Poetry Shelf review and reading: Overseas Experience by Nicola Andrews

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Overseas Experience, Nicola Andrews
Āporo Press, 2025

Well I thought
I was going
on a short hīkoi
but I reckon this
is turning out to be
more of a haerenga, eh?
Auē, auē, auē.

 

from ‘Left on Read’

Nicola Andrew’s terrific debut poetry collection navigates her experience being here and there, traversing bridges between living in both Tāmaki Makaurau and San Francisco, holding close being Māori, as her hīkoi widens to haerenga.

Poetry is the resonating bridge, the anchor, a form of home.

How to describe reading this book, the way it pulls you in with its sweet and sour simmer of wit and pain and acumen. Listen to Karl the San Francisco god doing a mihi in te reo, with his mantra of return. Or enter the abrasive rub of the gap between the powdered milk of a Henderson childhood, the chalky vase collectibles on Herne Bay shelves and the poet’s drive to scroll for vintage porcelain. Ah, how that blue butter dish the poet bids for is a repository of stories. And here I am again in the sweet and sour and crackle of here and there.

I bid on a blue butter dish, and consider my whanaunga,
carving corridors through the sky, the flight path perhaps
resembling the gently curved neck of a white swan.

 

from ‘Te Toi Uku’ 

Words substituted from Zoom transcriptions of interviews with Māori peers discussing Tino Rangatiratanga steer the poem, ‘Colonisation Via Transcription Algorithm’. Here is the heart of the book: it’s whānau, it’s “the whakapapa held close”, the “inherent sovereignty”. And it’s these vital words: “In fact, to be born Māori is a gift”. On the other side of the page, there’s a translation that splinters whānau and taonga and kaupapa to produce a different portrait of the modern, think pop-up blockers, digital data and pissing on the past. My heart is breaking.

And then I love love love reading ‘I Didn’t Come Here to Make F.R.I.E.N.D.S’, a poem that blasts the white saturation of Friends with a nod to fierce poems by Hera Lindsay Bird and Tim Grgec. How timely (when is it not?) to be reading of the hierarchical boxes that divide the dreams of children according to the colour of their skin. The poet is confessing that as a young girl she wanted to be a paleontologist but that too was a white saturated (male?) domain. So her mother took her out into the West Auckland garden to dig in the clay.

As I leaned the spade against the weathering fence
I think I mumbled something about the improbability
Of a dig succeeding without major grant funding
But truthfully, I had just come to recognise
That everything we claim as a discovery
Is someone’s dear, once beloved

This book. This poetry. It’s poetry that’s laying down roots, stretching roots, recognising roots. Poetry as a way of opening more windows onto the insistent and continual habits of exploitation, inequity, hierarchies, stealing what is not ours, disrespecting degrading disenfranchising. It’s there in the Māori name Jeff Bezos gave his yacht. It’s there in the marae set ablaze.

And then, in this heart reading this mind travel, I am holding lines close, especially at a time when global and local darkness is intense:

                                [ . . .] The karanga is coming from inside,
the whare that is your body / of water / of knowledge / of work—
The karanga is coming from inside the whare, and I reach
outwards to pry the door of you open, and remake myself,
at home. 

 

from ‘the tsunami warning is cancelled’

I turn the book sideways to read the middle section, the small bridge between Section One ‘Overseas’ and Section Two, ‘Experience’. And it’s the border patrol, the departure lounge, the safety video between here and there, And that is what reading this extraordinary book can do: send us sideways, startle, soothe, delight and ignite us, keep us reading and writing and speaking out. So many lines I want to quote to you from poetry that sends tendrils into both experience and wisdom, that opens windows wider onto a world that is personal, global and at unforgivable risk.

Nicola writes with her poetic ink infused with the pulse of her own heart, her whakapapa, and of the wider world both past and present, and it is utterly compulsive reading. I am so grateful for its existence and for Āporo Press.

