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

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

Wild Houses

Bright bright horses choose me
to house their hooves. Houses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

further still. Drank deep.

Maia Armistead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is stardust in my blood

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

Joel LeBlanc

Five questions for Tracey Slaughter, the editor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Gilbert
from ‘The Sunset of the Century’

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

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

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

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

Three questions for Josiah Morgan, the featured poet

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

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

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

The readings

Josiah Morgan

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

Joshiah reads ‘REDACTED (after Ralph Hotere)‘

Josiah reads ‘Family secret’

Josiah reads ‘It could happen to you too’

Rebecca Hawkes

Rebecca reads ‘All Souls’

Elizabeth Morton

Elizabeth Morton reads ‘O-O-O’

Richard Reeve

Richard reads ‘Wake’

Sabrina Li

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

Megan Kitching

Megan reads ‘Fire’

Sherry Zhang

Sherry reads ‘First swim of summer’

Alvia Farooqui

Alvia reads ‘Relapsing’

Leah Dodd

Leah reads ‘Pure expression of colour’

The readers and editor

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

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

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

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

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

Megan Kitching is an Ōtepoti Dunedin poet. Her debut collection At the Point of Seeing (Otago University Press, 2023) won the Jessie Mackay Prize for Poetry in the 2024 Mātātuhi Foundation Best First Book Awards and was awarded Best International First Collection in the UK Poet Laureate’s The Laurel Prize 2024. In 2021, Megan was the inaugural Caselberg Trust Elizabeth Brooke-Carr Emerging Writer in residence.

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

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

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

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

Poetry Shelf review: Dinah Hawken

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Peace & Quiet, Dinah Hawken
Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2026
cover: Kelly O’Shanessy

Today

turns ashen. The old men are waiting
to drive from the first tee. The poets are waiting
to hit the right note even though
a war and pandemic- in the same warm air –
permit no lyricism and no bright ideas.
A wave comes in. The wind stirs.
How casually we used to fit
into our endless lives.

Dinah Hawken

Dinah Hawken’s new poetry collection, Peace and Quiet, offers a compelling reading retreat, an extended version of Poetry Shelf’s Breathing Room, where you take time out from daily routine and news feeds and jagged edges, and breathe in the joy and delight and skin tingling rewards of poetry. Yet Dinah’s intricate collection is also deeply aware of people and planet issues that we are facing navigating challenging .

We begin in a room, waiting listening waiting, a dark room, mysterious, senses on alert, and this poem, this is poetry where everything, every line and every lithe word sings. We move into the real, beyond real, into fable, beyond fable, into the shifting oceans and sands outside, the appearances and disappearances, the sky, yes a beauty curtain the sky, the infinite possibilities for being, and from this waiting room, from this sweet poetry pause, let’s say contemplation, we step into poetry as song, as uplift.

Poetry as a song cycle where “life is the endless chanting of a choir / that you can join, she said.”

Senses are on alert to life: the dailiness, the quotidian that unfolds and continues upon the beach, the sound of a fire engine’s siren, to where the women who once held themselves back in restraint and hid their inner selves, now leave footprints in the sand, tracing their true nature. Children are born. Or maybe we flick sideways to where the woman in the street has a hidden gun. And back again to “She is listening to his breathing”.

Sea and ocean, and the water is an ongoing current we are drawn to, with its murmurings and welling ups and breathings and light and beauty and murmurings and sheen.

Quietness is to be on the other side of rain and storm, it is not speaking of “the rough and sombre days” they are hiding in between the lines where “beauty in the sheen of the sea / is indisputable.” Observed beauty and the nooks and crannies and wide sky of living. In the way light illuminates “time and place”. This precious moment. This beloved scene. Where old age and death are the ragged edges. And this: “and between waves a monumental second of silence”.

Peace. Holding hands with quiet and we are guided back to Parihaka. To Somme. To Archie Baxter. To non violence. Calling as we do and must and will for “a lull, a truce, // a ceasefire, a prohibition on the use of force.” Remembering “that an island of warfare can, / given time, become a sanctuary.”

There are so many pathways through Dinah’s stunning collection, so many glades to linger in, so many vantage points where you can stand or sit to absorb the shifting moods of sea and sky, so many trails into the rugged war-smashed greedy world, into living and dying, into aging and becoming, into mourning the dead. Into the ocean at fingertips and the mantra meditation. Still becoming. This living. This daily movement. So many hinges upon peace and quiet. On peace ahead of war. On the power and joy and tremble of silence.

I hold this precious book out to you so you may navigate your own pathways though.

June down under

The winter is reluctant to come.
The stacked wood
lies undisturbed, protecting wētā.

The only thing that won’t ice over
on the other side of the world
is the father’s heart.

He is digging in the rubble
with his bare hands
for a small boy.
A small son.

Dinah Hawken

Dinah Hawken is one of New Zealand’s most celebrated poets. She was born in Hāwera in 1943 and now lives in Paekākāriki. Recent poetry collections include Faces and Flowers: Poems to Patricia France, Sea-light, and There Is No Harbour. In 2025 she received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement.

