A Shell-Print of Waves – Aramoana Poems
eds David Eggleton and Michelle Elvy
At the Bay | I Te Kokoru, 2025

A Shell-Print of Waves – Aramoana Poems is like a poem travel guide that draws a particular place into view with a rich stitching of visual detail. The chapbook presents poems that came out of sessions run by David Eggleton, Michelle Elvy and Madeleine Child in Aramoana in April 2024 and April 2025. The venture was run in association with Wild Dunedin while the chapbook was supported by Ōtepoti Dunedin UNESCO City of Literature.

Twenty-two poets step off from a place, Aramoana, to reflect and absorb: perhaps a writing exercise where you translate what is physically present through an array of senses, memory prompts, thought trails, word delights. A pocket guide book, and it feels like I have spent the weekend in a place unfamiliar to me. There are recurring motifs (how could there not be?): calm, storm, movement, constant change, sunlight, sky, birds, waves sand, sea. Every now and then, the presence of the writing circle filters through, exposing a process of seeing and doing.

I borrowed a few verbs from Michelle Elvy’s poem, ‘Waterways 2: our stories are wild weather’, to underline the way it’s a collection of shifting rhythms, as the poems burn grab ripple rumble puff weave carry nudge rainwash cloudswim swell pull dip.

Here’s a sample from Diane Brown’s ‘Not a matter of calm’, a poem that shifts and twists:

( . . .) We have come

to expect no day here the same.
Sometimes a flat sea and sun
to bathe in. Sometimes

we come face to face with wildness,
sea lions, leopard seals, or our shadowy
selves shifting course.

In ‘Between Aramoana Spit and Taiaroa Head’, David Eggleton amplifies both sound and image on the line, embedding the reader in a shadowy-rich scene. Here is the final stanza:

There’s a salty savour to the air; brine bubbles;
the tide’s sheen glides up over the wet, flat sand.
Shadows stretch estranged from what they shadow:
the shadow of a flounder, the shadow of an albatross,
shadow of macrocarpa, shadow of a channel marker,
shadow of a cargo ship bearing logs into chasms of the night.

Gilbert May, as the cover shows, has produced the perfect line drawings and design for the subject matter. This gorgeous wee chapbook is a perfect treat to tuck into pockets for a dose of weekend travel. Maybe I’ll pick up a pen, look about me, reflect a moment, and start writing: the flat and the wild, the shadows and the cargo.