Author Archives: Paula Green

Poetry Shelf Protests: an introduction

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Hotel Emergencies

The fire alarm sound: is given as a howling sound. Do
       not use the lifts. The optimism sound: is given as the
       sound of a man brushing his teeth. Do not go to bed.
       The respectability sound: is given as a familiar honking
       sound. Do not run, do not sing. The dearly-departed
       sound: is given as a rumble in the bones. Do not enter
       the coffin. The afterlife sound: is given as the music of
       the spheres. It will not reconstruct. The bordello sound:
       is given as a small child screaming. Do not turn on the
       light. The accident sound: is given as an ambulance
       sound. You can hear it coming closer, do not crowd the
       footpaths. The execution sound: is given as the sound of
       prayer. Oh be cautious, do not stand too near

 or you will surely hear: the machinegun sound, the weeping
      mother sound, the agony sound, the dying child sound:
      whose voice is already drowned by the approaching
      helicopter sound: which is given as the dead flower
      sound, the warlord sound, the hunting and fleeing and
      clattering sound, the amputation sound, the bloodbath
      sound, the sound of the President quietly addressing
      his dinner; now he places his knife and fork together (a
      polite and tidy sound) before addressing the nation

and making a just and necessary war sound: which is given
      as a freedom sound (do not cherish memory): which is
      given as a security sound: which is given as a prisoner
      sound: which is given again as a war sound: which is
      a torture sound and a watchtower sound and a firing
      sound: which is given as a Timor sound: which is given
      as a decapitation sound (do not think you will not gasp
      tomorrow): which is given as a Darfur sound: which is
      given as a Dachau sound: which is given as a dry river-
      bed sound, as a wind in the poplars sound: which is
      given again as an angry god sound:

which is here as a Muslim sound: which is here as a Christian
      sound: which is here as a Jewish sound: which is here as
      a merciful god sound: which is here as a praying sound;
      which is here as a kneeling sound: which is here as a
      scripture sound: which is here as a black-wing sound: as
      a dark-cloud sound: as a black-ash sound: which is given
      as a howling sound: which is given as a fire alarm sound:

which is given late at night, calling you from your bed (do
      not use the lifts): which is given as a burning sound, no,
      as a human sound, as a heartbeat sound: which is given
      as a sound beyond sound: which is given as the sound
      of many weeping: which is given as an entirely familiar
      sound, a sound like no other, up there high in the smoke
      above the stars

Bill Manhire
from Lifted, Te Herenga Waka University Press (VUP), 2005

At the weekend it felt like a monster had taken over all our rooms and was scoffing up joy and fortitude and hope and leaving dribbles of greed and ignorance and violence on the wooden floors. I got to thinking about protest. I got to thinking about the ban the bomb badges I pinned to my school bag in 1969. I got to thinking about the Vietnam protestors, Martin Luther King, Bob Dylan, the women’s liberation movements, Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring. I got to think about doing my Italian doctorate and reading about clientelism, corrupt governments, writers who challenged injustice and inequity, as I considered the ink in the pen of Italian women writing across a century.

And I got to thinking about how we have never stopped writing protest poems in Aotearoa.

Like many others, my heart is breaking at the situation in Gaza and in the Ukraine, at the recent refusal of our coalition government to recognise the Palestine State, at Israel’s interception of aid and peace flotillas overnight. I can not stop mourning our inhumanity. The senseless murder and starvation of men, women, children, aide workers, journalists.

I decided to create a third new series on Poetry Shelf entitled Protest. I want to feature protest poems from various decades and I want to feature specific issues.

But what is a protest poem? Poetry protest can take many forms: from subtle spotlights to fierce outrage. Protest includes placards and banners with overt messages, loud and clear. It includes stories that render inhumanity, injustice and struggle visible, whether in journalism, fiction, poetry or the oral stories we share. But protest can also be concealed in symbols and parables, especially in societies run by despots and tyrants. I have been wondering if this might be in store for the USA.

