I have been thinking a lot about the place of poetry in global catastrophe and the incomprehensible leadership in Aotearoa. How do we write? Read? Do we need comfort or challenge or both? This week Liz Breslin.

5 questions

1. Has the local and global situation affected what or how or when you write poetry?

Thank you for having me as part of this series. I’ve been thinking a lot about the place of poetry too, or perhaps more precisely about showing up in a specificity of words. Reading the words ‘comfort’ and ‘challenge’ above made me think about how, personally, there are times when I feel comfortable and need challenging and challenging times when it would be OK to let myself have some comfort. And in political terms, how those of us who have a relative level of comfort ought to be challenging ourselves pretty much constantly at the moment, and thinking about how we can bring comfort for people facing challenges. But then I think those two words or the alignments I’ve made aren’t quite specifically right enough for my thoughts about any global and local situations. I’m situated in a place where I want to use very specific words including ‘genocide’, ‘tino rangatiratanga’ and ‘colonisation’ and ‘what the actual fuck’ on the daily.

My writing and my reading right now is shaped by a can’t-look-away-ness of the wide and deliberate use of words to uphold a white supremacist worldview. Like the vast disparity between how people write about Palestine and Ukraine. Like David Seymour condemning ‘political violence in all its forms’ after Trump getting shot at while pushing through multiple egregious political violences here in Aotearoa. It’s so disgusting and it makes me want to take language apart and shake it.

2. Does place matter to you at the moment? An object, an attachment, a loss, an experience? A sense of home?

I’m currently doing a PhD which is a queer exploration of settler coloniser stories of gender, space and violence in the rural south of Te Waipounamu. So I think that’s probably the place that I’m spending most head space in at the moment, even when sitting at my desk in Ōtepoti. As a sense of place, it gives me more ‘challenge’ than ‘comfort’, because although I am getting so much out of the opportunity to explore the stories, it’s also a place I am very uncomfortable in as there are a lot of reminders of my abusive marriage there. What I am loving is finding and cutting and pasting stories from the area that challenge the she’ll-be-right Southern Man patriarchal stronghold, and even working out some of my own stories. My notes app is my best friend and constant confuser in this regard.

3. Are there books or poems that have struck a chord in the past year? That you turn to for comfort or uplift, challenge or distraction.

O gosh. What even is a year? Noreen Masud’s A flat place for really particular and thoughtful takes on trauma and landscape. Lots of Mary Oliver, which is a constant. Local reads include Robert Sullivan’s Hopurangi Songcatcher, Majella Cullinane’s Meantime and Ash by Louise Wallace. I absolutely can’t wait to read Whaea Blue by Talia Marshall. Also I’ve been consuming and consumed by a lot of Alexis Hall books. And I wanted to like The Priory of the Orange Tree but, no thank you to a book that says it’s queer but is super based on women existing to reproduce and none of the queer characters getting a happy anything. Poems by Mosab Abu Toha. He had one called ‘The Moon’ on the New York Review of Books a few weeks ago that I couldn’t stop reading. (https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/03/21/the-moon-mosab-abu-toha/) Something Nathan Joe said a while back made me determined to be a more conscious consumer of words and media  – the exact quote is probably somewhere buried in the aforementioned notes app. But then I go and ruin it all by hammering whole seasons of shows like ‘I kissed a girl’, ‘I kissed a boy’ and ‘Are you the one?’ (Season 8 is the queer one).

4 What particularly matters to you in your poetry and in the poetry of others, whether using ear, eye, heart, mind – and/or anything ranging from the abstract and the absent to the physical and the present?

I wish I knew how to answer that. I think it would make me more in charge of my ability to craft. I spend a lot of time on the edge of unsureness but I love the catch of a true word group feeling thing that is a poem.

5 Is there a word or idea, like a talisman, that you hold close at the moment. For me, it is the word connection.

I’m always obsessing over words and recently one of them is ‘manifest.’ Rooted in the French word for ‘hand’, it’s also a ships list and a kind of magical thinking. Which is maybe a joining of hands. I think that thinking about the possibilities of ‘manifest’ was sparked by something I read in Living a feminist life by Sara Ahmed. I’m obsessed with her queer and particular style and also I’m prone to hand-thoughts anyway. I had a quick look just now and found them in nine recent poems.

