury History Foundation grant. Having got a job at the University Book Shop, she came to Dunedin last year, and has become part of the local poetry community.
Now 50, she says it took five years from the first inkling of the idea to return home.
"I think it was a combination of factors. I lost my parents during that time and I also realised I wasn't career orientated and climbing the ladder. London's quite a hard place to live - in your 20s you have great buoyancy. Also, I'd been writing back to New Zealand in my first collection and I knew at some point I would come back."
Her first collection of poems, Salt Water Creek was published in London in 2003 and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for a first collection.
Having a first book published kicks in a degree of self-consciousness which you have to overcome to be able to move on with your work, she says.
Salt Water Creek was published by a small independent publisher, so Gallagher feels having Auckland University Press publish Shift is a landmark.
She was awarded a Janet Frame Award in 2008.
"In some ways I feel Salt Water Creek and Shift are one book, and it's only now, completing Shift I feel that I'm in some kind of different place for writing."
