Palestine poems

1: Backfire

This morning as I walk our dog Maxi
through streets silenced not by apocalypse
but by the indulgent early hour of
the summer holiday, a car backfires
making her cower, shake, and press against
my sympathetic leg, so that out of
my early Al Jazeera news items
(forty-six thousand Palestinians
killed in Gaza since that October 7, 2023)
I hear myself utter
the words I heard often on any day
back in 1969, in Amman,
Jordan, a greeting but also a kind
wish for peace, As-salamu alaykum,
and as if cued in by that memory,
Mahmoud Darwish’s Diary of a Palestinian Wound,
his Rubaiyat for Fadwa Tuqan, poet
sister of my friend Fawwaz who didn’t
bother to restrain his tears when reading
the Arabic but quenched while translating
its many verses, starting with this one
that I didn’t know I recalled until
keeping sympathetic pace with Maxi:

We’re free not to remember because Carmel’s within us
& on our eyelashes grows the grass of the Province of Galilee.
Don’t say: I wish we were running to it like the river/
Don’t say this.
We exist in the flesh of our country & it in us.

2: Baqa’a

Absurd and self-indulgent to think of
the fetch and carry of Max’s frisbee
in the tranquil early morning parkland
just down the road from our cosy place in
Three Lamps as trigger to the memory
of dead and wounded being transported to
overcrowded hospitals in Amman
from the refugee camps on the outskirts
of the city where I worked years ago …
but away it flies, the trajectory,
landing with uncertain precision whence
its consequence must be borne back to mark
memories of repeat detonations,
the intermittent yowling rise and fall
of air-raid sirens and then silence that
was soon broken by barking dogs and the
anguished blare of many car-horns racing
from Baqa’a camp fifty-six years ago
when I used to catch a bus out to the
UN relief and works agency for
Palestinian refugees camp school
where I and twenty destitute students
tried to find the place where whatever we
had in common could accommodate their
desperation and my comfortable
return to a city home at day’s end.

Ian Wedde

Ian Wedde was born in Blenheim, New Zealand, in 1946. He’s lived and worked in various parts of the world including the Middle East in Jordan in 1968-69 where he collaborated with Fawwaz Tuqan, brother of the Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan, on a book of selected poems by Mahmoud Darwish, published by Carcanet Press, England, in January 1973. He’s published seven works of fiction, thirteen of poetry, and a collection of essays, Making Ends Meet, in 2005. In the 1980s he coedited The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse and The Penguin Book of New Zealand Poetry. He lives in Auckland with his wife the screen-writer and producer Donna Malane.

The two poems published here are from a new book in preparation, Being Here – Selected Poems 2007 – 2025.

To celebrate the Ockham NZ Book Award Poetry Shortlist I invited the four poets to answer a handful of questions, and to select a favourite poem from their book and one by another NZ poet.

In the Half Light of a Dying Day, C. K. Stead
Auckland University Press, 2025

C. K. Stead has been writing versions of Catullus poems since 1979, also drawing upon Clodia, the woman believed to be the origin of Catullus’s Lesbia. Karl introduces a new figure, Kezia, borrowing the name from a child in Katherine Mansfield’s Burnell stories, a child believed to based on herself. Karl suggests his new collection, In the Half Light of a Dying Day, might be ‘read as a work of fiction’.

For me, this deeply affecting book, offers an album of bridges. I traverse the bridge from Caesar and his men away at war to ‘the lantern light / around the kitchen table / the women talking’. I cross the bridge between the farm up North with the calling morepork and another bloody battle. I am stalling on the bridge between Kevin and Karl sharing a wine or a poem and Catullus and Sappho penning verse. There is the bridge between our vulnerable world teetering on ruin and a world of hope and resourcefulness. I walk the bridge between the deeply personal and the imagined/documented past. More than anything, there is the bridge between love and grief, illness and death.

