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Poetry Shelf celebrates the Bill Manhire Honoured Writer session at AWF 2026

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access the video here

Poetry Lane

It leads down to the river
where you can sit all day imagining
the slow walk home.

Bill Manhire
from Lyrical Ballads, THWUP, 2026

My must-go-to event at the Auckland Writer’s Festival was the 2026 Honoured Writer session. I was utterly gutted not to go, and extremely grateful to the festival for making the session video available. I have travelled with Bill Manhire’s poems for a long time, his collections are my go-to destinations for poetry that offers musicality, movement, intricacy, economy, agility, wit, surprise, storytelling, deep-seated feeling, his heart and mind engaging with what is close at hand along with the beating heart of the wider world, both physical and imagined. I get to feel his poetry, I get to think his poetry, I get to head off into extraordinary states of reading where poems simply and utterly and complexly shine. Think poetry with wings.

Bill has published some of my all-time favourite nz poems – poems which dance and tremble and echo on the page, poems that dance and tremble and echo in the ear / air. To hear Bill perform his poetry is an utterly breathtaking experience.

Thought I’d offer my provisional top-ten Bill poems as a reading starting point for you, and yes, every day the list shifts a little to suit my mood.

a provisional top ten

‘It Is Nearly Summer’
How to Take off Your Clothes at a Picnic, Wai-te-ata Press, 1977

‘The Ladder’
Lifted, THWUP, 2005

‘Making Baby Float’
The Victims of Lightning, VUP, 2010

‘1950s’
The Victims of Lightning, VUP, 2010

‘Erebus Voices’
Lifted, THWUP, 2005

‘Hotel Emergencies’
Lifted, VUP, 2005

‘My World War 1 Poem’
Some Things to Place in a Coffin, VUP, 2017

‘Little Prayers’
Wow, VUP, 2020

‘Kevin’
Lifted, VUP, 2005

‘A Lullaby’
The Victims of Lightning, THWUP, 201

Plus this year, there’s the arrival of Bill’s new poetry collection Lyrical Ballads iTHWUP 2026). Spend a weekend sojourn with this remarkable book.

I wrote on Poetry Shelf: And of course there’s the ink steeped in music, with rhyme and repetitions, loops, the exquisite lyricism that audio-marks each ballad. My dream is to sit in the Titirangi hall again and listen to Bill read us the whole book as we sit spell bound, before moving to the side room to the spread the locals have put on, to return with plates of food balancing on our knees, and to talk poetry and life until our voices are hoarse.

Is it possible to consider this collection in the light and possibilities of tracing paper, where each poem is a set of overlaid sheets, where story is overlaid upon song, which is overlaid upon the personal, which is overlaid upon philosophy and contemplation, and where every layer is embued with humanity, what it means to be human and humane, kind and caring, and every layer is shining through and adding myriad possibilities? What will the insects sing next? What will I hear in the kissing room? What do I picture when I picture the bend in the road?”

After the rain

we climb out
onto the roof

& tiptoe right
to the edge

we want to see
where the water

shakes its wings

Bill Manhire
from Lyrical Ballads, THWUP, 2026

The Honoured Writer Session

Publisher Fergus Barrowman chaired the session with Ian Wedde, Norman Meehan, Emily Perkins and Elizabeth Knox, each choosing a poem to read and to use as a prompt to talk poetry. While Bill was unable to attend the session, we got to hear him read courtesy of a laureate event.

Anna Rawhiti-Connell, deputy chair of AWF, introduced the session with some scene-setting words. Bill was gifted a pounamu that carried the warmth and gratitude of the people in the room.

Anna: “To try and quantify the generative and multi generational impact of Bill Manhire’s work and leadership across the decade would be akin to dropping a hefty scroll on the stage, having it unfurl, roll up the aisle onto Queen Street and float out onto the Waitematā”

I am picturing testimonies from writers, students, readers on the scroll, and I am agreeing with Peter Simpson: “Bill has done more for poetry in nz than any other writer.”

Gaza

The dead boy tries to open his eyes.
He wants to se the world he is leaving.
But there is nothing to see here,
nothing and nothing, and anyway he is gone.
His parents held him while he died
but they are both dead, too.
Or he held them, no one remembers.

