“Poetry probably isn’t necessary, strictly speaking. It doesn’t happen because somebody thought it financially viable or ethically responsible or somehow socially vital. But in the bombed cities, the wasted homes, the dishevelled places, poems are still being written; poems are still being written in Palestine. And so one of the reasons that artmaking remains radical is that its existence alone suggests, or even speaks into reality, however briefly, an alternative system of value. In this I’m something of an old-school progressive. Poetry goes on in the sense that it just happens — despite violence; motivated by nothing; needed, but less than shelter; heralded by no dollar, poets continue their work. Poetry also goes on in the sense that its aesthetic conception of value chafes with a world in extreme turmoil, ruled by monied interests, in which a genocide is unfolding on our phone screens; it figures by negation another, better world of no violence. For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives (Auden). And so we go on. In which direction? Ake, ake, ake; onwards.” Jackson McCarthy
For the past month I have spent time with Jackson McCarthy’s sublime debut poetry collection, Portrait (AUP, 2026). It is the kind of poetry experience that underlines why, no matter how rugged my road is, how depleted my energy jar is, poetry is both vital and connecting, so utterly nourishing. Our conversation sparked ideas for my blog, for my own writings. To hear Jackson read was a bonus.
This week a special event took place: the celebration and gifting of the tokotoko to Robert Sullivan Ngāpuhi (Ngāti Manu, Ngāti Hau / Ngāti Kaharau) and Kāi Tahu (Kāti Huirapa ki Puketeraki), our current Poet Laureate, at the National Library. The tokotoko, embued with mana, is carved by master artist carver, Jacob Scott, and specially created to fit the laureate. The event was sadly moved from Matahiwi marae in Hawke’s Bay, due to the storm, but was a moving and fitting ceremony that included karanga, singing, speeches and readings from around 18 poets. Since 2007, when the National Library took over the appointment of the Poet Laureate, the Laureates have been Michele Leggott, Cilla McQueen, Ian Wedde, Vincent O’Sullivan, CK Stead, Selina Tusitala Marsh, David Eggleton and Chris Tse.
Monday: Poetry Shelf Monday Poem – A sickle sun by Megan Kitching
Tuesday: Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites – Melinda Szymanik picks Erik Kennedy (she writes her own poem version!)
Wednesday: Poetry Shelf Breathing Room – Love by Jenny Powell
Thursday: Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Jenna Todd picks Michael Pederson (and his incredible ode to bookshops)
Friday: Poetry Shelf conversation and reading – Jackson McCarthy
An invitation: I invite you to choose a poetry book you love that has been published in Aotearoa in 2025 or 2026. Write a paragraph (or two) on why you love this (your choice what you write) and choose a poem that, with permission from the poet and publisher, I would include. paulajoygreen@gmail.com
My new post box: PO Box 58, Waitākere 0660.
Song
I was licking the moon like a streetlamp before the water razed the city — people, jobs, lovers, I feel your movements glowing and reckoning with me. Some people say the loss I felt
with you was inevitable, a foregone conclusion, but I can still breathe the air around the dark shape of your body.
The life I’ve felt has been larger only than this tide; tonight, messages from family reach me, surreal, on my phone.
My cousins in Beirut can feel the terror in the air, I go on with so little left to speak; listen to my heart, these songs of loss I write while I cannot hear the bombs.
For the past four years I have been addicted to travel as my ventures into the physical world have been restricted to blood labs and the hospital. I travel every day within and beyond the pathways and tow ropes of a poem, within the joy and nourishment of a secret books I am writing, within the writings and conversations and posts I create and poets contribute to Poetry Shelf. I travel into the past, especially to my long term scholarly relationship with Italy and the incredible experiences I have had there, to New York, London, Scotland, Ireland, Portugal, France, Barcelona, Japan to name a few, and all over Aotearoa with my partner Michael and our girls (as both children and adults).
Travel is a way of widening how we approach beauty, human endeavours, art, music, theatre, literature, sport, physical challenges, cultural relationships, racism, sexism, how we create and dismantle hierarchies, how we feed ourselves and our families, how we can communicate in different languages. How we see things in astonishing lights.
Travel is also a way of widening the markers of home. Of finding and holding beauty, of holding epiphanies close to our hearts, of listening to the stories of the person standing next to us, of taking time out from daily routines to savour and reboot within the rhythms of travel whether by train or bus or car or bicycles, or in hiking books or walking shoes.
Peter Ireland has created a mesmerising exhibition at the National Library, entitled Broken River Train | Dreams of Travel. To celebrate, and with the help of Peter and a group of poets, I offer you a poetry and image travel feast.
Peter has written an introduction to the exhibition and we have included seven photographs, along with a link to the collection of William Williams, one of the photographers.
I went travelling through my poetry shelves to select a dozen poems that offer myriad travel connections.
To travel is to dream. To dream is to travel. To dream and to travel is to connect and to reboot.
Paula Green
H. A. F. Jackson, J. Alexander, and A. G. Jackson with penny-farthing cycles. The three men travelled from Christchurch to the West Coast on the bicycles in January 1887. Photographer unidentified. ATL: PA1-f-010-21
I don’t know exactly why this exhibition came to the fore and into the programme, though to spend time looking at the collections of the Turnbull Library is to travel and to roam. And as someone for whom dreams are almost always about travel, then a sense of why this exhibition begins to emerge. The exhibition originally had the title of Road Trip … and the wonderful image above was the first added to a file of about 350 images, of which 51 appear in the exhibition. Curiously, and somewhat to my regret, the Penny Farthing cyclists didn’t make the final cut though it’s an image I remain very fond of.
Along the way I came across a Steffano Webb image of Christchurch Railway Station showing a sign for ‘Broken River Train.’ This felt like just the right title.
Central to the exhibition is a selection from the more than 1000 holiday pictures taken by William Williams during the leisurely trip to Europe he made with his wife Lydia between 1925 and 1927. Evocative, dreamlike images of ‘foreign places,’ timeless, austere, sparsely populated stage sets of history, pre-tourist boom and ripe for William Willam’s deliberate and tender record.
A hundred years on these images speak to the opening lines of L. P. Hartley’s novel, ‘The Go-Between,’ that ‘the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.’ Whilst true in one sense, I suggest that we are more than passive onlookers at a remote world, we respond to the pathos and beauty of the images, that in looking at the past we rearticulate it, make it fresh and meaningful, dream it anew.
Other photographers provide key imagery for our dreams of travel, including Leo White, official war photographers Thomas Frederick Scales and George Kaye and the American adventurer Melvin Vaniman. Max Oettli, John Pascoe and Edgar Williams are also among the abiding spirits.
My hope for the exhibition is that visitors will find it evocative and that they take away a favourite image in their mind together with an appetite for exploring the collections for themselves.
Peter Ireland
Installation shot, Peter Ireland
Seven Photographs
Christchurch Railway Station, c. 1906 Photographer Steffano Webb ATL: 1/2-040999-G
The platform sign for Broken River Train provides a helpful clue for dating this image. The Broken River train serviced a temporary railway terminus on the midland railway line, completed in time to allow travel to the Christchurch exhibition in 1906 – 1907. Thirty-six years in the making, the midland line was finally completed in 1923 with the opening of the 8.5km Ōtira tunnel.
Ice skating in the Otago region, c. 1935 Photographer: Leo White ATL: WA-25279-F
Street vendor, Barcelona, Spain, c.1926 Photographer: William Williams ATL: 1/4-100043-F
William Williams (1858 – 1949) was born in Cardiff and emigrated to New Zealand with his family about 1881. He lived in Wellington for a time, recording his experience of life in a bachelor’s flat, the ‘Old Shebang,’ on upper Cuba Street. In 1887 he married Lydia Devereux, the couple living first in Napier, then moving to Dunedin and to an address on Royal Terrace, Kew.
M. Vertelli crossing the Whanganui River on a tightrope, 31 October 1867 Photographer: William Harding ATL: 1/1-000253-G
M. Vertelli, dubbed the ‘Australasian Blondin,’ caused quite a stir on his tour of New Zealand as these two reports suggest:
‘On Saturday next at 3 o’clock M Vertelli will astound the admiring multitude by accomplishing the most daring act recorded in ancient or modern times, and, regardless of danger, unconscious of fear, he will, by, as it were, a magic chain, connect Campbelltown and Wanganui by bridging the noble river, (900 feet across!) the vast expanse of waters flowing beneath.’
