some helpful models of grief, Hana Pera Aoake Illustrations by Priscilla Rose Howe Compound Press, 2025
“I stayed up all night and blistered my hands braiding muka into a rope to slow the sun down just for you.”
Rhythm. I begin with rhythm as I read and slowly reflect upon Hana Pera Aoake’s poetry collection, some helpful models of grief. The rhythm of the line, the rhythm building across the arm-stretch of a poetic sequence. Think heart beat. Think the shifting rhythms of life, illness, love, death. The rhythms of thoughts flooding, speaking to loved ones, sons and daughters. The rhythm that builds as poet puts pen to page, and it is sweet and sharp and sour, these currents of anxiety, epiphany, recognition, searching.
And when I listen to the rhythm, the words spilling and coiling and arching and arcing, I am absorbing the poetry so very deeply.
Here is poetry that moves hand-in-hand with grief, with the sharp and soft edges of desire, aroha, body intimacy, wound, self repair.
“You say you feel understood and that my love of art reminds you why it matters, but I feel like moss drying in the sun ripped from the moss.”
Here is poetry that navigates and holds close the power and magnetic pull of creating art, beyond and inside the smash of doubt, I too am body struck by Rothko, ache with myriad doubt, and am drawn to the garden, where we might fling our art to burn, and then feed the garden pumpkins with the ash. Ah. The garden, with its ongoing visibility and necessities, might be the fertile earth in which Hana’s poetry is planted. Ah the stories that precede and shape us, whether familiar, inherited, whether myths and legends. And then this: “I think of Martha Stewart saying that if you make a garden you have / a friend for life.”
Here is poetry that interlaces the personal and the political, how can it not in this spiky wounded world. We are standing next to the tourist in Iceland scooping moss that takes hundreds of years to regrow. We are holding Gaza. Grieving. And I am stilled and stalled before the pyramid poem that speaks of our founding document written in te reo Māori but signed in translation, those stolen lands, that stifled language, and pyramid poem becomes precious cloak on the page, with its origins, and vital and connecting stitching.
Here is poetry of echo and return. And it’s yes to poetry as echo and return, as the poems luminate past, present and future. The moss a recurring physical political eco marker that activates our senses, touch and smell and sight, that might build a tower of metaphors as we read, with its beauty and function and fragility and presence. Think life. Think nurture. Think care.
And here is poetry that speaks to you, the shifting me I we they you.
This is a sequence, a chronicle that draws upon the words and ideas of multiple writers and thinkers, including Moana Jackson, Keri Hulme, Talia Marshall, Fleur Adcock, Plato, Louise Glück, Roland Bathes, Annie Ernaux, Samuel Beckett, Homer, Andrei Tarkovsky, Kathy Acker, Stephen Fry, Freud, Shakespeare, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Autumn Royal.
And here I am back to the notions of rhythm – so deeply fertilised with experience and invention, with the literal and the figurative, with how poetry is sweet and succulent on our tongues, our speaking tongues, sweet and succulent in our ears, our listening ears, sweet and succulent in our hearts, our feeling hearts. And yes sour and savoury. These rhythms, movements, chronicles. This gift. This book. This poetry.
“I saw the Te Rakanui moon still bright this morning and wondered whether you could see it in the city. By the time went outside everything was covered in fog and there was ice on the moss.”
the reading
Photo credit: Frances Carter
Hana reads from some helpful models of grief
Hana Pera Aoake (Ngāti Hinerangi, Ngāti Mahuta, Waikato/Tainui is an artist, writer, and sweaty milf living at the foot of Pūtauaki maunga. Hana has published three books, including a bathful of kawakawa and hot water (2020), Blame it on the rain (2025) with no more poetry (Australia) and Some helpful models of grief (2025). They are also working on a fourth book of essays, how to be with Discipline (Australia). Hana is a PhD candidate at the Auckland University of Technology.
Peace & Quiet, Dinah Hawken Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2026 cover: Kelly O’Shanessy
Today
turns ashen. The old men are waiting to drive from the first tee. The poets are waiting to hit the right note even though a war and pandemic- in the same warm air – permit no lyricism and no bright ideas. A wave comes in. The wind stirs. How casually we used to fit into our endless lives.
Dinah Hawken
Dinah Hawken’s new poetry collection, Peace and Quiet, offers a compelling reading retreat, an extended version of Poetry Shelf’s Breathing Room, where you take time out from daily routine and news feeds and jagged edges, and breathe in the joy and delight and skin tingling rewards of poetry. Yet Dinah’s intricate collection is also deeply aware of people and planet issues that we are facing navigating challenging .
