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Poetry Shelf review, conversations and readings: Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook – All Souls

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Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook -all souls
editor, Tracey Slaughter
Massey University Press, 2026
anthology page

Wild Houses

Bright bright horses choose me
to house their hooves. Houses

house their light like the evening
holds lock-jaw streetlights, and

kitchen windows house inaccessible
grief and joy; like the sun sets in

princess colours, yawns pastel mouths.
I have walked these paths so lonely

the streetlights have extinguished
as I passed. Behind a sky-rise

the sun blossoms like a tender bruise.
When I left home I learnt a new city

like a horse learns an apple in its mouth:
consumed its sweet, waning colours.

Saw my sun-struck reflection in a pool
of greywater. Pocketed my hands

further still. Drank deep.

Maia Armistead

Poetry, as I repeat like a mantra on Poetry Shelf, can be and do many things. Poems can ignite milky ways of feelings, ideas, experience, memories, desires, drawing us deep into and beyond who we are and who we might be. And that’s what the latest Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook: All-Souls does for me. All–Souls is a smooth and jagged uplift, an inspiration, an absorbing gathering of what poetry can do. This glorious anthology set my writing pens and pencils dancing again.

All-Souls is a special issue celebrating 75 years of publications. It was first edited by Louis Johnson, and from 1954 published by Pegasus Press in Christchurch. Nicola Legat presents an overview of Louis’s editorial role; his varying views of nz poetry. She locates examples across the years from from scolding to jaunty to despairing to marvellous to furious. Louis’s final issue was in 1964, upon which the journal took a break. Frank McKay edited it biannually from 1971 until 1984. Again a break, and then from 1990, with a series of publishers, the editors were David Drummond (brief spell from 1990) and Alistair Paterson (1993 to 2014). Jack Ross became editor and published from 2014 with Massey University Press assuming the publishing role in 2017. Johanna Emeney followed him, with Dr Tracey Slaughter assuming the role in 2021. As Nicola remarks:

“Louis Johnson, who published 32 poets in volume 1, would surely be astounded that the year book features 120 poets or so each edition. The New Zealand poetry he was so anxious to support and sustain has only grown in in all those years.”

Indeed! And as the diverse poetry in All-Souls demonstrates, whether style tone subject matter, and as Tracey’s inspired introduction underlines, as she explores the issue’s title.

The poems navigate aging, death, illness, therapy, multiple darknesses, but they also draw upon multiple lives, lights and lightnesses.

Darkness. Take for example, Cindy Botha’s moving ‘heart of the dinner table’, with its smouldering absences, “where silences are handed out like empty boxes”. Or the grief and deep aroha in Kerrin P Sharpe’s extraordinary ‘nothing like himself’, where the loss of a magnolia’s foliage reveals a brother loss:

He’s only here
in the tree
at dinner time
his wedding ring
that last ray of sun

Light: In ‘A Garden’, Lucy Miles offers sanctuary to weeds and birds, rather than resort to the uplift of Prozac or meth. And I stall on the ending to Mary Creswell’s Ceento: I am part of all that I have met”:

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks,
and there is a story in a book about it:
that which we are we are:
a few old pecker-fretted apple trees.

And now, I return to the darkness and to the light and find the poems smudge both like heart ripples, and everything in between. Linger over the aroha and memory of violence in Joel LeBlanc’s heart-bending ‘There is stardust in my blood’ (poem below). Or the lithe moves of Maia Armistead’s ‘Wild Houses where windows ‘house grief / and joy’ (poem above). Linger in the “nursery of stars” and “opening umbrella” and the missed body next to her, in Medb Charleton’s glorious ‘Making Love to the Muse’. Take time out with a good dose of Erik Kennedy’s wit and seriousness in ‘Classic Rain’:

There are people who would play sports or go to war in this,
when instead they could watch the surface of a birdbath.

The Yearbook continues to offer exemplary attention to reviewing New Zealand poetry, the kind of reviews that leads us to a book that takes our fancy on multiple levels. I have had Mary McCallum’s Tackling the Hens on my desk for far too long, and the review makes reading it this weekend imperative. And I’ll be tracking down Rhondda Greig’s book of poems and paintings.

To celebrate this anniversary issue, I invited nine poets to record their poems, and the editor and the featured poet, Josiah Morgan, to answer some questions. Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook continues to be a gift for our poetry communities – we are in the debt of Massey University Press.

Poetry is a gift to ourselves and to each other. Thank you.

There is stardust in my blood

and it smells of smoke and sulphur, a memory 
of violence, charcoal pencils that leave dusty
kisses on my fingertips, a house filled with
burnt coffee, mānuka wood transforming into 
incense and ash in our fireplace, my husband’s
skin as I curl against him, hunting for warmth
like comfort in a church, his breath tickling
as he tells me, “Love, it’s time to get up,” 
and I imagine the world was born exactly 
this way: the caress of a hand, a mumbled
whisper, light intruding, moths fluttering away,
us forgetting that the birth of the universe was 
also an ending, and we used to be stars.

Joel LeBlanc

Five questions for Tracey Slaughter, the editor

Paula: I was both surprised and moved to discover your review of my collection The Venetian Blind Poems at the end of the review section. I discovered it at 4 am when I was both wide awake and at a low ebb, and your exquisitely crafted words and thoughts, and personal acknowledgements, drew me back to why poetry matters to me, as reader and writer, reviewer and blogger. I got musing on how reviews can open rather than shut down a book, how they might draw closer to both the light and the dark, how the personal can be gold. How what we bring to a poetry collection as readers makes an electric difference. What are your thoughts on reviewing poetry?

Tracey: Firstly, I’m so glad that my review found you in that 4am place. When I read your book I felt like it was speaking directly to that part of me that can get so washed up and cut off in those pain-hours too, and the hold your poems kept on language, to guide you through those lonely precincts, just…glowed to me. I think reviews should help map our way towards those books we most need, & it’s often a deeply felt review, one which is willing to take the risk to open up the personal, the tender, the vulnerable, which shines a light on a book that might go on, in a profound sense, to save us in some future moment, connect with our tattered nerve-ends when nothing else will.

Paula: I totally agree. I want my reviews to open up a book rather than close its potential doors and windows and trails. I have an ongoing fascination with what poetry can be and do, as my introduction acknowledges: the way a poem might be an echo chamber or a form of travel, the way it might be squatting in the sand dunes absorbing beauty. I kept drawing ideas from your terrific introduction. For example, poetry as telescope, mirror or solace. Each new collection I read, seems to add another possibility, and I love that. How poetry is beyond rigid formulae. What discoveries have you made about what poetry can be and do, whether as editor or reader or writer?

Tracey: So beyond rigid formulae and forever smashing fixed mirrors! It’s been fascinating as editor to see our national poetry shift, stretch and flow over the years, always searching new fields, voicing fresh modes and moods. This year’s issue All-Souls announced its theme with resounding urgency from very early reading – while each piece was distinct, original, innovative, there was also a sense in which a collective quest for something – meaning, god, soul – was building in our poets to a force that felt outright choral. Lit up amidst all our global catastrophes, there’s a symphonic scanning for some human essence going on – these poems shiver with the existential, and scroll for meaning far beyond the algorithmic screen.

Paula: I find certain poems stand out in my reading travels, poems that catch me by surprise, offering wonder or joy or challenge. Is there a poem (among many I am sure) in All-Souls that caught you by surprise?

Tracey: The submission that cut right through my heart this year came from a bereaved wife sending in poetry her partner composed in his final days, transmitting words painfully pulse by pulse via device when his body was frozen by MND. You read poetry like that and there’s nothing more to say…It was so intensely moving to have one of David Gilbert’s last poems entrusted to our pages.

The sunset of the century
The pink had turned to green
How many breaths a man should take
And whether he may scream

I would play-act the drama
I would speak from the heart
But my heartbeat might falter
And I’d just mime my part

David Gilbert
from ‘The Sunset of the Century’

Paula: I am a big fan of your poetry – can you offer three words that matter to you when you are writing a poem. I guess it comes back to what we want our poetry to be and do.

Tracey: Oh thank you! That means so much to me. Mmmm, only three…then the things I surrender to first might be: Rhythm. Fire. Ruthlessness. Or is that maybe a way of saying: Instinct. Instinct. Instinct…

Paula: Oh yes to instinct! And yes, more than ever, we are all, collectively, hand-in-hand, navigating the dark and the light, at personal and global levels. What helps you through the day?

Tracey: Honestly, connecting with other creatives. I’m blessed that in my work, at Waikato University, and in my editing, for Poetry Aotearoa, I’m continuously brought into contact with creative voices brimming with fresh life. And lately my writing practice has spilled over into collaborative forms too, which I’ve found infinitely sustaining, even when I’m running on near-empty – I’ve been co-writing a screenplay adaptation of my novella The Longest Drink in Town with my eldest son Liam Hinton, & also performing in a theatre production of his latest Adam Award-winning play Passionfruits (on in Kirikiriroa very soon!!! & I’m alive with stage-fright already! yet finding I’m happiest in rehearsal, which is like getting to live right inside a book…).

Three questions for Josiah Morgan, the featured poet

Name three words that matter to you when you are writing a poem.
Fragments, challenge, opacity

Can you share a few poets whose poetry boosts you as a poet?
Dennis Cooper changed my life, and his work boosts me whenever I’m in a rut. So does the writing of the new ethnographic photographer-writer New Juche, who makes work with a bizarre and strange opacity that challenges me. In the Aotearoa context, Liz Breslin, Liam Jacobson, and the editor of this year’s Poetry Yearbook Tracey Slaughter feel closely aligned with what I do. The Compound Press book the prism and the rose, by Schaeffer Lemalu was published posthumously and is the most inspiring volume of local poetry I can think of in recent years. 

Why poetry? Why poetry in this tumultuous world?
Poetry is a way of thinking. It is part of what constitutes and constructs our everyday lives. Poetry reduces the boundary between the Western-individualist ‘i’ and the world around us, it is a mode of relation. Poetry is one of the few language-oriented tools we have with which we can disempower language. Language is very easy to bastardise for, say, political gain. Well, poetry can bastardise politics back upon itself. And poetry can stand for itself as an object, too. Poetry cannot be explained as anything other than what it is; it just is.

The readings

Josiah Morgan

Josiah reads ‘Noir is a field of unequal informatics, like a poem that could have been a sestina if it didn’t end too early, if it hadn’t been organised randomly out of order’

Joshiah reads ‘REDACTED (after Ralph Hotere)‘

Josiah reads ‘Family secret’

Josiah reads ‘It could happen to you too’

Rebecca Hawkes

Rebecca reads ‘All Souls’

Elizabeth Morton

Elizabeth Morton reads ‘O-O-O’

Richard Reeve

Richard reads ‘Wake’

Sabrina Li

Sabrina reads ‘Venice Syndrome’
This poem won First Prize in 2025 Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook student poetry competition.

Megan Kitching

Megan reads ‘Fire’

Sherry Zhang

Sherry reads ‘First swim of summer’

Alvia Farooqui

Alvia reads ‘Relapsing’

Leah Dodd

Leah reads ‘Pure expression of colour’

The readers and editor

Dr Tracey Slaughter is an award-winning poet and short story writer. Her books include Her Body Rises, The Longest Drink in Town, Deleted Scenes for Lovers, Devil’s Trumpet and The girls in the red house are singing. She has been the editor of the Poetry New Zealand Yearbook since 2020.

Alvia Farooqui is a Year 13 student at Macleans College in Tamaki Mākaurau Auckland. Her poem ‘Relapsing’ won first prize in the 2025 Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook student poetry competition.

Elizabeth Morton is a spinner of yarns and a poem-maker from Tāmaki Makaurau. Her poetry and prose have been published in New Zealand, the UK, the USA, Canada, Ireland, Australia and online. She has three collections of poetry, the latest being Naming the Beasts (Otago University Press, 2022). An upcoming collection, Incident Report (Otago University Press), will be published this year. She is a PhD candidate in psychological medicine with the University of Otago.

