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Poetry Shelf celebrates the Ockham NZ Book Awards Poetry Shortlist: Some favourite things with Anna Jackson

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Terrier, Worrier A Poem in Five Parts, Anna Jackson
Auckland University Press, 2025

“Anna Jackson’s glorious new collection, Terrier, Worrier A Poem in Five Parts, gets sunlight slipping through the loops of my thinking, reading, dreaming. The collection is offered as a seasonal loop as we move through summer, autumn, winter, spring, summer, and in this temporal movement, the loop regenerates, absorbing and delivering rhythms of living . . . mind and body . . . rhythms of writing . . . nouns, verbs, conjunctions . . . rhythms of thinking . . . and little by little . . . the compounding ideas, the feelings. It’s poetry as looptrack: overloop, underloop, throughloop.”

Paula Green, Poetry Shelf

To celebrate placement on The Ockham NZ Book Awards poetry shortlist, I invited the four poets to choose some favourite things. First up Anna Jackson.

Anna Jackson chooses favourites

Four photos
(a favourite object, place, book cover, album)

my mix-tape cd collection is a favourite thing!

my favourite place would be, in bed, with the cat

Thee sets of three

3 Words?  I don’t really have favourite words. I could say Lorna, Lucy and Peggy, the names of my three hens.

3 things that matter to me in poetry: I like surprise, a twist that goes somewhere unexpected but not random. I like repetition, the way it builds memory into a poem.  And voice, I love it when I hear emotion in the way something is said.

3 poets who have inspired me: Catullus, obviously, but not counting Catullus, Frank O’Hara, Wislawa Symborska, Helen Rickerby. 

One question

Why does Terrier, Worrier matter to me? 

Terrier, Worrier is made up of thoughts I was thinking during the Covid lockdowns and at the time I felt some urgency to write them down and not forget them, which was a very temporary impulse.  I don’t write down thoughts any more. But then I had what felt like raw material, that I wanted to work with the way you might want to work with clay or with fabric samples you’d collected.  I felt like using them up.  And I like what I made out of them. 

An extract from Terrier, Worrier

I remember sitting in the car after work, not wanting to turn on the windshield wipers because I felt like I needed the rain on the windshield to do the work of crying for me. 

I thought, every body is a memory palace. 

I dreamed I was in conversation with a photographer who had been photographing a series of traumatic scenes, a series of photographs both terrible and beautiful.  But, before he could exhibit them, before he could even print them, he exposed all the film, and all the images were lost.  Now, he wondered, did he have to go through everything again, re-enact the scenes, in order to recreate the images?

I thought, I don’t know why I translate Catullus over and over again, but it happens and I feel it, I feel like I am split in two. 

I thought, when I am Catullus, writing as Sappho, as Ariadne, as Attis, as Procne, am I bird or birdsong?  The journey, or the backwards glance?

I sat in the car with my daughter, tears running down our faces.  Then I laughed, and turned the windscreen wipers off.

Anna Jackson
from Terrrier, Worrier 

Anna Jackson is the author of seven collections of poetry as well as Diary Poetics: Form and Style in Writers’ Diaries 1915–1962 (Routledge, 2010) and Actions & Travels: How Poetry Works (Auckland University Press, 2022). She lives in Island Bay, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, and is professor in English literature at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington.

Anna Jackson’s website
Auckland University Press page
Poetry Shelf review
Anna and Paula in conversation on Poetry Shelf
Anna chooses an extract from Terrier, Worrier (longlist feature)

Poetry Shelf celebrates Ockham NZ Book Awards poetry longlist: a review and Emma Barnes picks a poem

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If We Knew How to We Would, Emma Barnes
Auckland University Press, 2025

Poetry Shelf review

Emma Barnes’ new collection comes with an advisory note as some parts deal with suicide, depression and grief. I utterly loved Emma’s debut collection,I Am in Bed with You (AUP, 2021), but in my patchwork year of light and dark, in 2025 I could not enter the pathways of If We Knew How We Could. Making choices like this is an important part of self care, yet this week, having steadily grown into my new normal, I felt ready to read it. And I absolutely love it.

I near the end of my madcap plan to celebrate every poetry book on the Ockham NZ Book Awards poetry longlist (within an uncharacteristic short space of time) and I know what an extraordinary set of books the judges have selected. And here is Emma’s book, one of the few collections I had not already read and reviewed, and it touches me so profoundly. It did not trigger the dark, it opened up a kaleidoscope of light on existence, on non-existence, on self love as much as self loathing.

The book is dedicated to “all the ad hoc mental health support teams who are out there doing their best in an underfunded, seemingly unloving world.’ How this resonates when our health system is rusting up and out, when our doctors and nurses are working against all our odds to heal and care.

Emma’s collection is divided into three sections, each prefaced with epigrams from authors who, as Emma writes in their endnote, are their “literary ancestors”: “As a writer I am descended from every author I’ve read and loved”. Again so resonant. I am reminded how I carry mantras in my heart and pockets, lines from poems that flicker and fertilise throughout each day. Try this for size:

“Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone,
it has to be made, like bread;
remade all the time, made new.”

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

I have filled a notebook with epigrams from If We Knew How We Could. Yet every prose poem is like an opening fan of epigrams, each line intricately woven into the “tilt” and “truth” of how we read the ones either side. This for example from ‘To knit is to code is to code is to knit’:

I am aware of the gaps within myself. I leave a little bit of openness for a
future though I knit around you, I knit around us. I knit into a future world
where thread and gap combine to wrap our history neatly of lopsided. The
gaps that made us then are not the gaps that make us now.

