Cancelled!
LOUNGE 72 Wednesday 25 March at Old Government House 5.30-7 pm
It will be rescheduled later in the year.
Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Lounge cancellation
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Poetry Shelf tonic: Tom’s happy poem
Last year I invited NZ children to write a poem that embraced happiness. This is what Tom wrote. Ah, I just can’t stop reading it. Children’s minds can be free range as well as roving on the beach!
Recipe for Happiness
1. Imagination – let it free.
2. Corn – eat it up.
3. Cheetahs – watch them run.
4. Yellow – let it paint.
5. Science – let it create.
6. Books – read them quiet, read them louder.
7. Exploring – discover and look.
8. Art – colour colour colour.
9. Poetry – be writing.
Tom N Age 11 Year 6 Hoon Hay School/Te Kura Koaka (2019)
Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Stars of Pasifika Poetry 2020
Sad but understandable!
After a lot of deliberation, it is with great sadness we announce the cancellation of this event. However, we hope to hold it later in the year so watch this space.
Please spread the word if you have shared it with family, friends and your networks. Arohanui.
Poetry Shelf new books: Jeffrey Paparoa Holman celebrates Michael Steven’s The Lifers
7
Halide compounds hum inside the floodlights
pouring down lumens on the prison yard
across the service lane. Sleep is futile.
Antarctic breezes rattle loops of barbed wire.
Pairs of men in dark coats milled from rough wool
make laps of the yard’s fenced interior.
I lean out the window, into the brumal air
of tonight’s vision. The lifers carry on.
They walk their fates in thick woollen coats,
addressing each other inaudibly—
confessing and sanctifying their stories
with hand gestures, glowing tips of cigarettes.
You sleep. It is too late to show you them.
Their cold cells are a museum, open at 9 a.m.
Michael Steven
This is poem 7 from a sequence called ‘Leviathan’ in The Lifers (Otago University press, 2020).
Jeffrey reads ‘7’
Jeffrey Paparoa Holman:
There is a whakapapa of prison poetry that links Michael Steven’s poem on men behind bars in The Lifers, his recent second volume from Otago University Press. The poems in this book have gritty echoes that François Villon would hear and feel; a deep well of humanity also that Oscar Wilde would appreciate, from his cell in Reading Gaol. Whether we are watching users scoring, thieves preparing a raid, a friend mourning the suicide of a kindred lost soul, there opens up before us a vision of brokenness elegised with compassion through an unsparing binocular lens. The poem considered here – Sonnet 7 from a series, Leviathan – captures precisely the cold realities of those sentenced to life for the most serious of crimes. The effect is so visual, it returned to me a memory of Van Gogh’s ‘Prisoners Exercising’, painted in 1890 while he was in the asylum at Saint-Rémy, suffering deep depression. Most Fridays, with two other poets, Bernadette Hall and Jeni Curtis, we take part in a reading group at Christchurch Mens Prison; I recently took copies of this poem and shared it. The silence that greeted its reading attested the truth Michael Steven has captured, from the inside. This poem – and the rest of his fine and developing oeuvre – invite your close attention.
Jeffrey Paparoa Holman is a Christchurch poet and non-fiction writer. His most recent poetry collection, Blood Ties: selected poems, 1963-2016 was published by Canterbury University Press in 2017. A memoir, Now When It Rains came out from Steele Roberts in 2018. He is currently working on a book chapter for a collection of studies on early 20th century ethnographers. He makes his living as a stay-at-home puppy wrangler for Hari, an eight-month old Jack Russell-Fox Terrier cross. Hari ensures that very little writing happens, but Victoria Park is explored and mapped daily.
Michael Steven is the author of the acclaimed Walking to Jutland Street (Otago University Press, 2018). He was recipient of the 2018 Todd New Writer’s Bursary, and his poems were shortlisted for the 2019 Sarah Broom Poetry Prize. He lives and writes in West Auckland. The Lifers (Otago University Press) was recently launched at Timeout Bookshop.
Otago University Press author page
Poetry Shelf noticeboard: AWF 2020 cancelled
This is such sad but understandable news and my heart goes out to Anne O’Brien and her team. Such an important literary gathering on our annual calendar that is dependent on hard work and vision over months and months. So innovative, so refreshing, so vital.
