Hibiscus Tart, Carin Smeaton, Titus Books, 2024

meghan markle’s sister

u never wantd to go to australia
leave cat-pig behind with friends
bk to the river
away from the sun
the sky on their tongue
caught in yr throat
burning bye into
yr ancestral wings
let them go hun
they’d never make it
thru customs anyways
crammed into yr suitcase
like a whakapapa happy meal
kiss me good-bye too
go live with mum
under the circling planes
louder than dragon flies
they wont be around for long
them open spaces
will lick em up clean
show u how to sketch
trips in & out of yr hometown
away from the weddings the wendys
the house flipping bullshit
paint yr forever home in melting shades
of lunar
the mexico trips
thru the desert
(& the pink
deep crevices of the old man’s face)
will be the best thing
to ever happen

pukekohe

ur calling in to sort the whenua & calm the cousins while yr at it u
travel all the ways from whangarei aunties swooping in like kahu
from a waking sky

u weaves in & out of matua’s shelves just how tane does breaking
code n kete in a tropical low u says who’s this white guy & tf does
he know?

u knew that nen we all knew her she never recoverd they really put
the boot in we remember pukekohe with its fukd up colour bars

cinema hellscape stores porn lovin bishops pukekohe with its head-
less angels grieving schools nothing 2 see here fukboys mayors of
mediocracy

pukekohe the kahu in the sky sees u as do i (the ancient trees of tane) we all knows what u r&weallknowatudid Ae

we knows where u live

we was only around for yr market gardens sustenance n five spice
life but even we left after that we never went back eh whaea survival
of tha aunties

once upon a time u says we wāhine had mana and we was treatd as
such but not now eh pukekohe fuk u we only want land bk we
jus want our mokos feel welcomed

Carin Smeaton

Reading Carin Smeaton’s collection is to step out of the straightjacket label, the demeaning tag, ‘tart’, placed upon women, into a tribute to mana wāhine: mothers aunties grandmothers sisters. This album of women is speaking poetry, poetry speaking. Women speaking, speaking women. It is poetry as making language your own, challenging the status quo on how a poem ought to be, how woman ought to be, how the world ought to be.

Call it poetry in the vernacular, slang poetry, read it as electrifying performance on the page, this peppery poetry wave. Heck yes. I’m talking poetry as gathering shopping scavenging stinging flying needing falling questioning singing. For this is what the women do. This is what the poems do. You will linger under moonlight, book-dally in libraries, listen to the collection’s subterranean soundtrack with its whiffs of songs.

Call it body poetry. It’s so physically present, it is the body birthmarked moko-ed yearning feeding lonely embraced. It’s poetry with succulent word openings, repeating motifs and connections that forge pulsating rhythms.

Call it poetry as challenge, like a protest banner drawing attention to the sharks, the hungry, the dispossessed and the abused. Heck yes. It’s poetry as women arm-in-arm on the street marching.

Call it poetry as aroha – the poet’s love of whanau, whenua, mahi, language, life, reading, writing. This is a love of poetry, and it is so very infectious.

Paula Green

“Carin Smeaton’s Hibiscus Tart goes down many paths, she is cheeky, gives respect to slang and holds in her hands different ways of loving the whenua and offering an honest appraisal of what it means to be Indigenous in a colonised world. Sometimes I think I’m going down one wormhole only to be jolted down another only to be bitten around the corner of another. She grasps complicated and disparate ideas and forms of languages and sculpts them into porous poems that swim in your head for days afterwards. I want to read more poetry like this that doesn’t give a shit about the rules and flips images on their head and spit roasts them with fire spitting out of her fingernails one word at a time.”

Hana Pera Aoake, Poetry Shelf, 2024 highlight collage

A reading

Photo credit: Robert Eruera

‘a musical is only 10% of the revolution’

Carin Smeaton lives in Tāmaki Makaurau with whanau. She’s working in a research centre in the city and in Manukau. Her third collection “Death Goddess Guide to Self Love” is forthcoming in May 2025 via Titus Books. If you want to help her raise funds for its publication please visit here.

Titus Books page

Slender Volumes, Richard von Sturmer, Spoor Books, 2024

17. Xiangyan’s Great Enlightenment

For centuries cutlery was kept higgledy-piggledy in a wooden box with knives scratching forks and forks jabbing spoons. Then, during the Age of Enlightenment, this situation changed with the invention of the cutlery drawer. Knives, forks and spoons could now live peacefully in separate compartments. Hands no longer ran the risk of being cut or pricked when reaching for a desired utensil. Some believed this to be progress, others were not so sure.

