Poetry Shelf noticeboard: The ockham NZ Book Awards poetry shortlist

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Poetry Shelf warmly congratulates the four finalists

The finalists in the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry are poet and academic Anna Jackson for Terrier, Worrier: A Poem in Five Parts; poet and critic Erik Kennedy for Sick Power Trip; and debut poets Sophie van Waardenberg for No Good and Nafanua Purcell Kersel (Satupa‘itea, Faleālupo, Aleipata, Tuaefu) for Black Sugarcane.

Black Sugarcane byNafanua Purcell Kersel (Satupa‘itea, Faleālupo, Aleipata, Tuaefu) (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
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No Good by Sophie van Waardenberg (Auckland University Press)
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Sick Power Trip by Erik Kennedy (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
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Terrier, Worrier: A Poem in Five Parts byAnna Jackson (Auckland University Press)
Poetry Shelf feature

JUDGES for theMary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry: poet, musician and multi-disciplinary artist Daren Kamali (convenor); poet, writer, performer and editor Jordan Hamel; and writer, musician and translator Claudia Jardine.

“As judges we were filled with imagination and excitement, and we were also torn by the reasoning, culture, storytelling and language of the high-quality poetry collections in this year’s submissions,” says category convenor of judges Daren Kamali. “We salute the four finalists, from the island realness of Black Sugarcane and the love, loss and distance in No Good, to long COVID in Sick Power Trip and the shape and form of Terrier, Worrier.”

Poetry Shelf celebrates Ockham NZ Book Awards poetry long list: a review and Matariki Bennett picks a poem

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e kō, e nō hea koe, Matariki Bennett
Dead Bird Books, 2025

kareao

kareao is a vine native to our ngahere
she finds her strength in a tree
spends her life reaching for tama-nui-te-rā

kareao is used in our rongoā
she is a natural healer

ka ora te whenua
ka ora te tangata

we have always been people of the land
with korokoro tūī

an understanding of te ao tūroa that transcends this realm

kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua

when they came

te reo pākehā was embraced as pītau
a new beginning

we learnt their reo
wrote with rau and rākau

always going back to our rawa taiao to maintain this balance between
onamata
and anamata

when they came

tino rangatiratanga was agreed to
a promise in our language for sovereignty

while their māngai salivated for a taste of
our wāhine
their puku bloated from
our kai
their pockets stuffed with
our whenua

when they came

we pulled stakes from the belly of papatūānuku
told her not one more acre until she no longer recognised us

when they came

we saluted the queen of a country that refused our name

instead called us savages
kept our heads as trophies

to gawk at
like our people are only valuable when they’re dead

when they came

arero unfamiliar with our mita
|with the native schools act they scraped language from our tongues til we
spat out our culture like poison

when they came

teachers made their students cut kareao

then beat them

with the thickest and strongest vines

for speaking our reo

on our whenua

weaponising our taiao

against us

kei hea taku kāinga|
kua ngaro kē

where else could we go if not to our healers
|what else could we do if not to heal

he ahi
e tahu ana
i taku korokoro

there is a fire
burning
in my throat

Matariki Bennett

“In the mid-1980s Sir James Henare recalled being sent into the bush to cut a piece of pirita (supplejack vine) with which he was struck for speaking te reo in the school grounds. One teacher told him that ‘if you want to earn your bread and butter you must speak English.” 

I am a child of kohanga. A child who learnt two languages by the age of 5. A child of a father who only knows one and has spent this lifetime yearning for his reo. I am a moko of a grandfather whose generation was forbidden to speak. Whose generation were beaten for speaking. I watch as our language is skinned from the walls of parliament. Our culture is a political football. Our government is hellbent on causing division. I have seen the mamae our people hold not being able to speak. I know that this was no coincidence. To sever a people from their language is like severing root from tree. My poems speak to all that will never be forgotten. Everything my pāpā cannot say. Everything his pāpā couldn’t.

Matariki Bennett

Poetry Shelf review

It’s the first time I have ever celebrated ten books in ten days, but I was so drawn to the Ockham NZ Books Awards poetry long list I decided to embark on this crazy plan. Crazy yes with my small energy jar, but absolutely wonderful. Every single poetry book has offered tilt and truth – to borrow two poem titles from Emma Barnes. It’s like these ten poetry collections deliver little electric shocks, sweet miniature startles, skin prickle thrills – all feeding into and out of what it is to be human, what it is to write, to be mother father daughter son friend lover. What it is to navigate the dark and the light of past and present and maybe future, because so many on then longlist do this. And yes, more than ever, we are all, collectively, hand-in-hand navigating the dark and the light, at personal and global levels. And maybe my reviews are strange and not reviews and more like miniature biographies and odes to poem writing, and to surviving light and dark because I am drunk on poetry.

Matariki Bennett is the only poet whose work I had not yet encountered on the longlist, who I have not seen in performance. It feels like Matariki’s writing in e kō, nō hea koe has ignited a solar system of connections in my head. Wow! I felt like putting Jimi Hendrix’s famous guitar solo on full blast, or lying on the grass by the mānuka watching the pīwawaka dance bush poems, and then holding Matariki’s writing to my heart because more than anything, her poetry reminds me of the miracle of life. Maybe it’s because it’s the last day of my intense ten-day poetry sojourn where I have been reviewing at 4 am and reading at ten pm. Extraordinary. Extraordinary, too, to discover the cover artwork, ‘motherlines’ is by Matariki’s mother, Jane Holland, and the interior artworks are by her sister,
Māhina Bennett.

