Anne Kennedy 

Back Before You Know by Murray Edmond (Compound Press, 2019), 80 pp., $20; Conventional Weapons by Tracey Slaughter (Victoria University Press, 2019), 95 pp., $25

These two engrossing and unique collections are evidence of great variety in our poetry scene, but they are also fascinating to look at side by side because they each inhabit Pākehā Gothic—in quite different ways. Murray Edmond’s cheerfully titled Back Before You Know is set in a heady historical bush-world of hard yakka, violence and romance, while Tracey Slaughter’s Conventional Weapons eviscerates the moments, big and small, of a suburban Kiwi girl. Both volumes, in true Gothic style, are dark, funny and rhetorical.  [Read more…]

Janet Newman

By Sea Mouths Speaking: Collected poems 1973–2018 and related prose by Denys Trussell (Brick Row, 2019), 784pp, $75

It is hard to remember the time when human entanglement with the environment was not at the forefront of our minds. Yet only forty years ago, Denys Trussell’s ecological sequence of poems ‘Dance of the Origin’ was ‘outside the dominant view’ of New Zealand contemporary dance, for which it was written. The performance of Trussell’s poetic sequence explored ‘the body as nature; the body as ecological entity within larger ecological processes’, says Origins Dance Theatre founder Alison East, in an essay in this collection – ideas which in 1980 contrasted with ‘the dominant view of human beings as separate from and superior to all aspects of nature’ (532). [Read more…]

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…]

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…]