Tag Archives: Poetry Shelf Breathing Room

Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: Puanga by Airini Beautrais

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Puanga

The children are making the river.
They have sand and pumice. They have ferns.

A teacher unrolls masking tape,
presses a map to the wall.

There are birds that sing when squeezed.
Wild-eyed, a girl clings to a tūī.

There are little whare, into which
the birds can be inserted.

A boy carries the kōkako
around all morning.

*

Over the radio, silence.
Then the swish of piupiu,

tread of feet,
pat of plastic poi.

Stillness. Silence moves
across the airwaves.

A drum, a guitar strum
breaks it. Girls open their throats.

The sound of lungs filling.
The loosing of tongues.

*

This is Puanga, or Rigel.
The laser pointer circles the gleam.

Children’s heads silhouetted
by the projector,
continually in movement.

This is Matariki, or the Pleiades,
or Subaru.

But in Whanganui,
Puanga is the star
we look for in the new year.

*

The children have made star biscuits.
They have harakeke. They are weaving stars.

Milo in the star-cave,
telescopes searching cloud.

They have playdough the colour
of night sky, filled with glitter.

Dressing gowns, gumboots, woolly hats.
A brazier in the sandpit.

The smell of damp air.
The smell of burning sugar.

*

It is a time for planting.
A child chooses a pine

with blue-grey needles.
It will bear nuts in forty years.

A time for gathering.
Pink yam fingers poke from the soil.

A time to prepare new ground.
Bared black of loam.

Where can we plant this tree?
Where will it cast its shadow?

*

From here, Puanga.
From here, Rigel.

In the sky a hunter stands
on his hands,
both feet upwards.

In a tank a real eel.
The silver of īnanga.

The stones are lined up,
the birds are positioned.
The children are making the river.

Airini Beautrais
from Flow: Whanganui River Poems, THWUP (VUP), 2017

 Airini Beautrais lives in Whanganui. She is the author of four poetry collections, a book of short stories, and an essay collection. Her new poetry collection, Salt Quilt, is forthcoming from Te Herenga Waka University Press in July 2026.

The Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: A place to enter and pause and take a long slow breath and then another, as you absorb the beauty movement joy stillness wonder movement of a poem.

Poetry Shelf weekend reading

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Poetry Shelf offers a five links for you over the long weekend.

First up Michelle Elvy’s Monday poem: ‘Memory is a feather’

Secondly Manjit Grewal’s poem in Poetry Shelf Speaking Out To For With. Food inequality is ia key thread: ‘Saturday Morning at St Peter’s‘

Thirdly Nina Mingya Piowles Katherine Mansfield poem in The Breathing Room: ‘Katherine Mansfield Park‘

Fourthly, Elizabeth Smither and I in conversation to celebrate her new collection, The Interview Rose (AUP).

Fifthly, and quite wonderfully, Poetry Shelf toasts Te Marama Puoro o Aotearoa | NZ Music Month 2026 with 23 poems. My first ever open invitation to submit a poem. And I loved doing it so much I might very well do another one!

Please note our post shop is closing so I am in the process of getting a new post box at a different venue.

Do send me poetry news.

Your support of poetry this week has been extraordinary. Let’s continue to connect, challenge, console, delight in the uplift and sidetracks and over bridges and fertile clearings of what poetry can do and be.

Thank you.

new parcel opened

Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: Nina Mingya Powles

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Katherine Mansfield Park

After we moved away, I often thought about the park. I thought of how I
used to practice rolling sideways down the hill. I thought of grass stains
on my elbows and dirt beneath my fingernails. I thought of sitting on the
seesaw licking the pink icing off hundreds-and thousands biscuits.

This must be the place where I first saw her name. It was printed in yellow
letters on a signpost next to the slide.

If I could, I would tell her I like the park best at dusk in summer,
looking up at the green hills looming above. I would ask her if she
remembers this—the moon rising and shapes collapsing inside their own
shadows, birds flinging themselves out of the bush, calling out to each
other in the dark.

Nina Mingya Powles
from the chapbook, ‘Sunflowers’ in Luminescent, Seraph Press, 2017

Nina Mingya Powles is a writer from Aotearoa based in the UK. She is the author of several poetry collections and pamphlets, most recently In the Hollow of the Wave (2025), Magnolia 木蘭 (2020) and two books of creative nonfiction, Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai (2020) and Small Bodies of Water (2021). She is part of fieldnotes collective, an experimental nature writing project in collaboration with Alycia Pirmohamed, Jessica J. Lee and Pratyusha. She writes a monthly substack on food and memory called Crispy Noodles.

The Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: A place to enter and pause and take a long slow breath and then another, as you absorb the beauty movement joy stillness wonder movement of a poem.

