Join Chris at the National Library to mark the end of his time in the role with his reflections on the future of Aotearoa New Zealand poetry and readings from special guests.
Chris will be joined by poets Ken Arkind, Cadence Chung, Gregory O’Brien, Chris Price, and Ruby Solly.
“I left the doors to the past and the future unlocked …”
Chris Tse’s three-year term as Aotearoa New Zealand Poet Laureate ends on Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day, when the next Poet Laureate will be announced.
Date and Time: Wednesday 20 August 2025, 6pm to 8pm
Location: Te Ahumairangi Ground Floor, National Library of New Zealand
1. That morning I read some poems 2. Could not walk far because of my surgery 3. A wholegrain roll I filled with chicken and coleslaw for lunch 4. Thought about the fridge being a silver coffin we carry around 5. Listened to Jim Morrison singing ‘The End’ 6. Thought of tubular bells making a comeback 7. Falling into water then rising up: my heart dipped with the tabla drum 8. …the world, a brief dream under a summer moon 9. Decided on Earl Grey 10. Stood at the window and thought how quiet the street is 11. Wiped sticky fingerprints from the handle of the fridge 12. Stared at the packing cases in the hallway 13. Texted my husband: ‘We had a dream and we made it happen we should be proud of ourselves’ 14. Stared at the pale yellow slipper orchid, newly opened; large and quiet and perfect 15. Read some poems 16. Remembered the one I wrote about cormorants nesting in the huge macrocarpa at Brendan Beach 17. Thought about looking it up but remembered it was packed away 18. Asked Google the question: How long does a stone take to round off in a riverbed? 19. It depends; some take a few weeks and some 100,000,000 years or more 20. Looked up the actor Mandy Patinkin 21. Noticed his wife, Kathryn, looked the same age 22. Wondered if he was still friends with Claire Danes? 23. Marvelled at the trivia I “knew” 24. Thought of my mother dying in the afternoon, falling asleep with a book 25. Glanced at the bed and wondered but lay down anyway.
Wes Lee
Wes Lee lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. She has four poetry collections — her latest, Wearing Today, was shortlisted for The Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award 2023 (Otago University Press), and has been launched this month in Wellington. She has received a number of awards for her writing, including, The BNZ Katherine Mansfield Literary Award and The Bronwyn Tate Memorial Award. Most recently she was awarded the Magma Editors’ Prize 2024/25; The 2024 Free Verse Prize, by the Poetry Society, in London; The Heroines/Joyce Parkes Women’s Writing Prize 2022, in New South Wales; The Poetry New Zealand Prize 2019. Placed in The Plaza Poetry Prize 2025 and The Fish Poetry Prize 2025. She was selected as a finalist for The Fool for Poetry Chapbook Prize 2023, in Ireland (Munster Literature Centre); shortlisted for the Poetry London Pamphlet Prize 2023, and The Alastair Reid Poetry Pamphlet Prize 2024, in Scotland.
The Venetian Blind Poems, Paula Green, The Cuba Press, 2025
When I wrote Wild Honey: Reading New Zealand Women’s Poetry (MUP, 2019), I built a house, dividing the book into rooms, and then moving through open doors and windows to the wider world. The book was neither a formal history nor a theoretical overview of New Zealand’s women’s poetry but a way of collecting, building recouping valuing the poetic voices of women in Aotearoa. As I moved through the rooms in the house the themes accumulated: politics, poetics, love, the domestic, self, relations, illness, death, location, the maternal, home, voice.
The book came out in 2019, not that long ago, and I was interested to read ‘The sickbed’ chapter again. I began the chapter by saying inquisitive audiences often ask, ‘Why write poetry?’. I still claim the answers are myriad: it makes us feel good, we are addicted to wordplay, we can squeeze writing a poem in between domestic chores, parenting, scholarly endeavour, work commitments. We might crave public attention, awards, good reviews. We might simply have to write. Our poetry might reflect a love of music, storytelling, suspense, wit, surprise, attraction to the unsayable or beauty. We might write poems at the kitchen table, in our head as we walk, run, dream or dillydally. We might favour condensation and pocket size writing or expansion and long sequences. We might write from a sick bed.
My collection Slipstream (AUP, 2010) came out of my breast cancer experience. I refer to it in Wild Honey: ‘poetry was an energy boost, a way to enhance my sense of wellbeing’. As I wrote, at least a year after the experience, I did not feel I was writing poems – nothing on the page earned the label ‘poem’ in my view — but I was conscious that the white space, the juxtapositions, the assembled lists and the melody were reaching for the poetic. I did not want to summon the dark, middle of the night slumps, but rather to show illness can change the way you see the day as well as live the day.
The Venetian Blind Poems is a little different in that I wrote it in the moment, in hospital and then back home on the recovery road. But I recognised similar motivations to write.
My new collection has been out in the world for a fortnight now, and it feels so very special. To be in Motutapu Ward and the Day Stay Ward this week, signing copies for nurses, hearing them read fragments aloud, reminded me that poetry is an incredible way of connecting. I am still in a thicket of appointments as I fine tune the road ahead, but this fortnight feels like like my time in hospital, when so many poets sent me a poem in a card. The emails you have sent me these past two weeks, so thoughtful and caring, have shone fresh light on how and why poetry is a gift. On why we write and sometimes publish poetry. I will treasure your emails for a long time (and reply soon)!
