Debut poet Haro Lee’s Watching Television in a Love Motel takes on self, family, and past though the cultural lens of TV. Helen Rickerby’s genre-bending poetic memoir, My Bourgeois Apocalypse, is made with fragments from journals of the ‘weird years’, including the pandemic, while Airini Beautrais’s return to poetry finds her crafting a portrait of an uneasy time in The Salt Quilt, both sharp-witted and self-aware.
These three innovative poets are joined by Chris Tse for a conversation about bending poetic form to make past and future come alive.
Writers on Mondays is presented by the International Institute of Modern Letters and The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. The 2026 series will run from 12.15—1.15 pm each Monday from 6 July to 28 September at Te Papa and Circa Theatre, with two special evening sessions at Meow. Admission is free and all are welcome. The series is supported by the Letteri family.
some helpful models of grief, Hana Pera Aoake Illustrations by Priscilla Rose Howe Compound Press, 2025
“I stayed up all night and blistered my hands braiding muka into a rope to slow the sun down just for you.”
Rhythm. I begin with rhythm as I read and slowly reflect upon Hana Pera Aoake’s poetry collection, some helpful models of grief. The rhythm of the line, the rhythm building across the arm-stretch of a poetic sequence. Think heart beat. Think the shifting rhythms of life, illness, love, death. The rhythms of thoughts flooding, speaking to loved ones, sons and daughters. The rhythm that builds as poet puts pen to page, and it is sweet and sharp and sour, these currents of anxiety, epiphany, recognition, searching.
And when I listen to the rhythm, the words spilling and coiling and arching and arcing, I am absorbing the poetry so very deeply.
Here is poetry that moves hand-in-hand with grief, with the sharp and soft edges of desire, aroha, body intimacy, wound, self repair.
“You say you feel understood and that my love of art reminds you why it matters, but I feel like moss drying in the sun ripped from the moss.”
Here is poetry that navigates and holds close the power and magnetic pull of creating art, beyond and inside the smash of doubt, I too am body struck by Rothko, ache with myriad doubt, and am drawn to the garden, where we might fling our art to burn, and then feed the garden pumpkins with the ash. Ah. The garden, with its ongoing visibility and necessities, might be the fertile earth in which Hana’s poetry is planted. Ah the stories that precede and shape us, whether familiar, inherited, whether myths and legends. And then this: “I think of Martha Stewart saying that if you make a garden you have / a friend for life.”
Here is poetry that interlaces the personal and the political, how can it not in this spiky wounded world. We are standing next to the tourist in Iceland scooping moss that takes hundreds of years to regrow. We are holding Gaza. Grieving. And I am stilled and stalled before the pyramid poem that speaks of our founding document written in te reo Māori but signed in translation, those stolen lands, that stifled language, and pyramid poem becomes precious cloak on the page, with its origins, and vital and connecting stitching.
Here is poetry of echo and return. And it’s yes to poetry as echo and return, as the poems luminate past, present and future. The moss a recurring physical political eco marker that activates our senses, touch and smell and sight, that might build a tower of metaphors as we read, with its beauty and function and fragility and presence. Think life. Think nurture. Think care.
And here is poetry that speaks to you, the shifting me I we they you.
This is a sequence, a chronicle that draws upon the words and ideas of multiple writers and thinkers, including Moana Jackson, Keri Hulme, Talia Marshall, Fleur Adcock, Plato, Louise Glück, Roland Bathes, Annie Ernaux, Samuel Beckett, Homer, Andrei Tarkovsky, Kathy Acker, Stephen Fry, Freud, Shakespeare, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Autumn Royal.
And here I am back to the notions of rhythm – so deeply fertilised with experience and invention, with the literal and the figurative, with how poetry is sweet and succulent on our tongues, our speaking tongues, sweet and succulent in our ears, our listening ears, sweet and succulent in our hearts, our feeling hearts. And yes sour and savoury. These rhythms, movements, chronicles. This gift. This book. This poetry.
“I saw the Te Rakanui moon still bright this morning and wondered whether you could see it in the city. By the time went outside everything was covered in fog and there was ice on the moss.”
the reading
Photo credit: Frances Carter
Hana reads from some helpful models of grief
Hana Pera Aoake (Ngāti Hinerangi, Ngāti Mahuta, Waikato/Tainui is an artist, writer, and sweaty milf living at the foot of Pūtauaki maunga. Hana has published three books, including a bathful of kawakawa and hot water (2020), Blame it on the rain (2025) with no more poetry (Australia) and Some helpful models of grief (2025). They are also working on a fourth book of essays, how to be with Discipline (Australia). Hana is a PhD candidate at the Auckland University of Technology.
