Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Diane Brown

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What we do


At the small-town pool in between flutter kicks, rock climbing, cycling, jumping Jacks and Jills, and plain aqua jogging, we catch up. Nine o’clock, the instructor says, and already I’ve birthed two ewes, milked the cow, inoculated the lambs, fed the calves, the horses, the hens and myself, not to mention repelling the calf that thinks I’m his mother. A classmate says, I’ve vacuumed the house, made the beds, washed and hung the washing and started painting the spare room.

                       I’ve written 
                       a poem, I say,
                       and they say, Really?



Diane Brown

I’ve chosen ‘What we do’ because it is about two of my favourite activities, firstly, writing poems which adds great richness to my life, and secondly, jumping around in an aqua-fit class with friendly people from a wide variety of backgrounds. I wrote this a while ago while living in Alexandra for a year when my husband had the Henderson House residency. It will be published in March 2027 by Otago University Press in my collection, Not a Matter of Calm. DB

Diane Brown runs Creative Writing Dunedin. Her eight published books range over poetry, novels, and memoirs. Every Now and Then I Have Another Child, was published by Otago University Press, in 2020. Her forthcoming book, a hybrid collection of poetry and prose, Not a matter of calm, will be published by Otago University Press in March 2027.

Poetry Shelf: Schoolhouse Bay by Paula Green and the book recipient

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Schoolhouse Bay

I am wearing poetry
like an overcoat. No, a thermal singlet.
I am wearing the wind off the uppity
waves and the green leaves that skim
and the black-barked beech
and the cobbled light.

You can’t see the poem.
I can see the new generation bush
and a single fantail that flits
like a dandelion wish.

My thermal singlet is heavy with ghosts.
It is only the start.
I am picnicking in the thought
of a young girl and her skipping road.
She looks through the high window.
She draws a tōtara tree with her sharp pencil.
The grey sky is out of reach.

Does she know the queens of England?
Does she wear a velvet dress to match the inkwell?
Does she hear the raucous tūī?
Can she pick Istanbul on a map and draw a rectangle?

The porthole slams shut in the wind.

Paula Green
from The Track, Seraph Press, 2019

Mary Cresswell’s wonderful review sent me back to reread The Track and it was just what my frozen writing pen needed. To be delivered back into the arms of writing is a precious thing indeed. I put all the names in a hat and picked out Jan FitzGerald to send a copy of the book. it is now out of print sadly and only have two on my shelves!

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Jeffrey Paparoa Holman

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Rigor mortis
– for Thomas Lynch

It’s the greatest summer’s day
in existence.
My death stands out on the lawn
like a hero.
The sun has counted every blade:
green, green, green.
I’m as content as a cemetery
under snow.

I foresee a time when metaphor
and simile
will just be soil in the gut
of worms.

When the silver mirror melted
this morning
I must have been ready to give
myself up.

I can’t wait for the moon to rise,
a revelation: so ready to
die, so ready to live, sibilance
whistling in my tombstone
teeth, and my doctor dressed

up as an undertaker.

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman
from As big as a father, Steele Roberts 2002

I can barely remember where and when this came along. but it was there when I got together the manuscript for As big as a father, in 2002. Maybe it was written in London, when I worked in the 1990s at Waterstones, Charing Cross Road WC2H, with my Kiwi friend discovered there also – the amazing Dylan Horrocks. We both worked at  our arts in nearby cafés at lunch times, Dylan drawing comics, me writing short stories and poetry. Eventually, we both came home, to deliver.

Jeffrey

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman writes poetry, short fiction, history and memoir. He has published seven volumes of poetry; Best of Both Worlds (history, 2010); The Lost Pilot (memoir, 2013); Now When it Rains (memoir, 2017). As Big As A Father (Steele Roberts, 2002) was shortlisted in the Montana Book Awards, Poetry, 2003. Best of Both Worlds: the story of Elsdon Best and Tutakangahau (2010) was shortlisted in the Ernest Scott Prize, History (2011, Australia).

