The spring season of the 2024 Poetry in Performance season starts this Thursday 10 October with guest poets HINEMOANA BAKER, JOR DANSAREN, and PHILOMENA JOHNSON. 

Poet and performer HINEMOANA BAKER (Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Toa Rangatira, Te Āti Awa, Ngāi Tahu, Ngāi Kiritea) is the author of four collections of poetry. Her latest, Funkhaus (THWP 2020), was a finalist for the 2021 Ockham Book Awards. Funkhaus has also just been released as a bilingual edition (German and English, tr. Ulrike Almut Sandig) by Voland & Quist AZUR Edition in Berlin (2023). Hinemoana is spending the coming months in Wellington as the 2024 Randell Cottage Writer in Residence. (Photo credit: Ashley Clarke, 2019) [top left in photo]

JOR DANSAREN is a pagan, pansexual, powerlifting, poetry powerhouse. She is a multiple regional poetry slam finalist and host of the popular 6pm Speakeasy series in Ōtautahi/Christchurch. Her work is themed largely around nature, Nordic deities, neurodivergent experience, and the inevitable chaos of life. [too right in photo]

PHILOMENA JOHNSON graduated from The Hagley Writers’ Institute in 2017 where her portfolio was short-listed for the Margaret Mahy Award. Her poetry has appeared in The Quick Brown Dog, The London Grip, takahē, Fuego, a fine line; in the anthologies broken lines / in charcoal and Voiceprints 4; and forthcoming in the New Zealand Poetry Society Anthology 2024. Mena is a tutor at WRITE ON: School for Young Writers and she won The John O’Connor First Book Award in 2024 for her manuscript not everything turns away which was launched on August 23rd, National Poetry Day. [bottom left in photo]

Tickets are $10 for the night or $30 for a season/supporter ticket which gives you all 4 nights for the price of 3 plus the option to join via Zoom (perfect if you suddenly can’t make it in person one night but you don’t want to miss out!).  Two hours of poetry including our warm and friendly open mic! Arrive early to add your name to the open mic list, mix and mingle, and grab a good seat before we get started at 6.30 pm sharp.

All funds raised go to support future CPC events and poetry in Canterbury. Door sales with eftpos available or buy online: https://canterburypoets.org.nz/tickets/

Big thanks to our venue sponsor Ara Institute of Canterbury for use of their Imagitech Theatre.

Coming up next…
17 October: Richard von Sturmer, Marjory Woodfield, and Tarn Wright
24 October: Sue Wootton, Cadence Chung, and Davien Gray
31 October: Dan Goodwin and the Airing Cupboard Women Poets

John Geraets has been running Countertop for awhile now, nurturing a terrific celebration of poetry. The site includes book reviews, recorded interviews with poets, his own poetry musings, poems. He includes essays that were published in ka mate ka ora: a new zealand journal of poetry and poetics. To date, the conversations are with Chris Tse, Stephen Bambury, Janet Charman, Richard von Sturmer, Lisa Samuels, Vaughan Rapatahana, Orchid Tierney, Kim Pieters, Bob Orr, Mark Young, Ian Wedde, Emma Neale, Michael Harlow.

The latest conversation is with Rebecca Hawkes and it’s a treat getting to hear a poet whose work I love, muse on writing, her origins, predilections, the questions that surface, the impulse to move to USA. She reads an extract from, as she says, “a poem in sentences or a very brisk lyric essay” that she is currently working on.

You can listen here.

Counterpoint is a treasure trove to explore indeed.

John Geraets lives in Whangārei, Aotearoa-New Zealand. His Everything’s Something in Place appeared from Titus Books in 2019. He has published a number of poetry collections and edited A Brief Description of the Whole World (1999 -2002). He curates the online magazine remake, the latest issue of which is available here.

Rebecca Hawkes, poet and painter, debuted in AUP New Poets 5. Her collection Meat Lovers won Best First International Collection in the Laurel Prize and was a finalist in the Lambda Literary Awards. She edits the journal Sweet Mammalian and co-curated the Antipodean climate poetry anthology No Other Place to Stand. She is a founding member of popstar poets’ performance posse Show Ponies. She is currently doing an MFA in poetry at the University of Michigan as a Fulbright grantee.

How to live through this

We will make sure we get a good night’s sleep. We will eat a
decent breakfast, probably involving eggs and bacon. We will
make sure we drink enough water. We will go for a walk,
preferably in the sunshine. We will gently inhale lungsful of
air. We will try not to gulp in the lungsful of air. We will go to
the sea. We will watch the waves. We will phone our mothers.
We will phone our fathers. We will phone our friends. We will
sit on the couch with our friends. We will hold hands with our
friends while sitting on the couch. We will cry on the couch
with our friends. We will watch movies without tension –
comedies or concert movies – on the couch with our friends
while holding hands and crying. We will think about running
away and hiding. We will think about fighting, both
metaphorically and actually. We will consider bricks. We will
buy a sturdy padlock. We will lock the gate with the sturdy
padlock, even though the gate isn’t really high enough. We
will lock our doors. We will screen our calls. We will unlist our
phone numbers. We will wait. We will make appointments
with our doctors. We will make sure to eat our vegetables.
We will read comforting books before bedtime. We will make
sure our sheets are clean. We will make sure our room is aired.
We will make plans. We will talk around it and talk through it
and talk it out. We will try to be grateful. We will be grateful.
We will make sure we get a good night’s sleep.

