Lynn Jenner
Peace & Quiet by Dinah Hawken (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2026), 94pp, $25;
Beyond the Border and Other Poems by Owen Marshall (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2026), 111pp, $30; Making Mixtapes with Seichan by Annabel Wilson (Ngā Pukapuka Pekapeka, 2025), 44pp, $17
Peace & Quiet is Dinah Hawken’s eleventh book. In 2025 she received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement. Readers familiar with Dinah’s work will expect elegance, deliberate simplicity, intellectual and spiritual depth and a focus on the natural world, and all of these qualities are present in this new collection. Here, skilfully managed rises and falls of emotion take you along for the ride.
The collection begins with a section of poems titled ‘Brief Scenes’. These are exactly what the title suggests: short pieces, often beginning with a moment that seems real and literal. For example, in ‘The Sea’ the opening lines are:
She is listening to his breathing.
Not even the sea can silence it.
The poem then moves into the sea:
The sea is laid very low, off colour
inhibited, unlikely to drown out
or overhear anything.
This move into metaphor and image, into metaphysics and mystery, is to be found in many of these first brief scenes. In the notes and acknowledgements, Hawken says that some poems in this section are ‘after’ collections by Jannis Ritsos and Tomas Tranströmer, and these influences are discernible. The poems have a sense of enigma alongside and in the everyday, and I enjoyed this very much. It is also clear from the notes that, although Hawken may write her poems in a small room in Paekākāriki, she is in conversation with poets and writers from many times and places.
The second section is a 14-poem sequence titled ‘Speaking of Peace’. These poems bring together ‘the thoughts of the thoughtful’ about the human ‘habit’ of violence and the ‘deep and faithful instinct for peace’. Again, Hawken draws on others—for example, Gandhi and Te Whiti, who experienced war and practised non-violent resistance while holding aspirations for peace. Quoting Adrienne Rich in ‘Poem 12’, Hawken writes, ‘Gentleness is active.’ The tone throughout the sequence is serious yet resolute, as the poems acknowledge the suffering that war brings to everyone.
The third section, also titled ‘Brief Scenes’, is a series of poems that are slower, quieter and more contemplative than those in ‘Speaking of Peace’. Here the poet speaks as someone outside the hustle and noise of one world, connected instead to another: the world of trees and children, friends who have died, the sea.
The final poem in the collection is ‘and’. It is a longish poem, made up of fragments. Here, at the end of the collection, the poet takes the reader to a place where:
even though we have weapons
of mass destruction even though
we are filling the oceans with poisons and plastic
even though our long-held agreements
are breaking up like sea icetwo hands play the cello. And
can you believe it all is well …
Hope, the poet says, is a discipline, and in this collection we can feel hope being practised. Paekākāriki figures strongly as the world Hawken sees from her window, while beyond that, the sea, the weather and the history of Kāpiti are powerful elements. I have lived on the Kāpiti Coast myself, and Peace & Quiet, in its clarity, offers both a sense of grounding and the savour of salt. On a less positive note, there are a number of errors in the matching of page numbers to the notes, which is disappointing in a collection from such a respected publisher.
· · ·
Owen Marshall is also a much-honoured writer, best known for his short stories. Beyond the Border and Other Poems is his fifth poetry collection. It comprises more than 90 prose poems. Many are arranged in two or three stanzas joined by run-on sentences. By and large, the poems are written in plain language, as though the poet is casually speaking to the reader. This, together with their ordered appearance, gives the reader a sense that these are poems one can easily approach without intimidation. Yet there are also moments containing spectacular figurative elements. For example, in ‘Unspoken’, a sound carries all the emotion of the situation:
I came away today from the bedside of a dying
friend, and beyond the trivialities that were the
tokens of emotion unable to be expressed, was
the ineffable, piercing cry of some great seabird
wingspread over oceans of our mutual past. I
knew from my friend’s slight smile and steady
eyes that as we talked, he too could hear the call.
The tone of the collection is that of someone who sees the end of his life coming. The poet’s response is to look back at moments of beauty and the many moments that make up a life. Those moments are the territory of these poems. There is careful observation, conjecture and interpretation of events. There are records of places visited, both in New Zealand and overseas, and of personal experiences, such as the poems ‘Hip Op’ and ‘Scan’. The poet’s father is a significant presence, and it is clear how important an influence he has been. There are also tributes. The title poem, ‘Beyond the Border’, is a tribute to Vincent O’Sullivan, while ‘River Song’ is dedicated to Brian Turner. In ‘River Song’ Marshall says of Turner:
Love, longing and loss you stated as your
themes, and played them clear-eyed without demand for
pathos.
