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Poetry Shelf conversation and reading: Airini Beautrais

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

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

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

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

from ‘Cancer Moon: Poet Life’

a conversation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

from ‘Cancer Moon: Poet Life’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

from ‘Lemon sky’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Regret

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

a reading

photo credit: Skye Boniface

‘Failure’

‘Dreams’

‘Salt quilt’

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

Te Herenga Waka University Press page

Poetry Shelf review: Dinah Hawken

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

Today

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

Dinah Hawken

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

June down under

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

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

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

Dinah Hawken

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

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


Poetry Shelf congratulates Ockham NZ Book Award Poetry Winner

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Warm congratulations to Nafanua Purcell Kersel for her awarding poetry collection, Black Sugarcane (THWUP).

Moana Pōetics

We build a safe around our birth stones.
Craft it with a dream, a gourd, a drum-made
chant.

Pile it high with frigate bird bones,
song bones, bones of
cherished names.

We rub sinnet along our thighs and lash
our cache. Our stories kept sound, where words
and names and songs are not forgotten.

One day before, now, or beyond, something
with a heart drops a hank of its flesh
before us. It sounds like a drum and we know

it’s time
to undo the rope, iron-rock and bone-sand.
The stories, they tell us

that if we are the dark blue seas then we are
also the pillowed nights and days, soft with
clouds, spread half-open.

We are a tidal collection, hind-waters of the
forever we rally on, to break the staple
metaphors from the fringes.

Safe.
We sound together on a dance or
bark an intricate rhyme.

We, are the filaments of a devoted rope. We,
who contain a continuance and

call it poetry.

Nafanua Purcell Kersel

Let me say this. There is no shortage of poetry books published in Aotearoa this year to love, to be enthralled and astonished by. We need this. We need these reading pathways. Sometimes I love a poetry book so much I transcend the everyday scene of reading (yes those bush tūī singing and the kererū fast-swooping) to a zone where I am beyond words. It is when reading is both nourishment and restoration, miracle and epiphany . . . and that is what I get with this book.

Begin with the physicality of a scene, a place, an island, a home. The scent of food being prepared and eaten will ignite your taste buds. Pies filled and savoured, luscious quince, the trickster fruit slowly simmered, a menu that is as much a set of meals as a pattern of life. Move into the warm embrace of whanau, the cousins, aunties, uncles, parents, grandparents, offspring. And especially, most especially, the grandmother and her lessons: ‘”If you want to learn by heart, / be still and watch my hands” (from ‘Grandma lessons (kitchen)’).

Find yourself in the rub of politics: the way you are never just a place name and that where you come from is a rich catalogue of markers, not a single word. The question itself so often misguided and racist. Enter the ripple effect of the dawn raids, or the Christchurch terrorist attack, or poverty, or climate change, crippling hierarchies. And find yourself in the expanding space of the personal; where things are sometimes explored and confessed, and sometimes hinted at. I am thinking pain. I am thinking therapist.

Find yourself in shifting poetic forms, akin to the shifting rhythms of life and living: a pantoum, a found poem, an erasure poem, long lines short lines, drifting lines. Find yourself in the company of other poets, direct and indirect lines to the nourishment Nafanua experiences as a writer: for example, Lyn Hejinian, Kaveh Akbar, Karlo Mila, Tusiata Avia, Selina Tusitala Marsh, Serie Barford, Konai Helu Thaman, Dan Taulapapa McMullin. So often I am reminded we don’t write within vacuums. We write towards, from and because of poetry that feeds us.

Bob Marley makes an appearance so I put his album, Exodus, on repeat as I write this. It makes me feel the poetry even more deeply. This coming together, this ‘One Love,’ this getting together and feeling alright, as we are still fighting, still uniting to make things better in a thousand and one ways.

I give thanks for this book.

From Nafanua picks some favourite things:

One question:  Why or how does your poetry book matter to you?
“It mattered to me to have something to pass on to my children, something they could hold with our family names and stories in it.” 

Nafanua Purcell Kersel (Satupa‘itea, Faleālupo, Aleipata, Tuaefu) is a writer, poet and performer who was born in Sāmoa and raised in Te-Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa. Her poetry has been widely published. She has an MA from the IIML at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington and won the 2022 Biggs Family Prize in Poetry for Black Sugarcane, her first book. She lives in Te Matau-a-Māui Hawke’s Bay.

