Closed for the night Closed by fog and mist Closed by strong winds Closed by gates Closed for the weekend Closed for the duration Closed by seismic activity Closed by Rūamoko Closed by bushfires Closed by the fiery fingers of Mahuika Closed till Christmas Closed until next year Closed until the sale of conservation land goes through Closed until the Coalition Government decides otherwise
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. He has contributed to Koe: An Aotearoa ecopoetry anthology, edited by Janet Newman and Robert Sullivan (Otago University Press, 2024), and No Other Place to Stand: an anthology of climate change poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand, edited by Jordan Hamel, Rebecca Hawkes, Erik Kennedy and Essa May Ranapiri, (Auckland University Press, 2022).
“The alarm bells should be be ringing loudly in your ears, as our Public conservation is under serious threat by the current government. The Conservation Amendment Bill 2026 represents a direct assault on New Zealand’s back country heritage, threatening to strip away long standing safeguards and clear the way for a massive sell off or commercial development of up to 60% of our public land.” Hiking NZ
Another sizzling simmering wonderful week of poetry delight and connections.
I spotted David Eggleton’s poem online and got musing and caring even more about all the things a Government could and must do to care for people and planet.
Meanwwhile I’ve been musing on how to get Poetry Box sizzling and simmering – a place where children taste the rewards of playing with words, a place to share my love of picture books for children, along with fiction and nonfiction, and especially poetry for and by children. I am still musing!
And thank you for responding to my poem invitation last weekend – I will be reading and replying this week.
An invitation: This week an invitation to choose a poetry book published in Aotearoa in 2026 that you have loved. Write a paragraph sharing why. Send to me by Jun 27th. I will post some on Poetry Shelf. paulajoygreen@gmail.com
Monday: Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: ‘All we have is the urupa’ by Hana Pera Aoake
Tuesday: Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Erik Kennedy picks Jane Arthur
Wednesday: Poetry Shelf Speaking Out To For With: Food as a Weapon by Sheila Hadstone
Thursday: Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Morrin Rout chooses Dinah Hawken
Friday: Poetry Shelf celebrates Landfall Tauraka 251 with nine readings
He brings up the morning coffee on the faded red tray that for decades our right hands have gripped, raised and carried towards each other through the compatible air.
Dinah Hawken from Peace & Quiet, THWUP, 2026
Dinah Hawken received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement last year. It recognises her many years of writing supremely crafted, perceptive and insightful poems centred around social justice and the environment. None of these are didactic but lead the reader to quiet contemplation and, sometimes, quiet rage at the state of the world we are bequeathing to our whanau.
Her latest collection is called Peace & Quiet and both words in the title reflect the tone and intention of the poems perfectly.
Being of a similar age to Dinah, many of these works resonate with what I am experiencing and thinking about. She lives at Paekākāriki in sight and sound of the sea so her daily interaction with the ocean is very much part of her work. I too live within sight and sound of the sea, in my case, Whakaraupō, Lyttelton Harbour and my mood and thoughts are absolutely affected by what is going on outside my window.
Some of her poems are about the deaths of friends and family, what they don’t have to know or worry about anymore and how the natural world provides some solace and acceptance of the inevitability of these events.
The poem I have chosen, which I asked her to read in my recent interview with her on Bookenz, says so much in so few words. My husband, Jonty died in 2003 and of the multitude of ways in which I miss him, one of the most enduring is the daily interactions that are often tacit and routine. The long and loving relationship that Dinah and her husband share is captured entirely in the poem and the last line could not be bettered.
Morrin Rout
Dinah Hawken is one of New Zealand’s most celebrated poets. She was born in Hāwera in 1943 and trained as a physiotherapist, psychotherapist and social worker in New Zealand and the United States and has worked as a student counsellor and writing teacher at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. Of her ten collections of poetry, four have been finalists for the New Zealand Book Awards. Her first book, It Has No Sound and Is Blue (1987), won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Best First Time Published Poet. A recent poetry collection is Faces and Flowers: Poems to Patricia France (2024), and other recent collections include Sea-light (2021), Her most recent collection is Peace and Quiet (2026) Dinah lives in Paekākāriki.
Morrin Rout has spent over 30 years organising literary events and festivals and producing and presenting book programmes on national and local radio. She is the former Director of the Hagley Writers Institute and still co-produces and presents a weekly book show, Bookenz on Plains Media which is available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Book interview with Morrin: Lauren Keenen, Dinah Hawken, Ingrid Horrocks
Her hands, long-fingered, freckled, by sun and soil, rested quietly on her thighs. She was sitting alone by the window, admiring the agility of birds on the branch of a plum tree. Suddenly sunlight caught the face of her watch as it can sometimes catch the turquoise bowl on the bookshelf. Place and time, time and place, illuminated.
