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

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

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

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

from ‘Cancer Moon: Poet Life’

a conversation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

from ‘Cancer Moon: Poet Life’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

from ‘Lemon sky’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Regret

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

a reading

photo credit: Skye Boniface

‘Failure’

‘Dreams’

‘Salt quilt’

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

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