Te Herenga Waka University Press page

Listen to Nafanua read here

Poetry Shelf Conversations and Readings: Amber Esau

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Hungus, Amber Esau
Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2026

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

a conversation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

reading

Amber reads from Hungus

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

Te Herenga Waka University Press page

The Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: Dinah Hawken

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Evening light

Her hands, long-fingered, freckled,
by sun and soil, rested quietly
on her thighs. She was sitting alone
by the window, admiring the agility of birds
on the branch of a plum tree. Suddenly
sunlight caught the face of her watch
as it can sometimes catch
the turquoise bowl on the bookshelf.
Place and time, time and place,
illuminated.

Dinah Hawken
from Peace and Quiet, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2026

Dinah Hawken is one of New Zealand’s most celebrated poets. She was born in Hāwera in 1943 and trained as a physiotherapist, psychotherapist and social worker in New Zealand and the United States and has worked as a student counsellor and writing teacher at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. Of her ten collections of poetry, four have been finalists for the New Zealand Book Awards. Her first book, It Has No Sound and Is Blue (1987), won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Best First Time Published Poet. Her latest poetry collection is Faces and Flowers: Poems to Patricia France (2024), and other recent collections are Sea-light (2021), longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, There Is No Harbour (2019), and Ocean and Stone (2015). Dinah lives in Paekākāriki.

Peace and Quiet will be launched at Unity Books Wellington on April 23rd.

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.

Poetry Shelf noticeboard: James Brown and Dinah Hawken launch

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Join us to celebrate the arrival of two excellent new poetry collections: New Days for Old by James Brown and Peace & Quiet by Dinah Hawken. The books will be launched by Jenny Bornholdt.

Thursday 23 April, 6pm
Unity Books Wellington
All welcome!

James Brown’s New Days for Old is a delightful experiment in form.

Each scene in this book is like a 1-minute pop song: its depths are at first easy to miss. But as the story proceeds, the grand scheme of things hoves into view: we are born, we crawl and then are carried away, and everything is a-shimmer, even the disappointments

‘How does James Brown do it? Every page in this book is my favourite.’ —Bill Manhire

What use is poetry in times of ecological and political turbulence? Dinah Hawken’s Peace and Quiet grapples with this question, invoking both human voices and the voices — ‘the silt and the slash’ — of the natural world.

Powerful and illuminating, these poems show that peace, gentleness and reflection are a form of resistance.

‘This is poetry that digs deeply into existence, life and death, peace ahead of war, the power of silence and the power of the spoken.’ —Paula Green 

Poetry Shelf review: New Days for Old by James Brown

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

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

James Brown
from New Days for Old: prose poems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Te Herenga Waka University page

James reads from New Days for Old: prose poems

Poetry Shelf celebrates the Ockham NZ Book Awards poetry shortlist: Erik Kennedy picks favourites

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Sick Power Trip, Erik Kennedy
Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025

Erik’s collection has stuck with me for a number of reasons. I have never read a collection quite like it and I love that. It feels like there are two significant settings. Firstly, an extraordinary band of wit and humour, with unexpected scenarios, shifting angles and points of view. Secondly, the necessary and imperative knottiness of humanity, from exposed self to a wider global reach. Not an either or view, but an incredible shifting light on how to live and how to survive. A poetic prism on the contemporary world that might be sharp, jagged, wise, personal.

Paula Green, Poetry Shelf

To celebrate placement on The Ockham NZ Book Awards poetry shortlist, I invited the four poets to choose some favourite things. Third up Erik Kennedy.

Erik Kennedy chooses favourites

Four photos
(a favourite object, place, poetry book, album)

Three sets of three

Three favourite words in your poetry toolkit
But, only, if. Powerhouses of rhetoric.

Three things that matter to you when you read and write poems
I like a first line that’s a poem on its own. I hope that if I’m being lied to in a poem, there’s a good reason for it. And I like to have my priors demolished.

Three poets who have inspired you
Agony to have to do this. Today . . . George Herbert, Norman MacCaig, Natalie Shapero.

One question

Why or how does your poetry book matter to you?
Well, it’s the truest of my books, both personally and artistically. And that feels big. I think readers have sensed that, because the reactions I have got to Sick Power Trip go far beyond anything I heard about the first two. It’s like it took me until my forties to be able to write with the honesty of a teenager. But it takes as long as it takes, I guess. 

One poem

Shop Floor Layout Algorithm

It was with palpable relief that, after a protracted illness, I got back to spending money again.

Economically inactive for October and November, I might as well have been dead instead of just feeling dead.

I got a glimpse of the great beyond, where there are no smart kettles reduced to clearance.

Now I have been in the aisles again, moving slowly and fragilely through the optimised layout of the world.

