Zombie tourists drive camper vans off highways, and into ditches, and leave them there without a care. They eat brains and spit out the remains. In public car parks they ignore any official sign. They hurry around on the wrong side of the road. They don’t speak unless challenged in te reo, and bump into you backwards, carrying selfie sticks; and then they deliquesce into phophorescent slime, all the while protesting they are having a good time.
Zombie tourists take scenic routes but feel every bump, and they always get trapped behind a wide-load, so their camper van ends up crawling like a sick toad. They act like they don’t know the road code, stuck in the middle of a whole lot of hogs: bikers blatting along like a slow-moving bog, who only stop for a mass take-out of burritos, which are eated al fresco and à la mode, off the roof of their low-rider support-vehicle. And as the camper van pulls out, the bikers all growl: may the circle be unbroken, bye-bye.
Zombie tourists look for Aotearoa the White Whale. You won’t find that Whale in any guide-books, but they believe they might trace it in carvings, still sunk in raupo swamps, that glow in the dark. And on either side of the Alps, there are stories, small myths, always being crafted and left for others to find. New Zealand’s scenery, they say, is so beautiful it’s almost obscene, because the wealthy elite have reserved it for a blow-out lunch, that will turn into a saturnalia of livestock gobbled up by Cyclops and his whole one-eyed clan, as they eat the ideals of egalitarianism, and hose what’s left down the gurgler.
David Eggleton
David Eggleton lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin and is a former New Zealand poet laureate. His Respirator: A Laureate Collection 2019 -2022 was published by Otago University Press in 2023. Lifting the Island: Poems was published in the United States by Red Hen Press in 2025.
Poetry Shelf toasts Te Marama Puoro o Aotearoa | NZ Music Month 2026
Music streams in the ink of so many poets I love, whether on the page or in the ear/air. Think rhythm, rhyme, chords, key, hooks, harmonies, disharmonies, pitch, bridges. And of course the lyrics.
One of my favourite poetry books of 2026 to date, is Bill Manhire’s Lyrical Ballads (THWUP): “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.” My review
Yesterday I finished reading Khadro Mohamed’s sublime novel Before the Winter Ends, and it is probably my favourite novel from 2025. Khadro writes with her poetic ear attuned to the musicality of words. I just adore it. I will be posting some thoughts on the book in the next week or so. In fact I seem to be binging on novels with sentences that achieve such musical cadence I am bursting with the pleasure of reading – and daydreaming upon how the ear of the reader is as important as the eye, the heart, the musing mind.
Music is such a connecting activity – listening to music gets us through tough patches, gets our bodies moving, our hearts moving. And how vital live gigs are, having our socks blown away by the utter joy and pleasure of live performances.
I have never invited open submissions to Poetry Shelf, but on the spur of a midnight moment, invited poets to contribute to a poetry / music month celebration. I made the brief open: “YES the poems will offer links to NZ music. Maybe subtle links, maybe a clear spotlight on performances, albums, past or present experiences, music anecdotes, memorable occasions, but the poems may also connect with music as part of our daily lives.”
I got an astonishing arrival of poems, and while it was super hard choosing only a handful, I think I will do a quick-fire submission invite again. Maybe in a few months. Maybe sooner.
Thank you everyone who sent poems. This was an absolute pleasure.
23 poems
Mata singing in the supermarket
It is the first sound I encounter, Mata singing, a humming hovering over the ripe oranges, tomatoes, the perfect newly washed potatoes, curling around persimmons in season, the sultry scent of feijoas Mata singing, a hibiscus flower tucked behind her ear
Her voice follows me past the morning newspaper, beyond a magazine with Audrey Hepburn’s face on the cover, oh those were the beautiful days, it’s passing the wine bottles, the beer, the lo-alcohol cans, our sober days are here, it riffs across the scent
of soap and laundry powder, and the eggs, bread and cheese that sustain us, Mata singing
to children whose mother is buying a happy birthday cake and lollies; so long as I remember Mata has been here, her voice crooning tunes amongst the herbs and spices, her hair greying. One day she’s not there
but a young woman from Samoa is at the checkout counter, her voice soaring. But where is Mata today? I ask. She will be back, it’s just her day off, the song must go on, Mata will come back, Mata singing.
Fiona Kidman
When the band played the chords of their opening song the crowd surged forward.
Not wanting to be crushed, he slipped under the stage like a moray eel and became immersed in a reverberating ocean of sound.
Richard von Sturmer from a new poetry sequence
White duck
On the way to the gig I stopped by the sea the tide was in and slow. I stood on grey and mellow stones, marked time, looked out to the horizon.
A white duck meandered by, and as I tried (crimped hands, cramped knees) to revive the swing, the feel of lines it parked me beside me: white feathers, round stones.
There were drumbeats and triplets and words I could not remember, though I stared hard at the sea, the way the duck did, for verse, bridge chorus to reappear
which they didn’t, despite the tight paradiddles of my heart and quavers in my knees, so I watched the duck and the duck watched the sea until I had to leave,
and I think I played pretty tight, that night at the Royal Albert.
Jillian Sullivan “A poem, published in JAAM, from when I was a drummer (in the all- female band Red Dress, and full of nerves before a gig.”
Amy Winehouse on St Clair Esplanade
A breezy day on the Esplanade, where nothing escapes the view, a kid high on a can of Red Bull, guys in hoodies puffy as cobras. Drifting from their wound-down window, the sob-sister on a squawk box, — make me go to rehab, but I said no, no, no!
Backflips through an ocean’s backyard, with dipsticks, dropkicks, surf wipe-outs, salt haze drifting like a filmy drape, floaty over barren rocks, eroded sand dunes, flowers yellow as a lick of butter, yellow as sunshine, — make me go to rehab, but I said, no, no, no!
I buy a chocolate ice-cream cone for you. Smiley faces and stuck-out tongues, there’s e-scooters, shiny shells of cars, and peeled from a seal-black wetsuit, the pipe-band drum-major’s leg tattoo, — make me go to rehab, but I said no, no, no!
Your pointy leather boots clack on concrete, while hunch-backed scolds of gulls are moving red-webbed feet to a ska beat, they’re crying out like Amy Winehouse, — ska, ska, ska! — no, no, no!
The evening sky vamps like a lava lamp of tie-dye kaftan mauves and yellows, but now there’s no scamp Amy Winehouse to echo along with the seagulls, — ska, ska, ska! — no, no, no!
David Eggleton published in Otago Daily Times in 2024
Organology
I dropped my new earrings in the sink and fished them out again. Only a small dark
fingerprint of tarnish gave any indication of their drainward descent. I wore them out
to the orchestra, where we stared up the legs of the cellists, in the cheapest of cheap seats.
Sitting there with a new friend I wondered how it all turned out like this — libraried afternoons, waiting
nights, hurried mornings — all these violins oiled by the fingers of guys who would have worn wigs
and white powder and all the rest of it. My friend told me he cried, and I chose to believe him. He has eyes
like I’ve seen in photographs from 1912. The evolution of cornets mimics the evolution observed in fossils.
Ammonites curled in spirals as if sleeping. I almost bought one the other month with my cousin, at that
incensey place on Willis Street; a tiny crystalline thumbnail of a thing. A lover, somewhere, reaches
for a nightstand. I didn’t see any tears fall. I saw the wood, worn and singing, and fiddled with my rings.
Cadence Chung
Quantum Decoherence at a Bailter Space Gig, 1989
20 July was my seventeenth birthday and I went to Sammy’s on a Thursday night. Cold and rain, a winter standard for Dunedin. My one clear memory is standing alone on a fairly empty dance floor, spotlit by a stream of sodium blue light while feeling my neural networks being reformatted by a subsonic phase shift on top of which an avalanche of white noise glued loosely together with a standing wave of human friendly harmonic frequencies pulsed from side to side of the hall while bodies swayed like reeds in a gale. When I left some time after midnight life had changed permanently, and my inner ears were filled with a softly anesthetic snowfall.
Victor Billot from The Sets, Otago University Press, 2021
The Smith the Grocer girl
wipes tables, ferries plates and bowls and cups and jugs back and forth to the counter
After the rush tray-laden in the light-filled well of the old lift shaft she looks up
and pitches a melody rung by perfect rung to the sky
and you know she’ll climb it
It’s for her the cutlery has stopped clacking, and in their pre-porcelain clay, their porous places, the saucers,
it’s for her they listen and thirst
Sue Wootton from By Birdlight, Steele Roberts, 2011.
Phoenix Foundation (for Will)
“En-tnt”: that was what you used to call an elephant. You’d say “I carry you” when you wanted to be picked up.
Each time we read that page in Peter and Jane where the farmer is getting ready for work, you’d shout out “Boots on!”
because on walks you wore your red boots. You had long yellow curls like Little Lord Fauntleroy, a Leicester accent
thick and ruddy like the local cheese. Once in the grocer’s in Stoneygate, an old lady bent down, stroked your hair,
murmured: “What a very pretty boy.” “Fook off!” you said, staring at your boots. She jerked her hand away as though stung.
Years after, I see you running round and round a room, arms flapping wildly. You stop. “I can’t fly,” you say, surprised.
But here tonight you’re standing stage right behind your barricade of drums. Shaved head, black singlet, sticks raised, you might be
the sorcerer’s latest apprentice. The guitars kicks in, the blue light spins, your hands begin to fly.
Harry Ricketts from Just Then, Victoria University Press, 2012
Martin Phillipps’ eyes
From photos, Martin Phillipps’ eyes look out; looking for all the world like eyes forever looking out.
The music is all we have of him now.
On walks down the street where he lived close by our street, I ask myself: Is that the house he lived in? Not knowing for sure, I can only guess.
For some of us, all that’s left of him is the music, the songs and any memory. Like the one I have of seeing him, once, in the late nineties, alone on a stage, playing keyboard
and singing, Submarine Bells. The second time, over twenty years later, in Ian Chapman’s house at the launch of his book, OK Boomer, where he was just a man standing at the window
looking out at the harbour, my husband beside him both of them remarking about the weather rolling in and the yachts, my husband not realising who the man was until he asked him his name.
Martin, the man said. Of course, my husband thought. Martin Phillipps. Knowing then why he’d looked familiar. And they both just stood there a moment longer, looking out.
Kay McKenzie Cooke “I thought immediately of this poem I wrote after the death of Martin Phillipps of the Dunedin Sound band The Chills. It is a poem that will be in my new collection, My Favourite Set of Lights, due out in November this year with The Cuba Press. Co-incidentally, a new LP by the late Martin Phillipps arrived in my email yesterday to be downloaded through Bandcamp, and today I’ve been listening to songs of his I’d never heard.”
Recipe for a Mother’s Mana for Helen
It must be possible to conclude a home concert without food, without cheesecake, chocolate cheesecake that is, but I wouldn’t risk my motherly mana to find out.
