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.
Starling is a go-to online poetry space for writers under 25: wide-ranging in form, voice, subject matter, mood. It’s vibrant, essential reading. Plus there’s the bonus of a featured writer (latest issue is Sophie van Waardenberg). To celebrate the tenth anniversary and the selection of two new editors, I invited the the co-founders, Louise Wallace and Francis Cooke, along with the two writers now at the editorial helm, Maddie Ballard and Tate Fountain, to select a poem from Starling‘s past decade and write a note to explore why the poem has stuck with them.
Poetry Shelf offers a bouquet of congratulations to the editors and participants, and looks forward to Starling‘s finger on the pulse of new writing.
Starling was established in 2015 by us (Louise Wallace and Francis Cooke) as a literary journal for authors under 25 to publish their work and read writing by their peers. At the time we hoped could give space to a community of young writers that we knew were often not given their own platform in the broader Aotearoa literary landscape. Over the decade that’s followed we’ve been very fortunate to see how much the writers of Starling have taken up the journal and made it their own – it’s been more than we’d even hoped for, and we’ve been lucky to be a part of the start of the publishing career of so many incredible authors who’ve entrusted us with their work. As we approached the ten-year mark, it seemed like the right time to hand over the reins, and so we were very happy to announce this September that Tate Fountain and Maddie Ballard would be taking over as Starling editors, ably assisted by the Starling editorial committee, currently made up of Joy Holley and Ruby Macomber. Tate, Maddie, Joy and Ruby are all past Starling writers who have now stepped into the role of shaping the journal for its next era, and we’re very excited to read the 21st issue, which they’re currently crafting, and all the issues to follow. We hope that Starling will be around for as long as young writers need it, and we can’t wait to see what’s to come.
Louise Wallace and Francis Cooke
four poems
Driving Directionless
It happens like that sometimes, stranded in the carpark in Mt Eden Village, and your car battery is dead because you couldn’t sit with the silence. The rain has been sweeping in from the horizon all day, in and out, in and out, and you’re so much younger
than you thought you were. Nothing has been constant, lately, but things must come to an end. I thought I knew that, I really thought I did. And Circus Circus is so warm. The cheesecake sweet, and we talk like we’re seventy. I went to a sushi train for lunch, plates
travelling around a circuit. The jumpsuit I bought was expensive, but money is money. It was like trying on my own skin. There, I say to my reflection, there you are. And as we approach the red light, I don’t think about placing my foot gently on the brake. I
don’t think about switching lanes, or how my hands automatically flip off the indicator after a turn. Instead, I think about tomorrow and the colour of your eyes and the rising inside me. The words stuck, gathering at the heart. How do you translate a feeling? How
do you wash yourself clean? I want to be wanted. I want to see where we are all going to land at the end of all this. In the passenger seat, you listen patiently. A reminder that you are not the enemy. I don’t know who is. The sunset is so different every day. A cloud rears up in front
of my windscreen like a tidal wave, puffy, and peach-coloured, and astounding. I want to remember, want to keep it all with me. Time is unsteady. Today, is today and you finally noticed.
Brecon Dobbie
On Brecon Dobbie’s ‘Driving Directionless’(from Issue 12)
The first time I read this poem I was overcome with envy! Partly because of its wonderful final line and partly because of how well it does sincerity, a quality I think it’s really hard to write well. I love that it’s about being a new driver in Tāmaki. I love that it mentions the cheesecake at Circus Circus. I really love that it couches its existential moments (‘How do you translate a feeling? How / / do you wash yourself clean?’; ‘you’re so much younger / / than you thought you were’) amid sushi trains and car batteries. Isn’t that exactly how life is? All the big things squeezed up against the little ones. I’ve returned to this poem several times over the years because I love the speaker’s voice so much: wise and sad and hopeful and observant of peach-coloured clouds. I hope to read lots more from Brecon in the future.
