AUP New Poets 9 – Sarah Lawrence, harold coutts, Arielle Walker, ed Anna Jackson
Auckland University Press, 2023

Each poetry book I read this year refreshes the page of what poetry can do. Yet some things remain constant in my addiction to reading poems: musicality, surprise, freshness, movement, heart – in varying blends and eclectic relationships. Aotearoa poetry is doing so much at the moment – there is neither constricting paradigms nor narrow recipes. Instead we get multiple connections along the sparking wires of writing. AUP New Poets 9, edited by poet Anna Jackson, brings sublime new poets to our attention. Anna has edited the series since issue 5 (2019), captivating our attention with the work of poets such as Rebecca Hawkes, Claudia Jardine, Vanessa Crofskey, Ria Masae, Modi Deng. This is Anna’s final issue, with Anne Kennedy taking over the editorial reins for issue 10.

In her introduction, lingusitically agile and idea forward, Anna writes potential pathways and animated openings for the reader. It is the kind of introduction that fertilises a book rather than burying its poetic potential in claustrophobic frameworks.

You can hear harold and Arielle read poems from their sequences here.

Sarah Lawrence

Sarah Lawrence’s sequence of poems embodies all the traits I have listed above. She achieves sweet movement along the line, petal-packed detail, heart spikes, flakes of the everyday alongside shards of strangeness. The combination is electrifying, luminous, immensely satisfying. Musicality is an imperative. Listen to the melody and chords in this stanza:

(…) Stitching the crumbs
into an upside-down cake, I speak slowly
to strangers who blink like cats.
On the lunar eclipse I come home glitter-drenched
to a gaggle of gawkers on beanbags outside, late
for the hole in the sky

from ‘The edge of winter’

I am in awe of the way metaphorical language enhances the physicality of both anecdote and reflection.

(…) The city is beginning
to pepper with faces I know. I can’t
leave our house without seeing at least one
man in a fisherman hat. I can’t leave our
house without saying at least one hello. Yes,
open your orange before we are home, it
is nice to squeeze stories from the rind.
Yes, I am here now & I am no longer
quite anonymous. The city is beginning.
I have never felt so brave.

from ‘real-life origami (to unfold)’

Slender moments shimmer in an intensity that draws love or grief or everyday friendship close. The “you” heightens the intimate layerings, and it is as though we get to inhabit that coveted addressee spot too. We move between the fragile and the tender, resemblance and divergence, the idyllic and the life singed.

Sarah writes with an intimacy ink that gets you warm and heart-touched as much as it startles and surprises. A dazzling arrival.

harold coutts

I find myself saying harold’s poems out loud, delighting in the rhythm and rhyme, the pitch and perfection of sound, and the sequence becomes a poem album on replay. Anna picked out ear-catching rhymes from the sonnet, ‘i am growing a garden’. Listen to that, and then listen to the melodic complexity of this stanza with its ripple lilts:

in the morning i cook eggs to placate the hearth of me
there’s a place for your shoes, still
i have missed you enough to fill all the walls i exist between
but never enough to call you

from ‘cooking eggs for one’

Gender is the insistent blood pulse of the sequence: ‘my gender is my inside room’. Gender is the vital refrain, an issue that links to body presence. The body with skin, lungs, ribcage, a body with growth and bloom, longings and limits. The body that loves and lusts, that eyeballs life or death, that brings itself into mesmerising view through physical detail and metaphor. I am moved immeasurably, held in the grip of heart and bone. The physicality and the animation. Haunted.

i am without my bones
mould me into carpet and lay me down
thus i might get some rest
i saw the sunset and now it rises
mocking the mountains of my eyelids
as i lurch home

from “hi and welcome to ‘i’, tired’ with harold coutts”

There is a sense of the body as threadbare, as shell, as stripped back by rodents. Yet it is also lavender bloom, survival. There are so many essential tracks through harold’s sequence, and I am only offering you this one, this body insistence, because it is gluing me to the lines. The tactile that arrests. The sublime music. Yet you will also fall upon the sun, flowers, swords and knives, swivel chairs, earth and dirt, love, pronouns, heat and sweat, the poet as reader, the reader as writer, and you will simply crave more. This is another dazzling arrival.

Arielle Walker

Reading Arielle’s sequence and I am held close in the tonic of what poems can be. Her opening poem, ‘a poem is a fluid thing all wrapped in fish skin’, is the most tender, the most illuminating embrace of the word and the world – whether physical, relational, heart-strung. Being. Becoming. Becoming poem. For yes, this is an offering of poetry as a form of becoming. I have never thought of a poem as a body of water but it feels so perfect – fluid yes but more than this. Hydrated, generating ebb and flow, life sustaining, beauty delivering.

How can I write a poem unless it rolls (a ready-made
river) out of the side of a mountain and runs gleefully
forward in a rush of eddying currents towards the sea
       so that all I have to do is hold out a hand to unravel
                       the slightest fraying edge of its fluidity, and
                                             spin a new yarn from its depths?

In her bio, Arielle writes: ‘Her practice seeks pathways towards reciprocal belonging through tactile storytelling and ancestral narratives, weaving in the spaces between.’ This resonates so deeply, as the poems are a form of guardianship, of caring for the natural world, trees plants, rivers. I am walking through the poems, hand in hand with a poet guide, making tracks through aural and textured delight, finding awe and nourishment. And as I walk, the guide draws my attention to here and there – I am thinking how caring for the natural world, how standing beside and beholding the sea, how weaving together this story and that story, this heart and that heart, is also a form of reading and writing: we are contemplating, translating, connecting, conversing, imbibing, witnessing, contributing.

Arielle’s form of writing is as full of movement and variation as the sea: constant, same, nuanced. She is spacing out, striking through, bunching up words, using italics, step-laddering. The shifting movement on the line echoes the shifting rhythm that is as visual as it is sonic. The musicality of a view is woven into the image-rich fabric of writing. She is weaving words of multiple languages from Te Reo Māori to English to Shetland dialect. The Scottish heather becomes weed in Taranaki landscapes. The shoormor where sea meets shore in Shetland becomes toes in the water, selkie returning to the sea, the river spine and river mouth, a new form, an old form, a memory, a myth.

she grew accustomed to her new form
learned to exchange salt for soil, built instead
upon the body of a mountain
her brine beginnings buried in the earth

she locked her words away too
dialect smoothed like seaglass
into new vowel shapes
the shoormal, the skröf, the lönabrak
forgotten

from ‘skin’

We will take what we need from the bush and no more. We take what we need from these poems and it will make our heart sing, our feet will plant firmly in the soil as we gather and acknowledge. And it is both essence and wide, irreducible and fortifying. These poems have touched a deep cord. They are quiet and humble and extraordinary in their dazzle.

