Awards

• Winner of Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award 2025

Overview

Winner of the 2025 Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award, The Gum Trees of Kerikeri by Lynn Jenner is a beautifully crafted and quietly compelling tour de force. Grounded in the natural world and the community of the land the speaker lives on – an area in the far north of Aotearoa New Zealand that was once a kauri forest – the collection weaves observations and encounters from daily life with musings on societal and environmental issues, memory, history, art and culture. The result is a deeply observant, reflective collection on that most challenging of constants: change. From the opening poem, Jenner traces how this land has been transformed since the late nineteenth century. Where kauri forest once stood there have been gumfields, orchards, dairy farms, lavender rows and now tourist accommodation. Humans and landscapes alike continue to be altered over time, but Jenner asks that we not forget the past. Across 56 finely tuned prose poems, Jenner’s technical restraint and precision allow her explorations to unfold with calm, measured power. She draws connections between people, place and creative practice, examining how time, art and memory shape our sense of belonging. The Gum Trees of Kerikeri is a thoughtful, sensitively balanced work that shows how close observation can uncover new understandings of the world and our own  circumstances – even as the speaker sometimes doubts that any of it is useful in a world speeding towards catastrophe.

Full Product Details

9781991348180

Table of Contents

Reviews

[Jenner’s] sensitive engagement with the world reminds us that poetry can be found in the smallest moments of our day-to-day lives and how such moments become intertwined with a much larger tapestry of human experience. — Chris Tse, judge of the 2025 Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award 

Author Information

Lynn Jenner is the author of Peat (OUP 2019), a collection of essays and glossaries which consider the construction of the Kāpiti Expressway in the light of aesthetic and ecological ideas drawn from the writings of Charles Brasch. Lynn’s first book Dear Sweet Harry (AUP 2010) won the NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book of Poetry prize and her second book Lost and Gone Away (AUP 2015) was shortlisted in the Non-Fiction category of the Ockham Book Awards. Lynn lives in Waipapa, near Kerikeri. 

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