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Anna Jackson chooses Amy Marguerite

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drives and drops

we were hitting the shuttlecock 

and it started to rain and you 

started singing and all of a sudden 

i knew what i had to do to be good 

at this game and the girl sat 

beside the net complaining about 

her body and the tide came 

closer and sleep seemed further 

away and the book i was supposed 

to have finished was still on the couch 

and i love the way you put your arm 

around me there and i want you 

to do it again and we are so wet now

it is time to get undressed and the 

clothes stay on and the girl puts on 

an accent and the net falls onto 

the grass and this is so convincing 

i might never read again and the boy 

brings us beer and badminton is easier 

when you’re drunk and i am getting 

so good at this and i am never 

good at anything and everything 

smells like the dinner we forgot 

to take out of the oven and the ocean 

that is so close i am already 

swimming and let’s just drop our 

racquets

Amy Marguerite
from over under fed, AUP, 2025

drives and drops

I have been thinking about voice in poetry, and a student, Erina French, pointed me to Alice Notley’s observation that “a good poetic voice must have … something like vividness, actual presence of the live poet in the dead words on the page—the poem is very little without that.”  I don’t know if words on a page are ever dead to me, but I do know that any writing I have ever read by Amy Marguerite is somehow more vividly, urgently alive than almost any other writing I can think of, including even those writers Amy Marguerite loves for their aliveness, Grace Paley and Eileen Myles (I love them too).  “To make that transference is a mysterious thing to do,” Notley says, but this poem, “drives and drops,” being, as it is, about finding a way to live with the vividness and presence of a good poem, tells us something about how this transference might come into being.  It is a poem about playing badminton with such abandon that everything becomes part of the game, and the game becomes part of everything around it – the book left unread is part of the game of badminton, the girl complaining about her body, the dinner forgotten in the oven, the tide coming in… Of course everything and everyone is going to get wet!  In a poem like this, you are already swimming before you have even dropped your racquets.  Are we in love?  The desire coursing through the poem, out of which pours forth the poem’s dizzying trajectory, somehow languorously slow and heart-stoppingly fast at the same time, in a very badminton-like way, cannot possibly not be felt by any reader of the poem who knows how to love.  Who, reading this poem, could help but love the poet, the players, the game itself and everything the game encompasses, which is nothing less than the whole world?

Anna Jackson

Amy Marguerite (she/her) is a poet, essayist, and peer support worker living in Pukekohe. In 2022, she completed an MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters. Amy’s debut collection over under fed was published by Auckland University Press in March 2025. Her essay on the new generation of Aotearoa poets features in Te Whāriki: Reading Ten New Poets from Aotearoa, published by Auckland University Press in October 2025.

Anna Jackson is a poet and Professor of English literature at Te Herenga Waka/Victoria University of Wellington, whose latest book Terrier, Worrier came out with Auckland University Press in 2025. 

Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: Majella Cullinane

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Feather

If only every day was as simple as listening to birds, their small voices
plucking the grey-blue morning, emboldened on this first day of spring.
We too might dare to hope that what has long been desired is not so far away.
Let’s suppose it is here already, as real as this room’s radiator
switching itself on and off; the thermostat of our longing unhindered
by a dial of hours. Rather it exists in a kind of elsewhere,
or takes form in the wanderer who crosses bridges and borders
without restraint. Better to loosen the tangle of our rough wishes,
of the could-have-beens and might-have-beens and know we had it all,
just for a moment. Beneath the clamour of sounds –
logging trucks rattle to and fro from the port, a dog barks at the passersby.
A friend writes a message, subvoce – imagine, imagine,
and the bird that sheds a feather without knowing,
is the one we might chance upon, pick up and carry home.

Majella Cullinane
from Whisper of a Crow’s Wing, Otago University Press, 2018

Majella Cullinane writes essays, fiction and poetry and has lived in Aotearoa since 2008. She has published three poetry collections with Salmon Poetry Ireland and Otago University Press. Her most recent, Meantime (Otago University Press 2024) was chosen as The New Zealand Listener’s Top Poetry Books Of 2024. In 2020 she graduated with a PhD in Creative Practice from the University of Otago. Her short story collection Islands Ever After (Quentin Wilson Publishing) will be published in June this year. She lives with her family in Kōpūtai, Port Chalmers.

The Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: A place to enter and pause and take a long slow breath and then another, as you absorb the beauty movement joy stillness wonder movement of a poem.

Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: Jo McNeice

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Aro Valley

I want to take
your picture.
The silver blue
mist moving
over the pine trees,
the Edwardian houses
running backwards
up the hillside,
the road running
slower than myself.
The sky a kind of
silver screen,
the moon is out tonight.
A neon TV.
A noticeboard.
The buttery light
melting out of the chip shop
into the indigo air.
The weeds tripping up
the fences, the flowers
tripping up the weeds.
The night about to settle
in for the night.
But pausing before
it closes the door.
relax. I think you look
just wonderful.
I imagine you can tell
I want to take your picture.

