Poetry Shelf celebrates Landfall Tauraka 251 with nine readings

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Landfall Tauraka 251, ed Lynley Edmeades, reviews ed David Eggleton
Otago University Press, 2026

Incl winner of Landfall Tauraka Young Writers’ Essay Prize 2026
Art Portfolios: Megan Brady and Julian Hooper
Craft Interview with Tusiata Avia

Otago University Press page

Landfall Tauraka 251 is a gift package of poetry, fiction, artwork, an interview, a terrific winning essay and reviews. The selection of poems and poets catches the eclectic reach and possibilities of poetry in Aotearoa in 2026, whether performed or published or shared online.

I have two ongoing series on Poetry Shelf that resonate with this issue. The Poetry Shelf Breathing Room offers poems to pause on and breathe in slowly and deeply. And secondly Poetry Shelf Speaks Out To For With – where poetry is a way to speak out, whether political and/or getting personal, whether nuanced or loud. This is what I get, as I spend the weekend reading and rereading Landfall’s poetry selection. I am stalling on every poem, breathing in the exquisite lyricism, the lightness, the visual brocades of detail. And then again, I am musing on poetry that is speaking out in myriad vital ways.

Landfall Tauraka 251 feels like my favourite Landfall to date. The subject matter roves from cities towns and streets to eulogies and grief, to family, pūkeko and museums, to swamp forests and to sweet hot chocolate. There are poets new to me along with poets I have admired for ages.

Plus there is a cracking, standout, must-read interview with Tusiata Avia where she goes deep into writing poetry. She speaks of the boost Bill Manhire and IIML gave her. She speaks of her vulnerabilities and doubt in the early years and how intuition is a key tool as a poet.

This is an issue to listen to, to linger over, to track new poets you want to read again. Already my issue is well thumbed.

To celebrate Landfall Tauraka 251, I invited nine poets to record their poems.

ART Megan Brady, Julian Hooper, John Reynolds, Deborah Smith
FICTION Molly Crighton, Heather Holdaway, Sam Keenan, Cait Kneller, David Large, Jemma Richardson, Grant Smithies, Cora Tate, Pearl Tuohy, Tarn Wright
NON-FICTION Cian Dennan, Uzair Khan
POETRY Tunmise Adebowale, Hannah Rose Arnold, Nick Ascroft, Izzie Birnie, Cindy Botha, Hana Buchanan, Nathaniel Calhoun, Kim Cope Tait, Brett Cross, Brandon de la Cruz, David Eggleton, Craig Foltz, Alison Glenny, Eliana Gray, Jackson, Erik Kennedy, Fiona Kidman, Brent Kininmont, Leonard Lambert, Jessica Le Bas, Carolyn McCurdie, Kirstie McKinnon, Alice Miller, Anuja Mitra, Janet Newman, Grace Nottingham, Gregory O’Brien, Jilly O’Brien, Claire Orchard, Harriet Prebble, Joanna Preston, Hope Rännäli, Vaughan Rapatahana, Richard Reeve, Holly Ruth, Will Salmon, Regan Solomon, Jillian Sullivan, Stacey Teague, Dunstan Ward, Andrew Paul Wood, Nicholas Wright
REVIEW Sally Blundell, John Gereats, Michael O’Leary, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, Paddy Richardson, Elizabeth Smither, Bronwyn Wylie-Gibb

The readings

Alison Glenny

‘Waffle’

Alison Glenny lives near Te Whanganui-a-Tara and is the author of several collections of mostly prose poems, published by Otago University Press and Compound Press. In 2024 they were the Aotearoa recipient of the Caselberg Trust Margaret Egan City of Literature residency in Whaka Oho Rahi/Broad Bay, on the Otago Peninsula.

Hana Buchanan

Photo Credit: Julia Sabugosa

Hana Buchanan (Ngāti Haumia ki Te Aro, Taranaki iwi, Te Atiawa, Taranaki Whānui ki te Upoko o te Ika) is a word person, a tangata toikupu — poet, kaikaranga, kaitito waiata — and yoga teacher working from her ancestral lands in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Hana’s poetry is published online and in print journals and her first full collection, Kupu Whenua, is out now!

Cian Dennan

‘Fragments on the house of memory’

Cian Dennan is a poet, educator and multidisciplinary artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa. Cian completed her Master’s degree in Creative Writing at the University of Auckland in 2025, and continues to develop a body of work exploring the intricacies of self and memory from a Kiwi-Italian perspective. Cian’s work has been recognised by a number of prestigious awards, including the Phoenix Prize and the Garth Maxwell Creative Project Prize.