The day before a concert while I listen to Maestro practise Brahms and Gershwin on the piano down in the lounge, I adapt my sister’s recipe, my hands knowing what to do.
I crush a packet of biscuits, mix with two tablespoons of sugar three of cocoa and four ounces of melted butter, then cover the bottom and up the sides of a lined large round cake tin with a push up bottom.
Next, as I think through To-Do lists I beat two tubs of cream cheese and one of cottage, a cup of brown sugar two tablespoons of flour half a teaspoon of instant coffee three quarters of a cup of cream and three eggs.
If you’re a Luddite like me and beat by hand, it takes time and grunt till it’s harmoniously blended but when it is, quickly stir in 300 g of melted dark chocolate, pour into the crust and when no-one’s watching lick the bowl.
It cooks over the next hour or a bit more in a slow oven, the smell of melted chocolate sweetly seeping down the hall to Maestro at the piano now with Helen on the viola practising Schubert and Glazunov.
The next day, after the first course of the post-concert dinner, Maestro is back on the piano jamming with Helen on viola, violin, cello, flute, guitars singing.
In the quiet of the dining room I put out the expected cheesecake and ambrosia, food of the gods ~ ambrosia ~ how I love that word, berry yoghurt, whipped cream tinned boysenberries chopped marshmallows.
In the end it is simple, make music have concert eat cheesecake.
Tui Bevan
Backyard Blues Revival
This sucks. Among the reverb thinking I was tapu then. Not now. My axe rings in circles swinging back through the firewood in my skin cutting a shard in scrap tōtara from the old farm house, Shick! / Thunk! It cracks open. Careful now. Not to take my fingers, pare the shard back down until I am vinyl and ten again lost in a picture of an old man playing a Kōauau and seeing the soul of my poverty.
i toko
rattling the tauranga jazz fest hum
you came from some crevice in the city’s noise from the cafe across the road from its canopy of dark-skinned grapes.
the singing blade of you arrived and rattled the whispering stars you stood there all jaunty in your tattered coat and I wanted to unravel you thread by pretty thread.
on stage we inverted chords swapped surfaces knelt in snow so deep it could thaw a summer’s grief oh how we harmonised, improvised, be-bob sha-bammed and all of that jazz
now, pasted down far apart we hum those old songs crazy with superheros and and bright lights there’s a strange high note playing in the skies as icarus and angels fall and our veins run feverish with loss.
Lyndsey Knight
The Thistle
Climb the stairs, and tight to the right. Up into the old tea merchants. There was no lingering smell of potted empire when I reached the top. Rather the punk cologne of dak, scrumpy, sweat and leather. Wander in past the array of anarchist books, the dangerous tools of revolution. Now a google search would be a lot quicker. And ‘the man’ can keep his tabs remotely. And the revolution is remoter still. The PA is old and clad in carpet. The amps are shared, the drum kit communal. The masses form up; the sound system rumbles. The old, the young, and the great unwashed, we are all in this mess together. We are all a mess, in this mess , together. Then two sets in, the inevitable disruption. In flow the police, with shields and truncheons. And down the stairs we flow, barrelling to the left with a scent of bourbon. And out into the night of yellow and black, so full of nineteen nineties energy. So full of pregnant possibility.
Kieran Haslet-Moore
Thistle Hall is a community hall which played a key role in Wellington’s punk/alternative/underground music scene through the 70’s, 80’s, 90’s and 00’s.
Shihad
Unite against the apathy. The name on our backs is your name —
one shared with the faithful rendered malleable in the forge where
crowd surfers’ boots smash noses of Medusa boys with ringing ears,
loose spines whip wild heads, and masses roar ’til they turn to stone. Yet, still,
you would know us, struck mute, because the name on our backs is your name.
Bee Trudgeon
and somehow his silence
from the second row we see stagelights gleam on Jon Toogood’s forehead the bassist’s mouth clenching and unclenching the guy from The Phoenix Fountain mouthing Heart of Gold from stage left
the man next to me has spilled out under the armrest and as the drums pulse through the seats I feel his side belly tremble against my arm
when the song ends he doesn’t clap just turns to his phone some bannered news website something about Trump
and I turn my head just enough to see his grey hair black pants plaid shirt and I’m suddenly conscious of my movements my nodding and tapping along my denim jacket my calling out into the applause
and somehow his silence has sucked something out of the night and I’m searching for it in the bags under the guitarist’s eyes the greasy fall of his hair the grip of his hand on the fretboard grey haze of the smoke machine flicker of lights to blue as the band shifts into the wings
and there’s one guy left on the keyboard Lawrence Arabia I think his name is ginger moustache black jeans brown boots and as he starts to sing I lean into these details knit them together stitch a curtain between me and the guy beside me velvet and dense
his belly quivers against my arm again but there’s no drummer now no bass and in my peripheral vision I see movement a plaid arm rising
and I turn my head just enough to see his thumb and finger spread into a fleshy triangle each one pressed to an eyelid the gleam of blue light in the wetness of his cheek skin
and Lawrence Arabia’s voice seems to fill the space between major and minor the smell of dust and steam the bite of IPA at the front of my mouth the question and the answer when will I see you again
when will I see you again
Rebecca Ball
Lessons
Sunday morning and the light is grey inside this house. I embrace the heavy silence like a flood embraces gravity seeping down beneath buildings and soil and rocks and roots of living things. Systemic is in the very name of this disease and so it takes a long while—everything takes a long, long while. I learn to measure distance by how it feels to walk to the bakery, the park, the classroom where I teach teenagers the meaning of words like circulatory and interconnectedness. They are learning about the human body the way our organs work: the heart, the lungs like singing, I say the poetry in science these things that keep us alive. My flatmate is sympathetic says the roads to our house are all uphill but that is not the story. I am learning to step outside this new set of imposed boundaries the things we normalise as we gather ways to place our selves in the landscape of our grief. Sometimes it feels like I’ve misplaced my self and if I just look hard enough I might see my centre pulsing behind a mesh of muscle and bone deep within my stomach with the rest of my voice. Pacifism is not the same as passiveness. My other students are learning to breathe like they did when they were babies the diaphragmatic ebb and pull before we grow into the panting, holding tightness of everyday. But it’s difficult. We relax and focus at once. Try to recall the measured freedom of youth the evenness, the newness the burst of life and noise because babies come out crying ready to sing
Lola Elvy
Voyager
this tiny machine this analog toy this little adventurer a glorious toddler exploring the unimaginable vastness of its boundaries speaks greetings from Akkadian to Wu
and the walking tribes that dream their dreams of the rainbow serpent sing Johnny B. Goode and play Mozart Bach and Stravinsky at 16 and 2/3 rpm if the finder has a decent record player
tethered to us by hope and grit and dreams and yesterday’s genius and dial up speeds of imagery and sound and the cacophany of creatio go looking for God beyond grasp of the sun beyond its anger its rage its wrath
the war within itself that will destroy it one day one day one day
Ben Brown
Oh my
I was born a devil, he tells me licking salt off my skin
holy smoke rising from his hot wings
invites me to feast on gravel and wine, drive the black sheep over the edge
of this world.
Everybody’s doing it, he says, smudging the clear dome of my cornea
and I know we’re doomed to die regardless of what’s written in the water.
Drunk on air, he tastes licorice and tar notes of sulphur
black sand scorching, scorching.
Mikaela Nyman “A tribute to Gin Wigmore’s ‘Written in the Water Die Regardless'”
Community Choir
It’s November & next month, December we’ll sing at the Rest Home, Silent Night
Pam, alto, says I keep slipping into lead Pat, bass, says I want to move on ‘dawn’ Jay, tenor, says You leave Dawn alone
Everyone laughs The dog licks Diane’s – soprano – toes I’ve been in the garden, she says & everyone laughs again
& Pat learns not to move on dawn & Pam learns not to sing the lead & Jay puts his right foot in & his right foot out
Jay shakes it all about & everyone laughs once more Oh Jay! & Diane’s toes are clean now That’s better, she says
Sam Duckor Jones
Hugh playing the Moonlight
Hugh is playing the Moonlight to the valley.
In swannie, shorts and Tuesday’s socks he takes the stage before kānuka and jostling miro.
He begins to play.
The kahikātea on the balcony adjusts the stars upon her shoulders.
Tawai on the high terrace bend to pay attention and kōwhai huddle close where they can sway in their yellow ear rings.
Lizard, spider, bird and fish, rock and lichen, creek and tussock hold their breath.
Hugh’s fingers find notes like seeds sown on a stave. He plants them in the dark and the music sets leaf. It grows into a supple vine, looping tree to tree.
There is nothing more beautiful in nature than a man in a swannie, playing the Moonlight.
Summit, Thomson Gorge Road (looking towards Mount Aspiring). Photo: Gregory O’Brien, October 2025
Backcountry
Now and ever the mountain river.
A fantail flits. Moss over branch, the trees hurry.
Undying stone continues the rhyme: there is no time.
Richard Reeve from Generation Kitchen (Otago University Press, 2015)
At the end of September, Gregory O’Brien sent me the media release for an online fundraising art show he was curating.
Nine well-established New Zealand artists have gifted works to raise funds in opposition to the proposed Bendigo-Ophir gold mine in Central Otago. The artists – all strongly opposed to the open pit mine – have come together under the banner “No-Go-Bendigo”, and are offering 100% of the funds raised towards fighting the fast tracked mine. All have been deeply affected by the majesty and singular character of the region—as the statements on the exhibition website underline. They all wanted to make a strong stand.
Dick Frizzell, Enough Gold Already, 2025, limited edition of 12 screenprints, 610 x 860mm,
The artists who have contributed are Bruce Foster, Dick Frizzell, Elizabeth Thomson, Eric Schusser, Euan Macleod, Grahame Sydney, Gregory O’Brien, Jenna Packer and Nigel Brown. The works they have gifted for sale can be seen here.
Exhibition organiser Gregory O’Brien, said that the group of artists from all over the country was highly motivated to help. “The proposed desecration of a heritage area for purely monetary gain is an outrage to all of us, as it is to the citizens of Central Otago and to all New Zealanders.” He said that the initial group of nine artists have already heard from other artists enthusiastic to help “during the next round”. “Painters, photographers, writers, film-makers, choreographers and other arts practitioners from within Central Otago and further afield are incensed at the churlishness of both the mining consortium and the Government’s ruinous ‘Fast Track’ (aka ‘Highway to Hell’) legislation. The environmental cost of such a cold-blooded, extractive exercise is simply too high, as is the social impact and down-stream legacy.”