Te Herenga Waka University Press page
Book interview with Morrin: Lauren Keenen, Dinah Hawken, Ingrid Horrocks
Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Morrin Rout chooses Dinah Hawken


Poetry Shelf celebrates Landfall Tauraka 251 with nine readings

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Landfall Tauraka 251, ed Lynley Edmeades, reviews ed David Eggleton
Otago University Press, 2026

Incl winner of Landfall Tauraka Young Writers’ Essay Prize 2026
Art Portfolios: Megan Brady and Julian Hooper
Craft Interview with Tusiata Avia

Otago University Press page

Landfall Tauraka 251 is a gift package of poetry, fiction, artwork, an interview, a terrific winning essay and reviews. The selection of poems and poets catches the eclectic reach and possibilities of poetry in Aotearoa in 2026, whether performed or published or shared online.

I have two ongoing series on Poetry Shelf that resonate with this issue. The Poetry Shelf Breathing Room offers poems to pause on and breathe in slowly and deeply. And secondly Poetry Shelf Speaks Out To For With – where poetry is a way to speak out, whether political and/or getting personal, whether nuanced or loud. This is what I get, as I spend the weekend reading and rereading Landfall’s poetry selection. I am stalling on every poem, breathing in the exquisite lyricism, the lightness, the visual brocades of detail. And then again, I am musing on poetry that is speaking out in myriad vital ways.

Landfall Tauraka 251 feels like my favourite Landfall to date. The subject matter roves from cities towns and streets to eulogies and grief, to family, pūkeko and museums, to swamp forests and to sweet hot chocolate. There are poets new to me along with poets I have admired for ages.

Plus there is a cracking, standout, must-read interview with Tusiata Avia where she goes deep into writing poetry. She speaks of the boost Bill Manhire and IIML gave her. She speaks of her vulnerabilities and doubt in the early years and how intuition is a key tool as a poet.

This is an issue to listen to, to linger over, to track new poets you want to read again. Already my issue is well thumbed.

To celebrate Landfall Tauraka 251, I invited nine poets to record their poems.

ART Megan Brady, Julian Hooper, John Reynolds, Deborah Smith
FICTION Molly Crighton, Heather Holdaway, Sam Keenan, Cait Kneller, David Large, Jemma Richardson, Grant Smithies, Cora Tate, Pearl Tuohy, Tarn Wright
NON-FICTION Cian Dennan, Uzair Khan
POETRY Tunmise Adebowale, Hannah Rose Arnold, Nick Ascroft, Izzie Birnie, Cindy Botha, Hana Buchanan, Nathaniel Calhoun, Kim Cope Tait, Brett Cross, Brandon de la Cruz, David Eggleton, Craig Foltz, Alison Glenny, Eliana Gray, Jackson, Erik Kennedy, Fiona Kidman, Brent Kininmont, Leonard Lambert, Jessica Le Bas, Carolyn McCurdie, Kirstie McKinnon, Alice Miller, Anuja Mitra, Janet Newman, Grace Nottingham, Gregory O’Brien, Jilly O’Brien, Claire Orchard, Harriet Prebble, Joanna Preston, Hope Rännäli, Vaughan Rapatahana, Richard Reeve, Holly Ruth, Will Salmon, Regan Solomon, Jillian Sullivan, Stacey Teague, Dunstan Ward, Andrew Paul Wood, Nicholas Wright
REVIEW Sally Blundell, John Gereats, Michael O’Leary, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, Paddy Richardson, Elizabeth Smither, Bronwyn Wylie-Gibb

The readings

Alison Glenny

‘Waffle’

Alison Glenny lives near Te Whanganui-a-Tara and is the author of several collections of mostly prose poems, published by Otago University Press and Compound Press. In 2024 they were the Aotearoa recipient of the Caselberg Trust Margaret Egan City of Literature residency in Whaka Oho Rahi/Broad Bay, on the Otago Peninsula.

Hana Buchanan

Photo Credit: Julia Sabugosa

Hana Buchanan (Ngāti Haumia ki Te Aro, Taranaki iwi, Te Atiawa, Taranaki Whānui ki te Upoko o te Ika) is a word person, a tangata toikupu — poet, kaikaranga, kaitito waiata — and yoga teacher working from her ancestral lands in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Hana’s poetry is published online and in print journals and her first full collection, Kupu Whenua, is out now!

Cian Dennan

‘Fragments on the house of memory’

Cian Dennan is a poet, educator and multidisciplinary artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa. Cian completed her Master’s degree in Creative Writing at the University of Auckland in 2025, and continues to develop a body of work exploring the intricacies of self and memory from a Kiwi-Italian perspective. Cian’s work has been recognised by a number of prestigious awards, including the Phoenix Prize and the Garth Maxwell Creative Project Prize.

Tunmise Adebowale

‘Beautiful People in Dunedin’

Tunmise Adebowale is a Nigerian-born New Zealander. Her work has been published in several major publications, including Poetry Ireland Review, Landfall Tauraka, The Spinoff, The Big Idea, The Pantograph Punchand Newsroom. 

