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.
We tiptoed into the house. The neighbourhood was quiet as a mouse.
I felt very on edge. The money Was in the oven, not the fridge.
*
I glanced at the note on the piano. Uh oh, uh oh, uh oh.
*
There’s always a point at which a routine enquiry turns into something else entirely.
I had to shoulder my way in. The bathtub was simply full of the victim.
Bill Manhire from Lifted, VUP, 2005
I love it when a poem is readable and seems easy to follow like a catchy song, and yet its surprises and depths never end, and I want to read it again and again. ‘An Inspector Calls’, by Bill Manhire, is such a poem.
Over the years, I’ve convened quite a lot of workshops on the topic of narrative poetry. I make a course reader from a bunch of poems which change over time, but this poem always seems to be in my reader. As I’m writing this, I realise I’ve never once asked Bill Manhire if he minds me rolling out his brilliant poem to a class. Sorry, Bill! Do you mind?
Anyway, I usually rabbit on a bit at the beginning about something must happen and near and far (looking up close, narrative arc) and who’s looking at what and keep with the sound. I know already, because I’ve read it hundreds of times, that ‘An Inspector Calls’ does all these things to perfection, but that it also has that extra thing you can never quite explain. It’s original. This poem always engenders a lot of discussion. People are amazed that it can be so short and yet cover so much territory. They love the jazzy sound of it, the funny rhyme at the beginning, the noir feel, the angular look. After a while, they notice that ‘I’ is three different points-of-view, and they love that surprise. After a while longer, they talk about the way all the ingredients work together in a way that seems effortless yet asks us to – well, all sorts of things. And I totally agree.
‘An Inspector Calls’ is a poem that has been with me for a long time.
Years late: Thank you, Bill.
Anne Kennedy, May 2026
Bill Manhire’s latest poetry collection is Lyrical Ballads, THWUP, 2026. He has won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry five times, and was New Zealand’s inaugural poet laureate. He founded and directed the International Institute of Modern Letters at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. He has edited major anthologies of New Zealand literature, including, with Marion McLeod, the now classic Some Other Country: New Zealand’s Best Short Stories (1984). In 2018 Bill was awarded an Icon Award Whakamana Hiranga from the Arts Foundation.
Anne Kennedy’s most recent books are The Sea Walks into a Wall, The Ice Shelf and, as editor, Remember Me: Poems to Learn by Heart from Aotearoa New Zealand. She is the current editor of AUP’s New Poets series. Awards include the Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry, the NZ Post Book Award for Poetry and the Montana Book Award for Poetry. Anne lives in Tāmaki Makaurau.
For the past four years I have been addicted to travel as my ventures into the physical world have been restricted to blood labs and the hospital. I travel every day within and beyond the pathways and tow ropes of a poem, within the joy and nourishment of a secret books I am writing, within the writings and conversations and posts I create and poets contribute to Poetry Shelf. I travel into the past, especially to my long term scholarly relationship with Italy and the incredible experiences I have had there, to New York, London, Scotland, Ireland, Portugal, France, Barcelona, Japan to name a few, and all over Aotearoa with my partner Michael and our girls (as both children and adults).
Travel is a way of widening how we approach beauty, human endeavours, art, music, theatre, literature, sport, physical challenges, cultural relationships, racism, sexism, how we create and dismantle hierarchies, how we feed ourselves and our families, how we can communicate in different languages. How we see things in astonishing lights.
Travel is also a way of widening the markers of home. Of finding and holding beauty, of holding epiphanies close to our hearts, of listening to the stories of the person standing next to us, of taking time out from daily routines to savour and reboot within the rhythms of travel whether by train or bus or car or bicycles, or in hiking books or walking shoes.
Peter Ireland has created a mesmerising exhibition at the National Library, entitled Broken River Train | Dreams of Travel. To celebrate, and with the help of Peter and a group of poets, I offer you a poetry and image travel feast.
Peter has written an introduction to the exhibition and we have included seven photographs, along with a link to the collection of William Williams, one of the photographers.
I went travelling through my poetry shelves to select a dozen poems that offer myriad travel connections.
To travel is to dream. To dream is to travel. To dream and to travel is to connect and to reboot.
Paula Green
H. A. F. Jackson, J. Alexander, and A. G. Jackson with penny-farthing cycles. The three men travelled from Christchurch to the West Coast on the bicycles in January 1887. Photographer unidentified. ATL: PA1-f-010-21
I don’t know exactly why this exhibition came to the fore and into the programme, though to spend time looking at the collections of the Turnbull Library is to travel and to roam. And as someone for whom dreams are almost always about travel, then a sense of why this exhibition begins to emerge. The exhibition originally had the title of Road Trip … and the wonderful image above was the first added to a file of about 350 images, of which 51 appear in the exhibition. Curiously, and somewhat to my regret, the Penny Farthing cyclists didn’t make the final cut though it’s an image I remain very fond of.
Along the way I came across a Steffano Webb image of Christchurch Railway Station showing a sign for ‘Broken River Train.’ This felt like just the right title.
Central to the exhibition is a selection from the more than 1000 holiday pictures taken by William Williams during the leisurely trip to Europe he made with his wife Lydia between 1925 and 1927. Evocative, dreamlike images of ‘foreign places,’ timeless, austere, sparsely populated stage sets of history, pre-tourist boom and ripe for William Willam’s deliberate and tender record.
A hundred years on these images speak to the opening lines of L. P. Hartley’s novel, ‘The Go-Between,’ that ‘the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.’ Whilst true in one sense, I suggest that we are more than passive onlookers at a remote world, we respond to the pathos and beauty of the images, that in looking at the past we rearticulate it, make it fresh and meaningful, dream it anew.
Other photographers provide key imagery for our dreams of travel, including Leo White, official war photographers Thomas Frederick Scales and George Kaye and the American adventurer Melvin Vaniman. Max Oettli, John Pascoe and Edgar Williams are also among the abiding spirits.
My hope for the exhibition is that visitors will find it evocative and that they take away a favourite image in their mind together with an appetite for exploring the collections for themselves.
Peter Ireland
Installation shot, Peter Ireland
Seven Photographs
Christchurch Railway Station, c. 1906 Photographer Steffano Webb ATL: 1/2-040999-G
The platform sign for Broken River Train provides a helpful clue for dating this image. The Broken River train serviced a temporary railway terminus on the midland railway line, completed in time to allow travel to the Christchurch exhibition in 1906 – 1907. Thirty-six years in the making, the midland line was finally completed in 1923 with the opening of the 8.5km Ōtira tunnel.
Ice skating in the Otago region, c. 1935 Photographer: Leo White ATL: WA-25279-F
Street vendor, Barcelona, Spain, c.1926 Photographer: William Williams ATL: 1/4-100043-F
William Williams (1858 – 1949) was born in Cardiff and emigrated to New Zealand with his family about 1881. He lived in Wellington for a time, recording his experience of life in a bachelor’s flat, the ‘Old Shebang,’ on upper Cuba Street. In 1887 he married Lydia Devereux, the couple living first in Napier, then moving to Dunedin and to an address on Royal Terrace, Kew.
M. Vertelli crossing the Whanganui River on a tightrope, 31 October 1867 Photographer: William Harding ATL: 1/1-000253-G
M. Vertelli, dubbed the ‘Australasian Blondin,’ caused quite a stir on his tour of New Zealand as these two reports suggest:
‘On Saturday next at 3 o’clock M Vertelli will astound the admiring multitude by accomplishing the most daring act recorded in ancient or modern times, and, regardless of danger, unconscious of fear, he will, by, as it were, a magic chain, connect Campbelltown and Wanganui by bridging the noble river, (900 feet across!) the vast expanse of waters flowing beneath.’
Source: Wanganui Herald, Volume I, Issue 124, 24 October 1867, page 3
Cyclists Pat Driscoll and Bill Mulrooney near the road bridge in Alexandra, c. 1901 Photographer: J.H. Ingley ATL: MNZ-1740-1/2-F
Bernini Fountain, Rome, Italy, c.1926 Photographer: William Williams ATL: 1/4-100248-F
Taxi driver’s dinner, Westwind coffee bar, Queen Street, Auckland, 1968 Photographer: Max Oettli ATL: PADL-000106
a dozen poems
The Armchair Traveller
Excuse me if I laugh. The roads are dark and large books block our path. The air we breathe is made of evening air. The world is longer than the road that brings us here.
The necklace is a carving, not a kiss. You run towards the one you can’t resist. At first she edges backwards, then she stalls. Now every sentence needs another clause.
The road goes off through willows, then it winds. Is that the famous temple over there? Why are the people round about so undefined? Why must they kiss then disappear?
