A new artwork has been added to Wellington Writers Walk – the Walk’s first sculpture in te reo Māori, and the first addition to the Walk since 2013.
Philippa Werry: Since the unveiling of the first eleven sculptures in 2002, the Wellington Writers Walk has become a much-loved part of the Wellington waterfront, with its series of sculptures that honour and celebrate the lives and works of New Zealand writers – poets, novelists, and playwrights, all with a connection to the city. The Walk’s first new sculpture since 2013, and the first in te reo Māori, was unveiled last month in time for Matariki. It features text by Ben Ngaia (Te Āti Awa) – gifted to the Walk by Te Wharewaka o Pōneke, with design by David Hakaraia (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Paoa) and landscape design by Tama Whiting (Te Whānau-ā-Apanui). It looks especially beautiful in the evening when its backlit letters glow against the backdrop of the harbour.
Tuesday: Poetry Shelf Speaks Out: Practical Navigation by Lyndsey Knight
Wednesday: Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Damien Levi picks Liam Jacobson Much to Liam Jacobson’s chagrin, I have lip-synced along to this poem (often incorrectly) at many places and spaces across Tāmaki Makaurau. One of my favourite contemporary New Zealand poems, ‘THE DAY MELTS AMONG ME’, paints a specific picture, though with a much more discerning hand than a landlord’s. Liam
Thursday: Poetry Shelf Pocket Reviews: Janet Newman on Lynn Jenner’s The Gum Trees of Kerikeri ‘Yet this is not a pessimistic book. It is a journey of enquiry in a life filled with everyday joy and confusion. Each poem feels satisfying yet curious: a small offering of humanity with a grounding effect at a time of crisis.’ Janet
Friday: audio and conversation with Airini Beautrais “At my launch I said that poetry is my first love, and it is my favourite genre to write in because I feel that it is where words meet spirit. To me it matters in more of a psychological and spiritual way than an aesthetic or intellectual way. Poetry is very diverse and means lots of different things to different people, but I see a strong connection between poetry and prayer, chant, meditation and music.”
Invitations
I am very sorry but in order to manage my tiny energy jar I do not publish unsolicited poems.
An invitation: If you have a poem that fits my ongoing series Speaking Out To For With – do send – political gets personal, personal gets political, poetry speaks out and sideways, whether quietly or loudly. paulajoygreen@gmail.com
An invitation: Choose a poetry book published in Aotearoa in 2025 or 2026 and write a paragraph in response to why you are drawn to the book. With permission from the poet/publisher I could include a poem. paulajoygreen@gmail.com
My public postal address: PO Box 58, Waitākere, 0660
Salt Quilt, Airini Beautrais Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2026
Airini Beautrais’s new poetry collection, Salt Quilt, is like a prism I hold to the light and dark of living, past present future, of what is experienced and what is imagined, what is felt and what is thought. The poetry ranges and embraces diverse subject matter, form, mood, connections. I have felt so utterly boosted by this book.
I kept teaching, I started having human children and I kept writing poems. Eventually I had enough for another book. I had a launch at Thistle Hall on a Saturday afternoon with my baby on my hip.
Pip Adam and Maria McMillan read with me, and their children drove trucks back and forth across the wooden floorboards. Bill Manhire sat in the corner slowly eating olives.
from ‘Cancer Moon: Poet Life’
a conversation
Paula: Firstly I thank you for kind acknowledgment in the endnote. Honestly I felt like crying. I felt like crying because poetry is so connecting for so many people, and for me it is my lifeline. Your new poetry collection has got me thinking and feeling deeply, on so many levels. Thinking about poetry, about life, about being and becoming a poet, and still being and becoming a poet. The first word I wrote on the page beside me as I read, was openness. The openness of the speaking voices, the opening of the past, the opening of the present, the openness of what a poem can be.
What word or words catch what the poetry was being and doing as you wrote?
Airini: Well firstly, thanks again to you Paula, for all that you do. I know it is a lot of mahi and we don’t always get a lot of acknowledgement or compensation for work in the arts in Aotearoa NZ, especially in the current political climate.
I wrote the poems in this collection over fifteen years, so there was a lot of being and doing in that time. There are also a lot of different approaches, as some of these poems are very personal, whereas others were commissions and are removed from my personal experience by default. Some words that come to mind now are: Exploration, distillation, sense-making, acknowledgement, vulnerability, experimentation.
Vulnerability is a big one. I think poets, or at least serious/ literary poets, tend to avoid it. I think this is because poetry allows for distance between the emotional self and the text via linguistic and stylistic features and there can be a temptation to increase that distance. When I started out my poetic career, I definitely wanted to be cool. My first book was called Secret Heart which I think was apt given there is a lot of hiding in those poems. Now I feel happier to just be who I am, and put uncomfortable things out there.
Paula: Vulnerability seems to have been crucial in a number of poetry books I have loved over the past year. Your list of words resonate as I reflect upon your collection. I was deeply moved by ‘Cancer Moon: Poet Life’, a poem that traces your origins and unfolding life as a poet. I recognised myself at times, the difficult child who never felt seen, the incredible turning points, the people places, situations and choices that matter. It feels like poetry is what we do, against all odds, but it also feels like we write, perform and share poetry, out of so many different things. Difficulty, love, renewed relationships with the world, whether physical or peopled. Has this changed for you over time? What you write out of? And why poetry matters to you?
Airini: In that poem I talk about how over the time I have been a writer, writing has only got harder, and I don’t know why. So although I am more comfortable with myself, I do find it harder to put things into words. There are a few possible reasons for this. One is being a working single parent and being tired a lot. Another is having a bit more emotional maturity – being able to reflect in the moment (more often, at least) means less need to reach for the notebook and pour one’s heart out. And I also think it’s inevitable that we become more self-critical as we get older. We have a wider frame of reference and more awareness of where our work sits in the scheme of things, and sometimes that can be daunting.
I think I write out of compulsion, and even if I tried to stop, I wouldn’t be able to. I sometimes wonder if I write because my brain takes longer to tease things out, while other people might be able to just figure out how they think and feel right away, and go about their day.
At my launch I said that poetry is my first love, and it is my favourite genre to write in because I feel that it is where words meet spirit. To me it matters in more of a psychological and spiritual way than an aesthetic or intellectual way. Poetry is very diverse and means lots of different things to different people, but I see a strong connection between poetry and prayer, chant, meditation and music.
Learning about inherited forms I got into the idea of the sonnet as corset, like some kind of erotic bondage, although I am actually quite vanilla in real life.
from ‘Cancer Moon: Poet Life’
Paula: Yes! I love that. And indeed the joy and boost of writing out of love. It is the key to why I keep Poetry Box going for children – to be an ambassador for writing out of love and play. Vital for children and equally vital for adults.
