Hello the Same Feeling

Michelle Elvy

No Good by Sophie van Waardenberg (Auckland University Press, 2025), 80pp, $30; The Venetian Blind Poems by Paula Green (The Cuba Press, 2025), 96pp, $30; Sick Power Trip by Erik Kennedy (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025), 104pp, $30

In Sophie van Waardenberg’s No Good, the poems look unflinchingly at the Self and its many hues—insightful and forgetful, flawed and striving—against the backdrop of personal loss. The shroud of the past hangs over the collection, yet these poems are firmly connected to the present. There are ordinary things: cats, antidepressants, laundry on a line, the scent of rain and lemons, plus knowledge gained from The Simpsons and stark realities of The Royal Tenenbaums. Unexpected images and moments take us deep into the poet’s experience, yet despite the personal edge to the poems, these are also universal questions.

The beetle and apple are symbols holding the collection together: the apple on the cover, half-eaten with the beetle atop; the beetle scurrying across section dividers. Both hold growth and decay, an implied rhythm of symbiosis. Form and content work in concert with each other.

The book starts with a series of images around the nature of ‘good’, and what actions and thoughts promote or provoke it. We move from the immediate and personal outward, towards possible fantasy:

My shoes are clean and comfortable.
My body does not matter.

Everybody’s toes fall off in winter
And nobody smells perfect

Even if they’re Claudia Schiffer and everyone
Forgets to cut their nails. See that girl there.

I know that she is perfect.
I know therefore I am perfect.

Whimsy and earnestness are paired effectively, so that the ‘what if’ of perfection feels almost attainable:

All the large rocks will know my name.
I could be good at so many things.

But the carefully placed ‘could’ also casts doubt—an absence of certainty—and soon we enter darker terrain, which sets the stage for what follows. In these lines we sense the necessary coexistence of things past and who we are:

All the dead people in my life

Watch me with vested interest.
They hold my arms over my face

to save me from the rain.

The poem suggests both confidence and irony with the line ‘I walk with purpose / and I smell so, so good.’ And then comes the question that gnaws: ‘What do I deserve?’—and the answer: ‘The same as all of us. Everything.’ This poem is a whole story by itself, a bundle of ideas and suggestions opening the collection. The tender language, attention to rhythm and space, and the sense of the past holding us in place—or launching us into possible forward movement—are all here. Consider the repeated lines:

Everyone I love will live forever.
Everyone I love will live forever.

The last days of childhood are poignantly noted; life is made up of absences and pain—and unanswered questions. Some poems end with a question: ‘How can a girl get clean again?’ (‘Sticky’); or the conundrum shared in ‘Song of a Selfish Girl’:

I do not want anyone to love me.
But when they don’t, why don’t they?

The middle section contains a series of ‘Cremation Sonnets’, where the poems grapple with the immediate circumstances of a father’s death. The penultimate sonnet casts light on the meaning of a word, an action, a place, the very act of survival. Considering the world beyond words—realities and absences—the poet illuminates things outside herself, that ‘eely weed / trying something against my heel’. And then she lands on the impossibility of a permanent departure:

Ocean for where we put him,
I say it, ocean, whenever I lose him
But is he heaving onto shore with every next tide?
We stood on the dune looking for the scatter leaving,
As if looking could make good. And we felt
And didn’t say the same thing. Is that it?

In the next poem—the last of the ‘Cremation Sonnets’—we stay with the idea of leaving and arrive at the centre of the collection: the apple from the cover, the question of good, the sense of why something is or is not. This last sonnet begins:

Satisfaction as in apple. Unbitten
Or bitten full ring. As in the song
The whole way through, so complete
It can’t come back. As in mirror,
Clean, fleshless. Soaked soil.
Butter to the edges. Empty glasses.

These lines capture the finite reality of a moment, a life—yet they also suggest something infinite, something living in the realm of ideas:

The hand
stretches for the note. Perfect fourth,
flight of the first leaf, true hunger

By the time we come to the third section, relationships are more readily examined for their external and internal values. The poems ‘Grace from a distance’ and ‘Love Practice Weekend Four’ both offer a view into forward movement: the first looks at shared spaces and small things, while the second uses repeated lines of ‘You continue’ to create story and reflective rhythm. Meanwhile, the exploration of grief continues, externally and internally. In ‘Dose’, the poet is in the empty house, she is gasping for air, she is enacting joy. She is hearing herself laugh: ‘This is what I need.’

In ‘The Getting Away’ there is steady momentum towards something like acceptance—with a buoying universality:

I’m moving out. Everyone does it.
Everyone turns their dining tables upside down

to remove the legs.

And there’s consideration of good, with the hint of fruits—ripe or rotten—again:

… I’m ready for nothing,
smallhanded, tricked. I’m rotten and roiled

And no good, truly—truly no good at all.

The final poem, written in couplets, bookends the collection, returning us to the rhythms of the first poem. Where the opening poem considers how ‘everything will be good’ in the future tense, the final page gives us a definitive present tense, ending with a line that feels, if not optimistic, at least full of self-understanding:

I’ll bring one coat, one hat

the car, the raw cashews, my loving.
How do we go on. No, really. When it’s over

all the time? Drop what’s spent, lick up
the blank air, why lie, it tastes almost good

inside this wet wishing mouth. And something’s next.
Here I go reaching. I cannot help myself.

