Tag Archives: Poetry Shelf Breathing Room

Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: Jenny Bornholdt

Leave a reply

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

Leave a reply

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.

Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: Growing Advice by Megan Kitching

Leave a reply

Growing Advice

At all costs avoid the twisted or winding pathways so often seen in the
small garden situated on the corner where two streets meet.
— THE COMPLETE NEW ZEALAND GARDENER


You can make it work if you’re at all
handy, hunkered and humble. It costs
only rain and the sun’s incandescence (avoid
hatless noons) along with the twisted
complicity of leafy time unwinding.
Bump the wheelbarrow up the pathway,
tread, rake, tease and weed so often
peas will bloom as soon as you’re seen in
flip-flops and crocuses flag your small
vernacular seasons because the garden
is making something of you, situated on
the border of dirt and thumb, the corner
with its stepover wall where two streets
grow neighbourly and flora and fauna meet.

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.

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 wonder stillness of a poem.

The Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: Dinah Hawken

Leave a reply

Evening light

Her hands, long-fingered, freckled,
by sun and soil, rested quietly
on her thighs. She was sitting alone
by the window, admiring the agility of birds
on the branch of a plum tree. Suddenly
sunlight caught the face of her watch
as it can sometimes catch
the turquoise bowl on the bookshelf.
Place and time, time and place,
illuminated.

Dinah Hawken
from Peace and Quiet, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2026

Dinah Hawken is one of New Zealand’s most celebrated poets. She was born in Hāwera in 1943 and trained as a physiotherapist, psychotherapist and social worker in New Zealand and the United States and has worked as a student counsellor and writing teacher at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. Of her ten collections of poetry, four have been finalists for the New Zealand Book Awards. Her first book, It Has No Sound and Is Blue (1987), won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Best First Time Published Poet. Her latest poetry collection is Faces and Flowers: Poems to Patricia France (2024), and other recent collections are Sea-light (2021), longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, There Is No Harbour (2019), and Ocean and Stone (2015). Dinah lives in Paekākāriki.

Peace and Quiet will be launched at Unity Books Wellington on April 23rd.

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: Robert Sullivan

Leave a reply

Rākaumatohi: E hoa

((((((((((High energy))))))))))))))))

How do I love you, my friends?
let me count the mountain’s ways,
the heightened plains that bend
up into snowy reaches, playing
on the mind out of sight to send
pillars of light, clouds, rains
on a grateful garden bed
pulling out rocks making lakes
with his tokotoko, with her cloaks sent
from our māra kai into our food basket
filled with sweetness and kōrero each
to each—we’re peaches, plums,
strawberries and yams, we’re
only the bumblebee’s hums 
aroha stumblefooting the air
in this flowering season.

Korekore Rawea (Low energy, be creative)

Q+A from a Shakti card.

Because korowai take
all the abilities
of their makers
they aren’t made
on hunches,
and the īnanga
(kōkopu, baby tuna)
rippling in pounamu
are active and best
with huge love
but I wasn’t ready
I lacked the insight
and went for a moon
launch when a go-cart
or a raft made
from recycled bottles
might have played
to my best abilities
plus I don’t have
a roof rack for a kayak
which is what I’d love
to do, go kayaking,
or hitch my bike
on my bike rack
and ride round
the Waitaki lakes
rather than 
moon shadows.

Oh, Shakti, I did
follow my hunch
but much better
to call beyond
the greenstone
on my chest
beyond this cloth
of knowing
that the veil
is going to lift
from the picnic
after all the games
of hide and seek,
the swings, seesaws
and slides
of birthdays
in the park.
Much better
to drink
the water.

Robert Sullivan
from Hopurangi | Songcatcher, Auckland University Press, 2024

Robert Sullivan is Aotearoa New Zealand’s 14th Poet Laureate. He belongs to Ngāpuhi (Ngāti Manu, Ngāti Hau / Ngāti Kaharau) and Kāi Tahu (Kāti Huirapa ki Puketeraki) iwi and is also of Irish descent. He has won many literary awards. His most recent books are Hopurangi / Songcatcher (AUP) which was shortlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award at the 2025 Ockham Book Awards, Koe: An Aotearoa Ecopoetry Anthology coedited with Janet Newman (Otago University Press 2024) and a collection of essays coedited with Anna Jackson and Dougal McNeill, Te Whāriki: Reading Ten New Poets from Aotearoa (AUP 2025). Robert is Associate Professor in Creative Writing at Massey University. He lives in Ōamaru.

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: Claire Beynon

Leave a reply

Grapefruit

He has two wishes for his sixth
birthday: a pocket of ruby grapefruit
and a citrus knife
with a bend in it.

It is the Fast of Ramadhan — the twenty-eighth day
in — and the weather shows no consideration.
Flies and an irreverent heat
nudge Mr Sahlie the fruit seller
and his cart horse up the street.

