A documentary on Fiona Kidman, directed by Joshua Prendeville, will screen at the NZ International Film Festival in July.
“At 84, Fiona Kidman has published more than 30 books of fiction, poetry, and memoir, and received a raft of the highest accolades here and abroad. In this gentle, meandering film, we’re shown a vocational life lived with conviction and courage, punctuated by loss. From precocious beginnings in rural Northland to her involvement with the New Zealand Women’s Liberation Movement, Fiona Kidman has always been propelled by her sense of the power of words to inspire change, and a nose for thinly veiled Kiwi conservatism.”
With the opening of competitions for the Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day less than two months away, the director of Given Words, Charles Olsen, has invited the winners and special mention of the 2023 competition, Elliot Harley McKenzie, Boh Harris and Tim Saunders, to read their poems for NZ Poetry Shelf.
All entries had to include the five words broken, reflection, disappear, path, and paint, which were chosen by students at López de Arenas Secondary School, Marchena, Seville, Spain. The winners were selected by Mikaela Nyman, Sophia Wilson and Charles Olsen. Their comments on the poems along with a selection of the entries by both adults and under-16s can be read on Given Words.
On 1st August 2024, Given Words will open for its ninth year, with some of the words chosen by pupils of Te Parito Kōwhai Russley School in Christchurch. Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day will be held on Friday 23 August this year and all competitions will be available on the Competition Calendar.
The readings
The winner of ‘Best Poem’ was Elliot Harley McKenzie for their poem transmutations.
Winner of the ‘Best Poem by Under-16s’ was Boh Harris, then aged 12, for his poem The Broken School.
And a Special Mention was awarded to Tim Saunders for his poem My Mother, Deciduous.
The poets
Elliot Harley McKenzie (they/them) is a pākehā poet living in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. They have previously been published in Starling, Best New Zealand Poems, Tarot and Sweet Mammalian. Elliot enjoys listening to audiobooks, bouldering, ceramics and their job as a support worker for people with disabilities. Their poetry is inspired predominantly by love, heartbreak, queer identity, ecology and visual art. The poem transmutations looks back on a past relationship, exploring turbulent emotions and fragmented memories alongside the myth of Narcissus.
Hi, I’m Boh Harris. I am 12 years old and I’ve been at Write On School for Young Writers for nearly 2 years. My top two interests are creative writing and drama. When I grow up I would like to be an actor and an author. Poetry isn’t my forte but I am happy with the outcome of this poem and will continue to do more poems in the future because I thoroughly enjoyed writing this piece.
Tim Saunders farms sheep and beef in the Manawatu. He has had poetry and short stories published in Turbine|Kapohau, takahē, Landfall, Poetry NZ Yearbook, Headland, Flash Frontier, Broadsheet, Best Small Fictions, RNZ and he also won the 2018 Mindfood Magazine Short Story Competition. Tim placed third in the 2019 and 2020 National Flash Fiction Day Awards, and was shortlisted for the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. His first book, This Farming Life, was published by Allen & Unwin in August, 2020. His second book, Under a Big Sky, was published in August, 2022.
A GOWN IS A GLACIER, RECEDING, Nina Mingya Powles, handbound chapbook, 2024
A gown can be a peony
a gown can be a kelp forest
a gown can hold vast quantities of water
from A GOWN IS A GLACIER, RECEDING
I have Nina’s zine playlist on as I write this, having had boygenius and Phoebe Bridgers albums on replay this past week. If you go to Nina’s website you will find playlists she has created for her essay and poetry collections.