If van Waardenberg’s collection is a close examination of the Self, Paula Green’s The Venetian Blind Poems uses the Venetian blind as a metaphor for light and dark, striped and layered, beyond the uncertainty and darkness of a hospital room:

Liquorice strips of harbour
beyond grey to storm, beyond dark storm
to blinking cranes.

Her words weave poetics into the close confines of the room, as if peering beyond the storm could bring a kind of hope. Turning the page, we come to the poem’s next lines, closing in on the honed perspective:

The grey harbour slips through Venetian slats
the light a silver streak and I gasp

… and now we are in her immediate world, the threat taking the air from her. As the poems unfold, we sense their purpose: the poet gazing at the ‘harbour’s beauty’ and ‘cloudstories’ to pull away from her hospital reality: nurses changing dressings, morphine and fitful sleep. This world—where the poet lived while writing these poems—is full of light and dark, movement and confinement. There are boats bulging as they to and fro in the harbour, and nurses bringing more immediate attention to the patient. There is the kinetic energy of road works (outside) and inedible fish pie (inside), the Spotify playlist from her daughter and the wild west coast with its black sand beaches and rhythmic waves, which she goes to in her mind. Sharp memories of Florence and New York and Arrowtown sit alongside Matthew the chaplain and a drugged haze.

The world is a jumble of images and sometimes, for Green, missing words (as she listens to Pride and Prejudice), yet her experience is brought to the page with clarity. We sink into her world where an encounter with Dr Seuss’s ABC, daily visits from doctors and morphine nightmares coexist with an awareness of the mountain she must climb and the seeds she must plant for new life.

There is a gentle skip back in time, too—E.B. White, Kate DiCamillo, The Beatles—and a sense of wistfulness when looking from the present to her past:

There’s the rustle bustle wind in the bush-clad valley
Buttered toast and clover honey
marmalade brain and mandarin heart
Ah, there were no fences around childhood summers

Green remains fully present, reading letters sent by poets, nestling into the ‘joy of Cilla McQueen’s kitchen table’, writing notes to her beloved on the Scrabble board, listening to a northern Irish voice reading a Booker-winning novel. Aotearoa poets are always in the conversation: ‘stretching out on Fiona Farrell’s The Deck’; conjuring Robin Hyde’s irises and Bub Bridger’s wild daisies next to Gertrude Stein’s roses. And when she comes to Tusiata Avia’s ‘Prayer’ in the hospital, she is lifted, despite the weight of the world.

The blinds return, shading the world again:

I think the whole world is made
of strips, strips of good and evil
strips of story and strips of song

Unexpected images linger: a rope strung between her hospital room and the Sky Tower; balancing like a leaf while we admire her (slow) progress; the moon through the blinds as she imagines ‘climbing the mountain / with sweet mandarins in my pocket’. The pressure is close, but the breeze is real and possible, too:

Today there is the real world
and the imagined world
mixing up with
an Airini Beautrais short story
and missiles are dropping
and children are starving
and I can only do one day at a time
and The National is singing
and there’s a midnight moon
in the dead of the night
with the window wide open

We see how repetition and flow inform the poet’s days, and her lines—everything connected. And that brings us to the power of what feels like one long continuous reflection: there are no separate poem titles here, only a page to turn and the mingling of thoughts, remembrances, notes for the day and calls to action. In fact, she is no mere observer: with a debilitating illness and the demand to wait and see what comes next, she chooses action over passivity. This is protest poetry, written for our times. Noticeable among the personal and profound observational qualities of these poems is the sense of agency:

Hold onto your hats
there’s a wild ride ahead
I put a coloured pencil box
under the intense rainbow
for someone to find
The tigers are still howling
Soon we will play chess
I will make the first move

Here I reference the last page, a commentary on the act of writing poetry itself, and the invitation to the reader, and anyone willing to step out with her:

Most of this poem
is in 1000 pieces
in a box on the table
The picture on the lid
might be autobiography
It might be a red herring

There’s a large grassy area
There’s room for dog play
and there’s the infinite blue
There’s time for dream
and there’s time for sleep

I will meet you at the top of the hill
We will be able to see for miles

Green walks the fine line between her confinement and the wider world, with a necessary view forward. This is a poetry book to keep close, for here is all the damage in our world, with Green’s search for recovery—not only for herself but for all of us.

Erik Kennedy’s book, Sick Power Trip, is also about the personal and global. It’s observational and inquisitive—demanding we look, with him, at how grim things are in our twenty-first-century world. The poems are imbued with feeling: rage, sadness, disbelief, but also happiness. Like Green, he has a knack for taking us into his personal space, while also demanding we look out at the wider world. Some observations are intimate, as when he references his friend and fellow poet John Allison and considers things shared, both infinite and finite. Yet even in the small poems, Kennedy mines for meaning by exploring not only big ideas, but also form. There are prose poems, unexpected line breaks and small rhyming moments, as in ‘Autumn couplets’:

Mujaddara

I know. I know what’s happening elsewhere.
While I mess around with my kitchenware.

