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Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Murray Edmond

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INTERVIEW WITH A POEM: ‘Night Shift 1’ (1970)

Night-Shift 1

I get up at 4.00pm
& buy a cheese
3 tomatoes, an orange, & a tin of fruit juice
as usual;
also a paper.
I return to the kitchen
& put 2 tomatoes in the fridge for midnight,
cut off a piece of cheese
& put the rest in the fridge,
also for midnight;
then I open the tin of fruit juice,
two triangular holes neatly opposite each other;
I wish I had had time to put it too in the fridge to cool.
When I come to sit down at the table
I find Kathryn is reading my newspaper.
I eat the tomato, the piece of cheese & the orange;
also I drink the tin of fruit juice.
I feel I need some exercise,
So I go for a walk as the sun goes down.

Murray Edmond
from Entering the Eye, Caveman Press, 1973
First publication of this poem was in Landfall 98, June 1971, pp.122-123 (lovely cover by Pat Hanly – please note, Landfall then cost $1.00!).

Interviewer: Today we are speaking with a poem, which hasn’t been seen for many years, but has been reprinted here today. I began by asking the poem how it persuaded the poet to get re-printed:

Poem: Truth to tell, I didn’t even recognize the old bugger, it’s been so long.

Interviewer: So, did you get in contact . . . I mean, was it you who approached him?

Poem: Pure coincidence. I was on my way down to the mall. I work down there, back of the supermarket. Opening boxes all night. It’s a job. I usually stop off at the local – have a beer and a falafel. I took a short cut down a street I’d never been before. I’ve completely lost contact over the years. Once you’re written, that’s it. Most of them don’t give a monkey’s after that.  They go off and they write different kinds of poems. But we’re pretty stuck as we are. As we were, so to speak.

Interviewer: So, what happened?

Poem: This old guy was mowing the berm. Pushing an old hand mower. I walked right past him. He’d looked up and caught my eye. I thought: why is he looking at me like that? I’d gone about twenty paces further on, and I stopped. It was him.

Interviewer: So, did you say hullo?

Poem: I turned back and had a second look. It was him all right. We were staring at each other. Just staring like. Then we both pretended not to know. He was the first to break. He put his head down and started pushing the mower like fury.

Interviewer: So, nothing happened.

Poem: It had been too long. Like seeing an old lover across the street.

Interviewer: When I read you, I don’t see much love in you.

Poem: I like to think I’m a love poem.

Interviewer: Really?

Poem: True.

Interviewer: How do you work that out?

Poem: I don’t. It’s what I am.

Interviewer: I don’t see it. Who’s the lucky . . . whoever?

Poem: Not that kind of love. All youse interview bods are the same. Love! For the fucking world. And all its shit. The sun, the cheese, the fridge, the tin of juice, the fucking orange, bro!

Interviewer: Do you call that love?

Poem: I call it love. What do you call it?  Sorry! “We ask the questions”. Mind you, maybe you’re a bit right. Turned out we had the same girlfriend once. That was a bit odd. I’d forgotten all about her. I wanted to ask him ask: Where is she now? But I didn’t.

Interviewer: Was that Kathryn?

Poem: Kathryn?

Interviewer: In the poem. You should know: “I find Kathryn is reading my newspaper.”

Poem: Oh, Kathryn! No, no.

Interviewer: So, who was Kathryn?

Poem: She’s still there. She’s in the poem. She’s reading the newspaper.

Interviewer: Are you just making this up?

Poem: No, no. Cross my heart. Well, yeah. I guess. I’m aware that I’m just made up. “Every time I wake up, I’m putting on my make-up . . . “ Don’t look so worried, bro. Aretha Franklin!  I’m not ‘making up’ to you. Swear. One thing I am proud of is my semi-colons. Did you notice? Didn’t think so. And did you notice the lack of pull-tabs back then? Do your homework. Thing is I’ve worked night shift for years. They say it stuffs your health. Stuffs your . . . what’s it called? Psyche? Is that the word?

Interviewer: You’re the poem. You should know.

Poem: Tell me: how do you get a job like yours?

