Anne reads a selection of her poems
Anne Kennedy’s most recent books are The Sea Walks into a Wall, The Ice Shelf and, as editor, Remember Me: Poems to Learn by Heart from Aotearoa New Zealand. She is the current editor of AUP’s New Poets series. Awards include the Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry, the NZ Post Book Award for Poetry and the Montana Book Award for Poetry. Anne lives in Tāmaki Makaurau.
Wonderful news!
2026 Writer in Residence Tusiata Avia
Photo credit: The Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi
Acclaimed poet Tusiata Avia MNZM has been appointed Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML) and Creative New Zealand Writer in Residence for 2026.
2026 Writer in Residence Tusiata Avia. (Photo credit: The Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi.)
Tusiata has received many significant awards including the 2013 Janet Frame Literary Trust Award, a 2023 Te Herenga Waka Distinguished Alumni Award, and the 2024 Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement.
In 2020, she was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to poetry and the arts. In 2024, Tusiata received a Creative New Zealand Senior Pacific Artists Award.
Tusiata’s poetry collections include Wild Dogs Under My Skirt (2004, also staged as a theatre show), Bloodclot (2009), the Ockham-shortlisted Fale Aitu | Spirit House (2016), the Ockham-award-winning The Savage Coloniser Book (2020, also staged as The Savage Coloniser Show), and Big Fat Brown Bitch (2023). Her new book, Giving Birth to My Father, will be published on 6 November 2025.
While holding the residency, Tusiata will work on a new collection of poems provisionally titled How to Make a Terrorist. She says the collection will move from the personal to the global, “from inside an MRI machine scanning my brain. to Christchurch five years after the mosque shooting . . . to Hana Rawhiti Maipi-Clark tearing up the Treaty Principles Bill in parliament.”
Director of the International Institute of Modern Letters, Damien Wilkins, says, “Tusiata is a major writer working at the height of her powers. We’re honoured to host her.”
Commenting on the appointment, Tusiata says, “I’m excited to be returning to Te-Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington and to the International Institute of Modern Letters, where my writing career really began, back in 2002. It’s a great opportunity to create something new and contribute to the life of the university and the city.”
Tusiata takes up the residency at the IIML on 1 February 2026.
widening the gap
in the wild night of storm the wind is widening the gap
or is it the roar of a government hellbent on building
a ravine between the rich and the poor Māori and Pakeha
in every choice they make. A school curriculum has lost
sight of the prismatic stories that shape us, sums that include
x-factor joy, and I am stuck on this freight train
in the widening gap because I see no end to damage and despair and
I’m filling an ocean with tears crying over lessons that slam the door
in the face of poverty or another language or the tangata whenua
and this rumble gap is the distance between sick earth and well earth
between building roads and restoring our hospitals and schools
and here I am holding my fragile torch to the widening gap
in my sodden socks no idea where to shine the light next yet
except maybe on all those protestors from the 1960s who are stomping
in the streets even louder now with their dreams our dreams where women
are heard where Māori are heard my bones breaking and I am blowing
all around to resist persist hope dream begging to fill this gap with precious care
to build glorious people-friendly bridges out of knowledge and foresight.
Paula Green
October 2025
1
McCahon’s Defile
For John Reynolds
And so Colin I cast off in my frail craft of words
my craft of frail words of crafty words
into the defile of Three Lamps where
struck by sunshine on the florist’s striped awning
and the autumn leaves outside All Saints
as you did before fully waking in Waitākere
to look at the elegant pole kauri in dewy light
I defile my sight with closed eyes
and so see better when I open them the Sky Tower
pricking a pale blue heaven like Raphael’s
in Madonna of the Meadows or the scumbled sky of
Buttercup fields forever where there is a constant flow of light
and we are born into a pure land through Ahipara’s blunt gate
a swift swipe of pale blue paint
on Shadbolt’s battered booze bar where bards
bullshitted among the kauri.
