Kindness Collective is a nationwide charity that spreads kindness by connecting children and families with the things they need (from everyday essentials to moments of joy). They support thousands of people living in poverty every year through nationwide programmes. The Collective aims to promote a kinder New Zealand, tackling inequity from the ground up, creating long-term, positive social impacts where everyone has the chance to thrive.Works will be on show at Gow Langsford Onehunga during business hours (Thursday-Friday 10-5pm; Saturday 10-4pm) or by appointment from Thursday 31 October – Thursday 7 November. The auction is now live and biddable online with thanks to Art + Object. Ben Plumbly will conclude the sale with a live auction event on Thursday 7 November at 7pm at Gow Langsford Gallery, Onehunga. RSVP for this special evening to info@gowlangsfordgallery.co.nz.
Anna Smaill named as 2025 International Institute of Modern Letters Writer in Residence
Acclaimed novelist Anna Smaill has been appointed as Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML) and Creative New Zealand Writer in Residence for 2025.
Anna began her publishing career with a volume of poetry, The Violinist in Spring, which was released in 2005 by Te Herenga Waka University Press. Her first novel The Chimes won the prestigious award for Best Novel at the 2016 World Fantasy Awards. It was also longlisted for the Booker Prize and translated into four languages. Her second novel Bird Life was published in 2023 in the US, UK, and Australia to excellent reviews, with TheTimes (UK) calling it “a deeply affecting novel [that] transcend[s] cultural barriers while reaching through them to the essentially human”. Locally, it was longlisted for the Ockham Book Awards.
While holding the residency at the IIML, Anna will work on a novel tentatively titled The Blazing, which she describes as “part archival thriller, part coming-of-age story”. Set in both the US and UK, the novel will be“an examination of the value and worth of art and history in the midst of cultural collapse, and will explore ideas of provenance and whakapapa. In testing how individual stories can ripple outward to effect historical change, it will follow a path back to Aotearoa New Zealand,” said Anna.
Director of the International Institute of Modern Letters Damien Wilkins said, “Anna’s two novels put her in the front rank of writers in this country and we’re thrilled to have her in Bill Manhire House next year”.
Commenting on the appointment, Anna said, “I am so grateful for the chance to work on my next book at the International Institute of Modern Letters in 2025, the place where I first started to take myself seriously as a writer. The residency position represents time and creative freedom. But even more it represents the collective mana of the institute and all the writers it has fostered. I feel very lucky to be part of it”.
Anna takes up the residency at the IIML on 1 February 2025.
In 2001, Anna completed an MA in Creative Writing at the IIML. She subsequently lived and studied overseas, receiving a PhD in English Literature from University College, University of London. She has worked as an academic and as a senior communications advisor. Most recently she was the team leader of Te Papa’s English writing team. Anna is also an accomplished literary critic, having published articles on writers such as Janet Frame and Bill Manhire.
In 2015, Anna was a finalist in the Wellingtonian of the Year, Arts category. She also received a New Generation Award that year from the Arts Foundation.
Book Launch: Lily, Oh Lily by Jeffrey Paparoa Holman
30 Oct – 6pm, Unity Books, Wellington
About the event
Join us in the shop to celebrate the launch of Jeffrey Paparoa Holman’s new book, Lily, Oh Lily published by Canterbury University Press.
Lily Hasenburg was just such a figure in Holman’s growing years. She was whispered into his ear by grandmother Eunice – in memorable stories of her older sister, who married and moved to Germany at the turn of the 20th century, and was later caught up in the Nazi web spun by Adolf Hitler. Unable to shake loose this story, Holman pursued her to Berlin, Hamburg and Dresden. Here, we have an account of his pilgrimage; the kind of family history we might bury, and forget – to our loss.
Jeffrey will be in conversation with Dylan Horrocks about the book.
‘Holman travels, learns German, encounters the lost who were always right there … Lily, Oh Lily is family memoir at full stretch, made with love, yearning and just a hint of reproach. A wise, timely, beautiful read.’ —Diana Wichtel
‘Lily, Oh Lily is a thriller, a search for a particular person caught in the events of Nazi Germany – not a whodunnit, but a where-is-she?’ —Patrick Evans
Here is the world in which you sing. Here is your sleepy cry. Here is your sleepy father. And here the sleepy sky.
Here is the sleepy mountain, and here the sleepy sea. Here is your sleepy mother. Sleep safe with me.
Here is pohutukawa, here is the magpie’s eye, here is the wind in branches going by.