Where to begin Perhaps with the stars and moon and sun. There in the poet’s name, matariki. There in the poem where necessary protest is projected “all the way up to the moon”. There when the poet is looking out from a poem’s scene to the stellar sky, and on one occasion, holding someone close under “a blanket of stars”. The first two words that I write in my notebook are wisdom and wonder because in the opening poem the grandmother is pondering the stars, wondering why light outlives them. And then, many poems later, within the steady and glorious currents of wonder curiosity recognition, the grandmother and granddaughter meet again in a poem:

grandmama reckons i’m just as mad as she is
i reckon we are bits of the same star

we have always known where we come from
we have always known each other

from ‘what am i to a star?’

Where to begin Maybe with the echo-chamber question, where are we? And embedded in that, like an origami flower: where are we from? And in that who and how and maybe even why are we? I am holding the book title close, and lingering on where are we from, e kō, nō hea koe. This is the poem laying whakapapa on the page to open out. This is the poet connecting with her father and his father. This is the poet in her kitchen, connecting with her maternal lines, and yes, it’s poetry as the trickle on our cheek, the heart glitter:

i lock eyes with her, glitter crusting in the corners of my smile
while i light a ciggy for us in the glow of stars.

mum looks back from the danube towards home

i lock eyes with her from the kitchen of my flat in te aro, writing a poem
about our mother line
as it trickles down my cheek.

from matarua

Where to begin The way what we speak is utterly vital, tattooed on skin and yes heart, speaking te reo Maori is speaking home and bloodlines, and now, still now, especially now, we are challenging anything and everything that damages that. Because more than ever, language is our skin and blood and bones. In ‘koro’ Matariki writes: “my reo is the closest thing i have to home”.

Where to begin Perhaps with music, with the father’s playlist, or the album on the turntable, maybe Sinead, or Arihia on the ukulele, or the singing like starlight, or the lullabies, or the way Matariki’s poetry is poetry to be performed as much as read because every line is music in the ear. And that translates to music in the heart.

Where to begin Maybe with the youth knowing there’s “an expiry date on being young and outspoken” or maybe with the grandmother living in her memories or when “it’s time to grow the fuck up”. It’s maybe silence and sheddings, silence and sheddings rippling across days and days and months and months of writing and talking and being. All this.

Where to begin Let’s follow the trails and seeds of what it is to write, what it is to pick up a pen, in and out of each day, memory, strengthening relationship, little epiphanies, larger insights, landscape views. It is this:

kōrero mai e pā
kei kōnei mātou hei whakarongo

every poem i write has been generations in the making
it is everything my pāpā cannot say

from ‘koro’

More than anything it is also this:

my dad lost his dad when he was 18. for the last few weeks of his lifegrandpa could only whistle.

dad tells me this in a restaurant in morocco.

there’s an old man strumming peace on a guitar.
a woman dances between tables.
i excuse myself to the bathroom to cry.

every piece of writing feels like a eulogy.
dad wants me to come home.

i want my writing to whistle.
heaven.

something that’ll survive
us all.

from eulogy

Where to begin. Pick up the book and start reading. Feel the blanket stars, the moon light drops, the light emanating from each poem, because on a day when my news feed and social media is flooding with doom and devastation and despair, I feel so grateful for Matariki’s book, for its light and its aroha, its te reo Māori and its groundings, its fragilities and its protest, its whanau and its bridging breath. Pick up the book and start dreaming.

Matariki Bennett is a 23 year old award-winning Slam Poet and Filmmaker. She released her first book, e kō, nō hea koe in May 2025. She is a founding member of Ngā Hinepūkōrero, a bilingual Wāhine Māori Slam Poetry Collective, who in 2021, were honoured with the Creative New Zealand Ngā Manu Pīrere Award, recognising outstanding emerging Māori artists. In 2023, Matariki was the Wellington Poetry Slam Champion. Matariki co-wrote and co-directed, ‘Te Kohu’ (2022)’ and directed the short documentary, ‘Wind, Song and Rain (2022)’, she also wrote and directed ‘Tōku Reo’ (2019). 

Whakapapa, Te Reo Māori and Hītori are the tūāpapa of Matariki’s storytelling.

He uri tēnei nō Ngāti Pikiao, nō Ngāti Whakaue hoki, ko Matariki Bennett tōku ingoa. He Kaituhi Toikupu, he Kaihanga Kiriata ahau. I puta mai taku pukapuka tuatahi i tēnei tau, ko ‘e kō, nō hea koe’ te ingoa. Ko au tētahi o te tokowhā o Ngā Hinepūkōrero, he rōpu Toikupu i riro i te tohu Ngā Manu Pīrere i te tau 2021 hei whakanui i ngā ringatoi Māori. I te tau 2023, ko au te toa o te whakataetae Toikupu ki Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Ko au te Kaituhi, ko au te Kaitohu o te kiriata, ‘Te Kohu’ (2022)’, te kiriata, ‘Wind, Song and Rain (2022)’ me te kiriata, ‘Tōku Reo’ (2019). 