Many of us are finding it impossible not to make room for protest in our writing, for grief and helplessness.

How to write in such damaged and damaging times?

Today I’m looking at damp patches of Waitākere sky with Jimmy Cliff on full volume, the words of beloved sixties and seventies song writers streaming in my ears, thinking Bob and Joni and Neil. And yes, it is a wide wide world, it’s a rough-rough road, and yes it’s still inhumane fighting, genocide, greed and abuse. Are we sitting in Jimmy’s limbo with the world on fire and entrenched suffering in the lands? Waiting for the dice to roll. Today even my morning is a dense dark heavy personal patch, but I’m thinking of Helen Clark, John Campbell, Anne Salmond, Tusiata Avia, the frontline workers, journalists, songwriters, politicians, poets, caregivers, forest and ocean guardians, so many people across the globe who are working against all odds to hold onto the light. To share the light. To gift the light.

I have decided to dedicate my first Protest post to Gaza (Friday Oct 3rd). I’ve already posted Gaza poems on the blog but I’ve decided to bring them together along with some others; poets and poems standing together, heart alongside heart, voice alongside voice. Some poets were unsure their poems were protest poems, but I think of the Poetry Shelf protest series as a way of shining light, a way of showing support, a way of saying no to inhumanity injustice cruelty and all manner of -isms.

Bill Manhire has posted a number of Gaza poems on social media and gave permission to repost one in tomorrow’s post, but he also mentioned how his poem ‘Hotel Emergencies’, a poem written during the Iraq conflict 20 years ago, “seems to live beyond its moment”. And I agree. And this is why I want to travel through the decades and revisit poetry protest across a century.

To have heard Bill read ‘Hotel Emergencies’ at a festival, one of my all-time go-to poems, was utterly memorable. You can listen to Bill read the poem. There are certain poems we carry with us, and for me this is one of them.

On Facebook this morning, Ariana Tikao mentioned going to the Catalyst 22 launch last night at Space Academy in Ōtautahai. She read her poem ‘Prayer’, a poem which “stitches together the memories held in the whenua at Ōnawe with the genocide taking place in Gaza right now”. She asks us where is the prayer that will forge peace. She speaks of the flotilla, of the suffering: unbearable unforgivable relentless.

And our hearts are breaking apart.

And we’ve got to speak shout sing and whisper, hold a vital light, hold our loved ones close, hold this precious day and take the next compassionate step whether fierce or gentle.

Let’s keep writing and sharing poetry.
And protesting.

Peace
20 May

What if I made up a poem about a house
on a hill with views of the sea and passionfruit
vines laden, and a woman knitting stories
of family connections and sublime epiphanies
into socks and scarves and comfort blankets
with an abundance of vegetables in garden plots
and fruit on the trees and soup simmering
whatever the season and how she is always content
in her own company but one day she opens
a newspaper and it is full of war and plague
and bullies and hunger and racism and side-lined
histories and abusive relationships, underfunded
hospitals and underfunded schools, and she
looks at the olive-green sea and she smells

the tomato soup simmering the fresh basil aromatic
in the air and she turns on her radio and hears
the voice of a young Palestinian student
begging the world to listen, begging for freedom
for her people and how the relentless bombs
trap everyone in houses and how aid can’t get
through and how nowhere is safe and how
everywhere is under attack, and the woman
on the hill tries to imagine the terrified children,
the lack of news and power and water, and how
the catastrophe goes deep into roots and land and home,
and how they cannot pray safely in mosques, and how when
Palestinians resist they are terrorists and their resistance
is deemed invalid, and the woman on the hill looks

at the patch of blue sky and the free-floating clouds
and puts down her knitting with its happy stitching
its loving connections and storytelling skeins
and tells the olive-green sea that we are all
human, and we all need to eat and feel safe,
to stand on soil we call home, to speak our mother
tongues, tell our grandparent stories,
and to feel the depth and caress of peace

Paula Green
20 May 2021

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Jackson McCarthy

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Uniform

Louis and I had this theory that nobody knew
we were fucking. Uniforms could do that to a bloke —
help him blend in with a crowd. Only once, at a party,
did I ever see him without the shirt, collared and blue,
the high socks and striped scarf. All day at school,
stuffed and starved, I wanted to get them off him
as a way of loving him in them. Later, those first
February afternoons, our uniforms wilted in his room.

