I flew over the North Island in a jetplane and noticed the clouds for once, how they covered the land like a forest, a huge forest billowing into the sky with its fungi, insects, bacteria, spores, cones, leaves, twigs, birds spilling up like little mountains of life and oh the streams of water upwards and downwards as I took a cup of tea and a biscuit.
Robert Sullivan
Robert Sullivan (Ngāpuhi Nui Tonu, Kāi Tahu Whānui) is the 14th Aotearoa New Zealand Poet Laureate. Among his sixteen books are the bestselling Star Waka, Weaving Earth and Sky and Hopurangi Songcatcher. He has won awards for his poetry, editing, and writing for children. His year 6 teacher at Onehunga Primary School, Mrs Naire, first inspired him to write poetry, which was a cloud poem. He lives in Ōamaru on ancestral whenua, the beautiful coasts of Te Tai o Āraiteuru.
In 1978 in the old Onehunga Primary school hall we met with a group of teachers and parents to show off the new technology—a Casio calculator which I demonstrated with a classmate, and encouraged them all to use. Our school principal, teachers, and my friend, their faces now blurred on a platform as my time train speeds by, just petals pounded in the wetness of memory; I remember the room full of pride and my blossoming blood when a parent said I could be a teacher.
Robert Sullivan
Robert Sullivan (Ngāpuhi Nui Tonu, Kāi Tahu Whānui) is the 14th Aotearoa New Zealand Poet Laureate. Among his sixteen books are the bestselling Star Waka, Weaving Earth and Sky and Hopurangi Songcatcher. He has won awards for his poetry, editing, and writing for children. His year 6 teacher at Onehunga Primary School, Mrs Naire, first inspired him to write poetry, which was a cloud poem about a boy observing an alligator. He lives in Ōamaru on ancestral whenua, the beautiful coasts of Te Tai o Āraiteuru.
The Poet Laureate Postcards is a new and ongoing series where Robert, our current Poet Laureate sends a postcard, whether poem or prose, from his travels or from home, from experience, memory or imagination.
“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.
•
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.
