Pōneke poetry lovers rejoice! Our new Poet Laureate, Robert Sullivan (Ngāpuhi, Kāi Tahu) welcomes poets including Arihia Latham (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, Waitaha), Matariki Bennet (Ngāti Pikiao, Ngāti Whakaue, Ngāti Hinerangi, Amber Esau (Ngāpuhi / Manase), Jordan Hamel, Nick Ascroft, Rebecca Hawkes, Anne-Marie Te Whiu and more to the stage to demonstrate the unmissable power and beauty of poetry in live performance.
Join us next week for an Auckland celebration of Jenny Bornholdt’s new poetry collection, What to Wear. A wise and beautiful collection from one of New Zealand’s most beloved poets.
The poems in What to Wear observe that life means doing ordinary and marvellous things, like going to Bunnings, falling asleep on the train, losing and finding poems, losing and dreaming of our mothers, loving, dying, and deciding what to wear.
🪡 🪡 🪡 ‘Mischievously joyful, like being in on the very best in-joke. Jenny Bornholdt reveals the strange magic of the everyday. Some of these poems move like a heat-seeking missile set to the heart.’ —Louise Wallace, author of Ash and This Is a Story About Your Mother
‘Bornholdt has never been so spare, so stark and wise.’ —Jake Arthur, author of Tarot and A Lack of Good Sons
Jenny Bornholdt has published over a dozen books of poems, including Lost and Somewhere Else (2019), Selected Poems (2016) and The Rocky Shore (winner of the Montana New Zealand Book Award for Poetry, 2009). She has edited a number of anthologies, including Short Poems of New Zealand (2018), and has worked on numerous book and art projects with artists including Annemarie Hope-Cross, Pip Culbert, Mary McFarlane, Noel McKenna, Mari Mahr, Brendan O’Brien and Gregory O’Brien. In 2018 she was the co-recipient, with Gregory O’Brien, of the Henderson Arts Trust Residency and spent 12 months in Alexandra, Central Otago. She was New Zealand’s poet laureate in 2005–2007, and in the 2014 New Year Honours she was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services as a poet.
Season Tickets are available now for Poetry in Performance March 2026!
We’ve got 4 unforgettable Thursdays of powerful poetry, featuring four acclaimed guest poets from across Aotearoa alongside an exceptional line-up of Ōtautahi talent and our always awesome open mic featuring the talents of the local poetry scene.
Buying a season ticket (4 nights for the price of 3 + Zoom link) is the best way to support local poetry and ensure you don’t miss a moment. Every dollar goes toward future CPC events and grassroots literary initiatives in Canterbury.
THE LINE-UP:
– 5 Mar: Richard Reeve, Annabel Wilson, Jenna Heller
– 12 Mar: Tim Jones, Megan Clayton, Dietrich Soakai
– 19 Mar: Sophie van Waardenberg, James Norcliffe, Regan Kupu Stokes
– 26 Mar: Kiri Piahana-Wong, Dominic Hoey, Best of the Open Mic
Where: Ara Imagitech Theatre, 130 Madras Street, Christchurch
When: Every Thursday in March at 6:30 PM sharp
Tickets: $10 per night | $30 season ticket (4 nights for the price of 3)
Tickets available at the door (cash, Eftpos, PayWave) or online via Humanitix
Each night includes an open mic – arrive early to sign up, connect, and grab a great seat.
Thanks to our venue sponsor Ara Institute of Canterbury and to everyone who supported our 2024 Boosted campaign – this season exists because of you!
Photo: (top row, l to r) Dominic Hoey, Tim Jones, Kiri Piahana-Wong, Richard Reeve; (middle row, l to r) Regan Kupu Stokes, James Norcliffe, Jenna Heller, Annabel Wilson; (bottom row, l to r) Megan Clayton, Dietrich Soakai, Sophie van Waardenberg
Poetry. Dear old poetry. Your rusty relics groan on forgotten shelves of secondhand bookshops – Wordsworth and Shelley bearded with cobwebs, Spenser dispensed with, the pages of both Brownings gone brown. Look, there’s an abridged Longfellow leaning for support against a broken-backed Bracken. But no, it’s not over. It’s never the end. Poetry lives on. Its voice is stuttering within us all. A waitress smears mist from a restaurant window and seizes the day in a heartbreaking haiku.