More than anything, The Venetian Blind Poems is a way of saying thank you to the doctors and nurses who have given, and are giving so much. I offer an enormous bouquet of thanks to Mary McCallum and Paul Stewart at The Cuba Press, for the beautiful book, and for inviting such terrific responses to post on social media by poets who have read it.
Now its back to normal transmission! I have new ideas for Poetry Shelf bubbling like my sour dough starter, manuscripts to finish, a treasury of books to review, emails to answer, a few more appointments, and most excitingly, I am ready to get my secret seedling idea off the ground: Poetry Shelf Goes Live. Yes! Soon I will be back in the world organising live poetry events around the country.
A cluster of illness poems
The waiting game
begins with someone calling your name before you wait to have your blood taken in a windowless room. Wait for the stultifying thoughts of red and disease to pass. Wait for the phone call, for relief to wash over you. And while you are waiting I recommend you dance like the memory of sweat easing down his throat; roll open like the drum beat of your limbs in sync; tear through your wildest nights, still lit in hopeful neon; cry like the Christmas you lost your last grandparent; and sing like the forgotten violin slowly coming undone in your muscle memory. If you do not allow yourself to sleep in peace with your worries, you will find yourself awake at the bottom of a very deep, very secret lake.
Chris Tse Turbine, 2014
A Final Warning
I walked past the stars the silence of grandfathers
I was going somewhere but where
I went left at first then right then way off course then back to somewhere
near the middle did this mean I was ready to die
well they’ve been testing me for everything I think I’ve got the lot
Bill Manhire from Honk Honk, The Anchorstone Press, 2022
The Night Shift
I wake on the ward, afloat on ketamine, fentanyl, see sky-blue morphine swifts roost nearby in pleated paper thimbles
and some uneasy instinct tugs my gaze to a scuff mark on the lino floor. Coal-dark, it smolders. I stall.
A voice reassures me it’s just a graze left by the wheel of some routine machine: IV, PCA line, heart monitor screen.
Yet as I ease deep-cut core and leaden legs over the distant side of the high bed I can’t shake this need to stare
not quite in fear: not quite.
For last night, creatures came. They arrived en masse, nodded, swayed, pressed into each dimmed cubicle,
their copper eyes bright-candled, lips pouched over strong, proud teeth, their heads bowed in silent inspection;
marmalade lions with oxen feet, crested birds with antlers, candy-pink teats, all crowded, crowded round each bed
as the window in time was fast contracting, and they wanted us to see before our minds sealed tough with the fibers of logic, denial.
Their fur packed tight as green florets on catkins. Their horns, colossal black spikes, gleamed like grand pianos. Such mass and strength in their embedded weaponry,
yet still, they withheld their crush and maim.
The breath and bunt of their herded skulls said we are the unbroken in you, don’t be afraid, and I saw through the seep of dawn
that soon like guardians they will gather each one of us, our failing forms absorbed into their warm, strong-walled veins
until we too watch each figure on the bed as something invisible shifts in the intricate balance of matter and spirit.
So it is awe, not dread, that asks me to leave the ground undisturbed where they gathered, to skirt carefully the sign one left like a scorched hoof print as if they had stood in fire to show they bear time’s pyre for us,
our wild sentries, our wild sentries.
Emma Neale from Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit, Otago University Press, 2024
(A lifetime of sentences)
Soon, I could leave my body without prompts. The artist’s concept of the birth of a star, or I broke my name until the fibres separated and lost their coats. My thirst for windows kept me indoors. My gaze wandered across the suburbs of childhood, faces stammering with shyness, bodies masquerading as furniture. Initial mass and luminosity determine duration, but my sensibility comes to require an object. Here, the word “system” implies a level of certainty that is unwarranted. Some of those memories were not written by me, so they are memos, at home on my desk, but still authoritative. Now, instead of a pupil, there’s a screensaver. It was late. The room was empty. A lifetime of sentences which at first glance seem superfluous, but whose value is later understood. One thing leads to a mother. Soon enough, a flock of children came running and tapped on the glass. When I reached the bottom of the stares, I looked up.
Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle selected by Kiri Pianaha Wong and was published a fine line and also Best NZ Poems 2011
it is a wedding cavalcade in which I take your day of birth and marry it with ten pink tulips to mine look, behind us on the road sadness and unutterable joy leaping over the rocks how we were those people in the crowd unmindful of everything except stepping along together under our parasols what’s wrong with that? see, the road is still there still ahead and behind losing its mind and leaping over the rocks with its train of clowns who are careless careless careless and will never behave any differently believing themselves arm in arm with all they need to sustain life on a distant planet choogaloo, this is all you need tulips and a parasol to keep off the bigger bits of debris falling out of the sky don’t be sad there is every chance we are just now resident in two minds regarding each other tenderly, quizzically, uproariously as a wedding cavalcade
Michele Leggot from Milk & Honey, Auckland University Press, 2005
What’s the time, Mr Wolff-Parkinson-White?
Press palm against skin feel its breathless sprinting
count 230 beats in a minute count six sibling arguments count four gecko squawks
gulp two glasses of water phone the absent dad three times return to the couch
count 194 beats—and whoah with the flutter of a moth it slows down to a jog
steady rhythm of 75
Fire heart Sea heart Earth heart
Calm waters as a child now more fire than earth chased by a white wolf
Want to feed my child ruby corn raspberries red meat cherry tomatoes pomegranate bursts sugar and acid enough to woo a rebel
The heart heals itself between beats, reassures Elizabeth Smither
Mikaela Nyman
Amy Marguerite picked a poem from Shira Erlichman’s Odes to Lithium, a book I now have on order! But sadly I didn’t manage to get permission to post the poem but you can listen to Shira read it here.