Time now to let the story take its course, just settle back and let the driver drive. Bliss is it late at night to be alive, learning to yield, and not to strive.
Bill Manhire from Wow, VUP, 2020
xxv. No Response
Noman under a sheep who’s calling?
Why am I calling sheep farmers? Don’t they hear the call of Cassino? Don’t they know you can see the whole damned world from the top of Montecassino! The whole wide world if you stretch your arms out and fall off the edge and sail like a paratrooper?
Didn’t they remember the names here?
My mind leaves the walls of the abbey and sits in the train station chapel with the smell of cigarettes outside.
Robert Sullivan from Cassino: City of Martyrs / Città Martire, Huia, 2010
In Dublin for my father, need it be said
I’ll go to Ireland some day, see those places you’ve told me about, now that is a promise. Not before I die, don’t leave me alone, my father said, contrary as ever, all that bullshit and teardust I knew so well, and that is how I let the years slide steadily and quietly away beyond his last defeated breath. But the day had to come
and I wish there was some way I could tell you how much I love the broad River Liffey that runs through the town and the way I’m enchanted by St Stephen’s the sunlit park in the heart of the city and the magnificent Corinthian portico on the Four Courts, and yes the new Spire of Dublin which of course you wouldn’t have seen a whip of metal one hundred and twenty metres high in the sky and the way they joke about the ‘stiffy by the Liffey’ with that raw sly affection
but really it’s here in this music store in Dublin these swift easy Irish tears of mine begin falling between the CD spines lay me down / between the bars / everybody / I’ll see your heart and I’ll raise you mine / stay with me till dawn / volcano / no ordinary love / nothing can nothing can and I remember that you could sing a sweet tenor all your own
So, yes, here I am, I’ve made it, right to the centre of it all, it’s a grand street is O’Connell Street complete with bullet holes and all. I’m watching men walk past their hard faces taut with strain and the women with their difficult mouths. I feel perfectly at home, thank you for asking.
Fiona Kidman from Where Your Left Hand Rests, Random House, 2010
Tour Bus Minutiae and Commentary: West Berlin, 1985
I have felt the bite & crunch of winter winds, the sudden stir of snow hunched around the corner waiting to pounce on you, I’m envigoured by it. It’s called: Berliner Luft: Duft, Duft, dufte! Loverly.
Dog-lovers walk their pets home, anxious to complete the chore quickly, a marvel of detachment & poise as the dog pisses or shits. When new snow lies white on the ground, the nature-mess that dogs make is easier to see and avoid.
There are over a hundred thousand dogs registered in Berlin. The City Authorities are sympathetic. Two hundred and fifty thousand trees have been planted.
Despite the generosity of statistics, there are canine territorial disputes over the third tree. Tribal Elders from my Dog Tribe—Ngati Kuri—will send a mediator to Geneva, me. It’s not a piddly matter.
Every tree has been given a number which I find phantastisch! You may rendezvous with the beautiful Dame from East Berlin unter den Linden tree Nummer 2231 Eisenberger Strasse. On the Wannsee border-bridge, a Spy Exchange Service— Spionageastauschdienst—is in place.
Dead leaves, which carpet drain and pathway, are cleared away by City Council workers who come from Italy and Türkei. Five tons of dog-dung is collected every day.
Bottled bio-gas from such a rich source is exported. Gas ovens at Dachau & Auschwitz have been made redundant. A taped recording of mixed doggy-barks is enclosed with each bottle. I’m not impressed . . . Doggy-bark recording is a dubious practice.
On the Lietszensee Ufer the trees are stark and still. A ridge of snow rests along the tops of their nobbly, snaky branches, their dark winter bareness, fattened and enhanced. On the frozen lake, voices go up in steam—to the hiss of skates, sluicing . . .
Inside the warm pub on Nachod Strasse a dog comes in wagging its owner, Sabine, on the end of a leash. Sabine orders a coffee, unwinds her scarf. The dog sits down by her feet. Helmut, A Berliner, greets her with tongue-in-cheek: ‘Sabine, kommen Sie hier bei Fuss?’
Dear Brown Bear City, I love you. Ach ja! You’re s bloody wonder- ful ache.
Hone Tuwhare from Short Back & Sideways, Godwit, 1992
Ode to the little hotel
Little Hotel we love you and in your little rooftop room we love each other, even though we are big and hardly worthy of such a little bed.
•
We love the street you stand on which is neither long nor short, but somewhere in between. And we love your neighbours who are our friends— smaller than us and so ideally suited to their address.
•
O Little Hotel we love your breakfast room your petit déjeuner the crypt we reach by steep narrow stairs a bob and a curtsy on the last to miss the bottom beam—we love all this.
•
You are our first and last of Paris, Little Hotel. We love your lightning and the |rinsing rain, the way your white towels sound the slap of surf outside our room.
•
You are the rabbit of Paris. The duck with beans and peas. Little Hotel you are our herb and cheese, our soup and sauce, you are all of these.
•
O Little Hotel we love your lift in which we are always pleased to know each other, pressed so close as we are. And when we take them we love your stairs— wide enough for one winding up to light.
•
Little Hotel your windows through which we duck and climb to stand on your roof and look out over other roofs, we hold these dear to us.
•
You are paint and wood and stone and all things made from the these. Little Hotel you are a gallery of leaves.
•
You are our pink suit of Paris, Little Hotel, our men in shorts, our jazz band. Later we will slap our knees and remember you as four musicians outside the Sorbonne.
•
O Little Hotel in whose room we read and rest a little after long days we revere you.
•
O Little Hotel we will never forget you. We will write and we will return. O Little Hotel doorway to our city of Paris au revoir.
Jenny Bornholdt from Summer, VUP, 2003. It was originally published as a limited edition accordion book (or leporello) hand printed by Brendan O’Brien, with drawings by Greg O’Brien.
The laboratory of time passing
The angle of the sun tells us who we are
or might be. And what time passes as it passes. How
each afternoon is soothed into place – the newest tile
in the old town’s expansive roof – and the ticking of
the unofficial parish clock: its most senior citizen, his walking stick
ascending the high stone path, bicycle bell
and water bottle clinging to its shaft.
Saorge, 13 June 2002
Gregory O’Brien from afternoon of an evening train, VUP, 2005
Getting to know you, Venice
Pigeons in Venice are born mathematicians. Under their wings, the flash of fob watch and compass with metal points sharpened. Kohl-eyed from nights spent marking and route-mapping, they leave their ledges in the morning, the distance between dome, cornice and cobbled square plotted for ease
of business. The city’s theirs—a lavish 3D drawing of scrubbed stone and stolen-gold mosaics, an almost-place defined by saints and lines, angles and lions and, of course, the pigeons’ squawk. Raucous at ground level, they are silent in flight, daring to keep the company of angels, careful
not to graze the pinnacles of temples. Down a side street, away from the crowds, a gondolier monitors his comrades’ movements via cell phone. The smells of garlic, myrrh and dead fish mix. And above it all, the quiet, white whirr of pigeons’ wings. I believe it might be possible to attempt the impossible
here—wear feathers? Dissolve solid marble on the tongue? In this city, where rain falls from frescoes and children fence their shadows in courtyards at dusk, even the gutters and drainpipes and dirt bins shimmer.
Claire Beynon from Open Book: Poems and Images, Steele Roberts, 2007
Spare Change
New to London, maybe I gave off the scent Naïve to the ragged man who shuffled
along the tube train aisle where I stood gripping the pole
amid the massed bodies of rush-hour crush; each face, it seemed, averted in disgust.
Like the small-town citizen I really was when the man said, ‘Can you help me, love?’
I met his gaze then looked down to see what he wanted to show me:
his forearm split open, swollen, infection swarming like red wasps.
‘I need some change to get to hospital. Spare a couple of quid?’
I didn’t know local custom. How to draw a blank down over the mind, or how to give a pound
as indifferently as if our hands held slots for cash. Instead I cried out, ‘What happened to you? Oh my God.’
He stalled, his stare a flame held too close, then rolled down shirt and jacket sleeves.
‘Never mind.’ He pushed through the throng as our train hurtled to the next stop.
A second stranger tapped my shoulder. ‘Forget him. He’s a con artist.’
But the fire-swarmed gash. The pomegranate gasp of it.
The man shrugged. ‘Doesn’t let it heal. I’ve seen him. Uses pocket knives, tin lids.
‘Grifter. Scabber. Shows wounds for sympathy. Don’t encourage him with money.’
One man so strung out he’d self-harm for cash. Another so jaded he’d cauterised compassion.
Decades on, the memory opens and reopens in the same raw place.
