Laurence’s Fearnley’s novel, Winter Time, came out in 2022 but I missed it, in my year of sleeping blogs and slow paced reading. I am such a fan of Laurence’s writing, I was thrilled to discover Winter Time‘s existence in the world. And the book is so good, so beautifully written and exquisitely paced, I wanted to let you know in case you have missed it too. I devoured it in two sittings, breathlessly, compulsively, saying to myself, this is what fiction can do.
Roland returns home to the Mackenzie Country to make sense of the unexpected death of his brother, haunted too by previous family deaths, impersonated on social media when he never uses social media, beleaguered by his brother’s irksome neighbour, ruing the strained relations with his partner back in Sydney.
The novel is character rich, spiky, unexpected; these multi-dimensional figures draw you in so beautifully. They creep up on you, contribute to the engulfing mood, the traces of foreboding and tension, loss and grief, connection and disconnection. The detail is piquant, pitch perfect. The melody of the sentences so supremely judged. It feels like all the narrative roads lead to mood. To the way we inhabit our lives, navigating who we love and who we miss, what we have and what we long for. Place matters. The way memory both infects and nourishes. The way things change and things stay the same.
I adore this book, with its sublime settings and deeply engraved feeling. I simply adore this book.
Laurence Fearnley is an award-winning novelist. Her novel The Hut Builder won the fiction category of the 2011 NZ Post Book Awards. In 2014 her novel Reach was longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, and, in 2008, Edwin and Matilda was runner-up in the fiction category of the Montana New Zealand Book Awards. Her second novel, Room, was shortlisted for the 2001 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. In 2004 Fearnley was awarded the Artists to Antarctica Fellowship and in 2007 the Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago. In 2016 she won the NZSA/ Janet Frame Memorial Award and in 2017 she was the joint winner of the Landfall essay competition. She was named a New Zealand Arts Foundation Laureate in 2019. She lives in Dunedin.
Saga, Hannah Mettner,Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023
‘Birth control’
‘Beep test’
Hannah Mettner is a Wellington-based poet from Gisborne. Her first collection, Fully Clothed and So Forgetful, won the 2018 Jessie Mackay Best First Book Award for Poetry. Her second collection, Saga, was released in August 2023. She is co-founder, with Morgan Bach and Sugar Magnolia Wilson, of Sweet Mammalian, an online poetry journal launched in 2014.
I ordered an air fryer for $2 but received a bag of glow-in-the-dark stars.
Despite knowing better, I’m still looking for magic. When I swim in the night time fiord, through its dense bioluminous clouds, I am waiting for something inside me to transform.
I’m twenty-four, I should know this moment won’t save me, even though I’m alone in its cold light, under the milky way and the ferns overhanging the water. I should know these are plankton, not wishes.
When I was seven, I wanted to be a geologist and the pocket of my school culottes always held treasure: pebbles, cicada shells, and sidewalk receipts. I read Tintin alone in the library, by the window overlooking the pier. I still dream I’m a crab in a rockpool. I still hope so much that it hurts.
Lily Holloway
Poem note:
The title of this poem comes from the following tweet exchange:
Lily Holloway is a trench coat full of ladybugs. Their first chapbook was published in 2021 as a part of Auckland University Press’ AUP New Poets 8. Their other work can be found in places such as Cordite, Hobart After Dark, Peach Mag, Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems, Out Here: An Anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ New Zealand Writers, and various other nooks and crannies. You can find more about what they’re up to at lilyholloway.co.nz or on Twitter @milfs4minecraft.
Poetry is like a stream. I woke in the middle of the night and had a thought flash in the dark that I get pulled along poetry currents, and that they might be fierce or gentle, rippled or calm, crisp cold or comfort warm, and sometimes I float and drift and dream, and sometimes I clamber onto a stream boulder and soak up melody and mystery, marvel and the mundane, word dance and human stretch, and it is skin tingle and heart embrace. And it is poetry.
Welcome to Poetry Shelf Cafe and a set of readings by 8 poets to celebrate National Poetry Day. Each poet reads a favourite poem of their own and one by someone else.
Happy National Poetry Day
Arielle Walker
‘Gateway’ by Makyla Curtis from Apertures hand-printed and hand-bound small print run through her MVA project Folding Time
‘dream futures from a plant beneath your tongue’ by Arielle Walker from AUP New Poets 9 (Auckland University Press, 2023) and also No Other Place to Stand: An Anthology of Climate Change Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand (Auckland University Press, 2022)
Each time I tried to write this line “on poetry,” it quickly threatened to become a very long cord instead, a thread, a whole weaving, possibly even a poem, unspooling quickly even though my other (non-poetic) writing has recently felt effortful – and I think that’s what I love most about it: as reader or writer, poetry has always offered me different ways and possibilities into language.