Dinah Hawken from Peace and Quiet, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2026
Dinah Hawken is one of New Zealand’s most celebrated poets. She was born in Hāwera in 1943 and trained as a physiotherapist, psychotherapist and social worker in New Zealand and the United States and has worked as a student counsellor and writing teacher at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. Of her ten collections of poetry, four have been finalists for the New Zealand Book Awards. Her first book, It Has No Sound and Is Blue (1987), won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Best First Time Published Poet. Her latest poetry collection is Faces and Flowers: Poems to Patricia France (2024), and other recent collections are Sea-light (2021), longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, There Is No Harbour (2019), and Ocean and Stone (2015). Dinah lives in Paekākāriki.
Peace and Quiet will be launched at Unity Books Wellington on April 23rd.
The Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: A place to enter and pause and take a long slow breath and then another, as you absorb the beauty movement joy stillness wonder movement of a poem.
Join us to celebrate the arrival of two excellent new poetry collections: New Days for Oldby James Brown and Peace & Quiet by Dinah Hawken. The books will be launched by Jenny Bornholdt.
Thursday 23 April, 6pm Unity Books Wellington All welcome!
James Brown’s New Days for Oldis a delightful experiment in form.
Each scene in this book is like a 1-minute pop song: its depths are at first easy to miss. But as the story proceeds, the grand scheme of things hoves into view: we are born, we crawl and then are carried away, and everything is a-shimmer, even the disappointments
‘How does James Brown do it? Every page in this book is my favourite.’ —Bill Manhire
What use is poetry in times of ecological and political turbulence? Dinah Hawken’s Peace and Quiet grapples with this question, invoking both human voices and the voices — ‘the silt and the slash’ — of the natural world.
Powerful and illuminating, these poems show that peace, gentleness and reflection are a form of resistance.
‘This is poetry that digs deeply into existence, life and death, peace ahead of war, the power of silence and the power of the spoken.’ —Paula Green
Poetry Shelf offers a bouquet of warm congratulations!
To celebrate Dinah Hawken as the 2025 recipient of the Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry, I am reposting a poem she picked from Small Stories of Devotion (Victoria University Press,1991) with her comment (Playing Favourites), an audio of her reading from Sea-light (Victoria University Press, 2021), and an extract from Wild Honey: Reading NZ Women’s Poets (Massey University Press, 2019).
Dinah Hawken is one of New Zealand’s most celebrated poets. She was born in Hāwera in 1943 and trained as a physiotherapist, psychotherapist and social worker in New Zealand and the United States and has worked as a student counsellor and writing teacher at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. Of her ten collections of poetry, four have been finalists for the New Zealand Book Awards. Her first book, It Has No Sound and Is Blue (1987), won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Best First Time Published Poet. Her latest poetry collection is Faces and Flowers: Poems to Patricia France (2024), and other recent collections are Sea-light (2021), longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, There Is No Harbour (2019), and Ocean and Stone (2015). In 2007, Hawken received the Lauris Edmond Award for Distinguished Contribution to Poetry; and her new book of poems, Peace and Quiet, is to be published in 2026. Dinah lives in Paekākāriki.
The harbour is hallucinating. It is rising above itself, halfway up the great blue hills. Every leaf of the kohuhu is shining. Cicadas, this must be the day of all days, the one around which all the others are bound to gather.
The blue agapanthus, the yellow fennel, the white butterfly, the blue harbour, the golden grass, the white verandah post, the blue hills, the yellow leaves, the white clouds, the blue book, the yellow envelope, the white paper. Here is the green verb, releasing everything.
Imagine behind these lines dozens and dozens of tiny seed-heads whispering. They are a field of mauve flowers. What they say is inexplicable to us because they speak another language, not this one written from left to right across them, made up of distinct and very subtle, ready-to-burgeon sounds.
Dinah Hawken from Small Stories of Devotion (Victoria University Press,1991)
Note on Poem
‘The harbour poems’ come from my second book of poetry, Small Stories of Devotion. It’s a book I’m very fond of, not least because the book itself is a beautiful shape, on beautiful paper and with unique images by the New Zealand artist Julia Morison. It is also a unique book in my poetry backlist since it is a narrative made up of mostly prose poems, and prose poetry in 1991 was unusual on our shelves. Looking back 30 years I see it is the book amongst my collections with the most faith in the imagery of dreams, and with my preoccupation with the Sumerian myth of Inanna, one of the earliest stories ever written. The epilogue of the book contains 36 6-line poems and it is the first three, written above Wellington harbour, I have included here.
Dinah Hawken
Dinah reads from Sea-light
Dinah Hawken reads ‘Haze’, ‘The sea’ and ‘Faith’ from Sea-light, Victoria University Press, 2021
In my review of Dinah’s collection, Sea-light I wrote: “reading her deftly crafted poems is akin to standing in an outside clearing and reconnecting with sky, earth, water, trees, birds, stones. It is personal, it can be political, and it is people rich”.