Ko tōku whakapapa, ko Te Reo Māori, ko te Hitori te tūāpapa o ōku mahi katoa.

Dead Bird Books page
Matariki Bennett will be in the Schools Programme at the AWF 2026
A kōrero with Read NZ

Poetry Shelf celebrates the Ockham NZ Book Awards poetry longlist: Tusiata Avia

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Giving Birth to My Father, Tusiata Avia
Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025

Ah. Tusiata Avia’s sublime fifth poetry collection is like moving into a meditative room where grief and love are yin and yang. The book is written to and from the death of her father, which in Sāmoan culture, is also his birth. Tusiata’s dad had lived in Aotearoa for fifty years, but returned to Sāmoa for the final stages of his life. He had helped build and nurture the Sāmoan community in Ōtautahi Christchurch.

The opening poems rise out of mourning, out of her father’s funeral ceremony in Sāmoa. First an imagined how-it-was-supposed-to-go sequence. Then a second how it-actually-went sequence. This precious collection was nine years in the making; a book, as Tusiata said in an RNZ radio interview, that was difficult to send into the world, a book in which she kept adjusting thoughts feelings revelations. It’s a eulogy, it’s writing poetry as a way of drawing close, it’s poetry as writing the gap that aches, facing the questions that compound, the anger that sizzles, it’s writing and living when each day grief is the shawl draped across the shoulders of being.

Yes. It’s travelling with and responding to and negotiating grief.

Ah. I am so deeply moved as I read this. Entering different scenes. Sometimes poignant, such as ‘In the Countdown carpark’, when the father’s hand rests on the shoulder of his fifty-year-old daughter sitting in his kitchen as she weeps. Or the flashes of anger at Sāmoan funeral culture and the way a grieving family feels, or the presence of water and of boats, the carving of boats, the rowing the steering the sharing. There is the ping and pang that her father wasn’t always present, a voice on the end of the line, and then how father and daughter are moving closer with visits in later years. The way mother and daughter, brother and many aunties, are also moving in and out of scenes, amplifying the love, sometimes irritations, but always returning and maintaining the integral power of alofa.

Yes. It’s travelling with and responding to and transmitting alofa.

It’s recognising the complicated difficulties of being mother daughter sister niece. It’s sitting in the gods with her mother to watch her dad in the band or hearing her beloved daughter on the ukulele.

It is is the shifting lights of here and not here, and as a reader my every pore is trembling. This from ‘I thought you were gone and not coming back’, where there are multiple light sources, there’s ice cream and old women’s foreheads:

It’s important I know where the light is coming from –
the afterlife or the ice cream?
My grandmother’s hair or the minister’s house?
The important thing is: I thought you were gone.

And then to read the final skin-trembling line: “in other words, you are the light, Dad.”

I stall on the poem, ‘Watch’. This is what Tusiata’s poetry can do. Swivel and tilt you as each poem carries you though every diamond-cut facet of feeling. Heck this poem sticks to me as it unfolds. The poet, and yes I am saying Tusiata, because this collection is incredibly personal, removes the watch from her father’s wrist, and then places it upon her own. You get that skin tremble again with building memory-ache as both poet and wristwatch summon this place and that occasion, this smell and that nickname. The brown watch that becomes gold watch, becomes missing watch, that becomes this watch returned. It’s me brimming with alofa and grief and tenderness, especially when I read the final two stanzas:

That was six months ago. Now I’m in the Sky City Hotel layering
myself in my niece’s make-up. I am going to have a seizure in a few
minutes. I will wake up and find myself on the bathroom floor. I
will crawl to the hotel phone, ring my cousin in Christchurch and
ask her what city I’m in and what to do.

You’re at the book awards, the book awards, she calls to me. Ring
Hine and make her come and get you. I ring Hine, who will win
the book awards. Before I leave the room, I open a small zip on the
side of my overnight bag and my father enters the room. He slips
the watch over my wrist. I kiss his hand. And we go.

And here we go, yes let’s go into the meditative room of reading, this special special place that Tusiata has built for herself, for her loved ones, that we, her poetry fans and friends can share, travelling deep into grief and alofa through the power and nourishing strength of words. Thank you.

Tusiata Avia is the award-winning author of Wild Dogs Under My Skirt (2004; also staged internationally), Bloodclot (2009), Fale Aitu | Spirit House (2016), The Savage Coloniser Book (2020; winner of the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry and also staged nationally) and Big Fat Brown Bitch (2023). Tusiata has held the Fulbright Pacific Writers Fellowship at the University of Hawai‘i in 2005 and the Ursula Bethell Writer in Residence at University of Canterbury in 2010. She was the 2013 recipient of the Janet Frame Literary Trust Award, and in 2020 was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to poetry and the arts. In 2023 she was given a Distinguished Alumni Award at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington and a Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement. 

Te Herenga Waka University page

Interview on RNZ on Culture 101

Poetry Shelf celebrates Ockham NZ Book Awards poetry longlist: a review and Emma Barnes picks a poem

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If We Knew How to We Would, Emma Barnes
Auckland University Press, 2025

Poetry Shelf review

Emma Barnes’ new collection comes with an advisory note as some parts deal with suicide, depression and grief. I utterly loved Emma’s debut collection,I Am in Bed with You (AUP, 2021), but in my patchwork year of light and dark, in 2025 I could not enter the pathways of If We Knew How We Could. Making choices like this is an important part of self care, yet this week, having steadily grown into my new normal, I felt ready to read it. And I absolutely love it.

