Poetry Shelf review conversations: Chris Tse

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Dance-Floor Romance, Chris Tse
Auckland University Press, 2026
AUP page

“Let the poem approach you first. Don’t point; don’t scare it.”

from ‘How to edit a poem‘

Chris Tse’s new collection of poetry, Dance-Floor Romance, sets me musing on the sublime reach of what poetry can do. It makes me feel. It makes me think. Laugh. Tingle. Dance with joy. To celebrate this sublime arrival, Chris and I had a poetry conversation. Honestly I am bursting with the connective and connecting joy of poetry.

Plot a lifetime of joy.
Begin with a niece discovering how to dance;
end with a poet weeping happy tears
next to water.

from ‘On joy’

Paula: I pick up a book, put it down, pick it up again when the mood is right, find myself navigating multiple paths and reaping multiple poetry rewards. This is what happened when I picked up Dance-Floor Romance and, from the first line, held the poetry to my heart. The opening poem, ‘On joy’, unfolds from a notion of joy, and this notion epitomised my reading experience. It was one of joy, a word that drives my blogs and my own writing. Before we talk about your extraordinary book, does poetry joy resonate with you?

Chris: Absolutely – poetry has always been a major source of joy because of all the opportunities and experiences it’s created for me. It helped me find a community of poets and writers who inspire me and have become incredible friends and collaborators. That’s why joy became the foundation of how I carried out my duties as Poet Laureate and the conversations I had with different people during my term. Joy became a really useful way to frame poetry and challenge the stigma attached to it (that it’s complicated, or boring, or irrelevant). Asking people to begin from a place of joy can do wonders to change their perceptions. It’s been amazing to witness ecstatic audience responses at poetry slams and events like Show Ponies or Love At First Line (the poetry dating show I curated at WORD Christchurch), which have had people cheering and laughing – such a great reminder of the many ways that poetry create joy for others.

Paula: You were a fabulous Poet Laureate Chris. And yes you spread poetry joy across Aotearoa. What matters to you when you write a poetry book? When you write a poem?

Chris: Over the years I’ve given myself more permission to trust my instincts and to not get caught up in what I think other people expect from me, so the thing that matters most when I’m writing is remaining true to myself – that is, saying what I want to say, honouring my fears and insecurities, or letting myself lean into silliness. I want that sense of curiosity and play to come through for the reader. Writing each of my books has been a chance to challenge my creative practice, so if I can surprise myself, it feels like that means I’m on the right track.

Paula: And what is important to you when you read a poem by someone else? What poetry books have travelled with you, vitally, essentially?

Chris: For me, it’s about that moment of pause a poem or a book can create – for you to laugh, gasp, or sit and ponder. I like it when a poem creates space to imagine, so the ones that stick with me are usually the ones that offer a moment of hope, even if it comes with a side of discomfort.

In terms of vital and essential books, Jenny Bornholdt’s These Days is a perennial touchstone, as is Richard Siken’s Crush, which I’ve talked about before in other interviews. They’re quite different books, but I like how each one creates layers of detail to move between the ordinary and the extraordinary.

During my term I kept a few anthologies nearby like talismans: An Anthology of New Zealand Poetry in English, which was a set text for the undergrad poetry workshop at the IIML back in the day; A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand; and No Other Place To Stand An Anthology of Climate Change Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand.

Paula: Did anything in particular spark the arrival of this collection?

Chris: Essentially it was being appointed Poet Laureate! Super Model Minority had just been published a few months before the appointment, so I was planning to take a bit of a break from working on a book-length project, or perhaps even dip my feet into another genre like fiction. However, the Poet Laureate role required me to write new poems and I received a lot of commissions, so I began to accumulate a lot of new material. However, a finished book wasn’t top of mind as I was writing them.

In some ways this is the first book I’ve published where I didn’t set out with a particular structure or concept in mind, but things started to fall into place when I landed on the title Dance-Floor Romance. The theme of ‘joy’ is probably the closest I had to a north star as I was writing, and as I sifted through the poems I could see that there were recurring themes or interests – legacy, nostalgia, desire – that I was thinking about a lot over the past few years for various reasons. I spent a lot of time figuring out how all the poems I wrote could fit together in a collection – the sequencing was the hardest part of the process this time around.

