Tag Archives: Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Harry Ricketts

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The Necessity of Failure

Why this obsession with success,
which gives so brief a glow?
Fading already: won; done it;

past. Afterwards, what then? What next?
With failure, there’s so much
more to savour, so much more to feel.

Like a loose tooth, you can jiggle
it any time you like;
the true friend you can never brush off.

Failing is like having children:
you find out stuff about yourself
you’d never known nor dared to guess.

And think of the variety.
There are so many ways
to fail. Not just the smart disasters

like going bust or off your head,
betraying those you love
or knowingly blowing your talent –

only a few of us can be
that chic. Don’t be choosey.
Any flop will reward you with guilt,

remorse, embarrassment and shame,
whose every nuance
you can endlessly replay, retaste.

Even quite a tiny failure
can last you a lifetime:
that thing you said, that moment you missed,

will twist in time until you see
how it led to all that
and all of this. Some revelation.

So don’t begrudge your blunders,
screw-ups, A minor blues.
Nothing’s wasted; failure makes sense.

Harry Ricketts
from Your Secret Life (HeadworX, 2005)

Keats’s ‘To Autumn’, Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘One Art’, Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Eurydice’, Bill Manhire’s ‘My Sunshine’: playing favourites with other poets’ poems is much easier than with one’s own. I’ve gone for ‘The Necessity of Failure’ (Pemmican Press, 2001). This was written in 2000 as a reaction to the way we were all being exhorted to say how successful we were, and I thought but what about our failures? That’s the one subject we’re all experts in. We’ve slid much further down the self-adulation PR track since then; which perhaps explains why this half-comic poem still seems to strike a chord in readings.

Harry Ricketts

Harry Ricketts has published 35 books, most recently his thirteenth collection of poems, Bonfires on the Ice (Te Herenga Waka Press, 2025). He is working on volume 2 of his memoirs. He is an Emeritus Professor at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, where he continues to teach a course in creative nonfiction at the Institute of Modern Letters. He likes coffee, cafés and cricket.

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Sue Fitchett

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& verily the bishop saw an absence
(response to Bishop Vercoe’s statement of ‘looking forward to a world without gays’)

I take my science
leaf through
memory
will-o’-the-wisp moments
can be caught
embedded
deep into the brain
a place where even
torture
cannot hook
yank you out
leave absence

I take your name
repeat over & over
each syllable
someone has scored
a name into the wooden seat
beside my bus stop
this is how my brain will look
soft folds clasp
a bright tattoo

I take the colour of your eyes
condition myself to be alert
spot an exact match
in variegated green leaves
a grey sea wash
the brown earth I turn over
to make home for a sapling
this Arbor day

I take your laugh
in which ear will I hide this joy
harmonies to play amoroso
on morning ferries
shield against some of the din
scudding through our city

& to back all this up
when we stand in supermarket aisles
rice  flour  bread in our basket
say good-bye at airports
between one heart beat & the next
I will reach for you
with both hands
print a public kiss
on your lips

a reading
so transpicuous
luminous
if they turn us into salt
we will shine

& shine

Sue Fitchett
from Magazine, ed. Raewyn Alexander 2004

There are times when certain poems I‘ve written speak to me afresh.   While they may not be an all-time favourite they reverberate again in consciousness, align with my mood or the environment I find myself in personally or within the wider world.  I’ve become increasingly aware of the growing book bans happening in supposedly liberal western democracies, for example, thousands more this year in the US.   Many are LGBTQR+ titles or content.  Twenty something years ago a leading NZ Bishop said publicly he was ‘looking forward to a world without gays’.  I wrote a poetic response.  It’s with fierce sadness I stumbled again on this poem and now it’s become a bit of an ear-worm as I scan global new items, hear local political party ‘dog whistles’.
Sue

Sue Fitchett is a conservationist, volunteer fire fighter & Waiheke Islander.  Authored Palaver lava queen (AUP: 2004), On the Wing (Steele Roberts: 2014) and Between (The Cuba Press 2025). Co-author or editor of several poetry books & anthologies.  Work has appeared in various publications in Aotearoa/New Zealand & overseas & exhibited in art shows. Louis Johnson Bursar 2001-2002.

