Poetry Shelf review, conversations and readings: Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook – All Souls

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Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook -all souls
editor, Tracey Slaughter
Massey University Press, 2026
anthology page

Wild Houses

Bright bright horses choose me
to house their hooves. Houses

house their light like the evening
holds lock-jaw streetlights, and

kitchen windows house inaccessible
grief and joy; like the sun sets in

princess colours, yawns pastel mouths.
I have walked these paths so lonely

the streetlights have extinguished
as I passed. Behind a sky-rise

the sun blossoms like a tender bruise.
When I left home I learnt a new city

like a horse learns an apple in its mouth:
consumed its sweet, waning colours.

Saw my sun-struck reflection in a pool
of greywater. Pocketed my hands

further still. Drank deep.

Maia Armistead

Poetry, as I repeat like a mantra on Poetry Shelf, can be and do many things. Poems can ignite milky ways of feelings, ideas, experience, memories, desires, drawing us deep into and beyond who we are and who we might be. And that’s what the latest Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook: All-Souls does for me. All–Souls is a smooth and jagged uplift, an inspiration, an absorbing gathering of what poetry can do. This glorious anthology set my writing pens and pencils dancing again.

All-Souls is a special issue celebrating 75 years of publications. It was first edited by Louis Johnson, and from 1954 published by Pegasus Press in Christchurch. Nicola Legat presents an overview of Louis’s editorial role; his varying views of nz poetry. She locates examples across the years from from scolding to jaunty to despairing to marvellous to furious. Louis’s final issue was in 1964, upon which the journal took a break. Frank McKay edited it biannually from 1971 until 1984. Again a break, and then from 1990, with a series of publishers, the editors were David Drummond (brief spell from 1990) and Alistair Paterson (1993 to 2014). Jack Ross became editor and published from 2014 with Massey University Press assuming the publishing role in 2017. Johanna Emeney followed him, with Dr Tracey Slaughter assuming the role in 2021. As Nicola remarks:

“Louis Johnson, who published 32 poets in volume 1, would surely be astounded that the year book features 120 poets or so each edition. The New Zealand poetry he was so anxious to support and sustain has only grown in in all those years.”

Indeed! And as the diverse poetry in All-Souls demonstrates, whether style tone subject matter, and as Tracey’s inspired introduction underlines, as she explores the issue’s title.

The poems navigate aging, death, illness, therapy, multiple darknesses, but they also draw upon multiple lives, lights and lightnesses.

Darkness. Take for example, Cindy Botha’s moving ‘heart of the dinner table’, with its smouldering absences, “where silences are handed out like empty boxes”. Or the grief and deep aroha in Kerrin P Sharpe’s extraordinary ‘nothing like himself’, where the loss of a magnolia’s foliage reveals a brother loss:

He’s only here
in the tree
at dinner time
his wedding ring
that last ray of sun

Light: In ‘A Garden’, Lucy Miles offers sanctuary to weeds and birds, rather than resort to the uplift of Prozac or meth. And I stall on the ending to Mary Creswell’s Ceento: I am part of all that I have met”:

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks,
and there is a story in a book about it:
that which we are we are:
a few old pecker-fretted apple trees.

And now, I return to the darkness and to the light and find the poems smudge both like heart ripples, and everything in between. Linger over the aroha and memory of violence in Joel LeBlanc’s heart-bending ‘There is stardust in my blood’ (poem below). Or the lithe moves of Maia Armistead’s ‘Wild Houses where windows ‘house grief / and joy’ (poem above). Linger in the “nursery of stars” and “opening umbrella” and the missed body next to her, in Medb Charleton’s glorious ‘Making Love to the Muse’. Take time out with a good dose of Erik Kennedy’s wit and seriousness in ‘Classic Rain’:

There are people who would play sports or go to war in this,
when instead they could watch the surface of a birdbath.

The Yearbook continues to offer exemplary attention to reviewing New Zealand poetry, the kind of reviews that leads us to a book that takes our fancy on multiple levels. I have had Mary McCallum’s Tackling the Hens on my desk for far too long, and the review makes reading it this weekend imperative. And I’ll be tracking down Rhondda Greig’s book of poems and paintings.

To celebrate this anniversary issue, I invited nine poets to record their poems, and the editor and the featured poet, Josiah Morgan, to answer some questions. Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook continues to be a gift for our poetry communities – we are in the debt of Massey University Press.

Poetry is a gift to ourselves and to each other. Thank you.

There is stardust in my blood

and it smells of smoke and sulphur, a memory 
of violence, charcoal pencils that leave dusty
kisses on my fingertips, a house filled with
burnt coffee, mānuka wood transforming into 
incense and ash in our fireplace, my husband’s
skin as I curl against him, hunting for warmth
like comfort in a church, his breath tickling
as he tells me, “Love, it’s time to get up,” 
and I imagine the world was born exactly 
this way: the caress of a hand, a mumbled
whisper, light intruding, moths fluttering away,
us forgetting that the birth of the universe was 
also an ending, and we used to be stars.

