O is a figure amongst crop circles. O scythes cornstalks that flank the maze. O tells me she lived through red barns and dust and lard and mashed sweet potatoes. O says the tobacco yellowed her fringe, that she hasn’t danced in forty years, that the doily gathers a fine lint.
—
The patient says O like the world is poetry.
She says O to the mashed sweet potatoes and O to the commode. Maybe that’s how it ends. A series of vowel sounds softening to murder. An O that sits in a vacant lot, a rust-chassis O, an O that has cold hands but would pass a Turing test in a heartbeat.
—
O – she sits in a lawn chair rocking her hippocampi to sleep. Babies,
the sky is her centrifuge. Her one use.
Grass-wick in her foreteeth, haze of summer long as a scythe, trembling with cloud.
—
O eats the Old Testament. O finds a full set of teeth in her centre console. O says they don’t make eggs like they used to. Where the light falls on the curtains, O licks it off. Where the sun goes, O might follow it, around and around the campus lavender.
—
O, to love with one synapse holding the wound of the world shut. O, to be a ghost that spooks the cortex but jumps ship at the final moment.
—
The janitor wipes up whatever spilled out of O. A comma on the lino, like there was more to say.
Elizabeth Morton from Incident Report, Otago University Press, 2026
Elizabeth Morton is a yarn teller, poem maker, and neuroscience enthusiast from Tāmaki Makaurau. Her writing has been published in the likes of Landfall, Takahē, Poetry Aotearoa, and also in overseas journals such as the Moth Magazine, Rattle, Narrative Magazine and Smokelong Quarterly. She is always the bridesmaid, never the bride, as is evidenced by twice placing second in the Sunday Star Times Short Story Competition and also second in the Sargeson Prize. She has four poetry collections, the latest being Incident Report (Otago University Press, 2026).
Bright bright horses choose me to house their hooves. Houses
house their light like the evening holds lock-jaw streetlights, and
kitchen windows house inaccessible grief and joy; like the sun sets in
princess colours, yawns pastel mouths. I have walked these paths so lonely
the streetlights have extinguished as I passed. Behind a sky-rise
the sun blossoms like a tender bruise. When I left home I learnt a new city
like a horse learns an apple in its mouth: consumed its sweet, waning colours.
Saw my sun-struck reflection in a pool of greywater. Pocketed my hands
further still. Drank deep.
Maia Armistead
Poetry, as I repeat like a mantra on Poetry Shelf, can be and do many things. Poems can ignite milky ways of feelings, ideas, experience, memories, desires, drawing us deep into and beyond who we are and who we might be. And that’s what the latest Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook: All-Souls does for me. All–Souls is a smooth and jagged uplift, an inspiration, anabsorbing gathering of what poetry can do. This glorious anthology set my writing pens and pencils dancing again.
All-Souls is a special issue celebrating 75 years of publications. It was first edited by Louis Johnson, and from 1954 published by Pegasus Press in Christchurch. Nicola Legat presents an overview of Louis’s editorial role; his varying views of nz poetry. She locates examples across the years from from scolding to jaunty to despairing to marvellous to furious. Louis’s final issue was in 1964, upon which the journal took a break. Frank McKay edited it biannually from 1971 until 1984. Again a break, and then from 1990, with a series of publishers, the editors were David Drummond (brief spell from 1990) and Alistair Paterson (1993 to 2014). Jack Ross became editor and published from 2014 with Massey University Press assuming the publishing role in 2017. Johanna Emeney followed him, with Dr Tracey Slaughter assuming the role in 2021. As Nicola remarks:
“Louis Johnson, who published 32 poets in volume 1, would surely be astounded that the year book features 120 poets or so each edition. The New Zealand poetry he was so anxious to support and sustain has only grown in in all those years.”
Indeed! And as the diverse poetry in All-Souls demonstrates, whether style tone subject matter, and as Tracey’s inspired introduction underlines, as she explores the issue’s title.
The poems navigate aging, death, illness, therapy, multiple darknesses, but they also draw upon multiple lives, lights and lightnesses.
Darkness. Take for example, Cindy Botha’s moving ‘heart of the dinner table’, with its smouldering absences, “where silences are handed out like empty boxes”. Or the grief and deep aroha in Kerrin P Sharpe’s extraordinary ‘nothing like himself’, where the loss of a magnolia’s foliage reveals a brother loss:
He’s only here in the tree at dinner time his wedding ring that last ray of sun
Light: In ‘A Garden’, Lucy Miles offers sanctuary to weeds and birds, rather than resort to the uplift of Prozac or meth. And I stall on the ending to Mary Creswell’s Ceento: I am part of all that I have met”:
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks, and there is a story in a book about it: that which we are we are: a few old pecker-fretted apple trees.
And now, I return to the darkness and to the light and find the poems smudge both like heart ripples, and everything in between. Linger over the aroha and memory of violence in Joel LeBlanc’s heart-bending ‘There is stardust in my blood’ (poem below). Or the lithe moves of Maia Armistead’s ‘Wild Houses where windows ‘house grief / and joy’ (poem above). Linger in the “nursery of stars” and “opening umbrella” and the missed body next to her, in Medb Charleton’s glorious ‘Making Love to the Muse’. Take time out with a good dose of Erik Kennedy’s wit and seriousness in ‘Classic Rain’:
There are people who would play sports or go to war in this, when instead they could watch the surface of a birdbath.
The Yearbook continues to offer exemplary attention to reviewing New Zealand poetry, the kind of reviews that leads us to a book that takes our fancy on multiple levels. I have had Mary McCallum’s Tackling the Hens on my desk for far too long, and the review makes reading it this weekend imperative. And I’ll be tracking down Rhondda Greig’s book of poems and paintings.
To celebrate this anniversary issue, I invited nine poets to record their poems, and the editor and the featured poet, Josiah Morgan, to answer some questions. Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook continues to be a gift for our poetry communities – we are in the debt of Massey University Press.
Poetry is a gift to ourselves and to each other. Thank you.
There is stardust in my blood
and it smells of smoke and sulphur, a memory of violence, charcoal pencils that leave dusty kisses on my fingertips, a house filled with burnt coffee, mānuka wood transforming into incense and ash in our fireplace, my husband’s skin as I curl against him, hunting for warmth like comfort in a church, his breath tickling as he tells me, “Love, it’s time to get up,” and I imagine the world was born exactly this way: the caress of a hand, a mumbled whisper, light intruding, moths fluttering away, us forgetting that the birth of the universe was also an ending, and we used to be stars.
