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Poetry Shelf review, conversations and readings: Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook – All Souls

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Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook -all souls
editor, Tracey Slaughter
Massey University Press, 2026
anthology page

Wild Houses

Bright bright horses choose me
to house their hooves. Houses

house their light like the evening
holds lock-jaw streetlights, and

kitchen windows house inaccessible
grief and joy; like the sun sets in

princess colours, yawns pastel mouths.
I have walked these paths so lonely

the streetlights have extinguished
as I passed. Behind a sky-rise

the sun blossoms like a tender bruise.
When I left home I learnt a new city

like a horse learns an apple in its mouth:
consumed its sweet, waning colours.

Saw my sun-struck reflection in a pool
of greywater. Pocketed my hands

further still. Drank deep.

Maia Armistead

Poetry, as I repeat like a mantra on Poetry Shelf, can be and do many things. Poems can ignite milky ways of feelings, ideas, experience, memories, desires, drawing us deep into and beyond who we are and who we might be. And that’s what the latest Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook: All-Souls does for me. All–Souls is a smooth and jagged uplift, an inspiration, an absorbing gathering of what poetry can do. This glorious anthology set my writing pens and pencils dancing again.

All-Souls is a special issue celebrating 75 years of publications. It was first edited by Louis Johnson, and from 1954 published by Pegasus Press in Christchurch. Nicola Legat presents an overview of Louis’s editorial role; his varying views of nz poetry. She locates examples across the years from from scolding to jaunty to despairing to marvellous to furious. Louis’s final issue was in 1964, upon which the journal took a break. Frank McKay edited it biannually from 1971 until 1984. Again a break, and then from 1990, with a series of publishers, the editors were David Drummond (brief spell from 1990) and Alistair Paterson (1993 to 2014). Jack Ross became editor and published from 2014 with Massey University Press assuming the publishing role in 2017. Johanna Emeney followed him, with Dr Tracey Slaughter assuming the role in 2021. As Nicola remarks:

“Louis Johnson, who published 32 poets in volume 1, would surely be astounded that the year book features 120 poets or so each edition. The New Zealand poetry he was so anxious to support and sustain has only grown in in all those years.”

Indeed! And as the diverse poetry in All-Souls demonstrates, whether style tone subject matter, and as Tracey’s inspired introduction underlines, as she explores the issue’s title.

The poems navigate aging, death, illness, therapy, multiple darknesses, but they also draw upon multiple lives, lights and lightnesses.

Darkness. Take for example, Cindy Botha’s moving ‘heart of the dinner table’, with its smouldering absences, “where silences are handed out like empty boxes”. Or the grief and deep aroha in Kerrin P Sharpe’s extraordinary ‘nothing like himself’, where the loss of a magnolia’s foliage reveals a brother loss:

He’s only here
in the tree
at dinner time
his wedding ring
that last ray of sun

Light: In ‘A Garden’, Lucy Miles offers sanctuary to weeds and birds, rather than resort to the uplift of Prozac or meth. And I stall on the ending to Mary Creswell’s Ceento: I am part of all that I have met”:

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks,
and there is a story in a book about it:
that which we are we are:
a few old pecker-fretted apple trees.

And now, I return to the darkness and to the light and find the poems smudge both like heart ripples, and everything in between. Linger over the aroha and memory of violence in Joel LeBlanc’s heart-bending ‘There is stardust in my blood’ (poem below). Or the lithe moves of Maia Armistead’s ‘Wild Houses where windows ‘house grief / and joy’ (poem above). Linger in the “nursery of stars” and “opening umbrella” and the missed body next to her, in Medb Charleton’s glorious ‘Making Love to the Muse’. Take time out with a good dose of Erik Kennedy’s wit and seriousness in ‘Classic Rain’:

There are people who would play sports or go to war in this,
when instead they could watch the surface of a birdbath.

The Yearbook continues to offer exemplary attention to reviewing New Zealand poetry, the kind of reviews that leads us to a book that takes our fancy on multiple levels. I have had Mary McCallum’s Tackling the Hens on my desk for far too long, and the review makes reading it this weekend imperative. And I’ll be tracking down Rhondda Greig’s book of poems and paintings.

To celebrate this anniversary issue, I invited nine poets to record their poems, and the editor and the featured poet, Josiah Morgan, to answer some questions. Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook continues to be a gift for our poetry communities – we are in the debt of Massey University Press.

Poetry is a gift to ourselves and to each other. Thank you.

There is stardust in my blood

and it smells of smoke and sulphur, a memory 
of violence, charcoal pencils that leave dusty
kisses on my fingertips, a house filled with
burnt coffee, mānuka wood transforming into 
incense and ash in our fireplace, my husband’s
skin as I curl against him, hunting for warmth
like comfort in a church, his breath tickling
as he tells me, “Love, it’s time to get up,” 
and I imagine the world was born exactly 
this way: the caress of a hand, a mumbled
whisper, light intruding, moths fluttering away,
us forgetting that the birth of the universe was 
also an ending, and we used to be stars.

Joel LeBlanc

Five questions for Tracey Slaughter, the editor

Paula: I was both surprised and moved to discover your review of my collection The Venetian Blind Poems at the end of the review section. I discovered it at 4 am when I was both wide awake and at a low ebb, and your exquisitely crafted words and thoughts, and personal acknowledgements, drew me back to why poetry matters to me, as reader and writer, reviewer and blogger. I got musing on how reviews can open rather than shut down a book, how they might draw closer to both the light and the dark, how the personal can be gold. How what we bring to a poetry collection as readers makes an electric difference. What are your thoughts on reviewing poetry?

Tracey: Firstly, I’m so glad that my review found you in that 4am place. When I read your book I felt like it was speaking directly to that part of me that can get so washed up and cut off in those pain-hours too, and the hold your poems kept on language, to guide you through those lonely precincts, just…glowed to me. I think reviews should help map our way towards those books we most need, & it’s often a deeply felt review, one which is willing to take the risk to open up the personal, the tender, the vulnerable, which shines a light on a book that might go on, in a profound sense, to save us in some future moment, connect with our tattered nerve-ends when nothing else will.

Paula: I totally agree. I want my reviews to open up a book rather than close its potential doors and windows and trails. I have an ongoing fascination with what poetry can be and do, as my introduction acknowledges: the way a poem might be an echo chamber or a form of travel, the way it might be squatting in the sand dunes absorbing beauty. I kept drawing ideas from your terrific introduction. For example, poetry as telescope, mirror or solace. Each new collection I read, seems to add another possibility, and I love that. How poetry is beyond rigid formulae. What discoveries have you made about what poetry can be and do, whether as editor or reader or writer?

Tracey: So beyond rigid formulae and forever smashing fixed mirrors! It’s been fascinating as editor to see our national poetry shift, stretch and flow over the years, always searching new fields, voicing fresh modes and moods. This year’s issue All-Souls announced its theme with resounding urgency from very early reading – while each piece was distinct, original, innovative, there was also a sense in which a collective quest for something – meaning, god, soul – was building in our poets to a force that felt outright choral. Lit up amidst all our global catastrophes, there’s a symphonic scanning for some human essence going on – these poems shiver with the existential, and scroll for meaning far beyond the algorithmic screen.

Paula: I find certain poems stand out in my reading travels, poems that catch me by surprise, offering wonder or joy or challenge. Is there a poem (among many I am sure) in All-Souls that caught you by surprise?

Tracey: The submission that cut right through my heart this year came from a bereaved wife sending in poetry her partner composed in his final days, transmitting words painfully pulse by pulse via device when his body was frozen by MND. You read poetry like that and there’s nothing more to say…It was so intensely moving to have one of David Gilbert’s last poems entrusted to our pages.

The sunset of the century
The pink had turned to green
How many breaths a man should take
And whether he may scream

I would play-act the drama
I would speak from the heart
But my heartbeat might falter
And I’d just mime my part

David Gilbert
from ‘The Sunset of the Century’

Paula: I am a big fan of your poetry – can you offer three words that matter to you when you are writing a poem. I guess it comes back to what we want our poetry to be and do.

Tracey: Oh thank you! That means so much to me. Mmmm, only three…then the things I surrender to first might be: Rhythm. Fire. Ruthlessness. Or is that maybe a way of saying: Instinct. Instinct. Instinct…

Paula: Oh yes to instinct! And yes, more than ever, we are all, collectively, hand-in-hand, navigating the dark and the light, at personal and global levels. What helps you through the day?

Tracey: Honestly, connecting with other creatives. I’m blessed that in my work, at Waikato University, and in my editing, for Poetry Aotearoa, I’m continuously brought into contact with creative voices brimming with fresh life. And lately my writing practice has spilled over into collaborative forms too, which I’ve found infinitely sustaining, even when I’m running on near-empty – I’ve been co-writing a screenplay adaptation of my novella The Longest Drink in Town with my eldest son Liam Hinton, & also performing in a theatre production of his latest Adam Award-winning play Passionfruits (on in Kirikiriroa very soon!!! & I’m alive with stage-fright already! yet finding I’m happiest in rehearsal, which is like getting to live right inside a book…).

Three questions for Josiah Morgan, the featured poet

Name three words that matter to you when you are writing a poem.
Fragments, challenge, opacity

Can you share a few poets whose poetry boosts you as a poet?
Dennis Cooper changed my life, and his work boosts me whenever I’m in a rut. So does the writing of the new ethnographic photographer-writer New Juche, who makes work with a bizarre and strange opacity that challenges me. In the Aotearoa context, Liz Breslin, Liam Jacobson, and the editor of this year’s Poetry Yearbook Tracey Slaughter feel closely aligned with what I do. The Compound Press book the prism and the rose, by Schaeffer Lemalu was published posthumously and is the most inspiring volume of local poetry I can think of in recent years. 

Why poetry? Why poetry in this tumultuous world?
Poetry is a way of thinking. It is part of what constitutes and constructs our everyday lives. Poetry reduces the boundary between the Western-individualist ‘i’ and the world around us, it is a mode of relation. Poetry is one of the few language-oriented tools we have with which we can disempower language. Language is very easy to bastardise for, say, political gain. Well, poetry can bastardise politics back upon itself. And poetry can stand for itself as an object, too. Poetry cannot be explained as anything other than what it is; it just is.

The readings

Josiah Morgan

Josiah reads ‘Noir is a field of unequal informatics, like a poem that could have been a sestina if it didn’t end too early, if it hadn’t been organised randomly out of order’

Joshiah reads ‘REDACTED (after Ralph Hotere)‘

Josiah reads ‘Family secret’

Josiah reads ‘It could happen to you too’

Rebecca Hawkes

Rebecca reads ‘All Souls’

Elizabeth Morton

Elizabeth Morton reads ‘O-O-O’

Richard Reeve

Richard reads ‘Wake’

Sabrina Li

Sabrina reads ‘Venice Syndrome’
This poem won First Prize in 2025 Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook student poetry competition.

Megan Kitching

Megan reads ‘Fire’

Sherry Zhang

Sherry reads ‘First swim of summer’

Alvia Farooqui

Alvia reads ‘Relapsing’

Leah Dodd

Leah reads ‘Pure expression of colour’

The readers and editor

Dr Tracey Slaughter is an award-winning poet and short story writer. Her books include Her Body Rises, The Longest Drink in Town, Deleted Scenes for Lovers, Devil’s Trumpet and The girls in the red house are singing. She has been the editor of the Poetry New Zealand Yearbook since 2020.

Alvia Farooqui is a Year 13 student at Macleans College in Tamaki Mākaurau Auckland. Her poem ‘Relapsing’ won first prize in the 2025 Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook student poetry competition.

Elizabeth Morton is a spinner of yarns and a poem-maker from Tāmaki Makaurau. Her poetry and prose have been published in New Zealand, the UK, the USA, Canada, Ireland, Australia and online. She has three collections of poetry, the latest being Naming the Beasts (Otago University Press, 2022). An upcoming collection, Incident Report (Otago University Press), will be published this year. She is a PhD candidate in psychological medicine with the University of Otago.

Josiah Morgan (he/him, Kāi Tahu / Ngāti Maniapoto) is a poet, actor, drama teacher, performance artist, facilitator, reviewer, editor and writer from Ōtautahi Christchurch. In 2026, he was the Visiting Writer at Washington State University’s creative writing program. He is the author of i’m still growing (Dead Bird Books, 2024), and his novella Road: A Postlapsarian Comedy won the Macmillan Brown Writers Prize in 2021. His work has featured in The Spinoff, Landfall, Out Here and numerous other journals, blogs and magazines. His chapbook Black Window holds the featured poet slot in Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2026.

Leah Dodd grew up in Taranaki and lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Her first collection of poetry, Past Lives, was published by Te Herenga Waka University Press in 2023. She is currently working on a second.

Megan Kitching is an Ōtepoti Dunedin poet. Her debut collection At the Point of Seeing (Otago University Press, 2023) won the Jessie Mackay Prize for Poetry in the 2024 Mātātuhi Foundation Best First Book Awards and was awarded Best International First Collection in the UK Poet Laureate’s The Laurel Prize 2024. In 2021, Megan was the inaugural Caselberg Trust Elizabeth Brooke-Carr Emerging Writer in residence.

Rebecca Hawkes is a painter-poet from a farm near Methven, now living in Wellington. She is the author of the poetry collection Meat Lovers (Auckland University Press) and the chapbooks Softcore Coldsores (AUP New Poets 5) and Hardcore Pastorals (Cordite). She edits poetry journal Sweet Mammalian. Rebecca holds an MFA in yearning from the University of Michigan and MA in half-truths from the IIML. Her new chapbook Hide, an illuminated manuscript of narrative verse, is coming in September 2026 with ngā pukapuka pekapeka, and her next  collection Fool’s Spring is forthcoming from Yes Yes Books and AUP in 2027.

Born in Dunedin in 1976, Richard Reeve is the author of seven collections of poetry, Dialectic of Mud (AUP 2001), The Life and the Dark (AUP 2004), In Continents (AUP 2008), The Among (Maungatua Press 2008), Generation Kitchen (OUP 2015), Horse and Sheep (Maungatua Press 2019) and About Now (Maungatua Press 2024). With Mick Abbott, he is also co-editor of an anthology of essays on wilderness, Our Wild Heart: The Possibility of Wilderness in Aotearoa New Zealand (OUP 2011). He lives in Warrington, to the north of Dunedin, with Octavia and the cat Lionel.

Sabrina Li is a young writer from Christchurch who enjoys exploring poetry through inventive forms and structures, often finding beauty in the ordinary moments of everyday life. She draws inspiration from the natural world around her, as well as the stories and perspectives she encounters through social media. Her poetry has also appeared in Write On Magazine and Given Words, along with a new work forthcoming from the Hagley Writer’s Institute.

Xue Li (Sherry) Zhang is a writer born and raised in Tāmaki Makaurau. She works across poetry, theatre and prose. Her family are from Fujian, China. She was the editor of The Pantograph Punch, and the co-manager of Te Kāhui Creative Writing. 

Poetry Shelf review and readings: Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2025 – breath

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Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2025 – breath
ed. Tracey Slaughter, Massey University Press

Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2025 is entitled “breath”. It is a potent theme for an anthology of poems because it generates multiple possibilities for the reader. Breath is a key component in writing a poem, just as it is a key player in our mind and body partnerships. Breath stretches into a broad-ranging field of human experience: relationships, politics, moods, self care. Breath is the vital sign of life, and that is exactly what the anthology delivers, signs of life: distinctive, diverse, captivating.

Reading the 141 poems underlines poetry cannot be forced into square boxes that limit how and why we are writing across communities in Aotearoa in 2025. There is no singular setting for style, politics, the personal, recurring motifs. Both subject matter and mood are eclectic. As I read, I have a heightened awareness of shifts in my own breathing: slow and steady, gasps, skin prickling fast. The journal will affect and attract each reader in different ways – depending upon our own predilections, our favoured reading routes.

The poems draw me into haze and blur, proximity and distance, silence and disquiet, illness and death, yearning and resignation, life love sustenance. Some poems, perhaps many of the poems, are introspective, with the writer gazing inwards and drawing out an anecdote, reflection or story that may be deeply personal or utterly invented. There is a deep vein of anxiety, a walking on broken glass kind of feeling or balancing on tight rope that might signpost the world or self or both. There is a concatenation of surprise wonder delight. Where will this poem take me?

Take Chrys Anthemum’s astonishing poem ‘Ballad of the Ancient Laundry Woman’, for example. She infuses her poem with a surreal mix of inside-outness that catches the way a dream might tilt tiny anxiety kinks in the every day to something incredibly strange and skewing. Here is the first stanza:

I saw a woman dressed
in pearls
sneak in my laundry room
last night, she put
ovaltine in my washing machine
and left a note about

a wedding I was late for so
I tossed my sparkling eyes in,

Take the intensity of connection that builds in Bella Sexton’s ‘Lady in green’, with the uplift of detail grounding a relationship, and carrying us to an ending that imparts surprise and wonder in its pulsating intimacy.

In a year or two
  these things will be closer than they are now
        waiting at the front door
     shadows against the glass

You can find me here
pressed between     water-marked pages
  in the soft opening
of the warmest ‘hello’

Hebe Kearney backtracks a city, reverse-reels Tānaki Makaurau in the glorious ‘Princess Young and the Prince Young the’. You simply need to read the whole poem to get the you-and-I reverse haunting. Gail Ingram’s terrific ‘Owning up’ is also a curling poem that is jittery at its edges of return, and looking inwards and outwards. Jitters and judders across a journal and yet the recurring patches of stillness, the utterly satisfying moment of pause, of observing sky, ‘a divine view’, Kupe’s sail. Take Emma Phillips’ extraordinary poem ‘When I leave’, for example, where a particular morning and where home, are linked to an artwork in vibrant detail. It’s a rich symphony of sound and image etched on the heart.

When I leave I see the lights of home blurring into the river /
everything stretched and warped across the water / and Van Gogh made
this moment / subtle brushstrokes and home is light in the dark / and
you don’t see the graffiti anymore / the cracks in the pavement / and
all that is compelling me to push the pedal to the floor is forgotten

/ I only see the stars in the review mirror / guiding me home

The more I read local poems, the more I am convinced poetry in Aotearoa draws upon eclectic voices, stylistic tracks, ways of breathing. So many poems in the anthology and I am holding my breath, hairs stand on end moment and I am blasted apart, physically and emotionally. Take Ash Davida Jane’s extraordinary poem, ‘visitors’, that renders death as a physical presence, a disconcerting character in the narrative. Here are the opening lines:

The death follows us down to the river.
We sit on flat stones with the death
cross-legged between us.
Crack cans of beers and cheers
being sure to make eye contact with the death.
The death dips its feet in the warmth.
We strip off and plunge ourselves in.
We eye the strength of the current
as the death wades out.

Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook includes breathtaking poems from familiar voices (Bob Orr, Sue Wootton, Fiona Kidman, Emma Neale, Erik Kennedy, Jack Ross), new favourites such as Cadence Chung and Jackson McCarthy, and also a significant range of voices new to me that I want to read more of. I wanted to invite a couple of poets to read a poem, but in the end wanted to hear the whole anthology as an audio. Ha! I have selected ten poets whose poems I loved, so you can have an audio taster and find your own listening rhythms.

