Tag Archives: Emma Neale

Poetry Shelf Protest series: ‘Reading Poetry to Rare Lizards’ – Poetry in Defence of the Environment

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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 langue verte; 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.

Mutuwhenua: The Whole World

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 Poetry from 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. 1870 of 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.

Gregory O’Brien

Poetry Shelf celebrates The Venetian Blind Poems: a gathering of illness poems

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The Venetian Blind Poems, Paula Green, The Cuba Press, 2025

When I wrote Wild Honey: Reading New Zealand Women’s Poetry (MUP, 2019), I built a house, dividing the book into rooms, and then moving through open doors and windows to the wider world. The book was neither a formal history nor a theoretical overview of New Zealand’s women’s poetry but a way of collecting, building recouping valuing the poetic voices of women in Aotearoa. As I moved through the rooms in the house the themes accumulated: politics, poetics, love, the domestic, self, relations, illness, death, location, the maternal, home, voice.

The book came out in 2019, not that long ago, and I was interested to read ‘The sickbed’ chapter again. I began the chapter by saying inquisitive audiences often ask, ‘Why write poetry?’. I still claim the answers are myriad: it makes us feel good, we are addicted to wordplay, we can squeeze writing a poem in between domestic chores, parenting, scholarly endeavour, work commitments. We might crave public attention, awards, good reviews. We might simply have to write. Our poetry might reflect a love of music, storytelling, suspense, wit, surprise, attraction to the unsayable or beauty. We might write poems at the kitchen table, in our head as we walk, run, dream or dillydally. We might favour condensation and pocket size writing or expansion and long sequences. We might write from a sick bed.

My collection Slipstream (AUP, 2010) came out of my breast cancer experience. I refer to it in Wild Honey: ‘poetry was an energy boost, a way to enhance my sense of wellbeing’. As I wrote, at least a year after the experience, I did not feel I was writing poems – nothing on the page earned the label ‘poem’ in my view — but I was conscious that the white space, the juxtapositions, the assembled lists and the melody were reaching for the poetic. I did not want to summon the dark, middle of the night slumps, but rather to show illness can change the way you see the day as well as live the day.

The Venetian Blind Poems is a little different in that I wrote it in the moment, in hospital and then back home on the recovery road. But I recognised similar motivations to write.

My new collection has been out in the world for a fortnight now, and it feels so very special. To be in Motutapu Ward and the Day Stay Ward this week, signing copies for nurses, hearing them read fragments aloud, reminded me that poetry is an incredible way of connecting. I am still in a thicket of appointments as I fine tune the road ahead, but this fortnight feels like like my time in hospital, when so many poets sent me a poem in a card. The emails you have sent me these past two weeks, so thoughtful and caring, have shone fresh light on how and why poetry is a gift. On why we write and sometimes publish poetry. I will treasure your emails for a long time (and reply soon)!

More than anything, The Venetian Blind Poems is a way of saying thank you to the doctors and nurses who have given, and are giving so much. I offer an enormous bouquet of thanks to Mary McCallum and Paul Stewart at The Cuba Press, for the beautiful book, and for inviting such terrific responses to post on social media by poets who have read it.

Now its back to normal transmission! I have new ideas for Poetry Shelf bubbling like my sour dough starter, manuscripts to finish, a treasury of books to review, emails to answer, a few more appointments, and most excitingly, I am ready to get my secret seedling idea off the ground: Poetry Shelf Goes Live. Yes! Soon I will be back in the world organising live poetry events around the country.

A cluster of illness poems

The waiting game

begins with someone calling your name before you
wait to have your blood taken in a windowless room.
Wait for the stultifying thoughts of red and disease
to pass. Wait for the phone call, for relief to wash
over you. And while you are waiting I recommend you
dance like the memory of sweat easing down his
throat; roll open like the drum beat of your limbs
in sync; tear through your wildest nights, still lit in
hopeful neon; cry like the Christmas you lost your
last grandparent; and sing like the forgotten violin
slowly coming undone in your muscle memory.
If you do not allow yourself to sleep in peace
with your worries, you will find yourself awake
at the bottom of a very deep, very secret lake.

Chris Tse
Turbine, 2014


A Final Warning

I walked past the stars
the silence of grandfathers

I was going somewhere but where

I went left at first then right
then way off course then back to somewhere

near the middle
did this mean I was ready to die

well they’ve been testing me for everything
I think I’ve got the lot

Bill Manhire
from Honk Honk, The Anchorstone Press, 2022

The Night Shift

I wake on the ward, afloat on ketamine, fentanyl,
see sky-blue morphine swifts roost nearby
in pleated paper thimbles

and some uneasy instinct tugs my gaze
to a scuff mark on the lino floor.
Coal-dark, it smolders. I stall.

A voice reassures me it’s just a graze
left by the wheel of some routine machine:
IV, PCA line, heart monitor screen.

Yet as I ease deep-cut core and leaden legs
over the distant side of the high bed
I can’t shake this need to stare

not quite in fear: not quite.

For last night, creatures came.
They arrived en masse, nodded, swayed,
pressed into each dimmed cubicle,

their copper eyes bright-candled,
lips pouched over strong, proud teeth,
their heads bowed in silent inspection;

marmalade lions with oxen feet,
crested birds with antlers, candy-pink teats,
all crowded, crowded round each bed

as the window in time was fast contracting,
and they wanted us to see before our minds
sealed tough with the fibers of logic, denial.

Their fur packed tight as green florets on catkins.
Their horns, colossal black spikes, gleamed like grand pianos.
Such mass and strength in their embedded weaponry,

yet still, they withheld their crush and maim.

The breath and bunt of their herded skulls
said we are the unbroken in you, don’t be afraid,
and I saw through the seep of dawn

that soon like guardians they will gather
each one of us, our failing forms absorbed
into their warm, strong-walled veins

until we too watch
each figure on the bed
as something invisible shifts
in the intricate balance of matter and spirit.

So it is awe, not dread, that asks me
to leave the ground undisturbed
where they gathered,
to skirt carefully the sign one left
like a scorched hoof print
as if they had stood in fire
to show they bear time’s pyre for us,

our wild sentries, our wild sentries.

