“With its raw honesty and starvation-rations of irony, Big Love Songs is entirely different to anything I’ve read lately. It is in-yer-face poetry, but it is also poetry that aches and is vulnerable. It is poetry that, like Northland citrus fruit, manages to be both bitterly pithy and sweetly personal.”
– Elizabeth Morton, Landfall Review Online

“One of the greatest achievements of this collection is how Gunson draws the reader in and creates this sense of intimacy… If you’re love-sick, Big Love Songs knows how it feels and is right there with you.”
– Joshua Morris, Poetry NZ

“These poems flow nicely as a group. They are light – not lite, definitely not – and a pleasure to read, combining as they do serious emotion with almost a playful presentation.”
– Mary Cresswell, Takahe

“Gunson is deliberately crafting poems of elegance and restraint which, when read alone, pale somewhat into insignificance when compared to the cumulative effect of reading several, one after another…”
– Vaughan Rapatahana, A Fine Line, NZPS

To purchase Big Love Songs for $25 (including postage) send an email to vaughangunson@gmail.com

There are catacombs beneath
aaaaaaathe terror and jazzy nights
aaaaaaaof Paris, which you can pay

to visit, like Monet’s soft lilies
aaaaaaaor the monstrous halls
aaaaaaaof the Louvre.

From the careful through-the-ages layering
aaaaaaaof femur and skull, something
aaaaaaathat moves, still.

Published in Fast Fibres 5, 2018.

What I find serious
is losing ground: it’s the plaintive voice
of the singer on my old stereo;
the book of Michelangelo’s poems
bought at a garage sale for a dollar
which still has its dust jacket
and a name in linked writing
over the frontispiece.

It’s easy enough to find these things
if you enter into the search, not like
when Schliemann set out for Troy
with a copy of the Iliad in his trunk
and only a rough idea where to dig

aaaaaaaaaa―but would anyone care now
if you bragged of finding a necklace
once worn by a girl called Helen?

For so long I thought I was in time,
and now so completely out of it
I’m tempted to find a pirate shirt
and loll about on hard benches
smoking opium from a wooden pipe

which seems a better option
than wearing my pants low
or taking photos of myself smiling
    aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa    ―Michelangelo
never did that; the fashion then
was for sonnets, which he wrote
when he wasn’t working, when he was
a little melancholy, unsure if he was loved
and the world’s creeping indifference
something he was struggling with.

Published in Poetry NZ Yearbook, 2017.  

reading a humble poet tell us
of his eggs-over-easy start to the day
has made me braver, truly

and I’m glad now
the dentist is running late
and I’ve been able to fortify
myself with poetry

remembering again
that thoughts written down
in an elegant vernacular
can make you feel better
about your day
pushing out any anxiety you have
about having a molar filling replaced
or whether your friends
actually care

to write down something
that’s almost honest
is at least as important as what the man
in the pale blue apron does
all day
poking with metal tools
into our cavities

so I’ll make this call:
for collections of humble poetry
in dentist’s waiting rooms everywhere,
pages and pages of expertly cut off
lines
journeying through someone else
into yourself, as necessary
as the dentist who helps
keep healthy teeth
in our heads

poetry too
can fill the holes.

They―always they, not us―
aaawanted to drill for oil in the gallery.

They said it wouldn’t be a problem
aaato pull up the polished wooden floors;

they could build up through the roof
aaaand over, positioned like a giant mosquito

with a black-steel proboscis pumping
aaafrom the earth into a bulbous belly.

“And the gallery?” I asked.
aaa“What about the Constables, the Monets?”

“Who made this decision? You can’t
aaabankroll a gallery on profits from oil!”

They were right of course;
aaapeople came to look, and it was said

it was the best conceptual work
aaasince Duchamp hung 1200 bags of coal

from the ceiling of the Gallerie des Beaux-arts.
aaaOur jobs were safe, and we didn’t have to apply

for funding―anyway, government money
aaafor the arts had been drying up.

The Constables and Monets darkened
aaato a Malevich black, and it all

shouldn’t matter, but somehow it does
aaa(or something like that kind of frustration).

