Category Archives: NZ poetry

Poetry Shelf Monday poem: E Wen Wong’s ‘Catalysis’

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Catalysis

 

I’m sitting and pondering catalysis

musing on fumes from our molten exhaust

hydrogenation of oils makes the margarine sitting in our fridge

white dyed yellow like the lace dress you wore in 1973

snagged beneath the catalytic converters you stole for platinum.

a lot has changed since then.

if you were here you would see our city made of roads

shadows posing as guilty silhouettes

distorted paperclips of the bus stop where I wait.

in its file you would see reams of trees cloaked with marmalade leaves

it is autumn in August, and I see catalysts in my eyes.

alkylation makes the petroleum veneer beneath my feet

grey-on-grey the word “hydraulic fracking” conceals the black with blue.

the world spins too fast for our reaction to wait

salt masks the centreline

the activation energy dips beneath the level we call normal.

and I breathe powdery white clouds into this world of roads

watching as they lose themselves in the thick body of smog

as my bruised heart moves through midnight traffic

riding on the million catalysts that pepper our city of roads.

my heart rate monitor dips beneath the normal

a laconic glissando as the Bus 29 takes me to the road to the sky.

my heart falters just slightly

lingers at the long line of reactionary procession

the stagnant exhale of our earthly products.

 

E Wen Wong

 

 

 

E Wen Wong is in her final year at Burnside High School, where she is Head Girl for 2020. E Wen has been writing poetry since she was ten years old and was one of the very first fans of NZ Poetry Box. Last year, she was a finalist in the National Schools Poetry Award and Winner of the Poetry New Zealand Student Yearbook Competition.

Poetry Shelf audio poem: Claire Orchard reads ‘Long Haul’

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Claire Orchard reads ‘Long Haul’. It was originally published in Verge

 

 

 

 

 

Claire Orchard lives in Wellington. Her first poetry collection, Cold Water Cure, was published by Victoria University Press in 2016. Links to more of her work can be found here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf summer reading: Jane Arthur’s Craven

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Craven, Jane Arthur, Victoria University Press, 2019

 

 

 

I have a broth at a simmer on the stove.

Salty water like I’ve scooped up some ocean

and am cooking it in my home. Here,

gulp it back like a whale sieving plankton.

Anything can be a weapon if you

swallow hard enough:

nail scissors, a butter knife, dental floss,

a kindergarten guillotine, hot soup,

waves, whales.

 

from ‘Circles of Lassitude’

 

 

Jane Arthur’s debut collection Craven inhabits moments until they shine – brilliantly, surprisingly, refractingly, bitingly. Present-tense poetry is somewhat addictive. With her free floating pronouns (I, you, we) poetry becomes a way of being, of inhabiting the moment, as you either reader or poet, from shifting points of view.

It is not surprising it has been longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

The collection title references lack of courage, but it is as though Jane’s debut collection steps across a line into poetic forms of grit. This is a book of unabashed feeling; of showing the underseam, the awkward stitching, the rips and tears. Of daring to expose. The poems are always travelling and I delight in every surprising step. You move from taxidermy to piano lessons to heart checks and heart beats, but there is always a core of exposed self. And that moves me. You shift from a thing such as a plastic rose to Brad Pitt to parental quarrels. One poem speaks from the point of view of a ship’s figurehead, another from that of Constance. There is anxiety – there are dilemmas and epiphanies. The poetic movement is honeyed, fluid, divinely crafted – no matter where the subject travels, no matter the anxious veins, the tough knots.

An early poem, ‘Idiots’, is like an ode to life, to ways of being. I keep crossing between the title and the poem, the spare arrival of words punctuated by ample white space, elongated silent beats that fill with the links between brokenness, strength and pressing on.