We begin in a room, waiting listening waiting, a dark room, mysterious, senses on alert, and this poem, this is poetry where everything, every line and every lithe word sings. We move into the real, beyond real, into fable, beyond fable, into the shifting oceans and sands outside, the appearances and disappearances, the sky, yes a beauty curtain the sky, the infinite possibilities for being, and from this waiting room, from this sweet poetry pause, let’s say contemplation, we step into poetry as song, as uplift.
Poetry as a song cycle where “life is the endless chanting of a choir / that you can join, she said.”
Senses are on alert to life: the dailiness, the quotidian that unfolds and continues upon the beach, the sound of a fire engine’s siren, to where the women who once held themselves back in restraint and hid their inner selves, now leave footprints in the sand, tracing their true nature. Children are born. Or maybe we flick sideways to where the woman in the street has a hidden gun. And back again to “She is listening to his breathing”.
Sea and ocean, and the water is an ongoing current we are drawn to, with its murmurings and welling ups and breathings and light and beauty and murmurings and sheen.
Quietness is to be on the other side of rain and storm, it is not speaking of “the rough and sombre days” they are hiding in between the lines where “beauty in the sheen of the sea / is indisputable.” Observed beauty and the nooks and crannies and wide sky of living. In the way light illuminates “time and place”. This precious moment. This beloved scene. Where old age and death are the ragged edges. And this: “and between waves a monumental second of silence”.
Peace. Holding hands with quiet and we are guided back to Parihaka. To Somme. To Archie Baxter. To non violence. Calling as we do and must and will for “a lull, a truce, // a ceasefire, a prohibition on the use of force.” Remembering “that an island of warfare can, / given time, become a sanctuary.”
There are so many pathways through Dinah’s stunning collection, so many glades to linger in, so many vantage points where you can stand or sit to absorb the shifting moods of sea and sky, so many trails into the rugged war-smashed greedy world, into living and dying, into aging and becoming, into mourning the dead. Into the ocean at fingertips and the mantra meditation. Still becoming. This living. This daily movement. So many hinges upon peace and quiet. On peace ahead of war. On the power and joy and tremble of silence.
I hold this precious book out to you so you may navigate your own pathways though.
June down under
The winter is reluctant to come. The stacked wood lies undisturbed, protecting wētā.
The only thing that won’t ice over on the other side of the world is the father’s heart.
He is digging in the rubble with his bare hands for a small boy. A small son.
Dinah Hawken
Dinah Hawken is one of New Zealand’s most celebrated poets. She was born in Hāwera in 1943 and now lives in Paekākāriki. Recent poetry collections include Faces and Flowers: Poems to Patricia France, Sea-light, and There Is No Harbour. In 2025 she received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement.
Te Herenga Waka University Press page Book interview with Morrin: Lauren Keenen, Dinah Hawken, Ingrid Horrocks Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Morrin Rout chooses Dinah Hawken
spell to keep things firm and intact in spite of counterspells
move the hair from your face / be reflective as a cat’s eye / become intimate with what you can touch with your hands / collect flora from the forest floor / shells from the foam of the tide / find days that are silken and healing / get used to living underneath / the same sky / when things won’t stop coming apart / in an almost sexy way / become life-size / be gentle to gentle things /
spell to survive
Today I put my anxiety into a card for Natalie like a pressed flower Today I walked around in the sun and waved to everyone in the other ocean Today the light wanted to come through Today I lay under a bed of leaves Today I woke up and kept waking up Today there was green green green I fell into Today I mailed out my grief in shiny gold envelopes Today I found a long black strand of hair and held it up to the sun as an offering Today I couldn’t see the future but I heard it like a branch snapping Today I texted the sky ‘I don’t want this’ Today I remembered the big red moon in my dream Today there was a little hope Today there was not Today I turned 31 and felt each of my years like a multi-tiered wedding cake Today I could not touch anything within my reach Today I walked up the hill and came back down again Today the windows reflected me Today I saw the sea and felt it fill my lungs Today I put on my pink mask Today you stood closer
spell to gain courage
love wide-open against the natural framework / sinking always across phenomena / shift the form and work the despair until it is hollow / when you can’t see through the fear / you have to reclaim your structure / rearrange the text until / you can see yourself there in it /
Stacey Teague 3 poems from Plastic, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024
Poetry Shelf’s Monday poem spot usually features unpublished poems, but recently I’ve posted poems that have travelled with me over time, whether months or years or decades. I have a physical poetry room in the house with a substantial book collection, but I also have a poetry room in my head where I store poetry to return to, poems that haunt comfort astonish.
