Alexandra reads and talks poetry
Alexandra Cherian (she/they) is a filmmaker, writer, and girltwink extraordinaire from Te Whanganui-a-Tara. She has been published in bad apple, Takahē, Starling and Overcom among others, and is a founding member of queer filmmaking collective The New New. In 2025, she completed her Masters in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters.
This evening, on 27 November, the National Library is celebrating 60 years of the Library with a ‘Laureates line up’ — a rare gathering of nearly all living New Zealand Poets Laureate. Enjoy readings from legends like Elizabeth Smither, Jenny Bornholdt, Michele Leggott, Cilla McQueen, Ian Wedde, Karl Stead, Selina Tusitala Marsh, David Eggleton, Chris Tse, and Robert Sullivan, with Fergus Barrowman as MC.
6pm – 8pm, National Library, Wellington
It is also a chance to celebrate our new Poet laureate, Robert Sullivan. From my extended shelf of favourite poems by Robert, I have chosen a poem that has travelled with me for a long time. I posted this poem last year to launch my ongoing Playing Favourites series. The comments I wrote in 2024 still stand. This is why poetry matters. This is why honouring a poet who has gifted us so much through his sublime poetry collections matters.
Robert also reads a few poems.
I highly recommended Robert’s most recent collection, Hopurangi / Songcatcher (AUP) which was shortlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award at the 2025 Ockham Book Awards. I wrote: “I often use the word ‘breathtaking’ when I am tagging a poetry collection I love, and yes, poetry can take your breath away, but after reading Robert Sullivan’s sublime new collection, Hopurangi—Songcatcher: Poems from the Maramataka, I am musing on the idea, ‘breath-enhancing’.’ — Paula Green, Poetry Shelf
This is a day to celebrate poetry, to listen to poets, to read poems, and to advance the connecting and vital strength of words.
a reading
a poem
Voice carried my family, their names and stories
Their names and fates were spoken.
The lands and seas of the voyage were spoken.
Calls of the stroke at times were spoken.
Celestial guidance, sightings, were spoken.
Prescriptions – medical and spiritual – were spoken.
Transactions – physical and emotional – were spoken.
Family (of), leaders (to), arguments, were well spoken.
Elders (of), were well spoken.
Burials were spoken.
Welcomes at times were spoken.
Futures lined up by pasts, were spoken.
Repeating the spoken were spoken.
Inheritance, inheritors, were spoken.
Tears at times were spoken.
Representations at first were spoken.
The narrator wrote the spoken.
The readers saw the spoken!
Spoken became unspoken.
[Written froze spoken.]
Robert Sullivan
from voice carried my family, Auckland University Press, 2005
When Robert Sullivan’s poetry collection, Star Waka, entered the world in 1999, it felt like a significant arrival. This was a poet who sang from his past present future, his ancestors friends loved ones. His collection voice carried my family particularly resonated with me, and it is a book I draw from my shelves when I crave nourishment.
This poem. This poem in particular, that speaks even more deeply to me today, when voice brings us together across the motu, bringing us together through stories, songs, history, aroha and the respect that matters.
This poem that reminds me, so acutely, so vitally, how much voice matters, how much a poem can matter – when the world our nation and our people hang by a fragile thread. When I hang by a fragile thread.
Today this poem, this precious poem, is a poem to hold close.
Robert Sullivan is Aotearoa New Zealand’s 14th Poet Laureate. He belongs to Ngāpuhi (Ngāti Manu, Ngāti Hau / Ngāti Kaharau) and Kāi Tahu (Kāti Huirapa ki Puketeraki) iwi and is also of Irish descent. He has won many literary awards. His most recent books are Hopurangi / Songcatcher (AUP) which was shortlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award at the 2025 Ockham Book Awards, Koe: An Aotearoa Ecopoetry Anthology coedited with Janet Newman (Otago University Press 2024) and a collection of essays coedited with Anna Jackson and Dougal McNeill, Te Whāriki: Reading Ten New Poets from Aotearoa (AUP 2025). Robert is Associate Professor in Creative Writing at Massey University. He lives in Ōamaru.
Auckland University Press page
My recent book, Slender Volumes, is made of 300 seven-line poems. Really they are 300 stories, told in different modes: the realistic, the autobiographical, the historical and the surreal. One, popular with audiences when read aloud, is number 216, which concerns Mr Moth and his dairy:
There was a dairy at the end of the road owned by Mr Moth. Everybody knew it as Moth’s dairy. He sold ice blocks made in a special mould – the stem being a popsicle with a large wing on each side. The ice blocks came in different colours and were named Emerald Surprise, Ruby Splendour and, best of all, the Tiger Moth. The dairy always shut its door at dusk. No fluorescent lights were switched on. Mr Moth liked the darkness.