Maddie Ballard
loss
mum went to bed for months. got up only for using bathroom with red toilet seat & sitting on step outside pink back door, smoking, saying i love you without her eyes.
moving truck got stuck under opawa’s overbridge & my baby brother was born just a red mess onto a matted towel. one of those things no one talked about.
family came to visit. nana picked me up from school, aunty slept, floor of my room, & made a sticker chart so i could be Good.
in doorways i stood peering around corners to see mum’s supine form or curve of her spine as she sat outside, puffing.
her room seemed grey i wanted to say: what did i do?
but more than anything i wanted to lose my first tooth; to have a broken grin; to tongue empty space.
mum got better suddenly – woke up one day & darkness had gone away, ran out to lawn in her underpants, cheering & dancing.
i lost a tooth eventually & then, oh, so much more.
I am a huge fan of ‘quiet poems’ and Hebe Kearney is very good at them. I think they are the hardest poems to get right, and it’s also hard for them to jostle for space in a journal selection process, up against loud, funny, bold poems. But when quiet poems work, they sing – like Hebe’s piece here.
First up, if you’re looking for an example of ‘show, don’t tell’, the line “saying i love you without her eyes” hits that mark perfectly. We understand that something is off, there’s something distant about the mother – the reason she’s gone to bed “for months” – without the poet needing to spell the specifics of the situation out. I can see the “supine form or curve of her spine” as I read – Hebe offers those shapes to me.
Towards the end, things become brighter – the mother seems to miraculously recover and the speaker loses a tooth just as she had hoped – which makes the uppercut of the last two lines hit even harder. We remember the title, ‘Loss’, and feel that emotional impact at the end.
Louise Wallace
Any Machine Can Be a Smoke Machine If You Use It Wrong Enough
Circe likes to live comfortably. The island, the private jet – does putting everyone else between Scylla & Charybdis make this worth less? Hardly. Circe is moulding you in her fingers like soft wax – here, amorphous
child of Morpheus, are you comfortable? Circe takes her tax, she is a circular saw coaxing sap from a slack veiny tree & in her menagerie the sad lion is left to starve & chew his stately mane for comfort. She will destroy your planet to live comfortably, but oh! she is compelling –
for instance, she claims she’s only anti-vaccination insofar as she is against the continuation of the existence of this human race, the world’s worst disease, abominations bombing nations, laughing lesions of senseless flesh celebrating their own unsubtlety, the syrupy pus of which
she collects in a glass & holds to her lips. Bemused charmer of every snake, she has taken men to space and yet has not succeeded in getting them to respect it. She has fought a thousand wars for you and your right to say that war is bad, although there is a comfort in it. Knowing who your enemy is. Circe leaves a thick slick of spit
on the panther’s taut haunch, sends him off with a resounding slap and when his whispering ear is gone she advises you sincerely to cultivate your loneliness, make your silence violent, remember a woman’s first blood doesn’t come from between her legs but from biting her tongue. Circe says
to treat comfort ephemerally, like a fleecy faery-circle of ringworm on the skin of your inner thigh, a sick unscratchable itch you don’t want to show. If you admit that you need something that badly then it can be taken away from you. Circe instructs you to become blood diamond, smoky topaz, hard-edged undesiring object of destructiveness
& self-destruction internalised by all as desire, as comfort, as Circe’s white dandelion-floss cat who flows down the street on his way to eat or sleep or fornicate with the mouse he doesn’t keep at home instead silently stealing out to play with her garnet heart among the liquorice-scented ferns.
Rebecca Hawkes
On Rebecca Hawkes’ ‘Any Machine Can Be a Smoke Machine If You Use It Wrong Enough’ (from Issue 1)
Sometime in 2015, Ashleigh Young wrote on twitter (this was back when twitter was, mostly, good) ‘One of my students has written a poem called ANY MACHINE CAN BE A SMOKE MACHINE IF YOU USE IT WRONG ENOUGH. It’s great.’ I remember reading it and thinking that I’d love to read it someday. A few months later, going through the pieces we’d received for the first issue of Starling – I remember the day exactly, it was 14 November and I was reading submissions before heading out for the second ever LitCrawl – I picked up a set of poems by a writer named Rebecca Hawkes, and there it was.