Erik Kennedy

‘Lined v Unlined Paper’

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 lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch.

Nick Ascroft

‘Spite in the Beat’

Nick Ascroft’s most recent book of poetry is It’s What He Would’ve Wanted (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025). 

Fiona Kidman

Fiona Kidman at home

‘Blue This and That’

Fiona Kidman writes poetry, novels, memoirs and essays. Her most recent poetry collection was The Midnight Plane, gathering up work of the past 50 years, and new poems.Her fiction has won a number of prizes and is published internationally, particularly in France. She lives on a high hill in Wellington.

Jillian Sullivan

‘Framework’

Jillian Sullivan lives in the Ida Valley, Central Otago. Her thirteen published books include creative non-fiction, novels, short stories and poetry. Her latest book is  Map for the Heart- Ida Valley Essays, Otago University Press.

Alice Miller

‘Old Romantic’

Alice Miller’s fourth poetry collection is Here & Thereafter (Pavilion, 2026). She is also the author of a novel, More Miracle than Bird (Tin House). Alice lives in Berlin, but she and her family are planning to return to Aotearoa in 2027.

Poetry Shelf collage review: The girl who was swallowed by ice and snow by Bernadette Hall and Kathryn Madill

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The girl who was swallowed by ice and snow
Bernadette Hall and Kathryn Madill
The Tuirau Arcade, 2026

Bernadette Hall and Kathryn Madill shared an Artists in Antarctic Award in 2004, a memorable experience that drew them into creative collaborations and an enduring and close friendship.

The girl who was swallowed by ice and snow is an ice-aching poem exhibition story fable haunting collaboration with text by Bernadette and paintings by Kathryn. An exhibition was displayed from 17 March to 13 April 2026 at City Art Depot Gallery, Christchurch.

Sometimes I pick up a book, and it is perfect timing, a book that fills the gap or ache or hunger of now. I open the The girl who was swallowed by ice and snow, and get that electric connection, this is the book I need to be reading, this slender book that opens out into thickets of discovery, recognition, delight.

Sul is sixteen, born on a Sunday, she is full of grace, but for some self-smashing, self-unacccountable reason, she plunges into a crippling state of silence. A state of frozen ice. But then, after days and months entrapped, upon hearing her name called in the middle of the night, she moves. She begins walking moving walking moving with ice limbs through garden forest beach.

Sul is moving with a comfort quilt draped across her shoulders, through a radically changed world, with horrifying things sliding off a banquet table, with no desire, just ice. And here we are in the mysterious terrain of fable, with a tugging desire to be walking, to be naming things, with a moon ladder, with the world’s fabled beginnings, with the fingertap of the dead and death, in some scenes.

And yes we are in the terrain of fable when a rescue Ice Warden cares for Sul, with uncertain and maybe unstable time passing, and dear Sul is fed snow berries and sea lettuce and stories.

The Ice Warden takes her to the sharpest ice shard imaginable, figuratively, and literally, there in the Antarctica scene, to a frozen ice hut, to an ice bridge collapsed, to scrapping sled dogs and to where men are trapped in blizzard death, trapped in stagger and collapse, and the death-watch Ice Warden unwittingly offers a turning point, an epiphany moment for dear Sul.

More than anything, I am busting through ice to care for and be cared for, for Sul to be cared for and to care for. For you to care for and be cared for. Musing within this precious moment on how to care for the person next to me, how to be held in warm embrace, how to recognise what I want and need when desire is a big thin unstable wedge.

Bernadette’s writing is a visual canvas, painterly with detail, economical, lyrical, rich in effect. The sentences exude an exquisite honeyed fluency, even when writing of ice and shards and death and the dead, uncertain times and timings. The sublime rhythm and simplicity accentuates the haunting, the fablesque, the real world.

Kathryn’s artwork, comprising watercolours and monoprints, is a dark-light visionary narrative, also lyrical with haunting rhythms, and if you place your ear tenderly against an image, you will hear the mysterious haunting dream. The pitch black intimate night of the painting. I am, for example, drawn deep into the empty chair, the velvety red smudges, the suspended moon. The rippling paint texture catching the intimate interior world of Sul.

I am shimmering and shivering and thawing and dreaming beyond and within the layers of this extraordinary wee book. Thank you.