What seems to be a figment of my imagination, in the surreal mode, in fact came from a walk around Onehunga Bay Lagoon. On this particular walk my wife Amala and I encountered an old-time resident who told us that many years ago there used to be a dairy opposite our house on Normans Hill Road. The dairy was owned by a Mr Moss. I misheard him, and thought he said “Mr Moth”. This led to a reverie about Mr Moth and his dairy, which I wrote down when I got home.
Richard von Sturmer is a New Zealand writer. He was born on Auckland’s North Shore in 1957. His recent works are the acclaimed memoir, This Explains Everything (Atuanui Press, 2016), Postcard Stories (Titus Books, 2019), and Resonating Distances (Titus Books, 2022).
In 2020 he was the University of Waikato’s writer-in-residence. His book Walking with Rocks, Dreaming with Rivers: My Year in the Waikato (Titus Books, 2023) was written during his residency.
In 2025 his new collection of poetry, Slender Volumes (Spoor Books, 2024), was shortlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the 2025 Ockham Book Awards.
Wheat in the East
The body you gave me’s wearing
thin: I won’t patch a scarecrow’s
coat. The plains of the east I tilled
are stippled with wheat; magpies nest
in the hair of my head, my heart is
all marching feet. This night I lie
beside my wife; the moon creaks over
the sill: I breathe, “You’re a tinny sod!”
and tilt in the coffin of sleep. I dream
of what’s left in this sliver of life,
the reins my hands can’t reach.
Jeffrey Paparoa Holman
London 1993
This poem was written in London in the mid-1990s, at a time when I was working in a central city bookshop – Waterstones – and devoting myself to writing. Short stories and poetry, going along to writing programmes at City Lit adult education centre in WC2H, and making friends with Dylan Horrocks, also at the same Charing Cross Road branch, doing his drawings and cartoon strips in lunch breaks, evenings and weekends. We all now know the result of his apprenticeship to the art. Quite when or why this poem emerged, it’s too far gone to remember, but it’s fair to say, is part of a self-appointed midlife apprenticeship to my lifelong writing urges. It was time to get serious and ‘Wheat in the East’ belongs there. 1997, I was back in New Zealand for good – in both senses – returning to university to finish a rusty, abandoned 1970s BA. I decided the following year, to put together a self-published 36 pp chapbook, with Johnathan of Molten Media as my guide. In 1998, we produced Flood Damage, where this poem, with many other London-birthed works appear. I was away. There was no stopping now. I couldn’t know it, but I was on my way to publishing what became As Big As A Father, with Steele Roberts, in 2002. The title poem here had also been written in our London council flat. This poem was part of that journey, so resides in my heart, with affection.
Jeffrey Paparoa Holman writes poetry, short fiction, history and memoir. He has published seven volumes of poetry; Best of Both Worlds (history, 2010); The Lost Pilot (memoir, 2013); Now When it Rains (memoir, 2017). As Big As A Father (Steele Roberts, 2002) was shortlisted in the Montana Book Awards, Poetry, 2003. Best of Both Worlds: the story of Elsdon Best and Tutakangahau (2010) was shortlisted in the Ernest Scott Prize, History (2011, Australia). His most recent work, a family history, Lily, Oh Lily – Searching for a Nazi ghost, is published by Canterbury University Press.
volume turned down to 7
Slowly it dawns, the need to listen
to the faint grief of a mourning cello, the sky’s blue jug
pouring out a second helping of custard sun,
this music that vies with a lost bee and a kereru’s three-note
flight path beyond our open door. Nick Tipping’s low voice,
sounding like a pilot’s announcement: Enjoy this shadow of trees,
this laughter of water. From among a shock of leaves, a tūī’s semi-colon,
a piano note, a caught dragonfly cupped in the soft sweat of a child’s hand.
The lowest black key repeating—a lawnmower four houses down.
Nick corrects himself, ‘Rachmaninoff,’ he says.
My grandson comes down to visit from upstairs, says,
‘I thought you were still in bed.’
No. I’m here just awake and no more even though
it’s now past noon. I’m here taking it all in. The Concert Programme
in summer, volume turned down to 7, the fret of a pīwakawaka. No.
I stand corrected. Vaughan Williams’ Lark Ascending.
Kay McKenzie Cooke
Although Kay McKenzie Cooke (Waitaha, Kāti Māmoe, Kāi Tahu) lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin, she continues to hold a deep connection to Murihiku Southland, the province where she was born. She is the author of four poetry collections and three novels.