19. “Ordinary Mind is the Way”

When my glasses become dirty, I reach for a cloth to wipe them clean. When my mind turns dull or distracted, I go outside and study the clouds. How many clouds can fit inside my skull? A whole sky-full! You could pack them in like stuffing a cushion. I shake my head – this is too fanciful. The clouds today, in the clear blue sky, have flexed their cloud muscles and are moving at a leisurely pace high above the trees and houses.

261. Yunmen Composes a Verse

It’s like you’re standing in the ocean and you feel the pull of a big wave and know that you have to write. Then the wave breaks over you and everything is just fragments of surf and billows of sand. No verse could be composed, certainly none by Yunmen. And the pull is always there; it draws you away from your desk, scatters your papers and lets the words wander by themselves, shedding their letters, one by one, as you enter unknown territory.

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.

The readings

’99. Layman Pang’s Stringless Lute’

‘105. The Hands and Eyes of Great Compassion’

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

The Girls in the Red House Are Singing, Tracey Slaughter
Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024

from opioid sonatas

#                                                                                        [allegro]                                                     

I crashed. It was choral. The glass formatted the light. She
was driving a scream into distance. The gravel doubled over. Halt
this. It was illustrated. Let the scalpel tell you what
happened. That was a trickle of mercy
from her ear. Many revolutions. Steer with the thorax. Sunlight
belts you to the ambulance. She bleeds
on the blue nurse. Asleep in needles. The car is a seven
pointed flower. She was singing in the blindspot. The red line holds
a nocturne. It was metal. It was god. It was weightless. I
misspelt collision with my wrists. Please radio. He stood
on the right, observing the passenger tendons. Swung
a corona through the windshield. She
was dropping. It was filigreed. He smashed
the screen like a recital. I was just out of town. It was quartz.
I needed. Sparkles on the gurney. Conjoined. I
bruised the rearview. An eyeful. It was dressage. She was singing
from the glovebox. Tell the doctor what
didn’t. Aluminium can swim. The lid. The back
of your thoughts are sticky. Staunch this. Four door. Intravenous. Admitted.
Singing deuteronomy. Reversible in her red jacket. Her laughter tied
at the back. Inserted. Facedown floating to the next
prescription. Sunlight welds you to errata. That was the cathedral. Tell
the doctor you’re an article. His crowbar smashed the scheme
of things. Regain a mouthful of memory
in water. The white believes in minimalism. It was solitude. The fenceline
blessed us. It shattered. Erasure scrapes chairs. Open all sides. Her angels
birthed against disposable plastic. Solve this. She
was singing to the haemorrhage
in waiting. The nurse made a red head
or tail of it.

Tracey Slaughter

Reading Tracey Slaughter’s The Girls in the Red House Are Singing, is to traverse multiple routes into the human heart, body, experience, to track an anatomy of pain, the legacy of wound. Subject matter eyeballs difficulty: from the aftermath of a devastating car crash with its opiate relief, grief and suicidal thoughts, to elusive balm in hotel adultery, to drawing to the surface sexual violence endured as a teenager.

The first sequence, ‘opioid sonatas’, won the Manchester Poetry Prize in 2023, and the judges mentioned how they kept reading the poems aloud. And I can see why. As I listened to Tracey read for this feature, I just wanted to hear the whole book. The entire collection offers language at its most elastic vibrant electrifying sizzling playful serious razor-edged. The sonic interplay of words astonishes, mesmerises. It is like turning an extraordinary album up loud loud loud and feeling it in every pore of your being. It is like the most melodic dark with different instruments singing out, chords connecting, harmonies and disharmonies overlaying.

The Girls in the Red House Are Singing could be written as chapter-book narrative, sentence-based memoir, but Tracey’s poetic language produces music of cut slice bruise. The rhythm, the swings and heightening what is to live, to be alive, to experience the edge and ravine. This collection sets my nerve endings sparking. Here I am, on my own spiky road of pain and recovery, persistent dark and light, and this extraordinary gift of a book is a form of restoration. I absolutely love it.

