Monthly Archives: July 2025

Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Big Things Little Things competition for Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day

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Get out your imagination and write some poems for children as part of our Big Things Little Things competition for Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day 2025. You have three more weeks left to get your entries in. See below for competition details and how to enter. #NZPoetryDay

Timeline: open now – closes midnight Friday 1st August 2025

Winning poems to be celebrated on Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day, Friday 22nd August 2025

Theme: “BIG THINGS little things” – to be interpreted as widely and wildly as entrants like

Winning poem: $50 cash prize

Judge: Renowned children’s writer and poet, Bill Nagelkerke

Criteria:

• Entry is free

• Open to anyone in New Zealand aged 18 years and over

• Send in up to three poems aimed at 5-12 year olds

• There is a 25 line limit per poem

• Poems should be previously unpublished (including not on private blogs, websites, social media)

• Poems should be all your own work and not have any AI generated content. Any poems found to have AI generated content will be disqualified

• Poems should be written in English

• Previous winners are welcome to enter

To Submit:

• Poems should be in a single Word document. Please use the title of your first poem as the file name for this document. Please don’t include your name anywhere in this document

• You will need to provide a short author bio including a sentence or two about why you write poetry for children (up to 100 words)

• Preferred method: Completing the online entry form (requires Google account) at https://forms.gle/x2VjZ7kSEDqh4zj19

• Alternative method: Emailing your Word document to thepoetsxyz@gmail.com. Please put Big Things Little Things Poetry Competition in the subject line. In the body of your email please include your name, the title(s) of your poem(s) and a brief author bio (up to 100 words) and 2-3 sentences about why you write poetry for children

The Fine Print:

By submitting an entry, you are consenting to your poem:

• being promoted as part of Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day 2025 which may include being published in whole or in part on social or other media;

• being published on social and other media to promote poetry for children in New Zealand and any future poetry for children competitions run by The Poets XYZ for National Poetry Day.

• being used in future digital or printable media to promote poetry for children in New Zealand

Writers will retain copyright of their poems. Unfortunately it is not possible to provide personal feedback for each entry we receive.

Thank you to National Poetry Day and Phantom Billstickers for their support for this event. 

For more info email thepoetsxyz@gmail.com or visit us on Facebook at The Poets XYZ

Poetry Shelf launch series: Lynley Edmeades launches Mikaela Nyman’s new book

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In order to widen the reach of new poetry books, Poetry Shelf is posting a series of launch speeches and photographs. Do get in touch if you have had a launch you would like featured.

The Anatomy of Sand, Mikaela Nyman, Te Herenga Waka University Press,2025
(the photos are by Ina Kinski at UBS Otago)

Launch speech for The Anatomy of Sand by Mikaela Nyman

Kia ora koutou

Thank you so much for this invitation, Mikaela, to launch this new book, The Anatomy of Sand. It’s an honour to be asked. My job, as book-launcher, is to tell you why you should buy and read this book. I’ve got plenty of reasons why you should.

I never tired of reading and rereading this book. It was a joy to read a full collection, to sit down and do that thing many people don’t often get to do these days without distraction, and read a book from cover to cover—to read it’s contours and shimmies, its tilts and turns, its rises and falls. The poet seems to say to us: Look at this, can’t you see how curious it is? And then she goes on to show us. The poet is curious to the world, sensitive to our missteps as humans, but also alive its wonders.

As cliche as it may sound, reading Anatomy of Sand felt like traversing the world with my slippers on. Mikaela takes us so many places, in time and space: as expected (and hoped), we travel to Norway, Finland, and Sweden. But we also visit Nigeria, Palau, and the United Arab Emirates, Western Australia, New Caledonia, Dubai and Cornwall, Jamaica, Nigeria, the Virgin Islands, Bamiyan, and London’s River Thames. But we also flit around Aotearoa, from her home in Taranaki and the surrounding regions of Ōpunaki, Parihaka, Mōkau, we also go to Tokoroa, Porirua, Lake Rotokare, Waiwhakaiho, Mangorei, Mimitangiatua Awa, Whakarewarewa, Ngahoro, and back down here to Ōtepoti where a little bit of Mikaela’s heart remains after having the Burns Fellowship in 2024 (more on that later). Mikaela’s sense of place is immense and the poet never takes her taking up space for granted.

