“I am incredibly moved by all the amazing readings we’ve had tonight. They just bring the room alive. Books multiply the world, and it’s just incredible to hear all of the worlds that were evoked in these books we’ve heard from tonight. I really want to shout out to all the books that have been published in the past year. I am so grateful to everyone who supports books, to the booksellers, all the sponsors, to everyone who has come here tonight, to readers, I think of all of us writers as readers, first and foremost, and that’s something that brings us all together.

It’s been helpful for me to remember that it’s been our books going through this prize process, not us, it’s really easy to conflate these things, especially in writing when we’ve put all of ourselves into our work. It is about the books. I hope everyone can go to their local library or booksellers and ask them to recommend a New Zealand book.

Fiction is a form of magic. It’s necessary magic. It has saved many of us at different times in our lives and it will again if we let it. To the politicians and decision makers and anybody who might find themselves in a system of ‘what if?’, I say read a story, read a novel, and the work of the great Canadian writer, Alice Munro, who died today, and remember how vulnerable and layered and loving and connected we all are, and how much we need each other.”

an extract from Emily Perkins acceptance speech
for Lioness (Bloomsbury UK), winner of the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction

Last night I live streamed the book awards. It was a terrific occasion that honoured sixteen books shortlisted in the four categories, and the three best first books. This year Te Mūrau o te Tuhi, a special award given for a book written originally and entirely in te reo Māori, was given to Tā Pou Temara KNZM (Ngāi Tūhoe), esteemed academic and Waitangi Tribunal member, for Te Rautakitahi O Tūhoe ki Ōrākau (Kotahi Rau Pukapuka, Auckland University Press). Watch online here.

Like Emma, I particularly loved the short readings from each author. I loved Jack Tame as emcee. I valued the ongoing insistence that books matter, that our books reflect and speak to us, and that in Aotearoa, we continue to write, read, publish, purchase and borrow books.

I loved Emma Wehipeihana‘s reading from There’s a Cure for This (Penguin). Her acceptance speech for (E. H. McCormick Prize for Best First Book of General Non-Fiction) was brilliant, especially with junior doctors going on strike again today. Emma said: “As a doctor I’ve seen the insides of most orifices of the human body and held the viscera of the living and the dead, and I can tell you without a doubt, it’s the arts and artists who elevate our existence from being sacks of meat circling a dying star to something magical, sometimes with meaning.” The judges write: “Emma Wehipeihana’s engaging, eloquent, witty and sometimes confronting memoir is an extremely impressive first book. It is structured as a series of powerful essays about her journey as a wahine Māori through both her early life and her time in medical school. Emerging as a doctor, she recounts with candour and wry humour the racism she and other Māori experience, and she highlights, in an infinitely readable way, the structural inequalities in the health system.”

I also loved Emily Perkins speech and her reading from Lioness (Bloomsbury UK), winner of the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction. Perhaps one of the best acceptance speeches I have heard in years and I’ve quoted most of it above. I began 2024 by reading Lioness. A perfect start to the year – so layered and heart tapping, idea challenging, character rich – it’s a must read. The judges write: “Emily Perkins deftly wrangles a large cast of characters in vivid technicolour, giving each their moment in the sun, while dexterously weaving together multiple plotlines. Her acute observations and razor-sharp wit decimate the tropes of mid-life in moments of pure prose brilliance, leaving the reader gasping for more. Disturbing, deep, smart, and funny as hell, Lioness is unforgettable.”

Gregory O’Brien‘s beautifully published Don Binney Flight Path (Auckland University Press) won the Booksellers Aotearoa NZ Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction. It is an art treasure. So much love and research and care went into this book. The judges write: “Even as an experienced biographer, Gregory O’Brien has achieved a near impossible task in Don Binney: Flight Path. He has encapsulated the artist’s full life, honestly portraying his often contrary personality, and carefully interrogating a formidably large body of work and its place in Aotearoa New Zealand’s art history. O’Brien’s respect for Binney includes acknowledging that he could be both charming and curmudgeonly, and as a result he offers a complete picture of this complex and creative man.”