Joel LeBlanc

Five questions for Tracey Slaughter, the editor

Paula: I was both surprised and moved to discover your review of my collection The Venetian Blind Poems at the end of the review section. I discovered it at 4 am when I was both wide awake and at a low ebb, and your exquisitely crafted words and thoughts, and personal acknowledgements, drew me back to why poetry matters to me, as reader and writer, reviewer and blogger. I got musing on how reviews can open rather than shut down a book, how they might draw closer to both the light and the dark, how the personal can be gold. How what we bring to a poetry collection as readers makes an electric difference. What are your thoughts on reviewing poetry?

Tracey: Firstly, I’m so glad that my review found you in that 4am place. When I read your book I felt like it was speaking directly to that part of me that can get so washed up and cut off in those pain-hours too, and the hold your poems kept on language, to guide you through those lonely precincts, just…glowed to me. I think reviews should help map our way towards those books we most need, & it’s often a deeply felt review, one which is willing to take the risk to open up the personal, the tender, the vulnerable, which shines a light on a book that might go on, in a profound sense, to save us in some future moment, connect with our tattered nerve-ends when nothing else will.

Paula: I totally agree. I want my reviews to open up a book rather than close its potential doors and windows and trails. I have an ongoing fascination with what poetry can be and do, as my introduction acknowledges: the way a poem might be an echo chamber or a form of travel, the way it might be squatting in the sand dunes absorbing beauty. I kept drawing ideas from your terrific introduction. For example, poetry as telescope, mirror or solace. Each new collection I read, seems to add another possibility, and I love that. How poetry is beyond rigid formulae. What discoveries have you made about what poetry can be and do, whether as editor or reader or writer?

Tracey: So beyond rigid formulae and forever smashing fixed mirrors! It’s been fascinating as editor to see our national poetry shift, stretch and flow over the years, always searching new fields, voicing fresh modes and moods. This year’s issue All-Souls announced its theme with resounding urgency from very early reading – while each piece was distinct, original, innovative, there was also a sense in which a collective quest for something – meaning, god, soul – was building in our poets to a force that felt outright choral. Lit up amidst all our global catastrophes, there’s a symphonic scanning for some human essence going on – these poems shiver with the existential, and scroll for meaning far beyond the algorithmic screen.

Paula: I find certain poems stand out in my reading travels, poems that catch me by surprise, offering wonder or joy or challenge. Is there a poem (among many I am sure) in All-Souls that caught you by surprise?

Tracey: The submission that cut right through my heart this year came from a bereaved wife sending in poetry her partner composed in his final days, transmitting words painfully pulse by pulse via device when his body was frozen by MND. You read poetry like that and there’s nothing more to say…It was so intensely moving to have one of David Gilbert’s last poems entrusted to our pages.

The sunset of the century
The pink had turned to green
How many breaths a man should take
And whether he may scream

I would play-act the drama
I would speak from the heart
But my heartbeat might falter
And I’d just mime my part

David Gilbert
from ‘The Sunset of the Century’

Paula: I am a big fan of your poetry – can you offer three words that matter to you when you are writing a poem. I guess it comes back to what we want our poetry to be and do.

Tracey: Oh thank you! That means so much to me. Mmmm, only three…then the things I surrender to first might be: Rhythm. Fire. Ruthlessness. Or is that maybe a way of saying: Instinct. Instinct. Instinct…

Paula: Oh yes to instinct! And yes, more than ever, we are all, collectively, hand-in-hand, navigating the dark and the light, at personal and global levels. What helps you through the day?

Tracey: Honestly, connecting with other creatives. I’m blessed that in my work, at Waikato University, and in my editing, for Poetry Aotearoa, I’m continuously brought into contact with creative voices brimming with fresh life. And lately my writing practice has spilled over into collaborative forms too, which I’ve found infinitely sustaining, even when I’m running on near-empty – I’ve been co-writing a screenplay adaptation of my novella The Longest Drink in Town with my eldest son Liam Hinton, & also performing in a theatre production of his latest Adam Award-winning play Passionfruits (on in Kirikiriroa very soon!!! & I’m alive with stage-fright already! yet finding I’m happiest in rehearsal, which is like getting to live right inside a book…).

Three questions for Josiah Morgan, the featured poet

Name three words that matter to you when you are writing a poem.
Fragments, challenge, opacity

Can you share a few poets whose poetry boosts you as a poet?
Dennis Cooper changed my life, and his work boosts me whenever I’m in a rut. So does the writing of the new ethnographic photographer-writer New Juche, who makes work with a bizarre and strange opacity that challenges me. In the Aotearoa context, Liz Breslin, Liam Jacobson, and the editor of this year’s Poetry Yearbook Tracey Slaughter feel closely aligned with what I do. The Compound Press book the prism and the rose, by Schaeffer Lemalu was published posthumously and is the most inspiring volume of local poetry I can think of in recent years. 

Why poetry? Why poetry in this tumultuous world?
Poetry is a way of thinking. It is part of what constitutes and constructs our everyday lives. Poetry reduces the boundary between the Western-individualist ‘i’ and the world around us, it is a mode of relation. Poetry is one of the few language-oriented tools we have with which we can disempower language. Language is very easy to bastardise for, say, political gain. Well, poetry can bastardise politics back upon itself. And poetry can stand for itself as an object, too. Poetry cannot be explained as anything other than what it is; it just is.

