Musings from Menton

How to Complete a Book in Menton
Selina Tusitala Marsh

*

I arrived with 800 kilometres of Spanish road still lodged in my calves,
the Camino's cadence ticking in my tendons—
Pyrenees, meseta, cracked bells of village churches,
pave stone surrender, muscles taut as sinnet.
Thirty-five days of one foot, then the next
had taught me what the body knows when the mind begs to quit:
the long task asks only for the next step.

I would need this.

*

Off-season. Winter. The way to stretch euros
thin as communion wafers, sheer as faith.
But Menton in the off-months keeps its own counsel:
the Côte de Azur without the crowds,
light arriving slant and amber through balcony glass,
pooling on my table like resin, like runny honey,
like something Katherine understood about radiance
when she hauled her lungs here
and wrote the best work of her brief, bright life.

Most mornings the sun cracked the Mediterranean open—
water so blue it bruised the looking,
cypresses torching dark against Garavan's cliffs.
Coffee. Clementine—impossibly sweet. Mophead propped against the citrus bowl.
The manuscript spread before me: a chart of stars
I'd been mapping for thirty years.

Some days the weather remembered its winter:
waves rearing over the Promenade du Soleil,
salt spray lashing the coastal roads,
the sea showing its teeth, its heritage, its heft.
I loved those days equally—the drama a reminder

that paradise is not politeness,
that beauty keeps a backbone.

*

FETŪ: First Pacific Women Poets.

Twenty women. Sixty years. One constellation.

I am the star charter, mapping their voices.
I am the star chanter, singing them into the light.

From Oodgeroo Noonuccal in 1964 to Lee Perez in 2024—
sixty years of first light.
Grace Mera Molisa with her bedrock blackstone.
Haunani-Kay Trask, fierce as magma.
Teresia Teaiwa, sailing theory into flesh.
Caroline Sinavaiana, to whom this book is dedicated,
who showed me what Pacific womanist poetics
could forever hold in the VĀ.

For three decades I traced their positions,
read the swells of influence between them,
the way their lines refract around our literature
like waves bending, always, toward land.

Here, in Menton's extraordinary light,
I drew the final lines of the chart.
The most important, least urgent book—done
with two weeks to go.

*

Gifts I hadn't packed for:

La Tignasse—Mophead dressed in French—
launched while I was here to hold her.
Behind every book, the unseen hands:
Nelly Gillet, chief translator, who poured herself into every syllable,
organised each event with tireless grace, drove us to her family farm in Jonzac
where her people walked us through the cognac cellars—
amber liquid aging in oak like patience, like craft.

William Rubenstein, dear friend of the Fellowship,
who threw a party, organised a talk at Sciences Po,
a Nice signing at Librairie BD Fugue,
welcomed fifty-two fellows to this coast
and made each feel chosen. Merci, William.
Merci, Nelly. The ones who open doors.

At the Menton library: children cross-legged,
giggling at my mop-headed girl finding her fierce,
recognising themselves
in a brown girl's frizz and fire.

At Angoulême—Le Festival de la BD, Rising Phoenix—
Mophead stood small and wild among giants.
A chance meeting with the Mayor, a warm handshake—
this Pasifika phoenix landing where Pacific had never perched,
carrying into the Francophone world:
Tahiti, Kanaky, every island child
who speaks en français and deserves
to see herself grinning from the page.

Two mayors in one fellowship:
the Mayor of Menton pressing the Mansfield key into my palm
in Cocteau's wedding room, Geraldine Baumann next to my side —
she who stewards the Fellowship from afar—
then lunch with her, William, and my brother Luka,
who captured the best of it through his lens.

The walks kept me honest.

Flask of coffee. Journal. The kilometre to Italy
at Pont Saint-Ludovic—another country for the price of bread—
then down to the beach beneath the Rochers Rouges,
rust-and-ochre cliffs layered with ancient epochs.
I'd sit on salt-smoothed stones and write
what the morning's desk-work couldn't unlock.

Once, Pala and me, my son Davey and Atlanta,
climbed Nietzsche's Walk in Èze,
winding through olive and cactus
to where the philosopher drafted Zarathustra,
thinking his way toward joy.

Walking after writing. Writing after walking.
Katherine's rhythm, though she walked against a death sentence
and I walked only toward the next line.

In Paris: New Zealand and French Embassies celebrating
70 years at UNESCO, a keynote with Witi Ihimaera and me —
two Pacific writers threading brown through marble halls.

In London: my first duty as Commonwealth Poet Laureate,
hosting High Commissioners from fifty-six nations,
poetry the lingua franca of unlikely connection.

And in my notebook, How to Make a Commonwealth Quilt—
commissioned for Westminster Abbey, March,
where I'll stand before King Charles
ten years after standing before his mother.
Two monarchs. One mop-headed poet from the moana.
What I carry is never mine alone:
it is the constellation, the twenty stars of FETŪ,
all the women who navigated before me.

*

What I came to complete: the book.
What Menton let me finish:
the book, a fourth poetry collection,
academic articles, a lyric essay,
Mophead's French becoming,
a Commonwealth quilt stitched from scraps of hope.

*

I leave on Valentines Day—a date chosen for love
of this critical-creative work.

I did not know that February 14th opens the Fête du Citron,
Menton's famous festival of lemons and light.

So I go in the wake of citrus:
the town swelling gold with sculptured fruit,
zest sharpening the morning air,
the whole Riviera ringing
with the bright, tart scent
of things coming finally
to ripeness.

Selina Tusitala Marsh (ONZM, FRSNZ) is the inaugural Commonwealth Poet Laureate (2025–2027) and Professor at the University of Auckland. Of Samoan,Tuvaluan, and
Pākehā heritage, she was the 2025 Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellow.