New Zealand writers under 25, we are seeking submissions for the 14th issue of Starling! Send us your best poetry, prose, and anything in-between by 20 April 2022.
Full details here
Aotearoa’s countrywide celebration of poetry is preparing to mark its 25th anniversary with plans for the broadest range of events and promotions yet, as registrations open today for participation in Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day on 26 August 2022.
National Poetry Day co-ordinator Erica Stretton says that after two years of largely online events, the NPD team, poets and organisers are all eager and optimistic about a return to the usual feast of in-person and community events across the motu.
She urges organisers to register their interest early in hosting an event on or around 26 August, in order to access the seed funding available and to be included in the heavily promoted official calendar of NPD events.
“We’ve all learned so much in the past two years about the power of the digital reach in showcasing poets and poetry, and online will continue to play an important part in our promotions. But we can’t wait to see poets and enthusiasts unleashing the power of poetry again in theatres, cafes, marae, bookshops and libraries, in parks and on beaches, pavements and public transport, anywhere and everywhere!”
In 2019 a massive 160 events took place nationwide, bringing together acclaimed poets, new voices, young writers and poetry enthusiasts of all ages.
This year also marks the 40th anniversary of NPD sponsor, Phantom Billstickers. CEO Robin McDonnell says the company has plenty planned to mark its special milestone, but that poetry will always be at the heart of what they do. “Phantom’s founder Jim Wilson was sharing the works of New Zealand poets on posters in New Zealand and around the world well before the company was even formed. We can’t wait to take the power of poetry to the streets of Aotearoa again in our 40th year, in a nationwide poster campaign in the lead up to National Poetry Day 2022.”
Interested organisers can access registration documents, templates and a full range of planning and promotional resources via the NPD website.Registrations for seed funding close at 5pm on 1 June 2022. The official Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day 2022 calendar will be announced on 1 August.
For further information contact Erica Stretton at poetryday@nzbookawards.org.nz and to keep up with plans for NPD 2022, follow NZPoetryDay on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
Full details here
Requiem for a Fruit by Rachel O’Neill, We Are Babies, 2021
Rachel O’Neill’s second collection Requiem for a Fruit continues a preoccupation with prose poetry that resonated in their debut book One Human in Height. The opening poem, ‘It’s an interesting time’, epitomises the delight that poem compression offers. Revelation jostles alongside the unspoken. The image of a ‘rusted coat’ startles, and then pokes and prods as ‘amour’.
In an endnote, Rachel acknowledges readers who are at home in their imaginations. They quote a grandmother’s line from a poem: ‘life is a great mystery, and then that mystery ends’. Mystery, Rachel suggests, is the magnet tug of storytelling. Storytelling reflects and feeds who we are, our origins, where we are going, with an imperative to listen. Listening helps us to ‘reason and act with humanity’, they suggest. This feels overwhelmingly important; this need for us to bend in and listen, to keep recounting who and how and where we are, past present and future, no matter the genre or subject matter.
‘From the homely catacomb in the living room my mother can see the stars.’ from ‘I dream I bury a machine’
And yes, mystery matters in Rachel’s prose poems. The real shimmers then moves to become off-real, startling and strange; and then slips and slides back to the everyday, the usual, the humdrum. I read each poem and see it as a startling painting, or a short film where the mise en scene trembles and quakes and expands the set with mystery connections. There is anecdote, revelation, fantasy, wit, confession. In ‘The commonplace’, a woman is dressed in a ballooning skirt, and she may be part woman and she may be part boulder. The aunt invites the woman/boulder to help herself from ‘the earth in the bowl where the potatoes should be’. What an image! Mystery in the commonplace. It’s also where the seeds are, according to the uncle. The aunt needing to locate the commonplace with its seed bounty: ‘Where’s that?’ What delicious ripples. What a way to be held to a page.
You can move through the book tracking the mystery whiffs, debris, clues. You can also pick up a thread and follow different routes through the narrative maze. Try love for example. Or the mother. Try wit. You can revel in the character festivity. Track and stop awhile with wives husbands love interests mothers fathers a Church of England clergyman children a companion a guest. In fact you are a guest in these poetry alcoves, bringing your own disposition, your own craving to absorb and expand, hum and ah ha.
Put this book in your tote bag or leave it on the kitchen table. You can pick it up and read a single poem, then let that poem drift and settle as you move through the day. It’s magnificent. Electrifying. I recommend it highly as Bernadette Hall does on the back of the book.
‘The relationship is new, yet the love is a stone.’ from ‘The love interest’
Rachel O’Neill is a Pākehā storyteller who was raised in the Waikato and currently lives and works in Te Whanganui-a-Tara/Kāpiti Coast. Rachel enjoys collaborating with writers, artists and filmmakers on publications, exhibitions and works for screen, and they are a founding member of the four-artist collaborative group, All the Cunning Stunts. A graduate of Elam School of Fine Arts (BA/BFA) and the International Institute of Modern Letters (MA), Rachel was selected for the 2017 Aotearoa Short Film Lab, received a 2018 SEED Grant (NZWG/NZFC) for feature film development, and held a 2019 Emerging Writers Residency at the Michael King Writers Centre. Their debut book, One Human in Height (Hue & Cry Press) was published in 2013. As a queer non-binary storyteller Rachel strives to represent the longing for connection and the humour and strangeness that characterise human experience.
A version of ‘Almost exactly the love of my life’ appeared on Poetry Shelf
We Are Babies site
Motherchild
We see the bones through the skin.
In some lights, they’re like baby birds,
so delicate it scares us. In other lights,
they’re machines. Built to take over the world.
We see the skin that thickens, thins,
thickens, thins all the way till the end.
We see the bones that train the muscles,
then relent, redundant. So many
bones to be broken, so much skin to be torn,
delicate hearts to be ruined
by an accumulation of errors.
I was the child for most of my life.
I never felt able to give that up, to stop
writhing, in constant search
of the manual for living.
I’m not sure when I was at my most resilient
but it isn’t now, now you can’t
show me anything because it all
sucks my organs to the outside of me,
freezes skin, ruins heart.
Jane Arthur
Jane Arthur is a poet who lives in Pōneke, where she co-owns a small independent bookshop. Her first poetry collection, Craven (VUP, 2019), won the Jessie Mackay Prize for Best First Book of poetry in 2020.
The launch of will be part of The Whau Arts Festival.
Dr. Mary Paul, specialist in Aotearoa NZ Literature, will officiate.
Here is the festival link where you can register to attend
Due to Covid gathering restrictions there will only be room at the venue for 25 guests, but the festival will keep a waitlist and advise people on it of any cancellations.
Venue:
All Goods community art gallery – behind the Avondale Library carpark.
99 Rosebank Rd
Avondale
Date: Thurs 31st March
Time: 5.30
All refreshments served individually.
Vax passes and registration checked at the door.
If you can’t attend but would like to know more about the collection here is a link to it at the OUP website
Janet Charman is one of New Zealand’s sharpest and most subversive writers. In 2008 she won the Montana Book Award for Poetry for her sixth collection, Cold Snack. In 2009 she was a Visiting Fellow at the International Writers’ Workshop of Hong Kong Baptist University. In 2014 she appeared as a Guest Reader at the Taipei International Poetry Forum. Her collection 仁 Surrender (2017, OUP) chronicles her writing residencies in Hong Kong and Taiwan. This is her ninth collection of poetry.
‘Chewing the nails of just one hand, the right
Silence falling back on us
With all its weight of sky and stars.’
Plague Poems, Brian Flaherty, Little island Press, 2022
10.
Fingering the page of statistics in your pocket
You are still trying to find the right words
It’s not a matter of painting a black picture
It’s a matter of taking precautions
Even to express such simple emotions
Costs an enormous effort
Most of all you like a certain bell in the neighbourhood
That rings softly around five in the evening.
