“Many New Zealand poetry books left their indelible mark on me this year.” Chris Tse, NZ Poet Laureate

In the middle of the night when I can’t sleep, I sometimes tune into Radio NZ and catch programmes from the BBC, programmes that cover science, the arts, climate change, people fixing the world, sports, history, happy news. Voices from all over the world, voices across time.

Recently, on Witness History, I discovered the Three Marias, three Portuguese poets who feature on the BBC’s 100 Women list, a list that features ‘inspiring and influential women from around the world’. Maria Teresa Horta, Maria Velho da Costa and Maria Isabel Barreno wrote Novas Cartas Portuguesas (New Portuguese Letters) in 1972, at a time when Portugal was ruled by an authoritarian dictatorship and women’s rights were few. The poetry collection was banned after publication, the women faced imprisonment, and became globally famous. Copies were smuggled out of Portugal and translated, and applauded by Simone de Beauvoir and Margurite Duras and other feminists: ‘It set the western world on fire’. We get to hear Maria Teresa Horta, feminist poet, journalist and activist speak. She has published over 40 books and is now 87. Listen here.

Many of us have struggled this year, mourned the unspeakable atrocities inflicted upon Gaza and Lebanon, unspeakable and yet must be spoken. Many of us have loathed a coalition government dismantling and damaging systems that protect the lives of many, that honour Te Tiriti o Waitangi, that promote the wellbeing of children, teenagers, adults, and yes, the planet. And many of us have faced health struggles, whether mental or physical, family and personal tragedies, redundancy, reduced income.

I asked some poets how they continued to write poetry in this slam of global inhumanity in my 5 Questions series. It was a question I carried and continue to carry to both my blogs, and my own writing.

The voice of Maria resonates in my head, along with the Palestine poets writing and sharing poetry against all odds, the thousands and thousands and thousands of us who marched on the hikoi, in body and in spirit.

How to respond to 2024? How to present a suite of highlights? I invited a number of poets to write a paragraph or so on what they have loved this year – and the response has been incredible. Wide ranging, multi-hued, connecting. I have added a number of books to my must-order-read list, I have felt comforted, I have identified with so much.

Amy Margurite’s admission that her capacity to read fiction has been impaired by health issues resonates when health issues have also defined my year. Amy writes, “This year poetry has allowed me to go on. Every year poetry allows me to go on.” This I share. I can’t wait to read my way through her list of poems. Ah. The rejuvenating power of poetry. Murray Edmond applauds our terrific boutique presses and highlights the rewards of long poems (yes!). Chris Tse embraces our taonga Tusiata Avia alongside four outstanding local poetry collections. Bill Manhire sends me off in search of John Gallas’s sublime tanka. The joy of short poems! Yes! It’s on order! Anne Kennedy reminds me of books I have loved, notably Grace Yee and Helen Lehndorf. Robert Sullivan’s visit to Hone Tuwhare’s crib and legacy once again gets Hone singing in my ears. I finish with the uplift of Hana Pera Aoake’s piece, and her thoughts forming an exquisite and essential bridge between writing and reading, and how the mahi and aroha of others can resonate so deeply.

My 2024 highlights collage has expanded into three parts that I am posting today, Tuesday and Wednesday. Thank you, to all the poets who have contributed so generously. This feels very special.

Amy Marguerite

Earlier this year, I decided I was going to keep a monthly record of all the poems and songs I found myself loving, questioning, returning to. This has kind of felt like keeping a diary, except a diary in which I never actually write about myself but always actually do! Whenever I revisit these records, these lists, I notice something new and layered about my condition that month and I think I really love this? Yes, I do really love this. I welcome the startle.

There are so many beautiful books I wish I’d read this year, but sadly my capacity for prose has been severely restricted due to some persistent health issues. But I have read many, many poems and I have listened to many, many songs, and every single one has been there for me in exactly the way I’ve needed it to be, which is to say they’ve all managed to ‘give credit to the real things’.[1] Poetry in particular has provided incredible relief, and by relief I don’t necessarily mean escape (although I absolutely turn to poetry for this). If you’ve ever repeatedly attempted to describe twenty seemingly discrete symptoms to a doctor in a single, fifteen-minute appointment, I think you’ll understand me when I say that poetry has provided—continues to provide—some long-overdue validation. So what I mean by relief is really the feeling of being able to go on. Every year poetry allows me to go on.

If you’re interested, here’s a list of some of the poems I’ve read and adored this year.