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: ‘Work’ by Anne Kennedy

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Work
(from ‘Lostling and Foundling’)

The most-asked question is do your cocktails have
umbrellas in them? It’s true that here we have learned
to make Pineapple Bombers. But no. That thing
on the rim of the glass is the sun going down
on America. When I first looked out from Waikiki
I thought I was seeing the Pacific Ocean
for the first time. People think we lie
under umbrellas at the beach all the time,

but no. Mostly life goes on just the same. I am
still planning my book, Talking Loudly: A Self-Help Guide
for Better Communication Between the Members
of Rock Bands. Seeing a need which has not diminished
with distance. I am reading narrowly just as I always did,
a sharp point under which there is no shade.

Anne Kennedy
from The Darling North (AUP, 2012)

‘About Work’

I wrote this poem, which is part of a sequence of sonnets, when we were living in Hawai`i in the late-2000s. I hoped I was writing a diary-esque account of how, when big stuff happens – when people are suffering in the face of oppression and corruption – most of us continue with our tiny little lives.

Worth noting: the ‘sun going down on America’ bit isn’t just metaphorical. It really does go down last on Hawai`i.

About the form: I was quite new to poetry when I wrote this, and I was experimenting – which sounds odd when talking about the sonnet, and is! I grew to love the idea of tipping contemporary ideas and words into an archaic form (although of course, it’s a more modern version). As a person who mostly writes by the yard, I found the concise form, its parameters and turn, helped me shape what I wanted to say. I realized, oh, that’s what poets do.

Anne Kennedy’s most recent books are The Sea Walks into a Wall, The Ice Shelf and, as editor, Remember Me: Poems to Learn by Heart from Aotearoa New Zealand. She is the current editor of AUP’s New Poets series. Awards include the Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry, the NZ Post Book Award for Poetry and the Montana Book Award for Poetry. Anne lives in Tāmaki Makaurau.

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: aotearoa inc by Isla Huia

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aotearoa inc
after mohamed hassan

at thy feet, in the bonds of love
ground control to ranginui e tū iho nei
i’m done guarding the pacific star
it reeks like praying to politicians
or noticing that waitī is looking
like cowshit in my hautapu

hear our praises left choking
on the oil drip, how desperate
we are to say thank you
for something worth thanking
more than rugby my guts
are clogged with residential
developments with names like
westwood heights or the dale

god of nations by whom i
mean hinepūtehue from the
shafts of gourd please play
us a new song now, in their
language if you have to, in
whatever code they’re switching,
hi-vis harikoa in the meadow
fonterra boys promoting
clean waterways on tv is making
me wanna say every creed and
every race but their one, and i
wish tall poppies on them,
and i wish all the children
of the ngahere on us

asking thee to bless this place
by whom i mean tāne
who pushed apart his parents
like a kid being uplifted
and he meant for light
and he meant for this to be un-hinged
and what he got was economic growth
and what he got was fast tracked
102 billion dollars in savings
but not to be spent on saving us,
still rationing the queens veges and
asking for a refund

the cost of saying land back is the same price
as a karakia when you have to ask for it, god defend
our free wheeling and dealing god defend
us all from the politicians who don’t want to pay
and god defend the damaging pests
that we don’t have the budget to control
and god defend the politicians who are
also the damaging pests and

god by which i mean papa defend
anyone who’s looked extinction in the eye
and said why are you looking at me like that

Isla Huia
from Āta, Dead Bird Books Publishers, 2026

This poem is from my latest collection, Āta, which has just been released by Dead Bird Books. I think this poem still resonates strongly for me because the kaupapa is so relevant to our current situation, nationally, in the lead-up to the election. I was so taken by Mohamed Hassan’s poem of the same name, and the way he captured the ironies and contradictions between our political messaging and our treatment of Papatūānuku. I hope that my own version can put words to the feelings so many of us are reckoning with, and can do justice to Hassan’s original.
Isla

Isla Huia (Te Āti Haunui a-Pāpārangi, Uenuku) is a kaituhi based in Ōtautahi. Her debut collection of poetry, Talia, was released in May 2023 by Dead Bird Books, and was shortlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Her second collection, Āta, has just been released. She has been published in journals and anthologies across Aotearoa including Ōrongohau Best New Zealand Poems, Takahē, Catalyst and Short | Poto. Huia is the current recipient of a Te Tumu Toi Arts Foundation Springboard Award, under the mentorship of inaugural Commonwealth Poet Laureate Selina Tusitala Marsh.

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: 1968 by Paula Green

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1968

Copernicus is giving Watermelon Sugar a go
under the shade of the pōhutukawa tree.