The book is also in conversation with many and provides a very contemporary constellation of voices. Like a great navigator of place and time, of language and culture, Mikaela reaches out to writers and artists, great myths and minds from so many reaches of the globe and somehow, somehow, joins them all in conversation. We meet Lauris Edmond, Michael Smither, Bill Manhire, Ngāhina Hohaia, Ni Vanuatu poet Carol C. Aru, Mary Oliver, Mary Ruefle, Rilke, Gregory Kaan, Andreas Wannerstedt, Maggie Nelson, Paul Celan, Brett Grahame, Sisyphus, and Oppenheimer. But this is not a name-checking exercise—Anatomy of Sand is a tapestry of language, connected deeply with the layers and complexities of our time. One poem, for example, is called ‘Reading Maggie Nelson at Matariki,’ where the poet invites Nelson’s presence into a contemplation of our celebrated winter stars, Puanga and Tautoro, to collectively contemplate the idea that may be what connects all writers and artists across time and space: that we’re all searching for ways to articulate the world. As Mikaela says, so beautifully: ‘Focus on Puanga bright above Tautoru / know that the inexpressible / is contained within / the expressed // We feed our anxieties with that / which eludes us, what can be said / instead—galaxies sugared / and stripped—stuck on verbs that explode a constricted throat.’

This is a generous poetry, a poetics of openness, ‘whose verbs explode a constricted throat’. We’re constricted by our time, our inability to fight against the monoliths of industry that continue to plunder our resources and tip the delicate balance of our environment, the ecosystems that would allow us all to thrive if we just took what we needed to sustain ourselves and nothing more. Mikaela’s poetry is sensitive to these plunders and butcherings, always turning toward the problems—never away from them—as if to say, let’s look at it. Let’s address the absurdities that underly so much of our late-capitalist motivations, the immense madness that is a phenomenon like private property, or, as the poet calls it, the ‘cost of sand.’ In her poem ‘Iron throne, submerged’ the poet tells us about the mineral Vanadium-rich iron ore found off the coast of Taranaki that a company called Trans-Tasman Resources ‘had their eye on’, and that vanadium is used for treating various life-threatening ailments. And yes, that sounds ideal, but the mineral can also be found in ‘space vehicles, nuclear reactors, aircraft carriers, piston and axles, as girders in construction.’ The poem asks, ‘who does the sand belong to anyway,’ and finishes by suggesting that ‘next time you’re held at ransom, why not bargain for sand dollars.’ It’s not too far outside the realm of possibility—stranger things have happened…

Of course, sand is a central feature throughout the book. The poetry is attuned to mineral, geology and the ancient body of earth we call home. But not just the land that we can successfully ‘own’ but also the water, the bodies of oceans that are also the home to so much life. The poet is sensitive to sand as border, porous, sometimes solid, and almost mythical line between land and sea, particularly as she comes from a long line of islanders and nordic seafarers, and has spent much time in the Pacific, particularly in Vanuatu, and with the work she did with ni-Vanuatu poets as co-editor of the excellent book Sista Stanap Strong! The poet seems to at home on and in the sand, as the place of welcome and transition, a porousness and openness to the waves of what comes and what goes.

And perhaps, if we too could hover in that sand-space for longer, we might also come to notice the things the poet is alerting us to. To exist on sand, to examine the anatomy of sand, is to learn of both the sea and the land. It is made up of both, just like the poet now is made up of the Aland Islands of Finland and the islands of Aotearoa, of several languages and cultures. And as such, the poet and the poetry has so much to teach us: as fellow island dwellers, we could really learn a lot from the reach of this poetry, the way it respects the land it is borne of it but is constantly looking out from.

