your skin becomes a dark damp winter cloak. july dew necklacing your chest holding your lungs close.
some weeks it’s like that. like your mouth is full of stones. the past a pebble stuck between teeth.
practice patience. ride the offbeat tracks your ancestors lay down. church organ your ribs.
from ‘Donnnie Darko’
Rex Letoa Paget’s debut collection, Manuali’i, was the perfect book to choose from my poetry pile. It is like a heart imprint on the page, and at this current smash of inhumanity, we need heart. I am immediately drawn into the initial acknowledgements, a form of mihi to the poet’s mother and father, to the way each parent shapes the two halves of his ‘good heart’. It feels, at this threshold of reading, I am entering a book of gratitude. Uncharacteristically, I leap to the acknowledgments page at the back of the book, and again the bloodlines of writing and living are underlined. Writing poetry can be so very private; the intimate seams, folds and pockets of living may find their way into a poem’s form. Yet writing poetry, along with its passage into the world, is so often in debt to family, friends, mentors, place, the books we love, the narratives that affect us.
your heart has always been a jukebox first lit with mum’s acoustic guitar bellowing to your nightmares freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose dad’s empire of dirt you dust off ask him what his favourite is when the night is the dark side of the moon. you gave yourself up. burned out supernova falling thru gravity. come with your silence with your wild your blackberry thorns your mother’s music box your father’s rusted sapelu your nana-stitched knuckles your grandfather-clock gold teeth balance you scaled from the sea sheep wool you pull and gift to fledglings.
from ‘The path doesn’t exist til you carve it’
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.
A reading
‘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.
Last week, World Suicide Prevention Day was marked by readings from Otago poets on the theme of mental health and loss; themes which Lynda Scott Araya, Diane Brown, Liz Breslin, Majella Cullinane, Clare Lacey and Mikaela Nyman have all written powerfully about. They were brought together by Linda Collins, local author, poet and editor (Loss Adjustment, Sign Language for the Death of Reason) with the support of Michelle Elvy of NZSA, the aim being to share, as well as raise awareness and funds for Life Matters – Suicide Prevention Trust.
‘As soon as I approached poets for the reading, everyone was incredibly enthusiastic about the idea. The event was deeply moving, with poetry the star, threading truths, feelings and connections. It could have been a sad occasion, with the death of my daughter integral to my creativity, but the kindness of poets carried me through – and upwards, softly and hopefully.’ Linda Collins
The poetry shared had a deep impact on all who were there, and it’s hoped this special reading will now become an annual event.
Dyspraxia, from the Greek: Dys. Bad, difficult. Praxia. Perform.
My clumsy child, we trip up through life together and even attempt your maths schoolwork.
But sequencing is beyond us. Marvel at our frozen brains. Marvel at our fingers, the lack of fine motor skills. Our dead hands drop pens on the floor. Again. Again! My child cries: Enough! No more reining in. She runs, I run from classroom, up the hill. Galumphing,
Whoops-a-daisy crash is us tumbling over and over. Our knees are bloodied, we struggle to get up. Our neurons sputter, stuck in recesses of brain wiring.
Able at least to gasp, laugh, we surrender to the doing of nothing, to languor on soft grass. Dissing the dys, just us; stasis.
Linda Collins
recaptcha / all I ask is
prove that you’re not a robot check all the boxes with crosswalks trafc lights, fre hydrants, buses, trains
prove that you’re not a robot optimise, improve, do more do right, write lists
prove that you’re not a robot cry quiet with the rain, close your eyes, dream electric
prove that you’re not a robot so you can progress to the next and the next screen and
check all the boxes with sidewalks so the robots can learn how to drive check the hydrants, stop at the lights
prove that you have skin in the game pay with plastic, use adaptogens you haven’t touched another human in weeks
if a leaf falls can you if a leaf falls can you if a leaf falls can you
prove that you’re not a robot teach the robots you know what’s what check all the boxes with red lights, greens
you cut, you bleed, you sew, you click prove that you’re not a robot submit
Liz Breslin from In Bed with the Feminists (Dead Bird Books, 2021)
6pm Speakeasy @ Austin Club: a spoken word event in the heart of Ōtautahi’s CBD.
Coming at you live with a fresh new feature, last Thursday of every month.
MCed by Jor Dansaren and generously hosted by Austin Club Basement Bar – 161 Cashel Street, Christchurch.