Poetry. Yup, poetry. Musical emotion. Seraphic utterance. Precise notation of our hearts’ desires. The phantom Muse floats high above city chimneys. Anguished zealots spy her, exclaim, leap madly at her ankles. A few even succeed and are borne briefly aloft, clinging to the Muse’s toes and warts and corns, singing loudly down to the rooftops that our lives are noble and signify.
Poetry. Sweet poetry. It’s a contagion, let me warn you, an epidemic. The whole city’s at it. There are sonneteering plumbers out there, lyrical clerks and romantic drain diggers. Classicist butchers are chopping up trochees and iambs with their tripe and lamb. Wharfies wail oceanic epics. Sad-eyed masseuses devise Buddhist mantras in Thai. The Nuns jabber limericks. An elegiac taxi driver honks past with a carload of rowdy symbolists.
Poetry. Wow, poetry. What a comfort, what a blessing, what a boon, for those of us who can’t jog, juggle, sew, whistle, turn cartwheels or make money, who topple from tightropes and sing like cats caught in a dishmaster, whose thuggee fingers maim any instrument they touch. Words – words are all we have. And they escape our needy grasp like startled eels.
Iain Sharp from ‘The Poets’, in The Singing Harp, Earl of Seacliffe Art Workshop, 2004
Iain Sharp (1953- 2026), librarian, writer, poet, performer, reviewer, lover of books, was born in Glasgow, and arrived in New Zealand in 1961. He ended up settling in Nelson with his beloved wife, Joy. He studied English at the University of Auckland, before enrolling at library school at Victoria University Wellington. He worked at the Sylvia Ashton-Warner Library at the Auckland College of Education and as a rare books assistant at the Grey Collection, Auckland Public Library. In 1982, he completed a PhD at Auckland University (Wit at several weapons: a critical edition, 1982), that considered the 17th century comedy by the Jacobean playwright and poet Thomas Middleton and William Rowley.
As a nonfiction author, he wrote Sail the Spirit (Reed 1994), a book on Auckland City Libraries treasures: Real Gold (2007) and a book entitled Heaphy (AUP, 2008). His poetry collections include Why Mammals Shiver (1981), She Is Trying to Kidnap the Blind Person (1985), The Pierrot Variations (1985) and The Singing Harp (2004). Along with poets such as Dave Mitchell, Michael O’Leary and David Eggleton, he performed his poetry at the Globe Tavern in the late 70s and early 80s, and the Shakespeare Tavern in the 1990s.
Reading Iain’s poetry again, is to get his incredible wit singing in my ear, to savour the intoxicating amalgam of music, surprise, love, living and reflecting in the moment, writing and performing in the arc and loops and riffs of what poetry and life can do. I am moved and I am inspired. Utterly. I so loved reading Iain’s piece on Bill Manhire published in Quote Unquote in 1996. Iain highlights Bill’s wit and ability to surprise, his humanity, humbleness, his lyricism, his cool. Iain writes: “When I was young, I wanted to write poems that sounded just like Bill’s: enigmatic, poised, deeply ironic, simultaneously lyrical and subversive. I never came within cooee of success.” I smiled in recognition. And yes, here I am bringing similar words to Iain’s sublime poetry. As Iain says in ‘The Poets’, the poem posted above, poetry can be such a blessing, a ‘wow’ unfolding.
Iain was writing poetry on his laptop, feeding on the nourishing strengths and blessings of poetry until his final days. Joy has included one of these poems, ‘Breakfast in Hamilton’ after her first pick. I have included one, ‘Blood Cancer Blues’, at the end of the tribute so that we may hold his voice close, gathering as we are here in this time of sadness, to read his poetry and share stories together. And yes, let’s embrace poetry as a blessing.
To celebrate the poetry of Iain Sharp and assemble a wee tribute, Poetry Shelf invited a few of Iain’s friends to select a favourite poem and write a few sentences. Donald Kerr has written a terrific tribute for The University of Otago that is a must read (go here). You can listen to Iain read here.
