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.
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.
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 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.
Two poems for the preservation of Thomson Gorge, Central Otago
I Dunstan Daybook
The undescribed moth The unrecorded native daisy The unsung rowanberries The unheeded bidibid The unimpeded lacebark The unrecognizable cushion-plant laid down on its gravel sofa The unapologetic Spaniards The unsuspecting blue tussock browsing the false dawn The unrelenting South Copper Tussock The unassuming Woolyhead Hence to me, Molly Gray, Low creatures of the Thomson Gorge Road!
II. Rise & Shine Gully
There is a dancer in the gully. In Cromwell-broom and hard-tussock, in blue wheat grass. In the unrehearsed choreography of falling rock, shadow of passing bird, cloud drift. Switch off the hydrometer and rock-hammer, the stamper and pounder. Quiet the hydraulic shovel and excavator. Allow us this zig-zag stream, its curvaceous body, our handknit, our matagouri. And Mount Aspiring an otherworldly tent pitched on the horizon. There is a dancer in the gully, and the first synchronized bulbs of rumoured spring. And this her last dance. Everything disguised as every other thing: elusive lizard skin, bejewelled rockface, speargrass. The blue thread of our crooked stream. The earth on its axis. There is a dancer in Rise and Shine Gully, and humanity adrift on its own star.
Gregory O’Brien
A brief note on poetics and politics
Poetry can be political, but politics is rarely poetic. These days, on the national as well as the world stage, spoken and written language has been reduced, denigrated and dragged through the mud. Luxon. Bishop. Shane Jones. Seymour. A sign of the times, maybe: this assault on language has been accompanied by a cold-blooded, hard-hearted approach to life in the broader human sphere and in relation to the natural world beyond. –
In recent months, photographer Bruce Foster and I have been completing a commissioned book about Central Otago (Tailings, Ugly Hill Press, forthcoming in 2026). Our many-facetted view of the region has now had to accommodate the advent of the Santana Mining Corporation’s plans to destroy a truly remarkable location in Central Otago. Bruce and I have both lived in that region and, like the local people, we know what there is to lose.
Central Otago is not a ‘mineral reserve’ (Shane Jones’s monstrous phrase), it is our collective body and our soul.
There is no up-side to mining. You only need to look around you. I have spent time every year since the 1980s in the Waihi district. Gold-mining has wrecked that town. The place never boomed, the population never thrived, as we were told it was going to. Occasionally entire houses collapse into sink-holes left by previous mining misadventures. When you stand at the edge of the open cast mine and stare down into it, you don’t see hundreds of happy, well-paid, skilled workers—you find yourself staring into The Void. No one is there. There might be two or three oversized vehicles groaning beneath the weight of earth piled into them. Waihi lost its soul. It’s the same story wherever you find a gold mine. The town of Palmerston, the nearest ‘centre’ to the gigantic, open cast mine at Macraes in Otago, has gone backwards or, at best, weirdly sideways.
At the present time, it is hard to think about ‘poetics’ as distinct from the rest of life. In this era when the powers-that-be are intent on replacing ‘education’ with ‘training’, and we are expected to put all else aside in the interests of Unregulated Progress—the ‘Fast Track’ / ‘Quick Buck’ / ‘Drill Baby Drill’ mentality that stalks the corridors of power and is poisoning our public life. As Henry David Thoreau once wrote: ‘A few are riding, but the rest are run over.’
Gregory O’Brien
Gregory O’Brien’s recent books are House and Contents (AUP, 2022) and Don Binney–Flight Path (AUP, 2023). Recent activities have been focussed on the wider Pacific region (he is currently working on a book of poetry and art with John Pule) and Central Otago. Last year Gregory was made an Honorary Geographer by the New Zealand Geographic Society. A short film of Greg reading ‘Thomson Gorge Road Song’ (text published on Poetry Shelf last month) can be viewed here:
Also filmed in Thomson Gorge, October 2025, the ‘dancer in valley’ can be seen in situ here:
Thanks to Bruce Foster for shooting both videos. Acknowledgements also to Sue Healey, Richard Harvey and Jen Bornholdt.
