Tackling the Hens, Mary McCallum The Cuba Press, 2026
Mary McCallum’s latest poetry collection, Tackling the Hens (2025), is a poetic engagement, both intimate and intricate, with the world close at hand, the world remembered and the world experienced. I am carried along multiple currents of poetic fluency, stalling on scenes that move and delight, savouring motifs that shimmer and dance. I follow threads of sadness, difficulty, joy. This book is life. This book is living. This book is loss. This book moves me so very much.
To celebrate its presence in the world, Mary responded to a few questions and recorded a few poems. I was moved by the book, I feel deeply moved by the conversation and the reading. Thank you Mary. Thank you.
Cauliflower
What to say, except I thought it just a vegetable, but when my friend told me of her gift to the neighbour with the sick boy—a perfect fresh cauliflower I brought you from over the hill— her standing at the door holding it with two hands like treasure, shy green leaves curled to cup the curd—so perfectly white, not a mark on it, florets tucked one to another—the neighbour in front of her assailed from all sides by sickness and hope, by grief, by what would be the death of a child— the grim maw of that—and here it was, cauliflower, something close to heaven in its physical perfection and the dear kindness of its delivery, I could never see it the same way again.
Mary McCallum
Paula: Tackling the hens is dedicated to your mother, a woman who left poetry lying around for you to find, an anthology that’s now in a drawer by your bed, for example. For me, the collection is imbued in both your mother’s presence and heart-felt absence. I found this very moving. I am curious about the poetry books you stumbled upon, but more importantly, how a maternal pulse is at the heart of the book. Was it hard or restoring or necessary to be writing this precious book?
Mary: It moves me to think that you feel Mum’s presence so strongly in the book, Paula. I was close to completing the poems for Tackling the Hens when she died unexpectedly. I was travelling overseas and couldn’t get back in time to see her. Shocked and grieving, I couldn’t think about the book for a while, not just because I’d lost my mother so suddenly, but because I’d lost the person who had opened the door to poetry and lived it with me. But I’ve always found poetry to be a solace in difficult times, so before long I was back inside the collection with work to do.
I saw how the poems with my mother in them had become elegiac and a way of honouring her, and I knew I needed to get that right. I made small revisions, making a little more of her in the opening poem, where she’s ‘hopeful in pastel trouser suits’, and taking time to explore what I was trying to say in ‘Hunting for Cavafy’, a poem that I’d not had the courage to show her. I found mentions of Mum in the collection that I’d forgotten were there.
Over the coming months, I surprised myself by writing a poem about her death and one that gestured to it. And of course there’s the dedication. So, the short answer to your question is that working on the collection after Mum died was restorative and helped with my grief.
Poetry was a thing I thought all households had as a backdrop. Mum had poetry on her bookshelves, stacked on coffee tables, beside her bed – books from the library (she was a librarian and huge library user), books she’d bought or was given, and a basket of them in the loo. There were the classic English and American poets that she loved, poets in translation (like Cavafy), popular collections by writers like Spike Milligan and Pam Ayres, and the New Zealand poets, which she was discovering. Mum was born in England and when she left for Africa in her early twenties she took two poetry books with her: Other Men’s Flowers and Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, and a novel, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford. She left Cranford on a train. The other two precious books were there for me to read growing up and were placed on her coffin at the funeral.
The anthology ‘shedding itself in the drawer by my bed’ is a collection of poems by English and American poets that was Mum’s once. I don’t have it with me as I write – it’s at our home over the hill in the Wairarapa – so I can’t tell you its name! The pages are crisp and yellowed and falling out; I can’t think how often they have been handled and read. Here I discovered poems like ‘The Highwayman’ by Alfred Noyes and ‘Home Thoughts from Abroad’ by Robert Browning and learnt them by heart. They still reside in my head.
I found Kiwi poets lying around the house too. I remember impressing a teacher at Wellington Girls’ College by quoting ‘Song of Allegiance’ by R.A.K. Mason in an essay. My feminist mum read the poetry that burst forth in 1975 from women writers like Rachel McAlpine and Fiona Kidman. She loved two West Coast poets, Bub Bridger and Keri Hulme, and adored the work of Margaret Mahy. A story she delighted in telling was when she drove Mahy across Wellington in her orange Fiat Bambina to deliver her to an event at Newtown Library, Mahy’s head poking through the sunroof wearing her trademark orange wig.
Paula: I am even more moved reading this. At what point did you pick up a pen and start writing poems?
Mary: I loved writing from the age of four, and I started writing actual ‘things’ when I was five – short stories, like my version of Rapunzel, which went on for pages. I was seven or eight when I first remember writing a poem. It was a sunny day at Karori West School and our teacher told us to lie outside in the playground and shut our eyes. After a while we sat up and had to write what we’d ‘seen’. I still have this poem somewhere. The whole process excited me. I wrote about the colours under my eyelids – blues and greens – ending the lines where I felt they should end and finishing with ‘I said to the sun you’re the love of it all’, which nicely repeated the word ‘all’ used earlier. I felt like a magician – transforming my sunlit experience into four lines on the page and in doing that making the sun a character I could talk to! Could anything be better?
Fast forward to the age of nine or ten, and I am at the dining room table with Mum getting dinner ready through the door in the kitchen. There’s a stack of paper, enough pens. I’m writing funny poems about people and birds. I like reading funny stories and want to try and write them. I can’t remember how often I did this, but I know Mum would have encouraged it and made me feel what I was doing was worthwhile. She’d have made the paper available and the pens, and when I’d finished and was clearing up and setting the table, she’d have read my writing with interest and declared that what I’d written were poems. Then she’d have filed them away as something worth keeping. I have them still.
I kept writing into my teens, getting published in my school magazine and in a national anthology of school writing, You Can’t Eat A Poem. I was commended for the Denis Glover Award, which led to a poem published in Landfall, and awarded PEN Young Writer of the Year! Then I was accepted for Bill Manhire’s new creative writing course, called Original Composition, at Victoria University. In the class with me were Kirsty Gunn and Jean Watson. I felt I’d arrived. I continued writing poems and stories, but it took twenty years for me to get back to publishing my work, distracted as I was by travel, journalism and starting a family.
Paula: Can you choose five (or so) words that signal what is important to you when you write poetry?
