This is such sad but understandable news and my heart goes out to Anne O’Brien and her team. Such an important literary gathering on our annual calendar that is dependent on hard work and vision over months and months. So innovative, so refreshing, so vital.
Yes authors miss out, readers miss out – but I am sending a virtual hug to this astonishing festival team. I am toasting YOU tonight! Goodness knows how you are feeling.
Publication news!
On this day, 15 March, we remember the events of one year ago in Christchurch and honour the memory of those who died. It seems a fitting day that we announce the publication of a new volume that was born in the wake of this tragedy.
Ko Aotearoa Tātou | We Are New Zealand will be published by Otago University Press in August 2020.
The starting point for the anthology was the statement by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern after the March Christchurch attacks: ‘Because we represent diversity, kindness, compassion, a home for those who share our values, refuge for those who need it…we will not, and cannot, be shaken by this attack.’
The book includes prose, poetry and visual art that explores, investigates or interrogates life in contemporary New Zealand. A celebration, yes, but also an examination of who we are, with young voices new to publication and well-known poets, storytellers and essayists such as Selina Tusitala Marsh, Apirana Taylor, Tusiata Avia, Mohamed Hassan, Alison Wong, Donna Miles-Mojab, David Eggleton and more, plus artwork from Yuki Kihara, Nigel Brown, Barry Cleavin, Bridget Reweti, Sabine Poppe, Zulfirman Syah and others.
The editors thank everyone who submitted. We received a wide range of wonderfully crafted responses to the call for submissions, from Kerikeri to Bluff. Some were teenagers still at school; some were in their 80s. Most lived in New Zealand; some were New Zealanders currently living overseas. Submissions roamed from a Chinese restaurant in Christchurch to a fruit-packing factory in Opōtiki to a cemetery under Grafton Bridge in Auckland to a high school in Hastings, and from London to Finland to Vienna to Iran.
The editors also thank the team of consulting editors, without whom we would not have discovered such rich content.
We are looking forward to seeing this volume in August, with thanks to Otago University Press and Creative New Zealand.
For more information
working from home
Kia ora readers, writers, publishers and booksellers
With book launches already being cancelled, and uncertain months ahead as we work hard to keep our communities well, I am going to open Poetry Shelf Lounge to host online launches of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. I could do children’s books on child-friendly Poetry Box.
I will post Poetry Shelf launches around 5 to 6 pm (wine and nibbles optional!)
I can post launch features with audio and/or texts of a launch speech, an author reading and thank-you speech. Photos. Videos. Whatever works for you and that I can do.
I like the idea of bridging communities and having the launches posted in more than one place if that works.
I am already at capacity with the time I devote to my blog and writing deadlines so this is in your hands. I don’t have time to write material or chase people. And I may have to limit myself to one or two a week! I do have time to assemble posts and spread the word.
Publishers and publicists feel free to get in touch with me – and gather the material for a Poetry Shelf Lounge launch.
My blog reaches more people than a book launch does but I can link to other significant sites.
This is a time to strengthen our book communities and invent new ways to celebrate our books without putting people at risk.
If you have ideas on how to help or make this idea even better let me know. Goodness knows if it will work but I want to give it a shot! Other ideas are simmering:
* host NZ poetry readings online if they are going to be cancelled (is the Pasifika reading in Te Atatu Library to be cancelled or the first Lounge reading?)
* host NZ book discussion podcasts
* host author interviews video or audio
* any other suggestions?
Maybe there is a better way and place to do this – but this a grassroots project so let’s see what we can do to boost books.
Ngā mihi
Paula Green
Lynn Davidson reads ‘Even though it’s not the beginning’ from Islander (2109, Victoria University Press)
Lynn Davidson is the author of five collections of poetry and a novel, Ghost Net, along with essays and short stories. She grew up in Kāpiti, Wellington and currently lives in Edinburgh.
