Jack Ross reads four poems from The Oceanic Feeling, Salt & Greyboy Press, 2021
Jack Ross works as a senior lecturer in creative writing at Massey University. He is the author of five poetry collections and eight works of fiction, most recently Ghost Stories (Lasavia Publishing, 2019) and The Oceanic Feeling (Salt & Greyboy Press, 2021). He blogs here
Notes to The Oceanic Feeling
Jack reads and comments on ‘1942’
Siobhan Harvey, Ghosts, Otago University Press, 2021
Siobhan Harvey is the author of eight books, including Ghosts (Otago University Press, 2021) and 2013 Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award-winning Cloudboy (OUP, 2014). She received the 2020 NZSA Peter & Dianne Beatson Fellowship, and won the 2020 Robert Burns Poetry Award and the 2019 Kathleen Grattan Award for a Sequence of Poems. Her work appears in recent anthologies: Arcadian Rustbelt: Poets Emerging 1980–-1995 (University of Liverpool Press, 2021), Feminist Divine: Voices of Power and Invisibility (Cyren US, 2019) and, translated into Italian, in Alessandra Bava (ed.), HerKind: Anthology of Contemporary New Zealand Poets (Editione Ensemble, 2021).
Otago University Press page
Siobhan in conversation with Lynn Freeman, Standing Room Only, RNZ
The Friday Poem: ‘If befriending Ghosts’ from Ghosts
Kiri Piahana-Wong review for Kete Books
The moon has shone in poems for centuries and I can’t see a time when it won’t. Aside from the beauty allure that transfixes you in the dead of night – for me there is the way the connective light shines down on us all – both transcendental and sublime. When I read a moon poem that I love, it feels like I am cupping the moon in the palm of my hand to carry all day. Moon poem bliss. So many moon poems to love. So hard to choose. As with all my themes, it is not so much poetry about the moon, but poetry with a moon presence.
I am grateful to all the poets and publishers who have and are supporting my ongoing season of themes.
Eleven poems about the moon
Last summer we were under water
for K.
and we asked what are you doing there, moon?
our bodies neck-deep in salt and rain
each crater is a sea you said & dived under
the sun before I could speak water rushing
over your skin the place where chocolate
ice cream had melted and dried there like a
newly formed freckle on the surface of
us and the islands crumpling apart softly
over sea caves somewhere opening
my mouth in to the waves to save you are
you are you are
Nina Mingya Powles
from Magnolia 木蘭, Seraph Press, 2020
Soon, Moon
It’s not you, moon, it’s me:
the way I look to you as if
you’ll choose to be muse
then look back at my battered
corner-alley of a blue mood
and find only eye rhymes
for human-ugly and you:
lost hubcap, squashed yoghurt pot,
metal sewer lid; all the zeros
on the street numbers of the richest
most forbidding houses; the fierce interrogations
of their security lights and satellite disks;
the white flowers like hung-head hoodies
on the roadside gang of onion weed.
Even the pale, shucked hull
of mandarin peel dropped in the street
seems like eco-graffiti that cusses
we’re a pack of greedy moon-calves,
fancy apes with glitter-baubles,
guzzlers at Earth’s thin, sweet milk
who can’t see our hungers
will turn her into your mirror, darkly.
Emma Neale
from Tender Machines, Otago University Press, 2015
Tapa Talk
I’m a shadow catcher
I walk and fly in worlds
between worlds
but you were born in
the light of a bright moon
when the doors of heaven
were open to the songs of stars
your lips are trochus shells
fully parted in sleep
your eyes are nets
that draw me in
to your arms
your Leo heart
is a starfish freshly
plucked from heaven
your familiar body
the midrib of a coconut leaf
adorned with pandanus blooms
your laughter
a banana pod
burst open
and right now
dawn crawls over you
like a centipede
at last I understand
you’re the translation
of an ancient text
and the tapa on the wall
is the gallery of motifs
I found in your sleeping form
that tapa could be you
lying next to me
breathing into the first light
and you, darl
could be the tapa
hanging on the wall
Serie Barford
from Tapa Talk, Huia Press, 2007
Moon
for Ruth
You tell me you are a moth drawn to the moon
and I see you, a rare white puriri
unable to rest in the perfect green
of your sisters. You rise
from the forest
wings lifting and sighing.
You are heavy with prescience
and you have only
a few nights.
Alison Wong
from Cup, Steele Roberts, 2006
From Above
The twinkly stars disinterestedly
staring back, it tickles your thinking,
the sum of you, the multiplicated product
of all your hysterical episodes, and function,
fluctuated, fractal, of your moods and vacuities.
The people you’ve wrung out your guts for
like the sponge end of a squeegee, that’ve ticked
and tocked through a month, three months,
six months, a year of rinse cycles,
the faces who’ve written their looks
into your programming, all the undeletable,
second-guessed significations, the gestures
of their lips, their fingers’ commands,
it leaves you spinning, dehydrating
the evening to a dusty, distant simile.
I feel like a moon, punched all over with
old bruises, but whole, orbiting on,
pressing on, whole.
Nick Ascroft
from Back with the Human Condition, Victoria University Press, 2016
Madrigal
The moon rose out of the sea
and climbed above Mihiwaka.
How terrible, lonely far off
it seemed, how resolute and cold
in a vast nest of stars.
I stood leaning on a gatepost
listening to the mysterious wind
bending the pines a long time
before I set off down the hill
feeling like a stranger
returning to the place
where he was born.
And the moon came after me,
sat on my shoulder
and followed me inside.
All night it lay glowing
in the bones of my body,
a private pain, given over
to everything; all night
the moon glowed as a body glows
in a halo of moonlight,
and in the half-light of dawn
I heard the moon sing a madrigal
for those who live alone.
Brian Turner
from Ancestors, John McIndoe, 1981, picked by Richard Langston
Moon
‘Look,’ I said,
‘there’s the bloodied moon
over Paekakariki.
She’s tilting crazily
(one ear lopped off),
skimming the bright sea,
colliding with the hill-side.
I am afraid of madness –
the moon worries me.’
‘All the best people
are mad,’ you said.
And I laughed, agreeing,
so we welcomed her as she
moved along the coast
towards where we lay,
warm, in our bed.
Meg Campbell
from The Way Back: Poems, Te Kotare Press, 1981
The night sky on any day in history
I want you to look into an oncoming night.
Is it a little green? Does it have the cool orange
beginnings of streetlights? Tip your head back
as someone with a nosebleed might.