As much as the collection faces, negotiates, and indeed travels, with grief, it faces, negotiates and travels with life. I see the book as a form of embrace. Think self, think life, and also think form. The first and third sections are the warm arms around the middle section’s aching jagged heartwrenching core. In the opening section, the poems, both organic and mesmerising, at times erotic draw us close to a together and breaking “we”, to bodies that yearn and crave and desire, smudging and crossing borders between we and you and I. Of words, beyond words. Of self, beyond self. The middle section faces a suicide (the word too unbearable to be used by the poet) of someone close, with the pain of the what-if alternate paths and alleys, the toughness of the “unknown” and the “unknowable”, especially to self, even to self. The third section returns to the homeself, to the body, to the self as a solar system of possibilities, truths, recognitions. And yes, pain and desire and fragilities. Read this sample from one of my favourite poems, ‘I Am’:

I am an unmade bed. I am a single thing made up of many other things. I am a reason, a raising, a roof to be raised. I am a song you sing in your sleep. I am a collection of dots. I am a need you buried in the back garden. I am a literal spray of light across a wooden floor in a house where the sun has only just returned. I am a musical phrase. I am a lead light. I am a host. I am seven different names. I am all the fat in my body. I am the sky when it is early spring and I can’t believe I exist in this colour range. I am so blue.

What do I pull close from this extraordinary book, words to carry in my pockets and heart? I could point you to the way we are organic and multi-hued, maybe even multi-hulled. The way both world and self are full of gaps, how there is the known and the unknown, the knowable and the unknowable, recognition and misrecognition. I utterly love the unfolding slowness of the narrating voice, the rhythm intensifying thoughtfulness, the weave of “truth” and “tilt”, the complicated “knit” of how to live and co-exist, how to be, despite edges and wounds. I love the physical objects that feed into the self-narrative-knit: the Wi-Fi restarting, the egg cracked, the empty street, the tree roots and leaves, the pattern of feet, tender wall, soft bridge.

Extraordinary, this is my heart book of 2025, this book of human stutters and connections.

Emma Barnes (Pākehā, they/them) studied at the University of Canterbury and lives in Aro Valley, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington. Their poetry has been published in journals including Landfall, Turbine | Kapohau, Cordite and Best New Zealand Poems (2008, 2010, 2021). They performed in Show Ponies in 2022 and 2023. They are the author of the poetry collection I Am in Bed with You (AUP, 2021) and co-editor with Chris Tse of Out Here: An Anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ Writers from Aotearoa (AUP, 2021). They work in tech and spend a lot of time picking up heavy things and putting them back down again.

Auckland University Press page

Poetry Shelf Celebrates Okham Book Awards poetry long list: Gregory Kan picks a poem

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Clay Eaters, Gregory Kan
Auckland University Press, 2025

Not wanting to be bent

Over each and every loss

Divided my mind into multiple plots

Of land, with fences

Growing around each of them

Pretended

That there was nowhere else to go

That where I was

Was all that was left

And years went by

Like on television

Gregory Kan
from Clay Eaters

“I feel like I’ve written this poem many times, differently.” Gregory

From Paula Green’s review on Poetry Shelf:

I have just finished reading Gregory Kan’s Clay Eaters and I am caught in an eddy of multiple hauntings. How to translate this transcendental state of reading? How to share this poetry nourishment? I will begin with the notion that the collection resembles a landscape of braided rivers: a polyphonic source, the tributaries, the gentle currents and the torrents, the obstacle boulders and the jagged edges, the ripples and the calm. The beauty. The fierceness. The shifting waters. The place to stand and ponder. The place to stand and be. Poetry as braided river. Poetry as wonder.

Poetry that is personal and invented and incredibly moving.

Who were you, really

Outside of us, outside of me

Outside of all my

Useless bargaining

There are autobiographical braids. The family who moves from Singapore to Aotearoa. The poet who returns to Singapore six years later to do compulsory military service on Pulau Tekong. A father who suffers a stroke. A partner and a beloved cat who dies. Siblings and their offspring.

Poetry that is slowly unfolding as we traverse the braided currents. The visual layout offers shifting movement as we move amidst silence, the double spacing, the single spacing, the space to ponder, the spare and the dense, the jungle and the family room, the familiar and the unfamiliar.

Poetry as mapping. Maps are a recurring motif on an island that has a chequered history of cartography and naming, where orienteering is a key lesson for the military trainees. Yet I find myself viewing this as more than jungle mapping, because these poetic braids are a way of mapping self, of heart. There are the slippery currents of losing and finding one’s way in both past and present, the porous areas between here and there. There is no translation for a dish, kueh: ‘Neither cake nor jelly / Neither dumpling nor pudding / But somewhere between them all’. For me that signalled the inhabited space. Nothing set in concrete. Nothing static. The forever changed. Like the braided river flowing, the same but different.

This is poetry that navigates a tough experience, the poet’s military cadet years, those jungle ghosts, where spirits may dwell in trees: ‘The island didn’t seem like a place for people’. Where it’s the ‘Endless trees running deep into the red clay earth’. And it’s the weight of packs and mysterious stories and escape longings. The hammering weapons. Heart wrenching. This ache.