Tickets available on following scale:
$5 – early bird/concession
$10 – general admission
$15 – generous admission
Tickets of each type limited – please consider choosing a ticket according to your capability to contribute. For any ticketing queries, please contact Jor Dansaren via Facebook..
Donations also welcome!
Door sales may be available, cash only.
Open mic sign ups from 5.45pm. Open mic kicks off 6pm with feature to follow.
September feature: Gail Ingram!
Gail Ingram is an award-winning writer from Ōtautahi, author of anthology (n.) a collection of flowers (Pūkeko Publications 2024), Some Bird (SVP 2023) and Contents Under Pressure (Pūkeko Publications 2019). Winner of both Caselberg and NZPS International Poetry Competitions, her poetry and short fiction has appeared across all five continents. She is a creative-writing teacher for Write On and managing editor for a fine line. She prefers the mountains to the sea.
In the house that lives by poetry tea is made the old, slow way, or if you prefer, Turkish coffee heated in a copper cezve on the stove.
Waiting is always a pleasure.
In the house that lives by poetry, armchairs sag like soft cocoons and a little bird rings a bell like Eckhart Tolle.
In winter, the air in the house smells like hay in Ted Kooser’s barn on a warm Nebraska morning, or the embers of a bonfire on Eagle Pond.
In summer, there are always poets in residence no matter what date the obituaries. Their books we give due diligence and leaks and cracks in the walls
are diligently ignored.
Jan FitzGerald
Jan FitzGerald is a full-time artist and poet who lives in Napier. She is the author of four previous poetry collections, the most recent being A question bigger than a hawk (The Cuba Press, 2022), and she has been shortlisted twice in the Bridport Prize poetry competition.
breathe in the salty air the ocean weathered sand the stuttering dotterels the pink light shifting through dark clouds the concerto of waves the cantata of sea birds the not-a-soul in sight
carry home and breathe in beauty when your legs fail and the world is out of tune
Paula Green
Voting for NZ Bird of the Year closes today at 5pm. You can vote here.
So many of our birds are under threat for all kinds of reasons. I love Forest & Bird’s annual initiative to bring the birds in Aotearoa into sharper focus. I have so many favourites. Living in an expansive bush clearing a skip and hop from the Tasman Sea, we are rich in bird life. So special. In the end, I voted for the dotterel at Te Henga – so precious. The locals are so protective, yet some visitors still ignore the signs and set their unleashed dogs running outside the designated area. Really scary as it is always a miracle when fledglings not only arrive but survive.
Join Dead Bird Books writers, Jenny Rockwell, Dominic Hoey, Liam Jacobson and Oliver Green for a night of poetry and stories. Everyone gets a free wine and pizza. There will be books for sale and a general feeling of merriment and joy in the air.
An evening of ecopoetry conversation and poetry reading with Janet Newman and Robin Peace, with host, Helen Lehndorf.
Award-winning local writer, Janet Newman has co-edited, with poet and professor Robert Sullivan, a significant new anthology of ecopoetry in Aotearoa, ‘Koe’. ‘Koe’ charts the genesis, development and heritage of a unique Aotearoa ecopoetry derived from both traditional Māori poetry and the English poetry canon. Janet is also the author of the ecopoetry book, ‘Unseasoned Campaigner’.
Poet Robin Peace recently published her second book, ‘Detritus of Empire’. Drawing from Robin’s long career in geography the book explores the idea of introduced plants as colonisers, echoing the habits of humans. The book weaves Robin’s personal history with the complexities of living in a colonised land. The writing is deft, precise and sensitive.
Janet and Robin will be in conversation with local writer Helen Lehndorf, author of A Forager’s Life and long time eco-writer.
This evening will be nourishment for the mind and an invitation to look more closely at the land, flora and fauna around us.
Living in a clearing in the bush out west, with expanse views of sky and the Waitākere Ranges, we get to appreciate the night sky, the glow of planets and salt and pepper stars. It’s beauty, it’s balm, it’s that sweet moment of contemplation. I often travel to city appointments before the sun comes up, and again the sky is a source of wonder.
I loved looking through my poetry shelves for poems with star glints – yes I fell upon beauty, a gleam here, a night glimmer there, but I was surprised how many of the poems I picked made me feel something. That moved me. Deeply.
