Tag Archives: Poetry Shelf playing faavourites

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Philippa Werry chooses Bill Manhire

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Too many Draculas

Too many Draculas are coming down the road.
It’s sunset, they’re fixing their heads on right.
They need the deep, dark night. They need blood
on their teeth, they’re wondering who they’ll meet.
Maybe me, maybe you, maybe some brand new Draculas.
Here take this stake, and see how many
you can get. Pick them off one by one. Don’t give up yet,
you can always use the cross. Get the slow ones first,
they’re often weak from starving. They think
they’re ageless, but Jesus take a look!
Anaemic is surely the word that comes to mind.
Their posture is good, but frequently they trip.
That’s when you act. Find out where they feed.
Now you can watch whole sections of the city crumple.
So much rubble, so much blood. Also too many Draculas
these days writing poetry: they should stick
to screenplays. Also, too many Draculas getting library cards,
they take out all the books and never bring them back.
And now they’re putting pressure on our hospitals.
They flop and lie about, just picking at their food.
They dream all day of secret lairs and lonely paths.
It’s always hit or miss. They blow us all a kiss
then promise to unlock an age of economic bliss.
Too many Draculas, too many Draculas,
all climbing up the waiting list.

Bill Manhire

from Lyrical Ballads, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2026

Too many Draculas

Last November, the National Library hosted ‘Laureates line up’, a poetry reading event featuring nearly all living New Zealand Poets Laureate.

During the evening, Bill Manhire read from his new book Lyrical Ballads which came out in February 2026. ‘I spend far too much time on social media’, he said, and mentioned a post about Dracula’s grave (or lack of) at a church in Whitby, before reading his poem “Too many Draculas”.  I didn’t follow the reference about why Dracula’s grave was (or wasn’t?) at Whitby (and why Whitby?) From a few puzzled looks around me, I thought others were equally mystified. 

Thinking about it later, I realised that it didn’t make sense because I hadn’t ever read Dracula, only Frankenstein – which has been the case with everyone I’ve mentioned this to; people think they’ve read Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) but they’re all thinking of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818).

So the first gift this poem gave me was the enjoyment of hearing Bill read it; the second was the unexpected pleasure of reading one of the classics for the first time, and the third was how it led me down so many fascinating rabbit holes (perhaps, a bit like Bill on social media). 

The story about how Bram Stoker came to be in Whitby and what inspired him his book is such an interesting insight into how creative imagination works, again, perhaps much like Bill’s, prompted by that social media post which could have been someone snapped a pic of the notice pinned to the door of St Mary’s Church in Whitby: ‘Please do not ask staff where Dracula’s grave is as there isn’t one. Thank you.’ 

I love the playfulness in this poem which seems both serious and not, and the way the end and internal rhymes lift and lighten it. The opening declaration (“Too many Draculas are coming down the road”) raises all sorts of questions: which road? Where are they going? How many Draculas is too many? The casual, almost flippant “Maybe me, maybe you”, five lines in, also makes us wonder who the narrator is addressing with their helpful and precise instructions about methods of approach: stakes, crosses and targeting the weaker ones first. I’m entertained by the way the narrator’s voice shifts at “Also… Also…” from its initial matter of fact tone to one that is more petulant, even whiny, the same complaint repeated five times: “too many Draculas”. 

“Also too many Draculas / these days writing poetry; they should stick / to screenplays”. Somehow you can read this declaration, treating these mythical beings as an accepted part of life, as both solid fact and weird non-nonsense simultaneously. The Draculas are muscling in on territory that isn’t theirs, taking up opportunities (poetry! library cards!) that the rest of us want for ourselves and simply not doing the right thing. (They take out too many books and don’t return them!) Perhaps Draculas are to blame for everything going wrong in our society, which might be a consoling thought – it‘s always good to have something or someone else to blame.  We think we know them from legend but who are they, really, the Draculas among us, making these wild gestures and promises? For a poem that seems so sure of itself, there are a lot of unanswered questions. By the final lines, the roaming vampires ( a word never used in the poem) have morphed from bloodthirsty and threatening creatures of the night to bumbling losers that ‘flop and lie about’, stuck on hospital waiting lists. 

Philippa Werry

This is a poem that is “delightfully weird” (as it says on the THWUP website about the whole collection) but somehow hard to stop thinking about.