When Gregory said that this was just the beginning, at the end of the exhibition media release, I knew Poetry Shelf had to become involved. My new Poetry Protest series was the perfect opportunity – knowing that poetry speaks out and for and because of issues in myriad ways. Gregory, Richard Reeve and I invited a number of poets based in the area (and beyond) to contribute a poem. Jenny Powell’s poem catches sight of the Dunstan Range, David Kārena-Holmes has penned an aching lament, Emma Neale writes of her local blue swallows that can also be found near Benigo. And then there are poets with miners in the family history such as Jeffrey Paparoa Holman and Diane Brown. Twenty three poets have gathered on this occasion but there are so many poets in Aotearoa singing out in defence of the land. Some poets chose poems from collections, while others wrote poems on the spot, often out of anger and frustration.
Richard Reeve, who is organising an anti-mining poetry reading in Alexandra in November (see poster), has written an introduction for the post. He sent me a suite of poems, both new and old, that touch multiple cords of beauty and outrage. I have included an older poem to head the post, and a longer new poem after his introduction. I have also included an extract from a recent media release by Sam Neill.
An enormous thank you to Gregory and Richard for co-curating this post, to all the poets who contributed, and to everyone who continues to read and write poetry. Today is a day of significant strikes by nurses, doctors and teachers in Aotearoa, a day with a major weather event still unfolding and widespread power outages, and the continuing heartslamming news from overseas.
To be able to connect with readers and writers who care, matters so very much, as I sit here weeping with a strange mix of sadness and gladness, beauty and outrage.
Thank you.
Thomson Gorge Road Photo: Richard Harvey, October 2025
For Freddy – Ora pro nobis
A little while ago now, Lord Byron in his book-length poem The Prophecy of Dante mused, “Many are poets who have never penned / Their inspiration, and perchance the best”. By this he meant that even non-literary types can have poetic experiences. That of course begs the question, What do we mean when we talk about poetry? Is poetry, as some sceptics would suggest, purely prose with line-breaks, or does the concept embrace something more than words on a page to encompass the wider spectrum of lived experience?
Thomson Gorge Road in Central Otago is a place many would say has its own poetry, whether the subject of poems or not. A backcountry dirt road stretching from Matakanui near Omakau in the east to Bendigo near Tarras in the west, it cuts through a pass in the Dunstan Mountains that divides the Manuherikia Valley from the Upper Clutha Basin. Thomson Gorge Road is hawk country. Tussock country. The road is notorious for the sheer number of gates one has to open when using it as an alternative to the highway that skirts the base of the mountain range south to Alexandra and the Cromwell Gorge. The gates, livestock, steep winding track, stream crossings and mud mean Thomson Gorge Road is certainly not the fastest route from Omakau to Wanaka, even though more direct than the highway. Nevertheless, people travel it regularly enough.
Indeed, those who travel the road are off on an adventure. Punctuated with heritage sites associated with the colonial period (mine-shafts, abandoned huts, battery sites and so on), and before that significant to Southern Māori travelling the pounamu routes west to east, the passage exemplifies the interconnected complex of geophysical frontiers, native-vegetation-clad landforms and cultural touchstones that makes Central Otago uniquely important in our national psyche. The scenery is magnificent, encompassing in the course of the journey expansive views of two of the three great basins of Central Otago. Just as with the Hawkdun Mountains to the north or the Clutha-Mata-au River and Old Man Range to the south, Thomson Gorge Road is an essential component of wild Central Otago’s fabric, part of our collective heritage as a nation.
Despite this, flagged on by Minister of Resources Shane Jones and his “fast-track” legislative reforms, an Australian gold mining company – Santana Minerals – is now seeking permission to establish a giant open-cast gold mine not far from the crest of Thomsons Saddle, in an area situated within an officially designated Outstanding Natural Landscape and already subject to a conservation covenant. If consented, the base of the mine where huge volumes of tailings and toxic waste are to be stored will be only 6-7 kilometres from the Clutha-Mata-au River. In light of Minister Jones’ fast-track legislation, the general public have no right of input on the outcome of the proposal even though the open-cast mine is widely regarded as offensive, a public health risk and indeed a brutal and crass affront to the values of the region.
Those protesting the mine include not only poets and artists but also people who have no great interest per se in the literary arts or perhaps even the fine arts. Some have limited exposure to literature. Others likely know very little at all about Byron or indeed Cilla McQueen, Jillian Sullivan, Liz Breslin, Michael Harlow and others who have contributed poems to this edition of Poetry Shelf. Like the poets, they nevertheless understand intuitively and deeply that no amount of trumpeting by Santana or Minister Jones of the alleged financial value of the gold deposit will annul the violence being proposed to the fine poem – or fine wine, or fine painting, or good day on a bike – that is wild Central.
In this issue, Gregory O’Brien uses as an epigraph to his contribution, ‘Thomson Gorge Road Song’, Minister Jones’ now infamous comments to the effect that the days of deifying New Zealand wilderness are over:
We are not going to sit around and read poetry to rare lizards, whilst our current account deficit goes down the gurgler … If there is a mining opportunity and it’s impeded by a blind frog, goodbye Freddy.
Au contraire, Minister. In this issue we proudly dedicate poems to skinks, hawks, backcountry streams, tussocks, snow melt. We wilfully and without reservation pledge our heart and soul to Freddy. For, as Annabel Wilson asks in her poem ‘Gorge’, What would the real Santana – St Anna, mother of Mary – say? “Sancta Ana, ora pro nobis.” Pray for us, St Anna. God help us if we cannot as a people do better than this.
Richard Reeve – 20.10.25
Clutha Gold
People! Keep an eye on the prize before you. Emerging nugget, the stuff “Black Peter” knew about, Bombay gentleman
who struck gold in 1857 at Tuapeka, scooping glinting gravel from the riverbed with his cup years before Gabriel Read
saw flecks “shining like the stars in Orion on a frosty night”, gold confirmed in Otago, a decade after New South Wales,
the glory – not to say reward – bestowed on the well-dressed candidate (not the half-caste from Bombay whose honesty gave rise to no reward).
People! Keep an eye on the prize. Yes. The cycle trail we journey in a meditative state, pausing to assess, for instance,
the scarification of the land above Beaumont Gorge, native scrub scraped off just wherever possible given the steepness,
elsewhere, feral trees spilling out of the radiata along the tops, sprouting under cliffs that once were waymarks to Māori
travelling up river from the coast along mahika kai routes. If we are honest with ourselves, it is carnage. Chaos, plunder:
we ogle the fate of our kind who would move mountains not far from here, nevermind scrub, in pursuit of the shiny stuff,
at so-called “Bendigo” in the Dunstan Mountains, Kura-matakitaki, where men and women with geology degrees feverishly
calculate potential returns from the sparkling core samples extracted under permit from the mountainback,
their CEO crowing future profits in the billions, regional growth, speculation to accelerate the pulse of offshore investors.
Without cash, their fabled open-cast mine may not proceed. Or it may. Certainly, the carnage we see from the riverbank
tells a story the trail people wouldn’t want us to focus on, namely, the irrepressibility of our activity, humans in time
destined to be extracted from the view just like the mountains, the land sliced up by farming, forestry, mining, infrastructure,
enterprise that in the end failed to save us from ourselves. Those, at least, are the signs. What happens remains to be seen,
and we are getting ahead of ourselves. The end isn’t quite yet. There is still sunlight and shadow, glitter of today’s fine day.
The prize is this deep blue vein of the motu, Clutha, Mata-au, river that gave a pseudonym to Janet, a colour to Marilynn,
incrementally digging out its passage through culture, resolving its way to the sea. We cycle from name to name,
past livestock, old gardens unravelling with age like memories, derelict barns at the edge of paddocks, willow clusters;
the prize presumably is us, steering our contraptions along the edge of a signature, at Beaumont saying goodbye
to the river, the trail now mostly following the highway, gold country but no longer river country, dead Black Peter
ghosting the great disenfranchisements evident from the trail as we ride through a converted landscape, sheep country
at Bowler’s Creek, pine plantations on the hills above Lawrence, wholly transformed land, just riparian planting in the valleys
to give any indication of a time before now. The age of birds, rivers, podocarps, sunlight, snow-melt, flax. Winking boulders
in which the ore retained its secret, faithful to the long moment before our century of hard-hatted Ministers of Resources
tapping rocks and denouncing the catastrophe of the economy (no mention of the slow-motion catastrophe of the land,
what is obvious all around us yet routinely overlooked by those in rapid transit from name to name, place to place).
People! Anyway. Yes. Keep an eye on the prize before you, we get that. And riding into Lawrence is certainly gold,
the sun setting on our handlebars, sheep laughing as we pass, the fields outside town home to sun-drunk ducks, goats, horses,
good sorts in the only environment they have ever known, lifestyle blocks, drained, fenced paddocks, previously bog
that before the man-driven fire was once primaeval forest. Hard to believe, the gaudy general store on the main drag
now also extinct; also extinct the ironmongers, breweries, lions that roamed the township, in its origins displaced by mining creep
to the present location. Not yet extinct the beauty of the town. Rusted colonial rooftops pepper the view, seasoned by exotic trees.
Truth is, nature was always ahead of us. To the bitter end. Whatever control any of us dreamed we had was an illusion.
Night colonises the shadows. Worn out, we pull up at the car. We are the gift that keeps on giving, despite the prognosis.
Clutha Gold was awesome, we say. At the Night ‘n Day, we gorge. And it is a fact, we are happy. Good work people! Keep it up!
Richard Reeve
TOXIC
It’s unbelievable, really. Unbelievable. Why would you visit this kind of environmental catastrophe onto a region that is thriving, that is in the midst of what many of us think of as a renaissance? The future of Central Otago lies in its bike trails, vineyards, cafes, in good farming practice, and a diverse and growing population of people, young and old, who genuinely care about the future of where we live.
All aspects of life in the province will be permanently affected by the toxic presence of a mine at Thomson Gorge. The initial mining proposal (and it will only get bigger, you can be sure of that) includes four mining pits, one of which will be a kilometre long and two or three hundred metres deep. All fouling our water, risking arsenic and cyanide pollution among other poisons. Don’t even mention the mad noise, the carbon, the ruin of our rivers, land and air pollution, the road traffic, the dust… the incalculable environmental cost.
Of one thing you can be certain: If the Thomson Gorge Mine goes ahead, there will be further mining proposals to follow. Watch out, Bannockburn. Watch out, Central. Remember this – ‘fast track’ can mean hasty and fatal mistakes.
Coming in here with their bogus claims, their invented figures (’95 per cent of the locals support the mine’– come off it!), these people should be ashamed. Those of us who love Central Otago are going to fight this. Because, make no mistake, this mine would be the ruin of our region, and importantly its future.