Yes authors miss out, readers miss out – but I am sending a virtual hug to this astonishing festival team. I am toasting YOU tonight! Goodness knows how you are feeling.
POetry Shelf noticeboard: Ko Aotearoa Tātou | We Are New Zealand will be published by Otago University 2020
Ko Aotearoa Tātou | We Are New Zealand
Publication news!
On this day, 15 March, we remember the events of one year ago in Christchurch and honour the memory of those who died. It seems a fitting day that we announce the publication of a new volume that was born in the wake of this tragedy.
Ko Aotearoa Tātou | We Are New Zealand will be published by Otago University Press in August 2020.
The starting point for the anthology was the statement by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern after the March Christchurch attacks: ‘Because we represent diversity, kindness, compassion, a home for those who share our values, refuge for those who need it…we will not, and cannot, be shaken by this attack.’
The book includes prose, poetry and visual art that explores, investigates or interrogates life in contemporary New Zealand. A celebration, yes, but also an examination of who we are, with young voices new to publication and well-known poets, storytellers and essayists such as Selina Tusitala Marsh, Apirana Taylor, Tusiata Avia, Mohamed Hassan, Alison Wong, Donna Miles-Mojab, David Eggleton and more, plus artwork from Yuki Kihara, Nigel Brown, Barry Cleavin, Bridget Reweti, Sabine Poppe, Zulfirman Syah and others.
The editors thank everyone who submitted. We received a wide range of wonderfully crafted responses to the call for submissions, from Kerikeri to Bluff. Some were teenagers still at school; some were in their 80s. Most lived in New Zealand; some were New Zealanders currently living overseas. Submissions roamed from a Chinese restaurant in Christchurch to a fruit-packing factory in Opōtiki to a cemetery under Grafton Bridge in Auckland to a high school in Hastings, and from London to Finland to Vienna to Iran.
The editors also thank the team of consulting editors, without whom we would not have discovered such rich content.
We are looking forward to seeing this volume in August, with thanks to Otago University Press and Creative New Zealand.
For more information
Poetry Shelf noticeboard: I am opening Poetry Shelf Lounge for online NZ book launches
working from home
Kia ora readers, writers, publishers and booksellers
With book launches already being cancelled, and uncertain months ahead as we work hard to keep our communities well, I am going to open Poetry Shelf Lounge to host online launches of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. I could do children’s books on child-friendly Poetry Box.
I will post Poetry Shelf launches around 5 to 6 pm (wine and nibbles optional!)
I can post launch features with audio and/or texts of a launch speech, an author reading and thank-you speech. Photos. Videos. Whatever works for you and that I can do.
I like the idea of bridging communities and having the launches posted in more than one place if that works.
I am already at capacity with the time I devote to my blog and writing deadlines so this is in your hands. I don’t have time to write material or chase people. And I may have to limit myself to one or two a week! I do have time to assemble posts and spread the word.
Publishers and publicists feel free to get in touch with me – and gather the material for a Poetry Shelf Lounge launch.
My blog reaches more people than a book launch does but I can link to other significant sites.
This is a time to strengthen our book communities and invent new ways to celebrate our books without putting people at risk.
If you have ideas on how to help or make this idea even better let me know. Goodness knows if it will work but I want to give it a shot! Other ideas are simmering:
* host NZ poetry readings online if they are going to be cancelled (is the Pasifika reading in Te Atatu Library to be cancelled or the first Lounge reading?)
* host NZ book discussion podcasts
* host author interviews video or audio
* any other suggestions?
Maybe there is a better way and place to do this – but this a grassroots project so let’s see what we can do to boost books.
Ngā mihi
Paula Green
Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Pop-up Pasifika bookshop with David Eggleton and Tayi Tibble reading
Poetry Shelf noticeboard: AUP New Poets 6 launch
Poetry Shelf audio spot: Lynn Davidson reads ‘Even though it’s not the beginning’
Lynn Davidson reads ‘Even though it’s not the beginning’ from Islander (2109, Victoria University Press)
Lynn Davidson is the author of five collections of poetry and a novel, Ghost Net, along with essays and short stories. She grew up in Kāpiti, Wellington and currently lives in Edinburgh.
My review of Islander
Victoria University Press author page
NZ Poetry Shelf 