I offer a warm bouquet of sweet and salty ocean air from Te Henga to friends and family in this time of sadness, and especially to dear Joy. Thank you for helping create this special tribute.
the poems
Joy Sharp
The Reckoning
Life is improvised like Charlie Parker. Sure, you can rehearse a few routines but you never know in advance
how they’re likely to go down — too rigid and they’re bound to snap too loose and they won’t sustain
your weight or anyone’s interest. Some nights nothing works in spite of deft fingers
impeccable breathing a wonderful shirt or hat. Other nights are magical
but you can’t explain why though you think hard for years . . . like the beauty of your lover’s face
as she knelt to light a white candle in Saint Patrick’s cathedral the night you entered the church
only because it was raining. In the end that’s what we’re left with . . . shards of inexplicable magic
but while you’re waiting for them instead of just pining for your brain to become a rainbow or for the breaks
in every surface to heal, why don’t you step outside and do something useful such as extolling the stars?
Iain Sharp The Singing Harp, Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop, 2004
This poem brings back a wonderful memory of the two of us dashing into the church seeking shelter from the rain. It was Iain’s poetry that drew me to him over 30 years ago, and poems like this will continue to sustain me. Iain was lovable, kind, intelligent, witty and fun to be with. We were blissfully happy living together in Nelson. He was my dearly-loved husband and my best friend. I miss him terribly but am grateful for his unwavering love and the life we shared.
Joy Sharp
Breakfast in Hamilton
Skittering along Clarence Street, Hamilton, not long after dawn, I’m feeling virtuous to be up and walking and headed for Pak ‘n’ Save for breakfast victuals while back in our motel bed my darling sleeps blithely on and, having already completed a circuit of Hamilton Lake, my lumbago is easing up and though the fierce morning glare plays havoc with my ageing eyes I’m congratulating myself on my new athleticism when I spy a big sign outside the tax-reckoners which seems to ask in comics sans serif: “Are you praying too much?” — and, taken aback, I wonder “Can this be possible? Is the universe ruled by a god of limited patience who wants us all to shut the eff up so He can hear Himself or She can hear Herself think?” — like that moment this morning when I heard by the sedges the shrill peep-peep-peeping of an adolescent pukeko whose mother had had enough of the incessant needfulness and was dashing on tiptoe to a remote part of the lake — and then, pausing to rub my eyes, I see the word in fact is “paying” and, heck, I’m on the lowest rung of middle-class remuneration and en route to the supermarket, so of course affirmative, of course, but that other phantom question gnaws at me still as I tote yellow bags bulging with fruit back to Ashwood Manor, where Joy, just woken, requests a cup of tea of decent strength— and I pray for more days like this – another skittering decade, or half a decade at least, with more dawns with Joy beside me, more walks with most of myself still more or less functional, more encounters with pukeko, more misread signage, more libations of decent strength, more Pak ‘n’ Save holiday breakfasts in – for God’s sake – Hamilton
Iain Sharp
Serie Barford
THE NEVERTHELESS INCREDIBLY HAPPY POEM
Well, here it is at last, folks, the nevertheless incredibly happy poem, done in prose. Yes, happy. Remember? There might be worms in the apples, blood in the gutters, crumbs in the bed, cracks in the globe, black holes in the cosmos, guilt and acne and egg all over our disgusting faces, but things will work out, the end will be wholesome heartwarming fun for all the family, all creatures that on earth do dwell chuckling together and slapping their gleeful knees beneath a hunky- dory sunset. Trust me. Step down from your kitchen chair and return the noose to your bottom drawer. Throw away those toasted deathcap toad- stool sandwiches. Take the bullets from your pistol and the pistol from your head. Smile. Dance. Rouse your rump. Jive your jelly. Boogie your booty. Flamenco your flab. Immerse your caboodle in delirious optimism. A new dawn is coming. Summer is coming. The calvary is coming. The millennium, apocalypse, and Second Coming are coming. I know. I’ve had word right from the top. As I was traversing Albert Park after a few litres of cognac with the Earl of Seacliff, lo and behold, the deity peeked out from behind a puff of white cloud and spake unto me saying, “Hi there, Sharpie, you daft drunken bugger. Chin up, old son. Taller mercies are beaming your way. Be incredibly happy!”