Survey the lower sky. Are there chimneys
making mini city silhouettes? Satellite dishes,
their smooth, grey craters turned in one direction?
You might insist you hear a nightingale.
Might see, at a distance, the huge screen
advertising an upcoming concert by the Beach Boys.
You could spend your time watching trains pull
their strings of yellow windows along in lines.
Or you might come here, where I am
where I stand upon the rarely silent floor
looking up at the rectangle moon
of our neighbour’s window.
Kate Camp
from How to be Happy Though Human: New and Selected Poems, Victoria University Press, 2020
Gregorian
Will you have me count off the days in your calendar, like some kind of self-soothing tool? Have we all been sold the latest gadget, to take our focus away from what’s happening out there? Distracted from colours changing in the trees, the moon continuing her cycle above, and the ocean’s repetitive lull. Do you dream about the world ending, or worry yourself down to the quicks in your nail beds, devouring hoarded tins of peaches and complaining because you can’t get into Farro Foods for poshos — when most people have to queue to buy an overpriced bottle of milk and a loaf of white bread to feed their children? I don’t care if your fancy-arsed store didn’t have the brand of cereal you desired. No, I will not post social media diaries of daily activities (like you who never bothered before and kept us at a distance with your academic nonsense, avoiding the reality our communities were already fucked); the thesaurus that kept you safe now serves as a doorstop, your words have dried up, and you’re resorting to colloquialisms. I doubt you will ever have a sense of life as it is for the minorities (who are really the majorities if you look at the world’s pyramid charts on the distribution of wealth); most of us struggle week to week, day to day, to survive everything you have created, and I don’t need to use your learned words of ‘capitalism’ and ‘eco fascism’ to know what I’m on about — without those labels we are connected regardless, through tissue, blood and ether, going back to wherever it is that we came from, whenever it was the beginning, if there ever was one. A painful silence echoes through these unspoken things, I see you in your ‘bubble’ wittering on about the importance of connection; but have you checked on your elderly neighbours to see what they might need? Or are you inside, behind your locked doors and twitching bespoke drapes, waiting for something to arrive?
Iona Winter
The Woman in the Moon
I was dancing in the shadow of the moon
under dark trees strung with party lights; a band
played waltzes; I can still feel the warmth of your hand
on the small of my back
while my fingers curled round your neck,
knowing your pulse through my long red gloves.
I hoped we were dancing into love;
we’d turn under those lit trees forever.
My hair was piled high, we looked to a future
I thought. If only I’d followed your eyes,
caught where they rested: that other light,
an ivory candlestick, skin so pale
drawing you in like a moth. Of course you fell.
Looking back, I see now, the obvious clue
I was dancing in the shadow of the moon.
Janis Freegard
from Kingdom Animalia: the Escapades of Linnaeus (Auckland University Press, 2011).
Moon of love
Under the moon of love, I shimmy
on silver over waves, flirt with light,
hang with cloud, under the moon of love.
Under the cloud of the moon of love, rain
shower blessing my lunatic stroll.
In every way guided by stars, under
the moon cloud of love.
Shine on the man I am
in this moon, reflect on the heart
of my inner space. Show me the night
shadow my day, shine on the man
in the moon of love.
You marvellous moon, I’m making
all your promises. Luminous moon, promise
me, promise you moon of love.
Michael Giacon
from Fast Fibres 6 2019, Olivia Macassey pick
Nick Ascroft dangles from the Wellington skyline on his e-bike, kid in the child-seat, and a look in the eyes that says: surmountable. His most recent collection of poems is Moral Sloth (VUP 2019).
Serie Barford was born in Aotearoa to a German-Samoan mother and a Palagi father. She was the recipient of a 2018 Pasifika Residency at the Michael King Writers’ Centre. Serie promoted her collections Tapa Talk and Entangled Islands at the 2019 International Arsenal Book Festival in Kiev. Her latest poetry collection, Sleeping With Stones, will be launched during Matariki, 2021.
Kate Camp’s most recent book is How to Be Happy Though Human: New and Selected Poems published by VUP in New Zealand, and House of Anansi Press in Canada.
Meg Campbell (1937-2007) was born in Palmerston North, and was educated at Carncot, Marsden School and Victoria University. In 1958 she married poet, Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, and lived with him and his son in Pukerua Bay on the Kāpiti Coast. She worked in a number of libraries and a bookshop, and published six poetry collections.
Wellington-based Janis Freegard is the author of several poetry collections, most recently Reading the Signs (The Cuba Press), as well a novel, The Year of Falling (Mākaro Press). She was the inaugural Ema Saikō Poetry Fellow at New Zealand Pacific Studio and has previously won the Katherine Mansfield Short Story Prize and the Geometry/Open Book Poetry Prize. She grew up in the UK, South Africa and Australia before her family settled in Aotearoa when she was twelve.
Michael Giacon was born in Auckland and raised in a large Pakeha-Italian family. He was the NZ Poetry Society featured summer poet 2021, and his work has featured in the recent editions of Landfall and the New Zealand Poetry Yearbook. He is currently finalising a manuscript for publication.
Emma Neale is a writer and editor. Her most recent collection is To the Occupant (O. In 2020 she received the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for a Distinguished Contribution to New Zealand Poetry.
Nina Mingya Powles is a poet and zinemaker from Wellington, currently living in London. She is the author of Magnolia 木蘭, a finalist in the Ockham Book Awards, a food memoir, Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai, and several poetry chapbooks and zines. Her debut essay collection, Small Bodies of Water, will be published in September 2021.
Brian Turner was born in Dunedin in 1944. His debut collection Ladders of Rain (1978) won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. His writing includes biography, poetry, sports writing and journalism and has won many awards. Just This won the NZ Post Book Award for Poetry (2010). He was the Te Mata Poet Laureate (2003-2005) and received the Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry in 2009. He lives in Central Otago.
Iona Winter (Waitaha/Kāi Tahu) lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin. Her hybrid work is widely published and anthologised in literary journals internationally. Iona creates work to be performed, relishing cross-modality collaboration, and holds a Master of Creative Writing. She has authored three collections, Gaps in the Light (2021), Te Hau Kāika(2019), and then the wind came (2018). Skilled at giving voice to difficult topics, she often draws on her deep connection to land, place and whenua.