Josiah Morgan (he/him, Kāi Tahu / Ngāti Maniapoto) is a poet, actor, drama teacher, performance artist, facilitator, reviewer, editor and writer from Ōtautahi Christchurch. In 2026, he was the Visiting Writer at Washington State University’s creative writing program. He is the author of i’m still growing (Dead Bird Books, 2024), and his novella Road: A Postlapsarian Comedy won the Macmillan Brown Writers Prize in 2021. His work has featured in The Spinoff, Landfall, Out Here and numerous other journals, blogs and magazines. His chapbook Black Window holds the featured poet slot in Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2026.

Leah Dodd grew up in Taranaki and lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Her first collection of poetry, Past Lives, was published by Te Herenga Waka University Press in 2023. She is currently working on a second.

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.

Rebecca Hawkes is a painter-poet from a farm near Methven, now living in Wellington. She is the author of the poetry collection Meat Lovers (Auckland University Press) and the chapbooks Softcore Coldsores (AUP New Poets 5) and Hardcore Pastorals (Cordite). She edits poetry journal Sweet Mammalian. Rebecca holds an MFA in yearning from the University of Michigan and MA in half-truths from the IIML. Her new chapbook Hide, an illuminated manuscript of narrative verse, is coming in September 2026 with ngā pukapuka pekapeka, and her next  collection Fool’s Spring is forthcoming from Yes Yes Books and AUP in 2027.

Born in Dunedin in 1976, Richard Reeve is the author of seven collections of poetry, Dialectic of Mud (AUP 2001), The Life and the Dark (AUP 2004), In Continents (AUP 2008), The Among (Maungatua Press 2008), Generation Kitchen (OUP 2015), Horse and Sheep (Maungatua Press 2019) and About Now (Maungatua Press 2024). With Mick Abbott, he is also co-editor of an anthology of essays on wilderness, Our Wild Heart: The Possibility of Wilderness in Aotearoa New Zealand (OUP 2011). He lives in Warrington, to the north of Dunedin, with Octavia and the cat Lionel.

Sabrina Li is a young writer from Christchurch who enjoys exploring poetry through inventive forms and structures, often finding beauty in the ordinary moments of everyday life. She draws inspiration from the natural world around her, as well as the stories and perspectives she encounters through social media. Her poetry has also appeared in Write On Magazine and Given Words, along with a new work forthcoming from the Hagley Writer’s Institute.

Xue Li (Sherry) Zhang is a writer born and raised in Tāmaki Makaurau. She works across poetry, theatre and prose. Her family are from Fujian, China. She was the editor of The Pantograph Punch, and the co-manager of Te Kāhui Creative Writing. 

Poetry Shelf conversation and reading: Airini Beautrais

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Salt Quilt, Airini Beautrais
Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2026

Airini Beautrais’s new poetry collection, Salt Quilt, is like a prism I hold to the light and dark of living, past present future, of what is experienced and what is imagined, what is felt and what is thought. The poetry ranges and embraces diverse subject matter, form, mood, connections. I have felt so utterly boosted by this book.

I kept teaching, I started having human children
and I kept writing poems. Eventually I had enough
for another book. I had a launch at Thistle Hall
on a Saturday afternoon with my baby on my hip.

Pip Adam and Maria McMillan read with me,
and their children drove trucks back and forth
across the wooden floorboards.
Bill Manhire sat in the corner slowly eating olives.

from ‘Cancer Moon: Poet Life’

a conversation

Paula: Firstly I thank you for kind acknowledgment in the endnote. Honestly I felt like crying. I felt like crying because poetry is so connecting for so many people, and for me it is my lifeline. Your new poetry collection has got me thinking and feeling deeply, on so many levels. Thinking about poetry, about life, about being and becoming a poet, and still being and becoming a poet. The first word I wrote on the page beside me as I read, was openness. The openness of the speaking voices, the opening of the past, the opening of the present, the openness of what a poem can be.

What word or words catch what the poetry was being and doing as you wrote?

Airini: Well firstly, thanks again to you Paula, for all that you do. I know it is a lot of mahi and we don’t always get a lot of acknowledgement or compensation for work in the arts in Aotearoa NZ, especially in the current political climate.

I wrote the poems in this collection over fifteen years, so there was a lot of being and doing in that time. There are also a lot of different approaches, as some of these poems are very personal, whereas others were commissions and are removed from my personal experience by default. Some words that come to mind now are: Exploration, distillation, sense-making, acknowledgement, vulnerability, experimentation.

Vulnerability is a big one. I think poets, or at least serious/ literary poets, tend to avoid it. I think this is because poetry allows for distance between the emotional self and the text via linguistic and stylistic features and there can be a temptation to increase that distance. When I started out my poetic career, I definitely wanted to be cool. My first book was called Secret Heart which I think was apt given there is a lot of hiding in those poems. Now I feel happier to just be who I am, and put uncomfortable things out there.

Paula: Vulnerability seems to have been crucial in a number of poetry books I have loved over the past year. Your list of words resonate as I reflect upon your collection. I was deeply moved by ‘Cancer Moon: Poet Life’, a poem that traces your origins and unfolding life as a poet. I recognised myself at times, the difficult child who never felt seen, the incredible turning points, the people places, situations and choices that matter. It feels like poetry is what we do, against all odds, but it also feels like we write, perform and share poetry, out of so many different things. Difficulty, love, renewed relationships with the world, whether physical or peopled. Has this changed for you over time? What you write out of? And why poetry matters to you?

Airini: In that poem I talk about how over the time I have been a writer, writing has only got harder, and I don’t know why. So although I am more comfortable with myself, I do find it harder to put things into words. There are a few possible reasons for this. One is being a working single parent and being tired a lot. Another is having a bit more emotional maturity – being able to reflect in the moment (more often, at least) means less need to reach for the notebook and pour one’s heart out. And I also think it’s inevitable that we become more self-critical as we get older. We have a wider frame of reference and more awareness of where our work sits in the scheme of things, and sometimes that can be daunting.

I think I write out of compulsion, and even if I tried to stop, I wouldn’t be able to. I sometimes wonder if I write because my brain takes longer to tease things out, while other people might be able to just figure out how they think and feel right away, and go about their day.

At my launch I said that poetry is my first love, and it is my favourite genre to write in because I feel that it is where words meet spirit. To me it matters in more of a psychological and spiritual way than an aesthetic or intellectual way. Poetry is very diverse and means lots of different things to different people, but I see a strong connection between poetry and prayer, chant, meditation and music.

Learning about inherited forms
I got into the idea of the sonnet as corset,
like some kind of erotic bondage, although I am actually
quite vanilla in real life.

from ‘Cancer Moon: Poet Life’

Paula: Yes! I love that. And indeed the joy and boost of writing out of love. It is the key to why I keep Poetry Box going for children – to be an ambassador for writing out of love and play. Vital for children and equally vital for adults.

I utterly love how the collection resembles an ode to form. How form, whether villanelle or pantoum for example, offers musical patterns in repeating lines and rhymes but how form is never a straitjacket. For me form offers musicality but it also heightens the vital echoes. The way the collection is like an echo symphony, scoring the musical notes of memory, reflection, the physical wold, the peopled world. What drew you to poetic forms?

Airini: On a conscious level it was being contrarian. I wanted to do something that other people, especially people of my generation, weren’t doing much anymore. I do think there is a place for poetry written in the rhythms of prose, and I still write a lot of it myself, but it’s not all I want to do, or read. On a subconscious level, I think rhyme and meter and other sonic features have an innate appeal to our brains. I have been listening to my four-year-old niece come up with words and phrases and say ‘Hey, that rhymes!’ in utter delight. In ‘Cancer moon’ I write about how sometimes it feels like it’s me and a bunch of old men who write in inherited forms. I don’t think form itself is political, but some people do associate it with conservative politics. I just find it really fun. I studied form as part of my PhD and it was an eye (and ear) opening thing to look into. I am fascinated by things to do with sound, like how the pentameter line isn’t really innate to English, which is a stress-timed language, and the old Anglo-saxon alliterative meters were based around a four-stress line. Around 95% of popular music is written in 4/4 time which suggests there is something we find really appealing and easy about four beats.

Paula: So many books I’ve spent time with this year bring together the personal and the political. I am drawn to this insistent weave – to our need to share intimate details, personal hurts delights epiphanies, alongside our need to speak out for the environment, for the undermined, the silenced, the war smashed, the hungry, against damaging political choices. How important is a political personal weave for you as you write?  

Airini: I don’t think it’s always a deliberate choice. Some of my political poetry has been written in collaboration with artists, and I think political topics are a good basis for inter-arts projects because they allow for exploration of big, complex issues.

I find the current state of the world, and Aotearoa New Zealand, so depressing at the moment. I have found it really hard feeling like every other week we have to make a submission on a bill that either allows for vandalization of the environment, or undermines human rights. I think we are more polarized now than we have ever been in my lifetime, and social media is driving this – for very cynical reasons. I would personally prefer to spend energy on making positive connections with people and effecting positive change, than arguing, fighting and name-calling. When I weave the personal and political together in my writing, it is often a form of self-soothing. Basically I just need to stay mentally well enough to function and I can only deal with so much awful stuff at any given time. I often have to tune out and go into nature and look for good things.

The lights come on: streetlamps,
fairy lights outside the indie bookshop.
It is autumn, the sun sets earlier
behind the brutalist building.
I imagine it covered in trees.
I imagine something happening here.
I imagine we are sitting on this hill
on the top of the city
for the sole purpose of
observing everything.
Less like Olympian gods,
more like nesting pigeons.

from ‘Lemon sky’

Paula: Oh that word is staying in my self-care room in my head: self-soothing. Poetry, as one of my ongoing series underlines, can be a way of speaking out for to with. How do we navigate and inhabit this jagged world? And yes to positive connections.

I loved reading your endnote and discovering the varied lives of some of the poems, how some were commissioned, published and performed in diverse settings. It got me thinking again on your magnificent origin poem, ‘Cancer Moon: Poet Life’. How our writing communities matter. Your poems acknowledge this, from poets you have read and loved, teachers who have boosted you (for example, James Brown and Harry Ricketts at IIML to whom you dedicated the book), writer friends who read and respond. I am fascinated by the private secret and public lives of poetry. How do you find moving between these zones a writer?

Airini: I think it’s very hard. I find it difficult moving between these zones as a writer and I also find it difficult being all the different people I have had to be in my life. I am about to start another break from science teaching which has been my main bread and butter over the last couple of decades, and focus on creative work for a while. It’s quite a scary prospect because it feels like those public and private worlds are now colliding and I have less of a public persona to hide behind.

On the other hand, as I’ve mentioned earlier, I think poetry, by its stylized and often contorted nature, gives us a useful distance between personal experience and the text. So even though it is a bit cringe having people read about my romantic failures, it also feels like those are fictional stories and readers are not seeing the full ugly face of what happened.

In terms of teachers and communities, I think this is hugely important to the creative arts. Although the act of writing itself is often a solitary pursuit, all the other aspects aren’t. I couldn’t do this without the people I have learned from, or the editors, proofreaders, publicists, administrators, booksellers, festival organisers, reviewers, readers and everyone else who has helped me out.

Paula: Can you give me a reading tip, and share the title of a poetry book you have loved and felt affected by in the past couple of years.

Airini: I am a very eclectic reader, but I’m also not as committed a reader as many of the writers I know. This is partly because I’m not very good at sitting still or staying focused. Also, I am not very good at being on top of trends, so it often takes me years to catch up. So my tips would be: Audio books count as reading. Poets, please consider recording audio books of your poetry! And, read what you feel like reading, when the mood takes you. For me, it’s often at breakfast time. I have accepted that I am not a morning person and my morning routine is a pot of Earl Grey and an hour or so of reading, rather than a walk, a litre of water, a meditation, intention-setting and a gym workout. (If that is someone’s routine – awesome. Just not something I’m able to do!)