Extract from Wild Honey
I fell in love with the poetry of Dinah Hawken, particularly her collection Small Stories of Devotion, published in 1991, when I was writing my Master’s thesis on the Italian novelist Francesca Duranti and her myriad narrative movements.
As much as I was enjoying stepping into another language at that time, Hawken offered a different direction: she inspired me to write poetry. I have always thought of Hawken as a sky poet because she leads me to a state of contemplation; to see beauty, strangeness and disquiet.
Hawken’s collection It Has No Sound and Is Blue won the 1987 Commonwealth Poetry Prize for a debut book of poems.13 Mostly written in New York, the poems record Hawken’s intricate relationships with the city — the homeless, the leafless trees, the fierce cold, the lack of balance, the unwarranted deaths, the points of neglect — as well as reflections on New Zealand.
In these poems, Hawken zooms in on the way miniature details can lead to larger ideas, and the way she could find connections to stillness and quiet amid the clatter of a major city. The poems both delay and promote movement; she deliberates on things, branching out in a range of directions with physical attachments and floating ideas. In ‘Writing Home’, a long sequence of sonnets in couplets, a slow contemplation of the city is important to Hawken:
Since you left the trees have been standing against the snow making those small inexplicable gestures
children make in their sleep. Today they were strictly still. They gave nothing away, as if
they themselves were the dead of winter.
from ‘Writing Home’ (It Has No Sound and Is Blue, VUP, 1987)
Hawken is ‘acutely aware of [her] human breathing’ as she stands next to trees that are barely alive. This description of such a sensation is a hallmark of her poetry: keen to absorb intricate patterns, especially from nature, she produces poetry that abounds with life.
Hawken’s poetry favours space as though she wants room for her poems to breathe: on the white page, in the pause at the end of the line, and in the way both poet and reader have room to move in the poem. But the physical world is equally important. She is fascinated by surfaces and depths, and the way the physical world ignites all senses: ‘Stay in the physical world you say. / Take your boots and socks off.’15 The poem ‘Stone’, for example, delights in a stone’s physicality as well as in attributes that are much harder to discern:
Plain the call of a noun
of balance and beauty.
Stone.
from ‘Stone’ (Ocean and Stone, VUP, 2015)
Hawken conveys the plainness of objects with a plainness of words, and she often returns to the same object to uncover new revelations. If you hold a stone in your mind as a poet surprising connections rise to the surface:
Stony this, stony that. They are cold today, these stones on the desk. Stone cold. Stone blind. Stone deaf. Heart, reception, stare, silence. They remember the slingshot.
from ‘Stone’ (Ocean and Stone)
For Hawken, ‘[w]riting, at least, is going somewhere’; to write is to take risks, to ponder and to feel:
To write is to live on a balcony: the outlook is great, the air is still, roads are not yet taken.
The air is unpredictable. The elements are downright dangerous.
from ‘How far’ (The leaf-ride, VUP, 2011)
Hawken’s movement between the physical world and drifting thought might be a way of travelling through time and across the land, among people and within herself: ‘We try reading between the pages, the stars. / We’re attached to a planet of ocean and stone.’ Her poetry is people-dependent, and she is as attentive to strangers as she is to people she knows. Sometimes her pronouns are personal. In ‘Welcome’, the grandfather, for example, holds his smiling granddaughter in his arms; in ‘Sixteen months, co-creation’, ‘[s]he is the question and / the answer and the question again’. At other times, her pronouns move beyond the personal to belong to anyone. Humanity is always under scrutiny. It bothers her that we live surrounded by digital screens, for example; they limit life and induce loneliness. When she considers a tree, she confronts another concern that we must face:
[. . .] It reminded me I had a family and the company of friends. It reminded me I had a home by a heavy and beautiful sea. It told me that we live in a world of treeless, make-shift cities, cities that are flickering and maybe drowning.
from ‘A screen is a screen’ (Ocean and Stone)
If Hawken’s poetry is entrancing in its musicality, mystery, physicality and space, speaking out about the state of the world is equally significant to her:
If we live in the light or the dark too long, being human, we go blind. We are suspects, all of us, in a cruel climate. Is it ok to speak out in this world-wide room?
from ‘The question of cruelty’ (The leaf-ride)
Small Stories of Devotion features the meandering, looping threads of a woman writing, dreaming and loving. The poems keep repeating: ‘she wants me to talk simply and to reach you’. Feminine motifs flourish in a sequence that is divided into the four quarters of the moon, and feed a narrative that explores women’s friendships, rape, death, birth, cancer, Sumerian goddesses, muted woman, the outspoken woman, academic thinking, history, love, subtle politics, blatant politics, gardening, mourning, this language, another language, stones, the ocean, flowers, a hallucinating harbour, low clouds, small ponds, the struggles between men and women, hands, bodies, hearts.