Mary:
Clearing (the physical space and time to write, a clearing for poetry in the forest of thought and feeling, openness to what comes, working through the layers to find the real poem underneath)
Curiosity and compassion (these give me my poems – people fascinate me and the natural world too – I want to know and understand more, get inside their skin and discover what makes them tick)
Joy and hope (I hope to find it somewhere as I write a poem, even a glimpse)
Emotion (used with restraint, so the reader can connect)
Rhythm and sound (gives a poem a heart and legs)
Shape and form (gives the poem spine and helps the eye)
Paula: Oh Mary, such key words. They totally resonate with me. Joy to hold to your heart. A clearing for writing but also reading and for living.
What is important to you when you read a poem by someone else? What poetry books have travelled with you, vitally, essentially?
Mary: A poem has to invite me in. The title and first line and the shape on the page probably do that first, and then the language, the syntax and rhythms, the story it tells. The poet has to have a voice all their own. Compassion and curiosity don’t go amiss. And I also need to feel that the poet has spent time with and crafted the poem, that they care about it.
For books that have travelled with me – there have been different ones at different times of my life, but there are those volumes that have travelled with me for the longest time that I need to know are at arm’s length. The ‘dog-eared’ anthology in the drawer by my bed is one. A ratty copy of Selected Poems by WB Yeats edited by A Norman Jaffares that I bought at university another. Also on the pile: a much-thumbed paperback of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Poems and Prose edited by WH Gardner, and a volume of the Collected Poems of WH Auden – my poem ‘After reading Auden’ refers to this book. An Anthology of Twentieth Century New Zealand Poetry edited by Vincent O’Sullivan, published in 1976, is the book that introduced me to many New Zealand poets, and while I don’t read it now – it’s been overtaken by hundreds of slim poetry volumes hot off the press – I like to know it’s there.
Paula: I find there are many engaging reading paths through your collection. I love how I am drawn into the domestic scenes, not skating past but on a slow pause, like the bread rising in the bowl (‘Bread’), a poem that made me muse on the way a poem might rise within the bowl of writing (and reading). What draws you to the domestic realm, to the personal?
Mary: Hah! I love that about a poem rising. I am a domestic creature, so writing about the domestic world seems natural, and more so when I still had children at home, which is when some of the Hens poems were written. I’m also curious about people, and I think the work people do – domestic or otherwise – says so much about them. In the poem ‘Bread’, we see my daughter’s partner, Jonas, and the love he puts into the food he makes for her, work that’s largely invisible, like the yeast in the dough. In ‘Beastly’ the incident in our pantry with me, my builder son and a mouse with its nose in a trap, shows how we can be trapped by who we are (a woman needing a breast scan and expected to have a mouse-free pantry/a mouse needing to eat), but a single kind gesture explodes all that. ‘Compost’ shows the huge emotional wrench of moving from a family home and how it can be interrupted by the thought that we leave some of ourselves behind in the compost bin – all that food we shared, all that work to make it! – ‘warm with rotting’.
Paula: There are many flora and fauna motifs – I love the bees, rats, hens, the oak tree. I was musing on how these things are there in the domestic or rural scene – they enhance a scene or memory visually and then might resonate on metaphorical levels. What motifs really struck a chord for you as you wrote?
Mary: Oh, creatures. I am drawn to them. I love how they skitter through our lives, often unnoticed, and yet they are our connection with the natural world and constantly challenge our humanity. I think of all the animals making their way into my poems the hens surprised me most. One popped in at the end of my opening poem ‘Weightless’ in the line ‘the benevolence of hen’. What was I thinking of – their gifts of eggs (their golden yolks)? Or was it simply the assonance that got me there. No doubt a bit of both. And the chooks in the eponymous poem ‘Tackling the Hens’ – that poem was fun to write like the hens (I never knew birds could be so much fun). It was only after the book was published that I realised this poem is really about the delightful chaos of family, which drives us nuts and sustains in equal measure, and that we miss terribly when its gone.
Paula: I also love how both living and writing open a sense and state of belonging? Does writing feel like that for you?
Mary: Yes, it does! As an immigrant to New Zealand, aged four, I’ve found so much of my writing has been a way to better understand the country my parents chose to live in and our place in it. ‘Strangers everywhere,’ my father said about my family in ‘Weightless’, and I guess that’s the lot of the immigrant to work at not being a stranger. In writing about a place and the people and animals that inhabit it you come closer to understanding them and yourself, closer to that thing called ‘belonging’. Tackling the Hens is structured to follow a progression from that feeling of strangeness through places we’ve lived as a family, the places we’ve come from, the places we’ve called home.
Paula: Choose a poem from the collection for the reader of our conversation to linger on. Why this poem?
Mary: Thank you, Paula, for your wonderful and generous questions. I’d like to finish with ‘Shines’. This was a poem that was commissioned for a collection called More Favourable Waters: Aotearoa poets respond to Dante’s Purgatory edited by Marco Sonzogni and Timothy Smith and published by my publishing company, The Cuba Press. All the poets were given lines from the Clive James translation of Purgatory that they had to respond to and include verbatim somewhere in their poem. The last six lines of ‘Shines’ from ‘Know this, you know it …’ are Dante’s. They feel fresh and energetic and not 700+ years old at all. Knowing I would finish with these lines influenced the rhythm and tone of the whole poem, and gave me my story, which is the power of a prompt like this – to provoke a writer into something new. More Favourable Waters is a fine collection of poems with 33 shining poets and I’m proud to be in it.
What I also love about this poem is the reaction I’ve had from the family I wrote about: young Moss, and his mother with wild hair. As I did ten years ago, they are moving from where they live across the harbour in the ‘house that smelled of oiled wood like a church’ to live elsewhere, and in preparing for the move they find they’ve been reading ‘Shines’ with fresh eyes. They’ve discovered in there an expression of their own grief at leaving, which is enough to make any poet’s heart leap, and read in the final lines a positive call to embrace their new life, which is all Dante, of course. What a guy!
Shines
Day calls you to attention, asks you out the door to the hard jaw
of the city. Most mornings there’s enough to gentle it: the woman
in a frilled shirt, the laughing clutch of builders, Moss making coffee
at the hissing machine—the wide grin. You know him from long ago,
watch as the dark liquid spills into a cup, think of where he lived
across the harbour, on the hill: the house that smelled of oiled
wood like a church; his mother, her wild hair. The bush track
at the top of their road where you walked the mongrel—a nervous
dog, loyal, lean. How you breasted each rise, the land soft and hummocky,
your steps blessed by beech leaves, the dog an unreliable guide and
gone now. Out of reach, too, those wāhine toa with wild hair,
the boy’s mother one of many, and all the children, your children, who
pleat your heart. But here’s Moss handing you a keep cup,
and you’re crossing the street between buses. Know this, you
know it, this is the way: from here on, you yourself must be your guide. Steep
ways and tight opposed you. You came through. The sun shines on your brow.