Arielle Walker
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 first chapbook, river poems, can be found in AUP New Poets 9 (Auckland University Press, 2023), and her poetry can also be found in Stasis Journal, Turbine | Kapohau, Tupuranga Journal, Oscen: Myths, No Other Place to Stand: An Anthology of Climate Change Poetry fromAotearoa New Zealand (Auckland University Press, 2022), and the upcoming anthology Te Awa o Kupu (Penguin Random House, 2023).
Robert Sullivan
‘Tangaroa whariki kiokio’ by Robert Sullivan from his new collection Hopurangi | Songcatcher (forthcoming from Auckland University Press in 2023).
‘The crash of living things’ by Arihia Latham from Birdspeak (Anahera, 2023)
Kia ora. Poetry day is a celebration of our many traditions sheltering under the old trees of poetry. When Paula Green asked for a contribution I immediately thought of Arihia Latham’s wonderful new collection Birdspeak and its multiple emotional centres. Her poem “The Crash of Living Things” draws its decolonising energy from the colonisation of forests, spirit, and families. It makes gestures toward the traditions of both tangata whenua and western ideas of prayer, care and literature. I hope you each enjoy the eternally delightful energy of poetry on this great day helped along by Paula’s aroha for this artform. Ngā mihi mahana.
Robert Sullivan
Robert Sullivan (he/him/ia, Kāi Tahu and Ngāpuhi) has won awards for his poetry, editing, and writing for children, including the 2022 Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for a distinguished contribution to New Zealand poetry. Tunui Comet (Auckland University Press, 2022) is his eighth poetry collection. His widely acclaimed book Star Waka (AUP 1999) has been reprinted many times. Hopurangi / Songcatcher is forthcoming from Auckland University Press later this year. Robert’s an Associate Professor at Massey University and coordinates its Master of Creative Writing programme. He is a great fan of all kinds of decolonisation.
Hannah Mettner
Photo credit: Ebony Lamb
‘after Sissinghurst’ by Morgan Bach from Middle Youth (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023)
‘La bohème’ by Hannah Mettner from Saga (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023)
Sissinghurst is the ‘castle garden’ in England created by Vita Sackville-West, poet and writer (and the inspiration for Virgina Woolf’s character Orlando), and her husband Harold Nicolson, author and diplomat, who were members of the famous ‘Bloomsbury Group’. The couple spent thirty years transforming a farmstead of “squalor and slovenly disorder” into one of the world’s most influential gardens. In her poem, Morgan visits the now heritage listed garden and imagines what that life must’ve been like; to “have hands all day in soil and sap / and all night in words and lovers, / that is the life we want, that we can / no longer pay for.” This stanza hits me in the chest every time I read it because it gets to the very heart of what makes poetry so seductive: the human need for beauty and love and good honest dirt, and the modern affliction of feeling so separated from those things. Of course, Vita and Harold had money; that’s how they were able to live that life. Morgan’s poem doesn’t dwell heavy-handedly on these problems, instead moving on to consider more sensual pleasures, but it leaves the reader questioning: what happens if only those who have money have the time/energy/resources to make art? Do only the well-off get to experience poetry? Are those things we so crave as humans, beauty and love and good honest dirt, the preserve of the rich? Surely that isn’t fair? With this in mind, the poem of my own that I’ve recorded is ‘La bohème’ which is coming at the same questions as Morgan’s in perhaps a less lovely way.
Hannah Mettner
Hannah Mettner is a Wellington-based poet from Gisborne. Her poems have appeared widely in literary journals, including Sport, Turbine and Cordite. With Morgan Bach and Sugar Magnolia Wilson, she is a founding editor of Sweet Mammalian, an online poetry journal launched in 2014. Her first collection, Fully Clothed and So Forgetful, won the 2018 Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry. Her second collection, Saga, was published by Te Herenga Waka University Press in August 2023.
Emma Neale
Photo credit: Caroline Davies
‘The Names’ by Lauris Edmond first appeared in Salt From The North (Oxford University Press, 1980)
‘The Night Shift’ by Emma Neale first appeared at Adda: Issue 2 : Remember to Rest (Commonwealth Foundation, 2023)
While poetry can be visually, typographically and sonically experimental, and can push the boundaries of language and meaning in multiple ways, I often return to it as a way to find a restorative comfort through the music of voice, and an untangling of complex emotions. Lauris Edmond’s poem ‘The Names’, for example, has a bittersweet seesaw between feelings of deep attachment and the distance that time and geography have wrought between a mother and her children: here there is wistfulness, poignancy, sharp recall and the sense of evolution in relationships, all placed alongside the sense of enduring bonds, despite those changes. My own poem revisits the liminal experience of resurfacing into consciousness after major abdominal surgery. I suppose what both poems might have in common is how they try to reassemble the speaker, or restore memory, after experiences of separation, fragmentation, disintegration of a kind.