Book awards have the ability to your attention to books you have missed, books that immediately go to the top of the must-read pile. Today I am ordering a copy of Toeolesulusulu Damon Salesa‘s An Indigenous Ocean: Pacific Essays (Bridget Williams Books). He won the General Non-Fiction Award for his and the judges said: “This scholarly but highly accessible collection of essays carves out space for indigenous voices to tell their own narratives. Grounded in a deep understanding of Pacific history and cultures, Salesa addresses the contemporary social, political, economic, regional and international issues faced by Pacific nations. This seminal work asserts the Pacific’s ongoing impact worldwide, despite marginalisation by New Zealand and others, and will maintain its relevance for generations.”

I am also itching to read Emma Hislop’s (Kāi Tahu) Ruin and Other Stories (Te Herenga Waka University Press) which was awarded Hubert Church Prize for Best First Book of Fiction. The judges write: “Emma Hislop’s portrayals are perceptive, providing the women in her stories the space to grapple with disquieting questions that lack easy answers, while the insistent humanity of her characterisations suggests cause for hope. There is not a spare word in these refined and compelling stories, which introduce a striking new voice to our literature.”

Yes, there are countless extraordinary books that made neither the 2023 longlist nor the shortlist, but today, for just this moment, I am saluting our fabulous winners. Long may we write, read, publish, buy and share our local stories, knowledge and imaginings.

Ockham NZ Book Awards page

The Poetry

It is with great pleasure I congratulate Grace Yee, winner of the 2024 Ockham NZ Book Award for Poetry, and Megan Kitching, winner of Best First Book of Poetry. It was a stellar shortlist; I loved all four books on the list, and celebrated them on Poetry Shelf with absolute poetry pleasure (as indeed I did the longlist and various sublime collections that didn’t make either). I have included the judges’ comments at the bottom.

Winner of Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry
Chinese Fish, Grace Yee, Giramondo Press, 2023

Grace Yee’s terrific debut poetry collection caught my attention immediately- the clarity of writing, the intricate and affecting weave of multiples voices, voices that carry family, issues of immigration and racism, overlapping motifs. She weaves English and Cantonese and Taishanese. Dialogue sits alongside the newspaper borrowings, lyricism alongside more scholarly lines. Historical and cultural facts, along with additional comments, arrive in a faint grey font, little disruptions like a persistent shadow that hovers behind every we line we read, every voice we hear. And yes food is a succulent presence, a visibility that heightens both the sense of belonging and not belonging: from roast lamb, brussel sprouts and white bread to steamed rice and wontons in soup.

In my review I wrote:

“Grace has produced a remarkable poetry collection that speaks to who we are and who we have been. It is a vital reminder that we need to do better, that we need to listen and forge connections, celebrate and welcome, make and enact laws that are just, acknowledge the richness of all cultures. Poetry has the power to reflect and speak to humanity. It is essential. To have spent time with this book is a gift.“

What is the point of this anecdote? Is this a story
about assimilation
or – god forbid – miscegenation? This
Cherry character
doesn’t seem very … Chinese.
Could you put her in a chong-sam
or have her wipe a few grains of rice
from her mouth…or explore the Pākeha boy’s point of view
perhaps? How does he feel kissing this exotic
Chinese girl? Does she taste like
soy sauce?

from ‘For the Good Husband’

“Yee’s craft is remarkable,” judge Erik Kennedy says. “She moves between old newspaper cuttings, advertisements, letters, recipes, cultural theory, and dialogue. Creating a new archival poetics for the Chinese trans-Tasman diaspora, the sequence narrates a Hong Kong family’s assimilation into New Zealand life from the 1960s to the 1980s, interrogating ideas of citizenship and national identity. It displaces the reader, evoking the unsettledness of migration. In Chinese Fish, Yee cooks up a rich variety of poetic material into a book that is special and strange; this is poetry at its urgent and thrilling best.”

Grace Yee is the author of Chinese Fish, winner of the Victorian Prize for Literature and the Victorian Premier’s Poetry Award in 2024. Her poetry has been widely published and anthologised across Australia and Aotearoa, and internationally, and has been awarded the Patricia Hackett Prize, the Peter Steele Poetry Award, and a Creative Fellowship at the State Library Victoria. Grace has taught in the Writing and Literature Program at Deakin University, and in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Melbourne, where she completed a PhD on settler Chinese women’s storytelling in Aotearoa New Zealand. She lives in Melbourne, on Wurundjeri land.