A reading

‘Te Toi Uku’

‘Departure Lounge’

‘Defence Mechanism’

Nicola Andrews (Ngāti Paoa, Pākehā) is a poet, librarian and educator who grew up in Waitākere and currently works as a librarian in San Francisco. Their poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets anthologies, and they are the grateful winner of the 2023 AAALS Indigenous Writers’ Prize in Poetry. Most of their poems were written in the company of a very spoilt Siamese cat, with Overseas Experience being their first full-length poetry collection.

Āporo Press page

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: Offerings / Reynard by Niamh Hollis-Locke

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Offerings / Reynard

 

At night we leave
scraps out in the garden
for the fox.
I sit in the study with
the lamp off for hours, forehead
against cold windowglass,
willing him to appear –

quiet wanderer,
sharp-toothed ghost,
red coat black in the flat of the moon and

nothing.

Only
            me,
            darkness sitting heavy on the roof of the house,
            and the lights of the town down the valley
                        over the fields,
                                    reflecting off the sky.

Niamh Hollis-Locke

Niamh Hollis-Locke was born in England, but now lives in Pōneke. She holds a BA in English and History, a BA(Hons) in English Literature, and a Master’s degree in Creative Writing. Her work has been published widely in Aotearoa, as well as in the UK and Australia, and in 2023 she was shortlisted for the Ginkgo Prize Best Poem of the UK Landscape Award. She was the guest editor of Minarets 14 (Compound Press). In 2025, Niamh was awarded a mentorship by the New Zealand Society of Authors to work on a children’s fantasy novel.

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: Given These Times by Bernadette Hall

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Given these times

There’s no doubt that we’re all a bit swampy. 
You can smell it in the bog, the wet weeds,
the rotted wood, the mud, the fish and the frog eggs,
all the muck that lies at the bottom of the pond.
Kathryn calls herself a goose. She’s still in love
with Birdie Bowers, the way he used to talk
with Jesus on the deck of the ship as the world
filled up with ice. And so we continue
our Socratic dialogue all the way to Springs Junction.
Survival, they say, depends on making a list,
so here we go: a hand-knitted tea-cosy,
a canary water-whistle, glue made from flour and hot water
you have to keep stirring or it will go all lumpy,
some cut-out paper dolls and a couple of girl-detectives. 

Bernadette Hall    

Notes:
The poem moves from the present to the past.
Kathryn Madill and I shared an Antarctic Fellowship in 2004.
The list takes me back to the 1950’s when post-war my world felt safe.

As I move towards my 80th birthday, it’s surprising how things from the past
come round again. Yesterday at The Piano, the Jubilate Singers performed a
poem that was published in my first book, HEARTWOOD, published by Caxton
Press in 1989. The composer, Richard Oswin, lives in Christchurch. His
interpretation was delicious.  I have done a lot of editing, blurbing and
launching this year, all good fun. Pakiaka by Gabrielle Huria, published by
Canterbury University Press, was a highlight. It’s an exquisite book. Here’s
something of what I wrote for it. ‘How gracefully they walk together on these
pages, te reo and English. Arm in arm. So proud, so strong. There’s an energy
that blitzes. I’ve been waiting for words like these. They take me right down
into the roots of this place where I live not far from the sacred mountain.’
These are my values. An edited version appears on the book’s cover.

Bernadette Hall, 2025

Poetry Shelf: how to hold onto the light by Paula Green

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It is plain to see we’re in a terrible situation
Sufferin’ in the land
Nearly half of the world on the verge of starvation
Sufferin’ in the land
And the children are crying for more education
Sufferin’ in the land
They’re singin’

Jimmy Cliff, from ‘Sufferin’ in the land’ (1969)

Listen here

It is 1969 and Jimmy Cliff is mourning warning protesting grieving because the world is damaging and damaging, he is singing of wealth and poverty, guns and bombs. Bob Dylan claimed Jimmy’s ‘Vietnam’ as the best protest song of all time. And here we are fifty-six years later and the suffering in the land is every which way we look. How to hold onto the light when the world helplessly watches Gaza bombed and starved to smithereens. How to hold onto the light when Ukraine is also suffering through the choices of a neighbouring war criminal. How to hold onto the light when our Government listens to the wealth of the few rather than the multiple needs of the many. How to hold onto the light when our health system is at breaking point, and patients, nurses and doctors suffer. How to hold onto the light when our children are forced into little learning boxes that have no vision of the whole child. How to hold onto the light when our first language, te reo Māori, is the target of Government abuse. How to hold onto the light when our native flora and fauna are under increased threat. How to hold onto the light when white skin (usually male) becomes (again) a ticket of privilege, how to hold onto the light when the dark patches are smashing on our windows and doors.