I utterly love how the collection resembles an ode to form. How form, whether villanelle or pantoum for example, offers musical patterns in repeating lines and rhymes but how form is never a straitjacket. For me form offers musicality but it also heightens the vital echoes. The way the collection is like an echo symphony, scoring the musical notes of memory, reflection, the physical wold, the peopled world. What drew you to poetic forms?
Airini: On a conscious level it was being contrarian. I wanted to do something that other people, especially people of my generation, weren’t doing much anymore. I do think there is a place for poetry written in the rhythms of prose, and I still write a lot of it myself, but it’s not all I want to do, or read. On a subconscious level, I think rhyme and meter and other sonic features have an innate appeal to our brains. I have been listening to my four-year-old niece come up with words and phrases and say ‘Hey, that rhymes!’ in utter delight. In ‘Cancer moon’ I write about how sometimes it feels like it’s me and a bunch of old men who write in inherited forms. I don’t think form itself is political, but some people do associate it with conservative politics. I just find it really fun. I studied form as part of my PhD and it was an eye (and ear) opening thing to look into. I am fascinated by things to do with sound, like how the pentameter line isn’t really innate to English, which is a stress-timed language, and the old Anglo-saxon alliterative meters were based around a four-stress line. Around 95% of popular music is written in 4/4 time which suggests there is something we find really appealing and easy about four beats.
Paula: So many books I’ve spent time with this year bring together the personal and the political. I am drawn to this insistent weave – to our need to share intimate details, personal hurts delights epiphanies, alongside our need to speak out for the environment, for the undermined, the silenced, the war smashed, the hungry, against damaging political choices. How important is a political personal weave for you as you write?
Airini: I don’t think it’s always a deliberate choice. Some of my political poetry has been written in collaboration with artists, and I think political topics are a good basis for inter-arts projects because they allow for exploration of big, complex issues.
I find the current state of the world, and Aotearoa New Zealand, so depressing at the moment. I have found it really hard feeling like every other week we have to make a submission on a bill that either allows for vandalization of the environment, or undermines human rights. I think we are more polarized now than we have ever been in my lifetime, and social media is driving this – for very cynical reasons. I would personally prefer to spend energy on making positive connections with people and effecting positive change, than arguing, fighting and name-calling. When I weave the personal and political together in my writing, it is often a form of self-soothing. Basically I just need to stay mentally well enough to function and I can only deal with so much awful stuff at any given time. I often have to tune out and go into nature and look for good things.
The lights come on: streetlamps, fairy lights outside the indie bookshop. It is autumn, the sun sets earlier behind the brutalist building. I imagine it covered in trees. I imagine something happening here. I imagine we are sitting on this hill on the top of the city for the sole purpose of observing everything. Less like Olympian gods, more like nesting pigeons.
from ‘Lemon sky’
Paula: Oh that word is staying in my self-care room in my head: self-soothing. Poetry, as one of my ongoing series underlines, can be a way of speaking out for to with. How do we navigate and inhabit this jagged world? And yes to positive connections.
I loved reading your endnote and discovering the varied lives of some of the poems, how some were commissioned, published and performed in diverse settings. It got me thinking again on your magnificent origin poem, ‘Cancer Moon: Poet Life’. How our writing communities matter. Your poems acknowledge this, from poets you have read and loved, teachers who have boosted you (for example, James Brown and Harry Ricketts at IIML to whom you dedicated the book), writer friends who read and respond. I am fascinated by the private secret and public lives of poetry. How do you find moving between these zones a writer?
Airini: I think it’s very hard. I find it difficult moving between these zones as a writer and I also find it difficult being all the different people I have had to be in my life. I am about to start another break from science teaching which has been my main bread and butter over the last couple of decades, and focus on creative work for a while. It’s quite a scary prospect because it feels like those public and private worlds are now colliding and I have less of a public persona to hide behind.
On the other hand, as I’ve mentioned earlier, I think poetry, by its stylized and often contorted nature, gives us a useful distance between personal experience and the text. So even though it is a bit cringe having people read about my romantic failures, it also feels like those are fictional stories and readers are not seeing the full ugly face of what happened.
In terms of teachers and communities, I think this is hugely important to the creative arts. Although the act of writing itself is often a solitary pursuit, all the other aspects aren’t. I couldn’t do this without the people I have learned from, or the editors, proofreaders, publicists, administrators, booksellers, festival organisers, reviewers, readers and everyone else who has helped me out.
Paula: Can you give me a reading tip, and share the title of a poetry book you have loved and felt affected by in the past couple of years.
Airini: I am a very eclectic reader, but I’m also not as committed a reader as many of the writers I know. This is partly because I’m not very good at sitting still or staying focused. Also, I am not very good at being on top of trends, so it often takes me years to catch up. So my tips would be: Audio books count as reading. Poets, please consider recording audio books of your poetry! And, read what you feel like reading, when the mood takes you. For me, it’s often at breakfast time. I have accepted that I am not a morning person and my morning routine is a pot of Earl Grey and an hour or so of reading, rather than a walk, a litre of water, a meditation, intention-setting and a gym workout. (If that is someone’s routine – awesome. Just not something I’m able to do!)
I have loved a lot of poetry books in the last few years. I have been enjoying sharing NZ poetry at an open mic night that I co-MC in Whanganui. Jordan Hamel’s collection Everyone is Everyone Except You is full of poems that are fun to read aloud. People love hearing some Hera Lindsay Bird. And sometimes I like to put in a throwback poem like Allen Curnow’s ‘You will know when you get there.’
The poetry book that has affected me the most in the past couple of years is Refaat Alareer’s If I must die: Poetry and Prose (OR Books, 2024). Refaat was killed in Gaza City in December 2023. It’s so easy to complain about things like not being in the window display of Unity, or not being in this or that anthology or journal, but fuck, we are alive, folks. We should never take for granted that we are alive on earth, still writing.
Paula: Yes! I often begin my day at 4 am if not earlier and find this pocket of time perfect to read a few poems and write, waiting for the dark to lift, the bush birdsong to arrive. It is self-soothing indeed.
Can you choose one poem use as an end point for our conversation – and why you chose this poem.
Airini: I’d like to choose a poem that you initially published on NZ Poetry Shelf. It’s called ‘Regret’ and it is a found poem made up of quotes from wrestler and actor John Cena. Cena has been such a beloved figure for so many people for decades now. I came across an interview with him following the release of the Transformers movie Bumblebee in 2018, and thought it just felt like poetry. One of the reasons I enjoy poetry is that I find language endlessly fascinating. Not just poetry with a capital P but the poetry of everyday life. I think a found poem becomes a poem when you put effort into choosing bits of language and arranging them in a form, a bit like a collage. I really resonated with what Cena was saying about letting go of ego and letting go of regrets. The quote ‘I don’t regret a single thing man not one thing’ is a good mantra to remember for actors, wrestlers and poets alike.
