Vincent O’Sullivan with Philip Mann at the site of the military internment camp outside Featherston, photographed by Robert Cross during rehearsals for Shuriken in August 1983.

Sarah Therese we call you,
  A name that is only yours-
Although ‘only yours’ is the gift
  of that small pause

In time when we and you
  Are as close as this,
To say your name, to say
  “She comes, our girl, she goes.”

Yet we have been together.
Known each other’s touch.
We know to speak of little
  Or of much

Are not the words to use
  For what you give.
With love you came, our Sarah.
  Now go with love.

Vincent O’Sullivan

Selected by Dominic O’Sullivan and the family. Dominic writes, “As far as I am aware, this untitled poem is unpublished. It is inscribed on the headstone of my daughter Sarah at Newstead in Hamilton. She died at birth in 2006. Vince read the poem at her funeral.”

Launch Still Is of at National Library of New Zealand, Wellington, June 21

Born in Auckland in 1937, Vincent O’Sullivan was one of New Zealand’s leading writers, acclaimed for his poetry, plays, short stories, and novels, which include Let the River Stand, Believers to the Bright Coast, and the Ockham-shortlisted All This By Chance. He was joint editor with Margaret Scott of the internationally acclaimed five-volume Letters of Katherine Mansfield, edited a number of major anthologies, and was the author of widely praised biographies of John Mulgan and Ralph Hotere. He taught at Waikato University and Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, and was the New Zealand Poet Laureate for 2013–2015. In 2000, Vincent was made a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, and in 2021 he was redesignated as a Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit. He died in April 2024.

Te Herenga Waka University Press page

To clear a string of days, to put cello or piano or violin on the turntable, to gather Vincent O’Sullivan’s poetry collections from my shelves, is to embark on an autumn vacation, to savour the views, to let poetry simmer and sing as I read. Lines and phrases, images and circumstances, stall me. I am charting my own reading pathways, predilections, gathering touchstones that resonate. On a different occasion, I might savour the presence of story, the characters, so often unnamed, the girl boy woman man goddess god, but in this sweet autumn sojourn, I am entranced by a weave of ‘being’. Perhaps it is arcing back to the 1970s and reading Be Here Now, and then returning, again and again, to the miracle of now, to the joy of looking and pausing. I am remembering Vincent’s collected poems published in 2015, is entitled Being Here.

Reading the poetry of Vincent O’Sullivan, I am pausing and I am looking.

‘Still at your window,’ they say, ‘can’t
you give it a rest?’ Not on your life, tell them,
not on your earthly.

 

from ‘Still waiting are we?’
in Nice Morning for it Adam, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2004

Across all the collections, Vincent’s writing encourages us to slow down and absorb a moment, an object, a setting, a gesture, and to let that shimmer and settle within and beyond the frame. The titles so often underline the tiny tremors, the unfixed, the degree of surprise, the arrival of anchor. I could use the word philosophical to signpost the strands of thinking. An early collection, Bearings (Oxford University Press, 1973), foreshadows a future of pathfinding, of residing and expanding ‘the spaces we have no words for’. And yes, so exquisitely yes, poetry that is finding the words to silhouette and map such spaces.

An acknowledgement of the ephemeral enlivening the physical is a steady refrain, as Vincent keeps returning to ‘this and this, nothing is quite lost’. The world, large and miniature, is still this. It is garden, weather, birds, nature, orchards. It is picking the succulent apricot and sharing with a beloved. It is relishing both fruit and single moment.

Vincent’s acute awareness of the indeterminacy of writing, of how poetry is this, and this, and this, heightens the delight of reading his work. It sitting under a tree by the museum, or on an evening with friends, musing on the thought that ‘something will happen after every poem for a long / time yet’. It is ‘the colour of going’ and ‘how things are’.

As often as a vein ticks, the commodious
promise between each tick, the fat stars
dangle their colossal order, the heart swirls
        its small time pander

that Now adds up: for longer than the mind
knows its trawl can manage, to something out there
with design that takes us in, in language’s
         jigging bucket hoisted

into light.

 

from ‘as is, is’
in Lucky Table, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2001

So often Vincent invites us into exquisite poetry clearings, whether as reader, friend, loved one, drawing us into his conversations, his reckonings, his thinking, his concern. Listen to some of his titles: ‘All right then, are we?’, Things OK with you?, Seeing You Asked. There are multiple ways to find our bearings in the scope and depth of his work: multiple vantage points, elevations and uplifts, arrivals and returns, ways back into a luminous moment. I am imagining one of Vincent’s utterly precious poetry books in your hands, as you set sail reading, in awe and in love with what words can do. Looking, listening, pausing.

Not much, but can do better

 

Every day the century failed
a boy woke and knew beyond all
doubting, there were fish in a river
only he had wind of.

Each morning statistics piled
in their parody of a baker’s
window, a girl knew for certain
there was a horse

she’d ride before the day was out.
There were rooms all over
where good things were said, excellence
achieved , even on evenings

when the sentences were passed
and the magazines loaded.
In the palest edging of dawn
ribbons billowed out

as a child dreams them
and hands moved across each other
as surely as ice cracked outside.
These are things slipped

into books, uneventful
scraps—a leaf from a tree,
a stalk from an August
paddock, a brittle violet.