The readings

Josiah Morgan

Josiah reads ‘Noir is a field of unequal informatics, like a poem that could have been a sestina if it didn’t end too early, if it hadn’t been organised randomly out of order’

Joshiah reads ‘REDACTED (after Ralph Hotere)‘

Josiah reads ‘Family secret’

Josiah reads ‘It could happen to you too’

Rebecca Hawkes

Rebecca reads ‘All Souls’

Elizabeth Morton

Elizabeth Morton reads ‘O-O-O’

Richard Reeve

Richard reads ‘Wake’

Sabrina Li

Sabrina reads ‘Venice Syndrome’
This poem won First Prize in 2025 Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook student poetry competition.

Megan Kitching

Megan reads ‘Fire’

Sherry Zhang

Sherry reads ‘First swim of summer’

Alvia Farooqui

Alvia reads ‘Relapsing’

Leah Dodd

Leah reads ‘Pure expression of colour’

The readers and editor

Dr Tracey Slaughter is an award-winning poet and short story writer. Her books include Her Body Rises, The Longest Drink in Town, Deleted Scenes for Lovers, Devil’s Trumpet and The girls in the red house are singing. She has been the editor of the Poetry New Zealand Yearbook since 2020.

Alvia Farooqui is a Year 13 student at Macleans College in Tamaki Mākaurau Auckland. Her poem ‘Relapsing’ won first prize in the 2025 Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook student poetry competition.

Elizabeth Morton is a spinner of yarns and a poem-maker from Tāmaki Makaurau. Her poetry and prose have been published in New Zealand, the UK, the USA, Canada, Ireland, Australia and online. She has three collections of poetry, the latest being Naming the Beasts (Otago University Press, 2022). An upcoming collection, Incident Report (Otago University Press), will be published this year. She is a PhD candidate in psychological medicine with the University of Otago.

Josiah Morgan (he/him, Kāi Tahu / Ngāti Maniapoto) is a poet, actor, drama teacher, performance artist, facilitator, reviewer, editor and writer from Ōtautahi Christchurch. In 2026, he was the Visiting Writer at Washington State University’s creative writing program. He is the author of i’m still growing (Dead Bird Books, 2024), and his novella Road: A Postlapsarian Comedy won the Macmillan Brown Writers Prize in 2021. His work has featured in The Spinoff, Landfall, Out Here and numerous other journals, blogs and magazines. His chapbook Black Window holds the featured poet slot in Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2026.

Leah Dodd grew up in Taranaki and lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Her first collection of poetry, Past Lives, was published by Te Herenga Waka University Press in 2023. She is currently working on a second.

Megan Kitching is an Ōtepoti Dunedin poet. Her debut collection At the Point of Seeing (Otago University Press, 2023) won the Jessie Mackay Prize for Poetry in the 2024 Mātātuhi Foundation Best First Book Awards and was awarded Best International First Collection in the UK Poet Laureate’s The Laurel Prize 2024. In 2021, Megan was the inaugural Caselberg Trust Elizabeth Brooke-Carr Emerging Writer in residence.

Rebecca Hawkes is a painter-poet from a farm near Methven, now living in Wellington. She is the author of the poetry collection Meat Lovers (Auckland University Press) and the chapbooks Softcore Coldsores (AUP New Poets 5) and Hardcore Pastorals (Cordite). She edits poetry journal Sweet Mammalian. Rebecca holds an MFA in yearning from the University of Michigan and MA in half-truths from the IIML. Her new chapbook Hide, an illuminated manuscript of narrative verse, is coming in September 2026 with ngā pukapuka pekapeka, and her next  collection Fool’s Spring is forthcoming from Yes Yes Books and AUP in 2027.

Born in Dunedin in 1976, Richard Reeve is the author of seven collections of poetry, Dialectic of Mud (AUP 2001), The Life and the Dark (AUP 2004), In Continents (AUP 2008), The Among (Maungatua Press 2008), Generation Kitchen (OUP 2015), Horse and Sheep (Maungatua Press 2019) and About Now (Maungatua Press 2024). With Mick Abbott, he is also co-editor of an anthology of essays on wilderness, Our Wild Heart: The Possibility of Wilderness in Aotearoa New Zealand (OUP 2011). He lives in Warrington, to the north of Dunedin, with Octavia and the cat Lionel.

Sabrina Li is a young writer from Christchurch who enjoys exploring poetry through inventive forms and structures, often finding beauty in the ordinary moments of everyday life. She draws inspiration from the natural world around her, as well as the stories and perspectives she encounters through social media. Her poetry has also appeared in Write On Magazine and Given Words, along with a new work forthcoming from the Hagley Writer’s Institute.

Xue Li (Sherry) Zhang is a writer born and raised in Tāmaki Makaurau. She works across poetry, theatre and prose. Her family are from Fujian, China. She was the editor of The Pantograph Punch, and the co-manager of Te Kāhui Creative Writing. 

Poetry Shelf Noticeboard: Ben Brown launches The Imperfect Light

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Scorpio Books and Dead Bird Books warmly welcome you to the Ōtautahi Christchurch launch of This Imperfect Light by Ben Brown with original artwork by Bill Hammond (29 Aug 1947 – 30 Jan 2021).

