Hibiscus Tart, Carin Smeaton, Titus Books, 2024

meghan markle’s sister

u never wantd to go to australia
leave cat-pig behind with friends
bk to the river
away from the sun
the sky on their tongue
caught in yr throat
burning bye into
yr ancestral wings
let them go hun
they’d never make it
thru customs anyways
crammed into yr suitcase
like a whakapapa happy meal
kiss me good-bye too
go live with mum
under the circling planes
louder than dragon flies
they wont be around for long
them open spaces
will lick em up clean
show u how to sketch
trips in & out of yr hometown
away from the weddings the wendys
the house flipping bullshit
paint yr forever home in melting shades
of lunar
the mexico trips
thru the desert
(& the pink
deep crevices of the old man’s face)
will be the best thing
to ever happen

pukekohe

ur calling in to sort the whenua & calm the cousins while yr at it u
travel all the ways from whangarei aunties swooping in like kahu
from a waking sky

u weaves in & out of matua’s shelves just how tane does breaking
code n kete in a tropical low u says who’s this white guy & tf does
he know?

u knew that nen we all knew her she never recoverd they really put
the boot in we remember pukekohe with its fukd up colour bars

cinema hellscape stores porn lovin bishops pukekohe with its head-
less angels grieving schools nothing 2 see here fukboys mayors of
mediocracy

pukekohe the kahu in the sky sees u as do i (the ancient trees of tane) we all knows what u r&weallknowatudid Ae

we knows where u live

we was only around for yr market gardens sustenance n five spice
life but even we left after that we never went back eh whaea survival
of tha aunties

once upon a time u says we wāhine had mana and we was treatd as
such but not now eh pukekohe fuk u we only want land bk we
jus want our mokos feel welcomed

Carin Smeaton

Reading Carin Smeaton’s collection is to step out of the straightjacket label, the demeaning tag, ‘tart’, placed upon women, into a tribute to mana wāhine: mothers aunties grandmothers sisters. This album of women is speaking poetry, poetry speaking. Women speaking, speaking women. It is poetry as making language your own, challenging the status quo on how a poem ought to be, how woman ought to be, how the world ought to be.

Call it poetry in the vernacular, slang poetry, read it as electrifying performance on the page, this peppery poetry wave. Heck yes. I’m talking poetry as gathering shopping scavenging stinging flying needing falling questioning singing. For this is what the women do. This is what the poems do. You will linger under moonlight, book-dally in libraries, listen to the collection’s subterranean soundtrack with its whiffs of songs.

Call it body poetry. It’s so physically present, it is the body birthmarked moko-ed yearning feeding lonely embraced. It’s poetry with succulent word openings, repeating motifs and connections that forge pulsating rhythms.

Call it poetry as challenge, like a protest banner drawing attention to the sharks, the hungry, the dispossessed and the abused. Heck yes. It’s poetry as women arm-in-arm on the street marching.

Call it poetry as aroha – the poet’s love of whanau, whenua, mahi, language, life, reading, writing. This is a love of poetry, and it is so very infectious.

Paula Green

“Carin Smeaton’s Hibiscus Tart goes down many paths, she is cheeky, gives respect to slang and holds in her hands different ways of loving the whenua and offering an honest appraisal of what it means to be Indigenous in a colonised world. Sometimes I think I’m going down one wormhole only to be jolted down another only to be bitten around the corner of another. She grasps complicated and disparate ideas and forms of languages and sculpts them into porous poems that swim in your head for days afterwards. I want to read more poetry like this that doesn’t give a shit about the rules and flips images on their head and spit roasts them with fire spitting out of her fingernails one word at a time.”

Hana Pera Aoake, Poetry Shelf, 2024 highlight collage

A reading

Photo credit: Robert Eruera

‘a musical is only 10% of the revolution’

Carin Smeaton lives in Tāmaki Makaurau with whanau. She’s working in a research centre in the city and in Manukau. Her third collection “Death Goddess Guide to Self Love” is forthcoming in May 2025 via Titus Books. If you want to help her raise funds for its publication please visit here.

Titus Books page