Poetry Shelf celebrates our Poetry Treasures

Laureates: Chris Tse, Elizabeth Smither, Karl Stead, Michele Leggott, Cilla McQueen, Jenny Bornholdt, Bill Manhire, David Eggleton. Image: Miro King

An extraordinary gathering of Poet Laureates at the National Library in Wellington on November 27th inspired this celebratory post. Peter Ireland, who steered the event so beautifully, has kindly shared photos, audio and video links, and written an introduction. I invited a number of the laureates to contribute a poem and write a paragraph. Poet Philippa Werry was in the audience and shared a few words.

Stephen Olsen’s write-up in Wellington Scoop
Video links are available for one month

Laureates Line Up: a view from the wings

The genesis of Laureates Line Up took place 30 years ago when John Buck had the compelling idea of creating a Poet Laureate Award to recognise one hundred years of planting grapes on Te Mata land.

Fast forward to 27 November 2025, 14 Poets Laureate later, the National Library supported by Te Puna Foundation, Air New Zealand and Te Mata was inspired by John’s example for its 60^th birthday by holding the poetry party of the year.

Fergus Barrowman presided as MC with a touch both deft and warm and Selina Tusitala Marsh, prerecorded in Menton lead out with ‘Te Aroha’ and a tribute to Vincent O’Sullivan.

Robert Sullivan embraced definitions of aroha from his home in Ōamaru; before eight Laureates took the stage one by one; together with Jillian Sullivan and Dominic O’Sullivan reading on behalf of Brian Turner and Dominic’s dad, while exploring a family tie along the way.

There have been Laureate gatherings before, but time had caught up with some for Laureates Line Up. But local poets were out in force among the audience of 250 to reinforce the point that poetry is in good heart in New Zealand and that the Poet Laureate Award has mana and is thriving.

As Laureate David Eggleton observed after the reading, it did indeed feel like an historic moment. And a precious one.

Peter Ireland
National Library

Image: Miro King

Laureates Line Up: a view from the audience

A rare and precious moment at the National Library: 14 Poet Laureates, all of them gathered either in person, online or by proxy, or, as Jillian Sullivan said about Brian Turner, with their memory in our hearts; along with Jacob Scott, creator of the tokotoko for each poet, Peter Ireland (National Library ”Poet Laureate minder”) andloyal sponsors John and Wendy Buck of Te Mata Estate winery, who provided the fine Te Mata wine to go with the delicious nibbles. 

The evening began with a welcome from Jackie Hay, of the community engagement team at the National Library (the “rare and precious moment” quote is hers) and an acknowledgement of those whom we’ve sadly lost in recent years: Vincent O’Sullivan, Brian Turner and kaumātua Tom Mulligan from Matahiwi marae. Selina Tusitala Marsh (“bonjour from Menton”) then led everyone in a pre-recorded waiata of Te Aroha and Fergus Barrowman, with warmth and humour, introduced the Laureates to read in pairs. New Poet Laureate Robert Sullivan joined in online from Oamaru, followed (again from sunny Menton) by Selina reading a poem to honour Vincent O’Sullivan, remembering a time when they were both guests at Lockwood Smith’s London home and Vincent, uncomplaining, was given a room on the third floor.  

In the lineage of laureates
excellence is simply this
just climb the stairs and write 

The next pairing was Jillian Sullivan, Brian Turner’s partner, reading for Brian, and Dominic O’Sullivan, Vincent’s son, who flew over from Australia to read for Vincent. Jillian read “The rocks below”, Brian’s message to a grieving friend; his shortest, one-line poem titled “New Zealanders, a definition”, “Deserts, for instance” (which is to be the text of a sculpture in Central Otago to recognise him as Poet Laureate of Nature) and lastly, a poem that Brian read at his final public reading last year in Dunedin. Dominic read two family poems, one about Vincent’s grandfather, the other a poem carved on the headstone of Dominic’s daughter Sarah.

