Roar Squeak Purr: A New Zealand Treasury of Animal
Poems
Roar Squeak Purr: A New Zealand
Treasury of Animal Poems (2022)
Editor: Paula Green
Illustrator: Jenny Cooper
Roar Squeak Purr:
A New Zealand Treasury
of Animal Poems
Ill. Jenny Cooper (2022)
Puffin/Penguin Random House
269 pages, Hardback
ISBN 978 0 14 377514 0
In this mammoth poetry collection, Paula Green (poet, editor
and mentor) promises animals both ‘real and invented, domesticated, wild, endangered,
extinct,’ while illustrator Jenny Cooper apologises for the lack of unicorns
but promises ‘barnacles and crocodiles galore.’ They both deliver.
Roar Squeak Purr: A New Zealand Treasury of Animal
Poems contains an ark-load of animals, from tuatua to tardigrades, dolphins
to dragons and karearea to flingamangos. Paula
Green encourages young people to enjoy and write poems, so there are plenty of poems
by youthful bards. Equally well represented are such adult writers as James Norcliffe,
Janet Frame, Ben Brown, Hone Tuwhare, Joy Cowley, Kyle Mewburn, Lauris Edmond, Bill
Nagelkerke and Margaret Mahy.
The poems are all as lively as the creatures they depict.
Jon Gadsby describes a hippopotamus as a ‘watery, snortery potamus thing’
while Joy Cowley creates an unforgettable cat in just four lines:
‘There was a cat called Moggy
Who used to swim in the sea.
It made her whiskers soggy
But it got her fish for tea.’
My favourites both turned out to be the work of the talented
Renee Liang. Not only did she write the world’s first poem about Tardigrades (the
tiny creatures who can survive in boiling springs or outer space) but she also
wrote the highly educational ‘Zombie Wasp’ which follows the life cycle of a deadly
insect:
silent surgeon
jewelled sheath
creeping through
the leaves beneath
stalks its patient
a crunching cockroach
unaware
it’s booked for lunch …
Every page carries magnificent colour illustrations by Jenny
Cooper, who uses different styles to match each poem. For Peggy Dunstan’s witty
‘Centipede’ she has created a cartoon centipede undergoing a shoe crisis. For Anna
Jackson’s ‘Tuatara’, however, the dignified portrait reflects the words perfectly:
‘the tuatara sitting still
It hardly seems to move at all.’
Note: There’s a reading of Sacha Cotter’s gloriously funny
‘Chook Chook’ available on YouTube.
Marvellous to just dip into, Roar Squeak Purr also
has two indexes – one for Animals; one for Authors – so readers can find their favourites
again.
The opening line of the first poem (‘Recipe for Happiness,’
by Tom Nalder aged 11) proclaims a perfect theme for this imaginative animal anthology:
‘Imagination - let it free.’
Trevor Agnew 11 July 2026
[Review 3847]
**********************************************************************
Paula Green interview
By Trevor Agnew
30 Sep 2010
For Magpies Magazine
A small snowball in
the head
Paula Green talks to Trevor Agnew
Paula Green may be the only author to have started her
writing career before she could read. Her father was a Minister, with a study
and – in those pre-computer days – a typewriter. Paula remembers, “I used to go and sit at his typewriter and
write things. This was before I went to school, so it made no sense. I also
used to like to write things in all his books, so in the end my parents had to
elevate the books, and just have a bottom shelf with books that I could write
in.”
Paula credits her father’s skill at telling stories and
using words with sparking her interest in words. “That was my first hook really – hearing him stand in front of a
congregation and tell stories. There was a kind of poetry in the way he was
speaking.”
When she mastered reading, Paula found she was an eclectic
reader, because in those days, “it was a
matter of going to the Library and reading whatever the library had to offer
you.” Like many her age, she was transported by Swallows and Amazons, the
Arthur Ransome series. “You’ve got all
these children who can go and do whatever they like, sail a boat, set up camp
on an island for a week. It doesn’t
happen now.”