Emma Neale
Emma Neale, the author of six collections of poetry and six novels, received the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for a Distinguished Contribution to New Zealand Poetry in 2020. Her most recent novel, Billy Bird (2016) was short-listed for the Acorn Prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and long-listed for the Dublin International Literary Award. Her first collection of short stories, The Pink Jumpsuit (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2021, was also long-listed for the Acorn Prize. She lives in Ōtepoti/Dunedin, New Zealand, where she works as a freelance editor.
Modi Deng
’The River’ by Mark Leidner from Beauty Was the Case That They Gave Me (Factory Hollow Press, 2011)
‘Lessons’ by Modi Deng from collection ‘安慰 (an wei)’ in AUP New Poets 8 (Auckland University Press, 2021)
Poetry is so close to me that it is difficult to write about it. As a form to read, it leaves something out, and yet is full and all-consuming. As a form to write in, it is incredibly concentrated and full of unexpected connections. It might reach behind itself and show you something broken when you were expecting an apple. At the heart of it, it is very beautiful and simple and true. It’s difficult to describe…
Modi Deng
Modi Deng is a pianist and writer from Aotearoa New Zealand. Her debut poetry collection was published in AUP New Poets 8. Currently based in Melbourne, her recent works have appeared in Cordite Poetry Review, Starling, Write Together, and on NZ Poetry Shelf. She cares deeply about literature (especially poetry, diaspora), music, psychology, and her family.
Joan Fleming
Photo credit: Gerard Starling
‘Glaciers’ by Sarah Jane Barnett from WORK (Hue & Cry Press, 2015)
‘Coins, Glass, Nails, Pottery, Cinders’ by Joan Fleming from Australian Book Review, May 2023
I think I still know what poetry is, but I might have forgotten how to do a ‘poem’. These days I’m stuck on the sequence, the hybrid, the poet’s novel. This is why I love Sarah Jane Barnett’s book Work, an undersung triumph of NZ letters. Her sequence work blows me away, as do her exquisite/devastating ecofeminist metaphors. Woman as glacier; woman as geological era. “She melted into deltas / and sinuous lakes” — of course she did.
Joan Fleming
Joan Fleming is the author of three books: The Same as Yes and Failed Love Poems (from THWUP) and the verse novel Song of Less (Cordite Books). Her honours include the Biggs Poetry Prize, the Verge Prize for Poetry, the Harri Jones Memorial Prize from the Hunter Writers’ Centre, a Creative New Zealand writing fellowship, and a residency with the Michael King Writers’ Centre. Her manuscript Dirt was shortlisted for Australia’s richest poetry prize, the Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest. She works as a lecturer in Creative Writing at Massey University, and writes about staying awake on the precipice of total ecological shitfuckery.
Vana Manasiádis
‘How do you keep a civil tongue’ by Vana Manasiádis (the poem is made up of English ‘translations’ of Greek proverbs, and the background reading is the Greek original)
‘Princess Alexandra Amalie of Bavaria (believed she swallowed a grand piano made of glass)’ by Rebecca Palmer
In his poem ‘Duplex’, Jericho Brown says ‘a poem is a gesture towards home’. I’ll say poetry is home. Is garden, body, heat and mess; the meal that someone you love makes you when you really need one.
Vana Manasiádis
Vana Manasiádis | Βάνα Μανασιάδη was raised in Pōneke and Ātene Greece and now lives in Ōtautahi. She is senior lecturer in creative writing at Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha Canterbury University.
Chris Tse
‘Making a Salad’ by Sudha Rao from On Elephant’s Shoulders (The Cuba Press, 2022)
‘Portrait of a life’ by Chris Tse from Super Model Minority (Auckland University Press, 2022)
Last weekend I had the pleasure of being a judge at the second semi-final heat of the Word – The Front Line, a team slam competition in Auckland. Every single word and poem shared that day was imbued with emotion, from joy and rage, to sadness and longing. Something I found so inspiring was how the young poets used poetry to challenge how they are perceived by others (parents, teachers, society, the media) and to take back control of their own narratives. What a privilege it was to listen to their stories and experience first-hand the rapturous response from the audience. These young poets reminded us all that poetry can be a gift, a superpower, a provocation, and a balm – a way to crack upon every question or issue that troubles us to find a way towards light.
Chris Tse
Chris Tse is New Zealand’s Poet Laureate for 2022-24. He is the author of three poetry collections published by Auckland University Press: How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes, HE’S SO MASC, and Super Model Minority (a finalist for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and longlisted for the 2023 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards). He and Emma Barnes edited Out Here: An Anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ Writers from Aotearoa.
