Vaughan Rapatahana begins many of his poems with a whakataukī. He is reading English versions of his poems that are then read in Spanish, but I love the way he brings in te reo Māori. Words say so much that are lost in translation, especially in poetry where each word is a rich vessel – words such as karakia and whanaunga. Vaughan’s poems consider death, place, whānau, significant issues such as global warming, the treatment of Māori. One poem particularly moved me: ‘Talking to my son in a funeral home’. Vaughan wondered why he keeps writing poems about and for his son who committed suicide 16 years ago. He shares his recent epiphany: that he writes of his son to keep his son alive. Later he reads a second poem, ‘The Zephyr’, a list poem, that is equally compelling (‘The zephyr that is my lost son still frisks me’). Ah. Ah. Ah. He reads a love poem he has written in te reo Māori to his wife, because he says he finds it easier to write how he feels in his first language.
To hear this coming together of te reo Māori, English and Spanish – a poetry meeting where words are held across distance to draw upon depth and intimacy – is a rare and glorious treat. Thank you.
Vaughan Rapatahana (Te Ātiawa) commutes between homes in Hong Kong, Philippines, and Aotearoa New Zealand. He is widely published across several genre in both his main languages, te reo Māori and English and his work has been translated into Bahasa Malaysia, Italian, French, Mandarin, Romanian, Spanish. Additionally, he has lived and worked for several years in the Republic of Nauru, PR China, Brunei Darussalam, and the Middle East.
from one spark: Skylla draws the planet as three lippy women
the planet as Klytaemnestra
don’t shove you everywhere the tail yours don’t sear you the fish to the lips my like the fish out of water δεν τρέμω the fish stinks from the head like the fish σαν out of water won’t cut I the throat my το ψάρι won’t lower I the tail my won’t shake like the fish I
the planet as Medea
show I the teeth my squeeze I the teeth my armed until the teeth fight I with nails and with teeth talk I inside from the teeth talk I outside from the teeth if don’t you have teeth can’t you to bite you can’t dodge this δράκου δόντι να’χεις δεν γλιτώνεις not even with a dragon’s tooth
the planet as Antigone
from one spark grows a bushfire put I the hand to the fire from one spark είμαι grows a bushfire am I lava and fire the eyes my throw sparks fall I φωτιά to the fire the eyes my throw sparks grab I the fire και put I the hand λάβρα to the fire grab I the fire am I lava lava am I and fire and fire
Vana Manasiadis
Vana Manasiadis is a Greek-New Zealand poet and translator born in Te Whanganui-a-Tara and based in Tāmaki Makaurau after many years living in Kirihi Greece. She is 2021 Ursula Bethell Writer-in-Residence at Te Whare Wanaga o Waitaha Canterbury University. Her most recent book was The Grief Almanac: A Sequel (Seraph Press).
Poetry Shelf is launching a new season, Readers Pick Poems, that will appear every Friday over the next few months. I have invited a group of readers to choose some Aotearoa poems they love. First up cartoonist Tara Black. She has chosen poems by Karlo Mila, Anna Jackson, Jackson Nieuwland, Hera Lindsay Bird and Rebecca Hawkes.
The poems
Leaving Prince Charming Behind
For a while I thought we were living the fairytale but sadly I realised that this was the myth and you were so busy believing that we were living the happy ever after I don’t think you noticed for a while I’d rejected the role of princess in your production.
I am Rapunzel with her dreadlocks shorn trying to pull down the tower with broken nails cursing your name.
I believed you the architect of my isolation and it didn’t matter what you tried to do the poison apple was lodged firmly in my throat and not believing in glass slipper redemption I worked my own midnight magic for all it was worth re blood, white cloth mirrors on the wall.
My poor dark prince on your gallant white horse the shoe didn’t fit your kiss couldn’t wake me up to your way of thinking.
I transformed myself into a beautiful dragon you felt honour bound to slay.
Karlo Mila
from Dream Fish Floating, Huia Publishers, 2005
Bees, so many bees
After twenty years of marriage, we walked out of the bush and on to a rough dirt road we followed till we saw a pond we might be able to get to. The ground was boggy and buzzing. The pond was thick with weed and slime. It was not the sort of pond anyone would swim in, but we did – picking and sliding in to the water over the bog and bees, bees we suddenly noticed were everywhere, settling on our hair as we swam, ducks turning surprised eyes our way. After twenty years of marriage what is surprising isn’t really so much the person you are with but to find yourselves so out of place in this scene, cold but not able to get out without stepping over bees, so many bees.
Anna Jackson
from Pasture and Flock: New & Selected Poems, Auckland University Press, 2018
I am an ant.
In fact, I am the happiest ant in the world.
I wasn’t always the happiest ant in the world, and I didn’t become the happiest ant in the world by getting any happier
Another ant got sadder.
Jackson Nieuwland
from I Am a Human Being, Compound Press, 2020
THE EX-GIRLFRIENDS ARE BACK FROM THE WILDERNESS
The ex-girlfriends are back… emerging once again from the tree shadows… into the primordial burlesque of autumn with their low-cut… reminiscences… and soft, double ironies… trembling once again into their opulent… seasonal migration patterns a corsage of wilting apologies tethered to the bust…
The ex-girlfriends are back…with their hand-beaded consistencies… & various unhappy motives… dragging their heart like a soft broom through leaves… and they go on hurting… like the lit windows of a dollhouse in winter… with a too-big house outside…
The ex-girlfriends are back but in a romantically ambiguous way…
The ex-girlfriends are back and have transcended the patriarchal limitations of romance… unlike the new girlfriends… still handcuffed to monogamy… slowly writhing… with their naughty…post-hetereosexual fatalism
The ex-girlfriends are back with their unfounded Soviet aspirations… and anti-hegemonic arts initiatives… draped over a piano on the edge of the thicket playing the lonely upper hand of chopsticks… in their vague tropical displeasure…
The ex-girlfriends are back and the post-girlfriends… and the ‘let’s not put a label on this’ girlfriends… all of them at the same time, walking through a beaded curtain of water… like too much Persephone and not enough underworld… wearing nothing but an Arts degree… and the soft blowtorch of their eyes…
You can feel their judgements come down upon you like too-heavy butterflies… but there’s nothing you can do about it! and worst of all they don’t even want anything… they’re just standing there…performing many
enigmatic life blinks re-mentioning Deleuze and Guattari in loneliness and natural lighting The ex-girlfriends are back with their sanity pangs and various life fatigues… like a stuffed-crocodile exhibit still begging for death relevance in the glass case of your heart But you are the museum director now! Walking talent on a gold leash & there’s nothing anyone can do about it!
The ex-girlfriends are back like the liquidation sale of an imported rug megastore that’s been liquidating for centuries… getting rich off all that…tasselled goodbye money as they grind your face yet again into the hand-knotted… semi-Persian wool blend…of their hearts begging once more for closure.
The ex girlfriends are back with their pre-distressed sadnesses and their…talent unlike yourself who is both undistressed and talent-free!
Yet somehow still above them all like the grand arbiter of happiness laughing in your ermine neck ruff as you push them one by one down the waxed fuck-ff chute of their bad erotic failures
Hera Lindsay Bird
from HERA LINDSAY BIRD, Victoria University Press, 2016
Nemesis Mine
yours is the name I hate most of all which I know because I have been repeating it between my teeth instructing my minions to conduct increasingly elaborate heists that will lure you at last to your doom which is destined to be me obviously
I burglarize a priceless artwork which you had acquired at significant personal cost I cut out the gently smiling face in the painting and replace it with a selfie so when you steal it back the painting is worthless on the black market but you do not get rid of it my spies report that you keep it under your pillow gilded edges jutting out
you construct a laser superweapon to etch a gigantic tag of your name across the moon on my birthday ruining my luxury moon themed full moon party to which I specifically did not invite you though I did arrange a data leak of the coordinates when you arrive in your warship cannons booming my heart leaps in my throat whilst I dive for cover