I have loved a lot of poetry books in the last few years. I have been enjoying sharing NZ poetry at an open mic night that I co-MC in Whanganui. Jordan Hamel’s collection Everyone is Everyone Except You is full of poems that are fun to read aloud. People love hearing some Hera Lindsay Bird. And sometimes I like to put in a throwback poem like Allen Curnow’s ‘You will know when you get there.’

The poetry book that has affected me the most in the past couple of years is Refaat Alareer’s If I must die: Poetry and Prose (OR Books, 2024). Refaat was killed in Gaza City in December 2023. It’s so easy to complain about things like not being in the window display of Unity, or not being in this or that anthology or journal, but fuck, we are alive, folks. We should never take for granted that we are alive on earth, still writing.

Paula: Yes! I often begin my day at 4 am if not earlier and find this pocket of time perfect to read a few poems and write, waiting for the dark to lift, the bush birdsong to arrive. It is self-soothing indeed.

Can you choose one poem use as an end point for our conversation – and why you chose this poem.

Airini: I’d like to choose a poem that you initially published on NZ Poetry Shelf. It’s called ‘Regret’ and it is a found poem made up of quotes from wrestler and actor John Cena. Cena has been such a beloved figure for so many people for decades now. I came across an interview with him following the release of the Transformers movie Bumblebee in 2018, and thought it just felt like poetry. One of the reasons I enjoy poetry is that I find language endlessly fascinating. Not just poetry with a capital P but the poetry of everyday life. I think a found poem becomes a poem when you put effort into choosing bits of language and arranging them in a form, a bit like a collage. I really resonated with what Cena was saying about letting go of ego and letting go of regrets. The quote ‘I don’t regret a single thing man not one thing’ is a good mantra to remember for actors, wrestlers and poets alike.

Regret

I’m in the stunt business and I just want to fall down.
But that’s not the way it works.
It’s storytelling, but I have comfortable roots.

I was still trying to learn and define who I was.
And you’re waiting eight hours for a giant stunt.
And you don’t understand the reason.

Went through a character shift
from the ruthless aggression guy, to the rap guy,
to the non-rap guy, to the superman guy.

Feel free to be open with me.
I have no ego.
My ego is making an awesome movie.

These were the prime years
when things were catching fire, and the place
I really wanted to be was on that canvas.

No ego. Let’s make great moments
and how can we do that?
My ego lies with the finished product.

Life is always good no matter what.
We tell stories sometimes that are real close to the vest.
learn from every single situation.

If this thing doesn’t fly I’m putting it on my shoulders
and I’m gonna figure out why and I’m hopefully
gonna get another chance to attack it again.

Man I don’t have a single regret in my life.
I’ve been on such a crazy ride.
I don’t regret a single thing man not one thing.

a reading

photo credit: Skye Boniface

‘Failure’

‘Dreams’

‘Salt quilt’

Airini Beautrais was born in Auckland in 1982. Her debut work of fiction, Bug Week, won Aotearoa New Zealand’s top fiction award, the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize, at the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. She is the author of five collections of poetry, including Salt Quilt (2026) and Secret Heart (2006), which won the Jessie Mackay Award for First Book of Poetry at the 2007 Montana New Zealand Book Awards, and The Beautiful Afternoon (2024), a collection of essays. In 2016 she won the Landfall Essay Prize. Airini is also a science teacher and dance instructor. She lives in Whanganui.

Te Herenga Waka University Press page

Poetry Shelf conversation : Elizabeth Smither and The Interview Rose

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The Interview Rose, Elizabeth Smither
Auckland University Press, 2026

I have been a long fan of the poetry of Elizabeth Smither. Her new collection, The Interview Rose, is a work of beauty and heart nourishment. It is a book of unfoldings, it’s prismatic multilayered poetry offering lily launchpads to moments of awe and surprise. I found myself reading and rereading particular lines. Embracing deeply the music of the everyday alongside the music of the imagined and the witnessed. Family matters. Other writers matter. Reading matters. The domestic matters. The sheer inspirational delight in how words nestle together in a line of poetry matters.

To celebrate Elizabeth’s new book is a vital uplift.

Mark Doty: a footnote

Walking between venues in Aldeburgh
to attend the next reading or panel
a boy kicks a football in Mark Doty’s path.

Just a poet walking, one of those
removed from the world, a floater,
but look he has scooped up the ball

on the curve of his foot, cradles it
like a bird fallen from a tree,
rolls it up to chest height

then over his shoulder, his other foot
hooks to kick it back to
two astonished boys. A poet

who could play for Chelsea or Real Madrid,
earn a fee greater than any poet,
but greatest of all the way

he goes on chatting to the other poets,
=his head lowered, as modestly
he sets the world back in place.

Elizabeth Smither
from The Interview Rose

A conversation

Magic in our collaboration.
Woman and frog, a distant pond
reached by plodding and breathing
and by companionableness.

from ‘The frog’

Paula: The opening poem, ‘The frog’, epitomises the experience of reading  your beautiful new collection of poems. As the frog hops from steps to pond, on each step he pauses. As I read, I too am propelled by stillness and movement. Pause and contemplation. Slow reading steps and discoveries. I also love the rhythm of the arrangement of poems. Tell me about your rhythms of writing.

Elizabeth:  What a dear creature: a very large frog and my big feet treading on each step as he exits. A feeling of privilege; I didn’t think he was frightened of me and I noticed his skin was kept damp by a drizzling rain. Boldness on his side, rhythm and timing on mine, in case I stepped too soon. Eventually the steps ended and he was on the grass and heading towards a pond. The lovely order is the work of Elizabeth Caffin; I can see the internal order while I write; she knows to put the frog first.

Paula:  Your observation of the physical world is another delight, an uplift, a snapshot of the beauty of the moment. Is there in your daily movement, as if there in your writing?

Elizabeth:  I’ve always taken to heart Colette’s last words as she was turning the pages of a book of butterfly images: ‘Regarde, regarde’ (in a rolling Burgundian accent). To look is everything. The idea of a subject is very unfashionable but I agree with Carol Ann Duffy: ‘the subject of a poem is what the poet sees, hears, thinks about, is moved by’. She also said ‘I regard poetry as a vocation. Any other work – freelance or bank manager – simply supports the person writing it’.

Paula:  I also love the sway between the said and the unsaid. How important is silence and the unspoken as you write?

Elizabeth:  Recently I’ve been writing a kind of journal based on quotations. One of them comes from May Sarton’s ‘The Single Hound’. Tout lasse, toutcasse, tout passe. Everything passes, everything breaks, everything tires. It’s lovely when you speak it. There is an ending, not quoted so much: et tout se remplace. And everything is replaced. It’s not a defeat but an allowance of decline and fall, the said and the unsaid, rather like an incoming and outgoing tide. Or it could be like a poetry reading: the preparation, the stumbling over a word, or going too fast, and later conducting a critical analysis of the event. And then lasse, casse, passe come in and reason is restored.

Paula:  I love that! The incoming and outgoing tide of both reading and writing. Some poetry collections are steeped in pain and darkness but for me your collection is a trove of pleasure. Take ‘De-stringing beans’ for example. This sublime poem carries me from the contentment of peeling beans for her sons to clambering, underrated garden beans to the contentment of art viewing, the woman pouring from a jug in particular. Was writing it a source of pleasure for you?

Elizabeth:  I think it was a sense of speed, though contemplation can lie at the heart of it. I’m always trying to get something down. In the case of the beans perhaps I am imagining a formidable Italian nonna whose life skill is making tortellini for her family. Like the nonna my mind wanders as the mountain of beans goes down and I am thinking how shall I allot them and what is the calming image inside the chore?

Paula:  I adore the exquisite startle moments, little arrivals of surprise. For example ‘Mark Doty; a footnote’, where the poet deftly hooks a football back to the young boys in the street while he chats to the other poets, “his head lowered, as modestly he sets the world back in place”.  Do you surprise yourself as you write and read?

Elizabeth:  I feel really proud of Mark Doty. I think the key word is ‘a floater’ which is meant to be contemptuous, a negative view of poets. But here he is playing like Cristiano Ronaldo but doing it with nonchalance, talking and walking and returning the ball but first having a little dialogue, a demonstration with it; it wraps itself around him like a scarf. I imagined the boy saying ‘Shit!’ not realising Mark Doty is a poet and a deservedly famous one. I am the one who is surprised and thrilled. A poet ambassador.

Paula:  A number of poems are dedicated to writer friends. Various writers make an appearance. Other companions make appearances. The frog in the opening poem! The cat sitting on Wittgenstein quotes. Jane Austen’s Emma. It got me musing on how writing is for me an act of connection. Does that idea work for you?

Elizabeth:  Yes, I love the idea of companionship, for writers dead or alive. I loved in the Emma poem that mentions Robert Gottleib that he hated semi-colons and would squash any he encountered; that he would read mss late into the night, sympathising with authors who would be on tenterhooks. And friends. I have decided to keep all their names in my address book since they still seem alive in my mind.

 Paula:  Can you pick a handful of words that epitomise how writing poetry matters to you? That are the key in the creation of a poem?

Elizabeth:  I think if I were put in a cell I would pretend I hated books in the hope that a jailer would bring armfuls for me to read. And I would write childishly as if I had never been to school. But if I were unsupervised I would write like a speeding angel and hide the pages under a mattress.

The words: quick (the opposite of dead) and bright (Keats’s ‘Bright Star) merry (unless some dreaded seriousness is required). There’s a cardinal called Merry del Val whom I like very much.

Paula:  And can you choose a poem that is particularly significant for you?

Elizabeth: I’d choose Wallace Stevens, ‘Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour’ with its lovely last stanza:

‘Out of this same light, out of the central mind,     
We make a dwelling in the evening air.
 In which being together is enough’.

Paula:  Writing has been such a vital part of your time, a gift for us as readers.  What else offers uplift and nourishment? I do think readers will discover answers to this across this charismatic collection.

Elizabeth:  I think work, even of the slogging kind, should not be underestimated. And thinking, turning things over for new angles and insights, being active and sometimes being fallow like one of those marvellous 18th century fallow fields.

Paula: What a pleasure Elizabeth to spend time with your collection, to reflect upon how reading and writing poetry matters so very much. How angles and insights can refresh the contours of our days. I feel poem enriched. Thank you.

Elizabeth Smither has written six novels, six collections of short stories and nineteen poetry collections. She has twice won the major award for New Zealand poetry and was the 2001–2003 Te Mata Poet Laureate. In 2004, she was awarded an honorary LittD from the University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau for her contribution to literature and was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit. She received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in 2008. Her book, Night Horse (Auckland University Press, 2017), won the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Award for Poetry.

Auckland University Press page

Poetry Shelf Conversations and Readings: Amber Esau

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Hungus, Amber Esau
Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2026

To celebrate Amber Esau’s terrific new collection, Hungus, Amber reads some poems and answers six questions. The conversation is like a surrogate review as I enthuse whole-heartedly on why and how I love the book so much.

a conversation

Paula: I love reading your collection so much. For all kinds of reasons. The rhythm of reading for a start. At times it’s like a lightning storm with my heart pumping, at times like that beauty moment when I stall and star gaze. Slow, fast, utterly inspiring. What was the rhythm of writing like for you?

Amber: A lot of the shorter poems and the foundations for the longer poems were written during my MA year but they really started crystallising once I had distance from the work. I had started editing it pretty soon after finishing my course but it was still very undercooked. I spent over a year not looking at the manuscript, reading and editing other poets’ works, before I could finally see mine better. The first draft of poems were a lot more slippery and while I love that uncertainty I was better able to accept where too much elusiveness was limiting my writing. The varying rhythms between the poems are likely in part due to these different concentrations of time. It’s also very Geminian of me to love a switch up like I do!! At my core, though, I am a turtle writer; slow on land, quick in the water.

Paula: Another love for me is your agility with words. Every line is sheer music delight, with sonic shifts and dances. Sweet sharp savoury. There’s hip jargon, urban slang, words that smash together or elide, words that jam in harmony, disharmony, similes that stick and surprise. I just want to hear you read the whole friggin book. Out loud. Honestly your use of words is inventive, life-rich, like a K-Rd dairy-on-the-corner milky hills mosh pit symphony. Do things sing differently as you move between page and performance?

