Poetry Shelf celebrates the Ockham NZ Book Awards poetry long list: Sophie van Waardenberg chooses a poem

Leave a reply

No Good, Sophie van Waardenberg
Auckland University Press, 2025

Cremation Sonnet

When you come back your eyes are huge and bursting.
You come back with clean long hair.
You come back normal but you’re swelling
in the middle like a bird. Your skin luminous.
Or your skin something else. Last night—
did you know—you came back caved in, beaten,
and tomorrow you’ll be perfect, wading nowhere
through a football field of loose complacent light.
You come back: you do not know me. Or if you do,
you do not love me. Or if you do, it’s not enough.
Still you come back, forty-eight and starving,
twenty-two and blushing from a pantomime.
Dead dead traveller, what song is it,
when you come back, that you sing?

Sophie van Waardenberg
from No Good

This is the first of a bunch of ‘Cremation Sonnets’ that make up the middle chunk of No Good. There were a lot more of those sonnets that didn’t make it into the book, and I almost feel like I could write just as many if I tried to again now, but I don’t think I’ll try to again. Grief gets boring. (And I think some of the poems are about that, about how boring it is.)

This one, though, comes from the dreams I had — still have, sometimes — of my dad being alive again. He died when I was thirteen, and for a long while there was nothing I wanted more than to have him back. But it is never comforting to have a dead person come back in a dream, at least not for me, because they are not themselves and have nothing new to say to you. They are what your sleeping brain makes from scraps: some kind of ghoul or stupid caricature. If I wanted to achieve anything in particular with this poem, it was probably to at least gesture at that weird cavernous space between longing and horror. How can you bear that desire for something you can never have again? How can someone be gone? I think grief is more like confusion than sadness.

The thing is, these sonnets weren’t actually horrific to write. They were sometimes quite fun. I remember being in a bit of a frenzy, writing one or two of them a day — most of them unpromising. I had a pretty on-again off-again relationship with metre, obviously, and I made no attempt to rhyme. Still, there are plenty of iambs lolloping around in here. ‘A football field of loose complacent light’ is definitely a result of working in metre; I love how that constraint can force me into a less predictable line. The most fun I have when I’m writing is when I surprise myself, and I did that a lot when I wrote these poems.

Sophie van Waardenberg

Poetry Shelf review extract:

What initially hooks us into a poem? For me, there is no singular response. Indeed if there were, it might limit what poetry can be and do. When I first started reading Sophie van Waardenberg’s new collection, No Good, I jotted down two words in my notebook: rhythm and voice. I was hooked. I was drawn into the musical cadence of a speaker speaking, drawn into the under and over currents of spiky, thistle, bloom. And as I read the collection, on a number of occasions over the past few months, crucial questions arrived. I was especially musing on the way a poem might become both self and other.

The title is the perfect welcome mat into the collection, particularly coupled with the cover illustration, where ‘good’ wavers, and I gaze at the beetle on the apple that is both good and not good. Pausing on the welcome mat, a cascade of (centuries) of good girl propaganda spins in my mind, and I am peering into the no good to see the next apple in the bowl, a portal of good in the pillowcase of no good.

Full review here

Sophie van Waardenberg is a writer from Tāmaki Makaurau. She holds an MFA from Syracuse University where she was editor-in-chief of Salt Hill Journal. Her first chapbook, ‘does a potato have a heart?’, was published in AUP New Poets 5 (2019). Her poems about eating carbohydrates and kissing girls can be found in Cordite, Sweet Mammalian, The Spinoff and Best New Zealand Poems.

Listen to Sophie read two poems on Poetry Shelf: ‘Self-Portrait as Adolescent Covered in Flour’, ‘Hymn to the Insomniac in Fool’s Spring’

Auckland University Press page

Poetry Shelf celebrates the Ockham NZ Book Award poetry longlist: Anna Jackson chooses an extract

Leave a reply






Poetry Shelf has invited poets to choose a poem from their longlisted collections and to write a few comments on the poem and poetry. Today Anna Jackson:

Terrier, Worrier A Poem in Five Parts, Anna Jackson
Auckland University Press, 2025


Terrier, Worrier is one long poem so instead of choosing a poem from it for Poetry Shelf I have selected an extract.  This should be easy because every paragraph is almost a self-contained little poem, but to me what makes Terrier, Worrier a poem are both the gaps between the paragraphs and the repetitions, returns and resonances across the collection as a whole.  Thought doesn’t lead straight on to another thought but is present under the surface of the forward movement of the prose and emerges transformed elsewhere in relation to a new idea.  I don’t know if this is really poetry or just how the mind works.  In Terrier, Worrier thoughts are prompted by conversations, funerals, the behaviour of my hens, questions posed by philosophers, massages, memories and dreams. 