Giramond page

Poetry Shelf feature

Winner of The Jessie Mackay Prize for Poetry Best First Book
At The Point of Seeing, Megan Kitching, Otago University Press, 2023

When I first started reading Megan’s At the Point of Seeing, it was an intake of breath, knowing this was a poet to watch, this was a book of return, and indeed, on every occasion of reading, I think and feel something new. It is there in the title, this vital cusp, this sway between comprehension and obliviousness. Awareness alongside ignorance. Megan’s collection holds out the natural world, so we may also stand on the point of seeing. So we may absorb the wildness, the wilderness, the edge. So we may inhale beauty and growth. So we may recognise how our states of awareness might be infected or controlled, how our blindness to choices of the past might aggravate contemporary and future life.

In my review I wrote:

“I also read this sumptuous collection as musical sound track, and again it produces wonder, delight, sonic surprise. It is a sweetly mixed playlist as we move from assonance, to rhyme, near rhyme, alliteration, aural dip and lift and slide. It is writing on the wire. It is scoring the world, it is intricate melody, it is open tuning.”

Ah. I am pitching this book to you, when against all odds, poetry is a lifeline, the source of joy, the connecting force, the point of contemplation. We are at the point of seeing, we are at the point of speaking, sharing, hoping, and poetry such as this, poetry as good as this, makes all the difference.

An Environmental History

The book hurts but I go on reading.
It doesn’t take long once we come to it:
sharp as an adze blow, ash blaze, rats’ teeth,
whalebone, deals done, a swift overrun.
The toll of knock-on consequences
like a ship’s wake razing shore upon shore
is a line too often sung. Eaten, exhausted,
our stores of regret for the flightless dead.

Down on the beach, gulls are feeding.
All I do for today is watch each fend
their patch as terns zone in, heads cocked.
Fish shirr water, fleet away to their own resources.
Ponderous, as if evolving only now, dimly
feeling something has changed, chitons
graze the rock. There is food in books too,
better knowing, but until we come to that
let algae, plankton, foliage flourish
long enough to keep the survivors fed.

Megan Kitching
At the Point of Seeing, Otago University Press, 2023

The judge, Erik Kennedy writes: “At the Point of Seeing is one of the most accomplished debuts readers are likely to encounter. The collection uses structure to amplify meaning, and its luxuriant lexicon and sometimes knotty syntax are always invigorating rather than confusing. But this book is never a mere exercise in building poems mechanically. Megan Kitching’s poems are warm-blooded, compassionate, and inquiring. They take the reader into an Aotearoa landscape and a moral universe that they will want to explore over and over again.”

Megan Kitching was born in Tāmaki Makarau Auckland and now lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin. She holds a PhD in English Literature from Queen Mary University, London, looking at the influence of the natural sciences on eighteenth-century poetry. She has taught English and creative writing in the UK and at the University of Otago. Her poetry has appeared in The Frogmore Papers (UK), takahē, Poetry New Zealand, and Landfall. “The horses,” published in takahē 95, was nominated for Best Small Fictions 2020. In 2021, she was the inaugural Caselberg Trust Elizabeth Brooke-Carr Emerging Writer Resident. At the Point of Seeing is her debut collection.

Otago University Press page

Poetry Shelf feature

Welcome to a new and ongoing series on Poetry Shelf. 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 to read? Do we need comfort or challenge or both? I am inviting various poets to respond to five questions, and to include a poem or two of their own. This week poet, novelist, essayist and editor, Ian Wedde.

Maxi checking walk weather

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

Always – sometimes the bad news shuts me up, as now somewhat, with a sense of weariness at the very bad regressive policies of New Zealand’s current government. At other times – ‘You have to start somewhere/ in these morose times’ (The Lifeguard) – or when I wrote poems about call it the human condition (Barbary Coast) it was from a compassion with and for those of us not feeling good about the state of call it the human condition:

and I can’t remember
where the silence ended and speech began,
where vision ender and tears began.
All our promises vanish into thin air.

… bit morose, really.

Other responses have been less introverted, for example the work I did with Fawwaz Tuqan producing the book of poems by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish back in 1973, my contribution of a sort to the situation I lived with while working with Palestinian refugees in Amman, Jordan.

