Tag Archives: Otago University Press

Poetry Shelf Pocket Reviews: Janet Newman on Lynn Jenner’s The Gum Trees of Kerikeri

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The Gum Trees of Kerikeri, Lynn Jenner
Otago University Press, 2026

41.

Our talk has no official beginning, no structure and no
official end: it starts when the first person says what has
been on her mind; that could be the problem of finding a
parking place at the supermarket at New Year, or it could
be that she has planned a trip and her husband doesn’t
want to go; no-one is criticised or blamed, including the
husband: our conversation is a river with eddies and
currents. We have children who fight with us as though
we were the enemy; men who have taken themselves off
to other countries and left us with mortgages; we have
diseases with scary names: this is deep water but we are
not scared of deep water. We make gardens, we paint, we
write songs and poems, we record stories from the past
and we create adventures for ourselves so that our spirit
won’t slowly die: there are cool shady pools in this river.
We are not optimistic for the earth and its people, but we
think the best idea is to be as optimistic as possible in our
personal lives. Someone always says that and although
we all look a bit shifty and our eyes slide away, we nod.

Lynn Jenner

Poems in The Gum Trees of Kerikeri are disarmingly matter-of-fact given their subject matter: existential crises, climate catastrophe, war, alongside the things that make life worth living: rivers, trees, the sweet taste of fruit. They offer daily optimism while also asking the hard global questions: Is this the age of the death of the planet? Do you see deliverance and redemption anywhere? Is this the Promised Land? And most chillingly, given that the collection was written before the current war in the Middle East, are we there yet?

Referencing the work of philosphers, writers and artists, Jenner doesn’t provide solutions, rather different ways of looking. She draws connections betweeen disparate thoughts leading to a sense of gentle yet rigorous reflection. In one poem, she tells us Ursula Le Guin searched near the end of her life ‘for a way to resist the unfolding political and environmental catastrophes of these days.’ This quotation perhaps summarises the collection’s raison d’etre. Yet this is not a pessimistic book. It is a journey of enquiry in a life filled with everyday joy and confusion. Each poem feels satisfying yet curious: a small offering of humanity with a grounding effect at a time of crisis.

Janet Newman

Janet Newman is a poet, editor and farmer from Horowhenua. She holds a PhD from Massey University for her thesis: ‘Imagining Ecologies: Traditions of Ecopoetry in Aotearoa New Zealand.’ Her collection Unseasoned Campaigner (OUP, 2021) won the 2022 NZSA Heritage Book Award for Poetry. She is an editor of Koe: An Aotearoa ecopoetry anthology (OUP, 2024). 

Lynn Jenner is the author of Peat (OUP, 2019), a collection of essays and glossaries which consider the construction of the Kāpiti Expressway in the light of aesthetic and ecological ideas drawn from the writings of Charles Brasch. Lynn’s first book Dear Sweet Harry (AUP, 2010) won the NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book of Poetry prize and her second book Lost and Gone Away was shortlisted in the Non-Fiction category of the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Lynn lives in Waipapa, near Kerikeri.

Otago University Press page

Poetry Shelf celebrates Landfall Tauraka 251 with nine readings

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Landfall Tauraka 251, ed Lynley Edmeades, reviews ed David Eggleton
Otago University Press, 2026

Incl winner of Landfall Tauraka Young Writers’ Essay Prize 2026
Art Portfolios: Megan Brady and Julian Hooper
Craft Interview with Tusiata Avia

Otago University Press page

Landfall Tauraka 251 is a gift package of poetry, fiction, artwork, an interview, a terrific winning essay and reviews. The selection of poems and poets catches the eclectic reach and possibilities of poetry in Aotearoa in 2026, whether performed or published or shared online.

I have two ongoing series on Poetry Shelf that resonate with this issue. The Poetry Shelf Breathing Room offers poems to pause on and breathe in slowly and deeply. And secondly Poetry Shelf Speaks Out To For With – where poetry is a way to speak out, whether political and/or getting personal, whether nuanced or loud. This is what I get, as I spend the weekend reading and rereading Landfall’s poetry selection. I am stalling on every poem, breathing in the exquisite lyricism, the lightness, the visual brocades of detail. And then again, I am musing on poetry that is speaking out in myriad vital ways.

Landfall Tauraka 251 feels like my favourite Landfall to date. The subject matter roves from cities towns and streets to eulogies and grief, to family, pūkeko and museums, to swamp forests and to sweet hot chocolate. There are poets new to me along with poets I have admired for ages.

Plus there is a cracking, standout, must-read interview with Tusiata Avia where she goes deep into writing poetry. She speaks of the boost Bill Manhire and IIML gave her. She speaks of her vulnerabilities and doubt in the early years and how intuition is a key tool as a poet.

This is an issue to listen to, to linger over, to track new poets you want to read again. Already my issue is well thumbed.

To celebrate Landfall Tauraka 251, I invited nine poets to record their poems.

ART Megan Brady, Julian Hooper, John Reynolds, Deborah Smith
FICTION Molly Crighton, Heather Holdaway, Sam Keenan, Cait Kneller, David Large, Jemma Richardson, Grant Smithies, Cora Tate, Pearl Tuohy, Tarn Wright
NON-FICTION Cian Dennan, Uzair Khan
POETRY Tunmise Adebowale, Hannah Rose Arnold, Nick Ascroft, Izzie Birnie, Cindy Botha, Hana Buchanan, Nathaniel Calhoun, Kim Cope Tait, Brett Cross, Brandon de la Cruz, David Eggleton, Craig Foltz, Alison Glenny, Eliana Gray, Jackson, Erik Kennedy, Fiona Kidman, Brent Kininmont, Leonard Lambert, Jessica Le Bas, Carolyn McCurdie, Kirstie McKinnon, Alice Miller, Anuja Mitra, Janet Newman, Grace Nottingham, Gregory O’Brien, Jilly O’Brien, Claire Orchard, Harriet Prebble, Joanna Preston, Hope Rännäli, Vaughan Rapatahana, Richard Reeve, Holly Ruth, Will Salmon, Regan Solomon, Jillian Sullivan, Stacey Teague, Dunstan Ward, Andrew Paul Wood, Nicholas Wright
REVIEW Sally Blundell, John Gereats, Michael O’Leary, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, Paddy Richardson, Elizabeth Smither, Bronwyn Wylie-Gibb

The readings

Alison Glenny

‘Waffle’

Alison Glenny lives near Te Whanganui-a-Tara and is the author of several collections of mostly prose poems, published by Otago University Press and Compound Press. In 2024 they were the Aotearoa recipient of the Caselberg Trust Margaret Egan City of Literature residency in Whaka Oho Rahi/Broad Bay, on the Otago Peninsula.

