‘Kawarau River’, oil on linen, 2024

Headwaters

Over time, Michael Hight has produced two distinctive but connected bodies of work, his beehive paintings and his black paintings. The beehive paintings present the beehive as found arrangements on landscapes, often southern, with the allure of sky and mountain incandescent. The black paintings (the night paintings, the nocturnes) offer an arrangement of objects, usually scoured from secondhand shops, with miniature leavenings of landscape. The parallel series are in direct contrast, in opposition you could say, as they navigate night and day, shadows and light, and yet bridges are present.

Headwaters is a continuation of Michael’s nocturnal paintings, with objects and motifs that have appeared in previous works, a return to beloved locations, especially southern rivers. A wellspring of motifs, symbols, ideas, stories.

‘Rangitata River’, oil on linen, 2024

Still life. I begin with the painting as still life, a composition of objects that immediately resist confinement to immobility. Herein lies the delight and power of Michael’s artworks to transport the viewer to moments of wonder. A form of psychological, intellectual, physical movement. Each object is a surrogate vessel of memory, a repository of history, a wellspring of narrative. The objects, so often time-battered and chipped, evoke curiosity. Their function often elusive, lost in long ago activities, and yet here we are, we still heat, make light and measure. I go dream-roaming in the kerosene burners, the scales and funnel, the lanterns and old boat. The windmill, the barometer, the ornate umbrella stand, the cake stand.

Art becomes an intimate trigger point. Personal private idiosyncratic. Looking at the suite is meditation. Still life as a weave of light and dark. And perhaps in this interplay, we can see how Headwaters draws day closer, dissolving the border between light and dark, enhancing the juxtaposition between interior and exterior. Shadows on the wall favour domestic life as opposed to the external world. The tablecloth on the ledge establishes a connecting domestic chord. Objects that make light resonate.

And the beehive presence returns us to Michael’s other series, the iconic mountain peaks referencing beauty and fragility, the beehives signalling the art of transformation, the conversion of pollen into honey, an eco system under threat.

‘Kawaitaki River’, oil on linen, 2024

And yet the dark is ubiquitous. It is there in the embedded narratives. At finger’s touch, yet out of reach. And looking becomes mourning, and mourning becomes haunting. Mesmerising. Moving. There is an underlying ledger of our repeated need to measure and manipulate the land and its people. Colonisation. Climate catastrophes. Consumerism. An impulse to create. A set of scales weighs a measure of snow-capped mountain peak. A birdcage confines another. This insistence on control. And then. And then again. The scales shift. Here I am standing in the Kitchener Street gallery and the set of scales is my grandmother weighing flour and butter and making scones, and the dinghy debris is a thousand sea voyages off the coast of Northland, the bean slicer slicing Pop’s divine green beans. Ah.

‘Te Awa Whakatipu / Dart River’, oil on linen, 2024

On this tablecloth ledge, I am measuring beauty and reverie and loss. Artist becomes poet, storyteller, recorder, colourist, dream catcher. Art offers solace and point of protest. Harmony, disharmony, cryptic symbols, overt connections. I am reminded of the joy of listening to music when you go beyond speech, yet overflow with words. Feeling as much as thinking.

Art as conversation. Yes, it’s you and the painting, that private discourse, those illuminating moments you store to revisit. Three dear friends unexpectedly sent me responses to Michael’s show. Gregory O’Brien looked at it on line, while Anna Jackson and her mother, and Harriet Allan visited it in person.