Emma Neale
from Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit, Otago University Press, 2024

(A lifetime of sentences)

Soon, I could leave my body without prompts. The artist’s concept of the birth of a star, or I broke my name until the fibres separated and lost their coats. My thirst for windows kept me indoors. My gaze wandered across the suburbs of childhood, faces stammering with shyness, bodies masquerading as furniture. Initial mass and luminosity determine duration, but my sensibility comes to require an object. Here, the word “system” implies a level of certainty that is unwarranted. Some of those memories were not written by me, so they are memos, at home on my desk, but still authoritative. Now, instead of a pupil, there’s a screensaver. It was late. The room was empty. A lifetime of sentences which at first glance seem superfluous, but whose value is later understood. One thing leads to a mother. Soon enough, a flock of children came running and tapped on the glass. When I reached the bottom of the stares, I looked up.

Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle
selected by Kiri Pianaha Wong and was published a fine line and also Best NZ Poems 2011

it is a wedding cavalcade
in which I take your day of birth
and marry it with ten pink tulips
to mine     look, behind us on the road
sadness and unutterable joy
leaping over the rocks
how we were those people in the crowd
unmindful of everything 
except stepping along together 
under our parasols
what’s wrong with that?
see, the road is still there
still ahead and behind
losing its mind and leaping
over the rocks with its train
of clowns who are careless
careless careless and will never
behave any differently
believing themselves arm in arm
with all they need
to sustain life on a distant planet
choogaloo, this is all you need
tulips and a parasol
to keep off the bigger bits of debris
falling out of the sky
don’t be sad
there is every chance 
we are just now resident
in two minds regarding each other
tenderly, quizzically, uproariously
as a wedding cavalcade

Michele Leggot
from Milk & Honey, Auckland University Press, 2005

What’s the time, Mr Wolff-Parkinson-White?

Press palm against skin
feel its breathless sprinting

            count 230 beats in a minute
            count six sibling arguments
            count four gecko squawks

gulp two glasses of water
phone the absent dad three times
return to the couch

           count 194 beats—and whoah
           with the flutter of a moth
           it slows down to a jog

steady rhythm of 75

Fire heart    
                          Sea heart   
                                             Earth heart

Calm waters as a child
now more fire than earth
chased by a white wolf

Want to feed my child
             ruby corn        raspberries
red meat        cherry tomatoes
             pomegranate bursts
sugar and acid
enough to woo a rebel

The heart heals itself
between beats, reassures
Elizabeth Smither

Mikaela Nyman

Amy Marguerite picked a poem from Shira Erlichman’s Odes to Lithium, a book I now have on order! But sadly I didn’t manage to get permission to post the poem but you can listen to Shira read it here.

Self-Affirming Mantra

I was searching my symptoms online. Disturbed sleep led to fatigue which led to post-viral condition and also to alcohol abuse and liver disease and unthinkable cancers which all led to conclusions about society and how one operates in it, how someone can be rational and maladaptive at the same time, how resilience is just a word in a PowerPoint, how years of work go into the manufacture of one unit of anxiety (a person), and how each unit, although similar to others in many ways, is unique, the product of a freakish and golden permutation of inputs, which led me back to my usual searches for wars and politicians and racing drivers and recipes and animals and islands and colours.

I went out into the day with my symptoms. The sun made the swans look like harps. I appreciated the silhouettes of buildings. I scrumped apples from over a fence. My symptoms were still with me but also not with me. I was loving them. I was setting them free.

Erik Kennedy
from Poto | Short (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025)

Paula Green in conversation with Anna Jackson
A collage conversation with nine poets
The Cuba Press page

Poetry Shelf Monday poem: Emma Neale’s ‘Fresh’

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Fresh

I open the door to the deck to get a little fresh

rooster crow / blackbird song / power saw / cat meow/

child’s lilt / father’s laughter / late autumn cicadas

ticking like they’ve all thrifted

matching gold fob watches

from a fancy second-hand store/

in absentminded rapture

at the sudden busking backyard orchestra

I pour luke-yikes! coffee down my sky blue T-shirt

as goof-struck at this thunderclap

of unlikely love for the bunged-up world

as that teenage boy who cycled past me once

in the briefest time I was green and goldening:

he smiled as he turned around to see

whether my face agreed

with his behind-view reckons

then hit the fender of a parked car

so I could just keep

awkwardly walking and blushing on

confusingly new with happeous pity,

piteous happy.

Emma Neale

Emma Neale, the author of six collections of poetry and six novels, received the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for a Distinguished Contribution to New Zealand Poetry in 2020. Her most recent novel, Billy Bird (2016) was short-listed for the Acorn Prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and long-listed for the Dublin International Literary Award. Her first collection of short stories, The Pink Jumpsuit (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2021, was also long-listed for the Acorn Prize. She lives in Ōtepoti/Dunedin, New Zealand, where she works as a freelance editor.

Poetry Shelf Occasional Poems: Emma Neale’s ‘Little Fibs’

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Little Fibs

Let us praise
the small evasions:
the missed call
the slight sore throat,
the prior engagement;
the short works of fiction
that act like the turn of a key,
the snib of a front door’s fly screen
which mean we can try to forge the silence
that ferries us to the hinterland of the wildest interior.

Emma Neale

Emma Neale is the author of six novels,  six collections of poetry, and a collection of short stories. Her novel, Billy Bird (2016) was short-listed for the Acorn Prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and long-listed for the Dublin International Literary Award. Emma has received a number of literary fellowships, residencies and awards, including the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for a Distinguished Contribution to New Zealand Poetry 2020. Her first collection of short stories,  The Pink Jumpsuit (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2021) was long-listed for the Acorn Prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. The mother of two sons, Emma lives in Ōtepoti/Dunedin, where she works as a freelance editor.

Poetry Shelf celebrates 2021: Emma Neale picks favourite books

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The Pink Jumpsuit, Emma Neale, Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2021

Rather than do my annual list where I invite loads of poets to pick favourite books, I opted for a much smaller feature. I have invited authors whose work I have loved (a book of any genre, a poem, a website) to share favourites. No easy task as I have read so many books I have loved in the past year: poetry, fiction, nonfiction, children’s, local and international. On Friday 17th I will post the feature but, between then and now, I am posting some authors who have produced longer contributions.

Emma Neale’s collection of short fictions is one of my favourite reads of the year. In my short review, I wrote:

Any book by Emma Neale underlines what a supreme wordsmith she is. At times I stop and admire the sentences like I might admire the stitching of a hand-sewn garment.