Gaunt cranes along the city skyline
avert their gazes towards the Gulf
away from babblers at Bambina
breakfast baskers outside Dizengoff
some pretty shaky dudes outside White Cross
beautiful blooms in buckets at Bhana Brothers
(open for eighty years) Karen Walker’s window
looking fresh and skitey across Ponsonby Road
my charming deft dentist at Luminos
most of South Asia jammed into one floor at the Foodcourt
Western Park where wee Bella bashed her head
on some half-buried neoclassical nonsense
the great viewshaft to not-faux Maungawhau
and then turn left into the dandy defile of K Road
where you make your presence felt yet again
Colin through the window of Starkwhite
in building 19-G_W-13 where dear John Reynolds
has mapped your sad Sydney derives and defiles
across the road from Herabridal’s windows all dressed up
in white broderie Anglaise like lovely frothy brushstrokes
or the curdled clouds and words you dragged into the light
fantastic along beaches and the blackness that was all
you saw when you opened your eyes sometimes
like the bleary early morning Thirsty Dogs
and weary hookers a bit further along my walk.
I love the pink pathway below the K Road overbridge
a liquid dawn rivulet running down towards Waitemata’s riprap
but also the looking a bit smashed washing hung out
on the balcony above Carmen Jones
and over the road from Artspace and Michael Lett etc
there’s El Sizzling Lomito, Moustache, Popped, and Love Bucket
the Little Turkish Café has $5 beers
it’s like a multiverse botanical garden round here
you could lose yourself in the mad babble of it
like the Botanical Gardens at Woolloomooloo
with the clusterfucking rut-season fruit-bats
screaming blue murder.
But it’s peaceful again down Myers Park
the mind empties and fills like a lung breathing
the happy chatter of kids swinging
and my memory of you Colin
sitting alone and forlorn on a bench
must have been about 1966
contemplating the twitchy cigarette between your fingers
as if it divined the buried waters of Waihorotiu
or the thoughts that flow beneath thought
in the mind’s defile at dawn when you open your eyes
and see that constant flow of light among the trees.
Ian Wedde
Note on
Ode to Auckland 1. McCahon’s Defile (For John Reynolds)
This is the first of five ‘Ode to Auckland’ sections/poems, themselves the first twenty-one-page section of a sixty-one-page book BEING HERE: SELECTED POEMS 2020 – 2025 looking to publish in 2026. The poems address a city I’ve loved for the many years I’ve lived in it at various times, including early on when I was a student at Auckland University in the 1960s when I lived in Wood Street, Ponsonby. It was a pretty rough neighbourhood then compared to the Ponsonby of today which is mostly upmarket and chic. Our part of it in Three Lamps is not in the wealthy space, a functionally convenient four-floor unit in a multi-unit apartment complex with office space on the top floor for my wife Donna and myself. What this elevated space provides is the view out west from my panoramic fourth-floor windows to the Waitākare hills across the luxuriantly tree’d suburbs that stretch across that view. What’s just across the road from our inner-city place is one of my favourite dog-walks, it takes Maxi and me into the steep, sensational viewshaft down to the north-east harbour where we often walk in the morning via one of the little old-tree-planted parks that have survived from the 1960s Ponsonby I remember.
Living here now in this folding-together of memory and present, I celebrate the huge old Chinaberry tree that stretches up past our office window on Donna’s northern side and is typical of the old plantings I can see stretching out west to the Waitākeres on my side, and I’m glad to have most of what I need within walking distance, but I’m annoyed by the homogenizing impacts of the suburb’s wealth and even find myself grumbling in an old-fuck way about why all the classic villas are getting painted the same white. But the frustration is really with myself. Back in the day when I was flatting in Wood Steet the scungy villas hardly mattered and Ponsonby was just a great place to live. It still is. The title of my prospective book, Being Here, should be where I stop whingeing.
The poems in the ‘Ode to Auckland’ section are mostly written to-and-fro across something like a give-or-take twelve-syllable line which I like because it gets the measuring mind in a focused but not stalled state – like walking with wide-open eyes and a sense of your foot-falls having an organic not regimented pace, mind and breath in synch, the lines reaching ahead but anticipating a transition that keeps the thing moving.
Ian Wedde, 21 October 2025
Kia ora koutou, booklovers!
Scorpio Books and Otago University Press warmly welcome you to an author talk featuring Lynley Edmeades in conversation with Kiran Dass.
Lynley Edmeades is the author of Hiding Places, a compelling and beautifully written meditation on early motherhood and creativity published in September 2025. Told through a series of fragments that range from raw and troubled to delightful and hilarious, this remarkable book responds to the unexpected shocks and discoveries of becoming a mother, drawing on excerpts from family letters and secretive medical records, and advice contained in Truby King’s 1913 tract, Feeding and Care of Baby. This author talk will include discussion on this wonderful and strange book, already a favourite with the Scorpio Books staff.