I love all of them, I especially loved the one with the glass tubes, but the light on everything is so wonderful, I loved the textures in the one with the oil stove and weights, the brush strokes, and I love the shadows on the black in them all, but all of them are so haunting and resonant, with that dream like shimmer about them where everything has a symbolic feel but in such an open way, not like an equation but like an aura. Anna Jackson

What a marvellous suite of work, I do think he’s a marvel . . . great to see such purpose and continuity, and such a burrowing down into the subconscious mind and memory. Gregory O’Brien

They are like cryptic crosswords, I kept circling the room, seeing connections and savouring the amazing artistry. There’s also black humour: the mountains on cake stands, a clown, the river boat chopped up for firewood, the bird ornament flying away from an empty cage. The sense of looking at our country’s past as if in a kind of museum, leads the viewer to think of where we are now and where we are going (the river perhaps). Harriet Allan

A few weeks ago I wrote a piece about Shane Cotton’s exhibition at Gow Langsford Gallery in Onehunga. My comments returned to me as I looked at Michael’s show because they were equally applicable. Swap the figure for the object:

Movement. Shane’s art generates incredible movement. The figure painted in contemplation, walking or meditation renders me still, for an exquisite pause, until the prolonged moment slips and shifts into an acute awareness of body breath, heart beat, light, darkness, and again light.

I mentioned my partner Michael, and my occasional walks up to his studio:

Every now and then I walk up the hill to Michael’s studio and find myself in a state of awe, astonishment, wonder. I am not weeping but I am experiencing the electric fields of looking, contemplation, uplift.

To stand in the Gow Langsford’s city gallery, and absorb the suite of paintings on the walls, away from the soundtrack of bush birdsong and west coast salty air, is to again feel the electricity of looking. There was a woman walking round the gallery when I was there, her word wonder filling the room. It was contagious.

Art matters. We will continue to make art, to sing the praises of art, to inspire our children to make art, to peer into the depths of the unknown alongside the familiar, to bring history to the surface, and to speak in myriad voices and visual keys. I am with my friends on this, I love this show. These headwaters of curiosity.

Gow Langsford Gallery page

Over the summer months Poetry Shelf is hosting a series of readings from the incredible range of poetry collections published by mainstream and boutique presses in Aotearoa in 2024. It’s my Poetry Shelf toast to local poetry.

Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit, Emma Neale
Otago University Press, 2024
cover artwork by Laura Williams, design by Fiona Moffat

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. I will be posting a review of her new collection in January, in my summer season of reviews and readings.

Scapegoat

Once, a stranger on a long coach ride
showed me the birthmark beneath her sleeve
as if it was a cherished photo
in a delicate heirloom locket.
It looked a little like a red-inked crowwith stooped head and slim, folded tail.

She told me that far back along
the cobweb lines of family history,
was another woman whose honest body
shared the mark and who like a weather vane
was made to spin in the bitter gale of men’s fears.

Turn around. Show your skin. Lay your breast bare.

When what they saw
made them weak at the knees
as if thighs, waist, nipples were not soft
but struck like rock against the flint
of their thoughts, they used words
like camouflage to distract and dissemble:
that mole, that smatter of freckles were

the bite, the thumb print of the devil —

her port-wine birthmark
the warm place they might themselves
have stained with a bruising kiss
blunt and crimson as trodden geranium
or blackberries crushed on the tongue, so

Witch, they lied. Witch.

Emma Neale
from Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit
This poem was shortlisted in the Bridport Prize (judged by Liz Berry) this year. 

Photo credit: Caroline Davies

Emma reads ‘Spare change’

Emma reads ‘&’

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

The Summer Readings

David Gregory reads here
Gail Ingram reads here

 
 
 

Tidelines, Kiri Piahana-Wong
Anahera Press, 2024

This is a deceptively slim volume of fourteen poems, most of which have been published elsewhere over several years.

Deceptive, because there are not many poems, and none are very long. Deceptive also because Kiri Piahana-Wong does not pen complicated toikupu, rife with looooong, arcane kupu, nor ripe with over-clever technical tweaks and twists. Rather she is a poet who keeps things simple. Who bares their soul across few words.

So after a rather easy glide through the entire volume in one sitting, the impression may be of ‘just another’ poetry collection.