And then.

This is poetry that draws forward the father, there in his invalid wheelchair or his study, notebooks piling, books on shelves. The difficulty and ease of being with him, then and now. And the family, the mother, the siblings and the offspring, coming into view. And a scene, this together family scene, after the ‘archetypal family feast’, that is a catch in my throat, as the dreams accrue and connect.

Gregory Kan is a writer and developer based in Pōneke/Wellington. His first collection of poetry, This Paper Boat, was shortlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for poetry in 2017. Under Glass, his second collection, was longlisted for the award in 2020. He was the 2017 Grimshaw Sargeson Fellow.

Auckland University Press page

Listen to Gregory read here

Poetry Shelf celebrates the Ockham NZ Book Awards poetry long list: Sophie van Waardenberg chooses a poem

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No Good, Sophie van Waardenberg
Auckland University Press, 2025

Cremation Sonnet

When you come back your eyes are huge and bursting.
You come back with clean long hair.
You come back normal but you’re swelling
in the middle like a bird. Your skin luminous.
Or your skin something else. Last night—
did you know—you came back caved in, beaten,
and tomorrow you’ll be perfect, wading nowhere
through a football field of loose complacent light.
You come back: you do not know me. Or if you do,
you do not love me. Or if you do, it’s not enough.
Still you come back, forty-eight and starving,
twenty-two and blushing from a pantomime.
Dead dead traveller, what song is it,
when you come back, that you sing?

Sophie van Waardenberg
from No Good

This is the first of a bunch of ‘Cremation Sonnets’ that make up the middle chunk of No Good. There were a lot more of those sonnets that didn’t make it into the book, and I almost feel like I could write just as many if I tried to again now, but I don’t think I’ll try to again. Grief gets boring. (And I think some of the poems are about that, about how boring it is.)

This one, though, comes from the dreams I had — still have, sometimes — of my dad being alive again. He died when I was thirteen, and for a long while there was nothing I wanted more than to have him back. But it is never comforting to have a dead person come back in a dream, at least not for me, because they are not themselves and have nothing new to say to you. They are what your sleeping brain makes from scraps: some kind of ghoul or stupid caricature. If I wanted to achieve anything in particular with this poem, it was probably to at least gesture at that weird cavernous space between longing and horror. How can you bear that desire for something you can never have again? How can someone be gone? I think grief is more like confusion than sadness.

The thing is, these sonnets weren’t actually horrific to write. They were sometimes quite fun. I remember being in a bit of a frenzy, writing one or two of them a day — most of them unpromising. I had a pretty on-again off-again relationship with metre, obviously, and I made no attempt to rhyme. Still, there are plenty of iambs lolloping around in here. ‘A football field of loose complacent light’ is definitely a result of working in metre; I love how that constraint can force me into a less predictable line. The most fun I have when I’m writing is when I surprise myself, and I did that a lot when I wrote these poems.

Sophie van Waardenberg

Poetry Shelf review extract:

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.

Full review here

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 celebrates the Ockham NZ Book Award poetry longlist: Anna Jackson chooses an extract

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Poetry Shelf has invited poets to choose a poem from their longlisted collections and to write a few comments on the poem and poetry. Today Anna Jackson:

Terrier, Worrier A Poem in Five Parts, Anna Jackson
Auckland University Press, 2025


Terrier, Worrier is one long poem so instead of choosing a poem from it for Poetry Shelf I have selected an extract.  This should be easy because every paragraph is almost a self-contained little poem, but to me what makes Terrier, Worrier a poem are both the gaps between the paragraphs and the repetitions, returns and resonances across the collection as a whole.  Thought doesn’t lead straight on to another thought but is present under the surface of the forward movement of the prose and emerges transformed elsewhere in relation to a new idea.  I don’t know if this is really poetry or just how the mind works.  In Terrier, Worrier thoughts are prompted by conversations, funerals, the behaviour of my hens, questions posed by philosophers, massages, memories and dreams. 

This extract includes the dream that gives the collection its title, and, with that sentence in the middle, connects narratives about my hens and worries about motherhood and daughterhood that run through the collection.  

This summer, I kept dreaming about a terrier. It was not a recurring dream but a recurring terrier that appeared in dream after dream, often needing to be released from somewhere it was trapped.  It did seem as if my unconscious was hard at work trying to tell me something I was repeatedly failing to grasp.  I thought, a terrier is a good symbol for the work of digging up something underground but still alive. 

Wilma had not been interested in me as a person when she was still part of a flock but now she looked in the eye which is not something she had ever done when the other hens were still alive.  I thought she was looking at me person to person now, whereas before she had only looked at me as an object.  I thought, there is a difference between being tame, and being a friend. 

There is a difference between being a tame, and being a daughter.

I wondered whether I could hear terrier as a version of the word worrier, a worrier being not someone who makes you worry but someone who themselves worries, who worries away at things like a terrier might worry away at a sock.  A terrier would be someone who allows themselves actually to indulge in the feeling of terror.  I tell myself “I am not okay, but I will be okay,” but maybe I need to stop saying that and release the terror, or maybe the terrier is not myself but represents someone else’s terror which needs to be heard. 

I thought, it tells us something about poetry that when we need to talk to ourselves about something we don’t know we know, we tell it to ourselves when we are asleep, in images we struggle to remember when we awake, and often take more than one reading to fully understand.