But show them to someone, say,
in a hundred years, the book
freakishly opened as it’s never been,
you’ll hear the afternoon lean

across a forest, smell harvest
as high as your chest, almost feel
the fingers brushing along the page.
‘This is the story, isn’t it,

in a book, making it seem
all right?’ But so it was, that
day, that afternoon. So it was,
before tomorrow.

 

from ‘Not much, but do better‘
in Blame Vermeer, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2007

I invited a group of Vincent’s friends to select a poem of his they loved, and to include a few comments on why they are drawn to the poem. I am grateful to Fergus Barrowman and Bill Manhire for help in creating this tribute, and to those who have participated. My thoughts are with friends, family and fellow poets. Thank you. I offer you this gathering, a slow weekend gathering, so that you too may pause and listen.

Photo by Grant Maiden, 2017

A suite of poems by Vincent O’Sullivan

The thinker in the greenhouse

Philosophy has so helped me over the years.
The kind where the words fight the things the things
insist they are. There is little I am not receptive
to, once ‘receptive’ is defined. How
can one not accept the demand to be exact?

I change flowerpots about in the small conservatory
my wife speaks of as though Kew isn’t in the running.
She tells me the pretty yellow speckled pillows
are calceolaria. She advises never to question
the Latin of those with green fingers, the quality
of garlic depends on its grower speaking French.
In the light of the conservatory we seem to touch
more often. We are less likely to regret.

As though a boy, my popping the fuchsia buds
to a little war of their own. True gardeners
deplore, quite rightly, this inventing allegory
as fun. Nature intends. There are no limits to pleasure.

My wife instructs, too, certain plants that sting
one has no right to speak of unless one has been stung.
In late afternoon, there is something cloistered to a greenhouse.
There is the faintest chanting one all but hears.
Something is winging through. You are part of the wing.

Vincent O’Sullivan
from Things OK with you?, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2021

Lynley Edmeades: Many of Vincent’s poems hold the sound of his voice, and I can hear him speaking this poem as I read it as if we’re having a cup of tea together. The slightly syncopated rhythm; the Irish lilt in the use of ‘so’ in the opening line that sings the songs of his ancestors; the immense skill he had of bringing the existential into the quotidien. And always, that incredible way that Vincent had of reminding us, with such grace, that for all our egos and posturing, we are not the world, but part of it: “There is the faintest chanting one all but hears./ Something is winging through. You are part of the wing.” 

Morning

This morning I have shifted two goats
tangled under a feijoa,
given them a bank half blackberry,
half rusty clover-like weed
they prefer to ignore,
I have given them pretty much
what life does.

Then I look at my birch
whose almost falling leaves
are curled, as though matches
were held near them
                        until green shrank brown.

There is mist along the river,
the three cats loll after feeding,
the mown grass sticks to my shoes,
brings the morning inside.

That is all my morning comes to,
April morning, autumn—
                                      goats
on a lush bank, three cats
indulged, wet lawn, a birch
ready to lose its leaves,
let leaves drop, dry leaves.
Birch showing through
like a woman, a word
that matters, a guitar string
streaming white
                          against the morning.

                                              Morning.

Vincent O’Sullivan
from Bearings, Oxford University Press, 1973, and in Being Here: Selected Poems, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2015

Anna Jackson: In the end, I couldn’t go past ‘Morning,’ the first poem in Being Here, Vincent O’Sullivan’s Selected Poems.  It is a poem that lingers on the details of a day, as if a little puzzled at its own lingering, when the morning has after all amounted to nothing more than this – moving the goats, indulging the cats, looking – and then looking again – at the birch leaves.  In a later poem, ‘The Monastic Life,’ a man is obsessed by elephants – seeing one elephant starts him off on a quest to see more,  every new elephant only fuelling the desire for a greater understanding, the particularity of the individual only taking him further and further from the elephant as concept.  It ends with the wonderful line about the elephant as a theology that sways.  I love that line!  But while the man in ‘The Monastic Life’ insisted that only the grandeur of the elephant was worthy of his attention, a Vincent O’Sullivan poem can make anything shine – this too is a very moving kind of theology. 

The child in the gardens: winter

How sudden, this entering the fallen
gardens for the first time, to feel the blisters
of the world’s father, as his own hand
does. It is everything dying at once,
the slimed pond and the riffling of leaves,
shoes drenched across sapless stalks.
It is what you will read a thousand times.
You will come to think, who has not stood
there, holding that large hand, not said
Can’t we go back? I don’t like this place.
Your voice sounds like someone else’s. You
rub a sleeve against your cheek, you want
him to laugh, to say, ‘The early stars can’t hurt
us, they are further than trains we hear
on the clearest of nights.’ We are in a story
called Father, We Must Get Out.
Leaves scritch at the red walls,
a stone lady lies near the pond, eating
dirty grass. It is too sudden, this
walking into time for its first lesson,
its brown wind, its scummed nasty
paths. You know how lovely yellow
is your favourite colour, the kitchen at home.
You touch the big gates as you leave,
the trees stand on their bones, the shoulders
on the vandaled statue are huge cold
eggs. Nothing there wants to move.
You touch the gates and tell them, We
are not coming back to this place. Are We, Dad?