Nothing could be further from the reality: Tidelines is a profound statement of angst, anxiety (Lorazepam rears up during the poem ironically titled Happiness) and agony, replete with themes pertaining to mamae (pain) and whakamomori (suicide), garnished contrapuntally however with joy and wonder and awe for – while the poet frankly relates personal griefs and dubieties –  they also extol visceral illuminations, often presaged by ngā manu (birds), and presented as a pageant nā te Ao Tūturu (Nature). There is nothing slim whatsoever about these poems, about this collection. Despite some despair, there is bravery in the brevity, there is reconciliation, resilience. Tidelines washes away tragedy and becomes a delight, an oxymoron, a  courageous catharsis in print.  

Piahana-Wong inculcates and parallels Hinerangi, whose own loss of her bethrothed at sea led to her waiting stoically, indeed stochastically, for his reurn to her. Tragically, this never transpired and Hinerangi remained there and remains there still, cast as a set or rocks now known as Te Āhua o Hinerangi.  

Yet, this poet is not a mass of immovable headland. Far from it. Because, in compiling these poems relating some dark days of distress, several scintillas of sorrow, the poet becomes saved, rescues themself. For while during ‘On the day I died‘ –

I felt the unremitting pull
of Hinerangi calling
me, urging me to join her,
jump from the cliff, drown
myself in her distress

Piahana-Wong instead, is delivered by her tūpuna and –

(…) a mighty
gust of wind blew me back
from the edge of the cliff
and away

Indeed, by volume’s end, we read in the final poem titled – again somewhat ironically –  ‘In the beginning’ –

Sometimes, on the
right day, with the
wind in the west and
the sea gleaming,
I even catch myself
on the edge of song.

The dedication in the early pages of Tidelines is ‘For the lost. May you be found.’ To which I would now add, ‘This poetry collection will certainly help!’

Mō ngā ngaro. Kia kitea koe. Ka tino āwhina tēnei pukapuka toikupu!

Vaughan Rapatahana

Kiri Piahana-Wong is a poet, editor and publisher at Anahera Press. She is of Ngāti Ranginui, Chinese and Pākehā ancestry. Her writing has appeared in over forty journals and anthologies, including Essential NZ Poems, Landfall, Tātai Whetū: Seven Māori Women Poets in Translation, Ora Nui, Vā: Stories by Women of the Moana and more. Her previous publications are Night Swimming (Anahera Press, 2013) and (as co-editor with Vaughan Rapatahana) Te Awa o Kupu (Penguin Random House, 2023). A second poetry collection, Give Me An Ordinary Day, is forthcoming. Kiri lives in Whanganui with her family.

Anahera Press Tidelines page

Vaughan Rapatahana (Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Te Whiti) is an award-winning poet, novelist, writer and anthologist widely published across several genres in both his main languages, te reo Māori and English. He is a critic of the agencies of English language proliferation and the consequent decimation of Indigenous tongues. His most recent poetry collection, written in te reo Māori (with English language ‘translations’), is titled te pāhikahikatanga/incommensurability. It was published by Flying Islands Books in Australia in 2023. W=ith Kiri Piahan-Wong he co-edited anthology of Māori poetry, Te Awa o Kupu (Penguin,20230) Vaughan lives in Mangakino.

Based on a True Story, David Gregory
Sudden Valley Press, 2024

Finding Your Own way Home

 

There is a speed limit
on Memory Lane
and the fog doesn’t help.

I am racing my sister
to the next recollection
because somebody has
to claim the truth.

The truth is, there isn’t any
in this fanciful landscape.

You place the house in the sun,
while I remember the rain.

But there is the constant
of our mother,
standing in the doorway
after he left.

And you, sister, on your high horse
and me on my old green bike.

 

David Gregory

What is it that imbues a poetry collection with charisma, that insists you spend as much time with it as possible, that gets you thinking (even more) about what poetry can do and be? Is it the invisible strings that reattach you to the world as you read? Poetry that gets you imagining feeling pondering. Poetry that pulls you towards the unknown, that might settle and resettle, that is deeply and poignantly human. That delivers a fascinating poetry-mesh of motifs, subjects, references, allusions, withholdings. That holds you in clearings and carries you along pathways. Charismatic poetry is all of this and more. Subtle, blazing, nuanced, half shuttered, open hearted.

