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Wednesday

Jan Kemp: Dancing Heart (2025)

Design: John Denny

Jan Kemp. Dancing Heart: New and Selected Poems 1968–2024. Edited by Jack Ross. ISBN 978-3-00-083163-8. Kronberg im Taunus, Germany: Tranzlit, 2025. 172 pp.

Contents:

Introduction

New Poems:

Dancing Heart

epigraph

dancing heart

together & apart

Black matter
Coping with male anger
Dante & a surplus star
Forest burial
Shedding
Crater

family & friends

A little red port left
A poem for AWJ
A poem for Franz
A poem to Leila who fell down a mountain
Christmas Lily
Gattopardo – Leopard
Little Dot
Mustn’t miss anything
True love

nature & the world

Angels
Anima mundi
Cantor
Creation
God, the Holy Ghost
Lounge lizard
The Nile
You can’t rely on snow to stay where it is
White paradise
The casino at Nice
Sipping Sav after Samarkand …

sequences

A triptych at Pentecost
- Daily
- Prayer
- Truce
Chimera – a song cycle
- I – Eastern Wall
- II – A gift to the gods
- III – A chased love
- IV – Jeremiah, his book
- V – You silly goose
- VI – Pact
Magpie

postscript

body halo

Selected Poems:

Against the Softness of Woman

Against the softness of woman
Mad Sally
Poem (for RAK Mason)
A pattern of loving
Candy Floss – Sky flyer
Cadences on green
Words were whispers
Seal to the sea-captain
Satori
Puriri
Poem
Old railway guard

Diamonds and Gravel

Great fish at Muriwai Beach
In golden smock, walking
Tugboats
Timing
Nocturne
How far is it to Haadyai?
Down the first road
“When the wild goose finds food …”
The prince
Cockcrow
Swifts
Turkey talk

The Other Hemisphere

Into that space
Chagall Windows, Fraumünster, Zürich
At Stonehenge
Looking at St. Paul’s
A grim tale
Walking a beach
To my father, M.H.K.
Atalanta
If you’re my friend for life
Street sleeper, Hong Kong
At Anawhata i-iv
Moon mad
Goddesses
The dance of hemispheres
The phoenix in my palm
The mermaid
Self portrait

The Sky’s Enormous Jug

Woman sings
Redhead
Camellia pink
Us
Stone
The sky’s enormous jug
Return
Archive
Professor Dietrich on the Dachstein

Only One Angel

The Ballad of Donna Quixote
Seventh Floor, Flat A
My heart is a columbarium
‘One loses privacy with a woman in love’
Chemin des Serres de la Madone
Snow or alles ist klar
Rain
Elephant riding
Gold ring
The silence
The terrible angel
Pilgrims

Dante’s Heaven

Dante’s ‘heaven’
Glance
Sailing boats
The past present/s
A childhood secret
Swimming
Nikau at Punakaiki
Love is a babe …
E la selva oscura, non c’è?
Jousting
Beatus

Voicetracks

À la recherche de votre temps perdu …
Red lamp
crossing fields
Cornish hymn
Dalí, past it?
Goethe in Italy
Vindobono, Vienna
Plötzensee, Berlin
blasted harvest
A plinth for Buddha
Dancer
Stolpersteine / Tripstones
Jennet’s poem: wild love
The place of the dead
Golden Week, Kyoto
Dream

Black Ice & the Love Planet

The Kiwi in me
On the Mayor of Wellington’s proposal …
An Albanian cellist in Viktoria Park
Stork, cuckoo, lark
Spring death
Black ice
Feather
Roses
Will you dance with me?
Venus and the Organ Player
Communion at Pentecost
Leftie

Notes & Acknowledgments

•

Jan Kemp (2012)

Available:

Tranzlit
Bahnhofstrasse 16a
61476 Kronberg im Taunus
Germany
www.tranzlit.de
Contact email: jantranzlit@gmail.com

•

Jan Kemp: Dancing Heart (2025)

Blurb:

Jan Kemp MNZM & Dr Jack Ross first worked together 20 years ago creating the Aotearoa NZ Poetry Sound Archive (2004) [www.aonzpsa.blogspot.com]. Since then Jan has published three poetry collections, Dante’s Heaven (Puriri Press, 2007) which became Dante Down Under (English/German) (2017), and Black Ice & the Love Planet (English/German) (2020), both from Tranzlit [www.tranzlit.de] & Tripstones (Puriri Press, 2020), as well as the two memoirs Raiment (Massey University Press, 2022) and To see a World (Tranzlit, 2023). She lives with her husband Dieter Riemenschneider in Kronberg im Taunus, Germany, where she sings in a choir, presents poetry & music performances and walks in its parks.

Jack, too, has published three poetry collections since 2004: To Terezín (Massey University, 2007); A Clearer View of the Hinterland: Poems & Sequences 1981-2014 (HeadworX, 2014), and The Oceanic Feeling (Salt & Greyboy Press, 2020); as well as Celanie (Pania Press, 2012), a collaboration with artist Emma Smith, which includes a translation of Paul Celan’s poems to his wife Gisèle Celan-Lestrange. He was also managing editor of Poetry NZ (now Poetry Aotearoa) from 2014 to 2020. He lives in Mairangi Bay, on Auckland’s North Shore, with his wife, crafter, curator and art-writer Bronwyn Lloyd.