Now see the grass.
Mary McCallum
a reading
Photo credit: Trinity Thompson-Browne
‘Hare’
‘Hunting for Cavafy’
‘Mouth’
Mary McCallum is a writer and publisher who lives in the Wairarapa and Pōneke. Her own published work includes award-winning novel The Blue, a poetry book XYZ of Happiness and a children’s novel Dappled Annie and the Tigrish. She won the inaugural Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize and her poem ‘Sycamore Tree’ was selected for Best NZ Poems. She is the director of Mākaro Press and The Cuba Press.
he came for us mad dog that he is on a chain of saliva
who knew his blood would run this cold inventing history
today we rise and fall like the lungs we are inhaling victory
tomorrow as dark smoke he will be gone our hearts will shine
no more of his lies will rise to murder spring and summer
24.7.26 Jeffrey Paparoa Holman
Jeffrey Paparoa Holman writes poetry, short fiction, history and memoir. He has published seven volumes of poetry; Best of Both Worlds (Penguin, history, 2010); The Lost Pilot (Penguin, memoir, 2013); Now When it Rains ( Steele Roberts,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.
My mokopuna made me a birthday card written in cloud-white pen on bright blue card, the words so faint I need to read them up close in order to take in each word and letter. I have stuck the card to our fridge with a magnet I’ve taken out from my Te Reo kete— a small tama who stands hands on hips with pounamu tiki, toki tucked into his waist band, tāmoko on his right arm. My grandson used GRANDMA as an acronym, with Marvellous for the M, writing it as, ‘MARVYOULIS’. He’s still learning the ins and outs of English—Saxon, Latin, Old Norse mashed together like parsnips and carrots. I’m learning too. Te Reo. Slowly. Learning that it is te takata, it is te whenua. It is te hau raki, te hau taitoka, te hau rāwhiti, te hau-ā-uru. The wind from the north, the wind from the south, the wind from the east, the wind from the west. It is rain. Tā te manawa. It is replacing ‘ng’ with a ‘k’. Mauka for maunga. It is Kāi Tahu dialect. It is learning to feel sound rise from your puku, your wairua, ready for breathing out through soft lips as line, sentence, song, chant; with vowels that need room to lie together, to blend, to marry. It is consonants for my tongue to tap and roll like thunder, or manu on the brink of flight. My mokopuna made me a birthday card written in cloud-white pen on bright blue card, the words so faint I need to read them up close in order to take in each word and letter.
Kay McKenzie Cooke
Kay McKenzie Cooke (Waitaha, Kāti Māmoe, Kāi Tahu) lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin between the harbour and the sea. Her new poetry collection titled, My favourite set of lights, is being published by The Cuba Press and is due out in November.
Newsroom published Airini Beautrais’s memorable poem, ‘Cancer Moon: Poet Life’ from Salt Quilt (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2026). The epic memoir poem has got so much love on social media I thought I would share the link plus a link to the conversation Airini and I had about her new book, about poetry and writing.
Here are the poem’s opening stanzas:
Cancer Moon: Poet Life
I had parents who were in some ways indulgent and would write as I dictated. This is how I got into poetry. Here are some lines from four-year-old me:
We love the little flowers that grow in the springtime Merrily merrily merrily ho! I think my first influence was William Blake. Mum had an English degree and was the kind
of mother who reads her infant the work of dead poets.
Along with our conversation, Airini read a few poems. Listen to the poems and read the conversation here.
“Airini Beautrais’s new poetry collection, Salt Quilt, is like a prism I hold to the light and dark of living, past present future, of what is experienced and what is imagined, what is felt and what is thought. The poetry ranges and embraces diverse subject matter, form, mood, connections. I have felt so utterly boosted by this book.” Paula Green
“I wrote the poems in this collection over fifteen years, so there was a lot of being and doing in that time. There are also a lot of different approaches, as some of these poems are very personal, whereas others were commissions and are removed from my personal experience by default. Some words that come to mind now are: Exploration, distillation, sense-making, acknowledgement, vulnerability, experimentation.
“Vulnerability is a big one. I think poets, or at least serious/ literary poets, tend to avoid it. I think this is because poetry allows for distance between the emotional self and the text via linguistic and stylistic features and there can be a temptation to increase that distance. When I started out my poetic career, I definitely wanted to be cool. My first book was called Secret Heart which I think was apt given there is a lot of hiding in those poems. Now I feel happier to just be who I am, and put uncomfortable things out there.” Airini Beautrais
Airini Beautrais was born in Auckland in 1982. Her debut work of fiction, Bug Week, won Aotearoa New Zealand’s top fiction award, the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize, at the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. She is the author of five collections of poetry, including Salt Quilt (2026) and Secret Heart (2006), which won the Jessie Mackay Award for First Book of Poetry at the 2007 Montana New Zealand Book Awards, and The Beautiful Afternoon (2024), a collection of essays. In 2016 she won the Landfall Essay Prize. Airini is also a science teacher and dance instructor. She lives in Whanganui.
“This collection began with the watery space where I grew up and extends to the space that holds us all: the ocean. The poems built themselves around family who are always with me, even if gone or far away. They rely on memory, flawed but real, rushing like fast-flowing current. They came into focus in 2025 as our world was pushed off kilter after the inauguration of the 47th president of the United States; the title poem is from a set of ‘Poetry Dispatches’ I wrote for Paula Green’s Poetry Shelf in the months following. ‘Motion sickness’ was the first poem I wrote in that series and the poem that closes the collection, ‘Tomorrow’, was the last.” Michelle Elvy
Airini Beautrais, Mikaela Nyman and Helen Llendorf are coming to Poppies Bookshop, New Plymouth in two weeks to read from their recent poetry collections and talk all things poetry and the poet’s eye.
let us hold Riemke to our hearts, as we stand, hand in hand breathing in the sweet salty air at Muriwai Beach, wherever we might be
WaitakereRiver Valley for Derek March
Lost, you say, the songs of the forest where light never shone and listen to wind remembering adventures through trees smothered in liana.
See how the water flits over stone and all the colours of darkness suddenly speaking. The currents swirling in great swathes of sound.
Clouds make a choir and all the sky is melancholy in a rumble of rain.
Where the sea curves and breaks inland, spirits roam in the drift of waiata wailing through bones of trees dank with grief.