This extract includes the dream that gives the collection its title, and, with that sentence in the middle, connects narratives about my hens and worries about motherhood and daughterhood that run through the collection.  

This summer, I kept dreaming about a terrier. It was not a recurring dream but a recurring terrier that appeared in dream after dream, often needing to be released from somewhere it was trapped.  It did seem as if my unconscious was hard at work trying to tell me something I was repeatedly failing to grasp.  I thought, a terrier is a good symbol for the work of digging up something underground but still alive. 

Wilma had not been interested in me as a person when she was still part of a flock but now she looked in the eye which is not something she had ever done when the other hens were still alive.  I thought she was looking at me person to person now, whereas before she had only looked at me as an object.  I thought, there is a difference between being tame, and being a friend. 

There is a difference between being a tame, and being a daughter.

I wondered whether I could hear terrier as a version of the word worrier, a worrier being not someone who makes you worry but someone who themselves worries, who worries away at things like a terrier might worry away at a sock.  A terrier would be someone who allows themselves actually to indulge in the feeling of terror.  I tell myself “I am not okay, but I will be okay,” but maybe I need to stop saying that and release the terror, or maybe the terrier is not myself but represents someone else’s terror which needs to be heard. 

I thought, it tells us something about poetry that when we need to talk to ourselves about something we don’t know we know, we tell it to ourselves when we are asleep, in images we struggle to remember when we awake, and often take more than one reading to fully understand.

Anna Jackson

From Paula Green’s Poetry Shelf review (a review in nine loops):

There’s a long black cloud streaking from the west coast to the backyard bush sprinkling salt and pepper rain. Terrier, Worrier is generally written in the past tense, with many stanzas beginning with ‘I thought’, yet for me, curiously, wonderfully, it carries the charismatic freight of the present tense, the sweet fluidity of the gerund, the present participle . . . where be-here-now fluency prevails regardless of gaps, rest-stops, hesitancy. Reading is to be embedded in the moment of the past as reader, so that what happened, and what was thought, becomes acutely present. Dive into the poetry currents in the collection, and along with the writer, you will might find yourself filtering, evaluating, experiencing, valuing, photographing, documenting, thinking. Savouring a moment.

My full review here

Anna Jackson is the author of seven collections of poetry as well as Diary Poetics: Form and Style in Writers’ Diaries 1915–1962 (Routledge, 2010) and Actions & Travels: How Poetry Works (Auckland University Press, 2022). She lives in Island Bay, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, and is associate professor in English literature at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington.

Anna Jackson’s website
Auckland University Press page



Poetry Shelf celebrates the Ockham NZ 2026 Book Awards Poetry Long List: Erik Kennedy

Leave a reply

Poetry Shelf has invited poets to choose a poem from their longlisted collections and to write a few comments on the poem and poetry. Today Erik Kennedy:

Sick Power Trip, Erik Kennedy
Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025

Animals on Leads

We entered the town and the first thing we saw
was a woman taking her ferret for a walk.
‘Nice day for it,’ I said significantly. The ferret
was going everywhere at once, an absolute possibility engine

producing the energy of a ten-man brawl in a two-man toilet.
And us, should we visit the town’s oldest church
with its medieval eagle lectern and greensand voussoirs,
or should we ramble to the squinty, stony seafront, walled in

by white gin-palace-style hotels? Let’s let the twitchy ferret
be our compass needle, straining against its bonds,
the confident quadrupedal scamperer pulling its minder along
until she’s going north and south, finding nothing and God.

Erik Kennedy

‘Animals on Leads’ is perhaps not a typical Sick Power Trip poem. It doesn’t lean into the collection’s preoccupations with things like illness and politics and war. It is explicitly not set in Aotearoa. And there is barely any glumness to it; it is almost chipper. But I like it a lot because I like poems that tell true stories, and I wish I had more of them. (The problem is that I don’t lead an interesting enough life to generate reams of fascinating ‘true story poems’.)

The setting of the poem is Eastbourne, East Sussex. There are two solid clues as to the location. ‘The town’s oldest church / with its medieval eagle lectern and greensand voussoirs’ is St Mary the Virgin, which is an absolutely stonking Grade I listed building. I lifted the language in that second line directly from the leaflet about the church’s architecture. And ‘the squinty, stony seafront, walled in // by white gin-palace-style hotels’ is a feature of Eastbourne more than any other South Coast resort town. I rate Eastbourne surprisingly highly. On looks it is at least an 8 out of 10. On culture it is becoming more like Brighton. The sea itself is pretty clean, which is a luxury in twenty-first-century England. And it has a wonderful collection of Eric Ravilious works at the Towner gallery.