Three poets with deft and distinctive approaches to writing, three poets who thread preoccupations with acute perceptiveness, earth concerns, personal disquiet and intimate recognitions. This is an anthology to celebrate, to dawdle over and absorb the satisfactions and epiphanies as you read. AUP New Poets 9 underlines the refreshing engagements a new generation of poets is producing in Aotearoa. And yes, altogether dazzling!

Sarah Lawrence (she/her) is a Pōneke-based poet, performer, musician and pizza waitress. She recently dropped out of law school to study acting at Toi Whakaari: New Zealand Drama School. Her parents are thrilled. She won the Story Inc Prize for Poetry in 2021, and you can find her writing in Starling, Landfall, A Fine Line and The Spinoff.

harold coutts is a poet and writer based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. They have a hoard of unread books and love to play Dungeons & Dragons. Their work can be found across various New Zealand literary journals such as bad apple, Starling, Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems, Poetry New Zealand Yearbook, and in Out Here: An Anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ Writers from Aotearoa edited by Chris Tse and Emma Barnes (Auckland University Press, 2021).

Arielle Walker (Taranaki, Ngāruahine, Ngāpuhi, Pākehā) is a Tāmaki Makaurau-based artist, writer and maker. Her practice seeks pathways towards reciprocal belonging through tactile storytelling and ancestral narratives, weaving in the spaces between. Her work can be found in Stasis Journal, Turbine | Kapohau, Tupuranga Journal, Oscen: Myths and No Other Place to Stand: An Anthology of Climate Change Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand (Auckland University Press, 2022).

Anna Jackson’s latest collection of poetry is Pasture and Flock: New and Selected Poems (Auckland University Press, 2018). She has also released Actions and Travels, a book on poetry (Auckland University Press, 2022). She is based in Wellington. 

Auckland University Press page

A reading from A Game of Swans, Janet Wainscott, Sudden Valley Press, 2023

‘The sampler’

‘The stationmasters’

‘She saw plesiosaurs’

‘The lagoon’

Janet Wainscott lives in Lincoln, near  Otautahi/Christchurch, and writes poetry and essays. Her work has appeared in takahē, Poetry NZ Yearbooks, Landfall, Catalyst and recent New Zealand Poetry Society anthologies. Janet won the poetry section of the NZSA Heritage competition in 2017 and the short prose section in 2019. In 2020 she was commended in the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine competition. 

Her first collection of poetry, A Game of Swans, was published by Sudden Valley Press in May, 2023.

Sudden Valley Press page

January 1st

on the horses’ birthday
we step brand new into the day,
hoping that for once, we have gone to bed
as one thing and risen another.
I go to bed tired, and I wake up
tired. I went to bed, a year ago,
and in the meantime I have grown
out of love. the days are
as long as they ever are. somewhere,
the horses are a year older. somewhere,
another horse slips wet and ready
into this life. how perfect, to be born
on the day that was already your birthday.
I go to bed, ready to love again,
legs unsteady as a newborn’s, expected
to hold up a body. how do we know
what to do the first time something
is asked of us. the first time we laugh.
the first time we taste salt. does
the body know how to love before
it’s born, thrust into a life it did not ask for.
nothing to unlearn yet. somewhere,
a mare licks her foal clean, nudges him
with her nose to try out his feet.
we try one step, then another.

Ash Davida Jane

Ash Davida Jane is a poet and editor from Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Her second book, How to Live With Mammals (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2021) won second place in the 2021 Laurel Prize. She is a publisher at Tender Press and regularly reviews books on RNZ.

With the opening of competitions for the Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day less than two months away, the director of Given Words, Charles Olsen, has invited the winners of the 2022 competition, Sarah-Kate Simons and Saphra Peterson, to read their poems for NZ Poetry Shelf.  

All entries had to include the five words help, different, thankful, warrior, and dream, which were chosen by girls of the Our Little Roses orphanage in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. The winners were selected by Mikaela Nyman, Sophia Wilson and Charles Olsen. Their comments on the poems along with a selection of the entries by both adults and under-16s can be read on Given Words.   

On 1st August 2023, Given Words (now in its eighth year) will open with words chosen by students of López de Arenas Secondary School in Marchena, Seville, Spain. National Poetry Day competitions for 2023 will be added to the Competition Calendar during July.   

The winner of ‘Best Poem’ was Sarah-Kate Simons for her poem Prognosis.  

Winner of the ‘Best Poem by Under-16s’ was Saphra Peterson, aged 15, for her poem Doubt.  

Sarah-Kate Simons is a young poet and writer from rural Canterbury, where she lives with her adorable but troublesome Fox Terrier. She is widely published online, in magazines and in anthologies, such as Toitoi, Write On, Re-Draft, the NZ Poetry Society Anthology, and Poetry NZ Yearbook. She has also placed in several poetry and writing competitions, recently winning the 2021 HG Wells International Short Story Competition. Her other hobbies include ballet, talking to thin air and going ratting along the riverbank with her dog.  

Saphra Peterson lives in rural Canterbury but one day aspires to rule the world. She loves reading, writing, creating disturbing artwork, and running from the authorities. She can be found playing violent games of cards or contemplating her own demise. She hates writing biographies, in case you can’t tell. 

Calamities! Jane Arthur, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023

Jane Arthur’s second collection, Calamities!, is a glorious translation of being, of existence in an unsettled world. Think comfort and discomfort, the physicality and elusiveness of being, its poetry and its prose. Big questions surface, little questions simmer. Conundrums hover and anxiety lurks. This is poetry of tilt and tremor and one reading wasn’t enough. I dived back in for more.

The opening poem, ‘The Better to See You With My Dear’, is a declaration for the poetry to come. The title draws the ubiquitous and macabre fairy-tale threat of bad things into a present tense, into the tension of apocalyptic views and warnings, into the tug between closing eyes and speaking out, between body worry and body action. And already as reader you are making a stand, ticking the boxes: action and/or speaking out, writing, deferring, addressing, more writing.