Amber: Wooooah I really appreciate that, thank you. I never used to read my poems aloud until I finished writing them which often surprises people about my process. We all have our own internalised sense of rhythm and I have secretly always wanted to be a rapper. I think that kinda gets injected into the writing. If I say a poem aloud too early though, it starts trying to rhyme too much and I have to reset myself. This process creates a mean tension between the sounds of things and the meanings of them. I also grew up in a predominantly Samoan speaking household but I only spoke English. I understand Samoan better than I speak it and I think there’s something in there about learning a language only through the ears in relation to learning a language through the verbal and written word. The former is more mutable. Sometimes, I still have to say Samoan words aloud to know what I’m reading on the page and tbh, “fobbing” up my English is where I feel most at home. I think this might be a common experience within a lot of immigrant households.

Paula: The title, ‘Hungus’, magnetised me, with its connotations of both enormousness and hunger. And The Mantis, the equally mesmerising prankster figure on the cover who appears larger than life in poems, electrifies your writing ink. Did your relationship with The Mantis change over the course of writing the collection?

Amber: The Mantis is comical and menacing and laced in a sort of cartoonish violence that feels so familiar to me. I used to view it steeped only in its “badness” which was both alluring and repellent. Originally, the Mantis was very archetypal in my imagining and slowly I started wondering what the flipside to this figure would be… kinda in the way that Hinetītama becomes Hine-nui-te-pō. That’s where the Manaia comes out of. We all hold many contradictions and there are many factors that transform us – for better or worse, eh. Mostly though, I started to consider the Mantis’ capacity for change and how bloody annoying that is and how maybe that means it’s still possible.  

Paula: Your collection has tendrils and roots in sky and land. It feels personal and it feels imagined. It feels political and it feels mythological. It feels like poetry of now and then and might be. Yep, as the blurb says ‘a work of world-building’. I love that. Was there an ignition point for the collection? Experiences, world, possibilities, real or imagined, that you wanted to ‘visit’ as you wrote.

Amber: Oh that’s mean as! Thank you! Originally, I planned to explore addiction/the addict in a way that echoes the different representations of Maui across the pacific. It wasn’t until the Mantis started bubbling to the surface that I had something to craft around. Warping Maui into the Mantis felt like an interesting entrance into the intersections of urban indigeneity and moana diaspora. It took a few versions of the work as a whole to realise that a big part of Hungus is about the idea of empire and ways we maintain certain legacies; of expanding so as not to be swallowed; of establishing hierarchies within a language; of projecting hurts as a form of self-preservation; of resisting meaningful change. In my experience, these also rhyme with the ways that power dynamics and inherited traumas are expressed within the home.

Paula: For me writing is a secret private intimate activity and also a public one, whether through Poetry Shelf poet connections or as a published author. Your moving acknowledgements page underlines how important other writers are to you, how important writing communities are. Do you need a secret private writing space alongside your nourishing community space/presence?

Amber: Definitely. I’ve gotten into a pretty consistent journaling practice which has helped me figure out what I’m actually saying, how I feel about my daily life, responses to current events, lots of dissecting my traumas lol, small notes for projects, and what I’m reading. Too many tokes back in the day means my memory is kinda shoddy though, so it’s been really useful writing about the books I read to help my recall.

Paula: In this upheaval world, a world that is straining and testing the foundations of humanity, what matters to you? As a writer yes, as a new voice yes, and as daughter, sister, friend, human being?

Amber: It’s hard not to be somewhat cynical about where humanity is heading, but publishing a poetry collection feels like an act of hope and faith. The other day, my brother, who doesn’t read poetry at all, texted me he’s been really enjoying the book, slowly reading through it, and cracking up that some poems have been sparking unexpected insights within him. It’s important to me that my brother, someone who has always felt a lil excluded from literary spaces, has found a place to dock in my poetry. This doesn’t mean that I’m anti-intellectualism – I’m just suss about the hierarchy of languages and knowledge systems lol. My idealistic ass still thinks that language fuckery is one of the many ways we might shift the collective psyche towards learning how to sit with uncertainty and make space for each other on our terms.  

reading

Amber reads from Hungus

Amber Esau is a SāMāoRish (Ngāpuhi / Manase) writer from Tāmaki Makaurau. She is a poet, storyteller, and professional bots. Always vibing at a languid pace, her work has been published both in print and online. In 2023, she co-edited the queer poetry anthology Spoiled Fruit. She is a past recipient of the emerging Pasifika writer’s residency from the Michael King Writers Centre and the Ideas In Residence residency from the Basement Theatre. Hungus is her debut collection. 

Te Herenga Waka 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 conversation: Rebecca Hawkes

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Photo credit: Ebony Lamb

although the flighty vampires suckling so obscenely
are the only creatures that really belong in this scene
not the dogs or the willows or the girl
or the gorse with its raptures of yellow

that invasive stellation annexing the slopes
to wrestle black beech at the bush boundary
the smells of pollinated combat mingling by the water
sultry as marzipan and honeydew casting a heady spell

over the colonised valley the weeds like her very presence here
a legacy of other people’s blood and money
though she has yet to understand this history is her own
still finding a place in her bones let alone the land

 

from ‘Noonday gorsebloom’

 

Rebecca Hawkes caught my attention in AUP New Poets 5 (Anna Jackson’s reboot of the series). I became an instant and avid fan. Rebecca’s debut full collection Meat Lovers is now out in the world and is attracting a solar system of love. Freya Daly Sadgrove wrote this for the blurb: ‘Rebecca Hawkes is the unmatched empress of viscera. Thrillingly, perverse, utterly compelling – you eat these poems like overripe peaches, or your own tongue.’

To celebrate poetry, and the arrival of Meat Lovers, Rebecca and I have an ongoing email conversation over the past month or so.

Paula: Before we discuss your sublime debut collection, these are strange and challenging times. I am finding books help. Writing helps. I just read Rachel O’Neill’s stunning Requiem for a Fruit and it was such an uplift. Inspiring. Have you read any books lately that have stuck with you?

Rebecca: Lately I’ve been disappearing into gaming a fair amount -dystopian epic sequel Horizon Forbidden West just came out and I’ve been abandoning our world for the tragic beauty of that story. I’ve also been reading a lot, enjoying the first releases in the bounty of local poetry arriving this year. The Surgeon’s Brain by Oscar Upperton stuck in my craw, as an incisive testament to an extraordinary life. It’s  a powerful reminder of the ongoing need for rediscovery of queer history, and how we continue to fight for our place in the record. It inhabits the character of James Barry, a brilliant transgender military surgeon in the 1800s. Oscar’s work is precise and immersive – it felt like being dropped right into Barry’s whirring mind at various moments throughout his storied life. Reading the book is like speedrunning a novelised biography in a way that fits my fractured attention span, while also having plenty of room to breathe with Barry through his gnarliest thoughts. 

I’ve also just read Chris Tse’s much anticipated Super Model Minority. Rainbows and rage, passion and pride, it meets my pent-up energy in the pandemic. This book evolves Chris’ previous work reckoning with racist and homophobic violence, and the radical possibilities of joy in a doomscroller’s world.

I’ve also been lucky to receive a copy of I got you babe, the first publication by new publishing collective Taraheke/Bushlawyer. I’m so glad to see this in the world. I got you babe includes poems and essays by the five writers, holding their power and care and grief. Importantly, it places the forthcoming anthology No Other Place To Stand (which I’ve been co-editing with essa, Erik and Jordan for the past few years), in a richer, wider ecosystem of critical and creative work around climate, capitalism and colonisation. As we get closer to the anthology launching at last (it has gone to print!), it’s daunting how little has changed since the start of this project and the pandemic – the poems sent to us in 2020 have only become more (alarmingly) prescient.  The critical urgency of I got you babe is a breath of fresh air.

2022 is, despite all the overall horribleness of Current Events, set to be a killer year for poetry. I’m eager for the new books by Anahera Gildea, Michaela Keeble, Anne-Marie Te Whiu, Erik Kennedy, Jordan Hamel, essa may ranapiri, Cadence Chung, Khadro Mohamed, Michael Steven… My bundle from Titus Books just arrived and I’m reading Chris Holdaway’s Gorse Poems tonight!

Meatlovers Rebecca Hawkes, Auckland University Press, 2022

Paula: How was it, writing your sublime Meat Lovers?

Rebecca: Well, I’ve been working towards Meat Lovers for some while. After Softcore coldsores came out in AUP New Poets 5 in 2019, I wanted to do more with some of the down-home-on-the-farm poems, and build a more cohesive full-length collection set firmly in the rural gothic. The title Meat Lovers came early on. It led to the eventual bisected structure of the book, the two halves of one cracked geode. But getting there was a meandering process… 

I bloody love to write a poem, any poem, as a wry joke or full-throated cry. The puzzle and thrill of tinkering with verse ‘til it moves on its own steam and I get to watch the poem skitter off in its own chosen direction is reason enough to keep writing them. And each poem is only one weeny little fragment in the churning vortex / hot mess of whatever’s going on in my head, so a lot of them live in completely different parts of my world that would never touch outside of a word document.  A lot of poems therefore ended up on the cutting-room floor for this manuscript, as I had to corral a more cohesive set of little machines that could work as a pack for a more focused sequence. I had so many ‘spare’ poems that there were more than enough for another rather different manuscript – which in a funny turn of events was a runner-up in the Kathleen Grattan Award at OUP last year. Maybe I could have published that altogether more playful and girl-gamerish book first instead, but Meat Lovers holds the work I was most compelled to delve into, mining some darker recesses of my home and heart, and way to still live in some places from my past that I can never really return to.

Once I’d gold-panned for the vibes/themes of this book (food, farming, foolish love) and gathered my first set of poems, structuring it was the challenge – I’d never tried to be so purposeful in a manuscript order before this. I’m grateful for the early eyes of friends like Rebecca K Reilly and essa ranapiri who helped me zero in on what really mattered for the shape of this work. And then of course I kept on writing fresh poems and trying to find places for the new darlings, even as the manuscript really needed to be pruned. How has writing this book been? What is it ever like to make art, to do something freeing but also serious, disarmingly ironic but nonetheless excruciatingly sincere? At turns it has been deep work and easy fun, therapy and tomfoolery, surfing the ecstasy of creation or gruelling arduous labour. Writing the book was humbling, cos making art always kicks my ass, but obviously it’s me doing the kicking as well as my buttcheek with the boot print on it.

‘Frenzy’, Rebecca Hawkes, 2021

Paula: Love the idea that incongruous things in the world co-exist in the neighbourhood of the page! And love how we can never pin the writing process down to one easy answer. Yet for me it is the best thing in this wild and challenging and complicated world. Energy boosting. Heart easing. Body uplifting. Whether reading or writing. I get a similar reaction when I look at your paintings. I have lived with an artist for over thirty years and we inhabit a shared space, but also private and utterly necessarily separate spaces each day. How is it for you both painting and writing? Reading your poems and sinking into your art it is a yin and yang experience for me – the one electrified by the other.

Rebecca: For me the painterly and poetic forms are so intertwined, you could never ask me to choose one, or to go without them. That was why it was so important to me to do my own cover art, even if digital painting isn’t my main medium… and even though what I mostly see in my own paintings is how much learning I still have to do! My necessary poetry-space is laptop-sized and portable, so it’s a more readily accessible art than the ritual of setting up paints and solvents, and then cleaning brushes when I’m bleary-eyed past my bedtime. Sometimes I go months without having – or making – time to paint. But I somehow find the hours when exhibitions are coming up, like right now …

When I’m not both writing and painting I’m not my whole self. They’re things I’ve always done. As a child I constantly drew chimeras, collaging together the most interesting limbs from my gen 1 and 2 Pokémon handbooks and the dinosaurs I was obsessed with – an Arcanine head and mane on a Houndoom’s punk pup frame, equipped with the wings of a Charizard and an Ankylosaurus club tail for bashing. What’s it called when you’re a horse girl but for dragons? I was that. For me a dragon is still the ideal animal, an impossible assemblage of apex attributes, wise and prideful and wild… While my art subjects are often less creaturely now, dragon-building is still basically how I approach both paintings and poems. I rip little shreds of potent detail out of life or dreams, and solder them together to make something that has its own new roar.