Published in NZ Listener, 29 March 2015 

the taonga are placed on the sand.
taiaha stand quivering in the wind

speaking to the rōpū of sand-diggers,
fire-lighters, early morning risers.

the people of this place mix easily
with us manuhiri, come to watch.

the greenstone mere smashes
the seashell in half: a clean break

between where we’ve come from
and where we are now, understood.

we talk on the wind—impatience,
the ragged wave, sinks into the sand.

we listen to a story of seabirds,
how in the evening, their bellies full

they’ll spiral upwards on the wind.
when high enough, the leading birds

cry out and begin to fly straight
in the direction of their island home.

the birds on the sea, watching this,
lift off and follow

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa —friends 



you who first rise up on the wind

to see which way for us, we promise 



to follow. call out loud from above 
and we in our numbers will fly!

the tide turns, we gather the taonga,
put them in the boot of the car

and drive to the whare, where we eat
together quietly—before one-by-one

we rise to the heights and speak
of all our directions home.

there’s a few I’ve lost, fallen off in the dark
behind a chest of drawers, under the bed,
gone to the place where socks go

I’ve lost some between meetings
& footpath conversations

some I’ve lost between the ears,
others between the sheets
(though I’m not so worried about those)

some I’ve lost through inattention,
quite a few from laziness

some I’ve sent off to other people,
who’ve probably lost them, or thrown them away

some I’ve lost while talking to a friend
in a bar, between the last wine
& the first whisky

some it’s dishonest to say I lost
when I never had them

some I’ve lost were as precious, I would say,
as a shipload of Athenian black-figure pottery
gone down in a storm north of Samos

others no more valuable than receipts in my pockets
that have gone through the wash

there’s some I regret losing,
some I can’t now remember ever having

but there’s one I’ve lost
which I hope to find

so I can read it again
like I did when I was 13
in front of a classroom of boys
in their grey school uniforms
all sweaty after lunch

the first poem I ever wrote,
the first time I’d been asked.

Published in ‘a fine line’, magazine of the NZ Poetry Society, May 2014

1.
I’d really like to go out for lunch in Manhattan
and get a liver sausage sandwich.

2.
The roof of the gallery rattles when extreme wind blows.

3.
I’m avoiding today the demand to do things quickly,
to get to the end.

4.
To live inside your mind you must be tough,
like Kerouac.

5.
The chocolate liquorice log didn’t help. Will have to follow it
with a deep-fried lasagne topper.

6.
We don’t like being alone, even when we ask for it.

7.
Who made the decision to build another pyramid
when the harvest is failing?

8.
You can’t smell something that’s dead,
until it’s dead.

9.
I just want to move, after six generations in this tribe
that’s grown too big and a drought coming on.

10.
Lunchtime at the basilica, a lot of people worried about
higher taxes, slave revolts, and the devalued currency.

11.
I’ve lost faith in the new empire of Byzantium.

12.
I wish I didn’t have to sit here amongst the gunpowder.

13.
You don’t see EXIT signs, until you have to EXIT
and can’t get back to where you entered.

14.
She said it was a picture of a rainbow stretched to black.

15.
Blue sky floods into the gallery
through high windows

I can’t keep my head level,
I have to look up.

for Paula Green

I was late, didn’t bring a pad of paper or a pen
to a workshop — hadn’t registered that
I might have to work. My subconscious though
at work, perhaps I didn’t want to be there.
Not when I sat down anyway, at the front,
where the only empty chair was, within reach
of the teacher, a problem child, who with a sigh
had to be given a pen and paper to work on.

‘What matters to you about poetry?’

I muttered a few things about line breaks,
brevity, emotion, Pablo Neruda and humour.
Then it was into the warm-up: quick flash
lines, responding to prompts, which lightened
my ‘denim blue mood.’ Fun with alliteration
‘rumbling down the rudimentary road.’
‘An aubergine and a bicycle at one in a line.’

Next, childhood memories after Bill Manhire
using the music of rhyme and near-rhyme:
‘Marmite sandwiches, all I ate, playing
with battleships, short shorts and T-shirts,
bedroom curtains with a herd of lions, zebras,
elephants and giraffes, unable to sleep
in summer, everything brown and ochre,
walking barefoot, burnt-off grass with prickles,
Star Wars, wondering who John Lennon was.’

That was okay, decided I wouldn’t leave
in the break. One poem done, onto the second.
Your direction: ‘No feelings but in things.’
My thing a moldy mandarin. Only ten words
at first, a forced economy, then twelve lines.
The mandarin went off, like a bomb.
I read the poem out: my phrasing was praised.

I was like a kid receiving the approval
of a teacher.
 You finished with a reading
of your own poems, where you bobbed about
to the rhythm of your words. I was happy
to get your reference to Sweet Virginia
off Exile on Main St. I liked your story
about hearing a wild, hairy James K Baxter
on stage in the Kamo High School hall
six days before he died, when you decided
you were going to be a poet.

And I wish 
after seeing Sam Hunt at Whangarei Boys
that I’d decided to be a poet. But I’m trying now
to arrange, as best I can, the lines I wrote
in a poetry workshop, which I had to rescue
from the wind that blew them from my hands
outside, all around the carpark. I had to chase
each page, as you watched, surely amused
at the antics of your student who arrived late.

Published in Poetry NZ 47, September 2013.