Two more themes left in this series, but looks like I am creating a second group, it is such a satisfying thing to do and share. Thanks to all the poets who have contributed.
The poems
Dyslexic Child Makes Errors in the Night Sky
He’s leaning from the moon’s chin and draws new stars with a glow-in-the-dark pastel. The colouring in is messy sometimes. He goes over the edges but the moon doesn’t mind. It lets him scribble on the night so he can try making new colours.
Higher in the dark he uses glitter pen and draws a brid a bored a birrd by mistake. He hugs the moon and cries down its skinny cheeks. ‘It’s all right,’ the moon tells him. ‘Everything is written in the stars.
Jenny Powell from Hats, HeadworX, 2000
What the stars say
I hear bird bones crack, splinter. I hear offal slosh in a bucket.
Matariki have seen it all before — my star companions remain silent. Have they gone mad?
Yes, mad as a meat axe.
I hear gunshots at the growing wall, I hear laughter at cocktail hour out of mouths as wide as mako shark.
The bleached face of Sirius gives no clue, all are catching a ferry to the Isle of the Blessed.
My ageless self trapped in a maimai — who knows how temporary?
It seems I am lasting forever, as long as stories repeat.
I blush and quiver to see myself related to this pale imitation of the gods.
Reihana Robinson from Aue Rona (Steele Roberts, 2012)
My Sister‘s Dead Perfection
You were up in the sky, an absolute star.
You had the ear of God they said — my God nothing matched their love for you dead
nothing on earth was as pure; you were the prototype of girl making good
so I practised reaching your infinite tall, jumped from the roof and the walnut tree
to be perfect too I thought, I can be as dead as you.
Rhian Gallagher from Shift, Auckland University Press, 2011
Virgil at Bedtime
There are glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling which probably won’t peel off. And yes, there are two gates of sleep, sweet heart, it is not just in the morning you have to be careful what side of the bed you choose, there are choices to make day and night, and for the rest of your life. And the ivory gate is glittering but not smiling at you, it is just the way it is shaped like the mouth of a crocodile opening wide, offering futures like vistas, dream that will eat you up. No, the other gate is the gate to choose, sweet heart, and your dreams, if you dream, will be safe as houses and won’t bankrupt you at all – you just have to be dead to go through.
Anna Jackson from Thicket, Auckland University Press, 2011
The Desert Road
Mount Ruapehu breaches clouds — a whale arrested in a dive fluke still planted in the earth.
Driving back through tussock barnacles of shining white and the high ice-creaking calls locate us.
Wet banks move, agitated, through slow day-lights shunt time, whole eras, ahead and behind carry small architecture on great backs.
We cut across this old wake, our father, the suspension shakes and shakes we can’t make the corners fast.
It gets dark and the languages come out in constellations and even though we don’t know how we follow them to familiar places.
Lynn Davidson from Islander, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2019
Old-fashioned Love
Nights are cold, hard as the stars. I wonder whom you dazzle now.
Harry Ricketts from Your Secret Life, HeadworX, 2005
Taking heart for Ian Wedde at Gladstone Vineyard
A big one, by the sound of it the sure beat of an old engine reliable after all
the flash new models have given up the ghost lacking the guts to make it
over the big hill from Wellington to where you now stand and deliver, bare feet
on a Persian rug in fierce sun, and somewhere out of sight, the sly
asthmatic commentary of magpies. True, it’s run down round here, but the grapes
are driving a comeback. You had a head start — hearing, art, an elliptical star —
until, like the Georgians, you ran out of steam. The prescription? Well,
a glass of red a day stops the arteries hardening
they say, and in the end old forms refuse corrosion. Out here things are
as they seem — and so it’s good to see you taking heart, that glad
stone, something unfashionable that suddenly we all can’t get enough of.
Chris Price from Husk, Auckland University Press, 2002
A star like no other
If a star—like a bare bone cleaned of everything pink—took his place, then perhaps that would swing me. I would fail, once again, to be metal.
˜
‘That is sunlight peeking through your seams’, said the moon. ‘That is too much muscle for such a simple act of raising lanterns and holding him close’.
So I dropped my arms, resumed stasis. As it turns out, that is too much sky for a single star to bear.
˜
Stars with sparrow tattoos. Stars with Russian memoirs.
The headlines fall off the pages, go swimming in my morning coffee.
Stars in the arch of an eyebrow. Stars twitching under blankets.