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

Yes it does. I love living where I do at present, in Three Lamps, Ponsonby, Auckland, encircled by sea and in a walking-distance neighbourhood with pretty much everything I need within dog-walk reach, including a swimming beach (when not polluted by rain run-off). I lived nearby in Wood Street back in the 60s when I was at university and Ponsonby was very down market, so I have a kind of stretched-out sense of home. There’s a new small book on the way called Ode to Auckland, which begins like this:

1

McCahon’s Defile
For John Reynolds

And so Colin I cast off in my frail craft of words
my craft of frail words of crafty words
into the defile of Three Lamps where
struck by sunshine on the florist’s striped awning
and the autumn leaves outside All Saints 
as you did before fully waking in Waitākere
to look at the elegant pole kauri in dewy light
I defile my sight with closed eyes
and so see better when I open them the Sky Tower
pricking a pale blue heaven like Raphael’s
in Madonna of the Meadows or the scumbled sky of
Buttercup fields forever where there is a constant flow of light
and we are born into a pure land through Ahipara’s blunt gate
a swift swipe of pale blue paint
on Shadbolt’s battered booze bar where bards
bullshitted among the kauri.

Gaunt cranes along the city skyline
avert their gazes towards the Gulf
away from babblers at Bam Bina
breakfast baskers outside Dizengoff
some pretty shaky dudes outside White Cross
beautiful blooms in buckets at Bhana Brothers
(open for eighty years) Karen Walker’s window
looking fresh and skitey across Ponsonby Road
my charming deft dentist at Luminos
most of South Asia jammed into one floor at the Foodcourt

… and so on for a few pages, from 2020.

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.

I’ve been loving very regular email posts from my good mate Barry (Bazza) Hill in Queenscliff, Victoria, Australia. He’s been sending regular chunks of a new book for me to have a read and comment as appropriate, so it’s like a drawn-out conversation when I suspect both of us have a glass of wine to hand. His poems are coming in an amazing rush of energy largely driven by rage at the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, a momentum I can’t even imagine matching, especially as the poems I’m writing at present are very slow to come and often minimal when they finish. Sample from back in 2007:

Film Treatment

The klieg lights, the dark,
dripping forest, the rank flanks

of horses, a sneery hound pissing
on wet tents. The collapse

of public transport, the unhygienic
orphanage, the barracks, the unpredictable

success of tour discounts. A lake
in which a lake

is reflected. A mountain
superimposed on another where

thoughts race along the boardwalk
losing touch with their bodies

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?

Pretty capacious question! I’d say entertainment in the very broad sense of texts that engage me fully by whatever means, ideally very diverse and as unexpected as possible – poems that entertain everything from the most minimal and conceptual to the most deliberately programmatic. I admit to wearying of let’s call it the introverted domestic-personal, I prefer the unexpected and to not have my sympathy courted too simply.

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

Conversation.

Born 1946 in Blenheim, New Zealand, Ian Wedde has lived in various places in New Zealand and elsewhere and currently in Auckland with his wife the screen-writer Donna Malane and their dog Maxi. They have five sons between them and six grandchildren.

Submissions are OPEN.

We will read all poems sent to us between now (May) and 30 June 2024.

We’ll aim to respond to everyone by the end of August.

Issue 11 will be launched in the Southern hemisphere spring.

What we ask:

Share your poetry – be it a roar, purr, or pip-squeak. 

Broadly, we seek poems in which we feel a warm-blooded liveliness – beating hearts, teeth and claws or rough-tongued tenderness. To get a sense of the range of work we’ve adored before, browse our previous issues online.

We believe that you should pursue the writing that most energises you, rather than tailoring your voice to journals – and we are always pleasantly surprised by new modes of enchantment. Send us the work you’d be most chuffed to see in the world.

Email us up to five poems, preferably in a Word document, to sweetmammalian at gmail.com along with an author bio in your cover note. We also appreciate knowing we’re you’re from, within Aotearoa or abroad.

Sweet Mammalian site

A writer’s work is inevitably—at least to some degree—anchored in its own time and space. And yet some writing also transcends those temporal and geographical connections in important ways: opening up questions that refuse easy answers, these works stay hauntingly relevant long after they were first published, and well beyond their particular geographical locale. Janet Frame, as a writer of immense creative capability, paired with formidable intellectual curiosity and social awareness, has endowed us with such “transcendent” writing; indeed, she has given us a body of work whose probing questions we have barely begun to unpack with the full attention, and respect, that they deserve.

To celebrate Frame’s extraordinary legacy and mark the centenary of Frame’s birth in Dunedin, the University of Otago English and Linguistics Programme invites scholars and writers to participate in a one-day symposium that teases out some of the enduring questions raised by her work. We specifically aim to explore the complex ways in which Frame’s work might speak to the contemporary moment: how—and perhaps why—might we read her work today?

