well this looks so inviting!
Poetry Shelf noticeboard: National Flash Fiction Day
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Author Archives: Paula Green
Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: ‘The heart is a camera’ by Jo McNeice
The heart is a camera
In a dark red night, in a light tight box
seconds develop into past particles, a dream of seizing time.
In the light tight box the world is closed
to sound & everything a picture.
The heart sees in wide angles & thinks
in slow/fast shutter speeds
Each beat a click of the shutter
freezing a moment.
Freezing a movement.
The camera is a birthday gift, not once but twice.
The camera can break.
This could be a fact or myth,
it could be nothing at all-the heart can think for itself.
On a night like a yellow apple,
the air is purple and wanting,
the heart is electrical -give me thunder, give me lightning.
The heart is mechanical. Give me grease.
Everything divides by one.
Give me a match, a candle.
Give me something to set this heart alight.
Give me a roll of film – B&W or colour,
Let me weave through the chamber
Let me follow your every move
If the camera is a room, the heart is also a room:
Sometimes the kitchen,
dishes left unwashed in the sink,
as if this lazy person left in a hurry.
Sometimes the attic – furnished with paintings
of ships in stormy seas, an old naval uniform,
footsteps dragging across the floorboards after dark.
Sometimes a bedroom with light streaming
in through the half closed curtains
last night’s clothing strewn on the floor.
Sometimes the heart doesn’t know where to begin
Sometimes the heart is a second thought.
The heart is a confidential informant
The heart contains a small bird. That is to say
the heart is a bird cage.
The camera snaps the small bird in flight.
Caught, captured.
A bird in the heart is worth two in the bush.
The heart sees you, like the camera sees you.
It sees you & me
& I am firefly without wings
You are here, you are here
I take your photograph
My heart it sings, it sings
Jo McNeice
Jo McNeice completed a MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters, Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington in 2013. Blue Hour, was published by Otago University Press, 2024. Her poems have been published in Turbine|Kapohau, Sport, JAAM, Takahe and Mayhem. She lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara.
You can hear Jo read from Blue Hour here.
Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Anna Jackson launches Terrier, Worrier
Terrier, Worrier, Anna Jackson, Auckland University Press, 2025
This beautiful book is launching in a sweet suite of events.
You can read some of Anna’s favourite Autumn Reads here
Poetry Shelf celebrates a birthday with 7 Beacons of Light
The moon will be here before
I say cheese and crackers and I am wishing
in vain for feather down sleep
It’s almost dawn
There’s a pheasant on the lawn
My mouth is dry
The first light feels magenta
Today I will read Claire Keegan
write a long shopping list
visit the hospital
read Anna Jackson’s poetry
This is not a poem
it is a tree
from The Venetian Blind Poems
I was going to let my seventieth birthday slip by with little more than a bowl of comfort Moroccan soup, not the usual extended family lunch or dinner feast. But on Wednesday Jackson McCarthy sent me the most wonderful email in response to my invite for a Monday poem. I loved it so much I felt other people would love it too – how many of us are struggling in these tumultuous times, our hearts breaking every morning at the daily news from Gaza, the Ukraine, the choices of our inhumane Government. And how those of us who write, wonder how to write through the dark and the light.
Shortly later I got an email from Peter Ireland at the National Library in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. He had discovered an eye-catching photograph in the archives that might fit an exhibition he is planning. I loved this email gift.
After reading Jackson’s email, and stalling on the photograph, after musing on silence and light, poetry, protest and road trips, I felt so warm and comforted, an idea fell into my mind, surprisingly delightfully, and I decided to write a blog entitled ‘Beacons of Light’ to celebrate my special birthday. Seven beacons for seven decades. Peter and Jackson have given permission for me to include the letter and the image.
This miracle birthday.
one: my two blogs
My blogs have held on by thin threads over the past few years, especially as I read and write at the pace of a garden snail, my energy jar’s tiny, and each day a patchwork cloak of dark and light. Mostly light. Yet I harvest so much joy, energy, love and connections by doing Poetry Shelf and Poetry Box. A beacon of light, beacons of light. I am happy for review books to be sent – I can’t promise to review and feature them all, but I absolutely love travelling within the pages of new books.
The letter from Jackson:
Paula,
Thank you for thinking of me!
I’ve been following along with your recent posts and greatly appreciated yours and Bill Manhire’s Gaza poems. For me, it is the tough but urgent subject. I remember talking to Hinemoana Baker about the violent streak in some of her recent poems, wishing I could allow myself a voice or a kind of imagery able to face a genocide.