One of the best parts of editing Starling are the moments where you get absolutely smacked in the face discovering brilliant writing by someone who, until that moment, you’ve never heard of, and realise ‘oh, wait, we’re going to get to publish this?’. Rebecca’s poem was one of the first of many moments like that – I remember reading ‘Any Machine….’ and being blown away by how expansive and luxurious it was in its language, heightened and apocalyptic while still undercutting itself at the right moments with a pitch-black humour (Circe stating that “she’s only anti-vaccination / insofar as she is against the continuation of the existence / of this human race” is a particular stand-out).
Rebecca’s poem has a lot of the themes that she’s fleshed out further in her writing since, as she’s become one of my favourite poets working in Aotearoa – a merging of classical themes and very distinctly New Zealand pastoral imagery, a very physical and sensuous love of the natural world while also being enmeshed in our modern, technology-driven present. She’s throwing it all into the pot here, and I’m sure if she looks back on this early piece now there are things she might want to change or edit out, but I hope she still recognises that at the heart of the poem is a true show-stopping line – “remember a woman’s first blood doesn’t come / from between her legs but from biting her tongue” – that still hits home a decade later. It’s been a privilege to get to follow Rebecca’s writing, and the work of so many other great authors who published some of their first writing with us, since I first read this poem, and it’ll always be a special one for me because of that.
Francis Cooke
Extract from ‘UNTITLED’ by Matthew Whiteman for complete poem, visit here
On Matthew Whiteman’s ‘UNTITLED’ (Starling, Issue 17)
To highlight any single Starling poem from the past ten years is a daunting task. I vividly remember so many poems that struck and compelled me in my early days as a reader and contributor to the journal: Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connor’s ‘(Instructions)’ in Issue 6; jane tabu daphne’s ‘K–A–R–O’ and Van Mei’s ‘On Beauty’ in Issue 7; Sinead Overbye’s ‘The River’ in Issue 10 (to name only a few!). Likewise, I could list off countless poems that have made me put a hand to my heart, or pump my fist, or cheer while reading submissions during my time on the editorial committee. One of the great gifts of Starling is the range of work and of stylistic and poetic approaches that we get to read twice a year – no better job.
On this occasion, I’d like to spotlight Matthew Whiteman’s ‘Untitled’ from Issue 17. Dedicated to German artist, filmmaker, and writer Hito Steyerl – addressed directly to, and referencing,her throughout – this is a go-for-broke, abundant, ekphrastic, pointedly intertextual poem that grabbed me immediately on the first read. Framed within an illustrated and progressively disintegrating – well – ‘disintegrating emoji’, Whiteman contextualises this ‘two second clip’, this ‘poor image’, and its silent or elongated variations, within a larger relational and arthistorical web: Steyerl’s ‘How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File’ (2013), the iconic classical statue group of Laocoön and his sons; even The Simpsons, briefly, gets a look in. We are all scaffolded by our references, clear or opaque, and what I am so drawn to about this poem is that, stacked up and arranged in this form, it really could have only come from one person.
Matthew’s ‘Untitled’ seems to bend so many poetic conventions: the fact of the title, intentionally ‘Untitled’ or else by necessity, speaks so well to the perhaps-futile search for meaning outlined in the poem itself. ‘I want to tell you what it means,’ he writes, ‘but I’m not sure I even know, Hito.’ The arrangement of the text, in square brackets and struck-through, likewise reflects this: everything is couched in erasure, something hiding even as it’s visible, or drawing from the form of emojis as textualised (as Matthew points out, ‘[‘disintegrating emoji gif’]’). The closest we get to the text outright engaging with its meaning is within the collage of this framing. It’s perhaps not an ‘easy’ read, but one that allows a few different paths for engagement, a few methods by or levels at which it might be read. (The links! The gorgeous electric blue links to give you the chance to experience the full web Matthew is pulling from!)