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Jan Kemp: Black ice & the love planet (2021)

Reviews & Comments:

The Sunday Poem by Jan Kemp, "Lines on a Severed Friendship." Newsroom (August 10, 2025):

Jan Kemp on the autobahn by bus, en route home from Innsbruck (July 2015)

Christmas Lily

to Jeny Curnow (1931–2013)

I’ll never know why the Christmas lily she gave us grew.
After eight years, she severed her friendship
with not even a knife-like you no longer amuse.
It was hot irritation. But how she’d always treasure
the gone good times. Well, you do grow up.
I’d sworn to her everlastingly out of pity at her
biggest loss. Now that’s all so, like anything
that comes to pass.

But how, this late October
does a Christmas lily come to me to pot, re-pot,
put in the light to bring white pods of
pure flower up from the dung? She is now
something, a teaspoon, I could pick up or leave
lying absently near my cup. But a lily is insistent &
shows its love. Is it that she or I may yet forgive?

Taken with kind permission from the newly published (in Berlin) limited edition of 80 copies (156 pages, 230gms in weight) Dancing Heart: Poems 2019–2024 by Jan Kemp, with an Introduction by Jack Ross (Tranzlit, $35), available via the author by emailing her on jantranzlit@gmail.com. The price covers post and packaging from Germany.

Nicholas Reid. "Something New:: “BONFIRES ON THE ICE” by Harry Ricketts ( Te Herenga Waka University Press, $NZ25); “GIVING BIRTH TO MY FATHER” by Tusiata Avia (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $30.00)“DANCING HEART” by Jan Kemp (published by Tranzlit, Germany); “IF WE KNEW HOW TO WE WOULD” by Emma Barnes (Auckland University Press, $NZ 24.99)." Reid's Reader - A Blog of Book Reviews and Comment (17/11/2025):

The first 32 pages are new poems called “Dancing Heart.” In these, there is an acute awareness of becoming older, and some of her first poems in this selection say so. Thus the poem “Forest burial” wherein “We’ll sink before AI / is rife, we’ll have / known human lives. / And human love”. And in the poem “Shedding” she tells us it is “Time soon to start shedding” and giving things away. The poem “Crater” begins “A Week ago / on the crater’s edge / I looked down & saw / endless nothingness / & death”. But there is some hope in older age with poems about love and friendship and in one of her best poems “Anima mundi” she salutes the glories of nature where “I have my own cathedral here - / the nave-like path / leads through sunlit trees / where light filters / as through green, stained- glass windows.” Kemp often tries to work out some sort of belief. Could it be love itself? Or could she be trying to work out a sort of home-made religion? At any rate she sometimes quotes the Bible and wonders about it, as she did in some of her earlier collections where Dante often turned up. But she stoutly rejects any particular religion.

... there is every so often concern for the status of women, but she is more interested with intimacy, love, various countries, religion, beliefs and nature. Most important, she has the great merit of writing clearly and without the pretentious vocabulary that plagues many academics or younger poets.

Denys Trussell, "Thin Sheaves against Virtual Muses: Te Pūrere/The Exodus: The anthology of expatriate New Zealand poets edited by Vaughan Rapatahana and John Gallas (Cold Hub Press, 2025), 205pp, $35; Dancing Heart: New and selected poems 1968–2024 by Jan Kemp (Tranzlit, 2025), 172pp, n.p." The Landfall Tauraka Review: Aotearoa New Zealand Books in Review (March 2, 2026):

Jan Kemp’s collection, Dancing Heart: New and selected poems 1968–2024, edited and introduced by Jack Ross, very much fits the theme of expatriate poetry. A long-time resident of Germany, Kemp has spent much of her life away from the country of her birth, but she has maintained strong contacts, and was instrumental in establishing the Aotearoa NZ Poetry Sound Archive in 2004, an audio collection stored at the National Library.
...
She moves in light, sure curvatures, as if in flight, through the phrasing, the junctures, the visible appearances the words might carry into a reader’s mind. Entering life by means of poetry becomes, for her, something that has created meaning and purpose throughout a life of largely self-exile. Her decision has been to stay in Europe, but to use poems to express a sense of distance and tension, feelings of being torn between places:
I long for the sea,
for islands
even the Kea’s raw call,

but love our Berg & Burg
with its cobble-stoned wall.
Now trim & as neat

As a Hausfrau should be …

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"A Plinth for Buddha" - Jan Kemp in Werner Jaksch's garden (2026)

•

The Landfall Tauraka Review

Complete Review:

Denys Trussell. "Thin Sheaves against Virtual Muses." The Landfall Tauraka Review - Aotearoa New Zealand Books in Review (3/3/2026)

Jan Kemp’s collection, Dancing Heart: New and selected poems 1968–2024, edited and introduced by Jack Ross, very much fits the theme of expatriate poetry. A long-time resident of Germany, Kemp has spent much of her life away from the country of her birth, but she has maintained strong contacts, and was instrumental in establishing the Aotearoa NZ Poetry Sound Archive in 2004, an audio collection stored at the National Library. Born in 1949, Kemp was one of the younger poets involved in the years of ‘counter-culture’ here. These were responses to the anomalies of capitalism, conflict and colonialism, made highly visible by the Vietnam War. Radical feminism, ‘open’ poetics, a belief in a sexually liberated society, and in universal and indigenous rights resonate in the title Freed, a sporadic literary publication that became a point of focus among writers — Alan Brunton, Ian Wedde, Russell Haley, Murray Edmond, Stephen Chan, Jan Kemp and others — who were students at Auckland University.

Moving through this turbulence, Kemp developed a lyrical style — concise, sensitive and imagistic; a style that makes visible the space between objects and conveys a visual emphasis in a poem. This does not mean ideas and incident are absent. They are very much there, but they speak rather than declaim. This produces all that needs to be said in a small compass:
    We’ll sink before AI
    Is rife, we’ll have
    known human lives,
    And human love.
    
