I sat on the grass, hiding my legs under my skirt “obfuscate”
“it doesn’t obfuscate very much” he said
But everything is new now lintrolling eyelashes
disappear and continue to live
white smear- ed over armpits
face and voice talking
List of things to buy, however small
you’re imagining, it’s going to be smaller. Two lists of things to buy and no interest in giftgiving
kiss about try
try the rats of the sky
the mice of the sky you’re the yellowhead of the earth
you’re the skylark of the bikepath I’m telling you that
listen to me He said
“a train is going to hit you” hurtful
my sister sitting on the road crying I’m standing on the actual tracks
crying and I bought so many things today
I dusted so many small glass
figur -ines in my
key-hole t-shirt.
Amber French
Amber French grew up in Waitakaruru, Hauraki Plains. Her ancestors came to Aotearoa from Somerset in England. A lover of books and reading, she lives in Sydney now, where she writes poetry and works in a school library. Her writing can be found in publications including Takahē, Landfall, and Poetry Salzburg Review.
Jo McNeice reads from Blue Hour (Otago University Press, 2024)
Jo McNeice is a poet based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. She completed a Master of Arts in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters, Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, in 2013, and her poems have been published in Turbine | Kapohau, Sport, JAAM and Mayhem. In 2023, she won the prestigious Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award for her manuscript Blue Hour.
In honour of Hone Tuwhare For Melinda, Sophie & Nathan
& no-one knows if your eyes are blurred red from the wind, too much sun, or the tears streaking your face that could be tears or just lines of dried salt, who can tell
& you never can tell if you are seasick, drunk, or just hungover — the symptoms are the same
& sea and sky merge until the horizon is nothing but an endless blue line in every direction, so that you are sailing, not on the sea, as you thought, but in a perfectly blue, circular bowl, never leaving the centre
& you wonder who is moving, you or the clouds racing by the mast-head
& you wonder if those dark shapes in the water are sharks, shadows, or nothing but old fears chasing along behind you
& the great mass of land recedes, until you forget you were a land-dweller, and you start feeling the pull of ancient genes — in every tide, your blood sings against the moon
& food never tasted so good, or water so sweet — you’ve never conserved water by drinking wine before — and rum; and coke; and rum and coke; and can after can of cold beer
& your sleep is accompanied, not by the roar of traffic on the highway, but by the creaks and twangs of your ship as she pitches and moans through the dark ocean, all alone
& you wonder — where did that bird, that great gull perching on the bowsprit, come from?
Kiri Piahana-Wong The poem first appeared in Snorkel (2005), and then was reprinted in Night Swimming (Anahera Press, 2013).
Deep water talk
I wrote this poem when I was in my early twenties. I’d been reading a lot of Hone Tuwhare – the poem’s title is a homage to his 1994 collection Deep River Talk, and it also has some stylistic similarities to his work. During this time of my life, sailing was very important to me, and I wanted to capture how it feels to be on the ocean day after day. I dedicated the poem to three close friends whom I regularly sailed with at this time.
This was the first ever poem I had published, in an Australian online journal called Snorkel in 2005. These days, I’m four books in and I’ve had hundreds of poems published, to the extent I struggle to keep track of all of them. But back then, it was all new to me, and I remember just how excited and euphoric I was to have finally received that elusive first acceptance. The one that comes when nobody knows you, and you’ve published nothing at all, and you’ve been writing for years and stashing the poems in a box under your bed, and you’re studying English Lit at university and you read poetry books in the park, and you’re dreaming of being a writer like the writers you’re reading. The ones who have actual books, and people like you reading them.
Snorkel posted me a cheque for $50 for the poem (yes, this was way back in the days of cheques), which was an absolute thrill. I photocopied the cheque and pinned it above my desk for encouragement and inspiration. Snorkel shut up shop in 2016, however I’m still grateful to them all these years later. ‘Deep water talk’ eventually became the opening poem in my first poetry collection, Night Swimming (Anahera Press, 2013), and I’m still very fond of it.
Kiri Piahana-Wong is a poet, editor and publisher living in Whanganui.
Moon Pizza Music and Beer Bar 167 Riddiford Street, Newtown,
Poets and the moon: it’s a love affair as old as language. So it’s only fitting that Nick Ascroft, Harry Ricketts, Stacey Teague, Jake Arthur, Kate Camp, Sylvan Spring and Ashleigh Young read poems to you in Moon Bar!
Settle in for an hour of readings where the poets meet their muse at last (or at least, read in a bar named after it). Expect poetry that’s funny, moving, surprising, sharp and difficult to take photos of.
Scorpio Books and Te Herenga Waka University Press warmly welcome you to an author talk featuring Harry Ricketts in conversation with Erik Kennedy. This author talk comes on the eve of publication day for Harry’s new poetry collection Bonfires on the Ice. Pre-order your copy today!