All welcome, this is a free event. Refreshments provided. Please send in your RSVP.
Mining is the Pits Poetry Reading
Central Stories Museum, Alexandra
6:30 pm–8:30 pm, Saturday 22 November 2025
Six Aotearoa New Zealand poets – Michael Harlow, Bridget Auchmuty, Jillian Sullivan, David Eggleton, Richard Reeve and Robert Sullivan – read poems to emphasise our cultural and spiritual connection with the land as a people, and protest the ecological and aesthetic violence being proposed in the form of open-cast gold mining.
Poetry reading to protest industrial gold-mining
A mining-protest reading by six Aotearoa New Zealand poets – Mining is the Pits – is scheduled for the Central Stories Museum in Alexandra on 22 November 2025.
The reading – which features both the present New Zealand Poet Laureate Robert Sullivan and 2019-2022 New Zealand Poet Laureate David Eggleton – is planned as a continuation of the cultural protest No Go Bendigo, an art auction curated by acclaimed Wellington-based writer Gregory O’Brien featuring leading New Zealand artists including Sir Grahame Sydney, Dick Frizzell and Nigel Brown.
Poets and artists across the motu emphatically reject the plans of Australian company Santana Minerals and other multinationals to establish open-cast gold mines in the Central Otago backcountry, not only at Bendigo in the foothills of the Dunstan Mountains but also in the Rock and Pillar and Lammerlaw Ranges near Middlemarch, the Ida Valley near Alexandra and the Silver Peaks near Dunedin.
In Auckland, Paula Green, recipient of the 2017 Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry, has hosted on her widely-read Poetry Shelf website, ‘Reading Poetry to Rare Lizards’ – Poetry in Defence of the Environment, a diverse and powerful collection of protest poems in response to the Bendigo proposal.
The scale of the proposed onslaught on Otago’s natural heritage, brought on in no small part by Minister of Resources Shane Jones’ aggressively pro-mining stance and Fast-Track legislative reforms, is unprecedented.
Poet Michael Harlow of Alexandra, recipient of the 2018 Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry and a poet performing as part of Mining is the Pits, has described the widespread proposals as a ‘plague’.
Celebrated Oturehua author Jillian Sullivan, surviving partner of the renowned late poet and environmentalist Brian Turner, believes ‘Brian would be into this fight for land boots and all.’
While the protest reading has been brought into existence by Santana’s proposal and its implications for Central Otago, the poets in their work will be emphasising our cultural and spiritual connection with the land as a people, with the environmental destruction arising from open-cast mining being wholly contrary to those values.
For more information on the reading or to arrange for poet interviews, please contact:
Richard Reeve (Coordinator)
THE POETS
Michael Harlow of Alexandra is the author of thirteen books of poetry and a recipient of the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in 2018.
Bridget Auchmuty lives in the Ida Valley. Her collection of poetry, Unmooring, was released by Quentin Wilson Publishing in 2020.
Jillian Sullivan lives and writes in Oturehua in the Ida Valley. Recent publications include Map for the Heart: Ida Valley Essays (Otago University Press, 2020), A Way Home (Potton and Burton, 2016) and Parallel (Steel Roberts, 2014)
David Eggleton was New Zealand Poet Laureate from 2019-2022. His most recent book is Lifting the Island: Poems (Red Hen Press, 2025). Eggleton lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin.
Richard Reeve lives in Warrington / Ōkāhau, to the north of Ōtepoti Dunedin. A barrister sole, he is also the author of seven collections of poetry including About Now (Maungatua Press, 2024).
Robert Sullivan (Ngā Puhi (Ngāti Manu / Ngāti Hau), Kāi Tahu, Irish) lives in Oamaru. He is the current New Zealand Poet Laureate. His most recent book, Hopurangi – Songcatcher: Poems from the Maramataka (Auckland University Press, 2024), was a finalist for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
Readings & installations to celebrate the launch of our special issue connecting the poetics of Aotearoa with South Asia and its diaspora, edited by Nirvana Haldar.
Readings by Arielle Walker, Jasmin Singh, Liam Jacobson (more TBC).
