List #7: NEW ZEALAND POETRY 

We recommend these books as seasonal gifts and for summer reading. Click through to our website to reserve or purchase your copies—we will have them delivered anywhere or aside for collection. Let us know if you would like them gift-wrapped. 
If you don't find what you're looking for here, browse our website, e-mail us, or come and talk to us: we have many other interesting books on our shelves.

The Savage Coloniser by Tusiata Avia          $25

"Savage is as savage does. And we’re all implicated. Avia breaks the colonial lens wide open. We peer through its poetic shards and see a savage world – outside, inside. With characteristic savage and stylish wit, Avia holds the word-blade to our necks and presses with a relentless grace. At the end, you’ll feel your pulse anew." —Selina Tusitala Marsh

Funkhaus by Hinemoana Baker       $25
A strong collection from a vital poet; radio signals crackling across the spaces between people, between cultures, between generations, and between worlds. 
I am not a building I say I have no pull-out map is what I meant to say so we deal with what comes up yes right there in the passersby one horse at a time you stepping 
out into traffic with your hand held up strong and me thanking every fucker for their help 

How To Be Happy Though Human: New and selected poems by Kate Camp       $30
The seventh collection from one of New Zealand's most admired poets. Camp stares down the ordinary until it reveals both its beauties and its threats. 

Nouns, Verbs, etc: Selected poems by Fiona Farrell            $35

Farrell has published four collections of poetry over 25 years, from Cutting Out (1987) to The Broken Book (2011). Nouns, Verbs, etc. collects the best work from these books, and intersperses them with other poems thus far 'uncollected'. 

Mezzaluna: Selected poems by Michele Leggott         $35
Mezzaluna gathers work from critically acclaimed poet Michele Leggott's nine collections, from Like This? (1988) to Vanishing Points (2017). Leggott's poetry covers a wide range of topics rich in details of her New Zealand life, full of history and family, lights and mirrors, the real and the surreal. Leggott writes with tenderness and courage about the paradoxes of losing her sight and remaking the world in words. 

The Grief Almanac by Vana Manasiadis          $30
This bold hybrid of poetry, memoir, letter, essay and ekphrasis shows what alchemy can happen when pushing at the boundaries of what poetry is. Using strikingly unique forms and melding Greek with English, prose with poetry, and the past and present with fantasy and myth, The Grief Almanac defies conventions as it steers us over multiple terrains. The grief of the title is the grief of memory, inevitability, and in particular the grief of, and for, a lost mother, but the result goes beyond eulogy. Wry revisions, elegy, and a kind of poetic archiving, point to co-existence and interconnectedness and culminate instead in a guidebook, a legend and expansive lament. 

 "The Grief Almanac is rich, brilliant, with a kind of texturing that feels to me like complex symphonic music. This is not a collection of poems in any conventional sense. It is a sustained work of immense, far reaching intellect. With the two languages at her disposal and the full force of a great mind and heart, Manasiadis lifts her mother up into the light. We see the mother and we see the daughter and the primal truth that lies at the heart of those tragedies and myths that have endured for centuries because they are profoundly true." — Fiona Farrell

Wow by Bill Manhire         $25

Excuse me if I laugh.

The roads are dark and large books block our path.

The air we breathe is made of evening air.

The world is longer than the road that brings us here.

Bill Manhire's new book begins with the song of an extinct bird — the huia —and journeys on into troubling futures. These poems reach for the possibilities of lyric, even as their worlds are being threatened in a range of agitating ways. In the title poem we hear a baby say Wow to life and to the astonishing prospect of language; but almost immediately we hear the world reply: Also. Along the way there are several desperate jokes.

Magnolia 木蘭 by Nina Mingya Powles          $30

Shanghai, Aotearoa, Malaysia, London—all are places poet Nina Powles calls home and not-home; from each she can be homesick for another.  The poems dwell within the tender, shifting borderland between languages, and between poetic forms, to examine the shape and texture of memories, of myths, and of a mixed-heritage girlhood. Abundant with multiplicities, these poems find profound, distinctive joy in sensory nourishment – in the sharing of food, in the recounting of memoirs, or vividly within nature. This is a poetry deeply attuned to the possibilities within layers of written, spoken and inherited words. 

"This is a book of the body and the senses, whether the million tiny nerve endings of young love; the hunger that turns ‘your bones soft in the heat’; the painterly, edible, physical colour of flowers and the fabric lantern in the pattern of Maggie Cheung’s blue cheongsam; or ‘the soft scratchings of dusk’. These are poems of ‘warm blue longing’ and understated beauty, poems to linger over, taste, and taste again. As Powles searches for home she leaves an ‘imprint of rain’ in your dreams'." —Alison Wong

Head Girl by Freya Daly Sadgrove         $25
"The first time I read Freya’s work I thought . . . uh oh. And then I thought, you have got to be kidding me. And then I thought, God fucking dammit. And then I walked around the house shaking my head thinking . . . OK – alright. And then – finally – I thought, well well well – like a smug policeman. Listen – she’s just the best. I’m going to say this so seriously. She is, unfortunately, the absolute best. Trying to write a clever blurb for her feels like an insult to how right and true and deadly this collection is. God, she’s just so good. She’s the best. She kills me always, every time, and forever." —Hera Lindsay Bird

The Lifers by Michael Steven         $28
From Sean Macgregor's lounge occupied by stoned youths, to three bank robbers en route to the Penrose ANZ, Michael Steven's second poetry collection presents his clear, clean vision of 'the lifers' who inhabit these islands and beyond. A generation's subterranean memories of post-Rogernomics New Zealand are a linking thread, in the decades straddling the millennium, while other poems echo with the ghostly voices of the dead, disappeared and forgotten.