My review of Islander
Victoria University Press author page
Exciting news from Jack Ross: I am delighted to announce that an agreement has been reached between Dr Tracey Slaughter, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Waikato University; Dr Jack Ross (me), the present managing editor of Poetry New Zealand; and Nicola Legat, head of Massey University Press, our publisher, for the future housing of the journal in the School of Arts at Waikato.
Outhwaite Park
and three cheers for the old neighbourhood
clawing its way through the dirt and the
new
houses that squat where the vacant lots reflected us
and three shadows
for the people we used to be, for
rice and dope and chilli olives, three shadows
for your silhouette, with its cigarette, for the sound
of a swing at midnight
the sound of a swing when the swinger is crying
three sighs for the stubborn authenticity of a face
harsh with streetlights
the horrors of a clarinet
devastating revelations
and for the lies, for the unmoved trees
which made it all seem underwater
for the melancholy see-saws and the warm air, for her dress
in the crooked oblong of doorway, her crooked dress
in the yellow of the door
the stumbling between houses, clutching salads and lovers
the bodies passed out on our floors
three tears
for the pale orange poppies
that bloom where you kissed me
bloom where you kissed me
and three tears
for the people we used to fuck
for backbones scraped on the washing machine
for the strangers who slept outside your bedroom door
and the schoolgirls and drag queens playing table tennis
and the cockroaches breeding in the microwave;
and the four am trains and six am buses,
mint icecreams, roofs of carparks, moulting hedgehogs
lit by the phonebox, the grass overrun by wirewoves
and rotting cardboard, my summer clothes, my love —
and tunnels we crept through at dawn, birds which sang blind in the dark
the refrigerator with its empty hum, before we borrowed credibility,
we had the insane faces of barbie dolls, the overpainted walls
and exploding demolition fires
we had stones in our shoes and delinquents in our ceilings
catching our prayers before they got to the sky,
and that bridge most of us
never jumped from, we were saving it for a rainy day,
yeah three tears for the old neighbourhood
clawing its way through the dirt
and the park
that I see and can never return to
that stage on which all our memories were undone,
and I am again in the wood chips at midnight
with my neck pressed against the silence of your mouth
and I am again on the swing at dawn
watching the policeman make his way across the grass
Olivia Macassey
appeared in New New Zealand Poets in Performance, ed. Jack Ross and Jan Kemp (Auckland: AUP, 2008)
Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connor:
I first heard this poem in Tracey Slaughter’s creative writing class, and I still remember the shiver down my spine. There were those neighbourhoods like mine right there in the lecture hall and this voice that talked a bit like how I talked: yeah. It was one of those poems that you read at the exact right moment, and it was the first that I printed out and carried with me.
It’s beautiful and sort of pining, but all the same gritted and stubborn. It’s got this sort of nostalgia, but with claws. The parties, but also the grubby silences after them, the confetti and the roaches and the cardboard rotting lonely in the corner. The impossibility of going back, but also the impossibility of wholly forgetting: ‘The park that I see and can never return to’. It was the first time I remember seeing repetition in a poem and really loving it. The first poem I read out loud again and again. That rhythm, that imagery, those final lines. The white space after them. Those echoes in the half-dark. I come back to this poem often.
Olivia Macassey‘s work has appeared in Takahē, Rabbit, Poetry New Zealand, Otoliths, Ngā Kupu Waikato, Landfall and elsewhere. Her books are The Burnt Hotel and Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connor was awarded the 2018 Charles Brasch Young Writers’ Essay Competition, and the 2017 Monash Prize for Emerging Writers. Her poem ‘Instructions’ was named by The Spinoff as the best poem of 2018, and she took up The Spinoff Review of Books Writer-in-Residence Award at the start of 2019. Her work has appeared in Starling, Mayhem, Brief, Poetry New Zealand, Landfall, Turbine, Mimicry, Min-a-rets, Sweet Mammalian, Sport and Verge. She writes thanks to the tireless support of some of the best people on this great watery rock.
NZ Poetry Shelf 