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[1] Weyes Blood, “Movies”

Chris Tse

A highlight of the year for me was finally getting to watch The Savage Coloniser Show, a triumph of poetry and theatre that will no doubt be talked about for years to come. Hugest of congratulations to the show’s cast and crew for bringing Tusiata Avia’s poems to the stage with such ferocity and humanity. Many New Zealand poetry books left their indelible mark on me this year, including Tracey Slaughter’s The Girls in the Red House are Singing (THWUP); Stacey Teague’s Plastic (THWUP); Lee Murray’s Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud (Cuba Press); and Rex Letoa Paget’s Manuali’i (Saufo’i Press). And it’s been wonderful to see New Zealand writers making waves around the world, like Megan Kitching and Robyn Maree Pickens being recognised by the 2024 Laurel Prize judges, Rebecca Hawkens winning in US journal Palette Poetry’s 2024 Sappho Prize for Women Poets, and novels by Rebecca K. Reilly and Saraid de Silva being published overseas to much acclaim.

Anne Kennedy

Three highlights for me, in a year full of wonderful reading experiences:

Chinese Fish, by Grace Yee (Giramondo). This stunning debut verse novel tells the story of family immigration to Aotearoa, mostly from the point of view of women. The thing that hits you first is the daring form – layered prose and poetry that is sometimes discursive, sometimes taut, always surprising. What this technical highwire act achieves is a telling that is heart-wrenching, informative, funny, original. I read this book in different ways – which to me is the sign of a great book. I gulped it down compulsively, I lingered over bits and went back to them, I and went back to the whole thing. One of my favourite books of all time.Chinese Fish won both the 2024 Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry in the Ockham Awards, and the Victorian Prize for Literature in Australia, and you can see why.

A Forager’s Life: Finding My Heart and Home in Nature, by Helen Lehndorf (HarperCollins). I was late to the party for this 2023 book, but loved reading AND listening to it this year. Poet Lehndorf brings her extraordinary gifts to a book that is part memoir, part edible-plant guide, part how-to manual. I was enthralled with the contrasts in Lehndorf’s life: country girl discovers Punk, working class girl goes to uni (a poignant story in itself), young woman’s OE is spent not hanging around Earl’s Court but foraging in the wilds of her ancestor’s Britain. Each chapter ends with a recipe. As a reader, full disclosure: I am never going to make a healing tincture out of kawakawa. Doesn’t matter. The recipes are beautiful to read, and they amplify the beautiful storytelling here. A must-read.  

A Different Light: First Photographs of Aotearoa, by Catherine Hammond and Shaun Higgins (AUP). The book of the exhibition at Tāmaki Paenga Hira / Auckland Museum. It’s a treasure – lovely production with lots of plates, informative, moving as it shows and tells stories of Aotearoa’s photographic past.

Bill Manhire

John Gallas:  Billy ‘Nibs’ Buckshot: The Complete Works

John Gallas is one of the most prolific yet mysterious figures in New Zealand poetry. He has spent most of his adult life in the UK, yet visits New Zealand frequently. I interviewed him a few years ago in Sport, where he quoted approvingly a reviewer who said his poems were “funny, melancholy, and just plain weird.” His latest book from his loyal publisher Carcanet is true to form in a number of ways. It’s certainly weird and funny and melancholy. It’s also a book of tankas, a Japanese form which – at least in this outing – is rather more demanding than the haiku. Each poem has five lines. The first has five syllables, the second seven, the third five, while the fourth and fifth each have seven.  Here there are 198 such tankas – each with a title, and double-spaced on its own page. So much white space! Each of the poems seems to float. Many of them seem to involve riding around England on a bicycle while thinking about other things, sometimes indeed words and places back in New Zealand. Here’s one called ‘The Voice’:

When I pump up the

old accordion, it hoots

and squeals and sighs with

merry anticipation.

Are you in there, my darling?

And maybe one more called ‘Summer Song’:

Remember when dad

led us up Mount Robert ridge

through a hall of snow

higher than our heads. I miss

the bright struggle of winter.

Murray Edmond

One highlight for the year has been the continued output of volumes from the small presses. Here are eight examples from five different presses:

Compound Press with Alison Glenny’s /slanted and Craig Foltz’s Petroglyphs; Spoor Books with Richard von Sturmer’s Slender Volumes; Lasavia Press with Mike Johnson’s Love in the Age of Unreason, Leila Lees’s Hekate and Lindsay Rabbit’s Poems & Images; Titus Books with Carin Smeaton’s Hibiscus Tart; and, from Australian small press Vagabond, Titus and Atuanui Press’s founder and editor, Brett Cross’s first volume of his own poems, Islands.