Hana Buchanan

Photo Credit: Julia Sabugosa

Hana Buchanan (Ngāti Haumia ki Te Aro, Taranaki iwi, Te Atiawa, Taranaki Whānui ki te Upoko o te Ika) is a word person, a tangata toikupu — poet, kaikaranga, kaitito waiata — and yoga teacher working from her ancestral lands in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Hana’s poetry is published online and in print journals and her first full collection, Kupu Whenua, is out now!

Cian Dennan

‘Fragments on the house of memory’

Cian Dennan is a poet, educator and multidisciplinary artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa. Cian completed her Master’s degree in Creative Writing at the University of Auckland in 2025, and continues to develop a body of work exploring the intricacies of self and memory from a Kiwi-Italian perspective. Cian’s work has been recognised by a number of prestigious awards, including the Phoenix Prize and the Garth Maxwell Creative Project Prize.

Tunmise Adebowale

‘Beautiful People in Dunedin’

Tunmise Adebowale is a Nigerian-born New Zealander. Her work has been published in several major publications, including Poetry Ireland Review, Landfall Tauraka, The Spinoff, The Big Idea, The Pantograph Punchand Newsroom. 

Erik Kennedy

‘Lined v Unlined Paper’

Erik Kennedy is the author of the poetry collections Sick Power Trip (2025), Another Beautiful Day Indoors(2022), and There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime (2018), all with Te Herenga Waka University Press, and he co-edited No Other Place to Stand, a book of climate change poetry from Aotearoa and the Pacific (Auckland University Press, 2022). He lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch.

Nick Ascroft

‘Spite in the Beat’

Nick Ascroft’s most recent book of poetry is It’s What He Would’ve Wanted (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025). 

Fiona Kidman

Fiona Kidman at home

‘Blue This and That’

Fiona Kidman writes poetry, novels, memoirs and essays. Her most recent poetry collection was The Midnight Plane, gathering up work of the past 50 years, and new poems.Her fiction has won a number of prizes and is published internationally, particularly in France. She lives on a high hill in Wellington.

Jillian Sullivan

‘Framework’

Jillian Sullivan lives in the Ida Valley, Central Otago. Her thirteen published books include creative non-fiction, novels, short stories and poetry. Her latest book is  Map for the Heart- Ida Valley Essays, Otago University Press.

Alice Miller

‘Old Romantic’

Alice Miller’s fourth poetry collection is Here & Thereafter (Pavilion, 2026). She is also the author of a novel, More Miracle than Bird (Tin House). Alice lives in Berlin, but she and her family are planning to return to Aotearoa in 2027.

Poetry Shelf celebrates Ariana Tikao’s Pepeha Portal – a review and a reading

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Pepeha Portal, Ariana Tikao
cover image: Kate Stevens West (Kāi Tahu), Kurawaka/Tender Ties Kohikohi, 2021
University of Otago Press, 2026

To read Pepeha Portal is uplifting. The poetry offers an experience that nourishes the air I breathe, the physical ground I stand upon, the metaphorical paths I navigate, the way I move between past present future, the way poems can hold me in prolonged and vital embrace.

The collection is divided into two parts, ‘Pepeha’ and ‘Portal’. Two warm welcome palms held out to me as reader, let’s say to you as reader. Two versions of homecoming and homebeing perhaps, with vital movement between and beyond and close to. The first section, ‘Pepeha’, introduces self in Māori through connections to tīpuna place and stories, where the presence of people and ancestors acutely matter. The second, the ‘Portal’, the doorway, offers an array of life-rich movement in the Christchurch of Ariana’s childhood and the Ōtautahi of her adulthood.

Think place. Think belonging. Think aroha. Think wisdom. Think physical land. Think the ache of the land ravaged for-earth-ruinology, not for-earth-ecology: “rock spews into Whakaraupō / in the name of progress”.

I love how te reo Māori and English weave together across the collection, heightening the rhythm of two languages singing alongside each other, the way individual words are blooming with distinction, semantic nuances, cultural links. To have this precious language presence is vital when we are calling for te reo Māori to be both heard and visible in the streets, in schools, in parliament, in books published, the songs recorded, the stories shared. Let these lines from ‘To’u Reo’ settle upon your skin:

Then I remember Hana O’Regan:
He ātaahua te reo i roto i a koe

Āe, the reo inside me is perfect

It’s in my blood
like lava
like a fire

like my pōua said   Mana
is a fire
never extinguished  

I keep jotting down words to carry through the collection as I read, like echo mantras: belonging, connecting, here, from. There in the moving eulogies to mother and father. There in the poem, ‘Ko Au Tonu’ with its echo-chamber line, “I am here”. And there in the terrific poem ‘From’. It’s like song. It’s like a self chant. I just want to hear the poem singing in the air. Here’s a taste of it (you can hear Ariana read the poem below):

I’m from Redgrave Street, Hoon Bay. Pōtiki of seven ‘half-caste’
kids raised in a house built by the state, with purple polyanthus
and sweet peas blooming along the driveway

I’m from picking the hardened chewing gum off the footpaths,
spitting out grit like pips, coaxing back flavour with persuasive
saliva and metal-filled teeth

Musicality is important as I read, and I was super keen to hear Ariana perform some poems. Ariana, a musician and New Zealand Arts Laureate, is attuned to the cadence of words and her poetry reflects this, with her aural agility, a gift.

In the poem, ‘Intonation’, a poem dedicated to the late Moana Jackson, I find deep-seated heart, and again we are in a crucial stream of belonging and connections. The poem sings the praises of Moana and underlines we are not writing and reading in empty impoverished hopeless vacuums. We are writing and singing, joining and remembering, connecting and that matters. Here’s a stanza:

The time has come
if we each tell
one of his stories
we will light up this place
so bright we gotta wear shades

Ariana is crafting and sharing poetry with roots in the personal but it is also poetry speaking to for out and for the world. I stall on ‘Kua Whetūrakitia’, a poem shaped like an urn or a vase or beacon. A beacon of light that we hold up for Gaza.

I stall on ‘Settling’, a striking poem that holds the title word, a prickly spiky word, out to us, shaking the word a little like a snow globe, letting sediment settle upon us, the sediment that forms in the shaken jar. Turn the word again and settle is negotiating, negotiations. And another turn and it’s the Israeli settling settlers on the West Bank, as the Palestinians mourn their bombed whanau. This word. This settling, this unfolding and refolding gash in hearts settling.

I’m electrified by ‘Transforming’ and its call for action. Protest. Speaking out. It feels important this, that Ariana’s poetry, so personal and grounding, shines insistent light on global and local wounds and speaks out. In this ground-tremor poem, Ariana turns to the mokopuna:

Papa’s heat is also rising. We will summon those wiling to fight
for Papatūānuku, those who won’t keep extracting from her –
unlike us, who believed the the claim of the capitalists. These new
fighters will speak our reo and dance with the fluid movement
of bull kelp surging around the rocks. Wehi and wana will
explode from them like white water from a blowhole. It is these
mokopuna that we need. They won’t stay seated in rows. They
won’t wear bows in their hair. Nau mai e tama. Nau mai e hine!