Simone de Beauvoir has her shades on
so no one knows what she is thinking.
She is in charge of the stereo and has
John Lennon finding words to rhyme with revolution
Grace Slick feeding her head with Alice and
Aretha Franklin singing ‘think think think’.

I was thirteen and saw no signs of barricades
flower power LSD Molotov cocktails or the like
and I’d never used capitalism and consumerism
in the same sentence or feminism and authority.

I did draw an anti-bomb sign whenever I got the chance
and mushrooms on the school walls,
and wear a string of love beads to match my flowing skirt.

Simone picks ‘All Along the Watchtower’ next
and I lie back under the pōhutukawa shade
and try to imagine finding myself
in a sloop of spinning colours.

Paula Green
from The Baker’s Thumbprint
Seraph Press, 2013

For all kinds of reasons I can’t cross the bridge to my own writing at the moment, to the numerous books I have on the go, and as you know, when you can’t cross the bridge to your own writing on the page, it is damn tough. At least I have things simmering in the rooms in my head. Yesterday I picked up an old poetry book of mine, The Baker’s Thumbprint, one of several published by dear Helen Rickerby, and fell into the glorious sloop of 1968, of being 13, of having doors and roads and windows to explore. I loved being in the same poem as Simone and Grace and Jimi and Aretha and Copernicus! I had wanted to rewrite my protest poem, ‘The Suffragette’, because today feels like a time to speak out but I’ll do that on Friday. Instead I’m relaunching my Playing Favourites series because poetry feels like an essential tool for us at the moment, whether as protest or balm. Go well dear poetry fans, go well.

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Serie Barford picks Albert Wendt

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She Dreams

Nearly always she remembers her dreams vividly
At breakfast this morning    she recalled she was flying
through a noiseless storm across the Straits for Ruapuke and her father
who was sitting on his grave   in their whānau urupā
wearing a cloak of raindrops
and she looked down and back at her paddling feet
and saw she wasn’t wearing her favourite red sandals
She stopped in mid-flight   in mid-storm   and called
Alapati   get me my saviours!
Woke and didn’t understand why she’d called them that

It’s been about thirteen years and that makes you the man
I’ve stayed the longest with    she declared unexpectedly
as we cleared the breakfast dishes
To her   such declaration are so obvious and   like raindropsyou can flick easily off a duck’s back
but   for me   it will stay a nit burrowing permanently into my skin
I won’t understand why

If I tell her that   she’ll probably say   You love guilt too much
You read too much into things and need someone to blame
So shall I blame her for staying thirteen years and plus?
For not wearing her saviours and reaching her dead father
who would have taken off his fabulous cloak of rain and draped it around her?
Shall I blame her for not having met me when we were young
and we could have been together much longer?

Or shall I   as usual   let it pass
content that I am blessed to be with her
and   in her dreams  one day she and I will fly togther
through the voiceless storm to Ruapuke and her waiting father?
She will be wearing her saviours
and we will arrive safely

September-October 2005

Albert Wendt
from Mānoa to a Ponsonby Garden, AUP, 2012

   I chose to respond to this poem because I often sat at the breakfast table with my motherand grandmother, recounting and interpreting dreams. My grandmother said that Sāmoan dreams are conversations with ancestors and atua.  I kept a dream journal for years. Dreams connect me to ancestors and ancestral knowledge. Provide glimpses of past and future events. Enable me to guide and help people.

   Then I became ill. Was prescribed endocrine therapy, a treatment for hormone-positive breast cancer. Aromatase inhibitors and targeted therapy medications affected my mind. I slept a lot. Experienced brain fog. Couldn’t dream. Felt incredibly vulnerable, abandoned, frightened. Oncologists proffered antidepressants, controlled drug ‘holidays’, and counselling. This side effect of my treatment wasn’t, and still isn’t, relevant to them. They say, “It hasn’t been reported in any clinical trials or studies.”

     She dreams comforted me when drugs stole my visions. The poem opens with the adverbial phrase, “Nearly always”, priming the audience to expect the reocurrance of a high-probability process, event, or condition. We encounter Reina, who refers to her partner, the narrator, as Alapati – the Sāmoan version of Albert. She vividly recalls dreams, and in a recent moemoeā had flown through a storm toward her dead father, who was sitting upon his grave, on an island called Ruapuke. She was propelled through ātea by paddling feet, but unaccountably desired to wear her favourite red sandals – her ‘saviours’.  The dreamer has agency within her moemoeā. She stops flying and issues an imperative, Alapati   get me my saviours!