Self-Affirming Mantra
I was searching my symptoms online. Disturbed sleep led to fatigue which led to post-viral condition and also to alcohol abuse and liver disease and unthinkable cancers which all led to conclusions about society and how one operates in it, how someone can be rational and maladaptive at the same time, how resilience is just a word in a PowerPoint, how years of work go into the manufacture of one unit of anxiety (a person), and how each unit, although similar to others in many ways, is unique, the product of a freakish and golden permutation of inputs, which led me back to my usual searches for wars and politicians and racing drivers and recipes and animals and islands and colours.
I went out into the day with my symptoms. The sun made the swans look like harps. I appreciated the silhouettes of buildings. I scrumped apples from over a fence. My symptoms were still with me but also not with me. I was loving them. I was setting them free.
Erik Kennedy from Poto | Short (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025)
The Venetian Blind Poems, Paula Green The Cuba Press, 2025
Later in the year I am planning a number of Poetry Shelf live events to celebrate poetry voices in Aotearoa. This month I have a new poetry collection out but my energy jar and immunity is not quite ready for book launches so I have invented three celebrations for the blog. On Publication Day (August 1st), I posted an email conversation I had with my dear friend Anna Jackson, a conversation that celebrates our shared love of writing and our two new books. Anna’s Terrier, Worrier (Auckland University Press) and my The Venetian Blind Poems (The Cuba Press).
For my second feature, I have created a collage conversation by inviting some of the poets whose books I have reviewed and loved over the past year to ask me a few questions. It gives me another chance to shine light on the extraordinary writing our poets are producing. I have kept the conversation overlaps as I find something new when I return to a similar idea or issue.
It is with grateful thanks to David Gregory, Mikaela Nyman, Cadence Chung, J. A. Vili, Rachel O’Neill, Kate Camp, Xiaole Zhan, Claire Beynon and Dinah Hawken, I offer this conversation in celebration of poetry. You can find links to the reviews below. The conversation has ended up being something rather special for me. I have never experienced anything quite like it! I loved the questions so much. Thank you. Because this is a book of love, I would like to gift signed copies to five readers, whether for themselves or a friend (paulajoygreen@gmail.com).
I also want to share a review Eileen Merriman posted on her blog after reading my book, because she is in the unique position to respond to it as another writer, a haematologist and a close friend. Some things she says struck me and I refer to them when I answer a question by Kate Camp.
I’ve just finished reading Paula Green’s recently published poetry collection, The Venetian Blind Poems in one sitting. This book was an oasis in the midst of a hectic time for me (when is life ever not?); it’s not very often I can be compelled to sit for more than half an hour currently. Yet I connected with this on so many levels: as a writer, as a doctor, as a patient, as a friend, as a human. Green details her experience on the Motutapu ward, the bone marrow transplant/haematology unit at Auckland Hospital, where she received a bone marrow transplant for a life threatening blood disorder in June 2022.
As a haematologist, I know this is one of the most challenging treatments you can put a patient through, bringing someone to the brink of death to save a life. Recovery takes months, sometimes years. The acute phase can be akin to torture, one only the recipient could ever understand. But Paula holds us close, so that we can begin to understand: ‘I return to the pain box in Dune… I am using the box/for when my ulcerated mouth pain is unbearable/last night I held the box/as the mouth pain radiated but/I didn’t put my hand in/I decorated the box/ with seashells instead’. And then we are elevated from the abyss to the sublime, because this is how Green survives, by stacking poems along her windowsill and creating word pictures in her head: ‘Buttered toast and clover honey/marmalade brain and mandarin heart’. And then, time and time again, we are brought back to the world that Green sees, from the confines of her isolation room, peering through the Venetian blinds at the world that sustains her, one second, one minute, one day at a time.
This book had me captivated from the delicious first line ‘Liquorice strips of harbour’, throughout the rough seas, eddies, near-drownings and becalmed harbours of the stem cell transplant, and beyond, right through to that hopeful last line, ‘We will be able to see for miles’. Kia kaha, Paula Green, your inner strength knows no bounds.
Eileen Merriman
me with my daughter’s dog, Pablo
a collage conversation
Every morning I open an envelope and read a poet’s choice inside a greeting card I nestle into the joy of Cilla McQueen’s kitchen table
David Gregory
David: Where do your ideas for your poetry come from? Paula: They fall into my head like surprise word showers, whether from what I see, hear, feel or read. From the world experienced, the world imagined, the world recalled.
David: How do you know when a poem is complete? Paula: It’s a gut feeling. When it hits the right notes and catches a version of what I want to transmit. Poetry can be and do so many things, and I’m a strong advocate for poetry openness rather than limiting and conservative ideas on what a poem ought to be. Paul Stewart from The Cuba Press edited the book and he has a sublime ear for poetry and its range. You couldn’t ask for a better poetry editor.