Source: Wanganui Herald, Volume I, Issue 124, 24 October 1867, page 3
Cyclists Pat Driscoll and Bill Mulrooney near the road bridge in Alexandra, c. 1901 Photographer: J.H. Ingley ATL: MNZ-1740-1/2-F
Bernini Fountain, Rome, Italy, c.1926 Photographer: William Williams ATL: 1/4-100248-F
Taxi driver’s dinner, Westwind coffee bar, Queen Street, Auckland, 1968 Photographer: Max Oettli ATL: PADL-000106
a dozen poems
The Armchair Traveller
Excuse me if I laugh. The roads are dark and large books block our path. The air we breathe is made of evening air. The world is longer than the road that brings us here.
The necklace is a carving, not a kiss. You run towards the one you can’t resist. At first she edges backwards, then she stalls. Now every sentence needs another clause.
The road goes off through willows, then it winds. Is that the famous temple over there? Why are the people round about so undefined? Why must they kiss then disappear?
Time now to let the story take its course, just settle back and let the driver drive. Bliss is it late at night to be alive, learning to yield, and not to strive.
Bill Manhire from Wow, VUP, 2020
xxv. No Response
Noman under a sheep who’s calling?
Why am I calling sheep farmers? Don’t they hear the call of Cassino? Don’t they know you can see the whole damned world from the top of Montecassino! The whole wide world if you stretch your arms out and fall off the edge and sail like a paratrooper?
Didn’t they remember the names here?
My mind leaves the walls of the abbey and sits in the train station chapel with the smell of cigarettes outside.
Robert Sullivan from Cassino: City of Martyrs / Città Martire, Huia, 2010
In Dublin for my father, need it be said
I’ll go to Ireland some day, see those places you’ve told me about, now that is a promise. Not before I die, don’t leave me alone, my father said, contrary as ever, all that bullshit and teardust I knew so well, and that is how I let the years slide steadily and quietly away beyond his last defeated breath. But the day had to come
and I wish there was some way I could tell you how much I love the broad River Liffey that runs through the town and the way I’m enchanted by St Stephen’s the sunlit park in the heart of the city and the magnificent Corinthian portico on the Four Courts, and yes the new Spire of Dublin which of course you wouldn’t have seen a whip of metal one hundred and twenty metres high in the sky and the way they joke about the ‘stiffy by the Liffey’ with that raw sly affection
but really it’s here in this music store in Dublin these swift easy Irish tears of mine begin falling between the CD spines lay me down / between the bars / everybody / I’ll see your heart and I’ll raise you mine / stay with me till dawn / volcano / no ordinary love / nothing can nothing can and I remember that you could sing a sweet tenor all your own
So, yes, here I am, I’ve made it, right to the centre of it all, it’s a grand street is O’Connell Street complete with bullet holes and all. I’m watching men walk past their hard faces taut with strain and the women with their difficult mouths. I feel perfectly at home, thank you for asking.
Fiona Kidman from Where Your Left Hand Rests, Random House, 2010
Tour Bus Minutiae and Commentary: West Berlin, 1985
I have felt the bite & crunch of winter winds, the sudden stir of snow hunched around the corner waiting to pounce on you, I’m envigoured by it. It’s called: Berliner Luft: Duft, Duft, dufte! Loverly.
Dog-lovers walk their pets home, anxious to complete the chore quickly, a marvel of detachment & poise as the dog pisses or shits. When new snow lies white on the ground, the nature-mess that dogs make is easier to see and avoid.
There are over a hundred thousand dogs registered in Berlin. The City Authorities are sympathetic. Two hundred and fifty thousand trees have been planted.
Despite the generosity of statistics, there are canine territorial disputes over the third tree. Tribal Elders from my Dog Tribe—Ngati Kuri—will send a mediator to Geneva, me. It’s not a piddly matter.
Every tree has been given a number which I find phantastisch! You may rendezvous with the beautiful Dame from East Berlin unter den Linden tree Nummer 2231 Eisenberger Strasse. On the Wannsee border-bridge, a Spy Exchange Service— Spionageastauschdienst—is in place.
Dead leaves, which carpet drain and pathway, are cleared away by City Council workers who come from Italy and Türkei. Five tons of dog-dung is collected every day.
Bottled bio-gas from such a rich source is exported. Gas ovens at Dachau & Auschwitz have been made redundant. A taped recording of mixed doggy-barks is enclosed with each bottle. I’m not impressed . . . Doggy-bark recording is a dubious practice.
On the Lietszensee Ufer the trees are stark and still. A ridge of snow rests along the tops of their nobbly, snaky branches, their dark winter bareness, fattened and enhanced. On the frozen lake, voices go up in steam—to the hiss of skates, sluicing . . .
Inside the warm pub on Nachod Strasse a dog comes in wagging its owner, Sabine, on the end of a leash. Sabine orders a coffee, unwinds her scarf. The dog sits down by her feet. Helmut, A Berliner, greets her with tongue-in-cheek: ‘Sabine, kommen Sie hier bei Fuss?’
Dear Brown Bear City, I love you. Ach ja! You’re s bloody wonder- ful ache.
Hone Tuwhare from Short Back & Sideways, Godwit, 1992
Ode to the little hotel
Little Hotel we love you and in your little rooftop room we love each other, even though we are big and hardly worthy of such a little bed.
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We love the street you stand on which is neither long nor short, but somewhere in between. And we love your neighbours who are our friends— smaller than us and so ideally suited to their address.
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O Little Hotel we love your breakfast room your petit déjeuner the crypt we reach by steep narrow stairs a bob and a curtsy on the last to miss the bottom beam—we love all this.
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You are our first and last of Paris, Little Hotel. We love your lightning and the |rinsing rain, the way your white towels sound the slap of surf outside our room.
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You are the rabbit of Paris. The duck with beans and peas. Little Hotel you are our herb and cheese, our soup and sauce, you are all of these.
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O Little Hotel we love your lift in which we are always pleased to know each other, pressed so close as we are. And when we take them we love your stairs— wide enough for one winding up to light.
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Little Hotel your windows through which we duck and climb to stand on your roof and look out over other roofs, we hold these dear to us.
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You are paint and wood and stone and all things made from the these. Little Hotel you are a gallery of leaves.
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You are our pink suit of Paris, Little Hotel, our men in shorts, our jazz band. Later we will slap our knees and remember you as four musicians outside the Sorbonne.
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O Little Hotel in whose room we read and rest a little after long days we revere you.
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O Little Hotel we will never forget you. We will write and we will return. O Little Hotel doorway to our city of Paris au revoir.
Jenny Bornholdt from Summer, VUP, 2003. It was originally published as a limited edition accordion book (or leporello) hand printed by Brendan O’Brien, with drawings by Greg O’Brien.
The laboratory of time passing
The angle of the sun tells us who we are
or might be. And what time passes as it passes. How
each afternoon is soothed into place – the newest tile
in the old town’s expansive roof – and the ticking of
the unofficial parish clock: its most senior citizen, his walking stick
ascending the high stone path, bicycle bell
and water bottle clinging to its shaft.
Saorge, 13 June 2002
Gregory O’Brien from afternoon of an evening train, VUP, 2005
Getting to know you, Venice
Pigeons in Venice are born mathematicians. Under their wings, the flash of fob watch and compass with metal points sharpened. Kohl-eyed from nights spent marking and route-mapping, they leave their ledges in the morning, the distance between dome, cornice and cobbled square plotted for ease
of business. The city’s theirs—a lavish 3D drawing of scrubbed stone and stolen-gold mosaics, an almost-place defined by saints and lines, angles and lions and, of course, the pigeons’ squawk. Raucous at ground level, they are silent in flight, daring to keep the company of angels, careful
not to graze the pinnacles of temples. Down a side street, away from the crowds, a gondolier monitors his comrades’ movements via cell phone. The smells of garlic, myrrh and dead fish mix. And above it all, the quiet, white whirr of pigeons’ wings. I believe it might be possible to attempt the impossible
here—wear feathers? Dissolve solid marble on the tongue? In this city, where rain falls from frescoes and children fence their shadows in courtyards at dusk, even the gutters and drainpipes and dirt bins shimmer.
Claire Beynon from Open Book: Poems and Images, Steele Roberts, 2007
Spare Change
New to London, maybe I gave off the scent Naïve to the ragged man who shuffled
along the tube train aisle where I stood gripping the pole
amid the massed bodies of rush-hour crush; each face, it seemed, averted in disgust.
Like the small-town citizen I really was when the man said, ‘Can you help me, love?’
I met his gaze then looked down to see what he wanted to show me:
his forearm split open, swollen, infection swarming like red wasps.
‘I need some change to get to hospital. Spare a couple of quid?’
I didn’t know local custom. How to draw a blank down over the mind, or how to give a pound
as indifferently as if our hands held slots for cash. Instead I cried out, ‘What happened to you? Oh my God.’