How Dracula Came to Whitby page

Bram Stoker’s visit to Whitby 

The notice on the church door 

Poetry Shelf celebrates a Laureate evening

Bill Manhire (CNZM’)s latest book, Lyrical Ballads (2026). His books include Wow (2020), Some Things to Place in a Coffin (2017), Tell Me My Name (with Hannah Griffin and Norman Meehan, 2017) and The Stories of Bill Manhire (2015). He has won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry five times, and was New Zealand’s inaugural Poet Laureate. He founded and directed the International Institute of Modern Letters at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. He has edited major anthologies of New Zealand literature, including, with Marion McLeod, the now classic Some Other Country: New Zealand’s Best Short Stories (1984). In 2018 Manhire was awarded an Icon Award Whakamana Hiranga from the Arts Foundation.

Philippa Werry writes fiction, non-fiction, poetry and plays for children and young adults. Several of her books, both fiction and non-fiction, have been shortlisted for awards, including her verse novel Iris and Me, a fictional biography of writer Robin Hyde, which won the Young Adult section of the New Zealand NZ Book Awards for Children and Young Adults in 2023. Her most recent book is Degrees of Happy (Cuba Press, 2026).

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Morrin Rout chooses Dinah Hawken

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The Tray

He brings up the morning coffee
on the faded red tray that for decades
our right hands have gripped, raised
and carried towards each other
through the compatible air.

Dinah Hawken
from Peace & Quiet, THWUP, 2026

Dinah Hawken received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement last year. It recognises her many years of writing supremely crafted, perceptive and insightful poems centred around social justice and the environment. None of these are didactic but lead the reader to quiet contemplation and, sometimes, quiet rage at the state of the world we are bequeathing to our whanau.

Her latest collection is called Peace & Quiet and both words in the title reflect the tone and intention of the poems perfectly.

Being of a similar age to Dinah, many of these works resonate with what I am experiencing and thinking about. She lives at Paekākāriki in sight and sound of the sea so her daily interaction with the ocean is very much part of her work. I too live within sight and sound of the sea, in my case, Whakaraupō, Lyttelton Harbour and my mood and thoughts are absolutely affected by what is going on outside my window.

Some of her poems are about the deaths of friends and family, what they don’t have to know or worry about anymore and how the natural world provides some solace and acceptance of the inevitability of these events.

The poem I have chosen, which I asked her to read in my recent interview with her on Bookenz, says so much in so few words. My husband, Jonty died in 2003 and of the multitude of ways in which I miss him, one of the most enduring is the daily interactions that are often tacit and routine. The long and loving relationship that Dinah and her husband share is captured entirely in the poem and the last line could not be bettered.

Morrin Rout

Dinah Hawken is one of New Zealand’s most celebrated poets. She was born in Hāwera in 1943 and trained as a physiotherapist, psychotherapist and social worker in New Zealand and the United States and has worked as a student counsellor and writing teacher at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. Of her ten collections of poetry, four have been finalists for the New Zealand Book Awards. Her first book, It Has No Sound and Is Blue (1987), won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Best First Time Published Poet. A recent poetry collection is Faces and Flowers: Poems to Patricia France (2024), and other recent collections include Sea-light (2021), Her most recent collection is Peace and Quiet (2026) Dinah lives in Paekākāriki.

Morrin Rout has spent over 30 years organising literary events and festivals and producing and presenting book programmes on national and local radio. She is the former Director of the Hagley Writers Institute and still co-produces and presents a weekly book show, Bookenz on Plains Media which is available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Book interview with Morrin: Lauren Keenen, Dinah Hawken, Ingrid Horrocks

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Erik Kennedy picks Jane Arthur

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Disgusting

Every now and then I get a rippling rush of vertigo

like waves of seasickness          or a flashback to
lying down too fast on a waterbed       or

an inner-ear issue

Sorry to talk about this but lately
I’ve been dreaming about intense messy delicious
relationships with romantic hopeless addicts and I am left

with so much longing                                      I want it

like I’m in love with a past version of me

carrying around something heavy and literal in my body

It’s the humidity          it’s making my dreams
grimy and it turns out I’m attracted
to sour sweat               to things I shouldn’t be                      

So much longing
for the disgusting         I yearn             I wonder what went wrong
and when        to give me this psychology      
but I guess

we’ve all got our kinks                         When does what we do
change who we are                 

We should die before we turn bad\
before the soap writers run out of storylines
and it turns out                                   we were the serial killer all along