As if I could heal anything as pernicious as indifference
I am at it again with the sutures and saline of these ink-black glyphs
needle and stitch needle and stitch.
Emma Neale from Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit, Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2024
Remembering America
The question ‘Do you miss it?’ is unanswerable. It’s obscene to say yes. It’s depressing to others to say no. It’s inauthentic and invertebrate to say maybe. I’d rather sing ‘Oh baby, oh baby, oh baby’ in a song than answer it. I have attempted just to name things I have liked in my location-limited experience, like fried clams as big as men’s watch-faces or a turkey jumping majestically over my father’s bicycle wheel or suburban snowmen bathing in the cold light of flat-screen TVs, but that doesn’t answer the question ‘Do you miss it?’ any more than ‘I believe I was a cat in a past life’ answers the question ‘How do you feel?’ Prove to me that the country I thought I grew up in was real. You can’t unless you beguile me with your fireworky thinking, your monster-truck cunning, your whispers of calumny that you cast like the peal of a cracked bell across the prairies I’ve never been to and the peninsulas I have been to and the places I’ve been to and forgotten everywhere. Missing something is a state of mind, says the polar bear on her shrinking ice floe. Knowing not to miss it is a state of grace, says the hermit crab in her rented carapace. America, like a lot of people, I’m keeping my distance, as we do from a super-volcano on public land. America, a house haunted by itself cannot stand. America, you are a monument to monumental misrepresentation, and all your monuments should commemorate this. America, you’re apostrophised so much because you’re still not listening. America, you look even worse from somewhere else than you do from inside yourself.
Erik Kennedy from There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime, VUP, 2018
The Catskill Mountains
There is a world of things that bees can see which we cannot. They sense the earth’s magnetic field, the electricity driven by the molten core.
I know that in my heart of hearts I am not someone who loves the country. But I do crave the idea of it to fall upon its soils in relief,
to live in a cabin, in a hollowed out tree in the Catskill Mountains. Of course what I really want is America not the the real one, the wide, wide one
with its purple this and that and the big gold moon trapped in its branches.
Kate Camp from How to Be Happy Though Human, VUP, 2020
Travel Bag
The notebook is a surrogate suitcase in which to pack a road map, a water bottle, a sharpened pencil, comfortable walking shoes, a wind breaker, a mood catcher, some folk music, a violin, cranberry nut mix, seasonal fruit, a sailing ship, a glimpse of moonlight, a well-thumbed dictionary, seven memorable novels, five yoga positions, a braided river, a tide chart, another violin, a view of clouds, a pink travel mug, a philosophy of doing, a philosophy of seeing, a guidebook to verbs, an old cardigan, stepping stones, changing tides, a light switch, woollen socks, ginger tea, a book mark, a mountain to climb.
Paula Green from Road Trip, a work in progress
Riding the train
As the river consumes its banks I tell you, yes – as the sky
sucks the sea up into its chalky glare at noon, as the stars
leak salty dew on the palms and the palm frond’s jagged shadow disfigures
the stonemason’s perfectly furled siesta – I’m lost, somehow, at the frontiers
of what’s distinct, of waking and sleeping, seeing and dreaming.
I’m riding the train. Don’t know if I’m blind
or in the longest tunnel, now, on the whole bright coast, or what the difference is.
Ian Wedde from Arriving blind, in Good Business, AUP, 2009
Sky and water, quiet sand. Little whistle that gets up and goes.
Bill Manhire from My Sunshine, VUP, 1996, and Collected Poems, VUP, 2001
Paula’s note: This poem resonates so acutely for me. I am transported to Te Henga Bethells Beach where the endangered dotterels also scutter and whistle.
Bill Manhire’s latest poetry collection is Lyrical Ballads, THWUP, 2026. He has won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry five times, and was New Zealand’s inaugural poet laureate. He founded and directed the International Institute of Modern Letters at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. He has edited major anthologies of New Zealand literature, including, with Marion McLeod, the now classic Some Other Country: New Zealand’s Best Short Stories (1984). In 2018 Bill was awarded an Icon Award Whakamana Hiranga from the Arts Foundation.
The Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: 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.
Lyrical Ballads, Bill Manhire Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2026
Lyrical Ballad
I bought a bend in the river. It was a good,quiet bend. You couldn’t see around the corner and after a few steps you could. The water flowed round the bend, which is essentially what you want. Everything else was doing its thing. The Lost Hills were there in the distance. The river was slow as it entered the bend, and maybe just a little faster after that, I don’t know why. For a while I wondered about getting a little boat, maybe a raft, but it was walking around the bend that really made me happy. I liked the reliable surprise. It’s gone now anyway, that bend, washed away in the last big rains. Now it’s just a patch of land: a channel and some structural damage. I suppose I should sell it, but I can’t quite make myself. It was everything I ever wanted.
Bill Manhire
In 2017, I chaired ‘Words and Melody’, a session with Bill Manhire and Norman Meehan at Going West. We discussed their collaboration, Tell Me My Name, and how they worked together to reach a place where, to quote Bill, “the music doesn’t overpower the words; but neither does it defer to them”. You can listen to the podcast here. And yes, there was music in the room. The best session I have chaired ever.
Bill has now written a collection of lyrical ballads dedicated to Norman. One part of me wants to hold the book out to you all, and simply say read this glorious collection, find a cosy reading nook and snuggle into the poetry to read in one slow and sweet sitting. Then put the book to one side for a few days before reading it again, even more slowly. I would stay on a hooked on poem, read it a number of times before turning the page.
But that said, I want to find a few words that will catch specks and glimmers of why I love this book so much. Last year I read all of Bill’s collections before writing a paragraph on his poetry to go in a new book and decided he was my Desert Island poet. His writing, over the course of decades, has offered everything I love about poetry, what makes me want to write poetry, read poetry, and yes review poetry. A word that has lifted to the surface in my week of roaming and reflecting within and beyond Lyrical Ballads, even above the beloved musicality and surprise arrivals, is “openness”. Poetry in Bill’s care, foregrounds the open poem. Dump prescriptions, formulae on the compost heap where they might transmute into open settings.
So here goes. The cicadas are at late summer screech. The west coat wind is nipping. The coffee is waiting. I want to write my way in and out of Bill’s glorious collection without closing windows and doors, paths and bridges for you, you the potential reader.
The first poem, ‘Come On In’, is an open invitation. We are invited into a room, “the kissing room”, and the four-couplet poem forms a labyrinth of possibilities. The poem (the room) might be a miniature narrative, anecdote, postcard from elsewhere or a home doorstep, an invention or a confession. A fable. A song. A lyrical ballad. It’s an open invitation to fill in detail with coloured pencils, if we so desire. Here is the room (the poem) that fills with talk and maybe heartbreak, braveness and maybe recitations.
When I roll the word “open” about in my mind, it picks up on ambiguity, the way a poem might swivel meaning, favour cloudy edges. The cast of characters feeds into this, relishing ambiguity and openness, along with Bill’s characteristic wit. We get to meet Mr Crimson from the Ministry of Health, Mr Doormat, Mungo, a girl called Daffodil Paddock (wow!!!) who wanted to be a character in a Margaret Mahy story, the recurring Alexander and Raewyn. This assembly of characters augments the ballad, advances the accumulation of story, the openness of story, as we get to picture and imagine, and add our own details. More than anything, the awkwardness, the ragged edges of existence, the difficulties (and ease) of fitting in and not fitting in, sing out.
Part of the joy of openness in poetry, is the way it promotes travel, and that is a significant and satisfying feature of the collection. We encounter roads and rivers and canals and bridges. We contemplate beyond, ins and outs, distance and proximity. It may be the known, it may be the unknown. It might be softening edges. Tough climbs. Watching the dawn or the dusk. Moving into older age. And wonder, yes above all wonder. I am reminded of the poetry of Vincent O’Sullivan where a poem infused with his ink might be an occasion of being there/here, or as one of Bill’s title says, “Getting There’.
After a time
After a time, my writing began to take a new direction. Left after you cross the bridge, and then down what people used to call the stumble-path – steps cut in the bank, occasional big stones – to the water’s edge. You go down in daylight and wait till it’s dark and there’s absolutely no one there. After a while you aren’t there either. You feel truly alone, fully neglected. I write all that down – you know, in my head – then start on the difficult climb, no moon, back up to the road. I need badly to return to the house, even though it is empty now, windows open and curtains billowing, still the place where everybody sits up waiting.
Ah. So many things to hold out to you in delight. I now want you to read the poem ‘Some Other Words They Sang’, where we are walking in the same direction as the insects when they sing in the night.
Some Other Words, I Think They Sang
Insects singing in the night. We were all walking in the same direction.
Be careful. Be strong. Be kind. That’s what they sang.