Add the imperative of awe, a need to feel the world: ‘I tried / to place myself in the context of the size / and the history of the universe’ (from ‘Meteorite’). Joy is elusive, elation is slippery. I come back to the notion of poetry as being. I have entered a book of ideas and of feelings, experience and thought. This is what Jane’s poetry does: it offers multiple paths, entrances and exits, pulling you into both the unimaginable and the imagined, the concrete and the elusive. It brings the tilt of the world within reach, so as reader, you can feel the heat and hit of anxiety, the unsettled.

A single poem can be so complex, so simple, so piercing, so affecting. Take ‘Dodge’, for example, where ‘each day is each of us / carving through space/ using our bodies’. Then, in the next stanza, we are divided into groups depending on how we answer the listed questions. The last stanza is a throb-of-the-heart moment, a “wow”, a stop-you-in-the-tracks-of-reading:

Do we live only to the limits
of our comprehension?
We will never know
what we don’t. Alack.
Some of us
carry shame and others of us
probably should.

Move from domestic life to philosophy, from dead flies in cups on kitchen shelves, to the prospect of heroism and couch hugging. Climate change is there in ‘Alien’, an ode to once was, to what ‘is kind of like / getting cooked alive but so slowly you’ll / probably barely notice it’. World fret meets individual fret meets world fret. Ah. Such friction. Such knowing that leads to less knowing that leads to knowing hunger in the fabulous poem ‘How, All Right’. And then, in travels though calamity, in the poem ‘Autumn’, the writer speaks of autumn light, where the nag of cheesy thoughts is nothing compared with bigger issues. This is a solace branch, this beauty moment, this invitation to pause and restock:

(….) Not us, not
when there are bigger things to worry about –

and not when it’s still possible to put them aside
to look at the low shadows, the glow

of evening sun across the branches
of trees that refuse to be anything but green.

The core of Calamities! contains a longer sequence, ‘The Bear’, and it’s mesmerising: part fable, part magic, part analogy. The speaker lives in a cave with no heating or sanitation but a hibernating bear for company, yet the visiting sisters don’t see the animal. Ah. The bear begins fierce and blazing, then shrinks and sags, and remains a vital source of heat, for the speaker is cold. So many paths through this sequence.

Jane produces the kind of poetry that haunts, that clings with mystery and mood, with a mise en abyme effect of story and storytelling, personal, global, affecting. How to get warm in the calamity of cold? How to find the bear and the cave and the point of rescue? I am rereading the collection, and writing becomes a key, reading and writing, this twinned joy, this survival.

The book’s final poem, ‘Imaginary Den’, makes a touching bridge back to ‘The Bear’. The poem begins with dogs nestling in close and then ends with an image of comfort and security. Such a perfect note to finish the collection, and indeed my review, a review that barely scratches the surface and depths of the book’s making, with its sweet craft and its intricate layering. Calamities! is a collection to spend extended time with, to nestle in close to the power of poetry to move and to comfort and to speak.

(…) The dogs want to be
near me, seek safety and comfort in numbers,

which is no new concept but one that
gets eroded as the world devises ways

to wring value out of its inhabitants
(and inhabitants wring value out of their world).

Let me dig my little hole. Let me
settle down into it, feigning safety, let me.

You can listen to Jane read ‘The Better to See You With My Dear’ here

Jane Arthur is the author of Craven, which won the Jessie Mackay Prize for Best First Book of Poetry in 2020. She received the Sarah Broom Poetry Prize in 2018 and has a Master of Arts in Creative Writing from the IIML at Victoria University of Wellington. Born in New Plymouth, she manages and co-owns a small independent bookshop in Wellington, where she now lives with her family.

Te Herenga Waka University Press page

Die die, live live

1.

A puff of air
like a lover’s
sweet speech
bubble, blue
as sky. A brown
horizon turning
fast into tomorrow
and tomorrow, etc.
Mud and leather
and a man
who runs like rubber
drawn from itself
over mud
born from
its muddy
mother field.
A kick-off
and the howl of
a moon’s dog.
They kick
the tender thing and kick and kick the tender thing
and wail and sing.
Five-nil to them.
Fuck. And fuck
the conversion
too. More
points for them.
The ball sings.
The wind
sings a hymn
down the Saint
Patrick’s Day
parade-length
of field
and the wind
blows the ball
where it shouldn’t
go. You have to
hope these idiots
grasp softness
the idea of it
its air and
innocence.
Twelve-nil to
the other side.
Conversion? No.
A rose blooms.
The fullback
there he goes
into a scrum. He’s
in the scrum
for his girlfriend
the girl he loves.
A torn ear a red rose the love-song of the fullback
a big man a
fucking giant
look at him
run. A lot of blood.
He runs for the
invisible woman.
He’s a moving tree
a flowering
tree. The Aussie
should be sin-binned.
Oh. He is.
Penalty. Twelve-
three. Tenderness
and the terrible
wind-sound
necessary for
play. They kick the tender thing and kick and kick
the tender thing
and wail and sing.
A man jumps
to his feet
throwing the hand
of his girl into
the sky. He flails
and beseeches.
Go go go go go!
It’s her envoi.
A guttural
call Moss has
never heard before
coming from
here and here
a beating on
the edge of seagull
i.e. clarinet.
There’s a rolling
maul, players
scragging faces
with sprigs. The referee
runs and blood
runs like tears.
Penalty. Twelve-six.
Go man boot
the groaning
air cradle it
as your child.
Don’t fucking
drop it idiot.
A moan goes up.
It rests in
the bodied
stadium staying
there, living on
among the people
as damage.
They kick the tender thing and kick and kick the tender thing
and wail and sing.
Rain starts. Good
for the home team
(used to it).
The visitors gnash
their teeth. Mud
sprays men
into fossils
memento mori.
They’re covered
in the game
head to foot.
Outrageous penalty
fifteen-six. Fuck.
A scrum in mud
and more rain.
The field is
ankle-glass
sometimes shattered as a dance once seen moved in water
a splish and trail
like scarves.
Half time
(FW).

2.