The truth is I can’t write about Gaza, but I can clear a space in the poetry for that suffering, a suffering that isn’t mine. I find it haunting my recent poems, which are concerned with dying, the city, dreams, and memory, albeit in oblique ways.
I keep thinking of Ben Lerner, his poems “No Art” and “Dedication” (the former of which I think you might love), and in particular this phrase from “Dedication”: “For the mode of address / equal to the war / was silence”.
But then I think again, of silence as ignorance, as violent in itself or consenting to Death somehow; as a kind of shroud of disinformation or apathy. I wonder if there are different registers of silence: the honorific silence that signifies mourning; the obliterating silence of a concert hall moments before music; the heartless silence of those who will not speak out; the lucid silence of what a poem, being a poem, necessarily occludes.
Basically, yes, I’d love to send you something for Poetry Shelf. And I’m very grateful for your blog’s little lifeline in dark times. The poem is called “Song”, and it’s attached to this email. I hope you like it.
Best,
Jackson
two: libraries, bookshops, books
Pedestrians and a balloon seller, Barcelona ca. 1925
Photographer: William Williams
Alexander Turnbull Library 1/4-100050-F
I have spent a number of years trawling in the archives over the decades, most especially when I was researching Wild Honey: Reading New Zealand Women’s Poetry, and most especially in the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington. What a treasure house. When Peter emailed this photograph I was transported back to the joy of discovery and curiosity. The image transfixed me – firstly it was a golden ticket to a road trip of another time. The light, the couple posing hands in pockets, the buildings, the quotidian pedestrian movement. Secondly it was a golden ticket to the time Micheal, Georgia, Estelle and I spent in fabulous Barcelona, on our extended road trip in Spain, Portugal and Ireland. Ah. I fall into a reverie of road trips.
And herein lies the delight of my second beacon of light – the way books are an essential form of travel. I haven’t yet been into a bookshop physically, but have sustained myself ordering books online. I am a big fan of Carole Beu and The Women’s Bookshop, Volume Books in Nelson, Unity Books in Wellington, and numerous bookshops in the Wairarapa. I highly recommend the NZ Bookhub as a way of tracking down books and supporting our local bookstores. My book parcel might contain a few novels, a nonfiction book, a cookbook, children’s books, overseas poetry. Instead of outings and travel, I splash out on reading.
And of course audio books. For those of us running on small jars of energy audio books are gold nuggets. I’ve been binging on Graham Norton’s books – he is a whizz at Irish accents, prismatic characters, twisty cryptic plots, and before you know it, you are back there in the embrace of Ireland. Oh heck Irish audio books full stop.
Every day I read poetry. New light that gleams from the review books stacked on my desk and the undiminished light in old favourites on the shelves in my poetry room. So many ideas sizzling for poetry in Aotearoa and in my own secret writing projects. As Poetry Shelf underlines, we are rich in poets and poetry books, poetry that moves, dazzles, challenges, comforts, sings, imagines and invents in a thousand and one ways. We can write poetry out of pain and love, simplicity and knots, music, mystery, old age, youth, experimentation, tradition, politics, confession, global turmoil, global healing, poetry that feeds the ear, the mind, the heart. Heck yes, we can write.
three: listening to music
Listening to music is full scale light, whether a beloved album on repeat or a favoured playlist. I love listening to whole albums. I recently read and loved two local poetry collections that prompted me to put an album on as I wrote the reviews.
Bob Marley makes an appearance in Nafanua Purcell Kersel’s sublime debut poetry collection, Black Sugarcane. I am big fan of Bob, so put Exodus on as I was writing the review. Reggae is a go-to uplift genre for me at the moment, but it also takes me back to Western Springs in the 1970s when I saw Bob and his band one blue-sky Sunday afternoon. Ah. Those standout music gigs. The Rolling Stones also on 1970s Sunday afternoon. Hearing Nina Simone at Ronnie Scotts in London, being right up the front for Prince’s astonishin final concert in Aotearoa, hearing opera diva Alessandra Marc at the Aotea Centre. My review and Nafanua reads here.
When I was reviewing and loving Cadence Chung’s brilliant Mad Diva, I played the opera Norma with Maria Callas singing. Have a listen to ‘Costa diva’, Hairs on end. You can read my review and hear Cadence read.
