‘I Prefer Mornings’ was published in Landfall 224: Home and Building,
November 2012 (Otago University Press).
Medb Charleton grew up in Sligo, Ireland. She did an MA in Creative writing at the IIML in Wellington and since has published poems in Landfall, Sport, JAAM and online.
Tony Beyer has a new long poem up at Mudlark.
Tony Beyer operates out of Taranaki, New Zealand. His work appears frequently online in Otoliths and his most recent collection, Anchor Stone (Cold Hub Press), was a finalist in the poetry category of the 2018 New Zealand Book Awards.
My name is Aurelia
An earthquake grew me up
I unhappened
was just a shoe size away from falling
into fissures, being pulverized by wall fall
While tsunamis practiced their warnings
bridges reared up, rupturing egress
land changed colour; there is no gold in sands
of liquefaction
Living in the white zone
is like diving the blue hole in the red sea
surviving broken perils of orientation
But here red was a cordon of the dead, and dying city;
We each knew a white chair on the edge of our busyness
our minds voices mutated hues
I became like Aurelia, a gunmetal moon orbiting red dwarf star
extra terrestrial.
Robynanne Milford
Robynanne Milford has published four collections; Finding Voice, Women on the Dunstan 2018 Aspiring Light, Grieve Hopefully & Songcatcher. Her poems are included in a number of anthologies including Leaving the Red Zone, Voice Print 3, Canterbury Poets Collective and Crest to Crest, and in journals including Landfall, Takahe and Poetry NZ. She is currently evolving a collection of women artists inspired by Central Otago; and whose work is lost to common knowledge or who enabled prominence of their spouses at the expense of their own careers.
Robynanne (aka Bella Boyd) lives in Christchurch where she worked as a GP with her late husband John. She was Founding President of DSAC and has co-authored books on Medical Management of Sexual Abuse. She is a guide at the Christchurch Art Gallery and her special interest is in Art and Alzheimers. She has three adult children.
Hebe Kearney is from Christchurch but now calls Auckland her home. She currently studying to complete her Honours in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Auckland. She couldn’t stop writing poems if she tried, and her work has appeared in Starling, The Three Lamps and Oscen.
Hebe is appearing at Titirangi Poets with Paula Green on Saturday October 12th at 2pm. Details here.
Read NZ Te Pou Muramura’s article including the back story of how the competition came about
You are warmly invited to the launch of
Let Me Be Frank
by Sarah Laing
Thursday 10 October, 6pm–7.30pm
at Marsden Books, 159 Karori Road, Karori, Wellington.
All welcome!
Paula Morris and Alison Wong invite submissions of creative writing by new NZ writers of Asian heritage for an anthology to be published by Auckland University Press.
Submissions may be poetry, fiction or creative non-fiction. We’re not accepting scripts/plays, journalism, academic or other non-literary nonfiction.
Please submit up to five poems and/or two prose pieces. Fiction and creative nonfiction can be up to 6000 words per piece. Work may be published or unpublished, with or without Asian themes.
Writers should not have published more than two full-length books or be considered ‘established’ in any literary field.
Please email anthology@auckland.ac.nz by Monday 30 September, including a short bio.
Attach submissions as Word documents, with your name on each page and as the first part of the document name.
Quiet
After this death I become thin veined
my hands remade into petalled flesh.
I can hear the clink of my own laughter,
an undertow inside a metal chest.
The air tastes unexpectedly cheerful and,
at morning, like day-old smoke.
Since that day, I realise my face can be
both plain and shaded pyrotechnic.
His voice still combs through me like
bone fingers in wet hair.
The words I don’t use, that can only be said
in his vernacular, such as ‘risible’
and ‘hackneyed’
clock me awake, just when I am
arching towards the left side
of our bed.
In Italian, they called a bed this size
matrimonial, like sleep and sex
can only be accomplished under a vow
inside a religion beneath a temple.
When you left, I felt the sky suck into my eyes
and all I could see were your old shoes
placed in the corner and
your feet
becoming a garden
of marigolds.
Catherine Trundle
Catherine Trundle is a writer, mother and anthropologist, based in Wellington. She writes flash fiction, poetry and ethnography, and experiments with unpicking the boundaries between academic and creative genres. Recent works have appeared in Landfall, Not Very Quiet, Plumwood Mountain and Flash Frontier.
Listen to Catherine read ‘Undergrowth’ here
Thank you so much Palmerston North poets and poetry fans for a special night celebrating women. Before the event started I discovered the poetry section in Bruce McKenzie Bookshop next door and spotted so many treasures. What a gorgeous book haven this place is. I could have spent hours there and bought a truckload of books – but was limited by what I could fit in my carry-on bag. Really one of the best gatherings of NZ poetry books I have seen in ages. Now I wish I had taken notes of all the books I had wanted to get – including some of mine that are out of print.
Bruce McKenzie Bookshop, Palmerston North
What I have found special about the Wild Honey readings is the way other women are brought into the room through the poems read. This time among others Tusiata Avia, Alice Te Punga Somerville, Vivienne Plumb, Nina Mingya Powles, Elizabeth Smither, Ruth Dallas, Maria McMillan, Joan Fleming and Lauris Edmond. It was particularly moving that the event was held on the fourth anniversary of Joy Green’s passing, and that her friend Hannah Pratt read one of her poems (‘The Cardboard Box’). It was also great to have two fiction writers (Tina Makereti and Thom Conroy) read poems they love by NZ women. And I was especially moved that Jo Thorpe had driven down from Gisborne and Marty Smith from Hawke’s Bay to be there.
Marty and I had a lively conversation – and it reminded me why poetry matters. I forget there is an audience when I get to talk poetry with someone (on the radio, on stage, in an interview) and feel utterly enthusiastic about what poetry can do. Poetry is always a cause for celebration. Even when it is laying down challenges, speaking of tough things, getting complex and difficult, opening up self. It is sound and it is heart and it is interlaced.
I loved this event so much but I am also the kind of writer who likes two tablespoons of public light and acreages of privacy. It feels like it’s time to move back into secret terrain and times having had such support in bringing my new books into the world. Particularly Wild Honey.
Thank you Palmerston North: Bruce McKenzie Bookshop, Genny Vella and Palmerston North Library and the writers: Johanna Aitchison, Paula Harris, Thom Conroy, Paula King, Helen Llehndorf, Marty Smith, Hannah A Pratt, Jo Thorpe, Janet Newman and Tina Makereti.
Thanks to everyone who has bought the book, shared the book and supported my other equally special events in Auckland, Wellington and Dunedin. I will be doing more next year!
Thanks especially to my publicist Sarah Thornton and to Nicola Legat, my publisher at Massey University Press.
This is my book of love and connections.
Thank you!
The three Paulas!
Conversing with the delightful Marty!
NZ Poetry Shelf 