On a very practical level, although I don’t condone googling-while-reading, I would suggest keeping your phone nearby as there is so much to be gained by following Mikaela’s layers of interest to teach you about so many things you’ve heard of, let alone even thought of: we learn about the Global Seed Vault at Svalbard, a secure backup facility for the world’s crop diversity on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen in the remote Arctic Svalbard archipelago; the epic Finish National creation story, the Kalevala, and how representations of Aino, a mythological character who was the victim of sexual advances of a male counterpart have been rethought in the wake of the #metoo movement; that in 1961, amateur Italian radio engineers recorded what appeared to be a female Russian cosmonaut burning up on re-entry to the Earth’s orbit. I was constantly stopping and looking out the window, thinking: fuck! There’s a wonder in these pages, both of the poet in wonder of the world, but also the wonderment of a poet with the skill to show us her own wonder and to make us, in turn, wonder. I felt myself wondering: how exactly is she doing this? There is a desire to share (not ‘tell’) ideas and information, a generosity that comes, I think, with the poets capacity to see what’s curious and to infectiously share this with us.

This openness is twofold, both in the poetry and the poet, as observed from her time in Ōtepoti as the Burns Fellow in 2024. Mikaela threw herself into our community, forged genuine and what I imagine to be life-long friendships with some of us in the room. Her desire for connection and community is immense and this is illustrated in the poetry too. It forges connections, leads you toward that ‘Aha’ moment, guides you the reader toward new knowledge. It’s a poetics of generosity—a sisterlyness, for people and for the environment.

It’s a generosity that is quite unrivalled in contemporary poetics, I would say. This is poetry that isn’t intersted in the the self, the personal. Yes, it views the world as any subject would, making it subjective, but the poet is so acutely aware of the bigger world, the one in which that subject lives. The beautiful poem ‘Beach Scrabble’, reads:

Drop your phone and concentrate
On this complex arrangement of stones and bones
for the sake of sanity, beauty
and all the things
that count yet cannot
be measured

Of course good intentions count—
but do they suffice?

What are we but petrified symbols
standing in for the real thing
lost to rising tides

Mikaela’s voice is unlike anything I’ve read in NZ before and we’re lucky to have her, writing about us, writing with us, writing amongst us. She comes from a civilisation eons older than our own and she’s chosen to make a life here, to share the wisdom from beyond, and Anatomy of Sand is a taonga in our literary ecosystem. The work in here offers threads where threads have not been, invisible ties to a world that is not our own, lands and sands beyond our shores, and yet shows us exactly how connected we all are, how undeniable these threads of connection are.

It’s a leap of faith, by the writer, to ask someone who hasn’t read the book yet to launch it and I also took a leap of faith when I agreed to launch Anatomy of Sand before I’d even read it. There’s always that slightly fretful moment of thinking, ‘what if I don’t like it?’ ‘What will I find to say about it?’ Well, I can assure you, I love it (and have obviously got a lot to say about it) and I absolutely know you will too. If you don’t buy this book, you’re missing out.

Dr Lynley Edmeades (she/her) 
Editor, Landfall Aotearoa Arts and Letters
Lecturer | Pūkenga, University of Otago – Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka


Te Herenga Waka University Press page




Poetry Shelf review: Terrier, Worrier A Poem in Five Parts by Anna Jackson

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Terrier, Worrier A Poem in Five Parts, Anna Jackson
Auckland University Press, 2025

“She came upstairs looking more like a cloud than a silver lining.”

Loop: A Review in Nine Parts

LOOP

Anna Jackson’s glorious new collection, Terrier, Worrier A Poem in Five Parts, gets sunlight slipping through the loops of my thinking, reading, dreaming. The collection is offered as a seasonal loop as we move through summer, autumn, winter, spring, summer, and in this temporal movement, the loop regenerates, absorbing and delivering rhythms of living . . . mind and body . . . rhythms of writing . . . nouns, verbs, conjunctions . . . rhythms of thinking . . . and little by little . . . the compounding ideas, the feelings. It’s poetry as looptrack: overloop, underloop, throughloop.