Joel LeBlanc
Five questions for Tracey Slaughter, the editor
Paula: I was both surprised and moved to discover your review of my collection The Venetian Blind Poems at the end of the review section. I discovered it at 4 am when I was both wide awake and at a low ebb, and your exquisitely crafted words and thoughts, and personal acknowledgements, drew me back to why poetry matters to me, as reader and writer, reviewer and blogger. I got musing on how reviews can open rather than shut down a book, how they might draw closer to both the light and the dark, how the personal can be gold. How what we bring to a poetry collection as readers makes an electric difference. What are your thoughts on reviewing poetry?
Tracey: Firstly, I’m so glad that my review found you in that 4am place. When I read your book I felt like it was speaking directly to that part of me that can get so washed up and cut off in those pain-hours too, and the hold your poems kept on language, to guide you through those lonely precincts, just…glowed to me. I think reviews should help map our way towards those books we most need, & it’s often a deeply felt review, one which is willing to take the risk to open up the personal, the tender, the vulnerable, which shines a light on a book that might go on, in a profound sense, to save us in some future moment, connect with our tattered nerve-ends when nothing else will.
Paula: I totally agree. I want my reviews to open up a book rather than close its potential doors and windows and trails. I have an ongoing fascination with what poetry can be and do, as my introduction acknowledges: the way a poem might be an echo chamber or a form of travel, the way it might be squatting in the sand dunes absorbing beauty. I kept drawing ideas from your terrific introduction. For example, poetry as telescope, mirror or solace. Each new collection I read, seems to add another possibility, and I love that. How poetry is beyond rigid formulae. What discoveries have you made about what poetry can be and do, whether as editor or reader or writer?
Tracey: So beyond rigid formulae and forever smashing fixed mirrors! It’s been fascinating as editor to see our national poetry shift, stretch and flow over the years, always searching new fields, voicing fresh modes and moods. This year’s issue All-Souls announced its theme with resounding urgency from very early reading – while each piece was distinct, original, innovative, there was also a sense in which a collective quest for something – meaning, god, soul – was building in our poets to a force that felt outright choral. Lit up amidst all our global catastrophes, there’s a symphonic scanning for some human essence going on – these poems shiver with the existential, and scroll for meaning far beyond the algorithmic screen.
Paula: I find certain poems stand out in my reading travels, poems that catch me by surprise, offering wonder or joy or challenge. Is there a poem (among many I am sure) in All-Souls that caught you by surprise?
Tracey: The submission that cut right through my heart this year came from a bereaved wife sending in poetry her partner composed in his final days, transmitting words painfully pulse by pulse via device when his body was frozen by MND. You read poetry like that and there’s nothing more to say…It was so intensely moving to have one of David Gilbert’s last poems entrusted to our pages.
The sunset of the century The pink had turned to green How many breaths a man should take And whether he may scream
I would play-act the drama I would speak from the heart But my heartbeat might falter And I’d just mime my part
David Gilbert from ‘The Sunset of the Century’
Paula: I am a big fan of your poetry – can you offer three words that matter to you when you are writing a poem. I guess it comes back to what we want our poetry to be and do.
Tracey: Oh thank you! That means so much to me. Mmmm, only three…then the things I surrender to first might be: Rhythm. Fire. Ruthlessness. Or is that maybe a way of saying: Instinct. Instinct. Instinct…
Paula: Oh yes to instinct! And yes, more than ever, we are all, collectively, hand-in-hand, navigating the dark and the light, at personal and global levels. What helps you through the day?
Tracey: Honestly, connecting with other creatives. I’m blessed that in my work, at Waikato University, and in my editing, for Poetry Aotearoa, I’m continuously brought into contact with creative voices brimming with fresh life. And lately my writing practice has spilled over into collaborative forms too, which I’ve found infinitely sustaining, even when I’m running on near-empty – I’ve been co-writing a screenplay adaptation of my novella The Longest Drink in Town with my eldest son Liam Hinton, & also performing in a theatre production of his latest Adam Award-winning play Passionfruits (on in Kirikiriroa very soon!!! & I’m alive with stage-fright already! yet finding I’m happiest in rehearsal, which is like getting to live right inside a book…).
Three questions for Josiah Morgan, the featured poet
Name three words that matter to you when you are writing a poem. Fragments, challenge, opacity
Can you share a few poets whose poetry boosts you as a poet? Dennis Cooper changed my life, and his work boosts me whenever I’m in a rut. So does the writing of the new ethnographic photographer-writer New Juche, who makes work with a bizarre and strange opacity that challenges me. In the Aotearoa context, Liz Breslin, Liam Jacobson, and the editor of this year’s Poetry Yearbook Tracey Slaughter feel closely aligned with what I do. The Compound Press book the prism and the rose, by Schaeffer Lemalu was published posthumously and is the most inspiring volume of local poetry I can think of in recent years.
Why poetry? Why poetry in this tumultuous world? Poetry is a way of thinking. It is part of what constitutes and constructs our everyday lives. Poetry reduces the boundary between the Western-individualist ‘i’ and the world around us, it is a mode of relation. Poetry is one of the few language-oriented tools we have with which we can disempower language. Language is very easy to bastardise for, say, political gain. Well, poetry can bastardise politics back upon itself. And poetry can stand for itself as an object, too. Poetry cannot be explained as anything other than what it is; it just is.
The readings
Josiah Morgan
Josiah reads ‘Noir is a field of unequal informatics, like a poem that could have been a sestina if it didn’t end too early, if it hadn’t been organised randomly out of order’
Joshiah reads ‘REDACTED (after Ralph Hotere)‘
Josiah reads ‘Family secret’
Josiah reads ‘It could happen to you too’
Rebecca Hawkes
Rebecca reads ‘All Souls’
Elizabeth Morton
Elizabeth Morton reads ‘O-O-O’
Richard Reeve
Richard reads ‘Wake’
Sabrina Li
Sabrina reads ‘Venice Syndrome’ This poem won First Prize in 2025 Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook student poetry competition.
Megan Kitching
Megan reads ‘Fire’
Sherry Zhang
Sherry reads ‘First swim of summer’
Alvia Farooqui
Alvia reads ‘Relapsing’
Leah Dodd
Leah reads ‘Pure expression of colour’
The readers and editor
Dr Tracey Slaughter is an award-winning poet and short story writer. Her books include Her Body Rises, The Longest Drink in Town, Deleted Scenes for Lovers, Devil’s Trumpet and The girls in the red house are singing. She has been the editor of the Poetry New Zealand Yearbook since 2020.