Alison Wong is the coeditor of the first anthology of creative writing by Asian New Zealanders. A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand (AUP, 2021) will be launched at the Auckland Writers Festival on 15 May and at Unity Books Wellington on 27 May 6 pm. There will also be events at the Napier and Dunedin public libraries on 3 and 10 June respectively. Alison’s novel, As the Earth Turns Silver (Penguin/Picador, 2009) won the NZ Post Book Award for fiction and her poetry collection Cup (Steele Roberts, 2006), which includes ‘Moon’, was shortlisted for the Jessie Mackay Award for best first book of poetry. She was a poetry judge at the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
Ten poems about clouds
Twelve poems about ice
Ten poems about dreaming
A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand
eds. Paula Morris and Alison Wong, Auckland University Press, 2021
To celebrate the arrival of A Clear Dawn, I invited nine poets to read one of their poems in the collection as audio or video. This fabulous anthology of poetry and fiction, so astutely and loving assembled by Paula Morris and Alison Wong, is sheer reading joy. I am delighted you get to have a taste of nine of the poets’ voices here. Auckland University Press have created an exquisite book. I love holding it, I love finding my way through the beautifully designed pages. I just love this book.
If you live in Auckland you might like to go to the launch at the Auckland Writer’s Festival:
Saturday May 15th, 5:00pm – 6:00pm Balcony Bar, Level Five, Aotea Centre
Enjoy a complimentary glass of wine with selected readings as this ground-breaking contribution to our literature is launched.
You can listen to Alison Wong discuss the book with Kathryn Ryan here.
Auckland University Press page.
The Readings
Isabelle Johns reads ‘The Dance’
Maryana Garcia reads ‘Glass questions’
Modi Deng reads ‘Ben Lomond’
Neema Singh reads ‘A proper way to make tea’
Jiaqiao Liu reads ‘to a future you’
E Wen Wong reads ‘one world sleeps in an apple’
Chris Tse reads ‘Punctum’
Rushi Vyas reads ‘I saw you and I learned this, beloved‘
Vanessa Mei Crofskey reads ‘What’s the pH balance of yin + yang?’
Vanessa Mei Crofskey is an artist and writer based in Te-Whanganui-a-Tara, who features in A Clear Dawn, the first-ever anthology of Asian New Zealand creative writing. She is the current director of Enjoy Contemporary Art Space.
Modi Deng is a postgraduate candidate in piano performance at the Royal Academy of Music on scholarship. Currently based in London, Modi received a MMus (First Class Hons, Marsden research scholarship) and a BA from Auckland University. Her first chapbook-length collection of poetry will be part of AUP New Poets 8. She cares deeply about literature (especially poetry, diaspora), music, psychology, and her family.
Maryana Goco Garcia is a poet, and a journalist who dabbles in photography. All of Maryana’s work, visual or written, attempts to find the miracle in the moment, to encourage pausing, to look hard at what lies before us until we notice something new. You can find her poetry on Instagram where she keeps a visual and word archive as @ripagepoet.
Isabelle Johns likes to write when she has the inspiration, and is (grudgingly) practising doing so without the inspiration part, too. She studies Computer Systems Engineering at the University of Auckland, where she can be found most of the time, either catching up on missed lectures or frantically debugging code before a deadline. Her poems have been published in The Three Lamps, University of Auckland’s literary journal, as well as the upcoming anthology for Asian New Zealand writers, A Clear Dawn.
Jiaqiao (Jay) Liu is a Chinese nonbinary poet currently doing a creative writing MA in Pōneke. They write about family, queerness, longing, myth and tech, among other obsessions. Some of their work can be found in brief, Blackmail Press, takahē and Queer the Pitch.
Neema Singh is a poet from Christchurch of Gujarati Indian descent. Her work appears in Ko Aotearoa Tātou: We Are New Zealand(2020) and A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand (2021) and she is currently working on her first collection of poetry, a series of poems unfolding the layers of culture, identity and history contained within ordinary moments. Neema is an experienced secondary school English teacher and holds a Master of Creative Writing from The University of Auckland.
Chris Tse is the author of How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes and HE’S SO MASC. He and Emma Barnes are co-editors of Out Here: An Anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ Writers From Aotearoa, due to be published in October 2021. He is The Spinoff‘s Poetry Editor.
Rushi Vyas is a writer, educator, and PhD candidate at Te Whare Wānanga o Ōtākou / University of Otago. He is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection When I Reach For Your Pulse (Four Way Books, 2023) which was a two-time finalist for the National Poetry Series in the US, and the co-author of the chapbook Between Us, Not Half a Saint, with Rajiv Mohabir. He holds degrees from the University of Michigan and the University of Colorado-Boulder. He currently serves as Reviews/Interviews Editor for GASHER Journal. Recent poetry is forthcoming or published in The Georgia Review, Indiana Review, Pigeon Pages, Landfall (NZ), Redivider, The Offing, Adroit, Waxwing, and elsewhere.
E Wen Wong is a first-year Law and Science student at the University of Canterbury. She was the winner of the 2020 National Schools Poetry Award.
Dear Featherston Booktown
Thank you so much for inviting me to the fabulous Wairarapa to perform and feast on the words of others, to stay in a cosy cottage where it was quiet and pitch dark at night (so I felt right at home) and where Virginia cooked me crepes with ratatouille that were so fresh and herby and melted in your mouth (just what I needed after a long day travelling with a thousand hiccups), to touch base with David and his fabulous Hedley’s book stand that stocked poetry gloriously galore, to wander around the bookstalls crammed in the hall and discover some gold-nugget books,
to eat the best afghans ever with my best mate Selina Tusitala Marsh in the Supper Room, to hear Selina woo the Fish-n-Chip eaters with her sensational knotty Mophead work in progress, and hear her stories about performing for the Queen, to arrive early the next morning and hear Biggsy, Selina and Ben Brown talk in the “on the couch” session
to do a two-hour poetry workshop with local children and their mothers and get them all zinging and shining with poems (will be posting poems from this on Poetry Box soon)
to drive over to Greytown and eat the tastiest tofu dumplings ever, and then head to Martinborough to stock up on wine and relish for the family and to have dinner with our new reading ambassador Ben Brown and other authors and really click with Ben’s wisdom and approach to writing and working with children, and to eat a big fresh fruity breakfast to stock up my empty energy tank so I could stay up late and hear our national treasure John Campbell MC True Stories Told Live, and hear Renee’s wit and daring at 91 with a hilarious deadpan tale of action and “pot” plants, and then Anahera Gildea’s daring (at half that age) as she laid down a challenge for the rows of white men in the Anzac Hall photographs and for us, most definitely for us, and reminded us to bust up our immunity to the undercurrent words and images that surround and shape us if we are to move forward as a nation, and I just loved her for her words, and I wanted to hug her close, and it got me thinking of all the women in Wild Honey who had struggled to speak and to be heard as poets and as women for a century, and I thought YES! this is my festival highlight
and then downstairs to my late night Collision event between old and emerging poets and there I was hoping I would last the distance old woman me and not be nodding off in my chair next to my best mate Selina but I held up Wild Honey and said this book was my book of communities and connections just like a poem is community and connections just like Booktown is community and connections as are the bridges between readers and writers, and I shared a poem from my secret project and all that stockpiling self doubt that had accumulated over the past year in my hermit state just flitted off like moths to the light
and I got to hug all the Show Pony poets and talk reviews with Rebecca Hawkes and it felt like a transfusion of poetry love
and how good it felt to hear Tayi Tibble and Sam Duckor-Jones read from their new books and earlier on to hear Rachel McAlpine, Vana Manasiadis, Helen Rickerby, Carolyn DeCaro and Emma Barnes make poetry spark from whispery to loud
and to see gift-to-us Tara Black comic-stripping the sessions!