Bill Manhire
from Lyrical Ballads

a highlight WOW exchange

Elizabeth spoke first and it was edge of the seat for me as she read and identified two key words: lightness and buoyancy: “The poetry is lighter than air and can carry great loads. When you enter a Bill poem you don’t know whether you are going to be carried up, and you’re always carried up, into sunshine, or whether you’re going to end up in the dark storm clouds. He’s got this buoyancy that takes you somewhere, but there might be rain there.”

Emily added negative space: “it can feel like buoyancy but it can feel very weighted and full of subtext, and you enter a poem, and it might just turn a corner, and in fact it probably will definitely turn a corner and you’ll find yourself somewhere totally new. The one I am going to read has a very intentionally enigmatic quality. One of the things the poems do for me they just work on the level of sound and you want to let that happen and not worry too much at them with the front of your mind.”

Elizabeth: “They’re not twist surprises he’s built into the poem, the place he’s going to take you to, but he’s done it, so you don’t see it until you end up there, and it’s always amazing every time. It’s like WOW! Like the title of that book of his.”

Ian: “I always like the way there’s a kind of self deprecation in the way that Bill writes, where he establishes his presence and then just gently removes it and leaves the presence to what the poem is doing and it’s a very subtle process and its a very understated one, but it’s also at a very basic level an immensely skillful one.”

Norman: “I’d been setting ee cummings poetry as music twenty-five years ago and said to Fergus I’d like to work with something closer to home. The great thing about asking a publisher a question like that is you leave his office with a box full of books. What I found with Bill’s work there was a musicality in how these poems performed themselves on the page and as I read them it suggested music to me and there were some that leapt of the page so a poem like Kevin, it was instantly telling me stories about the kind of music it wanted to live with.”

You get a clip of Bill reading at the National Library Poets Laureate event (28 November 2025). He reads the hilarious and serious poem, ‘Too Many Draculas’ . He also reads ‘Gaza’, with its ache and heart smash: “One of the things that the Poet Laureate position did for me and I think maybe does for other people too is it made me a little braver about using poetry as a thing where you could say what you thought about public events, things in the world, rather than things that just happened to be in your muddled brain and heart.”

The session ends with a video clip of Norman and Hannah Griffin singing Making Baby Float. Extraordinary.

Little Prayers will be released this Saturday, June 13 at 6.00 pm
at a concert in the Hall of Memories as part of the 2026 Lõemis
Festival. Tickets are available HERE.

Hannah Griffin (vocals)
Norman Meehan (piano)
Martin Riseley (violin)
Zephyr Wills (viola)
Brenton Veitch (cello)
Bill Manhire (texts)

Following the horrific events in Christchurch in 2019, Bill wrote “Little Prayers”, a poem that surprised him. “I want to say I didn’t know I had it in me, but of course I didn’t have it in me—it was always out there in the world. My work was to catch it, edit it hard, and get the choreography right.”

Bill Manhire (CNZM’)s latest book, Lyrical Ballads (2026). His books include Wow (2020), Some Things to Place in a Coffin (2017), Tell Me My Name (with Hannah Griffin and Norman Meehan, 2017) and The Stories of Bill Manhire (2015). He has won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry five times, and was New Zealand’s inaugural Poet Laureate. He founded and directed the International Institute of Modern Letters at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. He has edited major anthologies of New Zealand literature, including, with Marion McLeod, the now classic Some Other Country: New Zealand’s Best Short Stories (1984). In 2018 Manhire was awarded an Icon Award Whakamana Hiranga from the Arts Foundation.

Te Herenga Waka University Press page

Photo credit: Grant Maiden

Poetry Shelf review: A Game of Two Halves: The Best of Sport 2005 – 2019

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A Game of Two halves: The Best of Sport 2005 – 2019, ed Fergus Barrowman
Victoria University Press, 2021

This book looks back through the fifteen issues of Sport from 2005 to 2019. In 600 pages it presents fiction, poetry, essays and oddities by 100 of our best writers, from leading lights like Bill Manhire, Ashleigh Young and Elizabeth Knox, to emerging glow worms like Tayi Tibble, Ruby Solly and Eamonn Marra. (Blurb)