His most recent work, a family history, Lily, Oh Lily – Searching for a Nazi ghost (2024), is published by Canterbury University Press. He journeys in time on the trail of of his grandmother’s sister, Lily Hasenburg, married into German society at the turn of the twentieth century; and space, where he travels to Germany in 2014 to research her fate, an Englishwoman living through two world wars, citizen now of an enemy country.

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: O-O-O by Elizabeth Morton

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O-O-O

O is a figure amongst crop circles. O scythes cornstalks that flank the maze. O tells me she lived through red barns and dust and lard and mashed sweet potatoes. O says the tobacco yellowed her fringe, that she hasn’t danced in forty years, that the doily gathers a fine lint.

—

The patient says O like the world is poetry.

She says O to the mashed sweet potatoes and O to the commode. Maybe that’s how it ends. A series of vowel sounds softening to murder. An O that sits in a vacant lot, a rust-chassis O, an O that has cold hands but would pass a Turing test in a heartbeat.

—

O – she sits in a lawn chair rocking her hippocampi to sleep. Babies,

the sky is her centrifuge. Her one use.

Grass-wick in her foreteeth, haze of summer long as a scythe, trembling with cloud.

—

O eats the Old Testament. O finds a full set of teeth in her centre console. O says they don’t make eggs like they used to. Where the light falls on the curtains, O licks it off. Where the sun goes, O might follow it, around and around the campus lavender.

—

O, to love with one synapse holding the wound of the world shut. O, to be a ghost that spooks the cortex but jumps ship at the final moment.

—

The janitor wipes up whatever spilled out of O. A comma on the lino, like there was more to say.

Elizabeth Morton
from Incident Report, Otago University Press, 2026

Elizabeth Morton is a yarn teller, poem maker, and neuroscience enthusiast from Tāmaki Makaurau. Her writing has been published in the likes of Landfall, Takahē, Poetry Aotearoa, and also in overseas journals such as the Moth Magazine, Rattle, Narrative Magazine and Smokelong Quarterly. She is always the bridesmaid, never the bride, as is evidenced by twice placing second in the Sunday Star Times Short Story Competition and also second in the Sargeson Prize. She has four poetry collections, the latest being Incident Report (Otago University Press, 2026).

Poetry Shelf presents the Time Out Bookstore Poetry Choice: Sorry About the Fire by Colleen Coco Collins

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Sorry About the Fire
Colleen Coco Collins
Biblioasis, Ontario, 2024
Time Out Bookstore page

A clutch of short poems from Canadian/Odawa poet Colleen Coco Collins, Sorry About the Fire brings together a stream of acutely sonic, deeply felt observations drawn from natural and interpersonal phenomena.

With a careful, cutting pen and a predilection for off-kilter images, Collins’ poems manage to feel both spontaneous and indelible; tender and utterly vicious.

FAST DROGUES

admit them
these strange arrangements
these fast drogues in the
         name of constancy

pain eater put it aside
that harm dish

you are being welcomed
          to the reveille

everywhere    petrichor

everywhere
turduckens of joy
            and surety

Having never encountered the word ‘turduckens’ in a poetic context, I’m startled by Collins’ post-ironic framing; a knife-edge of earnestness and wicked surprise. ‘Strange arrangements’, indeed, reminiscent at times of Chelsey Minnis. From ‘Hem’:

the horse is a wardrobe
                  full of killers

                  and only you know

Collin’s offbeat image play never overwhelms; her carefully distilled lines generate gentle vibrations. Sparse stanzas resound with pealing vowel rhymes and sharp consonance at varying junctures. Flashes of Paul Celan’s precise yet dense economy echo throughout Collins’ phrases. From ‘Night Plow’:

Toothed bucket
come jabbing
through the bank

small thing

shrugged out
from under the aegis
of the sky,

swept backwards
              through death.