and to barely sleep but to keep on my feet and somehow do a poet’s response to the four sublime poetry finalists in the Ockham NZ Book Awards and shuffle on the spot and say this year it is too close to call but that I will dance for joy whoever wins (Mohamed Hassan, Nina Mingya Powles, Hinemoana Baker, Tusiata Avia)
and to wish I had had the stamina to talk to all the people who wanted to talk to me instead of scurrying back to the cosy cottage or the back seat of my little hire care like an awkward mouse needing to reboot
and to feel sad I was too spinning-out-tired to hear the Show Ponies again especially when I heard how magnificent organiser Freya Daly Sadgrove was
and to somehow drive over the glorious Rimutaka mountain range on Monday morning with mist and cloud and spine tingling views, and go to Good Books and fill a box with book treats and talk books with dear Jane Arthur and meet author extraordinaire Eamonn Marra
and then and then
to find my way home.
Thank you Mary and Peter Biggs, Mary McCallum and the Booktown crew for your special festival, rich in community and connections. I had a wonderful time.
Aroha nui
Paula Green
Unity Books’s Marion Castree, poet Vana Manasiadis and I toast the end of the festival with green tea (for me) at Featherston’s wonderful Royal Hotel
(Poetic Licence: too tired to get words and photos and sequence of events in right order!)
the widow stands trial
I’ll miss the attention,
that much is true.
the neighbours clutching
bags of flour at my door
as if all I could think to do
was eat. I appreciate the show
of sympathy, though of course
some hungers are larger
than that. winter bit like a dog
that year. I watched my breath
feathering the window
as our men prised
last life from the land, scouring
her cold cheeks for plunder.
funny: to them Mother Earth
is a harsh mistress
and not the first woman
we learned how to ruin.
but I digress — all this is just scenery
and you want to hear of the death.
see, severed from one husband
I wed Rumour in the night,
placed a band on my finger
and pledged to be his. now
my hand throbs pleasantly
as the villagers talk:
see how her face betrays
guilt not grief. she must have
done it. she must have
snapped.
much mythology there is
around the snap.
sometimes it happens
when you are slicing an apple
and a spider slinks out
from its bowels.
sometimes it happens
the third time he strikes you
(though rarely at moments
so climactic as that).
and sometimes it happens
alone in the fields,
hills pulled flush
against the gash of horizon
when something in you unlatches
and swings free like a gate
to some forbidden arch, some space
for the soul to surge through.
perhaps my story needs more
of a relatable flavour.
very well. to the judge
who asks how I plead,
I’ll say I’ve been pleading
all my life:
for some measure of grandness
to fill my wifely days,
some passion to slip through
the cracks of those hours
when I stood fishing ants
from the sugar.
a life for a life. his concluded
to make way for mine.
or so my accusers would say.
gentlemen of the jury, you must examine
my account; turn it round in the light
like some lovely old clock
whose hands you are not sure
you can trust.
there lies the question
you are asked to decide:
what unseemly things
have these hands seen?
let us put that to rest
as I did my good husband —
and while you deliberate
you may find me in the fields;
arms raised heavenward,
light catching my knife
like a smile.
Anuja Mitra
Anuja Mitra lives in Auckland. Her writing has appeared in Takahe, Mayhem, Cordite Poetry Review, Starling, Sweet Mammalian, Poetry Shelf and The Three Lamps, and will appear in the AUP anthology A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand. She has also written theatre and poetry reviews for Tearaway, Theatre Scenes, Minarets and the New Zealand Poetry Society. She is co-founder of the online arts magazine Oscen.
Not many younger poets sent me poems about ice but there were loads of dreaming poems. I have always loved poems that dream because poetry is a close relation with its slants, mists, hallucinations, and deep personal cores. I sometimes think that to dream is to write. To enter the opaque, to reclaim the obvious, to have no idea where you will end up or how you will get there. To astonish yourself.
I am so very grateful to the poets and publishers who have backed my themed poetry season with such loving support.
Ten poems about dreaming
the dream is real
the moon is an open eye
high in the sky or winking
at the world below
the wind is the sea’s breath
rustling the leaves in the trees
night is a dark river
flowing through the day
a bird is a song
the dream is real
clouds are ghosts
flight is a wing
Apirana Taylor
from a canoe in midstream, Canterbury University Press, 2009
Insomnia
it is a black night
I lie perfectly still
mine is the long
awake adult body
two small boys
flickering at either side
night sweats
bad dreams
fluttering in and
out of sheets
I lie black
in between
head
thorax, abdomen
trembling children
my wings
Karlo Mila
from A Well Written Body, Huia Press, 2008
My Father Dreams of His Father
My father dreams of his father
walking in the garden of the old family homestead
on Kawaha Point.
I have not been back since he passed away.
As decrepit dogs wander off under trees
to sniff out their final resting places,
elderly men wait in the wings
rehearsing exit lines.
I’m sure my grandfather never envied his dog more
than during those last days.
I’m sure, given the choice, he would have preferred
to slip away under the magnolias.
The garden is tended by different hands now.
My grandmother still walks by the lake,
her little dog in tow. The current man of the house
is more interested in the chasing of swans
than the cultivating of camellias.