Shining on a selection of works from the poet Ben Brown and the artist Bill Hammond, This Imperfect Light is a collaboration born from too many glasses of wine in a bar between earthquakes.

Gathered together here are 31 years of words in no particular order, other than exactly where they should be. Brown is an avid story teller, amateur philosopher, and self-professed expert orator, known for enjoying the sound of his own voice.

This selection allows for quiet contemplation of a life lived imperfectly. The Māori Jesus and The Blue Blanket Boy wander freely through islands, sea-scapes, and the birds and bones of an artist’s imaginings.

Ben Brown (Ngati Mahuta, Ngati Koroki, Ngati Paoa) is an acclaimed writer, poet, performer and publisher who lives in Lyttelton, New Zealand. Born in Motueka, New Zealand, in 1962, he has previously worked as a tobacco farm labourer, market gardener and tractor driver, and has been writing and publishing since 1992. Brown is the author of an evocative memoir, A Fish in the Swim of the World, a number of children’s books, non-fiction works, and short stories for children and adults, many of which have strong New Zealand nature themes.

Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: Terrier, Worrier by Anna jackson

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I hear birds and thought that although I am only hearing them,
and I am not having a thought, it still feels like a thought, almost
like a thought of my own, or a conversation I am having, or
perhaps it is more like reading a poem, where the words, or the
movement of the thought, the song of the thought, is given to
you rather than coming from you, but still moves through you.

from ‘Summer: Terrier, worrier’

I thought, it tells us something about poetry that when we
need to talk to ourselves about something we don’t know
we know, we tell it to ourselves when we are asleep, in images
we struggle to remember when we are awake, and often take
more than one reading to fully understand.

from ‘Summer: Terrier, worrier’

I wondered if anyone wrote a diary anymore. For writers like
Virginia Woolf this was a daily necessity, a form of expression
so compulsive that a day without writing in the diary felt for
Woolf like ‘a tap left running’, with it being not the writing
she imagined as a running tap but the day itself, as if writing
somehow stemmed from the flow of time. Could the diary really have
become so important to so many writers just because the paper was
cheap, and ready-made exercise books were sold in stationery
shops? Did the diary not answer a need for secret self-reflection
but create the need?

from ‘Autumn: Lounge scale’

I thought, even if the mind is a construction of activity of the
brain it makes no more real sense to think of thoughts as being
located in the head than it does to think of them as located in
the heart. They aren’t material things that can be there behind
the eyes, and why behind the eyes except that I look at the
world through the eyes and so can locate myself there?

from ‘Autumn: Lounge scale’

She came upstairs looking more like a cloud than a silver lining.

from ‘Winter: Hilbert spaces’

I thought, perhaps it isn’t that people high on mushrooms are
accessing some transcendent truth through the unlocking of
their own minds, perhaps it is that they are experiencing life the
way fungi experience it, with a consciousness without individual
identity, dispersed and without borders.

from ‘Winter: Hilbert spaces’

Agnes asked if meaning drains out of life as you get older, and
almost everyone said no, except for me. I answered emotionally,
not logically, and even as I was answering yes I was thinking,
but is a novel drained of meaning in its last few chapters? is a
sonnet drained of meaning after the volta?

from ‘Spring: Matchbox beetles’

I thought, we take it as axiomatic that happiness is the
highest good, but for the Romans it was justice, for the Greek
philosophers it was knowledge. For me, I think is beauty.

from ‘Spring: Matchbox beetles’

Lying on the carpet in our living room, Simon cooking in the
other room, I had the most profound sense of contentment.
I realised I was in the position I spent much of my childhood
in, lying on a carpet, able to play the most complicated
imaginary games in front of everyone, with whatever props
were to hand, knowing that even with the outer workings of
my inner life on display I was completely private because no
one was remotely interested.

from ‘Summer: Memory palace’

Anna Jackson
from Terrier, Worrier, Auckland University Press, 2025

Terrier Worriers is a long poetic sequence divided into five parts, into five season loop: summer autumn winter spring summer. These nine pieces are lifted from the extended sequence.

Inspired by The New York Times invitation to take ten minutes and slowly absorb the artwork they post each Monday, I created an ongoing series, the Poetry Shelf Breathing Room. Here, I invite you to breathe in a poem slowly for ten minutes. I love choosing the poem, I love slowing down to a restorative snail’s pace, to see what is experienced when we unfold a poem slowly.

As I move Poetry Shelf slowly and gently back online, I have spent this week lingering in the Breathing Room. On Tuesday, I was set to pick a poem from Bill Manhire’s Lyrical Ballads (THWUP, 2026) but stayed with the whole collection for several glorious hours. Yesterday it was a painting from Michael Hight’s exhibition, and wrote a poem in response. Today I spent several hours reading Anna Jackson’s glorious Terrier, Worrier again. I am curious to see what happens when I return to books I have loved so much, and to write down my engagements, as I also did with Bill’s new book. On both occasions, the books shifted to reveal new delights and wonders.

