Ngā mihi ki a koutou, thank you for sending us your poems for this landmark tenth edition of Given Words. We received over 160 poems and have chosen 64 to publish here on Given Words. The winning poems have been selected by Sophia Wilson, Pat White and Charles Olsen. (You can read about us here.) We have also awarded three Special Mentions in each category.
Charles Olsen comments on the poems on behalf of the judges: First, I’d like to say a special thank you to the filmmakers who created the word films for this year’s Given Words: Ebba Jahn, Tom Konyves, Cindy Stockton Moore, Ian Gibbins and Colm Scully. They are all well-respected filmmakers in the field of poetry film and videopoetry, and I find it fascinating the ways they use image and sound to add layers of meaning to words and poems. (You can find out more about them here.)
Choosing the five word films from all the submissions was tricky and Pat White beautifully expressed the risks we faced with the selection: ‘For 2025 the Given Words hold an interesting conundrum for the aspiring poet: justice, endure, pair, lightfast, hold, are words that invite judgement and confirmation. A lot of the best poetry is an exploration, launching into the wonder of the unknown, finding where language will take us. Judgement takes us to what we already think we know, in that way words like justice and endure are traps for the unwary in a world of poetry, image and metaphor.'
Choosing the winning poems and poems to share on Given Words is also fraught with difficulties! I’m very grateful to Sophia Wilson and Pat White for being part of this process with me again this year, picking up on poems I may have overlooked, sharing their impressions and wisdom. Each year I’m reminded of the importance of listening and being open to different ways of looking.
Judging a competition also gives a new perspective on ones own work not being selected. Sophia comments, ‘Some otherwise excellent poems were let down by lines or stanzas that felt extraneous, or effortful attempts to include a given word that interrupted the poem’s flow.’ I’ve often gone from ‘enduring the injustice of rejection’ to completely re-writing my text—learning a lot in the process—and being grateful it wasn’t chosen in its original form. This has even happened multiple times with the same piece of writing. Much as I’d like to, unfortunately I don’t have the resources to give feedback on all the poems sent in, but I recommend getting in touch with a local writing group where you can share, and get feedback on, your work. There are groups across the country listed on Te Puni Kaituhi o Aotearoa | The New Zealand Society of Authors NZSA or ask in your local library.
One of the lovely things about Given Words is the sense of a shared journey and seeing how others have taken different paths with the same five words. Sophia, Pat and I share our impressions below, but I recommend reading the selection of poems first and returning here to compare notes!
Please note: I’ve included the poet’s names below, but when we were judging the poems we didn’t know who had written them.
I thought Dessa BLUU’s poem Gatekeepers deceptively simple, with each given word giving form to a stanza adding to the poem’s arc, and I loved her use of lightfast: ‘lightfast as tapa in the Pasifika sun / Refusing to fade’. The lines ‘We hold our breath / At the gallery’s edge’ and ‘a pair of hands / Break glass to let light in’ subtly hint at the wiri and Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke’s defiant protest in parliament.
Indigenous themes, politics and colonialism were also a feature in Elspeth Tilley’s Dotterel. It put me in mind of Te Kahu Rolleston, spoken word poet and educator with Writers in Schools, talking about how putting your classes into poetry can help you remember things. Here the complex story of naturalist, politician and land purchase commissioner, Walter Mantell, is brought to life in all its complexity. Central to the poem is the migration of the dotteral, how it usurps the bird’s Māori name and, like Mantell himself, ‘migrates south once more’. I enjoyed the wonderful language of this prose poem: ‘…and adze to slice whenua for clinker and topple rimu for corduroy planking’. I initially thought clinker and corduroy planking had to do with boats, but didn’t get its relation with whenua. Actually they are raw materials being extracted by Māori labourers for road construction.
A walk can become a poem and a way to reflect on our relationships. With its opening lines, a tribute to poet John Allison, who died last year—‘A pair of muscle-crusted black buoys, / sea biscuits by the dozen, a riddle of / three-pronged footprints. You taught me / to look, and look again.’ —Cataloguing the beach by Jenna Heller is, in Pat’s words, ‘a beautifully rendered poem’. I loved the physicality of the given words in: ‘time is / a myth that we agree to endure and justice / is salt in unseen wounds.’
‘A well-constructed response to a graveside experienced’, writes Pat of Larthia speaks by Denise O’Hagan, which is inspired by a visit to the Regolini-Galassi tomb (dating to c. 680-660 BCE) in Cerveteri, Italy, and, in wonderfully descriptive verse, gives a present-day voice to its occupant: ‘truth is, / I never wanted an afterlife’.