Like Emma free-falling into memory, sideways skating after looking at ‘Wanderlust’, I am free-falling and sideways skating with this glorious book. I am free-falling into the power of truths, diverted by fiction, the dark the light, the raw edge of human experience, and this matters, this matters so very much.

Emma Neale, a Dunedin based writer and editor, is the author of six novels and six collections of poetry. Her most recent collection is To the Occupant (Otago University Press). In 2020 she received the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for a Distinguished Contribution to New Zealand Poetry.

Emma Neale’s Picks

Poetry


I’m disoriented when I realise how few full poetry collections I’ve read this year. Lockdown, and then major surgery, altered my reading habits more dramatically than I was aware of until I sat down to look at my (scrappy) reading journal. I feel a bit like the dreamy kid who hasn’t done all her homework: there are so many 2021 titles that I haven’t managed to read yet. But books should last so much longer than their year of publication, shouldn’t they?


Selima Hill’s Gloria: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books) stands out, for its gorgeously bewildering fusion of the surreal, the direct, the subversive and sharp; she writes tiny, acid drop poems that sting you awake with their dark and often tragic accounts of male-female relationships and family, and their sardonic skewering of contemporary consumerist culture.

 
The Selected Poems of Tomaž Šalamun – edited by Charles Simic (The Ecco Press), with an introduction by Robert Hass, was a new discovery for me: I ordered it on the strength of the opening  poem ‘History’ – which is wacky, subversive, swerves from apparently self-aggrandising to irreverent and bitterly self-mocking with rapid, comically dislocating speed. 


Pascale Petit’s Tiger Girl (Bloodaxe Books) in which many poems explore her grandmother’s Indian heritage, and the natural world in subcontinental jungles, was a delight to read, as her work is exuberant with metaphor and simile, even when she deals with grim  psychologically tough material. I feel like she is a bit of a soulmate poet, as she doesn’t necessarily agree that less is more. Lush is more, here, and there are times I just want to soak up to my chin in the warmth and prismatic light of this generous, capacious voice.


Between us Not Half a Saint, co-authored by Rushi Vyas and Rajiv Mohabir (Gasher). This collection astonished me with its discipline, the dialogue between the two poets, the way it manages to embrace the political and the spiritual; how well the dialogue about responsibility, power, identity, territory, belief, self vs ‘community’ operates.


Siobhan Harvey’s Ghosts (Otago University Press) was an intellectually and emotionally challenging editing job I was lucky enough to work on; the poetry often stretched the ‘literal-minded’/logic-tracking compartment of my editing brain while we were at the dialogue stage of author-and-editor; and I think (I hope!) it made me a more open reader. The final book, which includes a profound personal essay, is intensely philosophical, and another striking achievement from the author of Cloudboy. 


Prayers for the Living & the Dead by Lindsay Rabbit (SP) was a refreshingly sparse, quiet, and reflective collection: somehow it helped to still the babble, clamour, the torrent of words from other non-literary sources pouring in to my head and home this year.


The Wilder Years: Selected Poems by David Eggleton (Otago University Press) – as I said at the Dunedin Writers and Readers festival event on the politics of poetry: David’s work ranges from the piercingly lyrical, to epic postcolonial tsunamis of language, that exhibit a zany abundance of imagination and, I think, an extraordinary capacity to hold wild contraries together, in work that often has the spring and salt of satire. The poems condense such a vast general knowledge, comment on so many social phenomena, that often when reading his work I’ve thought, ‘David is basically the internet’.


I’m still reading both How to Live with Mammals, by Ash Davida Jane (VUP), and Rangikura by Tayi Tibble (VUP). In the first, I’m enjoying the interleaving of vulnerability, humour, intriguing facts slipped in like quick sparkles of energy, a youthful spritz and yet a piercing nostalgia for the planet as it once was, a filmic sense of what it’s like to be young and in love and still frightened of how it all trembles on the brink of loss and collapse. With the second, I’m finding it shares some of the qualities of Ash Davida Jane’s work, and yet the unpredictable power dynamics of desire, the history of imperialism, colonialism, and the dance of contemporary and mythic references are a bright, looping needle-and-thread running through it all. 

Bird Collector, by Alison Glenny (Compound Press) seems both somehow more humorous and more absurd than  The Farewell Tourist, yet it still has a kind of atmosphere of loss and melancholy. Elliptical answers to elusive questions; nostalgia for an impossible past; large tracts of knowledge erased; definitions from a dreamlike dictionary; the melancholy of lost, exquisite creatures, moments, and even of self-recognition …. this collection is intriguing. As I’ve said elsewhere, ‘it  reads as if a Victorian composer, carrying her valise of new operetta libretti, collided in the street with a watchmaker, his briefcase of sketches for a new time-keeping device, and a genderfluid astronomer toting the patent forms for a mechanised orrery made of blown egg shells and  bird skulls. Their papers, shuffled together by misdirected desires, unspoken and even unconscious intentions, lead to an entirely new work — a sheaf of pages where the negative space of silence speaks as pressingly as the shape of song.’


Bird Collector increases the absurd humour and the sense of literary pastiche found in The Farewell Tourist,  as it both flirts with voices of disembodied wisdom and scholarship, and exposes so much of what is surreal in human behaviour, by creating an alternative, credible epoch and society that seems bound by strange rules, to contain weird and uncanny juxtapositions, yet is as riven by unpredictable desires and sudden disappearances as our own. A plangent strain of loss might rise from the pages: yet when we wake from their trance, we’ve seen such entertainingly strange and marvellous things.  

Prose

I’ve written elsewhere about how much I Ioved Charlotte Grimshaw’s The Mirror Book (Penguin), and Doireeann Ni Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat (Tramp Press) this year; both psychologically profound and lyrically composed books, which explore the construction of identity, and the sometimes subtle (but often glaringly overt) cross-tides of internalised and institutionalised misogyny. They variously examine narcissism, parenthood, motherhood, marriage, and in Ni Ghríofa’s work, the erasure of women’s experiences historically: in the sense that archival records of their lives, in the past, weren’t kept as clearly or as diligently as those of men. The books are very different stylistically, yet in my mind, they mirror or ghost each other. 