Possessing a depth belied by its short page count, Sorry About the Fire imprints on the ear and mind’s eye well beyond its end.Poetry Shelf Time out

Frances Libeau

Frances Libeau is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and bookseller based in Tāmaki Makaurau. Recent publications include Min-a-rets 15 (Compound Press, 2025) and Radicant (Hocken Collections, 2025). They work part-time at Time Out Books and order in a selection of poetry titles for the store.

Poetry Shelf review: Mary Cresswell reviews The Track by Paula Green

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My book The Track is now out of print but I have one spare copy I would like to gift to a reader who leaves a comment here or on my social media pages. Thanks Mary Cresswell for the review!

The Track, Paula Green
Seraph Press, 2019

This extraordinary collection starts out in the well-known natural beauty of the Queen Charlotte Track and ends up turning nature poetry on its head. The poet begins a three-day walk at Ship Cove:

The day’s brightness screams
of utter beauty.
It hurts to look.
I can’t stop looking. 

from ‘Resolution Bay‘

And farther along:

I can’t control thoughts
in the middle of nowhere.

Am I true to myself
in the middle of walking
carrying the lightness of beauty
like a body craving flight?                 

from ‘Endeavour Inlet to Big Bay’

And then:

on the last day the longest day      walking/ into four hours of storm [ …]
my foot breaks once     the rage then twice
no sign of promised beauty 

from ‘Queen Charlotte Track’

Beauty is out the window and pain takes over, as Green begins, not a four-hour walk on the final day, but a ten-hour shamble to safety and medical help.

Her language changes from laid back and descriptive to disconnected babbling that fuels her ability to stay conscious and moving. The broad beauty of the environment is taken over by a detailed recording of the minutiae of pain:

For ten hours don’t take your eyes off
leaves amulet beds orange saffron red
it’s electric art beneath leaf stone leaf
dragging dredging yes patterns cling to this

from ‘The Track’

Sue Wootton, who is both poet and medical professional, has reviewed the language of this collection from the angle of pain and its effects on the poet’s consciousness. It’s fascinating (though too short), and  there’s nothing I could possibly add to it. What is also interesting is what poetic form this pain-racked language lends itself to.

Green used composing the poems to hold herself together those last hours of the walk. Later she collected and polished them, but at the time her consciousness of simply Writing A Poem Step By Bloody Step kept her going. When you’re drowning, you grab for a lifeline – the lifeline here is not the abstract idea of poetry but the most basic rope she is able to hang on to: the alphabet.

Alphabet poems have been around a long time – the original Hebrew 119th Psalm is an example. But they tend to hide in children’s books and don’t always get a fair press, acrostics in general often being considered a bit frivolous.  Over a third of the pages in this collection are “abecedarians” (one name for them); they list animals, cities, food, novels, movie directors, musicians, children’s books, colours, random whatevers, with decreasing coherence. They are all run together, the earlier ones with line breaks, the later ones not bothering even with that.

‘Counting Animals’ has a pattern centring on doubles: impudent iguana, jolly jackal, tiny tiger, but it isn’t easy:

the yawn and the yak I’ve got to count
croak it’s my throat two three must keep the zoo
a foothold of zebras go count for miles and miles

and ‘Counting Cities’ is similar: emblems of Edinburgh, grandmother’s Glasgow, and by the end things are getting messy:

Venice a jig in the streets the Warsaw of fiction Tiananmen Square
in China weep and put the lid on the teapot green steaming
have carried a flask old York still drinking tea midstream walking.

‘Counting Food’ and ‘Counting Novels’ degenerate further, and the order starts to skip around. There are no entries for the letter X, barring its inclusion in the middle of the odd word. (It’s not a very imagination-inducing letter anyway – or perhaps the prospect of multiple X-rays at the end of the walk makes it too boring.) ‘Counting Novels’ is a worry, about structure and the poet’s state of mind, as she is now having trouble holding on to the most common letter of the alphabet:

Dante David Copperfield in a steady river of pip pip models be damned
slatter writing pip pip shower E E showering from glades in my reading from leaf above to blue cheek eight hours slashed    

And so it goes. Suddenly we have a brief break, 16 words on an untitled page of their own: “a drop of sky/ a drop of dream/ a drop of leaf/ a drop of blue” (p 44). These are a welcome respite in the pain, a hope of seeing a different pattern; they are also an example of Seraph Press’ excellent habit of reminding us that typography is a member of the family, not just a last-minute visitor.

