To celebrate the inclusion of Talia by Isla Huia (Dead Bird Books, 2023) on the Ockham NZ Book Award Poetry short list, Isla has read three poems from the collection and I have written a short review. Isla’s debut collection is a book to be celebrated. The awards will be announced at an Auckland Writers Festival Event on May 15th. In the meantime here is a taste of this sublime book, and if you get a chance to hear Isla read live, do!

The reading

‘Hiruhārama’

‘Pegasus’

‘Motuoapa’

Isla Huia (Te Āti Haunui a-Pāpārangi, Uenuku) is a te reo Māori teacher and writer. Her work has been published in journals such as Catalyst, Takahē and Awa Wāhine, and her debut collection of poetry, Talia, was released in May 2023 by Dead Bird Books. She has performed at the national finals of Rising Voices Youth Poetry Slam and the National Poetry Slam, as well as at writers festivals and events throughout Aotearoa. Isla can most often be found writing in Ōtautahi with FIKA Collective, and Ōtautahi Kaituhi Māori.

Dead Bird Books page

The review

          when you carried me to the bath / and to the chest where i
          sat / and pronounced myself very much alive again

          to night ‘n day / where we married /
          over steaming hot potato / and it felt so native,
          so hāngi / so ancestor / to say
          the passenger seat is your mould now / love /

          there is nothing i wouldn’t do for you / and
          i think we should keep this up forever /

          a fact so irredeemable / and hot to the touch / that it
          slots better / into a cloud formation or penne pasta /
          than into language

         from ‘eleven eleven’

Poetry books can be like favourite albums that demand repeated listening for all kinds of reasons. Reading Talia is so. The poetry soothes and tugs, unsettles and mesmerises. The poems are personal, intimate, revealing. They pull you into the sweet musicality of words and the magnetic power of storytelling. There are the resonant and connecting threads of place. There is the absolute need to connect with people: whanau, friends, loved ones, mother, whaea, wife, tīpuna, whakapapa.

Voice is paramount, within audible distance, necessary, singing in both te reo Māori and English, with epiphany, reflection, memory, challenge. Acknowledgement. Ah, there is a pulse of yearning, of writing one’s self close, of speaking health and the planet, cancer and virus and isolation. Of signposting division and injustice and rejuvenation.

There is a sense of urgency, a building momentum, like a whispered chant, or compelling list poem, with the surprise arrival of certain words (‘this wholegrain miracle of feast’), or the lyrical agility of a phrase (‘there’s a swamp beneath us all, a cathedral / in the abdomen, and rūaumoko’), or the physical tang and sweetness of detail (‘before the becoming, it was all body / bags of meatloaf, the lingerie, the storm.’)

You will fall upon Nina Simone, Keri Hulme, Audre Lorde, the isolation hotel, headlights, islands, suburbia, hospitals, love. Yes, this is a collection so movingly steeped in aroha, in the power and reach and traffic of love. It is a poetry collection to put on repeat, to lose and find your way in. I love it.

Paula Green

The poem

god-ly

“In some future day, when this generation is dead and gone, to those who look up inquiringly at this statue it will be told how the fathers of the colony left their homes and tamed the wilderness under the leadership of a man of heroic type; how, when he died, the representatives of the people, appreciating his character, determined to erect a monument worthy of his memory, and how a great sculptor in executing the work impressed it with the stamp of his genius. So shall some old man speak in the after time To all the people, winning reverence. And now I may congratulate the city that this statue is about to be handed over to its care, worthy as it is of admiration, like King Arthur’s sword of old, not only for the memory of a great man, but on account of its own intrinsic beauty not like that sword, to disappear from the eyes of men, but to be preserved by us and our successors as a possession for ever.” – C.C. Bowen, 7 Aug 1867

godley, you’re standing awful casual up there
warmer layers slung in your crook 
lookin like your foot wants to accelerate something
or stand or somethings neck 

you’re balding now
but have done well to love what’s left 
a blueprint of my own swelling curls 
framing eyes that are hungry, unyielding 
for the next swampland you may conquer 
another someplace hot and brown 
to be the founder of, frame this 
as experimental, or really good work,
or home 

godley, how’s it looking from up there 
since your recent resurrection 
you can see the birds, shitting in the rafters
they want to fix that too, apparently we 
are all walking around gutted without a cathedral, 
headless, big bellies bleeding

hey, i’m still upright
same as you, the first face of this land 
to be petrified in bronze, cast in forever 
the creation story of pākehā public art 
auē old koro, i see your oxygen

and your ships, and associations 
i don’t even want to patu you up 
or send you shaking at the whites 
of my eyes, i just want them to 
stop spending our money on 
your very dead face, freckled 
i imagine, and maybe cracked 

i want to whakaiti you, wanna 
munch on your mana, wanna 
bark at you, wanna rip up the 
stone and the bins and the benches
and plant a pā harakeke and 
whistle to my bird brothers and 
my tattooed sisters and my mobsters 
and my students and my knees 
and we can just all here sit on you 
like the weight of our great mother 
and hold your hand while the dust 
of your settler manhood does settle 

e tau, e tau
e tau, e tau 

when the first four ships came 
to see what you had made and then 
live on it, your wife said you did not
know whether to cry, or laugh, and 
so you did both 

godley, did you know my ancestors? 
what were they like? what did they say? 
were you kind to them? did they dance for you? 

in me they are immortalized 
like you in this square chest of the city
i hold them up to the sun and say 
thank you, one by one to the bones 
interred in us just as the words of this 
plaque make memory of you 

godley, why don’t you lay down
just for a little while 
just sleep 

let me see the sky 
your stomach takes up.

Isla Huia