I photographed a floor softly tiled in white and grey and
posted it with a quote from Emily Brontë’s diary: ‘Aunt has
come into the kitchen just now and said, “Where are your
feet Anne?” Anne answered, “On the floor Aunt.”‘

BREAKING THE FRAME

There is a long tradition of breaking the frame of poetry, or let’s say opening the frame, widening, nurturing, reinventing, rebooting, invigorating. And yes, there is sunlight drifting in through the gaps in these poetry weatherboards, lighting up what poems can do or be, both beyond the frame and within the frame. Subject, style, sensation. Anna writes:

Poetry can be a form of refusal as well as openness.

I am reading this poetry book at the kitchen table and it is a loop of ignition points. Anna also writes:

I thought, it tells us something about poetry that when we
need to talk to ourselves about something we don’t know
we know, we tell it to ourselves when we are sleep, in images
we struggle to remember when we awake, and often take
more than one reading to fully understand.

PRESENT TENSE

There’s a long black cloud streaking from the west coast to the backyard bush sprinkling salt and pepper rain. Terrier, Worrier is generally written in the past tense, with many stanzas beginning with ‘I thought’, yet for me, curiously, wonderfully, it carries the charismatic freight of the present tense, the sweet fluidity of the gerund, the present participle . . . where be-here-now fluency prevails regardless of gaps, rest-stops, hesitancy. Reading is to be embedded in the moment of the past as reader, so that what happened, and what was thought, becomes acutely present. Dive into the poetry currents in the collection, and along with the writer, you will might find yourself filtering, evaluating, experiencing, valuing, photographing, documenting, thinking. Savouring a moment.

I remember sitting in the car after work, not wanting to turn on the windscreen wipers because I felt like I needed rain on the windscreen to do the work of crying for me.

THOUGHT

Thinking. Yes Terrier Worrier is a poetic record of thought that offers anchors, the cerebral terrain of the philosopher say, an archaeology of ideas to dig for. Where testing the possibilities of what is matters along with what is not, along with everything in between. Poetry forms a thinking loop, a porous border between poem and idea, where meaning is organic, fertilised by nuance and shifting light. Sunlight say. Looping motifs and coiling thinking, like the surprise delight of letting thoughts carry you without planned itinerary. Where meaning ripples and slides. This is what happens as I read Terrier, Worrier.

Anna writes:

I thought, most of the time I, too, am a person not having thoughts but only having sensations, emotions, instincts, memories, anticipations.

Perhaps the poem becomes the vessel for ‘sensations, emotions, instincts, memories, anticipations’.

PRESENCE

Anna’s poetic record of thought (how ‘record’ resonates with the effects of tracks and music) is physically active. Thinking is anchored in a physical world, a yard of hens, a cat, partner, mother, father, daughter, son, friends. A tangible texture of dailiness that grounds the rhythm of thought in physicality. I love this.

Beside my bed there is a painting of a blue fish, floating high above a grey-blue sea, impaled on a grey-blue spike. On the back of the painting are written the words of the artist, my daughter, aged 3: ‘This is the fish. I painted it because it stuck in my mind.’

DREAMING

Dreaming becomes thinking becomes inventing becomes dreaming. Anna holds the idea of dreaming, like a prism on her palm, to question, revisit. Again I’m acutely aware how everything I have already said feeds into what I am saying here, and what I will say. How dreaming is the present tense, looping past and future, how the poet wonders her dream, with dream seeping into life and life into dream, into the threads of a poem in five parts. How do “sensations, emotions, instincts, memories, anticipations” slip into the dream texture, I wonder. Into the making of a poem.

When Amy told me she had dreamed about me, I felt as if my
own life were like that dream in which you climb some stairs
in your house and discover an additional room, or a whole
series of rooms, you didn’t know was there.

SPACE

A word with myriad possibilities. There is space in the reading, in this nourishing process of reading that sends me looptracking and dawdling in a state of dream and wonder. Early in the sequence Anna is (and yes usually I am cautious about attributing the speaking voice to the author, but this book feels utterly personal so I think of the voice as Anna’s) – taking photographs of squares.

There is too the proximity of space and death, especially as both Anna’s parents and sister had had “a turn at death’s door”.