Sing when the world is worn away. Some other words I think they sang.
Insects singing in the night. We were all walking in the same direction.
Or read and re-read, and hold close Bill’s Gaza poem that has already moved us so deeply. Many of us are struggling with how to write within a matrix of global and local catastrophes, and abominable leaderships, climate change. How to live.
I am drawn to the talisman words and mantras I might carry in my pocket through the day (a bit like the words of the insects singing). I loved what the student took away from the History lecturer’s blackboard covered in difficult language: “‘It’s not the facts,’ he / said. ‘It’s what we do with the facts.'”
And of course there is the ink steeped in music, with rhyme and repetitions, loops, the exquisite lyricism that audio-marks each ballad. My dream is to sit in the Titirangi hall again and listen to Bill read us the whole book as we sit spell bound, before moving to the side room to the spread the locals have put on, to return with plates of food balancing on our knees, and to talk poetry and life until our voices are hoarse.
Is it possible to consider this collection in the light and possibilities of tracing paper, where each poem is a set of overlaid sheets, where story is overlaid upon song, which is overlaid upon the personal, which is overlaid upon philosophy and contemplation, and where every layer is embued with humanity, what it means to be human and humane, kind and caring, and every layer is shining through and adding myriad possibilities. What will the insects sing next? What will I hear in the kissing room? What do I picture when I picture the bend in the road?
In the acknowledgement page Bill thanks several people for their “encouragement, wisdom and rescue”. These words strike deep with me just as this book does. It feels like the poetry gives me encouragement, offers wisdom and rescues my frozen pen. There you go, I am holding this book out to you, so that you too may find your own gleams and shimmers.
Bill Manhire’s previous books include Wow (2020), Some Things to Place in a Coffin (2017), Tell Me My Name (with Hannah Griffin and Norman Meehan, 2017) and The Stories of Bill Manhire (2015). He has won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry five times, and was New Zealand’s inaugural poet laureate. He founded and directed the International Institute of Modern Letters at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. He has edited major anthologies of New Zealand literature, including, with Marion McLeod, the now classic Some Other Country: New Zealand’s Best Short Stories (1984). In 2018 Bill was awarded an Icon Award Whakamana Hiranga from the Arts Foundation.
The fire alarm sound: is given as a howling sound. Do not use the lifts. The optimism sound: is given as the sound of a man brushing his teeth. Do not go to bed. The respectability sound: is given as a familiar honking sound. Do not run, do not sing. The dearly-departed sound: is given as a rumble in the bones. Do not enter the coffin. The afterlife sound: is given as the music of the spheres. It will not reconstruct. The bordello sound: is given as a small child screaming. Do not turn on the light. The accident sound: is given as an ambulance sound. You can hear it coming closer, do not crowd the footpaths. The execution sound: is given as the sound of prayer. Oh be cautious, do not stand too near
or you will surely hear: the machinegun sound, the weeping mother sound, the agony sound, the dying child sound: whose voice is already drowned by the approaching helicopter sound: which is given as the dead flower sound, the warlord sound, the hunting and fleeing and clattering sound, the amputation sound, the bloodbath sound, the sound of the President quietly addressing his dinner; now he places his knife and fork together (a polite and tidy sound) before addressing the nation
and making a just and necessary war sound: which is given as a freedom sound (do not cherish memory): which is given as a security sound: which is given as a prisoner sound: which is given again as a war sound: which is a torture sound and a watchtower sound and a firing sound: which is given as a Timor sound: which is given as a decapitation sound (do not think you will not gasp tomorrow): which is given as a Darfur sound: which is given as a Dachau sound: which is given as a dry river- bed sound, as a wind in the poplars sound: which is given again as an angry god sound:
which is here as a Muslim sound: which is here as a Christian sound: which is here as a Jewish sound: which is here as a merciful god sound: which is here as a praying sound; which is here as a kneeling sound: which is here as a scripture sound: which is here as a black-wing sound: as a dark-cloud sound: as a black-ash sound: which is given as a howling sound: which is given as a fire alarm sound:
which is given late at night, calling you from your bed (do not use the lifts): which is given as a burning sound, no, as a human sound, as a heartbeat sound: which is given as a sound beyond sound: which is given as the sound of many weeping: which is given as an entirely familiar sound, a sound like no other, up there high in the smoke above the stars
Bill Manhire from Lifted, Te Herenga Waka University Press (VUP), 2005
At the weekend it felt like a monster had taken over all our rooms and was scoffing up joy and fortitude and hope and leaving dribbles of greed and ignorance and violence on the wooden floors. I got to thinking about protest. I got to thinking about the ban the bomb badges I pinned to my school bag in 1969. I got to thinking about the Vietnam protestors, Martin Luther King, Bob Dylan, the women’s liberation movements, Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring. I got to think about doing my Italian doctorate and reading about clientelism, corrupt governments, writers who challenged injustice and inequity, as I considered the ink in the pen of Italian women writing across a century.
And I got to thinking about how we have never stopped writing protest poems in Aotearoa.
Like many others, my heart is breaking at the situation in Gaza and in the Ukraine, at the recent refusal of our coalition government to recognise the Palestine State, at Israel’s interception of aid and peace flotillas overnight. I can not stop mourning our inhumanity. The senseless murder and starvation of men, women, children, aide workers, journalists.
I decided to create a third new series on Poetry Shelf entitled Protest. I want to feature protest poems from various decades and I want to feature specific issues.
But what is a protest poem? Poetry protest can take many forms: from subtle spotlights to fierce outrage. Protest includes placards and banners with overt messages, loud and clear. It includes stories that render inhumanity, injustice and struggle visible, whether in journalism, fiction, poetry or the oral stories we share. But protest can also be concealed in symbols and parables, especially in societies run by despots and tyrants. I have been wondering if this might be in store for the USA.
Many of us are finding it impossible not to make room for protest in our writing, for grief and helplessness.
How to write in such damaged and damaging times?
Today I’m looking at damp patches of Waitākere sky with Jimmy Cliff on full volume, the words of beloved sixties and seventies song writers streaming in my ears, thinking Bob and Joni and Neil. And yes, it is a wide wide world, it’s a rough-rough road, and yes it’s still inhumane fighting, genocide, greed and abuse. Are we sitting in Jimmy’s limbo with the world on fire and entrenched suffering in the lands? Waiting for the dice to roll. Today even my morning is a dense dark heavy personal patch, but I’m thinking of Helen Clark, John Campbell, Anne Salmond, Tusiata Avia, the frontline workers, journalists, songwriters, politicians, poets, caregivers, forest and ocean guardians, so many people across the globe who are working against all odds to hold onto the light. To share the light. To gift the light.
I have decided to dedicate my first Protest post to Gaza (Friday Oct 3rd). I’ve already posted Gaza poems on the blog but I’ve decided to bring them together along with some others; poets and poems standing together, heart alongside heart, voice alongside voice. Some poets were unsure their poems were protest poems, but I think of the Poetry Shelf protest series as a way of shining light, a way of showing support, a way of saying no to inhumanity injustice cruelty and all manner of -isms.
Bill Manhire has posted a number of Gaza poems on social media and gave permission to repost one in tomorrow’s post, but he also mentioned how his poem ‘Hotel Emergencies’, a poem written during the Iraq conflict 20 years ago, “seems to live beyond its moment”. And I agree. And this is why I want to travel through the decades and revisit poetry protest across a century.
To have heard Bill read ‘Hotel Emergencies’ at a festival, one of my all-time go-to poems, was utterly memorable. You can listen to Bill read the poem. There are certain poems we carry with us, and for me this is one of them.
On Facebook this morning, Ariana Tikao mentioned going to the Catalyst 22 launch last night at Space Academy in Ōtautahai. She read her poem ‘Prayer’, a poem which “stitches together the memories held in the whenua at Ōnawe with the genocide taking place in Gaza right now”. She asks us where is the prayer that will forge peace. She speaks of the flotilla, of the suffering: unbearable unforgivable relentless.
And our hearts are breaking apart.
And we’ve got to speak shout sing and whisper, hold a vital light, hold our loved ones close, hold this precious day and take the next compassionate step whether fierce or gentle.
Let’s keep writing and sharing poetry. And protesting.