Vincent O’Sullivan
from Nice morning for it, Adam, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2004

Bill Manhire: ‘The Child in the Gardens: Winter’ does exactly what Emily Dickinson once mentioned as proof that poetry is present: it makes your whole body feel so cold that no fire can ever warm you. For me it’s the voice of the child at the end – that sudden, trusting, troubled question: ‘Are we, Dad?’ – that’s truly devastating. Here’s the instructive note Vincent wrote about the poem for the 2002 edition of Best New Zealand Poems: “So many poems and stories are about being tossed out of the garden (usually Eden) that I was interested in one where people actually wanted to leave. And instead of it being a good place to be (the beginning of all) it was rather a grim place, a place where things ended. Perhaps the son and the father might be taken in different ways, but I didn’t want them to be at odds as they are in the Eden story, but close and trusting before and after they pass the gates. A dead myth is good to leave behind; and winter of course is where so many myths die – at least for a while.”

Listen to Vincent reading the poem on The Poetry Archive.

Right on

A dead overturned beetle can look as if
it’s feeling in several fob-pockets at once,
checking the beetle version of time
when the ticking stopped on cue.
A dead beetle looks as though
there’s nothing left to do, supposing
it stayed alive. Dead and complete.
While the squashed face of a bog-man
like a school satchel run over and over
never looks, does it, as though that’s it,
as though this is exactly what Ending
had in mind? Even untainted saints
in their glass pods outsmarting
conclusion are ‘sleeping’, as we say, that’s
as far as words take us, this time
round.
          A trite thought on a sunny
morning, the tiny carapace rainbowing
as your finger flips it over.
It was alright being a beetle, the sun
says off the still bright back, there was
nothing round here not actually done.

Vincent OSullivan
from Lucky Table, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2001, originally published in I’ll Tell You this Much, Pemmican Press, 2000

Chris Price: A poem about the big things – time, mortality – wrapped up in close attention to the extraordinary nature of a small creature that’s often overlooked, or considered (if it’s considered at all) as insignificant. The poet reminding himself, perhaps, with that capacious brain of his, full of the sardonic laughter and restless intellection found throughout his work, that this beetle is the real deal – when all’s said and done, a beetle, or (as in other poems) an apple or an apricot, is the self-sufficient and untainted thing, its being its own reason for being. Its life and death taking the whole over-complicated human enterprise down a peg or two: a classic O’Sullivan manoeuvre.

Check-out

The librarian I was brought up to admire, ‘sir’
I called him as I did no one else, he called me
‘sir’ back, looking across his half-moon glasses
with what people liked to call ‘the innocence

of a lamb’. (It is always good if the best read
man you can think of goes a beat behind
ourselves in worldly cunning.) He was known
for mild jokes and good humour, for a certain

staleness if you stood too close, for turning
up appropriate verse at a moment’s notice
for the unexpected wedding or passing on.
He said, the one time we spoke as two adults,

‘I have been reading for a lifetime in the hunt
for evidence that humans are less than vile, that good
persists.’ He looked at me as when he called me ‘sir’.
‘I should have closed the first book and collected stamps.’

Vincent O’Sullivan
from Further Convictions Pending, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2009

Michael Hulse: Vincent possessed the ability to sink a sudden plumbline down through the everyday into horror. This unprepossessing poem appears to be talking casually about the transition from childhood to adulthood, about social attitudes and stereotyping, and above all about one man everyone imagined they knew. All of this is deftly in the poem, but in a devastating moment of openness the librarian reveals himself to be intimate with evil, despairing of ever finding evidence that humanity has a better side, fearing that his life’s pursuit has been without meaning. I imagine his words finding their place in Vincent’s notebook, Vincent knowing that they raised the hairs on the back of the neck as surely as anything in Housman or Sebald. Knowing what to do with a donnée, how to throw it into relief, is a crucial skill in anyone who works with words. In the case of one as well-travelled as Vincent in the dark as well as bright places of heart and mind, poems such as ‘Check-out’ act as a penumbra, the necessary shadow-realm against which the fine celebratory poems such as ‘Still waiting, are we?’ or ‘Being here’ can be understood as full joyful daylight.

Michael Hulse is an English poet and translator with long-standing ties to New Zealand writers

8

On the day my father died a flame-tree
with its stiff immaculate flares cupped over
the leafless branches outside the hospital window
said for us several things voice could not get round to,

yet not only and not foremost the riding of life
above the stark branches nor the perfect Fin
once the work is done, as though time’s shining
is when the match is struck and is over, so.

It spoke, each opening red fist only feet from dying,
of small errors, of mornings forgotten by afternoon,
of words taken or words put down lightly
as a glass, or laid like a single log on a fire,

or touched as the head of a child absently
while other words moved on; the looks,
brushings, immediate treasure, the cusps of morning
lifting as sky lightens the withholding tree.

Vincent O’Sullivan
from Brother John, Brother Kafka, with prints by John Drawbridge, Oxford University Press, 1980
also published in Being Here, Selected Poems, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2015

Kirsty Gunn: I have had a photocopy of this poem – taken from the collection, and the sequence of which it is a part – in the drawer of my study desk ever since it was published. There it lies, the single leaf of paper, beneath a whole lot of other papers and letters and bank statements…A single poem that seems to contain all of this world and everything beyond it: An image, a set of gestures underpinned by loss, the sense of absence set at the heart of the world… And yet life ever present. How I love it. 

