Livesey, Anna

New Zealand, (b. 1979)

Shoeman in Love

  1. I fell in love
  2. through a pair of beaded slippers.
  3.  
  4. She brought them to me
  5. to have the heels repaired.
  6.  
  7. They were black satin,
  8. the toes hung with jet beads,
  9.  
  10. and lined with pig-skin,
  11. a leather that absorbs sweat.
  12.  
  13. Her voice was like pig-skin
  14. fine and strong enough
  15.  
  16. to absorb me,
  17. but it wasn’t that —
  18.  
  19. it was the taste
  20. of the imprint of her heel
  21.  
  22. when I licked it,
  23. holding her slipper
  24.  
  25. in front of my face
  26. like a cup.

Livesey says the poem was “written while I was a student at the International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML) in 2002. There is a small shoe-repair shop on the route between my home in Mt Victoria and the International Institute of Modern Letters.”

 Anna Livesey. Good Luck. Wellington, NZ: Victoria University Press (2003).

About the Poet:

Anna Livesey, New Zealand, (b. 1979), is a poet, short story writer and corporate strategist. She studied at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington, where in 2002 she completed an MA in Creative Writing.

Livesey is the author of Good Luck (2003), The Moonmen (2010) and most recently Ordinary Time (2017). She was a recipient of the MacMillan Brown Prize (2000 and 2002), and the Bank of New Zealand Katherine Mansfield Novice Category Award (2003). She won the Schaeffer Fellowship in 2003, enabling her to spend a year studying at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

Her writing has featured in a wide range of journals, in print and online. Sport, Landfall, Takahē, Turbine, Poetry New Zealand, Australian Journal of Canadian Studies and Best New Zealand Poems. Livesey edited a collection of poetry called Enormous Picture in 2004 for Victoria University Press.

In the last five years she has lived in Wellington, Beijing, Shanghai, New York, Dunedin, Wellington again and currently Auckland, where she works as a corporate strategist. [DES-04/18]

Additional information: