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.
Join us to celebrate the arrival of two excellent new poetry collections: New Days for Oldby 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 Oldis 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
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.
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 aboutme.
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 Erikhere
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.
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.
New Days for Old: prose poems, James Brown Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2026
To celebrate the publication of his new poetry book, New Days for Old, James Brown talks poetry and reads from the collection.
‘How does James Brown do it? Every page in this book is my favourite.’ Bill Manhire
“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 am 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.” Paula Green (from forthcoming review)
James reads from New Days for Old
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.
Giving Birth to My Father, Tusiata Avia Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025
Ah. Tusiata Avia’s sublime fifth poetry collection is like moving into a meditative room where grief and love are yin and yang. The book is written to and from the death of her father, which in Sāmoan culture, is also his birth. Tusiata’s dad had lived in Aotearoa for fifty years, but returned to Sāmoa for the final stages of his life. He had helped build and nurture the Sāmoan community in Ōtautahi Christchurch.
The opening poems rise out of mourning, out of her father’s funeral ceremony in Sāmoa. First an imagined how-it-was-supposed-to-go sequence. Then a second how it-actually-went sequence. This precious collection was nine years in the making; a book, as Tusiata said in an RNZ radio interview, that was difficult to send into the world, a book in which she kept adjusting thoughts feelings revelations. It’s a eulogy, it’s writing poetry as a way of drawing close, it’s poetry as writing the gap that aches, facing the questions that compound, the anger that sizzles, it’s writing and living when each day grief is the shawl draped across the shoulders of being.
Yes. It’s travelling with and responding to and negotiating grief.
Ah. I am so deeply moved as I read this. Entering different scenes. Sometimes poignant, such as ‘In the Countdown carpark’, when the father’s hand rests on the shoulder of his fifty-year-old daughter sitting in his kitchen as she weeps. Or the flashes of anger at Sāmoan funeral culture and the way a grieving family feels, or the presence of water and of boats, the carving of boats, the rowing the steering the sharing. There is the ping and pang that her father wasn’t always present, a voice on the end of the line, and then how father and daughter are moving closer with visits in later years. The way mother and daughter, brother and many aunties, are also moving in and out of scenes, amplifying the love, sometimes irritations, but always returning and maintaining the integral power of alofa.
Yes. It’s travelling with and responding to and transmitting alofa.
It’s recognising the complicated difficulties of being mother daughter sister niece. It’s sitting in the gods with her mother to watch her dad in the band or hearing her beloved daughter on the ukulele.
It is is the shifting lights of here and not here, and as a reader my every pore is trembling. This from ‘I thought you were gone and not coming back’, where there are multiple light sources, there’s ice cream and old women’s foreheads:
It’s important I know where the light is coming from – the afterlife or the ice cream? My grandmother’s hair or the minister’s house? The important thing is: I thought you were gone.
And then to read the final skin-trembling line: “in other words, you are the light, Dad.”
I stall on the poem, ‘Watch’. This is what Tusiata’s poetry can do. Swivel and tilt you as each poem carries you though every diamond-cut facet of feeling. Heck this poem sticks to me as it unfolds. The poet, and yes I am saying Tusiata, because this collection is incredibly personal, removes the watch from her father’s wrist, and then places it upon her own. You get that skin tremble again with building memory-ache as both poet and wristwatch summon this place and that occasion, this smell and that nickname. The brown watch that becomes gold watch, becomes missing watch, that becomes this watch returned. It’s me brimming with alofa and grief and tenderness, especially when I read the final two stanzas:
That was six months ago. Now I’m in the Sky City Hotel layering myself in my niece’s make-up. I am going to have a seizure in a few minutes. I will wake up and find myself on the bathroom floor. I will crawl to the hotel phone, ring my cousin in Christchurch and ask her what city I’m in and what to do.
You’re at the book awards, the book awards, she calls to me. Ring Hine and make her come and get you. I ring Hine, who will win the book awards. Before I leave the room, I open a small zip on the side of my overnight bag and my father enters the room. He slips the watch over my wrist. I kiss his hand. And we go.
And here we go, yes let’s go into the meditative room of reading, this special special place that Tusiata has built for herself, for her loved ones, that we, her poetry fans and friends can share, travelling deep into grief and alofa through the power and nourishing strength of words. Thank you.
Tusiata Avia is the award-winning author of Wild Dogs Under My Skirt (2004; also staged internationally), Bloodclot (2009), Fale Aitu | Spirit House (2016), The Savage Coloniser Book (2020; winner of the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry and also staged nationally) and Big Fat Brown Bitch (2023). Tusiata has held the Fulbright Pacific Writers Fellowship at the University of Hawai‘i in 2005 and the Ursula Bethell Writer in Residence at University of Canterbury in 2010. She was the 2013 recipient of the Janet Frame Literary Trust Award, and in 2020 was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to poetry and the arts. In 2023 she was given a Distinguished Alumni Award at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington and a Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement.
Black Sugarcane, Nafanua Purcell Kersel Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025
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
Nafanua Purcell Kersel’s debut poetry collection, Black Sugarcane is a book to savour slowly, with senses alert, ready to absorb the aroha, the myriad pathways, the songs, the prayers, the dance of living. The first line of the first poem, ‘Moana Pōetics’, is a precious talisman: ‘We build a safe around our birth stones.’ It is a found poem that uses terms from the glossary in Mauri Ola: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English, edited by Albert Wendt, Reina Whaitiri and Robert Sullivan (Auckland University Press, 2010). The poem draws us deep into the power of stories, night and day, the ocean, safety, the power of rhythm. And that is exactly what the collection does.
The book is divided into five sections, each bearing a vowel as a title (ā, ē, ī, ō, ū), the macron drawing out the sound, as it does in so many languages like an extended breath. When I read of vowels in the poem, ‘To’ona’i’, the idea and presence of vowels lift a notch, and poetry itself becomes a ‘sweet refresh’, a warm aunty laugh: “Aunty Sia’s laugh is like a perfectly ripe pineapple / a sweet refresh of vowel sounds”.
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.
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.
NZ Poetry Shelf 