My father dreams of his father
walking in the garden of the old family homestead
on Kawaha Point.
I have not been back since he passed away.
Claudia Jardine
from AUP New Poets 7, ed. Anna Jackson, Auckland University Press, 2020
Sentries
I’m frantically chasing my mother who weaves in and out of the aisles throwing down craft supplies. I trip over scissors and quick unpicks
not seeing her face, only clean ponytail and collar poking out over plum cardigan. We run between shelves of antique vases but lose contact with the linoleum
and float out. In this world we drive couches like cars. I’m picking one up from the junkyard with a blue shag cushion for reference. Bumper stickers are glinting
while the couches lie gridlike. We scramble through the drivers’ seats running fingers through the upholstery. In the winter gardens there are fish tanks
nestled between succulents. One has a tangle of thin eels within it. Boys tap on the home of a solitary neon tetra until it shatters. I hold the fragments together
and try to keep the fish swimming in a handful of glass and water. They put me in the newspaper. I run out to catch you in the ocean, my mother
but you keep dipping under. As I look around I notice, embedded in rock formations are those white plastic fans, not rotating anymore just facing the horizon.
Lily Holloway
originally published at The Spin Off, October, 2020
in my dream nick cave had a long, thick black mane.
it swung around his hips, kissed
with a bright white streak
snaking its length.
he served noodle soup at the concert
full of moving mushrooms, blooming
into elegant dancing technicolour spores;
tasted like purple.
the show was very red, like the blood
of his falling son. my mother
was falling too,
drunkenly, over crimson seats,
hurting her back and lying down with the room spinning.
pissing off the man in the toupee, and toupee’s wife.
nick drawled, don’t worry,
sung a song sad and it broke us,
spun around inside a steel cage,
spray-painted KINGS on our leather jackets
so we could get into his next stadium show free.
afterwards, we matched up our snails in the foyer.
nick was smoking through tears out back,
about to catch a flight, saying,
i think i’ve met someone with your name,
and it was you already.
Hebe Kearney
Lake Wakatipu
A jade lizard bends in a circle,
chasing its tail;
straightens, and darts for a crevice.
Mist swathes in grey silk the lake:
flat-stomached, calm, slow-pulsed,
a seamless bulk.
Vapours spiral,
pushing up to a cloud-piercer,
where snow has been sprinkled
like powder from a talc can at height.
Grandeur stands muffled.
The Earnslaw headbutts shorewards.
After lying prone for years,
rocks shift downwards
at speed, eager to wheel
through air, crash in a gully,
and not move.
The lake buttons up to dive deep,
leaving a perfectly blank black space,
through which you might fall forever.
David Eggleton
from Edgeland and other poems, Otago University Press, 2018
Daisy
This town is just one great big farm. The main road runs alongside these power poles tilted over green green paddocks, the lines all sagging, the poles on the piss. You hit it at forty k and slug down the main street, past the Strand, the Top Pub, the Nott. Past blue election billboards and wooden fences painted red with Water Gouging and Inheritance Tax. The arterial line is just panel beaters, tractors, pots of pink flowers dripping from shop windows. She says they look like icing. And these cows. There are forty-two of them, all painted up to look cultural. Blue like an old tea cup, pearls and roses dribbling over the rim. One unzipped at the side, with muscle and guts peeking out like baked beans and salmon. One flower power cow, real LSD yellow and orange, like it sorta wandered over from Woodstock and got lost for years and years. Little kids run across the road just to touch them. Name their favourites after their pet cats. Rusty, Mittens, Boots. They’re bolted to the pavement so at night they just haunt the main street, all washed out and hollow. But the worst is that giant one right at the start of town. Two stories high, with black splotches like flames of tar. I have these dreams that the paddocks are on fire and the ground is opening up and all you can hear is mooing. The Mega Cow watching over his herd like some great milky God. The trains rattle past at dawn and wake me up. The cows hardly blink.
Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connor
from Ngā Kupu Waikato: an anthology of Waikato Poetry, ed. Vaughan Rapatahana, Self Published, 2019
Tilting
The woman on the bus said
I’ve never been on a bus before
as she lifted her bag
a miniature suitcase
black and shiny as a beetle.
Next time you’ll know what to do
said the driver as he stood on the brakes
pointed to the building on the left and said
The lift’ll take you to The Terrace.
There were no ledges on The Terrace
just buildings tilting and leaning
and the wind to push against.
That night, unpacked and tired
the woman climbed on her black beetle bag
and flew across the harbour
soaring above its flat cool face
staring deep into its mouth
and wondering about earthquakes.
The next morning the bus driver couldn’t shake
the woman from his mind.
As he left the depot
his bus pshishing and grinding through peak hour flow
he checked his mirror
but she wasn’t there
instead he saw the edges of his bus converting
row by row, slice by slice
into a huge loaf of bread.
The aroma filled the aisles
stirring the appetites of even
his sleepiest passengers
and when he neared the end of Lambton Quay
all that was left of the bus, was the crust.
Some like the crust, some don’t, he thought
as he chewed and chomped
until the last crumb fell
into the gutter, into the drain
into the harbour, and out to sea.
What now? he said
peering skywards, catching a glint.
Trish Harris
published under the title ‘Openings’ in New Zealand Poetry Society Anthology 2015/2016
bone / tired
I am tired to my bones
this exhaustion
has wrapped around my ribs
sunk into my jaw
slunk
down
each vertebrae
I take deep slow breaths
each exhale
rattles the cage of ribs
I don’t sleep anymore
I just rattle around the house
the rooms empty of the wakeful
I touch each wall
like a talisman
like an averter of the evil eye
to avert whichever evil
might choose us tonight
I keep vigil
I don’t sleep anymore
rattle the bones
of the sleeping
I am rattled
to my bones
I don’t sleep anymore
the bones of my shoulders
have permanently rolled inward
they hunch
waiting for a fight
for a blow
I have never been in a fight
just in anticipation
of the fight, the flight
there are 27 bones in the human hand
I count them all
in lieu of sleeping
I am tired to my bones
I don’t sleep anymore
Rose Peoples
Pasture and flock
Staring up into the sky my feet
anchor me to the ground so hard
I’m almost drowning, drowning,
in air, my hair falling upwards
around my shoulders, I think I’ll hug
my coat closer. I’m standing
on hundreds of blades of grass, and
still there are so many more
untrodden on. Last night, in bed,
you said, ‘you are the sheet
of linen and I am the threads,’ and
I wanted to know what you meant
but you wouldn’t wake up to tell me
and in the morning you didn’t
remember, and I had forgotten
till now when I think, who is
the blades of grass, who is the pasture?