Much of collection was written during Ariana’s 2023 Ursula Bethell Residency at the University of Canterbury. In her endnote, she mentions her office corkboard: “I progressively added printed pages from the Ngāi Tahu digital atlas Kā Huru Manu, to use it as a visual reminder of our placenames and the stories behind them. As a way to track progress, I’d added coloured pins to the map. In the end, there were over thirty pins.”

And now, the extraordinary reach and intimacy of Pepeha Portal settles and unsettles and resettles me. I am musing on writing poetry as a form of travel, inner private intimate travel, physical travel, travel that sparks epiphany, travel that refreshes the light in which I view and hear and absorb the world.

This gift of a book is in the world. Thank you.

a reading

‘Te Waihora’

‘Transforming’

‘From’

‘Intonation’

Ariana Tikao is a Kāi Tahu writer, musician and New Zealand Arts Laureate. Her work spans poetry, music and interdisciplinary performance, and has been published widely in Aotearoa. Her book Mokorua: My Story of Moko Kauae was published in 2022 (AUP). Pepeha Portal is her debut poetry collection.

Otago University Press page

Poetry Shelf conversation: James Norcliffe

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A Day Like No Other: Selected Poems, James Norcliffe
Otago University Press, 2026

Treatment
for Ted Pearson

the clouds are moving
with surprising speed

in the window that is a lake
leaves are floating

the acupuncturist
so lightly holds my wrist

I am a centre of stillness
my wrist is a trout

the clouds like days
race across the leafy lake

somewhere a fin flickers
as regularly as a pulse

I float in the still shadows
soon I will tell him everything

James Norcliffe
from A Day Like No Other: Selected Poems
originally published in Letters to Dr Dee (Hazard Press, 1993)

Otago University Press has celebrated the poetry of James Norcliffe in A Day Like No Other, a lovingly designed, hardback edition of his selected poems. This is a gorgeous book to hold in the hand, with its feel-good paper stock, the beauty of the internal design and the choice of font. The poetry has room to breathe on the page and this makes such a difference.

Reading this collection, slowly over the course of weeks, is to savour myriad fascinations, reflections, observations. Things move in and out of view, stillness and silence as resonant as darkness and light, the strange and the ordinary. Humour. Wit. Especially humour and wit. I kept jotting down things to quote you, similes that hold my attention, the lyricism of a particular line, the allure of a gap. Imagine stars set like teeth in a rat poem. Or what a cow is to believe’. Or a willow tree that ‘was a prayer in the still air’.

To have a publisher pay such loving homage to a much loved poet, is a very fine thing indeed. this is a book to treasure.

Paula: I loved reading the selection of your poetry gathered from across the decades. I was drawn to the ongoing lyricism, the connecting fascinations, the wit, the humour, the acute observations. This could be the focus of a whole book on my part, but can you share any highlights, epiphanies, discoveries, challenges?

James: When Sue Wootton of Otago University Press suggested the possibility of doing a selected to me, I was delighted with the idea, especially as it offered the opportunity to revisit earlier work and bring to the light poems from books long out of print.

I was even more delighted when Sue explained that she envisioned a book with beautiful production standards, in hardback and with a ribbon. And, of course, she delivered in spades. I think it is a beautiful book.

One difficulty soon presented itself: there were an awful lot of poems to consider from eleven or so books.

When Joan (my wife Joan Melvyn co-selected with me) and I gathered together the poems we especially liked, there were, of course, far too many! My eyes far too big for my stomach. Sue was patient and explained the difference between ‘selected’ and ‘collected’. We needed to cull, but that became a very useful if sometimes painful exercise, forcing us to crystallise the criteria for selection. Among these were personal favourites, poems with specific resonance, poems that best demonstrated what was a James Norcliffe poem, poems that had been especially well received by audiences and readers, and poems that represented the whole range and breadth of the work, the aspects you list so kindly in your second sentence. Thus the selection with Sue’s assistance, became more of a distillation. I’m very happy with the result.

One problem we couldn’t overcome was that I have written a number of lengthy sequences over the years. I’m rather with Edgar Allan Poe that a long poem is a contradiction in terms, but I square that circle by writing shorter poems and stitching them together. I like the sequences but it would have been too extravagant to include them.

Perhaps the most cheerful discovery was how well so many of the early poems still stacked up given my more critical elderly eye.

Paula: We will have to go back to your books and hunt out the sequences. Spend time with the rewards of the long extended poetry breath. A different but equally satisfying pleasure for poetry fans.

Do you think anything has changed as you hold your writing pen? What or how or where or why you write poetry?

James: Not really. Poems usually come as fleeting visitations and I’ll try to catch a line as they flit past and write it down. I’ll then work at it and sometimes something develops. Sometimes – wonderfully – a whole poem will come at once, but this is rare. I don’t ever sit before a blank page to try to write a poem. It has to develop from a prompt of some sort: an image, a word or combination of words, a memory, something I’ve seen. This hasn’t changed really. I often quote the surrealist artist, Joan Miro, who once described drawing as ‘taking a line for a walk’. In many ways, for me, poetry is taking an idea for a walk. I love it when that walk takes me to strange or quirky places.

Why do I write? I’ve always wanted to. Now while it’s something that gives me great pleasure, it’s also something I feel compelled to do do, and I get such a buzz when I read a new poem and know that it works.  

Paula: Walking has been such a aide for writers. It was for Blanche Blaughan. I get a sense of it in Michele leggott’s work.

I love how, from your early poems onwards, there are philosophical undercurrents. Whether it is the philosophy of soap or what a cow is to believe or, as fossils are scraped from the beach rocks, “to teach our children / the difficult meaning / of togetherness” is paramount. These over-and-undercurrents of ideas are gold. I particular love ‘The Visit of the Dalai Lama’ where the battered man (“life / has battered him / as a fish is battered”) is also doing the bright-side not-bad response: “papering himself  / around with a warmth // that could steam windows”. Ah, I held this precious poem close.

What matters when you are writing a poem? Or to rephrase, what do you want your poetry to do? Can you choose an early poem you especially love and then a newer one to share with readers here.

James:  The Bob that ‘The Visit of the Dalai Lama’ is dedicated to was an uncle of mine whose life was a succession of misfortunes and tribulations – rather a Job-like figure, but who through it all who maintained a sense of grace and warm humanity. The fish and chip analogy seemed to work on so many levels. I’m so pleased it spoke to you.

If I understand what you’re implying, it’s my hope that the poems express themselves without telling something or finger wagging. The poetry I most enjoy is layered, subtle, and often with playful ambiguity. I really hope that my poems often do the same.