The poet is speaking in the ear of Catullus, the ear of Kezia, in the ear of the reader. He is speaking with heart on sleeve, sublime music rippling along the line, music that enhances the slow-paced revelations, the acute observations, poignant hypotheses, the building talk. In this lyrical unfolding, in this Calvinoesque city of bridges, poetry becomes a form of attentiveness, for both reader and writer.

There are many ways to travel through this extraordinary collection. To savour the contemporary references and locations along with those from the past. To see this as a personal navigation of loss, grief, love. To move from beloved to the wider reach of humanity. This is story. This fiction. This poetry. This is a book of love that I will carry with me for a long time.

Swimming at Menton

Were there any highlights, epiphanies, discoveries, challenges as you wrote this collection?

They began just as a return to my old ‘poems in the manner of Catullus’ device, a way of using one’s own experience and half concealing its origin behind the persona of the Roman poet, so the reader could not be sure whether or not it was autobiography. But it was at just this time that my wife of 68 years, Kay, was diagnosed with cancer. The illness and her death occurred over several months so Catullus needed another lover than the ‘Clodia’ of my earlier poems.  I gave her the name Kezia, and the poems became an account of her illness and death and of Catullus coping with the loss, the bereavement, the memories of their long past together, and the new reality of life alone. As in all my Catullus poems he never speaks in the first person – he is spoken to, or about, so these are not poems in the confessional manner, they keep a certain cool, a certain distance, the emotional demands on the reader are not heavy, which is why I think they work, if they do.

The poems seemed to write themselves, fluently.  They were all written in one year, and then they stopped.  I wrote the last one, and knew it was the end of the book and almost certainly the last poem I will ever write.

Is there a particular poem in the collection you have soft spot for?

Possibly ‘Now more than ever seems it rich…’ which might be the longest single-sentence poem in New Zealand poetry. But I’m especially fond of ‘First light’, a swimming poem involving the yellow buoy at Kohi and the time when both Kezia and Catullus would swim all the way out to it in the early light.

‘Now more than ever seems it rich …’

Last night Kezia
Catullus called up
his ever-ready Keats
nightingale ode
and remembered how
in the same bed
when you were dying
you’d asked for the same poem
and he’d had to stop
at the sixth stanza
because you were weeping
at those lines that displayed
so poignantly
how the Muse could call forth
out of the nowhere
of a poet’s inner self
words so precisely placed
on the cliff-edge between
beauty and death
that poet and reader alike
must pause and weep.

First Light

Kezia’s funeral
Catullus
was yours too
no need for another.
Fine weather forecast
and an early tide
you are up at first light
to swim at Kohi
remembering days
when Kezia swam with you there
to the yellow buoy
in a sea that looked like glass
and felt like silk
and the vast beautiful harbour
under the enigma
of Rangitoto
felt like forever.

What matters more than ever when you are writing a poem? Or to rephrase, what do you want your poetry to do?

I can only reply to this by quoting what I wrote in the Foreword to my Collected Poems 1951-2006: ‘I think of writing a poem as putting oneself in the moment at the moment – an action more comprehensive, intuitive and mysterious than mere thinking, governed partly by history (the poet works in a tradition), but equally by individual temperament and voice, and by a feeling for what is harmonious, fresh, surprising and even, occasionally, wise.’

I would find this impossible to narrow to one example, but is there a poem by a poet in Aotearoa that has stuck with you?

There are so many of course but a good example would be Curnow’s ‘You will know when you get there’ which I quote in my final poem in the collection.