She also loved reading A.A. Milne’s poems, but Paula
stresses that she has never stopped reading children’s books. “When I started teaching, we had Margaret Mahy. To me, she’s our writer-genius, and
she was inspiring for me. Because I like
to be a poet and I like to tell stories, I think she brings both things
together – like in A Summery Saturday Morning.”
Two New
Zealand poets played a significant part in
turning Paula towards a career where writing and poetry would be crucial
elements. When she was in Form 1 (Year 8) in Whangarei Intermediate
School, the poet
Frederick Parmee was her teacher. “He had
had a few books published so he really connected with that ‘inner poet in you’
(if there is such a thing) and I just loved writing in that class. It felt like
I was taking a really important step in my writing and he gave me a lot of
encouragement.”
When she went on to Kamo High School,
Paula found her teachers far less positive about her writing. “In fact, I wasn’t fortunate enough to come
across any teacher who gave me the kind of encouragement I needed; it was the
opposite. I remember my teacher in Year 12 saying, ‘You’re never going to get
anywhere in the world writing like you do.’.”
Paula admits that comment threw her, but in the same year
(1972) something happened that overrode the teacher’s remark.
“James K. Baxter [New Zealand poet, 1926-72] came to our school, stood on the stage in front of the whole of Kamo High
School and he read his poetry and I just felt
‘Wow, this is it.’ I went home and I wrote some poems, some James. K. Baxter
poems, and then a week later he died.”
Baxter’s sudden death heightened Paula’s experience. “I can remember I did this painting of him
all in blue and wrote some more James K. Baxter style poems. At the same time I
discovered Hone Tuwhare’s writing, which was quite different from the kind of
things that Baxter was writing at the time, his Jerusalem Sonnets and that. I
felt Hone Tuwhare was such a playful poet and cheeky, and I loved that too. All
of these experiences set me on the path of writing.”
They also set her on the path of teaching, something she
loves. “I loved Wellington Teachers’ College.
I loved being a teacher. I taught in New Zealand,
then I went and lived in London
and I taught there for a number of years. My last class in London I taught for two years. It was a very
small class, a lot of disturbed children with no hope of getting anywhere so I
threw the education system out the window. My aim was to get them to want to
walk into that classroom. I turned
them around. I worked with them for two years and at the end of it I felt
utterly exhausted. I left teaching and just knew that I wanted to write. That
had to be the main thing and everything else had to fit around the edges.”
Paula completed her Ph.D in Italian literature at Auckland University and raised eyebrows by
interweaving her own poetry with the academic prose of her thesis. “My academic writing conformed to the
accepted model but then I printed a poetic version on tracing paper, so you had
to lift it up to read the other one. It also meant that I had an excuse to keep
writing poetry all the time I was writing my thesis.”
Paula Green became the Literary Fellow at the University of Auckland in 2005, the same year that she
organised ‘Poetry on the Pavement’. Although
they sound very different, she found the two roles worked well together. As
Fellow, she had an office and could write whatever she liked. With ‘Poetry on
the Pavement’, she chose a wide range of poems and had them hand-painted on the
central Auckland
footpaths by a sign-writer.
“I had such fun doing
that. I made a walk from the top of Karangahape
Road down Queen Street, doing a loop so you could go
right down to the harbour. My poem’s still there in Kitchener Street. Every now and then I’ll
be at the traffic lights and I’ll see someone reading my poem. Once I saw these
two guys reading it and when I came level with them, I said, ‘I wrote that. I’m
the poet.’ They were Irish and had just arrived in New Zealand and they were saying:
‘Get out of here.’ ‘No way!’ ‘Oh, this is such a cultural place.’ They were so
gob-smacked; it was such an amazing little moment.” Paula chuckles at the
memory. “It’s not very often when you’re
a writer, you get to spy on someone reading your work.”
|
Message on School Librarians listserv, 17
Sep 2010:
“We had Paula Green visit this week as part of our Poetry
Week through NZ Book Council - she was fabulous with each class from year 1-
6 and pitched her presentation accordingly. She read her poems from Macaroni
Moon and Flamingo Bendalingo with amazing expression and emotion. We all
loved her visit and would highly recommend her.”
|
Visiting schools to do poetry workshops is important to
Paula. “I do lots of workshops from Year
1 to Year 13. That’s quite a range, to be able to go into. My whole idea is
that I want them to step over the threshold into the business of writing poetry
and to just fall in love with it. From that, if you fall in love with words and
how they can spark and collide and do wonderful things, from that you can do
all different other kinds of writing.”