Nobody knew. But surely we inspired envy, our moody
solitudes and companies — a chance hand on his chest,
over the school crest — or our shining morning faces
in the supermarket, shimmering back to us in the glass
jars of olives. Behind us, watching, was Jackson McCarthy,
noted homosexual. Eater of olives. Writer of poetry.

Jackson McCarthy

I read this poem first at a Starling launch party in August last year, and people really seemed to like it. It’s one thing when a poem ticks all your own personal checkboxes: desire, love, Death, time, boys, mysteries, the night, vision, dreams, happiness, the dark furniture of the radio, Arcadia, blue jeans, blond hair, the vantage point of language where words sound before they mean, the city, parties, Louis, inexplicable sorrow, the past, beauty, mirrors, consent, solitude, virginity, and you. But it’s another when a crowd of real-life people click with it, too.

I think of ‘Uniform’ as an Italian sonnet (or at least in its typographical layout it appears to be) — but then it gives us a sudden English turn at the end. And I think this formal arrangement is mimetic of the tricks the poem’s playing on its readers about author, speaker, and confession: you start the poem thinking it’s one thing, but finish realising it’s another. I was writing a number of free-verse sonnets at the time, which I felt a little guilty about: it’s like sonneteering on easy mode. But you need some sort of formal scheme, no matter how defanged, to give you resistance; something to write into. I found even the most basic measurement of the sonnet — the terminal volta at the thirteenth and fourteenth lines — to be extremely productive for a while. You do twelve lines, then you do a twirl.

I would like to think this poem has a bit of nice sound patterning, including that delicious internal rhyme in the eighth line that to my shock and horror sounds clearer, I think, than the rhyme between lines thirteen and fourteen. Well, I guess I honestly have no clue what I’m doing — but then again, I do trust my own taste, my only gift. You can’t decide in advance or preempt what mode of work will become available to you, but you can shape it with your good judgement. If I get stuck I go for a walk and think of beautiful things: boys’ faces, the music of Poulenc, my parents, the water, my life.

‘Uniform’ was first published in The Spinoff’s Friday Poem column; I’m grateful to Hera Lindsay Bird for choosing it.

Jackson McCarthy is a poet and musician from Auckland currently studying in Wellington. He is of mixed Māori and Lebanese descent. His work has been published in Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems, Landfall, Starling, The Spinoff, and elsewhere, and he currently serves as an editor at Symposia. You can read more of his work here.

Poetry Shelf review: A Shell-Print of Waves – Aramoana poems ed David Eggleton and Michelle Elvy

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A Shell-Print of Waves – Aramoana Poems
eds David Eggleton and Michelle Elvy
At the Bay | I Te Kokoru, 2025

A Shell-Print of Waves – Aramoana Poems is like a poem travel guide that draws a particular place into view with a rich stitching of visual detail. The chapbook presents poems that came out of sessions run by David Eggleton, Michelle Elvy and Madeleine Child in Aramoana in April 2024 and April 2025. The venture was run in association with Wild Dunedin while the chapbook was supported by Ōtepoti Dunedin UNESCO City of Literature.

Twenty-two poets step off from a place, Aramoana, to reflect and absorb: perhaps a writing exercise where you translate what is physically present through an array of senses, memory prompts, thought trails, word delights. A pocket guide book, and it feels like I have spent the weekend in a place unfamiliar to me. There are recurring motifs (how could there not be?): calm, storm, movement, constant change, sunlight, sky, birds, waves sand, sea. Every now and then, the presence of the writing circle filters through, exposing a process of seeing and doing.