Here is a heart to beat with yours, here is your windy smile. Here are these arms to hold you for awhile.
Here is the world in which you sleep, and here the sleepy sea. Here is your sleepy mother. Sleep safe with me.
Bill Manhire The Victims of Lightning, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2010
Over the coming months, the Monday Poem spot will include poetry that has stuck to me over time, poems that I’ve loved for all kinds of reasons. Poems that comfort or delight or challenge. Poems that strike the eye, ear or heart.
So many of Bill Manhire’s poems have taken up residency in the poetry room in my head, poems that make the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end, poems that deliver an exquisite interplay of music, surprise, wit, observation, invention. How hard it has been, choosing a single poem for this occasion. At first I sought permission to post ‘Hotel Emergencies’, a poem that has resonated deeply over the years, and that still pierces acutely. How heartbreaking, almost twenty years later, that it reflects a version of our current catastrophic world. You can listen to Bill read the poem here.
But today I have chosen ‘A Lullaby’, a tender poem I also return to, so moving, so comforting. It’s poetry gold, a poem that holds me in a warm embrace. I have had it open on the kitchen table, all week, poem as balm, praying against all odds the world will sleep safe, stay safe. Bill is our poet musician extraordinaire, the way he makes a poem sing, whether he is writing of dark or light, difficulty or love, Buddhist rain or garden gates. Today I need to take this one quiet moment, and let these lullaby lines soothe my aching heart.
Bill Manhire’s most recent books, all published by Te Herenga Waka University Press / Victoria Press, include Wow (2020), Some Things to Place in a Coffin (2017), Tell Me My Name (with Hannah Griffin and Norman Meehan, 2017) and The Stories of Bill Manhire (2015). He was New Zealand’s inaugural poet laureate, and founded and until recently directed the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington. He has edited major anthologies, including, with Marion McLeod, the now classic Some Other Country: New Zealand’s Best Short Stories (1984).
I am drawn to all kinds of harbours: harbours that offer beauty, that keep us safe, that are mirages on a horizon, havens we invent for both mind and body in this challenging world of clamour and catastrophe. The way harbour can be a gathering, a meeting place for birds or water, ideas or conversation. And yes, poetry as harbour. Harbour as poetry.
I find myself holding this suite of poems to the morning light as I read them again, these miniature word prisms. With each subtle turn a different harbour catches my attention. This I love. The way a poem can deliver different things, the way it catches the world, whether the world imagined or the world experienced. Just for a moment, for one glorious heart-diverting moment and then, in the case of much poetry, sticks to you.
And now, this weekend, I begin a second series, slowly reading through my poetry shelves, fortified by a cluster of new themes in my notebook.
The poems
The Sea
The sea is coming out of the haze with a smooth insistence
It’s as if it is having an idea. An idea it will certainly fulfil.
Dinah Hawken Sea-light, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2021
Kororareka
On the morning of New Year’s Day we catch a boat across the gleaming bay
The first thing we see as we land is a café next to the beach Surely this is my spiritual homeland
We eat pancakes next to the stony shore and I remember letting these same pebbles run through my fingers on the holiday with my grandmother where I sang from the back of the car all summer, all the way from Ninety-Mile Beach to Fiordland
We walk around the town and out to the streets where people live and before lunchtime we’ve decided this will be our new home
Visiting the church, the house where the French missionaries tanned leather and made bibles, the museum the community noticeboard I’m looking for ways to fit myself in ways to live here
And as we caught the ferry back I never dreamed it would be so long before we’d return
Helen Rickerby Heading North, Kilmog Press, 2010
Reading the Bar Whakatane Harbour
Such a liquid language lisping between the headlands with a slight disturbance of syntax over the rocks, fresh and salt; the river knuckling under.
Read the slurred waves. Air as braille against the skin, hair; always more episodes of driftwood. An interrogation of gulls demand their living off the backs of water.
The sea is not contained by adjectives – sullen, playful, unforgiving – the insult of ignorance has a sure response.
A woman stands alone literate in grief.
David Gregory Based on a True Story, Sudden Valley Press, 2024
Interlude
On my first swim of the summer The tide is out The mud sticks to my feet I float in water as deep as my thighs As warm as the sun on the grass The sky above me an open book As wide as my arms gathering myself up in my towel laughing at the mud in my hair, streaking my legs After my swim, I need to swim again.