Two unpublished poems though the first is on my Instagram… @liz_breslin.  I chose them because one is the very cutting up of language and the other is all about the hands, in this case the hands of a specific settler coloniser woman I’ve been studying but that’s another story.

two poems

The ABCs of Don’t say gay
All the words from Mount Aspiring College’s ‘Pride video’ 2024

a a a a a a a a a a a about about about about about about about about about acceptance accepting accepting after all all allows also also and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and any anyone applied are are are are around as as as as as awareness

be be be be be because because because been being being but by by

celebrate celebrate celebrating celebrating character colourful come coming community community community community community confident content creating

despite differences different diverse diversity doesn’t doesn’t don’t

each embodies encouraging environment equality equity everybody everyone everyone everyone everyone

fairness family faster fear feel feel feel feel flag flag for for for for for for fostering free friends friendship from from fun

great great great

hard has have honour how how how

I I I I I I if important important important importantly in included inclusivity inclusivity initiative involved is is is is is it it it it it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s

judgement judging

kindness King kura

let looking louder love love Luther

make make making manaakitanga Martin matter matter may me me me me me me me means means means members members most much

near not

of of of of of of on only or other others others others otherwise our our our our

peers people people people person person place positivity Pride pride pride pride pride pride pride pride pride progress

really really really recognise reflect remember reminder respect respectful right

said school school sense sense should show show show show show show so so society speaking support support

tell that that that that that that’s that’s the the the the the the the the the the the their them then there there’s these they they they things things think think think think think think this this time time time to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to tolerance towards towards treat treat treated

up us

valued video wanna watching way way we we week week week week week weeks welcome what where which who who who whole with with within within within without workers write

you you you you you you you you you your your your yourself yourself

Acceptable notions

Ecclesiastes 3:7
A time to tear apart and a time to sew together;
A time to be silent and a time to speak

 

A time to smooth your hands on the rough of your skirt
A time to feel the fibres of your fingers curl

A time to count the callouses for all they are worth
One a penny two a penny three a

time to watch your palm as it strokes against hers
A time to make light of the shift of the day past your window

A time to swallow your emotions
A time to

swallow
you’re

A time
A time

                  to stare at the hills and think the word horizon
Like it does not shift as you shifted as you

Liz Breslin is a tangata Tiriti writer, editor and performer of Polish and Irish descent, living in Ōtepoti Dunedin. Liz’s poem collections are In bed with the feminists (Dead Bird Books, 2021, 2023), winner of the Kathleen Grattan Prize for A Sequence of Poems 2020, and Alzheimer’s and a spoon (OUP, 2017, 2021), one of the NZ Listener’s Top 100 books of 2017. Liz is a creative critical PhD candidate (and recipient of a City of Literature scholarship) at the University of Otago Ōtākau Whakaihu Waka, making zines and poems and sewings about cycles of settler coloniser violence in the rural south of Te Waipounamu.

Tidelines, Kiri Piahana-Wong, Anahera Press, 2024

Near the end of my
days, I knew.
Timer moved through
me like the wind.

With every outbound tide
I felt my breath receding,
my life running from me
like the river feeding
the bay. And the
longing,
I was tired.
I longed to merge my voice
with the world-song, become
a single drop in the ocean,
be everywhere and nowhere.

 

from ‘Hinerangi’

Kiri Piahana-Wong’s new collection, Tidelines, is poetry of weaving, waiting, water. She interweaves the tragic story of Hinerangi with her own personal challenges. Hinerangi married a young chieftain who drowned while fishing off the rocks at Te Unuhanga-o-Rangitoto (Mercer Bay). Consumed by grief, she kept vigil on the rocks, and eventually died there. The headland, where her face is said to be outlined, is known as Te Āhau o Hinerangi (The likeness of Hinerangi).

Kiri weaves patterns of grief, worry, emptiness, a self in pieces, aloneness, leaving, staying, happiness, suicidal tugs and, as she weaves, water permeates, there in the ebb and flow of grief: Auckland’s west coast, the falling rain, the falling tears, floating in the sea, swimming in the sea, Tāwhirimātea lashing the Laingholm Bach with storm, seagulls standing in tidal mud, not trapped but grounded, ready for flight.