Iain Sharp The Globe Tapes Vol 1, 1985
I chose this poem from The Globe Tapes (Vol. 1), a collection of two booklets and two cassette tapes that recorded 42 poets who frequented Poetry Live at the Globe pub in Auckland, 1985. I vividly remember Iain reading this poem with his warm, distinctive voice cutting the smoke-filled room with a Glaswegian inflection and dramatic gestures. The Globe was run down but welcoming. Poets were rowdy and drawn from varied backgrounds. I visited The Globe several times before I garnered enough confidence to read a poem I’d written. I realised the stage was truly a public forum when a taxi driver rushed in one night, elbowed his way through the crowd and poured his heart out without using a microphone. He read a hastily jotted poem about his wife and memorable passengers, then charged back outside to his cab. Iain encouraged me to read that night. He always supported fledgling poets. Iain displayed an inquiring mind, a keen sense of humour, sarcasm toward ignorant and arrogant gatekeepers, gentleness and empathy toward the vulnerable. He was ‘a scholar and a gentleman’ in rumpled clothes with a big smile and will be missed by many.
Serie Barford
Donald Kerr
Four o’clock. Five. The afternoon slithers by on its broken ribs. I linger awhile in city parks wishing I’d learned the names of trees.
A woman who thinks I might want her studies my palm in a coffee parlour. Her words are swarms of winged insects buzzing, buzzing beyond my grasp.
At Vulcan Lane a man I once knew tells how his face has grown so heavy He keeps falling forwards. I nod. I buy him a shot of brandy.
The city is a huddle of oblongs. Though I search for the hem of the sky to lift the greyness from this life there’s nothing my nails will go under.
Iain Sharp published in Echoes 3, 1984.
“A lover of words and puzzles, he regularly tackled crossword puzzles, wordle, sudoku. He had an ability to remember weird facts and details on the strangest things. Indeed, his knowledge was encyclopaedic, and he was a very welcome team member on pub quiz nights. One fact needs mention: he was not showy, pompous, or arrogant with his learning. He was modest and quiet to the nth degree, exhibiting a demure reserve. Importantly, he was encouraging to others entering the literary world. New, younger poets, or older writers who wanted feedback on their works were met with the same patience and understanding and fairness.
The second and last items that feature in Real Gold concern Charles Heaphy (1820-1881), soldier, painter and colonial surveyor: ‘Plan of the town of Auckland’ (1851) and a pen and washing drawing of ‘Neche Cove, Nengone Loyalty Islands’ (c.1850). Heaphy obviously appealed to Iain’s sensibilities because in 2008 his Heaphy appeared, published by Auckland University Press. It is a superb biography that reflects his scholarship and his usual demand for accuracy in tracking down obscure facts about his subject. It is a very readable book. He must have been pleased with it.
Contemporaries in the world of letters in New Zealand have already remarked on this very sad occasion, the loss of such a good man: clever, witty, unassuming, never loud, and very kind. He was a consummate gentleman. His family will miss him greatly: Joy, his wife; Marion, his sister and her children Kyle and Rhiyen; and Don, Andrew and Tim, to whom Iain was a much-loved step-father. Vale.”
Donald Kerr, full tribute here Dunedin, February 2026
Stephanie Johnson
Watching the Motorway by Moonlight
We sit on the viaduct dangling our toes in mid-air. A truckload of turnips heads towards Auckland followed by a carload of nuns all eating hamburgers. You close your eyes. Your thoughts become the night sky the mist around the moon. I nudge you gently.
Look love at the white moths. An angel’s wing is moulting.
Iain Sharp The Pierrot Variations (Hard Echo Press, 1985)
I chose this poem because Iain very kindly granted me the use of the first verse in my 2021 novel ‘Everything Changes’ and it brings him back to me. The character reading the poem asks himself ‘Did I ever the meet the poet? Was he the dapper young Scotsman?’ In the writing world, Iain was a rare bird – kind, gracious, erudite, humble, clever. We first met at the Globe in the early eighties. He was a poet the crowd hushed for, partly to listen to his lovely Scots accent but mostly to listen to his great poems. If only we could time travel back to those days and listen to him again.
Stephanie Johnson
Johanna Emeny
The Ponsonby Strut
First you go downtown and you get half-cut. You climb College Hill when the taverns shut, find an open party and talk some smut or politics or art or God knows what. Smoke in your eyes and cheap wine in your gut — that’s how you do the Ponsonby Strut, whoa-ho-ho the Ponsonby Strut (yeah).