 

Idiots

I’ve known people who decided

to carry their brokenness like strength

idiots

I’m a tree

I mean I’m tall, I sway

I don’t say, treat me gently

No¾I say, cool cool cool cool

I say, that really sucks but I guess I’ll survive it

or, that wind’s really strong

but so are my roots, so are my thighs

my branches my lungs my leaves my capacity to wait things out

I can get up in the morning

I do things

 

 

I heard Jane read for the first time at the Sarah Broom Poetry Prize session at the Auckland Writers Festival in 2018. Her reading blew my socks off, just as her poems had delighted American judge, Eileen Myles, and it was with great pleasure I announced her as the winner. Eileen described Jane’s poetry: ‘poetry’s a connection to everything which I felt in all these [shortlisted] poets but in this final winning one the most. There’s an unperturbed confident “real” here.’ In her report, Eileen wrote:

The poet shocked me. I was thrust into their work right away and it evoked the very situation of the poem and the cold suddenness of the clinical encounter, the matter of fact weirdness of being female though so many in the world are us. And still we are a ‘peculiarity’ here and this poet manages to instantly say that in poetry. They more than caught me. I like exactly how they do this – shifting from body to macro, celestial, clinical, and maybe even speaking a little out of an official history. She seems to me a poet of scale and embodiment. Her moves are clean and well-choreographed & delivers each poem’s end & abruptly and deeply I think. There’s a from the hip authority that inhabits each and all of these poems.

 

I am revisiting these words in view of Craven’s multiple poetry thrills. So often we talk about the way a poem steps off from the ordinary and blasts your heart and senses, if not your mind, with such a gust of freshness everything becomes out of the ordinary. This is what happens with Craven. A sense of verve and outspokenness is both intoxicating and necessary:

 

I’m entertaining the idea of never being silent again,

of walking into a room and shouting, You Fuckers Better Toe the Line

like a prophylactic.

from ‘Sit Down’

A sense of brittleness, vulnerability and self-testing is equally present:

I’ve been preoccupied with what others think again.

I’ve been trying not to let people down.

Nights are not long enough.

Lately there’s been more sun than I would’ve expected.

I keep the weather report open in its own tab and check it often.

From ‘Situation’

 

The movement between edge and smooth sailing, between light and dark, puzzle and resolution, and all shades within any dichotomy you might spot – enhances the reading experience. This is a book to treasure – its complexities and its economies, its confession and its reserve. It never fails to surprise. I am so excited she will be reading at my Poetry Shelf Live session at Wellington’s Writers Festival in March (see below). Triple yeah!

 

 

Jane Arthur was the recipient of the Sarah Broom Poetry Prize  (2018). She has worked in the book industry as a bookseller and a book editor for over fifteen years. She has a master of Arts in Creative Writing from IIML at Victoria University of wellington. She was co-founder of the The Sapling, an online site for children’s literature. She lives in Wellington.

Jane will be appearing in my Poetry Shelf Live session at NZ Festival of the Arts,

Michael Fowler Centre,  Sunday 8 March 2020 12:30pm – 1:30pm

 

Victoria University Press page

Poetry Shelf Monday poem: ‘Situation’ by Jane Arthur

Poetry Shelf audio spot: Jane Arthur reads ‘Snowglobe’

Poetry Shelf: Conversation with Sarah Broom Prize finalist, Jane Arthur

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: Janet Charman’s ‘daughters depart’

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daughters depart

 

they are in the waves

beating for shore

as the little fish of their absence

swims in the fissures of my long grown bones

 

currents take hold

until

from sentiment

i fall to sediment

where the fumerole heat

escapes

in deep

dark

down

hair

a fontanelle

tells the stalker of memory

the necessity of tenderness

 

 

Janet Charman

 

 

 

 

 

Janet Charman’s monograph ‘SMOKING! The Homoerotic Subtext of Man Alone’ is available as a free download at Genrebooks. Her essay ‘Mary Mary Quite Contrary’ on Allen Curnow’s suppression of the poetics of Mary Stanley, appears in the current issue on-line of Pae Akoranga Wāhine, the journal of the Women’s Studies Association of NZ.