Alvia Farooqui is a Year 13 student at Macleans College in Tamaki Mākaurau Auckland. Her poem ‘Relapsing’ won first prize in the 2025 Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook student poetry competition.
Elizabeth Morton is a spinner of yarns and a poem-maker from Tāmaki Makaurau. Her poetry and prose have been published in New Zealand, the UK, the USA, Canada, Ireland, Australia and online. She has three collections of poetry, the latest being Naming the Beasts (Otago University Press, 2022). An upcoming collection, Incident Report (Otago University Press), will be published this year. She is a PhD candidate in psychological medicine with the University of Otago.
Josiah Morgan (he/him, Kāi Tahu / Ngāti Maniapoto) is a poet, actor, drama teacher, performance artist, facilitator, reviewer, editor and writer from Ōtautahi Christchurch. In 2026, he was the Visiting Writer at Washington State University’s creative writing program. He is the author of i’m still growing (Dead Bird Books, 2024), and his novella Road: A Postlapsarian Comedy won the Macmillan Brown Writers Prize in 2021. His work has featured in The Spinoff, Landfall, Out Here and numerous other journals, blogs and magazines. His chapbook Black Window holds the featured poet slot in Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2026.
Leah Dodd grew up in Taranaki and lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Her first collection of poetry, Past Lives, was published by Te Herenga Waka University Press in 2023. She is currently working on a second.
Megan Kitching is an Ōtepoti Dunedin poet. Her debut collection At the Point of Seeing (Otago University Press, 2023) won the Jessie Mackay Prize for Poetry in the 2024 Mātātuhi Foundation Best First Book Awards and was awarded Best International First Collection in the UK Poet Laureate’s The Laurel Prize 2024. In 2021, Megan was the inaugural Caselberg Trust Elizabeth Brooke-Carr Emerging Writer in residence.
Rebecca Hawkes is a painter-poet from a farm near Methven, now living in Wellington. She is the author of the poetry collection Meat Lovers (Auckland University Press) and the chapbooks Softcore Coldsores (AUP New Poets 5) and Hardcore Pastorals (Cordite). She edits poetry journal Sweet Mammalian. Rebecca holds an MFA in yearning from the University of Michigan and MA in half-truths from the IIML. Her new chapbook Hide, an illuminated manuscript of narrative verse, is coming in September 2026 with ngā pukapuka pekapeka, and her next collection Fool’s Spring is forthcoming from Yes Yes Books and AUP in 2027.
Born in Dunedin in 1976, Richard Reeve is the author of seven collections of poetry, Dialectic of Mud (AUP 2001), The Life and the Dark (AUP 2004), In Continents (AUP 2008), The Among (Maungatua Press 2008), Generation Kitchen (OUP 2015), Horse and Sheep (Maungatua Press 2019) and About Now (Maungatua Press 2024). With Mick Abbott, he is also co-editor of an anthology of essays on wilderness, Our Wild Heart: The Possibility of Wilderness in Aotearoa New Zealand (OUP 2011). He lives in Warrington, to the north of Dunedin, with Octavia and the cat Lionel.
Sabrina Li is a young writer from Christchurch who enjoys exploring poetry through inventive forms and structures, often finding beauty in the ordinary moments of everyday life. She draws inspiration from the natural world around her, as well as the stories and perspectives she encounters through social media. Her poetry has also appeared in Write On Magazine and Given Words, along with a new work forthcoming from the Hagley Writer’s Institute.
Xue Li (Sherry) Zhang is a writer born and raised in Tāmaki Makaurau. She works across poetry, theatre and prose. Her family are from Fujian, China. She was the editor of The Pantograph Punch, and the co-manager of Te Kāhui Creative Writing.
Naming the Beast, Elizabeth Morton, Otago University Press, 2022
You don’t want book reviews to diminish your reading experience, to lead you up the garden path of expectation, to lay false trails and unreliable hopes. Imagine the review as a tasting room where you let a morsel of the book swirl on your tongue, releasing flavour, leaving a vital aftertaste. You don’t want book jargon, you just want an aromatic taste (precursor) of the writing, the ideas, the feelings, the connections.
Elizabeth Morton’s Naming the Beast is poetry gold. It is the kind of book you savour slowly, absorbing brocade textures, the sumptuous threads, the surprising patterns, satisfying layers. This is poetry that is sonorous, sensual, startling. It got me thinking about how enmeshed I become in certain poetry collections. How I am laid bare as a reader. How I am spiked and soothed. I get caught in a poem, no question.
Elizabeth writes about being in someone else’s poem:
In somebody else’s poem it’s goddamned desolate. I’m in a house with no windows; just venetian blinds on blank walls. The rotary phone bleats hircine, and I hold a real gun to my head. In a poem, the gun goes off. I wake in another poem, planting succulents because love goes as far as my toes, and no further.
from ‘We write what we know when we run out of things we don’t’
I could simply pitch this as a collection of beasts and wild(er)ness, because beasts and wildness are an integral part, but it is also a collection of time, mothers, luck, castles, fire, relatives. The subject matter roves and ranges, at times resembling stream of consciousness connections, lily pad leaps, edgeways writing. The music is symphonic. The lexicon is extraordinary; words feed subterranean narratives and dreamscapes, pungent fields of details. There is plainness and there is opulence. There is the off-real and there is the hyperreal.
Celebrate the richness of poetry, the allure of detail thickets, but there is too the invitation of the unsaid, the vibrating space, the reading alcoves.
I admire the collection’s invisible stitching, the behind-the-scenes craft of the poet that produces such poetic fluency. Yet at other times, the making of poetry is poignantly visible. Poetry comes protagonist, a character moving in and out of shadow and light.
Ah, I have used book jargon, kindled your expectations crazily, so I return to my idea of a tasting room – I will hold out a tasting platter for you, and let some of Elizabeth’s lines spark your reading tastebuds.