I love finding odd juxtapositions that shouldn’t work, but do.

A couple of poems, early and late, that may demonstrate this would be ‘Treatment’ as you mention below and begin our conversation with, and secondly, ‘Four travellers in an Austin Maxi’, a poem dealing with memory and misapprehension.

Four travellers in an Austin Maxi

They sang it in the navy-blue (or brown?) Austin as it climbed over
the mountain.

They sang it on the white road through the gloom of the beech forest.

The white dust – or perhaps it was brown – billowed behind.

Sometimes I joined in: O Veederzane! Sweetheart!

A strange and haunting name, the promise of an impossible love, like
Marlene, like Mercedes under a lamplight in European mist.

One traveller remembers a road littered with handbags, another
antlered creatures in the trees, the third recalls the pink hot-water
bottle growing cold, the fourth remembers an idea.

A girl named Goodbye.How many times did I dream of her before I
said hello to you?

The sky would know. The blue sky – or perhaps the brown – the lost
sky somewhere high above the dust.

James Norcliffe
from A Day Like No Other: Selected Poems
originally published in Letters to ‘Oumuamua (Otago University Press, 2023)

Paula: So many poems to enthuse over. I love ‘treatment’  – so lyrical, so spare. It reminds me of the power of silence in a poem, the resonance of the gap, the unspoken. There is a sweet sway between movement and stillness, almost yin and yan veering in mind the scene is an acupuncturists. For me, it’s a poem rich in ideas and in feeling.

I float in the still shadows
soon I will tell him everything

Do you feel you signal and signpost rather than confess and expand upon the deeply personal. 

James: I like ‘treatment’ very much as well, especially the unexpectedness (I hope) of the final couplet and the pulling together of images prompted by the somnolent state induced by lying silently on a clinic bed on a warm afternoon with a picture window to look out of.

I do of course have strong feelings but I prefer in my poetry to express these slant. To hint and suggest rather than shout – or whine. Deadpan, again, I guess. Images and figures can do much of the work and ambiguity. I do like poems that are layered this way.

Paula: I also love the recurring motifs. Especially frogs! Especially sky hills wind water. Do you find comfort in certain things finding their way into your poems?

James:Things do recur, sometimes too often. Joan often culls the white moons! But, yes, certain images and motifs become part of your idiolect, your personal language, and they’re worth embracing. We live in a part of the world surrounded by hills and water, wind from all directions and often astonishing skies. It’s one of the delights of Aotearoa and one shared by so many New Zealanders. I should add trees and birds as well – I’m a tree buff – and trees and birds regularly find their way into the poems, often as the main feature.

Paula: Two poems struck me deeply in these heartbreaking days: ‘The attack on Baghdad’ (where black peaches fell from the tree staining the sand with peach blood), and ‘How to dress for peace’. How do we write in these war-hungry times? Are you writing poetry as protest or solace or both?

James: These two poems were ones where my heart was more openly on my sleeve and they do resonate with people. ‘The attack of Baghdad’ has especial salience right now given the lunacy of the assault in Iran and it didn’t surprise me that Steve Braunias chose it to represent the book in Newsroom.

Several years ago, I read ‘How to Dress for Peace in Medellin, Colombia’ at the Twentieth International Poetry Festival which was dedicated to peace  – unsurprisingly after the Pablo Escobar years. The poem was very well received.

Interestingly, my first published poetry was very politically involved. I wrote satirical pieces for an alternative little magazine called Kobald which had set up as a slightly subversive response to Canta, the official student magazine, at the University of Canterbury. They were little squibs, really, and also with the NZ Monthly Review, a left wing journal I subscribed to. A fellow contributor was David Eggleton. This was at the time of Vietnam so there was a lot to be political about. These days I don’t write such politically engaged work. Perhaps I ought to. I don’t hold with poets being unacknowledged legislators, but I do think we should bear witness. These are, as you say, war hungry times and also full of shouting and finger wagging. Poetry is better equipped to be more subtle, reflective, I feel.

Paula: Yes to bearing witness. I think Poetry Shelf hosts political nunces alongside protest placards. Are there particular poets that have sustained you, as you navigate poetry as both reader and writer?

James: I do read a lot of poetry. There are a number of poets, both classic and modern, I return to, probably because of the way they use language and because they have written poems I would   love to be able to write – among the moderns and among dozens of others I might mention Derek Walcott, James Tate and Charles Simic, but honestly I could fill pages with names.

Paula: If you were able to curate a poetry reading inviting poets from any time or place who would you line up?

James: Oh, goodness. It would be a disparate bunch! I’d have to cut it down to half a dozen or so or it would go on all night.

How about John Donne, William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, W.H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, and Pablo Neruda. I’d like to squeeze in Yeats and a couple of hundred others.

Paula: I’m justr picturing the event. Wow! I find our poetry communities are thriving, despite the scant visibility in media or at festivals (Featherston is a notable exception). I love The Canterbury Poets Collective, the way it celebrates poets and poetry, both locally and from elsewhere. Exciting. Any thoughts on life as a poet in 2026?

James: The CPC is still going strong after more than thirty years and as popular as ever and locally, too, Catalyst and Common Ground have regular poetry events. Sudden Valley Press and Cold Hub Press maintain an extensive poetry list and local mags range from the venerable Takahē to Quick Brown Dog from the Hagley Writer Writers’ Institute. And for younger writers there is the Write-On School for Young Writers and of course the ReDraft series for young writers – national but based in Christchurch – has just published its twenty-fifth annual collection. To add icing, there is the wonderful Scorpio Bookshop with regular poetry launches. So, all in all, poetry is in good shape down here. As part of this environment, I find it hugely stimulating.  Poets here are very supportive of one another and of their work and also keen to help up and coming writers find their feet.

Paula: Poetry has been such an important activity for many of us, whether as readers or writers or both. What else gives you comfort, stimulation, mind and heart boosts?

James:  Family first, of course. We have a wonderful family, some alas overseas which is bittersweet, especially in these current times. Then there’s our garden: it’s large but still manageable, just, and so good for the soul. We enjoy travelling and discovering new places and connecting with new people and reconnecting with old friends. And images and ideas still flit past from time to time and I’m still adroit enough to grab some of them. It’s all rather lovely.

Paula: Thanks James. I raise my glass to your terrific selection of poems, so lovingly produced, so lovingly written over decades. It is poetry book I treasure.

James Norcliffe is a poet, children’s writer, novelist and editor. He was awarded the 2022 Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry and has published 11 poetry collections, most recently Letter to ’Oumuamua (Otago University Press, 2023). He is also the author of 14 novels for young readers, notably the award-winning Loblolly Boy series, and his first adult novel, The Frog Prince (RHNZ Vintage), was published in 2022. Norcliffe has a long association with the Canterbury Poets’ Collective, takahē, the ReDraft anthologies and Flash Frontier.

