Above me, the pink and grey clouds are unravelling It’s 8pm and still warm. As usual, I’m struggling to turn the hose tap off after watering the garden. They call this time high summer, I believe, and it is— Our five tomato plants are fruiting, There are so many beans and sugar snap peas we can’t eat them all, The corn isn’t ready yet, but it will be soon, the ears are growing, the silks turning brown, and a number of huge marrows, that grew during our holiday, lie forgotten and obscured by leaves. The branches of the peach tree bow to the ground, heavy with fruit. I point this out to my son, and he says, Are they bowing to us, Mum And I say, Why yes. Yes they are. And we bow back.
Kiri Piahana-Wong
Kiri Piahana-Wong is a poet, editor and the publisher at Anahera Press. She is the author of two poetry collections, Night Swimming (2013) and Tidelines (2024), and the co-editor of Te Awa o Kupu (Penguin NZ), an anthology of contemporary Māori literature, as well as Short! Poto! The big book of small stories (forthcoming from MUP in June 2025). She lives in Whanganui.
Koe: An Aotearoa ecopoetry anthology edited by Janet Newman and Robert Sullivan Otago University Press, 2024
Ecopoetry. I have been musing on the slipperiness of poetry labels and categories. Poetry has always re-presented and celebrated nature, drawn upon its beauty and its wild-er-ness, used it as a source of comfort, healing, symbolism, bridges into states of mind, a way of mapping the coordinates of home. But what shifts when ecosystems are under increasing and devastating threat? How do we write nature? Every morning I wake up to the radio and social media scrolling the evil choices of [some] world leaders and it forms a heavy overcoat of darkness. What we are doing to this planet is unforgivable, to nature, to people, to creativity, to the stories we tell, the justice we build, the lives we save. Heartbreaking.
So what good is poetry?
Janet Newman asks at the beginning of her unmissable introduction to Koe: An Aotearoa ecopoetry anthology: “Can poetry save the earth?”. A question that reverberates across the globe as poets struggle to write in a climate of catastrophe. Not just the environment. Not just nature. I keep returning to the notion that poetry is an incredible aid and homage to life. To write a nature poem might be to write beauty and wilderness but to write an ecopoem might be to widen that view. I live near Te Henga Bethells Beach, a place dune-ravaged in the Gabrielle cyclone and storm, where dottorel are under continued threat, where the wetlands are fragile and contested. I wrote a poem to go on the visitor booth at the start of the beach. Is it a nature poem? Is it an ecopoem? Who knows? The poem is an entry point into a place we locals hold in our hearts. A place we are working hard to protect. I have carried the beach image though the wounding shards and cracks of the past three years, through the pandemic, as balm for my stuttering health coupled with our stuttering planet.
So what good is poetry?
Koe: An Aotearoa ecopoetry anthology was a timely arrival late 2024. It is an anthology lovingly edited and introduced by Janet Newman and Robert Sullivan and, with equal love and care, designed and produced by Otago University Press. Janet and Robert place ecopoetry within the context of Aotearoa, where the first voices are the tangata whenua. Where Māori poets were singing the land’s beauty and bounty and narratives as a taonga not to be taken for granted. As a taonga to be conserved and nourished.
‘Koe’ is a bird cry and also a scream, as Robert suggests via H. W. Williams’s Dictionary of the Māori Language. Robert writes: ‘a disturbing scream from the forest, or the shore, or the marshes, or the bushlined gullies and gorges, or its absence from the paddocks, the eroded dead-timber hillsides and mountains, the oxidation of ponds and outfalls.’
Poetry as scream.
The anthology is divided into three parts: ‘The early years’, ‘The middle years’, ‘Twenty-first-century ecopoetry’. I love this. I love being transported across the different attachments to nature, to the environment, to ways of singing contemplating challenging screaming. And yes this Aotearoa, this ground we stand on, in which we plant multiple roots, this ground is colonised contested stolen. Janet and Robert have gathered an anthology of voices across time culture location preoccupations experience to unsettle and resettle the view. The views. It is personal and political.
Poetry connecting me to you to planet to you to me.
Poetry as challenge.
Poetry as beauty and kindness.
Poetry as hope.