I kneel to the mess in my bedroom

I kneel to the mess in my past             to the dust       to death
which is incomprehensible      to dangerous longing   not even kidding

I kneel to the internet of vacuous memes        give it praise

I kneel to do up my laces         The dog chases the cat who

chases the fly               it’s all a big misunderstanding

each of their motives aligns to a different reality
and it nearly                            breaks my heart

Jane Arthur
from Calamities!, THWUP, 2023

‘Disgusting’ by Jane Arthur is not ‘deceptively simple’, to use a hackneyed phrase. It is actually simple in the best way. It means what it says, and what it says is kind of awful, which I love to see in poetry. This is a poem that is full of beauty on the level of the phrase but that also wallows in filth and bad decisions (‘it turns out I’m attracted / to sour sweat’, ‘I’ve been dreaming about these intense messy delicious / relationships with romantic hopeless addicts’). Arthur shows a worthy commitment to empathy, but, refreshingly, a commitment to personal change is not proposed. Imagine a self-help book that ends a third of the way through—this is the world of ‘Disgusting’.

I once took a graduate seminar about ‘the abject’—you know, pus and shit and puddles of deliquescing matter and bodies riddled with illness and madness—the kind of phenomena that are hard to look at and hard to look away from. For me, Arthur’s writing in this poem captures the eternal fascination exerted by the abject, which is a subject that many writers avoid, possibly because it induces feelings of guilt. Well, Arthur is a great poet of guilt:

So much longing
for the disgusting        I yearn             I wonder what went wrong
and when         to give me this psychology

The most powerful moment of yearning in the poem is for the sweet release of death. ‘We should die before we turn bad’ is a great line because it’s about moral decay, obviously, but also about rotting (‘turning bad’) like a cucumber in a fridge.

I find most of Arthur’s work profoundly funny, and this poem is no exception. Little throwaway lines like ‘we’ve all got our kinks’ and ‘not even kidding’ have the effect of being taking-you-into-my-confidence asides which humanise the speaker and make her seem charming in spite of the picture she’s painting of herself.

And of course a highlight here is the poem’s ending, which can’t fail to move a reader with its sudden, frank little yelp of despair:

The dog chases the cat who

chases the fly              it’s all a big misunderstanding

each of their motives aligns to a different reality
and it nearly                            breaks my heart

Calamities!, the book that this is drawn from, is a favourite of mine. Some of it is less depressing than this, but don’t let that put you off.

Erik Kennedy

Jane Arthur is the author of two poetry collections: Craven (2019), which won the Jessie Mackay Prize for Best First Book of Poetry in 2020, and Calamities! (2023). Both are published by THWUP and both were longlisted for the Ockham NZ Book Awards. She also wrote the children’s novel Brown Bird (2024, Penguin), which was a finalist in the NZ Book Awards for Children and Young Adults. Jane lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington with her family.

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

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Adrienne Jansen chooses Peter Rawnsley and Gabrielle Huria

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Origins

Born in a time of war,
I rose at dawn to watch
troop ships gather
in Wellington Harbour.

I come
from pressed uniforms,
boarding schools, the smell
of pipe tobacco.

I come
from Hail Marys and Paternosters,
fragrance of incense, the smack
of a strap.

I come
from the pungency of green needles,
sitting quiet in the crown of a pine tree.

I come
from moonlight, appassionata and
a passion for the music of Beethoven.

I come
from a chatter-box kid
and the cut and thrust of argument

I return
by the chatter, the music,
the tree and the discipline,
to the quiet harbour.

Peter Rawnsley
from Paper Cups (forthcoming Marmac Media)

Adrienne Jansen:

I’ve been reading the third collection of poems by Peter Rawnsley. Peter’s second collection was published by Cuba Press, who describe him on their website as ‘one of Aotearoa’s best-kept secrets.’ I agree, he’s a much under-recognised poet. He combines a sharp intellect, a wide reading base – particularly in science – a love of the natural world, a love of music, and a thoughtful Catholic faith. That’s a big spread.

And that’s why I chose his poem ‘Origins’, which opens his forthcoming collection. It’s a down-to-earth poem, that doesn’t have some of the imaginative leaps and mystery of some of his other work, but it draws together each aspect of his life in that succinct way that poetry can. Form is very important to Peter, and his choice of three 4-line stanzas, three 3-line stanzas, then one last 4-line stanza, will be careful and deliberate. I often don’t pay much attention to form, so it’s always interesting to see this unobtrusive but careful use of form. And of course the poem returns to where it began.

