Kia ora!
Tuwhare Residencies are open for applications.
We have 3 residencies on offer:
Te Pane Kākā o Tuwhare – Tuwhare Poetry Residency.
Te Ringatoi o Tuwhare – Tuwhare Creative Residency.
Te Kaituhi o Tuwhare – Tuwhare Creative Writing Residency.
Applications are available at here https://honetuwhare.org.nz/tuwhare-residency/
Art work: Tracey Tawhiao, 2025. Buy her art at: Tracey Tawhiao
Entries are now open for the 2026 Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize!
This year’s judge is Emma Neale, whose collection ‘Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit’ (Otago University Press, 2024) won the 2025 Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry.
The winning poem and judge’s report will be published in Landfall Tauraka Journal 252 (November 2026).
Entries close: 5pm, Tuesday 30 June 2026
Find out more and enter here
in the seam of a dream I find myself
in the dream of a seam I write
spilling onto the roads of imagined cities
I don’t know about you but poetry in Aotearoa in 2026 is a sizzling simmering dazzling arrival of new books. I keep picking a book from the review stack and find myself electrified nourished challenged utterly in awe with what words can do within and beyond the form and possibilities of a poem.
Thank you for your continued support as readers and writers, and for sharing the POETRY LOVE.
five readings
Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: Myths of the Freedom Campers by David Eggleton
Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Anne Kennedy picks Bill Manhire
Poetry Shelf review: Before the Winter Ends by Khadro Mohamed
Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: Puanga by Airini Beautrais
Poetry Shelf celebrates Ariana Tikao’s Pepeha Portal – a review and a reading
an invitation
Poetry Shelf Off the Shelf: I want to start a new series on Poetry Shelf where we pick a beloved New Zealand poetry book from at least a couple of years ago, maybe twenty, maybe fifty, maybe a hundred. A poetry blast from the past. Choose the book. Write one or two paragraphs on why the book has stuck to you. With permission we could even include a poem from it. I will post on the blog.
Please note our Swanson Post Box lobby is closing in the next few days so will advise you soon of our new post box.
Pepeha Portal, Ariana Tikao
cover image: Kate Stevens West (Kāi Tahu), Kurawaka/Tender Ties Kohikohi, 2021
University of Otago Press, 2026
To read Pepeha Portal is uplifting. The poetry offers an experience that nourishes the air I breathe, the physical ground I stand upon, the metaphorical paths I navigate, the way I move between past present future, the way poems can hold me in prolonged and vital embrace.
The collection is divided into two parts, ‘Pepeha’ and ‘Portal’. Two warm welcome palms held out to me as reader, let’s say to you as reader. Two versions of homecoming and homebeing perhaps, with vital movement between and beyond and close to. The first section, ‘Pepeha’, introduces self in Māori through connections to tīpuna place and stories, where the presence of people and ancestors acutely matter. The second, the ‘Portal’, the doorway, offers an array of life-rich movement in the Christchurch of Ariana’s childhood and the Ōtautahi of her adulthood.
Think place. Think belonging. Think aroha. Think wisdom. Think physical land. Think the ache of the land ravaged for-earth-ruinology, not for-earth-ecology: “rock spews into Whakaraupō / in the name of progress”.
I love how te reo Māori and English weave together across the collection, heightening the rhythm of two languages singing alongside each other, the way individual words are blooming with distinction, semantic nuances, cultural links. To have this precious language presence is vital when we are calling for te reo Māori to be both heard and visible in the streets, in schools, in parliament, in books published, the songs recorded, the stories shared. Let these lines from ‘To’u Reo’ settle upon your skin:
Then I remember Hana O’Regan:
He ātaahua te reo i roto i a koe
Āe, the reo inside me is perfect
It’s in my blood
like lava
like a fire
like my pōua said Mana
is a fire
never extinguished
I keep jotting down words to carry through the collection as I read, like echo mantras: belonging, connecting, here, from. There in the moving eulogies to mother and father. There in the poem, ‘Ko Au Tonu’ with its echo-chamber line, “I am here”. And there in the terrific poem ‘From’. It’s like song. It’s like a self chant. I just want to hear the poem singing in the air. Here’s a taste of it (you can hear Ariana read the poem below):
I’m from Redgrave Street, Hoon Bay. Pōtiki of seven ‘half-caste’
kids raised in a house built by the state, with purple polyanthus
and sweet peas blooming along the driveway
I’m from picking the hardened chewing gum off the footpaths,
spitting out grit like pips, coaxing back flavour with persuasive
saliva and metal-filled teeth
Musicality is important as I read, and I was super keen to hear Ariana perform some poems. Ariana, a musician and New Zealand Arts Laureate, is attuned to the cadence of words and her poetry reflects this, with her aural agility, a gift.
