Te Pūrere The Exodus
Te Paenga Kōrero ā Ngā Kaitito Toi o Aotearoa
The Anthology of Expatriate New Zealand Poets
eds Vaughan Rapatahana and John Gallas
Cold Hub Press, 2026

We lost count of the number of times we packed up our loves and left our
homes, and sat on the shore with our suitcases, playing music for animals who
resembled flowers, while our spirits were cut into jigsaws, while we threw away
our names and birthplaces, and watched the sun fragment into amethyst and
coconut shards as it walked backwards into the ocean.

Manisha Anjali
from ‘Sea, Pilgrim’

Te Pūrere The Exodus offers an eclectic selection of poems by 60 Aotearoa New Zealand poets who live overseas, expatriates with tendrils in various homes. The anthology includes an introduction by Roger Horrocks and the sublime cover art work by Vaughan’s daughter, Pauline Canlas Wu.

I lived in London for five years in the 1980s, an arm stretch from my Scottish Grandmother’s Glasgow, and an elbow tap from my English Grandfather’s London. I lived through London IRA bomb scares, through art exhibition astonishment in both the UK and across Europe, embarked on long cycle trips, food discoveries, author discoveries and an extraordinary set of gigs and concerts, including Nina Simone at Ronnie Scotts, Annie Lennox. I adored West End musicals, astonishing Shakespeare productions. And then London got hit with radioactive rain from Chernobyl and planes laden with bombs left from southern England to bomb Libya. Michael and I felt an urgent pull to return home. To replant ourselves by bush and ocean.

So I entered Te Pūrere The Exodus with an offshore/home longings back story, drawn to the resonance of being here and there. Place and people are brought to life in the wide-ranging poetry. Poetry becomes a terrific way of making oneself at home, whether offshore or back here in Aotearoa, whether past or present. The anthology, so beautifully produced by Cold Hub Press, is an enriching read, a gathering of fascinations and discoveries and loves.

I have been participating
in the word – Scotland –
we have been moving through each other
like fish and light and water through water.

Lynn Davidson
from ‘To get here’

Two questions for Vaughan and John

1. What discoveries did you make as you gathered this anthology together? Whether on poets or poetry itself? Whether moments of surprise or delight or learning?

Vaughan: Tēnā koe mō tēnei pātai. I became more surprised as we went on, just how many expatriate Kiwi kaitito (poets) there are. I already knew of many – which is why I instigated this project – but not as many as we eventually invited to contribute. More, almost without exception, they responded enthusiastically and obligingly and we – and here I speak for John, I am sure – were quite delighted with the quality of their toikupu (poetry). Across a wide swathe of kaupapa and an array of styles. Aotearoa New Zealand should be very proud of its expatriate poets!

John: Every contribution a discovery. The unique combination of ‘displacement’, the attitude to it, the pluses and minuses of it, the emotional response to it, and the kind of ‘double-life’ it represented, all expressed in a wild variety of forms and styles … all this made for a real odyssey – calling in at every port on the way! Individually, the ‘feel’ of the poems was super-personal, even when not a direct expression of ‘I’: and as a whole, the noticeable rejection of what might be called Traditional/European forms and disciplines made for a freshness, independence and originality that was striking … and made me feel kind of proud of Us.     

2. How have notions and the experience of exodus, of being an expatriate writer affect you as a poet?

Vaughan: Tēnā koe anō. For me, literally living across three countries and cultures, as well as several languages, has vastly widened my mental vistas, which – invariably – lead to poems incorporating these variegated experiences. I guess that I no longer see New Zealand with a ‘domestic point of view’, but from afar, and accordingly perhaps have different opinions and outlooks inside my work.

I would also like to note that during our compilation of this anthology, we lost some fine Kiwi poets – Fleur Adcock, Eric Beach, Vernice Wineera. Te Pūrere/The Exodus was compiled to commemorate as many Kiwi poets as possible and to bring them further recognition in Aotearoa now.

John : Can be summed up, for me, in the following, which was written for the back cover of ‘Aotearoa/Angleland’ (New Walk Editions ISBN 978-1-8381153-4-0):

“A life, a heart, a soul – and a book – divided. Happily divided. In this pamphlet, John Gallas wanders the corners of his two homelands: Aotearoa and England. The heart doesn’t bleed, the soul doesn’t yearn to be one, and Life can always get on a plane. As Misuzu Bonchō wrote, when she moved to Dodge City:

A thing with two roots
will grow to embrace the earth
with both arms. Write on …”

the readings

Vaughan Rapatahana

Vaughan reads ‘three countries’

John Gallas

John reads four tankas, ‘Poeticals’, ‘Rooked’, ‘Lowestoft Harbour’, ‘Hillgate’

Hinemoana Baker

photo credit, Tim Gruar, courtesy of Randell Cottage Trust 2024

Hinemoana reads ‘the librarian asks me about the green stone around my neck’ and ‘Fox’

John Puhiatau Pule

John reads ‘Looking at rain too long has given me eternity’

Joan Fleming

photographer credit Reyes Cervantes

Joan reads ‘Catalogue’

Amy Catherine Brown

Amy reads ‘Pacing Poem’

Lynn Davidson

Lynn reads ‘To Get Here’

Orchid Tierney

Orchid reads from ‘My Beatrice’, and ‘prayer | suit’ and ‘to the is-land’

Charles Olsen

 

Charles reads ‘El Avefría | The Lapwing’, ‘Por la mañana | Morning’, and ‘Five o’clock’

Alison Wong

Alison reads ‘Family Photographs’

Stephen Chan

Stephen reads ‘Love in the Time of Covid’

The editors

John Gallas is published by www.carcanet.co.uk  Website at www.johngallaspoetry.co.uk : Poem of the Month & All News. Presently living in Markfield, Leics. with weekly getaway caravan/bike in Lincolnshire. Project Poet for Saxonship shipbuild www.saxonship.org , librettist, translator (‘The Song Atlas’, ’52 Euros’, ‘Petrus Borel:Rhapsodies’ : all Carcanet), Fellow of the English Association, Poet for St Magnus Festival, Orkney. 