I’ve also been reading Pakiaka, which is the first volume of poetry from Gabrielle Huria (Ngāi Tūāhuriri/Ngāi Tahu). It’s one of those small beautifully produced books of poetry which feels like a gift. There’s a long poem in it called ‘How to Be a Good Ngāi Tahu.’ Rather than describe it, I’m going to include a couple of excerpts here. But go and find the whole thing. Read the whole book.

“Know your kai, how to get it, where to get it, how to work it, how
to store it, and how to cook it.

Have a freezer packed with kai.

Have much more kai than you need just in case a relation calls,
in which case over-feed them with everything you’ve gather.

Be ready to make a big feed 24/7 – there’s no such thing as a
snack.”

“Have rights to a tītī island.

If you don’t have rights, marry someone who has.

If you can’t do that, have a standing annual order with a birder
for a few buckets.

On the island if you have rights, you have a say.

If you married into the rights, keep your mouth shut – just do the work.

Don’t be a slacker every anywhere, especially not on the island.

Ngāi Tahu know how to work.

Lazy Ngāi Tahu must be half something else, probably from
the north.”

Gabrielle Huria
from Pakiaka, Canterbury University Press, 2025

Adrienne Jansen writes poetry, fiction and non-fiction for both adults and children. She’s published several collections of poetry, and is the co-founder of Landing Press, a small Wellington publisher of poetry that many people can enjoy. In 2026 they are working on an anthology of poems about water. She lives at Tītahi Bay, north of Wellington.

Peter Rawnsley is a retired public servant living in Porirua, New Zealand. Paper Cups, his third collection, will be published by Marmac Media, July 2026. He has also published Light Cones (Mākaro Press 2018) and Stones & Kisses (Cuba Press 2024.)

Gabrielle Huria is Ngāi Tūāhuriri/Ngāi Tahu. She lives with her extended whānau at Tuahiwi in North Canterbury. Gabrielle is a keen practitioner of Ngāi Tahu mahinga kai (traditional food gathering). Her collection of poems Pakiaka is part family chronicle and part a settling of accounts – a depiction of being Ngāi Tahu in a modern world.

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Michele Leggott picks Ben Brown

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I am the Māori Jesus
A response to Baxter

i AM the Māori Jesus
And i don’t like
mussels and parāoa
Give me fish ‘n’ chips
with tomato sauce
Fresh white bread
and loads of butter
Butter makes
this country great
So feed my whenua
to the cows
for all i care

My father Hōhepa
worked at Watties
where they made the sauce
at least until redundancy
Now mother Mere
works behind the bar
at the Metropol Hotel
and does some cleaning
in the mornings

And you
will know me
by my Kēnana hair and
my wrap-around sunnies
whose eyes
you cannot see
But trust me
they have seen
my other Father’s light
and not
been blinded

So i can say
that i have met
the Devil personally
and been tempted
by his retinue
of sweet-mouthed whores
and silver salesmen
dripping promises
of Mammon
and extravagance

Yet underneath his
snakeskin smile
he wears a bland suit
of a nondescript shade
that fits him quite well
and he spends his days
conducting secretaries
who write infringement notices
demanding restitution

And i have been up to the temple
where i met the moneychangers
who offered me
a competitive rate of interest
and a little pink plastic pig
to put my shrapnel in
and fee rebates and a free holiday
in the Republic of Fiji to go with my
Visa card and my mortgage

But my other Father’s house
has many mansions
and i don’t pay no rent
so i don’t need no mortgage
and anyway the bankers
turned out to be wankers
who didn’t know their numbers
But all that imaginary money
went into somebody’s pocket
Sure as Arabs own oil
and your arse points downhill
and Mom & Dad America
got foreclosure sales
and dead kids in the desert but
STILL THEY BELIEVE

Meanwhile there’s a whale
needs saving
up near Kaikōura
but the bros got there
before DOC did
and they ate the bugger
back at the marae
like so many loaves and fishes
They made taonga whakairo
carved treasures
from his teeth and bones
So honouring the beast
and showing its
true worth

i shot up in a filthy flat
with a skinhead panel beater junky
who had his own name
tattooed on his dick
that you could only read
when he was hard
The implication being he was hard
when the needle bit the flesh
and spelled BARABBAS
i sold him
the last taste of his life
and saved his junky soul
in doing so

i lay down with
a wahine named Mary
Ah sweet Mary
So many Marys
and not enough time
to lie down with them all
And don’t get Freudian on me now
though she does bear

some small resemblance
to my mother
given grace
And bless her anyway
Her willingness to suffer all
the rage of Men
Yet freely shed her tears
with love
upon my tired
feet

i walked the roads
i raised a deadman from
the street beneath a tree
where pigeons routinely
shat upon him
dead or alive
i shared his bottle afterwards
drank a cheap toast to his life
before he told me to
piss off
But before you go boy
give me back my bottle