First, bark the moon. Make ceremony from a stammer, from a steaming crockpot of two-minute noodles, from the way the taxi driver sucks his bottom teeth as he drives you north.
from ‘Instructions on how to lose a mind’
My mother is the night owl. My father is the tussock, I own memories, alone. My celestial object is done for. The rust core of a lamp that was already out – a red star coughing though light-years of average days, days spent picking lemons and walking average suburbs, nodding at ordinary dogs.
from ‘Stolen pepeha’
We pipette soluble proteins like mothers do. Mothers are no minor characters, who arrange herbs like rubrics, under the soft light of a kettle stove. Home is a fume-cupboard where legend is filtered like breath. Our mothers huddle around pantries of cod liver oils, vitamins, and bleach. Their hands haul the sun over the eastern hillocks, like an axiom.
from ‘Immunohistochemistry’
I want to say I know this place with my eyes closed. I can run, butt naked, through cabbage rows and dairy cows, and the Waikato will annunciate my name with a branding iron and an ear tag that speaks to a bloodline sniffed out by regret. I am writing in my first language. My second is shame. When I dream I dream words I cannot spell.
from ‘God of nations’
If I were a robot, I would be in a better poem. If I were a person, I’d want the telephone wires to hum like stars, and the stars to be unavoidable.
form ‘Hard sell’
Get a copy of this book, open it, pick a poem, take a road trip within its lines, inhabit as a small retreat, sojourn in a series of alcoves. This collection is gold.
Elizabeth Morton grew up in suburban Auckland. Her poetry and prose have been published in New Zealand, the UK, the USA, Canada, Ireland, Australia and online. She holds an MLitt in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow. Morton has accrued many literary acknowledgements for her work, and her previous collection of poetry, This is Your Real Name (OUP, 2020), was longlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry in the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. The manuscript of Naming the Beasts was shortlisted for the 2021 Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award.
Poetry is a way of bridging the faraway and the close at hand. A poem can make the achingly distant comfortingly close. Poetry can be a satisfying form of travel, whether to the other side of the world, to the past or to imagined realms. Reading poems that offer the faraway as some kind of presence, I feel such a range of emotions. Moved, yes. Goose bumps on the skin, yes. Boosted, yes. This is such a fertile theme, I keep picturing a whole book moving in marvellous directions.
I am grateful to all the poets and publishers who continue to support my season of themes.
The Poems
Remembering
if you can you can try to recall
the sun across the roof and you
knee-deep in childhood playing
near the fence with the storm
of daisies still impressionable
in the way of dreams still
believing leaves had voices
and you might then remember
curtains drowned in burnished light
how at night the sky emptied
into a field of stars leaching out
the guilt you’d soon forget unlike
the woman you called Nana who kept
knitting you hats while you kept not
writing back and maybe then you’d know
the injustices you had no part in
the lady who bought your house how
she ravaged your kingdom while
you were away oh these memories
spiralling into memories into
nothing this helter skelter art of
remembering this bending
over backwards running out of light
Anuja Mitra
from Mayhem Literary Journal, Issue 6 (2018)
Drifting North
Acknowledgement to David Eggleton
She said we discussed post
structuralism in a post modern
context. She said in order
to remember such crucial
poetic phrases she had bought
a small exercise book in which
to record them.
It was, she said, a book
of semantic importance.
She said we considered
the deception of disjointed
parody and the fragmentation
of shallow consumer culture.
I can only remember
a girl
in her pale blue cardigan
drifting north
in a zither of light.
Jenny Powell
from Four French Horns, HeadworX, 2004
apricot nails
I want to paint my nails apricot as an homage to call me by your name and the fake italian summer I had last year —
fake because I didn’t cycle beside slow streams or in slow towns
Instead I lay on a 70 euro pinstripe lounger and couldn’t see the water only other tourists
And the apricots I ate came from peach spritzes at sea salt restaurants and clouded supermarket jars
But all the shops are shut and the closest nail colour I have is dark red
I want to be somewhere in northern italy with light green water and deep green conversations
I want to pick fresh apricots from drooping branches and kiss a boy I shouldn’t on cobblestone paths against cobblestone walls
I want to lick a love heart on to his shoulder so that when he gets on a train my hands shake like a thunderstorm
and I can’t cycle home past the fields we held each other in and mum has to pick me up from the station
I want to walk down a staircase with winter at the bottom waiting to sweep me into snow
I want the phone to ring when the sky is white and hear an apricot voice ripe and ready to be plucked from the tree
he’ll say how are you and I’ll slowly leak
Rhegan Tu’akoi
from Stasis 5 May 2020, picked by Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connor
Wearing Katherine Mansfield’s Shawl
Seventy years on, shut
in a cardboard box in the basement
of City Hall, you might think
the shawl would have lost
its force to charm, the airy fragrance
of its wearer departed, threads
stripped bare as bones,
yet here it is, another short story:
it felt like love at the Hôtel
d’Adhémar the moment you placed
the silk skein around my shoulders,
the dim red and rusty green fabric
and a fringe gliding like fingertips
over my arm, a draught of bitter
scent – Katherine’s illness,
Virginia’s sarcasm – and
yes, a trace of wild gorse
flowers and New Zealand, not
to mention the drift of her skin
and yours during the photograph,
the stately walk through the town.
Fiona Kidman
from Where Your Left Hand Rests, Godwit, Random House, 2010
Sparks
On the occasion of the Sew Hoy 150th Year Family Reunion, September 2019
Here in this earth you once made a start
home treasure watered with sweat, new seeds
a fire you can light and which gives off sparks
the gleam of gold glowing in darkness
an open door, warm tea, friendships in need
here on this earth you once made a start
sometimes you imagined you left your heart
elsewhere, a woman’s voice and paddies of green
a fire which was lit, remembering its sparks
but even halfway round the world, shoots start
old songs grow distant, sink into bones unseen
here in this earth you can make a new start
with stone and wood you made your mark
built houses of diplomacy and meaning
a new fire was lit, with many sparks
flame to flame, hand to hand, heart to heart
150 years, sixteen harvests of seed
here, in this earth, you once made a start
A fire was once lit. We all are its sparks.
Renee Liang
Heavy Lifting
Once, I climbed a tree
too tall for climbing
and threw my voice out
into the world. I screamed.
I hollered. I snapped
innocent branches. i took the view
as a vivid but painful truth gifted
to me, but did not think to lay down
my own sight in recompense.
All I wanted was someone to say
they could hear me, but the tree said
that in order to be heard I must
first let silence do the heavy lifting
and clear my mind of any
questions and anxieties
such as contemplating whether
I am the favourite son. If I am not,
I am open to being a favourite uncle
or an ex-lover whose hands still cover
the former half’s eyes. I’ll probably never
have children of my own to disappoint
so I’ll settle for being famous instead
with my mouth forced open on TV like
a Venus fly-trap lip-synching for its life.