Bill Manhire and Jenny Bornholdt read poems from new books coming out next year. Bill commented, “I spend far too much time on social media” and described a recent post about Dracula’s grave (or lack of) at a church in Whitby, before a brilliant reading of “Too many Draculas” (definitely worth buying the new book for that poem alone). He said that one of the things being Poet Laureate had given him was the courage to use poetry to speak out on public events and then read his protest poem “Gaza”.

His parents held him while he died
but they are both dead, too.
Or he held them, no one remembers

Jenny read four new poems: “Luck”, “Forecast”, “Worry” and “First aid”, the last one ending with a lovely, very Wellington-seeming scene on a bus. Elizabeth Smither read some wonderful and hilarious librarian poems, which all the librarians in the audience clearly related to, and C K Stead read some of his recent Catullus and Kezia poems, bringing an Auckland flavour with shades of Kohimarama and Rangitoto. Fergus then read for Ian Wedde, in Ponsonby: another Auckland, very Ponsonby poem (“See what love can do”) with a perfect ending, and he also read Hone Tuwhare’s “Toroa”, noting its link with Wellington and the Tanya Ashken sculpture on the waterfront.

Your head tilts, your eyes open to the world.  

Two poets from the deep south followed: David Eggleton (who described himself as the pandemic Poet Laureate and read an extract from Rāhui, his lockdown journal) and Cilla McQueen, who read “Letter to Hone 2022” (“one of many”) and “Learning by heart”, written the day after a car accident. And the very last pairing was Michele Leggott and Chris Tse. Michele read “a summertime poem” and a poem in praise of the scientists and technicians – and the mouse! – of the Malaghan Institute:

The battlefield
of blood and bone marrow

Chris, the outgoing Poet Laureate, read “I want things that make me happy”:

Give me scars of adventurous days
Give me old age and better 

And his last poem looked ahead to “the other side of next year”, a fitting ending. (Lots of these poems had wonderful endings). Wonderful and very special line-up, amazing evening of poetry and stories.

Philippa Werry

Laureate Jenny Bornholdt. Image: Miro King

eight poets laureate select a poem

Bill Manhire

I think of myself as being a fairly quiet poet but being poet laureate helped me find the courage to step into public spaces  – even to occasionally attempt writing to order. ‘Erebus Voices’ is one example. It was written for Sir Edmund Hillary to read at a Scott Base memorial service in November 2004 honouring the 257 passengers and crew who had died 25 years earlier in the Erebus tragedy. Peter Beck, then Dean of Christchurch Cathedral, who led the service, requested the poem on his behalf. Apparently Sir Ed was happy to participate in the service, but did not wish to read a Christian text. One of his closest friends had died in the disaster. I was able to see him reading the poem on the TVNZ News. He gave it heaps.

Erebus Voices

The Mountain

I am here beside my brother, Terror.
I am the place of human error.
I am beauty and cloud, and I am sorrow;
I am tears which you will weep tomorrow.
I am the sky and the exhausting gale.
I am the place of ice. I am the debris trail
And I am still a hand, a fingertip, a ring.
I am what there is no forgetting.
I am the one with truly broken heart.
I watched them fall, and freeze, and break apart.

The Dead

We fell.

Yet we were loved and we are lifted.

We froze.

Yet we were loved and we are warm.

We broke apart.

Yet we are here and we are whole.

Bill Manhire
from Lifted, Victoria University Press, 2009

Elizabeth Smither

At the conclusion of ‘Persuasion’ Anne Elliot enters her father’s house so happy as to require an interval of meditation to prevent her emotions from overflowing. ‘She went to her room, and grew steadfast and fearless in the thankfulness of her enjoyment’. Jane Austen often uses this corrective half-hour of quiet to steady the emotions, to lower the pulse, to regulate joy or tears. I imagined the jumble of Anne’s feelings before she faces the evening’s pallid entertainment and before she becomes pastel herself. I removed all the commas because jumbled emotions need no pause.