It don’t matter eh
Coz i got my brothers around me
My apostles twelve in all
or maybe thirteen i dunno
Been a while since i counted
but we’re a righteous crew
Staunch as
Patched up
Yo-fuckin-yo-bro

i got Jake the muss
and Tū the freezing worker
and Billy T James
in a black shearer’s singlet
i got Hone Tuwhare now
there’s a man who likes his mussels
i got a Rastaman from up the coast

i got several of his brothers, hell
i got the horses they rode in on
i got a slick-suited lawyer
from the city
and i even got you Hēmi
Every crowd needs a doubter

So you won’t catch me
walking on Wellington Harbour mate
Too bloody cold and windy eh
and too many bureaucrats pushing
compliance with occupational
safety and health regulations

Na not me man
i’m off up north with the bros
to the Hokianga
Choice dak eh
and a nice place
forever to leave from
Warmer too bro

Ben Brown


“First publication of I am the Māori Jesus was on a CD I recorded in 2009, for Dogtown. I performed it for two or three years before recording. I recorded Dogtown with Creative NZ funding. It was a 5 track CD with beats recorded independently as Fly on the wall productions. 
Had fun doing that.”
Ben Brown

Michele Leggott Plays Favourites

What is the time of a poem? Or, rather, how many times does it have? When Ben Brown walked to the front of the Old Government House lounge in Auckland in 2010, his signature poem ‘I am the Māori Jesus’ was already well on the way to becoming part of the long conversation that is Aotearoa New Zealand poetry.

The occasion was PHANTOMS AT LOUNGE, a collaboration between the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc) and Phantom Billstickers, organised by the late Jim Wilson to launch another edition of his poem posters. Ben was part of the line-up that read poem posters for poets, local and international, who couldn’t make it to the event. Then he launched into ‘I am the Māori Jesus’ and his Auckland audience — students, poets, musicians and general hangers-on — sat up and tuned into the extraordinary echo chamber Ben was creating right in front of us:

“You can’t get through a poetry gig in Aotearoa without some kind of Baxter buzz so this is mine. On the Writers’ Walk in Wellington are cement words facing the sea from the Baxter poem that begins:

‘I saw the Maori Jesus
Walking on Wellington Harbour.
He wore blue dungarees.
His beard and hair were long.
His breath smelt of mussels and paraoa.
When he smiled it looked like the dawn.’

And they are some beautiful words for a good Catholic white boy from Otago with Māori sensitivities. The only problem I have with them you see is:

i AM the Māori Jesus
And i don’t like
mussels and parāoa
Give me fish ‘n’ chips
with tomato sauce
Fresh white bread
and loads of butter
Butter makes
this country great
So feed my whenua
to the cows
for all i care”

Lyttelton poet and performer Ben Brown (Ngāti Paoa, Ngāti Mahuta), takes on the poem James K Baxter published only once in his lifetime, in a little magazine in 1966, opening a dialogue between Pākehā observer and Māori subject that looks straight back at the Jesus figure Baxter posits and which Ben rejects. Detail by detail the younger poet takes apart Baxter’s water-walking Christ and his mission among the urban down and out, putting in its place a different lived experience.

There is humour, cockiness, and harder truths than Baxter was prepared to entertain. Nevertheless Ben’s poem, in the words of Paula Green, jams with Baxter’s from the moment its speaker declares ‘i AM the Māori Jesus / And i don’t like / mussels and parāoa’. It brings on board Alan Duff’s Jake the Muss and Apirana Taylor’s Tū the freezing worker; Billy T James and Hone Tuwhare (‘now there’s a man who likes his mussels’). It might even loop in McCahon’s enormous ‘I AM’ canvas, Victory Over Death 2, with its wall-hung words to  walk past and wonder at.

In 1966 Baxter couldn’t know he was already on the road that would lead to Jerusalem and the commune he founded there three years later. But his poem knows, and Ben certainly knows, and that is why the later poem heads up north to a home place on a harbour that is the equivalent of a long drive up the Whanganui River.