The first and last of everything
are always connected by
the dotted line of choice.
If there is an order to such things,
then surely I should resist it.
Chris Tse
from he’s so MASC, Auckland University Press, 2018
My city
drawing blank amber cartridges in windows
from which we see children hanging, high fires
of warehouse colours, a reimagining, my city fluttering
far and further away with flags netted
and ziplining west to east, knotted
and raining sunshine,
paving cinder-block-lit-tinder music in alleys
where we visit for the first time, signal murals
to leapfrog smoke, a wandering, my city gathering
close and closer together a wilderness
of voices shifting over each other
and the orchestra,
constructing silver half-heresies in storefronts
to catch seconds of ourselves, herald nighttimes
from singing corners, a remembering, my city resounding
in and out the shout of light on water
and people on water, the work of day
and each other,
my city in the near distance fooling me
into letting my words down, my city visible
a hundred years from tomorrow,
coming out of my ears and
forgiving me,
until i am disappeared someways and no longer
finding me to you
Pippi Jean
Looming
I call it my looming
dread, like the mornings I wake
crying quietly at the grey
in my room, like whispering to my sleeping
mother – do I have to
like the short cuts I can’t take
like the standing outside not breathing
like my hand on the doorknob
counting to twenty and twenty
and twenty.
Tusiata Avia
from Wild Dogs Under My Skirt, Victoria University Press, 2004
mothering daughter
I am coming home to myself
while watching
my mother going away from herself.
Every move you make
an effort
so much slower now, mother
like your body is trying to keep pace
with your mind
everything about you reads as
tired
but sometimes I read as
giving up
FUCK THIS! silently salts my tongue
a tight fist slamming the steering wheel
gas under my foot
tears choking my ears
smoke swallowing my chest.
I am a mother:
Mothering her son,
a motherless daughter mothering her mother.
It’s hard somedays not to be swallowed.
Grace Iwshita-Taylor
from full broken bloom, ala press, 2017
Memoir II
Preparing for death is a wicker basket.
Elderly women know the road.
One grandmother worked in munitions, brown
bonnet, red stripe rampant. the other, a washerwoman:
letters from the Front would surface, tattered.
You must take the journey, ready or not.
The old, old stream of refugees: prams
of books and carts with parrots.
Meanwhile the speeches, speeches: interminable.
When the blood in your ears has time to dry: silence.
The angel will tie a golden ribbon to the basket’s rim.
You will disappear, then reappear, quite weightless.
Jeffrey Paparoa Holman
from Blood Ties: New and Selected Poems 1963- 2016, Canterbury University Press, 2017
fever
moving away from the orchard plots,
laundry lines that sag under the macrocarpa.
moving away from the crystalline skies,
the salt-struck grasses, the train carts
and the underpasses. i astral travel
with a flannel on my head, drink litres
of holy water, chicken broth. i vomit
words into the plastic bucket, brush
the acid from my teeth. i move away,
over tussock country, along the desert
road. i chew the pillowcase. i cling
my body to the bunk. the streets
unfurl. slick with gum and cigarettes.
somebody is yelling my name. i quiver
like a sparrow. hello hello, says the
paramedic. but i am moving away from
the city lights, the steel towers.
and i shed my skin on a motorway
and i float up into the sky.
Elizabeth Morton
from This Is Your Real Name, Otago University Press, 2019
Black Stump Story
After a number of numberless days
we took the wrong turning
and so began a slow descent
past churches and farmhouses
past mortgages and maraes
only our dust followed us
the thin cabbage trees were standing
in the swamp like illustrations
brown cows and black and white and red
the concrete pub the carved virgin
road like a beach and beach like a road
two toothless tokers in a windowless Toyota
nice of you to come no one comes
down here bro – so near and
yet so far – it takes hours
not worth your while –
turned the car and headed back
shaggy dogs with shaggy tales
Murray Edmond
from Fool Moon, Auckland University Press, 2004
The Poets
Tusiata Avia is an internationally acclaimed poet, performer and children’s author. She has published 4 collections of poetry, 3 children’s books and her play ‘Wild Dogs Under My Skirt’ had its off-Broadway debut in NYC, where it took out The Fringe Encore Series 2019 Outstanding Production of the Year. Most recently Tusiata was awarded a 2020 Arts Foundation Laureate and a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to poetry and the arts. Tusiata’s most recent collection The Savage ColoniserBook won The Ockham NZ Book Award for Best Poetry Book 2021.
Murray Edmond, b. Kirikiriroa 1949, lives in Glen Eden. 14 books of poetry (Shaggy Magpie Songs, 2015, and Back Before You Know, 2019 most recent); book of novellas (Strait Men and Other Tales, 2015); Then It Was Now Again: Selected Critical Writing (2014); editor, Ka Mate Ka Ora; dramaturge for Indian Ink Theatre. Forthcoming: Time to Make a Song and Dance: Cultural Revolt in Auckland in the 1960s, from Atuanui Press in May, 2021.
Jeffrey Paparoa Holman is a Christchurch poet and non-fiction writer. A poetry collection, Blood Ties: selected poems, 1963-2016 was published by Canterbury University Press in 2017. A memoir, Now When It Rains came out from Steele Roberts in 2018. He makes his living as a stay-at-home puppy wrangler for Hari, a Jack Russell-Fox Terrier cross. Hari ensures that little writing takes place, while psychogeography and excavating parks happen daily. Recent work has appeared in Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2021, an essay on prison reform, and poetry; also, an inclusion in The Cuba Press anthology, More Favourable Waters – Aotearoa Poets respond to Dante’s Purgatory.
Grace Iwashita-Taylor, breathing bloodlines of Samoa, England and Japan. An artist of upu/words led her to the world of performing arts. Dedicated to carving, elevating and holding spaces for storytellers of Te Moana nui a Kiwa. Recipient of the CNZ Emerging Pacific Artist 2014 and the Auckland Mayoral Writers Grant 2016. Highlights include holding the visiting international writer in residence at the University of Hawaii 2018, Co-Founder of the first youth poetry slam in Aoteroa, Rising Voices (2011 – 2016) and the South Auckland Poets Collective and published collections Afakasi Speaks (2013) & Full Broken Bloom (2017) with ala press. Writer of MY OWN DARLING commissioned by Auckland Theatre Company (2015, 2017, 2019) and Curator of UPU (Auckland Arts Festival 2020).