Anna Jackson

From Paula Green’s Poetry Shelf review (a review in nine loops):

There’s a long black cloud streaking from the west coast to the backyard bush sprinkling salt and pepper rain. Terrier, Worrier is generally written in the past tense, with many stanzas beginning with ‘I thought’, yet for me, curiously, wonderfully, it carries the charismatic freight of the present tense, the sweet fluidity of the gerund, the present participle . . . where be-here-now fluency prevails regardless of gaps, rest-stops, hesitancy. Reading is to be embedded in the moment of the past as reader, so that what happened, and what was thought, becomes acutely present. Dive into the poetry currents in the collection, and along with the writer, you will might find yourself filtering, evaluating, experiencing, valuing, photographing, documenting, thinking. Savouring a moment.

My full review here

Anna Jackson is the author of seven collections of poetry as well as Diary Poetics: Form and Style in Writers’ Diaries 1915–1962 (Routledge, 2010) and Actions & Travels: How Poetry Works (Auckland University Press, 2022). She lives in Island Bay, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, and is associate professor in English literature at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington.

Anna Jackson’s website
Auckland University Press page



Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Helen Rickerby Poetry Launch

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Event by Auckland University Press

Southern Cross Garden Bar Restaurant

Join us to celebrate the launch of My Bourgeois Apocalypse, a new poetry collection by Helen Rickerby.

Friday 13 March
7pm

The Guest Room, out the back of the Southern Cross Garden Bar Restaurant
39 Abel Smith Street
Te Aro, Wellington

The book will be launched by Anna Jackson, with a reading by Helen.

In the spirit of the collection’s hybrid collage-essay-memoir form, this is a launch-cum-dance party, with music featured in the book playing throughout the night (mostly from the 80s). So bring your dancing shoes!

Books will be available for purchase on the night thanks to Unity Wellington.

About the book: https://aucklanduniversitypress.co.nz/my-bourgeois…/

Poetry Shelf review: In the Hollow of the Wave by Nina Mingya Powles

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In the Hollow of the Wave, Nina Mingya Powles
Auckland University Press, 2025
first published, Nine Arches Press, UK, 2025

handiwork

 

People asked me where I learned
and I said I taught myself the slow work of making.

But memory is a house with scraped white walls.
I step inside and choose what to take, what to leave behind.

My hands feel their way through
the gathering, the careful pulling apart.

The work of particular poets can strike you so deeply, so resonantly. Poets who produce collections that satisfy your hunger to read so keenly, with books that take up residency in both your mental and physical poetry rooms. Nina Mingya Powles has been that kind of poet for me, from her terrific debut collection Magnolia 木蘭, through her various other published offerings. Her new collection, In the Hollow of the Wave, is one of the most gorgeous poetry books I have held this year – a sweet combination of heavenly paper stock, generous size, lovingly-tended internal design and vital breathing room. Nina has also created textile works that add to the visual beauty and allure of the book.

Textile is a key word. I experience the book as multiple loomwork: a weaving of memory, experience, language, cottons and fabric. Weaving as a way of observing the world, feeling the world, observing the object, feeling the object, observing the past, feeling the past. It might be the sewing machine upon which her grandfather stitched quilts from garments belonging to her siblings, mother and grandmother. It might be a gown, a pleat, or a sheet of white paper or fabric.

And now, with In the Hollow of the Wave, the granddaughter is herself stitching quilts; inside the stitched poem the stitched cloth, and inside the stitched cloth the stitched poem. I experience contemplation pockets tucked with memory pleats, and inside memory pleats, I threads of slow contemplation: andante, largo, adagio.

The book title is borrowed from a line in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. It gains its own life as Nina ponders Virginia’s use of orientalism and Kitsushika Hokusai’s woodblock print, ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa’. The poem haunts, the hollow in the wave haunts, the recurrent pulse of existence and non-existence haunt. The poem is skin-prickling reading:

beyond the frame I saw a distant city / a place I used to know / where rain
falls in the foreground / all day and all night / I took out my sketchbook /
sharpened my pencil / drew a line across the sea / asked the mountain /
what does it mean to see and be unseen / it did not answer

So many echoes across the collection. So many threads to follow and pause on(slip stitch, ladder stitch, cross stitch). There is the scent of plants and plantings, herbal remedies, the reminder of the women in poverty who stitched the garments we wear, the reflection of self in a stirred pan on the stove, the way dreaming seeps into making, the way the language, chores, hopes and the lives of women still matter. The way poetry can be a way of asking questions.

Inside the hollow of a wave is a poem. And inside that poem is a book. A book such as this one. Stitched with aroha and luminous threads. I want you to read it for yourself and get absorbed in its beauty and craft. It has already found spots in my poetry rooms.

Nina Mingya Powles is a poet and writer from Aotearoa New Zealand, currently based in London. Her debut poetry collection, Magnolia 木蘭, was published in New Zealand, the UK and the US, and was a finalist in the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection and the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Powles won the inaugural Women Poets’ Prize in 2018 and the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize for under-represented nature writers in 2019. Her resulting book of essays Small Bodies of Water was published in 2021 by Canongate. She has also published a short food memoir, Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai (The Emma Press, 2020).]