Another highlight has been the joy of reading long poems. Ranier Maria Rilke’s ‘Requiem for a Friend,’ in memory of the painter, Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907), is a ‘short’ long poem (more than 270 lines). In the face of “wrenching the till-then from the ever-since” in relation to her early death, Rilke says of the painter’s work: “you saw yourself as a fruit.” Searching to articulate what this might mean, he writes: [you] “didn’t say I am that. No: this is.” Grief at the loss of his friend brings the poem to that Horatian conundrum: “an ancient enmity/ between our daily life and the great work.” The 44 pages of James Schuyler’s The Morning of the Poem celebrate daily life as he lived it on “July 8 or July 9, the eighth surely, certainly 1976 . . .“ and, in doing so, he gives as a poem that stands up as ‘a great work.’ Byron’s uncompleted 16,000-line Don Juan is a ‘long’ long poem. Cantos VII and VIII are a full account of the Russian siege and capture of Izmail, then a Turkish/Ottoman town and fortress, during the Russo-Turkish War of 1787-1792. The Russian commander ordered Izmail taken “at whatever price.” Once captured the Russian soldiers were granted three days of carte blanche –  40,000 Turkish, Moldavian, Armenian, Jewish men, women and children were slaughtered. On 27^th September 2024 the Russian military launched a drone and missile attack (drones first to distract from the missiles to follow) against the now-Ukrainian town of Izmail.  Poetry can’t stop the bombs, but it can keep us ‘up-to-date’ with the past as well as the present.

Robert Sullivan

Kia ora everyone, one of my highlights this year has only just happened. It was my second visit to the Hone Tuwhare crib at Kākā Point in the Caitlins. The Hone Tuwhare Trust led by Jeanette Wikaira and Rob Tuwhare marshalled the expertise, efforts and aroha of Hone Tuwhare’s huge community and whānau to restore the crib. Big Congratulations to the Trust and their many supporters who have also established a writers and artists’ residency. After visiting Rob and Manaia Tuwhare at the crib and having a kai (venison!) and a kōrero there, we went on into the Catlins—the forests, Cathedral Cave, the Pūrākaunui Waterfalls, swimming at Papatowai estuary and then driving up the Owaka Valley to Mataura to see the effects of industrialisation on the Mata-au or Clutha River, and then into the amazing Gore Museum with the Ralph Hotere collection rich in poetry from Hone Tuwhare, Cilla McQueen, Bill Manhire and Ian Wedde and art from Marilyn Webb. One amazing part of the collection was the resurrection of the Mata-au through the imagination of botanical and wilidlife artist Jo Ogier. Her series of bird, fish and water-scapes, called “He Wai Apakura – Te Ara Pounamu, The River’s Lament – A Pathway,” was painted with support from the Hokonui Rūnanga of Kāi Tahu. Instead of the freezing works, and the abandoned papermill, there was a healthy river with its endowment of native flora and fauna. The exhibit by Jo Ogier will be there until the end of summer. 

Jo Ogier exhibition

Hone Tuwhare crib

Hana Pera Aoake

My favourite collection of poems I read this year was Schaeffer Lemalu’s the prism and the rose and the late poems; published posthumously on Compound Press. When I write poetry I struggle with its simplicity as a form, or rather how to extricate a feeling or experience into a simple collection of words meaning my poems are always really long and due for a line edit when I eventually let go of trying to relay everything I can into one poem. Sometimes you need to just let words rest and give them space and that therein give these ideas power and an ability to percolate. Lemalu mastered this, but still sought to fuck with poetry as a form by making it conversational as though he is directly speaking to you. At other points he becomes others from anon or sean.smith or nolans bateman. He wrote through and outside the body. His poems elicit something so bodily that makes you want to observe more around you, such as the sensation of gently peeling a mandarin while reading a book and observing someone save a bee trapped in the middle of a swimming pool with their hands. It’s gentle, but cutting and although sometimes tightly structured, other times its loose and playful.

this is my rifle
this is my gun
this is for fighting
this is for fun
this is my rifle
this is my gun
this is for fighting
this is for fun

i want to see your whips
in my study break after
o how was india enjoy it

like that

from ‘2 the prism and the rose a digital manifesto by nolans bateman’

The central treatise of the book is the prism and the rose a digital manifesto by nolans bateman which is perhaps that most difficult to decipher, because all of these other voices spill out onto the page and it’s hard to know when it ends, but you don’t want it to end. His work appears deceptively simple even when there is an echo or a repetition of certain ideas or phrases or images, it’s always done in a way that’s completely unexpected and something funny, but not in a hahaha way, in a way that is mischievous.