Today I’m looking at damp patches of Waitākere sky with Jimmy Cliff on full volume, the words of beloved sixties and seventies song writers streaming in my ears, think Bob and Joni and Neil. And yes, it is a wide wide world, it’s a rough-puff pastry road, and it’s still inhumane fighting, greed and abuse. Are we sitting in limbo? Waiting for dice to roll. Today even my morning is a dense dark heavy patch, but I’m thinking of Helen Clark and Anne Salmond, the frontline workers, journalists, songwriters, politicians, poets, caregivers, forest and ocean guardians, who are working against all odds across the globe to hold onto the light.

Haere i runga i te rangimarie
Haere me te aroha

Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Emma Neale awarded The Janet Frame Prize

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Congratulations Emma Neale!

Happy Birthday Janet Frame!

28 August 2025

IN MEMORY OF JANET FRAME WHO WAS BORN 101 YEARS AGO ON THIS DAY. 🌺

The Trustees of the Janet Frame Literary Trust are delighted to announce that the 2025 recipient of the Janet Frame Prize is acclaimed Ōtepoti Dunedin novelist and poet Emma Neale, who will receive a gift of $10,000 from an endowment fund that Janet Frame established in 1999 to support and encourage her fellow New Zealand writers.

Emma Neale is the author of fourteen works of fiction and poetry, the most recent of which, ‘Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit’ (Otago University Press) won the Peter and Mary Biggs Prize for Poetry at the 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

Emma works as a freelance editor for publishers in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia. She said: “The award has come at a time just when my editing workload has meant I wondered if I’d ever manage to find headspace to explore a longer fiction project again. This generous gift will allow me to set time aside early next year to really read attentively and experiment more with approaches to that project.

“To hear that the trust has awarded me this prize has been nothing short of astonishing. Janet Frame’s work and example has helped to shape my private thoughts, my life, and my writing ever since I studied her fiction, autobiography and poetry in my twenties. Her poetic, complex, experimental work, with its richly figurative language that explores the interior life so deeply, still stands as a beacon for many creative artists.”

Janet Frame Award site

Poetry Shelf review and reading: The Midnight Plane – Selected and new poems by Fiona Kidman

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The Midnight Plane: Selected and new poems, Fiona Kidman
Otago University Press, 2025

It’s the same again this weekend, wild weather,
rain and delays, and a long way south, suspension
on a cloud, books take you everywhere.

 

from ‘On small planes’

Reading your way through the poetry collections by a particular poet can be such a rewarding experience. I recently read Chris Tse’s poetry books and felt utterly moved. I sat at the kitchen table thinking this is why I write my own poems, and read, review and blog all-things poetry. Poetry is the ultimate prismatic experience for heart and mind, eye and ear. It is sustenance, it is challenge, beauty and balm, multiple-toned music. It is deep-rooted aroha.

For a number of years, I read and researched every possible woman poet who had published poetry in Aotearoa. It was illuminating, heartbreaking and felt utterly necessary to shine a light on the women who have written and published poems for over 150 years, to question their scant representation in anthologies, in publishing and award lists, in public appearances. The visibility of and attention paid to women poets has changed to a remarkable degree, but I am always suspicious of any critique or review that promotes a hierarchy of style or subject matter, that dismisses the domestic, the personal, the tricky-and-impossible-to-define feminine.