I near the end of my madcap plan to celebrate every poetry book on the Ockham NZ Book Awards poetry longlist (within an uncharacteristic short space of time) and I know what an extraordinary set of books the judges have selected. And here is Emma’s book, one of the few collections I had not already read and reviewed, and it touches me so profoundly. It did not trigger the dark, it opened up a kaleidoscope of light on existence, on non-existence, on self love as much as self loathing.

The book is dedicated to “all the ad hoc mental health support teams who are out there doing their best in an underfunded, seemingly unloving world.’ How this resonates when our health system is rusting up and out, when our doctors and nurses are working against all our odds to heal and care.

Emma’s collection is divided into three sections, each prefaced with epigrams from authors who, as Emma writes in their endnote, are their “literary ancestors”: “As a writer I am descended from every author I’ve read and loved”. Again so resonant. I am reminded how I carry mantras in my heart and pockets, lines from poems that flicker and fertilise throughout each day. Try this for size:

“Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone,
it has to be made, like bread;
remade all the time, made new.”

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

I have filled a notebook with epigrams from If We Knew How We Could. Yet every prose poem is like an opening fan of epigrams, each line intricately woven into the “tilt” and “truth” of how we read the ones either side. This for example from ‘To knit is to code is to code is to knit’:

I am aware of the gaps within myself. I leave a little bit of openness for a
future though I knit around you, I knit around us. I knit into a future world
where thread and gap combine to wrap our history neatly of lopsided. The
gaps that made us then are not the gaps that make us now.

As much as the collection faces, negotiates, and indeed travels, with grief, it faces, negotiates and travels with life. I see the book as a form of embrace. Think self, think life, and also think form. The first and third sections are the warm arms around the middle section’s aching jagged heartwrenching core. In the opening section, the poems, both organic and mesmerising, at times erotic draw us close to a together and breaking “we”, to bodies that yearn and crave and desire, smudging and crossing borders between we and you and I. Of words, beyond words. Of self, beyond self. The middle section faces a suicide (the word too unbearable to be used by the poet) of someone close, with the pain of the what-if alternate paths and alleys, the toughness of the “unknown” and the “unknowable”, especially to self, even to self. The third section returns to the homeself, to the body, to the self as a solar system of possibilities, truths, recognitions. And yes, pain and desire and fragilities. Read this sample from one of my favourite poems, ‘I Am’:

I am an unmade bed. I am a single thing made up of many other things. I am a reason, a raising, a roof to be raised. I am a song you sing in your sleep. I am a collection of dots. I am a need you buried in the back garden. I am a literal spray of light across a wooden floor in a house where the sun has only just returned. I am a musical phrase. I am a lead light. I am a host. I am seven different names. I am all the fat in my body. I am the sky when it is early spring and I can’t believe I exist in this colour range. I am so blue.

What do I pull close from this extraordinary book, words to carry in my pockets and heart? I could point you to the way we are organic and multi-hued, maybe even multi-hulled. The way both world and self are full of gaps, how there is the known and the unknown, the knowable and the unknowable, recognition and misrecognition. I utterly love the unfolding slowness of the narrating voice, the rhythm intensifying thoughtfulness, the weave of “truth” and “tilt”, the complicated “knit” of how to live and co-exist, how to be, despite edges and wounds. I love the physical objects that feed into the self-narrative-knit: the Wi-Fi restarting, the egg cracked, the empty street, the tree roots and leaves, the pattern of feet, tender wall, soft bridge.

Extraordinary, this is my heart book of 2025, this book of human stutters and connections.

Emma Barnes (Pākehā, they/them) studied at the University of Canterbury and lives in Aro Valley, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington. Their poetry has been published in journals including Landfall, Turbine | Kapohau, Cordite and Best New Zealand Poems (2008, 2010, 2021). They performed in Show Ponies in 2022 and 2023. They are the author of the poetry collection I Am in Bed with You (AUP, 2021) and co-editor with Chris Tse of Out Here: An Anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ Writers from Aotearoa (AUP, 2021). They work in tech and spend a lot of time picking up heavy things and putting them back down again.

Auckland University Press page

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: you can’t complain about bird noise in the city, Isla Reeves Martin

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you can’t complain about bird noise in the city

the word gauze comes from gazzatum silk comes
from gaza / who is still dressing everybody elses wounds

cleaning out the cuts of cities flung farther than /
petrol can slick the founding fathers 

hair back / but just as long as an olive branch /
tended to by the same blood / since the past started, 

can oil us / make us a throng again / cashel street 
thick / with chanting like we forgot we / 

were a all village once too and / we always gave 
the megaphone / to the kids first and /

in my own language i look up the words for bond 
starve trauma / in my own language i am always looking up /

now / everything is relative to palestine /
at the traffic light a / woman unwraps a browned apple

slice / from a napkin and puts it in a man’s / mouth 
and the wall says free / gaza like

from the river to the dead sea / and the dead
i / want to put us all in the recovery position / i 

hope the bridge of remembrance /
remembers us back. 