In the poem, ‘Intonation’, a poem dedicated to the late Moana Jackson, I find deep-seated heart, and again we are in a crucial stream of belonging and connections. The poem sings the praises of Moana and underlines we are not writing and reading in empty impoverished hopeless vacuums. We are writing and singing, joining and remembering, connecting and that matters. Here’s a stanza:
The time has come
if we each tell
one of his stories
we will light up this place
so bright we gotta wear shades
Ariana is crafting and sharing poetry with roots in the personal but it is also poetry speaking to for out and for the world. I stall on ‘Kua Whetūrakitia’, a poem shaped like an urn or a vase or beacon. A beacon of light that we hold up for Gaza.
I stall on ‘Settling’, a striking poem that holds the title word, a prickly spiky word, out to us, shaking the word a little like a snow globe, letting sediment settle upon us, the sediment that forms in the shaken jar. Turn the word again and settle is negotiating, negotiations. And another turn and it’s the Israeli settling settlers on the West Bank, as the Palestinians mourn their bombed whanau. This word. This settling, this unfolding and refolding gash in hearts settling.
I’m electrified by ‘Transforming’ and its call for action. Protest. Speaking out. It feels important this, that Ariana’s poetry, so personal and grounding, shines insistent light on global and local wounds and speaks out. In this ground-tremor poem, Ariana turns to the mokopuna:
Papa’s heat is also rising. We will summon those wiling to fight
for Papatūānuku, those who won’t keep extracting from her –
unlike us, who believed the the claim of the capitalists. These new
fighters will speak our reo and dance with the fluid movement
of bull kelp surging around the rocks. Wehi and wana will
explode from them like white water from a blowhole. It is these
mokopuna that we need. They won’t stay seated in rows. They
won’t wear bows in their hair. Nau mai e tama. Nau mai e hine!
Much of collection was written during Ariana’s 2023 Ursula Bethell Residency at the University of Canterbury. In her endnote, she mentions her office corkboard: “I progressively added printed pages from the Ngāi Tahu digital atlas Kā Huru Manu, to use it as a visual reminder of our placenames and the stories behind them. As a way to track progress, I’d added coloured pins to the map. In the end, there were over thirty pins.”
And now, the extraordinary reach and intimacy of Pepeha Portal settles and unsettles and resettles me. I am musing on writing poetry as a form of travel, inner private intimate travel, physical travel, travel that sparks epiphany, travel that refreshes the light in which I view and hear and absorb the world.
This gift of a book is in the world. Thank you.
a reading
‘Te Waihora’
‘Transforming’
‘From’
‘Intonation’
Ariana Tikao is a Kāi Tahu writer, musician and New Zealand Arts Laureate. Her work spans poetry, music and interdisciplinary performance, and has been published widely in Aotearoa. Her book Mokorua: My Story of Moko Kauae was published in 2022 (AUP). Pepeha Portal is her debut poetry collection.
Otago University Press page
Puanga
The children are making the river.
They have sand and pumice. They have ferns.
A teacher unrolls masking tape,
presses a map to the wall.
There are birds that sing when squeezed.
Wild-eyed, a girl clings to a tūī.
There are little whare, into which
the birds can be inserted.
A boy carries the kōkako
around all morning.
*
Over the radio, silence.
Then the swish of piupiu,
tread of feet,
pat of plastic poi.
Stillness. Silence moves
across the airwaves.
A drum, a guitar strum
breaks it. Girls open their throats.
The sound of lungs filling.
The loosing of tongues.
*
This is Puanga, or Rigel.
The laser pointer circles the gleam.
Children’s heads silhouetted
by the projector,
continually in movement.
This is Matariki, or the Pleiades,
or Subaru.
But in Whanganui,
Puanga is the star
we look for in the new year.
*
The children have made star biscuits.
They have harakeke. They are weaving stars.
Milo in the star-cave,
telescopes searching cloud.
They have playdough the colour
of night sky, filled with glitter.
Dressing gowns, gumboots, woolly hats.
A brazier in the sandpit.
The smell of damp air.
The smell of burning sugar.
*
It is a time for planting.
A child chooses a pine
with blue-grey needles.
It will bear nuts in forty years.
A time for gathering.
Pink yam fingers poke from the soil.
A time to prepare new ground.
Bared black of loam.
Where can we plant this tree?
Where will it cast its shadow?
*
From here, Puanga.
From here, Rigel.
In the sky a hunter stands
on his hands,
both feet upwards.
In a tank a real eel.
The silver of īnanga.
The stones are lined up,
the birds are positioned.
The children are making the river.
Airini Beautrais
from Flow: Whanganui River Poems, THWUP (VUP), 2017
Airini Beautrais lives in Whanganui. She is the author of four poetry collections, a book of short stories, and an essay collection. Her new poetry collection, Salt Quilt, is forthcoming from Te Herenga Waka University Press in July 2026.
The Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: A place to enter and pause and take a long slow breath and then another, as you absorb the beauty movement joy stillness wonder movement of a poem.
Scuttlebook is a monthly newsletter comprising Elizabeth Heritage’s book reviews. It will be including some of poetry reviews, as well as prose. Mostly local.