In the 1970s, women poets were finally catching the attention of readers. In an interview with me in 2016, Fiona mentioned some of the women who were publishing poetry and performing at venues together: Lauris Edmond, Elizabeth Smither, Marilyn Duckworth, Meg Campbell and Rachel McAlpine among others. A handful of women joined the young men countering the poetry traditions that had preceded them with calls for the new, but others, such as Fiona, advanced the rewards of the domestic in poetry. Rachel made it into Big Smoke: NZ Poems 1960 – 1975 (AUP, 2000), while Fiona, with her attention to the domestic, did not. Yet in my view, both women liberated words for women, inspired women to write. Like Fleur Adcock and Rachel, Fiona has favoured the first person pronoun. It is personal and intimate, and I feel like I’m sitting in the same room as the poem, entering the terrain of autobiography. The relationships, the acute observations and anecdotes, carry me within and beyond a domestic setting.

In her preface to The Midnight Plane, Fiona tellingly writes: ‘I am a plain poet; some critics would describe my early work as ‘confessional’, others as ‘domestic’. Perhaps I was such a poet, and at heart still am, although I am not given much to such labels. What I know is poetry still has the power to shake the heart.” And that is exactly what Fiona’s poetry does for me. It shakes my heart.

Let’s listen to Fiona read:

Fiona Kidman at home

Photo credit: Robert Cross

‘The midnight plane’

‘What I do’

Otago University Press has gathered a selection of poems from Fiona’s books, along with some new ones. The beautiful production, with a hard cover, lovely paper stock, and a gorgeous cover, acknowledges the work as a national taonga.

Fiona’s debut collection, Honey & Bitters (1975), is one of my all-time favourite poetry collections. It is a series of both actual plantings and memory plantings, a matrix of movement and stillness, physical views and revealed feelings, where what is not said rubs alongside what is said. The writing is agile, surprising, holding out the rhythm of slow-paced observation. I read a poem, I stall and have to read it again, and again.

In the field the sheep are scattered like hail,
this pale dun landscape with small
quaint cottages we’ve driven miles to find, for sale,
near trees

whose scribble branches wait for spring,
scratch barren messages across the sky.
But a man, a boy, a girl and I
are here.

from ‘Wairarapa Sunday’

The poem, ‘Kohoutek’ is dedicated to the comet, but draws our attention to the preciousness of each day, to the ‘voyages of discovery’ in a new house, to the trees bursting in green, and the sunlight patches. Fiona writes: ‘These are the miracles of the everyday’, and this for me is a miniature poetry manifesto. It is one I hold close to my heart, sitting at the kitchen table where I have written so many books, celebrated so many books by other poets, shared so many meals.

I like the way you stand, fingers trailing
over the back of a chair before a velvet
curtain looped with braid, your eyes fierce
and direct, a hat like a guardsman’s
helmet tilting on your brow, a telltale
ruffle of lace at the wrists
because you are my grandmother
fluted silver vases stand poised
above my bookshelves
because you are my grandmother
I wear old fine gold and mother-of-pearl
because, because of this,
I wear this hair shirt of guilt
the settlers’ shame

from ‘Speaking with my grandmothers’

In Where Your Left Hand Rests (2010), another collection I adore, there is a poem I would love to post in its entirety on Poetry Shelf. ‘Speaking with my grandmothers’, is a poem that threads past and present, that forms a braid of spike and silk as Fiona reflects upon the grandmother ancestors she never met, and the stolen land she stands upon. Here are the final lines: “Tonight I want to sit quietly by this window. There is so / little silence, so many voices.” Ah, we can take this moment and hold our line of grandmothers close, and for some of us, the stolen land we stand upon.

This Change in the Light (2016) is another go-to collection for me, with its haunting portrait of Fiona’s mother in ten sonnets, its travels from Paris to Provence to Singapore to a cancer ward. The poem, ‘What I do’, is one I could pin to the wall; it navigates mornings devoted to writing books, afternoons to preparing food, suggesting the mornings may not be cut and dried like food, but how love seeps though the whole day. It feels like I see myself in the poem’s mirror, with my endless hoard of cookbooks, my love of cooking and writing every single possible day. And then, and then movingly then, the exquisite final poem, ‘So far, for now’, a loving tribute to her beloved husband Ian. I am holding this poem to my heart. I wanted to share lines but it felt wrong to take a handful out, you need to read it in full, and let it unfold in you over the course of a day.