how many times have you sailed recklessly over continents and ocean trenches in hot pursuit launching torpedoes as I careen in your spyglass sights cackling away on my gold plated jet ski O nefarious O dastardly I live to hurl bullion back at you from a slingshot while my space squad of highly educated dolphins breaks into the hull of your craft they purloin small items of enormous sentimental value and release the conspiracy of lemurs you have trafficked and trained to paint flawless reproductions of frankly dated masterworks
loose at last the bandit-faced primates graffiti your clandestine labyrinth with the same tasteless repetitive sunflowers but you have already arranged for special forces to capture me at the border loathsome busybody I hate you I hate you I wouldn’t have it any other way
and yet my last several escapades went off without a hitch and I can no longer intercept your vile machinations on any channel even the encryptions only you and I use mortal enemy the world is boring without your meddling I lie awake awaiting intel
apparently you are spending your days in a state of deranged reasonableness you have been waking early to jog without your bespoke catsuit or balaclava your throwing stars rusting in their cabinet you have taken to hand crocheting hanging baskets for your carnivorous plants you have filed tax returns on a number of offshore accounts thereby defeating their very purpose and you have quibbled on consumer review sites for home appliances under your real name
I cannot abide all this ruin by prudence come for me you coward get! in! your! pirate! ship! you say you have been taking “therapy” you are “working on yourself” your psychoanalyst has some “reservations” about our “relationship”
ahoy there mouthbreathing brigand thinking yourself too damaged for a final duel I see it I do who knows you better than I sniveling craven stand and fight yes your shame is coiled up inside you and ready to play yes your shame is a slinky delightful in rainbows as it loops over itself going down and down and down the spiral stairwell in the frivolous castle you built for your dreams this is not an invitation to tell me the unfinished business of your childhood
but do you really think you can outdo me in abjection never fear I will draw my own shame out of my throat like a sparkling feather boa I will drape it over my shoulders I will perform a sensual dance using my shame as a prop I will helicopter my shame wildly in front of my crotch oi enemy oi nemesis look at moi through all our capers and larceny did you think I couldn’t anticipate this twist our ultimate boss battle a public redemption arc
I always expected we would grow old together spending our ill gotten gains to purchase adjacent volcanic island lairs like two humongous tits jutting up from the ocean we would spit at each other across the archipelago and in the evenings with our weakening arms we would row halfway out in our canoes and wrestle
Rebecca Hawkes
Tara Black is an Aotearoa cartoonist with a deep abiding love for fried potato. She can often be found in the front row of book events, illustrating authors and their ideas. You can find her work in places which almost exclusively start with the letter ‘s’: The Sapling, Stasis Journal, The Spinoff, The Suburban Review, and her website, taracomics.com. Her first graphic novel, This Is Not a Pipe, was published by Victoria University Press in 2020.
Hera Lindsay Bird was a poet from Wellington. She hasn’t written a poem in a long time, and no longer lives in Wellington.
Rebecca Hawkes is a queer pākehā poet, painter, and PowerPoint slide ghostwriter living in Te-Whanganui-a-Tara. Her chapbook ‘Softcore coldsores’ can be found in AUP New Poets 5. She is co-editor of the journal Sweet Mammalian and an upcoming anthology of climate change poetry, and is a founding member of popstar performance posse Show Ponies. More of Rebecca’s writing and paintings can be found in journals like Starling, Sport, Scum, and Stasis, or online at her vanity mirror.
Anna Jackson lectures at Te Herenga Waka/Victoria University of Wellington, lives in Island Bay, edits AUP New Poets and has published seven collections of poetry, most recently Pasture and Flock: New and Selected Poems (AUP 2018).
Karlo Mila is a mother, writer, poet and indigenous knowledge geek. She lives in Tāmaki Makaurau with her three sons. Karlo is especially over-active on Facebook. She works in the area of leadership for her day job, trying to understand and explore what that means when drawing on the ancestral knowledge of those who have lived in this region for over three thousand years. Of Tongan, Pākehā and Samoan descent, figuring out and living what this means in this contemporary context is often centred in her work.
Jackson Nieuwland is a human being, duh. They are a genderqueer writer, editor, librarian, and woo-girl, born and based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. They co-founded the reading/zine series Food Court. This isn’t even their final form. Their debut collection, I Am a Human Being, won Best First Poetry Book at the Ockham NZ Book Awards 2021.