Installations and screenings of works by international contributors Imaad Majeed, Priyanka Chhabra (more TBC).
Join us at @samoahouselibrary for some snacks and beverages in the company of good words.
SIDE A: MANIFESTO
I WILL NOT DWELL IN THE CAUSEWAYS OF ANGUISH.
I WILL NOT DWELL IN THE CAUSEWAYS OF ANGUISH AND CALL THEM DREAMS.
WE WILL CELEBRATE THE PETALS OF THE SPIDER CHRYSANTHEMUM, EMBRACING IN THREE DIMENSIONS, EACH AS A THICK IMPASTO STROKE REACHING FURTHER INTO THE WORLD THAN ANY MORTAL PAINTER COULD MANIFEST, DUSTED WITH TRACKS OF PIGMENT ALMOST-MIXED AND OF GREATER DIVINITY FOR IT—THE VIEW STILL AND EXPLODED.
EVERYTHING WILL BE ALRIGHT, ACTUALLY—IF YOU HOLD TO THIS KNOWLEDGE AND ARE TENACIOUS ABOUT YOUR LIFE.
I WILL NOT DWELL IN THE CAUSEWAYS OF ANGUISH.
I WILL NOT DWELL IN THE CAUSEWAYS OF ANGUISH AND CALL THEM GOD-GIVEN.
YOU MUST FIND THE THING THAT SINGS TO YOU AND LET YOURSELF REJOICE IN THE MELODY.
MY LIFE CAN BE REAL WITHOUT IT BEING CAPTURED. A YOUNG WOMAN WALKING DOWN KARANGAHAPE ROAD IN THE RAIN, BUNCHES OF FLOWERS FROM A PONSONBY GROCER CRADLED IN HER ARMS, IS JUST AS BEAUTIFUL WITHOUT BEING FLATTENED, FRAMED, AND HELD AT A REMOVE. SHE LIVES WITHOUT US HAVING SEEN HER.
DIVE INTO THE HAVING. SEE HOW IT IMPACTS YOUR COMPULSION TO SPEAK.
MY LIFE CAN BE REAL WITHOUT IT BEING CAPTURED. LET SOMEBODY BREATHE WORDS OF LOVE BEHIND A CLOSED DOOR AND RESIST THE URGE TO HAVE A LENS PHASE INTANGIBLY THROUGH THE WOOD. SET DOWN THE SCREENPLAY.
MY LIFE CAN BE REAL WITHOUT IT BEING CAPTURED. ARE YOU IN LOVE OR DO YOU JUST WANT SOMEONE TO TEND TO IN THE SOFT BLUR OF A CROWD SHOT?
MY LIFE CAN BE REAL WITHOUT IT BEING CAPTURED.
MY LIFE IS REAL—THIS—NOW—AND IT IS HAPPENING.
KEEP SOMETHING FOR YOURSELF—THE TROUBLE WITH SO EASILY DISGUISING THE EXERTION IS THAT THOSE YOU’RE SOOTHING DON’T GAUGE THE DEGREE OF YOUR EFFORTS.
YOU DON’T HAVE TO LIVE WITH THIS CAVERNOUS THING INSIDE THAT YOU FEEL COMPELLED, FOR OTHERS’ SAKE, TO CRACK OPEN.
WE WILL CELEBRATE THE HURTLING BEAT—THE SOARING CHORUS—THE WAILING SINGER—THE ALTO AT DUSK.
YOU’RE NOT TRAPPED IN THIS. YOU’RE NOT TRAPPED AND ANYTHING CAN CHANGE AND NOTHING IS EVER WITHOUT HOPE.
I WILL NOT DWELL IN THE CAUSEWAYS OF ANGUISH.
MY LIFE CAN BE REAL WITHOUT IT BEING CAPTURED: SURGING ADRENALINE, A POP BEAT AND A THICK ANCHOR—THE THRUM, THE THRUM, THE THRUM, THE THRUM, THE THRUM. THE TURN AWAY. THE I’M BACK. THE HEY, BABY. THE—THE—THE—
I WILL NOT DWELL ON EVERYTHING THAT COMES AFTER. I WILL FRONTLOAD THE GIFT AND THE DOING.