Stacey Teague’s Plastic (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024) is one such collection. In particular, the spell poems that are like daily reinforcements, heart boosts, poems demanding replay. I had trouble choosing three to share with you. In my review I wrote: “I have jotted down so many lines I want to quote to you, in order to share the heart-rich rewards of this glorious book. This is a book to pack an overnight bag for, to sojourn within and beyond, to reflect upon and to re-emerge nourished. I am wondering if poetry can also be an amulet that protects ‘the heart’s pulses’. I love it.”
Poetry in Aotearoa is akin to the view from my windows, weird analogy I know, but it is expansive, opening wide upon sky bush land, with myriad musical tracks, imaginings, with birdsong and leaf dance, a meeting place of storm beauty clouds growth new beginnings death harvest. We are reading writing performing reviewing publishing poetry with hearts blazing, with speed and with slowness, gentleness and fire, against all odds, with love and with heart. I agree with Anna Jackson’s opening line: “This has been such a dark and troubling year but also lit up with so much that is wonderful”. And with Louise Wallace’s: “This year, particular poems have been seared in my mind with blinding lines and palpable heartbreak.”
A huge thank you bouquet to all the poets who contributed to the collage.
Poetry Shelf 2024 Highlights Collage – part one here
Louise Wallace
by Chris Tse
This year, particular poems have been seared in my mind with blinding lines and palpable heartbreak. I have seen these poems shared and reshared on social media, which is a wonderful way to both admire the work that goes into these pieces and ensure that these issues stay front and centre. I’m grateful to these hard-working poets who continue to direct our attention here – to global and local injustices – and who demand that we do not look away.
These poems include Omar Sakr’s pieces on the genocide in Palestine (a thank you to Starling Editorial Committee member, Khadro Mohamed for bringing me back to this series), many of which can be read on and shared from his Instagram and will be published by University of Queensland Press as The Nightmare Sequence in 2025. On the same topic – Loretta Riach’s devastating ‘Reverse Tragedy’ from Starling Issue 18. Finally, Chris Tse shared a scorching poem ‘Ake ake ake’ (pictured above) following the November hīkoi in response to the proposed ‘Treaty Principles Bill’ – it is of course, not too late to make a submission on the bill here.
Anna Jackson
This has been such a dark and troubling year but also lit up with so much that is wonderful, such as Zia Ravenscroft’s “They beheaded St Valentine” and the whole of Starling Issue 18 that this poem appears in. I had several brilliant poets in both of the classes I taught, American Literature and Reading and Writing Poetry, so that meant every week was highlit one way or another. The hīkoi was a highlight. The launch of Robert Sullivan’s Hopurangi: Song Catcher (AUP). Writing my book, ‘Terrier Worrier’, coming out next year with AUP, while house-sitting Edreen’s cat Oli. Going to a Tiny Ruins concert in the Begonia House, in Wellington’s Botanical Gardens. Please, Wellington City Council, don’t pull down the Begonia House. My Brilliant Sister (Scribner), Amy Brown’s very wonderful novel; Nine Girls (Penguin), Stacy Gregg’s novel for adolescent readers, her best yet; Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost (Penguin), a novel about a performance of Hamlet in the West Bank; Stacey Teague’s Plastic was a highlight, Practice (Orion), a novel by Rosalind Brown about writing an essay. Starling Issue 18 was full of poetry highlights, including Aroha Witinitara’s “The Production,” already famous in poetry circles as the Frog Poem. Also in Starling 18: Jackson McCarthy’s “Still Life at Sunset.”
Gregory O’Brien
Richard von Sturmer is one of the greats. And so too is his new prose-collection Slender Volumes (published in an exquisite edition by the recently landed Spoor Books). Reading Richard is like having your eyes and mind and heart and soul polished. Polished, in fact, by two whirling dervishes in zebra outfits, singing their zebra songs and providing musical accompaniment. But then, a moment later, a Zen-like calm descends upon all…
Alongside that, I’d place Dinah Hawken’s timeless gem of a book, Faces and Flowers (THWUP), which features the paintings of Patricia France (1911-1995). Lyrical, understated, a little sad, Dinah’s poems talk to the paintings and vice versa—and it is the most beguiling and disarming of exchanges. (By the way, anyone wishing to know more about the artist should look up ‘Patricia France Painter’ on Youtube.)