Peace 20 May
What if I made up a poem about a house on a hill with views of the sea and passionfruit vines laden, and a woman knitting stories of family connections and sublime epiphanies into socks and scarves and comfort blankets with an abundance of vegetables in garden plots and fruit on the trees and soup simmering whatever the season and how she is always content in her own company but one day she opens a newspaper and it is full of war and plague and bullies and hunger and racism and side-lined histories and abusive relationships, underfunded hospitals and underfunded schools, and she looks at the olive-green sea and she smells
the tomato soup simmering the fresh basil aromatic in the air and she turns on her radio and hears the voice of a young Palestinian student begging the world to listen, begging for freedom for her people and how the relentless bombs trap everyone in houses and how aid can’t get through and how nowhere is safe and how everywhere is under attack, and the woman on the hill tries to imagine the terrified children, the lack of news and power and water, and how the catastrophe goes deep into roots and land and home, and how they cannot pray safely in mosques, and how when Palestinians resist they are terrorists and their resistance is deemed invalid, and the woman on the hill looks
at the patch of blue sky and the free-floating clouds and puts down her knitting with its happy stitching its loving connections and storytelling skeins and tells the olive-green sea that we are all human, and we all need to eat and feel safe, to stand on soil we call home, to speak our mother tongues, tell our grandparent stories, and to feel the depth and caress of peace
The Venetian Blind Poems, Paula Green, The Cuba Press, 2025
When I wrote Wild Honey: Reading New Zealand Women’s Poetry (MUP, 2019), I built a house, dividing the book into rooms, and then moving through open doors and windows to the wider world. The book was neither a formal history nor a theoretical overview of New Zealand’s women’s poetry but a way of collecting, building recouping valuing the poetic voices of women in Aotearoa. As I moved through the rooms in the house the themes accumulated: politics, poetics, love, the domestic, self, relations, illness, death, location, the maternal, home, voice.
The book came out in 2019, not that long ago, and I was interested to read ‘The sickbed’ chapter again. I began the chapter by saying inquisitive audiences often ask, ‘Why write poetry?’. I still claim the answers are myriad: it makes us feel good, we are addicted to wordplay, we can squeeze writing a poem in between domestic chores, parenting, scholarly endeavour, work commitments. We might crave public attention, awards, good reviews. We might simply have to write. Our poetry might reflect a love of music, storytelling, suspense, wit, surprise, attraction to the unsayable or beauty. We might write poems at the kitchen table, in our head as we walk, run, dream or dillydally. We might favour condensation and pocket size writing or expansion and long sequences. We might write from a sick bed.
My collection Slipstream (AUP, 2010) came out of my breast cancer experience. I refer to it in Wild Honey: ‘poetry was an energy boost, a way to enhance my sense of wellbeing’. As I wrote, at least a year after the experience, I did not feel I was writing poems – nothing on the page earned the label ‘poem’ in my view — but I was conscious that the white space, the juxtapositions, the assembled lists and the melody were reaching for the poetic. I did not want to summon the dark, middle of the night slumps, but rather to show illness can change the way you see the day as well as live the day.
The Venetian Blind Poems is a little different in that I wrote it in the moment, in hospital and then back home on the recovery road. But I recognised similar motivations to write.
My new collection has been out in the world for a fortnight now, and it feels so very special. To be in Motutapu Ward and the Day Stay Ward this week, signing copies for nurses, hearing them read fragments aloud, reminded me that poetry is an incredible way of connecting. I am still in a thicket of appointments as I fine tune the road ahead, but this fortnight feels like like my time in hospital, when so many poets sent me a poem in a card. The emails you have sent me these past two weeks, so thoughtful and caring, have shone fresh light on how and why poetry is a gift. On why we write and sometimes publish poetry. I will treasure your emails for a long time (and reply soon)!
More than anything, The Venetian Blind Poems is a way of saying thank you to the doctors and nurses who have given, and are giving so much. I offer an enormous bouquet of thanks to Mary McCallum and Paul Stewart at The Cuba Press, for the beautiful book, and for inviting such terrific responses to post on social media by poets who have read it.
Now its back to normal transmission! I have new ideas for Poetry Shelf bubbling like my sour dough starter, manuscripts to finish, a treasury of books to review, emails to answer, a few more appointments, and most excitingly, I am ready to get my secret seedling idea off the ground: Poetry Shelf Goes Live. Yes! Soon I will be back in the world organising live poetry events around the country.
A cluster of illness poems
The waiting game
begins with someone calling your name before you wait to have your blood taken in a windowless room. Wait for the stultifying thoughts of red and disease to pass. Wait for the phone call, for relief to wash over you. And while you are waiting I recommend you dance like the memory of sweat easing down his throat; roll open like the drum beat of your limbs in sync; tear through your wildest nights, still lit in hopeful neon; cry like the Christmas you lost your last grandparent; and sing like the forgotten violin slowly coming undone in your muscle memory. If you do not allow yourself to sleep in peace with your worries, you will find yourself awake at the bottom of a very deep, very secret lake.
Chris Tse Turbine, 2014
A Final Warning
I walked past the stars the silence of grandfathers
I was going somewhere but where
I went left at first then right then way off course then back to somewhere
near the middle did this mean I was ready to die
well they’ve been testing me for everything I think I’ve got the lot
Bill Manhire from Honk Honk, The Anchorstone Press, 2022
The Night Shift
I wake on the ward, afloat on ketamine, fentanyl, see sky-blue morphine swifts roost nearby in pleated paper thimbles
and some uneasy instinct tugs my gaze to a scuff mark on the lino floor. Coal-dark, it smolders. I stall.
A voice reassures me it’s just a graze left by the wheel of some routine machine: IV, PCA line, heart monitor screen.
Yet as I ease deep-cut core and leaden legs over the distant side of the high bed I can’t shake this need to stare
not quite in fear: not quite.
For last night, creatures came. They arrived en masse, nodded, swayed, pressed into each dimmed cubicle,
their copper eyes bright-candled, lips pouched over strong, proud teeth, their heads bowed in silent inspection;
marmalade lions with oxen feet, crested birds with antlers, candy-pink teats, all crowded, crowded round each bed
as the window in time was fast contracting, and they wanted us to see before our minds sealed tough with the fibers of logic, denial.
Their fur packed tight as green florets on catkins. Their horns, colossal black spikes, gleamed like grand pianos. Such mass and strength in their embedded weaponry,
yet still, they withheld their crush and maim.
The breath and bunt of their herded skulls said we are the unbroken in you, don’t be afraid, and I saw through the seep of dawn
that soon like guardians they will gather each one of us, our failing forms absorbed into their warm, strong-walled veins
until we too watch each figure on the bed as something invisible shifts in the intricate balance of matter and spirit.
So it is awe, not dread, that asks me to leave the ground undisturbed where they gathered, to skirt carefully the sign one left like a scorched hoof print as if they had stood in fire to show they bear time’s pyre for us,
our wild sentries, our wild sentries.
Emma Neale from Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit, Otago University Press, 2024
(A lifetime of sentences)
Soon, I could leave my body without prompts. The artist’s concept of the birth of a star, or I broke my name until the fibres separated and lost their coats. My thirst for windows kept me indoors. My gaze wandered across the suburbs of childhood, faces stammering with shyness, bodies masquerading as furniture. Initial mass and luminosity determine duration, but my sensibility comes to require an object. Here, the word “system” implies a level of certainty that is unwarranted. Some of those memories were not written by me, so they are memos, at home on my desk, but still authoritative. Now, instead of a pupil, there’s a screensaver. It was late. The room was empty. A lifetime of sentences which at first glance seem superfluous, but whose value is later understood. One thing leads to a mother. Soon enough, a flock of children came running and tapped on the glass. When I reached the bottom of the stares, I looked up.
Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle selected by Kiri Pianaha Wong and was published a fine line and also Best NZ Poems 2011
it is a wedding cavalcade in which I take your day of birth and marry it with ten pink tulips to mine look, behind us on the road sadness and unutterable joy leaping over the rocks how we were those people in the crowd unmindful of everything except stepping along together under our parasols what’s wrong with that? see, the road is still there still ahead and behind losing its mind and leaping over the rocks with its train of clowns who are careless careless careless and will never behave any differently believing themselves arm in arm with all they need to sustain life on a distant planet choogaloo, this is all you need tulips and a parasol to keep off the bigger bits of debris falling out of the sky don’t be sad there is every chance we are just now resident in two minds regarding each other tenderly, quizzically, uproariously as a wedding cavalcade
Michele Leggot from Milk & Honey, Auckland University Press, 2005
What’s the time, Mr Wolff-Parkinson-White?
Press palm against skin feel its breathless sprinting
count 230 beats in a minute count six sibling arguments count four gecko squawks
gulp two glasses of water phone the absent dad three times return to the couch
count 194 beats—and whoah with the flutter of a moth it slows down to a jog
steady rhythm of 75
Fire heart Sea heart Earth heart
Calm waters as a child now more fire than earth chased by a white wolf
Want to feed my child ruby corn raspberries red meat cherry tomatoes pomegranate bursts sugar and acid enough to woo a rebel
The heart heals itself between beats, reassures Elizabeth Smither
Mikaela Nyman
Amy Marguerite picked a poem from Shira Erlichman’s Odes to Lithium, a book I now have on order! But sadly I didn’t manage to get permission to post the poem but you can listen to Shira read it here.
