JENNY BORNHOLDT was born in Wellington in 1960. She began writing in earnest after attending the Original Composition course at Victoria University of Wellington. She has published seven books of poems, including a Selected Poems Miss New Zealand. Her latest collection is Summer (Victoria University Press, 2003) written during her time in Menton, France, as the Meridian Energy Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellow. She is married to Gregory O’Brien, who makes occasional appearances as a character in her poems. They co-edited My Heart Goes Swimming: New Zealand Love Poems (1996) and, with Mark Williams, An Anthology of New Zealand Poetry in English (1997), which won the 1997 Montana New Zealand Book Award for Poetry.

Bornholdt comments: ‘ “Ode to the Little Hotel” was written after we spent a week in Paris in 2002 as part of my time in Menton, France. I wanted to write a celebratory poem about Paris and it ended up taking the form of an ode to the hotel we were staying in. Of course it’s a love poem really – for a person and a place.

‘The poem was originally published as a limited edition book, hand-printed by my brother-in-law Brendan O’Brien, with drawings by Gregory O’Brien. Two of the drawings are reproduced with the poem in Summer.’

 

Poem: Ode to the Little Hotel