Well here we are, Monday morning and I’ve just got back from a week in a caravan at Whangapoua beach on the Coromandel. Having spent a couple of hours surgically attached to the washing machine I thought I’d check to see if Auckland poet Paula Green had responded to the e-interview I sent to her before we went away.

I first met Paula when I had just barged in on a conversation she was having with Fergus Barrowman of VUP at the Going West festival earlier this year. Fergus introduced us and mentioned that Paula was the current Auckland University Literary Fellow, a fact I was rather embarrassingly (and let's face it, a tiny bit drunkenly) unaware of. I made a mental note to remedy this ignorance. I’m very glad I finally did and pissed off that it took me so long.

I have to confess I’m still a novice poetry reader – apart from brief but tumultuous affairs with TS Eliot, then John Donne, then e e cummings when I was about 17, I’ve read novels almost exclusively. Crap, I know. But Paula’s work has made it very clear to me all over again the emotional upheaval, or breathless, beady-eyed focus that good poetry can bring about.

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