What Anne Elliot did in her respite room

She peeled off her gloves laid down
the umbrella offered by Captain Wentworth
she went to the window and looked out
too agitated to sit she removed her shawl
and bonnet smoothed her brow patted her hair
bent at the waist and eased herself into a chair
deep breaths counting to ten then
letting them out again to the same tempo
gradually her heartbeat slowed she touched
her pulse with two fingers to confirm it
and the room’s familiar things settled
her books her hairbrushes her jewellery box
a crystal vase with flowers one browning leaf
a little dust since this morning had alighted
indiscriminately on the furniture. Half an hour
and she felt she was turning pastel enough
to return to the drawing room.

Elizabeth Smither

Brian Turner (1944 – 2025)
(selected by his partner, Jillian Sullivan)

This poem of Brian’s spoke to me in a personal way, the way his poetry does, shining a light on your own fears, losses, hopes. And wonders. Explaining how things are. How things could be. I am leaving this week to walk the length of the South Island, or as Brian says in Hard Luck, Nature: “here’s hoping, here’s to a decent attempt, for all the right reasons.’ I want to be in the mountains at the date that’s a year of him leaving. To be crossing rivers, standing on summits, facing the steep bits, loving the slopes down from the bluffs. This poem speaks metaphorically of life at the same time it carries the authenticity of his own long tramps in nature. And as for grief, there is hope in the lines; ‘the dusty earth/ believes we are crying/yet the river sings’, and advice in his mantra: ‘Let’s go on reaching,’ and the two words, ‘living, here.’

Jillian Sullivan

 Walking in                               

The country throbs 
and all that is dead 
is buried by all that’s 
so convincingly alive.

We sweat. The dusty earth 
believes we are crying 
yet the river sings.
We hate the steep bits,

love the easy grades 
down from the bluffs, 
the way the body 
handles it all

as long as we don’t 
over-reach ourselves.
Let’s go on reaching.
We carry all that we need,

we think we know 
where we’re heading 
and why, and two words 
dwarf all others: living, here.

Brian Turner
from All That Blue Can Be, 1989

Jenny Bornholdt

‘Worry’ combines three occasions I’d written  notes about, thinking I’d probably want to use them in a poem, or poems, sometime. I started with worrying about the day and then, in the way that poetry happens, the other two followed on from that. Each had its own strangeness and I think this is what bound them together. It was good to start with upset and finish with a rush and then the calmness of mothers sleeping.

Worry

I woke to worry
about the day
so went out into the garden
to move things around. Said
sorry, sorry, sorry
to stick insects disturbed
along the way.

Then I walked
along the river, said hello
to two women and
a baby, one man,
a runner and three
cyclists. Dogs veered like thoughts
into a tiny experimental
forest.

I walked beside tennis courts
to the next sunny rise, to the bent
tree, the big rock, then
I was done.

I sat and remembered
the time my cousin and I
ran through all the gardens
of the world. Our mothers slept
on the lawn while we sprinted through
Spain, Greece, Italy; my uncle
grumpy amongst the bright flowers
of India. Japan was an ocean
of pale stones, calm as our mothers
in their childhood beds, whispering
like grass.

Jenny Bornholdt
from What to Wear, forthcoming THWUP, Feb 2026

Michele Leggott

This is a praise poem for the scientists and clinicians of the Malaghan Institute of Medical Research and for the mouse whose genes helped save my life three years ago. For eight or nine months I was part mouse and then the genetic material dispersed and I was myself again, with a debt of gratitude that is hard to overestimate.  

lymphocyte | rag

I am a chimera  —  the 68 million cells
each with its mouse head  —  and trailing antibodies
made from transcriptions of a human gene
have replicated themselves who knows how many times
antigen receptors looking for trouble  —  doubled
in their capacity to hunt down and eliminate
diffuse large B-cells  —  gone crazy
killers versus killers  —  they hang about
munch munch munch  —  creep creep creep
the battlefield of blood and bone marrow
the waterfall above my heart  —  mouse god Apollo
tune up your banjo and lead those antibods
in a ragged medley  —  you’re going to miss me
when I’m gone  —  it’s going to take
years to rewrite the symphony
that was my lymphocytes  —  white mice
rejoice  —  your red eyes and the control panels
have wrought the miracle  —  plain as day
a string of chimeric figures
jigging on the high plateau
and below their fandangles  —  a single line
near normal subsets  —  dance mice
dance scholars and poets everywhere  —  dance on ice
dance in the streets  —  and praise
the high chimeras of the blood volcano
and the caves where miracles are made