Another memoir that I rate really highly this year is Deborah Levy’s Real Estate (Penguin), for its exploration of ideas of independence and motherhood after children have left home; singledom after a long marriage; and the politics of heterosexual relationships. One of the paragraphs that beams out illumination runs:

Is it domestic space, or is it just a space for living? And if it is a space for living, then no one’s life has more value than another,  no one can take up most of that space or spray their moods in every room or intimidate anyone else. It seems to me that a space for living is more gendered and that a space for living is more fluid. Never again did I want to sit at a table with heterosexual couples and feel that women were borrowing their space. When that happens, it makes landlords of their male partners and the women are their tenants.

Local fiction that I’ve lost myself in this year includes Sue Orr’s intricate, sensitive, thoughtful Loop Tracks (VUP); some of the  quiet, elegant stories in Elizabeth Smither’s The Piano Girls (Quentin Wilson Publishing), others in Tracy Slaughter’s The Devil’s Trumpet (particularly the extended piece published as the novella-in-flash, If there is no shelter) (VUP) and Kirsten McDougall’s comic eco-thriller, She’s a Killer (VUP), which I’m celebrating for its tense and ominous cameo from a blissfully unaware-yet-also-wary four year old, towards the end … argh!!! Do not drink strong coffee immediately just before this scene. 


I came late to Catherine Chidgey’s Remote Sympathy (VUP), which was published last year: but it absolutely knocks it out of the book-park for me in terms of New Zealand fiction I’ve read lately. It’s skilfully constructed, managing several different narrative voices; it somehow deals with traumatic, terrifying cruelty with a superlatively light hand, which enables us to keep looking at the heart and mind of evil. Chidgey has a gift for choosing the right metaphor or simile to encapsulate a situation at exactly the right moment: the way she balances plot and poetry is exquisite for the reader. For me as a writer, it makes me want to throw up my hands and quit and yet at the same time it makes me want to work even harder. It’s a bittersweet confusion to have.


I’ll limit my raves to two other novels I read this year. One is David Vann’s Halibut on the Moon (Text Publishing), an immensely strong fictionalised version of the last days of his father’s life before he committed suicide. It is a remarkable achievement, as we want to keep reading, even though the main character’s actions and desires are often deeply repellent. There’s such compassion in the narrative, somehow, and I found myself comparing it to the unlikeable narrators in two other books I read this year: Eileen, by Ottessa Moshfegh (Penguin) and First Love by Gwendolyn Riley (Allen & Unwin); both books I failed to engage with fully. I think Vann’s novel is so effective because  we see all the other characters in Jim’s family so clearly struggling with him, and trying to bring him back to some kind of moral centre. The way Vann handles a painfully direct, honest, bitter, revealing conversation between the suicidal Jim, and his lifelong-monosyllabic father, is cooly devastating, for the way it pulls in massive unspoken, suppressed intergenerational trauma for indigenous (Cherokee) people.  


Oh really only one other rave?? Okay,  Susanna Clark’s Piranesi (Bloomsbury). A wonderful, crisply written, strange fantasy about a character who lives in a mysterious labyrinth that contains various classical marble statues, and whose vast chambers fill and drain with ocean tides. He is trying to piece together his own identity through reading shredded notebooks and trying to recall the oblique dialogues he has with the one other inhabitant of the labyrinth. At one point I thought perhaps the labyrinth was the delusion of a man terrifyingly trapped by another man   … but … if I say any more, I will tear and mangle the magic for other readers.

Poetry Shelf review: Emma Neale’s The Pink Jumpsuit

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The Pink Jumpsuit, Emma Neale, Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2021

Emma Neale, novelist and poet, has recently released her first collection of shorter prose pieces. Short fictions and tall truths, we read on the cover, and that gets me musing on the way fiction might draw upon the truth of experience while also liberating imagination. Perhaps the fiction that affects me most embodies kernels of human truth no matter how the fiction stretches and concertinas. And that is exactly what The Pink Jumpsuit does – and it affects me deeply.

The title of the book, and the title of a short story inside, references the cover work by Sharon Singer (‘Wanderlust’, 2019). The painting is itself like a short fiction and a tall truth, with its bounding enigma, accruing questions, miniature narrative. The rough texture of the acrylic on canvas renders everything a little more vulnerable, a great deal more mysterious. The diminutive figure, standing stock still in an ambiguous setting against an ambiguous dark, is a whirlpool of determination, despair, resignation, hope. Emma’s story references the painting in an epigraph and admits: ‘”Wanderlust” somehow leads me away from any specific narrative I think the artist might be trying to tell, and tips me sideways, Alice-wise, into a free-fall of memory.’ Emma’s story pivots on an awkward gift (‘a slim-fit boiler suit in a light denim fabric’) that the father gives the mother on his return home. This genius heart-smacking story traverses gift giving, relations rupturing, the way silences are like the packed suitcases on the figure’s head in ‘Wanderlust’, and the way we may never truly know anyone (if indeed ourselves). The story heads back towards the painting and you go keeling through the what you have heard so far and what you see when you fall into the wanderlust image. Then there’s the cracking hit of the final line.

Decades ago I bought an American anthology Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories (1987) and it felt fresh and rich in writing possibilities. I loved the idea of fiction suddenness, was excited by the ultra short. Years later we have flash fiction, short fiction, prose poems (and more I am sure) jostling and connecting and opening wide the short story paradigm. Emma’s collection returned me to the notion of suddenness as an appealing reading effect. Read Emma’s collection and you most definitely experience the sudden as you jolt or gasp or shudder. Then again, think of this collection as a deftly composed piece of music, because the reading effects are multiple. You will also imbibe the slower paced, enjoying a story like a slow-release tablet on the tongue (or in the heart say).

Suddenness goes hand-in-hand with the power of the twist. The twist in the tail or the gut or the heart of a story. Take Emma’s ‘Worn once’, the best break-up story ever (reviewers seem drawn to this story!). I refuse to tell you what happens and dilute the effects as you read. Or take ‘Party games’, the child’s birthday written on extreme-nightmare setting, and experience the sudden jolt. Ah, these stories have to be read to be delighted in. Creepiness might creep up on you, the sharp edges and debris of living, the tidal slap of despair, fear, wonder, joy.

Any book by Emma Neale underlines what a supreme wordsmith she is. At times I stop and admire the sentences like I might admire the stitching of a hand-sewn garment.

Like Emma free-falling into memory, sideways skating after looking at ‘Wanderlust’, I am free-falling and sideways skating with this glorious book. I am free-falling into the power of truths, diverted by fiction, the dark the light, the raw edge of human experience. and this matters, this matters so very much.