You Will Know When You Get There

Nobody comes up from the sea as late as this
in the day and the season, and nobody else goes down

the last steep kilometre, wet-metalled where
a shower passed shredding the light which keeps

pouring out of its tanks in the sky, through summits,
trees, vapours thickening and thinning. Too

credibly by half celestial, the dammed
reservoir up there keeps emptying while the light lasts

over the sea, where it ‘gathers the gold against
it’. The light is bits of crushed rock randomly

glinting underfoot, wetted by the short
shower, and down you go and so in its way does

the sun which gets there first. Boys, two of them,
turn campfirelit faces, a hesitancy to speak

is a hesitancy of the earth rolling back and away
behind this man going down to the sea with a bag

to pick mussels, having an arrangement with the tide,
the ocean to be shallowed three point seven metres,

one hour’s light to be left and there’s the excrescent
moon sponging off the last of it. A door

slams, a heavy wave, a door, the sea-floor shudders.
Down you go alone, so late, into the surge-black fissure.

Allen Curnow
From Collected Poems by Allen Curnow edited by Elizabeth Caffin and Terry Sturm, Auckland University Press 2017 permission courtesy of the copyright owner Tim Curnow, Sydney.

Are there particular poets that have sustained you, as you navigate poetry as both reader and writer?

Too many.  I have always been a compulsive reader of poems and poetic drama, over the whole range, though in olde age I’m not good at ‘keeping up’ with what’s going on in the present.

We are living in hazardous and ruinous times. Can you name three things that give you joy and hope?

I could just reply ‘poetry’ – three times.  But a better answer might be to refer to the poem ‘World’s End’ (p.22) where Catullus’s affirmative temperament acknowledges the terrible things ahead for the human race but seems to see better times beyond them, but then has to acknowledge ultimate extinction.

C. K. Stead is an award-winning novelist, literary critic, poet, essayist and emeritus professor of English at the University of Auckland. He was the New Zealand Poet Laureate from 2015–2017, has won the Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction and is a Member of the Order of New Zealand.

Auckland University Press page

Event 32

Poetry and Music

Last held in 2023 in front of a packed-out and spellbound room, Poetry and Music makes its return to the Festival, once again pairing the four finalists in the poetry category of this year’s Ockham New Zealand Book Awards with the brilliant musicians of the Ockham Collective (a charitable trust devoted to fostering creativity and connection in Tāmaki Makaurau).

The poets read and the musicians interpret, making for a mesmerising performance.

Fri, 16 May 2025

• 2:30pm – 3:30pm
• Herald Theatre, Aotea Centre
• Earlybird $24 Standard $29.50 Patrons $19.50 Students $13

Slender Volumes, Richard von Sturmer, Spoor Books, 2024

To celebrate the four collections on the Ockham NZ Book Award Poetry Short list I invited the poets to answer a handful of questions, and to select a favourite poem from the book and by another NZ poet.

Reading this collection is to savour the gift of slowness, a slowing down to absorb the world, the things we hear see smell feel, back in the past, here in the present. And yes, it becomes a form of slow travel, reading these 300 poems, strengthening feet on the ground, hearts and minds set to uplift. Yes. Reading this exquisitely crafted collection is to travel with roadmap still in the pocket, to fall upon egg-whisk clouds in the sky hot water bottle Buddha Plutarch Dante a washing machine coffee with a drop of milk. It is to travel to Bologna Sydney New York Venice Poor Knights Islands Honolulu Auckland Mount Wutai Yumen Gate.

For me it is neither source nor destination but the travel itself. I am falling into the utter joy of writing and reading as travel. As discovery surprise wonder. A world in ruins and a world in repair. Richard is translating the koan within his own time and place, his own narrative, and I find myself doing this I read.

And that is what poetry can do. This book. These poetic vibrations, these wisdoms. Openings. Autobiography. Meditations. Poetry as an intimately and intricately woven cloth of both experience and imagining. Personal. Resonant. Anchored and anchoring.

Were there any highlights, epiphanies, discoveries, challenges as you wrote this collection?

Just to let everything drop (thoughts, expectations) and to see what appears.

Is there a particular poem in the collection you have soft spot for?