Tomorrow I am launching a new season on Poetry Shelf. I have invited a number of readers to pick a handful of Aotearoa poems they love. No easy task! I have trouble reducing all the poems I love to an anthology, so I know assembling a tiny gathering is a challenge. Over the coming months you will see the choices of Tara Black, Victor Rodger, Emma Espiner, Peter Ireland, Claire Mabey, Foodcourt, a crew from AWF, Sally Blundell, Rebecca K Reilly and Francis Cooke, among others. I am both excited and moved by this season – especially because these readers have put in their own time and enthusiasms to share a connective love of poetry.
This photograph is as close as I get to the ocean at the moment. The blurry photo is standing in for my blurry mind. Me walking up and down the road to gaze out to the Tasman Sea. For so many of us in Tāmaki Makaurau, we get to the ocean at the moment by reading, by dreaming and finding new and old ways to be and stay at home. Music helps. Cooking comfort food definitely helps. Poetry too can be such a connecting delight, reaching across the divides to fingertap warmth, ideas, feelings, music, whether soothing or spiky.
I am grateful to the readers, poets and publishers who have contributed so generously with writings, cartoons, permissions and choices.
🙏 It is with great sadness, I farewell Lydia Wevers. This is my well-thumbed much-loved copy of Yellow Pencils: Contemporary Poetry by New Zealand Women, the second anthology that drew local women’s poems under a spotlight. So many readers, writers and students, along with friends and family, are sharing how this remarkable woman has affected them; mentored, inspired, opened windows. As the writer of Wild Honey I followed in her groundbreaking footsteps. From my Level 4 isolation, I am linking in grief with everyone who is mourning, with others who are also lost for words. Let us toast Lydia today. Let us toast her warmth and acumen, her dedication to writing, research, fresh ideas, New Zealand books and, above all, humanity. 🙏
a prayer for your lungs inhaling the salted oceans a prayer for your knees buckled in sludge and flood a prayer for your stomach wounded by one man’s hatred a prayer for your shoulders bearing the freight of the world a prayer for your hips holding your small child close a prayer for your hands that soothe and caress a prayer for your tongue that sings to heal
a prayer for the Muslim’s heart, warm and beating a prayer for the Christian’s heart, also warm and beating a prayer for the beating-heart warmth of the tangata whenua a prayer for the beating-heart warmth of Afghan refugees, so recently welcomed a prayer for your heart beating in time with the sun and the stars a prayer for your heartache traversing the rough and the wild a prayer for your heart in sync with the land and the water a prayer for she and he and they
a prayer for your ears listening to ever-bleak media feeds a prayer for your eyes breaking up over images and statistics a prayer for your fingers unravelling daily knots and tough choices a prayer for your tiredness and a prayer for your despair a prayer for your silence and a prayer for your protest a prayer for your movement over corrugated roads and bendy tracks a prayer for the lonely and the unloved or the led astray
a prayer for your face that shuts out the name-calling a prayer for your arms that lower the raised weapon a prayer for your leaders that face boulders and crevasses a prayer for your legs that cross cruel divides and welcome bridges a prayer for your body that is sick or wounded or dying
a prayer for the blue sky overhead with the kerurū coasting a prayer for your children lost in daydream kites and story locomotives a prayer for your children digging garden soil and planting spring seeds a prayer for kawakawa leaves brewing and manukā balm a prayer for your lentil soup warming and your words of love a prayer for your arms open wide and your arms embracing
a prayer for your heart a prayer for your heart a prayer for your heart yes you and you and you
I wasn’t going to post anything today. Life is overflowing with bends in the road for me at the moment, where I can’t exactly see what is ahead. I have been musing on the bends in our road and how I love them. This was me out walking yesterday, in the brilliant blue-sky day, breathing in the clean air, savouring the after-storm gleam. Straight roads would be so much less satisfying. Bliss.
At the start of the year I decided to write things (“psuedo books”) with scant if any aim to get published again. It is is liberating, to write out of a love of writing. But against all odds, on Wednesday I agreed to write a piece for Newsroom on floods and Covid-19, even though I live on a safe hill in a bush haven, with an ability to fill my days with no sense of being locked up or locked out or locked in. Yet life is not normal – I am constantly under threat of deluge.