In the middle of the night the radio takes me to Science in Action and I am listing ways to save the planet and the way dance liberates cumbersome feet
Mikaela Nyman
Mikaela Nyman: These poems emerged out of a life temporarily reduced by severe illness. Yet they’re not limited by the medical circumstances, and not merely a comfort blanket, but seek to connect with the world outside. Did this happen straight away, or is it something you consciously pursued later in the writing process? Paula: I love this question – yes my life was limited physically, not only on the ward but on my long recovery road with a fragile immune system, daily challenges and minute energy jar. But I also saw it as an expansion of life. I focused and am focusing on what I can do, not what I can’t do. On the ward, the world was slipping in through the blinds as much as I was looking out. From the start my writing navigated both my health experience and the world beyond it.
Mikaela: Given the dire circumstances that compelled you to turn to poetry at this point in life – i.e. your personal health struggle as well as the state of the world – how important is it for you to retain hope and offer a sense of wonder in your poems? Paula: I think it ‘s been ongoing, across decades, my impulse to write through dark and light. I think all my books have sources, whether overt or concealed, in patches of difficulty. I was writing 99 Ways into NZ Poetry with Harry Ricketts when I was first diagnosed and I never stopped writing. Maybe writing is my daily dose of vitamins. And that word wonder. Wonder is a talisman word – whether it’s the delight you might find in thought coupled with the delight you might find in awe. It is a crucial aid.
It’s the third day of the poetry season Oh, everyone’s queueing up to read a poem and count falling leaves
Cadence Chung
Cadence: Do you have a particular line/poem you’ve written that you think really encapsulates the collection?
I will meet you at the top of the hill we will be able to see for miles
Cadence: What’s an experience you’ve had lately that has brought you joy? Paula: Ah, such an important question. Every day is a patchwork quilt of joy. Take this day for example. Reading and reviewing a poetry book. Drinking coffee with a homemade muffin with sun-dried tomatoes and paprika. Making nourishing soup for lunch and sourdough with millet flour for a change. Watching the pīwakawaka dance in front of the wide kitchen window as though they are rehearsing for an special occasion. Replying to children who have sent me poems for Poetry Box. Cooking a Moroccan tagine with preserved pears and rose harissa paste for dinner and sharing with my family. Listening to Jimmy Cliff on repeat all day and imbibing the uplifting reggae beat and need to protest.
This morning I got up at 5 am to drive to an early appointment as the full-wow-moon shone in the dark, and streaks of bright colour ribbons hung over Rangitoto. It felt like my heart was bursting. I switched to Maria Callas singing ‘Casta Diva’ from Bellini’s Norma.
Today I feel happiness as solid as a wooden kitchen table with six chairs and a bowl of ripe fruit
Cadence: How does a poem come to you? Quickly and all at once, or more measured and worked out? Paula: Poems linger in my head -as they did on the ward – before I write them in a notebook. Often poem fragments arrive in the middle of the night, or when I am driving across country roads to Kumeū. But there is always a sense of flow not struggle. I love that.
I decide even stories are slatted with missing bits, so I lie still and fill in the gaps of my childhood
J. A. Vili
Jonah: How did your writing flow in the light and dark times, on the good days and bad days of your recovery journey? Paula: It flowed and flows in my head, most days, slowly, slowly. But sometimes, especially in the dark patches, I don’t have the energy to write on paper. I can’t function. Words falter. I compare it to the stream in the valley – sometimes it flows like honey, sometimes it struggles over rocks and debris. When it’s honey flow I write, when it’s not, I do something else. So I pull vegetables from the fridge of garden and make a nourishing meal to share with my loved ones. Or watch Tipping Point on TVNZ! Or listen to an audio book.
Jonah: How much did writing these poems during your personal struggle help in your healing and recovery? Paula: To a huge degree. And it still does. It was and is a crucial aid because it was and is a way of connecting with the world and people, of feeling love though my love of words. It’s a vital part of my self-care toolkit.
Jonah: Since this was such a personal journey for you, what was something new you discovered about yourself and life itself? Paula: How in the toughest experience you can feel humanity at its best – for me the incredible care and patience of the doctors and nurses, no matter how tired or stretched they were (and underpaid). I loved my time on the ward. An anonymous donor gifted me life and that felt extraordinary to me. This miracle gift – it felt like I was seeing and experiencing the whole world for the first time and it was a wondrous thing. And still is (despite the heart slamming choices of certain leaders and Governments). It’s recognising what is important. Cooking and sharing nourishing food (especially Middle Eastern flavours). Watching football. Listening to music on repeat: reggae, Bach, opera, Reb Fountain, Boy Genius, Nadia Reid, The National, Marlon Williams, Lucinda Williams, Billy Bragg, Delgirl, Nina Simone,more reggae. I am hooked on Jimmy Cliff at the moment and the struggle he was singing about way back in the 1960s and 1970s: our half starved world, the Vietnam War, the broken planet, the ‘suffering in the land’. Well we are still singing and writing these same songs of heartbreak and protest.
In the basement of song there are jars of pickled zucchini worn shoes and well-thumbed novels
Rachel O’Neill
Rachel: Where does a poem generally begin for you, and has that changed at any point? Paula: In my conversation with Anna, I talked about the way phrases drift into my head, surprise arrivals in my mental poetry room. I referred to these arrivals as gentle word showers. I have had these arrivals since I was a child. when I was in Year 8 (Form 2) my teacher, Frederick C. Parmee, was a poet! He was the only teacher who saw the potential in me as a writer and I flourished. By secondary school I was shut down as wayward and I failed school. Yet the words kept falling into my mind, and then into secret notebooks (like many women across the centuries), across my years of travelling, living in London, and finding a place in the Italian Department at the University of Auckland. Taking an MA poetry paper with Michele Leggott. Getting a poetry collection published with Auckland University Press. Extraordinary. And still the words drift and fall.