The land shaved
of trees made
useful by
its nakedness
and water. Men
stand as if cattle
mirrored at
a trough. A whistle
like a cast
in a roving
eye roving
over the field.
The men swarm
towards the ball
flicking earth
and sky.
The Centre’s
butchering
down the field
as a lion hunts
prey in the late
afternoon.
As a boy he
loved animals.
Off-side. Fuck.
Blood and
sweat and blood
and the crack
of bones. They kick the tender thing and kick and kick
the tender thing
and wail and sing
and wail and sing.
A man is carried
off by St John’s
Ambulance. Ah well
Fifteen-eleven
but missed the
conversion the
egg. Another
kick-off and
before long
a line-out whatever
that is. A player
hurling himself
into infinity
running and falling
and not caring
his body everything
and nothing
hovering
on the brink of
his death, death
of a small
nation. He is
a carcass
or palace. He’s carried off by St John’s Ambulance.
But there’s a penalty.
Fifteen-fourteen.
They kick
the tender thing
and kick and kick
the tender thing
and wail and sing.
Howl and a face
coated in the season
and the game
is a season
imperative
compulsory
gone again and
a girl who walks into a woman. And rain drums length
of rain
drumming.
It’s late
and the sun dips
below the cap
of cloud touching
the heads of
the crowd limning
a moment blue.
They kick
the tender thing
and kick and kick
the tender thing
and wail and sing.
On the field
blood squelches
underfoot.
Twenty-fourteen.
Paul weeps
on her shoulder.
They’ve lost.
If they’d won
there’d be
just the same
weeping like a
well a stream
or cataract. She holds his bones under her hands
his back
where wings
might once
have been.
A good man
full of tenderness
giant i.e. a lot of
tenderness.
The small mercy
of no conversion.
A minute to go.
A man runs
down the field
like a doctor
in a field hospital.
A try to us!
Forty seconds
to go. The
half-back
lines up the
wet egg
of the universe
and after some
deliberation kicks
the tender thing.
And wails.
And sings.
Converted.
The sun sinks
The whistle blows.
They won!
(i.e. We won
apparently)
Paul and his mates
leap to their feet.
Hell we won.
They leap one
by one. Fintan
leaps to his feet.
Look even
Forest is leaping
to his feet. Moss
carried away with
the win and
Paul weeping
and giants leaping
and without thinking
she stands.
She looks down
at the long body
her old favourite.
And glances up
at the great giant
there beside her
a head taller
(no matter, he will
soon go away now
the game is over
and there is just
Finnegans Wake
to read or whatever
tall tale it was).
Light from
the tall lamp casts the giant shadow of the girl over Paul.
He is bathed
in a quick new
coolness, as
dusk falls suddenly
in the Tropics
and feels it
and stares up
at the girl and
backs and backs
(the love song
of the full-back).

Anne Kennedy
from The Time of the Giants, Auckland University Press, 2005

Note: The reason I’ve thought about that poem lately is that when I wrote it, in the early 2000s, rugby was the preserve of men. The voice in the poem is a woman who knows nothing about rugby and doesn’t really want to know because it’s not for her. But that’s all changed now that women are forging ahead so mightily with rugby and are being acknowledged for it. We need some new rugby poems!  

Listen to Anne read the poem at Ōrongohau | Best NZ Poems

Anne Kennedy’s recent books are The Sea Walks into a Wall and The Ice Shelf. Awards include the Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry and the Montana NZ Book Award for Poetry. Remember Me: Poems to Learn by Heart from Aotearoa New Zealand, edited by Anne, will appear later this year from AUP.

M  

The sun hangs half-hearted in the face of another post-
modern ending and I’m driving home, and that’s
that—another day down. The clouds stumble across
my eyeline, like I wrote them there. In this light, that
night seems distant somehow, like the dried-up cleaner
fluid that haunts the corners of my windscreen. How
we were in Kingsland—how you talked only about
yourself. And I let you. I’ve been mid-way out my body
for the last couple of months, pooling in a quiet, little
stupor. When you asked me to be honest and I couldn’t.
Not with you. Not with myself. I keep driving. None
of this is what I was hoping for—not really. But, on
Thursday night, M and I scoured the aisles of Tai Ping
and I let myself unwind amongst the spring onions and
coriander. The fluorescent lights hummed and buzzed
in a kind of symphony. Inside the green basket, all my
uncomfortable thoughts, swinging back and forth as we
walked. And I thought, for the first time, here, right
now—I am seriously so tired. Tired of nestling myself
amongst these minutes just to watch them pass me by,
of talking and not being heard. The way you erased me
in conversation, trivialising my pain. You spoke and
I didn’t exist. Now, M is putting the ramen in the basket,
and when we drive home, Lizzy is on the radio. I feel
at peace. And somehow, I’m older, too. I settle in. And
tomorrow—

Brecon Dobbie

Brecon Dobbie finds poetry to be her place of solace. She writes to make sense of things, often without meaning to. Some of her work has appeared in Starling, Minarets Journal, and Poetry New Zealand Yearbook. 

‘Prayer’ by Tusiata Avia, Auckland Hospital, 9 March 2023

Saturday 17th June and it is one year since I had my bone marrow transplant at Auckland Hospital. If I hold the past year out to you, inside that year is another year, and inside that another, and then another, and then another. There is the year of miracle happiness, of finding joy in reading writing blogging. Of finding joy in looking out of my hospital room window to the harbour and sky and volcanic island. There is the joy of being cared for by extraordinary nurses and doctors over five weeks on Motutapu Ward.

Each day was one small step up a very steep and difficult mountain, but no matter how steep and how difficult, and how far away the peak seemed, there was always time to savour beauty, the view, the cleansing air. There was always one small step.

Ah. Inside the year of mountain climbing is the year of books, even in hospital where I had little towers of children’s picture books and junior novels to delight in, to consume in the tiniest of bites. I say books have the power to nourish, to keep you grounded, to fill you with awe comfort delight. It was so special to have two children’s books out in 2022, under the careful guidance of Catherine O’Loughlin and her team at Penguin Random House.

Inside the year of books is the year of support, from family friends and people I have never met in person. The year of kind emails you sent and send, the understanding when I don’t answer the phone or emails or say yes to all the wonderful things I normally say yes to. Even though I have made extraordinary progress on my mountain climb, I still haven’t reached the top. I am running on half a cup of energy a day, sometimes less, but I am also fuelled with awe and wonder and aroha.

