Koe: An Aotearoa ecopoetry anthology launches on 22 August 2024 – plus recent writing news & events

Koe: An Aotearoa ecopoetry anthology launches on 22 August – you’re invited to the launch!

I’m delighted that my poem “All That Summer”, first published in my collection New Sea Land (2016), has been selected for this new anthology of environmental poetry from Aotearoa / New Zealand, edited by Janet Newman and Robert Sullivan. I’ll be one of the poets reading at the Wellington launch, which is at
Meow, 9 Edward Street, Wellington from 6pm on Thursday, 22nd August – the same day the anthology becomes available in bookstores.

Please share the event with your friends, fellow poets, artists and activists on Facebook at:
https://www.facebook.com/share/tgMg2PTEwB58NmCL/ – and please come along!

More about Koe

Koe invites readers to explore human connections with nature through a selection of over 100 poems composed in Aotearoa New Zealand from pre-European times to the present day. Including a substantial introduction and editors’ notes, Koe is the first anthology to provide a comprehensive overview of ecopoetic traditions in Aotearoa and to locate these traditions as part of the global ecopoetry scene.

In Koe, editors Janet Newman and Robert Sullivan reveal the genesis, development and heritage of a unique Aotearoa New Zealand ecopoetry derived from both traditional Māori poetry and the English poetry canon. Organised chronologically into three sections—representing the early years (poets born in or before the nineteenth century), the middle years of the twentieth century, and the twenty-first-century ‘now’—each segment presents a diverse array of voices. Across all these time frames, speaking from the conditions of their era, the poets delve into themes of humility, reverence and interconnectedness with the nonhuman world. They challenge traditional Eurocentric perspectives, highlight the significance of indigenous narratives, and wrestle with the impacts of European colonisation.

With more than 100 poems of celebration, elegy, apprehension, hope and activism, Koe gives us the history that holds our future.

New Poems Published in a fine line and Tarot

I’ve recently had new poems published in a fine line and Tarot – thanks very much to respective editors Gail Ingram and Kit Willett for selecting these poems for publication!

Check them out here:

a fine line (Autumn 2024): Tuesdays [a reprint], The Hedgehog Heart In Conflict With Itself [new]

Tarot 8: The Richter Scale (p. 30), Balcony (2023) (p. 47)

Where To From Here webinar for Our Climate Declaration

In July, I spoke to an Our Climate Declaration webinar about the nexus between climate writing and climate activism, referring both to my novel Emergency Weather and to the current political moment.. Thanks to Our Climate Declaration for the opportunity – check out the webinar below!

A Change In the Weather: The Climate Crisis In Poetry And Fiction

Photo of Dunedin writing event described in text

Tim Jones, Kay McKenzie Cooke, Michelle Elvy, Tunmise Adebowale, Mikaela Nyman, Jenny Powellthanks to Kay for the photo!

I spent a couple of weeks in the south of the South Island in late June and early July, travelling with family and visiting friends. Along the way, I took part in a writing event in Dunedin, A Change In the Weather: The Climate Crisis In Poetry And Fiction on Thursday 4 July, which Michelle Elvy, Kay Mckenzie Cooke and I organised. The event was held in the Dunningham Suite at Dunedin Public Library – thanks very much to Ali and her team for setting the venue up & being such good hosts!

We had six readers:

Tim Jones
Kay McKenzie Cooke
Michelle Elvy
Tunmise Adebowale
Jenny Powell
Mikaela Nyman

and everyone read wonderful pieces! Then, afterwards, we had a really good discussion, covering both climate & environmental writing and climate activism, with the audience. Books got sold, drinks were drunk, nibbles nibbled (thanks to Kay and Robert for getting the drinks and nibbles) – it was a very positive event and I enjoyed it a lot. I lived in Dunedin from 1976 to 1993, and I felt very welcomed by the Dunedin literary community at this event.

Thanks to all our sponsors: The Cuba Press, Ōtepoti – He Puna Auaha / Dunedin City of Literature, Dunedin Public Libraries and the University Book Shop.

A Change in the Weather: The Climate Crisis in Poetry and Fiction

Dunningham Suite, Dunedin Public Library, Thursday 4 July, 5.30-7.30pm

Doors open 5.30pm for drinks, nibbles and conversation
Readings start 6pm
Audience Q&A starts 7pm
We close around 7.30pm

I’m reading with Dunedin writers Tunmise Adebowale, Kay McKenzie Cooke, Michelle Elvy, Mikaela Nyman, Jenny Powell and Richard Reeve

Please come along!Poster for "A Change in the Weather" event described in text of post

There is no mercy in insurance

News that Tower Insurance and other insurance companies are considering refusing to insure houses in flood-prone areas reminded me of “Written Off”, a poem from my 2016 collection New Sea Land.