It is awfully cold, and my coat
smells of something unusual.
It almost seems as if it is the stars
smelling, as if there were
an electrical fault in the sky,
and though it is almost too dark
to see I can see the sheep
moving closer, and the stars
falling. I feel like we are all
going to plunge into the sky
at once, the sheep and I,
and I am the sheep and I am
the flock, and you are the pasture
I fall from, the stars and the sky.
Anna Jackson
from Pasture and Flock: New & Selected Poems, Auckland University Press, 2018
Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connor was awarded the 2018 Charles Brasch Young Writers’ Essay Competition, and the 2017 Monash Prize for Emerging Writers. Her work has appeared in Starling, Mayhem, Brief, Poetry New Zealand, Landfall, Turbine, Flash Frontier, Mimicry, Min-a-rets, Sweet Mammalian, Sport and Verge. She is Poetry New Zealand‘s 2021 Featured Poet. She writes thanks to the support of some of the best people on this great watery rock.
David Eggleton is the Aotearoa New Zealand Poet Laureate 2019 – 2022. His most recent book is The Wilder Years: Selected Poems, published by Otago University Press.
Trish Harris has written two books – a poetry collection My wide white bed and a memoir The Walking Stick Tree. She teaches non-fiction on the Whitireia Creative Writing Programme, is co-founder of Crip the Lit and edited their 2019 pocketbook, ‘Here we are, read us: Women, disability and writing’. She says she’s a part-time crane operator…but maybe she’s dreaming?
Lily Holloway has a Teletubby tattoo and is forthcoming in AUP New Poets 8. You can find more of her work here
Anna Jackson lectures at Te Herenga Waka/Victoria University of Wellington, lives in Island Bay, edits AUP New Poets and has published seven collections of poetry, most recently Pasture and Flock: New and Selected Poems (AUP 2018). Thoughts on dreaming and on being dreamed about can be found here and here.
Claudia Jardine (she/her) is a poet and musician based in Ōtautahi/Christchurch. In 2020 she published her first chapbook, The Temple of Your Girl, with Auckland University Press in AUP New Poets 7 alongside Rhys Feeney and Ria Masae. Her work has also been published in Starling, Sport, Landfall and Stasis. For the winter of 2021, Jardine will be one of the Arts Four Creative Residents in The Arts Centre Te Matatiki Toi Ora, where she will be working on a collection of poems.
Hebe Kearney is a poet from Christchurch who now calls Auckland her home. Her work has appeared in The Three Lamps, Oscen, Starling, Forest and Bird, a fine line, and the Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2021.
Dr Karlo Mila (MNZM) is a mother, writer, award-winning poet and leadership programme director. Of Tongan and Pākehā descent, her creative and professional career has focused upon Pasifika peoples in Aotearoa. Her book Dream Fish Floating won the best first book of poetry in the NZ literary awards in 2005. Karlo lives in Tāmaki Makaurau with her three sons. Her third poetry book Goddess Muscle was published by Huia in 2020.
Rose Peoples is from Te Awakairangi/Lower Hutt. She is a student at Victoria University and, having finished her law degree last year, decided that the logical next step was to embark upon a Masters in Literature. She is a bookseller at Good Books. Her work has previously appeared in Cordite, Mimicry and Starling.
Apirana Taylor, Ngati Porou, Te Whanau a Apanui, Ngati Ruanui, Te Ati Awa, is a nationally and internationally published poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, actor, painter and musician. He has been Writer in Residence at Canterbury and Massey Universities. He frequently tours nationally and internationally visiting schools, tertiary institutions and prisons reading his poetry, storytelling and taking creative writing workshops. He has written six collections of poetry, a book of plays, three collections of short stories, and two novels. His work has been included in many national and international anthologies.
Ten poems about clouds
Twelve poems about ice
We’re Nice to Each Other After the Trauma
Christchurch, after 15 March 2019
We’re nice to each other after the trauma.
It’s emotional labour spent in a good cause,
like signing a birthday card at work or volunteering
to clean a beach. In the geography of care
the grieving city is bright, busy, sensitive
to extraordinary needs, able to flex and soothe.
It’s one of a series of temporary truths,
a glimpse of something not quite representative
that we wish could stay once it’s there.
We wish we couldn’t see it disappearing
into routine, because we were desolately happy because
we were nice to each other after the trauma.
Erik Kennedy
Erik Kennedy is the author of There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime (Victoria University Press, 2018), and he is co-editing a book of climate change poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific forthcoming from Auckland University Press later in 2021. His poems, stories, and criticism have recently been published in places like FENCE, Hobart, Maudlin House, Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, the TLS, and Western Humanities Review. Originally from New Jersey, he lives in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Photo credit: Alison Glenny
Some poetry books catch you on the first page and you get goosebumps and your breathing changes and you know this is a book for you. I felt like that when I first read Alison Glenny’s sublime The Farewell Tourist with its luminous connections to Antarctica. There is something about poetry that takes risks, that never loses touch with heart, is unafraid of ideas, and is able to sing on the line. You just want to camp up in the book for days, with a thermos of tea, and all your devices unplugged.
I felt the same way about Bill Manhire’s extraordinary poem ‘Erebus Voices’ (Lifted, Victoria University Press, 2005). You can read the poem at The Spin Off here and listen to Bill read the poem here. Thinking of Alison’s book and Bill’s poem, I knew ice had to be one of my themes.
Ice in poems: it might be a hint, a hurt, an underlying coldness, an icy image, a heart freeze, a trip to the snow-capped mountain, a melting ice-cream, an avalanche.
I am so grateful to all the poets who have supported my extended thematic poetry gatherings. Thank you.
The Poetry Shelf Theme Season runs every Friday until mid August.
In the morning the mountains beckon
Blue and clear like bells; glaciers feed upon
Light pouring from heaven brighter than ice-stone.
Ruth France (1913-1968), from No Traveller Returns: the selected poems of Ruth France, Cold Hub Press, 2020
Twelve poems about ice
Some afternoons a fog rolled down the hallway. On others, the staircase groaned with moisture. A finger laid carelessly on a bannister dislodged a ledge of rime. She lifted the hem of her dress to avoid the damp in the passageway, wore knitted gloves in the kitchen. She was lying in the bath when the glacier pushed through the wall. She sank deeper into the water to escape the chill that settled on her shoulders. Trying to ignore the white haze, to lose herself between the pages of her book.