Anna’s book is an extraordinary sailing ship, a deep simmer-pot of thinking and exploration: porous moving full of song, with questions puzzles ideas worries that tremble and quiver and navigate as they set sail upon the page. There’s Anna’s recurring dream terrier pulling us into digging up and over and under things, the lyrical lines that carry us with wit and agility. It feels like I am are drawn into the waiting room, a poetry room that’s maybe cerebral physical recalled experienced imagined. An utterly intimate space of poetic and self exploration, where beloved hens cats Simon son and daughter mother and father are seated or standing close, where writing becomes thinking and thinking becomes writing, and everything is steeped in a slow braise of feeling and being and tenterhooks and life, yes above all life. To read this precious book, in my three-day Breathing-Room retreat is utterly precious.

Anna Jackson is a poet and Professor of English literature at Te Herenga Waka/Victoria University of Wellington, whose latest book Terrier, Worrier came out with Auckland University Press in 2025. She is the author of seven collections of poetry as well as Diary Poetics: Form and Style in Writers’ Diaries 1915–1962 (Routledge, 2010) and Actions & Travels: How Poetry Works (Auckland University Press, 2022).

Auckland University Press page

Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: Kyeburn by Michael Hight

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‘Kyeburn’ by Michael Hight
from The Seasons, Gow Langsford Gallery, 2026

Kyeburn

Light rises, an ocean swell across the mountains
Heartbeat rhythm of the snowcapped range
Light licking the shivering grass
There’s music of honey bees and autumn willows
There’s light stoking the blue sky beauty
Rhythm of the hives and a person pausing
The light swashes and laps, and we’re on the Maniototo Plains

Paula Green

Inspired by The New York Times invitation to take ten minutes and slowly absorb the artwork they post each Monday, I created an ongoing series, the Poetry Shelf Breathing Room. Here, I invite you to breathe in a poem slowly for ten minutes. I love choosing the poem, I love slowing down to a restorative snail’s pace, to see what is experienced when we unfold a poem slowly.

For the first time I am posting both an art work and a poem, extra special as the artist is my partner Michael Hight. When I most need it, I walk up the hill to his studio, sit on the couch and absorb the beauty, stillness and extraordinary light of a beehive painting. Unfold a painting slowly. Last week I stood in his latest Gow Langsford show for ten minutes, breathed in the beauty, and felt body and heart recharge. My wee poem is simply a tentative bridge to the ripples his work lit in me. This gift. This incredible gift.

Michael Hight is best known for his hyper-real paintings of beehives in the New Zealand landscape, which frequently depict locations in Central Otago and Canterbury. Hight’s more recent works include dark, surreal dreamscapes that weave in imagery of objects that have a personal significance to the artist. Toys, musical instruments, books, rusted corrugated iron and other such items are set in striking juxtaposition to rustic landscapes, often with dark skies above.Hight has an exhibition history of more than 30 years. He continues to exhibit regularly in New Zealand and Australia. Highlights include inclusion in exhibitions at City Gallery, Wellington (2001 and 2007)—and his work is held in numerous public and private collections in New Zealand, and private collections in the UK, Germany, Italy, USA, Hong Kong and Australia. In 2014 Gow Langsford Gallery published his first monograph Michael Hight: Crossing the Line.

Gow Langsford Gallery has represented Michael Hight since 1987.

The Seasons page

Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: Three poems by Bill Manhire

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The Distant Road

Some days I try to stare past
the distant road
at all the roads beyond it

nothing there yet

then the noise of desperate engines
comes on the wind
the sound of waves too and

look!

a child runs into the safe small waves
pauses a moment then
sits down on his well padded

autobiography

Poetry Updates

Yes, there will be sadness.
There will be metaphors and music.
There will be music and the lovely names.

There will be the beating of hearts,
the happiness of trees beside water,
plus death with its aches and gratitude.

And more on this throughout the day
as fresh information comes to hand.

The World About Us

There was a weatherboard church
but no settlement to speak of

just a few houses
some bewildered passers-by

I remember wild bells ringing underwater
a line of torn macrocarpas

also the sound of children coughing
someone had made this whole thing happen

Bill Manhire
from Lyrical Ballads, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2026

Inspired by The New York Times invitation to take time out and slowly absorb the artwork they post each Monday, I created an ongoing series, the Poetry Shelf Breathing Room. Here, I invite you to breathe in a poem slowly for ten minutes. I love choosing the poem, I love slowing down to a restorative snail’s pace, to see what is experienced when we unfold a poem slowly.

This morning, I wanted to choose a poem from a book I have loved so much, Bill Manhire’s Lyrical Ballads, and found myself absorbed for several hours. The whole book became my Breathing Room, not just one poem. Again I experienced surprise and delight and nourishment. Lyricism. Prismatic tracks and electric undercurrents. An infectious love of writing. New things sung in mind: ideas, images, feelings. And yes, for many of us, poetry is the perfect uplift destination when the road is spiky (along with a bowl of green goddess soup!). Bill gave me kind permission to share three poems – do track down a copy of the book! It is a Breathing Room gem.

Bill Manhire’s latest poetry collection is Lyrical Ballads, THWUP, 2026. He has won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry five times, and was New Zealand’s inaugural poet laureate. He founded and directed the International Institute of Modern Letters at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. He has edited major anthologies of New Zealand literature, including, with Marion McLeod, the now classic Some Other Country: New Zealand’s Best Short Stories (1984). In 2018 Bill was awarded an Icon Award Whakamana Hiranga from the Arts Foundation.

