Tag Archives: Aotearoa poetry

Poetry Shelf cafe readings: Sue Wootton

Leave a reply

Poet and novelist Sue Wootton’s most recent poetry collection is The Yield (Otago University Press, 2017), which was a finalist in the 2018 Ockham New Zealand book awards. She has held the Robert Burns Fellowship, the NZSA Beatson Fellowship and the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship. In 2025 she was awarded the Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems, for a suite of sonnets called ‘Holding Patterns: Seven songs of pots, jars, bowls and vases’. Sue lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin, and is the publisher at Otago University Press. 

Poetry Shelf goes hiking: Te Araroa poems by Jillian Sullivan

Leave a reply

Jillian at the Bluff signpost

Jillian Sullivan has just started walking the South Island section of the Te Araroa trail. I invited her to send poems whenever she felt inspired to do so, internet access permitting.

Friends are why we come home

Friends around the table and all
the glorious food and laughter.
Sometimes I yearned to run away
from here, I told Graeme. But I didn’t

want to leave this. He guessed the weight
of my pack closest, at 14 kilos. Some
said 17. It was 13. Achievable,
then.

The gifts they gave me of their eyes.
The gifts they gave me of their selves,
who know me. And so we said
goodbye. And so it is true

I am going. Margaret took a photo, as pack
on back I walked down the white line
of the empty road running through our village.
A metaphorical photo.

Now it is a thrush singing outside
my window. Bach, Ave Maria,
black coffee. The gentle easing into
leaving this life, for when I come

back, who will I be? Someone
dissolved into trees and rocks and sky?

It’s always Wednesday

It’s always Wednesday, it’s always
eight am,        it’s always.

One last morning in the hut, figuring
the right thing to do. What would you do?

Your younger, thoughtful look,
considering. You would tell me to listen.

The final walk along the stream
bearing the heavy pack. The final call in

at Gilchrists Store for the mail. The apples
outside my window growing into their appleness

after such a winter. A sparrow riding high
on the pale green under a grey sky.

The last morning I won’t be hanging onto
every word of the weather forecast.

The last morning casually making coffee
looking around at my books which are

everywhere. Yesterday two more shelves,
already full. The last morning

I will count the weeks to the ten months
you’ve been gone. There is ease in this world

of a physical kind, but then I will learn
how to keep walking. You said it first. Keep on.

While I’m away the sun will take all this
green and lushness and turn it gold, the hay

cut, dried, stacked. A whole season over.
Like another Wednesday.

That tramper

Yes, I am now that tramper
who, after the first day

bent under weight in rambunctious
wind, unpacks the pack, examines,

holds, casts away, takes back, casts
away. Gone: rescue remedy,

extra shirt, my darling’s hat, also,
his book of poems. I will have to cleave

them closer. My daughter laughs when I say
I packed a nighty for the huts. Now

I know I am a grandmother. Ok, gone
the nighty, the togs, the jar of magnesium pills,

also, the merino jersey. The wind held me
down and I was hardly a leaf. The photo

at the yellow signpost of Bluff – I’m not
staunch. My legs aren’t even

straight. My body saying,
“You’re going to do what?”

No regrets

The beach is a long wing, of course
you like it; the waves blue, white crests
blown apart by wind, the sand
tawny and firm. But now you have to
walk it as if this is a sentence,
for seven hours, actually, until you turn
from the jauntiness of one step after another,
like hope in the future, which is possibly
why you’re doing this, until about the|
six hour point it all becomes pain.
The thigh bone connected to the|
knee bone, intimately. There is nothing
to be done about the future now, except
keep walking. No-one will save you. Only
the memory at five hours when the young
tattooed builder from Western Australia,
who has caught up to your stride,
stops to swim in the lolloping waves.
You are longing, you are longing to, also.
You won’t regret it, he says. You
take off your clothes on a public beach.
You don’t regret it.

Jillian Sullivan

Oreti Beach

Jillian Sullivan lives and writes in Central Otago, New Zealand. She is published in a wide variety of genres and teaches workshops on creative non-fiction and fiction in New Zealand and America. Once the drummer in a woman’s originals band, and now grandmother of eleven, her passion is natural building. She finished a Masters degree in Creative writing in her 50s, and became builder’s labourer and earth plasterer nearing 60. Now home is the tussock lands, the tor-serrated dry hills and the white flanked mountains of the Ida Valley, where she has 20 acres bordering the Ida Burn, and plenty of room to store clay and sand for future earth projects. Her books include the creative non-fiction book, Map for the Heart – Ida Valley Essays (Otago University Press 2020).