All right then, are we?

We’d been walking across farmland to the coast,
the sea-lions you’ve warned to keep at a distance,
the cliffs that sensibly you imagine are most
to be avoided by solitary walkers, the weird glance

that at times can make you wonder, ‘Should
I ask if he feels all right?’, although we never do
and then forget we’ve thought it, and the stiff plod
on the dunes, collars turned at the southerly blow-

ing in from the scoured ice, the furthest sea.
‘It’s the loneliness I love,’ sometimes one of us says,
‘the appalling edge, the vast extremity
of whatever we care to imagine beyond the haze.’

On the way back, the dog raging at gulls
raucous and out of range, at a rabbit’s breaking
cover close to the pines, the forecast squalls
smudging the edged-in horizon, the hacking

of a motor on the estuary’s dull reflected cloud.
Then, ‘Is there anything sadder?’ you say, seeing a dead
tractor tilted by a stack of collapsing wood.
Once back on the road we put the dog on its lead,

find the car, drive in from the always deceiving
coast. And later, ‘It was bitter all right out there,’
the storm following us in, its slanted, flailing
sleet. And the loneliness out there; back here.

Vincent O’Sullivan
from Being Here: Selected Poems, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2015

Majella CuIinane: I love this poem for its sense of wonder, for its subtle and vivid evocation of landscape that intensifies over its six stanzas. The scene is familiar to me – Aotearoa’s deep South, very possibly a beach on the Otago peninsula, or somewhere in Ōtepoti Dunedin, Aramoana or Tunnel Beach perhaps, or maybe even Southland, with that reference to the ‘scoured ice, the furthest sea.’ The rhythm is mellifluous, the tone beguiling as the reader is invited into the scene with the kind of question that many of us think to ask strangers we momentarily encounter, but for whatever reason don’t: ‘Should I ask if he feels alright?’ And then, that bold admission in the third stanza: ‘It’s the loneliness I love,’ and of course it is that loneliness and absence that draws the poet’s sensibility in, deeper and deeper and into ‘whatever we are to imagine beyond the haze.’ The repetition of sound and action in the 4th stanza – ‘the dog raging’, ‘the rabbits breaking,’ ‘squalls smudging,’ leads to the surprising, unexpected question in the 5th – ‘is there anything sadder?’ But no, not in terms of life per se, but rather the specificity of a ‘tractor tilted,’ an object abandoned and forgotten. The poignant final stanza sums up the memory of the experience and how “it was bitter all right out there,’ which is what many of us might say as we return from a ‘southerly blowing in’ to the warmth and safety of a car or the indoors. The knowledge too that something of the place: ‘the storm following us in’ lingers – lingers in the loneliness of the landscape, which echoes the loneliness that resides within us, and inspires us to ask ourselves: ‘All right then, are we?’

Ida Valley

The paddocks iced over for weeks,
sky scoured each morning, the frost
even at noon thickening with intent.

Hawks tracking the warm highway
count on a smeared rabbit as lucky strike.
Ignoring traffic, a persistent beak

hauls at a red thread from the splattered
gift, draws a quote declaring how
God looks after his own, which

this day he does. Guts laden
with kill lift deftly. Sun flares
its wingspan. Night nails down.

Vincent O’Sullivan
from The movie may be slightly different, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2011

Sue Wootton: Reading the title of this poem, and embarking on its first words, you might be thinking, ah, how sweet, a lovely landscape poem, a pastoral. Perhaps some memory of a Graham Sydney on a gallery wall springs to mind. You keep reading, and are swept through the sing-song metre of the first line so swiftly that you might be slow to catch on that you’re not being offered a behind-glass tourist view of the Ida Valley. Maybe what pulls you up short is the abrupt change of metre in the second line, the way the full bleakness of the scene suddenly hits ear and eye – bang, bang – with ‘sky scoured’. Now you hear them you can’t unhear them: the ‘s’ and ‘k’ sounds that slip and crackle through this deadly poem. Reading ‘Ida Valley’ with an ear on the sounds, a finger on the rhythms and an eye on the images is a mini master class in how to weave a satisfying poem. 

Another reason I love ‘Ida Valley’ is that I can hear another poem nesting, so to speak, within it. The ‘red thread’ in ‘Ida Valley’ leads me back decades to one of Vincent’s Butcher poems, ‘Still Shines When You Think of It’. A hawk is central to that poem too, ‘closing sweet on something, / death, that perfect hinge’. When I read ‘Ida Valley’, Butcher is there with me. His assessment? Succinct, blunt, absolutely nailing it: ‘ah! feathered guts!’

Honoured writer at the Auckland Writers Festival, 2016.
Photo by Marcel Tromp.