Pinhole by Renee Liang shows ‘restraint and skill’ says Pat, ‘a simple image is used to discuss the passage of time, and the way ageing occurs while we’re elsewhere’. I especially enjoyed the echoes of words across the poem—justice/held court and those suggesting birth (foetal, impregnated, baby) and death (buried, exhumed). Pinhole stood out for Sophia, as did Dose by Lincoln Jaques, 'in their economy of language, attention to structure, and the way the poet centred their work cleverly around a particular scenario.'
‘The seamless daring with which the poet highlights political and environmental dysfunction’ and ‘the juxtaposition of cynicism with covert optimism of the poem’s brilliant final lines’ wrote Sophia of Lightfast by Gail Zing, while Pat stated ‘Lightfast carries us along without a semblance of cohesion while each image adds to the theme critiquing our need for instant gratification in a culture of purchasing power.’ You’ll have to read the poem to see what they are on about!
Nō Te Paruparu, Nō Te Purapura | Of the Mud, Of the Seed by Cindy Kurukaanga is very visual and tactile, and I could imagine it in te reo as a waiata or even a haka. Pat comments the poem has ‘a timeless quality’ with its ‘idea of time healing, through the earth and what comes from it.’ He also praises the way it incorporates the word justice ‘without drawing attention to itself’.
We could continue discussing the charm and alive senses of Whalefall by Thalia Peterson, the impossibility of knitting the sea in Ashlee-Ann Sneller’s #584 The Treaty Principles Bill and More, ask who is speaking in of Mārama over Hauturu and palpitations of Matariki stars by Piet Nieuwland with its opening line ‘My secret occupation is to be human’—highlighted by Sophia alongside Varanasi Incantation by Lee Thomson, for their 'refreshing and unique portrayals'—, or delve further into Lincoln Jaques’ Dose where ‘This life each minute / is a pass-the-parcel / where it’s never your turn’…
In the end it was ‘the adept tongue-in-cheek humour and irony’—as Sophia commented—of Sadie Yetton’s Venus, Don’t You Laugh At Me, which really made it stand out for us. Pat described it as ‘a powerful poem, it manages to capture a world of mistakes and miracles without explanation or self-pity, yet a picture emerges of someone growing into wisdom even while blundering through her days, loving and giving, receiving hurt and hope along the way, with a sort of courageous defiance’. It is very relatable and bounds along right up to the finality and ironic self-deprecation of the two-hundredth word: ‘Look at who you made / Love it’. Sophia praised the way the given words ‘harmonise with the subject matter and poetic tone’ and how ‘words and images are unleashed that simultaneously undercut, elevate, accuse and surprise’.
Sophia speaks for all of us when she says ‘I adore reading the Under 16's entries, but without a doubt it is the harder portion of the competition to judge. It's almost impossible to compare the work of a 15 year-old to that of an 8 or 9 year-old. I was so impressed this year by the variety and scope of emotions and topics featuring in the submissions. There was so much love, sadness, despair, grief, political, environmental and spiritual awareness and concern for the future expressed by our younger poets as well as cowboy duels, nightmare basements, shipwreck incantations and humour!’ She was particularly struck by the uses of the word pair: ‘There were pairs of birds, pairs of clouds, of opposite hands, lovers’ hands and monster’s hands, pairs of willows, of rusty hinges, fractured pairs, monochrome pairs, paired gummies and pairs of pixelated eyes.’
Lamenting that we don’t publish all the poems that we receive, Sophia highlighted some gorgeous lines from poems that did not make it in this time, such as: 'red and purple flavour in the air / Like a flipped fantasy' (Lily Malcolm, 10), ‘Hold yourself tall against the rain’ (Mila Furniss, 13), 'light tugging at my drenched dress' (Charlotte Gilbert, 13), 'justice slips off of me like a stick of butter' (Daisy Forster, 12), 'The slow unravelling of joy' (Alex Miller, 12), 'celestial army / that is dancing across the moon tonight' (Penelope Kerr, 13), ‘hope stays lightfast—a small, stubborn spark' (Lena Shinn, 13), 'you will lose limbs of your own in return for the feeling of being / complete' (Mika Delowe, 14), 'blackened trees branch out like veins' (Belle Fisher-Starzynski, 12), and 'waves rolled higher / The clouds land lower / A pair of birds chirped louder […] The rain poured harder' (Francesca Russ, 11). We could continue and create a collective poem of everyone’s work…
Sophia remarked on the ‘evocative and moving interweaving of dream and wake, personal and environmental’ in Colour blank by Lucia Sampson where ‘The world was lightfast, / I held 1000 colours in my palm’ is contrasted with ‘bleached sunrise, / blank paper, bed sheet, cornstarch’ and ‘monochrome pairs: / 2 leafless trees, / 2 boneless fish, / 2 songless birds’, and on the ‘beautiful imagery and environmental message’ of Claire Zhao’s poem The Stars Build Shadows, which tells of ‘paper-flower / candles lightfast in the moonlight. / Trees of kelp […] these broken seas.’