˜
I see stars, and I have written him into mine. I am still brushing his ashes from my sheets.
Chris Tse from He’s So MASC, Auckland University Press, 2018
Dance in jet-dark depth, in star-set height, Lights dancing, west, east, Star-high, heart-deep, All night.
Ursula Bethell from Day and Night, Poems 1924 – 1935, Caxton Press, 1939
we see the stars
walk outside and look up those pearls are a million miles away you can touch them here you can see them here there’s nothing between you and nothing
stand on the beach the sea is chanting riddles in the long night winds a fishing boat way out there trawling floats by the light of stars like pearls
camp in the bush by a bank of glow worms kiwi fossick and slice the night lie on your back and open the flap in the tent of the sky with its eyes wide open
your broken heart a deserted city your whitened bones an empty street your poor blind eyes no stars to see
Jeffrey Paparoa Holman from After Hours Trading & The Flying Squad, Carride Press, 2021
Matariki June 2002
watching the flight of a space shuttle on a cold winter night & marvelling again
that there are people inside this bright light that comes silently out of the southwest
& behind in the northern sky, the seven stars of Matariki, who guided the canoes of hope across the Pacific
to celebrate endeavour & the spirit of discovery
this celestial bridge between rocketry & the ancient belief of stars.
Rangi Faith from Conversation with a Moahunter, Steele Roberts, 2005
The poets
Anna Jackson, poet, anthologist, essayist, critic, fiction writer, grew up in Auckland and now lives in Island Bay, Wellington. She has a DPhil from Oxford and is an associate professor in English literature at Victoria University of Wellington. Anna made her poetry debut in AUP New Poets 1 before publishing six collections with Auckland University Press. Her most recent book, Pasture and Flock: New and Selected Poems, gathers work from her previous collections as well as twenty-five new poems. As a scholar, Anna Jackson is the author of Diary Poetics: Form and Style in Writers’ Diaries 1915–1962 (Routledge, 2010) and, with Charles Ferrall, Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950: The Age of Adolescence (Routledge, 2009). Her volume Actions & Travels: How Poetry Works (AUP, 2022) considers poetry through 100 poems.
Chris Price is based in Wellington, where she teaches the poetry MA at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University. Her first collection of poems, Husk (Auckland University Press, 2002), won the 2002 NZSA Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry and her next book, the genre-busting Brief Lives (Auckland University Press, 2006), was shortlisted in the biography category in the 2007 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. Her subsequent collections are: The Blind Singer (AUP, 2009) and Beside Herself (AUP, 2016).
Chris Tse is New Zealand’s Poet Laureate for 2022-25. He is the author of three poetry collections published by Auckland University Press: How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes, HE’S SO MASC, and Super Model Minority (the latter of which was a finalist for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry). He and Emma Barnes edited Out Here: An Anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ Writers from Aotearoa. His poetry, short fiction, and non-fiction have been recorded for radio and widely published in numerous journals, magazines and anthologies, both in Aotearoa and overseas. He was the editor of The Spinoff’s Friday Poem and Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems 2023. He is currently 2024 resident at the Iowa International Writing Programme.
Harry Ricketts is a poet and literary scholar and has published around 30 books. He has lived in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, since 1981. Until his retirement in 2022, he was a professor in the English Programme at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. His books include the internationally acclaimed The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling (1999) and Strange Meetings: The Lives of the Poets of the Great War (2010). His recent poetry collections include Winter Eyes (2018) and Selected Poems (2021). With historian David Kynaston, he is the co-author of Richie Benaud’s Blue Suede Shoes: The Story of an Ashes Classic (Bloomsbury, 2024). His most recent book with Te Herenga Waka University Press is First Things, a memoir.
Jeffrey Paparoa Holman writes poetry, short fiction, history and memoir. He has published seven volumes of poetry; Best of Both Worlds (history, 2010); The Lost Pilot (memoir, 2013); Now When it Rains (memoir, 2017). As Big As A Father (Steele Roberts, 2002) was shortlisted in the Montana Book Awards, Poetry, 2003. Best of Both Worlds: the story of Elsdon Best and Tutakangahau (2010) was shortlisted in the Ernest Scott Prize, History (2011, Australia). His most recent work, an upcoming family history, Lily, Oh Lily – Searching for a Nazi ghost, is due in late September 2024, from Canterbury University Press. He journeys in time on the trail of of his grandmother’s sister, Lily Hasenburg, married into German society at the turn of the twentieth century; and space, where he travels to Germany in 2014 to research her fate, an Englishwoman living through two world wars, citizen now of an enemy country.