Sam Neill – 22nd October 2025
Near turn-off to Thomson Gorge Road, Tarras Photo: Gregory O’Brien, October 2025
Reading Poetry to Rare Lizards
SONG FOR THE TUSSOCK RANGE ‘I will up my eyes unto the hills …’ – Psalm 121
Deep Stream, Lee Stream, Taieri River and their tributary waters – all your lovely water-daughters, Lammerlaw and Lammermoor – dear to me and ever dearer, Lammerlaw and Lammermoor!
Deep Stream. Lee Stream, Taieri river – where I wandered in my childhood with a fishing bag and flyrod – Lammerlaw and Lammermoor, dear to me and ever dearer, Lammerlaw and Lammermoor!
Deep Stream, Lee Stream, Taieri River – let no profiteers deface these windswept, wild, beloved places – Lammerlaw and Lammermoor, dear to me and ever dearer, Lammerlaw and Lammermoor!
David Kārena-Holmes
AT WEST ARM, LAKE MANAPOURI
Tourists on tourist buses enter ‘The Earth’s Arsehole’* (blasted, grouted, |as though the Earth itself were buggered) to view the powerhouse in the bowels, where all the weight of thunderous water that once was the glorious Waiau river, flowing freely South to the sea, is prisoned now in pipes and turbines to serve the mercilessness of man.
And so, it seems, the mythic grief of Moturau and Koronae (whose tears, in legend, filled this lake) is vented in a cry transformed, exhaled as an electric current from generators underground, to howl through cables strung on pylons, gallows-grim, from here to Bluff.
Are we who turn on lights at evening, or use the smelted aluminium, exploiters of anguish, buggerers of the Earth?
David Kārena-Holmes *The site of this power project was, in the construction period, known to the workers (as is, no doubt, commonly the case in such environments) as ‘The arsehole of the Earth’. Most, or all, of the the power has gone to supply an aluminium smelter at Bluff.
Swoon
Skylark ripples the edge of silence, icy hollows mirror its hover, lines of dry grass quiver.
Winter’s travelling light transforms the field of shaded frost to shallow melt, and then, again.
Mountains drift into distance, curve in whiteness. On either side, hills and sky swoon at vision’s end.
Jenny Powell
Leave the arthropod alone
I saw a centipede in the crack of a rock flipped the grey shape to view the earth underneath, watched tiny legs scurry to safety, skittering from my unwanted gaze
I found a story in the hem of my coat picked it apart, ripping the seam stitch by stitch till the torn fabric, this undoing, was all I could see
I peered through a telescope at the southern sky’s gems winced at the big-man voice next to me, joking about ladies who covet – if only we could own them, if a man would get them for us, we’d be happy
I light the quiet fire of this poem: a resilient critter, a seam that holds, the sparkling truth lightyears from man’s reach – these things shining in the untouched crux
Michelle Elvy
A Faustian Bargain
Can I speak as a descendent of Cornish tin miners? Hunger led them to flee to Australia and Kawau Island, where they survived and profited in minor ways, digging up gold and copper. None owned a mine, some died of the dust, and in 1867 my great-great grandfather died in a mine collapse in Bendigo, Victoria leaving a widow, and nine children, one unborn. Is the tiny opal in my wedding ring handed down from him?
Can I speak, knowing nothing of this heritage before I shifted south and my husband took me to the old schoolhouse site in Bendigo, Central where we camped on the hard dryland. Born in Tamaki Makaurau, in view of the Waitemata I took time to love this new land, the forbidding mountains, cold lakes and rivers, shimmering tussocks, and now vineyards and tourists annoying as they may be bringing a more benign form of riches.
Can I speak, knowing my ancestors left their toxic tailings, their dams of arsenic and lead still poisoning the water 150 years later? Too late for apologies or compensation, the best I can do is speak up, say, beware these salesmen with their promises of jobs, and millions to be made. Once the land is raped, its gold stored safely in a vault for nothing more than speculation, the money men will walk away leaving land that feeds no one,
water that will slake no thirst.
Diane Brown
An Anti-Ode to Mining in Central Otago
There’s Lord Open Cast, pompous in yellow smog. Corporate blokes raise another hair of the dog, and pump more pollution for the water-table. Dirty dairying brings bloody algal bloom; so much cow urine until nitrogen’s poison, that the arse has dropped out of the rivers.
Yes, the day looks perfect with road tar heat; gorsebush fires flame above the lakeside beach. Spot mad scrambles of rabbits gone to ground, as orchards totter and grape-vine soils erode; while every avenue is twisting itself around, looking for the fastest way out of town.
Roadside lupins in Ophir echo purple sunsets. Bendigo’s carbon offerings are burnt by nightfall. A hundred per cent pure express their distance, when smell of decayed possum chokes the air. Don’t let land’s dirge be your billy-can of stew, the petrol reek of your tail-finned septic tank.
Tailings will anchor environs turned unstable. Once hymns were sung to hum of the tuning fork, as the ruru called out, Morepork, morepork; now drills hit post-lapsarian pay-dirt, just where Rūaumoko rocks an iron cradle, and the raft of Kupe fades to a roof of stars.
They would mine hills hollow because earth shines gold. Clouds packed in sacks, a bale-hook making way. Hear creeks burble and croon in violin tones, over lost honey-thunder of long-gone bees. Join the boom and bust of prize pie in the sky; chase lizards of rain running down bulldozed trees.
David Eggleton
The Underside
Under the house the dust is dry as an archaeologist’s brush, stippled by the motionless rain of those particulars that make our bodies, my body groping, stooped and short-sighted, under the loom of joists and time.
In this lumber room of mothlight and clotted webs are countless lives burrowing down and flitting between.
There is a workbench, joyously scarred. There are bedsprings for sleeping bones. There are scaffolding planks, rusty bricks, the cheek of the hill that holds us up. There is fire and there are stars beneath this upturned palm on which the piles of our home tremble.
And beyond, the astringent glory of brindled hills that calls me to dwell on the underside: this drowning-fear that has us scrabbling up the ladder of never enough, forgetting the ground it foots upon. This lapse in listening to the depositions of the earth.
Megan Kitching
nothing to do with you
For a cup of coffee, you would strike the heart
with an axe, mine stone for its marrow.
Maim what rolls on into sky. Screw
metal poles into quiet land, warp and crush
its offer of light and air.
*
For greed, on whenua
nothing to do with with you, you would trammel
quilted, southern ground, leave a trail of stains,
thrust twisted iron nto its soft belly.
*
Rocks the wind or sun cannot move, sleep on.
Tussock-backed they carry soft gold
sound we can hear for miles.
From somewhere, a farmer
calls his dogs. Somewhere the blaring throats
of young bulls we cannot see.
Under our feet the gravel coughs. Fallen apples
form a wild carpet below a crooked tree.
*
The mist freezes where it wafts, solid
lace. Cold, bloodless and beautiful. Still for days
on end, the sun a smear across the sky’s white mouth.
Bulrushes stuck fast in frozen ponds.
Willows and poplars as wan as horse-hair.
*
In summer, the grasshopper screams. In summer
the road floats grey. Purple lupins
and orange poppies dribble paint.
When we stop the car we hear overhead
a pair of paradise ducks, their alternating cries
the unfenced sound of a mountain tarn.
*
Seized by the sun, valleys do not resist
the line and fall of riverbeds and trees.
On whenua nothing to do with you, somewhere
the sound of a tiny bird. Somewhere, lovely light,
the sound of nothing, of no one, of the air.
*
Kay McKenzie Cooke This poem, ‘nothing to do with you’, differs slightly from the original published in the book Made For Weather (Otago University Press, 2007).
Burn
It’s Brian Turner rolling around in the bed of a dry burn. Ghost poet Brian Turner galloping the fence line, hunched over a hockey stick. Brian Turner, order of merit, spectral at a precipice, rubbing scree in his beard. Brian Turner opens his mouth and out comes the roar of the sun. The broom fries. The hawks microwave. Ghost poet Brian Turner teleports up and kicks at the plateau with a heel. To the living, the clouds are invisible. But, squirting over stones, the skinks have Brian Turner’s tiny eyes. Tussock have his hands, the wind his keys. The hilltops had hoped to be rid of him. And they are.
Nick Ascroft
Otago: A Ballad (golden version)
Another golden Aussie in his big golden truck, crossing the water to try his golden luck.
Rips up the golden tussock. Digs a golden hole. Finds a lot of rock and a bit of golden gold.
While Shane and all his buddies stand around and cheer in a land called Desolation. No vision. No idea.
But they take their golden pennies, buy a house, a car, a yacht. And they sail away on a plastic sea, to nowhere you would want to be.
On this barren rock they’ve scraped blood red, trashed and burned and left for dead.
Leaving us nowhere to run. Circling round and round the sun.
Ripped out our heart. our breathing space.
This golden land that was our place.
Fiona Farrell
Mine i.m. Pike River miners 19 November 2010
Son, there was a time when you were mine Brother, when the shining day was ours Friend, there was an hour when all went well Darling, for a moment we were love Father, you were always close at hand Human, we were people of the light.
And now, the mountain says ‘he’s mine’‚ And now, the rivers say ‘he’s ours’‚ And now, the darkness says ‘my friend’‚ And now, the silence says ‘my love’‚ And now, the coal says ‘father time’‚ And now, we wait for the day to dawn.
Jeffrey Paparoa Holman from Blood Ties, Selected Poems (Canterbury University Press, 2017)
This is something of a raw topic for me, given my background as a miner’s son, growing up in a mining town. I’ve just looked in my copy of Blood Ties, Selected Poems, from 2017, and there is a section there with twenty poems related to mining and miners, much of it related to my growing up in Blackball. There are three poems there that speak to Pike River, a sore wound at the moment, with the film’s premiere in Greymouth last night. I have a family member who could not face going. Her father died in the Strongman Mine explosion in 1967, when nineteen miners lost their lives. JPH
The Blue Language
In our local park, five welcome-swallows swoop and dart for midges, their red chests swell as they sing their high, sky dialect; the thin vowels in their lyric glint as if rung from glass bells blown in South Pacific blue.
The quintet shifts, leans in the italics of speed: moves now like mobile acrostics, now a faithful, swaying congregation every bone adoring air
until an unseasonal despotic wind flings them out of sight — scatters twigs, dirt, smashed tail-light, laundry, leaves and newspapers like those that reported how, across Greece,
thousands of migratory swallows dropped on streets, balconies, islands and a lake, small hearts inert as ripped sheet music.
In our throats, the wild losses dilate, squat like rock salt in a browning rose
a grief clot, untranslatable.
Emma Neale
Note: There is a shadow of the phrase ‘the green language’ here; also known as la langueverte; in Jewish mysticism, Renaissance magic, and alchemy, this was a name for the language of birds; often thought to attain perfection and offer revelation. Also see ‘High winds kill thousands of migratory birds in disaster over Greece’, Guardian, April 2020.
