On Our Watch, Alison Carter, Catherine Delahunty, Julie Sargisson, Lora Mountjoy
Outwatch Press, 2023

Four Coromandel poets who meet regularly to share and talk poetry, have published an inviting collection of their writing. The poems navigate a world close at hand and our world under threat. You enter the intimate and the personal alongside a deep-seated concern for our environment and the choices we make. This is poetry at its most connective, both celebratory and challenging.

So settle back into the Poetry Shelf Cafe and have listen to Alison Carter, Catherine Delahunty, Julie Sargisson and Lora Mountjoy read.

Alison Carter

‘Captured’

‘Victorian Fantasy’

‘Piwakawaka’

Alison Carter is a journalist, writer and documentary maker who lives on a native restoration block at Kikowhakarere Bay in Hauraki. She wrote and performed poetry in her twenties and has found returning to it, after many years in the world of fact, to be creatively and emotionally liberating.

Catherine Delahunty

‘Tax is Love’

‘The Detectorist’

‘Leaving Te Moehau’

Catherine Delahunty ( Pākehā) writes columns, fiction and poetry and is active in environmental campaigns and Te Tiriti education work. She lives in the Kauaeranga Valley in Ngāti Maru lands in Hauraki. She writes about the place she lives, adventures in politics and people who have touched her life. She notes that poetry is harder to write than opinions but also more liberating and random. She likes having a group to give feedback and set deadlines so that she had to stop pretending to do housework and actually write something! 

Lora Mountjoy

‘Everything Beeps’

‘Three-year-old Girls Love Pink’

‘Papatuanuku’

Lora Mountjoy is the author of two novels and has contributed poems to many publications over the years.  She has raised a family, worked as a journalist and taught creative writing in a community setting. From the late 1980s and into this century Lora enjoyed reading and performing her poetry, both in Wellington and Coromandel.   She had been focussing on other writing projects when Julie encouraged her back into poetry and is really delighted to have the chance to share writing with other women and to be part of On Our Watch.

Julie Sargisson

‘Tidal’

‘Inheritance’

‘It’s Time’

Julie Sargisson lives on the outskirts of Kapanga above a tidal salt marsh. She replants wetland areas and bare hillsides to help restore this environmental treasure. She walks the hills and shore lines, writes articles, poetry and essays. Julie is “often inspired to write by this wild finger of land, the Coromandel. The seasons, the light, the birds. But also the microcosm of tragic history; forests and people who were here before us and the long term consequences played out here.  I’m also fascinated by how poetry can go beneath the surface and echo ideas.”