Isla Reeves Martin

Isla Huia (Te Āti Haunui a-Pāpārangi, Uenuku) is a te reo Māori teacher and kaituhi from Ōtautahi. Her debut collection of poetry, Talia, was released in May 2023 by Dead Bird Books, and was shortlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards 2024. Her work was also featured in the International Institute of Modern Letters’ Ōrongohau Best New Zealand Poems in both 2023 and 2024, and has been published in journals and anthologies throughout Aotearoa as well.

Poetry Shelf celebrates Ockham NZ Book Awards poetry longlist: Grace Yee picks a poem

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Joss: A History, Grace Yee
Giramondo Press, 2025

my father was not a gardener

but he was a handsome widespreading form descended from a
long-lived drought-resistant species.

every night he out-walked the doughnut boys ‘fuckin’ asians!’ out
in the street in their revved-up ford cortinas.

walking, he knew, was good for surveying the lie of the land and
building tolerance for life’s implacably white horizons.

in forty years, one hundred and twenty-five million steps graven
in the asphalt, relieving the pressure like a burr hole.

the woman he married was a graceful weeping habit (her beauties
severe and planed): a splendid courtyard specimen, unable to
grow in heavy soils.

nightly she waited for him: flashlight wedging the dark, bones
crumbling early, safe and dry.

discouraged by heavy staking and rectilinear boundaries, my
father, struck with leaves of variable light, was a legend among
biologists.

every evening he ventured into the wilderness, spade hands a
hundred feet deep in thought earth. the land he roamed was
densely populated:

sepia daughters, china, mother. heaving sea-plane, roiling ocean.
jock-the-border-collie flying in the rearview mirror. vauxhall viva.
blue.

dead brother. dead lover. whisky. codeine. lost keys a tilting door
nana mouskouri singing ‘you return to love’ carbon monoxide
filling his lungs like a lake in a bonsai forest.

rain hail sleet snow or interstellar dust, my father rode out to
orion’s belt in his sherlock hat, hohner harmonica + johnnie
walker + cat in tow. moths strumming the campfire.

when the embers fell, he’d pull up his collar and shuffle inside,
pausing a moment to gaze at the oak trees bathed in molasses on
the floors of the house.

Grace Yee

Early drafts of ‘my father was not a gardener’ were written in response to the word ‘solace’, a prompt I read somewhere – it might have been for a competition I ended up not entering.

The poem was inspired by my father, who suffered a stroke at the age of forty-four and during his rehabilitation, spent hours each day walking up and down the street. After he went back to work he continued walking, mostly in the evenings – it was a habit that kept him alive for decades, right up until the restrictions imposed by the pandemic in 2020 (he died in 2021).

He walked in all kinds of weather. In the winter, he would wear a thick scarf and the Sherlock hat with ear flaps that I bought for him in England. The stroke affected his balance: he had a wide-legged gait, more of a shuffle, slow but steady. Immediately after the stroke, he gave up cigarettes and took up chewing gum, so he’d walk and chew. Before the stroke, he’d been a whistler – after the stroke, he never whistled again.

At the time, it seemed to me that the stroke cleaved his life in two – before the stroke, he was young-ish and able-bodied and cheerful, and after, he became old and disabled and grumpy. I used to think the stroke was the most dramatic thing that ever happened to my father – but over the years, and after his passing at the age of 84, I came to realise that he had survived many upheavals, that the stroke was just one of them, and that even in the darkest underpasses of his life, there had been light.

My father was not a gardener: he had no patience for growing things for leisure or for work – he was never the stereotypical Chinese market gardener. But he did love poetry and philosophy and fiction and music and people and animals and nature. When I wrote that he was “struck by leaves of variable light, was a legend among biologists”, I meant that he was captivated by literature and trees, and the vast abstract and concrete worlds he lived in, and that despite his diminished capacity to engage, was in awe of it all.     

Grace Yee

A Poetry Shelf review

Grace Yee’s multi-award winning debut poetry collection, Chinese Fish, adapted her collection from the Creative Writing and Cultural Studies PhD thesis that she completed at the University of Melbourne. The collection is rich in multiple voices, braided narratives, cultural inheritances. It is a probing reaction to immigration, hierarchies, overt and covert racism, and emerges from daily living, personal experience, feeling, reflection, research and a tremendous love of words. Her writing draws upon and borrows from diverse sources: New Zealand archives including newspapers; nonfiction works on gender and women; songs, radio documentary. Seven poem sequences gather the overlapping subject matter, the motifs, the linguistic melodies.

I return to this earlier collection because Joss: A History, equally acute and probing, steps off from the foundation stones in her debut book to shine further vital light on Chinese communities, present and past, in Australasia. I see this new collection standing in for the ‘joss’ stick held high, with its connotations of the divine, as a move both to respect and to honour. It’s a collection held high for us to see, hear and feel the chorus of assembled voices. Grace has sourced, borrowed and adapted text from multiple settings: museums, news media, diaries, novels and nonfiction books (see her comprehensive endnotes). From these precious fragments she is excavating, exhuming, exposing the heartbreaking gaps and cliches. Together the voices establish a matrix. It’s a throb. It’s a poetic finger on the pulse of ideas, circumstances, erasures, narratives that link past to present in myriad slippery ways.