‘I am the Māori Jesus’ is the kind of poem you don’t want to end. It’s rich in texture, amused as well as irritated by the older poet’s construction of a protagonist meant to draw down sympathy for the oppressed, Māori and Pākehā alike. Except, says the younger poet, they aren’t alike and why should we pretend they are.

Does ‘I am the Māori Jesus’ extinguish ‘The Maori Jesus’? Hardly. Instead, it amplifies the earlier poem, widens its circle of reference and provokes its later audiences with wit and graceful substitutions that link back to Baxter’s poem.

Then there are the first lines of ‘The Maori Jesus’ in stone (actually concrete) set into the pool on the northern side of Te Papa as part of the Wellington Writers’ Walk. On the opening day of the walk in 2002, Baxter’s son John McColl Te Wharematangi Baxter (1952-2026) leapt into the pool and threw arcs of water over his father’s words. His mihi was caught on camera by Evening Post photographer John Nicholson and remains one of the most memorable moments of cultural consonance I can think of.

The two poems, decades apart, are perhaps best understood in their powerful performances by poets who know how to send waves of sound over any audience that wants to listen. Listen to Ben Brown performing ‘I am the Māori Jesus’ for nzepc’s Six-Pack Sound in 2016 (link below). Listen to David Eggleton performing ‘The Maori Jesus’ against an atmospheric soundscape by Wellington composer David Downs for the CD Baxter released in 1999.

What is the time of a poem? Any time a voice carries it into the future.

My thanks to Ben Brown, David Eggleton, Paula Green, Paul Millar, Tim Page and Philippa Werry for their help with piecing together the layers of this appreciation.

Michele Leggott

A timeline for two poems

1966: James K Baxter publishes ‘The Maori Jesus’ in Eikon, issue 2, December 1966, p. 18. Reprinted in Collected Poems, edited by John Weir, Oxford University Press, 1979, pp. 348-49. Reissued in 1995 and 2004.

1997: Bruce Morrison and Paul Millar include ‘The Maori Jesus’, recorded by Michael Hurst, in their TV documentary The Road to Jerusalem. Commentary and poem at 58:40:

1999: David Eggleton records ‘The Maori Jesus’ for Baxter CD with a soundscape composed by David Downs:

2002: Wellington Writers’ Walk features the first stanza of ‘The Maori Jesus’ in a pool on the northern side of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, facing the harbour.

2007: Ben Brown (Ngāti Pāoa, Ngāti Mahuta) performs ‘I am the Māori Jesus’ for a Green Party fundraiser at the Lyttelton Coffee Company. The poem is recorded in 2009 for his CD Dogtown (2010).

2010: Ben performs ‘I am the Māori Jesus’ for PHANTOMS AT LOUNGE, 28 April 2010.

2013: ‘I am the Māori Jesus’ appears in Ben’s debut poetry collection Between the Kindling and the Blaze, published by Anahera Press. Review by Paula Green for Poetry Shelf.

Ben Brown’s The Kindling and the Blaze is poetry from the heart

2016: Ben records ‘I am the Māori Jesus’ at the University of Auckland for Six-Pack Sound, 30 March 2016.

Ben Brown (Ngāti Mahuta, Ngāti Koroki, Ngāti Paoa) writes children’s books, short stories and poetry for children and adults, general non-fiction, freelance articles and memoir. In 2006 he won Best Picture Book with artist/illustrator Helen Taylor in the NZ Post Children’s Book Awards with their book A Booming in the Night. His poetry has been published in various anthologies here and around the world and Radio NZ and The Radio Network have also recorded him. In 2011 he was the Maori Writer in Residence at the Michael King Writers Centre in Devonport Auckland. His poetry collection Between the kindling and the blaze was shortlisted in the 2014 Nga Kupu Ora Aotearoa Maori Book Awards. In 2021 he was appointed inaugural Te Awhi Rito New Zealand Children’s Reading Ambassador. He was the Te Kaipukahu University of Waikato Writer in Residence in 2024. He is also a father of two, which he considers his best work to date.

Michele Leggott’s recent publications include Face to the Sky (Auckland University Press, 2023) and Groundwork: The Art and Writing of Emily Cumming Harris (Te Papa Press, 2025), co-authored with Catherine Field-Dodgson and long-listed for the 2026 Ockham award for illustrated non-fiction.