Tending the Landscape of the Heart (Steele Roberts: 2019)

This collection was published three years following our move to Falcons Return, here in the Ngongotahā Valley. It was a year before I retired from the University of Waikato. I found myself thinking of the poet Virgil, who wrote his Georgics some time around 29BC at a relatively safe distance from the bloody intrigue of Rome. The Greek word geōrgiká means “agricultural matters”, and at one level the long poem is a how-to guide for owners of rural estates. This book is no Georgics, but it does encapsulate a sense of remove and seasonal variation.

Ranging Around the Zero (Steele Roberts: 2014)

Ranging Around the Zero was my first experience of working on a volume of poetry with Roger Steele who, in my mind, is an icon of publishing in Aotearoa.
You can still access a wonderful Radio New Zealand interview with Roger from 2022 entitled “Roger Steele: the publisher dedicated to the underdogs”. I was more than happy to be one of his underdogs: he was charming, direct (sometimes brutal) and had a wonderful eye for infelicities both in expression and layout.

From my perspective, Ranging Around the Zero was the book that got me back on track as someone who could start to believe that there was something of merit in what I had been writing over a number of years, despite holding down a demanding job as an academic at the Faculty of Education at the University of Waikato. It was the book where I came out of the cold.

Maketu: A sequence (2003): HeadworX

This collection of poems arose out of a random visit to Maketu in 1977, when I was a student-teacher on practicum at Te Puke High School. As I wrote in the Preface to this collection: “The day was fine. The Kaituna River eddied quietly seawards. The old diving-board was still. Near the memorial was an old cannon, and attached to the cannon’s base was a plaque bearing the name, Philip Tapsell. The plaque functioned for me as a spring-board into the turgid waters of our past, into the dim light where fact and fiction merge in the realm of document.”

Home Territory (1984): Lindon Publishing

Home Territory consists of two poems. The first, entitled “The Motel”, is written in the aftermath of a grief. “The Motel” in the title is the Pacific Rendezvous Resort at Tutukaka. The weather at the time was wild, as is indicated in the poem itself.

The second poem is a long sequence entitled “HOME TERRITORY”. To some extent it owes a debt to New York poet Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems. At the time I worked at the English Department of Auckland University, and would walk to work from our home in Kingsland. I generally (but not invariably) wrote the poems when I arrived at my office based on what I was thinking about en route.

After a Life in the Provinces (1973): Lindon Publishing

The book brings together poems written over the period 1975-1982, some of which had been published in Landfall, Morepork and Tango. Some were hugely influenced by the poetics of the so-called Black Mountain School, about which I will have something to say on this site. Some of this influence in Aotearoa was mediated by the poet, printer and theorist, Alan Loney, whom I am privileged to count among my friends and mentors.

Te Reo Pohewa (with Jackie Evans, 2020). Rotorua Mad Poets Society

This is an edited collection. Mad Poets Rotorua set out to produce a collection of poetry from our local tamariki in 2021, with the enveloping theme of “I am from….”. As the theme suggests, the focus was very much on “place” as experienced by our young writers. Then Covid struck, schools went into lockdown, and a professional development programme I was offering to local teachers on poetry writing pedagogy was translated into an online Zoom programme, which I’ll refer to elsewhere in this site.

Jewels in the Water: Contemporary New Zealand Poetry for Younger Readers (2000, Leaders Press)

This anthology, and the one the follows below (Doors) were published by the University of Waikato via Leaders Press. Neither of these publications would have been possible without the support of the former Dean of the Faculty of Education, Noeline Alcorn. My motif was to produce anthologies of poems by poets actually alive at the dawn of the new millennium. All contributors received an upfront royalty, in part to compensate them for the widespread habit of English teachers photocopying poems without thinking through the implications of this practice for the livelihoods of poets themselves.

Doors: A Contemporary New Zealand Poetry Selection (2000: Leaders Press)

This is the second of the two millennium anthologies. Poets responded very positively to the invitation to be involved in this project. Sadly, one of them, Lauris Edmond passed away during the production process, but was still included. Other poets in both anthologies include: Alan Riach, Albert Wendt, Alistair Campbell, Apirana Taylor, Bill Manhire, C. K. Stead, Greg O’Brien, Hone Tuwhare, Jan Kemp, K. O. Arvidson, Jenny Bornholdt, Brian Turner, Michele Leggott, Anna Jackson, Fiona Farrell, James Norcliffe, Janet Charman, Mark Pirie, Jenny Powell-Chalmers, Kapka Kassabova, Phil Kawana, Raewyn Alexander, Robert Sullivan and Roma Potiki.

White Feathers: An Anthology of New Zealand and Pacific Island Poetry on the Theme of Peace (with Peter Low and John Winslade) (Hazard Press: 1990)

The three of us began working on this collection during the first Lange Labour Government 0f 1984, when Russell Marshall was Minister of Education and when anti-nuclear protest was at its peak. Under Marshall’s leadership, the Ministry of Education was developing a Peace Studies Syllabus. The Ministry also agreed in principle to our developing this anthology and funding it as a resource. However, after Labour was re-elected in 1987 and Lange himself took over the education reins, this funding dried up. We made it into print through the assistance of the QEII Arts Council and the Friends’ School Trust Administration Committee, and through the generosity of such people as Gil Hanly, who provided photographs free of charge. 

Developing Writing Teachers: Practical Ways for Teacher-Writers to Transform their Classroom Practice (2015), Routledge, New York.

The premise of Developing Writing Teachers is this: When teachers of writing identify as writers, it adds a special dimension to their writing pedagogy. Practical and accessible while drawing on a range of relevant research and theory, this text is distinguished by its dual focus—on teachers as writers and the teaching of writing. Part I addresses the question, What does it take for a teacher of writing to develop an identity as writer? Using case studies and teacher narratives, it guides readers to an understanding of the current status of writing as the 21^st century unfolds, the role of expressive writing in developing a writing identity, the relationship of writing to genre and rhetoric, writing and professional identity, and writing as design. Part II focuses on pedagogical practice and helping writer-teachers develop a toolkit to take into their classrooms. Coverage includes building a community of writing practice; the nature of writing as process and the place of grammar