Having had the good fortune of arriving in Manchester, UK, early in 2024, I was promptly handed a collection by the American poet Stanley Moss, then in his 100th year. By the time Carcanet released his nicely titled Goddamned Selected Poems midyear, Stanley was gone. The book is stacked to the gunwales with marvellousness. His publisher Michael Schmidt wrote an obituary which serves as an excellent curtain raiser to the verse itself.
While in England, Jenny and I gave a reading with a youngish Jamaican poet Christine Roseeta Walker. Her book Coco Island (Carcanet) is fiery, imaginative, magical (but plausibly so) and full of life and character–more than sufficient to make the midwinter city of Manchester feel like a sun-drenched, bird-heavy, wind-powered waterfront in the West Indies.
Elizabeth Smither
A highlight of 2024 has been writing something between a commonplace book and an irregular diary. I have always loved quotations but this time I decided to accompany each quotation with a loosey loosey goosey kind of meditation. Each quotation was to expand to 10,000 words.
Some of the quotations:
‘If a lion could talk we could not understand him’, Wittgenstein. Not having a lion I substituted a cat and re-read Christopher Smart‘s ‘For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry’.
‘What I mean by a shifty eye,’ continued Miss Marple, ‘is the kind that looks very straight at you and never blinks’. (Check the TV news).
‘Prayer is the contemplation of things as they are from a very great height’, Ralph Waldo Emerson. If I were a boy I would like to have been called Waldo.
‘The canopy of a single mature tree intercepts 40% of the water falling during a storm, so it doesn’t reach the ground’. This will be titled ‘Trees’.
And the writing life:
‘I am not at all in a mood for writing, I must write on until I am’ – Jane Austen on persistence.
‘Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass’ – AntonChekhov on metaphors.
And Simon Armitage on being a practising poet: ‘the sense of being forever apprenticed to an unachievable goal’. How true that is.
David Gregory
I will stick to the highlights, even though it has been a pretty tumultuous year for my family and for the world. If I can be selfish, the top highlight has to be the publication and launch of my fourth book of poetry, Based on a True Story (Sudden Valley Press). The other highlights are also all about books. The publication by Sudden Valley Press (of which I am the nominal manager) of Gail Ingram’s Some Bird, although this was in 2023. Plus the second John O’Connor Award going to Philomena Johnson’s great book, not everything turns away.
We (SVP) are also working on some great books, which deserve to see the light of day.
A continuous highlight, if there is such a thing, is my amazing family.
Harry Ricketts
A major highlight was definitely going to Crete for a week and having long, lazy, sun-sinking dinners with children and grandchildren. On the book front, I finally finished Trollope’s six Barset novels (well worth it) and read Victoria Glendinning’s biography of Trollope (ditto). Locally, Megan Dunn’s funny, melancholy The Mermaid Chronicles: A Midlife Mer-moir (Penguin) hit the spot, as did Dinah Hawken’s Faces and Flowers: Poems to Patricia France (THWUP). (I love the way Hawken’s unrhymed sonnets riff off and around Francis’s disconcerting paintings.) Two cricketing highlights were the White Ferns winning the T20 World Cup and the Black Caps thrashing India 3-0 in India. More egotistically, the highlights were the publication of First Things, vol 1 of my memoirs (THWUP), and of Richie Benaud’s Blue Suede Shoes: The Story of an Ashes Classic, co-written with my friend David Kynaston (Bloomsbury).
Jeffrey Paparoa Holman
First of all, on the local front, it just has to be Te Hīkoi mō Te Tiriti, the massive protests we have just seen – some of you were on that road – against Seymour’s egotistical roadblock in the flow history, that bill I will not name. Auē, an estimated 42,000 surrounding Te Whare Paremata in oceanic waves. Made me cry, and rejoice.
Out there in the wider world, for me it’s been Ukraine, as it has since Russia’s psychopathic ruler launched in 2022, his egotistical assault on the country he’s been undermining for the past ten years. The heroism of Ukraine’s citizens, and the terrible price they are paying breaks my heart. I am the child of WW2 survivors. Both parents, and both grandparents, either served in the armed forces or were civilian volunteers. Those who survived bore inner wounds that wounded us.
Those children of Ukraine who survive will also bear a generation’s trauma.