Self-Affirming Mantra
I was searching my symptoms online. Disturbed sleep led to fatigue which led to post-viral condition and also to alcohol abuse and liver disease and unthinkable cancers which all led to conclusions about society and how one operates in it, how someone can be rational and maladaptive at the same time, how resilience is just a word in a PowerPoint, how years of work go into the manufacture of one unit of anxiety (a person), and how each unit, although similar to others in many ways, is unique, the product of a freakish and golden permutation of inputs, which led me back to my usual searches for wars and politicians and racing drivers and recipes and animals and islands and colours.
I went out into the day with my symptoms. The sun made the swans look like harps. I appreciated the silhouettes of buildings. I scrumped apples from over a fence. My symptoms were still with me but also not with me. I was loving them. I was setting them free.
Erik Kennedy from Poto | Short (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025)
The Auckland Writers Festival is a strong supporter of poetry in Aotearoa, hosting a variety of events that feature poets from across generations, locations, styles, genres. You will find poets in conversation, in performance, on mixed panels, in outdoor street settings. Poetry is such a key part of many our literary festivals, I was delighted when Kasandra Hart-Kuamoana and Bridget van de Zijpp from the the Auckland’s literary festival agreed to pick some poems.
Hotel Emergencies, Bill Manhire
I love the way Bill Manhire’s poem, Hotel Emergencies, starts off with a gentle playfulness and a mild sense of internal panic and then spirals out to something much darker and concerned about state of the world. I once saw Bill reading it, saying he was inspired by a notice in a Copenhagen hotel room, and it stuck with me so firmly that forever after whenever I saw a badly translated notice near the door of a hotel room I would think of this poem. (Bridget)
When they ask you where you are really from, Mohamed Hassan
I was overseas when the mosque shootings occurred and from so far away I had only glimpses of how the tragedy was opening up a new dialogue here about racism and belonging. Then, on returning home, I picked up Mohamed Hassan’s collection, National Anthem, and was so moved by the profound intelligence of it, and the way he quietly breaks hearts with his beautiful way of expressing both resistance and recognition, and also tenderness and yearning, warmth and defiance. His reading of ‘When they ask you where you are really from’, which can be found online, is transfixing. (Bridget)
High Country Weather, James K Baxter
Is an Ockham’s razor for lockdown frustration and fatigue. Considered a Kiwi classic by many, and it’s no wonder. Baxter’s call to conquer anger and frustrations, to weather the storm, and to “surrender to the sky / your heart of anger” reads so much like incantation. It takes me down memory lanes of high-country alps, and my home region – through Waitomo Caves, to Rangitoto and Wharepapa South. The speaker recognises the value in never losing sight of the briefest semblance of beauty. The speaker also considers this practice to be an imperative, a survival technique. Where the very act of choosing to “yet see the red-gold cirrus / over snow mountain shine” seems like the utmost act of defiance. I celebrate this and a handful of Baxter’s other early works for their covert rebellion. Their giant phlex of negative capability. (Kasandra)
Eulogy, Ruby Solly
To me, the poem reads like whakatauki on the powerful nature of father and daughter – made even more powerful when explored in this form, and so poignantly. Its voice tends to me. Telling me to walk in both worlds. To grapple with internal conflicts and harness understanding through the wielding of ink and paper, mind and memory – within the external world. It sings of a journey toward catharsis, an accomplishment of the same, and I love that it reminds us how powerful the act and gift of writing is for the pursuit of understanding and reconciliation. (Kasandra)
Ruth Dallas, ‘Pioneer Women with Ferrets’
I use this poem to draw strength from days of old. From three or four, or more, generations ago. See the vignettes of daily life, and the fortitude of pioneers versus now. Be inspired. Let the old photographs that fill your mind with the roads of the road builders, and the hunt and the huntsmen and women, and the strife and the weather worn clothes, trickle into your spirit. Remember that once-upon-a-time tradies never used to have Tough Hands or WorkSafe! This poem stares with stark, steadfast eyes. An urging for my overdue stocktake of my whakahautanga (self-mastery), I use this poem in times of disillusionment to fortify, survive, and soldier on. (Kasandra)
The poems
Pioneer Woman with Ferrets
Preserved in film As under glass, Her waist nipped in, Skirt and sleeves To ankle, wrist, Voluminous In the wind, Hat to protect Her Victorian complexion, Large in the tussock She looms, Startling as a moa. Unfocused, Her children Fasten wire-netting Round close-set warrens, And savage grasses That bristle in a beard From the rabbit-bitten hills. She is monumental In the treeless landscape. Nonchalantly swings In her left hand A rabbit, Bloodynose down. In her right hand a club.
Ruth Dallas
from Walking on the Snow, Caxton Press, 1976. Published with kind permission from the Ruth Dallas Estate
High Country Weather
Alone we are born And die alone Yet see the red-gold cirrus Over snow-mountain shine
Upon the upland road Ride easy, stranger: Surrender to the sky Your heart of anger.
James K Baxter
from Blow, Wind of Fruitfulness, Caxton Press,1948. Also appears in numerous Baxter anthologies including Collected Poems, ed JE Weir, Oxford University Press, 1980, 1981, 1988, 1995). Published with kind permission of the James K Baxter Estate.
When they ask you where you are really from
Tell them you are an unrequited pilgrim two parallel lives that never touch a whisper or a window to what your country could be if only it opened its arms and took you whole
Tell them about the moon how she eats at your skin watches you pray and fast and cry while the world sleeps how she gives birth to herself and dies and you wish upon her children
How you wander her night plant cardamom in your friends’ eyes cumin in their teeth zaatar on their brow lick the rest off your fingertips it tastes of visa-on-entry heaven with no random checks
Round the iftar table everyone speaks of politics and God trans rights and colonialism we forget we didn’t speak the empire’s tongue
once
When they ask you why you speak so well for an immigrant:
Tell them about your grandmother’s laugh how you never quite knew whether she was story or myth the upper lip in your conviction or a song ringing in your bones drifting through the kitchen window with the fried shrimp and newspaper voodoo dolls
Tell them how you have always been a voodoo doll your feet licking the flames the stove top eye a television screen a news bulletin an open casket the needle pushing and pulling through your skin every puncture a question played by an accusation every bullet hole an answer you have to fill
with silence with religion with Xanax and daytime television
And when the muazzen calls you to pray on the radio you will wrap your limbs in cotton sheets walk through the crowd with your hands in your mouth waiting for the gun.
Mohamed Hassan
from National Anthem, Dead Bird Books, 2020.You watch Mohamed read the poem here.
Eulogy
As a child Whenever I was angry, Inconsolable, My father would tell me to write a eulogy To the person who had caused me pain. He said that by the end of it I would see That even those who cause us pain Are precious to the world
My father was an exceptional man, He was blessed With a gentle soul. He walking in step With the many animals he adores And he treaded lightly on this earth.
He taught To tread as he did And to leave the world as you found it. Ideally, improve it.
One day I will read this to a room of faces I barely recognize. I will look out on a world No different with him gone As it was With him here.
Ruby Solly
from Tōku Pāpā, Victoria University Press, 2021
Hotel Emergencies
The fire alarm sound: is given as a howling sound. Do not use the lifts. The optimism sound: is given as the sound of a man brushing his teeth. Do not go to bed. The respectability sound: is given as a familiar honking sound. Do not run, do not sing. The dearly-departed sound: is given as a rumble in the bones. Do not enter the coffin. The afterlife sound: is given as the music of the spheres. It will not reconstruct. The bordello sound: is given as a small child screaming. Do not turn on the light. The accident sound: is given as an ambulance sound. You can hear it coming closer, do not crowd the footpaths. The execution sound: is given as the sound of prayer. Oh be cautious, do not stand too near
or you will surely hear: the machinegun sound, the weeping mother sound, the agony sound, the dying child sound: whose voice is already drowned by the approaching helicopter sound: which is given as the dead flower sound, the warlord sound, the hunting and fleeing and clattering sound, the amputation sound, the bloodbath sound, the sound of the President quietly addressing his dinner; now he places his knife and fork together (a polite and tidy sound) before addressing the nation
and making a just and necessary war sound: which is given as a freedom sound (do not cherish memory): which is given as a security sound: which is given as a prisoner sound: which is given again as a war sound: which is a torture sound and a watchtower sound and a firing sound: which is given as a Timor sound: which is given as a decapitation sound (do not think you will not gasp tomorrow): which is given as a Darfur sound: which is given as a Dachau sound: which is given as a dry river-bed sound, as a wind in the poplars sound: which is given again as an angry god sound:
which is here as a Muslim sound: which is here as a Christian sound: which is here as a Jewish sound: which is here as a merciful god sound: which is here as a praying sound; which is here as a kneeling sound: which is here as a scripture sound: which is here as a black-wing sound: as a dark-cloud sound: as a black-ash sound: which is given as a howling sound: which is given as a fire alarm sound:
which is given late at night, calling you from your bed (do not use the lifts): which is given as a burning sound, no, as a human sound, as a heartbeat sound: which is given as a sound beyond sound: which is given as the sound of many weeping: which is given as an entirely familiar sound, a sound like no other, up there high in the smoke above the stars
Bill Manhire
from Lifted, Victoria University Press, 2005. You can hear Bill read the poem at Poetry Archives.
