Poetry Shelf celebrates The Venetian Blind Poems: a gathering of illness poems

By Poetry Shelf - Paula Green | Posted: Thursday Aug 21, 2025

When I wrote Wild Honey: Reading New Zealand Women's Poetry (MUP, 2019), I built a house, dividing the book into rooms, and then moving through open doors and windows to the wider world.

The book was neither a formal history nor a theoretical overview of New Zealand's women's poetry but a way of collecting, building recouping valuing the poetic voices of women in Aotearoa. As I moved through the rooms in the house the themes accumulated: politics, poetics, love, the domestic, self, relations, illness, death, location, the maternal, home, voice.

Continue Reading: Poetry Shelf celebrates The Venetian Blind Poems: a gathering of illness poems | NZ Poetry Shelf