The gift shop
When Josephine leaves Ellis Island she is not yet sure what she takes away with her, and what she leaves behind in the glass cabinets, and she wonders if the gift shop sells little blue bottles of hope, gathered as carefully as saffron, to keep in a coat pocket and season the next day, and then the day when it is most needed.
© Paula Green New York Pocket Book Seraph Press, 2016.
SARAH BROOM POETRY PRIZE
The Sarah Broom Poetry Prize is New Zealand’s most valuable poetry prize and aims to recognise and financially support new work from an emerging or established New Zealand poet through a $10,000 award.
The prize was established in 2013 in honour of the New Zealand poet Sarah Broom (1972-2013), the author of Tigers at Awhitu (2010) and Gleam (2013).
Entries open on 6 February and close on 2 March 2017
The Sarah Broom Poetry Prize is now in its fourth year, and we are pleased again to be working together with the Auckland Writers Festival to showcase and celebrate New Zealand poetry. The prize will be announced at the Auckland Writers Festival in May 2017. Shortlisted poets will be invited to read their poetry at a dedicated poetry event at the Festival, where the winner will be announced.
The judge for the 2017 prize is Carol Ann Duffy. Duffy is Britain’s Poet Laureate and is the first woman in the role’s 400 year history. She is one of the most significant names in contemporary poetry and the author of books for children, plays and many celebrated poetry collections including Mean Time (1993), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award and the Forward Poetry Prize, The World’s Wife (1999), Love Poems (2010) and The Bees (2011). She has been awarded numerous awards and prizes for her work including the T.S Eliot Poetry Prize.
For more information about the prize and Sarah Broom see here.
For more information about the Auckland Writers Festival, which will be held from 16 – 21 May 2017, visit here.
HOW TO ENTER
The prize is awarded on the basis of an original collection of poems by a New Zealand resident or citizen. Entries will be accepted from from 6 February 2017 until 2 March 2017.
Poets are required to submit six to eight poems, of which at least five must be unpublished. The recipient of the prize will be announced in May 2017 at the Auckland Writers Festival. Shortlisted poets will be invited to attend a dedicated event and read from their work.
Entries should be emailed to poetryprize@sarahbroom.co.nz Any queries should be emailed to enquiries@sarahbroom.co.nz
CONDITIONS OF ENTRY
1. Poets are required to submit six to eight poems of which at least five must be unpublished. 2. There is no maximum or minimum length – formatting and font size is your choice.
3. Entrants must be New Zealand permanent residents or citizens.
4. Only one entry per person will be accepted.
5. Entries must be the author’s original work. Any use of quotation must be acknowledged by attribution to its source.
6. Entries must be submitted as one electronic file per entrant, as an email attachment in Word or PDF format. No identifying details should be present in this poetry portfolio.
7. Your entry should also include a covering email with a brief personal statement, an indication of how you would use the award money, and contact details. These covering details are not provided to the judge.
8. The judge will assess the merits of submissions, and the Sarah Broom Poetry Trust reserves the right not to award a prize.
9. The prize recipient will be announced at the Auckland Writers Festival in May 2017 and in other appropriate publications.
10. No correspondence with the judge will be entered into.
11. The name and photograph of the prize recipient may be used by the Sarah Broom Poetry Trust for publicity purposes.
Josephine waits in a queue
Josephine wears her Time Out Guide as a hat and then uses it as a fan
and then wears it as a hat again because she is caught in a queue
that is endless interminable bending about in the biting heat
with the buskers upstaging the Statue of Liberty and the Statue of Liberty
out there in the harbour like a pale welcome sign in the murky light.
Someone stands on a ladder dressed as the statue and doesn’t blink
or twitch, the classical green folds look like stone and next the bronze figures
stuck on the pier that might twitch or blink or be there for an eternity
one knee-deep in water with fingers outstretched missing the rescue
always not-quite saved the man stretching fingers down from the plinth
a boat and there’s an accordion frozen in time hands to mouth the bronze
tinged with liberty green a tableau of hope intense melancholy
that trips the woman up. For a moment Josephine thinks she’s an immigrant
taking off her shoes and belt and surrendering her bags, and then after three
hours and without warning she is moved into the fast lane as though she
is exactly what America wants.
©Paula Green New York Pocket Book Seraph Press, 2016
As a child in the UK, Liz Breslin memorised Charles Causley’s poems, sitting in the bath. She now lives in Hawea Flat, New Zealand and writes poems, plays, stories, articles, and a fortnightly column for the Otago Daily Times. She also edits, parents, partners, skis badly, gardens sporadically, coordinates a school student volunteer programme, drinks too much coffee and loves getting her feet wet.
Liz’s first collection of poems, Alzheimer’s and a Spoon, will be published by Otago University Press in 2017. She is comfy on the page and the stage, was second runner up in the 2014 New Zealand Poetry Slam in Wellington and did an audience-response poem at the 2016 TEDx Queenstown. Liz took part in the ‘52’ project in 2014, where she discovered new voices and fantastic practices. Her poems can be found in Landfall, Café Reader, Takahē and other places in NZ, overseas and online, as well as brewing in the bath. Poems give her hope, connection and stoke. http://www.lizbreslin.com
Full details here.
Comments from Liz here.
You can find some of her poems here and they are good!
Exciting to see Liz has a collection out with Otago University Press this year.
BLOOD TIES: New and Selected Poems 1963-2016.
Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, Canterbury University Press,
978-1-927145-88-3, $25.00, due February 2017.
‘Blood Ties is a journey through a lifetime that is a parable of settlement, one man’s response to the challenge of living responsibly and with sensitivity to the question of where we are and what we must be. There are strong ancestors throughout, but, at the same time and very distinctively, the urgent sound of this river of poetry is all this fine poet’s own.’
Patrick Evans
Come one, come all, to our opening night of the year!
GUEST POET: ANNE KENNEDY
Anne Kennedy is a poet, novelist and screenwriter. Her awards include the NZ Post Book Award for Poetry for Sing-song and the Montana New Zealand Book Award for Poetry for The Darling North. Her novel, The Last Days of the National Costume, was shortlisted for the NZ Post Book Award for Fiction in 2014. In 2016 Anne was Writer in Residence at IIML, Victoria University of Wellington. She teaches fiction and screenwriting at Manukau Institute of Technology.
GUEST MUSICIAN: MW SELLWOOD
MW Sellwood is an up-and-coming Auckland blues artist from the city’s thriving underground music scene. Equally at home performing tunes on stage or a street corner, his groovy electric guitar riffs and playful vocals combine for a fresh take on Blues music in the new millennium!
POETRY OPEN MIC
KOHA ENTRY
MC: KIRI
NZ Poetry Shelf 