I borrowed a few verbs from Michelle Elvy’s poem, ‘Waterways 2: our stories are wild weather’, to underline the way it’s a collection of shifting rhythms, as the poems burn grab ripple rumble puff weave carry nudge rainwash cloudswim swell pull dip.

Here’s a sample from Diane Brown’s ‘Not a matter of calm’, a poem that shifts and twists:

( . . .) We have come

to expect no day here the same.
Sometimes a flat sea and sun
to bathe in. Sometimes

we come face to face with wildness,
sea lions, leopard seals, or our shadowy
selves shifting course.

In ‘Between Aramoana Spit and Taiaroa Head’, David Eggleton amplifies both sound and image on the line, embedding the reader in a shadowy-rich scene. Here is the final stanza:

There’s a salty savour to the air; brine bubbles;
the tide’s sheen glides up over the wet, flat sand.
Shadows stretch estranged from what they shadow:
the shadow of a flounder, the shadow of an albatross,
shadow of macrocarpa, shadow of a channel marker,
shadow of a cargo ship bearing logs into chasms of the night.

Gilbert May, as the cover shows, has produced the perfect line drawings and design for the subject matter. This gorgeous wee chapbook is a perfect treat to tuck into pockets for a dose of weekend travel. Maybe I’ll pick up a pen, look about me, reflect a moment, and start writing: the flat and the wild, the shadows and the cargo.

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: ‘Rejuvenate’ by Aroha Witinitara

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Rejuvenate

Sometimes you reach a point
tipping                        breaking
where you’re wound too tight
rope                            pulled
fraying and about to break.
A fern frond folding back on itself
curling in                    instead of out
moving in the wrong direction.

Listen carefully.

Get yourself a fresh fry-bread.
A hot one that burns the soft skin of your fingertips
and oozes oil onto the plate.
Split it open down the middle and find an air-pocket inside.
Lay down in that doughy cave.
Rest your head against the velvet floor.
Eat yourself into a comfortable nook.
Watch the light filter through its thin skin and
take belly breaths of yeasty air.

You have to slow down sometimes
It’s just the way you’re built.
Wait for the flood.
A glossy golden wave of salted butter streaked with strawberry jam.
Don’t panic as it fills the cavity.
A gentle grip caressing your body, lifting you upward.
Stay a while and drink.

Aroha Witinitara

Aroha Witinitara (Ngāti Kahungunu ki Wairarapa) is a poet in their third year of study at Victoria University. They grew up in Masterton but live in Wellington now. You can find more of their work in Starling, PŪHIA, Takahē and elsewhere.

Poetry Shelf review and readings: Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2025 – breath

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Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2025 – breath
ed. Tracey Slaughter, Massey University Press

Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2025 is entitled “breath”. It is a potent theme for an anthology of poems because it generates multiple possibilities for the reader. Breath is a key component in writing a poem, just as it is a key player in our mind and body partnerships. Breath stretches into a broad-ranging field of human experience: relationships, politics, moods, self care. Breath is the vital sign of life, and that is exactly what the anthology delivers, signs of life: distinctive, diverse, captivating.

Reading the 141 poems underlines poetry cannot be forced into square boxes that limit how and why we are writing across communities in Aotearoa in 2025. There is no singular setting for style, politics, the personal, recurring motifs. Both subject matter and mood are eclectic. As I read, I have a heightened awareness of shifts in my own breathing: slow and steady, gasps, skin prickling fast. The journal will affect and attract each reader in different ways – depending upon our own predilections, our favoured reading routes.

The poems draw me into haze and blur, proximity and distance, silence and disquiet, illness and death, yearning and resignation, life love sustenance. Some poems, perhaps many of the poems, are introspective, with the writer gazing inwards and drawing out an anecdote, reflection or story that may be deeply personal or utterly invented. There is a deep vein of anxiety, a walking on broken glass kind of feeling or balancing on tight rope that might signpost the world or self or both. There is a concatenation of surprise wonder delight. Where will this poem take me?