Tunmise Adebowale

‘Beautiful people in Dunedin’

Tunmise Adebowale is a Nigerian-born New Zealander. Her work has been published in several major publications, including Poetry Ireland Review, Landfall Tauraka, The Spinoff, The Big Idea, The Pantograph Punchand Newsroom. 

Erik Kennedy

‘Lined v Unlined Paper’

Erik Kennedy is the author of the poetry collections Sick Power Trip (2025), Another Beautiful Day Indoors(2022), and There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime (2018), all with Te Herenga Waka University Press, and he co-edited No Other Place to Stand, a book of climate change poetry from Aotearoa and the Pacific (Auckland University Press, 2022). He lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch.

Nick Ascroft

‘Spite in the Beat’

Nick Ascroft’s most recent book of poetry is It’s What He Would’ve Wanted (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025). 

Fiona Kidman

Fiona Kidman at home

‘Blue This and That’

Fiona Kidman writes poetry, novels, memoirs and essays. Her most recent poetry collection was The Midnight Plane, gathering up work of the past 50 years, and new poems.Her fiction has won a number of prizes and is published internationally, particularly in France. She lives on a high hill in Wellington.

Jillian Sullivan

‘Framework’

Jillian Sullivan lives in the Ida Valley, Central Otago. Her thirteen published books include creative non-fiction, novels, short stories and poetry. Her latest book is  Map for the Heart- Ida Valley Essays, Otago University Press.

Alice Miller

‘Old Romantic’

Alice Miller’s fourth poetry collection is Here & Thereafter (Pavilion, 2026). She is also the author of a novel, More Miracle than Bird (Tin House). Alice lives in Berlin, but she and her family are planning to return to Aotearoa in 2027.

Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Ariana Tikao and Ruby Solly in conversation

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Join us, Ariana Tikao and Ruby Solly at Te Matapihi ki te ao Nui (Wellington Central Library) for a fantastic lunchtime conversation, discussing Ariana’s latest pukapuka Pepeha Portal.

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

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

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

‘There’s breathtaking scope and emotional depth in this collection, so much whakapapa wisdom, and finely hued poetry. He taoka toikupu.’ – Robert Sullivan, New Zealand Poet Laureate

All welcome, not to be missed!

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Morrin Rout chooses Dinah Hawken

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The Tray

He brings up the morning coffee
on the faded red tray that for decades
our right hands have gripped, raised
and carried towards each other
through the compatible air.

Dinah Hawken
from Peace & Quiet, THWUP, 2026

Dinah Hawken received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement last year. It recognises her many years of writing supremely crafted, perceptive and insightful poems centred around social justice and the environment. None of these are didactic but lead the reader to quiet contemplation and, sometimes, quiet rage at the state of the world we are bequeathing to our whanau.

Her latest collection is called Peace & Quiet and both words in the title reflect the tone and intention of the poems perfectly.

Being of a similar age to Dinah, many of these works resonate with what I am experiencing and thinking about. She lives at Paekākāriki in sight and sound of the sea so her daily interaction with the ocean is very much part of her work. I too live within sight and sound of the sea, in my case, Whakaraupō, Lyttelton Harbour and my mood and thoughts are absolutely affected by what is going on outside my window.

Some of her poems are about the deaths of friends and family, what they don’t have to know or worry about anymore and how the natural world provides some solace and acceptance of the inevitability of these events.

The poem I have chosen, which I asked her to read in my recent interview with her on Bookenz, says so much in so few words. My husband, Jonty died in 2003 and of the multitude of ways in which I miss him, one of the most enduring is the daily interactions that are often tacit and routine. The long and loving relationship that Dinah and her husband share is captured entirely in the poem and the last line could not be bettered.

Morrin Rout

Dinah Hawken is one of New Zealand’s most celebrated poets. She was born in Hāwera in 1943 and trained as a physiotherapist, psychotherapist and social worker in New Zealand and the United States and has worked as a student counsellor and writing teacher at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. Of her ten collections of poetry, four have been finalists for the New Zealand Book Awards. Her first book, It Has No Sound and Is Blue (1987), won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Best First Time Published Poet. A recent poetry collection is Faces and Flowers: Poems to Patricia France (2024), and other recent collections include Sea-light (2021), Her most recent collection is Peace and Quiet (2026) Dinah lives in Paekākāriki.

