Hone Tuwhare Trust.

The Hone Tuwhare Trust was established in 2010 to inspire people through the preservation, promotion, and celebration of the poet’s legacy, and was working—at the time—to fundraise toward the redevelopment of Tuwhare’s crib at Kaka Point in the Catlins into a writer’s residency. In support, four New Zealand designers and typographers—Catherine Griffiths, Sarah Maxey, Kris Sowersby, and myself—each responded typographically to one of Tuwhare’s poems in a set of four limited-edition posters.

The poem I chose was ‘Roads’. I had been working at the time with the Southern Cross as a marker of both identity and place—a constellation that represents, for New Zealanders, both who and where we are, and that has long served as a navigational tool connecting travellers to a wider sense of their position—and, struck by the non-linear journey Tuwhare takes the reader on, one passage lost and the next more self-aware, I set the Southern Cross in place of every letter ‘t’ in the poem, to accentuate the distorted clarity I read in the words.