Regret
I’m in the stunt business and I just want to fall down. But that’s not the way it works. It’s storytelling, but I have comfortable roots.
I was still trying to learn and define who I was. And you’re waiting eight hours for a giant stunt. And you don’t understand the reason.
Went through a character shift from the ruthless aggression guy, to the rap guy, to the non-rap guy, to the superman guy.
Feel free to be open with me. I have no ego. My ego is making an awesome movie.
These were the prime years when things were catching fire, and the place I really wanted to be was on that canvas.
No ego. Let’s make great moments and how can we do that? My ego lies with the finished product.
Life is always good no matter what. We tell stories sometimes that are real close to the vest. learn from every single situation.
If this thing doesn’t fly I’m putting it on my shoulders and I’m gonna figure out why and I’m hopefully gonna get another chance to attack it again.
Man I don’t have a single regret in my life. I’ve been on such a crazy ride. I don’t regret a single thing man not one thing.
a reading
photo credit: Skye Boniface
‘Failure’
‘Dreams’
‘Salt quilt’
Airini Beautrais was born in Auckland in 1982. Her debut work of fiction, Bug Week, won Aotearoa New Zealand’s top fiction award, the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize, at the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. She is the author of five collections of poetry, including Salt Quilt (2026) and Secret Heart (2006), which won the Jessie Mackay Award for First Book of Poetry at the 2007 Montana New Zealand Book Awards, and The Beautiful Afternoon (2024), a collection of essays. In 2016 she won the Landfall Essay Prize. Airini is also a science teacher and dance instructor. She lives in Whanganui.
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.
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.
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 BreathingRoom: 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.
A space to write quietly with a small group in the library BYO writing project or use the prompts provided Please note, this is not a workshop or feedback group – please talk to our friendly librarians if you are looking for one of those!
I had this belt buckle with a picture of Karl Marx’s face on it. It was a real talking point, let me tell you. A big brass depiction of the beardy philosopher around my waist while I was in the supermarket, in the street, at the garden centre, drawing people’s eyes to me and making them think of the great currents of history.
So what happened was I was swimming in the lake one Saturday and someone stole my belt! I sprinted to the shore like one of those daft frogs that runs on water like someone’s electrocuting it, but the thief was hotfooting it away already. Well, what would you do? I threw on my trousers, held them up with one hand and chased the purloiner like an avenging spirit.
The thief was resourceful. He checked into spas and camouflaged himself in the mud baths, so I had to do the same, soaking in the hot, therapeutic slurry like some blissed-out predator. He’d go into a pub and disappear from view, so I’d have no choice but to order pints all day and watch the door to see if I could collar him when he made a break for it.
I did that for six months, and I was so tired at the end of it that I took a good long rest for another six months. So that’s what goes on my CV for late 2023 and early 2024, between ‘Office Oaf’ and ‘Sales Dick’. No, I didn’t get the belt back.
Erik Kennedy from Sick Power Trip, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025
‘Gap in my CV’ by Erik Kennedy
I reviewed Erik’s poetry collection Sick Power Trip for Radio NZ last year and immediately loved it. The poem that resonated with me the most, and which I really enjoy reading out loud to other people, is ‘Gap in My CV’.
The gap in the CV is a real-life dilemma for a lot of writers and other creative practitioners. Many of us find it hard to juggle the ‘day job’ with a creative career. Many creative projects take a lot of time, space and dedication to come through to completion. But, if you quit your job to write a book, will you ever get another job? Will potential employers look at your CV and ask why there’s a six-month gap, and will they still want to employ you if you say you were writing poems during that time? I am not sure if this is what was on Erik’s mind when he wrote this poem, but it’s what comes to my mind, and heart, when I read it. ‘Gap in My CV’ treats the subject with characteristic gusto, telling the story of a person who has to explain the gap between their roles as ‘office oaf’ and ‘sales dick’. As it turns out, they have been on a long, exhausting journey to find the thief who has stolen their Karl Marx belt buckle, which has taken six months, and they have then needed another six months to recover from it. The fact that it’s Karl Marx on the belt buckle gives the whole poem a beautiful underpinning of irony. It’s a poem sitting amongst other poems that deal with serious political subjects, sometimes with rage, often with humour. It’s a very generous collection. I feel seen by this poem, and by this book.
Airini Beautrais is a poet, writer and teacher based in Whanganui. Her most recent publication is the essay collection The Beautiful Afternoon (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024).
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 is the poetry editor of takahē and an adjunct fellow in English at the University of Canterbury. Originally from New Jersey, he lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch.
cos anywhere’s safer than sleepin shallow on queen street in deep night never deep enuf tho to hide her from dem young ones wit their shark skin suits and radar brows made for catchin jumpy heart-beats and hers would let out an irregular vibration like a wounded echo in a sinkhole leadin em direct to her & lee (they been together 2 years since she were kickt outta home out west and she aint never been back) and it’d take jus one of dem young ones to land her one in the jaw smash her teeth in top to bottom leavin a hole too big to whistle thru too small to cry over but even then she still is pretty as a petal for an old gal in her twenties lee says and she’d laugh and show him her pretty bloody gums and go wit a shrug n short memory to the hospital where they’d fix her up proper cos they already knows her from last time the day she lay dazed on the concrete next to lee wit her ear to the pavement knowin she could hear the water of the waihorotiu flowin to swellin under the sewer below in a direction only she could calculate wit her inbuilt compass her north star hearin it movin not stoppin magnetic all the way and as long as it never stood still never stopped stagnant she knew it would get to where it were goin cos she could hear it go torrential and it sounded alive and she understood that
Carin Smeaton from Tales of the Waihorotiu (Titus Books, 2017)
Playing favourites: Why she quit Queen at night by Carin Smeaton
This poem is from Carin’s collection Tales of the Waihorotiu (Titus Books, 2017). It was selected by then NZ Poet Laureate Selina Tusitala Marsh for the anthology Best New Zealand Poems. I got to know it because I was doing the admin for the website at the time. At the reading for BNZP 2017, as part of the IIML’s Writers on Mondays series, I chose to read this poem. Every time I read it, in my head or out loud, it always brings tears to my eyes.