To celebrate the anthology, five poets read a poem and Janet answers five questions.
The readings
Ash Davida Jane
photo credit: Ebony Lamb
‘2050’
David Eggleton
‘A Report on the Ocean’
Rebecca Hawkes
‘The Land Without Teeth’
Erik Kennedy
‘Phosphate from Western Sahara’
Kiri Piahana-Wong
‘Piha’
5Questions for Janet Newman
Editing a poetry anthology can offer multiple joys as you scavenge your shelves, libraries and the archives for poems. What surprised or delighted or challenged you?
I was surprised that Aotearoa New Zealand did not have an ecopoetry anthology. Much of this country’s poetry and indeed literature is focused on the landscape and relationships between people, land and sea, so it seemed we should have been one of the first countries to explore our ecopoetical heritages. Once I started delving into New Zealand’s ecopoetry I was surprised to discover that even in colonial times when European settlers were felling the forests, their poets were portraying senses of loss. Not only loss of the forests but of the solace they provided, and also loss of the living things forests supported: vines, ferns and bird life, so an awareness of ecological interconnection. Once I started looking outside of the English poetry canon it was no surprise to find that traditional Māori poetry showed emotional, cultural and physiological attachment between people and nature. What was surprising, however, was the total absence of poetry stemming from the Māori tradition in the English poetry canon until as recently as the second half of the twentieth century. It also struck me that the concept of culture as a part of nature and vis versa, portrayed at first in English in poems by Hone Tuwhare, were entirely alien to an English speaking audience and treated as something other by critics at the time. It shows how much has changed in this country if we look, for example, at the granting this century of legal personhood to the Whanganui River, Te Urewera and Mount Taranaki.
The biggest surprise of all, though, was how critics primarly in northern hemisphere countries appeared to be completely unaware of such concepts in which human and nonhuman worlds are entwined and defined ecopoetry in terms of duality between nature and culture. It was satisfying to discover that this country’s ecopoetry is not only a unique, local variant but that it expands current Eurocentric characterisations of the field. I feel proud to belong to a country with rich poetic heritages that recognise and value the importance of different relationships between people and nature. Nevertheless, Aotearoa New Zealand’s ecopoetry is saturated with loss. Loss of ecologies and loss of a sense of belonging. So it was heart-rending to read Romantic ecopoems revelling in solace in a nature constructed by colonisation which were written at the same time as marginalised ecopoets portrayed a sense of alienation through the loss of land and indigenous species.
I love how the anthology is divided into three sections: ‘The Early Years’, ‘The Middle Years’ and ‘Now’. What struck you about how poetic attachments to the land, shores, forests, skies have travelled over time? What connections and disconnections, challenges and homages?
Over time, the Māori and English poetry traditions which are the heritages of contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand ecopoetry are drawing closer together. In earlier years, there was wide separation. The nineteenth-century genesis of New Zealand ecopoetry in English is marked by fatalism towards a dying nature, such as William Pember Reeves’ “The Passing of the Forest” (1898). Conversely, just nine years earlier, Pāora Te Pōtangaroa reissued Te Kooti Te Arikirangi Te Tūruki’s moteatea, “Kaore Hoki Taku Manukanuka,” which called on nature, specifically the behaviour of the mātuhi (bush wren), as a model for iwi to unite against British takeover of Māori land, hailing nature’s endurance during times of struggle. In the twentieth century, Pākeha poets wrestled with a sense of belonging in an alien land and found solace in the nature constructed by colonisation while poets from the Māori tradition mourned the loss of indigenous ecologies and Indigenous culture. This century, we see a coming together of the two traditions. Airini Beautrais’s “Trout / Oncorhynchus mykiss / Salmo trutta” recognises the detrimental effect of introduced trout on indigenous fish species. Dinah Hawken’s “Losing Everything” states ‘I am the beneficiary of injustice’ as it acknowledges that the poet’s forbears bought land illegally confiscated from Taranaki Māori. Te Kahu Rolleston’s “The Rena” relates the sinking of the container ship off the coast of Tauranga in terms of capitalist pollution of not only the sea––‘the realm of Tangaroa’––but also of kaitiakitanga and tikanga. Hinemoana Baker’s “Huia, 1950s” wrestles with the knowledge that the call of the extinct huia is preserved in a sound recording of a huia trapper mimicking the song. ‘I want to tug / something out of him’ she writes. These poems show the complexities of nature and the human relationship with it in a settler colonial country.
