David Eggleton at Matahiwi marae, 2021
Image credit: Lynette Shum

Wild Indigo: five poets reading the weather

Celebrated Aotearoa poets join current Poet Laureate David Eggleton to explore the spirit of Oceania in our time of climate crises. Join us in person or online for an evening of poetry.

New Zealand Poet Laureate David Eggleton with Selina Tusitala Marsh, Gregory O’Brien, Dinah Hawken and Kate Camp read the weather. An event which doubles as the closing of the exhibition Trouble in Paradise: climate change in the Pacific. The title of the reading is from David’s poem, ‘A report on the weather’.

Where: Free event – National Library Auditorium,

Molesworth Street, Wellington

When: 5.30 for 6pm start, Friday 29 April 2022

Also streaming live at:

https://dia-nz.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_q6xepQuSQiqydReP_8HabQ

More details here

About the speakers

David Eggleton is the Aotearoa New Zealand Poet Laureate 2019 – 2022. His most recent book is The Wilder Years: Selected Poems (Otago University Press, 2021). Recent poems online can be found at the New Zealand Poet Laureate blog.

Selina Tusitala Marsh was recently made a full Professor at the University of Auckland. She is currently working on Mophead: KNOT Book 3, the latest in her series of award-winning graphic memoirs. In KNOT Book, Selina helps loosen and untie the real-life knotty questions kids of all ages send her by answering with Moppy creative exercises.

Kate Camp is a poet, essayist and literary commentator, born in 1972 and currently living in Wellington. Widely anthologised and critically acclaimed, she is the author of seven collections of poetry with Te Herenga Waka University Press: Unfamiliar Legends of the Stars (1998), Realia (2001), Beauty Sleep (2005), The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls (2010), Snow White’s Coffin (2013), The Internet of Things (2017), and How to Be Happy Though Human: New and Selected Poems (2020), published simultaneously in Canada and the United States by House of Anansi Press. Her memoir You Probably Think This Song Is About You is published in 2022.

Dinah Hawken was born in Hawera in 1943 and now lives in Paekakariki. Her first book won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for ‘best first-time published poet’ in 1987 and her ninth collection Sea-light was published by Te Herenga Waka University Press in 2021. It was long-listed for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

Gregory O’Brien‘s most recent book is a collection of poems and paintings, HOUSE & CONTENTS (Auckland University Press, March 2022). Other recent publications include his book-length meditation on the Pacific, ALWAYS SONG IN THE WATER (2019) which is the basis for an exhibition at the New Zealand Maritime Museum, Auckland, early next year. Currently, he is completing a monograph on the painter Don Binney, to be published in summer 2022-23.

‘…your weather patterns of wild indigo,
your blue starfish, your purple thunderheads,
your forked stabs of lightning,
your hammering rain
shape-shift in the lagoons of your latitudes…’

David Eggleton, from ‘A report on the weather’