Kiri Piahana-Wong Tidelines, Anahera Press, 2024
red lake
For days we cross the highest plane. I think of sea borders far from these stretches of dust. This country’s edge invisible as a trip line or culture—a snag, a sudden immersion.
I long for a river to swim in but we pass quickly into night with a crackle of water-like light sliding over rocks the sandy colour of peeled peaches.
By morning, my wet clothes hung to dry in the window have frozen solid. The women in my room have fine rivulets of blood running from the softly steaming heat of their breath.
My cold skin is translucent; a blue hue in it could be the stain of movement or a bruise. Still it’s home to me, like the remembered burn and tickle of dusty carpet in the sun, small mammal
howls, a forest along the sill, a window to sit in. Framing is everything, is the paint on my nails, turning feet from slugs to sirens and the maraca
of my pulse, the invisible line behind me and that wide red lake turning into sky as birds rise and I part these rows of bones to tell someone where I’m from.
Morgan Bach Middle Youth, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023
The Inner Harbour
The pigmy blue whale comes by, off-shore. The dwarf minke whale comes by, off-shore. The pigmy right whale comes by, off-shore. They make their way into the inner harbour, past the pear trees, the hills and the houses, past where King Shag commands the view, past where the twisted rata flowers on cliff-tops; as saltwater flows into the channels of the harbour, as ribbons of kelp sway in the crystal of the harbour, as white seabirds hover over the oyster-grey harbour; till all is swept up on the coastal high tide, before each whale floats out on the coastal ebb-tide, swimming away from the seaweedy harbour; and a tsunami’s faint ripples finally arrive from far-flung Vanuatu, west of Fiji, across Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, the great ocean of Kiwa; and silvery beams of moonlight waver on waves. See the sky brushed thick with stardust, see the stars, tapu stars, little star eyes of Matariki, the whetū marama, the whetū moana, all the stars in the sky without number, the large stars, the small stars, the stars red and yellow; all the bright stars of Rangi the Sky-father; see the bright stars, against the Void of Te Kore.
David Eggleton Respirator: A Poet Laureate Collection 2019-2022 (OUP)
Fish
The spook and the crater lake. The fish in the wine goblet. A shadow on the house.
Putting the book over your nose so that you are of it, breathing in a very small space until the air is hot and wet and doesn’t fill you.
I am sick of being clever in the dark. I am sick of feeding the fish, the fish- feeding, the Sisyphean fish-feeding.
The giant goldfish in my dream was the colour of a ripening peach. It put me in its mouth. It had such a saintly countenance.
When I poured myself into the glass, I floated upside down, not a body but a lack of one, or of light, altogether.
Jake Arthur A Lack of Good Sons, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023
Waiheke
Not for the lives that are lived here nor the stammering footage of the black and white
harbour, gulls like opening credits over Matiatia Bay. Elsewhere
the autumnal typography of swans – shadows trailing their reflections
across a shining floor. Against the grey ceiling we kick the white ball.
Gregory O’Brien Afternoon of an Evening Train, Auckland University Press, 2005
spell to erase and replace
press a shell to your chest / so that it can hear the ocean / listen to music that makes you grow lighter / speak across rooms / sleepless in your baby doll dress / move the colour wheel in your head / make new names for everything you see / Me is tree / He is plume / You is wave
Stacey Teague Plastic, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024
as the tide
i am walking the path around hobson bay point nasturtiums grow up the cliff face and the pitted mud has a scattering of thick jagged pottery, bricks faded edam cheese packaging and a rusty dish rack all of the green algae is swept in one direction i am aware of the blanketed crabs only when a cloud passes overhead and they escape in unison into their corresponding homes claws nestling under aprons my dad talks about my depression as if it were the tide he says, ‘well, you know, the water is bound to go in and out’ and to ‘hunker down’ he’s trying to make sense of it in a way he understands so he can show me his working i look out to that expanse, bare now to the beaks of grey herons, which i realise is me in this metaphor
Lily Holloway AUP New Poets 8, Auckland University Press, 2021
The Quiet Place
I cannot set a colour against it or rest it on my knee. The sound of a glove pulled on a hand, amber, through a glass, through a tapestry, the quiet place opens like water. As I look into greyness, as the children look under the stones for light, as the tongue of the bells mid-week calls to a ship or a wedding. The quiet place. After the song ends, after the chemistry – a cooling sky. As if I were listening to miles slowly. It’s where I outstay my time, the small boat tied, the mother ship anchored in the bay.