My daughter Georgia and I are big fans of The National (she went to concerts in Europe, USA, Australia and here), a band that has been a go-to listen for me this year, along with Reb Fountain, Marlon Williams, Boy Genius . . . and a bit of Bach, especially violin partitas, Lucinda Williams. Ah the joy of delving into the hundreds of albums I have amassed over the years. And yes! Georgia has just gifted me Matt Berninger’s solo album, Get Sunk.
four: food
Moroccan fish tagine
Food is also a form of travel, returning me to my favourite cuisines, favourite road trips. Even if I can’t eat banquets, I can nearly always cook. Daily bread. A meal, a soup, a baked treat. Food can be simple, nourishing ingredients, tasty combinations and easy to prepare. At the moment Moroccan, Spanish and Indian, with a serving of Italian is on my frequent playlist.
Fish tagine
saute one onion slowly, season
add two tablespoons of rose harissa spice paste
add sliced carrot, orange kumara and green pepper chunks
add a few cups of stock of your choice
maybe add some halved plump dried apricots or green olives
simmer for at least thirty minutes
add chunks of fish and cook for 5 minutes or so
sprinkle chopped herbs – coriander, dill, parsley
recipes are stepping points – change the spices, the protein
just like poems! We make them our own.
note: the tagine in the photo uses tomatoes, carrots, celery and green olives
five: looking at art
Michael Hight, ‘Tapuae-o-Uenuku’ (2021), oil on linen, 915 x 1830 x 33 mm
Private collection
Yes, you got it, art is also a form of travel, an elevation of spirits and mind. I am such a fan of art with heart. Art that makes you both feel and ponder something. I have lived with an artist for almost forty years. To be able to walk into his studio and fall into one of his sublime paintings, incandescent with light, is worth a thousand and one road trips.
Michael Hight, ‘Haast’ (2021), oil on canvas, 551 x 704 x 34 mm
Private Collection
From the kitchen table I get to travel with some of Michael’s paintings on the lounge wall, and the portrait of Frida my daughter Estelle did for me.
six: writing
Writing is not work for me. Writing is survival. It is love. Connections. I have written many different things over the last few years and my manuscripts and ideas are all at various stages. But one of them, The Venetian Blind Poems, will be published by The Cuba Press in July this year. It has been a joy working with two fabulous book-lovers, Mary McCallum and Paul Stewart. I wrote the first part of the book in my head when I was in Motutapu Ward having my bone marrow transplant and the second part when I began my recovery back home and the wider world seemed so tilted.
Today there is the real wolf
and the imagined wolf
mixing up with
an Airini Beautrais short story
and missiles are dropping
and children are starving
and I can only do one day at a time,
and The National is singing
and there’s a midnight moon
in the dead of the night
with the window wide open
seven: home, otherwheres
My seventh beacon of light and it’s hard to choose. So I find a quiet cushion and write down seven words that matter to me. I often ask poets to do this when I interview them, so I thought I would ask myself. Each morning I imagine a patchwork cloak of things I can do. Sometimes small patches, sometimes larger. The words I just have written down, are the words stitched into my day. After lunch I drape the cloak over my shoulders and dream. Maybe the umbrella word care fuels the beacons of light, beginning with the all important self care, and then moving onto caring for those nearby, and this beautiful broken astonishing planet we share.
joy
heart
kindness
connections
home
family
aroha
Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Nominate a New Zealand Poet Laureate
Celebrate New Zealand’s poetic talent: Nominate a New Zealand Poet Laureate
Kia hiwa ra!
Kia hiwa ra!
The National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa is seeking nominations for the New Zealand Poet Laureate Award 2025–2028.
Poetry is a quintessential part of New Zealand art and culture, and through the New Zealand Poet Laureate Award the government acknowledges the value that New Zealanders place on poetry.
The National Librarian Te Pouhuaki will appoint the New Zealand Poet Laureate after reviewing nominations and seeking advice from the New Zealand Poet Laureate Advisory Group.
Nominees must have made an outstanding contribution to New Zealand poetry, and be an accomplished and highly regarded poet who continues to publish new work. They must also be a strong advocate for poetry and be able to fulfil the public role required of a Poet Laureate. The role includes engaging with a wide range of people and inspiring New Zealanders to read and write poetry.
Candidates are expected to reside in New Zealand during their tenure as Laureate.
The term of appointment for the next Poet Laureate will run until August 2028.
Nominations close on Wednesday, 30 July 2025 at 5pm.
The next New Zealand Poet Laureate will be announced on Friday 22 August 2025.