He stalled, his stare a flame held too close, then rolled down shirt and jacket sleeves.
‘Never mind.’ He pushed through the throng as our train hurtled to the next stop.
A second stranger tapped my shoulder. ‘Forget him. He’s a con artist.’
But the fire-swarmed gash. The pomegranate gasp of it.
The man shrugged. ‘Doesn’t let it heal. I’ve seen him. Uses pocket knives, tin lids.
‘Grifter. Scabber. Shows wounds for sympathy. Don’t encourage him with money.’
One man so strung out he’d self-harm for cash. Another so jaded he’d cauterised compassion.
Decades on, the memory opens and reopens in the same raw place.
As if I could heal anything as pernicious as indifference
I am at it again with the sutures and saline of these ink-black glyphs
needle and stitch needle and stitch.
Emma Neale from Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit, Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2024
Remembering America
The question ‘Do you miss it?’ is unanswerable. It’s obscene to say yes. It’s depressing to others to say no. It’s inauthentic and invertebrate to say maybe. I’d rather sing ‘Oh baby, oh baby, oh baby’ in a song than answer it. I have attempted just to name things I have liked in my location-limited experience, like fried clams as big as men’s watch-faces or a turkey jumping majestically over my father’s bicycle wheel or suburban snowmen bathing in the cold light of flat-screen TVs, but that doesn’t answer the question ‘Do you miss it?’ any more than ‘I believe I was a cat in a past life’ answers the question ‘How do you feel?’ Prove to me that the country I thought I grew up in was real. You can’t unless you beguile me with your fireworky thinking, your monster-truck cunning, your whispers of calumny that you cast like the peal of a cracked bell across the prairies I’ve never been to and the peninsulas I have been to and the places I’ve been to and forgotten everywhere. Missing something is a state of mind, says the polar bear on her shrinking ice floe. Knowing not to miss it is a state of grace, says the hermit crab in her rented carapace. America, like a lot of people, I’m keeping my distance, as we do from a super-volcano on public land. America, a house haunted by itself cannot stand. America, you are a monument to monumental misrepresentation, and all your monuments should commemorate this. America, you’re apostrophised so much because you’re still not listening. America, you look even worse from somewhere else than you do from inside yourself.
Erik Kennedy from There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime, VUP, 2018
The Catskill Mountains
There is a world of things that bees can see which we cannot. They sense the earth’s magnetic field, the electricity driven by the molten core.
I know that in my heart of hearts I am not someone who loves the country. But I do crave the idea of it to fall upon its soils in relief,
to live in a cabin, in a hollowed out tree in the Catskill Mountains. Of course what I really want is America not the the real one, the wide, wide one
with its purple this and that and the big gold moon trapped in its branches.
Kate Camp from How to Be Happy Though Human, VUP, 2020
Travel Bag
The notebook is a surrogate suitcase in which to pack a road map, a water bottle, a sharpened pencil, comfortable walking shoes, a wind breaker, a mood catcher, some folk music, a violin, cranberry nut mix, seasonal fruit, a sailing ship, a glimpse of moonlight, a well-thumbed dictionary, seven memorable novels, five yoga positions, a braided river, a tide chart, another violin, a view of clouds, a pink travel mug, a philosophy of doing, a philosophy of seeing, a guidebook to verbs, an old cardigan, stepping stones, changing tides, a light switch, woollen socks, ginger tea, a book mark, a mountain to climb.
Paula Green from Road Trip, a work in progress
Riding the train
As the river consumes its banks I tell you, yes – as the sky
sucks the sea up into its chalky glare at noon, as the stars
leak salty dew on the palms and the palm frond’s jagged shadow disfigures
the stonemason’s perfectly furled siesta – I’m lost, somehow, at the frontiers
of what’s distinct, of waking and sleeping, seeing and dreaming.
I’m riding the train. Don’t know if I’m blind
or in the longest tunnel, now, on the whole bright coast, or what the difference is.
Ian Wedde from Arriving blind, in Good Business, AUP, 2009
How do I love you, my friends? let me count the mountain’s ways, the heightened plains that bend up into snowy reaches, playing on the mind out of sight to send pillars of light, clouds, rains on a grateful garden bed pulling out rocks making lakes with his tokotoko, with her cloaks sent from our māra kai into our food basket filled with sweetness and kōrero each to each—we’re peaches, plums, strawberries and yams, we’re only the bumblebee’s hums aroha stumblefooting the air in this flowering season.
Korekore Rawea (Low energy, be creative)
Q+A from a Shakti card.
Because korowai take all the abilities of their makers they aren’t made on hunches, and the īnanga (kōkopu, baby tuna) rippling in pounamu are active and best with huge love but I wasn’t ready I lacked the insight and went for a moon launch when a go-cart or a raft made from recycled bottles might have played to my best abilities plus I don’t have a roof rack for a kayak which is what I’d love to do, go kayaking, or hitch my bike on my bike rack and ride round the Waitaki lakes rather than moon shadows.
Oh, Shakti, I did follow my hunch but much better to call beyond the greenstone on my chest beyond this cloth of knowing that the veil is going to lift from the picnic after all the games of hide and seek, the swings, seesaws and slides of birthdays in the park. Much better to drink the water.
Robert Sullivan from Hopurangi | Songcatcher, Auckland University Press, 2024
Robert Sullivan is Aotearoa New Zealand’s 14th Poet Laureate. He belongs to Ngāpuhi (Ngāti Manu, Ngāti Hau / Ngāti Kaharau) and Kāi Tahu (Kāti Huirapa ki Puketeraki) iwi and is also of Irish descent. He has won many literary awards. His most recent books are Hopurangi / Songcatcher (AUP) which was shortlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award at the 2025 Ockham Book Awards, Koe: An Aotearoa Ecopoetry Anthology coedited with Janet Newman (Otago University Press 2024) and a collection of essays coedited with Anna Jackson and Dougal McNeill, Te Whāriki: Reading Ten New Poets from Aotearoa (AUP 2025). Robert is Associate Professor in Creative Writing at Massey University. He lives in Ōamaru.
The Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: A place to enter and pause and take a long slow breath and then another, as you absorb the beauty movement joy stillness wonder movement of a poem.
Yadayada, or Don’t Worry, It all Adds Up (Feb 17th, then)
The bunting and cicadas cleared, The Herald having sailed the middle island for the natives’ trade in blankets for curly iron gall, I snuggled into the basement with rats and worms, snails sliming my finest parchment (historians only mention the rats but I know the rest.) I had been nuzzling and gnawing muzzles in the far north, and in the King Country I purged my mind of all sovereign thoughts of a beautiful crown as my pillow was smoothed by whiskery rat down.
Oh for a koauau to share this basement with. I am bent down with worry, and hunger. Low, small. A worm. A crawler. Me down. The governor up. These words echo like a dreamt inferno. I trusted my treasured words to hate! I promised feasts for all, with open hearts and flowing wine! I played sly, turned my new in-laws into dogs thinking I’d fly with the birds. But now I am a moth eaten by moths. I am a rag for a strop designed to pacify, and closely shave, hell.
Robert Sullivan
Robert Sullivan is Aotearoa New Zealand’s 14th Poet Laureate. He belongs to Ngāpuhi (Ngāti Manu, Ngāti Hau / Ngāti Kaharau) and Kāi Tahu (Kāti Huirapa ki Puketeraki) iwi and is also of Irish descent. He has won many literary awards. His most recent books are Hopurangi / Songcatcher (AUP) which was shortlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award at the 2025 Ockham Book Awards, Koe: An Aotearoa Ecopoetry Anthology coedited with Janet Newman (Otago University Press 2024) and a collection of essays coedited with Anna Jackson and Dougal McNeill, Te Whāriki: Reading Ten New Poets from Aotearoa (AUP 2025). Robert is Associate Professor in Creative Writing at Massey University. He lives in Ōamaru.
To launch Poetry Shelf 2026, our current Poet Laureate Robert Sullivan has written a sequence called “Tidbits of Te Tiriti”. He wrote these Te Tiriti Tidbits in the voice of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. There will be one published each day for this Waitangi Day weekend, and then a fifth one today, on Feb 17th, which is the day his Ngāti Manu tūpuna signed Te Tiriti.
I’m pretty sure Prince Tui Teka met Billy T. And Sir Howard Morrison met Billy T. I met Sir Howard once. But Māui T. T. a T. never met Billy T. So I’m e-introducing them.
