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

Waitakere River 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 website

Listen to Riemke read at the Poetry Archive

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, late sixties

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.

Riemke Ensing
Talking Pictures: Selected Poems, HeadworX, 2000

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
from Blue 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

Riemke Ensing
Talking Pictures, Selected Poems, HeadworX, Wellington, 2000

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 (1970s) with Riemke, Vincent O’Sullivan, 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 Light Poems 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 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 were to send me your new book, but it cost too much. I would have to fly there to pick it up. 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.

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

wow!

If you missed reading and listening to the wonderful Poetry Day feature .posted here on Friday . . here you go

A crowd in Ōtepoti Dunedin’s Athenaeum library, the country’s oldest continuously operating library, still filling its original purpose to stimulate, inform and entertain. A cool evening, around 60 people crammed among old shelves laden with books. Thirteen poets, each reading a single poem around a theme that had been set with great sensitivity by the convenor, Wendy Parkin, chair of the Ōtepoti Dunedin branch of NZSA, in a week of ecological catastrophe, war and more Trumpian posturing. In Te Anau, another branch of Otago NZSA, was also celebrating the day in an event organised by Sara Litchfield. 

Tūmanako: Words of Hope

Wendy’s introduction widened its scope to encompass global politics, climate destruction, and also current attacks on literature, the humanities and original thought, drawing her references from Emily Dickinson (‘Hope is the thing with feathers’), Dinah Hawkins (‘Hope… is to do with trees”), Rebecca Solnit (Hope ‘is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky.’), Mary Oliver  (‘what we must do, I suppose, is to hope the world keeps its balance’),  and concluding with Shelley’s beautiful breath of air from the west wind (“…can spring be far behind?”). 

The poets and musicians who followed Wendy’s introduction rose to her challenge, and in all their various voices, sought to articulate this pressing need. Many in the audience commented afterward that the result had been one of the best poetry readings they’d ever attended in the city – and that’s a high bar! 

As Wendy expressed it, in summing up the evening, ‘Tonight, our invited poets have offered us consolation and challenge, addressing the most profound themes of life and death, love and loss, in different places and times, by turning their attention to the most ordinary of objects, like white shirts and yellow quinces, and activities from play and parties to cooking, sewing, re-building, performing, healing, and of course making poetry.… We are here tonight as part of that commitment to a live-able present and a sustainable future….It is my hope that we can – at least for a time, here together – imagine that the spring Shelley doesn’t want us to forget while in the depths of winter, is possible and is fast approaching, that the time of destruction might end and we might yet save and renew all that is life-affirming, beautiful and good. 

We can only hope. And fight. And vote. And write’.

It was a fine evening, and everyone walked out into that cool Otepoti Dunedin night, feeling yes, indeed! Spring could not be far behind!

---

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 (24 May 1939 -10 August 2026)
from The K. M. File and Other Poems with Katherine Mansfield, Hazard Press, 1993

top of my reading pile, a short black and a good poetry book
perfect weeks ahead

Poetry Shelf celebrates NZ Poetry Day 2026 with contributions from poets who have participated at three events across the country.

First up Helen Rickerby, Jackson McCarthy and Anna Jackson were part of a Panel of Poets, a Wellington event chaired by Chris Tse. As the poets were invited to talk about poetry and books, I invited the panelists to write a paragraph on poetry.

Secondly Tūmanako: Words of Hope is an evening of poetry and music that will be held at the Athaeneum Library, In Dunedin’s Octagon tonight with a number of poets and musicians performing. Fiona Farrell, David Eggleton, Emma Neale Sue Wootton and Louise Wallace have contributed a paragraph and a poem on Poetry and Hope.

Finally I invited poets and the MC from the Canterbury Poets’ Collective annual event Lambing Season in Christchurch to record a few poems and answer a few questions. A bouquet of grateful thanks to Poet Gail Zing who gathered the material from the participating poets: Jordan Irvine, Naomi Roberts, Indigo Tomlinson and Jor Dansaren.

Today, and over the weekend, Poetry Shelf invites you to listen and read, to choose a new poetry book to stall on, then to pull an old favourite from your shelves, on this special day when poetry is visibly and audibly sizzling and simmering across the motu. I am reading all Reimke Ensing‘s books on my shelf as we come together in shared sadness at her death. Next Thursday and Friday Poetry Shelf will be posting two tributes.