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: Before Top Surgery by Holly Painter

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Before Top Surgery

I.

On the way to the hospital
I see breasts everywhere:

yellow-tagged dairy cows
professional lactaters;
sagging barns beside
red-topped grain silos;
murmurations of sparrows
blobbing and dispersing
over the Catskills foothills.

II.

We wait, masked and distanced,
in the mid-December soundscape
of Frank Sinatra and Mariah Carey,
tap at the Times crossword,
take turns visiting the gift shop,
scan the wall of last millennium’s donors,
share selfies the kids took yesterday.

III.

The sleep is in my arm now
and I’m sarcophagused
in toasty blankets.

The surgeon’s been in.
I stood like a Renaissance Jesus,
palms up, gown shrugged off
to my elbows as she marked up
my torso like a new play
for the offensive line.

When I wake, I will be
a mismatched children’s puzzle:
giraffe on the top, lion on the bottom
as if men and women were ever really
different species and not
variations on the same themes
of salty carbs and worrying
and walks around the block
just to see if anything’s different today:
the neighbor’s pinecone wreath
tiny icicles on the mailbox
dark-eyed junco at the feeder
fat with feathers
and the dream
of sunflowers.

Holly Painter

Holly Painter is the author of the poetry collections At last we listen closely: cryptic crossword poems (Black Spring, 2026), The pressure of all that light (Rebel Satori, 2022), My Pet Sounds Off: Translating the Beach Boys (Finishing Line, 2020),andExcerpts from a Natural History(Titus, 2015). Holly teaches in the English Department at the University of Vermont and also directs the Center for Research on Vermont.

Poetry Shelf Noticeboard: Canterbury Poet’s Collective Lambing Season event

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Canterbury Poet’s Collective Lambing Season – 20 Aug 5.15pm Tūranga

They may be lambs, but these young Canterbury poets are shaking tales and getting noticed! The Canterbury Poets’ Collective brings you LAMBING SEASON, some of the best Ōtautahi poets under-25 to celebrate National Poetry Day this year.

Four guest poets – Solomon Vasa Davies, Jordan Irvine, Indigo Tomlinson, Naomi Roberts– plus an OPEN MIC exclusively for our under-25s and MCed by the fabulous JOR DANSAREN! 

Poetry Shelf takes a short break

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Poetry Shelf is aiming to be back online on Friday but only if the current jagged spike smooths and the road ahead settles.

I thought I’d share some photos of some of the books I have got sent to review and some of the books I have been buying lately. Looking forward to reading them all! My desk is a like a range of book mountains.

And my mind is like a mysterious enclave of rooms where ideas and images and feelings simmer and sizzle but can’t quite reach the page or screen yet – and when I attempt to write about your glorious poetry I create nonsense puddles on the screen.

So time to recharge with nourishing soups and juices. My highlight of the week was seeing the incredulous look on the face of Zoe Hobbs when she won the 100 metres in the outside lane at the Commonwealth Games. And that is what we can do. Against all odds. In the outside lane or the middle lane or the invented lane, we can get poetry simmering and sizzling and skateboarding. Drifitng and dancing and dillydallying. Going shallow and going deep.

Please note my new public postal address (but do use private one if you have it): PO Box 58, Waitākere 0660

Poetry Shelf weekend reading and listening

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Wild stormy out there!

Poetry Shelf is taking a short break over the coming week. But it is a huge thank you to all the poetry readers and writers who support the blog and enhance its connections. It is so nourishing! Like this sublime basket from the Bethells Farm Shop.

Monday: Monday Poem – Your Data For the Year by Murray Edmond

Tuesday: Poetry Shelf Breathing Room – White horses by Gail Zing

Wednesday: Poetry Shelf Speaking Out To For With – ‘ a conversation about death’ by Sue Fitchett

Thursday: Poetry Shelf Pocket Reviews – Michelle Elvy reviews The Venetian Blind Poems

Friday: Poetry celebrates Te Pūrere The Exodus with eleven readings

WITHOUT BEES

hony
uml
nativ

workr
dron
hiv

royal jlly
vnom
wax
propoli

pollination?

Jenny Powell
from Biology Field Trip, cold hub press, 2026

Poetry Shelf celebrates Te Pūrere The Exodus with eleven readings

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Te Pūrere The Exodus
Te Paenga Kōrero ā Ngā Kaitito Toi o Aotearoa
The Anthology of Expatriate New Zealand Poets
eds Vaughan Rapatahana and John Gallas
Cold Hub Press, 2026

We lost count of the number of times we packed up our loves and left our
homes, and sat on the shore with our suitcases, playing music for animals who
resembled flowers, while our spirits were cut into jigsaws, while we threw away
our names and birthplaces, and watched the sun fragment into amethyst and
coconut shards as it walked backwards into the ocean.

Manisha Anjali
from ‘Sea, Pilgrim’

Te Pūrere The Exodus offers an eclectic selection of poems by 60 Aotearoa New Zealand poets who live overseas, expatriates with tendrils in various homes. The anthology includes an introduction by Roger Horrocks and the sublime cover art work by Vaughan’s daughter, Pauline Canlas Wu.