WE WILL CELEBRATE CORIANDER AND MINT AND BASIL—CELEBRATE THE PARSLEY THAT USED TO GROW IN CLAY POTS AT THE VERGE WHERE YOUR GREAT-GRANDFATHER’S GARDEN MET THE STEPS OF THE HOUSE. YOU HAVE THE SAME HANDS NOW AS THOSE HE HELD. THE SAME IDIOSYNCRACIES AS ONCE KNOWN BY THOSE WHO HAVE CLOSEST LOVED YOU.
WE WILL CELEBRATE THE REFRACTED LIGHT AS IT CASTS ITS SLANTING GLANCES.
WE WILL BANISH SELF-DENIAL.
I WILL DEFAULT TO COURAGE AND FAITH.
I WILL EMBRACE FUN!!!!!!!!!!
MY LIFE CAN BE REAL WITHOUT IT BEING CAPTURED.
MY LIFE CAN BE REAL WITHOUT IT BEING CAPTURED. THE TENDER SLICING OF ANGEL TOMATOES ON THE SUMMER MORNING—THE GENTLE POOL OF OLIVE OIL—THE UNENCUMBERED ENOUGHNESS IN THE MEASURE OF MILK TO BE STEAMED.
I WILL BE ACTIVE IN MY DEVOTION.
WE WILL CELEBRATE THE FACT IT’S ALL AN ADVENTURE, EVERY SINGLE THING, AND ONE DAY IT WILL BE GONE.
I WILL LET GO OF THE COMPULSION TO CARVE IMMEASURABLY DEEP GULFS BETWEEN MY PRESENT SITUATION AND A FORMLESS, IMAGINED SCENARIO WHEREIN MY LIFE IS SOMEHOW BETTER. I WILL LET GO OF ABANDONING MYSELF AND MY DEAREST ONES AND ALL THOSE I AM YET TO MEET. I WILL COME HOME TO MYSELF AND LOVE HER.
I WILL BE GRATEFUL FOR EVERY HAND-UP AND KINDNESS.
ALL OF US IN SUCH CIRCUMSTANCES WILL CELEBRATE OUR DAY-TO-DAY STABILITY AND THE SAFETY IT CAN BE SO EASY TO TAKE FOR GRANTED. WHEN WE FIND OURSELVES IN POSSESSION OF THIS INALIENABLE HUMAN RIGHT, NEEDLED PERHAPS BY DISSATISFACTION BUT NOT RAVAGED BY STATE-SANCTIONED EVIL, IT IS OUR DUTY TO STAND AS MEANINGFULLY AS WE CAN WITH THOSE WHOSE HUMANITY, HISTORY, AND FUTURE IS BEING TARGETED AND ERASED. WE MUST. HEAR ME: WE MUST.
I WILL BE ACTIVE IN MY DEVOTION.
I WILL RETIRE THE METHODS I TOOK UP TO SURVIVE MY ADOLESCENCE—I NEVER HAVE TO BE THAT GIRL AGAIN. INSTEAD—
I WILL BE EXACTLY THE PERSON I’VE WAITED FOR, EVERY WOMAN I’VE LOOKED AT WITH ADMIRATION AND DELIGHT, WITH DEEP, DELICIOUS ASPIRATION. I HAVE THE MEANS NOW. I JUST HAVE TO RESPECT MYSELF ENOUGH TO BECOME HER.
I WILL NOT DWELL IN THE CAUSEWAYS OF ANGUISH AND CALL IT BEING PREPARED.
WE WILL CARVE OUR MOST FUNDAMENTAL TRUTHS INTO THE MATTER OF THIS AND ALL WORLDS, AND WE WILL NEVER LET IMPOSED DESPAIR WIN OUT.
WE WILL MAKE MISTAKES AND GROW AND ALLOW THE SAME FOR OTHERS.
WE WILL CELEBRATE PASSION AND RELIEF.
I WILL COME HOME TO MYSELF AND LOVE HER.
I WILL NOT DWELL IN THE CAUSEWAYS OF ANGUISH.
I WILL COME HOME TO MYSELF AND LOVE HER.
SIDE B: MANIFESTEAUX
The thing about the other side is that it fuckin’ rocks—
—once you take the reins of your life and throw all that other shit out.
It’s a wonder what the right pair of boots will do, even if they immediately crack a sole on the edge of the footpath. Even at the end of a month that has felt cursed to you. Even as everything in your body is screaming at you that it’s time.