Thank you for your continued support of Poetry Shelf. My new Post Box (but do you use my private address if you have it): PO Box 58, Waitākere, 0660

Go well, go gently and, as Anna Jackson says, “The more the world darkens around us, the brighter poetry seems to shine.”

ordered these from Time Out Bookstore as I won’t make their event tonight
they offer a gold star poetry book selection

Panel of Poets

Helen Rickerby

I assume I think more than the average person about what poetry is, and the frequency of this musing has increased the more I move away from what (my) poetry was towards what (my) poetry will be. I do not think poetry is a puzzle to be solved, but it can be puzzling. I do not think poetry is a code to be cracked, but you do have to learn how to read it. Sometimes reading is feeling. It is possible the poet I am most influenced by is David Lynch, who was not a poet, and I am not a film maker and I do not like horror. But I think he showed me to read through feeling. To understand without knowing, to know without understanding. Though, on reflection, he probably learned that from us, us poets. Poetry can be beautiful without being beautiful. Poetry is not always poetic. Telling it slant isn’t only poetry, but it’s poetry. I think I can recognise it when I see it, hear it, but I think we will all disagree on where the boundaries are. And I think I like that.

Jackson McCarthy

I love poems, and I accept that some people don’t love poems. But I do think they’re wrong. It’s nice to have a few drinks and make a few texts that you probably shouldn’t. Beauty is overwhelming sometimes — you have to readjust your life to accommodate beauty. Beauty turns heads, makes people fall, ruins days. Every now and then I encounter a poet who totally revives my interest and my life. Recently, that has been Kate Camp. I love the sudden drops and escalations… “Walking up the path one time / I thought you’d hung a blue sheet on the line // it was the sky”. It was the sky! Well, that’s one way to feel about poetry: it was the sky and I’m living under it and it’s good to say true things. Some people want to talk about all that travels under the sign of love, but I want to talk about love itself. If you don’t love today, you have no concept of tomorrow. I once tried dating a boy who had no concept of tomorrow, and it was tortuous. Because I love today, I hope on tomorrow; I believe I will be alive tomorrow, even though tomorrow is unknowable and is not guaranteed. But if I really believed tomorrow wasn’t guaranteed, I’d act very differently today. In this sense fantasy is the foundational structure, and it’s nice to date somebody instead who promises things that they have no business promising, such as forever. Meanwhile, poetry is something I really like and maybe even love, and I think about the poets often. The other day while shelving books (I work at a bookshop) I thought of Auden’s Limestone, and Tse’s Last poem, and I walked almost to tears. My hands were occupied with banal tasks which I had sold to a company for money; my mind wandered and felt for you. To think of these poems… was it redemption or medication? Was it a fissure in capital or a way in which I was numbed to its degradation? Both — and that’s why I go dancing. 

Anna Jackson

The more the world darkens around us, the brighter poetry seems to shine. I do think reading and writing poetry is an act of resistance. What matters in poetry is everything a tech-driven late capitalist economy has no time for – beauty, confession, interiority, emotion, love, surprise.

Tūmanako: Words of Hope

Emma Neale

Recently an old university friend sent me a photo of his teenage daughter, curled up in her room with a pen and a paper notebook. She was writing poetry, the friend said. There was a touch of irony or bewilderment when, after a beat, he added, cos it’s beautiful weather outside. I was silently barracking for her, of course, but he probably guessed that, given he’s known me since I was 18, when I, too, showed him my early foal-staggers into poetry. I asked him who his daughter’s favourite poets were: he said that it was a good question, and he should know the answer, but didn’t. I sent him Ada Limón’s ‘How to Triumph like a Girl’, for him to show his daughter, some time. He liked the choice and that was the sum of our exchange. Yet this small glimpse of a new generation in cocooned absorption left me buoyed. There it was again, like a flower that insists through frosts: this urge to catch experience, ideas, emotions, translate them into language, and perhaps arrive at something transformed that might also have the power to shift perspective in the mind of the reader. I took that candid photo of a young girl determined to stay inside with her notebook as evidence of how stubbornly and robustly poetry persists, as a conduit of ideas, feeling, rebellion, history, personality, from generation to generation. It does so despite everything at large, outside the window — and that very much includes the Gradgrindians and dust-skulled politicians who try to suppress and deplete the creative impulse. Poetry and optimism might even be synonyms.