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf pop-up poem video: Ben Fagan with NZ Youth Choir ‘Days Bay’

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Ben Fagan is a performance poet and director of Motif Poetry.

He has a video just released in collaboration with the NZ Youth Choir. It’s the seventh video in his series Pākehā 2020, which is wrapping up this month.

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf Friday talk spot: Murray Edmond on Ka Mate Ka Ora: A New Zealand Journal of Poetry and Poetics

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‘To stiffen the sinews, to summon the blood’: Ka Mate Ka Ora: A New Zealand Journal of Poetry and Poetics

 

Ka Mate Ka Ora: A New Zealand Journal of Poetry and Poetics will be 15 years old in 2020. The latest issue contains a memoir of the last years of Baxter’s life, an essay about Mary Stanley’s poetry, an essay about David Merritt’s poetry and production systems, an essay about David Kaarena-Holmes’ poetry, and a reflection on the fictive lives of poets. But no poems. And no reviews of recent books of poetry. That’s what it’s like at Ka Mate Ka Ora. We don’t publish poems and we don’t run short reviews (though longer review-articles are definitely part of our kaupapa).

Ka Mate Ka Ora was designed to fill a gap – the lack of in-depth discourse about poetry and poetics within Aotearoa’s literary community. I guess you can say we are a specialist magazine, a niche product for an informed market. But this ‘informed market’ has many links to international poetries and poetics, which is where the electronic format is crucial. And this means KMKO is more than ‘just’ an academic journal. (I know that ‘just’ is not ‘just’!).  If you haven’t seen the magazine before and want a look, or if you want to go back and revisit this or that issue, click here.

Throughout Ka Mate Ka Ora’s existence, we have sustained a policy of looking outward to what is going on elsewhere via reports from local roving reporters: Pam Brown on Australian poetry (issue #1), Anne Kennedy on Hawai’i poetry (#3), Anna Smaill on poetry in London (#5), Murray Edmond in China (#5), Lisa Samuels in Spain (#12) and Erena Shingade from Mumbai (#16).

The magazine is open access on-line. Its inception dates back to a time when the internet was more innocent and idealistic. We are still holding out for this ideal.

 

But times pass and worms turn and poets die. Over its 15 years obituaries have also become a regular feature: we have said haere ra to Dennis List, Mahmoud Darwish, Jacquie Sturm, Leigh Davis, Martyn Sanderson, Trevor Reeves. Rowley Habib (Rore Hapipi), Russell Haley, Heather McPherson, Gordon Challis and John Dickson. This list is interesting because each of these names occupied a crucial niche situation in New Zealand poetry at various times; yet none would quite qualify for that brief eternity of media attention that is shone in this age of reincarnated celebrity on certain kinds of literary names at their passing. I like to think that Ka Mate Ka Ora’s attention to such figures as those listed above will provide a valuable doorway through from the future to the past.

The majority of issues of Ka Mate Ka Ora have been composed from the careful editorial selection, aided by outside readers, of unsolicited contributions. But there have been at least four ‘special’ issues. Hone Tuwhare’s death warranted an issue-sized response, and Robert Sullivan took over the editorship for this (#6). Then there have been issues about ‘Words and Pictures’ (#7), James K.Baxter (#8) and Translation (#11).

Special issues tend to bring in a swathe of special contributors, whereas an issue that consists of four or five substantial essays errs in favour of depth rather than spread. More than 100 different writers have contributed to KMKO over the past 15 years. Contributors range from those who are poets themselves to academics, to Masters and Doctoral students who are often both poets and scholars, plus photographers, illustrators, archivists, printers, designers, songwriters et al.

 

The contents of KMKO have become cumulative, as the editorial in the latest issue highlights in relation to the catalogue of contributions about James Baxter:

 

John Newton, ‘”By Writing and Example”: The Baxter Effect,’ No.1, Dec. 2005.

Paul Millar, ‘Return to Exile: James K. Baxter’s Indian Poems’ plus the unpublished Indian poems, No. 3. March 2007.