Is there a poem or two that particularly resonate with you?
A poem from The Early Years section that particularly resonates with me is Alan Mulgan’s “Dead Timber.” By finding that the only creative act of settler society is nature’s destruction, it connects ecological ruin with the shaping of a national character devoid of artistic or literary culture. The national character Mulgan is referring to is that of European settlers such as my forebears. Another poem that resonates shows a way of perceiving the natural world beyond my personal experience. Co-editor Robert Sullivan’s “Waka 16 Kua wheturangitia koe” in Star Waka (1999), in the list of Further Reading, mourns the diminishment of star light due to the artificial nightlights of modernity. By portraying stars as natural elements and guiding lights of ancestors, their diminishment is both a physical encroachment and a spiritual and communal violation.
In these earth-smashing times, I find myself drawn to writing the Te Henga beach beauty as much as writing poetry as both challenge and marker of human and earth catastrophe. How does this tension between beauty/solace and ruination/despair affect you as a poet?
Reading ecopoems has given me an understanding of the many different ways in which nature and the human relationship with it is conceived. As a farmer, I am working in a constructed nature and yet it contains animals and much beauty which together lend me a sense of wellbeing. However, farmland is a source of great loss and grief to tangata whenua, as Jacq Carter reminds in “Our Tūpuna Remain.” I am aware that the ecologies of the local places where I love to swim and enjoy ‘nature’–– Mānawatu River, Ōhau River and Waitārere Beach––are largely constructed by colonialism. “Nothing that meets the eye on a New Zealand coastal plain that has been the subject of a swamp drainage scheme is yet a century old,” writes Geofff Park in Theatre Country, Essays on landscape and whenua (2006). My poem “Koputaroa, near the Manawatū River” in Unseasoned Campaigner (2021) explores how “the recognisable combination of trees, pasture and human structures makes it seem perhaps as if they are all that was ever here.” Like you, Paula, I am caught between appreciating beauty and acknowledging loss.
It is on my mind every day. How to navigate this toxic world? What gives you joy? Hope?
It is in poetry that I find joy and hope. As Gail Ingram writes, poetry “moves us … by bearing witness to pain, joy, all that our community is … it gets us back to living again.” Finding in poetry the expression of feelings of fear and optimism similar to my own gives me a sense of community:
song coming. Song coming, beyond any we’ve ever before lifted in song.
Carolyn McCurdie, from ‘Ends’
The readers
Ash Davida Jane is a poet, editor and reviewer from Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Their second book How to Live With Mammals (Te Herenga Waka University Press) won second prize in the 2021 Laurel Prize. They are a publisher at Tender Press and reviews co-editor at takahē.
David Eggleton lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin and was the Aotearoa New Zealand Poet Laureate between August 2019 and August 2022. He is a former Editor of Landfall and Landfall Review Online as well as the Phantom Billstickers Cafe Reader. His The Wilder Years: Selected Poems, was published by Otago University Press in 2021 and his most recent collection Respirator: A Laureate Collection 2019 -2022 was published by Otago University Press in March 2023. He is a co-editor of Katūīvei: Contemporary Pasifika Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand, published by Massey University Press in 2024.
Kiri Piahana-Wong is a poet, editor and the publisher at Anahera Press. She is the author of two poetry collections, Night Swimming (2013) and Tidelines (2024), and the co-editor of Te Awa o Kupu (Penguin NZ), an anthology of contemporary Māori literature, as well as Short! Poto! The big book of small stories (forthcoming from MUP in June 2025). She lives in Whanganui.
Rebecca Hawkes is a queer painter-poet from a farm near Methven. Her first book is MEAT LOVERS (Auckland University Press). She shepherds the warm-blooded journal Sweet Mammalian and co-edited the anthology No Other Place to Stand. Rebecca is currently topsy-turvy between hemispheres studying an MFA in yearning (and, to a lesser extent, poetry) at the University of Michigan.