Rachel: Does your new collection speak to dynamics of patience and urgency? Along these lines, what has writing this collection made you appreciate more, or challenged you to move on from? Paula: I think it has amplified my attraction to slowness, to patience, to writing and reading and blogging like a snail, into uncharted territory as much as into the familiar. When you run on slow dose energy, I think urgency is disastrous – I favour slow cooked braises and sourdough bread. Choosing the slow reading of poetry books, so much more is revealed. Yet urgency is both rewarding and necessary for other people, and produces breathtaking results, it just doesn’t work for me. That said, we need to unite with urgency to heal this damaged planet.
The second part of your question is crucial. In a nutshell, I appreciate life, I have had a transplant that has gifted me the miracle of life. Extraordinary. How can this not change the way I am in the world. What matters. Dr Clinton Lewis at Auckland Hospital has made an excellent video for bone marrow transplant patients. He talks about how many patients reassess what matters most. I have drafted a book, A Book of Care, it is not quite ready yet, but it is the manuscript I am most keen to be published. I offer it is as a self-travel guide, a tool kit, borrowing practical ideas that have helped me.
Rachel: In what ways do you think poetry helps us integrate and accept tension or discomfort as part of human experience and living a full life? Paula: I love this question. I have been musing no matter what I am writing, the tough edges of the world, the daily wound of news bulletins find their way in. What difference does it make if we speak of Gaza and the abominable choices our Government is making? I just don’t know, but I do know silence is a form of consent, and that in the time of fascism in Italy, it was strengthening that some people spoke out. Every voice ringing out across the globe, in song or poem or article, every protest march and banner, is a human arm held out, a call to heal rather than destroy, to feed rather starve, to teach and guide the whole child rather than discriminatory parts.
My repugnance at the devastation of Gaza is not eased by the soft light on the Waitākere Ranges or a canny arrangement of summer nouns or Boy Genius on the turntable or even a bowl of chickpea tajine
Kate Camp
Kate: do you ever feel when you are writing about personal experiences – especially intimate ones of the body – that you are invading your own privacy? And once you have written about those experiences, do you find that the poem version overlays the “real” remembered version? Or if not overlays it, then how do they co-exist, how does the personal, private version of the experience alongside the version of the experience as captured in a poem? Paula: I love love this question Kate. Xiaole introduces their reading for a Poetry Shelf feature I am posting on Poetry Day, by talking about oversharing. I know this feeling so well. I feel like I am doing it in this collage conversation! To what extent do people want to hear about illness? About bumps in the road? I started sharing my health situation on the blog because I wanted people to know why I was operating on a tiny energy jar and couldn’t review quite so many books or answer emails so promptly. And most people have been unbelievably kind. I felt so bad when I hadn’t celebrated a book I had loved. And then I would think EEK! And wanted to delete my talk of cancer and transplant experiences and issues. But what I don’t do is go into dark detail. That stays private and personal. Will I have the courage to press ‘publish’ for this collage conversation! Scary.
I found it so illuminating to read Eileen’s review of the book. She writes from her experience as a writer, avid reader, haematologist and my friend. She says things I don’t have running through my head but are important! To read her words made feel so much better about how I am handling my recovery road and my own writing! I don’t use warrior language on my cancer road. I don’t wallow in what I can’t do. I have never said ‘why me?’. But I do have dark patches where I feel I physically can’t function. To hear doctors say a bone marrow transplant is an extremely tough experience is like getting a warm embrace. Recognition.
So yes, I love the idea of a private version and a shared public version – I am a writer that keeps most of my life private – my personal relationships, especially with my partner and our children. I think part of my impulse to write this experience was self-care, as I mentioned to Jonah. Liking drinking water. And how important it is for me to write out of aroha and wonder as much as difficulty. To write as you travel, in the present tense of experience. Once I had spent two years writing the sequence, I wanted to get to get the book published as a gift for doctors, nurses and other people ascending Mountains of Difficulty.
After a night of dream scavenging I open my mouth and out fly stars a garden of leeks and carrots a family of skylarks a track to the wild ocean
Xiaole Zhan
Xiaole: I’ve been thinking a lot about this idea from e.e. cummings: ‘To know is to possess, & any fact is possessed by everyone who knows it, whereas those who feel the truth are possessed, not possessors.’ Did you have any experiences of not knowing or of ‘being possessed’ while working on/ living through your collection? Paula: What fascinating traffic between knowing and feeling! Possessing the facts, being possessed. What slippery territory . . . truth yes, but even facts. Are they ever fixed or certain? Sometimes I think writing is a way of re-viewing an experience, of re-speaking it say, and it is for me an organic process. Never fixed. The versions I tell my consultant, the nurse, my psychologist, my close friends, my family, are tremble stories, never fixed, as I remember and forget and shift the focal lens, the distance finder, the colour filter. It is so very important. I almost feel like venturing to Zenlike thought by saying there is knowing in the unknowing, and unknowing in the knowing.