Alison Glenny
from The Farewell Tourist, Otago University Press, 2018
He Manawa Maunga
We are dwarfed by a snow bank
that reaches beyond our eyes,
a single hole punctuating its white sheet.
Your hand covers my small eyes
and I feel you shielding me in the warmth of your jacket
as we move though.
I open them to a palace of ice and snow
meticulously carved by strangers
long gone down the mountain.
We sit together in silence,
deep in the mountain’s quiet heart.
Watching our breath melt away
the walls around us.
Ruby Solly
from Tōku Pāpa, Victoria University Press, 2021
Pencarrow Lighthouse
Mrs Mary Jane Bennet saw frost on the ground
circling the lighthouse where her children sleep.
At the cliff edge where wildflowers were,
gulls wash seafoam up the shore.
You, gulls, over hoofprints on the track,
over the dunes, over pearl beams ghosting
out from the lighthouse,
in your thousands over clean seashells.
The wind spins dead things in circles.
Collect up the wintertime, won’t you,
crack it on a rock,
drop it from a height.
But, you bird whose wing cuts the tops off waves,
shut your wings for the children
of Mrs Mary Jane Bennett.
Let loose a grey feather.
She will tuck it into the knot
of the blue satin ribbon
ion her eldest daughters hair, the one
who dreams of white things circling.
Nina Mingya Powles
from Girls of the Drift, Seraph Press, 2014
Wabi-sabi
I was thirty-three before I learned
people stuck in snow
can die from dehydration.
I would melt icicles
on my tongue for you, resist
the drinking down, drip it
into you. Then repeat, repeat
until my lips were raw.
Deep snow squeaks. We
stop on the Desert Road
because of the snow. You
throw snowballs at the
‘Warning: Army Training Area’ sign.
I take macro-photographs of
icicles on tussock.
When we drive up the Desert Road
we lost National Radio, we lose
cellphone reception, we lose
all hope. I was thirty-seven before
I considered not trying to always fix
things. I read an article in the New Yorker
about wabi-sabi – the beauty in the
broken and the worn. The integrity
of the much-used utilitarian object.
But then there was another article
about a woman flying to Mexico
to be put into a coma
so she can wake up mended. It is
like rebooting a computer, said the doctor.
Despite wabi-sabi, I want that.
To live in snow and not be thirsty.
I want good reception all the way
up the country. I want a shiny, clean
version of myself. Closedown,
hibernate, restart.
Helen Lehndorf
from The Comforter, Seraph Press, 2011
Girl Reading
She overhears the sound of things in hiding.
She bites an apple and imagines orchard starlight.
Each time she licks her thumb, its tip,
she tastes the icy branches,
she hears a sigh migrate from page to page.
Bill Manhire
from Zoetropes, Victoria University Press, 1981
Opa
They would ice-skate:
he worked the canals
with speed.
My grandparents,
between villages, on ice
above the level of the land.
*
Amsterdam in the fifties:
a row of white stone houses
on a paved street.
*
New Zealand’s blue sea
lapped at sloping shores,
knew its place
at the flank of land.
Wide stars, small shells,
the open span of sand.
*
A wooden villa
changed you.
Housed you.
Those years of good
morning, goodnight,
pudding and bread,
climbing in
and climbing out of bed.
*
Your skates
hang on the wall.
Blond varnished wood.
Braided laces.
Those blades, sweeping,
never shook off the ice.
Angela Andrews
from Echolocation, Victoria University Press, 2007
Island girl Tokoroa
ice-cream puddle licks bare feet
a sky so bright and blue
the sun rimming its yellow stain
make-believe it is summer
yet winter bites frozen fingers
gloves and scarves for some other child
in her hands she holds the key
a coin for lunch one Sally Lunn, miss
creamy pink-smothered bun
there is no word for luxury beyond
this daily walk in winter sun
she can almost taste it
morning flicks by chafing
children
head down she holds out her hand
winter may snow for all she cares
the skies can turn black
one Sally Lunn, miss
is heaven and blue
and forever
Reihana Robinson
from Her Limitless Her, Mākaero Press (Hoopla series), 2018
Three people in the snow
two linked by marriage
memorising fault line
by fault line
and every now and again the head of the summit
tails in
and out of sight
three people with backpacks and knees in the snow
threading the mountains with a silence
that once broken
would make you cry
and every now and again the head of the summit
tails in
and out of sight
like the early love of a June morning
first an accent and then the hearing
and the sky is a blanket wishing it gone
late on the summit a sparrow
whittling alone
and away
Modi Deng
from A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand, eds Paula Morris & Alison Wong, Auckland University Press, 2021
Avalanche
There was the war on TV,
the snow, the people lying on plastic
in the snow, death arriving
with his suitcase full of tools,
the delivery out of this world
offers such a dazzling
variety, and the snow, forever this
white tableau becomes forged
with the recollections of your last
oncology visit
and the people lying on the plastic
in the snow.
At the doctor’s I sat with
my tiny hands held in my lap the way
I’d been taught, two lovebirds,
but the flesh was as cold as sheet ice
I was up to my elbows
in frostbite and snow.
There were stories in the news
each day and in the morning paper,
death can happen overnight, may
be in your house if you don’t move
fast enough, in a trench, or
the dreadful football-stadium one,
under the trees in a dark
wood, against a hedge, or even lying
on plastic in the wan snow.
Such soft subdued footfalls,
but a goodly advance
over a long stretch of time.
Others shift their seats away from me
leaving a pencil
-thin cavity, a subtle margin,
but you and I are crouched
together in the snow reading the
avalanche instructions;
they are torn and dirty, tacked to
the cobwebbed wall of some
wild and woody alpine mountain hut:
Construct earthen fortifications
Behind your village. In the case
of serious exposure it is
best to wait for rescue dogs.
We must read the instructions
we must read the instructions
but there are no instructions
I believe there are no instructions.
Vivienne Plumb
from Avalanche, Pemmican Press, 2000
Every morning I congratulate
the icicles on their severity.
I think they have courage, backbone,
their hard hearts will never give way.
Then around ten or half past,
hearing the steady falling drops of water
I look up at the eaves. I see
the enactment of the same old winter story
– the icicles weeping away their inborn tears,
and if only they knew it, their identity.