We make the world with what’s left
to us after fire claims its share. Songs
of praise run their course and ink fades

on letters never sent, their secret joys
& pleasures left to cool with no one
to fulfill them. Bury it all in the sky.

from ‘2024 & Other Poems’

Paula: I love the glorious multifariousness of the collection, whether I am thinking of form or musicality or themes. I am thinking of friendship, music, dance, desire, taking photographs, memory, being gay, getting high, getting low, the difficulties of the world. Yet everything feeds into the collection’s pulsating core. For me, and I could be widely off the mark here, this is a book of self. Incredibly moving in its personal ebb and flow, its tremble between failure and loneliness and epiphany, the opting for glitter shower rather than screams pitched at alarmist headlines. Does this collection feel deeply personal to you?

Chris: Nicholas Reid had a similar observation in his review of the book in The Listener, noting that the majority of the poems are written in the first person and could be seen as ‘autobiographical divulgences’. It’s not what I set out to do, but perhaps it was inevitable that it ended up where it did because becoming Poet Laureate did bring up a lot of existential questions.

It feels like each subsequent book I write is an act of peeling off another layer to reveal the self within. After HE’S SO MASC I didn’t think I’d ever get super personal again but this latest book feels somewhat more vulnerable and personal in a different way – perhaps because I don’t feel the need to hide behind personas and other voices like I did in HE’S SO MASC and to some extent Super Model Minority. I like to think there’s some hard-earned wisdom in these newer poems, even if I’m still learning to feel comfortable in my own skin and in this world. I’ve been asked to write a memoir by multiple people but to me it feels like the poems are the memoir because there’s so much of me in them already.

Paula: I like to put a favourite album on repeat and that is how I am with your book. This a book I want on repeat, and music is a key ingredient, whether the lyricism in your ink or the musicians you reference, the lines you borrow and riff on. How does music drive you as a poet?

Chris: People who have followed my work or read any of my interviews will know how important music is to me and my creative process. I can’t imagine being a poet without music – it’s a major source of inspiration, particularly when I’m trying to figure out the mood or vibe of a poem. There have been many poems I’ve written where I’ve tried to emulate the rhythm or structure of a favourite song. Also, I’ve always been fascinated about the function and universality of dance and pop music, particularly in the queer community. There’s something so magical about how songs or albums can capture a particular moment or period of time in your life and therefore can be used to access those memories and emotions. Also, I love how there are some songs that transcend language and generational barriers to bring people together on the dance floor. Perhaps deep down I’d love to see poetry be able to do the same thing, and in some ways it does. (As I’ve done for my previous books, I’ve made a playlist for Dance-Floor Romance.)

My hopeful poems wait in the wings—my highlights &
golden hours are no match for our collective whiplash.
Make a wish before we knot this year & let it slip out
of our hands as another lesson we fail to learn. Is it
enough to summon the star that once called us home?

from ‘2023 & Other Poems‘

Paula: I am also drawn to the weave of ideas, like mantras simmering above and below the surface. I love how poetry can walk hand in hand with philosophy. So many I want to share but any idea arrivals delight and surprise you in particular? [i will quote my picks from a poem or two]

Chris: This is a very interesting question, because sometimes I start a poem with an idea clearly in my mind, but then the writing process nudges me in a completely different direction. It’s so hard to explain how this happens – it just feels like my brain is set to ‘and then…?’ mode as I write, pulling in other ideas and going on tangents that I then have to figure out how to string together.

Early in the writing of this book I was working on a series of ‘theories’ about joy and beauty, fragments of which eventually became the poems ‘On joy’, ‘The monument’ and ‘Long exposure’. What surprised me about these poems was how the ideas I had about joy and beauty evolved into explorations of how art is used to (re)shape narratives or memorialise universal experiences. This in turn began to influence some of the other poems I was writing. When I was assembling the manuscript and figuring out what to keep and what to cut, I found myself leaving out some of the overtly political or polemic poems, even though they shared similar ideas and themes with the other poems. I guess it’s because I was guided more by the tone of the book I was trying to make, rather than getting fixated on ideas per se.

Must be the way a poem kick-starts a world into being that
alters how time leans into itself. The rise & fall of oceans
never felt so slow or sticky on your skin, salt crusting between
heartbeats.

from ‘Number 13‘

Paula: Another exquisite love is how the collection offers a manifestation of and on and because of poetry – and I don’t want to straightjacket this into the term manifesto. I scrawled so many things in my notebook on writing poetry. It leads us back to my opening question on why poetry matters. Did any thought arrivals on poetry surprise and delight you?