Throw it away! Throw it away! Let it mean more by letting it go! Throw it away!
Don’t luxuriate! Let the tides lap at it! It’ll stay if it’s meant to! Here’s your real life, baby!
BRIGHT BLEEDING TULIPS SPRAY CHRYSANTHEMUMS THE LONG LINE FOR THE MADELEINES THE CITRUS ZEST AND THE ELDERFLOWER THE OIL CLINGING TO THE ICING SUGAR THE BUFFETTING LATE SPRING WIND
THE DIP OF YOUR COLLARBONE SMOKED LAVENDER ELECTRIC BLUE
Loosen your grip! Open your hand!
It’s all got a bit serious, hasn’t it!
THE DIP OF YOUR COLLARBONE SMOKED LAVENDER ELECTRIC BLUE THE MONT BLANC DOWN THE ALLEYWAY ON A SUNNY DAY THE SQUARE LINES THE GEOMETRIC JAVA TILING THE SWEET DEEP EUCALYPTUS THE
DEEP EU— ORANGE TU— ENOUGH LOVE HERE THAT THERE’S SOMETHING TO LOSE
You owe it to yourself not to hesitate. Or else you owe it to yourself to power through. You owe it to yourself to be the version of yourself you wish you could be, the one you know you are at your best. Tip your head back and meet the rain. And meet it. And meet it. And—
Most of the time what you’re scared of losing isn’t the thing itself anyway, just evidence that, for a time, you had it—and you did; and you do; but the past doesn’t exist anymore, just as the future doesn’t, hasn’t reached us yet; what can you put down on the way there? What preemptive punishment are you assigning to yourself in order to beat some hypothetical judge to the punch down the line? Let it go! And—
I love you in words I love you aloud I love you waiting for the bus I love you incomprehensible I love you at the perfect time I love you with jitters I love you with your hair in a bun giving notes I love you and your dog who is in many ways a lot like me and vice versa I love you through all events I love you with shared pocket tissues I love you for the others you love I love you from 1.5m away to ensure we’re in focus I love your attentive baby I love your braids I love you at the football I love you unproofread I love you undone I love you I love
THE UNEXPECTED GENEROUS GIFT NEVER ASKED FOR AND YET RECEIVED NEVER ASKED FOR OUT OF THE ASSUMPTION IT WOULD NOT BE GRANTED AND YET RECEIVED AND YET GIVEN WITH THE FULLNESS OF ANOTHER’S HEART
AND NOTICE THE EXCITEMENT SPILLING OVER ACROSS THE TABLETOP FLOODING THE PICKLED FENNEL AND THE STRACCIATELLA THE CRUMBLED PISTACHIO AND THE SICILIAN OLIVES THE FOCACCIA AND THE ROSEMARY ALREADY OILED AND FLAKED WITH SALT AND THE UNREMARKED-UPON SHARED DESSERT
WHAT MIGHT OTHERS TAKE AS SIGNS WHEN REALLY THE LOVE IS AT THE SURFACE WHEN REALLY THE LOVE IS THERE WHEN REALLY ALL I MEAN IS EXACTLY WHAT I AM SAYING TO YOU WHEN WE CAN SINK TWO SPOONS INTO THE CUT OF A CHEESECAKE TO TASTE OUR EQUAL SHARE OF BLISS AND I’M NOT TRYING TO TELEGRAPH ANYTHING ELSE AND WHAT IT MEANS IS THAT WE’RE HERE TOGETHER WHAT IT MEANS IS THAT WE’RE HERE TOGETHER WHAT IT MEANS IS THAT WE’RE HERE TOGETHER HERE RIGHT HERE FOR NOW THANK GOD
One day, sickeningly soon, it’ll all change. You’ll have to find someone new to call on the way home from work, some new supermarket corner to be disappointed by, yet another new site to which hopes can be pinned. All those things you once wrote about with such matter-of-fact self-derision—well, in many ways you were right, trying to haul yourself up as you always have, closer to that great wish, that gnawing right place, that fantasy. But that other world will be one you build, which requires grace. A different flower market. A different, likely more demanding, commute.
Another gentle gaze to fall into.
For the better. For the better.