Is the whole world going into Mutuwhenua? I’m looking at No Other Place to Stand (te whenua, te whenua engari kāore he tūrangawaewae) and it gets me wondering about the end of the whole blimmin’ world. Blimey. What will I do then? Can’t swim in ash. Can’t plant akeake. Can’t eat mushrooms like our tūpuna, the ones that grew on trees and used for rongoā, or practice as children on gourds the tā moko tattoo patterns of our tūpuna with plant juices from tutu and kākāriki (pp. 98–100 of Murdoch Riley’s Māori Healing and Herbal). Soot from kauri was rubbed into tattoos to make them black forever.
Robert Sullivan from Hopurangi / Songcatcher: Poems from the Maramataka (Auckland University Press, 2024)
E hoa mā, please buy No Other Place to Stand:An Anthology of Climate Change Poetryfrom Aotearoa New Zealand Edited by Jordan Hamel, Rebecca Hawkes, Erik Kennedy and Essa Ranapiri (Auckland University Press, 2022)
Mining Lament
I went to see the golden hill but it had all been mined away all that’s left is an empty bowl of yellow gorse and rutted clay
But it had all been mined away except a clay bluff topped with stone in yellow gorse and rutted clay one stubborn relic stands alone
Only a clay bluff tipped with stone remains of the hill the painter saw one stubborn relic stands alone of a rounded hill of golden ore
Remains of the hill the painter saw rutted clay and a stumbling stream a rounded hill of golden ore sluiced away with a sluicing gun
Rutted clay and a stumbling stream all that’s left is an empty bowl sluiced away with a sluicing gun I went to see the golden hill
(after a painting by Christopher Aubrey, c. 1870of Round Hill, Aparima, Southland)
Cilla McQueen from The Radio Room (Otago University Press, 2010)
Thomson Gorge, Gregory O’Brien, Oct 2025
Old Prayer
Hawk, as you lift and flare above the river’s slide, take us not in thy talons. Take us not from the bank or branch or wrench us from the earth, lifted by calamitous wings. Fix us not with your eye. Take us not up the way you raise the sparrow and the finch. Leave us as the covey of quail in the willow. Leave us be.
Jenny Bornholdt from Lost and Somewhere Else (Victoria University Press, 2019)
Gorge
Somewhere
in deep time, this collection of
chemical / isotopic / insoluble
composition signatures rises
and falls —
and falls —
falls —
rises
No one still, silent surface
along this space
in this intense South,
Gwondwana: floods, grey-washed
avalanches, rumbling glaciers, slips
hot water rushing through cracks
engorging crystalline schist
with veins of quartz
layers of platy mineral grains
{ graphite, pyrite, arsenopyrite }
Variations roaring through endless seasons
myriad manifolds must melt
surfaces scrape
gales salve
escarpment creep
alps keen, pine, take
Glaciers loose from time
Ice must, is—
grey, weathering—
heat, rousing—
Mata Au quickening—
Give, heave, cleave, groan
water milky blue, rock particles
scattering sunlight beginning and beginning and
Fast track to hammer / / Fast track to tamper \ \ Fast track to “explore”, drill, dredge, bore / / Fast track to gorge gorge gorge \ \ Fast track to contamination / / Fast track to hollowed out \ \ Fast track to haunted / / Fast track to dust \ \ Fast track to coarse-veined lies / / Fast track to nowhere \ \ Fast track to what would the real Santana, St Anna, say? / / / Sancta Ana, ora pro nobis.
Annabel Wilson
a suitable machine for the millions for/after Hannah Hayes
forge and smithy durability before cheapness do the work of a dozen men
colonise settle, spin the wheel first cost, last cost, stop
the machine if necessary check up press and guard before
you start up all cut, all shaped all mannered the same two
tubes snug one turns another turns one turns a way
to make it work invention is the mother on two
wheels and everything is material or it is
immaterial floating, dust between us
Liz Breslin from show you’re working out, (Dead Bird Books, 2025)
Stone
After all, stones remember the opening and closing of oceans the thrust of volcanoes; they remember, in their sediments, ancient creatures and trees, rivers, lakes and glaciations. After all stone is the firmness in the world. It offers landfall, a hand-hold, reception. It is a founding father with a mother-tongue. You can hear it in the gravity of your body. You can hear it with the bones of your body. You can hardly hear it. See that line of coast… See the ranges ranging… they seem to be saying after you, after you, after all…
Dinah Hawken from Ocean and Stone (Victoria University Press, 2015)
Māori Point Road, Tarras
You and not I, notice the change in light at this time. On my side, it’s all busted rough-chewed grass, stink of silage, black bulls in drenched paddocks. Rusted mailboxes punctuate the long gravel line. Drenched sheep. We are haunted by the chortle of a trapped magpie, the Judas bird made to betray. The black glove comes down once a day.
On your side, twilight bathes paddocks Steinlager green, all the way to those wedding cake Buchanans, the white crown in the distance. The human need to see shapes in things: a rock that looks like a wing. We carry on, not speaking. We carry on not speaking. You know I want to ask you something.
Annabel Wilson
Substratum
We are so vulnerable here. Our time on earth a time of how to keep warm and how to be fed and how to quell our most anxious thoughts which come back and back to connection.
How do we stay here on this earth which is right below our feet? Soil, clay, substrates of rock, magma, lava, water, oil, gas; the things we want to bring up and use, the things we want to use up.
If all we ever wanted was to know we would be warm and fed and listened to, would we be kinder? Would we in turn listen? Would we understand the importance of those close to us and the importance of what is under us?
We have the far sight. And we are what the shamans warned against.
Jillian Sullivan Previously published in Poems4Peace, Printable Reality
Deserts, for Instance
The loveliest places of all are those that look as if there’s nothing there to those still learning to look
Brian Turner from Just This (Victoria University Press, 2009)
Ōpawaho Heathcote River
As a child we fished and swam the Ōpawaho Now Ōpawaho is muddy full of silt unswimmable unfishable for days after rain
as cars leach poisons, some factories spill metals, subdivisions and farms without 20 metre wide riparian plantings spread, as shallow rooting pine forests get blown and burn Opawaho’s waters grow thick with mud sediment and poisons
For our tamariki to swim and play safely in our river we want 20 metre wide riparian plantings on each side of any stream or creek flowing into the awa where the awa flows muddy we can plant raupo
build flax weirs to stop sediment with holes to let fish through lay oyster shells on the river floor Any other ideas let us know
Ōpawaho pollution is our mamae pain Her harikoa joy brings smiles to the faces of our people Her rongoa healing restores our wetland home
Kathleen Gallagher
Great Men (after Brecht)
‘Great Men say dumb things.’
And then they do them. When that plumped-up someone is trying to talk to you about themselves and they are using ‘fat word’ you can be sure they are as spindle-shanked in heart as anyone can be. ’The dumbness of their third-rate ideas’ not even a tattered wonder. And you know that whenever they are smooth-talking about peace, they are preparing the war-machine. Just to show you how dumb they really are, they keep talking to each other about how they are going to live forever.
Michael Harlow from Landfall 243, 2022
Poet’s note: Bertolt Brecht was a Poet, Playwright, and Theatre Director. He was renowned for The Three Penny Opera, and his most famous plays Mother Courage and Children, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle. His most famous quotation: ’Terrible is the Temptation to be Good’. As a Marxist and Poet he was noted for his social and political criticism.
Thomson Gorge Road Song
“Those people who have sought to deify our wilderness … those days are over. We are not going to sit around and read poetry to rare lizards, whilst our current account deficit goes down the gurgler… If there is a mining opportunity and it’s impeded by a blind frog, goodbye Freddy”. (Shane Jones, Minister of Resources, May 2025)
Stand me a while in this warming stream then stay me with flagons, apples—
the sustainable industries of each numbered morning. Or bury me in arsenic, in heavy metals,
blanket me in blackened earth and scatter my ashes beside the Mata-Au,
in the bright orange of its contaminated flow. Bury but do not forget me under what was once
a greenwood, then lay that ailing tree to rest beside me. Steady and sustain me, streets
of the noble town of Alexandra, strike up your municipal band and
bring on the blossom princesses of early spring. Forget if you can this season’s toxic bloom.
Bury me in sodium cyanide, then set me adrift as toxic dust, carry me high above
your ruined waters, your tailings. Bury me in spurious claims, the cheery sighing
of cash registers, volatile stocks and the non-refundable deposits of a town that goes boom. Lay me down
in bedrock and slurry, in overburden and paydirt, fast-track me to the next life.
Bury me under the freshly laid asphalt of Thomson Gorge Road
in gravel and aggregate—bury me there, beneath your highway to hell, but please don’t take me
all the way with you, Minister Jones. Play instead this song on every stringed instrument of the province: on the wiring of
O’Connell’s Bridge, each note strung out on vineyard wiring and well-tempered,
rabbit-proof fencing. Sing me this open-cast, sky-high song above Rise & Shine Valley,
bury me in the company of the last native frog of Dunstan, the last attentive lizard,
lay me to rest, this once quiet road my pillow, sing me this song but do not wake me.
A Shell-Print of Waves – Aramoana Poems eds David Eggleton and Michelle Elvy At the Bay | I Te Kokoru, 2025
A Shell-Print of Waves – Aramoana Poems is like a poem travel guide that draws a particular place into view with a rich stitching of visual detail. The chapbook presents poems that came out of sessions run by David Eggleton, Michelle Elvy and Madeleine Child in Aramoana in April 2024 and April 2025. The venture was run in association with Wild Dunedin while the chapbook was supported by Ōtepoti Dunedin UNESCO City of Literature.
Twenty-two poets step off from a place, Aramoana, to reflect and absorb: perhaps a writing exercise where you translate what is physically present through an array of senses, memory prompts, thought trails, word delights. A pocket guide book, and it feels like I have spent the weekend in a place unfamiliar to me. There are recurring motifs (how could there not be?): calm, storm, movement, constant change, sunlight, sky, birds, waves sand, sea. Every now and then, the presence of the writing circle filters through, exposing a process of seeing and doing.
I borrowed a few verbs from Michelle Elvy’s poem, ‘Waterways 2: our stories are wild weather’, to underline the way it’s a collection of shifting rhythms, as the poems burn grab ripple rumble puff weave carry nudge rainwash cloudswim swell pull dip.
Here’s a sample from Diane Brown’s ‘Not a matter of calm’, a poem that shifts and twists:
( . . .) We have come
to expect no day here the same. Sometimes a flat sea and sun to bathe in. Sometimes
we come face to face with wildness, sea lions, leopard seals, or our shadowy selves shifting course.
In ‘Between Aramoana Spit and Taiaroa Head’, David Eggleton amplifies both sound and image on the line, embedding the reader in a shadowy-rich scene. Here is the final stanza:
There’s a salty savour to the air; brine bubbles; the tide’s sheen glides up over the wet, flat sand. Shadows stretch estranged from what they shadow: the shadow of a flounder, the shadow of an albatross, shadow of macrocarpa, shadow of a channel marker, shadow of a cargo ship bearing logs into chasms of the night.
