I subscribe to Claire Mabey’s Domestic Animals at Substack and love it so much I want to share the link with you – Check it out as a free or paid subscriber. Claire is the Founder of Verb Wellington and the books editor at The Spinoff. Her first novel is out in July 2024.

On her posts, Claire discusses books she has read, festivals she has been to, people she has met, sometimes films, a birthday gift. Many of the books she reads are books I have also loved immensely – so am always keen to check out the ones new to me.

The latest arrival, ‘An Autumnal Roundup and banging my drum’ (April 9th), struck multiple chords with me because it nails exactly what I have been thinking over the past weeks, especially in the middle of the night. Every morning when I press ‘publish’ on a new Poetry Shelf post, and then get stuck into writing and assembling the next one, I shudder. There is such unbearable stuff going on in the world and here in Aotearoa, it feels off-key to celebrate poetry and books, from comfort poems to the melancholic, from beauty to the challenging, from food to climate change. Ah. This is what Claire writes:

I feel like crying. Like Claire, I am so grateful to the journalists and (some) politicians who are challenging how the wellbeing of people and the planet itself are under threat from deplorable decisions and actions. At a time of mounting injustice and inhumanity, it is indeed a time to speak up and out. Loudly. Together.

And I am also grateful to Claire because I savour the book, the poem, the email, the blog, the piece of writing, the music and the movie that gets me through the day. I am in the middle of assembling a tribute feature for John Allison, a poet who recently died. It feels important to bring together a community of voices, some of his poems, some poets reading his poems, written tributes, photographs. And I have reviewed The Long Road Trip Home that came out in 2023 with Cold Hub Press. In my patchwork sleep last night – yes it is on trend but two plus two is not filling my energy jar – I felt grief that I hadn’t managed to do the review late last year.

So I reread Claire’s post at 4 am.

And here is the epiphany. Here is the impulse to continue. We need Claire’s voice along with voices such as John Campbell, Helen Clark, Philip Matthews, Miriamo Kamo, Sharon Murdoch, The Spinoff, Simon Wilson, Chlöe Swarbrick to name a few. This morning I heard Ash Maindonald, the Principal at Western Heights School in West Auckland, speak with Nathan Rarere on RNZ National about the traffic light system being brought in by government to track school attendance. It was commonsense, it was empathy, it filled me with hope.

We need to challenge and we need to celebrate. In order to do the tough stuff, whether on a private level or a public one, whether as frontline worker stretched to breaking point (health workers, teachers, police, aid workers, emergency crews) or as critic across all media, we need to tend our daily energy jars. To replenish them with sources of comfort, nourishment, joy.

Thank you Claire, your writing and your mahi matters.