Robert Sullivan
Robert Sullivan is Aotearoa New Zealand’s 14th Poet Laureate. He belongs to Ngāpuhi (Ngāti Manu, Ngāti Hau / Ngāti Kaharau) and Kāi Tahu (Kāti Huirapa ki Puketeraki) iwi and is also of Irish descent. He has won many literary awards. His most recent books are Hopurangi / Songcatcher (AUP) which was shortlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award at the 2025 Ockham Book Awards, Koe: An Aotearoa Ecopoetry Anthology coedited with Janet Newman (Otago University Press 2024) and a collection of essays coedited with Anna Jackson and Dougal McNeill, Te Whāriki: Reading Ten New Poets from Aotearoa (AUP 2025). Robert is Associate Professor in Creative Writing at Massey University. He lives in Ōamaru.
To launch Poetry Shelf 2026, our current Poet Laureate Robert Sullivan has written a sequence called “Tidbits of Te Tiriti”. He wrote these Te Tiriti Tidbits in the voice of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. There will be one published each day for this Waitangi Day weekend, and then a fifth one on Feb 17th, which is the day his Ngāti Manu tūpuna signed Te Tiriti.
Inside the city a house Inside the house a room Inside the room a cupboard Inside the cupboard a drawer Inside the drawer a box Inside the box a necklace Inside the necklace a story Inside the story a city hope
Some years I invite you to share your favourite reads of the year, especially poetry, especially when poetry doesn’t get much attention in the end-of-year lists and book stacks that we are seeing across all forms of media. This year has sizzled and simmered and shone with local poetry: new collections along with live performances. So many collections document and explore tough stuff: illness, heartbreak, despair, suicidal thoughts, global wars and inhumanity, our government inflicting more and more damage on planet and people. And so many collections deliver love, a multi-stranded love and a deep love of what words can do, whether exuberant or sweetly nuanced.
Every poetry book I have picked up, lingered over and reviewed (see photos below in the side bar and you will discover my reviews), I have utterly loved. Sadly for me, there is still a stack of books on my desk I’m itching to get to (see photos below), books by poets I love, books by poets new to me. This week I made the hard decision to return to reviewing these books after Poetry Shelf and I have rebooted, after we all get through the busy season where it is hard to read more than shopping lists.
I want to share a couple of highlights with you, but first a wee update. I am standing at a fairytale door, a threshold onto my new road. What specialists call my new normal, not the normal I enjoyed when I was travelling all over the country, visiting schools, doing events and author tours, reading and writing all day long. I have had a bone marrow transplant that has gifted me the miracle of life, thanks to an anonymous donor and an incredible medical team, but it comes with scars. Looks like I will always have to use my energy jar carefully, to manage my daily physical challenges with various aids. But I sure in heck find enjoyment and delight in every day.
Poetry Shelf has made such a difference in year that I have tagged both my worst and best. So many poets contributing, so many poetry fans reading and sharing. So many thoughtful caring emails, especially those responding to The Venetian Blind Poems, especially those responding to features and audio that have resonated with you. Poetry Shelf is nothing without you, without readers and writers connecting across generations, cultures, the length and the breadth of the country.
Creating three new series this year has been a special highlight for me. I have included links to one of them, Poetry Cafe Readings, because hearing these poets read has been such a gift. This will be back next year, along with the Speaking Out ( check out the Gaza poems) and Playing Favourites series, plus some new ideas. I have included a link to the fabulous Te Whāriki anthology where some of the contributors selected a favourite poetry book of 2025. And to a handful of special moments on the bogs.
Thank you so much everyone for your incredible support.
Some Special Poetry Shelf Moments
Celebrating the poetry of Brian Turner (1944- 2025)
Celebrating Dinah Hawken, winner of Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry
Feature on Te Whāriki: Reading Ten New Poets from Aoteatoa, edited by Anna Jackson, Dougal McNeill and Robert Sullivan (Auckland University Press, 2025)
Poetry Shelf Cafe and Summer readings Poets read and talk poetry for around twenty minutes
Write name in side bar and check out my review Many of the books I reviewed included readings
Books on my must-read pile
I often ask poets in interviews what words matter to them as they write – but today I am asking you what words matter as you live each day. I am thinking: kindness, self-care, connections, hope and joy. Over the next month or so I am going to read novels, watch movies, listen to music, tend the vegetable garden, and bake and cook.
Sending aroha to you all along with a huge bouquet of sweet and salty Te Henga ocean air.
Junction Box
sitting here at the junction box of war and peace and flowing waters hearing the soundtrack of bush haven hearing the dawn bugle the flyover the kōrero the silence searching in the manukā for remedy cables mourning every raised weapon every sacrifice every empty stomach displaced refugee every cruel act the weasel words from weasel politicians jamming our children in square learning boxes slamming our hospitals in low voltage budgets cramming our planet in polluted circuits extinction coils feeling in this breaking dawn the connecting calls for peace picturing protest placards holding voices of resistance past and present picturing aid workers risking life to nurse and feed and shelter picturing a global jigsaw puzzle of greed and smash and grab for how long have we imagined peace have we called for peace for how long have we imagined blue sky transformation today we are standing here holding our currents of hope and yes today we are joining in calls for peace calling calling calling
25 April 2025 Paula Green
widening the gap
in the wild night of storm the wind is widening the gap or is it the roar of a government hellbent on building
a ravine between the rich and the poor Māori and Pakeha in every choice they make. A school curriculum has lost
sight of the prismatic stories that shape us, sums that include x-factor joy, and I am stuck on this freight train
in the widening gap because I see no end to damage and despair and I’m filling an ocean with tears crying over lessons that slam the door
in the face of poverty or another language or the tangata whenua and this rumble gap is the distance between sick earth and well earth
between building roads and restoring our hospitals and schools and here I am holding my fragile torch to the widening gap
in my sodden socks no idea where to shine the light next yet except maybe on all those protestors from the 1960s who are stomping
in the streets even louder now with their dreams our dreams where women are heard where Māori are heard my bones breaking and I am blowing
all around to resist persist hope dream begging to fill this gap with precious care to build glorious people-friendly bridges out of knowledge and foresight.
This evening, on 27 November, the National Library is celebrating 60 years of the Library with a ‘Laureates line up’ — a rare gathering of nearly all living New Zealand Poets Laureate. Enjoy readings from legends like Elizabeth Smither, Jenny Bornholdt, Michele Leggott, Cilla McQueen, Ian Wedde, Karl Stead, Selina Tusitala Marsh, David Eggleton, Chris Tse, and Robert Sullivan, with Fergus Barrowman as MC.
6pm – 8pm, National Library, Wellington
It is also a chance to celebrate our new Poet laureate, Robert Sullivan. From my extended shelf of favourite poems by Robert, I have chosen a poem that has travelled with me for a long time. I posted this poem last year to launch my ongoing Playing Favourites series. The comments I wrote in 2024 still stand. This is why poetry matters. This is why honouring a poet who has gifted us so much through his sublime poetry collections matters.
Robert also reads a few poems.
I highly recommended Robert’s most recent collection, Hopurangi / Songcatcher (AUP) which was shortlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award at the 2025 Ockham Book Awards. I wrote: “I often use the word ‘breathtaking’ when I am tagging a poetry collection I love, and yes, poetry can take your breath away, but after reading Robert Sullivan’s sublime new collection, Hopurangi—Songcatcher: Poems from the Maramataka, I am musing on the idea, ‘breath-enhancing’.’ — Paula Green, Poetry Shelf
This is a day to celebrate poetry, to listen to poets, to read poems, and to advance the connecting and vital strength of words.
a reading
a poem
Voice carried my family, their names and stories
Their names and fates were spoken. The lands and seas of the voyage were spoken. Calls of the stroke at times were spoken. Celestial guidance, sightings, were spoken. Prescriptions – medical and spiritual – were spoken. Transactions – physical and emotional – were spoken. Family (of), leaders (to), arguments, were well spoken. Elders (of), were well spoken. Burials were spoken. Welcomes at times were spoken. Futures lined up by pasts, were spoken. Repeating the spoken were spoken. Inheritance, inheritors, were spoken. Tears at times were spoken. Representations at first were spoken. The narrator wrote the spoken. The readers saw the spoken! Spoken became unspoken. [Written froze spoken.]
Robert Sullivan from voice carried my family, Auckland University Press, 2005
When Robert Sullivan’s poetry collection, Star Waka, entered the world in 1999, it felt like a significant arrival. This was a poet who sang from his past present future, his ancestors friends loved ones. His collection voice carried my family particularly resonated with me, and it is a book I draw from my shelves when I crave nourishment.
This poem. This poem in particular, that speaks even more deeply to me today, when voice brings us together across the motu, bringing us together through stories, songs, history, aroha and the respect that matters.
This poem that reminds me, so acutely, so vitally, how much voice matters, how much a poem can matter – when the world our nation and our people hang by a fragile thread. When I hang by a fragile thread.
