Zephyr over water (the last move of zephyr outside a zoo) so light, unseen to move a liquid stroke over liquid beneath.
Skin could do this to skin and find fish within or heavier breathing aggrieved bears without ice holes to speak.
Stay, the moving fingers semaphore to bear or maggot, herring or swan pushing their snouts towards us. Touch is our deepest theology.
Elizabeth Smither
A young man at a reading asked if he could request this poem and I’ve always felt sorry I disappointed him, not being a memoriser of poems. It was published in A Question of Gravity (Arc Publications, 2004) and is about the French word, effleurage, for a light gliding stroking touch on the skin; it is useful for headaches before they get too severe and it is also used at the beginning or end of a massage session.
Zephyr means a soft gentle breeze, hardly perceptible (deliberately confused with zebra in the poem) and bears are too heavy. The effleurage touch is as light as you can make it but it is surprisingly comforting.
Elizabeth Smither’s four novellas, Angel Train, will be published in November by Quentin Wilson.
Playing Favourites is a new series on Poetry Shelf. Invited poets pick a favourite poem from their backlist and write a small (or longer) piece to accompany the poem. The written accompaniment may be anecdotal, consider the poem itself, the context in which it was written (whether the times or personal), shifting relationships with the writing, even the times in which the poet is reading it now, or whatever takes the poet’s fancy.
Object defined by activity (then), 2009 (Olafur Eliasson Your Curious Journey exhibition Auckland Art Gallery 2025)
The trees are a green presence writ large in our eyes & we talk about them how sad crappy food is served in this setting where wrap around glass lets us imagine a rustle of leaves against our skin these trees deserve better we agree & we agree the exhibition we’ve just seen has startled our senses blown us apart I fashion a casual voice to ask did you first see it as glass fragments suspended in the air light transformed diamonds or tears yes I saw glass you reply & add it was of course a small water fountain why do I suspect you read the exhibition notes before we went in & I did not standing in the dark room with you just a shadow to my right glass a scatter of tears lit from above enters my eyes my brain I want to know did you see this then erase it with knowledge you standing beside me thinking about the illusion while I fill slowly with glass glitter & light.
Sue Fitchett
Sue Fitchett is a conservationist, volunteer fire fighter & Waiheke Islander. Authored Palaver lava queen (AUP: 2004) & On the Wing (Steele Roberts: 2014). Co-author or editor of several poetry books & anthologies. Work has appeared in various publications in Aotearoa/New Zealand & overseas & exhibited in art shows. Louis Johnson Bursar 2001-2002. A new collection Between (Cuba Press) will be launched October 17th, 2025 on Waiheke Island.
Sick Power Trip, Erik Kennedy Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025
Mujaddara
I know. I know what’s happening elsewhere. While I mess around with my kitchenware.from
‘Autumn Couplets’
Every time I review a new poetry collection, it feels like I am holding poetry itself to the light, discovering things about how poems might work, what they might deliver, what they might spark in a reader.
Erik Kennedy’s sublime new collection, Sick Power Trip, got me musing on how poetry might stand as a prism. A poem might be held to get a view, then swivelled to get a different view, and then another, and then again. Each time I turn a page in Sick Power Trip, it’s a prismatic surprise. Unexpected. Utterly fertile. I love it.
Erik’s collection has stuck with me for a number of reasons. I have never read a collection quite like it and I love that. It feels like there are two significant settings. Firstly, an extraordinary band of wit and humour, with unexpected scenarios, shifting angles and points of view. Secondly, the necessary and imperative knottiness of humanity, from exposed self to a wider global reach. Not an either or view, but an incredible shifting light on how to live and how to survive. A poetic prism on the contemporary world that might be sharp, jagged, wise, personal.
Even the pronouns, particularly the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ are multi-tendrilled. The voice speaking is prismatic, drawing us into a stretching field of possibilities, vulnerabilities, recognitions. Nothing is set concrete here. I love this.
Let me shift the prism again for you, in a collection that reveals both the positives and negatives of situations, poetry that is mindful of an impulse to decipher, to muse upon sides, to navigate the good and the bad and the inbetween. There’s involvement and not involvement. Darkness and lightness splintering, merging, resisting clear borders.
And always, let me underline this, there is always the ripple of surprise, in turning each page, within the poem itself. I love this. For example, going shopping after illness:
I thought about the things that are abut me.