Just finding the day

The thrushes are back. The blackbirds too
are back, already worrying the thrushes,
filching their choice worms. The gorse
is running the hills along the Aramoana
Road, spills the slopes yellow; the broom,
so much more politely, you call it
gold. Look again, the gorse walks prickling
against the skyline. This is September.
Today would have been my father’s birthday,
were 126 thought a reasonable lifespan.
The black swans with their necks carved
into questions, take over the shallows
round from Deborah Bay. Further, at
the ocean’s rim, oystercatchers busy
as door-knocking Adventists, time’s surf
certain behind them, soon moving inland.
There’s nothing extraordinary about this.
With us, and the dogs, and the ceremonious
sea, as if there need be. Just finding the day.

from forthcoming Still Is, Te Herenga Waka University Press

Fergus Barrowman: ‘Just finding the day’ comes very near the end of Still Is (due June 2024), and was the poem that stayed with me most strongly after my first reading of the manuscript in late February.

Please join us for the launch of Still Is, the final poetry collection by Vincent O’Sullivan.

Still Is will be launched by Fergus Barrowman, with readings by Jenny Bornholdt, Diana Bridge, Bill Manhire, Gregory O’Brien, and current New Zealand Poet Laureate Chris Tse.
 
Friday 21 June
5–7pm

Te Ahumairangi Foyer
National Library of New Zealand
Corner Molesworth and Aitken Street
Thorndon, Wellington

All welcome. Please RSVP to: thwup@wgtn.ac.nz

Light refreshments will be provided,
with wine kindly sponsored by Te Mata Estate.
Copies of Still Is will be for sale in Te Āmiki.

With thanks to Helen O’Sullivan and the wider O’Sullivan whānau.

The thrushes are back. The blackbirds too
are back, already worrying the thrushes,
filching their choice worms. The gorse
is running the hills along the Aramoana
Road, spills the slopes yellow; the broom,
so much more politely, you call it
gold. Look again, the gorse walks prickling
against the skyline. This is September.
 

Still Is gathers ninety dazzling new poems by Vincent O’Sullivan. These are poems that call and respond, poems that elaborate and pare down, and poems in which an ending is a beginning.

Born in Auckland in 1937, Vincent O’Sullivan was one of New Zealand’s leading writers, acclaimed for his poetry, plays, short stories, and novels, which include Let the River Stand, Believers to the Bright Coast, and the Ockham-shortlisted All This By Chance. He was joint editor with Margaret Scott of the internationally acclaimed five-volume Letters of Katherine Mansfield, edited a number of major anthologies, and was the author of widely praised biographies of John Mulgan and Ralph Hotere. He taught at Waikato University and Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, and was the New Zealand poet laureate for 2013–2015. In 2000, Vincent was made a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, and in 2021 he was redesignated as a Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit. Vincent died in April 2024.

Welcome to an ongoing series on Poetry Shelf. I have been thinking a lot about the place of poetry in global catastrophe and the incomprehensible leadership in Aotearoa. How do we write? What to read? Do we need comfort or challenge or both? I am inviting various poets to respond to five questions. Today, poet Isla Huia.

1. Has the local and global situation affected what or how or when you write poetry?

Absolutely, totally, overwhelmingly; yes. When reflecting on the poems that made up my book, Talia, I notice now how many of them came from the perspective of a response, a review, or an observation. Writing is the avenue by which I express my reactions to the world around me; it always seems like the most natural way for me to express myself, and to answer back to what I’m seeing in the world. Indigeneity has always been a key theme in my work, and now more than ever, it feels vital to provide a counter-narrative to the one we’re hearing from our so-called leaders, and to openly and courageously (albeit on paper) hit back at it all with some home truths. Obviously, there’s more going on than just the blatant racism in the political sphere – the daily assaults on papatūānuku, the daily assaults on our diverse communities, and of course, the daily atrocities we’re seeing being experienced by our Palestinian brothers and sisters. It’s too much to hold in my body, so really, it feels like I have no other choice but to get it out through my words.

2. Does place matter to you at the moment? An object, an attachment, a loss, an experience? A sense of home?

Place is fundamental for me. In a Māori sense, the most important things in my world are people and places, and everything else comes as a byproduct. Similarly to what I was referring to earlier, I didn’t really realise how much of Talia was focused on places until I looked back on it, but now I see that the book itself is really a map between the locations and the lives of people who are crucial to me. Te Henga, on Auckland’s west coast, featured a lot, as did Whanganui and Motuoapa and the places I whakapapa to. So did Ōtautahi, and Te Kiekie Mount Somers, and so many of the places that I’ve been called to write in, or about. I spend a lot of my time walking, and when I’m not at mahi I’m usually either reading, or tackling my ever-growing list of tracks and places to explore here in Waitaha. And when I’m walking, I’m always writing. It’s places, especially quiet and isolated places, that give my body and my head the kind of clarity they need to work together and produce words that are true, authentic and real. 

3. Are there books or poems that have struck a chord in the past year? That you turn to for comfort or uplift, challenge or distraction.

Oh, always. I find myself reaching more and more often for either works that hit-home so hard that they make me feel seen, or works that are so far outside of my lived experience that I feel distracted from the actual world we’re living in – or at least the one I’m seeing. Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride, and Intimacies by Lucy Caldwell are works of fiction that I’ve totally fallen for this year. Haerenga: Early Māori Journeys Across The Globe by Vincent O’Malley, The Believer by Sarah Krasnostein and So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Mellissa Broder are non-fiction books that have challenged me and helped me in all the same breath. We, The Survivors by Tash Aw, The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi, and A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam have given me insight into lives so painful, and beautiful, and fundamentally unimaginable to my own. Overall, though, the books I’ve read that have come out of Aotearoa are the ones that I’ve clung to, and the one’s I’ll always remember for their familiarity, their relatable ache and the way they remind me of something I can’t name but always need: Tangi and Into The World of Light: An Anthology of Māori Writing by Witi Ihimaera, Loop Tracks by Sue Orr, Bird Child and Other Stories by Patricia Grace, 2000ft Above Worry Level by Eamonn Marra, Plastic by Stacey Teague, Faces in The Water by Janet Frame …. to name but a few.