Save the date… Sweet Mammalian’s twelfth issue is almost upon us! Join us for readings from the new issue of Aotearoa’s most hot-blooded lit mag, and general merriment to follow.
This event is free to attend. We will provide light victual refreshment and beverages are available at your leisure from the bar.
The disappeared, the totalled, those who ain’t there; whether hollow, solid, reinforced, bolted or cemented to a pedestal, nothing is as invisible as a monument, until you turn the spotlight on it; as ghostbusters prepare to topple another statue.
The past may be best understood as the bust on a tottering plinth of a complete unknown being wheeled away; a once majestic face on currency and buildings torn down and cast into the oubliette of a long time ago.
Let them who are without sin take up the correction chisel, to hammer, smash, throw down in a puddle of blood, sweat and tears, the unwanted; surplus to requirements of the present; to cast out the decapitated, sink them at sea.
There are multitudes in the cancelled lines, depedestalled saviours awaiting de-installation, deconstruction, decolonisation, defenestration. They raise a monument to replace a monument. Statues of different sizes await comeuppance. Each bust gone bust and busted down to size.
Those once approved of are now torn out of book pages; disambiguated, declassified deselected, renumbered, and deported; certain to have gone for a burton; at one with the thrown shoe, the thrown stick, the thrown bomb, the torn-off limb, the over-thrown world we live in.
David Eggleton
David Eggleton lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin and was the Aotearoa New Zealand Poet Laureate between August 2019 and August 2022. The Wilder Years: Selected Poems, was published by Otago University Press in 2021, and Respirator: A Laureate Collection 2019 -2022 was published by Otago University Press in 2023. He is a co-editor of Katūīvei: Contemporary Pasifika Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand, published by Massey University Press in 2024. His poetry chapbooks include Mundungus Samizdat (2024), and his most recent poetry collection Lifting the Island was published by Red Hen Press in Pasadena, California in September 2025.
Poetry Shelf offers a bouquet of warm congratulations!
To celebrate Dinah Hawken as the 2025 recipient of the Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry, I am reposting a poem she picked from Small Stories of Devotion (Victoria University Press,1991) with her comment (Playing Favourites), an audio of her reading from Sea-light (Victoria University Press, 2021), and an extract from Wild Honey: Reading NZ Women’s Poets (Massey University Press, 2019).
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). In 2007, Hawken received the Lauris Edmond Award for Distinguished Contribution to Poetry; and her new book of poems, Peace and Quiet, is to be published in 2026. Dinah lives in Paekākāriki.
The harbour is hallucinating. It is rising above itself, halfway up the great blue hills. Every leaf of the kohuhu is shining. Cicadas, this must be the day of all days, the one around which all the others are bound to gather.
The blue agapanthus, the yellow fennel, the white butterfly, the blue harbour, the golden grass, the white verandah post, the blue hills, the yellow leaves, the white clouds, the blue book, the yellow envelope, the white paper. Here is the green verb, releasing everything.
Imagine behind these lines dozens and dozens of tiny seed-heads whispering. They are a field of mauve flowers. What they say is inexplicable to us because they speak another language, not this one written from left to right across them, made up of distinct and very subtle, ready-to-burgeon sounds.
Dinah Hawken from Small Stories of Devotion (Victoria University Press,1991)
Note on Poem
‘The harbour poems’ come from my second book of poetry, Small Stories of Devotion. It’s a book I’m very fond of, not least because the book itself is a beautiful shape, on beautiful paper and with unique images by the New Zealand artist Julia Morison. It is also a unique book in my poetry backlist since it is a narrative made up of mostly prose poems, and prose poetry in 1991 was unusual on our shelves. Looking back 30 years I see it is the book amongst my collections with the most faith in the imagery of dreams, and with my preoccupation with the Sumerian myth of Inanna, one of the earliest stories ever written. The epilogue of the book contains 36 6-line poems and it is the first three, written above Wellington harbour, I have included here.
