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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I know, I know, ANZAC day is over. But this year, I didn’t get a chance to stand on the side of some road and watch the ever-dwindling group of fiercely blank, impossibly dignified old men march or shuffle along behind a pipe band. I was too busy.

My Granddad never went to ANZAC day events. ‘No use scratching up the past,’ he would always say. He spent four years in an Italian prisoner of war camp, escaped and basically walked home to Yorkshire – over the Italian Alps in mid-winter. He would never discuss it. But I wanted to know: I think we are all fascinated and horrified by ‘the spectre of war’, especially now. So we hungrily gaze at those old men, and try to imagine. And they look straight ahead, and try to forget.

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Harbour
Mud and shellcrunch
tui contemplative, plaintive
shocked by sonic boom
across the still water
the majestic Heads
blunt in the crisp-gold afternoon
stare mute across the wrinkled miles

It’s not much, but it’s from the heart, and it’s LeafSalon's contribution to the Manukau Libraries call for poems about Manukau City with a view to possible publication on its site.

They have already got some big names, and some little ones. As we live here, in Laingholm, and love our harbour for the above reasons and many more, this gets the major thumbs up from us. Contribute and enjoy.

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Between broadcasting, writing, and coping with the needs of the media and her family, new Sargeson Fellow Karyn Hay has answered a few questions for LeafSalon.

LeafSalon Karyn, NZ audiences know you mostly for your broadcasting background - Radio with Pictures, all those years ago. Where have you been, and what have you been doing since RWP?

Karyn How long have you got?

LeafSalon What was it that made you move into writing?

Karyn The frustration of not writing got too much.

LeafSalon What's the background/inspiration of Emerald Budgies? Why do you think it caught the judges’ eyes?

Emerald Budgies is fiction, although I do think of it in terms of 'being sick'. Now that I've thrown up I can clean up the mess (or get somebody else to) and leave the building (never to return). Don't know why it caught the judges’ eyes. Have to ask a judge.

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Two weeks ago, the London Book Fair hosted Lit Idol, the literary equivalent of Pop Idol. Designed to spark interest in writers, the event was big enough to attract 1,466 aspiring authors (and merit over 800 words of terms and conditions).

Five judges chose five finalists and 900 people voted online - 25 percent of the total number of voters. The final tally was taken live, and while the finalists sat in front of a spotlight-swept audience, game show music kept all on tenterhooks. The winner was Canadian Paul Cavanagh (pictured), who scored representation by publisher Curtis Brown (whose clients also include Margaret Atwood, Vickram Seth and Fay Weldon).

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