I lived in London for five years in the 1980s, an arm stretch from my Scottish Grandmother’s Glasgow, and an elbow tap from my English Grandfather’s London. I lived through London IRA bomb scares, through art exhibition astonishment in both the UK and across Europe, embarked on long cycle trips, food discoveries, author discoveries and an extraordinary set of gigs and concerts, including Nina Simone at Ronnie Scotts, Annie Lennox. I adored West End musicals, astonishing Shakespeare productions. And then London got hit with radioactive rain from Chernobyl and planes laden with bombs left from southern England to bomb Libya. Michael and I felt an urgent pull to return home. To replant ourselves by bush and ocean.

So I entered Te Pūrere The Exodus with an offshore/home longings back story, drawn to the resonance of being here and there. Place and people are brought to life in the wide-ranging poetry. Poetry becomes a terrific way of making oneself at home, whether offshore or back here in Aotearoa, whether past or present. The anthology, so beautifully produced by Cold Hub Press, is an enriching read, a gathering of fascinations and discoveries and loves.

I have been participating
in the word – Scotland –
we have been moving through each other
like fish and light and water through water.

Lynn Davidson
from ‘To get here’

Two questions for Vaughan and John

1. What discoveries did you make as you gathered this anthology together? Whether on poets or poetry itself? Whether moments of surprise or delight or learning?

Vaughan: Tēnā koe mō tēnei pātai. I became more surprised as we went on, just how many expatriate Kiwi kaitito (poets) there are. I already knew of many – which is why I instigated this project – but not as many as we eventually invited to contribute. More, almost without exception, they responded enthusiastically and obligingly and we – and here I speak for John, I am sure – were quite delighted with the quality of their toikupu (poetry). Across a wide swathe of kaupapa and an array of styles. Aotearoa New Zealand should be very proud of its expatriate poets!

John: Every contribution a discovery. The unique combination of ‘displacement’, the attitude to it, the pluses and minuses of it, the emotional response to it, and the kind of ‘double-life’ it represented, all expressed in a wild variety of forms and styles … all this made for a real odyssey – calling in at every port on the way! Individually, the ‘feel’ of the poems was super-personal, even when not a direct expression of ‘I’: and as a whole, the noticeable rejection of what might be called Traditional/European forms and disciplines made for a freshness, independence and originality that was striking … and made me feel kind of proud of Us.     

2. How have notions and the experience of exodus, of being an expatriate writer affect you as a poet?

Vaughan: Tēnā koe anō. For me, literally living across three countries and cultures, as well as several languages, has vastly widened my mental vistas, which – invariably – lead to poems incorporating these variegated experiences. I guess that I no longer see New Zealand with a ‘domestic point of view’, but from afar, and accordingly perhaps have different opinions and outlooks inside my work.

I would also like to note that during our compilation of this anthology, we lost some fine Kiwi poets – Fleur Adcock, Eric Beach, Vernice Wineera. Te Pūrere/The Exodus was compiled to commemorate as many Kiwi poets as possible and to bring them further recognition in Aotearoa now.

John : Can be summed up, for me, in the following, which was written for the back cover of ‘Aotearoa/Angleland’ (New Walk Editions ISBN 978-1-8381153-4-0):

“A life, a heart, a soul – and a book – divided. Happily divided. In this pamphlet, John Gallas wanders the corners of his two homelands: Aotearoa and England. The heart doesn’t bleed, the soul doesn’t yearn to be one, and Life can always get on a plane. As Misuzu Bonchō wrote, when she moved to Dodge City:

A thing with two roots
will grow to embrace the earth
with both arms. Write on …”

the readings

Vaughan Rapatahana

Vaughan reads ‘three countries’

John Gallas

John reads four tankas, ‘Poeticals’, ‘Rooked’, ‘Lowestoft Harbour’, ‘Hillgate’

Hinemoana Baker

photo credit, Tim Gruar, courtesy of Randell Cottage Trust 2024

Hinemoana reads ‘the librarian asks me about the green stone around my neck’ and ‘Fox’

John Puhiatau Pule

John reads ‘Looking at rain too long has given me eternity’

Joan Fleming

photographer credit Reyes Cervantes

Joan reads ‘Catalogue’

Amy Catherine Brown

Amy reads ‘Pacing Poem’

Lynn Davidson

Lynn reads ‘To Get Here’

Orchid Tierney

Photo by Graham Stokes

Orchid reads from ‘My Beatrice’, and ‘prayer | suit’ and ‘to the is-land’

Charles Olsen

 

Charles reads ‘El Avefría | The Lapwing’, ‘Por la mañana | Morning’, and ‘Five o’clock’

Alison Wong

Alison reads ‘Family Photographs’

Stephen Chan

Stephen reads ‘Love in the Time of Covid’

The editors

John Gallas is published by www.carcanet.co.uk  Website at www.johngallaspoetry.co.uk : Poem of the Month & All News. Presently living in Markfield, Leics. with weekly getaway caravan/bike in Lincolnshire. Project Poet for Saxonship shipbuild www.saxonship.org , librettist, translator (‘The Song Atlas’, ’52 Euros’, ‘Petrus Borel:Rhapsodies’ : all Carcanet), Fellow of the English Association, Poet for St Magnus Festival, Orkney. 