Born and bred in the heart of Te Awamutu-King Country, Kasandra M. Hart-Kaumoana (Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Hikairo) completed her BA at Victoria University as a VUW-Foundation Scholar in Film, English, and Philosophy in 2019 – and Creative Writing at the IIML. She has since published two original pieces in Matatuhi Taranaki: A Bilingual Journal of Literature. Kasandra is kept busy full-time coordinating the Auckland Writers Festival and relishes the bona fide westie lifestyle in her newfound home, Waitakere.
Bridget van der Zijpp is the author of three novels: Misconduct (VUP, 2008), In the Neighbourhood of Fame (VUP, 2015), and the recently released I Laugh Me Broken (VUP, September 2021). Bridget returned to Auckland in March 2020 after living in Berlin for a few years and is now the Programme Manager at the Auckland Writers Festival.
James K Baxter (1926 – 1972), poet, dramatist, literary critic and social commentator, was born in Dunedin. He was Burns Fellow at the University of Otago (1966-7). He published numerous plays and books of poetry and criticism during his life time, while several anthologies have been published posthumously. He lived in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington and Hiruharama Jerusalem. An extensive bio is available at ReadNZ.
Ruth Dallas (Ruth Minnie Mumford) (1919 – 2008) was born in Invercargill and lived in Dunedin from 1954. An award-winning poet and children’s author, she won the Poetry category of the New Zealand Book Awards in 1977 for her fifth collection, Walking on the Snow. She wrote over 20 books. During the 1960s, she assisted Charles Brasch with Landfall. She was awarded a CBE for Services to Literature, was the Burns Fellow at the University of Otago (1968) and received an honorary doctorate from there a decade later.
Mohamed Hassan is an award-winning journalist and writer from Auckland and Cairo. He was the winner of the 2015 NZ National Poetry Slam, a TEDx fellow and recipient of the Gold Trophy at the 2017 New York Radio Awards. His poetry has been watched and shared widely online and taught in schools internationally. His 2020 poetry collection National Anthem was shortlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards (2021).
Bill Manhire founded the creative writing programme at Victoria University of Wellington, which a little over 20 years ago became the International Institute of Modern Letters. His new book Wow is published by Victoria University Press in New Zealand and Carcanet in the UK.
Ruby Solly (Kāi Tahu, Waitaha, Kāti Māmoe) is a writer, musician and taonga pūoro practitioner living in Pōneke. She has been published in journals such as Landfall, Starling and Sport among others. In 2020 she released her debut album, Pōneke, which looks at the soundscapes of Wellington’s past, present and future through the use of taonga pūoro, cello, and environmental sounds. She is currently completing a PhD in public health, focusing on the use of taonga pūoro in hauora Māori. Tōku Pāpā is her first book.
Poetry Shelf Spring Season
Tara Black picks poems Victor Rodger picks poems Peter Ireland picks poems Emma Espiner picks poems Claire Mabey (VERB) picks poems Sally Blundell picks poems Frances Cooke picks poems We Are Babies pick poems
Bill Manhire founded the creative writing programme at Victoria University of Wellington, which a little over 20 years ago became the International Institute of Modern Letters. His most recent book Wow is published by Victoria University Press in New Zealand and Carcanet in the UK.
‘A poem is / a ripple of words / on water wind-huffed’
Hone Tuwhare
from ‘Wind, Song and Rain’ in Sap-wood & Milk, Caveman Press, 1972
The ocean is my go-to salve. Before we went into level-four lockdown last year, I went to Te Henga Bethells Beach near where I live. I stood by the water’s edge as the sun was coming up. The air was clear and salty. Not a soul in sight. I breathed in and I breathed out, and I saved that sublime moment for later. Like a screen shot. Over the ensuing weeks in lockdown, I was able to return to that spot, my eyes on the water, my senses feeding on wildness and beauty. Look through my poetry collections and you will see I can’t keep the ocean out. It is always there somewhere.
Unsurprisingly there is a profusion of water poems in Aotearoa – think the ocean yes, but lakes and rivers and floods and dripping taps. This was an impossible challenge: whittling all the poems I loved down to a handful. I hadn’t factored in leaving poems out when I came up with my theme-season plan. Some poets are particularly drawn to water. Kiri Piahana-Wong’s sublime collection Night Swimming is like an ode to water. The same can be said of Lynn Davidson’s glorious collections How to Live by the Sea and The Islander. Or read your way through Apirana Taylor’s poems and you will find they are water rich – and his poetry flows like water currents. As does the poetry of Hone Tuwhare. Again water rich. And of course the poetry of Dinah Hawken, with her lyrical eye bringing the natural world closer, water a constant companion.
I have so loved this water sojourn. The poems are not so much about water but have a water presence. I am grateful to all the poets and publishers who continue to support my season of themes.
The poems
Girl from Tuvalu
girl sits on porch
back of house
feet kicking
salt water skimming
like her nation
running fast
nowhere to go
held up by
Kyoto Protocol
An Inconvenient Truth
this week her name is Siligia
next week her name will be
Girl from Tuvalu: Environmental Refugee
her face is 10,000
her land is 10 square miles
she is a dot
below someone’s accidental finger
pointing westwards
the bare-chested boys
bravado in sea spray
running on tar-seal
they are cars
they are bikes
they are fish out of water
moana waves a hand
swallows
a yellow median strip
moana laps at pole houses
in spring tide
gulping lost piglets
and flapping washing
girl sits on porch
kicking
Selina Tusitala Marsh
from Dark Sparring, Auckland University Press, 2013, picked by Amy Brown
The body began to balance itself
It started to rain
and it was not clear
if this would last a short time
or a long time
so I got my husband
and colleagues
and the librarian
and the owner of the local chip shop
and the humourless lady who failed me
on eyesight at the driver licence testing station
into a boat
though it was extremely cramped
and they rowed
out to the open ocean
and sat quiet
and waited.
Louise Wallace
from Bad Things, Victoria University Press, 2017
The Lid Slides Back
Let me open
my pencil-case made of native woods.
It is light and dark in bits and pieces.
The lid slides back.
The seven pencils are there, called Lakeland.
I could draw a sunset.
I could draw the stars.
I could draw this quiet tree beside the water.
Bill Manhire
from The Victims of Lightning, Victoria University Press, 2010
Train of thought
I thought of vitality,
I thought of course of a spring.
I thought of the give inherent
in the abiding nature of things.
I thought of the curve of a hammock
between amenable trees.
I thought of the lake beyond it
calm and inwardly fluent
and then I was thinking of you.
You appeared out of the water
like a saint appearing from nowhere
as bright as a shining cuckoo
then dripping you stood in the doorway
as delighted by friendship as water
and beaming welcomed us in.
Dinah Hawken
The lake
The ripples are small enough. The lake surface is the lake surface is the lake surface. All lakes exist in the same space of memory. Deep dark water. The scent of stones. I think of a swift angle to depth. I think of the sound when you’re underwater and the gravel shifts beneath your feet. I think of all the colours of water that look black, that look wine dark, that look like youth looking back at me. I can barely take it. I can see the lake breathing. I am the lake breathing. The lake breathes and I breathe and the depth of both of us is able to be felt by finger, by phone, by feeling. Don’t ask what you don’t want to know. I ask everything. I want to know nothing, everything, just tell it all to me. The gravel shifts again with the long-range round echo of stones underwater. I am separate parts breathing together. You say that I am a little secret. You say, as your brain seizes, that you have lost the way. Your eyes flicker and flutter under your eyelids as you try to find what’s lost, what’s gone forever. Nothing can really be found. I am never located when I want to be located the most. I am instead still that teenager on the side of the road with a cello hard case for company. I forget I exist. You forget I exist. I’ve forgotten I’ve believed I’ve not existed before. I’ve not forgotten you. Never forgotten your face. Could never. Would never. I don’t know how to communicate this with you in a way that you’ll understand. My mouth waters. I am back in the lake again. Except I’m the lake and I’m water myself.