The poet’s pain and circumstances are an outline traced in the coastal setting, in the persistent or fickle birdsong, in the vases of freshly picked flowers, the pōhutukawa flowing, a message in a bottle, a frost departing, and in the voices of of her tūpuna tāne arriving, as she is perched on a rock, a precipice, the ragged edge of living.

This is a precious poetry collection, both moving and lyrical, that lets you feel the sting of salt and despair, fragility and resolve, and you know you need to hold life and loved ones very close. I love it.

And with their coming, a mighty
gust of wind blew me back
from the edge of the cliff
and away until the forest
swallowed it from sight.

 

from ‘On the day I died’

Kiri Piahana-Wong is a poet, editor and publisher. Her previous publications are Night Swimming (Anahera Press, 2013) and (as co-editor) Te Awa o Kupu (Penguin Random House, 2023).

Anahera Press page

POETRY TAKES OVER: A NATIONWIDE CELEBRATION OF WORDS IS SET TO SWEEP ACROSS THE COUNTRY IN LATE AUGUST

Get ready to celebrate the power of poetry, Aotearoa! Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day 2024 is scheduled for Friday 23 August, and a packed programme of close to 100 official events is revealed today, showcasing the nation’s love of poetry.

“At Phantom Billstickers”, says CEO Robin McDonnell, “National Poetry Day is a celebration that reminds us of the power of words to bridge gaps and touch hearts. In a world often divided by uncertainty, poetry stands as a beacon of unity and hope.”

“As we unveil this year’s exciting lineup,” Robin continues, “let’s come together to experience the joy, reflection, and connection that poetry offers. In these times of change, let poetry be our constant – a force for good that unites us as a community.”

You’ll find poetry everywhere in late August: on buses, written on pavements, displayed on projected screens, and even emerging from typewriters. This vibrant annual celebration of words and creativity offers something for everyone. “You don’t have to be a literary scholar to write or recite a poem,” says Richard Pamatatau, poet and spokesperson for programme coordinators, the New Zealand Book Awards Trust Te Ohu Tiaki i Te Rau Hiringa. “On Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day, we are all invited to share our joys, fears, and challenges by expressing what often comes to mind, and to share our emotions in a way that resonates with everyone.”

You can immerse yourself in the rhythm and energy of hip-hop poetry, contribute your own verses to an endless poem, or dive into the excitement of a poetry slam. There are also numerous workshops available, where you can hone your craft and connect with fellow poetry enthusiasts.

Among the many events, one standout opportunity is a special workshop hosted by Red Room Poetry with Grace Yee, winner of the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. This webinar, set for Thursday 22 August, continues the collaboration between Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day in New Zealand, and Australia’s Poetry Month. It offers an excellent chance for established and aspiring poets alike to learn from Grace Yee’s distinct voice as she explores characterisation and voice, scene-setting and polyphony in poetry.

New Zealand Poet Laureate Chris Tse is embarking on an exciting poetry tour with multiple events lined up, including a stop at Hamilton Book Month, an appearance at the Ōrongohau / Best New Zealand Poems event, and a special National Library event on National Poetry Day, chairing a lively session featuring international poet Jean Chan.

The NPD Competition Calendar has opportunities for both children and adults to showcase their talents on a grand stage. Some competition favourites are back: Poets XYZ invite adults to write children’s poetry, and the beloved Given Words competition offers five new words chosen by schoolchildren in Andalusia. Auckland Libraries invite you to submit ‘blackout’ poems and in the Bay of Plenty you can enter the Cringefest Poetry Hall of Shame with your most cringeworthy poetry.

The full programme of Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day events can be found on the website, but some other highlights include:

International/Nationwide: Berlin joins the celebration with a vibrant evening of poetry readings, music, and open mic excitement. David Merritt’s iconic Poetry Bricks will make a splash nationwide.

Northland: Kahui Ako’s Be Published event gives kids the thrilling chance to craft their own poetry and see it transformed into a real book!