For instance
anyone can have a brain
its a very mediocre commodity

from ‘3 the prism and the rose a digital manifesto by nolans bateman’

batman
batman
whys he running dad

because we have to chase him

from ‘7 the prism and the rose a digital manifesto by nolans bateman’

At times he blends films, from The Last Samurai, The Wizard Oz to The Sound of Music to his will and aligns them alongside more brutal realities such as mother on benefits or a line acknowledging the work of Erza Pound or the Italian poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini or a subtle nod to Frank O’Hara’s A coke with you.

pasolini said history does not exist shortly before he died

from ‘like a peacock fanning its eyes’

 Lemalu’s poems hit really quietly and he could convey so much with only a few words, so there is room to breathe around a bricolage of different cadences . Yet the collection is full of surprises, of tiny little glimpses of life, whether that be joy, death, love and the fragility and transience of everything around us whether that be the blossoms in nights for days and neo.

search for the perfect blossom
and you won’t find it
they are all perfect

Every time I have re-read it I find something different and there are parts I find difficult until I read it aloud and try to imagine how he might have read it and what his voice might have sounded like. I never met him, but having seen some of his paintings, I think they speak to his poems in terms of the subtlety and playfulness, particularly with how he used colour. There is something of a childlike wonder or longing that I cannot quite articulate, but this is a book I will return to again and again and I’m grateful to Chris Holdaway for working with Lemalu’s whānau to publish his words. This collection is bittersweet, because I want to read more of his work, but he’s no longer with us and when I think about this I recall Donald Revell’s introduction where he notes that

‘His word is among us, travelling still’

The other three poetry books I think were very important for me to read were Liam Jacobson’s Neither (Dead Bird Books), Carin Smeaton’s Hibiscus Tart (Titus Books) and Maggie Nelson’s Bluets.

Liam Jacobson’s poems are unruly; they take you in unexpected places and illuminate Tāmaki Makaurau in new ways that are not nostalgic nor cliche. They also made my heart ache and helped me nurse certain heartaches I was experiencing while reading this book.

dream-time whispers at stars
crackers n cream whippers from KRD Mart
a city in a coma shaken awake, a ghost town past the horizon’s end

from ‘BUS TO K’

i remember your hands soaked in oil
before everything started following
& i fell

which one of us feels like this?

i’d leave my body for u
i’d leave my body for u

from ‘SOMETHING FOR TOMORROW UNLESS YOU HATE IT’

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.

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

from ‘meghan markle’s sister’

Before whales swam they flew thru the blu stars of life on
earth she calls for her orcas her children her babies to gather together
she’s ready she says to return

from ‘flying whales on earth’

Finally I re-read Maggie Nelson’s Bluets on a flight from London to Auckland. I had just seen a theatre production of Nelson’s meditation on the colour blue at the Royal Court theatre with Emma D’Arcy, Ben Whishaw and Kayla Meikle. The performance saw the three performers standing with a mic and a tray of props and a screen behind them. I hated it. I feel that Nelson’s book is very distinctly American and the lyrical, sensuous and incredibly visceral and beautiful heartbreak of Bluets needs to be read not performed. On a sentence level Bluets is so elegant and is numbered like a manifesto.  The way she blends the essay and poetry, the theoretical with the explicitly sexual pulverises your insides. It’s disjointed, but never feels that way. It’s terrifying and profound and conjures up so many different associations, memories and emotions. It distills the ecstasy of falling in love and having your heart broken in a way that I don’t think any other book has ever or will ever do as well. It’s still so powerful nearly two decades after it was published and I’m glad I re-read it and cried and cried. It’s definitely a book to give to someone you love who is in pain.

238. I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a
time when I would rather have had you by my side than
any one of these words; I would rather have had you by
my side than all the blue in the world.

156. “Why is the sky blue?” -A fair enough question,
and one I have learned the answer to several times. Yet
every time I try to explain it to someone or remember it
to myself, it eludes me. Now I like to remember the ques-
tion alone, as it reminds me that my mind is essentially a
sieve, that I am mortal.

Non poetry books I read this year that were fucking great include Talia Marshall’s Whaea Blue, Emma Hislop’s Ruin, Catherine Comyn’s The financial colonisation of Aotearoa, Ursula K Le Guin’s The carrier bag of fiction, McKenzie Wark’s Philosophy for Spiders: On the Low Theory of Kathy Acker and Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.

‘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