Otago University Press page

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Cilla McQueen picks ‘Quark Dance’

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Quark Dance

here come the colours
to settle on our lips and eyes
and rainbow lighting all the edges
the boundaries are unstable
trust love not logic
light falls
never the same way twice
keep awake
jump out into the never look back
dream hair ribbons unfurling
I can if you can too
barefoot balance and free fall
without scary death in our mouths
just plain delight
learning to nudge the wind
dance falling exploding symmetry
stretching the space
pulse slow arm elbow up
whip spine twist
thigh knee toe out
the current passes
nowadays science is pure poetry
all the particles bounce and decay
sweetly and sure as seeds
and quarks come in such colours and flavours
as beauty charm and strangeness
it’s all so weird and simple
the world’s made up of tiny little energetic
multicoloured irrational jellybeans
so dance
quark dance

Cilla McQueen
From Anti Gravity (McIndoe 1984), re-published in Poeta (2018, OUP)

‘Quark Dance’: it was unusual to write about quantum physics in 1984, but I did it anyway in this poem from Anti Gravity which delights unscientifically in the remarkable behaviours of elementary particles.
Cilla McQueen


Cilla McQueen MNZM is a poet, teacher and artist, and a three-time winner of the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry. She received an honorary doctorate in literature from the University of Otago in 2008 and was New Zealand Poet Laureate from 2009 to 2011. In 2010 she received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement (Poetry). In 2020 she was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services as a poet. Cilla lives in Bluff, at the southern tip of New Zealand’s South Island.

Otago University Press page

Playing Favourites is a series where poets pick a favourite poem of their own or by another nz poet.

Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Lynn Jenner new launch date

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We are excited to announce that we have rescheduled our special Kerikeri book launch for The Gum Trees of Kerikeri by Lynn Jenner. To be launched by Kim Martins and proudly sponsored by the @nzpoetrysociety. All welcome! We hope to all see you there! 💙

Main Hall, The Cornerstone Church, 144 Kerikeri Road

Saturday 18 April, 2pm – 4:00pm

Kai and refreshments provided

Please RSVP before the 14 April: publicity@otago.ac.nz

Event page

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Megan Kitching on Cilla McQueen’s ‘The Hole’

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THE HOLE

Measure a black thread.
Roll one end between forefinger and ball of thumb
to a small knot tangle.
Thread the other, moistened by lips to a point,
through the eye of the needle.
Consider the hole in the heel.
Engage with the sock.
Mercury’s wing would fit.
There is no ironic distance between us, Sock,
for I must remove my glasses
to obtain a microscopic view
of you.

      Is what I perceive as a void,
such as the void in Eridanus that intrigues me,
so from your viewpoint? Do you know
that you have nothing in you –
an unravelling place,
a shirking, Sock, of the looping continuous
cause that defined you, shaped your ideal,
but for the hole,
the void wherein there is no matter, not a skerrick?
I’d like to go to Eridanus when I die.
Meanwhile darn it,
the steel tip needling in and out
between there and not there, defines
edge where there was none, fell whereon
the latticework will be attached,
                                                     as is,
between the gutter and the house,
tautened the pragmatic architecture of spiders.

Cilla McQueen
from The Radio Room Otago University Press, 2010 (also in poeta: selected and new poems, Otago University Press, 2018)

I adore poems that peer through ordinary things into the universe. Pull on the threads of this one and fascinating things happen. ‘The Hole’ starts as a poem of instructions. This is how to thread a needle as I remember my mother doing, as I did as a child, squinting with the effort. The poem has me at “Engage with the sock.” The voice sparkles with Cilla McQueen’s trademark humour and intelligence. I love the hint of a combat about to kick off between the speaker and recalcitrant matter. Or rather, the lack of matter: the hole.

One of the reasons this poem remains a favourite of mine is that it still generates questions. I’m not completely sure what Mercury is doing there, patching the gap with his hypothetical wing. But I’m fine with not knowing. That a deity associated with eloquence pops up just then feels right. Engaged with the sock, glasses off, the poet is gearing up for flights of imagination.

Poetry has long been fascinated with the borders of our perception at both ends of the scale, the microscopic and the majestic. The sock’s “void” brings us to the gap in Eridanus, which I learned from this poem is a constellation. I love that we’re prompted to muse on the mysteries of space by considering a sock. A black sock, the opening line suggests, with a black hole in its heel.

Sock is nothing special, a bit lacking. But engaging with Sock in open curiosity takes us vast distances. To me, the two questions at the heart of the poem are as confounding as koans, almost absurdly deep. Can a sock have a “viewpoint”? Of course, I can’t help turning the second-person “you” on myself: “Do you know / that you have nothing in you …?” That could be a lifetime’s meditation. Or it could be poking satirical fun at navel-gazing. Either works. There’s the creative cause with an ideal in mind, and then there’s reality wilfully “shirking” that destiny. There’s the beautiful hope of travelling into the stars after death—then we’re brought back to earth with a pun. I love this bouncing between the playful and the profound. From darning to dark matter.

Sewing becomes a metaphor for poetry or any act of creation at the edge “between there and not-there.” It’s both a daring act, the poem suggests, and one as “pragmatic” as a spider’s web. The closing simile is artfully natural, almost offhand, as if the poet has just glanced out the window. It also ties everything together beautifully. Yet the poem is named for the hole in the fabric of things, and that’s why it keeps bringing me back to wonder.

Megan Kitching 

Megan Kitching is an Ōtepoti Dunedin poet. Her debut collection At the Point of Seeing (Otago University Press, 2023) won the Jessie Mackay Prize for Poetry in the 2024 Mātātuhi Foundation Best First Book Awards and was awarded Best International First Collection in the UK Poet Laureate’s The Laurel Prize 2024. In 2021, Megan was the inaugural Caselberg Trust Elizabeth Brooke-Carr Emerging Writer in residence.

Cilla McQueen MNZM is a poet, teacher and artist, and a three-time winner of the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry. She received an honorary doctorate in literature from the University of Otago in 2008 and was New Zealand Poet Laureate from 2009 to 2011. In 2010 she received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement (Poetry). In 2020 she was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services as a poet. Cilla lives in Bluff, at the southern tip of New Zealand’s South Island.

Otago University Press page

Poetry Shelf review and reading: The Midnight Plane – Selected and new poems by Fiona Kidman

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The Midnight Plane: Selected and new poems, Fiona Kidman
Otago University Press, 2025

It’s the same again this weekend, wild weather,
rain and delays, and a long way south, suspension
on a cloud, books take you everywhere.