There are recurring motifs of rooms and buildings, and especially this thought:

I thought, every body is a memory palace.

And this:

I thought about the concept of ‘peripersonal space’, the idea
that your mental mapping of the self includes the immediate
space around you, and what you habitually keep about your
person, including for instance your bag, or your falcon.

READING LIST

Lately, I have been reading novels and poetry books that make a writer’s reading history visible. I love falling upon titles to be added to my must-read notebook, across genre, time, location, languages. Anna’s reading list at the back and the titles sprinkled throughout is incredible.

How may times do I return to Virginia Woolf! I must read Jan Morris’s thought-a-day diary, or Robert Wyatt’s irony of doing loads of minimalism, and how I too loved Susan Stewart’s magnificent On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, The Gigantic, the Souvenir, Olivia Lang’s Crudo, Madison Hamill’s brilliant Specimen, Muriel Rukeyser’s poetry.

SELF LOOP

Worrier, Terrier is the kind of book you can’t put down. I keep giving myself another week to flow along its currents, neither to explain nor pigeonhole, but to embark upon the joys of reading poetry, of reading a book that feeds your mind, that sparks and startles your memory banks, that gets you revisiting your own secret feelings and thoughts. Because more than anything, I hold Terrier, Worrier as a book of self. This book of invigorating return, where you will find yourself expanding with both recognition and discovery. It feels like this is what Anna did as she wrote. Is the poetry a form of coping with the abysmal world, the drift thoughts and non-thoughts, the dailiness, the relationships?

I read another page. Then I reread this, a pulsating heartcore of the book:

Some feelings expand the self like a gas into the world and
some condense the self into the coldest matter.

And then this:

I wondered whether I could hear ‘terrier’ as a version of the
word ‘worrier’, a worrier being not someone who makes you
worry but someone who themselves worries, who worries away at things like a terrier might worry away at a sock. A terrier would be someone who allows themselves actually to indulge in the feeling of terror. I tell myself, ‘I am not okay, but I will be okay’, but maybe I need to stop saying that and release the terror, or maybe the terrier is not myself but represents someone else’s terror that needs to be heard.

Tomorrow I will pick up the book again, and find another gleam and thought spur. I want to sit in a cafe with you all, let our thoughts dream and drift and link, as we empty our coffee cups, pick up our pens, and catch both the dark and the sunlight slipping in . . . as we write through weeping, laughter, longing, with doors ajar and love strengthening. I utterly love this book of wonder.

Anna Jackson is the author of seven collections of poetry as well as Diary Poetics: Form and Style in Writers’ Diaries 1915–1962 (Routledge, 2010) and Actions & Travels: How Poetry Works (Auckland University Press, 2022). She lives in Island Bay, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, and is associate professor in English literature at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington.

Anna Jackson’s website
Auckland University Press page

Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Nafanua Purcell Kersel is 2025 Emerging Pasifika Writer in Residence

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Nafanua Purcell Kersel, photo credit: Ebony Lamb, 2024

The University’s International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML) is delighted to announce the appointment of Nafanua Purcell Kersel as the Emerging Pasifika Writer in Residence for 2025.

Nafanua, a Sāmoan writer and performer, is based in Heretaunga, Te Mātau-a-Māui (Hawke’s Bay). She will use the residency to work on a stage adaptation of her debut poetry collection Black Sugarcane, as well as a new book of poems.

Her aspiration is to create work that creates more. “More alofa, more creativity, more understanding in our communities and worlds,” says Nafanua.

Nafanua has a background in facilitation and community storytelling, including her role with Nevertheless NZ, where she leads the storytelling programme and runs creative writing workshops with Māori, Pasifika, and Rainbow+ communities. Her creative work includes poetry, theatre and spoken word, often centring on themes of intergenerational memory and Pasifika knowledge systems.

Black Sugarcane, published in 2025 by Te Herenga Waka University Press, grew out of Nafanua’s Master of Creative Writing at IIML, for which she won the 2022 Biggs Family Prize in Poetry. Her poetry has appeared in anthologies and in various literary journals including Cordite, Landfall and Turbine l Kapohau.