Dinah Hawken
Dinah reads from Sea-light
Dinah Hawken reads ‘Haze’, ‘The sea’ and ‘Faith’ from Sea-light, Victoria University Press, 2021
In my review of Dinah’s collection, Sea-light I wrote: “reading her deftly crafted poems is akin to standing in an outside clearing and reconnecting with sky, earth, water, trees, birds, stones. It is personal, it can be political, and it is people rich”.
Extract from Wild Honey
I fell in love with the poetry of Dinah Hawken, particularly her collection Small Stories of Devotion, published in 1991, when I was writing my Master’s thesis on the Italian novelist Francesca Duranti and her myriad narrative movements.
As much as I was enjoying stepping into another language at that time, Hawken offered a different direction: she inspired me to write poetry. I have always thought of Hawken as a sky poet because she leads me to a state of contemplation; to see beauty, strangeness and disquiet.
Hawken’s collection It Has No Sound and Is Blue won the 1987 Commonwealth Poetry Prize for a debut book of poems.13 Mostly written in New York, the poems record Hawken’s intricate relationships with the city — the homeless, the leafless trees, the fierce cold, the lack of balance, the unwarranted deaths, the points of neglect — as well as reflections on New Zealand.
In these poems, Hawken zooms in on the way miniature details can lead to larger ideas, and the way she could find connections to stillness and quiet amid the clatter of a major city. The poems both delay and promote movement; she deliberates on things, branching out in a range of directions with physical attachments and floating ideas. In ‘Writing Home’, a long sequence of sonnets in couplets, a slow contemplation of the city is important to Hawken:
Since you left the trees have been standing against the snow making those small inexplicable gestures
children make in their sleep. Today they were strictly still. They gave nothing away, as if
they themselves were the dead of winter.
from ‘Writing Home’ (It Has No Sound and Is Blue, VUP, 1987)
Hawken is ‘acutely aware of [her] human breathing’ as she stands next to trees that are barely alive. This description of such a sensation is a hallmark of her poetry: keen to absorb intricate patterns, especially from nature, she produces poetry that abounds with life.
Hawken’s poetry favours space as though she wants room for her poems to breathe: on the white page, in the pause at the end of the line, and in the way both poet and reader have room to move in the poem. But the physical world is equally important. She is fascinated by surfaces and depths, and the way the physical world ignites all senses: ‘Stay in the physical world you say. / Take your boots and socks off.’15 The poem ‘Stone’, for example, delights in a stone’s physicality as well as in attributes that are much harder to discern:
Plain the call of a noun
of balance and beauty.
Stone.
from ‘Stone’ (Ocean and Stone, VUP, 2015)
Hawken conveys the plainness of objects with a plainness of words, and she often returns to the same object to uncover new revelations. If you hold a stone in your mind as a poet surprising connections rise to the surface:
Stony this, stony that. They are cold today, these stones on the desk. Stone cold. Stone blind. Stone deaf. Heart, reception, stare, silence. They remember the slingshot.
from ‘Stone’ (Ocean and Stone)
For Hawken, ‘[w]riting, at least, is going somewhere’; to write is to take risks, to ponder and to feel:
To write is to live on a balcony: the outlook is great, the air is still, roads are not yet taken.