The image of the rough-sleeping woman listening to the Waihorotiu stream is a very poignant one. Before the city of Auckland was built, Queen Street was a gully with a stream running down it. Aotea Square was a swampy area. Now the Waihorotiu has been covered over and channelled into brick sewers, and the former swamp is a paved area, and the Aotea centre. I think of the woman in this poem and the stream as being kindred spirits who have both been subjugated by capitalism. Commerce is given priority over people and over nature. But, both woman and stream retain their inherent power. It is important to note that in Aotearoa New Zealand, Māori women are disproportionately affected by homelessness, with a report in 2024 finding that four out of five unhoused women are Māori. So there is a very significant layer in this text involving colonisation and structural inequities. I am always amazed by the potential of poetry to convey big, difficult and upsetting things within a small amount of words – Carin is a poet who is adept at this.
In 2011, artist Barry Lett (who died in 2017) proposed uncovering the stream and turning upper Queen Street into a garden. What an awesome idea! I hope we see more nature-focused urban design in the future, for ecological reasons but also for our own spiritual health.
Listen to Carin read the poem on Best NZ Poem 2017 page
Carin Smeaton lives in Tāmaki Makaurau with whānau. Her fourth collection, Age oƒ Orpah, will be published early next year. Orpah is the third part of an unholy trinity, accompanying Hibiscus Tart and Death Goddess Guide To Self Love into the infinite centre. All published by Titus Books and illustrated by her gifted Sydney based niece Kansas Smeaton. They’re fundraising for Orpah’s publication on Boosted if you want to check her out.
Airini Beautrais writes poetry, fiction and creative non fiction. Her most recent work is the essay collection The Beautiful Afternoon (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024). She lives in Whanganui.
When you were clear-eyed When your breasts burst out of you like blossoms Your legs brown willow wands Your hair like golden fire You determined to be strange Wore bad 80s tracksuits Hair in a low ponytail tied with a scrunchie Frumpy centre part and frizz, a frown Under thick eyebrows Wore old man pants Hacked off your hair Grew it back without grooming Went to the ball in jandals and your grandma’s dress Smelling like dust Wore no bra and your mum’s old skivvy Ate cake in the street Made homemade dreadlocks That stunk of skin and rotting thread Went swimming in baggy boyleg trunks Wore old sneakers from a skip bin Smoked weed out of toilet rolls, apples, plastic bottles, bits of bamboo Threw all your costume jewellery in the clothing bin Bought a pair of heels and never wore them Gave them to the opshop Slept with stoners, drunks, deadbeats and layabouts Tried to get jobs in bare feet Threw out everything made of leather Wore thai fisherman pants and no undies Refused to shave anything Hacked your hair off again Wore a bad 80s jacket Dyed it patchy pink with DYLON cold Cut your own bangs crooked Got paint all over yourself Wore clown pants Carried everything in a dirty backpack No spare change no time of day Get lost, fuck off, nothing to see here Like a tree dropping fruit On the pavers of an abandoned courtyard
Airini Beautrais
Airini Beautrais lives in Whanganui and is the author of four poetry collections and a collection of short fiction. Her most recent poetry collection is Flow: Whanganui River Poems (VUP 2017). Bug Week and Other Stories recently won the Ockham NZ Book Fiction Award 2021.
These are poems chosen in lockdown. Perhaps it shows. They are rooted in one place, with an eye on a flickering, shifting other. Ruth France, who died in 1968, finds herself between ‘headlands we did not know were headlands’ – France mastered the art of dislocation, her experience never quite fitted the map. Bernadette Hall’s twist in the tale, her superb tripwire, gives the land the upper hand, puts us in our place. Simone Kaho’s Blues holds the dream of music success just beyond the horizon of island time and an alcohol-fuelled bender. Rhian Gallagher is in that other place, of foreign sounds and welcome anonymity. Selina Tusitala Marsh’s perfunctory dismissal of ‘Jimmy’ Cook from his step on the podium of our history; Richard Langston’s gentle last rites for a roadkill seabird; the charged adolescent hopes in Airini Beautrais’ The Library – from our masked up, emptied spaces, these are Apirana Taylor’s reasons for writing: the richness of the land given to the poor.
Sally Blundell
The Poems
Near Hurunui
It is surprising, not far from home, to discover An unknown, a shy bay where the water is very blue.
Where the road comes in through the bush Casually, and arrives with no rush
But just comes there, beside the beach. Where the headlands we did not know were headlands reach
Blue-shadowed into the the blue sea, stealing Each from the other as an old remembered song
Of Greek islands lost, a long time ago. There is a a feeling here of sleep, too
Many completed times we did not have part in, And a strangeness as of other gods than our own
Walking among these hills. It is good in some ways To come at evening back over the high ranges
Towards our own land, to leave such shadows behind us, And feel tired, as though we have been a long way.
Ruth France
from No Traveller Returns: The selected poems of Ruth France, ed. Robert McLean, Cold Hub Press, 2020
The River Whau
for Linda
she tells me how her big desire is to capture the River Whau
every day she sends me another photo
here is the river in gold dust here is the river in ice here is the river in mist as it twists the sweet daily bread of language
who can explain the mystery of desire?
now, we’ve both been captured by the River Whau
Bernadette Hall
from The Ponies (Victoria University Press, 2007).
Poem note: The Whau estuary is in Kelston. Auckland. The quotation is from Janet Frame’s poem, ‘I Write Surrounded by Poets’, from The Goose Bath (Random House, 2006)
Blues
Andy Blues, man, soul man let’s jam to the view Do you want a cup of tea brother? How did we get home last night? Nah – good call good call. Things have moved on man it’s another day. I’d give you that cat if it was mine I swear sister. Nah I’m Sāmoan, mainly Sāmoan. My woman – she saved me I like to think of her as an angel I haven’t seen her all weekend she doesn’t like to see me when I am on a bender. Don’t you know who I am? I’m Andy Blues I’m gonna make it big in the UK and come back and buy this street. Yeah that’s what I said on Police Ten 7 haha cos they said You’ve got to turn it down sir but here drink this sis you gotta hydrate all the time on the island. That’s it have a big long drink.
Simone Kaho
from Lucky Punch, Anahera Press, 2016
Abroad
I
Your own voice comes back at you accentuating the rise as if scaling a staircase of sound, and everything here goes the other way round. Everything you say is in question.
II
For the first time in your life you feel free of your story, walking street after street in a city that is layered with history. You are alone; you are in a zone of millions. Anonymity shines down on you from a sky so unclear after years you will still not know its true colour.
III
The islands shimmer against damp red brick, flaunting their best appearances: wild mountains & rivers & sea. A tape in your head plays the earliest memories. That girl, you mother says, where she has gone?
Rhian Gallagher
from Shift, Auckland University Press, 2011
Breaking Up With Captain Cook on Our 250th Anniversary
Dear Jimmy,
It’s not you, it’s me.