Murray Edmond: born Kirikiriroa 1949; lives in Glen Eden, Tāmaki-makau-rau. Recent publications: Time to Make a Song and Dance: Cultural Revolt in Auckland in the 1960s (Atuanui Press,  2021) – cultural history; FARCE and Sandbank Sonnets: A Memoir, (Compound Press, 2022) – 2 books of poems; Aucklanders (Lasavia, 2023), a book of 15 short stories.

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Richard von Sturmer

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My recent book, Slender Volumes, is made of 300 seven-line poems. Really they are 300 stories, told in different modes: the realistic, the autobiographical, the historical and the surreal. One, popular with audiences when read aloud, is number 216, which concerns Mr Moth and his dairy:

There was a dairy at the end of the road owned by Mr Moth. Everybody knew it as Moth’s dairy. He sold ice blocks made in a special mould – the stem being a popsicle with a large wing on each side. The ice blocks came in different colours and were named Emerald Surprise, Ruby Splendour and, best of all, the Tiger Moth. The dairy always shut its door at dusk. No fluorescent lights were switched on. Mr Moth liked the darkness.

What seems to be a figment of my imagination, in the surreal mode, in fact came from a walk around Onehunga Bay Lagoon. On this particular walk my wife Amala and I encountered an old-time resident who told us that many years ago there used to be a dairy opposite our house on Normans Hill Road. The dairy was owned by a Mr Moss. I misheard him, and thought he said “Mr Moth”. This led to a reverie about Mr Moth and his dairy, which I wrote down when I got home.

Richard von Sturmer is a New Zealand writer. He was born on Auckland’s North Shore in 1957. His recent works are the acclaimed memoir, This Explains Everything (Atuanui Press, 2016), Postcard Stories (Titus Books, 2019), and Resonating Distances (Titus Books, 2022).

In 2020 he was the University of Waikato’s writer-in-residence. His book Walking with Rocks, Dreaming with Rivers: My Year in the Waikato (Titus Books, 2023) was written during his residency.

In 2025 his new collection of poetry, Slender Volumes (Spoor Books, 2024), was shortlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the 2025 Ockham Book Awards.

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Jeffrey Paparoa Holman

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Wheat in the East

The body you gave me’s wearing
thin: I won’t patch a scarecrow’s
coat. The plains of the east I tilled
are stippled with wheat; magpies nest

in the hair of my head, my heart is
all marching feet. This night I lie
beside my wife; the moon creaks over

the sill: I breathe, “You’re a tinny sod!”
and tilt in the coffin of sleep. I dream
of what’s left in this sliver of life,
the reins my hands can’t reach.

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman
London 1993

 
This poem was written in London in the mid-1990s, at a time when I was working in a central city bookshop – Waterstones – and devoting myself to writing. Short stories and poetry, going along to writing programmes at City Lit adult education centre in WC2H, and making friends with Dylan Horrocks, also at the same Charing Cross Road branch, doing his drawings and cartoon strips in lunch breaks, evenings and weekends. We all now know the result of his apprenticeship to the art. Quite when or why this poem emerged, it’s too far gone to remember, but it’s fair to say, is part of a self-appointed midlife apprenticeship to my lifelong writing urges. It was time to get serious and ‘Wheat in the East’ belongs there. 1997, I was back in New Zealand for good – in both senses –  returning to university to finish a rusty, abandoned 1970s BA. I decided the following year, to put together a self-published 36 pp chapbook, with Johnathan of Molten Media as my guide. In 1998, we produced Flood Damage, where this poem, with many other London-birthed works appear.  I was away. There was no stopping now. I couldn’t know it, but I was on my way to publishing what became As Big As A Father, with Steele Roberts, in 2002. The title poem here had also been written in our London council flat. This poem was part of that journey, so resides in my heart, with affection.

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman writes poetry, short fiction, history and memoir. He has published seven volumes of poetry; Best of Both Worlds (history, 2010); The Lost Pilot (memoir, 2013); Now When it Rains (memoir, 2017). As Big As A Father (Steele Roberts, 2002) was shortlisted in the Montana Book Awards, Poetry, 2003. Best of Both Worlds: the story of Elsdon Best and Tutakangahau (2010) was shortlisted in the Ernest Scott Prize, History (2011, Australia). His most recent work, a family history, Lily, Oh Lily – Searching for a Nazi ghost, is published by Canterbury University Press.