I can get quite defensive of visual poetry – I never want people to think the ‘conceit’ or aesthetic identity of an effective poem nullifies or overpowers its content at line level. (In the same vein, I’m not overly interested in internet poems for internet poems’ sake; there needs to be something that grounds or further substantialises the work.) Any form can be a great act of assemblage, but the writing still has to stand out. And that’s something I love so much about this poem – that even if you stripped away all the rest of the work it’s doing, there would still be descriptions like ‘a poor image’, ‘pure anguish’, a ‘parabolic mouth is so agape it exceeds the face’, ‘disembodied hands grasping for heaven’. You would still have the immediate internal assonance of ‘Simpsons™ skin’ and ‘rounded chin’, the inbuilt, square-bracketed/struck-through pace shift of ‘[it bothers me] that lost scream [because that felt real] [wasn’t it] [someone’s scream] that then [became image] then [language]’. You would still have the closing lines to settle any of the destabilisation of what’s come before; the calm (characteristically struck-through, occasionally bracketed and linked) sentence function: ‘On Twitter [X] people just signal it like that. I want to tell you what it means but I’m not sure I even know, Hito. I think it may be a kind of speechlessness, the kind that calls you offscreen. I think you follow the scream elsewhere.’
I just love this poem. I’m drawn to its singularity, its stretching of form, its tone and the inherent line-toe of sincerity in a broadly comedic set-up; I’m compelled by its finding of art everywhere, its determination of meaning and its existential search, its deep thought. I feel really honoured, too, that it found its way to Starling and that we had the chance to publish it, especially as part of a longer intertextual poetic/artistic sequence within Issue 17.
He is a man carved from witness wood and tonight they will cut him open.
Whispers ate his tongue and people failed to ask after him.
As they tear at his flesh to let in borrowed light his body splinters and edges its way under their nails.
No men with warmth in their fingers or an inkling of privacy, no women with a shred of public sympathy.
They fling his body open. They dismantle him with effortless crime.
Behold the human mess inside cue a surgeon’s wail. Blood-and-bone strokes warped beyond recognition.
What ages he has lived through what ruinous tides have claimed him not unlike the waters that claimed the SS Ventnor.
And having cast off the grain of his years into hallowed seas he traded fear for a nightmare of snakes.
Inside he could be dancing his feet as light as music. Inside he could be snow.
Extraction after extraction there is no consensus on who will keep his soul, who will keep his bones.
When their cruel exercise is over when they have retrieved what they never needed
what remains is a man of a thousand regrets. The insects bury themselves in his swollen dark.
Chris Tse Published in How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes (AUP, 2014).
It’s around this time 20 years ago that I was putting the final touches on my thesis for the MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters. My thesis was split into three sections, one of which contained the earliest versions of poems that would eventually become my first book, How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes. Some of these poems made it into the final version of the collection untouched, but that first go at telling the story of Joe Kum Yung only scratched the surface of the themes I’d ultimately explore.
‘(Biopsy)’ wasn’t written during that period – it came along much later and was prompted by an unlikely source: the television series Desperate Housewives. In episode two of season seven, Bree Van de Kamp’s contractor and love interest Keith Watson shows her some timber that he wants to use as panelling for her study. “Feel it,” he instructs her. “You know what they call this? Witness wood, ’cause it’s seen so much history.” I’d never heard the term ‘witness wood’ before; later I learned that it specifically refers to salvaged and repurposed wood from structures that were present during significant events. You never know when you’ll see or hear something that’ll give you the start of a new poem. I certainly didn’t expect that watching the melodrama and sexual tension unfold on Wisteria Lane would also give me the start of one of Snakes’ key poems.