Jenny Powell has published six poetry collections, two chap books collections and two collaborative collections. She has been a finalist in the UK Plough Poetry Prize, two times finalist in the Aesthetica Creative Arts Award, finalist in the Lancaster one minute monologue competition, runner-up in the Plough Poetry Prize, runner-up in the Mslexia Poetry Competition, short listed in the Welsh Poetry Competition, shortlisted in the New Zealand Society of Authors Janet Frame Memorial Award and in the inaugural NZ Book Month ‘Six Pack’ Competition. In 2020 Powell was the RAK Mason Writing Fellow.
Lynn Jenner, a writer, teacher, and researcher, received the Adam Prize in Creative Writing for the manuscript of Dear Sweet Harry, which was then published by Auckland University Press and won the NZSA Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry. She has been widely published in the literary journals, here and overseas, including Carcanet’s Oxford Poets: An Anthology, 2013. A hybrid collection of writing, Lost & Gone Away (AUP, 2015), traverses the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquake. She writes poetry, memoir, essays and creative nonfiction.
Rangi Faith (Kai Tahu , Ngati Kahungunu, English, Scottish) was born in Timaru and brought up in South Canterbury. He is retired from teaching and is currently living in Rangiora. His work explores both European and Maori history and welcomes the resurgence of te reo and kotahitanga in Aotearoa. Published books include Spoonbill 101 (Puriri Press, 2014), Conversation with a Moahunter (Steele Roberts, 2005) and Rivers Without Eels (Huia Publishers, 2001). His poetry is included in ‘koe’ An Aotearoaecopoetry anthology (Otago University Press, 2024), Te Awa O Kupu (Penguin, 2023), No Other Place to Stand (Auckland University Press, 2022), ThePenguin Book of New Zealand War Writing (Penguin, 2015), When Anzac Day Comes Around (Forty South Publishing Pty Ltd, 2015), and other collections and anthologies.
Reihana Robinson is a writer, artist and organic farmer who lives on the Coromandel in Aotearoa/New Zealand, with part of the year in western Massachusetts. Her writing has appeared in various local and overseas journals. She debuted in AUP New Poets 3, Auckland University Press, 2008 and has two further collections: Aue Rona (Steele Roberts, 2012) and Her Limitless Her (Makaro Press, 2018). She has held artist residencies at the East West Center, Honolulu, Hawai’i and the Anderson Center, Red Wing, Minnesota, and was the inaugural recipient of the Te Atairangikaahu Award for Poetry.
Rhian Gallagher’s first poetry book, Salt Water Creek, was published in London (Enitharmon Press, 2003) and short-listed for the Forward Prize for First Collection. In 2007 Gallagher won a Canterbury History Foundation Award which led to the publication of her book, Feeling for Daylight: The Photographs of Jack Adamson. She also received the 2008 Janet Frame Literary Trust Award. Her second poetry collection Shift, (Auckland University Press 2011, Enitharmon Press, UK, 2012) won the 2012 New Zealand Post Book Award for Poetry. Freda: Freda Du Faur, Southern Alps, 1909-1913 was produced in collaboration with printer Sarah M. Smith and printmaker Lynn Taylor in 2016 (Otakou Press). Rhian was the Robert Burns Fellow in 2018. Her third poetry collection Far-Flung (AUP) appeared in 2020. Gallagher lives in Dunedin.
Ursula (Mary) Bethell (1874-1945) was born in England, raised in New Zealand, educated in England and moved back to Christchurch in the 1920s. Bethell published three poetry collections in her lifetime (From a Garden in the Antipodes, 1929; Time and Place, 1936; Day and Night, 1939). A Collected Poems appeared posthumously (Caxton Press, 1950). She did not begin writing until she was fifty, and was part of Christchurch’s active art and literary scene in the 1930s. Her productive decade of writing was at Rise Cottage in the Cashmere Hills, but after the death of her companion, Effie Pollen, she wrote very little. Vincent O’Sullivan edited a collection of her poetry in 1977 (Collected Poems, Oxford University Press,1985).
NZ Poetry Shelf 