Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Frankie McMillan picks Kerrin P Sharpe

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blue

your blue wooden house
still nestles in Niaqornat
                        Johanna

the washing line once
a bunting of towels and nappies
                        stands empty
the breathy songs of narwhals
dried by the wind

that last night in the front room
Johanna four tall candles
                        held stillness
around you an orchestra
of faith in light

and when morning arrived
with the sledge you were blessed
                        with herbs and moss
the whole village behind you
all the way to Chapel

do you remember saying
the ice would never change?
                        these days
it’s too thick for boats
too thin for sledges

some hunters shoot their dogs
unmended nets sleep on the beach
                        what happened
to elbow grease Johanna?
everyone’s on the internet

Kerrin P  Sharpe 
from Hoof, Te Herenga Waka Press, XXXX

This is one of my favourite Kerrin Sharpe poems. At first glance the elegy honours and laments an old woman Johanna, while also reflecting on the changes climate crisis has brought to her remote village in Greenland. Then the title, ‘blue’ with its associations of feeling down or depressed reflects on the high incidence of mental health related to the abandonment of cultural practices in the region. In the dark days of winter, instead of coming together in the evenings, ‘ Everyone’s on the internet.’ ‘ So many stay indoors/ forgetting/who they are.’

The traditional farewell to Johanna is conveyed in ten lines with a close up view … ‘four still candles held stillness /around you/ to the wide angle view of Johanna on the sled ‘ the whole village behind you/all the way to the Chapel.’ As with all Kerrin’s poems there is an astonishing agility and lightness of touch to the imagery.  The apt use of synesthetic lines,  ‘the breathy songs of narwhals/ dried by the wind.’ is another characteristic of her work that I admire. 

There is a power in the unanswered questions posed throughout but also a sense that the poet herself is baffled by the enormity of the environmental degradation.

‘Waves nibble away the cliffs.
What if the ice left
and never returned,
what then, Johanna?’

The shape of the stanzas, with their indented lines denote a kind of falling and for me, this juxtaposition of falling and grace or terror and beauty epitomize our extraordinary rich and fragile world.

Frankie McMillan

Frankie McMillan is an award winning poet and writer of short fiction. In 2019 her book, The Father of Octopus Wrestling, and other small stories(Canterbury University Press) was shortlisted for the NZSA Heritage Award and listed by Spinoff as one of the ten best fiction books of 2019. Her poetry has been selected for Ōrongohu  /Best New Zealand Poems 2012, 2015 and 2022, Landfall, Takahe and in international journals including Cincinnati Review, Shenandoah and Atlanta Review.   Her collection, Eddie Sparkle’s Bridal Taxi (CUP) was launched, October, 2025.

Kerrin P. Sharpe is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Hoof (2023) and Louder (2018). Her poems have appeared in local and international literary journals including Landfall, Turbine | Kapohau, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook, POETRY (US), Blackbox Manifold, PN Review and Stand. Her work has been anthologised in Best New Zealand Poems six times, the anthology Best of Best New Zealand Poems, Oxford Poets 2013, 150 Essential New Zealand Poems and A Game of Two Halves: The Best of Sport 2005–2019. In 2021 she held a writing residency at the Michael King Writers Centre.

 

Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Michael King Australian Residency

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The Michael King Writers Centre in association with Varuna, The National Writers’ House in Katoomba, NSW, Australia is pleased to announce for the fifth time, a residency in Australia for New Zealand writers.  
This three week residency is open to mid-career or established writers who have had a book published in the last two years.
The writer awarded the residency will receive return economy airfares to Sydney, accommodation with all meals included, plus the opportunity to present their work at the Blue Mountains Writers’ festival.
 
Applications close on Monday 27 April and the selection is expected to be announced in late May.

This programme is a partnership between the Michael King Writers Centre, Varuna, The National Writers’ House of Australia and the Blue Mountains Writers’ Festival, Katoomba.

Details here

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Cilla McQueen picks ‘Quark Dance’

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Quark Dance

here come the colours
to settle on our lips and eyes
and rainbow lighting all the edges
the boundaries are unstable
trust love not logic
light falls
never the same way twice
keep awake
jump out into the never look back
dream hair ribbons unfurling
I can if you can too
barefoot balance and free fall
without scary death in our mouths
just plain delight
learning to nudge the wind
dance falling exploding symmetry
stretching the space
pulse slow arm elbow up
whip spine twist
thigh knee toe out
the current passes
nowadays science is pure poetry
all the particles bounce and decay
sweetly and sure as seeds
and quarks come in such colours and flavours
as beauty charm and strangeness
it’s all so weird and simple
the world’s made up of tiny little energetic
multicoloured irrational jellybeans
so dance
quark dance

Cilla McQueen
From Anti Gravity (McIndoe 1984), re-published in Poeta (2018, OUP)

‘Quark Dance’: it was unusual to write about quantum physics in 1984, but I did it anyway in this poem from Anti Gravity which delights unscientifically in the remarkable behaviours of elementary particles.
Cilla McQueen


Cilla McQueen MNZM is a poet, teacher and artist, and a three-time winner of the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry. She received an honorary doctorate in literature from the University of Otago in 2008 and was New Zealand Poet Laureate from 2009 to 2011. In 2010 she received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement (Poetry). In 2020 she was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services as a poet. Cilla lives in Bluff, at the southern tip of New Zealand’s South Island.