Peace & Quiet, Dinah Hawken Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2026 cover: Kelly O’Shanessy
Today
turns ashen. The old men are waiting to drive from the first tee. The poets are waiting to hit the right note even though a war and pandemic- in the same warm air – permit no lyricism and no bright ideas. A wave comes in. The wind stirs. How casually we used to fit into our endless lives.
Dinah Hawken
Dinah Hawken’s new poetry collection, Peace and Quiet, offers a compelling reading retreat, an extended version of Poetry Shelf’s Breathing Room, where you take time out from daily routine and news feeds and jagged edges, and breathe in the joy and delight and skin tingling rewards of poetry. Yet Dinah’s intricate collection is also deeply aware of people and planet issues that we are facing navigating challenging .
We begin in a room, waiting listening waiting, a dark room, mysterious, senses on alert, and this poem, this is poetry where everything, every line and every lithe word sings. We move into the real, beyond real, into fable, beyond fable, into the shifting oceans and sands outside, the appearances and disappearances, the sky, yes a beauty curtain the sky, the infinite possibilities for being, and from this waiting room, from this sweet poetry pause, let’s say contemplation, we step into poetry as song, as uplift.
Poetry as a song cycle where “life is the endless chanting of a choir / that you can join, she said.”
Senses are on alert to life: the dailiness, the quotidian that unfolds and continues upon the beach, the sound of a fire engine’s siren, to where the women who once held themselves back in restraint and hid their inner selves, now leave footprints in the sand, tracing their true nature. Children are born. Or maybe we flick sideways to where the woman in the street has a hidden gun. And back again to “She is listening to his breathing”.
Sea and ocean, and the water is an ongoing current we are drawn to, with its murmurings and welling ups and breathings and light and beauty and murmurings and sheen.
Quietness is to be on the other side of rain and storm, it is not speaking of “the rough and sombre days” they are hiding in between the lines where “beauty in the sheen of the sea / is indisputable.” Observed beauty and the nooks and crannies and wide sky of living. In the way light illuminates “time and place”. This precious moment. This beloved scene. Where old age and death are the ragged edges. And this: “and between waves a monumental second of silence”.
Peace. Holding hands with quiet and we are guided back to Parihaka. To Somme. To Archie Baxter. To non violence. Calling as we do and must and will for “a lull, a truce, // a ceasefire, a prohibition on the use of force.” Remembering “that an island of warfare can, / given time, become a sanctuary.”
There are so many pathways through Dinah’s stunning collection, so many glades to linger in, so many vantage points where you can stand or sit to absorb the shifting moods of sea and sky, so many trails into the rugged war-smashed greedy world, into living and dying, into aging and becoming, into mourning the dead. Into the ocean at fingertips and the mantra meditation. Still becoming. This living. This daily movement. So many hinges upon peace and quiet. On peace ahead of war. On the power and joy and tremble of silence.
I hold this precious book out to you so you may navigate your own pathways though.
June down under
The winter is reluctant to come. The stacked wood lies undisturbed, protecting wētā.
The only thing that won’t ice over on the other side of the world is the father’s heart.
He is digging in the rubble with his bare hands for a small boy. A small son.
Dinah Hawken
Dinah Hawken is one of New Zealand’s most celebrated poets. She was born in Hāwera in 1943 and now lives in Paekākāriki. Recent poetry collections include Faces and Flowers: Poems to Patricia France, Sea-light, and There Is No Harbour. In 2025 she received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement.
Te Herenga Waka University Press page Book interview with Morrin: Lauren Keenen, Dinah Hawken, Ingrid Horrocks Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Morrin Rout chooses Dinah Hawken
Reflect on 40 years of Homosexual Law Reform in Aotearoa this Queer History Month, Pūmahara Ia Te Wā. Explore collection items at your own pace — from ephemera and audiovisual taonga to books — and create your own poetic response.
Programme
Join in across the day with hands-on activities, screenings of Thin Edge of the Wedge, and a collection viewing.
Collection viewing
When — 10am to 1pm
Where — National Library Gallery, Ground floor
Explore collections relating to Homosexual Law Reform in Aotearoa with our friendly curators.
Featuring collections from the National Library, the Alexander Turnbull Library, Archives New Zealand, Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision and Kawe Mahara Queer Archives Aotearoa.
Activity: Create your own blackout poem
When — 10am to 1pm
Where — Programme rooms, Ground floor
Take a moment to reflect by crafting your own poetic response to this significant anniversary using found materials from Papers Past. Reinterpret, reimagine, or honour an existing text by picking out your own poem.
Presented by Blackout Poetry Aotearoa and supported by Chris Tse (New Zealand Poet Laureate 2022-2025).