In her introduction, editor Tracey navigates how breath infuses her selection, from the rhythm of writing to its connecting possibilities to sharp rage at the state of the world (here and abroad) to the oxygenating possibilities of the human and the humane. Breath is a vital tool for us as both readers and writers; it is the rhythm of the day, shadowing and guiding us through the tough, the quotidian, the awe-inspiring, offering multiple nourishments. Poetry is the breath upon the glass window – we make our own patterns, forage our own insights as we peer through a poem to worlds both intimate and external. This Poetry Shelf feature barely scratches the surface of the poem treats on offer, the featured poet, Mark Prisco, and extensive poetry reviews. Tracey has curated the best issue yet, an issue that will get you hunting down the work of a poet, or picking up a pen and writing your next poem. Let me finish with the final lines of Amber French’s ‘a love poem’ (you can hear her read the whole poem below):

The streets in this city are a garden where
flowers are made of crumbled tissues and greasy paper
it is very busy and the seeds spill everywhere

Laundry is tumbling at the laundromat
     and everyone’s clothes are so happy

All this is to say:
be strong.


Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2025 page

ten readings

Nathaniel Calhoun

‘I guess this was non-negotiable’

Nathaniel Calhoun works on biodiversity and board governance. His projects focus mostly on the Amazon basin or Aotearoa New Zealand. His poems have featured or will soon feature in the Iowa Review, Oxford Poetry, Lana Turner, DIAGRAM and many others. He reads for Only Poems and tweets @calhounpoems

Amber Abbott

‘Rest stop’

Amber Abbott is a PhD student and writer who recently completed her first poetry collection and Master’s in Professional Writing at the University of Waikato. She enjoys sad poems, complex metaphors, and trains.

Shivani Agrawal

‘we’re just collecting some info,
and then we’ll restart for you’

Shivani Agrawal is a creative writer from India, based in Hamilton, New Zealand. She has completed her Master’s in Professional Writing from the University of Waikato and works as a communications advisor. Her work has been nominated for Sundress Publications’ Best of the Net 2026 and appears in Poetry Aotearoa, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Flash Frontier, Overcomm, Mayhem, Mister Magazine and The Alipore Post.

Adrienne Jansen

‘The tent’

Adrienne Jansen has published four collections of poetry, and her poems have appeared in several publications and anthologies. She also writes fiction and non-fiction. She is co-founder of small Wellington publisher Landing Press, which publishes accessible poetry with a social edge. She lives in Tītahi Bay, north of Wellington.

Amber Esau

‘Muse’

Amber Esau is a Sā-Māo-Rish (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. 

Victor Billot

‘Necessary’

Victor Billot is a Dunedin writer. He is the editor of The Maritimes, the journal of the Maritime Union. His poetry has appeared in Breath: Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2025 (Massey University Press), Perch (At the Bay, 2024), and A Kind of Shelter Whakaruru-taha (Massey University Press, 2023). He has work appearing in the forthcoming Landfall Tauraka 250th issue (Otago University Press, October 2025.)

David Eggleton

‘Below Te Ua’

David Eggleton lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin and was the Aotearoa New Zealand Poet Laureate between August 2019 and August 2022. He is a former Editor of Landfall and Landfall Review Online as well as the Phantom Billstickers Cafe Reader. His The Wilder Years: Selected Poems, was published by Otago University Press in 2021 and his collection Respirator: A Laureate Collection 2019 -2022 was published by Otago University Press in March 2023. He is a co-editor of Katūīvei: Contemporary Pasifika Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand, published by Massey University Press in 2024. His poetry collection Lifting the Island was published by Red Hen Press in Los Angeles, California in September 2025.

Teresa Hakaraia

Teresa Hakaraia is of Ngāti Toa, Ngāti Raukawa, and Ngāi Tahu descent. She gained her Master of Writing with Distinction at the University of Canterbury. Having lived and travelled abroad, she now resides on the West Coast of the South Island, where she writes, collects rocks, and shares her home with her three small dogs- or rather- they share their home with her.

Zephyr Zhang 张挚

‘What was Built Over’

Zephyr Zhang 张挚 is an ex-geotechnical engineer based in Tāmaki Makaurau. They like half of the ingredients in a Jägerbomb. You can find more of Zephyr’s 
poetry in Starling, Landfall, Sweet Mammalian, Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems, and on their website.

Amber French

‘a love poem’

Amber French grew up in Waitakaruru, Hauraki Plains. Her ancestors came to Aotearoa from Somerset in England. A lover of books and reading, she lives in Sydney now, where she writes poetry and works in a school library. Her writing can be found in Takahē, Landfall, and Poetry Salzburg Review.

Poetry Shelf: Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2022

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Poetry New Zealand Yearbook is now edited by Tracey Slaughter, supported by the University of Waikato and published by Massey University Press. The latest issue continues to showcase poetry, essays, reviews and a feature poet. It also runs an annual poetry competition for secondary students.

Tracey Slaughter’s introduction sidesteps the traditional literary journal’s editorial ‘opening’ and riffs on the theme of breakage. I adore it! The end of a line provides infinite fascinations: either as a rest stop or an open valve, but Tracey draws us to the way the line itself may be punctured with white space. It is not just the visual hit, prolonged breath or a shift in rhythm, it’s ‘Switch your senses on’. Tracey’s editorial is an invigorating piece on reading and writing poetry. It’s a rush to the senses, and inspired me to to create my second Paragraph Room (coming up soon!).

As an electrified proposition on reading poetry, it also applies to our entry into Poetry New Zealand 2022:

‘Bring it all. Waste nothing. Use everything you are to open the poems in this book.’

Celebration time: there is a succulent and diverse wave of young poets in Aotearoa New Zealand. You meet them on Starling, on social media, in the IIML secondary school poetry competition, and through publishers such as We Are Babies. Holding an annual competition for secondary school students in Aotearoa, PNZYB adds to the increased visibility of emerging voices.