4. What particularly matters to you in your poetry and in the poetry of others, whether using ear, eye, heart, mind – and/or anything ranging from the abstract and the absent to the physical and the present?

He pātai pai tēnā. For my own writing, I aim more for heart, mind and wairua than ear or eye. I want my writing to physically move me back to the place, circumstance or perspective I was in when I wrote it. I want it to feel entirely tika, and raw, and I want to understand myself better for having written it. Sometimes, that doesn’t translate onto the page, or feel palatable or decipherable to an outside audience; but it’s always the place I write from, regardless. How my readers interact with my work is secondary to whether or not I feel like I am entirely, uncompromisingly myself, within it. I guess the same applies for me as a reader, when I think about it. I like books of all genres that emote a certain feeling, or provide an atmosphere, or hold an energy; all of those more abstract things that are hard to pinpoint or describe. I look at words far more than I look at plot, or narrative, or structure. I look for the feeling between the lines more than I look for a perfect description, or a clever piece of dialogue. It’s all in the wairua.

5. Is there a word or idea, like a talisman, that you hold close at the moment. For me, it is the word connection.

I’ve always loved the word ‘remember.’ I have it engraved on the inside of a ring that I’ve worn every day for years. Sometimes I worry that I do too much remembering (stewing, over-analysing, regretting…) that I’m stuck in the past, but I also think that my love of remembering is where my poetry comes from. The name ‘Hinewai’ is a bit of a talisman for me too. It was the name of a whole line of my tūpuna wāhine and is definitely the name I’ll give to a pēpi one day. It translates to ‘girl of the water’, which makes sense, being that we hail from the banks of the Whanganui river, and the Manganuioteao tributary. Oh, and my aunty Alice read my tarot cards last week and almost all of the cards were cards of ‘cups’, which she said signified emotion, connection and relationships. So that’s a bit of a tohu, too. And so are aunties – thank god for them. 

korowai 

in the back of aunty’s whip
makawe rewilding in the hau
hands on hot plastic we are 
precious in the cargo trailer
and i think, i want to be telling
my nephew to put down the
fishing rod and mihi atu ki a whaea 
for the rest of always, 

i wanna go out telling him
‘it’s an urupā not a flower farm’ and 
that i have comeback to see the dead 
in my grass rash the gods in my genepool
the fruits in my fat

i want this land to return me dirty
and sodden, to de-extinct me 
from the birdbones out

i want my river to whāngai me 
backwards as in, i wanna come through
this place to find there is no otherside
other than this one.

Isla Huia

Isla Huia (Te Āti Haunui a-Pāpārangi, Uenuku) is a te reo Māori teacher and kaituhi from Ōtautahi. Her work has been published in journals such as Catalyst, Takahē, Pūhia and Awa Wāhine, and she has performed at numerous events, competitions and festivals around Aotearoa. Her debut collection of poetry, Talia, was released in May 2023 by Dead Bird Books, and was shortlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards 2024.

Dead Bird Books page

HECTOR
Written by Cadence Chung

The season is from the 18th-22nd of June, at BATS Theatre in Wellington. Cadence is putting it on with a group of young artists from the Music, Theatre, and English departments of Victoria University.

Hector Berlioz, the 19th-century French composer, and Hector Wong, Chinese Wellingtonian, inexplicably find themselves in a room together. What else are they to do but talk to each other?

Hector is a short play written by poet Cadence Chung, co-directed by Hazel Perigo-Blackburn and Lewis Thomson, alongside stage manager Jackson McCarthy.

The play follows just two characters – Hector Berlioz and Hector Wong – and their attempts to find some commonalities despite the centuries between them. Travelling through many scenarios and eras, the two loosely catalogue their lives, in a dialectic style reminiscent of a Platonic dialogue.

Witty, acerbic, hilarious, and deeply poetic, this play explores how we interact with historical canons in the modern era, and shares personal experiences about racism, identity, and gender roles in contemporary Aotearoa.

Cadence Chung, Hazel Perigo-Blackburn, and Lewis Thomson are all university students and young performers, now operating under their newly-formed production company Hebe Productions. They aim to showcase the vibrancy of emerging directors, writers, and performers. Their previous show In Blind Faith debuted to a sold-out season and national news coverage.

CREATIVE TEAM

Director – Hazel Perigo-Blackburn

Hazel Perigo-Blackburn is an actor, director, and scriptwriter. She has been involved in acting clubs and drama classes her whole life and is currently in her third year of a double degree of Film and English Literature at Victoria University. In 2021, her film Marum Chechil made it into the top 5 Secondary Schools in Wellington in the 48 Hour. She was the director for both the Wellington High School and BATS seasons of the musical In Blind Faith.