I’ve chosen a poem that I’ve loved ever since I was around eighteen, too: it was first published in the 1980s. It seems to join hands with the photo my old friend sent.

Girl Reading

She overhears the sound of things in hiding.
She bites an apple and imagines orchard starlight.
Every time she licks her thumb, its tip,
she tastes the icy branches,
she hears a sigh migrate from page to page.

Bill Manhire
From Sheet Music: Poems 1967—1982, Wellington, VUP, 1996

David Eggleton

Relaying Hope

Hope, as Emily Dickinson describes it, is a thing with feathers, a kind of comfort eiderdown to help get us through the darkest hour before dawn. The pitch-dark night of the soul gives way to light. And hope, as Lawrence Ferlinghetti well knew, is of the essence for poets: ‘the state of the world calls out for poetry to save it’; while Marianne Moore mused on hope, thusly: ‘tired but hopeful /hope not being hope, /until all ground for hope has/ vanished …’.

Hope, then, is something irreducible. For Rebecca West: ‘Poetry should be burned to the bone by austere fires and washed white with the rains of affliction’, before any declaration of hope. In West’s formulation, the poetic is an unparaphrasable communion with the void, expressive of our basic humanity – one defined by ‘worlds that were and will be, by death and day’, to steal a quote from Wallace Stevens, writing in a poem about Walt Whitman. Poets at their best, Wallace Stevens went on to declare, are philosophers and ponderers, and their evocations are the speech of clouds. Resonance is all in poetry; we are part of the chaos and the chaos is part of us.

Poetry has something of the character of Mr Micawber in Charles Dickens’ novel David Copperfield, ever hopeful of something turning up, to be spun like straw into gold. Poets live in hope because they are able to work something up from the most humble or insignificant of materials, the most evanescent or intangible of moods, and make something lasting, using no more than pen and paper. If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, as P. B. Shelley affirmed, it is because they speak in purest form to human conscience and its values; they articulate, lighter than air, the ethics that govern or should govern human behaviour. Poetry is a tradition, an aspiration, an illumination, that ‘beacons from the abode where the Eternal are’, or else it offers ‘a warm moment that rings with song’, to borrow from Ruth Dallas.

‘In dreams begin responsibilities’, intoned Delmore Schwarz, hopefully; while William Butler Yeats chanted, ‘I have spread my dreams under your feet, tread softly because you tread on my dreams’ – proof positive of the power of hope and wilful self-belief, which poets certainly need. In the end, poetry is the effort of wresting words not from silence but from the noise of other words; and for poets, the nowness of everything is absolutely wonderous, while paying poetic attention is always a declaration of hope.

Tomorrow

Tomorrow, every now and then, the world might end,
but we will be carrying on.
Tomorrow, the whistle blows for the start of the week,
and that’s where you come in.
Tomorrow is poetry in the hully-gully of its making.
Tomorrow is the spice paladin’s heated aromas.
Tomorrow is the green, waved flag of farm hills.
Tomorrow is petals, proud and bright on magnolias.
Tomorrow, everything goes in the rumpus room:
the spillage, the abandoned card game, the unemptied ashtray,
the sticky whisky glass.
Tomorrow is golden chimes, lighting up the lemon tree.
Tomorrow is wild mountain hail, and snow to sea-level.
Tomorrow, in all the iridescence and bewitching beauty of it.
Tomorrow, I got your back, and I wanna hold your hand.
Tomorrow, we go as inseparable comrades, arm in arm, through the advancing years.
Tomorrow, geology is pressing you to coal, and then to rough diamond.
Tomorrow, the world’s as blue as an orange.
Tomorrow, the world’s going micro.
Tomorrow, each of us is moving backwards,
sweeping the trail clean with a branch.
Tomorrow, see you on the flipside, sistah.
Tomorrow, in drist, rain will dringle and drumble
to form evanescences, vapours, balms and rinsings.
Tomorrow, more bafflegarb, gobbledegook, bumpf,
officialese, taradiddles and blatteration.
Tomorrow, never give in, never give in, never, never, never —
in nothing ever give in, except to accede to good sense
and deeds of honour, for the sake of others.
Tomorrow, out of the black: ka awatea, daybreak, an ocean gleam,
a faint stain, ripples, eels crossing vast waters;
and above them, a mollymawk’s glide
tomorrow.