Poetry Shelf review: 28 days by Janet Charman and Elizabeth Anderson

Leave a reply

28 days, Janet Charman and Elizabeth Anderson
Skinship Press, 2025

I am sitting at the kitchen table, the doors wide open, feeling the wind rustling in from the Waitākere ranges, the bird song racketing after all that rain, my flat white growing cold, and I slowly reflect upon 28 days. The book fits in the palm of my hand but expands in prismatic ways in both heart and mind. I have never experienced anything like it. It is pitched as a creative memoir. Elizabeth Anderson has produced 28 artworks, Janet Charman 28 texts. The artwork focuses on cafe scenes, drawing upon multi media, echoing Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s Parisian café paintings. The little texts – dialogue or poems or anecdotes – are like word kisses on the page.

The memoir is a collaboration, a contiguous relationship between word and image, between artist and writer, and this brushing close, this besidedness as the blurb says, is utterly fertile, utterly heart expansive in its reach. I am stretching for words, and they slip away. So I sit here on the rim of weeping, weeping at the way I’m brought cheek to cheek with the sharp edges of humanity. The shadows. My shadows. The unspoken. My unspoken. There in the cafe settings. There where dark brushes against light, where isolation and loneliness are rife. There where stories are shared, and equally stories are held back. Darkness and light.

Probably against the grain of reading a sequence of images and text, I look at Elizabeth’s images first. She produces all the drawings on her iPad using the Procreate drawing app, recording her observations in cafes or buses. I am absorbing the people frozen in a cafe moment, those on phones, those alone, those in groups, those with son or daughter, and each scene amplifies an intensity of mood. I can’t think when I have last felt portraits to such a degree. I feel the gaze of the eyes, the expression on the face. I feel the unspoken, and more than anything, the way we become a catalogue of memory, experience, pain, aroha, longing, recognitions.

In these tough times that can be so overwhelming, this book, I am feeling to its raw mood edges.

Now I return to the beginning and read Janet’s texts, these little patches of dialogue or poetry or anecdote, and again I am shaken to my core. It’s dark and light, its jarring and surprising. It’s gender relations and damage and patriarchy and femen and abuse and dressing wounds and how do we become and how do we be. Interior monologues, intimate revelations. Again I am feeling this book, feeling poetry to a skin tingling degree.

I am reading through the book for a third time, text alongside image, image alongside text, and the besidedness is extraordinary. It takes me deep into grief, into how we live, how vital our stories and conversations are, how connectedness matters, how listening to the person beside us matters. How important it is to nourish our children and ourselves in multiple self-care ways. And my words are a knot. How to re-view? How to speak? How to write?

Janet and Elizabeth’s collaboration began during the Canal Road Arboretum protest in Avondale, where the two artists first met. The book is in some ways a form of protest, in another ways a memory theatre, an intimate album. I haven’t felt a book this deep in a long time. This book is a gift. And I have ordered a copy to gift to a friend. Thank you.

Janet Charman is an award-winning poet, recipient of the Best Book of Poetry at the 2008 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. Her 2022 collection The Pistils was longlisted at the 2023 NZ Book Awards, and her 11th collection The Intimacy Bus was released in 2025.

Elizabeth Anderson is an artist and educator with an MFA from Elam. She has worked across design and television in Aotearoa and the UK, and now focuses on observational drawing and community-based creative work.

Skinship Press page

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: Paranormal Phenomenon by Richard Reeve

1 Reply

Paranormal Phenomenon

My garden’s gum tree, creaking above my roof,
is nearly normal. By which I mean
the sound branches make when hit by weather,
rain, wind and the like, whinge of the limbs
bending to a gale, drizzle, or stillness
when the nut flowers bring in the bees.
All this is normal, scarcely worth commentary,

and yet, also, mysterious.

99 percent of all paranormal phenomena involve sticks,
shufflings in the wind, storms, shadows.
Sound or form first associated, then disassociated,
inflating superstition. The fact of weather.
99 percent of such occurrences being quietly remarkable,
the sound of the gum is quietly remarkable
(the one percent a mere statistic).