The photo was taken in the City Art Depot in Otautahi Christchurch

“On March 17 at the City Art Gallery in Ōtautahi Christchurch, my YA short story ‘The Girl Who Was Swallowed by Ice and Snow’ will be launched. It is a collaboration with the Dunedin artist, Kathryn Madill, 1,800 words from me and 17 paintings from her. Set in an Antarctic dreamscape, it explores the phenomenon of silence, the kind of silence the young can vanish into. To save themselves. As I did when my dad died in front of me when I was 16 years old. His Irish heart giving out. So it has taken me 22 years to make this artwork. How wonderful to celebrate the making now with Kathryn.” Bernadette Hall

Bernadette Hall is Otago born and bred. Following a long and much enjoyed career as a high school teacher in Dunedin and Christchurch, she has for the last eighteen years lived in a renovated bach at Amberley Beach in the Hurunui, North Canterbury, where she has built up a beautiful garden. Fancy Dancing is her eleventh collection of poetry. In 2015 she collaborated with Robyn Webster on Matakaea, Shag Point, an art /text installation exhibited at the Ashburton Art Gallery. In the same year she was awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for literary achievement in poetry. In 2017 she was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Dunedin artist Kathryn Madill is an established New Zealand artist. Her paintings, drawings and prints explore fragments of literature, legend and landscape. Within these delicate works, we find poised moments of human experience stalled against the grey of day, the dark of night, the barren contours of a desolate landscape. Madill has been a consistent exhibitor at City Art Depot since our first exhibition in 2001.

The exhibition: The girl who was swallowed by ice and snow, City Art Depot Gallery, Christchurch, 17 March to 13 April 2026 exhibition link. gallery

The publisher: The Tuirau Arcade thetuirauarcade@gmail.com

An event June 19th

An event: Waimakariri Libraries invite lovers of stories and beautiful art to enjoy a lively book talk to celebrate ‘The girl who was swallowed by ice and snow’, a book written by Bernadette Hall with accompanying artworks Kathryn Madill.

This special event features images of the original artworks by Kathryn Madill, and a reading from the book by Bernadette Hall. This beautiful book is 20 years in the making, with roots that go back to their shared 2004 residency in Antarctica.

Poetry Shelf celebrates Ariana Tikao’s Pepeha Portal – a review and a reading

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Pepeha Portal, Ariana Tikao
cover image: Kate Stevens West (Kāi Tahu), Kurawaka/Tender Ties Kohikohi, 2021
University of Otago Press, 2026

To read Pepeha Portal is uplifting. The poetry offers an experience that nourishes the air I breathe, the physical ground I stand upon, the metaphorical paths I navigate, the way I move between past present future, the way poems can hold me in prolonged and vital embrace.

The collection is divided into two parts, ‘Pepeha’ and ‘Portal’. Two warm welcome palms held out to me as reader, let’s say to you as reader. Two versions of homecoming and homebeing perhaps, with vital movement between and beyond and close to. The first section, ‘Pepeha’, introduces self in Māori through connections to tīpuna place and stories, where the presence of people and ancestors acutely matter. The second, the ‘Portal’, the doorway, offers an array of life-rich movement in the Christchurch of Ariana’s childhood and the Ōtautahi of her adulthood.

Think place. Think belonging. Think aroha. Think wisdom. Think physical land. Think the ache of the land ravaged for-earth-ruinology, not for-earth-ecology: “rock spews into Whakaraupō / in the name of progress”.

I love how te reo Māori and English weave together across the collection, heightening the rhythm of two languages singing alongside each other, the way individual words are blooming with distinction, semantic nuances, cultural links. To have this precious language presence is vital when we are calling for te reo Māori to be both heard and visible in the streets, in schools, in parliament, in books published, the songs recorded, the stories shared. Let these lines from ‘To’u Reo’ settle upon your skin:

Then I remember Hana O’Regan:
He ātaahua te reo i roto i a koe

Āe, the reo inside me is perfect

It’s in my blood
like lava
like a fire

like my pōua said   Mana
is a fire
never extinguished  

I keep jotting down words to carry through the collection as I read, like echo mantras: belonging, connecting, here, from. There in the moving eulogies to mother and father. There in the poem, ‘Ko Au Tonu’ with its echo-chamber line, “I am here”. And there in the terrific poem ‘From’. It’s like song. It’s like a self chant. I just want to hear the poem singing in the air. Here’s a taste of it (you can hear Ariana read the poem below):

I’m from Redgrave Street, Hoon Bay. Pōtiki of seven ‘half-caste’
kids raised in a house built by the state, with purple polyanthus
and sweet peas blooming along the driveway

I’m from picking the hardened chewing gum off the footpaths,
spitting out grit like pips, coaxing back flavour with persuasive
saliva and metal-filled teeth

Musicality is important as I read, and I was super keen to hear Ariana perform some poems. Ariana, a musician and New Zealand Arts Laureate, is attuned to the cadence of words and her poetry reflects this, with her aural agility, a gift.

In the poem, ‘Intonation’, a poem dedicated to the late Moana Jackson, I find deep-seated heart, and again we are in a crucial stream of belonging and connections. The poem sings the praises of Moana and underlines we are not writing and reading in empty impoverished hopeless vacuums. We are writing and singing, joining and remembering, connecting and that matters. Here’s a stanza:

The time has come
if we each tell
one of his stories
we will light up this place
so bright we gotta wear shades

Ariana is crafting and sharing poetry with roots in the personal but it is also poetry speaking to for out and for the world. I stall on ‘Kua Whetūrakitia’, a poem shaped like an urn or a vase or beacon. A beacon of light that we hold up for Gaza.