Well, maybe it is you.
We’ve both changed.
When I first met you you were my change.
Well, your ride the Endeavour was anyway on my 50-cent coin.
Your handsome face was plastered everywhere.
On money on stamps on all my world maps.
You were so Christian you were second to Jesus and both of you came to save us.
But I’ve changed.
We need to see other people other perspectives other world views.
We’ve grown apart.
I need space.
We’re just at different points in our lives —
compass points
that is.
I need to find myself and I can’t do that with you hanging around all the time.
Posters, book covers, tea cozies every year, every anniversary.
You’re a legend.
I don’t know the real you (your wife did burn all your personal papers but that’s beside the point.)
I don’t think you’ve ever really seen me.
You’re too wrapped up in discovery.
I’m sorry but there just isn’t room in my life for the two of you right now:
you and your drama your possessive colonising Empire.
We’re worlds apart.
I just don’t want to be in a thing right now.
Besides, my friends don’t like you.
And I can’t break up with my them so …
Selina Tusitala Marsh
from Ko Aotearoa Tātou: We Are New Zealand An Anthology, eds Michelle Elvy, Paula Morris & James Norcliffe, Otago University Press, 2020
Seabird
I have not forgotten that seabird, the one I saw with its wings stretched across the hard road.
One eye open, one closed. I wanted to walk past,
but the road is no place for a burial – I picked it up by the wings
took it to the water & floated it out to sea,
which was of no use to the bird. It had ceased. I like to think someone
was coaching me in the small, never futile art, of gentleness.
Richard Langston
from Five O’Clock Shadows, The Cuba Press, 2020
The library
The library is full of people looking for love. At the sound of footsteps approaching, a boy turns around with a meaningful glance, and casually slips a pencil behind his ear. Girls pause on the landings, clutching armfuls of books to their breasts. Sometimes, you feel sorry for these people. You wish this wasn’t happening. All you want is a book, and all the shelves are filled with eyes of longing.
Airini Beautrais
from Secret Heart, Victoria University Press, 2006
To write
to write of the mountains to write of the rivers to write of the lakes to write of the seas to write of the land to write for the poor that is the dream
Apirana Taylor
from Ko Aotearoa Tātou: We Are New Zealand An Anthology, eds Michelle Elvy, Paula Morris & James Norcliffe, Otago University Press, 2020
Sally Blundell is a freelance journalist and writer in Ōtautahi Christchurch. She holds a PhD from the University of Canterbury. She was books and culture editor for the NZ Listener and a judge (fiction) in the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. She was awarded MPA journalist of the year in 2020 and was runner up as reviewer of the year in this year’s Voyager Media Awards.
Airini Beautrais lives in Whanganui and is the author of four poetry collections and a collection of short fiction. Her most recent poetry collection is Flow: Whanganui River Poems (VUP 2017). Bug Week and Other Stories recently won the Ockham NZ Book Fiction Award 2021.
Ruth France (1913–68) published two novels: The Race (1958), which won the New Zealand Literary Fund’s Award for Achievement, and Ice Cold River (1961); and two volumes of poetry: Unwilling Pilgrim (1955) and The Halting Place (1961), under the pseudonym Paul Henderson. Poems from a third collection, which remained in manuscript at the time of her death, are published as No Traveller Returns: The Selected poems of Ruth France (Cold Hub Press, 2020).
Rhian Gallagher’s first poetry collection Salt Water Creek (Enitharmon Press, 2003) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for First Collection. In 2008 she received the Janet Frame Literary Trust Award. Her second poetry collection Shift, (Auckland University Press 2011, Enitharmon Press, UK, 2012) won the 2012 New Zealand Post Book Award for Poetry. A collaborative work, Freda: Freda Du Faur, Southern Alps, 1909-1913, was produced with printer Sarah M. Smith and printmaker Lynn Taylor in 2016 (Otakou Press). Rhian was the Robert Burns Fellow in 2018. Her most recent poetry collection Far-Flung was published by Auckland University Press in 2020.
Bernadette Halllives in the Hurunui, North Canterbury. She retired from high-school teaching in 2005 in order to embrace a writing life. Fancy Dancing is her eleventh collection of poetry (VUP, 2020). In 2015 she was awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for literary achievement in poetry and in 2017 she was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Richard Langston is a poet, television director, and writer. Five O’Clock Shadows is his sixth book of poems. His previous books are Things Lay in Pieces (2012), The Trouble Lamp (2009), The Newspaper Poems (2007), Henry, Come See the Blue (2005), and Boy (2003). He also writes about NZ music and posts interviews with musicians on the Phantom Billstickers website.
Simone Kaho is a digital strategist, author, performance poet and director. Her debut poetry collection Lucky Punch was published in 2016. She has a master’s degree in poetry from Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML). She’s the Director of the E-Tangata web series ‘Conversations’ and a journalist for Tagata Pasifika. In 2021 Simone was awarded the Emerging Pasifika Writer residency at the IIML.
Selina Tusitala Marsh (ONZM, FRSNZ) is the former New Zealand Poet Laureate and has performed poetry for primary schoolers and presidents (Obama), queers and Queens (HRH Elizabeth II). She has published three critically acclaimed collections of poetry, Fast Talking PI (2009), Dark Sparring (2013), Tightrope (2017) and an award-winning graphic memoir, Mophead (Auckland University Press, 2019) followed by Mophead TU (2020), dubbed as ‘colonialism 101 for kids’.
Apirana Taylor, Ngati Porou, Te Whanau a Apanui, Ngati Ruanui, Te Ati Awa, is a nationally and internationally published poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, actor, painter and musician. He has been Writer in Residence at Canterbury and Massey Universities. He frequently tours nationally and internationally visiting schools, tertiary institutions and prisons reading his poetry, storytelling and taking creative writing workshops. He has written six collections of poetry, a book of plays, three collections of short stories, and two novels. His work has been included in many national and international anthologies.
Poetry Shelf Spring Season
Tara Black picks poems Victor Rodger picks poems Peter Ireland picks poems Emma Espiner picks poems Claire Mabey picks poems
Ah. Love is my final theme. My seventeenth gathering. I chose love because love is the ink in my pen, it drives the pencil filling my notebooks. It’s the reason I keep two blogs running when, at times, it seems impossible. There is the love of reading and writing stretching back to childhood. Love poetry can embrace many subjects, moods, objects, experiences, relationships. So many poetry books in Aotearoa are steeped in love. In what is written and, just as importantly, in the infectious love poets feel for the power of words. For the possibility of the line, silence, music, physical detail. As readers, writers, publishers, reviewers, booksellers of poetry, we are connected through a shared and invigorating love of poetry. Ah.
