MICHELE AMAS was born in Dunedin in 1961. She has a degree in Performing Arts from The New Zealand Drama School and has spent most of her working life acting and directing for stage and television. Her short film ‘Redial’ which she wrote and directed was selected for competition in the 2002 Venice Film Festival. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Victoria University and was the Adam prize winner in 2005. Her first book of poetry will be published in 2006. Her work has been published in Sport 33 and online in the literary journal Turbine 05. Her shift from acting to writing poetry came out of a desire to speak from her own script rather than someone else’s. ‘Acting is a great way to escape yourself, to ignore yourself, and when I stopped for a while there was this chattering going on in my head that I’d never heard before, so I just started taking notes.’

Amas comments. ‘ “Daughter” was written out of a desperation to contain a myriad of emotions that living with a teenager forces you to experience daily. In this poem I have attempted to describe the shifting emotional landscape that a mother and child stumble into, quite out of the blue, both unprepared and bewildered – full of blame and guilt, need and love.’

 

 

Poem: Daughter