Vaughan Rapatahana (Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Te Whiti) commutes between homes in Hong Kong, Philippines, and Aotearoa New Zealand. He is widely published across several genre in both his main languages, te reo Māori and English and his work has been translated into several other languages. He is the author and editor/co-editor of over 50 books. He won the AAALS Indigenous Poetry Prize in 2026.

The readers

Alison Wong is a Cantonese New Zealander living in Geelong, Australia. Her collection, Cup (Steele Roberts), was shortlisted for the 2007 Jessie MacKay Award for Best First Book for Poetry. Her novel, As the Earth Turns Silver (Penguin NZ), won the 2010 NZ Post Book Award for Fiction. She coedited A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand (AUP, 2021), the first anthology of creative writing by Asian New Zealanders. She is working on a revised edition, and also Journeys Home: A Memoir from Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and China. 

Hinemoana Baker (Ngāti Tukorehe, Ngāti Tupaia ki te Aro, Ngāti Raukawa ki te Tonga, Ngāti Toa Rangatira, Te Āti Awa, Kāi Tahu, Ngāi Tiamana, Ngāi Ingarangi) Poet, musician and educator Hinemoana Baker is known for her power on the page and stage, her wry humour and deep sense of cultural and personal inquiry. In 2015 Hinemoana received the Creative New Zealand Berlin Writer’s Residency and lived for almost a decade in Germany. In that time her Ockham-shortlisted collection ‘Funkhaus’ was published in German and Polish. Hinemoana is currently back in Te Whanga-nui-a-Tara Wellington completing a PhD exploring how poetry can be a rongoā for takatāpui.

Joan Fleming is a New Zealand-Australian writer who doesn’t know where she’s from. This year she is living back in Spain. Her last book was the post-collapse verse novella Song of Less (Cordite Books). Her debut novel The Fig Book will be published in 2027 by Allen & Unwin (Au/NZ) and Mariner Books (US). 

Amy Brown is a New Zealand-Australian writer and teacher who lives in Naarm/Melbourne. She has published three collections of poetry, four children’s novels, and completed a PhD at the University of Melbourne. Amy Brown’s debut novel was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Prize for an Unpublished Manuscript and was later published as My Brilliant Sister. Her next novel, This Creature, will be published in 2027.

Lynn Davidson writes poetry, memoir, and essays. Her memoir Do you still have time for chaos? was published by Main Point Books, Edinburgh, and Te Herenga Waka University Press, Wellington. Her latest poetry collection Islander was published by Shearsman Books, Bristol, and Te Herenga Waka University Press. Lynn had a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2013 and a Bothy Project Residency in 2016.  She won the Poetry New Zealand Poetry Award, 2020, and was the Randell Cottage Creative New Zealand Writer in Residence, 2021, and the Mike Riddell Writer in Residence, 2023. Lynn lives in Edinburgh and calls Aotearoa New Zealand and Scotland home.

Charles Olsen has published three bilingual poetry collections in Spain. He is preparing an anthology of the first ten years of the Given Words poetry competition (see @givenwords). Currently in Colombia presenting his poetry films in the IV ALARI Continental Conference on Afro-Latin American Studies in Cali, he has also been invited to curate a screening of poetry film at REELpoetry Houston, Texas, in September.

John Puhiatau Pule was born in Niue and since 1964 has lived in Auckland. In 2015 he returned to Niue to live. His expansive interdisciplinary practice has transformed oceanic imaginaries, offering new ways of understanding the arts, cultures, and histories of our region. He has published two novels and has published extensively as a poet. He also works as an artist, painting, drawing, printmaking, filmmaking and performing. Pule’s work has been represented in three Asia-Pacific Triennials at the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane (2006, 2002, 1996) Other selected group exhibitions include Hawaii triennial (2025) Sydney Biennale (2024) Oceania at Royal academy of arts, London & Musee du quai Branley ( 2018 & 2019) Kwangju Biennale, Korea (1995 &  2018); the 3rd Auckland Triennial, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki (2007)South Pacific Arts Festival in Palau (2004), New Caledonia (2000), Samoa (1996); Johannesburg Biennale, South Africa (1995).

Orchid Tierney is a poet and scholar originally from Aotearoa New Zealand, now living in Ohio. Her collections include this abattoir is a college (Calamari Archive, 2025) and a year of misreading the wildcats (The Operating System 2019). She is the author of several chapbooks including looking at the Tiny: Mad lichen on the surfaces of reading (Essay Press, 2023), ocean plastic (BlazeVOX, 2019), and blue doors (Belladonna* Press, 2018). Tierney is a senior editor at the Kenyon Review and is an associate professor at Kenyon College. She invites you to visit her www.orchidtierney.co

Since he left NZ in 1976 Stephen Chan has completed graduate and post doctoral work at London King’s, Kent and Oxford and is now Professor of World Politics at SOAS University of London. Before then he served as an international civil servant in emerging countries, working in zones of development and war. He has published more than 40 academic books, 5 volumes of poetry and 3 novels. He teaches karate in emerging countries and has been European Masters Champion in the fighting division.