 

from ‘On small planes’

Reading your way through the poetry collections by a particular poet can be such a rewarding experience. I recently read Chris Tse’s poetry books and felt utterly moved. I sat at the kitchen table thinking this is why I write my own poems, and read, review and blog all-things poetry. Poetry is the ultimate prismatic experience for heart and mind, eye and ear. It is sustenance, it is challenge, beauty and balm, multiple-toned music. It is deep-rooted aroha.

For a number of years, I read and researched every possible woman poet who had published poetry in Aotearoa. It was illuminating, heartbreaking and felt utterly necessary to shine a light on the women who have written and published poems for over 150 years, to question their scant representation in anthologies, in publishing and award lists, in public appearances. The visibility of and attention paid to women poets has changed to a remarkable degree, but I am always suspicious of any critique or review that promotes a hierarchy of style or subject matter, that dismisses the domestic, the personal, the tricky-and-impossible-to-define feminine.

In the 1970s, women poets were finally catching the attention of readers. In an interview with me in 2016, Fiona mentioned some of the women who were publishing poetry and performing at venues together: Lauris Edmond, Elizabeth Smither, Marilyn Duckworth, Meg Campbell and Rachel McAlpine among others. A handful of women joined the young men countering the poetry traditions that had preceded them with calls for the new, but others, such as Fiona, advanced the rewards of the domestic in poetry. Rachel made it into Big Smoke: NZ Poems 1960 – 1975 (AUP, 2000), while Fiona, with her attention to the domestic, did not. Yet in my view, both women liberated words for women, inspired women to write. Like Fleur Adcock and Rachel, Fiona has favoured the first person pronoun. It is personal and intimate, and I feel like I’m sitting in the same room as the poem, entering the terrain of autobiography. The relationships, the acute observations and anecdotes, carry me within and beyond a domestic setting.

In her preface to The Midnight Plane, Fiona tellingly writes: ‘I am a plain poet; some critics would describe my early work as ‘confessional’, others as ‘domestic’. Perhaps I was such a poet, and at heart still am, although I am not given much to such labels. What I know is poetry still has the power to shake the heart.” And that is exactly what Fiona’s poetry does for me. It shakes my heart.

Let’s listen to Fiona read:

Fiona Kidman at home

Photo credit: Robert Cross

‘The midnight plane’

‘What I do’

Otago University Press has gathered a selection of poems from Fiona’s books, along with some new ones. The beautiful production, with a hard cover, lovely paper stock, and a gorgeous cover, acknowledges the work as a national taonga.

Fiona’s debut collection, Honey & Bitters (1975), is one of my all-time favourite poetry collections. It is a series of both actual plantings and memory plantings, a matrix of movement and stillness, physical views and revealed feelings, where what is not said rubs alongside what is said. The writing is agile, surprising, holding out the rhythm of slow-paced observation. I read a poem, I stall and have to read it again, and again.

In the field the sheep are scattered like hail,
this pale dun landscape with small
quaint cottages we’ve driven miles to find, for sale,
near trees

whose scribble branches wait for spring,
scratch barren messages across the sky.
But a man, a boy, a girl and I
are here.

from ‘Wairarapa Sunday’

The poem, ‘Kohoutek’ is dedicated to the comet, but draws our attention to the preciousness of each day, to the ‘voyages of discovery’ in a new house, to the trees bursting in green, and the sunlight patches. Fiona writes: ‘These are the miracles of the everyday’, and this for me is a miniature poetry manifesto. It is one I hold close to my heart, sitting at the kitchen table where I have written so many books, celebrated so many books by other poets, shared so many meals.

I like the way you stand, fingers trailing
over the back of a chair before a velvet
curtain looped with braid, your eyes fierce
and direct, a hat like a guardsman’s
helmet tilting on your brow, a telltale
ruffle of lace at the wrists
because you are my grandmother
fluted silver vases stand poised
above my bookshelves
because you are my grandmother
I wear old fine gold and mother-of-pearl
because, because of this,
I wear this hair shirt of guilt
the settlers’ shame

from ‘Speaking with my grandmothers’

In Where Your Left Hand Rests (2010), another collection I adore, there is a poem I would love to post in its entirety on Poetry Shelf. ‘Speaking with my grandmothers’, is a poem that threads past and present, that forms a braid of spike and silk as Fiona reflects upon the grandmother ancestors she never met, and the stolen land she stands upon. Here are the final lines: “Tonight I want to sit quietly by this window. There is so / little silence, so many voices.” Ah, we can take this moment and hold our line of grandmothers close, and for some of us, the stolen land we stand upon.

This Change in the Light (2016) is another go-to collection for me, with its haunting portrait of Fiona’s mother in ten sonnets, its travels from Paris to Provence to Singapore to a cancer ward. The poem, ‘What I do’, is one I could pin to the wall; it navigates mornings devoted to writing books, afternoons to preparing food, suggesting the mornings may not be cut and dried like food, but how love seeps though the whole day. It feels like I see myself in the poem’s mirror, with my endless hoard of cookbooks, my love of cooking and writing every single possible day. And then, and then movingly then, the exquisite final poem, ‘So far, for now’, a loving tribute to her beloved husband Ian. I am holding this poem to my heart. I wanted to share lines but it felt wrong to take a handful out, you need to read it in full, and let it unfold in you over the course of a day.

On the cover of the book, a photograph shows Fiona sitting in her lounge looking out the window at the Wellington sky and harbour. A perfect image for poetry that embraces both lounge and sky, that depends upon slow observation and the dailiness of living, a mind that goes travelling. Sitting at my kitchen window looking out across the ever-changing expanse of bush and sky, as I pick my way along a road thatched with spike and sweetness, I am crying, strangely crying, because somehow, I know that for so many of us, poetry is a gift, a gift we do and a gift we share. Fiona’s poetry winds about me, I gather it in, the shifting lights and the vital substance, knowing in her work there is always heart, her fingers on the pulse of humanity, and that is why the poetry of Fiona Kidman matters so very much.

Dame Fiona Kidman is a poet, fiction writer and memoirist. She has also written for the screen industry. Her internationally published work has won numerous prestigious literary awards, and her honours include a damehood (DCNZM), an OBE and the French Legion of Honour (La Légion d’Honneur). She lives on a cliff top in Wellington.

Otago University Press page

Poetry Shelf review: Landfall 249: Autumn 2025

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Landfall 249: aotearoa new zealand arts and letters
Autumn 2025, ed Lynley Edmeades
Otago University Press

Sometimes I pick up a literary journal such as Landfall and dip and dive in over a few weeks, but today I have decided to read it cover to cover. Yes, today I have booked myself in for a Landfall road trip, sundried-tomato muffins in the oven, oatmeal coffees lined up. The journal has been in existence for almost 80 years and maintained its consistent dedication to writing in Aotearoa New Zealand. I know my road trip will include poetry, nonfiction, fiction, art and reviews.

