Slea Head: Dingle Peninsula Michael Hight, 2020

Poetry is a way of bridging the faraway and the close at hand. A poem can make the achingly distant comfortingly close. Poetry can be a satisfying form of travel, whether to the other side of the world, to the past or to imagined realms. Reading poems that offer the faraway as some kind of presence, I feel such a range of emotions. Moved, yes. Goose bumps on the skin, yes. Boosted, yes. This is such a fertile theme, I keep picturing a whole book moving in marvellous directions.

I am grateful to all the poets and publishers who continue to support my season of themes.

The Poems

Remembering

if you can you can try to recall

the sun across the roof and you

knee-deep in childhood playing

near the fence with the storm

of daisies still impressionable

in the way of dreams still

believing leaves had voices

and you might then remember

curtains drowned in burnished light

how at night the sky emptied

into a field of stars leaching out

the guilt you’d soon forget unlike

the woman you called Nana who kept

knitting you hats while you kept not

writing back and maybe then you’d know

the injustices you had no part in

the lady who bought your house how

she ravaged your kingdom while

you were away oh these memories

spiralling into memories into

nothing this helter skelter art of

remembering this bending

over backwards running out of light

Anuja Mitra

from Mayhem Literary Journal, Issue 6 (2018)

Drifting North

Acknowledgement to David Eggleton

She said we discussed post

structuralism in a post modern

context. She said in order

to remember such crucial

poetic phrases she had bought

a small exercise book in which

to record them.

It was, she said, a book

of semantic importance.

She said we considered

the deception of disjointed

parody and the fragmentation

of shallow consumer culture.

I can only remember

a girl

in her pale blue cardigan

drifting north

in a zither of light.

Jenny Powell

from Four French Horns, HeadworX, 2004

apricot nails

I want to paint my nails apricot
as an homage to call me by your name
and the fake italian summer I had last year — 

fake because
I didn’t cycle beside slow streams or
in slow towns

Instead I lay on a 70 euro pinstripe lounger
and couldn’t see the water
only other tourists

And the apricots I ate
came from peach spritzes at sea salt restaurants
and clouded supermarket jars

But all the shops are shut
and the closest nail colour I have
is dark red 

I want to be somewhere in northern italy
with light green water and
deep green conversations

I want to pick fresh apricots from drooping branches
and kiss a boy I shouldn’t
on cobblestone paths against cobblestone walls

I want to lick a love heart on to his shoulder
so that when he gets on a train
my hands shake like a thunderstorm

and I can’t cycle home past
the fields we held each other in
and mum has to pick me up from the station

I want to walk down a staircase
with winter at the bottom
waiting to sweep me into snow

I want the phone to ring when the sky is white
and hear an apricot voice 
ripe and ready to be plucked from the tree

he’ll say how are you
and I’ll slowly leak

Rhegan Tu’akoi

from Stasis 5 May 2020, picked by Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connor

Wearing Katherine Mansfield’s Shawl

Seventy years on, shut

in a cardboard box in the basement

of City Hall, you might think

the shawl would have lost

its force to charm, the airy fragrance

of its wearer departed, threads

stripped bare as bones,

yet here it is, another short story:

it felt like love at the Hôtel

d’Adhémar the moment you placed

the silk skein around my shoulders,

the dim red and rusty green fabric

and a fringe gliding like fingertips

over my arm, a draught of bitter

scent – Katherine’s illness,

Virginia’s sarcasm – and

yes, a trace of wild gorse

flowers and New Zealand, not

to mention the drift of her skin

and yours during the photograph,

the stately walk through the town.

Fiona Kidman

from Where Your Left Hand Rests, Godwit, Random House, 2010

Sparks

On the occasion of the Sew Hoy 150th Year Family Reunion, September 2019

Here in this earth you once made a start

home treasure watered with sweat, new seeds

a fire you can light and which gives off sparks

the gleam of gold glowing in darkness

an open door, warm tea, friendships in need

here on this earth you once made a start

sometimes you imagined you left your heart

elsewhere, a woman’s voice and paddies of green

a fire which was lit, remembering its sparks

but even halfway round the world, shoots start

old songs grow distant, sink into bones unseen

here in this earth you can make a new start

with stone and wood you made your mark

built houses of diplomacy and meaning

a new fire was lit, with many sparks

flame to flame, hand to hand, heart to heart

150 years, sixteen harvests of seed

here, in this earth, you once made a start

A fire was once lit. We all are its sparks.

Renee Liang

Heavy Lifting

Once, I climbed a tree

too tall for climbing

and threw my voice out

into the world. I screamed.

I hollered. I snapped

innocent branches. i took the view

as a vivid but painful truth gifted

to me, but did not think to lay down

my own sight in recompense.