Painting is where I most keenly feel the gap between the work I aspire to make and the limits of my capability. I’m not a planner, working out decent compositions in thumbnail sketches. Instead I dive right in with colour and a couple of starting images, then see what happens. Same for poetry, but with poems nobody can see the smudged under-layers lurking beneath the surface of the finished piece… Word docs are forgivingly blank behind the text, so no-one sees my orphanage of random lines, loose chimera limbs waiting to be assembled. 

Right now I’m in that horrible gulf between expectation and reality where I’m blocking in a painting, waiting for images to emerge from the mess, knowing that every mistake will be baked in forever, making slapstick attempts to shield the hideous draft with my whole body when friends visit. But when I am actually at work on a painting I let go of all that shame. I get so absorbed I might forget to breathe, eat, drink, urinate – lost in flow-focus, crouched over my canvas between the TV and the couch. As you say, artists need necessary space, to focus and to dream… but I find I get by with surprisingly little of it. 

When I paint I kneel on the carpet because there is no space in my apartment for a studio (see: me having feelings about this when I went to see Hilma af Klint’s stupendous body of work), and because painting is a kind of prayer activity anyway. It’s an act of faith, isn’t it, to scratch out some small artwork in response to the shabby miracle of the world? Writing is like that too, a deeply interior creative practice that requires me to be open, curious, trusting and responsive to whatever drifts up from my subconscious. Don’t get me wrong I don’t think my processes are all that spiritually glorious, or my artwork particularly accomplished, but when the going’s good it is transporting, and as I give my energy over to a work it breathes life back into me. Am I a pompous loon, indulging in surrender to my own bad art, while the signals of my partner’s PS4 controller and sounds of gamer swordplay beam through my body as he slays monsters in Elden Ring? Sure. But I can’t not do it.

In painting and poems I’m meditative and open, but also working hard in pursuit of something that mainly eludes me – but maybe I’ll get it next time, and this is what keeps me growing (I hope) as an artist. It also keeps me hungry for others’ work. Yes to everything you said about the energising and uplifting nature of sinking into others’ art! Reading outside of myself is crucial to my writing, and looking carefully at other people’s visual art is essential to my painting. Even though making my own art is a solitary act, if I was in a vacuum without others’ work to delight in and explore, I doubt I’d make much of anything. Do you feel this with poetry?

Paula: Absolutely. The sheer joy that the poetry of others gives me is immeasurable. I thrive on it. Like an extreme vitamin boost. For me, the process of writing is intimate, secret, unfathomable, but it is in debt to writing communities past and present. Thus my continued drive to keep Poetry Shelf alive. And I know the doubt, that aching gap between reality and expectation, I don’t know if it ever goes away. I don’t know if I can ever bear to be published again, aside from children’s books. Tell me about your connections to poetry communities. I am thinking of Show Ponies for a start! I asked Chris Tse if he was a social poet, a hermit poet or something in between!

Rebecca: I totally agree on writing being a personal activity but also inextricable from communities around and before us! Even the solitary work of writing is not completely alone… I’m always reading so my writing is inevitably in conversation with other people’s work, and eventually a handful of trusted first-readers who are the unfortunate recipients of my little jokes. Often my poems are elaborate jokes for my friends. I don’t mean to diminish the poetry by saying that… But my Wellington poet-pals are the people whose response most matters to me, and whose support buoys me along, people I trust completely with my beautiful dark twisted fripperies. I also tend to be most motivated to write when there’s a deadline, which is often some event where I know (or hope) people will show up. So even though I’ve written alone for most of my life, I’d characterise myself as a social poet these days, and am so grateful to be part of a lively community.

Show Ponies is its own beast – Freya is the horsepower behind that. But it reflects the creative connections that are possible in a community like ours, where people are good sports with open hearts. There’s a lot of trust involved in doing something big and silly. It’s as vulnerable and sincere as any earnest confessional poem. But a bunch of poets who aren’t afraid of looking like fools together is a powerful thing. To manifest your popstar destiny you have to commit to the bit!

Rebecca: I’ve missed in-person events dearly through the pandemic, and it feels miraculous that Chris and I got to launch our books to people live and in the flesh. I’m interested in what you said here about bearing to be published. Stacey Teague recently asked posted on Twitter I’m trying to figure out why I should try to get my manuscript published and what motivates other people to get their books published and several people have just said “so you can have a party!” which obviously is something you can just do (well, depending on relative pandemic risk) without all the work of writing and vulnerability of publishing at all. For my sins, I was one of the people who’d said ‘party’ right away. But the launch party for a book is so important to me, bringing all someone’s solitary work into a shared public sphere – where the book now exists as its own object and something that will literally belong to other people, outside of the writer’s brain and screens. Aside from getting to celebrate the launch, the meticulously considered process of putting a manuscript together and then having the book itself exist in hard-copy for real has been so rewarding. I’ve been publishing poems around the place for ages, but this first book feels so precious. It’s been a very different process from blatting out last-minute poems and has taught me so much more about this craft. But the blessing of poems is that we can do whatever we want with them, right? There is no requirement to write books, or to publish the poems in any format.

lambs explode onto the scene like popcorn
kernels such freshly detonated fluff
antigravity mammals no heart leaps higher
than the skipping lambs flocked in dozens
barely touching the ground for the joy
full fortnight in which they invent their limbs
before they settle down to their true vocation
grazing themselves into flesh factories
babies babies babies babies
the loin the chop the shank
the juicy vacuum-sealed rack
and great value barbecue meat pack
stunned slit hung bled gutted skinned

 

from ‘Hardcore pastorals’

Paula: Exactly! I was out on a rare road trip across the harbour bridge this morning and it felt like the route was lined with poems! Just the sensation of travelling got miniature poems roaming in my head. Who knows what I will do with them!

I reviewed Meat Lovers for Kete Books and absolutely loved it. First up I loved its music. Like I really love it like I might love a breathtaking album. Do you play a musical instrument? What music do you have on repeat at the moment?

Rebecca: Gosh this is so lovely of you to say! Alas I can’t claim to be a musician. I hammered away on the piano as a child and can mimic several convincing barn animal noises… Maybe I could have a go at being a heavy metal singer, but realistically that’s because my friends are just staggeringly supportive at karaoke. 

I’m charmed by the sounds of words, which I guess is why I like lush OTT poetry – where it’s permissible to load up the adjectives just because they’re delicious, and make subtle music in that way. I truly was trying to think of Meat Lovers as a concept album, actually, with a Side A and Side B, and poems that can be heard alone but build something bigger when they’re experienced in order.

Lately I’m revving songs about sad cowboys and/or the devil. I love a broody lyric. Orville Peck, Nadine Shah, The Veils, Warren Zevon, Julia Jacklin, that sort of thing. The song I was trying to keep up with while running today was Sinnerman (Nina Simone), and the song I’m looping now to tune out and write this is called I just wanna lie in bed and drink my wine (various artists), which is a mood, and just before that it was Head alone (Julia Jacklin)

you have one job
which is to hold

this disturbingly large moth
battering the woven
basket of your fingers

every instinct whining to
close your fingers and crush it

or open your palms
set the fluttering insect loose
free your hands for other tasks

but this is your job
the having and the holding

 

from ‘Poem about my heart’

Paula: I also love the way your collection has heart. If I pick up a collection at the moment and it is devoid of heart it feels like a remote unreachable island. Yours mattered to me. What matters to you when you write? Does heart matter?

Rebecca: For these poems, certainly. This book is one big folded stained paper heart, clumsy and earnest. It’s anchored in my foundational love for the land I grew up on, gratitude for the life my parents gave me, and care for the animals we lived with – and also the felt complications in all those things. Then there’re my attempts to write about the frustrations and discoveries, failure and bliss of eros and romance – about which there’s nothing new to say under the sun but when has that ever stopped a poet? To be honest, usually when I write I try not to worry about whether a poem has heart. Something I’m doing as play might well turn into something true, but only if I don’t try too hard! 

In both writing and reading, different modes call to me at different times, from the sentimental to disaffected… Recently I was bowled over by Frank: Sonnets by Dianne Seuss, which is an often devastating book – poems of desperation, poverty, motherhood, addiction – but often dryly funny. Just observing things, reporting without telling a reader what to feel. Her poems often have a sting in the tail that makes my guts churn, like this one. I’m drawn to gutting poems, just as I am doleful music. 

In poems I’m interested in humour and irony and the sardonic, too – how the heartfelt can be reprocessed into more distanced ways of engaging with our feelings. In editing No Other Place to Stand, I was really interested in the poems that did this. The causes, effects, and injustices of climate change, colonialism and capitalism evoke big primary emotions – Fear, Anger, Grief, Hope, Etcetera – so sometimes the only way into these subjects without getting washed away by those feelings can be to approach through slant wit. Those poems have their place in the body of climate writing alongside the activist battle cries, mourning songs, and stirring polemics that they sit with in the book. Sidling away from pure emotion doesn’t imply a lack of care to me, necessarily – the poems are still being written! And the more I learn about the pressures facing our planet and peoples, the less inclined I am to believe there’s any one right way to respond in our heads and hearts. Plus the sentimental can be treacherous too – I was trying to be careful with this in writing my book, not glorifying my nostalgia or delivering undue condemnations, especially in how I speak about aspects of farming life.

it’s not real cottagecore unless you are up to the elbow in it
blindly groping down the blood-slick canal
as another contraction ripples around your knuckles
the cow is lain on her side licking a mud angel

your hand clutching at the calf’s limp hoof
head torch slipping over your brow
as you affix the chain and brace yourself
to pull and pull until an amniotic spill

when the calf’s head breaches unbreathing
still you pull and bring the whole body wetly
into the cold world you drag the whole darkness
drenched newborn around so the mother can lick

caked salts from her motionless baby

 

from ‘Sparkling bucolic’

Paula: So few women have returned to the farm in their poetry. I am thinking Ruth Dallas and Marty Smith. Ruth had a nostalgic yearning for rural life so wrote farm poems from her Dunedin home to make up for not being there! Marty grew up on a farm and returns to farmland in Horse with Hat. Your return is electrified by edgy realism, razor-edged fantasy, the whole glorious mash of childhood, ‘a rural gothic’. What pulled you back?

Rebecca: Can any of us grow out of our childhoods? The longer I spend away from the farm the more strongly I feel how that land, that life, has shaped me. I have loads of long-winded thoughts about how we live and work and eat and consume and produce on these colonised islands. In my poems it was important for me to write critically and lovingly about these things – to challenge the assumptions I absorbed about the ordinary/natural state of the world as a child, while also celebrating the gifts of my upbringing, the cruelly beautiful lessons and earthing sensory experiences and many ways of relating to other animals. I carry all this with me –I am never without it. I’m glad you registered that not all the book is straight reporting on my life though – there’s plenty of fantasy and fiction in there. Let poets tell lies! 

I think often about Ruth Dallas’ Milking Before Dawn. And Marty’s book made an enormous impression on me – she really encouraged me not to worry too much about being macabre! Rural gothic, as you say, is where I’m most at home. And I was so blessed to journey ‘home’ to the farm through these poems, as well as honour previous selves formed in that place – the girl encountering a mythical panther, the adolescent queen of weed-killers, the teen rapt in agonies finding reasons to fight in the rampant gorse in the riverbed… And I hope some of this work rings true for other queer rural kids, farmhands with a taste for verse, or anyone else seeking poems with bloody dirt still fresh under their fingernails.

Paula: When I first held a copy of my debut collection I burst into tears. There was an overwhelming gap between the poetry in my head and the object I held. I can’t explain it. Something to do with a physical thing and a mental thing. Your collection has just been launched into the world – in a venue with friends and family! How is the book’s arrival for you?

