Part of the landscape

Black Barn — portrait of a place — is a collection of poetry, history, recipes and photography, celebrating the Hawke’s Bay institution

VISITORS’ BOOK

Family and friends, friends of friends, best men and women and Australians. Distant relations, holiday-makers, firesiders and chartered accountants (figure skaters).

Wedding guests and climate refugees (Wellingtonians), bridesmaids, best men, Bostonians.

Made men and women, three from Bombay, sleepers, walkers, and those who like to play tennis and swim in a pool with a view. Artists, cyclists, people who barbecue. Groups who hang out, who rest, who read fiction, Brazilians and Londoners, couples from Picton, members of the band, those who lend a hand.

Jenny Bornholdt

THE RIVER AND THE PEAK

Why is it that we contemplate landscapes, sunsets, the distant horizon? It’s a question that has preoccupied poets and others for many centuries. “You ask why I turn to landscape, lift / my eyes unto the hills”, New Zealander Michael Jackson wrote in his poem Damariscotta.

He then replied with the assertion that, by doing so, “we are returned to ourselves / in some small way, able to comprehend / what’s slipping through our hands, what will not answer to our will”.

A powerful landscape has the capacity to sweep away all before it, removing us from our habits and complacencies. Looking across from the Riverside retreats towards Te Mata Peak, the river is laid out like a baseline. While the