VIVIENNE PLUMB is a Wellington writer who writes poetry, prose and drama. She was born in the St George V Memorial Hospital for Mothers and Babies in Camperdown, Sydney, Australia (1955) to a New Zealand mother and an Australian father.

Her collection of short fiction, The Wife Who Spoke Japanese In Her Sleep, was awarded the Hubert Church Prose Award. Her first novel, Secret City, was published by Cape Catley Press in 2003.

Her poem, ‘The Tank’, won first prize in the 1999 N.Z. Poetry Society annual competition. The poem, ‘Goldfish’, appears in Scarab, a chapbook of twelve linked poems that are about the death of her son from Hodgkins disease (cancer of the lymph glands).
Vivienne has also been a recipient of the Bruce Mason Playwrighting Award (N.Z.), the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship (N.Z.), a University of Iowa International Writing Residency (U.S.A), and a Varuna Retreat Fellowship (Australia).
She presently teaches creative writing in Wellington.

Plumb comments: ‘I wrote this poem one night when I couldn’t sleep. It’s about the big ones: birth and death. It was written about my only son, Willie, who had Hodgkins disease (cancer of the lymph glands) and died at age 27 after a ten-year struggle against the disease. This poem was written at the beginning of his illness, when he was seventeen and undergoing his first course of chemotherapy.

There is some interesting rhyming going on in “Goldfish”. For me, the poem has a particular rhythm when I read it – a rhythm that changes three times. The dream in the poem was a dream my son really had, right down to the medical dictionary he was reading in the dream when he woke up.

For some reason goldfish often appear in my writing – I did own two quite beautiful goldfish in a tank when I was a child, they often won prizes in the local pet competitions.’


Poem: Goldfish