The floods this week have been devastating for some families. But what has struck me is the way communities come together. I belong to three private communities bongos out west and the support is staggering. None more so at my nearby beach, at Te Henga. The houses there are still cut off, but the community is strengthening a strong support network. I see this happening so often in the time of Covid. Individuals doing astonishing things to help those with unbearable challenges. The 100 plus nurses heading to Auckland to work in hospitals. Wow! The bus drivers who keep going to work despite abuse. The way South Auckland faces unforgivable and ignorant racial abuse.
Poems are a lifeline. Like I say in the piece, poetry is an energy boost for me. As are our poetry communities.
Next Friday I will starting a new season – I am very excited about it.
‘Monday night and the rain and thunder are loud and relentless. Uncharacteristically I am tweeting that I am scared. I never do personal tweets. I have never tweeted I am scared in a storm. Maybe it is the intense noise. We are watching tv, but the tv reception is on storm fade, and I am missing the final of Australian Master Chef after months of viewing. This is upsetting me as much as the storm.’
All Tito’s Children, Tim Grgec, Victoria University Press, 2021
An intro:
Tim reads ‘Infectious Divides’:
Tim reads ‘Lost Tendencies’:
Tim Grgec was the 2018 recipient of the Biggs Family Prize for Poetry. Having failed to achieve his childhood dream of playing for the Black Caps, he now has delusions of becoming a great writer. His first book, All Tito’s Children, is out now with Victoria University Press.
Throw Net | Upena Ho’olei, David Eggleton, artwork by Tonu Shane Eggleton, National Library / Fernbank Studios, 2021
I’m mesmerised by the sunshine’s sheen, and every minute particular feels mine.
The sea disgorges its catalogue of shells on the white page of sand for no-one.
On my hotel bed, I dream and sail.
from ‘Tourist Island’
Our current Poet Laureate, David Eggleton, has published a handset, hand-bound collection of poetry with artwork (woodblock prints) by his brother Tonu Shane Eggleton. Brendan O’Brien, beautiful-book craftsman extraordinaire, has produced an edition of 100 at his Fernbank Studios. The book is exquisite. I run my hand over the rough edged paper (Kerkall, plus Stonehenge for the covers). It is book joy. Holding this book. Holding this beauty. The artwork is an evocative sheen on the page.
The National Library, which has administered the New Zealand Poet Laureate Award since 2007, published the book. The award was established by Bill Manhire and winemaker John Buck as the Te Mata Poet Laureate Award n 1996. Throw Net | Upena Ho’olei is fittingly dedicated to John.
In 2018 David spent three months at the University of Hawai’i’s Moana Campus, as the Fulbright-Creative New Zealand Pacific Writer Resident. The poems began in notebooks while he was there, and were completed upon his return.
Throw Net | Upena Ho’olei, with nine poems and a scattering of artworks, is the perfect place to sojourn.
This is poetry that celebrates the moment. It feels like the poet is inhabiting a particular place, at a particular time, and slowly breathes in the experience. The poem establishes a heightened relationship with place, a translation of experience within measure poetic form. The treasured details offer sound and visual explosions to the point I am imbibing a poetry feast, a delectable banquet. I am unashamedly drawn to food metaphors because poetry is a form of nourishment on the tongue, in the heart, in the lungs. This is poetry that is so very nourishing.
There is quietness, there is melody, there are shifting keys and multiple forms. I am breathing in salt and ocean, and undulating voyage. I am lingering over vignette and anecdote. In this time of limited travel and strict local borders, poetry is a travel plan, an itinerary of respite and joy. You might swim with turtles and hear the church bells ring out. There is ‘the chop of waves’ and ‘ukelele strums’. Expect mountains and lava and sun, much much sun. I am feeling skin glazed as I spend a whole Saturday drifting in and out of these poems. Pleasure crafts. Such honeyed vessels.
I love this lovingly crafted chapbook. Such economy, such fluidity, such reach. I dream and I set sail.
The snores of a sleeper on a beach towel recite genealogy under volcano’s glow. A sunken raft of manta rays stirs after dark.
Hands hula-hula, shaping sandwiches into islands; mechanically, a shark takes a bite out of the moonlight.
Someone slings a hammock between trees. Each wave is a line; each line is breaking; and even the mountains are setting sail.
NZ Poetry Shelf 