I stall on ‘Settling’, a striking poem that holds the title word, a prickly spiky word, out to us, shaking the word a little like a snow globe, letting sediment settle upon us, the sediment that forms in the shaken jar. Turn the word again and settle is negotiating, negotiations. And another turn and it’s the Israeli settling settlers on the West Bank, as the Palestinians mourn their bombed whanau. This word. This settling, this unfolding and refolding gash in hearts settling.

I’m electrified by ‘Transforming’ and its call for action. Protest. Speaking out. It feels important this, that Ariana’s poetry, so personal and grounding, shines insistent light on global and local wounds and speaks out. In this ground-tremor poem, Ariana turns to the mokopuna:

Papa’s heat is also rising. We will summon those wiling to fight
for Papatūānuku, those who won’t keep extracting from her –
unlike us, who believed the the claim of the capitalists. These new
fighters will speak our reo and dance with the fluid movement
of bull kelp surging around the rocks. Wehi and wana will
explode from them like white water from a blowhole. It is these
mokopuna that we need. They won’t stay seated in rows. They
won’t wear bows in their hair. Nau mai e tama. Nau mai e hine!

Much of collection was written during Ariana’s 2023 Ursula Bethell Residency at the University of Canterbury. In her endnote, she mentions her office corkboard: “I progressively added printed pages from the Ngāi Tahu digital atlas Kā Huru Manu, to use it as a visual reminder of our placenames and the stories behind them. As a way to track progress, I’d added coloured pins to the map. In the end, there were over thirty pins.”

And now, the extraordinary reach and intimacy of Pepeha Portal settles and unsettles and resettles me. I am musing on writing poetry as a form of travel, inner private intimate travel, physical travel, travel that sparks epiphany, travel that refreshes the light in which I view and hear and absorb the world.

This gift of a book is in the world. Thank you.

a reading

‘Te Waihora’

‘Transforming’

‘From’

‘Intonation’

Ariana Tikao is a Kāi Tahu writer, musician and New Zealand Arts Laureate. Her work spans poetry, music and interdisciplinary performance, and has been published widely in Aotearoa. Her book Mokorua: My Story of Moko Kauae was published in 2022 (AUP). Pepeha Portal is her debut poetry collection.

Otago University Press page

Poetry Shelf review: Before the Winter Ends by Khadro Mohamed

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Before the Winter Ends, Khadro Mohamed
Tender Press, 2025

The entire courtyard is bathed in bright orange. Omar feels
a prickling in his eyes and he lets tears fall. His mother is
rubbing her soil-stained fingers together when she turns to him.
Her eyes have grown soft. Instead of saying anything, because
there is nothing she can say, she reaches across the space between
them and grips his hand. His grandmother calls for them in the
distance. The Adan rings across the houses.

from Before the Winter Ends

Khadro Mohamed’s debut novel, Before the Winter Ends, is the kind of novel that sticks to you in vital ways. For me, it is a complete and utterly satisfying narrative package. Khadro writes with her poet’s ear attuned to the flow of the sentences (her debut poetry collection We’re All Made of Lightning won the Jessie Mackay Prize for Best First Book of Poetry at the 2023 Ockham NZ Book Awards). Oh yes, and Tender Press have a done an excellent production job!

I love this book. I love this book so very much.

This year I am drawn to novels that are written in ink that is musical, with sonic rewards multiple. I am drawn to characters that fold and unfold into the plains and mountains and valleys of human experience. Khadro’s characters, particularly the protagonist Omar and his family, draw me deep, oh so very deep into humanity, with their various connections to past and present and future.

I am drawn into the physical world, so present in illuminating detail. Physical scenes alive with detail, with food, the wafting flavours and preparation and customs and associations. And most importantly, the movement between places, between Wellington, Egypt and Somalia. And this movement, geographical, familial, these attachments and displacements, feel as relevant to today, as they were in the 1999 and 2019 of the novel’s narrative.

Omar is a struggling university student in Wellington. He lives with his mother, Asha, who is ill. He hangs out with his uni buddy, Nick. He speaks on the phone to his grandmother in Egypt. He has rarely talked to his aunt Fardowsa who has lived in multiple African cities. He can’t stop thinking about his enigma father, Yasser, who went missing in war-plagued Mogadishu of 1999 and is a persistent and troubling gap. Omar is learning Arabic and Somalian. He is sitting in his science lab with a lost-in-the-bush feeling, tuning out, wanting to set fire to his afro, and by the end of class:

“The bush fire in Omar’s mind has eased to a single flame by the end of the lab. He welcomes it but tries to ignore the scorched landscape left in its wake.”

Before the Winter Ends is in three parts. Part 1, Wellington in 2019, introduces Omar and Asha with connections and misconnections. Part 2, in Cairo, Egypt and in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1999, returns to the meeting of his parents. Part 3, is Cairo in 2019 when Asha and Omar go to to see his grandmother and aunt. It’s his first visit. And there’s a small final section that returns to Mogadishu Somalia.

This novel is one you hold to your heart with its mesh of grief and silence and challenge, its currents of distance and intimacy and epiphany.