The four First Prize winners (from Y11 to Y13) are nestled in the alphabetical order of the contributors. Good to see them sit alongside the selected poets rather than as a competition adjunct. Unlike most writing competitions, there is no judge’s report. Were there common themes, styles? Leanings towards politics or the personal or both? What the four published poems underline is these new writers are an unmissable destination. You get heart, you get garden-fresh, breathtaking music, thunderbolt surprise, word nimbleness. The names to watch: Ocean Jade, Caitlin Jenkins, Sarah-Kate Simons and Jade Wilson. I am lost for words … these poets are so darn good.

get some air. the haze of summer is ripe and all i could ever want
is to rest my head into its shoulder, rendered to its shallow fever
until i can find a warmth to keep safe. for now,
my head is tilted north through your slack-jawed window
with patient wind threading into my skin

Ocean Jade from ‘Route Back Home’

when the world wants our faces to kiss the concrete
we’ll still be safe in the arms of papatūānuku
cause when things go south —
we’ll deal with them like south —
with the love our roots nourish us in …
bronze skin mona lisa

Caitlin Jenkins from ‘South’

Wes Lee is the featured poet. Her most recent collection is By the Lapels (Steele Roberts, 2019). She was a finalist for the Sarah Broom Poetry Prize (2018) and was awarded the Poetry New Zealand Prize the following year. Tracey provides two terrific paragraphs as entry points into both the poems and an interview she has with Wes. Wes’s poems leave her in awe: ‘accosted, exhilarated, struck’. Tracey writes: ‘The scenes glimpsed within a Wes Lee poem are often low-key, incidental, domestic, yet under the surreal pressure of the poet’s eye the ordinary detonates and homely details seethe and seize.’ Indeed. The poems walk on a precarious edge of living. They scratch and lash, they tilt you as read. You body surf on currents of memory, trauma, the personal.

A highlight for me is reading the essay of poet and journalist, Maryana Garcia’s ‘A Clearer Dawning”. Maryana writes of being selected for the AUP antholgy A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand, and on standing in the wings about to read at the book launch at the Auckland Writers Festival. The essay is sorting buttons, reciting vowels and diphthongs, a moving ledger of plus and minuses in the family’s move to New Zealand several decades ago (bomb checks v Lola’s cloth cupboard, smog v the best mangoes in the world). It is self doubt as a poet. We should all have a folder marked ‘Dietritus’! It is the way memory is hooked when you least expect it (by the fabric feel of the anthology’s cover). More than anything, it is in keeping with A Clear Dawn‘s stated aim: that Asian poets, like all poets, write about anything in a thousand inspiring ways.

I stared at my poetry folder, asked myself which poems I felt at home with. The answer was: none. Tabs closed. Tabs opened. I blinked again. Then I clicked on a folder I’d called, in a fit of creative frustration, Dietritus.

Maryana Garcia from ‘A Clearer Dawning’

Derek Schulz’s essay steps off from a brilliant Alice Oswald quotation (‘poetry is the great unsettler’) to opening windows on Emily Dickinson’s poetry. I kept arguing and agreeing with the essay which is far more satisfying than skim reading and moving onto the next page.

Sometimes you fall upon a piece of writing at exactly the right time. Sue Wootton’s extraordinary ‘This Damned Helplessness’ chimes so deeply when I am currently equating 2022 to climbing Mt Everest, when I am in training for a high risk adventure and not at all sure what views I will see. Caught in the gap between so many things. Sue considers climbing a first mountain and a second mountain, each with different views, and then perhaps imaginary mountains (Dream, Day, Night, Fact, fiction, Science, Culture, Body, Soul). More importantly, she traverses (connects with) how to exist, survive, flourish in the space between disparate things. Say Science and Culture. The first mountain view and the second mountain view. What is said and what is misheard. She uses her past experience as a physiotherapist to consider storytelling, gap navigation, treating pain, broken self narratives, bridges, patient involvement, re-composition. I am barely scratching the surface of this intricate tapestry of thought. It’s a satisfying neighbourhood of quotations and responses to other writers, physicians, thinkers, patients. Beautifully written, supremely thought provoking, it’s an empathetic plea to speak from both mountains. Yes, extraordinary, humble writing.

My issue of Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2022 is already well thumbed as I lily-pad hop the poems (one poem per poet) along with the continued solid devotion to reviewing poetry books published in Aotearoa. This is a journal I am drawing out over months not days. To savour and sidestoke in. There are unfamiliar names and recognisable favourites. Under Tracey’s inspired editorship, Poetry New Zealand Yearbook is something I look forward to. Rejuvenating. Rejuvenating. Rejuvenating.

take this night
quickly like a pill / the pull
of space cracking / ankle joints
from the stretch up
in its dark belly
gurgling acid starlight

Hebe Kearney from ‘night comes on’

she lay on the pavement
squinting at clouds
and never made out
my father roosting
in cranes and carillons
even her dress    pressed
with paintings of the domes
of Budapest  made
her giddy sun downing
giddy      this way
                               and that

Kerrin P. Sharpe from ‘the scaffolding of wings’

didn’t matter that our Chinese faces
spoke white/all of us knew the routineness
of string/mā má mǎ  mà/knotted our xīn
into snake bites/left our tongues parched/
dead nailed until the bell rang three.

Wen-Juenn Lee from ‘chinese class’

Massey University Press page
10 Questions with Tracey Slaughter

Tracey Slaughter teaches creative writing at the University of Waikato, where she edits the journals Mayhem and Poetry New Zealand Yearbook.

Poetry Shelf celebrates new books with readings: Ten poets read from Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2021

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Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2021, ed Tracey Slaughter, Massey University Press

Poetry New Zealand is our longest running poetry magazine – it features essays and reviews, along with substantial room for poems. Tracey Slaughter has taken over the editorial role with the 2021 issue, a wide-ranging treat. A poet and fiction writer, she teaches creative writing at the University of Waikato. Her new collection of short stories, Devil’s Trumpet, has just been released by Victoria University Press.

Winners of the Poetry New Zealand Poetry Prize and the Poetry New Zealand Yearbook Student Poetry Competition are included. Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connor is the featured poet. To celebrate the arrival of the new issue – with 182 poems by 129 poets – I invited a few to read.

Cadence Chung reads ‘Hey Girls’ (First Prize, Year 12, Poetry New Zealand Yearbook Student Poetry Competition)

Brecon Dobbie reads ‘Diaspora Overboard’

Nida Fiazi reads ‘the other side of the chain-link fence’

Lily Holloway reads ‘The road to the hill is closed’

Michele Leggott reads ‘Dark Emily’

Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connnor reads ‘Cat’ and ‘If the heart is meat made electric’

Kiri Piahana-Wong reads ‘Before’

essa may ranapiri reads ‘Hineraukatauri & Her Lover’ (for Ruby Solly)

Jack Ross reads ‘Terrorist or Theorist’. Listen here

Michael Steven reads ‘The Gold Plains’

Cadence Chung is a student at Wellington High School. She first started writing poetry during a particularly boring maths lesson when she was nine. Outside of poetry, she enjoys singing, reading old books, and perusing antique stores.