Riemke Ensing from Blue Is a Cracked Vase in Memory, Cold Hub Press, 2026
Riemke Ensing beloved mother, partner, sister, mentor, poet, anthologist, teacher, peace actiivist, friend. Riemke was born in The Netherlands, in 1939. At the age of twelve and, at this point speaking no English, she and her parents immigrated to New Zealand. She went to school in Dargaville, attended Ardmore Teachers’ Training College, taught for two years and then lectured in English Literature at the College for a year. She graduated with an MA (Hons) from the University of Auckland in 1967 and then tutored in the Department until 1999. She was appointed as an Honorary Research Fellow (Faculty of Arts) and as a Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellow in 2002. Riemke’s poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies and she published a number of poetry collections and chapbooks including two collected works, Blue Is a Cracked Vase in Memory (Cold Hub Press, 2026) and Selected Poems: Talking Pictures (HeadworX, 2000).
Riemke ‘s biographer, Deborah Shepard pays tribute
In this time of shared sadness and mourning, and with the help of friends, family, and poets, Poetry Shelf has assembled a special tribute to Riemke. I needed to retreat to Riemke’s poetry, to draw her books off my shelves and reabsorb her voice. As I read and reread, I was drawn deep into a poetic intimacy where poetry is a way of speaking to loved ones, to observing the world with tender and close attention, to speaking out fiercely and vitally against injustice, war, cruelty. And as I still read, I am absorbing the lyricism, the painterly palette, the aroha of Riemke’s precious words.
I am reminded of Riemke’s groundbreaking work, Private Gardens: An Anthology of NZ Women Poets (Caveman Press, 1977). Her aim was to make more women poets visible. When speaking of Riemke’s own poems in the anthology, I wrote that Riemke and Jan Kemp coupled prodigious reading with roving intellects and linguistic playfulness. It is a landmark book. Across decades, Riemke worked within communities of other writers, and within the deep support of her family, especially her beloved, Bill Trussell and son James.
Riemke’s latest collection, Blue Is a Cracked Vase in Memory (2026), is a book to hold to our hearts. In the opening pages, Riemke draws us to coastal ground, to Muriwai Beach so we too may stand with our feet in the dark sand, breathing in west coast air, with the music of waves invigorating, the warmth and talk of close friends essential, looking up to everchanging sky and weather. And this is what this collection is, a book that draws us close to the world and peoplc that Riemke held dear. Artists and writers, from Aoteroa and from overseas, both contemporary and from the past, are present in the seams and folds of the poems. And this matters. This deep engagement with the work of others. This deep commitment to writing as a way of observing, contemplating, feeling, grieving. A collection, with blue the connecting ink, linking art and beauty and heart. And let us hold this book to our hearts, let us hold Riemke to our hearts, as we stand, hand in hand, breathing in the sweet salty air at Muriwai Beach.
I invited twelve poets to choose a favourite poem by Riemke and write an accompanying paragraph. The gathering includes Roger Hickin, Dorothy Howie, Anita Arlov, Bob Orr, Gregory O’Brien, Jack Ross, Sue Fitchett, Renee Liang, Siobhan Harvey, Janet Charman, Michele Leggott and Frederika van Elberg, and Jan Kemp. Michele and Frederika’s collaboration includes Riemke reading a poem in Dutch. Finally, Brian Gregory wrote a poem especially for Riemke.
Poetry Shelf is deeply grateful to Riemke’s son James Ensing-Trussell for permission to post the poems, photographs and sound recordings. We are grateful to James for permission to use Ensing material from the Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive, MSS & Archives 2005/01 held in He Māra Mahara | Cultural Collections, University of Auckland. Special thanks to Jan Kemp for providing many of the photos, for Dorothy Howie for going the extra step to get a photo scanned, and to Brendan O’Brien and Donald Kerr for tracking book covers.
Photograph: James Ensing-Trussell Riemke Ensing (1939-2026)
Riemke reads ‘Tarawera’
Riemke and James
Riemke, James, Jan, Bill
The Tributes
Roger Hickin
Blue––a painting by Anna Caselberg thank you, Roger Hickin
Blue was never a struggle. It came out of the hills till your eyes hurt with its glory. The sea also rushing up to join that miraculous cobalt offered as celestial gift. Your sky full of it positively leaping with excitement as though Kandinsky just reared past with his Blauen Reiter into that complicated freedom ‘from something that happened’. Maybe the emptiness darkened and you needed light––that fiercely fierce exuberance flying with such insistent joy. A boisterous allegro to the sky.
Was blue your way to heaven? Are the Camino skies like this?
Riemke Ensing from Blue Is a Cracked Vase in Memory, Cold Hub Press, 2026
In 2015 Riemke Ensing went south for a Caselberg Writers Residency at Broad Bay on Otago Harbour. There she discovered the paintings of Anna Caselberg [1942–2004], described once by Ralph Hotere as “a better painter than her old man [Toss Woollaston]”. The perpetual alchemies of harbour, hills, and sky, as seen from the Broad Bay cottage, had been a recurrent subject of Anna’s. Above a sea shimmering with poems, “immersed in silence”, Riemke sat “in the frame the painter used for her outlook” and began to think of writing about Anna and what she characterized as her transformation of the everyday “into rapture”. But illness got in the way, and the handful of luminous poems included in Blue is a cracked vase in memory were all she managed to achieve. After I gave her a small painting of Anna’s which she loved, she wrote and sent me the poem “Blue––a painting by Anna Caselberg”.
Roger Hickin
Riemke with Jan Kemp and Russell Haley, 1978
Dorothy Howie
Elizabeth I (1533-1603) Detail For Dorothy Howie
Even the carry-bag was marvelous. Much travelled and all the way from the National Portrait Gallery with Elisabeth D.G. Angliae Franciae, et Hiberniae, Regina, a portrait inside a catalogue by a compatriot Marcus Gheeraerts (the younger) 1592. I ironed out the wrinkles with brown paper the way my mother taught me, and the collar sprung back in starched folds each a cathedral window arched and spun with stories caught in fans around that magnificent neck. Imagine the lace makers. How many went blind (or mad) who did the washing, arranged those folded wings not to take flight from all that stiff upbearing (see how the vein throbs in the temples) into the lightening sky.
Riemke Ensing from Talking Pictures: Selected Poetry, HeadworX, Wellington, 2000
I have chosen this poem because it reflects some of the things I, as a close and long-term friend, love about Riemke. It also demonstrates her ability to write both forcefully and tenderly. Riemke treasured friendships, including the giving and receiving of gifts. Her early life in Groningen, and liberal parents, contributed to her hate of narrow mindedness and injustice. She cared about art, observing it meticulously. She felt things strongly and deeply.