Otago University Press page

Playing Favourites is a series where poets pick a favourite poem of their own or by another nz poet.

Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Ariana Tikao book launch

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Kia ora koutou, booklovers!

Scorpio Books and Otago University Press warmly welcome you to the launch of Pepeha Portal by Ariana Tikao.

Pepeha Portal is the keenly anticipated debut poetry collection from New Zealand Arts Laureate Ariana Tikao. Rooted in Kāi Tahu identity, the collection chronicles a homecoming and offers a moving account of memory, place and connection.

Born and raised in Ōtautahi Christchurch, Tikao left the city after the devastating earthquakes of 2010 and 2011. In 2023 she was awarded the Ursula Bethell Residency at the University of Canterbury and returned to live in a place that was both deeply familiar and astonishingly new. Written largely during this period, Pepeha Portal is shaped by stories embedded in the landscape – many long erased by colonialism and only recently exposed by cultural, as much as geological, shifts.

Responding to suburban landscapes and tīpuna places, personal memory and ancestral voice, Pepeha Portal considers how language, whakapapa and whenua act as portals to belonging.

All welcome, this is a free event. Refreshments provided. Please send in your RSVP.

Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: Claire Beynon

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Grapefruit

He has two wishes for his sixth
birthday: a pocket of ruby grapefruit
and a citrus knife
with a bend in it.

It is the Fast of Ramadhan — the twenty-eighth day
in — and the weather shows no consideration.
Flies and an irreverent heat
nudge Mr Sahlie the fruit seller
and his cart horse up the street.

The children are waiting. They know
he will come. He’ll spoil them
with a fistful of pomegranate, a slice of ice
green melon. Upside down they wait
dangling limbs and rinds of chatter
from the purple crown of a jacaranda
tree. They swing from a sandpit sky
scuffed toes bare, swishing through a thick mirage
of air. Up at the gate, in the post-box shade
beach buckets brim with the horse’s drink.

Ramadhan. And today is the boy’s
sixth birthday. He drops to the ground
with a ripe fruit sound, runs
pelter, pelter down the street.
There’s a horse, a cart and an old man
to meet.

And of course he’s remembered. He whistles
and grins, heaves the grapefruit down.
Next week, they agree, when the Fast
is complete, they’ll sit on the pavement
enjoy a pink feast.

“Why, Mr Sahlie?” I hear my boy speak.
“Why do they smell so wet
and deep?”

Claire Beynon
from Open Book: Poetry & Images, Steele Roberts, 2007

Claire Beynon is an artist and writer living in Ōtepoti Dunedin. Her poetry, flash fiction and short stories have been widely pub-lished and anthologised in Aotearoa and abroad. She has been a runner-up in the Sunday Star Times Short Story Competition and in 2002 was the winner of the NZ Poetry Society’s International Poetry award. In 2021 her poem ‘Today’s Sky’ was awarded the Takahē Monica Taylor Poetry Prize.  Claire combines the contemplative rhythms of writing and art-making with a range of interdisciplinary collaborations. Two summer research seasons in Antarctica continue to inform her work. Her most recent collection is For when words fail us: a small book of changes, The Cuba Press, 2024. Website

The Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: A place to enter and pause and take a long slow breath and then another, as you absorb the beauty movement joy stillness wonder movement of a poem.

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: ‘An Irregular Family Villanelle: Cornwall, August 2025’ by Harry Ricketts

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An Irregular Family Villanelle: Cornwall, August 2025

All thoughts can be bent like a spoon,
even this sunny, wave-splashy afternoon.
Lost pasts twist and shout in the wind.

The sea morphs green to blue.
‘You must catch the wave; the wave won’t catch you.’
All thoughts can be bent like a spoon.

Francis and Maxime hurl howlers at the sky;
Jamie makes a wicked cottage pie.
Lost pasts twist and shout in the wind.

Each lane unspools its herring-bone stone charm.
Tommy with a child on either arm.
All thoughts can be bent like a spoon.

Jessie suspends the how and when;
Arya and Delfi are ‘president’ again.
Lost pasts twist and shout in the wind.

The sea morphs green to blue.
My mother lived here once; so, too, did you.
All thoughts can be bent like a spoon.
Lost pasts twist and shout in the wind.

Harry Ricketts

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.

Poetry Shelf Speaks Out To For With: Stumbling into Li He by Jeffrey Paparoa Holman

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Stumbling into Li He
– for Mike Johnson

Reading Li He in your translation, somebody
threw me back on the Blaketown Tip, at
the moment a fishing boat was flipped.

Some people told me poetry was a waste,
but now, beneath their graves, they cry
for immortality.

What did I do wrong by writing?
I could easily have sold my spine
to industry and the chainsaws.