Auckland University Press page

Poetry Shelf celebrates National Poet Laureate Chris Tse

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photo credit: Celeste Fontein

Today Chris Tse is stepping down from his role as National Poet Laureate, and it felt extremely fitting to acknowledge his vital contribution to poetry in Aotearoa and overseas. He has staged a range of poetry events around the country, drawing in voices, inspiring younger writers, contributing to inspiring poetry conversations in various settings.

Having always been a big fan of Chris’s poetry — from his debut in AUP New Poets 4 (AUP 2011) to Super Model Minority (AUP, 2022) — I decided I would pick one poem from each of his books as a celebration of his tenure. Chris kindly answered a couple of questions from me and contributed a recent poem. To reread my way through his collections was utterly moving: from How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes (2014, AUP), a collection that returns to the tragedy of murdered goldminer, Joe Kum Yung, to his next two, he’s so MASC (AUP, 2018) and Super Model Minority (AUP, 2022). His books navigate sexuality and race, sky and mountain peaks, revolution and imagining, speech and peace. Ah, take the time and spend a long weekend absorbing his extraordinary poetic ink.

Thank you, Chris thank you.

five poems

Dig
     after Seamus Heaney

Our first back yard hugged
the prickled slopes
of Kelson.

I watched my father dig and
tear his way       through bush and clay
to find that richer soil.

That spicy scent of gorse, the path
                he zigzagged.

And beyond him, decades
              and oceans away,
his father stooping to dig
gathering ginger and spring onion;
               dreams of richer days.

                  •

Between my finger and my thumb
the sticks rest.

                  •

Below the surface lies
a history of chopsticks.
                                          In the days
of new sight we clung to comfort
as a sign of success.

Eight treasure soups,
the finest teas
            ivory and bone over
            wood and plastic.

                 •

I’ll dig
           with them.

from Sing Joe, in AUP New Poets 4, Auckland University Press, 2011

•

They peer through me as if I were dead.
My hands are tired now, fading to mist.

•••

I’ve held out for luck
and fortune like a stony fool,

•••

but sometimes the heart must
gracefully accept defeat.

•••

These days it feels like I am digging
my own grave.

from How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes, AUP, 2014

Heavy Lifting

Once, I climbed a tree
too tall for climbing
and threw my voice out
into the world. I screamed.
I hollered. I snapped
innocent branches. I took the view
as a vivid but painful truth gifted
to me, but did not think to lay down
my own sight in recompense.
All I wanted was someone to say
they could hear me, but he tree said
that in order to be heard I must
first let silence do the heavy lifting
and clear my mind of any
questions and anxieties
such as contemplating whether
I am the favourite son. If I am not,
I am open to being a favourite uncle
or an ex-lover whose hands still cover
the former half’s eyes. I’ll probably never
have children of my own to disappoint
so I’ll settle for being famous instead
with my mouth forced open on TV like
a Venus fly-trap lip-synching for its life.
The first and last of everything
are always connected by
the dotted line of choice.
If there is an order to such things,
then surely I should resist it.

from he’s so MASC, AUP 2018

Wish list—Permadeath

I wish I didn’t feel compelled to write about racism, but there it is
patrolling my everyday thoughts like a mall cop drunk with power.

I wish people didn’t ask me how to solve a problem like racism, as if
it is a cloud they cannot pin down. I am not an expert spokesman

holding an elusive truth. I wish I could predict when racism
would exit stage right to wherever bad things go to die rusty

non-biodegradable deaths, but I can’t predict the death of something
with a robust business continuity plan that involves moving from

host body to host body. I am not an exorcist—I am a sympathetic
vomiter. Is it predictable for me to write this poem? I suppose so.

What I really want to write about are things with promise, to offer up
whiskers on kittens when the outlook is for Nazis on Nazis. I wish

I could sing my way out of this while the man I love applauds from
the front row, our adorable Jack Russell terrier Rocket sat by his feet.

I wish I could start a love poem with a line like ‘He thumbs me
like the Oxford Dictionary‘ and consider it a job well done. I wish

I didn’t always feel this way—always tired of explaining why
I am tired and why writing this poem is more need that want.

I never felt the need to be the gunshot during a knife fight until they
told me there was no such thing as ‘let’s finish this once and for all’

from Super Model Minority, AUP, 2022

How to edit a poem

  1. Let the poem approach you first. Don’t point; don’t scare it.
  2. Encircle the poem with broken lines and half-hearted rhymes to reverse any spell that may cause the reader sorrow.
  3. Ask yourself: is the poem merely camouflage for the poet’s desires?
  4. All persons, real or imagined, are questions and aphorisms double-crossing each other in pursuit of a revelation.
  5. Inside this poem there are two poets: one is literal and the other is metaphorical.
  6. Ask yourself: is the poet a secret carried in a whale’s mouth?
  7. Capitalise every word that reminds you of your childhood.
  8. Strike out every verb that will make the reader feel guilty for not living a wholesome and virtuous life.
  9. Inside this poem there are two poets: one tells the truth and theother got away with it.
  10. Ask yourself: when did you last trust a poem?  
  11. Interrogate each line as if it were a co-ordinate plucked from a map.
  12. A crooked staircase halfway to the moon. A wolf cries in the dark.
  13. The margins seesaw as you pull yourself into the poem for a better view, to take it all in.
  14. (There is no way out.)
  15. Use the poem as a mirror.
  16. Use the mirror as a sucker punch.
  17. Attack the mirror with a mallet.
  18. Hide the broken shards in the feathers of birds and instruct them to land on rooftops when the night is at its softest.
  19. The townsfolk’s sleep is disturbed by the crackle of crystal rain.
  20. Record their reactions.
  21. Respond, respond, respond.

from Everything I Know About Books: An insider look at publishing in Aotearoa, edited by Odessa Owens and Theresa Crewdson (Whitireia Publishing, 2023)

three questions

What draws you into a poem, whether as writer or reader?