Dorothy Howie
Riemke with Dorothy Howie, Jan Kemp and Jan’s husband Dieter at the Governer General’s Garden Party in Auckland
Anita Arlov
K.M. AT GARSINGTON
The flow of the pen scratching bars on paper / small prisons to hold herself and the shade of vision / the bright beams of sun taking off as so many freedom doves clapping delighted above lavender & rosemary (that’s for remembrance) the pot pourri of garden all around the blue scent of life fragile on the open page.
Riemke Ensing from Spells from Chagall, The Griffin Press 1987
Dear Riemke,
You included ‘K. M. at Garsington’ in Spells from Chagall, your book of poems in tribute to your friend and poet Helen Shaw. Here find the garden. Poise. Flight. Birds opening wings. Rushes of light. The drama of sun and shade. Heroic colour. Detail. The drive and consequence of art. Here find the past living in the present, the way glorious paintings and poems do. Signals of freedom. Delight. Here is a new page pressed. Here also find the chains of pain. The blasted business of breathing.
Here find your thinking of others, of friends. You cared how they were faring. What they were making with head and hands. What they were thinking:making of things. Here find appreciation. Recognition. These qualities and skills of yours Riemke and a hundred more gleam in this poem. You worked with words as a body works its born cells. It’s a binding, a deceptive simplicity, but creation hangs on it.
I am beyond grateful to have known you and called you friend.
Anita Arlov
Bob Orr
Blue (II) For Gerda Leenards
This blue has nothing to do with darkness. This blue is the magic of imaginings the mystery of distance as if Rimbaud just walked by whistling to rearrange the sky. This blue is the colour of old Persian poems, the sheen of silk whispering ancient stories, the wind in great sweeps gathering as songlines of a remembered past.
Riemke Ensing from Blue Is a Cracked Vase in Memory, Cold Hub Press, 2026
My first recollection of Riemke Ensing is when she was tutor in the English dept at Auckland University and I was a stage 1 student in 1968. George Eliot`s Middlemarch was the novel our tutorial group was studying, a work whose sheer length alone, I am sure many of us found intimidating. What dispelled that notion was the manner of Riemke`s engagement, her sense of enthusiasm and wonder, her great sense of humour, her belief that that doorstopper of a book should be read not merely as a stepping stone to a degree but with enjoyment and pleasure. This is what Riemke imparted, pacing the room, a cigarette in one hand, and another one burning away in the ashtray at her desk. At the time I was unaware that Riemke was also a poet. Reading her poems today can see that she also brought to them, as to her life, the same seasoning of enjoyment and pleasure. I hardly knew her personally but reading her poems I have a sense of sharing a life well lived.
Bob Orr
Gregory O’Brien
Taonga for the painter Margaret Lawlor-Bartlett
I see the mountain now is no longer outside.
It has entered this room the window into your house your body a meeting place where colours sing Jubilates and line exults to draw the ancestors breathing into these soaring graphites and paints.
Riemke Ensing from Tarawera – Te Maunga Tapu, The Pear Tree Press, 1999
As I recall, the first poetry reading I ever gave was with Riemke in 1983. Chris Price and I (and maybe one other) from Karl Stead’s writing class had been asked to be part of a poetry reading at Auckland University to mark an anniversary of some kind. The university’s poet-lecturers were out in force. I remember both the brilliance and ponderous aspect of Allen Curnow’s reading; Kendrick Smithyman was wonderfully gnarly in both sense and sound… But, in all honesty, it is Riemke Ensing’s voice I remember most emphatically. She read from ‘Topographies’ (which was to be published the following year, with drawings by Nigel Brown). Her voice and her poetry filled the room like smoke. Yet there was nothing rigid or teacherly about her thick Dutch accent and her slow, textured reading. It lingers in my memory like the sound of a baritone saxophone making its way through a complex musical score. I remember the pauses as well as the words. I’ve always loved Topographies. Riemke seemed to have extracted many of the devices and effects of ‘open form’ poetry and inserted something within those parameters that was personal and emotive–yet also understated, musical, welcoming… It remains my favourite of her books–with Nigel’s scratchy pen-drawings providing virtuosic banjo-like accompaniment.
Spells from Chagall, Riemke Ensing cover, Gregory O’Brien The Griffin Press, 1987
A few years later, I made a drawing for the cover of Riemke’s book Spells from Chagall. Like her, I have always enjoyed sitting on the boundary fence between verbal and visual arts, making idle as well as purposeful conversation with the inhabitants of both those adjacent properties. I followed her collections of poetry down the years–and was pleased to be able to include her elegy ‘and then Don Binney died’ at the conclusion of the monograph Don Binney–Flight Path in 2023. We spoke a few times on the phone in recent years but I never, to my regret, managed a visit. Alongside Riemke’s selected poems, Talking Pictures, published by HeadworX in 2000, the selection of her more recent poems Blue is a Cracked Vase in Memory (Cold Hub Press, 2026) is her lasting testament.
Gregory O’Brien
Jack Ross
Love Affair
A given poem from Katherine Mansfield with thanks to Helen McNeish
You wrote the table was laid for two but nobody came| so you dined opposite a white napkin.
It’s called giving yourself to life. Through the window a quiet branch has the evening to itself also.
Riemke Ensing from Classic NZ Poets in Performance (2006)
“Jack, you’ve got so fat!” True, perhaps, but not exactly tactful. But then, Riemke’s sense of humour tended to prevail over the Kiwi convention of backbiting people in private rather than to their faces. I have to respect her for that. I felt, too, that keeping things jokey was her way of combatting a certain turn towards melancholy. It’s all there in the poems. Poetry was a necessity, not a luxury, for Riemke. How else could she make sense of her life in this strange country at the bottom of the world, with these people whose monosyllabic utterances were so difficult to fathom? I remember at the launch of Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance, Riemke came upon my parents and me sitting out in the corridor, munching on sandwiches, because my Mum was sure that my Dad would get irritable if he didn’t get his dinner on time. She laughed out loud at how absurd we looked. Then she accepted the offer of a sandwich and sat down with us to polish it off. That was Riemke: vital, outrageous, but also, in the final analysis, quite practical – as well (of course) as fiercely intelligent. She scared me, but I’ll miss her anyway.