Dougal McNeill, ‘Baxter’s Burns,’ No. 8, Sept. 2009.

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, ‘”Reason not the Need”: John Newton and James K. Baxter’s Double Rainbow,’ No. 8, Sept. 2009.

Francis McWhannell, ‘Hunt’s Baxter,’ No. 8, Sept. 2009.

Reproduction of Baxter’s ms. Of ‘Jerusalem in Winter,’ No. 8. Sept. 2009.

John Petit’s photographs of Baxter at Hiruharama, Dec. 1970, No. 8, 2009.

Stephen Innes,’ The Baxter Papers at the University of Auckland Library,’ No. 8, 2009.

Paul Millar and Miranda Wilson, ‘”The Fire-bird Singing Loud”: James K. Baxter’s Relationship with Composer Dorothy Freed,’ No 15, July, 2017.

Keir Volkerling, ‘James K. Baxter – an Evolving Memoir,’ No.17, Oct 2019.

 

Threading one’s way through these disparate works of criticism and literary historiography, it is possible to trace the developing case study of Baxter criticism as it has taken shape in the 21st century up to (and with Keir Volkerling’s piece, even beyond) the recent controversy of Baxter’s ‘me/too moment’ with the publication of the Letters in 2019.

 

Ka Mate Ka Ora is named after the first line of what can be labeled Aotearoa’s most well-known and, at times, most controversial poem. The crass, commercial and appropriative imitations of the haka form that now get mounted world-wide with depressing regularity, do not touch upon Te Rauparaha’s words. The words of haka have always been of the most charged and sensitive kind. Robert Sullivan, in his editorial in issue #1 quotes Timoti Karetu with regard to this kind of kind of short, intense haka, he ngeri, to the effect that such a form is designed ‘to stiffen the sinews, to summon up the blood’: life or death?

I have been the editor of Ka Mate Ka Ora from the first issue until now. I have been greatly assisted in this role by Hilary Chung, Michele Leggott and Lisa Samuels. We are planning a new issue for 2020, #18, so if you wish to send a contribution, first spend a little time looking through some issues, then read about us by clicking on the red ‘about’ at the bottom right of the magazine’s home page, and email to Murray Edmond at m.edmond@auckland.ac.nz. All contributions are sent out for at least one reader’s report.

 

Murray Edmond

 

 

Murray Edmond’s recent books include Back Before You Know (2019) and Shaggy Magpie Songs (2015), two poetry volumes; Then It Was Now Again: Selected Critical Writing (2014); and Strait Men and Other Tales, (2015), fictions. He is the editor of Ka Mate Ka Ora: A New Zealand Journal of Poetry and Poetics (http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/kmko/ ); and works as a dramaturge (Jacob Rajan and Justin Lewis’s Mrs Krishnan’s Party (2017) and Welcome to the Murder House (2018) and Naomi Bartley’s Te Waka Huia, 2017/ 2018). Also directed Len Lye: the Opera (2012).

Back Before You Know (Compound Press, 2019) has been longlisted for the Ockham NZ Book Awards.

 

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf poets pick: Johanna Emeney celebrates Maria Yeonhee Ji’s ‘HAPŪ WĀNANGA’

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HAPŪ WĀNANGA

for Tawera & Sharron

 

 

From Parihaka you can see it                                 maybe hope is a kind of haunting

the shape of women learning                                             maybe it is a dazzling thing

how to startle the red earth the whenua                            like the threads of a kaitaka

that will be buried but not left behind                                      that have been woven

how to labour in the present                                with something I can only describe

tense with the weight of a future                                                                    as breath

and the sound of tupuna knocking                                      the wind has an ache in it

the marae fills with the first language                                           it sounds like a river

I recognise but do not understand                                       whose blue end is coming

but the kuia teaches me how to harvest moonlight                 where the world begins

pulling the threads from harakeke                           is this enough to remedy the past

draped over her lap like a question                         the world doesn’t stop to answer