Rebecca: Agh, the tears! The gap between the final proof PDF being sent off to print and the arrival of the first book was hardest for me. I’m always spelunking new depths in the elaborate limestone cave system of my self-doubt (though thankfully have enough robust arrogance to keep making art regardless). Downing tools was difficult because I knew that from here on, the book wouldn’t get any better. I wanted this book to have a wholeness between the art and writing and fussed over it for aaaaages. But at some point the endless incrementally different PDFs became a blur, so it was time to end my meddling. The months away were tough because it was when the book was most abstracted from me, just some soulless files in the ether that I couldn’t ever touch again.

But then receiving that first copy of the book was magic. Tearing into the courier package with my teeth in the work elevator to find this actual book, its own thing, with its own weight and colour and scent, an actual living object in the world freed of my brain and screens… My favourite part of the physical book is the inner covers, with a meaty marbling that I learned to do on a version of Photoshop Elements so ancient that I actually own the program (rather than subscribing annually to “creative cloud”, ew). The pinkness peeps out when the book is read, and radiates onto the creamy paper of the pages. I loved the book so much from first sight, and am so grateful to everyone at AUP for helping manifest it. And the urge to tinker further has ceased. I accept it for what it is, now – a polaroid snippet of part of my work. I no longer worry that it doesn’t contain everything I could ever put on the page, or that the gap between the work preserved in the book and the work I’m presently more interested in making will only get wider. 

Launching with Chris was a dream come true. I admire his work so much, and it’s inspiring to see how his poetic interests have developed from book to book. As fellow Show Ponies, we both love the energy of a real crowd, especially in a space like Meow. We were on the same buzz about wanting to share a live event with our loved ones and communities. There’s something so special about Wellington’s poetry scene – the city is big enough for stuff to happen, but small enough to hold a close-knit community. I’m shriekingly aware that we are not post-pandemic and there was still risk looming over the event (not least cos we were both meant to fly to the Brisbane Writers’ Festival a few days later), but I’m glad we were able to gather, for my dearest mum and Razz to travel there, for Chris and I to thrive on costumes and theatrics, to demand that a handful of people offered us some obligatory praise, and, most importantly, to perform our dramatic recital of Dragula by Rob Zombie.

Rebecca Hawkes grew up on a sheep and beef farm near Methven and now maintains a tenuous work/work balance in Wellington city. With poems widely published in Aotearoa journals, Rebecca’s debut chapbook ‘Softcore coldsores’ was published in AUP New Poets 5 for the reignition of the series in 2019. Meat Lovers is her first full-length collection. Rebecca is an editor for literary journal Sweet Mammalian and the climate change poetry anthology No Other Place to Stand (Auckland University Press, forthcoming). She is a founding member of popstar poets’ performance posse Show Ponies and haphazard coordinator of the Pegasus Books poetry reading series.

Rebecca Hawkes website

Auckland University Press page

Ash Davida Jane reviews Meat Lovers on Nine to Noon

Paula Green review at Kete Books

Poetry Shelf conversation: Sarah Scott on paintings and poetry

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Leaven

Heapmeal. Piecemeal. Leafmeal. We all fall
into our chairs like collapsed parachutes. Each of us is known
to have been ground down. Each of us has wished
for a meal like this. Wholemeal. With some warmth
in the talk or in herself. In Leonardo da Vinci’s painting
of the last supper, the person beside you sprouts
nasturtium-green, seems attached to a branch – Rameal.
On this very fertile ground, another person has found the sea
is internal – watermeal – and seems draped in an only slightly
tousled world. But you are inside the
flesh of a pomegranate. Bloodmeal. Ravishmeal. Each of us lean
into the foreground of the other – Limbmeal
by Limbmeal – to see the source of sun is a person.
So much ground, from which everything can rise.

Sarah Scott

Paula: I am captivated by your poetry. The three poems included here, with their attachments to particular paintings, mesmerise on so many levels. Are they part of a wider project? What prompted it?

Sarah: My background is in art history and curating and I’ve always drawn and painted. I thought it might be interesting to have those things cross-pollinate with my creative work in poetry, and now I would love to see this to grow into a larger project. Writing poetry about art feels like a rich vein to me; there’s an endless supply of material, and there is something that happens between the artist/artwork and writer/poem, like a double shot of creativity.

I woke up from a dream one night and wrote down the name Fiona Hall. She’s an Australian artist whose work I must have come across and it had lodged in my subconscious. I sought out her work and I love her experimental, beautiful depictions of the natural world. My poem Amazonical was prompted by looking at a still of the video Amazonical from her exhibition Force Field.

In Leaven I looked at Leonardo da Vinci’s fresco The Last Supper – it was Easter or almost, when I wrote it, so ideas around ascension just floated up into the poem. My poem House by the Railroad, which I talk more about below, responds to Edward Hopper’s haunting painting of the same name.

Amazonical

maybe we go for our usual walk
& the way you talk
draws out one kid-soft living example:

maybe the sky looks
                        like a giant waterlily
except heavier, its Victorian under-structure
Built for Dusk

maybe mountains of babies were placed on its leaves
in a crystal pavilion in the 1830’s
a shoot to show what else there could be

in the universe more powerful than
when you touch gingerly &

my mouth is another opening flower
bruised as the natural world

 

Sarah Scott

Paula: I think we need a new word to describe the bridge between poem and artwork. Not exactly translation, transcendence, conversation, road trip.

Sarah: Yes, that’s so true! There’s the potential to speak in a slightly different language and transcend your usual ways of thinking. Anne Carson writes somewhere about the desire to find ways to stand back from yourself, in order to get closer in, and I think the words ekphrasis (poetry about art) and ekstasis (to stand outside of oneself, as in awe) seem curiously close, like they are knit together somewhere deep in the language. Ekphrasis poetry also feels collaborative, like a conversation – sparks from the art overbrim into your own creative process, taking you in unexpected directions.

Paula: What draws you to a painting?

Sarah: If an image draws me down into something deeper, I run with it. Fiona Hall’s video Amazonical immediately threw a confetti of ideas over me. It’s surreal, slant and beautiful. In the video-still I base my poem on, the image of a giant waterlily is overlaid on a landscape, in dusky, bruised colours, making me think about the vulnerability and exhaustion of the natural world, which seems critical right now. I also love the title, and sometimes it’s the title (like with poetry) that draws me in.

Paula: I love how your poems are a sweet trinity of sound, image and surprise. What is important when you write a poem?

Sarah: Sound is so important to me. The more mysterious grooves of prayer and song rather than ordinary speech resonate for me, and I like to let language lead. I’ve also realised that I think through images – they open up vistas through which to talk about other things. The process of writing is like travelling through those doors, toward someplace you didn’t know you were going, but hopefully, you’re happy you did.

House by the Railroad
for Phyllis

If a house could be you, in your pale blue swimsuit.
If you’d mouthed this house like gum.
If the letterbox still flapped open, making the sound
of one afternoon on the ocean.
If the railroad tracks carried blood
back to the plains of your heart.
If this house could make light of its own dark.
If I scalloped some sky from a Botticelli.
If we washed all the small talk off.
If your weatherboards were touched soft
by grass. If I could return here
on a recommissioned train. If we were on the rust
-filled platform again, me helping you down
and down, into the open sea.

Sarah Scott

Paula: Does autobiography enter the mesh?

Sarah: I feel like this process allows me to go down the tracks of my own life and thought without realising. Hopper’s painting House by the Railroad for instance, felt strangely comforting to me, even though it is a painting that speaks of absence, and my poem became a love letter to my late grandmother who I was very close to.

Paula: Tell me about the Poetry Lightbox Series you curate in Te Whanganui-a-Tara.

Sarah: The lightbox project has given me the opportunity to showcase the work of other poets in a space usually reserved for visual art. People encounter the lightbox on their commute to work or walking up Cuba Street, and I like that these might be people that may not seek poetry out, but there it is, in such an unexpected place. It’s a joyful project to me – creating room for quiet and beauty in the busy urban environment, and I’m hugely grateful to the poets who have contributed their amazing work for it.

Paula: Do you read much poetry? Can you share a couple of books that have left a mark on you recently?

Sarah: I’m smitten by the work of American poet Mary Szybist, whose collection Incarnadine refracts and reflects on depictions of the Virgin Mary from different perspectives. Her imagery is startling, and I can’t recommend her work highly enough. A friend in the States put me onto the ‘pastoral surrealism’ of James Wright. Reading Wright’s collected poems, I’ve had to pause quite often just to take it in – it’s quietly ecstatic – an amazing and rare reading experience.

Sarah Scott’s poetry has appeared in Landfall, Turbine |Kapohau and Fresh Ink. She currently curates the Poetry Lightbox Series in Te Whanganui-a-Tara where she lives with her partner and two sons. 

Poetry Shelf conversations: Bernadette Hall

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Like thumbprints, the moulding of the mountains
made by light and shade, the long spine
like folded paper, the crane of peace perhaps
but we are a long long way from that.

from ‘Tears and Wounds’ in The Lustre Jug (VUP, 2007)

Some poets you carry with you. Every new book is a significant arrival. The poetry of Bernadette Hall has been like that for me. Her writing touches so many levels, from heart to ear to eye to cheek. Her writing relishes warmth, connection, observation, experience. Living. Reading. Questioning. Ideas. As I travelled through Bernadette’s books again, looking for poem extracts to add to our conversation, I realised what a tough job I had set myself. I wanted to quote everything.

Needing a word
for the little jumps
on the surface of things

(that certain
blurring of the edges
like the sea’s turning back
or the gulls hitched up on elastic)

I’m still hanging around

My sleeves ripple like flags

from ‘the persistent levitator’ in The Persistent Levitator (VUP, 1994)

Paula: Thank you so much for agreeing to an email conversation with me. I have been fan of your poetry for a long time, so this feels like a much needed outing. I have no idea how it will unfold but I am picturing the two of us sitting down on the beach watching the waves roll in as we talk about books and poetry, about reading and writing. With a flask of tea. The sky is blue and the sun is shining but there’s a nip in the air because, after all, it is autumn.

It is so long since we have seen each other, such corrugated and challenging times for everyone. Books and writing have been an essential part of my day. Have you read anything, any genre, in the past year that has lifted you? Anchored you? Taken you apart and reassembled you?

Bernadette: A gorgeous afternoon here today, dear Paula. A slight tremor in the leaves of the trees that crowd around my little writing room. I like being backed into a small, dimmed space like this. As if I’m underground. I’ve spent much of the last few weeks way up on a high ladder, pruning dead wood out of olive and plum trees and a peach. And a hedge which I think is called taupata. I’m much in love with all this, being way up there in the air. My body knowing what it has to do. Shifting, balancing, rebalancing. No thinking. No talking. No words.

And then of course I do come back. To this place. To the big white desk. To the walls that are covered with books and paintings. The door open to the gravel path that goes one way to the front of the cottage and the other way to the street. And the world is full of suffering and outrage and there are words, words, words, and there are screams and there’s weeping and there’s the ripping shrieks of missiles.  And all the while the glaciers are melting. I’m not writing much at the moment. I haven’t got words for it. But I am reading. Voraciously, hungrily, reading and rereading. Mostly non-fiction. Some fiction. Not so much poetry. For poetry hurts. And I can’t say why.

Paula: To picture you pruning and then in your writing space is a welcome image in my head. I agonised over whether to reboot my blogs in 2022, but it came down to a love of words, books and writing connections. I have been thinking about the poets who have mattered so much to me since my debut collection in 1997. The way the lines of certain poets sung to me: This is what poetry can do. Were there poets important to you in your poetry beginnings?

Bernadette: I am so grateful to you, dear Paula, as a poetry connector. Every time you set me a little task, I feel the jolt of a writing impulse and am grateful. In the late 1970’s, not long after the birth of my third child, I joined a writing group run by John Dickson in Dunedin. That’s where I met the Americans, most memorably, John Berryman:

My daughter’s heavier. Light leaves are flying.
Everywhere in enormous numbers turkeys will be dying 
and other birds, all their wings.

from ‘Dream Song 385’

So, the scene is Thanksgiving. And the little child recurs. What resonates with me in Berryman’s work is not the whole but fleeting lines like these. The final stanza in this particular poem is one I go back to again and again. It reassures me that poetry is my place.