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Airini Beautrais picks Carin Smeaton

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Why She Quit Queen at Night

cos anywhere’s safer than sleepin shallow on queen street in
deep night never deep enuf tho to hide her from dem young
ones wit their shark skin suits and radar brows made for
catchin jumpy heart-beats and hers would let out an irregular
vibration like a wounded echo in a sinkhole leadin em direct
to her & lee (they been together 2 years since she were kickt
outta home out west and she aint never been back) and it’d
take jus one of dem young ones to land her one in the jaw
smash her teeth in top to bottom leavin a hole too big to
whistle thru too small to cry over but even then she still is
pretty as a petal for an old gal in her twenties lee says and
she’d laugh and show him her pretty bloody gums and go wit
a shrug n short memory to the hospital where they’d fix her
up proper cos they already knows her from last time the day
she lay dazed on the concrete next to lee wit her ear to the
pavement knowin she could hear the water of the waihorotiu
flowin to swellin under the sewer below in a direction only
she could calculate wit her inbuilt compass her north star
hearin it movin not stoppin magnetic all the way and as
long as it never stood still never stopped stagnant she knew
it would get to where it were goin cos she could hear it go
torrential and it sounded alive           and she understood that

Carin Smeaton
from Tales of the Waihorotiu (Titus Books, 2017)

Playing favourites: Why she quit Queen at night by Carin Smeaton

This poem is from Carin’s collection Tales of the Waihorotiu (Titus Books, 2017). It was selected by then NZ Poet Laureate Selina Tusitala Marsh for the anthology Best New Zealand Poems. I got to know it because I was doing the admin for the website at the time. At the reading for BNZP 2017, as part of the IIML’s Writers on Mondays series, I chose to read this poem. Every time I read it, in my head or out loud, it always brings tears to my eyes.

The image of the rough-sleeping woman listening to the Waihorotiu stream is a very poignant one. Before the city of Auckland was built, Queen Street was a gully with a stream running down it. Aotea Square was a swampy area. Now the Waihorotiu has been covered over and channelled into brick sewers, and the former swamp is a paved area, and the Aotea centre. I think of the woman in this poem and the stream as being kindred spirits who have both been subjugated by capitalism. Commerce is given priority over people and over nature. But, both woman and stream retain their inherent power. It is important to note that in Aotearoa New Zealand, Māori women are disproportionately affected by homelessness, with a report in 2024 finding that four out of five unhoused women are Māori. So there is a very significant layer in this text involving colonisation and structural inequities. I am always amazed by the potential of poetry to convey big, difficult and upsetting things within a small amount of words – Carin is a poet who is adept at this.

In 2011, artist Barry Lett (who died in 2017) proposed uncovering the stream and turning upper Queen Street into a garden. What an awesome idea! I hope we see more nature-focused urban design in the future, for ecological reasons but also for our own spiritual health.

Airini Beautrais

Barry Lett article
Homeless women report

Listen to Carin read the poem on Best NZ Poem 2017 page

Carin Smeaton lives in Tāmaki Makaurau with whānau. Her fourth collection, Age oƒ Orpah, will be published early next year. Orpah is the third part of an unholy trinity, accompanying Hibiscus Tart and Death Goddess Guide To Self Love into the infinite centre. All published by Titus Books and illustrated by her gifted Sydney based niece Kansas Smeaton. They’re fundraising for Orpah’s publication on Boosted if you want to check her out.

Airini Beautrais writes poetry, fiction and creative non fiction. Her most recent work is the essay collection The Beautiful Afternoon (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024). She lives in Whanganui.

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Chris Tse

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(Biopsy)

He is a man carved from witness wood
and tonight they will cut him open.

Whispers ate his tongue
and people failed to ask after him.

As they tear at his flesh to let in borrowed light
his body splinters and edges its way under their nails.

No men with warmth in their fingers or an inkling
of privacy, no women with a shred of public sympathy.

They fling his body open.
They dismantle him with effortless crime.

Behold the human mess inside           cue a surgeon’s wail.
Blood-and-bone strokes warped beyond recognition.

What ages he has lived through                           what ruinous tides have
claimed him            not unlike the waters that claimed the SS Ventnor.