I have sojourned through an aisle rammed with 900 kilos of chocolate Santas I’m not going to buy because they’ve got dairy in them.

And I thought to myself, in the climate of that aisle, Not everything is about me. 

I thought about the things that are about me.

And I went to look for the aisle where they keep the fully-realised lives, doubtless alongside the wax food wraps and the fancy vinegars.

Erik Kennedy
from Sick Power Trip

Erik Kennedy (he/him) is the author of the poetry collections Another Beautiful Day Indoors (2022) and There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime (2018), both with Te Herenga Waka University Press, and he co-edited No Other Place to Stand, a book of climate change poetry from New Zealand and the Pacific (Auckland University Press, 2022). His poems, stories, and criticism have been published in places like berlin lit, FENCE, The Florida Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, the TLS, and Western Humanities Review. Originally from New Jersey, he lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch.

Full Poetry Shelf review here and reading by Erik here

Erik picks a favourite poem from the book

Te Herenga Waka University Press page

Poetry Shelf review: What to Wear by Jenny Bornholdt

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

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

Jenny Bornholdt
from ‘Ada in the Room’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plum

Why wear socks
when your days
are numbered.

Like plums falling
from trees, frequent
as minutes

Jenny Bornoldt

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

Te Herenga Waka University Press page

Poetry Shelf celebrates the Ockham NZ Book Awards Poetry Shortlist: Nafanua Purcell Kersel picks some favourite things

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Black Sugarcane, Nafanua Purcell Kersel
Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025

“Let me say this. There is no shortage of poetry books published in Aotearoa this year to love, to be enthralled and astonished by. We need this. We need these reading pathways. Sometimes I love a poetry book so much I transcend the everyday scene of reading (yes those bush tūī singing and the kererū fast-swooping) to a zone where I am beyond words. It is when reading is both nourishment and restoration, miracle and epiphany . . . and that is what I get with this book.”

Paula Green, Poetry Shelf, 2025

To celebrate placement on The Ockham NZ Book Awards poetry shortlist, I invited the four poets to choose some favourite things. Second up Nafanua Purcell Kersel.

Nafanua Purcell Kersel chooses favourites

Four photos
(a favourite object, place, book cover, album)

A favourite thing is a seat with a view

A favourite place is the ‘blue corner’, our family coffee spot on my Mum and Dad’s front porch in Sāmoa.

Current favourite poetry book is Hungus by Amber Esau, one of the smartest, slickest poets in Aotearoa

Fave album: All the xennial girlies know

Three sets of three

Three favourite words in your poetry toolkit

A/a – small, sharp/round and very useful.
Place – I’ve been learning to see each poem as a place which helps me nest in and focus.
Mana – I try to ask myself, where does the mana sit?

Three things that matter to you when you read and write poems (just a sentence for each)

Rhythm: how does it sound and flow, what’s the pace and where can these be interrupted?
Structure and shape: concentric patterns of structure and shape in a line, stanza, poem and collection.
Simplicity: As much as possible (unless it’s impossible) I try to use plain language, easy or interesting shapes, blank spaces. 

Three poets who have inspired you

Tusiata Avia
Amber Esau
M. NourbeSe Philip

One question:  Why or how does your poetry book matter to you?

It mattered to me to have something to pass on to my children, something they could hold with our family names and stories in it. 

One poem 

Family video call
15 March 2019

On screen our faces are
like clay, about to crack.

We listen for Dad
to splinter the distance between us—

tatou tatalo,
let us pray for those poor families
in Christchurch,
with their loved ones taken.

We must stay aware,
keep safe
and never forget.

We had felt almost safe before this,
thought it was okay to be loud with our brown selves

thought we were free,
but we had only forgotten

that blackbirding and dawn raids
were hatchets roughly buried

and for decades we had let
tiny red flags sneak past us,

let our guards
slip off to sleep.

Now we are reminded
that we are minor.

A migrant shadow follows me to bed,
slips in heavy beside me

steals my comfort
warmth
dreams
prayers

Nafanua Purcell Kersel

‘

Nafanua Purcell Kersel (Satupa‘itea, Faleālupo, Aleipata, Tuaefu) is a writer, poet and performer who was born in Sāmoa and raised in Te-Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa. Her poetry has been widely published. She has an MA from the IIML at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington and won the 2022 Biggs Family Prize in Poetry for Black Sugarcane, her first book. She lives in Te Matau-a-Māui Hawke’s Bay.

Te Herenga Waka University Press page

Listen to Nafanua read here

Poetry Shelf review