On the cover of the book, a photograph shows Fiona sitting in her lounge looking out the window at the Wellington sky and harbour. A perfect image for poetry that embraces both lounge and sky, that depends upon slow observation and the dailiness of living, a mind that goes travelling. Sitting at my kitchen window looking out across the ever-changing expanse of bush and sky, as I pick my way along a road thatched with spike and sweetness, I am crying, strangely crying, because somehow, I know that for so many of us, poetry is a gift, a gift we do and a gift we share. Fiona’s poetry winds about me, I gather it in, the shifting lights and the vital substance, knowing in her work there is always heart, her fingers on the pulse of humanity, and that is why the poetry of Fiona Kidman matters so very much.

Dame Fiona Kidman is a poet, fiction writer and memoirist. She has also written for the screen industry. Her internationally published work has won numerous prestigious literary awards, and her honours include a damehood (DCNZM), an OBE and the French Legion of Honour (La Légion d’Honneur). She lives on a cliff top in Wellington.

Otago University Press page

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: Day’s End by Philomena Johnson

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Day’s End

The door to your room is open
to the corridor. Unused. I am alone
with you and as flat as a car battery
in lockdown. Yet all that is required
of this moment is for me to sit
by your bedside, hold the space
for your leaving. How many ancestors
have sat like this for their loved ones
after death? Behind us;fear, doubt,
grief. And yet still I sit, surrender to love
and only my hands are cold.

Philomena Johnson

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, Voiceprints 4 and The New Zealand Poetry Society Anthology 2024. Philomena won The John O’Connor First Book Award in 2024 for her manuscript not everything turns away, published by Sudden Valley Press. She lives where the river meets the sea right beside Te Ihutai Avon-Heathcote Estuary where she gets to walk by water every day. Philomena tutors at the Write On School for Young Writers.

Poetry Shelf’s cafe reading for NZ Poetry Day plus breaking news

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Later in the year I want to launch a series of Poetry Shelf Live events around the country because I want to get back out in the world, and work offline as much as I do online. In the meantime, assembling poetry readings on Poetry Shelf gives us all a chance to hear poetry off the page. I will be doing more of this over the coming months!

To celebrate National Poetry Day, I offer you a suite of nine readings, not quite the same as being in a cafe or bookshop and getting a live poetry experience, but hearing poets read is such a heart-nourishing treat.

Poetry Shelf offers heartfelt congratulations to our new National Poet Laureate, Robert Sullivan. Robert is a terrific choice. His debut collection Star Waka (1999) was a groundbreaking arrival and the subsequent collections have added extraordinary threads, light and aroha to our poetry kete. Robert is also an anthologist, editor, festival participant in Aotearoa and overseas, currently President of the New Zealand Poetry Society / Te Rōpū Toikupu o Aotearoa and is Associate Professor in Creative Writing at Massey University Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa. He belongs to Ngāpuhi Nui Tonu (Ngāti Hau, and Ngāti Manu), and Kai Tahu (Kāti Huirapa ki Puketeraki), with affiliations to Ngāti Raukawa, and Ngāi Tai, and is also of Irish, Scottish and English descent. He lives in Oāmaru on the coastline known as Te Tai o Āraiteuru.

This news is the poetry cream on our national poetry celebrations.

Happy Poetry Day to poetry readers and writers across Aotearoa!

The National Poetry Day page with event schedule.

The readings

Hana Pera Aoake

excerpts from Some Helpful Models of Grief (Compound Press, 2025)

Xiaole Zhan

‘{Untitled}’ and ‘Learning the character for soul (靈)
contains the character for rain (雨)’

Jackson McCarthy

Three Southern Songs: ‘Punatapu’ ‘Arrowtown’, ‘Kawarau’. Then ‘Happiness’, ‘Song’

Sophie van Waardenberg

‘Self-Portrait as Adolescent Covered in Flour’, ‘Hymn to the Insomniac in Fool’s Spring’ from No Good (Auckland University Press, 2025)

Nadezhda Macey

‘Uranga’, ‘Syntax’ (from Starling Issue 18), ‘Victoria Park’, ‘Capsicum is a New Zealand Word?’