And having cast off the grain of his years into hallowed seas
he traded fear                   for a nightmare of snakes.

Inside he could be dancing
his feet as light as music.         Inside he could be snow.

Extraction after extraction           there is no consensus
on who will keep his soul, who will keep his bones.

When their cruel exercise is over
when they have retrieved                       what they never needed

what remains is a man of a thousand regrets.
The insects bury themselves in his swollen dark.

Chris Tse
Published in How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes (AUP, 2014).

It’s around this time 20 years ago that I was putting the final touches on my thesis for the MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters. My thesis was split into three sections, one of which contained the earliest versions of poems that would eventually become my first book, How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes. Some of these poems made it into the final version of the collection untouched, but that first go at telling the story of Joe Kum Yung only scratched the surface of the themes I’d ultimately explore.

‘(Biopsy)’ wasn’t written during that period – it came along much later and was prompted by an unlikely source: the television series Desperate Housewives. In episode two of season seven, Bree Van de Kamp’s contractor and love interest Keith Watson shows her some timber that he wants to use as panelling for her study. “Feel it,” he instructs her. “You know what they call this? Witness wood, ’cause it’s seen so much history.” I’d never heard the term ‘witness wood’ before; later I learned that it specifically refers to salvaged and repurposed wood from structures that were present during significant events. You never know when you’ll see or hear something that’ll give you the start of a new poem. I certainly didn’t expect that watching the melodrama and sexual tension unfold on Wisteria Lane would also give me the start of one of Snakes’ key poems. 

Having spent some time revisiting my first book over the past couple of years, to mark its 10th anniversary and to prepare for the audiobook recording, I see the beginnings of themes and concerns that continue to pop up in my later work. ‘(Biopsy)’ is one of my first attempts at untangling the complications of writing about history and the power imbalance that goes with it. In some ways ‘(Biopsy)’ is a small meta moment in the collection that comments on the writing of the book itself and the use of Joe Kum Yung as a source of trauma to drive the narrative forward. Lionel Terry used Joe Kum Yung to make a point about ‘the Yellow Peril’ – as writers, how do we navigate our own biases and motivations when it comes to writing about other people and historical events, even if we’re doing so with the best intentions?

Chris Tse

Chris Tse is a poet and editor based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara | Wellington. He is the author of three poetry collections published by Auckland University Press: How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes, HE’S SO MASC, and Super Model Minority. He and Emma Barnes edited Out Here: An Anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ Writers from Aotearoa. In 2022, Chris was named New Zealand’s 13th Poet Laureate and completed his term in August 2025. He was a 2024 fellow of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program Fall Residency and a 2025 Nederlands Letterenfonds writer in residence.

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Ian Wedde

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1

McCahon’s Defile
For John Reynolds

And so Colin I cast off in my frail craft of words
my craft of frail words of crafty words
into the defile of Three Lamps where 
struck by sunshine on the florist’s striped awning
and the autumn leaves outside All Saints  
as you did before fully waking in Waitākere
to look at the elegant pole kauri in dewy light
I defile my sight with closed eyes
and so see better when I open them the Sky Tower
pricking a pale blue heaven like Raphael’s
in Madonna of the Meadows or the scumbled sky of
Buttercup fields forever where there is a constant flow of light 
and we are born into a pure land through Ahipara’s blunt gate 
a swift swipe of pale blue paint
on Shadbolt’s battered booze bar where bards 
bullshitted among the kauri.

Gaunt cranes along the city skyline
avert their gazes towards the Gulf 
away from babblers at Bambina
breakfast baskers outside Dizengoff 
some pretty shaky dudes outside White Cross 
beautiful blooms in buckets at Bhana Brothers
(open for eighty years) Karen Walker’s window
looking fresh and skitey across Ponsonby Road
my charming deft dentist at Luminos 
most of South Asia jammed into one floor at the Foodcourt
Western Park where wee Bella bashed her head 
on some half-buried neoclassical nonsense
the great viewshaft to not-faux Maungawhau
and then turn left into the dandy defile of K Road
where you make your presence felt yet again
Colin through the window of Starkwhite
in building 19-G_W-13 where dear John Reynolds
has mapped your sad Sydney derives and defiles 
across the road from Herabridal’s windows all dressed up
in white broderie Anglaise like lovely frothy brushstrokes
or the curdled clouds and words you dragged into the light
fantastic along beaches and the blackness that was all
you saw when you opened your eyes sometimes
like the bleary early morning Thirsty Dogs 
and weary hookers a bit further along my walk.