Sue Wootton wins $1000 Poetry Prize
International Writers’ Workshop NZ is delighted to announce that Ōtepoti Dunedin poet Sue Wootton is the 2025 winner of The Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems judged by Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington poet Anna Jackson. Richard Smith from Porirua is runner-up.
Sue receives the prestigious $1000 prize for her sequence ‘Holding Patterns: seven songs of pots, jars, bowls and vases’. She says she is honoured and delighted to be awarded this year’s Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems and thanks the Grattan family for making this award possible, IWW, and judge Anna Jackson.
The sequence was initially inspired by the poems of Ruth Dallas, which are studded with references to pots and vases, and by contemplating the question, ‘Is the clay / Subject to the potter / Or the potter to the clay?’ This led Sue to write about a set of hand-thrown glazed bowls (made by Ōtepoti Dunedin ceramicist Liz Rowe), each of which has two words pressed into it. She responded to these in a series of bowl-shaped sonnets, each poem contained within a defined form.
Sue is a poet and novelist and the publisher at Otago University Press. Her most recent poetry collection isThe Yield (Otago University Press, 2017), a finalist in the 2018 Ockham New Zealand book awards. In 2023 Sue travelled to France as the 50th New Zealand writer to hold the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship.
Richard Smith is awarded runner-up for his sequence, ‘Mango Rains’, The sequence was drawn from his time while living in Phnom Penh. and draws attention to small markers of hope within the hardship of daily life in Cambodia, while acknowledging the shadow of genocide. The sequence also encounters Cambodia’s flora and seasons, the Khmer people, classical dance, crafts, work and play. In the distant past Richard’s work appeared in half a dozen publications in Aotearoa New Zealand. More recent writing can be found in Ekstasis, A Fine Line, Balloons Literary Journal, London Grip, and the anthology Now and Then (Landing Press). Richard studied writing poetry at Victoria University of Wellington and publishing and writing at Whitireia.
Anna Jackson said judging The Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems was an honour and a pleasure. She said there was a wonderful range of approaches to writing sequences amongst the entries. The most successful sustained one idea, and didn’t combine too many formatting or punctuation styles but brought the poetry alive with vivid, concrete imagery and a sense of direction or purpose. On choosing her winner, Anna said that of her short-listed entries, this is the one she kept returning to.
Anna also particularly highly commended two Tamaki Makarau Auckland poets, SK Grout for ‘Ghost Nets’ and Edna Heled for ‘riding a two humped camel in the vampire land on milk and honey’.
The Kathleen Grattan Prize of a Sequence of Poems was established by the late Jocelyn Grattan in memory of her mother. International Writers’ Workshop NZ has had the honour of running the competition for its members since its inception in 2009, and over the years it has been won by both established and emerging poets. The Prize is the smaller of the two poetry competitions funded by the Jocelyn Grattan Charitable Trust, the other being the biennial Kathleen Grattan Award, run by Landfall / Otago University Press.
International Writers’ Workshop NZ (IWW), which is celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2026, aims to encourage new writers and inspire more experienced writers with workshops and writing competitions covering a range of genres, as well as poetry, throughout the year. Workshops are held twice monthly from February to November and alternate between rooms at St Aidans Church in Auckland’s Northcote, and Zoom.
Harry reads from Bonfires on the Ice, along with earlier poems.
Harry Ricketts taught for many years in the English Programme at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. He has published around 30 books, including literary biographies, essays and twelve collections of poems (most recently, Selected Poems). First Things, published by Te Herenga Waka Press, is the first instalment of a two-volume memoir. He lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara/Wellington and is mad about cricket and coffee. Persuasion is his favourite novel, Les Enfants du Paradis his favourite movie. Bonfires on the Ice has just appeared from Te Herenga Waka Press.