    ‘Forest Burial’
She has a self-confessed affinity with Emily Dickinson, expressed in her ‘Self Portrait’:
    I remind myself of Emily Dickinson
    locked in the attic of my thoughts.
I believe her empathy with Dickinson is based on more than introversion. She has a similar way of sensing a poem. I had already found, in Dickinson’s output (‘Poem 653’), lines that remind me of Kemp’s presence in her own poetry:
    Of Being is a Bird
    The likest to the Down
    An Easy Breeze do put afloat
    The general Heavens — upon —
She moves in light, sure curvatures, as if in flight, through the phrasing, the junctures, the visible appearances the words might carry into a reader’s mind. Entering life by means of poetry becomes, for her, something that has created meaning and purpose throughout a life of largely self-exile. Her decision has been to stay in Europe, but to use poems to express a sense of distance and tension, feelings of being torn between places:
    I long for the sea,
    for islands
    even the Kea’s raw call,

    but love our Berg & Burg
    with its cobble-stoned wall.
    Now trim & as neat

    As a Hausfrau should be …

    ‘The Kiwi in Me’
Dancing Heart begins with her most recent work, written as her husband became ill and then finally died in 2025. This subset contains some of her most accomplished poems — direct in expression, minimal in means. Among them is the six-line piece that titles the whole book:
    as your two heart-valves
    now don’t quite close,
    I’ll slip into that space
    & dance with you—
    so your heart will beat
    steadily & surely on …
This section ends with ‘Body Halo’:
    As I sat there
    I could feel
    his love all around me
    a body halo,
    warm & sweet
    as his skin, hair & breath
    when I hold him,
    my husband
    who found me,
    when I wasn’t looking
The collection then swings back to her Poems 1971–1974, beginning with the set’s title piece, ‘Against the Softness of Woman’. Written into a different world more than fifty years ago, it reveals a youth that nonetheless has sufficient judgement and will not indulge the narcissism of a lover:
    you were born to fit him
    to be his lay, his lie
    his way to run his way;
    when he has pared down his spare image
    don’t try to catch him
    you’ll catch yourself —
This ‘collected’ gives the impression that the shorter poem is her home territory, but she does lay out more extended works. There is her quietly satiric account of a literary château and its hostess at Lavigny in Switzerland. Jane Rosenthal Ledig Rowohlt (née Scatcherd) runs a ‘fin de siècle salon’ — the siècle in this case being the twentieth century. The ghosts of Thomas Mann and Marcel Proust hover. Mann’s The Magic Mountain, though, was a sanatorium, and fiction. Kemp’s is a real mountain Shangri-la, inhabited by writers lucky enough to be healthy, but not entirely free of the risks of fade-out in a culture in decline. Kemp’s title is a brilliant alteration of Proust: À la recherche de votre temps perdu — ‘In search of your lost time’. But Proust had no ‘votre’ in the title of his massive novel, making it clear thereby that it involves a universal nostalgia for a vanishing civilisation. However, Jane Rosenthal’s salon is real rather than fiction, and inclusive only of her own milieu. She has her virtues, but these are diminished by flaunted privilege — a fact of which Kemp is subtly aware:
                    Born in England
    grown up in France you thought Switzerland
    the perfect place for such homeless people
    as yourselves to settle. We do suit you — we whose
    home is words.
By contrast, Kemp can turn her home of words to quite different account. Her ‘Street-Sleeper, Hong Kong’ shows life stripped of the slightest privilege or hope:
    His limbs are sticks and twigs.
    His body is the tree of life.
    He is fruit and flower of a hard city.
    He did not make the top branches.
In Germany she literally stumbles over its mid-twentieth-century history in the streets. ‘Stolpersteine’, or ‘Tripstones’, a poem she chose to write in English and German, tells of the plaques sunk into pavements naming the vanished of the Holocaust. She trips and learns:
    We’re missing
    this person. I read:

    Here lived
    Julius Grünebaum
    b. 1892
    deported
    Auschwitz
    Murdered 31.10.1943
Neither the tragedies of history nor nature spare the poet. This one does not flinch at setting down the bones of a human catastrophe. Nor does she withhold pathos, lamenting in ‘Great fish at Muriwai Beach’ the fate of seventy whales that stranded on the New Zealand coastline:
    where looters
    can’t even give the dignity
    of complete burial.

    What requiem did you sing,
    mighty herd
    what whale-talk, what music
    sang in your minds
    as you followed maps
    forged more ancient in you
    than the land you struck
    instead of water?
In conclusion I would return to ‘Us’, a poem that brings her back to the self, involved in the riddle and enigma of love. We are Us, and so included in the meanings of the words:
    These bodies
    we lie in
    return us
    to our simplest selves.

    Loving, can you tell
    who’s who?
  

Denys Trussell

Denys Trussell is a poet, biographer, musician and environmentalist. The author of many books, he won the 1985 PEN Best First Book Award for non-fiction with Fairburn, a book about the life of poet A.R.D. Fairburn. He lives in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.

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Tuesday

Mike Johnson: Selected Poems (2023)

Design: Daniela Gast & Rowan Johnson

Mike Johnson. Selected Poems 1977-2022. Edited by Jack Ross. ISBN 978-1-991083-00-5. 99% Press. Auckland: Lasavia Publishing Ltd., 2023. 206 pp.