We are taken to the White Hills Cemetery in Bendigo where a thousand plus ‘Chinamen’ are buried, many in unmarked graves, many with links back to south China’s Canton area. As Grace is discovering precious fragments in her reading and research, her discoveries – the buried, the eclipsed, the misrepresented, the exoticised – shift in the light and singe of her poetry. It’s poetry that is political, personal, shifting in form, layered with history yet never loosing touch with the present. And that is why this book matters so much. In these times. In these hard times where the past is a jagged edge in the gut and the heart of the present. And it needs to be. Grace reminds us the poem can be a vessel for thinking back, for carrying the pain of the world, for holding out possibilities for the paths forward. Poetry carries us beyond. Joss: A history carries us back and beyond, and that is a gift in this colonised world. Thank you.

Grace Yee was born in British Hong Kong, grew up in Ōtautahi, Aotearoa New Zealand and now lives in Melbourne, on Wurundjeri land. Her poetry has been widely published and anthologised in Australia and internationally. Her awards include the Patricia Hackett Prize, the Peter Steele Poetry Award, a Creative Fellowship at the State Library Victoria, and grants from Creative Victoria and the Australia Council for the Arts. She has taught in the creative writing programs at Deakin University, and at the University of Melbourne, where she completed a PhD on settler Chinese women’s storytelling in Aotearoa New Zealand. Her debut collection Chinese Fish won the 2024 Victorian Prize for Literature, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, and the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Her second collection, Joss: A History, was published by Giramondo in June 2025 and longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Award for Poetry.

Giramondo page

Poetry Shelf celebrates the Ockham NZ Book Awards Poetry Long list: Nafanua Purcell Kersel

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Black Sugarcane, Nafanua Purcell Kersel
Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025

Moana Pōetics

We build a safe around our birth stones.
Craft it with a dream, a gourd, a drum-made
chant.

Pile it high with frigate bird bones,
song bones, bones of
cherished names.

We rub sinnet along our thighs and lash
our cache. Our stories kept sound, where words
and names and songs are not forgotten.

One day before, now, or beyond, something
with a heart drops a hank of its flesh
before us. It sounds like a drum and we know

it’s time
to undo the rope, iron-rock and bone-sand.
The stories, they tell us

that if we are the dark blue seas then we are
also the pillowed nights and days, soft with
clouds, spread half-open.

We are a tidal collection, hind-waters of the
forever we rally on, to break the staple
metaphors from the fringes.

Safe.
We sound together on a dance or
bark an intricate rhyme.

We, are the filaments of a devoted rope. We,
who contain a continuance and

call it poetry.

Nafanua Purcell Kersel

Nafanua Purcell Kersel’s debut poetry collection, Black Sugarcane is a book to savour slowly, with senses alert, ready to absorb the aroha, the myriad pathways, the songs, the prayers, the dance of living. The first line of the first poem, ‘Moana Pōetics’, is a precious talisman: ‘We build a safe around our birth stones.’ It is a found poem that uses terms from the glossary in Mauri Ola: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English, edited by Albert Wendt, Reina Whaitiri and Robert Sullivan (Auckland University Press, 2010). The poem draws us deep into the power of stories, night and day, the ocean, safety, the power of rhythm. And that is exactly what the collection does.

The book is divided into five sections, each bearing a vowel as a title (ā, ē, ī, ō, ū), the macron drawing out the sound, as it does in so many languages like an extended breath. When I read of vowels in the poem, ‘To’ona’i’, the idea and presence of vowels lift a notch, and poetry itself becomes a ‘sweet refresh’, a warm aunty laugh: “Aunty Sia’s laugh is like a perfectly ripe pineapple / a sweet refresh of vowel sounds”.

Let me say this. There is no shortage of poetry books published in Aotearoa this year to love, to be enthralled and astonished by. We need this. We need these reading pathways. Sometimes I love a poetry book so much I transcend the everyday scene of reading (yes those bush tūī singing and the kererū fast-swooping) to a zone where I am beyond words. It is when reading is both nourishment and restoration, miracle and epiphany . . . and that is what I get with this book.

Begin with the physicality of a scene, a place, an island, a home. The scent of food being prepared and eaten will ignite your taste buds. Pies filled and savoured, luscious quince, the trickster fruit slowly simmered, a menu that is as much a set of meals as a pattern of life. Move into the warm embrace of whanau, the cousins, aunties, uncles, parents, grandparents, offspring. And especially, most especially, the grandmother and her lessons: ‘”If you want to learn by heart, / be still and watch my hands” (from ‘Grandma lessons (kitchen)’).

Find yourself in the rub of politics: the way you are never just a place name and that where you come from is a rich catalogue of markers, not a single word. The question itself so often misguided and racist. Enter the ripple effect of the dawn raids, or the Christchurch terrorist attack, or poverty, or climate change, crippling hierarchies. And find yourself in the expanding space of the personal; where things are sometimes explored and confessed, and sometimes hinted at. I am thinking pain. I am thinking therapist.

Find yourself in shifting poetic forms, akin to the shifting rhythms of life and living: a pantoum, a found poem, an erasure poem, long lines short lines, drifting lines. Find yourself in the company of other poets, direct and indirect lines to the nourishment Nafanua experiences as a writer: for example, Lyn Hejinian, Kaveh Akbar, Karlo Mila, Tusiata Avia, Selina Tusitala Marsh, Serie Barford, Konai Helu Thaman, Dan Taulapapa McMullin. So often I am reminded we don’t write within vacuums. We write towards, from and because of poetry that feeds us.