I love the pink pathway below the K Road overbridge
a liquid dawn rivulet running down towards Waitemata’s riprap
but also the looking a bit smashed washing hung out
on the balcony above Carmen Jones
and over the road from Artspace and Michael Lett etc
there’s El Sizzling Lomito, Moustache, Popped, and Love Bucket
the Little Turkish Café has $5 beers
it’s like a multiverse botanical garden round here
you could lose yourself in the mad babble of it
like the Botanical Gardens at Woolloomooloo
with the clusterfucking rut-season fruit-bats 
screaming blue murder.

But it’s peaceful again down Myers Park
the mind empties and fills like a lung breathing
the happy chatter of kids swinging 
and my memory of you Colin 
sitting alone and forlorn on a bench
must have been about 1966
contemplating the twitchy cigarette between your fingers
as if it divined the buried waters of Waihorotiu
or the thoughts that flow beneath thought
in the mind’s defile at dawn when you open your eyes
and see that constant flow of light among the trees.

Ian Wedde

Note on

Ode to Auckland 1. McCahon’s Defile (For John Reynolds)

This is the first of five ‘Ode to Auckland’ sections/poems, themselves the first twenty-one-page section of a sixty-one-page book BEING HERE: SELECTED POEMS 2020 – 2025 looking to publish in 2026. The poems address a city I’ve loved for the many years I’ve lived in it at various times, including early on when I was a student at Auckland University in the 1960s when I lived in Wood Street, Ponsonby. It was a pretty rough neighbourhood then compared to the Ponsonby of today which is mostly upmarket and chic. Our part of it in Three Lamps is not in the wealthy space, a functionally convenient four-floor unit in a multi-unit apartment complex with office space on the top floor for my wife Donna and myself.  What this elevated space provides is the view out west from my panoramic fourth-floor windows to the Waitākare hills across the luxuriantly tree’d suburbs that stretch across that view. What’s just across the road from our inner-city place is one of my favourite dog-walks, it takes Maxi and me into the steep, sensational viewshaft down to the north-east harbour where we often walk in the morning via one of the little old-tree-planted parks that have survived from the 1960s Ponsonby I remember.  

Living here now in this folding-together of memory and present, I celebrate the huge old Chinaberry tree that stretches up past our office window on Donna’s northern side and is typical of the old plantings I can see stretching out west to the Waitākeres on my side, and I’m glad to have most of what I need within walking distance, but I’m annoyed by the homogenizing impacts of the suburb’s wealth and even find myself grumbling in an old-fuck way about why all the classic villas are getting painted the same white. But the frustration is really with myself. Back in the day when I was flatting in Wood Steet the scungy villas hardly mattered and Ponsonby was just a great place to live. It still is. The title of my prospective book, Being Here, should be where I stop whingeing.

The poems in the ‘Ode to Auckland’ section are mostly written to-and-fro across something like a give-or-take twelve-syllable line which I like because it gets the measuring mind in a focused but not stalled state – like walking with wide-open eyes and a sense of your foot-falls having an organic not regimented pace, mind and breath in synch, the lines reaching ahead but anticipating a transition that keeps the thing moving.

Ian Wedde, 21 October 2025

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Kiri Piahana-Wong

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Deep Water Talk

In honour of Hone Tuwhare
For Melinda, Sophie & Nathan

& no-one knows
if your eyes are
blurred red from
the wind, too
much sun, or the
tears streaking your
face that could be
tears or just lines of
dried salt, who
can tell

& you never can tell
if you are seasick,
drunk, or just
hungover — the
symptoms are the
same

& sea and sky merge
until the horizon is
nothing but an
endless blue line
in every direction,
so that you are sailing,
not on the sea, as you
thought, but in a
perfectly blue, circular
bowl, never leaving
the centre

& you wonder who is
moving, you or
the clouds racing
by the mast-head

& you wonder if
those dark shapes
in the water are
sharks, shadows, or
nothing but old fears
chasing along behind
you

& the great mass of
land recedes, until
you forget you were
a land-dweller, and
you start feeling the
pull of ancient genes
— in every tide, your
blood sings against
the moon

& food never tasted
so good, or water
so sweet — you’ve
never conserved water
by drinking wine
before — and rum;
and coke; and rum
and coke; and can
after can of cold
beer

& your sleep is
accompanied, not
by the roar of traffic
on the highway,
but by the creaks
and twangs of your
ship as she pitches
and moans through
the dark ocean,
all alone

& you wonder —
where did that bird,
that great gull perching
on the bowsprit,
come from?