The readings

Photo credit: Joel Hinton

‘lifetime prescription (for the chronic)’

‘psychopathology of the small hotel’

Tracey Slaughter is the author of The Girls in the Red House are Singing (Te Herenga Waka, 2024), Devil’s Trumpet (Te Herenga Waka, 2021), if there is no shelter (Ad Hoc, 2020),Conventional Weapons (Te Herenga Waka, 2019), deleted scenes for lovers (Te Herenga Waka, 2016), The Longest Drink in Town (Pania Press, 2015) and her body rises (Random House, 2005). Her poetry, short stories and personal essays have received numerous awards including the 2024 Moth Short Story Prize, the 2024 ABR Calibre Essay Prize, the 2023 Manchester Poetry Prize, the 2020 Fish Short Story Prize, the 2015 Landfall Essay Prize, the 2014 Bridport Prize and BNZ Katherine Mansfield Awards in 2004 and 2001. She lives in Kirikiriroa Hamilton, where she teaches Creative Writing at the University of Waikato. She was founding editor of Mayhem Literary Journal, and is the editor of Poetry Aotearoa. Most recently she has been collaborating on a screenplay adaptation of The Longest Drink in Town with writer Liam Hinton, and working on a book of personal essays. 

Te Herenga Waka University Press page

In the Half Light of a Dying Day, C.K. Stead
Auckland University Press, 2024

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.

Talking to the cat

To Nico Catullus tries to speak only
Māori
which has been recommended
as a way of learning te reo.
Nico replies volubly
(he was always a talkative cat)
in his own first language
almost certainly
Siamese.
When the nights are cold
he occupies your space
Kezia
and Catullus sometimes half-wakes
to the sensation
of a small rough tongue
licking his hand.
It’s Nico’s way of saying
I know you miss her Catullus. So do I.

C. K. Stead

 

C. K. Stead has been writing versions of Catallus poems since 1979, also drawing upon Clodia, the woman believed to be the origin of Catallus’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 Catallus 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 Catallus, 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.

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

/ slanted, Alison Glenny, Compound Press, 2024

        from APPENDIX: SÉANCE NOTES

 

S2.1

Small volume bound in dark

~

sheets brittle heavy
to the touch

~

astral tables ocean steamships
Gold letters gilt-edged

~

thin spines cracks

 from THE MOUNTAIN LOVER

. . . ] a perfectly good damper. Dipped
in demerara, pineapple pleases in slices.
Peaches from a tin slip down easily with
syrup. Breakfasts in darkness, swallowed in
haste, alpine starts require second repasts.
Luke-warm, sipped from a spoon, an
infusion soothes swollen lips. An ounce of
cocoa and quart of tea gives strength for
superfluities. Meals at strange hours means
forcing and nibbling, sometimes gorging
and a feast [

. . . ] a handkerchief of silk, so useful. Leg
of mutton sleeves beneath pelisses. Fur of
fox or lynx is garnish for a neck preserved
with creams. A complexion spoiled, spilt
milk. Hot water foments, no Cleopatras or
asses. Only a cheek that once was tender [

Alison Glenny

Alison Glenny’s longlisted collection is inspired by Edwardian mountaineer Freda Du Faur (1882-1935), an Australian who was the first woman to summit Aoraki Mount Cook. Alison borrows from Freda’s memoir, The Conquest of Mount Cook and other Climbs: an account of four seasons’ mountaineering in the Southern Alps of New Zealand (1915) and unpublished correspondence to Otto Frind.

You can listen to an abridged version of Freda’s book on RNZ.

Enter this sublime poetry, and you enter the terrain of light and peak, edge and step, avalanche and bouquets. The words form a soundtrack, a gift for the ear, a visual track, a gift for the eye, and a heart track, the mesmerising movement in the white space between, the silence, the icy snow. Reading becomes surrogate climbing walking ascending slithering transitioning contemplating. I stall on this book. I get lost and astonished within the book’s crevices and footprints. I am in the archives and I am in the mountains, wandering and wondering and absorbing. A insistent question. What do we scavenge and retain from the view, whether from alpine mountain side or buried archival file?

There are five distinct sections: a prelude, the archival borrowings, concrete poems, correspondence quotations, an appendix and a coda. Haunting movement on the page. Haunting travel in the mind. Resonant travel in the heart.

This book, this handbook of infinite travel.