Emma Barnes
Flow
To the stone, to the hill, to the heap, to the seep,
to the drip, to the weep, to the rock, to the rill,
to the fell, to the wash, to the splash, to the rush,
to the bush, to the creep, to the hush;
to the down, to the plain, to the green, to the drift,
to the rift, to the graft, to the shift, to the break,
to the shake, to the lift, to the fall, to the wall,
to the heft, to the cleft, to the call;
to the bend, to the wend, to the wind, to the run,
to the roam, to the rend, to the seam, to the foam,
to the scum, to the moss, to the mist, to the grist,
to the grind, to the grain, to the dust;
to the core, to the gorge, to the grove, to the cave,
to the dive, to the shore, to the grave, to the give,
to the leave, to the oar, to the spring, to the tongue,
to the ring, to the roar, to the song;
to the surge, to the flood, to the blood, to the urge
to the rage, to the rod, to the rood, to the vein,
to the chain, to the town, to the side, to the slide,
to the breadth, to the depth, to the tide;
to the neap, to the deep, to the drag, to the fog,
to the stick, to the slick, to the sweep, to the twig,
to the roll, to the tug, to the roil, to the shell,
to the swell, to the ebb, to the well, to the sea.
Airini Beautrais
from Flow, Victoria University Press, 2017, picked by Amy Brown
as the tide
i am walking the path
around hobson bay point
nasturtiums grow up the cliff face
and the pitted mud has a scattering
of thick jagged pottery, bricks
faded edam cheese packaging
and a rusty dish rack
all of the green algae
is swept in one direction
i am only aware of the blanketed crabs
when a cloud passes overhead
and they escape in unison
into their corresponding homes
claws nestling under aprons
my dad talks about my depression
as if it were the tide
he says, ‘well, you know,
the water is bound to go in and out’
and to ‘hunker down’
he’s trying to make sense of it
in a way he understands
so he can show me his working
i look out to that expanse,
bare now to the beaks of grey herons, which i realise is me
in this metaphor
Lily Holloway
Ode to the water molecule
‘Our body is a moulded river.’ Novalis
Promiscuous, by some accounts,
or simply playing the field—
indecisive, yet so decidedly
yourself, you are
all these things: ice flow,
cloud cover,
bend of a river,
crystalline structure
on an aeroplane window, fire-
bucket or drop
in the ocean, dissolver of a morning’s
tablets or
mountain range. We envy you
your irresolution,
the way you get along
with yourself, as glacier
or humidity of
an overheated afternoon. A glass
of pitch-black water
drunk at night.
Catchment and run-off. Water,
we allow you
your flat roof and rocky bed
but there are also
tricks we have taught you:
papal fountain, water
feature, liquid chandelier and
boiling jug. It is, however,
your own mind
you make up, adept as you are
—‘the universal solvent’—
at both piecing together
and tearing apart. With or
without us, you find your own
structure, an O and two H’s
in the infinity
of your three-sidedness, your
triangulation, at once trinity
and tricycle. Two oars
and a dinghy, rowed.
Colourless, but for
‘an inherent hint of blue’,
molecule in which
we are made soluble, the sum
of our water-based parts—
resourceful, exemplary friend
kindred spirit – not one to jump to
conclusions
as you would traverse a stream, but rather
as you would leap in. Fluid,
by nature—given to swimming more than
being swum—
with rain as your spokesperson,
tattooed surface of a river’s
undiluted wonder,
snowfall and drift,
you enter the flow
of each of us, turn us around
as you turn yourself around
as tears,
sustenance,
more tears.
Gregory O’Brien
first appeared (in a typeset and ‘drawn’ version) in PN Review 252, in the UK, March-April 2020.
First dusk of autumn here and i swim
through fish flicker through
little erasing tails
that rub the seafloor’s light-net out
that ink in night
down south winter warms to her task and
will arrive smelling of wet shale in
a veil of rain
bats flicker into leaves
to rub the tree-cast light-net from the grass
to ink in night
Lynn Davidson
Waiheke
You yearn so much you could be a yacht. Your mind has already set sail. It takes a few days to arrive
at island pace, but soon you are barefoot on the sand, the slim waves testing your feet
like health professionals. You toe shells, sea glass, and odd things that have drifted for years and finally washed up here.
You drop your towel and step out of your togs, ungainly, first your right foot, then
the other stepping down the sand to stand in the water.
There is no discernible difference in temperature. You breaststroke in the lazy blue.
A guy passing in a rowboat says, ‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ And it is. Your body afloat in salt as if cured.
James Brown
from Poetry, 2018, picked by Frankie McMillan
Mere Taito
Isthmus
Write the sea in your heart, write the rain.
Only that. Words are a poor habit. Let
the wind slide under your ribs let the rain,
for no one will love you the way
you write to be loved,
and your name only a name – but the green
edge of a wave made knifish by light
or some hurtful winter clarity in the water:
a bright sheet of sky against the horizon as if
breathing, as if the air itself
is your own self, waiting. Only there.
And know how your heart is the green deep sea,
dark and clear and untame,
and its chambers are salt and the beating
of waves, and the waves breaking,
and the waves.
Olivia Macassey
from Takahē, issue 90
Deep water talk
In honour of Hone Tuwhare
& no-one knows
if your eyes are
blurred red from
the wind, too
much sun, or the
tears streaking your
face that could be
tears or just lines of
dried salt, who
can tell
& you never can tell
if you are seasick,
drunk, or just
hungover—the
symptoms are the
same
& sea and sky merge
until the horizon is
nothing but an
endless blue line
in every direction,
so that you are sailing,
not on the sea, as you
thought, but in a
perfectly blue, circular
bowl, never leaving
the centre
& you wonder who
is moving, you or
the clouds racing
by the mast-head
& you wonder if
those dark shapes
in the water are
sharks, shadows, or
nothing but old fears
chasing along behind
you
& the great mass of
land recedes, you
forget you were
a land-dweller,
feeling the pull
of ancient genes
—in every tide, your
blood sings against
the moon
& food never tasted
so good, or water
so sweet—you’ve
never conserved water
by drinking wine
before—and rum;
and coke; and rum
and coke; and can
after can of cold
beer
& your sleep is
accompanied, not
by the roar of traffic
on the highway,
but by the creaks
and twangs of your
ship as she pitches
and moans through
the dark ocean,
all alone
& you wonder—
where did that bird,
that great gull perching
on the bowsprit,
come from?
Kiri Piahana-Wong
from Night Swimming, Anahera Press, 2013
The Poets
Emma Barnes lives and writes in Pōneke / Wellington. They have just released their first book I Am In Bed With You. For the last two years they’ve been working with Chris Tse on an anthology of LGBTQIA+ and Takatāpui writing to be released this year by Auckland University Press. They work in Tech and spend a lot of time picking heavy things up and putting them back down again.
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.
James Brown’sSelected Poems was published by VUP in 2020. He is working on a new book.
Lynn Davidson’s latest poetry collection Islander is published by Shearsman Books and Victoria University Press. She had a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2013 and a Bothy Project Residency at Inshriach Bothy in the Cairngorms in 2016. In 2011 she was Visiting Artist at Massey University. She won the Poetry New Zealand Poetry Award, 2020 and is the 2021 Randell Cottage Writer in Residence. Lynn has a doctorate in creative writing and teaches creative writing. She recently returned to New Zealand after four years living and writing in Edinburgh.
Dinah Hawken lives and writes in Paekakariki. Her ninth collection of poetry, Sea-light, will be published by Victoria University Press in August, 2021.
Lily Holloway is a queer nacho-enthusiast. She is forthcoming in AUP New Poets 8 and you can find her work here.
Olivia Macassey’s poems have appeared in Poetry New Zealand, Takahē, Landfall, Brief, Otoliths, Rabbit and other places. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and The Burnt Hotel (Titus). Her website
Bill Manhire founded the creative writing programme at Victoria University of Wellington, which a little over 20 years ago became the International Institute of Modern Letters. His new book Wow is published by Victoria University Press in New Zealand and Carcanet in the UK.
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’.
Gregory O’Brien recently completed a new collection of poems Streets and Mountains and is presently working on a monograph about artist Don Binney for AUP.
Kiri Piahana-Wong is a poet and editor, and she is the publisher at Anahera Press. She lives in Auckland.
Mere Taito is a poet living and working in Kirikiriroa. She is interested in the way poetry can be used to revitalise minority Indigenous languages like Fäeag Rotuạm ta.
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.
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