Jan Ludemann
30 January 2021, 4:54 PM
The country’s lockdown last year due to Covid-19 not only changed people’s lives forever but also enabled some to discover latent talents.
In the case of Te Anau resident, Tony Bridge, he discovered he was a poet.
In fact, he has now become a published poet with the first printing of his book ‘Raahui – A Walk in the Shadowlands’ almost completely sold out.
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The professional photographer and former teacher relocated to Te Anau from a small settlement near The Hokianga in Northland in 2018 after completing a job photographing parts of the South Island for a Ngai Tahu cultural project. He spent his time, after settling in the south and prior to the disruptions of 2020, nature guiding tourists in Fiordland.
Each day during the lockdown, which he refers to as a Raahui (restriction) with its less authoritarian connotations, one of his poems would appear on the Te Anau Community Facebook page, often accompanied by one of his landscape images.
Logging on for the daily poem, or waiata (Maori prayer), became a daily ritual for many users of the social media site during the lockdown/Raahui.
He said it went far beyond Te Anau with many Facebook users around the world seeking the emotional balm his words and images brought to them.
Mr Bridge said he feels “at home” in Te Anau and that Fiordland had been calling him for the last 14 years.
“Every day I look out at that landscape and I’m reminded this is where I want to be”.
He said his Whakapapa springs from the South, through his mother from Waihopi (Invercargill) and through his father from Fiordland, but it took that long for him to trust the calling.
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Mr Bridge never set out to write a book, the words just started appearing.
“On the first day of the lockdown, I just wrote something on my phone and I thought, oh that looked really good, so I thought I would share it”.
On day one
I rose as I do
in the space between night and day,
when the air is thin
I went to my back door,
stepped out
And rooted myself into the cool,
shimmering grass.
and, in silence untainted
by traffic or helicopters or
the energy of human intention,
I opened my heart
and listened
to the soft whisper of clouds
sliding along the underside of the night,
to the swift wing-beats of passing geese
and to the spaces between raindrops,
I heard the heartbeat to the earth
as she slowly turned in her bed,
and the slow breathing
of realignment and renewal.
The last poem was written on the day New Zealand went into Level three.
The book, which he has dedicated to his children because they are not likely to inherit any other significant wealth from him, is the result of a collaboration of colleagues, friends and benefactors. It was published just before Christmas and has been eagerly snapped up by people from all around the world.
He said the hardest part of producing the book was writing his biography.
There was no “official” book launch, just an announcement on Facebook and Mr Bridge has undertaken the task of signing and posting every single copy himself.
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