Pat highlighted I know everything but I know nothing by 9 year-old Charlie St John, writing ‘A set of vivid images hold this poem together, and they’re more striking by being commonplace or surprising by their juxtaposition. And to finish with the image of the apple, with all that signifies in our culture of sin and redemption, is very powerful. Repetition is a simple form, but handled so well here. Somehow it becomes of no concern that cats carry lunch money, or that detergent gets eaten, the images contain their own ironies and truths.’ And of Lilly Pan’s poem The painter who forgot to use lightfast paint, he points out ‘Using the structure of the courtroom holds this poem together, and handles the concept of justice easily. There is audacity in using Dae Vincy as a name… very droll. Why it works is because the poem ends without a judgement. Different voices are created, while the given words are incorporated seamlessly. And the entire piece is satisfyingly “different” in its vision.’
My purple life! by Gia Beckett (also 9 years old) is ‘a wonderful, short and well-formed poem’ says Sophia, and asks ‘where else could we read about “an indigo squish mellow named Justice”?’ Pat praises its ‘direct clarity and sense of playfulness’ and writes ‘This riff on the famous, “When I grow old I’ll wear purple,” is complete in its own right. Such a simple little idea, homely and vivid, yet adventurous at the same time.’ Gia even put her title in purple, and here we’ve taken the liberty to put her whole poem in purple!
As AI seems to inveigle its way into our lives, I was surprised only a couple of people admitted to using it in the writing of their poems, and even then only as a source of advice on word use rather than a partner in the creative process. Lily Richards takes on the theme of artificial intelligence in Thread of reality with reflections on truth and how we are complicit in our use of AI. Her playful use of symbols running through the poem give a visual parallel to the theme.
Sophia commented on Sabrina Li’s poem Photos Taken on the Day They Said It Was Over highlighting its ‘poetic allusion to personal, spiritual and environmental assault’. I found it abstract, spacious, thoughtful and subtle. This was taken up by Pat saying the poem ‘hints at knowledge which is cultural, ancient and private. At the same time, it opens in the commonplace of gender, with images that are intimate. The sense of tension between what is common knowledge, and in some way mysterious, attracts the readers attention. Subtle, yet powerful stuff to be penned by a fifteen-year-old.’
In the ten years of Given Words we’ve never had a unanimous decision on the winner—each poet-judge-reader bringing their own tastes and life experiences, finding poems that speak to them in different ways—so it was a lovely surprise to find we had all selected in first place The Menu by Miranda Yuan. It is succinct with each word perfectly integrated into the poem. Five dishes served with irony and social criticism. Sophia described it as ‘a beautifully structured poem which cleverly and understatedly expresses its opposition to political injustice, economic inequality, competition for resources, and animal exploitation.’ She highlighted ‘the final stanza/course/Dessert in which fraught love is brilliantly linked to an overheating world.’ Pat commented how ‘We’re sucked into a compelling set of images, because we like reading a menu’ and that it ‘manages to lightly say serious things that we’d gloss over in another setting. A most satisfying piece of poetry to dine on… as it were.’
Having read all the poems, made our individual choices, compared notes and agreed on the awards, we could finally look up the names of the poets. We are delighted to announce the winner of Best Poem is Sadie Yetton for her poem Venus, Don’t You Laugh At Me and the winner of Best Poem by Under-16s—for the second year running—is Miranda Yuan for her poem The Menu. They will receive books courtesy of The Cuba Press and Massey University Press.
For this 10th edition, and because there were so many wonderful poems, we would also like to award Special Mentions in the adults category to Gail Zing for her poem Lightfast, Cindy Kurukaanga for her poem Nō Te Paruparu, Nō Te Purapura | Of the Mud, Of the Seed, and to Renee Liang for her poem Pinhole. In the under-16s category, Special Mentions go to Sabrina Li for her poem Photos taken the day they said it was over, Gia Beckett for her poem My Purple Life!, and Lily Richards for her poem Thread of Reality. Congratulations to all on behalf of Given Words, The Cuba Press and Massey University Press.
Below are the winning poems and Special Mentions. We also invite you to read our selection of the rest of the poems from adults here and from under-16s here. All entries had to include the following five words: pair, endure, lightfast, hold, and justice.
Venus, Don’t You Laugh At Me
Venus, don’t you laugh at me
I’m your daughter, it appears you made a crooked one
Stilted in manner, steadfast in mania
Unjust in justice, your infinite amusement
Venus, you birthed a brute
You spat out a savage
You knew I’d fall on the way of love
Just as wolves fall on rabbits
Making a mess of how I eat it; blood, bones, brain
Clueless how to clean up after myself
What have I ever been if not your doing?