As there are 300 poems it changes. At the moment:

Linji Sees Huangbo Reading a Sūtra

Linji believed that a true Zen master should ignore the written word. But didn’t he know that The Lankavatara Sūtra states: “Things are not as they seem, nor are they otherwise”? The clouds read the wind, and their shadows read the fields. The large clock in the hall of the railway station reads the moving escalators. Waves scroll across the surface of the sea. And in their caves and crevices crabs turn over pages of seaweed, deciphering each grain of sand.

What matters when you are writing a poem? Or to rephrase, what do you want your poetry to do?

To open a door.

I would find this impossible to narrow to one example, but is there a poem by a poet in Aotearoa that has stuck with you?

The Darkness

My father had a plan to float down
part of the Waikato River
on a lilo
through the darkened canyons
seeing things
that you could never see
from up above

The plan was for my mother
(They were newly courting
not yet married
Junior Hospital
House Surgeons
in Hamilton)
to let him off at one reserve

then drive downriver
& pick him up
at the other end
She drove downstream
& waited
for hours
(it seemed)

She worried that he might have fallen off
The airbed gotten tangled at a bend
When he finally floated
out of the darkness
he was soaked to the skin
chilled to the bone
“I don’t remember anything about it”

“No, but I do,” she says to him

Jack Ross
A Clearer View of the Hinterland: Poems and Sequences 1981-2014 
(Wellington: HeadworX, 2014)

Are there particular poets that have sustained you, as you navigate poetry as both reader and writer?

Rainer Maria Rilke

We are living in hazardous and ruinous times. Can you name three things that give you joy and hope?

Getting out of bed each morning, sunlight, the company of a beloved.

Richard von Sturmer is a writer, performer and filmmaker who is well known for having written the lyrics to Blam Blam Blam’s “There is No Depression in New Zealand”. He is a teacher of Zen Buddhism and the co-founder of the Auckland Zen Centre. Slender Volumes is his tenth collection of writings.

Spoor Books page

Richard von Sturmer is a writer, performer and filmmaker who is well known for having written the lyrics to Blam Blam Blam’s “There is No Depression in New Zealand”. He is a teacher of Zen Buddhism and the co-founder of the Auckland Zen Centre. Slender Volumes is his tenth collection of writings.

Spoor Books page

Richard reads several poems here

in the cracks of light, Apirana Taylor
Canterbury University Press, 2024

bud

the poet tree
buds forever

 

Apirana Taylor

 

in the cracks of light is an apt title for Apirana Taylor’s collection of poems, a book that begins with the idea that poetry is born out of light and dark. It is a perfect book to pick up this week, when life itself clings desperately to cracks of light, when words, against all odds, are a way of building light across the globe.

Apirana begins with a wahine’s call on the marae, with the welcoming ‘karanga mai, karanga mai’, and I am hearing that call. I am hearing that call with everyone together.

the people weave the light
from threads of memory
stories stitching weaving
everyone together with laughter tears and kōrero

 

from ‘karanga’

This is a collection of wonder, acknowledgement, aroha, home, descendants. It is a book of protest and it is a book of plantings. It is a book of the land and the people, of listening looking reflecting.

Apirana’s lyrical craft exemplifies the way spareness on the line can open out into a lingering richness. The poems, some short, some longer, become song. A flower that slowly opens as we read. A poetic bloom. An album in the key of hope.

I am musing on how the stories we carry with us over generations shape us, from times of protest and challenge to the time of planting kūmara, fingers in the life-enriching soil. Sharpness and edge, tenderness and wisdom.

Think too of this book as a handbook, a guidebook on writing. The poet is ‘raining poems’. He will write of rivers, mountains, lakes, seas, the land, the poor, ‘for that is the dream’ (‘to write’). He will write of beauty and wonder (‘microscope’), and I am wondering, let’s say wandering, into the realm of miniature detail in the wide expanse of a view.

