Little Prayers

The creative collaboration between Bill Manhire and Norman Meehan dates back to their debut Rattle release, Buddhist Rain (2010), for which Bill wrote poems that Norman set to music for vocalist Hannah Griffin. Making Baby Float followed in 2011, then These Rough Notes (2012) and Bifröst (2021). Norman and Hannah also collaborated on Small Holes in the Silence (2015) and Wahine (with Thomas Voyce in 2023), and as a member of jazz ensemble Unwind (with Hayden Chisholm, Paul Dyne, and Julian Dyne) Norman has released five albums of instrumental music; Unwind (2017), Orange (2018), Saffron (2020), Daylight (2023), and Embers (2025).

Adding to this prolific and highly creative body of work, Little Prayers emerged from "Fierce Light", a 2016 event co-commissioned by 14-18 NOW to mark the centenary of the Battle of the Somme. Along with other poets, Bill was invited to compose a work that explored the complexity and human cost of the First World War.

His response was "Known unto God," the inscription on the headstones of unknown New Zealand war casualties. The voices in these poems belong to those soldiers, except for the very last, which is that of a girl clinging to wreckage in the contemporary Mediterranean.

The sober nature of the poems, along with their chiselled brevity, suggested that relatively austere musical settings would best complement the texts. A small chamber group comprising violin (Martin Riseley), viola (Zephyr Wills), and cello (Brenton Veitch) offered a sound palette that balanced gravity and transparency. Bill suggested “Huia” from Ornithological Anecdotes, which he wrote for composer Gareth Farr to set for baritone Julien Van Mellaerts, as a complement to this sequence.

Following the horrific events in Christchurch in 2019, Bill wrote "Little Prayers", a poem that surprised him. "I want to say I didn’t know I had it in me, but of course I didn’t have it in me—it was always out there in the world. My work was to catch it, edit it, and get the choreography right."

This final poem provided an apt title and emotionally resonant conclusion to the arc of this compelling song cycle.