To celebrate the end of my theme season I have ten copies of Wild Honey: Reading New Zealand Women’s Poetry to give away. I will sign one for you or for a friend. You can leave a comment on the blog, on FB or Twitter: Which theme resonated for you? What theme do you suggest if I should ever do this again? Or just email me if you have my address.
Grateful thanks and aroha to all the poets, publishers and readers who have supported my season of themes. I so loved doing this!
The poems
Poem
So far it has worked by imagining you in all the places I would like you to be
*
this is the one I love. he is not here but the air is still warm from where he might have been
*
we have spent hours circling each other with words-thinly vowelled embraces
*
how to translate these words into silences or the silences into words
*
when I cannot fix you behind my eyes I carry your absence like stars on the blue roof
Jenny Bornholdt
from Selected Poems, Victoria University Press, 2016
Catch
Two sitting at a table two at a table sitting two and two a table in the grass in the grass a table and on the table empty almost with a little a little empty almost but with a little water there sits a jar for love on the table a jar for love not a fresh jar every day fresh every day nothing in the jar that lasts always fresh they are sitting sitting at the table looking they are looking at the jar at the table at each other they are sitting looking sitting at the table at the jar looking looking sitting now is nearly the day the day is nearly now now go to sleep go to love go to jar go to look look looking look sit sitting catch that catch two sitting at a table two at table sitting two and two and two a table in the grass
Murray Edmond
from Fool Moon, Auckland University Press, 2004
Because of you
(for Darae)
My Son,
in you I see the shape of the heart all poets try to explain
you, the greatest poem I could never pen
how blessed I am to mother a son to exercise hope and love when everything else is absent
Son, your are a gift to men because of you I pray for men still love men hold hope for me, for you.
Grace Iwashita-Taylor
from Full Broken Bloom, Ala Press, 2017
The wind has shaken everything out of the quince tree. Behold the bony gullets of fledglings as yellow as the towers of rock that arise in Wyoming. ‘Stop blocking the gangway,’ the old woman used to say, cutting away long roils of yellow clay with her spade, hell bent on re-configuring a brand new version of genetically modified melancholy. ‘Never forget how the old ones arrived from Dubh Linn, the Place of the Dark Pool, formed from the union of the River Liffey and the River Poddle. Never forget that we are arisen from a line of proud people.’ And here I am, holding onto my end of the string and I know, my love, that you are holding onto the other.
Bernadette Hall
Aroha Mai
Aroha mai I was trying to get to you but the wind kept changing direction
Aroha atu she hates it when institutions use Te Reo in their signatures she hates it when my wet hair drips all over the bedsheets
Aroha mai I couldn’t see you this time I was down a rabbit hole along the coast beside the point
Aroha atu love given love received there isn’t enough room in this house to house our love the brick square flat beneath a rectangle sky
Aroha mai your baby finally came the angels found your address submerged in yesterday’s current and she’s clapping in every photo
Aroha atu my feet don’t touch the ground these days take the stairs to stay fit I keep my car full of gas it is easy to recycle the past
Aroha mai my ghost is in town and I don’t know if I should email her back
Aroha atu already the skeleton wings of this year are casting long shadows we don’t know what’s for dinner but next door’s Tui keeps singing all the buried bones to life
and you’re opening every can of beans in the cupboard to feed the tired warrior in my arms
Courtney Sina Meredith
from Burnt Kisses on the Actual Wind, Beatnik Publishing, 2021
Helping my father remember
My father is in the business of transmissions. A radio technician, the basic premise being that a message is sent out, then received. Except something’s gone wrong with the wiring, and he didn’t teach me how to fix it. I see him, standing at the kitchen bench, his hand hovering over an orange and paring knife; trying to think what he had planned.
*
There is evidence that sound helps restore memory: the sound of a cricket ball colliding with tin fence; lemonade meeting beer in a shandy; sticks smouldering in the air, when pulled from a camp fire. The doctor says depression, my sister says stress, my father says stop being so bloody dramatic.
*
They say I am the most like you, and that we are like your mother. I am following you through tall grasses, as high as my head. You’re in your angling gear. It’s summer, I can hear the cicadas. There’s a wind up, but its warm. We’re heading to the river. You find Nana, and I’ll find you. We won’t be lost if we’re together.
I haven’t read a single new book since I’ve been with you. I’ve been so busy peering into your eyes where I can see dark passages & feinting canaries & gold & mine mine mine mine
Plus I’ve been preoccupied with the joy of sex the science of living the interpretation of dreams & my undiscovered self.
So today I read a love poem.
But when I looked at it, it just said your name.
It was very repetitive. It just kept skipping over itself. Skipping to the important bits. Slipping into something more comfortable.
I looked away for a second & when I looked back the love poem had filled the whole room. It was thrusting against the ceiling & had burst through the open window pushing the vase of sunflowers right out.
I tried to call to you to come & look but the love poem was so big that it caught in my throat. There were fainting canaries everywhere like the fallen petals of sunflowers gasping yours yours yours yours
Hannah Mettner
from Fully Clothed and So Forgetful, Victoria University Press, 2017
Strummer Summer
All that summer we kissed outside because we had nowhere inside to be alone. We had matching Clash t-shirts and black outlooks. After my shifts at Seafood Sam’s I would pick you up in my Dad’s ute and we’d drive to the river
so I could swim off the chip grease. I’d light a fire while you showed me the riffs you’d learned that day on your unplugged Fender. /I’ve been beat up, I’ve been thrown out,/ /But I’m not down, No I’m not down./ I requested Blondie but you said it was chick-music.
Poking the fire with a stick, the tinny twang of your dead strings. We thought we had it pretty bad. Your Dad didn’t like me because I was “the wrong flavour”. I craved city life. Packed my army bag and left home, but not before I withdrew half my chip money and bought you an amp.
Helen Lehndorf
from The Comforter, Seraph Press, 2011
The library
The library is full of people looking for love. At the sound of footsteps approaching, a boy turns around with a meaningful glance, and casually slips a pencil behind his ear. Girls pause on the landings, clutching armfuls of books to their breasts. Sometimes, you feel sorry for these people. You wish this wasn’t happening. All you want is a book, and all the shelves are filled with eyes of longing.
Airini Beautrais
from Secret Heart, Victoria University Press, 2006
Always on Waking
Always, on waking, I look out into treetops: I lie beside you in the shimmering room Where, whether summer morning, shell of dawn Or dazed moonlight patterns leaves on walls I wake to wide sky and the movement of treetops.
As the leaves flicker (thin scimitars of opaque Dull green the eucalyptus bundles over her bark strips) They become lucent; leaves lined with sunlight With moonlight are no longer drab But seem scimitars shining, are not now opaque.