First up the spellbinding artwork on the cover: Tia Ranginui’s ‘Cold Feet’ (pigment ink on Hahnemühle Photo Rag). It’s a taster for the sequence inside, a taster that moves both symbol and personal narrative into a zone of extraordinary wonder. I am hooked.

The issue includes the winner of the Landfall Young Writers’ Essay Competition 2025, selected by Landfall editor Lynley Edmeades. Her judge’s report signals the record number of entries this year and offers a fascinating snapshot of the engagements and anxieties of young writers. The winner, Ava Reid, resists attempting to tell us how the world functions, choosing instead to use the essay as a space “for trying to work things out, to notice and to try to make sense of the world”. I love the essay, and am already sidetracked into slow travel reading, musing on the attraction to flotsam and jettson, discarded objects, those inherited, excavated, misplaced or abandoned. Ava is musing on the back story to the ‘artefacts’ in her fields of vision. For some reason I find myself returning to a still life by Giorgio Morandi, picturing the daily clutter beyond the frame of his orderly compositions. It is writing at its most sublime.

What if I were to write a tiny poem, a sweetly arranged still life where I show you the green leaf on the wooden deck, the wet pattern of winter rain, and then abruptly pull you away into a clamorous narrative beyond, that may or may not be true.

Let’s turn the page and absorb the volume of a vegetable in Rhian Gallagher’s sublime poem, ‘Potato’, crossing a bridge between Dunedin and Donegal, a father memory, the layers of soil as pungent as the layers of narrative held beyond the frame of revealing. On the opposite page, Rhian’s ‘Early Autumn’, is equally rewarding. wondering how place is also a narrative harbour, past and present. The listening, the observing, the recalling. Rhian writes with both economy and richness, thought and feeling, an autumnal view a hub of beginnings and endings and beginnings. I am backtracking back to reread Ava’s essay.

A duet of poems and I have pulled into a roadside cafe to linger, knowing Landfall is not a single day excursion for me. I am stalling on Ariana Tikao’s haunting lament, ‘Te Tārere a Hikaiti’. Then Riemke Ensing’s moving eulogy for Vincent O’Sullivan, ‘Blue’. Her final lines glue me to my chair. You need to read the whole poem.

No getting away from it. I am slow traveller whether reading or writing or blogging. I need a week at least to read this treasure-trove issue. I need to be taking side roads and overbridges, relishing pools of thinking, skipping to familiar voices, sparked by those new to me. Jodie Dalgleish’s ‘Skin-Water-Skin: Repeat’ is like fertilised word buds bearing incredible aural rewards.

Landfall is shaping up to be a perfect road trip – a plethora of surprises, points of wonder, comfort. I am a big fan of Wes Lee’s poetry, so what a delight to read ‘December’. It’s physical, it’s rich in absence as much as presence, it’s symbolic and so utterly fluent.

And then I pull into another cafe diversion where laughter is on the menu. Alistair Du Chatenier’s ‘But Will It Fly’ is a tongue-in-cheek poem that takes us into Bill Manhire’s workshop where he is building a flying saucer (a surrogate poem?). Ah what you can create from shredded journals and anthologies.

Oh and now it’s Zoë Meager’s ‘it one was one of those nights’, a prolonged moment of reading that hooks you with its opening words ‘when the moon kept getting out of bed just to have a look around’ and then upturns you with its final revelation. Ooh.

I am having overnight stays in the work of the two artists in the issue. Eliza Glyn’s contemporary gouache paintings offer table settings: a gathering of objects in muted colours, verging on the kinetic, with a hint of Cubism, Frances Hodgkins, a daily diary, a closely packed huddle of predilections, angles askew. I love them.

The cover artist, Tia Ranginui’s work forms a sequence entitled ‘Ahi Teretere’, with the title referencing the flickering flame. Her work I read, “plays on the complicated and nuanced emotions provoked by returning home, particularly the artist returning to her papa kāinga on Te Awa Whanganui”. She navigates both ice and flame, as she seeks home with both embrace and defiance, a hunger for warmth, and with the help of her daughters who appear in the artworks. Extraordinary.

I toast this issue. It inspires me to keep reading writing blogging looking art. Planning road trips, within the pages of books and out there in the real world. Thank you.

Lynley Edmeades is the author of two poetry collections, As the Verb Tenses (Otago University Press, 2016) and Listening In (Otago University Press, 2019), and a poetry and art picture book for adults, Bordering on Miraculous (Massey University Press, 2022), in collaboration with Saskia Leek. She has an MA in creative writing from the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University of Belfast and holds a PhD in avant-garde poetics from the University of Otago. In 2018, she was the Ursula Bethell Writer in Residence at the University of Canterbury, and she currently teaches poetry and creative writing on the English programme at the University of Otago.

Landfall page

Poetry Shelf features Cadence Chung: a review, a reading, a conversation

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Mad Diva, Cadence Chung
Otago University Press, 2025

But lo! Here’s my heart in my hands,
clots squished on my sleeve, all sinewy
and stringy in that way organs are. If you
don’t want to take it, well, I wouldn’t blame
you. But it’s the same heart those poets
had once. One with reckless abandon,
always finding love in every little corner
and squashing it flat on the page.

 

from ‘Love Lyrics’

A recurring word that epitomises poetry collections I have read and loved this year is heart. The word is particularly applicable to Cadence Chung’s second collection, Mad Diva. Not only does the poetry offer heart ripples, it is rich in ear and art, and most definitely heat. A symphony of heart. And yes, as the title suggests, we are entering the addictive terrain of opera, a chorus of intensity, an intensity of chorus, with threads of painting and poetry making moving in and out of view.

I once sat in an auditorium listening to Alessandra Marc sing arias and you could hear a pin drop. It was a full scale body reaction. I could scarcely breathe. I get that when I put Maria Callas singing Bellini’s Norma on repeat on the turntable. Listen to ‘Casta Diva’ and let that settle under your skin. I was raised with an opera soundtrack and grew deep into loving it, but I was surprised how my relationship with the music changed when I had finished my PhD in Italian and could understand the words! Suddenly I was catapulted into everyday language delivering scenes of desire and betrayal and amore. I think of this haunting scene of listening because here I am in Mad Diva and it is grit and grandeur and intake of breath . . . and yes, catapulting us into different ways of listening reading understanding. Ancora. Ancora. Ancora.

Mad Diva‘s opening poem ‘Mélodie’ spirals around song, a singing heart, an off-key dream, and stands as a vital entry point into the poems to come, the way poetry is pitched in diverse keys, with harmony and disharmony, solo flights and connecting chords. Or the way languages generate melody with their different pronunciations and accents on vowels and consonants. The musical notes of speech. One of the delights of reading poetry is the surprise arrival – especially individual words on the line. Janet Charman is a whizz at this. As is Cadence. This is poetry to listen to. This is poetry to feel from your seat in the auditorium.

