some helpful models of grief, Hana Pera Aoake
Illustrations by Priscilla Rose Howe
Compound Press, 2025

“I stayed up all night and blistered my hands braiding muka into a
rope to slow the sun down just for you.”

Rhythm. I begin with rhythm as I read and slowly reflect upon Hana Pera Aoake’s poetry collection, some helpful models of grief. The rhythm of the line, the rhythm building across the arm-stretch of a poetic sequence. Think heart beat. Think the shifting rhythms of life, illness, love, death. The rhythms of thoughts flooding, speaking to loved ones, sons and daughters. The rhythm that builds as poet puts pen to page, and it is sweet and sharp and sour, these currents of anxiety, epiphany, recognition, searching.

And when I listen to the rhythm, the words spilling and coiling and arching and arcing, I am absorbing the poetry so very deeply.

Here is poetry that moves hand-in-hand with grief, with the sharp and soft edges of desire, aroha, body intimacy, wound, self repair.

“You say you feel understood and that my love of art reminds you why
it matters, but I feel like moss drying in the sun ripped from the moss.”

Here is poetry that navigates and holds close the power and magnetic pull of creating art, beyond and inside the smash of doubt, I too am body struck by Rothko, ache with myriad doubt, and am drawn to the garden, where we might fling our art to burn, and then feed the garden pumpkins with the ash. Ah. The garden, with its ongoing visibility and necessities, might be the fertile earth in which Hana’s poetry is planted. Ah the stories that precede and shape us, whether familiar, inherited, whether myths and legends. And then this: “I think of Martha Stewart saying that if you make a garden you have / a friend for life.”

Here is poetry that interlaces the personal and the political, how can it not in this spiky wounded world. We are standing next to the tourist in Iceland scooping moss that takes hundreds of years to regrow. We are holding Gaza. Grieving. And I am stilled and stalled before the pyramid poem that speaks of our founding document written in te reo Māori but signed in translation, those stolen lands, that stifled language, and pyramid poem becomes precious cloak on the page, with its origins, and vital and connecting stitching.

Here is poetry of echo and return. And it’s yes to poetry as echo and return, as the poems luminate past, present and future. The moss a recurring physical political eco marker that activates our senses, touch and smell and sight, that might build a tower of metaphors as we read, with its beauty and function and fragility and presence. Think life. Think nurture. Think care.

And here is poetry that speaks to you, the shifting me I we they you.

This is a sequence, a chronicle that draws upon the words and ideas of multiple writers and thinkers, including Moana Jackson, Keri Hulme, Talia Marshall, Fleur Adcock, Plato, Louise Glück, Roland Bathes, Annie Ernaux, Samuel Beckett, Homer, Andrei Tarkovsky, Kathy Acker, Stephen Fry, Freud, Shakespeare, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Autumn Royal.

And here I am back to the notions of rhythm – so deeply fertilised with experience and invention, with the literal and the figurative, with how poetry is sweet and succulent on our tongues, our speaking tongues, sweet and succulent in our ears, our listening ears, sweet and succulent in our hearts, our feeling hearts. And yes sour and savoury. These rhythms, movements, chronicles. This gift. This book. This poetry.

“I saw the Te Rakanui moon still bright this morning and wondered
whether you could see it in the city. By the time went outside
everything was covered in fog and there was ice on the moss.”

the reading

Photo credit: Frances Carter

Hana reads from some helpful models of grief

Hana Pera Aoake (Ngāti Hinerangi, Ngāti Mahuta, Waikato/Tainui is an artist, writer, and sweaty milf living at the foot of Pūtauaki maunga. Hana has published three books, including a bathful of kawakawa and hot water (2020), Blame it on the rain (2025) with no more poetry (Australia) and Some helpful models of grief (2025). They are also working on a fourth book of essays, how to be with Discipline (Australia). Hana is a PhD candidate at the Auckland University of Technology.

Compound Press page