Josiah Morgan

three untitled poems from ‘act three’, in i’m still growing, Dead Bird Books, 2025

Erik Kennedy

‘Individualistic Societies’, ‘Notes Towards a Theory of Fun’ and ‘We’ve All Been There’ from Sick Power Trip, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025

Grace Yee

‘with two black dates for sweetness’ and ‘my father was not a gardener’ from Joss: a History, Giramondo Poetry, 2025

Anne Kennedy

‘The Black Drop: My History of Ugly’, from The Sea Walks into a Wall (AUP, 2021)

The poets

Hana Pera Aoake (Ngāti Mahuta, Ngāti Hinerangi, Tainui/Waikato) is an artist, writer, and sweaty milf from Aotearoa. Hana’s first book, a bathful of kawakawa and hot water, was published with Compound Press in 2020. Their second book, Blame it on the rain was published in 2025 with no more poetry (Australia). They just released a third book, Some helpful models of grief with compound press and are also publishing a fourth book of essays, On how to be with Discipline (Australia) in 2026.  Hana is edging through a PhD at Auckland University of Technology.

Xiaole Zhan (詹小乐) is a Chinese-Aotearoa writer and composer based in Naarm. Their work features in Auckland University Press’s New Poets 11. They are a 2025 Creative New Zealand Fellowship recipient, a 2025 Red Room Poetry Varuna Fellowship recipient, the 2024 Kat Muscat Fellow, as well as the winner of the 2023 Kill Your Darlings Non-Fiction Prize. Their name in Chinese means ‘Little Happy’, but can also be read as ‘Little Music’.

Jackson McCarthy is a poet and musician from Auckland currently studying in Wellington. He is of mixed Māori, Lebanese, and Pākehā descent. His work has been published in Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems, Landfall, Starling, The Spinoff, and elsewhere, and he serves as an editor at Symposia. You can read more of his work at https://linktr.ee/jacksonmccarthy. 

Sophie van Waardenberg is a writer from Tāmaki Makaurau. Her work can be found in Cordite, Starling, Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems, Takahē and elsewhere. Her debut poetry collection is No Good (AUP, 2025). 

Nadezhda Macey (she/her) is a student of English Literature and French at Te Herenga Waka. She is also a poet and artist, you can find more @nadezhda.4rt, and in magazines starting with ‘S’: Starling, Salient, and Symposia.

Josiah Morgan (Kāi Tahu, Ngāti Maniapoto) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Ōtautahi. His latest book i’m still growing is out with Dead Bird Books now in all good bookstores. His other books were all released in the United States, including his hybrid text The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which was performed as a six-hour-long performance artwork in Auckland Pride 2024. He believes in magic and the power of words to transform. He is currently working on a chapbook called Black Window, a new full-length book, and a theatrical adaptation of Faust in collaboration with Hagley Theatre School.

Erik Kennedy is the author of the poetry collections Sick Power Trip (2025), Another Beautiful Day Indoors (2022), and There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime (2018), all with Te Herenga Waka University Press, and he co-edited No Other Place to Stand, a book of climate change poetry from Aotearoa and the Pacific (Auckland University Press, 2022). He lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch.

Grace Yee is the author of Chinese Fish (Giramondo), which won the Victorian Prize for Literature in Australia, and the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Chinese Fish will be published by Akoya in the UK in 2026. Her second book Joss: A History (also Giramondo) was released in June 2025. She lives in Melbourne, on Wurundjeri Land. 

Anne Kennedy is a Tāmaki Makaurau poet, novelist and teacher. Awards include the Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry, the NZ Post Book Award for Poetry. Recent books are The Sea Walks into a Wall, The Ice Shelf and, as editor, Remember Me: Poems to Learn by Heart from Aotearoa New Zealand. Anne is the current editor of AUP’s New Poets series. 

Poetry Box popUP poem challenge for National Poetry Day

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Roar Squeak Purr: A Treasury of Animal Poems,
ed Paula Green, Illus Jenny Cooper
Penguin, 2022

The Muddy Cat

Squelch! Squilch! Squolch!
The mucky muddy cat is so muddy mucky
she looks like a mucky mud puddle
with two green eyes

and there is too much muddy mucky muck
for her dainty little pink cat tongue
to lick clean.