Today this poem, this precious poem, is a poem to hold close.
Robert Sullivan is Aotearoa New Zealand’s 14th Poet Laureate. He belongs to Ngāpuhi (Ngāti Manu, Ngāti Hau / Ngāti Kaharau) and Kāi Tahu (Kāti Huirapa ki Puketeraki) iwi and is also of Irish descent. He has won many literary awards. His most recent books are Hopurangi / Songcatcher (AUP) which was shortlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award at the 2025 Ockham Book Awards, Koe: An Aotearoa Ecopoetry Anthology coedited with Janet Newman (Otago University Press 2024) and a collection of essays coedited with Anna Jackson and Dougal McNeill, Te Whāriki: Reading Ten New Poets from Aotearoa (AUP 2025). Robert is Associate Professor in Creative Writing at Massey University. He lives in Ōamaru.
Summit, Thomson Gorge Road (looking towards Mount Aspiring). Photo: Gregory O’Brien, October 2025
Backcountry
Now and ever the mountain river.
A fantail flits. Moss over branch, the trees hurry.
Undying stone continues the rhyme: there is no time.
Richard Reeve from Generation Kitchen (Otago University Press, 2015)
At the end of September, Gregory O’Brien sent me the media release for an online fundraising art show he was curating.
Nine well-established New Zealand artists have gifted works to raise funds in opposition to the proposed Bendigo-Ophir gold mine in Central Otago. The artists – all strongly opposed to the open pit mine – have come together under the banner “No-Go-Bendigo”, and are offering 100% of the funds raised towards fighting the fast tracked mine. All have been deeply affected by the majesty and singular character of the region—as the statements on the exhibition website underline. They all wanted to make a strong stand.
Dick Frizzell, Enough Gold Already, 2025, limited edition of 12 screenprints, 610 x 860mm,
The artists who have contributed are Bruce Foster, Dick Frizzell, Elizabeth Thomson, Eric Schusser, Euan Macleod, Grahame Sydney, Gregory O’Brien, Jenna Packer and Nigel Brown. The works they have gifted for sale can be seen here.
Exhibition organiser Gregory O’Brien, said that the group of artists from all over the country was highly motivated to help. “The proposed desecration of a heritage area for purely monetary gain is an outrage to all of us, as it is to the citizens of Central Otago and to all New Zealanders.” He said that the initial group of nine artists have already heard from other artists enthusiastic to help “during the next round”. “Painters, photographers, writers, film-makers, choreographers and other arts practitioners from within Central Otago and further afield are incensed at the churlishness of both the mining consortium and the Government’s ruinous ‘Fast Track’ (aka ‘Highway to Hell’) legislation. The environmental cost of such a cold-blooded, extractive exercise is simply too high, as is the social impact and down-stream legacy.”
When Gregory said that this was just the beginning, at the end of the exhibition media release, I knew Poetry Shelf had to become involved. My new Poetry Protest series was the perfect opportunity – knowing that poetry speaks out and for and because of issues in myriad ways. Gregory, Richard Reeve and I invited a number of poets based in the area (and beyond) to contribute a poem. Jenny Powell’s poem catches sight of the Dunstan Range, David Kārena-Holmes has penned an aching lament, Emma Neale writes of her local blue swallows that can also be found near Benigo. And then there are poets with miners in the family history such as Jeffrey Paparoa Holman and Diane Brown. Twenty three poets have gathered on this occasion but there are so many poets in Aotearoa singing out in defence of the land. Some poets chose poems from collections, while others wrote poems on the spot, often out of anger and frustration.
Richard Reeve, who is organising an anti-mining poetry reading in Alexandra in November (see poster), has written an introduction for the post. He sent me a suite of poems, both new and old, that touch multiple cords of beauty and outrage. I have included an older poem to head the post, and a longer new poem after his introduction. I have also included an extract from a recent media release by Sam Neill.
An enormous thank you to Gregory and Richard for co-curating this post, to all the poets who contributed, and to everyone who continues to read and write poetry. Today is a day of significant strikes by nurses, doctors and teachers in Aotearoa, a day with a major weather event still unfolding and widespread power outages, and the continuing heartslamming news from overseas.
To be able to connect with readers and writers who care, matters so very much, as I sit here weeping with a strange mix of sadness and gladness, beauty and outrage.
Thank you.
Thomson Gorge Road Photo: Richard Harvey, October 2025
For Freddy – Ora pro nobis
A little while ago now, Lord Byron in his book-length poem The Prophecy of Dante mused, “Many are poets who have never penned / Their inspiration, and perchance the best”. By this he meant that even non-literary types can have poetic experiences. That of course begs the question, What do we mean when we talk about poetry? Is poetry, as some sceptics would suggest, purely prose with line-breaks, or does the concept embrace something more than words on a page to encompass the wider spectrum of lived experience?
Thomson Gorge Road in Central Otago is a place many would say has its own poetry, whether the subject of poems or not. A backcountry dirt road stretching from Matakanui near Omakau in the east to Bendigo near Tarras in the west, it cuts through a pass in the Dunstan Mountains that divides the Manuherikia Valley from the Upper Clutha Basin. Thomson Gorge Road is hawk country. Tussock country. The road is notorious for the sheer number of gates one has to open when using it as an alternative to the highway that skirts the base of the mountain range south to Alexandra and the Cromwell Gorge. The gates, livestock, steep winding track, stream crossings and mud mean Thomson Gorge Road is certainly not the fastest route from Omakau to Wanaka, even though more direct than the highway. Nevertheless, people travel it regularly enough.
Indeed, those who travel the road are off on an adventure. Punctuated with heritage sites associated with the colonial period (mine-shafts, abandoned huts, battery sites and so on), and before that significant to Southern Māori travelling the pounamu routes west to east, the passage exemplifies the interconnected complex of geophysical frontiers, native-vegetation-clad landforms and cultural touchstones that makes Central Otago uniquely important in our national psyche. The scenery is magnificent, encompassing in the course of the journey expansive views of two of the three great basins of Central Otago. Just as with the Hawkdun Mountains to the north or the Clutha-Mata-au River and Old Man Range to the south, Thomson Gorge Road is an essential component of wild Central Otago’s fabric, part of our collective heritage as a nation.
Despite this, flagged on by Minister of Resources Shane Jones and his “fast-track” legislative reforms, an Australian gold mining company – Santana Minerals – is now seeking permission to establish a giant open-cast gold mine not far from the crest of Thomsons Saddle, in an area situated within an officially designated Outstanding Natural Landscape and already subject to a conservation covenant. If consented, the base of the mine where huge volumes of tailings and toxic waste are to be stored will be only 6-7 kilometres from the Clutha-Mata-au River. In light of Minister Jones’ fast-track legislation, the general public have no right of input on the outcome of the proposal even though the open-cast mine is widely regarded as offensive, a public health risk and indeed a brutal and crass affront to the values of the region.
Those protesting the mine include not only poets and artists but also people who have no great interest per se in the literary arts or perhaps even the fine arts. Some have limited exposure to literature. Others likely know very little at all about Byron or indeed Cilla McQueen, Jillian Sullivan, Liz Breslin, Michael Harlow and others who have contributed poems to this edition of Poetry Shelf. Like the poets, they nevertheless understand intuitively and deeply that no amount of trumpeting by Santana or Minister Jones of the alleged financial value of the gold deposit will annul the violence being proposed to the fine poem – or fine wine, or fine painting, or good day on a bike – that is wild Central.
In this issue, Gregory O’Brien uses as an epigraph to his contribution, ‘Thomson Gorge Road Song’, Minister Jones’ now infamous comments to the effect that the days of deifying New Zealand wilderness are over:
We are not going to sit around and read poetry to rare lizards, whilst our current account deficit goes down the gurgler … If there is a mining opportunity and it’s impeded by a blind frog, goodbye Freddy.
Au contraire, Minister. In this issue we proudly dedicate poems to skinks, hawks, backcountry streams, tussocks, snow melt. We wilfully and without reservation pledge our heart and soul to Freddy. For, as Annabel Wilson asks in her poem ‘Gorge’, What would the real Santana – St Anna, mother of Mary – say? “Sancta Ana, ora pro nobis.” Pray for us, St Anna. God help us if we cannot as a people do better than this.
Richard Reeve – 20.10.25
Clutha Gold
People! Keep an eye on the prize before you. Emerging nugget, the stuff “Black Peter” knew about, Bombay gentleman
who struck gold in 1857 at Tuapeka, scooping glinting gravel from the riverbed with his cup years before Gabriel Read
saw flecks “shining like the stars in Orion on a frosty night”, gold confirmed in Otago, a decade after New South Wales,
the glory – not to say reward – bestowed on the well-dressed candidate (not the half-caste from Bombay whose honesty gave rise to no reward).