The air is unpredictable. The elements are downright dangerous.
from ‘How far’ (The leaf-ride, VUP, 2011)
Hawken’s movement between the physical world and drifting thought might be a way of travelling through time and across the land, among people and within herself: ‘We try reading between the pages, the stars. / We’re attached to a planet of ocean and stone.’ Her poetry is people-dependent, and she is as attentive to strangers as she is to people she knows. Sometimes her pronouns are personal. In ‘Welcome’, the grandfather, for example, holds his smiling granddaughter in his arms; in ‘Sixteen months, co-creation’, ‘[s]he is the question and / the answer and the question again’. At other times, her pronouns move beyond the personal to belong to anyone. Humanity is always under scrutiny. It bothers her that we live surrounded by digital screens, for example; they limit life and induce loneliness. When she considers a tree, she confronts another concern that we must face:
[. . .] It reminded me I had a family and the company of friends. It reminded me I had a home by a heavy and beautiful sea. It told me that we live in a world of treeless, make-shift cities, cities that are flickering and maybe drowning.
from ‘A screen is a screen’ (Ocean and Stone)
If Hawken’s poetry is entrancing in its musicality, mystery, physicality and space, speaking out about the state of the world is equally significant to her:
If we live in the light or the dark too long, being human, we go blind. We are suspects, all of us, in a cruel climate. Is it ok to speak out in this world-wide room?
from ‘The question of cruelty’ (The leaf-ride)
Small Stories of Devotion features the meandering, looping threads of a woman writing, dreaming and loving. The poems keep repeating: ‘she wants me to talk simply and to reach you’. Feminine motifs flourish in a sequence that is divided into the four quarters of the moon, and feed a narrative that explores women’s friendships, rape, death, birth, cancer, Sumerian goddesses, muted woman, the outspoken woman, academic thinking, history, love, subtle politics, blatant politics, gardening, mourning, this language, another language, stones, the ocean, flowers, a hallucinating harbour, low clouds, small ponds, the struggles between men and women, hands, bodies, hearts.
After twenty-five years of reading Dinah Hawken, I am still finding fresh reading tracks in her work. Phrases that blaze in multiple directions still catch my eye:
‘Oh let’s recognise the silence so composing her’
from ‘Memory’ (Small Stories of Devotion, VUP, 1991)
Hawken’s ‘her’ might reference the silence of ‘the friend who has died’ or the recurring refrain of women who have been misheard, ignored, shut down, mistranslated, spoken over. Across a lifetime of writing Hawken has given ‘her’ a kaleidoscopic voice:
Who is she? She is trimming the smallest fingernails, she is threading honeysuckle through trellis. She is the context, the swell, the breathable air. She is singing, she is swinging the boy on the swing in the park. She is fluent and steady and unpaid.
from ‘She is Kissed Three Times’ (Small Stories of Devotion)
It’s getting colder as the flames rise from the bonfires, real and virtual. See how they flicker in the darkling air.
What is happiness in a suddenly unfamiliar world? What happens to us once the old connections spark and disappear? In this new poetry collection, with his characteristic humanity, intelligence and humour, Harry Ricketts writes of youth, hope, books and writers, and the friendships through which we come to know ourselves. Included in this book are poems about finding one’s way through a world altered by loss, and the magical thinking that sustains us.
Harry Ricketts is a poet and literary scholar and has published around 30 books. He has lived in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, since 1981. Until his retirement in 2022, he was a professor in the English Programme at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. His books include the internationally acclaimed The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling (1999) and Strange Meetings: The Lives of the Poets of the Great War (2010). Recent poetry collections include Winter Eyes (2018) and Selected Poems (2021). With historian David Kynaston, he is the co-author of Richie Benaud’s Blue Suede Shoes: The Story of an Ashes Classic (Bloomsbury, 2024). His two most recent books with Te Herenga Waka University Press are the memoir First Things (2024) and the poetry collection Bonfires on the Ice (2025).
Steve Braunias is a multiple award-winning author, columnist, journalist and editor. He writes for the New Zealand Listener, serves as the literary editor of Newsroom, and is the author of 14 books. Steve was part of The New Zealand Herald reporting team who won Best Coverage of a Major News Event at the 2025 Voyager Media Awards for their coverage of the Polkinghorne trial.
NZ Poetry Shelf 