We invite scholarly and creative abstracts of no more than 300 words. Topics might include, but are not limited to:

• Creative adaptations of Janet Frame’s work
• The demands of reading Frame in an era of distraction
• Beyond New Zealand: Frame and the world of migration/travel/cross-cultural encounter
• The state of Frame scholarship
• Frame and the world of ideas
• Empathy and (non-)violence in Frame’s writing
• The question of the political in Frame’s writing
• Frame and contemporary cultural theory (How might recent theoretical turns, such as affect theory or ecocriticism, inflect our understanding of Frame? Conversely, what resources might Frame offer to contemporary theoretical preoccupations?)
• Frame’s attentiveness to time and place
• Frame’s attentiveness to “the marginalised”
• Creative writing—or reading—through of one or more of Frame’s texts
• Frame’s lineage and legacy in contemporary literature. Please email abstracts and a short biographical note to janetframesymposium@gmail.com by 15 June (with notification of acceptance on or before June 30).

Hopurangi -Songcatcher Poems from the Maramataka, Robert Sullivan
Auckland University Press, 2024

A review

I often use the word ‘breathtaking’ when I am tagging a poetry collection I love, and yes, poetry can take your breath away but, after reading Robert Sullivan’s sublime new collection, Hopurangi -Songcatcher Poems from the Maramataka, I am musing on the idea, ‘breath-enhancing’. I am in the luxurious position of being able to slow read, to wind the reading pace down to country road rambles, so I may savour and absorb and delight. I do want to add that I am huge fan of beach running, of getting into a sweet rhythm that gets mantras flowing, and I relish the jumpstart of crime fiction and exhilarating breakneck poetry.

Robert’s new collection is inspired by Maramataka, the Māori lunar calendar. After a long absence from Facebook, over a three-month period, he posted a poem day, attuned to the lunar cycle energies, drawing upon what he was learning about Maramataka. Each poem is tagged with an energy meter – low, medium, or high. The resulting poetry is a testimony of whanau, language, the natural world and aroha.

Language. Robert weaves together English and te reo Māori and I am reminded how important our language choices are, how what we say in one language is often only approximated in another, how a single word, phrase, line or concept only reaches fullness in its mother tongue. How the musicality of one language might resound in a different key when transposed into the musicality of another. I know this from the decades I spent thinking in Italian. I am reading Robert’s collection with my ears acutely engaged, listening to the music and cultural resonance of the two languages. There is also the of the uplift of the commonplace through refreshing word choices – rain is ‘like television static’, spring blossoms ‘pop / like a summer shirt’, ‘a uniform grey jersey / covers the day sky’.

Love. Herein lies the lifeblood of the collection, the current that connects and moves as you read. Robert is speaking to and with and for his mother, father, son, friends and loved ones, authors that have sustained and comforted him, from Keri Hulme to Hone Tuwhare to Maya Angelou, Ruby Solly and Arihia Latham, Sinead Overbye. What is love? he asks. How to measure this mysterious presence (or absence)? And, how do I love you? He might view things that remind him:

of love, such as the gold over the snow-capped mountains,
and the gold in fields of spring, and the gold
in dripping kōwhai blossoms that look sweet.

But they don’t measure up really.
They’re compensation. Those images are ideas
and lack the bite, kaha te katakata kicks and lick of life.

 

from ‘Ōuenuku: Anei Anō he Rā’

Planting. The poet is tending his paddock, planting trees, making a rabbit-proof fence, giving back to Tāne Mahuta, collecting litter from the beach, but he is also planting himself, setting down roots in the poems, come together on and between the line as a form of home, learning to play the kōauau, singing waiata, writing the daily poem, open to making mistakes and to keep trying, to share kai, to share kōrero, to say ‘thank you’, to travel to various places that are home.

Rhythm. This is also a vital connection. There is the rhythm of the line, resembling a steady voice, like a speaking voice. There is the rhythm of the seasons, Maramataka, the weather, of generations, of knowledge and language passed down, the ebb and flow of energy, of waiata, of storytelling. There is

As someone who depends upon reading glasses, the font choice is a crucial ingredient in a book for me – I found the faint grey font difficult to read, for others it would be even more so. It is something for publishers and poets to bear in mind. But once my eyes became accustomed, I fell in love with the effect, I don’t even know how to describe it, but it added an aesthetic layer that entranced, beguiled, softened.