I roll the silver between my fingers                                    rain rolls off the mountain

the strands fray into more questions                    but they say you don’t need an atlas

made up of tinier pieces of doubt                                           the size of the universe

she takes them and rests them on her calf                                  to make sense of this

handrolls the fear into a muka of light                                      approaching moment

 

Maria Yeonhee Ji

 

 

This piece by Maria has everything I seek to admire in a poem. First of all, its structure is entirely emblematic and relevant. It does something different without being gimmicky and gratuitous. For me, the white space is possibility. It is an invitation to hope. It is a suggestion that I may read the poem two ways. Most importantly, it is a birth canal of sorts for “the approaching moment” upon which the poem ends—but does not end.

“Hapū Wānanga” has an easy unity of theme and imagery. Indeed, one of its themes, the solidarity of women—sensed especially in this place of ancestors—is highlighted by the motif of weaving. There is a blended spirituality and corporeality to this poem which hinges on Maria’s ability to make magic from the concrete to “harvest moonlight” like the kuia who shows the speaker part of this new world.

This poem is also special because it signifies Maria’s last year publishing work in Signals, the journal of the Young Writers Programme. Ros Ali, my colleague at the YWP, taught Maria at St Cuthbert’s College, and Ros and I have both enjoyed Maria’s company at many workshops and master classes over the years. This is a beautiful valedictory poem as Maria goes off into the world of medicine (and the world of more writing, of course). Ros and I wish her every success.

Johanna Emeney

 

Johanna Emeney is a senior tutor in Creative Writing at Massey University, where she has worked since 2011. She also leads community writing projects with migrant young people and older adults with her friend, Ros Ali. They have worked together on the Michael King Young Writers Programme since 2009. Jo has published two collections of poetry (Apple & Tree, Cape Catley, 2011, and Family History, Mākaro Press, 2017), as well as an academic book called The Rise of Autobiographical Medical Poetry and the Medical Humanities (ibidem Press 2018). Her latest publication is a chapter on poetry for the Routledge Companion to Literature and Disability (2020).

Maria Yeonhee Ji is a writer and junior doctor based in Tāmaki Makaurau. She holds an MBChB and a BMedSci (Hons) from the University of Auckland, and dreams of adding a Masters in Creative Writing to this list someday. Her writing has appeared in several publications, including The Pantograph Punch, takahē, Signals, and Starling.

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf summer reading: essa may ranapiri’s ransack

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ransack, essa may ranapiri, Victoria University, 2019

 

 

 

‘he is like a bumblebee stinger on my tongue when I say it’

from ‘Dear Orlando’

 

 

 

essa may ranapiri begins their debut poetry collection ransack with a quote from Virginia Woolf’s gender-switching Orlando: ‘Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue.’

When I was doing my doctoral thesis (Italian) I carried a Virginia Woolf quote from A Room of One’s Own with me and I still do: ‘Mary is tampering with the expected sequence.  First she broke the sentence; now she has broken the sequence. Very well, she has every right to do both these things if she does them not for the sake of breaking, but for the sake of creating.’

Sometimes we need to break language, to smash how we do things in order to begin again, in order to find form and fluidity for our voices. Sometime language fails us. Sometimes we have to smash muteness and test our way into a new musicality, a new sequence of connections. We may be fierce and we may be vulnerable.

I dipped in and out of ransack last year, and loved every snatched moment, but a few weekends ago I sat down in the cool shade and read the book slowly, cover to cover, and felt myself upturn, overturn, inturn and sideturn as the poetry pulsed through my being (I am thinking of that as a verb). This is what a book can do.

essa’s book is a glorious sequence of creating – of ransacking what has been, in order to refresh what will be. Letters written to Orlando make an appearance – like a epistle spine for the collection or a poetry pivot for both reader and writer.