All I wanted was someone to say

they could hear me, but the tree said

that in order to be heard I must

first let silence do the heavy lifting

and clear my mind of any

questions and anxieties

such as contemplating whether

I am the favourite son. If I am not,

I am open to being a favourite uncle

or an ex-lover whose hands still cover

the former half’s eyes. I’ll probably never

have children of my own to disappoint

so I’ll settle for being famous instead

with my mouth forced open on TV like

a Venus fly-trap lip-synching for its life.

The first and last of everything

are always connected by

the dotted line of choice.

If there is an order to such things,

then surely I should resist it.

Chris Tse

from he’s so MASC, Auckland University Press, 2018

My city

drawing blank amber cartridges in windows

from which we see children hanging, high fires

of warehouse colours, a reimagining, my city fluttering

far and further away with flags netted

and ziplining west to east, knotted

and raining sunshine,

paving cinder-block-lit-tinder music in alleys

where we visit for the first time, signal murals

to leapfrog smoke, a wandering, my city gathering

close and closer together a wilderness

of voices shifting over each other

and the orchestra,

constructing silver half-heresies in storefronts

to catch seconds of ourselves, herald nighttimes

from singing corners, a remembering, my city resounding

in and out the shout of light on water

and people on water, the work of day

and each other,

my city in the near distance fooling me

into letting my words down, my city visible

a hundred years from tomorrow,

coming out of my ears and

forgiving me,

until i am disappeared someways and no longer

finding me to you

Pippi Jean

Looming

I call it my looming

dread, like the mornings I wake

crying quietly at the grey

in my room, like whispering to my sleeping

mother – do I have to

like the short cuts I can’t take

like the standing outside not breathing

like my hand on the doorknob

counting to twenty and twenty

and twenty.

Tusiata Avia

from Wild Dogs Under My Skirt, Victoria University Press, 2004

mothering daughter

I am coming home to myself

while watching

my mother going away from herself.

Every move you make

an effort

so much slower now, mother

like your body is trying to keep pace

with your mind

everything about you reads as

tired

but sometimes I read as

giving up

FUCK THIS! silently salts my tongue

a tight fist slamming the steering wheel

gas under my foot

tears choking my ears

smoke swallowing my chest.

I am a mother:

Mothering her son,

a motherless daughter mothering her mother.

It’s hard somedays not to be swallowed.

Grace Iwshita-Taylor

from full broken bloom, ala press, 2017

Memoir II

Preparing for death is a wicker basket.

Elderly women know the road.

One grandmother worked in munitions, brown

bonnet, red stripe rampant. the other, a washerwoman:

letters from the Front would surface, tattered.

You must take the journey, ready or not.

The old, old stream of refugees: prams

of books and carts with parrots.

Meanwhile the speeches, speeches: interminable.

When the blood in your ears has time to dry: silence.

The angel will tie a golden ribbon to the basket’s rim.

You will disappear, then reappear, quite weightless.

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman

from Blood Ties: New and Selected Poems 1963- 2016, Canterbury University Press, 2017

fever

moving away from the orchard plots,

laundry lines that sag under the macrocarpa.

moving away from the crystalline skies,

the salt-struck grasses, the train carts

and the underpasses. i astral travel

with a flannel on my head, drink litres

of holy water, chicken broth. i vomit

words into the plastic bucket, brush

the acid from my teeth. i move away,

over tussock country, along the desert

road. i chew the pillowcase. i cling

my body to the bunk. the streets

unfurl. slick with gum and cigarettes.

somebody is yelling my name. i quiver

like a sparrow. hello hello, says the

paramedic. but i am moving away from

the city lights, the steel towers.

and i shed my skin on a motorway

and i float up into the sky.

Elizabeth Morton

from This Is Your Real Name, Otago University Press, 2019

Black Stump Story

After a number of numberless days

we took the wrong turning

and so began a slow descent

past churches and farmhouses

past mortgages and maraes

only our dust followed us

the thin cabbage trees were standing

in the swamp like illustrations

brown cows and black and white and red

the concrete pub the carved virgin

road like a beach and beach like a road

two toothless tokers in a windowless Toyota

nice of you to come no one comes

down here bro – so near and

yet so far – it takes hours

not worth your while –

turned the car and headed back

shaggy dogs with shaggy tales

Murray Edmond

from Fool Moon, Auckland University Press, 2004

The Poets

Tusiata Avia is an internationally acclaimed poet, performer and children’s author. She has published 4 collections of poetry, 3 children’s books and her play ‘Wild Dogs Under My Skirt’ had its off-Broadway debut in NYC, where it took out The Fringe Encore Series 2019 Outstanding Production of the Year. Most recently Tusiata was awarded a 2020 Arts Foundation Laureate and a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to poetry and the arts. Tusiata’s most recent collection The Savage Coloniser Book won The Ockham NZ Book Award for Best Poetry Book 2021.