First time I have done this on the blog! I would like to give at least one copy of The Pink Jumpsuit away to someone who writes a poem / sudden fiction / short short fiction (300 words or so max) jump-started by Sharon Singer’s ‘Wanderlust’. I would love to post some pieces on the blog. Send to paulajoygreen@gmail.com by 2nd November.

Emma Neale, a Dunedin based writer and editor, is the author of six novels and six collections of poetry. Her most recent collection is To the Occupant (Otago University Press). In 2020 she received the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for a Distinguished Contribution to New Zealand Poetry.

Quentin Wilson Publishing FB page

Emma Neale website

‘The Pink Jumpsuit’ appears at The Spinoff as an essay.

Interview at NZ Booklovers

Anna Jackson-Scott review Nine to Noon, RNZ National

Carole Beu review at Kete Books

Emma in conversation with Lynn Freeman Standing Room Only RNZ National

Poetry Shelf Theme Season: Eleven poems about the moon

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The moon has shone in poems for centuries and I can’t see a time when it won’t. Aside from the beauty allure that transfixes you in the dead of night – for me there is the way the connective light shines down on us all – both transcendental and sublime. When I read a moon poem that I love, it feels like I am cupping the moon in the palm of my hand to carry all day. Moon poem bliss. So many moon poems to love. So hard to choose. As with all my themes, it is not so much poetry about the moon, but poetry with a moon presence.

I am grateful to all the poets and publishers who have and are supporting my ongoing season of themes.

Eleven poems about the moon

Last summer we were under water

for K.

and we asked what are you doing there, moon?

our bodies neck-deep in salt and rain

each crater is a sea you said & dived under

the sun before I could speak water rushing

over your skin the place where chocolate

ice cream had melted and dried there like a

newly formed freckle on the surface of

us and the islands crumpling apart softly

over sea caves somewhere opening

my mouth in to the waves to save you are

you are you are

Nina Mingya Powles

from Magnolia 木蘭, Seraph Press, 2020

Soon, Moon 

It’s not you, moon, it’s me:

the way I look to you as if

you’ll choose to be muse

then look back at my battered

corner-alley of a blue mood

and find only eye rhymes

for human-ugly and you:

lost hubcap, squashed yoghurt pot,

metal sewer lid; all the zeros

on the street numbers of the richest

most forbidding houses; the fierce interrogations

of their security lights and satellite disks; 

the white flowers like hung-head hoodies 

on the roadside gang of onion weed.

Even the pale, shucked hull

of mandarin peel dropped in the street

seems like eco-graffiti that cusses

we’re a pack of greedy moon-calves,

fancy apes with glitter-baubles, 

guzzlers at Earth’s thin, sweet milk

who can’t see our hungers

will turn her into your mirror, darkly.

Emma Neale

from Tender Machines, Otago University Press, 2015

Tapa Talk

I’m a shadow catcher

I walk and fly in worlds

between worlds

but you were born in

the light of a bright moon

when the doors of heaven

were open to the songs of stars

your lips are trochus shells

fully parted in sleep

your eyes are nets

that draw me in

to your arms

your Leo heart

is a starfish freshly

plucked from heaven

your familiar body

the midrib of a coconut leaf

adorned with pandanus blooms

your laughter

a banana pod

burst open

and right now

dawn crawls over you

like a centipede

at last I understand

you’re the translation

of an ancient text

and the tapa on the wall

is the gallery of motifs

I found in your sleeping form

that tapa could be you

lying next to me

breathing into the first light

and you, darl

could be the tapa

hanging on the wall

Serie Barford

from Tapa Talk, Huia Press, 2007

Moon

for Ruth

You tell me you are a moth drawn to the moon
and I see you, a rare white puriri
unable to rest in the perfect green
of your sisters. You rise
from the forest
wings lifting and sighing.
You are heavy with prescience
and you have only
a few nights.

Alison Wong

from Cup, Steele Roberts, 2006

From Above  

The twinkly stars disinterestedly  

staring back, it tickles your thinking,  

the sum of you, the multiplicated product  

of all your hysterical episodes, and function,  

fluctuated, fractal, of your moods and vacuities.  

The people you’ve wrung out your guts for  

like the sponge end of a squeegee, that’ve ticked  

and tocked through a month, three months,  

six months, a year of rinse cycles,  

the faces who’ve written their looks  

into your programming, all the undeletable,  

second-guessed significations, the gestures  

of their lips, their fingers’ commands,  

it leaves you spinning, dehydrating  

the evening to a dusty, distant simile.  

I feel like a moon, punched all over with  

old bruises, but whole, orbiting on,  

pressing on, whole.

Nick Ascroft

from Back with the Human Condition, Victoria University Press, 2016

Madrigal

The moon rose out of the sea

     and climbed above Mihiwaka.

          How terrible, lonely far off

             it seemed, how resolute and cold

in a vast nest of stars.

     I stood leaning on a gatepost

         listening to the mysterious wind

             bending the pines a long time

before I set off down the hill

     feeling like a stranger

          returning to the place

              where he was born.

And the moon came after me,

    sat on my shoulder

       and followed me inside.

            All night it lay glowing

in the bones of my body,

     a private pain, given over

        to everything; all night

             the moon glowed as a body glows

in a halo of moonlight,

    and in the half-light of dawn

      I heard the moon sing a madrigal

           for those who live alone.

Brian Turner

from Ancestors, John McIndoe, 1981, picked by Richard Langston

Moon

‘Look,’ I said,

‘there’s the bloodied moon

over Paekakariki.

She’s tilting crazily

(one ear lopped off),

skimming the bright sea,

colliding with the hill-side.

I am afraid of madness –

the moon worries me.’

‘All the best people

are mad,’ you said.

And I laughed, agreeing,

so we welcomed her as she

moved along the coast

towards where we lay,

warm, in our bed.

Meg Campbell

from The Way Back: Poems, Te Kotare Press, 1981

The night sky on any day in history

I want you to look into an oncoming night.
Is it a little green? Does it have the cool orange
beginnings of streetlights? Tip your head back
as someone with a nosebleed might.
Survey the lower sky. Are there chimneys
making mini city silhouettes? Satellite dishes,
their smooth, grey craters turned in one direction?

You might insist you hear a nightingale.
Might see, at a distance, the huge screen
advertising an upcoming concert by the Beach Boys.
You could spend your time watching trains pull
their strings of yellow windows along in lines.