   I’m reminded of another pair of red shoes, the magical ruby slippers given to Dorothy after she’s swept away by a tornado from Kansas to the land of Oz. What is it about red shoes and flying  through tempests?  That’s another story. Perhaps a poem.  I also note that Reina, though ancestrally linked to the Atua of thunder, flies through a noisless storm toward her waiting father, who wears a cloak of raindrops. She flys through her bloodline. Embodies the magic and mystery of sound. 

    I enjoy the interchanges between Albert and Reina. The in-ya-face declarations and imagined banter that demonstrate intimacy, angst, self-awareness, and most of all – the enduring substance of a treasured relationship. I’m delighted that after their sojourn in Mānoa there’s life in Ponsonby. Aroha. Alofa. And I imagine that one day, when all is as it should be, this couple will fly to Ruapuke, and the two hills will watch them arrive safely. And Reina will be wearing her saviours.

Serie Barford

* moemoeā      (Māori) noun, dream

* atua               (Sāmoan) “God” or a deity/supernatural spirit. Across Polynesian cultures, it refers to                         powerful spiritual entities or ancestral gods.

*ātea                (Māori)  a wide expanse, outer space, or a physical gap.

*aroha             (Māori) love

*alofa               (Sāmoan) love

Serie Barford was born in Aotearoa to a German-Samoan mother (Lotofaga) and a Pālagi father. She held a 2018 Pasifika Writer’s residency at the Michael King Centre, performed at the 2019 International Book Arsenal Festival in Kyiv, and collaborated with filmmaker Anna Marbrook for the 2021 Going West Different Out Loud poetry series. Her poetry collection (2021), Sleeping with Stones, was shortlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Standing on My Shadow (Anahera, 2025) was longlisted for the 2026 Ockham Book Awards.

Maualaivao Albert Wendt CNZM is of the āiga Sa-Maualaivao of Malie, āiga Sa-Su‘a of Lefaga, āiga Sa-Patu of Vaiala and āiga Sa-Asi of Moata‘a, Sāmoa. An esteemed poet, novelist, short-story writer, playwright and painter, he is also Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Auckland, specialising in New Zealand and Pacific literatures and creative writing. Wendt has been an influential figure in the developments that have shaped New Zealand and Pacific literature since the 1970s and was made Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2001 for his services to literature. His Adventures of Vela, a novel in verse, was published in 2008; and his co-edited collection Mauri Ola: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English was shortlisted for the 2011 New Zealand Post Book Awards. 

Todd Barrowclough’s interview with Albert at ANZL Academy of NZ Literature

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Anne Kennedy picks Bill Manhire

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An Inspector Calls

We tiptoed into the house.
The neighbourhood was quiet as a mouse.

I felt very on edge. The money
Was in the oven, not the fridge.

*

I glanced at the note on the piano.
Uh oh, uh oh, uh oh.

*

There’s always a point at which a routine enquiry
turns into something else entirely.

I had to shoulder my way in.
The bathtub was simply full of the victim.

Bill Manhire
from Lifted, VUP, 2005

I love it when a poem is readable and seems easy to follow like a catchy song, and yet its surprises and depths never end, and I want to read it again and again. ‘An Inspector Calls’, by Bill Manhire, is such a poem.

Over the years, I’ve convened quite a lot of workshops on the topic of narrative poetry. I make a course reader from a bunch of poems which change over time, but this poem always seems to be in my reader. As I’m writing this, I realise I’ve never once asked Bill Manhire if he minds me rolling out his brilliant poem to a class. Sorry, Bill! Do you mind?

Anyway, I usually rabbit on a bit at the beginning about something must happen and near and far (looking up close, narrative arc) and who’s looking at what and keep with the sound. I know already, because I’ve read it hundreds of times, that ‘An Inspector Calls’ does all these things to perfection, but that it also has that extra thing you can never quite explain. It’s original. This poem always engenders a lot of discussion. People are amazed that it can be so short and yet cover so much territory. They love the jazzy sound of it, the funny rhyme at the beginning, the noir feel, the angular look. After a while, they notice that ‘I’ is three different points-of-view, and they love that surprise. After a while longer, they talk about the way all the ingredients work together in a way that seems effortless yet asks us to – well, all sorts of things. And I totally agree.

‘An Inspector Calls’ is a poem that has been with me for a long time.

Years late: Thank you, Bill.