My life is the colour of water
nothing of itself
but what it borrows.

 

from ‘The Colour of Water’

David Gregory’s new collection, Based on a True Story, is perhaps one of my favourite poetry reads of the year. I never do best picks. Book of the year kind of thing. But reading this book has been exactly what I needed. So here I go, this is my poetry book of 2024.

The collection is divided into three sections that resound with narrative possibilities: ‘Once Upon a Time’, ‘Intermission’, ‘The End of the Beginning’.

The opening poem, ‘Finding your way home’, reinforces the expectation that we are entering poetry fields of travel, that memory will propel trains of thought, that memory is inconstant as much as it is necessary. In the opening poem, there is sun and rain, a high horse and a green bike, and more than anything, pathos. What is spoken fuels what is withheld, what is unspoken fertilises what is said.

Think of this collection as time travel, but also consider it as a meditation on time. There is the way time stalls as you read and the outside world dissolves to the point it is just you and the text. A slow pace of contemplation permeates the writing, and time itself is a recurring theme.

There is a focus on both the particular and the personal that stretches wide to draw in universal themes and motifs: war, sky, the weather, order, chaos, reading the world, floods, flight, beauty, writing the world whether exterior or internal. There is the way those we love might disappear into the shadows after they die, into the slipperiness of unknowing, leaving the mutations of family memories, the footprints of love. I am especially drawn to the poems where the mother or father make an entry. Poignant. One moment I am brimming with a sad ache and the next, moving tenderness.

Her life smoored
in the cold hearth
of her marriage.

 

from ‘Smoor’

We hold the hand of large ideas
big as parents
and so many years
from understanding.

 

from ‘Are We There Yet?’

Ah, I am drawn to poems that deliver philosophy as much as they deliver heart. To take an idea and hold it on your tongue and savour the taste. How does this work you might ask? Let it linger as you taste the sweetness sourness connections. I loiter upon, ‘The sea is the music that plays itself’, I am stalled by ‘Recollection is an old street in a seeping dusk’, and of course, ‘It’s not the speed of light that counts/ as much as / the speed of darkness’.

The future is blank paper
untrodden sand
and the sea’s voice.

Tell me it is not
a story written over
all the other stories?

 

from ‘Based on a True Story’

Linguistic surprises add to the delight in reading this collection; the utter love of what words can do is contagious. Whether it is aural chords, an unanticipated word choice, an agile simile, lithe language that serves our ears ‘Our shadows puddled out before us’, ‘A fine sieve in the sky today / giving us a dust of drizzle’, ‘I peel onions, / watch famine’s spare ribs / through the fly’s facets, television’.

Heart is what I crave when I read poetry this year. I open any page in David’s collection and I am breathing in heart.

David Gregory arrived in Christchurch NZ from the UK on a three year contract in 1982 and found a supportive literary community here. In spite of spending a year back in England on a job exchange, the pull of NZ was strong for him and his family. That whanau has grown to include four grandchildren. He has worked on coastal environmental issues for most of his working life. He has combined this with establishing his reputation as a New Zealand poet with four books to his credit. His poetry has appeared in many NZ publications and a number of anthologies and has been performed at venues in NZ and overseas. David is a founder member of the Canterbury Poets Collective. With the late John O’Connor, he established Sudden Valley Press (SVP) and is the current Manager and one of the editors.

Sudden Valley Press page

You can hear David read here as part of Poetry Shelf’s summer readings.

Final Whistle
Ōngarue, 1996

Now it’s happened, even the sound is startling
like a braking train, or a morepork hunting.
All of us are here in the bulging cookhouse,
laughing and eating.

When we started here, I was told the men would
need a bit of mothering. Sure, they did, but
it was like a family. Well I don’t know
why I am crying,

thinking of the bush and its eerie sadness,
rain collapsing all of the things we made here.
Still, I know they’ve sawn every dip and ridge, left
nothing of value.