Take Chrys Anthemum’s astonishing poem ‘Ballad of the Ancient Laundry Woman’, for example. She infuses her poem with a surreal mix of inside-outness that catches the way a dream might tilt tiny anxiety kinks in the every day to something incredibly strange and skewing. Here is the first stanza:

I saw a woman dressed
in pearls
sneak in my laundry room
last night, she put
ovaltine in my washing machine
and left a note about

a wedding I was late for so
I tossed my sparkling eyes in,

Take the intensity of connection that builds in Bella Sexton’s ‘Lady in green’, with the uplift of detail grounding a relationship, and carrying us to an ending that imparts surprise and wonder in its pulsating intimacy.

In a year or two
  these things will be closer than they are now
        waiting at the front door
     shadows against the glass

You can find me here
pressed between     water-marked pages
  in the soft opening
of the warmest ‘hello’

Hebe Kearney backtracks a city, reverse-reels Tānaki Makaurau in the glorious ‘Princess Young and the Prince Young the’. You simply need to read the whole poem to get the you-and-I reverse haunting. Gail Ingram’s terrific ‘Owning up’ is also a curling poem that is jittery at its edges of return, and looking inwards and outwards. Jitters and judders across a journal and yet the recurring patches of stillness, the utterly satisfying moment of pause, of observing sky, ‘a divine view’, Kupe’s sail. Take Emma Phillips’ extraordinary poem ‘When I leave’, for example, where a particular morning and where home, are linked to an artwork in vibrant detail. It’s a rich symphony of sound and image etched on the heart.

When I leave I see the lights of home blurring into the river /
everything stretched and warped across the water / and Van Gogh made
this moment / subtle brushstrokes and home is light in the dark / and
you don’t see the graffiti anymore / the cracks in the pavement / and
all that is compelling me to push the pedal to the floor is forgotten

/ I only see the stars in the review mirror / guiding me home

The more I read local poems, the more I am convinced poetry in Aotearoa draws upon eclectic voices, stylistic tracks, ways of breathing. So many poems in the anthology and I am holding my breath, hairs stand on end moment and I am blasted apart, physically and emotionally. Take Ash Davida Jane’s extraordinary poem, ‘visitors’, that renders death as a physical presence, a disconcerting character in the narrative. Here are the opening lines:

The death follows us down to the river.
We sit on flat stones with the death
cross-legged between us.
Crack cans of beers and cheers
being sure to make eye contact with the death.
The death dips its feet in the warmth.
We strip off and plunge ourselves in.
We eye the strength of the current
as the death wades out.

Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook includes breathtaking poems from familiar voices (Bob Orr, Sue Wootton, Fiona Kidman, Emma Neale, Erik Kennedy, Jack Ross), new favourites such as Cadence Chung and Jackson McCarthy, and also a significant range of voices new to me that I want to read more of. I wanted to invite a couple of poets to read a poem, but in the end wanted to hear the whole anthology as an audio. Ha! I have selected ten poets whose poems I loved, so you can have an audio taster and find your own listening rhythms.

In her introduction, editor Tracey navigates how breath infuses her selection, from the rhythm of writing to its connecting possibilities to sharp rage at the state of the world (here and abroad) to the oxygenating possibilities of the human and the humane. Breath is a vital tool for us as both readers and writers; it is the rhythm of the day, shadowing and guiding us through the tough, the quotidian, the awe-inspiring, offering multiple nourishments. Poetry is the breath upon the glass window – we make our own patterns, forage our own insights as we peer through a poem to worlds both intimate and external. This Poetry Shelf feature barely scratches the surface of the poem treats on offer, the featured poet, Mark Prisco, and extensive poetry reviews. Tracey has curated the best issue yet, an issue that will get you hunting down the work of a poet, or picking up a pen and writing your next poem. Let me finish with the final lines of Amber French’s ‘a love poem’ (you can hear her read the whole poem below):

The streets in this city are a garden where
flowers are made of crumbled tissues and greasy paper
it is very busy and the seeds spill everywhere

Laundry is tumbling at the laundromat
     and everyone’s clothes are so happy

All this is to say:
be strong.


Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2025 page

ten readings

Nathaniel Calhoun

‘I guess this was non-negotiable’

Nathaniel Calhoun works on biodiversity and board governance. His projects focus mostly on the Amazon basin or Aotearoa New Zealand. His poems have featured or will soon feature in the Iowa Review, Oxford Poetry, Lana Turner, DIAGRAM and many others. He reads for Only Poems and tweets @calhounpoems

Amber Abbott

‘Rest stop’

Amber Abbott is a PhD student and writer who recently completed her first poetry collection and Master’s in Professional Writing at the University of Waikato. She enjoys sad poems, complex metaphors, and trains.

Shivani Agrawal

‘we’re just collecting some info,
and then we’ll restart for you’

Shivani Agrawal is a creative writer from India, based in Hamilton, New Zealand. She has completed her Master’s in Professional Writing from the University of Waikato and works as a communications advisor. Her work has been nominated for Sundress Publications’ Best of the Net 2026 and appears in Poetry Aotearoa, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Flash Frontier, Overcomm, Mayhem, Mister Magazine and The Alipore Post.

Adrienne Jansen

‘The tent’

Adrienne Jansen has published four collections of poetry, and her poems have appeared in several publications and anthologies. She also writes fiction and non-fiction. She is co-founder of small Wellington publisher Landing Press, which publishes accessible poetry with a social edge. She lives in Tītahi Bay, north of Wellington.

Amber Esau

‘Muse’

Amber Esau is a Sā-Māo-Rish (Ngāpuhi / Manase) writer from Tāmaki Makaurau. She is a poet, storyteller, and professional bots. Always vibing at a languid pace, her work has been published both in print and online. 

Victor Billot

‘Necessary’

Victor Billot is a Dunedin writer. He is the editor of The Maritimes, the journal of the Maritime Union. His poetry has appeared in Breath: Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2025 (Massey University Press), Perch (At the Bay, 2024), and A Kind of Shelter Whakaruru-taha (Massey University Press, 2023). He has work appearing in the forthcoming Landfall Tauraka 250th issue (Otago University Press, October 2025.)

David Eggleton

‘Below Te Ua’

David Eggleton lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin and was the Aotearoa New Zealand Poet Laureate between August 2019 and August 2022. He is a former Editor of Landfall and Landfall Review Online as well as the Phantom Billstickers Cafe Reader. His The Wilder Years: Selected Poems, was published by Otago University Press in 2021 and his collection Respirator: A Laureate Collection 2019 -2022 was published by Otago University Press in March 2023. He is a co-editor of Katūīvei: Contemporary Pasifika Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand, published by Massey University Press in 2024. His poetry collection Lifting the Island was published by Red Hen Press in Los Angeles, California in September 2025.

Teresa Hakaraia

Teresa Hakaraia is of Ngāti Toa, Ngāti Raukawa, and Ngāi Tahu descent. She gained her Master of Writing with Distinction at the University of Canterbury. Having lived and travelled abroad, she now resides on the West Coast of the South Island, where she writes, collects rocks, and shares her home with her three small dogs- or rather- they share their home with her.

Zephyr Zhang 张挚

‘What was Built Over’

Zephyr Zhang 张挚 is an ex-geotechnical engineer based in Tāmaki Makaurau. They like half of the ingredients in a Jägerbomb. You can find more of Zephyr’s 
poetry in Starling, Landfall, Sweet Mammalian, Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems, and on their website.

Amber French

‘a love poem’

Amber French grew up in Waitakaruru, Hauraki Plains. Her ancestors came to Aotearoa from Somerset in England. A lover of books and reading, she lives in Sydney now, where she writes poetry and works in a school library. Her writing can be found in Takahē, Landfall, and Poetry Salzburg Review.