Chris: I reckon manifesto is actually a pretty apt word for this particular book, more so than any of my other collections. The book’s interrogation of poetry and why it matters is another symptom of being Poet Laureate. Unsurprisingly, people wanted me to have opinions and ideas about poetry, so I had to quickly distil decades of contemplation into tidy soundbites that would be accessible to multiple audiences. I was so immersed in poetry for those three years that it’s no wonder all of this thinking about it found its way into the poems and eventually the book. To be honest, I still don’t have the perfect answer, but in some ways it’s been useful to have those conversations and go through that process to see how it feeds into my own creative practice.

When I was in the Netherlands last year I was asked to take part in a bookclub-esque discussion about Juliana Spahrs’ Ars Poetica, which asks the big question of “why poetry?”. I’ve been returning to this book a lot since then – it’s a really beautiful exploration of the purpose of poetry at a time of ecological crisis and political upheaval.

For eleven years I took a photograph a day—an exercise in handing
myself over to ritual & its hidden potential. A quiet joy buried in
the sobriety of routine where life unfurls out of the ordinary, like
seeds planted to bloom in some distant spring.

from ‘Long exposure‘

Paula: One poem sees the speaker taking a photograph a day for eleven years and it got me musing on the connections between taking photographs and creating poems. I am picturing a box of poems, a poem as a vessel for memory, a scene, a situation. What do you make of the relationship between poetry and photography?

Chris: It occurred to me as I was rereading my previous books that photography does pop up a lot in my work. I’ve always had an affinity for image-based art, which led me to study film at university and develop an interest in photography. I guess poetry and photography share an ability to capture a moment or distil an idea into something quite singular. The challenge and practice of taking a photograph every day for 11 years was a good training ground for me as a poet to pay close attention to my surroundings, and to interrogate why certain things felt important (or not) to record and remember.

Paula: I keep asking poets this question and it seems especially vital alongside your book. What matters to you in this ravaged and tilted world with its precious glints of hope?

Chris: Community. This book was written during a beautiful and unforgettable time in my life when I got to travel Aotearoa and the world, reading alongside legendary poets and getting to share my love of poetry with new audiences. I got to see all the incredible ways poetry is celebrated in different cities and countries, from writing clubs at schools to huge, well-attended festivals. And all of these are driven by people who are passionate about poetry and creating these communities for others to bring people together and create joy. Dance-Floor Romance would not exist without all the people who supported me during my term.

Paula: Choose a poem from the collection for the reader of our conversation to linger on. Why this poem?

Chris: I think it has to be ‘The last poem’, which brings the themes and ideas of the book together in one poem. I wrote it to be read at Poetry International in Rotterdam to close out one night of the festival, a humble offering to shepherd the festival attendees into the night after a day of words and conversations. In the poem, I describe a piano being dismantled on the street after it has been left out in the rain, then unceremoniously chucked into the back of a rubbish truck. There was something both tragic and poetic about the piano being stripped for parts and discarded. One one hand, someone was taking what they needed from it to perhaps create something new; on the other hand, how could we be so callous with a beautiful instrument that just a few days ago had been entertaining an enraptured crowd? And even though the destruction of the piano is a sad image, the poem itself reminds me of a very happy and creative time in my last few months as Poet Laureate, so it felt like a fitting poem to end the collection (and this conversation) with.

The last poem

Life gives me wishes.
I tuck them under the lemons
in a fruit bowl that isn’t a fruit bowl.
Every vessel is versatile, after all.
Both whole & empty. Both host & guest.
Holds the present as much as it
holds a whisper of the future.
I save my wishes like a child
afraid of ruining a brand-new art set.
Watercolours untouched for decades.
So many rainy days spent in boredom.
But of all the wishes rotting under lemons
the one I want to use the most is
to see him in every room I walk into
from now until our last night’s last poem.
These days I wish for love more than ever,
now that I’m attuned to its give & take.
On an in-between night in Amsterdam
I stand on a bridge & watch the water turn
from passage to mirror & back again.
I’ve seen water change like this before
when it was too tired to continue carrying
the wishes of a broken world. Too clear
to protect us from what happens
at the end of joy. It’s summer &
I’m rewiring myself in this new city—
one that doesn’t judge
what you wish for selfishly. Desire
will be granted in return for patience.
Outside my apartment a man dismantles
a piano soaked by overnight rain.
The wires shriek & the instrument’s cavity
frees its final notes. The city moans along.
Keys & little hammers piled up
on the pavement like abandoned poems.
So many ends & new tides lately
it’s got me turning to water
for direction. Something to wild the urge
to be settled for this version of now.
Life is good when you let yourself be taken
by new joys that don’t yet have a name.
Here, over a canal, I weep. Life is good.

