Our thoughts are all of Rose this beautiful morning in Whakaraupo – next week on Bookenz we will be replaying the interview I did with Rose after she won the John O’Connor award for this poetry collection which has now been reprinted.

Morrin Rout, 3 May, 2024

To celebrate the reissue of My Thoughts are all of Swimming by Rose Collins (Sudden Valley Press), ten poets each read a poem from the collection. The new edition also has a foreword by Rose’s mother, Siobhan Collins.

James Norcliffe has written a response to the collection’s title poem.

My review posted in 2023.

A series of written tributes paid by friends and authors in 2023.

Rose Collins (1977 -2023), born in New Zealand and of Irish descent, was a poet and short fiction writer. She worked as a human rights lawyer before completing the MA in Creative Writing at the IIML in 2010. She won the 2022 John O’Connor Award and the 2020 Micro Madness Competition, and has been shortlisted for the UK Bare Fiction Prize (2016), the Bridport Prize (2020) and the takahē Monica Taylor Poetry Prize (2020). Rose was the 2018 Writer in Residence at Hagley College. She was a some-time litigation lawyer, a beekeeper and a mother of two. She lived in Te Whakaraupō Lyttelton Harbour with her family.

Sudden Valley Press page

The readings

James Norcliffe reads ‘My thoughts are all of swimming’

Siobhan Collins reads ‘The Port Hills hare considers rock fall risk’

Morrin Rout reads ‘Over the Fields from Ballyturin’

Zoë Meager reads ‘The weeping of the women and children is a lamentable scene’

Lynn Davidson reads ‘Everything that we are afraid of’

Frankie McMillan reads ‘She hoped that Jack would come up the stairs and hold her.’ 

Síle Mannion, Síle Ní Mainnín reads ‘The Squid and the Whale Send Alan a Piece of Ambergris’ in Irish / Gaeilge and in English

Joanna Preston reads ‘Telling the Bees’

David Gregory reads ‘Five Eggs’

Jeni Curtis

Jeni Curtis reads ‘Brace Comb’

The readers

James Norcliffe is an award-winning writer of poetry and fiction and an editor. His eleventh collection of poetry Letter to ‘Oumuamua was published this year by Otago University Press. He has also written novels for young people and his novel for adults. In 2022 he was awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement for Poetry and tin 2023 was awarded the Margaret Mahy Medal.

Siobhan Collins lives on the Lyttelton Harbour where she practices as a Jungian Psychoanalyst in between snatching moments to write poetry. She is a graduate of the Hagley Writers Institute and is a busy grandmother to seven grandchildren. She chose this poem of Rose’s as both she and Rose lived in the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquakes and she is appreciative particularly in this poem of Rose’s wit and clever juxtaposition of poet and hare, the hare speaking for the poet and the poet for the hare.

Morrin Rout has spent 30 years organising literary events and festivals and producing and presenting book programmes on national and local radio. She is the former Director of the Hagley Writers Institute and has just retired from the WORD festival trust board.

Zoë Meager’s work has appeared in Cheap Pop, Ellipsis Zine, Granta, Hue and Cry, Landfall, Lost Balloon, Mascara Literary Review, Mayhem, Meniscus, North & South, Overland, Splonk, and Turbine | Kapohau, among others. She’s a 2024 Sargeson Fellow.

Lynn Davidson’s memoir Do you still have time for chaos? was published by Te Herenga Waka University Press, Wellington, in 2024. Her latest poetry collection Islander was published by Shearsman Books, Bristol,  and Te Herenga Waka University Press in 2019.

Frankie McMillan is a poet and short fiction writer.  Her poems have been selected for Ōrongohau / Best New Zealand Poems 2012, 2015 and 2022. In 2009 she won first prize in the New Zealand Poetry Society International Poetry Competition. In 2023 she was short listed for the international Bridport Poetry Prize. Her latest book, ‘ The Wandering Nature of Us Girls,’ was published by CUP Press in 2022. 

Síle Mannion is a proud Irish woman/Bean na hEireann, and citizen/tauiwi, of Aotearoa/New Zealand. Published variously and widely, on this side of the world and the other, she reads everything and writes anything; poems and bits and pieces of small fictions, short stories, songs, essays and the odd odd review.

Joanna Preston is a Tasmanaut poet, editor and creative writing tutor. Her second collection, tumble (OUP, 2021), won the Mary and Peter Biggs Prize at the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. She teaches at Hagley Writers’ Institute, runs The Poetry Class, and stares guiltily out at her overgrown garden in semi-rural Canterbury.

David Gregory is an established New Zealand poet with three books to his credit and a fourth on the way. His poetry has appeared in many NZ publications and a number of anthologies. David is a founder member of the Canterbury Poets Collective and the manager for Sudden Valley Press.

Jeni Curtis is a Christchurch/ Ōtautahi writer with short stories and poetry published in various publications in New Zealand and overseas, including literary journals and anthologies. Her poem “come autumn” was shortlisted for the Pushcart Prize 2020. She was chair of the takahē trust and co-editor for poetry from 2017-2021. She was co-winner of the Heritage New Zealand poetry award 2021, and runner up in the Canterbury Poets’ Collective John O’Connor Award, 2022. Her collection of poems stone men was published in August 2023 by Sudden Valley Press and she is now an editor at Sudden Valley Press.