Green and her foot finally make it to Tōrea Saddle, long after the last alphabet poem has lost any obvious structure, and the poem that ends the book says:

Now breathing in millponds and good views
the morning blue cracks the storm and
I let the poem go           

from ‘Portage Bay’

The collection is remarkable in the way that, instead of expanding to merge with the glorious outdoors, we go in the opposite direction. There’s a tighter and tighter focus on small things, images popping up at random from the poet’s memory, rather than virtually requiring spiritual processing of new experience, admirable as that may be. Instead of communion with Nature, we have a totally self-obsessed human consciousness doing its best to get from A to B, all ten awful hours of it.

And the book that has come out of it? Definitely a bonus.

Mary Cresswell

Mary Cresswell is from Los Angeles and lives on the Kapiti Coast. Retiring after a career as a science editor, she took up poetry in her old age.

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Jackson McCarthy

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Moon

Maya’s gazpacho turned out grey —
my new maroon shirt had stolen
all the red in the house.

I wore that shirt daily
like a rare bird or fish
wears its rarity. Soon I saw you,

first by fingers, then the shapes
of your hands perfecting moon.
You were standing red

in the middle of the street,
the rarest thing I ever saw — the truck
had swerved to kiss you.

Wairua, I should kiss you too — twice, once
for each direction you’re facing.

Jackson McCarthy
from Portrait (Auckland University Press, 2026)

Oh, I love the colour blue, but I wanted to bring some red into the poetry, especially toward the end of my book, which is where this poem appears. I think the lightly surreal touch has a Maia Armistead quality about it, and I’m quite pleased with how the lines break and turn over the thoughts they think. It’s all quietly surprising, as most things in the night are. Kissing appears lots in my poetry as it does in my life. It’s just such a great thing to do, nothing psychological about it. Like, I don’t think kissing expresses a desire to consume or to master the beloved or whatever. Kissing expresses its own duration, so as to draw itself nearer and nearer to somebody else’s mystery, which I think is very beautiful and in some sense quite like poetry. And as for the facing in two directions, there in the last two lines — I hope it has resonance with another night scene from earlier in the book, “Night train”. In that poem, one way is the past, and the other way (the future, extrapolated to its extreme) is death. Not sure what it all means, but my preoccupation is with nothing less than love, death, and time, of course. Where are you headed and where have you been? And what should we do with the present?

“Moon” was first published in my book Portrait; thank you to my publisher, Auckland University Press.

Jackson McCarthy is a poet based in Te-Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. He is of Lebanese, Māori, and Pākehā descent. His poetry has been published widely in Aotearoa literary journals, including Landfall Tauraka, Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems, The Spinoff, Starling, and Sweet Mammalian. Portrait (Auckland University Press, 2026) is his first book.

Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Toitū te Kupu – The Power of Poetry

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Toitū te Kupu: The Power of Poetry

Wednesday, November 18, 2026, 6:00pm–8:00pm

Tūranga Library

Experience the power of the spoken and written word with performances by rakatahi poets, along with Ōtautahi-based kaituhi Isla Huia, and one of our country’s most celebrated poets and the Aotearoa New Zealand Poet Laureate Robert Sullivan. Sullivan will share poems from his Ockham shortlisted Hopurangi – Songcatcher and other toikupu from his illustrious career. Huia’s debut collection. Huia’s Talia was also shortlisted for the Ockham awards, and she will be sharing work from her recently published second collection Āta. We will also hear from the Ōtautahi Youth Poetry Slam winners for 2026 Ngā Kōhine o Te Kupu from Te Kura Whakapūmau i te Reo Tūturu ki Waitaha.

