What do I want Poetry Shelf to be?

This question resonated at dawn because, even when I step back from news feeds, toxic political voices, both global and local, hierarchical and hegemonic, make their way in to fuel thoughts and images of a world on the brink of catastrophe.

Do I want Poetry Shelf to be a clearing in the disheartening thicket that comforts, inspires, nourishes, celebrates, offers myriad connections across myriad poetry communities in Aotearoa?

Do I want Poetry Shelf to be a patchwork of light and dark, a composition which reflects how my life is at the moment, and how it is for so many people? My mornings are light, my afternoons dark. Today my morning hits a dark patch and everything tilts.

Do I want the blog to offer respite, to provide channels for joy, contemplation, restorative breathing, or do I want to offer space to challenge the selfish choices of leaders and individuals that foreshadow dangerous consequences . . . or both?

This morning, I just don’t know. I have started reading Talia Marshall’s glorious memoir, Whaea Blue, and it is doing the trick. It is splintering the dark. She writes with such care and craft, such wisdom and humanity, I am reminded why books matter, why books of all genres matter.

Honestly, I don’t know how my spiky recovery road is proceeding, whether I will ever escape my daily challenges, but I do know that joy is the key. I do know that holding tight to the things that deliver joy each day, no matter how small, are essential aides: cooking, gardening, reading, writing, blogging, breathing in bush song and sea air. Touching base with friends. And I do know that so many people are navigating incredibly tough times. Across all ages, across the world.

So yes, my blog is a tapestry of dark and light. I want to provide space for challenge and wound and despair, but more than anything, I want to offer Poetry Shelf as balm, a wee retreat, a place to connect and find aroha, to share the joy we harness and harvest when we read and write.

Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit, Emma Neale, Otago University Press, 2024

Spare Change

New to London, maybe I carried the scent Naïve
to the ragged man who shuffled

along the tube train aisle
where I stood gripping the pole

amid the massed bodies of rush hour crush;
each face, it seemed, averted in disgust.

Like the small-town citizen I really was
when the man said, ‘Can you help me, love?’

I met his gaze then looked down
to see what he wanted to show me:

his forearm split open, swollen, 
infection swarming like red wasps.

‘I need some change to get to hospital.
Spare a couple of quid?’

I didn’t know local custom. How to draw a blank
down over the mind, or how to give a pound

as indifferently as if our hands held slots for cash.
Instead I cried out, ‘What happened to you? Oh my God.’

He stalled, his stare a flame held too close,
then rolled down shirt and jacket sleeves.

‘Never mind.’ He pushed through the throng
as our train hurtled to the next stop.

A second stranger tapped my shoulder. 
‘Forget him. He’s a con artist.’

But the fire-swarmed gash. 
The pomegranate gasp of it.

The man shrugged. ‘Doesn’t let it heal.
I’ve seen it. Uses pocket knives, tin lids.

‘Grifter. Scabber. Shows wounds for sympathy.
Don’t encourage him with money.’

One man, that strung out, he’d self-harm for cash.
Another, that jaded, he’d cauterized compassion.

Decades on, the memory opens 
and reopens in the same raw place

so as if I could heal anything
as pernicious as indifference

I am at it again, with the sutures and saline
of these ink-black glyphs:

needle and stitch
needle and stitch.

Emma Neale

Emma Neale’s poetry is rich in connections, experience, visual and aural delights. Like many other poets, her ink is imbued with personal life, with a deep concern about the state of the planet, injustice, humanity. More than anything, Emma writes with heart, her words agile on the line, her poems lingering in the mind as you move though the day.

The readings

‘Spare change’

‘&’

Emma Neale is the author of six novels, seven collections of poetry, and a collection of short stories. Her sixth novel, Billy Bird (2016) was short-listed for the Acorn Prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and long-listed for the Dublin International Literary Award. Emma has a PhD in English Literature from University College, London and has received numerous literary fellowships, residencies and awards, including the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for a Distinguished Contribution to New Zealand Poetry 2020. Her novel Fosterling (Penguin Random House, 2011) is currently in script development with Sandy Lane Productions, under the title Skin. Her first collection of short stories, The Pink Jumpsuit (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2021) was long-listed for the Acorn Prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Her short story, ‘Hitch’, was one of the top ten winners in the Fish International Short Story Prize 2023 and her poem ‘A David Austin Rose’ won the Burns Poetry Competition 2023-4. Her flash fiction ‘Drunks’ was shortlisted in the Cambridge Short Story Prize 2024. The mother of two children, Emma lives in Ōtepoti/Dunedin, Aotearoa/New Zealand, where she works as an editor. Her most recent book of poems is Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit (Otago University Press, 2024).

Otago University Press page

Over the next two weeks Poetry Shelf will celebrate the ten books on the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry 2025 Longlist. The longlist underlines the vitality of poetry in Aotearoa, the incredible range of books published, from style to subject matter to voice. Coupled with that is the range of publishers dedicating resources to poetry publishing, from the University Presses to Boutique Houses. That a number of sublime poetry collections didn’t make the 2025 list, also marks poetry in New Zealand as fertile terrain, with its eclectic and electric communities.

Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry

• Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud by Lee Murray (The Cuba Press)
• Hibiscus Tart by Carin Smeaton (Titus Books)
• Hopurangi – Songcatcher: Poems from the Maramataka by Robert Sullivan (Ngāpuhi, Kāi Tahu) (Auckland University Press)
• In the Half Light of a Dying Day by C.K. Stead (Auckland University Press)
• Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit by Emma Neale (Otago University Press)
• Manuali ʻi by Rex Letoa Paget (Saufoʻi Press)*
• /Slanted by Alison Glenny (Compound Press)
• Slender Volumes by Richard von Sturmer (Spoor Books)
• Slim Volume by James Brown (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
• The Girls in the Red House are Singing by Tracey Slaughter (Te Herenga Waka University Press)

Departures, Dunstan Ward, Cold Hub Press, 2024

Listening with Nicola

‘When I heard the waves dragging the pebbles
I was reminded of my dear uncle Dunstan,
showing me how it sounds if you cup your ears.’

And so I, too, relive that moment in Kent,
four decades ago, during your first return trip
to the country that our pioneer families left.

My laptop recaptures, amplified through headphones,
the harsher sound of massive Tasman breakers
cascading down these grey-black stones on the Coast,

your unlikely new home the farther side of the Alps.
Listening now in Paris, I think of you,
listening there, and thinking of us together.

Firstlings

The first crocus burning under the oak trees,
the first snowdrops, hidden amid the dead leaves;
the first pale lilac, its childhood fragrance,
the first wild violet’s fugitive scent;
the first sunlit steps to the morning garden,
the first fingers dipped in the ocean’s font.

The first strawberries, perfumed, waterish,
the first firm red cherries, a secret wish;
the first fat asparagus, white and pricey,
the first chestnuts roasted on chillier streets;
the first oysters shucked to briny succulence,
the first glass of glowing new wine for a toast.

The first swallow’s joyous fioriture,
the first cuckoo’s echo lost in the hills;
the first bat near nightfall above the river,
the first coruscating frost on crisp grass;
the first ice stilling the weir, the millrace,
the first flakes of snow, re-enchanting the world.

Dunstan Ward

The readings

‘A Message’

‘The Garden at Night’

Having lived in Paris for over fifty years, I regard myself as a New Zealand Parisian. Born in Dunedin in 1942, I was brought up on a farm in Otago, and educated at Catholic schools in Timaru and at the University of Canterbury. After three years teaching at the University of Waikato, I left in 1971 for London, and then in 1973 settled in Paris, retiring as Professor of English at the University of London Institute. With Beryl Graves, the poet’s widow, I edited the Complete Poems of Robert Graves (Carcanet, 1995–99; Penguin Classics, 2003). I have published three poetry collections: Beyond Puketapu (Steele Roberts, 2015), and At This Distance and Departures (both Cold Hub Press, 2019 and 2024).

Cold Hub Press page

not everything turns away, Philomena Johnson, Sudden Valley Press, 2024

Coming Out of the Dark

off the beach a shadow empties
itself into detached clouds

wind-vanes oscillate
past magnetic north

ships are lost to view
behind toppling wave crests

salt and sand spindrifts
blind your way beside a heaping sea

scattered white-caps
helpless before the wind

rafts of pumice
islands

leaves of loose paper
razed to dust

has there never been a choice
but to step into the bright space

between clouds

Philomena Johnson

The readings

‘The Cast of a Net’

‘The House of Winds’

Philomena Johnson graduated from The Hagley Writers’ Institute in 2017 where her portfolio was short-listed for the Margaret Mahy Award. Her poetry has appeared in The Quick Brown Dog, The London Grip, takahē, Fuego & a fine line; in the anthologies broken lines / in charcoal, Voiceprints 4 and The New Zealand Poetry Society Anthology 2024. Philomena won The John O’Connor First Book Award in 2024 for her manuscript not everything turns away, published by Sudden Valley Press. She lives where the river meets the sea right beside Te Ihutai Avon-Heathcote Estuary where she gets to walk by water every day. Philomena tutors at the Write On School for Young Writers.

Sudden Valley Press page

The End of the Beginning, Jenna Heller, At the Bay | I te Kokoru, 2024

Drawing lots

We go searching, digging deeply, soil on our hands and knees, earthworms wrapped round our fingers, digging in the dirt beneath the germination and tangled roots webbing a map to the underground where memory sings and rivers cry through crumbling rock and fault lines to the heat of the heart of the underworld. We build into the sides of mountains, thatch roofs, paint mosaics on stamped earth, scribble chalk drawings, dance for rain. We sleep with our ancestors, live on shells baked into the land, tend to flowers growing fire-wild and free like the sparking of pine and birch up the flue past wasps buzzing and humming, a hive caught between light and dark. We watch clouds braid through island skies and learn their mythology by pulling them apart as they reel past—on our backs, on our skin, on the compost of our gardens-in-waiting. Lurking underground, the edible legend flowers amongst the weeds, hardy like the southerly spinning through our mountains, ripping across our plains, shooting up our dry riverbeds, tearing at young gum bark drooping back to the ground just as sure as bare branches scream toward the sky.

