National Poetry Day YO

It is National Poetry Day. You’ve still got until 5pm tonight to enter our competition.

Here are some tantalising samples of the poems entered so far

Woman and child pause
to rest on a flat, seat-like rock
that peers out to sea … (Shanee Barraclough)

After a while, the watched pot boils,
and I throw in handfuls of pasta.
Hotly splashing and then sinking,
like so many tiny slippers or even little toenails …  (Sile Mannion)

Fernbank Studio: away past elsewhere is a Christchurch Art Gallery exhibition at our Central Library Peterborough. It features a selection of hand-printed books, broadsides and ephemera from Fernbank Studio, a private press run by Brendan O’Brien in Wellington. One of New Zealand’s foremost letterpress printers, O’Brien has printed books for significant poets and artists including Bill Manhire, Jenny Bornholdt, Joanna Margaret Paul, Gregory O’Brien, Mari Mahr, Ralph Hotere and Pip Culbert. Fernbank Studio: away past elsewhere showcases the collaborative relationship that exists between poets, artists and the printer.

More Christchurch events & competitions

Be poetic out there.

• Tips on how to celebrate (including  Christchurch  events)
• Pictures of NZ poets from DigitalNZ
• Poems from our 2010 poetry competition and the winner was Out of season by Stephen Trinder

Allen Curnow, Denis Glover, Bob Lowry, and unidentified friend. Williams, Bridget: Photographs used in Port Nicholson Press biography of James K Baxter. Ref: PAColl-2146-008. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://natlib.govt.nz/records/23135745

The late Hon. H. K. Taiaroa, M.L.C., with his wife and two of his children.: Picturing Canterbury

The late Hon. H. K. Taiaroa, M.L.C., with his wife and two of his children.
The Hon. Hori Kerei Taiaroa was a principal chief of the Ngai Tahu and in the late 1870s built a large two-storey house at Taumutu which was named ‘Awhitu’. He moved his family, stock and other belongings there from the marae at Otakou (Taiaroa Heads). The Taiaroa family subsequently played an important part in the development of the Taumutu district. He variously represented the Maori people both in the Legislative Council and the House of Representatives from May 1871 until his death on 5 August 1905. His wife’s name was Mrs Tawa Tini Taiaroa, reported to have been a remarkable woman.

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