Airini Beautrais

Everyone is Everyone Except You by Jordan Hamel (Dead Bird Books, 2022), 69pp, $30; A Question Bigger than a Hawk by Jan FitzGerald (The Cuba Press, 2022), 72pp, $25; People Person by Joanna Cho (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022), 95pp, $30

Jordan Hamel is a performance poet as well as a poet for the page, having won the New Zealand Poetry Slam in 2018 and represented New Zealand at the World Poetry Slam Champs in 2019. His debut poetry collection, Everyone is Everyone Except You, has strongly performative qualities. These poems interrogate their subject matter in ways that would be equally at home on page or stage: from the visceral horror of ‘Meat mannequin’ to the creepy kink of ‘Sex toy roadshow’, exploring 90s nostalgia, Christianity and Kiwi bloke culture along the way. The shock value in these poems doesn’t feel gratuitous, more part of a performance of introspection. How deep do we go before we come right out the other side, into something else? Perverseness seems an important part of the process. [Read more…]

Robyn Maree Pickens 

Seasons by William Direen (South Indies Text & Music Publishing, 2022), 72pp, $22; Resonating Distances by Richard von Sturmer (Titus Books, 2022), 150pp, $30; Breach by Lisa Samuels (Boiler House Press, 2021), 75pp, $28

William Direen’s Seasons prompted me to consider readerly expectations of access to a speaker’s inner world. A man spends a year in the remote Strath Taieri/Maniototo—inland and north of Ōtepoti Dunedin—but seemingly withholds his reasons for being there. Is he ‘taking time out’ or is he really there to engage with the region’s hot summers and winter snow? If it is the latter, which encompasses the entanglement of people, weather, land, and livelihood, shouldn’t this be sufficient? 

Perhaps the description of the collection as a ‘poetry diary’ led this reader to expect access to the speaker’s ‘inner world’, to his perspectives on the events unfolding around him— seasonal and otherwise. [Read more…]

Victor Billot 

Gorse Poems by Chris Holdaway (Titus Books, 2022), 72pp, $25; The Stupefying by Nick Ascroft (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022), 88pp, $25

Chris Holdaway (b. 1989) belongs to a new generation of New Zealand poets by demographic. He is set apart from his peers by his distinctive style and his role as publisher and printer of poetry. As founding editor of Minarets journal and co-founder of Compound Press, Holdaway has produced a substantial number of publications, which provides an intriguing angle in consideration of his own writing. It is a thread back to New Zealand poet/printers of previous eras as well as a contemporary link to the world of DIY indie music and zine production (although it must be said his production standards are well above the norm). This is his first full-length collection, but Holdaway has previously produced a chapbook, has been widely published in New Zealand and overseas, and is a MFA graduate of the Notre Dame creative writing programme. The back of the book features insightful words from his former teacher, the remarkable American poet Joyelle McSweeney, as well as New Zealand poet Michael Steven. So, this is a ‘debut’ that perhaps carries more weight than many first collections.  [Read more…]