Bob Marley makes an appearance so I put his album, Exodus, on repeat as I write this. It makes me feel the poetry even more deeply. This coming together, this ‘One Love,’ this getting together and feeling alright, as we are still fighting, still uniting to make things better in a thousand and one ways.

I give thanks for this book.

Listen to Nafanua read here.

‘

Nafanua Purcell Kersel (Satupa‘itea, Faleālupo, Aleipata, Tuaefu) is a writer, poet and performer who was born in Sāmoa and raised in Te-Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa. Her poetry has been widely published. She has an MA from the IIML at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington and won the 2022 Biggs Family Prize in Poetry for Black Sugarcane, her first book. She lives in Te Matau-a-Māui Hawke’s Bay.

Te Herenga Waka University Press page

Poetry Shelf celebrates Ockham NZ Book Award poetry longlist: Serie Barford selects a poem

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STANDING on my SHADOW by Serie Barford
Anahera Press, 2025

Waiting room triad

I face the door, eyes closed, wait for the kuia from my                     
moemoeā to arrive. She’ll step into this room like a feisty
maunga dismantling into an outgoing tide. Glow like                     
fading embers.

Flick. My eyes roller-blind open. Focus on a patient at
reception. She sees me. Seers me. Sails the mopped floor
of diagnosis and disease. We hongi. Kiss cheeks. Sit quietly
on cheapskate chairs opposite a television screwed to the wall.

Utu, she explains. A blood transfusion was the portal. An
enemy with mākutu flair slept within a donor’s toto. One
whiff of my whakapapa, he woke up – greedy to settle
old scores. Steered a waka taua through red tides infusing
my tinana. Ha! That sneaky bastard gave colonial troops
a runaround in his day. I was a sitting duck!

I’ve swallowed pills for five years. Hormone suppressors
to starve breast cancer. They took the wahine out of me.
Make me hōhā. Weak.

We admire the intricacies of utu. The enemy’s tenacity.
The way he patiently nursed a grudge through bloodlines.
Waited to strike.

At least it ends with me. Balance is restored. My whānau
safe. No way I can talk to doctors about this. Aue!

We laugh. Roll our eyes at how casually we censor truth.
Whitewash talk.

Hine-nui-te pō is waiting.

Not long now.

Serie Barford

Notes

kuia  elderly woman, grandmother, female elder

moemoeā dream, vision

maunga  mountain. Some west coast coast maunga – once volcano but also personified ancestors – are slowly eroding and being  carried by the sea to beaches in this area

hongi  sharing of  breath by two people pressing noses together

utu   concept of reciprocation or balance to retain mana; both friendly and unfriendly actions require an appropriate response

mākutu   sorcery, the infliction of physical and psychological harm or death through spiritual powers

toto  blood

whakapapa a line of descent from one’s ancestors, genealogy

waka taua   canoe for war parties

tinana    body, torso

wahine   woman

hōhā      annoyed, irritated

whānau   extended family, family group

aūe!      exclamation expressing an emotional reaction

Hine-nui-te-pō      Māori goddess of night and death

I’ve chosen this poem because it explores the casualisation of blood in the    Western medical system and how this affects some cancer patients’ behaviour, as well as relationships between patients and medical professionals.

I’m descended from a line of dreamers. Seers. I often dream who I’ll meet days, weeks or even years before we encounter each other. The night before a chemo infusion I met a woman in a dream.  I could tell from the shape of a mountain that the kuia was from the Taranaki region. I also saw that she was eroding. Physically disintegrating. We introduced ourselves. Chatted.

The next day I sat in the oncology waiting room, closed my eyes, waited to feel her enter the room. We recognised each other and continued our        
conversation. Some of our kōrero is written as italics within the poem.

 One of her ancestors had an adversary who was unable to extract utu before he  died. The ‘cost’ was in the ether – waiting to be paid. It’s an intergenerational   debt that will eventually be paid by a person from the ‘wrongdoers’ bloodline.  Both warriors were involved in the Taranaki land conflicts in the 1860s. The kuia was targeted by her ancestor’s enemy who wanted to address a perceived betrayal.

Over a century later this kuia needed a blood transfusion. The blood that saved her life contained the bloodline (DNA cellular memory) of her ancestor’s      adversary. Blood recognises blood. Some people can even smell blood          connections. I’ve walked into rooms and people have ‘scented’ me as being part of their ancestral line. Her ancestor’s adversary attacked her from within. Sailed her “red tides” on a waka taua – a war canoe.

We discussed hormone therapy that’s part of breast cancer adjuvant treatment. It wasn’t until I embarked on this treatment that I realised how vulnerable it makes women with certain wairua/spiritual gifts. I lost my ability to dream. I just couldn’t access this part of my life. I felt useless. My dreaming guided and protected me, connected me with ancestors and was something that helped my community. I was “blind” for six years.

So there were were, a woman who’d stopped hormone therapy and a woman who was yet to begin this treatment. We met in a space where we were able to dream and connect. I was still hopeful that I’d have many years ahead of me. The graceful kuia knew she’d paid the cost for her ancestor’s transgression. She was peaceful because the debt was paid. Her descendants were safe. She would soon pass into Hine-nui-te-pō’s realm.

