​Goodbye Kukutauaki Road


my old friend. 
I know how far you travel.
            Back to my no-gear,
pedal-brake bike tyres 
catching in dull gravel,
            school bus
turning in smoky dust, Dad milking Jerseys 
in a walk-through shed: six cowsheds, six houses,
a sheep farm at your end.
            Back to war veterans clutching
 marbles in your land ballot. 
            Back to Te Rauparaha’s boundary:
Kukutauaki Stream near Paekākāriki.
Your name, a snare for catching kākāriki.
            Out west, sunsets
over Waitārere Beach. East, rainbows
over the Tararua Range, colourful 
as your jam-packed letterboxes jostling 
with wheelie bins.
            Yet why do I see your bitumen shine
as loss my friend, your slick curves
as enclosure?
            You’re smooth
as a black cow and our vehicles slide down 
your spine all the way to Wellington,
coast nose-to-tail through the gully, return
to pūkeko stalking lifestyle blocks, kererū
ghosting rural retreats.


            I wave as my car swings past 
your long, blue sign. Bye, bye 
no exit Kukutauaki Road.


                –after “Hello Great North Road” by Robert Sullivan






Janet Newman lives at Koputaroa in Horowhenua. Her poetry, short stories, reviews and essays have been published in New Zealand and Australia. In 2019 she completed a PhD at Massey University with her thesis, 'Imagining Ecologies: Traditions of Ecopoetry in Aotearoa.'

Her debut poetry collection Unseasoned campaigner  (Otago University Press, 2021) won the 2022 Heritage Poetry Book Award. Its manuscript was a runner-up in the 2019 Kathleen Grattan Award. Unseasoned campaigner  includes seven poems from Tender, winner of the 2017 IWW Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems, and Biking to the Manawatu River, winner of the 2015 New Zealand Poetry Society International Poetry Competition.

Her review, "Gathering Places: Dinah Hawken and Airini Beautrais," was published in Sydney Review of Books in November 2019. Her essays "Listening Harder: Reticulating Poetic Tradition in Michele Leggott's 'Blue Irises'" and "Thinking Like a Leaf: Dinah Hawken, Romantic Ecopoet" won the Journal of New Zealand Literature Prize for New Zealand Literary Studies in 2014 and 2016.

She edited with Robert Sullivan Koe: An Aotearoa ecopoetry anthology (Otago University Press, 2024).