List #7: NEW ZEALAND POETRY
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"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
Winner of the Mary & Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
This exquisite little hardback of 21 poems and 26 watercolour paintings is the result of a long-time poet-and-artist collaboration and grew out of their thinking about the natural world, childhood memories and thoughts about the climate change crisis. It’s part of a growing literary genre based on emerging forms of ecological thinking that cross genres and scientific disciplines. An adult picture book to be read aloud to all ages, and a gesture of playful joy, this small treasure can be enjoyed in one sitting and returned to on a regular basis.
>>Look inside.
A patchy archive of hallucinatory field notes, dictionary definitions from inside a dream, and diary entries from an alternate history. This collection of strange poems maintains both excitement and melancholy like the two-edged blade of a letter opener.
"Reading Bird Collector is like walking through the rooms of a nineteenth century house, filled with curiosities but also with a deeper sense of buried trauma: both on a personal and an environmental scale. The fragmentary pieces invite the reader to search for a narrative at the same time as they frustrate this desire—much like the appearance and disappearance of ghosts or spirits. Alison Glenny’s writing suggests a literary lineage that includes Gertrude Stein and Anne Carson. There is a mastery of technique and a skilled repurposing of language and text. I am very much in awe of this work." —Airini Beautrais
"I often think of Emily Dickinson when I read Alison Glenny. There are the same provoking gaps and absences, the same particular gaze; and always — to adapt one of Alison Glenny’s own phrases — the steady habit of turning starlight into song." —Bill Manhire
Stjepan and Elizabeta are siblings in Kotoriba, a small village between two rivers in Yugoslavia. They want to know everything about the world. From their tiny corner of communist Europe, small cracks are starting to appear in their adoration of their national leader, Tito. The poems in All Tito's Children are shadowed by the story of Grgec's own grandparents, who fled communist Yugoslavia in the 1950s and came to New Zealand as refugees. The collection is a multilayered portrait of personal and political disillusionment, deception, escape and loss.
Hassan's poems chartan intimate course through memories from his childhood and upbringing in Egypt, New Zealand, Turkey and elsewhere to untangle the intersecting traumas of migration, Islamophobia and grief and ask difficult questions about the essence of nationalism and belonging.
New Zealand West Coast poet, novelist, teacher, bookseller and conservationist Peter Hooper (1919-1991) was described by Colin McCahon, who used his poems in a number of art works, as a 'poet of grace and truth'. His voice on behalf of nature and the environment, and clear insight into where our treatment of the environment was heading, has only deepened in its relevance in the 21st century.
"A new book by Anne Kennedy, one of our most exciting and innovative poets, is always a cause for celebration. These poems, like her mind, are a treasure trove – full of wit, intelligence, innovation, challenge, beauty and a whole lot of heart." —Helen Rickerby
"Anne Kennedy celebrates and memorialises the world in a state of flux, at once dynamic, absurd and magical. Her poems are funny, sceptical and impassioned by turns, and always finely calibrated. Ultimately, she writes about the minor daily miracles of life itself, the narratives of the moment, the human surplus that eludes legal tidiness and finality of judgement." —David Eggleton
Great Works consists of thirteen poems, each about a different freezing works in Aotearoa New Zealand. Satirising the colonial-pastoral mythologies through which the local landscape has often been interpreted, the collection gives due attention to an industry which, in spite of its centrality to the nation’s economic history, has remained conspicuously absent from its art and literature. Here, as in Bataille, ‘the slaughterhouse is linked to religion’: Great Works offers a darkly comic view of sacrifice and slaughter in ‘God’s Own Country’. Limited edition of 100.
>>Read some of the poems.
A beautifully presented collection of surprising and shifting poems, focused on connection and displacement, the blurring between internal landscapes and longed-for realities.
"Courtney Sina Meredith is one of New Zealand's most talented and influential authors. Burst Kisses On The Actual Wind will find an eager audience." —Paula Morris.
"Courtney Sina Meredith has grown a distinctive voice. Her arrangements are formally inventive. She surprises in ways that writers ought to." —Lloyd Jones
The first collecting from an exciting emerging poet. "Take part in a new transformation with every new page as the speaker becomes by turns an egg, multiple trees, a town crier, a needle in a haystack, and a cone of blue light in this incisive and pathos-filled exploration of what it means to be anything at all."
From his 1989 collection Coming Here – in which he wrote the first of his ‘Secret Life’ poems – to his 2018 collection Winter Eyes, which reviewer Tim Upperton called "unsettling, moving, both estranging and empathetic", Ricketts has written of friendship, youth, romance, loss, and the small moments that carry a lifelong weight, or light, within us.
"When you first told me that you gave me the name of our tupuna so that I would be strong enough to hold our family inside my ribcage, I believed you. Here you are. Here is how I saw you, trapped in your own amber. Now it’s time for you to believe me. Tōku Pāpā is a book that serves as a map of survival for Māori growing up outside of their papakāika. These poems look at how we take the knowledge we are given by our ancestors and hide it beneath our tongues for safekeeping. They show us how we live with our tūpuna, without ever fully understanding them. This book encompasses a journey spanning generations, teaching us how to keep the home fires burning within ourselves when we have forgotten where our homes are. But have our homes forgotten us?"
Tibble's eagerly awaited second collection, following 2018's Poūkahangatus.
"The intricate politics woven into Tibble’s poetry give her writing strength and purpose." —Winnie Siulolovao Dunn, Cordite Poetry Review
"Tibble speaks about beauty, activism, power and popular culture with compelling guile, a darkness, a deep understanding and sensuality." —Hinemoana Baker
>>Two poems from the book.
>>Two poems from the book.
Is it the case that repetitive tasks of quotidian cleaning better distill our existential predicaments than the loftiest theoretical musings? Possibly, but, be that as it may, this little book of delightfully sprightly, concisely insightful verse, matched with equally amusing illustrations, will improve the mood of anyone who reads it.
>>And there are cards!!
>>And there are cards!!
This collection of poetry, fiction and essays by emerging writers is the first-ever anthology of Asian New Zealand creative writing. A Clear Dawn presents a new wave of creative talent. With roots stretching from Indonesia to Japan, from China to the Philippines to the Indian subcontinent, the authors in this anthology range from high school students to retirees, from recent immigrants to writers whose families have lived in New Zealand for generations. Some of the writers – including Gregory Kan, Sharon Lam, Rose Lu and Chris Tse – have published books; some, like Mustaq Missouri, Aiwa Pooamorn and Gemishka Chetty, are better known for their work in theatre and performance. The introduction outlines New Zealand's long yet under-recognised history of immigration from Asia.
"Breathtaking in its parts and as a hole. Even if you know a part of Asia well, even if you feel in touch with present-day Aotearoa, this anthology will surprise you again and again, as, voice by unique voice, truth by particular truth, its artists build a mosaic you have never seen before." —Rajorshi Chakraborti
Aotearoa is a land of extraordinary queer writers, many of whom have contributed to our rich literary history. But you wouldn’t know it. Decades of erasure and homophobia have rendered some of our most powerful writing invisible. Out Here will change that. This landmark book brings together and celebrates queer New Zealand writers from across the gender and LGBTQIA+ spectrum with a generous selection of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction and more.