Or you might come here, where I am
where I stand upon the rarely silent floor
looking up at the rectangle moon
of our neighbour’s window.

Kate Camp

from How to be Happy Though Human: New and Selected Poems, Victoria University Press, 2020

Gregorian

Will you have me count off the days in your calendar, like some kind of self-soothing tool? Have we all been sold the latest gadget, to take our focus away from what’s happening out there? Distracted from colours changing in the trees, the moon continuing her cycle above, and the ocean’s repetitive lull. Do you dream about the world ending, or worry yourself down to the quicks in your nail beds, devouring hoarded tins of peaches and complaining because you can’t get into Farro Foods for poshos — when most people have to queue to buy an overpriced bottle of milk and a loaf of white bread to feed their children? I don’t care if your fancy-arsed store didn’t have the brand of cereal you desired. No, I will not post social media diaries of daily activities (like you who never bothered before and kept us at a distance with your academic nonsense, avoiding the reality our communities were already fucked); the thesaurus that kept you safe now serves as a doorstop, your words have dried up, and you’re resorting to colloquialisms. I doubt you will ever have a sense of life as it is for the minorities (who are really the majorities if you look at the world’s pyramid charts on the distribution of wealth); most of us struggle week to week, day to day, to survive everything you have created, and I don’t need to use your learned words of ‘capitalism’ and ‘eco fascism’ to know what I’m on about — without those labels we are connected regardless, through tissue, blood and ether, going back to wherever it is that we came from, whenever it was the beginning, if there ever was one. A painful silence echoes through these unspoken things, I see you in your ‘bubble’ wittering on about the importance of connection; but have you checked on your elderly neighbours to see what they might need? Or are you inside, behind your locked doors and twitching bespoke drapes, waiting for something to arrive?

Iona Winter

The Woman in the Moon

I was dancing in the shadow of the moon

under dark trees strung with party lights; a band

played waltzes; I can still feel the warmth of your hand

on the small of my back

while my fingers curled round your neck,

knowing your pulse through my long red gloves.

I hoped we were dancing into love;

we’d turn under those lit trees forever.

My hair was piled high, we looked to a future

I thought.  If only I’d followed your eyes,

caught where they rested: that other light,

an ivory candlestick, skin so pale

drawing you in like a moth.  Of course you fell.

Looking back, I see now, the obvious clue

I was dancing in the shadow of the moon.

Janis Freegard

from Kingdom Animalia: the Escapades of Linnaeus (Auckland University Press, 2011). 

Moon of love

Under the moon of love, I shimmy

on silver over waves, flirt with light,

hang with cloud, under the moon of love.

Under the cloud of the moon of love, rain

shower blessing my lunatic stroll.

In every way guided by stars, under

the moon cloud of love.

Shine on the man I am

in this moon, reflect on the heart

of my inner space. Show me the night

shadow my day, shine on the man

in the moon of love.

You marvellous moon, I’m making

all your promises. Luminous moon, promise

me, promise you moon of love.

Michael Giacon

from Fast Fibres 6 2019, Olivia Macassey pick

Nick Ascroft dangles from the Wellington skyline on his e-bike, kid in the child-seat, and a look in the eyes that says: surmountable. His most recent collection of poems is Moral Sloth (VUP 2019).

Serie Barford was born in Aotearoa to a German-Samoan mother and a Palagi father. She was the recipient of a 2018 Pasifika Residency at the Michael King Writers’ Centre. Serie  promoted her collections Tapa Talk and Entangled Islands at the 2019 International Arsenal Book Festival in Kiev.  Her latest poetry collection, Sleeping With Stones, will be launched during Matariki, 2021.

Kate Camp’s most recent book is How to Be Happy Though Human: New and Selected Poems published by VUP in New Zealand, and House of Anansi Press in Canada.

Meg Campbell (1937-2007) was born in Palmerston North, and was educated at Carncot, Marsden School and Victoria University. In 1958 she married poet, Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, and lived with him and his son in Pukerua Bay on the Kāpiti Coast. She worked in a number of libraries and a bookshop, and published six poetry collections.

Wellington-based Janis Freegard is the author of several poetry collections, most recently Reading the Signs (The Cuba Press), as well a novel, The Year of Falling (Mākaro Press). She was the inaugural Ema Saikō Poetry Fellow at New Zealand Pacific Studio and has previously won the Katherine Mansfield Short Story Prize and the Geometry/Open Book Poetry Prize. She grew up in the UK, South Africa and Australia before her family settled in Aotearoa when she was twelve.

Michael Giacon was born in Auckland and raised in a large Pakeha-Italian family. He was the NZ Poetry Society featured summer poet 2021, and his work has featured in the recent editions of Landfall and the New Zealand Poetry Yearbook. He is currently finalising a manuscript for publication.

Emma Neale is a writer and editor. Her most recent collection is To the Occupant (O. In 2020 she received the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for a Distinguished Contribution to New Zealand Poetry.

Nina Mingya Powles is a poet and zinemaker from Wellington, currently living in London. She is the author of Magnolia 木蘭, a finalist in the Ockham Book Awards, a food memoir, Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai, and several poetry chapbooks and zines. Her debut essay collection, Small Bodies of Water, will be published in September 2021. 

Brian Turner was born in Dunedin in 1944. His debut collection Ladders of Rain (1978) won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. His writing includes biography, poetry, sports writing and journalism and has won many awards. Just This won the NZ Post Book Award for Poetry (2010). He was the Te Mata Poet Laureate (2003-2005) and received the Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry in 2009. He lives in Central Otago.

Iona Winter (Waitaha/Kāi Tahu) lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin. Her hybrid work is widely published and anthologised in literary journals internationally. Iona creates work to be performed, relishing cross-modality collaboration, and holds a Master of Creative Writing. She has authored three collections, Gaps in the Light (2021), Te Hau Kāika(2019), and then the wind came (2018). Skilled at giving voice to difficult topics, she often draws on her deep connection to land, place and whenua.

Alison Wong is the coeditor of the first anthology of creative writing by Asian New Zealanders. A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand (AUP, 2021) will be launched at the Auckland Writers Festival on 15 May and at Unity Books Wellington on 27 May 6 pm. There will also be events at the Napier and Dunedin public libraries on 3 and 10 June respectively. Alison’s novel, As the Earth Turns Silver (Penguin/Picador, 2009) won the NZ Post Book Award for fiction and her poetry collection Cup (Steele Roberts, 2006), which includes ‘Moon’, was shortlisted for the Jessie Mackay Award for best first book of poetry. She was a poetry judge at the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. 