LET THE IMAGES CASCADE
If you tallied it up—took time and took stock—it’s likely that the list of material objects you’d deem essential to the base comforts of your life and your sense of self would be vanishingly small. To be told this makes you defensive, as though you’re being reprimanded, as though they’re being taken from you by another person’s thought experiment, as though you are without agency again. Unless you’re being actively threatened, resist this urge. The odds of the ‘you’ actually being you are rare. Act in good faith. Let the rest fall through your fingers, unclaimed, to find a better home.
All those months. Years. Whispered, as in prayer: Give me something to run to. Give me something that makes it hard to leave. Better yet—baby, just go. You’re ready! You’ve done all the learning you need to! All the rest will roll on from here, underfoot and overhead and in your hands. So much unknown—and how electric is that!
LET THE IMAGES CASCADE AS A BROOK AS A PERFUME AS A WATERFALL YOUR BEAUTIFUL FACE YOUR BREATHLESS LAUGH YOUR SINCERITY CAUGHT OFF GUARD YOUR HAIR UNKEMPT YOUR SOFT SHIRT CORNFLOWER BLUE MY BOOTS REPLACED THE CRYSTAL DESCANT THE FINAL RASPING JAGGED STONE AGAINST THE SMOOTHNESS OF YOUR VOICE THE PAPERED FRONDS
THE IRIS BOLTING—
ALL THOSE YEARS AS CONCERTINA. LET YOUR HEART REACH RIGHT THROUGH.
You’ve got here and you love her: you love her; you love her; you love her.
Here’s your real life, baby. Here’s your real life and your leitmotif and the themes you’ll never be cured of.
STAND YOUR GROUND / EXHIBIT GRACE / REARRANGE YOUR PRIORITIES FOR THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN AND THE WORLD YOU HOPE, THROUGH ACTIVE COURSE, YOU’RE HEADED TO
Enjoy it, this, everything—everyone through a warm lens, half-grained and smiling.
BELIEVE IN SOMETHING BETTER, FULLER-HEARTED / REFRAME ABUNDANCE / ESCHEW DEPLETION / BE STEADFAST, CLEVER, FIERCELY KIND
And you love her. Keep on proving it.
AND THE IMAGES CASCADE
And you’re here now.
AND YOU HOLD THEM
And you’re gonna love it here.
AND YOU’RE HERE NOW
And you love her.
AND I’M GONNA LOVE IT HERE.
And I’m here now.
AND I LOVE HER / AND
Tate Fountain
Tate Fountain is a writer, editor, and creative producer. She has held programming, digital marketing, and strategy roles with Te Ahurei Toi o Tāmaki Auckland Arts Festival, Whānau Mārama New Zealand International Film Festival, and theatre and film company, extracurricular. She is the author of SHORT FILMS (Tender Press, 2022) and, as of September 2025, the editor of Starling, alongside Maddie Ballard.
Event by Going West Books and Writers Festival
Poetry at Piha returns! The Listening Sand with Anne Kennedy
Bring a picnic and gather at North Piha and join award winning poet Anne Kennedy for a gentle, exploratory poetical workshop under the pohutukawa. Then carve your words into the vast sand-art mural of David “Beach Tagger” Hilliam.
Please register interest to diane@goingwestfest.co.nz
RAIN DATE: 16th November
We’re thrilled to host the fourth edition of our now-famous Poetry at Piha event. This free, public workshop is – in essence – a trip to the beach with one of our finest writers and literary mentors, Anne Kennedy. What could be nicer than that? The inspiration of nature, the power of literature, and the sweeping beauty of large-scale sand art to wrap it all up: it’s a lot!
Anne will take us through a gentle but thought-provoking workshop under the pohutukawa at North Piha. Then we’ll all take our work to the beach to meet with David “Beach Tagger” Hilliam to entwine our words, our kupu and our visions with his own beach mural.
Anne’s poetry workshop is easy, exploratory and fun. She’ll help you find your tone, select words, and work poetical wizardry like crystalising time, resolving insurmountable challenges and telling secrets, memories and hopes to the sand, the sea and the seagulls
In the words of a former participant; “That was a special day for me – the sharing of our deeper feelings with complete strangers, subtle but powerful. The grounding of the ocean, the senses, the truth.”
Special thanks to the Waitākere Ranges Local Board for their ongoing support to Going West Trust and for making this unique connection with nature a reality.
You can see samples of previous editions of this event here and here.
NZ Poetry Shelf 