I lip read the cloud stories and remember the comfort points
Claire Beynon
Claire: I appreciated the absence of ‘explicit’ punctuation in your collection—all commas, colons, semi-colons, full stops are invisible/implicit. The rhythm and cadence of each word, line and stanza work quietly and diligently on their own, as if seeking connection and continuity. They neither ask for, nor require, anything extra in the way of emphasis or embellishment. Did you set out to write the collection this way? Or did you initially include ‘traditional’ punctuation and make a decision to remove it later/during your editing process? Paula: Punctuation is an aid for the poem – for me it is a key part of the musical effect – and it is a guide for the reader – where to take a breath or to pause. I have had many books published and worked with many editors and they have different, and at times, contradictory approaches. I wanted to keep faith with the first section of The Venetian Blind Poems as I gathered it in my head on the ward. Punctuation played more of a role in the second section which I wrote back home. A musical tool. A rhythm aid.
Claire: I wondered while reading The Venetian Blind Poems whether living with a painter—your partner, Michael Hight—influences your way of composing and structuring your poems? I mentioned in my FB post that something about the tone and shape of this collection reminds me of the work of artist Giorgio Morandi. I’ve long admired Michael’s paintings, too—their quiet, contemplative quality, compositional sophistication and attention to detail, the at-times unexpected juxtaposition of objects—and sense between them and your poems a kind of reciprocity or shared sensibility.
Forgive me if I’m projecting here. I don’t mean to speak out of line or to make any assumptions… but, well, I found myself wondering about these things… how there seems to be something deeply simpatico between your work and Michael’s. And it moves me/strikes me as beautiful. Paula: Michael and I are big fans of Morandi! We live very separate creative lives – he doesn’t enter the poetry room in my head and I very rarely walk up the hill to his studio – neither of us talk about work in process with anyone. But I have written about Michael’s work (read a review of his last Auckland show here). We have his art on our walls and it’s uplifting, a vital form of travel. I give him my manuscripts to read just before they go to a publisher! We have two creative daughters and we have shared love of books, movies, music and art. To be in New York together absorbing art, music, literature and food was incredibly special – and Ireland, Barcelona and Lisbon on another occasion – and of course Aotearoa.
Claire: I realised when I reached the last page of your collection that I’d read the book as one long poem—a whole comprised of many parts, yes, but essentially ‘one poem’. I actively appreciated the fact that, aside from the titles at the start of each of the two sections, there are no titles to distract or interrupt the flow of the writing. This allows readers to fall into step with you and walk more closely alongside. On the last page, you seem to confirm this:
Most of this poem is in 1000 pieces in a box on the table
Do you see the collection as one poem? Paula: Yes I do! One poem like a quilt made of many notes, light and dark patches.
A poem might be an envelope to store things in for a later date: old train tickets postcards buttons a map of Rome a bookmark
Dinah Hawken
Dinah: A few weeks ago I found myself asking myself what I most hoped my poems would do now that I’m in the last part of my writing life. My main hope is that a few readers will feel ‘be-friended’ by a poem of mine, in the way I have felt be-friended by the poems of others. Then, in reading your conversation with Anna (Jackson), I came across – with surprise – your idea of ‘poetry as friendship’ and Anna’s of poetry as ‘a short cut to intimacy.’ Do you have more to say about this? Paula: Anna and I have been friends since my first collection Cookhouse was published in 1997, when I had just completed my Doctorate in Italian. Before our slow-paced email conversation, I had never thought of poetry as friendship, but the more I thought of it, the more it resonated as an idea and a practice. I realised my slow-tempo approach to poetry – to reading, writing, blogging and reviewing – is a way for forging connections, of holding things to the light to see from different angles, explore multiple points of view, experiences, hues and chords. Of listening. Our poetry communities in Aotearoa are so active and so strengthening. As this collage conversation underlines.
Dinah: And were you thinking of a particular kind of reader (say someone who had experienced serious illness) when you were writing The Venetian Blind Poems? Paula: No, I wasn’t thinking of a reader at all. Of getting published. I write first out of my love of writing, as a form of nourishment, as a source of joy. So I guess that is selfishly writing for one’s self. Inhabiting the moment. But now that The Venetian Blinds Poems is out in the world, to be able to give copies to doctors, nurses and other people going through difficult health experiences matters so very much. And to other poets! Climbing a mountain can be hard but it can also be a source of beauty, and I am nothing, this book is nothing, without my support crew, particularly Anna Jackson, Harriet Allan, Eileen Merriman, Michele Leggott and all the fabulous doctors and nurses on Motutapu and the Day Stay Ward. All the readers and poets who contribute to Poetry Shelf as both readers and writers. And my dear family. Thank you. My dedication catches how I felt when I had finished writing the book:
for everyone ascending the Mountains of Difficulty and their support crews
David Gregory, Based on a True Story, Sudden Valley Press, 2024, review Mikaela Nyman, The Anatomy of Sand, THWUP, 2025, review Cadence Chung, Mad Diva, Otago University Press, 2025, my review J. A. Vili, AUP New Poets 11: Xiaole Zhan, Margo Montes de Oca, J. A. Vili editor Anne Kennedy, Auckland University Press, 2025, review Rachel O’Neill, Symphony of Queer Errands, Tender Press, 2025, review Kate Camp, Makeshift Seasons, THWUP, 2025, review Xiaole Zhan, AUP New Poets 11: Xiaole Zhan, Margo Montes de Oca, J. A. Vili editor Anne Kennedy, Auckland University Press, 2025, review Claire Beynon, For when words fail us: a small book of changes,The Cuba Press, 2024, review Dinah Hawken, Faces and Flowers Poems to Patricia France, THWUP, 2024, review
The Cuba Press page Paula Green and Anna Jackson in conversation
I am up at Seneca’s tower, sliding in my shoes. The line between us is feeble kinetic sand black and shivering, holding on grain for grain
This is the landing place of exile middle of glass silver ocean. At night the sound of rocks clicking together metal, bats echoing off the terraced blue stone gardens curtains, old tablecloths, billowing white. Here is the sea wind the pulse dance of pink jellyfish green flash over the water line.