The word ‘knowledge’ appears 23 times, and Section 2 consists of 43 footnotes. It’s filled with references, political notations, statistics. However, this is not science—it’s poetry, where beauty—the art—is in the ordering. There’s a set of things that mean one thing, then another, then another; there’s a story arc with a beginning, middle and end, but it begs rereading from multiple angles.

This is poetry that gets under your skin. Here, in ‘What Thinking Feels Like’, Kennedy tells us:

I reckon I remember how the story goes, but then I come to
the moment in the fable when the man pulls the thorn out of the lion’s paw,
and the thorn turns out to be another tiny lion,
rampant and raging,
who also needs assuaging.

Kennedy has a way of packaging big concepts neatly: when is bad bad? When do we know? How do ordinary people compare to bigger-than-life sources of power? These are serious questions, and the poet constantly reminds us we are flawed humans. In ‘The Summer We All Called Cigarettes “Snargers”’, he tells us: ‘Dave said a lot of things. / He was the unreliable narrator of our hearts.’ And in ‘I Like Rich People, But I Couldn’t Eat a Whole One Myself’ we come to this:

Believe it or not, genetically speaking,
you have more in common with an oligarch than with an aardvark
or a sea turtle
or a red-collared lorikeet.
I know this is bitter news, but that’s what news is—an acrid, tacky sap
that sticks together the days. Whoever invented knowledge was on some sort of sick power trip.

Then there is the metaphor for the submarine/family Christmas dinner in ‘All Submarine Movies Are Christmas Movies’; we’re all stuck in this ship together. But Kennedy’s ship is in dire shape: not sinking but already underwater, and in danger of losing all oxygen. It’s biting humour, and we nod along knowingly, absorbing the creeping feeling that we’re nearly out of breath. And while we’re hopeful that this plea may open some space for air, we have the sneaking sense Uncle Trevor will never shut up.

Humour is a key ingredient in Kennedy’s poetry. He laces wry observation with dire statistics; he brings a punch line when we least expect it. Humour is often present where the poems are personal. I laughed all the way through the poet getting his Karl Marx belt buckle stolen, or—not laughing but appreciating—the parallel story to the Mark Knopfler line ‘sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug’. Or talking at a party to a mini golf course designer. Or self-diagnosis, in the last poem in the collection, ‘Self-Affirming Mantra’, which is also included in the anthology Short | Poto—The Big Book of Small Stories | Iti Te Kupu, Nui Te Kōrero. It begins:

I was searching my symptoms online. Disturbed sleep led to fatigue which led to post-viral condition and also to alcohol abuse and liver disease and unthinkable cancers which all led to conclusions about society and how one operates in it, how someone can be rational and maladaptive at the same time, how resilience is just a word in a PowerPoint …

—and concludes with seven short sentences that indicate the power of perspective. Here we have darkness and light, and also agency:

My symptoms were still with me but also not with me. I was loving them. I was setting them free.

Kennedy’s questions are particular and idiosyncratic, but offer suggestions for how to pay closer attention. In ‘We’re all in this together’, humour, self-deprecation and keen wit work to bring the message home:

I stored my plan for world peace
safely in my coat pocket,
and then I washed the coat.

The days when I was writing the plan
were dark, the nights frosty
and full of agues.

I don’t know what will befall me
as I rewrite the plan from memory.
I even forget

to eat lunch when I’m distracted,
so who knows how I’m going to remember
what mechanisms I came up with

for the end times …

If Kennedy is having fun with poetry, he’s intensely serious about his subject. Belief and wonder are also part of the poet’s world. In ‘Horses in the Dark’, he considers the bigness of horses, opening with the question, ‘Do non-horse people grasp how massive horses are?’ and continuing:

Am I getting the bigness across? What if I called a horse / a ‘hoss’ and made a flank-slapping gesture and mimed / galloping away on a tremendous untameable beast / like someone riding a missile aimed at the US Northeast / to convey the power of one of these animals, the annihilating / potential of horse?

Sometimes overt, sometimes understated, these poems present a thinking-feeling continuum—a whole experience to be turned over, again and again. But this is not merely one poet’s own preoccupations; we are invited to participate as active readers and citizens, too. I’ll leave you with this memorable note at the end of the long prose poem, ‘Bino’, about a chimpanzee:

There is no real coda for Bino. No latter-day memorial yet. Not much writing about him, because everyone is limited by an absence of information. Sometimes when it comes to projects of recovery and memory, there is only so much that can be done. And when there is only so much that can be done, that is exactly how much you have to do.

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MICHELLE ELVY is a writer and editor in Ōtepoti Dunedin. Her books are the everrumble and the other side of better. She has co-edited Te Moana o Reo | Ocean of Languages (The Cuba Press) and Poto: Iti te kupu, nui te kōrero | Short: The Big Book of Small Stories (Massey University Press). Her collection ‘We Are Here’ was shortlisted for the 2025 Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award.