In one poem, Robert is at an English teachers council hui, advocating the need for schools to fill the curriculum with ‘local Māori poets first, / and then local poets, and local Māori writers and then local writers’:

until we fill every school

in Aotearoa with our voices

because our voices

are recognised and loved

by our kids. Let’s speak

at school like it’s home.

 

from ‘Tangaroa Whāriki Kiokio: You’ll Get an Email from Me’

How this plea resonates alongside the current political edicts, prescriptions and alarming descriptions of what the Coalition Government pledges for the child, the adult and our planet. In Robert’s sublime and breath-enhancing collection, I am finding seeds of hope. Of te reo Māori growing alongside English, both languages vital on our tongues, of tending our relationships, whether human or planetary, with care as opposed to greed, of acknowledging our spikes and our difficulties, of never ceasing to learn new things. I hold this collection out to you as a book of freshness, of reassessing and finding one’s place, a book of experience, wisdom, friendship, hope. And above all, a book of aroha.

A reading

Robert reads ‘Continuous Positive Airway Pressure Machine’

Robert reads ‘Pupurangi Shelley’

Robert reads ‘The Paper Chase’

Robert Sullivan (of Ngāpuhi, Kāi Tahu, and Irish descent) is the author and editor of fifteen books. He co-edits The Journal of New Zealand Literature with Dr Erin Mercer, and is President of the NZ Poetry Society. Among his awards is the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for a distinguished contribution to New Zealand poetry. Hopurangi | Songcatcher: Poems from the Maramataka is his ninth collection of poetry and is published this month by Auckland University Press. The three recorded poems are “Pupurangi Shelley,” “The Paper Chase” and “Continuous Positive Airway Pressure Machine” from his new collection.

Auckland University Press page

Skeletal

Leaves loosen on their bed; they can fall
no further. I pick one up before
the earth comes crumbling
from its darkened door
to claim it.

I press this blueprint against the light
and parched canals and gardens appear:
a city inked with a single hair.

On my palm, it lies
diaphanous in the lift of body heat.
See the breath rush back
into the chambers of its birth.
It’s like my flesh as a threadbare sheet,
my touch reduced to finger-whorls,
the lines of my life writ small,
all grip and strive relinquished.

It rides at rest on its stem, tremblingly,
this skiff of lace.
There is the trace
of kinship in the veins.

Megan Kitching

Megan Kitching is an Ōtepoti Dunedin poet. Her debut collection At the Point of Seeing (Otago University Press, 2023) was shortlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Prize for Poetry at the 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Her poetry has been published in Aotearoa New Zealand and international journals including The Frogmore Papers (UK), takahē, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook and Landfall. In 2021, she was the inaugural Caselberg Trust Elizabeth Brooke-Carr Emerging Writer Resident.

This weekend the brilliant Featherston Booktown Festival will be in full swing – such a warm and inspiring occasion. Would so loved to have been at Friday’s late night event with Tayi Tibble, Becky Manawatu, Lee Murray, Madeleine Slavick and Mary McCallum (‘A Place to call Home’). Or to catch Jenny Bornholdt talking about Annemarie Hope-Cross (1968–2022) with Lynn Freeman.

And this week Poetry Shelf has launched a new series – I invite writers to respond to 5 Questions. Like so many people in these troubling times, I keep agonising over what and how to write, what and how to blog. Community feels so important.

Looking forward to opening AUP New Poets 10 edited by Anne Kennedy – it will be launched on May 29th but is out in shops now.

Also looking forward to seeing responses to sessions at the Auckland Writers Festival on social media. Lots of poets appearing at The Streetside events at Britomart. If anyone wants to send me festival thoughts, I will make a collage of them when the festival is over – words and pictures!

New books in my post box this week: First Things – A Memoir, Harry Ricketts (THWUP) and Manuali’i, Rex Letoa Paget (Saufo’i Press).

Poetry Shelf does not accept open submissions for poems, but do send me notices for the noticeboard, and new books. I cannot promise to feature or review everything as my energy jar is still half full. Thank you so much for your contributions, ideas and enthusiasm for poetry, and indeed, for the gorgeous books published in Aotearoa.