Enquiries about the New Zealand Poet Laureate Award can be directed to Peter.Ireland@dia.govt.nz
Poet Laureate website
Poetry Shelf features Cadence Chung: a review, a reading, a conversation
Mad Diva, Cadence Chung
Otago University Press, 2025
But lo! Here’s my heart in my hands,
clots squished on my sleeve, all sinewy
and stringy in that way organs are. If you
don’t want to take it, well, I wouldn’t blame
you. But it’s the same heart those poets
had once. One with reckless abandon,
always finding love in every little corner
and squashing it flat on the page.
from ‘Love Lyrics’
A recurring word that epitomises poetry collections I have read and loved this year is heart. The word is particularly applicable to Cadence Chung’s second collection, Mad Diva. Not only does the poetry offer heart ripples, it is rich in ear and art, and most definitely heat. A symphony of heart. And yes, as the title suggests, we are entering the addictive terrain of opera, a chorus of intensity, an intensity of chorus, with threads of painting and poetry making moving in and out of view.
I once sat in an auditorium listening to Alessandra Marc sing arias and you could hear a pin drop. It was a full scale body reaction. I could scarcely breathe. I get that when I put Maria Callas singing Bellini’s Norma on repeat on the turntable. Listen to ‘Casta Diva’ and let that settle under your skin. I was raised with an opera soundtrack and grew deep into loving it, but I was surprised how my relationship with the music changed when I had finished my PhD in Italian and could understand the words! Suddenly I was catapulted into everyday language delivering scenes of desire and betrayal and amore. I think of this haunting scene of listening because here I am in Mad Diva and it is grit and grandeur and intake of breath . . . and yes, catapulting us into different ways of listening reading understanding. Ancora. Ancora. Ancora.
Mad Diva‘s opening poem ‘Mélodie’ spirals around song, a singing heart, an off-key dream, and stands as a vital entry point into the poems to come, the way poetry is pitched in diverse keys, with harmony and disharmony, solo flights and connecting chords. Or the way languages generate melody with their different pronunciations and accents on vowels and consonants. The musical notes of speech. One of the delights of reading poetry is the surprise arrival – especially individual words on the line. Janet Charman is a whizz at this. As is Cadence. This is poetry to listen to. This is poetry to feel from your seat in the auditorium.
O, the night that stretched before us!
The cool lamplight of it, shining
like cicada-wing.
from ‘VI. O, the night’
Thematic subject matter is a unifying thread in the collection. It is like we venture into an opera house to witness performance, to move in and out of opera scenarios, but these divas are out and about in the world as much as they inhabit the skin of a character. Let’s move in deeper. Let’s listen in wider. These mad divas. Let’s move behind the scenes and the surface brocade. Across two acts, these poetic performances, dig deep into yearning and fancy dress, painted bodies and madness, weapons and treasures. It’s personal. It’s imagined. It’s sung across centuries.
In One Thousand and One Nights, Scheherezade told stories to stay alive, to witness the next dawn, but in the mesmerising poem ‘Scheherezade’, she is Ubering into town with the poet/speaker. The poet/speaker is musing on what it would be like to be locked in a bind of telling, never speaking herself. And herein is a glittering hook of the collection: yes it’s a dazzling navigation of divas in performance, on and of stage, but it’s also the navigation of a poet in the seismic heart of poem making, drawing upon other poets as aids. What to tell? What to speak? How to speak? The voice sometimes appearing in italicised dialogue, sometimes not: ‘How do I write about the Great Themes?’ Or: ‘They say all poetry is about Love, Death, / and Time. What a horrible thing a poet is, / writing about these things instead of living / them, deep inside a lover thinking about / what a sensual poem it will make.’
The poem ‘Scheherezade’, feels like a pulsating core of a collection that portrays a poet as much as it portrays divas. It is personal vulnerable tactile aromatic as it speaks to the way making poetry can never be pinned down to exactitudes. It is gauze for us to peer through:
I try to be like her, swallowing my histories
in rattles of metal, hide my grandmother’s jade
in the back of my jewellery box. But my foreignness
finds me anyway, in mispronounced
names and schoolyard games and men
leaning in ever closer on the bus. I call to her:
with a clink of long earrings she looks at me.
Tell me Scheherezade, I try to say.
When does the telling end? Tell me,
When does the silence come? I fill
every space with poems and only in the dull
hum of the ride home do I realise how stupid,
how stupid it all sounds.
She can only tell, I can never
ask. She is as distant to me as a ship
gauzed by time.