Michele Leggott

Vincent O’Sullivan
selected with comment by son, Dominic O’Sullivan

Sláinte

It was to the surprise of some that Vincent accepted a knighthood in 2022. He explained that one of his reasons was the sense of historical irony it brought to his family’s story. It was for the sake of his grandfather Tim, born in Tralee shortly after the Great Famine, and who died before Vincent’s father was born.

Sláinte is a reflection on Tim’s story. His death from cancer in 1898 and his widow Maryanne’s emigration to New Zealand with her children with Vincent’s father, also Tim, the youngest. For me, its resonance is simply that it is a poem about family and one of Vincent’s last. Written as he said,

‘As close as it gets
this late in another’s day’.

Sláinte

A man who adds up to half
my lifetime, were we
into counting. A man from
a train looks up to the grey cliff
of the Mater Hospital, Eccles
Street, 1897.

At the end of his drenched
disconsolate country,
the woman is pregnant to the man
who has travelled from Kerry
in pain’s private carriage.

It is always dusk
in my thinking of it, the lone
man’s arriving, the lights
white-circled in the evening
wards, the veiled nurses …
his fingers nervous (as his son’s
in time) on pyjama buttons.

My father would hear
as a boy from a shawled
sybil in the street of the Bon
Secours how she’d seen
his father that same day
as he died in Dublin,
smoking as though back home,
at ease on his doorstep,
before fact arrived.

It was later again. A butterfly
out of season on the curtain
of the room where my father’s born.

Strand Street by autumn then
with the widow’s five
charges, planning the world’s
passage from a corner store,
so the South stays always
morning in memory,
boys aboard the Scharnhorst
a decade later, fun
on deck and the German sailors
teaching numbers and phrases,
the horizon hauling
at Timaru’s rising …

This now for my father’s
father, and then my father,
unknown to each other yet never
further than namesake, one,
and one to another, to my
saying this. As close as it gets
this late in another’s day.
In theirs. In mine.

from Still Is, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024

CK Stead

After my last  collection, In the Half Light of a Dying Day, I said I would write no more poems, and for two and a half years I didn’t, but in the past few weeks I’ve found myself writing a series of sonnets.  There are currently about 20 and they seem to be continuing.  This one, ‘Gary’ (above), was the seventh.  It appeared in a recent Listener and resulted in many questions about my own survival from going unconscious out there.  The sonnet’s 14 lines are limiting, but it’s true that I did ‘pass out’ while swimming, and ‘came to’ underwater.  I think I survived because it didn’t panic, just floated to the surface, and hitched a ride inshore with a woman I’d been chatting to out at the yellow buoy who was equipped with one of those orange balloons some swimmers use to make themselves visible, or to stay afloat.  After the event I was instructed by my wife and daughters not to do big swims any more and have restricted myself to the nearer buoys; and I think I’m now too  old and weak to go any further.  The whale I’d seen a few days before my ‘passing out’ incident returned next day.  It was identified by Project Jonah experts, as a young Southern Right whale, and has not been seen again.  It seems Gary (Williams) did not drown; he’d appeared to be swimming well, as usual, and had a heart attack. Many older swimmers (I among them) think it would be a great way to go.  Gary, father of the New Zealand comedian Guy Williams, was much loved by all of us in what we call the High Tide Club at Kohimarama.   

 Gary 

There’s a group in Kohi’s High Tide club swims
most days to the Yellow Buoy. I had been one 

until, aged 90, I passed out on my way back 
and came to in the world of Underwater 

where only a week before I’d met a whale,
a young Southern Right, maybe an omen.

So I’ve never been back to that buoy, and yesterday
one of the group, Gary, who always called me CK, 

eager in every weather and loved by us all 
died in the water and couldn’t be revived. 

