The words ‘love’ and ‘local’ resounded at the launch of Helen Lehndorf’s The Bruise Palette at Palmerston North City Library in May. Best-known for her memoir, A Forager’s Life: Finding my heart and home in nature (2023), which traces childhood, motherhood and the solace of foraging for edible plants in urban wild places, Lehndorf has become a guru of creativity and wellbeing in her adopted home-town. Originally from Taranaki, her work in the Manawatū over many years as an author, creative writing teacher, food resilience and journaling educator and all-round community player has endeared her to the local community of artists, activists and alternative thinkers. Such is the esteem in which she is held that when launch MC, author Carly Thomas, asked members of the sizeable audience to raise their hands if they ‘had been supported by Helen’, the room became a forest of arms. Indeed, the title of her first poetry collection, The Comforter (2011), could accurately be applied to this beloved local writer. Poems in The Bruise Palette, her second poetry collection, were written over fifteen years. They reflect changes in poetic attributes and the poet’s attitude during this time. It is a writing process Lehndorf calls ‘a slow brew’, perhaps akin to the herbal drinks she provides recipes for in her memoir. The collection contains 39 poems divided into four sections. The first section, titled “climb on board my sinking ship”, is an antidote to twenty-first century angst. Poems pay attention to and at times ironically mock the emotions of fear, confusion, powerlessness and anger while insisting on resilience, activism and hope. Many offset challenge with humour. “Insomnia Diaries”, for instance, faces the dilemma of sleepless nights with an invocation:

Dear Sleep, please take me out. I’m a cheap date
if you take me, I promise I’ll only order table water
and the side salad.

— ­Insomnia Diaries

The mix of dark humour and quickshot lines reminds one of spoken word poetry. Poems in the second section titled “nature is just too damn much” evoke gardening, vegetables, weeds and the inherent wildness of the natural world we humans strive to tame – what Ursula Bethell, in her poem “Pause” (1929), called ‘our small fond human enclosures.’ While interrogating the relationship between nature and gardening recalls Bethell’s poems, there is nothing spiritual or gentle in Lehndorf’s work. Rather, it expresses a feisty stubbornness and a raw, physical connection with the natural world. ‘Over time, you will become feral and bright as the weeds’ is the epigram from American poet Catherine Pierce to the poem “Life after people”, which begins:

The convolvulus wraps around my ankles
and pulls me down into the garden
a salvia bush my salvation

Part of the garden enters my hand
I can see it sitting there below my skin
I leave it there so it will swell red
& escape in a stream of infected pus I want to watch

— Life after people

In this poem, Lehndorf’s speaker becomes ‘invasive, corrupted and vegetal’ while in “Plants are people too” herbs and vegetables attain anthropomorphic qualities. Zucchini is ‘stealth swelling / from elegant finger / to obese member’, radish is ‘speedy comedian’, mint ‘opportunistic freedom camper’. In another poem, dahlias are ‘pom-pom punks’. In “Cottagecore”, the poet speaker finds ‘a small rat the cat / has disembowelled. It looks how I feel.’ These poems evoke a rampant nature thriving in the detritus of human physical and emotional impoverishment. The collection’s third section, “roots painted red”, includes the poem “here is a grey little surprise for you” which movingly recalls loss, possibly a miscarriage or stillbirth. It ends: Ghost daughter is a seal slipping off a rock
into a roiling dark sea.

— here is a grey little surprise for you The titular poem in the final section of the same name recalls good intentions in motherhood gone horribly wrong. The discovery of soil pollution in a backyard garden where vegetables were lovingly grown for a young son is a haunting indictment of twenty-first century urban living, even in a city as small as Palmerston North. The poem, “Did you get my message?” mourns a lost loved one. It ends with an honouring in which nature provides imagery for grief:

You were the loop of the fruit

the glow in the gloaming

the sunny shimmer
on the wall
of my shady lane.

— Did you get my message?

Throughout the collection, poems play enthusiastically with rhyme, language and punctuation, creating a rich compost of words which is at times difficult to extract meaning from. Many poems are confessional, suggesting situations open to interpretation. They evoke senses of pain and the burden of life. ‘People lack grace. They ask so much’, the speaker writes in “So much white noise”, and in “Hunker”: ‘People can be selfish shits and fair-weather fuckers.’ Poems appearing near the end of the collection project a measured, assured approach in contrast to the feisty humour of those at the start. The tone of these later poems shifts to a more melancholy acceptance of life’s challenges. The final poem, “I prefer a plain-speaking woman”, ends with a reminder to remember the good times:

Drag it out into the light.
Anxious over residue, over static-cling.
Press a bruise take a risk.

Because we have so much
we get to be ungrateful
carrying around all the lucky years we’ve accumulated

like so much pocket lint.

— I prefer a plain-speaking woman

Honouring the local, The Bruise Palette is published by Manawatū’s Firestarter Press and printed by Greenlees Print in Wairarapa. The cover art is by Palmerston North artist Kirsty Porter.