Rhian Gallagher salt water creek, Enitharmon Press, 2003
The poets
Dinah Hawken is one of New Zealand’s most celebrated poets. She was born in Hāwera in 1943 and trained as a physiotherapist, psychotherapist and social worker in New Zealand and the United States and has worked as a student counsellor and writing teacher at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. Of her ten collections of poetry, four have been finalists for the New Zealand Book Awards. Her first book, It Has No Sound and Is Blue (1987), won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Best First Time Published Poet. Her latest poetry collection is Faces and Flowers: Poems to Patricia France (2024), and other recent collections are Sea-light (2021), longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, There Is No Harbour (2019), and Ocean and Stone (2015). Dinah lives in Paekākāriki.
Helen Rickerby lives in a cliff-top tower in Aro Valley, Wellington. She’s the author of four collections, most recently How to Live (AUP 2019), which won the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the 2020 Ockham Book Awards. In 2004 she started boutique publishing company Seraph Press, which mainly published poetry. In 1995 she was part of the group that founded JAAM literary journal, of which she was co-managing editor, with Clare Needham, from 2005 to 2015. She has co-organised conferences and events, including Truth and Beauty: Poetry and Biography (2014), Poetry and the Essay: Form and Fragmentation (2017) and the Ruapehu Writers Festival (2016). With Anna Jackson and Angelina Sbroma, Rickerby edited Truth and Beauty: Verse Biography in New Zealand, Canada and Australia (Victoria University Press, 2016).
David Gregory moved with his family from the UK to New Zealand in 1982. Something in the air awoke a dormant zest for poetry, and since then he has been widely published within NZ and overseas. A founder member of the Canterbury Poets Collective, and one of the two co-founders of Sudden Valley Press, David has been an integral part of the development of poetry in Canterbury for over forty years. He has worked on coastal environmental issues for most of his working life, and lives with his wife Ann in Ōhinetahi Governor’s Bay.
Kiri Piahana-Wong, (Ngāti Ranginui) is a poet, editor, and the publisher at Anahera Press. Anahera has worked to uplift and promote toikupu by kaituhi Māori since 2011, and the press has also published Pasifika/Moana poets. Kiri is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Night Swimming (2013) and Tidelines (2024). She is co-editor of the Māori literature anthology Te Awa o Kupu (Penguin NZ, 2023), and co-editor of Short! The big book of small stories (MUP, forthcoming in 2025). Kiri lives in Whanganui.
Morgan Bach lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara and has published two collections of poetry with Te Herenga Waka University Press, Middle Youth (2023) and Some of Us Eat the Seeds (2015). Some of her recent work appears in Turbine, The Spinoff and Best New Zealand Poems. In 2014, with Hannah Mettner and Sugar Magnolia Wilson, she co-founded the online poetry journal Sweet Mammalian. She was the recipient of the 2013 Biggs Family Prize in Poetry. She is about to embark on a PhD in Creative Writing, and is looking forward to the summer of reading ahead.
David Eggleton, of Rotuman, Tongan and Pākehā heritage, former Aotearoa New Zealand Poet Laureate, lives in Ōtepoti. The Wilder Years: Selected Poems (Otago University Press) was published in 2021, and Respirator: A Laureate Collection 2019-2022 (OUP) in 2023. He is co-editor of Katūīvei: Contemporary Pasifika Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand (Massey University Press, 2024). His collection The Conch Trumpet (Otago University Press, 2015) won the 2016 Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the 2016 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. He also received the 2016 Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry. David was the Aotearoa New Zealand Poet Laureate from 2019 to 2021.
Jake Arthur is a writer and teacher living in Pōneke, Wellington. His first collection of poems, A Lack of Good Sons, was published in 2023 and his second collection, Tarot, is out now, both from Te Herenga Waka University Press. He also writes fiction and was recently awarded second prize in the Sargeson Story competition for his entry, ‘On Beauty’.
Gregory O’Brien is a writer, painter and art curator. Alongside his poetry and painting, he has written major books on New Zealand art and artists including Lands and Deeds: Profiles of Contemporary New Zealand Painters (Godwit Publishing, 1996), A Micronaut in the Wide World: The Imaginative Life and Times of Graham Percy (Auckland University Press, 2011). His poetry collections include His book Always Song in the Water (Auckland University Press, 2019) is the basis for a major exhibition at the New Zealand Maritime Museum, Auckland. Gregory O’Brien became an Arts Foundation Laureate and won the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in 2012, and in 2017 became a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit and received an honorary doctorate from Victoria University of Wellington.