Richard Reeve


Richard Reeve is the author of seven collections of poetry, published variously by Auckland University Press, Otago University Press and Maungatua Press. His most recent publication, About Now, was published by Maungatua Press in 2024. A new collection is forthcoming. Reeve lives at Warrington, to the north of Dunedin, with his partner Octavia, cat Lionel, some hedgehogs, a selection of introduced bird species and a few mice.

Poetry Shelf cafe readings: Ethan Christensen

Leave a reply

Ethan Christensen is a writer from parents, grandparents, and tīpuna based in Coromandel Town. His work features in publications across Aotearoa and Australia, and he co-edited the penultimate issue of Overcom Magazine in 2024. In 2025, he won the Peter Wells Short Fiction Most Promising Young Writer award, presented by Samesame but different. In the breaths of community and belonging, he hopes others can see themselves in the experiences he puts to page, whatever they may be. You can find more of his published mahi on Instagram, @eth_christ.

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Murray Edmond

Leave a reply

INTERVIEW WITH A POEM: ‘Night Shift 1’ (1970)

Night-Shift 1

I get up at 4.00pm
& buy a cheese
3 tomatoes, an orange, & a tin of fruit juice
as usual;
also a paper.
I return to the kitchen
& put 2 tomatoes in the fridge for midnight,
cut off a piece of cheese
& put the rest in the fridge,
also for midnight;
then I open the tin of fruit juice,
two triangular holes neatly opposite each other;
I wish I had had time to put it too in the fridge to cool.
When I come to sit down at the table
I find Kathryn is reading my newspaper.
I eat the tomato, the piece of cheese & the orange;
also I drink the tin of fruit juice.
I feel I need some exercise,
So I go for a walk as the sun goes down.

Murray Edmond
from Entering the Eye, Caveman Press, 1973
First publication of this poem was in Landfall 98, June 1971, pp.122-123 (lovely cover by Pat Hanly – please note, Landfall then cost $1.00!).

Interviewer: Today we are speaking with a poem, which hasn’t been seen for many years, but has been reprinted here today. I began by asking the poem how it persuaded the poet to get re-printed:

Poem: Truth to tell, I didn’t even recognize the old bugger, it’s been so long.

Interviewer: So, did you get in contact . . . I mean, was it you who approached him?

Poem: Pure coincidence. I was on my way down to the mall. I work down there, back of the supermarket. Opening boxes all night. It’s a job. I usually stop off at the local – have a beer and a falafel. I took a short cut down a street I’d never been before. I’ve completely lost contact over the years. Once you’re written, that’s it. Most of them don’t give a monkey’s after that.  They go off and they write different kinds of poems. But we’re pretty stuck as we are. As we were, so to speak.

Interviewer: So, what happened?

Poem: This old guy was mowing the berm. Pushing an old hand mower. I walked right past him. He’d looked up and caught my eye. I thought: why is he looking at me like that? I’d gone about twenty paces further on, and I stopped. It was him.

Interviewer: So, did you say hullo?

Poem: I turned back and had a second look. It was him all right. We were staring at each other. Just staring like. Then we both pretended not to know. He was the first to break. He put his head down and started pushing the mower like fury.

Interviewer: So, nothing happened.

Poem: It had been too long. Like seeing an old lover across the street.

Interviewer: When I read you, I don’t see much love in you.

Poem: I like to think I’m a love poem.

Interviewer: Really?

Poem: True.

Interviewer: How do you work that out?

Poem: I don’t. It’s what I am.

Interviewer: I don’t see it. Who’s the lucky . . . whoever?

Poem: Not that kind of love. All youse interview bods are the same. Love! For the fucking world. And all its shit. The sun, the cheese, the fridge, the tin of juice, the fucking orange, bro!

Interviewer: Do you call that love?

Poem: I call it love. What do you call it?  Sorry! “We ask the questions”. Mind you, maybe you’re a bit right. Turned out we had the same girlfriend once. That was a bit odd. I’d forgotten all about her. I wanted to ask him ask: Where is she now? But I didn’t.

Interviewer: Was that Kathryn?

Poem: Kathryn?

Interviewer: In the poem. You should know: “I find Kathryn is reading my newspaper.”

Poem: Oh, Kathryn! No, no.