Nafanua says it is a privilege and an honour to receive this award.

“I admire each of the previous recipients, and feel humbled to have been chosen to follow on from them.

“My wish is to write work which offers an insight into the complexity of community and the subtle work of shared stories, through my own experiences, dreams, and observations. My goal for the residency is to produce work which is mana-enhancing and unapologetic in its cultural depth. Fa’afetai, fa’afetai, fa’afetai tele lava mo le avanoa.”

Nafanua will receive a stipend of $15,000 to write her new work at the IIML for three months. She will also work with a mentor during the residency.

Damien Wilkins, Director of the IIML, says Nafanua’s wonderful first book of poems shows her to be a highly skilled writer with new things to say.

“We’re excited to see her work develop. The IIML is also very appreciative of the support of the University and Creative New Zealand.”

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: ‘#2 (This just doesn’t happen here … but it did)’ by Helen Rickerby

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#2 (This just doesn’t happen here … but it did)

I’m a bit afraid, and resistant, to go back to my essay. Though
that doesn’t mean I’m not constantly checking my emails –
hoping. Turned out the shooter had filmed it all with a
go-pro – like a first-person shooter game. Very often S will
tell me he loves me, and quite often I will ask him ‘Why?’ – or
sometimes ‘Why do you say that just now?’ That was where I
started reading Brighton Rock. The way forward is unknown –
we don’t even know if it’s a good idea. I had been sitting
reading on my phone – actually Paula Green’s interview with
Anne Michaels – I think I’d just read how for her poetry was
reaching out to hold another person – which is kind of
appropriate because I moved over in my seat – she was across
the aisle from me, and I touched her on her arm and looked
concerned and said ‘I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.’ The one
moment while we were talking and I felt a charge – and shied
away – was when he was talking about blu and azzurro, and
he said azzurro is used for sea and sky and eyes – and I looked
at his blue eyes and I think he looked at mine. Ah good, I’ve
got the fire blazing again. That was the Christmas S bought
me the Roboraptor, and I wondered if he really even knew
me, but I still have Fluffy and am actually very fond of him.
There are too many things and I am behind with all of them –
hence the panic. Thinking about why reading books can be so
calming compared to reading on the internet – and I think it’s
the linearity – a novel doesn’t have to be linear in terms of
chronological, but you know where you are with it. This isn’t
the kind of thing that happens here. We sat on the couch, we
hugged, we held hands, we cried a bit – but not enough. I
expect to be a bit inflamed and disrupted. I sent him a short
email on Tuesday night – after I’d seen him that morning –
telling him two alternative translations for my motto – Dignity
at all times (Dignità sempre and Dignità a ogni momento),
which are both nice. I went to bed worried that I would wake
up to find that there were more attacks around the world. V
said that in Greek the word for progress is connected to the
word for doubt – I’ve been thinking a lot about doubt and the
positive side of doubt – doubt that isn’t crippling, but that stops
you from thinking that you’re right about everything all the
time – the confidence to doubt. Anyway – today there are two
minutes of silence – a call for prayer at 1.30 and then two
minutes of silence at 1.32. The book we lost last time we were
here is still here – the travel guide to Sicily. Love to me, until
now, had not been a thing of wanting but of having.

Helen Rickerby
from My Bourgeois Apocalypse

Helen Rickerby lives in a cliff-top tower in Aro Valley, Te Whanganui-a-Tara (Wellington). She’s the author of four and a half collections of poetry, most recently How to Live (AUP, 2019), which won the poetry category in the 2020 New Zealand Ockham Book Awards. Her recently completed new poetry collection, My Bourgeois Apocalypse, (AUP, forthcoming) is part fragmentary poetic essay, part collage memoir, constructed from (mostly) randomly selected sentences from her journals between 2019 and 2024.