Gilbert May, as the cover shows, has produced the perfect line drawings and design for the subject matter. This gorgeous wee chapbook is a perfect treat to tuck into pockets for a dose of weekend travel. Maybe I’ll pick up a pen, look about me, reflect a moment, and start writing: the flat and the wild, the shadows and the cargo.
Throw Net | Upena Ho’olei, David Eggleton, artwork by Tonu Shane Eggleton, National Library / Fernbank Studios, 2021
I’m mesmerised by the sunshine’s sheen, and every minute particular feels mine.
The sea disgorges its catalogue of shells on the white page of sand for no-one.
On my hotel bed, I dream and sail.
from ‘Tourist Island’
Our current Poet Laureate, David Eggleton, has published a handset, hand-bound collection of poetry with artwork (woodblock prints) by his brother Tonu Shane Eggleton. Brendan O’Brien, beautiful-book craftsman extraordinaire, has produced an edition of 100 at his Fernbank Studios. The book is exquisite. I run my hand over the rough edged paper (Kerkall, plus Stonehenge for the covers). It is book joy. Holding this book. Holding this beauty. The artwork is an evocative sheen on the page.
The National Library, which has administered the New Zealand Poet Laureate Award since 2007, published the book. The award was established by Bill Manhire and winemaker John Buck as the Te Mata Poet Laureate Award n 1996. Throw Net | Upena Ho’olei is fittingly dedicated to John.
In 2018 David spent three months at the University of Hawai’i’s Moana Campus, as the Fulbright-Creative New Zealand Pacific Writer Resident. The poems began in notebooks while he was there, and were completed upon his return.
Throw Net | Upena Ho’olei, with nine poems and a scattering of artworks, is the perfect place to sojourn.
This is poetry that celebrates the moment. It feels like the poet is inhabiting a particular place, at a particular time, and slowly breathes in the experience. The poem establishes a heightened relationship with place, a translation of experience within measure poetic form. The treasured details offer sound and visual explosions to the point I am imbibing a poetry feast, a delectable banquet. I am unashamedly drawn to food metaphors because poetry is a form of nourishment on the tongue, in the heart, in the lungs. This is poetry that is so very nourishing.
There is quietness, there is melody, there are shifting keys and multiple forms. I am breathing in salt and ocean, and undulating voyage. I am lingering over vignette and anecdote. In this time of limited travel and strict local borders, poetry is a travel plan, an itinerary of respite and joy. You might swim with turtles and hear the church bells ring out. There is ‘the chop of waves’ and ‘ukelele strums’. Expect mountains and lava and sun, much much sun. I am feeling skin glazed as I spend a whole Saturday drifting in and out of these poems. Pleasure crafts. Such honeyed vessels.
I love this lovingly crafted chapbook. Such economy, such fluidity, such reach. I dream and I set sail.
The snores of a sleeper on a beach towel recite genealogy under volcano’s glow. A sunken raft of manta rays stirs after dark.
Hands hula-hula, shaping sandwiches into islands; mechanically, a shark takes a bite out of the moonlight.
Someone slings a hammock between trees. Each wave is a line; each line is breaking; and even the mountains are setting sail.
Music is the first poetry attraction for me. I am drawn to poems that sing. Poems sing in multiple keys with affecting and shifting chords, rhythms, harmonies, counterpoints, pitch, cadence, codas, crescendo. Tune your ear into the poetry of Karlo Mila, Emma Neale, Sue Wootton, Bill Manhire, Hinemoana Baker, Michele Leggott, Nina Mingya Powles, Lily Holloway, Alison Wong, Chris Tse, Mohamed Hassan, Gregory Kan, Anna Jackson, David Eggleton and you will hear music before you enter heart, mystery, experience, startle. Take a listen to Bernadette Hall or Dinah Hawken or Anne Kennedy. Anuja Mitra. Louise Wallace. How about Grace Iwashita Taylor? Ian Wedde. Tusiata Avia. Tayi Tibble. Rebecca Hawkes. Helen Rickerby. Selina Tusitala Marsh. Murray Edmond. Apirana Taylor. Iona Winter. Rose Peoples. Sam Duckor Jones. Vincent O’Sullivan. Kiri Pianhana-Wong. Jackson Nieuwland. Serie Barford. Listening in is of the greatest body comfort and you won’t be able to stop leaning your ear in closer. I think of one poet and then another, to the point I could curate an anthology of musical poets. I can name 100 without moving from the kitchen chair. Ah. Bliss.
But for this theme I went in search of poems that speak of song. The poems I have selected are not so much about song but have a song presence that leads in multiple directions. And yes they sing. Once again I am grateful to publishers and poets who are supporting my season of themes. Two more themes to go.
The poems
poem to Hone Tuwhare 08
the master
adroit composer of
‘No Ordinary Sun’
has gone
and still
the music grows flows grumbles and laughs
from his pen
only the old house has fallen to the wind and storm
death shakes the tree but the bird lives on
Apirana Taylor
from A Canoe in Midstream: Poems new and old, Canterbury University Press, 2009 (2019)
Between Speech and Song
I’m sorry, you said.
What for, I said. And then
you said it again.
The house was cooling.
The pillowcases had blown
across the lawn.
We felt the usual shortcomings
of abstractions. I hope,
you said. Me too, I said.
The distance between our minds
is like the space
between speech and song.
Lynley Edmeades
from As the Verb Tenses, Otago University Press, 2016
Dust House
my sister is humming
through wallpaper
the front door is shutting
and opening like lungs
to kauri trees
leaping upwards through air
my lungs are pressed
between walls
grey warblers sing like
dust moving through air
the sunflower is opening
and shutting like lungs
my lungs are shifting
the air
Rata Gordon
from Second Person, Victoria University Press, 2020
Lullaby
The woman next door sings so slowly someone must have died. She practices her sorry aria through the walls. When we bump on the steps she is neighbourly, maybe, with her purpled eyes. She tries for lightness. The radio tells me it is snowing somewhere south. Drifts fall down for days. The presenter uses the word ghastly far too often. In the ghastly snow, he says, animals dig for their calves. When we meet on the path my own voice is chestnut and dumb. ‘It’s a ghastly thing,’ I say. ‘It was a ghastly mistake.’ In the dark the woman’s voice touches a sweet, high place. It’s a small cupboard where her children once hid when she’d tried to explain – which you never really can – why the animals must paw in the cold, brown slush. Where are the young? Who hears their low, fallow voices?
Sarah Jane Barnett
from Bonsai – Best small storiesfrom Aotearoa New Zealand, edited by Michelle Elvy, Frankie McMillan and James Norcliffe, Canterbury University Press, 2018
Song
i
The song feels like singing,
looks out the window:
clouds glued to the sky,
harbour slate-grey,
hills like collapsed elephants.
There’s food stuck to the highchair,
a plastic spoon on the floor.
The cat stares up in awe at the fridge.
The song opens its mouth,
but seems to have forgotten the words.
ii
The song wakes up.
It’s dark.
Someone is crying.
The morepork in the ngaio
shakes out its slow spondee:
more pork more pork more pork.
Back in the dream a line
of faces passes the window.
Each face smiles, lifts
its lips to show large teeth.
iii
The song sits at the window, humming
ever so softly, tapping
a rhythm on the table-edge, watching
the harbour slowly losing
colour. At the very far end
of the harbour slightly up to the right,
a zip of lights marks the hill
over to Wainuiomata. If that zip
could be unzipped, thinks the song,
the whole world might change.
iv
The song strokes the past
like a boa, like some fur muff
or woollen shawl,
but the past is not soft at all;
it’s rough to the touch,
sharp as broken glass.
v
The song longs to sing in tune.
The song longs to be in tune.
The black dog comes whenever
the song whistles, wagging its tail.
The black dog waits for the song’s whistle.
The black dog wants a long walk.
vi
The song croons “Here Comes the Night”
very quietly. Meanwhile the baby
spoons its porridge into a moon.
The black dog leads the song
down long, unlovely streets.
The night is slowly eating the moon.
Harry Ricketts
from Winter Eyes, Victoria University Press, 2018
The Crowd
The crowd is seaweed and there’s always one man too tall at least or one man dancing too much or one woman touching too much. We form short bonds with each other. The man next to me we briefly worry is a fascist. But him and I set a rhythm of touches with each other as we’re together and apart from the music and the bodies. When the bassline and the drums are inside my entire body they always shake up grief like sediment in water so that I am the sediment and my tears become water. And I am the water and the seaweed at the same time and I hover in the thick of the sound experiencing myself experiencing sound and feeling and my body as one piece of a larger thing. I want to be part of a larger thing as often as I can. So many days there isn’t enough music to pull us together. We shred each other, other days. A little rip. A tiny tear. A deep cut. We curl backwards into ourselves to do the damage. I follow the line. I rise into it because it is the sea and the only thing to do is to rise. I am bread and I am fire. I am the line of the horizon as it is reflected back to you. We make our own beds and lie in them. You will have said something. To me. Later, as I think it through I remember us neck to neck, clutching.
Emma Barnes
from Sweet Mammalian 7
singing in the wire
The song is a clutch of mailboxes
at the end of an undulating road,
an unsteady stack of bee-hives
beside poplars.
The song is the whine from a transformer,
crickets, waist-high roadside grass,
a summer that just will not let up.
The song is a power pole’s pale-brown
ceramic cup receiving a direct hit
from a clod flung by my brother.
It is looped bars laid
against the white paper of a gravel road.
Released the year and month my father died,
‘Wichita Lineman’ can still bring me the valley
where we lived,
still bring me grief, the sound
of wind through wire, the loneliness
of country verges; but does not bring
my father back. You can ask
too much of a song.
Kay McKenzie Cooke
from Born To A Red-Headed Woman, Otago University Press 2014
thursday quartet 9:15
The stairwell grew and rolled
with slackened half-night. Quite clearly
she saw how her words had become her.
When she sang she remembered; her breath was deep
letters unnudged. The stairwell hummed. Everything
smelt of other people’s hands.
One, two, three. Another life had trained her ready.
She knew these breaths. It had been a day
of near misses, daredevil secret creatures
who followed her home, a line of sight
and the road, misadventured art deco.
Had she been good enough?
At night her window smithied day.
She could see the boats as they came.
The stairwell rose and then uprising
the first notes.
Pippi Jean
Trigger
When Johnny Cash was sad he’d call Willie Nelson and ask for a joke.
Willie knew a dirty joke – good or bad – was the secret to happiness.