Stacey Teague (Ngāti Maniapoto/Ngāpuhi) is a poet, publisher, editor and teacher is a poet and teacher living in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. She has a full length poetry collection, ‘takahē’ (Scrambler Books, 2014, out of print), a chapbook, not a casual solitude (Ghost City Press, 2016) and a chapbook, hoki mai (If A Leaf Falls Press, 2020). She is currently a publisher and editor at Tender Press. She is the former poetry editor for Scum Mag and Awa Wahine. In 2019 she completed her Masters in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters. Her latest book ’Plastic’ was published by Te Herenga Waka University Press in March 2024.
Lily Holloway is a powerlifting enthusiast and third-year MFA candidate in the creative writing programme at Syracuse University. They are a 2024 winner of the Griffith Review Emerging Voices competition, a hopeless romantic, and a pain in the neck. You can find their work published or forthcoming in various places including Black Warrior Review, Sundog Lit, Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems, Peach Mag, and Hobart After Dark. Their chapbook was published in 2021 as a part of Auckland University Press’s AUP New Poets 8. Follow them on Twitter and Instagram @milfs4minecraft.
Rhian Gallagher’s first poetry book, Salt Water Creek, was published in London (Enitharmon Press, 2003) and short-listed for the Forward Prize for First Collection. In 2007 Gallagher won a Canterbury History Foundation Award which led to the publication of her book, Feeling for Daylight: The Photographs of Jack Adamson. She also received the 2008 Janet Frame Literary Trust Award. Her second poetry collection Shift, (Auckland University Press 2011, Enitharmon Press, UK, 2012) won the 2012 New Zealand Post Book Award for Poetry. Freda: Freda Du Faur, Southern Alps, 1909-1913 was produced in collaboration with printer Sarah M. Smith and printmaker Lynn Taylor in 2016 (Otakou Press). Rhian was the Robert Burns Fellow in 2018. Her third poetry collection Far-Flung (AUP) appeared in 2020. Gallagher lives in Dunedin.
Tusiata Avia at the 2024 Arts Foundation Laureates Awards
Dear Tusiata
I hold your poetry to my heart.
When I am at Auckland Hospital for my regular checkups, I am stalled by your magnificent awe-rich body-hugging poem, ‘Prayer’. I realise in my prolonged contemplation, what gratitude I feel for your words, for your poems, your plays, your poetry collections, your presence.
I am standing by you, for you, with you.
Prayer
I pray to you Shoulder blades my twelve-year-old daughters’ shining like wings like frigate birds that can fly out past the sea where my father lives and back in again.
I pray to you Water, you tell me which way to go even though it is so often through the howling.
I pray to you Static – no, that is the sea.
I pray to you Headache, you are always here, like a blessing from a heavy-handed priest.
I pray to you Seizure, you shut my eyes and open them again.
I pray to you Mirror, I know you are the evil one.
I pray to you Aunties who are cruel. You are better than university and therapy you teach me to write poetry how to hurt and hurt and forgive, (eventually to forgive, one day to forgive, right before death to forgive).
I pray to you Aunties who are kind. All of you live in the sky now, you are better than letters and telephones. I pray to you Belt, yours are marks of Easter.
I pray to you Great Rock in my throat, every now and then I am better than I feel I am now.
I pray to you Easter Sunday. Nothing is resurrecting but the water from my eyes it will die and rise up again the rock is rolled away and no one appears no shining man with blonde hair and blue eyes.
I pray to you Covid I will keep my mask on, and the loved ones around me.
I pray to you Child for forgiveness, forgiveness, forgiveness. I will probably wreck you as badly as I have been wrecked leave the ship of your childhood, with you handcuffed to the rigging, me peering in at you through the portholes both of us weeping for different reasons.
I pray to you Air you are where all the things that look like you live all the things I cannot see.
I pray to you Reader, I pray to you.
Tusiata Avia from The Savage ColoniserBook, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2020
‘Prayer’ by Tusiata Avia, Auckland Hospital
Big Fat Brown Bitch, Tusiata Avia, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023
In 2023 I reviewed your most recent collection, Big Fat Brown Bitch, in support of your poetry and your incredible contribution to readers and writers in Aotearoa. What I wrote feels so very apt as you continue to suffer an unacceptable backlash from a despicable politician who resides in the highest realm of ignorance and racism. You deserve to be honoured. You utterly deserve golden globes of every hue. Here is what I wrote . . . and how my words still resonate so deeply.
with love, admiration and respect Paula
My niece and I are lost travellers
We have to find our way, we have to search our symbols
and pray to the marrow in our bones for our stories,
for our whakapapa. This is what I tell my niece.