Despite the sense of an ending imminent, Marshall’s collection has no hint of pathos. Love, however, is certainly an important theme. Here, from ‘Thanksgiving from Gom’, is the poet’s gratitude for the many good parts of his life:
Best of all is my wife
beside me and family growing larger, louder about us.
There is something of the same feeling in the final poem, ‘Snow at Christmas’. Here the poet remembers Christmases past and the richness of sharing a snowy day, years ago, with his family. It is a warm, generous note on which to end the collection.
In a quote on the back cover of Beyond the Border and Other Poems, Vincent O’Sullivan (may his memory be a blessing) says, ‘… in reading Marshall, there was always a sense of moral commitment and part of the literary excitement in reading him was that this was inseparable from aesthetic choices’. In this collection there is also a sense of the poet holding himself to account. For example, in ‘Five Apologies’ he reflects on people he treated badly and wishes he had behaved better. The bluntest statement comes in ‘To the Friend Who Became a Plumber’, where Marshall apologises for his class snobbery:
What a prick
I was to you, although we parted with familiar laugh and wave.
You could buy and sell me in these times and deserve to do so.
I would tell you that I’m sorry now, if by chance we met again.
The apologies for the sins of childhood are endearing, partly because the sins themselves are so small. In terms of form, the poems often finish with a summation. I found these a bit emphatically controlled and inclined to close off the reader’s capacity to interpret events or images for themselves. For example, in ‘Vestiges’, the poem ranges poignantly over objects and moments from the past, describing what has been forgotten and what remembered. It ends:
So much forgotten and so much
recalled, but you cannot go back, for as Proust
knew, what you seek is not a place, but time past
I recognise that readers are a very diverse bunch, and anyone reading this very human collection will find poems that strike a particular chord. My personal favourites are those in which an image remains unexplained, as in ‘Unspoken’, with its searing bird sound, and ‘Dusk Dog’, where the poet sees a dog loping along the beach at dusk, unaccompanied by any person. The dog has a destination, but it is unknown. The dog is simply there, in that place, at dusk, and the poet records that strange moment:
That
journey on the dark sand until he’s swallowed up
by night and distance and I am left to find a home.
The collection contains many poems about specific places, often in the South Island, while there are also poems recording the poet’s responses to visiting overseas locations. I was struck by the sense of connection the poet records in ‘Anzac Cove’:
So much smaller in reality than the place possesses
within our national consciousness, but even though
the sea is calm and the beach quiet in the sun, there
are rushing shades here that have nowhere else to be.Sounds too of both anguish and resolve that break into
the mind and distort the seabirds’ calls.
This is a large collection, and it contains many moods. Marshall shares the experiences and moments that have shaped his life with warmth, careful observation, reflection and, finally, love.
· · ·
Annabel Wilson’s Making Mixtapes with Seichan could hardly be more different from the collections by Hawken and Marshall. Wilson is a Canterbury-based poet and spoken-word performer who has previously published adult fiction, flash fiction, plays and a collaborative book of poetry and photographs. The best known of these is Aspiring Daybook: The diary of Elsie Winslow (Makaro Press, 2017), which Wilson describes on her website as a ‘genre-bending book … made up of poems, snapshots, conversations and letters’. As her past creative work shows, Wilson has a wider repertoire beyond poetry on the page.
Making Mixtapes with Seichan, a 42-page chapbook, is a collection of poems gathered around a central concept. Wilson’s poems are presented in relationship to, influenced by and in conversation with excerpts from The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagon, written in Japan in the early tenth century by the courtesan Sei Shōnagon. Several of Wilson’s poems tell the reader what is known about Sei Shōnagon’s life. In musical terms, a mixtape is a relatively informal project in which an artist shows what they can do and may experiment more than they would on a studio album. Wilson’s use of intertextuality certainly makes this an innovative project.
Making Mixtapes with Seichan is divided into five sections, each related to a season. The number of poems and the grouping into sections make the book easy to read in a single sitting.
In The Pillow Book, Sei Shōnagon wrote short texts about what had happened around her, about nature and about her responses to day-to-day events. This Japanese form is described as zuihitsu, literally ‘follow the brush’, in which writers record thoughts and observations as they arise. Lists are also a characteristic feature.