Now here’s the hoop-la — the cast’s all present: the drunks the punks, the poets, the peasants, the incoherent, the incandescent, the refugees from Boyle Crescent, the drugged, the bugged, the insipid, the incessant, the fresh-from-rehab semi-convalescent, the unhappily unhugged, the plain unpleasant, and Herman (the world’s oldest adolescent), who boasts to his hosts he’s still tumescent. There’s an implant down his urethra, but it doesn’t impede the Ponsonby Strut, whoa-ho-ho the Ponsonby Strut.
On the porch by the flowering quince in fake black leather the Dark Prince trills of his talent, tries to convince Rhiannon with the raspberry rinse that he’s the tastiest morsel since lasagne added cheese to mince. Rhi just yawns; the rest of us wince beneath the moon’s wan aquatints. Distant galleries lure us, but we keep on doing the Ponsonby Strut, whoa-ho-ho the Ponsonby Strut.
In the hall beneath the gilt chandelier Hollywood Lorna strives to make it quite clear she inhabits the wrong hemisphere. She’s a born star, she says. Did you see her last year in the outdoor production of King Lear? But even while Lorna is bending your ear Con, the red-nosed Trotskyite pamphleteer, clutching fresh pamphlets attacks from the rear. You look for a nook in which to disappear. You just popped in, after all, for the beer and whatever else you could souvenir. The cost some evenings is too great, but short of emigrating to Lower Hutt, what else can you do but the Ponsonby Strut? whoa-ho-ho the Ponsonby Strut.
Well, first you get sloshed as a halibut, then swim up College Hill with your eyes half-shut. Cursing yourself for being such a slut, you crash another party and say God knows what. Martian canals in your eyeballs, cardboard wine in your gut; that’s how you do the Ponsonby Strut.
Iain Sharp The Singing Harp
Only Iain Sharp could create such memorable characters as priapic Herman and amateur thespian Lorna in a poem constrained by only four end-rhyming sounds throughout.
“The Ponsonby Strut” swings along as jauntily and humorously as a local wag dishing the dirt on the area’s other inhabitants — “the drunks the punks, the poets, the peasants.” The language is naughty, taut, and clever. Who else would have thought to use “souvenir” as a verb?
In addition to being a gifted poet, Iain was always generously available to write a review or to help with research. He was a genuinely charming and beautifully mannered man. Beannachd leat, Iain.
Johanna Emeny
Anne Kennedy
WALKING THE inch arp WAY
A blue saxophone. A suggestion of cymbal. Doop-wah ffftt. Then a drum roll, a symphonic surge. inch arp walks down the road.
Yes, inch arp (dadaist) is walking down the road. Down the road walks arp. arp’s active. He’s proceeding. Talents must be nourished. Encouraged. A phantom crowd whistles and thumps.
arp trots. He nomadizes by. Compact. Authoritative. Stately, plump. Walking. Going public. In his tam o’shanter. In his eyebrows and wide trousers. With decorations to brighten the home.
He’s good at it. He’s holding his own. He knows what he’s about. He’s walking. Down. Great South Road. South of the equator. Penrose. Past dark fumes and smelly mills. Loving it. Loving the peripatetic method. Left foot right foot left. The most effective timing of the arms and legs has been a matter of controversy for some years. arp favours the two-beat crossover kick. Eyes front. Back straight. Sweep up from the hip with a relaxed lower leg and ankle
Dugongs must have flippers. Ducks have rubber webs. Frogs leap high and frogs leap low. arp walks. He walks down the road. That’s what ‘staying on the ball’ is.
Describe him. Describe his walk. Describe the angles his teeth make relative to his spinal curvature. Cite the latitude of the street. The composition of the asphalt. The height of the kerbstones above sea-level in centimetres. The distance from Mercury. Io. The nearest civilized star. What proportion of arp’s soles have been worn away by friction? How many molecules does he contain? How many parasites? List any perceptual problems, clinical manifestations, minor neurological signs. Comment on the isobars. The aphasiological context. If you were the government of the day how would you improve this scene?
The road is being walked down by arp. It feels his impress. Steady, inch. Don’t get overexcited. Remember the day in the freightyard.
inch ambles. He paces himself. He’s a flexible mover. Agile. Awake. Coming back from the market. Collecting visual information.