Auckland: Glenbrook Poetry Week energises students with open mics, recitations, slams, and workshops. Wordcore: Micromegas fuses spoken word, music, visual art, and digital storytelling for a unique collaborative performance. All Tomorrow’s Poets marks its 10th anniversary with a mix of past and new performers at Time Out Bookstore. Projection Poetry dazzles with a city-centre poetry projection show; Books on the Bus celebrates National Poetry Day with poetry books on buses; and Albert Park and Waiheke will come alive with poetry on the pavements.

Bay of Plenty: Join the Kupu Waiata, Singing Word event in Tauranga for a lunchtime open-mic jam session and a fun workshop. In Katikati Gaye Hemsley spreads joy with humorous poems at a local retirement home and invites poetry lovers to The Arts Junction for a lively discussion.

Hawkes Bay: Haiku in Hawke’s Bay turns local cafes and restaurants into poetry hotspots for National Poetry Day, challenging everyone to craft haiku on ‘hope & promise’ with standout pieces set to be featured in Hawke’s Bay Today.

Wellington: Poems Against Sustainability challenges students to pen poems on environmental issues; Studio Kiin launches the debut poetry collection Kalokalo by Arieta Tegeilolo Talanoa Tora Rika; Wai–te– ata Press invites you to dive into the art of hand-setting and printing; Rangituhi: Writings Across the Sky brings an open mic event to the great outdoors in Tawa; and Peculiar Letters showcases local queer poets reading and analysing their work on the big screen.

South Island: NOLA’s Progressive Poem evolves throughout the day in an Oamaru café, with contributions from passersby. Words Without Borders in Queenstown offers inclusive poetry workshops, spoken word events, and open mic nights in various languages. The Canterbury Poets’ Collective showcases the top under-25 poets. Dunedin comes alive with poetry, offering a vibrant and diverse lineup: From the Hills to the Harbour: A Poetic View of Our World celebrates 10 years of

Ōtepoti as a UNESCO City of Literature with poetry, music, art, workshops, and a city-wide poster series. Experience the magic of personalised poetry with Spontaneous Poetry, where poems are typed on a typewriter while you wait! And don’t miss Speakeasy’s Poetry Swap, inviting participants to trade and read each other’s work.

Kia ora e te whānau,

Please join us for the launch of Whaea Blue, the debut book by Talia Marshall.

Thursday 8 August
6pm
Meow
9 Edward Street, Te Aro, Wellington
View more info on our Facebook page.

Nau mai, haere mai!

Te Herenga Waka University Press

“Tempestuous and haunting, Whaea Blue is a tribute to collective memory, the elasticity of self, and the women we travel through. It is a karanga to and from the abyss. It is a journey to peace.”

Please join us to celebrate the launch of The girls in the red house are singing, the new poetry collection by Tracey Slaughter, to be launched by New Zealand Poet Laureate Chris Tse. As part of a dedicated evening for poetry during Hamilton Book Month, Ashleigh Young and a group of local poets will also share some of their work.

Friday August 16
6:30pm
Te Whare Tāpere Iti
The University of Waikato, Hamilton.
View more info here.

All welcome! Drinks and refreshments provided.

Slim Volume, James Brown, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024

A chair is a good place to sit.
You spend a week with a poem.

Then another week. Not your poem.
Somebody else’s.

 

from ‘Love Poem’

Ah. After a string of days watching the rain fall, Lake Fog slowly melt, the sour dough rise, 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’ (posted on Poetry Shelf, extract 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. Take ‘Green and Orange’ for example, and track the loops and latches as a sideways glance becomes so much more. Sheez I love this poem. Just want you to read it for yourself. Here is the opening stanza:

The trees bend in the window frame.
Outside, I barely give them a glance,
but framed, each leaf has its own geometry,
anemone fingers in a green sea.

Or take a young lad on his milk run (‘it’s more of a milk walk’) in ‘One Thing Leads to Another or / My Part in the Dairy Industry’. And again I am sitting in the chair of poetry reading and it is description and it is wonder and it is different forms of loops and latches. Try these middle stanzas:

I get slower and slower
like the music box
in our kitchen.

People always startle.

A standing man
on the brink of his
water feature.

A hesitation in a
dressing gown.