Brecon Dobbie recently graduated from the University of Auckland with a BA in English and Psychology. She is currently writing as much as possible and trying to navigate her place in the world. Some of her work has appeared in Minarets Journal, Howling Press and Love in the time of COVID Chronicle. 

Nida Fiazi is a poet and an editor at The Sapling NZ. She is an Afghan Muslim, a former refugee, and an advocate for better representation in literature, particularly for children. Her work has appeared in Issue 6 ofMayhem Literary Journal and in the anthology Ko Aotearoa Tātou | We Are New Zealand.”

Lily Holloway (born in 1998, she/they) is a forever-queer English postgraduate student. Her creative writing has been published in Starling, Scum, The Pantograph Punch, Landfall and other various nooks and crannies (see a full list at lilyholloway.co.nz/cv).  She is an executive editor of Interesting Journal and has a chapbook forthcoming in AUP New Poets 8. Lily is based in Tāmaki Makaurau, is a hopeless romantic and probably wants to be your penpal!

Michele Leggott was the New Zealand Poet Laureate 2007-09 and received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry in 2013. Recent collections include  Vanishing Points (2017) and Mezzaluna: Selected Poems (2020). Michele coordinates the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc) with colleagues at the University of Auckland. In 2017 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.

Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connor writes thanks to the support of some of the best people on this big watery rock.

Kiri Piahana-Wong (Ngāti Ranginui) is a poet and editor, and she is the publisher at Anahera Press. Her poems have appeared in over forty journals and anthologies, most recently in tātai whetū: seven Māori women poets in translation,Solid Air: Australian and New Zealand Spoken Word and Set Me on Fire(Doubleday, UK). Her first poetry collection, Night Swimming, was released in 2013; a second book, Give Me An Ordinary Day (formerly Tidelines), is due out soon. Kiri lives in Auckland with her family. 

essa may ranapiri / tainui / tararua / ootaki / maungatautari / waikato / guinnich / cuan a tuath / highgate / thames / takataapui / dirt / dust / whenua / there is water moving through bones / there are birds nesting in the cavities

Jack Ross works as a senior lecturer in creative writing at Massey University. To date he’s published three novels, three novellas, three short story collections, and six poetry collections, most recently The Oceanic Feeling (Salt & Greyboy Press, 2021). He was the managing editor of Poetry New Zealand Yearbook from 2014-2019, and has edited numerous other books, anthologies, and literary journals. He blogs here. 

Michael Steven was born in 1977. He is an Auckland poet.

Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Tracey Slaughter launches Devil’s Trumpet

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Victoria University Press and Poppies Bookstore
warmly invite you to the launch of

Devil’s Trumpet
by Tracey Slaughter

on Thursday 15 April, 6pm 
at Poppies Bookshop,
Casabella Lane, Barton St,
Kikiroa, Hamilton.

All Welcome.

Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Poetry NZ Yearbook editor Tracey Slaughter talks favourite things on Afternoons with Jessie Mulligan

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Photograph by Catherine Chidgey

Listen here to Tracey Slaughter’s invigorating conversation with Jesse Mulligan (music, books, writing, solitariness, collaboration, a new short-story collection). And thanks for the Poetry Shelf nod! Meant a lot. Especially love hearing the books that make us (Marguerite Duras’s ‘quicksilver’ sentences!). Excellent music choices to hunt down too.

Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Paula Green reviews Landfall 240 at Kete Books

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A good literary journal will offer the reader an inviting range of tones, subject matter, emotional effects and cerebral demands. Familiar writers will sit alongside new voices. Landfall 240 achieves an eclectic mix of voices, especially as it favours multiple genres: poetry, fiction, memoir, essays, artworks, reviews. Such a writing smorgasbord suits my habit of devouring issues over repeated visits and the degree to which certain pieces affect me is why I am a long-term Landfall fan.

An annual highlight is always the results of the essay competition. Editor Emma Neal received 85 entries this year and A. M. McKinnon’s winning essay, Canterbury Gothic, is a little beauty. The essay begins with a great aunt, exquisitely detailed, and moves through a city’s architectural detail to the dark and moving twists in a family history.

full review here

Poetry Shelf Lounge: Elizabeth Morton launches This is your real name

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Elizabeth Morton This is your real name (Otago University Press, 2020)

 

Elizabeth Morton’s launch scraped in by the skin of its teeth recently, but I thought it would be lovely to do an online version and get Poetry Shelf Lounge rolling. You can read and listen for morning tea with a short black, afternoon tea with your favourite tea, or a glass of wine or beer this evening.

At the bottom of the post, I have put a selection of good bookshops where you can buy or order the book online (this is a list in progress, please help me fill the gaps).

 

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Tracey Slaughter launched the book.

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Split the pages of Elizabeth Morton’s This is your real name anywhere & you are in the pulsing presence of questions that cut to the very heart of poetry: How much, if anything, can language actually touch? How much of our experience can we ever name? How much can poetry reach past the stars smashed into the emergency-glass of daily-living & offer the kind of voice that leaves more than a bloody trace, that makes a vital difference. ‘Poetry wallows between question marks/police? fire? ambulance?’ says a piece that opens with telephone lines exploding in a gaze pushed to the edge – how much can language ever hope to halt pain, to offer connection, to help in such a crisis? ‘Deep breaths,/say the operator’ within that poem, but ‘inside the communications centre/the desks are inconsolable.’

‘There is no touching the black heat at the centre of things’ another early poem entitled ‘Inside-out’ declares – and yet travel through the bolted internal doors and bleak domestic corridors, the blighted global landscapes and glinting dystopias of Elizabeth’s collection & you know you’re in the hands of a poet who, like Plath or Sexton before her, has all the dazzling surreal command of language to reach to the core of that black heat, to make it speak.

‘Inside-out’ concludes with a widespread vision of ‘a wreckage of stars’ – but the volume goes on in piece after luminous piece to chronicle the work of salvage, of a self bent on using every particle of language to dig through the ruins, rewire the evidence, sustain the spark, relight every shard.