That outline’s the Bombay Hills. The ocean must be out there too. Somewhere. Distant buoys and lightships blinking. Left foot right foot. Look before crossing. Look up when you can. Bits of sky, whole stretches, cold and pure as white chrysanthemum. Nascent shimmers near the horizon. 350 A.D. The Pope invents Christmas. 1986. arp’s walk. Doop-wah. Wah-doop. ffftt.
Iain Sharp First appeared: Rambling Jack 2 (Miracle Mart Receiving, 1986)
This was, I think, the first piece of creative writing I read by polymath Iain Sharp – who I already knew from his daring writing on books and literature. I remember being dazzled. Forty years later, I still love this flash-fiction, am amazed by its inventiveness, humour and – no other word – profundity. And importantly its relevance to today.
I remember a bit of background about this piece, from bumping into Iain and his future wife Joy – who were a picture of happiness – in cafes in Auckland. As people who knew Iain will know, he maintained his lovely Scottish accent, and therefore (I guess) noticed New Zealand accents. To his ear, people around him pronounced his name, ‘Inch Arp’.
The flash-fiction ‘Walking the inch arp way’ packs so many things into its economical form, riffing and extemporizing like Jazz. First of all, of course, it calls on the Dadaist artist and poet, Jean Arp, who I seem to recall was having a bit of a resurgence in the 80s. (Or was that just in cafes in Auckland?) Like Dadaism, Iain’s poem is absurd and aching at the same time. Hilarious and political. The speaker, inch arp, navigates the world with both puffery (‘a drum-roll, a symphonic surge’) and self-deprecation (‘arp trots’), in itself a kind of loping gait. Sharp finds myriad connections between the self and everything-else – from the body (‘his eyebrows and wide trousers’), to animals, to outer space. In so few words, Sharp drills down through ‘dark fumes and smelly mills’, ‘the freightyard’, bureaucracy-speak to find an underlying dystopia. ‘If you were the government of the day how would you improve this scene?’
Like Jazz, Iain’s attuned ear makes ‘Walking the inch arp way’ sound so good. The vowel chimings, the found phrases, the rhythmic walk. In the end, the beautiful juxtapositions of tossed-offness and refinement carry us along while we absorb a representation of being.
Thank goodness we have Iain’s legacy of writing. My deep condolences to Joy and Iain’s wider family. RIP Iain Sharp.
Anne Kennedy
Ian Wedde
The Ian Sharp Poem
Iain Sharp is a fat parcel of mixed groceries tied with a clumsy knot.
Iain Sharp is a black kite adrift on changeable winds.
Iain Sharp is a pile of scoria drifting softly to the sea.
Whenever I peep in mirrors Iain Sharp frowns back at me. It’s terrifying.
Iain Sharp is a runaway tramcar. Iain Sharp is a chunk of moonrock.
Iain Sharp is nine letters wrenched from the Roman Alphabet.
Look there and there! Bits of bright confetti blow from chapel to chapel. I chase them with outstretched hands. They might be Iain Sharp.
Iain Sharp
Yes it was heartbreaking to hear of Iain’s death. I loved his wry, self-effacing tone, picking an example results in protracted indecision! One of my favourites is given away by its droll title, it’s ‘The Iain Sharp Poem By Iain Sharp’. So many fleeting moments that yet convey an observant, genuine sensibility, and perhaps an invitation.
Ian Wedde
Blood Cancer Blues
When mild anaemia becomes leukaemia that’s not good news. Blood cancer blues.
Though some last for years with cells shaped like tears, you don’t get to choose. Blood cancer blues.
Quite at ease, then whup! Someone’s number’s up, but precisely whose? Blood cancer blues.
Leaving my sweet life and my lovely wife and our ocean views. Blood cancer blues.
Watching the sun sink peach and coraline pink, cerise and chartreuse. Blood cancer blues.
Let me apprehend blessings till the end amidst darker hues. Blood cancer blues.
Yadayada, or Don’t Worry, It all Adds Up (Feb 17th, then)
The bunting and cicadas cleared, The Herald having sailed the middle island for the natives’ trade in blankets for curly iron gall, I snuggled into the basement with rats and worms, snails sliming my finest parchment (historians only mention the rats but I know the rest.) I had been nuzzling and gnawing muzzles in the far north, and in the King Country I purged my mind of all sovereign thoughts of a beautiful crown as my pillow was smoothed by whiskery rat down.