Paula’s earliest such poetry workshop visits were to her
daughters’ school and resulted in an illustrated anthology of poems, Flamingo
Bendalingo: Poems from the Zoo (2006). “I
did workshops, then picked 50 children to be my co-poets.” She prefers not
to follow a set formula. “If you’re
writing a poem you say, ‘What happens if I put this word next to that
word?’ So often I’ll do a jam session
where we’ll start, almost like musicians, playing around with words.”
“So then I start
jamming around with words and we start making the words make music, so that each
word is a musical note and suddenly it’s just like, it’s thrown everything up
in the air, and they can just come to it in a completely different way. I love doing it.”
Paula’s method of writing children’s books begins in her
head. She laughs, “This might have to
change as I get older. It’s like having a little snowball in my head. It starts
off small. It’s the seed of an idea, and then it gets bigger and bigger until
it feels like there’s no room in my head for any more. It has to come down on
to paper. I’ll have a notebook to put it in. For Aunt Concertina, I have got
this notebook where I’ve written and rewritten over and mapped out the story.
By ‘mapping out,’ I don’t mean making a plan so much as writing my way through
the story or poem I’m doing.”
When her notebook is full of what she calls ‘funny poems,’ Paula finally goes to her
computer. This is in her study, which she describes as ‘a little box’ near the house. “I’ve
got windows that can look out on to the bush, so it’s very good. It’s a
self-contained room, which means I’m away from being the mother and cooking and
all those sorts of jobs. It’s quiet
because we live in the country.”
Paula is happy to provide a word picture of their
surroundings at Bethells
Beach. “We live ten minutes inland from the coast. It
has black sand and wild waves, and people can drown there if they don’t know
how to read the ocean. We go for long walks along the beach and, in winter,
you’ll come across baby seals basking in the sun, and little blue penguins
nesting. There are mussels on the rocks. Where we live, we can see the tail-end
of the Waitakere Ranges,
which is a fantastic area of bush in Auckland
that is full of wonderful native birds and walks. It’s one of Auckland’s treasures.”
The Terrible Night (2008) introduced a remarkable
storytelling cat. Although the tale is amusing, it had its origins in a
personal crisis. Paula had been diagnosed with breast cancer but to her
surprise this was also accompanied by “a
renaissance” in writing for children. “I
just loved it. I decided that I would
write junior chapter books, because when my girls were that age I had trouble
finding stories that had appropriate content but which also challenged them.”
With The Terrible Night, Paula decided that the rule for her
stories - she has written three more which have yet to be published - was that each
had to start from something that really happened to her, and that there would
be an animal and a human in it. “The true
part of it was I went to my daughters’ parent teacher night on a wild and stormy
night in Auckland. Rooves were being ripped off houses, and
trees were being felled. The warning was ‘Don’t go out in this storm unless
it’s an emergency,’ but I just thought ‘I have to go, I have to see my
daughters’ work’. And so I went to the
school. There was no-one there, and the principal was being gusted across the
playground towards me – “Hi, Paula!” I
went to the classroom. There was no-one
in the classroom, not even the teacher, but then in walked the cat. It went over to the library corner, sniffed
the books, then went and sat on a cushion.
And I just thought ‘I have to write this into a story’. I liked the idea of The 1001 Nights, the
classic storytelling thing, where each night you keep telling a story to remain
alive. So I thought of having little
stories that the cat tells to the teacher. So there was that really traditional
framing device of ‘There, it could be worse’.”