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Elizabeth Smither

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Effleurage

Zephyr over water (the last move
of zephyr outside a zoo)
so light, unseen to move
a liquid stroke over liquid beneath.

Skin could do this to skin
and find fish within
or heavier breathing aggrieved bears
without ice holes to speak.

Stay, the moving fingers semaphore
to bear or maggot, herring or swan
pushing their snouts towards us.
Touch is our deepest theology.

Elizabeth Smither

A young man at a reading asked if he could request this poem and I’ve always felt sorry I disappointed him, not being a memoriser of poems. It was published in A Question of Gravity (Arc Publications, 2004) and is about the French word, effleurage, for a light gliding stroking touch on the skin; it is useful for headaches before they get too severe and it is also used at the beginning or end of a massage session.

Zephyr means a soft gentle breeze, hardly perceptible (deliberately confused with zebra in the poem) and bears are too heavy. The effleurage touch is as light as you can make it but it is surprisingly comforting.  

Elizabeth Smither’s four novellas, Angel Train, will be published in November by Quentin Wilson.

Playing Favourites is a new series on Poetry Shelf. Invited poets pick a favourite poem from their backlist and write a small (or longer) piece to accompany the poem. The written accompaniment may be anecdotal, consider the poem itself, the context in which it was written (whether the times or personal), shifting relationships with the writing, even the times in which the poet is reading it now, or whatever takes the poet’s fancy.

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: ‘Object defined by activity (then), 2009’ by Sue Fitchett

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Object defined by activity (then), 2009
(Olafur Eliasson Your Curious Journey exhibition Auckland Art Gallery 2025)

The trees are a green presence
writ large in our eyes &
we talk about them
how sad crappy food is served in
this setting where wrap around glass
lets us imagine a rustle of
leaves against our skin
these trees deserve better we agree
& we agree the exhibition we’ve just seen
has startled our senses blown us apart 
I fashion a casual voice to ask
did you first see it as glass
fragments suspended in the air
light transformed diamonds or tears
yes  I saw glass you reply & add
it was of course a small water fountain
why do I suspect you read the exhibition
notes before we went in & I did not
standing in the dark room with you just
a shadow to my right
glass a scatter of tears lit from above
enters my eyes  my brain
I want to know did you see this
then erase it with knowledge
you standing beside me
thinking about the illusion
while I fill slowly with
glass glitter
& light.

Sue Fitchett

Sue Fitchett is a conservationist, volunteer fire fighter & Waiheke Islander.  Authored Palaver lava queen (AUP: 2004) & On the Wing (Steele Roberts: 2014).  Co-author or editor of several poetry books & anthologies.  Work has appeared in various publications in Aotearoa/New Zealand & overseas & exhibited in art shows. Louis Johnson Bursar 2001-2002. A new collection Between (Cuba Press) will be launched October 17th, 2025 on Waiheke Island.

Poetry Shelf review and reading: Sick Power Trip by Erik Kennedy

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Sick Power Trip, Erik Kennedy
Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025

Mujaddara

I know. I know what’s happening elsewhere.
While I mess around with my kitchenware.from

 

‘Autumn Couplets’

Every time I review a new poetry collection, it feels like I am holding poetry itself to the light, discovering things about how poems might work, what they might deliver, what they might spark in a reader.

Erik Kennedy’s sublime new collection, Sick Power Trip, got me musing on how poetry might stand as a prism. A poem might be held to get a view, then swivelled to get a different view, and then another, and then again. Each time I turn a page in Sick Power Trip, it’s a prismatic surprise. Unexpected. Utterly fertile. I love it.

Erik’s collection has stuck with me for a number of reasons. I have never read a collection quite like it and I love that. It feels like there are two significant settings. Firstly, an extraordinary band of wit and humour, with unexpected scenarios, shifting angles and points of view. Secondly, the necessary and imperative knottiness of humanity, from exposed self to a wider global reach. Not an either or view, but an incredible shifting light on how to live and how to survive. A poetic prism on the contemporary world that might be sharp, jagged, wise, personal.