Books, how can I ignore them? Just four I can name as fresh, recently read, or in the process of reading. Poetry, I’ve been diving into Tim Upperton’s most recent work, A Riderless Horse (AUP, 2022). He’s a very fine writer with a range in both style and subject, and a deceptive simplicity of presentation that releases great depth.
I loved Bold Types – Indie Bookshops of Aotearoa New Zealand (Ugly Hill Press), where Jane Usher, Jemma Moreira and Deborah Coddington opened up the world of independent local bookshops in print with such lavish photography. One of the shops featured, Wardini Books, in Havelock North and Napier has produced a best-selling crime novel, The Bookhop Detectives – Dead Girl Gone (Penguin), which I am happily devouring.
On the non-fiction front, I’m now digging into the magisterial work of John Barton, A History of the Bible – The Book and its Faiths (2019), recommended by a very rapid-fire biblical scholar my wife follows on Tik-Tok. No more than a dozen pages in, I can report on the erudition, superb style, the sheer sweep of this work. It is going to carry me over Christmas, and all the way to Easter, with fresh eyes, with open ears.
I’m also rejoicing in getting my latest work of non-fiction over the line, brought to the light by the most excellent Canterbury University Press, their designers, their proof readers, printers and distributors. What a combination of talents it takes to do all this, we writers can so easily forget to herald. Thank you, all of you, for making Lily, Oh Lily – Searching for a Nazi Ghost, a reality, out there now, set free in the world.
Reihana Robinson
As my third volume of poetry is a fundraiser for Kia Ora Gaza and the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund PCRF (NZ), I would like to share the final poem ‘Children of Gaza’. When we learned of the journeys of renowned Auckland specialist Dr Alan Kerr, paediatric and cardiac surgeon who, with his wife Hazel (now friends), worked in Palestine over many years under the auspices of PCRF (NZ). The organisation does the hard work of humanitarian justice that my words can only skim.
Children of Gaza
Where are the children of Gaza? Gone from the wedge of land of no water, no fuel, no medicine— gone from the land of no sanctuary Where are the children of Gaza? Come out. Come out. Why are you hiding? Why so secretive? Your mother’s embroidered skirts will not save you The eaves of the hospital will not save you Your holy places will not save you And we are complicit We don’t stop the bombs We don’t stop the machine Swept under the carpet of daily life We cover our ears on your cries We close our eyes on despair We anguish in solitude or out loud in the streets Yet we do nothing to stop your agony your tears, your disease, your starvation We keep hydrated on the far side of the world We eat healthy. We bite our tongues to not offend, not offend—allow chanting to be a crime Oh you warmongers are hurt by our outrage that grows to be towering against Goliath, the brute force— the nation of prison guards, the nation inflicting horror every minute. We read six children killed every hour. How to take cognisance? Who are we? Who are we so far and yet on the very same earth? And why do we hope we are different? What makes us think we are not culpable? Now we see how one can become mercenary. A mercenary fighting for a speck of land We believe what we do can make a difference. But civil disobedience is all that’s left for peace activists The cries of children do not stop and our hearts cry, as hope fills empty hands Where, oh where are the children of Gaza?
Reihana Robinson from be the rising human, Off the Common Book, 2024
Ruby Solly
As usual I’ve had quite a varied reading diet this year, and not a huge amount of poetry! Regardless, here’s some ones that have really stuck with me. A bit of a dark theme across them all! But I guess that makes sense considering our wider world. Earlier this year I re-read a YA novel from my childhood, Dave at Night by Gail Carson Levine, and loved it just as much as I did when I was ten. Dave at Night follows a little boy in a Hebrew Boys Home in Harlem, who is rescued by a jewish elder called Solly each night to go to rent parties and jazz jam sessions. In terms of growing up understanding where we fit within jazz and music this was a huge book for me as a kid. I’d forgotten about it for years, but got so much out of rereading it. Felt like retracing my steps!
And now for something completely different… The Doloriad by Missouri Williams was a firm favourite, but is definitely not for the squeamish or faint of heart. Set in some strange post-apocalyptic settlement where one family has survived over generations in whatever way possible, the long winding sentences and descriptions in this book were part of Missouri Williams recovery from a series of temporal lobe seizures. This book is incredibly goth, incredibly detailed, and incredibly stunning (but again please apply every trigger warning bar somehow racism and homophobia).