Pick up Apirana’s sublime collection and like me, you might weep, feel and celebrate the power of words connect, heal and pay attention. This collection, penned in the key of love, is a gift, a taonga.

catch the wind

 

oh poem

raise your sail
catch the
wind

 

Apirana Taylor

Apirana Taylor was awarded the 2024 Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry. He is a poet, playwright, novelist, short story writer, storyteller, actor, painter and musician. His prose and poems have been translated into many languages and are included in many nationally and internationally published anthologies. Api travels to schools, tertiary institutions and prisons throughout New Zealand to read his poetry, tell his stories and take creative writing workshops. He has now published seven collections of poetry, three collections of short stories, two novels and three plays. Api is of Māori and Pākehā descent, with proud affiliation to Ngāti Porou, Te Whānau-ā-Apanui and Ngāti Ruanui.

Canterbury University Press page

for more details and online form

Michael King Writers Centre 2025 Australian Residency  Monday 20 October to Monday 17 November 2025 Applications are Now OpenThe Michael King Writers Centre in association with Varuna, The National Writers’ House in Katoomba, NSW, Australia is pleased to announce for the fourth time, a residency in Australia for New Zealand writers.   This four week residency is open to mid-career or established writers who have had a book published in the last two years. The writer awarded the residency will receive return economy airfares to Sydney, accommodation with all meals included, plus the opportunity to present their work at the Blue Mountains Writers’ festival. Applications close on Monday 31 March and the selection is expected to be announced in May.

Invitation from Otago University Press

Join us to celebrate the launch of The Intimacy Bus, a new poetry collection by Janet Charman.

6:00pm–7:30pm
Thursday 13 March 2025
The Women’s Bookshop
105 Ponsonby Road
All welcome!
Please RSVP to publicity@otago.ac.nz for catering purposes

ABOUT THE BOOK:
In The Intimacy Bus, award-winning poet Janet Charman reckons with some of life’s heaviest traffic: bereavement, grief, ageing, loneliness, gender, sexual identity, power and inequality. Along the way, the collection gathers up encounters with friends and strangers, and reflections on matters as various as Korean telenovelas, classic films, personal memories, ‘modern life’, real estate, ‘sex treats’, companion animals, a favourite hairdresser, finding joy, a grandmother’s politics and the rapper Psy.

Shorn of sentiment, direct and uncompromising, Janet Charman’s The Intimacy Bus arrives as an irrepressible affirmation of love, life and lesbian desire.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Janet Charman is one of New Zealand’s sharpest and most subversive writers, described by Anne Kennedy as ‘a complete original in voice and content’. The Intimacy Bus is Charman’s tenth collection of poetry. In 2008 she won the Montana Book Award for Poetry for Cold Snack. In 2009 she was a visiting fellow at the International Writers’ workshop of Hong Kong Baptist University. In 2014 she appeared as a guest reader at the Taipei International Poetry Forum. Her most recent poetry collection, The Pistils (Otago University Press, 2022) was longlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry in the 2023 New Zealand Ockham Book Awards.

Facebook event page

About The Intimacy Bus

Kailua Crystals

(for Sinavaiana, tragically taken too soon)

I walked into Kailua
Crystals, thinking of you,

The stones and essential oils
You packed, along with your

Yoga mat, for our work trip
To Savai’i, a small apothecary

In your beach fale, and I had
A heavy head and you said

‘Come, darling, come’ and rubbed
Frankincense on my pulse points

Fingers cooing in soft circles,
‘There, darling, there’ and we sat

By the ocean, sipping niu and crunching
Salty potato chips and later walked

Out to the blow holes at
Taga i Savai’i and your

Spirit animal, the matu’u,
A moon-silver reef heron

Landed on a rock before you
Calling ‘See you soon, sister, see you soon.’

Selina Tusitala Marsh

Selina Tusitala Marsh is a poet, scholar and author-illustrator of the award-winning series Mophead. She is this year’s Katherine Mansfield Menton fellow.