While you are there I am nested among leaves; As sparrows come each morning for breadcrumbs So I look for your still face beside me; Without your calm in the face of what wild storm I am no longer nested, but desolate among these leaves.
Ruth France
from No Traveller Returns: The poems of Ruth France, Cold Hub Press, 2020
Honey
It was manuka honey, the best kind, in a big, white plastic bucket, given to you by someone with bees, because you’d been helpful, so much honey, it looked like it might last a lifetime and you being you, and maybe why I love you, you spooned it out into carefully washed jars and gave it to your uncle, your mother, your brothers, our friend with the little boy, your mother’s neighbour who had the birthday, so much honey, and after all that you gave away, there was still so much left for us.
Janis Freegard
from Meowing Part 1 (the Meow Gurrrls zine).
Is It Hard to Follow Your Heart When You Have Three?
(on the story of the giant octopus from Aelian’s De Natura Animalium)
is it hard to follow your heart when you have three?
one for circulation two for breathing
i am the stone jar of pickled fish you are the giant octopus
i wait in the dark for you you crawl up the sewer for me
we cast our votes two are for breathing
Claudia Jardine
from The Starling 9
Toikupu aroha 1
I waited all night for you to come home to plant kihikihi into your cupped palms
now as you sleep I glide my fingers memorising the tracks that led me here
to this chest – arms – manawa with such vastness and proximity
I lean down taking in the entirety of your pulse and there my hā quickens
above lifelines grooved with spacious and honest certainty.
Iona Winter
from Gaps in the Light, Ad Hoc Fiction, 2021
For Baukis
There are four extant poems written by the ancient Greek poet Erinna. Three of these concern the death of her childhood friend, Baukis.
you lost her, didn’t you? the one that made it worthwhile to be underneath the sun and breathing
you remembered her, didn’t you? the days you played chasing the tortoise topsy turvy, falling from all the white horses
you missed her, didn’t you? when marriage came like a thief and snatched her away the ribbon of your world
you mourned her, didn’t you? when the ribbon was torn the bright eyes empty, the breath stilled
you cried for her, didn’t you? raw, with it heaving out the wet thick language of snot and tears
you loved her, didn’t you? even more than a friend, the closest companion the only one
you wrote for her, didn’t you? wove her memory through hexameters to stave off oblivion
and, now, for her we read.
Hebe Kearney
When the Person You Love Leaves You in the Night
When the person you love leaves you in the night, it is only natural to get out of bed and follow them. It is also only natural for your pyjamas to be all crumpled and your hair sticking up at the back. It is only natural to feel confused, and alone.
Nine times out of ten, a light will be on and you will walk into the living room, squinting. The person you love will probably be making human body parts out of plasticine, or playing video games. They will look up and say ‘Hello’ and smile at you like you’re some kind of lost baby animal. You will feel a little bit found.
If there is no light on in the house, it is important that you check the garden. If there is no garden, check the balcony. The person you love will be out there, staring at the moon and not crying. You are the one who cries. Except that one time… and the other. Don’t ask them if they’re okay because they will just say ‘Yeah’. Besides, you are the one who was left alone in the night.
Just look at them in the moonlight, and let them look at you. Stay very still. Then take their hand in slow motion and walk to the kitchen. The person you love will follow you, and so will the moon. Pour some milk into a pan and simmer gently. You will see a quivering white circle. The moon will be in there somewhere. Slice cheese onto bread and turn on the grill.
When you have two pieces of cheese-on-toast, put them on a plate. Pour half the milk into the mug with Peter Rabbit on it and half into the souvenir mug from Sweden. There will be sugar on the floor and it will stick to your feet. Swing yourself up onto the kitchen bench. You and the person you love will sit with your feet dangling side by side. The sugar will fall without a sound. You will drink your milk. The person you love will eat their grilled cheese, with sips of milk in-between. Peter Rabbit will eat his radishes.
Congratulate yourselves for drinking calcium. Sit at opposite ends of the couch with your legs tossed over their legs. Talk until you wake up the birds.
It is important that at some point during the night the person you love reminds you that you are the person they love. It is also important that they thank you for the grilled cheese. If they don’t, give them a pen and a piece of cardboard. Drop them on the side of the road. Tell them, ‘You can hitchhike from here.’
Joy Holley
from Starling 4
Love Poem with Seagull
I wish I’d seen it from your side of the table when the horrid gull attacked my fish and chips, the springy baton of haddock in my hand a signal for the post-saurian psycho to swoop at my talon-less fingers as they moved toward my mouth in their classically dithering mammalian way, because if I’d had the privilege to see the stress-warped, flexuous face behind my bat-like ultrasonic shrieks of shock as I fought off the bird unsuccessfully then I’d have some idea of what it means for you to love me, the sort of person who manages to always look like this or feel like this regardless of how much easier being normal is.
Erik Kennedy
from There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime, Victoria University Press, 2018
Found Again
our love is a tracking device more sure than any global positioning system
just carve us into wooden tablets then imprint us on opposite corners of a mighty length of siapo and watch tusili’i spring forth
making bridges to connect us over rock-bound starfish scampering centipedes and the footprints of bemused birds
we have many stories of losing and finding each orther
of getting lost and losing others
but today all is well
I lie beneath the old mango tree smothered with coconut oil embellished with wild flowers and droplets of your sweat
your aging shoulders still fling back proud
and I still arch towards you like a young sweetheart
you have whispered in my hair
found again
and we both know this is our final harbour
Serie Barford
from Tapa Talk, Huia Press, 2007
Everything
This morning when I looked out my window they were the first thing I noticed. I saw them flocking outside my house. I like to look at them from my window. I get the sun there. I’ll go out and stroke them. I wonder what they think of me. Some people don’t have anything much but if you put a hen on their knee they start looking. I’m not fast on my feet. I have bother with my eyes. I’ve got friends that can’t get out. Everything goes downhill. I would go back to when I was younger. I love the first things. When you’re young you’ve only a future. I’ve made no plans for dying. I haven’t paid for anything. I’d be terrified if they made a mistake. I do love everything about living though. I love being able to see. I like to look out my windows and see the leaves like a blanket on the ground. I love the autumn. I love the hens in the autumn. They’re beautiful. I couldn’t imagine my life without them. They’re everything to me.
Ashleigh Young
from How I get Ready, Victoria University Press, 2019
The poets
Serie Barford was born in Aotearoa to a German-Samoan mother and a Palagi father. She was the recipient of a 2018 Pasifika Residency at the Michael King Writers’ Centre. Serie promoted her collections Tapa Talk and Entangled Islands at the 2019 International Arsenal Book Festival in Kiev. She collaborated with filmmaker Anna Marbrook to produce a short film, Te Ara Kanohi, for Going West 2021. Her latest poetry collection, Sleeping With Stones, will be launched during Matariki 2021.
