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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.

Skinship Press page

Poetry Shelf review: No Good by Sophie van Waardenberg

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No Good, Sophie van Waardenberg
Auckland University Press, 2025

What initially hooks us into a poem? For me, there is no singular response. Indeed if there were, it might limit what poetry can be and do. When I first started reading Sophie van Waardenberg’s new collection, No Good, I jotted down two words in my notebook: rhythm and voice. I was hooked. I was drawn into the musical cadence of a speaker speaking, drawn into the under and over currents of spiky, thistle, bloom. And as I read the collection, on a number of occasions over the past few months, crucial questions arrived. I was especially musing on the way a poem might become both self and other.

The title is the perfect welcome mat into the collection, particularly coupled with the cover illustration, where ‘good’ wavers, and I gaze at the beetle on the apple that is both good and not good. Pausing on the welcome mat, a cascade of (centuries) of good girl propaganda spins in my mind, and I am peering into the no good to see the next apple in the bowl, a portal of good in the pillowcase of no good.

And then, there on the first page, the ‘Poem in Which I am Good’, and the welcome mat widens, and still I am musing on the good girl, the no good girl, and the lyrical voice is blisteringly affecting.

Everything will be good, and the trousers I left
to blow in the wind and the rain and lemon leaves,

them too. The linen will keep its soft thatching.

Who is she? How is she? The speaking voice gently draws me into both flawed and happy, and as much as I am on the edge of weeping, I hold tight to the coat-tails of joy. These words. These lines. These poems. I read : ‘A girl is born out of comparison.’ Read the glorious poem, ‘Sticky’, and feel the possibility of girl stretch oh so wide, even in the complicated history of her making, whether personal, or across centuries, or as negotiable and contested ideas.

A girl is filth and bright. A girl is born
out of comparison. A girl can sing or can’t.
A girl is held inside a duck’s bill, weighed
against a slice of bread for softness.
What flour is a girl made of? Wheat or corn?
How can a girl get clean again?

The middle section of the book, ‘Cremation sonnets’ resembles a grief casket, where the poems lead in multiple directions, carrying us between presence and absence, letting go, and unable to let go. This lost love. This elegiac memory.

The final sequence of poems, so utterly moving, are written with the ink of love. The poems are addressed to ‘you’, written across a distance between here and there, between hunger and satisfaction, dream and reality, turning away and moving close. This is love. This loved and loving woman. This is ache and this is a yearning to love and be loved. Such gentleness, such a slow perfect unfolding of what is special, with only so much revealed and gently placed in the pockets of the poems. And if this is a love that is over, such deep sadness, it seems to me, that love finds a way to linger in residues, traces, scents.

The word I write in my notebook in my latest reading is bridge, the way poems become a bridge, establish vital bridges. Think sweet and sour crossings, fluid and awkward, here and there, good and not good. Not as a restrictive dichotomy but as a series of movements, like music, like the way personal experience resists pigeon holes. Traversing the myriad bridges in Sophie’s sublime collection makes me both think and feel the world. Yes I am thinking and feeling a version of her world, but also a version of my world. And this moves me.

Rhythm, voice, bridges. I hold this book out to you so you may find your own self-affecting crossings.

A stagger of lemons and a goneness
I can’t swallow. Hello the same feeling,

didn’t I wash you off,
you get everywhere, sog up my arms

and droop me. It’s something alien
in my gut that knows you so well.

I say it again: I am not a creature of sorrow.
But I could be proper sad if I put my mind to it,

if someone dropped me from a height.

from ‘The Getting Away’


Sophie van Waardenberg is a writer from Tāmaki Makaurau. She holds an MFA from Syracuse University where she was editor-in-chief of Salt Hill Journal. Her first chapbook, ‘does a potato have a heart?’, was published in AUP New Poets 5 (2019). Her poems about eating carbohydrates and kissing girls can be found in Cordite, Sweet Mammalian, The Spinoff and Best New Zealand Poems.