The editors
Janet Newman lives at Koputaroa in Horowhenua. She has a PhD from Massey University for her thesis ‘Imagining Ecologies: traditions of ecopoetry in Aotearoa New Zealand’ (2019). Her essays about the sonnets of Michele Leggott and the Romantic ecopoetry of Dinah Hawken won the Journal of New Zealand Literature Prize for New Zealand Literary Studies in 2014 and 2016. She won the 2015 New Zealand Poetry Society International Competition, the 2017 Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems and was a runner-up in the 2019 Kathleen Grattan Awards. Her first collection of poems, Unseasoned Campaigner (OUP, 2021), won the 2022 New Zealand Society of Authors Heritage Book Award for Poetry.
Robert Sullivan (Ngāpuhi, Kāi Tahu) is the author of 10 books of poetry, a graphic novel and an award-winning book of Māori legends for children. His most recent poetry collections include Tūnui | Comet (AUP, 2022) and Hopurangi—Songcatcher: Poems from the Maramataka (AUP, 2024). Robert is the co-editor of anthologies of Polynesian poetry in English, Whetu Moana (AUP, 2002) and Mauri Ola (AUP, 2010), alongside Albert Wendt and Reina Whaitiri. He’s also the co-editor of an anthology of Māori poetry, Puna Wai Kōrero (AUP, 2014), with Reina Whaitiri. Among many awards, he received the 2022 Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for a distinguished contribution to New Zealand poetry. He is associate professor of creative writing at Massey University and has taught previously at Manukau Institute of Technology and the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.
College of Education’s Children’s Writer in Residence
New Zealand’s unique and treasured Children’s Writer in Residence is not being offered for 2026, due to loss of external funding.
This Dunedin residency has been running for 32 years, and has supported numerous, gifted writers in producing quality New Zealand children’s literature. It is the only residency of its kind in New Zealand.
This residency facilitates the creation of quality children’s literature that reflects the lives and interests of children in Aotearoa. Great books spark children’s imaginations, give them a love of reading, and support them to engage with, and learn about, the world.
We are seeking support to get this residency back on track.
If you value quality children’s literature and the work of New Zealand children’s authors, please support this project. Help us get this unique and treasured residency back in place in 2027 and beyond.
They return to earth, some nine months later. Stretchers await, teams at the ready for re-orientation – beware space motion sickness. Their sensory vestibular systems are out of balance, their bodies fragile from floating.
On the ground, they’ve missed too much of everything: deportations and wars, purges and violations of civil rights, a nation’s constitution – our sensory systems are off-kilter, too our nerves grand-scale wreckage. Do they know the world down here – how much has changed since they sped into space. Will they recognise it again?
They planted seeds, nurtured life spacewalked their way into record books from their tidy small ship, then plunged through the atmosphere, setting down in the Atlantic after slowing to a mere 16 miles per hour. An exercise in patience, their nine months of waiting.
Here, we are reeling, we are spinning. We suffer motion sickness and wonder when we will find a new equilibrium, who carries a seed of hope, where in this world there is a state of better being. They say they are ready to ‘tackle the earth’s gravity’ but have they really reckoned with the gravity of here, of now?
Michelle Elvy 18 March 2025, on the return of NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore
Friday 22 August 2025 is set to be a day where words take flight and poetry pulses through the streets, libraries, parks, bookshops, and unexpected corners of Aotearoa. Now in its 28th year, Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day invites communities nationwide to create, share, and celebrate the power of poetry. Registrations and seed funding applications are now officially open.
Event organisers throughout the motu are invited to begin imagining creative ways to bring people together through poetry events, from open mic nights and school initiatives to public displays, live performances, or small, contemplative gatherings. “We’re inviting you to craft something memorable for your community this August. Whether it’s quietly powerful or joyfully bold, traditional or completely unexpected, we’re excited to see what you create” says National Coordinator Gill Hughes.
“Poetry is the heartbeat of our language, a constant, accessible rhythm that belongs to everyone,” says Robin McDonnell, CEO of Phantom Billstickers. “We are dedicated to amplifying that rhythm, through our ongoing series of poems on posters and our support of National Poetry Day – ensuring it pulses throughout our communities. We believe in its power to resonate in the open, to bridge gaps between individuals, and to breathe unexpected beauty into the everyday moments we often overlook.”
