‘People asked me where I learned / and I said I taught myself the slow work of making’ (“Slipstitch”). Nina Mingya Powles’s writing has always focused on this slow, ruminative work: the work of unpicking memory, of understanding the changing seasons of oneself.

While embodying many of the same themes as her acclaimed first collection, Magnolia 木蘭, the poems in In the Hollow of the Wave feel distinctive in their sense of place, beauty and mystery. Powles turns both inward and outward; mining her history as well as her present, including the present belonging to all of us in a world afflicted by climate change. The result is a book compelling in form and rich in imagery and intertextuality, deeply personal while speaking of and to our times. 

Sewing and weaving seem to be having a moment among Aotearoa writers, featuring prominently in Flora Feltham’s Bad Archive and Maddie Ballard’s Bound. In “Slipstitch”, Powles traces the history of a family sewing machine and her efforts to ‘mirror [the] hands’ of ancestors. This first part of the collection (“A Woven Sea”) pairs text with textile, collage and photography. There are sky-blue squares of fabric, a needle slipped through cloth I glide my finger across. I wonder if there was scope to weave more visual media through the book. As
it is, I like the tactile feel of this section, how it places us beside Powles as she navigates ‘the gathering, the careful pulling apart’. Quilt blocks laid side by side are a ‘sentence’, then an
‘island’. There is a clear metaphor here for writing and its imperfect excavation of the past, the way it makes something new and yet not new. To write is to echo other voices, just as
Powles works with fabric caressed by the ghosts of other hands:     

      Our threads crossing over the fold.
      To enclose my raw seams, I mirror her hands.
      I follow her along a blue patterned
      edge.

      (“Slipstitch”)

The second part of the collection, “The Metropolitan Museum”, might be considered something of a centrepiece. This and the remaining sections of In the Hollow of the Wave
are highly referential, comprising many poems in dialogue with other works of art. There can be a risk in this for a writer if readers are unfamiliar with those works. On the other hand,
these kinds of allusions can enrich engagement with a text, as the reader is encouraged to do their own research (as I did and discovered writer Theresa Hak Kgyung Cha). “Seams /
Traces” pulses with loss and blurred boundaries. A glove goes missing from a pocket. Museum visitors reach out to touch Chinese and Japanese silks ‘forgetting they are behind glass’, asking who is the ‘they’ encased: the visitors or the exhibit?

One of my highlights of the collection, “A gown is a glacier, receding” (after Auckland Art Gallery’s Guo Pei: Fashion, Art, Fantasy 郭培：时装之幻梦), addresses the politics of being
on display. Clothing, heritage, orientalism, industrialisation, global warming, gendered labour – Powles pulls at a multitude of threads while maintaining her usual lightness. There are
many excellent lines:

      a gown is a glacier, receding
      a gown is a slow accumulation
      a gown is an edifice that forms around
      an opening

      (“A gown is a glacier, receding”)

The poem ends perhaps too neatly – ‘I am made of the clothes wear and the hands of the women who sewed them’ – but Powles’s imagining of her ‘body like a forcefield … against the coming dark of winter’ segues well into the next longer
piece. “Spell of the Red Flowers”, inspired by artist Yayoi Kusama, opens with the ‘soft dark wave’ caused by an earthquake. Powles again skilfully explores themes of fantasy and otherness, but with a stronger sense of place, and arguably a stronger sense of haunting. Fear blankets the poem: fear of foreigners, of illness, of earth itself. I feel the atmosphere of COVID19-era xenophobia, mingled with the more timeless awe and unease in nature. ‘Dear river,’ Powles writes, ‘would you    hold my fear in your hands? Dear river, my body possesses knowledge of things before I know them myself.’ 

“The Heart Works Harder” is the final part of the book, and feels like both a change of pace and a culmination of everything that had come before. I’m enchanted by “Dog-hearted”, a
tender look at the human-animal bond, from its first words to its last (opening with ‘If a pulse of a dreaming dog drops below sixty beats per minute, / the wind stops to listen.’) This poem
and several others stand out among the more referential works in this section, but all build on similar themes – like a collage, or the quilts in “A Woven Sea”. “Emulsion” returns to the motif of making and how it engages body and spirit. Something profound lurks in “The Harbour”, styled as a letter to ‘[the] whales inside the waves’. I admire the movement of this piece; the almost-urgency of its short lines: ‘The fact is the running. The dream is the sea’. With In the Hollow of the Wave lingering with me some time after finishing it, I suspect I, too, may
start dreaming of that sea.