Kiri Piahana-Wong
The poem first appeared in Snorkel (2005), and then was reprinted in Night Swimming (Anahera Press, 2013).

Deep water talk

I wrote this poem when I was in my early twenties. I’d been reading a lot of Hone Tuwhare – the poem’s title is a homage to his 1994 collection Deep River Talk, and it also has some stylistic similarities to his work. During this time of my life, sailing was very important to me, and I wanted to capture how it feels to be on the ocean day after day. I dedicated the poem to three close friends whom I regularly sailed with at this time. 

This was the first ever poem I had published, in an Australian online journal called Snorkel in 2005. These days, I’m four books in and I’ve had hundreds of poems published, to the extent I struggle to keep track of all of them. But back then, it was all new to me, and I remember just how excited and euphoric I was to have finally received that elusive first acceptance. The one that comes when nobody knows you, and you’ve published nothing at all, and you’ve been writing for years and stashing the poems in a box under your bed, and you’re studying English Lit at university and you read poetry books in the park, and you’re dreaming of being a writer like the writers you’re reading. The ones who have actual books, and people like you reading them. 

Snorkel posted me a cheque for $50 for the poem (yes, this was way back in the days of cheques), which was an absolute thrill. I photocopied the cheque and pinned it above my desk for encouragement and inspiration. Snorkel shut up shop in 2016, however I’m still grateful to them all these years later. ‘Deep water talk’ eventually became the opening poem in my first poetry collection, Night Swimming (Anahera Press, 2013), and I’m still very fond of it.

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

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Harry Ricketts

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Your Secret Life
(for Jessie)     

I can see it all already:
sitting up long after the kiwi
and cat have gone to bed
to do whatever it is they do
when the screen scrambles to noisy snow.

I’ll hear you shut the front door
with a soft click that makes me jump –
just time to fix a welcoming smile
before you bound into the kitchen (perhaps
for a drink) blooming with your secret life.

What shall we say? Will I blurt out,
“Do you know what time it is!”,
angry with relief that you’re home
at last and apparently unharmed
from that film, that party, that lover?

Would that be better or more likely
than a ‘Had a nice time, sweetheart?’,
poured out with an oh-so-casual cup of tea?
‘Sorry, Dad.’ ‘Yes, Dad.’ Not now, not soon,
but sometime it will happen.

Harry Ricketts
First published in Coming Here (Nagare Press, 1989)


I wrote ‘Your Secret Life’ one Sunday afternoon in late 1986. I was sitting at my desk, on one side a line of roll-up cigarettes, on the other a half-drunk cup of coffee. I was making notes for a first-year poetry lecture which would include two of my favourite Fleur Adcock’s poems, ‘For Andrew’ and ‘For a Five-Year-Old’. I could vaguely hear my six-year-old daughter Jessie and four-year-old son Jamie outside on the trampoline. They sounded happy.

Above the first Adcock poem, I scribbled ‘self-deflating’ and alongside the second ‘rhyme’, ‘shape’, ‘tone’: hooks that might help with the lecture. I started thinking about the effect of the delayed rhyme in ‘For a Five-Year-Old’, the quiet pulse of the iambic pentameters before the shortened eighth line, the apparently easy conversational tone, the admission of past acts, unkindnesses, betrayals, the raised eyebrow (amused? wry? rueful?) at the conclusion: ‘But that is how things are: I am your mother, / and we are kind to snails.’