People! Keep an eye on the prize. Yes. The cycle trail we journey in a meditative state, pausing to assess, for instance,
the scarification of the land above Beaumont Gorge, native scrub scraped off just wherever possible given the steepness,
elsewhere, feral trees spilling out of the radiata along the tops, sprouting under cliffs that once were waymarks to Māori
travelling up river from the coast along mahika kai routes. If we are honest with ourselves, it is carnage. Chaos, plunder:
we ogle the fate of our kind who would move mountains not far from here, nevermind scrub, in pursuit of the shiny stuff,
at so-called “Bendigo” in the Dunstan Mountains, Kura-matakitaki, where men and women with geology degrees feverishly
calculate potential returns from the sparkling core samples extracted under permit from the mountainback,
their CEO crowing future profits in the billions, regional growth, speculation to accelerate the pulse of offshore investors.
Without cash, their fabled open-cast mine may not proceed. Or it may. Certainly, the carnage we see from the riverbank
tells a story the trail people wouldn’t want us to focus on, namely, the irrepressibility of our activity, humans in time
destined to be extracted from the view just like the mountains, the land sliced up by farming, forestry, mining, infrastructure,
enterprise that in the end failed to save us from ourselves. Those, at least, are the signs. What happens remains to be seen,
and we are getting ahead of ourselves. The end isn’t quite yet. There is still sunlight and shadow, glitter of today’s fine day.
The prize is this deep blue vein of the motu, Clutha, Mata-au, river that gave a pseudonym to Janet, a colour to Marilynn,
incrementally digging out its passage through culture, resolving its way to the sea. We cycle from name to name,
past livestock, old gardens unravelling with age like memories, derelict barns at the edge of paddocks, willow clusters;
the prize presumably is us, steering our contraptions along the edge of a signature, at Beaumont saying goodbye
to the river, the trail now mostly following the highway, gold country but no longer river country, dead Black Peter
ghosting the great disenfranchisements evident from the trail as we ride through a converted landscape, sheep country
at Bowler’s Creek, pine plantations on the hills above Lawrence, wholly transformed land, just riparian planting in the valleys
to give any indication of a time before now. The age of birds, rivers, podocarps, sunlight, snow-melt, flax. Winking boulders
in which the ore retained its secret, faithful to the long moment before our century of hard-hatted Ministers of Resources
tapping rocks and denouncing the catastrophe of the economy (no mention of the slow-motion catastrophe of the land,
what is obvious all around us yet routinely overlooked by those in rapid transit from name to name, place to place).
People! Anyway. Yes. Keep an eye on the prize before you, we get that. And riding into Lawrence is certainly gold,
the sun setting on our handlebars, sheep laughing as we pass, the fields outside town home to sun-drunk ducks, goats, horses,
good sorts in the only environment they have ever known, lifestyle blocks, drained, fenced paddocks, previously bog
that before the man-driven fire was once primaeval forest. Hard to believe, the gaudy general store on the main drag
now also extinct; also extinct the ironmongers, breweries, lions that roamed the township, in its origins displaced by mining creep
to the present location. Not yet extinct the beauty of the town. Rusted colonial rooftops pepper the view, seasoned by exotic trees.
Truth is, nature was always ahead of us. To the bitter end. Whatever control any of us dreamed we had was an illusion.
Night colonises the shadows. Worn out, we pull up at the car. We are the gift that keeps on giving, despite the prognosis.
Clutha Gold was awesome, we say. At the Night ‘n Day, we gorge. And it is a fact, we are happy. Good work people! Keep it up!
Richard Reeve
TOXIC
It’s unbelievable, really. Unbelievable. Why would you visit this kind of environmental catastrophe onto a region that is thriving, that is in the midst of what many of us think of as a renaissance? The future of Central Otago lies in its bike trails, vineyards, cafes, in good farming practice, and a diverse and growing population of people, young and old, who genuinely care about the future of where we live.
All aspects of life in the province will be permanently affected by the toxic presence of a mine at Thomson Gorge. The initial mining proposal (and it will only get bigger, you can be sure of that) includes four mining pits, one of which will be a kilometre long and two or three hundred metres deep. All fouling our water, risking arsenic and cyanide pollution among other poisons. Don’t even mention the mad noise, the carbon, the ruin of our rivers, land and air pollution, the road traffic, the dust… the incalculable environmental cost.
Of one thing you can be certain: If the Thomson Gorge Mine goes ahead, there will be further mining proposals to follow. Watch out, Bannockburn. Watch out, Central. Remember this – ‘fast track’ can mean hasty and fatal mistakes.
Coming in here with their bogus claims, their invented figures (’95 per cent of the locals support the mine’– come off it!), these people should be ashamed. Those of us who love Central Otago are going to fight this. Because, make no mistake, this mine would be the ruin of our region, and importantly its future.
Sam Neill – 22nd October 2025
Near turn-off to Thomson Gorge Road, Tarras Photo: Gregory O’Brien, October 2025
Reading Poetry to Rare Lizards
SONG FOR THE TUSSOCK RANGE ‘I will up my eyes unto the hills …’ – Psalm 121
Deep Stream, Lee Stream, Taieri River and their tributary waters – all your lovely water-daughters, Lammerlaw and Lammermoor – dear to me and ever dearer, Lammerlaw and Lammermoor!
Deep Stream. Lee Stream, Taieri river – where I wandered in my childhood with a fishing bag and flyrod – Lammerlaw and Lammermoor, dear to me and ever dearer, Lammerlaw and Lammermoor!
Deep Stream, Lee Stream, Taieri River – let no profiteers deface these windswept, wild, beloved places – Lammerlaw and Lammermoor, dear to me and ever dearer, Lammerlaw and Lammermoor!
David Kārena-Holmes
AT WEST ARM, LAKE MANAPOURI
Tourists on tourist buses enter ‘The Earth’s Arsehole’* (blasted, grouted, |as though the Earth itself were buggered) to view the powerhouse in the bowels, where all the weight of thunderous water that once was the glorious Waiau river, flowing freely South to the sea, is prisoned now in pipes and turbines to serve the mercilessness of man.
And so, it seems, the mythic grief of Moturau and Koronae (whose tears, in legend, filled this lake) is vented in a cry transformed, exhaled as an electric current from generators underground, to howl through cables strung on pylons, gallows-grim, from here to Bluff.
Are we who turn on lights at evening, or use the smelted aluminium, exploiters of anguish, buggerers of the Earth?
David Kārena-Holmes *The site of this power project was, in the construction period, known to the workers (as is, no doubt, commonly the case in such environments) as ‘The arsehole of the Earth’. Most, or all, of the the power has gone to supply an aluminium smelter at Bluff.
Swoon
Skylark ripples the edge of silence, icy hollows mirror its hover, lines of dry grass quiver.
Winter’s travelling light transforms the field of shaded frost to shallow melt, and then, again.
Mountains drift into distance, curve in whiteness. On either side, hills and sky swoon at vision’s end.
Jenny Powell
Leave the arthropod alone
I saw a centipede in the crack of a rock flipped the grey shape to view the earth underneath, watched tiny legs scurry to safety, skittering from my unwanted gaze
I found a story in the hem of my coat picked it apart, ripping the seam stitch by stitch till the torn fabric, this undoing, was all I could see
I peered through a telescope at the southern sky’s gems winced at the big-man voice next to me, joking about ladies who covet – if only we could own them, if a man would get them for us, we’d be happy
I light the quiet fire of this poem: a resilient critter, a seam that holds, the sparkling truth lightyears from man’s reach – these things shining in the untouched crux
Michelle Elvy
A Faustian Bargain
Can I speak as a descendent of Cornish tin miners? Hunger led them to flee to Australia and Kawau Island, where they survived and profited in minor ways, digging up gold and copper. None owned a mine, some died of the dust, and in 1867 my great-great grandfather died in a mine collapse in Bendigo, Victoria leaving a widow, and nine children, one unborn. Is the tiny opal in my wedding ring handed down from him?
Can I speak, knowing nothing of this heritage before I shifted south and my husband took me to the old schoolhouse site in Bendigo, Central where we camped on the hard dryland. Born in Tamaki Makaurau, in view of the Waitemata I took time to love this new land, the forbidding mountains, cold lakes and rivers, shimmering tussocks, and now vineyards and tourists annoying as they may be bringing a more benign form of riches.