Contents:

Introduction

The Palanquin Ropes

sparrow of ashes
salmon leap, buck
I’ve never had a chipped bowl
branch, bare dawn
delved into religions
the poet asks
much time spent afraid
wind through my hands

From a Woman in Mt Eden Prison & Drawing Lessons

feeling at home
cinderella
doing a starfish
exercise four

Standing Wave

street sign – Oneroa, Waiheke Island
a red paper fish
enough
I found the ten thousand lines missing
J was a captive of wonder. She travelled
I’m burying it
no change
you have to be able
all things come to rest
memory rock

Span

the children

Treasure Hunt

2 - Learning to read is like trying to walk on your hands –
4 - Here there are signs which don’t so much exist
5 – If the telephone rings, don’t answer
7 – Be glad there’s still a morepork or two left
10 - Look for this one in the most ordinary places
11 – Go to the city if you have the gall
13 – There are Clues that can be found
17 – Certain things you will notice, little irrelevancies
19 – The chase ends in the dissipation of moons –
Night of the blue moon a warm northerly rain comes down
They’ve all gone mad, love. There’s Nanu, ringing me up
On the day another Bosnian peace accord collapsed
Dark rain sweeps the valley at dawn
Seeing you after the play
The scoop of Palm Beach was dark as we walked
Watch us
She chops up her fingers on the chopping board
Winter Solstice
Skull has a resurrection, the kind known
When the man with the grey skin comes to your door
We huddle down behind the pews, pressing ourselves
Edicts have been issued, the guards doubled and queues are forming
I want to convey that quality of light that goes frail
Walking up through the section

The Vertical Harp: Selected Poems of Li He

singing the blues on Mt Hua
curly beard
autumn on its way
incarceration
high mountain, goddess trails
cold canyons
found arrowhead
on the frontier

To Beatrice Where We Crossed The Line

Soft Toy Goddess
Eyeglass in Gaza
After Alamu Prabhu
My Father was a Shoulder

Two Lines and a Garden

after everything
for the fish, no notion of rain
mountain, beach, and valley, sky and stone

Ladder With No Rungs

distance is measured in the body
she drew a line through her memory
tyres crunch on gravel
words, can’t be located
between the uprights and the

Raising Light Trilogy

1 - The Toy Box

a house with no windows
Scheherazade: a still life
Noddy – a short story
Goldilocks the refugee
where it goes, nobody knows
you can’t say we didn’t get fair warning
the map is not the territory
we have these things
cowboy capers
memories of an arrow

2 - Hide Your Eyes: The Rumi Poems

that greater frenzy
see-saw
most gentle revenge
cultivation
the Beloved rules
the gardenia
the wooden spoon
sensual senses
cutting up shadows into syllables
the empty boat

3 - Extinction Rebellion: A Tribute

the intention
as we lived
soft bandage
the same world
no longer the sun
stealing flowers
the book
not as dead
this is where I died
the houses of sleep

Flippity Fluppity Flop

One little match-head
Bugle call
Poems
Before
Run, run, run
My Mummy

Sketches

labyrinth
Coromandel wake up
bird sketches
the power of the eagle
Whakanewha sunrise
Putiki Point
beach walk
movement
Palm Beach in the age of Covid 19
Thompson’s Point
From the slopes of Ruapehu
passing through
a trick of the eye
at Auckland hospital
at Found – Surfdale
winter rain

Poetry Bibliography

•

Mike Johnson

Available:

Lasavia Publishing
37 Crescent Rd West
Ostend
Waiheke Island
Auckland 1081
https://www.lasaviapublishing.com/

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Blurb:

A meaty and satisfying selection of the work of one of New Zealand's most preeminent and prolific poets, tracing the development of his work from the seventies to today

'Johnson is one of New Zealand's most acomplished and inventive writers, at one with the word, its power, its airy fitness and everyday solidities, its resourcefulness, its craft.'

- Siobhan Harvey, winner of the Kathleen Grattan
poetry award, 2019

'The immense complexity of human relationships, social, sexual and everyday are at the heart of much of Mike’s best poetry. However, there’s an almost equal pull towards the empyrean: the cosmic mysteries of nature and the visible world, the beauty of the birds, trees and beaches which surround him in his longtime home-base, Waiheke Island.'

- Jack Ross, editor of Poetry New Zealand (2014-2019)

'[Johnson finds] just the right formulation to deiver a descriptive vitalism that is open, alert, tentative, ambulatory, elegant, palpable.'

- David Eggleton, Poet Laureate, 2019-2022

•

Mike Johnson: Afterworld (2023)

Reviews & Comments:

Lindsay Rabbitt, "The Blue Drift: Selected Poems by Mike Johnson (Lasavia Publishing, 2023), 208pp, $34.99; Sketches: Poems and drawings by Mike Johnson with artwork by Leila Lees (Lasavia Publishing, 2023), 172pp, $21.99; Afterworld by Mike Johnson (Lasavia Publishing, 2023), 74 pp, $19.99." Landfall Review Online (March 1, 2021):

We’re at the library to launch three new Lasavia titles; and I say a few words about the history of Mike’s first book, which is represented by eight poems in his Selected Poems. The Selected Poems has been edited by literary critic and author Jack Ross, who also has had a book of short stories, called Ghost Stories, published by Lasavia. Poet and writer Murray Edmond speaks eloquently about Mike’s ‘magic realism’ novella Afterworld; and Mike and his partner Leila Lees take the floor to talk about, among other things, the wonderfully conceived and well-designed Sketches, in which Leila’s colour-grained-and-washed drawings and sketches accompany Mike’s poems.