All welcome, this is a free event. No RSVP required as this event is not catered.
Harry Ricketts is a poet and literary scholar and has published around 30 books. He has lived in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, since 1981. Until his retirement in 2022, he was a professor in the English Programme at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. His books include the internationally acclaimed The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling (1999) and Strange Meetings: The Lives of the Poets of the Great War (2010). His recent books include the poetry collections Winter Eyes (2018) and Selected Poems (2021), and the memoir First Things (2024). With historian David Kynaston, he is the co-author of the award-winning Richie Benaud’s Blue Suede Shoes: The Story of an Ashes Classic (Bloomsbury, 2024).
Erik Kennedy is the author of the Ockham-shortlisted There’s No Place Like the Internet In Springtime (2018), Another Beautiful Day Indoors (2022), and Sick Power Trip (2025), launched at Scorpio Books earlier this year! Originally from New Jersey, he lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch.
What an incredible lineup for this must-see annual event. I am currently loving Tracy Farr’s novel, am big fan of Fiona Kidman and Emma Neale’s most recent poetry collections and am itching to get a copy of Frankie McMillan and Josie Shaprio’s’s new books. Oh and loved Sonya Wilson’s novels.
Sunday 2 November 2025, 1pm to 5.30pm Raye Freedman Arts Theatre, Epsom Girls Grammar
1pm Tracy Farr – Wonderland In a ’wonder-ful’ leap of imagination, this glorious novel brings Marie Curie to Aotearoa to recuperate with a joyous, loving family, including 3 delightful little girls. Utterly original & life-affirming, this book, like radium, shines like sunlight.
1.20 Nadine Hura (Ngāti Hine, Ngāpuhi, Pakeha) – Slowing the Sun These wise, enlightening essays explore climate change through the lens of whakapapa, highlighting the intersectional impacts on whānau, communities & the environment. In beautiful writing, they demonstrate the urgent need for an anti-colonial action that affirms & activates indigenous knowledge, Te Tiriti o Waitangi & te reo Māori.
1.40 Vanessa Croft – Where In All the World This epic saga based on real events moves from Aotearoa to England to Africa, capturing the language, style, & mores of the Victorian era. Harriet is a bold and determined young woman whose marriage to a charismatic but controlling adventurer soon reveals a darker truth, & forces her to fight for her own voice beneath the shadow of Empire.
2pm Emma Neale – Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit Winner of the 2025 Ockham NZ Book Award for Poetry, these clever poems explore subterfuge, from little fibs to porkies to whoppers to serious social & political deceptions. A novelist & freelance editor, Emma also writes poetry that is both tender & astute.
2.20 Josie Shapiro – Good Things Come and GoThis poignant, redemptive second novel, deals with grief & regret, friendship & betrayal, lost dreams & ambitions, but also moments of bliss & risk-taking & renewal. Subtle, brilliant writing from the author of Every Is Beautiful and Everything Hurts.
2.40 Kirsty Senior & Sophie Gilmour – Fatimas From our ‘local’ Middle-Eastern just down Ponsonby Road, more than 100 recipes from 30 years of business. For any day of the week & for cooks of all skill levels, this gorgeous book will inspire you with zesty flavours & fill you with satisfying sighs!
3pm Afternoon Tea & book signing in the foyer. With lammingtons, melting moments, savouries & more!
3.50 Kaarina Parker – FulviaTake a lively chariot ride to Ancient Rome to meet vivid, audacious Fulvia who dared to take on the men at their own power games. The parallels with many of the maniacal manipulating male leaders of today are illuminating!
4.10 Lucy O’Hagan – Everything But the Medicine: A Doctor’s Tale In her long career as a GP Lucy has come to understand that consulations involve a clash between biomedical science & human experiences. Tackling health inequity requires us to understand peoples’ stories first. Lucy works in a Pasifika Māori practice in Porirua & this superb memoir is candid, wise & moving.
4.30 Frankie McMillan – Eddie Sparkle’s Bridal Taxi These dextrous, inventive prose poems & small stories explore the unusual in the everyday with curiosity & sharp insight. From angels & thieves, to drownings & infidelities, to reclusive aunts & nuclear warfare, Frankie reveals the absurdity of life, with all its brokenness & beauty.
4.50 Sonya Wilson – Spark Hunter & The Secret Green In the densely beautiful bush of Fiordland, Nissa & Tama urgently need to assist the Sparks to preserve their precious natural environment. For ages 9 to 90, these enthralling novels are written by the organiser of the brilliant charity Kiwi Christmas Books.
5.30 Dame Fiona Kidman – The Midnight Plane: Selected and new poems What an honour to celebrate the long, illustrious writing life of this remarkable woman, in the same year as the film about her, The House Within, has been released. Poet, novelist, activist, feminist, her contribution to the literature of Aotearoa and to our lives as women, is enormous. Her writing ‘has the power to shake the heart’.