And of course a third way we know the poem is not set here is the presence of a pet ferret. A ferret is an animal that certainly doesn’t belong in New Zealand, given that its great passion in life is eating birds and eggs. But in England, being walked on a lead, a ferret is a different proposition altogether. It stands for chaotic exuberance. The lines ‘The ferret / was going everywhere at once, an absolute possibility engine // producing the energy of a ten-man brawl in a two-man toilet’ have probably earned me more compliments for their deranged splendidness than any other lines I have ever written. Something in this image speaks to people.

It might be obvious to say this, but the ferret is not the only animal ‘on a lead’ in the poem. The owner of the ferret, dragged about according to her mad mustelid’s whims, is in my view also an animal on a lead. I mean, we all are, in one way or another. A lead always connects two animals, and the hierarchical relationship between them may not be what you would expect. I think there is some joy in the serendipitous meanderings of creatures without meaningful plans. Quite a lot of joy, in fact. When I said ‘Nice day for it’ to the woman in line 3 of the poem, I really meant it.

Erik Kennedy

Erik Kennedy (he/him) is the author of the poetry collections Another Beautiful Day Indoors (2022) and There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime (2018), both with Te Herenga Waka University Press, and he co-edited No Other Place to Stand, a book of climate change poetry from New Zealand and the Pacific (Auckland University Press, 2022). His poems, stories, and criticism have been published in places like berlin lit, FENCE, The Florida Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, the TLS, and Western Humanities Review. Originally from New Jersey, he lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch.

From Poetry Shelf review:
“Erik’s collection has stuck with me for a number of reasons. I have never read a collection quite like it and I love that. It feels like there are two significant settings. Firstly, an extraordinary band of wit and humour, with unexpected scenarios, shifting angles and points of view. Secondly, the necessary and imperative knottiness of humanity, from exposed self to a wider global reach. Not an either or view, but an incredible shifting light on how to live and how to survive. A poetic prism on the contemporary world that might be sharp, jagged, wise, personal.” Full review here and reading by Erik here

Te Herenga Waka University Press page

Poetry Shelf goes hiking: Te Araroa by Jillian Sullivan 2

1 Reply

Riverton to Colac Bay

There are ways to walk the trail
I hadn’t imagined. Thanks
to grandsons: use your poles to
Mario dance, vault up on
rocks, jump off again, use
tree roots to twirl 360
degrees, run off track to
investigate boulders, use wave-
smoothed rocks as a half-pipe for
the tech-deck always carried
in your pocket. Choose the deep
shingle to walk on instead
of taking the firmer path.
I stop under a ponga
tree to write instructions down.

Longwood Forest

When the long strand of bush lawyer
wrapped my face, hooked so slightly
my lips, I greeted the plant as one who
greeted me; touch in a forest where I am
the only one moving, all day today
and yesterday and the day before. I don’t know

this life, only the trees, who are silent too,
hung about with lichen and moss,
mud at their heels. I follow footsteps – who slipped,
who sank, skirt the dangers as far
as possible. When I fall, I fall safely, pack
holding my face to the ground:

hello bush, moss, stone. But not
mud, deep and viscous and sucking.
So, I am safe (wet, encrusted).  Darling,
I say to the orange marker. This way.
This way. I touch the trunks. In the dimming
forest, there is no more welcome

light than one that tells you: turn here,
turn here, straight ahead.

A 39 km day

There are no strangers in this hut
though I wish there were, someone
tall and loud, someone unfitter than
me, who yesterday walked fifteen
hours, the last two in darkness,
reading my way up the wrong path
by pebbles and rocks. How they
shone though the night was dark.
One star, a broken lamp.

And having taken the wrong road
entirely, I was at last
felled, lay like that on some unknown
damp hillside, yet knew enough
to take off wet boots, socks, pull on
dry ones, burrow into the
bag, wrapped in the tent, and ask
the sky not to rain.

It rained. Water fell from my
eyelids like tears. How long a night
is waiting for light – and then,
bird call, enough sky to pull on
wet boots, wet socks, roll wet tent,
wet bag in wet pack, retrace
my path, looking for the orange
markers, which, after an hour,
flare like small sunrises, until,
more lessons learned, I take the right
trail to Duggie’s Hut.

Duggies Hut   2.