Chris Tse

readings

Photo credit: Rebecca McMillan Photography

2022 & Other Poems

Dance-floor romance

Your uncle’s story

Chris Tse is a poet and editor based in Wellington. He is the author of four poetry collections published by Auckland University Press, including Super Model Minority (a Lambda Literary Award finalist for Best Gay Poetry) and Dance-Floor Romance. He and Emma Barnes edited Out Here: An Anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ Writers from Aotearoa. Chris was New Zealand’s Poet Laureate from 2022-25.

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Simon Sweetman

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No Crossed Words:

back to back, black ‘n’ white classics.
me, watching Elvis Presley singing Jailhouse Rock.
she, preparing the nightly crossword.
rightly, we each know that ‘history’ and ‘opinion’
are both 7-letter words but only one fits correctly in
2. ACROSS
leaving the other
1. DOWN

Simon Sweetman, c. 2002

This is the first ‘love’ poem I wrote for my wife. We had just started dating. I’m better at being a partner than writing love poems. This one didn’t have a title, and I read it one time, a few years after writing it, at a Poetry Day event where I was opening for Sam Hunt. I told the audience to write their ideas for a title on a napkin. Sam told the bar staff to tell me to visit him when I was done. We sat and had a wine, and he showed me a his child’s school classroom photo. He told me he really liked the ‘crossword poem’ so I hurriedly ripped it from my pages and handed it to him. I was probably far too enthusiastic about that, but he put it in his little suitcase on top of his son’s class photo. When I got back to the bar I was elated.  And then I saw that someone had written down on a napkin that I should call the poem “No Crossed Words”. That’ll do nicely, I thought. And drove home, beaming.
Simon

Simon Sweetman writes a poem every day and shares most of them on his Substack where you can also read reviews, interviews, short stories, and opinions. He is the author of the poetry books, The Death of Music Journalism (2020) and The Richard Poems (2024). He has written The Jimmy Stories (a novella in connected stories) and would like to publish it. He’s working on a bunch of poems about Harry Nilsson, and has a book of short stories almost ready to go from the MA he completed at Victoria University last year. But maybe no one cares about that.

Poetry Shelf noticeboard: a liminal gathering 2 launch

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‘a liminal gathering 2’ (Elixir & Star Press) traverses grief through the visual and written art of 107 New Zealand artists. Grief is universal and flows beyond labels, boundaries and division. The expression of grief through creative practice seeds connection, community and ultimately life.

‘a liminal gathering 2’ is being launched with talks by six of the contributing artists online via Zoom on 24th November 2026, 7pm. To register interest contact: books-elixirandstar@proton.me.

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Diane Brown

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What we do


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

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



Diane Brown

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

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

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

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Schoolhouse Bay

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

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

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

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

The porthole slams shut in the wind.

Paula Green
from The Track, Seraph Press, 2019

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

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Jeffrey Paparoa Holman

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Rigor mortis
– for Thomas Lynch

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

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

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

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

up as an undertaker.

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

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

Jeffrey

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

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

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

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O-O-O

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

—

The patient says O like the world is poetry.

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

—

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

the sky is her centrifuge. Her one use.

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

—

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

—

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

—

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

Elizabeth Morton
from Incident Report, Otago University Press, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

FAST DROGUES

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

pain eater put it aside
that harm dish

you are being welcomed
          to the reveille

everywhere    petrichor

everywhere
turduckens of joy
            and surety

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

the horse is a wardrobe
                  full of killers

                  and only you know

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

Toothed bucket
come jabbing
through the bank

small thing

shrugged out
from under the aegis
of the sky,

swept backwards
              through death.

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

Frances Libeau

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

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

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

The Track, Paula Green
Seraph Press, 2019

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

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

from ‘Resolution Bay‘

And farther along:

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

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

from ‘Endeavour Inlet to Big Bay’

And then:

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

from ‘Queen Charlotte Track’

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

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

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

from ‘The Track’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

from ‘Portage Bay’

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

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

Mary Cresswell

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

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Jackson McCarthy

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Moon

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

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

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

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

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

Jackson McCarthy
from Portrait (Auckland University Press, 2026)

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

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

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