Jack Ross
Sue Fitchett
What shall we tell Li Po Tiananmen Square, June, 1989
What shall we tell Li Po now that dragons claw at skies and the sun’s a goblet of blood. Somewhere a lute turns into wood and trees change pale as jade. What shall we tell Li Po now that wind breathes fire into the summer square and iron horses plough the streets. What shall we tell Li Po now that the young are swept as autumn leaves for burning and the smell of death is incense in the streets. What shall we tell Li Po now the new moon’s caught in ragged branch of ancient trees and the cinnabar sky flies a torn black flag.
Always a forthright supportive friend and a poet who ‘delighted in metaphor’, Riemke stood confidently in many different worlds including literary, visual arts and as I learnt from the forward she wrote for Jane’s and my collaborative work, boats and sailing. She declared ‘the sea is my element’. Her element was, also, to be a powerful poetic voice for peace and against injustice. I was moved to tears when I first heard her reading her Tiananmen Square poem ‘What shall we tell Li Po’ at a New Zealand Society of Authors Courage Day event. Moe moe ra Riemke.
Sue Fitchett
Renee Liang
T’ai Chi for Zhang Weiping in prison
If the space where they keep you the next years is just a little larger than the length of your outstretched arm, you’ll be able to visualize clouds and move them away with a slow graceful turn of your hand should they frown or darken to form rain. A few movements will shape you trees to shade your head and the hard board of your bed will be earth sprung bright with flowers and new grass. You might be tempted to tense a melon out of the early vapours of air and imagine, oh imagine that cool caress for breakfast. These acts will make you strong, subtle as ink brush-stroked on paper all those centuries ago.
Remember the story told of the woman in prison. She knew Beethoven well. From inside each day she conducted a quartet. Each part separately in her head, then putting all four instruments together silently as she sat there in solitary confinement. It took years, but the music lifted the sky into that darkness, and the sun
gave back her life.
Riemke Ensing fromBlue Is a Cracked Vase in Memory: Poems 2000 – 2025, Cold Hub Press, 2026
Riemke befriended me, as she befriended many, with a warm laugh, home cooked food and that beguiling naughty twinkle in her eye. I experienced her famously sharp wit – you had to watch what you said around Riemke as she was apt to grab a careless statement and flick it back at you. But if Riemke was hard and fast with words in real life, in her poetry, she was the opposite.
In this poem, Riemke handles words as if they are fine ink – her hands light yet strong as she guides them into images and story. Like a Chinese calligrapher her rendering seems effortless but can only be achieved with years of practice. Her portrait of the Cantonese poet Zhang Weiping also invokes the movements of the T’ai Chi of the title. My father loved this movement form: he told me that the key to doing this correctly is the immense, controlled power behind each set of movements. This is an apt metaphor for how Riemke writes.
With a sure, deceptively soft hand, Riemke draws out the lines of emotional tension, building in waves, reminiscent of layering a painting or composing a piece of music. Maybe this poem moves me so much because it is about choosing freedom of the mind: a deliberate, sustained act that no physical imprisonment nor political masters can prevent.
I also chose this because Riemke always had a soft spot for the strays, the fellow migrants, the slightly out-of-place people – that’s who she gathered to her and fed. She collected them and their words and sometimes introduced them to each other. When she found out I was working on a play to celebrate my children’s dual Croatian heritage she gifted me her original, out of print edition of Amelia Batistich’s work, without hesitation, because she knew it would help.
Renee Liang
Siobhan Harvey
Hokianga Love Song
In the hollowed trunk of the puriri tree wild bees have made honey. They hum songs in the vault of shining leaves and drink from flowers sensuous in the green dark. We too have had our fill of nectar and watch light crochet moving patterns of shade through branches making wide verandahs. We lie remembering how houses grew from local timbers (kauri mostly, Agathis australis, with totara for blocks) and the wind blew from up harbour light as your encircling arms in this summer grass tousled blond by sun licking its warm tongue across our bodies salt with the sea where the taniwha lives behind rocks wreathed in swirls of kelp. We follow the tumbling drift of curves coming and going and coming together again as lovers on tides undisturbed by gulls, and in that turbulence our bodies are solemn as hills that shape with the burden of stories older than ancient weeping waiata and the naming of past under the light blue winking leaves of sky.
Riemke Ensing from Talking Pictures: Selected Poems, HeadworX, Wellington, 2000
Riemke Ensing was a fine poet and generous friend. A fellow outcast, I first met her when I moved to East Auckland, close to where Riemke lived, at the turn of the millennium. Acquaintances of Riemke, my neighbours mentioned to her that another writer was living nearby. It’s a testament to Riemke’s kindness that almost immediately she welcomed me to her home, shared food, drink and literary korero with me. She was the first person to invite me to read my work at a literary event she hosted at the University of Auckland Music School. Since we’ve been poetry allies, working on local poetry events, readings and exhibitions. In doing so, as a young mother I often had my son in tow. Riemke adored him, sending him sweet emails when he gifted her drawings and the like. For nearly 20 years, she read at each of the National Poetry Day events I organised, and her work was included in the Essential New Zealand Poems anthology I co-edited in 2014. Through Jan Kemp’s support, I was also honoured to write the bio for Riemke’s ‘Poetry Archive’ page. Her contribution to New Zealand poetry cannot be overstated. Private Gardens was a seminal anthology, which I feel grows in standing with each generation. While the poems in her collections, including her most recent, Blue Is a Cracked Vase in Memory (Cold Hub Press) evidence a writer with an acute perceptiveness, deeply mulled sensibility and rich lyricism. I will miss her greatly, acutely. I thank Paula for allowing us to celebrate Riemke’s life and legacy; may we continue to do so –
Siobhan Harvey
Janet Charman
Age
A new month and the start of summer but the same old bones reluctant into the aching sea-blue dawn
People today forget (or would like to) how hostile the cultural climate was for women artists in Aotearoa in the post WW2 period––right through to the mid nineteen–eighties. Riemke Ensing, as a determinedly practicing poet, was working in the thick of that inhospitable atmosphere. In person she was fearless. Had to be. Only way to survive. However, I for one, will always remember how her inspiring 1977 anthology of women’s poetry ‘Private Gardens’, from Caveman Press, was met by some with disingenuous critical incomprehension. Shame on them. I am now in the very demographic, which she places under consideration in her poem Age. A piece whose accomplished clarity privileges hard-won resilience and formidable honesty over petty recriminations and fault finding. Ah me.
Janet Charman
Michele Leggott and Fredrika van Elburg
From left: Vijftigers Remco Campert, Jan G. Elburg, Bert Schierbeek, Gerrit Kouwenaar. Lucebert is sitting in front. The book was published in 1958.