Having spent some time revisiting my first book over the past couple of years, to mark its 10th anniversary and to prepare for the audiobook recording, I see the beginnings of themes and concerns that continue to pop up in my later work. ‘(Biopsy)’ is one of my first attempts at untangling the complications of writing about history and the power imbalance that goes with it. In some ways ‘(Biopsy)’ is a small meta moment in the collection that comments on the writing of the book itself and the use of Joe Kum Yung as a source of trauma to drive the narrative forward. Lionel Terry used Joe Kum Yung to make a point about ‘the Yellow Peril’ – as writers, how do we navigate our own biases and motivations when it comes to writing about other people and historical events, even if we’re doing so with the best intentions?
Chris Tse
Chris Tse is a poet and editor based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara | Wellington. He is the author of three poetry collections published by Auckland University Press: How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes, HE’S SO MASC, and Super Model Minority. He and Emma Barnes edited Out Here: An Anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ Writers from Aotearoa. In 2022, Chris was named New Zealand’s 13th Poet Laureate and completed his term in August 2025. He was a 2024 fellow of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program Fall Residency and a 2025 Nederlands Letterenfonds writer in residence.
Join us to launch a new book of poetry by the incredible Tusiata Avia.
Saturday 15 November, 5pm Space Academy: 371 St Asaph Street, Christchurch Books will be for sale with thanks to Scorpio Books Kai and refreshments provided
Giving Birth to My Father is about learning to live with a loss that seems simply too heavy to bear.
First, Tusiata Avia tells the imagined story – the one of how things should go – followed by the story of what really happens. As her father travels through his last days and into the arms of his tupu’aga, transformed, the family gathers around him with their love and raw need, and their suffering turns to storm clouds.
For Avia, his death is a beginning. Parent and child have switched places as the river carries them downstream, and she sees her father with new eyes. But this is also a time of not knowing to whom she belongs and where she will be welcome now.
This is an extraordinarily rich poetic work about grief and renewal that will rearrange its readers. Giving Birth to My Father takes in a world of family and memory, including a sequence of poems about a much-loved brother as he faces a life-threatening injury. It is a book about ways of holding one another even after we are gone.
Tusiata Avia is the award-winning author of Wild Dogs Under My Skirt (2004; also staged internationally), Bloodclot (2009), Fale Aitu | Spirit House (2016), The Savage Coloniser Book (2020; winner of the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry and also staged nationally) and Big Fat Brown Bitch (2023). Tusiata has held the Fulbright Pacific Writers Fellowship at the University of Hawai‘i in 2005 and the Ursula Bethell Writer in Residence at University of Canterbury in 2010. She was the 2013 recipient of the Janet Frame Literary Trust Award, and in 2020 was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to poetry and the arts. In 2023 she was given a Distinguished Alumni Award at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington and a Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement.
‘old altars will be overturned’ Jacqui Sturm, ‘Good Friday’
Toward Raumati in a butter-yellow dawn five black swans swim north while a camper-van hurtles south down The Parade, a message writ above the cab: JESUS IS COMING. From one house a Ukrainian flag, from another the United Tribes of 1835. And the swans progress.
There’s a poem on a plaque on a post that stands beside the sea that warns us all: ‘Old altars will be overturned.” A boy runs round and round Campbell Park. He wants to be Christian Cullen. The septic tank truck lumbers by after Jesus who’s departing fast.
Did ever a day dawn like this on Papa-tū-ā-nuku? The answer to that common question is always different, always correct. The mind is a beach, or words to that effect, the poem says. Infinite. Hour by hour the sand shifts and shifts. And the swans have already flown.
Murray Edmond
Murray Edmond: born Kirikiriroa 1949; lives in Glen Eden, Tāmaki-makau-rau. Recent publications: Time to Make a Song and Dance: Cultural Revolt in Auckland in the 1960s (Atuanui Press, 2021) – cultural history; FARCE and Sandbank Sonnets: A Memoir, (Compound Press, 2022) – 2 books of poems; Aucklanders (Lasavia, 2023), a book of 15 short stories.