Tusiata Avia, from ‘Tualima’
Tusiata Avia’s new poetry collection, Big Fat Brown Bitch, steps off from a bonfire blaze of racism, hatred, ignorance, intolerance, the inability to cross and build bridges, to understand what it is like to be colonised, to be judged by the colour of your skin, the sound of your name.
The book begins with a news clipping outlining the ACT Party’s outrageous response to Tusiata’s play and poetry collection, The Savage Coloniser. The ensuing furore played out on social media, the radio, in print media, and generated a whiplash of toxicity, including death threats towards her, and importantly, a significant groundswell of loving support from our writing and reading communities.
Tusiata stands up in her poems, she stands up and speaks, speaking out from the scars and the wounds and the rage and her brown skin. Speaking out. Echoing out. Writing out of skin, blood, bones and heart of anger, hurt, resolve.
This is poetry of now. This is poetry so essentially, imperatively and heartbreakingly for NOW, at a time when the ACT Party and its picklehead leader are stoking racism, division, inequity, injustice, ignorance, intolerance through its abominable choices, goals and speeches – in collaboration with its Government coalition partners.
This is poetry for NOW.
Tusiata is a “sharp like an arrow” poet. She is a beloved poet, much lauded, multi-medalled, award-winning “Arts Laureate ,Distinguished Alumni” who “got a Fulbright, got off-Broadway, got that Ockham”. Take that Peters. Take that David. Take this write/right/rite of reply. Read this book and reSEE what freedom means. A word I can barely hold on my tongue it has become so stained with ignorance, so hijacked.
This is poetry searing in its music and its heat. Its heart and its strength. Its complexity, intricate layers, ranging subject matter, overlaps and undercurrents. This is NOW.
I am the Pākehā woman holding my pen and ink rendered mute in despairing at the Government and its resistance to the wellbeing of our planet, land and people, grieving at the insane inhumane catastrophic tragedy in Gaza. This is emptiness.
But Tusiata’s sublime poems are reminding me that poetry is both balm and resistance, both threaded needle and sharpened sword, both anchor and open fight/flight. It is personal and it is political. It is necessary for both reader and writer.
Here, hold my hand, bae, it’s OK cos poems: sometimes they like to make us feel
sometimes they like to flip the script and make us wonder: What would it be like if things were different? And some poems, they can make us ask: Why?
from ‘Hey, David’
The poems draw upon family whether grandmother, father, mother, daughter, sister, niece. It challenges colonialist dogma with wit and barb and necessity. The poems face, let’s say eyeball, the tough challenges of ongoing illness – headaches, epilepsy, osteoarthritis, crutches, wheelchair – and again, yes, this is NOW. This is the tilted health system, the inequity of yardsticks measurements treatment.
Here, too, is poetry that grieves and honours. A poem visits Al Noor, the poet-speaker, ‘part coloniser, part colonised’, enters with respect:
I went to Al Noor to remember. To say sorry with lilies, the flowers of death, white for peace, pink for the hearts stopped beating.
from ‘Diary of a death threat, 15 March 2023 (Anniversary)’
This is poetry that digs deep into self, self awareness, into the complicated constellations of self existence, wound, history, experience, that is knowable, unreachable, reachable, werewolf, heart-rattling, alive. Oh so alive. That is savage and soothing.
Throw me like a colour against a canvas or the footpath or an made bed or the eyes of a classroom or a New Zealand literary festival or a lunchtime crowd in a Wellington bookshop, throw me like a colour and see what happens.
from ‘Big Fat Brown Bitch 87: She feels most Samoan in a room full of white people’
Tusiata holds out her poetry as an offering and the poems are whispering and hollering, wailing and insisting: see me, name me, call me, feel me. And yes, this is poetry as big extraordinary embrace, as big warm fierce embrace from you Tusiata, from you, gorgeous woman, gorgeous big brown woman, whose pen is aroha, who is pen is resistance, whose pen is offering. This is poetry for NOW. I am breathing it in, listening to the storm outside, feeling the breath and tang and edge of words, feeling revived. And this matters. For many of us this matters. Thank you.
30 Oct – 6pm, Unity Books, Wellington
NZ Poetry Shelf 