The Introduction to Mike Johnson’s Selected Poems by Jack Ross begins with a poem that was first published in the eighth collection, Ladder Without Rungs:
I want you to think about it, she said.
I am, he said.

It’s not helping, she said.
Ross writes: ‘a strong sense of humour … the immense complexity of human relationships, social, sexual and everyday, is at heart of much of Mike’s best poetry. However, there’s an almost equal pull towards the empyrean: the cosmic mysteries of nature and the visual world, the beauty of the birds, trees and beaches that surround him in his long-time home-base, Waiheke Island.’

Ross selected 128 poems from the approximately 950 Johnson has published over the past 40 years. Johnson’s 12 collections are: The Palanquin Ropes, written in Whakatane, after Mike had spent eight years wandering abroad, and dedicated to the Indian medical practitioner turned philosopher Dr R.P. Kaushik (1926–81) who ‘sparked the flame’; A Woman in Mt Eden Prison & Drawing Lessons (1984); Standing Wave (1985); Span 23 (1986); Treasure Hunt (1996); The Vertical Harp: Selected poems of Li He (2006); To Beatrice Where We Crossed The Line (2014); Two Lines and a Garden (2017); Ladder With No Rungs (2019); The Toy Box: Book one of Raising Light Trilogy (2020); Hide Your Eyes: The Rumi Poems, book two of Raising Light Trilogy (2020); Extinction Rebellion: A Tribute, book three of Raising Light Trilogy: Flippity Fluppity Flop (2021) and Sketches (2023).

... Flicking through the Selected Poems, I land on a poem called ‘as we lived’ that I’d previously read on his Facebook page. It impressed me because of its restrained disgust and matter-of-fact clockwork: ‘Our history will be written in rock / in the fossil records / in broken landscapes / and plastic filled oceans // the planet itself will be our memorial / and our obituaries will be carved / from violent skies / and a shimmering heat haze // a short-lived species, as species go / for as we lived, we died.’

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Sunday

Poetry NZ Yearbook 2019 [Issue #53]

Cover Design by Jo Bailey /
Typesetting by Megan van Staden

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2019. ISBN 978-0-9951029-6-5. 344 pp.

Contents:

Jack Ross / Editorial: What makes a poem good? / 14-20

FEATURED POET

Stephanie Christie

Stephanie Christie / 22

Microchasm / 26

Crossing the Park / 28

Unfinished Objects / 29

Amethyst / 31

-OH / 32

Mag[net]ic / 38

Flow(n / 40

Clod / 42

Krisis. / 44

Poverty Mentality / 46

FleshselF / 48

SQWANDER / 50

Nix / 52

Madeness / 55

Stephen Hawking’s Dead / 58

Mall Song / 59

Parachute / 61

Felt calculus / 63

Bode / 64

Jack Ross / An Interview with Stephanie Christie / 68-74

Stephanie Christie: Aubade (2013)