Oh for a koauau to share this basement with. I am bent down with worry, and hunger. Low, small. A worm. A crawler. Me down. The governor up. These words echo like a dreamt inferno. I trusted my treasured words to hate! I promised feasts for all, with open hearts and flowing wine! I played sly, turned my new in-laws into dogs thinking I’d fly with the birds. But now I am a moth eaten by moths. I am a rag for a strop designed to pacify, and closely shave, hell.
Robert Sullivan
Robert Sullivan is Aotearoa New Zealand’s 14th Poet Laureate. He belongs to Ngāpuhi (Ngāti Manu, Ngāti Hau / Ngāti Kaharau) and Kāi Tahu (Kāti Huirapa ki Puketeraki) iwi and is also of Irish descent. He has won many literary awards. His most recent books are Hopurangi / Songcatcher (AUP) which was shortlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award at the 2025 Ockham Book Awards, Koe: An Aotearoa Ecopoetry Anthology coedited with Janet Newman (Otago University Press 2024) and a collection of essays coedited with Anna Jackson and Dougal McNeill, Te Whāriki: Reading Ten New Poets from Aotearoa (AUP 2025). Robert is Associate Professor in Creative Writing at Massey University. He lives in Ōamaru.
To launch Poetry Shelf 2026, our current Poet Laureate Robert Sullivan has written a sequence called “Tidbits of Te Tiriti”. He wrote these Te Tiriti Tidbits in the voice of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. There will be one published each day for this Waitangi Day weekend, and then a fifth one today, on Feb 17th, which is the day his Ngāti Manu tūpuna signed Te Tiriti.
You will find it in the icy sky of daybreak above the marine light of waves in the pages of the books of the dead poets: Vincent who some would call Voss, Lauris, Brian, Glover and Campbell, I loved them all more or less the pub and the drinks, the banter until evening and swearing blue murder blue, the word blue although to read them you could be forgiven for thinking it is a word they couldn’t bring themselves to use, as if every day blue was too ordinary a betrayal of the imagination, a carpet of flowers to trample, yet if you search deep in the end you will find it, the irresistible blue rain beyond the blue and round the lake so blue the visible blue dark they came to it sooner or later. You will find it too in the dark luminosity of navy on the mountain ranges at nightfall.
Fiona Kidman
Fiona Kidman has been writing for the past sixty or so years, her life’s vocation. Her work includes fiction, poetry and memoir, although for a long time her income came from screen writing. Her work has been published internationally and she has received a number of prizes, most recently the Jann Medlicott Ockham new Zealand Book Award for Fiction for This Mortal Boy. Her latest publication is The Midnight Plane: Selected and New Poems (Otago University Press 2025). She is a Patron of the New Zealand Poetry Society and of the Randell Cottage Writers Trust.
Join us for an evening with beloved poet and writer Glenn Colquhoun as his discusses his latest pukapuka, The Ballad of Joe Taihape, amongst other things! Surely an event not to be missed. All welcome, see you at the signing table!
-About the book- In this collection of poetry Glenn Colquhoun pays tribute to the narrative poem, and to all the joys of rhythm and rhyme that are associated
with it. It also introduces us to the adventures of one of New Zealand’s most enigmatic and elusive musicians — Joe Taihape.
Beautifully presented as a graphic epic poem by some of Aotearoa / New Zealand’s leading artists and illustrators it is a wonderful way to re-discover the power of poetry to spin a yarn — and to put a smile on your face.
If you’ve ever had the pleasure of learning a poem by heart, wondered about things that go bump in the middle of the night, or heard what you thought was the wind moaning along some empty Aotearoan valley, then cock your head and listen out for Joe Taihape. He’s a singer, he’s a singer, he’s a wanderer-a-longer, and for every sort a’ sorrow he’s a cure.