Freshwater by Awkaere Emezi has probably been my most recommended book this year. Both for how it is written, and for how it portrays our whānau who live as a system, or within their own ancestral understandings of personality, personhood, and the mind. The main character is occupied by an ogbanje, a deity from Igbo religion, and the story is of the relationship between the internal world and the external world that isn’t always built to understand the microcosms lodged within it. It’s the kind of book that gives you empathy for the character, without any sense of needing to ‘save them’ because you see how they are the expert on their own mind, as so many of us are.
My poetry recommendation this year is again, dark (oops). Isdal by Susannah Dickey is a poem novel / exploration of the true crime genre and our obsession with it and its subsequent dehumanization of its victims. It focuses on the ‘Isdal Woman’, a woman who’s burnt remains were found in Norway in the 1970s and never identified. I loved this book because it made me question so much about how we depersonalise true crime, and about how we build mythologies around women such as this. Amazing format too, lots of different voices and people being addressed. Reads like a beautiful and tragic puzzle, which ultimately has no end.
Music wise, it’s been another year of pretty diverse listening too! But here’s three albums that have been on repeat in our house. The Harrow and the Harvest by Gillian Welch has been the whānau ‘wind down at night’ album for most of this year. Welch released the album after an eight year break from recording, as she felt nothing was good enough. This record is an album of stories that are lifted higher with perfect harmonies, and gentle string backing. I fall asleep at about track seven, ‘Six White Horses’. Another popular wind down album (and definitely a writing album for me) is Same Room Another Day by mHz. I’m lucky to be friends with Mo but awkwardly I probably listen to this album more than I see him, because I listen to it all the time! It’s a chameleonic record that seems to not just play over your own surrounding environmental sounds, but becomes part of it. Even though it stays the same, it feels like it’s always changing. A discovery from the past for me this year was Walkin my Cat Named Dog by Norma Tanega. You may recognise the classic ‘You’re Dead’ from What We Do in the Shadows. But Norma’s songwriting and arrangement are peak folk class. She was a songwriter mostly for other musicians, like her friend and ex, Dusty Springfield, but this album is her being herself and getting to create her own musical world. On the title track, the story goes that Tanega wanted a dog but wasn’t allowed one in her apartment building, so she got a cat, named it ‘Dog’, and took it out on a leash.
In terms of general happy things that kept me going this year, ‘we’ have a cat that lives between about three or four houses on our street. She has at least three different names (we call her Maggie, short for ‘Magpie’) and seems to show up exactly when you need a little comfort and company. It’s uncanny, and she is the most amazing member of our little community (even if she sometimes brings in critters for me to rescue).
I’ve been lucky to be a part of some amazing community art spaces this year too, like Pyramid Club and Urban Dream Brokerage. These spaces have hosted some amazing gigs, exhibitions, workshops, and experiences in my communities. It’s amazing how far just opening the doors on these spaces can stretch in terms of positive impact that keeps reverberating out. And it’s a good reminder to support them. My final highlight for this year, is the beautiful jasmine-esque smell of ti kouka. And their early flowering this year means we may be in for a long hot summer.
Having just posted a tribute to Sarah Broom, I now have permission to post one of her poems: ‘holding the line.’ Picking a poem from her new book, Gleam, was no easy task. In the end I picked the poem that opens the book, an entry that unfolds upon the page like an origami bird. It takes flight. It trembles, hovers, and shimmers with meaning and music and tiny little freedoms.
This is a poem of utter economy, every word poised and perfect in its location and resonance. The lines sound out with exquisite music, each musical note, a chime for the ear.
There is the homely gesture — a gesture that signals self care (the full moon placed on the brow). There is the way the moon shining bright and cool in the night sky is an object of beauty in which to restore oneself. There is the quiet hint at the moment of despair (‘my heart/ is clapping out of time’). There is the extraordinary leap of imagination that is a leap of fortitude (‘I take it out/ and throw it among the stars’). There is the depositories of wisdom (‘who know all there is to know’).
But what grips me, what haunts, what unfolds and refolds and unfolds again for me, is the line that both starts and finishes the poem: ‘holding the line.’
Reading this line in the context of the book and the context of Sarah’s life, I see this as holding onto the thread of existence, the ticking heart beat, the line that leads faintly, beautifully to a moon or to the ‘drag of the sea’ or to the arms that embrace her. It is the line that is an anchor, the blood line that is family and loved ones, it is the line that is the line and length of friendship. Above all, and movingly so, it is the line that the poet inscribes in her notebook and then wings through the air to a reader. It is the line that makes poetry — that the poet held close and then let go for all to see.
NZ Poetry Shelf 