The set of climate change consequences outlined in this poem were not difficult to come up with. Perhaps, if our “leaders” had spent more time thinking about consequences and less time bowing and scraping to vested interests, we wouldn’t be in quite such a deep hole seven years after this poem was first published.

Written Off

They had insured

and re-insured,

still it was not enough.

They hunched over maps,

consulted climate science.

Beachfront property

went with the stroke of a pen:

no possible premium

could insure that level of risk.

And floodplains:

why do people choose to build on them?

Bigger floods, more often: gone.

East coast farmers, eyeball-deep

in debt, haunted by drought,

desperate to irrigate:

you backed the wrong horse.

Low-lying suburbs, factories

built next to streams:

there is no mercy

in insurance. The numbers speak,

and then there is no mercy.

No Other Place To Stand: An Anthology Of Climate Change Poetry From Aotearoa New Zealand

Pile of copies of poetry anthology "No Other Place to Stand" ion table, with trees shown through window in background

I’m very pleased that my poem “Not for me the sunlit uplands,” first published in New Sea Land, is included in this new anthology. I’m looking forward to the Wellington launch on 14 July – check out the details below:

Auckland University Press invites you to the launch of NO OTHER PLACE TO STAND: AN ANTHOLOGY OF CLIMATE CHANGE POETRY FROM AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND.

Join editors Jordan Hamel, Rebecca Hawkes, Erik Kennedy and Essa Ranapiri – as well as plenty of special guests – to the celebration and launch party of this brilliant new anthology.

6pm, Thursday 14 July
Meow
9 Edward Street
Wellington
All welcome!

Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/389905359776491

Editors’ note: We’re also planning a Te Waipounamu launch for the anthology with Word Christchurch later in the year. 

The Last Days of the Coastal Property Boom – now closer than ever

With a new analysis showing that rapid sea level rise is going to hit Aotearoa earlier and harder than expected – with Wellington one of the areas to be worst hit – this feels like a good, or at least appropriate, time to bring back my poem “The Last Days of the Coastal Property Boom”, first published in my 2016 collection New Sea Land and then republished on the excellent Talk Wellington blog.

We need to reduce emissions, massively and urgently, but we also need to deal as best we can with the climate effects that are already coming – worse floods, worse droughts, more sea level rise. Check out the draft National Adaptation Plan and have your say by 3 June.


The Last Days of the Coastal Property Boom

Lights on, curtains drawn, ‘Ode to Joy’

turned up loud to drown the pounding sea —

habits of prosperity surviving awareness of its end.

But uncurtained morning shows the ocean

nearer by a day, the last remaining dune

barely a memory of marram grass and halophytes.

High tide casts driftwood to the bottom step,

spume splits paint flakes from seaward-facing walls,

decking warps and peels as foundations wash away.

This was prime property when they saw it first,

the retirees’ dream of a quiet cottage, snug

between tarmac’s end and the start of the dunes.

They saw the waves and wondered, paced

the reassuring distance from high tide to front gate.

The LIM report should have warned them  

but lawyers hired by those with most value to lose

had overturned the Council’s plans

and the LIM report said nothing.

The estate agent’s hectic glibness, the bank’s eagerness to lend,

lulled their fears to a vague and distant concern.

They found an insurer who would cover them,

cocooned themselves in pensions and furnishings,

paid no attention as Greenland and West Antarctica

spritzed meltwater into the rising sea.

That was the stuff of one-minute world news roundups,

helicopter shots of nameless, faceless, drowning refugees

in lands a reassuring hemisphere away.

Until the coastal defences failed, until first-world cities

were sent scrambling backwards from the beaches,

a planet-wide Dunkirk unfolding in reverse.

Now the children call them daily, desperate

for them to make the move inland. Now the house

rises and falls to the rhythm of the tide.

Now the last of their furniture vanishes,

hand-carried down the narrow strip of land

to the sympathetic darkness of the moving van.

They emerge defeated, encircled by cameras,

the human-interest story of the moment,

the last of this rich coastline’s climate refugees.

The van departs for the hinterland, where tent towns

sprawl cold across a wind-assailed plateau.

The coast reverts to sea wrack and bird call.

Waves take all but their house’s foundations, latest

and most miniature of reefs. What remains

is memory, that widest, all-consuming sea.

From Tim Jones’s poetry collection New Sea Land (Mākaro Press, 2016)