And you help. You have all helped enormously.

Some days I feel sad that I am not out zooming and zipping doing school visits and author visits and poetry readings and book tours. Or hanging in the shadows at poetry events to feed off that goosebump zing of live poetry. I feel sad that I haven’t yet managed to do monthly poem challenges on Poetry Box as it is a big thing emailing every child that sends me a poem. I feel sad about this.

But to have both blogs up and running is a lifeline. To post almost daily reviews of children’s books on Poetry Box is sustenance. When you are zapped, a picture book is the perfect vitamin, and then writing on the uplift of reading an extra vitamin dose.

To post audio readings by poets with new books on Poetry Shelf is like staging live events in a cafe for me – so invigorating. I reach for my notebook and scrawl another poem. AND what joy to post new poems from you along with my slow-coach book reviews – equally satisfying.

Over the coming months my blogs will carry on as they are now – I will barely make a dent in the books waiting for me to review, I will say no to almost everything, I may not answer emails promptly, and the Poetry Shelf noticeboard will rarely have a presence. But slowly and surely I will keep the new series going that I have started. Hoping to assemble the next place on my poem road trip! Plus! I am going to do a few clusters of poems by children on Poetry Box with the help of a kind librarian poet.

To celebrate my year I have purchased a copy of WHAKAWHETAI: Gratitude – A Daily Bilingual Journal by Hira Nathan (Allen & Unwin, new edition 2023).

Recently I was at Auckland Hospital for my regular checkup and I stalled by Tusiata Avia’s magnificent awe-rich body-hugging poem, ‘Prayer’. I realised in my prolonged contemplation, what gratitude I felt for Tusiata’s words, and within that gratitude for your words, for friends and family, for our magnificent writing and reading communities, for supportive booksellers, for the exceptional hospital care by Richard, Tom, Sarah, Rosie, Hannah and the nurses, people who were and are consistently patient and kind and attentive, no matter how tired or overworked they are. No matter how tired or sizzled my brain is!

Today I celebrate one miracle year. I thank my anonymous young donor and I thank you. I offer special thanks to my dear friend Tusiata, who has given kind permission to post ‘Prayer’. Breathe this poem in and savour the day slowly. It is precious.

Prayer

I pray to you Shoulder blades
my twelve-year-old daughters’ shining like wings
like frigate birds that can fly out past the sea where my father lives
and back in again.

I pray to you Water,
you tell me which way to go
even though it is so often through the howling.

I pray to you Static –
no, that is the sea.

I pray to you Headache,
you are always here, like a blessing from a heavy-handed priest.

I pray to you Seizure,
you shut my eyes and open them again.

I pray to you Mirror,
I know you are the evil one.

I pray to you Aunties who are cruel.
You are better than university and therapy
you teach me to write poetry
how to hurt and hurt and forgive,
(eventually to forgive,
one day to forgive,
right before death to forgive).

I pray to you Aunties who are kind.
All of you live in the sky now,
you are better than letters and telephones.
I pray to you Belt,
yours are marks of Easter.

I pray to you Great Rock in my throat,
every now and then I am better than I feel I am now.

I pray to you Easter Sunday.
Nothing is resurrecting but the water from my eyes
it will die and rise up again
the rock is rolled away and no one appears
no shining man with blonde hair and blue eyes.

I pray to you Covid
I will keep my mask on, and the loved ones around me.

I pray to you Child
for forgiveness, forgiveness, forgiveness.
I will probably wreck you as badly as I have been wrecked
leave the ship of your childhood, with you
handcuffed to the rigging,
me peering in at you through the portholes
both of us weeping for different reasons.

I pray to you Air
you are where all the things that look like you live
all the things I cannot see.

I pray to you Reader,
I pray to you.

Tusiata Avia
from The Savage Coloniser Book, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2020

Photo by Jenny Powell

Here too the city will help, hill tree and tower
by sunlight or by starlight assembled into a setting
for something to take place in, a place to go on from.

Iain Lonie
from ‘The Entrance to Purgatory’  from The Entrance to Purgatory (McIndoe, 1986)

The first stop on my poetry road trip was the Kāpiti Coast and Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. Second stop is Ōtepoti Dunedin. A fitting place to linger as I have spent extended sojourns in poems with Dunedin connections. I am thinking of all the poets who have lived in Dunedin at different points, poets who have captivated readers with their poetic verve across decades: from Ruth Dallas and Janet Frame through to Cilla McQueen and Vincent O’Sullivan, David Eggleton and Emma Neale. Many of these poets have lived and written elsewhere but have also been a vital part of the city’s writing pulse, this beloved City of Literature. I am thinking too of the explosion of new voices, of younger poets enriching the performance spaces, the poetry collectives, with appearances in the Otago Daily Times, literary journals and their own publications.

I am thinking of Charles Brasch founding Landfall in Dunedin in 1947, and how after time elsewhere, the journal has returned to its home place. It is now published by Otago University Press under the astute editorship of Lynley Edmeades and David Eggleton (reviews). I am thinking of the Robbie Burns Fellowship that supports writers. I am musing on how Otago University Press is led by poet and publisher Sue Wootton, and how OUP bestowed such loving attention on David’s recent NZ Poet Laureate collection (my review here). There is the eclectic and lovingly assembled Under Flagstaff: An Anthology of Dunedin Poetry (eds Robin Law and Heather Murray, Otago University Press, 2004). And I am thinking of Jenny Powell and Kay McKenzie Cooke’s touring duo: J & K Rolling! Finally I am thinking of the vital mentor of our younger poets, co-founder of The Starling, poet Louise Wallace (also with a fabulous new book out).

When I visit Ōtepoti in person, hang out in the cool cafes, scour the bookshops, visit the galleries, take a trip along the headland to see the albatrosses, stand in the Octagon and breathe in the crisp southern air, I feel alive with a vibrant and vital city. And that is how Dunedin poetry is for me – whether it’s a hint of city connections or full immersion. Dunedin poetry is prismatic, it moves and gleams in multiple ways, there is no single southern recipe or voice, there is sustenance and substance.