Out at the yellow today his mates spread flowers 
and gave three cheers. His daughter told me Gary 

would have been pleased to die with an audience. 
‘He was theatrical’, she said, like him loud and cheerful. 

CK Stead

David Eggleton

‘Mostly Black’ is one of the three poems I read at the Poet Laureates’ event at the National Library in November 2025, all taken from Respirator: A Poet Laureate Collection 2019 – 2022, published by Otago University Press. Respirator is, deliberately, a kaleidoscopic whirl of a book about a turbulent time – or maybe it’s just a cosplay ragbag of a book, containing stage jewellery and other suspect finery. The book’s cover, a photo taken in the West Coast bush/Te Tai Poutini, invites the impression that it contains within an assortment of rusted-on, cast-iron ironies: humanity’s engineering marvels found abandoned in a rain-forest which are the lungs of the planet – or something like that. So, ‘Mostly Black” is mostly a sort of found poem, dug out of the rain-forest of the mind. A craft-minded, or crafty, poet, given enough words to rhyme and chime with, usually can connect anything with anything and make it stick. This poem, though, is built around a mono-rhyme. It ponders the paradoxes of nationhood and identity and self-hood through the smoked-glass lens of the word ‘black’.

When I found myself invited to become the twelfth Poet Laureate in National Poetry Day in August 2019, I already possessed a folder of poems, completed in 2019, that were my response to holding the Fulbright-Creative New Zealand Pacific Writers’ Residency, which I held for three months at the end of 2018 at the Manoa campus of the University of Hawai’i. These I rolled over into the bundle that became Respirator, capturing what I wrote from the beginning of 2019 and to end of 2022 chronologically, though not all the poems I wrote in that time-frame made it into the final selection of well over 100 poems. The hardback book consists of verses for specific occasions, pandemic journal poems, comic and satiric poems, Moana Nui poem sequences, and more. It is a chronological record of what I thought I should write about as the Poet Laureate during those years. The brief was: be yourself, which I took to mean, speak as you ought to speak – with nobody, and yet everybody, hanging on your words.

Mostly Black

Before, as it was, it was mostly black,
dark beaks, polished talons, feathers, a black
regime drenched in the melancholy black
of rains that took tides further towards black.
From hinges of sunlight hung blocks of black,
and risen humps of islands were matt black.
Cinders sailed from bush burn-offs, carbon black.
Beads on antimacassars gleamed jet black.
Through pine’s silent groves possum eyes shone black.
Above tar-seal a melted rainbow turned black.
At disintegration of monolith black,
green, all that blue can be, then back to black.
Green of pounamu lost under lake’s black.
Blackout’s lickerish taste, blood-pudding black,
and midnight mushrooms gathered from deep black.
Tattoos drawn with bent nib and homemade black.
Batman’s mask, a dull sheen of cue ball black.
The primeval redacted, placed in black
trash bags, or else turned out as burnt bone black.
Pull on the wool singlet of shearer’s black,
for blacker than black is New Zealand black,
null and void black, ocean black, all black.
In Te Pō’s night realm, from Te Kore’s black,
under the stars spreads the splendour of black.

David Eggleton
from Respirator: A Poet Laureate Collection 2019 – 2022, OUP, 2023

one laureate reads a poem

Hone Tuwhare (1922 -2008)

Hone Tuwhare (1922-2008) reads ‘No Ordinary Sun’, from No Ordinary Sun, Blackwood & Janet Paul, 1967. Some of the poems on this record were recorded at a reading given at the Birkenhead Public Library, during the North Shore Festival of Arts and Crafts, on 23 February 1967. You can listen to the album at the National Library.

two laureates on video

Selina Tusitala Marsh

Robert Sullivan

Poetry to me is like a waiata, which translated can mean reflecting water. Yet I find most of the language I have for poems comes from other poems, such as “a ripple of words on water / wind-huffed” which is a quote from Hone Tuwhare, or to borrow from William Carlos Williams, the very ordinary become special because it is “glazed with rain.” I so enjoyed the readings from all the poets’ laureate. My many many thanks for this honour. Ngā mihi nunui.

Robert Sullivan, current Poet laureate