And I went to look for the aisle where they keep the fully realised lives, doubtless alongside the wax food wraps and the fancy vinegars.
from ‘Shop Floor Layout Algorithm’
Another stunning example, the notion (or experience) of consolation. Wit and wisdom again refracting. Self fragility and collective strength. The poet holds the prism poem along the degree to which one can understand what someone is going through. Here is the final stanza, it resonates so deeply:
That’s why I can picture it but can’t imagine what it feels like to be a phone, delicately poised on the arm of a chair, that gets one message too many and vibrates onto the floor.
from ‘Consolations’ 73
I want to share so many of the poems in the book with you, so you too can experience the glorious settings. I like how a word or idea might pose like a mise en abyme – inside this thought (word) another thought (word), inside this light refracting, another light that surprises startles delights. Take the poem offering an analogy on thinking, poised on the moment in a fable when the thorn pulled from a lion’s paw turns out to be a little lion, and the whole progression and stability and expectation of thought or story is in jeopardy.
And then, most importantly, how to deliver and absorb the poem prism in a time when the world is so damn awry. I keep swearing I won’t mention this in a review, but it’s the monster in my kitchen. As I read, I pick up on how doing is in partnership with thinking, how in one poem protest might be deflating tyres of SVUs and in another poem caring might be hugging trees like a 70s hippy. Again the vital oscillation. I am thinking this. Writing poems might be a form of protesting, sharp insistent necessary protesting (listen to the three poems below), but it is also a form of caring. I love this. I love this so very much.
On multiple occasions, a single poem stalls (shadows?) me with its prismatic effects. Surprise turns alongside shards of wisdom alongside physical detail alongside acute global and local concern, with every effect housed within writing that is sublimely fluent. Read ‘How a Year Ends’ for example. This poem. This magnificent poem. Try this stanza:
A year is a road that ends at the sea in an afterthought of a town, just a few weatherbeaten houses, some indifferent trees, a small picnic area, and a one-eyed cat wandering around proprietorially. You drive here because it is here.
from ‘How a Year Ends’
Maybe reading this collection is akin to a snow globe effect. Every time I hold a poem to the light and dark of my reading, and let the poetry shake and settle in my mind, I feel the sharp sweet delight of surprise and wonder. On the back of the book (always the last thing I read), it states “Kennedy reminds us that some things remain true and vital: self-care, empathy and solidarity”. And that is exactly why I love this collection so very much. Let us put these words in our pockets and carry them over close the coming months: self-care, empathy, solidarity.
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.
from ‘Self-Affirming Mantra’
a reading
Erik reads: ‘Bildungsroman’, ‘I Like Rich People, but I Couldn’t Eat a Whole One Myself’ and ‘The $6 Pepper Song’
Erik Kennedy is the author of two previous books of poems, both with Te Herenga Waka University Press: the Ockham-shortlisted There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime (2018) and Another Beautiful Day Indoors (2022). Originally from New Jersey, he lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch.
Cover design: Todd Atticus Te Herenga Waka University Press page
The first time I weighed myself I was a teenager. I was worried I was underweight for a blood drive. People told me I was pretty in high school. Thinking back all I hear is skinny. Being diagnosed with depression at 20, I was prescribed Lexapro. I gained close to 20kg. Being diagnosed with PCOS at 22, I was prescribed weight loss. I starved myself. It didn’t work. I went off Lexapro & starved myself again. This time the weight came off like limbs. See how I did that? A poem can survive things a body can’t. I hacked off my arms, my legs, my extra chin just to see the scale drop. This was always my destiny, being born in the year of the snake, to become all torso.
And I did, I did change my life.
I snapped the neck of gravity itself & called it
enjambment.
What do bodies become in a poem but symbolic against their will?
Look here — I set a cello on fire
& call it a woman.
Xiaole Zhan
Xiaole Zhan (詹小乐) is a Chinese-Aotearoa writer and composer based in Naarm. Their work features in Auckland University Press’s New Poets 11. They are a 2025 Creative New Zealand Fellowship recipient, a 2025 Red Room Poetry Varuna Fellowship recipient, the 2024 Kat Muscat Fellow, as well as the winner of the 2023 Kill Your Darlings Non-Fiction Prize. Their name in Chinese means ‘Little Happy’, but can also be read as ‘Little Music’.
Well I thought I was going on a short hīkoi but I reckon this is turning out to be more of a haerenga, eh? Auē, auē, auē.
from ‘Left on Read’
Nicola Andrew’s terrific debut poetry collection navigates her experience being here and there, traversing bridges between living in both Tāmaki Makaurau and San Francisco, holding close being Māori, as her hīkoi widens to haerenga.
Poetry is the resonating bridge, the anchor, a form of home.