As a reader, I want to get a sense that the poet is writing from a place of curiosity and isn’t afraid to let the reader get a glimpse behind the curtain as they work through their thinking or daydreaming. I don’t necessarily need anything to be resolved – an open end is just as good as any. I try to apply this to my own work as well because a big part of my writing process is to seek understanding about myself or the world. The poem is the result of that exploration.

Have you discovered any poets new to you in the course of your physical or reading travels over past couple of years?

So many! Editing Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems 2023 was a voyage of discovery of new-to-me poets, like John Allison, Isla Huia, Geena Slow and Marjorie Woodfield. This week I’ve been dipping in and out of the 2025 edition of Aotearoa Poetry Yearbook and there are lots of unfamiliar names, so I can’t wait to get to know these poets’ work. I’ve also had the good fortune of working or performing with poets from other countries, either online or in person. Some of the poets whose work I’ve really enjoyed are Hasib Hourani and Panda Wong from Australia, Péter Závada from Hungary, and Amanda Chong from Singapore.

Can you share a couple of highlights from your tenure as Poet Laureate?

For National Poetry Day 2023, I invited students from Te Whanganui a Tara for a day of poetry workshops and activities at the National Library. The poems that the students wrote that day were great and demonstrated how fearless and creative young minds can be. Another highlight was the Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam, where I appeared in an event with Poets Laureates from around the world. It was a really special performance bringing poetry and dance together. I was very proud to be able to represent Aotearoa on stage that night alongside some poetry legends.

National Poet Laureate page
Auckland University Press page

Poetry Shelf review: Terrier, Worrier A Poem in Five Parts by Anna Jackson

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Terrier, Worrier A Poem in Five Parts, Anna Jackson
Auckland University Press, 2025

“She came upstairs looking more like a cloud than a silver lining.”

Loop: A Review in Nine Parts

LOOP

Anna Jackson’s glorious new collection, Terrier, Worrier A Poem in Five Parts, gets sunlight slipping through the loops of my thinking, reading, dreaming. The collection is offered as a seasonal loop as we move through summer, autumn, winter, spring, summer, and in this temporal movement, the loop regenerates, absorbing and delivering rhythms of living . . . mind and body . . . rhythms of writing . . . nouns, verbs, conjunctions . . . rhythms of thinking . . . and little by little . . . the compounding ideas, the feelings. It’s poetry as looptrack: overloop, underloop, throughloop.

I photographed a floor softly tiled in white and grey and
posted it with a quote from Emily Brontë’s diary: ‘Aunt has
come into the kitchen just now and said, “Where are your
feet Anne?” Anne answered, “On the floor Aunt.”‘

BREAKING THE FRAME

There is a long tradition of breaking the frame of poetry, or let’s say opening the frame, widening, nurturing, reinventing, rebooting, invigorating. And yes, there is sunlight drifting in through the gaps in these poetry weatherboards, lighting up what poems can do or be, both beyond the frame and within the frame. Subject, style, sensation. Anna writes:

Poetry can be a form of refusal as well as openness.

I am reading this poetry book at the kitchen table and it is a loop of ignition points. Anna also writes:

I thought, it tells us something about poetry that when we
need to talk to ourselves about something we don’t know
we know, we tell it to ourselves when we are sleep, in images
we struggle to remember when we awake, and often take
more than one reading to fully understand.

PRESENT TENSE

There’s a long black cloud streaking from the west coast to the backyard bush sprinkling salt and pepper rain. Terrier, Worrier is generally written in the past tense, with many stanzas beginning with ‘I thought’, yet for me, curiously, wonderfully, it carries the charismatic freight of the present tense, the sweet fluidity of the gerund, the present participle . . . where be-here-now fluency prevails regardless of gaps, rest-stops, hesitancy. Reading is to be embedded in the moment of the past as reader, so that what happened, and what was thought, becomes acutely present. Dive into the poetry currents in the collection, and along with the writer, you will might find yourself filtering, evaluating, experiencing, valuing, photographing, documenting, thinking. Savouring a moment.

I remember sitting in the car after work, not wanting to turn on the windscreen wipers because I felt like I needed rain on the windscreen to do the work of crying for me.

THOUGHT

Thinking. Yes Terrier Worrier is a poetic record of thought that offers anchors, the cerebral terrain of the philosopher say, an archaeology of ideas to dig for. Where testing the possibilities of what is matters along with what is not, along with everything in between. Poetry forms a thinking loop, a porous border between poem and idea, where meaning is organic, fertilised by nuance and shifting light. Sunlight say. Looping motifs and coiling thinking, like the surprise delight of letting thoughts carry you without planned itinerary. Where meaning ripples and slides. This is what happens as I read Terrier, Worrier.

Anna writes:

I thought, most of the time I, too, am a person not having thoughts but only having sensations, emotions, instincts, memories, anticipations.

Perhaps the poem becomes the vessel for ‘sensations, emotions, instincts, memories, anticipations’.