The opening poem ‘my tongue as rope’ lays down a thicket image – the kind of image that hooks you, especially when you think of  writing, speaking and even self as braid. The braided rope is the anchor, the preserver, the tough knot, ‘the single knot’, the finder.

essa writes: to pull in sound / draw in lists / the endeavour hits the land’. Can the poems be a form of rope? ‘my tongue-rope wraps itself until it is a single knot.’

A single poem breaks apart in my mouth and heart. The break in the flow creates a new current.

 

 

fetal

 

a mothe

r returnin

g to the grown ground like a gow

n of weeds got a stretching motion

n to stil

l body corps

e the wood in the wax in the flowe

r chains a bab

y stil

l bor

n rattling i

n the mutton skie

s chubby in the loa

m to no mor

e

 

Reading ransack allows me to absorb the nonbinary experience afresh. Unsettling the line on the page unsettles the line of thought, the entrenched dichotomies of either / or / male / female / she / he / soft / hard / weak / strong

A long poem ‘Con-ception’ is dedicated to essa’s mother and is a reading explosion of arrival, pregnancy, forming embryo, forming mother. I have never read a piece that breaks into and out of the maternal that has affected me so much. I am going to give you a quote that is also right-hand margin justified, but not all the book is (the forms are dancing on their toes in an exuberant display of variousness:

 

in the world and into the world of tubes

ride the machine

incubate in plastic

and drench in yellow light

the air is whole new in-the-world

and out of the old world

recognise voices

am i

an i?

 

put in

alove?

When she finally has a shower afterwards she is crying.

 

Reading the ransack sequences and I am feeling poetry. essa tells Orlando ‘You never had to discover yourself in a book. You never questioned your gendered nature – you moved from one perfect set of genitalia to another according to Aristophanes and the great round people of concave and convex, of female and male.’

essa places body and experience at its white hot core – a gift in its sharpness, its broken cutting lines and its sweet fluencies as the writer navigates how to be, how to be body, how to be bodymindheart in the world. Part of the writing of experience, with that backstory sting of ‘he’, is claiming name, celebrating a pronoun:

 

u said you liked the ‘th’ sound in they and them the softening of it

and how it fitted around my rage

made it/for it

to be okay to touch

i talk you through other constructions

ones that subverted phonetics

me as a slice of not that

when expecting this

the xe sound like zay

 

from ‘a phone call about the nature of pronouns gendered and otherwise’

 

ransack is a skin-prickling, heart-blasting, mind-opening glorious feast of a book that in the spirit of Virginia breaks up language in order to create something breathtakingly new.

 

 

 

essa may ranapiri, Ngāti Raukawa, is a poet from Kirikiriroa, Aotearoa. They graduated with an MA in Creative Writing from Victoria University of Wellington (2018) and their work has appeared in many local journals. They are the featured poet in Poetry Yearbook 2020 (Massey University Press). ransack has been longlisted for the Ockham NZ Book Awards 2020.

 

essa may ranapiri website

Victoria University Press page

The Pantograph Punch Jackson Nieuwland reviews ransack

RNZ interview

Poetry Shelf: essa reads ‘Glass Breaking’

essa on being at IIML with Tayi Tibble

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf Monday poem: Vaughan Rapatahana’s ‘Aotearoa New Zealand’

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Aotearoa New Zealand

 

‘Kotahi ano te kōhao o te ngira 

E kuhuna ai te miro ma te miro whero me te miro pango ‘

– Pōtatau Te Wherowhero

]There is but one eye of the needle,

Through which the white, red and black threads must pass.]

 

ko Aotearoa te ingoa o tēnei whenua ātaahua.

land of the long white cloud for many

nestling in a sea of verdant green,

surrounded by a brilliant blue ocean

& where the All Blacks often reign.

 

yet of course New Zealand

is also the name of these islands

some say that maybe –

with our increasingly multi-cultural crew

Pākehā, Māori, Asian, Pasifika –

it is time for a new name,

stressing our interconnections?

after all, we are rowing together

in this waka nowadays

heading in the right direction –

learning how we can all work closely

to include, as well as to respect, all our

sometimes confusing cultural credos

and to kōrero together in spite of them

in a continuous talanoa.