The poem’s ending knocks me off my poetry chair and it is ‘Back home, a glass of cold milk / trickles into my account / from three or four hills / beyond my understanding.’

Like any satisfying form of travel, the collection offers diverse mood keys. There is a childhood anecdote of (slightly creepy) The Magic Show at a school fair, a defiant and much-missed Allegory hiding up a tree outside the classroom, and then ‘Bad Light’, an unsettling poem of uncertainty and impending disaster involving a boy on a red bicycle. Phew. Wow.

I keep coming back to two mother poems. ‘Evening’ frames a sharper-than-real scene at the kitchen table, mother with pen in hand, the son pulling the string of an odd musical instrument. The room fills: ‘The melancholy song / we think of as Russian // waltzes slower and slower / around the room.’ And then it fills and refills, these moments that have stuck and replayed. Yes, it’s the music box we meet in the milk-run poem.

The poet cyclist is mindful of pulling over on the edge of the road to absorb the view or take a break. To atone for seemingly no section breaks (think poem clusters), James inserts intermissions laced with witty invitations: ‘I like sections because they give you space to have a breather, to pause and think about things . . . like what brought you here and what you are doing with your life.‘ Don’t get me started James. But I will take this moment to make an espresso and heat a scone and ponder on potholes and war. The second-section break ‘marker’ invites me to take further time out:

So take some time out.
Look around the room.
Look out the window.
What do you focus on?
Is the view so familiar
you’ve stopped seeing it?

Again I am switching back to open-poem travel, to how we may become immune to the views and reading trails, as much as when we stroll down the road or gaze out the kitchen window. Ah, always the kitchen.

I thought I would try writing what I think of my latest poem travels on the back of a post card and sending it to a friend: Stunning scenery, sublime food, every mood under the sun, utterly refreshing, unforgettable.

I would like to gift this book to one reader. Let me know here or on my social media feed.

The first time I saw the sea,
I was completely enchanted.
I’d always known it existed, I’d just
never really noticed it before.

I hadn’t even gone to see it, I’d more
stumbled across it accidentally
between Foxton and Himatangi.

 

from ‘You Don’t Know What You’re Missing’

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.

Te Herenga Waka University Press page

DAD LEAVES FOR WORK

daily
each morning
from the New Testament
a few verses
after cleaning teeth
applying aftershave
read silently
from the little book
with the cedar of Lebanon
wooden bindings
no man cometh
unto the Father
check for handkerchief
RSA badge
satchel
down the stairs
knees clicking
like worry beads
sufficient unto the day

Murray Edmond

Murray Edmond b.1949, Kirikiriroa. Lives in Glen Eden. Recent pubs: Back Before You Know (2019, Compound) two long narrative poems; Time to Make a Song and Dance: Cultural Revolt in Auckland in the 1960s (2021, Atuanui) cultural history; FARCE (2022, Compound) poems; Sandbank Sonnets (2022, Compound); Aucklanders (2023, Lasavia) 15 short stories.

Name

Solitary, after all, were the gardener,
But for the accompaniment of words.

Is this my matutinal seclusion
Sights, sounds, and scents all, all agree to please.
Comely the smile of all well mannered subjects,
Goodly the smell of wholesome up-turned soil.
Lovely above all is this silence –
But the silence is vibrant with words.

They murmur in the distance like bees,
They whisper in the rustle of trees,
Then springs one, instant to be heard,
Sings on my should like a bird.

 

 

Ursula Bethell
from Garden in the Antipodes, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1929

Poetry Shelf is going on holiday for two weeks; time to replant, reseed, to daydream. Keep safe, keep well, savour the delights of poetry. See you all soon.

Love
Paula

AUP New Poets 10, edited by Anne Kennedy
Auckland University Press, 2024
Auckland University Press page

Anne Kennedy is the new editor of the AUP New Poets series. Anna Jackson edited the collections from issue 5 (2019) until issue 9 (2023), and captivated our attention with the work of poets such as Rebecca Hawkes, Claudia Jardine, Vanessa Crofskey, Ria Masae, Modi Deng, Sarah Lawrence, harold coutts, Arielle Walker. In her debut issue, Anne brings together three distinctive and engaging voices, poets who are unafraid of the personal or of ideas, of writing poems that represent the physical, signpost the felt, the withheld, the unsayable, that expose tough circumstances and difficult feelings, that offer diverse music and linguistic flair. Arresting voices indeed. AUP New Poets 10 is a triumph that I have lingered with for weeks. I’m delighted to post an interview with Anne, along with a set of readings and my reviews.