Poetry Shelf launch speech series: Helen Rickerby launches Anna Jackson

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I decided it would be a great idea to share the occasional poetry launch speech. All kinds of things get in the way of attending book launches – distance, time, illness, work, double-bookings! So I thought it would be great to host a series of launch speeches and photos – if you go to a poetry launch and love the launch speech, well maybe the poet and the launcher will give permission to post on Poetry Shelf. Let me know!

First up is Helen Rickerby launching Anna Jackson’s Terrier, Worrier A Poem in Five Parts (Auckland University Press) at Unity Books in Wellington.

Wellington launch speech for Terrier, Worrier

Kia ora kotou. Hi, I’m Helen Rickerby, and it’s an honour to be launching this new book by Anna Jackson – Terrier, Worrier. And lovely to see you all here to help celebrate.

I’ve been a big fan of Anna’s work since I first came across it, back sometime in the dark ages – the late 90s. She was living far away (Auckland) and submitted to a literary magazine I was editing. We got a lot of submissions, but Anna’s really stood out. I accepted it immediately, and that was the beginning of my friendship with Anna’s work.

I got to meet Anna herself not too much later, and then, conveniently, she got a job here in Wellington. She has become one of my dearest friends and her work and her self continue to be a big inspiration to me. She writes poetry that always makes me excited and inspired, which pushes me to be explorative and ambitious in my own poetry.

I know she’s been a great inspiration to many other people too, as a writer and teacher and as a person.

I’ve loved all of Anna’s books, so I don’t say this lightly – and I don’t really want the other books to hear me say this, I mean I don’t want to hurt their feelings and some of them are engraved on my heart – but I think Terrier, Worrier, is my favourite yet.

Auckland University Press, 2025 (page)

I got to see this book in various stages – when I read the first draft I remember thinking – and saying – that it was my favourite kind of thing to read. It’s sparky and fun and deep, it’s gorgeously written, with beautiful turns of phrase. It’s also quite educational – I learned a lot of things reading this. It’s like having a really really good conversation with Anna, and getting to watch her think in action.

This book is a thought diary in poem form – a hybrid prose poem form, which is my favourite.

Anna – or perhaps we should really say ‘the narrator’, because it is of course a composed and beautiful work of art; but while recognising that the voice of this poem is in fact a construct and not exactly or completely Anna herself, it also sounds so much like at least one version of Anna herself, that I am just going to call the narrator ‘Anna’. Anyway, Anna implies in the poem and the notes (I want to put in a plug for the notes – which are almost as rich, fun and conversational as the poem itself, and do feel to me like part of the poem itself): Anna says that she doesn’t think she has thoughts, or emotions. It is so clear to me that Anna is full of emotions, and full of thoughts – as proven by this book. I am someone who feels very full of both thoughts and feelings – when she began this project, I thought and felt that recording one’s thoughts would be quite overwhelming – I feel that I have a thought tumbling into another thought followed by another faster than I can even follow – I couldn’t comprehend how you could capture them all. But I’ve come to understand that one difference between Anna and myself is that she has higher standards of many things, including of what a thought is – and perhaps what a feeling is.

This is longish for a poem, but small for a book – however, in this small book there is just so much! A lot of thoughts and ideas per square inch. As well as her own thoughts, she argues with Ludwig Wittgenstein over language and beetles, questions Hannah Arendt over beauty, reads and considers scientific studies about time and perception – but despite all that dense deepness the experience of reading Terrier, Worrier, is easy, light, spacious, fun.

This is thanks to the beautiful, light, clever and funny way it is written.

And it isn’t just jumping from one profound thought to another – it circles back, revisits, reconsiders and sometimes disagrees with itself, makes connections with other thoughts and, aided by the fragmentary nature of this poem, there is space for us the readers to think and make connections too. For me it is the kind of writing that makes my brain spark.

This quote is from early on in the poem:

I heard birds and thought that although I am only hearing them,and I am not having a thought, it still feels like a thought, almost
like a thought of my own, or a conversation I am having, or
perhaps it is more like reading a poem, where the words, or the
movement of the thought, the song of the thought, is given to
you rather than coming from you, but still moves through you.