Anne Kennedy, May 2026 

 

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

Anne Kennedy’s most recent books are The Sea Walks into a Wall, The Ice Shelf and, as editor, Remember Me: Poems to Learn by Heart from Aotearoa New Zealand. She is the current editor of AUP’s New Poets series. Awards include the Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry, the NZ Post Book Award for Poetry and the Montana Book Award for Poetry. Anne lives in Tāmaki Makaurau. 

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Frankie McMillan picks Kerrin P Sharpe

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blue

your blue wooden house
still nestles in Niaqornat
                        Johanna

the washing line once
a bunting of towels and nappies
                        stands empty
the breathy songs of narwhals
dried by the wind

that last night in the front room
Johanna four tall candles
                        held stillness
around you an orchestra
of faith in light

and when morning arrived
with the sledge you were blessed
                        with herbs and moss
the whole village behind you
all the way to Chapel

do you remember saying
the ice would never change?
                        these days
it’s too thick for boats
too thin for sledges

some hunters shoot their dogs
unmended nets sleep on the beach
                        what happened
to elbow grease Johanna?
everyone’s on the internet

Kerrin P  Sharpe 
from Hoof, Te Herenga Waka Press, XXXX

This is one of my favourite Kerrin Sharpe poems. At first glance the elegy honours and laments an old woman Johanna, while also reflecting on the changes climate crisis has brought to her remote village in Greenland. Then the title, ‘blue’ with its associations of feeling down or depressed reflects on the high incidence of mental health related to the abandonment of cultural practices in the region. In the dark days of winter, instead of coming together in the evenings, ‘ Everyone’s on the internet.’ ‘ So many stay indoors/ forgetting/who they are.’

The traditional farewell to Johanna is conveyed in ten lines with a close up view … ‘four still candles held stillness /around you/ to the wide angle view of Johanna on the sled ‘ the whole village behind you/all the way to the Chapel.’ As with all Kerrin’s poems there is an astonishing agility and lightness of touch to the imagery.  The apt use of synesthetic lines,  ‘the breathy songs of narwhals/ dried by the wind.’ is another characteristic of her work that I admire. 

There is a power in the unanswered questions posed throughout but also a sense that the poet herself is baffled by the enormity of the environmental degradation.

‘Waves nibble away the cliffs.
What if the ice left
and never returned,
what then, Johanna?’

The shape of the stanzas, with their indented lines denote a kind of falling and for me, this juxtaposition of falling and grace or terror and beauty epitomize our extraordinary rich and fragile world.

Frankie McMillan

Frankie McMillan is an award winning poet and writer of short fiction. In 2019 her book, The Father of Octopus Wrestling, and other small stories(Canterbury University Press) was shortlisted for the NZSA Heritage Award and listed by Spinoff as one of the ten best fiction books of 2019. Her poetry has been selected for Ōrongohu  /Best New Zealand Poems 2012, 2015 and 2022, Landfall, Takahe and in international journals including Cincinnati Review, Shenandoah and Atlanta Review.   Her collection, Eddie Sparkle’s Bridal Taxi (CUP) was launched, October, 2025.

Kerrin P. Sharpe is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Hoof (2023) and Louder (2018). Her poems have appeared in local and international literary journals including Landfall, Turbine | Kapohau, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook, POETRY (US), Blackbox Manifold, PN Review and Stand. Her work has been anthologised in Best New Zealand Poems six times, the anthology Best of Best New Zealand Poems, Oxford Poets 2013, 150 Essential New Zealand Poems and A Game of Two Halves: The Best of Sport 2005–2019. In 2021 she held a writing residency at the Michael King Writers Centre.

 

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Cilla McQueen picks ‘Quark Dance’

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Quark Dance

here come the colours
to settle on our lips and eyes
and rainbow lighting all the edges
the boundaries are unstable
trust love not logic
light falls
never the same way twice
keep awake
jump out into the never look back
dream hair ribbons unfurling
I can if you can too
barefoot balance and free fall
without scary death in our mouths
just plain delight
learning to nudge the wind
dance falling exploding symmetry
stretching the space
pulse slow arm elbow up
whip spine twist
thigh knee toe out
the current passes
nowadays science is pure poetry
all the particles bounce and decay
sweetly and sure as seeds
and quarks come in such colours and flavours
as beauty charm and strangeness
it’s all so weird and simple
the world’s made up of tiny little energetic
multicoloured irrational jellybeans
so dance
quark dance

Cilla McQueen
From Anti Gravity (McIndoe 1984), re-published in Poeta (2018, OUP)

‘Quark Dance’: it was unusual to write about quantum physics in 1984, but I did it anyway in this poem from Anti Gravity which delights unscientifically in the remarkable behaviours of elementary particles.
Cilla McQueen


Cilla McQueen MNZM is a poet, teacher and artist, and a three-time winner of the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry. She received an honorary doctorate in literature from the University of Otago in 2008 and was New Zealand Poet Laureate from 2009 to 2011. In 2010 she received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement (Poetry). In 2020 she was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services as a poet. Cilla lives in Bluff, at the southern tip of New Zealand’s South Island.