Ten poems about clouds

Twelve poems about ice

Ten poems about dreaming

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: Emma Neale’s ‘Indicator’

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Indicator

All through thin winter

a single yellow-lipped flower

hangs like honeydrip

from the tip of a twig

on the kowhai outside our window.

Now and then a wax-eye

or an eerily silent tūī slips by,

suckles there, each visit so swift

we soon guess the teat’s run dry:

no languid glug of nectar

like those summer-dusty kids,

canter-and-cartwheel parched

at the schoolyard drinking fountain,

when their every mouthful sounds

a grateful, gulping hum

like the rev of a warming engine.

Through ice, hail and fog

this blossom that grips the brink

seems bitter, withered emblem

of what is not; of tense lockdown;

of what cost; futures lost,

the tired earth’s toxin-clogged, wild demise

I even cuss some fossicking birds

as if they’re mad deniers —

boom-times are gone.

Can’t you just goddamn leave

that last poor scrap alone?

Then one cold but blueing morning

I lift the kitchen blind

wait for coffee to send its sun

through the hoar-frost of sleep

to see the whole tree

buckets with its own bright rain

a thousand beak-mouthed flowers

sing the aria of themselves

as if that one yellow blossom

in its winter death clench

was the stoic pilot light

that set the whole tree ablaze

a Kali-armed candelabra

peacocking with gold —

yet this silken dart and glitter

of unbidden happiness —

now grown so unfamiliar —

is it dangerous?

What have I turned my back on

for that moment

it takes a small child

to rush before a speeding van,

slip into an unfenced pool,

for some link in the web to fray

by the time night flows over the tree

as dark as the inside of a body?

Emma Neale

Emma Neale is a Dunedin based writer and editor. The author of 6 novels and 6 collections of poetry, Emma is the current editor of Landfall.

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: Emma Neale’s ‘The First World Hotel’

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The First World Hotel

You’re quite some guest, you know, buddy. Wet towels tossed in loose crumples like botched thank-you notes; toast crumbs Hanselled in pockets of your room; thoughts and plans kept schtoom behind that door-sized don’t disturb sign. The other occupants only ever hear you from behind the clam-shell of your walls; as if your murmured conversations always hide private, no-tell pearls.

Sometimes, true, they glimpse you in the front foyer as you knock storm-strewn camellias, tea-bag brown, from your shoes; shake rain, wood-smoke, and leaf-lint from your lapels. Or with their arms laden with laundry, linen, they might pass you in the corridor’s electric fritz and hum, where your fleet nod and smile flash up like ID, for security scans that you hope run glitch-free, let you back into your own hushed interior.

They carry on: attend to quiet comforts. Not after-dinner mints on pillows; white cloths folded into mute swans; not single malt, strong, campfire peaty and dry, in doll-sized phials. They store and preserve the apple-fall of small realisations. Such as, when you leave, how polite this son will be, as he acknowledges transient strangers in the world’s anonymous spaces.

Emma Neale

Emma Neale is the author of six novels and six collections of poetry. Her most recent novel, Billy Bird (2016) was short-listed for the Acorn Prize at the Ockham NZ Book Awards and long-listed for the Dublin International Literary Award. Emma has received a number of literary fellowships, residencies and awards, the most recent of which is the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for a Distinguished Contribution to New Zealand Poetry 2020. Her first collection of short stories, Party Games, is due out late 2020/early 2021. Emma lives and works in Ōtepoti/Dunedin, and she is the current editor of Landfall, New Zealand’s longest-running literary journal.

Poetry Shelf Lounge: A National Poetry Day gathering

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Kia ora poets and poetry fans

Welcome to the Poetry Shelf gathering on National Poetry Day. One of my favourite Poetry Days was in Wellington when I jumped in a taxi and went from one event to the next: Vic Books, the National Library, Unity Books, the Book Hound, Miaow. Listening to others read, reading a snippet myself or mc-ing, it felt like the best thing in the world (well right up there with early morning beach walks, and cooking meals, writing secret things, reading books for hours on end).

These days it feels good to count blessings because there is so much toxic stuff out there. I feel utterly privileged to get sent loads of poetry books published in Aotearoa, and to celebrate some of them on the blog. So many times this year I have picked up a new book and felt goosebumps as I settled into the poem thickets and clearings. You know the feeling – when the music and the mystery and the freshness, the challenges and the sensualness and the connective currents – make you feel so darn good.

I invited a handful of poets to send me an audio or video to celebrate National Poetry Day – it was over to them what they did: read their own poems, read the poems of others, share a favourite book or poet, muse on poetry. Bernadette Hall drove 30 km to hook up with Doc Drumheller and Rangiora Library staff at the band rotunda to create her video. Amy Brown did two versions, one with interruptions and a wee poem from her son Robin. I posted both for you! Student E Wen Wong recorded a poem by Cilla McQueen.

I have been getting these files as Auckland is in level 3 – and everyone else level 2 – and what a treat to listen to them. Poetry can do so much! The past few months it has been of immense comfort, and the way so many of you say yes to my requests.

As some of you know I had a melt down yesterday as WordPress has put us onto a new system that I find hard to manage yet. My daughter helped me a bit, but I had to make a few compromises, and one poet will make a future appearance. Thank you for the boosts on social media.

Happy National Poetry Day everyone. Dip and delve into this glorious and utterly special poetry gathering.

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Amy Brown reads two poems of her own: ’16 August 2016′ and ‘Pacing Poem’ from Neon Daze Victoria University Press, 2019. She also reads Airini Beautrais’s ‘Flow’ from Victoria University Press, 2017. Amy sent me two versions, one with interruptions by her son Robin (he does a poem at the end) and one without Robin present. I couldn’t pick as I loved so both, so you get to choose which one to listen to. I think the Robin one is rather special.

Amy Brown reads two poems with the help of Robin

Amy Brown reads the two poems without help

David Eggleton reads ‘The Sound and the Fury’ filmed by Richard C. Wallis in Waikouaiti, North Otago, on Wednesday 19.08.20. Not his tokotoko but a walking stick. Still waiting for the tokotoko ceremony at Matahiwi marae.