Airini Beautrais
from Flow: Whanganui River Poems, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2017

I have loved all Airini’s poetry collections, numerous poems have travelled with me. I have picked ‘Final Whistle’, from Flow, to share. It’s a haunting poem that folds and unfolds a thousand times as you read. Just as the collection does. In 2017 I wrote of the book: “The sumptuous choral effect produces so many layers, it is a book that demands multiple attentions.” You can see this poetic succulence in ‘Final Whistle’, this ability to produce myriad chords, shadows and light, presence and absence, intricate feeling.

In 2017, to celebrate the arrival of Flow, Airini and I embarked upon an email conversation over the course of a week. Such generosity on her part. Reading the conversation all these years later, it resonates so profoundly. The way we can slow down to a gentle pace and absorb poetry, fiction, music, art. Whether as readers or writers. Feels quite special to have done this leisurely, satisfying thing.

Here is the start of our conversation, words that remind me why I dedicate time and energy to poetry:

“After reading the first few pages of your new collection, Flow: Whanganui River Poems, I felt the kind of spark that travels like electricity through your body as you read: heart, mind, ear, eye, everything on alert. When I was doing my Masters in Italian I read the fragmented fiction of Gianni Gelati. His writing was poetic, strange, addictive. With Narratori delle pianure (Storytellers of the plains), he travelled the length of the River Po, collecting stories from people who lived there. His people, his river, yet while the river dictated the itinerary, it was less of a protagonist. Instead the people he met flourished on the page in their out-of-the-ordinary ordinariness.

I had the idea at page 24 of Flow to have an email conversation with you as I read. I wondered how my relations with the poems might change over the course of reading; the reading would act as my surrogate river with its various currents and tributaries. I wondered how I would shift in view of the poetics, the ideas, stories, characters and the river itself. The book fills me with curiosity and delight at what poems can do.”

You can read the conversation here.

Lizzie De Vegt, a singer / musician, made ‘Final Whistle’ into a song. You can listen here.

Excerpt from The Beautiful Afternoon (THWUP 2024)

Airini Beautrais is a multi-genre writer and educator who lives in Whanganui. Her most recent collection of poetry is Flow: Whanganui River Poems (VUP 2017). Her collection of essays, The Beautiful Afternoon, was published in 2024.

Over the summer months Poetry Shelf is hosting a series of readings from the incredible range of poetry collections published by mainstream and boutique presses in Aotearoa in 2024. You can hear David Gregory read here.

anthology (n.) a collection of flowers 
Gail Ingram, Pūkeko Publications 2024

anthology (n.) a collection of flowers is like an ode to nature, a rich illustrated compendium of native flowers, that is encyclopedic, poetic, personal and that reaches out scented tendrils and draws nourishment from other poets, history, music, symbolism, myth, eco-fragility and wide ranging experience. Each poem is labelled with English, Te Reo and botanical names, a few facts and a photograph. The poetry is as multi-hued as the flowers, presenting a seeded and blooming meadow of past present future.

Gail reads two poems

‘They is gender diverse’

‘Grandmother and granddaughter choose a tattoo’

Definition of a buttercup

It’s easy with one word:
buttercup
but difficult with many:
it equals the sun, each calling
to the other; yellow shining
like melted butter in a porcelain cup 
under your chin
do you like butter?
grows using photosynthesis
and “water” (see later poem); 
hairy leaves as described by
alpine botanists 
with microscopic vision; 
it roots itself to
earth in a goldilocks position
between rocks, in bogs; the chance
that you stumble across one
looking up between milky
500-million-year-old karst 
under the giddy sun
this new year’s day 
in some new millennium, spinning outwards 
in an ever-expanding universe with other 
star-spiralling galaxies 
is so
immeasurably 
small.