Riemke reads ‘Schierbeek boven Howick’
So here she is, out of the archive and elegising her parents and the poet, stitching together her northern and southern worlds.
We present the 2004 AoNZPSA recording, its Dutch text and a translation by Fredrika van Elburg, whose doctoral thesis investigates links between Schierbeek and his post-war fellow-experimentalists the Vijftigers, and the North American Language Poets of the 1970s and 1980s.
Schierbeek boven Howick Voor Thea en de families.
Nu zijn ze alle drie dood. De vader, de moeder en Bert Schierbeek. Allen op hun manier heengegaan naar de lucht, de hemel, de sterren.
Ik zie ze elke avond. Stevig arm in arm als schaatsers over ‘t Dampsterdiep naar ‘t Oosten. Klaar, helder, fonkelend wit als ijs in een schilder’s landschap.
Soms zweven ze even alleen maar toch samen, gemoedelijk naast mekaar in de avond als punten van de Driehoek, de sterren in de Phoenix die vrede, schoonheid en kalmte brengen. De rijkdommen van Zen de streling van vlammen die weer vorm geven. De lucht ruist met namen, flakkert met herinneringen.
Ik herken ze als ouwe vrienden. All drie lange verhalen man, en moar proat’n. Zij schateren in het pronkjuweel van woorden. Nemen het serieus. Kijk hoe aandachtig ze elkaar verstaan. In de hoge tempels van licht zingen de dichters. Drie van ‘t Noorden in de Zuider nacht.
Als je luistert, heur je grunings.
Riemke Ensing from Talking Pictures: Selected Poems, HeadworX, 2000
Schierbeek over Howick For Thea and the families.
Now all three of them are dead. The father, the mother and Bert Schierbeek. All in their way gone to the sky, the heavens, the stars.
I see them every evening. Firmly arm in arm like skaters over the Damsterdeep towards the east. Clear, bright, sparkling white as ice in a painter’s landscape.
Sometimes they float briefly apart but together still, good natured side by side in the evening like corners of the Triangle, the stars in the Phoenix that bring peace, beauty and calm. The riches of Zen the caressing of flames that bring back form. The air rustles with names, flickers with memories.
I recognise them as old friends. All three long stories man, and lots of talk. They laugh out loud in the jewellery of words. Take it seriously. See how with close attention they understand each other. In the high temples of light the poets sing. Three from the north In the southern night.
When you listen, You hear Gronings.
Riemke Ensing Translation by Fredrika van Elburg, September 2026. Translator’s note: The dedication ‘For Thea and the families’ refers to Schierbeek’s widow Thea and the poet’s grandchildren.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to James Ensing Trussell for permission to use Ensing material from the Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive, MSS & Archives 2005/01, item 12/29, held in He Māra Mahara | Cultural Collections, University of Auckland. Thanks also to archivist Katherine Pawley for retrieving relevant files and texts.
Jack Ross, co-editor with Jan Kemp of Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance (Auckland University Press, 2006) supplied a copy of Riemke’s initial reading script for the 2004 aoNZPSA recordings. This is the source of Riemke’s note about the Schierbeek poem.
Deborah Shepard generously shared information about the history of the poem from research for her forthcoming biography of Riemke.
Fredrika van Elburg’s PhD thesis, ‘The Vijftigers and the Language Poets: A Study of the Poetics of Two Experimental Groupings’ was completed at the University of Auckland in 2007.
Riemke Ensing recorded 20 poems for the Aotearoa NZ Poetry Sound Archive in 2004. Her final poem, written and performed in Dutch, was accompanied by a note in English that was not included in the recording but is preserved in the script she was reading from:
“When the Dutch poet Bert Schierbeek died, I was devastated. He was from the same province where I was born and I had read most of his work in New Zealand. When we finally met in Amsterdam, we were immediately at home with each other, speaking, as it were, the same language. In the poem I imagine my parents ( also from Groningen and therefore ‘gruningers’ ) skating together arm in arm in the sky, in animated conversation with the poet with whom they make a reassuring and richly reminiscing threesome. As music of the spheres, the ‘northern’ dialect enticing as a ‘jewel’.”
Riemke was reading a version of the poem that appeared in Talking Pictures, her first selected poems, published by HeadworX in 2000. In a final interview in August 2026 with her biographer Deborah Shepard, Riemke read the poem in Dutch, talked about its origins and translated it for Deborah.
So here she is, out of the archive and elegising her parents and the poet, stitching together her northern and southern worlds.
We present the 2004 AoNZPSA recording, its Dutch text and a translation by Fredrika van Elburg, whose doctoral thesis investigates links between Schierbeek and his post-war fellow-experimentalists the Vijftigers, and the North American Language Poets of the 1970s and 1980s.
Michele Leggott and Fredrika van Elburg
Jan Kemp
Jan Kemp dines out during Singapore Writers Week (1986) with Riemke, Vincent O’Sullivan, Goh Poh Seng and a couple of Australian poets at Peranakan Place.
Crossings
Above the North a taniwha flicks its tongue towards Wairoa. Its tail loops all the way back to the coast. Its eye maps the always insistent horizon brooding in timeless distance across the consciousness of land. Flexed in flame wings are sharps set sails filled with the exultation of isolation. Always beneath, that stretch of water and earth marking the end and the beginning of all stories, the narratives of exile explored as wingbeat above tumultuous waves. Here history is close. You hear it in the rhythms of wind roaming where dark meets light and sea joins earth in celebration of journeys, the pathos of space| where the heart lies.
Riemke Ensing from Talking Pictures: Selected Poems, HeadworX, 2000
/
Überfahrten
Über den Norden schnellt ein Taniwha seine Zunge hevor aus Wairoa. Sein Schwanz schlängelt sich den Weg zur Küste zurück. Sein Auge vermisst den stetig fordernden Horizont der in zeitloser Ferne über dem Eigenwissen des Landes brütet. Gebogen zu Flammenschwingen sind scharf gesetzte Segel erfüllt vom Jubel der Trennung. Stets darunter jene Land- und Wasserweite die Ende und Anfang aller Geschichten markiert, Erzählungen vom Exil erkundet als Flügelschlag über den stürmischen Wellen. Hier ist Geschichte nahbei. Man hört sie in den Rhythmen des wandernden Windes wo Dunkel auf Licht trifft und Meer und Land sich verbinden die Reisen zu feiern, das Pathos der Weite wo das Herz liegt.