Reviewing A Game of two Halves is a sad glad day for me. I have loved reading my way through old favourites but I am also sad that this is a farewell. I can remember how excited I was when the first issue of Sport hit the bookstands. It was fresh, exciting, unmissable. I am pretty sure I have every copy stacked on my study shelves. On the blurb, I read that editor Fergus Barrowman’s A Game of two Halves selection is a mix of ‘leading lights and glow worms’, the established and the emerging. Light is such a good analogy because I often find myself using the word ‘incandescent’ to describe writing I love. Writing lights me the reader, the world at large and in miniature, the present, future, past, the miraculous things words can do. Even when the subject matter is dark, shadows and weirdness loom, writing still lifts. Sets me alight. This is what literary journals can do. This is what Sport has done.

All those clothes it turned and churned, the lint
that trapped in its door. I once thought
many things would make my life happier
and now one by one I will let them go.

Rachel Bush from ‘All my feelings would have been of common things’

Confession – I haven’t read the whole volume yet but I can’t wait to do that to share. I am so engaged, I want you to place A Game of Two Halves on your summer reading pile as a go-to source of luminous writing. Last ‘light’ analogy I promise. Reading the poetry (I always start with the poetry) is like tuning into a Spotify playlist where individual tracks resonate and then send you back to the albums. Rachel Bush’s sublime ‘Thought Horses’ sent me back to that collection. Michele Amas’ equally sublime ‘Daughter’ sent me back to After the Dance. Herein lies the first joy of Fergus’s playlist. I am reconnected with poems that have registered as all time favourites. Read Angela Andrews’ ‘White Saris’. Bill Manhire’s ‘The Schoolbus’. Read Ruby Solly, Esther Dischereit, Rebecca Hawkes, Ash Davida Jane, essa may ranapiri, Tayi Tibble, Michael Krüger, Jane Arthur, Chris Tse, Freya Daly Sadgrove, Emma Neale. Read Amy Brown’s ‘Jeff Magnum’. Ashleigh Young. Louise Wallace.

This is the place where the schoolbus turns.
The driver backs and snuffles, backs and goes.
It is always winter on these roads: high bridges
and birds in flight above you all the way.
The heart can hardly stay. The heart implodes.

Bill Manhire from ‘The Schoolbus’

Perhaps the biggest gleam is from Tina Makereti’s prose piece, ‘An Englishman, an Irishman and a Welshman walk into a Pā’. I am such a fan of her novels, rereading this reminds me of the power and craft of Tina’s writing.

This is the way of it. Before I have memorised her in a way that will last forever, my mother is gone. If someone asks me to recite my first memory, which consists of chickens in a yard and an old farmhouse and an outside toilet, it will contain this absence. For the rest of my childhood, I don’t think it matters.

Tina Makereti from ‘An Englishman, an Irishman and a Welshman walk into a Pā’

In his introduction, Fergus tracks the development of Sport, the almost demises, and the decision to close (with regrets!). He mentions the vibrancy of the issue Tayi Tibble recently edited (Sport 47, not just the cover but also the contents) and ‘whether it made sense to go on reinventing Sport every year?’ I have appreciated the move to showcase Aotearoa writers beyond the traditional Pākehā set in recent years. To always draw upon the inspired writing of new generations. Fergus closes off his introduction by mentioning a couple of other anthologies VUP / THWUP are doing and then offers this: ‘And after that? You tell us? Send us your ideas. Send us your work.’ Exciting prospect.

I raise my glass to toast what has been an important venue for new and established voices. I will miss Sport. I will really miss Sport. Thank you Fergus and Victoria University Press / Te Herenga Waka University Press for dedicating time and love to a vital space for readers and writers. I look forward to what comes next.

It has been a long time
since I last spoke to you.
When we were children, our fathers
wanted to be mountains
our mothers were the sky.
So here I am, the dry hands,
steady in fog, waiting by the not-there
trees, the holes birds make
in the air.

Jenny Bornholdt from ‘It Has Been a Long Time Since I last Spoke to You, So Here I Am’

the air is thick with depression
even the flies   fly very slowly

Freya Daly Sadgrove from ‘Pool Noodle’

I worry about whakamā and imposter syndrome paralysing our people, making them too afraid or inhibited to really live their best lives or at least the best lives they can under the hellskies of capitalism and party politics. I’m all about people, and I’m all about the best lives.

