Robyn Maree Pickens
Pakiaka by Gabrielle Huria (Canterbury University Press, 2025), 39pp, $25; Dear Alter by Jiaqiao Liu (Auckland University Press, 2025), 106pp, $30; In the Hollow of the Wave by Nina Mingya Powles (Auckland University Press, 2025), 95pp, $25
These three books arrived together and the synergic imprint they left on me is … time. There is more to these three than time, but this is my parsing methodology or heuristic, my apparatus. By way of gentle introduction then, Pakiaka by Gabrielle Huria (Ngāi Tūāhuriri / Ngāi Tahu) enacts ancestral time fraught by colonisation; Dear Alter by Jiaqiao Liu dis/embodies a disjunctive, retro-future-reaching time; and In the Hollow of the Wave by Nina Mingya Powles exudes a type of artisanal, deep-guild, slow time of care and attentiveness. Each of the three also deploys at least two languages and is unimaginable without these bilingual constituents.
But to describe Pakiaka by Gabrielle Huria as a poetry collection ‘fraught by colonisation’ feels inadequate. There was a time before the arrival of Pākehā, when hapū and iwi living within Te Wai Pounamu practiced mahinga kai (traditional food gathering) according to knowledge, custom and venturing across the whole island and, indeed, through trade, with the whole of the collective motu. Huria’s ancestors, as she writes, lived this way until a specific moment in time, in the year 1862, when, following Kemp’s Purchase, 2640 acres (1068 hectares) were ‘set aside’ for mana whenua in the Kaiapoi area in what is now known as North Canterbury. The benign-sounding phrase ‘set aside’ erases the formal term, which is ‘reservation’. The official, if frequently obscured, title for the 2640 acres was Reservation 873, which is also known today as Tuahiwi. In 1862, 2640 acres of reservation land was divided into 14-acre (5.6 hectare) allotments for each male (only). For a contemporary city dweller, this might sound like a lot, but not when you’re used to food gathering across an entire island, and when some of your new Pākehā ‘neighbours’ have hundreds of acres; it’s an amputation.
Huria writes with this voice. A voice that knows an abundance of rivers, forests and coastline existed for her ancestors but that she and her whānau are hemmed into 14-acre blocks at Tūāhuriri. You can almost feel a contraction of those big North Canterbury macrocarpa windbreaks enclosing Huria, yet also the ease with which an ephemeral shift like a scent or a breeze can (however inadequately) transport the speaker beyond the reservation pegs. Huria writes about and as a whole island shrunk to a postage stamp and, correspondingly, therefore as perforation straining or aching for lost wholeness.
The transportive power of scent and breeze are both evident in the eponymous first poem of the collection,
The smell returns me to before
where the old ones have passed.
I hold their kōrero in my hand,
ask for a koha from the breeze:
Ka hau mai,
breath of life enter me.
This poem also holds the kawa (protocol) of acknowledging and paying respect to the ones who have gone before; the ones who have passed. In complementary sequence, the next two poems (‘Hinetītama’ and ‘Te Korekore’) honour and celebrate the ur-ancestors within the overarching becoming that is held in the void of absolute potential (Te Korekore).
Over the course of this slim but powerful debut collection, Huria increasingly deploys an instructive or lightly imperative voice to record daily, seasonal and cultural ways of being. This is particularly evident in the poem, ‘How to Be a Good Ngāi Tahu’:
Eat everything with eyes,
Eat eels.
Eat eels without eyes.
Have a good knife.
While the imperative form is generally associated with giving orders or establishing power over others, the effect here is intimate and, in the reservation context, it is charged, if not underpinned by a survival ethos. It feels hard won and is wildly expansive in its generosity to share—despite unfathomable loss.