I was a child, then a child with a woman’s voice
I was lightning, lightfast, then lightless
I was a person, then somehow only parts of one
But I’ve always been of your blood
And you can’t bleed it out of me
A creature is still a child if it claims to be
A freak is due her worth if she endures
Venus, I know why you laugh at me
Because not feigning hilarity
At your own incompetence is worse than being so
Even with your back to me, we’re a pair of siamese souls
Because this rabid thing resembles its mother
And she wants you to hold her like you mean it
Look at who you made
Love it
Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland
Tonight’s Special: The Final Feast
Appetizer
Bread
And circuses
to entertain the masses.
Elevated rations
of what the poor had to endure.
Olive
A single fruit offered from the branch.
Starvation is minimalism,
and minimalism is art.
Main
Lamb
From the slaughter
with flesh that tastes like still-warm blood.
Pair it with red wine
lightfast on the lips.
Whose feet had juiced the grapes?
Let’s raise a glass to justice.
Dessert
Pomegranate
Six seeds to hold you–
sweet as the promise of love.
Brûlée
The world burns with a hint of orange.
Ōtautahi Christchurch
Nō Te Paruparu, Nō Te Purapura | Of the Mud, Of the Seed
They came to me while
barefoot in bitter mud,
with aeons angry whakapapa,
they held me there.
Hands stretched through flesh soaked earth,
wrapped my feet in weighted expectation.
My soles a pair of seeds, husks
waiting to be pierced by
a justice of tīpuna, as steadfast as
battle-blooded taiaha.
Hope takes root.
Lightfast, it endures
this bright white blaze.
Helena Bay, Northland
My Purple Life!
I have a pair of purple shoes
lightfast and lightning fast.
I have a lavender laptop case –
it endures knocks and drops.
My rabbit’s fur is indigo purple –
I stroke and hold her floof.
I have lavender flowers
on my purple nightstand.
I have an indigo squish mellow
named Justice.
Today, I’m getting my hair dyed
PURPLE!
Ōtautahi Christchurch
Lightfast
Like the way gel polish from Barrington Mall lasts on your toenails
all month. Or the blades of wind grass hold silver-orange
against gathering skies dark as a male pūtakitaki’s head; some animals
know how to pair properly, dragging their plastic six-pack rings
across the ponds, at least one of them breathing.
The way the sun and rain threaten in equal measure. If
we brought back Māui, could he hold down the price
of cheese and butter in our big-gotten culture that’s lasted longer
than our short-term memory on reality, consequence looming large
as Erik Kennedy’s horse on the home stretch to justice.
The way some things endure, lines of a poem, or light beams
on aluminium window frames in new suburbs, or pop-up swamps.
Ōtautahi Christchurch
Photos Taken on the Day They Said It Was Over
(in Polaroid captions)
One: the pairing room
Lightfast.
Violet sky,
then pink.
yellow,
amber, then
Blue.
an odd pair of tūī and miromiro
cut the hush
with honey-throated cries.
and pepeketua harbouring
within the tangle of rimu roots,
fizzle.
watch them.
their melodies weave melted butter
into strands that lie
connected. Between our forests,
the tether is diaphanous.
Two: the endurance chamber
The fan spun slowly,
slow, but not slow enough
to cool the heat between my ribs
with pooling light on cold tiles,
I smile without knowing why.
Already dressed,
his shirt half-buttoned, eyes elsewhere
but my eyes are direct.
The stained kōkōwai sheets are below
and finger-like ponga fronds
prod at my spine.
endure it,
I will
– but it’s just so funny
that I can live so insignificantly.
It made sense at the time,
So, I stayed still like a ragdoll.
Disregarded.
limp body.
soft body.
It’s what it truly means to be a woman.
kissing my forehead,
I thank him,
as if this ritual
was some kind of
justice.
Three: the photo
In order to hold me,
he gave me his condolences.
Ōtautahi Christchurch
pinhole
for years this box
has waited
for justice
lightfast
but for that moment
paired momentarily
with sunlight
foetal-curled film
impregnated
its open mouth taped shut
tossed
in a box and buried
to endure
now it’s been exhumed.
the red room holds court.
the baby at last developed
and held to the light –
the class of 1973
grins from the time capsule.
Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland
Thread of reality
Hold onto the final threads of reality, ——
the world around you collapsed into the hands
of an unnamed artificial intelligence.
The line blurred bet/ween
the “truth” and the “lie”
pairs of pixelated eyes follow you
<Everywhere.>
Those who live in the world will watch in awe as
they realise the world isn’t
lightfast; it f a d e s.
It loses colour faster than you want it to.
You wonder
Why?
but you are the one draining life
and replacing it with grey,
you are the one allowing this to happen.
There is no way to justify what we are doing
to the world.
But you and I both know we can’t endure this much longer soon
the threads will sever — —
and you will have to let go. – – – – – –
Canterbury
About the Poets