Paula Green, 2025

Today is National Poetry Day so to celebrate I am offering you a popUp poem challenge. For childreen from Y0 to Y8 in Aotearoa New Zealand.

I challenge you to write some cat poems.

Your poems can be funny, based on your family cat, your nana’s cat, anyone’s cat (!), tell a story, use your eyes, use your ears, use your imagination, use a cat fact or two!

Over to you! And if you want you can illustrate your poem.

The deadline is 9 am on Monday 25th August

Please include name, age , year and name of school


I will post some poems on Tuesday 26th August

I will give away one copy of Roar Squeak Purr: A Treasury of Animal Poems.

Don’t forget to write CAT POEM in the email subject line.

HAPPY NATIONAL POETRY DAY!

Poetry Shelf celebrates National Poet Laureate Chris Tse

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photo credit: Celeste Fontein

Today Chris Tse is stepping down from his role as National Poet Laureate, and it felt extremely fitting to acknowledge his vital contribution to poetry in Aotearoa and overseas. He has staged a range of poetry events around the country, drawing in voices, inspiring younger writers, contributing to inspiring poetry conversations in various settings.

Having always been a big fan of Chris’s poetry — from his debut in AUP New Poets 4 (AUP 2011) to Super Model Minority (AUP, 2022) — I decided I would pick one poem from each of his books as a celebration of his tenure. Chris kindly answered a couple of questions from me and contributed a recent poem. To reread my way through his collections was utterly moving: from How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes (2014, AUP), a collection that returns to the tragedy of murdered goldminer, Joe Kum Yung, to his next two, he’s so MASC (AUP, 2018) and Super Model Minority (AUP, 2022). His books navigate sexuality and race, sky and mountain peaks, revolution and imagining, speech and peace. Ah, take the time and spend a long weekend absorbing his extraordinary poetic ink.

Thank you, Chris thank you.

five poems

Dig
     after Seamus Heaney

Our first back yard hugged
the prickled slopes
of Kelson.

I watched my father dig and
tear his way       through bush and clay
to find that richer soil.

That spicy scent of gorse, the path
                he zigzagged.

And beyond him, decades
              and oceans away,
his father stooping to dig
gathering ginger and spring onion;
               dreams of richer days.

                  •

Between my finger and my thumb
the sticks rest.

                  •

Below the surface lies
a history of chopsticks.
                                          In the days
of new sight we clung to comfort
as a sign of success.

Eight treasure soups,
the finest teas
            ivory and bone over
            wood and plastic.

                 •

I’ll dig
           with them.

from Sing Joe, in AUP New Poets 4, Auckland University Press, 2011

•

They peer through me as if I were dead.
My hands are tired now, fading to mist.

•••

I’ve held out for luck
and fortune like a stony fool,

•••

but sometimes the heart must
gracefully accept defeat.

•••

These days it feels like I am digging
my own grave.

from How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes, AUP, 2014

Heavy Lifting

Once, I climbed a tree
too tall for climbing
and threw my voice out
into the world. I screamed.
I hollered. I snapped
innocent branches. I took the view
as a vivid but painful truth gifted
to me, but did not think to lay down
my own sight in recompense.
All I wanted was someone to say
they could hear me, but he tree said
that in order to be heard I must
first let silence do the heavy lifting
and clear my mind of any
questions and anxieties
such as contemplating whether
I am the favourite son. If I am not,
I am open to being a favourite uncle
or an ex-lover whose hands still cover
the former half’s eyes. I’ll probably never
have children of my own to disappoint
so I’ll settle for being famous instead
with my mouth forced open on TV like
a Venus fly-trap lip-synching for its life.
The first and last of everything
are always connected by
the dotted line of choice.
If there is an order to such things,
then surely I should resist it.

from he’s so MASC, AUP 2018

Wish list—Permadeath

I wish I didn’t feel compelled to write about racism, but there it is
patrolling my everyday thoughts like a mall cop drunk with power.