Anne Kennedy’s most recent books are The Sea Walks into a Wall, The Ice Shelf and, as editor, Remember Me: Poems to Learn by Heart from Aotearoa New Zealand. She is the current editor of AUP’s New Poets series. Awards include the Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry, the NZ Post Book Award for Poetry and the Montana Book Award for Poetry. Anne lives in Tāmaki Makaurau.
2026 Writer in Residence Tusiata Avia Photo credit: The Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi
Acclaimed poet Tusiata Avia MNZM has been appointed Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML) and Creative New Zealand Writer in Residence for 2026.
2026 Writer in Residence Tusiata Avia. (Photo credit: The Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi.)
Tusiata has received many significant awards including the 2013 Janet Frame Literary Trust Award, a 2023 Te Herenga Waka Distinguished Alumni Award, and the 2024 Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement.
In 2020, she was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to poetry and the arts. In 2024, Tusiata received a Creative New Zealand Senior Pacific Artists Award.
Tusiata’s poetry collections include Wild Dogs Under My Skirt (2004, also staged as a theatre show), Bloodclot (2009), the Ockham-shortlisted Fale Aitu | Spirit House (2016), the Ockham-award-winning The Savage Coloniser Book (2020, also staged as The Savage Coloniser Show), and Big Fat Brown Bitch (2023). Her new book, Giving Birth to My Father, will be published on 6 November 2025.
While holding the residency, Tusiata will work on a new collection of poems provisionally titled How to Make a Terrorist. She says the collection will move from the personal to the global, “from inside an MRI machine scanning my brain. to Christchurch five years after the mosque shooting . . . to Hana Rawhiti Maipi-Clark tearing up the Treaty Principles Bill in parliament.”
Director of the International Institute of Modern Letters, Damien Wilkins, says, “Tusiata is a major writer working at the height of her powers. We’re honoured to host her.”
Commenting on the appointment, Tusiata says, “I’m excited to be returning to Te-Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington and to the International Institute of Modern Letters, where my writing career really began, back in 2002. It’s a great opportunity to create something new and contribute to the life of the university and the city.”
Tusiata takes up the residency at the IIML on 1 February 2026.
in the wild night of storm the wind is widening the gap or is it the roar of a government hellbent on building
a ravine between the rich and the poor Māori and Pakeha in every choice they make. A school curriculum has lost
sight of the prismatic stories that shape us, sums that include x-factor joy, and I am stuck on this freight train
in the widening gap because I see no end to damage and despair and I’m filling an ocean with tears crying over lessons that slam the door
in the face of poverty or another language or the tangata whenua and this rumble gap is the distance between sick earth and well earth
between building roads and restoring our hospitals and schools and here I am holding my fragile torch to the widening gap
in my sodden socks no idea where to shine the light next yet except maybe on all those protestors from the 1960s who are stomping
in the streets even louder now with their dreams our dreams where women are heard where Māori are heard my bones breaking and I am blowing
all around to resist persist hope dream begging to fill this gap with precious care to build glorious people-friendly bridges out of knowledge and foresight.
And so Colin I cast off in my frail craft of words my craft of frail words of crafty words into the defile of Three Lamps where struck by sunshine on the florist’s striped awning and the autumn leaves outside All Saints as you did before fully waking in Waitākere to look at the elegant pole kauri in dewy light I defile my sight with closed eyes and so see better when I open them the Sky Tower pricking a pale blue heaven like Raphael’s in Madonna of the Meadows or the scumbled sky of Buttercup fields forever where there is a constant flow of light and we are born into a pure land through Ahipara’s blunt gate a swift swipe of pale blue paint on Shadbolt’s battered booze bar where bards bullshitted among the kauri.