David Eggleton
from Respirator: a Laureate Collection, Otago University Press, 2023

Louise Wallace

Poetry is my way of navigating difficult things, so writing is often a hopeful act in itself. This poem was about unpacking the twin events of the birth of my son and my father’s experience with dementia, and later, his passing. Through that grief and through the poem, I found a way to carry on.

from VESSEL

 

Try to picture me.
Try to imagine my face.
I wonder if you will think of me

                      when I no longer know

                                                           I’m here.

       In sailing,
you must learn how to demast:

                                       how to cut away

                              the mess.

                        *

There are many different scales of pain.
Some are songs.
                                                          Some linen

                                   with white lace trim.

How small they seem, you’ll say,
             when you hold the clothes

 

      I once thought hard about for you.

                                                       In an instant,

we transform.

                        *

Birth is the body’s intuitive process.
And people walk tightropes all the time.

 

There is now a whole fleet
of waiting vessels.
                                              An envoy

              at the edges of my eyes.

                        *

Try to picture me.
                                             Sunlight beams

through the window
but I do not yet feel myself.

It shines
                         on blue pathways that run under

 

your skin,
                                  passages filled
                                                                     with life.

                                                          You smile and I feel

 

                                  your forehead on mine.
    As well as pain,

                                             there is joy.

                        *

We knew who you were as soon as we saw you.
The second they pulled you from my body.
The name means firm or strong, and you are beautiful.

Other names mean

                                                       courageous.

                                           Voyager.

                        *

In some other place, you finish building
                      the boat my father no longer can.

 

          Some lines can’t be cut.

 

                                                I know
                      how to move now, I know
                                                             how to breathe.

 

                        *

Swaddle the hull’s ribcage in wooden sheets.
I am ready to sail with you.

 

Louise Wallace

 

from This is a story about your mother, THWUP, 2023

Sue Wootton

Hope, like light, is energy required for life. It may flicker or grow fierce; it may flare, or dwindle – but heaven forbid it turn completely to cold ash. Then, despair descends to fill the void: smothering, oppressive, breeding apathy, making you believe there’s no point in even imagining a turn for the good.

Poets are in the business of paying attention to the world. Given our species’ longstanding predilection for making such a mess of things, you might therefore expect poetry to trade only in despair. Yet what poets in their close-noticing often uncover – even if they’re down in the ruins dismally stirring those stone cold ashes – are glimpses of beauty and love. Stubborn sparks! Glimmers of possibility, glimmers of joy, glimmers of freedom. Poets are hope-finders. They just can’t help it; it’s in the job description: Notice, imagine, create.

Poem in June 2020

A narrow aperture of light today, a squint
in the year’s dark walls, and I, as if in anchorite
seclusion, am pressed to it. Truly the light is sweet,
flowing like a gently falling stream between
bare branches, spreading out along the path
as if to say, behold the sun, perhaps the earth
abideth and may flourish yet. There is, from cell
to cell, a season’s purpose quickening, voices

rising, carried on the birds of air across the lands,
insisting time and chance might turn on all
with equal favour, and all will breathe and none
shall labour for the wind in endless days of darkness.
The monumental marble men are falling on the cracked
foundations. An aperture, an opening. Press to it.

Sue Wootton
(First published as ‘Poem on the Shortest Day’ in takahē 101)

Jordan Irvine 

‘thickets’

‘not even a mouse’

‘sydenham’

Name three words that matter to you when you are writing a poem.
Purpose, perspective and rhythm 

Can you share a few poets whose poetry boosts you as a writer? 
Dominic Hoey, Ruby Macomber, Josiah Morgan

Why poetry? Why poetry in this tumultuous world?
There’s this Armand Hammer song, “Dogeared” and in the second verse, billy woods is posed this question and says he doesn’t answer but thinks about it over the week and throughout the verse he just describes what happened in that week and when he is asked again he replies “I’m still grappling”. That’s the extent of it I suppose.

Jordan Irvine (they/them) is an Ōtepoti born and Ōtautahi based poet. Their work details the absurdness of both the mundane and extra-ordinary through their own absurd nature. Their work has been featured in The Spinoff, The Art Lens, Symposia, bad apple and more.

Naomi Roberts

‘Coup de Grace’

‘Palindromic’

‘Don’t Bother Reading The Poem’

Name three words that matter to you when you are writing a poem.

Precision, reality, exploration 

Can you share a few poets whose poetry boosts you as a writer? 