Listen to Sophie read two poems on Poetry Shelf: ‘Self-Portrait as Adolescent Covered in Flour’, ‘Hymn to the Insomniac in Fool’s Spring’

Auckland University Press page

Poetry Shelf review: In the Hollow of the Wave by Nina Mingya Powles

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In the Hollow of the Wave, Nina Mingya Powles
Auckland University Press, 2025
first published, Nine Arches Press, UK, 2025

handiwork

 

People asked me where I learned
and I said I taught myself the slow work of making.

But memory is a house with scraped white walls.
I step inside and choose what to take, what to leave behind.

My hands feel their way through
the gathering, the careful pulling apart.

The work of particular poets can strike you so deeply, so resonantly. Poets who produce collections that satisfy your hunger to read so keenly, with books that take up residency in both your mental and physical poetry rooms. Nina Mingya Powles has been that kind of poet for me, from her terrific debut collection Magnolia 木蘭, through her various other published offerings. Her new collection, In the Hollow of the Wave, is one of the most gorgeous poetry books I have held this year – a sweet combination of heavenly paper stock, generous size, lovingly-tended internal design and vital breathing room. Nina has also created textile works that add to the visual beauty and allure of the book.

Textile is a key word. I experience the book as multiple loomwork: a weaving of memory, experience, language, cottons and fabric. Weaving as a way of observing the world, feeling the world, observing the object, feeling the object, observing the past, feeling the past. It might be the sewing machine upon which her grandfather stitched quilts from garments belonging to her siblings, mother and grandmother. It might be a gown, a pleat, or a sheet of white paper or fabric.

And now, with In the Hollow of the Wave, the granddaughter is herself stitching quilts; inside the stitched poem the stitched cloth, and inside the stitched cloth the stitched poem. I experience contemplation pockets tucked with memory pleats, and inside memory pleats, I threads of slow contemplation: andante, largo, adagio.

The book title is borrowed from a line in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. It gains its own life as Nina ponders Virginia’s use of orientalism and Kitsushika Hokusai’s woodblock print, ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa’. The poem haunts, the hollow in the wave haunts, the recurrent pulse of existence and non-existence haunt. The poem is skin-prickling reading:

beyond the frame I saw a distant city / a place I used to know / where rain
falls in the foreground / all day and all night / I took out my sketchbook /
sharpened my pencil / drew a line across the sea / asked the mountain /
what does it mean to see and be unseen / it did not answer

So many echoes across the collection. So many threads to follow and pause on(slip stitch, ladder stitch, cross stitch). There is the scent of plants and plantings, herbal remedies, the reminder of the women in poverty who stitched the garments we wear, the reflection of self in a stirred pan on the stove, the way dreaming seeps into making, the way the language, chores, hopes and the lives of women still matter. The way poetry can be a way of asking questions.

Inside the hollow of a wave is a poem. And inside that poem is a book. A book such as this one. Stitched with aroha and luminous threads. I want you to read it for yourself and get absorbed in its beauty and craft. It has already found spots in my poetry rooms.

Nina Mingya Powles is a poet and writer from Aotearoa New Zealand, currently based in London. Her debut poetry collection, Magnolia 木蘭, was published in New Zealand, the UK and the US, and was a finalist in the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection and the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Powles won the inaugural Women Poets’ Prize in 2018 and the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize for under-represented nature writers in 2019. Her resulting book of essays Small Bodies of Water was published in 2021 by Canongate. She has also published a short food memoir, Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai (The Emma Press, 2020).]

Auckland University Press page

Poetry Shelf Occasional Poems: Dinah Hawken’s Speaking of Trees

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Speaking of Trees

What does it take to break ground?
What does it take to carry yourself
with dignity through mist and rise?

You can see the fragility of trees
and the forbearance of trees.
You can see the agility of trees.

You know where you stand with a tree:
sheltered and strengthened,
beholden to the nature and network

of trees; the assembly of trees,
the farmland haunted by trees  
and the regiment of trees.