We learn more about Asha in the second part. The Asha buried inside the ill woman in Wellington. How this moved me, as I stretch out to women’s struggles across time and place. Asha makes sacrifices to be a wife, to be alone at home, she who had dreams of teaching Somali literature, and there’s her husband Yasser heading out the door to the library. When she asks for mint, Yasser buys her pomegranates. His empty sorry, a hollow echo. And sorry becomes an ache refrain. The seeing and not been seen. Language and dream buried deep in her tongue and heart and mind. This precious pregnant woman who travels to Wellington to nourish new life tendrils.

This is heart reading. This is making me care so deeply about this young man. This mother. About where and how to be in the knife-edge, war-smashed world we inhabit.

This is a novel on being seen and seeing. On the need to be seen. On the self-restoring act of seeing.

This a novel on saying and being said. On not being able to say what is reached for, struggled for, deflated by, exhausted by. On being able to. On being able to say.

This is also a novel on healing, on navigating the paths ahead.

Read this precious novel. Let it settle under your skin and travel with you, as together we navigate the roads ahead, the roads behind, and with heart to heart, the roads we share and stand upon, reading, writing, speaking, doing, listening.

Khadro Mohamed is a writer and poet living in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington. She has a bachelor’s degree in biology from Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. She’s originally from Somalia and has a deep connection with her whakapapa, which is often a huge source of inspiration for her poetry. Her poetry has appeared in online magazines such as: Starling, Salient Magazine, Pantograph Punch, Poetry Shelf, The Spinoff and more. Her debut poetry collection, We’re All Made of Lightning (Tender Press, 2022), won the Jessie Mackay Prize for Best First Book of Poetry at the 2023 Ockham NZ Book Awards.

Tender Press page

A poem on Poetry Shelf: ‘If I Go Back’

Poetry Shelf Conversations and Readings: Amber Esau

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Hungus, Amber Esau
Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2026

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

a conversation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

reading

Amber reads from Hungus

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

Te Herenga Waka University Press page

Poetry Shelf review: New Days for Old by James Brown

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New Days for Old: prose poems, James Brown
Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2026

In my country of origin, far across the sea, the women
sweep the floors with what you would call broomsticks.
These are effective until their ends begin to fray and snap,
creating more debris than they clean away. This was also
the problem with our government, which is why my
father disguised us as suitcases and brought us here.

James Brown
from New Days for Old: prose poems

First up, I love the feel, shape and look of James Brown’s new poetry collection. Secondly, I love the title: New Days for Old. Thirdly, I love the choice of genre: a sequence of prose poems. And finally I love the opening quotation: “Much of the greatest art, I find, seeks to remind us of the obvious.” (Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: A Museum Guide’s Adventures in Life, Loss and Art).
I tip the quotation on its heels, borrow the word beauty, and get caught in a thinking whirlpool of beauty and wonder, the obvious and the ordinary. I was sidetrailed into musing on the small in the large as much as the large in the small.

Nothing like a glorious poetry eddy to get your senses tingling.

The opening prose poem is like a trinket box, like I’m entering a prose poem, a pocket narrative that is strange and unsettling all in one breath, that is finger tapping magic realism maybe, dystopian fiction, an arcing life story, the addictive openness of a Bill Manhire poem, and not to forget, never to forget, the brutal reality 2026.

On the back of the book Bill claims every poem in the book as his favourite, and I agree. It feels like I am in a unique treasure shop and I am agog with wonder, picking every prose poem up and holding it to the light to see it spin and shift and sparkle. Every poem is sense-catching. Think of the book as an unfolding life story, brimming with babies and childhood, delight and despair. It’s wit and it’s politics and its pocket narratives, it’s sonic fluency and it’s silence.

“We take lasagna round to John because ‘He’s fallen
through the cracks,’ says my mother. That must be why
it’s bad luck to step on them.'”

James’s metaphors resemble surprise packages the rural courier has just delivered – each is a receptacle of narrative possibilities. Plump with behind-the-scenes anecdotes. I am not sure if this idea works but I was thinking of metaphors as little foundation stones – extraordinary and glorious – upon which I get to build imagine remember things. This is poetry at its interactive best. Reading between and under and above the lines.

“Every high tide, all our little chickens come home / to roost.”

A poetry collection can flourish as a whole, it can offer gold nugget lines sprinkled throughout, and sometimes as in the case of James, it can do both. Every poem, as you see in the pieces I have quoted, has lines that grip you. That fascinate.

The cover of the book has the title and the blurb laid on a musical staff, both bass and treble clef. How perfect when, as James says in his cafe reading, tone matters. It is tone, so exquisitely crafted, that transports us through the treasure shop. Picking up new and old, whether imagined or confessed. Picking up the curious, the ordinary, the satisfying.

Every review I write reconsiders my relationship with poetry, as both reader and writer. What interests me is the poetic effect on mind and heart, maybe skin, think the goosebump effect, or enhanced energy levels. I am gravitating to books that offer tilt and openness – that soothe and challenge and sing, and that is the gift of this new collection: I have experienced tilt, openness, balm, challenge, song. And that is altogether perfect when the weather outside is off-key.