Middle Youth, Morgan Bach, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023
‘cosmos’
‘Thursday’
‘magpies’
‘health & safety’
Morgan Bach lives in her home town of Pōneke, though spent half the last decade living in London, and so some poems in her new book are set there. Middle Youth is Morgan’s second collection of poems, and was published by Te Herenga Waka University Press in August 2023.
Love-language of milk trees, blood trees, ghost trees – a hydra of sap and xylem, every green stain a tenderness. This is Homecoming, a configuration of what a house might be when left to scaffold a forest. My dear, these branches are clumsy and don’t know what to do to you. How to be civil in a garden raked by guilt. How to gather your wingspan in my shattered hands, and what to do with the feathers as they loosen. Love-language of mudbanks, floodwaters, the curled bulrushes that hug to memory like a suffix. I have been butchering the lyrics, hacking octaves with my fat tongue. This feeling is non-falsifiable. I have no legroom for two on a ride-on mower fashioned to endure every seatbelt sign, every broken catcher, and every time you tell me this is enough. How to be kind in a mixed-metaphor about grass. How to stranglehold a lawn snake. How to not be a fire-hazard amongst dry straw. How to be forgiven in a saltmarsh where I don’t know how to right a sunken vessel. How to love a green shrub in a yellow meadow.
Elizabeth Morton
Elizabeth Morton is an Auckland spinner of poems and yarns, and an occasional academic. She has published three collections of poetry, the latest being Naming the Beasts (Otago University Press, 2022). Website
Poet Iona Winter has assembled a liminal gathering, a multidisciplinary anthology (or ‘almanac’) on grief, with over 100 contributors. It promises to be a powerful book navigating a difficult topic, a topic important to open up a dialogue about.
Iona is currently seeking Boosted funding with the money going to printing the book, providing a koha for contributors and holding launches in Auckland and Dunedin. Any help spreading the word would be awesome as every donation, no matter how little, helps.
“a liminal gathering celebrates the destigmatisation of grief, by making it relatable through multiple creative lenses, and to normalise the various ways grief can be expressed. The almanac seeks to provide comfort, and act as a taonga to be shared between loving hands, during difficult times.”a liminal gathering celebrates the destigmatisation of grief, by making it relatable through multiple creative lenses, and to normalise the various ways grief can be expressed. The almanac seeks to provide comfort, and act as a taonga to be shared between loving hands, during difficult times.
This Boosted campaign is to raise funds for: the printing of a liminal gathering (approximately $6,900), to provide a small koha (of $50 to 103 contributing artists – including making their copies available at cost); because a reality of being a creative in NZ is that most of us are unpaid, and finally to hold two book launches in Dunedin and Auckland during November.
I am donating my time/energy/aroha to all the behind-the-scenes mahi – shout outs to the generous wahine who gave koha to support me with this. While Boosted is a reward-free platform, there is a platform fee, and the cost for this has been included in our fundraising goal of $14,000.”
So many exciting events across the country to celebrate National Poetry Day – not just on Friday but throughout the week. I am posting a reading in Poetry Shelf Cafe on Friday for those of us who can’t go to physical events or go on a poetry road trip!
I would love to go to Time Out in Mt Eden to hear: Haro Lee, Tim Wilson, Hebe Kearney, Arielle Walker, Shania Pablo, Ngaio Simmons, Zephyr Zhang, Beth Torrance- Hetherington, Yě Yě, Abby Irwin-Jones, and Roman Sigley.
I would love to pop into Poetry on the Edge: A South Island Celebration and hear New poetry: Victor Billot, Cilla McQueen, Emma Neale, Richard Reeve, plus young poets from local schools. New books: Megan Kitching, Robyn Maree Pickens, Rushi Vyas, Louise Wallace. Collaborative words & sounds: Claire Beynon, S J Mannion, Lola Elvy, Robert Sullivan, Sophia Wilson, Susan Wardell
I would love to eavesdrop on the Poet Laureate Quiz at the HOME cafe,National Library in Wellington on Saturday 26 August 2023, 10am to 12pm. Do you know your poetry .. will bring a team!
And tomorrow I definitely want a seat at: Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems to hear Nick Ascroft, Morgan Bach, James Brown, Anahera Gildea, Tim Jones, Michaela Keeble, Frankie McMillan, Khadro Mohamed, Sarah Scott, Siobhan Harvey and Frances Samuel. The poets will be introduced by Damien Wilkins. Monday 21 August 2023 12.15-1.15pm. Te Papa Marae, Level 4, Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington
Events are in big towns small towns big cities small cities, outside inside, and involve so many different poets and so many different approaches and activities.
NZ Poetry Shelf 