Before the Winter Ends, Khadro Mohamed
Tender Press, 2025
The entire courtyard is bathed in bright orange. Omar feels
a prickling in his eyes and he lets tears fall. His mother is
rubbing her soil-stained fingers together when she turns to him.
Her eyes have grown soft. Instead of saying anything, because
there is nothing she can say, she reaches across the space between
them and grips his hand. His grandmother calls for them in the
distance. The Adan rings across the houses.
from Before the Winter Ends
Khadro Mohamed’s debut novel, Before the Winter Ends, is the kind of novel that sticks to you in vital ways. For me, it is a complete and utterly satisfying narrative package. Khadro writes with her poet’s ear attuned to the flow of the sentences (her debut poetry collection We’re All Made of Lightning won the Jessie Mackay Prize for Best First Book of Poetry at the 2023 Ockham NZ Book Awards). Oh yes, and Tender Press have a done an excellent production job!
I love this book. I love this book so very much.
This year I am drawn to novels that are written in ink that is musical, with sonic rewards multiple. I am drawn to characters that fold and unfold into the plains and mountains and valleys of human experience. Khadro’s characters, particularly the protagonist Omar and his family, draw me deep, oh so very deep into humanity, with their various connections to past and present and future.
I am drawn into the physical world, so present in illuminating detail. Physical scenes alive with detail, with food, the wafting flavours and preparation and customs and associations. And most importantly, the movement between places, between Wellington, Egypt and Somalia. And this movement, geographical, familial, these attachments and displacements, feel as relevant to today, as they were in the 1999 and 2019 of the novel’s narrative.
Omar is a struggling university student in Wellington. He lives with his mother, Asha, who is ill. He hangs out with his uni buddy, Nick. He speaks on the phone to his grandmother in Egypt. He has rarely talked to his aunt Fardowsa who has lived in multiple African cities. He can’t stop thinking about his enigma father, Yasser, who went missing in war-plagued Mogadishu of 1999 and is a persistent and troubling gap. Omar is learning Arabic and Somalian. He is sitting in his science lab with a lost-in-the-bush feeling, tuning out, wanting to set fire to his afro, and by the end of class:
“The bush fire in Omar’s mind has eased to a single flame by the end of the lab. He welcomes it but tries to ignore the scorched landscape left in its wake.”
Before the Winter Ends is in three parts. Part 1, Wellington in 2019, introduces Omar and Asha with connections and misconnections. Part 2, in Cairo, Egypt and in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1999, returns to the meeting of his parents. Part 3, is Cairo in 2019 when Asha and Omar go to to see his grandmother and aunt. It’s his first visit. And there’s a small final section that returns to Mogadishu Somalia.
This novel is one you hold to your heart with its mesh of grief and silence and challenge, its currents of distance and intimacy and epiphany.
We learn more about Asha in the second part. The Asha buried inside the ill woman in Wellington. How this moved me, as I stretch out to women’s struggles across time and place. Asha makes sacrifices to be a wife, to be alone at home, she who had dreams of teaching Somali literature, and there’s her husband Yasser heading out the door to the library. When she asks for mint, Yasser buys her pomegranates. His empty sorry, a hollow echo. And sorry becomes an ache refrain. The seeing and not been seen. Language and dream buried deep in her tongue and heart and mind. This precious pregnant woman who travels to Wellington to nourish new life tendrils.
This is heart reading. This is making me care so deeply about this young man. This mother. About where and how to be in the knife-edge, war-smashed world we inhabit.
This is a novel on being seen and seeing. On the need to be seen. On the self-restoring act of seeing.
This a novel on saying and being said. On not being able to say what is reached for, struggled for, deflated by, exhausted by. On being able to. On being able to say.
This is also a novel on healing, on navigating the paths ahead.
Read this precious novel. Let it settle under your skin and travel with you, as together we navigate the roads ahead, the roads behind, and with heart to heart, the roads we share and stand upon, reading, writing, speaking, doing, listening.
Khadro Mohamed is a writer and poet living in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington. She has a bachelor’s degree in biology from Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. She’s originally from Somalia and has a deep connection with her whakapapa, which is often a huge source of inspiration for her poetry. Her poetry has appeared in online magazines such as: Starling, Salient Magazine, Pantograph Punch, Poetry Shelf, The Spinoff and more. Her debut poetry collection, We’re All Made of Lightning (Tender Press, 2022), won the Jessie Mackay Prize for Best First Book of Poetry at the 2023 Ockham NZ Book Awards.
Tender Press page
A poem on Poetry Shelf: ‘If I Go Back’
Register your interest for Sound On for Poetry workshops at @yours_otepoti this June!
Hosted by Yours Ōtepoti, 43 Moray Place, Central Dunedin.
Please complete this form to express your interest by Thursday 4th of June
Poetry people, it’s your move.
National Poetry Day 2026 is on Friday 28 August.
Registrations are now OPEN! Head here
Dream it up, put it on the map, and let poetry go wide across Aotearoa.
NZ Poetry Shelf 