NEW POEMS

Gary Allen / The God complex / 76

John Allison / Die Luft hier in Laft … / 77

Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connor / Mice / 78

Miguel Ángel Arcas / Finales de los sesenta / 79

– / The End of the Sixties [translation by Charles Olsen] / 80

Shelley Arlidge / Albatross / 81

Stu Bagby / Who is it who remembers? / 82

Tony Beyer / The Globe / 83

Victor Billot / So as not to wake / 85

Benjamin Blake / Lost Recordings / 86

Cindy Botha / My Mother’s Hands, Mine / 87

Mark Broatch / Kererū / 89

Steve Brock / Humble Wine / 90

Owen Bullock / not knowing / 91

Chris Cantillon / Truckdriver / 92

Marisa Cappetta / Homeless like bones / 93

Mariana Collette / DNA / 94

Rose Collins / the Port Hills hare considers rock fall risk / 96

Jennifer Compton / Cat Sitting in Brunswick East / 97

E J Doyle / Inheritance / 98

Rachael Elliott / Wheel / 99

Johanna Emeney / RLSV / 101

Bonnie Etherington / Catcall on Oakton Street / 103

Mike Evans / Impermanence / 104

Rachel J Fenton / Break / 105

Jess Fiebig / morning after / 107

Sue Fitchett / I, robot / 108

Katie Fitzpatrick / Confession / 109

Dara Flaws / Dad / 110

Alexandra Fraser / Piha night / 112

Kim Fulton / This is it, Ruahine Range / 113

Ruth Hanover / The Oranges / 115

Paula Harris / I will go on tour and read my poetry all over the world / 116

Jenna Heller / tanka / 118

Sara Hirsch / Nocturnal / 119

Joy Holley / Twenty / 121

Alice Hooton / Lover / 122

Amanda Hunt / Family Skeletons / 123

Gail Ingram / Morning flight / 124

Ross Jackson / The exit / 125

Adrienne Jansen / The children in the dark canoe / 126

Lincoln Jaques / The Things He Left Behind / 127

Annie Tuarau Jones / For My Sister / 129

Robert Kempen / Hey, what is going on / 130

Paula King / The Square / 132

Elizabeth Kirkby-McLeod / The Daughter Goes To Hospital By Car / 133

Katrina Larsen / Life is Like a Bag of Cats / 134

Jessica Le Bas / Near Blind Channel / 135

Wes Lee / By the Lapels / 137

Michele Leggott / the wedding party / 138

Izzy Lomax-Sawyers / Pre-loved / 141

Olivia L. M. / The harrowing ... / 142

Victoria McArthur / Self Portrait / 143

Olivia Macassey / Elephants / 145

Isabelle McNeur / Moss / 146

– / Happy Parents under the Microscope / 147

Mary Macpherson / On being unwilling to click ‘I forgot my password’ / 149

D. S. Maolalai / Raspberries / 150

Ria Masae / Children’s Eyes / 152

Layal Moore / Two / 154

Margaret Moores / Black and white / 155

Martha Morseth / The street / 156

Fraser Munro / Paper bags don’t have feelings / 157

Emma Neale / The TastiTM Taste Guarantee / 158

– / Affidavit / 160

Keith Nunes / In the bookshop uttering / 162

Stephen Oliver / Protocols / 164

Bob Orr / The Vegas Girl / 166

Hayden Pyke / Danger is my Family Name / 167

essa may ranapiri / Gallows / 168

Vaughan Rapatahana / Rangiaowhia, 1864 / 169

– / ngā rākau / 171

Ron Riddell / Remains of the Day / 172

Gillian Roach / The Object Disappeared / 173

Fiona Roberton / Chinese medicine / 174

Jeremy Roberts / A Movie Ticket & a Little Bit of Philosophy / 175

Siobhan Rosenthal / Whanau / 176

Dadon Rowell / Lily Bennett / 177

Sigune Schnabel / Grenzland / 178

– / Borderland [translation by Simon Lèbe] / 179

Sarah Shirley / Long lie / 180

Tracey Slaughter / mostly a/b/c/d / 181

– / archaeological / 183

Barry Smith / Arrival / 184

Ian C. Smith / Remembering Willie Pep / 185

Lauren J. Smith / you never know what’s on the other side / 186

Elizabeth Smither / Ten conductors / 187

– / Strange dream / 188

Stephen Smithyman / My Father and the Poplar Tree, 1979 / 189

John Tarlton / On Sabbatical / 190

Loren Thomas / Friends / 191

Tybalt / intimacy is a sick puppy / 192

Bryan Walpert / from Micrographia: Of the Bookworm / 193

– / Of the pores of bodies / 195

Laura Williamson / Wrong turn on the Hump Ridge Track / 196

Sue Wootton / from Typewriter songs: Anywhen / 198

– / Olivetti / 199

Sigred Yamit / Sweater / 200

Grace Yee / for the good husband / 201

Mark Young / Concerning / 203

Zuo You / I accepted his apologies (translation by Yi Zhe) / 204

COMPETITIONS

Poetry New Zealand poetry prize:

First prize ($500)
Wes Lee / The Things She Remembers #1 / 206

Second prize ($300):
Brett Gartrell / After the principal calls / 210

Third prize ($200):
Natalie Modrich / Retail / 213

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook student poetry competition

First prize (Year 11):
Aigagalefili Fepulea'i-Tapua'i / 275 Love Letters to Southside / 214

First prize (Year 12):
Kathryn Briggs / Earth is a Star to Someone / 217

First prize (Year 13):
Amberleigh Rose / Snake’s Tongue / 218

ESSAYS

Elizabeth Kirkby-McLeod: A Map of Effort

Elizabeth Kirkby-McLeod / Telling without Looking / 222-33

Jessica Pawley / Dreaming of Death: The Hangover of History in Derek Walcott’s ‘The Schooner Flight’ / 234-46

Erena Shingade / A Buddhist Hermitage on Great Barrier Island: Richard von Sturmer’s Suchness / 247-60

Richard von Sturmer: Clothesline on Great Barrier

REVIEWS

Ella Borrie / Owen Bullock / 262-64:

Owen Bullock. semi. Glebe, NSW: Puncher & Wattmann, 2017. RRP $AU 25.00. 126 pp.

Mary Cresswell / Anna Jackson - Marlène Tissot - Tātai Whetū - Majella Cullinane / 265-70:

Anna Jackson. Dear Tombs, Dear Horizon. Limited edition of 200 copies. Wellington: Seraph Press, 2017. RRP $20. 24 pp.

Marlène Tissot. Last stop before insomnia / dernier arrêt avant l’insomnie. Trans. Anna Jackson & Geneviève Chevallier. Seraph Press Translation Series No. 3. Wellington: Seraph Press, 2017. RRP $20. 40 pp.

Tātai Whetū: Seven Māori Women Poets in Translation. Ed. & trans. Maraea Rakuraku & Vana Manasiadis. Seraph Press Translation Series No. 4. Wellington: Seraph Press, 2018. RRP $20. 40 pp.

Majella Cullinane. Whisper of a Crow’s Wing. ISBN 978-1-98-853122-9. Dunedin: Otago University Press / Ireland: Salmon Press, 2018. RRP $27.50. 88 pp.

Rachael Elliott / Rogelio Guedea - Jan Fitzgerald / 271-74:

Rogelio Guedea. Punctuation. Trans. Roger Hickin. Lyttelton: Cold Hub Press, 2017. RRP $25.00. 48 pp.

Jan Fitzgerald. Wayfinder: New & Selected Poems. Wellington: Steele Roberts Aotearoa, 2017. RRP $24.99. 64 pp.

Johanna Emeney / Michele Leggott / 275-78:

Michele Leggott. Vanishing Points. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2017. RRP $27.99. 132 pp.

Matthew Harris / Mark Pirie / 279-82:

Boots: A Selection of Football Poetry 1890-2017. Ed. Mark Pirie. Wellington: HeadworX, 2017. RRP $30. 102 pp.

Mark Pirie. Sidelights: Rugby Poems. Wellington: HeadworX, 2017. RRP $20. 80 pp.

