Siobhan Harvey

Prayers for the Living & the Dead by Lindsay Rabbitt (Voice Press, 2021), 64pp, $25; Still Life: Timeless poems by Helen Jacobs (TuiTwo Publishers, 2022), 76pp, $24; Stream Light by William Direen with colour illustrations by Scott Flanagan (South Indies Text and Music Publishing, 2023), 72pp, $22

‘Death,’ observed American author and journalist Norman Cousins, ‘isn’t the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.’ It’s a sentiment navigated expertly by three senior New Zealand poets as they contemplate their existence and the imminency of its extinguishment in their latest books. In this, it isn’t the universal relevancy of facing up to the world without us that lingers long after the last pages of these collections are closed, it’s the skilled authors’ ability to discover the joy and import of existence in the smallest moment and everyday engagement. [Read more…]

Michael Steven

Drinking With Li Bai by Doc Drumheller (Cold Hub Press, 2022), 136pp, $22; Surprised by Hope by John Gibb (Cold Hub Press, 2022), 80pp, $28; Sheep Truck by Peter Olds (Cold Hub Press, 2022), 48pp, $19.95

My preference as a poetry reader is for voices that operate and sing to us from the edges of the field; and for writers who have spent long hours observing the play of the world, honing and refining their perceptions, turning in reports that endure over the temporary and slight. The three collections at hand are by writers who all share the virtues of stillness, attention to craft, and the patience of careful observation.  [Read more…]

Patricia Prime

The Song of Globule: 80 sonnets by Stephen Oliver (Greywacke Press, Canberra, 2020), 82pp, $25; Heroides: 15 sonnets by Stephen Oliver (Puriri Press, 2020), 24pp, $20

The Song of Globule by Stephen Oliver contains 80 sonnets and 14 pages of notes. Oliver is an Australasian poet and author of 21 volumes of poetry. In this volume, Oliver mines his experiences of living in Sydney in order to construct a convincing portrait of an ethereal young woman, Globule, footloose in Sydney and yet also tethered to it. From the first sonnet, ‘escape from Eden’, where he asks:

Did Globule sprout seraphic wings for flight?
not beneath this bumpy sky—not tonight.  [Read more…]

Vincent O’Sullivan

What Fire by Alice Miller (Liverpool University Press, 2021), 52pp, $37; Unseasoned Campaigner by Janet Newman (Otago University Press, 2021), 104pp, $27.50

What fire, indeed? This attractively printed collection with its fifty pages of poetry is prefaced with a quote from Volumnia, the honour-at-all-cost matron in Coriolanus: 

I am hush’d until our city be a-fire,
And then I’ll speak a little.

There is also a poem called ‘Volumnia’, with its lines: 

We had no use for history but Volumnia’s.
That woman against fire.

[Read more…]

Erik Kennedy

A Riderless Horse by Tim Upperton (Auckland University Press, 2022), 68pp, $24.99; Naming the Beasts by Elizabeth Morton (Otago University Press, 2022), 80pp, $25; Surrender by Michaela Keeble (Taraheke | BushLawyer, 2022), 130pp, $30

My only complaint about Tim Upperton’s work is that there is not enough of it. A Riderless Horse comes a full eight years after his last book, The Night We Ate the Baby, and, like that book and his first (A House on Fire in 2009), it has barely fifty pages of poems in it. But Upperton builds books like racing cars, without an unnecessary gram. In only thirty-two poems, we get full servings of hard-won wisdom and music and rue and pathos. In a recent interview, Upperton characterised A Riderless Horse as ‘a kinder, more reflective book’. Some of the strongest poems in the book seem to be evidence that this is true. [Read more…]