These are poems that speak again and again from both the inside and the outside, from both the blasted solar plexus of private traumas and the slow-mo devastations of the wider planet – over and over the poems flicker from hallways tremoring with personal pain to the ‘casual terrorism’ of history, taking an ‘aerial photograph’ of a suffering earth with the same kind of acute irradiated poetic lens that it turns on the lone & isolated heart. Whether it’s the stranding of a single life caught in the driftnets of personal desolation, or the mass beaching of a populace oblivious to the global damage they’ve done, Elizabeth’s language zeroes in on the waste & makes us see the interconnections: whether it’s steering the reader through burning towerblocks or coldblooded wards, past disinterested drone strikes or through achingly-handled small-scale solo losses, the breathtaking scope of poetic skill with which she charts her urgent scenes makes the reader feel every detail, feel the meds and the headlines catch in our throats, feel the doors locked and the altitude dropping, feel the kiss blown against the quarantine window & the distant ‘circle[s] of blood’ left on political screens.

These are poems that detonate and sing, that ring in the ear and sting in the political consciousness, and linger in the bloodstream long after they’ve stained your eye. They’ll also make you outright belly laugh: ‘I’d marry Finland. I’d blow Nicaragua. I’d shag Australia if she wore a paper bag’ states a slapstick look at politics that plays wicked & sacrilegious footsie with stereotypes. With the same comedic weaponry ‘How I hate Pokemon but I can show restraint and just talk about my adolescence’ gives a gore-soaked rundown of methods to slaughter innocent anime, and ‘In the next life’ tracks Wile E. Coyote speeding to collide with another booby-trapped piano or hurtling freight train. But of course, under the cartoon bloodsport there’s another violence being expressed: ‘I’m from the wrong cartoon she says…There is no/acid in my stomach to digest the sadness’; ‘I spent my teens/hyperventilating in elevators…yanking at emergency cords’ – that’s what lurks beneath the funny foreground of these onscreen critters and their messy calamities.

‘This is not a joke’ warns another poem, parading a cast of backwoods bar-leaners and big boned nobodies, its humour always ready to brim with ‘a metaphor so sad it makes grown men sob and jerk off into the same handkerchief.’ The counterstrike to comedy is always coming, the punchlines always poised ready to gut you. We might snicker when we’re introduced to a blowsy homespun oblivious America, but when she ‘order[s] Big Mac’s and Napalm’, lazily erases continents & watches bodycounts rise from her consumerist couch, the smile is wiped off our faces. And when the pronouns shift in this poem to fold us into complicity, as they do to such clever & ethical effect throughout the collection as a whole, we too are left standing with supermarket bags and shotguns/baffled and alone.’ That moment of aloneness – whether it’s the self turning figure-eights of final need or the last polar bear ‘pacing his cell, as the credits go down’ – is the place which the poems often return us to: ‘I wonder whether you know/you are melting’ this poetry asks with chilling economy. Over and over we find trapped ourselves in that phone booth, as in the masterpiece ‘Aubade’, where the glass is ‘skull-cracked’ and the world seems only to have ‘hold music’ to offer us. But even in this moment of exigency, with our ‘hearts in []our horror mouth’ & all the lines crossed, language is held up as ‘the loneliest miracle’: because we still use it to ‘pray, into the receiver’ hoping for a sign on the other end, some voice to come back from the empty page. ‘Writing is a political act’ the poem insists, even from this place. Even if all it can sometimes do is trace ‘the face of the enemy,’ or chalk round the bodies of selves and lovers we’ve lost; even if all it can sometimes do is echo the bleak dialtone inside our chests, its utterance ‘sets you apart’ the voice of ‘Aubade’ repeats to the sufferer.

Elizabeth had already set herself apart as a poet of breathtaking force, edge, intensity and empathy – This is your real name is another stunning, irrefutable, crucial book, a fearless personal testimony and a blistering political act. It goes to the places we need poetry to go to, places that only a language loaded with heart and shimmering with pressures can name. It smashes the glass.

Tracey Slaughter

 

Listen to Elizabeth read ‘Tropes’:

 

 

 

Stranding

 

We were never alone, pushing up loam on a blackened beach.

We kicked our tails like we were trying to escape
the outline of ourselves. We came ashore, two by two
with our cutlasses and compasses, with our baleen smiles

and bad attitudes, with our dead-end marriages and dreams that choked

in drift nets. We were never lost. We knew the shoreline better
than we knew our own purposes. We were a quarter into lives
that stood us up from the water-break, that left us gasping

by the river mouth, blistering under wet sacking,
our eyeballs fierce with the evening sun.
We wanted the attention. We wanted to arrange ourselves

upside down and scattered like something infinite. Like stars.

We follow each other to the end of the beach
and sing something that reminds us of bone
and the million land-flowers our mothers spoke of,
and the kamikaze heritage, our fathers and their fathers,

who recognised a vague phosphorescence
and shadowed it into the salt marshes, dreaming of air.

 

Elizabeth Morton

 

ELIZABETH MORTON grew up in suburban Auckland. Her first poetry collection, Wolf, was published by Mākaro Press in 2017. She has placed, been shortlisted and highly commended for various prizes, including the 2015 Kathleen Grattan Award, and her poetry and prose have been published in New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States, Ireland, Australia, Canada and online. She has completed an MLitt in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow.

Otago University Press author page

 

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Let’s support our books and authors. Most importantly you can order this book online or visit your local bookshop. Here are a few choices (new books):

Whangārei Piggery Books  Porcine Gallery

Auckland  The Women’s Bookshop,  Time Out Bookstore,  Unity Books, The Book Lover(Milford), Dear Reader

Matakana Matakana Village Books

Hamilton Books for Kids  Poppies Bookshop

Tauranga Books a Plenty

Rotorua McCleods

Palmerston North  Bruce McKenzie Bookseller

Whanganui Paiges Gallery

Gisborne Muirs Bookshop

Napier and Havelock North Wardini Books

New Plymouth Poppies

Featherston Loco Coffee and Books, For the Love of Books

Carterton Almos Books

Masterton Hedkeys Books

Martinborough Martinborough Bookshop

Wellington Marsden Books  Unity Books, Vic Books

Petone   Schrödinger’s Books

Nelson Volume    Page & Blackmore

Christchurch Scorpio Books      University Bookshop

Queenstown BOUND Books & Records

Manapouri The Wee Bookshop (no website?)

Twizel The Twizel Bookshop

Dunedin University Bookshop

 

Poetry Shelf audio spot: Tracey Slaughter reads ‘She is currently living’

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‘She is currently living’ appears in Conventional Weapons, Victoria University Press, 2019

 

 

Conventional Weapons is Tracey’s first full poetry collection but she has been publishing poetry for over two decades. She was the featured poet in Poetry NZ 25 (2002) and has published Her body rises: stories & poems (2005). She has received multiple awards including the international Bridport Prize in 2014, a 2007 New Zealand Book Month Award, and Katherine Mansfield Awards in 2004 and 2001. She also won the 2015 Landfall Essay Competition, and was the recipient of the 2010 Louis Johnson New Writers Bursary.