She begins by considering whether hearing is a thought, continues on to the nature of poetry and then you realise it’s doing exactly what it’s talking about – we’re following her thinking and the poem is making us feel like we’re doing the thinking, but then there is the space for us to actually think – if we want to – otherwise we can just go back to watching Anna’s brain.

One thing I love about Anna’s work, and actually about Anna herself, is her complete lack of concern with a hierarchy of culture. She mixes the high – classic and classical literature, philosophy etc – with the ordinary – the domestic space, family life, pets – but also treats both the ‘high’ and ‘low’ as much the same – or at least of equal importance. Or equal-ish – I think the pets might actually be more important than the philosophy.

And pets do make frequent appearances in Terrier, Worrier – mostly hens and also cats, as illustrated on the cover. There’s also a whale on the cover, and there are also whales in the book, but I don’t think even Anna could make a pet of a whale, though you never know.

While in some ways this poem is like a monologue, is really a conversation – as well as being in conversation with philosophers and scientists, she has conversations within the poem – or in fact arguments – such as with Simon about whether it would be better to leave doors open (apparently it is). And it also feels like a conversation with us.

I love how she says:

Whether including conversations
counted as cheating was another question. I decided it
probably was cheating, because it is almost impossible not
to have thoughts in conversation.

I have in fact had conversations where I have had trouble having thoughts, but never with Anna.

As I expect you have noticed, we are living in some pretty weird times. While this isn’t a book that engages directly in a political way, it is the kind of book I think we need in these times – the kind of book that stands in opposition to the values that are prominent right now among some of our so-called leaders.

This is a book that is full of curiosity, empathy with other humans and with animals. It is not interested in hierarchies of status, but in the beauty of all the things, big and small, that make an individual and collective life worth living. It values thinking deeply and is not content with the first knee-jerk idea or black and white solutions. It is a book that values connections and conversations, between ideas, between people and animals, and between people and people. These are the kinds of values that give me hope.

I don’t feel I’ve done this book justice – there are so many things that are wonderful about it, but I hope I’ve whet your appetite for it. And so now I declare Terrier, Worrier launched!

Helen Rickerby

Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Robert Lord 80th birthday celebration

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Robert Lord would have turned 80 this year – to mark the occasion, the Robert Lord Writers Cottage Trust and Friends of the Cottage are throwing a party on his birthday.

Friday, July 18, 2025
5:30 PM

Dunningham Suite,
Dunedin City Library,
230 Moray Place
Dunedin

A line-up of special guests will read from works by and about Robert, followed by a celebration of his life and legacy with drinks and nibbles.

Tickets are $20 and include refreshments.

Book tickets here

All proceeds go to the Writers Cottage Trust to help keep the residency programme running in the way Robert intended.

If you can’t attend the celebration but would like to support the Writers Cottage Trust, donations of any size are welcomed here.

Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Selina Tusitala Marsh – first ever Commonwealth Poet Laureate

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Poetry Shelf warmly congratulates Selina Tusitala Marsh

Notable New Zealand poet and academic Selina Tusitala Marsh ONZM, FRSNZ has been announced as the first Commonwealth Poet Laureate.

The professor of English at Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland is a former New Zealand Poet Laureate and award-winning writer, known for her three collections of poetry and, most recently, her best-selling children’s graphic memoir series Mophead.

The appointment, the first in the 75-year history of the Commonwealth of Nations, will run until 31 May 2027 and involve Marsh crafting original poems for flagship Commonwealth events, including Commonwealth Day, the Commonwealth People’s Forum, and Ministerial and Heads of Government Meetings.

She will also advise on the Commonwealth Foundation’s creative programming – the principal agency for Commonwealth culture – and will appear in person at the Commonwealth People’s Forum and Heads of Government Meeting in Antigua & Barbuda in 2026.

Marsh, who is of Sāmoan, Tuvaluan, English, Scottish and French heritage, says she is “deeply honoured” to accept the role.

“In Samoan, we say, O le tele o sulu e maua ai figota. ‘The more torches we have, the more fish we can catch.’ Poetry is our torch, illuminating paths between our diverse cultures and histories.”

More here