Gail Ingram (she, her, they) writes from the Port Hills of Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand and is author of three collections of poetry. Her latest collection, anthology (n.) a collection of flowers (Pūkeko Publications 2024) weaves poetry and botanical and mountain art. Her second and third collections Some Bird (2023) and Contents Under Pressure (2019) were published by Sudden Valley Press and Pūkeko Publications respectively. Her work has been widely published in local and international journals and anthologies, such as Poetry New Zealand, Landfall, Atlanta Review, The Spinoff, Cordite Poetry Review and Barren Magazine. Awards include winning the Caselberg (2019) and New Zealand Poetry Society (2016) international poetry prizes. She has edited for NZ Poetry Society’s flagship magazine a fine line, Flash Frontier: An Adventure in Short Fiction and takahē. She teaches at Write On School for Young Writers and holds a Master of Creative Writing (Distinction). 

New Literary Award in NZ goes to Brian Turner

The Central Otago Environmental Society, COES, has 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. This is a new national award in New Zealand, and is backed by the National Library of New Zealand and by former sponsors of the NZ Poet Laureate Award, John and Wendy Buck of Te Mata Wines.

Brian Turner was appointed the fourth Te Mata Estate NZ Poet Laureate in 2003-2005.

“During his tenure and in the following years, we formed a strong friendship with many shared interests, growing to admire him as an outstanding New Zealander,” says John Buck. “His myriad achievements justify the title of Poet Laureate of Nature, which we fully support.”

Peter Ireland spoke on behalf of the National Library, home to the New Zealand Poet Laureate Award.  “Brian’s whakapapa in terms of speaking to and of the environment in New Zealand is founded on a lifetime’s presence in our landscape, both the physical and literary forms of it. He is much loved, respected and recognised in these spheres and to acknowledge that with this honour is apt and fitting.”

As part of the award, there will be a sculpture of one of Brian’s poems in his loved landscape of Central Otago.

“It’s remarkable and warming to be given this award,” Brian said. “New Zealand has had the means to work hard to protect nature. Instead we’ve often cruelly damaged a lot of our forests and our lands and waters. It was important I was a supporter of environmental concerns, taking part and drawing attention to the respect required for our natural world.”

Brian came to know the land and waters of New Zealand intimately. Now 80, he was a national sportsman, an offshore sailor, a fly fisherman, a road cyclist, and and a mountaineer, climbing several major peaks including Aoraki/Mount Cook. He traversed the land and the rivers and wrote of them and for them; his environmental activism extending for over fifty years. There is much wisdom in his observation that “an attack against the Body of Nature is an attack against oneself”.

As well as the NZ Poet Laureate award, Brian Turner has been awarded numerous awards, including an Hon D Litt from the University of Otago, an ONZOM for his services to literature and the environment, the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry, the Commonwealth  Poetry prize and several national book awards for poetry. Much of his writing has been in service to the natural world.

To celebrate this much deserved award, Jillian Sullivan, Peter Ireland and Paula Green have each picked a poem of Brian’s to share.

3 poems

Taieri Days

How far off those days, never mine
and never not mine, when
the only poems I knew
were the bursting greens of willows
by the Taieri in spring,
greens of cress and water weed
and the grass that sheep grazed
incognito because they all
looked much the same.

But the sky never did,
the clouds never did
shaped like tubes, plates, slats,
piles of rubble, knucklebones
and bunting streaming before the stars.

The river sprang and shone,
had a shifty and open
arrangement with skies
arcing and stretching
over the Maungatua
and Rock and Pillar ranges.

I didn’t want to own
or sell anything so grand
and communal as land;
all I needed
was the right to belong,
one’s spirit all the colours
of the spectrum,
like the sky.

Brian Turner
from Quadrant, v 42, 1998

I love this poem, imagining Brian in the hills and by the river, only needing to belong. A year ago when I asked him how he finds contentment, he said straight away, “I like the formation of the clouds,” and here they are in this poem, first published in Quadrant in 1998.

Jillian Sullivan

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

It is hard to settle on one poem by Brian, but the heading quote by Gary Snyder tipped my choice in favour of ‘Just this’, the title poem of the book published in 2009. It has been lovely returning to Brian’s poems, though it’s not as though they ever leave you. To his voice – bardic, truly wise, looking at the world through the eye of the world, and the heart. Helping us to accept and to enjoy our predicament.