Elizabeth Kirkby-McLeod / Jenny Powell - Damian Ruth - Mercedes Webb-Pullman / 283-88:

Jenny Powell. South D Poet Lorikeet. Lyttelton: Cold Hub Press, 2017. RRP $29.95. 88 pp.

Damian Ruth. On Edge. Wellington: HeadworX, 2017. RRP $30. 134 pp.

Mercedes Webb-Pullman. Track Tales. Magill, South Australia: Truth Serum Press, 2017. RRP $Aus 11.00. 118 pp.

Bronwyn Lloyd / John Howell - Annabel Wilson / 289-96:

John Howell. Homeless. Submarine. Wellington: Mākaro Press, 2017. RRP $25.00. 68 pp.

Annabel Wilson. Aspiring Daybook: The Diary of Elsie Winslow. Submarine. Wellington: Mākaro Press, 2018. RRP $25.00. 128 pp.

Elizabeth Morton / Michael Steven - Tony Beyer / 297-302:

Michael Steven. Walking to Jutland Street. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2018. RRP $27.50. 88 pp.

Tony Beyer. Anchor Stone. ISBN 978-0-473-341104-6. Lyttelton: Cold Hub Press, 2017. RRP $39.95. 166 pp.

Jack Ross / Dan Davin - Alistair Paterson - Johanna Emeney / 303-13:

Dan Davin. A Field Officer’s Notebook: Selected Poems. Ed. Robert McLean. Lyttelton: Cold Hub Press, 2018. RRP $29.95. 82 pp.

Alistair Paterson. Passant: A Journey to Elsewhere. London: Austin Macauley Publishers, 2017. RRP £8.39. 302 pp.

Johanna Emeney. The Rise of Autobiographical Medical Poetry and the Medical Humanities. Studies in World Literature, 5. Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2018. RRP €29.90. 264 pp.

Richard Taylor / Keith Westwater - Peter Rawnsley / 314-20:

Keith Westwater. No One Home: A Boyhood Memoir in Letters and Poems. Submarine. Wellington: Mākaro Press, 2018. RRP $25.00. 88 pp.

Peter Rawnsley. Light Cones. Submarine. Wellington: Mākaro Press, 2018. RRP $25.00. 74 pp.

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS / 322-40

ABOUT POETRY NEW ZEALAND / 342-43

Samples:

Massey University Press

Poetry New Zealand Index

Poetry New Zealand Website

Reviews & Comments:

Anna Bowbyes, Poetry New Zealand Student Poetry Competition Winners. Massey University Press (24/8/18):

We are thrilled to announce the winners of the Poetry New Zealand Yearbook Student Poetry Competition, judged by Jack Ross.

To read all the winning entries, click here.

Congratulations to all the winners and thanks to everyone who entered!

The first-prize winners in each category will be published in next year’s edition of Poetry New Zealand Yearbook, publishing in March 2019.”

Aorere College Facebook Page (13/9/18):

A huge congratulations to Fili Fepulea'i-Tapua'i who has won the Year 11 category of the Poetry New Zealand Yearbook Competition.

Described as “hard-hitting,... from the heart" by competition Judge Jack Ross, Fili's winning poem- "275 Love Letters to Southside" will be published in the 2019 edition of the Poetry New Zealand Yearbook. What an awesome achievement!.

Amberleigh's winning way with words. Kuranui College Online Newsletter (19/9/18):

Kuranui Deputy Head Girl, Amberleigh Rose, has won first place in the high school section of the Massey University Press Poetry Yearbook competition, designed to foster a love of words.

Amberleigh’s poem entitled Snake’s Tongue is an unconventional poem about love, causing one of the judges to comment in their feedback that they liked it because “It was a bit different and showed wisdom beyond her years”.

“It’s what I call my weirdo poem,” explained Amberleigh. “It’s not straightforward and it twists and flicks, keeping you guessing.”

The poem is going to be in next year’s edition of the yearbook and someday she would like to write a book of poems herself. For Amberleigh, poetry is a passion, especially slam poetry. “I love the way the words feel and their sound, the meaning behind how you speak and what message you’re trying to send.”

Growth, another one of Amberleigh’s poems, was chosen to be a part of Christine Daniell’s ‘Poems Around Town’. The street art project focuses on fostering a love of words. A panel chose poems from Wairarapa to hang up around the community and Amberleigh’s poem has pride of place on the side of the Trust Lands Trust building in Masterton.

Writing comes naturally to Amberleigh, but it wasn’t until she experienced poetry that her creative side really took off. “It was like a key had turned inside me and there was no going back.”

Kuranui’s Head of English, Kathryn Holmes, said her work ethic and natural ability has meant that she has excelled at the college. “However, it is her heart that makes her very special; this adds depth to her poetry which means her message can resonate with the reader.”

Apart from writing poetry, Amberleigh also excels in the sciences and her love of environment and communities has seen her enrol in Canterbury University, where she will study Natural Resource Engineering. “I am interested in making our world a cleaner, better place.”

Congratulations Kathryn Briggs. Baradene College of the Sacred Heart (1/11/18):

In Term 3, Kathryn's poem "Earth is a star to someone" received 1st place for the Year 12 category of the Poetry New Zealand Yearbook competition run by Massey University. This poem will be published in next year’s edition of 'Poetry New Zealand Yearbook'.

Click here to read 'Earth is a star to someone'.”

Nicola Legat, Massey University Press website:

A dose of terrific new New Zealand poetry

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook, this country’s longest-running poetry magazine, showcases new writing from New Zealand and overseas. It presents the work of talented newcomers as well as that of established voices. Issue #53 features 130 new poems — including work by this year’s featured poet, Stephanie Christie — essays, and reviews of 30 new poetry collections.