“A woman with a red hat gets on the bus at a stop
nobody gets on at. Aah dee doo, ah dee doo dah day.
A woman and child exit the bus at a bookmark in the
middle of the middle volume of In Search of Lost Time.
Read Proust for soft focus. Aah dee doo, ah de daay dee.
A lamp post on a hillside recedes into gorse and
bedstraw.”

James Brown describes himself as ‘a Sunday poet who fell in with the wrong crowd’. His poetry collections are New Days for Old (2026), Slim Volume (2024), The Tip Shop (2022), Selected Poems (2020), Floods Another Chamber (2017), Warm Auditorium (2012), The Year of the Bicycle (2006), which was a finalist in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2007, Favourite Monsters (2002), Lemon (1999), and Go Round Power Please (1996), which won the Best First Book Award for Poetry.

James has been the recipient of several writing fellowships and residencies, including the 1994 Louis Johnson New Writers Bursary (1994) and a share of the 2000 Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship, the Canterbury University Writer in Residence (2001). He edited The Nature of Things: Poems from the New Zealand Landscape (Craig Potton, 2005), the literary magazine Sport from 1993 to 2000, and Best New Zealand Poems 2008. In 2002, as Dr Ernest M. Bluespire, he published the useful booklet Instructions for Poetry Readings (Braunias University Press). In 2018, James created what he calls ‘a transcribed poem’ out of Herbert Morrison’s famous radio commentary of the Hindenburg disaster: ‘Hindenburg: A transcribed poem’, and also produced the small booklet Songs of the Humpback Whale. In 2019, Alan Gregg, formerly of the band the Mutton Birds, turned two of James’s poems (‘Shrinking Violet’ and ‘Peculiar Julia’) into songs.

James works as an editor and teaches the Poetry Workshop at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington.

Te Herenga Waka University page

James reads from New Days for Old: prose poems

Poetry Shelf review: What to Wear by Jenny Bornholdt

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What to Wear, Jenny Bornholdt
Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2026

A woman stilled by light
then folded
into darkness.
Still, though, she’s there
by the window, still there
in the room.

Jenny Bornholdt
from ‘Ada in the Room’

What an absolute treat to lose and find myself within the paths and slipstreams of Jenny Bornholdt’s new writing. This book is a visual haunting, a soundtrack of grief, loss, illness, love, wonder. Enter this collection, and enter a poetic terrain that is both gloriously spare and captivatingly rich.

Poetry can do this. Poetry can offer subtlety within richness, and then in a sweet poetry swivel, offer richness within subtlety.

I found myself musing on the art of dressmaking – an irony when the cover and the title of the book signal clothing (more on this later). I got musing on the way slivers of life are hiding within the seams of the poems, in the nuance of a line, in the folds of a metaphor. Musing on the way tiny arrivals are signposts in the wide expanse of daily living, whether a word mantra repeated during an MRI, or how a mountain’s death zone brushes against the death zone in a cancer ward, or the throwing away of a mother’s maps, or the wearing of socks when days are numbered, or the drawing-breath sound of trees after rain.

‘What to wear’ is the final line in the final poem, ‘Illness’. Not a question, but a member of the checklist of daily choices. The poem — so heart-affecting when the woman we read of is “up, but just, just / hanging on” — returns me to the terrific cover image (photograph by Deborah Smith). The hanging shirt. Hanging in space. Hanging in the great unknown. And in my madcap musings, I am wondering if, in one or more senses, I am wearing the poems, these poems so exquisitely crafted, with piquant detail, with an under-and-overlay of personal experience, with a shimmering bridge between what is and what is not, between what is spoken and what is framed in silence. What is fascinating fable and surprising fiction. Ah. What to read in the seams? I am losing and finding the way a poem hangs in both the dark and light.

Sometimes I muse that what we bring to a poetry collection makes an electric and eclectic difference. Maybe that is why the book has sparked for me on many levels. Both personally and on how we might write a poem.

I read and love ‘Ada in the Room’. It’s an exquisite visual haunting, a poem that catches you as a sublime painting might, and then I discover the poem is a response to an actual painting, ‘Interior, Sunlight on the Floor’ in the Tate Gallery in London. Plus it has a fascinating anecdote. An owner had folded the painting so the artist’s wife Ada was no longer visible! But it is the poem that holds me. I am transported to the moment on the kitchen chair when I too watch the light streak the floor, and knowing I get folded into light and dark across the course of every single day.

Oh the joy of poems as miniatures to fold and unfold.

When I slow down to an extended reading pause, I am reminded of reading Bill Manhire’s new collection, Lyrical Ballads THWUP, 2026). How poetry can hint and whisper, sing and imagine, find humour and enigma, whether in everyday starting points or imagined flight, in both the strange and the unexpected. How the everyday prompts vital rewards for mind heart imagination senses. I loved the idea of listening to Bill read Lyrical Ballads from start to finish, and now I want Jenny to do the same.