Such a pleasure hanging out in this splendid city courtesy of poets I have lingered with over time and those I have only just met in print. Grateful thanks to all the contributors. I also toast the much loved poets who are not part of this particular mix! I needed a book! I begin the Dunedin stopover with the much loved voice of Cilla McQueen and conclude with the equally loved Vincent O’Sullivan and Ruth Dallas.

Thank you. Next up I am heading to North Island towns and small cities.

The Poems

Joanna

I visit my friend’s kitchen.
There are roses on the floor

and a table with pears.
Her face is bare in the light.

She smiles. She has hung
a curtain. I like the darkness

inside our Dunedin houses
even in summer, the doors

that open into the hall, the
front door that opens into the sun.

Cilla McQueen
from Homing In, John McIndoe, 1982 and in poeta: selected and new poems, Otago University Press, 2018

Called

It is October in Dunedin.
Rhododendrons fan out flounced skirts;
magnolias, magnanimous with their moon-cool glow,
light the path south so the sun stirs us early;
although the river, the creek boulders,
the city’s cinched green belt, still hold the cold
like an ice store’s packed-down snow.

The days shiver with filaments
of ua kōwhai: soft rain that dampens paths,
shakes loose carpets of white stamens, yellow flowers
bruised and trodden like flimsy foil cornets.
School holidays send out falling, silvery arcs
of children’s sky-flung laughter; our bodies drink it in
as if love’s parched ground sore needs this watering.

Yet the radio stays hunched in the kitchen corner
hard grey clot in the light’s fine arteries
muttering its tense bulletins;
and as if they sense this late spring still harbours
frost’s white wreck, or some despotic harm abroad
seeps too near, our sons more than anything want
their old games: secret codes, invisible ink, velvet cloaks;
hide ’n’ seek in public gardens’ clefts and coves—

and again, again, can we tell them again

the chapters of how they first appeared
in the long, blurred myths we are entangled in;
kingfisher-blue wells of their eyes a-gleam
as if they know how much all adults withhold.
They want us to go back deeper, to when 
we both were star-spill, sea-flume, spirits,
only belatedly woman, man, climbing up from a shore
feathered in sand black and soft as ash,
driven by some gravid magnetism towards each other

in case we changed to birds, lizards, trees,
or back to sea-salt borne by wind;
an urge clear as hunger coursing the cells’ deep helix 
to complete this alteration, half-bury and re-germinate
the fleet molecules of self, so we could run our mortal hands
the small, kind way along the children’s plush skins,
learn, pulse on pulse, their true, human names.
Yes, we must go back and back; as if to swear
even to this dread epoch’s wild, original innocence.

Emma Neale
from To the Occupant, Otago University Press, 2019

Dune din

grain upon grain grain gains upon grain
upon grain upon grain upon grain up on 
grain rain rains upon grain shifts grain
up on grain lifts grain up on grain upon
grain upon grain shhhh whispers grain
hisses grain and again grain gains upon grain
booms grain upon grain sings grain again grain

Sue Wootton
from The Yield Otago University Press, 2017

Dunedin

The city is not asleep,
It’s burning and I’m burning too.

Not my motherland, so I try to find
resemblance in the foreign bodies-in-faces
that glisten with sweat under the confusing weather.

Follow the path of statues
that takes me to my favourite fish and chip store.

Ruins of nostalgia are the aftertaste of my childhood.
I don’t remember resting.

Years later when I traced back the roads I travelled,
akara and fufu always resembled my motherland and
I never had anyone to hold hands with.

Today the city is asleep,
and I’m not burning.

I hold onto the space between your fingers
even though I know when I return,

all I will have is the ruins of nostalgia.

But this time it will be of a friend’s
and maybe Ōtepoti doesn’t feel so foreign after all.

Tunmise Adebowale

Mornington

A morning rain of muslin, hardly there
except in the pinprick flicker, a thickening
of the air. Far then farther the cars down
watery tunnels shrink while every branch
and blade swells into closer green. The leaves,
poised, tuck the mist between crease and rib,
now and then bouncing to shed a drop
with a quiver. In such twitches and glints the rain
gathers, finds runnels and nubs in concrete
that coil clear water into guttered dark.
What remains, drifts: the road a stippled mirror
of a hushed and hooded suburb whose colours
through wet hours deepen, become more patient.                        

Megan Kitching
from At the Point of Seeing Otago University Press, 2023

Dunedin, October

Broken bottles like diamonds
ground into pavement.
The sun slants through leafless trees,
lost in the gloom, gives up.

Ducks tuck their heads
in the shade.
The heat bakes pink blossoms,
scent rising, beer and burnt coffee.

Shereen Asha Murugayah

South D Poet Lorikeet

Born in the heart of South Dunedin,
too soon, too light, the Home
too full, the Doctor too late.
Night falls away, early sun climbs into play.

It’s baby city in Melbourne Street,
Rawhiti Maternity’s over-crowded,
no rooms left, no time left.
The mother lies on a bed of boards.

Rawhiti. East, direction of dawn,
day born in the waking of bellbirds,
tuis, thrushes and finches,
calling, cajoling, comforting.

Bed for the Mother made over a bath.
‘Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water,’
she said. ‘Blood is thicker
than water,’ they said.

Born in the heart of South Dunedin
where still waters run deep,
a Rawhiti songbird breaks into memory.
Her call haunts bedraggled trees.

Jenny Powell
from South D Poet Lorikeet Cold Hub Press, 2017

Poet makes a useless round-trip journey

Walked around City Rise from home
to the Warehouse, above the Exchange, to look

for notebooks & scribble-pads. Quite a hike
for me these days . . . Out of Prestwick, past Sim,

down Drivers Road, into Queens Drive, Royal Terrace,
up London Street, across Stuart, into Arthur (at

Otago Boys’ High), over the top of  York & down
Rattray to Maclaggan, & on to the Warehouse

where I bought 3 DVDs but no notebooks––Oh!
––& an icecream . . . Then on again to Queens

Gardens for a pee at the public toilets next to
the brothel, & on past the Leviathan Hotel

around the corner from the old Police Station
to the new Bus Hub opposite the new Police Station

where I caught a bus back home.