Rather than knit or bake sourdough, Brian Flaherty wrote a poem a day after Aotearoa went into its first lockdown, just before midnight on 25 March 2020. The next morning, he took Albert Camus’s The Plague (La Peste). He read five pages each day, and ‘used them to sample and shape a poem’ that echoed our pandemic situation, and that he emailed to a friend. Plague Poems represents the fifty poems he wrote. It is a slender, dark-covered book that sings out of dark and life, the unknown and the recognisable.
A reshaping, a sampling, a translation, a poetic transparency laid over our pandemic time. As I read the book in one slow sitting, entranced, captivated, the poetry forms a transparency over my own lockdown experience. Here and then, the empty city, the empty streets, the hijacked and reinvented daily routines, these poems like those days, offer new and surprising sustenance.
Brian slows down in the empty city, in Camus’s novel, and in his slowness of daily pace, observation is heightened. There are posters demanding hygiene, a droning radio, a glass of warm beer, people on balconies and people walking the boulevards. In the ambulation, whether physical, emotional, cerebral, the poet’s mind is adrift, collating and collecting. The poem is thinking with new eyes. It is contemplating the strange and the estranging. I am personally returned to my own drift through the house, up the country road, without anchor and then again with a different anchor. Reading the collection it feels like the objects on the mantelpiece of the mind were taking time to settle. They still are.
14.
To make the trains run again in our imagination
The only way to escape this unbearable holiday
To speak more particularly at last of lovers
Those one sees wandering at any time of the day
Subservient to the sun and the rain
Handed over to the whims of the heavens
To go back through the story
And examine its imperfections
It must be said that people are drinking a lot
You have the impression that cars
Have started to go round in circles.
Time is elongated, meaningless, endless, meaning rich, meaning astray, meaning hungry, questions compounding.
I adored reading this elegant suite of poems, with its silence, its epiphanies, its unexpected resonance, its sweet craft. I am returned to a time that was body-displacing off-real, like a film noir set, a dystopian novel from past or future, as we grappled to reshape our days, our relationship with today. Two years later, it feels altogether noisier, edgier, more divisive, less connected and less connecting. Brian’s poetry takes me back to a time where, against all odds, life felt precious, when we worked together to make it so. We walked through the empty city, observing, collating, harvesting, recognising, celebrating, and being alive to and for what matters. I love this precious book.
33.
After eleven, plunged into darkness
Under a moonlit sky
The town is like a monument
A necropolis in which disease and stone
Have finally silenced every voice
Night crouching in our hearts
The myths that are passed around
Black shape of a tree, the howl of a dog.
Brian Flaherty is a poet librarian. He is co-founder of the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre with Michele Leggott, and was co-editor of the poetry journal Trout. Poems have appeared in Turbine, Best NZ Poems, Blackmail Press, Ika, Ka Mate Ka Ora, and Trout. Recordings of some of his poetry are at Six Pack Sound.
Little Island Press Plague Poems
Little Island Press Brian Flaherty
Black Spiral, Eileen Merriman, Penguin, 2022
I choose my books carefully in these tumultuous times. I want a book that transports, uplifts, lingers long after you put it down. A book that raises questions, that offers edge, but that leaves you anchored. That draws you in close to what is good in humanity as much as it might signal what is bad. I adored reading the first two volumes in Eileen Merriman’s The Black Spiral trilogy. My words grace the back of the third volume:
Characters matter, dialogue matters, real-life detail matters, significant issues matter and you are always held in the grip of a perfectly pitched narrative …This YA fiction at its life-crackling best.
This appraisal also applies to the third and final volume, Black Spiral because it resonates and grips on many levels. Like the first two books, it is exquisitely crafted at the level of both sentence and architecture. Violet and Johnno/ Phoenix have escaped the Foundation and what the Foundation might do to them, in its devastating commitment to virus experimentation on humans. The Foundation is especially keen to track the escapees down, to harness (hijack, manipulate) their skills at shape-shifting, astral travelling, telepathy. Especially as Violet is pregnant.
