Away from her work in the prosaic surroundings of North Shore District Court, Sergeant Rhona Stace is a poet.
Earlier this year she published a book of haiku - Nine Lines - and is working on her second collection, Tea for Two.
Last week she learned that Green Tea, a poem from the collection in progress, had been selected to appear in the New Zealand Poetry Society¡¯s 2018 anthology.
And two haiku from Nine Lines have been listed in the top ten in 100 Best Hooked On Haiku, a publication of the best entries from an international competition.
Rhona says she was at a crossroads in her life and looking for a way to rekindle her creative spark when her mother, children¡¯s author Glenys Stace, suggested she try haiku.
¡°The only thing I got to level 3 in was English literature, and I tended to focus on the poets,¡± says Rhona.
¡°That fell by the wayside as I got more focused on my Police career, having kids and all the stuff that goes with it.
¡°It was when I started dealing with my gender issues and came out to my parents that I started revisiting some of the things I¡¯d done previously.¡±
Rhona says she found the format of haiku - a Japanese form of three lines of five, seven and five syllables ¨C a challenge and a spur.
¡°Three lines suited my attention span,¡± she says. ¡°I really liked the idea of putting some quite tight, disciplined parameters on the creative process. I find you¡¯re much more creative when you stick within such limits.
¡°I got hooked very quickly once I decided to give it a go. I just wrote about what I was seeing out of my window over a period of about 12 months.¡±
She found a lot of her haiku seemed to group together thematically in threes and decided to make the whole collection into triptychs ¨C hence the title Nine Lines.
At first she stuck rigidly to the traditional haiku themes of nature and the seasons but then widened her scope. ¡°I found I could apply it to people I knew, or other situations or personalities. A few were written with a certain person in mind.¡±
Green Tea is a tribute to another literary Stace relation ¨C the poet Jeanette Stace ¨C and was the title of a posthumously published collection of her works.
The other poems in the new collection include traditional haiku, alongside modern variations on the form, sonnets and free verse.
¡°It¡¯s a bit of a mixed bag, with a wider range of topics. I¡¯m still working on that one.¡±
- Nine Lines is available for New Zealand customers from Rhona's Etsy.com shop CopyWriteRhona, and Trademe, for $20 delivered. It is also available from Amazon, as is 100 Best Hooked On Haiku.
Photo: Sergeant Kelly Corby, PPS, North Shore