With over 100 events expected to take place nationwide, Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day 2025 promises another extraordinary showcase of creativity, diversity, and community spirit.
Organisers wishing to apply for seed funding are encouraged to do so early, with applications closing at 5pm on Tuesday 3 June 2025. All the resources needed to plan and promote an event – including registration forms, funding guidelines, and helpful templates – are available now on the National Poetry Day website.
The official 2025 event calendar will be published on Thursday 31 July, building excitement for a nationwide celebration where poetry takes centre stage.
Makeshift Seasons, by Kate Camp Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025
Kate Camp’s new collection, Makeshift Seasons, opens with ‘Kryptonite’, a surprising, wonderful poem that features Superman and unfolds into notions of existence. The speaker is speaking and I am listening. I am on the edge of my chair listening as the speaker’s words touch upon what might deliver energy, strength, hope, power, visibility. The poem feels open and vulnerable and necessary. Face to face with danger damage devastation. I read:
I am gathering fragments of my humanity like dull crystals and throwing them into the sea
from ‘Kryptonite’
Ah. The ache. The shuffle between light and dark, gleam and memory-thud. At one point, the speaker borrows lines from Lawrence Ferlinghetti to suggest they ‘revolve like a beacon / in the midst of dangers // as a lighthouse moves its megaphone / over the sea‘. Such a mesmerising image I carry as I read. Almost as if this collection becomes lighthouse poetry, where writing is a navigation aid for both reader and writer, where reading and writing carry the potential of both beauty and storm.
I am drawn into Kate’s rhythm of writing, the surprising arrival of words, where you do a sweet word pivot: ‘In the Stonehenge of the house’ and ‘your hand Napoleoned in your shirt’ (from ‘Equinox’). I am drawn into the rhythm of the subject matter, the recurring locations and motifs, the insistent beat of the sea, the harbour, especially Island Bay. Or the uplift from terra firma to astral plains: the moon, cloud, sun, comets, light.
Poetry has the ability to make a moment in time exquisitely reachable, a place that is threaded with past and present, a song an attitude a joy. Kate does exactly this. I am caught up, stalled let’s say, in the moment of the poem. Take ‘Autumn’, where I am hitching a ride to the seaweedy coast, and I am in that Berlin bar singing ‘You’ve got a friend’. It’s ragged past rubbing against ragged present:
I come home past Chappies Dairy, it’s been closed a while I think, the name painted over in a mid-blue, still legible. All the dairies are closing now we don’t need the things anymore we went there for. Cigarettes and newspapers, I used to carry with me everywhere a source of fire now it’s just my phone, it’s startling torchlight, smooth warmth of its glass and all its memories, it sets them sometimes to music, like I do.
When the world outside is in such cruel upheaval, when ‘kryptonite’ might stand in for a thousand threats and vulnerabilities, when life feels so brittle, to fall into the body of the poem—or let’s say the poem of the body because beneath and above the surface is stuttering health—is nourishing. So open. Reverberating. Resonant. This:
The failings of the body can be a form of company a trapped nerve ringing in the night like music.
from ‘In the bathroom rubbish bin’
I return to my madcap notion that this is lighthouse poetry, a beacon in the pitching world of pain and dark, for this is what words can do, what we can do as we make our daily choices, as we get through the brittle and the shards of humanity. We can be that light. I want to quote you a thousand stanzas. I want to listen again to Kate read, and then pick up the book and find my way through the ‘makeshift seasons’. Thank you.
A reading
Photo credit: Ebony Lamb
Kate reads ‘Towards a working definition of global warming’, ‘Island Bay’ and ‘Extra-large geometry’
Kate Camp is the author of eight collections of poems, including The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls (winner of the 2011 NZ Post Book Award for Poetry) and How to Be Happy Though Human: New and Selected Poems (2020), and a collection of essays, You Probably Think This Song Is About You (2022). Her most recent book is Makeshift Seasons (2025), a new collection of poetry. Kate was born in 1972 and lives in Wellington.
NZ Poetry Shelf 