The award winning poet Pip Griffin delighted me with one of the first copies of her new poetry collection,
Opus
A life with music
Using a creative metaphor, I am proud to say I was one of the midwives in its creative growth and Pip’s birthing of the book. The joys and nurturing of music in our lives always came through as Pip’s poetic ideas grew .
A great combination of life and music, a mood and a mode, a singular voice, that draws her readers like me to each new poem she writes.
I am thrilled for Pip and honoured to be her friend.
Opus: A life with music is a stunning collection, beautifully written and withheld.’ – Libby Sommer
‘“Through music, we can say what we didn’t even know we felt.” – Ed Le Brocq. What more powerful way to reflect on your journey of life than entwined with the memory of music. Exquisitely wrought, Opus gives us snapshots, sometimes softened, sometimes shocking but always honed and beautifully crafted, revealing a deep perception and intimacy as we have come to know of Pip Griffin’s poetry.’ – Colleen Keating
‘Pip Griffin’s Opus is a gently written verse memoir of her childhood in New Zealand to her mature years in Australia. References to Chopin, Mahler, Gustav Holst, Elvis Presley and many others justify its subtitle, “a life with music”. Touches of sadness, including her partner’s death and her mother’s thwarted dreams, balance the collection’s positive tone. This is poetry to read over a few winter evenings by the fire or summer afternoons in the shade of a tree.’ – Norm Neill
Opus is Pip Griffin’s eighth poetry publication. Her books include Virginia & Katherine: The Secret Diaries (Pohutukawa Press 2022), Winner, Society of Women Writers NSW Book Awards (poetry) 2022; Margaret Caro, the extraordinary life of a pioneering dentist (Pohutukawa Press 2020) Highly Commended, Society of Women Writers NSW Book Awards (poetry) 2020; Mood Indigo (Picaro Poets 2019) with Colleen Keating and The Climb Back: poems for Ted (Ginninderra Press 2021).
Two of Pip’s poems Libertango and The Dave Brubeck Quartet were published in the recent
Women’s Ink, Autumn 2023
Libertango
One winter’s evening
in an old asylum’s grounds
there’s a hub of warmth –
coffee, conversation, music
where a diminutive young woman
dances her bow across her double bass
syncopating with guitar
playing the Libertango.
They have the audience –
folk followers, musicians
poets, singers
maybe even shades of troubled souls
clapping, tapping their feet
swaying, smiling
surrendering their bodies to the seductive beat
of a sultry Buenos Aires night.
Pip Griffin
The Dave Brubeck Quartet
At twenty she shares a flat with friends
in half a house that clambers up the hill in Thorndon
adds a Brubeck record to her Bach and Brahms
buys a ticket to his Town Hall concert
and sits alone amongst expectant fans
taut as drum skins begging to be played.
Brain on fire with crooked rhythms
her body jitterbugs to teasing riffs
the dry martini saxophone stirs her spine
dizzying drumming pummels her solar plexus
and there is Brubeck – bespectacled face beaming
striding syncopated chords across the keyboard.
Pip Griffin
available through ginninderrapress/our books
978 1 76109 570 2, 86pp
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