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.
Fiona Kidman has written more than 30 books and won a number of prizes, including the Jann Medlicott Acorn Fiction Prize for This Mortal Boy. Her most recent book is All the way to summer:stories of love and longing. She has published six books of poems.In 2006, she was the Katherine Mansfield Fellow in Menton. The poem ‘Wearing Katherine Mansfield’s shawl ‘is based on an event during that time. Her home is in Wellington, overlooking Cook Strait.
Renee Liang is a second-generation Chinese New Zealander whose parents immigrated in the 1970s from Hong Kong. Renee explores the migrant experience; she wrote, produced and nationally toured eight plays; made operas, musicals and community arts programmes; her poems, essays and short stories are studied from primary to tertiary level. In recent years she has been reclaiming her proud Cantonese heritage in her work. Renee was made MNZM in 2018 for Services to the Arts.
Anuja Mitra lives in Auckland. Her writing has appeared in Takahe, Mayhem, Cordite Poetry Review, Starling, Sweet Mammalian, Poetry Shelf and The Three Lamps, and will appear in the AUP anthology A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand. She has also written theatre and poetry reviews for Tearaway, Theatre Scenes, Minarets and the New Zealand Poetry Society. She is co-founder of the online arts magazine Oscen.
Elizabeth Morton is a teller of poems and tall tales. She has two collections of poetry – Wolf (Mākaro Press, 2017) and This is your real name (Otago University Press, 2020). She has an MLitt in creative writing from the University of Glasgow, and is completing an MSc in applied neuroscience at King’s College London. She likes to write about broken things, and things with teeth.
Jenny Powell is a Dunedin poet and performer. Her work has been part of various journals and collaborations. She has a deep interest in music and used to be a french horn player.
Chris Tse is the author of two poetry collections published by Auckland University Press – How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes (winner of Best First Book of Poetry at the 2016 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards) and HE’S SO MASC – and is co-editor of the forthcoming Out Here: An Anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ Writers From Aotearoa.
Rhegan Tu‘akoi is a Tongan/Pākehā living in Pōneke. She is a Master’s student at Victoria and her words have appeared in Turbine | Kapohau, Mayhem and Sweet Mammalian. She has also been published in the first issue of Tupuranga Journal
Elizabeth Morton reads two poems from This is your real name (Otago University Press, 2020)
Elizabeth Morton is a poet and teller of yarns. She has two poetry collections – Wolf (Mākaro Press, 2017) and This is your real name (Otago, 2020). She is included in Best Small Fictions 2016, and was feature poet in the Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2017. She has an MLitt in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow, and is currently completing an MSc through King’s College London.
CONGRATULATIONS to all the poets. This is the best longlist I have seen in years. I have loved all these books to a sublime degree. I am also delighted to see a mix of university presses and smaller publishers, and those inbetween. I plan to review Hinemoana and Karlo’s books over the coming weeks (Goddess Muscle, Karlo Mila, Huia Press and Funkhaus, Hinemoana Baker, Victoria University Press).
This is your real name, Elizabeth Morton, Otago University Press, 2020
There were days I spent gulping sky,
picking every star off the plate
with the stub of a thumb.
from ‘The eating of sorrow’
Elizabeth Morton grew up in Auckland. Her poetry has been published in various journals, both in New Zealand and internationally, and has achieved a number of award placements, including the 2015 Kathleen Grattan Award. Her terrific debut collection, Wolf, was published by Mākaro Press. She recently finished an MLitt in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow with Distinction.
This book was one of two poetry collections that I kept returning to during lockdown (plus Oscar Upperton’s). I found I could drift in and out of a poem, I could write phrases on sheets of paper, but I couldn’t string sentences together, let alone articulate a reaction to a book. What I could say was I loved it.
The epigraph felt uncannily fitting: ‘For people who wait and people who are alone.’
I had written down the word ‘detail’. Elizabeth’s deft handling of detail forms the visible stitching of a poem. It offers hue and texture to the multiple poem threads. The detail is a gateway to threads that are personal, universal, engaged in storytelling, recollection, contemplation, association, inquiry.
There are reading footholds and there are wobbly boards, especially in poems that are a mix of real life, memory, fable, fiction, enigma. The real is often elusive, but lands in shards, both striking and evocative. In ‘After’, two lines in particular catch this movement, and echo throughout the collection as a whole (and with me during lockdown):
Night comes apart, like everything else.
We know the landmarks for their hardness.
At the poem’s start, the speaker suggests closing one’s eyes is enough. Shutting one’s eyes is contemplative, an escape device, a pause. This is me in lockdown. I keep shutting my eyes and waiting. The poem features the last polar bear cage-pacing at Auckland Zoo and a butterfly caught on a truck’s windscreen. Two sad notes that alter the way we view the ‘you’ whom the poem addresses. It is the kind of poem you keep reading to absorb the dislocation, the absences, the mournings, the complexities. The ending catapults you back to the beginning which then returns to the eyes closing at the start. The ending:
When I open my eyes I’m in the same cage I was in yesterday.
I am the same yellow bear driving the same haulage truck
over ice sheets, thin as a prince’s hairline.
What night is this? We talk about the butterfly like it got away.
We talk abut you, like you are here. Like you never left.
Every poem works its magic on me – and the breathtaking effects are now heightened by lockdown. I am musing on how I have read this book before, during and after levels 3 and 4. I am writing this review in level 2, and I am wondering when everything I read and write won’t be touched by my Covid experiences. Yet this was the book that held my fuzzy attention.
Most of the poems are dense thickets, interconnected threads, offbeatness and misty bits to get lost in. The beginnings of poems are exquisite hooks:
You might make it, if you sprint.
from ‘Gap’
I’m not going to cry. All winter the television
sulks in the corner of our love. You put the lentils
in a colander to flush the ugly bits.
from ‘You can’t, always’
Here I am turning the pages of the book, writing a review with my thoughts and feelings close up, because I stall on every poem and want to set up a coffee club in a cafe so we can talk about how we move through the poem thickets. Take ‘Aubade with hold music’ for example. You start with the image of a phone booth: ‘The phone booth was skull-cracked, / and caulked with soggy directories.’ Again the uncanny link. The reference to all the people we never know reverberates acutely in lockdown because that’s how I feel about the global Covid statistics. And how I have often felt when I drive down streets and wonder at the lives of the people I see.