You can see the bearing of trees,
the felling and falling of trees,
the shipment of trees, the return on trees.

The return of trees.

What does it take to carry yourself into a forest
one valley over
from the one, right now, on fire?

                                           

Dinah Hawken

Dinah Hawken’s ninth collection of poems, Sea-light, was published by THWUP in 2021. ‘Speaking of Trees’ was written for Gerda Leenard’s exhibition of paintings at Pataka in Porirua : Regeneration – A Story of Trees. 

Poetry Shelf review: Frankie McMillan’s The Wandering Nature of Us Girls

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The Wandering Nature of Us Girls, Frankie McMillan, Canterbury University Press, 2022

The feel of a book in hand matters. Holding Frankie McMillan’s new collection, The Wandering Nature of Us Girls, is immensely satisfying. The size and shape, the paper stock, the pale blue title pages, the choice of font and font size, the breathing space. A perfect alchemy of design and production.

The dedication page: “For Marvin, / who taught me how to wander. / Without you, I would never have gotten lost.” This is the keyhole entry into a book where wandering becomes wondering; we get lost in wonder and wander, whether reader or writer. The collection of small stories performs bridges between both, in so many delicious ways. Even me naming the pieces is a mental excursion through form and label; how we tag what we write from poetry to prose to essay to fiction to short story, and any number of hybrid marriages.

The book is offered as small stories so I am running with that. Think mouthfuls of narrative or let’s say fiction. Think past and present. Think stepping stones from the miniature to wider issues, issues hungry for human attention: love, death, loss, violence, curiosity. Think anchors in the real, and offshoots in the hyperreal, sidelines in the surreal.

Water is the connective tissue, and if you think of the ever-changing appearance and movement of water, it is extremely apt. Frankie often crafts long sentences, sentences an Italian novelist might favour, sentences that showcase the currency of water. Extended tidal rhythms, the water breathing in and out. It makes me think again of wander, and the flâneur comes to mind, the bricoleuer, with both reader and writer meandering, amassing detail, absorbing atmosphere.

Water is the connective tissue and like the ocean it is a meeting ground of dark and light. The grandmother goes swimming, others go swimming, but there are drownings, there are bodies missing at sea. This is a collection of mystery, of gaps in the narrative, of surprising turn of events, of tragedy. Most definitely tragedy, terrible twists in events. The aunt who loves sweeping stays home in the flood, sweeping out the water, until the point she is on the roof, still sweeping, still sweeping, until she and broom and house are swept away.

There is such power in Frankie’s imagination. A beaked mouth, an antlered head. A baby under a tree writing a thesis on “aerial domesticity”. There are the acrobatics of circuses, of putting on a show. There are the subcurrents of our planet under grave threat. The tragedy we must face. Along with violence against women, ‘us girls’, and suddenly, slowly, the meandering takes on a greater insistent force. We are wandering and wondering, and there are consequences, cause and effect.

The mood and ideas a book generates matters. The Wandering Nature of Us Girls is less concerned with geography than with movement, with action, with human connections. It is a handbook of curious and gut smacking things. It is a book you feel as well as a book you think. It is a book of catastrophe and a book of epiphany. Small story brilliance.

Frankie McMillan is the author of five books of poetry and short fiction. Her most recent collection, The Father of Octopus Wrestling, was listed by The Spinoff as one of the 10 best New Zealand fiction books of 2019 and shortlisted for the NZSA Heritage Book Awards, and her 2016 collection, My Mother and the Hungarians, was longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. She has twice won the New Zealand Flash Fiction Day competition and has been the recipient of numerous awards and residencies, including the NZSA Peter and Dianne Beatson Fellowship (2019), the Michael King writing residency at the University of Auckland (2017), and the Ursula Bethell residency in creative writing at the University of Canterbury (2014). McMillan spends her time between Ōtautahi Christchurch and Mohua Golden Bay.

Canterbury University Press page

Girls Raised by Swans on Poetry Shelf (‘Accounts of Girls Raised by Swans’)