The Editor

PG: There is no single recipe, but what do you find gives poetry charisma?

AK: Two things: message and voice. These are obviously very broad categories, but for me, when a poet has something to say that feels unstoppable, and they say it with conviction, that makes a poem fly. This has nothing to do with specific topics or style, it’s to do with the poet’s appeal to the reader – as Aristotle’s Rhetorical Triangle theorized back in the day.

PG: You use the words ‘freshness’ and ‘newness’ in your Foreword. What were some of the qualities in these three terrific debuts that prompted this response?

AK: Each poet shows their world and ideas in a distinct way, and that’s what invites us in as readers. What grabs me about these three writers is that they use language – turn of phrase, metaphor, image, all that lovely stuff – in ways that we’ve never seen quite like that before, even though they write within poetic conventions. It’s that quality of newness that makes us listen to what they have to say.

PG: I also loved your suggestion that this is ‘urgent work that allows us to perceive our contemporary world in ways that we would not have otherwise’. I have been thinking a lot about the place of poetry in global catastrophe and the incomprehensible leadership in Aotearoa. How do we write? What do we read? Do we need comfort or challenge or both? Thus my ‘5 Questions’ series’.

AK: It’s interesting that in these stark times, people turn to literature to analyse, lament and in some cases take comfort. Those famous dystopian novels are getting quite an airing these days, because they ring true like nothing else. They’re like touchstones, a kind of shorthand for how we organize ourselves, how we think. It’s worth remembering that the writers of those works were responding to their world.

In that way, new writing is essential to our times – it always has been, but especially when people are suffering. The New Poets 10 poets are writing into a volatile world that is unfolding before them, just as their writing forebears did. You can see that in the various ways each poet presents these strange times through their refined and special vision. It’s a brave thing to do, an uncertain thing to do. We can take comfort from that, because in the end, imaginative vision does influence how societies think.  

Anne Kennedy is the author of three novels, a novella, four books of poetry, and many anthologised short stories. Her first book of poetry Sing-song was named Poetry Book of the Year at the 2004 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. The Darling North won the 2013 New Zealand Post Book Award for Poetry and Moth Hour was a poetry finalist at the 2020 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Anne has also won the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Short Story Award and has held fellowships at the University of Auckland, the IIML, and at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. She has taught creative writing for a number of years in Hawai‘i and Auckland. Most recently she edited Remember Me: Poems to Learn by Heart from Aotearoa New Zealand.

The Poets

Tessa Keenan

Tessa: I love poetry that, on its face, talks to you straight up. Poetry that has the rhythm and fluctuation of an ordinary conversation, and the words to match. But then when you look closer the words that are coming out of the person’s mouth are jumbled a bit, or are too repetitive, or do not sound real. Still, the words get at something so real and otherwise untouchable. I feel like I’m doing a bad job of explaining this. Maybe it’s like a poem that anxiously laughs the whole way through. Until that one last line that stabs you in the heart.

from ‘5 Questions ‘on Poetry Shelf

Tessa reads ‘Taranaki’ and ‘Mātou’

a review

Tessa Keenan’s chapbook is entitled ‘Pukapuka mapi / Atlas’, a fitting title for a suite of poems that generate lyrical poetic mappings. I am immediately drawn into the steady and surefooted rhythm of writing, the sweet carwheel hum of travel. Poetry can do this. Poetry can render the rhythm of ideas and heart so necessary, so refreshing, your skin tingles. In focusing upon an object or place or person, Tessa produces a series of foldings and unfoldings, the physical world at hand and an ethereal world captivating.

Take the breathtaking poem, ‘Ōākura Beach’, for example. Think of it as an occasion. Think of it as an occasion of startle wonder delight. I adore how the opening lines hook and hold my attention: ‘That space asks for something to enter it. / I imagine people walking with clean washing / towards the sea.’ This poem replays the pulse of both presence and absence, drawing us across bridges between place, mood, space. The lure of possibilities. If I adored the opening stanza, I adored the closing one even more:

The wind tucks its fingers into the space
between an ocean and a home.
I see it slide through the people I’ve imagined.
It whispers an imperative.