My house is made of wood and it’s made well,
unlike us. My house is older than Henry;
that’s fairly old.
If there were a middle       ground between things and the soul
or if the sky resembled more the sea,
I wouldn’t have to scold
                                             my heavy daughter.

When it comes to New Zealand poetry, my hand reaches time and time again to DIA by Michele Leggott (AUP, 1994), where the unsayable is said and gorgeously:

the heart in its cage stands up
desiring fine instruments     what shall we play?
laughter startles the sublime lyric c’est
le pays du desire and I its best gesture
wake in tears

from ‘CIRCLE’ in DIA (AUP, 1994)

I’m currently reading, and re-reading as I go because it’s difficult, a substantial piece of non-fiction, On Equilibrium by John Ralston Saul, published in 2001. When it comes to imagination, he describes it as ‘a rhythm of the body.’ So it’s something that’s there, ‘in our intellect, our perception, our body as a whole, our relationship to others, to what we create, to rooms, to atmospheres.’  What do you reckon? Thrilling, eh?

Paula: I love that! Imagination as a body rhythm. This week, I posted a review of Janet Charman’s fabulous new collection, The Pistils, and found myself navigating its ideas, heart and physicality through rhythm. I find both head and heart reactions, body reactions to the world, to a poem. Body music. You got me thinking how a poem is a set of rooms and corridors, atmospheres and relationships. How essential rhythm is as you write (and read).

I can remember analysing one of your poems (‘Rathcoola rain’) at Hagley Institute with a group of students. In your company! I opened the music of the poem as a way of walking through its ‘rooms and corridors, its atmospheres and relationships’. Its ideas, its physical reach. Your poems have always struck me in this way. What was important to you when you were writing poems at that time?

The rain is like mice scrabbling in the ceiling.
It’s like the crackling of plastic,
the first licking of flames in a handful of wood shavings,
the complicit turning of pages in hundreds of Mass books

It is slight and light and insistent.

from ‘Rathcoola rain’ from The Lustre Jug (VUP, 2009)

Bernadette: Survival! I needed an ‘island’ where I could just be. A secret place where words which I didn’t know were inside me might find their way out. A place, I guess, of instinct and intuition. A private, solitary space. For truth-telling. As far as I could feel it.  

Paula: I think it’s how I work. A secret island where I’ve no idea what paths I will track and what will fall upon the notebook page. Especially now when writing is a survival aide. Are you able to write at the moment?

Bernadette: More prose than poetry at the moment. Bits and pieces. Though there is one new one, a love poem in precarious times.

On adding up the loves of our lives  

When I walked into the room
my garden walked in with me.

When he walked into the room
his cat walked in with him.

I heard them whispering in the night.

‘Don’t worry, little man,’ I heard him say.
‘I’m sure the sea-wall will hold.’

 

Paula: Ah so lovely! I am writing both poetry and prose but not sure how I feel about publication. Do I want or need this? I am on my third draft of a children’s novel and love having this place of retreat. I also write a tiny poem each day to go with my Wordle result. It is automatic writing that taps into an autobiography of the everyday, found poetry, surreal tracks, the imagined, the felt. What draws you to prose? A patchwork quilt of prose?

Bernadette: Or a rag-bag! Prose is often something I’ve been invited to do. It’s like a job that makes sense before I begin. I think the poems come from a deeper, more unpredictable place. Or rather, the ordinary, lived experiences that are at the base of a poem shift of their own accord into a darker, less rationally controlled space. It doesn’t always happen, of course. So you learn to be patient, don’t you. You sort of despair yet over the years you begin to understand that that emptiness is actually part of the process. ‘You go back and back to the same leaping off place.’ When a poem fills itself up, you feel amazed and jubilant. I don’t write all the time. I come and go. I’m a Sagittarian, I have enthusiasms.

Tell me about your love of children. The way you have celebrated their poetry in beautiful books. Year after year you have exerted yourself encouraging, teaching, travelling round the country, all for the sake of young writers. In the same way, your Poetry Shelf has been essential and much loved as a connector and an instigator nation-wide for years. How did you find the time? Could you share with us one of your tiny poems and a children’s poem?

A man with two shopping bags
and a dog on the lead
makes it down the street

A kererū sleeps
on the telephone wire
at the top of our long drive

A tiger reads War and Peace 
to a family of little giraffes
under our carpet

Paula Green, April 24 (WORDLE poem)

The Glass Door

Open the glass door
and the whole world changes

after the splatter splatter rain
and the tiger tiger wind
and the pepper pepper hail
and the nose biting cold

the grounds steams like little dumplings
the birds sing like my warbling aunt
the cat rolls over on her tummy
and I hide in the shiny grass.

from Groovy Fish and other poems (Scholastic, 2019)

Paula: I have always loved writing for children. Walk into a classroom and poetry can liberate the most reluctant writer through word play. You don’t need rules or models. Imagination sets sail. The real world counts. It’s fun but you also navigate important ideas such as friendship, difference, what we want and need in the world. The joy of engaging with children, as they make poems matter, is beyond words.

 And yes, poetry comes out of a deep unpredictable place. So private, so intimate, so vulnerable. It’s an energy source. It fits into little and larger pockets of time.

I have connected with your writing, but also in the way you have mentored younger writers. How they hold you in such deserved esteem. Did your teaching/mentoring and writing feed each other? How did you find the time? I am thinking poetry time finds us!

Under Erebus

A woman is standing under Erebus
She has wrapped all her gifts around her,
including caritas.

A bulky mammal able to feed her young.

See the red flag with its purple shadow,
the flagged road curving towards tomorrow.

There is shelter here, off to the right,
a bunch of metal rods and a cloth.

You wonder if it’s going to be enough.

Bernadette Hall, from The Ponies (VUP, 2007)

Bernadette: You’ve hit the nail on the head when it comes to the dual highway of exhilaration when that liberation of words happens between like minds. So often it’s been blissful, talking up a storm, one on one, with someone who’s on the track, as it were. In love with language, compelled to make something out of that desire. Gifted yet unsure. Open, honest, trusting. It’s a huge honour to be trusted in that way. By someone giving some part of themselves away. So the creative intimacy, the vulnerability you refer to is somehow shared. Hopefully along with laughter. And cake and good coffee!

Do you remember the little poem I sent you for your birthday book a few years ago? It’s so slight and mysterious. Yet somehow it seems to pull together all I want to say about writing poetry. Maybe the very word emporium is along the lines of Janet Frame’s Mirror City. And our job is to entrust ourselves to it. Daniella Bagozzi, a fabulous Christchurch teacher, translated the little poem into Italian for you. That’s another string to your bow, isn’t it. That lovely operatic language. 

On entering the emporium

I understand now why the children fuss and stir
looking for some light relief.

Even a little bird will do, hopping oddly along a bench.

Paula: Well that was a special arrival – turning my laptop on when I turned 60 and falling upon a suite of poems as a birthday gift. Helen Rickerby made it into a beautiful book. These gestures seem even more important now.

And the idea of an emporium hooks. Michele Leggott used it on the flap of Mirabile Dictu (Auckland University Press, 2009): ‘If the effect is a kind of poetic emporium I would be very pleased, having learned that the word reached us through the Greek emporos, traveller or merchant, from poros, a journey, a prosperity, passing from one thing to another.’

Italian! We both spent time in another language. I enrolled at the University of Auckland for one year, but I loved Italian so much, I kept going back until there were no more degrees left. It was the beauty of the language, it was stepping into a wondrous literature from the Renaissance through to contemporary times. Above all, it was admiration for what the women were doing with pens and paintbrushes across the centuries. It has shaped me as a poet, an anthologist and a blogger!


Bernadette: Many moons ago, dear Paula, you asked me what I’d found enthralling in my recent reading. We’ve covered quite a lot of ground between then and now. And somehow you took me back in time. I’m thinking how lucky I was to spend four years within the Classics haven at Otago University, starting in 1964. The poet Iain Lonie was my tutor. Hearing him and Judith read their poems in a performance was breath-taking. Having Prof. Kenneth Quinn share with a couple of us the manuscript of his emerging translation of the lyrics of Catullus was challenging, as people say today. He asked for our opinions, this English phrase or word or another, and he repeated over and over that we had to be ‘sensitive’ to language.  He clearly thought we weren’t. It certainly got me thinking. Vincent’s ‘The Dark is Light Enough’, his brilliant portrait of Ralph Hotere, published in 2020, fills up so many gaps for me. I gobbled it up eagerly, twice through. So this is what was going on under my nose in Dunedin at that time. I played cello in the uni. orchestra conducted by Bill Southgate. I went to plays at the Globe Theatre. But I was shy, my sphere sequestered. I didn’t get to know the movers and shakers.

A month ago I was enthralled by Jane Campion’s film, The Power of the Dog.  Enthralled even more when I went on to read Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel republished in 2001 with an afterword by Annie Proux. My edition dated 2021. Thank goodness I entered the story this way, film then text with room for so much richness and complexity fully realised on the page.

Bernadette: I have two other current enthralments. Conversātiō – in the company of bees by Anne Noble with Zara Stanhope and Anna Brown (Massey University Press, 2021). It’s exquisite, a life-changer, rich in language and in image. It’s majorly desirable, it reignites in me a passion for making, poetry along with my beloved bee-garden.

You have linked my writing with music, Paula. I’m not conscious of that myself, but here’s a quotation from Zara’s essay: ‘ Music is a language of its own that touches nerves and ignites our sensory imaginary. Sound is felt.’  And I’m thinking ah yes, the sound of words. But what about ideas, what are the words saying?

Paula: Absolutely! Music leads to ideas, feeling, the physical world, sensations. Maybe music enhances the other effects and arrivals in a poem. I too loved Anne’s book. So beautifully crafted at the level of image, word and book production.

Bernadette: And finally there’s The Lobster’s Tale, text by Chris Price and photos by Bruce Foster (Massey University Press, 2021). I’ve just got my hands on it. I’ve not read it yet, just dipped in a little, stroked the paper, turned the beautiful pages. ‘Look to the life that goes on in your blind spot, the light that will eat you alive. Ahead remains a narrowing gap no creature can thread solo, by exercise of will or control, but only in collaboration: you might choose to carry each other as the kōura in berry carries eggs below her tail…..’ Already I know that this is something I need, it’s come at the perfect time, it will fill me up. And I am really grateful.

ii

Slowly the place takes shape. We are homeless
and dissolving in the silky water-laden air.
The dream was of my mouth full of crushed
glass, quite different from that other one
of stealing envelopes and being pursued by a monkey,
by a donkey, by a monkeydonkey and to be honest,
who cares. I met Joanna at 6.00pm
and we went to see SMOKE. Now that’s a film
and a half. My stars say you must abandon
complexity as if to have more than one word
in your mouth at a time is a vice. ‘You have to make
a choice,’ says the gum tree, pushing itself
up out of the lumpy asphalted playground.
‘Otherwise there’s nothing but bird noise in the aviary.’

 

Bernadette Hall, from ‘Fancy Dancing’, in Fancy Dancing (VUP, 2020)

Bernadette Hall is Otago born and bred. She gained an MA in Latin at Otago University She taught at high schools in Dunedin and Christchurch, and for the last eighteen years has lived in a renovated bach at Amberley Beach in the Hurunui, North Canterbury, where she has built up a beautiful garden. In 2008 Bernadette co-founded the Hagley Writers’ Institute in Christchurch. She was involved with the Institute as a tutor, a supervisor, and eventually the Patron, retiring from that role a couple of years ago. She has written eleven collections of poetry, including Fancy Dancing: New and Selected Poems 2004 – 2020 (VUP). She edited Like Love Poems (VUP), a gorgeous edition of poems by Joanna Margaret Paul and brought the poetry of Lorna Staveley Anker our attention in The Judas Tree (CUP). In 2015 she collaborated with Robyn Webster on Matakaea, Shag Point, an art /text installation exhibited at the Ashburton Art Gallery. She received the Prime Minister’s Award for literary achievement in poetry (2015) and was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature in Aotearoa New Zealand (2017).