Ah. So much to say about this sontuosa collection. It is akin to unpacking a heart basket packed with entangled treasures, with flakes of wound, multiple perfumes, pinpricks of discovery tragedy epiphany, the fireworks and nuances of recognition . . . because every time you unpack this precious basket (just liking putting on a much loved album), you hear and discover something anew, behind the scenes, behind the character, that new connection, an idea that trills, an idea -knot to play with, a ‘cicada-wing’ spark of what poetry can light. So it’s a standing ovation: Bravissimo! Bravissima!
a reading
‘Habits’
‘Ulysses’
‘Fire Island’
a conversation
Were there any highlights, epiphanies, discoveries, challenges as you wrote this collection?
I guess in a way, Mad Diva was a whole series of tiny epiphanies. It’s a bit of a culmination of different manuscripts that hadn’t quite worked out. I’d written very glitzy, narrative-based ones, and also very confessional ones, and this manuscript merges the two in a combination of the fantastic and the lyric. Many of the poems are named after and in the voice of famous divas in the canon — Carmen, Delilah, Salomé, Scheherazade — and I discovered how easy it is for me to drive a poem through a character voice. It was what helped me combine the two facets of my writing: a first-person confessional voice combined with a character façade. It’s a bit like a recital, where you’re still yourself, but a heightened, slightly over-the-top version. I think that’s an important balance in poetry, and a tricky one to pull off! Readers often assume the lyric ‘I’ is the poet, and while that is true in a sense, I never want to just be recounting a true experience without transforming it in some way. Especially when some of the poems in the collection deal with topics of madness and mental illness, I wanted to keep some distance, for both myself and the readers, while still staying truthful to the lyric project.
What matters when you are writing a poem? Or to rephrase, what do you want your poetry to do or be?
Really, I hope that a poem is whatever the reader needs it to be! Having your poetry read by different people is such a strange experience, because you get so many different responses and interpretations. When I read a poem that I love, it shocks me, gives me a little jolt that I carry throughout the day. I want to see something in there that I couldn’t have written myself, that makes me see things just a little differently. I’m always going on about transformation, but I think it’s really true. A poem transforms the poet’s experience or thoughts, then the poem transforms the reader, and so on: a chain of tiny differences is created.
Are there particular poets that have sustained you, as you navigate poetry as both reader and writer?
The poets I’m constantly reading are my contemporaries in this new generation of poets. In particular, my beautiful friends Jackson McCarthy, Amelia Kirkness, Zia Ravenscroft, Maia Armistead, and Joshua Toumu’a. I’m really inspired by the boldness and assuredness of new writers, and the heavy lyric moment we’re returning to. Being self-effacing is out, being insecure is out, cringing at earnestness is out. Love is in!
We are living in hazardous and ruinous times. Can you name three things that give you joy and hope?
The biggest thing that keeps me going is being part of the strong arts communities I’m in. Being in a bookshop or concert hall or theatre or dive bar and having it full of enthusiastic people is so special. Three specific things that have been giving me joy lately: going to and running literary events, rehearsing for operas with my music friends, and playing with my little cat Hebe.
Tell us about your tour
As part of Mad Diva’s release, I went on tour to four cities: Te Whanganui-a-Tara | Wellington, Tāmaki Makaurau | Auckland, Ōtepoti | Dunedin, and Ōtautahi | Christchurch. These launch events featured guest poets Jackson McCarthy, Zephyr Zhang 张挚, Rushi Vyas, Claudia Jardine, and Amelia Kirkness, as well as guest singers from the New Zealand School of Music, and Sarah Mileham, Tomairangi Henare, Teddy Finney-Waters, and Emily-Jane Stockman. It was such a fun and chaotic time. It took place over the span of a week, so I tried to cram in as much sightseeing as I could while also performing and connecting with friends around the country! We had a great turnout at all of the events and I was so thrilled to meet new people, as well as people I’d only ever met online. I had no idea what to expect with the tour, so I was really heartened to see people coming out to support new poetry.
Cadence with Emily-Jane Stockman, at Little Andromeda, Ōtautahi Christchurch
Cadence Chung is a poet, composer, and singer currently in her Honours year at the New Zealand School of Music. Her nationally bestselling chapbook anomalia was released in 2022 with Tender Press, and her anthology of young artists, Mythos, was released in 2024 with Wai-te-ata Press. Her next book, Mad Diva, was released in April 2025 with Otago University Press. She also performs as a classical soloist, presents on RNZ Concert, and co-edits Symposia Magazine, a literary magazine for young New Zealanders.