Screening: Thin Edge of the Wedge
When — 10:30am and 12:30pm (72 minutes, plus an introduction and time for questions)
Where — Taiwhanga Kauhau — Auditorium, Lower ground floor
Experience the media landscape of 1985 and 1986 following the introduction of the Homosexual Law Reform Bill. This screening includes material some viewers may find challenging.
This event is presented as part of Queer History Month Pūmahara Ia Te Wā, in partnership with Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision, Archives New Zealand, Kawe Mahara Queer Archives Aotearoa, and Blackout Poetry Aotearoa. Banner artwork created by Sam Orchard.
In her inaugural lecture, Professor Anna Jackson will look at how poetry differs from other forms of communication.
Reading poems by six poets, from Catullus to Jackson McCarthy, Professor Jackson will consider what it is to be a poet—the role of the body and the pleasures of disembodiment, translation as both disappearance and revelation, reading as a form of espionage, how a poem travels, where it goes, and how its transmission and reception make ghosts of both poet and reader.
I gave away your shirts The jeans I ordered for you from England fit my brother
You’re gone
But last night I heard you in the wardrobe
Empty coat hangers swinging around 10 pm doing your dance
Did you notice I left some of your favourites
The one that reads Last Clean Shirt and your most comfortable shoes
Disturbed from dreaming I woke excited thinking you had returned
But what were you doing shaking your booty at 10 pm rattling the empty coat hangers
This morning on GeoNet 3.9 south west of French Pass shaking at 9.55 pm
I thought it was you doing your dance coming back to me
It was only a silly earthquake
Joy Sharp
Joy Sharp was born in Hamilton and now lives in Nelson where she spent seven blissfully happy years with her husband Iain, before his death early this year from blood cancer. She has an MA (hons) University of Auckland where she was a graduate of the Creative Writing programme. Her chapter on Meg and Alistair Campbell in Between the Lives: Partners in Art arose from her Masters thesis on Meg’s poetry, and she wrote the introduction to the Campbells’ last published collection: It’s Love Isn’t It? The Love Poems. Joy is a past winner of the Whitireia Pietry Competition, the Sunday Star Times Short Story Contest, and the Lilian Ida Smith Award. She was also highly commended in the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Short Story Competition.
The discharge meeting was as pointless as a stylus without a needle. Ray wore a blue sateen Anko robe, he insisted was made by extraterrestrials.
“This is not my first time on the ship,” he told the doctor who was shining a pen torch into his eyes, refusing to surrender his watering can for any part of the exam.
The demand for his bed was high. In the garden, on the other side of barred windows, Pierrot-collared roses barely concealed their giggles, the punchline of his release clear as a cling film face mask.
Pouring wet cement into the ocean, after the funeral, I stripped off to wade in and lie on my back. Lost in lenticular clouds, I recalled Ray’s certainty that UFO beams evaporate puddles, and wished like a child at Christmas.
Driving back to the old house in my underwear, the traffic lights tested my adhesion to mortality.
“Why slow down now?,” a stop sign at the level crossing taunted.
I got out of my car and clambered up on the bonnet to punch it, in case it had spoken this way before, or planned to ever again. My old high school principal chose that moment to drive past, tactful enough to solemnly wave but not stop. He would have known that Ray had died the week prior, thanks to the Dominion Post, whose thoughts (if not their discretion) were ‘with the family of the deceased’ – a story about a body found in two pieces on Moonshine Road, pulled from the wreckage of a stolen car my brother had neither the licence or knowledge to drive.
But Ray hasn’t left the lounge of the family home. Forever a tin-foil-hatted boy of five, 10, 15, pointing a coat hanger at the sky, only travelling in the glow of the radiogram’s regional dial, the mystery of telephone wires.
“Good evening, Ray, always good to hear from you,” the talk show host greets him like a trusted envoy. “What’s happening in Plimmerton tonight?”
Bee Trudgeon
Bee Trudgeon is a writer, rocker, mama, storyteller, children’s librarian, perpetual student, and frequent Crip the Lit collaborator. Her journalism has been published in Capital Times, RipItUp, The Sapling, NZ Poetry Shelf, The Spinoff, Muzic.NZ, and AudioCulture Iwi Waiata; her poetry in NZ Poetry Box, NZ Poetry Shelf,a fine line, Tarot, and the NZ Poetry Society 2024 and 2025 anthologies. She was awarded the 2024 Story Inc. Poetry Prize. She has been posting a poem a week on the Patreon page of her alter ego – Grace Beaster – for over a decade. Read more here.
Bee says: “‘Radiogram’ contains my grief for the ones squeezed out of our broken health systems, turned into indiscrete news stories while their families are still wondering what went wrong, remembering them the ways they were, not the ways they were let down. It’s a quiet protest, like the ones we hold inside ourselves that very few placards are ever lofted for.”
NZ Poetry Shelf 