Tayi Tibble from ‘Diary of a (L)it Girl or, Frankenstein’s Ghost Pig’

 

Fergus Barrowman has been the Publisher of Victoria University of Wellington Press since 1985, and founded Sport along with Nigel Cox, Elizabeth Knox and Damien Wilkins in 1988. He edited the Picador Book of Contemporary New Zealand Fiction in 1996.

Victoria University Press / Te Herenga Waka University Press page

Poetry Shelf Winter Season: Ian Wedde off-piste

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From ‘A hymn to beauty: days of a year’

 

Beauty

you’re the trouble I’m in

because there’s a lot of sweetness in my life

with that rude kind of magnificence

as when they hung Le Bateau upside down,

unusually animated and sparking.

Happy Birthday Montgomery Clift:

Where did I see this guy—in Red River

or in From Here to Eternity?

Accept and you become whole

bend and you straighten.

 

 

I hung around a little too long

I was good but now I’m gone,

I may find myself in a tight spot

but forge ahead

where satellite images show Yongbyon

and a mariner in the distance appears cordial.

Happy Birthday Betty Hutton

who is to be found in the lines and gradations

of unsullied snow

for your heart will always be

where your riches are.

 

 

They’re Justified and they’re Ancient

and they drive an ice-cream van

so do what will help

and don’t worry what others think

if King Kong premieres in New York.

In his eyes, beauty may be seen.

Happy Birthday Lou Reed,

as fast as a musician scatters sounds

out of an instrument.

One thing only do I want

to marvel there.

 

©Ian Wedde Three Regrets and a Hymn to Beauty (Auckland University Press, 2005)

 

 

Note for poetry shelf

In ‘Enjoyment’, the preface to Selected Poems (2017), I ‘confess to restlessness and the enjoyment of subverting my own practice’, which is one way of saying I got bored with myself and switched tracks regularly over the years. In a selection covering fourteen collections these swerves look more abrupt than they were. One place where they converge is in ‘A hymn to beauty: days of a year’, a sequence of fifty-seven sections that sampled lines from songs, the day’s horoscope advice to Librans, a ‘today in history’ clip from the Evening Post, the birthday of someone famous, a quote from the shambolic literature of the Sublime, and a religious homily. It took up 22 pages in its original covers (Three Regrets and a Hymn to Beauty, AUP 2005) and I only stopped when a sensible little voice told me to—I was having too much fun. It took me out of an autoethnography groove, it allowed me to mess around with a complex word, beauty, without being trapped by aestheticising lyric conventions, and it construed narrative meanings that had nothing to do with my intentions. Fergus Barrowman first published the whole thing in Sport 32 (Summer 2004) for which I thank him. Here are three sections, the opening one and two more picked at random with my eyes shut.

 

Ian Wedde’s first (very small) book was published by Amphedesma Press in 1971 and in May this year his (fairly chunky) Selected Poems was published by Auckland University Press, with artwork by John Reynolds. A small book about the art of Judy Millar, Refer Judy Millar, is just out from Wunderblock in Berlin. His essay ‘How Not To Be At Home’ is in the anthology Home: New Writing just out from Massey University Press.

 

From Paula: For Poetry Shelf’s Winter Season, I invited 12 poets to pick one of their own poems that marks a shift in direction, that is outside the usual tracks of their poetry, that moves out of character, that nudges comfort zones of writing. It might be subject matter, style, form, approach, tone, effect, motivation, borrowings, revelation, invention, experimentation, exclusions, inclusions, melody …. anything!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sport 45 and other musings

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45_sport_cover_front__57214.1492999247.220.220.jpg  45_sport_cover_front__57214.1492999247.220.220.jpg  45_sport_cover_front__57214.1492999247.220.220.jpg

 

 

I picked up the latest Sport the other day and the cover was so good that I didn’t want to open the issue for ages. Sam Duckor-Jones’s drawing is like a poem that is strange, off-kilter, mesmerisingly good (someone is adrift awkwardly in the sky).