This summer

What you notice most about
this summer
are the dandelions.

There are dandelions
everywhere
outside the dental clinic,
lining the hills
of the Aro Valley
with tiny yellow bricks.

Millions of stars
in the emerald sky.

Jo McNeice
from Blue Hour, Otago University Press, 2024

Jo McNeice is a poet based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. She completed a Master of Arts in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters, Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, in 2013, and her poems have been published in Turbine | Kapohau, Sport, JAAM and Mayhem. In 2023, she won the prestigious Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award for her manuscript Blue Hour, which was published by Otago University Press.

The Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: A place to enter and pause and take a long slow breath and then another, as you absorb the beauty movement joy stillness wonder movement of a poem.

Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: Tunmise Adebowale

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Estuary

Blue gathers into estuaries and their sheen,
tidal blue.
At low tide: gull-prints, a soft pocking of absence.
The flats spread, taking shape and losing it.
From the dark of silted underplaces,
cold blue, the diluted gleam,
a film of tidal light.

Blue thins and wanders, a slow bleed
along the faint line of return,
littoral.
Blue lowers, folds back,
a weight without form,
held under.

Mud receives it, works it loose:
blue in grains,
blue in residue.
Blue gives way.

Tunmise Adebowale

Tunmise Adebowale is a Nigerian-born New Zealander. Her work has been published in Starling, Landfall, The Big Idea, Arts Makers Aotearoa, Mayhem Literary Journal, The Spinoff, Tarot Poetry Journal, takahē, The Pantograph Punch, Turbine | Kapohau, Newsroom, NZ Poetry Shelf, Verb Wellington, and ReDraft. She writes the Substack whispers of oizys. 

The Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: A place to enter and pause and take a long slow breath and then another, as you absorb the beauty movement joy stillness wonder movement of a poem.

Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: Nod Ghosh

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The Pond

The pond isn’t there anymore.

It’s dried up, the water gone.

It never was bottomless, but then he never really believed it had been.

He often visits the pond in his dreams. But now it’s not there anymore.

Nod Ghosh
from filthy sucre, Truth Serum Press, 2020

Nod Ghosh is a graduate of the Hagley Writers’ Institute in Ōtautahi, Christchurch. Nod’s books have been published in the U.K. and Australia. The most recent is How to Bake a Book Everytime Press (2025), a text-book on creative writing. See http://www.nodghosh.com for further details.

The Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: A place to enter and pause and take a long slow breath and then another, as you absorb the beauty movement joy stillness wonder movement of a poem.

Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: Jenny Bornholdt

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Mrs Winter’s Jump

We’re coming out
from under
dismal. The sun is up
and so are the children,
mucking about
with skateboards.
He’s out the back
playing ‘Mrs Winter’s
Jump’. And jump
she does. She
gathers up
her rusty skirts
and crosses all the
crooked space
between us.

Jenny Bornholdt
from Mrs Winter’s Jump, Godwit, 2007


Jenny Bornholdt has published over a dozen books of poems, including The Rocky Shore (winner of the Montana New Zealand Book Award for Poetry, 2009). Her latest collection is What to Wear (THWUP, 2026). She has edited a number of anthologies, including Short Poems of New Zealand (2018), and has worked on numerous book and art projects with artists including Annemarie Hope-Cross, Pip Culbert, Mary McFarlane, Noel McKenna, Mari Mahr, Brendan O’Brien and Gregory O’Brien. In 2018 she was the co-recipient, with Gregory O’Brien, of the Henderson Arts Trust Residency and spent 12 months in Alexandra, Central Otago. She was New Zealand’s poet laureate in 2005–2007, and in the 2014 New Year Honours she was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services as a poet.

The Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: A place to enter and pause and take a long slow breath and then another, as you absorb the beauty movement joy stillness wonder movement of a poem.

Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: Opoutere Nest Song by Bill Manhire

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Opoutere Nest Song

Sky and water, quiet
sand. Little whistle
that gets up and goes.

Bill Manhire
from My Sunshine, VUP, 1996, and Collected Poems, VUP, 2001

Paula’s note: This poem resonates so acutely for me. I am transported to Te Henga Bethells Beach where the endangered dotterels also scutter and whistle.

Bill Manhire’s latest poetry collection is Lyrical Ballads, THWUP, 2026. He has won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry five times, and was New Zealand’s inaugural poet laureate. He founded and directed the International Institute of Modern Letters at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. He has edited major anthologies of New Zealand literature, including, with Marion McLeod, the now classic Some Other Country: New Zealand’s Best Short Stories (1984). In 2018 Bill was awarded an Icon Award Whakamana Hiranga from the Arts Foundation.

The Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: A place to enter and pause and take a long slow breath and then another, as you absorb the beauty movement joy stillness wonder movement of a poem.