At the beginning of her book, Wilson gives the reader a some strong leads about what to expect by quoting Sei Shōnagon:
I set to work with this boundless pile of paper to fill it to the last sheet with all manner of odd facts, stories from the past, and all sorts of other things, often including the most trivial material. On the whole I concentrated on things and people that I found charming and splendid; my notes are also full of poems and observations on trees, plants, birds, insects and so forth …
Wilson, too, follows where her thoughts lead, describing events and experiences and whatever catches her eye or ear. Some poems are memories, such as ‘El Niño’ and ‘the summer that didn’t want to be over’. Some combine experiences and memories. ‘Cleansing Phase’, for example, tells of a visit to an op shop and the poet’s childhood memories of visiting the dump:
I’m reminded of going to the dump as a kid. Sickly sweet rotting
fragrance: like sileage. Keening seagulls. Beautiful horror. Beginnings and
endings.
In the same poem Wilson turns to love:
A couple at the counter lean over the jewellery beneath the glass. The older
man buys his partner a gold necklace. I have a little heart pang. All those
decades and still deeply in love. I go back to something I’d passed by.
Hand the vintage tea towel to the shopkeeper: Pink Terraces. Gone but
not forgotten. Someday we’ll find places of our own.
This breadth of tone—from lyrical to poignant, from hyper-real to down and dirty—is one of the most engaging and interesting features of these poems.
At the beginning of the book Wilson also quotes Virginia Woolf:
The poet is always our contemporary.
Again, this is a strong lead. Wilson’s poems have a very contemporary edge. In ‘Folding washing while listening to the latest, breaking, news’, for example, she takes the reader into the world of the mother of a newborn in intensive care:
I am folding squares of muslin, remembering meeting this tiny being basking under the incubator lamp, lying chest down, dollface turned towards us, knees folded out like a frog. The plexiglass portholes where we reached in to place palms on that small body, stroke that shock of dark hair.
And then we are in Gaza:
I am folding squares of muslin, thinking of Al-Shifa neonatal unit running out of power, oxygen.
If one looked at Wilson’s book within a traditional genre framework, Making Mixtapes with Seichan could be described as genre-bending. It comprises poems in a variety of forms, including lists, haiku, prose pieces of varying lengths and graphic features. The concept of the book, the link to Sei Shōnagon’s text and Wilson’s own poems are all represented in the look of the pages, as well as in the contents. Page 6, for example, begins with the bold heading ‘In spring, it is the dawn’. Beneath that is Wilson’s three-line translation, followed by a three-line quotation from The Pillow Book in italics. Under that is ‘Offerings’, the title of Wilson’s poem, and under that is the poem itself. From a visual point of view, the shifts in typeface, justification, and layout create a great deal for the eye to take in. I found the effect of this visual complexity somewhat unsettling, as if the reader should never relax with either text.
Given the innovative nature of Wilson’s work, both here and in her other books, I think it is possible that keeping the reader slightly on edge is an aesthetic or political aim, but I am not sure. In the book, the Sei Shōnagon elements are allocated significant weight. Wilson’s own poems are original in both tone and territory. They are strong pieces of writing, and I would prefer that they have more space to do their work and carry more weight in the intertextuality.
One especially pleasing aspect of Wilson’s poems is their strong link to place. They travel around Te Wai Pounamu, to Wellington and some places overseas. Wilson aces the feelings and character of those journeys. ‘The Aurora Hunters/Jagged road to the deep south’, for example, takes the reader on a road trip:
Seichan sleeps beside me while I drive hurrying through the night to make
the Interislander.Desert Road. Dawn. Tank near-empty, cutting it fine (another favourite
contranym). I tally low flying hawks, beehives …Light sharpens, greens deepen, as we hasten south. Vineyards, beech
forest, farmland. On Kaikōura beach, tread warm black stones into the
sea, into the rain./// A pie and a fight in Culverden ///
Making Mixtapes with Seichan will appeal to readers who like their poetry to have grit, authenticity, beauty—and an interest in experimentation with form.
LYNN JENNER is a writer of essays, poetry, non-fiction and hybrid texts. Her Dear Sweet Harry (Auckland University Press, 2010) won the Best First Book Award for Poetry at the New Zealand Post Book Awards in 2011. The essay collection Lost and Gone Away (Auckland University Press, 2015) was a finalist in the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards in 2016. The Gum Trees of Kerikeri (Otago University Press, 2026) won the 2025 Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award.
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