Overnight it rained again.
I lay in my blue sleeping bag, socks,
gloves, hat (the fire out), pictured

the river rising. My only way out.
Phone set for six am to cross the icy
gush and boulders. But my foot

still swollen, water bag ruptured, night
light flat. In the dark, considering options. Forward
or back? You can turn back, Mum,

daughter Evie had told me. Another white
feather on the path yesterday, my
signs from Brian. And I did find

the hut, where I rest, rebuke the mouse,
rest, read. It is gentle here, all paths
covered in golden leaves, the stream

pouring. If Brian had survived
would we have tramped to a hut
such as this? The dilemma

to go forward or back, to cross
or not. He, being experienced,
would have made those decisions.

Even without a feather,
I have decided, this time,
to turn back.

Visitors

Just like I wished, two trampers
walk up to the hut – Martin from
Munich, Mike from Utah. There’s firewood
gathered, chopped, stacked, fire lit, and
time for stories, firewall and hot chocolate
(hut toddy). This would be enough, yet three
shepherds arrive and six dogs. Young
Charlie fills the door frame. He
shakes our hands, passes us cans of
Speights. All I know about Utah
is Charlie Kirk, he says.
The young men light cigarettes, the dogs,
with their collars and antennas,
mull about, run wide after pigs.
We say, Come in, the fire’s warm, but they
keep their boots on, their eyes on their receivers.
We join them and drink on the verandah.
They’re happy work’s finished now for
Christmas. They have hunting, and
heaps of beer.

The hut feels right with bunks filled,
food bags hanging from the rafter,
packs on the floor, boots and poles
outside. Mike broke both his poles
extricating his length from the mud.
The poles taped with splints; an old
spoon and fork flattened by a rock.
In the bush there are no power bank
top ups, no chances to call home, no
food restocks, no new laces, no pole
replacements but sometimes,
unexpectedly, cold beer.

Christmas Eve  

To take my pack in for repair
I lift out the pieces of my life (heart):
water treatment pills (to survive),
power bank (to find maps), dry
socks (for wet hillsides); unpacking
histories, small decisions, enough
nuts for a week. Tent. Last thing,
sleeping bag. Empty, the pack
breathes again. Full of fantasies
of tramping like a cartoon voice
bubble – have fun!
I unclip my trail pass. Is this significant?
Foot x-ray this morning. The pack and I
in need of repair. I limp in the throng
of Christmas shoppers on Shotover Street,
a tramper, deconstructed.

Sienna

I cannot leave yet. Eight
to ten days more rest, no more

than ten minutes walking.
The physio, Rion, is surprised

there are no broken bones, so
all’s good. Back to reading

What’s App – the vertiginous
track to Stody Hut, the Arrow

angry in the gorge, tree fall
taking out the markers.

My body knows these terms. First
Introduction, earth and I didn’t get off

to a great start. I had expected
a calmer character, someone who

agreed with everything I thought,
not up in my face like a warrior,

staunch, not backing down. On
persevering with our relationship

(because what can you do when you
are the only ones in this world)

one day there’s a smile, another,
a hand held out, some tacit

understanding between
the land and me. And then, a long

wide ridgeline of sienna
grass under a cobalt sky.

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: My father’s toolbox by Jackson

Leave a reply

My father’s toolbox

A slack-jawed shifting spanner
A yellow tape measure
that pulls out stiffly
and won’t retract

A small white pill
A fishing knife, stain-blotched wood,
line of triangular fangs
A piece of heavy wire bent into a hook

The key to a long-lost lock
Pliers and wire-cutters,
red vinyl grips worn dull
by years of hands

A seven-sided Irish silver coin
dating from the year I left home
A wrench
whose name I don’t know

A World War Two Australian penny,
verdigris film on wide brown disc,
an unshot kangaroo, the head
of a long-dead king

A new set of screwdrivers,
square-heads, sealed
in their blister pack
A sturdy green-handled Phillips …

The Honeymoon Screwdriver!
(Did little me name it?)
Translucent golden resin handle
fifty-years-later smooth

Nothing in this torn carton
will help me dig out the stubborn screw
inside his left-behind closet,
release the mildewed shelf

I have to get in a man
with corded forearms
like my father
used to have

Jackson
First published in Westerly

Jackson lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin. In 2021, they moved to Aotearoa from Australia, where Recent Work Press published their fourth poetry collection, A coat of ashes, based on their award-winning PhD thesis. In New Zealand, their poems have appeared in takahē, A fine line, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook and other journals. They are on the committees of the New Zealand Poetry Society and Dunedin’s monthly poetry reading group Octagon Collective.

Website
Facebook
Instagram