I am reading Nina’s new chapbook as though it is a gown, a glacier receding, following the top thread of lines, eyes dropping to the hem, the second narrow thread at the bottom of the page, stitched between place and fabric, ‘the cotton poplin of my dress / the changing colour of an island in the harbour’, caught in the texture and tissue of the endless possibilities of gown, ‘a gown can trace an outline of a field from one’s childhood’
to the loose threads, ‘the white scholar’s dream to touch the distant place / with his own hands’ to the the sharp needle, ‘”80% of apparel is made by young women / between the ages of 18 and 24 earning under the poverty line”‘, to
‘a departure of Said’s theory of orientalism’, stalling on pleat when ‘a pleat is a sentence written by hand on folded paper’, and there I am, pleated and stitched and folded within a gown of my own making
on the occasion of reading this exquisite chapbook, sweet sharp shine falling from museum archive to faultline to documentary to stretched jeans to grandmother stories to secondhand fabric to Sally Wen Mao’s book The Kingdom of Surfaces that responds to ‘China though the looking Glass exhibition at the Met in NYC in 2015 and the documentary The First Monday in May (2016) that chronicled its making and the accompanying Met Gala.
‘I wash the dress by hand and let it become waves, I hang it to dry by the window and touch the sea through the fabric.’
Guo Pei: Fashion, Art, Fantasy 郭培 ：时装之幻梦 “In this Aotearoa New Zealand exclusive exhibition, experience the extravagant, breath-taking fashions of globally renowned Chinese designer Guo Pei. Drawing on influences from around the world and incorporating extraordinary fabrics and bejewelled embroidery, Guo Pei’s striking ensembles of clothing, shoes and jewellery are truly wearable works of art.” Auckand Art Gallery Toi o Tāmariki
Nina Mingya Powles is a poet and writer from Aotearoa New Zealand, based in the UK. Her debut poetry collection, Magnolia 木蘭, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and was a finalist in the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. She is also the author of several poetry pamphlets and zines. In 2018 she was one of three winners of the Women Poets Prize, and in 2019 won the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize. Her resulting book of essays Small Bodies of Water was published in 2021. She has also published a short food memoir, Tiny Moons (2020). Nina is a pamphlet selector for the Poetry Book Society and is on the editorial committee of Starling magazine.
Note: I spotted a copy of Nina’s chapbook in a photograph of the Unity Books poetry table in Wellington. I see they still have one in stock.
For a while the landlady kept a zebra in the kitchen and this zebra was always there when we came down for breakfast, most often standing with its rump to the fire, no doubt dreaming of the lost lands of the savannah and though none of the neighbours believed in the zebra, saying it was an optical illusion, that all changed when bald patches appeared in their lawns, the trampled grass flecked with zebra spittle. It was unnerving to know there was a zebra out there the neighbours said, pulling their dressing gowns tighter around their waists. Ah, so, said the landlady, we must embrace the changing order, an order I might add that has nothing to do with the fires. At that some neighbours crouched, to inspect the ground for hoof prints. Others turned their thoughts to the striped pyjamas they’d seen on sale at the mall. The sun rose, hotter than ever.
Frankie McMillan
Frankie McMillan is a poet and short fiction writer. In 2016 her collection, My Mother and the Hungarians and other small fictions(Canterbury University Press) was long-listed for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. In 2019 The Father of Octopus Wrestling and other small fictions ( CUP) was listed by Spinoff as one of the ten best New Zealand fiction books of 2019. In the same year it was shortlisted for the NZSA Heritage awards.
In 2013 and 2015 she was the winner of the New Zealand Flash Fiction Day competition. She has won numerous awards and creative writing residencies including the Ursula Bethell residency in Creative Writing at the University of Canterbury (2014) the Michael King writing residency at the University of Auckland ( 2017) and the NZSA Peter and Dianne Beatson Fellowship (2019). Her latest book, The Wandering Nature of Us Girls ( CUP) was published in 2022.
The Caselberg Trust will soon be calling for entries for the 2024 Caselberg Trust International Poetry Competition. Now in its 14th year, the Trust is delighted to announce that Dunedin’s finest book shop – the University Book Shop is supporting the poetry prize again this year, and will also host our awards night to coincide with the publication of Landfall 248 Spring 2024. Thank you to everyone at the University Book Shop for your ongoing support.
The competition opens Saturday 1 June and closes on Wednesday 31 July 2024. Entries are judged blind. First Prize is $500 (plus one-week stay at the Caselberg house at Broad Bay, Dunedin). Second Prize is $250; and there are up to 5 Highly-Commended awards (no monetary prizes).