Otago University Press page

Playing Favourites is a series where poets pick a favourite poem of their own or by another nz poet.

Poetry Shelf Playing favourites: Cadence Chung

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Black Opium

Coleridge wrote his best poems in a poppyseed haze.
I’m not sure about those tiles, he said from my bathtub,
looking up at the ceiling. I had no idea what he was thinking:
my only experience with opium was the YSL perfume, that
pungent amber stuff that always sat on my mother’s dressing table.
And then later, the redesigned Black Opium, an awful
vanilla-sugar thing I wore to class with a scratch on my wrist,
angled and shallow like a cat might have done it. When I came
home, Coleridge was alight. He showed me the poem
he’d written, wet with tap-drip. I know it is but a Dream,
yet feel more anguish than if it were Truth, he told me.
In my own visions, cross-hatched and foggy though they are,
I can still make out the shape of you.

Cadence Chung
Originally published in Cordite Issue 114

I wrote this strange little poem while taking a course on Romantic poetry. In one lecture, we were shown a quote from one of Keats’ letters, describing a conversation he had with Coleridge:

‘I walked with him at his alderman-after dinner pace for near two miles I suppose. In those two miles he broached a thousand things [ . . . ]—Nightingales, Poetry—on Poetical sensation—Metaphysics—Different genera and species of Dreams—Nightmare—a dream accompanied [with] a sense of touch—single and double touch—A dream related—First and second consciousness—the difference explained between will and Volition—so many metaphysicians from a want of smoking the second consciousness—Monsters—the Kraken—Mermaids—Southey believes in them—Southey’s belief too much diluted—A ghost story—Good morning—I heard his voice as he came towards me—I heard his voice as he moved away—I had heard it all the interval—if it may be called so’ (letters, 15-16 April 1819).

My friend Jackson McCarthy and I thought this was the most hilarious little passage, even though I’m sure nobody else in the course did. It made me feel a fondness for Coleridge, an almost jovial sense of camaraderie with him. In my mind, he’d gone from a serious and canonical Romantic poet to a strange uncle, or a messy friend who would text you, drunk, at midnight, with details of the evening’s disastrous escapades. He seemed the sort of man who really could sit in my bathtub high out of his mind. A lot of my poetry interacts with canons in this way; I like to think of all those old poets and characters as my friends.

Talking about opium in the course made me think of my mum’s little bottle of the YSL perfume called Opium, which was a constant fixture in my childhood remembrances of her dressing-table, always in the background while she did her makeup. I don’t think she ever really used it — it was a tiny bottle that I think was genuinely from when the perfume first came out — and it absolutely reeked. I don’t think they make it like that anymore. The 2014 Black Opium is a disappointingly safe shadow of that original concoction; sweet and vanillary and with that unidentifiable chemical undertone that all modern designer perfumes seem to have. I’m sure you could say something there about mass production, evolving beauty standards, unoriginality under late capitalism, etc.

But anyway. The poem took me a while to figure out, especially in terms of what Coleridge would actually say to me. The final sentence was changed around 5 times. Jackson has now taught this poem twice in one of his guest lectures about ways to end poems, as an example of a volta. I’m pretty sure that term traces back to the verb ‘to turn’, but it also reminds one of voltage, to a sudden spark that creates a change. Black Opium is concerned with many things — perfume, dreams, visions — but then suddenly turns to the lyric, to the you that is there in the background of any poem.

Cadence Chung is a poet, mezzo-soprano, and composer, currently one of the resident artists at Te Pae Kōkako – The Aotearoa New Zealand Opera Studio. She has released three books: anomalia (Tender Press, 2022), Mythos: an Audio-Visual Anthology of Art by Young New Zealanders, (ed.) (Wai-te-Ata Press, 2024), and Mad Diva (Otago University Press, 2025). She also edits Symposia Magazine and the New Zealand Poetry Society’s quarterly magazine, a fine line.