Peter Ireland

Deserts, for instance

The loveliest places of all
are those that look as if
there’s nothing there
to those still learning to look

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

I cannot think of a more apt poet to be the inaugural NZ Poet Laureate of Nature. Brian’s poetry has provided paths and windows that enrich our connections with nature. In every book. In myriad ways. His poems sing with the music of Central Otago, they glimmer with the light and beauty of skies mountains plains. Poetry that brings nature to life within poetic forms is a vital aid, not just today in these toxic planet and human depleting times, but across the centuries. Like Peter, Brian’s poetry sticks with me, as a tonic in the difficulty of a day, as a way of breathing in what matters, what is important. I have lived with an artist for eons who is known for his Central Otago beehive works, so the southern landscapes resonate deeply for me. Perhaps this adds to the incredible effect Brian’s poetry has upon my heart. The poem I have chosen shows how a handful of words can unfold into so much more. Sublime.

Te Herenga Waka University page

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. He lives in Central Otago.

Based on a True Story, David Gregory, Sudden Valley Press, 2024

Over the summer months Poetry Shelf is hosting a series of readings from the incredible range of poetry collections published by mainstream and boutique presses in Aotearoa in 2024. I begin with David Gregory. I have dipped in and out of this glorious book over the past months. It has haunted me. It has delighted me. It has moved me. Now I get to hear him read two of the poems. Listening to him read this, I want more! Now I get to read the book again in his voice.

Here’s to a festival of summer readings on Poetry Shelf. Thanks to all the poets who are contributing.

a reading

‘Half a moon’

‘Half a Prayer’

David Gregory arrived in Christchurch NZ from the UK on a three year contract in 1982 and found a supportive literary community here. In spite of spending a year back in England on a job exchange, the pull of NZ was strong for him and his family. That whanau has grown to include four grandchildren.

He has worked on coastal environmental issues for most of his working life. He has combined this with establishing his reputation as a New Zealand poet with three books to his credit and a fourth due to be launched soon.His poetry has appeared in many NZ publications and a number of anthologies and has been performed at venues in NZ and overseas.

David is a founder member of the Canterbury Poets Collective. With the late John O’Connor, himself a noted poet, he established Sudden Valley Press (SVP).  SVP has published over thirty well-received poetry books. He is the current Manager and one of the editors for Sudden Valley Press.

Sudden Valley Press page

Love poem

Houses are likened to shoeboxes but shoeboxes are
not likened to houses. A car is likened to a heap but
a heap is not likened to a car. A child is a terror but
terror is not a child. A business might be a sinking ship
but a sinking ship is no business. A bedroom is a dog’s
breakfast but a dog’s breakfast is not a bedroom. A bad
review might be a raspberry but a raspberry is not a bad
review. A haircut is likened to a disaster but a disaster
is not a haircut. Books can be turkeys but turkeys are
never books. A holiday might be a riot but a riot is not
a holiday. A garden might become a headache but a
headache is not a garden. I dream about you but you
are not a dream.

Gregory O’Brien
from Beauties of the Octagonal Pool, Auckland University Press, 2021

Over the coming months, the Monday Poem spot will include poetry that has stuck to me over time, poems that I’ve loved for all kinds of reasons.

I have loved Gregory’s poetry across every collection, from Location of the Least Person (Auckland University Press, 1987) to House and Contents (Auckland University Press, 2022). He writes with sweet wit, word agility, sonic attention, across roving subject matter, and with deep-seated heart. I am always moved, surprised, in awe, nourished. The humour in ‘Love poem’ gets me every time, and then, when I reach the end, and the world stalls, I take a long inward breath, and say, yes, this is what poetry can do.

So let’s do poetry!

Gregory O’Brien’s recent projects include an exhibition of poems and paintings at the Manchester Poetry Library, U. K., Jan-Feb 2024, and  ‘Local Knowledge’, an exhibition of collaborative paintings made with Euan Macleod, which is at Te Manawa, Palmerston North, until March 2025.