The first- and second-placed poems will be published in the November issue of Landfall, and all winning and highly-commended entries will appear on the Caselberg Trust website (copyright remaining with the authors).
Performance, David Coventry, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024
Please join us to celebrate the launch of Performance, the new novel by David Coventry, to be launched by Tracey Slaughter.
Thursday June 13 6pm Unity Books 57 Willis Street, Wellington. View more info here
All welcome! Drinks and refreshments provided.
For Coventry, ME radically overturns the rules of time, thought and embodiment – an experience which has shaped the writing of this book. Through an illuminating blend of life transcription and deep imaginative projection, he shows how placing fiction into the stories of our damaged lives can remind us of who we are and who we might have been, even when so much of us has been taken away by illness.
From a mountaineering disaster in Kaikōura to a literary encounter in Austria, a country mansion to a volcanic archipelago, this novel is a strikingly vivid, at times disorienting series of journeys, stopovers and emergencies that take in the world, one in which Coventry is often an outsider, even when at home in Wellington. With purposeful unreliability and flashes of humour amid pain and searching, Performance takes us into a space where ‘reading’ itself fails as a description of how we meet the text. This is a generous, unforgettable vista of life within illness.
Hopurangi Songcatcher, Robert Sullivan, Auckland University Press, 2024
Auckland University Press and Scorpio Books invite you to celebrate the launch of Robert Sullivan‘s new poetry collection Hopurangi—Songcatcher. Inspired by the cyclical energies of the Maramataka, these poems see the poet re-finding himself and his world – in the mātauranga of his kuia from the Ngāti Hau and Ngāti Kaharau hapū of Ngāpuhi; in his mother’s stories from his Ngāti Manu hapū at Kāretu; in the singing and storytelling at Puketeraki Marae, home of his father’s people of Kāti Huirapa, Kāti Māmoe, Waitaha and Kāi Tahu Whānui in Te Tai o Āraiteuru; and in the fellowship of friends on Facebook.
All welcome, light refreshments provided. Arrive from 5.30pm for a 6pm start.
Tarot, Jake Arthur, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024
Join us on the eve of the solstice to celebrate Tarot, a new poetry collection by Jake Arthur.
Thursday June 20 6pm Moon Bar 167 Riddiford Street, Newtown, Wellington View more info here
All welcome!
Here are the cards. Put your hand on them, Close your eyes. You don’t want to? But you are blind with them open.
Tarot, Jake Arthur’s beguiling second poetry collection, opens with a tarot reader coaxing us into a reading over a cup of tea. And in a rush of vivid scenes and impressions, we begin to imagine episodes from different lives – a woman tries to train a robin; parents anxiously attend a teacher–parent interview; a man is cast overboard and wonders if he will ever be found. Each card prompts a new character to mull over their uncertainties, hopes, obstacles and joys.
Loosely inspired by the illustrations of the famous 1909 Rider-Waite tarot deck, with its riotous depictions of magicians, occultists, lovers, fools and angels, these poems have us grappling our way towards a clear path.
Poetry Shelf is taking a short nap for the coming week. After a tough few months navigating a stretched health system, it feels like a mountain has lifted. But sometimes when a mountain lifts you get a smash of tiredness. This is a long slow recovery road. No change there. Today I am feeling for everyone who is struggling to cope with health challenges, overdue bills, overwork and low pay, racism, homophobia, concern about nature and the state of our planet, war and its inhumane effects upon innocent people.
I love furnishing Poetry Shelf, establishing connections, spotlighting new books, showcasing authors, ideas, writing of all genres, coming up with new series. I know that more than anything, in these turbulent times, whether personal, local or global, we need to find ways to tend and build our daily joy, our self comfort, and to reach out to the person standing next to us. Poetry Shelf, for me, is solace, diversion, inspiration, heart. And it only works because you are part of it.
Poetry Lane
It leads down to the river where you can sit all day contemplating the slow walk home.
NZ Poetry Shelf 