Bonfires on the Ice, Harry Ricketts Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025
Harry Rickett’s poetry collection delivers multiple heart loops, beginning with a poem entitled ‘Happiness’, travelling though terrains of grief and loss, and then reaching sparks of hope, with the grief bonfires and the grief ice easing, just a little, just a very little. Happiness, as the poem indicates, is illusory: “we cling to the thing with wings” and “It’s no potato you can grow”. The poetry is deeply personal: love and death is personal, the world is personal, politics is personal. I am feeling this book to the edge and depth of what matters, to the edge and depth of being alive, to the edge and depth of not being alive, being present and human and humane. I am recognising the difficulty of writing when happiness and equilibrium is in jeopardy. And how poetry can affect us so much.
The first poems are dedicated to friends no longer here, with each poem offering a savoured memory, a phrase, a place, a miniature portrait of dear friend (especially Lauris Edmond). In ‘Aro St Again’, a poem for Juliet, for me, the final lines resonate throughout the collection: “You paused, smiled, said / quite distinctly: ‘Aroha and ambiguity.'” This bloodline of writing, this love, these smudged edges of life and living. This aroha, this ambiguity.
How to write within the throb of grief and loss? What to hold close, what to let go? The poem, ‘Tangle’, strikes a chord. I am reading tributes to dear friends but I am also reading how the tangle of life, and I infer grief, might be reflected in the tangle of a poem, in an acute writing-life-writing tangle:
The past’s shifting scalene triangles tease us to adjust their angles, though geometry won’t put it right.
Harry gets me thinking about the poet as architect or builder in his couplet, ‘Poetic Architecture’, a poem that likens poems to rooms: “some poets prefer walls and a door, others open plan.” I am musing on the process of writing – how we may have a sense of walls and doors from the outset, and how we might also (or instead) write and read within a form of open plan. ‘Down There on a Visit’, a Rakiura poem penned for Belinda instead of a valentine, where the depiction of a shared experience of place becomes a tender gift, gets me musing even deeper. On the walls and windows and open expanse of writing.
If this is poetry as a series of rooms, with windows and doors opening onto and out of grief, onto and out of living, then both the exterior and internal views are paramount. Take the room where the poet is teacher, with the students sidetracking diverting moving into and beyond literature. I am back there in the heart loop, catching up on the ancient mariner, or listening to the lesson in “Another Footnote to Larkin”:
But if we hand the misery on from self to others every day, there’s this to say (Larkin again): we should also be kind while we may.
The poetry draws me again and again into that ricocheting phrase love and ambiguity. And let me lift the word crochet, a craft that depends upon holes as much as it does thread. Take the poem ‘Bits and Pieces #3’ for example. It is not just a matter of crafting the missing pieces, but holding them as they jiggle, switching between sky and water, or hill and undergrowth. Is writing a continuous state of being, replete with ambiguity and flux, etched and anchored with love? Ah. How to face the silence, the blankness, the missing and ambiguous pieces? I utterly love the sequence that introduces Stella, an invented poet who is learning the grammar of grief, who is coming in from the garden, embraced by books, cooking badly, looking at hills and sky with infinite wonder.
The Garden (Stella)
Here you are, in from the garden, smelling of yourself.
In your left hand is a present, a tiny black box.
Inside is a single, perfect, pointy leaf of thyme.
Bonfires on the Ice is a gift, in the bright light, the half light, the dream light. It is a lyrical record of living and loving, reading and writing, whether there are windows and doors or open plan. Yes there is the pain of bonfire and ice, but there is also the gradual breaking of ice in the flowing river. Near the end of the collection, a handful of poems draw Belinda closer, from the first long-ago meetings to the nearness of the hospice setting, her chemical life, their shared routines. And there in in the fading light, with the grief in me mounding, I read a couplet poem dedicated to hope. And inside the fragile dimensions of hope, I recognise the insistent infusion of love across the heart loops of the poetry. How this collection makes me hold these two precious words even closer. Sometimes when I review a book I might focus on the craft, but today what matters more than anything, is the way poetry can affect us so very deeply. And this book does exactly that.
Hope
Hope is a grey warbler, that whistles down our street, the tune is thin and sweet, but always on repeat.
Harry Ricketts has published thirty-five books, most recently First Things: A Memoir and (co-written with David Kynaston) Richie Benaud’s Blue Suede Shoes: The Story of an Ashes Classic (both 2024) and his thirteenth poetry collection, Bonfires on the Ice (2025). He lives in Wellington Te Whanganui-a-Tara, loves cricket and coffee, and teaches a creative non-fiction course at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington.
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