After twenty-five years of reading Dinah Hawken, I am still finding fresh reading tracks in her work. Phrases that blaze in multiple directions still catch my eye:
‘Oh let’s recognise the silence so composing her’
from ‘Memory’ (Small Stories of Devotion, VUP, 1991)
Hawken’s ‘her’ might reference the silence of ‘the friend who has died’ or the recurring refrain of women who have been misheard, ignored, shut down, mistranslated, spoken over. Across a lifetime of writing Hawken has given ‘her’ a kaleidoscopic voice:
Who is she? She is trimming the smallest fingernails, she is threading honeysuckle through trellis. She is the context, the swell, the breathable air. She is singing, she is swinging the boy on the swing in the park. She is fluent and steady and unpaid.
from ‘She is Kissed Three Times’ (Small Stories of Devotion)
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.
The Venetian Blind Poems, Paula Green The Cuba Press, 2025
Later in the year I am planning a number of Poetry Shelf live events to celebrate poetry voices in Aotearoa. This month I have a new poetry collection out but my energy jar and immunity is not quite ready for book launches so I have invented three celebrations for the blog. On Publication Day (August 1st), I posted an email conversation I had with my dear friend Anna Jackson, a conversation that celebrates our shared love of writing and our two new books. Anna’s Terrier, Worrier (Auckland University Press) and my The Venetian Blind Poems (The Cuba Press).
For my second feature, I have created a collage conversation by inviting some of the poets whose books I have reviewed and loved over the past year to ask me a few questions. It gives me another chance to shine light on the extraordinary writing our poets are producing. I have kept the conversation overlaps as I find something new when I return to a similar idea or issue.
It is with grateful thanks to David Gregory, Mikaela Nyman, Cadence Chung, J. A. Vili, Rachel O’Neill, Kate Camp, Xiaole Zhan, Claire Beynon and Dinah Hawken, I offer this conversation in celebration of poetry. You can find links to the reviews below. The conversation has ended up being something rather special for me. I have never experienced anything quite like it! I loved the questions so much. Thank you. Because this is a book of love, I would like to gift signed copies to five readers, whether for themselves or a friend (paulajoygreen@gmail.com).
I also want to share a review Eileen Merriman posted on her blog after reading my book, because she is in the unique position to respond to it as another writer, a haematologist and a close friend. Some things she says struck me and I refer to them when I answer a question by Kate Camp.
I’ve just finished reading Paula Green’s recently published poetry collection, The Venetian Blind Poems in one sitting. This book was an oasis in the midst of a hectic time for me (when is life ever not?); it’s not very often I can be compelled to sit for more than half an hour currently. Yet I connected with this on so many levels: as a writer, as a doctor, as a patient, as a friend, as a human. Green details her experience on the Motutapu ward, the bone marrow transplant/haematology unit at Auckland Hospital, where she received a bone marrow transplant for a life threatening blood disorder in June 2022.
As a haematologist, I know this is one of the most challenging treatments you can put a patient through, bringing someone to the brink of death to save a life. Recovery takes months, sometimes years. The acute phase can be akin to torture, one only the recipient could ever understand. But Paula holds us close, so that we can begin to understand: ‘I return to the pain box in Dune… I am using the box/for when my ulcerated mouth pain is unbearable/last night I held the box/as the mouth pain radiated but/I didn’t put my hand in/I decorated the box/ with seashells instead’. And then we are elevated from the abyss to the sublime, because this is how Green survives, by stacking poems along her windowsill and creating word pictures in her head: ‘Buttered toast and clover honey/marmalade brain and mandarin heart’. And then, time and time again, we are brought back to the world that Green sees, from the confines of her isolation room, peering through the Venetian blinds at the world that sustains her, one second, one minute, one day at a time.
This book had me captivated from the delicious first line ‘Liquorice strips of harbour’, throughout the rough seas, eddies, near-drownings and becalmed harbours of the stem cell transplant, and beyond, right through to that hopeful last line, ‘We will be able to see for miles’. Kia kaha, Paula Green, your inner strength knows no bounds.
Eileen Merriman
me with my daughter’s dog, Pablo
a collage conversation
Every morning I open an envelope and read a poet’s choice inside a greeting card I nestle into the joy of Cilla McQueen’s kitchen table
David Gregory
David: Where do your ideas for your poetry come from? Paula: They fall into my head like surprise word showers, whether from what I see, hear, feel or read. From the world experienced, the world imagined, the world recalled.
David: How do you know when a poem is complete? Paula: It’s a gut feeling. When it hits the right notes and catches a version of what I want to transmit. Poetry can be and do so many things, and I’m a strong advocate for poetry openness rather than limiting and conservative ideas on what a poem ought to be. Paul Stewart from The Cuba Press edited the book and he has a sublime ear for poetry and its range. You couldn’t ask for a better poetry editor.