Otago University Press page
Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: Mother’s Day with ironing and sardines by Sue Wootton
Mother’s Day with ironing and sardines
Turned down an invitation from my daughters
in favour of the porch in autumn sunshine, time
alone. Read about eclipses of the sun, paths
of totality and how, at any given time, forty saros series
are underway on Earth, each unfolding to a crawling pitch-black
stripe of bat confusion, restive roosting birds. Also, how a Mars-
sized body known as Theia smashed into our baby planet, hence
the moon. Huh. I had not known of Theia till today. Sardines
on toast for lunch, the pages oiled. Licked my fingers,
washed them, wrestled with the board. Ironing slowly
near the window, crisp yellow leaves beyond the pane,
pressed sunlight into pillowslips for overnight release.
How any series set in motion must advance. How much,
at any given time, I love – I love! – those girls.
Sue Wootton
Sue Wootton is a poet and fiction writer whose publications include the Ockham New Zealand Book Award longlisted novel Strip and Ockham New Zealand Book award poetry finalist The Yield. In 2023 she travelled to Menton, France as the 50th New Zealand writer to hold the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship. Sue lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin where she works as publisher at Otago University Press. Her website is suewootton.com
Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Hana Pera Aoake launch with guests
Compound Press presents Some helpful models of grief, the new collection of poetry by Hana Pera Aoake, with illustrations by Priscilla Rose Howe.
June 27th, 5:30pm at Lamplight Books
G01/100 Parnell Road, Parnell, Auckland
Book sales, signings, and readings featuring special guests:
Arielle Walker
Carin Smeaton
Liam Jacobson
Praise for Some helpful models of grief:
“Everything Hana writes has a pulse. It could be moss, Britney or Plato but it sings a song that is nervous, in the body and out of the body, you’d be a fool not to take in all of Hana’s grins.”
—Talia Marshall
“Hana’s writing is daring, elliptical, charismatic and above all, interesting. The kind of writer where it doesn’t matter what the subject is, you know you are always in good company.”
—Hera Lindsay Bird
About the book:
A composite chronicle of various loves—desired, lost, or never realised—and their corresponding joys and griefs against the backdrops of contemporary art and late capitalism. These poems radiate with Aoake’s characteristic force, tenderness, intelligence, and humour, often all within the very same breath. The personal is the political is the personal.
Hana Pera Aoake (Ngāti Mahuta, Ngāti Hinerangi, Tainui/Waikato) is an artist, writer, curator and sweaty milf from Aotearoa. Hana’s first book, ‘A bath full of kawakawa and hot water’, was published with Compound Press in 2020. Their second book, ‘Blame it on the rain’ was published in 2025 with no more poetry (Australia). They are also publishing a book of essays with Discipline (Australia) in late 2025. Hana is currently slogging through hell and doing a PhD at Auckland University of Technology. Hana lives in the shadow of Pūtauaki maunga and likes dirt and worms, long walks on the beach, Pilates, orange wine and sparkling water.
Poetry Shelf noticeboard: The DANZ Book Award Winners
Twenty-nine books made the longlist for the 2025 ASLA DANZ Children’s Book
Awards, selected by over 110 children and teenagers from across Australia and New Zealand. The longlist came from an outstanding field of 135 books made up of Graphic Novels, NonFiction, Poetry, and Young Adult Novels celebrating diverse people and communities in a balanced and authentic way.
Here are the winners:
Nonfiction: The Trees by Victor Steffensen and illustrated by Sandra Steffensen (Hardie Grand Explore)
Poetry: Pasifika Navigators by 52 Pasifika Student Authors (Mila’s Books)
Graphic Novel: Ghost Book by Remy Lai (Allen & Unwin)
Young Adult: Catch a Falling Star by Eileen Merriman (Penguin Random House New Zealand)
I am delighted to see Eileen Merriman has won the YA category with her novel To Catch a Falling Star (Penguin, 2023). The book, with both nuance and complexity, navigates tough issues. Aged fifteen, Jamie Orange participates in school musical productions, is secretly in love, but faces persistent and crippling mental health challenges. The story and the characters are utterly moving. The novel is an unforgettable, thought-provoking read, so I am pleased to see it get this recognition.
In my Poetry Shelf review I wrote: “Ah. Triple ah. Quadruple ah. Catch a Falling Star is a sad, contemporary, thought-provoking, must-read story that revives you no matter how little sleep you have had! The word I take with me is hope, the image I hold is two teenagers bonding over books and coffee. Utterly riveting! Utterly humane.”
You can read my review here.
I look forward to celebrating Pasifika Navigators by 52 Pasifika Student Authors on my blogs.
NZ Poetry Shelf 