I thought about the son reflecting back to the mother a trusting version of herself, which gives her pause. This pause, I saw, was the poem. My mind bumped to an early scene in Edge of Darkness, an apocalyptic TV series I’d been avidly watching. The camera pans slowly round a student bedroom as a policeman goes through his dead daughter’s possessions, pauses as he looks numbly at her things. These two pauses fused in my mind. I thought of Jessie outside on the trampoline. I imagined her as a teenager. I’d be in the kitchen, waiting up for her. It would be late. She would be late. I’d hear the front door click. She would come in; the phrase ‘blooming with your secret life’ jumped into my head. I jotted down phrases, bits of imagined dialogue, a possible ending: ‘Not now, not soon, / but sometime it will happen.’ The poem seemed, half-involuntarily, to write itself, and I felt (really for the first time) that it sounded like me.

Soon afterwards at a reading, I’d usually open with ‘Your Secret Life’. It seemed to strike a chord. I still often begin with it. But, for me, the poem has long taken on quite a different meaning. Within five years, my marriage had broken up, and Jessie and I lived in different hemispheres. That imagined late-night encounter happened only in the poem, never in real life. Instead, I’d receive bulletins on the phone (the previous night for her, the following morning for me). Sometimes the line wobbled with echoes; sometimes it was clear as a bell, and I wrote poems about those heart-turning calls.

Harry Ricketts lives in Wellington. He is a poet, biographer, essayist, editor, anthologist and literary scholar and has published 34 books, most recently First Things: A Memoir (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024). His thirteenth collection of poems, Bonfires on the Ice (Te Herenga Waka University Press), will appear in November.

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Jackson McCarthy

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Uniform

Louis and I had this theory that nobody knew
we were fucking. Uniforms could do that to a bloke —
help him blend in with a crowd. Only once, at a party,
did I ever see him without the shirt, collared and blue,
the high socks and striped scarf. All day at school,
stuffed and starved, I wanted to get them off him
as a way of loving him in them. Later, those first
February afternoons, our uniforms wilted in his room.

Nobody knew. But surely we inspired envy, our moody
solitudes and companies — a chance hand on his chest,
over the school crest — or our shining morning faces
in the supermarket, shimmering back to us in the glass
jars of olives. Behind us, watching, was Jackson McCarthy,
noted homosexual. Eater of olives. Writer of poetry.

Jackson McCarthy

I read this poem first at a Starling launch party in August last year, and people really seemed to like it. It’s one thing when a poem ticks all your own personal checkboxes: desire, love, Death, time, boys, mysteries, the night, vision, dreams, happiness, the dark furniture of the radio, Arcadia, blue jeans, blond hair, the vantage point of language where words sound before they mean, the city, parties, Louis, inexplicable sorrow, the past, beauty, mirrors, consent, solitude, virginity, and you. But it’s another when a crowd of real-life people click with it, too.

I think of ‘Uniform’ as an Italian sonnet (or at least in its typographical layout it appears to be) — but then it gives us a sudden English turn at the end. And I think this formal arrangement is mimetic of the tricks the poem’s playing on its readers about author, speaker, and confession: you start the poem thinking it’s one thing, but finish realising it’s another. I was writing a number of free-verse sonnets at the time, which I felt a little guilty about: it’s like sonneteering on easy mode. But you need some sort of formal scheme, no matter how defanged, to give you resistance; something to write into. I found even the most basic measurement of the sonnet — the terminal volta at the thirteenth and fourteenth lines — to be extremely productive for a while. You do twelve lines, then you do a twirl.

I would like to think this poem has a bit of nice sound patterning, including that delicious internal rhyme in the eighth line that to my shock and horror sounds clearer, I think, than the rhyme between lines thirteen and fourteen. Well, I guess I honestly have no clue what I’m doing — but then again, I do trust my own taste, my only gift. You can’t decide in advance or preempt what mode of work will become available to you, but you can shape it with your good judgement. If I get stuck I go for a walk and think of beautiful things: boys’ faces, the music of Poulenc, my parents, the water, my life.

‘Uniform’ was first published in The Spinoff’s Friday Poem column; I’m grateful to Hera Lindsay Bird for choosing it.

Jackson McCarthy is a poet and musician from Auckland currently studying in Wellington. He is of mixed Māori and Lebanese descent. His work has been published in Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems, Landfall, Starling, The Spinoff, and elsewhere, and he currently serves as an editor at Symposia. You can read more of his work here.