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)