Since I first discovered his works as a child, I’ve enjoyed E E Cummings’ poetry. The enrapturing rhythm of his words and frequent use of parentheses and enjambment to change the way lines are read commands me to pay attention to the form of poetry rather than solely the poem’s content. Bill Manhire’s succinct writing captures vast imagery and concepts within a few words, leading me to draw more out of a poem each time it is re-read. His work leads me to consider the same in my own poetry — how can I say what I mean sharply on paper, but leave larger implications in a line’s wake? 

Why poetry? Why poetry in this tumultuous world?

There’s not really another option for me. Poetry is language in (simultaneously) its most naked and put-together form, showing almost viscerally the workings of the writer’s mind. There’s a punchiness to it that is undeniably attention-grabbing. Our perceptions of the world can be shaped by the words we use to view it. Reading and writing came hand-in-hand for me: as I discovered how poets have been speaking their minds for generations I soon learnt I had plenty to say as well.

Naomi Roberts is a long-suffering word tamer who has been wrangling stray sentences since 2009. Born and raised in Ōtautahi and tutored at Write-On School For Young Writers, the young poet/songwriter enjoys meddling with forms she knows little about and asking more questions than she answers. Her work has been published in NZPS’s anthology There Are Rabbits Here. 

Indigo Tomlinson

Name three words that matter to you when you are writing a poem.

Emotional honesty, empathy, excision. 

Can you share a few poets whose poetry boosts you as a writer? 

Embarassing as this is to admit, I actually read relatively little poetry in my free time! As an English Lit major however there are a number of poets whose work I have read and enjoyed from a more analytical perspective, in particular Louise Glück and Sylvia Plath.  I studied The Wild Iris quite extensively last year and I adored how structured the collection was and how effortlessly Glück moved between different voices. I think that her fluidity of voice is really inspiring, and she also uses a lot of rich nature imagery which I appreciate. Thematically I appreciate anything which feels intersectional or like it straddles a boundary and I think she does that very well. Although I don’t read much poetry, I do listen to a lot of music, and I think that songwriting can function as a poetic form when its done well. With that idea in mind, some of the artists whom I love are Maisie Peters, Taylor Swift and Lana del Rey. I’m definitely not very niche or original when it comes to the musical media I consume but I do like to think that popular things are popular for a reason and its interesting to consider what is it about these songs which cause them to evoke such strong emotional responses in so many different people.  

Why poetry? Why poetry in this tumultuous world?

Well, why not poetry?

I think I like poetry it requires a creative exchange between the writer and the reader. To me, the meanings of my writing always feel very obvious, but I know that to other people my poems could read as weird or confusing, and that friction is interesting to me. You get as much out of a poem as you put into it, both as a reader and as a  writer.  I like that poetry is a liminal and ambigous form of expression, because, as you say, our world is a tumultuous place. Poetry can reflect that but it can also provide a respite from  it. 

Indigo’s poems

Deposition II

this is a painting made psychedelically violent by conflicting color, a corrosive pressure against my eyeballs. the lecturer muses that it is modern art, shorthand for this can mean anything you want. I look at the title 

Deposition II

and wonder where Deposition I is. Such grand roman numerals – I and II, lined up like multi-coloured dominoes, the father knocking over down into the son, king passing on to king. I am the first of my name in an un-illustrious line, called indigo for eye color and not for legacy, unoriginal i know, but primogeniture reigns supreme, and if i was a boy i would have the letters G R T printed on my birth certificate – in untidy newborn parent handwriting, pushing me backwards into my father and his father before him.  

G R T – for grit and gravel and grazes, for my psychedelically violet childhood, a flailing fist, seven-year-old gives her father a black eye. And my grandfather is G R T too, G R T and also blind on his right side. These patterns are clearer to me than the sporadic smears of color which comprise Deposition II.  

Grayson, they might have termed me, had some chromosomes aligned differently. A son made gray, no paint palette explosion of color, nothing like this childish picture projected on the wall of a lecture theatre, just like how I am weakly projecting myself onto my forebears. Art imitates life imitates art, and imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so I suppose it is a good thing I have never been capable of detecting sarcasm.

As Grayson, my form would be like a graphite pencil, like clouds. As Grayson, perhaps, other things would be different too. 

