poetry – Page 2

Hear Here

April 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Claire Lacey

Listening In by Lynley Edmeades (Otago University Press, 2019), 74 pp., $27.50; AUP New Poets 5 by Carolyn DeCarlo, Rebecca Hawkes and Sophie van Waardenberg (Auckland University Press, 2020), 114 pp., $29.99

Lynley Edmeades’ second poetry collection, Listening In, is a celebration of poetic craft. Edmeades plays with the multiplicity of language in contemporary daily life, and the poetry is so rich and layered that I found it difficult to write a concise review. There are references to diverse literary influences, including a twelfth-century French troubadour and the poets John Ashbery, Caroline Bergvall and David Eggleton. Poems about personal domesticity sit alongside others about the pervasive discourse of politics. Translations and ‘un-translations’ are peppered through the book. At its heart, this collection is about language itself: how the words we use are slippery and meaning is always contingent on context. [Read more…]

Creatures of the Mind

April 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Elizabeth Morton

Craven by Jane Arthur (Victoria University Press, 2019), 88 pp., $25; The Track by Paula Green (Seraph Press, 2019), 64 pp, $25; At This Distance by Dunstan Ward (Cold Hub Press, 2019 ), 88 pp., $27.50

Craven by Jane Arthur feels effortless, unfiltered – it displays the raw motions of the limbic system, untroubled by social mores or poetic constraints. It is the over-sharer at the party – but one who is artful, engaging. It is the deep-and-meaningful quasi-confessional anecdote told over a punch bowl that commits you to feeling more flawed but also as if you are more of a participant in the human race. Eileen Myles, American poet and judge of the 2018 Sarah Broom Poetry Prize (which Arthur won), said of Arthur’s poems, ‘they don’t have to try so hard’. There is an ease to their pared back conversational honesty. [Read more…]

‘I Am Talking of a Being’

March 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Michael Steven

Dandy Bogan by Nick Ascroft (Boatwhistle Books, 2018), 82pp., $21.99; Islander by Lynn Davidson (Victoria University Press, 2019), 80pp., $25

Where I grew up, in the small East Auckland suburb of Bucklands Beach, bogans were both a source of envy and terror to me and my impressionable mates. We envied them for their wild girlfriends, their outlaw status, their flagrant disregard for the conservatism practised by our parents. They sold us smoking dope, did burnouts in their souped-up eight-cylinder rides outside our school during class time, and arrived at our parties in hordes to start fights. They were a mongrel cabal. A scruffy aristocracy, unaccountable to anyone. Dandies they were not. [Read more…]

Breathing Out, Breathing In

March 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Renee Liang

All of Us by Adrienne Jansen and Carina Gallegos (Landing Press, 2018), 76pp., $22; More of Us edited by Adrienne Jansen, Clare Arnot, Danushka Devindra and Wesley Hollis (Landing Press, 2019), 92pp., $22

Writing migrant stories can turn into a perilous crossing. How do you empower without assuming? How do you give voice to people who have been taught by experience to stay silent? How do you know you are pulling out their real thoughts and not just something they think you should hear? And what are the implications of asking them to write in a language they are just learning to use? [Read more…]

A Wellspring

February 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Emer Lyons

Wild Honey: Reading New Zealand women’s poetry by Paula Green (Massey University Press, 2019), 572 pp., $45

Intergenerational conceptions of poetry, conveyed through the voices of my lesbian foremothers, are paramount to my existence. Historical definitions of the poetic gather and coalesce into my own ability to write within the space my foremothers have cleared for me. Not just lesbian women poets, but all women poets have contributed to this clearing. [Read more…]