Even the pronouns, particularly the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ are multi-tendrilled. The voice speaking is prismatic, drawing us into a stretching field of possibilities, vulnerabilities, recognitions. Nothing is set concrete here. I love this.

Let me shift the prism again for you, in a collection that reveals both the positives and negatives of situations, poetry that is mindful of an impulse to decipher, to muse upon sides, to navigate the good and the bad and the inbetween. There’s involvement and not involvement. Darkness and lightness splintering, merging, resisting clear borders.

And always, let me underline this, there is always the ripple of surprise, in turning each page, within the poem itself. I love this. For example, going shopping after illness:

I thought about the things that are abut me.

And I went to look for the aisle where they keep the fully realised lives,
doubtless alongside the wax food wraps and the fancy vinegars.

 

from ‘Shop Floor Layout Algorithm’

Another stunning example, the notion (or experience) of consolation. Wit and wisdom again refracting. Self fragility and collective strength. The poet holds the prism poem along the degree to which one can understand what someone is going through. Here is the final stanza, it resonates so deeply:

That’s why I can picture it
but can’t imagine what it feels like
to be a phone,
delicately poised on the arm of a chair,
that gets one message too many
and vibrates onto the floor.

 

from ‘Consolations’ 73

I want to share so many of the poems in the book with you, so you too can experience the glorious settings. I like how a word or idea might pose like a mise en abyme – inside this thought (word) another thought (word), inside this light refracting, another light that surprises startles delights. Take the poem offering an analogy on thinking, poised on the moment in a fable when the thorn pulled from a lion’s paw turns out to be a little lion, and the whole progression and stability and expectation of thought or story is in jeopardy.

And then, most importantly, how to deliver and absorb the poem prism in a time when the world is so damn awry. I keep swearing I won’t mention this in a review, but it’s the monster in my kitchen. As I read, I pick up on how doing is in partnership with thinking, how in one poem protest might be deflating tyres of SVUs and in another poem caring might be hugging trees like a 70s hippy. Again the vital oscillation. I am thinking this. Writing poems might be a form of protesting, sharp insistent necessary protesting (listen to the three poems below), but it is also a form of caring. I love this. I love this so very much.

On multiple occasions, a single poem stalls (shadows?) me with its prismatic effects. Surprise turns alongside shards of wisdom alongside physical detail alongside acute global and local concern, with every effect housed within writing that is sublimely fluent. Read ‘How a Year Ends’ for example. This poem. This magnificent poem. Try this stanza:

A year is a road
that ends at the sea
in an afterthought of a town,
just a few weatherbeaten houses,
some indifferent trees,
a small picnic area,
and a one-eyed cat
wandering around proprietorially.
You drive here
because it is here.

 

from ‘How a Year Ends’

Maybe reading this collection is akin to a snow globe effect. Every time I hold a poem to the light and dark of my reading, and let the poetry shake and settle in my mind, I feel the sharp sweet delight of surprise and wonder. On the back of the book (always the last thing I read), it states “Kennedy reminds us that some things remain true and vital: self-care, empathy and solidarity”. And that is exactly why I love this collection so very much. Let us put these words in our pockets and carry them over close the coming months: self-care, empathy, solidarity.

I went out into the day with my symptoms. The sun made the swans look
like harps. I appreciated the silhouettes of buildings. I scrumped apples
from over a fence. My symptoms were still with me but also not with me.
I was loving them. I was setting them free.

 

from ‘Self-Affirming Mantra’ 

a reading

Erik reads: ‘Bildungsroman’, ‘I Like Rich People, but I Couldn’t Eat a Whole One Myself’ and ‘The $6 Pepper Song’

Erik Kennedy is the author of two previous books of poems, both with Te Herenga Waka University Press: the Ockham-shortlisted There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime (2018) and Another Beautiful Day Indoors (2022). Originally from New Jersey, he lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch.

Cover design: Todd Atticus
Te Herenga Waka University Press page