I wish people didn’t ask me how to solve a problem like racism, as if
it is a cloud they cannot pin down. I am not an expert spokesman

holding an elusive truth. I wish I could predict when racism
would exit stage right to wherever bad things go to die rusty

non-biodegradable deaths, but I can’t predict the death of something
with a robust business continuity plan that involves moving from

host body to host body. I am not an exorcist—I am a sympathetic
vomiter. Is it predictable for me to write this poem? I suppose so.

What I really want to write about are things with promise, to offer up
whiskers on kittens when the outlook is for Nazis on Nazis. I wish

I could sing my way out of this while the man I love applauds from
the front row, our adorable Jack Russell terrier Rocket sat by his feet.

I wish I could start a love poem with a line like ‘He thumbs me
like the Oxford Dictionary‘ and consider it a job well done. I wish

I didn’t always feel this way—always tired of explaining why
I am tired and why writing this poem is more need that want.

I never felt the need to be the gunshot during a knife fight until they
told me there was no such thing as ‘let’s finish this once and for all’

from Super Model Minority, AUP, 2022

How to edit a poem

  1. Let the poem approach you first. Don’t point; don’t scare it.
  2. Encircle the poem with broken lines and half-hearted rhymes to reverse any spell that may cause the reader sorrow.
  3. Ask yourself: is the poem merely camouflage for the poet’s desires?
  4. All persons, real or imagined, are questions and aphorisms double-crossing each other in pursuit of a revelation.
  5. Inside this poem there are two poets: one is literal and the other is metaphorical.
  6. Ask yourself: is the poet a secret carried in a whale’s mouth?
  7. Capitalise every word that reminds you of your childhood.
  8. Strike out every verb that will make the reader feel guilty for not living a wholesome and virtuous life.
  9. Inside this poem there are two poets: one tells the truth and theother got away with it.
  10. Ask yourself: when did you last trust a poem?  
  11. Interrogate each line as if it were a co-ordinate plucked from a map.
  12. A crooked staircase halfway to the moon. A wolf cries in the dark.
  13. The margins seesaw as you pull yourself into the poem for a better view, to take it all in.
  14. (There is no way out.)
  15. Use the poem as a mirror.
  16. Use the mirror as a sucker punch.
  17. Attack the mirror with a mallet.
  18. Hide the broken shards in the feathers of birds and instruct them to land on rooftops when the night is at its softest.
  19. The townsfolk’s sleep is disturbed by the crackle of crystal rain.
  20. Record their reactions.
  21. Respond, respond, respond.

from Everything I Know About Books: An insider look at publishing in Aotearoa, edited by Odessa Owens and Theresa Crewdson (Whitireia Publishing, 2023)

three questions

What draws you into a poem, whether as writer or reader?

As a reader, I want to get a sense that the poet is writing from a place of curiosity and isn’t afraid to let the reader get a glimpse behind the curtain as they work through their thinking or daydreaming. I don’t necessarily need anything to be resolved – an open end is just as good as any. I try to apply this to my own work as well because a big part of my writing process is to seek understanding about myself or the world. The poem is the result of that exploration.

Have you discovered any poets new to you in the course of your physical or reading travels over past couple of years?

So many! Editing Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems 2023 was a voyage of discovery of new-to-me poets, like John Allison, Isla Huia, Geena Slow and Marjorie Woodfield. This week I’ve been dipping in and out of the 2025 edition of Aotearoa Poetry Yearbook and there are lots of unfamiliar names, so I can’t wait to get to know these poets’ work. I’ve also had the good fortune of working or performing with poets from other countries, either online or in person. Some of the poets whose work I’ve really enjoyed are Hasib Hourani and Panda Wong from Australia, Péter Závada from Hungary, and Amanda Chong from Singapore.

Can you share a couple of highlights from your tenure as Poet Laureate?

For National Poetry Day 2023, I invited students from Te Whanganui a Tara for a day of poetry workshops and activities at the National Library. The poems that the students wrote that day were great and demonstrated how fearless and creative young minds can be. Another highlight was the Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam, where I appeared in an event with Poets Laureates from around the world. It was a really special performance bringing poetry and dance together. I was very proud to be able to represent Aotearoa on stage that night alongside some poetry legends.

National Poet Laureate page
Auckland University Press page