Founding Member/Actor – Lewis Thomson

Lewis Thomson is an actor and director, currently in studying at Victoria University. He acted in a piece in the SGCNZ Sheila Winn festival nationals which won three awards, and has participated in the Wellington Young Actors’ programme. In March 2022, Lewis entered the Fringe Festival with his emerging theatre group you be good i love you, debuting their show Tigers Can’t Change Their Stripes. He also played Percy/Penny in the Wellington High School production of In Blind Faith. In this production, he will be playing Hector Berlioz, alongside co-star Dennis Eir Lim, who is playing Hector Wong.

Writer – Cadence Chung

Cadence Chung is a poet, mezzo-soprano, and composer, currently studying at the New Zealand School of Music. Her nationally-bestselling chapbook anomalia was released in April 2022 with Tender Press. She also performs as a classical soloist, presents on RNZ Concert, and co-edits Symposia Magazine, a literary journal for emerging New Zealand writers. In 2023, she was named an Emerging Practioner by the Fund for Acting and Musical Endeavours.

Stage Manager/Dramaturg – Jackson McCarthy

Jackson McCarthy is a poet and musician from Auckland currently studying in Wellington. He is of mixed Māori and Lebanese descent. He was a finalist for the Schools Poetry Award 2021, and was recently one of the Starling Micro-Residents at the New Zealand Young Writers Festival 2023.

Iona reads three toikupu from In the shape of his hand lay a river – ‘Morass’, ‘Ara Toi’ and ‘Lodestone’. 

         Let my voice give meaning         to this ending
That I may shatter        and shelter   what lies between
 And in fragmented friction                  remain upright

 

from ‘Voice’

In the shape of his hand lay a river, Iona Winter, Elixir & Star Press, 2024

The section titles of Iona Winter’s new poetry collection underline the tidal wave of grief that drives the poems, the slam of loss, the invisible currents, the arteries of the heart: Torrents, Subterranean, Estuaries, Confluence, Tributaries. Iona draws us into the darkest crevices, into the painful afterslam of her beloved son’s suicide. She is navigating and retrieving, remembering and recording. No rules, no model for the parent savaged with grief. Ah. How to move and speak and scream and rage? How to write? This utterly moving sequence of poems, so brutally honest, so open for viewing.

How to write your darling when ‘in the shape of his hand lay a river, the warmth of his heart a universe’. He is there in the space between and above and within the lines, he is there on the beach, in the doctor’s waiting room awaiting diagnosis or prescription. How to replenish and heal the empty husk of self, the swollen heart, the need to love? Iona is singing her son, as she sings and screeches her grief, moving into incantation, moving between dark and light, mother-earth and infinite sky, between the impossible questions and the difficult answers. And with every step, with every ache, she never loses sight of love.

I am reading Iona’s poetic testimony, her aching revelations, her poetry that stitches grief to love, and I recognise this as deeply personal but as more than that. Her personal tributaries signpost imperative questions for us as a nation, as communities, questions that consider how to keep our young people safe, how to nurture and protect our vulnerable youth, how to foster self love and self growth, how to stand up and fight for what is precious. Look around us, look at the stockpiling wounds and losses and dislocations.

Iona has written poetry in the shape of her heart and it sings.

           you have no choice
but to withstand the storm, or break open

like a flooded plain, where green-leaved rākau
       are briefly dazzled by the returning sun

 

from ‘Three years without summer’

Iona Winter (Waitaha/Kāi Tahu) is a poet, essayist, storyteller and editor. She has several published collections of poetry and short fiction; most recently In the shape of his hand lay a river (2024). Her upcoming book A Counter of Moons, creative non-fiction speaking to the aftermath of suicide, is due for publication in 2024. In 2023, Iona founded Elixir & Star Press, as a dedicated space for the expression of grief in Aotearoa New Zealand. The inaugural Elixir & Star Grief Almanac 2023, a liminal gathering, included over 100 multidisciplinary responses to grief. Widely published and internationally anthologised, Iona creates work that spans genre and form, and lives in the Buller region. 

Elixir & Star Press page

Amy Marguerite reads ‘keep this true’

keep this true
       for blair

i jokingly suggest you change
your relationship status to
it’s complicated & i’ll change
mine to engaged we have exactly
six mutual friends on here probably
a matt & you know which freckles
to kiss to keep this true call them
fret markers or like don’t when
bree asks if we’re………Official
is that the rehearsal what steve albini
wrote in his letter to nirvana
the licking pattern of which dog
at the bowl it’s only complicated
if you paraphrase the dream
in which i meet you at the airport
with my girlfriend because i love you
like no amen at all & meaningful clutter
is a brilliant title for a poem
or a song………i won’t call this that you can
have it i’m not even talking about
your house just maybe a busy gap
our bodies on a sunday the novel somebody
else writes on the plane in this
heat anything is nowhere else a thing
i used to have a thing for &
this is new & great & new & pinched
harmonics in my search bar

Amy Marguerite

Amy Marguerite (she/her) is a poet and essayist based in Tāmaki Makaurau. She completed an MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters in 2022. Her poetry has appeared in Spoiled Fruit, the NZ Poetry Society Anthology white-hot heart and various literary journals. Amy is currently working towards the publication of her debut poetry collection. 

Waiting

They spoke animatedly about
capacity and he tangata.
I replaced their water,
tried not to hover.