Tessa’s poetic mappings are also a form of self anchor, the poem as surrogate grounding. At the core: whanau, the tupuna, the pā, the urupā. Every poem lyrically deft, with a refreshing turn of phrase, the shift of searching eye. One poem begins: ‘These days we are a photograph’. Another begins: ‘I’ve been told to map myself.’ I find myself anchored and then soaring within the folds and unfoldings of writing.

This is eclectic travel, and that adds to the delight and wonder of reading. In a self portrait, ‘Permission to Hate’, the speaker admits they hate ownership, money and colonisation, as they list things they were obliged but hated to do when young. Or take ‘Scurvy Girls’ – another list poem – that begins in a lecture on climate change and then side splinters to humorous pocket anecdotes on the attendees and other characters. The poem again epitomises Tessa’s genius skill with opening lines: ‘in the middle of a lecture about climate change and the Suez Canal, / Sophie realised she must be a pirate.’ The impetus to keep reading is strong. Here’s one of the character’s anecdotes:

‘When Janhavi is embarrassed about spending money she orders a filter coffee.
There is a small person inside her that enjoys watery things.’

Tessa’s poetry underlines the strength of words to map internal movement and conversation, as much as they might ground the reader in a vital and resonant sense of place. I feel physically located, enriched by her voice, her sensitivity, her awareness, embraced by her writing, by the inherent aroha, by the way writing is a matter of relationships (I have tucked this away as a fertile topic to muse upon further). When Tessa participated in my ‘5 Questions’ series, her responses resonated deeply, her poetry now equally so. Here are the final three stanzas from ‘Ōākura Beach’ because this is a poem to have on replay:

This is the first day of my lonely spell.
Seagulls are locked above like cut-outs.

There is nobody around, really. Extinction
is the only thing on the beach.

The wind tucks its fingers into the space
between an ocean and a home.
I see it slide through the people I’ve imagined.
It whispers an imperative.

Tessa Keenan (Te Ātiawa) is from Taranaki and is now based in Pōneke. You can find her writing in various Aoteroa publications including AUP New Poets 10, Starling, and Pūhia. 

romesh dissanayake

a reading

‘Walnuts’

‘Still cheers’

‘Eating a peach in the sun i wonder’

a review

romesh dissanyake has titled his chapbook ‘favourite flavour house,’ and it is a flavoursome house of poetry. At the collection’s hub, a restaurant embeds the physical presence of food: the sizzling caramel, the diced kūmara, the parsnip stock sieved, the truffle ravioli awaiting the simmer pot. But the food latticework radiates across the poems to include fenugreek stew with green mangoes, the plums and walnuts that hui brings the poet from the orchard, the succulent summer peach brought to breakfast lips.

Yet the delight of savouring food infused in the poems, extends beyond taste buds. The broken walnut shells in ‘Walnuts’, prompt a moving riff on brokenness, with the line on liberating identities striking a particular chord:

i expect my body to break like they break
i expect power structures to crumble upon my return
i expect to set free all the guilt i thought i had made
i expect to set free babula’s pelmini
so that she knows she didn’t die in vain
i expect to set free all those identities living within me

The voice of the poet pulls you in, pulls you into the revelations, intimacy, rifts. The way, for example, writing a poem is as necessary as letting ‘the garlic sizzle’ or the ‘tumeric leave stains’ in the airbnb, and that writing is not a matter of pleasing the ‘house-lords upstairs’, but a matter of writing in and from your own skin:

we can do what we damn please
because this is our poem
about being on holiday
just try and catch us and
like free roaming stray dogs
we’ll duck out stage right
whenever we like

from ‘Natasha says we shouldn’t heat our curries too high
in the microwave’

For me, the sequence has multiple hearts; food yes, the favourite flavoursome workplace yes, but there is also the pulsating heart of family, especially in the memory rich ‘Six a.m. in Colombo / Cinnamon Gardens’. The poem arcs from childhood to adolescence, from complicated, prismatic, signals of what’s important and what’s not, to the sublime ending, the utterly poignant, squeeze-the-heart ending.