Poetry, as my personalised review underlines, can offer delight along with self-nourishment. In What to Wear, the amalgam of reading delight and nourishment is there in broken things, sitting on the phone, the poem with the hole in it (ah what poem doesn’t have a hole in it), and the members of an extended family ‘declining like nouns’. I have had startle jabs of feeling, points of recognition, prolonged engagements with the chemistry of words. Take ‘Poem with a hole in it’. It juxtaposes word lists with stanzas. The laying of a path overlays/underlays the laying of a poem. The word lists epitomise how Jenny’s poems open out wider from their immediately visible pavings.

What to Wear is still on the table and I want to prolong my day in its nooks and crannies and spaces, in this magical poetry collection that folds and gently moves me to wonder and ache and absorb.

Plum

Why wear socks
when your days
are numbered.

Like plums falling
from trees, frequent
as minutes

Jenny Bornoldt

Jenny Bornholdt has published over a dozen books of poems, including Lost and Somewhere Else (2019), Selected Poems (2016) and The Rocky Shore (winner of the Montana New Zealand Book Award for Poetry, 2009). She has edited a number of anthologies, including Short Poems of New Zealand (2018), and has worked on numerous book and art projects with artists including Annemarie Hope-Cross, Pip Culbert, Mary McFarlane, Noel McKenna, Mari Mahr, Brendan O’Brien and Gregory O’Brien. In 2018 she was the co-recipient, with Gregory O’Brien, of the Henderson Arts Trust Residency and spent 12 months in Alexandra, Central Otago. She was New Zealand’s poet laureate in 2005–2007, and in the 2014 New Year Honours she was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services as a poet.

Te Herenga Waka University Press page

Poetry Shelf review: 28 days by Janet Charman and Elizabeth Anderson

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28 days, Janet Charman and Elizabeth Anderson
Skinship Press, 2025

I am sitting at the kitchen table, the doors wide open, feeling the wind rustling in from the Waitākere ranges, the bird song racketing after all that rain, my flat white growing cold, and I slowly reflect upon 28 days. The book fits in the palm of my hand but expands in prismatic ways in both heart and mind. I have never experienced anything like it. It is pitched as a creative memoir. Elizabeth Anderson has produced 28 artworks, Janet Charman 28 texts. The artwork focuses on cafe scenes, drawing upon multi media, echoing Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s Parisian café paintings. The little texts – dialogue or poems or anecdotes – are like word kisses on the page.

The memoir is a collaboration, a contiguous relationship between word and image, between artist and writer, and this brushing close, this besidedness as the blurb says, is utterly fertile, utterly heart expansive in its reach. I am stretching for words, and they slip away. So I sit here on the rim of weeping, weeping at the way I’m brought cheek to cheek with the sharp edges of humanity. The shadows. My shadows. The unspoken. My unspoken. There in the cafe settings. There where dark brushes against light, where isolation and loneliness are rife. There where stories are shared, and equally stories are held back. Darkness and light.

Probably against the grain of reading a sequence of images and text, I look at Elizabeth’s images first. She produces all the drawings on her iPad using the Procreate drawing app, recording her observations in cafes or buses. I am absorbing the people frozen in a cafe moment, those on phones, those alone, those in groups, those with son or daughter, and each scene amplifies an intensity of mood. I can’t think when I have last felt portraits to such a degree. I feel the gaze of the eyes, the expression on the face. I feel the unspoken, and more than anything, the way we become a catalogue of memory, experience, pain, aroha, longing, recognitions.

In these tough times that can be so overwhelming, this book, I am feeling to its raw mood edges.

Now I return to the beginning and read Janet’s texts, these little patches of dialogue or poetry or anecdote, and again I am shaken to my core. It’s dark and light, its jarring and surprising. It’s gender relations and damage and patriarchy and femen and abuse and dressing wounds and how do we become and how do we be. Interior monologues, intimate revelations. Again I am feeling this book, feeling poetry to a skin tingling degree.

I am reading through the book for a third time, text alongside image, image alongside text, and the besidedness is extraordinary. It takes me deep into grief, into how we live, how vital our stories and conversations are, how connectedness matters, how listening to the person beside us matters. How important it is to nourish our children and ourselves in multiple self-care ways. And my words are a knot. How to re-view? How to speak? How to write?

Janet and Elizabeth’s collaboration began during the Canal Road Arboretum protest in Avondale, where the two artists first met. The book is in some ways a form of protest, in another ways a memory theatre, an intimate album. I haven’t felt a book this deep in a long time. This book is a gift. And I have ordered a copy to gift to a friend. Thank you.

Janet Charman is an award-winning poet, recipient of the Best Book of Poetry at the 2008 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. Her 2022 collection The Pistils was longlisted at the 2023 NZ Book Awards, and her 11th collection The Intimacy Bus was released in 2025.

Elizabeth Anderson is an artist and educator with an MFA from Elam. She has worked across design and television in Aotearoa and the UK, and now focuses on observational drawing and community-based creative work.

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