Gaunt cranes along the city skyline avert their gazes towards the Gulf away from babblers at Bambina breakfast baskers outside Dizengoff some pretty shaky dudes outside White Cross beautiful blooms in buckets at Bhana Brothers (open for eighty years) Karen Walker’s window looking fresh and skitey across Ponsonby Road my charming deft dentist at Luminos most of South Asia jammed into one floor at the Foodcourt Western Park where wee Bella bashed her head on some half-buried neoclassical nonsense the great viewshaft to not-faux Maungawhau and then turn left into the dandy defile of K Road where you make your presence felt yet again Colin through the window of Starkwhite in building 19-G_W-13 where dear John Reynolds has mapped your sad Sydney derives and defiles across the road from Herabridal’s windows all dressed up in white broderie Anglaise like lovely frothy brushstrokes or the curdled clouds and words you dragged into the light fantastic along beaches and the blackness that was all you saw when you opened your eyes sometimes like the bleary early morning Thirsty Dogs and weary hookers a bit further along my walk.
I love the pink pathway below the K Road overbridge a liquid dawn rivulet running down towards Waitemata’s riprap but also the looking a bit smashed washing hung out on the balcony above Carmen Jones and over the road from Artspace and Michael Lett etc there’s El Sizzling Lomito, Moustache, Popped, and Love Bucket the Little Turkish Café has $5 beers it’s like a multiverse botanical garden round here you could lose yourself in the mad babble of it like the Botanical Gardens at Woolloomooloo with the clusterfucking rut-season fruit-bats screaming blue murder.
But it’s peaceful again down Myers Park the mind empties and fills like a lung breathing the happy chatter of kids swinging and my memory of you Colin sitting alone and forlorn on a bench must have been about 1966 contemplating the twitchy cigarette between your fingers as if it divined the buried waters of Waihorotiu or the thoughts that flow beneath thought in the mind’s defile at dawn when you open your eyes and see that constant flow of light among the trees.
Ian Wedde
Note on
Ode to Auckland 1. McCahon’s Defile (For John Reynolds)
This is the first of five ‘Ode to Auckland’ sections/poems, themselves the first twenty-one-page section of a sixty-one-page book BEING HERE: SELECTED POEMS 2020 – 2025looking to publish in 2026. The poems address a city I’ve loved for the many years I’ve lived in it at various times, including early on when I was a student at Auckland University in the 1960s when I lived in Wood Street, Ponsonby. It was a pretty rough neighbourhood then compared to the Ponsonby of today which is mostly upmarket and chic. Our part of it in Three Lamps is not in the wealthy space, a functionally convenient four-floor unit in a multi-unit apartment complex with office space on the top floor for my wife Donna and myself. What this elevated space provides is the view out west from my panoramic fourth-floor windows to the Waitākare hills across the luxuriantly tree’d suburbs that stretch across that view. What’s just across the road from our inner-city place is one of my favourite dog-walks, it takes Maxi and me into the steep, sensational viewshaft down to the north-east harbour where we often walk in the morning via one of the little old-tree-planted parks that have survived from the 1960s Ponsonby I remember.
Living here now in this folding-together of memory and present, I celebrate the huge old Chinaberry tree that stretches up past our office window on Donna’s northern side and is typical of the old plantings I can see stretching out west to the Waitākeres on my side, and I’m glad to have most of what I need within walking distance, but I’m annoyed by the homogenizing impacts of the suburb’s wealth and even find myself grumbling in an old-fuck way about why all the classic villas are getting painted the same white. But the frustration is really with myself. Back in the day when I was flatting in Wood Steet the scungy villas hardly mattered and Ponsonby was just a great place to live. It still is. The title of my prospective book, Being Here, should be where I stop whingeing.
The poems in the ‘Ode to Auckland’ section are mostly written to-and-fro across something like a give-or-take twelve-syllable line which I like because it gets the measuring mind in a focused but not stalled state – like walking with wide-open eyes and a sense of your foot-falls having an organic not regimented pace, mind and breath in synch, the lines reaching ahead but anticipating a transition that keeps the thing moving.
Saturday 15 November, 5pm
NZ Poetry Shelf 