Riemke Ensing Aus Wildes Licht Gedichte aus Aotearoa / Neuseeland, Dieter Riemenschneider (Herausgeber/ Übersetzer), Tranzlit, Kronberg im Taunus 2010 – from Wild LightPoems from Ao/NZ, (edited & translated by D.R.)
The handsome Dutch(i.m. Riemke Ensing 24.05 1939-10.8.2026)
The handsome Dutch I secretly named her, couldn’t say it to her face, she might hit out without humour – direct, outspoken – don’t try to flatter me!! I wasn’t, Riemke, dear. It was just for fun. And you are!
You were a friend for 58 years; at first afraid of you at AU in 1967 I was glad to study Breughel’s Fall of Icarus and Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts poem with Miss Marsich, but then in Beckett’s Come & Go you so splendidly directed, we three silent young women on a stage bench in walk-off speechless parts. At No 12 Grafton Rd where you lived with Bill, the peals of laughter above when I visited Tony Curry below to solemnly learn to recite: Heere biginneth the Nonnes Preestes Tale of the cok & hen, Chanticleer and Pertelote; my writing a poem Tugboats for your son James, aged 6, as if we were look-out boys in friendly galleons meeting on the sea to pull over, chat and laugh; the Amnesty International black & red posters – the readings we all gave, you leading us into political knowledge; in your best English you having directed the flying-boat planeload of European immigrants to slide down the ramp into the lifeboats when it unexpectedly landed on the Tasman Sea en route to Ao/NZ …or so the story went; your very Europeanness – how the dining table was laid first with a carpet then a cloth, the sumptuous meals on it – you were a great and inventive cook. With Oma & Bill carrying full tureens and plates, your all coming down my parents’ garden path in Howick from yours, full of joy to share a luncheon feast one Sunday. Dieter & me visiting Astrid & you at Cheltenham Beach for another, on your friends’ terrace, looking out towards the sea.
In 1977 & with Caveman Press, Dunedin, my own first publisher the year before, your collecting & editing an anthology Private Gardens, a first for all we women poets, so we could speak out, with our own book; our own Kemsing tour of the North Island, visiting the Smithers, reading with Elizabeth, each buying a small Michael S painting; your coming to Singapore to take part in Writer’s Week 1986, dining out with Goh Poh Seng, the Australians, Vincent O and me at Peranakan Place. You & me dining and dancing in our long black & silver glittering frocks in the Vienna debutantes’ ballroom at the 1991 PEN International Conference. On & on it went. Your brilliant career. And your delight at being a grandmother upon Hendrik’s arrival – he’s now seven. The enormous collections of your airmail letters safely in my Chinese trunk, all scanned and sent to Deborah Shepherd last year. And now your new book Blue is a cracked vase in memory: Poems 2000-2025, I haven’t even yet seen.
I’m so sorry you’ve gone. We hadn’t written for three months. You flew past, here, the day after, I know. And waved. I hadn’t realised you were quite so ill. I knew you were frail. Wouldn’t even see me in 2024 when I was there – we just telephoned often. Were you shy to look old? Dearest Riemke, I’ve always accepted you as you are, handsome or frail, stormy or kind, off on a rampage or rescuing a fallen sparrow or a flower. Whatever happened, you were always my dear friend.
Now James has phoned: he’s posting the dedicated and signed copy of Blue…you had there for me.
Like a gannet from Muriwai over the cliff, over the sea, wheeling & turning with my beloved Dieter and your Bill & all the other gannets we know, Terrisa from Texas & Taos sculpting clouds, Vincent O, all flying on my desktop screen every time I open it, now each other’s companions…farewell, farewell, dear loved friends, fare well.
Jan Kemp, 12 August 2026, Kronberg im Taunus, Germany
Brian Gregory
A Poem for Riemke Ensing
The darkness must have been so dark and the blue dark too for you to decide to say goodbye. “is this what it comes to in the end ? “ did you reflect – “a rendez-vous with oblivion on legs unable to handle steps?”
A wish now you have made your decision
that stars light up the way of your going and the moon be a guide for your feet.
May your eyes feast on colours always glowing In paintings where contraries meet.
Brian Gregory
Blue Window
To hold the sky in your hand for just one moment as though your heart would break. All that devotional blue swirling the ‘Oh!’ out of breath promising such a morning roofs of mosques stretching their azure curves voluptuously, a mountain startled into purity–– in these heavenly vapours of air.
Riemke Ensing from Blue Is a Cracked Vase in Memory, Cold Hub Press, 2026
The National Library assumed responsibility for the New Zealand Poet Laureate Award in 2007. For the ten years prior, this had had been the personal project and passion of John Buck of Te Mata Estate winery in Hawkes Bay. The connection of the Laureate Award to its Hawkes Bay origins was maintained in the form of a Laureate weekend at Matahiwi marae near Clive, where the Poet Laureate received their tokotoko created by Jacob Scott, and took part in a public reading supported by poets chosen to accompany them.
This year the planned weekend in April was abandoned due to safety concerns over Cyclone Vaianu. As it was unlikely the weekend could be replicated, the presentation of Robert Sullivan’s tokotoko took place at the National Library in Wellington on 29 June, when Robert and almost 20 fellow poets celebrated this special moment in an afternoon of korero and poetry.
As part of this occasion and in recognition of his ‘minder’ role with the Poet Laureates, his administration of the Award and his contribution to the planning of the Matahiwi weekend since 2007, National Library staffer Peter Ireland was presented with a special book. This combined the talents of hand press artist Brendan O’Brien and poet, writer and MC extraordinaire Marty Smith, whose gorgeous bespoke introductions to each Laureate and accompanying poets are a highlight of the public poetry readings that are an established part of the Matahiwi Laureate weekend.
As a guest of two Laureates at the Matahiwi weekends, I have witnessed the attention Peter pays to each occasion along with the ongoing tenure of the Laureates. Peter has supported Poetry Shelf’s aim to showcase each Laureate, whether through the ongoing events they participate in, new and old poems written, or conversations and thoughts on poetry.
I am posting the pages of In a space between, this exquiisite illuminating limited edition book, so that we may all share in its beauty, and as a way of marking Peter’s invaluable contribution to poetry in Aotearoa. Peter’s infectious enthusiasm for poetry reaches wide and touches hearts and minds. He is an avid reader, especially local poetry.
This post is also a way of acknowledging Marty’s precious gift to Peter.
Poetry Shelf raises its glass and says ngā mihi Peter, tēnā rawa atu koe.
NZ Poetry Shelf 