O, the night that stretched before us!
The cool lamplight of it, shining
like cicada-wing.

from ‘VI. O, the night’

Thematic subject matter is a unifying thread in the collection. It is like we venture into an opera house to witness performance, to move in and out of opera scenarios, but these divas are out and about in the world as much as they inhabit the skin of a character. Let’s move in deeper. Let’s listen in wider. These mad divas. Let’s move behind the scenes and the surface brocade. Across two acts, these poetic performances, dig deep into yearning and fancy dress, painted bodies and madness, weapons and treasures. It’s personal. It’s imagined. It’s sung across centuries.

In One Thousand and One Nights, Scheherezade told stories to stay alive, to witness the next dawn, but in the mesmerising poem ‘Scheherezade’, she is Ubering into town with the poet/speaker. The poet/speaker is musing on what it would be like to be locked in a bind of telling, never speaking herself. And herein is a glittering hook of the collection: yes it’s a dazzling navigation of divas in performance, on and of stage, but it’s also the navigation of a poet in the seismic heart of poem making, drawing upon other poets as aids. What to tell? What to speak? How to speak? The voice sometimes appearing in italicised dialogue, sometimes not: ‘How do I write about the Great Themes?’ Or: ‘They say all poetry is about Love, Death, / and Time. What a horrible thing a poet is, / writing about these things instead of living / them, deep inside a lover thinking about / what a sensual poem it will make.’

The poem ‘Scheherezade’, feels like a pulsating core of a collection that portrays a poet as much as it portrays divas. It is personal vulnerable tactile aromatic as it speaks to the way making poetry can never be pinned down to exactitudes. It is gauze for us to peer through:

I try to be like her, swallowing my histories
   in rattles of metal, hide my grandmother’s jade 
in the back of my jewellery box. But my foreignness
   finds me anyway, in mispronounced
names and schoolyard games and men
   leaning in ever closer on the bus. I call to her:
with a clink of long earrings she looks at me.
   Tell me Scheherezade, I try to say.
When does the telling end? Tell me,
When does the silence come? I fill
   every space with poems and only in the dull
hum of the ride home do I realise how stupid,
   how stupid it all sounds.
She can only tell, I can never
   ask. She is as distant to me as a ship
   gauzed by time.

Ah. So much to say about this sontuosa collection. It is akin to unpacking a heart basket packed with entangled treasures, with flakes of wound, multiple perfumes, pinpricks of discovery tragedy epiphany, the fireworks and nuances of recognition . . . because every time you unpack this precious basket (just liking putting on a much loved album), you hear and discover something anew, behind the scenes, behind the character, that new connection, an idea that trills, an idea -knot to play with, a ‘cicada-wing’ spark of what poetry can light. So it’s a standing ovation: Bravissimo! Bravissima!

a reading

‘Habits’

‘Ulysses’

‘Fire Island’

a conversation

Were there any highlights, epiphanies, discoveries, challenges as you wrote this collection?

I guess in a way, Mad Diva was a whole series of tiny epiphanies. It’s a bit of a culmination of different manuscripts that hadn’t quite worked out. I’d written very glitzy, narrative-based ones, and also very confessional ones, and this manuscript merges the two in a combination of the fantastic and the lyric. Many of the poems are named after and in the voice of famous divas in the canon — Carmen, Delilah, Salomé, Scheherazade — and I discovered how easy it is for me to drive a poem through a character voice. It was what helped me combine the two facets of my writing: a first-person confessional voice combined with a character façade. It’s a bit like a recital, where you’re still yourself, but a heightened, slightly over-the-top version. I think that’s an important balance in poetry, and a tricky one to pull off! Readers often assume the lyric ‘I’ is the poet, and while that is true in a sense, I never want to just be recounting a true experience without transforming it in some way. Especially when some of the poems in the collection deal with topics of madness and mental illness, I wanted to keep some distance, for both myself and the readers, while still staying truthful to the lyric project.

What matters when you are writing a poem? Or to rephrase, what do you want your poetry to do or be?

Really, I hope that a poem is whatever the reader needs it to be! Having your poetry read by different people is such a strange experience, because you get so many different responses and interpretations. When I read a poem that I love, it shocks me, gives me a little jolt that I carry throughout the day. I want to see something in there that I couldn’t have written myself, that makes me see things just a little differently. I’m always going on about transformation, but I think it’s really true. A poem transforms the poet’s experience or thoughts, then the poem transforms the reader, and so on: a chain of tiny differences is created.

Are there particular poets that have sustained you, as you navigate poetry as both reader and writer? 

The poets I’m constantly reading are my contemporaries in this new generation of poets. In particular, my beautiful friends Jackson McCarthy, Amelia Kirkness, Zia Ravenscroft, Maia Armistead, and Joshua Toumu’a. I’m really inspired by the boldness and assuredness of new writers, and the heavy lyric moment we’re returning to. Being self-effacing is out, being insecure is out, cringing at earnestness is out. Love is in! 

We are living in hazardous and ruinous times. Can you name three things that give you joy and hope?

The biggest thing that keeps me going is being part of the strong arts communities I’m in. Being in a bookshop or concert hall or theatre or dive bar and having it full of enthusiastic people is so special. Three specific things that have been giving me joy lately: going to and running literary events, rehearsing for operas with my music friends, and playing with my little cat Hebe. 

Tell us about your tour

As part of Mad Diva’s release, I went on tour to four cities: Te Whanganui-a-Tara | Wellington, Tāmaki Makaurau | Auckland, Ōtepoti | Dunedin, and Ōtautahi | Christchurch. These launch events featured guest poets Jackson McCarthy, Zephyr Zhang 张挚, Rushi Vyas, Claudia Jardine, and Amelia Kirkness, as well as guest singers from the New Zealand School of Music, and Sarah Mileham, Tomairangi Henare, Teddy Finney-Waters, and Emily-Jane Stockman. It was such a fun and chaotic time. It took place over the span of a week, so I tried to cram in as much sightseeing as I could while also performing and connecting with friends around the country! We had a great turnout at all of the events and I was so thrilled to meet new people, as well as people I’d only ever met online. I had no idea what to expect with the tour, so I was really heartened to see people coming out to support new poetry. 

Cadence with Emily-Jane Stockman, at Little Andromeda, Ōtautahi Christchurch

Cadence Chung is a poet, composer, and singer currently in her Honours year at the New Zealand School of Music. Her nationally bestselling chapbook anomalia was released in 2022 with Tender Press, and her anthology of young artists, Mythos, was released in 2024 with Wai-te-ata Press. Her next book, Mad Diva, was released in April 2025 with Otago University Press. She also performs as a classical soloist, presents on RNZ Concert, and co-edits Symposia Magazine, a literary magazine for young New Zealanders.

Otago University Press page