· · ·
I am perhaps somewhat unusual with respect to robots and the robotic world in general, which is the primary focus and thematic concern of Jiaqiao Liu’s debut collection Dear Alter. (There are no three-dimensional, mechanical robots, voice-command digital assistants and few automated machines in my day-to-day life.) Perhaps it is a semantic glitch on my part or a linguistic turn away from the word ‘robot’ towards the more familiar (to me) ‘bot’ or the seemingly omnipresent acronym AI for artificial intelligence. I mention this because reading this book, I stumbled over the use of the terms ‘robot’ and ‘cyborg’; you, however, may not. I also wasn’t always sure who was speaking, or who was conversing with whom. I suspect this may be the point, however, as people who use various digital platforms are increasingly unsure who they are speaking with, or even whether the conversant has human sentience.
Dear Alter is organised into three numerical sections, with the exception of the opening poem. Each section comprises a number of individual poems, many of which are written in an epistolary style (in addition to the title). To dis/embody the voice of robot actants, Liu employs a range of punctuation typologies, such as double dashes between short phrases in ‘Alter’s long-lost sibling’, to evoke the bland staccato of a stereotypical (historical?) robot. This irruptive, pause-ful monotone is itself surely a marker of almost ancient robotic history:
— —hello there— —it’s been a while— —since I’ve met anyone here— —
in this scrap sea— —of souls. Do you have a name? How are you?
Please— —I want to hear your answer— —you don’t have to be polite—
—I have a name— —no one uses— —once, I lived in the air— —between
This reader felt like she had stepped into a world that is most likely already here, albeit one she still has the capacity to limit her engagement with. It is me, and I am speaking of a digitally invasive world. I am not sure if I can wholly align my understanding of this world with the seemingly more mechanically robotic world Liu has created, or at least the language she creates out of it. Not being able to clearly follow the subtle tonal shifts between voices expressing passiveness, aggression, longing, alienation—who is speaking?—I accept that all incapacities to respond ‘correctly’ are surely my own.
Is it natural to grow up?
Are you growing down?
Where will I grow up to?
· · ·
If the time-scape of Pakiaka feels simultaneously part of deep-time and fractured, and that of Dear Alter a ragged non-place, In the Hollow of the Wave by Nina Mingya Powles feels like a warm cave in which you have all the shelter to slowly, methodically and carefully repair the worn hide blanket of Self. I would like my mind to be this calm; to be able to slow it down to such a pace that I could take such care with objects, craft practices, memories and subsequent poetic associations between all three. Powles truly possesses a voice of autumnal care. She is able to draw the sap of her world into herself, still the disparate parts and, carefully, with such fine needlework, articulate the leaves of her findings. The whole collection is an articulation of this voice, including the collages, photographs of solar prints and drawings.
Nothing is gratuitous; each form and their coherence is considered. Many of the shorter prose poems are arranged in square blocks—not just because—but because the central artefact (and conceptual apparatus) of the collection is a familial patchwork quilt and vast complexes of being like belonging. The drawings and solar prints are also arranged to share the variegated yet intersecting block forms of a quilt. If there is a quilt there is a sewing machine. The sewing machine is introduced in the second poem (‘compartment’) and was next to the piano (subject of the first poem) in the familial room that continues to house loved ones and the artefacts they worked with or made—even if the people have passed away and the artefacts are now fragile or faded.
In addition to familial ties, it is abundantly clear that Powles goes out into the world, particularly art galleries, and into the worlds of other poets, writers and filmmakers. Indeed, many of the poems are explicitly ekphrastic, such as ‘Living Portrait of a Tree’. Regardless of the source or experience, and even despite documented instances of direct borrowing, it is readily apparent that all have been thoughtfully and coherently milled (not mined), integrated and rearticulated by the poet. If Powles has been enriched by a poem or an artwork, there is a correlative sense of her gratitude and consummate evidence of her capacity to distil and share that enrichment.
I leave the last emblematic words to Powles in the form of her entire poem, ‘handiwork’:
People asked me where I learned
and I said I taught myself the slow work of making.But memory is a house with scraped white walls.
I step inside and choose what to take, what to leave behind.My hands feel their way through
the gathering, the careful pulling apart.
ROBYN MAREE PICKENS is a poet and art writer who lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin. Her work has been published in numerous online and print publications in Aotearoa and beyond. She holds a master’s degree in art history and a PhD in English (ecopoetics). Her award-winning debut collection, Tung, was published by Otago University Press in 2023.
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