Continually in print since 1951, when it was established by leading poet Louis Johnson, this annual collection of new poetry, reviews and poetics discussion is the ideal way to catch up with the latest poetry from established and emerging New Zealand poets.

Praise for the 2017 edition:
‘It’s all too easy to look around at naked bachelors marrying at first sight, and clowns clowning where current affairs used to be, and despair about the state of the world and the taste of the people in it. But then, the Poetry Yearbook turns up again, to show there is still room for sophistication and quality at a reasonable price.’ — Paul Little, North & South
For a full list of the poets featured in this year’s edition and to read the introduction, click here.
CATEGORY: Creative arts
ISBN: 978-0-9951029-6-5
ESBN: N/A
PUBLISHER: Massey University Press
IMPRINT: Massey University Press
PUBLISHED: 08/03/2019
PAGE EXTENT: 344
FORMAT: Soft cover

Jesse Mulligan, "1-4." Celebrating New Zealand Poetry (Monday 11 March 2019):

Jesse Mulligan 1-4

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook's 2019 edition is out now, focusing on Hamilton poet Stephanie Christie, and containing more than 120 poems.

The country's longest-running poetry journal also features the work of young kiwi poets, winners of the inaugural competition for high school students.

Dr Jack Ross, senior lecturer at Massey University and managing editor of Poetry New Zealand, joins us now to give us a taste of what's in the yearbook.

Duration: 12′ 17″

Jennifer Little, "New Poetry NZ Yearbook moves in many ways." Voxy.co.nz (Wednesday 13 March 2019):

"I feel the most proud of this volume," says Dr Ross, of the fifth consecutive edition of the Poetry New Zealand Yearbook he has edited, not including one as a guest editor some years ago.

He says in the book’s introduction, What makes a poem good?, that being moved emotionally has increasingly become his sense of a successful poem, which may be about something funny, or painful or revealing. "It’s not that I sit here boo-hooing as I read through all the submissions for each issue - but every now and then something in one of them sits up and looks alive, persuades me that something is being worked out here that might be relevant to others simply because it seems so relevant to me."

Mostly, he hopes the book will help to make poetry more visible, more accessible and maybe ignite new interest among a wider, more culturally diverse audience. This edition is his last as editor for the time being - he is handing the editorial reins for the next issue over to Dr Johanna Emeney, a published poet and creative writing lecturer at Massey. He is hoping to be able to devote more time to working on his own writing, with a project in the pipeline to explore his longheld fascination about ghost stories and the psychology behind them.

Jennifer Little, "New Poetry NZ Yearbook moves in many ways." Massey News (Wednesday 13 March 2019):

Stephanie Christie (5/3/19)

Dr Ross, a poet, editor and senior lecturer in the School of English and Media Studies at Massey’s Albany campus, says the task of sifting through over a thousand submissions to choose 130 for the book is formidable as well as a tremendous privilege. Always with an ear tuned for fresh and challenging new voices and views, he has mustered a bracing array of poetry from a diverse set of writers.

From modern probes into religion, romance, love, death and loss to the inner lives of a retail worker, a refugee, a doctor, a drunk – the eclectic mix offers poems in a multitude of forms, including prose pieces. As well as captivating lines by emerging poets there is new work by some of the country’s most respected names, such as New Zealand’s inaugural Poet Laureate Michele Leggott, along with Elizabeth Smither, Emma Neale and Bob Orr. There are dual-text poems too, in Chinese, German, Spanish and te reo Māori, as well as 20 poems and an interview with featured Hamilton poet Stephanie Christie.

Fardowsa Mohamed (5/3/19)

Michele Leggott (5/3/19)

Paula Green, "Poetry Shelf review: Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2019." NZ Poetry Shelf (26 March 2019):

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook always offers a substantial selection of poetry. This issue includes essays, reviews and the results of two poetry competitions, along with poems from new and established poets. I started reading the issue – I always dip and dive into literary journals – and made notes, gathering the poems that ‘spoke to me’. But then I hit the rest button and realised I was running on empty post big project. I have lain on a couch for a week and stared at the sky and after the horrendous terrorist event in Christchurch everything feels different. Because everything must be different. What happens when I pick up this journal again with a raucous bust-up of questions in my head: How to live? How to speak? How to connect? How to write a poem? How to run a blog? How to widen us and make room for past, present and future, to celebrate the good things and challenge the rest?

I picked up Poetry New Zealand again and started at the first page. No dipping and diving. Just tracking an alphabet of voices and letting poetry work its magic.

Harry Ricketts, "Book review - Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2019." Nine to Noon, with Kathryn Ryan (Tuesday 4 June 2019):

Kathryn Ryan: Nine to Noon

Harry Ricketts from quarterly review periodical New Zealand Review of Books Pukapuka Aotearoa reviews Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2019. Edited by Jack Ross, this collection is published by Massey University Press.

Duration: 9′ 07″

Emma Shi, "Book review: Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2019." The Reader: The Booksellers New Zealand Blog (13 June 2019):

I look forward to The Poetry New Zealand Yearbook each year, because it’s so wonderfully filled with all things poetry. It’s also a great way to see the current landscape of New Zealand poetry, with familiar names making an appearance alongside newer poets.

... I also appreciate the addition of reviews and essays in Poetry New Zealand, since creating discussions about poetry is also a rewarding process that brings new ideas to life. As well as being an important space for the work of New Zealand poets, this new instalment will inspire writers to continue writing and to introduce new methods in their craft.