The readings

‘under canvas’

‘conjured from thin air’

Alison Glenny is the author of The Farewell Tourist (Otago University Press, 2018), Bird Collector (Compound Press, 2021), and /Slanted (Compound Press, 2024), which responds to the queer life of the Edwardian mountaineer Freda du Faur. In 2019 she was an Ursula Bethell writer in residence at the University of Canterbury, and in 2024 the Caselberg Trust Margaret Egan City of Literature resident. She lives on the Kāpiti Coast.

Compound Press page

Hopurangi -Songcatcher Poems from the Maramataka,
Robert Sullivan, Auckland University Press, 2024

Ōrongonui 1: ‘Breezy vibes’ (((((((((((((((High Energy)))))))))))))))

Breezy vibes, says the podcast Taringa. I’m one of ‘those
people’ who says ‘hauhū’ instead of ‘hauhunga’
in the karakia ‘Whakataka te hau’ ’cause
I didn’t know better. Every version I found
says that, then I learn from Taringa it isn’t a word at all.
Auē taukuri ē! And then I learn that ‘aroha mai’
generally doesn’t mean ‘sorry’, that it’s clearer
to say ‘nōku te hē’. Then the panel on Taringa
talked about intensifiers like ‘rirerire’,
‘pohapoha’ and ‘mārika’. If you say
someone is ‘ātaahua rirerire’ it means
they are exceptionally beautiful. ‘Mārika’
also has that effect to mean ‘absolutely’.
‘Pohapoha’ does too, and also ‘crammed’
like in the phrase ‘ka kī pohapoha taku kete’
which means ‘my basket is full to the brim.’
Tērā pea, ōrite ki te manawanui nē?
I hope I’m keeping my vibes breezy here.
I listened driving into Puketeraki.
It was afterwards driving home that I found out about ‘hauhū’.
Yesterday was an exceptionally beautiful day.
Inanahi, he rā ātaahua rirerire.

Robert Sullivan

I often use the word ‘breathtaking’ when I am tagging a poetry collection I love, and yes, poetry can take your breath away but, after reading Robert Sullivan’s sublime new collection, Hopurangi -Songcatcher Poems from the Maramataka, I am musing on the idea, ‘breath-enhancing’. I am in the luxurious position of being able to slow read, to wind the reading pace down to country road rambles, so I may savour and absorb and delight. I do want to add that I am huge fan of beach running, of getting into a sweet rhythm that gets mantras flowing, and I relish the jumpstart of crime fiction and exhilarating breakneck poetry.

Robert’s new collection is inspired by Maramataka, the Māori lunar calendar. After a long absence from Facebook, over a three-month period, he posted a poem a day, attuned to the lunar cycle energies, drawing upon what he was learning about Maramataka. Each poem is tagged with an energy meter – low, medium, or high. The resulting poetry is a testimony of whanau, language, the natural world and aroha.

How Robert’s poetry resonates alongside the current political edicts, prescriptions and alarming descriptions of what the Coalition Government pledges for the child, the adult and our planet. In Robert’s sublime and breath-enhancing collection, I am finding seeds of hope. Of te reo Māori growing alongside English, both languages vital on our tongues, of tending our relationships, whether human or planetary, with care as opposed to greed, of acknowledging our spikes and our difficulties, of never ceasing to learn new things. I hold this collection out to you as a book of freshness, of reassessing and finding one’s place, a book of experience, wisdom, friendship, hope. And above all, a book of aroha.

The readings

‘Continuous Positive Airway Pressure Machine’

‘Pupurangi Shelley’

‘The Paper Chase’

Robert Sullivan (of Ngāpuhi, Kāi Tahu, and Irish descent) is the author and editor of fifteen books. He co-edits The Journal of New Zealand Literature with Dr Erin Mercer, and is President of the NZ Poetry Society. Among his awards is the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for a distinguished contribution to New Zealand poetry. Hopurangi | Songcatcher: Poems from the Maramataka is his ninth collection of poetry and is published this month by Auckland University Press. The three recorded poems are “Pupurangi Shelley,” “The Paper Chase” and “Continuous Positive Airway Pressure Machine” from his new collection.

Auckland University Press page

Just This

Find your place on the planet, dig in,
and take responsibility from there.
_ Gary Snyder

Affecting without affectation, like these sere hills
then the early evening sky where Sirius dominates
for a time, then is joined by lesser lights,

stars indistinct as those seen through the canopies
of trees shaking in the wind. There’s this wish
to feel part of something wholly explicable

and irreplaceable, something enduring
and wholesome that supresses the urge to fight …
or is there? Ah, the cosmic questions

that keep on coming like shooting stars
and will, until, and then what? All I can say
is that for me nothing hurts more

than leaving and nothing less than coming home,
when a nor’wester’s gusting in the pines
like operatic laughter, and the roadside grasses

are laced with the blue and orange and pink
of bugloss, poppies and yarrow, all of them
swishing, dancing, bending, as they do, as we do.