Peter Olds
from Sheep Truck and other poems, Cold Hub Press, 2022

Octagonal

A Cento

Drop down to roofs and that gray documentary harbour.
See those houses on Lookout Point ambiguously glitter.
Steer the car like a life-raft down Cumberland to this
and slide down towards St Kilda, as if that’s where breakfast is.
I never remember the sun in North East Valley
steamed open like a cockle this morning in mid-July.
I’ve gone down with the sun, written syllables till time has surprised me
and driven home through the bright lights of George Street.

Dad took us up Flagstaff and we slid on tea-trays
down a field, from the far side of Phar Lap’s ribcage.
Dunedin—grey as thinking grey on the greyest days,
crossing High Street for the last time—without looking both ways.
Dunedin—it snaps you awake quicker than smelling salts
and the dead can get good housing—Thomas Bracken, McLeod, McColl,
where the south sea burns the cliff-edge bushes to bent bare sticks
and there are no afternoon newspapers for insomniacs.

Always a loud grumbler after a feed of high-country rain
the Leith, like an Emerson’s Bookbinder, cold as an eel’s nose.
On the graceless branches of Queen’s Gardens, parables of winter burn,
a susurrus of wind is moving the fallen leaves on the ground by the museum.
A thick scattering of crushed amber glass spilt by the recycling truck,
the Leith, sloshed, certain, in time to upset scholastic bedrock.
The city spreads her nets by thought’s knife, the creek.
I smoked, drank, cursed, and dipped my wick in Castle Street.
the Leith, sloshed, certain, in time to upset scholastic bedrock.
The city spreads her nets by thought’s knife, the creek.
I smoked, drank, cursed, and dipped my wick in Castle Street.

A moon hangs a wafer above Saddle Hill
like a bullock’s skull hanging on the scrub fence of Mt Cargill.
Dunedin—catching the green the length of the One Way,
the poplars march down in flame, as to a new Dunsinane.
Houses home to new lives with no knowledge of that time.
If there is any culture here it comes from the black south wind.
Note after note after note of the Richter scale
at the edge of the universe, the city seems to fail.

Lynley Edmeades
from Listening In Otago University Press, 2019

steepest street

She’d heard that the reason roses are so popular 
is because they remind men of women’s breasts. Okay. 
Didn’t know that Mum. And cabbages too, she said. 
Okay … didn’t know that either. 
We’re at Dunedin’s Botanical Gardens
where she needs a sit down. 
She wants to sit under the tree 
by the frisbee throwers, but I say, No,
let’s push on to another seat over in the shade
under the oaks. I don’t trust those frisbees.

Progress is slow and when we finally get there
we find that the seat nearby is occupied 
by an old man in a schoolboy’s hat, shorts, 
long school-socks and a scarf.
He’s eating sandwiches and drinking tea 
from a thermos. “Happy New Year!” he says. 

Breather over, we head for the steepest street 
and a cafe out that way that might be open 
or might not. It wasn’t. 
Mum has never seen the steepest street before.
But now she’s feeling a little dizzy. It’s the heat.
“I’d love a Big Mac and a milkshake,” she says.
She eats it in the car on John Willie Drive 
with its ocean views and the car windows 
wound down so that we can hear the waves. 

My sister texts You made our 80-year old mother walk 
in 28 degree heat?! Tomorrow she’s going to Beaumont 
to stay with my brother and his wife. 
They’ve put a couch on their verandah 
for Mum to sit in the sun and read. There’s also 
mention of a hammock. However, we all agree 
that Mum in a hammock might be a bit of stretch.

Kay McKenzie Cooke

Summer Hum

Knock softly on a plum.
Is anyone  there? If the golden fruit at your fingertip
has an occupant, you’ll be told. If inside the taut skin
a honey bee is gorging on pulp, her first-comer’s claim
will be snarled, instant warning. Stand still.
Then slowly, slowly, tap your question
on the next plum. No harm done. This tree
sings abundance all summer long.

Bowls overflow. Your empty jam jars line up and wait.
Bucket handles groan and bags split on the way
to neighbours, friends and strangers
who may have a need of plums they had not known.

More! In unison, more! These bees are drunk.
Plums ferment on the ground with a sour
after-party smell that bewitches bumbling inebriates
falling over their own six feet. Mind where you step;
they’re too mellow to get out of your way.

Their throaty hum weaves again a soft summer spell,
a wing-whirred hymn of giving that comes
honeyed, tipsy, spun from the rhythms of our sun-held world.

Carolyn McCurdie

School Run

Yellow leaves catch
in the talons of the holly hedge

Evergreen, bar red berries
saved for another season

A dark backdrop
against the golden poplars’ loss

A dark foreground
before Olveston’s gingerbread cladding

At 3pm an ice-white Tesla arrives
I want to say:

Its shine is eclipsed
by the bright autumn light.

Hayley Rata Heyes

Salt Marsh

Though I can’t see beyond the entrance
there’s a honeycomb of housing below
past crab burrow to ghost shrimp and worm

sparking in the wet
catacombs of vitality, so busy down there,
small mouths on which this world leans.

*   *   *

What the body might feel
before thought: to inhabit skin
as a girl can, without meaning to.

Provisional, perishing, not solid ground
crossing the saltwort meadow
fossicking the ragged seam:

cast and carapace, small bird bones
a floating harvest of eelgrass –
weed pasted in like a poultice.

*   *   *

I’ve walked the salt marsh in sunlight
come back in the depths of night
to listen to geese at their pillow talk

the moon holding on to what it can’t have
brings the sea to my ear; a boundary found
then lost again – on this waterlogged map

my whereabouts is ‘almost’ or ‘maybe’.

Rhian Gallagher
from Far-Flung Auckland University Press, 2021

Shark Bell

Shark bell on the beach
but the waves
ring
louder

out we paddle
out, out

follow, follow
focus, focus
every hair, fibre, muscle, cell

move move move move
now now now now
catch
live

everything is gold
everything is silver
in the fast butter eyes closed
churn
everything is here
life, death

all the doors
are open.

Kirstie McKinnon
first published in the Otago Daily Times, 30 December 2013

4am

Shits. Two of them. I behold the magenta faces.
Simultaneous simmering grunts. The felt sound
of clay sinking into the hills that lap the harbor.