A similar pattern had emerged in the genesis of Aunt
Concertina and Her Niece Evalina (2009). Paula’s daughters, Georgia and
Estelle, were the first to hear the stories about Aunt Concertina in their earliest
form. Like Scherezade, Paula found herself relating an episode each night. “It began when they were little, and I would
tell them the story every night in bed. Aunt Concertina and her niece Evalina
had a kite, which could go anywhere, so anything could happen. Every night, there would be an adventure. And every night, I thought, ‘I’ve got to write
that episode down; that’s a good one.’
But, you know, I was a mother, I was tired, I had so much on that I
never wrote down a single word. In all the two years, nothing got ever written
down.”
Years later, when Paula was writing the final version of
Aunt Concertina, the girls would still rush home after school, this time to see
what had been written. “They would race
in the door each day and ask, ‘Have you written any more?’”
Aunt Concertina is a handsomely produced, visually striking
hardback, illustrated by Paula’s husband, Michael Hight. A professional
painter, he was reluctant to illustrate his wife’s book. “He’s
very busy and he doesn’t see himself as a children’s illustrator, so he wanted
me to get a ‘proper’ children’s illustrator to do the book. But I wrote this book shortly after the
breast cancer diagnosis and I think he just decided to make an exception this
time.”
Although Aunt Concertina is richly decorated, Paula actually
gave no guidelines for the illustrations. “Basically
I wanted to give an open canvas to the illustrator to have a kind of parallel
rich narrative, with a lot of things going on. It was all his idea; I had
nothing to do with it. And he did those paintings in oil (whereas the Flamingo
Bendalingo pictures, he did in gouache) and the oil painting meant that these
were much more time-consuming. So I I felt really proud of Aunt Concertina. The
writing wasn’t like anything I’ve written before and I’ll probably never write
anything like it again but, we both put a lot of time and effort into it.”
Our interview took place at a particularly busy time for
Paula. 99 Ways into New Zealand Poetry (2010), which she co-wrote with Harry
Ricketts, had just been published and her fifth adult poetry collection,
Slipstream (2010), which deals with her experience of breast cancer, was about
to be launched. Paula feels strongly that Slipstream is linked to her writing
for children. “I could only write
Slipstream when I’d written The Terrible Night and Aunt Concertina and Macaroni
Moon - the funny poems.”
“People say, ‘Where do
you get your ideas from?’ They just pop into my head and sometimes I think ‘How
did that get there and how am I going to do it?’ The idea was I wanted to try
writing poems that make children laugh, that are funny and play around with
words. The incredible step from The Terrible Night was those story
starting-points, which led to the funny poems then to this adult collection,
Slipstream, which is something altogether different.”
This article first appeared in Magpies Magazine, vol. 25 No. 5, Nov 2010, pages 1-3, NZ Supplement.
Some of Paula Green’s children’s titles:
Flamingo Bendalingo: Poems from the Zoo, Auckland University
Press (2006)
The Terrible Night, Random House (2008)
Macaroni Moon and Other Poems, Random House (2009)
Aunt Concertina and Her Niece Evalina, Random House (2009)
Letterbox Cat and Other Poems, Scholastic (2014)
A Treasury of New Zealand poems for Children, Random House
(2014)
Groovy Fish, Ahoy!/Cuba Press (2019)
The Little Tales of Hedgehog and Goat, Puffin (2022)
Roar Squeak Purr: A NZ Treasury of Animal Poems, Puffin
(2022)
Remember Me: Poems to Learn by Heart from Aotearoa New
Zealand, Auckland University Press (2023)
Trevor Agnew, Sep 2010. Updated Jun 2026
The delight I feel in seeing these pictures every day is matched by the pleasure I feel every time I unwrap a new parcel of review copies. While writing this, I unpacked Gavin Bishop’s Wildlife of Aotearoa, which uses five eels to tell the story of our natural history. It’s not just that Gavin’s designs are striking; I’m also amazed at people’s response to his art. I’m part of a Christchurch group, organised by Painted Stories, who gather regularly to discuss picture books. When I brought out Wildlife of Aotearoa, there was an audible gasp from the others and they reached out with excitement and anticipation, then turned each page with satisfied exclamations. What impressed them was the way the illustrations drew them into each topic.
