Adding a blog entry now feels like taking out an old toy from where it’s been stashed at the back of a dark cupboard: a spinning top, a ‘Lightenin’ Chaser’, a Magnetix set. Oh, I remember this! I used to love playing with this! I’m adding it this belatedly partly because it’s been a time warp of a year. It’s been so busy with editorial work and other responsibilities that the cover image on my latest book of poems suddenly looks like an oasis of sloth and abandon. I want to go there!
The collection, Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit came out last year from Otago University Press. It was awarded the Mary and Peter Biggs Prize for Poetry at the 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards in May. Each time I contemplate that fact, it still feels as if the walls of the room have flipped in a cartwheel. Is it real?
The less delayed news is that I’ll be discussing the book with poet and editor Lynley Edmeades at the Dunedin Writers and Readers Festival on 19 October at 1 p.m. at the Glenroy Auditorium in Central Dunedin. Tickets available here: Wry Song
I’m also reading at the Ladies’ Litera-tea in Auckland on Sunday 2 November, at the Raye Freedman Arts Centre in Epsom. That event runs from 1 p.m. – 5:30 p.m. Tickets available here: Lyrics and Lamingtons!
Discussing the book in public is a great privilege — and also such appearances never become less daunting. I love reading the poems themselves for an audience: they are what I mean. Standing a little aside from and above them, trying to extemporise and self-analyse is always faintly terrifying. I suppose that’s because the art of writing is often the art of the second thought, revision, self-correction: having the time to try a different approach on the subject to hand. Discussing the work can be like trying to reach an itch between the shoulder blades with both arms in a cast. Ouff! I suppose the reward if I do scratch that spot will be bliss. My own simile is calming me down. It will be like a Twister challenge. Fun and games. Come along and join in! I hope to see some blog readers at one or other of these events.
And for readers who would like an easy purchase button for Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit: Buy Here
I recently took part in an event which was a video interview with Manus Island refugee Behrouz Boochani – the prize-winning author of No Friend but the Mountain – and his translator Omid Tofighian. Neil Vallelly, author, academic and the event’s organiser and interviewer, invited four local poets to read work on migration or exile, partly as poetry is such a vital part of Kurdish culture, and as a way of honouring Behrouz’s extraordinary prison memoir. (The other poets were Rhian Gallagher, Lynley Edmeades and Fiona Farrell, all of whom read potent and confronting work.) I was still reeling from and absorbing No Friend but the Mountains so found I couldn’t write anything in immediate response. I was still absorbing its shocks, stoicism, lyricism and courage – and the gross injustice of his and other refugees’ detention without trial. Instead I read ‘Warning’, a poem which was in response both to an image of the tiny boy, Alan Kurdi, or Shenu, from the refugee crisis in 2015 – and to the way an article in The Guardian about his death was framed.
Landfall 237 edited by Emma Neale
Emma Neale 