Murray Edmond, b. Kirikiriroa 1949, lives in Glen Eden. 14 books of poetry (Shaggy Magpie Songs, 2015, and Back Before You Know, 2019 most recent); book of novellas (Strait Men and Other Tales, 2015); Then It Was Now Again: Selected Critical Writing (2014); editor, Ka Mate Ka Ora; dramaturge for Indian Ink Theatre. Forthcoming: Time to Make a Song and Dance: Cultural Revolt in Auckland in the 1960s, from Atuanui Press in May, 2021.

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman is a Christchurch poet and non-fiction writer. A poetry collection, Blood Ties: selected poems, 1963-2016 was published by Canterbury University Press in 2017. A memoir, Now When It Rains came out from Steele Roberts in 2018. He makes his living as a stay-at-home puppy wrangler for Hari, a Jack Russell-Fox Terrier cross. Hari ensures that little writing takes place, while psychogeography and excavating parks happen daily. Recent work has appeared in Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2021, an essay on prison reform, and poetry; also, an inclusion in The Cuba Press anthology, More Favourable Waters – Aotearoa Poets respond to Dante’s Purgatory.

Grace Iwashita-Taylor, breathing bloodlines of Samoa, England and Japan. An artist of upu/words led her to the world of performing arts. Dedicated to carving, elevating and holding spaces for storytellers of Te Moana nui a Kiwa. Recipient of the CNZ Emerging Pacific Artist 2014 and the Auckland Mayoral Writers Grant 2016. Highlights include holding the visiting international writer in residence at the University of Hawaii 2018, Co-Founder of the first youth poetry slam in Aoteroa, Rising Voices (2011 – 2016) and the South Auckland Poets Collective and published collections Afakasi Speaks (2013) & Full Broken Bloom (2017) with ala press. Writer of MY OWN DARLING commissioned by Auckland Theatre Company (2015, 2017, 2019) and Curator of UPU (Auckland Arts Festival 2020).

Pippi Jean is eighteen and just moved to Wellington for her first year at Victoria University. Her most recent works can be found in Landfall, Starling, Takahe, Mayhem, and Poetry New Zealand Yearbook among others.

Fiona Kidman has written more than 30 books and won a number of prizes, including the Jann Medlicott Acorn Fiction Prize for This Mortal Boy. Her most recent book is All the way to summer:stories of love and longing.  She has published six books of poems.In 2006, she was the Katherine Mansfield Fellow in Menton.  The poem ‘Wearing Katherine Mansfield’s shawl ‘is based on an event during that time. Her home is in Wellington, overlooking Cook Strait.

Renee Liang is a second-generation Chinese New Zealander whose parents immigrated in the 1970s from Hong Kong. Renee explores the migrant experience; she wrote, produced and nationally toured eight plays; made operas, musicals and community arts programmes; her poems, essays and short stories are studied from primary to tertiary level.  In recent years she has been reclaiming her proud Cantonese heritage in her work. Renee was made MNZM in 2018 for Services to the Arts.

Anuja Mitra lives in Auckland. Her writing has appeared in Takahe, Mayhem, Cordite Poetry Review, Starling, Sweet Mammalian, Poetry Shelf and The Three Lamps, and will appear in the AUP anthology A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand. She  has also written theatre and poetry reviews for Tearaway, Theatre Scenes, Minarets and the New Zealand Poetry Society. She is co-founder of the online arts magazine Oscen.

Elizabeth Morton is a teller of poems and tall tales. She has two collections of poetry – Wolf (Mākaro Press, 2017) and This is your real name (Otago University Press, 2020). She has an MLitt in creative writing from the University of Glasgow, and is completing an MSc in applied neuroscience at King’s College London. She likes to write about broken things, and things with teeth. 

Jenny Powell is a Dunedin poet and performer. Her work has been part of various journals and collaborations. She has a deep interest in music and used to be a french horn player.

Chris Tse is the author of two poetry collections published by Auckland University Press – How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes (winner of Best First Book of Poetry at the 2016 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards) and HE’S SO MASC – and is co-editor of the forthcoming Out Here: An Anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ Writers From Aotearoa.

Rhegan Tu‘akoi is a Tongan/Pākehā living in Pōneke. She is a Master’s student at Victoria and her words have appeared in Turbine | Kapohau, Mayhem and Sweet Mammalian. She has also been published in the first issue of Tupuranga Journal

Ten poems about clouds

Twelve poems about ice

Ten poems about dreaming

Eleven poems about the moon

Twelve poems about knitting

Ten poems about water