Milk dribbles down Purushottam’s chin, leaks out the corners
of Vayu smiling around the bottle’s teat. We named you
after the divine. On my right, the Bhagavad Gita says

you are a spirit “who-alone-knows-what-they-are.”
And to my left: you are breath itself, once incarnated
as the devoted leaping monkey God who lifted

a mountain to build a bridge across the ocean.
In some incarnations the two of you worked together
to bring peace. In others, war. Some say you fought

so that good could triumph over evil. Some say.
Dear infants attached by the branch this twin feeding pillow
extends, like poetry, I speak to you beyond the report

of comprehension. “Don’t burn up the city!” “You pooped
out your butt!” “Here’s a kiss.” “Let me change your brother
first.” In just a few months, this all has become easy. Endless laundry,

detaching wings, wiping the autumnal remainder of milk filched
of goodness, the rhubarb rank string of scent wafting
through the room. Vayu, they say you, God of wind,

were the first to drink soma and know the body. You begat
ritual. Puru, they say you are milk itself, and shit alike. Someday
we will wind down the peninsula and walk the path lined

with bright yellow lupins to Allan’s beach where all the baby
sea lions grow up, where the waves are “powerful as a horse
that yanks off pegs in the ground to which he’s bound.” Wait

until you smell blubber bathing in the harsh southern sun
and the creatures’ own excrement. No. I don’t, anymore, fuss.
I don’t hurry. A year ago, you were corpuscular. Now corporeal,

your cries slide into this crepuscular coloratura. “I’m glad you still
see the cuteness in their cry,” Natalie says. And yes. Wind
itself is the most sacred syllable. Carrying on it, the spirit.  

Lupins bloom behind my closed eyes each time I open the bin.

Rushi Vyas

French kissing on Princes Street while the red man beeps

time idles              one foot on the traffic
why wait for end of day I love you’s
when we can say it with tongues at the lights

five roads converge on this spot and I
I have my eyes closed because she says
she’s got a sense of when the green man will arrive

for the war effort we ought (for it 
is always war) (and it is always an effort)
to get all the people to kiss on all 

                                             the corners

all the time and in France they call 
orgasms petites morts and though this 
poem has no French pretensions (except 

for the kissing) (which is very not pretend)
this is the kind of fight to the death
I could really get behind

Liz Breslin
from in bed with the feminists, Dead Bird books, 2021

I’ve been here long enough
to watch the coastline change

The ocean
The sandbags pile up
and people say
How will we deal with this?
and
What can we put in its way?

No one ever indicates
or picks up their dog shit
I have come to believe
these are
the same decision

The sand falls away
in great cliffs
We sink into the ocean
and
keep
sinking

Nothing to weigh us down
but our own bodies
collected sacks
of decisions and things
Cleaved without notice
then everything sucks

Great cliffs of sand
with a couch atop them
Broken glass
remnants of a party
of people trying
to get closer to god

No one notices sea lions
cause they’re the same colour
as the sand
when they’re covered with it

No one thinks to keep
their dog on a lead
because no one
would ever hurt anyone
and no one knows
how anyone
gets hurt

Sand is just glass
’til it’s blunted
and the couch on the cliffs
will get wet
with no one to care

Eliana Gray

Midday/autumn

The clouds clear at noon,
or nearly. A beam of light:
pear tree, tauhou’s stage.

I take my coffee
outside, turn my face skyward.
Tūī bleats; I spill.

Pears plonk. Soft sun sets
the coffee stain on my shirt.
Who cares? Not the birds.

Claire Lacey

‘Hotere’ By Tuwhare on the Big Wall at Dunedin Public Art Gallery 14.10.20

I feel like I know you, man
it’s like lines shooting through time
they pierce my eyeballs and I follow 
forward to the past and your hands
swipe new lines in paint and your hands
swipe new lines on pages and your hands
sit cigarettes in knuckle dents
blue lines stripe up away pulled
into the ether to disappear
But you’re here
our public wall stacked of your lines
black on white
but there’s orange here and purple too
If I let my mind shift
I feel like I know you, man
you inhale and the embers glow your faces
I smell lacquer and fresh pencil shavings
ghost tobacco and fireplace smokes
sting my inner eye
damn, this is art
and I’m hungry

Jasmine Taylor

The road over Three Mile Hill

is dark and winding
bordered by dense forest —

possums, abandoned roosters
and the odd wild pig
prone to scamper
in the path of a vehicle

On black-ice nights
you take the hairpins
slowly, thankful
for ordinary blessings

like the ribbon of
cat’s eyes blinking
through
fog

lighting the way
to somewhere

Sophia Wilson
from Sea Skins, flying islands, 2023

Warming

Up here,
seagulls float like kites on thermals.
Down there,
a car canters like a racehorse
through pasture, towards Aramoana.
The giant wharf cranes of Port Chalmers
stand like steel giraffes in a story book,
and time is reluctant to turn the page.

A fishing boat’s wake is
carving a V
in the freckled salty skin of the sea,
furrowing its calm green translucence,
until the sun squeezes juice from quarter
of a lemon onto the veiling, foam-white,
dissolved wings of a billion butterflies.
Pick up that foam, pick it up and drape it
across the dry riverbeds of the skies.

David Eggleton
from Time of the Icebergs: Poems, Otago University Press, 2020

News from out the Heads

A bereaved albatross, its mate unreturned
from weeks of oceanic scoop and drift,
will up, at some point, relinquish its nest,
go down and join the partying juveniles,
clack beaks, make like its youth again
all over. It seems it works.

I talk with a widowed friend who loathes
heavy metal, rap, facebook, texting.
‘I’m too old,’ she says, ‘to learn not
to spell, to pretend I have never heard decent
music.’ Well, I console her, it’s hardly
as though you’re obliged to assume the skies,
to join the rout. No, she says, but the wind
roars for all that, the sea heaves. It is not
just albatross know about what they’ve lost.

Vincent O’Sullivan
from Us Then, Victoria University Press (Te Herenga Waka University Press) 2013

Calm Evening, Dunedin

9 p.m. and the sun still shining.
The city deserted.

The construction cranes
Make no more gestures in the blue sky.

The builders are far away
In their holiday houses.

The old year nods its head,
The new year not yet come.

Sparrows, who have no calendar,
Chatter in the linden trees.

My shadow grown tall as a telegraph pole
Slants across the quiet streets.

Tonight I should like to go on walking
Forever.

Ruth Dallas
from Collected Poems, Otago University Press, 2000 with recent poems, and originally 1987)