Jenna Heller

The readings

‘The Change’

‘Sometimes I Wish I Didn’t Have Breasts’

Jenna Heller grew up in the United States but has lived in Aotearoa New Zealand for the last 26 years, mostly near the beach in Ōtautahi Christchurch. In 2021, she was runner-up for the Caselberg International Poetry Prize. As a fiction writer, she has won a handful of awards including National Flash Fiction Day in 2020 and she has appeared in three editions of Best Small Fictions (2020, 2021, and 2023). The End of the Beginning, a collection of flash fiction and prose poetry, was published by At the Bay | I te Kokoru (Ōtepoti Dunedin) in June 2024. Her second book, a collection of poetry, will be published by Sudden Valley Press (Ōtautahi Christchurch) in late-2025.

Petroglyphs, Craig Foltz, Compound Press, 2024

Petroglyph
 
Our hands are stapled together & large wooden spikes have been driven through our feet. We wriggle at the prospect of unseen predators. Despite these somewhat uncomfortable conditions there is abundant food & a clean supply of water. There is no shortage of creative inputs.
Even to a corpse, the water in winter is cold. Our bodies are treated like ice floes & pitched over the side of a rusty trawler. This is how they treat dissidents these days, so most of us have abandoned our subversive activities.
Years later, when I resurface for a gulp of air, I find the world has become encrusted in a spiky vegetal material that slices those who would touch it into thin ribbons. Here comes the moon; drawn back & forth across this unforgiving surface by its yearning to touch the ocean, until there is nothing of it left.

The readings

‘Petroglyph – 2’

‘Petroglyph – 3’

Craig Foltz is the author of four full length books of poetry/prose (which have been published in some order by either Compound Press or Ugly Duckling Presse). In addition, his work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. He currently lives and works in New Plymouth. For more info and collaborative proposals see here.

Compound Press page

The World
Is Still Here

dream awake
awake dream

pages weeping
weeping pages

breakfast porridge
porridge breakfast

mountain hope
hope mountain

tomato salad
salad tomato

eyes opening
opening eyes

trickle song
song trickle

Paula Green

Blue Hour, Jo McNeice, Otago University Press, 2024

Tidal 

Through a fisheye lens 
through & through. 

The psychiatrist says
‘It’s your life.’

White lights shine out of paper, 
blue lights in the air. 

Yellow lights appear  
on people’s heads. 

Drops of blood 
on my hands- 

ants through desert sand. 
Angels like carrier pigeons 

darken the sky. 
A postcard came this morning 
soaking wet: 

Resolution in the sea. 
Cherry tree. Fish eggs, 
dulse & carrageenan. 
Silver tongues, catching tiny fish. 
Messages delivered through  
serrated teeth. 
Now just you wait  
with your mermaid scales 
desiccating.  Buried in 
the sand. Eyes open,  
waves washing over 
the top of you. 

All this life blooming  
in the water.
All this life blooming  
in water.

Jo McNeice

The readings

‘Not out of the woods yet’

‘Aro Valley’

‘Blue Hour’

Jo McNeice completed a MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters,   Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington in 2013. Her poems have been published in  Turbine|Kapohau, Sport, JAAM, Takahe and Mayhem.  She lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara.

Otago University Press page

Slender Volumes, Richard von Sturmer, Spoor Books, 2024

76. No-Mind is the Way

Deep in thought, working on the structure of a new book, I didn’t
realize that I’d walked down the hill and across the park. I was
brought back to the present by the cries of two children playing on
a seesaw. “Seesaw” comes from the French ci-ça, meaning this-that.
Left-right. Up-down. Earth-sky. But why, I asked myself, this need
for definitions? Better to feel the solid earth under your feet and
then your body being jolted into the sky.

Richard von Sturmer

A review

300 elaborations on koans collected by poet-philosopher Eihei Dōgen. Richard von Sturmer’s 300 poems form a mosaic of recognition epiphany memory physical anchors dreamkites with senses on alert with refractions reflections multiple lights.

“When my glasses become dirty, I reach for a cloth to wipe them
clean. When my mind becomes dull or distracted, I go outside and
study the clouds.”

from 19. ‘Ordinary Mind Is the Way’

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.

Publisher Erena Shingade has written an insightful introduction, and has produced a book that feels good in the hand. And as Anne Kennedy says on the book’s blurb, “I do believe Slender Volumes is von Sturmer’s most miraculous work”. Yes!

“Indeed. But best not to get your hopes up. Now that it autumn,
go into the back garden and search among the fallen leaves; there
are sure to be some gold ones among the brown.”

from 7. ‘Yangshan’s “It Is Not That There Is No Enlightenment”‘

The readings

1. ‘Qingyuang’s Whisk’

15. ‘Xuansha’s “One Bright Pearl”‘

48. ‘Xuansha’s Blank Letter’

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