Poet, teacher, activist: Riemke remembered

24 May 1939 - 10 August 2026

Netherlands-born poet Riemke Ensing, university teacher, mentor, anthologiser, visual arts commentator, peace activist, Depot Artspace cultural icon and writer of some of Aotearoa’s finest poems on migration, has died at Muriwai, West Auckland.

She was surrounded, as her son wrote, ‘with family and her books and poems and art’ in a landscape setting that evoked the poems of the west coast beaches she’d immortalised in the collection Storm Warning - after McCahon.

That book was dedicated to pianist Bill Trussell with whom she’d shared the pleasure of exploring the coastline, ‘We flew in like gannets at Muriwai / hovering on the currents of wind. / Sea was our element. Immediately / on that coast, we were home.’

Born in 1939, in the occupied city of Groningen in The Netherlands, Riemke’s early memories were of air raids and bombings, a sniper’s bullet narrowly missing her little sister. ‘Images sear themselves / into the retina of the heart. Even the rhododendrons / a splash of blood in the garden / or parachute silk fallen from sky / on a clear day / at the start of life / and the shot forever echoing / in poems.’ From ‘War-Childhood’.

Wartime trauma and bleak post-war conditions prompted the Ensings to endure an arduous migration to rural Dargaville, Northland in 1951.

‘It was culture shock from here to yesterday,’ Riemke later wrote, and yet its impact on the impressionable 12-year-old is perhaps what propelled her into writing, where she wrote to make sense of ‘both the past and the present, the here with the there, connecting history, myth, and the fragmented details of two small parcels of earth on different sides of the world.’

Riemke arrived in Aotearoa with just three phrases in English. A clever student, within 16 years she’d completed her schooling and teacher training at Ardmore Teachers’ College where her lecturers, recognising the bright star in their midst, invited her back to join the staff.

Riemke gained a BA and MA in English literature from the University of Auckland (1964-67) and began her academic career as a tutor and then senior tutor in the English department from 1967 to 1999,  becoming an honorary research fellow from 2000 to 2010.

A dynamic and inspiring teacher, her students remember her fondly. In poetry tutorials, and at the readings she organised for visiting and local poets, her audiences were enthralled by her eloquent delivery. You can hear Riemke reading on the UK poetry online archive.

In 1977 Riemke edited Private Gardens, the first anthology of New Zealand women poets. A landmark publication, her introductory critique, which drew attention to the marginalisation of women poets in the New Zealand literary canon, indicated the arrival of a bold new voice.

Fourteen collections followed, five of them dedicated to writers: Helen Shaw, Gloria Rawlinson, Katherine Mansfield, Charles Brasch, and Frank Sargeson. Other collections reflect her love of the natural world, with references everywhere to ‘wind, rain, sky, fauna, ocean, moon and stars, Ensing chronicles New Zealand’s simple beauty,’ writes Siobhan Harvey.

From 1987 to 2014 Riemke wrote for Art New Zealand, often championing women artists while her poems channelled the Dutch masters, European modernists and New Zealand artists; skilfully translating the visual into sublime poetry:

‘Gouache garden on paper’ by artist Jean Horsley. ‘Here is the garden / all open window and free / in the way wind runs / on a gorgeous day / inexplicable with delight / and the unexpected / Look at those blues – aubergine, heliotrope, berry, lilac, fuchsia, mauve… earth’s deepest riches / made wild with light / and language / resonant with marvel.’

Collaboration across artforms was a feature of Riemke’s practice working alongside artists: Nigel Brown, Gregory O’Brien, Margaret Lawlor-Bartlett, Nick Duggan, Beth Serjeant, Inge Doesberg. For sculptor Kazu Nakagawa, she gathered poems on migration and wrote of his art practice for his exhibition Carving Water, Painting Voice.

Composers set her poems to music, most notably Alex van den Broek’s setting of Storm Warning. Of particular significance was Riemke’s creative partnership with master letterpress printer and printmaker Tara McLeod, the pair producing several aesthetically gorgeous limited edition poetry books.

In 2000 editor Mark Pirie published a major anthology Talking Pictures (2000) with an introduction by Professor Lawrence Jones that confirmed Riemke’s position as a poet of significance: ‘Ensing has her own voice and eye and frame of reference, and the Dutch origins are a significant factor in this uniqueness…’

This collection drew attention to her peace activism. As a campaigner for Amnesty International she visited Ahmed Zaoui in prison and arranged for the translation of his poetry into English and in 2004 read his poem at an Amnesty fund-raising poetry reading to support his release. In 1989, in response to the military crackdown on students protesting in Tiananmen Square, she composed a profound series of poems to the ancient Chinese poet, ‘What shall we tell Li Po? Poems for China’. 

The second anthology Blue is a cracked vase in memory: Poems 2000-2025 (2026), edited by Cold Hub publisher Roger Hickin, crowned almost seven decades of writing and revealed her to be still working at the height of her powers in 2025.

Speaking as Riemke’s biographer, at the launch in March, I remarked on the large audience of family, friends, colleagues, poets and artists gathered to celebrate, with Riemke, her achievements, evidence of her gift for friendship.

Her close relationships were reflected in poems dedicated to the living and poems for the recently departed, a theme that emerged with her powerful elegy for her father in 1980, published in the world anthology of poetry New Directions.

Publisher Roger Hickin has commented, ‘Riemke is our greatest elegiac poet.’ In farewelling her, it is her own words that provide inspiration, from the final stanza of ‘This is not Goodbye’ for painter Eion Stevens.

‘The sky seems to be waiting–that still point / to inner freedom–touching the blue / you embraced from the beginning. / Later stars will continue to tell your stories.’

By Dr Deborah Shepard