How to describe reading this book, the way it pulls you in with its sweet and sour simmer of wit and pain and acumen. Listen to Karl the San Francisco god doing a mihi in te reo, with his mantra of return. Or enter the abrasive rub of the gap between the powdered milk of a Henderson childhood, the chalky vase collectibles on Herne Bay shelves and the poet’s drive to scroll for vintage porcelain. Ah, how that blue butter dish the poet bids for is a repository of stories. And here I am again in the sweet and sour and crackle of here and there.
I bid on a blue butter dish, and consider my whanaunga, carving corridors through the sky, the flight path perhaps resembling the gently curved neck of a white swan.
from ‘Te Toi Uku’
Words substituted from Zoom transcriptions of interviews with Māori peers discussing Tino Rangatiratanga steer the poem, ‘Colonisation Via Transcription Algorithm’. Here is the heart of the book: it’s whānau, it’s “the whakapapa held close”, the “inherent sovereignty”. And it’s these vital words: “In fact, to be born Māori is a gift”. On the other side of the page, there’s a translation that splinters whānau and taonga and kaupapa to produce a different portrait of the modern, think pop-up blockers, digital data and pissing on the past. My heart is breaking.
And then I love love love reading ‘I Didn’t Come Here to Make F.R.I.E.N.D.S’, a poem that blasts the white saturation of Friends with a nod to fierce poems by Hera Lindsay Bird and Tim Grgec. How timely (when is it not?) to be reading of the hierarchical boxes that divide the dreams of children according to the colour of their skin. The poet is confessing that as a young girl she wanted to be a paleontologist but that too was a white saturated (male?) domain. So her mother took her out into the West Auckland garden to dig in the clay.
As I leaned the spade against the weathering fence I think I mumbled something about the improbability Of a dig succeeding without major grant funding But truthfully, I had just come to recognise That everything we claim as a discovery Is someone’s dear, once beloved
This book. This poetry. It’s poetry that’s laying down roots, stretching roots, recognising roots. Poetry as a way of opening more windows onto the insistent and continual habits of exploitation, inequity, hierarchies, stealing what is not ours, disrespecting degrading disenfranchising. It’s there in the Māori name Jeff Bezos gave his yacht. It’s there in the marae set ablaze.
And then, in this heart reading this mind travel, I am holding lines close, especially at a time when global and local darkness is intense:
[ . . .] The karanga is coming from inside, the whare that is your body / of water / of knowledge / of work— The karanga is coming from inside the whare, and I reach outwards to pry the door of you open, and remake myself, at home.
from ‘the tsunami warning is cancelled’
I turn the book sideways to read the middle section, the small bridge between Section One ‘Overseas’ and Section Two, ‘Experience’. And it’s the border patrol, the departure lounge, the safety video between here and there, And that is what reading this extraordinary book can do: send us sideways, startle, soothe, delight and ignite us, keep us reading and writing and speaking out. So many lines I want to quote to you from poetry that sends tendrils into both experience and wisdom, that opens windows wider onto a world that is personal, global and at unforgivable risk.
Nicola writes with her poetic ink infused with the pulse of her own heart, her whakapapa, and of the wider world both past and present, and it is utterly compulsive reading. I am so grateful for its existence and for Āporo Press.
A reading
‘Te Toi Uku’
‘Departure Lounge’
‘Defence Mechanism’
Nicola Andrews (Ngāti Paoa, Pākehā) is a poet, librarian and educator who grew up in Waitākere and currently works as a librarian in San Francisco. Their poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets anthologies, and they are the grateful winner of the 2023 AAALS Indigenous Writers’ Prize in Poetry. Most of their poems were written in the company of a very spoilt Siamese cat, with Overseas Experience being their first full-length poetry collection.
At night we leave scraps out in the garden for the fox. I sit in the study with the lamp off for hours, forehead against cold windowglass, willing him to appear –
quiet wanderer, sharp-toothed ghost, red coat black in the flat of the moon and
nothing.
Only me, darkness sitting heavy on the roof of the house, and the lights of the town down the valley over the fields, reflecting off the sky.
Niamh Hollis-Locke
Niamh Hollis-Locke was born in England, but now lives in Pōneke. She holds a BA in English and History, a BA(Hons) in English Literature, and a Master’s degree in Creative Writing. Her work has been published widely in Aotearoa, as well as in the UK and Australia, and in 2023 she was shortlisted for the Ginkgo Prize Best Poem of the UK Landscape Award. She was the guest editor of Minarets 14 (Compound Press). In 2025, Niamh was awarded a mentorship by the New Zealand Society of Authors to work on a children’s fantasy novel.
