Loading Docs 2021 - Wind Song and Rain

Rain/ I can hear you/ making small holes in the silence

– The opening of Hone Tuwhare's beloved poem 'Rain'

It seems as though the world knew my great-grandfather before me...

– Manaia Tuwhare-Hoani reflects on her famous koro

It's really beautiful the idea that he learnt English by reading the Bible. And I learnt English from his poetry books. His poetry books are my bible.

– Hone Tuwhare's great-granddaughter Manaia Tuwhare-Hoani

That's why Dad came here, to get away from the mad rush. He told me once you don't have to ring people up here. You can just go down the road and see them.

– Rob Tuwhare on how his Dad loved living at Kaka Point, Stuff, 16 February 2016

His temperament, as expressed through his poetry, was as mercurial as the New Zealand weather, running a gamut of emotions. He was shaman-like too, in the way he sought in verse imagery to parallel gurgling streams, to invoke the bass chuckle of mighty rivers. He was a coast watcher, responsive to the sea in its many moods, and in one poem imagines ‘holding hands with the sea’. And he wrote about rain in indelible lines. He conjured with rain, made spells and charms from its presence, rendered it visible and memorably metaphoric, as in his poem “Rain’.

– XXXX Excerpt from a profile of poet Hone Tuwhare, Poetry Archive website

Hone came to our high school in the 70s as part of a travelling poetry show. He was this shambling, surly, larger than-life bloke not at all like my image of the classic poets we were studying. He made poetry seem dangerous. When I first heard his poem To A Maori Figure Cast In Bronze Outside the Chief Post Office, Auckland — the one where the statue, dying for a drink, ogles passing miniskirted girls and longs to be up on the marae where he can watch the ships come in, curling their white moustaches — I could feel a light going on ... It was a great honour to be asked, a couple of years ago, to set a poem of his to music.

– Songwriter Don McGlashan on Hone Tuwhare, Hone Tuwhare Charitable Trust webpage