I keep drawing upon the idea of heart, as romesh’s poems are in debt to heart, to the vulnerable, generous steady life blood of writing. Not a poetry exercise, not ‘cute little poems to please white people’, but a glorious liberation of both words and self. On each occasion of reading, I find different pulls, always the food yes, but the self recognitions, the yearnings, the fallibilties, the attention to what writing poetry might mean to the poet, build an inspirational tempo of insistence:

think of every line you’ve ever sat on
every time you’ve sat to shit
every tyre-kicking foreign ending
stanky, roachy, chuckling

well-worn slipper lips
donut sugar lips
a tortoise breakdancing breakneck
backspinning

that’s what poetry means to me

 

from ‘Tay has stans’

 

romesh dissanayake is a Sri Lankan and Koryo Saram writer, poet and chef from Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. His poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in various print and online publications. His first novel, When I open the shop, was the winner of the 2022 Modern Letters Fiction Prize and is published by Te Herenga Waka University Press. His chapbook poetry collection, ‘Favourite Flavour House’, is featured in AUP New Poets 10 published by Auckland University Press.

Sadie Lawrence

a reading

Sadie reads ‘Puppy’, ‘Ode to the Autism Diagnosis Report’ and ‘heartbreak (living next to the kindergarten)’

You can read Sadie’s poem ‘Aphantasia’ here

a review

Sadie Lawrence’s poetry is both overlap and underlay, an extraordinary evocation of wound and repair, of teenage girls and childhood scrapes, of nightmare hauntings and internal demons. Like the other chapbooks in AUP New Poets 10, the writing pulls me back in, again and again, to explore the nooks and crevices afresh. Her chapbook is entitled, ‘Like Human Girls / all we have is noise’.

The first attraction is aural because Sadie writes with linguistic flair and agility. She weaves shifting tones and melodies, sweet repetitions, and elastic syntax. Nouns and verbs resettle on the line to kindle an image, an idea, a moment, to deliver an arresting voice:

‘We barefoot the grass.’
‘Summer fizzled /  against the canine bite in the air.’

The second attraction is the way individual lines delight and stockpile in my imaginary room of reading wonder.

‘I discovered myself in the elbow of the tree.’
‘I am epiphany bathing.’
‘(…) and the egg yolk of the night slipped / down the back of our  necks with a chill’.
‘Love took me in its jaws like a weary dog.’

Move in deeper, still carrying the joy of poetic music and individual lines, and I reach the rippling arrival of wound, whether scraped knees, nose bleeds, broken heart, autism, slit throats, violent dreams, the elusiveness of normalcy. Here is the overlap and the underlay, the way skeletal references cut sharp as I read, and the echoes and missing bits are both poignant and vital. And how, embedded within this poetic ripple of difficulty and suffering, is the possibility and the signs of self repair, the girl friendships, the stitchings.

Individual poems, as is the case with romesh and Tessa, are like constellations: sparking and sparkling with possibilites. This is a book to take to a cafe poetry club and talk through the recognitions and pleasures you gain as you read. How you want to weep and laugh and grimace. How you feel the love, you most definitely feel the love of writing. How you want to celebrate the power of words to reveal myriad versions of who we are and who we can be. Sadie’s poetry does exactly this, and I am all the better for having lingered in and loved its exposures, within and beyond the poem frames. I am leaving you with the second stanza of ‘Leaving home’:

If there is an absence, it is a tangible thing
that lives, like cockroaches, in the depths of the pantry –
in food arranged by inexperienced lovers.
If there is independence, it is a stray
feeding on the plum carcasses
that stop the shed door shut.
If these are hands, then praying is second nature;
if they are not, the dusk feeds on my cold body,
jaws snapping like an impatient hound.
This is not growing up.
there must be an alien thing
deep in the chasms of me
that I am growing around.

Sadie Lawrence is an undergraduate university student of creative writing and media studies. Her collection in AUP New Poets 10, ‘Like Human Girls / all we have is noise’, was written from ages seventeen to nineteen. Her autism screening was inconclusive.