Morrin Rout has spent over 30 years organising literary events and festivals and producing and presenting book programmes on national and local radio. She is the former Director of the Hagley Writers Institute and still co-produces and presents a weekly book show, Bookenz on Plains Media which is available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Book interview with Morrin: Lauren Keenen, Dinah Hawken, Ingrid Horrocks

Poetry Shelf Speaking Out For to With: Food as a weapon by Sheila Hailstone

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Food as a weapon

My friend writes from Gaza 2025
….We have never begged for this help. It’s our shame.
Number one exporting strawberries and citrus.
They turned us into this …..

I watch
the sick, the disabled, the malnourished,
and children, walk forty-one kilometres
from the sea to the south.
A calculated death-march
to the distribution centre in Rafeh.
Famine is a weapon of mass destruction.

I hear
the sick, the disabled, the malnourished
and children, return
with nothing

I see
a family home turned
to rubble where eight
of nine children died,
a bombed hospital where their paediatrician
mother worked, without anaesthetic,
to remove bullets lodged in skulls and bodies.

I cry
as a six-year-old girl walks through fire
from a school, and tells the camera her mother
was martyred, as if she is telling the world
her mum’s gone to the shops
for flour again.

I say
nothing of this to my friend.
She is dreaming of olive oil and za’atar,
risking her life to send a message
while living with the grey stink of trinitrotoluene
and aluminium powder in the air
with little left to eat.

I pray

Sheila Hailstone
from potluck, Landing Press, 2025

From Aotearoa New Zealand, Sheila Hailstone sends poetry out into the world. Founder of Christchurch Women’s Toastmasters, winner of District 72 International & Humorous Speech Contests, she’s empowering women to find their voice one punchline at a time. She once scooped up first prize in a Flash Frontier international micro-fiction competition, because a few words can say enough. The author of many children’s stories, and a memoir, Dancing Around Cancer that’s funny and inspiring, and details her journey on the El Camino de Santiago. She was a CEO of a Not-For-Profit, a European Training Manager and recently a student at Hagley Writers Institute Ōtautahi. Because she believes learning never retires – even if she has.

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Erik Kennedy picks Jane Arthur

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Disgusting

Every now and then I get a rippling rush of vertigo

like waves of seasickness          or a flashback to
lying down too fast on a waterbed       or

an inner-ear issue

Sorry to talk about this but lately
I’ve been dreaming about intense messy delicious
relationships with romantic hopeless addicts and I am left

with so much longing                                      I want it

like I’m in love with a past version of me

carrying around something heavy and literal in my body

It’s the humidity          it’s making my dreams
grimy and it turns out I’m attracted
to sour sweat               to things I shouldn’t be                      

So much longing
for the disgusting         I yearn             I wonder what went wrong
and when        to give me this psychology      
but I guess

we’ve all got our kinks                         When does what we do
change who we are                 

We should die before we turn bad\
before the soap writers run out of storylines
and it turns out                                   we were the serial killer all along

I kneel to the mess in my bedroom

I kneel to the mess in my past             to the dust       to death
which is incomprehensible      to dangerous longing   not even kidding

I kneel to the internet of vacuous memes        give it praise

I kneel to do up my laces         The dog chases the cat who

chases the fly               it’s all a big misunderstanding

each of their motives aligns to a different reality
and it nearly                            breaks my heart

Jane Arthur
from Calamities!, THWUP, 2023

‘Disgusting’ by Jane Arthur is not ‘deceptively simple’, to use a hackneyed phrase. It is actually simple in the best way. It means what it says, and what it says is kind of awful, which I love to see in poetry. This is a poem that is full of beauty on the level of the phrase but that also wallows in filth and bad decisions (‘it turns out I’m attracted / to sour sweat’, ‘I’ve been dreaming about these intense messy delicious / relationships with romantic hopeless addicts’). Arthur shows a worthy commitment to empathy, but, refreshingly, a commitment to personal change is not proposed. Imagine a self-help book that ends a third of the way through—this is the world of ‘Disgusting’.

I once took a graduate seminar about ‘the abject’—you know, pus and shit and puddles of deliquescing matter and bodies riddled with illness and madness—the kind of phenomena that are hard to look at and hard to look away from. For me, Arthur’s writing in this poem captures the eternal fascination exerted by the abject, which is a subject that many writers avoid, possibly because it induces feelings of guilt. Well, Arthur is a great poet of guilt:

So much longing
for the disgusting        I yearn             I wonder what went wrong
and when         to give me this psychology

The most powerful moment of yearning in the poem is for the sweet release of death. ‘We should die before we turn bad’ is a great line because it’s about moral decay, obviously, but also about rotting (‘turning bad’) like a cucumber in a fridge.