The poem moves about a phone call to a mother, but then a central cluster of lines ‘shake’ the phone booth and you wonder what is going on behind the scenes of the poem:
The morning smelled like fire,
like the sun projecting simple stories
against the warehouse brickwork
and I wonder whether you know
you are melting.
Yes I could say this poem is about a phone call, a phone call about to be made; there is a small boy with coins, there are the White Pages, but then there is this: ‘This poem sets you apart, and / you are a small forest pressed against the city’. So mysterious. So ripe with meaning and possibilities. Each poem is like a little forest. Each poem is like a little forest pressed against us. How can we not stall and wonder. These lines stand out.
Writing a poem is a political act.
I want you to know, what you feel
is more than politics.
This is the joy of poetry: you think a poem and you feel a poem. It might be political or personal or a dense thicket, with multiple pathways and myriad connections to a peopled world. Elizabeth’s subject matter is wide ranging. Stories appear like neon lights or fleeting shadows or veiled self exposures. Sometimes it feels like the sun is out and sometimes like pitch-black night. The reading rewards are glorious. Find the book, make a coffee, and then let me know what you think. I am ever so grateful for the arrival of this book.
Elizabeth Morton This is your real name (Otago University Press, 2020)
Elizabeth Morton’s launch scraped in by the skin of its teeth recently, but I thought it would be lovely to do an online version and get Poetry Shelf Lounge rolling. You can read and listen for morning tea with a short black, afternoon tea with your favourite tea, or a glass of wine or beer this evening.
At the bottom of the post, I have put a selection of good bookshops where you can buy or order the book online (this is a list in progress, please help me fill the gaps).
Tracey Slaughter launched the book.
Split the pages of Elizabeth Morton’s This is your real name anywhere & you are in the pulsing presence of questions that cut to the very heart of poetry: How much, if anything, can language actually touch? How much of our experience can we ever name? How much can poetry reach past the stars smashed into the emergency-glass of daily-living & offer the kind of voice that leaves more than a bloody trace, that makes a vital difference. ‘Poetry wallows between question marks/police? fire? ambulance?’ says a piece that opens with telephone lines exploding in a gaze pushed to the edge – how much can language ever hope to halt pain, to offer connection, to help in such a crisis? ‘Deep breaths,/say the operator’ within that poem, but ‘inside the communications centre/the desks are inconsolable.’
‘There is no touching the black heat at the centre of things’ another early poem entitled ‘Inside-out’ declares – and yet travel through the bolted internal doors and bleak domestic corridors, the blighted global landscapes and glinting dystopias of Elizabeth’s collection & you know you’re in the hands of a poet who, like Plath or Sexton before her, has all the dazzling surreal command of language to reach to the core of that black heat, to make it speak.
‘Inside-out’ concludes with a widespread vision of ‘a wreckage of stars’ – but the volume goes on in piece after luminous piece to chronicle the work of salvage, of a self bent on using every particle of language to dig through the ruins, rewire the evidence, sustain the spark, relight every shard.
These are poems that speak again and again from both the inside and the outside, from both the blasted solar plexus of private traumas and the slow-mo devastations of the wider planet – over and over the poems flicker from hallways tremoring with personal pain to the ‘casual terrorism’ of history, taking an ‘aerial photograph’ of a suffering earth with the same kind of acute irradiated poetic lens that it turns on the lone & isolated heart. Whether it’s the stranding of a single life caught in the driftnets of personal desolation, or the mass beaching of a populace oblivious to the global damage they’ve done, Elizabeth’s language zeroes in on the waste & makes us see the interconnections: whether it’s steering the reader through burning towerblocks or coldblooded wards, past disinterested drone strikes or through achingly-handled small-scale solo losses, the breathtaking scope of poetic skill with which she charts her urgent scenes makes the reader feel every detail, feel the meds and the headlines catch in our throats, feel the doors locked and the altitude dropping, feel the kiss blown against the quarantine window & the distant ‘circle[s] of blood’ left on political screens.
These are poems that detonate and sing, that ring in the ear and sting in the political consciousness, and linger in the bloodstream long after they’ve stained your eye. They’ll also make you outright belly laugh: ‘I’d marry Finland. I’d blow Nicaragua. I’d shag Australia if she wore a paper bag’ states a slapstick look at politics that plays wicked & sacrilegious footsie with stereotypes. With the same comedic weaponry ‘How I hate Pokemon but I can show restraint and just talk about my adolescence’ gives a gore-soaked rundown of methods to slaughter innocent anime, and ‘In the next life’ tracks Wile E. Coyote speeding to collide with another booby-trapped piano or hurtling freight train. But of course, under the cartoon bloodsport there’s another violence being expressed: ‘I’m from the wrong cartoon she says…There is no/acid in my stomach to digest the sadness’; ‘I spent my teens/hyperventilating in elevators…yanking at emergency cords’ – that’s what lurks beneath the funny foreground of these onscreen critters and their messy calamities.
‘This is not a joke’ warns another poem, parading a cast of backwoods bar-leaners and big boned nobodies, its humour always ready to brim with ‘a metaphor so sad it makes grown men sob and jerk off into the same handkerchief.’ The counterstrike to comedy is always coming, the punchlines always poised ready to gut you. We might snicker when we’re introduced to a blowsy homespun oblivious America, but when she ‘order[s] Big Mac’s and Napalm’, lazily erases continents & watches bodycounts rise from her consumerist couch, the smile is wiped off our faces. And when the pronouns shift in this poem to fold us into complicity, as they do to such clever & ethical effect throughout the collection as a whole, we too are left standing with supermarket bags and shotguns/baffled and alone.’ That moment of aloneness – whether it’s the self turning figure-eights of final need or the last polar bear ‘pacing his cell, as the credits go down’ – is the place which the poems often return us to: ‘I wonder whether you know/you are melting’ this poetry asks with chilling economy. Over and over we find trapped ourselves in that phone booth, as in the masterpiece ‘Aubade’, where the glass is ‘skull-cracked’ and the world seems only to have ‘hold music’ to offer us. But even in this moment of exigency, with our ‘hearts in []our horror mouth’ & all the lines crossed, language is held up as ‘the loneliest miracle’: because we still use it to ‘pray, into the receiver’ hoping for a sign on the other end, some voice to come back from the empty page. ‘Writing is a political act’ the poem insists, even from this place. Even if all it can sometimes do is trace ‘the face of the enemy,’ or chalk round the bodies of selves and lovers we’ve lost; even if all it can sometimes do is echo the bleak dialtone inside our chests, its utterance ‘sets you apart’ the voice of ‘Aubade’ repeats to the sufferer.