Interviewer: So, who was Kathryn?

Poem: She’s still there. She’s in the poem. She’s reading the newspaper.

Interviewer: Are you just making this up?

Poem: No, no. Cross my heart. Well, yeah. I guess. I’m aware that I’m just made up. “Every time I wake up, I’m putting on my make-up . . . “ Don’t look so worried, bro. Aretha Franklin!  I’m not ‘making up’ to you. Swear. One thing I am proud of is my semi-colons. Did you notice? Didn’t think so. And did you notice the lack of pull-tabs back then? Do your homework. Thing is I’ve worked night shift for years. They say it stuffs your health. Stuffs your . . . what’s it called? Psyche? Is that the word?

Interviewer: You’re the poem. You should know.

Poem: Tell me: how do you get a job like yours?

Murray Edmond: born Kirikiriroa 1949; lives in Glen Eden, Tāmaki-makau-rau. Recent publications: Time to Make a Song and Dance: Cultural Revolt in Auckland in the 1960s (Atuanui Press,  2021) – cultural history; FARCE and Sandbank Sonnets: A Memoir, (Compound Press, 2022) – 2 books of poems; Aucklanders (Lasavia, 2023), a book of 15 short stories.

Poetry Shelf review: No Good by Sophie van Waardenberg

Leave a reply

No Good, Sophie van Waardenberg
Auckland University Press, 2025

What initially hooks us into a poem? For me, there is no singular response. Indeed if there were, it might limit what poetry can be and do. When I first started reading Sophie van Waardenberg’s new collection, No Good, I jotted down two words in my notebook: rhythm and voice. I was hooked. I was drawn into the musical cadence of a speaker speaking, drawn into the under and over currents of spiky, thistle, bloom. And as I read the collection, on a number of occasions over the past few months, crucial questions arrived. I was especially musing on the way a poem might become both self and other.

The title is the perfect welcome mat into the collection, particularly coupled with the cover illustration, where ‘good’ wavers, and I gaze at the beetle on the apple that is both good and not good. Pausing on the welcome mat, a cascade of (centuries) of good girl propaganda spins in my mind, and I am peering into the no good to see the next apple in the bowl, a portal of good in the pillowcase of no good.

And then, there on the first page, the ‘Poem in Which I am Good’, and the welcome mat widens, and still I am musing on the good girl, the no good girl, and the lyrical voice is blisteringly affecting.

Everything will be good, and the trousers I left
to blow in the wind and the rain and lemon leaves,

them too. The linen will keep its soft thatching.

Who is she? How is she? The speaking voice gently draws me into both flawed and happy, and as much as I am on the edge of weeping, I hold tight to the coat-tails of joy. These words. These lines. These poems. I read : ‘A girl is born out of comparison.’ Read the glorious poem, ‘Sticky’, and feel the possibility of girl stretch oh so wide, even in the complicated history of her making, whether personal, or across centuries, or as negotiable and contested ideas.

A girl is filth and bright. A girl is born
out of comparison. A girl can sing or can’t.
A girl is held inside a duck’s bill, weighed
against a slice of bread for softness.
What flour is a girl made of? Wheat or corn?
How can a girl get clean again?

The middle section of the book, ‘Cremation sonnets’ resembles a grief casket, where the poems lead in multiple directions, carrying us between presence and absence, letting go, and unable to let go. This lost love. This elegiac memory.

The final sequence of poems, so utterly moving, are written with the ink of love. The poems are addressed to ‘you’, written across a distance between here and there, between hunger and satisfaction, dream and reality, turning away and moving close. This is love. This loved and loving woman. This is ache and this is a yearning to love and be loved. Such gentleness, such a slow perfect unfolding of what is special, with only so much revealed and gently placed in the pockets of the poems. And if this is a love that is over, such deep sadness, it seems to me, that love finds a way to linger in residues, traces, scents.

The word I write in my notebook in my latest reading is bridge, the way poems become a bridge, establish vital bridges. Think sweet and sour crossings, fluid and awkward, here and there, good and not good. Not as a restrictive dichotomy but as a series of movements, like music, like the way personal experience resists pigeon holes. Traversing the myriad bridges in Sophie’s sublime collection makes me both think and feel the world. Yes I am thinking and feeling a version of her world, but also a version of my world. And this moves me.