Erik Kennedy reads ‘There Is a Man Dancing on the Rudder of an Enormous Cargo Ship’

Bernadette Hall reads two sonnets, one published in Aotearotica and the other in Landfall 239. Her guest Doc Drumheller reads his haiku in Landfall 239. Bernadette had travelled 30 kms to the band rotunda in Rangiora to film this reading with the help of Paula and Daniel from Rangiora Library.

You can listen to Bill read here

You can find texts of the original poem and Bill’s translation here

Emma Neale reads ‘Polemic’ from Tender Machines Otago University Press, 2015

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You can listen to Marty read here

Marty Smith reads ‘Agnus Dei’ from Horse with Hat, Victoria University Press, 2013

Ruby Solly reads two poems, a very early one and a very new one

Chris Tse reads ‘(Green-Nature)’

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Louise Wallace reads three poems on a women/mother/daughter theme: by herself, (from Bad Things Victoria University Press, 2017), and by Naomii Seah and Modi Deng (from the latest issue of Starling).

E Wen Wong reads ‘Vegetable Garden Poem iv’ by Cilla McQueen from Axis: Poems and drawings Otago University Press 2001

The Poets

Amy Brown is a New Zealand poet, novelist and teacher, living in Melbourne. In 2012 she completed a PhD in creative writing at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of The Propaganda Poster Girl (VUP, 2008), which was shortlisted at the 2009 New Zealand Book Awards, The Odour of Sanctity (VUP, 2013), a contemporary epic poem, and Neon Daze (VUP, 2019), a verse journal of the first four months of motherhood. She is also the author of Pony Tales, a series of children’s novels.

Doc Drumheller was born in South Carolina and has lived in NZ for more than half his life. He has worked in award-winning groups for theatre and music and has published 10 collections of poetry. His poems have been translated into more than 20 languages. He lives in Oxford, where he edits and publishes the literary journal, Catalyst.

David Eggleton is a Dunedin-based poet and writer. He is the current Aotearoa New Zealand Poet Laureate. His Selected Poems is forthcoming.

Bernadette Hall is Otago born and bred. Following a long career as a high school teacher in Dunedin and Christchurch, she has now lived 17 years in a renovated bach at Amberley Beach in the Hurunui, North Canterbury where she has built up a beautiful garden. Her 12th collection of poetry, Fancy Dancing (VUP), will be launched at the WORD festival in Christchurch in November. ‘It’s as close as I’ll ever get to writing an autobiography,’ she says, laughing. And as for the wilful sonnets that explode in the final pages of this book, she wonders where on earth they came from. ‘It was such fun writing them,’ she says, ‘as if I‘d kicked down the stable doors and taken to the hills.’ In 2015 she collaborated with Robyn Webster on Matakaea, Shag Point, an art /text installation exhibited at the Ashburton ArGallery. In the same year she was awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for outstanding achievement in Poetry. In 2017 she was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to New Zealand literature.

Erik Kennedy is the author of There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime (Victoria University Press, 2018), and he is co-editing a book of climate change poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific forthcoming from Auckland University Press in 2021. His poems and criticism have recently been published in places like FENCE, Landfall, Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, the TLS, and Western Humanities Review. Originally from New Jersey, he lives in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Bill Manhire Aside from publishing his own widely acclaimed poetry, Bill Manhire has edited a number of anthologies and written extensively on New Zealand literature. He was New Zealand’s first Poet Laureate. His most recent collections include Tell Me My Name and Things to Place in a Coffin.  Victoria University Press are publishing his new collection Wow November 2020.

Emma Neale is the author of six novels and six collections of poetry. Her most recent novel, Billy Bird (2016) was short-listed for the Acorn Prize at the Ockham NZ Book Awards and long-listed for the Dublin International Literary Award. Emma has received a number of literary fellowships, residencies and awards, the most recent of which is the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for 2020. Her first collection of short stories, Party Games, is due out late 2020/early 2021. Emma lives and works in Ōtepoti/Dunedin, and she is the current editor of Landfall, New Zealand’s longest-running literary journal.

Marty Smith’s Horse with hat won the 2014 Jesse Mackay award for Best First Book of Poetry. Some of the book looks at the cost to her father of not talking about the war. ‘Agnus Dei’ is a poem that crosses religion over into war, although it looks like farming. She grew up riding beside her father, hence the horse strand in Horse with hat, hence the book she is writing about the obsession of people who risk their lives to ride racehorses. She would risk her life right now to ride a racehorse, if she were allowed.

Ruby Solly is a Kai Tahu / Waitaha writer and musician from Aotearoa, New Zealand. She has had poetry and creative non-fiction published in Landfall, Sport, Poetry NZ, Starling, Mimicry, Minarets, E-Tangata, The Spinoff, and Pantograph Punch amongst others. Victoria University Press will be publishing her debut book of poetry ‘Tōku Pāpā’ in 2021. Ruby is also a scriptwriter and her film ‘Super Special’ which aims to share knowledge around traditional Māori views and practices around menstruation has been featured in film festivals within New Zealand and the US. As a musician, she has played with artists such as Yo-yo Ma as part of his Bach Project, Trinity Roots, Whirimako Black, Rikki Gooch, and Ariana Tikao. Ruby is a taonga puoro (traditional Māori musical instruments) player and therapist with a first-class master’s in music therapy where she conducted kaupapa Māori research into the use of taonga puoro in acute mental health. As a taonga puoro player and therapist, she is privileged to work around Aotearoa with people from all walks of life sharing the taonga of her ancestors. She will be beginning a PhD to further her research this year. Her first album, ‘Pōneke’, which also features poetry, is available from rubysolly.bandcamp.cpm

Chris Tse is the author of How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes and HE’S SO MASC, both published by Auckland University Press. He is a regular book reviewer on Radio New Zealand and contributor to Capital’s Re-Verse column. He is currently co-editing an anthology of queer writers from Aotearoa.

Louise Wallace is the author of three collections of poetry published by Victoria University Press, most recently Bad Things. She is the founder and editor of Starling, and is currently working on a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Otago on women, [domestic] paralysis and poetic form.

E Wen Wong is in her final year at Burnside High School, where she is Head Girl for 2020. Last year, her poem Boston Building Blockswon first prize in the Year 12 category of the Poetry New Zealand Student Yearbook Competition.