In the middle of the night the radio takes me to Science in Action and I am listing ways to save the planet and the way dance liberates cumbersome feet
Mikaela Nyman
Mikaela Nyman: These poems emerged out of a life temporarily reduced by severe illness. Yet they’re not limited by the medical circumstances, and not merely a comfort blanket, but seek to connect with the world outside. Did this happen straight away, or is it something you consciously pursued later in the writing process? Paula: I love this question – yes my life was limited physically, not only on the ward but on my long recovery road with a fragile immune system, daily challenges and minute energy jar. But I also saw it as an expansion of life. I focused and am focusing on what I can do, not what I can’t do. On the ward, the world was slipping in through the blinds as much as I was looking out. From the start my writing navigated both my health experience and the world beyond it.
Mikaela: Given the dire circumstances that compelled you to turn to poetry at this point in life – i.e. your personal health struggle as well as the state of the world – how important is it for you to retain hope and offer a sense of wonder in your poems? Paula: I think it ‘s been ongoing, across decades, my impulse to write through dark and light. I think all my books have sources, whether overt or concealed, in patches of difficulty. I was writing 99 Ways into NZ Poetry with Harry Ricketts when I was first diagnosed and I never stopped writing. Maybe writing is my daily dose of vitamins. And that word wonder. Wonder is a talisman word – whether it’s the delight you might find in thought coupled with the delight you might find in awe. It is a crucial aid.
It’s the third day of the poetry season Oh, everyone’s queueing up to read a poem and count falling leaves
Cadence Chung
Cadence: Do you have a particular line/poem you’ve written that you think really encapsulates the collection?
I will meet you at the top of the hill we will be able to see for miles
Cadence: What’s an experience you’ve had lately that has brought you joy? Paula: Ah, such an important question. Every day is a patchwork quilt of joy. Take this day for example. Reading and reviewing a poetry book. Drinking coffee with a homemade muffin with sun-dried tomatoes and paprika. Making nourishing soup for lunch and sourdough with millet flour for a change. Watching the pīwakawaka dance in front of the wide kitchen window as though they are rehearsing for an special occasion. Replying to children who have sent me poems for Poetry Box. Cooking a Moroccan tagine with preserved pears and rose harissa paste for dinner and sharing with my family. Listening to Jimmy Cliff on repeat all day and imbibing the uplifting reggae beat and need to protest.
This morning I got up at 5 am to drive to an early appointment as the full-wow-moon shone in the dark, and streaks of bright colour ribbons hung over Rangitoto. It felt like my heart was bursting. I switched to Maria Callas singing ‘Casta Diva’ from Bellini’s Norma.
Today I feel happiness as solid as a wooden kitchen table with six chairs and a bowl of ripe fruit
Cadence: How does a poem come to you? Quickly and all at once, or more measured and worked out? Paula: Poems linger in my head -as they did on the ward – before I write them in a notebook. Often poem fragments arrive in the middle of the night, or when I am driving across country roads to Kumeū. But there is always a sense of flow not struggle. I love that.
I decide even stories are slatted with missing bits, so I lie still and fill in the gaps of my childhood
J. A. Vili
Jonah: How did your writing flow in the light and dark times, on the good days and bad days of your recovery journey? Paula: It flowed and flows in my head, most days, slowly, slowly. But sometimes, especially in the dark patches, I don’t have the energy to write on paper. I can’t function. Words falter. I compare it to the stream in the valley – sometimes it flows like honey, sometimes it struggles over rocks and debris. When it’s honey flow I write, when it’s not, I do something else. So I pull vegetables from the fridge of garden and make a nourishing meal to share with my loved ones. Or watch Tipping Point on TVNZ! Or listen to an audio book.
Jonah: How much did writing these poems during your personal struggle help in your healing and recovery? Paula: To a huge degree. And it still does. It was and is a crucial aid because it was and is a way of connecting with the world and people, of feeling love though my love of words. It’s a vital part of my self-care toolkit.
Jonah: Since this was such a personal journey for you, what was something new you discovered about yourself and life itself? Paula: How in the toughest experience you can feel humanity at its best – for me the incredible care and patience of the doctors and nurses, no matter how tired or stretched they were (and underpaid). I loved my time on the ward. An anonymous donor gifted me life and that felt extraordinary to me. This miracle gift – it felt like I was seeing and experiencing the whole world for the first time and it was a wondrous thing. And still is (despite the heart slamming choices of certain leaders and Governments). It’s recognising what is important. Cooking and sharing nourishing food (especially Middle Eastern flavours). Watching football. Listening to music on repeat: reggae, Bach, opera, Reb Fountain, Boy Genius, Nadia Reid, The National, Marlon Williams, Lucinda Williams, Billy Bragg, Delgirl, Nina Simone,more reggae. I am hooked on Jimmy Cliff at the moment and the struggle he was singing about way back in the 1960s and 1970s: our half starved world, the Vietnam War, the broken planet, the ‘suffering in the land’. Well we are still singing and writing these same songs of heartbreak and protest.