Some people haven’t yet realised that Willie Nelson is one of the greatest singers, guitarists
and songwriters. But there’s time. There’s always time. Despite it being funny how it always seems
to just slip away. Still, to add to the legends of Willie smoking pot on the roof of the White House
and blowing out interviewers so that they couldn’t remember where they parked their car or where they lived or worked,
we can now thank Willie not only for his 70 albums and for writing the greatest jukebox weepie of all time…
But, also, on some level, he helped keep Johnny Cash alive for as long as he lasted. Johnny battled his depression
with a dirty joke from Willie Nelson. I’m not saying it works for everyone but it served The Man in Black.
carrying its song to crushed metal, smashed glass,
and fading in echoes of the old folks’ choir.
David Eggleton
from The Conch Trumpet, Otago University Press, 2015
Ephemera
My brother says that he doesn’t
understand poetry. He hears the words
but they all intersperse into a polyphonic
whirl of voices; no meaning to them
beyond the formation and execution
of sounds upon lips, pressing together
and coming apart. I cannot touch or feel
words, but I see them ‒ the word ‘simile’
is a grimacing man, poised on the edge
of polite discomfort and anguish. ‘Dazzled’ is
a 1920s flapper with broad, black eyes
and lank black hair around the edges of
her face. A boy in my music class hears
colours ‒ well, not hearing as such, he says,
but images in his mind’s eye. People play
tunes and ask him what colour it is, but
they play all at once, and he says that it is
the indistinguishable brown of all colours
combined. I think of a boy I used to know
called Orlando, and how this word conjures
the sight of a weathered advert for a tropical holiday
in my mind ‒ a forgotten promise, just ephemera
and not to be mentioned. The History room at school smells
like strange, zesty lemons, like the smell when you
peel a mandarin and its pores disperse their
sebum into the air, or when you squeeze the juice
from a lemon into your hands, and feel it dissolve
the soapy first layer of skin. I always think of
a certain someone when I smell this, even though
they wear a different perfume, and when I listen
to soft guitar ballads I think of them too, even though
I know they wouldn’t have heard them. All
of the sounds and smells and thoughts blend
into ephemera, scorched postcards of violets and
swallows, etched with the perfect handwriting of
old, consigned to antique stores that smell of
smoke. Things of the past with no value, no
substance, just air filled with citrus mist. I collect
each word and strain of what was once fresh in
my mind, in a forgotten jacket pocket, to be discovered
on some rainy day, years later. I’ll pull out the
postcard and think of the way I always look twice
when I see someone with curly hair; the word ‘longing’
is a blue wisp that creeps between the cracks
in my fingers. That wisp hides in these things,
tucked away, like the 1930s train tickets I found
in an old book. I wonder if their owner ever made it
to their destination. I wonder who they were.
Cadence Chung
first appeared in Milly’s Magazine
Love songs we haven’t written
Within the warm wreckage of me,
I’d never dare to ask you, but
in that moment when pain finds it plowing rhythm,
would you want me dead?
It’s a startling thought.
So round and whole and ordinary.
But you can’t know these things until
you’re sunk deep in the geometry of them. Of course,
the bed I lie on would be lily white and threatening levitation.
I would imagine the emptiness I leave and
you would think of all the ways to fill it.
That is the grotesque version.
It should of course be the other way around.
I don’t need misery to write poetry.
For me words come only after precarity passes
and there is safety in sitting still for long stretches.
Words, eventually, have the thickness of matter
left out too long in the sun. My love,
If we had a daughter, I’d be more dangerous.
She’d lick words whole out of the air.
I would recognize her tiny anthem.
Like you, she’d need two anchors, and only one mast.
Like me, she’d be immovable, a miniature old woman
by seven years old.
Catherine Trundle
thursday’s choir
my singing teacher says yawning during lessons is good
it means the soft palate is raised and air circulates the bulb of your skull
to be pulled out between front teeth like a strand of taut hair
gum skin or yesterday’s nectarine fibre
in empty classrooms my body is a pear, grounded but reaching
the piano is out of tune, its chords now elevator doors
a shrieking melody that says: relish the peeling off
floss til you bleed and watch through the bannisters
voices merge like a zip ripped over fingers
reeling backwards and thrown to the wall
are all the arcades, rubber children
midnight sirens and birds sounding off one by one
the sopranos cry out offering forged banknotes
while the altos bring the alleyways
you crash through the windscreen, thumbs deep in pie
laundromat coins with that rhythm
Lily Holloway
Emma Barnes lives and writes in Te Whanganui-ā-Tara. She’s working on an anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ writing with co-conspirator Chris Tse. It’s to be published by AUP in 2021. In her spare time she lifts heavy things up and puts them back down again.
Sarah Jane Barnett is a writer and editor from Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Her poetry, essays and reviews have been published widely in Aotearoa. Her debut poetry collection A Man Runs into a Woman (Hue + Cry Press) was a finalist in the 2013 New Zealand Post Book Awards. Her secondcollection Work (Hue + Cry Press) was published in 2015. Sarah is currently writing a book on womanhood and midlife.
Kay McKenzie Cooke’s fourth poetry collection was published by The Cuba Press in June 2020 and is titled Upturned. She lives and writes in Ootepoti / Dunedin.
Cadence Chung is a student from Wellington High School. She started writing poetry during a particularly boring maths lesson when she was nine. Outside of poetry, she enjoys singing, reading old books, and perusing antique stores.
Lynley Edmeades is the author of two poetry collections, most recently Listening In (Otago Uni Press, 2019). She lives in Dunedin and teaches poetry and creative writing at the University of Otago.
David Eggleton is the Aotearoa New Zealand Poet Laureate 2019 – 2022. His most recent book is The Wilder Years: Selected Poems, published by Otago University Press.
Rata Gordon is a poet, embodiment teacher and arts therapist. Her first book of poetry Second Person was published in 2020 by Victoria University Press. Through her kitchen window, she sees Mount Karioi. www.ratagordon.com
Lily Holloway is a queer nacho-enthusiast. She is forthcoming in AUP New Poets 8 and you can find her work on lilyholloway.co.nz.
Pippi Jean is eighteen and just moved to Wellington for her first year at Victoria University. Her most recent works can be found in Landfall, Starling, Takahe, Mayhem, and Poetry New Zealand Yearbook among others.
Harry Ricketts teaches English literature and creative writing at Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka. His Selected Poems appeared in June, Victoria University Press.
Simon Sweetman is a writer and broadcaster. His debut book of poems, “The Death of Music Journalism” was published last year via The Cuba Press. He is the host of the weekly Sweetman Podcast and he writes about movies, books and music for a Substack newsletter called “Sounds Good!” (simonsweetman.substack.com to sign up). He blogs at Off The Tracks and sometimes has a wee chat about music on RNZ. He lives in Wellington with Katy and Oscar, the loves of his life. They share their house with Sylvie the cat and Bowie the dog.
Apirana Taylor, Ngati Porou, Te Whanau a Apanui, Ngati Ruanui, Te Ati Awa, is a nationally and internationally published poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, actor, painter and musician. He has been Writer in Residence at Canterbury and Massey Universities. He frequently tours nationally and internationally visiting schools, tertiary institutions and prisons reading his poetry, storytelling and taking creative writing workshops. He has written six collections of poetry, a book of plays, three collections of short stories, and two novels. His work has been included in many national and international anthologies.
Catherine Trundle is a poet and anthropologist, with recent works published in Landfall, Takahē, Poetry New Zealand Yearbook, Not Very Quiet, and Plumwood Mountain.
Vaughan Rapatahana offers a commentary on his old schoolmate David Eggleton, along with a close look at David’s recent poem, ‘Are Friends Electric’. Terrific piece which you can read in full at Jacket 2. Here is a taster:
‘I have known David ever since we both went to the same South Auckland, New Zealand, schools waaaaay back in the 1960s. Indeed, we were in the same classes at Aorere College, Mangere, where David had a definite proclivity for compiling vocabulary. I recall once presenting him with the triad “copious, abundant, plethora,” which he noted was good, nodding enthusiastically.
Eggleton loves words, most especially esoteric, arcane, and interesting lexis, which he crafts into his cadenced poetry with considerable care. His poems are vital verbal extravaganza and this — along with his indomitable delivery style, itself rhythmically syncopated — are hallmarks of his work as a poet, given that he is also a writer across several other genres such as art criticism, literary reviews, and editing, and holds other roles, such as a recording artist. His poems abound with layers of colourful imagery, often adumbated, so that their overall patina is distinctive: one can often recognise his distinctive work even if his name does not appear on the page.’
The Wilder Years: Selected Poems, Otago University Press, 2021
David Eggleton is a poet and writer of Palagi, Rotuman and Tongan descent based in Dunedin. He has published a number of poetry collections, and has also released a number of recordings with his poetry set to music by a variety of musicians and composers. He is the former Editor of Landfall and Landfall Review Online as well as the Phantom Billstickers Cafe Reader. His book The Conch Trumpet won the 2016 Ockham New Zealand Book Award for Poetry. In 2016, he received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry. His most recent poetry collection is The Wilder Years: Selected Poems, published by Otago University Press in May 2021. He is the Aotearoa New Zealand Poet Laureate for 2019 – 2022.
Not many younger poets sent me poems about ice but there were loads of dreaming poems. I have always loved poems that dream because poetry is a close relation with its slants, mists, hallucinations, and deep personal cores. I sometimes think that to dream is to write. To enter the opaque, to reclaim the obvious, to have no idea where you will end up or how you will get there. To astonish yourself.
I am so very grateful to the poets and publishers who have backed my themed poetry season with such loving support.
Ten poems about dreaming
the dream is real
the moon is an open eye
high in the sky or winking
at the world below
the wind is the sea’s breath
rustling the leaves in the trees
night is a dark river
flowing through the day
a bird is a song
the dream is real
clouds are ghosts
flight is a wing
Apirana Taylor
from a canoe in midstream, Canterbury University Press, 2009
Insomnia
it is a black night
I lie perfectly still
mine is the long
awake adult body
two small boys
flickering at either side
night sweats
bad dreams
fluttering in and
out of sheets
I lie black
in between
head
thorax, abdomen
trembling children
my wings
Karlo Mila
from A Well Written Body, Huia Press, 2008
My Father Dreams of His Father
My father dreams of his father
walking in the garden of the old family homestead
on Kawaha Point.
I have not been back since he passed away.
As decrepit dogs wander off under trees
to sniff out their final resting places,
elderly men wait in the wings
rehearsing exit lines.
I’m sure my grandfather never envied his dog more
than during those last days.
I’m sure, given the choice, he would have preferred
to slip away under the magnolias.
The garden is tended by different hands now.
My grandmother still walks by the lake,
her little dog in tow. The current man of the house
is more interested in the chasing of swans
than the cultivating of camellias.
My father dreams of his father
walking in the garden of the old family homestead
on Kawaha Point.