Janet Frame
from The Goose Bath: Poems, eds. Pamela Gordon, Denis Harold, Bill Manhire, Vintage, Random House, 2006, picked Hebe Kearney
You can hear Janet Frame read ‘The Icicles’ here
At Home in Antarctica
In this place, silence has a voice
wide-ranging as the continent.
Some say it’s on the cusp
of madness, the way it hums
and stutters, mutters to itself
in quietest tones.
In this place, the universe brims.
Inside absence, presence.
Inside distance, dust
and our sleeping earth
dreaming beneath her thin blue
mask of ice.
In this place, the necessity
of memory, recollections
of a loved one’s face, shape
of laughter, weight of breath.
In this place, nostalgia
roams patient as slow
hands on skin transparent
as melt-water. Nights are light
and long. Shadows settle
on the shoulders of air.
Time steps out of line
here stops to thaw
the frozen hearts of icebergs.
Sleep isn’t always easy in this place
where the sun stays up all night
and silence has a voice.
Claire Beynon
from Open Book – Poetry & Images (Steele Roberts, 2007).
Suggested by Jenny Powell. The poem has also been a prompt for various musical compositions, including a piece Antarctikos by US composer, Jabez Co (2010) and The Journey Home (2012) for soprano, tenor, baritone, choir and orchestra by NZ composer John Drummond.
Visiting Rita at Sydney Street West
Wellington rains in a cross-hatch tantrum.
Wind blasts batter everyone backwards.
Lost in a volley of ‘after the hill second street right
follow your nose’ I have taken the wrong hill,
veering left with an eye on the clock.
Landmarks stream down my spectacles,
couplets of directions waterfall out of my head.
Lost in a valley of paper map ink-splash,
folds between us disintegrate. In the if-only world
my fingers wrap a hot cup of tea, my coat dries by your heater.
Sticks torn from moorings shoot down white-water gutters.
Wind race of paper packets eddies in high-speed gusts.
I am lost in solitary panic.
An onslaught of sleet freezes my face.
Jenny Powell
from Meeting Rita (forthcoming June, Cold Hub Press)
Angela Andrews lives in Auckland with her family. Her PhD in Creative Writing at Victoria University examined the relationship between medicine and poetry. She has previously worked as a doctor.
Claire Beynon is a Dunedin-based artist, writer and independent researcher. She works collaboratively on a diverse range of on- and off-line projects with fellow artists, writers, scientists and musicians in NZ and abroad. These group activities are buoyed and balanced by the contemplative rhythms of her solo practice. Websites here and here.
Modi Deng is a postgraduate candidate in piano performance at the Royal Academy of Music on scholarship. Currently based in London, Modi received a MMus (First Class Honours, Marsden research scholarship) and a BA from Auckland University. Her first chapbook-length collection of poetry will be part of AUP New Poets 8. Her poems have also appeared in A Clear Dawn (AUP), Starling, the Stay Home Zine (Bitter Melon Press), and on NZ Poetry Shelf for National Poetry Day. She cares deeply about literature (especially poetry, diaspora), music, psychology, and her family.
Janet Frame (1924 – 2004), born in Dunedin, was the author of thirteen novels, five story collections, two volumes of poetry, a children’s book and a three-volume autobiography. She won numerous awards including the New Zealand Book Award for poetry, fiction and non-fiction titles, and the New Zealand Scholarship in Letters. She received New Zealand’s highest civil honour in 1990 when she became a Member of the Order of New Zealand. She was awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in 2003 and was named an Arts Foundation Icon Artist in 2004.
Alison Glenny’s collection of prose poems The Farewell Tourist, was published by Otago University Press in 2018. A chapbook, Bird Collector, is being published by Compound Press in 2021. She lives on the Kāpiti Coast.
Helen Lehndorf’s book, The Comforter, made the New Zealand Listener’s ‘Best 100 Books of 2012′ list. Her second book, Write to the Centre, is a nonfiction book about the practice of keeping a journal. She writes poetry and non-fiction, and has been published in Sport, Landfall, JAAM, and many other publications and anthologies. Recently, she co-created an performance piece The 4410 to the 4412 for the Papaoiea Festival of the Arts with fellow Manawatū writers Maroly Krasner and Charlie Pearson. A conversation between the artists and Pip Adam can be heard on the Better Off Read podcast here
Bill Manhire founded the creative writing programme at Victoria University of Wellington, which a little over 20 years ago became the International Institute of Modern Letters. His new book Wow is published by Victoria University Press in New Zealand and Carcanet in the UK.
Vivienne Plumb writes poetry, short and long fiction, drama, and creative non-fiction. She held the Creative New Zealand Berlin Writing Residency in 2018, and has held several other writing residencies (both in N.Z. and overseas), and has been awarded the Hubert Church Prose Award and the Bruce Mason Playwriting Award, amongst others. Her work has been widely anthologised. A new chapbook of her poems will be released in July, 2021.
Jenny Powell is a Dunedin poet and performer. Her work has been part of various journals and collaborations. Her next collection, Meeting Rita, is inspired by the artist Rita Angus, and is due from Cold Hub Press in June 2021.
Nina Mingya Powles is a poet and zinemaker from Wellington, currently living in London. She is the author of Magnolia 木蘭, (a finalist in the Ockham Book Awards and the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2021), a food memoir, Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai, and several poetry chapbooks and zines. Her debut essay collection, Small Bodies of Water, will be published in September 2021.
Reihana Robinson is a writer, artist and farmer living in the wilderness of the Coromandel. She has written two collections, Aue Rona and Her Limitless Her, has had work published in Aotearoa, Australia, France and USA. She is a contributor to the Dante-themed anthology More Favourable Waters and the just published Ora Nui Māori Literary Journal New Zealand and Taiwan Special Edition.
Ruby Solly (Kāi Tahu, Waitaha, Kāti Māmoe) is a writer, musician and taonga pūoro practitioner living in Pōneke. She has been published in journals such as Landfall, Starling and Sport, among others. In 2020 she released her debut album, Pōneke, which looks at the soundscapes of Wellington’s past, present and future through the use of taonga pūoro, cello, and environmental sounds. She is currently completing a PhD in public health, focusing on the use of taonga pūoro in hauora Māori. Tōku Pāpā, published in February 2021, is her first book.
Ten poems about clouds
NZ Poetry Shelf 