This event is in association with the Whaiao Exhibition, and is hosted by local poet Ariana Tikao who works in the Māori Services Team, Ngā Ratonga Māori at Christchurch City Libraries.

Robert Sullivan (Ngāpuhi Nui Tonu, Kāi Tahu Whānui) is the 14th Aotearoa New Zealand Poet Laureate. Among his sixteen books are the bestselling Star Waka, Weaving Earth and Sky and Hopurangi Songcatcher. He has won awards for his poetry, editing, and writing for children. His year 6 teacher at Onehunga Primary School, Mrs Naire, first inspired him to write poetry, which was a cloud poem. He lives in Ōamaru on ancestral whenua, the beautiful coasts of Te Tai o Āraiteuru. See Robert’s books here.

Isla Huia (Te Āti Haunui a-Pāpārangi, Uenuku) is a kaituhi based in Ōtautahi. Her debut collection of poetry, Talia, was released in May 2023 by Dead Bird Books, and was shortlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. She has been published in journals and anthologies across Aotearoa including Ōrongohau Best New Zealand Poems, Takahē, Catalyst and Short | Poto. Huia is the current recipient of a Te Tumu Toi Arts Foundation Springboard Award, under the mentorship of inaugural Commonwealth Poet Laureate Selina Tusitala Marsh.

Ngā Kōhine o Te Kupu

He reo rangatira, he reo māia, he reo kōhine! Ko Ngā Kōhine o Te Kupu e tū whakahīhī ana i roto i tō rātou reo, tō rātou ahurea me tō rātou tuakiri. Ngā Kōhine o Te Kupu is a talented group of young wāhine from Te Kura Whakapūmau i te Reo Tūturu ki Waitaha, who have made their mark in the world of slam poetry through their powerful voices, creativity and passion for storytelling. Grounded in the values of Te Aho Matua, these kōhine proudly represent their kura, their whānau and their culture. Their journey through the slam poetry competition to the finals is a testament to their courage, dedication and ability to captivate audiences through the spoken word.

Ariana Tikao (Kāi Tahu) is a writer, poet, singer, composer, taonga puoro practitioner and New Zealand Arts Laureate. Her arts practice explores themes relating to her Kāi Tahu identity and mana wahine. Her first book Mokorua: Ngā Kōrero mō tōku moko kauae – My story of moko kauae was published in 2022, and her first poetry collection Pepeha Portal was published through Otago University Press in 2026.

Poetry Shelf remembers Parihaka Day: Tangi, Parihaka by Gregory O’Brien

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Tangi, Parihaka
for Te Miringa Hohaia

Everywhere a voice
is heard—
            not this voice, but

the hollow back-bone
of a dog, or a volcano
breathing inwards.

Somewhere a sprig,
stem or root, a wreath
          worn in the hair
and the river
which is only as deep
          as the sky

and the coiled eel
its foundation stone.

Elsewhere a voice
not this one
         a beaten drum
in a flax basket—the heart
in its retiring place.

Around the head of each
an encircling greenness—
          karaka, karakia, these
expertly woven branches
          and leaves
that cannot hold him 
               to us

         but neither will they
         let him go.

Gregory O’Brien
from Beauties of the Octagonal Pool, Auckland University Press, 2012
(written after attending the tangi of Te Miringa Hohaia at Parihaka)

Gregory O’Brien’s recent books are House and Contents (AUP, 2022) and Don Binney–Flight Path (AUP, 2023). Recent activities have been focussed on the wider Pacific region (he is currently working on a book of poetry and art with John Pule) and Central Otago. In 2024 Gregory was made an Honorary Geographer by the New Zealand Geographic Society. This month Gregory’s new book with poet artist John Puhiatau Pule, This Must Be the Island — Liga Hanai e MotuOceanic conversations, will be published by Massey University Press.