In the basement of song there are jars of pickled zucchini worn shoes and well-thumbed novels
Rachel O’Neill
Rachel: Where does a poem generally begin for you, and has that changed at any point? Paula: In my conversation with Anna, I talked about the way phrases drift into my head, surprise arrivals in my mental poetry room. I referred to these arrivals as gentle word showers. I have had these arrivals since I was a child. when I was in Year 8 (Form 2) my teacher, Frederick C. Parmee, was a poet! He was the only teacher who saw the potential in me as a writer and I flourished. By secondary school I was shut down as wayward and I failed school. Yet the words kept falling into my mind, and then into secret notebooks (like many women across the centuries), across my years of travelling, living in London, and finding a place in the Italian Department at the University of Auckland. Taking an MA poetry paper with Michele Leggott. Getting a poetry collection published with Auckland University Press. Extraordinary. And still the words drift and fall.
Rachel: Does your new collection speak to dynamics of patience and urgency? Along these lines, what has writing this collection made you appreciate more, or challenged you to move on from? Paula: I think it has amplified my attraction to slowness, to patience, to writing and reading and blogging like a snail, into uncharted territory as much as into the familiar. When you run on slow dose energy, I think urgency is disastrous – I favour slow cooked braises and sourdough bread. Choosing the slow reading of poetry books, so much more is revealed. Yet urgency is both rewarding and necessary for other people, and produces breathtaking results, it just doesn’t work for me. That said, we need to unite with urgency to heal this damaged planet.
The second part of your question is crucial. In a nutshell, I appreciate life, I have had a transplant that has gifted me the miracle of life. Extraordinary. How can this not change the way I am in the world. What matters. Dr Clinton Lewis at Auckland Hospital has made an excellent video for bone marrow transplant patients. He talks about how many patients reassess what matters most. I have drafted a book, A Book of Care, it is not quite ready yet, but it is the manuscript I am most keen to be published. I offer it is as a self-travel guide, a tool kit, borrowing practical ideas that have helped me.
Rachel: In what ways do you think poetry helps us integrate and accept tension or discomfort as part of human experience and living a full life? Paula: I love this question. I have been musing no matter what I am writing, the tough edges of the world, the daily wound of news bulletins find their way in. What difference does it make if we speak of Gaza and the abominable choices our Government is making? I just don’t know, but I do know silence is a form of consent, and that in the time of fascism in Italy, it was strengthening that some people spoke out. Every voice ringing out across the globe, in song or poem or article, every protest march and banner, is a human arm held out, a call to heal rather than destroy, to feed rather starve, to teach and guide the whole child rather than discriminatory parts.
My repugnance at the devastation of Gaza is not eased by the soft light on the Waitākere Ranges or a canny arrangement of summer nouns or Boy Genius on the turntable or even a bowl of chickpea tajine
Kate Camp
Kate: do you ever feel when you are writing about personal experiences – especially intimate ones of the body – that you are invading your own privacy? And once you have written about those experiences, do you find that the poem version overlays the “real” remembered version? Or if not overlays it, then how do they co-exist, how does the personal, private version of the experience alongside the version of the experience as captured in a poem? Paula: I love love this question Kate. Xiaole introduces their reading for a Poetry Shelf feature I am posting on Poetry Day, by talking about oversharing. I know this feeling so well. I feel like I am doing it in this collage conversation! To what extent do people want to hear about illness? About bumps in the road? I started sharing my health situation on the blog because I wanted people to know why I was operating on a tiny energy jar and couldn’t review quite so many books or answer emails so promptly. And most people have been unbelievably kind. I felt so bad when I hadn’t celebrated a book I had loved. And then I would think EEK! And wanted to delete my talk of cancer and transplant experiences and issues. But what I don’t do is go into dark detail. That stays private and personal. Will I have the courage to press ‘publish’ for this collage conversation! Scary.
I found it so illuminating to read Eileen’s review of the book. She writes from her experience as a writer, avid reader, haematologist and my friend. She says things I don’t have running through my head but are important! To read her words made feel so much better about how I am handling my recovery road and my own writing! I don’t use warrior language on my cancer road. I don’t wallow in what I can’t do. I have never said ‘why me?’. But I do have dark patches where I feel I physically can’t function. To hear doctors say a bone marrow transplant is an extremely tough experience is like getting a warm embrace. Recognition.
So yes, I love the idea of a private version and a shared public version – I am a writer that keeps most of my life private – my personal relationships, especially with my partner and our children. I think part of my impulse to write this experience was self-care, as I mentioned to Jonah. Liking drinking water. And how important it is for me to write out of aroha and wonder as much as difficulty. To write as you travel, in the present tense of experience. Once I had spent two years writing the sequence, I wanted to get to get the book published as a gift for doctors, nurses and other people ascending Mountains of Difficulty.