Brian Turner
from Just This, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2009

With much sadness, with collective sadness, we are mourning the loss of Brian Turner, a poet, writer, conservationist, who gifted us much, whether we are writers, readers, guardians of the earth, lovers of nature.

Over the coming weeks, Poetry Shelf will assemble a tribute, but today my heart goes out to family and friends, to our writing communities, and in particular to his beloved partner, Jillian Sullivan.

Brian Turner was born in Dunedin in 1944. His first book of poems, Ladders of Rain (1978), won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and was followed by a number of highly praised poetry collections and award-winning writing in a wide range of genres including journalism, biography, memoir and sports writing. Recent and acclaimed poetry collections include Night Fishing (VUP, 2016), and Just This (winner of the New Zealand Post Book Award for Poetry in 2010). He was the Te Mata Estate New Zealand Poet Laureate 2003–05 and received the Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry in 2009. In 2024, The Central Otago Environmental Society, COES, awarded Brian Turner the NZ Poet Laureate of Nature for his lifetime’s work in poetry and activism, fighting for and celebrating the natural world. He lived in Central Otago.

Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud, Lee Murray, The Cuba Press, 2024

from 婦 Woman

When you were born here in the land of the long white cloud, in the savage bushlands of New Zealand; when you were born at the turn of the century, you were a little strangeness, an alien olive strangeness with mysterious almond eyes.

You do not recall your mother, a woman of this country, because you were ripped from her post- partum. She is a stranger to you, because before you could protest you were taken by ship to the Middle Kingdom to dwell in the home of your ancestors. You were still a sapling then, when you were parted from your mother, uprooted from these moody bush-clad cloud-lands and carried across the sea to the golden country. You were one-part willow and one-part mānuka, an out-of-place unbelonging strangeness.

Your father had high hopes, though, that you might bloom pure and pink as a lotus, if only your feet were planted in the mud of the old country. A mysterious strangeness, you might yet become a golden landscape, if only you could be shaped and tended. You might even become a sacred penjing, a tiny landscape, grotesque yet beautiful. If only you could be contained.

my bonsai / cracks / the china tray

So you grow up in China, speaking the silk- slipper tongue of your father’s ancestors, your strangeness pinched and nipped and contained so you might become a golden filial daughter.

bush walk / pushing aside the mānuka

Lee Murray
From Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud

What a heart embracing collection this is. Such writing poise. Every line sings out with linguistic freshness, a feast of visual and aural conjunctions: “your heart shrivels to a rotting black walnut, the sweet sonata halts”. Every musical phrase leading to the jagged edge of living: “apples and flutes will always be parallel lines”. Every lyrical cadence twisting the blade: “the girl is a typhoon of want, a perfect symphony of longing”.

Lee draws upon: “the invisible Chinese fox women who came to make their home here in Aotearoa, who trod this cloud-land before me and who lived and died and suffered in these pages, though you are many and nameless, I want to thank you for allowing me to slip on your skulls, share in your lives and give voice to your stories.” from ‘Acknowledgements’

In her ‘Author note’, Lee admits the “poetry-prose work has been one of the most difficult pieces of writing I have ever completed, possibly because I was writing it during the global pandemic and was plagued with interruptions and anxiety, but also because as a New Zealand-born Chinese Pākehā, the tragedy of these narratives filled me with sadness and anger.”

Indeed. And out of this difficulty, out of this complicated and resonant stretch into the personal and the imagined, Lee has produced an extraordinary collection, a chorus of voices that will unsettle and unnerve and are utterly necessary to be heard. This is a book to be shared.

