Set your Sunday night on fire with some of the fiercest poets Ōtautahi has to offer, with all proceeds going to the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa. The current government’s favourite poet Tusiata Avia heads up a line up of poets that speak truth to power; Juanita Hepi, Ariana Tikao, Danielle O’Halloran, Davien Gray and Melanie McKerchar; all doing feature length sets. Join us at the darkroom for a night of powerful performance, that will fill your cup, and heat your blood. This government can try and keep the arts down, but we will keep fighting!
R18. R.O.A.R.
Please note the building is only accessible by stairs. For accessibility assistance please email info@darkroom.bar
darkroom 336A St Asaph St, Christchurch Central, Christchurch 8011, New Zealand
Slim Volume, James Brown, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024
Love Poem
A chair is a good place to sit. You spend a week with a poem. Then another week. Not your poem. Somebody else’s.
You become friends, then very good friends. You like the poem a lot. Maybe you are a little in love with the poem.
Every morning, the poem washes its limbs in a mountain spring. You close your eyes and watch. Then you talk to one another like water.
This probably goes without saying but you say it anyway.
James Brown
What better delight than to open James Brown’s eighth poetry collection, Slim Volume. The blurb on the back provides a perfect invitation to enter the collection’s cycling trails, its widening itineraries: ‘A slim volume of verse, like a bicycle, offers us fresh and joyful and sometimes troubling ways of seeing the world.’ In a nutshell, it’s why I love turning to poetry in states of emergency or dillydally and seek the electric currents of words.
Begin with notions of travel, the ever-shifting multifaceted view from cycle saddle, train window or pedestrian stroll. Whether cycling or walking, things catch the eye and ear, thoughts compound and connect, disintegrate and startle, and you move with the hum and whizzing wheels of memory and anticipation. Similarly poetry, whether reading or writing, is an exhilarating form of travel. Especially reading James Brown, especially savouring the sweet whirr of the line, the turning back for a second look to see things afresh, the unmistakable accumulation of physical joy.
Slim Volume draws you into the intimacy of letting things slip, of layering and leavening a collection so that in one light it is a portrait of making poetry, in another light the paving stones of childhood. The presence of people that matter glint, and then again, in further arresting light, you spot traces of the physical world. Try reading this as a poetry handbook and the experience is gold. There is an invitation to see any subject matter as ‘worthy’ of poems (for example, cheese in pies), musing on who wants to read angry poetry or wayward words or making poems your own. And am I stretching the communal art of making sandcastles to consider poetry as a communal art (oodles of theory on this)? Perhaps the poem that stuck the firmest is ‘Love Poem’ (poem above). It’s the best ode to reading a poem I have read in ages.
And that is exactly why I love this book so much. I am sitting back in the chair of reading and taking things slow, and then whizzing in downhill glee, and then it’s back to travelling slow. Savouring the wit, the power of looking, listening.
The readings
‘The Wedge of Light on a Chair’ from Slim Volume
‘This isn’t buying …‘ unpublished
James Brown‘s previous poetry collections are The Tip Shop (2022), Selected Poems (2020), Floods Another Chamber (2017), Warm Auditorium (2012), The Year of the Bicycle (2006), which was a finalist in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2007, Favourite Monsters (2002), Lemon (1999), and Go Round Power Please (1996), which won the Best First Book Award for Poetry. James works as an editor and teaches the Poetry Workshop at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington.
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.
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.
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.
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
Author C. K. Stead in London
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.
. . . ] 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.
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.
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.
NZ Poetry Shelf 