 

Poetry Shelf reviews Conventional Weapons.

Victoria University Press author page

 

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf review: Tracey Slaughter’s Conventional Weapons

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Tracey Slaughter, Conventional Weapons, Victoria University Press, 2019

 

Tracey Slaughter came to my attention as a fiction writer; I adored deleted scenes for lovers VUP, 2016) and lauded it in my SST review:

Tracey Slaughter’s daring short fiction deposits you on a rollercoaster, hoists you in the air, puts you in a dank, dark cupboard to eavesdrop, spins you round and round, makes you feel things to the nth degree.

 

Conventional Weapons is Tracey’s first full poetry collection but she has been publishing poetry for over two decades. She was the featured poet in Poetry NZ 25 (2002) and has published Her body rises: stories & poems (2005). She has received multiple awards including the international Bridport Prize in 2014, a 2007 New Zealand Book Month Award, and Katherine Mansfield Awards in 2004 and 2001. She also won the 2015 Landfall Essay Competition, and was the recipient of the 2010 Louis Johnson New Writers Bursary.

Like her fiction Tracey’s poetry is unafraid of dark subject matter: violence lament teenage eating teenage not eating abortion trauma. You will also find sex need desire love. The subject matter is important but it is the poetic effects that first strike me. There is an intensity of rhythm, an insistent beat that holds a poem together like a subterranean heartdrum, a breath metronome. It is no surprise that Tracey was (and is?) a drummer.

 

We deepdish kiss in the purple of your parents’ lounge,

a bunker plump with buttoned vinyl, fringed

 

with cocktail lamps. Your little brother doctors himself

a tower of afterschool toast and shovels into the corduroy

 

beanbag, watching claptrap TV—we’ll lip-sync those jingles

with their punchline chords the rest of our lives;

 

from ‘archaeological’

 

The beat in this two-and-a-bit page poem catches the intensity of after-school kissing, the heightened breath as the poem ‘sucks’ in detail of tongues and pashing, with an eye looking sideways to make the citrine kitchen and the purple lounge pulsatingly real. I am bowled over by the syntax, by the surprising juxtapositions of words, the lithe rhyme. I need to let the sonic impact sink in deep and savour the exquisite word play. Yes the young kissers are ‘archaeological’ but so too is the poet as she digs deep for flakes of the past and reposits them in the present tense.

The poem ‘the bridge’ also employs lithe syntax and rhythms to replay the urgency of kiss and touch:

 

Let feet slip on

sills of shell, a spiral

perimeter of crush.

Currents eel

 the light into

muscled canals we need

to oar & plough, tough-thighed

in the bridge’s underworld.

 

Often the poems are made electric by the present tense. The opening poem ‘she is currently living’ is a startling portrait, written like a mantra, all lower case, even after the full stops, so you are compelled to keep listening to ‘where’ she is currently living:

 

in a dead-end off jellicoe. in the waiting room of blue vinyl fear. she is currently

living in supermarket flowers that whisper buy me in their middle-class plastic.

she is currently living in a red metal playpen riding her stepsister’s rocking horse.

 

 

If Tracey’s aural dexterity keeps you on your reading toes so do her shifting forms. There are long form poems, bite-size pieces, block prose, fractured lines, lists, multiple choice. The poem ‘how to solve and 18-year sadness’ sits on the page like heart break – the heart hinted at, the break holding apart past and present, the sadness hiding in the crevice. Another poem ‘horoscope (the cougar speaks)’ sets word clusters against left and right hand margins. The poem with its film-noir lighting centres desire, attraction, loneliness, suicide drifting song lyrics that are cut off short as the speaker finds her way:

 

there are girls to pick

the wings off

 

but I’m not one of them

 

And now the subject matter. For me Conventional Weapons foregrounds character, women characters, which makes this book dig even deeper under my skin. The experience is often attached to trauma, the settings lit up in neon detail, the emotional core razor sharp. I posted a piece on Poetry Shelf from ‘it was the 70s when me & Karen Carpenter hung out’ and even in that brief extract the effects were incandescent. This is a poem of youth, song lyrics and singing, macramé, neon lights, freezer food, the backseats of cars, orange lounges, soap operas, instant things but it is also a poem of vomit and of bodies eating and starving, of the traumatic smash of eating disorders.

 

me & Karen carpenter

blu-tacked heartthrobs

to the hangout

wall & lay down

under our own gatefold

smiles. The ridges of our mouths

tasted like corduroy & the hangout

door was a polygon of unhinged

ultra-violet. We stole lines from stones

& rolled them like acid

checkers on each

other’s tongues, testing

the discs of our tucked spines as we

swallowed. (…)

 

When I return to the poem ‘horoscope (the cougar speaks)’, I return to the spike in the poem’s flow, the suicide that cuts into you as you trace the portrait of a woman:

 

& that last verse

is chloroform

*

don’t come

back with your bad

translations of love

one writs italicised

with scars

 

 

‘the mine wife’ is another imagined portrait; a long poem that features the wife of a miner lost in the Pike River disaster and the wife’s ‘grief is opencast’. In Wild Honey I write about the way poets might step into the shoes of another’s trauma, tragedy, loss, grievance, dislocation, wrongs, grief in order to make public horrific things both as a distant and/or close witness. Is this trespass? Is this keeping trauma and human wrongs in public view? For centuries writers have imagined beyond their own experience. In this poem I am heart struck by the way a woman continues to live alongside death, in the fist of life once lived, in the daily routines of food and laundry, in the coming up for air from the dark.

 

to stand at the mouth

takes a long journey. It’s like

a cathedral to all

we’ve done wrong. I thought

seeing it would cave me in. But it’s the peace

of the place that doubles me over.

 

The birds go on dialling

God. Even without you, the trees

don’t come to a standstill. Healing is

not clearcut. Air makes the sound of where

you were last seen. I listen

for scraps in the hush.

 

Grief is opencast.

 

Tracey’s poetry reaches me just as her short fiction has: her daring poems deposit you on a rollercoaster, hoist you in the air, put you in a dank, dark cupboard to eavesdrop, spin you round and round, make you feel things to the nth degree. I can think of no other local poet who has this effect on me. The collection will slip under my clothes and travel with me for months. It is a book I feel and it is a book I think and I adore it.

 

Victoria University page

Rae McGregor review at RNZ National

Jack Ross launch speech  (with images)