Can I speak, knowing my ancestors left their toxic tailings, their dams of arsenic and lead still poisoning the water 150 years later? Too late for apologies or compensation, the best I can do is speak up, say, beware these salesmen with their promises of jobs, and millions to be made. Once the land is raped, its gold stored safely in a vault for nothing more than speculation, the money men will walk away leaving land that feeds no one,
water that will slake no thirst.
Diane Brown
An Anti-Ode to Mining in Central Otago
There’s Lord Open Cast, pompous in yellow smog. Corporate blokes raise another hair of the dog, and pump more pollution for the water-table. Dirty dairying brings bloody algal bloom; so much cow urine until nitrogen’s poison, that the arse has dropped out of the rivers.
Yes, the day looks perfect with road tar heat; gorsebush fires flame above the lakeside beach. Spot mad scrambles of rabbits gone to ground, as orchards totter and grape-vine soils erode; while every avenue is twisting itself around, looking for the fastest way out of town.
Roadside lupins in Ophir echo purple sunsets. Bendigo’s carbon offerings are burnt by nightfall. A hundred per cent pure express their distance, when smell of decayed possum chokes the air. Don’t let land’s dirge be your billy-can of stew, the petrol reek of your tail-finned septic tank.
Tailings will anchor environs turned unstable. Once hymns were sung to hum of the tuning fork, as the ruru called out, Morepork, morepork; now drills hit post-lapsarian pay-dirt, just where Rūaumoko rocks an iron cradle, and the raft of Kupe fades to a roof of stars.
They would mine hills hollow because earth shines gold. Clouds packed in sacks, a bale-hook making way. Hear creeks burble and croon in violin tones, over lost honey-thunder of long-gone bees. Join the boom and bust of prize pie in the sky; chase lizards of rain running down bulldozed trees.
David Eggleton
The Underside
Under the house the dust is dry as an archaeologist’s brush, stippled by the motionless rain of those particulars that make our bodies, my body groping, stooped and short-sighted, under the loom of joists and time.
In this lumber room of mothlight and clotted webs are countless lives burrowing down and flitting between.
There is a workbench, joyously scarred. There are bedsprings for sleeping bones. There are scaffolding planks, rusty bricks, the cheek of the hill that holds us up. There is fire and there are stars beneath this upturned palm on which the piles of our home tremble.
And beyond, the astringent glory of brindled hills that calls me to dwell on the underside: this drowning-fear that has us scrabbling up the ladder of never enough, forgetting the ground it foots upon. This lapse in listening to the depositions of the earth.
Megan Kitching
nothing to do with you
For a cup of coffee, you would strike the heart
with an axe, mine stone for its marrow.
Maim what rolls on into sky. Screw
metal poles into quiet land, warp and crush
its offer of light and air.
*
For greed, on whenua
nothing to do with with you, you would trammel
quilted, southern ground, leave a trail of stains,
thrust twisted iron nto its soft belly.
*
Rocks the wind or sun cannot move, sleep on.
Tussock-backed they carry soft gold
sound we can hear for miles.
From somewhere, a farmer
calls his dogs. Somewhere the blaring throats
of young bulls we cannot see.
Under our feet the gravel coughs. Fallen apples
form a wild carpet below a crooked tree.
*
The mist freezes where it wafts, solid
lace. Cold, bloodless and beautiful. Still for days
on end, the sun a smear across the sky’s white mouth.
Bulrushes stuck fast in frozen ponds.
Willows and poplars as wan as horse-hair.
*
In summer, the grasshopper screams. In summer
the road floats grey. Purple lupins
and orange poppies dribble paint.
When we stop the car we hear overhead
a pair of paradise ducks, their alternating cries
the unfenced sound of a mountain tarn.
*
Seized by the sun, valleys do not resist
the line and fall of riverbeds and trees.
On whenua nothing to do with you, somewhere
the sound of a tiny bird. Somewhere, lovely light,
the sound of nothing, of no one, of the air.
*
Kay McKenzie Cooke This poem, ‘nothing to do with you’, differs slightly from the original published in the book Made For Weather (Otago University Press, 2007).
Burn
It’s Brian Turner rolling around in the bed of a dry burn. Ghost poet Brian Turner galloping the fence line, hunched over a hockey stick. Brian Turner, order of merit, spectral at a precipice, rubbing scree in his beard. Brian Turner opens his mouth and out comes the roar of the sun. The broom fries. The hawks microwave. Ghost poet Brian Turner teleports up and kicks at the plateau with a heel. To the living, the clouds are invisible. But, squirting over stones, the skinks have Brian Turner’s tiny eyes. Tussock have his hands, the wind his keys. The hilltops had hoped to be rid of him. And they are.
Nick Ascroft
Otago: A Ballad (golden version)
Another golden Aussie in his big golden truck, crossing the water to try his golden luck.
Rips up the golden tussock. Digs a golden hole. Finds a lot of rock and a bit of golden gold.
While Shane and all his buddies stand around and cheer in a land called Desolation. No vision. No idea.
But they take their golden pennies, buy a house, a car, a yacht. And they sail away on a plastic sea, to nowhere you would want to be.
On this barren rock they’ve scraped blood red, trashed and burned and left for dead.
Leaving us nowhere to run. Circling round and round the sun.
Ripped out our heart. our breathing space.
This golden land that was our place.
Fiona Farrell
Mine i.m. Pike River miners 19 November 2010
Son, there was a time when you were mine Brother, when the shining day was ours Friend, there was an hour when all went well Darling, for a moment we were love Father, you were always close at hand Human, we were people of the light.
And now, the mountain says ‘he’s mine’‚ And now, the rivers say ‘he’s ours’‚ And now, the darkness says ‘my friend’‚ And now, the silence says ‘my love’‚ And now, the coal says ‘father time’‚ And now, we wait for the day to dawn.
Jeffrey Paparoa Holman from Blood Ties, Selected Poems (Canterbury University Press, 2017)
This is something of a raw topic for me, given my background as a miner’s son, growing up in a mining town. I’ve just looked in my copy of Blood Ties, Selected Poems, from 2017, and there is a section there with twenty poems related to mining and miners, much of it related to my growing up in Blackball. There are three poems there that speak to Pike River, a sore wound at the moment, with the film’s premiere in Greymouth last night. I have a family member who could not face going. Her father died in the Strongman Mine explosion in 1967, when nineteen miners lost their lives. JPH
The Blue Language
In our local park, five welcome-swallows swoop and dart for midges, their red chests swell as they sing their high, sky dialect; the thin vowels in their lyric glint as if rung from glass bells blown in South Pacific blue.
The quintet shifts, leans in the italics of speed: moves now like mobile acrostics, now a faithful, swaying congregation every bone adoring air
until an unseasonal despotic wind flings them out of sight — scatters twigs, dirt, smashed tail-light, laundry, leaves and newspapers like those that reported how, across Greece,
thousands of migratory swallows dropped on streets, balconies, islands and a lake, small hearts inert as ripped sheet music.
In our throats, the wild losses dilate, squat like rock salt in a browning rose
a grief clot, untranslatable.
Emma Neale
Note: There is a shadow of the phrase ‘the green language’ here; also known as la langueverte; in Jewish mysticism, Renaissance magic, and alchemy, this was a name for the language of birds; often thought to attain perfection and offer revelation. Also see ‘High winds kill thousands of migratory birds in disaster over Greece’, Guardian, April 2020.
Is the whole world going into Mutuwhenua? I’m looking at No Other Place to Stand (te whenua, te whenua engari kāore he tūrangawaewae) and it gets me wondering about the end of the whole blimmin’ world. Blimey. What will I do then? Can’t swim in ash. Can’t plant akeake. Can’t eat mushrooms like our tūpuna, the ones that grew on trees and used for rongoā, or practice as children on gourds the tā moko tattoo patterns of our tūpuna with plant juices from tutu and kākāriki (pp. 98–100 of Murdoch Riley’s Māori Healing and Herbal). Soot from kauri was rubbed into tattoos to make them black forever.
Robert Sullivan from Hopurangi / Songcatcher: Poems from the Maramataka (Auckland University Press, 2024)
E hoa mā, please buy No Other Place to Stand:An Anthology of Climate Change Poetryfrom Aotearoa New Zealand Edited by Jordan Hamel, Rebecca Hawkes, Erik Kennedy and Essa Ranapiri (Auckland University Press, 2022)
Mining Lament
I went to see the golden hill but it had all been mined away all that’s left is an empty bowl of yellow gorse and rutted clay
But it had all been mined away except a clay bluff topped with stone in yellow gorse and rutted clay one stubborn relic stands alone
Only a clay bluff tipped with stone remains of the hill the painter saw one stubborn relic stands alone of a rounded hill of golden ore
Remains of the hill the painter saw rutted clay and a stumbling stream a rounded hill of golden ore sluiced away with a sluicing gun
Rutted clay and a stumbling stream all that’s left is an empty bowl sluiced away with a sluicing gun I went to see the golden hill
(after a painting by Christopher Aubrey, c. 1870of Round Hill, Aparima, Southland)
Cilla McQueen from The Radio Room (Otago University Press, 2010)
Thomson Gorge, Gregory O’Brien, Oct 2025
Old Prayer
Hawk, as you lift and flare above the river’s slide, take us not in thy talons. Take us not from the bank or branch or wrench us from the earth, lifted by calamitous wings. Fix us not with your eye. Take us not up the way you raise the sparrow and the finch. Leave us as the covey of quail in the willow. Leave us be.