What makes the novel strike so deeply are the ideas. Follow the stench of corruption wherein those in power (not just the Foundation but across Governments and other organisations) use power to serve themselves as opposed to multiple communities. To serve the well-off, to dupe the vulnerable. What price human life? was a question running through my mind as I read. Ideas on biological warfare, vaccines, pandemics, human greed, percolate above and below the narrative surface. I am reminded how we need to insist on scrutiny, on speaking out, on maintaining solid, useful and indeed loving human connections.
Yet what also makes the novel are the characters. The way good and evil are not clear cut, easily discernible divisions. For example, Violet’s father’s choices. Or the way some characters are absolute, unadulterated evil and must be stopped. The protagonists, Violet and Jonno, along with the supportive crew that gathers around them, are prismatic. You look through their eyes, actions and thoughts, and see and feel the world differently. You feel their love and courage, their determination to never give up. And yes, this determination to continue and face all the challenges and sideswipes, no matter how tough, is gripping. I couldn’t put the book down.
Black Spiral clung to me as I ate, did chores, did my own writing. After I read the final page, I dreamed of the novel that night, and it stuck with me the next day. Like a shape shifter before my eyes. Like a phantom cloud of ideas, plot and epiphanies. The relationships, the connections. Eileen’s medical background adds gritty layers, ethical choices, questions about the babies we carry, medical interventions, using humans as guinea pigs, being transparent.
Black Spiral still clings as I work on my own novel, as I read the next poetry book, as I hang out the washing, listen to the latest Covid numbers, the catastrophic events in Ukraine, the twisted choices of the protestors. Novels as good as this offer retreat, reinforcement and uplift. Glorious.
Penguin page
Eileen Merriman’s first young adult novel, Pieces of You, was published in 2017, and was a finalist in the NZ Book Awards for Children and Young Adults and a Storylines Notable Book. Since then, she has published another nine novels for adults and young adults and received huge critical praise, with one reviewer saying: ‘Merriman is an instinctive storyteller with an innate sense of timing.’ In addition to being a regular finalist in the NZ Book Awards for Children and Young Adults, Merriman was a finalist in the 2021 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel and Moonlight Sonata was longlisted for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction 2020. Editions of some of her young adult novels have been released in Germany, Turkey and the UK and three have been optioned for film or TV, including the Black Spiral Trilogy.
Her other awards include runner-up in the 2018 Sunday Star-Times Short Story Award and third in the same award for three consecutive years previously. She works as a consultant haematologist at North Shore Hospital.
After Kaveh Akbar
1.
find the legitimate.
part of the skin.
claim it or.
don’t claim it my.
bad exchange.
my pale belonging the.
way the word.
identity makes you.
spit.
what’s in there.
the visible
thing curled.
in the mouth.
exact like biting.
the blood.
speaks the quantum.
splits.
my favourite.
colour is white.
-passing.
2.
my cousins and I don’t.
have any.
brothers we don’t know.
about men don’t.
want to.
we connect at the.
colour of bruises.
open our drinks view.
pain as an ash-like.
diminishing.
we can imagine.
a sudden deep optimism.
in the face of utter.
calamity.
I will devote myself.
to its water.
develop a silken.
empathy.
harm is better.
dismantled.
3.
make me a weaver.
I will wait.
to stop bleeding.
to harvest.
the flax in my.
backyard cut.
away from the.
heart at an.
angle scrape off.
the skin with a.
shell my ancestors.
also waited.
4.
to be on an earth.
that turns is to.
exist around crisis.
like looking into.
a non-human eye.
my visions are alive.
with me like an.
empress I.
untouch the insides.
I make something.
fit that does.
not want to.
Stacey Teague
Stacey Teague (Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāpuhi) is a poet, editor, and teacher living in Te Whanganui-a-Tara.
Iona Winter’s hybrid work is widely published internationally, and she holds a Master of Creative Writing. The author of three collections, Gaps in the Light (2021), Te Hau Kāika (2019), and then the wind came (2018), Iona has recently completed her fourth, which addresses the complexities of being suicide bereaved. Iona Winter’s website
NZ Poetry Shelf 