Vaughan Rapatahana

Goddess Muscle by Karlo Mila (Huia Publishers, 2020), 220pp, $35; The Surgeon’s Brain by Oscar Upperton (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022), 96pp, $25; Home Base by Keith Westwater (The Cuba Press, 2021), 184pp, $25

On first inspection, including reading the cover blurbs, I saw that these were three very different books. Indeed, the only common thread seemed that all were published by separate Wellington-based publishers. Each one is particular in its own way. Two are poetry collections, while the third—Westwater’s—has more prose and realia than poetry crammed regimentally inside and deals solely with his army cadet years of 1964–1966. Upperton’s intriguing rich runnel of poetry never touches on Aotearoa New Zealand, contemporary or otherwise. Mila’s longer collection spans her mahi internationally from over a decade, across a variety of sectioned topoi.  [Read more…]

Erik Kennedy

ināianei/now by Vaughan Rapatahana (Cyberwit, 2021), 170pp, $25; Formica by Maggie Rainey-Smith (The Cuba Press, 2022), 86pp, $25

Among those who care about poetry in Aotearoa, Vaughan Rapatahana should be known particularly for two things. First, he is the most daring poet we have when it comes to seasoning his work with sesquipedalian lingo (that is, million-dollar words). Second, he has a more developed practice than anyone else when it comes to writing translingual poems in te reo Māori and English. His new collection, ināianei/now, offers plenty of examples of both modes, in poems that explore our fractured geopolitics, the dispossession and cultural losses of Māori, and the experience of dividing a life between different countries, as Rapatahana does. [Read more…]