Te Herenga Waka University Press page
Poetry Shelf review: Fancy Dancing

Poetry Shelf conversation: Vaughan Rapatahana

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Vaughan Rapatahana, Te Ātiawa, commutes between Aotearoa New Zealand, Hong Kong and the Philippines. He writes across genres, in both te reo Māori and English, and his work has been translated into multiple languages. He has published eight poetry collections and has a PhD from the University of Auckland (a thesis on Colin Wilson). His collection Atonement was nominated for a National Book Award in Philippines (2016). He was awarded the inaugural Proverse Prize in 2016. He appeared at Poetry International Festival at London’s Southbank (2019) and at Medellin Poetry Festival Poetry (2021).

Vaughan reads at Medellin Poetry Festival Colombia

Paula: In 2022 I am running a series of email conversations with poets whose work has engaged me, often over a period of time. In these jagged and uncertain days, it is a welcome chance to talk books, writing, reading, hearts and minds. And in our case, an opportunity to discuss your two new books (ināianei/now, cyberwit, 2021; mō taku tama, Kilmog Press, 2021). Has reading offered uplift, solace, diversion? Have certain books really stuck?

Vaughan: Tēnā koe mō tēnei Paula. Reading has certainly offered ‘busyness’, if there is such a word. I am fortunate to be involved in several projects right now and am doing a lot of reading. Of poetry, of short stories, flash fiction, creative non-fiction in both my main languages – te reo Māori rāua ko te reo Ingarihi. I have been very aware that ngā wāhine Māori especially are right at the forefront of current Aotearoa New Zealand writing. And I am impressed. Very impressed. Several collections have recently been published. Tupuranga Journal, Kei te Pai Journal, Saltwater Love Journal, Te Whē, Awa Wāhine, Atua Wāhine have all impressed me greatly, while I know that Cassandra Barnett has a new collection (which I have read) and Anahera Gildea and Alice Te Punga Sommerville also have collections out this year. And Briar Wood of course. I am also looking forward to Robert Sullivan’s new poetry collection, which I have just received. And Michael Steven’s too, eh. Then essa may ranapiri will impress us all with their own new set! Wow, this country has a mighty rich vein of poets.

Reading becomes religion.

Paula: If you made a roadmap of your own poetry writing, are there any significant presences, guides, lamps that you would mark?

Vaughan: To be honest, I did not get into poetry writing until about 2007, when I started to get into the craft more. I was well into my fifties. I do recall getting good advice from my old schoolmate, David Eggleton, and from James Norcliffe – we first met in Brunei Darussalam last century – about the poems I was learning to write back then.

I had always been very aware of Sam Hunt, as a  poet, and had a few dealings with him over the years before I got serious about writing poetry myself. To a degree he and James K Baxter had kept poetry in the public eye for a long period. Two distinctive Cancerians, eh. To digress, I remember drinking at the Kiwi Hotel with Baxter. Way back when. Hone Tūwhare was also a favourite of mine. And Jacquie Sturm became one, when I ‘discovered’ her work. There are a couple of her poems that really impressed and – probably – motivate the ‘political’ poetry I often find myself writing. And Hinewirangi too. I knew of her Moana Press collections and got what she was saying. As I noted earlier I am also very impressed by the wave of wāhine Māori poets right now. I won’t name more names as there are several, but I am sure you will see a lot of their work over the next few years.

But, on reflection, you know, the poet who really drove me, from waaaaay back when I never wrote poems, was Sylvia Plath. Too many pained shared echoes for me and I can always read some of her lines and be instantaneously moved.

ināianei/now, cyberwit, 2021 and mō taku tama, Kilmog Press, 2021

Paula: I think, among many things, I am drawn to your poetry because of the strong presence of te reo Māori. Yes it is music that adds to the poems, but it is also individual words that are like gold beacons on a musical staff – maunga, kōrero, manaaki whenua, manaaki tāngata, whakarongo. They take me back to growing up in Tai Tokerau. It is like being welcomed onto the marae that is poetry. What does it mean for you?

Vaughan: E tuhituhi ana ahau ki tāku reo tuatahi ināianei, i te reo Māori. Nā te aha? Nā te mea e pīrangi ana ahau kia whakapuaki whakatepe ngā mea katoa i tāku hinengaro, i tāku mānawa, i tāku wairua. Kāore e taea e au te tino whakapuaki ahau i tētahi atu reo. 

[I now write in my first language, the Māori language. Why? Because I want to fully express everything in my mind, in my heart, in my soul.

I cannot express myself fully in another language.]  

I think that the sentences above express why I now write a good deal of the time in te reo Māori. While at the same time utilising te reo Ingarihi [English] to twist back upon itself as a sometime circumlocutive, certainly dominating, even duplicitous tongue – or at least its fiscally motivated agents!

Paula: Thank you. Your two new collections, ināiane/now (2021) and mō taku tama (2021) both pulse with vital heart. Especially because you bring a deep-seated pain to the surface of your writing: the tragic loss of your son. The second collection gathers poems you have written to and for him since his death. The first includes some. At times I feel like a trespasser but, at other times, I am reminded why poetry matters to me. A poem can draw me deep into human experience and affect how I live and write my own life. This is what your poetry does. I am reminded of the gift of reading Iona Winter’s Gaps in the Light, who also tragically lost her son. mō taku tama is such a loving tribute and so beautifully crafted by Kilmog Press. The poetry says your grief. How was it, choosing to write this? Putting it out in the world?

Vaughan: Tēnā koe mō tēnei pātai. A good question.

I write in the introduction to mō taku tama (for my son) that composing poetry about him, his far too early demise, and my resultant various mixed feelings about this, keeps him alive – at least for me. In the end that collection, despite the sorrow imbued across the pages, is a celebration.

For Blake was a great guy and I miss him, even although I do often sense his presence. I want others to share not so much my grief , but my love for a wonderful son.

And I guess that I will at times write more poems which relate to him.

Thank you to Dean at Kilmog Press too. He mahi tino pai tēnei.

talking to my son in a funeral home
[tiwhatiwha pō tiwhatiwha te ao:
gloom and sorrow prevail, night and day]

I spoke more authentically
to you
during those thirty
estiolated minutes
than I ever did
when you were alive.

the stark room,
shaped more like a coffin
than what you lay in
quite composed,
unmoved by
my ascesis of angst,
my agenda of guilt.

the wooden floor
an eavesdropper
bouncing back a farrago
of belated apologies,
an echolation
of mea culpa.

those faded walls,
the fake flowers in a neutral vase
and the box of tissues
supplicating for the tears
I could no longer summon
during that one-sided
confession to myself.

 

Paula: I was thinking about the way you bring knitting into a couple of poems. I especially love ‘knitting a poem’ (read here). What we knit into poetry and ‘what exists beyond it’, and took me back to Blake. I have an uncertain year ahead and your beautiful two books made me hold my daughters closer. What do you think of the idea of poetry to keep us warm? Of poetry that is craft and heart gift? Or a different thought, a net even?

Vaughan: Yes, I guess we – as poets anywhere – are knitting and weaving and sewing together a final tapestry of sorts. It could be a long shawl to warm us up, to keep us snug. It could be some showy patterned piece to display our cleverness. It could be a blanket to stir up a fiery blaze within us – perhaps about an injustice. Equally it could be a fire retardant blanket created to quell raging conflagrations also within us. 

I think many of my own poems have elements of these. In the end though, I guess I do like to knit poetry into a coverall that – although it may be angry and sad and clever-dick at times – shares emotions, stirs up thinking, yet can comfort and console even in times of doubt and disaster. After all, eh – 

ko taku mahi
kia tuhituhi te tika
kia wewete ngā roimata
mō katoa ō tātou ki te tangi.
nō te mea,
ki muri ngā roimata anake tātou kia kata.

[it is my task
to write the truth
to release the tears
for all of us to cry.
because
only after the tears
can we laugh.]

Paula: Oh I love that riff on knitting and poetry, that ends with ‘coverall’! Did any poems surprise you when they reached the page? Were there some poems where you felt the stars aligned?

Vaughan: Yes, sometimes – but not often – a poem will arrive, if not ‘fully formed ‘at least well on the way. This usually happens when I am emotionally connected and the emotions have been brewing for some time. The stars aligned for example when I wrote ‘to my wife overseas during lockdown’ and ‘sixteen years’ (both in ināianei/now). I was surprised by the strength of my own feelings and the words just tumbled tightly onto the pages. Almost in perfect alignment.

Other poems are a travail. I can spend a lot of time and make several return trips to a poem before I am content with it. Especially if there is historical research associated with the kaupapa.

And then there are poems which never get completed. Despite many revisits. I guess that they just do not want to be written. Yet, anyway.

Paula: I sometimes think this is how it is as reader too. Sometimes the stars align, you cross the bridge and you are in the poem, and it is utterly wonderful. At other times you cannot sight the bridge and it is travail. But then the next day, the stars do align and you find your way into the poem.

Your poems are personal, but there is also a strong political spine. It seems to be a growing trend in Aotearoa. I welcome this. How important is this presence in your poetry? How does it connect with the poetics? How to write political poetry is wide open!

Vaughan: I don’t consciously write ‘political’ poems. Not in the sense of mainstream party political discourse.

However, when I feel, see, research injustice, whether contemporary or historical I write poetry that depicts the injustice and calls for recompense, recognition, realisation. In this way the poems are personal too. And so, important.

In the end, then, I write poetry from inside, and bugger the (political) ramifications.

Paula: Yes! The political is most definitely personal. You have produced a number of excellent teaching resources (including Poetry in Multicultural Oceania 1-3, Exploring Multicultural Poetry, Te Whakaako Toikupu: Teaching Poetry, Essential Resources) that open up poetry bridges for secondary school students. What prompted you to do this? And what are your aims?

Vaughan: You know – or maybe you don’t! – I was never any ‘good’ at poetry when I was at school.

I only started to ‘get’ it much later when I was overseas teaching English as a foreign language and I needed to somehow simplify the ordeal of comprehending how a poem was structured and only then any comprehension of what it might be ‘all about’ came through.

So all of these poetry teaching resources, commencing in Brunei Darussalam last century and carrying through Hong Kong SAR, to Aotearoa New Zealand and beyond nowadays, are designed to assist an EFL/ESL/poetry lost student – whether adult or at school somewhere – to open the poetry car door, start the engine, and then career down the highway of comprehension, switching gears up to appreciation and then writing their own.  Not an automatic this vehicle: you got to work on the gears a bit, eh.

More than this, I want multiculturalism presented as part of the entire package. This country is increasingly multicultural and I am fortunate to have many international poetry contacts to draw on when sourcing material. It is also why I produce bilingual resources, i roto i te reo Māori rāua ko te reo  Ingarihi. Such as Te Whakaako Toikupu.

There you go, then. These resources started off to help me work out poetry was ‘all about’ and then grew well beyond.

Paula: Such important resources. I have been wondering about our own personal poetry resources, the poems we have written over time. The poems that stick, whether sweet or sharp. I sometimes wonder: how did I write that? Can you share one of your poems that has stood out for you, for whatever reason?

And thank you Vaughan, for this warm and generous poem kōrero.

Vaughan: Sure, here is a poem. Sort of says a lot about what we have been talking about –

he waiata kai

at times,
writing a poem
   is like beans on toast.
easy to apply,
in cheap
economic actions
      & reasonably tasty.
especially if
garnished
with melted chyrons;
some cognoscenti cheese.

never anodyne
if served hot,
straight from the pot,
eaten with relish
& digested in
short, sharp bites.

the aftertaste
l  I  n  g  e  r  s
well                                       after               
you’ve scanned
    the can
in  the  cupboard,
  the      lines
on     the     page.

Cyberwit author page

Essential Resources page

Read NZ page

Vaughan reading his poetry on Youtube

NZEPC recordings of Vaughan’s poems