Women have published poetry in Aotearoa for 150 years, but many slipped from public view, were not paid the honour due to them in their lifetimes. Many found it difficult to break the literary hierarchy in order to be published and to write what and how they wanted. In 2019, Massey University Press published my major work, Wild Honey: Reading New Zealand Women’s Poetry. Publisher Nicola Legat welcomed my proposal with open arms and worked tirelessly to help bring the book into the world. I picked up the book today and was immediately returned to the joy of research and discovery, the need to open rather close women’s writing, to assemble a wide range of voices across time, place, age, culture, subject matter and style. Honestly, with my tiny jar of energy stretching to its limits to nourish my blogs and work on my own writing projects, I don’t know how I managed to research and write this book.

Today I will share a few morsels from it. Sarah Laing did gorgeous artwork for the Wild Honey cover, a group of poets picnicking. On the front: Selina Tusitala Marsh, Alison Wong, Ursula Bethell, Elizabeth Smither, Fleur Adcock, Airini Beautrais, Jessie Mackay, Blanche Baughan and Robin Hyde. On the back: Tusiata Avia, Hinemoana Baker, Michele Leggott, Anna Jackson and Jenny Bornholdt.

The early women, such as Jessie Mackay, Blanche Baughan, Eileen Duggan and Ursula Bethell, paved the way for the poets to come. These women communicated with each other, and with other women interested in literature and politics. A bit like we do today. A bit like the cover of Wild Honey. Today when I review books, I am delighted to read in the acknowledgements pages that women continue to draw strength from other women poets.

So today on International Women’s Day, I firstly toast four early women poets, and then include a poem from Amy Marguerite’s debut collection, over under fed (Auckland University Press, 2025). It feels perfect to post a poem from this brand new book, this sublime arrival, with its layerings of hungers and intensities, hauntings and recognitions. I will feature Amy and her new book in the coming month or so.

I have three copies of Wild Honey I would like to sign and give away. Leave a comment here or my social media pages if you would like one. Maybe name a poetry collection by a NZ woman poet you have loved.

Jessie Mackay

The Pearl of Women — strong and free;
Great as the coming woman, she.
Deep learn’d and read in student lore;
A mind enlarged to grasp at more.

from ‘The Pearl of Woman’
The Spirit Of Rangatira and Other Ballads
George Robertson, 1889

To enter the ‘feminine’ is to enter a risky label that might limit, stereotype or conversely enrich how we view women. Mackay cannot be pinned to either side: in her writing she is unafraid to represent beauty or challenge beastliness. She unafraid to speak out, and if you consider that feminism is a matter of of making women visible, of giving presence and possibility to women, of expanding options, then Mackay was a feminist.

Blanche Baughan

                                                (…)      Hers
Was a keen taste in little things ; she loved
That trivial, intimate, long-drawn-out talk
Of daily happenings, in-and-out details,
And chance of new-old changes, by whose help
Women in villages make shift to weave
Some kind of colour’d arabesque as fringe
To Life’s web, hodden-gray.

from ‘Reuben’
Reuben and Other Poems, Archibald Constable, 1903

I view Baughan’s collections not in the light of a settler-poet inventing a way to forge a poetry-home and failing at every turn, but as a journey to recognise and find peace within her invented and reclaimed self. Her writing cannot be pigeonholed within poetic genres or colonial narratives without losing sight of the woman writing. This is a story partly told. There are many tracks through Baughan’s poems. I have used her skeleton biography to stake a provisional route. Other critics have examined the way Baughan’s poetry grapples with the challenge of writing within the slow and thorny genesis of an emerging New Zealand poetry. The ink in the woman’s pen is not undercut by a lack of vocabulary or pioneering syntax. There are ways we can repack our knapsacks and absorb and feel her poems.

Eileen Duggan

We are the wheat self-sown
Beyond the hem of the paddock,
Banned by wind from the furrows,
Lonely of root and head

from ‘New Zealand Art’,
Poems, NZ Tablet Co, 1921

Duggan wrote as a way of anchoring and liberating the physical and spiritual contours of home, and that home was resolutely New Zealand. Her poetry embodied New Zealand. Just as New Zealand was a form of poetry for her. Yet for decades Duggan’s poetic choices rendered her version of home mute. She is our pioneering songbird.