Helen Rickerby
from How to Live, Auckland University Press, 2019

Over the coming months, Poetry Shelf Monday Poem spot will include poems that have stuck to me over time, poems that I’ve loved for all kinds of reasons. Poems that comfort or delight or challenge. Poems that strike the eye, ear or heart. This poem by Helen Rickerby resonates on so many levels, so perfect to read in these turbulent times, when a good night’s sleep can be elusive, when friendship is so important, when finding something precious is important. Something precious like this poem.

Helen Rickerby lives in a cliff-top tower in Aro Valley, Wellington. She’s the author of four collections, most recently How to Live (AUP 2019), which won the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the 2020 Ockham Book Awards. In 2004 she started boutique publishing company Seraph Press, which mainly published poetry. She’s having a break from that for the foreseeable future, and is focusing on her themes of the year: play and journal – which is resulting in a new poetry project. She works as a freelance editor and writer.

Scorpio Books and Canterbury University Press warmly welcome you to the launch of Lily, Oh Lily: Searching for a Nazi ghost by Jeffrey Paparoa Holman. All welcome, refreshments provided. Please send in your RSVP and pre-order your book today.

Lily Hasenburg was just such a figure in Holman’s growing years. She was whispered into his ear by grandmother Eunice – in memorable stories of her older sister, who married and moved to Germany at the turn of the 20th century, and was later caught up in the Nazi web spun by Adolf Hitler. Unable to shake loose this story, Holman pursued her to Berlin, Hamburg and Dresden. Here, we have an account of his pilgrimage; the kind of family history we might bury, and forget – to our loss.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman is an acclaimed poet, historian and memoirist. His poetry has been shortlisted for the New Zealand Book Awards; his family memoir The Lost Pilot (Penguin, 2013) was warmly received in Aotearoa and overseas. Best of Both Worlds: The story of Elsdon Best and Tutakangahau (Penguin, 2010) was short-listed for the Ernest Scott Prize (History) in Australia. Since retirement from his role as senior adjunct fellow at the University of Canterbury, he has taught creative writing in both primary and high school programmes.

Kia ora e te whānau,

Please join us for the launch of Delirious, the new novel by Damien Wilkins. Novelist Elizabeth Knox will be launching the book for us.

Thursday 17 October
6pm
Unity Books Wellington
View more info on our Facebook page.

Te Herenga Waka University Press

‘A New Zealand novel of grace and humanity. How does Wilkins do it? These are flawed and immensely satisfying characters – you close your eyes at the faulty, circuitous routes they take. Delirious is a marvel of a book.’ —Witi Ihimaera

‘This is just a beautifully powerful, wonderful book.’ —Pip Adam, RNZ

‘Funny, sharp, sad and profound, Delirious made me laugh, think, weep and actually beat my breast. A masterpiece.’ —Elizabeth Knox, The Conversation

It’s time. Mary, an ex cop, and her husband, retired librarian Pete, have decided to move into a retirement village. They aren’t falling apart, but they’re watching each other – Pete with his tachcychardia and bad hip, Mary with her ankle and knee.

Selling their beloved house should be a clean break, but it’s as if the people they have lost keep returning to ask new things of them. A local detective calls with new information about the case of their son, Will, who was killed in an accident forty years before. Mary finds herself drawn to consider her older sister’s shortened life. Pete is increasingly haunted by memories of his late mother, who developed delirium and never recovered.

An emotionally powerful novel about families and ageing, Delirious dramatises the questions we will all face, if we’re lucky, or unlucky, enough. How to care for others? How to meet the new versions of ourselves who might arrive? How to cope? Delirious is also about the surprising ways second chances come around.

Weather Report

There is a complex trough of grief
There is a ridge of missing hearts

Paula Green

you can’t write poetry about this government 
hate mail
death threats 
graffiti 

but not poetry 
you can’t write poetry about this government 
those grotesques 
never inspired no art
no heart’s ever danced
when they entered a room  
nobody has lost sleep
over their absence 

you can’t write poetry about this government 
purveyors of cruelty and debt 
like trying to find the beauty 
in black mould 
or concrete

Dominic Hoey  

Dominic Hoey is a writer based in Tāmaki. When he’s not losing money on his various vanity projects, he’s teaching writing to people who hated school.

Poetry Shelf is gifting a copy pf Te Awa o Kupu, edited by Vaughan Rapatahana and Kiri Piahana-Wong, Penguin 2023, to Christopher Reed.

You can read a gathering of poems by Māori poets, a couple of which appear in this stunning anthology, here.

Sometimes a tree grows inside you

while oystercatchers call from the shore
and red-billed gulls paddle for worms in the mudflats

sometimes a tree comes in through your eyes, ears or fingertips
and settles in your bones

perhaps a pōhutukawa, bent, knotted, lovely
low branches bathing in a gentle tide

it comes to live in you
finding its place in some quiet corner 

and when the bustle is too much 
or the sky too dark

you can go there, you can sit with your tree
breathing together while the sea laps your roots

singing with the riroriro
savouring the wind

Janis Freegard

Janis Freegard (she/her) is the author of several poetry collections, including Reading the Signs (The Cuba Press). Her short story collection, Wild, Wild Women was published recently by At the Bay | I Te Kokoru after winning their short story manuscript competition. Born in South Shields, England, she grew up in the UK, South Africa, Australia and Aotearoa, and has lived in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington most of her life. Website