I imagined making good points
– cake-cutting, smiling –
my words spoken like spells
over a cauldron.

They were the last table to leave.
One woman had a work card,
so the bill was thankfully
simple.

She’d adored the baby pāua
on its bed of lavender foam.

I wiped down, stacked and vacuumed.
Omar was prepping for tomorrow.
He gave me dahl and roasted cauli
to take home.

Time slows when you’re tired.
It took forever to unlock my broomstick
and attach the lights.
Did I have everything?
I rechecked my backpack.

Distance chimed its distant chime.
Every lurch of headlights
brought a brief bow-wave of fear,
but I love the small hours when they open out
under the stars.

A final climb, then the sweep into
the suburb where I roomed … some jumpy clouds
across the moon … the calabash
run away with
the spoon.

James Brown

James Brown lives in Wellington. His Selected Poems was published by Te Herenga Waka University Press in 2020. ‘Waiting’, ‘The Magic Show‘ and ‘Love Poem‘ are from Slim Volume (Te Herenga Waka University Press, forthcoming 2024). 

The Caselberg Trust and UNESCO City of Literature Dunedin, New Zealand are pleased to announce that the Caselberg Trust Margaret Egan Cities of Literature writers resident for 2024 will be poet Alison Glenny. Alison was selected by the judges from a strong field, and will be welcomed to the Caselberg House in Whakaohorahi/Broad Bay from the start of November till mid-December this year.

Alison Glenny was born in Ōtautahi/Christchurch, and lived in the UK and Australia before returning to Aotearoa, where she lives on the Kāpiti Coast. Her Antarctic-themed collection of prose poems and fragments The Farewell Tourist was awarded the Kathleen Grattan prize for a collection of poetry and was published by Otago University Press in 2018. A second collection, Bird Collector, was published by Compound Press in 2021. A third collection is forthcoming in 2024, also with Compound Press, and her work has been widely published in journals and anthologies.

The Caselberg Trust Margaret Egan Cities of Literature Writers Residency is run jointly and collaboratively by the Caselberg Trust and City of Literature Dunedin, New Zealand. Funding from the Caselberg Trust is provided through a generous bequest by the late Margaret Egan.

Website here

We’re so excited to announce the incredible Renee Liang as judge for the Monica Taylor Poetry Prize 2024!

The prize will be opening on 1st June, so start polishing your best unpublished poems!

Dr Renee Liang 梁文蔚 MNZM is a poet, paediatrician, playwright and essayist. After exploring open mics in Broken Hill, Australia, Renee joined the MC team at Poetry Live, becoming known for running slams. Since then Renee has become a jack of literary trades: she wrote, produced and nationally toured eight plays; makes operas, musicals and community arts programmes; and her poems, essays and short stories are widely anthologised. The Bone Feeder, a play adapted into opera for the Auckland Arts Festival in 2017, was one of the first Asian mainstage works in New Zealand and one of the opening works at the Waterfront Theatre in Auckland.

The annual takahē Monica Taylor Poetry Prize honours the memory of poet Monica Taylor, with the generous assistance of her whānau, and with the kaupapa of encouraging new generations of poets.

There’s more information about the Monica Taylor Poetry Prize here

Full details here

Events include

​Thursday 6th June

Poetry event at Gore Library Touring poets Kay McKenzie Cooke and Jenny Powell will read and discuss their writing.
Local poets are invited to read their work in the Open Mic section.
Gor Library 11:30 am

Poetry Reading and Panel Discussion with Sara Hirsch, David Eggleton, Kay McKenzie Cooke and Jenny Powell; Invercargill Library meeting room, 7pm, Koha entry.

Friday 7th June

Conversation on the Couch with Tusiata Avia.
An opportunity to hear from poet, writer and performer Tusiata Avia, about her journey and experiences as a Pacifica writer in Aotearoa.
Repertory House, 7pm. Limited ticket sales, max 2 tickets per person. $30 each.
(Note the bar will not be open). No door sales.

Saturday 8th June

Poetry writing workshop with Sara Hirsch, 9-11am Invercargill Library Meeting Room $20 (or both workshops for $30)
Have you always wanted to learn how to write poetry? Have you been writing for ages and would love the chance to get some tips and tricks? Whatever your background and experience everyone is welcome at this inclusive workshop, from newbies to the poetry obsessed.
The session will introduce you to some fun activities to get you scribbling. We will play with words, sounds and images until we find the poems that need to be written, spoken, shouted at the top of our voices. This workshop is for anyone who has something to say, even if you don’t know what it is yet. Come join in some games, meet some like minded people and explore poetry in ways they don’t teach you in school.

Poetry performance workshop with Sara Hirsch, 12-2pm Invercargill Library Meeting Room $20 (or both workshops for $30)

Taking words from the page to the stage! Whether you are new to the microphone or a seasoned slam poet, this performance workshop is for you. Come and join this inclusive, fun and interactive session centred around poetry in performance with UK Slam Champion Sara Hirsch.
We will explore performance techniques and practice speaking poems in a safe supportive space to help you build confidence and enjoy the power of spoken word.
​
​Poetry Masterclass with Tusiata Avia, 2.30-4.30pm Invercargill Library Meeting Room $30