After a night of dream scavenging I open my mouth and out fly stars a garden of leeks and carrots a family of skylarks a track to the wild ocean
Xiaole Zhan
Xiaole: I’ve been thinking a lot about this idea from e.e. cummings: ‘To know is to possess, & any fact is possessed by everyone who knows it, whereas those who feel the truth are possessed, not possessors.’ Did you have any experiences of not knowing or of ‘being possessed’ while working on/ living through your collection? Paula: What fascinating traffic between knowing and feeling! Possessing the facts, being possessed. What slippery territory . . . truth yes, but even facts. Are they ever fixed or certain? Sometimes I think writing is a way of re-viewing an experience, of re-speaking it say, and it is for me an organic process. Never fixed. The versions I tell my consultant, the nurse, my psychologist, my close friends, my family, are tremble stories, never fixed, as I remember and forget and shift the focal lens, the distance finder, the colour filter. It is so very important. I almost feel like venturing to Zenlike thought by saying there is knowing in the unknowing, and unknowing in the knowing.
I lip read the cloud stories and remember the comfort points
Claire Beynon
Claire: I appreciated the absence of ‘explicit’ punctuation in your collection—all commas, colons, semi-colons, full stops are invisible/implicit. The rhythm and cadence of each word, line and stanza work quietly and diligently on their own, as if seeking connection and continuity. They neither ask for, nor require, anything extra in the way of emphasis or embellishment. Did you set out to write the collection this way? Or did you initially include ‘traditional’ punctuation and make a decision to remove it later/during your editing process? Paula: Punctuation is an aid for the poem – for me it is a key part of the musical effect – and it is a guide for the reader – where to take a breath or to pause. I have had many books published and worked with many editors and they have different, and at times, contradictory approaches. I wanted to keep faith with the first section of The Venetian Blind Poems as I gathered it in my head on the ward. Punctuation played more of a role in the second section which I wrote back home. A musical tool. A rhythm aid.
Claire: I wondered while reading The Venetian Blind Poems whether living with a painter—your partner, Michael Hight—influences your way of composing and structuring your poems? I mentioned in my FB post that something about the tone and shape of this collection reminds me of the work of artist Giorgio Morandi. I’ve long admired Michael’s paintings, too—their quiet, contemplative quality, compositional sophistication and attention to detail, the at-times unexpected juxtaposition of objects—and sense between them and your poems a kind of reciprocity or shared sensibility.
Forgive me if I’m projecting here. I don’t mean to speak out of line or to make any assumptions… but, well, I found myself wondering about these things… how there seems to be something deeply simpatico between your work and Michael’s. And it moves me/strikes me as beautiful. Paula: Michael and I are big fans of Morandi! We live very separate creative lives – he doesn’t enter the poetry room in my head and I very rarely walk up the hill to his studio – neither of us talk about work in process with anyone. But I have written about Michael’s work (read a review of his last Auckland show here). We have his art on our walls and it’s uplifting, a vital form of travel. I give him my manuscripts to read just before they go to a publisher! We have two creative daughters and we have shared love of books, movies, music and art. To be in New York together absorbing art, music, literature and food was incredibly special – and Ireland, Barcelona and Lisbon on another occasion – and of course Aotearoa.
Claire: I realised when I reached the last page of your collection that I’d read the book as one long poem—a whole comprised of many parts, yes, but essentially ‘one poem’. I actively appreciated the fact that, aside from the titles at the start of each of the two sections, there are no titles to distract or interrupt the flow of the writing. This allows readers to fall into step with you and walk more closely alongside. On the last page, you seem to confirm this:
Most of this poem is in 1000 pieces in a box on the table
Do you see the collection as one poem? Paula: Yes I do! One poem like a quilt made of many notes, light and dark patches.
A poem might be an envelope to store things in for a later date: old train tickets postcards buttons a map of Rome a bookmark
Dinah Hawken
Dinah: A few weeks ago I found myself asking myself what I most hoped my poems would do now that I’m in the last part of my writing life. My main hope is that a few readers will feel ‘be-friended’ by a poem of mine, in the way I have felt be-friended by the poems of others. Then, in reading your conversation with Anna (Jackson), I came across – with surprise – your idea of ‘poetry as friendship’ and Anna’s of poetry as ‘a short cut to intimacy.’ Do you have more to say about this? Paula: Anna and I have been friends since my first collection Cookhouse was published in 1997, when I had just completed my Doctorate in Italian. Before our slow-paced email conversation, I had never thought of poetry as friendship, but the more I thought of it, the more it resonated as an idea and a practice. I realised my slow-tempo approach to poetry – to reading, writing, blogging and reviewing – is a way for forging connections, of holding things to the light to see from different angles, explore multiple points of view, experiences, hues and chords. Of listening. Our poetry communities in Aotearoa are so active and so strengthening. As this collage conversation underlines.