The reading

Lee reads from Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud

Lee Murray ONZM is a writer, editor, and poet from Aotearoa New Zealand, a Shirley Jackson Award and five-time Bram Stoker Award® winner, including for poetry for Tortured Willows. With more than forty titles to her credit, she holds a New Zealand Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Fiction and is an Honorary Literary Fellow of the New Zealand Society of Authors. She is a judge of the 2025 World Fantasy Awards. Read more here

The Cuba Press page

Manuali’i, Rex Letoa Paget, Saufo’i Press, 2024

DARLING I KNOW YOU SUFFER AND I’M HERE FOR YOU.

we laugh like we used to.
before the kids.
before the house.

back when debts were settled with
two coloured cats eye marbles
and my only pokémon card
i bought with my lunch money
off my rich palagi mate.

when ceilings were creaking floorboards
humming girl power anthems and
ain’t that just the way that life goes
down
down

down
down.
like mike splitting free throw lines.
i wanted to be the paekākāriki express.

chipping and chasing wild watercress
shotgunned under rooftops of punga eels
who sheltered clay soil paths dad spent a summer digging.

he carved our names into tree roots staircased to a creek
where we’d wash our legs scraped with blackberry.

we ran through maize he grew
chasing mystic moon views rising
at the edge of his green thumb.

he planted his seeds with
bootstraps
calloused hands and
we don’t need no education.

survived in
motor oil
whiskey breath
rothman cigarettes.

half his mates didn’t survive
asbestos or asphalt.

a few sit round his lounge now
broken boned road workers
fingers twisted in carpal tunnel
gifting bags of greenery.

cancer scares
cancer skin
four hundred dollars
a week in pension. 

gettin up
getting high
gettin down
gettin no-no-nowhere.

i sit across a table in remuera where
white collars popped discuss
what to do with their third property.

i stare at perfect crooked teeth dipped
in italian red wine
gnawing chipped paint off their beach house
in a town

they can’t even pronounce.

reclined in a railroad home
dads bones rattle and radiate
we throw our hands up to celebrate
him eating the first solid thing in weeks.

Time spins on a record player
our wishes crackle into dust.
can we pause for a moment?
can we go back to the start?

i missed my favourite part.

i visit dry creeks wishing for the same thing.
sandalwood burns through hallways and yeah

ain’t that just the way that life goes
down.
down.
down.
down.

Rex Letoa Paget

There is so much to love about this collection, I want it to remain an open field of possibilities for you. It is self portrait and it is family gatherings, it is prayer and testimony, it is grief and it is love. How it is imbued in love. The presence of grandmothers signals the importance of familiar anchors, of nourishment and nurturing, of roots and self growth. There is music on the line, music on the turntable, music recalled. In the opening section, ‘Manuali’i’, the eclectic movement of words and lines on the page offers sweet shifts in visual and aural rhythms, as though there is no one way to pin sky-gazing or family relationships or writing poems to a singular form. The lower case letter at the start of sentences enriches the music.

The second section, ‘Icarus’, initially conjures the Greek myth, and I find myself sidestepping into notions of life as labyrinth, the risk of burning up, of plunging down and of drowning. More than anything I am revelling in Rex’s language, because, in both subject matter and lyricism, this is poetry of becoming. Verbs favour the present tense, writing exists in the moment of living, writing is a vital form of connecting. But the verbs do more than this, these tools of action, whether physical emotional or cerebral, stall delight and surprise me within the wider wordcape of a poetic language that is succulent and sense rich.

At times there is a profound ache, contagious, human, humane, and we are in the ‘Elysian plains’, there with the poet’s grief as he remembers his father. This is writing as inhalation as much as outward breath, not explaining everything, tracing threads to the Gods or ancestors, to the places we become, the connections that matter. And yes, I keep returning to the idea of poems as sustaining breath.

To travel slowly with this sublime collection is to enter poetry as restorative terrain, to encounter notions and parameters of goodness, fragility, recognition, to link the present to both past and future, to question, to suggest, to travel, to connect. Oh! and Manuali’i has the coolest illustrations.

The Readings

‘La Douleur Exquise’

‘Shine on You Crazy Diamond’

‘Darling I’m Here for You’

Rex Letoa Paget (Samoan/Danish) is a fa‘afatama crafter of words born in Aotearoa, now living on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people. His poetry and storytelling are his compass through space and time. His works are giftings from his ancestors and have been published in Tupuranga, Te Tangi A Te Ruru, AUNTIES, Overcom, No Other Place to Stand: An Anthology of Climate Change Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand, Rapture: An Anthology of Performance Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand, Spoiled Fruit: Queer Poetry from Aotearoa, and Australian Poetry Anthology Vol 10. His offerings are lessons, learnings, and acknowledgments for the timelines and traditions of yesterday, today and tomorrow.

Saufo’i Press page