Ursula Bethell

But then these stinging sun-roused messages
tossed hither salt-cold from the pacific sea;
those foremost, dawn-dyed, rose-red eminences,
those snow-fast, soon-to-be-incarnadined strongholds beyond …..

from ‘July 9. 1932. & A.M.’
Collected Poems, Caxton Press, 1950

The more I read Bethell’s poetry and letters, the more I move beyond her characteristic reserve, the more I feel that this is a woman to whom I could devote an entire book. She is a knotty mix of reticence, acute intellect, acerbic advice, crippling heartbreak and poetic dexterity. Bethell rightly countered M. A. Inne’s claim in her 1936 Press review of Time and Place that ‘the poet knows no school mistress but her garden’ with the point that ‘the garden was a brief episode in a life otherwise spent’.

Amy Marguerite

home to you

cate le bon wrote a song called
what i called this poem it’s
4.13 i want a beer and paul’s
celebrating his graduation
at the bar i’m invited and that’s
so nice. it’s usually a bad sign
when i just want to drink
alone. it wasn’t usually bad
until claudia i got so ill then
better again when she went
to england and stayed there.

a week before i moved to melbourne
i told helen that i had fallen
in love. she said that’s usually
what happens and i nodded
at the screen like it had
happened before. it’s maybe
like finally writing the poem
for the first time like finally
telling that difference to matter.

tonight i’ll put on james salter’s
reading of ‘break it down’
wait as i usually do for the old shirt.
i don’t dread the endings of
things i’m going to have to
leave that somehow unlearn
autumn and get a job. but
my desire is not entirely over
in this place i’m still unleashing
pathetic furniture stopgaps for
when the beer fails and it does that
a lot up half the night without you.

i think so many stories are
flights we forget to run for
bridges we can’t drape across
the feeling only ever properly
borrowed if i never give
it back. i’m sick of the torch on
everything. that’s always
not mine. hung up on all that
true pretending like an unrequited
apparition old shirt without
ever actually calling it old and
there’s the usual design. i’m
not incapable of it just unfit
to adequately adore it compromise
the corporeal sconce how it
makes me real. are you as well
drinking alone with ungood thoughts.
reimagining that home to.
that home
too.

Amy Marguerite
from over under fed, Auckland University Press, 2025

Amy Marguerite is a poet and essayist based in Tāmaki Makaurau. She completed an MA with distinction in creative writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters in 2022. Her poetry has appeared in anthologies including Spoiled Fruit and white-hot heart and has featured in literary journals, magazines and publications including Starling, Turbine and Sweet Mammalian. Her essay on the new generation of Aotearoa poets appears in Auckland University Press’s forthcoming anthology Te Whāriki.

Blanche E. Baughan (1870-1958) was born in Surrey England. She graduated from the University of London and was its first student to gain a BA (Hons) in Classics. A poet, nonfiction writer, social worker, prison reformer and suffragette she was initially published in England. She travelled to New Zealand in 1900, eventually settling on the Banks Peninsula in Canterbury. Blanche published several poetry collections, along with books of prose pieces (Brown Bread from a Colonial Oven, 1912), travel writing (Studies in New Zealand Scenery, 1916) and articles on prison (People in Prison, 1936). In 1935 she was awarded the King George V Jubilee medal for her services to social work. Damien Love edited a selection of her writing in 2015.

Ursula (Mary) Bethell (1874-1945) was born in England, raised in New Zealand, educated in England and moved back to Christchurch in the 1920s. Bethell published three poetry collections in her lifetime (From a Garden in the Antipodes, 1929; Time and Place, 1936; Day and Night, 1939). She did not begin writing until she was fifty, and was part of Christchurch’s active art and literary scene in the 1930s. A Collected Poems appeared posthumously (1950). Her productive decade of writing was at Rise Cottage in the Cashmere Hills, but after the death of her companion, Effie Pollen, she wrote very little. Vincent O’Sullivan edited a collection of her poetry in 1977 (1985).