5.30 Authors signing in the foyer
Warm thanks to: Allen & Unwin, Bateman Books, Beatnik Books, Bridget Williams Books, Canterbury University Press, Cuba Press, Echo Press, Massey University Press, Otago University Press
In the Hollow of the Wave, Nina Mingya Powles Auckland University Press, 2025 first published, Nine Arches Press, UK, 2025
handiwork
People asked me where I learned and I said I taught myself the slow work of making.
But memory is a house with scraped white walls. I step inside and choose what to take, what to leave behind.
My hands feel their way through the gathering, the careful pulling apart.
The work of particular poets can strike you so deeply, so resonantly. Poets who produce collections that satisfy your hunger to read so keenly, with books that take up residency in both your mental and physical poetry rooms. Nina Mingya Powles has been that kind of poet for me, from her terrific debut collection Magnolia 木蘭, through her various other published offerings. Her new collection, In the Hollow of the Wave, is one of the most gorgeous poetry books I have held this year – a sweet combination of heavenly paper stock, generous size, lovingly-tended internal design and vital breathing room. Nina has also created textile works that add to the visual beauty and allure of the book.
Textile is a key word. I experience the book as multiple loomwork: a weaving of memory, experience, language, cottons and fabric. Weaving as a way of observing the world, feeling the world, observing the object, feeling the object, observing the past, feeling the past. It might be the sewing machine upon which her grandfather stitched quilts from garments belonging to her siblings, mother and grandmother. It might be a gown, a pleat, or a sheet of white paper or fabric.
And now, with In the Hollow of the Wave, the granddaughter is herself stitching quilts; inside the stitched poem the stitched cloth, and inside the stitched cloth the stitched poem. I experience contemplation pockets tucked with memory pleats, and inside memory pleats, I threads of slow contemplation: andante, largo, adagio.
The book title is borrowed from a line in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. It gains its own life as Nina ponders Virginia’s use of orientalism and Kitsushika Hokusai’s woodblock print, ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa’. The poem haunts, the hollow in the wave haunts, the recurrent pulse of existence and non-existence haunt. The poem is skin-prickling reading:
beyond the frame I saw a distant city / a place I used to know / where rain falls in the foreground / all day and all night / I took out my sketchbook / sharpened my pencil / drew a line across the sea / asked the mountain / what does it mean to see and be unseen / it did not answer
So many echoes across the collection. So many threads to follow and pause on(slip stitch, ladder stitch, cross stitch). There is the scent of plants and plantings, herbal remedies, the reminder of the women in poverty who stitched the garments we wear, the reflection of self in a stirred pan on the stove, the way dreaming seeps into making, the way the language, chores, hopes and the lives of women still matter. The way poetry can be a way of asking questions.
Inside the hollow of a wave is a poem. And inside that poem is a book. A book such as this one. Stitched with aroha and luminous threads. I want you to read it for yourself and get absorbed in its beauty and craft. It has already found spots in my poetry rooms.
Nina Mingya Powles is a poet and writer from Aotearoa New Zealand, currently based in London. Her debut poetry collection, Magnolia 木蘭, was published in New Zealand, the UK and the US, and was a finalist in the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection and the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Powles won the inaugural Women Poets’ Prize in 2018 and the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize for under-represented nature writers in 2019. Her resulting book of essays Small Bodies of Water was published in 2021 by Canongate. She has also published a short food memoir, Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai (The Emma Press, 2020).]
The verb to be is not, in Māori. How, then, would we translate that soliloquy?
We had the choice. We said not. Is this why they (me) tried so hard to
kill us (we)? We need be not. We live, which is a dark disguise
a river which itself swims. Beauty which flies into nets and tropes.
This is a warning and we all hear it: our wheels rumble and hum high strung
before we veer (volcanic) left or right towards the grimacing witness.
*
Look at me posing like this! Like that! A mother in a tizz with salt sea hair struggles not to stray.
Later a bodied wine will warm her glass and mine, the chamber of my voice, my rising
chest. Like mine her verbs and nouns resist. Her troubles, like the unforgiving
childgod, sometimes break the plates. Volcano in a fortification. Mirror in a mirror.
At any time at least one of us is looking straight ahead, no fraying, no strays. Look at me kneeling like this!
Look at me holding all fine things towards you! The deep blood beat of my music. Be, it sings. Be. Be.
Hinemoana Baker
Takatāpui poet and performer Hinemoana Baker traces her ancestry from Ngāti Raukawa-ki-te-Tonga, Ngāti Toa Rangatira, Te Āti Awa and Kāi Tahu, and from England and Germany. Her four poetry collections, several original music albums and other sonic and written work have seen her on stages and pages nationally and in many other countries around world in the last 25 years. Her most recent poetry collection, ‘Funkhaus’ (THWUP 2021) was shortlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, and has been translated into German and Polish. Having lived in Berlin for 9 years, Hinemoana has now returned home, and recently finished a term as Randell Cottage Trust’s 2024 writer in residence, living and writing at the historic homestead at the base of Te Ahumairangi (Thorndon) in Te-Whanga-nui-a-Tara.