The week’s links

Monday: Monday Poem – Bill Manhire’s ‘Hello’

Tuesday: Sylvan Spring reads from Killer Pack
Jesse’s Reading Party

Wednesday: 5 Questions – Khadro Mohamed
The Rush Cottage Writers’ Residency

Thursday: Review and conversation with Amy Brown, My Brilliant Sister

Friday: Review of Madeleine Slavick’s Town

A poem and a musing

II

How she grew old happened in fine-darned places,
Cracked pictures, seen too close: you’d barely know . . .
She was a red-haired woman, two little lines
Sharp cut between her brows: her eyes looked tired
As long as I remember, and her strong mouth sad.
Still she held firmly: when we went for walks
It was I who flagged: you’d never guess what frocks
She made us, while the clean thread broke and broke,
And I stood pricking at red sateen, or spoke
Roughly: that dance, the only one we had,
I remember Judy’s frock of petals, wired
Bright blue, with silver wrappings round the stalks.

Sometimes I loved her: but I liked smooth faces
Like the other mothers had, and told her so.
She laughed: she was never frightened: she took knocks
Square on the mouth, and wouldn’t hit you back:
I never saw my mother dressed in black
But grief came . . . and she never let it go.

Robin Hyde
from ‘The People’ in Houses by the Sea and the Later Poems of Robin Hyde, ed Gloria Rawlinson (Caxton Press, 1952)

So many poems of and for and by mothers on my shelves. How do we know and love and speak our mothers? In my second collection, Chrome (Auckland University Press, 2000), I built my house, my home, my place of belonging. The four sections were infused with a colour: my yellow self, my rose-red mother, my father green as grass, and the blue ripeness of poetry. I haven’t looked at this collection for a very long time, but with Mother’s Day on Sunday I wanted to read the mother section and see how I felt. My mother died a few days before Christmas last year, after a challenging month, and I could barely get to the airport, let alone fly down to care for her, or go to her funeral. So I mourned her here, at home.

Chrome. Fabrizia Ramondino’s novel Althénopis, inspired me to perform, in poetry, the process of writing home. I was writing myself as home, I was writing my mother and father as home, and finally, I was writing the text itself, the long poem, as a form of home. Colour functioned as both filter and point of saturation. I was drawn to the compelling colours of certain films: the work of Andrei Tarkovsky and Peter Greenaway, Sergo Paradjanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates. Alexander Theroux’s book The Primary Colours extended the range and play of colour. The blue-purple of The Rothko Room in London’s Tate Gallery and the yellow of a Wolfgang Laib installation helped provide the stillness I needed in order to write.

It was good to return to this sequence, to see what I had written all those years ago, to remember the complications of maternal relationships, and how we only ever know partial versions of our parents. I usually keep my family out of my poems, so this was an usual book to write. Today, when things feel so challenging both health-wise and planet-wise, I am still drawn to colour, to the earthy hues of Frances Hodgkins, a still life of Agnes Martin, the vibrant art of Sara Hughes and Grace Wright, Saskia Leek and John Pule, to the light on the Waitākere Ranges, the colour pop of food on a plate, tomatoes ripening in the garden.

At the end of the toughest week I have had in ages, when I want to weep at this nincompoop Coalition, at how very hard it is to recognise notions of ‘better’ in any of their choices, I witness the immeasurable kindness and care of health workers despite their breaking points. And yes, it was good to return to Chrome, to think of my mother, to think of writing, of reading, to find moments of stillness and joy.

I have a couple of spare copies of Chrome to give away, message me if you would like one.

we call it repetition
we call it in that order

red dahlias on the table
your face still fevered and hectic

here is a history of mothering
here is resentment and love

love is your origin
the flowers and the light

cyclamens flame-deepened on the sill
fuschias held for a moment

I am holding my mother closer
lingering at the border of home

she walks across Scottish Highlands
along Nelson rivers and Northland tracks

with crisp air salvaging a life
the mother returns to the beginning

the mother in pieces
where do I begin?

my voice cracked and blunt
the difficult daughter herself in pieces

I will walk along the Cascade track
in the secluded undergrowth

we sweep the rocks
we take the sand

I, the wayward daughter with heart
grown on stories and words and damask

leaking mouth
leaking lungs

see the tired skin of the mother
my mother still with milk memory

she moves on her own now
to places she once lived

I search for a token
a familiar place

we speak
in shifting patterns

Paula Green, from ‘Red’ in Chrome