The children are waiting. They know
he will come. He’ll spoil them
with a fistful of pomegranate, a slice of ice
green melon. Upside down they wait
dangling limbs and rinds of chatter
from the purple crown of a jacaranda
tree. They swing from a sandpit sky
scuffed toes bare, swishing through a thick mirage
of air. Up at the gate, in the post-box shade
beach buckets brim with the horse’s drink.

Ramadhan. And today is the boy’s
sixth birthday. He drops to the ground
with a ripe fruit sound, runs
pelter, pelter down the street.
There’s a horse, a cart and an old man
to meet.

And of course he’s remembered. He whistles
and grins, heaves the grapefruit down.
Next week, they agree, when the Fast
is complete, they’ll sit on the pavement
enjoy a pink feast.

“Why, Mr Sahlie?” I hear my boy speak.
“Why do they smell so wet
and deep?”

Claire Beynon
from Open Book: Poetry & Images, Steele Roberts, 2007

Claire Beynon is an artist and writer living in Ōtepoti Dunedin. Her poetry, flash fiction and short stories have been widely pub-lished and anthologised in Aotearoa and abroad. She has been a runner-up in the Sunday Star Times Short Story Competition and in 2002 was the winner of the NZ Poetry Society’s International Poetry award. In 2021 her poem ‘Today’s Sky’ was awarded the Takahē Monica Taylor Poetry Prize.  Claire combines the contemplative rhythms of writing and art-making with a range of interdisciplinary collaborations. Two summer research seasons in Antarctica continue to inform her work. Her most recent collection is For when words fail us: a small book of changes, The Cuba Press, 2024. Website

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: See What a Little Moonlight Can Do to You by Hone Tuwhare

Leave a reply

See What a Little Moonlight Can Do to You

The moon is a gondola.
It has stopped rocking.
Yes. It’s stopped now.

And to this high plateau
its stunning influence
on surge and loll of tides
within us should

somehow not go
unremarked
for want of breath
or oxygen.

And if I
to that magic micro-second
instant
involuntary arms reach out
to touch detain

then surely
it is because you
are so good:
so very good to me.

Hone Tuwhare
from Mihi: Collected Poems, Penguin Books, 1987

Hone Tuwhare (1922- 2008) was a father, poet, political activist and boilermaker. He published at least thirteen collections of poetry, won two New Zealand Book Awards, held two honorary doctorates and, in 1999, was Te Mata Poet Laureate. In 2003 he was named an Arts Foundation of New Zealand Icon Artist.

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 wonder stillness of a poem.

Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: Talia Marshall

Leave a reply

The first rope

S/he was wading in the river

buoyed by the intuition

there is only water between the sky

and the whenua and this wai

is how they talk to each other

afterwards they lit a fire

and fried leftover boiled potatoes in brown butter

using her kuia’s pan, when it was time for sleep

her hair was in the way of him

so she split it in three and

crossed one kelpy strand over the other

so he could take it apart over and over

in the morning he wears a top knot

where her braid used to be


Talia Marshall
from I hold you to me by a thread series on Substack

Talia Marshall (Ngāti Kuia, Rangitāne o Wairau, Ngāti Rārua, Ngāti Takihiku) is a Dunedin-based writer. She has had work published in Poetry magazine, Landfall, Sport, North & South, Mana, Canvas, The Spinoff, Newsroom, Pantograph Punch and with City Gallery. In 2020 she was the inaugural Emerging Māori Writer in Residence at the IIML at Te Herenga Waka–Victoria University of Wellington, and in 2021 she won the Newsroom Surrey Hotel Writers Residency. Whaea Blue (2024) is her first book.

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.

The Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: Magnetic South by Sue Wootton

Leave a reply

Magnetic South

You are my magnetic south.
I fall to you true.

I am the eel, the gull,
the silvery fish,
returning and returning.

Yours is the tide I swim to.

Sue Wootton
From Magnetic South, Steele Roberts, 2008

Sue Wootton’s most recent poetry collection is The Yield (Otago University Press, 2017), which was a finalist in the 2018 Ockham New Zealand book awards. She has held the Robert Burns Fellowship, the NZSA Beatson Fellowship and the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship. In 2025 she was awarded the Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems, for a suite of sonnets called ‘Holding Patterns: Seven songs of pots, jars, bowls and vases’. Sue lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin, and is the publisher at Otago University Press. The poem ‘Magnetic South’ is from her 2008 collection of the same name, published by Steele Roberts.

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 wonder stillness of a poem.

The Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: A Life by Kiri Piahana-Wong

Leave a reply

A Life

The late afternoon
finds you seeking
clarity in a book
of Rilke poems, a
shortbread biscuit,
and a cup of lemon
tea—with a dash
of honey.

The honey swirls
down through the
tea, and biscuit
crumbs fall into
the book, lodging
in the spine. The
fading sun slants
across the page.

Today, you decide,
you are truly content
to call your life a
great song. Or even
a small song.
A lullaby. Something
to sing your child to
sleep.

Kiri Piahana-Wong
from night swimming, Anahera Press, 2013


Kiri Piahana-Wong is a poet, editor and publisher living in Tāmaki Makaurau.

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 wonder stillness of a poem.