Vaughan Rapatahana (Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Te Whiti) commutes between homes in Hong Kong, Philippines, and Aotearoa New Zealand. He is widely published across several genre in both his main languages, te reo Māori and English and his work has been translated into several other languages. He is the author and editor/co-editor of over 50 books. He won the AAALS Indigenous Poetry Prize in 2026.

The readers

Alison Wong is a Cantonese New Zealander living in Geelong, Australia. Her collection, Cup (Steele Roberts), was shortlisted for the 2007 Jessie MacKay Award for Best First Book for Poetry. Her novel, As the Earth Turns Silver (Penguin NZ), won the 2010 NZ Post Book Award for Fiction. She coedited A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand (AUP, 2021), the first anthology of creative writing by Asian New Zealanders. She is working on a revised edition, and also Journeys Home: A Memoir from Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and China. 

Hinemoana Baker (Ngāti Tukorehe, Ngāti Tupaia ki te Aro, Ngāti Raukawa ki te Tonga, Ngāti Toa Rangatira, Te Āti Awa, Kāi Tahu, Ngāi Tiamana, Ngāi Ingarangi) Poet, musician and educator Hinemoana Baker is known for her power on the page and stage, her wry humour and deep sense of cultural and personal inquiry. In 2015 Hinemoana received the Creative New Zealand Berlin Writer’s Residency and lived for almost a decade in Germany. In that time her Ockham-shortlisted collection ‘Funkhaus’ was published in German and Polish. Hinemoana is currently back in Te Whanga-nui-a-Tara Wellington completing a PhD exploring how poetry can be a rongoā for takatāpui.

Joan Fleming is a New Zealand-Australian writer who doesn’t know where she’s from. This year she is living back in Spain. Her last book was the post-collapse verse novella Song of Less (Cordite Books). Her debut novel The Fig Book will be published in 2027 by Allen & Unwin (Au/NZ) and Mariner Books (US). 

Amy Brown is a New Zealand-Australian writer and teacher who lives in Naarm/Melbourne. She has published three collections of poetry, four children’s novels, and completed a PhD at the University of Melbourne. Amy Brown’s debut novel was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Prize for an Unpublished Manuscript and was later published as My Brilliant Sister. Her next novel, This Creature, will be published in 2027.

Lynn Davidson writes poetry, memoir, and essays. Her memoir Do you still have time for chaos? was published by Main Point Books, Edinburgh, and Te Herenga Waka University Press, Wellington. Her latest poetry collection Islander was published by Shearsman Books, Bristol, and Te Herenga Waka University Press. Lynn had a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2013 and a Bothy Project Residency in 2016.  She won the Poetry New Zealand Poetry Award, 2020, and was the Randell Cottage Creative New Zealand Writer in Residence, 2021, and the Mike Riddell Writer in Residence, 2023. Lynn lives in Edinburgh and calls Aotearoa New Zealand and Scotland home.

Charles Olsen has published three bilingual poetry collections in Spain. He is preparing an anthology of the first ten years of the Given Words poetry competition (see @givenwords). Currently in Colombia presenting his poetry films in the IV ALARI Continental Conference on Afro-Latin American Studies in Cali, he has also been invited to curate a screening of poetry film at REELpoetry Houston, Texas, in September.

John Puhiatau Pule was born in Niue and since 1964 has lived in Auckland. In 2015 he returned to Niue to live. His expansive interdisciplinary practice has transformed oceanic imaginaries, offering new ways of understanding the arts, cultures, and histories of our region. He has published two novels and has published extensively as a poet. He also works as an artist, painting, drawing, printmaking, filmmaking and performing. Pule’s work has been represented in three Asia-Pacific Triennials at the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane (2006, 2002, 1996) Other selected group exhibitions include Hawaii triennial (2025) Sydney Biennale (2024) Oceania at Royal academy of arts, London & Musee du quai Branley ( 2018 & 2019) Kwangju Biennale, Korea (1995 &  2018); the 3rd Auckland Triennial, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki (2007)South Pacific Arts Festival in Palau (2004), New Caledonia (2000), Samoa (1996); Johannesburg Biennale, South Africa (1995).

Orchid Tierney is a poet and scholar originally from Aotearoa New Zealand, now living in Ohio. Her collections include this abattoir is a college (Calamari Archive, 2025) and a year of misreading the wildcats (The Operating System 2019). She is the author of several chapbooks including looking at the Tiny: Mad lichen on the surfaces of reading (Essay Press, 2023), ocean plastic (BlazeVOX, 2019), and blue doors (Belladonna* Press, 2018). Tierney is a senior editor at the Kenyon Review and is an associate professor at Kenyon College. She invites you to visit her www.orchidtierney.co

Since he left NZ in 1976 Stephen Chan has completed graduate and post doctoral work at London King’s, Kent and Oxford and is now Professor of World Politics at SOAS University of London. Before then he served as an international civil servant in emerging countries, working in zones of development and war. He has published more than 40 academic books, 5 volumes of poetry and 3 novels. He teaches karate in emerging countries and has been European Masters Champion in the fighting division.