Te Herenga Waka University Press page
cos anywhere’s safer than sleepin shallow on queen street in
deep night never deep enuf tho to hide her from dem young
ones wit their shark skin suits and radar brows made for
catchin jumpy heart-beats and hers would let out an irregular
vibration like a wounded echo in a sinkhole leadin em direct
to her & lee (they been together 2 years since she were kickt
outta home out west and she aint never been back) and it’d
take jus one of dem young ones to land her one in the jaw
smash her teeth in top to bottom leavin a hole too big to
whistle thru too small to cry over but even then she still is
pretty as a petal for an old gal in her twenties lee says and
she’d laugh and show him her pretty bloody gums and go wit
a shrug n short memory to the hospital where they’d fix her
up proper cos they already knows her from last time the day
she lay dazed on the concrete next to lee wit her ear to the
pavement knowin she could hear the water of the waihorotiu
flowin to swellin under the sewer below in a direction only
she could calculate wit her inbuilt compass her north star
hearin it movin not stoppin magnetic all the way and as
long as it never stood still never stopped stagnant she knew
it would get to where it were goin cos she could hear it go
torrential and it sounded alive and she understood that
Carin Smeaton
from Tales of the Waihorotiu (Titus Books, 2017)
Playing favourites: Why she quit Queen at night by Carin Smeaton
This poem is from Carin’s collection Tales of the Waihorotiu (Titus Books, 2017). It was selected by then NZ Poet Laureate Selina Tusitala Marsh for the anthology Best New Zealand Poems. I got to know it because I was doing the admin for the website at the time. At the reading for BNZP 2017, as part of the IIML’s Writers on Mondays series, I chose to read this poem. Every time I read it, in my head or out loud, it always brings tears to my eyes.
The image of the rough-sleeping woman listening to the Waihorotiu stream is a very poignant one. Before the city of Auckland was built, Queen Street was a gully with a stream running down it. Aotea Square was a swampy area. Now the Waihorotiu has been covered over and channelled into brick sewers, and the former swamp is a paved area, and the Aotea centre. I think of the woman in this poem and the stream as being kindred spirits who have both been subjugated by capitalism. Commerce is given priority over people and over nature. But, both woman and stream retain their inherent power. It is important to note that in Aotearoa New Zealand, Māori women are disproportionately affected by homelessness, with a report in 2024 finding that four out of five unhoused women are Māori. So there is a very significant layer in this text involving colonisation and structural inequities. I am always amazed by the potential of poetry to convey big, difficult and upsetting things within a small amount of words – Carin is a poet who is adept at this.
In 2011, artist Barry Lett (who died in 2017) proposed uncovering the stream and turning upper Queen Street into a garden. What an awesome idea! I hope we see more nature-focused urban design in the future, for ecological reasons but also for our own spiritual health.
Airini Beautrais
Barry Lett article
Homeless women report
Listen to Carin read the poem on Best NZ Poem 2017 page
Carin Smeaton lives in Tāmaki Makaurau with whānau. Her fourth collection, Age oƒ Orpah, will be published early next year. Orpah is the third part of an unholy trinity, accompanying Hibiscus Tart and Death Goddess Guide To Self Love into the infinite centre. All published by Titus Books and illustrated by her gifted Sydney based niece Kansas Smeaton. They’re fundraising for Orpah’s publication on Boosted if you want to check her out.
Airini Beautrais writes poetry, fiction and creative non fiction. Her most recent work is the essay collection The Beautiful Afternoon (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024). She lives in Whanganui.
Visitors with Intent
On the radio, Jesse’s in Dunedin, interviewing locals
spinning our attractions, the usual tropes, wildlife,
lack of traffic, the cold, how much they love it.
‘Safe for students,” someone says. I question
the veracity, knowing how many land in ED
on Saturday nights, knowing about peepers and worse.
A car follows us down the road, negotiating the slips
and stops at the entrance to the carpark.
I turn around from the path, notice again the car.
At the top of the dunes, a man is looking for sea lions
to show his visiting niece, ‘one here Tuesday,’
I say, ‘but most gone now for winter.’
No waves to catch today so the beach is all ours,
the air fresh, the sky unclouded, the island uninhabited.
Hip-sore, I go back first, open the boot. A waterfall of glass
falling at my feet, the back window shattered. ‘A flicked stone,’
I say, believing in random accidents, unable to take in
the chunk of concrete lying amongst the shards.
Not until we get home do I notice the absences, red bag,
with emergency hats, mittens, first aid kit, and remember
the car, the occupants watching. I think of that word
I took issue with—‘safe’. But I am for now.
Diane Brown
Diane Brown runs Creative Writing Dunedin. Her eight published books range over poetry, novels, and memoirs. She has recently completed a hybrid collection, Growing Up Late and is now working on a prose/poetic exploration of female ancestors, Straight as A Pound of Candles.
Aruna reads a selection of her poetry
Aruna Joy Bhakta (she/her) grew up in New Plymouth, and went on to study her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in Classics Studies. She currently lives in Nelson, where she is completing further studies in Archives and Record Management, and is working in archives. Her previous work can be found in issues of Starling, Sweet Mammalian, Circular Publishing, and the Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook.
NZ Poetry Shelf 