John Geraets

Actions & Travels: How Poetry Works by Anna Jackson (Auckland University Press, 2022), 312pp, $35

When fate sleeps, it dreams of chance (69)
A strange transposition (141)

The pertinence of Anna Jackson’s poetic primer, Actions & Travels, is quickly self-evident. The poet-as-critic takes 100 poems—predominantly canonical—allowing their combined magic to flow over several local practitioners. [Read more…]

Siobhan Harvey

Tūnui | Comet by Robert Sullivan (Auckland University Press, 2022), 72pp, $20; Another Beautiful Day Indoors by Erik Kennedy (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022), 96pp, $25

It would be easy to review two recent collections by authors Robert Sullivan and Erik Kennedy exclusively through the lens of their political content. Environmentalism, colonialism and decolonisation are important issues explored. But politics is never a simple art, and art exploring politics is never a simple read. The take-home from reading Tūnui | Comet and Another Beautiful Day Indoors is that the definition and influence of politics extends far beyond a single issues-based narrative into memory, love, loss and the interior, emotional space.  [Read more…]

Claire Lacey

Meat Lovers by Rebecca Hawkes (Auckland University Press, 2022) 92pp, $24.99; Rangikura by Tayi Tibble (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2021) 96pp, $25.00; mō taku tama by Vaughan Rapatahana (Kilmog Press, 2021) 32pp, $38.50

Content warning: This review contains mention of suicide, disordered eating, and meat production. 

Here are three collections of poetry, each devastating in its own way. Rangikura by Tayi Tibble and Meat Lovers by Rebeccas Hawkes each confront coming-of-age sexually in a complicated adult word. Rangikura is situated in the urban landscape, while Meat Lovers is a ‘hardcore pastoral’ that gets into both the grit and the wonder of growing up on a farm. Both books use the sensuality of food as thematic vessels and have a contemporary urgency. And both collections reflect how the romantic imaginations of girls are shaped and constrained by social expectations of who and how those girls will eventually love. mō taku tama, by Vaughan Rapatahana, is a different type of emotional gut punch: a series of poems that reflect on losing a son and how grief matures, though never lessens, over sixteen years.  [Read more…]

Erik Kennedy

You Sleep Uphill by David Merritt (Compound Press, 2022), 86pp, $35; Super Model Minority by Chris Tse (Auckland University Press, 2022), 104pp, $24.99; The Pistils by Janet Charman (Otago University Press, 2022), 100pp, $25 

David Merritt excels at a sort of hard-luck lyrical life-writing that, in an Aotearoa context, is virtually his exclusive domain. (Maybe only slightly contested by Dunedin’s beloved Peter Olds.) His poetic practice is also unique in that he tirelessly travels the country gigging and selling his numerous lovingly made broadsheets and ‘poetry bricks’ to audiences outside the poetry mainstream. (Well, he did before COVID.) He is warm and engaging and engaged. So I was a little surprised to realise that his recent work, some of which I have read before, is, when put between two covers and handed over to a publishing house, suffused with a poignant sadness. It is affecting. [Read more…]