Just inside there is list of books that Victoria University Press are publishing this year: 8 fiction, 11 poetry, 2 plays/poetry-music, 9 non-fiction. I have been musing lately on VUP’s productiveness and how it is to be utterly lauded. In a tough publishing climate, VUP  work hard to showcase New Zealand writing in diverse forms and with diverse preoccupations. I hear niggles (especially when VUP got such a clean sweep at the Book Awards) yet I have no time for such gripes. This is a chance to celebrate a publisher sticking its neck out and publishing quality writing whichever way you look. I don’t see the VUP stable as a set of clones – the exact opposite. On my blog I only have time to review the books I love (and even then I don’t get to them all) and interview poets that have struck a chord at some point. It is very seldom I skip over a VUP poetry book because it has missed the mark for me as a reader. If I look back at books published over the past few years, I see an eclectic mix as opposed to a restrictive school of poetry. Think of the wry wit of James Brown, the  breathtaking musicality and heart-stopping moves of Bill Manhire, the grit of Geoff Cochrane, the anarchy and surrealism of Hera Lindsay Bird, the contemplative detail along everyday trails of Jenny Bornholdt, the inventive, unpredictabliity of Hannah Mettner. I have adored this poetry and yes, I will sing its praises from the rafters.

In ‘The Old Guard New Guard’ session at AWF17 and in response to Andrew Johnston raising the clone issue, Bill Manhire summed up his aims and ways of working when he was teaching at IIML.  The conversation utterly resonated with me and a few things he said corresponded perfectly with my idea for Poetry Shelf’s Winter Season (to be posted in July!). The essential aim was for students to find their own voice (Teju Cole talked about this a little too). I loved this idea: ‘Write what I don’t know but it will somehow be mine.’ In workshops, Bill wanted students ‘to jump the tracks, to go sideways from themselves.’  He wanted them ‘to turn themselves into other poems’ and ‘to produce poems that mattered to them.’ Bill also applied this to himself and talked about the way he might get too comfortable and thus seek out ways to elbow himself sideways off the writing tracks (my words sorry as I didn’t record this).  These notions really resonated with me. As poets we are all attached to the mysterious thing called voice: our voice, how to sustain it, how to tilt or transform or nurture it. I love the idea of sidestepping the usual ruts and paths.

The latest issue of Sport is chiefly a celebration of writing that has come out of Wellington or is part of the VUP stable. I don’t have an issue with this and I applaud the range and diversity of writing within. There is a fabulous interview (Bill Manhire interviews John Gallas). I now want to track down John’s poetry – the taster of poems confirms he is a poet to add to your shelves. Hope the poetry interview (or of other genres) becomes a regular feature of Sport particularly if it is conducted over months at leisure by email as this one was. Great reading!

Also loved the cluster of essays in the middle by John Newton, Virginia Were and Giovanni Tiso. Another essential ingredient that adds verve and challenges.

The poets range from James Brown to Frances Samuel ( conjunctional wit produced out of found material to slightly strange, reader-hooked storytelling); from the luminous detail of Elizabeth Smither to the surreally personal and personally surreal of Rata Gordon; from the bolt in the eye of Claire Orchard to the tender detail of Harry Ricketts. One of my favourite  new poets, Amy Leigh Wicks, haunts me, as does Bill Nelson, in the unfolding detail and the way the poems move. Good to read Bob Orr sharply conjuring place, Rachel O’Neill’s prose-like agility,  Jake Brown’s bright jumpcut portrait of a town, the stark, sharp tug of Natalie Morrison’s fairytale-ing.

I haven’t finished reading yet: still Anna Jackson, Vincent O’Sullivan, Jake Arthur, Helen Heath, Kerrin P Sharpe and more. In my bag for today. Ha! A poetry bag!

So this seems like the perfect occasion to say congratulations to Fergus Barrowman and his team at VUP. As a writer, reader and commentator on NZ poetry, I am in debt to the extent of your gifts to NZ literature. As for Bill Manhire, I reckon it is about time a poet got the top Honours in a Queen’s Honour’s list along with those who have done extraordinary things in the business world. Bill has gifted so much with generosity and humbleness, he has enhanced what we both read and write, and has written poetry collections that sing like no other.

Yes there is magnificent poetry in all its forms  accruing the length and breadth of NZ, fabulous poets and poetry projects, tireless ambassadors (Michele Leggott, Bernadette Hall, Emma Neale, David Eggleton)  but this is VUP’s year and I applaud you!