Airini Beautrais lives in Whanganui and is the author of four poetry collections and a collection of short fiction. Her most recent poetry collection is Flow: Whanganui River Poems (VUP 2017). Bug Week and Other Stories recently won the Ockham NZ Book Fiction Award 2021.
Jenny Bornholdt is the author of many celebrated collections of poems, including The Rocky Shore (Montana New Zealand Book Award for Poetry, 2009) and Selected Poems (2016), and editor of several notable anthologies, including Short Poems of New Zealand (2018). In 2005 she became the fifth Te Mata Estate Poet Laureate, during which time she wrote Mrs Winter’s Jump (2007). In 2010 she was the Creative New Zealand Victoria University Writer in Residence. In 2013 she was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature. In 2016 she edited the online anthology Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems. Jenny’s most recent collection is Lost and Somewhere Else (2019).
Murray Edmond, b. Kirikiriroa 1949, lives in Glen Eden. 14 books of poetry (Shaggy Magpie Songs, 2015, and Back Before You Know, 2019 most recent); book of novellas (Strait Men and Other Tales, 2015); Then It Was Now Again: Selected Critical Writing (2014); editor, Ka Mate Ka Ora (http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/kmko/); dramaturge for Indian Ink Theatre. Forthcoming: Time to Make a Song and Dance: Cultural Revolt in Auckland in the 1960s, from Atuanui Press in May, 2021.
Ruth France (1913–68) published two novels: The Race (1958), which won the New Zealand Literary Fund’s Award for Achievement, and Ice Cold River (1961); and two volumes of poetry: Unwilling Pilgrim (1955) and The Halting Place (1961), under the pseudonym Paul Henderson. Poems from a third collection, which remained in manuscript at the time of her death, are published as No Traveller Returns: The Selected poems of Ruth France (Cold Hub Press, 2020).
Janis Freegard is the author of several poetry collections, most recently Reading the Signs (The Cuba Press), and a novel, The Year of Falling. She lives in Wellington. website
Bernadette Hall lives in the Hurunui, North Canterbury. She retired from high-school teaching in 2005 in order to embrace a writing life. Fancy Dancing is her eleventh collection of poetry (VUP, 2020). In 2015 she was awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for literary achievement in poetry and in 2017 she was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Joy Holley lives in Wellington and has recently completed her Masters in fiction at the International Institute of Modern Letters. Her writing has been published in Starling, Sport,Stasis and other journals.
Claudia Jardine (she/her) is a poet and musician based in Ōtautahi/Christchurch. In 2020 she published her first chapbook, The Temple of Your Girl, with Auckland University Press in AUPNew Poets 7 alongside Rhys Feeney and Ria Masae. For the winter of 2021 Jardine will be one of the Arts Four Creative Residents in The Arts Centre Te Matatiki Toi Ora, where she will be working on a collection of poems.
Hebe Kearney is a queer poet who lives in Tāmaki Makaurau. Their work has appeared in The Three Lamps, Starling, Oscen, Forest and Bird, a fine line, and Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2021.
Erik Kennedy is the author of There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime (Victoria University Press, 2018), and he is co-editing a book of climate change poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific forthcoming from Auckland University Press later in 2021. His second book of poems is due out in 2022. His poems, stories, and criticism have been published in places like FENCE, Hobart, Maudlin House, Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, the TLS, and Western Humanities Review. Originally from New Jersey, he lives in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Helen Lehndorf’s book, The Comforter, made the New Zealand Listener’s ‘Best 100 Books of 2012′ list. Her second book, Write to the Centre, is a nonfiction book about the practice of keeping a journal. She writes poetry and non-fiction, and has been published in Sport, Landfall, JAAM, and many other publications and anthologies. Recently, she co-created an performance piece The 4410 to the 4412 for the Papaoiea Festival of the Arts with fellow Manawatū writers Maroly Krasner and Charlie Pearson. A conversation between the artists and Pip Adam can be heard on the Better Off Read podcast here
Courtney Sina Meredith is a distinguished poet, playwright, fiction writer, performer, children’s author and essayist, with her works being translated and published around the world. A leading figure in the New Zealand arts sector, Courtney is the Director of Tautai Contemporary Pacific Arts Trust, an organisation committed to championing Oceanic arts and artists. Courtney’s award-winning works include her play Rushing Dolls, poetry Brown Girls in Bright Red Lipstick, short stories Tail of the Taniwha and children’s book The Adventures of Tupaia. Burst Kisses On The Actual Wind is Courtney’s new collection of poetry, the book was released just this month.
Hannah Mettner (she/her) is a Wellington writer who still calls Tairāwhiti home. Her first collection of poetry, Fully Clothed and So Forgetful, was published by Victoria University Press in 2017, and won the Jessie Mackay Award for best first book of poetry at the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. She is one of the founding editors of the online journal Sweet Mammalian, with Sugar Magnolia Wilson and Morgan Bach.
Grace Iwashita-Taylor, breathing bloodlines of Samoa, England and Japan. An artist of upu/words led her to the world of performing arts. Dedicated to carving, elevating and holding spaces for storytellers of Te Moana nui a Kiwa. Recipient of the CNZ Emerging Pacific Artist 2014 and the Auckland Mayoral Writers Grant 2016. Highlights include holding the visiting international writer in residence at the University of Hawaii 2018, Co-Founder of the first youth poetry slam in Aoteroa, Rising Voices (2011 – 2016) and the South Auckland Poets Collective and published collections Afakasi Speaks (2013) & Full Broken Bloom (2017) with ala press. Writer of MY OWN DARLING commissioned by Auckland Theatre Company (2015, 2017, 2019) and Curator of UPU (Auckland Arts Festival 2020 & Kia Mau Festival 2021). Currently working on next body of work WATER MEMORIES.
Louise Wallace is the author of three collections of poetry published by Victoria University Press, most recently Bad Things. She is the founder and editor of Starling, and is currently working on a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Otago.
Iona Winter (Waitaha/Kāi Tahu) lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin. Her hybrid work is widely published and anthologised in literary journals internationally. Iona creates work to be performed, relishing cross-modality collaboration, and holds a Master of Creative Writing. She has authored three collections, Gaps in the Light (2021), Te Hau Kāika (2019), and then the wind came (2018). Skilled at giving voice to difficult topics, she often draws on her deep connection to land, place and whenua.
Ashleigh Young is the author of Magnificent Moon, Can You Tolerate This?, and How I Get Ready (Victoria University Press). She works as an editor at VUP.
NZ Poetry Shelf 