Jenny Bornholdt from Lost and Somewhere Else (Victoria University Press, 2019)
Gorge
Somewhere
in deep time, this collection of
chemical / isotopic / insoluble
composition signatures rises
and falls —
and falls —
falls —
rises
No one still, silent surface
along this space
in this intense South,
Gwondwana: floods, grey-washed
avalanches, rumbling glaciers, slips
hot water rushing through cracks
engorging crystalline schist
with veins of quartz
layers of platy mineral grains
{ graphite, pyrite, arsenopyrite }
Variations roaring through endless seasons
myriad manifolds must melt
surfaces scrape
gales salve
escarpment creep
alps keen, pine, take
Glaciers loose from time
Ice must, is—
grey, weathering—
heat, rousing—
Mata Au quickening—
Give, heave, cleave, groan
water milky blue, rock particles
scattering sunlight beginning and beginning and
Fast track to hammer / / Fast track to tamper \ \ Fast track to “explore”, drill, dredge, bore / / Fast track to gorge gorge gorge \ \ Fast track to contamination / / Fast track to hollowed out \ \ Fast track to haunted / / Fast track to dust \ \ Fast track to coarse-veined lies / / Fast track to nowhere \ \ Fast track to what would the real Santana, St Anna, say? / / / Sancta Ana, ora pro nobis.
Annabel Wilson
a suitable machine for the millions for/after Hannah Hayes
forge and smithy durability before cheapness do the work of a dozen men
colonise settle, spin the wheel first cost, last cost, stop
the machine if necessary check up press and guard before
you start up all cut, all shaped all mannered the same two
tubes snug one turns another turns one turns a way
to make it work invention is the mother on two
wheels and everything is material or it is
immaterial floating, dust between us
Liz Breslin from show you’re working out, (Dead Bird Books, 2025)
Stone
After all, stones remember the opening and closing of oceans the thrust of volcanoes; they remember, in their sediments, ancient creatures and trees, rivers, lakes and glaciations. After all stone is the firmness in the world. It offers landfall, a hand-hold, reception. It is a founding father with a mother-tongue. You can hear it in the gravity of your body. You can hear it with the bones of your body. You can hardly hear it. See that line of coast… See the ranges ranging… they seem to be saying after you, after you, after all…
Dinah Hawken from Ocean and Stone (Victoria University Press, 2015)
Māori Point Road, Tarras
You and not I, notice the change in light at this time. On my side, it’s all busted rough-chewed grass, stink of silage, black bulls in drenched paddocks. Rusted mailboxes punctuate the long gravel line. Drenched sheep. We are haunted by the chortle of a trapped magpie, the Judas bird made to betray. The black glove comes down once a day.
On your side, twilight bathes paddocks Steinlager green, all the way to those wedding cake Buchanans, the white crown in the distance. The human need to see shapes in things: a rock that looks like a wing. We carry on, not speaking. We carry on not speaking. You know I want to ask you something.
Annabel Wilson
Substratum
We are so vulnerable here. Our time on earth a time of how to keep warm and how to be fed and how to quell our most anxious thoughts which come back and back to connection.
How do we stay here on this earth which is right below our feet? Soil, clay, substrates of rock, magma, lava, water, oil, gas; the things we want to bring up and use, the things we want to use up.
If all we ever wanted was to know we would be warm and fed and listened to, would we be kinder? Would we in turn listen? Would we understand the importance of those close to us and the importance of what is under us?
We have the far sight. And we are what the shamans warned against.
Jillian Sullivan Previously published in Poems4Peace, Printable Reality
Deserts, for Instance
The loveliest places of all are those that look as if there’s nothing there to those still learning to look
Brian Turner from Just This (Victoria University Press, 2009)
Ōpawaho Heathcote River
As a child we fished and swam the Ōpawaho Now Ōpawaho is muddy full of silt unswimmable unfishable for days after rain
as cars leach poisons, some factories spill metals, subdivisions and farms without 20 metre wide riparian plantings spread, as shallow rooting pine forests get blown and burn Opawaho’s waters grow thick with mud sediment and poisons
For our tamariki to swim and play safely in our river we want 20 metre wide riparian plantings on each side of any stream or creek flowing into the awa where the awa flows muddy we can plant raupo
build flax weirs to stop sediment with holes to let fish through lay oyster shells on the river floor Any other ideas let us know
Ōpawaho pollution is our mamae pain Her harikoa joy brings smiles to the faces of our people Her rongoa healing restores our wetland home
Kathleen Gallagher
Great Men (after Brecht)
‘Great Men say dumb things.’
And then they do them. When that plumped-up someone is trying to talk to you about themselves and they are using ‘fat word’ you can be sure they are as spindle-shanked in heart as anyone can be. ’The dumbness of their third-rate ideas’ not even a tattered wonder. And you know that whenever they are smooth-talking about peace, they are preparing the war-machine. Just to show you how dumb they really are, they keep talking to each other about how they are going to live forever.
Michael Harlow from Landfall 243, 2022
Poet’s note: Bertolt Brecht was a Poet, Playwright, and Theatre Director. He was renowned for The Three Penny Opera, and his most famous plays Mother Courage and Children, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle. His most famous quotation: ’Terrible is the Temptation to be Good’. As a Marxist and Poet he was noted for his social and political criticism.
Thomson Gorge Road Song
“Those people who have sought to deify our wilderness … those days are over. We are not going to sit around and read poetry to rare lizards, whilst our current account deficit goes down the gurgler… If there is a mining opportunity and it’s impeded by a blind frog, goodbye Freddy”. (Shane Jones, Minister of Resources, May 2025)
Stand me a while in this warming stream then stay me with flagons, apples—
the sustainable industries of each numbered morning. Or bury me in arsenic, in heavy metals,
blanket me in blackened earth and scatter my ashes beside the Mata-Au,
in the bright orange of its contaminated flow. Bury but do not forget me under what was once
a greenwood, then lay that ailing tree to rest beside me. Steady and sustain me, streets
of the noble town of Alexandra, strike up your municipal band and
bring on the blossom princesses of early spring. Forget if you can this season’s toxic bloom.
Bury me in sodium cyanide, then set me adrift as toxic dust, carry me high above
your ruined waters, your tailings. Bury me in spurious claims, the cheery sighing
of cash registers, volatile stocks and the non-refundable deposits of a town that goes boom. Lay me down
in bedrock and slurry, in overburden and paydirt, fast-track me to the next life.
Bury me under the freshly laid asphalt of Thomson Gorge Road
in gravel and aggregate—bury me there, beneath your highway to hell, but please don’t take me
all the way with you, Minister Jones. Play instead this song on every stringed instrument of the province: on the wiring of
O’Connell’s Bridge, each note strung out on vineyard wiring and well-tempered,
rabbit-proof fencing. Sing me this open-cast, sky-high song above Rise & Shine Valley,
bury me in the company of the last native frog of Dunstan, the last attentive lizard,
lay me to rest, this once quiet road my pillow, sing me this song but do not wake me.
thinks about driving to Waihao to fetch some uku to make a koauau. It’s at Waihao Box where you said the local boaties couldn’t stand walking around your group of mana whenua collecting uku for taonga pūoro. I want to play taonga pūoro like you. It’ll improve my poetry readings where I need to lean against the fourth wall to be heard.
It ain’t easy. I still can’t click my fingers properly let alone make a clay flute in my head. It’s the idea that some non-Māori boaties are out there waiting to troll me for holding up their kayak adventure when this billy goat wants a koauau journey for healing. Āuē. I’m still in my dressing gown. If only Tangaroa would be my valet. Tomorrow it’s Mutuwhenua. I don’t even know the tides.
Robert Sullivan
Robert Sullivan belongs to the Ngāpuhi and Kāi Tahu iwi. He has won awards for his editing, poetry, and writing for children. Tunui Comet is his eighth collection of poetry. Robert’s an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Massey University. He is a great fan of all kinds of decolonisation.
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