What have I done in my life,
but sung of the terror, when our
wooden bridge sailed downstream?

Let me tell you of my graduation,
the day I went underground with my father,
and saw the hell he risked, to feed me?

Now at life’s end, this mad president
and a vain, ambitious minister, seek me
out for my votes, to kill me.

War’s survivors raised me up
in the hemisphere of desolation,
shadowing us to the earth’s far end,
pretending, here, at last, was peace.

23.9.25
Jeffrey Paparoa Holman

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, is published by Canterbury University Press.

POETRY SPEAKS OUT FOR TO WITH at a time when so many challenging issues in the world and at home need audible voices of dissent, vital spotlights, voice to voice connections. Intro

Poetry Shelf Writes Out To For With: a new series

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I have planted beetroot next to the peace seeds
I have planted cauliflowers next to the protest pots
I have planted oregano next to the hope seedlings
I have planted spinach in our home garden

The Poetry Shelf Breathing Room is getting so much love – and it is an absolute joy hanging out in my physical poetry room, pulling favourite books off my shelves, choosing poems that I love to linger over, to slowly breathe in. A perfect tiny retreat in this upheaval world.

But I do want to resume the idea of protest. Last year I posted clusters of protest poems, poems speaking out against the GAZA catastrophe and the Dunstan mining issues. This week I have been mulling over poems as protest and decided, yes poetry can be the protest placard, but it can speak/protest/spotlight/challenge in myriad ways. There are so many disturbing issues in the world and at home at the moment, issues that need audible voices of dissent – whether in print media, social media, on radio airwaves, in award speeches, in theatre, in music, in poetry.

When we speak out we can make our messages clear, as Dario Fo did in his Italian theatre decades ago, and we can also write poetry that is nuanced, that speaks for as much as of, that speaks against and also speaks with. Poets have done this across time, through the travesties of world wars, the plundering and poisoning of the planet, the widening of the gulf between rich and poor, the cruel and ignorant hierarchies that privilege gender and race, slave labour and privileged greed. I am thinking of education systems that stunt learning rather than nourish multiple options, health systems that deny access to the best drugs and care while stretching nurses and doctors to breaking point. I am thinking of the dispossessed and the hungry, water that is failing, flora and fauna that is at risk.

I am thinking of a world where a few maniac babyboychild leaders smash the lives and homes and futures of mothers fathers sons daughters aunts uncles friends scholars journalists frontline workers for reasons that are in no way linked to the good and wellbeing of our planet.

So at a time when my own writing pen has frozen, and my heart is breaking, and my energy jar manages a handful of daily drops, I am determined to keep Poetry Shelf as a connection point for poetry readers and writers in Aotearoa New Zealand.

So often we don’t know the stories hidden in the person standing next to us, the toughness and the challenges they are navigating in a world that is bent over and slam winded.

Let us counter leaders that have no concept of compassion, empathy, wisdom.

Your support and contributions and ongoing kindnesses are poetry gold.

let us speak out to for with

First Impressions

Vice-President Spiro Agnew brought his wife,
an Apollo 10 astronaut, a fleet of newsmen
and a score of aides to spread his message of goodwill
through the Pacific,
but hundreds of long-haired ruffians stood outside
the Intercontinental Hotel in Auckland
yelling, ‘One two three four
we don’t want your stupid war.’

He could tell in a flash they were
the brown-rice, I-Ching ruffians
the kidney-bean, carrot-cake–with-cream-cheese ruffians
the Carlos Castaneda, LSD ruffians
the Ban-the-Bomb, Give-Peace-a-Chance ruffians
the Mother-Earth, home-birth ruffians
the Be-Here-Now, flower-power ruffians
the I-love-Woodstock, Moosewood-cookbook ruffians
(give a year or two).

He could tell that in an instant.

After all the kerfuffle and the police batons drawn,
he raised his eyebrows, shrugged his shoulders
and said with all the goodwill in the world,
‘They have nothing constructive to offer.’

Paula Green
from The Baker’s Thumbprint (Seraph Press, 2013)

Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: See What a Little Moonlight Can Do to You by Hone Tuwhare

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See What a Little Moonlight Can Do to You

The moon is a gondola.
It has stopped rocking.
Yes. It’s stopped now.

And to this high plateau
its stunning influence
on surge and loll of tides
within us should

somehow not go
unremarked
for want of breath
or oxygen.

And if I
to that magic micro-second
instant
involuntary arms reach out
to touch detain

then surely
it is because you
are so good:
so very good to me.

Hone Tuwhare
from Mihi: Collected Poems, Penguin Books, 1987

Hone Tuwhare (1922- 2008) was a father, poet, political activist and boilermaker. He published at least thirteen collections of poetry, won two New Zealand Book Awards, held two honorary doctorates and, in 1999, was Te Mata Poet Laureate. In 2003 he was named an Arts Foundation of New Zealand Icon Artist.

The Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: A place to enter and pause and take a long slow breath and then another, as you absorb the beauty movement joy wonder stillness of a poem.