PRESENCE

Anna’s poetic record of thought (how ‘record’ resonates with the effects of tracks and music) is physically active. Thinking is anchored in a physical world, a yard of hens, a cat, partner, mother, father, daughter, son, friends. A tangible texture of dailiness that grounds the rhythm of thought in physicality. I love this.

Beside my bed there is a painting of a blue fish, floating high above a grey-blue sea, impaled on a grey-blue spike. On the back of the painting are written the words of the artist, my daughter, aged 3: ‘This is the fish. I painted it because it stuck in my mind.’

DREAMING

Dreaming becomes thinking becomes inventing becomes dreaming. Anna holds the idea of dreaming, like a prism on her palm, to question, revisit. Again I’m acutely aware how everything I have already said feeds into what I am saying here, and what I will say. How dreaming is the present tense, looping past and future, how the poet wonders her dream, with dream seeping into life and life into dream, into the threads of a poem in five parts. How do “sensations, emotions, instincts, memories, anticipations” slip into the dream texture, I wonder. Into the making of a poem.

When Amy told me she had dreamed about me, I felt as if my
own life were like that dream in which you climb some stairs
in your house and discover an additional room, or a whole
series of rooms, you didn’t know was there.

SPACE

A word with myriad possibilities. There is space in the reading, in this nourishing process of reading that sends me looptracking and dawdling in a state of dream and wonder. Early in the sequence Anna is (and yes usually I am cautious about attributing the speaking voice to the author, but this book feels utterly personal so I think of the voice as Anna’s) – taking photographs of squares.

There is too the proximity of space and death, especially as both Anna’s parents and sister had had “a turn at death’s door”.

There are recurring motifs of rooms and buildings, and especially this thought:

I thought, every body is a memory palace.

And this:

I thought about the concept of ‘peripersonal space’, the idea
that your mental mapping of the self includes the immediate
space around you, and what you habitually keep about your
person, including for instance your bag, or your falcon.

READING LIST

Lately, I have been reading novels and poetry books that make a writer’s reading history visible. I love falling upon titles to be added to my must-read notebook, across genre, time, location, languages. Anna’s reading list at the back and the titles sprinkled throughout is incredible.

How may times do I return to Virginia Woolf! I must read Jan Morris’s thought-a-day diary, or Robert Wyatt’s irony of doing loads of minimalism, and how I too loved Susan Stewart’s magnificent On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, The Gigantic, the Souvenir, Olivia Lang’s Crudo, Madison Hamill’s brilliant Specimen, Muriel Rukeyser’s poetry.

SELF LOOP

Worrier, Terrier is the kind of book you can’t put down. I keep giving myself another week to flow along its currents, neither to explain nor pigeonhole, but to embark upon the joys of reading poetry, of reading a book that feeds your mind, that sparks and startles your memory banks, that gets you revisiting your own secret feelings and thoughts. Because more than anything, I hold Terrier, Worrier as a book of self. This book of invigorating return, where you will find yourself expanding with both recognition and discovery. It feels like this is what Anna did as she wrote. Is the poetry a form of coping with the abysmal world, the drift thoughts and non-thoughts, the dailiness, the relationships?

I read another page. Then I reread this, a pulsating heartcore of the book:

Some feelings expand the self like a gas into the world and
some condense the self into the coldest matter.

And then this:

I wondered whether I could hear ‘terrier’ as a version of the
word ‘worrier’, a worrier being not someone who makes you
worry but someone who themselves worries, who worries away at things like a terrier might worry away at a sock. A terrier would be someone who allows themselves actually to indulge in the feeling of terror. I tell myself, ‘I am not okay, but I will be okay’, but maybe I need to stop saying that and release the terror, or maybe the terrier is not myself but represents someone else’s terror that needs to be heard.

Tomorrow I will pick up the book again, and find another gleam and thought spur. I want to sit in a cafe with you all, let our thoughts dream and drift and link, as we empty our coffee cups, pick up our pens, and catch both the dark and the sunlight slipping in . . . as we write through weeping, laughter, longing, with doors ajar and love strengthening. I utterly love this book of wonder.

Anna Jackson is the author of seven collections of poetry as well as Diary Poetics: Form and Style in Writers’ Diaries 1915–1962 (Routledge, 2010) and Actions & Travels: How Poetry Works (Auckland University Press, 2022). She lives in Island Bay, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, and is associate professor in English literature at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington.

Anna Jackson’s website
Auckland University Press page

Poetry Shelf launch speech series: Helen Rickerby launches Anna Jackson

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I decided it would be a great idea to share the occasional poetry launch speech. All kinds of things get in the way of attending book launches – distance, time, illness, work, double-bookings! So I thought it would be great to host a series of launch speeches and photos – if you go to a poetry launch and love the launch speech, well maybe the poet and the launcher will give permission to post on Poetry Shelf. Let me know!

First up is Helen Rickerby launching Anna Jackson’s Terrier, Worrier A Poem in Five Parts (Auckland University Press) at Unity Books in Wellington.

Wellington launch speech for Terrier, Worrier

Kia ora kotou. Hi, I’m Helen Rickerby, and it’s an honour to be launching this new book by Anna Jackson – Terrier, Worrier. And lovely to see you all here to help celebrate.