I have not been back since he passed away.
Claudia Jardine
from AUP New Poets 7, ed. Anna Jackson, Auckland University Press, 2020
Sentries
I’m frantically chasing my mother who weaves in and out of the aisles throwing down craft supplies. I trip over scissors and quick unpicks
not seeing her face, only clean ponytail and collar poking out over plum cardigan. We run between shelves of antique vases but lose contact with the linoleum
and float out. In this world we drive couches like cars. I’m picking one up from the junkyard with a blue shag cushion for reference. Bumper stickers are glinting
while the couches lie gridlike. We scramble through the drivers’ seats running fingers through the upholstery. In the winter gardens there are fish tanks
nestled between succulents. One has a tangle of thin eels within it. Boys tap on the home of a solitary neon tetra until it shatters. I hold the fragments together
and try to keep the fish swimming in a handful of glass and water. They put me in the newspaper. I run out to catch you in the ocean, my mother
but you keep dipping under. As I look around I notice, embedded in rock formations are those white plastic fans, not rotating anymore just facing the horizon.
Lily Holloway
originally published at The Spin Off, October, 2020
interventionalist god
in my dream nick cave had a long, thick black mane.
it swung around his hips, kissed
with a bright white streak
snaking its length.
he served noodle soup at the concert
full of moving mushrooms, blooming
into elegant dancing technicolour spores;
tasted like purple.
the show was very red, like the blood
of his falling son. my mother
was falling too,
drunkenly, over crimson seats,
hurting her back and lying down with the room spinning.
pissing off the man in the toupee, and toupee’s wife.
nick drawled, don’t worry,
sung a song sad and it broke us,
spun around inside a steel cage,
spray-painted KINGS on our leather jackets
so we could get into his next stadium show free.
afterwards, we matched up our snails in the foyer.
nick was smoking through tears out back,
about to catch a flight, saying,
i think i’ve met someone with your name,
and it was you already.
Hebe Kearney
Lake Wakatipu
A jade lizard bends in a circle,
chasing its tail;
straightens, and darts for a crevice.
Mist swathes in grey silk the lake:
flat-stomached, calm, slow-pulsed,
a seamless bulk.
Vapours spiral,
pushing up to a cloud-piercer,
where snow has been sprinkled
like powder from a talc can at height.
Grandeur stands muffled.
The Earnslaw headbutts shorewards.
After lying prone for years,
rocks shift downwards
at speed, eager to wheel
through air, crash in a gully,
and not move.
The lake buttons up to dive deep,
leaving a perfectly blank black space,
through which you might fall forever.
David Eggleton
from Edgeland and other poems, Otago University Press, 2018
Daisy
This town is just one great big farm. The main road runs alongside these power poles tilted over green green paddocks, the lines all sagging, the poles on the piss. You hit it at forty k and slug down the main street, past the Strand, the Top Pub, the Nott. Past blue election billboards and wooden fences painted red with Water Gouging and Inheritance Tax. The arterial line is just panel beaters, tractors, pots of pink flowers dripping from shop windows. She says they look like icing. And these cows. There are forty-two of them, all painted up to look cultural. Blue like an old tea cup, pearls and roses dribbling over the rim. One unzipped at the side, with muscle and guts peeking out like baked beans and salmon. One flower power cow, real LSD yellow and orange, like it sorta wandered over from Woodstock and got lost for years and years. Little kids run across the road just to touch them. Name their favourites after their pet cats. Rusty, Mittens, Boots. They’re bolted to the pavement so at night they just haunt the main street, all washed out and hollow. But the worst is that giant one right at the start of town. Two stories high, with black splotches like flames of tar. I have these dreams that the paddocks are on fire and the ground is opening up and all you can hear is mooing. The Mega Cow watching over his herd like some great milky God. The trains rattle past at dawn and wake me up. The cows hardly blink.
Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connor
from Ngā Kupu Waikato: an anthology of Waikato Poetry, ed. Vaughan Rapatahana, Self Published, 2019
Tilting
The woman on the bus said
I’ve never been on a bus before
as she lifted her bag
a miniature suitcase
black and shiny as a beetle.
Next time you’ll know what to do
said the driver as he stood on the brakes
pointed to the building on the left and said
The lift’ll take you to The Terrace.
There were no ledges on The Terrace
just buildings tilting and leaning
and the wind to push against.
That night, unpacked and tired
the woman climbed on her black beetle bag
and flew across the harbour
soaring above its flat cool face
staring deep into its mouth
and wondering about earthquakes.
The next morning the bus driver couldn’t shake
the woman from his mind.
As he left the depot
his bus pshishing and grinding through peak hour flow
he checked his mirror
but she wasn’t there
instead he saw the edges of his bus converting
row by row, slice by slice
into a huge loaf of bread.
The aroma filled the aisles
stirring the appetites of even
his sleepiest passengers
and when he neared the end of Lambton Quay
all that was left of the bus, was the crust.
Some like the crust, some don’t, he thought
as he chewed and chomped
until the last crumb fell
into the gutter, into the drain
into the harbour, and out to sea.
What now? he said
peering skywards, catching a glint.
Trish Harris
published under the title ‘Openings’ in New Zealand Poetry Society Anthology 2015/2016
bone / tired
I am tired to my bones
this exhaustion
has wrapped around my ribs
sunk into my jaw
slunk
down
each vertebrae
I take deep slow breaths
each exhale
rattles the cage of ribs
I don’t sleep anymore
I just rattle around the house
the rooms empty of the wakeful
I touch each wall
like a talisman
like an averter of the evil eye
to avert whichever evil
might choose us tonight
I keep vigil
I don’t sleep anymore
rattle the bones
of the sleeping
I am rattled
to my bones
I don’t sleep anymore
the bones of my shoulders
have permanently rolled inward
they hunch
waiting for a fight
for a blow
I have never been in a fight
just in anticipation
of the fight, the flight
there are 27 bones in the human hand
I count them all
in lieu of sleeping
I am tired to my bones
I don’t sleep anymore
Rose Peoples
Pasture and flock
Staring up into the sky my feet
anchor me to the ground so hard
I’m almost drowning, drowning,
in air, my hair falling upwards
around my shoulders, I think I’ll hug
my coat closer. I’m standing
on hundreds of blades of grass, and
still there are so many more
untrodden on. Last night, in bed,
you said, ‘you are the sheet
of linen and I am the threads,’ and
I wanted to know what you meant
but you wouldn’t wake up to tell me
and in the morning you didn’t
remember, and I had forgotten
till now when I think, who is
the blades of grass, who is the pasture?
It is awfully cold, and my coat
smells of something unusual.
It almost seems as if it is the stars
smelling, as if there were
an electrical fault in the sky,
and though it is almost too dark
to see I can see the sheep
moving closer, and the stars
falling. I feel like we are all
going to plunge into the sky
at once, the sheep and I,
and I am the sheep and I am
the flock, and you are the pasture
I fall from, the stars and the sky.
Anna Jackson
from Pasture and Flock: New & Selected Poems, Auckland University Press, 2018
Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connor was awarded the 2018 Charles Brasch Young Writers’ Essay Competition, and the 2017 Monash Prize for Emerging Writers. Her work has appeared in Starling, Mayhem, Brief, Poetry New Zealand, Landfall, Turbine, Flash Frontier, Mimicry, Min-a-rets, Sweet Mammalian, Sport and Verge. She is Poetry New Zealand‘s 2021 Featured Poet. She writes thanks to the support of some of the best people on this great watery rock.
David Eggleton is the Aotearoa New Zealand Poet Laureate 2019 – 2022. His most recent book is The Wilder Years: Selected Poems, published by Otago University Press.
Trish Harris has written two books – a poetry collection My wide white bed and a memoir The Walking Stick Tree. She teaches non-fiction on the Whitireia Creative Writing Programme, is co-founder of Crip the Lit and edited their 2019 pocketbook, ‘Here we are, read us: Women, disability and writing’. She says she’s a part-time crane operator…but maybe she’s dreaming?
Lily Holloway has a Teletubby tattoo and is forthcoming in AUP New Poets 8. You can find more of her work here
Anna Jackson lectures at Te Herenga Waka/Victoria University of Wellington, lives in Island Bay, edits AUP New Poets and has published seven collections of poetry, most recently Pasture and Flock: New and Selected Poems (AUP 2018). Thoughts on dreaming and on being dreamed about can be found here and here.
Claudia Jardine (she/her) is a poet and musician based in Ōtautahi/Christchurch. In 2020 she published her first chapbook, The Temple of Your Girl, with Auckland University Press in AUP New Poets 7 alongside Rhys Feeney and Ria Masae. Her work has also been published in Starling, Sport, Landfall and Stasis. For the winter of 2021, Jardine will be one of the Arts Four Creative Residents in The Arts Centre Te Matatiki Toi Ora, where she will be working on a collection of poems.
Hebe Kearney is a poet from Christchurch who now calls Auckland her home. Her work has appeared in The Three Lamps, Oscen, Starling, Forest and Bird, a fine line, and the Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2021.
Dr Karlo Mila (MNZM) is a mother, writer, award-winning poet and leadership programme director. Of Tongan and Pākehā descent, her creative and professional career has focused upon Pasifika peoples in Aotearoa. Her book Dream Fish Floating won the best first book of poetry in the NZ literary awards in 2005. Karlo lives in Tāmaki Makaurau with her three sons. Her third poetry book Goddess Muscle was published by Huia in 2020.
Rose Peoples is from Te Awakairangi/Lower Hutt. She is a student at Victoria University and, having finished her law degree last year, decided that the logical next step was to embark upon a Masters in Literature. She is a bookseller at Good Books. Her work has previously appeared in Cordite, Mimicry and Starling.
Apirana Taylor, Ngati Porou, Te Whanau a Apanui, Ngati Ruanui, Te Ati Awa, is a nationally and internationally published poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, actor, painter and musician. He has been Writer in Residence at Canterbury and Massey Universities. He frequently tours nationally and internationally visiting schools, tertiary institutions and prisons reading his poetry, storytelling and taking creative writing workshops. He has written six collections of poetry, a book of plays, three collections of short stories, and two novels. His work has been included in many national and international anthologies.
Poet Laureate David Eggleton has edited the latest edition of Best NZ Poems 2020. He concludes his introduction with these words:
I hope you will enjoy reading these poems as much I have on my year-long odyssey for which I didn’t have to leave home. I’m glad to have had the privilege of the journey and its discoveries. Discoveries rather than judgements because poems are essentially playful and deeply wilful and a law unto themselves and won’t be judged. As the American poet Archibald MacLeish put it in his brilliant formulation about the art of poetry: ‘A poem should not mean/ But be.’
I had already read most of the poems – but I loved revisiting them. Poems are like albums; you can put them on replay and they just get better.
NZ Poetry Shelf 