 

 

 

ni hao 

talofa lava 

tēnā koe  

geddaye

malo e lelei

as-salam alaykom

 

different, yes and yet, respecting this diversity,

this contrasting, this sometime conflicting mix,

where Te Tiriti o Waitangi is the foundation document,

where journalism has flourished for well over 150 years

with upfront news & freedom of views

in the two key tongues, te reo Māori rāua ko te reo Ingarihi,

& Hindi is now the fourth most spoken language – namaste!

together we can connect and thrive.

 

āe ko Aotearoa te ingoa

throughout both North and South

we are birds singing several different waiata

tui, takahē, kōkako, kiwi

striving to make one mighty nest;

our own place for all –

one of a kind, the very rare huia,

a heaven on earth.

pristine air; clean water; prime food,

scenic vistas second to none,

what else could anyone want?

                                                

āe, ko Aotearoa te ingoa

let’s be thankful about who we are

& what we have –

the sense of fair play

the spirit of helping those in need,

sharing & supporting

including one and all.

 

thank you my friends 

kia ora taku hoa  

fa’afetai outou o a’u uo 

xie xie wo peng-youmen

salamat po mga kaibigan

shukraan lakum ‘asdiqayiy

 

there is so much to celebrate

in this lengthy land,

tō mātou whenua tino waimarie

& we should all be proud.

 

Vaughan Rapatahana

from ngā whakamatuatanga / interludes  (cyberwit, 2019)

 

 

 

 

A poet, novelist, teacher, critic, translator and editor, Vaughan Rapatahana, Te Ātiawa, commutes between homes in Hong Kong, Philippines and Aotearoa New Zealand. He is widely published across several genres, in multiple countries, in both his main languages, te reo Māori and English, and his work has been translated into Bahasa Melayu (Malay), Italian, French, Mandarin.

In 2019, he published five books, participated in World Poetry Recital Night, Kuala Lumpur and Poetry International at London’s South Bank Centre and in the launch of Poems from the Edge of Extinction and in Incendiary Art: the power of disruptive poetry. His poem tahi kupu anake included in the presentation by Tove Skutnabb-Kangas to the United Nations Forum on Minority Issues in Geneva in November 2019. His PhD thesis from the University of Auckland is on Colin Wilson and subsequently published a collected works about Wilson,  More than the Existentialist Outsider (Paupers Press, Nottingham, UK, 2019.)

His latest poetry collection ngā whakamatuatanga/interludes was published by Cyberwit, Allahabad, 2019) and Aotearoa New Zealand. Atonement (University of Santo Tomas Press, Manila) was nominated for a National Book Award in Philippines (2016). He writes a series of commentaries pertaining to Aotearoa New Zealand poetry for Jacket 2 (University of Pennsylvania, USA): a 2015–2016 series and again during 2018-2019.

His poetry teaching resources have been published in Hong Kong SAR, Brunei Darussalam, Australia, and New Zealand, including the first bilingual (Māori and English) such resource in 2011, Teaching Poetry. In 2019, book three of the series Poetry in Multicultural Oceania has been published by Essential Resources, Christchurch, New Zealand – with a new resource Exploring Multicultural Poetry for younger students due at the end of 2019.

Rapatahana will be participating in The Foundation and Cultural Organization International Academy Orient-Occident. Curtea de Argeş, Romania in July 2020.

Rapatahana is one of the few World authors who consistently writes in and is published in te reo Māori – in all of his books and also poetry publications in Aotearoa NZ (for example, Mayhem, Poetry New Zealand, takahē), USA (Antipodes), Canada (The Capilano Review), Australia (Meniscus), U.K. and so on. It is his mission to continue to do so and to push for a far wider recognition of the need to write and to be published in this tongue.

His New Zealand Book Council Writers File