I’ve been a big fan of Anna’s work since I first came across it, back sometime in the dark ages – the late 90s. She was living far away (Auckland) and submitted to a literary magazine I was editing. We got a lot of submissions, but Anna’s really stood out. I accepted it immediately, and that was the beginning of my friendship with Anna’s work.

I got to meet Anna herself not too much later, and then, conveniently, she got a job here in Wellington. She has become one of my dearest friends and her work and her self continue to be a big inspiration to me. She writes poetry that always makes me excited and inspired, which pushes me to be explorative and ambitious in my own poetry.

I know she’s been a great inspiration to many other people too, as a writer and teacher and as a person.

I’ve loved all of Anna’s books, so I don’t say this lightly – and I don’t really want the other books to hear me say this, I mean I don’t want to hurt their feelings and some of them are engraved on my heart – but I think Terrier, Worrier, is my favourite yet.

Auckland University Press, 2025 (page)

I got to see this book in various stages – when I read the first draft I remember thinking – and saying – that it was my favourite kind of thing to read. It’s sparky and fun and deep, it’s gorgeously written, with beautiful turns of phrase. It’s also quite educational – I learned a lot of things reading this. It’s like having a really really good conversation with Anna, and getting to watch her think in action.

This book is a thought diary in poem form – a hybrid prose poem form, which is my favourite.

Anna – or perhaps we should really say ‘the narrator’, because it is of course a composed and beautiful work of art; but while recognising that the voice of this poem is in fact a construct and not exactly or completely Anna herself, it also sounds so much like at least one version of Anna herself, that I am just going to call the narrator ‘Anna’. Anyway, Anna implies in the poem and the notes (I want to put in a plug for the notes – which are almost as rich, fun and conversational as the poem itself, and do feel to me like part of the poem itself): Anna says that she doesn’t think she has thoughts, or emotions. It is so clear to me that Anna is full of emotions, and full of thoughts – as proven by this book. I am someone who feels very full of both thoughts and feelings – when she began this project, I thought and felt that recording one’s thoughts would be quite overwhelming – I feel that I have a thought tumbling into another thought followed by another faster than I can even follow – I couldn’t comprehend how you could capture them all. But I’ve come to understand that one difference between Anna and myself is that she has higher standards of many things, including of what a thought is – and perhaps what a feeling is.

This is longish for a poem, but small for a book – however, in this small book there is just so much! A lot of thoughts and ideas per square inch. As well as her own thoughts, she argues with Ludwig Wittgenstein over language and beetles, questions Hannah Arendt over beauty, reads and considers scientific studies about time and perception – but despite all that dense deepness the experience of reading Terrier, Worrier, is easy, light, spacious, fun.

This is thanks to the beautiful, light, clever and funny way it is written.

And it isn’t just jumping from one profound thought to another – it circles back, revisits, reconsiders and sometimes disagrees with itself, makes connections with other thoughts and, aided by the fragmentary nature of this poem, there is space for us the readers to think and make connections too. For me it is the kind of writing that makes my brain spark.

This quote is from early on in the poem:

I heard birds and thought that although I am only hearing them,and I am not having a thought, it still feels like a thought, almost
like a thought of my own, or a conversation I am having, or
perhaps it is more like reading a poem, where the words, or the
movement of the thought, the song of the thought, is given to
you rather than coming from you, but still moves through you.

She begins by considering whether hearing is a thought, continues on to the nature of poetry and then you realise it’s doing exactly what it’s talking about – we’re following her thinking and the poem is making us feel like we’re doing the thinking, but then there is the space for us to actually think – if we want to – otherwise we can just go back to watching Anna’s brain.

One thing I love about Anna’s work, and actually about Anna herself, is her complete lack of concern with a hierarchy of culture. She mixes the high – classic and classical literature, philosophy etc – with the ordinary – the domestic space, family life, pets – but also treats both the ‘high’ and ‘low’ as much the same – or at least of equal importance. Or equal-ish – I think the pets might actually be more important than the philosophy.

And pets do make frequent appearances in Terrier, Worrier – mostly hens and also cats, as illustrated on the cover. There’s also a whale on the cover, and there are also whales in the book, but I don’t think even Anna could make a pet of a whale, though you never know.

While in some ways this poem is like a monologue, is really a conversation – as well as being in conversation with philosophers and scientists, she has conversations within the poem – or in fact arguments – such as with Simon about whether it would be better to leave doors open (apparently it is). And it also feels like a conversation with us.

I love how she says:

Whether including conversations
counted as cheating was another question. I decided it
probably was cheating, because it is almost impossible not
to have thoughts in conversation.

I have in fact had conversations where I have had trouble having thoughts, but never with Anna.

As I expect you have noticed, we are living in some pretty weird times. While this isn’t a book that engages directly in a political way, it is the kind of book I think we need in these times – the kind of book that stands in opposition to the values that are prominent right now among some of our so-called leaders.

This is a book that is full of curiosity, empathy with other humans and with animals. It is not interested in hierarchies of status, but in the beauty of all the things, big and small, that make an individual and collective life worth living. It values thinking deeply and is not content with the first knee-jerk idea or black and white solutions. It is a book that values connections and conversations, between ideas, between people and animals, and between people and people. These are the kinds of values that give me hope.

I don’t feel I’ve done this book justice – there are so many things that are wonderful about it, but I hope I’ve whet your appetite for it. And so now I declare Terrier, Worrier launched!

Helen Rickerby