Elizabeth had already set herself apart as a poet of breathtaking force, edge, intensity and empathy – This is your real name is another stunning, irrefutable, crucial book, a fearless personal testimony and a blistering political act. It goes to the places we need poetry to go to, places that only a language loaded with heart and shimmering with pressures can name. It smashes the glass.
Tracey Slaughter
Listen to Elizabeth read ‘Tropes’:
Stranding
We were never alone, pushing up loam on a blackened beach.
We kicked our tails like we were trying to escape
the outline of ourselves. We came ashore, two by two
with our cutlasses and compasses, with our baleen smiles
and bad attitudes, with our dead-end marriages and dreams that choked
in drift nets. We were never lost. We knew the shoreline better
than we knew our own purposes. We were a quarter into lives
that stood us up from the water-break, that left us gasping
by the river mouth, blistering under wet sacking,
our eyeballs fierce with the evening sun.
We wanted the attention. We wanted to arrange ourselves
upside down and scattered like something infinite. Like stars.
We follow each other to the end of the beach
and sing something that reminds us of bone
and the million land-flowers our mothers spoke of,
and the kamikaze heritage, our fathers and their fathers,
who recognised a vague phosphorescence
and shadowed it into the salt marshes, dreaming of air.
Elizabeth Morton
ELIZABETH MORTON grew up in suburban Auckland. Her first poetry collection, Wolf, was published by Mākaro Press in 2017. She has placed, been shortlisted and highly commended for various prizes, including the 2015 Kathleen Grattan Award, and her poetry and prose have been published in New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States, Ireland, Australia, Canada and online. She has completed an MLitt in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow.
sulks in the corner of our love. You put the lentils
in a colander to flush the ugly bits. You peel oranges
to their pith and talk about your past like it was mine too.
You say it was sunnier in Queens than it could ever be in
an unhappy kitchen with a lover made of feathers.
I want to tell you about the way a man can look down
a corridor, the way a hunter visits his scope. There are things
too big to ever fold into your hands. A barbule is enough
to demonstrate how even soft things fall down,
like small people from towers that trade in shadows.
When I say I need you, it clambers up a stairwell in my throat
like you were the only window left in 110 levels of pain.
I’m not going to say I get it. You toss the lentils
in a brine pot and power-up the television.
You say we spend too much of life watching
the kind of comedies that make you sad. Like Home Improvement
and The Cosby Show that make you think of time
and the way we were happy in Queens
before small people sat on window ledges, before
the hunter’s scope settled on an ordinary bird.
I’m not going to cry. All morning chopping onions,
watching Bill Cosby hug his wife in Brooklyn Heights
before he was a rapist, and before you first registered
towers on the skyline by their absence.
When I say I need you I am a soft thing falling
on something familiar, and it is violence
in the way dispassionate surgery is violence
or the way The Cosby Show is what you get
before you get what you never wanted.
I’ll take what I can.
Elizabeth Morton
Auckland writer, Elizabeth Morton, is published in New Zealand, Australia, Ireland, the UK, Canada and the USA. She was feature poet in the Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2017, and is included in Best Small Fictions 2016. Her first poetry collection, Wolf, was published with Mākaro Press in 2017. She is completing a MLitt at the University of Glasgow, usually in her pyjamas.
I visited
the angels and stars and stones;
also, adjectival poets, preferably original.
There was an air of restlessness
an inability to subside, a state of being at attention,
at worst, at war with the immediately beating heart and breathing lung.
I looked then in the word-chambers, the packed warehouses by the sea,
the decently kept but always decaying places where nouns and their
representative images lay together on high shelves
among abbreviations and longlost quotations. I listened.
Water lapped at the crumbling walls; it was a place
for murder, piracy; salt hunger seeped between the shelves;
it was time to write. Now or never. The now unbearable,
the never a complete denial of memory:
I was not, I never have been.
Janet Frame from The Goose Bath: Poems, Vintage, 2006
published with kind permission from The Janet Frame Estate (note in The Goose Bath states that this appeared as a section in a long untitled sequence)
Notes from Elizabeth Morton:
Veni Vedi Veci is a T-shirt-perfect slogan, gloating in its victory of ancient history, and its facility with Latin grammar. As an undergraduate I likely sported such an item of casual alliteration. I may have stood at the fence of Albert Park, smoking a Wee Willem cigarillo, mispronouncing the words to passing first-years and telling a bastardised yarn about Julius Caesar. Janet Frame’s poem, ‘I Visited’ relates a quieter, more tentative conquest – that ends in brute self-nihilation – ‘I was not, I never have been’. This is no Caesar. Here is a concession that our words are things to be borrowed, not usurped. There is a sense of things in flux, things that spill through the gaps in your fingers – ‘decaying places’ and ‘crumbling walls’. There is no pillaging of intangibles. The world of words is a lending library with ‘word chambers’ and ‘high shelves’.
Frame’s poem is gently playful. Through it, I recognise this impossibility of ownership. Words are slippery; words alter to their context; words are shared but never spent. I have supermarket bags full of words – words for ‘angels and stars and stones’, earthly and metaphysical – words like ‘turophile’ and ‘oleaginous’ and ‘eosophobia’ and ‘absquatulate’. They can never be conquests. I visit them. Visito. And I try to shake the dust off the words that have been left for dead. Words are people too, you know – ‘with beating heart and breathing lung’. Frame’s poem captures an excitement, a vitality, and also an humility. Also, ‘salt hunger’ makes me shiver.
Auckland writer, Auckland writer, Elizabeth Morton, is published in New Zealand, Australia, Ireland, the UK, Canada and the USA. She was feature poet in the Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2017, and is included in Best Small Fictions 2016. Her first poetry collection, Wolf, was published with Mākaro Press in 2017. She is completing a MLitt at the University of Glasgow, usually in her pyjamas.
Janet Frame (1924-2004) published eleven novels, five story collections, a previous volume of poetry (The PocketMirror, 1967), a children’s book and a three-volume autobiography. She won numerous awards and honours, including New Zealand’s highest civil honour when she was made a Member of the Order of New Zealand in 1990. In 2003 she received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement and was named an Arts Foundation Icon Artist. Pamela Gordon, Denis Harold and Bill Manhire edited The Goose Bath, Janet’s posthumous collection of poems in 2006.
