would love to be able to go to this! I love the Manawatu poets
Voices of the Manawatu – Lynley Edmeades selects a poetry reading
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Category Archives: NZ poetry
Poetry Shelf audio spot: Sarah Jane Barnett’s ‘Playing Dead’
Sarah Jane Barnett is a poet and freelance editor. Her poetry has been published in Aotearoa, Australia, and the US. Sarah’s debut collection A Man Runs into a Woman was a finalist in the 2013 New Zealand Post Book Awards. Her second collection WORK was released in October 2015. She is currently working on a third collection, a poetic memoir about how raising her son makes her confront her own childhood trauma. She lives in Wellington, Aotearoa, with her family.
‘Playing Dead’ was published in Turbine.
Art Nahill and Stu Bagby launch poetry books at Time Out Bookstore
At Corpus: Mary McCallum on her moving poem, ‘C’
If like me you loved reading Harriet Rowland’s The Book of Hat, you will love this.
Mary McCallum talks about the genesis of her poem ‘C’, at Corpus: conversations about medicine and life. The poem is in her new collection XYZ of Happiness and navigates her time with Harriet and cancer. Wonderful!
We were a very new press, barely begun. The daughter of an old school friend had been diagnosed with cancer and was writing a blog. A bunch of us who’d been at school together began to read it. One of our group, illustrator Fifi Colston, sent me an email: ‘You could do worse than make a book about this.’ I agreed. This young woman knew how to write. Her blog posts had strong read-me titles and energetic don’t-argue-with-me first lines. They were focused on one event or idea and they told that story with economy and humour and knew where to end. She didn’t feel sorry for herself. She celebrated life. She often said how lucky she was.
Full piece plus poem here
Monday Poem: Nicola Easthope’s ‘Blue Night’
Blue night
Out of the frame is the baby.
Beyond the door is the sea.
Its white noise is not working.
The black out is not working.
The mother is not in the frame.
She brings him to her breast.
She rests her head on the sill.
Her head part goes to sleep.
The mother’s body, like a whale’s
mind, half insentient, half on
depth watch. The milk draws
blue and baby sleep.s.
Here in the painting is a man.
At four he sends her back.
Her neck clicks in the pillow.
The baby whistles awake.
Though it is full and fully burped.
The mother jolts and palpitates.
She begins to rise. But the father.
The father is in the picture.
On a chair, hardly, dressed, barely, under
damp green light, he shifts from buttock
to buttock, pumping and pressing
the red piano accordion.
Tendrils sling off the lampshade,
sea grass hums. A harmonic
vamp of frond and must and
tears become his cheek.
Her fingers free the water –
His fingers free the wind –
breath is the chord is the base tone
small pod of falling whales.
©Nicola Easthope
Nicola Easthope is a poet, reader, teacher, partner and Mum, living on the Kāpiti Coast. She is a champion of children, teenagers, and activism for a more just, green and peaceful world. Her forthcoming collection, Working the tang (The Cuba Press), includes explorations of her ancestral roots (Orkney Islands, Scotland, Wales and England), the life of oceans in between there and here, and what it means to be Pākehā supporting Te Tiriti o Waitangi, in Aotearoa. Nicola was a guest poet at the Queensland Poetry Festival in 2012, following her debut collection, leaving my arms free to fly around you (Steele Roberts Aotearoa, 2011). She will appear at the Tasmanian Poetry Festival in October. You can follow her at Nicola Easthope – poet, on Facebook.
The poem originally appeared in an online anthology for National Poetry Day 2015 – ‘Catch and Release‘ (KUPU poetry anthology).
‘Blue night’ was inspired by Kelly Joseph’s pencil and pen artwork, dirge. Check out her beautiful creations here.
Poetry Shelf audio spot: Vaughan Rapatahana’s Te Henga
Vaughan Rapatahana continues to write and to live across three countries. Several new books in different genre are due out soon in Hong Kong SAR, Aotearoa New Zealand, France, United Kingdom. Thank you also for this opportunity.
Poetry Shelf review of Ternion
Wai Word presens Anahera Gildea
Big Weather is back for National Poetry Day
Jacket 2: Vaughan Rapatahana in conversation with Bob Orr
Full piece and a few poems here
Bob Orr has been a well-regarded New Zealand poet for several decades, having eight collections of poetry produced to date, with a new collection due out soon. He is also rather different to so many ‘modern’ poets, in that he has always paddled his own poetic waka (or canoe) in and through his own currents. Oaring across his own ocean, if you will.
Bob never completed any tertiary education. He never attended any university ‘creative writing’ classes in an endeavour to craft his poetry ‘better.’ Up until very recently, when he was the 2017 University of Waikato Writer in Residence, he eschewed any applications for literary grants. He rarely, if ever, uses a computer to write with or on — he doesn’t even have an email address. Indeed, he continues to write with an old style ribbon-fed typewriter. Bob Orr is a bit of a Luddite — all of which ensures that his stream of poetry flows deep from his heart and mind and is never obfuscated by the trends, tropes, and trivialities of the latest poetic fad. Like another key New Zealand poet, Sam Hunt, Bob Orr has always remained a people’s poet, by which I mean, a writer who keeps it simple, who never overreaches into pretentiousness and amorphous cleverdickism.
Monday Poem: Anne Kennedy’s ‘One of My Baxter Poems’
One of My Baxter Poems
(from Moth Hour)
Coming down off the spine of the Botanical Gardens
onto the green flank of the dragon, shadows arch
under my feet. In the dell below, the shell-shaped stage
is strewn with red Camelias. November
and across the valley on the dense dark Tinakori hill
houses begin to light up like Guy Fawkes.
At the top of Patanga Crescent the pared-down villa
trembles with young men thinking,
pens lost in the wide sleeves of their dead uncles.
They are ecstatic and do everything extravagantly
in the last light: read, drink, fuck.
On the windowsill – a stone, leaf, a twig with buds,
and the black cat left behind mewling by the old lady
now in the Home of Compassion. No change.
©Anne Kennedy
Anne Kennedy’s new novel The Ice Shelf is due from VUP in October. She teaches writing at Manukau Institute of Technology.
NZ Poetry Shelf 