Eileen Duggan (1894-1972) of Irish ancestry was born in Marlborough, and grew up in Tuamarina, near Blenheim. Duggan graduated from Victoria University with an MA First Class Honours in History (1918). She briefly taught as a secondary school teacher, and as an assistant lecturer before devoting herself to writing full time. She wrote essays, reviews, articles, a weekly column for the New Zealand Tablet (from 1927) and published five collections of poetry. Three collections were also published in the United States and Britain to international acclaim. She left a substantial body of unpublished material which Peter Whiteford drew upon for Eileen Duggan: Selected Poems (1994). She was awarded an OBE (1937) and was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (1943). She lived most of her adult life, with her sister, in Wellington. 

Jessie Mackay (1864-1938) was born in the Rakaia Gorge, Canterbury, to Scottish parents. After training as a teacher at Christchurch Normal School, she taught at Kakahu Bush School (1887-1890) and Ashwick Flat School (1893-1894). She then worked as a journalist, writing a fortnightly column for the Otago Witness from 1898 and then as Lady Editor at the Canterbury Times, and as a freelance writer. She was an active member of the National Council of Women and strongly supported the suffragette movement. She published six collections of poetry. In 1936 Mackay was granted a life pension of £100 for her contribution to New Zealand letters, and in the year of her death, PEN organised the Jessie Mackay Memorial Prize for verse.

Hotel Theresa, Doc Drumheller, Cold Hub Press 2024

‘I planted my root in the hills like a hermit’

from ‘The Second Coming’

Doc Drumheller’s latest collection of poems was inspired by a visit to Hotel Theresa in Harlem, New York. An iconic hotel where legends such as Josephine Baker, Duke Ellington, Malcom X and Muhammad Ali stayed. The resulting poetry navigates multiple travels and multiple belongings. A dual citizen of USA and Aotearoa, Doc has also spent time in Asia, Europe and Central America. The poems themselves are seasoned travellers, having appeared in a terrific range of international journals.

What draws me deep into the collection, where home is as vital as a captivating elsewhere, is the way travel is a mesh of experience. Each poem is a set of seven couplets. I felt like I was on board a train with its mesmeric beat on the tracks, a visual beat say, that carries a sequence of fascinations. Every time you look into, and out of the window of the poem, the physical detail and musings resonate. If the poem is an excellent vehicle for travel, and yes it is, it includes foraging, shimmering, transforming, planting. There is suffering and there is singing. There are eulogies and there are odes. There are history markers and childhood memories.

I love the feel of this book in the hand, the paper stock and the internal design, and especially the nostalgic hotel postcard on the cover. I love how I travel from a lollipop man reciting poetry to a two-legged carrot and vegetable waste in the supermarket. You move from traces of the Christchurch earthquake to the legacy of slavery and of war, and to the final resonant poem, where the word you carry away with you is kindness. And that matters, in this collection that draws personal musings and belongings, local whanau and distant family, close.

‘You said to me: “Poetry is the shadow
cast by our streetlight imaginations.”‘

from ‘Via Ferlinghetti’

The readings

‘Via Ferlinghetti’

‘Hotel Theresa’

‘Viva la Vida’

Doc Drumheller is an award-winning poet, musician, dramatist, and has published 11 collections of poetry. His poems are translated into more than 20 languages, and he is the editor and publisher of the New Zealand literary journal Catalyst. He was elected to represent New Zealand on the Executive Board of the World Congress of Poets, and is the editor in chief of the World Congress of Poets literary journal Fuego. He has represented New Zealand at poetry festivals all over the world, and widely throughout NZ. His latest collection is: Hotel Theresa, Cold Hub Press, 2024.