But as it is, I was born with a vagina and the letter G on my birth certificate is not a signifier of name but of sex, standing for Girl, standing solely for this iteration of life and not some contrived parallel. Thus, the weight of G R T shall never be mine to bear, and I do not mind, although I feel it would not be very heavy; no heavier than a 3500g baby whom my father caught with two hands, and whose eyes he looked in when they first opened, and then whose eyes he told my mother were the color – indigo blue. 

on The Yellow Wallpaper and the duality of a teenage girl 

She doesn’t want me to tell you her name. This is because she thinks being nameless will lend her the universality of classic literature. She cited The Yellow Wallpaper like it made her intelligent and I told her Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a eugenicist. 

She went for a walk in the park yesterday and fancied that she looked tragically esoteric. I told her no-one can be esoteric in two thousand twenty six, that all the esotericism died with the rise of the Internet, or, if not then, when mankind built an AI and called it Claude. Claude does not require namelessness to be universal; he is everywhere, and also pigeons are spies for the government. 

She looks for signs of her importance in the shafts of sun, the way it lances like light off a knife smudged with butter. Silhouetted on screen she is radiating “main-character-energy.” The sun is yellow, but there is no wallpaper, except over all the cracks. 

If she crawls, it is not madly nor in circles, but only ever in the clubs, sometime after 11pm, amid a mass of writhing bodies, twisting like lines, limbs knotting into an indecipherable pattern. She does not suffer from postnatal depression because she is eighteen and also a virgin, although I doubt she wanted that disclosed. 

She thinks if I make her nameless then the audience (who the fuck are the audience?) will project themselves onto her, and through that process – grainy film rippling over a white sheet, hung in the backyard like so much laundry – she might at last be understood. 

Her laundry is like teeth, dirtied yellow, and her name is the one on my birth certificate. 

hand me down your blue genes size XS 

seven true ribs each one visible
count the valleys between, like on knuckles
find what months have thirty days always 
waning always wasting, waxing of legs 

Eve was torn out from Adam’s rib cage
was part of me not once held within yours?
if my mother grew her bones inside you, 
half of me must’ve formed in those moments as well

let us walk on splinters: crack the egg shell, 
the little mermaid lost her voice for such a privilege
bury beige shards in the compost, still nothing grows
yolk me bleeding to this wagon of waiting rooms  

doctors like to ask when i got my first period i say fifteen which is late although i am never.
do you know anything about this 
?

Indigo Tomlinson (she/her) is a first year student at the University of Canterbury studying Law and English literature. She grew up in the small town of Whakatane in the Bay of Plenty before moving to Whangarei as a teenager. Her poems have been published several times in the NZPS yearly anthologies. When not writing she enjoys spending time outdoors, volunteering, practicing aerial silks and spending time with her family.

Jo Dansaren

‘ŌhinetahI Tales’

‘Lost Ent-Wife Finding Oneself’

‘Hearth, Harvest

Name three words that matter to you when you are writing a poem. 

Flow, rhythm, feeling.

Can you share a few poets whose poetry boosts you as a writer? 

Desireé Dallagiacomo, Melanie McKerchar, Neil Hilborn

Q. Why poetry? Why poetry in this tumultuous world? 

Poetry is a powerful combination of voice and written word, allowing authenticity, intuition and emotion to connect people, especially in difficult times. As humans we love to relate to each other, poetry is a beautiful bridge between individuals. 

Jor Dansaren (she/they) is an MC, producer, poet and performance artist based in Ōtautahi. Heavily influenced by the delights of the natural world, Old Norse skaldic storytelling, and spiritual process, Jor finds wonder in life and the broad spectrum of human experience. They are a regular poetry slammer and their written work has been published in Catalyst and Fuego journals.

The Eastern Southland Gallery warmly invites you to a Floor Talk, Exhibition Opening and Poetry Reading, on Saturday 12^th and Sunday 13^th September, to celebrate the exhibition Faces & Flowers: Patricia France & Dinah Hawken – see invitation attached.

Dunedin artist Patricia France (1911-1995) began painting in her fifties. For Patricia, this activity was life transforming, and she became a dedicated artist, exhibiting regularly over the next thirty years and developing strong friendships with fellow artists.

Dinah Hawken is a poet, based in Paekākāriki and a relation of Patricia France. She has written a collection of sonnets responding to the paintings of Patricia France and these will be exhibited alongside her work.

Please join us in celebrating this new exhibition.

Eastern Southland Gallery

PO Box 305, Gore 9740

14 Hokonui Drive, Gore 9710