Currently Hinemoana is working towards a Creative Writing doctorate at IIML (Te Herenga Waka Victoria University), for which she is writing a new collection called ‘Exhaust World’. As a long-time teacher and mentor for other writers, Hinemoana is also involved in facilitating poetry sessions for takatāpui and LGBTQI+ Māori writers, through Mana Tipua Trust in Ōtautahi. These sessions, called ‘Ruri Rongoā’, are also part of Hinemoana’s doctoral research, facilitating poetry wānanga as a form of rongoā, repair, solidarity and community. In this work she draws on the model of Te Whare Takatāpui, a framework created by Dr. Elizabeth Kerekere.
Welcome to the new Cafe Reading series on Poetry Shelf. Listening to poets read and talk poetry in cafe settings is a joy. To share a taste of this, I have invited some poets to read and talk poetry over the coming months. Enjoy!
Richard von Sturmer reads two tankas
Richard von Sturmer is a New Zealand writer. He was born on Auckland’s North Shore in 1957. His recent works are the acclaimed memoir, This Explains Everything (Atuanui Press, 2016), Postcard Stories (Titus Books, 2019), and Resonating Distances (Titus Books, 2022).
In 2020 he was the University of Waikato’s writer-in-residence. His book Walking with Rocks, Dreaming with Rivers: My Year in the Waikato (Titus Books, 2023) was written during his residency.
In 2025 his new collection of poetry, Slender Volumes (Spoor Books, 2024), was shortlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the 2025 Ockham Book Awards.
Given Words, established and curated by poet Charles Olsen for ten years, has been a regular feature of Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day. After deliberating alongside Pat White and Sophia Wilson, Charles recently published the winning poems and a selection of special mentions in both the adults’ and under-16s’ categories. Over 160 poems were received this year, and the judges have chosen 64 to publish here on Given Words.
This year the ‘given words’ were supplied by five filmmakers: Ebba Jahn, Tom Konyves, Cindy Stockton Moore, Ian Gibbins and Colm Scully. Here are the five words: justice, endure, pair, lightfast, hold.
The winner of Best Poem is Sadie Yetton for her poem ‘Venus, Don’t You Laugh At Me ‘and the winner of Best Poem by Under-16s, for the second year running, is Miranda Yuan for her poem ‘The Menu’.
For this 10th edition, and because there were so many wonderful poems, the judges awarded Special Mentions in the adults category to Gail Zing for her poem ‘Lightfast’, Cindy Kurukaanga for her poem ‘Nō Te Paruparu, Nō Te Purapura | Of the Mud, Of the Seed’, and to Renee Liang for her poem ‘Pinhole’. In the under-16s category, Special Mentions go to Sabrina Li for her poem ‘Photos taken the day they said it was over’, Gia Beckett for her poem ‘My Purple Life!’, and Lily Richards for her poem ‘Thread of Reality’.
Congratulations to all on behalf of Given Words, The Cuba Press and Massey University Press. You can read the judges comments and all the winning poems on the Given Words website, but here are the two winning poems.
Venus, Don’t You Laugh At Me
Venus, don’t you laugh at me I’m your daughter, it appears you made a crooked one Stilted in manner, steadfast in mania Unjust in justice, your infinite amusement Venus, you birthed a brute You spat out a savage You knew I’d fall on the way of love Just as wolves fall on rabbits Making a mess of how I eat it; blood, bones, brain Clueless how to clean up after myself What have I ever been if not your doing? I was a child, then a child with a woman’s voice I was lightning, lightfast, then lightless I was a person, then somehow only parts of one But I’ve always been of your blood And you can’t bleed it out of me A creature is still a child if it claims to be A freak is due her worth if she endures Venus, I know why you laugh at me Because not feigning hilarity At your own incompetence is worse than being so Even with your back to me, we’re a pair of siamese souls Because this rabid thing resembles its mother And she wants you to hold her like you mean it Look at who you made Love it
Sadie Yetton Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland
The Menu
Tonight’s Special: The Final Feast
Appetizer Bread And circuses to entertain the masses. Elevated rations of what the poor had to endure. Olive A single fruit offered from the branch. Starvation is minimalism, and minimalism is art.
Main Lamb From the slaughter with flesh that tastes like still-warm blood. Pair it with red wine lightfast on the lips. Whose feet had juiced the grapes? Let’s raise a glass to justice.
Dessert Pomegranate Six seeds to hold you– sweet as the promise of love. Brûlée The world burns with a hint of orange.
NZ Poetry Shelf 