'At the edge of the universe / like everyone else': John McAuliffe explores poetry in the environment

John McAuliffe

Last week I travelled to Invercargill to watch Romania play Argentina in the Rugby World Cup. It’ a sequence of place names that is unlikely to recur and it felt as if a visit to New Zealand in September 2011 really should include some rugby. The stadium had a stand on one side and a grassy terrace at either end which kids skidded up and down as a crowd of around 12,000 cheered on an Argentine victory. The big screen which was situated atop the grassy hill was not even very big though its ads for DHL and others were a distraction from the choirs and band who otherwise entertained us before the match.

Arriving early I’d walked around the town, whose big silent roads and Antarctic winds effortlessly swallowed up the thousands of visiting fans.  I ended up in the museum, like any tourist, which featured some tuataras and a number of rooms devoted to the enjoyable, illustrative paintings of Nigel Brown. One set of paintings recorded his visit to Antarctica with the poets Bill Manhire and Chris Orsman. I knew and enjoyed Bill’s Antarctic anthology, The Wide White Page, and his own poems on the subject which appear in Lifted. There was a notice saying a video would be shown of Nigel, Chris and Bill’s adventures but when I got to the cinema a video about a tuatara named Henry was playing in its stead.  

Bill Manhire

A couple of days later I was in Wellington and Bill took me for a coffee in the impressively interactive Te Papa museum on the waterfront there. On the way we took a detour and Bill pointed out the extracts from poems which the city has placed around the harbour. Wellington is a beautiful city, steep hills climbing up out of the bay and snow-capped mountains visible beyond it.  The poem as civic monument is a difficult thing to get right, think of Andrew Motion’s poem on the side of a campus in Sheffield where the wall seems too small for the lines or, in Manchester, of Lemn Sissay’s site-specific ‘Rain’ which does look well above a greasy spoon café.  Wellington’s watery sites and outlined lettering, as well as its use of lines from existing rather than commissioned poems, seems like a more successful project: here’s Bill (right) standing next to the opening lines of his poem ‘Milky Way Bar’. 

James K Baxter's poetry
in Wellington Harbour

And just around the corner are James K Baxter’s lines about Wellington Harbour (left), now in Wellington Harbour.

Maybe its relation to place is one of the distinctive features of New Zealand’s arts: its visual art too is also markedly interested in linking texts and spaces. 

Bill Manhire is published
in Twenty Contemporary
New Zealand Poets

While there are some New Zealand poets whose places seem vividly alive (for example, Jenny Bornholdt’s Wellington - and her French Menton scenes) I had thought the poetry was more literary, more at an angle to its material than turned out to be the case. Seeing Phar Lap’s articulated skeleton in the Te Papa museum makes it feel less of a conceit than when I first read the Manhire poem on this subject; likewise walking Bornholdt’s Wellington hills, or buying a pint of Speight’s in one of the Dunedin bars which occur in Baxter’s poems, gave me a much stronger sense of how the very different cities and landscapes of New Zealand’s north and south islands shape their poets’ arguments about poetry, as well as bringing home the incidental pleasures of seeing how Dunedin and Otago and Auckland and Wellington and, indeed, Invercargill make their way into the poems that readers will find in the excellent anthology, Twenty Contemporary New Zealand Poets (pictured, right). 

John McAuliffe’s new book is Of All Places (Gallery). He teaches poetry at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester.


Twenty Contemporary New Zealand Poets is the first anthology in decades to present to British readers the remarkable freshness and vitality of New Zealand poetry. Starting in the mid-1980s, it captures turning points in the work of Allen Curnow and Bill Manhire, poets who have made a mark across the English-speaking world, and charts the advent of a new wave of writers who recombine influences from all over to investigate the self and language with passion, intelligence and humour. For more information and to purchase a copy with a 20% discount, please click here.