I find most of Arthur’s work profoundly funny, and this poem is no exception. Little throwaway lines like ‘we’ve all got our kinks’ and ‘not even kidding’ have the effect of being taking-you-into-my-confidence asides which humanise the speaker and make her seem charming in spite of the picture she’s painting of herself.

And of course a highlight here is the poem’s ending, which can’t fail to move a reader with its sudden, frank little yelp of despair:

The dog chases the cat who

chases the fly              it’s all a big misunderstanding

each of their motives aligns to a different reality
and it nearly                            breaks my heart

Calamities!, the book that this is drawn from, is a favourite of mine. Some of it is less depressing than this, but don’t let that put you off.

Erik Kennedy

Jane Arthur is the author of two poetry collections: Craven (2019), which won the Jessie Mackay Prize for Best First Book of Poetry in 2020, and Calamities! (2023). Both are published by THWUP and both were longlisted for the Ockham NZ Book Awards. She also wrote the children’s novel Brown Bird (2024, Penguin), which was a finalist in the NZ Book Awards for Children and Young Adults. Jane lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington with her family.

Erik Kennedy is the author of the poetry collections Sick Power Trip (2025), Another Beautiful Day Indoors (2022), and There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime(2018), all with Te Herenga Waka University Press, and he co-edited No Other Place to Stand, a book of climate change poetry from Aotearoa and the Pacific (Auckland University Press, 2022). He is the poetry editor of takahē and an adjunct fellow in English at the University of Canterbury. Originally from New Jersey, he lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch.

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: All we have is the urupa by Hana Pera Aoake

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All we have is the urupa

My body became clay
Wefting into golden brown
Drying before becoming wet

I climb the slippery urupa
In leather healed boots
Stumbling through fog eyes

My body became a grave
Tugging at the weeds
Seeping onto the curved mound

I notice the shifts of the soil 
Returning down deeper into the whenua
Between the two tī kouka trees 

My body became a mokomoko
A tohu of things to come
Perhaps there was a makutu

I think of disease as being dis-ease
There is utu between all things
But i flood a river

My body became a whisper
Images of water without rhythm
A camera shutter that would not turn

Hana Pera Aoake

Hana Pera Aoake (Ngāti Mahuta, Ngāti Hinerangi, Waikato/Tainui) is an artist, writer and sweaty milf. They are the author of three books of poetry(ish) and have three more in the works including a collection of essays and manifestos, On how to be, which is being published by Discipline in Naarm later this year. Mostly they are a PhD student researching industrial poisoning and Māori labour histories in the eastern Bay of Plenty.

Poetry Shelf weekend viewing listening reading and an invitation

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my birthday paella poem

Yesterday I spent the morning in a Kafkaesque rabbit hole trying to sort my new post box as the Swanson lobby is now closed. I have ended up with two boxes in two different places and like so many other people finding it impossible to sort with NZ Post. So fingers crossed my public postal address will eventually get sorted.

Meanwhile I am loving the newsletters Nelson’s VOLUME sends out.

I am currently listening to the audio book of Arundhati Roy’s memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me. It is so deeply engaging. Highly recommended.

a week of poetry highlights

This week so many of you responded to the poetry of others on the blog – so many emails and messages, you taking time to share thoughts on why a poem or a feature mattered and hooked you. Wow! Thank you.

ONE.

Poetry Shelf celebrates the Bill Manhire Honoured Writer session at AWF 2026. I am so grateful to the Auckland Writers Festival for posting the video of the session. So many poetry gold nuggets. The video of Hannah singing ‘Making Baby Float’ was incredible. And hearing the audio clip of Bill read.

Bill’s Little Prayers will be released this Saturday, June 13 at 6.00 pm at a concert in the Hall of Memories as part of the 2026 LõemisFestival. Tickets are available HERE.

TWO.

The girl who was swallowed by ice and snow by Bernadette Hall and Kathryn Madill. I also utterly loved spending time with this Antarctic collaboration between Bernadette and Kathryn (a book and an exhibition). Go here.

THREE:

Another highlight: Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Adrienne Jansen chooses Peter Rawnsley and Gabrielle Huria

FOUR:

Kerrin P Sharpe’s poem, ‘Requiem for a Pony’ in Poetry Shelf Speaks Out To For With got a whole a universe of love.

FIVE:

As did the Monday Poem: ‘car music’ by Amy Marguerite

Open invitation:

From today until June 27th you have an open invitation to send me poems that would work well in my series: Poetry Shelf Speaks OUT TO FOR WITH. A chance to get political, to challenge, to grieve, to muse, to connect, to find hope. Over to you. paulajoygreen@gmail.com