There’s no doubt that we’re all a bit swampy. You can smell it in the bog, the wet weeds, the rotted wood, the mud, the fish and the frog eggs, all the muck that lies at the bottom of the pond. Kathryn calls herself a goose. She’s still in love with Birdie Bowers, the way he used to talk with Jesus on the deck of the ship as the world filled up with ice. And so we continue our Socratic dialogue all the way to Springs Junction. Survival, they say, depends on making a list, so here we go: a hand-knitted tea-cosy, a canary water-whistle, glue made from flour and hot water you have to keep stirring or it will go all lumpy, some cut-out paper dolls and a couple of girl-detectives.
Bernadette Hall
Notes: The poem moves from the present to the past. Kathryn Madill and I shared an Antarctic Fellowship in 2004. The list takes me back to the 1950’s when post-war my world felt safe.
As I move towards my 80th birthday, it’s surprising how things from the past come round again. Yesterday at The Piano, the Jubilate Singers performed a poem that was published in my first book, HEARTWOOD, published by Caxton Press in 1989. The composer, Richard Oswin, lives in Christchurch. His interpretation was delicious. I have done a lot of editing, blurbing and launching this year, all good fun. Pakiaka by Gabrielle Huria, published by Canterbury University Press, was a highlight. It’s an exquisite book. Here’s something of what I wrote for it. ‘How gracefully they walk together on these pages, te reo and English. Arm in arm. So proud, so strong. There’s an energy that blitzes. I’ve been waiting for words like these. They take me right down into the roots of this place where I live not far from the sacred mountain.’ These are my values. An edited version appears on the book’s cover.
It is plain to see we’re in a terrible situation Sufferin’ in the land Nearly half of the world on the verge of starvation Sufferin’ in the land And the children are crying for more education Sufferin’ in the land They’re singin’
It is 1969 and Jimmy Cliff is mourning warning protesting grieving because the world is damaging and damaging, he is singing of wealth and poverty, guns and bombs. Bob Dylan claimed Jimmy’s ‘Vietnam’ as the best protest song of all time. And here we are fifty-six years later and the suffering in the land is every which way we look. How to hold onto the light when the world helplessly watches Gaza bombed and starved to smithereens. How to hold onto the light when Ukraine is also suffering through the choices of a neighbouring war criminal. How to hold onto the light when our Government listens to the wealth of the few rather than the multiple needs of the many. How to hold onto the light when our health system is at breaking point, and patients, nurses and doctors suffer. How to hold onto the light when our children are forced into little learning boxes that have no vision of the whole child. How to hold onto the light when our first language, te reo Māori, is the target of Government abuse. How to hold onto the light when our native flora and fauna are under increased threat. How to hold onto the light when white skin (usually male) becomes (again) a ticket of privilege, how to hold onto the light when the dark patches are smashing on our windows and doors.
Today I’m looking at damp patches of Waitākere sky with Jimmy Cliff on full volume, the words of beloved sixties and seventies song writers streaming in my ears, think Bob and Joni and Neil. And yes, it is a wide wide world, it’s a rough-puff pastry road, and it’s still inhumane fighting, greed and abuse. Are we sitting in limbo? Waiting for dice to roll. Today even my morning is a dense dark heavy patch, but I’m thinking of Helen Clark and Anne Salmond, the frontline workers, journalists, songwriters, politicians, poets, caregivers, forest and ocean guardians, who are working against all odds across the globe to hold onto the light.
IN MEMORY OF JANET FRAME WHO WAS BORN 101 YEARS AGO ON THIS DAY.
The Trustees of the Janet Frame Literary Trust are delighted to announce that the 2025 recipient of the Janet Frame Prize is acclaimed Ōtepoti Dunedin novelist and poet Emma Neale, who will receive a gift of $10,000 from an endowment fund that Janet Frame established in 1999 to support and encourage her fellow New Zealand writers.
Emma Neale is the author of fourteen works of fiction and poetry, the most recent of which, ‘Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit’ (Otago University Press) won the Peter and Mary Biggs Prize for Poetry at the 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
Emma works as a freelance editor for publishers in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia. She said: “The award has come at a time just when my editing workload has meant I wondered if I’d ever manage to find headspace to explore a longer fiction project again. This generous gift will allow me to set time aside early next year to really read attentively and experiment more with approaches to that project.
“To hear that the trust has awarded me this prize has been nothing short of astonishing. Janet Frame’s work and example has helped to shape my private thoughts, my life, and my writing ever since I studied her fiction, autobiography and poetry in my twenties. Her poetic, complex, experimental work, with its richly figurative language that explores the interior life so deeply, still stands as a beacon for many creative artists.”
NZ Poetry Shelf 