In the last days he sleeps in a different bed each night, unmade with no sheets I find him in the mornings before we go out in the garden
This, the place of arrival; playlist, untitled This track is the loop of rice fields
Gunshot lights rich with soy and red, umami flavour Theo is holding buckets of it by the door
Okay, okay yeah.
Nadezhda Macey
Nadezhda Macey (she/her) is a student and poet from Te Whanganui-a-tara. You can find more of her work in magazines starting with ‘s’: Starling, Symposia, and Salient.
Landfall 249: aotearoa new zealand arts and letters Autumn 2025, ed Lynley Edmeades Otago University Press
Sometimes I pick up a literary journal such as Landfall and dip and dive in over a few weeks, but today I have decided to read it cover to cover. Yes, today I have booked myself in for a Landfall road trip, sundried-tomato muffins in the oven, oatmeal coffees lined up. The journal has been in existence for almost 80 years and maintained its consistent dedication to writing in Aotearoa New Zealand. I know my road trip will include poetry, nonfiction, fiction, art and reviews.
First up the spellbinding artwork on the cover: Tia Ranginui’s ‘Cold Feet’ (pigment ink on Hahnemühle Photo Rag). It’s a taster for the sequence inside, a taster that moves both symbol and personal narrative into a zone of extraordinary wonder. I am hooked.
The issue includes the winner of the Landfall Young Writers’ Essay Competition 2025, selected by Landfall editor Lynley Edmeades. Her judge’s report signals the record number of entries this year and offers a fascinating snapshot of the engagements and anxieties of young writers. The winner, Ava Reid, resists attempting to tell us how the world functions, choosing instead to use the essay as a space “for trying to work things out, to notice and to try to make sense of the world”. I love the essay, and am already sidetracked into slow travel reading, musing on the attraction to flotsam and jettson, discarded objects, those inherited, excavated, misplaced or abandoned. Ava is musing on the back story to the ‘artefacts’ in her fields of vision. For some reason I find myself returning to a still life by Giorgio Morandi, picturing the daily clutter beyond the frame of his orderly compositions. It is writing at its most sublime.
What if I were to write a tiny poem, a sweetly arranged still life where I show you the green leaf on the wooden deck, the wet pattern of winter rain, and then abruptly pull you away into a clamorous narrative beyond, that may or may not be true.
Let’s turn the page and absorb the volume of a vegetable in Rhian Gallagher’s sublime poem, ‘Potato’, crossing a bridge between Dunedin and Donegal, a father memory, the layers of soil as pungent as the layers of narrative held beyond the frame of revealing. On the opposite page, Rhian’s ‘Early Autumn’, is equally rewarding. wondering how place is also a narrative harbour, past and present. The listening, the observing, the recalling. Rhian writes with both economy and richness, thought and feeling, an autumnal view a hub of beginnings and endings and beginnings. I am backtracking back to reread Ava’s essay.
A duet of poems and I have pulled into a roadside cafe to linger, knowing Landfall is not a single day excursion for me. I am stalling on Ariana Tikao’s haunting lament, ‘Te Tārere a Hikaiti’. Then Riemke Ensing’s moving eulogy for Vincent O’Sullivan, ‘Blue’. Her final lines glue me to my chair. You need to read the whole poem.
No getting away from it. I am slow traveller whether reading or writing or blogging. I need a week at least to read this treasure-trove issue. I need to be taking side roads and overbridges, relishing pools of thinking, skipping to familiar voices, sparked by those new to me. Jodie Dalgleish’s ‘Skin-Water-Skin: Repeat’ is like fertilised word buds bearing incredible aural rewards.
Landfall is shaping up to be a perfect road trip – a plethora of surprises, points of wonder, comfort. I am a big fan of Wes Lee’s poetry, so what a delight to read ‘December’. It’s physical, it’s rich in absence as much as presence, it’s symbolic and so utterly fluent.
And then I pull into another cafe diversion where laughter is on the menu. Alistair Du Chatenier’s ‘But Will It Fly’ is a tongue-in-cheek poem that takes us into Bill Manhire’s workshop where he is building a flying saucer (a surrogate poem?). Ah what you can create from shredded journals and anthologies.
Oh and now it’s Zoë Meager’s ‘it one was one of those nights’, a prolonged moment of reading that hooks you with its opening words ‘when the moon kept getting out of bed just to have a look around’ and then upturns you with its final revelation. Ooh.
I am having overnight stays in the work of the two artists in the issue. Eliza Glyn’s contemporary gouache paintings offer table settings: a gathering of objects in muted colours, verging on the kinetic, with a hint of Cubism, Frances Hodgkins, a daily diary, a closely packed huddle of predilections, angles askew. I love them.