Dinah: And were you thinking of a particular kind of reader (say someone who had experienced serious illness) when you were writing The Venetian Blind Poems? Paula: No, I wasn’t thinking of a reader at all. Of getting published. I write first out of my love of writing, as a form of nourishment, as a source of joy. So I guess that is selfishly writing for one’s self. Inhabiting the moment. But now that The Venetian Blinds Poems is out in the world, to be able to give copies to doctors, nurses and other people going through difficult health experiences matters so very much. And to other poets! Climbing a mountain can be hard but it can also be a source of beauty, and I am nothing, this book is nothing, without my support crew, particularly Anna Jackson, Harriet Allan, Eileen Merriman, Michele Leggott and all the fabulous doctors and nurses on Motutapu and the Day Stay Ward. All the readers and poets who contribute to Poetry Shelf as both readers and writers. And my dear family. Thank you. My dedication catches how I felt when I had finished writing the book:
for everyone ascending the Mountains of Difficulty and their support crews
David Gregory, Based on a True Story, Sudden Valley Press, 2024, review Mikaela Nyman, The Anatomy of Sand, THWUP, 2025, review Cadence Chung, Mad Diva, Otago University Press, 2025, my review J. A. Vili, AUP New Poets 11: Xiaole Zhan, Margo Montes de Oca, J. A. Vili editor Anne Kennedy, Auckland University Press, 2025, review Rachel O’Neill, Symphony of Queer Errands, Tender Press, 2025, review Kate Camp, Makeshift Seasons, THWUP, 2025, review Xiaole Zhan, AUP New Poets 11: Xiaole Zhan, Margo Montes de Oca, J. A. Vili editor Anne Kennedy, Auckland University Press, 2025, review Claire Beynon, For when words fail us: a small book of changes,The Cuba Press, 2024, review Dinah Hawken, Faces and Flowers Poems to Patricia France, THWUP, 2024, review
The Cuba Press page Paula Green and Anna Jackson in conversation
The harbour is hallucinating. It is rising above itself, halfway up the great blue hills. Every leaf of the kohuhu is shining. Cicadas, this must be the day of all days, the one around which all the others are bound to gather.
The blue agapanthus, the yellow fennel, the white butterfly, the blue harbour, the golden grass, the white verandah post, the blue hills, the yellow leaves, the white clouds, the blue book, the yellow envelope, the white paper. Here is the green verb, releasing everything.
Imagine behind these lines dozens and dozens of tiny seed-heads whispering. They are a field of mauve flowers. What they say is inexplicable to us because they speak another language, not this one written from left to right across them, made up of distinct and very subtle, ready-to-burgeon sounds.
Dinah Hawken from Small Stories of Devotion, Victoria University Press (Te Herenga Waka Press), 1991
Note on Poem
‘The harbour poems’ come from my second book of poetry, Small Stories of Devotion. It’s a book I’m very fond of, not least because the book itself is a beautiful shape, on beautiful paper and with unique images by the New Zealand artist Julia Morison. It is also a unique book in my poetry backlist since it is a narrative made up of mostly prose poems, and prose poetry in 1991 was unusual on our shelves. Looking back 30 years I see it is the book amongst my collections with the most faith in the imagery of dreams, and with my preoccupation with the Sumerian myth of Inanna, one of the earliest stories ever written. The epilogue of the book contains 36 6-line poems and it is the first three, written above Wellington harbour, I have included here.
Dinah Hawken lives in Paekakariki and her ninth collection of poems, Sea-light, was published by Te Herenga Waka University Press in 2021.
Poetry Shelf Favourites is an ongoing series where a poet chooses a poem from their own backlist and writes an accompanying note.
What does it take to break ground? What does it take to carry yourself with dignity through mist and rise?
You can see the fragility of trees and the forbearance of trees. You can see the agility of trees.
You know where you stand with a tree: sheltered and strengthened, beholden to the nature and network
of trees; the assembly of trees, the farmland haunted by trees and the regiment of trees.
You can see the bearing of trees, the felling and falling of trees, the shipment of trees, the return on trees.
The return of trees.
What does it take to carry yourself into a forest one valley over from the one, right now, on fire?
Dinah Hawken
Dinah Hawken’s ninth collection of poems, Sea-light, was published by THWUP in 2021. ‘Speaking of Trees’ was written for Gerda Leenard’s exhibition of paintings at Pataka in Porirua : Regeneration – A Story of Trees.
Sea-light, Dinah Hawken, Victoria University Press, 2021
Cover: Breaker Bay, Looking South, Gerda Leenards, 2007
Dinah Hawken reads ‘Haze’, ‘The sea’ and ‘Faith’ from Sea-light
Dinah Hawken is one of New Zealand’s most celebrated poets. She was born in Hāwera in 1943 and now lives in Paekākāriki. Sea-light is her ninth collection of poetry.
Few writers have the skill to return to the land and the sea with such originality and genuine knowing as Hawken.’ —Sarah Jane Barnett, NZ Booksellers
‘As a poet she utilises economy on the line to build richness above, between and beyond. That plainness of talking makes the impact even stronger, deeper, wider.’ —Paula Green, NZ Poetry Shelf
NZ Poetry Shelf 