Rhythm, voice, bridges. I hold this book out to you so you may find your own self-affecting crossings.

A stagger of lemons and a goneness
I can’t swallow. Hello the same feeling,

didn’t I wash you off,
you get everywhere, sog up my arms

and droop me. It’s something alien
in my gut that knows you so well.

I say it again: I am not a creature of sorrow.
But I could be proper sad if I put my mind to it,

if someone dropped me from a height.

from ‘The Getting Away’


Sophie van Waardenberg is a writer from Tāmaki Makaurau. She holds an MFA from Syracuse University where she was editor-in-chief of Salt Hill Journal. Her first chapbook, ‘does a potato have a heart?’, was published in AUP New Poets 5 (2019). Her poems about eating carbohydrates and kissing girls can be found in Cordite, Sweet Mammalian, The Spinoff and Best New Zealand Poems.

Listen to Sophie read two poems on Poetry Shelf: ‘Self-Portrait as Adolescent Covered in Flour’, ‘Hymn to the Insomniac in Fool’s Spring’

Auckland University Press page

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: ‘doe-eyed’ by Zia Ravenscroft

Leave a reply

doe-eyed


we’re all just kids riding bikes through
quiet neighbourhoods where all the houses
are identical and the colour of sand.
we’re all just the distant sounds of laughter,
sometimes crying.
we’re all just streetlights, we’re all trying
not to blind each other when we open
our mouths and sometimes we’re candles
and other times we’re the splash of water
and the flood.
we don’t mean to do this to each other
turn ourselves into headlights
and everyone else into deer.
we don’t mean to make the world
an open wound, but sometimes you’ll look
down and see the sharp thing in your own
hand. use your mouth or shut it then.
turn on veranda-light, open your hand.
we’re waking up together, we’re each other’s
alarm clocks, we’re the painted chain-link
fences, we’re the scream of love, we’re standing
up all the way down hill on bicycles we never
owned but somehow made out of all this red.

Zia Ravenscroft

Zia Ravenscroft is a writer, actor, and drag king currently studying in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. He has previously been published in Starling, Cordite, and Circular among others, and performed at the National Poetry Slam Finals in 2023. They like writing about boys and bodies and boys’ bodies. 

Poetry Shelf cafe Readings: Alexandra Cherian

Leave a reply

Alexandra reads and talks poetry

Alexandra Cherian (she/they) is a filmmaker, writer, and girltwink extraordinaire from Te Whanganui-a-Tara. She has been published in bad apple, Takahē, Starling and Overcom among others, and is a founding member of queer filmmaking collective The New New. In 2025, she completed her Masters in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters.

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Richard von Sturmer

Leave a reply

My recent book, Slender Volumes, is made of 300 seven-line poems. Really they are 300 stories, told in different modes: the realistic, the autobiographical, the historical and the surreal. One, popular with audiences when read aloud, is number 216, which concerns Mr Moth and his dairy:

There was a dairy at the end of the road owned by Mr Moth. Everybody knew it as Moth’s dairy. He sold ice blocks made in a special mould – the stem being a popsicle with a large wing on each side. The ice blocks came in different colours and were named Emerald Surprise, Ruby Splendour and, best of all, the Tiger Moth. The dairy always shut its door at dusk. No fluorescent lights were switched on. Mr Moth liked the darkness.

What seems to be a figment of my imagination, in the surreal mode, in fact came from a walk around Onehunga Bay Lagoon. On this particular walk my wife Amala and I encountered an old-time resident who told us that many years ago there used to be a dairy opposite our house on Normans Hill Road. The dairy was owned by a Mr Moss. I misheard him, and thought he said “Mr Moth”. This led to a reverie about Mr Moth and his dairy, which I wrote down when I got home.

Richard von Sturmer is a New Zealand writer. He was born on Auckland’s North Shore in 1957. His recent works are the acclaimed memoir, This Explains Everything (Atuanui Press, 2016), Postcard Stories (Titus Books, 2019), and Resonating Distances (Titus Books, 2022).

In 2020 he was the University of Waikato’s writer-in-residence. His book Walking with Rocks, Dreaming with Rivers: My Year in the Waikato (Titus Books, 2023) was written during his residency.

In 2025 his new collection of poetry, Slender Volumes (Spoor Books, 2024), was shortlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the 2025 Ockham Book Awards.