The cover artist, Tia Ranginui’s work forms a sequence entitled ‘Ahi Teretere’, with the title referencing the flickering flame. Her work I read, “plays on the complicated and nuanced emotions provoked by returning home, particularly the artist returning to her papa kāinga on Te Awa Whanganui”. She navigates both ice and flame, as she seeks home with both embrace and defiance, a hunger for warmth, and with the help of her daughters who appear in the artworks. Extraordinary.
I toast this issue. It inspires me to keep reading writing blogging looking art. Planning road trips, within the pages of books and out there in the real world. Thank you.
Lynley Edmeades is the author of two poetry collections, As the Verb Tenses (Otago University Press, 2016) and Listening In (Otago University Press, 2019), and a poetry and art picture book for adults, Bordering on Miraculous (Massey University Press, 2022), in collaboration with Saskia Leek. She has an MA in creative writing from the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University of Belfast and holds a PhD in avant-garde poetics from the University of Otago. In 2018, she was the Ursula Bethell Writer in Residence at the University of Canterbury, and she currently teaches poetry and creative writing on the English programme at the University of Otago.
My Weekend Table: Celebrating food from Aotearoa and beyond Gretchen Lowe, Bateman, 2025
oven baked salmon
I like my fat cooking pot I like my fat wild heart
Paula Green from Cookhouse, Auckland University Press, 1997
Poetry Shelf is dedicated to celebrating poetry in Aotearoa – across regions, cultures, communities, age, form, subject matter. But every now and then I’m drawn to a local art exhibition or cookbook I have loved. Perhaps I might start adding the occasional album or three!
I often have an album or a poetry collection on replay, and that seems to be the same for cookbooks. Usually I dedicate a week to a particular cookbook, but My Weekend Table by Gretchen Lowe has been the go-to book on my kitchen table for a month. We share a love of similar ingredients and a desire to create simple meals that are absolutely tasty and nourishing. I was going to try a couple of recipes, photograph them, and then sing the book’s praises. But here it is . . . a fourth week and I am still cooking from it.
For me, poetry is all about connections, and cooking is just the same. There is aroha in the process, and there is aroha in the sharing. Over the past year I have been nourished by so many poetry collections published in Aotearoa, and here is a cookbook that strikes the right culinary notes for me. Connections on the plate, connections in your tastebuds, with your family around the table, with memory, with love.
Let me tempt you with a few things I’ve made: Hazelnut romesco sauce / pistachio and any greens pesto / buttery prawn, lemon and rosé pasta / blueberry and vanilla streusel muffins / cod, agria and tarragon croquettes / prawn, lemon and white bean hot pot / chicken and thyme meatballs (which I made into paprika and parmesan bake) / sausage, fennel and tomato pasta / garden greens, leek, ricotta galette with hazelnut crust / cheesy leek and spinach gratin / roast butternut and beetroot salad with orange whipped feta and hazelnuts / pear, raspberry and lemon syrup cake / sour cherry and dark chocolate oat cookies.
The book is gorgeously designed, with terrific photography. The recipes are easy to follow, easily adaptable to suit what is in your pantry, to whether you eat meat, and what is in your daily energy jar. And most importantly for me, starting points for your own tweaks and twists and creativity. I have made the lemon syrup coconut cake with various toppings. I have dolloped the pistachio garden-greens pesto on fish chunks in a Moroccan braise.
“I hope the pages in this book will inspire you to cook with passion, savour each bite and treasure moments spent around your weekend table.” GretchenLowe
Just when I needed it . . . this gorgeous book replenished my heart and my energy jar . . and has given my family much joy. Thank you.
Gretchen Lowe is a celebrated food writer, chef, food stylist and photographer whose work has graced New Zealand’s top TV and radio campaigns, cookbooks, food columns, and social media platforms. Renowned for her ability to craft mouthwatering dishes and bring them to life through stunning photography, Gretchen’s creations are as visually captivating as they are delicious. Her food creations span a range of New Zealand’s most iconic brands, including Fonterra, NZME, Pic’s Peanut Butter, Fisher & Paykel, and Annabel Langbein Media, alongside contributions to the NZ Herald and a popular segment with Jesse Mulligan on Radio New Zealand.
Instructions for Performing CPR on Those Already Dead
like kissing a dead fish. purple lips. drop your ego
offer already-breathed air, scavenged from the shore – coast. like an [endangered form of] mother – bird; offer pink mush of worms pre-chewed. press it between their stiff lips.
pour yourself uninvited into the smooth ocean expanse of their chest agitate it like molecules gently colliding and rapidly expanding to the beat of pamp – pamp – pamp – pamp stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive.
bread dough-pale and bloated rub rocks and half-arsed arguments to produce a burnt-hair-static ZAP! like that scene in the croods
they jolt upright –hair slightly fried– like a resuscitated seabed mining bill–
good. we’re back in business. now with the touch of un-/earth upon them– the fish-eye of tīpuna, or kaos-or-god still
horizon-wide and unblinking– ask them the important questions:
at which point in time would you place the divide between holocene and anthropocene ?
how would you rate my singularity as an environmental poet, against all others ?
in which form of future, or non-life-or-void, do we consider this an issue yet ?
Molly Laurence
Molly Laurence is a rangatahi poet from rural Canterbury, studying first year law and sociology at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University. In 2023 she was a National Schools Poetry Award finalist and in 2024 her debut poetry chapbook, Parallel Lines, was released with Ngā Pukapuka Pekapeka Press. She likes nature, advocacy, and funky earrings.
NZ Poetry Shelf 