It all made perfect sense to us. We understood the potency of blood and how it is casualised in the Western medical system. We know that we have to censor      truth in order to be a “good patient”. I’ve been offered counselling and       antidepressants when I’ve tried to talk to medical professionals about indigenous spiritual matters. I wrote this book to express and connect. And because I wanted to give voice to censored truth. To elevate disrupted narratives.

Serie Barford

An extract from Paula Green’s Poetry Shelf review:

The final word of the collection is ‘aroha’. The final image drawing us back to the infusion of toxicity and delight we picture at the start of the collection. Here I am, personally attached to this personal record of an utterly challenging time, and I am brimming with sadness and recognition, joy and connections. Read the final paragraph from ‘The grace of a stranger’, order this book, and gift it to a friend:

Yesterday I was miserable. Overwhelmed by side effects.
Lay on the floor, heart flailing, sunlight rippling through
French doors, guarded by anxious cats. Birds were singing.
Clocks ticking. I thought about Chornobyl, the Exclusion
Zone, the trumpeting angel memorial to lives lost. Waited
for ancestors to appear. Fetch me. But it wasn’t my time.

Today I’m visiting an oncologist in Building 8. Facing this
tricky business of living. Talking about celestial beings.
Feeling uplifted by the grace of a stranger.

Aroha.

Serie Barford was born in Aotearoa to a German-Samoan mother and a Palagi father. She is one of New Zealand’s leading voices in contemporary poetry and has been a pioneer for Pasifika women poets since the late 1970s. She has published five previous collections of poetry. Sleeping with Stones was shortlisted for the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Award for Poetry. She was a recipient of a 2018 Pasifika residency at the Michael King Writers Centre. Serie promoted a Ukrainian translation of her poetry collection Tapa Talk at an international book festival in Kiev in 2019.

Anahera Press page
Serie in conversation with Emile Donovan on RNZ
Serie selects some books at The Spin Off
Sophie van Waardenberg review at Aotearoa NZ Review of Books
Hebe Kearney review at Kete Books

Poetry Shelf Celebrates Okham Book Awards poetry long list: Gregory Kan picks a poem

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Clay Eaters, Gregory Kan
Auckland University Press, 2025

Not wanting to be bent

Over each and every loss

Divided my mind into multiple plots

Of land, with fences

Growing around each of them

Pretended

That there was nowhere else to go

That where I was

Was all that was left

And years went by

Like on television

Gregory Kan
from Clay Eaters

“I feel like I’ve written this poem many times, differently.” Gregory

From Paula Green’s review on Poetry Shelf:

I have just finished reading Gregory Kan’s Clay Eaters and I am caught in an eddy of multiple hauntings. How to translate this transcendental state of reading? How to share this poetry nourishment? I will begin with the notion that the collection resembles a landscape of braided rivers: a polyphonic source, the tributaries, the gentle currents and the torrents, the obstacle boulders and the jagged edges, the ripples and the calm. The beauty. The fierceness. The shifting waters. The place to stand and ponder. The place to stand and be. Poetry as braided river. Poetry as wonder.

Poetry that is personal and invented and incredibly moving.

Who were you, really

Outside of us, outside of me

Outside of all my

Useless bargaining

There are autobiographical braids. The family who moves from Singapore to Aotearoa. The poet who returns to Singapore six years later to do compulsory military service on Pulau Tekong. A father who suffers a stroke. A partner and a beloved cat who dies. Siblings and their offspring.

Poetry that is slowly unfolding as we traverse the braided currents. The visual layout offers shifting movement as we move amidst silence, the double spacing, the single spacing, the space to ponder, the spare and the dense, the jungle and the family room, the familiar and the unfamiliar.

Poetry as mapping. Maps are a recurring motif on an island that has a chequered history of cartography and naming, where orienteering is a key lesson for the military trainees. Yet I find myself viewing this as more than jungle mapping, because these poetic braids are a way of mapping self, of heart. There are the slippery currents of losing and finding one’s way in both past and present, the porous areas between here and there. There is no translation for a dish, kueh: ‘Neither cake nor jelly / Neither dumpling nor pudding / But somewhere between them all’. For me that signalled the inhabited space. Nothing set in concrete. Nothing static. The forever changed. Like the braided river flowing, the same but different.

This is poetry that navigates a tough experience, the poet’s military cadet years, those jungle ghosts, where spirits may dwell in trees: ‘The island didn’t seem like a place for people’. Where it’s the ‘Endless trees running deep into the red clay earth’. And it’s the weight of packs and mysterious stories and escape longings. The hammering weapons. Heart wrenching. This ache.

And then.

This is poetry that draws forward the father, there in his invalid wheelchair or his study, notebooks piling, books on shelves. The difficulty and ease of being with him, then and now. And the family, the mother, the siblings and the offspring, coming into view. And a scene, this together family scene, after the ‘archetypal family feast’, that is a catch in my throat, as the dreams accrue and connect.

Gregory Kan is a writer and developer based in Pōneke/Wellington. His first collection of poetry, This Paper Boat, was shortlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for poetry in 2017. Under Glass, his second collection, was longlisted for the award in 2020. He was the 2017 Grimshaw Sargeson Fellow.

Auckland University Press page

Listen to Gregory read here